Be-Four
by Angel

Written for ConStricted By Plot 4.

In Smallville, there is no concept of time. Oh, the clock ticks away and the calendar pages peel off one
after another, but there are only two real times in Smallville: Before and After. Lex hears it everywhere, a
constant subtext in the prairie speech, a jitter in the town’s pulse:

Before and After.

Before.

Before the day the sky opened and rained deadly green rocks. Before people died. Before there were
normal folks and mutants. Before the Luthors came.

These things are all connected in the town’s collective mind like a poisonous vein of green meteor rock
running under the surface. Luthors and mutants. Rocks and death. All the same in the common parlance,
the truth of Smallville’s existence.

Lex lay staring at the ceiling, listening to his lover’s soft snores, thinking doleful thoughts. Post-coital tristesse,
his father would have called it in his overly jovial way.

And there lay another truth. Jove, father of the gods, who ascended to his lofty heights only by castrating and
killing his own father, Cronos. Lex reminded himself he was relaxing, and willed his thoughts away from the fire
that had killed his grandparents, on the other side of much time, even more than Before.

Lex knew myth was always true if never quite factual. A solid classical education had seen to that. And he was
Apollo, the eldest, the loyal son, even if Lionel never quite believed it.

Like Jove, Lionel had wanted to rule, lord of all he surveyed. Any fool could make money, he was fond of saying.
The true test was in putting it to work for you. Transmuting mere lucre, as if by alchemy, into raw power.

Alchemy and time could even reverse the roles of the gods, and Lex had become Jove. Lionel sat, impotent, shorn of
power and wealth, in prison. Cronos in exile. And Lex had had to do it, lest he be devoured by his father’s ambitions.

Lexcorp had been the workshop in which Lex was to become the sorcerer’s apprentice after his dissolute, prolifigate
youth. The Day of the Meteors had been the day Lionel bought his first property in Smallville.

Magic rocks and alchemists, all in a day. Smallville is perfectly right to think in Before and After.

For some people, like Lana, the demarcation is even sharper.

Before meant love, security, home and family. After meant celebrity and pain. Her tear-streaked toddler
face on Time had broken hearts across the country, but none as badly as her own Lex knew her desperation
to regain her security made her an excellent business partner.

Somehow, she had decided if she worked hard enough, made her own name big enough, people would forget
the terrified fairy princess and see a real person. She’d have back everything she’d lost. Lex wanted to tell her it
never worked that way, but instead decided to harness her thirst for the security she had known Before.

The Meteors had wreaked endless changes on Smallville, changing those they did not kill. Those caught outside
had mutated. In his time here, Lex had seen things that would make saner scientists run fleeing for their textbooks,
or for Charles Fort. People who could split themselves, pheremone enhanced beauties, nocturnals, he could name
dozens. And that wasn’t counting all those who had merely died.

A lot of people had died that day: 665 . He heard the number in his sleep and knew there had almost been one more.
That would have been a number to conjure with in the minds of the superstitious. Auspicious, audacious and deeply
challenging to the heartland folks’ ingrained social religion. It was less than a twentieth of the town, but still a huge
number all at once.

Even for Lex there was Before. Before, when his father had loved him. Before, when he had hair. Before the day
he’d wandered into a cornfield as a spoiled asthmatic brat and been carried out a mutant.

Every moment was clear in memory--fine green crystal--meteor glass distorting and changing but never hiding. He
remembers with absinthe-colored clarity: the boy made into a scarecrow, the rushing sound and endless green of
corn, its dusty milky scent enveloping and choking him.

A long time of fighting for air and then voices. Male voices and strong arms picking him up. The smell of hay, animals,
tulips and sweat, the feel of rough flannel, and an unfamiliar face. His father’s voice off to one side, and the answering
rumble from the chest beneath his head.

His father’s arms, strong with muscles from a nautilus machine, and the familiar comforting scent of tangerines, roses and
sandalwood from his father L’Egoist aftershave. The name and scent had amused Lionel, but Lex could never recall him
wearing it afterward.. He was wrapped in a blanket that smelled of fabric softener, and cradled in his father’s arms in
an old truck.

The biggest eyes in the world looked back at him from the woman’s lap. A mouth the color of the tulips that lay crushed
and forgotten on the floorboard smiled, just for him. And a tiny hand like a pink starfish reached out to pat his face.

Lex had spent the next decade trying to find a mouth that color, and to duplicate the love and gentleness of that touch. Not
til he returned to Smallville, and found his tiny love grown into a beautiful youth had he managed anything even approximating
the security he’d felt at that instant.

The tulip pink lips were parted in sleep now, and the tiny hand had grown massive with the intervening years. But it lay
on the pillow next to Lex’s head with the same gentleness as it had caressed him all those years before, with the same
deliberate tenderness that it had touched him before sleep.

Even for Lex, there are only two times in Smallville: before and after Clark.