"Lex, can you help me with this? I want to look good for the ceremony."
Kent is grinning, two blue eyes bright. He has a red tie in his hands. Clark needs to look his best for the Pulitzer
"....you've got to be kidding me," softly escapes almost unmoving lips.
Pewter eyes are as unyielding as ever, but Lex has to pause an unusually long moment when it's Clark standing in his office, implicitly inviting him to be inextricable from the journalist's biggest professional success to date: because Lex is humbled by the gesture.
Free press rarely grazes elbows with the two-headed moster of the corporate and the political, but here they are, the fresh-faced farm boy and the misfit trust fund brat, once more.
Lex exhales a breathless laugh. He ducks and shakes his head, both floored and unsurprised, in the span of seconds, at the corny familiarity. He saunters, he hopes, the remaining two steps between them. He fixes the tie that Clark Kent, ace reporter and thorough adult, needs no help with. There's a tightness in his chest and a burning in his eyes that he doesn't trust for another few moments.
Then,
"Congratulations, Clark." Not 'kiddo,' not 'buddy.' To Lex, Cark was always simply a peer. "More often than you think, I miss those evening strolls up to your barn loft...past your mom, doing propoerty taxes, or something else both ...smart and kind...in the kitchen, past your salt-of-the-earth dad, still wanting his blessing...up all those steps, past that damned, telescope, to try and chisel away at the enigma that was my friend."
The word almost cracks his voice. But it's too smooth, too measured, and time has only calcified those layers of social defense.
The final loop pulled, Lex gives Clark's chest a bracing pat, and squeezes his shoulder. He circles back to his desk, with its imposing view of the city skyline, and raises a tumbler of golden liquid.
"You deserve this. Keep making the lives of all my colleagues pure and utter hell." An impish pause and slow smile. "Got your speech ready?"
