grey [lex luthor]

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

He was watching her discreetly as she unclasped her earring from the grasp they had on her earlobe, and she stretched her long legs to grab the earring case on the shelf above.

"Whatcha doing?" Her metropolis accent obvious as she called out to him, finally done with her bathroom routine, taking the old lexcorp tshirt Lex had laying around off the gray granite counter, and putting it on. It was his own many years ago, when he was a teenager, he hadn't worn it since his father died. 

He didn't answer, but instead he stood up, the pants he had on, uncrumpling from his position on the armchair he was in. There were too many thoughts running through his head, he had a lot of things coming all at once, it was overwhelming. 

He leaned over his dad's table, it was the study that he hadn't touched in years, or even dared to come to. It just felt right that he did all the revealing of himself here. The bedroom, connected by an open door smelled like her, he loved it, but in here, it smelt like nothing but alcohol nights and strong punches. 

"Hey, everything alright?" Her voice appealed to him from the doorway, and his eyes whipped up from the floor to her own gaze, the one he loved so much. 

"Come here," He said in a quiet voice that urged her to come forward, he couldn't tell what she was feeling right now, but he knew what he was. 

The plush carpet made minimal sound as she made his way to him, which meant nothing was interrupting the sound of Mura Masa he had on replay. He enveloped her in his figure, taking in the warmth of her skin as she dipped her hips onto his.  

"What's wrong?" Her whisper asked through his hair, making him shiver a bit, as he put his arms around her waist, the solidness of table he was leaning on, being enough support for the both of their weight, as if she really weighed anything anyway. 

"I feel like I have so much to tell you, but I don't know where to start, what to say." He confessed in one blunt sentence. 

"Start anywhere, I don't care at all." She said in such a tone that convicted him to start to speak. 

"When I was a kid, I didn't really have a childhood." He said, his eyes flitting around as his mind started to reconstruct his memory, the only thing holding him down from pure insanity, was her touch, "My father used to come... used to come and hold his fist to my face, the only thing I could see actually was that fist and the bottle of whiskey he always had after shouting at my mom."

"He used to tell me, we are Lex Luthors, don't ever disgrace this name," He still couldn't meet her gaze as his thoughts were racing, "You will get what you will want, and you will be stronger, better, god-like than anyone in this city. Then right after, I would see him bent over a table, in a drunken stupor cursing me and my mom out, it was pure hell. As a kid, you want to live up to your dad's expectations, but as I reached each of them, they only seemed to get higher. And then my mom died, the beatings only got worse, my face was always covered in bruises."

"I got so tired of it, thank god I didn't go to a normal school, everyone would've fucking shit on me for the purple face I usually had. It was exhilarating, I was learning things at the speed of light, if I didn't my dad would get mad, I had been doing calculus in my freshman year of high school."

He paused, and she somehow breathed in, the sound bringing him back from reality, not the past he was tortured in, "So I killed him, serving one of those glasses of bourbon, whiskey, I don't remember, or at least choose not to, and put some chemical that the autopsy couldn't detect. And I didn't feel anything, or at least I chose not to, as he gave me the whole fortune, and I could do whatever I wanted." 

"And so being the smart kid I was, I invested the whole thing in every field you could think of, but money wasn't enough to hide me from my past. So I sought everything to my father's demise. I was so caught up, and probably still am for impressing him, anything for me to avoid a hypothetical fist." He said almost to himself, looking up at the mural ceiling and wondering if telling her all this was worth it. He wanted to kick himself and congratulate himself at the same time, he wanted her to know, but he didn't.