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In the dark it feels as if time had stopped. Without his powers, Clark cannot hear the ebb and flow of passing cars through lunch and rush hour. He cannot see through the layers of wall to look at the sun or find a clock. He can only see the mottled clouds behind his eyes, hear the pulse of his heartbeat as it rises with his panic and then his exhaustion.
But he can feel.
God, he can feel.
For the first time since childhood, he knows cold. The frigid concrete of the floor that sinks into the bones of his bare feet, the chill of the support beam against his back, the slick coolness from the suit, designed to be fire retardant and not for warmth, all work to leech the heat from his body.
There are so many aches to catalog. The ache of his shoulders from where they’d been wrenched behind him and tied behind the support beam, the ache of his wrists from the chafing of the ropes. The ache of his feet from standing for untold hours. The ache of his split lip, which Clark can’t stop poking with his tongue for the sheer novelty of the sensation.
But worse than all of that is the dig of the collar against the skin of his throat. The way it presses back against his Adam's apple with each swallow. They way it makes him feel like there’s a perpetual hand against his windpipe.
He didn’t realize just how much his sense of touch had been dulled by his invulnerability. Now the slightest stirring of air sends goosebumps prickling down his arms. Now the dried blood crusts and itches over his chin. Now the seam of the suit scrapes over his inner thighs.
It’s enough to drive him mad. You could learn to tune things out with his super hearing. You could control the amount of layers the x-ray vision saw through. But Clark doesn’t know how to stop feeling.
He almost misses the creak of the stairs as soft, heavy footsteps descend downward. Clark bites his tongue — sharp pain, so bright — against the urge to call out for help. He’s deep into Suicide Slums, that much he knows for sure. He’d answered a cry for help down into the basement of an abandoned home, just to walk straight into a kryptonite laced ambush.
But the figure that emerges with a bright flashlight is not the man who’d sucker punched him with a fist full of kryptonite.
It’s so much worse.
“You know, when Dawson said he had captured Superman, I didn’t believe him,” Lex drawls.
He’s dressed like a plume of smoke in all black, his coat nearly reaching the grimy floor. It makes his skin positively luminous in contrast, the flashlight making the river blue of his eyes almost glow.
“But it looks as if miracles do happen.”
To think Clark had told Bruce he didn’t need a tracker sewn into his cape. The man will never let him live it down. If Clark survives.
“Lex?” Clark rasps, throat dry and gritty like sandpaper. “You’re behind this?”
Perhaps it's naive to be so surprised. Despite knowing everything about Clark, Lex seemed satisfied with keeping their rivalry locked between himself and Superman, confined to the public eye, where he spun every one of Clark’s attacks on his labs or his businesses or his prototypes as attacks on an innocent man. He always has at least six degrees of separation between whatever shady bullshit Clark breaks up and himself so not even the Daily Planet could nail it to Luthor’s door and make it stick for long.
Not that Lex speaks to the Daily Planet during any press conference that Clark or Lois attends. Not that he has so much as looked at Clark Kent, Reporter, in the eye since Darkseid. Clark doesn’t understand how Lex can treat Superman as a well known enemy and Clark Kent as a stranger, as if the first ten years of their friendship never happened and didn’t matter.
Clark knows he should be grateful. Lex had done nothing to harm, either directly or indirectly, Lois or Chloe or his mom.
But it gives Clark a hollow, empty feeling each time Lex’s gaze skips over him in public, every time he calls Clark Superman instead of his name.
“Not directly,” Lex says, shining the light up into Clark’s eyes, making him flinch hard enough to feel the scrape of the rope against his wrists.
“It seems that you’re a gift from an admirer,” Lex continues, setting the flashlight on the ledge of the upper window, sending long shadows stretching over the floor.
He walks long, lazy circles around Clark, hands clasped behind his back as he inspects the ambusher’s handiwork. This close, Clark can smell the maddening scent of cedar and sandalwood that has always been Lex’s signature cologne since they first met.
It causes another kind of ache in his chest, but he’s used to that one. He’s felt it every day for almost a decade.
“Well, I say gift. Perhaps more like . . .a bargain. He’s asking for quite a lot in return but not as much as he could.”
Lex pauses behind Clark, his mere presence making Clark’s back muscles prickle and tense in anticipation
“He doesn’t know your worth to me.”
An unbearable hope rises up at the meaning of those words.
“As Superman or Clark Kent?”
The question spills out, unbidden and unwanted. Clark bites his bottom lip, too little too late, and hisses at the sharp pain of his cut.
Stupid. Pathetic. Lex could not have made it any more clear that Clark Kent meant nothing to him now that Superman and all his strange powers and stranger biology had arrived.
“Clark Kent?” he asks, testing it, as if he’d just now heard of it.
Lex passes back around, feet scraping to a stop in front of him. Considers Clark with a pensive tap of his finger on his lip as he rakes his gaze from the top of Clark’s head to his dirt crusted bare feet because the bastard took his boots.
His expression stays infuriatingly neutral, even in the half shadows of the flashlight. He’s gotten so good at that over the past few years. Clark remembers when every bit of anguish shone from his face like the beam of a lighthouse.
“Feeling nostalgic? It’s not the first time I’ve found you strung up wearing a necklace of Kryptonite."
He reaches out and brushes his fingers over the collar, thumbing at the stone embedded in the middle. Clark can feel the heat of him hovering over his skin. A hard swallow makes him feel that ghostly press of a hand again.
“You even have another S on your chest,” Lex murmurs, gaze dropping as he drags his fingers with agonizing slowness over Clark’s sternum to trace over the emblem. The heat of his skin follows like a trail of sparks, sinks into Clark through the thin material of the suit and this time Clark can’t stop the gasp from breaking free.
Lex’s gaze darts back up at the sound, his eyes narrowing at the collar in almost clinical fascination.
“It’s a different color, though, this stone,” he says. “What is the effect of blue Kryptonite on you? It doesn’t seem to be killing you.”
The sudden urge to tell Lex -- tell him everything -- bubbles up, fierce and undeniable: how powerless he really is right now, how much he wants to nuzzle into the heat of Lex’s body. How much he wants to hear Lex say his name, his real name, if only one last time. How he can see the glare of the sun on the windows of LexCorp tower from his desk at the Planet and how that makes the hollow ache in his chest throb sometimes.
The answer leaps up his throat and Clark has to bite down hard on his lip to keep it inside. Blood breaks free of the scab, bursting hot and metallic in his mouth, smearing over his lip.
It draws Lex’s eyes to his lip, a gaze of sudden, deepening hunger. He brings his other hand up to drag his thumb over Clark’s bottom lip. The salty sting of Lex’s skin on his own is unlike anything he’s ever felt before.
This is Lex. This is Lex touching him.
“Yet you still bleed,” Lex murmurs, pulling his thumb away to stare at the bright red smear over it.
He brings his thumb to his mouth -- and sucks.
It feels like something sucker punched the air out of Clark’s lungs.
“You taste the same as any human,” Lex says. “Are you human now, Superman?”
That’s not my name.
The thought crowds his throat with all the other stupid things he wants to say and shouldn’t.
“Or as close as you can be,” Lex amends. “These ropes should be like paper to someone like you. And yet here you are.”
He steps back around behind Clark, the scent of cedar and sandalwood stirring in the air again. Clark closes his eyes and breathes it in, breathes in a hundred memories that come with it. Games of pool. Late night talks in the loft. Coffee at the Talon. Lex’s sweat soaked shirt as he mucked stalls. Clutching his scarred, sun-burned body when he came back from the dead --
The feather light touch of Lex’s fingertips travel over the back of Clark’s hand until they tug at the ropes. Clark can feel it, the stark contrast of that gentle, fluttering touch with the rough scrape of the rope. Just as he can feel the soft puff of air against the shell of his ear as Lex leans forward.
“Caught.” he murmurs.
Clark’s had people whisper in his ear before. None have ever sent a shiver twitching through his body. None have ever caused him to turn his own head just to feel the cold tip of Lex’s nose brushing over the shell of his ear. Just to feel another shudder skitter down his spine.
His hand still tingles with the memory of that path long after Lex’s has pulled away.
Lex steps away again, taking his heat with him, and stops again in front of Clark. Suspicion has replaced the mocking curiosity in Lex’s eyes. His gaze darts over Clark’s form again, from his blood-wet lips to his cold bare feet, looking for his own trap now.
“You seem remarkably calm for being so helpless. Is that what blue kryptonite does? Make you as docile as a cow?”
“Being angry or afraid doesn’t change the fact that you can do whatever you want to me,” Clark whispers.
Lex’s eyes darken with that shark-like hunger again. He reaches out a ghostly hand and Clark’s gut clenches in anticipation. Warm finger tips land on his chin in a light grip, tilting his head up and then down. Clark doesn’t fight it, too focused on each point of contact on his skin, like little electric currents from each finger tip to the depths of Clark’s heart. Then they slide with aching slowness up the line of Clark’s jaw to crest over the shell of his ear. To land with nestled softness into his hair, hitched breaths stuttering out from his throat in their wake.
“If I didn’t know better, it would almost sound as if you want to be at my absolute mercy,” Lex says.
And then he proves it by twisting his fingers into Clark’s hair and giving it a sharp pull back. A damning moan tears from Clark’s throat.
“ . . .to be mine.”
Mine. The word sends a surge of desire so strong it makes Clark dizzy with it. If it weren’t for the ropes, for the sharp pressure of Lex’s fingers in his hair, his knees would buckle, sending him kneeling at Lex’s polished oxfords.
“Oh, Superman.” Lex says with fond condescension, the name clanging like a wrong note. “Your body betrays you.”
That’s not my name.
“Or is it this?”
Lex’s other hand rises up, gloved thumb pressing down ever so slightly on the blue stone in the collar, just enough to feel the imprint of his thumb on every swallow. With one hand still tightly fisted in his hair and the other at his throat, Clark has never felt more pinned, more trapped.
More turned on in his life.
He’s also never felt this much, period. Lex has barely touched him but every point of contact sinks deep into Clark’s bones. Every nerve of his body strains in anticipation of more. Time slows to a crawl each time Lex’s skin brushes against his own.
A pensive look crosses over Lex’s face as he strokes his thumb over the kryptonite. “Red makes you a self-serving prick. Does blue make you want?”
It would be easier, perfectly rational, to let Lex believe it’s just the kryptonite. To keep that other secret buried just as deeply as he did the first one. Lex has enough of his weaknesses as it is.
Clark is not feeling rational.
“It just strips me of my powers,” he confesses. “The rest is . . .”
Is you. He doesn’t have enough guts to say it though. But Lex’s gaze sharpens as if he heard it anyway.
“Everything feels so much,” he whispers instead.
The grip on his hair slackens, turns deceptively tender, as Lex rakes his short nails over Clark’s scalp, punching another moan from deep in Clark’s chest. The hand at his throat slides up, cradles his jaw. Lex steps back in, slotting between Clark’s legs, the heat of his body a warm column against his chest. Lips brush a fiery, delicate trail across the cool expanse of his cheek.
“Which is more of a mercy?” Lex whispers. “To deny you and walk away or touch you in all the ways I’ve obsessed over while there is nothing you can do to stop me?”
Holy fucking mother of God. If Lex walks away now Clark might very well die. His erection strains painfully against the elastic of his trunks, leaking a stain into his front. The cooling heat of his own precum is enough to make him light-headed.
Lex noses at the soft skin behind Clark’s ear, fingers tightening their grip at Clark’s responding gasp.
“Well, Superman? What should I do with you? What is the most ethical choice?”
Again, that sour note, jarring and wrong.
“That’s not my name,” Clark gasps.
Lex pulls back again, just far enough to look at him, to appraise him with that calculating stare as he pieces together yet another one of Clark’s weaknesses and how best to use it. Clark feels more exposed under it than he would if he were actually naked.
There’s a sick thrill in it, putting himself under the microscope of Lex’s mind. Giving himself over to Lex’s mercy just to see what Lex will do with it. The hope of kindness tempered with the fearful anticipation of his cruelty stirs together to make the strangest cocktail of arousal Clark has ever experienced. Coupled with the almost absent-minded stroke of Lex’s thumb over his cheekbone, Clark might explode without needing to be touched at all.
“And what should I call you, instead? Kal-El?”
The last time he heard that name from Lex was in the Fortress and the memory of it makes him flinch hard enough to hit the back of his head against the support beam.
“Lex.”
It was a question, a plea, a demand. The hard shrewdness of Lex’s gaze softens incrementally. The fingers cupping his cheek lift and curl inward. Knuckles stroke softly downward with unbearable intimacy until they brush over the pulse thudding wildly in Clark’s throat.
“Clark,” he says, almost an exhale more than a word but even Clark’s human hearing picks it up.
The sound of his name detonates, like those silent explosion scenes in movies, with soundless devastation. God, it has been literal years since he’s heard it from those lips.
Through it all, the back of Lex’s knuckles trace nonsensical paths over Clark’s cheek and throat. Clark turns his head and tries to catch that hand in a kiss, managing to brush his lips over the pad of Lex’s thumb.
“Lex,” he pleads. “Please.”
He’s not even sure what he’s begging for, what brand of mercy he even wants from Lex. Not that Lex would ever take Clark’s desires into consideration. There’s a strange relief in that, in knowing that the hard decision is in Lex’s hands instead, that he doesn’t have to choose between what is right and what is selfish. He just has to accept.
And Lex, as he always does, makes the worst and best decision. He brings both hands to cup Clark’s face and kisses him with sweet, agonizing slowness. Clark doesn’t want slow — he wants to devour and be devoured, he wants a ferocity that overwhelms his thoughts, years and years of yearning and confusion and desire pouring out like a broken dam.
But of course it's never about what Clark wants. Lex can make even the sweetest of kisses an exercise in torment, a study in selfish taking. He makes sure that Clark has time and sense to feel the slick softness of Lex’s lips against his, the syrupy ache every time they press against the split in his lip, the gentle nibble of teeth tugging at his upper lip, the hot slide of Lex’s tongue invading his mouth. It’s hypnotic, the rhythm Lex sets as he kisses Clark, a metronome that Clark can’t help but follow, grateful for this guidance as his thoughts burn to ash and smoke.
Lex’s hands start to explore, blunt nails raking down one side of Clark’s neck, swallowing the gasp that follows. Hands that glide over Clark’s chest, mapping out his ribs, his stomach, with casual possessiveness, as if he’s done this before, as if Clark always belonged to him. Warmth blooms in their wake, seeping through the fabric to melt into his skin. They tease over the red belt of the suit before dipping down. The barest tip of a finger traces over the outline of Clark’s dick.
Without kryptonite, Clark wouldn’t have registered such a light touch, but now? Now he feels every nerve awake and screaming under the path of that fingertip, the restrictive pressure of the suit against him as his cock twitches, the hot bloom of precum that soaks the fabric. All while Lex plunders his mouth with the relentless assault of his tongue, his lips, his teeth.
It’s all so much. He’s never felt want like this before, never felt so out of his mind with it. Lex could ask for the world right now and Clark would give it to him just to be touched.
His hips stutter forward of their own accord, driven by wild, instinctive need — Clark’s a helpless passenger in his own body — just for those hands to shove him back, hard, with a grip Clark feels all the way into his bones.
It’ll bruise. Lex shaped fingerprints on his skin.
A broken moan tumbles from his chest into Lex’s mouth, followed by a choked off whine as one of Lex’s hands slides over to palm over Clark’s dick. The slick material of the suit allows Lex’s grip to slide without resistance up and down the length of him as he swallows Clark’s garbled pleas. The other hand keeps its tight grip on Clark’s hip, holding him with surprising strength against the mindless writhing of Clark’s body. The ropes burn against his wrists but the pain is a flickering candle flame compared to the house fire of Lex’s mouth, his hands.
Fuck.
And just when Clark doesn’t think he can handle much more, that he’s already a broken mindless putty of need, Lex tears his mouth away from Clarks just to press sharp, sucking kisses down his neck.
Teeth dig into the delicate tendon, sending his cock throbbing in Lex’s grip, before the hot flat of Lex’s tongue soothes over it.
“God,’ Clark moans, the word stretched out like taffy, as a full body shudder wracks him.
“Not quite but close enough,” Lex whispers into his skin.
He savors Clark’s neck like his brandy, suckling on the skin until Clark’s voice hits a high pitched whimper, nibbling at the lobe of his ear, laving over his skin, tasting him. All while his hand works steady, infuriating wonders over the hard outline of Clark’s dick.
Pleasure coils tighter and tighter in his chest until Lex’s name becomes a litany, a prayer, a plea, babbling from his lips in half bitten cries or drawn out moans. Clark’s pulse becomes a shockwave that beats against his ribs, hammers in his throat under Lex’s mouth, throbs in his cock with each squeeze of Lex’s hand.
His orgasm breaks over him, breaks him, a white hot supernova that blots out every other facet of existence. Lex seals their mouths together, swallows the scream ripped from Clark’s chest, as hot spurts of come soaks the front of his suit.
It leaves him a dazed boneless mess, held up only by the ropes and the press of Lex’s body against his. He can’t stop shaking as Lex steps away, digging into his coat pocket. A knife blade glints in the glow of the flashlight before Lex steps behind Clark. He doesn’t have the capability of thought for even a flicker of worry. Lex could slit his throat and leave him to the dogs and Clark do nothing but sag against his bindings and shake and shake.
But Lex does not slit his throat, just the ropes. Without their stability, Clark collapses to the floor, the aches of his shoulders and wrists reviving with a vengeance.
He cannot stop shaking.
Lex crouches in front of him, knife still dangling in his hand, and if ever there was a time for revenge, it would be now. Clark feels as helpless and weak as a newborn calf and he probably looks it too, limbs akimbo, eyes wide and thoughtless.
He doesn’t fight, doesn’t flinch, as Lex reaches both hands around his throat and undoes the catch in the collar. It falls to his lap and Lex makes no move to take it. The blue crystal glow faintly in the dark cavern between his legs, almost hypnotic --
“Clark.”
Clark drags his eyes back up to Lex’s waiting gaze. Those black hole eyes.
“Lex?”
“That’s two secrets you’ve kept from me,” Lex says quietly.
Clark swallows, still feeling that old shame cast its shadow over him. “You know all of them now.”
“Do I?”
For a long moment Lex just stares, like he’s trying to commit to memory this pathetic tableau of weakness for future gloating.
And then he gets up and disappears, leaving the flashlight behind as the creaking stairs announce his departure.
The collar lives in his underwear drawer. He had left it on the ledge with the flashlight long enough to speed back to his apartment, change and shower, and drive back. By now it was the dead of night, Batman hours, but no one and nothing disturbed Clark as he parked in the dark, sped back down to the basement, and pocketed it.
He gives himself a lot of reasons for keeping it. It’s the perfect neutralizer the next time he goes out of his mind on Red K or some wacked spell or body possession. It’s useful if he needs to pass for human in ways he can’t on his own. It’s safest in his care more than anyone else's.
All lies.
A month passes by. An unnaturally quiet month because Lex spends it in Japan. No shady business deals from Lexcorp, no meteor mutants popping up to wreck havoc that Lex will take advantage of, no press conferences, no announcements of new projects.
It’s not the first time that Lex has spent long stretches away from Metropolis. Clark used to sigh in relief at them, though there were plenty of other assholes that filled the Lex-shaped villain void in his absence.
Now each day passes, the hollow feeling in his chest grows and grows. Clark takes showers as hot as the tank will go and barely feels it. He steps out into the arctic without the top half of his suit and doesn’t shiver. He clears the rubble of a broken bridge and doesn’t sweat, doesn’t strain.
He takes himself in hand at night, trying to remember the sensation of Lex’s teeth at his throat, and comes in dull, short bursts.
It’s unbearable.
He has never felt less human in his life.
Lex returns with little fanfare, only the signature of his heartbeat pulsing past the walls of the Planet as he steps inside Lexcorp Plaza alerting Clark to his homecoming.
Clark’s own pulse skitters like a nervous animal the rest of the afternoon. The sun creeps lower in the sky as he writes and rewrites the same lead until it's time to head home.
He skips dinner in favor of pulling out the lead-lined box that houses the collar and slips it in his pocket. Never before has he been so grateful for the early dark of winter. Clark slips into the ally behind his apartment, still dressed in his work clothes, presses tightly in the shadows before leaping up into the sky.
It takes two blinks to land on Lex’s balcony.
It takes three agonizing minutes for Lex to notice him as he walks past the kitchen.
It takes ten pulses of a thundering heartbeat for Lex to slowly cross the threshold and open the door.
“Clark.”
A question. A suspicion. A hope.
Clark pulls the collar from its box and holds it out, like an offering to a god.
“Lex.”
A question. A plea. A hope.
It takes four steps for Lex to stand close enough to take the collar and cinch it around Clark’s throat.
A dullness overcomes the world, as if someone stuff cotton in Clark’s ears. But his nerves come alive, shivering at the brush of Lex’s fingers over the nape of his neck.
“God, the things I’m going to do to you,” Lex whispers.
Clark follows him, happily deaf and blind, into the penthouse.