Author: Sleeps With Coyotes
Title: Floating
Category: Clark/Lex slash AU
Feedback: ciceqi@www.slashcity.com
Rating: PG for m/m kissyface and waterlogged Luthors.
Disclaimer: It's not really work / It's just the WB's boyz / Still slashing 'tween the frames / Cos we never see them kiss / But we wish...we wish...  :)
Spoilers: For the Pilot.
Notes: For the CLFF challenge.  Also, I recently picked up this really bad habit of drowning my muses.  This is the first time it's been canon, though...heh!  It was going to be creepier, but Lex ended up in a good mood after all.  ::shrugs::  I guess Clark just has this effect on him...
Challenge: What if Lex had pulled Clark down for a kiss after being resurrected in Smallville?  Blame it on oxygen deprivation? (kira-nerys)
Summary: Mouth to mouth.

It's like dreaming, hovering on the thin edge between waking and nightmare--like knowing you're dreaming and lying in the heavy cage of your body, unable to wake.  If you could open your eyes or move your hand, it would all be over, but you can't, and it isn't, and it seems to go on for days.

Some part of him knows he's underwater.  His open eyes stare without blinking into a finite shade of murky blue, like full-moon shadows through a mesh of trees or like soaring right up into the heart of a storm and wrapping himself in bruise-dark clouds.  It seems to him that his head hurts, that his lungs had briefly shivered and stung behind his ribs, but that's far away, unimaginably far, because those storm clouds around him are shifting, pulling him up with them and breaking apart and--

--and he's flying.  Suspended weightless in an empty sky, the sun pouring itself across his back and his outstretched arms, with the whole of Smallville spread out below him.  That morning, he'd hated the place and all it reminded him of, weakness and fear and the moment his father's disappointment had turned inexorably to disgust.  He hadn't wanted to come back, but from up here, with nothing between him and the soft, dreaming reality of the place, all he can see is the vastness of color and life spread out before him, just for him.  So fucking easy to love this endless mile of nowhere, just because it's beautiful and perfect and serene.

Because he's flying, and that's not strange at all.  He's been here before, many times, and it just keeps getting easier--he just never knows how or when, what would bring it on, so the search for the way back is almost dream-like in itself.  All he knows is that he has to get back here, as many times as he can, until he drifts away for good.  Fly and not come back.  Maybe then he can fall in love with the world and stay in love, keep this seamless ecstasy that surges beneath his skin.  It's like fucking, or the best high he's ever known--but the pills that sometimes send him here remind him a little of the magic Wardrobe in those old stories his mother read to him, because they only work once and never again.  Never, ever again.

He wants this time to be the one where he gets to stay, float forever--but before he knows it, the sun he feels on his back winks out with a sudden spreading of cold across his skin, like the dark clouds are back and pouring in across the sky.  He knows what's coming, and falling comes with a sickening spin of vertigo and loss, never-ending.  The worst thing about it is that even this feels good, screaming down out of the sky and plummeting into his own discarded flesh, and he can't help wondering if Lucifer had enjoyed the drop nearly as much as he did, even if it hurts.

And it does hurt to slam back into his body, to lose that feeling of freedom and peace, but he's carried some of it with him, like always--and as he wakes hard as a rock, like surfacing from a really good dream, there's a warm, soft mouth already fastened over his own.  Scent and sight seem to have deserted him, but the hands cupping his face and jaw are too big and hard to be a woman's, and he thinks he hears a boy's voice begging.  Breath, definitely, warmer than his own and trying to push its way inside him, but there's something in the way--something solid and heavy and comfortable that's filled him up and makes him feel sleepy and loved.  Like he could go back to flying in a minute, but there's something he wants to do first.

Opening his eyes slowly, he looks up into the face of beauty and meets a wide stare the color of the river--and it's the flying, the comforting weight behind his chest, the overlapping of that blind, idiot love he felt when he looked down over Smallville and felt things opening up before him instead of closing tight and locking him in.  It's all of this, and he doesn't even question as he brings a leaden arm up to wrap around the boy's neck and hold him tight, hold him close as Lex closes his eyes again and--

Kisses.  Slow and wet and thorough, and maybe this is all a dream, because it's sweet, it's good, and it goes on forever, one startled noise humming between them and a shy tongue almost, almost stroking him back.  First kiss--he can taste it in the hesitant response, and the panic-tense shoulders under his arm broadcast it like a shout, but it's happening and it's real and he tells the part of himself wondering when he's going to breathe to go fuck itself.  It's the first time he's been kicked out of heaven and back into flesh that he hasn't felt like killing himself after, and it's all because of this.  The unexpected anchor of a warm, soaked body hovering over his, and he knows he'll do anything at all to keep this, to make it his.  To fly again, and have this to come back to.

Even now, he feels like he could move mountains with a thought, as unstoppable and powerful as he ever felt in the air, and maybe that's what drives him to touch.  His other arm moves in slow-motion and by unexpected effort to ghost the boy's face, drifting down a sculpted chest until his knuckles brush a taut, flat stomach that jumps nervously beneath his touch.  Sweet and tender and so fucking young--and it's the boy's gasp, followed by an uncertain, shuddering moan, that finally does the trick, the barest tickle of breath breaking through that barrier in his chest and reminding his lungs of the first lesson they learned.

Inhale.  Air.  Breathe.

Wrenching his head away, he finds himself coughing on the bank of a narrow, forgotten river, almost convulsing as the water is forced from his chest in tearing spasms.  Hands curve around his shoulders and help him roll over on his side, and all he wants to do is curl up and wait for the screaming of his lungs to stop.  Breathing hurts, and he misses the deadly comfort of the water almost as much as the tentative caress of that mouth on his own, but there's something else that's twisting frantically in his thoughts for recognition, and he thinks it might be important.  That face...perfect and beautiful and real, like the world stretched out below him...

Rolling back over with a final cough, he stares up at his savior with the strangest sense that he's flying again, because this...is impossible.  That kid...the one on the bridge...

"I could've sworn I hit you," he grates past a raw throat, the world shimmering around him like an oxygen high.  It matches the spike driving itself into his skull, right behind his eyes, but even that's starting to fade as he concentrates on breathing and his rescuer's reply.

Disbelief and fear and...unmitigated shock look back at him, and he doesn't think the last is from his almost-question.  Touching his lips, the boy stares blindly at nothing, lakewater eyes soft and stunned, but the faint blush doesn't go away.  "If you had, I'd be...I'd be dead."

Now the shock hits, and Lex can more than sympathize, because he knows it's true--knows what he saw in the instant before his head hit the steering wheel, knows what it's like to be alive in the face of all reason--and how many times does this make?

How could he not have known?

All those times he'd flown before, from that first time at fifteen when he'd woke an hour later to find a needle still jammed in his arm and Louis dead beside him, and so many times after--coming closer together as he looked harder for the way back, as his father treated him more and more like the enemy and the people around him just looked away.  Looked at anything but him, and the money and cars and the clubs had all been fine, fine distractions.  Distracting enough that no one had even noticed that he'd died more times than most of them had made bail.

Died.  He'd died each time, and that's the price he pays for flying.

Sick thing is, he still wants to do it again.

"Um, I'm sorry," the kid says suddenly, focusing on Lex again with a shamefaced expression that looks perfectly sincere.  "Are you all right?  I think you hit your head, but...does anything feel broken?  I mean, I had to do CPR, and I think if you do it right, you're supposed to have some cracked ribs, but--"

Sitting up slowly, Lex rubs absently at his chest, but he feels...  "Fine.  I'm fine, thanks.  You pulled me out...?"  Stupid question--he knows damned well the kid did--but he can't seem to wrap his mind around anything beyond that one, numbing revelation.  The one where he ought to have been dead long before this.

"Yeah.  I mean...you didn't come up..."  Stark terror in the younger man's voice, and Lex looks, really looks at his rescuer and feels a cloudy echo of the fierce devotion that had followed him back to life.

"Thanks," he says again, reaching out to lay a cautious hand on the boy's arm.  There's a tiny twinge in the muscles bunched firm beneath his palm, not a flinch but a startled jerk, like the hyperawareness of over-sensitized skin.  "You saved my life."

That gains a blink, like it hadn't really sunk in before this, and the look that spreads across the square, handsome face before him is almost one of awe.  But--"You kissed me," bursts from the boy's mouth, startled and confused, and Lex can't quite keep himself from grinning.

"I did, didn't I?  Does this mean I can ask your name?"

"Clark," his rescuer says, blushing fiercely and dropping his eyes, only to glance up immediately though long, damp lashes.  "Clark Kent."

"Lex Luthor," he replies, and his hand's still wrapped around Clark's arm, and Clark isn't moving away.  "Would you believe me if I used the 'I mistook you for an angel' line?"

In Metropolis, the sheer banality of the cliché would have been enough to earn him a groan and a laugh, but Clark just gives him a sidelong look and a grin that casts serious aspersions on Lex's sanity.  "Um...did I mention you hit your head?"

Lex finds himself laughing instead, and it hurts, but...  "Yeah.  Sorry.  Just...chalk it up to tradition.  Heroes are supposed to be kissed," he clarifies when Clark just stares at him, and he can tell he's caught the younger man off-guard again, but he doesn't care.  Some other day, he might have apologized profusely, done everything in his power to assure Clark Kent that it was nothing, he'd been out of his mind, that he hadn't known it was a boy he was kissing, that the adrenaline surge of coming back to life could excuse pretty much anything.

But he isn't going to.  Because as a horrified shout from the bridge draws his eyes upward for a moment, he can just make out Clark's muffled words, not-quite meant to be overheard.

"Then I've really got to get into the hero business..."

And suddenly he loves life, madly and unreasonably, even with his feet planted firmly on the ground.

end