Cherry Wine {lex luthor}

chapter fifty three

Things moved quickly after the papers had been signed and hands had been shook. Benji, Lex and I slipped into an anteroom. It was panelled in dark wood, a shadow of the old study in the mansion. It smelled faintly of cigars and vanilla. The door shut behind us, and the sounds of the conference room dulled, leaving the three of us alone together. Benji was still refusing to look at me.

"The jet is waiting at an airstrip just outside the city." Benji handed Lex a sleek phone. "Your best bet is to drive out there. This is a burner. Get a new phone as soon as you get out of the country."

Lex clapped Benji on the shoulder, and shook him. "I can't thank you enough."

Benji nodded sharply. "I'll follow you out to the jet. You made sure everything else was destroyed?"

I was barely following their conversation. I was still reeling over the fact that we were fleeing the law, running from the country. It hadn't sunk yet. It still felt like we would leave the building, go home to the mansion, continue our lives.  I remembered the day of my kidnapping, the gun to my head. The hopeless feeling of knowing I was trapped. I wondered if that was how Lex was feeling, too. If he felt caged on every side. I couldn't hold this against him-I never would dream of it.

Lex opened a hidden door in the back of the room, and we filed out into a hallway. It led to the service elevator. It was a far cry from the modernity of the front-the lights flickered, and the cables groaned as we made our descent. I wrapped my arms tightly around my waist, holding onto myself for comfort. Lex placed a hand on the nape on my neck, his thumb tracing downwards. The small gesture made my muscles relax a fraction.

We didn't take the car we had come in. The elevator let us out into a back alley. Two white sedans waited for us, incongruent with their surroundings. There was graffiti slashed across the walls, cursing LexCorp and Lex himself in bright red. I shuddered at it, turning away.

Benji tossed a pair of keys to Lex. He glared at me, and looked away.

The inside of the car was almost identical to the car we had arrived in. The leather smelled new, the metal gleaming. Lex pulled out of the alley. Somewhere behind us, sirens had started to wail. I didn't know if they were for him, or for someone else, but it made my heart sink.

"Why is Benji so angry at me?" I asked. There was an embarrassing choked sound in my voice. Lex shook his head, turning sharply onto a main street.

"He's not angry at you, love. He's worried about you."

"He has a weird way of showing it, then."

The sirens were getting louder. They were almost definitely heading for the LexCorp tower. Someone on the board had tipped the police off, and I had no doubt who it had been.

"If I was in his shoes, I'd be worried about you, too." Lex said. His jaw ticked as he swerved around a turning car. "You're about to leave the country with a high profile criminal. Think about how we met, how we fell in love. We haven't exactly had a healthy relationship."

"I don't care." I said. "I don't care, Lex. If he thinks I'm just going to abandon you-"

"You should." Lex cut me off. "And I should make you, but god, I can't imagine living without you, Ruth. I need you."

It wasn't a new conversation. It's one we'd  had a million times before. Lex and I both knew that it was safer for me without him. He had  said it himself-he was a high profile criminal. There wouldn't be a wanted list he wasn't on, no crime networks who hadn't heard of him. By being with him, I was in immeasurable danger.

The day I first became fully conscious in the hospital, he had been at my bedside. It had been after visiting hours were over. The lights were dimmed, and the ward had been almost silent. It was the first time I had been aware of myself, with no drugs in my system, no orderlies sedating me. He had been watching me sleep, chair pulled up to my bed. There was a suit jacket pulled over the back of his chair, a briefcase next to him. He had come directly from work.  I had woken slowly. The first thing I had been aware of was the pain in my leg. The second had been how beautiful his eyes were. He hadn't broken my gaze, just tucked my hair behind my ear. I had known then, subconsciously, that we would be special, that we would mean something more to each other. The moment hadn't broken. We hadn't exchanged a word; after the hysteria of our first meeting, no words were necessary. My mother had told me that when she first met my father, it felt like an invisible string had suddenly bound then together. I hadn't known, then, what she meant. I had met Lex's eyes in that dark room, lit only by the ember glow of the setting sun, and suddenly I knew.

The buildings around us were beginning to shrink again. I turned in my seat to see if Benji was behind us. I could see him, tense behind the wheel of his car.  "I know." I said. "I need you too."

"Listen to me." Lex glanced at me. "Whatever happens in the next twenty four hours, promise you'll do as I say. There's going to be dangerous people with us, and I need you close to me."

I nodded, but he didn't turn to look at me. "I promise." I said.  Every moment I'd done the opposite of what he'd said flashed in front of me like a montage. It was a reel of us laughing, of him catching me around the waist as I tried to dart away from his hold. Of me closing his laptop, insisting it was time for bed, of me giggling as I hid in the garden as the day stretched into twilight and Lex called my name.

"What happens if-" Tears filled my eyes, and I blinked them away, shocked at how quickly I had become emotional. "What happens if something...happens to you?"

"You call Benji." Lex said grimly. There was no promises, no easily broken vows that he wouldn't be caught and taken. "If they kill me, you find the nearest phone, and you call Benji. If they take both of us, you call Benji. Don't try and talk to me. Don't talk to anyone but Benji. He'll get you home safe."

I hadn't considered the idea that Lex would be killed, and it stunned me into silence. He noticed. He let go of the wheel with one hand, traced my cheekbone with the knuckle of his finger. "I know." His voice was shaking. "I wish it were different, too. I wish I could give you a better life."

"I don't."

It was true. My life had been changed so drastically by Lex. I had been a suburban teenager before the disaster; average, pretty. Yes, Alistair had ruined my childhood, but had the attack on downtown not happened, he would have been arrested. I would have graduated, gone to university, gotten a job as a researcher or a lab assistant. Maybe I would even have worked for LexCorp. I would have been normal. Lex had saved me, but he had flipped my life on it's head. He had taken everything I knew and magnified it by a million.

I wouldn't have wished for anything different, and I had no idea how to repay him.

Lex flipped on the radio. The sirens had faded behind us, but I could feel the tension in the air.

"In breaking news: The tech genius Lex Luthor Jr. has been accused of fraud, illegal imports, murder, treason and conspiracy, and the abduction of his current fiancee Ruth Haze from the devastation in the downtown core almost a year ago. The news of their engagement came as quite a shock to the Metropolis community, as Haze had been declared dead along with her parents. Currently, law enforcement has the LexCorp building and Luthor's personal home surrounded. More on the story as we hear it.

I shut the radio off. "You didn't kidnap me."

"Technically I did." Lex said. "I forged your death certificate."

"So I wouldn't have to live with Alistair."

"That won't be how the courts see it." Lex was speeding now, the buildings on either side of us whipping by. "They'll see it as me kidnapping a young girl to live with me in my secluded mansion while I did all sorts of illegal things, and then I let you get kidnapped, and then I proposed."

It didn't sound great the way he put it, but he was leaving out the nuances of it, the love between us. "Lex." I laughed a little. He turned to me, a smile spreading over his face. A little of the tension in the car broke.

"And you said yes, despite everything." He laid off himself, and took my hand in his. I squeezed his fingers, not wanting to break contact.

It was a fatal mistake.

Lex drove one-handed, his speed building. I could hear the faint whirring of a helicopter coming from the city. Everything felt like it was moving underwater. A light ahead of us turned red. Lex didn't slow, refusing to acknowledge it. We were in a quiet suburb; the roads should have been quiet, empty.

We were crossing the highway, the right side hidden behind a dentist building and a clock tower. The black SUV was hidden until too late.

There was a symphony of car horns, and the metal grill of a car coming towards me. The last thing I heard was the shattering of glass, the rent of metal on metal.

There was a pain in my right side, and the world turned to nothing but an infinite pool of stars.

THE END.

A/N: I know :(

the epilogue will be up tonight.

-Ivory