Title: Don't Cry
Author: xoverau
Pairing: Clark/Lex
Rating: PG-13 (I think there's harsh language somewhere or other)
Summary: Diabetics and vampires beware. There's sweetness and light ahead, and a touch of sad too. I'd almost say AU, 'cept I like to think this is one possibility. Takes place a matter of days after Jitters.
Disclaimer: If I owned them I'd never leave the house. Which wouldn't really affect my life much.
Archive: SSA, others please ask.
Blame: This one is all on you, Liv. Er, I mean...for you. She's a manipulative wench, folks, but as she pointed out, she deserves some indulgence.
Three Words: From Theresa...no, I didn't forget. Insouciant, bitch-slap, and banana.

Lex-

Her name is Cleopatra. Merry Christmas.

Yours, Lionel Luthor

It couldn't be, of course. Even though his father's Christmas gifts were notoriously months premature. Even though the stationary was LuthorCorp legit, and the signature was excellent, and Dad did sign all his correspondence with the naked arrogance of his full name sans honorifics.

You could get the stationary from the website. You could scan his signature from public records, too. The message was terse enough that it couldn't be analyzed for content; the fact that it also emulated Lionel's usual style was coincidence. Though Lex was admittedly at a loss about why someone would bother to do so just to give him...this.

She rustled at him from beneath a fold of red tissue, all big caramel eyes and big quivering nose and thick droopy skin on her forelegs. Room in there to grow past his knee, maybe. Lex sat down on the Turkish rug runner in the downstairs hall and put his chin in his hands. "Who sent you?"

The puppy blinked. She had eyelashes. That disturbed him.

"Was it a scary tall skinny guy in a long coat?"

"Yrf."

"Come again?"

The puppy grinned. There was no other word for it. It was creepy. Tongue, hot pink and not exactly fragrant, lolled from the grin in an undignified way. For a moment, Lex toyed with the idea that this was some new Dean-Koontz-style genetic manipulation of LuthorCorp's--half human, half dog, all spy. Its only advantage as a theory was that he could stop wondering who sent her. "I saw 'Lassie'. You're supposed to give me a sign here. Bark twice if it was Clark and his sidekick, Supergeek."

"Yrf!" The puppy shook her head, which was either a denial or an effort to sublimate a sudden feral impulse toward Christmas. It failed. Under Lex's bemused eyes, she tore the festive box to scraps.

"You're preaching to the choir, sister," he remarked, and went to the kitchen to see if there was something there dogs could eat.

Out of the box, she proved to be longer and more solid than he expected, with giant silken paws and a spastic stub of tail. Her ears were like some absurd eighties club trend. She liked graham crackers and banana almost as much as he did, though he drew the line at sharing the milk.

Sitting in the morning-bright kitchen, not reading the paper spread under his espresso, he wondered who would want her. He had a vague idea that homeless dogs went to farms, to better spend their lives chasing vermin and fetching dead avians from marshland. Maybe Clark would know a family.

Maybe said family would have a little girl with a noncontagious illness and Lex would call Roger at the 'Inquisitor' and have his picture taken handing her over, wearing a big red bow. Maybe the stock would climb. Maybe he'd learn whatever lesson Lionel would have wanted him to learn if he had sent a puppy for Christmas.

Apparently Gucci slippers made an excellent palate cleanser. He fought her for the left one and put it on the top of the refrigerator. When he looked back, she was tasting his coffee, lips curled back incredulously.

"It's polite to ask first. I would have made you some."

She stared at him, an expression that looked like 'How can you stand this pretentious corporate-grown dark roast with the mistranslated name?' but was likely just 'I'm a dog, stupid.'

And if he was projecting Marxist philosophy on nonsentients, he really needed to get out more.

"I'm going to go use the phone. Call my friend Clark and see if I can catch him in a lie again. That all right by you?" He was unprepared for her to spring from the kitchen stool and land in a boneless sprawl at his feet, buried in charm and big ears. "The first one's a doozy, Grace."

She whined, leaning on one hip to dab her paw at him. Maybe she was wounded. She wasn't that big. He felt like a bastard and dropped to his knees, but the little bones all felt straight under his fingers. "You really are female, aren't you? Do anything to get a man on his knees. God...I have to call Clark. Fess up about the time I nuked my eight thousand dollar aquarium with a badly placed desk lamp."

She joined him the den without limping, nails making a cautious tick-tick-tick on the parquet. He sat on the loveseat and paged the handset from the base; there was a beeping from somewhere under the cushions. Recall followed tardily. Ah, the day and a half of semiconsciousness following the trip to Level Three, due less to his head injury than a bottle of prescription narcotics and some Dos Equis.

He checked the phone's numerical memory and wished he hadn't. Calling Vic at two AM in Metropolis had probably netted him her answering machine, but calling Clark immediately after...

Maybe he'd had the sense to hang up when someone answered. He could hope.

He steeled himself and hit redial. Cleopatra eyed the open cushion next to him, calculated carefully, and lowered her head. On the second ring, she ran. Sometime mid-third, the physics of fur and floor went subtly awry, and when Clark picked up just ahead of the machine, she was spinning like Tanya Harding on an eight-ball. Lex wailed with laughter.

It was heart-attack laughter, the sort that becomes frightening after the first minute. His chest locked up. His face was hot. His eyes felt too big. He could hear Clark yelping, "Pete? Pete, quit kidding around! Are you drunk?", which made it worse. Help, Clark...I'm laughing and I'm going to die...

"Pete, cut it out! I'm gonna hang up--"

He stumbled to the desk finally, banged through a drawer he never used, and sucked on the emergency inhaler. Quinine bitter, like Windex and cocaine. His arms went weak. "Cl-clark, it's me. Don't hang up."

"Lex?" Clark sounded...sunny. He always did, but for the first time Lex considered that it might have something to do with him. Which was something of a wonder even in Mutant World. "Usually "Hello" isn't my A material...jeez, are you gonna make it?"

Cleopatra still watched him from her aborted sprawl, stricken. "Four point nine," Lex offered. "Okay, five. But you missed the triple."

Placated, she fell to gnawing the edge of the carpet.

Clark said hesitantly, "Are you...um, high again?"

Silence put up its feet and got comfortable. "Er. No. I'm...you're talking about two AM, aren't you?"

"Two eighteen AM," Jonathan Kent's voice said, close as it was in several nightmares of Lex's, and followed by a deadly click.

"Sorry," Clark said sheepishly. "He was...Uh, sorry."

"No, I'm sorry." He covered the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand and said to Cleopatra, "Christ I hate normal conversation." She ate a tassel in agreement. "Look...I'm just calling to tell you that I'm not really a dog person."

"What?"

"Not that I don't appreciate the effort you and Chloe went to, but...well, it's a dog. Not a bottle of wine. I'm not around a lot. I can't take care of her. You're going to have to give her to someone who has kids."

Clark said cautiously, "Okay."

"Is this getting through, Clark?"

"Um...you're not a dog person, you're not around, I'm going to have to give her to some kids, and it's not a bottle of wine." Long pause, some crackling, faint mumble-mumble. "Dad, he's not high. Yes, I'm sure." Clark came back on the line, strong with dawning realization. "Hey! Do you have a dog?"

Lex covered the mouthpiece again. "Fucking hate it." Cleopatra digested a length of trim. "Yes, Clark. I have a dog. I gather I don't have you to thank."

"Why would I give you a dog? I can't even get my dad to let me have one."

Well, there it was in a nutshell. Foiled by the logic of a high school freshman. Lex's lungs ached. "Never mind." He responded to the desire fairly trembling over the open line. "Want to come over and see her? Maybe you can think of something to do with her."

"Do with her? Lex...she's your dog. I mean...I would do anything if someone gave me a dog!"

Cleo seized the cuff of his pants as if it were the neck of a rabbit, emitting falsetto growls. He bent his knee until it became apparent she had no problem with leaving the ground, then gave up. "Hey, Clark. Want a dog?"

"I...can't."

Yearning he could almost taste. God, had he ever wanted anything that pure? He felt like a dirty old man for offering, and it wasn't even anything dirty. "Okay. Well...you can come over and help me pick out a family for her, then. You know the area."

"Why can't you just keep her?" From the sound of Clark's voice, petulant but flagging, he was starting to think it was something he Didn't Get Because He Was A Kid.

"Good," Lex said to Cleo, putting the phone to his shirt. "He makes me feel like a dickhead all the time. You ever get that?"

She whined around a mouthful of wet silk blend.

"Lex?" Clark was saying when he put his ear up to the phone again. "Hey, were you just saying something?"

"I was telling the dog that you were going to bring her something to eat other than graham crackers and bananas."

Clark laughed. "What did she say back?"

"She said she'd buy you another truck. Maybe you'd accept it if it came from a dog and not a Luthor."

More silence, ugly flashing silence, and he'd only meant to be funny. "I suck at this," he said to Cleo, not bothering to put the phone down. "Clark...just come over when you can. I'm hanging loose here all day."

"How about you come here?"

"I--uh?" The first syllable tripped and the others fell over it. "Clark, your dad--"

"My dad has never made a deal over any of my friends coming over before. Especially not the ones who saved my life." There was enough emphasis on the words for Lex to suspect Jonathan was hovering in earshot. "And we have pork chops and potatoes and fresh beans and milk and Mom's making muffins and you never really got to look around the farm and if you stay here long enough I'll totally geek out and show you my comic book collection."

"You have any X-Men? I like the X-Men."

"You just identify with Professor X," said Martha Kent, and Clark squawked "Mom, get off the phone!" in horror, and yeah, Lex had that nightmare too, but in it she was usually wearing nothing but an apron and telling him he was bad. "Lex, go ahead and come over. I'll set another place for lunch. You might be all that stands between Clark and eight feet tall."

"Mom, I swear if you don't get off the phone--"

Lex looked at Cleo and covered the speaker. One of her ears was inside out. The fur inside was almost silver. "It's like they're from a dimension where the Waltons were real."

Back on the phone, Clark was blushing. He did it so loudly Lex could hear it. "She's off now. Um. Anytime you want to come over."

"I want to reassure you that all mothers are like that, but I'd be referencing sitcoms," Lex said. "I'll bring some..." What course hadn't Clark mentioned? "Some dessert. I have sorbet in the freezer, and I think there was angel food cake around somewhere."

"What's sorbet?"

"I'll just be coming over, Clark. Okay? See you in ten minutes."

"Twenty," Clark said sternly. It took Lex a moment to realize he was being warned against speeding.

"Twenty."

"Okay."

"Okay. Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

Fighting the high-school-boyfriend urge to prolong it with another one, Lex hit the disconnect. He punctuated the gesture by lobbing the phone onto the disordered heap of throw pillows Cleo had dragged from the loveseat.

He looked at her. She cruised him under her eyelashes. "I am not dating him. That thought just popped in there. It's called an analogy. Humans get those because they have the capacity for abstract thought."

She raised her eyebrows. Eyebrows? He had no idea dogs had eyebrows. "Shut up and get in the car."

The car. Hmm. The car. His mechanic, in a rare moment of whimsy, seemed to have alphabetized them, with the rack of keys centrally located. Lex set Cleo down on the garage floor, where she joined him in his survey.

"Which continent do you prefer?"

"Urrrrr."

"Europe?"

"Narfff."

"North America?"

She wagged her tail, an eccentric process that involved both her hind legs and a loss of gravity. "The truck it is," Lex said. He opened her door. "This was almost Clark's, you know. His father has masculinity issues. Or maybe a problem with me giving his son long, shiny red objects. Or, on second thought, maybe both." She blinked at him, patient. "Oh, pardon me." He scooped her onto the seat, over a step which was clearly intended to thin the herd of Weak-Ass Yuppies who might fancy themselves off-roaders. "Didn't mean to mention your stature. It's impolite."

There was a minor debacle when he got in on the other side. Apparently she had thought him lost forever behind a mountain of Detroit steel, and expressed her gratitude for his return with quantities of slobber.

"I'm going to have to claim you on my taxes," he muttered, wiping his lapel.

She responded by wedging her head between the steering wheel and his thigh as he was backing out of the garage. There was a brief, terrible moment where he was sure he'd strangled her, and then a warm soak of drool penetrated the fabric over his knee. "Must you?"

She gagged pathetically.

"Drama queen."

He rolled down the window, from which she joyfully tried to throw herself, and rolled it up again. The rushing of the wind wasn't as muted as it would have been by German engineering, and he felt the road's rises and falls in his throat. The sun rose, blurry peach, and dead corn jittered by.

"Alien," Lex spoke, when before he might have thought it. "Alien landscape. Look at this fucking place. I don't belong here. I fell off the wheel years ago."

Cleo nudged his leg with her nose. He wondered if he should have buckled her in.

Clark was standing in the yard when he pulled up, chin on his forearms where they cradled the top of the fence. Lex couldn't read his eyes, any more than he could read raindrops on a window. "Nice truck."

"Yeah, I was going to trade it for a couple of dress shirts, but I decided to live a little. Call it importing goodwill." He patted the truck's sleek side through the open window. It shouldn't hurt, the rejection. It still did. "This is--"

Cleo flung herself across his lap, skidding heavily on the silk, and she and Clark had a Moment. A meeting of eyelashes and innocent expressions and snakes and snails and puppydog tails and there had to be a puke threshold this was exceeding. It was meant to be painted in oils and Clark was supposed to be missing a front tooth and Cleo needed a spot over one eye and god, Clark had huge, graceful square hands with grit under the nails, and Lex didn't belong here. He was not a man of the earth.

He cleared his throat. "Do I need to leave you two alone?"

Clark rolled his eyes, and it was okay. "All that stuff you hear about farm kids and animals. It's way exaggerated. We wait til the middle of winter when it gets really boring."

Lex laughed. "A happy cow is a productive cow."

"Coming from a guy in the fertilizer business, I guess you'd know." Clark giggled--giggled!--and hauled Cleo out by her armpits. She kicked Lex soundly in the chest on the way. (At least that was the safer interpretation for the jolt he felt there when Clark buried his blissful face in her fur and smiled.)

"Clark, do dogs have armpits?"

A line appeared between Clark's eyebrows. "My dad is gonna try to smell your breath. Try not to act weird when he does it."

Lex got out of the truck, despite the contrary urging of common sense, and stuffed his tie in his pocket. He suspected snappy dressing wouldn't cut him any slack in the breath-sniffing department, anyway.

Cleo, happily arrayed in filth by her fourth step, bounded toward the Kents' side door as if she recognized it. Chicken fluff ringed each paw like designer mules.

"Awwwwwwww myyyyy Gawwwwwwd!" Martha Kent squealed, and threw open the kitchen door. It was a sound Lex had never hoped to hear in his life, particularly accompanying the image of her falling to her knees before him, but she was merely welcoming an armload of muddy dog. "Oh look at her, isn't she precious, oh yes, what a good good girl, good puppy girl, oh--bleh!"

"She uses tongue," Lex informed her in the opportune silence.

Martha gave him a look that he preferred not to examine too closely and gathered Cleo in her arms to stand. Cleo's eyes were black lines of joy. "Lunch is almost ready. You're just in time. Yes! Yes, isn't he? Isn't he just in time. Good puppy! Gooood girl!"

"Mom, jeez. Dad's gonna smell your breath in a minute."

Martha gripped Lex earnestly by the shoulder, half dragging him into the fragrant kitchen. "Oh, don't listen to him, Lex. Jonathan wouldn't do that."

"You might want to wear gloves when you handle the glasses, though," Clark offered. "And I can taste all your food."

"Clark! Enough of that." She released Lex to swat him. Lex recognized Clark's feigned wince, mostly because it differed so much from a real one.

"It's all right, Mrs. Kent," he said. "I know he's just trying to figure out a way to eat my lunch too."

They laughed. He felt like he'd scored in a professional handball tournament. He was certainly sweating enough.

It was his first time in a working kitchen, and it didn't take long to discover a preternatural knack for standing precisely where someone else needed to be. He pushed so far into the corner that a dreadlock of garlic trailed over his shoulder; apparently he was also blocking the knife drawer, but Martha steered him kindly to the left of it. He stood on Cleo, who wailed. Everything stuttered to a halt as Clark and his mother descended on her and scooped her up between them.

She peered at him insouciantly from beneath their stroking hands, and winked.

"I saw that," he said. "I did. You read much Dean Koontz? I bet you have the whole damn collection."

"Read what? Huh?" Clark asked, captivated by the inside of Cleo's ear. "Hey, feel this."

Lex took the tip of her other ear between his forefingers, mouth-watering soft, like the cuff of some Polo kidskin club pants Lex had toyed with buying Clark. He really didn't mean to brush Clark's fingers with his, smooth gold on smooth white and how did he keep them like that and work like he did? Lex couldn't see him using a sea salt scrub and an emulsifying oil bath, somehow. Clark was more of a Lava soap kind of guy. "Soft," he said, and hoped it wasn't too late.

"Yeah," Clark said, eyes sliding away from Lex's, and scruffed Cleo's head. "Want me to get the rolls, Mom?"

"Not with dog hands, you will not. Wash."

"Aw, mom! Dog spit is the cleanest--"

"It's not spit I'm worried about, it's chicken doo, and she's covered in it. Now wash."

"Maybe you can have her lick your hands off," Lex offered, out on a limb, and Clark chortled. Score! he thought, and wasn't this just sad, because what had he won? Not Clark. Never Clark. He really needed to stop thinking that, no matter how much he impressed the Kents. Only two of the Kents, for that matter. Jonathan was another--

"Lex," Clark said, observing him closely.

"Yes?"

"You're standing in front of the sink."

"Shit."

Silence.

"Sorry, Mrs. Kent. I apologize. That was--"

"A familiar word around a farm," Martha said. Smiled, thank God. "Apology accepted."

He retreated to the middle of the room, arms crossed awkwardly, and Clark rolled up his sleeves at the sink, and Lex absolutely did not look at the strength of the veins pushing against his hard forearms as he slicked them with soap. He scrubbed like a doctor, rinsed to the elbow, smelled like Ivory and damp flannel. His profile was milky in the indirect light.

When he bent to get the rolls, Lex dropped to a crouch and scooped Cleo up so he had something soft to hold. "Sublimating with a dog," he whispered against her fur. "I think even Dad would be freaked." She twisted to tonguebathe his nose.

"Hmmf," Jonathan Kent said from somewhere far overhead. "Didn't peg you for a dog man."

Wondering how his prescience failed to note the pall of ill will Jonathan's presence cast over the room, Lex pondered safe and less safe responses before choosing the truth. "I'm not. She was a gift. My...ah, father."

Jonathan folded his arms. "Didn't peg him as a dog man either."

Lex shrugged. "It's possible he went insane. I think the permanent staff have the pool up to like twenty grand by now, so someone'll have a Merry Christmas if he did."

Jonathan tried to disapprove of that; Lex watched the effort begin and recede in his eyes, the easiest he had ever read. "A son should treat his father with a little more respect," he said, the effect marred by a chuckle in the middle, and Lex grinned back.

As an icebreaker, debating Lionel's incipient psychosis worked wonders. Thanks, Dad. "I don't know if the dog came from him or not. At first I thought it was Clark, but..."

"But I'm not allowed pets," Clark interjected, and Lex almost laughed as father and son glared with identical cementlike expressions. This was clearly a conflict with history.

"Time for salad, boys," Martha said, clinking bowls on plates. The descriptive clearly included Jonathan. "We'll deal with the orphan after we eat."

Lex sat down at the table. Cleo collapsed immediately across both feet and gained twenty pounds.

"So, Lex," Jonathan said, and broke a roll to butter it. "Your head still giving you trouble?"

"The pain's mostly gone," Lex answered, and kicked surreptitiously to dislodge his living shackles. It was like trying to get his foot out of a bucket of hotpatch.

"We were starting to think you got a little screwy from the hit," Jonathan said. Martha halted an abrupt move that Lex suspected would have been a bitch-slap to the shoulder in other company, and Clark buried his face in his hands.

"Maybe," Lex said steadily. "Maybe I did." ~Why else would I care so much what a dirt-nailed farmer thinks of me? Why else would I be sitting at a table in his kitchen waiting for a helping of chitlins and mustard greens while a woman that smells like a department-store knockoff of White Shoulders coos over my dog? Why else would I, the scion of silk and shag and private opera boxes, feel homesick when she does?~

Jonathan laughed, grudgingly, but with genuine humor. "Well, I'm just glad to know I can start setting my alarm again instead of waiting for the wakeup call."

"Jonathan," Martha said, sighing. "It was only the three times."

Lex paled. "Three...three times?"

"Well...there was the first night at around one thirty, and then again, later."

"Four thirty-one," Jonathan supplied. "I was already up for that one, but Clark wasn't. School day, you know."

Lex shrank.

"And then you called--when was it, Mom?" Clark said, clearly eager to rip off the Band-aid of revelation on the way to another topic. "Two eighteen?"

"The next night," Martha said.

"What did I say?" Lex asked. ~Nothing maudlin, may it please God. Nothing sexual, oh beloved Jesus. Nothing about secretly hiring a team of engineers to investigate the car crash that could have killed your son, nothing about Victoria, nothing, please Lord nothing about Lionel. Not at two in the morning. Please.~

"Why, Lex, I think I'm hurt," Martha said. "You told me you loved me. We were going to elope in the spring."

Lex couldn't feel his feet. Or his lips.

"I'm kidding," Martha said after far too long. "Oh, Lex, if you could see your face!"

Clark snorted milk, palmed his nose with the back of his hand. "Jeez...Mom!" His cheeks were blazing, which gave Lex a vicious little thrill.

~That's what you get for asking me to family dinner. We could be eating fresh strawberries and sipping...well, nonalcoholic something-or-other on a leather divan. But nooooooo.~ "You, just...um." Clark cleared his throat, swallowed more milk. "You said my name a lot. And mentioned...your destiny. Our destiny. Together, like that stuff you were saying about Alexander at the mansion, and...then you started talking about the Dust Bowl, but I think that was from a movie."

~Quoting-Steinbeck stoned,~ Lex thought, behind an expression of protective blankness. ~Oh, merciful God.~

"You got the best of it," he said aloud. "When I called my father like that, I always quoted East of Eden."

Martha laughed. "I saw you as more of a Rebel Without A Cause type."

"It's the black. Part of the image."

She laughed again, an unselfconscious, brazen sound, almost a man's laugh. Lex felt dizzy, like a lightweight sneaking a punch past Tyson.

~I'm doing this. I'm bantering with Clark's mother about elopement and no one's pulled a gun. I'm actually doing this.~

"Hey, I smell--" Clark began.

"Oh, no, the chicken!" Martha leaped up, Clark moving like an eyeblink to right her falling chair, and fumbled through drawer after drawer. "Potholders, Clark, potholders, where did you put the--"

"Here," Lex said uncertainly, holding out a square of quilted cloth. The name made semantic sense. Pot + Holder. Almost Germanic.

Martha snatched it from his hand and took a smoking lump from the oven. "Oh." She picked at it with the meat fork, disconsolate. "No, oh, it's ruined. I'm sorry, I got distracted."

"Don't worry," Lex said in great relief. "This, I can fix." Flipped open his cell, hit the speed dial, and waited for the tone to clear. "Kenny?"

His cook banged something loud enough for all of them to hear, then answered. "What is this, a culinary ER? This is my first 911 page since your old man found out Bill Gates' sister was allergic to shellfish."

"That was funny as hell," Lex said. "She looked like her mother was raped by a platypus. He lost that account over it, didn't he?" He vaguely registered the Kents' stares.

"Good times, good times," Kenny chuckled. "But you didn't call me to rehash the old days. What's up? I still won't poison anybody without a cash advance."

"How fast can you make a chicken dinner?"

"Um...cooked?

"Yes, cooked." Lex rolled his eyes ceilingward. "Can't get good help nowadays."

Kenny, who had conspired to turn Lex temporarily orange with a week-long diet of carrot juice in order to get Lionel home one lonely half-term, guffawed. "Okay. Cooked with no cheating or cooked with that scary-ass thing you attached to the burner in the lab?"

"What do you think?"

"Okay, okay. Fifteen minutes. Tops. I'll rub it with some nice rosemary and crushed garlic and leave it in the basting juices. You eating in for a change?"

"No, Fernando is driving it over to the Kent farm. Give him the address on the bulletin board by the fridge."

"Lucky Fernando. What did you do, piss them off again or something?"

"Not yet." Lex sighed. "Just make it fast."

Kenny hung up in answer.

"That's very nice of you, Lex," Martha said, sucking a blister on the side of her thumb. Jonathan put an ice cube in his napkin and passed it to her. "But you didn't have to ask your friend to drive dinner here. We could have...I don't know, ordered pizza."

"Yeah," Clark said. "Way to screw up pizza, Lex."

"Clark," Jonathan said. His eyes were twinkling. Lex had no idea eyes did that outside the pages of C.S. Lewis books. "Don't be rude to your guest."

That concession occasioned a silence so profound that Cleo was compelled to bark. Martha dropped her fork, and Jonathan looked sheepish but didn't recant, and Clark...well, he smiled at Lex with such joy that it had to be dangerous, a smile with a future in it, wasn't that how the quote went, and Lex had talked around it a dozen times without ever seeing it as well as Clark seemed to now. Raindrop eyes, radiant. Their destiny together. Together.

~Why the hell couldn't you just hate me?~ he thought at Jonathan, taking himself aback with the ardor of the want. ~Was a shotgun too much to ask?~ He could have called it impossible then. Could have blamed it on his upbringing, on irreconcilable differences, on Marx. Could have said that he was a man for winter and Clark was spring, and that the wheel would never turn under his hand. Now nothing was certain.

They went out to feed the animals after lunch dishes were done. Lex, to his pride, broke one less than Clark (dish, that was, not animal). Cleo came with them, gamboling at his feet and then Clark's like the fickle creature she was, bolting after the chickens and digging in the stony yard. She sampled dried corn, pronounced it not to her palate with a repugnant gagging noise, and sprang into the long grass at the edge of the yard.

"Over there's the Johnsons," Clark said, his voice noncommittal as he pointed. "I bet their kids would love a dog. If you can talk their parents into it."

"I don't know," Lex said, not sure what he meant by it.

"Or the Carpenters," Clark said. "They're just a little way up the road. Their dog just died in an accident with the tractor. Maybe they'd want her."

"Should have been Delilah," Lex mused.

"Huh?"

"Her name. If it was Dad. He always tries to make a point with his gifts. I forgot."

"I don't...wasn't she the one who...when she cut off the guy's hair, he lost his manhood or something?"

Lex laughed til he coughed, and coughed til the cool air ran through his lungs like paper cuts, and laughed some more. "Or something. Ow...Clark..."

"Cleopatra was like that too, though," Clark mused. "I mean, didn't she, like sort of steal that guy's manhood with love? He couldn't see past it anymore and just gave up his job and his country?" He paused. "Well, it's not really the same. Because she didn't use magic. He just chose to love her instead."

"Some people said she tricked him," Lex said. "I never believed it myself. I'm a fan of free will." He was no longer sure how much innocence to ascribe to the conversation, or to the way Clark was almost-but-not-quite regarding him. Was Clark sophisticated enough to woo him with literary allusions, or was he, like his fictional predecessors, doing his own damned wooing?

"Even if choosing love destroys you?" Clark asked him. Looking at him, now, no doubt, and giving Lex what he had feared for months to need.

Where the hell had Clark gotten so much courage? Lex felt a freakish flash of hate for his serenity, crying out "love" with every confidence of echoes. Wanted to play dead, deny him with a cold glance, just because he could.

There was a howl from the field. Both of them ran toward it.

Cleo lay in a shallow depression, surrounded by brilliant splatters of blood. They seemed brighter than natural to Lex, some tithe demanded by the fields, or a more personal punishment for his disdain. A reminder that Nature was indifferent as he could never hope to be.

"Oh my God," Clark whispered, running his fingers over her shaking body. "Oh God. Where is it?"

It took Lex a moment to realize Clark meant whatever had caused the bleeding. He'd been thinking of it as an independent phenomenon. Once he expanded his field of regard, he quickly saw the fragments of broken bottle. "It's glass, we need to get it out of her, probably her paws or her leg--"

"It's her right hind leg," Clark said quickly. "I can feel it when I--"

Cleo's lips curled back, and she moaned. Lex had never heard a dog make that sound before. His brain felt big and wet, and he tasted something like a rag being pulled through his sinuses. "Don't cry," he said.

"What? Lex?"

"Don't cry. You'll be all right. Don't cry." He dropped to his knees, stroked Cleo's head surely. Held her down by the shoulders. "There's a knife in my pocket, Clark. Get the glass out. Quick."

Clark reached into Lex's jacket. Lex's heart was beating fast as Cleo's, just like Cleo's, and his skin was so hot he wasn't sure he'd ever need a jacket again.

"It's a beauty," Clark remarked, teasing out the short blade of the Swiss Army knife Lionel'd bought Lex to teach him self-sufficiency. "Hold her. I'm doing it now."

Cleo spasmed under Lex's hands, once, twice, again, her cries high and her eyes showing white. "Oh God," Lex said raggedly, and swallowed. "Stop." He had no idea whether he was talking to Clark or Cleo or just whatever kept coming up in his throat. None of them listened.

"One more little piece," Clark murmured. "Now."

"No," Lex hissed. "Nononononono..." and then it was over, with a short, sharp sound like a child screaming. His father's voice, freak thundercrack, overlaying his own. "Don't cry, baby. Don't cry."

Clark smeared Lex's cheek with his hand, and that was the first, and worst, he felt the cold. "Are you all right, Lex?"

He stroked the fur under his sweat-damp hands. Cleo looked limply up at him, Clark's big, gentle fingers cinching her ankle to staunch the blood. Lex felt wrung out, incapable of examining what the last few moments meant. From where had that fugitive memory come? The first leukemia scare? The first cornfield nightmare? Just some night when he had the flu? He only knew he couldn't afford to trade it for uncomplicated hate. "Fine, I just...I think my father might have sent her after all."

He smiled, and Clark met it, still touching his cheek. The storm rolled away.

Dear Dad:

Thanks for the present. I think I know what you wanted me to learn from her--loyalty, obedience, and responsibility. But I already knew those things, because I knew where they come from. They come from love. And that's something you can't give away, only share.

Three things I'll give you back, because they don't cost me anything anymore. I miss you. I'm sorry. I love you.

Merry Christmas,
Lex