Title: It's Not Easy
Author: xoverau
Pairing: Lex/Clark (well, not yet)
Rating: Only the F-word prompts me to give this a PG-13.
Category: Angst!
Disclaimer: Not mine, but you knew that.
Summary: Lex isn't the only one with a legacy he'd rather shed.
Dedication: Part 1 is for Brancher, who gave me three words and ALSO made me very happy. See? Just like Mako. This is how easy it is, folks. Three words, one smilin' fool. Can't get that on E-bay. Oh, and the words were

torque, treacherous, and oblong

It always starts with the little boy falling out of the tree. He has that kind of hair, like satin flax, that only young children keep, and chubby arms and grubby knees and Pooh Bear jeans.

Clark sees him start to go and lopes toward him lazily, each bound taking him yards. He stretches out his arms and sort of rises up to catch the sturdy body, and the boy lands soft as a soap bubble, without the pop. He has control of his strength now.

Even as he's coming to ground with the boy (floating, really) he hears a woman scream a half mile away. He knows why, too; the jack is collapsing under the weight of her husband's Cherokee, and when it does, she'll be a widow. He pushes the boy into his mother's arms and is gone so fast, she must think he doesn't hear her tearful thanks.

He catches the truck with one hand, pulls the man out with the other. This time he manages to wave at the grateful wife, but it's over his shoulder, because brakes are squealing at the railroad crossing on the edge of town.

Despite the certainty he'll survive, he doesn't have the courage to stand in the way of the train with his arms out. However, he does scoop four cows from the tracks and drops them in a nearby field in time to avert a derailment.

He would pause to catch his breath, but he's not breathing hard. He's finally doing what he was meant for. His ears alert him to a stranger trying to lure several small girls into his van with the promise of a puppy. He pulls the door off, revealing to them what only he could see--plastic garbage liners taped on every surface, a coil of duct tape and strips of burlap and a Barbie hairclip.

He shoos the girls home, restrains the man in tape as neat as a burrito, but as he's rushing him at clothes-tearing speed to the police station, a woman starts choking at Etta's sidewalk cafe.

He lashes the would-be molester to a lamppost and uses his X-ray vision to identify the place in her esophagus where the food is lodged. Narrowing his eyes, he does--something (this part gets dim and expostulatory) to break it up into digestible pieces. The crowd breathes a sigh of relief as her eyes open.

Three blocks away, a mother starts shaking her six-month-old baby.

He can do it. He can do all of it. He could play a whole game of football by himself, this is easy. And, as his father once reminded him, so much more important.

He just has to be faster. He found the edges of sound, then light. Why not time? He can stop a volcanic eruption in Peru. He can wipe up an oilslick in Alaska. (Must read about volcanoes. He can read faster, too. He just hasn't tried yet.) Getting across all that water...he'll find a way.

God, he's got to find a way.

It always ends with screaming.

After the first week of the nightmare, he starts sleeping in the Fortress, not because his parents keep him awake til dawn whispering about what's wrong with him (really) but because he wants to stop wondering himself. Too, after the rousing finale, he can get up and take the short walk under the trees to the Smallville cemetery, where he spends the even nights trying to sick up the cold sock he seems to always have lodged in his throat.

He tries on bitterness while he sneaker-skates through the treacherous flatgrass. "I'm so fucking lucky. I'm so fucking blessed."

He still blushes when he thinks that word.

Coming here is so dramatic. He might as well wear a nose ring and write song lyrics about the Sweet Embrace of Death with too many syllables to a line. He doesn't have to pass graves thinking Could have, could have, could have, if. He could read instead. He could jerk off picturing some disembodied mouth.

Oddly, it's not the "didn't" of the Smallville dead that bothers him. It's the could have. The inviolate past fills him with a fury so deep it's barely his, the fury of a man who'll cross oceans to thwart it if he figures out how.

He sits on Ernest Greenbaum, Loving Husband, and crosses his legs on the crypt of Wife Lillian, just long enough to accomodate him. Ernest owned the last real soda fountain in Smallville, died of a stroke. She had cancer. Clark could have saved them too, maybe. Seen the ominous shadow in her uterus, the starved veins beneath his skull.

He tries not to look too long at his parents now.

Not for the first time out here, too wired to sleep and goosebumped from the dew, he wonders what will kill him. Certainly not exhaustion. Doubtful, disease. Not plane crashes, not fire.

It'll take a man to do it, he decides. And maybe, on the right day, he won't mind.

His Jag dies at the gate of Smallville cemetery, its sense of dramatic irony perhaps sympathetic to its owner's. Lex gets out and pops the hood, surveys the mysteriousness within, wonders which part makes the capuccino. Debates banging around in there with a torque wrench and his IQ, and discards the notion for the folly it is. Slams the hood down again, eyes prickling.

He wishes he could place the source of his agitation. It's cold and strangling, the sort of invasion he associates with coming death--an attack, not an emotion. All the same, he knows this feeling, and not just as a sometime drowner. It's despair.

He folds his cell mid-dial and heads into the trees.

The trip through the trees is Escheresqe, the patches of moon bright and idiot and the dark blinding. He doesn't realize it's a graveyard til he stumbles over a marble oblong, half swallowed in leaves. Loretta Babbitt, 1924. May she walk with God.

He passes three generations of military graves, flat silver and regular as zipper teeth. The mist tries to soften them, and it does, really; they looks artsy, like an etching. Safely past.

He doesn't know what he's looking for until he sees it. (That's him and Clark in a nutshell.) Clark, of course, makes morose look like an Abercrombie and Fitch ad, but the mist can't soften this; his hair's slicked back with sweat even in the cold, and his face is gray.

Lex perches on the crypt across from Clark Indian-fashion, forcing him to inch over a few yards of leg. It's like sitting on a chest freezer. His balls hurry home. "You know, I can see why you prefer this to bed. It's got the whole morgue ambiance going on. Like a meat locker without the claustrophobia."

The joke falls flat. In fact, it might have fallen outside the gravity well for all the interest Clark shows. "Tough room."

It's fucking cold, and it's late, and he's still pissed about his car, but he's more worried about Clark and his incipient hypothermia. Like most of the important decisions of his life, it comes down to the question, ~What wouldn't my father do in this situation?~ He shrugs off his coat and throws it into Clark's lap. He almost tucks it around his shoulders instead, but something about the muscle pulsing in Clark's jaw tells him the gesture wouldn't be welcome.

Clark strokes the butter-soft leather thoughtfully. He makes no move to put the jacket on, even though gooseflesh is rashing his forearms. Lex, who's feeling the dewpoint like a damp knife already, wrestles with the twin urges to take it back and shake him.

~Okay,~ he thinks. ~So we sit.~ "Forever in your debt" probably covers freezing his ass off once or twice. He could use a little silence for its own sake. A little nature appreciation.

The light in Clark's eyes quivers. It's beautiful.

"Have you ever been afraid you won't get tired?"

Lex's response is immediate, too strained to be flip. "All the time." The quiet cuts in again, giving the night to the wind for a while. "Sometimes I'm afraid I won't die."

There are no words for that, only tears. Clark fights them off, but he's sure Lex knows, like you do at a graduation during the Farewell Speech or at a movie when Julia Roberts dies. He's too conscious of the sound of his breathing. Too still.

Lex doesn't touch him, even manfully. Thank God.

What can he say? A throwaway line? Change the subject? Quiet like this is too precious to be broken. Must be, or something will change between them and never change back, no matter how many oceans he can cross.

Lex spares him. Hands him a drink. It's in a flask, and he's ready for bitter, but it's cream soda in there.

"What--?"

"After driving through a guardrail into a lake, I don't need an opencontainer citation on my insurance record."

It's such a mundane reason that Clark searches Lex' face for the contrivance, trying to grin even though he's not ready. No humor there.

Well, maybe a little. Lex always looks like that.

And the cream soda's good, even warm, and the night's good too, charcoal gray with a finite scattering of stars. He feels cradled by his misery, like a childhood illness.

"So what are you doing here?" It's the first time the coincidence hits him.

"Oh." Lex sighs. Drinks some of the cream soda himself. "My car went to the light right by the gate."

"What was it, clutch or something?"

"Search me. Engine repair wasn't part of my classical education. Too practical."

Clark smiles. He's ready this time. "I can look at it, if you want. Do you have any tools?"

"My trunk is a craftsman's wet dream. I only recognize half of them." He pauses, unable to defeat his compulsion to say, "Fix it, you can have them."

It's Clark's turn to sigh.

They walk to the gate. It's a damned big cemetery. ~I'm walking over the bodies of half the people in Smallville,~ Lex thinks, knowing he's with one of the few who wouldn't call that a Luthor family tradition. Just as well; he's feeling morbid tonight, but strangely safe from sorrow.

God, the look on Clark's face when he drank from that flask.

As Clark jacks up the hood of the Jag--reverently, oh, reverently-- and pokes around inside with a hand torch, Lex knows he could have lost him. Reason is no proof against despair. He remembers a handful of pills and a weekend sleep, of waking with his body leaden and one eye popping like a flash, thinking--of all things--that Lionel was going to kill him. Of bile subsiding to blood in the toilet bowl, of words like "permanent brain damage", and the terrible weakness of his hands.

~Lost him.~

He puts his hand over Clark's where it's prying at some oil-covered arcana. Waits til he looks up to hold him, glad he's not tall enough to have to watch Clark's face. Clark's arms just hang there for a while, bracketing his foolishness, and then wrap cautiously around his waist.

It's about fifteen seconds til Clark starts crying. He does it hard but soundlessly, his father son. Once, Lex touched the steel rigging of a forty-foot sailboat and felt it shudder with the contrary vastness of sea and wind. Clark's arms feel like that on him now.

"Thank you," Clark whispers. His cheek against Lex's head is burning. "Thank you."

It's funny. He always thought saving someone would be hard.