American Beauty - by JJ   Disclaimers: Not mine. 

Rating: PG-13 

Spoilers: S1, particularly "Nicodemus" 

Pairing: Lex/Lana UST 

Archive: "Hazardous" is fine...anywhere else, just please ask first. :-) 

Feedback: Live for it Paris couture and ropes of diamonds, glitter that is
gold and not just the paltry illusion of it. 

You may hate the pink-frilled little girl in the photograph on the cover
of that magazine, but you'd give anything to grace the page with a
different face, the face that no one knows. Not yet. 

You may miss your parents desperately and wish for the life they could
have given you every day, but you also hate them. Because they just stood
there, staring blindly up into the sky as destruction hurtled down towards
them. Because if they had just run, they wouldn't have left you trapped in
this broken down shithouse of a town. 

And no one knows. Not yet. 

The closest they've ever gotten to the real Lana Lang was that date you
had with a certain psychotropic flower. In fact, no one knows--not even
Nell, although you think Lex Luthor might suspect--but you still own that
tight leather skirt, scanty top and scarlet satin lingerie set. You lost
your control, that day. But contrary to what you told everyone, you
remember it with perfect clarity. The "amnesia" is yet another brick in
the sparkling wall of lies that conceals the scheming heart of you. 

That part of you looks at Clark Kent and Whitney Fordman both with the
same disdain--small town boys who can only hold you back in the long run.
You'll string them along now for what they can do for you--an occasional
rescue when you need it and the local fame of being the quarterback's
girl--but someday you know you'll leave them both behind in the
meteor-flecked dust. 

That part of you, the "real" you, is the same part that looks at Lex
Luthor with different eyes. Eyes that see everything you want to be and
know he could give it to you. Status. Money. Power. A name no one in the
world would ever forget. A face that would be preserved in photographs for
generations as a reminder that even small town girls can have it all. 

Of course there's also the fact that when Lex looks at you, sometimes he
seems to strip back all those layers and expose your dark, bitter core,
buried beneath too much sugar like the center of a horehound candy. But
the same eyes that see the blackness, which would horrify anyone else who
knows you, still smile. The way he smiled when you played dirty to keep
the Talon afloat. 

Like Hephaestus, he can hold molten lava in his hands and not be burned,
shaping it instead like a mere potter would mold wet, cold clay. Maybe he
is Hephaestus, and you are Aphrodite--the one all men desire, but who can
never be true. After all, when the gods fell, what choice did they have
but to take human form? And would they not retain some knowledge of what
they had once been, longing ever after to regain the heights of Olympus? 

You would marry him, if he asked you. You would glitter on his arm for the
rest of your life, and you would both be wise enough to stay together even
if you grew to hate each other. Become the darlings of the media, the
dark, volatile mirror of the fairy tale. American royalty, only without
the stain of pathos that destroyed Charles and Di or JFK and Jackie in the
eyes of their adoring fans. 

You would not need to be pitied, then. Pity is for the weak, and you would
never be weak. You would leave the damsel in distress behind in Smallville
for Clark Kent to champion--after all, an illusion is what he's been
saving all these years. He just doesn't know it. 

No one knows. Not yet. 

Or so you think. 
  

FIN