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The one woman in the world who can keep Lionel Luthor waiting is currently doing so with, it seems, some enthusiasm. Her secretary, a polite, demure young woman who answers the phone with much less abruptness than anyone Luthorcorp has ever hired, smiles at him apologetically every few minutes, and tells him again that she'd be happy to make him some coffee. Perhaps he looks like he needs it.
He hasn't been sleeping. He hasn't had time to sleep. What a horribly wasteful activity it is, he's learned: hours spent alone and unproductive and, most of all, defenseless. More time wasted dressing, undressing, and pummeling a tired mind into something resembling an alert state in the morning. He can't afford to sleep anymore. Clark needs him, even if he would never admit it. There are only so many things a boy raised on a farm can do, and defending himself from the intellectual and financial force of Veritas will never be one of them.
Still, even if everything were quiet, even if he could go into his office without watching his back, sleep would evade him. The headaches feel as if they're cracking his brain apart, pain knifing behind his eyes as if someone else, however momentarily, is looking out at the world from his point of view. Codeine doesn't help, but he takes it anyway in the hope that things will change, that the mere psychological effect will give him some moments of rest.
"I'm sure it'll only be a few more minutes," the secretary tells him the instant he attempts to surreptitiously glance at his watch. He gets the sense that she's far more anxious than he is.
He can be charming when he tries. "The Senator's time is very precious. I wouldn't want to interrupt her work here."
She almost blushes at his smile, and he has to wonder how rarely any visitors to this office exhibit common courtesy when dealing with underlings. Were he meeting a member of Congress for any other reason, he can see himself being markedly more pointed in his exasperation at having to wait. He can see himself walking out.
The door opens.
It takes a little self-restraint to keep his seat, to keep his hands folded and his head bowed. She's not alone, and her relationship with the richest man in Kansas has already sparked more than a few media discussions, and a low-key investigation of her campaign funds that had, of course, come up empty-handed.
She's beautiful, smoothing auburn hair back from her face in a gesture that might be flirtatious if it came from anyone else. Brow furrowed slightly above intelligent eyes, she makes both of her companions - young men in suits who have the confident air of lawyers - feel as if they, and they alone, monopolize her attention. Really, Lionel knows she's in control, and he knows that she knows it as well - this petite, good-natured, consistently honest woman blazing a trail through Washington. He feels a spark of pride at the thought.
"Lionel?" As soon as the outer door has closed, she turns to him, reaching for his hand before he even makes it to his feet.
Once ignored, he now fills her world. He has to smile. "Senator."
"I'm sorry for keeping you waiting," she says softly, looking at her secretary, who is suddenly consumed with the contents of a manila file. "I wasn't expecting you until this evening."
"Well, as you know, I'm fortunate to be able to set my own schedules."
She seems suddenly aware of his fingers tangled up with hers, of her secretary only feet away. She turns away with a wry grin, beckoning him towards her office. "Don't seem too enthusiastic, Mr. Luthor. People will talk."
"More than they already do?" Lionel says clearly, aware of her discomfort. "With the number of column inches Ms. Sullivan gives us in the Planet we might as well be carrying on a torrid affair and laundering money for the mob."
"Laundering money is more likely," Martha says dryly, holding open the door for him. "Everyone's obsessed with money on the Hill. And I thought that the Smallville Savings & Loan was complicated. Jo? Mr. Luthor and I will be occupied for a couple of hours, at least. Feel free to go out for lunch."
In the doorway, he expresses mock surprise. "A couple of hours?"
"Wait until you see the boxes of files I have for you," she tells him, and meets his eyes with a smile. "Did you think I befriended the most prodigal financial talent Kansas has ever seen just so I could use your plane?"
"I don't know. I would."
She closes the door.
Her office has the same kind of studied luxury that he might expect to find in the chancellor's office of an Ivy League university: a deep blue carpet, still not tramped down flat by busy feet, an old oak desk, bookcases filled with just the right literature for an extremely appropriate photoshoot (he doubts that anyone, since this office was built, has ever read any of it).
Compared to the cold minimalism of his Metropolis office, where he could look out over a city of glass and deceptive reflections, this place is warm. Safe. He doesn't doubt that she likes it.
He is tracing the edge of a photo frame with a finger when she speaks to him, her back against the closed door, a hand reaching to lock it. "How've you been?" she asks him in a voice that has a shade of fear (or is it only concern?) in it.
"Good," he starts to say, moving towards her, but she cuts him off.
"Reeves Dam exploded. Clark barely escaped with his life. I read your obituary."
And he sees that confident politician's visage fading away, to be replaced by that of the woman he has known for years - afraid more for him than of him, as she's always been. He takes her hand in his. "Martha."
Look at me, he wants to say. I'm here. I'm alive. You'll never lose me. But he smiles instead. "No one can get rid of me that easily."
Her free hand strokes down the front of his shirt, and he breathes in with the movement, steadying himself. "And how many more scars, Lionel?"
He kisses her, then, and it's been such a long time since his lips were on hers that he can't bear to let go or pull back lest something else separate them.
Her hands go to him, sinking deep into his hair, pressing him closer to her. He thinks he can feel her smiling. "What?" he mutters, feigning annoyance as he dips his head to kiss her neck just below her jawline.
"You cut your hair," she says, her tone light, and he knows that a weight has been lifted.
He murmurs his agreement. "I'm a more practical man these days."
She's not responding as he'd hoped she might, but she's not pushing him away. "How's Clark?" she asks after a moment, and he's forced to straighten up, attempting to flatten down the tufts of hair she had left sticking up defiantly.
"He's a very resilient young man," he says. "He's doing a lot of good."
Martha frowns a little, as if trying to gauge how much, exactly, he is keeping from her. "He doesn't call as much as you do."
"Ah. Well. Clark is fortunate not to have yet reached the age where one craves company, rather than sulkily insisting that the world should leave him alone." He affectionately straightens her lapel. "He's fine, Martha. He's a young man, now, that's all."
"It must be difficult for him. Here I am, with my speeches and bills and endless meetings, while in Smallville he's saving the world."
Lionel tilts his head to the side, looking at her. "I really can't take the farm out of you, can I, Martha? Hundreds of miles away from Kansas, working for the good of an entire state - millions of people - and you still don't feel like you're doing enough."
"Bills don't matter much if the planet isn't here, Lionel," she objects, a little half-heartedly.
"Well, if we, hopefully not too optimistically, assume that Clark will succeed, and the planet will remain, bills will matter a great deal." He smiles. "There's no point in saving the world if there's not much of a world to save."
Martha pushes herself off the door. "You really have changed, haven't you?"
"For the better, I hope."
"How are the headaches?"
He even flinches at the word, and he knows she notices. "Crippling," he says, hoping that his smile will lead her to believe that he's exaggerating. Her expression tells him otherwise. "I don't sleep."
It'll kill me one day, he'd told her with forced cheerfulness on the phone. Kryptonian information was never meant to be stored - no, not stored, forced through - a human brain. John Jones looks at him with pity most days.
Some days, he's thankful for the simple love and care and concern that he had so derided in the past. He had wanted to extract her from that world, immunize her from family and small-town values. Now he wants to bury himself in them.
Her hand is small and cool against his. "You need to sleep," she tells him.
He doesn't have the energy to argue.
In his years of pursuing, longing for, and even fantasizing about Martha Kent (although he would never admit to the last of these crimes), he had never imagined that hours spent in her bed could be quite so decidedly unerotic.
He has a dull, hazy headache when he wakes up - nothing of Kryptonian origin, fortunately - and the room is dimly lit, although he can see light beyond the half-open door. It must still be daytime. Or, he thinks, checking his watch, an entirely different day altogether. Would she have let him sleep that long? Perhaps. She's a mother first and foremost. She cares. If she had thought that he needed to sleep, she would have dismissed any idea of him going to meetings, or even participating in the search for Brainiac.
He's still dressed. Mostly. His shoes are neatly paired up at the side of the bed. His shirt and socks have gone. He can remember feeling indignant and mildly amused as she loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. A Senator. But his objections had been tired ones, and perhaps he had fallen asleep after that, lying down and pushing the world away. He hopes, vaguely, that he hasn't slept through her one attempt at seducing him in seven years.
"Martha?"
He hasn't been to her apartment before. He only knows she has an apartment because of previous conversations over the phone, in restaurants, and at her office. Somehow he has always found it difficult to imagine her anywhere else but at the Kent farm when she speaks to him - sitting on the porch watching the sunset, cooking in the kitchen, maybe even curled up in bed on cold winter nights.
This place is nothing like the farm. It has no quiet rustic charm. It reminds him more of his own apartment, with all of its cool minimalism and reflective surfaces. He wonders that she hasn't lost her warmth entirely, forced to live in a cage of his making.
She's sitting on her couch when he finds her, a laptop spinning ever more intricate screensaver diagrams on the low table in front of her. She had always preferred pen and paper to tapping out long speeches on a soulless keyboard, and, in his nights helping her, he had been forced to do the same, reawakening a lost art of penmanship. He wonders if she has ever kept any of his notes, his rough, frustrated doodles when they have argued points of policy.
"Martha?"
She's getting used to his kisses, he knows, his mouth finding hers now, and lingering longer than anything that might masquerade as merely "friendly". It hadn't been much in the beginning: an impulsive kiss from her thanking god that he was alive after the cave-in; a kiss goodbye as she left for Washington. They're getting harder to explain away.
"You should be in bed," she scolds, smiling, as he slips between her and the end of the couch, sneaking a look at her papers.
"I don't sleep well alone," he says, and it's a joke, of course. How often has he attempted to seduce her over the years? A watch, a promotion, a dinner date? Hugs and protection and an almost-kiss one Thanksgiving? He's tried everything, has dragged himself along the path of redemption for her. And she's still strong, is still nowhere near as needy, now, as he had been years ago.
But she reaches out and touches his cheek, her thumb stroking over his lips. When did they become so comfortable with each other? He has to admit that it's a comfort born from desperation, from relief that, despite everything - gunmen and torture chambers and alien invasions - they are both still alive. "What am I going to do with you?" she murmurs. But in a second, she's recovered, her hand once more picking up her pen. "Maybe you can help me with this speech. I never seem to be able to pick up a good rhythm."
He takes the pad from her, noting the scored-out sections. "It's not what you write, Martha. It's how you say it."
"So you've told me," she agrees. "But not all of us have such a flair for the dramatic, Lionel. I'd prefer to just tell the truth as plainly and simply as possible."
He's barely listening, reading her draft, and making his own corrections as he goes. "Well, there's the truth, and there's the truth." He makes a wide circle around one paragraph on the third page and taps it with his pen. "Here's your real opening. A good human interest story. From the heart. If there's one thing you have over anyone else on the Hill, Martha, it's heart."
She takes the paper back, and checks over his notes. "I've found that heart really doesn't go as far as it should. But thank you, Lionel. I'll have another look at it later."
Tossing the pad on the table, she turns to look at him again. "Why do I get the feeling that you're leaving?"
"I have work to do."
"Voices in your head?"
He smiles. "It's getting harder to tell, isn't it? What I do for him, and what I do for my own sake." His eyes meet hers. "What I do for you. And Clark."
Martha's eyes narrow slightly. He's seen such concern in them over the years. Were he a teenage boy wrestling with unexpected power, would she be harder on him? Would she offer him guidance? "And where does it end? When do you stop?"
Something in his heart wants her to ask him more. "It doesn't stop, Martha. It can't."
"But..." She takes his hand between hers, the picture of a rational, calm mother. "Lionel, I worry about Clark. I do. But it's as if he was born for this. He has such amazing abilities. I can believe he was put on this planet to help people. But people like us... You and I. We're not superhuman. We're not even young anymore. How many times have you been in the hospital? At some point you have to walk away."
"You'd have me stop helping Clark?"
Her voice is soft, reasonable. "No. He's my son. Of course I don't want anything to happen to him. But one day he's going to run in here and tell me that something's happened to you. One day I'll be at your funeral. Jonathan's death was enough pain and grief to last me a lifetime. I can't lose you, too."
On another day, this would be an opening, a way to invite himself to spend the night, to be close to her and comfort her, to lie in lovers' whispers that he will always be there.
"But it's not just Clark," he says. "We are here - we are all here - to save the world. No one can do it alone."
She smiles, a little ruefully. "I never thought I'd see the day when I'd say this, but I think I liked you better when you weren't so idealistic. We all knew where we stood, then. You'd show up at my door just to flirt and give poor Clark palpitations. And I knew you'd always be around, even if it was just for that."
Even if it was just for that.
He takes her in his arms, and tells her that he's never letting go.
He leaves in the evening, his head clear, his stride purposeful as he boards his jet, preparing to fly home.
"I'm here for you," she had said as he held her in his arms, and the shadows grew longer around them. "I'll be here for you when you're done."
She won't have long to wait.