Team: Metahumans
Challenge: 34. Sick
Rating: All under PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Clex, Martha, Lucas, Jonathon, Lionel, Chloe, Lois, Oliver
Author's Notes: Some are silly, some are sad (the last one), and the others fall in between.
Title: Build-up
Characters/Pairings: Clark, Lex
Warnings: None. Early seasons.
Summary: Clark doesn't get sick, except when he does.
Lex drops to his knees, hands running quickly from forehead (so cold) to neck (slow pulse). Clark doesn't get sick, which makes his condition all the more worrisome. The green tint to his skin isn't a normal reaction, not even for meteor-affected humans, to the green meteors, but he's never seen them glow like that for anyone else.
It doesn't take a lot of thought to link the two phenomena together. The rocks are lighter and easier to move, so he does. Clark's recovery is quick. Curiously so.
But Lex doesn't ask, doesn't mention it, he won't, because Clark recovers.
*
Title: Gulliver's Travels
Characters/Pairings: Clark, Chloe, Olliver, Lois
Warnings: Sap. Cuteness. AU, given season 9 friendships.
Summary: Chloe is sick. Clark fails as a nurse.
It's extremely silly, but it does make her feel better. Laughter really is the best medicine.
She pauses for breath as Clark rises from the ground, silly string trailing off him like the ropes that bound Gulliver. Playing the Lilliputians Lois and Oliver exclaim (Lois in deadpan) about the giant being free.
There's some grumbling as they move around for the next scene, with Chloe directing. If the other three know they're being played, none of them show it as Gulliver, no played by Oliver and answering to "Gullie" wrestles a dragon.
Maybe tomorrow, she'll even tell them she's better.
*
Title: Pretense
Characters/Pairings: Clark, Pete, Chloe, Lex
Warnings: None.
Summary: Clark and friends watch movies. Sort of.
"That's sick. I don't know how you can watch it," Chloe says, shielding her eyes. On screen, someone else is maimed, possibly killed.
"It's based on a true story," Pete shares excitedly, as if it makes the gore easier to bear.
Clark pretends to watch, but his attention is focused through the screen and into the other room, where Lex is still diligently at work... playing Minesweeper. Clark wishes he could get out of having to watch the movies Pete picked, but he and Chloe lost the bet fair and square and Clark can at least pretend to pay up.
*
Title: Home for the Holidays
Characters/Pairings: Clex, the combined Kent and Luthor family
Warnings: An abundance of sap?
Summary: The mansion is full this Christmas, but there's not a lot of joy in the halls.
Clark took the last two bowls from Lex and disappeared to deliver them and then came back to lean against the counter. "All our parents are asleep."
"Lucas?" Lex asked, covering the soup pot.
"Drowning in mucous. Better. Lonely."
"I'll go up," Lex said. He was wrapped up in Clark before he could make good on his words.
"Wait a few minutes?" Clark asked, the words muffled against Lex's neck.
Lex embraced him in return. Just because he didn't get sick didn't mean Clark didn't get lonely. "What a Christmas."
Clark chuckled and kissed him. "At least we're all together."
*
Title: And this too, shall pass.
Characters/Pairings: Clex, Martha Kent, Lucas Luthor
Warnings: Death.
Summary: Clark isn't invulnerable to grief.
Fact: people die.
Clark grieves for his mother, then his friends. He and Lex go to Lucas's funeral, and neither mentions how Lex looks forty instead of eighty-three, or how Clark looks twenty-six, down to his hair style.
They change identities, cities, clothes, and hair. Lex makes jokes about the age difference between them and Clark laughs. It's not funny, though, when Lex's hair starts growing in. White, not red. He gets pneumonia and is sick for weeks.
Then comes the frailty of age, the decay of the body followed by decay of the mind. Then death for him, too.