What Clark didn’t get, he thought as he zoomed angrily back towards Metropolis, was how his parents could be so stupidly blind when it came to Luthor. All through Clark’s adolescence, the merest misstep on Lex’s part brought with it all kinds of Kentian fury. Warnings from both his parents – gruff pessimism from his father and earnest concern from his mother – had been so effective that Clark himself had very nearly been convinced of Lex’s evil nature. If it hadn’t been for an impulsive and bizarre confession one day near the end of Clark’s high school career, Clark was certain that the détente between he and Lex would have begun much sooner.

But when Clark, mid-sophomore year, had still failed to make a similar confession to his parents regarding his newly-defined relationship with Lex, Lex had taken matters into his own hands. Clark had come to the penthouse at Lex’s invitation one night, expecting dinner and maybe after-dinner entertainment, to find his parents seated in Lex’s mammoth living room, each holding a glass of imported water and looking deeply uneasy.

“What’s going on?” Clark had asked of them.

“Lex said that you’d tell us,” Jonathan had answered, already employing the voice that implicated Clark’s doom.

And, as though Lex had planned it that way (and he probably had), the fall-out from that painful evening of revelations had turned out to be permanent. In showing unflinching courage and honesty at the same time, Lex won Jonathan’s approval for the first time. And, in showing how completely he loved Clark, Lex won Martha’s heart. Except for the part where both of Clark’s parents were annoyed with him for keeping a secret from them for so long, it had all seemed to be great. Clark and Lex were out – not in the eye of the public, of course, but to everyone who mattered – and they had Clark’s parents happily supporting them.

Clark scowled as he rounded on the brilliant city lights of the Metropolis downtown core. It had been great up until things had started going wrong with Lex. Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, Clark had at first kept his parents apprised of the small changes that seemed to be plaguing his relationship with Lex – minor fights over the way LuthorCorp’s name kept cropping up in all of Lois Lane’s investigations, and Lex’s increasing vehemence that Superman had no business butting into Clark’s personal life. And at first, Martha and Jonathan had sympathized.

But then things had gotten worse. Clark, looking back, could never say exactly when they’d started avoiding each other at home, unable to speak over dinner for fear of launching into what seemed like one long continuous argument. They kept a brave face for everyone who knew them, but Clark was happy to move out of the dorm room he’d rarely used into his own apartment when he graduated, forsaking his usual habit of staying at the penthouse almost exclusively. He had stopped telling his parents, because all they did was argue for Lex’s side, tell Clark over and over how he must be mistaken, how he should always look for the best in people and how Lex had had a difficult time since his father’s death. And Clark, who had spent so much of his youth lying to cover up Lex’s inadequacies, the little betrayals which had seemed immense at the time, but now seemed minor by comparison – he was astonished by how completely his parents had bought into this mythology of Lex, the perfect man for Clark.

Clark knew when it had fallen apart, however – the exact moment when the illusion had no longer been enough. He’d been working with Lois for just over a year, and the story was on a near-crash of an airplane at Metropolis airport. Three hundred people would have died if Superman hadn’t interfered, and Lois and Clark were trying to find out why.

The path was convoluted and the investigation took over twelve weeks, but he and Lois broke the headline at last: ‘LuthorCorp Used Public as Testing Ground for Faulty Engine Part’. Clark had watched as the technicians put the paper to bed, and then had headed straight for the penthouse.

Clark landed in a darkened street, heading for an alley where he whipped back into his reporter clothes, including the too-tight sweater. Ten steps later, he was headed towards the Planet, remembering with sick devastation, the way it had happened.

“Well?” Clark had demanded, slamming a print-out of his article down on Lex’s desk. “What are you going to do?”

Lex had picked up the article, barely glancing at the leading paragraph before a tired smirk came over his face. “I was wondering when you’d remember that I existed,” Lex had said.

“Lex! People could have *died*!” Clark had exploded, pacing around the room with barely-contained fury. “Stop acting like this is somehow about us!”

“It *is* all about us,” Lex had said smoothly, following Clark’s motions lazily. “I haven’t seen you for over two months. Do you realize that?”

“So this was – what? A ploy to get my attention?” Clark had exclaimed, stopping short and staring. Lex was actually insane. And he had just all but admitted knowledge of what his company had done.

Lex had smoothed a hand down over the front page of the article, watching his fingers trace the words, seemingly weighing his words before he doled them out. “I thought for sure you’d come here in uniform, when you came back,” he had spoken at last, looking up at Clark with a fierce intensity that belied his casual tone. “To take me away. Because I’m a bad man.”

It was like a slap in the face. Clark remembered actually lifting his palm up to touch his cheek, unable to understand that the blow had been entirely verbal. “You –” he had begun, watching Lex to see the tiniest flicker of remorse or fear. There was none.

And he’d gone straight to his parents’ farm, scarcely able to keep to a straight path in the air, so dizzy he felt, so disoriented. And when he’d told them, told them what Lex had done, what he’d done to those people, repeated the conversation word for word so that they could understand what he felt…

“Has it really been two months since you saw him?” Martha had asked, the first to speak, following Clark’s prowling and brightly-clad presence just as Lex had done.

“Why didn’t you tell us things had gotten this bad between you?” Clark’s father had asked, accusingly.

The crazy part, Clark remembered as he pushed open the door to the newsroom, was that they had blamed *Clark*. Even as they willfully admitted that Lex had done wrong, they insisted that Clark was the one who had caused everything to go awry in the first place.

“You’re his compass,” Martha had said. “How many times has he said that? And you – you weren’t there for him, Clark!”

“I think,” Jonathan had added, “that if you spend enough time looking for the evil in people, they’ll conjure some up, just to satisfy you.”

It had been a double betrayal, unexpected and brutal. It had been some time before Clark and his parents had established their uneasy truce of silence. The Kents seemed to think that Clark was being obstinate and even cruel. Clark had finally forgiven them for thinking so, and moved forward with his war on Luthor in one life and made a huge effort to look like he was moving on in the other.

Clark blinked himself back to the present, realizing that he’d been glaring at his desk for at least a minute.

His desk, which was normally neat and tidy compared with the overwhelming disarray of Lois’s desk just opposite, but which now was completely obscured by a ridiculously huge bouquet of white and purple flowers.

It could only be from one person.

Lois blasted past Clark as he reached for the card, hand shaking with some combination of anger and nostalgia. “Did you get my message?” Lois asked, shuffling through the papers on her desk and completely ignoring Clark’s bouquet of flowers.

“Yeah,” Clark replied distantly, fumbling with the envelope, shredding it with clumsiness.

“And?”

“And you’re going to kick my app,” Clark said. “Also, Lucas had kryptonite at his place.” The card was very small but it felt strangely bulky, like something else was inside. As Clark pulled the card free of the wreckage of the envelope, something metallic pinged to the floor.

“He was going after Superman,” Lois said. “And get this – Luthor bailed him out!”

The card read, simply, Midnight, top of LC Tower. – LL. Clark caught himself touching the familiar script, then forced his attention back to Lois. “He bailed him out?”

“I think this is the beginning of Luthor returning to his old supervillain ways,” Lois said confidently. “I was right! I knew there was something weird about the way he pulled that Scrooge act.”

Actually, Clark thought, turning the card in his fingers to see the purple logo on the back, it was Clark who had been convinced that Lex was just playing a part. He’d been the one who’d pushed Lois to check up on Lex, on his every move. Clark was used to Lois taking credit for his ideas, so it wasn’t that he was surprised by her sudden acquisition of the glory that must accompany any such story – it was that he couldn’t quite understand why he’d been so desperate to prove himself right. Because now, granted the first seemingly solid proof that Lex was back on his old path, Clark’s first impulse was not to smile because he’d been right all along.

Clark instead felt like crying.

To distract himself, he scanned the floor for the metal object that had fallen out of the card. He was expecting some sort of key, a typical Luthorian gesture of granting access to a forbidden thing when really a trap was being laid. But the object, when Clark located it, wasn’t key-shaped.

He knelt down and picked it up, turning it over in his palm to face upwards. It was a silver locket, heart-shaped, delicate and perfect, with a hinge on the left side. Clark had never seen it before in his life, but he knew instinctively that this was a genuine Lillian Luthor artifact.

“We have to track him down – Lucas, I mean – and figure out what his next move will be. I’ll bet anything that they’re setting some sort of trap for Superman, that this is just one giant play for power,” Lois was ranting, invisible behind the wall of flowers and paper above Clark’s head.

He popped the locket open with one thumb, breathlessly cautious lest he should accidentally damage this precious thing.

Inside, a tiny scroll of paper, a long-dead way in which Lex had once sent love-notes to Clark – microscopic printing which only Clark’s eyes could make out without the aid of a lens. It was further encoded in Kryptonian, and it read, together they will be the balance between good and evil.

Clark’s throat closed. Once, over a decade ago, he and Lex had decided that those words could hold a different meaning than the bleak and endless battle they seemed to evoke.

“Like this,” Lex had said, tracing a circular symbol onto Clark’s naked stomach. “Yin and yang. They cannot exist apart, and each grants something of its nature to the other.”

“Without darkness,” Clark had extrapolated, “light would have no meaning.”

“It’s more than that,” Lex had said, clambering up over Clark’s hips to straddle his body and lean in for a kiss. “It’s that we have to be each other’s balancing points. If we lose this –” and Clark had laughed at the very idea – “If we *do*,” Lex had persisted, “then we lose the thing that makes us whole.” Then, with a dizzying dip of ginger lashes, Lex had said, “You make me a good man.”

Clark had felt something burst into glorious laughter deep inside of him as Lex spoke the words, and he had turned Lex onto his back and dipped down to kiss his chest, whispering, “You keep me human.”

“Clark?” Lois said, and true to her earlier promise, Clark felt the pointy tip of a Jimmy Choo jamming into his rear end. “Are you with me?”

Clark snapped the locket shut and stood up abruptly, turning to face Lois. “I can’t,” he said, unapologetic. “I have to go – I’m meeting a source.”

“A source on this story?” Lois asked eagerly. “Excellent, I’ll bring the tape recorder.”

“No, I promised I’d go alone,” Clark improvised quickly. He wasn’t at all certain that he wasn’t simply walking into Lex and Lucas’s trap, but he couldn’t bear the thought of Lex invoking that long-ago moment for such a purpose.

“So I’ll *hide*,” Lois said, rolling her eyes. “Come on, Smallville, let’s go.”

“No.” Clark didn’t mean to say it as sharply as he did, but the word slipped through his lips with surprising vehemence.

Lois blinked at him, shocked. “Okay,” she said, obviously hurt. “Okay, have it your way. I’ll go after Lucas, you go meet your source. But you’d better have something for me when I get back. I’m tired of being the only one devoting any time to this partnership.”

“You know,” Clark snapped, “that’s bullshit.”

“Is it? Where were you all day?” Lois demanded, angrily driving one arm into her coat sleeve.

“Why does it matter?” Clark exploded, uncertain why he was taking this so personally. “Can’t you just trust that, whatever I’m doing, it’s important? I can’t just – drop everything the second you think you might need to see my face. You can’t depend on me to be there for you, help you with all the decisions, make sure that you’re doing everything right all the time!”

“Who the *fuck* are you yelling at, Smallville?” Lois exclaimed, furious and baffled. “Because it sure as hell isn’t me! Since when do I *depend* on you for anything other than having the most excruciatingly awful fashion sense in the Western hemisphere?”

That pulled Clark up short, and he realized that he’d been holding that particular sentiment carefully in check for years. “I’m sorry,” Clark said, embarrassed and yet still trembling with anger. “I – I’m sorry.”

Lois threw her purse over her shoulder, tossed Clark a cold glare, and left the newsroom at a quick pace.

Clark had to remind himself not to crush the locket into a little ball, so tightly were his fists clenched. He wasn’t ready to meet Lex like this. It could only devolve into another shouting match.

It was odd, though, the things he’d shouted at Lois. Because that was what it came down to, with Lex. Clark felt responsible – as though Lex were Clark’s wayward child and every person he injured was a person Clark had failed to save. Lex had called Clark his compass, and Clark – he had never quite felt up to the task. He should have admitted it long before now, but Clark had failed Lex, and that was what was so spectacularly galling about the whole situation. Clark, who by night was the conscience of an entire world, by day couldn’t handle the job for a single man. But Clark had taken Lex anyway, taken him with all his flaws and his trust, because Clark was selfish and he’d wanted Lex for himself, because of the way Lex made him feel.

Beloved.

Unique.

Human.

But for all their talk of epic friendships and legendary balances, Clark and Lex had proven themselves unworthy of either epithet. Lex was only a mortal man who’d gladly foisted the responsibility for his ethics off on his superhuman boyfriend. And Clark was only a lonely and secretly misanthropic hero who had depended solely on Lex – at first, to give him something to fight for, and then, later, something to fight against.

Clark opened his fist to look at the locket again, feeling a tight and uneasy smile curl over his lips.

Midnight.

***

Clark dithered a bit about what to wear, which would have felt amazingly girly except that Lex’s long-ago comment about Superman coming to take him away was fresh in Clark’s mind. If he went as Superman, he was going as Naman, and he would have that disguise to keep his mind clearer, his emotions at bay.

Going as Clark Kent was much more dangerous, but it was also more likely to lay Lex open, make him more honest. Lex had never been able to lie to Clark as easily as he’d lied to Superman over the years.

Then there was the issue of Clark’s pants, and the way that none of them would quite fasten over his stomach. When Clark pushed at his belly in frustration, thinking that fat should be more compressible, he discovered that he wasn’t actually battling cellulite. Instead, the slight convex shape of his abdomen seemed to be due to a small but hard muscular mass just under Clark’s navel. He could feel it, like a large orange or a small grapefruit, distending his skin.

Did Kryptonians get cancer? Clark flattened his palm over his belly and pushed, disturbed by the intractability of the mass. But a glance at the clock showed that it was already ten to midnight, and Clark pushed aside his fears once again.

He would have to wear track pants or leave his top button undone.

***

In the end, Clark settled for an old and worn-in pair of jeans, soft around the waistband and secured with a doubled up elastic band which was neatly concealed by the tail of a too-long t-shirt from college. He walked to LuthorCorp Tower and then, casually leaning up against one of the side walls of the enormous building, bent his legs and make a rapid upward leap.

Lex was waiting for him, of course, pretend-casual even without the slightest wisp of a reason to be on the roof of his building.

“You took out the kryptonite,” Clark observed, feeling his feet hit the asphalt roof without the usual stumbling landing.

“Actually, it’s just shielded,” Lex answered, looking up from his contemplation of his feet. “Easier to run a thin layer of lead through the walls than to excavate the meteor rock.”

“More expensive,” Clark countered as the wind whipped up and buffeted his body. “And, I suppose, more easily reversed.”

Lex didn’t blink. “Both are true.” He took his hands out of his pockets and stepped closer, narrowing the distance between them to about fifteen feet. “But it seems like you don’t need a meteor rock to make you sick these days.”

Clark felt a blush rise like a heavy stain on his cheeks, and blamed it on the whipping wind. “It’s a situation. The AI is looking into it.”

If Lex knew it was a lie, he didn’t let it show. He tilted his chin in some slight acquiescence and took another few steps. “Earlier, you asked me about Lucas, and I refused to answer.”

Clark said nothing in response. Two more steps from Lex, and now they were less than ten feet apart.

“I should have answered,” Lex said, taking Clark’s silence as a cue to continue. “What he was planning concerns you, and you have every right to know about it. My reluctance to see the story in the press isn’t an adequate reason to hold back vital information.”

“Lucas knows. Maybe not who I am, but maybe enough to guess,” Clark supplied. “Enough to hurt me if he wanted to.”

“Yes,” Lex agreed simply. “And he wanted to.”

“Wanted?” Clark repeated. “Past tense? Have you lowered yourself to fratricide? Or is he just conveniently out of contact again?”

For the first time, Lex’s eyes flashed a warning at Clark, but his voice when he spoke was void of any antipathy. “I bought him off. I’ll keep him out of jail any way I can, and he disappears. I don’t care where, as long as your secrets stay secrets.”

“My secrets? Seems like you thought they were yours to give away,” Clark rejoined. With every step Lex took towards him, Clark was finding it more and more difficult to rein in the old instincts, to avoid anger and accusation. Lex was a bare four feet away by now.

Lex swallowed and his hands went back into his pockets. “It won’t help, but Lucas wasn’t granted that information on my orders. The fact remains that he should never have had access, I know. But that was before – before the investigation. The leak has been stopped up and everything I had on you has been expunged from the corporate database.”

Three feet. Clark’s breath was caught somewhere under his diaphragm, and he caught tantalizing drifts of Lex’s scent on the wind with every shallow breath.

“I still have my own materials, of course. Things you gave me, before,” Lex said.

“Samples?” Clark asked, suspicious and increasingly defensive. Two feet.

“Print-outs.”

Lex had been fascinated with the AI, and Clark had once ordered it to print out a comprehensive summary of Krypton, its people and its culture, as a birthday gift to Lex. Ten days and a small plane-load of documents later, Lex had been gifted with an enormous wealth of Kryptonian-coded knowledge. He’d started working through the translation that very night, lying naked and grinning amidst a snowdrift of papers. Clark had tenderly placed a single title sheet that read, ‘Sexuality’ over Lex’s bare ass when Lex had finally fallen asleep.

Clark had forgotten all about it until this moment, and he flushed with anger at himself that he should have left such a valuable and dangerous weapon in the hands of his nemesis.

“I’m not mentioning it to taunt you, Clark,” Lex said, reading Clark’s tortured expression far too easily. “I bring it up because I’m probably the world’s only human expert on Kryptonian physiology. I know for a fact that I know far more than you do about your own body.”

Clark suddenly wondered why Lex had stopped where he had, stalled just within arm’s reach, but frustratingly far away. “You know my body,” Clark echoed, but without the clinical detachment Lex had managed.

“I’ve made it a point of study only recently, however,” Lex said, disregarding Clark’s sudden shift in body language. “Since the charity function.” He leveled a gaze at Clark, forcing Clark’s attention away from the open collar of Lex’s shirt. “Since you became ill.”

It was much easier to blink past the sudden haze of attraction, provided with this stimulation. “You – knew?” Clark asked, torn between annoyance and a trifling amount of pleasure.

Lex ignored the question. “Your sleep patterns went to hell, your food intake doubled, you’ve been short-tempered and impossible at work, you’ve barely seen your parents, and today wasn’t the first day you were sick to your stomach, was it?”

“You knew,” Clark repeated, not a question this time. Lex had always been amazing at straddling the border between eerily compulsive obsession and endearing concern, but Clark had had no idea that the addiction had continued past the end of their fractured relationship. He was equal parts horrified and touched.

“That’s why I wanted to meet you tonight,” Lex said, still matter-of-fact, still stubbornly two feet away.

“That’s why you caught Lucas so quickly,” Clark breathed in return. “Because you were tracking me, not him.”

“I was tracking both of you,” Lex corrected neatly. “I knew he was planning something, and as soon as your path converged with his, my team moved. Happily, it turned out to be an unlucky coincidence for Lucas.”

“You care that much?” Clark asked. “That he might hurt me?”

Lex’s eyes skidded off to the left for the first time, breaking his intent gaze. “I cared. But – Clark, do you realize that you’re carrying my child?”

Clark opened his mouth, sure that he was about to hurtle an insult to Lex’s hard-earned sanity or maybe just erupt into laughter, but instead found himself standing with his mouth open and one palm tugging up his t-shirt to show the elastic band underneath. Clark looked down, disconcerted to see that the bump was visible from this angle, and said, simply, “Yeah. I kind of figured.”

Clark looked up again to see Lex’s reaction and found that Lex had finally closed in another foot, his hand outstretched, and Clark might have been a forward-thinking 21st-century kind of homosexual man, but if Lex so much as laid a finger on Clark’s pregnant belly, Clark would break his hand off at the wrist.

But Lex’s hand wasn’t headed for Clark’s stomach – it was grasping at his upper arm, and Clark couldn’t understand why exactly Lex’s entire body was suddenly getting smaller and sort of dark-splotchy until he hit the ground.

When Clark opened his eyes again, he half-expected to be in some bright-white lab, surrounded by technicians in coats with purple Ls on them, but apparently his fainting spell hadn’t lasted that long. In fact, Lex was still in the process of kneeling down beside Clark with an alarmed look on his face.

“When’s the last time you ate anything?” Lex asked, frowning.

Clark tried to sit up but sagged back as the black splotches invaded his vision once more. “Don’t be stupid,” he said irritably. “I don’t have *low blood sugar*. I’m a fucking invulnerable alien!”

“Right,” Lex said, but not in a tone of voice which was agreeing with Clark, or even humoring him. No, it was a tone of utter dismissal, because Lex had apparently already decided on a course of action. “Can you stand?”

“I can *fly*!” Clark shouted, but when he went to prove it, he ended up slinging his arms around Lex’s neck to keep from falling back on his ass. “Did you deshield your kryptonite?” Clark demanded, too irritated to properly appreciate the close-up view of Lex’s blue eyes.

“No, you arrogant ass, you’re starving my only shot at having an heir,” Lex sighed impatiently, lowering Clark back to the ground and untangling himself from Clark’s arms. “Stay here. I’ll go and get something for you to eat.”

“I’m fine,” Clark insisted, but Lex was already gone and the asphalt was actually pretty comfortable.

Pregnant. Fuck. Lois was going to *love* this.

No, Lois wasn’t going to know about this. No one was, except maybe his parents and Lex. Though how Clark was going to explain suddenly having a – but Clark couldn’t think that far ahead. He could barely think past the part where he was *pregnant* with Lex’s *spawn* and for *fuck’s sake*, this was actually way worse than ejaculating at muzzle velocity. It was worse than burning the training wheels off his bike, or running to Mexico, or having three testicles. It was worse than anything else Clark had ever faced.

Except maybe the day that he’d lost Lex. That had been pretty bad.

And where was Lex, anyway? He seemed to be taking a long time getting back, and maybe Clark *was* a little hungry, now he thought about it, because suddenly he was picturing all the things he’d like to be eating at the moment and Lex was taking *too damn long* and Clark was going to curl up and die of starvation here on the roof.

“I found some Certs,” Lex announced breathlessly.

“*Certs*?” Clark echoed, certain that he was now hallucinating, because he’d just been mentally eating his way through an enormous steak with a side of mashed potatoes and, for some reason, butterscotch pudding, and Lex was offering him fricking *breath mints*? “You were gone for three hours and all you could find was *Certs*?”

“I was gone for two minutes and I don’t keep food in my office,” Lex replied, a little archly.

“You are a bazillionaire!” Clark shouted. “Have someone make food!”

“I didn’t want anyone to know you’re on the roof when there’s no plausible explanation for how you got here,” Lex said, all too reasonably. “Have a mint and when you’re acting less like Godzilla, we’ll go and grab something at a diner.”

Clark scowled, but took the roll of mints and shot them all into his mouth, one after another, just because that would bug Lex. Still, Lex might have had a valid thought in that giant bald head of his, because moments after the first mint hit his stomach, some of the sparkly fog that seemed to have surrounded Clark’s brain began to drift away, and by the time the package was empty, Clark was able to sit up without clinging to Lex like the heroine of a Harlequin romance.

“You can’t do that,” Lex said, reaching out a steadying hand as Clark clambered to his feet. Clark batted the hand away. “You have to eat regularly. You can get energy from the sun, but the fetus needs sustenance in the form of nutrients, specific amino acids and fatty acids to make nucleic bases.”

Clark clenched his jaw to keep several of the stronger swear words inside his head, then turned to face Lex. “You don’t get to do this,” he spoke. “I need your help, I’ll ask for it.”

“You need my help,” Lex returned, a bit more heat seeping into his formerly cool and logical tone.

Clark was about to retort that he needed no such thing, but then he remembered that, if nothing else, Lex could help explain how this had all happened. Clark was still too far gone in a general sense of shock to think about ‘how’, but he sensed that sooner or later, the dampening effect of the surprise would end, and Clark might then regret having pushed Lex away. And, as far as tutors went, Lex was generally far less irritating than the Fortress’s AI.

“I want a burger,” Clark said, because it was still his predominant thought. “And a butterscotch milkshake. And onion rings.”

“Can you fly?” Lex asked, tone carefully matter-of-fact.

“I’ll meet you at the Vine Street café,” Clark decided, ignoring the question. “Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” Lex agreed, and headed back towards the stairwell into the building.

Clark spent the next nine and a half minutes quietly gathering his strength again before dashing off towards the Vine Street café. The really annoying part was that Lex probably knew it, too.

***

For an hour, over two mushroom burgers and three orders of onion rings (Lex sipped a cup of coffee and picked at a slice of lemon meringue pie), Clark got the standard sex education class he had apparently never been granted as a twelve-year-old back in Smallville.

“I always thought I was male,” Clark said, leaning in to look at the diagram Lex had scrawled on a napkin. “Jor-El called me his son.”

“You are a male,” Lex agreed. “On Krypton, you would have been called a man and you would have most likely been expected to marry a woman and she would have borne your children, just like humans.”

“Except for the part,” Clark said around a mouthful of onion, “where you knocked me up.”

Lex tapped his pen on the third testicle in his line diagram. “This isn’t a sperm-producing gonad, though,” he restated. “This is an ovary.”

“Undery,” Clark corrected absently, thinking of Chloe and senior biology.

Lex rolled his eyes. “It contains oocytes, okay? The things that produce ova? Eggs?”

“But I don’t – ovulate, do I?” Clark asked, feeling pained by the very idea.

“You do,” Lex said, sinking all Clark’s hopes. “But think of this as an emergency back-up system in your species. Your body’s resources are normally dedicated to all the functions of a normal male animal – sperm production, testosterone production, facial hair, erections, etc.”

Clark nodded, trying not to blush at Lex’s bluntness.

“But – and this is pure theory, you understand, Kryptonian evolutionary theory – at some point, natural selection began selecting for mammals who had developed this secondary gonadic function. Say there’s some natural catastrophe, and a population of brothodniks – that’s a kind of antelope thing – was decimated to the point that there were only three females left. Well, that might be the end of the brothodniks, except for this function. See, all Kryptonian mammals are recessively hermaphroditic – all have a secondary gonad of the opposing sexual function which can, if necessary, produce gametes compatible with another mammal of the same sex.”

Clark swallowed a large gulp of butterscotch milkshake, pretending that he’d understood any of what Lex had said.

Lex must have sensed Clark’s helplessness, however, because he restated his explanation in simpler terms. “Clark, on Krypton, all boys could have babies.”

“So – why don’t they? All have babies?” Clark asked.

“From what I understand, the function was considered culturally vestigial, if not biologically so. It happened, rarely, but for the most part, Kryptonians bred like humans.”

“And how –” Clark began, then stopped for another onion ring.

“Well, in most Kryptonians, the secondary gamete isn’t properly stimulated during the pubescent phase of development, and if it’s not stimulated, the function is lost.” Lex seemed to be examining his pie more closely, which seemed like a bad sign coming from a man who had never, in Clark’s knowledge, been embarrassed by the topic of sex.

“How does it get stimulated?” Clark asked, darkly. If this came down to Lex’s fingers in Clark’s ass one day when he was eighteen, Jonathan and Martha would probably spontaneously die of shock.

Lex tilted his head in a quick gesture of dismissiveness. “Well, you have to understand, Clark, that had you been raised in Kryptonian society, you would never have –”

“Lex!” Clark exclaimed, impatient.

“You played with your balls,” Lex blurted. “You were probably about fourteen or fifteen, and you played with your balls and that’s all it took.”

Glad he hadn’t had any milkshake in his mouth at the time of this revelation, Clark snorted. “Oh, god, it didn’t make me *gay*, it made me a *woman*,” he giggled, feeling more than a little unhinged.

“On Krypton, there were strict religious practices proscribing any sort of contact with the testicles for boys under the age of majority,” Lex continued, more calmly, “and as for the girls –”

Clark snorted again, picturing himself walking around with some sort of tiny chastity belt for boys.

“—the stimulation process is much more complex and involves exposure to certain pheromones, so –”

“It’s okay,” Clark assured Lex, freeing him of his compulsive need to overexplain. “Just – please tell me the baby isn’t coming out my ass,” he grinned, momentarily touching Lex’s hand in reassurance.

Lex went several shades paler and little lines appeared on either side of his mouth. “Actually, the process of conception is interesting,” he said, quickly.

“Lex…” Clark repeated, more urgently, his grin fading.

“Considering that we’ve only rarely had unprotected anal sex, and considering the general lack of contemporary knowledge due to the rarity of the sample population on Krypton, I’m tempted to guess that manual stimulation of the ovary during anal intercourse is the thing that triggers ovulation. I mean, I’m projecting here, but just based on the fact that you always come so hard when I – when I *did* that, I think that may be how we wound up in this situation, so to speak, just a random accident and yet I’m surprised that it didn’t happen years ago. I mean, we were never *shy* about that part of your sexual anatomy, right? So I figure –”

“Lex,” Clark said, more loudly. “Out of my *ass*?” This last drew the attention of the few patrons in the café, but Clark was beyond caring.

“Well, the mammalian male uterus on Krypton is actually just a sort of annex off of the transverse colon, and the birth canal is capable of tremendous muscular dilation in the throes of labor, so –”

The rest drifted into meaningless sound as Clark lowered his forehead to rest against the cool diner table.

The shock was returning anew.

***

When Clark’s alarm went off the next morning, he’d only had about half an hour of sleep. He’d gotten home late after spending another hour in the diner with Lex, alternately declaring that he wanted to remain completely ignorant of what was going to happen and demanding that Lex *explain* yet again. Even after returning home – his parting with Lex flooded with so much emotional ambiguity that Clark still had no idea if they were fighting again – Clark had been unable to sleep, consumed with recurring waves of disbelief and nervous exploration of his changing body.

Lex had said eleven months, but that, he had explained, was the gestational term for a pure-blooded Kryptonian. With a half-human fetus, the term could be shorter.

“Or,” Lex had said, all too casually, “the fetus could prove to be non-viable. The genetic equation might not add up. You could still abort.”

And Clark had stayed awake at least half an hour longer because of that, loathing himself for the quick surge of hope and joy which had arisen at Lex’s words.

Now, however, Clark was listening to the squawking of his alarm clock and clinging to his mattress, wondering how exactly he’d never noticed that mornings made him want to vomit profusely.

He carefully rolled onto his back and tugged at his flannel pajamas to study the lump there. It was some consolation, however strange, to know that his body was designed for this, even if it was only as an emergency back-up system. It made Clark less hesitant to feel for himself, trace the surprisingly firm outlines of what Lex called the colo-uterine annex. Letting his hand move further down, as he had done the night before last, Clark gently fingered his testicles, one, two, and three, trying to determine which was the aberrant one, but he could discern no obvious difference. However, he couldn’t deny that the touch of his fingers didn’t make him as aroused as they usually did, which all went to support Lex’s theory of ovulation being the reason this could make Clark’s eyes roll back in his head. Since he wasn’t going to ovulate, Clark supposed, the pleasurable sensation was gone, at least until –

Again, Clark couldn’t think that far ahead. Instead, he moved his hand up to his semi-erect cock and gave it a welcoming stroke. Still a guy, Clark assured himself, grunting as he got harder and his hips tilted into the welcome warmth of his closed fist. Only guys can want to hurl and still masturbate.

Clark closed his eyes and let his mind wander, habitually picking over fond memories of things he and Lex had once done, not feeling as self-antagonistic as usual when his thoughts drifted from memory to fantasy. What would he do, if he had Lex’s naked body under him right now? Clark would map all the changes time had wrought with his fingers and his mouth, and he’d make Lex stay perfectly still and submissive until Clark was certain he’d found every little familiar place and every place that had changed his absence. Then, and only then, would Clark let Lex use his hands too, and Clark would get on his knees and let Lex fuck him from behind, because that was Lex’s favorite. He loved the little noises Lex would make when he got really close, the way his thrusts stuttered and grew shallow and rapid, Lex clutching at Clark’s hips as though Clark was slipping between his fingers, dissipating into the air, and Clark would – he would –

Clark lifted his hand up to his mouth and sucked on one of his knuckles, keeping his eyes closed and imagining that he was tasting Lex instead of himself.

Clark really hoped that he and Lex weren’t still fighting.

***


[Poll #598837]

ETA: Poll closed! The next part is up!