Chapter Text
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Luthors
Lana Lang……………………Bride
Alexander Luthor……………Bride’s half-brother and man of honor
Clark (stylized Clarke)......…Bride’s former lover (rumored) and second man of honor
Lionel Luthor (deceased)….Biological father to Lana and Lex; adoptive father to Clark
Laura Lang………………….Mother of the bride and Lionel’s ex-wife
Lillian Luthor (deceased).....Mother to Alexander and Lionel’s first wife
Helen Bryce…………………Mother to Ryan and Alexander’s ex-wife
Ryan Bryce-Luthor………….Son of Helen and Alexander
The Fordmans
Whitney Fordman……………….Groom
Chloe Sullivan-Fordman……….Groom’s half-sister and member of bridal party
Betty Fordman………………….Mother of the groom
Gabe Sullivan…………………..Stepfather of the groom and father to Chloe
George Fordman (deceased)...Father of the groom and former CEO of Fordman Pictures
1
The wedding uniting Hollywood’s two great families — the Luthors and the Fordmans — was to be a sunset, cliffside affair overlooking the Pacific with a modest count of two hundred thirty-five guests that were hand-selected by the bride’s public relations team and her well-connected half-brother.
In attendance would be:
All 14 of the stars that recently graced Vanity Fair’s “Young Hollywood” cover and their dates.
The bride’s fellow nominees for the Academy Award she’d won the previous year and their dates.
A handful of whoever among her deceased father’s friends were still kicking (and their dates).
A venerable who’s who of The Industry to fill the remaining seats.
And then there was:
The bride, of course, a Miss Lana Lang, who’d adopted her mother’s last name to head off claims of nepotism among those who lacked subscriptions to the trades or who were ignorant of the big names in Hollywood, which amounted to a pittance of the people who would actually pay money to watch Lana Lang in her Very Serious Films.
The groom, a Mr. Whitney Fordman, of the Fordman Pictures Fordmans, whose personality was rumored to begin and end with forecasting the box office.
The bride’s nephew, Ryan Bryce-Luthor, son of
The bride’s half-brother’s ex-wife, Helen Bryce, and
The bride’s half-brother, Alexander Luthor, who was now five years installed as the president of LMC Theaters after the death of Lionel Luthor, who’d grown the small vaudeville venue his parents started up in small-town Kansas into the titan it was today.
Also in attendance:
The groom’s step-sister, Chloe Sullivan-Fordman, who along with—
Well, what should we call him?
The orphan kid whom the bride’s father adopted because he exuded such raw, natural talent in one of the auditions he’d brought Lana to that he couldn’t bear the thought of letting that raw, natural talent suffocate in the confines of an overcrowded boarding house?
Or maybe:
The bride’s first friend, first scene partner, first kiss, first proposal, first heartbreak after she rejected said proposal because they were only seventeen, after all, and shouldn’t they both make something of themselves first?
Or, wait:
The bride’s half-brother’s arch nemesis, who seemed to receive all the love his father could never give the son whose birth had killed his first wife? Whose rugged, good looks were undoubtedly what his father had imagined for his son, instead of the alopecia worn by his firstborn? Who, despite all the love lavished on him by their father, hadn’t even been written into the will? Who, after fleeing Los Angeles for New York, had gone from being a pretty nobody consistently typecast into fated-to-be-cancelled teenage soap operas to a highly sought-after stage actor whose performances were so glowingly reviewed that every director wanted him?
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call him Clarke. That’s the spelling he likes.
Also in attendance would be the groom’s sister, Chloe Sullivan-Fordman, who, along with Clarke, had apparently decided to skip the rehearsal and—
Ah, now, here they are.
And drunk, too.
Delightful.
. . .
Alexander Luthor — known to family and you, dear reader, as Lex — clenches his jaw so tight he nearly cracks a tooth watching Clark and Chloe saunter in six sheets to the wind.
Make no mistake: he is also drunk.
But Lex’s drunkenness has ceased being something upon which others remark or really even notice since his father’s funeral five years ago. Lex at least shows up on time when under the influence of alcohol, and yes, fine, alright, sometimes something a little harder, but that was just a job requirement at this point, being able to conduct himself in a manner befitting the CEO of the world’s leading theater chain while half-obliterated by ayahuasca.
The mere sight of Clark — sorry, Clarke as he so frustratingly insists upon styling his name — sets Lex’s blood boiling as it has since the moment his father forced him to share everything he owned — well, everything his father owned and had gifted to Lex — with the boy.
Including his room.
What’s your favorite color, Clark?
What side of the room would you like, Clark?
Would you like to go shopping for some things to make the room feel a little more cozy, Clark?
Lana can help you decorate, Clark.
Lex, can you tidy up this mess for Clark?
The kid was fucking five and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in a week and yet he’d been made the arbiter of taste for Lex’s bedroom, despite the fact that they lived in a Bel-Air mansion with several guest rooms that could have easily been made a bedroom for the stray.
But apparently the stray reacted poorly to sleeping alone, according to the social worker who’d approved the adoption. Abandonment issues, apparently.
He was five, Lex wanted to say. All five-year-olds have fucking abandonment issues.
He certainly had after his father forced himself on Lex’s nanny, driving her from their home, leaving Lex to be supervised by the father who’d drunk himself into a multi-year stupor after his wife had lost her life bringing Lex into the world.
He thought, for a moment, that Lana’s mother — who’d originally been Lionel’s secretary — could be a sort of mother to him, even if in her eyes he’d never been hers. But alas, Lionel fucked an assistant before Lana turned two and her mother left them, too. Well, she didn’t go very far. Just up to Laurel Canyon, where Lana spent half the time.
Lex didn’t even bother with learning the third nanny’s name.
Could he be blamed, really, for not breaking out the violin for the poor, little orphan boy? At least he wasn’t bald as a naked mole rat. Bad break with the parents, of course. But surely they’d loved Clark, when they’d been around.
A fascinating concept: the unconditional love of one’s parent.
His father had never cut it as an actor, but oh, did he revel in the new role he’d cast himself in as kind-hearted Daddy Warbucks, who only wanted to give the poor, unfortunate orphan the same life he’d given his own spoiled children.
Surely the compassionate act had nothing to do with the fact that Clark could perform a dramatic reading of a phone book that could bring a grown man to tears.
And lest you think Lex is exaggerating on this point, his father did indeed regularly invite industry bigwigs over to enjoy scotch, cigars, and Clark dramatically reading the phonebook in such a way that he never failed to evince tears from at least one of the men.
Surely, this was a vast improvement upon the son who — as Lex overheard his father say on the phone once — would only ever be cast as a terminal child in a medical drama. Pah!
It was an improvement even upon the ethereal, angel-faced Lana, who was the darling of commercials, but hadn’t quite managed to secure any roles that would win her critical acclaim and bragging rights for her father.
Clark was too young to see it. He was too disadvantaged to be anything but grateful for the attention his father lavished on him.
The poor kid was a circus act. He was like one of those bears they made up with blush and brought to dinner parties for entertainment in the Middle Ages. He’d been offered a roof and a warm bed and a stable family unit, but aha, Clark—
There was nothing stable about the Luthor family unit, Clark.
Lex might have almost felt sorry for Clark getting the old bait and switch if the stray hadn’t forced himself on Lex from the moment his father brought him home.
Not like that, no. He was five.
More like: Lex decided he’d rather sleep in the guest room that didn’t get the memo that the eighties had ended than share a room with the stray, only to wake up to an insistent pulling at his shirt in the middle of the night, a wet-eyed, dark-haired boy sniffling bedside, barely clearing the top of the mattress.
“What is it?” Lex had grumbled, and the boy didn’t do anything but sniffle. He’d barely said two words since Lionel brought him home and it was beginning to be increasingly unbelievable that the acting prodigy his father raved about and this mute child were one and the same.
“What?” Lex barked at him and then, of course, of course the boy started to cry, so then Lex scrambled out of bed and knelt next to the boy’s small toes whispering shhh, okay, okay.
Thus, Lex Luthor, at the age of 11, was sentenced to share a bedroom with a five-year-old, which had been decorated by said five-year-old, who apparently really liked rocket ships.
A few months later, Lex sat in on one of his father’s famous salons in which he had Clark read from the phonebook and cause grown men to cry. Even Lex found himself getting a little teary-eyed at how absolutely desolate Clark looked. Sure, the kid stole his room, but Jesus, he didn’t want anyone to be that sad.
Only when Lex went after him to see if he was okay, Clark was humming in the kitchen, rifling through the cabinet for snacks, as if he were a different child entirely from the one who so convincingly performed desolation.
He was a little monster. Prodigious in emotional manipulation, more than anything else.
Poor Lana, ever the empath, even from birth, never stood a chance. She was sweet on the stray from the very first day. Too close. Far too close they were. Lex had accidentally let it slip to Lana’s mother on one occasion he was picking her up from her house just how close they were, and Lionel announced, the very next week, that he’d be taking Clark to London that summer, for formal acting training. Lana would be staying back with her mother, who lived right next door to the Fordmans.
In some ways, Lex was the reason they all stood here today.
Lana and Whitney clasping hands in front of a wooden arch draped with white chiffon and wrapped with white fairy lights; a line of Whitney’s cousins, boarding schoolmates, and fraternity brothers standing behind him; and Lex — only Lex — standing behind Lana because the other two members of her bridal party had only just shown up.
Yes.
Lana had named Clark a man of honor, just as she did Lex.
A certifiably fucking insane choice considering she and Clark’s detente was not yet old enough to eat solid food.
Lex seriously doubted Clark was honorable enough to let bygones be bygones just because Lana had thanked him in her acceptance speech last year, but his sister was too good a person to fathom the lengths to which a narcissist wronged would go to seek justice for perceived wrongdoing.
The perceived wrongdoing, in this case, being Lana refusing his proposal to become barefoot and pregnant at seven-fucking-teen.
Clark was here to ruin the wedding.
Let there be no confusion on this point.
He was here to ruin the wedding and already, he was doing a pretty bang-up job of it.
. . .
She’d loved him from the moment she heard his voice.
His hadn’t been a voice she’d ever heard at school before.
Clark was shy.
He kept to himself, and to Lana.
But the three of them had been assigned a school project and since apparently Lana’s mother and Clark didn’t get on well, Lana suggested:
“Why don’t we go to your house, Chloe?”
Lana was as familiar with the Fordman-Sullivan home as she was her own and she flaunted this fact by reaching into the cupboard to pull down glasses for them to fill with the white peach iced tea Whitney’s mother had made before Chloe could even offer them anything to drink.
Chloe watched Clark watch her, his green eyes impassive behind his thick black frames, cords popping in his forearms crossed over his chest. They were kids still, but Chloe could already see the man Clark would be.
How lucky the girl that captured his heart.
How lucky she was that his was not the only heart she’d captured.
Chloe’s brother passed through the kitchen, smiling at Lana as she poured iced tea into a glass, and Chloe could see from across the room the blush that rose to color Lana’s cheeks.
Had Lana told Clark, Chloe wondered, about the summer she’d spent here, when he’d gone to London?
Had she told him about the late nights by the pool with musicians slipping them sips of their gin and tonics?
Had she told him about Whitney stepping in to read sides with Lana to prepare her for her auditions?
Had she told Clark about Whitney teaching her to waltz, a raspy-voiced Marilyn Monroe singing “I wanna be loved by you,” from the vintage record player in their den?
Lana brought Clark his glass of iced tea and he didn’t move.
“I’m not thirsty,” he told her.
She’d loved him from the moment she heard his voice. From the moment she saw the intensity of feeling rippling beneath its placid surface in the flex of his jaw.
He had the face of old movie stars. The ones like Gable and Grant and Kelly and Burton and Peck. The kind of face that made you think of champagne towers and elegant jazz and Santa Ana winds brushing your shoulders, smelling of honeysuckle.
She would have him, in whatever way she could have him.
In whatever way he was willing to have her.
If that meant letting him brush her hair behind her ear, tucking his smile away for safekeeping in the pocket of her dimple as Lana looked on with a worried line between her brows, so be it.
If that meant him grabbing at her hand when Lana was near them, and dropping it as soon as she was out of sight, so be it.
If that meant getting to slow dance with him at homecoming, but having him turn his face from her when she leaned in to kiss him.
So. Be. It.
Clark would never be hers.
But neither would Lana be his.
The intensity that Chloe wanted to drink from Clark like soda pop daunted Lana. She was always so tense with Clark. Not relaxed and smiley and bubbly the way she was with Whitney.
To be loved like that. To be needed like that.
And Lana didn’t even want it.
And then she did want it.
And then she didn’t.
And then she did.
She couldn’t make up her mind and Chloe — oh, how Chloe despised her the way only a teenage girl can despise another teenage girl.
She grew out of it eventually. The petty dislike. Truthfully, it was next to impossible to not want Lana to love you. If Clark was Grant, she was Aubrey. All doe eyes and dimpled smile and velvety, chocolate hair. She’d lean toward Chloe all oiled up in her string bikini and Chloe had to pretend like she cared about whatever blind item she was whispering when all she could focus on was the frisson of arousal puckering between her legs at the sight of the fabric dipping to reveal a hint of brown nipple on one of Lana’s small breasts. She’d have to excuse herself for the bathroom, which wasn’t a lie. In the bathroom, she’d rub herself to completion, imagining sucking Lana’s nipple between her lips.
Had Clark thought about it?
Had he gotten to slide his fingers through Lana’s lips into her slippery walls?
Her heart beat so much more rabidly for Lana than it ever had for Clark.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Yearning for the best friend who was dating the brother.
It was so fucking typical.
But alas, this was the plight of the sidekick.
Present only for comedic effect and to help guide the main towards her happy ending.
And so Chloe has.
The woman she loves is marrying her brother.
In some ways, Chloe was the reason they all stood here today. Years of minimizing her brother’s flaws and overinflating his personality to ensure that Whitney never lost her.
To ensure that she never lost her.
Like Clark had.
Of course they showed up late to the rehearsal.
Of course they drank through the morning and the early afternoon.
The woman they loved was getting married.
. . .
Clark wedges himself in behind Lex, needlessly brushing his back with his chest since there’s no one behind Lex he has to squeeze between.
“Oh, sorry,” Clark says, not sorry at all.
Lex shifts and in doing so, grinds his heel into Clark’s toes. “Oh, sorry.”
“We started half an hour ago,” the wedding planner says, her smile reminiscent of a dagger poised between two fingers. She slowly makes her way from Lana and Whitney to stand in front of Lex and Clark.
She holds a pointed, leather-gloved finger in Clark’s face and he shrinks back. “I knew you were going to be trouble.”
“He always has been,” Lex begins to say under his breath, but before he can get all the words out, the planner’s pointed finger swipes to his face.
“Did I ask you to speak?”
Now, Lex is the one to shrink back under her gaze.
“Quiet,” she says, looking between the two of them. “Both of you. All of you,” she says, for the benefit of everyone, stepping back from the two of them. “Quiet. Everyone except our lovely bride and groom here who still have some—”
“You think she’s a dom,” Clark’s whispered voice drowns out the rest of what the planner is saying.
“A what?” Lex asks, turning his head just incrementally.
“You know what I said,” Clark says.
“Quiet,” Lex says.
“I can’t imagine she can afford to wear vintage Yves Saint Laurent on a wedding planner's salary.”
Lex whips his head back to glare at Clark and is grateful, suddenly, for the tint of his sunglasses so Clark can't see his pupils widen fractionally at the sight of those thick, black lashes, those bronzed, freckled cheeks, the dusting of stubble above his full, pink upper lip. God, the kid was fucking endowed. “What the hell do you know about vintage Yves Saint Laurent?”
“Oh, come on, Lex. It’s been 20 years. I’m not that mangy stray your dad pulled off the street anymore.”
“Alexander,” Lex says, a little distracted by trying to place Clark's cologne.
No longer that mangy stray, indeed.
“What?” Clark asks him.
“Alexander. To you, I’m Alexander.”
“Hi.” The wedding planner is back in her — as Clark correctly clocked — vintage Yves Saint Laurent. A well-tailored three-button jacket and pencil skirt that tapered right to her well-moisturized knees. “Is there a problem?”
“He started it,” Lex says and he can feel Clark start his rebuttal until the planner holds up a leather-gloved hand.
“I don’t care who started it. Finish it. Or I will. And I don’t think either of you would like to see me finish it.”
The planner steps back from the two of them. “As I was saying, let’s get to the end of this first run-through, and then we’ll go from the top with our tardy friends here.”
“As I was saying, Lex,” Clark says, his breath ghosting Lex’s ear.
“Definitely a dom,” Lex finishes for him, shaking loose a tremor.
. . .
Now what, you may ask, dear reader, did Clark — sorry, Clarke — have planned?
Because surely, surely he must have had an ulterior motive in accepting Lana’s invitation to stand by her side as she married a man he’d once described as chewing gum after all the flavor’s gone out of it.
This was the girl he’d loved the whole of his life.
Ever since the day Lex up and decided, for no good reason, that he hated Clark, she’d become his everything.
His friend, his family, his receptacle for all of the feelings that grew tangled inside of him.
And oh, did Clark have a lot of feelings tangled up inside of him.
He’d only had her and he wanted her to only have him and maybe, for a little while, she did.
And then that summer came, where he went to London, and she went to her mother’s, and she never came back after that.
It was a big house they’d lived in and it became a big lonely house. Without Lana. Even without Lex, who might’ve hated him, but at least that hate was an honest, genuine thing, and not whatever cheap adoration Lional lauded on him.
A cornered animal snaps. At anyone. At everyone. Even the person approaching them with the intention to pet their fur.
Because it’s scared.
Kindness. Softness. Ease. Lana was a kind, soft creature of ease.
Put a kind, soft creature of ease in a cage with a scared, cornered animal, and sooner or later you will have two scared, cornered animals.
He could see the kind, soft creature shrink back under the intensity of his gaze, of his want, of his desire to possess her, to keep her from everyone else. He could see it and he couldn’t help it, he couldn’t dial it back, because he was scared, and a scared, cornered animal acts on instinct alone.
A ring. A ring was binding. It would bind her to him.
She went as far as sliding it on her finger, smiling tearfully at the burnished silver with the turquoise stone he scrounged up at a consignment shop.
And then came the I can’t, Clark.
She started to slide the ring off her finger but Clark interrupted her before she could finish, pulling it roughly across her knuckles, ignoring the small yelp that came from her, ignoring the Clark, wait that accompanied her hands clawing into his arm, trying to stop him from hurling the ring out to sea.
Had she thought he ran to be cruel?
To show her what she’d be missing? To show her what she could have had?
He ran because he was ashamed.
He was ashamed of reducing the kind, soft creature of ease into a crying, shaking, curled-up creature that fell in a pile at his feet.
I know what you really are.
It’s what Lex had said in the middle of the night, a few months after he’d been adopted.
Clark awoke to Lex collecting his things and readying himself to leave their room.
You have everyone else fooled, Lex said. But not me. I know what you really are.
He was five-years-old. He wasn’t really much beyond that. But Lex looked at him like he was a threat.
Lex was right, he’d thought, sitting in a plastic chair at the bus station, waiting for his ride to New York. Whatever he’d seen in Clark all the way back then, whatever made him look at Clark like he was a threat—
He was right.
In New York, he’d remake himself. He did remake himself. He refused the Luthor name, shaved his head, served pancakes and coffee to help scrape by on rent, performed in experimental plays attended by five people at most until one of those five people turned out to be a director looking to cast a no-name in his avante-garde production of The Tempest, and the entire town was soon fighting for a chance to see Clarke’s Caliban.
He’d left his cell phone back in Los Angeles along with anything else that tied him to his life there, so no one called him when Lionel died suddenly from a heart attack. No lawyers tracked him down to attend the reading of the will.
This didn’t surprise Clark. Didn’t disappoint him.
Lionel had never really thought of him as his son.
Despite his rising star, Clark still didn’t have enough to buy a cross-country plane ticket, so he didn’t attend the funeral. That was just an excuse, of course. Truthfully, he didn’t think he could face Lex, or Lana, and definitely not the two of them, together.
He didn’t see either of them again until last year. Clarke snagged a supporting role in a small independent film that garnered critical acclaim after an aggressive guerrilla marketing campaign managed to extend its theater run; he was nominated for an Academy Award.
He’d managed to avoid Lana at the luncheons and round tables meant to drum up publicity — mainly by refusing his manager’s command that he attend them.
He’d even managed to avoid running into her on the red carpet — mainly by asking his limo to keep circling the block until he was cutting it close to the no permitted entry danger zone.
But of course, fate finds a way. It always does.
Just as Clark was crossing the lobby to enter the theater, Lana was leaving the bathroom with an assistant trailing her, adjusting her dress.
They both stopped, frozen, like two deer in the road.
“Hi,” Clark said.
“Hi,” she said back.
“Lana, we should get going,” her assistant said, behind her.
But rather than head in the direction of the ushers and the open doors to the theaters, Lana took several tiny, constricted-by-her-dress steps over to Clark and hugged him.
“Hi,” she said again, her breath warm against his neck, and this time her voice sounded thick.
Clark felt the familiar urge to keep her. To take her and run. To keep her for himself.
But rather than listen to it, rather than tighten his arms around her, he loosened them, letting his hands drag against the sharp sequins.
“I should have known this was what was taking so long.”
Clark turned to see Lex standing a few feet away from them in a tux, appraising the scene.
Lex pointed to his eyes. “Your makeup, Lana.”
Her assistant had a touch-up kit already out and at the ready, patting Lana’s under eyes dry.
Lex took a few confident, unbothered steps toward him. “Clark,” he said, inclining his head in acknowledgement. “With an e now, I hear.”
“Figured you’d sue me if I tried using the Luthor name.”
Lex smirked. “Oh, I would have had no grounds to, Clark. Legally, you are our brother. Even if you fled the coop like a thief in the night.”
“I didn’t take anything,” Clark said.
“Not that night,” Lex said.
Not any night, Clark wanted to throw back at him. It was you who took from me.
It was Lex who fled the coop like a thief in the night with his blanket, and his pillows, and the security Clark felt in his presence.
“Please, sirs and madams,” an usher said, approaching them, a bead of sweat dribbling down their temple. “Please find your seats.”
Surely, you say, surely Clarke must have had an ulterior motive in accepting Lana’s invitation to stand by her side on her wedding day.
And not as the man marrying her.
But the truth was so much less interesting than anything you might imagine.
The truth is that Clarke said yes because Lex and Lana are the only family he’s ever had.
. . .
“This has to be some kind of practical joke.”
Two hours later, after two more run-throughs, after finalizing the details of the reading he's meant to give, after collecting his key card from the main desk, after finally letting go of a deep breath and stepping into the gold-plated, art deco elevator that deposits him on the floor of his suite where he plans to unwind a little, rub one out, shower, and prepare for what will undoubtedly be an eventful rehearsal dinner, if the chaotic rehearsal was any indication of how the night would proceed, Lex opens the door to his suite to find Clark pulling his t-shirt over his head and starting on his belt buckle, the spray of a shower muted behind the bathroom door.
He yelps at Lex’s voice, his hands going to his chest, like that does a fucking thing.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s my suite,” Lex holds up the key card.
“It’s my suite,” Clark shoots back, crouching to pick up the shirt he discarded and pull it overhead.
Lex glances at the room behind him. A little dated, but that was supposed to be the charm of these old, vintage hotels.
“It must be a mistake,” Lex says. “She can’t really expect me to share a suite with you.”
“I don’t think Lana made the room assignments, Lex,” Clark says. “Maybe the planner just thought—”
“What, that the CEO of LMC Theatres didn’t deserve his own suite?”
Clark scoffs. “You don’t really talk like that now, do you?”
“It’s disrespectful,” Lex says. “To not give me my own room.”
“You have your own room,” Clark says, gesturing to the second bedroom, the door ajar.
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, Lex,” Clark says, bringing a hand down to his shoulder. “Maybe one of the 250 guests invited deserved their own suite more than you did. Think you can swallow that?”
“Keep to your side of the room.”
“Have any masking tape?”
“I left all my night stalker gear in the trunk of my car.”
“Pity,” Clark says. “I guess we’ll just have to share.”
“Just like old times,” Lex grits out.
“Don’t look too disappointed, Lex." Clark smiles and tilts his head, pursing his lips. “I promise I won’t scream for you in my sleep.”