Title: Look! Up in the Sky!
Author: xoverau
Pairing: Lex/Clark
Rating: PG-13 ish
Category: Humor
Disclaimer: Not mine, but you knew that.
Summary: Ever wonder why it's so easy to slash Smallville? Maybe it's something in the air...
Dedication: For Makolane, who likes flannel, cuddling, and alliteration. She gave me three words and made me all happy inside: butterflies, buttermilk, and bend. Of course, I promised more cuddling than this, but laughs are almost as good, and it gives her a reason to send me MORE words to ponder...oh, and Brancher? I'm workin' on yours.

It was about three in the afternoon when the butterflies attacked.

Okay, so it wasn't an attack, Lex had to acknowledge, from his prison of filmy wings. They didn't do anything harmful, really, each one light as a postage stamp, their antennae silver scrolls in the sun. Just sat there on him, on his arms and cheeks and boots, clinging and wobbling and beady-eyeing him. He was like some weird Butterflyman of Smallville.

All the same, he didn't like it. Having so many of them so close made the air too light, like he was breathing on Jupiter. He felt fragile, normal motion impossible, the bugs already a part of his skin.

Then again, maybe his discomfiture came from Clark, who was sitting by the boggy part of the creek with a straw poking from his lip and not hiding laughter well.

"Some help wouldn't go amiss, Kent."

"Change your cologne."

"Just call me Madame Butterfly." He flapped his arm--oh, no, not frantically, just...expediently.

"That is freaky," Clark acknowledged when they didn't budge. He stood up and flicked cautiously at a butterfly. "One for the Wall of Weird, even. Try running."

Lex did. Only a few steps, feeling dumb...and feeling mud slog over the sole of one of his Guccis, too. Hopefully mud. Did mud smell like that? God, he couldn't even lower his head to look. He did a turn, arms over his head and legs kicking, barn-dance chants coming into his head unasked for. "Clark?"

"Yes?"

"If I start singing 'Zippedee-do-Dah' and waltzing with animated creatures, you'll stop me, right?"

"With a bullet if necessary," Clark agreed. "I don't want to see that either."

A large whitish butterfly was fanning sleepily on Lex's nose. Clark reached out--just a little faster than humanly possible--and took it on his finger. "You know, these aren't really butterflies. They're cabbage moths. My dad kills them with lye powder. They're kind of pretty anyway, though."

"They're bugs, Clark," Lex said, holding his arms away from his sides to avoid crushing wispy carapaces into his hand-brushed Paavo. "Just because they fly doesn't make them pretty. It makes them insidious." He jumped up and down in place, to no effect.

"Can moths yawn?" Clark asked.

Lex glared, also to no effect. "Maybe if I just ignore them."

"Maybe we can go to the barn. I'm sure my dad would be happy to throw lye on you."

"Did I ask for your help?"

"Yeah, actually."

"Consider that rescinded." Lex sighed, looked at his arms, dotted with what was starting to look more and more like Homecoming-Float tissue, and wondered if they were approaching a mating phase. "This'll make an interesting addition to end-of-quarter meetings."

"At least you'll know no one's staring at your head."

"Did I mention you're no longer allowed to help? With anything? Ever?"

Clark grinned. "Chloe's been coaching me to be a smartass. She said I had to tarnish my image if I ever wanted a date."

"Clark, if you get these off me, *I'll* date you."

Clark's eyes gleamed. "I'll hold you to that. Bend over."

"What, no flowers?"

Clark laughed--and blushed, which would have to be the estimable Chloe's next project. "Just do it. I have an idea."

The idea, of course, was to get Lex's eyes off him for the several seconds it took to wave his hands over the whole surface of Lex's body at just under the speed of sound. Buffeted and baffled, two hundred cabbage moths forgot their strange attraction and wandered off above the grass. "All gone."

"My hero." Lex straightened, shivering once in reflex at the remembered feeling of twelve hundred tiny legs plucking at his skin, the wind of four hundred departing wings. "So where do you want me to take you? Paris on the Concorde? The foothills of Nepal? Italy, to the Mouth of Truth?"

"Nah," Clark said, in front of him somehow without Lex seeing him move. Lex couldn't read his face, and that frightened him; unreadable was his father finding him looking at hoarded pictures of his mother, or about to administer one of his demeaningly painless slaps.

Clark stepped forward, and by force of will Lex didn't step back, and suddenly there was someone else's breath on his lips, someone's body heat slowly saturating his skin. "I'm a smalltown guy," Clark said. "I like to eat what's in front of me."

"Steak fries," Lex murmured. Clark caught the last word with a kiss to his upper lip, turning it into a mumble.

"Corn on the cob," Clark offered when he was done. Lex kissed his cheekbone. "Jut."

"What in God's name is jut?"

"Go with it." Clark's hands were under his shirt now, light and powerful and shaking just a little. Lex was fairly sure he had an individual heart beating under every spot Clark touched. "Cornbread."

"Coleslaw."

"Buttermilk."

"Ugh...If you want to keep the mood, Kent, don't ever say that to me again."

Clark looked up from the place he was tongueing beneath Lex's ear. Lex was positive he didn't actually need to scrape his stubblerough chin over every inch of sensitive throat in the process, but went weak-kneed anyway. "If you don't like white, creamy, slightly bitter liquid, the next part of this date is gonna suck."

"You need someone besides Chloe teaching you how to use your mouth," Lex agreed. "And sucking's a good start."

It was an even better finish.

Around twilight, a flock of faintly green-glowing moths settled on Johnathan Kent as he shipped the ramp of his produce truck at the vegetable stand on County Road BB. He swatted at them fruitlessly until Lana Lang's young man, Whitney, pulled up in his pickup.

"Can I help you, Mr. Kent?"

"Yeah, Whitney, I just don't know what's going on here, I've never seen them act like this! Can you get them off or something?" ~And why did "get them off" suddenly sound obscene?~

"Sure, Mr. Kent," said Whitney--almost eagerly, Johnathan thought. "Just a minute."

As Whitney climbed down from the cab and made his way around the bed toward him, Johnathan Kent thought, ~My God, why didn't I ever notice that boy's ass?~

The way Three Words works:

Give me three words and I'll write a page...well, at the most two...on it. The only rule is that the story must contain those words, not a conjugation thereof, and has to be in the specified fandom or with the specified pairing. It was gleaned from the Wonderful Te's site, may we give her many alms and much homage.