It's not technically that I *lied* when I said this part was ready... just that when I reread it at 11 p.m. today, I was horrified and was forced to rewrite it. But technically it's still Monday here, and so I'm in under the wire!!!

Rating: NC-17
Characters: Clark, Lex, Jonathan, Whitney, Lana, Gabe Sullivan, plus one.
Summary: The most heroic thing Clark did on a regular basis was to stitch up Taber’s right side whenever he needed it.
A/N: I will write the next scene and post within the next little while, since this part is so frelling short. Promise!

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3:1
Part 3:2
Part 3:3
Part 3:4
Part 3:5
Part 3:6
Part 3:7



They had a celebratory dinner of chow mein and spring rolls in Chloe’s executive apartment in the LuthorCorp tower.

“We’re putting up interns in the executive luxury suites?” Lex had asked, gazing in appreciation at the sleek granite floors and the hot tub in the living room.

“Well, not officially,” Chloe had said, sashaying around the space, still gleeful from their victory. “Your father had seventeen of these babies built when he remodeled the tower a few years back, but he forgot that most people would rather not literally live at work. There was a guy in accounting over in Suite 5B, but apparently he got married and moved to the suburbs. So – a little creative requisitioning, a little sweet-talking the key press manager, and tada! Luxury living at a fraction of the price.”

“A fraction being –”

Chloe had wrinkled her noise and flopped down on the leather sofa, drawing figures in the air with her index finger. “What’s ten percent of nothing?”

Lex had had to smile.

“The beauty,” she explained now, lifting a half dozen noodles on her chopsticks, “of a large, unwieldy, multi-billion-dollar corporation is that there are just so many loopholes.”

Lex was torn between laughter, disbelief, and the righteous outrage of a businessman. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “God, I couldn’t sneeze without it showing up in the security log when I was fifteen, and you’re telling me that you’ve managed to rip off free accommodation from my father’s bankroll?”

Chloe waggled her chopsticks. “And a corporate expense account. You see, you’re looking at Renee Welch from staff training and development.” She fluttered her lashes and waved at herself coyly.

“Renee – you’ve got two jobs?”

“No,” Chloe said. “Renee’s a real person. She got laid off six weeks ago, but sadly, her boss’s Action and Status form never made it to human resources. Seems some intern misplaced it. She’s been knocked off the payroll, but they forgot to close her expense account because of the lost form.”

“That’s fraud,” Lex said, somewhere between appalled and impressed.

“It’s a weird and unfortunate accounting error,” Chloe returned evenly. “Which may or may not be discovered at some point.”

Lex shook his head, biting into a spring roll. “Must be nice, to be able to work the system from the inside.”

She nodded. “I even managed to get one of the up-and-coming security techs to come by your office and debug it yesterday.” She rolled her eyes. “He was just *horrified* by how much intra-corporate espionage he found. Sent a memo to your dad and everything.” She snorted. “Lionel will have to wait at least a couple of days before sending in a team to bug you again, or it’ll contradict the very censorious memo he was forced to send in response.”

Lex carefully held his face in an impassive expression, not showing the wave of resentment that washed over him. That his father had been spying on him was not so much a shock as a disappointing reminder of how little he was trusted. “I almost wish,” Lex said, feigning detachment, “that he hated me. Fear is so much more difficult to predict.”

“Fear?” inquired Chloe, stealing a spring roll.

“He thinks I’m unstable,” Lex admitted. “He thinks I – he thinks I’m like some of the other meteor freaks. Homicidal.”

Chloe licked a spot of plum sauce from the corner of her mouth, frowning. “I honestly have to wonder about that – the psychosis, I mean. I know there are a few shining examples of what the meteors can do to a person’s mental health, but generally, people seem to cope pretty well. I know most of the undercover meteor freaks in Smallville, and the worst of them are only a little obsessive – not crazy. Like – well, take Whitney, for example –”

“Whitney Fordman?” Lex interrupted. “He’s one, too?”

Chloe nodded, but didn’t advance any details.

“I’m not so sure that he’s completely stable, in that case,” Lex told her, seriously. “He threatened me back in Smallville, told me to stay away from Lana. He stalks her, she told me so.”

“I wouldn’t call it stalking,” Chloe said, “when he can’t help but follow her around.”

Lex raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Chloe quickly explained about Lana and Whitney – they were psychically linked, thanks to Lionel’s little green rocks.

“So it’s no wonder he’s jealous,” she said. “Imagine having to watch your ex with someone else.”

Lex let himself imagine it for about two seconds, having to watch as Clark and his friend – but he forced the thought away. “Lana and I aren’t really together,” he assured Chloe hastily. “We were, but nothing serious. I mostly used her as a distraction, to keep my father’s attention away from – from what I was really doing.”

“Away from your investigations?” Chloe asked astutely. “Or away from Clark Kent?”

“Both,” Lex replied. “Your father warned me about – but you said Clark wasn’t – is it Brodie, then?”

“Brodie?” Chloe asked. “No, he’s just an ordinary little kid. Besides, Clark doesn’t let him eat locally-grown food, because of the meteor contamination. Even their water is specially filtered.”

“So why did your father warn me away?” asked Lex, puzzled.

Chloe pursed her lips. “My dad might think that Clark is one of them. But – my dad. He doesn’t have the whole picture. There’s a lot I didn’t tell him, to protect him, and the others. He doesn’t know most of the undercover mutants in Smallville, either.”

Lex thought there was more in this statement, but Chloe seemed to close down after she finished speaking, and he sensed there would be little point in pursuing the issue at the moment. He paused, then tried a different tack. “So, what you’re saying is that in order to distract my father from Clark Kent – who isn’t a meteor mutant – I used Lana Lang – who is.”

Chloe started to smile at this, but the grin froze into a worried grimace halfway through. “God, that could have been dangerous for Lana. I mean, she’s pretty good at hiding her powers, but if she’d made so much as a single slip while you were seeing her – she has no idea that LuthorCorp is linked to Constellation, none of them do. When I warned them, I kept it vague, to keep them safe. She wouldn’t have been on her guard.”

“She didn’t slip up,” Lex assured Chloe. “She’s fine. If anything, I’d be more worried about Whitney attacking her.”

“But you’ve spoken to her,” Chloe said, sighing with relief. “She’s okay.”

It wasn’t a question, but the statement forced Lex to realize that he hadn’t in fact spoken to Lana since his last night in Smallville. With a pretend-casual smile, Lex pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Lana’s number, gesturing to Chloe to be quiet for a moment. Lana was never far from her own cell phone, since it was the line from which she ran her interior design business.

“The number you have reached is out of service,” said a smooth computerized voice. “Please check your directory and try again.”