Fic: ...Clark Is Actually Pretty Ok With This, Thanks (Part 3, 2/3)
Title: ...Clark Is Actually Pretty Ok With This, Thanks (Part 3 -- Wherein Lois Attempts to Serve Lex a Reality Check)
Author: josephina_x
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark, Lex
Rating: R (because it sort of has vague references to themes of BDSM *shrug*)
Spoilers: References season 6 and previous, general spoilers for early season 7 and all prior. Diverges at the end of Wrath (7x07) when Clark goes to talk to Lex.
Word count: 26,900+
Summary: What if Lex decided to be a little more... evil... at the end of Wrath? What if he decided to punish Clark, for Lana's transgression? ...What if Clark agreed to sacrifice himself for her sake? Would Clark break? Or would he... bend?
...Hey, that would be a totally crazy fic, am I right? --Unfortunately, this is not that. (Oops.) Here, Lex kind of goes the other route. You know, the whole brotherly-love one.
So, instead, you get Lex being pissed about Lana treating Clark like her own personal bitch, Clark's "sacrifice" isn't so much of one, and everybody else is left standing around scratching their heads while Lana ends up doing screechy-harpy things which we don't have to hear too much about -- you're welcome. (Chloe does, though. Feel sorry for Chloe, and send her emergency chocolate cake, stat.)
Warnings: Un-beta'd. Still an ungodly amount of Lois POV. A little character-bashing (Lois towards Lex, but, yeah, he kinda needs a bit of a reality check).
Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.
Comments: Yes, please! :)
Author's Note: Lex still doesn't know what he's doing with the 'pet' BDSM stuff (what else is new?).
Like Part 2, this installment is kinda SRS BSNS for the sake of 'teh pl0t'. It should be a little lighter towards the end, but, yeah. I am slightly worried that this is trying to devolve into a Huge Ass Deal, because I caught myself researching episodes (and that never ends well for what are supposed to be 'frivolous' fics), so I'll try to be a little more off-the-cuff and not with the worrying so much from now on :)
The first part of this fic is here on LJ.
The second part of this fic starts here on LJ.
Also posted to AO3 here (includes all chapters to-date).
Previous piece of part 3 is here.
~*~*~*~*~*~
"...I think I'm starting to see why you might be so angry all the damn time," Lois said, watching him.
Lex let out a soft, pained laugh.
"I can't just stop, Lane," he said quietly. "If I'm right..."
"And if you're just delusional?"
Lex grimaced and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. "If I knew I was delusional, I'd find someone else to run LuthorCorp -- not Lionel -- and go have myself committed, if I had to." He looked over at her. "I couldn't in good conscience run the company while knowing I'm not in my right mind -- the business employs thousands of people!" he said with a frantic gesture. "If I was... was believing things that weren't true, without basis in reality, I'd make bad decisions. Wrong ones." It actually looked like the idea scared him. "I'd end up hurting people. Destroying livelihoods." And now Lois wanted to punch him in the face again, because he was already doing that, damnit!
He turned away and held his forehead in his palm. "But I can't not do something if I think I might be right. No-one else is doing what I am--"
"--really fucking horrific things, you mean; let's be honest here," Lois said, crossing her arms and glaring.
Lex hissed in a breath through clenched teeth. "It's a little difficult for me to weigh certain types of ethical concerns as highly important when I am measuring them against the very real possibility of the extinction of the human race." He glared at her sideways. "It puts things in an entirely different perspective."
"Yeah, well, when your so-called 'cure' is worse than the possibility of a 'disease' that even you admit may not even exist--"
"Christ, Lane! You make it sound like I'm the one trying to subjugate and enslave the entire human race and then slaughter us all off!" he spat out, sitting back and throwing his hands up in the air.
"Well, what the hell was with the dead army under the dam?!" Lois said angrily. "You locked all those people in there and they drowned! Who were they?!"
Lex stared at her blankly, and then his mouth dropped open. Then he snapped it closed and started to pull on a blank look.
"Oh, no," Lois said, pointing at him. "Don't you dare! You did that, to people, with families--"
"I didn't--"
"You--!"
"--There were no families!"
"So that makes it ok for you?!" she hissed at him under her breath. "That you chose people who were alone and took advantage--"
"They weren't alone, they--" He looked like he wanted to laugh, strained. "They weren't 'they'."
"What?" Lois was lost. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Goddamnit," he said quietly. Then: "It wasn't my idea to start with. Lionel... it was his project, at the very first. He... he funded the research for the original tech. I..." he grimaced. "I was just trying to turn it all into something workable, I... --Using people for the process wasn't working, not even when they went in fully informed and were completely uncoerced, totally willing to start with."
Lois didn't get what Lex was trying to say about Lionel, but the second part sounded far too familiar. "Key word being 'to start with', yeah?"
"...Yes," Lex admitted. "And that was part of the problem."
"Yeah, 'cause you couldn't let them go, could you--" Lois said quietly, starting to build up a head of steam.
"Not like that, no," Lex muttered. "They were, quite literally, test subjects, a step above human guinea pigs." He scrubbed at his face. "Fucking internal review boards to the nines, full psych workups prior, multiple rounds of testing, all of it, to try and weed out all the potential problem cases beforehand, and we still ended up with far too many mentally unstable failures. Frankly, I still can't say whether it was more the process that caused it or the people who cracked."
Lois, about to lambaste him, barely stopped herself as she realized that this was one of those times to wait. The son of a bitch was actually talking it out.
"A good half of them just... stopped," he continued, staring off into the distance. "No motivation, they barely made the effort to keep breathing on their own. Most of those we caught before it went too far in; we could reverse the first few steps of the process of imbuing superhuman abilities -- the mental groundwork for allowing the power control. The first one like that didn't recover, is still a vegetable; we updated the process, focusing on what seemed to go right with the others, tried drawing out the process longer so we might be able to catch anything that might be going wrong at earlier stages when we could do something about it, tried many things. The next two failures after that went completely insane and killed themselves." He grimaced. "We were lucky after that -- all the others who we were able to catch early have gone through a slow but steady recovery and are, more or less, back to their original mental states, as far as my people have been able to determine."
Lois clenched her teeth and made fists in her lap and told herself that Luthor sounded numb, and maybe a little freaked, and if she jumped on him and started screaming at him about how monstrous he was right now, she'd never hear the full truth...
"Of the rest..." he shook his head. "Many of them just... slowly went psychotic, similar to the meteor psychosis." He shook his head. "They believed they were now 'better' than everyone else, that they didn't have to do what they were told, all of it."
"I thought you were putting in mental controls where they had to do what you commanded," Lois prompted after he'd stopped for too long, after she'd counted to twenty twice and was fairly sure she could get it out without screaming obscenities and otherwise waking up Clark.
"That was at the very end. We only had one real success." he grimaced. "If you could have called it... him... that."
Wes, she thought.
"That's why I had both tracks," he said tiredly. "I needed a backup. Using people... People were just... too unstable. The mental controls became necessary to force compliance during missions when we would have them off-base, unrestrained--"
"You could restrain them?"
"We had to be able to. Too many just... came out wrong and needed to be locked away. I wasn't about to create a worse problem than..." he shook his head. "Of the few remaining that were willing to go through the process and came out fairly mentally unscarred, far too many of those started to become... nervous."
He sighed. "I think that when they saw what happened to the others, they became afraid that we'd just... 'scrap' them all, lock them away, regardless of apparent sanity, because they would be too dangerous to let loose to roam the common streets with abilities like that. Not to mention the temptation they'd have to live with. --They weren't stupid, I think they realized before any of the rest of us did that it was the temptation of no limits that drove the others quite literally power-mad."
"We'd been working fast, because we'd had that rash of new alien activity across the globe, since Dark Thursday. I'd had my people tracking down as much of it as possible, but it had been the most dangerous ones that we'd still failed to catch or kill." He grimaced. "The ones we found that had 'fallen' to earth, landing in craters, were all deadly killers, every last one. I don't know if they were sent to test our capabilities, or to try and soften us up before the main wave."
"We didn't have full protocols for removing the powers yet, or removing the mental structure that, more or less, made them act like programmable smart weapons, who only took orders from cleared individuals. We were working on it, but... we weren't there yet."
He laughed slightly, and Lois clenched her fists and nearly punched him. "It's almost funny," he said. "But, I never would have thought that those goddamn terrorists would be helpful in some way."
"Terrorists?" she prompted lightly.
"The so-called League. The 'Justice League'," he said, and she could literally hear the quotes. "Damn bastards stole terabytes of data from LuthorCorp-attached facilities across the globe, and then blew them up. Half the information processing capability of my company went up in a puff of C-4 smoke, " he gritted out, opening a hand like a flower, or releasing a cloud of dust. "Took out my damn guards on their little terrorist strike excursions. They were just regular building security personnel, people with families; many of them died, some are still unconfirmed missing simply because my people haven't completely cleared all the rubble, and some of those explosions vaporized large sections of the buildings that might've been populated. To say nothing of the injured," he said thinly. "They crippled the manufacturing infrastructure in many places, too. Luckily, only a few of those were key facilities; I've spend a great deal of my time trying to make every facet of my company as self-sufficient as possible, while trying to spread out some of the unique capabilities for redundancies."
Yeah, boo hoo, they've been out blowing up your secret evil labs and there was some collateral damage that you're probably playing up. You probably never even warned any of those guards what they were getting into, what they were defending, or they never would've gotten involved, she thought acidly. She didn't like the ramifications of what that might mean about what the League considered necessary casualties, though -- if Luthor wasn't lying. "Well if you hadn't been doing what you'd been doing in the first place--"
"What? Trying to run my company? The vast majority of the facilities they hit had to do with daily operations, not the labs dealing with the alien-defense projects that you seem to find so disgusting, and Clark thinks unnecessary." Lex shook his head. "It was fairly obvious that they were trying to cripple the company as a whole, from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in without internal knowledge of my company and how it works."
"They... what?"
"Oh, you're surprised?" he looked up at her. "Well, let me be clear, then: it was two parts destruction, one part terrorism, and one part corporate espionage. Your vigilante friends are as dirty as they come. They weren't trying to stop any so-called malpractice of mine, or they'd have been attacking other companies as well, that inflict far worse human-rights violations. They didn't. They never have."
"They've never gone after the factories that pump out toxins into the air and water without a care for how they're destroying the local environment and slowly poisoning to death the people that have to live there. They've never lifted a finger to stop the corrupt-as-hell shell companies whose sole existence is to launder money, or serve as warehouses for illegal drugs. They've never gone after the dregs of Intergang or Edge's consotrium --now those are some people who could use a little liberal introduction via nearby detonation to some high explosives," Lex said with a little laugh. "No. Your so-called heroes of justice don't do any of those things. They only ever go after LuthorCorp-owned or affiliated facilities, and if I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they're probably funded by Oliver Queen, but don't quote me on that."
"Oh? Why no quote?" Lois said sarcastically.
"Because while Oliver is and always has been a bully, and just about as rabid in trying to tear me down personally as the League has ever acted towards LuthorCorp, he's not a complete idiot." Lex rubbed his eyes. "I wish to god he was, because I would have found the damn money trail by now. Even worse, the technology leaps his company has made recently in areas similar to LuthorCorp's main strengths are just different enough that I can't prove that he bought the data on related tech research from the League, that they in turn stole from me. I can't prove anything," he said, sounding deeply, deeply tired. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. Which fucking gets to me, but if I have to fight a war on three fronts, I'd rather lose the human one if it means winning the one where I am able to wipe the aliens out before they kill us all."
"What's the third front?" Lois asked, feeling a little stunned.
"Lionel and his machinations, of course."
"...Of course," she echoed.
"Speaking of which, I'd recommend sticking to your attempts at writing LuthorCorp exposes, if you were thinking otherwise. I'm less likely to bomb the building you work in if I decide I don't like what you're doing, than the League is."
"I'm not afraid of them."
Lex snorted softly. "You should be. They're an ill-tempered lot, and even I, with all the resources available to me, have barely been able to slow them down, in a manner conducive to a lot of people not dying."
"Why would you care about what happens to me anyway?"
"Clark likes you," he said. "He thinks you're annoying, but he likes you. Chloe's your cousin, and the General is your father, and, well, it adds up."
"And what do you think?"
"I think you're interesting. And dangerous, but that's not surprising, given your family and connections." He looked away.
"...You think I'm interesting?" Lois wasn't sure what to make of that. It made her feel a little uneasy... or unsure.... or nervous. Or maybe a little flattered, but that was stupid, and she squashed that. Lex Luthor was not somebody anybody should feel good about impressing, not with his track record and seriously lacking moral code.
"I've a few contacts at the Metropolis Inquisitor. I've read your articles."
Oh god, not those, she mentally groaned, suddenly having a bad feeling of why he might've been so talkative with her. "Well, I hate to burst your bubble, guy, but my articles didn't have aliens in them. The editors put those in."
He blinked at her. "I know," he said patiently. "I have a few contacts at the Inquisitor."
There was a pause.
Lex sighed. "You actually have some odd sort of integrity. Despite the fact that you knew what your editors wanted, and they most likely pressured you to sensationalise your articles, you didn't give in. You wrote them straight-laced, as best you could -- or at least it seemed so, to me. That implies a particular set of ethics that drives your actions, and stubbornness, and resolve. --Again: dangerous, but interesting."
Wait, he's talking to me when he knows I don't believe in aliens? That makes no sense. Lois frowned at him. "Ok, and so, what, is that the reason you're talking to me about all this shit?" Integrity? Really?
Lex's eyes seem to light up for a moment. "Now, why would you think something like that, Miss Lane?"
Lois glared at him. "This isn't light stuff. Even if I wrote this up and you sued for libel, slander, whatever--"
"Libel, for written word; slander for spoken."
Lois gave him a look, not really needing the vocab lesson. "--you'd still be under a lot more scrutiny, and not just from the League. So what gives? You're taking a big risk, thinking I won't go around writing things and blabbing around to people. Like, you know, the League, for starters."
Lex narrowed his eyes at her tilted his head. "Do you really want to know?"
"Yes!"
Lex gave her a long look.
"Yes," she repeated, crossing her arms.
He seemed to come to a decision, nodded once to himself, and then said, "You started dating Gabriel."
Lois blinked at her. "What does Grant have to do with--"
"Everything."
Lois frowned at him in disbelief and confusion.
"I suppose we may get to that... later. Eventually. For now, I'll just say that I have a vested interest in him, and--"
"He sold out? To you?" Lois felt disgusted.
"--I would either feel the need to split you up, or somehow bring you into the fold-- no, he has not 'sold out'," Lex ended in quiet exasperation, then paused. "He'd better not have, at any rate. If he has, I certainly don't know anything about it."
"Where the hell do you get off making life decisions for another perfectly capable grown adult man?" Lois slammed back, thinking of how that had turned out for Wes.
"I don't," he said, exasperation sliding into the realm of irritation. "But I consider him family, and he, me."
Lois stared at Lex and felt a little sick. The ide that Grant might somehow feel in any way related to Luthor at all--
"Stay away from him," Lois demanded.
"No."
"You--!"
"You can certainly try to attempt to pressure him to cut me out of his life, Lane," Luthor told her, looking down at his wrists and straightening his cuffs. "But I'd recommend against it. I very much doubt that would sit well with him."
"Why? Because you'll come down on him like a ton of bricks?" Lois felt scared now -- for Grant.
Lex just looked unbelievably tired, and almost sad. "Lane-- ...Lois," he said quietly. "Have you ever heard of me doing anything like that? To anyone?"
"Wes," she said immediately.
"No, I-- damnit," he said, running a hand over his head and glancing away for a moment. "Not-- Forget the projects for a damn moment. I know I can't expect you to believe me when I say that I only took willing participants for those, and that... I suppose I, and the project scientists, should have been more careful to realize that some of them would most likely change their minds partway through, because the process itself involved altering their mental state."
"Not them," he said. "But... anyone else."
"Clark," she said.
Lex looked at her blankly for a moment. "What-- christ, --wait, this?!?" he said, gesturing and glancing at Clark on the bed, and then sitting up straight and staring at her.
"Maybe you're trying to treat it like a dare or a bet, or whatever, but I bet that's not really what you said, --right?"
Lex looked stymied. He looked away, towards Clark, lying on the bed, asleep, then said, "I can't say anything about that right now. That won't end well."
"Why?"
"Because you'll shout it to the rooftops and--"
"I'm not gonna promise you I won't say anything--"
"Of course not," he sighed.
"--not blind, anyway."
He stopped and stared at her.
For a moment he looked almost angry.
He leaned towards her. "If you do promise not to say a word--" he stopped, clenched and unclenched his jaw. "You had best not break that promise without clearing it with me, first, or for anything other than a previously discussed reason."
Lois frowned at him. "And if I don't promise?" she challenged.
"I'll probably be kicking myself for years," he muttered.
Lois frowned at him. She didn't really believe he'd tell her anything important. Hell, she especially didn't believe that he'd leave her alone even if she did promise something like that, but if she said she would then at least she'd know and, well, Lois could take care of herself. Chloe had warned her about digging into the Luthor's business, but she wasn't about to let that stop her.
Chloe wasn't around to get caught in the crossfire right now, anyway.
Oh what the hell; he probably won't leave me alone after all he's blabbed about already. What's one more thing, that mightactually even help Clark if I knew?
So Lois said: "Well, then?" and pretty much egged him on.
Lex's eyes narrowed.
He considered her for a very long time.
And then he said, "The agreement -- his life for Lana's -- wasn't my idea. Clark came up with that."
Lois blinked at him. Then she frowned and said, "You had to have prompted him," because that didn't sound very Clark-like at all.
Lex started, about to argue, then frowned. "I... suppose I did, but that wasn't my intent."
"What did you say?"
"...A life for a life."
Lois' eyes narrowed.
"Then who the hell were you referring to?"
"...I take it Clark never told you how we met," Lex said, turning sideways on the loveseat and tucking a leg under himself, twisting around to face her completely.
Lois frowned at him.
"You are a crazy bastard."
Lex smiled, sliding his elbow up over the back and propping his head up on a fist.
"You obviously haven't ever had to deal with an irate Clark barging in on you at all hours, screaming accusations about god knows what, and feeling an obligation to let him vent it all out, regardless of circumstance."
"Well, maybe if you didn't keep pulling the stupid shit he's feeling the pretty justifiable need to yell about you about..." Lois said with zero sympathy, because if it was anything like what had happened out on the street...
Lex's eyes narrowed. "He's not always right, you know."
Lois snorted.
"No, you misunderstand. There have been many times when he has made completely false accusations against me."
"Yeah? And what did he say when you told him it wasn't you?"
Lex gave her a smile that was more a baring of teeth. "Do I look stupid to you?"
Lois narrowed her eyes. "Yeah, you do. So I guess that means you didn't set him straight, then."
There was silence for awhile.
"Idiot," Lois added.
Lex looked like he wanted to strangle her.
"I don't have to defend myself," he gritted out. "I... I shouldn't have to. Not to him. And I seriously doubt that he would even have believed me if I had told him."
"Why the hell not?"
"Because he doesn't listen," Lex sneered out. "I can't have a civil, sane, rational conversation with him when he's the least bit upset with me. Quite possibly because he refuses to even consider the possibility that he might be wrong, even the least little bit on the smallest of matters!" he ended, tossing up his hands. "He has made it quite clear that not agreeing with his beliefs is tantamount to being wrong, which invariably leads to arguments that I not only cannot win, but cannot even ask for a stalemate on. He refuses to agree to disagree, let alone attempt simple, basic understanding or trying to see things from my point of view in any given situation or circumstances."
Lois glanced between Lex, who was holding his head in his hands, and Clark, asleep on the bed.
"He's a hypocritical, judgmental ass, and a horrible liar!" Lex ground out. "He lies to my face. I've caught him in horrible ones, even when he knows I know differently, and still he persists in the lie."
"...And you think this and are friends why?" Because it was kind of obvious after today that they were, and never really stopped -- they just stopped talking, and (mostly?) getting along.
Lex gave a laugh that came out more of a choked sob. "Because he actually gives a damn about me. Because he keeps saving my worthless fucking life." He gave a pained laugh. "Because he's Clark Kent. And I can't... I just can't..."
"Let go?"
"He is the only thing in my life that makes the least bit of sense. The last thing that ever did," Lex confessed to her. "That bridge... going over the rail. I died, you know. He gave me CPR. I remember being dead. I was..." he shook his head. "I was free, for awhile."
"...and then you weren't."
Lex licked his lips and shook his head. "He was the first strange thing that happened to me in that fucking town, and every day since then everything's gone upside-down and backwards and sideways and in-all-ways a fucking nightmarish mess," he said.
"Sometimes," he said, "Sometimes when I first wake up, I think that maybe I'm really halfway dead, still on that riverbank. Or maybe comatose in a hospital, somewhere, because I shouldn't have survived that. Or, hell," he laughed shakily, "still stuck in Belle Reeve, all completely delusional and jacketed and dosed and locked away, because none of this alien shit really hit until after," he said, lifting his head and throwing his arms wide jerkily. "There were bits and pieces of oddness, but nothing like..." He got a pained look and seemed to shut down almost.
"If you ever tried to describe to anyone outside of Smallville of the existence of meteor freaks and what they can do, without being able to bring them to town and just show them, they'd never believe you. Not even Metropolis," he said quietly, and flatly, and with fervor. "They'd think you insane. Most people who'd survived Smallville and got out would start second-guessing themselves, if they lived and stayed outside of town long enough. They'd certainly try to forget. That's how I fucking feel about this alien business," Lex said venomously. "But I don't have the luxury of just forgetting. I have the means by which to do something, and I know enough about the situation to know that it needs doing, and that makes me responsible."
"No, it doesn't," Lois interjected.
"Yes, it does," Lex said, looking her in the eye. "Someone needs to do something about it."
"Why does it have to be you?"
"Who else would it be?" he said, taken aback. "The military? They came to me for help!" he said, gesturing at his chest. "They provided funding to help pay for projects that I envisioned, I designed, I oversaw. --And I can hardly trust them with everything; the first thing they'd do if they knew everything I did and were given full control would be to demand I turn over the meteor freaks in Belle Reeve. They already have powers, and the military would surely think it best and easiest to simply brainwash them into killing machines. Because they do love their expediency," he spat out.
And you aren't trying to be 'expedient'? "Why wouldn't you want that?" Lois said, frowning, wondering if he really hadn't been doing that to them -- could he actually have been telling the truth earlier about Belle Reeve?
Lex stared at her in disbelief. "The majority of them have been -- were -- are teenagers!" he hissed out, horrified with her. "Most of them -- meteor psychosis is real, they ultimately can't be held responsible for their actions while subject to it. And it wasn't their fault in the first place -- they didn't mutate themselves on purpose!"
"And the adults?"
Lex grimaced. "They have been generally less... flexible than the youths. They tend to enjoy the killing and use of their powers more and are wholly unapologetic for their actions, in contrast to many of the teens who did not mean to hurt anyone. The vast majority of the adults would be perfectly willing to recommit and are generally angry at being caught and confined, while a good many of the less-psychotic teens are relieved when their powers are dampened." Lex ran a hand over his head. "All that said -- no, it still isn't their fault, either. They did not ask to be mutated, and from what I hear the vast majority of them were unassuming, sane law-abiding citizens before they were mutated by the meteors."
"And this stops you... why?"
Lex stared at her for awhile, then said through clenched teeth, "The vast majority of them are not of sound-enough mind to be able to make rational decisions about what they want or need. They aren't capable of making an informed choice about their own health and well-being. I have to do that for them. Being forcibly enrolled in a program that's barely a step up from a military concentration camp and programmed to become living weapons against their will is not in their best interest."
His eyes narrowed. "And it certainly wouldn't stop there."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Lois said.
"Some meteor freaks gained their powers immediately -- during one of the two meteor showers," Lex said slowly. "But some of them-- especially the teenagers -- tended to gain their abilities only after a second exposure to meteor rock." He took a breath. "And some were born that way to parents who were exposed during one of the two events."
Lois frowned at him.
"You really don't get it, do you," Lex said under his breath. "Everyone mutates from exposure during the showers. Everyone. It's only the degree of exposure that determines whether someone exhibits powers. I'm not the only one who knows -- Chloe's done extensive research on this. You yourself could walk into Smallville Medical and ask for a basic rundown on the 'normal' elevated white-blood-cell count for everyone in the region, and its effects." He clenched and unclenched his jaw. "Literally every person in town these days has that elevated count, and as a result they are stronger and more fit than the average person, and never suffer from common ailments. They hardy ever get sick, as a start."
"...And this isn't a good thing?"
"No!" Lex shot back. "Haven't you been listening to me?! A second exposure activates the latent mutation! ..Jesus christ, do I really have to spell this out?" he muttered. "If the military decides to grab the meteor-freaks, they won't stop there. The whole town will be at risk! They'll want to experiment, and when they realize how useful some of those mutations can be, and how diverse the results of the mutations, they'll want more, and that will mean grabbing every last resident of Smallville. And then forcing active mutations in them. --You, me, your friends working at the Talon -- everyone you know in town."
Lois' breath caught and her eyes went wide. "They can't do that-- they-- Won't!"
He gritted his teeth. "They damn well can and will. Not everyone is like your father and you know it." Lois flinched. "And once the other branches like the CIA and NSA get involved..." His eyes bored into hers. "Some of those mutations would be perfect for assassinations, or gathering intel. Telekinesis, teleportation, an ability to shift or vibrate through walls, telepathy -- I've seen all of these exhibited through meteor-rock-induced ability, and they're the least powerful of the bunch. The ethics in other agencies of the executive branch don't have quite the grounding morals of much of the military," he warned. "And it doesn't take a wide swath of corruption, Lois," he said quietly, intensely, "It only takes one."
Lois shivered. This was... this was insane. Evil. How could he think that...
"Lionel found one willing meteor-freak to try and kill your cousin before she could testify, and he subverted the boy," Lex said. "One. And then that boy slaughtered the guards at the safehouse where she was staying. He had 'blades' for hands, going up against professional guards with guns, and they were incapable of holding him off. He hadn't even been trained," he said. "Most people who don't know about the freaks just lock up, paralyzed, because they can't even process that what they're seeing is real. He was probably counting on that, when Chloe and Clark have been surviving the worst the town could throw at them for years prior. From what I heard, she and Clark still only barely fought him off -- they got lucky."
He shook his head. "It won't be like that if the freaks get pulled into the military-industrial complex. They'll get that training, and them some. Military training. And the only way to 'manufacture' more is to start with irradiating the people from the town. ...And then," he grimaced, "then once they run out of us, they'll have to start trying to mutate people without the original exposure, and that generally causes the Jitters in normal people, like it did in Earl Jenkins. --You can ask Clark and Chloe about that, if you really want to know more, but..." he shook his head.
"But the real nightmare will start once someone figures out how to mutate people who weren't in the original meteor shower," Lex continued. "And once they figure out that people with even a latent mutation will give birth children with non-latent mutations... --when that happens... then there will be no going back. They'll be grabbing and mutating whoever the hell they want, and force-breeding the rest. We'll have a virutal slave trade in the United States, a second-class race of possibly-psychotic human beings with abilities beyond the norm, subjugated for the purposes of the corrupt powerful elite." He looked almost sick.
"And someone at some point will think it's a great idea to try and make a black market out of irradiating meteor powers into those who can afford it -- maybe without the psychosis, maybe not -- alongside the slavery. We'll have the high, and the low, and everyone else caught in-between, and when revolution comes, we'll tear ourselves as a race apart from the inside." He rubbed his hands across his face. "And that doen't even begin to consider the ramifications on the rest of humanity residing elsewhere on the planet," he said. "The balance of power would shift drastically, with weaponized meteor freaks in the us arsenal."
"You're spouting dystopian crap," Lois said, her arms wrapped around herself, trying not to shiver. "It'll never happen." My dad would stop it first. No one would let that stand. It's just... wrong.
"No, it can happen," Lex said. "Very easily. Frighteningly so. I've already had to deal with people trying to gather up meteor-freaks for their own purposes. As for the rest... well, read a history book sometime. Revolution always comes when the subjugated get enough power to rise up. Always. And these subjugated will have the power practically built in under their skins. It's one of the reasons why I'm so focused on getting them sane. I don't want them feeling taken advantage of, and I want there to be no easy grounds for rounding them up and locking them all away out of the public eye."
"Fine," Lois spat back. "Let's pretend for a moment that you aren't trying to do that yourself with them--"
"--I'm not, or I wouldn't be having nearly the difficulties in doing what I feel needs to be done--" Lex interjected.
"--Then what the hell were you doing with Wes?" she demanded. "How was that not exactly the same thing?!" she hissed.
"One -- he had a choice and said yes, and no you didn't hear that from me. Two -- I'm not going to be using people like that and starting a damn slave trade, I'd like to think I've got better sense than that. Three -- the end result of the process was supposed to be reversible."
Lois felt like she'd been slapped in the face.
"At the end of the day, the superpowered can't walk among the rest of us. It just won't work," he said. "The solution is obvious -- no powers in 'normal civilian life' means no temptation and far less of a foothold for the psychosis to take hold. But there have been setbacks and screwups. --Mainly because we'd been rushing," he admitted, "because we have to be ready before the next strike. But-- well, I don't suppose you were wondering what I referred to when I said that there was one thing the League was actually useful in doing?"
Lois nodded numbly.
"It was in coming up with a solution to the depowering problem after the later end stages of the process," Lex said. "They were reckless as hell -- tried something desperate and dangerous that my own scientists has vetoed as not humane enough to attempt. A few of the test subjects defected -- ran off during the testing -- one of the reasons why I felt it necessary to include mental controls that could force compliance and execution of given orders in the field," Lex explained. "We needed to be able to be sure that they would complete their assignments as quickly as possible and then return to base immediately afterwards."
Lex rubbed his forehead and stared off into space. "The League apparently picked them up. They came up with a method of depowering them through the use of high-powered lasers. A long enough exposure to microwave radiation at the right wavelengths unraveled the DNA bindings in the serum that we'd injected them with."
"They broiled people out of their powers," Lois said slowly.
"Yes," Lex sighed tiredly. "If they hadn't had the enhanced strength I doubt they would have survived. They're lucky their brains didn't heat badly enough that all the proteins unravelled, which would otherwise had led to a feverish, lingering death. We caught up with some of the ones that the League turned loose, depowered, and got the information out of them. We gathered up volunteers from the sane test subjects and tried it out. When it worked, we started doing the same to the psychotics." Lex sighed again and ran a hand over his head. "Most of them became sane again, once they were depowered. Some are still undergoing psychotherapy, though my staff assures me that many of them had underlying problems that were 'only' exascerbated by the procedure, that someone just didn't catch the first time through, with reactions that are only now understandable in retrospect."
"And, what, you just let them all go?" Lois said in disbelief.
"Those who seemed sane again, and were willing to stand by the non-disclosure agreement, yes, of course," Lex said simply, blinking at her. "The insane ones, obviously not. And, of course, we will have to track them, and they'll be receiving checkups, medical exams, and psychotherapy for the forseeable future, given that there could be ill effects from the various processes that may only surface years down the line." He waved a hand, "But that is normal procedure for any major medical study."
"...Right," said Lois, wondering if she might be able to track down some of these supposed 'let-loose' people down and get them to talk -- or at least get a better picture of what Luthor was actually doing, because while it was still pretty horrific messed-up stuff, this didn't sound nearly as bad as she'd been afraid of.
God, I don't actually believe him ...do I?
"What did you think I was going to do with them?" Lex asked, frowning.
Oh, I don't know -- lock them up, jail them, kill them and dump their bodies down a hole...?
Lois shook her head and sidestepped that question. "What about the project itself? Why would you let everyone go if it was still ongoing?"
"Because it isn't ongoing," Luthor said. "We were using an alien DNA sequence that we'd extracted from one of the 'strange visitor's corpses. We found in studying it that we were able to use it to bind together various types of DNA between meteor freaks and 'normal' humans and other species -- very versatile stuff -- but we ran out of material for the process," he ended. "The whole thing's had to be mothballed and the research progress has slowed to almost a crawl."
Well thank god for small miracles -- if it's true, Lois thought.
"I don't understand why you were using people in the first place," Lois countered. "Why not machines, or just better guns?"
Lex frowned. "I have projects building better arms and armored weaponry," he said. "But robotics is a dead-end. These aliens subverted every last computer system on the planet on Dark Thursday," he said. "Not to mention that without a power source, anything electronic is useless. Besides, if I relied on robotics for targeting and a fast-enough reaction time to be able to respond to these things..." Lex shook his head. "The worst and most dangerous of the aliens are capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. Those robotic systems would need to be more-than-human-capable to target and shoot them, to have any hope of actually hitting what they were aiming at. If these aliens subverted those systems, we wouldn't be able to turn them off or break them before a huge amount of damage was done -- to us," he explained grimily.
"However, the only biological subversion known to-date is through these 'alien ghosts'," Lex continued. "And that's a one-to-one threat. If we can enhance humans to the point where we are strong and fast enough to use weapons against them and be able to score a hit--"
"--Wait, why strong enough?" Lois interrupted.
"Because being able to move at high speeds means nothing if the subject's tissues are so strained that they rip themselves apart from the stress forces," Lex explained. "That's why it's important to enhance the basic strength. We also needed to increase the metabolic and immune system response for a similar reason -- better blood circulation, oxygenation of tissues, and healing. they wouldn't be able to function properly without it, and would die much sooner, just from the use of their powers, otherwise," he frowned. "I wasn't trying to turn these people into kamikaze timebombs."
Lois breathed out a tired sigh. All this was really starting to get to her. He was being too serious, too logical about things -- even when those things were completely crazy to think, let alone talk about with a straight face. Down the fucking rabbit hole--
"Look, the aliens apparently do have a weakness," he said. "The worst of them don't seem to be able to function when exposed to green meteor rock, so if I can find a way to make a fast attack using the material--"
--and up again we go. Time to start fighting fire with fire. "Well, that makes no sense," Lois grumbled, massaging her temples. "If all these badass aliens are so horrible and un-takedownable, why would they throw meteor rock at us that we could use to take 'em down?" she asked.
Lex stopped short. "...What?" he said.
"I'm just saying," Lois pointed out. "If all these aliens are evil and trying to kill all humans and whatever, and all smart enough to screw up all our computers and steal our power and make us basically helpless," she scratched her head, searching for the right words. "Well, why would they basically be giving us the... the 'seeds of their own destruction'?"
Lex stared at her.
"And, I mean, if you're really the only guy in the world trying to stop them... well, what the hell happened with Dark Thursday?" Lois asked. "Did you stop them? --Because if you could stop something like that already, why isn't that enough?"
"I--" Lex looked a little ill. "It-- wasn't-- ...I didn't stop it," he said quietly.
"Okaaaay," said Lois. "So, who did?"
Lex stared at her.
"Because somebody had to, right?" Lois pressed. "Because either these alien guys are totally evil and somebody else stopped them, or they stopped on their own for whatever reason, probably because somebody talked them out of it."
"I-- I--" Lex looked very taken aback.
"First one or second one?" Lois asked.
Lex closed his mouth and swallowed. "First one, I think. Lana said--"
"We're trusting Lana now?"
Lex looked about to protest, then clammed up and turned a little pale.
"...For this, yes," he said, finally. "We weren't fighting back then."
"Right," Lois said quietly. "So, yeah, I'll ask again -- why does it have to be you?" Lois pressed him. "Because hey, here's a thought -- if there really are aliens, maybe not all of them are bad. Maybe the bad ones are in the minority -- 'cause, hey, there must not have been a lot of them running around, or a lot of people would've noticed -- enough that people would have talked and everybody would know about it. So, y'know, where are the rest of them?" she asked, throwing her hands up.
Lex stared at her.
"Did any of this ever even occur to you?" Lois asked.
He looked completely off-balance, then seemed to grope his way back to solidity with an annoyed frown. "For all I know, whoever or whatever managed to stop them last time, or the time before that--"
"Twice now?" Lois said, crossing her arms.
Lex gritted his teeth. "I don't know how they were stopped or stalled. Until I do, I can't risk sitting back and hoping and praying that whoever was involved didn't die in the attempt, or that whatever else will just magically happen again." He glared at her. "As it is, the death toll and property damage from the second meteor shower, and the Dark Thursday event, and the dam collapse were all unconscionable--"
"So, three times then," Lois pointed out.
Lex looked like he was getting a headache.
"Yeah, well, here's the thing, Luthor, you don't know," she said. "You don't know what happened, you aren't completely sure of the aliens existing in the first place--"
"--Even if they turn out to be not actual aliens, they're fucking something that's alien-like -- DNA doesn't lie," Lex muttered.
"--and you don't know whether anything will happen again--"
"It's entirely possible that those people might've only dispatched one of their kind because they thought they only needed one," Lex gritted out, rubbing at his temples.
"--and even if it did, you don't know that it won't get stopped without you needing to do anything about it, and I think that's what's the real kicker for you," Lois said, finally getting it, really really getting it -- no wonder he was such a dom -- "It's all about control with you," she ended decisively.
"...What?" Lex said, looking up at her in shock.
"Control," Lois repeated. "You don't trust anybody else -- I get it, you've been majorly screwed over by your dad, you've had three ex-wives try to kill you at different times, and probably a whole bunch of other crap, like stuff with Oliver and god knows what else. Whatever," she said, waving it off. "A whole bunch of people that you should've been able to trust, who hurt you real fucking bad." And you probably feel like the only way you can be safe is to have control over everything -- which is, unsurprisingly, why you're a dom. "Well, guess what?"
Lex looked at her with a little apprehension. "What?" he said slowly.
"Get over it," Lois said, poking him in the chest. "You want to be all control-freak on your own damn personal time? Great. Have at it!" -- Clark will probably love you for it -- "But not with everything else. You're making excuses about shit that may never happen down the line, and that'll probably resolve itself all on its own anyway even if it does, because, hell -- there's even a track record of it doing just that in the past, which even you admit!" she poked him in the chest again, then leaned in.
"So yeah, Luthor, you don't trust that everything's gonna work out ok, and you've got a hell of a lot of reasons for it," she said. "But that doesn't give you the right or the 'responsiblity' to run around doing a bunch of crazy shit that ends up hurting a lot of other people."
"I'm not crazy," Lex said adamantly.
God, Clark was right -- no, don't bring up Clark, that'll just set him off.
"Lex, you need to stop doing crazy shit--!" Lois started.
"I'm not crazy," Lex repeated, looking angry and scared.
"Don't be stupid, Luthor," Lois said. "If I thought you were crazy, I wouldn't be trying to talk some fucking sense into you," she said coldly. "I'd just--"
"You just said--" Luthor cut in, protesting.
"--Woah!" Lois cut in, throwing up her hands. "Time-out!" She stopped for a second and looked at Luthor -- really looked at him.
Ok, what the hell is he not getting? Lois thought, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with him. Because she was sure at this point that she could get through to him, she just needed to figure out how. He wasn't a loonie, but he wasn't really a nervous wreck, either -- not really. He fixated a little on stuff, certain things, but he was logical about shit. The whole thing about the meteor-freaks proved it: he thought things through to a logical conclusion, but, christ, it was like three-quarters of the way up, he was using 2+2=5, and that's why everything came out so bass-ackwards and just plain scary-wrong at the end of things. ...And he almost seemed willing to admit it. It was almost like he'd been asking her to check his math.
She stared at him, forehead crinkling up, and finally tried, "Ok, you do know the difference between... uh... who a person is and what they're like, and, uh, what they do, like how they act ...right?"
Lex stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language.
One he didn't know.
Oh for fuck's sake... Lois thought in exasperation.
"You can only judge a man by his actions," Lex said slowly.
"It's not the same thing," Lois said, and ...holy shit. "--Ok, wait, is there some kind of thing where you think that not doing shit about aliens -- like the stuff you've been trying to do? -- when you could be but don't is, like, tantamount to standing by and doing nothing and wanting everybody to be hosed?"
At the look on his face, Lois literally did a facepalm.
"Erg," she groaned, flopping back on the sofa and staring up at the ceiling. "Oh god, what the hell!" she complained, rubbing the heels of her palms into her eyes. ...And what does that say about what you think of anybody else who you think knows but doesn't help you, huh?
There was silence for awhile as she contemplated how truly fucked up Luthor's head really was, and Luthor sat there breathing.
"...This," she heard tentatively, "...isn't just a Clark thing?"
Oh good, he does remember what Clark tried to tell him earlier in the street, that I pretty much repeated damn near word-for-word. She let her hands fall behind her head and tilted her head up at him. "Uh, no," she said in 'well, duh' tones. "It's a normal thing."
Lex frowned at her.
"Ok, look," she groaned, sitting up. "A person is not what they do, ok? An artist may be artistic, but being an artist is their job -- it's not who they are--"
"--But it is," Lex insisted. "If someone is doing what they should be--"
"--What they should be???" Lois said, her voice starting to hit the higher registers. Because, really -- communist much?
Lex winced and glanced over at Clark, who muttered quietly and shifted a little on the bed.
"Well, you're a damn reporter, not a coffee girl," Lex said under his breath, once Clark had finished settling again. "There's a job, and there's finding your life's work -- who you really are, and what you should be doing."
Well, that's a little better than communist, Lois revised. ...Marginally.
But 'life's work' --good god, she thought. --No, no -- focus, girl!
"Right," Lois said lowly. " 'Who you really are, and what you should be doing.' --And maybe it should be a damn clue that when people say shit like that, that they're saying two things instead of just one," she hissed back at him, with a 'get it, already!' look.
Lex looked irritated in the extreme, and opened his mouth to say, well, Lois never actually found out what stupid junk, because he paused and frowned at her, then glanced down as he seemed to start working something out in his poor screwed-up electricity-crispy-fried brain of his.
Please, for fuck's sake, come on, Lois prayed.
"Is there really nothing else to you other than being a businessman?" Lois tried, hitting him as hard as she could think of -- because what sort of 'just-a-businessman' would spend time with Clark on weird social outings to random warehouse-malls, or played pool in the middle of the day, or, hell, let him yell at him about the stupid shit he'd done?
"I-- What--?!" Lex's head came up. "I'm not just--"
And then he looked a little stricken.
"What, you haven't always wanted to be the consummate businessman?" she asked him.
He looked even more taken aback.
"--No! I..."
Lois blinked at him and sat up a little straighter. "Wait -- you haven't always wanted to run LuthorCorp?"
"I..." he said softly, looking down at his hands, and Lois saw him shift in place almost nervously and...
Holy shit, I think I got under his skin, she realized. Between the sleep-deprivation, fatigue, and half-a-breakdown with Clark... and all the talking... oh man...
Hello, Mr. Luthor, and how are you today? she thought a little hysterically.
She knew she should stop, this wasn't really fair on him, but...
...if she did, she might not get another chance to get through to him again.
She shook herself and asked him, "What did you do in college? Wasn't it business track towards an MBA?"
"No," he shook his head, frowning at her. "I got my degree in biochem. I was attending grad school when..."
Lois tallied up the dates and times. "--when you decided to go to Smallville."
"I didn't decide to," Lex said, irritated again, his head coming up. "I didn't want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. My father--" He clenched his jaw and looked away.
"Wait, Lionel made you--" Lois blinked at him. "--He forced you to drop out of college?"
"You don't exactly say 'no' to the man, Lane. If I hadn't come willingly, he would've done something that would've ensured I couldn't go back to university later." Lex said sourly. "I'd assumed for a long time that I'd end up helping him run the business someday, but..." he looked pained. "I didn't think that I'd have to take the reins away from him; that he actually couldn't be trusted with his own damn company."
That's regret, Lois realized. She knew an 'it wasn't supposed to be like this!' when she heard it.
"...You sound like you don't actually want to be running LuthorCorp," Lois put out there.
"What I want has no bearing on the situation," Lex nearly snarled out, slashing a hand through the air. "I need to be--"
"Why? Why does it need to be you?" Lois said. "There are plenty of other businesses doing just fine with CEO's who are-not-you. Why can't you get someone else to--"
Lex shook his head, curling back a sneer. "What? Do what? Have to justify my actions to someone else who thinks I'm insane? Who'd probably just as soon look at me as have me commited to an asylum in order to ensure their total dominion over the company? The 'C' in CEO isn't for 'co-manage', Lane. CEO's don't like to share power."
Lane slowly narrowed her eyes at him. "Just to be clear -- why do you need to be doing all those alien experiment and tracking things, again?"
Lex looked as stunned as if she'd smacked him in the face with a raw halibut.
Lois continued brazenly: "Because you said yourself that you've convinced some people who are working for you already into believing in aliens--"
"I can't turn the company over to them!" he hissed back, making the leap in logic. "They don't have the training--"
"So train them."
"--and trusting someone to run a computer simulation or compile data or work out in the field is very different than trusting them to make smart business decisions about things that will directly affect the lives and livelihoods of thousands of employees!" he said, looking rattled.
"Selection process and training," Lois said.
Lex gritted his teeth. "...And, as I believe I mentioned before, they're completely out of line! I'm the one holding them back -- and if you think you have a problem with my methods and what I feel are necessary evils and sacrifices, you can damn well better believe that--"
"Stop. Just stop a moment."
Lex ground to a halt and gave her a very impatient look.
"You're going around in circles, Luthor." She gave him a look. "You say you don't want to CEO LuthorCorp, but you say you do it because you don't trust anyone else to be competent enough or make the right decisions. But it's kind of up in the air whether you've been making good or bad decisions right now. You shouldn't be thinking you need to find someone like you," she said, "What you should be looking for is someone to make better business decisions than you," she stressed. "You're a smart guy, right? If you're really that worried about the alien stuff --are you really telling me that there's absolutely no way that you could split off the alien-project parts of the company somehow, and set up the paperwork so that somebody else could make good day-to-day business decisions for you, so you'd be able to spend all your time on just the alien stuff that you say is so important?"
"I can't do that!" Lex said.
"Why the hell not?" Lois pressured him.
"--I need it to help me stay sane!" he blurted out, tossing his hands up.
Then his eyes went a little wide.
"...And you're wondering why the people you've got on 24-7 alien watch are a little out there?"
Lex looked like he was mentally slapping himself.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Next piece of part 3 is here.
Author: josephina_x
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark, Lex
Rating: R (because it sort of has vague references to themes of BDSM *shrug*)
Spoilers: References season 6 and previous, general spoilers for early season 7 and all prior. Diverges at the end of Wrath (7x07) when Clark goes to talk to Lex.
Word count: 26,900+
Summary: What if Lex decided to be a little more... evil... at the end of Wrath? What if he decided to punish Clark, for Lana's transgression? ...What if Clark agreed to sacrifice himself for her sake? Would Clark break? Or would he... bend?
...Hey, that would be a totally crazy fic, am I right? --Unfortunately, this is not that. (Oops.) Here, Lex kind of goes the other route. You know, the whole brotherly-love one.
So, instead, you get Lex being pissed about Lana treating Clark like her own personal bitch, Clark's "sacrifice" isn't so much of one, and everybody else is left standing around scratching their heads while Lana ends up doing screechy-harpy things which we don't have to hear too much about -- you're welcome. (Chloe does, though. Feel sorry for Chloe, and send her emergency chocolate cake, stat.)
Warnings: Un-beta'd. Still an ungodly amount of Lois POV. A little character-bashing (Lois towards Lex, but, yeah, he kinda needs a bit of a reality check).
Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.
Comments: Yes, please! :)
Author's Note: Lex still doesn't know what he's doing with the 'pet' BDSM stuff (what else is new?).
Like Part 2, this installment is kinda SRS BSNS for the sake of 'teh pl0t'. It should be a little lighter towards the end, but, yeah. I am slightly worried that this is trying to devolve into a Huge Ass Deal, because I caught myself researching episodes (and that never ends well for what are supposed to be 'frivolous' fics), so I'll try to be a little more off-the-cuff and not with the worrying so much from now on :)
The first part of this fic is here on LJ.
The second part of this fic starts here on LJ.
Also posted to AO3 here (includes all chapters to-date).
Previous piece of part 3 is here.
~*~*~*~*~*~
"...I think I'm starting to see why you might be so angry all the damn time," Lois said, watching him.
Lex let out a soft, pained laugh.
"I can't just stop, Lane," he said quietly. "If I'm right..."
"And if you're just delusional?"
Lex grimaced and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. "If I knew I was delusional, I'd find someone else to run LuthorCorp -- not Lionel -- and go have myself committed, if I had to." He looked over at her. "I couldn't in good conscience run the company while knowing I'm not in my right mind -- the business employs thousands of people!" he said with a frantic gesture. "If I was... was believing things that weren't true, without basis in reality, I'd make bad decisions. Wrong ones." It actually looked like the idea scared him. "I'd end up hurting people. Destroying livelihoods." And now Lois wanted to punch him in the face again, because he was already doing that, damnit!
He turned away and held his forehead in his palm. "But I can't not do something if I think I might be right. No-one else is doing what I am--"
"--really fucking horrific things, you mean; let's be honest here," Lois said, crossing her arms and glaring.
Lex hissed in a breath through clenched teeth. "It's a little difficult for me to weigh certain types of ethical concerns as highly important when I am measuring them against the very real possibility of the extinction of the human race." He glared at her sideways. "It puts things in an entirely different perspective."
"Yeah, well, when your so-called 'cure' is worse than the possibility of a 'disease' that even you admit may not even exist--"
"Christ, Lane! You make it sound like I'm the one trying to subjugate and enslave the entire human race and then slaughter us all off!" he spat out, sitting back and throwing his hands up in the air.
"Well, what the hell was with the dead army under the dam?!" Lois said angrily. "You locked all those people in there and they drowned! Who were they?!"
Lex stared at her blankly, and then his mouth dropped open. Then he snapped it closed and started to pull on a blank look.
"Oh, no," Lois said, pointing at him. "Don't you dare! You did that, to people, with families--"
"I didn't--"
"You--!"
"--There were no families!"
"So that makes it ok for you?!" she hissed at him under her breath. "That you chose people who were alone and took advantage--"
"They weren't alone, they--" He looked like he wanted to laugh, strained. "They weren't 'they'."
"What?" Lois was lost. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Goddamnit," he said quietly. Then: "It wasn't my idea to start with. Lionel... it was his project, at the very first. He... he funded the research for the original tech. I..." he grimaced. "I was just trying to turn it all into something workable, I... --Using people for the process wasn't working, not even when they went in fully informed and were completely uncoerced, totally willing to start with."
Lois didn't get what Lex was trying to say about Lionel, but the second part sounded far too familiar. "Key word being 'to start with', yeah?"
"...Yes," Lex admitted. "And that was part of the problem."
"Yeah, 'cause you couldn't let them go, could you--" Lois said quietly, starting to build up a head of steam.
"Not like that, no," Lex muttered. "They were, quite literally, test subjects, a step above human guinea pigs." He scrubbed at his face. "Fucking internal review boards to the nines, full psych workups prior, multiple rounds of testing, all of it, to try and weed out all the potential problem cases beforehand, and we still ended up with far too many mentally unstable failures. Frankly, I still can't say whether it was more the process that caused it or the people who cracked."
Lois, about to lambaste him, barely stopped herself as she realized that this was one of those times to wait. The son of a bitch was actually talking it out.
"A good half of them just... stopped," he continued, staring off into the distance. "No motivation, they barely made the effort to keep breathing on their own. Most of those we caught before it went too far in; we could reverse the first few steps of the process of imbuing superhuman abilities -- the mental groundwork for allowing the power control. The first one like that didn't recover, is still a vegetable; we updated the process, focusing on what seemed to go right with the others, tried drawing out the process longer so we might be able to catch anything that might be going wrong at earlier stages when we could do something about it, tried many things. The next two failures after that went completely insane and killed themselves." He grimaced. "We were lucky after that -- all the others who we were able to catch early have gone through a slow but steady recovery and are, more or less, back to their original mental states, as far as my people have been able to determine."
Lois clenched her teeth and made fists in her lap and told herself that Luthor sounded numb, and maybe a little freaked, and if she jumped on him and started screaming at him about how monstrous he was right now, she'd never hear the full truth...
"Of the rest..." he shook his head. "Many of them just... slowly went psychotic, similar to the meteor psychosis." He shook his head. "They believed they were now 'better' than everyone else, that they didn't have to do what they were told, all of it."
"I thought you were putting in mental controls where they had to do what you commanded," Lois prompted after he'd stopped for too long, after she'd counted to twenty twice and was fairly sure she could get it out without screaming obscenities and otherwise waking up Clark.
"That was at the very end. We only had one real success." he grimaced. "If you could have called it... him... that."
Wes, she thought.
"That's why I had both tracks," he said tiredly. "I needed a backup. Using people... People were just... too unstable. The mental controls became necessary to force compliance during missions when we would have them off-base, unrestrained--"
"You could restrain them?"
"We had to be able to. Too many just... came out wrong and needed to be locked away. I wasn't about to create a worse problem than..." he shook his head. "Of the few remaining that were willing to go through the process and came out fairly mentally unscarred, far too many of those started to become... nervous."
He sighed. "I think that when they saw what happened to the others, they became afraid that we'd just... 'scrap' them all, lock them away, regardless of apparent sanity, because they would be too dangerous to let loose to roam the common streets with abilities like that. Not to mention the temptation they'd have to live with. --They weren't stupid, I think they realized before any of the rest of us did that it was the temptation of no limits that drove the others quite literally power-mad."
"We'd been working fast, because we'd had that rash of new alien activity across the globe, since Dark Thursday. I'd had my people tracking down as much of it as possible, but it had been the most dangerous ones that we'd still failed to catch or kill." He grimaced. "The ones we found that had 'fallen' to earth, landing in craters, were all deadly killers, every last one. I don't know if they were sent to test our capabilities, or to try and soften us up before the main wave."
"We didn't have full protocols for removing the powers yet, or removing the mental structure that, more or less, made them act like programmable smart weapons, who only took orders from cleared individuals. We were working on it, but... we weren't there yet."
He laughed slightly, and Lois clenched her fists and nearly punched him. "It's almost funny," he said. "But, I never would have thought that those goddamn terrorists would be helpful in some way."
"Terrorists?" she prompted lightly.
"The so-called League. The 'Justice League'," he said, and she could literally hear the quotes. "Damn bastards stole terabytes of data from LuthorCorp-attached facilities across the globe, and then blew them up. Half the information processing capability of my company went up in a puff of C-4 smoke, " he gritted out, opening a hand like a flower, or releasing a cloud of dust. "Took out my damn guards on their little terrorist strike excursions. They were just regular building security personnel, people with families; many of them died, some are still unconfirmed missing simply because my people haven't completely cleared all the rubble, and some of those explosions vaporized large sections of the buildings that might've been populated. To say nothing of the injured," he said thinly. "They crippled the manufacturing infrastructure in many places, too. Luckily, only a few of those were key facilities; I've spend a great deal of my time trying to make every facet of my company as self-sufficient as possible, while trying to spread out some of the unique capabilities for redundancies."
Yeah, boo hoo, they've been out blowing up your secret evil labs and there was some collateral damage that you're probably playing up. You probably never even warned any of those guards what they were getting into, what they were defending, or they never would've gotten involved, she thought acidly. She didn't like the ramifications of what that might mean about what the League considered necessary casualties, though -- if Luthor wasn't lying. "Well if you hadn't been doing what you'd been doing in the first place--"
"What? Trying to run my company? The vast majority of the facilities they hit had to do with daily operations, not the labs dealing with the alien-defense projects that you seem to find so disgusting, and Clark thinks unnecessary." Lex shook his head. "It was fairly obvious that they were trying to cripple the company as a whole, from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in without internal knowledge of my company and how it works."
"They... what?"
"Oh, you're surprised?" he looked up at her. "Well, let me be clear, then: it was two parts destruction, one part terrorism, and one part corporate espionage. Your vigilante friends are as dirty as they come. They weren't trying to stop any so-called malpractice of mine, or they'd have been attacking other companies as well, that inflict far worse human-rights violations. They didn't. They never have."
"They've never gone after the factories that pump out toxins into the air and water without a care for how they're destroying the local environment and slowly poisoning to death the people that have to live there. They've never lifted a finger to stop the corrupt-as-hell shell companies whose sole existence is to launder money, or serve as warehouses for illegal drugs. They've never gone after the dregs of Intergang or Edge's consotrium --now those are some people who could use a little liberal introduction via nearby detonation to some high explosives," Lex said with a little laugh. "No. Your so-called heroes of justice don't do any of those things. They only ever go after LuthorCorp-owned or affiliated facilities, and if I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they're probably funded by Oliver Queen, but don't quote me on that."
"Oh? Why no quote?" Lois said sarcastically.
"Because while Oliver is and always has been a bully, and just about as rabid in trying to tear me down personally as the League has ever acted towards LuthorCorp, he's not a complete idiot." Lex rubbed his eyes. "I wish to god he was, because I would have found the damn money trail by now. Even worse, the technology leaps his company has made recently in areas similar to LuthorCorp's main strengths are just different enough that I can't prove that he bought the data on related tech research from the League, that they in turn stole from me. I can't prove anything," he said, sounding deeply, deeply tired. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. Which fucking gets to me, but if I have to fight a war on three fronts, I'd rather lose the human one if it means winning the one where I am able to wipe the aliens out before they kill us all."
"What's the third front?" Lois asked, feeling a little stunned.
"Lionel and his machinations, of course."
"...Of course," she echoed.
"Speaking of which, I'd recommend sticking to your attempts at writing LuthorCorp exposes, if you were thinking otherwise. I'm less likely to bomb the building you work in if I decide I don't like what you're doing, than the League is."
"I'm not afraid of them."
Lex snorted softly. "You should be. They're an ill-tempered lot, and even I, with all the resources available to me, have barely been able to slow them down, in a manner conducive to a lot of people not dying."
"Why would you care about what happens to me anyway?"
"Clark likes you," he said. "He thinks you're annoying, but he likes you. Chloe's your cousin, and the General is your father, and, well, it adds up."
"And what do you think?"
"I think you're interesting. And dangerous, but that's not surprising, given your family and connections." He looked away.
"...You think I'm interesting?" Lois wasn't sure what to make of that. It made her feel a little uneasy... or unsure.... or nervous. Or maybe a little flattered, but that was stupid, and she squashed that. Lex Luthor was not somebody anybody should feel good about impressing, not with his track record and seriously lacking moral code.
"I've a few contacts at the Metropolis Inquisitor. I've read your articles."
Oh god, not those, she mentally groaned, suddenly having a bad feeling of why he might've been so talkative with her. "Well, I hate to burst your bubble, guy, but my articles didn't have aliens in them. The editors put those in."
He blinked at her. "I know," he said patiently. "I have a few contacts at the Inquisitor."
There was a pause.
Lex sighed. "You actually have some odd sort of integrity. Despite the fact that you knew what your editors wanted, and they most likely pressured you to sensationalise your articles, you didn't give in. You wrote them straight-laced, as best you could -- or at least it seemed so, to me. That implies a particular set of ethics that drives your actions, and stubbornness, and resolve. --Again: dangerous, but interesting."
Wait, he's talking to me when he knows I don't believe in aliens? That makes no sense. Lois frowned at him. "Ok, and so, what, is that the reason you're talking to me about all this shit?" Integrity? Really?
Lex's eyes seem to light up for a moment. "Now, why would you think something like that, Miss Lane?"
Lois glared at him. "This isn't light stuff. Even if I wrote this up and you sued for libel, slander, whatever--"
"Libel, for written word; slander for spoken."
Lois gave him a look, not really needing the vocab lesson. "--you'd still be under a lot more scrutiny, and not just from the League. So what gives? You're taking a big risk, thinking I won't go around writing things and blabbing around to people. Like, you know, the League, for starters."
Lex narrowed his eyes at her tilted his head. "Do you really want to know?"
"Yes!"
Lex gave her a long look.
"Yes," she repeated, crossing her arms.
He seemed to come to a decision, nodded once to himself, and then said, "You started dating Gabriel."
Lois blinked at her. "What does Grant have to do with--"
"Everything."
Lois frowned at him in disbelief and confusion.
"I suppose we may get to that... later. Eventually. For now, I'll just say that I have a vested interest in him, and--"
"He sold out? To you?" Lois felt disgusted.
"--I would either feel the need to split you up, or somehow bring you into the fold-- no, he has not 'sold out'," Lex ended in quiet exasperation, then paused. "He'd better not have, at any rate. If he has, I certainly don't know anything about it."
"Where the hell do you get off making life decisions for another perfectly capable grown adult man?" Lois slammed back, thinking of how that had turned out for Wes.
"I don't," he said, exasperation sliding into the realm of irritation. "But I consider him family, and he, me."
Lois stared at Lex and felt a little sick. The ide that Grant might somehow feel in any way related to Luthor at all--
"Stay away from him," Lois demanded.
"No."
"You--!"
"You can certainly try to attempt to pressure him to cut me out of his life, Lane," Luthor told her, looking down at his wrists and straightening his cuffs. "But I'd recommend against it. I very much doubt that would sit well with him."
"Why? Because you'll come down on him like a ton of bricks?" Lois felt scared now -- for Grant.
Lex just looked unbelievably tired, and almost sad. "Lane-- ...Lois," he said quietly. "Have you ever heard of me doing anything like that? To anyone?"
"Wes," she said immediately.
"No, I-- damnit," he said, running a hand over his head and glancing away for a moment. "Not-- Forget the projects for a damn moment. I know I can't expect you to believe me when I say that I only took willing participants for those, and that... I suppose I, and the project scientists, should have been more careful to realize that some of them would most likely change their minds partway through, because the process itself involved altering their mental state."
"Not them," he said. "But... anyone else."
"Clark," she said.
Lex looked at her blankly for a moment. "What-- christ, --wait, this?!?" he said, gesturing and glancing at Clark on the bed, and then sitting up straight and staring at her.
"Maybe you're trying to treat it like a dare or a bet, or whatever, but I bet that's not really what you said, --right?"
Lex looked stymied. He looked away, towards Clark, lying on the bed, asleep, then said, "I can't say anything about that right now. That won't end well."
"Why?"
"Because you'll shout it to the rooftops and--"
"I'm not gonna promise you I won't say anything--"
"Of course not," he sighed.
"--not blind, anyway."
He stopped and stared at her.
For a moment he looked almost angry.
He leaned towards her. "If you do promise not to say a word--" he stopped, clenched and unclenched his jaw. "You had best not break that promise without clearing it with me, first, or for anything other than a previously discussed reason."
Lois frowned at him. "And if I don't promise?" she challenged.
"I'll probably be kicking myself for years," he muttered.
Lois frowned at him. She didn't really believe he'd tell her anything important. Hell, she especially didn't believe that he'd leave her alone even if she did promise something like that, but if she said she would then at least she'd know and, well, Lois could take care of herself. Chloe had warned her about digging into the Luthor's business, but she wasn't about to let that stop her.
Chloe wasn't around to get caught in the crossfire right now, anyway.
Oh what the hell; he probably won't leave me alone after all he's blabbed about already. What's one more thing, that mightactually even help Clark if I knew?
So Lois said: "Well, then?" and pretty much egged him on.
Lex's eyes narrowed.
He considered her for a very long time.
And then he said, "The agreement -- his life for Lana's -- wasn't my idea. Clark came up with that."
Lois blinked at him. Then she frowned and said, "You had to have prompted him," because that didn't sound very Clark-like at all.
Lex started, about to argue, then frowned. "I... suppose I did, but that wasn't my intent."
"What did you say?"
"...A life for a life."
Lois' eyes narrowed.
"Then who the hell were you referring to?"
"...I take it Clark never told you how we met," Lex said, turning sideways on the loveseat and tucking a leg under himself, twisting around to face her completely.
Lois frowned at him.
"You are a crazy bastard."
Lex smiled, sliding his elbow up over the back and propping his head up on a fist.
"You obviously haven't ever had to deal with an irate Clark barging in on you at all hours, screaming accusations about god knows what, and feeling an obligation to let him vent it all out, regardless of circumstance."
"Well, maybe if you didn't keep pulling the stupid shit he's feeling the pretty justifiable need to yell about you about..." Lois said with zero sympathy, because if it was anything like what had happened out on the street...
Lex's eyes narrowed. "He's not always right, you know."
Lois snorted.
"No, you misunderstand. There have been many times when he has made completely false accusations against me."
"Yeah? And what did he say when you told him it wasn't you?"
Lex gave her a smile that was more a baring of teeth. "Do I look stupid to you?"
Lois narrowed her eyes. "Yeah, you do. So I guess that means you didn't set him straight, then."
There was silence for awhile.
"Idiot," Lois added.
Lex looked like he wanted to strangle her.
"I don't have to defend myself," he gritted out. "I... I shouldn't have to. Not to him. And I seriously doubt that he would even have believed me if I had told him."
"Why the hell not?"
"Because he doesn't listen," Lex sneered out. "I can't have a civil, sane, rational conversation with him when he's the least bit upset with me. Quite possibly because he refuses to even consider the possibility that he might be wrong, even the least little bit on the smallest of matters!" he ended, tossing up his hands. "He has made it quite clear that not agreeing with his beliefs is tantamount to being wrong, which invariably leads to arguments that I not only cannot win, but cannot even ask for a stalemate on. He refuses to agree to disagree, let alone attempt simple, basic understanding or trying to see things from my point of view in any given situation or circumstances."
Lois glanced between Lex, who was holding his head in his hands, and Clark, asleep on the bed.
"He's a hypocritical, judgmental ass, and a horrible liar!" Lex ground out. "He lies to my face. I've caught him in horrible ones, even when he knows I know differently, and still he persists in the lie."
"...And you think this and are friends why?" Because it was kind of obvious after today that they were, and never really stopped -- they just stopped talking, and (mostly?) getting along.
Lex gave a laugh that came out more of a choked sob. "Because he actually gives a damn about me. Because he keeps saving my worthless fucking life." He gave a pained laugh. "Because he's Clark Kent. And I can't... I just can't..."
"Let go?"
"He is the only thing in my life that makes the least bit of sense. The last thing that ever did," Lex confessed to her. "That bridge... going over the rail. I died, you know. He gave me CPR. I remember being dead. I was..." he shook his head. "I was free, for awhile."
"...and then you weren't."
Lex licked his lips and shook his head. "He was the first strange thing that happened to me in that fucking town, and every day since then everything's gone upside-down and backwards and sideways and in-all-ways a fucking nightmarish mess," he said.
"Sometimes," he said, "Sometimes when I first wake up, I think that maybe I'm really halfway dead, still on that riverbank. Or maybe comatose in a hospital, somewhere, because I shouldn't have survived that. Or, hell," he laughed shakily, "still stuck in Belle Reeve, all completely delusional and jacketed and dosed and locked away, because none of this alien shit really hit until after," he said, lifting his head and throwing his arms wide jerkily. "There were bits and pieces of oddness, but nothing like..." He got a pained look and seemed to shut down almost.
"If you ever tried to describe to anyone outside of Smallville of the existence of meteor freaks and what they can do, without being able to bring them to town and just show them, they'd never believe you. Not even Metropolis," he said quietly, and flatly, and with fervor. "They'd think you insane. Most people who'd survived Smallville and got out would start second-guessing themselves, if they lived and stayed outside of town long enough. They'd certainly try to forget. That's how I fucking feel about this alien business," Lex said venomously. "But I don't have the luxury of just forgetting. I have the means by which to do something, and I know enough about the situation to know that it needs doing, and that makes me responsible."
"No, it doesn't," Lois interjected.
"Yes, it does," Lex said, looking her in the eye. "Someone needs to do something about it."
"Why does it have to be you?"
"Who else would it be?" he said, taken aback. "The military? They came to me for help!" he said, gesturing at his chest. "They provided funding to help pay for projects that I envisioned, I designed, I oversaw. --And I can hardly trust them with everything; the first thing they'd do if they knew everything I did and were given full control would be to demand I turn over the meteor freaks in Belle Reeve. They already have powers, and the military would surely think it best and easiest to simply brainwash them into killing machines. Because they do love their expediency," he spat out.
And you aren't trying to be 'expedient'? "Why wouldn't you want that?" Lois said, frowning, wondering if he really hadn't been doing that to them -- could he actually have been telling the truth earlier about Belle Reeve?
Lex stared at her in disbelief. "The majority of them have been -- were -- are teenagers!" he hissed out, horrified with her. "Most of them -- meteor psychosis is real, they ultimately can't be held responsible for their actions while subject to it. And it wasn't their fault in the first place -- they didn't mutate themselves on purpose!"
"And the adults?"
Lex grimaced. "They have been generally less... flexible than the youths. They tend to enjoy the killing and use of their powers more and are wholly unapologetic for their actions, in contrast to many of the teens who did not mean to hurt anyone. The vast majority of the adults would be perfectly willing to recommit and are generally angry at being caught and confined, while a good many of the less-psychotic teens are relieved when their powers are dampened." Lex ran a hand over his head. "All that said -- no, it still isn't their fault, either. They did not ask to be mutated, and from what I hear the vast majority of them were unassuming, sane law-abiding citizens before they were mutated by the meteors."
"And this stops you... why?"
Lex stared at her for awhile, then said through clenched teeth, "The vast majority of them are not of sound-enough mind to be able to make rational decisions about what they want or need. They aren't capable of making an informed choice about their own health and well-being. I have to do that for them. Being forcibly enrolled in a program that's barely a step up from a military concentration camp and programmed to become living weapons against their will is not in their best interest."
His eyes narrowed. "And it certainly wouldn't stop there."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Lois said.
"Some meteor freaks gained their powers immediately -- during one of the two meteor showers," Lex said slowly. "But some of them-- especially the teenagers -- tended to gain their abilities only after a second exposure to meteor rock." He took a breath. "And some were born that way to parents who were exposed during one of the two events."
Lois frowned at him.
"You really don't get it, do you," Lex said under his breath. "Everyone mutates from exposure during the showers. Everyone. It's only the degree of exposure that determines whether someone exhibits powers. I'm not the only one who knows -- Chloe's done extensive research on this. You yourself could walk into Smallville Medical and ask for a basic rundown on the 'normal' elevated white-blood-cell count for everyone in the region, and its effects." He clenched and unclenched his jaw. "Literally every person in town these days has that elevated count, and as a result they are stronger and more fit than the average person, and never suffer from common ailments. They hardy ever get sick, as a start."
"...And this isn't a good thing?"
"No!" Lex shot back. "Haven't you been listening to me?! A second exposure activates the latent mutation! ..Jesus christ, do I really have to spell this out?" he muttered. "If the military decides to grab the meteor-freaks, they won't stop there. The whole town will be at risk! They'll want to experiment, and when they realize how useful some of those mutations can be, and how diverse the results of the mutations, they'll want more, and that will mean grabbing every last resident of Smallville. And then forcing active mutations in them. --You, me, your friends working at the Talon -- everyone you know in town."
Lois' breath caught and her eyes went wide. "They can't do that-- they-- Won't!"
He gritted his teeth. "They damn well can and will. Not everyone is like your father and you know it." Lois flinched. "And once the other branches like the CIA and NSA get involved..." His eyes bored into hers. "Some of those mutations would be perfect for assassinations, or gathering intel. Telekinesis, teleportation, an ability to shift or vibrate through walls, telepathy -- I've seen all of these exhibited through meteor-rock-induced ability, and they're the least powerful of the bunch. The ethics in other agencies of the executive branch don't have quite the grounding morals of much of the military," he warned. "And it doesn't take a wide swath of corruption, Lois," he said quietly, intensely, "It only takes one."
Lois shivered. This was... this was insane. Evil. How could he think that...
"Lionel found one willing meteor-freak to try and kill your cousin before she could testify, and he subverted the boy," Lex said. "One. And then that boy slaughtered the guards at the safehouse where she was staying. He had 'blades' for hands, going up against professional guards with guns, and they were incapable of holding him off. He hadn't even been trained," he said. "Most people who don't know about the freaks just lock up, paralyzed, because they can't even process that what they're seeing is real. He was probably counting on that, when Chloe and Clark have been surviving the worst the town could throw at them for years prior. From what I heard, she and Clark still only barely fought him off -- they got lucky."
He shook his head. "It won't be like that if the freaks get pulled into the military-industrial complex. They'll get that training, and them some. Military training. And the only way to 'manufacture' more is to start with irradiating the people from the town. ...And then," he grimaced, "then once they run out of us, they'll have to start trying to mutate people without the original exposure, and that generally causes the Jitters in normal people, like it did in Earl Jenkins. --You can ask Clark and Chloe about that, if you really want to know more, but..." he shook his head.
"But the real nightmare will start once someone figures out how to mutate people who weren't in the original meteor shower," Lex continued. "And once they figure out that people with even a latent mutation will give birth children with non-latent mutations... --when that happens... then there will be no going back. They'll be grabbing and mutating whoever the hell they want, and force-breeding the rest. We'll have a virutal slave trade in the United States, a second-class race of possibly-psychotic human beings with abilities beyond the norm, subjugated for the purposes of the corrupt powerful elite." He looked almost sick.
"And someone at some point will think it's a great idea to try and make a black market out of irradiating meteor powers into those who can afford it -- maybe without the psychosis, maybe not -- alongside the slavery. We'll have the high, and the low, and everyone else caught in-between, and when revolution comes, we'll tear ourselves as a race apart from the inside." He rubbed his hands across his face. "And that doen't even begin to consider the ramifications on the rest of humanity residing elsewhere on the planet," he said. "The balance of power would shift drastically, with weaponized meteor freaks in the us arsenal."
"You're spouting dystopian crap," Lois said, her arms wrapped around herself, trying not to shiver. "It'll never happen." My dad would stop it first. No one would let that stand. It's just... wrong.
"No, it can happen," Lex said. "Very easily. Frighteningly so. I've already had to deal with people trying to gather up meteor-freaks for their own purposes. As for the rest... well, read a history book sometime. Revolution always comes when the subjugated get enough power to rise up. Always. And these subjugated will have the power practically built in under their skins. It's one of the reasons why I'm so focused on getting them sane. I don't want them feeling taken advantage of, and I want there to be no easy grounds for rounding them up and locking them all away out of the public eye."
"Fine," Lois spat back. "Let's pretend for a moment that you aren't trying to do that yourself with them--"
"--I'm not, or I wouldn't be having nearly the difficulties in doing what I feel needs to be done--" Lex interjected.
"--Then what the hell were you doing with Wes?" she demanded. "How was that not exactly the same thing?!" she hissed.
"One -- he had a choice and said yes, and no you didn't hear that from me. Two -- I'm not going to be using people like that and starting a damn slave trade, I'd like to think I've got better sense than that. Three -- the end result of the process was supposed to be reversible."
Lois felt like she'd been slapped in the face.
"At the end of the day, the superpowered can't walk among the rest of us. It just won't work," he said. "The solution is obvious -- no powers in 'normal civilian life' means no temptation and far less of a foothold for the psychosis to take hold. But there have been setbacks and screwups. --Mainly because we'd been rushing," he admitted, "because we have to be ready before the next strike. But-- well, I don't suppose you were wondering what I referred to when I said that there was one thing the League was actually useful in doing?"
Lois nodded numbly.
"It was in coming up with a solution to the depowering problem after the later end stages of the process," Lex said. "They were reckless as hell -- tried something desperate and dangerous that my own scientists has vetoed as not humane enough to attempt. A few of the test subjects defected -- ran off during the testing -- one of the reasons why I felt it necessary to include mental controls that could force compliance and execution of given orders in the field," Lex explained. "We needed to be able to be sure that they would complete their assignments as quickly as possible and then return to base immediately afterwards."
Lex rubbed his forehead and stared off into space. "The League apparently picked them up. They came up with a method of depowering them through the use of high-powered lasers. A long enough exposure to microwave radiation at the right wavelengths unraveled the DNA bindings in the serum that we'd injected them with."
"They broiled people out of their powers," Lois said slowly.
"Yes," Lex sighed tiredly. "If they hadn't had the enhanced strength I doubt they would have survived. They're lucky their brains didn't heat badly enough that all the proteins unravelled, which would otherwise had led to a feverish, lingering death. We caught up with some of the ones that the League turned loose, depowered, and got the information out of them. We gathered up volunteers from the sane test subjects and tried it out. When it worked, we started doing the same to the psychotics." Lex sighed again and ran a hand over his head. "Most of them became sane again, once they were depowered. Some are still undergoing psychotherapy, though my staff assures me that many of them had underlying problems that were 'only' exascerbated by the procedure, that someone just didn't catch the first time through, with reactions that are only now understandable in retrospect."
"And, what, you just let them all go?" Lois said in disbelief.
"Those who seemed sane again, and were willing to stand by the non-disclosure agreement, yes, of course," Lex said simply, blinking at her. "The insane ones, obviously not. And, of course, we will have to track them, and they'll be receiving checkups, medical exams, and psychotherapy for the forseeable future, given that there could be ill effects from the various processes that may only surface years down the line." He waved a hand, "But that is normal procedure for any major medical study."
"...Right," said Lois, wondering if she might be able to track down some of these supposed 'let-loose' people down and get them to talk -- or at least get a better picture of what Luthor was actually doing, because while it was still pretty horrific messed-up stuff, this didn't sound nearly as bad as she'd been afraid of.
God, I don't actually believe him ...do I?
"What did you think I was going to do with them?" Lex asked, frowning.
Oh, I don't know -- lock them up, jail them, kill them and dump their bodies down a hole...?
Lois shook her head and sidestepped that question. "What about the project itself? Why would you let everyone go if it was still ongoing?"
"Because it isn't ongoing," Luthor said. "We were using an alien DNA sequence that we'd extracted from one of the 'strange visitor's corpses. We found in studying it that we were able to use it to bind together various types of DNA between meteor freaks and 'normal' humans and other species -- very versatile stuff -- but we ran out of material for the process," he ended. "The whole thing's had to be mothballed and the research progress has slowed to almost a crawl."
Well thank god for small miracles -- if it's true, Lois thought.
"I don't understand why you were using people in the first place," Lois countered. "Why not machines, or just better guns?"
Lex frowned. "I have projects building better arms and armored weaponry," he said. "But robotics is a dead-end. These aliens subverted every last computer system on the planet on Dark Thursday," he said. "Not to mention that without a power source, anything electronic is useless. Besides, if I relied on robotics for targeting and a fast-enough reaction time to be able to respond to these things..." Lex shook his head. "The worst and most dangerous of the aliens are capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. Those robotic systems would need to be more-than-human-capable to target and shoot them, to have any hope of actually hitting what they were aiming at. If these aliens subverted those systems, we wouldn't be able to turn them off or break them before a huge amount of damage was done -- to us," he explained grimily.
"However, the only biological subversion known to-date is through these 'alien ghosts'," Lex continued. "And that's a one-to-one threat. If we can enhance humans to the point where we are strong and fast enough to use weapons against them and be able to score a hit--"
"--Wait, why strong enough?" Lois interrupted.
"Because being able to move at high speeds means nothing if the subject's tissues are so strained that they rip themselves apart from the stress forces," Lex explained. "That's why it's important to enhance the basic strength. We also needed to increase the metabolic and immune system response for a similar reason -- better blood circulation, oxygenation of tissues, and healing. they wouldn't be able to function properly without it, and would die much sooner, just from the use of their powers, otherwise," he frowned. "I wasn't trying to turn these people into kamikaze timebombs."
Lois breathed out a tired sigh. All this was really starting to get to her. He was being too serious, too logical about things -- even when those things were completely crazy to think, let alone talk about with a straight face. Down the fucking rabbit hole--
"Look, the aliens apparently do have a weakness," he said. "The worst of them don't seem to be able to function when exposed to green meteor rock, so if I can find a way to make a fast attack using the material--"
--and up again we go. Time to start fighting fire with fire. "Well, that makes no sense," Lois grumbled, massaging her temples. "If all these badass aliens are so horrible and un-takedownable, why would they throw meteor rock at us that we could use to take 'em down?" she asked.
Lex stopped short. "...What?" he said.
"I'm just saying," Lois pointed out. "If all these aliens are evil and trying to kill all humans and whatever, and all smart enough to screw up all our computers and steal our power and make us basically helpless," she scratched her head, searching for the right words. "Well, why would they basically be giving us the... the 'seeds of their own destruction'?"
Lex stared at her.
"And, I mean, if you're really the only guy in the world trying to stop them... well, what the hell happened with Dark Thursday?" Lois asked. "Did you stop them? --Because if you could stop something like that already, why isn't that enough?"
"I--" Lex looked a little ill. "It-- wasn't-- ...I didn't stop it," he said quietly.
"Okaaaay," said Lois. "So, who did?"
Lex stared at her.
"Because somebody had to, right?" Lois pressed. "Because either these alien guys are totally evil and somebody else stopped them, or they stopped on their own for whatever reason, probably because somebody talked them out of it."
"I-- I--" Lex looked very taken aback.
"First one or second one?" Lois asked.
Lex closed his mouth and swallowed. "First one, I think. Lana said--"
"We're trusting Lana now?"
Lex looked about to protest, then clammed up and turned a little pale.
"...For this, yes," he said, finally. "We weren't fighting back then."
"Right," Lois said quietly. "So, yeah, I'll ask again -- why does it have to be you?" Lois pressed him. "Because hey, here's a thought -- if there really are aliens, maybe not all of them are bad. Maybe the bad ones are in the minority -- 'cause, hey, there must not have been a lot of them running around, or a lot of people would've noticed -- enough that people would have talked and everybody would know about it. So, y'know, where are the rest of them?" she asked, throwing her hands up.
Lex stared at her.
"Did any of this ever even occur to you?" Lois asked.
He looked completely off-balance, then seemed to grope his way back to solidity with an annoyed frown. "For all I know, whoever or whatever managed to stop them last time, or the time before that--"
"Twice now?" Lois said, crossing her arms.
Lex gritted his teeth. "I don't know how they were stopped or stalled. Until I do, I can't risk sitting back and hoping and praying that whoever was involved didn't die in the attempt, or that whatever else will just magically happen again." He glared at her. "As it is, the death toll and property damage from the second meteor shower, and the Dark Thursday event, and the dam collapse were all unconscionable--"
"So, three times then," Lois pointed out.
Lex looked like he was getting a headache.
"Yeah, well, here's the thing, Luthor, you don't know," she said. "You don't know what happened, you aren't completely sure of the aliens existing in the first place--"
"--Even if they turn out to be not actual aliens, they're fucking something that's alien-like -- DNA doesn't lie," Lex muttered.
"--and you don't know whether anything will happen again--"
"It's entirely possible that those people might've only dispatched one of their kind because they thought they only needed one," Lex gritted out, rubbing at his temples.
"--and even if it did, you don't know that it won't get stopped without you needing to do anything about it, and I think that's what's the real kicker for you," Lois said, finally getting it, really really getting it -- no wonder he was such a dom -- "It's all about control with you," she ended decisively.
"...What?" Lex said, looking up at her in shock.
"Control," Lois repeated. "You don't trust anybody else -- I get it, you've been majorly screwed over by your dad, you've had three ex-wives try to kill you at different times, and probably a whole bunch of other crap, like stuff with Oliver and god knows what else. Whatever," she said, waving it off. "A whole bunch of people that you should've been able to trust, who hurt you real fucking bad." And you probably feel like the only way you can be safe is to have control over everything -- which is, unsurprisingly, why you're a dom. "Well, guess what?"
Lex looked at her with a little apprehension. "What?" he said slowly.
"Get over it," Lois said, poking him in the chest. "You want to be all control-freak on your own damn personal time? Great. Have at it!" -- Clark will probably love you for it -- "But not with everything else. You're making excuses about shit that may never happen down the line, and that'll probably resolve itself all on its own anyway even if it does, because, hell -- there's even a track record of it doing just that in the past, which even you admit!" she poked him in the chest again, then leaned in.
"So yeah, Luthor, you don't trust that everything's gonna work out ok, and you've got a hell of a lot of reasons for it," she said. "But that doesn't give you the right or the 'responsiblity' to run around doing a bunch of crazy shit that ends up hurting a lot of other people."
"I'm not crazy," Lex said adamantly.
God, Clark was right -- no, don't bring up Clark, that'll just set him off.
"Lex, you need to stop doing crazy shit--!" Lois started.
"I'm not crazy," Lex repeated, looking angry and scared.
"Don't be stupid, Luthor," Lois said. "If I thought you were crazy, I wouldn't be trying to talk some fucking sense into you," she said coldly. "I'd just--"
"You just said--" Luthor cut in, protesting.
"--Woah!" Lois cut in, throwing up her hands. "Time-out!" She stopped for a second and looked at Luthor -- really looked at him.
Ok, what the hell is he not getting? Lois thought, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with him. Because she was sure at this point that she could get through to him, she just needed to figure out how. He wasn't a loonie, but he wasn't really a nervous wreck, either -- not really. He fixated a little on stuff, certain things, but he was logical about shit. The whole thing about the meteor-freaks proved it: he thought things through to a logical conclusion, but, christ, it was like three-quarters of the way up, he was using 2+2=5, and that's why everything came out so bass-ackwards and just plain scary-wrong at the end of things. ...And he almost seemed willing to admit it. It was almost like he'd been asking her to check his math.
She stared at him, forehead crinkling up, and finally tried, "Ok, you do know the difference between... uh... who a person is and what they're like, and, uh, what they do, like how they act ...right?"
Lex stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language.
One he didn't know.
Oh for fuck's sake... Lois thought in exasperation.
"You can only judge a man by his actions," Lex said slowly.
"It's not the same thing," Lois said, and ...holy shit. "--Ok, wait, is there some kind of thing where you think that not doing shit about aliens -- like the stuff you've been trying to do? -- when you could be but don't is, like, tantamount to standing by and doing nothing and wanting everybody to be hosed?"
At the look on his face, Lois literally did a facepalm.
"Erg," she groaned, flopping back on the sofa and staring up at the ceiling. "Oh god, what the hell!" she complained, rubbing the heels of her palms into her eyes. ...And what does that say about what you think of anybody else who you think knows but doesn't help you, huh?
There was silence for awhile as she contemplated how truly fucked up Luthor's head really was, and Luthor sat there breathing.
"...This," she heard tentatively, "...isn't just a Clark thing?"
Oh good, he does remember what Clark tried to tell him earlier in the street, that I pretty much repeated damn near word-for-word. She let her hands fall behind her head and tilted her head up at him. "Uh, no," she said in 'well, duh' tones. "It's a normal thing."
Lex frowned at her.
"Ok, look," she groaned, sitting up. "A person is not what they do, ok? An artist may be artistic, but being an artist is their job -- it's not who they are--"
"--But it is," Lex insisted. "If someone is doing what they should be--"
"--What they should be???" Lois said, her voice starting to hit the higher registers. Because, really -- communist much?
Lex winced and glanced over at Clark, who muttered quietly and shifted a little on the bed.
"Well, you're a damn reporter, not a coffee girl," Lex said under his breath, once Clark had finished settling again. "There's a job, and there's finding your life's work -- who you really are, and what you should be doing."
Well, that's a little better than communist, Lois revised. ...Marginally.
But 'life's work' --good god, she thought. --No, no -- focus, girl!
"Right," Lois said lowly. " 'Who you really are, and what you should be doing.' --And maybe it should be a damn clue that when people say shit like that, that they're saying two things instead of just one," she hissed back at him, with a 'get it, already!' look.
Lex looked irritated in the extreme, and opened his mouth to say, well, Lois never actually found out what stupid junk, because he paused and frowned at her, then glanced down as he seemed to start working something out in his poor screwed-up electricity-crispy-fried brain of his.
Please, for fuck's sake, come on, Lois prayed.
"Is there really nothing else to you other than being a businessman?" Lois tried, hitting him as hard as she could think of -- because what sort of 'just-a-businessman' would spend time with Clark on weird social outings to random warehouse-malls, or played pool in the middle of the day, or, hell, let him yell at him about the stupid shit he'd done?
"I-- What--?!" Lex's head came up. "I'm not just--"
And then he looked a little stricken.
"What, you haven't always wanted to be the consummate businessman?" she asked him.
He looked even more taken aback.
"--No! I..."
Lois blinked at him and sat up a little straighter. "Wait -- you haven't always wanted to run LuthorCorp?"
"I..." he said softly, looking down at his hands, and Lois saw him shift in place almost nervously and...
Holy shit, I think I got under his skin, she realized. Between the sleep-deprivation, fatigue, and half-a-breakdown with Clark... and all the talking... oh man...
Hello, Mr. Luthor, and how are you today? she thought a little hysterically.
She knew she should stop, this wasn't really fair on him, but...
...if she did, she might not get another chance to get through to him again.
She shook herself and asked him, "What did you do in college? Wasn't it business track towards an MBA?"
"No," he shook his head, frowning at her. "I got my degree in biochem. I was attending grad school when..."
Lois tallied up the dates and times. "--when you decided to go to Smallville."
"I didn't decide to," Lex said, irritated again, his head coming up. "I didn't want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. My father--" He clenched his jaw and looked away.
"Wait, Lionel made you--" Lois blinked at him. "--He forced you to drop out of college?"
"You don't exactly say 'no' to the man, Lane. If I hadn't come willingly, he would've done something that would've ensured I couldn't go back to university later." Lex said sourly. "I'd assumed for a long time that I'd end up helping him run the business someday, but..." he looked pained. "I didn't think that I'd have to take the reins away from him; that he actually couldn't be trusted with his own damn company."
That's regret, Lois realized. She knew an 'it wasn't supposed to be like this!' when she heard it.
"...You sound like you don't actually want to be running LuthorCorp," Lois put out there.
"What I want has no bearing on the situation," Lex nearly snarled out, slashing a hand through the air. "I need to be--"
"Why? Why does it need to be you?" Lois said. "There are plenty of other businesses doing just fine with CEO's who are-not-you. Why can't you get someone else to--"
Lex shook his head, curling back a sneer. "What? Do what? Have to justify my actions to someone else who thinks I'm insane? Who'd probably just as soon look at me as have me commited to an asylum in order to ensure their total dominion over the company? The 'C' in CEO isn't for 'co-manage', Lane. CEO's don't like to share power."
Lane slowly narrowed her eyes at him. "Just to be clear -- why do you need to be doing all those alien experiment and tracking things, again?"
Lex looked as stunned as if she'd smacked him in the face with a raw halibut.
Lois continued brazenly: "Because you said yourself that you've convinced some people who are working for you already into believing in aliens--"
"I can't turn the company over to them!" he hissed back, making the leap in logic. "They don't have the training--"
"So train them."
"--and trusting someone to run a computer simulation or compile data or work out in the field is very different than trusting them to make smart business decisions about things that will directly affect the lives and livelihoods of thousands of employees!" he said, looking rattled.
"Selection process and training," Lois said.
Lex gritted his teeth. "...And, as I believe I mentioned before, they're completely out of line! I'm the one holding them back -- and if you think you have a problem with my methods and what I feel are necessary evils and sacrifices, you can damn well better believe that--"
"Stop. Just stop a moment."
Lex ground to a halt and gave her a very impatient look.
"You're going around in circles, Luthor." She gave him a look. "You say you don't want to CEO LuthorCorp, but you say you do it because you don't trust anyone else to be competent enough or make the right decisions. But it's kind of up in the air whether you've been making good or bad decisions right now. You shouldn't be thinking you need to find someone like you," she said, "What you should be looking for is someone to make better business decisions than you," she stressed. "You're a smart guy, right? If you're really that worried about the alien stuff --are you really telling me that there's absolutely no way that you could split off the alien-project parts of the company somehow, and set up the paperwork so that somebody else could make good day-to-day business decisions for you, so you'd be able to spend all your time on just the alien stuff that you say is so important?"
"I can't do that!" Lex said.
"Why the hell not?" Lois pressured him.
"--I need it to help me stay sane!" he blurted out, tossing his hands up.
Then his eyes went a little wide.
"...And you're wondering why the people you've got on 24-7 alien watch are a little out there?"
Lex looked like he was mentally slapping himself.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Next piece of part 3 is here.