Separation
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I don’t own Smallville, hence the lack of Chlex action in the series.
Spoilers: I don’t think so.
Summary: Lex needs help.
A/N: Yes, I am aware that I have two other stories on this board which are unfinished and that my second original novel hasn’t got passed the first four chapters but the plot bunny was insistent so here it is.
Chapter One
The crisp autumn sunshine bore down on the city of Metropolis, glinting off the LuthorCorp sky scraper. It filled the penthouse apartment, a sleek luxury abode filled with thousands upon thousands of dollars of art and antiques … most of which were now strewn across the floor. Most of them damaged if not completely destroyed. In short, the apartment is in chaos.
In the centre of the warzone stood a tall man with a forbidding expression etched onto his features. His normally pristine dark slacks were wrinkled and bore signs of spilled liquid, his shirt was rumpled, the sleeves up rolled up around his forearms and his jacket long since discarded.
In an obvious attempt to reign in his fury, he took a deep breath before pursing his lips attempting to reign in his fury. It wasn’t an entirely convincing expression. Even if it had, the redness creeping up his exposed neck would have been a dead giveaway. The normally composed businessman stared the room’s other inhabitant down.
She returned his gaze, apparently unimpressed by his towering size, his impervious expression or the warning glint in his eyes. She was his heart. She was absolutely gorgeous. Her long blonde hair hung messily around her face, but it couldn’t disguise her blue/green eyes or her will of iron.
“I am not in the habit of taking no for an answer”. He gave her the look which had sent older if not wiser people than she, ones who had been hardened by years of business battles, for the hills.
“No”. The word was screamed loudly enough for the entire city to hear. If either of them had torn their gaze away from the staring match in which they were engaged, they would have seen the pigeons who had been resting on the balcony taking flight.
He was a little shocked by the vehemence of her reaction but refused to let it show. “I will repeat myself”, he spoke slowly and clearly, “one more time”, it was more than anyone else would have got. He received another “no” for his troubles, along with a cacophony of “’ hate you’s”, screamed at him as she tore out of the living-room she had destroyed towards her bedroom.
“Lillian Luthor you come back here right now”, his tone brooked no disobedience, yet disobey she did. Lex Luthor, one of the most revered and feared men in the world, was met with a mahogany door slamming in his face and a shrill proclamation that she would never forgive him, “Not ever”.
Lex followed hot on her heels, his hand on the doorknob ready to rip the door of its hinges. He would not be locked out of a room in his own home and he certainly would not be spoken to like that. She was going to come out, talk about this and then clean up the mess. Then … He froze; through the door he could hear the unmistakable sound of muffled sobs.
“Fuck”, he swore, hopefully not loudly enough for his daughter to hear. Suddenly feeling about a hundred years old, with a head which weighed more or less the same as the state of Kansas, he leant forwards. The feel of the hard wood against his forehead did little to cool him down. He could still hear her, her breath catching in her tiny body. He gripped the door knob. Pride be damned; he had to go to her. He had made her so unhappy.
He straightened, turned around, made his way to the settee, brushed aside a few of the objects now strewn over it, and sank down. He surveyed the apartment and the incredible levels of damage which his progeny had wreaked. Nothing had been spared. His eyes travelled from his broken laptop, his destroyed documents, and his ancestor’s portraits now besmirched with crayon across the toy laden floor to his expensive decanter of whiskey which she had smashed. Heaving himself up, he made his way through the obstacle course of expensive, smashed toys and family heirlooms to the kitchen.
He was faced with the shattered remnants of porcelain and the hunk of broccoli stuck to the wall, which had actually started the whole meltdown. With a suppressed growl, he flung one of the cabinets open and grabbed a bottle of scotch, ripping its top off in one quick movement. He leant back against the kitchen counter top, ignoring the sensation that something was sticking to his rumpled shirt that shouldn’t be, as he swigged directly from the bottle.
How the fuck had he ended up like this? He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. His head was throbbing and he was convinced that he could still hear the sound of his child in pain. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” He asked the deserted room. Unsurprisingly, no answer was forth coming. The broccoli which remained stubbornly affixed to his wall, seemed to be mocking him.
He had no idea what he had done wrong. That day had been planned out like a military campaign - it was to be their first day together after all. He had arrived early to pick her up, giving him time to collect his bearings and make sure that he was looking his best with a big smile and a new pink pony cuddly toy under his arm. He had not got the huge hug he had been hoping for (and expecting), in fact she had seemed shy around him at first but he had hoped and trusted that she would open up once she had settled in.
The apartment had been done up since she had last seen it, and he had ensured that her bedroom was a little princess’ dream. It must have worked as she had seemed fine, if a little subdued, and had spent the rest of the morning at the coffee table in the living room colouring in as he worked on his laptop. He had planned to take her to the park after lunch, which had been nutritious and carefully thought out, but which had also proved to be her undoing. He had only suggested that she try some of the broccoli when she had erupted.
He was sure that she had liked broccoli, but even if she hadn’t her reaction had been completely unwarranted. There could be no excuse for the way that she had destroyed his laptop, his phone or his iPad. If it hadn’t happened in front of his very eyes he would have never believed it. It had reminded him of that Gremlins movie he had once seen at Prep school, his sweet little angel transforming into a monster. What was more, a monster of surprising speed. He couldn’t believe how quickly she had sped around, destruction in her wake, somehow managing to slip right through his fingers twice.
His bedroom was the scene of the next show down. He finally cornered her there, where she was attacking his passport with a pair of scissors she had found on his desk. She must have been possessed by the devil, that was the only explanation – a devil who had given her super speed. The second that he had released her, to place the scissors out of her reach, she had taken off once again, smashing, throwing or kicking everything in her path. If getting to his most prized painting hadn’t necessitated the arduous task of climbing up onto the mantelpiece, he doubted that he could have caught her again.
Lillian’s small body had been wrenched from the fireplace and tucked under his arm as he strode back across the room before, before being plonked down in the centre of the room a safe distance from anything that could potentially hurt her. He had been seething. Not only had she been rude, disrespectful, disobedient, made it impossible for him to continue with his work, and not eaten her broccoli, she had put herself in danger. She knew better than to go near the fireplace, climb on things and go near alcohol or broken glass.
He swore again as he began to pace, remembering the complete hash that he had made of everything. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to do and the mess (literal as well as figurative) was driving him crazy. At least one of them could be easily fixed. He ordered his staff in, and told them curtly to have the place spotless within twenty minutes before heading to his own suite of rooms (next to his daughter’s).
In his safe sat several emergency laptops, phones, tablets and copies of any and all important documents. He should have got straight back to work, but he stood there staring out of the window at the city which stretched out before him. All of this he could control, but one little girl had proved to be his undoing.
With no small degree of effort, he forced himself to calm down slightly; he was in no fit state to face her as he was. He went to shower and change his clothes, removing all evidence of her disobedience from his attire. Then he checked his reflection in the mirror, he was pleased to see looked more like himself. He was, once more, the slick, ruthless businessman who was feared all over the country.
“Back into the valley of the beast”, he said, his voice deceptively calm. He had decided to be polite and calm whatever happened. He marched out of his room and over to Lillian’s, noticing as he went that his orders had been carried out and that the place was not sparkling with what could be salvaged of her toys neatly stacked, all evidence of the tantrum removed and his prized painting covered up. He tapped on the door and took the muffled, “Go away”, as an invitation to enter.
“Lillian”, he started calmly, as he closed the door after himself. “I have come to talk to you and I hoped that this time we could have a mature and sensible conversation”.
He swallowed as he got his first good look at the room. The sea of pink was just as he had left it with only one small exception, there was tiny ball underneath the bed clothes and a unicorn’s horn sticking out of the top.
“Now”, he continued prosaically, making his way over to the bed. He considered sitting down on it for a second but then decided that that seemed too intrusive, he thought about remaining standing but didn’t want to tower over her, so he dragged a nearby, unfortunately child sized chair over, and did his best to be seated on it whilst maintaining the correct air of calm and patient authority.
“You know that your behaviour out there was not acceptable”, he continued giving her the opportunity to turn to face him properly. She appeared disinclined to do so. “And”, he tried to continue but stopped again, disconcerted. He was finding this hard enough without not being able to see her face; she might not even have been listening to him for all he knew. “Come on, sit up I can’t talk to you like this”.
“Don’t care”, she sniffled into her pillow, her voice still mulish and broken. The ball in his grew so large that he couldn’t swallow around it, he could barely breath. He supposed that he should have been happy for a proof that she hadn’t been ignoring him, but her obvious pain cut him to the quick.
“Lillian”, he repeated her name, “this is not going to work. We need to be able to talk about this to get to the bottom of the matter and start to forge a relationship”, apparently the book he had read the night before had had more of an effect than he had thought.
“Don’t care, hate you. Never want to speak to you again. Never going to forgive you. Want to go home!” Her normally eloquent (for her age) speech was garbled, the words either running into each other or punctuated with hiccups but Lex understood her.
“No baby, don’t say that”, he leaped up and reached over to the corner of the bed where she was hiding, and tried to pull her into his arms but she resisted, clinging to the bed with all of her might. “Princess, baby”, he tried again but met with the same reaction and, fearing that he might actually hurt her, he placed her back on the bed.
“Okay Lillian, you are clearly still upset. I will give you some time to calm down and then we will talk and try to put this all behind us”. ‘Put the mess behind them’, he snorted, that was code for ‘Please forgive me, I’ll forget about everything you did wrong, all of the naughtiness and let you get away with anything you want if you will just stop crying. If you stop hating me too, I will buy you a real pony to boot’.
He strove to remind himself that sometimes children needed time alone and that you weren’t supposed to give in to their every demand. That was what all of the books said. He forced himself to leave the room and wait for a whole hour – staring intently at his watch, just outside her bedroom door – before re-entering, but he had no more luck the second time around.
She still refused to even look at him. He tried to remain calm and not cave. Half an hour after that he returned with oranges, thinking that she needed to at least eat something but was met with stony silence. Twenty-five minutes later, he tried with bananas with the same result. Twenty minutes later, it was apples. Fifteen minutes after that, raspberries. Both were met with the same lack of response. By the time that he got it down to one minute intervals he had given up all thoughts of discipline, remaining calm and not negotiating. He was openly begging her to eat something, anything, and trying to sneak chocolate buttons into her.
Still she refused.
He retreated and grabbed his last hope, the house phone. He punched in the number he still remembered so well and held his breath as it rang once, twice and then he got the connection. In one breath, he let go of every last vestige of pride he possessed, “Chloe, I know that this is not a good time, and that I have no right to just call you up but I need you”.
A/N: If you would like me to continue with this story, please review so that I know. Also, feedback on what you think about Lex and the potential age of the child would be much appreciated (along with anything else of course). I know her age, but as witnessed before, the kids I know seem to be a bit smarter than the average ones.
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