East Coast Gazette

All right, you guys got a preview a few days ago, and now, here we go:

Arc pt 1/?: In which Conner never sees it coming, Clark should know better, Lex should communicate better, and Geoffrey is not actually Quasimodo. Happy reading!

Conner found out his dad was running for president when he stepped out of Whole Foods with half a brownie hanging out of his mouth and got assaulted by the entire North American press corps.

“Conner—do you have any comment on your father’s decision to enter the Democratic primary?” somebody had shouted at him, to which Conner felt compelled to reply, “What the fuck?” and drop his groceries in the process, eggs splattering across the pavement.

It was moments like this, Conner reflected glumly five minutes later, down on his hands and knees crawling out from a mass of flashbulbs and screamed questions, that he really wished that Superman could make a brief reappearance. As it was, Clark was probably at home, freaking out next to some kind of transmitter that hooked up to an implanted GPS slash radio that relayed Conner’s every move. Conner loved his father, but he had no illusions as to the depth of Lex Luthor’s crazy: it was dark and magical and extremely hi-tech.

It was pure luck that let Conner slip away from the madding crowd and down into the Norlina subway stop, half tumbling down two steep flights of stairs and dashing through the turnstile as he swiped his card. Conner was pretty sure he lost a chunk of his hair to the closing subway car doors but the entertainment value of seeing Melissa O’Brian from Action New 16 with her face pressed up against the glass in what looked like an extremely painful way was worth it.

As soon as the car started peeling away from the station—and Melissa O’Brian’s considerable amount of concealer—Conner dug through his jean pockets, tugging out his cell phone and stabbing speed dial four, and as soon as he heard his father pick up he yelled, “You’re running for president?”

Lex made a dismissive noise.

“Dad,” Conner promised, “I’m going to kill you!”

“Conner, really, don’t you think you’re overreacting a little?” Lex asked, voice wry. “It’s not as if you didn’t see this coming after my last senate race.”

In the background, Conner could hear Clark saying, “I told you we should have had a family meeting.”

“I was just attacked by like, three-quarters of the reporters in America!” Conner shouted over the sound of the rails. “I would know! I’ve spell-checked half of them!”

“I left you a voicemail,” his dad said evenly. Conner pulled his phone away to glare at the display, and there it was in the right hand corner of the screen: 1 new voicemail. “You should really check your messages more,” Lex was saying when Conner brought the phone back to his ear.

Conner tore at his hair. “I was coming out of the grocery store,” he moaned. “I was eating a brownie. I was coming out of the grocery store eating a brownie and then I dropped my groceries and now the only things in my refrigerator are a thing of mustard and Geoffrey’s God damn eye drops!”

“He should really just go to my ophthalmologist for that,” Lex chided.

“You suck!” Conner snapped and hung up, snapping his phone shut. And wasn’t until he leaned against a handrail, running his hands through his hair, that noticed everybody else in the subway car was staring at him. Wincing, Conner waved awkwardly. “Sorry. You know. About that.”

A guy in a hoodie gave him a sympathetic look. “Dude,” he said to Conner. “You know—it’s not like everybody didn’t see this presidential run coming.”

Conner gaped at him. The rest of the people in the car nodded.

After the Smallville High Brain Trust had strung Conner up half-naked and beaten and concussed in a field, Conner’s lifetime of media invisibility had dissolved. No one could have stopped the tsunami of public interest and it was only worse because Conner refused each and every single interview request—and still did when they trickled in one or two every season. It was nobody’s business. Conner knew the Luthor family notoriety was equal parts boon and bane—but at least he had money and bodyguards and an army of lawyers, all three of which Terry and Whitney had none.

So it had been weird to come back to Metropolis and get recognized—and even though it’d been a decade since Smallville and the corn field and the worst teen angst outing ever, Conner was still shy to be recognized. And everybody—Conner could tell—in that train car recognized him.

“It’s true,” a girl nearby said, her glasses glinting in the light. She held up a flier. “There’s actually a Luthor for America meet-up tonight at the Pinter Center at MetU.”

“I got a Facebook message about that,” somebody else piped up. “What time is it supposed to be?”

The girl looked to the left. “Starts at 7:30—they’re ordering pizza.”

“Arriving at West Eden, with transfers to lines three and four,” the mechanized announcer said as the subway car screeched to a halt.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Conner muttered, and stomped out of the train car.

*

Everybody—Conner and Geoffrey included, Conner admitted—had thought it would be easy, instinctive, as simple as breathing. For most of Conner’s life and all of it that had really mattered Geoffrey and Conner had been locked in orbit around one another, admiring, and that shift from best friends to the slick suggestion of body heat had crept in slow, cautious. Conner had been gun-shy and more than a little fucked up and Geoffrey was still trying to find some way to hide and or destroy all the extra-small lubricated condoms Eve had put in his locker as a Happy Break Up! present, and it had always been easy and unhurried between them—there was no rush.

But they’d forgotten that the world moved at a different pace than they did, and that outside of the artificially calm heartbeat of St. Ann’s, there were colleges and photographers and other boys and other girls—that their money and names meant something. As grateful as Conner was to have never really understood the power of the Luthor name as a kid, he wished somebody had pulled him aside for a reality check before he’d stepped into his first college class—or that Geoffrey hadn’t been nearly three thousand miles away, building castles out of air in Rhode Island.

College was bad and good, but mostly bad, and Conner had gone from living in dorms—total impossibility, thanks US Weekly—to student off-campus apartments—similarly foolish, thanks TMZ—to moving into the half-floor penthouse downstairs from his parents. He wrote the first ten pages of a lot of really terrible novels and missed Geoffrey constantly—stayed up way too late at night staring at Geoffrey doing math problems through the iSight camera on his laptop, which even Conner recognized was creepy and weird. But his loneliness was nearly tangible, and he missed Geoffrey, wanted Geoffrey, and for the first time in his life it was more than whatever stupid fight they’d had last week that was separating them.

Nobody even felt bad for him. Instead, they tended to ask questions like, “Why don’t you just use your family jet to fly over and see him every week?” and Conner couldn’t exactly answer, “Because my dad says that’s even creepier than the webcam thing, you douchebag.”

As it was, Conner did abuse the family jet as frequently as possible, but five years waiting for Geoffrey to become a B.Arch had dragged and dragged until Conner had finally started picking up some freelancing work—which of course meant he’d been in Tokyo, in soapland, talking to waifish underage prostitutes while Geoffrey had been graduating. Which, unsurprisingly, Geoffrey hadn’t taken well. God damn National Geographic anyway.

So when they were finally together—on the same continent, in the same city, arguing where to put what chair in the same apartment—they’d both assumed it’d be easy and smooth as Mrs. Banner’s sweet potato pie.

Instead, in those first twelve months:

1.They broke up three times;
2.Nearly got evicted during break-up number three when Gawker and TMZ raced to break the story and paparazzi started camping out on the sidewalk in front of their building hoping to telephoto Conner bonging whiskey and sleeping with serial killers or something;
3.Got grounded at Christmas when Geoffrey got kind of punchy and told a hilarious story about getting drunk at a frat party his freshman year at RISD and making out with a Kappa—after which Conner had flipped the entire dinner table with his telekineses and righteous fury and they’d all ended up eating take-out Mexican and Chinese and pizza;
4.Had to live through his father’s senate campaign.

Year two had been a little better, and by year three, Conner admitted that despite his and Geoffrey’s best efforts they’d never be normal and gave in to their pedigrees, moving to a 23rd story loft in the oldest section of West Eden. There was building security and a doorman with a questionable employment history, but who was perfectly comfortable shoving photographers out of the way so Conner could get home relatively unmolested. They lived across the down the hall from the guy Conner’s dad had beaten to get his senate seat, which made for awkward morning elevator conversations.

It was year four now and Conner needed his dad in a presidential election like he needed a knife in the eye. Geoffrey was sort of like a zombie these days, studying for the last sections of his AREs; Lois was using all but the most ethically-questionable methods known to man to badger Perry White into retirement so she could rightfully take her place as editor in chief of the Daily Planet; his grandmother had decided to start caring a lot about third-world adoption—and now this.

“I—have got—to start—working out,” Conner gasped to himself, rounding a corner and seeing the other quarter of the Metropolis press corp and a couple of news vans from the big three parked in front of his building.

“Give me a fucking break,” he moaned, took a deep breath, and braced himself for the final sprint, jacket flapping behind him.

And if the 11 o’clock news of every major network featured Conner Clark Luthor, scion of the LexCorp empire and only son of the junior senator from Kansas and Democratic candidate for the Office of the President of the United States tripping—full-body tumble and all—into his apartment building, Conner decided he didn’t care. If his dad had wanted to avoid negative publicity, he damn well should have engineered a less embarrassing kid—or at least informed his existing embarrassing one that he was running for God damn president.

“Have I ever told you how hot you are when you’re covered in panic sweat?” Geoffrey asked, and brought Conner a bag of frozen peas, setting it gently on Conner’s rapidly-darkening bruise, an ugly one that blossomed out over his left eye. “Oh, that’s going to be nasty when it sets in.”

Conner punched him in the side. “You just wait until I tell my dad you hit me in anger.”

Geoffrey rolled his eyes. “Because I’m the crazy jealous one who throws furniture. With my mind.”

Conner glared.

Holding up his hands in surrender, Geoffrey added, “Yes, okay, because I—” and here he started reciting “—foolishly and cruelly engaged in pre-sexual congress with a frat boy, for which I am eternally sorry.” He smirked. “Forever. Times six.”

Conner smacked him in the side. “You don’t have to say that part.”

“But it was in the original oath,” Geoffrey said, too innocent, blue eyes huge and wide.

“I wrote that oath when I was like nineteen,” Conner muttered, flushing.

Grinning, Geoffrey lifted the peas, touching his fingertips gently to Conner’s forehead. “And you still mean every word of it,” he said absently, and wincing, Geoffrey added, “This looks pretty bad—what the hell did you hit your head on?”

Closing his hands over the peas, Conner groaned, leaning forward until his cheek was pillowed on Geoffrey’s shoulder. “I came out of the rotating doors wrong and took a header into the lobby,” he moaned.

“Oh, good,” Geoffrey said, cheerful. “Then it’s all over TV. This is going to be fun.”

It was, all things considered, extremely lucky that Conner and Geoffrey were Conner and Geoffrey, because to say that Conner and Geoffrey had scary, crazy parents was possibly the grossest understatement in the history of time.

“Do you think we defaulted to each other?” Conner had once asked, lying on their living room floor eating Craisins by the handful, because nobody ever said being cool was hereditary.

“It’s better not to think that way,” Geoffrey had replied, talking around the tube of superglue in his mouth, bent over a magnifier, building a scale model for work. Conner had stared at him for along time before he’d said:

“You’re right—we’re probably just not cool enough to date anybody else.”

“That’s the spirit,” Conner had muttered, and settled in for the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon on USA.

*

At half past seven Conner had finally caved to earnest starvation and called down to the front lobby for Norman Hewitt from the LA Times and traded him ten minutes for him to deliver a three day supply of Chinese food from Lucky Dragon’s on Fearrington Street and a fridge-pack of Sunburst.

“If you forget the duck sauce,” he said seriously, “the deal’s off.”

“You are fucked up, Luthor,” Hewitt told him, forty minutes and two giant brown bags of lo mein and chicken and broccoli later. “You are seriously fucked up.”

“It’s what happens when you grow up under heavy media scrutiny,” Conner explained, and waved him into the apartment, saying, “We can do the ten minutes in here.”

“Am I getting your man-wife, too?” Hewitt asked, grinning.

Conner cocked an eyebrow. “You know as well as I do he’s never part of any deals I make.”

“I can always hope you’ll change your mind,” Hewitt said, looking over Conner’s shoulder into the apartment—down the hall to the shut-tight door of Geoffrey’s mostly-unused office. “You’d make it a lot easier for both of you if you just cracked your iron lockbox ten millimeters.”

Shrugging, Conner led him into the kitchen. “Come on, you’ve got ten minutes and I start counting—” he glanced at his Full Metal Alchemist watch “—now.”

Conner had once upon a time thought the way his father interacted with Clark was disconcerting, equal parts possessive and possessed, but now he thought he understood: Luthor’s want everything, and Conner was been taught from the day he was born that if he wanted it enough, he could have anything. There was privilege to the marrow of his bones. Geoffrey might not have minded being forced into Conner’s spotlight, but Conner was his father’s son, and jealous with the people he loved—and Conner loved Geoffrey best, enough that he couldn’t find edges to the geography of his feelings, and no one else would ever have the opportunity to look.

Hewitt pulled out a digital recorder, all business. “How did you find out about your father’s decision to run?” he asked, tugging out a pen and reporter’s notebook for good measure.

Conner rolled his eyes. “My voicemail—can you believe it? No, I’m not kidding, and yes, you’re free to quote on me on that.”

“Classic Luthor,” Hewitt said, grinning. “All right: historically, you’ve been an infamous media hermit. I don’t think anybody knew what you even looked like until the Smallville incident broke—”

Scowling, Conner said, “No brownie points for bringing up teenage trauma.”

“—and you were absent during his house and senate runs,” Hewitt continued, blithe and untroubled, the bastard, “so the question is, will you be participating in your father’s presidential campaign?”

Conner thought about it for a long moment before he said, “I’ll support my father to the best of my ability and however he needs me to, but I’ve always had faith in his convictions and I don’t doubt he can do this without my being there and smiling awkwardly.”

“Will Geoffrey be there?” Hewitt pressed.

Conner scowled. “Shouldn’t you be asking me if you think that being in relationship with a man will destroy my father’s chances at a successful run or something?”

Hewitt raised his eyebrows.

Conner rolled his eyes and sighed. “I like to believe that the country has come a long way since people had to resign their elected positions or quit their jobs because of who they loved, but I think it’d also be naïve to think it’ll be a cakewalk.”

“And once again, just for posterity: will Geoffrey be there?” Hewitt asked.

“He’s deformed you know,” Conner said, annoyed. “Truly and tragically hideous. I hide him in the apartment because he’s a living Quasimodo who can build skyscrapers, and I believe if I exposed the American populace to his disfigurement it would be detrimental to my father’s campaign.”

The door to Geoffrey’s office opened and a rubber gum eraser came flying out—just falling short of hitting Conner in the side.

Hewitt grinned and made a note. “Moving right along. There’ve been accusations in the past—whether or not they’re serious can be debated—that Lex Luthor wants to take over the world, and after LexCorp and congress and now a run for the White House, you can sort of see where the claims are coming from. Any opinion on that subject?”

Conner blinked. “You know,” he said oddly, “you’re probably the first person to ask that question to my face.”

“I’m fearlessly stupid like that,” Hewitt replied.

“Well, the thing is, the way I look at it,” Conner said, digging into a container of fried rice, “ just because my father might want to take over the world doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be good at it.”

Hewitt snapped his reporter’s notebook shut and grinned.

*

“He bought a journalist money-shot from you for the pittance of three days of Chinese food?”

“Dad!” Conner wailed in agony.

“Excuse me: he bought your integrity from you for the pittance of three days of Chinese food?”

Conner sighed and cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder, gathering up his latest metric ton of FedEx boxes. “Dad, reporters were eight-deep in front of my building—I wasn’t about to go out there and come back with another shiner, all right? And we were hungry.”

“Well,” Lex said, voice tight, “I hope Geoffrey understands that I’m interpreting this as the modern day equivalent of you prostituting yourself for his benefit.”

He’d tried working second shift on the copydesk of the Daily Planet, but there were constant and uncomfortable ethical questions—could he edit business stories? Could Conner write heds for articles about politics? First local, then state, and now nationally? And the day that Rhonda Jasper, the copy chief had come by his desk uncomfortably, asking if he felt all right with managing all the entertainment and reviews every Thursday afternoon, Conner had saved her the trouble and resigned. “I’m really sorry, Conner,” she’d said, and meant it, so Conner had given her his Brave Little Toaster grin and promised there were no hard feelings, and to point any good freelance work in his direction. So now he wrote blurbs for libraries, edited nonfiction and biographies, and when he was desperate—and it had to be true desperation—he ghost-wrote scifi fantasy for tech millionaires who could string together two nouns and an adjective. And between Geoffrey’s respectable salary at Dutch & Moller and Conner’s steady trickle of work, they lived fairly comfortably—and tried not to think about the fact that the apartment was bought and paid for by somebody else.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what this is like, Dad,” Conner agreed brightly. “And sometimes, when things get really tight around the time to pay the bills, Geoffrey walks me out onto the a corner, pulls down my jeans and starts asking for the highest bidder.”

On the other end of the line, his father made a wounded noise. There was a brief shuffle before Clark came onto the phone and said, voice reproachful, “Conner, you know your father can’t handle it when you say things like that.”

“Then he should stop talking about jerking off for the press,” Conner retorted, thinking tangentially that maybe he should rephrase that.

“You two deserve each other,” Clark said, disgusted. “How’s Geoffrey’s studying coming along?”

Conner glanced into the solarium, to where Geoffrey was surrounded by ferns and orchids and huddled with his drafting table, his dozens and dozens of prep books—murmuring to himself in the language of math and physics. His fourth year at RISD, Geoffrey had come home for Christmas with an armful of books about wood and steel, and Conner had flipped through them, lying in Geoffrey’s bed, and been jealous of bricks and frame and concrete. He felt that now again, just little pricks, and if Conner sneered at Geoffrey’s textbooks, that wasn’t for anybody else’s prying eyes.

“It’s coming. He’s barely looked up from his books except to eat and bathe.” Conner frowned. “And honestly? There hasn’t been enough bathing going on.”

“Any chance of hosing him down?” Clark laughed.

Grinning, Conner glanced over his shoulder: Geoffrey hadn’t moved an inch, still mumbling to himself. “Not unless I can convince him there’s something he needs to be studying for the AREs in the roof garden,” Conner said. “How’re you?”

“Fighting with your father’s media advisors,” Clark sighed, and after a beat said, “I’m sorry we didn’t schedule a real time to talk with you about this campaign—we should have.”

Conner shrugged, and wondered if it telegraphed over the phone line—or if he should give in and buy a videophone like his father had been pestering him to do for half a decade now. But Conner had strong feelings about giving his dad more opportunities to spy on him, and those generally veered in the direction of no.

“I’m used to it,” he said. “How’s D.C.?”

Conner heard his father pick up on a different line and say, gleeful, “Ted Haggert hit on Clark.”

“Lex!” Clark shouted, voice overlaying Conner saying, “Oh my God, Ted Haggert? That guy used to run a megachurch out in Colorado! Clark, you’re like, a homosexual beacon from Satan!” and then Clark muttered, “I hate you both,” and hung up.

It left a silence over the phone line for a long time until Lex finally cleared his throat and said, “This is going to be different than before—worse than the Senate race.”

Conner looked out his living kitchen window, at the persistent crowd at his front door, the line of news vans disrupting traffic. “I know.”

The Senate race had started the same way, but this would be different—this would be months before the primaries and then Iowa and New Hampshire, the steamy heat of Florida and the crackling hot of California, how it felt to drive endlessly though the middle forty of America, down interstates in a Luthor for America RV. Conner could already imagine it—putting a smile on his face at four in the morning when the caravan stopped to recharge, the red-eye flights.

And Conner thought he should be mad, that after all his father could still be selfish, to want things that weren’t good for his family—that were unfair to Conner, but mostly there was a sense of inevitability. It was stupid and impossible but Conner thought maybe he’d always known it would come to this, that he’d been ready since day one, like he’d been waiting.

“Look, Dad,” Conner said, to forestall any apologies or more awkward silence, “you should know this already—but you’ve got my vote, all right?”

And when Lex said, “Thank you, Conner,” he sounded too serious, his voice a little shaky, but whatever he meant to say and couldn’t out loud came through clear as a bell. And when Conner fell asleep alone that night, curled up on the living room couch, he could hear Geoffrey a murmur nearby, and the steady drone of the television—of CNN broadcasting his father’s face over and over again: bright and brave and unbeatable, the sure thing.

*

TBC