xparrot | this is all your fault

Yes, you. Because I did this, and you did not stop me. So really you only have yourself to blame. (That, and housecleaning puts me in the mood for absurdity, and also 6th season Clex is difficult to write without eventually becoming overcome with the urge to pick extravagantly!tortured!Lex up and give him snugglies and Clark is not quite at that point. Almost, but not quite. Geeze, it's been 50 pages, how many more do you need? Sigh.)

Smallville Season 6: PART II - The Equilateral Sides of the Tragic Triangle Becomes Inexorably More Tangled, In an Arguably Literal Way

(Some 50 pages later. These intervening chapters are of such an intensity of expression that to reproduce them here might wreak terrible damage upon the very fabric of this most fragile system of tubes.)

..."Oh, no," murmured the once-maiden in her meticulously appointed bedchamber that very eve. "Oh, someone, help me!" But diamond tears sprang to the hazelnut pearls of her eyes as she realized no one could hear her elusive whisper.

Little was she to know that those few miles away, her heartsick erstwhile lover had his exceptional ear cocked in the stalwart castle's direction. And no more able was he to refuse that dulcetly importunate whimper than he would have been able to fly, or in his case bear a mountain on his broad shoulders--no, survive an atomic blast--er, circumnavigate the globe on foot--um, bounce a bullet off his manly eyeball--perhaps inscribe a greeting card; is calligraphy generally recognized as one of his superior gifts?--at any rate, amidst the endless litanies of possibilities, that which was least possible even unto the incredible reaches of his power was to refuse that softly spoken cry for assistance.

Thus he came, over hill and dale and field and forest and the occasional exceedingly startled bovine, which blinked brown eyes in profuse confusion before returning unsettled to the chewing of her cud, to Lana Lang's bedchamber. "What is it?" Clark entreated her, and only barely managed to cease pronouncing 'my heart's desire' before it tumbled from his too-bold lips and proved his noble professions of friendship to be only diaphanous cover for his passionately pounding pulse.

In the few moments since he had heard and responded, more dazzling droplets had crowded onto the coral ledge rimming her shining orbs, threatening to spill down the flawless expanse of her rose cheeks. "Clark," her lips shaped her clandestine beloved's appellation, "oh, help me, my hair..."

For indeed, a hank of the raven tresses had seen fit to curve its silken length around the carved and polished cherry bedpost, and there no matter how she tugged and pleaded, like a haggard mother in a war-torn nation clutching desperately at her crying child while flaming arrows whistled overhead, these strands would not release their embrace of the delicately winged cherub engraved upon the wood.

"Oh, Lana," Clark breathed, tears coming unbidden to his own evergreen globes to see such pains inflicted upon this single one he loved more than mother, best friend, teacher, mentor, sister, brother, or father, that is if his father still lived, God rest his soul. "How brave you are, to endure this!" and with fingers augmented by the swift power of a race born such an unfathomable distance away that the light shimmering off Lana Lang's fair forehead would not cast a single ray on the rocky, space-lost wreckage that was all that remained of the formerly ice-encased planet for almost a century, give or take a convenient spatiotemporal wormhole, he began to unwind her tresses from the treacherous post.

So it was, that he was bent solicitously over her maiden-like if technically not literally maiden figure in her distress, when the portal of her chamber did swing ajar, and caught in its frame like the victim of a blackmailer's candid photograph stood Lex. There together he espied them, and seeing his adored seemingly clasped in the fetchingly ripped arms of his one-time comrade and now most manxome foe, the millionaire mogul's heart within his chest did shatter, even as will a tupperware bowl frozen to a scant few degrees above zero Kelvin when hit with a ten-pound sledgehammer.

*cue dramatic organ*

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

For the love of little fishes, somebody do something!