SV Colin Luthor Verse Fic: En Plein Air - Chapter One
Disclaimer: Smallville and certain characters belong to Miller-Gough et al. No profit is gained from this writing-only, hopefully, enjoyment.
There is no non-con/dub-con/rape depicted in this story, but there are references to it having occurred in the past. I included the warning just to be safe, as I certainly do not want to trigger anyone.
***
Lex hires a driver for the opening, just so it’s on someone else, and in this case someone who’s driven for him before, to maneuver the car in and around such a strange overwrought venue.
Michael stops the car about half a mile back from the absurd glitz and glam of relatively famous people awkwardly climbing out from shiny expensive cars and smiling plasticly as they saunter up Lin’s version of a red carpet: vinyl tablecloths stapled together.
What those dingbats up there don’t realize of course is just how much of a jerk Lin is because that stylish red carpet in fact, according to the artist himself, deadends right at a portable toilet, forcing the poor fools to retrace their steps back to the entrance and take one of the other, less glamorous dirt paths down to the beach where the real show is.
“They waste so much time on the wrong kind of beauty,” Lin had told him just the other night, in explanation, after he’d just finished telling Lex, “Don’t go toward the cameras, ok?”
And Lex had grinned and nodded. He said, “How delightfully devious of you to point out their flaws.”
Lin had smiled.
Lex unhooks his seat belt and meets Michael’s eyes in the rear view mirror.
“I’ll text when I’m ready,” he says.
Michael nods.
Getting out of the car as discreetly as he can, Lex pulls his coat closer, oddly grateful for the biting chill and wetness in the night air. It’s a welcome wake-up after what turned out to be an excruciatingly long and frustrating day downtown: board meeting running all goddamn morning; lunch with lobbyists wining and dining him in the hopes of him promising financial support for relaxing regulations on what seems like every damn aspect of business, which gave Lex a headache and had him shouting in public again; getting updates on 33.1 that showed several areas weren’t at all where he’d been assured they would be at this point; more paperwork and calls and signatures to try and kill that farce currently still fucking, somehow, filming in Gotham; and then several attempts to start scheduling for company events, now only a couple months away, which meant trying and failing to get Lucas on the line, since he’d claimed since last year he wanted to be in charge of organizing this year’s New Year’s Eve gala.
Lex takes out his phone and turns on the flashlight, spotting a tiny, rocky, dark path cut away and packed down among the overgrown weeds and dying Fall grasses.
It’s opening night of what the media has decided to refer to as Lin’s “sculpture garden,” a project he’s been working on hush-hush for at least a year and in that whole time never telling Lex much of anything about it beyond, “Oh, it’s progressing.”
“Is it abstract?” Lex had asked, once.
“Not really,” Lin had said.
He’d tried being sneaky. “What kind of materials are you working with?”
Lin had said, “Not paint this time.”
Month Eight, Lex asked, “Do you have a venue picked out?”
Lin said, “Yeah, I think so,” and that was it.
Lex only found out the show was confirmed when he read it in the newspaper. Listed there two months ago under “Newsworthy Notices,” “Colin Luthor: Untitled Art Show” appeared right between “Clark & Bodesman: Charity Dinner” and “Harper Ne’va: F/W Line Preview.”
And then, starting last month, Linny would slip Lex little tips, like to avoid the paparazzi.
Or like, two weeks ago, when a text invitation pinged on his phone, declaring Lex a VIP with an all-access pass to “CL’s ‘Pochade.’ ” It told him to “Dress for Hiking,” promised the location would be texted the day of, and warned: “Unoffical/Personal Photography Not Permitted.”
Last night, Lin went so far as to put a folded up scarf on top of Lex’s dresser. He then shuffled over into bed, into Lex’s arms, murmuring into his chest, “No chance of you wearing a hat, but that might help.”
In the script for this streaming TV-movie monstrosity, this hack piece of sensationalist bullshit that Lex furiously scanned through back in May at Nick’s request and decried, this vile mockery of their real fucking lives that’s still filming somehow, despite numerous Cease and Desists and, yes, Lex is somewhat ashamed to say, actual bribes to shut down production, there’s one particular scene that sticks with him, that he’s terrified is actually going to wind up onscreen whenever the dreck is actually aired or distributed or uploaded. This piece of shit that’s filming right under Bruce’s goddamn nose in Gotham features a scene where the adopted middle ‘Castell’ brother, who’s described early on as ‘beautifully traumatized with wet eyes in a perpetual thousand-yard stare,’ says to the infamous older brother, who is, of course, fucking bald from a childhood illness, “You know what Dad always said to me? ‘The lessons we learn from pain make us the strongest.’ ”
The middle brother, Marcus, then reaches out and grabs the older brother, Alastair, by the hand and says, in close-up, in what is described in the script as a ‘chillingly flirtatious and vaguely threatening whisper,’ “I can take everything and never say a word.”
He says later, to the older brother’s close friend, “No one needs ever know what really happened.”
In fact, the Marcus character’s final lines in the script are spoken, not in the actual final scene, but the one before it, where it’s him, the Alastair character, and the youngest brother, Ian, all riding in the back of a limo on its way to their father’s funeral service.
Marcus says, “Hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? If I don’t mind- Alistair, hey, hey, if I don’t mind, then why should you? I’m fine.”
The writer’s notes say in brackets, following that: [Alastair is frowning, doubtful of Marcus’s reassurances. Alastair shares a loaded look with Ian. Marcus stares into the middle distance, as the city passes across his face by way of reflection in the limo’s window. In close-up, Marcus’s hands are shown to be clenched, his knuckles bone-white. In all subsequent shots, Marcus is framed off-center and from above. He is already out of focus.]
Lex can’t stop thinking about that description.
He can’t help but think, as he’s about halfway down to the eerily red-lit beach, as he stops suddenly when his flashlight catches on something reflective sticking out from the brush to his left, that maybe that fucking TV-movie is more terrifying than insulting because it’s shockingly accurate.
As he takes a few careful steps closer to the shape hiding in the brush, Lex is able to pick out an exposed hand and arm and shoulder, a human arm, its fingers pointing back toward the road. It’s a sculpture made of wire, coiled and wrapped to imitate muscles and bones and tendons, bronze in color, maybe even actual bronze. From the positioning, the viewer is presumably meant to infer the rest of the figure is buried beneath the sand.
Lex almost smiles, continuing down the path despite what might be another one of Lin’s mind games, warning him to go back. And Lex wonders if anyone else would immediately know, beyond a doubt, that Lin constructed not only what’s visible of that figure above the sand, the arm, hand, and shoulder, but also everything else, the head and torso and legs and feet, only to then hide and bury it all away beneath the sand like a secret, all his hard work disguised like he does with everything he thinks no one will appropriately appreciate.
“They always make such a weird spectacle of everything,” Lin had said at his last showing, embarrassed and then annoyed by all the photographers blocking his canvases, snapping photos worth thousands not of the art, but of the audience.
The half-buried sculpture in sand strikes a chord with Lex, hitting a very specific frayed nerve Lin may or may not know about-because Lex is still uncomfortable with how he actually feels about Lin displaying his art, displaying and then selling it. He knows how he should feel on Lin’s behalf, and he is proud and happy for his success, for how much his self-confidence has grown with each moment of self-expression.
But Lex also feels a whole lot more that isn’t noble. He thinks of the painting in his office that Lin first displayed for the public and then gave to him, gave to Lex, and he’s jealous and petty enough to still not be satisfied, even though he’s the only one who knows it’s not really just a self-portrait. Lex wants Lin to be happy and healthy, but he also wants all of Lin, all of his work, and all of his attention. And so Lex isn’t always sure when he’s reading correctly the hidden meanings to Lin’s words and art and behavior, sifting carefully for those awful truths Lin can only tell him-or when Lex is simply projecting more that what’s honestly there.
“Nervous?” Lex asked Lin this morning, reaching over to brush his hair out of his face.
Lin just smiled and looked away, started talking about something else entirely, and Lex realized only then that the distance and silence between them of late, that he’d interpreted as anxiety on Lin’s part about the upcoming show, might not have been coming from Lin at all.
The road they’re walking these days, carefully, secretly, with only part-time help at the house, with only occasional appearances together in public, isn’t smooth or easy. Money doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t solve Lex being in love with his own brother.
And that leaves him to wonder, as he trudges down and down: did Lin make this path with Lex in mind, or did Lex just choose this one because it fucking fits?
Staged on the residential west bank of the river, on a piece of land Lin bought with his own money, “Pochade” officially opens at midnight tonight, which means, technically, at 11:45, Lex is unfashionably early for once in his life. Backlit by the industrial lights of the working docks across the water, Lin’s art installation is pretty much already the event of the season, if not the calendar year.
The Planet ran a small notice in today’s paper, featuring a few comments from Lin’s agent and one stock quote from Lin himself, where he described the installation as a “hypermodern approach to maximalist performance sculpture.”
Lex easily translated that to mean: “I’m going to fuck with your heads, and you’re going to love it and completely miss the fact I’m making fun of you.”
Ahead, a great gnarled tree looms, all but blocking the last bit of the path. As he tries to sidle around it, Lex spies another wire figure down low, this one in green, arms and legs wrapped around the base of the tree trunk like it’s hugging it for safety. It’s small, maybe a child, and part of Lex wants to reach out and touch, but he’d ruin the illusion, the associations Lin’s conjured.
Julian, of course, who won’t ever be that small again.
But also Linny and Lex himself.
And Mom. God, Mom, with that sad smile of hers.
Lex thinks of their old house with the trees. So much land they never used or explored.
He almost thinks of. . .
Lex moves around the tree, and he’s arrived. The ground levels out a bit, now more sand than dirt or grass. And there, directly to his left, sculpted from thick gold-colored wire, kneels a feminine figure, her arm extended out in front of her-back toward the tree, reaching.
Was she sculpted to read as desperate, or is that just Lex again?
He can’t breathe for a second because even just this is so much more intense than Lin’s paintings. He knows the hands that first sketched this woman kneeling, that then bent and twisted the wire to create her, that likely secured her here on the beach precisely at the end of this path. He knows every fleck and whorl of the eyes that heated and fused that wire together more securely than any blowtorch. Lex knows the head that dreamed all this.
He walks and walks, stopping at each figure, dozens of them, and he’s simultaneously amazed and unsurprised at how they all seem one big breath away from moving. One figure is stretched out on its back, as though sunbathing, and he laughs, remembering the feel of Lin’s fingernails pressing into his shoulder blades last night, almost able to see skin atop the wire.
It’s like being inside Lin’s head, seeing the broadest and yet most intimate strokes of what Lin processes of humanity, walking through and past and around what Lin remembers and dreams of. The sculptures are his version of an impressionist beach scene, wire figures sitting and lying together, heads thrown back in laughter, some standing and all but running toward the river, one beautifully positioned in the tide as though about to dive into the water. At the far end of the beach, a group of figures play volleyball, one suspended in mid-air, at the peak of a jump, about to spike a volleyball over a nonexistent net. But Lex can almost hear them laughing and shouting. He can just about see the net.
It’s only later, when he’s walked around the entire beach, periodically bumping into other flesh and blood people and sharing an awed smile or two, once, at the level of detail in one sculpture’s long ponytail, and a second time at the way a figure’s posture seemed to all but scream the water was too cold-Lex realizes he forgot to look for Lin, flesh and blood Lin.
He knows he’s here somewhere. He’ll want to see the initial reaction.
“Pochade,” he says to himself, standing again down by the water, looking once more at the figure poised to dive, and if Lex remembers correctly, pochade isn’t necessarily about the accuracy or the precision of the line at all. And while that might seem funny or ironic to some, considering Lin’s figures here are almost entirely composed of lines, it doesn’t surprise Lex, so much as it clarifies for him what Lin’s really attempting to convey. Pochades are sketches focused not on capturing the lines of the subject but the impression it makes, the ripples and effects surrounding and tinting the artist’s perception of the subject, the range of color and overall atmosphere of the entire moment. They’re portable memories, referential like shorthand or in-jokes or great works of art.
Lin’s wire figures are placeholders, occupying spaces he never has, and perhaps, for everyone down here looking at them and for those who might someday view photos of them in anthologies and online and, Lex muses, maybe even in art texts like the ones Linny had so loved, they’re also sketches of hope. At least, that’s what Lex likes to believe because of all the moments Lin could spend probably more than a year planning and reinterpreting and recreating, and of all the figures swimming and leaping and lying and diving around in his memory that he could choose to sculpt and position, he chose a fantasy of a day at the beach. Lin chose a beach he owned, a season he still has mixed feelings about, a time of day that still has him on edge even a decade and more later, and he chose to put all of it on display, to open it to the public and preserve it forever.
The diving figure is something else entirely though, and Lex stands in the same spot, to the left of it, staring for what seems an eternity. The shoulders low and the arms thrown high overhead, that curve that would fit Lex’s palm seamlessly, the long stretch of thigh that he could fill in with just the right skin tone, soft hair, overwhelming heat, and that little mole on the back down by the left knee, those feet with the crooked toes and that head with that hair, thick like a blanket that Lin still cuts himself alone in the bathroom, tangles and whorls across Lex’s pillow in the morning, that Lex runs his hands through almost every chance he gets. Lin is here, put himself here, and it’s only when Lex is fumbling his phone back out of his pocket as he walks away that he’s slightly embarrassed to find he’s crying.
He texts Michael to try and meet him back up at the start of the same path in five minutes. And people brush past Lex, but he keeps his eyes on his feet, wrung out, wrung dry but light, happy.
And just as he’s passing the tree trunk again with its tiny figure wrapped around the base, the wire woman on the other side reaching for it, for the child, not forgetting or leaving or dying-someone’s hand comes down between Lex’s shoulder blades.
Someone’s hand.
“Hey,” Lin then whispers in his ear.
Lex stops and looks up ahead at the path. Empty and dark, and he thinks, awfully, Just like me.
He wipes at his eyes and says, “Hey.”
“Walk with me?” Lin asks.
Lex snorts, and it’s wet and ridiculous. “ ‘Course,” he says. Then, “Can’t fool me.”
The path was barely wide enough for just Lex on the way down, and with the two of them together they’re each forced to walk half in the overgrowth.
Lex doesn’t mind a bit and knows Lin doesn’t either.
Lin moves his hand up to the back of Lex’s neck, and he says, in time with their footsteps as they carefully trudge upward together, “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Then, already breathless with that gorgeous, painful dark humor of his that the fucking pretentious TV-movie Blanket Permission actually managed to get right, Lin asks, “What’d you think?”
Lex smiles and says, “You big softie, you.” Then he stupidly, blindly reaches across to grab Lin’s hand, praying it’s dark enough still, even here, even now, to hide and forget and remember something a little bit more hopeful.