Chapter Text
The first thing Lex notices when he wakes is the glossy black floor beneath him. He’s so cold. He rises slowly, unsure why or even what for.
A white dog with a red cape sits with its back to him, tail wagging. His mind is blank. Nothing makes sense. This room means nothing to him. A sharp pain shoots through his arm—and his ribs. He doesn’t bother to cradle either as he pushes himself upright.
With effort and pain, Lex raises his eyes. He feels sick. The room is spinning before his eyes.
Before him stands a handsome, dark-haired man in a red-and-blue suit. His arms are crossed over his chest; his costume is stained somehow. Dusted. He has a fantastically striking face and blue eyes.
His expression… conveys so many emotions that Lex can’t name them. There is longing and sorrow. His eyes glow with a hopeless feeling, a kind of ache. Perhaps this man has lost someone. Or something terrible has happened in his life. Lex doesn’t know.
The only thing he remembers is his own name. Nothing else.
Hot tears streak down his cheeks. He doesn’t know why. He can’t even recall what made him cry in the first place.
***
Lex has no idea where he is. Not even a clue. White walls, a cold cell with a creaky bed.
They tell him it’s Belle Reve. Lex couldn’t care less. It’s very simple: he remembers nothing.
He figures out quickly that he’s rich, that he holds a special place in people’s hearts. They release him from that unpleasant room—too quickly, if the glares from his inmates in orange jumpsuits mean anything.
So many doctors, so many MRIs, so many tests. Neurocognitive baseline assessments. Oculomotor tracking. Endless and exhausting. A man in a medical gown asks what he knows—and what he doesn’t. They sift his words for lies.
Eventually, it ends.
A woman with braids leads him to a long black car and slides in beside him into a dark cabin with tinted windows.
She looks exhausted. Haggard, as if in pain. As though she’s been through a trauma. Her large brown eyes give it away.
“Everything will be okay, Lex. This won’t last forever. We’ll fix it, I promise.”
Lex nods, not knowing what exactly needs fixing—or what won’t last forever. He… doesn't care? He understands very little these days. Sunlight filters through the windows, offering a view of beautiful skyscrapers. Mesmerizing. He wishes he could visit one of them.
Suddenly he wants to voice that wish, because for some reason this woman makes him feel safe. As though he can trust her. As though she matters to him. But he stays silent, as if his lips are stitched together.
For some reason he knows it’s better to remain quiet. Back where they came from, people looked at him strangely whenever he tried to answer their odd questions.
As if he wasn’t saying what they wanted to hear.
As if he surprised them.
As if… nothing he spoke pleased them. Ever. Lex learned to keep his mouth shut very quickly.
It’s safer.
It’s better.
He got used to it.
His mind clings to a million details in the world around him. The details that captivate him.
The angle at which light reflects off surfaces and how it diffuses. How atmospheric pressure shifts with weather. What time it is by the sun’s position. All those numbers and the words on the doctors’ charts—he understands everything. It comes to him as easy as breathing.
He doesn’t know where he learned those facts and concepts.
They simply feel right. As if he’s always known them. In truth, it seems to be the only thing he remembers.
And he keeps silent about it when he talks to the men in lab coats.
He says nothing when he watches them prescribe a fresh batch of pills. He somehow knows the exact chemical formulas of those medicines. He sees their structures in his mind as if he could synthesize them. He knows he could.
The woman to his left shifts, distracting him from his thoughts. She’s clearly nervous—maybe because of the silence. Lex tries to talk to her. His voice is soft and gentle because he thinks that’s how he’ll reach her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing… I just hoped you'd be—”
She trails off, her eyes shining oddly. He turns away from her in disappointment. Well, she simply doesn’t want to talk to him. Or can’t say what she’s thinking. Fine. Let her be silent then.
Lex truly doesn’t care because nothing makes sense. Now his world is a void filled with random concepts, random flickers of past emotions as weak as moonlight on cold water. Never strong enough to matter. Always not quite strong enough.
Day by day, he finds himself noticing more than others do. All those elemental facts in his head.
The car stops. Lex looks out the window and raises his eyes. A skyscraper under renovation. Two towers shaped like “L”s, turned toward each other. Completely unfamiliar to him. Lex wonders why they’ve stopped here.
“We’re home,” the woman’s voice says on his left.
Home? Is this his home? Huh. Fantastic.
He already knew he was wealthy, but not this wealthy. They haven’t told him anything. From his cell he’d seen men in suits whispering about him, surveying his face for some clue before walking away.
A click of the door handle. The woman opens the door for him. He steps out uncertainly. A cold wind pierces him through to the bone. His barely healed right arm reminds him of its injury.
The main entrance is grand, though the building is inexplicably torn in two. What could have caused that? Earthquakes don’t work like that. He simply knows it. Lex knows that any skyscraper is built to withstand at least some tremors. He leaves the thought and follows the woman.
They walk. And walk. And walk.
An entrance. A spacious lobby. An elevator. Corridors. A door that opens via iris scan and his palm print. A loft.
His loft. A massive loft. It's gray and black and so, so cold. It's impersonal. Soulless.
Is he home? He looks around.
Nothing in this space feels familiar. Nothing in it feels real.
A room, another room, and another—bedroom, kitchen, countless hallways.
None of it sparks recognition in Lex. They tell him this is his home, but he stands in a stranger’s loft. He doesn’t know who he was. He hardly knows who he is now.
He has a vast emptiness in his chest. But Lex doesn’t cry. Because he thinks he’s forgotten how.
***
It turns out the woman’s name is Angela.
She tells him various things.
About him. About the past. About herself.
She doesn’t let him use a phone or a laptop for a long time. Too long.
His patience isn’t infinite. His observations of people persist even without memories. Lex starts to piece things together.
Worry. Fear. Curiosity. Revulsion.
Those are the emotions in their eyes when they look at him. And those are only his subordinates. He doesn’t want to know what lurks behind the entrance to his two skyscrapers.
***
Lex sleeps a great deal. After waking, it takes him ten minutes or more just to piece himself together. It seems he doesn’t forget anything from previous days, but the agony of pulling himself together each morning is dreadful. His mind refuses to function properly. His brain is aflame after every waking. Every single time. The headache’s so intense he wants to curl into a ball and stay that way forever.
His hands clench his head and he claws at it until it bleeds. It does no good. It doesn't help.
Pills sit on the bedside table. Angela brings them.
With a trembling hand he takes them. His hand trembles every time—pitiful and relentless.
He swallows the pills. And prays to the universe that the pain will cease.
***
He lets his hair grow out a bit. Just a bit. Now it looks like a buzz cut. He doesn’t know why he stops shaving his head.
But he won’t let it grow more than a third of an inch. It feels just right.
***
Angela has serious doubts about the phone. She’s fearful and suspicious. After a couple of weeks at home, Lex understands why. He realizes why his employees gaze at him the way they do.
He did something bad. Something wrong. Something terrible.
Something that earned him those looks.
But he is so tired. So tired of ignorance. Of ambiguity. Sometimes the bile rises in his throat. Not knowing makes him sick.
Angela never mentions it, obviously. She refuses. She talks about everything—except what Lex most wants to know. They spend a lot of time together doing memory and motor-skill exercises. He’s seen the medical records. His head trauma was severe. Very severe.
Lex extends his open palm.
He holds it and holds it—until he feels the cold aluminum device. He grips the phone so hard its screen feels as though it could crack at any moment.
He gives her a genuine smile.
“Thank you, Angela.”
She nods tiredly. Impassively. Hopelessly.
He has already learned how to soothe her. She needs comforting more than he does.
“Everything will be fine.”
***
It’s more than he's ever expected. Far more.
Thousands of articles. Tens of thousands of videos about him. About what he did. His crimes. His conviction.
And then—he finally learns who the man was who stood before him. Who caught him and brought him to his knees.
Superman.
Superman.
The name echoes through him, but it means nothing.
He whispers the name aloud—but it doesn’t help him remember. He isn’t angry at the man who captured him. Maybe he should be. But he isn't.
His mind is empty. All he has are his new memories. Nothing else.
The doctors say it’s unlikely to change. The hemorrhage was too extensive. They helped him too late. Noticed something was wrong with him too late. His entire life before waking up in the LuthorCorp command center is probably lost forever.
But Lex isn’t devastated by that. He doesn’t even remember what he’s lost. And judging by the articles—it’s better that he doesn’t.
He certainly wasn’t a good man.
***
One day he sees him again—the same handsome man with the red cape. Only now he knows the name.
Superman.
He stares and stares at him. Like a plant turning toward the sun, trying to absorb everything from that mere sight. His heart skips a beat. Then another. And another. Lex feels as though he’s suffocating.
But this isn’t the choke of being underwater. No—it’s something worse. It’s when there’s too much air, and it strangles you with its gentle yet merciless noose. Because it's too much.
For the first time in a long while, he feels alive. And he realizes he could watch this man for eternity. Let the world burn. Let the sun die out. Let the universe stop expanding and start contracting. Let anything happen. Nothing else matters. There’s nothing more important than what he sees in the air.
For the first time in many weeks, Lex understands what it means to live. To be alive.
The red cape flies off into the sunset, chasing a monster.
Red and blue—that’s all Lex sees when he closes his eyes.
His heart sings and weeps, trembling before the silhouette in the sky.