Smallville and all of its related elements are copyright © 2001 - 2007 Tollin-Robbins Productions, WB Television and DC Comics. Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all of its related elements belong to people other than me as well!
Chapter Ten
Willow waits at home, the phone glaring up at her. Buffy had gone for some re-con at the warehouse, and was supposed to ring on her cell phone when she was ready for back-up. Conner sat impatiently next to her, tapping his fingers on the computer table and using her tap top screen as a high-hat.
When his tapping reached an all time irritating high, she reached out and stilled his hand.
"You're going to bust my screen," she explained.
Conner reached for the phone and dialed Buffy's number.
"Conner," Willow exclaimed, reaching to take the phone from him. "You know Buffy always forgets to put it on silent! What if they're hiding?"
The phone's tinny ring tone sounded from the kitchen.
"Good point," Connor said. "Except that she also forgot to bring it with her."
"We're going," Willow said. "Get the girls ready."
Chloe opened the door. "How is the home front?" she asked. Lana followed in her wake.
"Annoyed."
Willow stalked up the stairs, yelling for Slayers to congregate. Then, the phone rang.
Willow ran to pick it up, because, though it couldn't be Buffy, she had been waiting all evening for a phone call.
"Yeah," she said.
She listened. Then, all the blood rushed from her face. "Yeah," she repeated. "I'll be there in ten."
She hung up.
The Slayers had assembled in the living room.
"The hospital," she explained. "It's Xander."
She grabbed her keys and slammed the door on the way out.
Q
They head underground.
Spike leads the way to a room packed with crate after crate of what must be explosives. In the middle, a pentagram; at each point, two figures: a robe clad man and a child.
Their heads snap up in unison.
"Oh God," Buffy whispers, and, without hesitation, she jumps forward. Spike is moving just as fast as her, the two of them pushing off crates and striding towards the vampires and their victims and the math, in their head, is too poisonous not to make their situation hopeless. Three of them, moving across the room, and all these vamps had to do was flinch.
They don't notice that Clark hasn't kept up. They focus on the girls, not their comrades; Clark within five feet of the closest monster when he drops.
And the vampires make their moves. Spike dives for the closest girl and Buffy for the one to the right, but knives flash and stakes were futile against these beasts.
An arrow, from a cross-bow, flies across the room. The Green Arrow, with Angel by his side, had come in through a window.
Buffy slams into the vampire with tremendous force, and pulls her stake free as though it had sunk into putty. She erases the picture of the girls from her mind and focuses on the vampire in front of her. She can't think about Angel, suddenly alive and freed, fighting one of the vampires across the room, or of a strange, leather clad human with a cross-bow. She can't remember that Clark is weakened by these rocks or that he could die and she could lose another person she was starting to care for.
Now, all that mattered was the fight.
Spike looks up from where he crouched. The girl he had gone for had been closer than the others by a long shot, and though the vampire had been quick, Spike had been quicker. Fortified by the boy's blood and the proximity of the rocks, he had moved like a gazelle. Though he felt slightly sickened, either from the starvation or from the strange, strengthening blood within him, he had saved the girl.
But a vampire loomed above him, and Angel was suddenly on scene, tossing the guy across the room as though he were a bean bag.
"Thanks, mate," he says.
"Don't mention it," Angel replies, oddly good natured, considered the company. He was usually so annoyed to have to save Spike's life.
Spike moves with the girl, towards where Clark appears to be injured. A second later, though, Clark is standing up again and Spike is desperate to fight these abominations who kept him chained and tortured him for days. He hands the girl off to him, and Clark takes her gently into his arms.
Clark looks across the room. Oliver was there, suddenly, shockingly, and with him another man, him and Buffy fighting with practiced ease. Oliver has his toys and Spike moves like an animal and there are five monsters and four dead girls and Kryptonite leaving a palpable thickness in the air and this child is so scared and Clark doesn't want to be useless again.
So he runs, out the door where they came, moving faster than a human could see, until he makes it to the car and it's then that he realizes that another car comes up the long drive.
"You're going to be okay," he says to her. And then time slows down to its normal pace and he can finally take in how terrified this girl is and how tired and hungry she must be.
He shrugs his jacket off and puts it around her thin shoulders.
"The other girls?" she asks.
"I'm sorry," Clark replies, and she sobs into the jacket.
"I'm going to go back in to the warehouse," he says. "A car is coming, though. Some of my friends are in it, and they'll get you some help, okay?"
She nods, and Clark glances again at the car, the headlights sharp against the darkening sky, Chloe's car and Lana riding shotgun. He disappears before they can see him.
Q
Buffy only just barely registers Clark returning to the scene. She'd yelled, only moments earlier that they had to destroy the rocks, and she thought they'd gotten it all. But the vampire she was fighting, just now, when Clark's entrance distracted her, he still had his, and he was running.
He was throwing his rock into the air, pulling off the chain on his neck, and Buffy eyes widened as she saw him run towards the sliver of light from the sunset coming through the broken window.
He's going to kill himself, was Buffy's last, confused thought, before the vamp caught fire.
Right over a case of dynamite—
In a room full of explosives—
Buffy screamed a warning and turned, but the thought of running not even fully formed before—
Clark saw the explosion ripple outward, and he moved towards Buffy, planning to shield her from the blast as he'd done so many times.
His head snaps to the side as the meteor rock the vampire threw flies past his head. It slows him imperceptibly, but the first blast is too far gone and there is metal, shrapnel, flying all around him, bouncing off him and the Kryptonite is long gone and his mind clears just soon enough for him to see Buffy, mid turn, and some pole and a jagged sheet of metal are flying towards her.
The world around him, the other fighters in the room, they blur into nothing as he runs towards her. His hand catches around the pole and the sheet flies off his back, slicing into his shirt, and he thinks—Thank God.
The second explosion knocks him forward a little, and he moves to wrap himself around Buffy, so that she doesn't get burnt and then he realizes that his hand won't move.
It's not that his hand can't move, but he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment so that he can try to comprehend why it just will not move.
He looks down.
"Buffy?" he asks.
"It doesn't hurt," she says, and she's not looking at her chest, she's looking up at him. He slowly, doesn't—doesn't—move his hand, still wrapped firmly around that pole, turns her, so that his arm wraps all the way around her body. He picks her up, his arm supporting her back and his other arm under her legs.
He thinks that probably, there was another explosion. He wonders briefly about the other guys, Buffy's vampire friend and Oliver and his friend.
"I'm going to be okay," she tells him.
He thinks that he should be saying that to her.
"But, smart guy," she says, and she's gasping like someone's standing on her chest, "a. Hospital. Would. Be. Nice."
So he runs.
Q
Chloe gets out of the car and runs to Clark's truck. She thought she'd seen a girl sitting in it, but she hadn't been sure, not until she rapped on the window and saw her face pressed against the glass.
The girl opened the door and Chloe listened to her slightly hysterical and very confused account of what had transpired over the past few days.
Lana though, she was running. Towards the warehouse, towards Clark, she didn't know; she wasn't supposed to love him any more, she wasn't supposed to care.
"Clark!" Lana called. She saw him materialize, as though her calling had brought him forth, at the door of the warehouse. He was looking into the sky and he was carrying someone—it looked like Buffy—and Lana screamed as a huge explosion sent shrapnel flying in all directions. Some landed mere feet from where Lana was standing, but she couldn't find the strength in her to move. Clark was too close to the warehouse still, and she suspected that the next explosion would be larger.
As Clark got closer to her, Lana could see that Buffy was covered in blood. There was a jagged piece of something protruding from her chest, but Lana wasn't able to get a closer look because at that moment another, exponentially larger, explosion occurred. Lana was thrown backward from the blast and when she was able to push herself into a sitting position she saw that the fire had completely engulfed Clark and Buffy.
The smoke began to clear and Lana saw Clark hunched over, with Buffy folded beneath him. His clothes were on fire, but somehow, miraculously, he pushed himself up. Another explosion sounded from behind him, and Lana saw a huge piece of shrapnel flying towards her. There was no time for her to move, and the metal screeched as it spun toward her—
Chloe had come up just behind Lana, and had watched when the explosion had knocked her off her feet. As Lana had fallen backward, Chloe had seen the metal flying toward her, and Lana had thrown her hands over her face and closed her eyes, but Chloe, from a bit further away, had stared as Clark disappeared from where he had been crouched seconds earlier and reappeared, looming over Lana, and the metal had struck his back and bent around him from the momentum it carried. With one arm he held Buffy, bloodied and pale.
For nearly a second, Chloe and Clark met eyes, and Chloe could tell that he had checked them over, looking for injuries, before he turned back to Buffy. There was a terrified look in his eyes, one that Chloe had never seen before. In that moment though, before Clark disappeared again, she saw why.
There was a pole, several centimeters thick, thrust through Buffy's sternum. Clark's hand, blackened from the explosion, was wrapped around the pole near the base, holding it steady. Chloe nodded slightly, giving him permission to leave them. The explosions had ceased. Lana wasn't hurt. They didn't need him anymore—but Buffy did.
Clark looked up and then into the distance, and Chloe knew that her human eyes would never be able to trace his movement. She was about to rush forward, to Lana, when a wave of air knocked her backward. Now propped on her elbows, she had a view of the pale blue sky above them, and she watched as Clark faded into the distance.
As Chloe picked Lana up from the ground, and started the too-familiar game of making excuses for the inexplicable, she had one thought echoing through her mind. It was an effort not to say it aloud every time Lana asks her a question, demanded an explanation.
Clark could fly.
Q
Willow pulled the car to the side of the road.
Her hands shook. She squeezed her eyes shut and placed her hands softly over her face. She needed to cry; she needed to be strong for Xander, so that meant that now, she needed to cry.
Her sobs came in long, tight breaths; an asthma attack, an episode of panic, she cried without tears for so many minutes. She thought about Xander, how he used to steal her Barbies and how he secretly cried when her goldfish died, and the fire truck and the yellow crayon. She thought of how he'd loved Buffy and Cordelia and finally her and how he came to her after his wedding disaster and how he'd been the only one there after she'd tried to destroy the world. He was her armor, through every battle.
All she wanted was to take away his pain. Throughout their lives they'd done so much for each other, they'd carried each other, she'd take the fall, he'd take the blame, they were always there to catch the other.
Buffy was the hurricane; they were the calm beneath.
Her foot started to tap against the gas pedal, tap-taping, tap-taping, and the sobs were gone. She tapped her foot, and then slowly took her hands from her face.
They had stopped trembling.
She closed her eyes and let her other senses guide her. The air was trembling with power, the ground vibrating with those stones, all those stones, so thick with power and ripe with rage.
She threw open the door of the car and started to run.