SV Fic: "Still Two Fools" 7/9 (NC-17) - Clark/Lex, Mercy
Title: "Still Two Fools" 7/9 
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark/Lex, Mercy
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3,280, for this chapter
Spoilers/Warnings: Future fic, although some vague spoilers for S6.
Summary: Clark and Mercy team up to save Lex from his real arch-nemesis: marriage.
Note: I 'borrowed' a joke from the Simpsons for this chapter. Alas, I couldn't resist. But it's not "and that's terrible." :P
Previously: Lex is getting married to yet another crazy woman who wants to murder him for his money. This one is an alien named Vivian, who wants to lay eggs in his brain, so nothing too new or unusual for Lex there. :P Clark and Mercy have decided that this absolutely cannot happen, but when they tried to stop Lex before the wedding, they were attacked by Vivian and knocked unconscious. Their one hope: Lex is physically incapable of killing anyone without first creating some big, contorted scheme that will give them plenty of time to escape.
Still Two Fools
by Kantayra
Chapter Seven
“Ha!” Clark exclaimed triumphantly. “I knew it!”
Clark had just woken up to discover, to his delight, that he and Mercy were both tied up back-to-back with Kryptonite chains, dangling above the giant shark tank twenty feet below. The other end of the chain was attached to some elaborate device that involved stones rolling at regular intervals and a giant winch. There seemed to be some sort of contorted timing mechanism, with blue and green blinking lights, that released one stone at a time, which in turn rotated the winch so that they were jerked one foot further down and closer to the shark tank. As usual, Lex had absolutely no respect for the category violation involved in combining medieval torture devices with modern technology.
“Don’t freak out,” Clark sighed with relief at the ridiculously Rube Goldbergian death contraption, “but I’m sort of in love with your boss right now…”
“There’s a real shocker,” Mercy retorted. Clark could hear her roll her eyes, even with his superhearing disabled due to the Kryptonite.
“No, seriously,” Clark argued. “Who else would have a device like this set up at their own wedding?”
Mercy was silent for a moment. “It probably would be cheaper if we didn’t have to import the great whites every time…” She sounded thoughtful.
“Exactly!” Clark agreed happily. “Now we just have to thwart Lex’s evil death trap!” This was something he was actually good at.
“Swing?” Mercy suggested.
“Swing.”
***
The problem with the ‘swing out of the tank’ technique was that the only way to start swinging was to flail a lot. Mercy had tried kicking Clark really hard to get a good lift-off, but that had just resulted in them spinning around really fast.
They finally actually managed to start swinging when they were about ten feet above the water below. And, once they got started, they built up steam well enough. They swung wider and wider and…
SPLAT!
Clark smacked right into the inside of the shark tank. “Uh, Mercy?” he winced when they swung back to center.
“Yeah?”
“I think we’re too low now to swing out of the tank.”
Another rock rolled from the contraption, and they jerked a foot lower. Fortunately, it also jerked them out of their swinging motion enough that they lost momentum and didn’t slam into the tank again when they swung back the other way.
Mercy’s body shook like she was trying to overcome some powerful emotion. “No, really?” she finally commented snidely. “What was your first clue?”
“Probably when I smacked into the glass,” Clark decided.
Mercy sighed, like she was hyperventilating or something.
“Are you okay?” Clark asked, concerned.
The contraption turned, and they fell another foot.
“I’m eight feet above a shark tank.” Mercy’s voice was strained. “I think that’s about as far away from ‘okay’ as you can get.”
“That’s all right,” Clark concluded. “Once we’re in the water, we just have to kick the sharks in the nose.”
“Kick them in the nose?” Mercy sounded incredulous.
“Batman says it works for him all the time,” Clark nodded.
“Batman says this?”
“Batman is a scientist,” Clark explained helpfully.
“And all this time we thought Bruce was the smart one,” Mercy sighed with frustration. She banged her head back against Clark’s for lack of anything else to bang it up against, but it didn’t really hurt. Clark thought that it was very considerate of Lex to use just enough Kryptonite to disable Clark’s powers but not so much that he was in pain. Really, these Kryptonite chains were almost comfy…
Just then, Clark picked up muttering the hallway. His superhearing must have been down, because Mercy seemed to hear it at the same time.
“…You think you have an evil lab?” the voice slurred, and there was some crashing in the hallway. “I’ll show you an evil lab…”
The door at the far end of the lab swung open, and in stumbled Doctor Oblitero, who seemed to be having an animated argument with the bottle of Scotch he was carrying.
“Now this,” Oblitero held out the bottle so that it could see the lab, “is what an evil lab lookth like!”
He promptly slumped against the control mechanism for their death trap and took another swig of Scotch.
Clark and Mercy exchanged a look.
“Hey, Oblitero!” Mercy called out in the sweetest sounding voice she could manage. She ended up sounding about as sweet as a vicious attack dog on a leash. At the same moment, the device turned, and they dropped another foot.
Seven to go.
Oblitero was startled by the sound and movement, looking around confusedly for a few moments. He didn’t seem to be able to spot Clark and Mercy, despite the fact that Clark was wearing a giant red cape.
“Whose arch-nemesis is this yokel again?” Mercy grumbled.
“Aquaman’s, I think…”
Mercy snorted. “Figures.” Then she called out, trying to sound nice again. “Hey, Arvin! Up here!”
“Arvin?” Clark coughed in disbelief.
“Shut up,” Mercy hissed out of the corner of her mouth. “This guy is our only chance.”
“I still think we’re better off kicking the sharks…”
Mercy kicked him.
Doctor Oblitero’s first name was, apparently, Arvin, because he looked up at that and then began waving drunkenly at them, like there was absolutely nothing unusual about seeing Superman and Lex Luthor’s bodyguard chained together over a shark tank.
Actually, given the lives that most masked crusaders - both good and evil - led, it probably wasn’t that strange, Clark conceded.
“Hi, Arvin, nice to see you,” Mercy sounded like she was trying to be pleasant, but Clark could hear her gritting her teeth.
“Then why aren’t you waving back?” Oblitero pouted.
“I’m kind of chained to Superman over a shark tank, you know?” Mercy practically hissed.
“Oh, yeah.” Oblitero took another chug of Scotch. “Bummer.”
They fell another foot.
“It really is,” Mercy agreed sweetly. “I don’t suppose you could help us out?”
Oblitero smiled and nodded drunkenly for a second, before something occurred to him. “I don’t know…” he said apologetically. “It looks like someone went to a lot of trouble here. I wouldn’t want to piss off Lex. He’s got…” Oblitero looked around furtively before his voice dropped to an overly-loud whisper. “Lawyers!”
Clark shuddered. He’d seen Lex’s lawyers. They’d once sent an entire invasion from the planet Evillorius off screaming. It had been pretty terrifying.
“But Arvin,” Mercy cooed. It was a truly terrifying sound. “I’m Lex’s bodyguard. He won’t get mad if you let me go, I promise.”
Another drop. Five feet to go.
Oblitero frowned. “But you’re tied up to Superman!” he argued, quite logically for a drunk person. Clark was actually very impressed.
“But Oblitero - Arvin,” Clark chimed in, batting his eyelashes, “remember what we talked about earlier? Lex would want me to be at his wedding. To, you know, make him an honest supervillain and all.”
Mercy sounded like she was choking.
Oblitero nodded very seriously at this, however. “Mmkay,” he finally agreed. “Whaddo I do?”
They dropped again. Four feet to go.
“The winch,” Mercy hissed urgently. “Stop the winch.”
Oblitero frowned about them, completely oblivious. “Which winch?”
“That winch!”
“This winch?”
“Yes, that winch!”
They fell again. Three feet.
The sharks, not being inherently aggressive the way they always were in bad b-movies, completely ignored them.
Oblitero staggered over to the winch and frowned. “Like this?” He turned the lever.
They dropped another foot.
“Other way! Other way!” Clark and Mercy cried out in unison.
Oblitero tried that. “It’s stuck…”
“Then pull harder!” Mercy hissed.
“Look,” Oblitero stumbled on his feet slightly as he turned to face them, “I’m just trying to be nice here, and you’re all with the yelling and the-”
“Full bar privileges!” Mercy squeaked out as they dropped another foot. Clark’s feet were brushing the surface of the water now. “At every LexCorp function for the next year!”
Oblitero pondered that. “Two years.”
“One and a half!”
“Deal!”
“Now, get us out this mess!” Mercy hissed.
Oblitero blinked. “Oh, is that what you wanted. I thought you wanted me to turn the winch…”
And, with that, he clapped his hands once and the tank - water, sharks, and all - vanished right out of existence.
Mercy blinked in surprise.
“See?” Clark retorted. “I told you he was Aquaman’s arch-nemesis.”
“Want me to get the chains too?” Oblitero offered.
“If you don’t mind.” Clark smiled brightly.
With the shark tank gone, it was actually a pretty nasty fall. Clark twisted them in mid-air, though, and with the Kryptonite chains obliterated out of existence, his powers had returned enough that it didn’t hurt him when Mercy landed on top of him.
Oblitero was grinning at where they’d fallen two feet away. “You guys’re great!” he exclaimed. “You’re the bestest buddies a supervillain could ever…”
And, with that, he fell back onto the contraption with a snore.
Clark and Mercy shared a disbelieving look.
“We’ve got to-” Clark began.
“I know already!” Mercy snapped.
“-Stop that wedding!”
Clark grabbed Mercy’s hand, and they flew for the chapel.
***
It was time-honored tradition that all heroic interruptions of weddings had to occur during the ‘if anyone knows why these two shouldn’t be wed’ section of the wedding. Thus it was horribly embarrassing when Clark and Mercy burst in before Vivian even had a chance to get down the aisle. Clark, who felt that his dramatic panache had been lacking of late, blushed in response to all the glares. Mercy didn’t seem to care, either way.
“Die, bitch!” She pulled out her Evil Kryptonite Laser and instantly began shooting up the place.
And that certainly didn’t fit in with Superman’s style. Clark was beginning to suspect that Mercy might be just a little unhinged.
Her technique sure worked for clearing the place out, though. Various villains and lackeys practically clamored over each other as they hid in the pews.
Vivian, however, was not one of them.
She turned angrily towards them, a hissing pile of white lace, and when Mercy broke out with her laser, three blue, scaly tentacles emerged from her mouth and shot out in Mercy and Clark’s direction.
Clark took to the air to avoid the hit. Mercy ducked to the side quickly enough to evade two, but not the third. It latched around her ankle and pulled her in toward the beast that had once looked like Vivian DeLisle. Mercy was shooting her Evil Kryptonite Laser at it the whole time, but it seemed that Kryptonite really didn’t bother Xthl’thz’nks much.
From above, Clark tried his heat vision on the tentacle that had captured Mercy. Vivian had transformed almost completely now into a gray-blue gooey monster, shaped kind of like a mailbox, with a series of tentacles of various lengths emerging from her body. Where Vivian’s arms would have been, were now two eyes on long gray stalks. No wonder twisting her arms had hurt; it must have been the equivalent to poking her in the eye.
Clark’s heat vision wasn’t enough to break the tentacle’s hold on Mercy, but it did seem to annoy Vivian enough for her to turn her attention to defeating Clark instead. Instantly, he was bombarded by a swarm of tentacles that wrapped around his limbs in various places.
“Hey! What part of the red and blue spandex doesn’t say ‘gay’ to you?” Clark complained when one tentacle landed in a very unfortunate place.
Vivian, blushing a blue-violet at her faux pas, moved the tentacle to Clark’s leg instead and began thrashing him across the room. It felt a lot like Clark imagined being mixed into a blender might feel like. He caught wild glimpses of startled faces hiding in the pews below. He was really sad he didn’t have a camera to capture Gorilla Grodd’s expression and show it to the entire Justice League later; it was particularly priceless. And then, out of the corner of his eye, was Lex, blinking wide-eyed at Clark like he’d said something really interesting or something.
“If you wanted to get free, Kal-El,” he dimly heard Mercy shout out through the ringing in his ears at being shaken so hard, “now would be a good time.”
It suddenly occurred to Clark that, yeah, ripping free was probably a good idea and, oh look, he had the superstrength to do it. He pulled himself free with a mighty flex of supermuscles, and Vivian screamed in pain as he broke free of her tentacles.
“Oh…” Lex sighed from the head of the chapel. “My…”
Clark flew out of range of the next barrage of tentacles and glanced over to see that Mercy had pulled out a bowie knife from somewhere or other and had just sliced off the tentacle that was around her ankle.
From her back pocket, Mercy pulled out the Phantom Zone gun. “Die, bitch,” she repeated and fired. “Or…er, go to a weird, extra-dimensional prison,” she amended. Even Clark had to admit that “die, bitch” sounded much cooler.
Vivian zigged and zagged very quickly for an alien, mailbox-shaped blob of blue-gray slime, however. She dodged the portal neatly, and it blazed black behind her as she hissed and reached out again with her tentacles for Mercy.
Mercy’s eyes widened, and she scrambled backwards, but Clark could see that she wasn’t going to be fast enough to evade Vivian’s grasp.
Then, out of nowhere, someone suddenly came stumbling down the aisle, oblivious to all that was happening, and crashed sideways into Vivian. For one precarious moment, Vivian wobbled, then she fell backwards into the portal, screeching as she went. One tentacle managed to wrap around one of the pews at the last moment.
Clark took great pleasure in using his heat vision on it. For one moment it blistered but held on, but then Vivian’s grip failed her, and she vanished into the portal.
It closed with a satisfying ‘pop.’
“What’d I miss?” Doctor Oblitero asked drunkenly from where he’d fallen on the floor after accidentally crashing into Vivian.
For a moment, Clark considered kissing him.
Then, however, he heard commotion from the head of the chapel and turned just in time to see the blue-white glow in Lex’s eyes blink out as Vivian’s control over him wavered and broke. A shudder traveled throughout his entire body, and he collapsed.
Before he had a chance to hit the floor, Clark was there, catching him mid-swoon. Lex fainted quite prettily, Clark noted absentmindedly, as Lex draped himself gracefully back over Clark’s arm. Clark, for his part, puffed up his chest in a heroic manner. It did quite a lot to restore his sense of superhero style which had been so lacking during the battle.
He heard several cameras go off in the background. Reporters, no doubt. Clark could see the tabloid headlines now: ‘Lex Luthor Caught In Bizarre Alien Love Triangle!’ Lex was probably going to kill Clark for letting him get his picture taken in pure romance-novel-style, damsel-in-distress pose. After all that had happened this week, Clark could live with Lex trying to kill him again.
In fact, he shifted Lex in his arms slightly so that their groins were pressed together more fully. It probably wasn’t as pretty of a pose, but it sure felt nice, and Clark felt like copping one little feel wasn’t so much to ask for after the heroic efforts he’d gone through to save Lex from brain-eating larvae.
“Well,” Mercy sat up shakily from the back of the chapel, glancing at Clark cradling Lex’s body, Doctor Oblitero inebriated on the floor, and several pews completely shattered from the battle, “that was annoying.”
At that moment, the doors to the chapel burst open to reveal Lionel Luthor, who had somehow gotten his way past Lex’s security, after all.
“What,” he demanded with an arched eyebrow, “is going on here?” He stalked down the aisle to where Clark held Lex.
Mercy let out a sound that was almost frightened and didn’t even try to stop Lionel.
Fortunately, at that moment, Doctor Oblitero decided to wake up, roll over, and vomit all over Lionel Luthor’s shoes.
There was a collective gasp.
Lex regained consciousness just long enough to say, “Knew I always invited that guy for a reason,” before he passed out again.
Lionel looked down in disgust.
‘Run!’ Mercy mouthed to Clark.
Clark didn’t need to be told twice. An unconscious Lex could never be trusted to his father’s care. Clark scooped up Lex in his arms and flew off into the night, just in time to hear the chaos break out inside.
He winced in sympathy at the mess he was leaving behind for Mercy to clean up.
***
Clark would never get over how fragile Lex felt in his arms. He cradled the curve of Lex’s skull in the palm of his hand, pressing Lex’s face gently into his shoulder as they flew back to LexCorp Towers. Lex curled instinctively into his warmth, at least while unconscious, and Clark found something deeply soothing about their flight. Lex was safe and cared for and the immediate threat to him had been destroyed.
Clark landed them on the balcony and was gratified to discover that Lex hadn’t changed the combination to the keypad outside his bedroom sliding doors since the last time Clark had come to chide him about his latest misdeeds. That had been over a week before, and Lex had to have known that Clark knew the combination now, but Lex was always uncharacteristically slow to change this code.
Lex still curled up in his arms, Clark flew over the bed and carefully lowered Lex until his back rested on soft white sheets. Lex’s left arm had looped around Clark’s neck in a near death grip some time during the flight, and it took a bit of finagling to dislodge it. Lex let out a little murmur of loss when Clark finally separated them, but promptly fell back into a deep, rhythmic sleep.
Clark hovered for a few minutes, directly over the bed and directly over Lex, watching Lex’s sleeping face and listening to the steady, reassuring thump of his heartbeat. Seemingly of its own volition, his hand reached down to trace the curve of Lex’s lower lip with his thumb. Lex hummed contentedly in his sleep and turned his head to follow the motion of Clark’s hand, rubbing affectionately against his palm.
It was a perfect moment of connection and the sort of thing they could only achieve while Lex was knocked unconscious.
Clark finally pulled back when he heard the sound of the penthouse’s back elevator arriving. The front elevator was probably still messed up from when he and Mercy had first teamed up two days before.
He stayed long enough to recognize the pulse and heartbeat in the elevator as Mercy and realized, with a start, that he’d actually been floating there, watching Lex sleep for over two hours. It had only felt like minutes. Embarrassed that he’d been hovering around Lex when Lex so clearly hated him, he flew out the way he’d come and into the cool Metropolis night.
Lex was safe at home, and Clark had done everything that was required of him. Everything was back to normal now.
It took Clark longer than usual to come out of his holding pattern around LexCorp Towers, and longer still before he took on the full mantle of Superman once more and rose into the heavens to do his job. Then, he heard a cry for help and shots fired two states over and he was off, like nothing had ever happened in the first place.
So, Clark = hopeless, y/y? :P Feedback, as always, is much appreciated.
Chapter Eight
All Chapters
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark/Lex, Mercy
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3,280, for this chapter
Spoilers/Warnings: Future fic, although some vague spoilers for S6.
Summary: Clark and Mercy team up to save Lex from his real arch-nemesis: marriage.
Note: I 'borrowed' a joke from the Simpsons for this chapter. Alas, I couldn't resist. But it's not "and that's terrible." :P
Previously: Lex is getting married to yet another crazy woman who wants to murder him for his money. This one is an alien named Vivian, who wants to lay eggs in his brain, so nothing too new or unusual for Lex there. :P Clark and Mercy have decided that this absolutely cannot happen, but when they tried to stop Lex before the wedding, they were attacked by Vivian and knocked unconscious. Their one hope: Lex is physically incapable of killing anyone without first creating some big, contorted scheme that will give them plenty of time to escape.
Still Two Fools
by Kantayra
Chapter Seven
“Ha!” Clark exclaimed triumphantly. “I knew it!”
Clark had just woken up to discover, to his delight, that he and Mercy were both tied up back-to-back with Kryptonite chains, dangling above the giant shark tank twenty feet below. The other end of the chain was attached to some elaborate device that involved stones rolling at regular intervals and a giant winch. There seemed to be some sort of contorted timing mechanism, with blue and green blinking lights, that released one stone at a time, which in turn rotated the winch so that they were jerked one foot further down and closer to the shark tank. As usual, Lex had absolutely no respect for the category violation involved in combining medieval torture devices with modern technology.
“Don’t freak out,” Clark sighed with relief at the ridiculously Rube Goldbergian death contraption, “but I’m sort of in love with your boss right now…”
“There’s a real shocker,” Mercy retorted. Clark could hear her roll her eyes, even with his superhearing disabled due to the Kryptonite.
“No, seriously,” Clark argued. “Who else would have a device like this set up at their own wedding?”
Mercy was silent for a moment. “It probably would be cheaper if we didn’t have to import the great whites every time…” She sounded thoughtful.
“Exactly!” Clark agreed happily. “Now we just have to thwart Lex’s evil death trap!” This was something he was actually good at.
“Swing?” Mercy suggested.
“Swing.”
***
The problem with the ‘swing out of the tank’ technique was that the only way to start swinging was to flail a lot. Mercy had tried kicking Clark really hard to get a good lift-off, but that had just resulted in them spinning around really fast.
They finally actually managed to start swinging when they were about ten feet above the water below. And, once they got started, they built up steam well enough. They swung wider and wider and…
SPLAT!
Clark smacked right into the inside of the shark tank. “Uh, Mercy?” he winced when they swung back to center.
“Yeah?”
“I think we’re too low now to swing out of the tank.”
Another rock rolled from the contraption, and they jerked a foot lower. Fortunately, it also jerked them out of their swinging motion enough that they lost momentum and didn’t slam into the tank again when they swung back the other way.
Mercy’s body shook like she was trying to overcome some powerful emotion. “No, really?” she finally commented snidely. “What was your first clue?”
“Probably when I smacked into the glass,” Clark decided.
Mercy sighed, like she was hyperventilating or something.
“Are you okay?” Clark asked, concerned.
The contraption turned, and they fell another foot.
“I’m eight feet above a shark tank.” Mercy’s voice was strained. “I think that’s about as far away from ‘okay’ as you can get.”
“That’s all right,” Clark concluded. “Once we’re in the water, we just have to kick the sharks in the nose.”
“Kick them in the nose?” Mercy sounded incredulous.
“Batman says it works for him all the time,” Clark nodded.
“Batman says this?”
“Batman is a scientist,” Clark explained helpfully.
“And all this time we thought Bruce was the smart one,” Mercy sighed with frustration. She banged her head back against Clark’s for lack of anything else to bang it up against, but it didn’t really hurt. Clark thought that it was very considerate of Lex to use just enough Kryptonite to disable Clark’s powers but not so much that he was in pain. Really, these Kryptonite chains were almost comfy…
Just then, Clark picked up muttering the hallway. His superhearing must have been down, because Mercy seemed to hear it at the same time.
“…You think you have an evil lab?” the voice slurred, and there was some crashing in the hallway. “I’ll show you an evil lab…”
The door at the far end of the lab swung open, and in stumbled Doctor Oblitero, who seemed to be having an animated argument with the bottle of Scotch he was carrying.
“Now this,” Oblitero held out the bottle so that it could see the lab, “is what an evil lab lookth like!”
He promptly slumped against the control mechanism for their death trap and took another swig of Scotch.
Clark and Mercy exchanged a look.
“Hey, Oblitero!” Mercy called out in the sweetest sounding voice she could manage. She ended up sounding about as sweet as a vicious attack dog on a leash. At the same moment, the device turned, and they dropped another foot.
Seven to go.
Oblitero was startled by the sound and movement, looking around confusedly for a few moments. He didn’t seem to be able to spot Clark and Mercy, despite the fact that Clark was wearing a giant red cape.
“Whose arch-nemesis is this yokel again?” Mercy grumbled.
“Aquaman’s, I think…”
Mercy snorted. “Figures.” Then she called out, trying to sound nice again. “Hey, Arvin! Up here!”
“Arvin?” Clark coughed in disbelief.
“Shut up,” Mercy hissed out of the corner of her mouth. “This guy is our only chance.”
“I still think we’re better off kicking the sharks…”
Mercy kicked him.
Doctor Oblitero’s first name was, apparently, Arvin, because he looked up at that and then began waving drunkenly at them, like there was absolutely nothing unusual about seeing Superman and Lex Luthor’s bodyguard chained together over a shark tank.
Actually, given the lives that most masked crusaders - both good and evil - led, it probably wasn’t that strange, Clark conceded.
“Hi, Arvin, nice to see you,” Mercy sounded like she was trying to be pleasant, but Clark could hear her gritting her teeth.
“Then why aren’t you waving back?” Oblitero pouted.
“I’m kind of chained to Superman over a shark tank, you know?” Mercy practically hissed.
“Oh, yeah.” Oblitero took another chug of Scotch. “Bummer.”
They fell another foot.
“It really is,” Mercy agreed sweetly. “I don’t suppose you could help us out?”
Oblitero smiled and nodded drunkenly for a second, before something occurred to him. “I don’t know…” he said apologetically. “It looks like someone went to a lot of trouble here. I wouldn’t want to piss off Lex. He’s got…” Oblitero looked around furtively before his voice dropped to an overly-loud whisper. “Lawyers!”
Clark shuddered. He’d seen Lex’s lawyers. They’d once sent an entire invasion from the planet Evillorius off screaming. It had been pretty terrifying.
“But Arvin,” Mercy cooed. It was a truly terrifying sound. “I’m Lex’s bodyguard. He won’t get mad if you let me go, I promise.”
Another drop. Five feet to go.
Oblitero frowned. “But you’re tied up to Superman!” he argued, quite logically for a drunk person. Clark was actually very impressed.
“But Oblitero - Arvin,” Clark chimed in, batting his eyelashes, “remember what we talked about earlier? Lex would want me to be at his wedding. To, you know, make him an honest supervillain and all.”
Mercy sounded like she was choking.
Oblitero nodded very seriously at this, however. “Mmkay,” he finally agreed. “Whaddo I do?”
They dropped again. Four feet to go.
“The winch,” Mercy hissed urgently. “Stop the winch.”
Oblitero frowned about them, completely oblivious. “Which winch?”
“That winch!”
“This winch?”
“Yes, that winch!”
They fell again. Three feet.
The sharks, not being inherently aggressive the way they always were in bad b-movies, completely ignored them.
Oblitero staggered over to the winch and frowned. “Like this?” He turned the lever.
They dropped another foot.
“Other way! Other way!” Clark and Mercy cried out in unison.
Oblitero tried that. “It’s stuck…”
“Then pull harder!” Mercy hissed.
“Look,” Oblitero stumbled on his feet slightly as he turned to face them, “I’m just trying to be nice here, and you’re all with the yelling and the-”
“Full bar privileges!” Mercy squeaked out as they dropped another foot. Clark’s feet were brushing the surface of the water now. “At every LexCorp function for the next year!”
Oblitero pondered that. “Two years.”
“One and a half!”
“Deal!”
“Now, get us out this mess!” Mercy hissed.
Oblitero blinked. “Oh, is that what you wanted. I thought you wanted me to turn the winch…”
And, with that, he clapped his hands once and the tank - water, sharks, and all - vanished right out of existence.
Mercy blinked in surprise.
“See?” Clark retorted. “I told you he was Aquaman’s arch-nemesis.”
“Want me to get the chains too?” Oblitero offered.
“If you don’t mind.” Clark smiled brightly.
With the shark tank gone, it was actually a pretty nasty fall. Clark twisted them in mid-air, though, and with the Kryptonite chains obliterated out of existence, his powers had returned enough that it didn’t hurt him when Mercy landed on top of him.
Oblitero was grinning at where they’d fallen two feet away. “You guys’re great!” he exclaimed. “You’re the bestest buddies a supervillain could ever…”
And, with that, he fell back onto the contraption with a snore.
Clark and Mercy shared a disbelieving look.
“We’ve got to-” Clark began.
“I know already!” Mercy snapped.
“-Stop that wedding!”
Clark grabbed Mercy’s hand, and they flew for the chapel.
***
It was time-honored tradition that all heroic interruptions of weddings had to occur during the ‘if anyone knows why these two shouldn’t be wed’ section of the wedding. Thus it was horribly embarrassing when Clark and Mercy burst in before Vivian even had a chance to get down the aisle. Clark, who felt that his dramatic panache had been lacking of late, blushed in response to all the glares. Mercy didn’t seem to care, either way.
“Die, bitch!” She pulled out her Evil Kryptonite Laser and instantly began shooting up the place.
And that certainly didn’t fit in with Superman’s style. Clark was beginning to suspect that Mercy might be just a little unhinged.
Her technique sure worked for clearing the place out, though. Various villains and lackeys practically clamored over each other as they hid in the pews.
Vivian, however, was not one of them.
She turned angrily towards them, a hissing pile of white lace, and when Mercy broke out with her laser, three blue, scaly tentacles emerged from her mouth and shot out in Mercy and Clark’s direction.
Clark took to the air to avoid the hit. Mercy ducked to the side quickly enough to evade two, but not the third. It latched around her ankle and pulled her in toward the beast that had once looked like Vivian DeLisle. Mercy was shooting her Evil Kryptonite Laser at it the whole time, but it seemed that Kryptonite really didn’t bother Xthl’thz’nks much.
From above, Clark tried his heat vision on the tentacle that had captured Mercy. Vivian had transformed almost completely now into a gray-blue gooey monster, shaped kind of like a mailbox, with a series of tentacles of various lengths emerging from her body. Where Vivian’s arms would have been, were now two eyes on long gray stalks. No wonder twisting her arms had hurt; it must have been the equivalent to poking her in the eye.
Clark’s heat vision wasn’t enough to break the tentacle’s hold on Mercy, but it did seem to annoy Vivian enough for her to turn her attention to defeating Clark instead. Instantly, he was bombarded by a swarm of tentacles that wrapped around his limbs in various places.
“Hey! What part of the red and blue spandex doesn’t say ‘gay’ to you?” Clark complained when one tentacle landed in a very unfortunate place.
Vivian, blushing a blue-violet at her faux pas, moved the tentacle to Clark’s leg instead and began thrashing him across the room. It felt a lot like Clark imagined being mixed into a blender might feel like. He caught wild glimpses of startled faces hiding in the pews below. He was really sad he didn’t have a camera to capture Gorilla Grodd’s expression and show it to the entire Justice League later; it was particularly priceless. And then, out of the corner of his eye, was Lex, blinking wide-eyed at Clark like he’d said something really interesting or something.
“If you wanted to get free, Kal-El,” he dimly heard Mercy shout out through the ringing in his ears at being shaken so hard, “now would be a good time.”
It suddenly occurred to Clark that, yeah, ripping free was probably a good idea and, oh look, he had the superstrength to do it. He pulled himself free with a mighty flex of supermuscles, and Vivian screamed in pain as he broke free of her tentacles.
“Oh…” Lex sighed from the head of the chapel. “My…”
Clark flew out of range of the next barrage of tentacles and glanced over to see that Mercy had pulled out a bowie knife from somewhere or other and had just sliced off the tentacle that was around her ankle.
From her back pocket, Mercy pulled out the Phantom Zone gun. “Die, bitch,” she repeated and fired. “Or…er, go to a weird, extra-dimensional prison,” she amended. Even Clark had to admit that “die, bitch” sounded much cooler.
Vivian zigged and zagged very quickly for an alien, mailbox-shaped blob of blue-gray slime, however. She dodged the portal neatly, and it blazed black behind her as she hissed and reached out again with her tentacles for Mercy.
Mercy’s eyes widened, and she scrambled backwards, but Clark could see that she wasn’t going to be fast enough to evade Vivian’s grasp.
Then, out of nowhere, someone suddenly came stumbling down the aisle, oblivious to all that was happening, and crashed sideways into Vivian. For one precarious moment, Vivian wobbled, then she fell backwards into the portal, screeching as she went. One tentacle managed to wrap around one of the pews at the last moment.
Clark took great pleasure in using his heat vision on it. For one moment it blistered but held on, but then Vivian’s grip failed her, and she vanished into the portal.
It closed with a satisfying ‘pop.’
“What’d I miss?” Doctor Oblitero asked drunkenly from where he’d fallen on the floor after accidentally crashing into Vivian.
For a moment, Clark considered kissing him.
Then, however, he heard commotion from the head of the chapel and turned just in time to see the blue-white glow in Lex’s eyes blink out as Vivian’s control over him wavered and broke. A shudder traveled throughout his entire body, and he collapsed.
Before he had a chance to hit the floor, Clark was there, catching him mid-swoon. Lex fainted quite prettily, Clark noted absentmindedly, as Lex draped himself gracefully back over Clark’s arm. Clark, for his part, puffed up his chest in a heroic manner. It did quite a lot to restore his sense of superhero style which had been so lacking during the battle.
He heard several cameras go off in the background. Reporters, no doubt. Clark could see the tabloid headlines now: ‘Lex Luthor Caught In Bizarre Alien Love Triangle!’ Lex was probably going to kill Clark for letting him get his picture taken in pure romance-novel-style, damsel-in-distress pose. After all that had happened this week, Clark could live with Lex trying to kill him again.
In fact, he shifted Lex in his arms slightly so that their groins were pressed together more fully. It probably wasn’t as pretty of a pose, but it sure felt nice, and Clark felt like copping one little feel wasn’t so much to ask for after the heroic efforts he’d gone through to save Lex from brain-eating larvae.
“Well,” Mercy sat up shakily from the back of the chapel, glancing at Clark cradling Lex’s body, Doctor Oblitero inebriated on the floor, and several pews completely shattered from the battle, “that was annoying.”
At that moment, the doors to the chapel burst open to reveal Lionel Luthor, who had somehow gotten his way past Lex’s security, after all.
“What,” he demanded with an arched eyebrow, “is going on here?” He stalked down the aisle to where Clark held Lex.
Mercy let out a sound that was almost frightened and didn’t even try to stop Lionel.
Fortunately, at that moment, Doctor Oblitero decided to wake up, roll over, and vomit all over Lionel Luthor’s shoes.
There was a collective gasp.
Lex regained consciousness just long enough to say, “Knew I always invited that guy for a reason,” before he passed out again.
Lionel looked down in disgust.
‘Run!’ Mercy mouthed to Clark.
Clark didn’t need to be told twice. An unconscious Lex could never be trusted to his father’s care. Clark scooped up Lex in his arms and flew off into the night, just in time to hear the chaos break out inside.
He winced in sympathy at the mess he was leaving behind for Mercy to clean up.
***
Clark would never get over how fragile Lex felt in his arms. He cradled the curve of Lex’s skull in the palm of his hand, pressing Lex’s face gently into his shoulder as they flew back to LexCorp Towers. Lex curled instinctively into his warmth, at least while unconscious, and Clark found something deeply soothing about their flight. Lex was safe and cared for and the immediate threat to him had been destroyed.
Clark landed them on the balcony and was gratified to discover that Lex hadn’t changed the combination to the keypad outside his bedroom sliding doors since the last time Clark had come to chide him about his latest misdeeds. That had been over a week before, and Lex had to have known that Clark knew the combination now, but Lex was always uncharacteristically slow to change this code.
Lex still curled up in his arms, Clark flew over the bed and carefully lowered Lex until his back rested on soft white sheets. Lex’s left arm had looped around Clark’s neck in a near death grip some time during the flight, and it took a bit of finagling to dislodge it. Lex let out a little murmur of loss when Clark finally separated them, but promptly fell back into a deep, rhythmic sleep.
Clark hovered for a few minutes, directly over the bed and directly over Lex, watching Lex’s sleeping face and listening to the steady, reassuring thump of his heartbeat. Seemingly of its own volition, his hand reached down to trace the curve of Lex’s lower lip with his thumb. Lex hummed contentedly in his sleep and turned his head to follow the motion of Clark’s hand, rubbing affectionately against his palm.
It was a perfect moment of connection and the sort of thing they could only achieve while Lex was knocked unconscious.
Clark finally pulled back when he heard the sound of the penthouse’s back elevator arriving. The front elevator was probably still messed up from when he and Mercy had first teamed up two days before.
He stayed long enough to recognize the pulse and heartbeat in the elevator as Mercy and realized, with a start, that he’d actually been floating there, watching Lex sleep for over two hours. It had only felt like minutes. Embarrassed that he’d been hovering around Lex when Lex so clearly hated him, he flew out the way he’d come and into the cool Metropolis night.
Lex was safe at home, and Clark had done everything that was required of him. Everything was back to normal now.
It took Clark longer than usual to come out of his holding pattern around LexCorp Towers, and longer still before he took on the full mantle of Superman once more and rose into the heavens to do his job. Then, he heard a cry for help and shots fired two states over and he was off, like nothing had ever happened in the first place.
So, Clark = hopeless, y/y? :P Feedback, as always, is much appreciated.
Chapter Eight
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