It started innocuously enough, Clark supposed, this fascination that archeologists had with Lex. He wasn't going to get jealous about it. He wasn't. Even the ones approaching retirement could have been Lex's great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids. Actually, some of them probably were, possibly with a few more greats thrown in there. It became difficult to keep track after the first couple generations.
But archeologists love Lex. Granted, he hasn't seen all of history, but he has stories about everything even if he didn't live it personally. This is what happens when a history buff becomes the oldest living human on the planet for nine centuries running.
History has always been one of his passions, but it's really the only one that survived time. He still dabbles in business, of course, but that's more a habit than a hobby nowadays. After proving he could gain controlling interest in every business on the planet back in 2330, he just hasn't felt the driving need to be ruthless and now only keeps shares in the companies that he thinks are interesting.
Plus, he's still got LexCorp, the oldest continuously running corporation on Earth. The company is so firmly entrenched in the world culture that even if Lex dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it would still be there centuries from now, stalwartly awaiting his return. They would never doubt return. Along with Superman, there was nothing more constant about Earth than the existence of Lex.
The archeologists would be devastated by his absence though. The profession would crumble away to dust.
World leaders might be caught out, too, since Lex still kept his fingers in politics. Habit there, as well. He'd gotten bored and joined the world together under one global government in 2517 and stayed on as a consultant after he lost interest in personally running it. But if he said jump, the world still did.
Clark himself had pretty much kept to the superhero gig. His day job changed every twenty years or so because people started to wonder about folks who didn't age. Lex sometimes did the secret identity thing, too, but it came and went in spurts. It usually started up when he decided they should have another kid. Lex had birthed 15 boys and 12 girls. Clark had birthed one, a girl, the first one, and refused to ever do it again. He'd told Lex right then, back in 2039, that if Lex wanted more kids he was going to carry them himself. Clark suspected Lex's fickle human memory (which could recall the phone number of Martha and Jonathan Kent's farmhouse even now but nothing of pain intensity more than a month after it happened) was largely responsible for them having more than two children. Either that, or Lex was right and he was a big alien wuss.
If Bruce were still alive, he'd find something in that hilarious. Clark couldn't decide if it was Lex being pregnant or Clark being a wuss. He was pretty sure Bruce hadn't survived long enough to see Martha (Martha El-Luthor, that is, not to be confused with Mom), but he could be wrong about that. Lex was much better at keeping chronology straight, even if Clark could recall moments with sharper clarity. It was one of the reasons the archeologists liked Lex better than Superman.
But he was sure his mother hadn't met her. He wished she could have. She had wanted grandchildren. He'd still been with Lois when she passed away, though. That was back before anyone had realized Lex didn't have a lifespan with an end point, when Lex was still trying to cram the centuries of living he wanted to do into the decades most humans were allotted. He'd been a real bastard when he lived in fast forward. He was much easier to get along with now.
Mellowed with age, so to speak. Heh.
He doesn't 1ook almost a thousand years old, of course. Clark had seen thousand year old men. He really could have done without, but these archeologists kept inviting Lex on these digs and Lex kept saying yes. Then Lex invariably got himself locked in an airtight passage or had a support give out and a massive wall would try to fall on him or some other disaster would happened and where's Superman then? At an archeological dig, rescuing his wayward spouse. Then does he get thanked for saving the man's life? No. He gets a lecture about the site, its significance, when it's from, who owned it, and why breaking through that wall when saving Lex's life destroyed ages of history. Then, if Clark was really unlucky, Lex would launch into an exposition about a time period that Clark could remember firsthand just as well as Lex did.
The archeologists, of course, were enthralled and shot him nasty looks every time he tried to shut Lex up.
Clark was beginning to suspect a new domination plot - either a cult following or possibly the groundwork for a new religion - but it lacked the usual hallmarks for that sort of thing. Usually when Lex decided to take over the world again there was no doubt that that was what he was doing.
Besides, there was no point anymore. All he had to do was ask for the world and they'd probably give it to him. He'd ruled it once already for sixty years and had stepped down leaving it a better place than how it had been when he took over. That was history. Everyone on the planet knew that. It was only the archeologists who tended to forget that Lex, the apparently middle-aged encyclopedia of everything historical, and Alexander El-Luthor, first President of Earth, were one and the same. They were generally focused on a time well before that. They sometimes remembered that he used to be Alexander Luthor, 51st President of the United States, which had happened during Lex's normal human lifetime but, like most humans, they couldn't quite grasp the enormity of Lex and tended to remember that he was older than dirt while simultaneously and somewhat oxymoronically thinking of him as just another leader in the field of archeology.
This generation, especially, Lex seemed perfectly happy to play the academic with the world as his sandbox. Clark suspected he might be thinking of having another kid. Increased interaction with the natives was usually one of the first signs. Plus, it had been awhile. Derrick, their youngest, had died a decade earlier. He had six great-grandchildren already and the oldest was going to go to college soon. He and Lex would stop keeping track of that sub-branch of the family tree pretty soon. It made them feel old to have grandkids older than their apparent age. (Nevermind that he and Lex were indisputably old. Ancient, actually, would perhaps be the better word. But let's not go there, alright?) Clark didn't even want to know how many descendants they had through Martha by now. It would take the full power of the Fortress's AI to work through all the genealogy and come up with a number.
Clark sometimes wondered if the AI kept track anyway, just so it would know how much of the Earth's population had partial Kryptonian blood. It was widespread enough that the geneticists had picked up on the irregularities in 2619. The resulting study suggested the number was up to one in four thousand back then and the source of the 'mutation' was indeterminate. Over the centuries, he and Lex had lived on every continent at one time or another, so the markers were showing up everywhere. Now, though, they mostly made their home at the Fortress. Except, of course, when Lex was being friendly with the archeologists.
Anyway, the archeologists first started coming to Lex about seventy years ago. It started small. Some grad student had been working on a translation project when he realized the ancient language wasn’t quite as dead as previously believed. There were, after all, two people on the planet who were documented as being alive during the time period from which the artifact dated (give or take a few decades). Unlike anybody else who might have previously made the same observation, this one had the gall and initiative act on it. Where he came up with Lex's contact code, Clark still didn't know, but Lex had opened his communicator over breakfast one morning and found a message and attached picture waiting for him. "Mr. El-Luthor," the message began, "we found this line etched in a wall - what does 'groovy' mean in this context?" Lex sent back a long detailed description of the 1960s, the etymology of the word, a sketch of a music record, and an anecdote of Woodstock that someone had told him an eon ago.
Over the next few years, there were several more inquiries of similar natures. Lex started following archeological journals to anticipate what questions he'd get asked next. He stopped waiting for requests and just offered relevant historical stories to archeologists and linguists all over the world.
Clark had heard every Alexander the Great story there was to hear by 2098 (this minor triviality did not stop Lex from dragging him on a day by day recounting of the man's life from 2144 until 2177, on the 2500th anniversary of each event as it happened). By 2300, Clark was fairly sure he'd heard every historical anecdote in Lex's arsenal. The archeologists were less familiar and Lex, faced with a fresh and eager audience for his favourite stories, could not be held back even by Superman.
When he found out a group of researchers were going to a dig that had a high probability of being his Smallville mansion (after all, how many stone castles could there have been in the area once known as Kansas?), he invited himself along for the expedition. As it turned out, he was right, and the sheer number of never before heard recollections of that time period stunned the historical community. After that, it was a rare archeological site that did not invite him to visit for at least a day if not longer. Clark had never known the Earth had so much archeological and anthropological activity still going on until he saw the volume of invites Lex began to get on a daily basis.
Clark hadn't spent this much time apart from Lex since The Argument of 2880. That had been bad. Not quite as bad as the mess they'd been in between Clark's senior year of high school and when the Justice League locked him and Lex into a Kryptonite laced warehouse (Clark's supposed 'friends' had apparently been planning the dual kidnapping for a while) and told them they weren't coming out again until either one of them was dead or they could live on the same planet without taking down cities as collateral damage. But bad. He didn't want to be angry at Lex like that again. But Lex was always with them.
Worse, archeologists were a decidedly not-evil group, unlike the robots Lex had been trying to create in 2880, and Clark felt bad about interrupting their fun. Even now, his secret identities were usually dorks, and he felt a kind of kinship with them. But saving the world got old after the first thousand years unless he could tell Lex about the dumb things people got themselves into before they made out, had sex, and went to sleep. But Lex wasn't at home. He was at the stupid archeology site, this time somewhere in what Clark still thought of as China, where Lex was helping to translate some old books that were almost as old as he was.
And Clark had a story about a guy who got stuck in a tree trying to get his cat down, and who was he supposed to tell it to, hmm? That almost never happened. Discounting firemen, usually women were the ones who got stuck going up after cats. Men got stuck in trees going after kids' kites or beer cans (Clark still wasn't sure how the beer cans got into the trees in the first place, but there it was, 486 times in the last thousand years: beer cans stuck in trees and ineptly rescued by drunk men).
He bet 'Computers for Dummies' in Mandarin or whatever it was Lex was translating wasn't that interesting.
Though, the way Lex could go on about things, the archeologists would probably disagree. Clark sighed, tossed over onto Lex's side on the bed, and sighed again.
"Clark!"
Clark sat up, head turning toward the voice coming from half a planet away. There was no fear in it, but he was still swirling into his suit and flying towards the sound even before the word finished. When he arrived on site, Lex was grinning like a loon and waving what Clark tentatively identified as a cell phone. A really old one. "Clark!" Lex repeated, and this time Clark had the presence of mind to recognize excited delight. "It's my cell phone that I lost in 2002! Remember I took that business trip to China with Dad and you called, but I'd lost my phone? Do you think the AI can get it to work so I can listen to your voice mail?"
Clark frowned doubtfully at the dirt-encrusted phone that looked like every other high tech phone from that long-gone era. "How do you know it's yours?"
Lex grinned and turned it over. Only Lex would have had his name engraved into his cell phone. But there it was: 'Lex Luthor' in a thin fancy script that wouldn't have even been visible if it wasn't filled in with dirt. Clark snorted and shook his head. Lex's smile brightened and Clark was struck by it. The archeologists were just going to have to miss out on their favorite piece of history tonight.
"Let's find out," he said in a low voice that most people didn't expect from Superman. Over the last few decades, archeologists had ceased being 'most people' and they took it in stride as Earth's oldest superhero scooped up Earth's oldest human and flew him off into the sunset. Well, over the northern horizon. Only because Lex would ask about it in the morning did he bothered to slow down to drop off the cell phone in the lab and instruct the AI to see if it could be made to work again. Otherwise, it was a straight line to the bedroom.
Lex smelled of dirt and sweat, but Clark wasn't going to wait to shower. Sure, they'd already had almost a thousand years and neither of them were showing any indication of not having a thousand more ahead of them, but it had been days and Lex had smiled like that, and well, there were archeologists who wanted Lex and Clark needed to show Lex just who wanted him most.
Not that he was jealous or anything.
