OMGWTFOTP

Mar 12, 2006 18:36

Title: Drive
Summary: On clocks and driving.
Fandom: Smallville
Word Count: 266
Rating/Warnings: PG
Pairing: slight Lex/Lana
A/N: The first two sentences of this came to me months ago, and I dropped them in a file and left them, but they wouldn't stop bugging me. Many thanks to Lissette for reading and commenting on it when it was just a wee idea.



The clock in his car is wrong.

It’s the first thing Lana notices.

It’s not an hour off, like a daylight savings time or time zone error, or ten or twenty minutes fast on purpose. It’s just wrong.

She tries to distract herself with trees out the window and cars going by. But it’s a long drive and nobody’s talking, so now it’s really bothering her.

Let’s say- conservatively- that he owns seven cars, pays three people to take care of them and/or drive them, and that each one costs- again, conservatively- more than the Talon makes in a month.

And, yet, in the car Lex drives the most, from what Lana has seen, the clock is wrong, as if someone replaced the battery and just left it, or tried to set it and stopped halfway through.

Lex drives like nobody else she’s ever seen. Until his cell phone inevitably rings, his hands never leave the wheel. When he turns, he doesn’t just jerk the wheel one way or the other. His hands stroke and pull and make smooth circuits across it. He clearly loves this vehicle- more, probably, than he will ever love a woman (though a voice in the back of her head whispers besides you). And yet, he hasn’t fixed the damned clock. It leads Lana to wonder how many more things in Lex’s life are like that- loved, but left to sit, neglected.

It finally gets to her. She sets it to the proper time, checking against her watch. Lex raises an eyebrow, but says nothing. There. She has done something concrete.

fic, best_of, smallville

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