SV Colin Luthor Verse Fic: En Plein Air - Chapter Five
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 tag just to be safe, as I certainly do not want to trigger anyone.
***
Lex gets home Sunday evening and figures Lin’s in his studio, and when he’s in there, of course, Lex tries his best to keep the disturbances to a minimum-tries, in fact, to never go in there.
It’s not that Lin’s ever complained, and it’s something other than Lex being considerate.
Not that Lex doesn’t himself hate being interrupted when he’s working. He does, and he could easily just play it off that way, as him not wanting to curb Lin’s creativity and self-expression, but Lin’s art isn’t work, not like business is for Lex. It doesn’t get his blood pumping the same way, and Lin’s studio isn’t like Lex’s office.
Art isn’t business for Lin, despite the fact he has an agent and rakes in a hell of a lot of money selling his paintings and, lately, sculptures, and despite the fact Lin actually owns the house they’re living in and most of the stuff inside it and almost every car he drives like a maniac.
Lex just isn’t all that comfortable in Lin’s studio. It’s too private, even for him.
It’s not that Lin’s art isn’t always somehow crookedly clear and too personal for Lex, and the making of it even more so. It’s always vaguely unsettling to look at, and Lin’s art still manages to sneak up on him, regardless of the fact Lex tries to mentally prepare himself beforehand. Take the haphazard sketch of some sparse trees surrounded by snow that Lex caught sight of last time he was in the studio with Lin, waiting by the doorway with Lin’s coat draped over his arm, waiting for him to hunt down the keys he’d left under a pile of papers over by the drying rack. The sketch was all shadows and negative space, and still it had Lex viscerally recalling moments from their shared childhood-like that first Christmas together, the two of them with Mom, flashes of happiness that have been so well-loved and worn so smooth as to be just scent memories now, pine and melted sugar and silk and thick artist’s paper-and those are butted right up against 2001, the whole tail-end of it, all cold grey terror with Lin in bare feet, staring back at Lex like he was already gone, up on the roof of the old mansion or down in the lobby getting shot and always lugging around that damn necklace and those chunks of green Kryptonite, always trying to kill himself over and over again while pushing Julian and Lex away, and all of that now contrasts, like the sparse bits of white among the dark charcoal of the sketched trees, with last year’s Christmas, when it was just the two of them, men now and some kind of free, when it was he and Lin trying to cook together and killing three bottles of grossly expensive wine and making love numerous times, once against the chill of the library windows, Lin’s naked chest glowing from the reflected fire in the grate, pressed to the glass as he laughed and moaned and dug his fingers back into Lex’s hip.
Lex knows Lin’s art is going to be overwhelming and yet is still caught off guard by how just the simple combination of blue and grey will make him close his eyes and feel ashamed, feel flayed in public at a fucking showing, feel forever smaller than a slug because he remembers, in excruciating detail, all the years he spent hating Lin, totally and absolutely, even as Lin loved him terribly-because grey and blue is Lin’s shorthand for Lex, and it’s everywhere. It’s in every painting.
He was staring at Lex all during dinner three, no, four years ago, and even with their table tucked over to the side in an alcove that was risky.
Brothers don’t look at each other like he and Lin. Brothers don’t wish for what Lex wishes.
“What is it?” Lex hissed, as their server took away the appetizer dishes.
“Roman silver,” Lin said, definitively.
Lex must have made a face because Lin grinned, smug, and Lex had to shift a bit in his seat because he always has a weird reaction to that expression on Lin’s face, wanting to simultaneously shove him away like an annoying little brother who’s baiting him and pull him close in a lover’s kiss and, stuck between the two, Lex always chooses neither, does nothing.
“Did I miss something?” he asked before taking another sip of wine, surreptitiously glancing around.
“Your eyes,” Lin whispered, “are Roman silver.” He leaned back in his seat, and Lex felt the air beneath the table move as Lin crossed his legs. “You’ll love this, though: it’s a metallic color, right? But incredibly difficult to produce and almost impossible to photograph accurately.” Then, even having physically pulled back and finally turned his head to look away, Lin was ridiculously close when he said, “Something to be said for the real thing.”
It thus isn’t remotely surprising to Lex that Lin’s art is sometimes more intimate and personal than actual sex with him or that it’s inexplicably more accurate when it’s nonrepresentational and abstracted, that it’s amazingly lifelike when it’s blocks and swipes and towers of precise color.
Some things are lost in translation.
And Lin is always translating and re-presenting and trying to connect the dots, attempting to capture what’s beneath human skin and human bone and human memory, trying to thread everything together just the way he wants it.
Lin said to Lex once, in response to why he’s never tried his hand at photography: “I don’t want to tell people how it should be or show them. I want to remember it, how it really was.”
Lex had said, “But you could make it like it was-software and double-exposure and all that. You could re-make it.”
And like a photo, like a film reel, something tangible and vulnerable and slightly imperfect, Lex can see Lin turn in his arms again and look up at him, can see him as he was then, ninety percent eyes and mouth and ridiculously long hair and one thousand percent what Lex loved.
Lex had suddenly recalled in that moment, some six years ago, and now of course recalls again over and over in a sick loop every time he remembers, the fact that Lionel had taken pictures of Lin when he was a kid, photos he kept in his desk of Lin naked and posed, always stuck in that mold, captured and captured wrongly, inaccurately, exposed and flawed, and Lex remembers blinking with the realization that that was almost certainly a huge reason Lin seemed to almost irrationally despise photography.
Lin then said, in a voice deep and throaty and just this side of slurring: “Can’t go backward, Lex, only ahead.” He’d reached up and cupped Lex’s cheek and whispered against his lips, right before kissing him, “That’s the whole point.”
And that mindset of Lin’s speaks volumes, although Lex doesn’t think they necessarily progress so much as sidestep, like Lex is dragging Lin off the path and deep into the trees. Or maybe it’s Lin dragging Lex.
After all, Lin translates what he’s already felt and seen, sidles alongside the memories even as he tries to deny their existence. He’s always dancing away, and now Lex is, too.
Even when Lin was four, supposedly, when he was young and so trusting, too trusting, when he still looked at Dad, at Lionel, and thought him an ally or friend or mentor, even then it was a balancing act for Lin, the act of picking up a crayon and recreating something for people he wanted to impress, showing just enough but not too much. Lin drew a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece in crayon, and he showed only Lex, and Mom only when Lex begged him to. Art has always been something outside the norm, something risky, something just for Lin, for Lex sometimes, for them.
Lin getting paid for his art isn’t exactly without snags.
He’s taken only two art classes his entire life, both at Met U; he is unequivocally self-taught and it shows in his technique.
Art isn’t business for Lin; it’s a survival tool, a coping mechanism.
And so Lex stays out of Lin’s studio because it’s like ‘Pochade,’ like being back on that beach with those romping figures and immediately gravitating toward the one Lin molded after himself and knowing without a doubt that Lin hurt while sculpting it, hurt to position it, and will hurt to sell it, that it pains him to put himself out there, literally, for strangers to gawk at and misunderstand and buy and not appreciate, but that he does it because it hurts and thus proves he’s still alive.
That’s Lex’s theory, anyway.
So Lex walks into the house on the Sunday following the ‘Pochade’ opening, sees the door to Lin’s studio is shut, and goes about his evening routine. He puts up his work stuff and makes some pleasant small talk with Angie before she leaves for the night.
She gives him a brief rundown on what’s left for dinner prep as she shrugs on her coat. Tonight’s ham. “You always do fine with the starch and vegetable,” she says, “and everything else is already cooked, so it’s just a matter of not letting it- ”
“ -dry out or burn,” he finishes for her, walking her over to the side door and opening it for her. “Right,” he says, taking a big breath and only half-jokingly saying, “I can do this.”
Angie grins and nods and leaves, moments later waving at him from her car as she drives away to her home, her family.
At first, Lex waits. He’s done it a few times before. He opens a bottle of Riesling and drinks a glass and a half before going upstairs and changing into soft pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He comes back downstairs and lurks in the hallway outside Lin’s studio and listens for him. Then he goes back into the kitchen and finishes his second glass of wine. He checks on the ham and peels potatoes and chops up broccoli.
Lin’s not blasting his music like he usually does, and there were no spraying sounds like when he airbrushes. It was silent and still, and Lex would almost doubt he was even in there if it weren’t for the light under the studio door.
The potatoes are in cold water on the stove, and rather than pour another glass of wine he’d planned on splitting with Lin, Lex walks back to Lin’s studio, where there’s still no sound.
Wearing headphones or just lost in thought maybe, but a feeling or mood is in the air, a sick tingle sliding along the hair on Lex’s arms. It’s not a sound or an image, just an inkling, an emotion.
It is, he realizes, quickly moving forward, something of a memory.
He turns the handle and pushes open the door, wondering, hoping, praying he’s overreacting or that he drank more than he thought, that the wine’s alcohol content was ridiculously high.
Because, suddenly, this is déjà vu.
Inside, the lights are on, and Lin is here, but it’s dark, too dark, and then it clicks in Lex’s mind that it’s not dark, just painted black.
And green.
The whole studio is covered in paint.
Lin still doesn’t talk that much, and Lex isn’t really expecting a response, but he keeps trying to, for some stupid stubborn reason, excavate the words because, yes, it is déjà vu, and it is a memory, and it’s neither because this scene, while different, unfortunately isn’t unfamiliar.
Lin hasn’t chopped all his hair off or crashed his car into a building. He hasn’t destroyed all his sketches or overdosed or hanged himself, but Lex knows this is a sign, knows the look on Lin’s face as he walks around him, knows, like a knife to the gut, that tiny scared thread in Lin’s voice as he asks, as he tries so stupidly and stubbornly to keep pushing things away while holding them too close, “Hey, how was your day?”
Lex says, and already his voice is giving him away, showing his hand, his concern, “Come sit with me, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Lin closes his eyes, and Lex moves forward. He takes Lin’s face between his hands, and he tries not to cry.
Then Lin says, lips as dry and pale as Lex’s hand, “I can’t remember.”
Lex frowns, of course, because he still doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t know exactly what Lin means, what he’s forgotten, who he’s talking to because maybe it’s not Lex, but it’s not hard to pull him close, to realize how cold he is or how thin and light he feels in Lex’s arms, like he’s already disappearing-or still is.
Like maybe he’s never stopped hiding from Lex.
It’s all perception, naturally, but Lex hugs Lin and isn’t hugged back and it feels just the same as it always does when Lin is trying to kill himself, when his first and second and third thought is always for Lex and Julian and Lucas and never for himself, never for facing what’s terrorizing him but always pushing it aside. All his energy goes toward suppressing.
But maybe this time can be different.
Maybe this time, Lex has caught him before he’s too far gone.
Time then seems to stretch because it’s everything all at once-Lin’s sculptures and sketches and paintings, like back in Daniel’s office all those years ago, like holding a thinner, stranger Lin on the roof some 16 years ago, like his thin wrists and hacked hair and blank, dead eyes, like Lex now finally forcing himself to face the fact that Lin’s depression and trauma isn’t ever going anywhere because it’s never leaving, has never left or gotten better, no matter how far Lin tries to push it aside or talk around it or not look at it head-on, and no matter how hard Lex tries to follow his lead and play along.
Lex has the urge to start babbling, to just steadily annoy Lin into reacting, even as he searches for the right turn of phrase, the right memory that will reconcile this moment with all the others.
Because he keeps trying, and failing, trying to get it right.
And so what pops into his head and right out his mouth, what has Lin breathing out quickly in something almost, very nearly, just this side of a chuckle is: “He’s not worth it, not worth anything, but that ham is going to be so fucking dry, Lin.”
Lin’s arms come up, and he makes a sound Lex might call a sob if he were being kind, and he asks, thickly, almost unintelligibly, “What was the song Mom used to sing?”
Lex almost chokes, startled, but eventually he finds it.
He says, “We’re right here,” and, “You’re with me,” and he hums against Lin’s temple, as Lin smears green and black paint all over Lex, all over himself, all through his hair and in the shower and down the drain.
And when Lin finally glances up-after the shower, standing wet and dripping on the rug, as Lex rubs at him with a towel, trying to get him warm again, trying to bring him back or forward or close so he’s not alone wherever he’s fallen-Lex can almost feel the wind rush past them and away, can just about hear Lin weeping in a different bathroom and call through to him, call back.
And he’s undoubtedly gripping Lin’s shoulders too hard, even for him, definitely too clingy and desperate, but Lex says, “Hey.”
And Lin almost looks Lex in the eye as he whispers, “Sorry.”
So when Lex wants to simultaneously shove him and kiss him, he makes a choice, finally.
He kisses Lin, and Lin kisses back.
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 tag just to be safe, as I certainly do not want to trigger anyone.
***
Lex gets home Sunday evening and figures Lin’s in his studio, and when he’s in there, of course, Lex tries his best to keep the disturbances to a minimum-tries, in fact, to never go in there.
It’s not that Lin’s ever complained, and it’s something other than Lex being considerate.
Not that Lex doesn’t himself hate being interrupted when he’s working. He does, and he could easily just play it off that way, as him not wanting to curb Lin’s creativity and self-expression, but Lin’s art isn’t work, not like business is for Lex. It doesn’t get his blood pumping the same way, and Lin’s studio isn’t like Lex’s office.
Art isn’t business for Lin, despite the fact he has an agent and rakes in a hell of a lot of money selling his paintings and, lately, sculptures, and despite the fact Lin actually owns the house they’re living in and most of the stuff inside it and almost every car he drives like a maniac.
Lex just isn’t all that comfortable in Lin’s studio. It’s too private, even for him.
It’s not that Lin’s art isn’t always somehow crookedly clear and too personal for Lex, and the making of it even more so. It’s always vaguely unsettling to look at, and Lin’s art still manages to sneak up on him, regardless of the fact Lex tries to mentally prepare himself beforehand. Take the haphazard sketch of some sparse trees surrounded by snow that Lex caught sight of last time he was in the studio with Lin, waiting by the doorway with Lin’s coat draped over his arm, waiting for him to hunt down the keys he’d left under a pile of papers over by the drying rack. The sketch was all shadows and negative space, and still it had Lex viscerally recalling moments from their shared childhood-like that first Christmas together, the two of them with Mom, flashes of happiness that have been so well-loved and worn so smooth as to be just scent memories now, pine and melted sugar and silk and thick artist’s paper-and those are butted right up against 2001, the whole tail-end of it, all cold grey terror with Lin in bare feet, staring back at Lex like he was already gone, up on the roof of the old mansion or down in the lobby getting shot and always lugging around that damn necklace and those chunks of green Kryptonite, always trying to kill himself over and over again while pushing Julian and Lex away, and all of that now contrasts, like the sparse bits of white among the dark charcoal of the sketched trees, with last year’s Christmas, when it was just the two of them, men now and some kind of free, when it was he and Lin trying to cook together and killing three bottles of grossly expensive wine and making love numerous times, once against the chill of the library windows, Lin’s naked chest glowing from the reflected fire in the grate, pressed to the glass as he laughed and moaned and dug his fingers back into Lex’s hip.
Lex knows Lin’s art is going to be overwhelming and yet is still caught off guard by how just the simple combination of blue and grey will make him close his eyes and feel ashamed, feel flayed in public at a fucking showing, feel forever smaller than a slug because he remembers, in excruciating detail, all the years he spent hating Lin, totally and absolutely, even as Lin loved him terribly-because grey and blue is Lin’s shorthand for Lex, and it’s everywhere. It’s in every painting.
He was staring at Lex all during dinner three, no, four years ago, and even with their table tucked over to the side in an alcove that was risky.
Brothers don’t look at each other like he and Lin. Brothers don’t wish for what Lex wishes.
“What is it?” Lex hissed, as their server took away the appetizer dishes.
“Roman silver,” Lin said, definitively.
Lex must have made a face because Lin grinned, smug, and Lex had to shift a bit in his seat because he always has a weird reaction to that expression on Lin’s face, wanting to simultaneously shove him away like an annoying little brother who’s baiting him and pull him close in a lover’s kiss and, stuck between the two, Lex always chooses neither, does nothing.
“Did I miss something?” he asked before taking another sip of wine, surreptitiously glancing around.
“Your eyes,” Lin whispered, “are Roman silver.” He leaned back in his seat, and Lex felt the air beneath the table move as Lin crossed his legs. “You’ll love this, though: it’s a metallic color, right? But incredibly difficult to produce and almost impossible to photograph accurately.” Then, even having physically pulled back and finally turned his head to look away, Lin was ridiculously close when he said, “Something to be said for the real thing.”
It thus isn’t remotely surprising to Lex that Lin’s art is sometimes more intimate and personal than actual sex with him or that it’s inexplicably more accurate when it’s nonrepresentational and abstracted, that it’s amazingly lifelike when it’s blocks and swipes and towers of precise color.
Some things are lost in translation.
And Lin is always translating and re-presenting and trying to connect the dots, attempting to capture what’s beneath human skin and human bone and human memory, trying to thread everything together just the way he wants it.
Lin said to Lex once, in response to why he’s never tried his hand at photography: “I don’t want to tell people how it should be or show them. I want to remember it, how it really was.”
Lex had said, “But you could make it like it was-software and double-exposure and all that. You could re-make it.”
And like a photo, like a film reel, something tangible and vulnerable and slightly imperfect, Lex can see Lin turn in his arms again and look up at him, can see him as he was then, ninety percent eyes and mouth and ridiculously long hair and one thousand percent what Lex loved.
Lex had suddenly recalled in that moment, some six years ago, and now of course recalls again over and over in a sick loop every time he remembers, the fact that Lionel had taken pictures of Lin when he was a kid, photos he kept in his desk of Lin naked and posed, always stuck in that mold, captured and captured wrongly, inaccurately, exposed and flawed, and Lex remembers blinking with the realization that that was almost certainly a huge reason Lin seemed to almost irrationally despise photography.
Lin then said, in a voice deep and throaty and just this side of slurring: “Can’t go backward, Lex, only ahead.” He’d reached up and cupped Lex’s cheek and whispered against his lips, right before kissing him, “That’s the whole point.”
And that mindset of Lin’s speaks volumes, although Lex doesn’t think they necessarily progress so much as sidestep, like Lex is dragging Lin off the path and deep into the trees. Or maybe it’s Lin dragging Lex.
After all, Lin translates what he’s already felt and seen, sidles alongside the memories even as he tries to deny their existence. He’s always dancing away, and now Lex is, too.
Even when Lin was four, supposedly, when he was young and so trusting, too trusting, when he still looked at Dad, at Lionel, and thought him an ally or friend or mentor, even then it was a balancing act for Lin, the act of picking up a crayon and recreating something for people he wanted to impress, showing just enough but not too much. Lin drew a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece in crayon, and he showed only Lex, and Mom only when Lex begged him to. Art has always been something outside the norm, something risky, something just for Lin, for Lex sometimes, for them.
Lin getting paid for his art isn’t exactly without snags.
He’s taken only two art classes his entire life, both at Met U; he is unequivocally self-taught and it shows in his technique.
Art isn’t business for Lin; it’s a survival tool, a coping mechanism.
And so Lex stays out of Lin’s studio because it’s like ‘Pochade,’ like being back on that beach with those romping figures and immediately gravitating toward the one Lin molded after himself and knowing without a doubt that Lin hurt while sculpting it, hurt to position it, and will hurt to sell it, that it pains him to put himself out there, literally, for strangers to gawk at and misunderstand and buy and not appreciate, but that he does it because it hurts and thus proves he’s still alive.
That’s Lex’s theory, anyway.
So Lex walks into the house on the Sunday following the ‘Pochade’ opening, sees the door to Lin’s studio is shut, and goes about his evening routine. He puts up his work stuff and makes some pleasant small talk with Angie before she leaves for the night.
She gives him a brief rundown on what’s left for dinner prep as she shrugs on her coat. Tonight’s ham. “You always do fine with the starch and vegetable,” she says, “and everything else is already cooked, so it’s just a matter of not letting it- ”
“ -dry out or burn,” he finishes for her, walking her over to the side door and opening it for her. “Right,” he says, taking a big breath and only half-jokingly saying, “I can do this.”
Angie grins and nods and leaves, moments later waving at him from her car as she drives away to her home, her family.
At first, Lex waits. He’s done it a few times before. He opens a bottle of Riesling and drinks a glass and a half before going upstairs and changing into soft pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He comes back downstairs and lurks in the hallway outside Lin’s studio and listens for him. Then he goes back into the kitchen and finishes his second glass of wine. He checks on the ham and peels potatoes and chops up broccoli.
Lin’s not blasting his music like he usually does, and there were no spraying sounds like when he airbrushes. It was silent and still, and Lex would almost doubt he was even in there if it weren’t for the light under the studio door.
The potatoes are in cold water on the stove, and rather than pour another glass of wine he’d planned on splitting with Lin, Lex walks back to Lin’s studio, where there’s still no sound.
Wearing headphones or just lost in thought maybe, but a feeling or mood is in the air, a sick tingle sliding along the hair on Lex’s arms. It’s not a sound or an image, just an inkling, an emotion.
It is, he realizes, quickly moving forward, something of a memory.
He turns the handle and pushes open the door, wondering, hoping, praying he’s overreacting or that he drank more than he thought, that the wine’s alcohol content was ridiculously high.
Because, suddenly, this is déjà vu.
Inside, the lights are on, and Lin is here, but it’s dark, too dark, and then it clicks in Lex’s mind that it’s not dark, just painted black.
And green.
The whole studio is covered in paint.
Lin still doesn’t talk that much, and Lex isn’t really expecting a response, but he keeps trying to, for some stupid stubborn reason, excavate the words because, yes, it is déjà vu, and it is a memory, and it’s neither because this scene, while different, unfortunately isn’t unfamiliar.
Lin hasn’t chopped all his hair off or crashed his car into a building. He hasn’t destroyed all his sketches or overdosed or hanged himself, but Lex knows this is a sign, knows the look on Lin’s face as he walks around him, knows, like a knife to the gut, that tiny scared thread in Lin’s voice as he asks, as he tries so stupidly and stubbornly to keep pushing things away while holding them too close, “Hey, how was your day?”
Lex says, and already his voice is giving him away, showing his hand, his concern, “Come sit with me, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Lin closes his eyes, and Lex moves forward. He takes Lin’s face between his hands, and he tries not to cry.
Then Lin says, lips as dry and pale as Lex’s hand, “I can’t remember.”
Lex frowns, of course, because he still doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t know exactly what Lin means, what he’s forgotten, who he’s talking to because maybe it’s not Lex, but it’s not hard to pull him close, to realize how cold he is or how thin and light he feels in Lex’s arms, like he’s already disappearing-or still is.
Like maybe he’s never stopped hiding from Lex.
It’s all perception, naturally, but Lex hugs Lin and isn’t hugged back and it feels just the same as it always does when Lin is trying to kill himself, when his first and second and third thought is always for Lex and Julian and Lucas and never for himself, never for facing what’s terrorizing him but always pushing it aside. All his energy goes toward suppressing.
But maybe this time can be different.
Maybe this time, Lex has caught him before he’s too far gone.
Time then seems to stretch because it’s everything all at once-Lin’s sculptures and sketches and paintings, like back in Daniel’s office all those years ago, like holding a thinner, stranger Lin on the roof some 16 years ago, like his thin wrists and hacked hair and blank, dead eyes, like Lex now finally forcing himself to face the fact that Lin’s depression and trauma isn’t ever going anywhere because it’s never leaving, has never left or gotten better, no matter how far Lin tries to push it aside or talk around it or not look at it head-on, and no matter how hard Lex tries to follow his lead and play along.
Lex has the urge to start babbling, to just steadily annoy Lin into reacting, even as he searches for the right turn of phrase, the right memory that will reconcile this moment with all the others.
Because he keeps trying, and failing, trying to get it right.
And so what pops into his head and right out his mouth, what has Lin breathing out quickly in something almost, very nearly, just this side of a chuckle is: “He’s not worth it, not worth anything, but that ham is going to be so fucking dry, Lin.”
Lin’s arms come up, and he makes a sound Lex might call a sob if he were being kind, and he asks, thickly, almost unintelligibly, “What was the song Mom used to sing?”
Lex almost chokes, startled, but eventually he finds it.
He says, “We’re right here,” and, “You’re with me,” and he hums against Lin’s temple, as Lin smears green and black paint all over Lex, all over himself, all through his hair and in the shower and down the drain.
And when Lin finally glances up-after the shower, standing wet and dripping on the rug, as Lex rubs at him with a towel, trying to get him warm again, trying to bring him back or forward or close so he’s not alone wherever he’s fallen-Lex can almost feel the wind rush past them and away, can just about hear Lin weeping in a different bathroom and call through to him, call back.
And he’s undoubtedly gripping Lin’s shoulders too hard, even for him, definitely too clingy and desperate, but Lex says, “Hey.”
And Lin almost looks Lex in the eye as he whispers, “Sorry.”
So when Lex wants to simultaneously shove him and kiss him, he makes a choice, finally.
He kisses Lin, and Lin kisses back.