Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first thing he noticed upon regaining consciousness was not the luxury of the satin sheets underneath his fingertips.

Nor was it the panoramic skyline that stretched across an entire wall of the expansive room he was currently inhabiting.

It wasn’t even the fact that the pillow beneath his head appeared to have been hand-fluffed by some rare species of Peruvian bird.

No. 

The first thing he noticed was that his head felt strangely cold.

Not the “forgot a hat in november” kind of cold. Not even the “some sadist just shaved your head at an army recruitment center” kind of cold.  This was the peculiar, drafty sort of cold that came from a baldness that suggested a man might have lost a philosophical debate with his barber decades ago. 

His hand went up. 

Smooth. 

Soft. 

Perfectly unblemished skin.

Huh.

He rose, admired his new black satin pajamas (luxurious, in the way only clothing you don’t remember buying can be), and set about exploring what he reasonably assumed to be the afterlife. After all, he had been dead just a minute ago, and the afterlife did have a reputation for being confusingly well-furnished.

Unfortunately the adjacent bathroom’s mirror ended the tour prematurely. Because there, staring back at him from the reflection in the glass, was Lex Luthor.

Lex. Luthor.

Billionaire. Genius. Arch-nemesis to Superman, and apparently a man who appeared to have been genetically engineered to star in hostage videos by major corporations.

After taking an appropriate amount of time to marvel at his newly defined cheekbones, his first instinct was to panic. His second was to check his bank balance. His third was to check it again, because he must have misread the number of zeroes he’d just seen.

And here was the most surprising part. Once the initial disorientation wore off, and a stern-looking East Asian woman came to collect him for the day, he realized he was actually rather good at being Lex Luthor.

Running an enormous, and ethically ambiguous corporation turned out to be mostly a matter of looking deeply unimpressed while people explained complicated things, and glowering at anyone who contradicted him. 

LexCorp practically ran itself, largely through the efforts of terrifyingly efficient executives who knew better than to ask questions like, “Why do we even have an orbital railgun division?”

Within days, he had taken to strolling into meeting rooms, making grand, decisive pronouncements, and leaving before anyone dared ask for clarification. He blamed the fact that his new reality was previously a comic book series for why this strategy seemed to not only work, but to actually make his new company thrive.

His only hard-and-fast policy was that if a project sounded likely to cause an international incident, it went straight to the long “to be shut down” list.

“Sir, about the experimental combat gorilla program—”

“Cancel it.”

“Mr. Luthor, the proposal for the black-hole-in-a-energy-drink project—”

“Destroy it. Thoroughly.”

And so the truly diabolical enterprises vanished in a flood of his vaguely benevolent apathy, leaving only the everyday villainy of aggressive monopolies, labyrinthine tax codes, and coffee prices in the lobby café that should honestly be considered an HR violation.

Along with a few death rays, of course. He couldn’t get rid of the death rays! What if he needed those? For… reasons.

Life settled into an unexpectedly comfortable routine after a while. He drank deliciously overpriced espresso in the mornings, skimmed through The Daily Planet with a smug expression in the afternoons, and never once had to wear an uncomfortable mask or sneak around in tights in the dead of night.

Villainy, he decided, was far more agreeable than advertised.

Three weeks later, Lex was in the middle of trying to copyright the signature letter “S” so Superman would have to pay licensing fees every time he appeared in public, when Mercy walked into his office.

Mercy was the East Asian woman he had initially been greeted by on the first day of his ‘arrival’. Doubling as his assistant, bodyguard, and possible secret super-soldier. She carried herself with the general air of someone who could defeat a small army before lunch, or possibly eat a small army for lunch, depending on her mood.

“Sir,” she said crisply, “you have that meeting at noon.”

He frowned. “Right. Which office is that in again?”

She didn’t even blink. “He’s coming up to your penthouse, sir.”

He paused, espresso halfway to his lips. “My penthouse?”

“Yes, sir.” Was all she said, even though the confusion in his voice was clear to anyone within earshot.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile tugged at Mercy’s lips– briefly betraying her true sadistic nature–  before she turned and left, leaving him baffled in her wake.

Who exactly was ‘he’?

~

“CEO, entrepreneur. Born in 1964. Jeffrey. Jeffrey Bezos”

Lex sang his favorite song to himself under his breath in an effort to try to sooth his nerves.

“Come on Jeffrey, you can do it! Pave the way, put your back into it!”

A sudden stray thought invaded his mind, disorientating him and threatening to throw him off tune. Why, out of all eight billion other humans on his previous planet, was he chosen to wake up in the body of Lex Luthor?

“ Fuck their wives! Drink their blood! Come on Jeff, get ‘em!”

It was a reasonable question, but before he could get to any useful conclusions the elevator door dinged.

Lex told himself he was prepared for anything as he waited inside the final floor of his penthouse suite for the polished metal doors to finally slide open. 

Perhaps a treacherous spy sent on a honeypot mission to poison the next corporate merger he planned? Or maybe a potential assassination attempt from a disgruntled employee that had finally snapped? No idea was too outlandish in the realm of corporate espionage. 

Not even someone with the potential to weaponize a perfectly well tailored suit to sabotage the next boardroom negotiation. Just the thought of it made Lex shudder. Truly nothing was sacred to these heretics!

However, no matter how many possibilities he ran through, nothing could have prepared him for what actually stepped out of the elevator to greet him.

It was a boy. 

A teenage boy. 

And not the promising, young sharp-suited intern sort of teenage boy either. No, he was more of the ‘slumped posture, too much hoodie, and smells faintly of resentment’ sort.

He had an air about him like a cat dragged in from the rain—a cat that would rather dive back into the storm than tolerate human hospitality. His hoodie was Superman blue, which was either an unfortunate laundry decision or the opening move in some cosmic joke. 

It was faded, frayed, and looked as though it had survived several minor wars, possibly even lost a few. His jeans didn’t look any better. His eyes, however, were startlingly bright. The sort of bright blue that made you think of the ocean, or the sky, or other things Lex had traditionally tried to buy, monopolize, or launch satellites into. 

Something about them tugged at him in a way he just couldn't place.

"This is so weird,” the boy announced. 

He said it with the tone of someone who found nearly everything to be weird, but was reserving special emphasis for this occasion. “Why did you call me? Your assistant said you wanted to talk.”

Lex blinked. Assistant? Talk? His brain frantically flipped through the alarmingly small filing cabinets of memory he had available. Most of which had been recently restocked with trivia about offshore tax havens, until it landed on a single dusty folder labelled ‘Comic Book Plot Points’.

“…Connor,” Lex said cautiously, as if testing a theory about whether the boy might explode upon being named.

The boy flinched. Like he wasn't expecting Lex to actually address him directly. However he didn’t outright reject the name, instead letting out a tentative, but still gruff, 

“Yeah. What?”

The word was loaded with the same suspicion one might reserve for a man trying to sell them a second-hand submarine, assuring them it was in perfect working order except for the bit that was currently on fire.

And then Lex’s brain did some Olympic level mental gymnastics as it finally registered what was happening. This wasn’t just a Conner. This was his Connor. His genetic offspring. Half-clone. DNA doodle. A living footnote to one of Lex Luthor’s more ill-advised science experiments.

The word ‘son’ landed in his stomach like a lead weight.

He had never had children before. Had remotely no experience with them in fact. And now, he rather wished that when he’d been dumped into this improbable mess of a new reality, someone had had the decency to at least leave him an instruction manual. Something helpfully titled along the lines of 

'So You’ve Been Reincarnated as a Supervillain! A Beginner’s Guide to Family Life.'

In all the origin stories, Connor was the discarded clone child. An “angry loner' type, mistrusted by Superman, misunderstood by everyone else, and, most damningly, completely ignored by Lex himself outside of villainous plots.

For some inexplicable reason this last thought struck Lex with a particular pang of self loathing. It felt like indigestion, but if indigestion occurred in the heart. He found himself taking a step forward towards the boy, intent on… what, exactly? 

Hugging him? 

Patting him on the shoulder? 

Delivering a Hallmark-card-worthy speech about fatherhood? 

The exact action was unimportant because, before Lex could even decide, Connor flinched violently and took two steps back. Which he found rather odd, given that out of the two of them, Lex was not the one capable of snapping the other in half with one hand. This reaction also had the unnerving effect of making Lex himself feel rather cowed, which was not a natural state of being for a man who owns several private satellites and a healthy-funded death ray division.

“Well, you see,” Lex started cautiously, taking a visible step back at the boy’s clear discomfort.

“I don’t know how to be—” (and here he mentally tried on several words in quick succession: A father?, A guardian?, something approximating a less morally ambiguous and functioning human being?) 

“—normal about this. But I’d like to make you comfortable. Would you care to sit down? So we may… talk.”

Connor gave him the sort of look normally reserved for mysterious packages that beeped ominously. “About what?”

Lex floundered. “About… school?”

Connor laughed in a way that contained as much joy as a tax auditor, and twice the scorn. 

“School’s fine. Why do you care?”

Ouch. Ok that was fair, but still ouch. The snide remark stung twice. Once because this hatred came from a son Lex had just newly acquired (and he was not going to panic about that. He wasn’t.), and once more because the real blame belonged to a completely different Lex altogether. A distinction he had no way of pointing out without sounding highly suspicious. 

Previous-Lex had done all the unfortunate parenting groundwork, by not doing any parenting at all. At best, previous-Lex had seen Connor as little more than a pawn. At worst, he was a biological footnote reminding him to be more thorough with the next questionable science project. 

“I care because…” Lex began grandly, and then quickly abandoned whatever overwrought speech he might have been about to make in favor of something that would make the superhuman in front of him look less likely to bodily throw Lex, or himself out of the 60th floor window. Could Conner even fly yet?

“…because I think I should have a long time ago. And I’d like to start now.”

Connor stared at him with the kind of flat, expressionless look that could mean anything from “I don’t believe you” to “I am currently ranking methods of patricide by efficiency.” Eventually he settled on just shrugging, and letting out another. 

“Whatever.”

And then, against all logic and narrative probability, Connor walked into the room, stiffly passed him in the entry way, and then finally took a seat on the couch set by the main kitchen.  

Lex followed in a kind of auto-pilot daze, trying not to stare too obviously at the boy’s face. Now that he had the proper context, the familiarity was even more glaring.

Conner was many things, but a clone of Superman was certainly not one of them. The all too familiar curve of his eye, and the sharp shape of his mouth that he had steadily been getting used to looking at every time he caught his reflection since waking up in this world were a dead give away.

No. Conner couldn’t be Superman’s complete genetic clone, because he looked way too much like Lex .

“Are you just going to stand there all day, or what?” Connor muttered, clearly unnerved by the staring.

Lex scrambled to sit down, trying to maintain a billionaire’s dignity while moving with all the grace of an upended chair. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again when he realized he had absolutely no idea what one was supposed to say in situations like this. 

Presumably, there had to be a book somewhere out there that explained how one ought to proceed in this sort of situation. Lex imagined a chapter on ‘etiquette and formalities’ in another oh so helpfully titled book like ’Parenting for Sociopaths ’ that he had unfortunately never had the chance to stumble across.

Luckily, Connor spoke first.

“If this is about what you asked me before, I’m not going to give you what you want!”

Baffled, Lex frowned. “And what do I want exactly?”

Conner seemed to misread his words for coyness. Newly enraged he responds with a passionate, “I’m not going to let you adopt me just so you can use me to one-up Superman! I’m not a pawn in one of your schemes!”

And in that instant, Lex realized with all the clarity of a man suddenly aware he’s been wearing his shirt inside out the whole day—that yes, this must be exactly what the other Lex had intended. He’d invited his only son here to use him in another petty revenge scheme against Superman.

Lex felt a profound wave of resentment course through him.

Seriously, Previous-Lex? Using your child as a publicity stunt , like some kind of spiteful divorcee? That was low. Even for him.

Then the second part of what Conner had said finally registered in Lex’s mind.

Oh shit.

He had no legal rights to his kid. 

None whatsoever. 

Did Conner even have a legal identity? Birth certificate? Social Security number? Passport? Driver’s permit? Could the boy even open a bank account, or was he technically still classified as “miscellaneous Kryptonian experiment #47B” in some government basement file? Surely he must have some form of documentation if he was attending school right?

The question came attached with an entire caravan of other questions, each one more catastrophic than the last, each making it painfully obvious how little Lex actually knew about his own son. His sixteen-year-old, going-on-toddler son. His half-human—dear lord—and half-Kryptonian son.

And so here he was, Lex Luthor, one of the most powerful men on the planet, realizing he couldn’t even say with confidence whether his child was legally allowed to buy cough syrup.

The thought knocked entire sections of his usual scheming apparatus offline. Internally, he even struck “artificially raising the global price of lead to inconvenience Superman” from his to-do list. Even though he could afford to buy Conner a personal mountain of lead suits embroidered with his initials. Just the thought of somehow potentially harming his child now seemed unnatural to him.

He opened his mouth, intending to say something clever, or at least devastatingly insightful, and was instantly ambushed by a thousand other questions crowding in all at once–

‘How long have you been out of your pod?’

‘ Are those bastards in the Justice League still keeping you in a cave like some sort of homeless teenage fugitive?’

‘ Please tell me that hoodie is just a bad fashion sense and not evidence they refuse to give you money for clothes.’

‘ Have you been eating?’

‘No seriously, have you been eating anything besides stale pizza and energy drinks scrounged up by the other wayward, cave-dwelling teenagers you’ve been squatting with?’

The questions piled up faster than he could swallow them down, forming a knot in his throat. In the end, all of that raw concern shrank down into the smallest, safest thing he could manage:

“That’s understandable. You have every reason to be wary of me.”

“I do? I— I mean, yes! Yes, I do.” Conner stammered, tripping over his own insistence like someone trying to convince a store clerk they definitely were old enough to buy cigarettes.

And Lex saw it then. The hostility, the sarcasm, the brittle sharpness, all of it was just armor. Armor stretched thin over a boy who had never been given the chance to figure out how to be around people. Social interaction wasn’t just a skill he lacked; it was a foreign language he had little to no experience with. 

The realization hit Lex so hard he wanted to wrap his kid in bubble wrap, lock him in the world’s safest vault, and not let him out until he was at least twenty-one. Preferably twenty-five.

Forcing down the sudden, feral urge to become a helicopter parent, Lex steadied himself. “I don’t expect you to sign anything today—or even anytime soon. Trust… trust is something built over time.”

Conner was staring at him now like he was the half-alien in the room.

“However,” Lex pressed on, “despite our… complicated history, the fact still remains that you are my son. Your safety is my top priority. And it has very recently come to my attention that the Justice League is doing… a laughably bad job of ensuring that.”

He lets the silence stretch, letting that sink in for a moment before adding, “That’s why I hope you understand my reasoning for someday wanting some sort of legal precedent over your wellbeing.”

Conner’s expression cracked. It was completely unguarded now, and painfully raw. Vulnerability written so openly across his face it made Lex’s chest ache. This was a boy who thought he was supposed to be indestructible, and yet in reality he was barely holding on. Pieced together with little more than scotch tape and stubbornness.

Lex wanted to strangle every single adult who had failed his child. Every supposed hero who had decided it was fine to leave him wandering through life like a lost puppy no one wanted to claim. And then, on top of it, they’d let him come here—alone—to meet with someone as dangerous as Lex Luthor .

The thought that they might not even know where Conner was made his blood boil. 

At the very least, Lex promised himself, this boy would be leaving here today with no fewer than three discreet tracking devices woven into his clothing. Because damn it, if his teenaged-toddler son was going to insist on wandering into situations with potentially predatory figures, then Lex was going to make damn sure he wasn’t doing it unmonitored.

“I… I don’t understand what you want from me,” Conner said at last. His voice was small, stripped of all bravado. All previous traces of anger were nowhere to be found.

If Lex hadn’t been sure the boy would detonate from it on the spot, he would have hugged him then.

“Let’s just take this one day at a time,” Lex said softly instead. 

“For now, I’d very much like it if you stayed for dinner. How about that?”

“O-oh. Uh… yeah. Okay. Sure.”

Conner was trying to be brave again, rebuilding flimsy shields around himself now that he realized this meeting wasn’t going to be over as quickly as he previously thought. But Lex could see straight through him. Every nervous flicker of his eyes, every twitch of his fingers. Conner was as easy to read as a book.

Or maybe a better comparison would be a newborn.

And when Lex looked into those eyes—bright and familiar, stubborn in shape but so startlingly blue—he saw something that unbalanced him completely.

Hope. Pure, unfiltered hope.

It wasn’t trust. Not yet. But it wasn’t rejection either.

Lex allowed himself the faintest of smiles.

For now, that was enough.