Lex’s Notebook

This is an unofficial fan work. All characters belong to DC Comics.

I thought I understood Clark Kent. I was wrong. 

I am writing this as I stare into the wake of destruction I have caused. All I have now is a few books and a sturdy desk. The note and I are likely to be burned along with everything else. 

When I returned to Smallville years ago, I was drawn to conspiracy theories like everyone else. For a small town, it had a long list of unsolved cases. Chloe Sullivan, the high school reporter, had attributed everything to meteor rocks. The only thing the meteor shower explained was how I lost all my hair as a kid. But the mystery was real. 

Over the last five years crimes have gone up and the resolution rate has gone down. I started crawling through old newspapers, sheriff’s records and interviewed anyone who had witnessed something unusual. Behind each murder, arson, and burglary there was a meteor freak, a phrase Chloe coined. Each case was different. Yet, every one of them are either dead, missing, or locked away with no memory of what had happened. 

It felt deliberate. It is almost as if there is a shark eating the small predators. 

One name kept coming up in several reports: Clark Kent. He appeared either at the hospital assisting victims or among them – unharmed. Could be just me reading too much into it. After all it was Clark who rescued me from that car crash when I had just come to Smallville. There was nothing unexplained about my crash. I had simply lost focus and driven into a fallen log. I offered him money, cars, anything a young man could need. He refused them all. When I understood his interest in science and archeology from school, I opened doors for him which he graciously accepted. We became friends.

But something didn’t add up. Why was there only one incident at a time? One meteor freak. One disaster. That just doesn’t feel statistically right. What if the person cleaning up these was also a meteor freak. I went back and poured over photos from each report. On closer inspection, there were beams bent in unnatural ways, steel doors melted, cars with odd collision profiles. The more I looked into it, there was a third party with superpowers at each of these. Perhaps this person is rescuing the victims and wanted to stay hidden.

But is it Clark?

I had the Kent farm investigated. Leaving spycams without anyone noticing wasn’t too hard. Not many days later, recordings showed him lifting tractors with his bare hands and moving faster than my cameras could capture. I felt disappointed more than anything else. Not because of who he was, but because he hadn’t trusted me enough to open up. I wanted to confront him, but I understood why he kept it hidden. Someone like him had to. I convinced myself, he would come to me when the time was right. The pattern of isolated incidents still lingered, but I chose to let it go for the time being

I had forgotten all about this. I was looking into county records for a new LuthorCorp factory, coincidentally near the Kent farm. The plans showed a storm shelter not too far away from the farm. Curiosity got the better of me and I went over there, carefully not to draw our vigilante’s attention. Under a dusty old cloth cover was an odd metallic vehicle. A spaceship? Not like the flying saucers we see in movies, but more like a fighter jet with no obvious devices of propulsion. It had clearly carried something. Something alive? Was the meteor shower a cover-up for a spaceship landing? Did it bring Clark? Clark’s adoption happened around the time of the meteor shower.

I needed proof. Something biological. I orchestrated a blood donation camp, and I dated a doctor. I did everything I could to find the truth. Nothing worked. Then, unexpectedly, I found myself in possession of a vial of alien blood, I wasn’t going to question the opportunity. It was passed through criminal networks, which had no idea of its origin. I had already put out feelers for anything alien. I didn’t know if it was Clark’s blood. I left breadcrumbs, expecting him to recover it. Shortly after, it disappeared from my collection, leaving almost no trace. After a while, it showed up back at the storm shelter. I left it untouched. I had my confirmation, short of drawing that blood myself.

But it still didn’t make sense why every incident, all meteor freaks are dead, or in a coma, or in a mental institution with lost memories. Why was there no one left to tell the tale? Couldn’t Clark rescue even one of them with his powers? One day, one of my employees found a dock with signs of struggle. I found a notebook that showed someone was experimenting with humans and meteor rocks. The handwriting did feel familiar. It gave the combination of meteor rocks to use, but no instructions on how they were applied. This particular experiment allowed the victim to bend their joints past what the body should allow. Compared to other powers we have known, this felt unusually benign. But that explained why there was only one incident at a time—because there was an evil scientist creating superhumans using meteor rocks. But why? And why do it in secrecy, when this would easily get funded by any top pharmaceutical company? Evidence kept piling up as I learned what to look for. Silent experiments on humans. When it ended, the only person who got hurt in the final scene was often the meteor-affected individual. It felt wrong to call them meteor freaks; now I knew it was thrust upon them—they didn’t ask for it. I didn’t know if I should tell Clark there was a scientist creating them. But that would mean I would have to tell him everything I found.

I wanted to tell him everything I had discovered. But if I did, he would see how deeply I had violated his trust as a friend. And if I didn’t, this scientist would go on hurting people. So I chose a third path. I accused Clark. I had no evidence, but I convinced myself it was the cleaner option – the one that let me stand above it all. Since he was innocent, he would follow the trail himself and stop the real culprit. It felt almost righteous at the time. I confronted him one day with everything I had gathered. He smiled, without a hint of concern. “Looks like things will be easier from now on,” he said. I was stunned. Easier? I had expected denial – perhaps even anger. At the very least, an explanation. Instead, he pulled out a notebook and showed me notes from his latest experiment. Then he laughed softly. “You never checked what I was doing in those labs, or those archaeology visits,” he said, as he appeared in front of me in an instant.

The terror nearly broke me. But he was right. I had broken into his home. I had watched him from a distance. But the labs, the ones I built for him, I had never touched. That would have been a betrayal. From then on, there were no longer any requests. They were demands, with no explanation. I still don’t know if that makes me complicit or loyal.

Things took a turn for the worse when he made me public enemy number one. He stopped his research after enough meteor freaks had been created and killed at his hands. By then, he understood the full extent of his powers. I had only seen a fraction of them. His focus shifted to building a character—“Superman”—to project that power to the world. Clark Kent, he decided, could not be the face of it. He needed that identity free so he could move without scrutiny. The double act was a stroke of genius. He asked me to destroy land and spread fear. I refused, saying it didn’t even match the instincts of a genius businessman. You make money when people are safe, when they are willing to spend. He dismissed it. “People are stupid,” he said. “Do you think all the meteor freaks were stupid? With those powers, they could have achieved greatness. But people don’t see that. They see the outcome and settle on the simplest explanation—that they were evil.” I couldn’t argue further. I couldn’t resist him. When it was over, I ran rescue and restoration operations to rebuild what had been destroyed. It was profitable, of course—but never under LuthorCorp. A network of shell corporations handled everything, all of them controlled by me. To the world, I became the face of evil. And for Clark, I accepted it.

Things only got worse. The kind of disasters Clark made me orchestrate slowly stripped me of my humanity. I had to drain my companies to keep him satisfied. LuthorCorp employees lost benefits and raises because of it. I confronted him. “This is getting out of hand. I can’t keep doing this.” He said, “You always had a choice.” All I could manage was, “True. The worst case? You would have killed me.” He looked at me more closely. “Do you want to add anything more?” I broke. “I worry that if I’m not there, the world will see your true face. And without me… you wouldn’t spare humanity.” Even as I said it, something in me knew it wasn’t the whole truth. He saw it too. “Really?” Clark asked. “Then why haven’t you gone against me yet?”

It finally dawned on me that I had never acted because I still saw Clark as the boy who rescued me—the only true friend I had. Even his closest friends knew only his alter ego—Superman. I was the one who knew his darker side. I told myself that made me different. If I were gone, who would show him the right way?

I was his only friend.