Fatter dragons and more porn.

SV: End of the World News

2009-07-14T18:29:00Z

I actually made most of this vid, um, before I had children. I finished it because it seemed silly not to do so and because it matched the "worst-case scenario" cliche bingo prompt. Also, it is ridiculously large for a 3:42 vid (81 M); clearly I'm exporting improperly.

End of the World News: Clark POV: I'm not the one wasting my time.

SV: beyond the rain

2009-07-11T12:59:28Z

Beyond the rain
Summary: Someplace where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place?
Prompt: medea_aries: What if, in Ruat Caelum, when Lex sends the message about being kidnapped by the Justice League, Batman does go ahead and handles it himself?
Warning: character death; otherwise PG.
Clark/Lex.

“I’m sorry,” Batman says, and he is, oh, he is; Clark knows that much, and more. “But you are not rational on this subject. He is too dangerous. This is the last time I will ask you: surrender Lex Luthor.”

This isn’t the Emerald City but Clark still has the impulse to tell him that hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. Not that it’s relevant to Batman; he’d think Clark had gone Joker-crazy. “I am sorry,” he says instead, soft, not at all like Batman said the same words.

“I know,” Bruce says, a moment in which Bruce is present, and then Clark can feel him submerging even without another word being said. It’s Batman who cuts the connection, and Batman Clark needs to prepare for now.

Lex is standing by the door—Clark has configured the place in human scale, doors and hallways and offices, for his new tenant. Prime real estate, new construction. If only the market weren’t about to drop off of a cliff, they’d be set for life. “I’d tell you to turn me over to the League and save yourself,” Lex says, “if I were the kind of man you didn’t feel the need to kidnap for the greater good of the world.”

Clark thinks: the world and Lex, they’re like two dogs fighting over a single bloody bone. Lex is smaller but more vicious, and he’s got Clark between his teeth. The fact that Clark has locked him up and implanted bombs in him to keep him in place is at best incidental. Maybe that makes Lex as much Clark’s prisoner as the reverse. But Clark wouldn’t place any bets.

“Are you even going to let me help you protect me?” Lex asks. But he doesn’t protest when, instead of answering, Clark takes him to bed.

****

Clark has to go patrol. If he doesn’t help where he can, he’s not himself. Integrity is all he has. Well, integrity, a giant ice fortress, and Lex, but the Fortress is basically a toy and Lex is … Lex.

They catch him just after he’s evacuated a Mexican town collapsed from an earthquake. Whatever their hopes, he’s not distracted and he’s not tired. He doesn’t really get tired any more, and maybe Batman knew they had this date from the beginning, because alien invasion only slowed down the pace of Clark’s progression past human boundaries.

Clark easily dodges the Kryptonite barrage and speeds back to the Fortress. He could have started a knock-down fight, but he knows that chances are better than good that one of the Leaguers wouldn’t walk away from that. And then there’d be no possibility of truce, no time to convince them that Lex can learn to behave.

Lex is waiting. He doesn’t say anything while Clark cleans up.

He doesn’t say much at all, now. But they leave the lights on, so that he can see as easily as Clark when they come together.

****

Wonder Woman corners him outside Jakarta. “If you turn him over,” she says, “we won’t consider you an accomplice.”

“How long before Batman decides that you’re too powerful to be trusted?” he asks. “Do you really think this is just about Lex, Diana?”

She waits a long time before she answers; in between there is a punch that could have cracked a mountain open, and Clark strikes back with equal force.

Neither of them are breathing hard as they float, wary, twenty feet apart. “Lex Luthor has demonstrated the desire and the capacity to rule the world,” she says. “Our judgment is hardly speculative.”

“That doesn’t mean he has to die!”

“Does he love his cage so much, then?” she asks, and he can see the goddesses in her bloodline. Her face could be marble. “Death is not the cruelest punishment, Kal-El. Not for such as us.”

For a moment, Clark is amazed that she thinks he doesn’t know that. But then, so many of his fellow superheroes consider him some sort of child, even now.

Clark leaves her—he isn’t fleeing, only avoiding a beating that would prove inconclusive.

He knows what he’s doing to Lex. He just prefers it to the alternatives.

****

The end comes on a day like any other.

The sky lights up with rockets. Something in them—magic, if Clark guesses correctly—sets up a web of force entirely surrounding the Fortress. Sirens are whooping, the high end of Kryptonian technology ultimately no more advanced than a car alarm. Clark feels the weakness that is Kryptonite, reaching inwards towards him.

When Clark finds Lex near the exit, he’s talking to the Fortress, fast and steady; the ground rumbles. Clark presumes that the Fortress is taking the defensive measures Lex has suggested.

For a moment Clark hates everyone in the League, because they either agreed with this or didn’t fight it, and things could have been different. They could have believed in Clark’s strength, or at least in Lex’s fragile political position; they could have seen that the hole Lex left in the world’s politics would close up around him the way power vacuums always did—this is pride, human and weak, that is leaching Clark’s powers and drawing them ever closer to new losses.

“What are you going to do?” Lex asks, who has naturally appointed himself to the role of Greek chorus if he can’t be the king.

Clark wonders if he should kiss Lex, for luck or goodbye or any of those other reasons that have nothing to do with who they are. “I wish I’d met you when I was older,” he says instead, because it’s true; if he’d been a little more formed, if Lex had been a little less in need of a hero to worship and inevitably to lose faith in, they might have made a very different pair.

Lex, for what it’s worth, looks extremely understanding. “Sometimes I wish—” he says, confessional like they’ve really gone back in time. Then he shakes his head. “Rip Batman’s head off for me, would you?”

Clark does smile at that. And then he’s off, flying, moving so fast that light slows and bends around him.

He never sees the arrow coming.

****

Pain. Pain and pain and pain again, jolting and twisting through him. Clark forces his eyes open and sees that he’s being dragged backwards across the snow. There’s a trail of red, shading to pink, in his wake. And there’s a shaft protruding from his chest, a couple of centimeters to the left of midline.

It hurts like hell, but he tilts his head back and sees that it’s Lex dragging him. Presumably the Leaguers have retreated to the perimeter, safety before glory. They should know better; Lex isn’t approaching to surrender, that’s for certain.

Lex checks over his shoulder and sees that Clark has regained consciousness. “There are a lot of ways for a dead man to make things happen, you know,” he says, casual over stressed steel. “Wills aside, if you wrap your directives in enough layers, nobody knows that the man behind the curtain is missing.”

Clark can’t make himself ask why Lex has chosen this particular monologue. His mouth is full of blood, hot compared to the chill wind against his face.

Lex isn’t bothered by the lack of response. “You’d be surprised at how much resentment there is against the metahuman,” he says, which is a lie, or at least Clark hopes is a lie. Clark has always known how fragile tolerance can be—“meteor freak” was Chloe’s term, and Chloe knew and sometimes even liked the kids in Smallville. Lex is panting a little with effort. Clark’s not light. “History will record me as a martyr. And your friends—they’ll be war criminals. Like Stalin and the West, used to win a war and then demonized in turn.”

The pain is fading now, even though Clark can see, where his hands are dragging beside him, that his veins are still blackened with Kryptonite exposure. He feels like he’s getting heavier. He tries to swallow the blood in his mouth, chokes, spits—looks like a total fool, he’s sure, which is another sign that they’re retreating through time, back to the days when they were so awkward, so soft: vulnerable as peeled oranges, as unshelled chicks.

He misses his mother.

“All that,” he gets out, and has to stop to catch his breath, “just for your own memorial?”

Lex stills. The sun is rising and Lex is a black tower, an outline cut in the world; his shadow is preventing Clark from soaking up the sun, which seems like it ought to be symbolic except that it never was. Over Lex’s shoulder Clark can vaguely see the perimeter, a series of stone pillars he put up years ago. Get outside that, and the bombs implanted in Lex’s legs will go off. If the Fortress were working properly, it could retrieve him and treat him so he wouldn’t die, but Clark’s not exactly prepared to bet that Batman will allow the Fortress to do its job.

“Not for my memorial,” Lex says, and Clark really thinks that what he hears is regret. “For yours.”

Lex drags him forward and they go into the light.

Comments on DW; comments on LJ.

Meme answer: SV

2009-07-09T01:47:01Z

Florid
For the Turn Left meme, jackycomelately said: “In Incarnadine, if Jonathan had been the one to drive Lex home (and hopefully comfort him).” I’m also calling this for “relative values” for bingo, because Lex deserves to be part of somebody’s family. PG in itself, but it’s about the aftermath of Red K exposure; Red K makes Clark horny and Lex has a nonstandard definition of “consent,” so there you are.

At the end of the driveway, Jonathan Kent signalled in the wrong direction. Lex opened his mouth. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” Jonathan said.

Lex shot out his left hand, grateful that he was still strong enough for this, and grabbed Jonathan’s forearm. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing, Mr. Kent, and I appreciate the care you’re showing for a person you have no reason to like. But if you do this, it will hurt me. My condition will get in the newspapers and it will hurt the company, and therefore it will hurt Smallville.”

Jonathan frowned like he hadn’t even heard the last sentence. “You’re—you need a doctor, Lex.”

“I heal fast,” Lex said. “A parting gift from the meteors.” Jonathan flinched, as expected. Luthors were arrogant, but Kents—Kents seemed to expect the world to be oblivious to their extensive and intriguing nervous tics, centered on the meteor shower.

As Lex had hoped, when Jonathan turned, he went in the direction of the mansion.

They drove in silence most of the way. Jonathan’s hands were tight on the steering wheel, but he couldn’t avoid the little flashes of pleasure at how the car handled. It would have been nice, Lex thought, to be able to discuss the finer aspects of fine engines with him—just a little elaboration on the daydream of acceptance.

He was guessing that, whatever might have been possible after Clark had pulled him out of the river, that sort of easy familiarity was decisively off the table now.

“Lex,” Jonathan said when they were only minutes away from the front door, “if you—if you go to the police, Clark will understand. He’ll—I can bring him down to the sheriff’s in the morning.” He stared forward like a man examining the guillotine to which he’d been sentenced.

Lex boggled. “Mr. Kent,” he said as soon as he was sure he hadn’t just hallucinated that, “you can’t possibly think I’d blame Clark for what was clearly some sort of meteor-induced—”

“If Clark can’t control himself, he needs to be—he needs to accept the consequences of his actions.”

Jonathan might as well have switched to Mandarin; actually, Lex had a working knowledge of Mandarin, so it would have made more sense. He struggled to figure out whether they had any common ground at all; repeating the caution that any official involvement would end up splashed on the front page of the Inquisitor seemed unlikely to help. “If Clark goes to the sheriff, he won’t be the one who’ll be arrested.”

“What?” The car shuddered a little and Lex wished that they were having this conversation at a standstill.

“He’s below the age of consent; I’m not.”

“But—” Jonathan’s face would have been funny under other circumstances, not that Lex would ever have let his amusement show.

“If questioned, I will tell the truth, which you know as well as I do: Clark didn’t do anything I wasn’t asking for. So you can send me to prison, Mr. Kent, and you can make your son the focus of a media circus. But I don’t think either of those will educate Clark properly in the nature of consequences.”

That shut Jonathan up—amazing, really; Lex wouldn’t have sworn it was possible, before—until he parked the car right in front of the stairs to the main entrance.

Lex pushed the door open and braced himself to stand.

“Lex,” Jonathan said, sounding like the name had been ripped out of him, “I know I’ve told you to take responsibility before. And I still think—but not everything is your fault. This wasn’t your fault.”

Lex blinked and shifted painfully in his seat. “I don’t—” He swallowed, his words lost.

Jonathan’s face screwed up, and Lex was terrified that he was going to cry, but instead he just pounded a fist on the steering wheel. “All along, I’ve known that no matter what your intentions, you—you’re a dangerous friend. Especially for Clark.”

“I know,” Lex admitted, softly so as to hide the hurt, because it was weak to be hurt by the truth.

“But Clark isn’t the only one in danger.”

“He’s worth it,” Lex said before he could think.

Jonathan hitched a laugh. “Nobody ever said Luthors lacked for good taste.” And then, as if he’d sensed Lex’s flinch out of the corner of his eye: “I know you’re not your father. But I don’t think you know who you are, not yet.”

“I’m trying to be a better man.” The words hung heavily in the darkness, and Lex was suddenly so tired that the aches faded beneath his exhaustion. If he slept, his body would be mostly repaired by the morning. He wanted very much to be in his bed, away from Jonathan and his judgments.

Jonathan exhaled loudly. “I see that now, Lex. And I’m sorry if I—Clark is my son. He’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Me too, Lex thought, and suppressed the hysterical laughter so conclusively that Jonathan probably thought Lex was getting angry instead.

“Are you all right?” Jonathan asked. He sounded like he cared, and Lex was surprised to find that he believed in Jonathan’s sincerity.

“I will be,” Lex told him, honesty in return. He clenched his jaw and levered himself out of the car, cursing how very low it was to the ground. “I’ll—I’ll come by for the car tomorrow. Unless you think I should stay away.”

Jonathan stared at him assessingly. In the yellow light emanating from the mansion, he looked careworn, near to exhaustion, and Lex thought that this day had been a difficult one all around; Jonathan must have hated his helplessness in his own house. “I’ll call if there’s a problem,” he said at last. “And, Lex—you call us if there’s anything Martha or I can do.”

Lex wasn’t sure Jonathan would mean it in the morning, but he meant it now. Lex couldn’t tell how that made him feel; his brain was too overloaded. But he thought it likely that he’d take this moment out and examine it, later on, just to figure out why his whole body seemed warmer now. “Thank you,” he said, and watched as Jonathan Kent drove away, heading back to take care of his son.

After the headlights faded, Lex turned and limped up the stairs. He needed to clean himself up. He needed to sleep. He needed a lot of things, and very few of them were to be found inside this pile of stone.

comments at DW; comments at LJ.

Reviews: Monette, YA vampires, manga

2009-07-08T22:56:14Z

Sarah Monette, Corambis: What does it mean, really, to be bad at pacing? Okay, so if you did a timeline of the events in this novel, there would be a lot of traveling before anything much happened, and some big events don’t have the narrative importance they seem to merit, and many major plot events clump at the end. But (1) if you’re on book 4 of Monette’s series and you weren’t comfortable with that, I’m not sure why you read a thousand-odd pages of her work, and (2) I didn’t care, because I was having such a fine time travelling with the characters. Felix and Mildmay are actually struggling to be better men, and largely succeeding, and there are new characters I liked as well. I understand that there’s no fifth book, but Felix and Midmay are in a satisfactory place at the end, despite the many unanswered questions I have about Monette’s world of gods, magical theory, and lost cities.

Claudia Gray, Evernight: Bianca’s the new student and fish out of water at exclusive Evernight Academy. But things aren’t as they seem, not even Lucas, the hot boy who seems equally exiled to the fringes. I know the author, so I’m biased, but I found this a clever twist on the teen vampire genre, more clever as I thought about it.

Setona Mizushiro, After School Nightmare v. 10: Well, I’m disappointed. I was really intrigued by this manga about a student who defines himself (and then herself) as half a boy, half a girl; I thought it had potential to do interesting things with gender and sexuality. And then, in the last volume, it became uninteresting, and not really about that at all. This is what I get for starting an unfinished series!

Meme answer: XF

2009-07-08T18:07:17Z

Variations on a Fugue:
Fox was the one who couldn't remember, and Dana got her memories back. (For hulamoth , and also—because that’s how I roll—satisfying my amnesia clichefic prompt.)
PG, A (if you don’t remember, A is for Angst)

I let him into my body. Minutes turned into hours after she remembered her real life, and she knew that she was focusing on the wrong issue. Mulder wasn’t responsible for her violation.

But he’d been the instrument, or an instrument, the one closest to hand. The one leaving the most visible marks. And so she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d allowed. What she’d been coerced into allowing: the one thing she’d committed to denying herself, because it would leave her with a certain integrity; and even that, false in all but form. A mannequin in the shape of the only man she trusted.

For all their moral outrage, she and Mulder had very little room in their lives for integrity. This abomination was even more complete than that surrounding her abduction.

At least he didn’t press her to continue their sham of a marriage. He was still, she thought, in love with the woman he thought he’d married, and she’d sea-changed on him, turned out to have bones made of coral and implants made of metal.

“This is us,” she told him when she showed him the reports of cases they’d investigated. “This is who we are.” But he didn’t understand: he’d never lost his sister, never watched a UFO hover brilliantly in the sky above his head. He thought she was only talking about their histories. The man that he was now was more than the X-Files, and so much less.

****

Six months after they’d returned to Washington, Mulder still didn’t remember his history beyond the barest flashes.

He retained just enough to return to the FBI, all the procedual memories and background knowledge that made him qualified to work as a Special Agent. They went back to the X-Files, but he found it all so incredible that he lasted all of two weeks before Skinner granted him a transfer out. Before he stopped talking to her, he admitted that he hadn’t been able to handle the nightmares. Scully remembered when he hadn’t been able to sleep; neither solution seemed ideal.

Scully didn’t fight him on his decision—without his credulity he was more trouble with witnesses than he was worth, communicating his skepticism with every tilt of his eyebrow or pout of his lips. She wasn’t comfortable with switching roles with him, either, becoming the one who would tolerate every insane possibility or speculation. It was better for them both not to have him stumbling through the motions that Mulder had inhabited with passion.

Nor did she think that profiling was a more dangerous job for him than teaching psychology. It had been amply demonstrated that, when the Conspiracy determined to do the next horrific thing to him, he’d be within easy reach no matter where he fled. Or maybe his amnesia would protect him; maybe he was a broken tool without his passion to seek out the unexplainable.

“Is it true?” one of her old friends asked, calling from Quantico. “They say he had a breakdown and lost his memory, and now he’s—fixed.”

“There was no breakdown,” she said, wondering whether he might not be doing more good hunting the human monsters than they’d ever managed in the basement of the Hoover Building. “But the memory loss, yes. I was under the impression that he was open about it.”

“Well, sure,” Janice said. “But he’s got a reputation as a joker, and, honestly, would you believe it?”

She very much wanted to say that Janice had no idea what she might believe. “Mulder has been through too much already,” she said instead. “I hope no one there is making it harder for him.”

That ended the conversation pretty quickly.

Mulder still called her, not constantly, but regularly, with the kind of concern she would have expected from a trained therapist. It was easier on the phone, when she didn't have to see the man who'd touched her, who'd made love to her with complete sincerity. He asked all the right questions in just the right order.

It made her sick.

She’d always been demanding, and she’d told herself that holding herself to the same standards was reason enough to justify her requirements. But this time, what she wanted from Mulder was not reasonable and not generalizable. She wanted the man who’d allow her utterly inappropriate intimacies on their first case, who’d tell her about his implausible childhood trauma and stop the car to pull out the spray-paint just to make a mark on the world.

For the first few months she asked him about his memories, retold stories in an attempt to make them real to him. He tried hard, no one could have disputed that, but somewhere in those disarranged neurons the fire that had consumed him had been quenched, and she wasn’t enough to rekindle it. After a while she only updated him on the latest X-Files, and, if she hoped that one of the cases might trigger the old enthusiasm, neither of them found it necessary to discuss the matter.

“I miss you,” he said one night early in the winter. And then there was just his breath across the phone lines, familiar and terrifying.

They never lied to one another, not out loud, not if it wasn’t personal. She and Mulder hadn’t, and she still owed his memory that honesty. “How can you?” she asked.

“Dana—” he began, and for a hot second she wanted to hurt him, physically. If she could have she would have reached out across the miles and pistol-whipped him. But then—“she wasn’t entirely made up. I can still recognize so much in you.”

Which was better, but not enough. “Then you’re missing her,” she said, her voice like a pond in winter.

“No,” he said, that broken sincerity she knew so well. “She’s gone. But you’re not, Scully.”

And even if it was that profiler’s genius speaking in him, she wanted to believe him. More than she’d ever wanted to disbelieve the other things.

“You can’t be him,” she said, shutting down her false hopes. She didn’t say, because she only feared it occasionally, that Mulder would be happier nonexistent—most of the time she thought that Mulder would want to be fighting still, for the barest chance to save Samantha or explain what had happened to her or expose the men whose machinations had brought them to this place. Most of the time she thought that he would grieve with her, if he could have. “You do good work. You’re a fine agent and,” she fought through the stiffness, “I am proud to call you my friend.”

Now they were breathing together, her a little faster, not quite in sync any more than they had ever been.

“So that’s it,” he said, and the finality of it was something that Mulder would never have accepted.

“Take care of yourself, Fox,” she said, and hung up the phone. In the morning, she’d talk to Skinner about finding someone to bring on board who might be able to handle the X-Files. Someone with a good imagination and no family; not a partner, surely, but perhaps an assistant and a gun arm.

Mulder would have understood the need to keep moving even when there was nothing left.

She hoped he wouldn’t call again.

Where she was going, he couldn’t follow.

Comments on DW; comments on LJ.

Meme

2009-07-08T04:36:07Z

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change. Something tiny (e.g. "and then Fay chose silver glitter instead of gold") or big (e.g. "and then Rose was arrested instead of Jack") and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

Comments on LJ; comments on DW.

Reviews: nonfiction

2009-07-06T22:45:05Z

Schadenfreude, with wit: “Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal…. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.”

Further on Palin, did she seriously say that she didn’t want to be lame duck because it’s not enough fun for her (or, generously, for the state)? She does know that term limits mean that lame duckishness is a feature of the system, right? Who’s supposed to be running the show in such circumstances? I am baffled.

Steve Almond, Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions: If you liked Almond’s Candyfreak, or essays in the David Sedaris/David Foster Wallace vein—with significantly more sex and cursing—then you may well enjoy Almond’s latest, which I found frequently hilarious. He writes about his sex life, his love for Kurt Vonnegut, his hatred for the Red Sox, his attempted recruitment as a Republican businessman, and so on. I was struck by his analysis of the popularity of shows like CSI: “we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a kind of displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.”

Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex: Entertaining, if rambling, journey through various sexual investigations. Ultimate conclusion: we know little of use about human sexuality, especially female sexuality. Lots of random facts: “One of the less prominently known similarities between pigs and men: They both fondle breasts. No other males on the planet regularly do this.” And, Priapus was a god of “fertility and gardens…. Clearly troubled by the girly job title, he took to wearing robes slit high enough to display his enormous cucumber. Those caught robbing his garden were promptly sodomized. ‘If I do seize you …,’ reads an epigram in Smithers and Burton’s Priapeia, ‘you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles.’”

Reviews and sundry

2009-07-05T23:24:02Z

My very first Smallville story, The Presence of Fire, is up at the Audio archive, courtesy of cathexys.

Jim Butcher, Backup: Novella (‘ware the hardcover price!) from the POV of Thomas, Harry Dresden’s half-brother, in which Thomas gets to be the secret hero, and also a noble monster. Since he actually is a monster—a sexual vampire—his angst is somewhat more convincing than Harry’s. An entertaining enough diversion.

Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns, Magic Bites, and Magic Strikes: Kate Daniels is a powerful magic-user in a world where magic has returned, intermittently. Sometimes the tech rises, so internal combusion and electricity etc. works, and sometimes waves of magic hit, so it’s magelights and enchanted water engines. Magical creatures exist all the time, but are stronger during magic waves. Kate has only ever seen airplanes in pictures; I loved the detail that cellphones sometimes work during magic because, since most people don’t understand how they work anyway, they’re fueled by belief rather than tech. Kate has a deadly secret—the source of the power in her blood—and a freelance job solving magical problems for people. In the first book, she investigates the murder of her mentor, and ends up caught between the People (necromancers) and the shapeshifters, who are the major competing power blocs in her area of what used to be the US. In subsequent books, her troubles continue.

Basically, if you liked Guilty Pleasures--even if the thought of Anita now makes you want to hurl—I recommend these books. Kickass heroine with difficult superpowers, matched with plausibly hard-to-beat foes; palace intrigue; frustrating and hot guys. So you get stuff like this: “To get clear of two hundred enraged shapechangers I’d need a case of grenades and air support. There was no reason to weigh myself down with extra weapons. Then again, maybe I should take a knife. One knife, as a backup. Okay, two.” Andrews occasionally trips a warning alarm on my gender politics sensors in terms of overbearing guys who think that’s what sexy is, but it’s been okay so far. As she’s set it up, rogue shapeshifters—loups—are really into rape with their cannibalism, so sexual violence comes up regularly, though without explicit depiction.

Quotes for my commonplace book:

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)

“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats

"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

SPN: Ex Machina

2009-07-05T02:37:34Z

Ex Machina
Immediately post-S4, PG, gen. Oh, Dean. Oh, Sam. Oh, stand back. I’ll do it. (Note: If you remember this summary from where I got it, I will write just about any prompt for you.)

Dean didn’t think to wonder how the car had gotten to Maryland until they’d been driving for half an hour. He looked over at Sam and thought about asking, but Sam was staring out the window like there was free porn pasted on the mile markers, and he swallowed the question down. He felt heavy, sick like he’d lost a pie-eating contest and not even gotten to taste the pie.

He checked the gas gauge and hoped that his credit cards had made it through the multiple angelic transports.

As if his discomfort had reached out to Sam, Sam finally twisted in the seat and stared at Dean, hollow-eyed.

“What now?” he asked, except that he didn’t sound curious, more like he was reading out entries on a menu at a shithole diner where everything was going to taste like grease anyway.

“Dunno,” Dean admitted. His only thought had been to stop Sam, and then once that had been a massive failure he’d just run, as if distance might help them avoid the apocalypse, which sounded fairly stupid when he put it together like that.

Silence again, stretching to minutes until Dean thought maybe it would be easier to never talk again.

“For fuck’s sake,” the radio said, a woman’s voice coming from the speakers, annoyed and crisp. “Turn around.”

Dean stomped on the brakes and fought the wheels through the squealing and zigzagging, until they were stopped on the side of the road and the smell of burnt tires was sharp in his throat.

He should have popped the door open and jumped out, but all he could do was stare at Sam, whose eyes were as wide as quarters.

“I’ve had about enough of this,” the radio snapped. “First you get yourself killed, Sam, and then you decide that killing Lilith is your Make-a-Wish, even though you know Lucifer’s the real problem—a plan only a hophead could love. How’s that demon blood taste now, Sammy?”

“Who are you?” Dean asked, just to shut the thing up; the look on Sam’s face was too painful, mainly because Dean remembered putting it there himself.

“And you, Dean-O,” the voice continued. “Sell your soul for Sam, go to Hell for him, then--then take a page from the John Winchester playbook and tell Sam you were through with him, which only the aforementioned hophead would have believed, making him think that the most important person in his world considered him a monster. I’m trying to think of worse decisions you boys could have made, but my imagination’s not that good. Frankly, I’m shocked you two managed to break your respective seals.”

Dean pulled his gun and aimed it at the radio. It should have hurt him to think of the damage he’d be doing to the car, but he needed that mockery stopped, and he’d done worse to his baby before.

“That won’t do you any good,” she said. “Seeing as how you’re sitting in me.”

Dean and Sam both jumped. They exchanged looks, then scrambled for the doors, united in the need to get the fuck out. The handle wasn’t opening, and the window crank didn’t move when he shoved at it.

“Calm down, boys,” the car said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Too much competition for that. Turn the engine on and let’s get going. Lucifer’s waiting.”

Sam leaned into Dean, twisting his body up onto the seat so that he could kick out at the side window with both boots. Dean heard the painful thunk of Sam’s heels, but the glass held.

“What are you?” Dean asked, his voice not shaking only because he was just about out of emotion.

The car sighed, which was freaky enough to make his skin crawl. Sam’s hand, braced on his leg, tightened; it was a reminder that they were together again. “Zachariah wasn’t lying when he said you’re the one to end this, Dean. Sam stands for the Morning Star, and you stand for the Viceroy of Heaven.”

“The archangel Michael,” Sam said before Dean could ask. “Armed with a flaming sword.” He wriggled until he was upright again, but he didn’t let go of Dean’s leg and Dean didn’t pull away.

The car made a sound like ‘hmmph.’ “Yeah, does this look like the Dark Ages? And can you imagine Dean Winchester with a sword? He’d look less awkward with a parasol. Do not even start on ‘flaming,’ either.”

“You’re saying,” Sam took a deep breath, “you’re Dean’s … mystical weapon against Lucifer?” He laughed, sharp and stretched, and Dean put his hand over Sam’s, trying to calm him down.

“I’m saying, turn the engine on, get back on the road, and let’s get this apocalypse over with. I’m due for detailing.”

Dean checked with Sam. Sam’s nostrils were flared and his hair was practically performing an interpretive dance about how freaked-out he was, but his expression made very clear that he didn’t have any better ideas.

So Dean turned the key and wheeled them around.

****

The highway had been empty for miles when they saw a dim yellow glow ahead of them. “This ought to be interesting,” the car said, speculatively.

“Uh—” Sam began.

“Oh, keep your pants on,” she snapped. “No, actually—well, we’ll talk about that later.” In the near darkness, Dean could still see Sam’s mouth round into a perfect surprised ‘o.’ “We’ll probably be fine. Hit the gas, Dean.”

Dean complied. The glow got brighter and resolved into a man, surrounded by a golden haze. He was—he was beautiful, noble as a statue, the light rolling over him only making him seem more lovely. He was standing in the middle of the road, waiting for them.

“He’s not moving,” Sam pointed out, entirely unnecessarily. And yes, Dean was a little bit worried that Lucifer was playing chicken with a two-ton automobile because he knew something they didn’t. Then again, that seemed to be the entire point of their lives so far, so no news there. He gritted his teeth and ground his foot into the floorboard.

“Dean,” Sam said, low and hurried.

Dean took one hand off the wheel and put his hand on Sam’s knee, squeezing gently. “Yeah, Sam,” he said back, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam’s real smile, for the first time in months.

They were less than ten seconds away from Lucifer. His expression was clearly visible now: triumphant, even jubilant. He raised his hands, urging them on.

Dean kept his eyes open as they zoomed towards the pillar of light.

The impact slammed them forward like a pair of dolls. Dean felt sharp pain across his chest and stomach, and then nothing.

****

“Dean!”

“Dean!”

Sam’s worried tone woke him faster than the vaguely familiar feminine voice. He felt like he’d been run over by a three-hundred pound guy on a Harley. But he was alive, and Sam was with him, so overall it was a good—

He cracked his eyes open and saw a patch of bright sky through the window. He turned his head, and Sam was there, pale and crappy-looking but whole, blinking as he shoved his seatbelt aside and leaned towards Dean, checking him out.

Overall it was a good day.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Apparently,” Sam said, relief warring with laughter, “a Chevy Impala is a really good substitute for a flaming sword.”

Dean struggled with his own seatbelt. He felt kind of like a basketball after an NBA game, and he could already tell that he’d be limping for the next couple of days if not weeks, but considering the alternatives it wasn’t so bad. “Lucifer’s dead?”

“Let’s just say he’s not gonna be your problem,” the car said. “At least, not unless you figure out how to live for another two thousand years.”

Dean looked around slowly, searching for some visible sign that his car was a freaking weapon of the Lord. Had she been like that in 1973? Had she been like that when she was made? He rubbed at the back of his neck, remembering exactly how many times she’d been witness to his backseat adventures. And, oh fuck, she talked now—the things she could tell Sam, he might just have to crawl back into his grave.

“Uh, no offense,” he began, “but are you—is this permanent?”

Sam’s lips twitched, but he looked just as interested in the answer.

“You’d prefer I just sit here, silently judging you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dean said immediately, and Sam snorted.

“Yeah, good luck with that,” she said. “So, from now on, I get washed by both of you once a week, and again any time there’s mud or roadkill involved. Weather permitting, you do it in the buff—”

“Wait a second,” Sam squawked. “Dean,” like it was his fault, “the car’s a pervert!”

“Oh, sure, Mr. I-prefer-to-date-outside-my-species,” she said. “Not like I haven’t seen—”

“Okay!” Dean interrupted, before she could detail exactly what she might have seen (and how the fuck did she see, anyway?). “Boxers, not nude, because we’re not gettin’ arrested for public indecency. And you keep your—uh, your mouth shut when other people are around.”

“I want the iPod jack back,” she said, a little sullenly. “And no more storing leftovers in the backseat. They stink.”

“Done,” Dean said, trying not to sound too desperate.

“And I want a name. A cool name. Like Excalibur.”

Dean’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He could feel Sam in the seat next to him, trying not to explode. “Tell you what,” he said at last. “Whatever name you pick, it’s all good. Sam here will help you with the research if you need it, that’s his thing. Sound good?”

Sam frowned. Dean wriggled his eyebrows, meaning ‘back my play,’ and Sam grimaced but didn’t object.

“Fine,” the car said. “Actually, now that it’s all out in the open, I’m prepared to do you more favors.”

“Like what?” Dean asked, a little wary.

“Oh, you know, coming when called, spooking the crap out of the bad guys--Knight Rider stuff.”

Dean thought about it for at least half a second. “Awesome.”

“What now?” Sam asked, looking straight at Dean.

Dean grinned; it felt unfamiliar on his face, but like maybe he could get used to it again. He started the engine and felt her purr. “Now? We’ve got a sweet ride and a million miles of highway, Sammy. I say we see what she can do.”

END

Cliche prompt: Deus ex machina, natch.

Comments at DW; comments at LJ.

Various fannish stuff: J2, SV, fan films, Farscape

2009-07-04T15:12:43Z

I find myself wanting to reread a short J2 Pern AU featuring Jensen’s dragon’s first mating flight that I read a while back—not the big dragonrider AU I found when I asked Google, but a different one more plainly set in Pern. Anybody remember this?

My SV bodyswap story, Switch: A Comedy of Terrors, is now available as a podfic read by pennyplainknits, also zipped. By the way, I love the whole podfic enterprise; I can’t do it myself because I am a creature of the written word (seriously; I am very little fun at parties), but I’m always thrilled if anyone wants to make podfics of my stories. All I’d like is a link when you’re done!

Clive Young, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind the Camera (2008): This is a very interesting book about fan films, starting with some maybe-scammers who went around in the 1920s making “Our Gang” films with local actors and continuing to the present day. Young is, like many live-action fan film enthusiasts, quite willing to go along with the copyright owner’s vision of a franchise—it’s a little weird to me that live-action fan films seem to sort much more into (1) the super-respectful/narrative extension or (2) the parodic/attacking categories than, say, fanfic or fanvids, but that is how it seems to work. This leads him to be fairly sympathetic to things like Lucasfilm’s attempts to channel fan energies into parodies and documentaries, though in fairness he explicitly recognizes that there is reason to worry about this trend. Likewise, he does know about vids (and gives a shoutout to the OTW), but his chapter about women in fan films, while presented as if it’s going to be a story about how the women really are out there directing, turns out to be more about women acting and carrying out other technical roles. In fact, the film he spends the most time on involves a husband-wife team (husband directing), in which the wife is a vidder, except we never learn a thing about her vids. He has interesting discussions of Star Wars fan film cliches, and he’s upfront about the fact that most fan films aren’t that good—I would have leaned harder on Sturgeon’s Law, myself.

He’s also deeply confused about copyright law, calling fair use a “good idea” instead of a right (the Supreme Court has indicated that fair use is a major reason copyright doesn’t violate the First Amendment), at the same time as he points out that people have to understand fair use before we can expect them to apply it. He aligns himself with Lucasfilm, DC, WB, Paramount and the like in sharply distinguishing between noncommercial filmmaking (which they’ll ignore) and profit-seeking (which they count as, for example, showing fan films at a film festival where admission is charged) (4-5, 200-02, 245). This isn’t the law, though it may well be the practical compromise. At the same time, fan filmmakers often have professional aspirations, and there are a couple of success stories at least among fan filmmakers who have managed to get jobs around the margins of Hollywood already and then used their fan films to work their way further into professional status.

I liked Young’s argument that fan films’ focus on superheroes etc. is often about nostalgia, and specifically about the thrill of imagining oneself participating in a heroic universe, as children are generally allowed to do in Western culture and adults are generally not. “Any adult who likes superheroes, for example, likely spent far more hours as a child making up valiant stories on the fly during playtime than he or she did watching the characters on TV or in the movies. As a result, that adult’s most familiar experience with a favorite superhero might not be as a complcent viewer but as the author of the hero’s adventures. Making a fan film, then, can be a return to that authorial position—an opportunity to reclaim that sense of ownership and authorship, putting the filmmaker back in touch with one of the reasons that a franchise appealed to him in the first place.” In the end, Young defends fan filmmaking as a process of active engagement with imagination and culture, and there’s where we are 100% in agreement.

Farscape Forever: Sex, Drugs and Killer Muppets, ed. Glenn Yeffeth: Sadly, this collection never goes much deeper than squee, despite a gesture or two at Zhaan as avatar of the Goddess. Names I recognized: Patricia Bray, Jim Butcher, Martha Wells, Josepha Sherman, Jody Lynn Nye, Roxanne Longstreed Conrad, P.N. Elrod. But this wasn’t the place to get even a good LJ-level analysis of St. John of the Uncharted Territories or any of his companions.

SPN: Rough and undistinguished on my bones

2009-07-02T19:26:56Z

Rough and undistinguished on my bones
Summary: Post S4, God’s sick tigers need a pause to lick their wounds. Mildly Castiel/Dean/Sam, at least at hurt/comfort levels. PG. (Title etc. from Stevie Smith.)
Cliche prompt: Illness

Dean’s first reaction, once he had time to feel instead of just move, was to think it was truly unfair that Cas had to stagger from getting beat up by his fellow angels to getting shellacked by Lucifer. Seemed like taking humanity’s side was more like choosing to be the pigskin, dropkicked by everyone else. Without Castiel, Dean and Sam would have been dead, so Dean felt justified in being pissed on his behalf.

At least Cas managed to get them out on the road before passing out across the backseat. (Dean wasn’t even going to wonder about how he’d managed to bring the car halfway across the country. Angel powers were awesome, except for how the angels had mostly refused to use them for more than sleight-of-hand.)

Sam was barely responsive, but Dean was chalking that up to regret—Winchesters didn’t go into shock. Dean was seriously considering skipping ‘I told you so,’ except he thought that coddling would probably make Sam feel even worse.

Neither of them, anyway, were in any condition to respond to Dean’s conversational gambits. It wasn’t exactly like talking to himself when he was out alone on a hunt, but it didn’t feel much better, what with Sam so distant he might as well have been on the other side of the planet and Castiel with his blood slowly drying in runnels on his face, breathing so shallowly that Dean kept checking the rear-view mirror to make sure that he didn’t need to pull over and start CPR.

And yeah, Dean felt crappy that he’d left Castiel alone to fight Zachariah and the holy host on Dean’s behalf, and worse that it had all been for nothing. Zachariah and Lucifer had both won: they got their apocalypse, and any moment now Dean expected the horizon to turn red with flames.

But he kept driving, because that was what he did, until his eyes started drifting shut and the silence from the car’s other two occupants got too hard to ignore.

There was a motel exactly where a motel ought to be, and Dean pulled into the lot. He got a double, not thinking, and then realized that he’d probably end up on the floor, which all things considered was not the worst thing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and yet still felt aggravating enough to make him want to slam his fist into a wall.

At least the room was on the other side of the building from the office, so nobody saw him guiding Sam into the room like Sam was some roofied college kid, walking where he was pushed. And nobody saw him hauling Castiel in a fireman’s carry, Castiel’s tie drooping ridiculously down Dean’s back.

Then it was back to the car for the bags. He didn’t know whether the first aid kit would do Cas any good, but he knew the weapons would make him feel better, so it was worth the third trip.

When he returned to the room and shut the door for the night, he found that Sam had curled up on his bed, giant man in a little kid’s pose. Dean rubbed his hand over his face, fighting off the emotion that threatened to overwhelm him, and went to make sure that Castiel was settled. The angel looked way too much like a corpse missing only his casket. The best Dean could do was to get a washcloth and wipe away the worst of the blood. Castiel didn’t stir with the shock of cold and wet, but he was still breathing. It was freaky to see how he’d bled without any bruising, like a doll or something. Dean wished he could apologize to Jimmy Novak. He wished Cas understood that there was something to apologize for.

Maybe someday, if by some bizarre accident they survived, Dean would be able to explain to Castiel why Dean was still mad about Jimmy and Claire.

Dean salted the doors and windows and made sure the hex bags were intact, then eyed the chair by the window. It didn’t look comfortable.

In the end, he grabbed a pillow from Sam’s bed and laid down on the floor. He hadn’t bothered with anyone’s shoes; too much chance they’d have to leave fast.

There was never any time.

Dean turned over, punched the pillow hard enough that he felt the shock of the stiff carpet underneath, and tried to get some rest.

****

Dean woke, brain gummy with sleep, to the sound of retching. His back hurt and his shoulders hurt and his head really fucking hurt, but somebody was near to choking to death, so Dean forced himself upright.

Turned out to be Sam, who didn’t really start puking until Dean had him positioned over the toilet. Dean didn’t mean to look, but the stuff coming out of Sam was black and mostly liquid, and under the stench of bile it smelled like what it was.

It wasn’t anything he didn’t already know, and it sucked a mile high.

When Sam had gotten sick as a kid, he’d always wanted Dean right there with him in the bathroom, rubbing his back and bringing him glasses of water. Dean knelt by Sam, who was taking up most of the room, and put a hand on his back. Sam had sweated through his T-shirt, but he was coherent enough to shrug Dean off.

Dean went back to check on Castiel.

Good thing too, because Sam’s distress had apparently been some kind of trigger. Cas was heaving too, curled up on his side, nothing coming out but a trickle of saliva. Just in case, Dean grabbed the wastebasket and put it by the side of the bed. Angels didn’t eat, as far as he knew, so that implied nothing to bring up. Even though Castiel’s skin was pale and clammy, he didn’t stink like an actual human body would, which, well, Dean didn’t even want to get into the mechanics (metaphysics?) of that.

Once he’d decided that Cas wasn’t actively dying, he could have gone back to his berth on the floor, or watched from the chair. But Sam was still making gagging noises in the bathroom; Dean could see his forehead pressed to the porcelain, and Dean remembered enough bad nights of his own that he could almost feel it against his own skin, chilly and calming, a piece of stability in a swiftly whirling world.

He sat next to Castiel and slid his hand down the angel’s back, wondering what the wings looked like to other angels. Castiel shivered under the touch, and Dean repeated it, watching how his hand moved over the tan fabric.

“Dean,” Castiel murmured, barely moving his lips. He blinked. His pupils were huge, and not quite the same size. Dean couldn’t treat a human’s concussion, much less an angel’s, but he couldn’t keep himself from reaching out and cupping Castiel’s cheek in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the sweep of cheekbone, cool and a little sweaty to the touch.

Dean bent over nearly double so that their faces were close enough to talk quietly, without disturbing Sam. “Hey,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

“Not well.” Dean’s stomach dropped even though he’d known better than to expect a comforting lie. “I will—recover. But Lucifer’s power is great and—I can no longer protect you.”

“Dude,” Dean chided. “You’ve already—I mean, it’s our turn. Don’t know what we can do, but anybody, fallen or not, who comes after you is gonna have to go through us first.”

“You have reconciled, then,” Castiel said, and his lips turned up. They were so pale, even paler than usual, like he’d been washed in milk.

Dean couldn’t help the glance over his shoulder, checking that Sam was still hunched over the toilet. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I think so.”

Castiel’s eyes closed, slowly. “Will you—my grace will restore itself, if there is time. But I would—please, don’t leave me.”

Again, Dean’s head jerked back, even though Sam couldn’t possibly have moved; Dean was just grateful Cas couldn’t have seen Dean’s reaction. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll be right here.”

And then he was exhausted, too, and it wasn’t wrong to lie down next to Castiel. Wasn’t wrong to curl up behind him and throw an arm over his waist, just to feel him breathing. The fabric of his trenchcoat was cool, not holding any body heat, but Dean edged up close enough that his breath bounced off of the nape of Castiel’s neck, warm and a little sour.

Dean drifted with the rise and fall of Castiel’s back.

There was a clunk from the bathroom. Dean managed to ease himself away from Castiel instead of shoving him to the floor in his haste; by the time he got through the door, Sam was off his knees and fumbling with their toiletries.

“Here,” Dean said, soft as he could manage, and got out the toothpaste and Sam’s toothbrush—left behind when he’d gone off with Ruby—then unwrapped one of the flimsy little plastic cups and filled it with water.

Sam brushed his teeth and drank carefully, small sips with pauses in between.

“So,” Dean asked, “am I gonna have to tie you down again?” The bruises on his neck throbbed in time with his pulse.

Sam stared down at his water as if he could use it to scry. “Don’t think so,” he said. “It hurts, but—it’s different now.” He didn’t say whether it was Lucifer’s rising or his own realization that he'd been wrong that accounted for the change, and maybe he didn’t even know. The cup crumpled in his hand. “Dean,” he said, and he was crying, hitching sobs in between the words, “I killed—a possessed woman, an innocent, I killed her—”

Dean had let himself forget what Ruby’s demon-killing knife meant, mostly because it had become too hard to keep track of all the humans who suffered because of them. He couldn’t tell Sam that what he’d done was acceptable; he couldn’t uphold some great Winchester standard of behavior. He wrapped his arms around Sam, letting them hide their faces from each other. “You’re gonna be okay,” he said, believing it because he had to. “I’m not lettin’ you go again.”

“I can’t,” Sam moaned, messy and boneless, soaking Dean’s shoulder. “What I did—”

“I know,” Dean told him, sure as cold iron. There was no making up for what they’d done, separately and for each other. There was no balance sheet where they got to offset rescues versus lives squeezed short and souls shriveled into cinders. There was only going forward, saving what could be saved.

Sam cried until he was hiccuping, sleepy against Dean’s chest. Dean eased him to his feet and brought him back out. Castiel was still on his side, motionless as a stone sculpture. Dean hesitated for a second, then pushed Sam down on the other side of Castiel’s bed. It was a queen, so there wasn’t much room when Dean laid down between them, but he felt shockingly better, almost safe.

Sleep hit him like knockout gas, before he could even stash his gun under the pillow.

****

The next time he woke up, Cas had managed to flip himself over so that Dean was the one being practically nuzzled from behind. Castiel’s knee was nudged between his legs and his right arm, heavy as if it were actually made of marble, was draped over Dean’s chest. None of that was as important as what was going on the other side, which was Sam pushed back to the far edge of the bed and staring at them—at Dean—as if he were storing up the pictures because he didn’t expect to get another look.

Dean might have missed how far Sam was falling, but he always knew the general direction of Sam’s thoughts. “Get your ass over here,” he ordered, low enough to be mostly a growl, because if the choice was between cuddling and having Sam take off in the throes of some delusion that he wasn’t good enough to stay, Dean could marshmallow up with the best of them.

Sam blinked, then wriggled forward until their faces were only an inch apart, their knees brushing. Dean could feel the heat coming off Sam, somewhere between fear and embarrassment. Dean was way too tired to worry about any of that. He reached out and flattened his palm over Sam’s heart. Sam’s T-shirt was stiff with dried sweat (at best, and Dean just wasn’t dealing with that right now, so it was dried sweat), but Dean could still tell it was him underneath.

Dean curled his fingers into the fabric, making sure Sam couldn’t go anywhere. Sam’s breath was hot and minty. Dean tilted forward, not making any attempt to get out from under Castiel’s grasp, and kissed Sam on the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes so as not to see Sam’s shock.

And while Dean wasn’t looking, Sam pushed himself closer, moving down on the bed so that his face ended up mashed into Dean’s chest, his hand curving around Dean’s shoulder, more than covering Castiel’s mark. He snuggled into Dean like the past decade hadn’t happened, like he trusted Dean to protect him.

Dean let go of Sam’s shirt, just because the angle was going to cramp the hell out of his wrist, but he made sure to keep his hand on Sam, resting on Sam’s side, smooth skin over hard muscle. He could have let Sam’s touch wake him up all the way; he could feel the electricity lurking right under the surface of the red, raised scar on his shoulder, waiting for Cas or Sam or, better, the both of them.

But they needed rest more. Rest, and then the fight, like always.

The funny thing was, Dean had spent most of his life completely terrified. Scared near witless of everything that could happen to him, to his family. Now Lucifer was risen and Hell was reaching up to claw him back into its embrace, and nobody but a few fragile humans and one maybe-fallen angel was prepared to stand up against the apocalypse, triggered by the petty politics of angels. But Dean felt calmer than he had in years, quiet in the deepest reaches of whatever soul he had left.

They were most likely going down, and it was going to be ugly. Still, Dean had what he wanted on both sides of him. Castiel had chosen him over Heaven, and Sam had figured out that Hell had nothing on offer that was worth the price. They’d all crawled over broken bones and glass to get here; they’d all taken sacrifices, willing and not, which maybe meant that there wasn’t as much difference between humans and angels and demons as everyone liked to pretend.

The three of them would lose, if they lost, together. If that wasn’t good enough to deserve God’s help, well, then: they’d just have to do it themselves.

comments on DW; comments on LJ

SV: Repent at Leisure 3/3

2009-07-01T20:21:09Z

Part 2

Doomsday reappeared on a Tuesday, popping up out of an excavation site in Turkey and slaughtering an entire team of archaeologists, along with most of the other people in a two-mile radius.

The early reports were understandably confused, and at first the League sent only some minor hangers-on to investigate. Then, once they'd lost contact with those three, Hawk and Dove decided that this went beyond something the heroes on monitor duty ought to be dealing with alone, and called up J'onn.

By the time Clark got the call from Batman, ten hours had passed since the initial call for help from Turkey. Clark was naked in Lex's bed, which made talking to Batman uncomfortable; he always had the feeling Bruce could see him, and honestly it was probably true, what with Bruce's access to tech.

"I have to go," he said to Lex, who was just coming out of the bathroom. Lex didn't mind being nude—and Lex was nude, not naked; Clark was fairly confident that nakedness was declasse and therefore nonLuthorian. Clark cut his eyes away and tried to concentrate on Doomsday. Batman had given him all the intel available by satellite, but some things could only be discovered by showing up and punching. "It's Doomsday, he's out and he's heading towards Ankara."

"No," Lex said immediately.

"What?" Clark blinked at him.

"Apparently you need to be reminded of the last time you fought, when—stop me if this sounds familiar—he killed you. Even Christ only came back from the dead once. No, you are not going to fight Doomsday." Lex's hands were fisted at his sides; traces of damp still clung to his skin from the shower, and Clark wanted to nibble on him, keep the flush from fading.

"Um, yes, I am," he said instead, because he was used to postponing what he wanted for the greater good.

"Clark," Lex said carefully, his left hand moving to twist the bracelet of Rao around his right wrist, "I forbid you to fight Doomsday."

"Lex!" Wait, Lex knew about the power he had over Clark? But he hadn't been—Clark couldn't deal with this revelation right now. "Lex, it's Doomsday. Billions of people could die."

Lex tilted his head and stared at Clark unblinkingly. "I've got contingency plans, Batman has contingency plans. If we pool our resources—"

"Your contingency plans don't happen to involve really big bombs, do they?"

Lex clenched his jaw. "The longer you fight me on this, the more time Doomsday has to gain strength."

"No!" Clark yelled, and tried to turn away so he could superspeed into costume and out into the night. But the bracelet of Rao gave a slight squeeze, almost undetectable, and he was stuck in place, like he'd been trapped in one of Jor-El's beams of light. He couldn't even shift his feet, watching helplessly while Lex strode over to the bedside phone and started punching buttons.

"Lex," he said, loud enough to interfere with Lex's hurried instructions to Mercy. "Lex, this isn't your choice to make."

Lex dropped the receiver to his chest. "I believe it's clear that it is," he said, and almost succeeded in sounding casual. "If you go and get yourself killed, you're leaving us vulnerable to the next bad thing that crawls out of this rather extraordinarily hostile universe that's opened up in the past few decades since your arrival. I'd rather sacrifice a few hundred thousand people than lose the whole planet." He raised the phone and gave Mercy a few more code words.

Clark felt a stab of fury, red and hot. "If you stop me," Clark said, almost whispering now, "I'll never forgive you."

Lex's face was pale stone. "That's nothing new."

Clark couldn't figure it out. As for the risk, Clark had more PR value to Lex as a dead hero than a live one. Lex couldn't rationally think that holding Clark in reserve for a worse threat than Doomsday made any kind of sense.

Unless, maybe, the sex had tangled him up same as it had Clark. If this was some sort of misguided attempt to protect Clark, then Lex might not listen to reason, but he might still listen to Clark.

"Please." Clark found himself capable of dropping to his knees. "Please, Lex. I have to do this. It's—it's who I am. And I know you don't—I know you hate me. But if you ever—I saved you, Lex. I saved you and I never regretted it. And I never will. I just—I need you to let me do this. You can make me do anything, I know that. But let me—let me be Superman, and I'll. I'll do it all willingly. I'll be yours."

Lex's eyes were as wide as they'd been when he'd seen Clark stand in the way of a speeding car. He was shaking, like one of his expensive cars poised to zoom off. The phone dangled uselessly from his hand.

Clark bent his head, submissive, looking up at Lex through the fringe of his bangs. Lex swallowed, suddenly looking ten years older.

"You'd do that," he said. "Anything I wanted." His voice—Clark wanted to say it was wonderment, or a thrill of victory, but it sounded more like revulsion, like Clark had finally revealed himself to be weak in some crucial way.

Clark nodded anyway. He didn't know what else to do.

Lex closed his eyes, still as a mausoleum. "Go," he said.

Clark felt the compulsion holding him in place disintegrate. "Thank you," he said, and paused just long enough to register Lex's flinch.

****

Lex looked away from the smear of blood he'd left on the marble wall and examined his rapidly swelling hand. If he just let it go, he'd be healed in half an hour, but at least four of the bones would need to be rebroken and reset.

He had work to do before he could have his doctors see him. "Mercy," he said, hitting the intercom, "change of plan. Are the satellites retargeted yet?"

No point in letting Clark go get himself killed if Lex didn't give Clark the chance to save the world all by himself again.

As he waited for more intel, he straightened his fingers, welcoming the distraction of the pain. Clark had promised him everything he ever wanted, with the crucial flaw that made the success rot in his mouth. His very own Clark-puppet. If he told Clark that he wanted to hear Clark apologize for all the lies, all the mistrust, Clark would probably even feel honor-bound to do it.

And even worse: now, when Clark was hurt, maybe killed, it was Lex's choice. His fault. Even if Clark made it through this battle, Lex would be the one sending him to the next one, and the next one, until Clark soared too far and fell to earth.

Lex remembered the funeral, the first time Doomsday killed Clark. The world had been monochrome, even though the sun had been shining and the flowers thick as tears. He'd thought then that he could get over Clark, the way he'd gotten over losing his hair and his mother (which was to say, never and not at all, but he functioned). But then Clark had returned from the dead and that was even worse, because it meant that Lex could never be certain that it was over.

The viewscreen on the side wall flared to life, showing the satellite feed. There was a lot of dust, and the resolution was only six inches, but glimpses of Superman's ridiculous outfit were discernable as he and Doomsday set about pounding the stuffing out of each other.

"The Justice League is on the line," Mercy said in his ear.

"What is it?" Lex snapped.

"We need those space mirrors you've been constructing in the guise of communications satellites." Batman's growl was ridiculous—Lex knew for a fact that Bruce Wayne's natural voice was a tenor—and if he'd been physically present Lex wouldn't have been able to avoid taking a swing.

"The plan," Lex demanded, because this was no time for posturing (and yes, he was aware of the irony, but Lex knew plenty of things about the tech that no one at the League would have, and if he didn't understand what the aim was then they might as well be fighting separately).

There was a pause, and then a different voice came on. "We wish to target Superman with a beam of solar energy, while simultaneously hitting Doomsday with an anenergic pulse that should prevent him from gaining power by fighting."

Lex didn't know whether Wonder Woman understood the technical underpinnings—"anenergic pulse" sounded suspiciously like it had something to do with reversing the polarity of the neutron flow—but he was relieved to find that an actual adult seemed to be present up there.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

****

Clark was grateful that Doomsday looked so—well, alien now. He was as subject to anthropomorphism as any human, and an enemy who looked like a cross between a bug and a junkpile was a lot easier to hit.

The first task was to get Doomsday to an unpopulated area, punch by punch, knocking Doomsday across an area the length of a football field each time. Whenever Doomsday hit back, Clark carefully twisted so that they'd keep going in the same direction. Getting whaled on still hurt, but at least it represented a variety of progress.

When his League communicator crackled to warn him that help was coming, he was digging himself out of a thirty-foot crater, and his ears were ringing, so he didn't get all the details. Clark managed to roll up the slope a few feet before Doomsday's punch could send him another dozen feet into the ground. But Doomsday grabbed Clark's cape and dragged him the rest of the way to the surface so he could whirl Clark around and around like a slingshot, except that on each circuit Clark smashed into the earth again. Clark briefly wished that his uniform wasn't quite so indestructible.

When the light hit, it was like being shoved into the sun. Clark could feel himself healing, the prickle-pain of it almost pleasure, blood drying up and cells reknitting in that bath of solar energy.

Doomsday roared and Clark pulled himself free, turning in the air and using his heat vision to blast Doomsday back another twenty yards. The light followed Clark, like this was a reality show and he had the spotlight. Which was all well and good, but Doomsday was just going to get stronger as he adapted to Clark's strengths again.

Then another beam touched down, arrowing out of the sky and encircling Doomsday. It was hard to perceive—even Clark's multispectrum vision had trouble identifying it; he could tell it was there, giving a bluish cast to Doomsday and the patch of ground around him. But he couldn't figure out what it was.

Doomsday howled frustration and lashed out, but the circle moved with him, so that he couldn't even reach the sides. Clark felt an unwilling sympathy with him, a victim of a world he'd never made, now with some alien technology seemingly taunting him as it enclosed him.

"Superman," Green Arrow's voice came as Doomsday whirled, angrier and angrier as each attempt to free himself failed.

"Whatever you're doing, it's working," Clark confirmed. "What are you doing?"

"I'm sure Luthor could explain it to you," Green Arrow said, somehow making it into an insinuation.

Clark narrowed his eyes. "Sure, if I want to be lectured about physics." But actually Clark could imagine listening, and even enjoying: Lex had stopped lecturing him years ago, when he'd stopped thinking that Clark wanted to be around him. And given what Clark had promised, lectures were better than most of the alternatives.

There was a more pressing matter at hand. "What now? You can't keep this up forever," he pointed out, because even if there weren't a mechanical risk—Clark had learned the hard way that containment fields generally stopped containing at the worst possible moment—the Turkish government was unlikely to be thrilled with a permanent Doomsday monument in the middle of the country.

Like that, glowing green force lines appeared around the column of whatever-it-was. Clark always had to suppress an instinctive cringe when Green Lantern's energy fields showed up. He was too used to that particular light coming from Kryptonite. The construct looked almost like one of those Russian tea-glass holders, the Lantern energy carefully surrounding the beam encasing Doomsday, tugging him upwards in a cradle of light. Doomsday was still raging, flailing against the invisible walls of his cage and bouncing back like he was in a padded room.

Clark watched until, a mile and a half above the Earth, Doomsday was sucked into the satellite generating the beam, which swallowed him up and then began accelerating out towards deep space. It wasn't a permanent solution—no such thing—but if they were very, very lucky Doomsday would be out of commission long enough for the human race to evolve some better defenses.

Clark closed his eyes and basked in his own solar energy beam, like a housecat in a shaft of sun, and right then—because of course Lex was involved, and efficiency dictated against waste of good energy—the power cut off, leaving him with only regular light. Usually that was enough, a kiss of life across his skin whenever he was outside, but now it felt like he'd been dumped from a hot tub into a cold shower.

He shouldn't have needed an announcement that the crisis was over. Now he had to deal with everything that Doomsday had left behind. First the humanitarian crisis, and then—

And then Lex.

As Clark worked on repairing what he could and rescuing the few survivors in Doomsday's path, he tried to anticipate what was going to happen next, now that Lex's power over him was out in the open. He'd promised not to fight Lex. He wasn't entirely confident it was a promise he could keep, especially since Lex would be sure to taunt him.

Except that Lex hadn't been taunting him, not of late. Clark frowned, trying to remember the last time they'd fought before Doomsday. Lex had been busy with the campaign, of course—there were enough dirty tricks in politics to divert him from most of his usual shenanigans. So there'd been less to fight about, and Lex had been pretty careful to keep his activities on the up-and-up, what with more reporters than Lane and Kent looking for reasons to discredit him.

Maybe what Lex had needed all along was the scrutiny of public office.

On the other hand, maybe Lex was going to start to use his control more now that it was explicit. Lex had a better imagination than most people, even if it was largely wasted on paranoia and weapons design; Clark shuddered to think what Lex might ask of him. If his orders got too bad, Clark knew, there was always Batman and his Kryptonite stash.

Today had shown that Lex was still reachable. Clark had never given up on him entirely, and his faith had been justified. He could work his way around his promise in order to encourage Lex to do the right thing. Maybe he could even use the bond between them to draw Lex closer to virtue. Lex hated owing any debts, and he might come to think that Clark had overpaid for his bargain.

****

Lex watched the reports pour in as the news channels scrambled to get footage. They didn't have any special information, but he needed to get on top of the spin. Someone was going to blame Superman for the destruction; someone always did.

He was reminded of that lawsuit, blaming him for Superman's actions. He'd thought it was preposterous, but he hadn't been making the right connections. If only the lawyers understood the ritual of Rao, he'd be paying damages that made the award for the Exxon Valdez look like a parking ticket. And then there'd be all the plaintiffs complaining that he hadn't sent Superman in their direction when he could easily have done so, could have toted up the costs and benefits until Clark's every flight was preplanned. It was an old complaint: Superman stopped this car crash, why not mine?

When he heard those whines, Lex was always reminded of how much he hated it when people who survived accidents said that God must have been looking out for them, or when a winning sports team thanked God, because of the necessary implication that God wasn't looking out for or supporting everybody else. True, Superman existed, and not being omnipotent he also had to make choices, so in some ways the comparison was flawed. But there was still an unwillingness to accept that random chance was a governing force in life, that rain fell on the unjust and the just alike, and Lex was never going to respect people who expected Superman to play God without the arbitrariness that came with the position.

And then came the Ritual of Rao, which had radically changed Clark's decisionmaking capacity. Clark wasn't even going to fight him any more, at least if Clark kept his word; and if he did renege, Lex could most likely order him to shut up about his petty qualms.

Lex had long understood that he was an irresistable force, and Clark was his immovable object. He'd taken it as a comfort: Clark was always going to be there to blink those big green eyes and tell him not to go any farther. Now, that was no longer true, and it was worse than having the entire sky fall on him, more terrifying because Lex wasn't just afraid of dying.

He knew what he had to do. He'd known for a long time, really, as soon as he'd realized that ordinary measures wouldn't suffice.

He looked down at the bracelet. Still featureless black, indifferent to his attention. Alien as Clark, and ultimately as damaging.

He paced back to his desk and hit the button to talk to his secretary. "Patience," he said, "clear out the second sublevel. I want it empty by the time I get down there."

****

Because crises didn't wait for one another to finish before starting their own shenanigans, there was a forest fire in Indonesia. Clark spent five hours fighting it, then had to leave when the army asked him to get out. It was a familiar annoyance: governments wanting him around for the heavy lifting, but not for the finish so they could claim the credit for themselves. Clark didn't like it, but he still got to save lives, and that had to be enough.

Anyway, he didn't have to return to Metropolis (Lex) as long as there was work to be done. He zipped to the Watchtower and checked the monitors, but Superman-level events were relatively rare and bitter experience had shown that addressing non-Superman-level events outside of Metropolis was a recipe for disappointment, resentment, and other less pleasant emotions from the citizenry and, not incidentally, from his fellow heroes.

Some days it was hard to remember why it was so important to help humanity out.

He was sitting with Green Lantern, soaking up John's casual and silent companionship, when the bracelet of Rao twitched on his wrist.

Clark made a noise that had John jumping into a combat stance; Clark was on his feet himself, not knowing how he'd gotten there, when he felt the bracelet shrink fractionally. Cracks appeared all over its surface. Hesitantly, Clark poked at it with his left index finger.

It crumbled into dust, pouring across his wrist and into his palm as he twisted his hand, trying senselessly to catch the superfine particles that felt like silk, like air, as they puffed into a black-grey cloud and disappeared.

"Superman?" John asked.

He stared at his wrist, the skin there no paler than the rest of him, like it had never been covered up. There was a mole on the knob of his wrist, a little brown spot; a few specks of dust clung to the hairs around it.

His brain felt frozen; he could feel his expression changing, but he didn't know what—Lex couldn't be—Lex wouldn't just die, that was preposterous, like gravity disappearing and the moon going nova.

"Superman!" He heard John hit the intercom, talking fast to whoever was on duty, but the words were as stretched and blurry as if they were coming from the far side of the moon.

He had never been more grateful for the specially designed force field that let him exit the Watchtower at speed; he would have punched a hole in its side if he'd had to.

Lex wasn't supposed to be anywhere special right now, so Clark flew to Metropolis, arrowing his hearing to catch voices he recognized using Lex's name. Mercy was talking fast and vicious to someone, so he went to her. LuthorCorp didn't have a specially designed force field around the building. They were going to have to replace a couple of blast doors.

Mercy was paler than Clark had ever seen her, but composed. She was standing in front of a bank of monitors, watching dozens of scenes of frantic activity. He skidded to a halt beside her. "Where's Lex?"

She didn't twitch, just continued to snap orders into her headset about media and—surgeons?

Lex wasn't dead, then. Clark's internal organs lurched, and for the first time in years, decades maybe, he thought he was going to throw up. "Mercy," he said, catching her arm in his hand, "where's Lex?"

She sneered at him for nearly a second, but then his expression must have gotten to her, because she shook her head fractionally and said "I'll meet you in the OR," then disconnected.

"He's downstairs," she informed him, then twisted her hand snake-fast so that she was hanging on to him instead of the reverse. "Unless you know how to perform high-speed reconstructive surgery, your best bet is to stay out of the way."

"Reconstructive surgery?" Clark repeated. He could do a lot of things fast, but surgery had never been one of them.

She closed her eyes as if to gather strength, then glared at him with a purity of hate that he'd only seen in Doomsday's eyes before. "There was an accident," she said in a perfect PR voice. "Mr. Luthor's hand was severed at the wrist. The surgeons are attempting a reattachment. However, his advanced healing factor appears to be hampering the attempt."

An accident. Clark felt the phantom pressure of the cuff against his wrist and knew that the only accident was the one that had sent his ship slamming into a field right next to Lex.

He'd done this, by explicitly fighting Lex's control. It didn't matter that Lex had coerced him into the deal in the first place; Clark had known what he was doing, or he'd thought he had. A flush of anger filled him, even though it did little to counteract the guilt. Still, he was furious, shaking with it: Lex just had to discover an ethical code when it would do the maximum possible damage. Just had to make a suicidal gesture, probably because he couldn't cut off Clark's hand at the wrist and knew that doing it to himself would hurt more.

"I need to see him," he found himself saying, even though he was just as likely to punch Lex as anything else and even though he had no need whatsoever to ask Mercy's permission.

Mercy folded her arms. "The operating theater's not lead-lined." Which was pretty much a fuck-you, not that he should have expected anything different from her.

He scanned the building, and sure enough there was a full medical facility in the subbasement. He'd never bothered to look there. Three doctors were hunched over Lex's arm—the bones of the forearm were intact, but they just stopped where the wristbones should have joined them. An anaesthesiologist was checking Lex's vitals worriedly. "—not responding," she finished as Clark tuned in. Another side effect of Lex's meteor-enhanced healing, Clark realized: Lex was throwing off sedation and painkillers as fast as they could be pumped into him.

"We can't do it," the lead doctor said. "Mr. Luthor, I'm sorry, but the healing of the stump is too far advanced, and the hand—it seems to be suffering accelerated decomposition." Clark flicked his gaze over to the refrigerated unit at the side of the operating table. What he saw inside didn't look like it could have belonged to a living human. He'd seen a lot of death and destruction, bodies torn and burnt, but he still had to fight back the nausea.

Probably this, too, was meteor-related. Whatever unnatural vitality Lex possessed had been taken back, like his hand was Dorian Grey's picture.

Lex still hadn't said anything.

"Mr. Luthor?" the doctor prompted. The other two backed away, presumably wanting to get out of the line of fire.

Lex opened his eyes. His skin temperature was low, too low to be accounted for by the chill of the operating room. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his temples. His jaw worked. "Thank you, Dr. Houn," he said at last. "Please do what you need to do to close up, then schedule a consult about a prosthetic with my assistant."

Clark fell back against the wall, staring up at nothing.

"I need to reschedule three campaign appearances," Mercy said sharply, startling him. "You're not welcome here."

Clark meant to snap back at her, but he couldn't figure out a thing to say.

"I'm sorry, was I unclear?" Mercy asked, honey over cayenne. "Get out or you'll be picking Kryptonite out of every square inch of your superheroic hide."

Clark went.

****

Lex wouldn't have thought that his right hand was all that useful, and his healing factor had gotten him through the phantom itch more quickly than he'd had any right to hope. But it was shocking how intensely he missed his previous symmetry. As it turned out, the nondominant hand was still extremely useful, or at least its absence extremely frustrating when he tried to do simple tasks like dressing himself, or soaping up in the shower, or answering email.

It was a good thing he hadn't let himself think about his plan too much before enacting it, because even a minute's thought would have convinced him that it was the stupidest sacrifice since the Bay of Pigs.

He'd done a brief press appearance, shown off a temporary prosthesis under a black leather glove. All signs indicated that the 'accident' wasn't going to affect the election. It was just too weird for voters to process, and as long as he didn't show the stump in public he was unlikely to trigger a serious aversive response, or so his staff psychologists told him.

Funnily enough, he wasn't all that worried about the election any more.

Maybe he ought to be questioning his fitness for the post. After all, a president had to be prepared to send people to die. Done right, that would require at least as much bravery as walking into mortal danger oneself—and Lex had never wanted to do it wrong.

But a president got to order people who volunteered; a president got to order people who voted.

No, that was all window dressing: the fact of the matter was, Lex couldn't be the one who sent Clark to his death against his will and he couldn't be the one who kept Clark away from his glorious goddamned mission to save humanity against his will. He refused to be the man who used Clark as a hammer, an object to be deployed if and only if it suited Lex's desires. And it would come to that, even if Lex resisted the first time: look how well he'd done turning down Clark's physical attentions. Forced fucking only contaminated him; abusing Clark's other abilities ran the risk of destroying the world.

All Clark's other blame, that was just the price of living, the decisions Lex had made that had seemed right, or at least necessary, at the time. Lex's sins were investigative, protective, occasionally wrathful. He always had reasons, defenses, excuses for Clark.

Not this time.

Almost worse than losing the hand was that he'd surrendered every inch of contested ground in the battle with Clark. Clark would take Lex's gesture (no pun intended, he thought, and smiled) as confirmation that his simplistic view of the world was right and that Lex agreed, underneath it all. Lex might still win the election, but as between the two of them, he was worse off than he'd been before the Ritual of Rao.

"Lex?" Clark's voice from behind him was tentative, coddling. So it began.

He closed his eyes. He'd have to remember to reprogram the doors to the penthouse. "Do we have business?" He made himself swivel his chair to face Clark. The temporary prosthesis couldn't clench its fingers, which was a reminder that he should keep his left hand relaxed. "Or is it perhaps pleasure that brings you?"

Clark went pale, or as pale as a golden idol like Clark could get. "You let me go," he said.

"I take it as an unpleasant judgment on humanity that 'Superman' refers to brawn and not brains."

Clark, shockingly, looked hurt for a moment. "I mean—" When he stopped, drew breath, and smiled—just a little, a curve of the lips that promised nothing tolerable—Lex knew that he was in worse trouble than he'd imagined. "How many more body parts do you think you can sacrifice before you have to talk to me for real?"

Lex fought his body to stillness. "I had thought that the point of losing the hand was to avoid talking to you at all."

"That's not going to work," Clark said, as predictable as ever. "I've been trying to understand why, what would make you decide to give up the greatest weapon you've ever had." Lex didn't contest the description; Clark was speaking with accuracy, not self-love. "But then—tell me, Lex: why did you tell me not to go after Doomsday?"

Lex clenched his hand, hard. "Again: I'm not discussing this with you."

Clark sighed. "Fine. Then you're going to sit here and watch the interview I just gave to Lois."

He couldn't outrun Clark, and shooting him with the reserve Kryptonite gun would be an overreaction even for him, so he gritted his teeth and pulled up the Planet's website.

Clark was sitting on a too-small chair, squirming as he looked down at his lap, at his bare wrist.

"How are you doing?" Lane asked, almost softly, and Clark's head jerked up, his eyes widening in surprise. She started to roll her eyes and then rather obviously realized that the camera could pick that up, so she cleared her throat. "What can you tell us about the accident?"

Clark, never good at PR, ignored the camera and stared straight at Lane. "Thanks for your concern. Uh, I don't really know what happened. I was away on League business and—Lex hasn't been able to tell me much. From what I know, the explosion happened very fast and the accounts are still pretty confused."

Lex needed to revise his judgment on Clark's ability to deal with the press. Clark was, after all, a political reporter, and he'd had a great deal of experience with deflection. That answer was an elegant diversion, making it sound like Lex didn't remember much. He was trying to forget; holding his hand in place to be crushed by heavy machinery was just about the worst thing he'd ever made himself do—it made him nostalgic for eating grubs and talking to his imaginary friend Louis.

"Is the accident related to the fact that you're no longer wearing your bracelet?" Lane leaned forward a tad, as if she planned on jumping Clark and sticking her tongue down his throat if he announced that he had separated from Lex.

Clark pasted on an expression that bore about as much relation to a smile as a three-year-old's drawing of a person resembled a photograph. "Uh. It's kind of, a private thing. Culturally. Actually, I've been thinking. I'll always be Kryptonian. But I'm also an American, and—it's time Lex and I made it official the American way."

Lane's response to such an obviously juicy statement was practically Pavlovian; she was lucky she didn't need to wipe the drool off of her chin. "And what is the American way, in this case?"

Clark smiled, the real one this time, supernova-bright even through the Superman illusion that distorted his face. "I guess that depends on where we're living six months from now."

Lex stopped the replay. He was grateful that his limbs worked. A lesser man would have asked a stupid question like, 'Did you just propose to me on camera?'

He cleared his throat. "Why did you propose to me on camera?"

"Uh, because apparently we only talk to other people about the fact that we can't actually live without each other?"

Lex turned. His face was inches from Clark's. Clark had turned off his Superman face, but it was still the same smile. "I can live without you," Lex told him, except that it came out a tad too breathless for comfort.

"You can live without saying it out loud, I'll give you that. But, Lex, you kind of showed your hand—" Clark turned bright red and even Lex was struck speechless at the utter inappropriateness.

They stared at each other, frozen, until Lex couldn't contain his laughter. It hurt—especially when he tried to clutch at his stomach and only managed half the job—but it was pure Smallville-era Clark, awkward and with no sense of social grace, and somehow that was exactly what Lex needed to hear.

When he managed to stop wheezing, Lex saw that Clark had retreated a couple of feet, but he still had his determined Man of Steel expression.

"When I'm leader of the free world, I'm going to order you around and you're going to do what I ask," Lex warned.

Clark considered him, head tilted a little. Lex knew he wasn't being scanned with X-ray vision, because that wouldn't give Clark any further insights, but he still had to stop himself from squirming. "Probably," he said. "When you make a case for it."

Part of Lex, the part most powerfully formed by reaction to his father, wanted to be angry at the prospect of endless battles, always having to prove his bona fides. A smaller but active part thought it might be the most interesting challenge he could give himself.

"Would you like to hear a case made for the virtues of oral sex?"

Clark's blush, which had faded, returned in full force. Lex was oddly charmed. "I'm willing to take that one on faith," Clark said quickly. And then there was very little of consequence to say.

****

"So," Jon Stewart said, "Superman and Lex Luthor got rid of their promise bracelets, causing screams of outrage in the fashion world. What will they do with all their unsold inventory now?" There was a picture, which Lex profoundly hoped had been photoshopped, of crates of sluglike gray bracelets engraved with Superman's crest spilling out onto Canal Street.

"The real question on everyone's lips is, what were the bracelets for?" he continued. "Superman says it's a cultural thing; all I can say is, Kryptonians better not have worshipped Xenu, or Superman's going to confront the only force that could truly defeat him: Scientology." Pause; smirk. "Nah, that's just crazy talk. So, the bracelets' real function—I'm thinking bleep-bleep." Lex could lip-read 'cock ring.' The audience roared. "I'm just saying, that Superman outfit is designed to make really clear that 'Superman' isn't false advertising."

Strangely, Lex was starting to find seeing his life played out on a fake news show rather comforting. Given how many entirely preposterous things had happened to him, fake news seemed just about right.

"Of course, you know what this means." He shifted to falsetto and wriggled his hands: "Wedding of the century. Will they wait until Luthor's in the White House? Given those pictures from a couple months ago, the First Residence will be the only thing about them entitled to wear white. Ooh, and then: Superman, as first—well, first superhero, I guess; Superman gets to redecorate." The screen showed a picture of the White House merged with the Fortress of Solitude, the whole thing looking like a Freudian nightmare of ice phalluses. Lex rather liked it.

"Maybe that's too much; maybe he'll just pick out some new china." This time the picture showed Clark, smiling uncomfortably, photomanipulated so that he was holding one of the collectible plastic plates McDonald's had issued back when the League was just getting started, the one with Batman's sigil on it. "Or is that in bad taste, to have a constant reminder of your exes around?" Lex choked a little on his drink. "Come on, what do you think those guys do up in that tower, away from the rest of the world, while they're waiting for some crisis to resolve? Think about it: first thing you'd do with superpowers, you'd take 'em for a little spin underneath the sheets. Or floating above the sheets." He raised his eyebrows and grinned out at the audience, which was applauding.

Lex took another swallow and thought that Bruce was probably less happy with the monologue than he was. And really, he could live with that.

"Lex?" Clark called from the bedroom. "Turn off the computer and get in here."

Lex didn't have to obey.

He just felt like it.

END

comments on DW; comments on LJ

SV: Repent at Leisure 2/3

2009-07-01T20:18:04Z

Part 1

SUPERPOWER COUPLE? was Newsweek's headline, independently arrived at by six other papers and magazines. Five more omitted the question mark. The Economist went with a caricature, Superman's cape wrapped around Lex, except that they always drew the cape as the American flag, and they had Lex in the pose of the Statue of Liberty, which made him look like some sort of fashion-challenged Roman potentate with a crown on his bald head. And those were the good ones.

The first press conference was precisely as excruciating as Lex had expected. After some internal debate in the campaign, they'd decided on the line that Lex had left it to Superman to characterize the relationship, because it was his heritage and his choice. And they'd had a new set of suits made so that the bracelet was exposed—no hiding for Lex Luthor—but the color of the metal was close enough to that of the fabric that anyone inclined to do so could see it as one blended entity.

Here was a thing he never expected to think, but: Thank God for the People reporter. Once she asked how they'd met, and Lex had explained that Superman had saved his life, the political questions ended and then it was pure gossip time. How long had they known each other? ("Several years," give or take a decade, "but I'm always learning something new.") When had the relationship changed? ("I'm not going to answer that" was a lot better than "two days ago.") What drew him to Superman? ("You're joking, surely"; the laughter was more than polite.)

"Is Superman going to campaign for you?" the Tribune reporter asked. Lex had called on her when he sensed that he needed to get back to substance.

Lex shook his head. "I haven't discussed it with him, but I don't have any reason to think his noninterference policy has changed." Actually—and he could just see the Weekly Standard article on this already—Superman had not been born in America. An act of Congress a couple of years back (sponsored, of course, by Senator Kent) had conferred American citizenship on him, after Lane's first set of interviews, but Lex's lawyers had told him then that the question of whether a nonhuman could even be a citizen was at best an open one. Superman campaigning for him openly might not just be a PR issue; it could be a campaign finance law violation. Fortunately it was a moot point, because Superman wasn't going to offer an encouraging word.

And even if Superman's citizenship became a campaign issue, he'd already be so much closer to victory that there was no point in worrying about it now. He nodded at the reporter, allowing her a followup.

"Are you concerned that if he's around you too much you won't be able to escape the gay marriage issue?"

Lex shrugged easily and held his hands out. "Ms. Hansen, I went through the Ritual of Rao with Superman. Since I don't have a working time machine, I expect most people are going to know. But he's got a career of his own and I'd prefer to keep it that way."

The question with Lois Lane was always whether to call on her early or late. Early, and she set the tone; late, and she could ask a question that erased everything that had come before. Today, he'd gone with late. "Ms. Lane."

"Are you going to reveal Superman's secret identity? We don't know what kinds of conflicts of interest you might have. Or if someone else finds out, you'd be subject to blackmail. Is that really a vulnerability we want a potential president to have?"

Lex didn't bother looking at her. He looked right into the cameras. "I think you've confused Superman with some of our other guardian angels. Superman doesn't wear a mask."

"He's never denied living a separate life," she called out.

Lex wanted to say: 'He's also never denied being a cocker spaniel.' There was no point putting ideas in people's heads, though. "Kal has kept his private life private. But you, and every other reporter in the Western Hemisphere, have had him under scrutiny from the moment he caught that runaway airplane. There's an extensive, even grossly excessive, public record of who he is. Not many of us can say the same." He wanted to ball his hands into fists; he wanted to tell them that if they hadn't found anything yet they weren't going to. But if there was anything that he'd learned from the line of annoyances running from Roger Nixon to Lois Lane, it was that provoking the press was a terrible idea no matter how satisfying it might feel in the moment.

****

Well, that kind of backfired.

Lex had 100% name recognition, more valuable than gold and harder to move than negative opinions. He was still behind in the polls, but Clinton-behind, not McCain-behind.

Clark had grown up with preachers on the radio talking about gay marriage like it was the apocalypse up close and personal. But it turned out that Kansas was pretty much as conservative as it got on the gay thing. Most of the people who wouldn't vote for Lex wouldn't have voted for him anyway. And because the Ritual of Rao wasn't the same thing as a wedding, plenty of people thought their relationship was kind of like a civil union, which was boring and not so obviously against anybody's religion. Over half of the population lived in states that recognized gay marriage or domestic partnership; the nation's capital had even legalized gay marriage a few years back.

The bracelets of Rao became a minor fashion trend, worn by teenagers in love with controversy and hipsters who had decided that they were somehow ironic. Some of the bracelets came with little Superman logos, enameled red and yellow. Clark found an entire warehouse full of them and thought about setting it on fire, but settled for running a story about the dodgy overseas production conditions and traces of lead in the paint.

Lots of the commentary suggested that Lex's election was just the next inevitable frontier in gay rights. The conservatives who talked about interspecies mixing like it was miscegenation just made the rest of the critics look bad. Apparently Clark really was that popular.

Jon Stewart riffed on Lex every night, and worse he spent a lot of time making jokes about what Clark presumably liked to do in bed. Even the non-sexual jokes were worrisome, because they were all about making Lex seem harmless, which Clark could have told him was like making a volcano sound like a sun-warmed piece of rock suitable for picnicking. But no, he got: "We've had a black president, a Mormon, a woman and a Jew. Maybe it's time to knock down that last barrier in modern times and elect a bald man."

Lex shook up his consultants and started going after independents who were tired of the culture wars. And they were listening. Lex always could sound like the most reasonable person in the room, as long as he'd had a chance to think about what he wanted to say.

Bruce frowned constantly. Clark asked him, as a personal favor, not to fund anti-gay groups as a way to take Lex down. Bruce called him a child and asked whether he thought there'd be no price for his rash decision. But, in his capacity as Clark Kent, he checked and didn't find Wayne money going to any of the usual suspects, which was a small relief.

Also, Clark was having an astonishing amount of sex.

This was something that he tried not to think much about when it wasn't happening—his uniform was really really tight, for one thing. And Clark Kent needed to be paying attention to what was going on around him or Lois would whack him on the arm, which always made her curse and shake her hand.

It wasn't like he hadn't known that Lex would be embarrassingly, outrageously good at sex. He'd seen Lex walk. And bend over. And touch things. And lean on—whatever, Lex was an Olympic-quality sexual gymnast, this was news to precisely no one.

The funny thing was that Clark could fall asleep in Lex's bed and not wake up terrified of what Lex was going to do to him, or make him do. He wanted to blame it on the Ritual of Rao. But the Ritual only made him obey. That, Clark had confirmed with the Fortress, which also said that it was irreversible. Apparently if Clark had known what he was doing he could have negotiated some constraints on the obedience, which would have been incorporated into the vows—the whole thing really was more like a marriage, crossbred with a contract, than Clark had known—but since he hadn't, the only thing holding Lex back was his inability to imagine that Clark might follow orders. Thanks a lot, Kryptonian culture, Clark thought. Too bad that particular wrinkle hadn't been part of his whirlwind tour of his heritage.

Fortunately, Lex's usually clever imagination seemed to have failed him when it came to exploiting the Ritual. Mostly, they just had sex, and occasionally fought about some story in the Planet or a sketchy Luthorian business venture.

One night, Lex stopped stroking his back and rolled out of bed, pulling his pants off of the floor. "Where are you going?" Clark asked, sleepy and satiated.

Lex stopped and ran his hand over the back of his head. "If I'm going to get the new testing facility approved this year, I need to finish this report." Clark knew that there'd be more to it: Lex probably had someone who needed to be bribed or intimidated as well. He'd have to look into it tomorrow.

"Come back to bed," Clark said. Even if Lex hadn't been able to cut him off with a single order, Clark didn't want to fight. "Just until I fall asleep."

Lex stood there like one of the statues in the mansion. Clark started to wake up, because if Lex was going to get mad Clark definitely needed all his brain cells in full working order. But then Lex sighed and dropped the pants. "I suppose it's not a particularly high priority."

****

Sonny Boswell had been the Mayor of Metropolis "since Hector was a pup," the line he unrolled on anyone unfortunate to be in a room with him for more than five minutes. One of these days, Lex was going to get around to having him recalled and replaced.

Boswell stood as Lex entered and crossed over to where Lex had stopped just inside the door. He was holding a manila envelope, sealed and unmarked.

"You asked for a meeting, Mr. Mayor?" Boswell was going to ask for some LuthorCorp donation, and Lex would have to go along for the publicity value, but he'd negotiate some sort of abatement, and everyone would go home with a burnished public image and an unchanged balance sheet. Boring.

Boswell smiled, reminding Lex of a remora. "I wanted to do this in person. And I wasn't sure the ordinary folks we use could get past your security."

"Excuse me?" Lex asked.

Boswell shoved the envelope at him, as if he were going to slap Lex in the chest with it. Lex grabbed it out of the mayor's hands purely in defense of his own dignity.

"Congratulations, Lex," Boswell said. "You've been served." He darted past Lex and out the door. Lex examined the people left in the room—various mayoral functionaries, most so trivial that he didn't even know their names. He turned on his heel and left, already dialing his lawyers.

The envelope gave him a papercut, which was just typical. Inside was a lawsuit—not his first by a long shot, but the first in a long time naming him as an individual defendant and not LuthorCorp.

Metropolis was suing him for compensation for damage caused by Superman's various activities over the years, on the theory that as Superman's spouse his assets were Superman's.

A lesser man would have said something like 'I don't believe this,' but Lex's threshold for belief was, like the rest of him, strongly influenced by his experiences in Smallville.

"Anne," he said to the partner who'd answered his call, "get over to my office. Bring a family law expert."

There was a shocked silence on the other end.

"I'm not getting divorced," he said when he realized the problem.

"Of course not," Anne said tartly, as if she'd never thought differently. That was why he paid her as much per hour as his masseuse: you could shock her, but you couldn't get her to show shock. "You should know, a post-nup is going to be a devil—"

"That's not what I want either," he said, deciding that it was legitimate to be peeved. "Just—get over there. And call Paul and tell him you won't be home for the next few days."

****

Lex, naturally, picked the newest and prettiest anchor in Metropolis for his first sit-down hometown interview since Clark's bombshell. Prettiest, because, well, Lex; newest because he hadn't had time to sleep with her and leave her resentful.

Or so Clark reasoned, anyway.

Her name was Kayleigh. Someone named Kal-El probably shouldn't have found that annoying, but at least he had a good excuse. As far as he knew, Kayleigh had been born and bred in Kansas.

"What's your response to getting sued by the city of Metropolis?" she asked, after a few warmup softballs.

Lex spread his hands and shrugged. "Well, first, I'd like to think that it's not the city, but the mayor, who's suing. Mayor Boswell and I have butted heads before, and it's certainly an excellent way for him to raise his political profile. But I think most Metropolis citizens prefer having Superman around to not having him."

"But, Lex, in the past you yourself have expressed concern about the amount of property damage Superman causes while he's doing all his noble deeds."

Lex managed to look modestly self-effacing, even though he should have been—well, Clark didn't know what he wanted, but it had to be something other than what Lex was delivering, which was relaxed comfort while he hung Clark out to dry. "I'm deeply impressed with how Kal—that is, Superman—has improved his record in avoiding collateral damage as he saves hundreds and even thousands of lives, which is of course always his primary goal."

"But you're refusing to compensate Metropolis businesses for that collateral damage when it does, unfortunately, occur."

Lex leaned forward, hands on his knees. "Over forty percent of that collateral damage, I should point out, has occurred on LuthorCorp property. I'm far from indifferent to the costs. I also recognize the benefits Superman has brought to Metropolis. In any event, it's true that I don't believe that I personally ought to pay for that other sixty percent. Kansas doesn't recognize any relationship between two men as having any legal effect. I don't see how the state can tell me on the one hand I'm not married and on the other I am, as long as that hand is picking my pocket."

"So you don't feel responsible for the damage Superman causes?" Kayleigh prodded.

Lex smiled. "Most spouses take suggestions, not orders. And most spouses don't have superpowers."

Clark just knew that Lex had an internal commentary track running, and that it was not nice either to Clark or to the interviewer. Who was leaning forward, and even if she wasn't flashing her cleavage to the entire audience, he could tell that Lex was getting a good view, even if Lex wasn't obvious about looking.

"And what is your view about federal recognition of same-sex marriage?"

Lex widened his smile, easy as if he weren't about two millimeters from a tantrum that would have left the studio in fragments. "As I've said numerous times in the past few years, I believe marriage is a religious matter. I support civil unions between consenting adults."

Clark frowned. There were all kinds of things wrong with that answer, but it seemed to be working. Of course it would; it had undoubtedly been focus-tested to perfection.

Later, he asked Lex about it, because he did have the opportunity—Lex wasn't throwing him out before he could pose an entire question. At least, if he managed to pose a question before they started having sex; they ate up a shocking number of hours that way.

Lex shook his head. "The state has no business determining who can marry. Any more than it has any business determining what counts as an unconscionable contract term. Private parties, private decisions."

Clark took the bait, even as he knew he was supposed to do so. "The government has to protect people! There just need to be rules about what kind of interventions are okay."

And they were off. The argument lasted through dinner, turned into yelling while Lex was trying to drink his cognac, quieted down when Lex shoved Clark back onto the couch and dropped to his knees, and resumed between rounds two and three. Then Clark needed his rest too much to continue, so they tabled (or more precisely, bedded) the issue.

Maybe Clark enjoyed debating political philosophy with Lex, a little, now that he had the knowledge and experience to hold his own. He didn't need to confess that to anyone, though.

****

"Why are you investing so much money in extra-durable building materials?" the business reporter for the Times asked him.

Lex opened his mouth, then closed it while he thought. "Given the threats faced by major cities in the twenty-first century, disaster-resistant construction is one of the best investments we can make in homeland security, and LuthorCorp's technical expertise has already made substantial improvements in the technology."

"But it will take decades to recoup that investment," the reporter pointed out.

Lex shrugged. "It depends on whether you factor in the insurance savings, along with the decreased chances of total loss of one of our key facilities. And one of the virtues of owning a controlling interest is that LuthorCorp can make decisions for the long-term, instead of the next-quarter mentality that has brought so much economic pain to this country."

He finished the rest of the interview in a haze. Fortunately the business side was easier than breathing, and the questions were relatively technical ones, unlikely to make scandal even if he screwed one up.

The problem was that he didn't know why he'd invested so much in extra-durable building materials. He'd just walked into his office one morning, called a meeting, and made it happen.

Lex didn't like not understanding his motivations. It led to misjudgments and mortal danger, not to mention the occasional humiliation.

He'd done it the morning after Clark had sighed and moaned about the football stadium he'd destroyed in his latest battle with the Toyman. Lex hadn't even bothered making Clark's monologue into a conversation, because they both knew it was the Toyman's direct fault even if Clark's presence was what had drawn the crazy to Metropolis, and none of the relevant underlying facts were going to change. At last, probably just to get his attention, Clark had started in on how LuthorCorp should be doing something to protect the people and properties of Metropolis.

Clark had told him to make buildings stronger, and Lex had started work on it immediately.

It hadn't been calculated, not consciously. Was he wooing his sort-of-husband? No, he dismissed that possibility.

He was doing it because he'd never considered not doing Clark's bidding.

He looked at the bracelet around his wrist, the metal dull and apparently quiescent under the office lights. Nice, simple alien ritual involving nice, simple alien artifacts. But words were powerful, and he'd said some of the most powerful ones of all to Clark.

Well, he thought, use unproven technology, get surprising results.

So, he had an impulse to obey Clark. He'd cancel the building project immediately, except that really would be a PR and financial disaster, so that would be a mistake. Unless, of course, that was a rationalization designed to keep him under Clark's control, compelled to obey.

Clark had shown no signs of understanding his power, and Lex couldn't afford to let him find out, so he couldn't attempt to provoke a test. He'd just have to be wary and ready to fight Clark's next demands. Though possibly he should simply avoid Clark, to minimize the chance of accidental exposure of his weakness.

Just like the fucking Kryptonians to hard-wire loyalty into their relationships. He should have known: nothing about them suggested much sympathy for free will.

Lex stiffened as the next set of implications occurred to him.

Clark had said some powerful words to Lex, too. Though there was surely some sort of fail-safe to protect either party from telling the other 'don't give me orders,' the Ritual of Rao could have given him the same type of influence over Clark that Clark had over him.

It elegantly explained the single most anomalous feature of his recent dealings with Clark. He remembered the first time with diamond-edged clarity: he'd ordered Clark to perform his conjugal duties. And Clark had done so, despite the array of unchanged facts, commitments, and past events that made a relationship between them more ludicrous than any costume the Justice League had yet to approve.

He'd let himself think, because he wanted to believe it, that Clark had always felt the same electricity between them as Lex had. That Clark had just been looking for an excuse, and that they were engaging in a mutually satisfactory exchange in the knowledge that there was very little left that either of them could do to hurt the other.

Lex was not a nice man. He'd had plenty of sex with people who, if they'd ruled the world, would never have come near him. He'd been the aggressor with some of them. But they'd all determined that the costs of not having sex with him outweighed the costs of having sex. They'd all had the capacity to get up and walk away in the middle of the action, as long as they were willing to accept the consequences. That wasn't the line that everyone would draw, but it was, he thought, an important one, and it was his own.

Clark was the only person he'd ever fucked who couldn't change his mind.

Lex didn't realize he was going to vomit until he was leaning over the toilet, reliving lunch and breakfast and, near as he could tell, last night's dinner as well.

****

"I'm going to be busy all night on this deal with Japan," Lex said distractedly the moment Clark stepped into his office. "You should probably—" He stopped, which was just weird, and Clark checked him out automatically, looking for elevated temperature or altered brain readings or anything out of the ordinary, but nothing showed up in broad-spectrum vision. "I'll be busy," he repeated (weirder). "If you like, you can have Lien make you some dinner." He swiveled in his chair, dismissing Clark.

Clark stood there like a complete moron for maybe half a minute before he understood that this wasn't one of Lex's games. There wasn't a whisper of invitation in Lex's pose.

He opened his mouth to ask if Lex was sure, but that was even more stupid than gaping at Lex. "Okay," he said. "I guess I'll head up to the Tower."

Lex nodded automatically. When Clark looked back from a mile away, he was absorbed in reading the report on his screen. Oddly, it was in French, something about nuclear power plants in Russia, and Lex didn't even have his fingers on the keyboard.

But then an undersea alarm went off—Arthur's kingdom was under attack by an army raised by Black Manta—and Clark turned his attention to more pressing matters.

****

Lex had three problems, each in the way of solving the others, each time-sensitive. First, there was his ability to coerce Clark. He was under no illusions that he'd resist abusing it forever. Second, there was Clark's reciprocal ability to influence him. Clark was not devious, but he wouldn't remain ignorant forever, and attempts to keep him in the dark by avoiding activities to which he'd object would also eventually trigger his suspicions. And third, last and least and in the end responsible for the other two, there was the damned election. The irony was: he was going to win it, too, unless something shocking occurred in the next month. Like Clark ordering him to withdraw from the race.

He suspected that there was some failsafe involved that prevented him from telling Clark not to give him any orders, and vice versa, but that was just logic and not actual Kryptonian knowledge. In the absence of such a provision, like the fairytale rule against wishing for more wishes, there'd be too much potential for exploitation. Kryptonians overall didn't seem like the type of people who appreciated being vulnerable, as much as they liked to see it in others.

Lex had chosen the Ritual of Rao because it had been described, rather poetically he'd thought, in the materials he'd kept from Clark's Arctic palace. But the description was limited to its establishment. He had no idea how, if at all, it could be dissolved.

It was possible that his father had been right about his inability to account for unexpected consequences.

He'd attempted to take a sample of the metal with a monofilament. He'd applied concentrated heat and concentrated cold, looking for softening or brittling, and only managed to give himself frostbite and third-degree burns on successive days. He'd subjected the bracelet to X-rays and next-generation MRIs (and getting the machine to function with the metal inside it had been a technical challenge even for him, by which he meant that he'd destroyed three labs and a dozen machines before he'd conceded that there was no discernable internal structure inside the bracelet; at least there was a new patent out of it).

Just in case, he'd tried speaking "I divorce you" out loud three times. Then he'd upped the repetitions to seven and switched to Kryptonian. Sadly, what worked for certain Earth cultures had no effect on the Kryptonian device. Maybe his translation had been off. The word he'd used in his experiment was more like "sever" than "divorce," for which he'd found no exact cognate. And that failure to have the concept was, perhaps, the source of his problem. Kryptonian marriages, from what he could decipher, seemed generally to end with the death of one party. Sometimes, the materials suggested, one spouse would hasten the day of that death, and apparently spousal homicide was not frowned upon on Krypton as it was on Earth.

Maybe there was some sort of aura emanating from Kryptonite that explained why all Lex's spouses had attempted to kill him.

No-fault divorce would have been a lot simpler, but also a lot less satisfying. Lex actually had the feeling that he would have gotten along fine on Krypton.

He pushed the problem aside to let his unconscious mull it over and turned to his daily press digest. After some internal debate, he clicked on the video clip from The View. "Why hasn't Lex Luthor's homosexuality been a bigger issue in the presidential campaign?" Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked the camera, smiling with teeth so white he suspected her of having internal floodlights installed.

Whoopi Goldberg grinned with the kind of tension Lex himself felt. "Actually, we've heard pretty detailed confirmation that he's bisexual, you know."

Hasselbeck frowned prettily. "Well, the American people don't care, they just don't want to hear about homosexual behavior in the White House."

"Speak for yourself," Whoopi rejoined, which made the others giggle or frown.

Katie Couric intervened: "I think if Bill Clinton taught us anything, it's that in the end the American people don't want to hear about what their presidents get up to in the bedroom—gay, straight, whatever."

"Is it relevant to job performance, that's all I want to know," Amy Robach said.

Lex closed the window, as reassured as he was going to get.

****

The thing was, it was unfair of Lex to cut him off. Clark didn't even know what he'd done. He would have thought his general track record of lying and investigating and foiling Lex's plans would have prevented Lex from wanting him in the first place. But since clearly none of that had been an insurmountable barrier, Clark was at a loss to explain why he'd been as sex-free as a monk on Prozac for the past month. Sure, that had been life pre-Lex, but that thought didn't improve his mood any.

Maybe Lex had just—gotten bored. It wasn't like Lex was used to long-term relationships, and maybe that wasn't just because all his wives and fiancees tried to kill him. Maybe the wives and fiancees were just getting out ahead of the inevitable.

Clark glared at the members of the Black Hat Gang. Several cringed. He realized that his eyes were glowing and made an effort to calm himself. The criminals didn't look particularly reassured, but Clark was overall okay with that.

He couldn't just go to Lex and ask, he realized as he delivered the miscreants to police custody, zipping back and forth between the bank they'd tried to rob and the jailhouse. Humiliation factor aside, Lex would think he was entering into some sort of negotiation. Clark didn't have anything he could afford to give, if the orgasms weren't doing it any more, and even if that hadn't been true he wasn't sure the bracelet would distinguish between a request from Lex and an order from Lex.

But—

Clark could live without the sex. That was a demonstrated fact, over many years. And yet—

Lex was so warm after, even though his skin usually felt cool. They'd lie in bed, the sheets damp and rumpled, sometimes torn (Clark was pretty sure Lex had new ones bought each night), and they'd breathe. No accusations or insinuations, no demands or threats. It was almost like hanging out back in the barn in Smallville, when he'd been just a kid—well, except with the addition of afterglow, and that was hard to count as some sort of deterioration in the situation.

Wally was yammering in his ear, he realized, asking him if he was done or if he wanted to bust some more walls into rubble.

"Sorry," he said into the comm link, meaning the rubble and his inattention. "I'm going off line for a while, okay?"

"Conjugal visit, eh?" Wally said, the leer almost visible through the connection—"Ow," he continued immediately, as if Hawkgirl had smacked him in the back of the head. "Sounds like a great idea, big guy! You work some of that tension out, you'll be back to fighting form in no time!"

Clark wasn't sure what was worse, the fact that Flash had noticed that he wasn't in perfect condition or the fact that Bruce hadn't yet said a word about it.

He clenched his jaw. He was going to have to deal with Lex, that was obvious. Problem was, he didn't have a model for doing that other than storming in with an accusation, and "You haven't slept with me in weeks!" was both pathetic and self-evident. Clark couldn't even expect a denial, so the whole formula for their interactions (pre-marriage, anyway) would be wrecked.

Back in the beginning, he'd come to the mansion just to hang out, because the world was brighter with Lex in it, sharper-edged. His blood had pumped faster through his veins. He'd been flushed and nervous and at the same time stronger and smarter in Lex's presence, like Lex's own galactic personality made Clark more himself in response.

In retrospect, he might have had a little bit of a crush on Lex.

At the time, he'd thought that nausea was the leading indicator of true love, so he hadn't figured it out. Now, he needed to make Lex remember those early days, when they both thought the other one was perfect. Or, well, he needed to make Lex remember. Clark couldn't afford any more memories than he already had.

****

The last thing Lex expected to find in his apartment was Clark.

Well, no. The last thing Lex expected to find in his apartment was his father, resurrected from the dead and declaring sincerely that all was forgiven. (Not that Lex entirely ruled this scenario out. He just considered it highly improbable. And really, most of that was from the 'sincerely' part.) Regardless, Clark's presence was unlikely, though the crossed arms and the glower helped convince Lex that he wasn't hallucinating again.

"Clark," he said, as neutrally as he could. It was truly insupportable to have his usual conversation openers like 'what can I do for you?' taken off the table, given that Clark was likely to answer and then Lex would be stuck obeying him.

"You know what," Clark said, "I'm tired of talking."

Which was even more ridiculous than usual, given that they'd barely said ten words to each other in the past month. But before he could blink, the world blurred and his skin chilled with the rapid transit into the bedroom, plus the sudden nudity.

"Stay put," Clark instructed him. Lex considered this while determining that he was laid out like a virgin sacrifice on the bed. The trip had been a bit disorienting. And then—Lex would have tried to suppress the noise he made if he could have processed the relevant input, but the human body wasn't meant to react to being caressed over every inch at superspeed. Clark was still moving so fast that it seemed like he had ten thousand hands, and a hundred thousand tongues, all moving on Lex, so fast that Lex thought maybe he was outstripping the speed at which Lex's neurons could fire. So fast the wetness on his skin didn't get any time to cool down, just slick heat everywhere, like he was being swallowed whole.

Lex's own groans seemed like they'd been slowed down in contrast, thick and distorted in his ears. Clark's hot hands covered him, cupped his ankle and ran up his calf and stroked under his balls and traced the outline of his biceps; his tongue tickled the back of Lex's knee and circled his navel and traced his jawline.

He thrashed, or tried to, but Clark wanted him in place, and Lex had never, never gotten off on bondage before, but he was underwater here, full fathom five. And then the orgasm hit him, supernova, every muscle seizing. If they were fucking in superspeed, then he'd lasted years, relatively speaking, so he wouldn't have felt embarrassed even if he'd had the coherence to work up a full-fledged emotion.

Clark had the presence of mind to slow down enough not to do Lex any damage when he pressed inside. At some point Lex was going to be grateful for that, but with Clark back at normal speed it seemed a more pressing matter to dig his heels into Clark's back and squeeze his biceps and bite at the curves of his collarbone and the tendons of his neck. Lex didn't understand why Clark even had muscles given the superstrength, or why Clark's bulletproof skin gave under the pressure of his fingers like a human's instead of resisting like a statue's, but right now he almost didn't care.

Clark grimaced, his eyes closed and his hair in little sweaty curls fanned over his forehead. Every thrust sent a buzz through Lex's entire body, toes to fingertips. Lex turned his head to one side and then the other, folding himself up further and clamping his jaw shut in case some idiotic portion of his psyche tried to get any words out.

When Clark came, it was with a roar that shattered the glass of the Art Deco mirror on the wall above the headboard. Lex managed to put his hands over his head before any fragments fell on him. Clark looked up and spent a moment with a hilariously confused expression that reminded Lex of the results of many, many innuendoes he'd used back in Smallville.

Then, most likely because he didn't want to waste the time cleaning up all the fragments covering the sheets, he moved them to one of the guest bedrooms and started all over again.

****

Clark hadn't managed to discuss anything with Lex, but he sure felt an awful lot better. He noted that Lex gave all his interviews the next day standing, which he kind of wanted to feel bad about but actually didn't, not even a little. Lex was a fast healer, and maybe he'd know better than to cut Clark off for no reason at all in the future. If Clark was bound to Lex, he might as well be getting the few benefits that the connection allowed him, after all.

And then the pictures showed up. Apparently, Lex's security had not been as thorough with the guest bedrooms as with Lex's own.

The motion-activated camera got fifteen frames per second, which meant that there was an animated version, but it was jerky enough that it really made more sense to look at the stills.

"Holy mother of fuck," Lois said, staring at her monitor, while Clark had to concentrate really hard on not actually sinking through the floor—or in his case, burrowing, but it was basically the same thing—and on not setting anything on fire with his eyes.

Maybe God has it in for Kryptonians, Clark thought. Maybe in his past life he was worse than Zod. Or maybe he was just that stupid, to think that he could use sex to solve his problems and not get Lex even angrier at him.

The reaction to the pictures was predictable: cue outrage on all sides. Lex's opponents decried the intrusion and subtly dug at Lex's lifestyle. The "independent" commentators weren't that subtle. Lex had no comment on his private life, though his chief spokesperson did, at the end of that first press conference, suggest that this kind of intrusion was likely to happen when people were too concerned with what went on in other people's bedrooms. Of course Lois, sitting next to Clark, jabbed him with her pen, scowled at the now-broken pen, and whispered, "When they look like those two, anybody'd be interested in what goes on in their bedroom." Which just went to show that 'no comment' was always the best policy for Lex, and Lex seemed to realize that.

So much for the 'sex it out' plan for relationship repair. Maybe that only worked for people who weren't being stalked by half of the entire journalistic profession.

****

Jon Stewart mugged for the camera and said that pictures of Superman and Lex Luthor having sex commanded a $5 million price, but that the American people would gladly pay the same amount to not see pictures of the other candidates' sex lives. "And one thing we know: a president has to be able to take anything the world dishes out and keep coming back for more. Inexhaustibly. Insatiably, if you will. I believe we've now seen that Lex Luthor is more than up to the challenge."

Lex picked up a priceless Greek statuette and wondered how many particles of worthless Greek dust it would create if he threw it through the screen. But no, he wasn't that boy any more, pouring out his aggression on the material world when it was people who hurt him. Or aliens.

Moving with exaggerated slowness, Lex set the reprieved statuette back down.

It was somewhat unfair to blame Clark, not that he was going to let that detain him long. The original command must have been percolating back in Clark's mind all this time, eventually boiling over when Lex hadn't given him any opportunity to perform his conjugal duties. Evasion had failed, and Lex had always known that he didn't have the fortitude to order Clark outright to keep his dick in his pants even if it wouldn't have signaled to Clark that something very strange was going on.

At least the pictures were going to keep Clark away while Lex figured out what to do, or, as Clark might have said, sulked.

Oddly, the polls had barely moved at all. If anything, he'd gained support. The very bravest of his advisers had suggested that many people were a little confused by the fact that Superman played both pitcher and catcher. But mostly the public seemed to take the pictures as confirmation of preexisting beliefs.

He didn't want to spend his term—terms, thank you—on lifestyle issues. Obama got to be more than the first black president; Lex could fight past this.

But right now, with Clark staying ensconced in the Watchtower except to superspeed into Lex's bedroom for his nightly fix, Lex was having a hard time remembering why he wanted so much to sit in that office and solve other people's problems.

Part 3

SV: Repent at Leisure 1/3

2009-07-01T20:14:09Z

Summary: To save Lois's life, Clark makes a bargain with Lex. Complications ensue.
Clark/Lex, R for sexual situations and Lex being a big jerk; also (mainly offscreen) violence. If you think things like mating bonds pose issues of consent, then there are definitely issues of consent here, though not exactly mating bonds. Well, Lex in himself is a walking issue of consent, isn't he?

I should probably mention that I'm ignoring much of anything past S5.

Written for mahaliem in the livelongnmarry auction. Thanks to Mary Ellen Curtin, geekturnedvamp , Gin, and Moselle Green for beta, especially ME's point about what always happens to Lex in my stories.

Read the whole thing here.

"Lois, don't," Clark said, and ever after he lived with the knowledge that if he'd used the superspeed, he could have swept her away before she opened the box. But he was still just Clark to her, and he wanted candles and flowers (and, to be honest, a place to hide while she got over the inevitable tantrum) when he did reveal himself, so he just yelled. Naturally, she ignored him, and gave the hinge a solid whack with her flashlight so that the lid popped up.

A brown cloud puffed out, enveloping her head and upper torso. Clark caught the scent of strawberries.

"Shi—" Lois began, and fell over gracelessly.

Clark did catch her before she landed, at least.

****

Lex was automatically notified of the intrusion alarm via a discreet IM on his computer, because the characteristics suggested a superpower-aided assault. If nothing else, LuthorCorp had the best event analysis software on the market; it'd made Lex a killing on emergency preparedness contracts.

Somehow it never seemed to keep Superman out, though.

This time, the target was—

Lex looked at the display and cursed.

****

"This is the sample I retrieved from LuthorCorp," Clark told Bruce, who took the vial with the expected caution. "The doctors at Met General say they can keep her breathing indefinitely, but her organs are showing signs of stress and, and—"

Lois Lane was a beautiful woman, but more than that she was a beautiful mind, quicksilver-fast and monofilament-sharp. The idea that whole sectors of her brain were shutting down under the stress of whatever Lex had been hiding in that box was too painful to bear.

Clark had no time to spend on recriminations. Not yet.

****

Lex hadn't checked in on Project A238 in several weeks, and then only to skim the summary. Reading the detailed reports now, he was impressed with the progress of the neurotoxin. It was a very good thing that LuthorCorp had all those Bush-era contracts squirreled away, never cancelled due to excellent (and expensive) lobbying. Otherwise what they'd been working on in that room would have been a federal crime. As it was, LuthorCorp was violating international law—but no one was likely to try to extradite Lex for it. At least not as long as Lex kept the matter quiet.

If Lois Lane died, he was not going to be able to keep the matter quiet.

He stared at the chemical formula and thought.

****

The penthouse was the only part of LuthorCorp that wasn't lead-lined. Clark figured Lex preferred a defined point of contact, and Clark needed that right now.

Somehow Lex's sensors had caught his direction early enough that Lex was properly posed before Clark touched down. Or maybe Lex waited like that all day long, glass in hand, contemplating the city he essentially owned.

But Lex didn't speak first, as if he thought it would be a defeat to do so. Clark just didn't care. "Lois needs your help."

Lex didn't move. Outlined against the deep blue-gray of Metropolis dusk, his head was a smooth dark shape, a hole cut in the world. Then he took a careful sip of his drink. "There's no cure, no antidote. She inhaled a potent toxin for which there is no known antitoxin. I suggest heavy doses of morphine. At least she can go easily."

"Luthor, you have to do something. You're killing her!"

"Don't try that with me. Not this time." The snap in Lex's voice was what a sudden frost must feel like to ordinary humans, waking to find the world gone cold. "You not wearing protective gear I can understand, but Lane? How many warning signs did you have to ignore to get in there?"

"Four," Clark said without thinking.

"Actually it was five," Lex corrected, swiveling to face him at last, "but the point stands. The bank robber doesn't get to blame the bank for leaving its money so temptingly in the vault." He put his glass down on his desk, a solid slab of one of LuthorCorp's prize products—transparent aluminum, Lex called it, which was some sort of joke. Like Lex, it looked fragile, but it could survive a holocaust untouched while everything around it crisped to ashes.

"Lois is dying." Lex was a stone statue, a graveyard monument. Clark wanted to reach out and shake him until the layers peeled off and he was Smallville's Lex again, Clark's Lex like when they'd first met, when he could have asked Lex for the moon and Lex would have reached up and ripped it out of the sky for him. "Lex, please." He took a deep breath as the world shimmered.

The tears were cool on his face when he knelt, echoing the long-ago time he remembered, even if Lex didn't, when Lex hadn't been Lex, but Zod. "Please."

Lex stared at him like he'd turned into a monster right in front of Lex's eyes, then looked away. "Lane's been a hindrance for years. If I were to put my scientists on the problem, you'd need to offer suitable compensation."

Clark gasped, loud and wet in the silent office. But he wouldn't have come if he hadn't been willing to beg. "What do you want?"

Lex's hands clenched into fists, right at Clark's eye level. "Far more than you can give me." Then, as if every word broke one of his bones, "But you can help."

He let the pause go on long enough to be dramatic. "Standing on the Jewel of truth and honor, in the presence of statues depicting your biological parents, we will perform the Ritual of Rao and exchange bracelets symbolizing your trust and faith in me and mine in you," Lex said, and it was like every lecture he'd ever given Clark except for the small matter of the blackmail.

Also: "What are you talking about?" Clark demanded, getting to his feet so that he could think through the humiliation. He'd never heard of the ritual of Rao. He knew Rao was the god of the sun, which meant that Rao was responsible for Krypton's death (if you believed in that kind of thing, which Clark didn't), and thus perfectly appropriate for Lex's own destructive impulses. But his Kryptonian education had never included any Rao-based rituals.

Lex smiled thinly. "Is that really a question you want to waste your time with?"

He'd never been quite certain what Lex had taken away from the Fortress, all those years ago. If Lex had snuck out with some data crystals, it was possible that he'd managed to analyze them, and extract—well, all things considered, Kryptonian cultural rituals weren't that bad.

"Why?" he asked. He put his hands on his hips, and Lex pressed his lips together in that familiar angry line, plainly recognizing that Clark wouldn't proceed without an answer to that question.

"I would think it would be obvious," Lex bit out. "With Superman at my side, all those past allegations will be forgotten, which will be a blessing for my presidential campaign. Of course part of the bargain is that you can't tell anyone why you're standing at my side. Not even your beloved partner."

"I'm not going to help you destroy—"

Lex raised his hand. "You can do whatever you want in private. I'm not asking you to stop your relentless assault on my special projects. But in public, you will smile and agree that I am the one man you trust enough to perform this ritual with, or else you'd better start writing Lane's obituary. You've got five minutes. Pull your usual Hamlet and she's already dead."

****

Lex retreated to his vault while Clark angsted. Being surrounded by the weird green glow of Kryptonite was as close as Lex got to comfort: chunks of chaos, secured under his control. The vault contained all his extraterrestrial treasures: pieces of advanced alien technology indistinguishable from mystical artifacts, fragments of space weapons so advanced they could take out a star system, a chunk of Doomsday's hide kept at absolute zero and enspelled by one of Lex's contract wizards so that it wouldn't start growing again. Little things like that.

He needed the familiarity and the reminders of his wealth. Negotiating with Clark was like being stabbed, sharp silvery pain that hurt more the more Lex let himself think about it. He hated his own weakness; an addict clinging to that which dragged him down.

But there was always so much to say to Clark. And this time, maybe, there was a chance he could get a step ahead. Clark needed him, more than he'd ever needed Lex's money and power back in Smallville. This was Metropolis, where the stakes were always higher.

It was only fair that Lex should get more out of his generosity than a chance at Clark's extremely variable respect.

He should have felt more triumph, he supposed. But years of having defeat kick him in the teeth every time he so much as considered a victorious curl of his lips had made him superstitious.

In a way, having the bracelets prepared, just in case an opportunity arose, branded him a hopeless optimist. But only in a way.

****

"What is that?" Clark demanded, horrified, when Lex returned from his cabinet of wonders. The black thing Lex was holding out was thick and rounded, puffy like a tire for a miniature moon lander. It looked like nothing more than an alien leech.

"A bracelet of binding," Lex said, managing to make the words sound completely serious, the same way he managed to make baldness look like a fashion statement. "Purple would clash too much with your ridiculous costume, so I will accept black."

Clark gaped at him. "I have to wear one too," Lex said, sounding miffed. "This is your heritage."

"I don't want it," Clark pointed out.

Lex shook his head. "No, you don't like some of the consequences. If you didn't want it, you wouldn't do it. As you've demonstrated repeatedly, no one on Earth can force you to do anything, and certainly I can't."

Clark didn't know where to begin with that. Or more accurately, he didn't know where it had ended, where he and Lex had diverged so much that Lex could pretend that caving in to extortion was somehow an exercise of free will. He almost asked Lex what had happened to him, but that was a diversion and Lex wouldn't know how to answer anyway.

"Let's get this over with," he said.

"Take us to your arctic hideaway," Lex instructed him, and Clark did.

Once they arrived, Lex called Mercy and told her to start work on Lois, keeping his side of the bargain. Clark still didn't trust Lex as far as he could throw him (though in fairness, he could throw Lex pretty far), but Lex did value his contracts.

It turned out that the Fortress could generate statues of his parents, twice as big as life and blindly staring. Clark would have liked to spend some time gawking at them. But right now he couldn't make himself lift his head enough to see them, because Lex ordered him to stand in front of them like—like they were standing together in a church.

"In the name of Rao, who kindled the sun," Lex began in passable Kryptonian. Clark blushed at the awfulness of it. Clark stared at the feet of the statue in front of him and tried not to fidget.

"In the name of Rao, who shaped the moons," Lex continued. Clark did his best to ignore him.

"Kal-El!" Hearing his Kryptonian name in Lex's angry tones made Clark snap his head up. Lex glared at him and wriggled the bracelet. Clark held out his right arm like a caught criminal awaiting manacles.

Lex continued, "I pledge to you my care and honor. My hope is ever in you." Clark would have expected the words to be mocking, but they were drained of all emotion, as if a computer had generated them. Lex took a deep breath and pushed the bracelet around Clark's wrist. The material was dull black, nonmetallic, no more chill than the air of the Fortress. The edge of the clasp slid along his skin, and then it closed around him. Clark felt a hot bright jolt, like flying through a sunspot, and shuddered in place.

Lex held out a second bracelet. "Now you."

Clark swallowed and grabbed the bracelet without touching Lex's fingers. "Uh, in the name of Rao, who shaped the moons," he began.

"'In the name of Rao, who kindled the sun,'" Lex hissed.

Like it mattered what order he used in this farce. But that was Lex all over, preferring form to content. Clark corrected himself and started again.

"'I pledge to you my faith and trust, my duty always to you,'" Lex prompted.

He hesitated, looking at the bracelet around his wrist. It was a solid ring of black, no sign it had ever been split at all. He didn't recognize the technology.

"Are you sure this won't hurt a non-Kryptonian?" he asked, desperate.

Lex tilted his head and waited.

Lois, waiting for him. Lois, for whom his word was given.

"I pledge to you my faith and trust, my duty always to you," Clark said, the words stumbling over themselves in his haste to get them out. He almost dropped the bracelet, and then he almost closed it so that it would have caught a flap of Lex's skin inside, but years of taking care over human fragility stopped him, and he ended up cradling Lex's wrist in both his hands as he slowly brought the ends of the bracelet together over the inside of Lex's right wrist, where the veins stood out royal purple under too-pale skin.

Lex twitched. Clark's thumb slipped, pressing against Lex's lifeline, the crease in his palm that went all the way to his wrist. Clark always remembered Lex's skin as cool, legacy of that very first touch when Lex had been shivering wet from the river, but this time the contact sent a gout of heat through him, as if whatever process sealed the bracelet had thrown off enough excess energy to melt steel. Clark couldn't breathe as he checked Lex's skin for burns, but apparently it had been mere illusion, just nervousness and anger leading to phantom pain.

"That's enough," Lex said roughly, pulling back. His mouth pinched in its familiar angry pout when he had to wait for Clark to release him. "Let's get back to Metropolis. I have a press release to issue, and I imagine you have a bedside to wait by."

****

Clark dropped Lex on the rooftop at LuthorCorp and was instantly gone, not even a dot disappearing into the sky. Lex wondered sometimes why Clark's passage didn't do more collateral damage. Even the laws of physics were inclined to cut Superman some slack, as if, instead of Planck and Heisenberg and Doppler, Clark's every move were attended by the little cartoon bluebirds that dressed Cinderella.

Lex snorted to himself at the image as he punched his code into the lock on the roof door. If they were doing Disney, then he supposed he had to be the evil uncle. Though the man he had to kill to achieve his kingdom was far from a kind and gentle ruler.

Fairy tales were so very Smallville. Metropolis was more a graphic novel type of place, he thought as he listened to the rattle of his feet pounding down the stairs. This building employed over two thousand people, and still the stairwell was empty, his own noises echoing back to him like he was the only one left after a neutron bomb. Almost, he wished he could stay like this, free from the demands and imperfections of others.

He'd have to look into automating the building, once the other items on his agenda had been settled.

****

Oliver called within fifteen minutes. The nurses gave Clark dirty looks, and he took his cell outside the hospital room.

"What did you do?" Oliver demanded.

"Pretty much what Lex is saying."

"Clark! How could you? Unless you take it back—"

"I gave my word, Oliver."

Oliver made a sound of disbelief mixed with disgust. "I'm gonna send Bruce—"

"Don't," Clark told him. "We'll figure it out. But it's done and there's no going back."

Oliver hung up on him. Clark couldn't really blame him. He checked through the walls and saw that Lois's vital signs were steadily improving. The LuthorCorp treatment was restoring her body, and more importantly, her brain activity was increasing every minute.

She was going to be fine. That was the only thing he wanted; the rest could be fixed later.

****

Security foiled three intrusions before Batman arrived. Between one blink and the next, he was there, silhouetted against the window. Lex put his drink down on his desk and wished, quite profoundly, that he could afford to kick the Bat so hard that the caped crusader would fall back through the reinforced glass. Batman would just use his gear to grab onto some part of the building and thus avoid pancaking, so it would only be a temporary pleasure, but there was plenty to be said for temporary pleasures.

"Which part of the threats and insults do you want to skip?" he asked instead of lunging. Batman would just dodge anyway and Lex wasn't in the mood for humiliation. The preliminary polls were—frankly, he'd never been much impressed with the intelligence of the average voter, but even he was surprised how much difference Superman's endorsement was projected to make. Point being, no dark avenger was going to get him down tonight.

Batman stared at him.

"All of them, then? I approve," he said, smiling his nastiest smile. "You're watching me, I'm watching you, we're all dangerous voyeurs and if I try to exploit Superman I'd better be prepared for the consequences. You'll let me know if there was anything I missed, of course." He dropped his gaze and considered pouring himself another slug, but he wasn't actually finished with his present drink and so the performance wouldn't have been convincing.

Batman stared at him.

Lex didn't roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. "Three options: talk, leave, or get ready for Mercy." Lex didn't think Mercy had a mosquito's chance against Batman, but it never hurt to watch an opponent fight. There was something to be learned from watching his best warrior get her ass handed to her.

Batman stared at him.

Lex reached out and slapped the security button. If Batman was in the mood to harass him, then there'd be no one awake to come running, but that would be interesting information as well.

But no, ten seconds and Lex heard the door from the main office start to open. Lex didn't see Batman's hands move, but the space where he'd been was suddenly surrounded by a dark gray cloud that smelled like licorice and burning leaves. Lex winced; another carpet lost.

Mercy charged into his line of sight, wearing a gas mask (another one skittered across the desk to rest between Lex's hands as she rushed towards the cloud; he appreciated the thought even if he was already exposed). She produced a foil from somewhere as equally mysterious as the source of Batman's smoke grenade and slashed it through the thick coils that were only slowly sinking downwards. It was pro forma, because obviously the Bat had flown, and yet Lex felt better for seeing her do it.

He wasn't worried about the threat implied by the Batman's ability to penetrate his security. Well, not deeply worried. Superheroes were so constrained by their nonlethal morality.

****

They cornered Clark at last after a foiled bank robbery in Star City, where he was patrolling while Green Arrow was off doing things Clark didn't want to know about in a country Oliver had refused to name. Oliver wasn't as accommodating of the press as Clark, for reasons that were pretty obvious, so Star City reporters had become used to descending in a crush whenever they got the chance. Clark didn't feel it was polite to fly off without a brief interview.

Unfortunately, they weren't much interested in the bank robbery, or even in Green Arrow's absence.

"Superman! Superman! Lex Luthor says that you've undergone the Ritual of Rao with him, indicating your trust and support for him. Is it true?"

Clark looked at the bracelet on his wrist. He'd spent so much time twisting it that if he were human he was sure he'd have a rash by now. But as with everything else, his body stayed stubbornly unmarked.

"Superman!"

He had to say something about the damned bracelet. Of course Kryptonians couldn't have their rituals confirmed with secret symbols, like Mormon underwear. No, they had to go for the most undeniable displays. And he had to keep his word. The fact that he and Lex never outright lied to each other was the only thing that had kept both of them alive and Metropolis largely intact over the past decade. Break that truce, even for the best of reasons, and the longterm consequences would be much worse.

"Yes, Lex and I performed the Ritual of Rao," Clark said, not looking at any particular reporter.

"In your own words, what is the Ritual of Rao?" a woman shouted out from the back of the crowd.

Clark took a deep breath. Lex was right, this would rehabilitate his reputation with a substantial percentage of the city, and even the nation. It would strengthen his campaign, maybe enough to get him elected, even if Clark refused to endorse him. "The Ritual of Rao," he began slowly, "is a ceremony that two people perform when they hold one another in high esteem."

How could he live with himself after this? Aiding Lex Luthor's rise to power, after so many years of fighting his every step. Stopping a nuclear power plant here or an unlicensed drug trial there, those were trivial compared to swearing fealty to Lex on a national stage.

And then, quite suddenly, he had the answer.

Clark raised his head and looked directly into the nearest camera. "Basically," he said, "it's a marriage."

He flew away before any of them recovered enough to ask a follow-up.

****

If Lionel had still been alive, Lex would have known fifteen minutes sooner that he'd entered into a sodomitical marriage. Realizing that gave Lex his first and only regret over his father's death.

As it happened, Lex found out the news when he left the meeting with the representatives of the Export Bank of China. The crush of media was so great that it overwhelmed Mercy, who was under strict orders not to cause grievous bodily harm within view of a camera. "When did you know you were gay?" was the nicest, least intrusive question he heard.

Lex threw himself into the limo and slammed the door. Mercy would have to find her own way back. "Drive!" he snapped.

By the time he returned to the LuthorCorp tower, the stock was down five percent, every major news network and Oprah had called to ask for an interview, and his Iowa coordinator had resigned. His Facebook group, however, had gained ten thousand adherents.

Perhaps his fate was to go through life with some sort of reverse Midas touch.

That night, The Daily Show's segment on him was called Red to Blew. "Conservative presidential candidate Lex Luthor shocked the nation today when it was revealed that he got gay married to Superman," Jon Stewart said, smirking all the while. "Apparently he didn't realize that you don't automatically win the Iowa primary just by being married to another guy. To do that, you have to get gay married in Iowa. We go now to our senior gay correspondent, Aasif Mandvi."

As Lex watched in horrified fascination, after Stewart and Mandvi bantered a while over the meaning of "gay correspondent," Mandvi and Hugo Huang (junior gay correspondent) debated whether Lex topped or bottomed. Mandvi maintained that obviously, if a notorious playboy like Lex was going to take it up the ass from anyone, it would have to be Superman, while Huang engaged in a bit of armchair physiology and suggested that Superman-on-bottom was less dangerous, since a real pounding from Superman would tear a human apart: "You remember those anti-gun ads where the bullet hits the apple? Like that, but with semen."

Then Stewart jumped in to point out that there was a potential for a crush wound from the otherworldly power of Superman's ass, which made Huang wince and cross his legs. In fact, that observation made Lex wince also, though the five glasses of brandy he'd had since the segment began might also have had something to do with his relative empathy. "You know, those are all concerns with a woman, too," Lex told the television, even as Stewart ended on a joke about how the two of them might just lie in bed and jerk each other off—"and every woman in the audience just passed out," Stewart finished. "We'll be right back."

Not on Lex's television. He managed not to throw the remote through the screen—replacing electronics was embarrassing, and anyway he suspected his aim was off—but he did hit the power before picking up the brandy and swallowing another few ounces.

The proximity alarm went off, and it took Lex three tries to find the display.

Superman was hovering outside the penthouse, arms crossed like a gaudy Oscar statuette.

Lex hit the button to let him in, then got to his feet. He had the feeling he was going to want the freedom to pace.

"Here to gloat?" he asked, turning his back as he poured himself another drink.

"I'm following your rules," Clark said from approximately ten feet behind him.

"So, yes, then." Lex couldn't blame him. It had been a brilliant piece of political strategy. "Who suggested you do that? Bruce? Or Oliver? My bet is Oliver, he's always had a better instinct for this sort of thing. Bruce knows fear, but not this kind of fear."

"I didn't—I thought of it," Clark said defiantly.

Lex turned, raising an eyebrow. Clark's scowl, even through the image distortion of the Superman illusion, reminded him of years past when Lex had dared to suggest that Lana Lang was possibly not Clark's destiny. "Congratulations, then. It does seem a bit unfair that I'm getting all the burdens of marriage without any of the benefits. So any time you'd care to perform your conjugal duties—"

Clark's eyes widened amusingly.

"You did promise," Lex said, because he was going to extract some satisfaction from this mess one way or the other, and really, leader of the free world was an ambition worth pursuing, but messing with Clark's head was always going to be more tempting. Not to mention more immediately gratifying. "I liked how you were when you came begging to me, on your knees. I suggest you start there."

Lex had faced a lot of unexpected events in his relatively short and eventful life. Even counting meteor attack, meteor mutant attack, attempted murder by plane crash, possession by alien entity, and—well, point made—he had never found it harder to maintain his cool than when Clark actually went to his knees. From anyone else, he would have anticipated some devastating taunt, something about what Lex would never have, but that wasn't Clark, so Lex's brain just locked up like New York in rush hour. Clark stared at Lex, looking almost amazed by his own boldness, and then started crossing the room.

On hands and knees.

Lex nearly lost his balance with the rush of arousal. And then Clark was in front of him, reaching for his trousers—impatient with the catches and buttons, tearing, ten thousand dollars of Hong Kong wool gone in an instant—"Turn off that fucking illusion," Lex snarled, because as much as he wanted that mouth on him, he'd set himself on fire to avoid touching Superman. Clark did, instantly, even though Lex couldn't see how it was controlled; maybe it was purely mental, he thought, before the sight of Clark's mussed dark curls and red red lips drove speculation from his consciousness.

****

Waking up was nearly as disconcerting as when Clark had shuddered back to life in his tomb after everyone thought Doomsday had killed him. The differences: sunlight instead of pitch-blackness, the pleasurable ache of tiredness instead of the full-body bruising that had lasted weeks, and the utter and complete shock. Dying was one thing—Clark had always understood that he was going to die eventually—but sleeping with Lex Luthor (not to mention the sex), now, that was as close to inconceivable as anything that had ever happened to Clark, including parallel universes, bodyswaps, and that one time he got pregnant with the last survivors of a dying species.

Now would be a really good time to be comfortable cursing, Clark thought as he sped back into his uniform. He barely remembered to restore the image enhancer that gave him Superman's face; he never wore the uniform without the enhancer, except that when Lex had told him to be Clark he'd felt such overwhelming relief that abandoning the enhancer had been as automatic as breathing.

At least superspeed let him dress himself and sneak out without waking Lex.

Lex, who was sprawled out and still taking up only a tiny fraction of his half-acre bed, the dark and stained sheets covering only his lower legs. The sheets had been softer than butterfly wings against their skin. Lex had muttered words about giving up purple for blue, but Clark wasn't trying to remember what Lex had said, sonnets composed on the fly as Lex's hands had worked him over like Lex was sculpting him out of clay. Relaxed with sleep, Lex's skin was pale everywhere, veins tracing over him like lacework, the heavy muscles of his shoulders and back so much bulkier than they'd been when he and Lex had been kids in Smallville.

Clark had left marks last night; Lex never could. But Lex was already healed, so Clark guessed they were even.

When Lex had ordered Clark to—to service him, Clark had meant to scoff and storm out, same as ever even if the topics had grown more adult. But then.

Then he hadn't.

Clark zoomed back to his apartment, where the sight of Lex wouldn't distract him so much. He started coffee, which unfortunately couldn't be made at superspeed (this, Clark knew from vile experience) and paced, human-slow, around his living room, which was smaller than Lex's bed. No, bad comparison.

The way Lex had sounded, his voice like smoked quartz, when he'd opened Clark up. The taste of him, brandy and oranges and a hint of metal.

Clark shook his head. He needed to figure out what had caused last night's insanity, not obsess about the details.

The Ritual of Rao. The words Clark had said had been different from the words Lex had said. "Duty," Clark had said, or the Kryptonian equivalent, and then Lex had repeated it last night, right before he'd demanded sex.

Maybe "duty" wasn't the full translation, and maybe the Ritual of Rao was more powerful than even Lex realized. Clark stared at the bracelet around his wrist, feeling newly betrayed by it.

If Lex could order Superman around, then Clark's bargain had been a much worse one than he'd thought. Lex wouldn't need to be electable: with his brains and Clark's powers, even the rest of the Justice League couldn't hold him off.

The only hope was that Lex didn't realize the extent of what he'd gotten from Clark. Lex had seemed shocked last night, under the thin layer of calm he could manage in any situation. Maybe he thought that Clark had just given in to a longstanding passion, never acknowledged when they'd been less than outright enemies and only acted on now because there was nothing left for them to lose.

Ridiculous, of course, but maybe Lex would believe it. Lex always did like the most complicated explanations.

Somehow, Clark would have to keep Lex from giving direct orders. And if Lex did demand that Superman assist his plots, Clark would have to figure out how to obey in the least helpful way possible, just like he'd done with the whole gay marriage scandal.

He could do this, he thought as he changed into his reporter's outfit. If it kept Lex convinced that the Ritual of Rao was just a set of words, Clark could pretend that he wanted to do those things with Lex.

****

Lex made himself—let himself—roll off, putting a few inches between them on the bed, and swallowed down on the noise that wanted to leave his throat. Beside him, Clark was breathing heavily, and Lex tried to decide if that was just some sort of habit, a useless unconscious gesture. Probably the panting was real, or as real as Clark ever got, because it made sense that his heart—or whatever he used for a heart—would speed up during sex, even if it wasn't exactly strenuous in the usual human sense.

"Whoa," Clark said, almost like he was talking to himself. For some reason, Lex very much wanted to get up and flee to his office. But that would be weakness, even if Clark wouldn't understand it as such.

He hadn't expected Clark to show up again so soon. He'd thought there would be at least a few days of agonizing, and then most likely accusations of manipulation.

Instead, he'd looked up from his computer screen, meaning to watch night fall on Metropolis. When the blue sky took the leap into darkness, he felt closer to his city than at any other time. They were both always transitioning from one thing to the next, always ready to light up fiercely.

Instead of the post-sunset blue, all he'd seen was Clark, already out of his Superman drag. The expression on Clark's face had been new, for all that Lex would have sworn that he'd rifled through every one of Clark's secrets.

After that Lex's memory was uncharacteristically blurry. He remembered everything about Clark's skin (slick, quickly sweaty; smooth except for the occasional mole) and Clark's mouth (sharp teeth, a predator's; there could be only one of him, at the top of the food chain) and Clark's hands (moving him like all his intense workouts were irrelevant, and of course they were; positioning him for maximum accessibility) and even Clark's eyes (shocked almost, wide and green as Lex's dreams of other worlds to conquer). But the physics of it, how they'd moved from LexCorp to his bedroom, that wasn't so clear. Though Lex was pretty sure that the first time had been in the office, which made the return on his investment in one-way glass a lot more substantial.

The bed smelled of them, damp salt and that special note of pure Clark, something like sandalwood cut with fresh grass—always a hint of green growing things, as if Clark's boundless vitality was going to spill over and leave flowers blooming in his wake.

The bracelet was warm around his wrist, like it had held on to the heat they made between them. Lex wanted to twist it, just to feel the unknown metal slide around him, a piece of a destroyed world that he'd shaped to his own devices. But he could already sense the nervous habit that wanted to form, and he couldn't have a blatant tell like that, so instead he just pressed his arm down a little, letting the edges of it dig into his skin.

His scientists had been unable to penetrate the secrets of this bit of Kryptonian technology. They speculated that what looked like metal was actually a complex nanodevice. It made about as much sense as any other explanation.

Clark sighed, almost soundless. Lex stared up at the ceiling, pure white twenty feet over his head. "I should go," Clark said. Lex could hear the bedsheets rustling as Clark shifted, whisper of skin on silk.

Lex swallowed. "Then go," he said—he wasn't going to fucking beg, those days were over and blasted apart. What they were doing now, he thought as Clark rolled to the edge of the bed and began gathering his clothes, had nothing to do with the early years in Smallville. Well, of course, the desire was still the same. It had been so long that every cell in his body had been replaced, but the desire was burned in deeper than that. It was like being bald: something he'd learned to accommodate, and even occasionally to use as a motivator.

But the friendship was gone. Now they had bargains. Bargains, and this.

****

Lois alternated between glaring at Clark and looking over his shoulder at the lights of the city. She was dressed to maim: tight black vest over crisp white shirt, skirt with creases like a switchblade, icepick heels. Even her earrings were silver daggers, edged with rubies. "I wanted to talk to you—" he told her.

"Yeah, I got that when you texted me for the fifth time."

She'd made him wait for ten minutes on the top of the Planet.

"I know you're probably wondering—"

"Wondering. No, I am not wondering. I am considering how to have you locked up so you can get your head looked at! I mean, obviously you made a deal to save me, which on the one hand I approve of, but on the other—marrying that snake? You could at least've bargained him down!"

He wanted to protest that her life was not a used car. Before the words came out, he remembered Lex's condition: don't admit the truth to anyone. That was an easy rule for him.

"It's not like that," he said, gently enough that she stopped sputtering and really examined him. "I was serious when I went through the Ritual."

Her mouth opened in shock. She fumbled for her cigarettes; Clark hadn't managed to steal the latest pack, so she was able to retrieve one. She'd tried to get him to light one with heat vision for a couple of months, before she'd decided that Superman was as humorless as Clark on the topic of smoking. Fishing the lighter out of the flotsam of her purse gave her something to do with her hands, and it meant that she didn't have to look the man she was halfway in love with—who was also maybe halfway in love with her—in the eyes while he explained that he had kind of married someone else, without even having the decency to tell her first.

Clark knew Lois better than she probably wanted to be known.

"Okay," she said when she'd sucked in a long hit, "so you guys, what, were pulling each other's pigtails all these years? Let me guess, Kryptonian courtship rituals consist of blowing shit up and attempted murder?" Her voice hardly shook at all, but the bobbing of the ember at the end of the cigarette was a small betrayal.

"It's complicated," he said. "I—He—" Lex could make him avoid the truth, but he couldn't lie, not about this. He put his hand around the bracelet; it disappeared beneath his fingers, and he could feel it like a band around his heart.

"Or is the sex just that good?" Lois asked, titanium-edged. "Lord knows his reputation—Holy shit." She sounded like she'd just witnessed an alien abduction; Clark knew this for a fact. "It really is the sex, isn't it?"

The Superman projection mimicked Clark's own expressions. Apparently it also transmitted blushes. "I don't—"

"Well, the Planet won't print that," Lois said, more regretful than he'd heard her up to this point. "Lex Luthor, intergalactic Casanova. Now I kinda wish I'd—"

"Lois," Clark said, pained.

"Sorry, sorry," she said, waving her free hand at him apologetically. And like that she was Lois Lane again, the girl who hid all her hurts behind a shell as impenetrable as Superman's skin. "So, what happens to all your anti-Luthor activities?"

Clark had thought a lot about this answer, especially now that he had to avoid demands from Lex. "LuthorCorp is still subject to the same laws as everyone else. When I see a violation of the law, I plan to act."

Lois took another drag of her cigarette and cupped her elbow in her palm as she turned towards LuthorCorp Tower. "I guess now you can put him on the couch if he acts up. Maybe that's the incentive he needs to start behaving."

Clark shook his head. "Not even Lex understands what makes Lex tick. I wouldn't make any predictions." It was the closest he could come to warning her that he couldn't be the guardian of Metropolis any more, not when Lex was involved.

She looked at him sidelong, her gaze still scalpel-sharp. "I never thought I'd say this, but: good luck with Lex. I have the feeling we'll all need it."

"Lois, you've been—" 'A good friend' was not entirely accurate; 'a pain in the ass' was too harsh, even if she'd understand exactly what he meant. "I need you to keep me honest, now more than ever. If I—Lex can be persuasive. Don't let me forget the costs of his plans."

Her eyes softened, the way he'd imagined they would have looked if he'd ever managed to declare himself to her. The chill wind of evening closing in on them whipped strands of her ponytail around her shoulders, and she smiled, wide and wry. "I'd like to see you try to stop me."

Part 2

Now that I'm writing all this gen, I'm thinking about non-con

2009-06-25T13:54:58Z

Note: of tangential relevance at best to the general warnings discussion. Rather than engaging with the dos/don’ts, I’m talking here about the meaning I give to particular terms, mainly “dub-con” or dubious consent. I’m interested in others’ definitions and usages, but it is unlikely I will stop enjoying dub-con in fanfic and I value having a way to distinguish a dub-con story from a story in which either the character or the author defines what happened as rape.

I understand why people object to distinguishing rape and non-con as labels. I have only the most tenuous of distinctions for them in my mind (mostly having to do with what the characters themselves think happened and/or fic community practices, and I see why that’s confusing). On the other hand, when we’re talking about “how to find what I want to read,” then in my experience the choice between one and the other is usually correlated, however imperfectly, with the story content, so maybe the dual terms are helpful to readers and authors, at least when paired with a summary.

Where my thoughts are most confused, and also most passionate, is dub-con. The fact that dub-con is non-con to many readers matters; my understanding of the point is that if the events happened to people and not to characters most if not all dub-con would be rape because of an inability to consent or uncertainty about consent. I agree with that premise but think that dub-con serves a valuable signalling role in fiction, perhaps even more valuable than non-con. Because the line between non- and dub-con differs for different people, having all three terms available seems like the best compromise I’ve seen. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility that someone will want a warning for non-con or rape and the author will disagree that that's what happens in the story.

I think of dub-con as “issues of consent,” actually, because issues of consent are where my fannish id lives and breathes. I love characters whose screwed-up-ness leaves them with trouble defining consent as it should be defined (according to Overlord Me). I love situations where normal human rules don’t work. I love situations where at least one character misapprehends the facts, or is out of control: amnesia and sex pollen and mistaken identity and golems shaped like people and and and. I love stories where Sam wants Dean and Dean gives in because he thinks it’s the only way to keep Sam; I love them whether or not Dean learns to stop worrying and love the bomb. I expect that my spectrum of “dubious” overlaps with the average definition, but only overlaps. Working with cliches is, I hope, a little protective here, because I expect that if you see “sex pollen” you will automatically presume that there are issues of consent. But I’ve been wrong before.

A ton of the het romance I read growing up I would now call dub-con. Did I notice it then? Not consciously. Did it shape my fantasy preferences? Quite possibly, and definitely living in a society that’s screwed up about, specifically, when women consent to sex also shaped my fantasy preferences. I still like some het dub-con now, but I’m more easily thrown out of it. I like a higher percentage of dub-con in slash because it feels like I can get the thrill of issues of consent between two people who are attracted to each other but have various barriers to acting on that attraction without the misogyny, or at a minimum accommodation to the strictures of heterosexism, that regularly accompanies this trope in het (note that I am not saying slash escapes or is more likely to escape misogyny, I am saying that slash dub-con more readily gets me hot without my inner censor telling me I am a bad feminist, and that I value this effect in particular cases while remaining concerned about it in general).

As for what I write: I write a lot of issues of consent. The first two that come to mind are: (1) I fell in love in Hell and it is simply so distressing, in which the issue of consent is, I flatter myself to think, a real issue: what does it mean to be capable of consent? Not for nothing, that's also the twist of the story. (2) An Act I Would Enjoy, the sequel to Filthy Mind. It was important to me that neither Sam nor Dean used the term “rape” in Filthy Mind, because of what it would have meant to them to say it even though they both knew what was happening. Filthy Mind is about rape, whereas I think the sequel is plausibly dub-con, though I didn’t label it as such because I wanted to leave the matter unclear. Sam--rather willfully in my opinion--refuses to engage with the real question, which is about Dean’s consent to sex with Sam in the first place, and not about Dean’s interest in particular scenes/props. Now that I’ve written this out, I see that these stories are both about the same issue, which is similar to the basic feminist question so painfully raised by Catharine MacKinnon: in a world that has done so much to crush your freedom of choice, to what extent can you choose to have sex, especially heterosexual sex and/or sex that eroticizes power disparities? (As I said above, this question is so excruciating that I find it easier to explore at a distance, through slash. And angels.)

But that’s not all dub-con is to me. I’ve written numerous other variants of dub-con, where it’s more about rejecting (often well-justified) constraints on desire. Dub-con can mean passion, passion so great that one character will sacrifice everything else in the world to satisfy it. I find that extremely hot. (But I still worry about contributing to various pathologies of desire, because what’s good for characters is often bad for people, and narratives are really powerful.)

In the end, I’ve got only this: I'm not done thinking about this, and I would like to talk about how we signal that issues of consent are important to a particular story, once we've decided that rape is not the right label. (Someone could convince me that rape is the right label, certainly in particular cases and possibly even in general, but more likely I'm going to want to keep dub-con.)

Comments at DW; comments at LJ.

SPN: Paradise by the Dashboard Light

2009-06-25T02:58:44Z

Paradise by the Dashboard Light
SPN
PG-13 for dirty talk, gen (Note: I am beginning to think that we have made a collective mistake in this whole “gen” idea. What I mean here is: sex is acknowledged, but not recounted, and nobody here is in an active sexual/romantic relationship, even though this is both a clichefic and by me. I know, I know!)
Summary: It’s not exactly a bun in the oven. Set in some halcyon time when angels and apocalypses are not pressing problems.
Prompt: There’s a poll at the end for you to help me decide which cliche bingo prompt I should count for this one.

When Dean wasn’t expecting to need the backseat for sex or sleep, it could get pretty junky back there, as they were both willing to let it hold almost anything that wouldn’t freak out civilians, stink too much to ignore, or tempt a bold robber. So it took them a couple of months before they noticed that the gas mileage had dropped from terrible to laughable, and that the back of the car was swelling.

****

“It’s not mold,” Dean said for the forty-seventh time. He’d stopped giving his reasons a while back, but they mostly concerned the lack of smell and the fact that, oh yeah, mold didn’t grow in a curve five feet long and two feet high in the center.

“I’m just saying, take up the seat—”

“Yeah, you’ve done that to a classic?” Dean sneered. “If—and I mean if—I decide to do that, it’s not gonna be in the middle of nowhere. If I gotta replace the leather—”

He stopped, struck by the thing he should have seen immediately.

Sam was still bitching about how Dean had made them clear everything out of the car but wouldn’t dare to cut even an inch of her interior.

“Sam,” Dean said, repeating it when Sam wouldn’t shut up. “If this wasn’t some hex, don’t you think the leather would’ve torn?” Instead, it had stretched and rounded, looking almost like she’d gotten a punching bag put in underneath the seat.

That put a cork in Sam, but had the unfortunate side effect of making him reluctant to ride in the car all the way to Bobby’s, and Dean was letting neither the Impala nor his brother out of his sight. Dean ended up spending way too much cash on a rented truck and trailer, and then he nearly killed Sam himself for getting underfoot while Dean was making sure the car was properly secured on the trailer. Then there was the slow, lurching progress to South Dakota, driving the truck that handled like a donkey with ‘roid rage.

By the time they got to Bobby’s, Dean was about ready to perform a blood sacrifice if it would have fixed the car, and he wasn’t fixing to be all that picky about the source of the blood.

Bobby quizzed them pretty hard about what they’d encountered in the past few months. He came up with a few new insults when they admitted that they had no clear idea of when the problem had started. Dean gritted his teeth and took it, because the Impala was his baby and yes, he should have known.

At least Bobby agreed with Dean that it would be mighty stupid to just try and pop the thing, when none of them knew what kind of danger might come pouring out, and even better, he had the equipment to take a look inside without slicing her up permanently, at least once Dean had spent some time tinkering with radio tubes and copper wire.

It was only when they developed the pictures that they realized how entirely screwed they were.

“Is that--?” Sam asked weakly, then stopped.

Bobby pushed at his cap, then went to get out the whisky.

Dean just stared.

“All right,” Bobby said, at the tail end of his second glass, “so your car is pregnant.”

Sam tilted his glass so as to get out the last drops, then slammed it on the table and gestured for a refill. “How could this even--?”

Like that, Bobby and Sam swiveled to look at Dean. It took him a minute, but when he got it he nearly punched them both. “There’s a difference between screwing in the back seat and screwing the back seat, you assholes!” Jeez, he was easy, not a pervert. And, sure, he might’ve given himself a happy ending back there a couple of times. But if they thought he’d willingly get spooge on the seats then they’d fundamentally misunderstood his priorities. “Plus, did any part of that look, I dunno, biological?” And now Sam was giving him the ‘it thinks!’ surprise face, as if Dean couldn’t reason for himself. “You know what—fuck you both.”

He stomped out, grabbing the pictures, and went to sit with the only one who understood him. He opened the driver’s side door and slid in. “Hey, baby,” he said miserably. “Kind of a mess we’re in, you think?” He didn’t know if she could see the pictures, but he left them on the passenger side dashboard just in case.

The lump was already bigger than it had been when they’d first noticed it, so large now that it was above the level of the seatback at its highest. Dean’s X-ray machine didn’t have great range, so there were only a couple of angles he could get—and now that he thought about it, he wasn’t thrilled about exposing her to more radiation. But what he had showed something with tubes—and what looked like two wheels.

“You wanna tell me what happened?” he asked. She had nothing to say for herself.

****

Bobby was the one who noticed that scrap near her was just disappearing, sucked into the thing she was growing. Incubating, Sam said. Building, Dean wanted to call it, but he’d been voted down. Anyway, she was eating metal somehow—never when they watched her, but Dean wouldn’t let Bobby hold a stakeout, because what if she couldn’t while people were around, and had to start cannibalizing herself? He’d seen rusted-through sides and floors on enough old cars; he shuddered to think of how his baby might be reduced.

Instead, he made sure that she had easy access to a variety of different metals, some rubber, some plastic. A couple of times he found mangled remains of some Ford part or other near her front wheels, like she’d spat it out. Never let it be said that his baby lacked good taste.

After a month, there wasn’t much room left in the back, the windows nearly obscured by the wave of black, and Dean was beginning to worry about how the—whatever, the baby, was going to come out. If he took out all the trunk modifications, maybe he could go in through the back. If he could figure out when was the right time. If, if, if.

When he opened the back door to check on the bulge, the door swung funny, like the bolts were loose.

“Sam!” he yelled. Sam came pounding out of the house, book still swinging from one hand, gun in the other. “I think it’s time.”

“What?” Sam stared at the open door, and Dean pointed to the sagging metal of the hinge. He’d been reading what he could about pregnancy, and that looked an awful lot like what an animal’s body would do to get ready to get something too big out of a small passageway.

“We gotta get the door off and get ready.”

For whatever reason, Sam had decided to defer to Dean’s judgment—or as he put it, Dean’s crazy ideas—and he let Dean order him around, setting up a workbench with padding on top to support the door as it came off. Bobby came and watched, and occasionally commented on the precise mixture of foolishness and magic at work. Dean ignored the insults; if worst came to worst, Bobby’d do what he could to help.

Finally, Dean was ready to reach inside her. He was really, really hoping that he’d been right about the whole ‘nothing biological’ thing, because car guts were comforting; people guts were not.

He pressed gently against the edges of the seat, where it would have been just about at a ninety-degree angle if the car had been in factory-normal condition. The leather made a shushing sound and separated.

Working as quickly as he could, Dean peeled back the leather, keeping to where the stitches were coming up of their own accord, trying to move the padding without tearing it.

At last he uncovered—“Holy fuck,” he said, which was pretty stupid given that he was arms-deep in a pregnant car, and if there was something unsurprising that might have come out he couldn’t picture it.

“Dean?” Sam demanded. “What is it?”

He pulled, but the tubes and protrusions kept getting caught, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to bend something important, and he was sweating buckets which also couldn’t be good for the metal. Finally he decided that dilly-dallying was doing nobody any favors and gave one enormous tug, twisting as he went so that the thing would be angled right to get out the door.

What felt like half a ton of baby motorcycle popped out of the car and fell on him. There was some yelling, from him and from Sam and Bobby, and he’d be limping for days because they rolled it right over him, but then he was staring up at open sky and Bobby was exclaiming over the baby.

Dean scrambled to his feet, torn between immediately fixing his girl and taking a look at this new creature he’d brought into the world. His head whipped back and forth—the seats in the Impala already looked like they were returning to their original configurations, but he needed to check; meanwhile Bobby was testing the engine on the cycle, which gave a pathetic little cough.

“Gas!” he said frantically.

“I’ll take care of the car,” Sam said, and Dean spared him a grateful nod before rushing over to grab the handlebars. He rolled the cycle over into the shade of Bobby’s garage. Dean hadn’t ever been a hog fan, but she was gorgeous, black and silver, with a stylized impala across her front just above the wheel. He grabbed a gas can and filled her with shaking hands.

This time she started up with no problem. He checked every spoke and antenna to make sure that nothing had gotten bent on the way out; he was no expert, but she looked and ran just fine.

Bobby couldn’t find a trace of the mystical about her, no matter what kind of tests he tried. Same with the Impala, now. Even the back seat cover just needed a bit of restitching.

It was a mystery, but it was probably the best mystery they’d ever failed to solve.

****

Jo came and took the cycle out for a test ride after Bobby swore on a stack of Bibles (yes, an actual stack of Bibles, though not all of them were exactly the standard versions) that it wasn’t dangerous magic.

When she returned, Dean was there on the porch to watch her take off her helmet and shake her hair out, walking towards Bobby’s house with her leather jacket and her tight jeans. Sam looked over at his slack jaw and glazed eyes and snorted. “That ship has sailed,” he warned Dean, but Dean didn’t pay him any mind. Wasn’t like he was planning on doing more than looking, anyhow. Him with the Impala and her with the kid—it would just be weird.

“You’ll call and let us know how she’s doing, right?” Dean asked again when she was getting ready to leave.

Jo didn’t bother to roll her eyes. “Yes,” she repeated, sighing.

“Good,” Dean said, nodding. “Kid’s got to get out on her own. Doesn’t mean we don’t want to know how she’s doing.”

“Right,” wearily, and if Jo was just being tolerant, Dean couldn’t find it in himself to get mad.

The Impala didn’t react when Jo peeled out of the yard. She was back to being inert, and Bobby couldn’t find anything magical left about her. But Dean could watch the cycle disappear into the horizon for the both of them. And if the dust got in his eyes, well, that was nobody’s business but his own.

END

Help me/prompt me!

View poll: Pregnancy or Crackfic?

</poll-622>
Comments on DW -- comments on LJ

SPN/MBV

2009-06-23T03:56:32Z

(When You Wake) You’re Still in a Dream
SPN/My Bloody Valentine crossover
PG-13 (not like the movie), Gen, set sometime after SPN S4’s repercussions have faded a bit.
For the cliche bingo prompt “doppelgangers,” naturally.

History catches up with him in Iowa.

At least, that’s the only thing that Tom can figure out about what happens, which is that a guy taps him on the shoulder. Tom turns, afraid he’s been recognized, and sees that the guy has his own goddamn face. After that Tom’s not too clear on the details, but there is pain and eventually, a bright light.

When Tom manages to blink his eyes open, the guy with his face is putting away a flashlight. Behind him, there’s a tall blur. Tom’s not small, but the other guy is bigger and broader and Tom begins to shudder in his chair, which is when he realizes that he’s tied down, wrists wrenched behind him and ankles strapped to the chairlegs.

He’s been strapped down for shock treatments, but this—this beaten-down motel room--is nothing like the hospital, and panic is sour copper in his mouth. He thinks maybe he’s going to throw up.

The dark-haired man pushes past Tom’s double and looms over him. “What are you?” he demands. He’s furious, like everyone back in Harmony. Tom cringes and the man looks disgusted. He brings out a knife, blade gleaming in the low light spilling into the room from the outside.

“What are you?” the man asks again, and now Tom is crying.

“Sam …” his double says uncertainly, his voice rougher than Tom’s.

The knife flashes out, slicing across Tom’s cheek, and the pain is shocking enough to make him yell out. The blood runs hot down his skin. The man—Sam—hits him across the other cheek. “Shut up,” he says, almost gently and Tom freezes. Sam bends down, presses his fingers to the cut as if he’s looking for something. “No reaction to silver,” he says. “But unless Dad had a lot more surprises for us—”

“Yeah,” his double agrees. After a moment, his double makes a frustrated noise and disappears from Tom’s line of sight. When he returns, he’s got a first aid kid; he presses gauze to Tom’s cut and tapes it up. Tom can still feel the ooze of the blood, but it’s not hurting so much any more.

Tom isn’t sure if he’s allowed to talk. He’s shaking so hard that the chair is actually wobbling back and forth, making heavy clunking sounds on the thin carpet. Even when Harry Warden had him in the cage, he could do more to defend himself than he can now.

“What’s your name?” his double asks him, squatting in front of Tom so that they’re at eye level.

“T—Tom. Tom Hanniger,” he manages. If he’s lucky they won’t have heard of him. Axel and Sarah closed ranks after he left, accused him of the murders. But the state police got involved and found out about Axel’s affair. Tom followed the reporting from afar; the story never made it all the way national, but that hardly mattered these days when information just floated through the air. In the end, the prosecutor concluded that Axel’s decision to handle the investigation himself had compromised any possible case against Tom beyond repair, plus nobody could even figure out whether Tom was still alive, so getting his side of the story wasn’t a high priority. He liked it like that.

“Well, Tom,” his double says easily, like this isn’t freaking him the fuck out, like this isn’t worth freaking the fuck out over, “my name’s Dean. And if this turns out to be the weirdest coincidence since Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz I will personally buy you a beer. And hold Sam down so you can smack him one.”

“Why did you tie me up and cut me?” Tom asks. This time his voice doesn’t shake, even though his body is still trembling. His muscles feel tight, locked up. He can’t help straining against the ropes, even though they’re watching and they’re armed.

Dean sighs, rubs his hand across his mouth, and looks up at Sam as if he’s got some answers. “Basically? We’ve met guys that look like me before. They’re usually trouble.”

Tom doesn’t understand this at all, and his face must show it. “Sam, you got any ideas here?” Dean asks.

Sam shakes his head.

Dean leans forward. “There’s a couple of other things we can try.”

The panic is back again, clawing its way up Tom’s throat, and as Dean gets closer, his face starts to flicker in and out, covered up by a gas mask, blank and horrible. He’s Tom and then he’s Harry, Tom and Harry, Tom and Harry—

Tom jerks back so hard that the chair goes over, landing hard on his arms and smacking his head against the floor. His teeth clang together and he tastes blood, but none of that matters because Harry is here for him and Tom is trussed up like a brown paper package—

Someone is yelling; someone else is screaming and Tom is pretty sure it’s him. Harry looms over him—

“Stop,” a new voice says, and everything goes quiet.

Somehow, Tom’s chair is righted, even though he doesn’t feel hands and he can see Sam and Dean—Dean again, not Harry and not Tom—and the new guy, all standing in a loose ring around him. Tom’s arms hurt like fuck and possibly he’s cracked an elbow. The new guy is staring at him like he’s either dinner or trash. He’s wearing a trenchcoat and a suit, and his eyes are blue as gas, so Tom looks down.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, like this is all normal. “Can you figure out what’s up with Mirror Dean here?”

Cas approaches. His hand is gentle on Tom’s chin, tilting it up. His face, too close to Tom’s, is unshaven and his eyes feel like they’re cutting into Tom worse than Sam’s knife.

“He’s human,” Cas announces, pulling back, and the fact that he says it like there was ever a question sends another shudder through Tom. “But he is deeply hurt.”

Over Cas’s shoulder, Harry appears again, raising his ax. “Look out!” Tom yelps, because as crazy as these people are, nobody deserves what Harry does. They all turn—a gun is in Dean’s hand, materialized there as fast as Harry—and then swivel back to him, Dean and Sam puzzled and Cas calm.

“Please,” Tom begs, “he’ll kill you.”

“Dude—” Dean begins, but Cas reaches out behind himself, his palm facing Harry, and Harry shivers and disappears like a TV signal dying out.

“Demons and angels walk the earth,” Cas says, like he’s reciting a sermon. “Do you wish to renounce your demon, Tom Hanniger?”

Tom’s more confused than he was before he went into the hospital and every inch of him hurts, but Cas got rid of Harry, which is better than anyone else has ever done. “Yes,” he says fervently.

“Do you give yourself over wholly to the service of God and His angels?”

“Hey, wait a second!” Dean begins, angrier than he’s been so far.

Cas tilts his head and examines Dean the way he was looking at Tom. “There is always a price, Dean.”

Tom’s too high with the promise of salvation. Harry’s been chasing him most of his life, and if he doesn’t get help soon he might as well let Harry catch him. “I do,” Tom says. “I do.”

“He doesn’t know what—” Dean begins to protest, but Cas steps forward and puts two fingers on Tom’s forehead, and the world goes white and cold. The light surrounds him; a buzzing rises in his ears, drowning out the sound of Dean continuing his useless argument. For the first time in years, Tom doesn’t smell the mine: the damp and the sweat, the coal and the metal, all gone. He doesn’t know how, but he can feel Harry writhing, dying, shrivelling into nothing.

The light reaches into him and he gives himself to it.

End

Notes: Okay, I’m that viewer who felt really bad for Tom and wanted Axel to get what was coming to him, which was not to die bloody but at least to suffer some.

SPN: Five Guns Dean Winchester Used to Have

2009-06-22T19:52:07Z

Five Guns Dean Winchester Used to Have
Summary: Every gun makes its own tune.
PG, gen

1. A water pistol

“Dean,” Dad said, heavy with what Dean hoped was just anger and not disappointment. He held his hand out.

“Yessir,” Dean said, swallowed, and handed the gun over. It was translucent orange, small even in Dean’s hand, and the shape was distorted by all sorts of blocks and lines that had nothing to do with a real gun.

“Where did you get this?” Dad’s voice was even, as if he were completely unbothered by the wet patch on the shoulder of his jacket. Dean hadn’t meant to hit him; he’d just come through the door when Dean was pretending to defend himself against robbers.

Dean met his father’s eyes like he was supposed to. “Mr. Wright. Next door, on the left,” he added, when Dad’s expression indicated that he had no idea who Mr. Wright was.

Dad didn’t say he couldn’t, so Dean crept after him, ending up crouched below the windowsill as Dad went into Mr. Wright’s living room.

“I appreciate that you were trying to be kind,” Dad said, in the same tone he’d used on Dean. “But I don’t allow my children to play with toy guns.”

Mr. Wright made a little grunt of disbelief. “Kid’s eight years old—he’s a boy.” Like he thought Dad was some kind of hippie weirdo.

“He’s a boy who’s not allowed to play with toy guns. In the future, please don’t give him or Sam anything like that. Thank you for your time.”

Dad didn’t seem surprised to see Dean up against the side of the house when he let himself out. “Come on,” he said, and Dean nodded, hurrying to keep up. “Do you know what you did wrong?”

Dean hesitated. “I shouldn’t have been firing the gun inside?” He’d tried really hard not to make it a question, but it came out that way anyway.

His father stopped, sighed, and shook his head. “You shouldn’t have been firing a gun at all. Not if you didn’t mean to kill or hurt something. You can’t—you can’t be playing games like that. What would have happened if Sammy had seen you and decided to be just like his big brother with the gun from under your pillow?” Dad sounded so sad that Dean felt even worse; he’d known he was breaking the rules, but he hadn’t realized just how dangerous that was.

Dean took a couple of deep breaths, calming himself down just like he was supposed to. “I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

Dad nodded and put his hand on the back of Dean’s neck, rubbing his hair a little. “I know it won’t.”

Sam never did understand why, when he was fifteen and suggested using squirt guns filled with holy water, Dean shut him down before he could mention the idea to Dad.

2. His first sawed-off

It wasn’t really that good.

When he found out Dad kept it, Dean was happy. Knowing Dad kept it, like he was proud, like he wanted to remember what a good kid Dean was, gave Dean a warm feeling that lasted through the whole mess with Bela.

But Dean hadn’t actually done that great a job, which was why the shotgun was stashed in Dad’s storage locker rather than kept for use, the way a real weapon would be. He’d screwed up with the hacksaw, had to take off more than he planned, and the bluing had been a mess. Beveled it nice, at least. Point was, it was okay for a first try but not exactly a showpiece.

And once Dean found out about Adam, well, the whole memento thing kind of left a bad taste in his mouth. Twelve looked a lot different throwing a baseball than it did clamping a gun into a vise after-hours at the auto shop where Dad was picking up some ready cash.

Dean was glad they’d left the sawed-off back in the locker, to be destroyed with all the rest of the artifacts too trivial or too dangerous to be added to Bobby’s collection. Him and Sam, they didn’t need any more useless baggage.

3. The Lazy Gun

Dean came across it while he was hunting without Dad. The guy who had it before Dean managed to get himself killed by a nix, which was evidence enough that the gun lacked the total killing efficiency the man had claimed for it.

The gun itself was black, about twenty inches long, a foot wide and nine inches deep, with a sight and two hand grips, one of which had the zoom control for the sight and the other of which had the trigger. The twin barrels ended in black lenses. Dean was pretty sure that “gun” wasn’t quite the right name for what it was.

Fucking thing had a nasty sense of humor: bad things happened to the target, but unpredictably so. The guy Dean got it off of said that once a rock dropped out of the sky and smushed the werewolf he was tracking into a fine gray paste. The first time Dean tried it, a real gun stuck in his waistband just in case, a giant bear came out of nowhere and ate the troll Dean was hunting. The second time, the kelpie exploded (and raw kelpie guts, Dean discovered, tasted like ass and smelled like decomposed ass, so Dean was not at all pleased).

After the kelpie Dean decided that, no matter how powerful it was, the risks weren’t worth the stopping power. He used it once more, firing it at a salted skeleton just to see what would happen (bolt of lightning; he nearly knocked himself out falling backwards from the blast and his ears rang for hours), then dumped it down a very deep hole out in the woods somewhere and used a don’t-notice-me spell Caleb passed on to him.

Later, Dean sometimes wondered whether hanging on to the Lazy Gun might have made a difference. But given the malice that the gun and the universe seemed to share, he thought probably not.

4. The gun Sam used to shoot Jake

It was a Smith & Wesson 4006, a nice piece, untraceable. Dean found it in the trash at the first place they stopped after leaving Bobby’s to lick their wounds in private. It was under a pile of tissues and other crap, but Dean stumbled a little and his boot nudged up against the can, which clanked, and the noise was so unexpected that Dean did a little prospecting.

Sam was out getting dinner and, most likely, thinking up more ways to yell at Dean about the deal.

Dean’s first impulse was to shove the gun in Sam’s face when he came through the door, shout some about throwing away hundreds of dollars of good money.

Then he thought about Sam reluctantly packing his knife to come looking for Dad, back when Sam thought he was doing one last weekend for Dean’s sake, and about what it felt like to kill a man.

Dean broke the gun down, made sure it was clean of prints, and put the pieces in the dumpster behind the motel.

5. The Colt

Dean was nowhere near a scholar, but he did like his weapons. He could have told Dad that the story Dad gave them about the Colt was fucked. A gun that old should have used balls, not cartridges, so obviously someone had reworked it after Samuel Colt made it. So when Ruby was able to fix it, he wasn’t that surprised. He only wished she’d gone all the way and converted it to semi-auto.

Bela’s theft was almost a relief. He already knew there was no rescue for him, and having the Colt around was an invitation to false hope.

He halfway expected Lilith to show up and taunt him with the gun once he was stretched out on the rack. But Lilith never did come; apparently Dean wasn’t important enough for her personal attention, or maybe it was just that Alastair was too good at his specialty to let a generalist like Lilith interfere.

Dean was nowhere near a scholar, but he wondered about the whole guns versus knives thing. Guns were, he thought, inherently opposed to the supernatural—they were human creations, technologies made once people stopped thinking that little spirits controlled the natural world and started thinking that they could figure out the rules. Knives, now—knives got you up close and personal. Knives made sense to demons, and, from the pictures he’d seen of angels, swords were pretty much the same to them. Soldiers carried guns; warriors carried swords. Dean didn’t want to be a warrior.

Dean missed the Colt a lot. He had the feeling that bringing a gun to a knife fight was going to be their only way out of this thing.

If they had the time, maybe he’d use some of it in Bobby’s workshop. Bobby had all the tools, and if Dean didn’t have the Colt any more he still had plenty of guns and a compelling motivation. Maybe Samuel Colt wasn’t the only one who could build himself a magical-mechanical hybrid.

Dean might have started the apocalypse, and he might have been the angels’ chew toy ever since. But give him a gun and a place to point it, and he was ready to move the world.

END

Notes: The Lazy Gun is from Iain Banks.

I love me some cliches.

2009-06-22T06:09:22Z

Chuck versus the Left Turn at Albequerque
This is my first entry in cliché bingo. You’ll see.
PG, gen-ish.

“Stay still, you big baby,” Ellie said, her tone as worried as her words were sharp.

“It’s—ow!—nothing,” Chuck insisted as she completed another stitch. There was blood in his eyes; he closed them and had a moment of regret that this was what she had to do with her medical degree. Ellie should be off saving lives, not running from a conspiracy of bad guys determined to kill Chuck or, worse, force Chuck to serve them.

“Seriously, I don’t know how a guy as smart as you always ends up getting the beat-down. Have I taught you nothing?”

And that demanded some little-brother defense. “Oh yeah? That’s not what you were saying when I used my freaky mind powers to save our asses.” He winced as she finished suturing.

Ellie wiped the blood away, her touch so gentle that he felt a rush of comfort, the old certainty that they would be all right as long as they were together. “As I recall, I was saying, ‘Chuck, use your freaky mind powers to save our asses.’ Or words to that effect.”

“Such uncouth language,” he chided, opening his eyes so that they could grin at each other.

“We don’t have time for this,” Casey said, and they both jumped six inches.

Ellie put her hands on her hips, ignoring that they were still covered with blood (she was going to be mad, later), and glared at Casey. “Jeez, Cas, warn a guy,” Chuck complained.

Casey tilted his head in that angry way he had. “Call me that again and I’ll kill you.”

“Well, look who woke up on the wrong side of—oh, wait, you don’t sleep, do you,” Chuck snarked back. Casey wasn’t going to harm Chuck, no matter how many threats he issued. That had been clear since he’d shown up at Chuck’s crappy motel room with Ellie in tow.

The thought of those months they’d been apart, what Ellie had been through, still filled Chuck with impotent rage. It made him want to take all the secrets in his head and rip them open until the world screamed with him. And, more important, it reminded him how very much he owed Casey, so he took a deep breath and made himself relax. “What’s so pressing you needed to interrupt our quality bonding time, which, I might add, tends to wilt under your harsh scrutiny?”

“That’s not the only thing that tends to wilt,” Casey snarled, which was totally unfair except for how Chuck had kind of walked into it. “Pack up, Bartowskis. There’s a job for you in Pismo Beach.”

Ellie sighed and headed towards the bathroom, obviously preparing to comply with Casey’s orders. Chuck was a little disturbed by how much she seemed to trust Casey; he still wasn’t sure what had gone on between them while Chuck had been off with Sarah on his own, ultimately futile, quest to rescue his sister.

Which reminded him—“Sarah’s supposed to be back soon. We should wait—I mean, we can’t exactly leave her a note.”

Casey’s lip curled. “She can’t be trusted.”

Chuck rolled his eyes. “Here’s a thought: instead of you saying that every time her name comes up, let’s all pretend you’ve done it. You can even substitute a symbolic gesture.”

Casey leaned forward until they were nearly nose to nose. Chuck gave in to the impulse to cringe backwards. “I’ve got a symbolic gesture, all right.” Chuck’s eyes crossed as they dropped to the fist Casey was making six inches from Chuck’s chin.

“Boys,” Ellie sang out from where she was shoveling supplies into her medical bag. Chuck pouted; it wasn’t like Chuck started it. Casey grunted and turned, moving to peer suspiciously out the window.

“So what’s this job?” Chuck asked, trying to do his part to decrease the tension.

“Seal,” Casey said, which was annoying enough that even Ellie wouldn’t blame Chuck for sassing.

Chuck could see her through the open bathroom door, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were so sad now. The only thing Chuck could do for her was kill Lilith, and any other demon who had the notion to torment the Bartowskis. He couldn’t protect Ellie, but he could avenge her, and maybe even someday set her free from this life.

Preventing the Apocalypse was a vital, if somewhat daunting, step in that plan. “Right,” Chuck prompted. “I didn’t think you were calling for a computer repair. Any more details, or should we just start tunneling like Bugs Bunny?”

Casey frowned, obviously missing the joke (like always). “A demon ring is preparing to sacrifice ten innocents to break the next seal. Do you feel better now?”

“Oh yeah,” Chuck volleyed back, “I feel superbly confident.”

Casey raised an eyebrow, managing to leave ‘that makes one of us’ unspoken, which Chuck considered a victory. With any luck, before this was over he’d have convinced Casey to communicate only in sneers and grunts.

There was no point in dwelling on the obstacles ahead. One demon at a time—or, okay, occasionally six or ten at a time, but the point was that Chuck should probably enjoy whatever calm moments he could grab. And if that happened to piss off Casey, well, somehow the angel only looked hotter when he was all wound up, so, bonus for Chuck. “Hey, while we’re waiting for Sarah, anybody want to do some Wii Fit?”

Ellie’s tolerant head-shake and Casey’s grimace were just about equally rewarding.

END

Note: my prompt was “fusion.” I’m really, really sorry, Awesome. Not everybody fit in exactly analogous places and it’s probably best not to think about Awesome’s fate, okay? Also, Sarah is actually on their side, because I say she is.

Victory!

2009-06-17T03:32:29Z

It only took six months longer than promised, but I have a rough draft of mahaliem 's SV story for livelongnmarry. 20,000 words, Clark/Lex, forced to marry (sort of). Anyone interested in betaing?

Also, Sarah Connor fans: bop_radar has a fantastic new vid about fighting metal, and whether flesh can do it.

Done grading!

2009-06-10T00:36:56Z

1. It makes me sad that among Wolfram Alpha's easter eggs is not "how old Cary Grant?" Google, by contrast, gets the answer right off.

2. Rewatching Serenity, I noticed three instances where extradiegetic titles turned into diegetic images--the Universal logo/Earth-that-Was, the movie title/the side of Serenity, and Haven/the entrance to Haven. I'm used to extradiegetic music moving into (or out of) the diegesis, but is it common for images to do this? This made me think about the extent to which, as one of the articles I recently read argues, the fact that we can now treat film pretty much the way we treat sound in terms of mixing, manipulation, etc. is affecting editors' and directors' sense of possibility for images.

3. Fellow parents! You know how in Dora the Explorer there’s always that creepy moment where Dora turns to the screen and waits unblinkingly for the audience to answer her question “What did you like best?” (My kids never answer; does anyone?) Z. suggests it would be engagingly disturbing to edit together ten or twelve of those moments, and I heartily agree. Maybe with the following quotes integrated in:
What Lily of the Valley says in a dream
Herr K said with a jewelry box.
What one says with flowers
Papa said with pearls
What Dora did not say
the doctor said with smoke.

--Hélène Cixous

James Newton Poling, Deliver Us From Evil
Dora seems to have resisted in silence for many years. In spite of Freud's attempt to manipulate her into revealing her own desires .... Dora was silent about her plans to terminate therapy after only three months. Freud could not complete his analysis because she resisted him through silence.

Nonfiction

2009-06-05T18:41:39Z

Gary L. Reback, Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive: This isn’t the most engaging general-interest book on why you should care about antitrust law; that honor belongs to Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant, which is essentially a true crime yarn focused on price-fixing in agricultural chemicals by Archer Daniels Midland. Eichenwald begins with a wonderful look at exactly why price-fixing is bad for other people, getting you to identify with the farmers hurt by anticompetitive practices. That said, Reback’s is a more comprehensive book than The Informant, focused on the high tech sector but giving an impassioned defense of the need for competition to protect consumers and spur innovation, along with an overview of current economic thinking about when markets can regulate themselves and when they are vulnerable to abuse by dominant market players to the detriment of others. Reback has defended companies against antitrust claims and also used the antitrust laws to challenge his clients’ competitors; he’s not exactly balanced, but he does end up with a pretty good story for why the government needs to do more before the market congeals around a standard. He hates patents because they promote monopoly, making nice connections between intellectual property and the overall competitive environment. His vitriol at the collapse of antitrust enforcement is engaging, and it’s really depressing when he points out that consolidation in the market has forced Americans to pay tons more for high-speed internet than citizens of other high-income countries, who by the way get faster service than we do. As with the overall financial crisis, the ultimate message is that you can regulate the market early, or you can try to fix it once it’s obviously broken, and the latter solution ends up with more government intervention overall.

Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, eds. Phil Powrie & Robynn Stilwell: Aside from the essays I found useful for thinking about vidding, there was a neat piece by Raymond Knapp about music in Frankenstein movies, including Young Frankenstein, which discussed the relationship between music and electricity and made the point that Shelley’s Frankenstein did not use electricity to raise his monster; that conceit is modern and visual. Robynn Stilwell also had a fun chapter about the use of music, specifically vinyl records, in coming-of-age stories for girls, and how the girl collector/boy collector divide plays out in various ways (for example, does the collector listen to the music?). “Male”-type collecting prioritizes the exertion of control over the outside world, whereas “female”-type collecting emphasizes the definition of self through connection to objects that reflect the collector’s subjectivity. Stilwell discusses female record collectors “one of whom feels her collection reveals who she is (as a whole), and another who considers her collection a diary, or self-portrait, and could not bear to part with any of the CDs because they contain ‘too many memories.’”

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: Typically engaging, and generalizing-from-a-few-examples, fare from Gladwell, who argues that success is the result not of individual characteristics, as we usually insist, but actually surrounding circumstance: fortunate opportunity, in time and place and resources. Being born just after the cutoff birthdate for various sports leagues that start kids really young, for example, is essentially the only way to succeed in those leagues, because it means you’re bigger and more developed than the other kids in your group, and so you get more playing time and coaching attention, increasing the disparity; those advantages, if conferred early enough, simply can’t be made up for later when birthdate is less important. He also argues that culture is critical, discussing airplane accidents and the ways in which various culturally inflected styles of communication can work or fail when people are tired, distracted, or otherwise unlikely to process the subtleties of deferential or indirect speech. Both are ways of highlighting the importance of context as opposed to the idea that achievement and failure can be attributed to unique individual competences or deficiencies. A more detailed and critical review from rachelmanija.

Tal Ben-Shahar, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life: A self-help book! I think I would have liked Happier better; this book is directed at giving readers strategies to guide themselves in the direction of “optimalism” rather than perfectionism, accepting disappointment and long, hard roads to success. I was really struck by the ways in which the advice was removed from social context and individualized: other people showed up, basically, as potential sources of desired goods like love, but it was all about changing yourself. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the baseline for a self-help book was a highly independent self with a lot of social capital, such that success (or failure) at standard material/social goals was possible, but it was just so unlike what I usually read. Ben-Shahar argues that human nature is fixed (though he gives very little content to that fixity in this book, except to say that communism must fail and capitalism must succeed; he quotes Ayn Rand as a good guide to love!) but human behavior isn’t, and once he made that move, with no attempt to discuss power and how things get slotted into nature v. behavior and by whom, I kind of stopped paying attention. On the other hand, I did find earlier parts of the book useful: he makes a good case that modern Western culture too readily encourages people to suppress bad feelings instead of acknowledging them, which makes it harder to experience good feelings in the long run.

Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive: Cialdini’s Influence is a fantastic book on the psychology of persuasion and how advertisers use it. Yes! is a quick read designed to give little bite-size chunks of that work, absent much of the research/citation. It’s diverting enough, but I really recommend Influence in its place, and that book ought to be cheaper used!

Sotomayor and Tiana

2009-06-04T18:19:30Z

Monica Youn (former classmate!) makes an excellent point about Sotomayor's "wise Latina" quote: it came about as a direct result of being asked to work the second shift of diversity. She writes:

With each new law job I've started, at some point the e-mail arrives: "Invitation to Join the Diversity Committee." It's a workday reminder that not only am I a woman, but I'm a member of an ethnic minority and, as such, a rare commodity in the legal profession. If I don't reply, I unfailingly receive a follow-up call, inquiring why I haven't responded—underscoring the subtle point that as one of the few examples of an "ethnic" attorney, my refusal to join the committee would be noticed. I willingly accept the invitation, spend the occasional lunch hour discussing recruitment, talk on career panels, engage in conversations about race that don't happen elsewhere in the workplace. The e-mail from the diversity committee is the invitation that can't be refused.
I was reminded of this when reading Judge Sonia Sotomayor's much-discussed keynote from the 2001 Honorable Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture at Berkeley's law school, aka the "wise Latina" speech. The symposium was titled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation," and Sotomayor's invite came from a Latina law school classmate and from Judge Olmos' widow, friends, and family. It was an invitation that could not be lightly refused. But in this political climate, an invitation to speak for half an hour about race in America—like an invitation to talk for 30 minutes about abortion or gay marriage or any other polarizing issue—is an invitation to provide fodder for opposition research. ...

Imagine Chief Justice John Roberts being invited by members of his own cultural network to deliver remarks for the Honorable William H. Rehnquist Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture on what special qualities white men bring to the bench: "What makes your approach, as a white male, different from that of your black judicial colleagues?" "Does being a white man give you special insight into the perspective of white male defendants in discrimination cases?" "Has the presence of white men on the bench made any difference in American law?" Odds are he wouldn't last two minutes before treading on someone's sensibilities. But this political high-wire act is expected from minority figures as a matter of course....

I've also been thinking about this NYT story on the first black Disney princess. The story seems to take the basic position that she's black, she's not a terrible stereotype, so why are you critics being so picky? The question of whether sexism or other intersectionalities might come into it is not raised. (And seriously, NYT, am I supposed to feel sorry for Disney for getting criticized "no matter how carefully it strives to put together its television shows, theme-park attractions and movies"? "Armchair critics" are taking aim at Disney? As opposed to all those, I don't know, action hero critics like you, NYT reporter?) I wish there'd been some acknowledgement in the story that the reason the scrutiny is so high is that Tiana is likely to be the only black Disney princess for at least the length of several childhoods, if not much longer--she's the focus of intense attention because before her are awful stereotypes and after her Disney will almost certainly feel discharged from the obligation to create a black heroine. Under such circumstances, critics who accept the NYT's framing, as if we could just look at the single movie to evaluate Tiana's place in culture, are in a no-win situation.

No vidder steps onto the same boat twice

2009-06-03T23:29:26Z

I’ve been watching two adorable I’m on a Boat ST:Reboot vids. Some thoughts: (1) I like the movie best when I can focus on (a) the Enterprise, (b) Uhura’s smile, (c) Spock’s expression that goes along with how he makes “live long and prosper” sound exactly like “fuck off and die,” and (d) Kirk’s smile, with occasional moments of (e) McCoy’s disgusted expression. And when I don’t have to think about the plot, especially the disregard for institutional structure, at all. So the vids are perfect for me.

(2) I really love seeing two or more artists take the same strictures and play with them! The vidders here sometimes use the same shots, but in different places, and they use Old Spock to very different narrative effect; they choose different moments for the mothers; and they use “If you're on the shore,/then you're sure not me-oh” quite distinctly, with one humorous and one kind of painful. It’s a little more repetitive than the three Body vids in three different fandoms, or the three Handlebars vids, but still neat to watch.

Now I know why I did so well in law school

2009-06-02T04:08:31Z

(Post title taken from actual grading story I was told by a professor who shall not be named.) Grading today; confronted with an exam bearing a note that the examinee had not noticed Part 3 until the end of the (8-hour) exam, and thus had not provided an answer, ensuring a pretty bad grade given that the question was worth 35% of the grade. I feel horrible for the student, but mainly I think because my embarrassment squick’s been triggered. Here is what I did beforehand: I announced there’d be three sections in class, each with a different format: short answer, essay, fact pattern. I posted the exam instructions on the course site before the exam; the instructions specify that there are three parts and set forth the percentages. On the exam itself, those instructions are repeated. On each question, the points available are marked at the beginning. The exam has “page X of Y” on each page. The third part took up several pages—it even had pictures, for pete’s sake! It’s an exam disaster, to be sure, and I do feel sorry for the kid. But sorry with a lot of argh attached.

Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix: YA fantasy in which Ai Ling, the heroine, leaves home to find her missing father and escape a lecherous suitor and finds amazing powers and a cute boy along the way. They meet an awful lot of mythical Chinese creatures and tour mythical landscapes (the setting is Xia, the first Chinese dynasty) and eat an awful lot of food, all described with enjoyment. Ai Ling is plucky and practical and by necessity concerned with the rules governing women’s behavior; the cute boy enlightens on the issue pretty fast, as is standard for the genre. I liked it, but as with my attempt to read LJ Smith, reading it made me realize that I’m not really the target audience; YA is often more about nostalgia for me than anything else. Longer, better reviews from rachelmanija and oyceter.

Karen Harbaugh, The Vampire Viscount and The Devil’s Bargain: Supernatural regency romance! In the former, a vampire must seduce a virgin to love him or go mad; in the second, Lucifer and an angel wager on whether Lucifer can make a man choose evil, and the price of saving his sister is the ruination of another innocent young girl. Regency isn’t generally my favorite, but it does provide the opportunity for finding total, all-consuming passion in the mere touch of fingers, and I enjoyed my brief excursion. It helped that Harbaugh’s heroes had reasonably good reasons for not disclosing the secrets they were keeping from their heroines, and that the heroines were strong of character and willing to take action to save their men. I am now unused to the rapid switching of limited third POV back and forth between hero and heroine during a single scene that comes with a certain type of romance. I have absorbed the lesson that this kind of switching is inelegant, but then again the books I read don’t generally have a 222-page maximum, and I did notice the technique’s efficiency: it’s useful if you need to be very clear about what both of them are thinking.

Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed: Still wish Briggs hadn’t left her classic fantasy novels for Laurell Hamilton territory, but I’m growing fond of Mercy Thompson, the shapeshifter hanging around a werewolf pack and, in this book, variously: recovering from a brutal attack; taking her relationship with the Alpha of the pack to the next level; helping a little boy who sees ghosts; and dealing with various powerful vampires who want to kill, fuck, or otherwise use her, sometimes nicely but mostly not. Plenty of room left to explore Mercy’s shapeshifter powers, and their relationship to other supernatural creatures, in subsequent books.

Patricia Briggs, Alpha and Omega (novelette) and Cry Wolf: Anna is an Omega, a nondominant wolf who is also not a submissive. Unfortunately, she was also turned into a werewolf against her will and brutally abused by her dysfunctional pack. Charles, the enforcer for the ruler of the North American werewolves, is sent to sort out what’s going on with the pack, and quickly falls for Anna. But murderous machinations and Anna’s past trauma stand in their way. It’s reasonably well done, and wolfy healing sex is at least better explained than standard healing sex (also, the fact that the characters’ wolves decide that they should mate does not in fact fix everything for Anna, not even after she decides to sleep with Charles). But this extension of the Mercy Thompson universe really confirmed for me that, though I like Briggs, I’m not that interested in werewolves and pack dynamics.