print this story!

Disclaimer: Smallville and all related elements, characters and indicia © Tollin-Robbins Productions and Warner Bros. Television, 2002. All Rights Reserved. All characters and situations—save those created by the authors for use solely on this website—are copyright Tollin-Robbins Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

Hating Clark
by Lar

He wants to, he knows this. Watching the Kents hug and share while his own skin crawls from his father's parody of affection, Lex wants to *hate* Clark. Simple enough emotion, pure and clean and easily managed. He does it often enough with himself. But he can't quite make himself slide into the red and view Clark with the same dispassion he displays in his mirror every morning.

This morning, like every other for as long as he can remember, he had knotted his tie, ran his hand over his scalp, and hated everything about himself. Tried to picture the current self with the child's crop of red curls and failed as always, he'd even forgotten the exact shade, the springiness of them under his nervous fingers. But the bitterness of what he is, freak, pawn, that's clear and sharp. Easy target, lock and load.

Lex wants to hate his father, and that's even more complex. Because he does hate him, on many levels, even on some he can't and won't ever realize. Yet there are still some ever-shrinking reserves of non-hatred at play in his psyche. There's need for approval, desire for acceptance. There's love, twisted and out of his hands but there nonetheless. If he lets himself think about it for too long, he gets a migraine of mammoth proportions that can only be cured by extremely expensive hobbies - good alcohol, bad women, pretty boys.

Pretty boys like Clark, and he's back to it again. Even as his father gives up the false front because the cameras have stopped whirring, the reporters scurrying off to find other parents, victims and potential litigious threats, even as dear old Dad straightens his jacket, smoothes his tie, steps back and says, "Nicely spun. Don't try it again." The sound of the 'copter blades is nowhere near as loud as the screaming inside of Lex's head as he stares past his father to Clark.

Clark, whose blue eyes are focused very suddenly on Lex's own. Whose mouth //god, that mouth, made for sex, made for // is turned up in one corner in the same rueful smile he's fallen into the habit of adopting around Lex. Who's disentangling himself from clutching arms of parental love and concern and heading in Lex's direction. Lex wants to hurt him, wants to see that smile turned to an 'O' of shock/pain/pleasure, wants to see what Clark looks like in any position other than hero //on his knees, on his belly, on my bed// for a change.

Wants to hate Clark, and can't get past the blade of pure and painful possessiveness that takes him every time the boy is there. Touching him, naive hands, unknowing fingers on his shoulder, Lex's eyes seeing that fuck-me mouth move as it forms words that he will replay later in his head, memory well trained to take in the data as a whole while he allows himself the luxury of indulging in the stimuli of Clark's skin burning him through the shirt. He's sure that he could take this, turn it, *spin it* and have what he wants. That face, angelic and shadowed and somehow as damned as his own, tells him so, the way Clark's body turns towards his like leaves to the sun confirms it. Not the first innocent, and not-so-innocent, to fall to the sway of the Luthor charm and leave Lex feeling the aftereffects of guilt and self loathing.

Lex wants to fall into that easy habit. Take him and bed him and leave Clark believing that it was all his own idea, simpler than anyone would ever believe, halfway done whether he's engineered it or not. Lex *wants* to fall. Another simple event to be covered over and tallied up in the morning when he knots his tie. Fuck Clark until he's tired of those eyes and that mouth and he doesn't wake up hard and bitter, jacking off in the shower with his face turned into the hard stream of water to drown his moans. And after, he could hate him, he could hate Clark for being stupid and gullible and far too easy a lay.

He wants to hate Clark. But it's far easier to continue to hate himself instead.

end