Category: XO with Smallvile
Pairings: UC: Liz/Lex
Rating: Teen, dark themes
Spoilers: Lets just say all of both to be safe
Summary: Hope was all she ever really had.
No wealth, no ruin, no silver, no gold
Nothing satisfies me but your soul
- O Death, Jen Titus
Tears, smiles, shakes of the head. He was an expert at reading even the smallest ticks of human behavior and she had never seen the point of building the walls that would block him out. Even when they're fighting, Liz wanted him to truly see her. It's only now, as he looked up at her from his desk - his face a mask of detachment - did it come to her that she might have given too much.
Her hands clench around the folder. Maybe he had wanted her to find the directory on his computer or maybe he thought she wouldn't do anything with it or maybe he had just been lazy, even Lex Luther was allowed his little slip ups. She didn't want to think about what he would view as the mistake: opening the 33.1 laboratories, the human experiments that broke every humanitarian law in existence, or the fact that she had caught him.
“You're better than this Lex.”
When she first met him she knew that the amount of darkness he carried within himself should have terrified her because she's seen it before, in the men that had hunter her in the past but even as she could read the warning she knew that Lex Luther was a different type of danger. He was the flame and before she could blink she'd been consumed. In her heart she knew that it didn't matter if he was the new face on a old evil or an old face on a new evil, the end result was the same: she's destroyed.
In the beginning he smiled a little more and was a little freer with himself. It was open between them and she'd breathed easily – she had liked to believe that he did too. Slowly but surely things changed between them. He stayed later at work, went on trips he didn't provide details for, and generally stopped talking about anything but the skeleton frame of his day. Got up, went to work, had a meeting, went to lunch, had a meeting, came home.
There were only so many times she could hear the same lie before it broke her heart.
He looked at her with an expression so full of scorn that it made a mockery of more than just their relationship, “And if I'm not?”
Still, there had been a time when there was enough of the good to balance out the bad. There were the rose colored days when they'd fought more than either was truly willing to admit to themselves but when they had accepted that that was just who they were: She coveted her independence. He didn't know how to stop being overprotective. She liked the unknown and spontaneity. He made it a point to hold as much information as possible and had plans for every contingency. At the end of the day though, they both could come home and just be.
Lex had been a closet romantic, he'd bring her flowers just because or hold her under the stars. Everything she hadn't ever known she wanted, he gave to her and Liz took it with a smile. She gave back more than he could ask for but still it was only just enough to meet the needs of a man who had never truly known what it was like to be loved unconditionally.
“You're going to kill me,” for a second his mask slipped, eyes widening in shock at what he most likely perceived as an accusation but it wasn't, it was simple fact. In his mind he would never do anything to hurt her. He didn't understand that he already was.
When she learned the truth, Liz had wished that it was just another woman. That kind of betrayal was familiar, but learning he was running labs that experimented on people that can do amazing things - people like her, even if the cause wasn't the same – just might have been enough to cripple her permanently.
She'd never told him the truth about Max and what she had become. Whenever she'd tried to the explanation had died in her throat, she liked to think that she didn't go through with it because keeping the secret had become so ingrained that she couldn't break the silence. If she was honest with herself it was because a part of her had always known that in Lex's hands that information would destroy the one thing that the Roswell Six had worked so hard for: Peace.
“Then why are you even here?”
Their relationship had always been sunshine and broken glass.
Liz held onto the sunshine too tightly. He provided too much broken glass. What a couple they made. Destruction and healing. The only thing that had kept her from dissolving into oblivion was the belief that it wasn't that she lacked the strength to save him it was that he lacked the conviction to save himself. Lex liked the taint on his soul too much to surrender it without a fight.
By the time Liz stopped believing the delusion that she was keeping him from turning into the monster that so many others believed he already was, it was too late. She was so desperately tied to him that she could never even think of existence without him.
“I can't leave you. I can't. No matter what you do, how much you pull away, or how thoroughly you destroy me, I can't leave. I need you more than I need to breathe,” hands gripping the side of his face, she pressed her lips against his. It was more than a kiss, it was a conflagration of teeth and tongues and the deep dark desires that had always surged between them. She poured everything she had into it trying to coax him into letting himself feel the acuteness of the hope and fears that had been warring with in her. Maybe she can make him understand. “I love you and next to that, dying doesn't matter.”
For a while Lex let her pretend that she'd gotten through to him. He spent a little less time at work and a little more time with her dreaming up a future for them but it was all make believe. She tried to ignore the midnight phone calls and hidden curses but Liz was, if nothing else, a person with a strong sense of what was right and she couldn't leave innocent people to suffer just so she could try to hold the precious threads of her happily-ever-after together.
One bright morning Chloe Sullivan stepped into Watchtower and got all the hope she needed even as a half mile away Liz Parker said goodbye to the last of hers laying on the floor of their sunshine yellow kitchen.
I don't really want to be saved.
-Shadow on the Wall, Brandi Carlile
-Shadow on the Wall, Brandi Carlile