![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Several of my Smallville stories have been translated into Chinese. This makes me unreasonably happy.
for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melisande431
Clex, Lex takes Superman to court over property damage. Happiness ensues. Note: I couldn’t get all the way to happiness, but maybe some of the way there?
Vi et Armis
Clark didn’t understand what had happened. In the movies, the well-funded, slick lawyers of the rich company were always doing well right until the end of trial, at which point the messy, failure-til-now guy with an office in the bad part of town and a snarky-but-cute assistant pulled a great speech out of nowhere, all about the common man and what people owe to each other, and the jury went for the good guy and the rich company slunk off with its (metaphorical) tail between its (metaphorical) legs, and possibly somebody from the rich company got mad and threw things or, even, went to jail.
Clark’s trial hadn’t been anything like that. To be sure, his lawyer had been messy, with an office in the bad part of town, and his main experience was in divorce cases, because Clark couldn’t afford anything more. But Lex’s lawyers hadn’t seemed all that slick. They’d seemed like regular folks too, even though that was a lie—they were just so expensive that they knew enough to pretend to be normal, like Lex himself had finally learned. And at the end, Lex’s lawyers had been the ones talking about fairness and ordinary people, and Clark’s lawyer had just made sweeping statements about how good Superman was and how he never meant to destroy eighty million dollars of LuthorCorp property.
Which was true: Clark hadn’t ever given much thought to the property. He’d always concentrated on the people.
Unfortunately, the jury hadn’t seen it that way.
He really thought that if Lex had been asking for money, they would have been on Clark’s side. But Lex was too clever for that. He had enough money that he could live with a moral victory.
“A draft of the proposed injunction, your honor,” Lex’s main lawyer, a tall brunette with heels so spiked that she was definitely sleeping with Lex, said and handed over a sheaf of paper. “The defendant to stay at least eight hundred feet from any and all properly marked LuthorCorp properties.”
Clark consulted his mental map of Metropolis. That would put more than sixty-five percent of the city off-limits to him. Sex offenders had more freedom of movement. He made a protesting noise, but the judge waved him silent. They’d had a conversation about how the lawyer was the one who ought to speak to the judge early on, and Clark had followed the judge’s instructions even as his confidence in his attorney had waned. He poked his lawyer in the arm, and the man snapped to attention. “We’ll, uh, be filing objections.”
“I’ll hear argument tomorrow,” the judge agreed. The case had moved Flash-fast, driven by its high profile and Lex’s money.
The awful thing was, Clark didn’t think Lex had suborned the jury. Those people really thought he was unjustified. Of course Lex’s lawyers had twisted things, but still, he should have been able to convince them that it was all okay in the service of the greater good.
As soon as the judge dismissed them, he sped out of the building, avoiding the cluster of reporters waiting for him. Lex hadn’t attended any of the trial; apparently his testimony was considered unnecessary.
Eight hundred feet meant he wouldn’t even be able to show up to the Planet as Superman, because it was too near LuthorCorp Tower.
That night, he flew over to the penthouse, figuring that he deserved one last run at Lex before he was ordered to stay away.
Lex was at his desk, working, the remains of dinner still beside him, along with an empty bottle of wine. He’d switched to brandy by the time Clark arrived.
Lex sighed and pressed a button on his desk, opening the door to the balcony where Clark stood with his hands on his hips. “You might as well come in.” He didn’t look up.
“I wouldn’t have destroyed all those buildings if you hadn’t been conducting illegal activities,” Clark began.
Lex didn’t look up. The light from his monitor reflected in his eyes, glimmering blue-white and unfriendly. “I didn’t think you were doing it merely on behalf of my competitors, whatever the effect. And I’ll even spot you the roughly one-third of the damages due to you pursuing other evildoers. But if you could have proven the illegality, you wouldn’t be here right now, asking for … what is it that you’re asking for, again?”
Clark frowned. He’d come because—because confronting Lex was part of the ritual, or had been until now. He didn’t really have any requests of Lex. He hadn’t tried asking in years, and he was pretty worn-out when it came to demands as well.
“I wanted to see you,” he said at last. “If—I won’t see you once this injunction goes into force, will I?” Lex was perfectly capable of staying within an eight-hundred-foot radius of his own properties, or if he needed to move somewhere new buying enough land to create a path for himself, insulated from Clark’s intrusion.
Lex’s fingers stopped moving on his keyboard. “Your vision extends for miles when you tune it properly,” he said.
Clark closed his eyes, just for a second. “It’s not the same.”
Lex stood, moving until he was only a few feet in front of Clark. He held his arms out, aggressive and martyred at once. “Here I am.”
Clark looked.
After a few minutes, Lex started to get uncomfortable, which Clark could tell from detecting his pulse and his occasional reflexive swallows, but he didn’t move.
“Well?” Lex snapped after five more minutes had passed.
“It’s not enough,” Clark admitted. “I’m never—we’re never going to be done with each other, Lex.”
Lex swallowed again and dropped his arms to his sides. “I washed my hands of you years ago, Clark.”
It was, Clark realized, the first time Lex had ever said his name while he was in costume. Lex’s surprised jerk suggested that Lex had just realized that as well.
“Get them dirty again,” he suggested, and Lex’s skin heated four degrees, which was—interesting information. Then Clark processed what he’d said, and his own blush made it hard to keep from lifting off and zooming away. But he was committed now, and he might as well try for more. “Invite me to dinner tomorrow. You can tell me how I can stop your illegal experiments without destroying your buildings. You’re the planner, after all.”
Lex blinked a couple of times, then took a breath. His shoulders were as tense as a suspension bridge. Clark kind of wanted to touch them. “I’ll have my lawyers modify the injunction so that you can come to the Tower.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Lex,” Clark told him, his voice softening into tones he remembered from years back, in the mansion in Smallville.
Lex gave him a small, not quite unhappy smile. “Yes, you do.”
Clark nodded, because even back then they’d sparred, tiger cubs heedless of their own nascent powers. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But not like this.”
Lex took a deep breath. “Dinner?”
Clark grinned, feeling like a lead box had just slammed down on a chunk of Kryptonite. “I’ll be there.”
And he`was, with pizza from Naples, because he was smart enough now to know that it wasn’t the gift, but the giving, that mattered. Lex didn’t smile, but he sent the chef’s carefully prepared meal back to the kitchen with a wave of his hand.
Nothing was fixed, but maybe, just maybe, they were a little less broken.
formeret
SPN Dean/BTVS Faith, first time
“How long until your friends can dig us out?” Dean asked, resting one hand on his knee as he drew his other leg up, changing position. He was going to be cramped as shit when they got out, but he’d probably be able to walk if he didn’t let his muscles freeze in place.
The superstrong hot chick made a noise, and her leather-clad thigh slid up against his. “Couple of hours at least. You had to blow up the building?”
“Hey, you had another idea to destroy twenty-six zombies, I was all ears.”
“I coulda taken ‘em.”
Dean snorted, and something sharp jabbed him in his lower back. “Lady, I’ll give you six, ‘cause what you did back there I never saw before, but that’s all.”
“Lady?” she asked, amused and annoyed at once.
“You prefer ma’am?”
Hot hands slid over his stomach, and Dean grinned into the darkness. “Actually,” she said, “ma’am sounds about right, coming out of your mouth.” She started flicking buttons open, and not on his shirt.
“I could do other things with my mouth instead,” he suggested. “Ma’am.” There wasn’t that much room to maneuver, but she seemed pretty flexible.
“Oh, you will,” she told him, and then they were done talking for a while.
forsvmadelyn
Smallville - Clark/Lex - darkness descends on Metropolis
When the dome grew up over the city, an opaque soap bubble, Lex was on the phone to Japan. The dome cut the call, along with every other electromagnetic signal of note, along with the light.
Lex went to his window and looked up at the place where the sky had been. Lights were coming on all over the city, people flicking the switch to replace daylight, but that wouldn’t last long; Metropolis only generated 34.5% of its own power, and the powerlines would have been severed by this event.
Mercy was already through the door, holding a flashlight for herself and one for him.
“Get me to the labs,” Lex told her.
Six hours later, they knew that the dome was impermeable to every chemical, biological, and physical attack reasonably available to Lex. There was always the tactical nuke in the subbasement of LuthorCorp, but Lex wasn’t going to try that in the first month. People wouldn’t be starving until the second month, and he’d need time to create some sort of radiation shielding.
Lex wasn’t sure whether the fact that Superman had been fighting a giant kraken down by Florida when the dome had appeared had represented a success or a failure for whatever had caused this. Was Metropolis a hostage? An accident?
Fifty sleepless hours later, he had a breakthrough. “Quantum tunneling,” he told the scientists assembled around him. “If we can punch through and then back, we can destabilize the structure. We’ll have to get everyone inside,” he told Mercy, who was waiting, “ideally underground, in case it collapses at the macro level.”
“But,” the smartest of his scientists said, “given the computational density of the dome, someone would have to construct the same apparatus right outside within six minutes of first penetration, or it’ll just reconfigure and that avenue will be closed to us.”
Lex nodded at Mercy, telling her to get started. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised.
They looked pale and nervous in the emergency lighting, but they didn’t dare disbelieve him.
Much later, when he’d managed put out the largest of the fires that had broken out in the wider world while the head of LuthorCorp had been unavailable, he raised his head from his desk—he hadn’t meant to nap, but even his body had limits—and saw Superman, standing not six feet away.
He blinked, unable to think of a suitably cutting remark. He blamed lingering fatigue toxins.
“How did you know?” Clark asked. “How did you know I’d be waiting right there?”
“Clark,” Lex said, forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to know, “you were on the other side of an uncrossable barrier from me. Of course you’d be waiting right there.”
Then he put his head back down, because his head was spinning and he was going to regret whatever else came out of his mouth.
If Clark said anything else, Lex missed it. But when he woke, he was in his bed, carefully tucked in, and the window was open, letting in the crisp Metropolis air and the distant sounds of sirens, the city crankily getting itself back to normal.
There was a sunflower in a glass of water on his bedside table.
Lex looked at it for a while, then turned his face to the sun.
forlomedet
Buffy - Willow Rosenberg - "Who can retell the things that befell us? Who can count them?"
"What is this?" Giles asked, holding up a perfect-bound printout, half an inch thick.
Willow raised her head from the pot she was stirring. "It’s my record of the past couple of years."
Giles stared at her in his bemused-British-guy way, the expression equal parts truly befuddled and warily gathering more data, though you wouldn't know about the latter until you knew him pretty well, maybe better than he wanted to be known. "Why have you been keeping a record?"
"You think a Watcher's journal is the only way to write history?" she asked, turning the flame down low so that the potion could simmer. "Sometimes it's a good idea to have multiple perspectives, especially at a critical time. And with the Council building gone, it's time to think about redundancy. Electronic archiving is the wave of the future, Giles."
She'd nattered on too much, like that shy teen Giles had met so long ago, bubbling over with enthusiasm when anyone seemed willing to listen.
Giles adjusted his glasses and did the thing with his mouth where he was disquieted but not angry. "Yes, of course, Willow, but you printed this out. I can only presume you wanted me to read it."
That was a leap, but maybe not a big one. Xander wouldn't fight his way through stories he already knew -- he got headaches looking at small print, and Willow was working on a spell to convert anything he wanted to read into graphic novel format. And Buffy wasn't around enough right now to read Willow's version of history. So Giles had a point: She’d wanted someone to know, and the only other person who was trying to make a record of what they'd done was a good candidate.
"It's just," she began, "these are the last Slayers. They aren't getting their own watchers. They’ll be footnotes, if they're lucky." And me, she didn't say. Not even a Slayer, just a witch who almost destroyed the world.
"You’re absolutely correct,” Giles said. "You and I have a lot of work to do."
She stared at him, waiting.
"I believe I have a supply of journals, but not enough to outfit all our slayers. Perhaps you could canvass them and find out which ones prefer to emulate you and write on one of those aggravating machines."
She had to look down, then. She should have known that Giles would understand. They could tell their stories the same way they'd lived them: overlapping and reinforcing and contradicting, and, in the end, together.
for
melisande431 Clex, Lex takes Superman to court over property damage. Happiness ensues. Note: I couldn’t get all the way to happiness, but maybe some of the way there?
Vi et Armis
Clark didn’t understand what had happened. In the movies, the well-funded, slick lawyers of the rich company were always doing well right until the end of trial, at which point the messy, failure-til-now guy with an office in the bad part of town and a snarky-but-cute assistant pulled a great speech out of nowhere, all about the common man and what people owe to each other, and the jury went for the good guy and the rich company slunk off with its (metaphorical) tail between its (metaphorical) legs, and possibly somebody from the rich company got mad and threw things or, even, went to jail.
Clark’s trial hadn’t been anything like that. To be sure, his lawyer had been messy, with an office in the bad part of town, and his main experience was in divorce cases, because Clark couldn’t afford anything more. But Lex’s lawyers hadn’t seemed all that slick. They’d seemed like regular folks too, even though that was a lie—they were just so expensive that they knew enough to pretend to be normal, like Lex himself had finally learned. And at the end, Lex’s lawyers had been the ones talking about fairness and ordinary people, and Clark’s lawyer had just made sweeping statements about how good Superman was and how he never meant to destroy eighty million dollars of LuthorCorp property.
Which was true: Clark hadn’t ever given much thought to the property. He’d always concentrated on the people.
Unfortunately, the jury hadn’t seen it that way.
He really thought that if Lex had been asking for money, they would have been on Clark’s side. But Lex was too clever for that. He had enough money that he could live with a moral victory.
“A draft of the proposed injunction, your honor,” Lex’s main lawyer, a tall brunette with heels so spiked that she was definitely sleeping with Lex, said and handed over a sheaf of paper. “The defendant to stay at least eight hundred feet from any and all properly marked LuthorCorp properties.”
Clark consulted his mental map of Metropolis. That would put more than sixty-five percent of the city off-limits to him. Sex offenders had more freedom of movement. He made a protesting noise, but the judge waved him silent. They’d had a conversation about how the lawyer was the one who ought to speak to the judge early on, and Clark had followed the judge’s instructions even as his confidence in his attorney had waned. He poked his lawyer in the arm, and the man snapped to attention. “We’ll, uh, be filing objections.”
“I’ll hear argument tomorrow,” the judge agreed. The case had moved Flash-fast, driven by its high profile and Lex’s money.
The awful thing was, Clark didn’t think Lex had suborned the jury. Those people really thought he was unjustified. Of course Lex’s lawyers had twisted things, but still, he should have been able to convince them that it was all okay in the service of the greater good.
As soon as the judge dismissed them, he sped out of the building, avoiding the cluster of reporters waiting for him. Lex hadn’t attended any of the trial; apparently his testimony was considered unnecessary.
Eight hundred feet meant he wouldn’t even be able to show up to the Planet as Superman, because it was too near LuthorCorp Tower.
That night, he flew over to the penthouse, figuring that he deserved one last run at Lex before he was ordered to stay away.
Lex was at his desk, working, the remains of dinner still beside him, along with an empty bottle of wine. He’d switched to brandy by the time Clark arrived.
Lex sighed and pressed a button on his desk, opening the door to the balcony where Clark stood with his hands on his hips. “You might as well come in.” He didn’t look up.
“I wouldn’t have destroyed all those buildings if you hadn’t been conducting illegal activities,” Clark began.
Lex didn’t look up. The light from his monitor reflected in his eyes, glimmering blue-white and unfriendly. “I didn’t think you were doing it merely on behalf of my competitors, whatever the effect. And I’ll even spot you the roughly one-third of the damages due to you pursuing other evildoers. But if you could have proven the illegality, you wouldn’t be here right now, asking for … what is it that you’re asking for, again?”
Clark frowned. He’d come because—because confronting Lex was part of the ritual, or had been until now. He didn’t really have any requests of Lex. He hadn’t tried asking in years, and he was pretty worn-out when it came to demands as well.
“I wanted to see you,” he said at last. “If—I won’t see you once this injunction goes into force, will I?” Lex was perfectly capable of staying within an eight-hundred-foot radius of his own properties, or if he needed to move somewhere new buying enough land to create a path for himself, insulated from Clark’s intrusion.
Lex’s fingers stopped moving on his keyboard. “Your vision extends for miles when you tune it properly,” he said.
Clark closed his eyes, just for a second. “It’s not the same.”
Lex stood, moving until he was only a few feet in front of Clark. He held his arms out, aggressive and martyred at once. “Here I am.”
Clark looked.
After a few minutes, Lex started to get uncomfortable, which Clark could tell from detecting his pulse and his occasional reflexive swallows, but he didn’t move.
“Well?” Lex snapped after five more minutes had passed.
“It’s not enough,” Clark admitted. “I’m never—we’re never going to be done with each other, Lex.”
Lex swallowed again and dropped his arms to his sides. “I washed my hands of you years ago, Clark.”
It was, Clark realized, the first time Lex had ever said his name while he was in costume. Lex’s surprised jerk suggested that Lex had just realized that as well.
“Get them dirty again,” he suggested, and Lex’s skin heated four degrees, which was—interesting information. Then Clark processed what he’d said, and his own blush made it hard to keep from lifting off and zooming away. But he was committed now, and he might as well try for more. “Invite me to dinner tomorrow. You can tell me how I can stop your illegal experiments without destroying your buildings. You’re the planner, after all.”
Lex blinked a couple of times, then took a breath. His shoulders were as tense as a suspension bridge. Clark kind of wanted to touch them. “I’ll have my lawyers modify the injunction so that you can come to the Tower.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Lex,” Clark told him, his voice softening into tones he remembered from years back, in the mansion in Smallville.
Lex gave him a small, not quite unhappy smile. “Yes, you do.”
Clark nodded, because even back then they’d sparred, tiger cubs heedless of their own nascent powers. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But not like this.”
Lex took a deep breath. “Dinner?”
Clark grinned, feeling like a lead box had just slammed down on a chunk of Kryptonite. “I’ll be there.”
And he`was, with pizza from Naples, because he was smart enough now to know that it wasn’t the gift, but the giving, that mattered. Lex didn’t smile, but he sent the chef’s carefully prepared meal back to the kitchen with a wave of his hand.
Nothing was fixed, but maybe, just maybe, they were a little less broken.
for
meretSPN Dean/BTVS Faith, first time
“How long until your friends can dig us out?” Dean asked, resting one hand on his knee as he drew his other leg up, changing position. He was going to be cramped as shit when they got out, but he’d probably be able to walk if he didn’t let his muscles freeze in place.
The superstrong hot chick made a noise, and her leather-clad thigh slid up against his. “Couple of hours at least. You had to blow up the building?”
“Hey, you had another idea to destroy twenty-six zombies, I was all ears.”
“I coulda taken ‘em.”
Dean snorted, and something sharp jabbed him in his lower back. “Lady, I’ll give you six, ‘cause what you did back there I never saw before, but that’s all.”
“Lady?” she asked, amused and annoyed at once.
“You prefer ma’am?”
Hot hands slid over his stomach, and Dean grinned into the darkness. “Actually,” she said, “ma’am sounds about right, coming out of your mouth.” She started flicking buttons open, and not on his shirt.
“I could do other things with my mouth instead,” he suggested. “Ma’am.” There wasn’t that much room to maneuver, but she seemed pretty flexible.
“Oh, you will,” she told him, and then they were done talking for a while.
for
svmadelynSmallville - Clark/Lex - darkness descends on Metropolis
When the dome grew up over the city, an opaque soap bubble, Lex was on the phone to Japan. The dome cut the call, along with every other electromagnetic signal of note, along with the light.
Lex went to his window and looked up at the place where the sky had been. Lights were coming on all over the city, people flicking the switch to replace daylight, but that wouldn’t last long; Metropolis only generated 34.5% of its own power, and the powerlines would have been severed by this event.
Mercy was already through the door, holding a flashlight for herself and one for him.
“Get me to the labs,” Lex told her.
Six hours later, they knew that the dome was impermeable to every chemical, biological, and physical attack reasonably available to Lex. There was always the tactical nuke in the subbasement of LuthorCorp, but Lex wasn’t going to try that in the first month. People wouldn’t be starving until the second month, and he’d need time to create some sort of radiation shielding.
Lex wasn’t sure whether the fact that Superman had been fighting a giant kraken down by Florida when the dome had appeared had represented a success or a failure for whatever had caused this. Was Metropolis a hostage? An accident?
Fifty sleepless hours later, he had a breakthrough. “Quantum tunneling,” he told the scientists assembled around him. “If we can punch through and then back, we can destabilize the structure. We’ll have to get everyone inside,” he told Mercy, who was waiting, “ideally underground, in case it collapses at the macro level.”
“But,” the smartest of his scientists said, “given the computational density of the dome, someone would have to construct the same apparatus right outside within six minutes of first penetration, or it’ll just reconfigure and that avenue will be closed to us.”
Lex nodded at Mercy, telling her to get started. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised.
They looked pale and nervous in the emergency lighting, but they didn’t dare disbelieve him.
Much later, when he’d managed put out the largest of the fires that had broken out in the wider world while the head of LuthorCorp had been unavailable, he raised his head from his desk—he hadn’t meant to nap, but even his body had limits—and saw Superman, standing not six feet away.
He blinked, unable to think of a suitably cutting remark. He blamed lingering fatigue toxins.
“How did you know?” Clark asked. “How did you know I’d be waiting right there?”
“Clark,” Lex said, forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to know, “you were on the other side of an uncrossable barrier from me. Of course you’d be waiting right there.”
Then he put his head back down, because his head was spinning and he was going to regret whatever else came out of his mouth.
If Clark said anything else, Lex missed it. But when he woke, he was in his bed, carefully tucked in, and the window was open, letting in the crisp Metropolis air and the distant sounds of sirens, the city crankily getting itself back to normal.
There was a sunflower in a glass of water on his bedside table.
Lex looked at it for a while, then turned his face to the sun.
for
lomedetBuffy - Willow Rosenberg - "Who can retell the things that befell us? Who can count them?"
"What is this?" Giles asked, holding up a perfect-bound printout, half an inch thick.
Willow raised her head from the pot she was stirring. "It’s my record of the past couple of years."
Giles stared at her in his bemused-British-guy way, the expression equal parts truly befuddled and warily gathering more data, though you wouldn't know about the latter until you knew him pretty well, maybe better than he wanted to be known. "Why have you been keeping a record?"
"You think a Watcher's journal is the only way to write history?" she asked, turning the flame down low so that the potion could simmer. "Sometimes it's a good idea to have multiple perspectives, especially at a critical time. And with the Council building gone, it's time to think about redundancy. Electronic archiving is the wave of the future, Giles."
She'd nattered on too much, like that shy teen Giles had met so long ago, bubbling over with enthusiasm when anyone seemed willing to listen.
Giles adjusted his glasses and did the thing with his mouth where he was disquieted but not angry. "Yes, of course, Willow, but you printed this out. I can only presume you wanted me to read it."
That was a leap, but maybe not a big one. Xander wouldn't fight his way through stories he already knew -- he got headaches looking at small print, and Willow was working on a spell to convert anything he wanted to read into graphic novel format. And Buffy wasn't around enough right now to read Willow's version of history. So Giles had a point: She’d wanted someone to know, and the only other person who was trying to make a record of what they'd done was a good candidate.
"It's just," she began, "these are the last Slayers. They aren't getting their own watchers. They’ll be footnotes, if they're lucky." And me, she didn't say. Not even a Slayer, just a witch who almost destroyed the world.
"You’re absolutely correct,” Giles said. "You and I have a lot of work to do."
She stared at him, waiting.
"I believe I have a supply of journals, but not enough to outfit all our slayers. Perhaps you could canvass them and find out which ones prefer to emulate you and write on one of those aggravating machines."
She had to look down, then. She should have known that Giles would understand. They could tell their stories the same way they'd lived them: overlapping and reinforcing and contradicting, and, in the end, together.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject