kitten
20th June 2008, 16:03
Burn Out
PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own them, but when I pull this string they dance!
Distribution: I have posted these stories and have control of them on this site. I don't want them to be posted anywhere else unless I'm the one posting them. Please take down my stories if you have them posted on another archive site. I understand I can't stop you from doing this but I hope by asking politely you'll respect my work and my wishes. If anyone has more comfort and convenience saving the text of a story to their own computer, I have no problem with that.
Spoilers: General Smallville up to Lex's wedding to Lana.
A/N: I thought of this last night and didn't want to write it as a multi-chapter, never ending, super story like Trauma. It could be that. But I concentrated it down to essentials and delivered it at less than 2300 words. There's hope for me yet.
A warning though: Read carefully or you'll miss the plot development. It zips along pretty quickly and sometimes a lot changes from one sentence to the next.
He is working – as usual– when The Talon explodes a few minutes after the customers are gone. It is ten minutes after that when he gets the call from Gabe Sullivan. Chloe was there grabbing a last cup for the night, and Lois went along to relieve the kitchen of the day old baked goods. Lex has failed to protect his property, his wife, his tenant, and his arguably favourite reporter.
It is another ten minutes before he drives up and into one of the barricades, doing a dent's worth of damage to car that he no longer remembers the make or model. It is fifteen minutes before he screams and threatens his way to the ambulance. The stretcher holds what looks like a blackened corpse, but the corpse is screaming in agony until morphine drips into her veins. She is nude even of her skin, it seems. Lex is not sure if she can be called a survivor when she looks nothing like human.
Her bustline is nowhere near the pneumatic heights of Lois Lane's, and she has dark hair that is crumbling off her head. This is Lana. His wife is alive. The doctors pump her full of medications to keep her that way. His only concern is that the flow of morphine is never stopped. If she were to feel any of her body she would die instantly. Lana believes in her own suffering more than Lex ever did. She is not the survivor she thinks she is.
He sits with Gabe Sullivan after the man is told there are no other bodies, just pieces. He says nothing as the sobs taper to the lack of personality that is catatonic grief. He says nothing as Clark Kent pushes his way into Lana's room and flees almost as quickly. That is the nature of Clark and Lana, both, and their fictional love. All three are stronger in image than fact.
There are weeks of waiting for Lana to die, then Lex is told she is holding steady. He takes her home to a hospital room where their bedroom used to be. He rarely spent the night in the old bedroom, and he never sets foot in the sick room it becomes. The nurses do their jobs, the specialists visit from time to time. He does his duty by paying for anything she needs without question. He spends millions on state of the art equipment, but he doesn't expect her to live long enough for most of it to be out of the box.
Lex is wrong. Lana lives two months at home and one of the nurses approaches him with a suggestion that he visit and speak to her. Her comatose state is partially the result of drugs, but she is also healing brain damage. If she is going to be awakened by anything, wouldn't it be the sound of her husband's voice, the nurse asks him erroneously. Lex figures it is easier to play along once and avoid further visits by saying it is too hard. He is not above playing on his mental health issues when it helps him.
He sits by the bed and looks at the clean new plastic of the rails. He mumbles about work and weather, and his eyes wander to her face. She is ugly, scarred, and unrecognizable. But she sips air in a way that soothes his own breathing, and she is quietly fighting along with the doctors and nurses to live. Lex includes himself in that fight without knowing why, and he schedules times to see her the next day.
He reads to her often, and the books he chooses aren't ones she would like. They have no stories or romances. They are solid facts and statistics and projections. He has to keep making money so he can pay for the machines that keep her around, though The Talon is worth more insurance money than it ever turned in for profit. Lex wonders if he has always failed somehow in seeing her, and worries this is not so much a second chance as it is a penance long enough to make her loss level him.
He notices she is losing mass and asks for another feeding tube to be installed, but it is almost too late. Infection nearly kills her and he spends days sitting by her bed and raging at her caregivers. For some reason her body doesn't show the infection until it causes malnutrition. Lex ponders this for a few days and decides it is likely a reaction to meteor exposure. He has always thought Lana had to be effected in some way. He pays more attention to her appearance, and is outraged when her hair starts growing in white. The texture is entirely different and he misses the bald, mottled skin underneath. Looking at it was less like outliving his wife.
He reads up on therapies that can wake coma patients, and has the nurses try all of them. He even shrugs out of his jacket to help bend and flex her slack limbs in time with a too happy music that makes the exercise like a demented fitness tape. He bites back disgust at the ugly details of a life without any higher function. He kisses her forehead when he leaves her to go to his own bed.
Lex is alone with her when Lana opens her eyes blearily. He has to squint for moment to make sure they really are blinking instead of twitching. He puts his hand on hers very carefully, and she squeezes it once, pauses, then squeezes it again.
He is thrown out as specialists arrive to test her, and Lex paces in the hallway. He tries not to hope for much. It was months after the explosion before she was counted among the living, and this might be the final bit of strength she has – playing itself out cruelly with false optimism. He shakes the lead doctor's hand sweatily when he is told she is awake and will remain that way. He rushes in to see Lana and is pushed out again to let her sleep, which is ludicrous. She has been sleeping for months, he bitches, and he catches a smile from the nurse. He is behaving like an insane husband and for once he is willing to let it show. His reward is a few minutes sitting by the bed and grinning at her.
Her feeding tube and the one in her throat are removed first, then the IV lines. Her heart monitor is only used during the night. Her morphine is changed to another pain killer and she is weened back to coherence. Her tongue and jaw are mangled and she can't speak well, but there are a few words she can say. Lex explains about the explosion carefully and she weeps as he blots at her face. She asks for Gabe Sullivan to visit, and the man plods up to the castle one night. He pats her hand awkwardly and seems dazed. In the hallway he says he thought for a moment she was Chloe. Lex makes sure someone else is driving Mr. Sullivan home.
The relief not to be a widower turns into concern to improve her quality of life. Lana is capable of mobility after physical therapy, but needs a wheelchair because her legs are weak. She is wheeling herself around in no time. Lex has to chase after her and he finds it difficult to reconcile that new vigor with the woman he married. He dismisses two of the four nurses because they aren't needed.
He works at his desk while she reads one of the books she never would have touched before. He gathers from her garbled, but improving, speech that she is understanding them. They read the same book almost in tandem and he has trouble recalling Lana ever reading for pleasure. Her hands are recovered enough to graduate from a notepad and marker to a laptop, and she types the most lengthy, insightful thoughts out while he carries on his end of the conversation. It is about this time Lex realizes he is living with a Lana he has never met before.
She has started using a walker when she asks for Clark to visit. All hope is extinguished, and Lex assumes he has been a patsy all along. He pays for Lana's recovery, she plays a sweet house guest, but once she is well she intends to return to her true love. He does as she asks, and the second visit goes as well as the first. Clark flees from her melted face and trembling body within minutes, leaving Lana sobbing in her bed.
Lex goes up to sit with her, and he curses Clark for not being able to hide his horror from the near skeletal woman clinging to his neck. Her need was more important than the revulsion of seeing her burns. She sees herself in the mirror every day, and made the same old mistake of leaning on a Clark who is only there for her in her fantasies.
The next day Lex clears it with the doctors and brings plastic surgeons. They examine Lana's face, make drawings and scans, then present her with a composite of the reconstruction. She will never look exactly like herself again, but they can rebuild her jaw and allow her to talk. They can make her look normal again, they say supportively.
She takes the printed page and crumples it into a ball, bursting into tears once more. Lex apologizes hastily and asks the doctors to wait for a decision. It is days before he can make any sense from what she is saying, and she refuses to type or write to him. She clutches his left hand, taps his wedding band, points to herself and shakes her head. “No.”
He gives her a few days of self-pity before he brings back the surgeons, and she holds his hand tightly and looks at him with such pain he has to send them away. The notepad comes out and she writes her name in shaky block letters. He knows the name before she turns the paper to him and forces it into his hands. She points to herself and he nods.
She is Chloe, and Lana died months ago to be buried in the Sullivan plot. Their rapport is only because she is not his hated wife. Lex strokes her fine, white hair and the texture is true to Chloe's golden blond strands. She is a living daughter to a grieving father. Lex needs proof before he tells Gabe, so he has an old blood sample retrieved in the hospital and compared to his guest's. It matches.
Gabe weeps openly and holds his daughter for half the day, only letting go to hug Lex for an uncomfortable moment. He is stunned and in shock, but he is happy. Lex is empty, especially when the loving father wants to take her away. He makes exaggerated claims about Chloe's frailty and scares Gabe into letting her stay put.
Gabe is staying in the castle, too, and his gratitude is overwhelming. Chloe is receiving the same treatment as before, with Lex's insistence. The plastic surgery is harrowing for all three, but once the swelling goes down Chloe can speak in her own voice. She can smile as she thanks Lex sincerely and with far too many words. He brushes it off and thinks how happy he is she looks like herself again.
She has the second surgery on her face, and once she recovers a hair dresser comes in to cut and dye her hair like it used to be. Lex strides right up to her and kisses the blond hair, and she giggles. The walker is gone and she can skip around the garden with her father well enough she is asking for her car keys. She will leave soon.
Chloe makes the offer on a Saturday, and Lex pushes his breakfast back. He tells her she helped him a lot by being there, and he isn't ready to be alone. He tells her he loves her. He tells her to think about it as long as she wants. She is moved out only three months before she is moving back in, planning a little wedding and asking for a cold-weather honeymoon.
She is mostly healed, but she may never be ready to wear a swimsuit again. Lex doesn't mind, and it saves him from having to find a private beach. The scandal over the mistaken identity is ferocious. Gabe sees the newlyweds off to a vacation in Montreal, and he is the first to hear Chloe is pregnant. Mother and father hold little Madrigal Luthor first, then hand her over to her grandfather. Gabe holds his daughter's hand through most of her second delivery, though Lex arrives in time to see Marcus Luthor's birth.
The former lot of The Talon was filled with a bank, and Lex thought back only once to the explosion that changed his life. He had regretted marrying Lana and arranged for the accident to kill her. Chloe and Lois were not supposed to be in the building. He remembered Lois as a loud-mouthed army brat with not enough brains for her spunk, but he hadn't meant for her to die. Chloe's suffering was an accident.
Ultimately, Lex was happy, his wife was happy, and their children were loved and protected. He saw no reason to live in the past.
PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own them, but when I pull this string they dance!
Distribution: I have posted these stories and have control of them on this site. I don't want them to be posted anywhere else unless I'm the one posting them. Please take down my stories if you have them posted on another archive site. I understand I can't stop you from doing this but I hope by asking politely you'll respect my work and my wishes. If anyone has more comfort and convenience saving the text of a story to their own computer, I have no problem with that.
Spoilers: General Smallville up to Lex's wedding to Lana.
A/N: I thought of this last night and didn't want to write it as a multi-chapter, never ending, super story like Trauma. It could be that. But I concentrated it down to essentials and delivered it at less than 2300 words. There's hope for me yet.
A warning though: Read carefully or you'll miss the plot development. It zips along pretty quickly and sometimes a lot changes from one sentence to the next.
He is working – as usual– when The Talon explodes a few minutes after the customers are gone. It is ten minutes after that when he gets the call from Gabe Sullivan. Chloe was there grabbing a last cup for the night, and Lois went along to relieve the kitchen of the day old baked goods. Lex has failed to protect his property, his wife, his tenant, and his arguably favourite reporter.
It is another ten minutes before he drives up and into one of the barricades, doing a dent's worth of damage to car that he no longer remembers the make or model. It is fifteen minutes before he screams and threatens his way to the ambulance. The stretcher holds what looks like a blackened corpse, but the corpse is screaming in agony until morphine drips into her veins. She is nude even of her skin, it seems. Lex is not sure if she can be called a survivor when she looks nothing like human.
Her bustline is nowhere near the pneumatic heights of Lois Lane's, and she has dark hair that is crumbling off her head. This is Lana. His wife is alive. The doctors pump her full of medications to keep her that way. His only concern is that the flow of morphine is never stopped. If she were to feel any of her body she would die instantly. Lana believes in her own suffering more than Lex ever did. She is not the survivor she thinks she is.
He sits with Gabe Sullivan after the man is told there are no other bodies, just pieces. He says nothing as the sobs taper to the lack of personality that is catatonic grief. He says nothing as Clark Kent pushes his way into Lana's room and flees almost as quickly. That is the nature of Clark and Lana, both, and their fictional love. All three are stronger in image than fact.
There are weeks of waiting for Lana to die, then Lex is told she is holding steady. He takes her home to a hospital room where their bedroom used to be. He rarely spent the night in the old bedroom, and he never sets foot in the sick room it becomes. The nurses do their jobs, the specialists visit from time to time. He does his duty by paying for anything she needs without question. He spends millions on state of the art equipment, but he doesn't expect her to live long enough for most of it to be out of the box.
Lex is wrong. Lana lives two months at home and one of the nurses approaches him with a suggestion that he visit and speak to her. Her comatose state is partially the result of drugs, but she is also healing brain damage. If she is going to be awakened by anything, wouldn't it be the sound of her husband's voice, the nurse asks him erroneously. Lex figures it is easier to play along once and avoid further visits by saying it is too hard. He is not above playing on his mental health issues when it helps him.
He sits by the bed and looks at the clean new plastic of the rails. He mumbles about work and weather, and his eyes wander to her face. She is ugly, scarred, and unrecognizable. But she sips air in a way that soothes his own breathing, and she is quietly fighting along with the doctors and nurses to live. Lex includes himself in that fight without knowing why, and he schedules times to see her the next day.
He reads to her often, and the books he chooses aren't ones she would like. They have no stories or romances. They are solid facts and statistics and projections. He has to keep making money so he can pay for the machines that keep her around, though The Talon is worth more insurance money than it ever turned in for profit. Lex wonders if he has always failed somehow in seeing her, and worries this is not so much a second chance as it is a penance long enough to make her loss level him.
He notices she is losing mass and asks for another feeding tube to be installed, but it is almost too late. Infection nearly kills her and he spends days sitting by her bed and raging at her caregivers. For some reason her body doesn't show the infection until it causes malnutrition. Lex ponders this for a few days and decides it is likely a reaction to meteor exposure. He has always thought Lana had to be effected in some way. He pays more attention to her appearance, and is outraged when her hair starts growing in white. The texture is entirely different and he misses the bald, mottled skin underneath. Looking at it was less like outliving his wife.
He reads up on therapies that can wake coma patients, and has the nurses try all of them. He even shrugs out of his jacket to help bend and flex her slack limbs in time with a too happy music that makes the exercise like a demented fitness tape. He bites back disgust at the ugly details of a life without any higher function. He kisses her forehead when he leaves her to go to his own bed.
Lex is alone with her when Lana opens her eyes blearily. He has to squint for moment to make sure they really are blinking instead of twitching. He puts his hand on hers very carefully, and she squeezes it once, pauses, then squeezes it again.
He is thrown out as specialists arrive to test her, and Lex paces in the hallway. He tries not to hope for much. It was months after the explosion before she was counted among the living, and this might be the final bit of strength she has – playing itself out cruelly with false optimism. He shakes the lead doctor's hand sweatily when he is told she is awake and will remain that way. He rushes in to see Lana and is pushed out again to let her sleep, which is ludicrous. She has been sleeping for months, he bitches, and he catches a smile from the nurse. He is behaving like an insane husband and for once he is willing to let it show. His reward is a few minutes sitting by the bed and grinning at her.
Her feeding tube and the one in her throat are removed first, then the IV lines. Her heart monitor is only used during the night. Her morphine is changed to another pain killer and she is weened back to coherence. Her tongue and jaw are mangled and she can't speak well, but there are a few words she can say. Lex explains about the explosion carefully and she weeps as he blots at her face. She asks for Gabe Sullivan to visit, and the man plods up to the castle one night. He pats her hand awkwardly and seems dazed. In the hallway he says he thought for a moment she was Chloe. Lex makes sure someone else is driving Mr. Sullivan home.
The relief not to be a widower turns into concern to improve her quality of life. Lana is capable of mobility after physical therapy, but needs a wheelchair because her legs are weak. She is wheeling herself around in no time. Lex has to chase after her and he finds it difficult to reconcile that new vigor with the woman he married. He dismisses two of the four nurses because they aren't needed.
He works at his desk while she reads one of the books she never would have touched before. He gathers from her garbled, but improving, speech that she is understanding them. They read the same book almost in tandem and he has trouble recalling Lana ever reading for pleasure. Her hands are recovered enough to graduate from a notepad and marker to a laptop, and she types the most lengthy, insightful thoughts out while he carries on his end of the conversation. It is about this time Lex realizes he is living with a Lana he has never met before.
She has started using a walker when she asks for Clark to visit. All hope is extinguished, and Lex assumes he has been a patsy all along. He pays for Lana's recovery, she plays a sweet house guest, but once she is well she intends to return to her true love. He does as she asks, and the second visit goes as well as the first. Clark flees from her melted face and trembling body within minutes, leaving Lana sobbing in her bed.
Lex goes up to sit with her, and he curses Clark for not being able to hide his horror from the near skeletal woman clinging to his neck. Her need was more important than the revulsion of seeing her burns. She sees herself in the mirror every day, and made the same old mistake of leaning on a Clark who is only there for her in her fantasies.
The next day Lex clears it with the doctors and brings plastic surgeons. They examine Lana's face, make drawings and scans, then present her with a composite of the reconstruction. She will never look exactly like herself again, but they can rebuild her jaw and allow her to talk. They can make her look normal again, they say supportively.
She takes the printed page and crumples it into a ball, bursting into tears once more. Lex apologizes hastily and asks the doctors to wait for a decision. It is days before he can make any sense from what she is saying, and she refuses to type or write to him. She clutches his left hand, taps his wedding band, points to herself and shakes her head. “No.”
He gives her a few days of self-pity before he brings back the surgeons, and she holds his hand tightly and looks at him with such pain he has to send them away. The notepad comes out and she writes her name in shaky block letters. He knows the name before she turns the paper to him and forces it into his hands. She points to herself and he nods.
She is Chloe, and Lana died months ago to be buried in the Sullivan plot. Their rapport is only because she is not his hated wife. Lex strokes her fine, white hair and the texture is true to Chloe's golden blond strands. She is a living daughter to a grieving father. Lex needs proof before he tells Gabe, so he has an old blood sample retrieved in the hospital and compared to his guest's. It matches.
Gabe weeps openly and holds his daughter for half the day, only letting go to hug Lex for an uncomfortable moment. He is stunned and in shock, but he is happy. Lex is empty, especially when the loving father wants to take her away. He makes exaggerated claims about Chloe's frailty and scares Gabe into letting her stay put.
Gabe is staying in the castle, too, and his gratitude is overwhelming. Chloe is receiving the same treatment as before, with Lex's insistence. The plastic surgery is harrowing for all three, but once the swelling goes down Chloe can speak in her own voice. She can smile as she thanks Lex sincerely and with far too many words. He brushes it off and thinks how happy he is she looks like herself again.
She has the second surgery on her face, and once she recovers a hair dresser comes in to cut and dye her hair like it used to be. Lex strides right up to her and kisses the blond hair, and she giggles. The walker is gone and she can skip around the garden with her father well enough she is asking for her car keys. She will leave soon.
Chloe makes the offer on a Saturday, and Lex pushes his breakfast back. He tells her she helped him a lot by being there, and he isn't ready to be alone. He tells her he loves her. He tells her to think about it as long as she wants. She is moved out only three months before she is moving back in, planning a little wedding and asking for a cold-weather honeymoon.
She is mostly healed, but she may never be ready to wear a swimsuit again. Lex doesn't mind, and it saves him from having to find a private beach. The scandal over the mistaken identity is ferocious. Gabe sees the newlyweds off to a vacation in Montreal, and he is the first to hear Chloe is pregnant. Mother and father hold little Madrigal Luthor first, then hand her over to her grandfather. Gabe holds his daughter's hand through most of her second delivery, though Lex arrives in time to see Marcus Luthor's birth.
The former lot of The Talon was filled with a bank, and Lex thought back only once to the explosion that changed his life. He had regretted marrying Lana and arranged for the accident to kill her. Chloe and Lois were not supposed to be in the building. He remembered Lois as a loud-mouthed army brat with not enough brains for her spunk, but he hadn't meant for her to die. Chloe's suffering was an accident.
Ultimately, Lex was happy, his wife was happy, and their children were loved and protected. He saw no reason to live in the past.