Smallville - Mosaic Fragments, Lex/Clark

[noracharles]

Title: Mosaic Fragments
Feedback: always welcome
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Lex/Clark
Summary: Lex considers his relationship with Clark
Rating: all audiences
Warnings: none

Mosaic Fragments

I drop hints like bread crumbs. I expect you to pay attention.

I attract people's notice, with flashy wit and extravagant style, keep them entertained, keep them dazzled. Sometimes they get the joke, and they are pleased and flushed with connecting with me. And there's triumph, because they don't see that it's a lie.

You always get the joke. Sometimes you are not amused, and I am ashamed of my own perfidy. But you always get it.

I prefer the bare numbers to the synopsis. There is no distance from reading to understanding. Like the dancing dots of color on a television screen, together the facts form a clear image. It is more challenging when other people paint the picture; the intangible image is imperfectly recreated in paste on a canvas, it clots, and runs together, the colors mixing and taking on the characteristics of one another. I must filter out the too-perfect smooth symmetry of the deliberate lie, the skewed aberrations of self-delusion and wishful thinking, and fill in the blanks left by misdirection or simple stupidity. Sometimes these pictures are interesting. They show me how people's minds work, and allow me to create a design precisely calculated for maximum impact.

I love learning you: your vision of the world is beautiful. In return I paint, using fabulous colors; pictures intended only to amuse, not manipulate, and big friendly informative posters and sign posts. But I have started something new. I am slowly building a mosaic. One by one, I slip you the pieces. Polished precious stones, each carefully matched to its context, fitting perfectly in place.

I've always appreciated patterns: The way a pattern is greater than the sum of its parts; the chaos at the most basic level combining into a coherent whole.

I used to look at the art on the walls for hours when I was a child. Seeing blobs of green and gold flow together to become a sun-dappled forest bed, somehow even more real than the real thing. Watching curving lines in blue and black shape themselves into the back of a nude woman, curled in on herself; she always looked sad to me. The one painting I found endlessly fascinating was covered with diagonal lines in a muddle of different hues, without any system that I could discern. There was no balance, it wasn't pretty, and the colors clashed. I asked my mother why the artist made it. She said that she didn't know, but she supposed he thought the little girls were cute. Maybe they were his daughters.

I was bewildered. I saw no girls in the picture at all, and I asked my mother to show them to me. And she pointed: this is the hair of one little girl, here is her eye, this is a box of crayons. But I still couldn't see it. Every day I went to look at it, but it was always just a canvas full of little diagonal lines. For the longest time I ached to be able to see beyond the chaos to the truth, when the mysterious image of the lovely girls that my mother could see would be revealed to me. Then suddenly it happened; something clicked in my head, and I saw. And I was devastated. The girls were there, but they were all wrong. The proportions were bad, the figures were wooden and dead, and the attempt to use the different colors to simulate the play of light failed miserably, only resulting in an ugly, mottled appearance. This was not a representation of reality, it was a lie.

I don't want to lie to you — this is too important. So I give you these gems. I pry them painfully from my innermost self, and smuggle them out through the walls. I want you to connect the dots for yourself, and not rely on such broad expressionistic brush strokes. I don't trust myself to wield them with any kind of precision.

I am always alert for when you reciprocate. Eagerly I gather the pearls of truth you sometimes throw me, some a gift of friendly trust, some washed to the surface by circumstances beyond your control. I still haven't completed the puzzle, but the more detailed it grows, the more beautiful and dear you are to me.

I slip you the mosaic stones one by one; and I watch you. I wait for your reaction. I anticipate you seeing me, with elation and dread. And you do. Something in your head clicks, and you are there, with me. You look at me with such compassion. You put your warm hand on my shoulder, and speak in hushed tones.

"Please don't take this the wrong way, Lex, but I think you might have some unresolved issues..." You snap your mouth shut abruptly as you feel me stiffen, as my expression hardens and becomes opaque against my will. I don't really care if I seem forbidding, because I am. You try to apologize for overstepping your bounds, and digging up emotions you should have left untouched, but I brush you off, and not very politely. You leave, hunched in on yourself. You throw a last pleading look over your shoulder as I turn my back.

I don't remember when I was last so angry. How dare you? How dare you assume me so careless, to show you this by accident? How dare you think me so simple and blind, that I can't work out my own feelings for myself, that I would need you to explain them to me? Do you think so little of me.

You always get my jokes. You pay attention to me. You followed the trail of bread crumbs I left you. How did you turn the gem stones I gave you into so much rubble? How could you refuse to receive my most precious gift? You rendered it meaningless, and this was all I had to give.

Have you really been giving me pieces of you? Or have I been building a magpie's hoard of tinsel and shattered shards of mirror, thinking myself blessed with wealth?

Is my portrait of you nothing but a wishful lie of random dots?