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Okay, this should be a bit more fun.
Clark examined Lex’s bathroom, which was larger than his house’s kitchen, with trepidation. There were bottles and jars of things that Lex probably used, but with his luck he’d use them in the wrong places and wind up with a noticeable rash. Then Lex would be all over him for abusing borrowed property.
At least there was a recognizable toothbrush, with toothpaste waiting next to it. He brushed his teeth, staring at the mirror as he did so and watching Lex’s face contort around the toothbrush. After he finished, he continued looking at his reflection.
After a brief look around as if someone might be watching, he opened his mouth wide, sucked in his cheeks, crossed his eyes and otherwise played with his new face. He had to stop several times to double over with laughter, but the fun was well worth the unfamiliar ache in his unfamiliar stomach. He scrunched his nose, pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows and winked; he grinned wickedly, scowled, and poked himself in the cheek; he pulled at the skin around his eyes until they were slanted and narrow, leered, and stuck out his tongue.
Lex, he decided, didn’t have nearly as many expressions as his face did. Lex tried to hide, even though in Clark’s opinion he wasn’t all that good at it. He’d clearly never been taught that it took more muscles to frown than to smile. Or maybe he had, and thought the exercise was good for him.
Okay, now he just needed to pee and get undressed.
He stopped halfway to the toilet. In his own bathroom, all he’d have had to do would be to turn around, and he wouldn’t have had time to consider what was about to happen. But if he’d been in his own bathroom, the problem would never have existed in the first place.
Calm down, Kent, he told himself. I’m sure *Lex* isn’t having any trouble handling your equipment.
Strangely, that thought was not as reassuring as it should have been.
He forced himself to finish the journey to the toilet and raise the lid.
Okay. Careful observation in the boys’ locker room had clarified that he was physically indistinguishable from human guys. There was nothing to worry about. This wasn’t rocket science, where Lex really would have had an advantage.
Still, his hands hesitated on Lex’s belt.
You’re kind of choiceless here, he reminded himself. He fumbled the belt open, then the fly.
After all the buildup, it was almost disappointing that Lex’s dick looked almost exactly like his, except for the missing foreskin, and worked the same, at least after waiting a minute for the shyness to dissipate. Using his left hand was also weird, but worked fine as long as he didn’t think about it. It wasn’t, he thought as he finished up and went to wash his hands, as if he hadn’t seen Pete naked. So his hesitance wasn’t about modesty among friends.
Now he had to find pajamas. Oh God, what if Lex slept in the nude? It would be Lexlike. Better stick with underwear.
After an initial period in which he tried to use his X-ray vision to scan until he realized why that wasn’t working, physical exploration revealed no hampers. He did, however, find Lex’s suit jacket tossed across a stool in what seemed to be a dressing room, so he left the tie, French-cuffed shirt and pants (which turned out to have a stealthy extra button on the inside that he almost tore off before discovering) on top of the jacket. The cufflinks went on a dressing table, next to a scattering of others. He left Lex’s mom’s watch there too. He’d wear something else in the morning. It wasn’t his watch, in a deeper way than the rest of the stuff wasn’t his.
Lex hadn’t been wearing an undershirt, and he was chilly in just – jeez, were those boxer-briefs silk? They certainly were smooth against his vulnerable skin. He looked down and noticed that Lex didn’t seem to have any hair anywhere. Not on his chest, his stomach, his underarms, or his legs. It was all smooth, pale skin dotted with occasional freckles over long, lean muscles.
There was a full-length mirror in the dressing room, and Clark examined Lex’s body carefully. Funny, he never thought about it, but Lex worked out a lot, and ran himself hard. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, maybe because he never wore T-shirts or shorts or even tight jeans. In a fair fight, Lex could probably have given Whitney a hard time. Not that Lex was likely to fight fair, which was part of the point of hiding, he guessed. Too bad that, in Smallville, being strong for a normal guy wasn’t as useful as it was elsewhere.
And too bad that Lex hadn’t gotten extra strength from the meteors along with baldness and fast healing. Oh, Lex had never said it outright, but his bruises, burns, cracked ribs and other assorted injuries had all disappeared faster than they should have. Clark was grateful for that, but Lex wouldn’t have needed that ability so much if it weren’t for Clark and the meteors, so it was kind of a wash.
Clark sometimes wondered what Lex thought of the fact that he didn’t scar any more. He didn’t have a scar from where he’d been stabbed at Club Zero, not one on his body, and maybe that made the ones in his head worse. The same with Desiree, and probably a lot of other incidents, if Lex’s offhand comments were any guide.
In a way, because of the healing thing, Lex’s body was a lot safer than Clark’s had been when he’d lost his powers to Eric. In retrospect, Clark was grateful for the incident, both because he’d learned more about his obligations to the world and because he’d gotten his powers back. This was a similar thing, and therefore it could be reversed just like the switch with Eric. Especially with Lex working on it.
Clark had been standing, daydreaming, for so long that he was starting to shiver. He should get to bed. As he was turning towards the door to the bedroom, however, he realized that the hairlessness hypothesis had not been entirely confirmed, as Lex would have said.
You’re going to have to shower tomorrow morning – a few hours from now – anyway, he rationalized. Before he lost his nerve, he grabbed his waistband and tugged it out and down.
Bare as the rest of him. He let the elastic snap back into place, and winced at the sting. He had to be more careful with Lex’s body.
Heading back into Lex’s bedroom, Clark saw that one side of the bed looked slightly more used than the other three or so acres. A lamp, a digital alarm clock, a book, a box of tissues, and a few pill bottles were on a small table there. He turned on the lamp and then trudged back to the light switch by the far door to turn off the overhead lights. He was sure that Lex had a remote control to spare himself the transatlantic-length journey back and forth, but he didn’t want to waste time looking for it.
When he got into the bed, he spared a moment to check the title of the book. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,’ it said. It sounded a lot like something Lex would say about some Smallville event, like the Fourth of July picnic.
He set the alarm and turned off the light, then laid back against Lex’s expensive sheets. The pillowcase was slick against his head – his bald head, he realized again. The creamy sheets, soft as spider silk, hissed against his limbs as he shifted in the bed. He’d never noticed how hair insulated skin from a lot of sensations, or maybe this was a human thing, but the slowly warming sheets were like hands sliding all over his body.
The phantom hands had their natural effect, and Clark felt his body stir with interest.
No, no, no, no. Also, no. This was wrong beyond standard-issue wrongness. Above and beyond the call of wrong.
The sheets tangled around his thighs, feeling almost liquid as they brushed against his skin.
He was the only one here – in the castle and in Lex’s body, both. Who would it hurt? It was normal and natural. Even his dad had said so, in that indirect and embarrassed way when they’d had the talk about girls and being careful and a boy’s best friend sometimes being himself. It was safe, safer than touching anyone or anything else because he couldn’t break himself, and sometimes it felt like the only good thing in his life. It wouldn’t hurt Lex. He’d never hurt Lex.
Clark brushed his left hand down the soft skin of his stomach, smoother and softer than the sheets, and pushed his underwear down. Trailing his fingers across his dick, he was amazed at the slow, inexorable rise of his erection, not much like the sudden hardness that he ordinarily got (often at the worst possible times). His vocabulary was inadequate to describe the swelling, twisting pleasure of it. He could feel his pulse pounding all over his body.
He swept his free hand over the line of his hip, pushing down on the hard line of bone until he gasped. He was sweating now as he grasped his dick more securely and began to move, sliding the delicate skin over the rigid flesh beneath. His thumb brushed against the naked head, bald just like the rest of Lex, and his hips surged involuntarily.
His fingers slipped over and between his thighs, searching for an inch of skin that wasn’t fine and smooth and perfect. He could feel the orgasm building, coiling around his spine like a dragon. His panting breath was loud in the silent, dark room.
Clark brought his hand up to lick the palm, and the strange, salty taste of Lex’s skin made him shudder. It was like being with another person, only not, and his wet hand resumed its frantic tugging, not caring any more if he hurt Lex’s body. He brought his other hand up, tasting Lex, darker and more bitter than the taste of Jessie, or Lana, or Chloe.
And came with the force of a car exploding.
He lay gasping for several minutes before he had the strength to grab at the tissues and do some damage control. He could only hope Lex’s staff would replace the sheets before they switched back. And that they wouldn’t say mean things about Lex.
Lex, whose skin was like cream and who tasted like leather and wheat.
Oh, this is not good, he thought and fell asleep.
****
“What are you wearing?” Lex asked with ill-concealed horror.
Clark looked down at the designer black jeans, black cashmere sweater and black wool overcoat. “This was the best I found for farm work,” he said, mildly defensive. “You didn’t exactly leave me a guide to your *four walk-in closets* worth of clothes, you know. And, hey, what are *you* wearing?”
“I found it in your bottom drawer. You don’t like it?” Sure, the faded red T-shirt was tight. As a matter of fact, one might legitimately say that the shirt went beyond hugging Clark’s body to actively sucking on it. But he had thrown on a protective flannel overshirt for the winter morning chill. Though it didn’t seem particularly chilly to him, despite Clark’s shivers.
“It’s just – old,” Clark said helplessly and shivered some more.
“Here,” Lex said and stripped off the flannel. “Put this on under the coat.”
His body looked fairly puny in Clark’s shirt. “I look like the ‘before’ picture in a Charles Atlas ad,” he muttered, disgusted.
“Hey, no!” Clark protested. “You have a great – uh, a lot of muscles. I was surprised. Because – you usually wear so many clothes. I mean –“
Lex was fascinated. He didn’t know that he could blush up past where his hairline should have been.
“—Uh, can we just get started?”
He smiled. It felt natural. “Let’s.”
It was amazing how many chores Clark had, and how tedious each one was. Feed, sweep, carry, load, and numerous other verbs that Lex had no particular desire to enact.
Clark kept up a stream of chatter about school, warning him what not to do and who was on top of the student hierarchy. Clark’s instructions confirmed his recollection that high school society was in many ways more complicated than adult relationships. The kids were making it up as they went along, as if no prior generation had faced the same problems.
Lex, in return, tried to offer a framework for dealing with the plant. On a good day, there weren’t important issues needing immediate decisions.
It was too much to hope for a good day, so he didn’t bother. It was more practical to try to give Clark a two-hour MBA. Clark listened and gave the right answers when questioned; Lex would have to trust Clark’s basic good sense.
He noted with interest that Clark didn’t try to lift anything heavy, leaving that to Lex. Clark wouldn’t want to struggle with weights that Lex could lift effortlessly. Even assuming a body used to farmwork competing with a gym-made body, the disparity in exertion required would be too obvious. Clark was getting more subtle in his deceptions, which was a good thing. Lex didn’t want any more Nixons. The ease of lifting was of separate interest: Lex found he could gauge relative mass fairly easily, while at the same time exerting almost no effort, no matter how heavy the object. It would be interesting to test the upper bounds of that strength.
At one point, a blushing Clark asked why Lex had eyebrows and eyelashes.
“Looking in the shower, were we?” he asked wryly, and Clark dipped his head, showing another expanse of flushed skin. “Implants, Clark. Expensive and painful implants. It took my father’s plastic surgeons three years to get it right. I was probably the only ten-year-old boy in the world who knew how to put on fake eyelashes.”
Clark winced in sympathy. Lex wondered what, if anything, Clark knew about physical pain. There had been that one time where he’d seemed to have actual injuries, cracked ribs and bruises.
“Don’t worry. Now that they’re in, they’re very hard to get out; you can even rub your eyes.”
Near the end, they ran into Jonathan Kent, who executed a classic double-take at the sight of Lex. “Clark?” he asked, his voice heavy with menace.
“Lex wanted to see what my chores were,” Lex said in the voice of perfect innocence.
Jonathan scowled. “I hope he’s not slowing you down too much,” he said, and, in his peripheral vision, Lex saw Clark twitch guiltily.
Even absent the current personality transplant, Smallville was too much like living in a murder mystery without any body. Clues and red herrings abounded, but he couldn’t be sure there was an actual plot.
“We’re almost done. Can Lex come to breakfast?” He blinked his doe eyes at Jonathan, who looked as if he’d smelled a high concentration of sulfur gas.
“I’ll tell your mother to set another place,” Jonathan begrudged.
“Before you go to the plant,” Lex said quietly as they walked away from Jonathan, “you’ll need to change into a suit and tie. It shouldn’t be easy to clash, so don’t worry too much about it.”
Clark rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything.
****
“Mr. Kent, can you tell us about carboxyl groups?”
Beside him, Chloe groaned softly, anticipating a lecture on paying attention in class.
Lex’s head snapped up from his idle sketch of his latest Porsche. “Carboxyl groups, one carbon atom, two oxygen, one hydrogen. Carboxyl is a monovalent radical that acts as a weak acid, based on a phenomenon known as resonance having to do with the double bond between the carbon atom and one oxygen atom. Resonance aids in ionization and a carboxyl group can thus be distinguished from an alcohol, which also has an –OH bonded to a carbon atom but, like water, ionizes barely at all. The four main types of reactions of carboxylic acids are chiefly due –“
“*Thank* you, Mr. Kent. That will be quite enough.” The chemistry teacher looked as if he were having an attack of heartburn. It was an expression Lex had often enjoyed putting on teachers’ faces.
Chloe and Pete – hell, all the students – were gaping at him as if he were an alien. Which, of course, was pretty much the case.
The teacher turned his attention to another victim, reasserting his authority, and Lex manfully avoided smirking, which would doubtless only earn Clark the teacher’s enmity.
The bell couldn’t have come at a better time, in his opinion.
Outside the classroom, Lex paused and pulled out his cellphone. Clark picked up on the first ring. “Lex! Thank God. Someone named Parker called and says he won’t go lower than forty-seven, and you should call him back before three.”
“Call Parker, tell him forty-three and I know that DeWitt will do it for that much but I’d prefer to stick with him. Parker will cave.”
“What if he doesn’t? Forty-seven what?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call again at lunch. Anything else?”
“Some personnel stuff from Mr. Sullivan.”
“Give Gabe whatever he wants, he’s great with personnel.”
“Lex, I’m really uncomfortable –“
Principal Reynolds was standing in front of him. “Gotta go.” He snapped the phone shut. “Hello, sir.” This was actually helpful. Standing in front of the man, he almost felt fourteen again. Though Lex at fourteen was probably more like Lex at twenty-two than Clark at sixteen.
“Mr. Kent, you know cellphone use is prohibited on campus.” He held out his hand.
Fuck. Fuckity fuck. “Yes, sir,” he said and turned the phone off before handing it over. The last thing Clark needed was to have the principal answer a panicked call. “May I retrieve it after school?”
The principal harrumphed. “Yes, you may.” He turned and stalked off to harass some other, more undeserving student.
Pete appeared and nudged his shoulder. “What is up with you, man? Spouting chemistry, ordering someone around on the phone – you haven’t been hanging around any red rocks, have you? Let me see your hands.”
This grows from strange to stranger, Lex thought. Clark would submit to an inspection, right? But he would say something. “What are you talking about, Pete?” he asked as he held out his hands and Pete examined each finger, his wrists, and then tugged at his collar as if checking for hidden jewelry.
“Class ring? Red meteor rock? Strange Clark Kent behavior? Am I ringing any bells?”
Chloe approached, raising her eyebrows at Pete’s patdown. “First Clark goes all Mr. Peabody, now Pete’s conducting physical exams? What is this, fantasy career day?”
“Nothing’s going on,” Lex said, mind spinning a thousand cycles a minute. “I’ve just been studying. You know, Lex is really good at chemistry. He helps me sometimes.”
“I’ll bet he does,” Chloe said, and he turned a jaundiced eye on her. That girl definitely bore watching.
****
At lunchtime, Lex called again.
“You didn’t tell me you had a trigonometry test.”
“Hi, Lex. Um, how’d I do?”
“Your teacher seemed bothered when I gave the test back to her after five minutes. She asked if I was all right. Then she actually looked at the test. This is turning out to be fun, after all.”
Oh, sweet Jesus. “Lex –“
“Relax,” he drawled, and if it weren’t for the difference in pitch, Clark could have forgotten that Lex was wearing Clark’s face, could have treated it as just an ordinary call between friends. “I’m not getting you into trouble. Much. So, blown up my plant yet?”
Clark kept Lex on the phone for half an hour, talking through his responses to all the messages that said “urgent.” He didn’t quite believe Lex’s claim that most of them were not urgent at all; he suspected that Lex was trying to make him feel better for screwing up LexCorp. Lex employed thousands of people! And Clark had the power to destroy all that. It was worse, somehow, than having the power to destroy a building.
“Where are you, anyway?” he said when Lex explained that he couldn’t use the cellphone any more.
“The Torch office,” Lex said. “I skipped lunch –“
Clark gasped in horror. “You did what?!”
“It’s not a problem, I practically ate an entire horse this morning, as you may recall.”
“Lex,” he said, “you ate less than I usually do at breakfast. And you can’t skip lunch. Do the words low blood sugar mean anything to you? Look, in the bottom right drawer in the big desk, Chloe keeps an emergency Kit Kat supply. Open it up and eat every single one of them. I’ll replace them later.”
There were clunking noises as Lex complied. “Hmm,” he said after a few moments, “I guess I could eat. You know, this stuff’s not that bad. Oh, God, your palate! I mourn for the youth of Smallville. Remind me to buy you some real chocolate. And stop calling me – that name. Anyone could walk in.”
Yeah, Lex was cranky, a sure sign that a massive food infusion was required. Unfortunately, aliens couldn’t live on Kit Kats alone, and Clark was very afraid of what a hyperactive Lex would do when school let out.
“I’ll pick you up right after school,” he said, resolving to stop on the way for some sandwiches.
“You know, when I do that, it must look – never mind. Just don’t crash my car.”
Clark examined Lex’s bathroom, which was larger than his house’s kitchen, with trepidation. There were bottles and jars of things that Lex probably used, but with his luck he’d use them in the wrong places and wind up with a noticeable rash. Then Lex would be all over him for abusing borrowed property.
At least there was a recognizable toothbrush, with toothpaste waiting next to it. He brushed his teeth, staring at the mirror as he did so and watching Lex’s face contort around the toothbrush. After he finished, he continued looking at his reflection.
After a brief look around as if someone might be watching, he opened his mouth wide, sucked in his cheeks, crossed his eyes and otherwise played with his new face. He had to stop several times to double over with laughter, but the fun was well worth the unfamiliar ache in his unfamiliar stomach. He scrunched his nose, pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows and winked; he grinned wickedly, scowled, and poked himself in the cheek; he pulled at the skin around his eyes until they were slanted and narrow, leered, and stuck out his tongue.
Lex, he decided, didn’t have nearly as many expressions as his face did. Lex tried to hide, even though in Clark’s opinion he wasn’t all that good at it. He’d clearly never been taught that it took more muscles to frown than to smile. Or maybe he had, and thought the exercise was good for him.
Okay, now he just needed to pee and get undressed.
He stopped halfway to the toilet. In his own bathroom, all he’d have had to do would be to turn around, and he wouldn’t have had time to consider what was about to happen. But if he’d been in his own bathroom, the problem would never have existed in the first place.
Calm down, Kent, he told himself. I’m sure *Lex* isn’t having any trouble handling your equipment.
Strangely, that thought was not as reassuring as it should have been.
He forced himself to finish the journey to the toilet and raise the lid.
Okay. Careful observation in the boys’ locker room had clarified that he was physically indistinguishable from human guys. There was nothing to worry about. This wasn’t rocket science, where Lex really would have had an advantage.
Still, his hands hesitated on Lex’s belt.
You’re kind of choiceless here, he reminded himself. He fumbled the belt open, then the fly.
After all the buildup, it was almost disappointing that Lex’s dick looked almost exactly like his, except for the missing foreskin, and worked the same, at least after waiting a minute for the shyness to dissipate. Using his left hand was also weird, but worked fine as long as he didn’t think about it. It wasn’t, he thought as he finished up and went to wash his hands, as if he hadn’t seen Pete naked. So his hesitance wasn’t about modesty among friends.
Now he had to find pajamas. Oh God, what if Lex slept in the nude? It would be Lexlike. Better stick with underwear.
After an initial period in which he tried to use his X-ray vision to scan until he realized why that wasn’t working, physical exploration revealed no hampers. He did, however, find Lex’s suit jacket tossed across a stool in what seemed to be a dressing room, so he left the tie, French-cuffed shirt and pants (which turned out to have a stealthy extra button on the inside that he almost tore off before discovering) on top of the jacket. The cufflinks went on a dressing table, next to a scattering of others. He left Lex’s mom’s watch there too. He’d wear something else in the morning. It wasn’t his watch, in a deeper way than the rest of the stuff wasn’t his.
Lex hadn’t been wearing an undershirt, and he was chilly in just – jeez, were those boxer-briefs silk? They certainly were smooth against his vulnerable skin. He looked down and noticed that Lex didn’t seem to have any hair anywhere. Not on his chest, his stomach, his underarms, or his legs. It was all smooth, pale skin dotted with occasional freckles over long, lean muscles.
There was a full-length mirror in the dressing room, and Clark examined Lex’s body carefully. Funny, he never thought about it, but Lex worked out a lot, and ran himself hard. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, maybe because he never wore T-shirts or shorts or even tight jeans. In a fair fight, Lex could probably have given Whitney a hard time. Not that Lex was likely to fight fair, which was part of the point of hiding, he guessed. Too bad that, in Smallville, being strong for a normal guy wasn’t as useful as it was elsewhere.
And too bad that Lex hadn’t gotten extra strength from the meteors along with baldness and fast healing. Oh, Lex had never said it outright, but his bruises, burns, cracked ribs and other assorted injuries had all disappeared faster than they should have. Clark was grateful for that, but Lex wouldn’t have needed that ability so much if it weren’t for Clark and the meteors, so it was kind of a wash.
Clark sometimes wondered what Lex thought of the fact that he didn’t scar any more. He didn’t have a scar from where he’d been stabbed at Club Zero, not one on his body, and maybe that made the ones in his head worse. The same with Desiree, and probably a lot of other incidents, if Lex’s offhand comments were any guide.
In a way, because of the healing thing, Lex’s body was a lot safer than Clark’s had been when he’d lost his powers to Eric. In retrospect, Clark was grateful for the incident, both because he’d learned more about his obligations to the world and because he’d gotten his powers back. This was a similar thing, and therefore it could be reversed just like the switch with Eric. Especially with Lex working on it.
Clark had been standing, daydreaming, for so long that he was starting to shiver. He should get to bed. As he was turning towards the door to the bedroom, however, he realized that the hairlessness hypothesis had not been entirely confirmed, as Lex would have said.
You’re going to have to shower tomorrow morning – a few hours from now – anyway, he rationalized. Before he lost his nerve, he grabbed his waistband and tugged it out and down.
Bare as the rest of him. He let the elastic snap back into place, and winced at the sting. He had to be more careful with Lex’s body.
Heading back into Lex’s bedroom, Clark saw that one side of the bed looked slightly more used than the other three or so acres. A lamp, a digital alarm clock, a book, a box of tissues, and a few pill bottles were on a small table there. He turned on the lamp and then trudged back to the light switch by the far door to turn off the overhead lights. He was sure that Lex had a remote control to spare himself the transatlantic-length journey back and forth, but he didn’t want to waste time looking for it.
When he got into the bed, he spared a moment to check the title of the book. ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,’ it said. It sounded a lot like something Lex would say about some Smallville event, like the Fourth of July picnic.
He set the alarm and turned off the light, then laid back against Lex’s expensive sheets. The pillowcase was slick against his head – his bald head, he realized again. The creamy sheets, soft as spider silk, hissed against his limbs as he shifted in the bed. He’d never noticed how hair insulated skin from a lot of sensations, or maybe this was a human thing, but the slowly warming sheets were like hands sliding all over his body.
The phantom hands had their natural effect, and Clark felt his body stir with interest.
No, no, no, no. Also, no. This was wrong beyond standard-issue wrongness. Above and beyond the call of wrong.
The sheets tangled around his thighs, feeling almost liquid as they brushed against his skin.
He was the only one here – in the castle and in Lex’s body, both. Who would it hurt? It was normal and natural. Even his dad had said so, in that indirect and embarrassed way when they’d had the talk about girls and being careful and a boy’s best friend sometimes being himself. It was safe, safer than touching anyone or anything else because he couldn’t break himself, and sometimes it felt like the only good thing in his life. It wouldn’t hurt Lex. He’d never hurt Lex.
Clark brushed his left hand down the soft skin of his stomach, smoother and softer than the sheets, and pushed his underwear down. Trailing his fingers across his dick, he was amazed at the slow, inexorable rise of his erection, not much like the sudden hardness that he ordinarily got (often at the worst possible times). His vocabulary was inadequate to describe the swelling, twisting pleasure of it. He could feel his pulse pounding all over his body.
He swept his free hand over the line of his hip, pushing down on the hard line of bone until he gasped. He was sweating now as he grasped his dick more securely and began to move, sliding the delicate skin over the rigid flesh beneath. His thumb brushed against the naked head, bald just like the rest of Lex, and his hips surged involuntarily.
His fingers slipped over and between his thighs, searching for an inch of skin that wasn’t fine and smooth and perfect. He could feel the orgasm building, coiling around his spine like a dragon. His panting breath was loud in the silent, dark room.
Clark brought his hand up to lick the palm, and the strange, salty taste of Lex’s skin made him shudder. It was like being with another person, only not, and his wet hand resumed its frantic tugging, not caring any more if he hurt Lex’s body. He brought his other hand up, tasting Lex, darker and more bitter than the taste of Jessie, or Lana, or Chloe.
And came with the force of a car exploding.
He lay gasping for several minutes before he had the strength to grab at the tissues and do some damage control. He could only hope Lex’s staff would replace the sheets before they switched back. And that they wouldn’t say mean things about Lex.
Lex, whose skin was like cream and who tasted like leather and wheat.
Oh, this is not good, he thought and fell asleep.
****
“What are you wearing?” Lex asked with ill-concealed horror.
Clark looked down at the designer black jeans, black cashmere sweater and black wool overcoat. “This was the best I found for farm work,” he said, mildly defensive. “You didn’t exactly leave me a guide to your *four walk-in closets* worth of clothes, you know. And, hey, what are *you* wearing?”
“I found it in your bottom drawer. You don’t like it?” Sure, the faded red T-shirt was tight. As a matter of fact, one might legitimately say that the shirt went beyond hugging Clark’s body to actively sucking on it. But he had thrown on a protective flannel overshirt for the winter morning chill. Though it didn’t seem particularly chilly to him, despite Clark’s shivers.
“It’s just – old,” Clark said helplessly and shivered some more.
“Here,” Lex said and stripped off the flannel. “Put this on under the coat.”
His body looked fairly puny in Clark’s shirt. “I look like the ‘before’ picture in a Charles Atlas ad,” he muttered, disgusted.
“Hey, no!” Clark protested. “You have a great – uh, a lot of muscles. I was surprised. Because – you usually wear so many clothes. I mean –“
Lex was fascinated. He didn’t know that he could blush up past where his hairline should have been.
“—Uh, can we just get started?”
He smiled. It felt natural. “Let’s.”
It was amazing how many chores Clark had, and how tedious each one was. Feed, sweep, carry, load, and numerous other verbs that Lex had no particular desire to enact.
Clark kept up a stream of chatter about school, warning him what not to do and who was on top of the student hierarchy. Clark’s instructions confirmed his recollection that high school society was in many ways more complicated than adult relationships. The kids were making it up as they went along, as if no prior generation had faced the same problems.
Lex, in return, tried to offer a framework for dealing with the plant. On a good day, there weren’t important issues needing immediate decisions.
It was too much to hope for a good day, so he didn’t bother. It was more practical to try to give Clark a two-hour MBA. Clark listened and gave the right answers when questioned; Lex would have to trust Clark’s basic good sense.
He noted with interest that Clark didn’t try to lift anything heavy, leaving that to Lex. Clark wouldn’t want to struggle with weights that Lex could lift effortlessly. Even assuming a body used to farmwork competing with a gym-made body, the disparity in exertion required would be too obvious. Clark was getting more subtle in his deceptions, which was a good thing. Lex didn’t want any more Nixons. The ease of lifting was of separate interest: Lex found he could gauge relative mass fairly easily, while at the same time exerting almost no effort, no matter how heavy the object. It would be interesting to test the upper bounds of that strength.
At one point, a blushing Clark asked why Lex had eyebrows and eyelashes.
“Looking in the shower, were we?” he asked wryly, and Clark dipped his head, showing another expanse of flushed skin. “Implants, Clark. Expensive and painful implants. It took my father’s plastic surgeons three years to get it right. I was probably the only ten-year-old boy in the world who knew how to put on fake eyelashes.”
Clark winced in sympathy. Lex wondered what, if anything, Clark knew about physical pain. There had been that one time where he’d seemed to have actual injuries, cracked ribs and bruises.
“Don’t worry. Now that they’re in, they’re very hard to get out; you can even rub your eyes.”
Near the end, they ran into Jonathan Kent, who executed a classic double-take at the sight of Lex. “Clark?” he asked, his voice heavy with menace.
“Lex wanted to see what my chores were,” Lex said in the voice of perfect innocence.
Jonathan scowled. “I hope he’s not slowing you down too much,” he said, and, in his peripheral vision, Lex saw Clark twitch guiltily.
Even absent the current personality transplant, Smallville was too much like living in a murder mystery without any body. Clues and red herrings abounded, but he couldn’t be sure there was an actual plot.
“We’re almost done. Can Lex come to breakfast?” He blinked his doe eyes at Jonathan, who looked as if he’d smelled a high concentration of sulfur gas.
“I’ll tell your mother to set another place,” Jonathan begrudged.
“Before you go to the plant,” Lex said quietly as they walked away from Jonathan, “you’ll need to change into a suit and tie. It shouldn’t be easy to clash, so don’t worry too much about it.”
Clark rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything.
****
“Mr. Kent, can you tell us about carboxyl groups?”
Beside him, Chloe groaned softly, anticipating a lecture on paying attention in class.
Lex’s head snapped up from his idle sketch of his latest Porsche. “Carboxyl groups, one carbon atom, two oxygen, one hydrogen. Carboxyl is a monovalent radical that acts as a weak acid, based on a phenomenon known as resonance having to do with the double bond between the carbon atom and one oxygen atom. Resonance aids in ionization and a carboxyl group can thus be distinguished from an alcohol, which also has an –OH bonded to a carbon atom but, like water, ionizes barely at all. The four main types of reactions of carboxylic acids are chiefly due –“
“*Thank* you, Mr. Kent. That will be quite enough.” The chemistry teacher looked as if he were having an attack of heartburn. It was an expression Lex had often enjoyed putting on teachers’ faces.
Chloe and Pete – hell, all the students – were gaping at him as if he were an alien. Which, of course, was pretty much the case.
The teacher turned his attention to another victim, reasserting his authority, and Lex manfully avoided smirking, which would doubtless only earn Clark the teacher’s enmity.
The bell couldn’t have come at a better time, in his opinion.
Outside the classroom, Lex paused and pulled out his cellphone. Clark picked up on the first ring. “Lex! Thank God. Someone named Parker called and says he won’t go lower than forty-seven, and you should call him back before three.”
“Call Parker, tell him forty-three and I know that DeWitt will do it for that much but I’d prefer to stick with him. Parker will cave.”
“What if he doesn’t? Forty-seven what?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call again at lunch. Anything else?”
“Some personnel stuff from Mr. Sullivan.”
“Give Gabe whatever he wants, he’s great with personnel.”
“Lex, I’m really uncomfortable –“
Principal Reynolds was standing in front of him. “Gotta go.” He snapped the phone shut. “Hello, sir.” This was actually helpful. Standing in front of the man, he almost felt fourteen again. Though Lex at fourteen was probably more like Lex at twenty-two than Clark at sixteen.
“Mr. Kent, you know cellphone use is prohibited on campus.” He held out his hand.
Fuck. Fuckity fuck. “Yes, sir,” he said and turned the phone off before handing it over. The last thing Clark needed was to have the principal answer a panicked call. “May I retrieve it after school?”
The principal harrumphed. “Yes, you may.” He turned and stalked off to harass some other, more undeserving student.
Pete appeared and nudged his shoulder. “What is up with you, man? Spouting chemistry, ordering someone around on the phone – you haven’t been hanging around any red rocks, have you? Let me see your hands.”
This grows from strange to stranger, Lex thought. Clark would submit to an inspection, right? But he would say something. “What are you talking about, Pete?” he asked as he held out his hands and Pete examined each finger, his wrists, and then tugged at his collar as if checking for hidden jewelry.
“Class ring? Red meteor rock? Strange Clark Kent behavior? Am I ringing any bells?”
Chloe approached, raising her eyebrows at Pete’s patdown. “First Clark goes all Mr. Peabody, now Pete’s conducting physical exams? What is this, fantasy career day?”
“Nothing’s going on,” Lex said, mind spinning a thousand cycles a minute. “I’ve just been studying. You know, Lex is really good at chemistry. He helps me sometimes.”
“I’ll bet he does,” Chloe said, and he turned a jaundiced eye on her. That girl definitely bore watching.
****
At lunchtime, Lex called again.
“You didn’t tell me you had a trigonometry test.”
“Hi, Lex. Um, how’d I do?”
“Your teacher seemed bothered when I gave the test back to her after five minutes. She asked if I was all right. Then she actually looked at the test. This is turning out to be fun, after all.”
Oh, sweet Jesus. “Lex –“
“Relax,” he drawled, and if it weren’t for the difference in pitch, Clark could have forgotten that Lex was wearing Clark’s face, could have treated it as just an ordinary call between friends. “I’m not getting you into trouble. Much. So, blown up my plant yet?”
Clark kept Lex on the phone for half an hour, talking through his responses to all the messages that said “urgent.” He didn’t quite believe Lex’s claim that most of them were not urgent at all; he suspected that Lex was trying to make him feel better for screwing up LexCorp. Lex employed thousands of people! And Clark had the power to destroy all that. It was worse, somehow, than having the power to destroy a building.
“Where are you, anyway?” he said when Lex explained that he couldn’t use the cellphone any more.
“The Torch office,” Lex said. “I skipped lunch –“
Clark gasped in horror. “You did what?!”
“It’s not a problem, I practically ate an entire horse this morning, as you may recall.”
“Lex,” he said, “you ate less than I usually do at breakfast. And you can’t skip lunch. Do the words low blood sugar mean anything to you? Look, in the bottom right drawer in the big desk, Chloe keeps an emergency Kit Kat supply. Open it up and eat every single one of them. I’ll replace them later.”
There were clunking noises as Lex complied. “Hmm,” he said after a few moments, “I guess I could eat. You know, this stuff’s not that bad. Oh, God, your palate! I mourn for the youth of Smallville. Remind me to buy you some real chocolate. And stop calling me – that name. Anyone could walk in.”
Yeah, Lex was cranky, a sure sign that a massive food infusion was required. Unfortunately, aliens couldn’t live on Kit Kats alone, and Clark was very afraid of what a hyperactive Lex would do when school let out.
“I’ll pick you up right after school,” he said, resolving to stop on the way for some sandwiches.
“You know, when I do that, it must look – never mind. Just don’t crash my car.”
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This is wonderful. Thanks so much for posting it...
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This is so wonderful: funny, sweet, sexy, and suspenseful. More, please!
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bwahahaha!
I love this. LOVE it.
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You're killing me. Oh DAMN this is fun.
*grins* Must have more soon. Or you know, ALL. Annnytime. But soon would be best.
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*joins in the chorus of 'More!'*
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wow
From: (Anonymous)
Woohoo for switching!
One question though - why isn't Clark freaking out about Lex using his body's powers? I would have presumed that it would be one of the first things he'd think about.
Unless there's a part I haven't read that deals with it? Or it's in an upcoming part [wheedling voice]that you'll post very very soon?!)[/wv]
Love Love Love it!
Emelerin
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I loved chemistry class and the trig test. And eyelashes! Ouch -- poor Young!Lex; I'd never considered that before, other than another meteoric quirk.
Thanks for writing and sharing, and I look forward to the next installment. :)
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More, please?
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