East Coast Gazette

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.

*

*

Three weeks later, Geoffrey got his last set of ARE results back and immediately tackled Conner into bed—which would have been a lot hotter and sexier if he hadn’t then immediately fallen asleep.

Conner, because Geoffrey was a dead weight and not at all because it was kind of nice to pet him like a cat, stayed in bed anyway, typing one-handed on his laptop and running his fingers through Geoffrey’s hair with the other. He had emails from both Julie and Garrison, casting disturbingly similar aspersions on one another—although only Julie’s included a frighteningly detailed plan of how to break into Garrison’s apartment and kill him without leaving any signs of entry. Garrison talked extensively about Loretta, his new dealer. Conner suggested—purely for Garrison’s safety—that he should look into introducing Julie and Loretta in the (very) near future.

And since Geoffrey seemed content to sleep through the night that way, Conner eventually wormed his way out from underneath his six-ton arm and wandered into the kitchen. There were three stacks of manuscripts laid out on the counter: to be mailed, in progress, and oh fuck I should have already started these. Most people worked straight off of electronic documents but Conner had approximately twelve thousand multicolored Fineliners and God damn if he wasn’t going to use them—so he grabbed something off of the in-progress pile and headed up for the roof garden.

It was an unseasonably cold spring for Metropolis. Conner had gotten used to the sidewalks and buildings soaking up sunshine like ovens, radiating it outward again so that team rose late at night. Conner, during his extremely short love affair with Sin City, had thought that Metropolis at night looked like something out of a Frank Miller comic: a little sultry—but only from a distance. From his 23rd story view, Metropolis looked like an electric playground. Nearby, there were short, orange-windowed rowhouses and brownstones, squat apartments with rooftop gardens, overflowing with greenery nearest, and in the distance, slick, sleek, seamless skyscrapers glittered.

The sight of Metropolis shining only made it feel colder, and Conner abandoned his defensive position next to their wildly overgrown fern to retrieve a blanket, wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl. It was too dark, really, to do any work, but it felt good to listen to the city murmur below, to look at the burnt umber shadows of people in nearby windows and smell food and car exhaust and the occasional breath of cold, sweet oxygen.

In his more maudlin moments—which Lex attributed to Clark’s genetic contribution—Conner thought Metropolis was a dark-haired woman, and like Lois Lane who documented her ins and outs, Metropolis would have a laugh that filled entire rooms. In contrast Washington felt buttoned-up, the beltway like fine hemming, holding it all in tailored perfection, a city cut out of limestone and marble and artfully lit—beautiful and intimidating and elegant.

Conner had always felt awkward in the face of elegance, like he was in a complicated choreography: he knew all the steps—of course he did—but he was so busy making sure he did everything right he could hardly do anything at all. When he was 17, redoing his junior year at St. Ann’s, he’d come out of a subway station and tripped—face first—into an open recycling bin, and even then he’d been thinking about the physics test he was honor-bound to fail. Conner had always thought privately he’d probably been born above his station in life, despite how horrible and French feudalism it all sounded: he’d come from a glass tube and a family legacy of megalomaniac bastards—it didn’t seem right he shied from crowds and blushed when photographed.

“And it’s only going to get worse,” Conner told the fern, sighing into the blanket.

In the morning, he had a four-hour meeting scheduled with Lex’s publicists and campaign strategists, and knowing how time slowed and warped at the event horizon of his father’s political intentions, he could expect that four hours to balloon into six, then eight. And then he’d wake up on a jet and be headed toward Washington, kidnapped out of his ordinary existence to make nice with potential contributors and negotiate Clark and Lex’s latest peace treaty, to keep them from burning down their multi-million dollar townhouse in Georgetown, which would almost certainly hinder his father’s campaign.

And even if he resented it more than a little, Conner could never begrudge his father’s aspirations, his due credit. He’d meant what he’d told the L.A. Times.

His father did want to rule the world, and Conner wanted to see what he would do with it.

*

The Luthor for America campaign headquarters were across the street from the only Krispy Kreme in all of Metropolis, which Conner figured was the primary reason for the location of said headquarters. Considering it was barely eight a.m. and he was meeting with politicos, he was grateful for it, and stuffed three still-warm doughnuts into his mouth, one after another, washing it all down with the appallingly bad coffee from Newton’s Cafe next door. Conner knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Newton, and if ever there was an argument for the power of guilt by association, it was Conner walking past two Caribou Coffees, a Starbucks, and an indie hipster place that roasted its own fairly-traded shade-grown organic beans on site to go buy coffee at Newtons.

The actual office interior bore no resemblance to any other Luthor-affiliated office space Conner had ever known: the furniture was old and scuffed and looked as if it’d been collected from the dumpster area of the MetU South Campus dorms, there were ugly (defaced) motivational posters on the walls, and there was utter, unrelenting chaos. People shouted into telephones and shouted at fax machines and computers and typed in ALL CAPS on their BlackBerrys; there were television and video feeds running constantly, NPR faint in the distance, and Conner saw at least two dozen video phones and two dozen faces from different corners of the country reporting in.

He debated, briefly, sneaking away, but then Sherry—God damn her, Conner thought—caught sight of him and waved him over. Even her elbows looked harried, snapping her forearm and wrist in and out like a telegraphed shout, and Conner hustled, eating another doughnut for strength as he went.

“You’re late,” she told him, snatching up a tablet computer and a binder of loose paper, pen already tucked behind one ear, near-lost in her nest of red hair. She was wearing a black linen shirt and tan slacks, spike heels and no jewelry. Conner and Julie had once been in the process of betting whether or not Sherry actually had a soul when Lex had walked past and dropped a twenty and said flatly, “No,” which had pretty much ruined the entire thing because Conner’s dad was only ever wrong about women he tried to marry.

“I was on time,” Conner argued, winding around wayward campaign workers and following her tap-tap-tapping heels to a back conference room. “I was watching the crazy.”

“I was teleconferencing with some stockbroker in Norway,” Sherry muttered, sounding disgusted, tugging open a door and waving Conner inside. “How many women did you father have to propose to? I’m the only person in politics who’s ever been in the unenviable position of trying to convince people somebody is gay instead of just slutty.”

Conner covered his face. “Sherry,” he moaned.

“Please, Conner, grow a pair,” Sherry sighed, aggrieved.

“Not about my father’s sex life,” Conner snapped, glaring at her through his fingers.

Sherry gave him a pitying look over the thin, silver-wire frames of her glasses and said, monotone, “Okay,” and tapped around her laptop with her manicured nails, clearing her throat before she said, “This is going to be a long ride, Conner—longer than the Senate races or House races.”

Conner wished he had another doughnut.

“I’d give you some stupid campaign kid speech about smiling and thinking of the White House but I think you already know that song and dance,” Sherry continued, relentless and without any empathy. “Are you ready for this?”

Conner stared at her, morose. “No.”

“Good,” she said, turning back to her tablet. “Let’s talk about platform.”

Seven hours later, Conner finally dragged back into his building, sore and cranky and feeling six kinds of stupid. Sherry had spent the whole morning insulting his intelligence and then the entire afternoon making fun of his clothes—and then she’d polled the entire office via instant message about whether or not his Chucks made Conner look like a hipster tool. the only redeeming element of the entire day had been when the poll came back with a firm, “Yes, but in a cute way,” answer.

Conner had just liberated himself of pants with buttons and his socks, Jeopardy playing in the background, when the migraine hit.

*

“Kill me,” Conner begged.

“Yes, because complaining is productive,” Geoffrey said, but his voice was barely louder than a whisper, just a brush of syllables near Conner’s ear, fingers carding through Conner’s hair.

Conner pressed his face into the coolness of the pillowcase.

“The medicine should kick in any minute,” Geoffrey promised.

“You lie,” Conner whimpered. “You’re a liar. The left side of my head is gonna explode and I’ll die.”

Conner recognized that his apparent age decreased with the magnitude of migraine-associated suck, because nothing brought you down a peg or two more than feeling like your brain was committing itself to suicide-bombing your skull.

“It’s true,” Geoffrey admitted. “And then I’ll take all your money and spend it on hookers and blow.”

Flailing in Geoffrey’s general direction, Conner promised, “I’ll kill you. And your hookers.”

“Yeah, that’s the Zomig,” Geoffrey laughed, palming the curve of Conner’s skull.

Conner turned his cheek to the pillow, squinting at Geoffrey’s silhouette, dark against the shining background of the city, faint blue in the lengthening days of late spring. “I’m not sure I’m happy about Dad running for president,” he admitted.

Geoffrey shrugged, reaching over Conner’s shoulder for a quilt to tuck around him, ward off the chill air slipping beneath the sash of their opened bedroom windows. It smelled like laundry detergent and atmosphere and falafels. “You’re entitled to your opinions, Conner.”

He felt selfish, uncomfortable in his own skin, and it was good to talk sometimes like this, when it would distract him from the lingering throb of the headache, a slow pulse in tandem with the blood pounding in his ears. Rolling over, Conner stared at his ceiling, the slowly-ambulating fan blades and thought of Lois and her old apartment, the breeze from her bedroom window.

He reached up and caught Geoffrey’s fingers, laced his own in between. “This is going to suck a lot for you and me.”

Geoffrey’s fingers mapped Conner’s knuckles, and he said, “Well, yeah.”

“Sorry,” Conner said.

Shrugging, Geoffrey said, “I knew what I was getting into when I got into it.”

Conner raised his eyebrows. “Did you just make a sex joke?”

“Yeah,” Geoffrey said, grinning, “I learned it from a hot Kappa in college.”

“Okay,” Conner promised, pushing himself up and reaching for Geoffrey’s neck, “I’ll kill you.”

Geoffrey caught his wrists. “Seriously—Conner. It’s fine.”

Blinking, Conner asked, “Are you sure? Because this—no one signs up for this.”

“Clark did,” Geoffrey pointed out.

“Yeah, but they’re…” Conner started, and then trailed off, because he didn’t even know what kind of point he was trying to make. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t like it because he liked to think that he and Geoffrey were the same kind of self-assured comfort that he saw in his parents—hopefully with less shouting and gay divorce. But he and Geoffrey were still new—a toy with the shine on.

“Stop worrying about it,” Geoffrey told him. “We’re going to be fine.”

*

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.”

*

TBC