"Lex! Son!" The latter call wasn't neccessary to identify the speaker. Only one person breezed into his study with such a cavalier attitude. Lex sighed and leaned back in his desk chair casually, while being careful not to let the other man see anything he shouldn't.

"Dad. What brings you to Smallville?"

"Just making sure you're still alive and accounted for, is all," the elder Luthor said, studying Lex's face with an uncomfortable intensity. Lex wasn't sure if that was an aftereffect of having been blind, or just another tactic to unnerve him. He was inclined toward the latter.

Lex just tilted his head and smirked mockingly. "As you can see, I am. Or do you think I'm a clone?"

The intensity of the look did not lessen, and the elder Luthor's voice spoke more to himself than to Lex. "No, no, not a clone." Lex felt the disturbing instinct that his father noticed something off and was trying to put his finger on what it was. Sudden revelation appeared on the older man's face, and he nodded in self-satisfaction. His tone still managed to convey disappointment. "A proper clone would be thinner. You've put on weight, Lex. Haven't you been getting any exercise?"

Lex gave his father a dark look. Being told he was fat did nothing to improve the sour mood that the mere sight of his father had precipitated. "I doubt concern for my well being is what prompted you to fly all the way here from Metropolis."

Lionel put a hand over his heart and tried to look hurt. He managed a fair approximation. "You wound me, Lex." When Lex didn't appear impressed, he continued somewhat less melodramatically, "Honestly, son, when you stop coming to work, send Eduardo to run your household errands, and manage to frighten the entire staff into avoiding you, I begin to worry."

Raising an eyebrow archly, Lex questioned, "Why? Your spies refuse to present themselves as targets so you don't know what I'm up to anymore? I threw a mug at Clark last week. Don't think you're exempted."

"Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex, these temper tanturums don't suit you."

The act of picking up the paperweight and throwing it happened so quickly that Lex didn't recall making the conscious decision to do it. It was, no doubt, a knee-jerk reaction to the patronizing tone of voice. On the plus side, it did force his father into a strategic retreat when Lex began reaching for the bin full of fountain pens.

He expected the lecture would continue via telephone later.

His private line rang twice before he answered it. "Dad, you don't even own the plant anymore, why do you care," perhaps the better question would begin with 'how do you know' but that would be revealing that he didn't know the weak point in his security, "whether I go -"

"Lex, this is Martha," the voice on the other line interrupted.

He blinked once and felt a slight flush warm his neck. "Oh. Sorry, Mrs. Kent. I was expecting a different call."

Her voice sounded suspiciously dry as she commented, "I figured as much."

Sitting back in his chair, he swivelled around to look the bright red of his stained glass windows, made even more red by the setting sun. "May I assume by the fact that you're calling that you spoke with Mr. Kent about my proposal?"

There was a sound from her that was likely a sigh, but he couldn't interpret the thoughts behind it over the phone. Dealing with the Kents was tricky enough when doing it face-to-face, and he didn't like the added degree of uncertainty. "Yes, I did."

"'Yes', 'no', or 'needs time to think about it'?" Lex asked, hoping that she got the idea that he thought the phone lines were compromised. He didn't, not really. He checked them now on a fairly regular basis, but neither did he want to get into the habit of discussing this too openly. That, and he was setting himself up for an excuse to meet them in person.

"He has a question, and I think it's an important one." Mrs. Kent was brilliant, and he could definitely see why his father had admired her so much.

"I'm on my way over." He stood up.

"Lex," her voice stopped him from hanging up, but he didn't sit down again. "I didn't tell him every detail." He could definitely learn to love Martha Kent.

"If I need to, I'll explain when I get there," he told her, absolving her of the responsibility of telling Jonathan Kent, the quintessential smalltown farmer, that Lex was pregnant and everything else that went along with that.

He squealed to a stop in the Kent driveway fifteen minutes later, feeling irrationally accomplished by the size of the dustcloud he managed to raise. Clark had mentioned in passing once that it was a twenty minute drive from the Kent Farm to the Luthor Mansion, but Lex had yet to take longer than ten for the journey. Today's trip had been made in six, as the other seven minutes had been spent changing into a grey jogging suit and walking down to the garage.

Mrs. Kent opened the door as he climbed the first stair of the front porch, and he smiled at her in greeting. "Evening, Mrs. Kent," he said, stepping inside, "Mr. Kent, Clark." All three were standing near the door, and he was invited to follow them the few feet it took to enter the living room. Lex and Clark took the couch, Martha sat in the rocking chair, and Jonathan claimed the arm chair.

"So what's the question?" Lex asked, when it became obvious that the rather formless jogging suit did enough to hide his shape that Jonathan opted not to ask about his weight gain. Either that or ingrained manners had overruled habitual Luthor hatred.

The three Kents looked at each other and elected Martha as the spokeswoman. "Lex, your appearance," she waved toward her head to indicate she meant his baldness rather than his current predicament, "isn't exactly . . ."

"Normal?" he said the word he knew she was thinking but was too polite to say.

". . . inconspicuous." He felt a half-smirk form at the more acceptable synonym, but let her continue without reaffirming the accuracy of his own suggestion. "We wondered if maybe that was hereditary."

"Kyla's ability to change into a wolf was an inherited trait," Clark added, "And that was originally meteor induced, too."

Lex looked between the three, a bad feeling beginning to form in his gut. "You think the kid will be born permanently bald." It wasn't something he had considered. Frankly, he was expecting a mini-Lionel.

"It's a possibility," Martha qualified. "Your son or daughter might still have," she hesitated, suddenly uncertain, "brown or -"

"Red," he supplied when she looked questioningly at him.

She smiled, looking only a little surprised. "- or red hair."

The married Kents exchanged a look that seemed to pass volumes but which Lex couldn't understand a single word. Jonathan's expression softened slightly, and he turned to address Lex. "We'll take a daughter regardless," he began. Sensing there was more coming, Lex did let himself smile or speak in gratitude, but merely nodded, acknowledging that half-chance acceptance of his child. "We'll take a red-haired son," he continued. Lex nodded again, but felt there was at least one combination of hair and gender coming that would not be accepted by the Kents. He braced himself. "But I cannot, in good conscience, take a brown-haired or bald Luthor boy."

Lex wanted to take comfort in the fact that brown was excluded while red was accepted, but it still hurt that a bald son would be refused. "It's the bald son that will need you most," Lex stated, feeling fairly confident that the inexplicable rejection he felt far too personally was well concealed. "He's the one with powers."

Jonathan looked the most shocked by that comment, but they all looked surprised. "Powers?" Mr. Kent repeated, sounding wary.

"I assume that if he got the baldness, he got the rest. It's nothing as spectacular as what Clark has," the three Kents looked nervously amongst themselves, but Lex ignored that, preferring to pretend that they trusted him at least a little. "But I have regenerative abilities. I don't get sick, and I heal too quickly for doctors to understand. It's not instanteous or anything, so its okay to be treated by an ambulance, but I try not to stay in a hospital overnight. During my time in Metropolis, and even here in Smallville, I've had opportunity to test my powers, and they're pretty versatile. Poison, alcohol," drugs, "head injuries, gun shots, knife stabs, cuts, bruises, heck, even asthma and allergies got cleared up without much more than minor medical attention and a few good nights sleep."

He looked at the three Kents and took a breath, "Clark and Martha know about the second ability that might affect a son, and I don't want to go into it. It's not an issue until puberty. And the last freakish aspect, discounting the bald thing which is fairly mundane compared to the rest of it, might just be coincidence, but I'm not convinced I'll ever die."

The Kents looked shocked by that pronouncement. Clark spoke first, "Lex, you nearly die every week."

It was an exaggeration, but Lex had a red marked calendar to prove it wasn't by much. Monthly was fairly accurate. "And yet I'm still here. The chances of me surviving all of those little adventures are astronomical. So either it's me that's throwing fate, or it's you. I can be convinced either way, but you keep insisting there's nothing unusual about you and I freely admit I'm a mutant at least twice over." He paused, then added as an idle afterthought, "Well, not freely. My father would probably strap me down in a lab somewhere if he realized I was anything more than bald. The pharmecutical applications of regenerative blood alone would dampen any ethical objections he might have, especially if he were already annoyed at me, which he always is. Wouldn't do his product line any good, of course, LexCorp hasn't been able to make any headway at all."

"You strapped yourself down in a lab somewhere?" Clark asked, horrified.

"Don't be ridiculous, Clark. I drew my own blood, put it in an unlabelled vial, brought it to my lab techs, and told them the subject was a mutant with regenerative abilities. They occassionally ask for another sample, which they get, but they don't know where it comes from."

He got the impression this still didn't sit right with the Kents. Clark continued to look disturbed, Martha excused herself to fetch some lemonade for everyone, and Jonathan frowned at him. Of course, Jonathan usually frowned at him and there were plenty of other obvious reasons for Clark to look disturbed besides a simple scientific study.

"So," Lex started, redirecting the interview to the original subject. "Given that the bald son is the one most in need of parents who understand his uniqueness, are you willing to take him as well? After raising Clark and almost adopting Ryan, you two are the most qualified." He looked up at Martha as she handed him a cool glass then at Jonathan. They looked like they'd tasted something sour. Since none of them had yet sipped their lemonade, he attributed the look to his knowledge that Ryan and Clark were anything but normal. While he could pretend they trusted him, he knew better than to believe it.

"Lex," it was Martha who spoke first. She had handed out lemonade to all three men and was reclaiming her own seat as she spoke. "A bald child, either male or female, in this town will make people think of you. Your intention in giving us your child was to make people not realize it was a Luthor, right?"

He saw where she was going with that line of questioning and he didn't like it. Not at all. But that didn't make it any less valid. He looking into his glass and swirled the lemonade around absently. "If a bald child is raised in Smallville everyone will know it's mine. My father will hear about it." But sending it outside Smallville was almost worse. In Smallville, it would be a freak, but there were other freaks here, worse freaks here. Only Smallville would understand. In Smallville, being a Luthor made one less than human far more than anything the meteors did.

The question was, was it worse to be a nameless freak elsewhere or a Luthor here? If Lex sent his bald son to be adopted elsewhere and he someday became pregnant . . . no. "Damn it, I can't protect him." He looked up at Martha, and said it again this time to her rather than to himself, "I can't protect him." He didn't know what he was asking for, but he needed her help. He needed someone's help.

She reached over and patted his knee. "We'll think of something, Lex," she promised. He wasn't sure that he believed her, but it was nice that she'd tried.