A/N: My thanks once again for all your support thusfar! I apologize sincerely for the extreme delay between this chapter and the last; real life kind of crept up on me! I've also hit 30,000 words with this chapter, and I have a pretty good (?) feeling it may be as long as a novel (50,000!) by the time I'm done! Thanks again for accompanying me on this crazy ride, and thanks in advance for your feedback!

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

William Bernbach

sic transit gloria
chapter eight

The day after the Gotham charity ball, Lois Lane wakes up alone and in her own Metropolis apartment, as if nothing had happened the previous night. After trying to protest the fact that she's awake, she slowly falls out of her bed and notices her dress on the floor. She tries to brush the wrinkles out of the taffeta without much success before giving up and hanging it back up in her closet, half-heartedly wondering if she could find an excuse to wear it again. She scrambles through the hangers until she finds a robe and wraps it around herself before shuffling to the kitchen in search of breakfast—and coffee. Lotsof coffee.

The blinds are open for whatever reason and she has to strain her eyes before noticing Marcus Luthor on the couch—her date, her boss, her whatever—with a large green apple and a knife in his hand and a glass of orange juice on the table. It was probably the healthiest thing he could find in her kitchen; Lois isn't exactly a well-balanced breakfast kind of girl. She squints at him in the light of the early sun glaring through her window.

"Excuse me, miss," he says after a while, pretending not to know her. "I was wondering if you've seen my date. She's about five-foot-eight, brown eyes, brown hair, looks great in purple?"

Lois lets out a mocking ha ha in response before deciding to ignore him and go into the kitchen. She finds a couple of leftover maple donuts and a Red Bull, and drops them on the living room table next to the paper plate Marcus has set his apple on.

He looks at her breakfast in disbelief, as if she's elected to eat glass. "You're eating that?"

"Breakfast of champions," she says with pride, and they clink their drinks together. Lois can already feel the caffeine hitting her blood stream, though she won't be fully conscious for several minutes.

It's at this time, out of the corner of her eye, that she notices Marcus is shirtless. Instead of his typical tie, jacket, and shirt combo, she's seeing bare skin. She's never been shy about her appreciation for the male body, which she counts as one positive aspect of her time on Army bases, but he's still her boss, and still a Luthor, and—still someone she's decided to be with, to save him from all that.

But then a possibility she's not sure she's ready for pops into her head. Even if he was out here and not in her bed, they could have—well, you know—and maybe they did—they had both certainly wantedto, she remembered that much from the night before—

"We didn't—" she says suddenly, unable to describe what she's thinking. Marcus looks confused. She gestures wildly with her hands and face, praying that she won't have to elaborate. Eventually he catches on, and he has to laugh, in his frustratingly untouchable way.

"No, Lois, we didn't." He squeezes her hand comfortingly. He's sowarm, though it is still early, and the sun can't have been up more than half an hour. Her body had been stiff, but at his assurance, she relaxes.

"Oh, thank God." She slumps back into her chair before she notices the way he's looking at her. "No offense," she assures him.

He laughs again, more good-natured this time. "None taken." Then he purses his lips, obviously with thoughts of his own.

"Lois, I did want to talk to you though—about us?"

She nods. She decides she's prepared for anything from a re-establishment of their professional distance to a relationship. She knows the latter will be much harder, but she'll take it if it means she has a chance of saving him from the monsters he calls his family.

"I'd like to keep seeing you," he says, and the way he says it is so earnest and kind Lois wonders how he had ever survived growing up in that authoritarian mansion his father owns. "It's been a long time for me, and right now—I think you're what I need."

It's all she can do to hold herself together and not break down. For once, she thinks, someone needs me. The men she had kissed and then some on the Army bases had never really needed her, or if they had they had certainly never told her.

"And you may not need me in the same way, but I feel like you want to keep seeing me too." He pauses, and looks like he's remembering that he doesn't want to do her thinking for her. "Is that true?"

She nods. "Yes. But—"

"But what?"

She bites her lip. "People can'tknow. We'll already have your family putting pressure on us. There's no need for us to be quite as—"

"Public," he finishes for her. It's not a question. She nods.

She hates secrets, especially since she's in the business of exposing them. But the rumors that Cat Grant had spread a few months back had been really damaging—and at that point they weren't even true. Marcus had been able to save their reputations once, but he may not be able to do so this time around, especially if the tabloid writers get their hands on the idea of Marcus Luthor dating one of his employees.

"It'll be all right," she says with a shrug. "I don't really need those big fancy dates a lot of people go on about. I just—want to be with you."

He smiles, all sunshine and optimism for a brief second, and leans in to kiss her. For better or worse, she's in this now, and she's not going to leave as long as she can help it.

Marcus soon figures out that saying a relationship will be secret and actually making an effort to keepit secret are two different things. Even on the first day they try to co-exist with their secret, it's maddening to see Lois and not be able to kiss her whenever he wants. It's maddening to see fellow newspapermen flirting with her and not being able to do something about it, though luckily Lois seems comfortable telling them that they don't have a snowball's chance in hell with her.

He throws himself further into his work as Ultraman, if only to keep himself preoccupied with people who aren't called Lois Lane. He still keeps an ear on her heartbeat, but he allows the other sounds in the city to override it sometimes, and both Lionel and Lex call him before lunch to encourage him to stop intervening in the world so much and to focus on his work at the paper. But it's hard to listen to their advice when he reviews all the editorials Lois has written about Ultraman in her folder, praising him for using his powers for the greater good—and also encouraging him to reveal his identity.

One of her editorials about a particularly impressive strategy he had to dismantle a bomb in an elevator a few weeks back ends with a call for Ultraman to speak to her. "I cannot promise to speak for the entire city," she writes, "but I know that I am so proud of what Ultraman does for the city of Metropolis. Our brave men and women who keep the city safe every day cannot possibly be there for everything, and he fills in the gaps to help make Metropolis a better place to live. I encourage him to contact me and to let me interview him, so that the people of Metropolis can better understand all the good that he does for us."

People had teased her for it after it was published, and even now, they're still saying she's in love with him and that's why the rest of the men in the bullpen don't stand a chance with her. She just shrugs and says they wouldn't understand.

He realizes now what needs to be done.

He speeds through the bullpen, leaving the note taped to her computer screen. When she comes back from a sandwich shop a few blocks away, he hides in a nearby phone booth and watches as she opens the note and reads it. As she does, a smile spreads across her face. He's seen girls who are getting engaged to the loves of their lives look less excited than she does right now.

Miss Lane—

I've been keeping an eye on the editorials that you've been writing about me. I've decided to take you up on your offer to help me speak to the people of Metropolis.

I cannot meet you face-to-face, but if you come to the Café de Flore on 7th & Lincoln, there's a phone booth I'd be able to contact you from. 8 pm tonight.

I hope I'll see you there.

Sincerely,
A friend

She jumps into the air happily, and when she lands, apologizes to Catherine Grant for upsetting the photo of her son. She races up to the elevator, and he wonders for a brief second if she's headed up to tell him what's happened. He races up the stairs, and manages to look relaxed and nonplussed in his chair by the time Lois bursts into his office. She's glowing with happiness, cheeks flushed and slightly out of breath.

"He read it! He's going to talk to me tonight!" She drops the note happily on his desk, her excitement barely contained.

"Tonight?" He perks an eyebrow as he reads the familiar words. "He moves fast, literally and figuratively." He allows himself a smirk. "Should I be jealous?"

Lois tries to laugh it off, though he notices the blush in her cheeks is back. "I just—I didn't think he'd get back to me so soon," she admits, her hands twitching as she fidgets with them. "This could really mean something, you know?"

He smiles and tries not to think about how strange this is, to talk to her as himself and not himself at the same time. If she knew—knew who Ultraman was—would she still admire him? Or would she see only the sins of his family name, the mark of Luthor, and would her ideal hero be ruined?

"Of course," is all he says instead.

"So I was thinking I could take you to that Chinese place tomorrow instead?" Lois asks apologetically.

"Sure," he responds nonchalantly, though he'd been looking forward to being alone with her tonight, and she gives him a thank-you kiss on his cheek—chaste, but warm.

"You're great," she tells him, though he can't help but feel a little put out. "I'll talk to you later. I need to draft up more questions."

And she leaves him hanging there with a sudden, throbbing headache, wondering if he's done the right thing, wondering if he can handle this—wondering if she thinks Ultraman is a better man than him.

Her café latte is cold and her biscotti hard, but it's even worse than that. It's eight-thirty. She could kill him for doing this to her—regardless of his potential invulnerability. The phone booth is unoccupied, and no one has called it. No one's even stepped past it. She checks her watch again and double-checks with the pretty French girl behind the counter. Eight-thirty, the girl says sadly, thinking Lois has been stood up on a date, but it is somuch worse than that.

"'Eight o'clock,' he says, 'eight o'clock'," she says sadly as she goes back to her table, trying to pull herself together. This certainly isn't the first time someone's contacted her for a story and then left her waiting, but this time was different. This was Ultraman, for God's sake, and it was supposed to change her career forever.

"Some 'friend,'" she sneers, and after taking a bite of her biscotti, she puts it away. She had been too excited to eat dinner, but now she's not even hungry. Nothing could quite kill her appetite like a story being dashed to pieces before deadline.

Her cell phone vibrates and she looks down at it to see a text from her cousin Chloe Sullivan, who works for the Star City Register. "In Metropolis tonight. Assignment filed. Drinks at the Ace of Clubs?"

Lois decides she doesn't want this evening to be a total waste, so she hails a taxi and starts the driver on the way back to her apartment. "Be there in an hour," she responds, and looks in vain at the sky, hoping to see Ultraman's large black shadow or hear the rush of him speeding past her—and seeing nothing.

Lionel Luthor has gotten used to the figurative weight of the world shifting under his hands. The office he's commandeered from his son in the L-shaped building outside of the city is outfitted with a touch-screen technology that improved on the latest prototype from Stark Industries. It's a little flashy for Lionel's taste, but it's certainly helpful to be able to close deals in the city and abroad at the same time, to check on shipments across the Atlantic and Pacific, to keep tabs on the people whose power he needs to check and balance.

He checks the clock at the top of the user interface, which reads 7:51 p.m. in bright numbers. He thinks he hears the faint whirr of a machine shutting down, but everything seems normal in his office. Deciding he needs a break, he fixes himself a single-malt scotch—the only drink he's cared to make as long as he can remember—and holds it deftly in his hand.

Less than a minute later, his door opens and Lex makes his entrance. He is dressed completely in white; it flatters him, but also makes him look unblemished, a lie that Lionel knows will never be true.

"Done so soon, Lex?" he inquires casually. He's just moved around a few things that should ensure that his son stays up for the rest of the night to fix. Lionel supposes two more all-nighters this month should suit Lex just fine if he's ever to become a good CEO. "If you aren't feeling up to the task, perhaps you should get some rest. You know what they say about burning the candle at both ends—trite, but true."

"Not tonight, Dad," Lex responds, just as casually. Lionel notices a slight tremor in his son's right hand, and for a while he thinks it may be nervousness, but he hasn't given his son any excuse to be nervous since he had been ten years old. "I have more important things to worry about."

Lionel fixes his mouth in a hard, humorless line. "If you're referring to the—lovely Miss Lucero," he says with thinly veiled disdain, "then—"

His sentence stops flat as Lex reveals his gun, and he stays stoic as his son approaches him, keeping his weapon fixed on his father's heart.

"Lex, please," Lionel says in a blasé way, as if the gun isn't there, as if he has nothing to fear. "Do you ever truly think about what you do?"

"I finally am," Alexander responds, putting his gun against his father's balmy forehead. "I'm finally thinking, Dad. And do you know what I've realized? You haven't given me nearly enough credit for what I've done."

Lionel remains silent. Best to see where this is going, he supposes. Best not to go somewhere Lex isn't ready to go.

"'Behold the superman, for man is something to overcome,'" Alexander says grandly, as if he is on stage, displaying his mind to all the world. "Nietzsche was right, Dad. Man is something to overcome. And you raised me to transcend the weaknesses of humanity. But no matter how much I excelled—no matter how many times I brought the world to its knees—it was never enough for you."

Lionel allows himself a smirk. "It never was, was it?"

Lex falters for the briefest of moments. What does he want me to do? Lie to him? Plead for my life? Lionel Luthor is many things; a coward certainly isn't one of them.

Alexander squares himself more firmly against his father, who is only looking up at him with cold, dark eyes. "Because I would never be Marcus, would I? Every day you looked at me and hoped I'd wake up with his gifts, with his powers. But that was never going to happen, was it? You could only hope that one day Marcus would have my same resolve, my same ambition—but he never would."

He cocks his gun, a sound that reverberates across his office.

"I was raised in your shadow, and in Marcus'. And now you will die in mine. And one day—no one will even remember your name."

For a long while, there is nothing but silence in the office, silence and the gun pointed at Lionel and the sweat beading at the top of Lex's head.

And then there is a sudden outburst of laughter, which Lionel knows is the last thing Lex expected from him. The gun shakes slightly in his son's hands; his eyes widen slightly.

"I had hoped this day would come," Lionel admits to Lex after he is done laughing. The gun is still not as steady as it should be if his son truly wants to kill him, though most of the shaking is done. "I pushed you and pushed you, and for a long time, I thought you wouldn't be able to know what you had to do. But now—now I know I have done everything I've needed to do."

He sees confusion flash across Lex's face for a moment, and he sighs, slightly disappointed.

"Allow me to explain," he says, impatient, ready to Lex to catch up, ready for him to know what he has done. "I have always told you what separates Luthors from other men. And that is?"

"Only the fittest survive," Lex says slowly. Before this day, he would always say it with a slight roll of his eyes. He knew it by rote the way other people knew the Hail Mary or the Our Father; years of reiteration had dulled its edges in his mind when they should have remained sharp. But he can see the edge coming back to his son's words. Perhaps it is not too late after all.

"Yes," Lionel says, strengthened again by the spoken presence of his mantra. "Only the fittest survive." He takes a pause, then smiles, almost serenely, at his son. "Tell me why you and your brother never met your grandparents."

"They died in a fire in the Suicide Slums," Lex replies. He still doesn't see, still doesn't understand. For all he has done right, he has failed to learn his last lesson, and it is imperative that he knows before Lionel takes that bullet. "And you said you would honor their memory by becoming all you could become."

"And did the police ever discover who set that apartment on fire? Did they ever bring my parents' killer to justice?"

"The police didn't care about two immigrants from the slums, so they—" Lex responds, starting to recite what had been told to him since he was old enough to ask after his grandparents. And then he stops. He keeps his face under control; if he was any weaker, he'd be gaping at Lionel. "It was you. You killed your parents."

"I did," Lionel says with an air of nonchalance, as if he is discussing the weather or the results of a sports match. "I did because they were unfit to survive. They were weak. By the time I was fifteen, I knew I was already stronger than the both of them put together. I would do everything they wished they could do, and I would do it in a way they could only dream of." He prompts Lex again; it is time for his son to take another test, but this will be one of his last. "And so I destroyed them not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Because…?"

"…only the fittest survive." Lex has found a new reverence for those words now, and hearing the solemn tone of his son's voice makes Lionel smile.

"...yes, I have been cruel to you, Alexander," he admits with that same air of nonchalance, though his son's eyes glint at the sound of his full name, his true name. "I do not deny that I have. But everything I have done—pushing you, stealing from you, ruining you, throwing you off-balance, questioning your every decision and every move—I have done for the sake of making you a true Luthor. I have done it to make you strong, to recognize that the future is yours. And that it is you who must seize it."

Questions are still written across Alexander's pale face, questions that start and end in the same place.

"You are wondering about Marcus," Lionel states. It is not a question. Alexander nods.

"I will admit that I had very high hopes for your Traveler brother," Lionel starts, and with a sigh of distaste, he notices that the ice in his drink has melted. "He held within himself potential to end all potential." He sighs then, thinking of his newspaperman son at the top of the Planet, with Miss Lane's waist in his soft hand, a complete waste of promise. "But despite all he can do, he will never possess the will of a Luthor. And for that, he will never be a true leader. He will never be the man that tomorrow needs. You were right—he will never have your resolve. And he will never have your ambition."

Lionel can see the truth spreading across Alexander's face. His time is drawing to a close. He must end the lesson now or leave his legacy incomplete.

"No matter if you curse me or bless me after I have gone, Alexander, you must know that I have left you three gifts," he says, well aware that these are the last words he shall ever say to his son. He walks towards his son, towards the gun, stops in front of it to feel the pressure on his heart.

"The first gift," he tells Alexander, "is my company. I have seen it prosper under my watch, but soon only your name will remain. And you shall go even further than I have because of my second gift to you: sheer willpower, forged of iron and steel, which I have pushed into you since before you were born. And with that will, you shall forge the mightiest weapon I can bestow to you; a weapon that cannot be defeated and will help you reshape the world in your image—in the image of Luthor."

He restrains himself from laughing, but lets the next statement drop like a pin against the floor: "And that weapon is your brother."

The light of knowledge dawns on Alexander's face, and Lionel presses a kiss against his son's forehead, father and son separated by the two ends of a gun. "You will only need to speak, my son," he tells him, "and the world will follow."

The clock tower from the city strikes then, strikes eight times in a row, but over the sound of the tower comes the sudden telltale whoosh to inform the Luthor men they are not alone. Marcus bursts in with sudden self-righteousness and indignation, and after assessing the situation for a half-second, jumps to the worst conclusion. Before he can even shout out a strained "Dad!" Alexander has already shot him.

Marcus falls to the floor with a painful groan, a hand struggling to serve as a tourniquet over his suddenly bloody shoulder. He is rendered useless, rendered mortal, helpless to stop what must happen. Before Alexander ushers him towards the window, Lionel sees a telltale blue glow that lets him know that Alexander has forged a bullet lined with blue kryptonite to break his brother's Kryptonian skin; a small green flash and a resulting cry from Marcus informs Lionel that the bullet has a one-two punch, a retractable layer, a line tethering Marcus to his brother.

It is more than he could have ever hoped for.

And when Alexander shoots the window behind him and shoots him in the shoulder, sending Lionel hurtling ninety stories down to the marble steps below, he has time to think of the man his son will become: a man the entire world will fear, a man that will speak and send continents running, a man that is everything a Luthor should be.