obsessions Chapter 21/21

And here it is. The final chapter of Obsessions. I want to thank everyone who read and commented. It always means a lot. I hope I offered a few hours of entertainment.

On to the Epilogue.



Epilogue


Summer ended, as summer always ended. Too soon. Clark's time with Lex was back to being fettered.

Weekends and the occasional weekday afternoon, if he had to have his fix. Or if some unexpected complication cropped up like attempted assassination or crazed retaliatory attacks by unhinged highly questionable researchers. The majority of which had been funded by Lex's father and suddenly found themselves defunded and their projects confiscated.

And Lex had thought getting away from Smallville would reduce his number of life threatening situations. Apparently Lionel had been funding a lot of private sector research involving meteorites. A lot of highly disturbing projects, some of which Lex still hadn't tracked down the locations of, just the progress reports that Lionel had kept in his personal records.

And Lex was trying to keep the knowledge of all this less than legal research, not to mention the knowledge of just how reactive the green meteor rock was, out of the public eye. Was trying to accomplish his clean up work very quietly. He was trying to avoid government fines and sanctums, as well as government interest in Smallville, which was, when one got down to it, the epicenter of all meteor related things.

Which meant Lex was contacting a lot of these researchers on the sly, going into situations involving people that had had an awful lot of exposure to a substance that could alter mind as well as body, and it was driving Clark to distraction.

It bothered Clark to no ends that Lex tended not to tell him about these things until after the fact. Lex being concerned about Clark and research facilities - - and that was a loose term since some of those facilities were little more than garages or basements - - that were filled with some form of meteorite. A decent bodyguard or two did not always make a difference when dealing with a meteorite enhanced lunatic. Clark had started keeping an ear out for Lex. It was getting easier to hone his hearing down to the finest detail, to the sound of a particular voice, a hundred miles away. Easier to track the sounds he was focusing on like a hound dog on the track of a scent.

Of course, Clark had his own share of lunatics to deal with; the usual Smallvillian roster of trouble that seemed to find its way to his vicinity. Lana was as prone to attracting lunatics as Lex and you could always expect to have at least one deranged devotee stalking her by the end of the first week of school.

It was nice to fall into old routine. It was nice to go home some school nights and finish his chores and casually mention to his parents, that he thought he'd take a spin to the city and eat dinner with Lex and not have them - - his dad in particular - - go through the roof. He'd sort of figured out that if he was responsible about it, and straightforward with them, they were pretty willing to accept that he was old enough to know what he was doing.

It wasn't like his dad ever said Lex's name with love and affection, but Clark thought he'd come to some sort of terms with the idea that Clark wasn't suddenly going to about face and turn heterosexual, and that Lex was an inescapable fact of life.

Pete had come to a similar conclusion. Granted, Clark and Pete talked about Lex and the things Clark might possibly be doing with Lex, as little as humanly possible, but still, things were as much back to normal as they could get in Smallville.

Pete had gotten pretty good at covering for Clark when Things happened that demanded Clark's attention. Case in point: right smack dab in the middle of forth period biology lab and the mixing of chemical agents in a test beaker over a live flame, Clark's hearing cut in. Or at least the parts he allowed to reach past the surface of his awareness did. Everyday conversations and activities flew right under his radar, but when someone he was attuned to, Mom, Dad, Lana, Pete, Chloe, Lex - - most especially Lex - - exclaimed outside the normal range - - he picked it up. He had no idea how, and Lex had grilled him relentlessly on the fine tuning of the skill - - it was just something that he did and that got better the longer he did it.

The liquid in the beaker was just beginning to bubble and turn colors when he heard Lex exclaim. Well, curse was a more accurate term. A really loud, really surprised curse followed, by the dull pop pop of what sounded like gunfire.

"Pete, I gotta go - -" he handed Pete his vial, didn't give him time to open his mouth to ask why, before he took off. Likely nobody but Pete even noticed he was gone, everyone absorbed by their experiments. And if the teacher did, and he got in trouble for the absence - - so be it.

He traced the sound to Granville, one town west of Smallville. To an old abandoned warehouse, and got there just as a portion of tin, corrugated wall was blown out from the side of the building. It flattened knee high, dead weeds, and was accompanied by a billow of smoke. There were two vehicles parked near the door of the place. A battered old ford station wagon, and a shiny new black and silver SUV with a LuthorCorp parking garage sticker in the window.

Clark cursed and headed in through the ragged hole in the wall. There was a lot of empty space, most of the contents of the warehouse clustered together. What looked like a lot of piecemeal hospital equipment and patched together computer equipment. There were shelves of containers with a lot of suspicious looking goop, several of which had been overturned. There was a man in a suit under one of the overturned cabinets, out cold. And across the warehouse, the movement of people behind stacked crates, and the pop of more gunfire. There was a guy stalking the crates in an untucked shirt and dirty slacks, with a lot of metal wires that looked like they were coming right out of his head, but were, when Clark narrowed his eyes and looked closer, actually attached to little shards of green rock that had been embedded directly into his skull. His hair had been shaved in little patches to allow for the rocks. It looked like something out of a Pinhead movie. He wasn't the one shooting though. That was from the woman with the gun behind the crates, who was with Lex - - Clark confirmed it with a quick burst of x-ray vision.

She fired and the guy with the rocks in his head squinted and the bullet deflected before it got to him and embedded itself in the wall behind Lex and his bodyguard's heads. The man squinted again and the nails holding several of the crates together began to pry themselves loose from the rotting wood and fly in the direction of the people behind the crates.

Okay, enough was enough. Clark picked up an old tire and hurled it. It hit the meteor pieced man square in the back of his head, dropping him like the proverbial rock.

There wasn't movement behind the crates, and with one last wary look at the guy with the rocks to make sure he was down for the count, Clark ran that way.

The woman with the gun was down, Lex was on his knees, looking a pale and pissed, his fingers over a wound in her neck gushing blood.

"What the hell, Lex?" Clark snapped, pissed himself, because they kept having this same damned argument about Lex trying to separate Clark from meteor-related situations. Frustrating habit, since they both knew Clark was better equipped to deal with them than anyone else. But then Lex was scared for him. Lex had seen with more detail than anyone, just how vulnerable he could be when meteor rock was in the mix. Hard to hold a grudge when Lex just couldn't shake those images in his head, and was practicing concern for Clark the only way he knew how, by keeping him away from certain trouble.

"Shut up," Lex gave him a glare. He had a little bloody furrow just above his ear where likely a nail had whizzed just shy of driving through his temple. "Get her to the ER, now!"

Clark glared back, gathering up the woman, who was stout and solid under her pants suit, and spiriting her to the Granville Emergency room in less time than it took for her to draw a pair of gurgling breaths. He made sure the medical staff realized what they had on their hands before heading back to the warehouse.

Lex had moved into the ruins of the little laboratory portion of the place and was trying to lift the shelving off the other suited man. Presumably a second bodyguard. Clark recognized the woman, but the man was new.

He started just a little when Clark showed up next to him, then stepped back and let Clark do the heavy lifting.
"You know that talk we had about you walking into these sorts of situations without even a 'hey, Clark, I might run into a crazed meteorite wielding lunatic with issues about having his operation shut down, today, so heads up?' Well, this is a good example of why that seems like a really good idea."

Lex looked up at him from his crouch next to the inert bodyguard. He had his fingers on the man's neck, trying to find a pulse. Clark could have told him it was there, but Clark was little pissed off.

"I assure you," Lex said between clenched teeth. "The last time I spoke with Dr. Howe, he was meteorite free. Would you mind?"

He jerked his head towards his man on the floor.

Clark glowered, and hauled him up, careful of what, upon closer x-ray inspection, turned out to be a broken collarbone and several fractured ribs. He deposited him in the same ER as the woman.

Lex was on the phone when he got back, pacing. The man Clark had taken out - -Dr. Howe, he presumed - - was still out cold.

Lex was barking at someone to get over here and clean the place up. The hand not holding the phone to his ear was still bloody. Fresh blood. And it occurred to Clark that it wasn't from where he'd been trying to put pressure on the woman's wound. There was a tear in Lex's jacket arm. And beneath that a scoring of flesh larger than a nail would make. More bullet sized.

"He shot you?"

Lex glanced his way, then down at his arm. He drew a breath and put the phone in his jacket pocket.

"Not exactly. One of my people shot at him - - he deflected the bullet and - -" he shrugged, the ending to that story self-evident.

"God." Clark stared around the place. He'd seen too many others like it. Little pockets of research funded by Lex's father. Run by men too radical to ever participate in legitimate research. "What are you going to do about him?"

Lex shrugged. "Have the meteorite implants removed. Make sure he's powerless without them and drop him off at Belle Reeve."

LuthorCorp had subsidized a whole new wing of the state's facility for the mentally disturbed. There was a whole new staff and a whole new set of protocols for those patients that normal safety procedures just wouldn't work for.

"So your people are on the way?"

Lex shrugged, looking disgusted. "They are. This was supposed to be a non-violent meeting. He had agreed to sign the non-disclosure agreement. God, you can't trust a scientist as far as you can throw him." He glanced at Clark and amended. "As far as I could throw him."

"And you stick by your word like glue," Clark groused.

"Get over it. I never promised to give you a detailed copy of my itinerary." He waved a hand in irritation and a little blood-spattered Clark's shirt.

"God, Lex. How bad are you bleeding?" Irritation faded in the face of concern.

Lex blew out a breath, staring down at the blood dripping down the back of his hand. Whatever adrenalin had been feeding his own temper seemed to drain away. He shook his head, and Clark could almost hear the 'I'm fine', before Lex managed to utter the words.

"ER or home?" he asked before Lex could insist he was more bullet proof than he was. Lex had had a lot of bad experiences in hospitals. Bleeding to death was a serious option to consider before he'd willingly agree to walk into an ER. Clark wouldn't force it on him if didn't want to go, but one way or another he would see the wound got treated.

"Home," Lex capitulated.

Clark gathered him up and ran. Shorter run to Metropolis from Granville. It cut two or three minutes travel time from the trip, which got him to the city and Lex's penthouse in just under seven minutes. He had taken it slow, conscious of the fact that human beings didn't tolerate traveling at the speeds he did, unprotected.

He sat Lex down on the couch, not trusting him to keep his feet if he put him directly on him, after the run and the steady blood loss.

Lex sucked in a lungful of air that had probably been hard for him to draw while Clark was running and started shrugging out of his coat. Clark went for the med-kit in the kitchen. He was familiar with the location, having had occasion to break it out before when Lex refused hospital based medical attention.

The score on his upper arm wasn't deep, but it must have nicked something, because it had bled pretty badly. It was beginning to clot now that Lex wasn't moving around. Clark cleaned it, while Lex sat on the sofa with his bloody shirt in his hands, wiped it with antiseptic salve and covered it with a white gauze bandage.

Neither of them spoke while he was about it. When he smoothed the last piece of tape down, he sat back against the arm of the couch and stared at Lex.

"You realize," he said finally, when Lex was apparently too wrapped up in his own thoughts to prompt conversation. "That I'm more likely to have problems rushing into something unprepared, than I am if I know a detail or two?"

Lex's eyes flicked to him, narrowing just slightly.

"I don't want an itinerary," Clark said in exasperation. "I just want to know when you're thinking about walking into dangerous situations."

"It wasn't supposed to be dangerous," Lex said calmly. "I promise you, I wouldn't have walked into the warehouse with nothing but two people and a legal document if he'd had shards of meteorite embedded into his skull the last time we talked."

"Yeah, that did seem sort of like a dead giveaway that he wasn't operating on all cylinders," Clark said dryly.

Lex's mouth twitched.

Clark opened another alcohol swab and dabbed at the thin score over Lex's temple. Lex leaned back against the sofa, head pillowed against soft tan leather, and let him.

"It's the middle of a school day," Lex observed, eyes closed.

"I know. You made me cut out on chemistry." The temple wound had already clotted and was small enough not to require a bandage. Lex healed at a crazy rate anyway. That one would be mostly gone in maybe a day or two. The bullet gouge in his arm, maybe a week before you'd hardly be able to tell the skin had ever been marred. He slouched down next to Lex, propping his boots on the edge of the glass coffee table.

"I'm sure you're devastated." Lex rolled his head to look at him.

Clark snorted. His arm touched Lex's bare arm. Lex's skin was pale against the cream of the couch, but a shade or two darker than the white of the gauze bandage. It was a nice juxtaposition.

Clark brushed his cheek against Lex's shoulder, smooth, warm skin, lots of smooth warm skin bared for his view. Lex could get him hard just talking to him over the phone, sitting next to him in the middle of the day, Lex shirtless, in the cool privacy of Lex's apartment had him twitching in his jeans.

He twisted his head to look up and meet Lex's eyes. Lex arched a brow, just enough interest in his blue eyes that Clark felt safe sliding the arm trapped between him and Lex behind Lex's back and curling it around his side.

"Shouldn't you head back to school?" Lex leaned down and kissed him lightly, in direct contradiction to the question. Because really, if Lex wanted to encourage him to head back to Smallville High, kissing him wasn't the way to urge him in that direction.

"You can help me come up with a believable excuse for cutting out."

"I generally find," Lex slid his hand under the hem of Clark's shirt, pushing it up as his fingers skimmed Clark's belly. "The more embarrassing, the more believable."

"So I claim I had a bout of explosive diarrhea or something and had to run home to change clothes?"

Lex rolled his eyes and pushed Clark onto his back, working his shirt up as he kissed him. Clark settled happily on his back, Lex between his legs, Lex's mouth and hands making his skin tingle and his cock rock hard against his belly.

Lex was hard too, rubbing up against Clark between two layers of pants. Lex's nudity issues were pretty much gone. He didn't particularly like being the only naked body in a room, but he was okay now with getting naked and having Clark's hands all over him. Sometimes little things made him start, little triggers that didn't always make sense to Clark, and Lex would stand there for a moment, breathing hard, eyes zoned out as something maybe terrible flashed across his memory, before he snapped himself out of it. But that happened a lot less now than it had.

His erection issues had also melted away, so mutual hand jobs had become the norm. Clark hadn't pushed for anything more. A little at a time seemed the course to take. He really, really wanted that next step, though.

It was a broad couch, especially convenient for two bodies making out. Easy to roll over and take Lex with him, without toppling over the edge. Lex looked up at him, on the bottom now, and Clark dipped down to kiss the faint indignation away, before sitting up and stripping off his t-shirt, then working his way down Lex's legs.

Lex watched with interest when Clark started unbuckling his belt. He pulled his pants and underwear down to about mid-thigh, and took Lex's erection in hand as it bobbed free. It was beautiful and pink, shiny at the head. He stroked it, slow, firm and Lex shut his eyes, head rolling back on the couch.

"I'm gonna suck you," he said, because giving Lex warning when new things were initiated was simply polite.

Lex made a sound, and lifted his head, eyes wide and dark. But there was nothing in his expression that hinted disinclination at the idea.

Clark bent down and took him into his mouth, before Lex could think about it and change his mind. Shut his own eyes at the feel of Lex filling his mouth, the scent of him, the taste of him, concentrated and primal. He worked him with mouth and hands, remembering with crystal clarity the way Lex had worked him, all those months ago. He must have been doing a good job, because Lex was gasping, moaning, his hands tangled in Clark's hair, his eyes dilated and huge as he stared down, watching. Clark grinned around his mouthful, loving everything about this. The reactions he was getting, the feel of slick, silken flesh, the way Lex's body tensed and thrummed under his hands.

Lex came and Clark swallowed it all. Stayed glued to the softening flesh, licking and tasting, hands gently rolling loosening balls, fingers stroking the inside of lean thighs, until Lex was lax and breathing normally again under him.

"God," Lex whispered.

"That was awesome. Why haven't we been doing that?"

Lex laughed, eyes shut, face turned towards the back of the couch. "Because I forgot how good it could be."

Clark hadn't forgotten, he'd just been biding his time. But he figured Lex had pretty good reasons to be gun shy. It had been a year, but a year wasn't that much time considering the things Lex was trying to forget.

Lex sat up abruptly, pushed Clark backwards with a hand on his shoulder. Clark went with it, sprawling back against the far arm of the couch, hoping, praying, Lex might be considering returning the favor. He wouldn't be upset if all he got was a hand job, but God, he had wet dreams at least once a week about Lex's mouth on his dick. And from the look in Lex's eyes, the focused determination, as his long fingers unbuttoned and unzipped Clark's jeans, Clark thought - -maybe. Please God, maybe.

Clark sprang free, all flushed and glistening at the tip, and he wasn't nearly as pretty down there as Lex. But really, he could have been sporting the ugliest dick in the world, but when Lex went down on it, it felt beautiful. Everything felt beautiful with the warm, wet suction of Lex's mouth around him. He clasped both hands behind his head to keep from puncturing Lex's couch from the initial reaction of pure bliss.

Lex's shoulders were hunched, the wings of his shoulder blades stark against stretched skin, the top of his head naked and lovely, as he bent over Clark. He pulled back, just the tip in his mouth and looked up at Clark, blue eyes intent and liquid, flicking over his face, as if he were memorizing Clark's no doubt dazed expression. Something in the line of Lex's back loosened and he sucked, cheeks hollowed, lashes fluttering down as he started concentrating on the most central part of Clark's being.

It didn't take much to get Clark to come. He warned Lex of the impending eruption with a breathless gasp. Lex pulled back and jerked him the rest of the way to completion with a tight hand. Then finally, when Clark had finished, bent down and swiped his tongue across the glistening tip of Clark's dick. Then again, as if testing the flavor. He looked up with a faint smile while Clark sprawled bonelessly.

Lex moved up to lie beside him, wriggling a little to get his half mast pants up enough to be more comfortable. Clark didn't bother with his. Just lay there, blissfully happy, with Lex pressed up against him.

Lex's fingers absently trailed down the ridge of his abs. It tickled a little, and it never ceased to amaze Clark that a bullet could bounce off his skin, but the lightest touch could still make his it pimple. He was eternally grateful for it.

"After you graduate and get into MET U. I want you to move in here." Lex said in that 'this is serious, so pay attention' tone of voice he got when he was talking about important things.

Clark blinked at him, wide-eyed, breathless. "Really? To live? With you?"

"No, I was thinking of living in my office and giving you the place to yourself," Lex said sarcastically, then gave Clark a narrow eyed look and clarified. "Yes, with me."

Clark grinned. "God, Lex. That would be great. It would be more than great - - it would be - -" He couldn't even come up with words to express how the idea made him feel. Warm and tingly and just filled to overflowing with love for Lex. All his extremities sort of vibrated from sheer want of him.

"Then we can have sex. Lots and lots of sex."

"You have a one track mind," Lex observed dryly, but there was a look in his eyes that said that he was expanding on the idea inside his head.

And duh, seventeen. What did he expect? Sex was sort of like the center of his universe at the moment. And besides, he was closer now to eighteen than seventeen. And Eighteen was supposed to be that magic moment when his parents stopped considering him too naïve and young to be engaging in serious sexual activity. Right.

"You know, seventeen is really sort of an arbitrary number," he commented.

Lex lifted a brow. "Is it?"

"I mean my parents just sort of assumed how old I was when they found me and picked a birthday date. I might be a hundred, for all he we know."

Lex's mouth twitched. "This is true."

"And technically, even if we were to stick by that birthday, I'm closer to eighteen than seventeen."

"First rule of negotiations. Don't show all your cards in one hand. You should have stuck with your original line of reasoning before getting desperate and throwing in a second alternative. You were swaying me with the arbitrary number argument."

"So my lack of bargaining skills are going to keep us from having sex sex, until my arbitrary birthday in March?"

Lex's eyes glinted amusement. He took an inordinate amount of enjoyment from ruffling Clark's feathers. Clark took a similar delight in rolling him onto his back and kissing him until he was breathless.

He laughed when Clark pulled back, and leaned over him. Relaxed with Clark's weight pressing him down into the leather. Almost back to what he had been, before his life had been ripped apart. Better maybe. Stronger almost in some things. More - - and Clark hesitated at the word - - honest, than he had been. Maybe even, strangely enough, more trusting. Like surviving had tempered something in him. Like the death of his father had released him from a lifetime of always expecting the worst from people. Always expecting that knife in the back, even from friends. Especially from friends. Or maybe, if Clark were feeling a touch narcissistic, that hadn't been so much Lionel Luthor's death, as Clark's friendship.

"Tell you what," Lex said, nails scraping up Clark's ribs and around to his back, leaving little sensory trails of pleasure in their wake. "Come over this weekend when you're not cutting class and present your case. We'll see what comes of it."

Clark beamed, feeling pretty secure in his ability to argue his way into sex if Lex was willing to put the issue on the table.

Life was good.

The End