East Coast Gazette

Arc pt 3/?

Happy reading, for previous parts click either under works in progress [sv] Arc, or, click on the fic:arc tag.

They spent the next three weeks on the front page of every newspaper and magazine and headlining every television newsmagazine in the entire world, it felt like—Conner talked to Stone Philips, Diane Sawyer, some guy from the New York Times, Hewitt from the L.A. Times, someone named Mary from the Trib, and a woman from the Houston Chronicle who was totally not psyched to be working for the Houston Chronicle.

“I like Texas,” Conner had said awkwardly, staring in blank horror down at the crib sheet of issue statements Sherry had given him along with her patented Warning Look.

“Really,” the reporter had said, sounding unconvinced and from Boston.

“It’s—you know,” Conner continued, giving desperate looks to the rest of the Luthor for America media staff. “Uh. Beef is delicious.”

There’d been a long sigh over the phone. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“What the fuck,” Conner said, hanging up half an hour later. “I mean, seriously, what the fuck?”

“They’re journalists, Conner,” said Mandy, one of the ex-journalism major interns. “It’s how they are.”

Glaring, Conner snapped, “I’m a journalist, I’m not like that!”

Mandy patted his arm. “Oh, Conner—you’re not a journalist,” she told him, and then reminded him he had a meeting with Matt Lauer in half an hour, and if he went on national television wearing his YES, BUT NOT WITH YOU t-shirt, Clark would die of embarrassment by-proxy. And an ugly, embarrassingly public death was the last thing that Clark—who’d spent the last three weeks on the campaign trail talking to single mothers and stay-at-home soccer moms—needed.

People kept asking not-so-subtly whether or not his father(s) had made Conner gay and Conner kept cracking the same, “My parents are gay?” joke over and over again until it felt stupid even to himself. He remembered that the senate campaign was the same three questions over and over, and here it was the same three ethical moral conundrums every time he talked to a reporter. He wished he was younger, or hell, fresh off of being scarecrowed in Smallville, when this degree of scrutiny would have been expressly forbidden, and he could have curled up in the safety of the West Eden apartment and watched all the boxed-set DVDs of Stargate: Atlantis and ask Geoffrey’s about art deco buildings downtown.

And it was during a phone interview with Savage Love that Conner finally snapped, a skull-splitting migraine curling around the back of his neck and pounding on his temples—Dan Savage asking, “Seriously—did your family foster homosexuality or something?” that Conner snarled:

“No, actually—but I did make Geoffrey gay.”

“Really, and how did you do that?” Savage said, fascinated, and Conner dug around his desk for his painkillers.

“With my cock, I guess,” Conner snapped. “Now—if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go find some opiates.”

It was on the wire less than an hour after The Stranger published, two days later.

The next time Conner saw his father—exactly fifteen minutes after that—Lex was lying prone on a fainting couch in their house in Georgetown, Clark changing the cold compress on his forehead while giving Conner darkly-accusing looks over the videophone. “I don’t even know what to say to you, Conner Clark Luthor,” Clark had said, mouth tight and disappointed, which made Conner feel like sixteen kinds of scum. “You know how hard it’s been—and I know it’s been hard for you, too, but I just—you should know better,” he concluded, and wandered off after Sherry, who’d called for him from off the viewscreen, her voice soft as she said, “Mr. Kent? I need a minute.”

There was a long silence filled up with Conner staring at Lex’s unmoving body and listening to the sullen nothingness before he finally cracked and said, “Look—Geoffrey’s already furious with me, okay? And I’m sorry, but there’re only so many times that I can—”

Lex flung the compress off of his face, rocketing to his feet to scowl directly into the viewscreen, saying low, “Conner—there is no limit to the number of times people will ask you stupid questions, and no limit to the number of times you might have to answer them in your lifetime. And this? Is unacceptable,” before the ended the call—picture disappearing into black with just a horizon line of color, melting into the LCD viewer.

“Oh,” Conner said to the black screen, “you have got to be fucking with me.”

*

If Lex was, it was the worst joke in history. And no matter how frequently Conner called or emailed or v-phoned, Lex could only spare him a minute or two before he dashed off. “He’s really not angry any more, Conner,” Clark sighed, during a snatched few minutes between speaking engagements, “he’s really just that busy—and maybe still a little hurt.” Conner—toothbrush still hanging out of his mouth—had shouted, “This is totally immature!” and even as he’d started hanging up the phone, he’d heard Clark mutter, “Which explains where you get it from.”

The publicity machine kept rolling. Conner got booked on Oprah, in part to apologize for his outburst and also to give a humanizing element to his relationship—now marred with the specter of drug abuse and sexual coercion. Everything was soft-lit and rounded edges, and the hair and make-up people had attacked him in the green room and forced him to put on a pale salmon-colored shirt despite Conner’s wailing protests that he was a redhead! This was a travesty! Were they trying to ruin his father?

Chicago was cold and slick from November rain showers, the slush that came down before the snow, and Conner had spent most of the night before his appearance on the show on the phone with Geoffrey, sulking and wishing Geoffrey was there. “You know I’d do it if you really want me to,” Geoffrey had reminded him softly. “It’s not too late for me to catch a plane.”

“You’re never part of the deal,” Conner had said, automatic. “Not any deals I make.”

“No,” Geoffrey had said, much-defrosted since the ’You told Dan Savage what?’ debacle, “no I guess I’m not.”

“Mr. Luthor? When we’re ready for you on air, Judy will walk you to the edge of the curtain, just step out and go to your left—there’ll be a lot of lights, but please don’t be startled,” said one of a million backstage producers who’d taken to manhandling him from point A to B—and so Conner just nodded oddly, tugged awkwardly at the sport coat they’d tossed over the shirt, felt restless in his dark blue Chucks.

And when Judy did push him out in front of the studio crowd, Conner suffered a moment of sheer blindness before he pasted a smile to his face, going on instinct, ignoring the deafening shouts and applause, the hundreds of people in the audience staring holes through him—felt his way to the plush seats, where Oprah said, “It’s so great to see you,” and kissed his cheek, told him to sit down. She asked him about his charity work and about the campaign trail, what it was like to be the center of so much media speculation, about what had prompted his semi-meltdown on the phone.

“It wasn’t really a meltdown,” Conner said, uncomfortable with the sheer amount of sympathy he could feel welling up in the room. “I just—I’ve always been extremely private about my personal relationships, and the sudden attention has been…a bit overwhelming.”

“And what about the opiates,” Oprah asked, eyes wide with concern, interest, affectionate acceptance. Conner thought about setting her stupid studio on fire with his mind, but considered that it might make him look even worse.

“I have severe migraines. I was talking about my Zomig,” he admitted, wryly. “I’m sure TheSmokingGun.com has already dug up illegal copies of my prescriptions and put them online—I promise, I’m way too whipped to ever do anything as cool as drugs.”

He was right about the prescriptions being online, and apparently being too whipped—by Geoffrey, who said, deeply unamused, “Amazing, given that you were supposed to have tamed me with your cock,”—won him major points with the eighteen to dead female demographic, and the controversy disappeared, like a lot of things, into a hush of ether in the Luthor for America campaign behemoth.

By Christmas, opinion polls said Lex rated higher in voter consideration than most of the candidates, but still lagged behind the democratic incumbent and the Republican favorite—which made celebrating Christmas about as fun as being stabbed in the eye with a tack. The penthouse was decorated as beautifully as ever, with an enormous Christmas tree and a lighting display that was the envy of Rockefeller Center, strung out like fairy lights on the roof garden, but Lex spent almost all of it locked into his study-cum-war room.

“How is this not driving you completely insane?” Conner asked, finally, sitting at the dining room table with Clark—drinking heavily and steadily eating the leftovers from dinner that night.

Clark smiled tiredly at him. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Wasn’t this your entire crusade?” Conner demanded, frowning across the table. “Like, don’t let Dad take over the world?”

Like so many other things, the family history was unspoken, suggested, and Conner had found it like any other gossip-hungry kid: on the internet, in the back archives of the Daily Planet and the Inquisitor and on the gossip pages of so many magazines. Conner had known about the many loves of Lex Luthor and the farm boy who’d broken his heart a hundred thousand wives and girlfriends ago—but it wasn’t until recently that Conner really understood the long-running dispute between his father and Superman, about how the most powerful man in the world, and the most powerful man not of this world were enemies—before Conner. Before he’d come along and interrupted, put a semicolon in the story that hadn’t picked up until nine years later, when he’d been bubbling over with more questions than there were answers.

Clark raised his eyebrows. “Conner, do you realize your dad used to invest in things like killer robots?”

“I’m sure they could be programed to do good stuff, too,” Conner defended automatically and at Clark’s soft laugh, Conner asked, “Seriously—how is this not bugging you? This is the antithesis of everything you used to stand for, I mean—”

“Conner,” Clark finally interrupted, putting a hand on Conner’s shoulder, looking fond, “why were you willing to put up with Geoffrey during his AREs?”

Blinking hard, Conner said, “Because he’s going to be a great architect.”

“Exactly,” Clark said, grinning, and standing up to ruffle Conner’s hair, he added, “Good night, Conner—merry Christmas.”

And so December rolled into January and one morning, when Conner rolled over to say good morning to Geoffrey, he opened his eyes to see his pillow soaked in bright red, to taste blood in his mouth and on his face and still streaming out of his nose.

*

“Okay, I really think you’re overreacting,” Conner managed to say through a faceful of terry cloth.

After Conner had shaken Geoffrey awake, Geoffrey had taken one look at Conner, the bed, the pillow, and all that blood before rolling out of bed, pulling a sweatshirt on and stuffing a damp towel over Conner’s face, stuffing him into a coat and then into a car. And Geoffrey, who was already a notoriously-reckless driver, tore through downtown Metropolis—city speed limit: 30—at 65 mph, ignoring stop signs and traffic signals and narrowly missing a city bus before he jackknifed into a parking spot at Mercy Metro General.

“Shut up,” Geoffrey muttered, rushing Conner toward the ER entrance, “save your energy to make more blood.”

“It’s really not that big a deal,” Conner said, preternaturally calm. “It’s just a nosebleed.”

Geoffrey looked around the dimly-lit room, at the rows of uncomfortable looking chairs and mom sand their colicky babies, people with bloody rags tied around their hands—the long, long wait, and muttered, “fuck this,” to himself before turning to Conner and saying, “This from the guy who nearly gave himself a stroke when I got into a fender bender and needed to wear a wrist brace.”

“You could have been brain damaged,” Conner hissed. It was an old fight but he was determined not to lose it.

“Jesus,” Geoffrey muttered, and went storming off after a passing nurse—and before Conner could do something like beg him not to make a scene, Geoffrey grabbed her by the arm and whispered something close to her ear, low and hurried and intense. And as Conner watched her eyes widen, he groaned, because there was only one possible reason for her suddenly hot-footing toward him.

“Thanks a lot, jackass,” Conner muttered, ignoring the poisonous glances of the other ER patients as he was led to to a bed in triage. “This is going to be all over the internet by tomorrow morning,” he complained, climbing awkwardly onto the gurney—smearing blood on the sheets.

Stroking Conner’s hair away from his face and lifting the towel to inspect Conner’s nose, Geoffrey mumbled, “Ask me how much I care.”

“You should care,” Conner said, petulant, but the unnatural disengagement was starting to wear off now, and fear trickle in. He was cold and still in his pajamas, a little lightheaded—probably from the blood loss, he thought half in whisper—and there was a lot of blood on the towel, a lot. It had started off pale yellow and now it—wasn’t. “Holy crap,” he mumbled into the towel, “that’s…that’s a lot of blood.”

Geoffrey put a hand on the back of Conner’s neck, thumb stroking along his throat. “Don’t talk,” he suggested.

Conner glared at him. “I want a divorce.”

“You can do that later,” a doctor interrupted, looking mildly amused and all business, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “I’m Dr. Brennan—move the towel, please.”

*

Dr. Brennan peered at him and peered at him, and made “hmm” noises until he snapped off the gloves and said, “Okay, we’re going to have to suction out the blood clots in order for me to get a better look.”

“What?” Conner squawked. They’d replaced his towel—lost to the medical waste bin now—with cotton balls, but the blood kept coming. “I want less bleeding, not more.”

“And I promise that is my ultimate goal,” Brennan said, and five minutes, five shouts of violation, and one barely-restrained freakout later, Brennan was anesthetizing the back of Conner’s nose in preparation to cauterize something in his face. But if nothing else, it seemed to stop the bleeding, and Conner got checked into one of the upper floors for an unpleasantly numb and breathing-impaired overnight stay, with Geoffrey sitting watchful at his bedside, looking worried and wearing bags under his eyes.

“Hey,” Conner said, hoarse, a few hours later, “stop that. I’m the one who just had the inside of his head burnt shut.”

“We should make another appointment with your neurologist,” Geoffrey said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Conner asked.

Geoffrey stared at him for a long time before he stood up and said, “I’ll call his office right now—it’s morning, they should be open.”

“Wait, what the hell?” Conner asked, but Geoffrey was already ducking out of the private room, and then all Conner could do was watch the sunlight grow stronger and stronger in the frame of his window—change from rose gold to orange and finally into searing white as the city shrugged off its yawns. Metropolis at morning was soft, green blending with fog and the warm light in windows before the sun was bright enough to make shadows out of the dark. Conner had spent two of the last four weeks on the road: traveling between Chicago and New York and Washington D.C., a brief stop in Miami for a speech his father was giving—in perfect Spanish, the show-off—there, and then cross country again to Los Angeles, where the studio heads at 20th Century Fox, Searchlight, Miramax, and Dreamworks all came together to throw Luthor for America fundraisers. Conner spent most of it hiding in upscale bathrooms and from the press—and also from T.R. Knight, who always wanted to know if Conner was watching Grey’s Anatomy and wanted to talk about how he was single now.

Geoffrey had been gone for more than half an hour when Conner’s beside phone rang—which he answered, resigned.

“Hi, Clark,” he said and silently cursed Geoffrey for being such a rat. “It’s really not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal,” Clark huffed. “They had to cauterize something in your face.”

Sometimes, Conner really loved his mom. “That’s what I said!”

“That’s obviously a big deal,” Clark decided over the phone, and after a beat asked, “I’m guessing that if they’re letting you talk the bleeding stopped?”

“Yeah, I mean—I’m fine now. A little lightheaded, but the doctor said that was normal,” Conner said, and contemplating hospital food for a moment, added, “You should have somebody send me piles and piles of cookies. For my health.”

Clark laughed over the line, and in the background, Conner could hear the bustle and rush of dozens of other people. The last he knew, his parents were still in Los Angeles, running the press gamut long after Conner had called it quits, and yesterday morning he’d seen his father on Good Morning America—although that was on satellite feed so he could have been calling in from anywhere.

“Where are you guys, anyway?” Conner asked.

“Your dad’s in Oregon,” Clark answered, “don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I’m back in Smallville bunking down with your grandmother, who obviously heard you talking about cookies because she’s making you some as we speak.”

Conner grinned and leaned back in the bed. “Excellent,” he said, “all part of my master plan.”

They said their I love yous and I love you way better than mom, Grandmas and Hey!s and hung up—which left Conner in the unenviable position of reading all the pamphlets they left in his room (twice) before Geoffrey showed up again, bringing with him breakfast and a change of clothes, tough guy chai’s from the cafe near their apartment.

“Well,” Conner said reluctantly, cupping his hands around the insulated mug, “I guess I forgive you.”

Geoffrey smiled tightly at him. “You have an appointment with the neurologist’s office tomorrow.”

Conner frowned. “I take it back.”