521 Ways

This kick-ass cover was made by lilwitchy. Thank you SO MUCH. I love it! *hugs*

Disclaimer - WB and DC own them! La da daaaa.

What's this? It's a FIC! Don't faint, now. It's Clex, future fic, AU, with angst for good measure. PG-13 for a bit of bad language.

Many thanks to my nel. *smooch*

Feedback would kick butt.

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Lex hasn't tasted anything but stale air for the last sixteen years.

Not that it matters. Not that anything will ever let him die.

He knows first hand. He's become remarkably creative at attempting suicide.

It wasn't a conversation he was ever supposed to overhear.

On his way up the steps to the loft, pausing when he heard a familiar, feminine voice.

"Not that it's not sweet, Clark," Chloe was in the middle of saying, "and not that it wasn't really *hot* that one time I walked in here and-"

"Chloe!"

That was something about Clark that would never, ever change.

Chloe grinned, she must have, even though Lex still couldn't see her. But it was gone by the time she spoke again, because he couldn't hear it in her voice at all.

"But..."

"But?" Clark prompted, not that Chloe ever needed prompting.

"Sometimes it's really *fucking* scary how much he loves you."

Mercy has no problems breathing, either. She had the surgery seven years ago that ensured she was protected from the toxins in the atmosphere.

Lex may not care about his own life, but good staff are frankly *impossible* to replace.

"Assembly is progressing on schedule," she reports, looking as immaculate as she did the first day she came to work for him, a talent no one else seems to have mastered. "We'll be able to deploy on target date."

"Good," he responds automatically, looking over what used to be Smallville before turning and leaving the room. "I'll be with our guest."

Lex knew it was true, of course. But then so did Clark. As they'd discovered, there was a reason Lex had never been in love before.

Lex loved like he drove.

Lex drove like a maniac.

The air inside is clean, controlled. It has to be. He'd offered her the surgery, the drugs; she'd refused and Lex has always respected Martha's decisions.

"I hope breakfast was to your liking today," he greets, looking through the window to her room. He knows the food was to her liking. It's the best food anyone will get anywhere, now, but he also knows she won't respond.

Martha stopped talking a long time ago.

"We're proceeding on schedule," he tells her, sinking into the chair next to the window.

"That's just Lex, Chloe," Clark told her. "It's the way he is. He gets...obsessed with things."

"Like you," she pointed out.

Very much the truth.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Clark argued.

But Chloe knew how to negotiate. "I'm sure that it feels incredible. I'm sure that most of us have no idea what it's even like."

"The way the device has been created, it should pull apart absolutely anything at the molecular level. Nothing should be able to withstand it." Nothing. Nothing. "Nothi-"

"He'd hate you for this."

Her voice is quiet, thready from lack of use. For half a second he almost convinces himself that he imagined it. "Martha. Good to hear your voice again."

"He'd hate you for everything you've already done."

"Ah, but which one first?" The bombs, the toxins, the countless deaths? So much choice.

Not that the deaths *were* countless. He knew precisely how many people he'd killed.

Lex inched further up the steps. He hadn't seen Clark for almost six hours and he needed something, even just a glimpse.

"It's just that sometimes I get the feeling that..."

He got it as Clark leant forward into view.

"That what, Chloe?"

The humour snaps away just as quickly as it'd appeared. "He was defending all of us, Martha. This entire fucking planet. It doesn't deserve to live any more than I do."

When he leaves she cries, yelling after him hoarsely, sounding disturbingly like her son.

He can almost pretend that it's Clark. He can almost pretend that he's glad to hear Clark crying.

"That...if he ever lost you...I mean, not just breaking up but...God forbid if you died..."

"Chloe?"

Lex watched Chloe turn further towards Clark as if preparing him for something, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that whatever she was about to say would be the absolute truth.

"He'd tear the entire planet apart."

Not quite yet, he thinks. Not quite yet.

Two more months. Two more months.

And he'll be ready.

~FINIS

And this wonderful cover was made by laurab1. Thank you, thank you, thank you! *hugs*