Author's Notes: Fun interaction between Superman and Lex again. We get to learn some thing about Clark's view of his place in the world. I always like feedback, so review if you have a chance!

"Luthor!" came an angry voice outside the sunroom balcony. Superman stormed in, cape swirling behind him. It was a pleasant mid-afternoon on the cusp of summer.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of your unannounced visit?" Lex asked banally behind his sunglasses, remaining seated. Conner and Lara were at school presently, which was good. He and his guest were about to have a long, heated argument.

"You know why I'm here." The muscled man in a new suit crossed his arms.

"Yes, we need to talk. I decided this was the fastest way to get your attention, and I didn't even have to kill anyone. I thought you'd be happy with the positive PR?"

"I donated nothing; you stole my suit," Clark fumed.

"And the money raised by the patents on the fibers are going towards Conner's and Lara's trust funds for college. What better tax-exempt way to invest for their future?"

Superman stared at him. "What do they have to do with me?"

"Come off of it, Clark. I know you'll deny it while you wear the Superman persona, but I tire of this game. We need to talk about how irresponsibly immature your decision to abandon your child threatens Lara's mental stability."

"…" Superman looked at him with a pitying look. "You really believe I'm Clark Kent, don't you?"

"What part of abandoning your daughter makes sense?" Lex roared out impatiently. "Do you know what studies say about an absentee parent?" Lex ticked off his fingers. "Chronic depression, drug addiction, personality disorders, social anxiety. There's a whole goddamned LIST. And YOU, in all your alien wisdom, want to condemn her to that because the Batman said she was a liability."

"You spied—"

"I'm. Not. Finished," Lex's voice boomed to cut Clark's accusations off, "Do you want to know how stupid that sounds? News flash, Superman: Abandoning your daughter on the advice of a bachelor who trains traumatized boys to play superhero is flat-out wrong. You are the most self-righteous being in the goddamn galaxy. Act like it!"

Superman stood there like a statue carved from tundra ice.

"And you have nothing to say?" With a shake of his head, Lex waved dismissively at him. "Lara's as much your daughter as mine. If you don't want to admit that, don't expect to waltz back in and be a father when she's grown."

"We've had this conversation before," Superman voiced with a strangely pained expression. "You know and you cloned me."

Pulling the specially designed tranq gun from his pocket, Lex flourished a hand at it. "A dose of this and..." Lex snapped his fingers. "You forget a few hours. Shame I've only used it once."

Superman's face changed from pain to fury. "Are you going to use it again?"

Looking at the superhero, Lex casually lifted the gun up. "That would defeat the aim of this meeting, wouldn't it? But you have a point. It's served its purpose." He hurtled it at the stone ground. The fragile, lead-lined gun shattered, leaving a green stain, while metal pieces skittered across the ground. He exaggeratedly wiped his hands clean of the affair. Of course it was all very symbolic since Lex could always manufacture another one if he so desired, but destroying it in front of Clark was supposed to provide impact.

Superman stepped back as he sensed the green fluid sap the tiniest fraction of his invulnerability. "This has to be some sort of trick." Superman's healthy paranoia struck as his eyes scanned the room again looking for traps or mysteriously lead-lined areas.

Lex grinned, standing with his hands up as if he was about to be arrested.

Superman took another step back.

Lex pressed forward, easily walking over the puddle of liquid Kryptonite laced with sedative and a few choice chemicals. "There's only one thing that's kept me from killing you when you came back with a baby in your arms, Clark."

The broad-shouldered alien continued to retreat, stepping into the sunlight. His pale face took on a healthier glow. "And what's that?"

"Love," Lex stated as if this was a rational motive, gesturing his hands away from his sides.

"...Are you trying to say that…" Superman's lips twisted. From the discomfited expression on his face, it wasn't because he was disgusted. If Lex had to guess, he looked completely taken aback.

"I love you, Clark Kent," Lex acknowledged, dropping his hands.

Taking another defensive step back, Superman looked incredibly off-kilter. "No. You don't."

Lex shook his head, chuckling mirthlessly. "Believe what you want, but I don't do take-backs unlike someone I intimately know," he said teeth bared.

"You can't," Superman continued, gesticulating his arms forcefully in appeasement. "We fight... All the time."

"Why? Is it too implausible that I could have feelings for you, even when I hate Superman with every shard of myself?" Lex sneered, fingers digging savagely into the lower hem of his stiff white jacket. The crux of the matter was that Lex hadn't known for a good amount of time that Clark and Superman were one in the same. He hated being reminded that he never figured it out on his own.

Shaking his head sagely, Superman dropped his hands. "We're destined to be enemies," he said, as if that explained everything.

Leaning forward as he glared at the floor, the President of the United States breathed in and then out as rage blinded him once again. Destiny, was it? Lex shook his head in disbelief. Clark-fucking-Kent believed in that Kryptonian propagandist garbage?

No, he amended as he saw the incongruous decisions Clark had seemed to arbitrarily make. It made sense. "Of course!" Lex shouted in half-crazed glee. The human-raised alien hadn't finished whatever 'learning programs' he was supposed to in that super-advanced fortress of his and was left with only a half-formed impression of the truth. "It's destiny!" He bellowed at the sky on his balcony, and his arms rose towards it in supplication. "Superman has come to save us all!"

Superman raised his hands in a placating manner like one would do when encountering a crazy individual. "Lex... Take it easy."

Laughter bubbled up uncontrollably at the irony. The world had been saved because Clark had stubbornly refused to listen to anyone around him, either friend or foe. Like most teenagers, he believed he had known everything already.

"Destiny!" Lex crowed at the surrounding gardens two floors below, howling with laughter. That was the most asinine, preposterous excuse he'd heard someone give him, and this coming from someone as intelligent as Clark.

"Did you forget to take your mood stabilizer...?" Superman ventured gently.

"Now who's invaded someone's privacy, hm?" Lex swung a fist out, pointing at him. "YOU, for MY benefit," Lex patted his chest, chuckling maniacally. "Created a Strawman argument based off insubstantial evidence to have this… this reason for us to be at odds, instead of admitting how you really felt about me. Is that right?"

"It's not insubstantial! It was prophesied that we'd be enemies, and we are!" Superman defended.

"What part of 'always check your sources' did you miss? The bounds the logic in your head must take to actually believe that bullshit must be astronomical," Lex said with as much pity as he could muster. Completely at odds with the rest of his expression, his lips lifted into a sneer.

Superman clenched his jaw. "Just because you don't believe doesn't make it untrue."

Lex knew that now was not the time to argue about the rather varied and interesting interpretations of the Naman legend world-renowned archaeologists had theorized to him. He deliberately blanked out his expression with several deep, snickering breaths, "Clark, I want to make something clear. What you're referring to is propaganda perpetuated by the Kryptonians who were on this planet before you. It was likely the end result of an extensive behavioral study on humans by Kryptonians."

Superman shook his head. "That doesn't even make sense."

"To these Kryptonians," Lex raised his voice again, tone flinty, "It would mean everything if they wanted to lord over humans at some later date. As a species, we're very prolific and easy to train, and it's good business sense to know where to acquire a low-skilled labor force if something devastating happened to your populace."

Lex watched Superman as the superhero paced. "And you think my logic is faulty?" Superman said disparagingly. "What you're saying is all conjecture."

"Just..." Lex closed his eyes, willing himself to keep going, willing himself to not sink into madness. He looked at Clark, wrapped in brightly colored spandex. "Imagine for one second what it would take to conquer the human species if your lifespan was exponentially greater than three generations of them." He knew his eyes were likely too intense, too bright by the unconvinced frown on the hard-planed face. "They're stories, Clark! Humans are hard-wired to remember song and dance. Kryptonians tried out different, but similar creationist stories to... to irrevocably change the collective consciousness of humanity. The concept of God is found everywhere, everywhere!"

Lex approached him, grabbing the sides of his muscled arms. Clark looked down at him with silent concern.

"Cue ten thousand years, and you appear as a symbol of hope and righteousness, here to battle the prophesied darkness."

"You really should keep taking your meds, Lex."

Frowning, Lex pulled back. "Don't you see?"

Clark stared back, obviously unmoved.

Lex thrust his hands forward, straightening his arms. "You're the second coming of Christ! The return of the Kawatche's Naman, the benevolent God to save us from ourselves and bring about world peace!" Lex flicked a hand in the air. "This is marketing… Art at its highest form. The ancient classic of good versus evil helped you win the approval of the human race, a classic I believe that was started by the stroke of a Kryptonian pen."

In the long silence that followed, Lex regretted nothing.

Then, Clark sighed, rubbing his face. "So," he drawled with his little used Kansas-ian twang, "where's your proof?"

Without batting an eye, Lex tossed a key chain towards the superhero. It had a key fob, security card, and a physical key on it. "It shouldn't take too long for you to find the correct room. The fingerprint reader knows your thumbprint."

Looking at the keys suspiciously, Superman's healthy paranoia had returned with a vengeance. "How do I know this isn't a trap?"

"Invite one of your buddies over if it makes you feel safer. I don't care as long as they don't damage anything. Keep in mind that whoever you'd pick would learn about an unethical page from the history of your race."

Wordlessly, Superman spun on his heel and walked into the bowels of the mansion, his cape flowing like red liquid behind him.

President Luthor turned back to the table where a thick binder awaited him.

He breathed in and then out once again, feeling his blood pressure drop significantly, and then re-took his seat inside the sun room.

Most modern presidents relied on their aides for this type of thing, but a lot of his aides had quit when they realized he was completely against Mutant Registration. One would think that he'd said that he intended to euthanize the disabled and elderly by the response he received.

But he knew he was doing the right thing, and he wasn't going to let anyone stop him.

TBC.