Title: Vermillion
Author: Meghan
Disclaimer: Like I really want to own Lana.
Notes: Thanks to Val
Summary: What she knows is a song he can't sing.
Do you believe that someone can be irrevocably damned?
It’s a question that he’s been asking for years. Everyone he's ever posed the question to have answered the question to the affirmative, looking at him with pity or mild acceptance like it was just the way things were when it came to his soul. That he was damned and there was no way to repent.
It was a weight that hung on his shoulders as if whatever remained of his soul recognized where it would eventually go and was slowly sinking down in anticipation. Maybe that’s why he insisted that he live on the top level of his penthouse or that his office be at the top of Luthorcorp. The higher he is, the longer it will take him to fall. He knows the logic is faulty but it gives him some measure of comfort.
Like she does.
Several years ago he saw her across 7th street, years past her college graduation and ages past when she started working at the Inquisitor. It was overcast and everywhere he looked, there were coats and umbrellas in muted colors. Chloe stood out from five hundred yards away though; blonde hair whipping in the wind and a suit in bright vermillion standing out against the gray like a beacon. He was captivated by her and she never even noticed him across the street, on that corner.
He had been surrounded suddenly by people rushing past and a man wearing a brown hat pushed rudely in front of him, blocking his view. When the man moved away, Chloe was gone, vanished in the overwhelming gray. But it’s something that Lex remembers while standing in front of the glass wall that dominates one side of his office. Her smile, her eyes that he couldn’t really see but he remembers from Smallville all those years ago. Back when someone believed in him.
But now, that seems like a myth. Like some story he’d tell someone to convince them that he was a better man than he really is. The idea that someone needed him and trusted him like Chloe did that summer would be laughed at by everyone who knows him now. Some days he thinks that summer and he's crippled by the feeling that it wasn't real, that he imagined all of it. Some mornings, he wakes up believing completely that he was always the way he is now: hard, ruthless, alone.
But the memory of being needed was long ago and far away, the idea of damnation only broken up by a memory of blonde hair and vermillion standing in a sea of gray and rain.
She is alive because he wanted her to be, needed to be. Regardless of what the man in spandex flying around the skies of Metropolis right now believes, Lex Luthor once had a heart and she knew that. Maybe today, she still believes that. If he ran into her on the street and asked her out for coffee, talked about old times, maybe he’d ask her if she believes in him still.
Maybe he would look back at her with that broad smile, full of white teeth and roll her eyes, the gesture telling him that the question was ridiculous. She would say that years ago, a much younger Lex Luthor panicked when he found out that she was in trouble and not just because he was worried that her testimony would be lost. In between long sips from her coffee cup, she would remember how he took her hand, told him that there was nothing to be worried about. And how with that reassurance, she knew that everything would be okay.
He presses his hand against the cool glass of the widow, his breath fogging it. Lex wipes it away with a slow wipe and imagines her face again as she would go on to chide him for losing touch. He would apologize and they would exchange numbers and that would make it real. Chloe was the proof that Lex was something more than what Clark, Superman, Pete, Lois, his father, the Kents, everyone believed him to be.
If he could he would paint his office, his home, his life in the same color vermillion as her suit as a private reminder that he doesn’t have to make the back room deals or develop the weapons or hate like he does. He closes his eyes and sees her smile at him, the same smile from years ago, the smile she would wear now.
He can’t make her real. He can’t make this fantasy real.
It would be simple really, to arrange a meeting and to say the things that she would need to hear in order to have her say the things he needs to hear back. But doing something like that, forcing the confession would defeat the purpose of it all. And he knows once he sees her again, talks to her, that he couldn’t stop. That he would crave her acceptance, her truth of so long ago like a drug.
He has to let this go because he doesn’t want to drag her down with him.
*End*
***
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hmy: so good but so sad, and somehow, it just rings true. damn. Great fic thought!
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