Brains And Heart

Once upon a time, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, something extraordinary happened above the city of Metropolis. And it started, of all things, with Lex Luthor and Superman working together for the very first time in their whole complicated history.

It began when Brainiac's ship appeared in the sky without warning — a mile-wide skull of gleaming green metal, hanging silently over the city. The moment it arrived, the ship began shrinking entire city blocks down into small glowing bottles, one after another, streets and buildings and everything inside them folding smaller and smaller until they vanished from sight completely.

Superman fought as hard as he had ever fought anything, straining against the ship's power with every ounce of his strength. But Brainiac's shrinking ray had been built specifically, cruelly, to work against Kryptonian strength — a weakness that, as it happened, only one person in all of Metropolis had ever noticed before.

Lex Luthor, watching from the window of LexCorp Tower, recognized it within seconds. He had studied Brainiac's strange technology for years, ever since he'd first learned of the collector-mind from beyond the stars, always hoping, somewhere in the back of his careful, calculating heart, that he might use that knowledge against Superman someday.

But today was different. Today, Lex didn't hesitate at all.

He opened an emergency channel straight to the Justice League Watchtower and offered something he had never once offered before, not in all his years of rivalry: full and complete cooperation.

"I know how to jam that ray," Lex said, his voice quick and certain. "I need Superman here in three minutes. And I need him to trust me."

Now, Superman had every good reason in the world not to trust Lex Luthor. Years of Warsuits and kryptonite beams and secret schemes had taught him better than that. But Metropolis was shrinking, block by block, family by family, and there simply wasn't time left for old grudges to matter.

So Superman flew straight to LexCorp Tower.

There, he found Lex already hard at work, assembling a frequency disruptor out of spare Warsuit parts, moving faster and more carefully than he had ever built anything before in his entire life. Sweat on his brow. Steady hands.

"Hold this steady against the hull," Lex instructed, pressing the device into Superman's hands. "And don't let go, no matter what you see inside that ship."

Superman looked at him for one long moment. Then, without asking why, without demanding an explanation, he simply nodded — and went.

Together, in a way neither of them had ever managed before, they carried out the plan Lex had sketched in only nine desperate minutes. Superman held the disruptor firmly against Brainiac's enormous hull while Lex, back in his tower, worked his own careful magic — rerouting the ship's shrinking ray back through its own targeting system, turning Brainiac's greatest weapon against itself.

The beam that had bottled three entire city blocks reversed completely. Brainiac's massive ship began to crumple inward on itself, folding smaller and smaller, shrinking down until it was no larger than a suitcase, harmless and still. Far below, the rescued city blocks unfolded gently back to their full size — dazed, a little shaken, but whole and safe once more.

And then something happened that had never, ever happened before in the whole long history of Metropolis.

The city cheered — for both of them. Together.

Lex Luthor let himself feel it, just for one shining, unguarded moment, standing right beside Superman on the rooftop of LexCorp Tower while cameras flashed and flashed below them. It was, he privately admitted to himself, in the quietest and most honest corner of his mind, an even better feeling than any victory he had ever won entirely alone.

For just a moment, he wondered what it might feel like to have more days like this one.

But then a reporter in the crowd below shouted up a question — had Lex Luthor finally changed, once and for all, for good? — and something in his expression closed up all at once, like a door swinging quietly shut.

"I solved a problem," Lex said flatly, already turning back toward the tower behind him, his voice carefully flat and even. "That's all this was."

Superman watched him go, walking back into the shadow of his own glowing tower, and felt something that wasn't quite disappointment and wasn't quite hope, but sat somewhere gently between the two.

He kept watching, and kept hoping, the way he always did, every single time — that someday, for Lex Luthor, it might finally mean something more than that.