Chapter Text
Sometimes, Lex wondered who he would have been if the world had no metahumans. Would he have been ‘normal’ like his contemporaries, unbothered by his fragile and powerless state and content in his affluent bubble, being directed by his father and whatever board members were in rotation at Luthorcorp?
Would have he been able to go about his life as a multimillionaire’s son, sleeping off hangovers in his classes at Harvard, playing polo or golf or whatever other tedious sport, summering in the Adriatic, sleeping with Olympic athletes and prima ballerinas who’d come running with a curl of his fingers—and doing nothing else?
Would Alexander Luthor III have been content to be just as vacuous and carefree as that obnoxious twat Oliver Queen or that braindead moron Bruce Wayne if a Green Lantern hadn’t crashed through his classroom, flung there by an alien taller than the school itself?
He still vividly remembered that day, how the reptilian creature had breathed fire into the broken window, setting off everything in the chemistry lab, and filling it with multi-colored flames and bursting gas. It had just been his luck that he was sitting at the back, and everyone else had fled the room before him, leaving him and the Lantern, trapped and suffocating on the burning concoctions.
By the time the Lantern had snapped out of it and flown back out to defeat the monster, Lex had breathed in too much, developed acute poisoning…and most of his hair had fallen out. Somehow, in the throes of a superhero crisis, neither the teachers nor the Lantern had realized he was in there, and he had been found over an hour later by the clean-up crew and the police.
His father had, of course, not been pleased with the negligence and sued the school into the ground. Briefly, Lex had felt touched, that this distant, gruff father had been so outraged on his behalf that he’d used his power to get revenge. Only that assumption didn’t last, popped like a balloon when Alexander ‘Al’ Luthor, Jr. hadn’t even visited him at the hospital and welcomed him home with all the excitement of a patron being served a wrong order.
The day he was discharged and their driver had dropped him back at the Metropolis penthouse, Lex’s father had folded the newspaper he’d been reading to watch him blankly as he settled at their breakfast table. The servants quietly and efficiently milled about, and Lena, in her own world between them with her headphones on and reading some godawful Hunger Games rip-off, hadn’t even noticed he’d sat down.
“Did the doctors say anything about any lasting complications?” His father had asked neutrally, pale eyes looking him over slowly before returning to his face—not to meet Lex’s gaze, but to examine his head, and how it was now completely void of his auburn hair. It was hard not to feel uncomfortable.
Thrilled by the seeming show of concern, Lex had begun to smile as he relayed what the doctor had told him. “I am set to make a full recovery after some rest. Doctor Thompkins will be sending nurses to come hang up some IVs and set up an oxygen machine, then I am due for a checkup in a few days.”
“No risk of organ failure or cancer then?”
“It’s too early to tell, sir.”
He hummed, not quite pleased with that answer. “So, your hair will be growing back soon?”
Lex immediately touched his head, feeling the upsetting reminder that he had almost died, feeling the shape of his skull, the slightly greasy smoothness reminiscent of his own face, and felt nauseous as he had in the hospital. But this had little to do with the poisoning, and what had been flushed out of his system.
“Doctors said it was unlikely, but it could, given some time,” he told his father meekly.
He didn’t need to see the bottom half of his face to know what expression he was making, his mouth was briefly pulled to the side in distaste as he sighed, “Let’s just hope it doesn’t speed up inheriting your mother’s cancer. We’ll already have everyone asking if I’ve put you on chemo.” He flapped his newspaper back upright and muttered, “The least that fucking lab disaster could have done was give you superpowers.”
Lex didn’t know what he had expected at the time, but it hadn’t been that. The fascination with metahumans and their occurrence in the world, namely this country, had long gripped his father and encouraged the scientific pursuits of several divisions at Luthorcorp. His grandfather, Alexander, Snr., had supposedly studied them, managing to obtain the odd cadaver of a reported meta and studying it, trying to understand either how they ticked or what made them so special to be chosen by a supernatural force like the Lantern, or the rumored Doctor Fate.
Lex’s own burgeoning admiration of these people hadn’t lasted long, not when he’d seen coverage of one moving so fast it left blazing tracks. Or when he’d heard of how an associate of their family’s had been exposed and had his assets seized after a superhero had broken in, hogtied him and dropped on the commissioner’s doorstep for funding illegal drug trials that would, hopefully, give some lucky experiment powers. It didn’t help that Lex had been hoping to intern for that man someday, see how viable his own ideas of transhumanism were, where powers could be granted with care and with an in-built killswitch.
After he’d unstuck his tongue from the roof of his dry mouth, Lex nudged his father. “Are you seriously disappointed that I didn’t become mutated? I could have died!”
“Yes, and you could have at least gotten something out of it like all those freaks seem to, it would have helped us come closer to understanding how metas occur, the precise the cocktail of genetics, compounds and circumstance that make you phase through walls or outrun a motorcycle,” he’d said, with no change in volume or tone, still finding today’s news more interesting than his son. “It would have been a social boon, having our own superpowered member of the family, if not been a great asset to the company. We could have gotten you your own marketing team, fashioned you one of those distinctive outfits and had you working to enforce our goals.”
Disbelief left him shrill. “That’s why you’re obsessed with this stuff? You wanted a mascot?”
“I wanted a minor god I could rely on, one to stand in the way of anyone who thinks they can come for me and my legacy, and a clear indicator that I am not to be fucked with. Surely you can grasp that benefit, or has the gas killed enough of your brain cells?”
Lex had felt his insides freeze to the extent that it had hurt to breathe. He had no response for his father’s coarse admission, all he’d felt was upsetting shock. It was one thing to know that his parents had been a political match to merge both their father’s goals and fortunes, and that he was first and foremost, born to be an heir. But they weren’t royalty, there was no throne at stake, Lena and himself should have been loved simply for being the children of Alexander, Jr. and Yelena, not because they were the embodiment of a deal…or as the property of Luthorcorp.
But perhaps he had been clinging too hard to his naivety. He existed to serve a purpose, to eventually take over the company and take it to new heights, just like Lena would also be given a high-ranking position then given in marriage to whoever their father thought would be the most beneficial match.
As he ate his breakfast in silence, staring blankly at the front page declaring the latest triumph against crime achieved by the speedster Max Mercury, Lex felt the ice in his lungs thaw and his blood begin to boil.
He didn’t know when or how, but someday, he would create a way to put these freaks in their place, to neutralize them and recreate their powers, either sold to the highest bidder or used purely for his own personal gain. He would outsmart chance and prove to his father that he didn’t need extreme mutations to jerk wealthier men and entire governments around.
Years after that conversation, when he had enraged his father by going from Harvard to to MIT to study nanotechnology, robotics and astrophysics, all part of his overarching plan, he had begun to develop his carefully-crafted persona as a Man of Tomorrow. Tesla and Hughes be damned, he was what would prove that they didn’t need to rely on a bunch of lucky assholes in primary colors.
What he had never expected to unravel his plans was the arrival of the alien.
It was one thing to have had generations of Green Lanterns that worked for an alien organization centered in a planet far, far away, it was another to have something completely inhuman to set up shop in his own backyard.
Initially dubbed the Blur, it had started by doing small acts regularly reported on the news such as quickly gathering unsuspecting civilians out of the way of a falling billboard, or pulling someone out of a car that had fallen into the harbor. Then it had escalated to stopping bank robberies by zipping in, disarming their guns and knocking out the assailants, and then the first proper sighting had come when a building had been set on fire. The Blur had slowed down enough to gather every single person and their pets and deliver them to the fire engines in the street.
Someone had been quick enough to snap a picture, selling it to the Daily Planet. It had been a blurry picture of a tall, dark-haired man wearing loud colors, and the article had dubbed him Superman.
Lex needed to get his hands on it.
The thing was, there was no telling what this thing’s strengths and limitations were, not without the opportunity to gather plenty of data. He couldn’t do that without being on the scene or having boots on the ground, ready to shoot at or capture it.
Naturally, he had to create his own crises.
He had started small, paying a couple of thugs through a shell account to drive in from Gotham and cause chaos, just so he could capture the Superman in better condition from the security cameras. After that, he sacrificed one of his properties to an unruly fire, just so he could watch from a van as the alien came and blew it out with his breath.
After that, he sabotaged a rival’s mega-yacht so it would sink off the coast of Metropolis and watched with a dropping jaw as the Superman dove in and carried it out of the water, safely depositing it back on the shore.
So far, it had more than just super-speed and storm-like breath, it was capable of picking up something a hundred times its size and flying with the ease one would pick up a box and place it on a shelf. He needed to create more drastic tests to get better results, more conclusive ideas on just what else this creature could do, and how it could juggle the powers an entire team of metas would have.
Throughout these events, sightings had increased, pictures of varying quality had popped up everywhere online, and it was safe to say that the alien looked passably human. It had Lex wondering about what projector technology it could be operating with, or if one of its powers was shapeshifting.
To say that that thought had left him a little paranoid would be an understatement, because if that thing could shapeshift then what did it actually look like? What level of Lovecraftian monstrosity could be hiding behind that humanoid appearance? The Lanterns may have worked for aliens and wielded alien power, but they were still people! They couldn’t know for sure what Superman was without capturing it and cutting it open.
Inconveniences, petty criminals and accidents weren’t enough anymore, he needed to do something that would give the alien some sort of a struggle so he could get a good look at it, maybe even salvage some DNA from the scene. He bought a troop of robots from a foreign scientist he had anonymously funded and had them attack the place Superman was oddly fixated on, downtown Metropolis.
They wreaked havoc, attacking passers-by, invading shops, causing pile-ups and monotonously declaring that the Age of Man was over and that the age of unchecked artificial intelligence was here.
In the bright midday sun, Superman came flying in full view of his hovering camera-bots, swift and graceful, it punched a few robots into a hundred pieces to release the people they were attacking and, for some reason, tried to reason with the machines.
It had been the first time Lex heard it speak. It had a pleasant voice, deep for someone affecting a generic American accent, sounding like it had picked it up watching classic films, and spoke with a patient cadence, like it were trying to soothe a wild animal.
Up in his tower, transfixed by the feed on his screen, Lex forgot how to breathe for a solid minute until the robot’s programming kicked into gear, grabbed Superman by the throat and flung him into a lamppost.
“All right, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he grumbled, getting back up off the broken post and shooting straight for the robot. It was ready for him, hands crackling with high voltage, but he beat it to the punch, slamming his fist through its metal head.
Lex finally exhaled, unsure of what he was feeling as he watched Superman dodge several attacks and take his frustration out on each robot he crushed with his fists. He had been distracted long enough by one that had picked up the lamppost and swung at his head to leave his back open to a robot that slammed its live wire hands onto his shoulders.
Going stiff with shock, he let out a cry of pain that made Lex’s pulse spike. Was this what did it? A giant taser?
Immobilized by the electricity, the other robot hit him with the lamppost so hard he flew out of his torturer’s grasp and through a bus’s windshield.
Alone in his office, Lex couldn’t help letting out a disbelieving laugh. Superman had been knocked out, and all he had to do was get the robots to overpower it and get him some DNA, maybe even drag it to his lab and tie it to a table and finally get his literal hands—
Superman shot out of the bus with a furious yell, bisecting every robot in his path as he flew through them, and within five minutes he had tracked down every single one and broken it in half.
Lex let out a frustrated scream and slammed his fists down on his glass desk, rattling its contents and making his coffee slosh out of its mug. This should have worked! This was working until it didn’t! How fucking powerful was this thing?
Civilians started to emerge once the coast was clear, the ever-reliable news-hounds with their cameras and microphones rushed onto the scene, keeping a cautious distance as they reported on what had just happened.
Plenty fled the scene, but the rest, as if spellbound, approached the floating figure like skittish animals, and some were brazen enough to reach for him. Only one person was bold enough to elbow her way to the front and shove her recorder up to him.
“Superman! This is Lois Lane from the Daily Planet, would you mind answering a few questions for us about what just occurred?”
The alien had the nerve to look stunned by the attention, but he recovered quickly, plastering on a smile and greeting the reporter as he softly touched down on the street.
Lane could barely get a few words out before others showed up and phones were shoved in his face, all screaming questions at him. Lex managed to get his drone close enough to get a clear look at his face and it—he was breathtaking.
That was the last think Lex should be thinking, but he couldn’t help himself.
It seemed the commotion was too much, and Superman just loudly declared that he hoped everyone was fine and then shot up into the sky, no doubt breaking the sound barrier.
The tension that had gripped him throughout this entire operation left his body, leaving him to slouch in his leather office chair and stare blankly at the feed.
Theoretically, this hadn’t been a complete loss. He had managed to gauge what affected his target to some extent—namely that he had responded to force and voltage, so both would need to be increased. His next effort would take some further planning, but until then, he needed a break, because he had ground his teeth so hard he might end up cracking another tooth.
Superman’s defeat of the mysterious robot uprising made international news. What had been limited to a stateside mystery had enough outreach to invite foreign conversation, with screencaps of the Daily Planet’s videos popping up everywhere on the news and stirring people up online.
Countless questions joined the ones he already had, but the reception, to his chagrin, seemed overwhelmingly positive. Way too many people were focusing on how handsome Superman was, rather than questioning the extent of his powers or where the hell he had come from.
They didn’t need to wait that long for some answers, as while he was visiting the Luthorcorp branch in Vancouver, he got alerts from all the saved keywords, update accounts and news apps that Superman had given his first interview.
Not to Lois Lane, but to someone else at the Planet called Clark Kent.
Lex couldn’t focus on the rest of his meeting, heartbeat elevated with shameful excitement as he kept glancing at his phone on the table between himself and the heads of the Canadian branch, checking both the time to see if enough had passed for him to adjourn and to see the update tabs that kept piling up.
It got to a point where he couldn’t bear it anymore and got, pretending to take a call as he walked to the nearest restroom, ears pounding as he swiped open the Daily Planet’s website to read Kent’s article with ravenous eyes.
With a picture of Superman posing on the Planet’s roof, the article wasn’t nearly as in-depth as he would have wanted, but it did confirm a few things, namely that Superman was not from Earth.
It was one thing to suspect, it was anything to have it straight from the horse’s mouth, and it made the paranoid side of his psyche ring alarm bells as he read through Kent’s article. The prose wasn’t stellar but it wasn’t middling either, he’d read better, but the neutral way Kent approached describing his encounter and meeting with the alien oddly fascinated him.
Lex had expected it to be a fawning puff piece over Metropolis’s new resident hero, but it was very matter-of-fact, making use of several questions Kent had no doubt gathered from popular online posts such as where he came from, when he’d arrived on Earth, if there were more of him due to pop up and if this was a ‘form we’d be more comfortable with’.
Superman had reportedly laughed and explained that he had arrived 'recently', that he had escaped the destruction of a planet orbiting a red star called Krypton, and that, as far as he knew, he was what was left of its civilization. Lastly, he said that no, he did not take a human form to be more approachable, but that was what he looked like.
The rest of the answers felt practiced, carefully chosen, making Lex feel like a good few revelations were left off the record, possibly under the threat of Kent having his windpipe crushed. Superman was ‘here to help’ and he ‘felt responsible to help those who can’t help themselves’ and that he ‘considers Earth his home’.
Lex wasn’t sure if he was buying the dead planet story, or that there weren’t others on their way to join him. He could have been a scout, sent ahead to find a new space to colonize, invade and settle, as any advanced civilization would do. All this could be to lull them into a false sense of security until he helped usher in a fleet of spaceships.
Who knew how long until the entirety of Earth went the way of the Aztec Empire?
Lex couldn’t stay in Vancouver longer than that. He left, determined, his latest girlfriend hot on his heels, more interested in the private jet than she was in him, and once they headed back to Metropolis he started planning his next move.
If anyone knew anything else about Superman, it would be Kent. That also begged the question of why he had been chosen to break the alien’s silence to begin with.
He needed to be looked into.
On the flight back, Lex completely forgot about Fleurette as she tapped away at her phone, and requested a deep dive into his new favorite reporter from his team while he did some light internet stalking himself.
Clark J. Kent only had a BlueSky, which he used for work, and an Instagram, which had very few pictures, most not of himself but of what must have been his original home. Sunset over a cornfield, a bunch of cows grazing, an honest-to-God red farmhouse with a rooster weathervane like in the cartoons, and a couple of shots of the interior, some which included his parents. One post in particular made something squirm in the pit of Lex’s stomach. It was just a picture of a small woman with a dated haircut and a cheap dye-job smiling and holding up a pie with an uneven crust.
‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had my ma’s famous Thanksgiving peach pie :)’.
The comments from co-workers and friends were predictably sweet, though only one person asked why it was peach instead of pumpkin, to which Kent had replied, ‘Never liked the consistency of a pumpkin pie, so Ma switched it up one time and we all liked it so much that it’s become a yearly tradition!’
It was a negligible fact, a basic explanation, but it lit a fire in Lex’s belly. This woman had changed a habit shared by millions across the country all to indulge her son’s preferences, and he couldn’t get his father and sister to feign concern for his health.
Grinding his teeth, he clicked on the tagged section of Kent’s profile and finally found a handful of pictures that included him. There were a handful of throwbacks from old classmates, namely from a man called Pete Ross, and the rest were from co-workers at the Planet, all of which seemed reluctant and awkward, and primarily came from Jimmy Olsen…who had thick auburn hair, just like Lex himself once had.
It was a stupid thing to fixate on after all these years. His father had looked into treatments and transplants, but those only worked if you still had some hair, not when your scalp was a wasteland. His sister had tried convincing him to a wear a wig like she did to some events and when she didn’t feel like committing to a new hair color, but that was beneath him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life beholden to something so false and temporary, like spoken deals and love, so he wore caps throughout school and soon developed enough confidence to walk about as he was.
It had, in a way, helped with his branding. Being bald as a young man was typically a stylistic choice, it made him come off as older, harder, more mature than his floppy-haired prettyboy contemporaries like Bruce Wayne.
Still, what he would never admit out loud was that he seethed whenever he saw other men on his level who looked better than him. It was one thing to be wealthy, another to be respected, and a whole other thing to turn heads as you walked.
Kent had a great head of hair, big, dark, unruly curls that fell over his brow and threatened to shield his eyes behind those horrendous old man glasses. It was a shame he had no idea how to style himself.
The general air about him in all these pictures was that he was profoundly awkward, not knowing how to smile or pose, hunching slightly the way tall people did, and wearing ill-fitting suits that were several seasons out of date. Lex couldn’t help wondering what he’d look like if a stylist had gotten hold of him, put him in a more flattering, form-fitting cut and gave him a haircut and slimmer glasses…
…What was he doing? How this man looked didn’t matter, but getting a hold of him for an interrogation did.
By the time they had touched down on the roof of his building, Lex had received a background check on one Clark Joseph Kent. Born in Kansas, adopted by farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent as a baby, graduated from Smallville High with a 3.8 GPA and headed to Metropolis University to study journalism on a scholarship, where he worked a couple of odd jobs and landed an internship at the Planet. All in all, pretty streamlined and simple. There were no health issues, no criminal record, no debts, no bad breakups, not even social media posts that aged badly. Nothing that could conceivably be used against him by the alien or Lex himself. Nothing short of threats of bodily harm, at least.
He had Fleurette flown home, too preoccupied to care about whatever the hell she was complaining about now, something about him being distant, not listening to her, caring about her ‘career’, as if she hadn’t gotten an all-around boost in her standard of living by being with him.
Frankly, he was tired of her. Perhaps he should go back to carting around the daughters of business partners and investors, the ones they had from their fourth marriages to models young enough to be their children, like Johan Teschmacher’s youngest, an airhead who’d never learned to shut up.
Back in the private comfort of his penthouse, he reexamined what he had on Clark Kent, lingering on the headshot from his IDs and work profiles—which were unflattering takes on anyone—and wondering what this man had said or done to convince Superman to do that interview.
Out of the shower and dripping in his bathrobe, Lex found the perfect excuse to meet his latest target. The Planet was set to cover the opening of the Yelena Luthor wing in the Metropolis Museum, and Lex, as the guest of honor, would request that they send Kent instead of Lane.
Fingertips on the screen of his tablet, he maximized the work profile picture of Clark Kent and felt something he’d thought long-dead stir in his gut: eagerness.