The Heart of a King -- Part 3, Metamorphosis
By: PepperjackCandy
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Het, Genderbending
Pairing: Lex (sort of)/Clark
A/N: Again, only the stuff that's changed is in here, so you'll just have to remember the big Clark/Greg fight at the end.
Also, um, Lex just happens to have a lead box lying around and chooses that one, of all of them, to put the necklace into? So not going to happen in this universe.
======
So. This is the Smallville Farmer's Market. What does one do at a Farmer's Market? Farm? Market? Er's?
She was brought out of her reverie by a male voice asking, "Excuse me. Miss Luthor?"
Leo turned and found herself face-to-face with a police officer, "Good morning, Officer . . ."
"Sheriff, ma'am. Sheriff Waid."
"Yes, of course. How may I help you?"
"I wanted to ask about the driver's side seatbelt in your car. Do you have any idea how your seatbelt got torn up like that?"
She smiled widely and lied blatantly, "I could've sworn I saw Clark Kent put a knife back in his pocket after I woke up."
"A pocketknife?" The sheriff tensed up.
"Yes," she paused, running through her memory of Kansas' statutes, "the blade was three, three and a half inches long . . . ."
Sheriff Waid relaxed, "and he sawed through the seatbelt with the knife?"
"Well, he must have, mustn't he? I mean, he hardly could've torn through it with his bare hands." She laughed lightly.
The sheriff echoed her laughter, "Of course not."
"Will there be anything else, Sheriff?"
"No, thank you, Miss Luthor."
The sheriff left and Leo continued walking the market, until she found Clark, who was watching a young man and woman kissing.
She approached Clark from behind, noting how he sat down on the edge of the bumper as she got closer.
"They're a lovely couple," she said once she was close enough.
"Yeah." He said noncommittally.
"I wanted to ask about this," she took the necklace out of her pocket, holding it where Clark could see it.
When Clark flinched away, Leo assumed it was because of the bad memories of the previous night. "It's Lana's," he choked out.
"Lana's?" she repeated, realizing that Lana was the name of the girl of the couple who'd been kissing earlier. But when she looked over there, the couple was gone.
She stuck the necklace back in her pocket. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah. Fine." He said shortly. But she heard the plaintive get that thing away from me, that he didn't voice.
"Don't worry. You won't see this necklace after today. I promise." She answered his unvoiced plea. Then followed it up with a more uncertain than she wanted it to be, "See you around?"
Clark managed a strained smile and nodded.
"Good."
Now to make good on her promise to Clark.
***
She only had to wait in the stables for fifteen minutes before Lana came riding up.
"Your form's good but his gait's off. You might want to check your shoes," Leo said by way of introduction. When the young girl didn't respond, she said, "Leo Luthor. My dad's a friend of your Aunt Nell."
"We've already met."
"Really?"
"When I was ten, I went to Metropolis for a riding competition,. Your father invited us to stay over. I only saw you the once. You didn't see me, though. You were reading something and nearly plowed me over in the hallway."
"You're right. I have no recollection. Oh, wait. That . . . little girl? Was you?"
She nearly laughed at the memory of the bewilderment on Lana's face when she asked the ten-year-old about chaos theory, so instead, she pointed out a cabinet full of trophies and ribbons. "These yours?"
Lana nodded. "It's tacky, but it makes Nell happy."
"Ah. I thought this necklace was yours." Leo reached into her pocket and held out the necklace.
"Where did you find it?" Lana asked.
"This year's scarecrow gave it to me."
She blinked in surprise at this. "That's not possible."
"Oh, I assure you. It is."
"No. My boyfriend's captain of the football team. He promised me . . ."
Leo saw her chance. If she couldn't give Clark a truck to thank him, she'd give him Lana Lang. "You have a boyfriend? What's his name?"
Lana preened, "Whitney Fordman," she said proudly.
"Whitney Fordman? The kid that Clark Kent saved today?"
"I just came back from seeing him. He's lucky Clark was there."
"I know the feeling. Kind of makes you wonder if you're with the right guy. One chucks footballs, the other helps save lives."
Confusion graced Lana's symmetrical features.
Leo moved in for the kill, "Speaking of saving lives, it's really surprising none of these . . . scarecrows of yours have died."
"But it's not like they nail them up or anything," Lana looked affronted.
"Nailing the victim is just a way of, say, adding insult to injury. The victim dies from asphyxiation. There's no way for him to support his own weight in this position," Leo extended her arms out to either side as an example, "so all of the body's weight is placed on the lungs, which give out, and the victim suffocates."
Lana goggled. "So they could've killed those boys?"
Leo nodded.
Lana, flustered, said, "I've got to go talk to Whi - someone." She began to stomp away, then turned around and held out her hand. "May I have my necklace back?"
Wordlessly, Leo held it out as Lana snatched it from her and stormed off.
"Don't worry about me. I'll see myself out," Leo said to the horse.
***
Lana kept her mad-on going until she got to Fordman's.
"Lana!" her oblivious boyfriend greeted her as she stomped up to him.
"We need to talk," she said shortly and dragged him outside. "Where were you before the game on Saturday?"
"Can we talk about this later? I've got to get back to work."
"It's a simple question, Whitney."
"I was warming up."
"So you didn't grab Clark Kent and hang him up in a field?"
"Lana, it was just a prank."
"'Just a prank'!?! Do you know how people on crosses die, Whitney?"
"Yeah, but we're careful."
"What does that mean? Has someone . . . been hurt?"
Whitney started babbling. "Not for a long time. 16 years. We learned our lesson and now we put their elbows on the crossbar. It helps support them so that it doesn't happen again."
Lana was appalled, she backed away saying, "I don't know, Whitney. I think I need some . . . time to think about all of this."
Then she hurried away, trying to ignore Whitney's cry of "Lana!" from behind her.
***
Clark brought over Leo's produce order and decided to see if she was up for a visit. He took the opportunity to explore Leo's office a little and found a little toy harbor with little toy ships.
Leo entered the room and greeted Clark with, "Save any lives on the way over? You keep it up and you could make a career out of it."
"I was just dropping off your produce. Planning an invasion?"
"My father gave this to me when I was nine."
"Cool gift."
"It wasn't a gift," she informed him haughtily, "It was a teaching tool. This," she held up a female figure, "was Cleopatra VII Philopater. The Cleopatra you probably know from school.
"This," she held up a male figure, "was Mark Antony, Cleopatra's husband. Well, one of her four husbands."
"Like a harem?"
Leo thought about this, "Not really, though she did have two husbands at a time for a while. The Ptolemies married family members. Often it was their siblings. Cleopatra may have been the result of such a sibling marriage.
"Anyway, Cleopatra's only brothers were much, much younger than she, but she married them for form's sake. One at a time.
"During her marriage to her first brother, she was also married to Julius Caesar. He was the father of her eldest son, Caesarion."
"Like the surgery?"
"It means 'little Caesar,' and no, not like the pizza chain.
"When Caesar died, his will adopted Octavian, whom you know as Augustus, and named him heir.
"Her fourth husband, Mark Antony, took offense at this slight and made it his life's goal to get Octavian to cede control of the empire to Caesarion, which led to the Battle of Actium," she pointed to the toy, "and then to the end of the line of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs."
"So where's Octavian?"
"Oh!" Leo flipped part of the 'harbor' over and revealed a small island with built-up walls. "Here." She reached under the wall and pulled out another male figure.
"I keep him hidden, because I don't like him much."
"I'd imagine not. Though it sounds like all of the men in her life gave Cleopatra a lot of trouble."
"Which was exactly Daddy's point. Well, one of them. He said that she was a powerful woman who made herself dependent on men who didn't respect that power.
"The other was that, because of this dependence on these Roman men, she made herself dependent on Roman military power. However, since they were Roman, when the going got rough, the legions had a tendency to desert, leaving Cleopatra woefully undermanned.
"That's why he sent me here."
"To build an army?"
Clark didn't know that Leo could blush, but she did. "More or less. He wants me to know that I'm never going to be dependent on a man. To . . . build an empire of my own."
"Starting with the fertilizer plant."
She nodded, "Along with any other business ventures that may come my way."
***
Tears in her eyes, Lana ran up to her bedroom. It was over. She could never go out with Whitney again. To think that he could possibly treat human life so casually.
She looked down at the necklace in her hand. Now, instead of a memorial to her parents, all she could see when she looked at it was Whitney explaining that no one had died in over a decade.
She opened her top dresser drawer, took out the box Nell had given her with the necklace, carefully placed her necklace inside it, and closed the book on that chapter of her life.
***
The next day, Clark walked up to the Fortress of Solitude, where he found Lana looking through his telescope at her house.
Surprised, he greeted her, "Lana."
"Your mom said I could wait up here. I hope you don't mind. This is an amazing place."
"My dad built it. Calls it my fortress of solitude."
"I didn't know you were into astronomy."
"Th-that's a hobby."
"Did you know you can see my house from here?"
"No. Really?" He yelped. He moved the telescope's focus off of her house. "You know, we've lived a mile apart our whole lives and you've never come over."
"And you're wondering what I'm doing here now."
"Not that I don't enjoy the company, but yes, I was."
"I found out about what Whitney did to you. The whole scarecrow thing and I came to make sure you were all right."
"I'm fine."
"He had no right to do that to you - did you know that you could have died?"
Clark just blinked at her, finally saying, "Who told you?"
"Leo Luthor. And when she told me that people die from being *tied* up on crosses - well, I had to see Whitney. He told me that he knew that. Someone died in 1985."
"What are you gonna do?
"I'm not sure. I thought I knew Whitney. Now I wonder what else I've been blind to in my life."
"I notice that your necklace is gone."
"I can't wear it anymore. I loaned it to Whitney, and now all I can think of when I wear it is that someone died, and that you could have died."
She looked deeply into Clark's eyes long enough that Clark cleared his throat and shifted back and forth on his feet before breaking eye contact.
"It sounds kind of weird, but it's made from a fragment of the meteor that killed my parents. Nell had it made. Gave it to me the day she officially adopted me and told me that life is about change. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's beautiful, but most of the time it's both. I better go. I'm glad you're okay, Clark."
***
Later that afternoon, Lana was feeding her horse when Greg Arkin appeared out of nowhere. "Hi, Greg," she said cautiously.
"It's time."
"Time for what?"
"For us."
With the proportional strength of an insect, or perhaps an arachnid, Greg grabbed Lana and began to walk away ignoring her feeble attempts to escape.
Whitney, just arriving to try to make up with Lana, saw them, but was too far away to catch them. As he headed back toward his truck, he saw Clark approaching.
"Are you here to bother Lana?" Clark asked.
"I came to try to make up with her, but someone just carried her away. I think it was Greg Arkin."
"Which way did he go?"
"He headed off into the woods."
"I think I know where he's going."
"Great, I'll drive."
By: PepperjackCandy
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Het, Genderbending
Pairing: Lex (sort of)/Clark
A/N: Again, only the stuff that's changed is in here, so you'll just have to remember the big Clark/Greg fight at the end.
Also, um, Lex just happens to have a lead box lying around and chooses that one, of all of them, to put the necklace into? So not going to happen in this universe.
======
So. This is the Smallville Farmer's Market. What does one do at a Farmer's Market? Farm? Market? Er's?
She was brought out of her reverie by a male voice asking, "Excuse me. Miss Luthor?"
Leo turned and found herself face-to-face with a police officer, "Good morning, Officer . . ."
"Sheriff, ma'am. Sheriff Waid."
"Yes, of course. How may I help you?"
"I wanted to ask about the driver's side seatbelt in your car. Do you have any idea how your seatbelt got torn up like that?"
She smiled widely and lied blatantly, "I could've sworn I saw Clark Kent put a knife back in his pocket after I woke up."
"A pocketknife?" The sheriff tensed up.
"Yes," she paused, running through her memory of Kansas' statutes, "the blade was three, three and a half inches long . . . ."
Sheriff Waid relaxed, "and he sawed through the seatbelt with the knife?"
"Well, he must have, mustn't he? I mean, he hardly could've torn through it with his bare hands." She laughed lightly.
The sheriff echoed her laughter, "Of course not."
"Will there be anything else, Sheriff?"
"No, thank you, Miss Luthor."
The sheriff left and Leo continued walking the market, until she found Clark, who was watching a young man and woman kissing.
She approached Clark from behind, noting how he sat down on the edge of the bumper as she got closer.
"They're a lovely couple," she said once she was close enough.
"Yeah." He said noncommittally.
"I wanted to ask about this," she took the necklace out of her pocket, holding it where Clark could see it.
When Clark flinched away, Leo assumed it was because of the bad memories of the previous night. "It's Lana's," he choked out.
"Lana's?" she repeated, realizing that Lana was the name of the girl of the couple who'd been kissing earlier. But when she looked over there, the couple was gone.
She stuck the necklace back in her pocket. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah. Fine." He said shortly. But she heard the plaintive get that thing away from me, that he didn't voice.
"Don't worry. You won't see this necklace after today. I promise." She answered his unvoiced plea. Then followed it up with a more uncertain than she wanted it to be, "See you around?"
Clark managed a strained smile and nodded.
"Good."
Now to make good on her promise to Clark.
***
She only had to wait in the stables for fifteen minutes before Lana came riding up.
"Your form's good but his gait's off. You might want to check your shoes," Leo said by way of introduction. When the young girl didn't respond, she said, "Leo Luthor. My dad's a friend of your Aunt Nell."
"We've already met."
"Really?"
"When I was ten, I went to Metropolis for a riding competition,. Your father invited us to stay over. I only saw you the once. You didn't see me, though. You were reading something and nearly plowed me over in the hallway."
"You're right. I have no recollection. Oh, wait. That . . . little girl? Was you?"
She nearly laughed at the memory of the bewilderment on Lana's face when she asked the ten-year-old about chaos theory, so instead, she pointed out a cabinet full of trophies and ribbons. "These yours?"
Lana nodded. "It's tacky, but it makes Nell happy."
"Ah. I thought this necklace was yours." Leo reached into her pocket and held out the necklace.
"Where did you find it?" Lana asked.
"This year's scarecrow gave it to me."
She blinked in surprise at this. "That's not possible."
"Oh, I assure you. It is."
"No. My boyfriend's captain of the football team. He promised me . . ."
Leo saw her chance. If she couldn't give Clark a truck to thank him, she'd give him Lana Lang. "You have a boyfriend? What's his name?"
Lana preened, "Whitney Fordman," she said proudly.
"Whitney Fordman? The kid that Clark Kent saved today?"
"I just came back from seeing him. He's lucky Clark was there."
"I know the feeling. Kind of makes you wonder if you're with the right guy. One chucks footballs, the other helps save lives."
Confusion graced Lana's symmetrical features.
Leo moved in for the kill, "Speaking of saving lives, it's really surprising none of these . . . scarecrows of yours have died."
"But it's not like they nail them up or anything," Lana looked affronted.
"Nailing the victim is just a way of, say, adding insult to injury. The victim dies from asphyxiation. There's no way for him to support his own weight in this position," Leo extended her arms out to either side as an example, "so all of the body's weight is placed on the lungs, which give out, and the victim suffocates."
Lana goggled. "So they could've killed those boys?"
Leo nodded.
Lana, flustered, said, "I've got to go talk to Whi - someone." She began to stomp away, then turned around and held out her hand. "May I have my necklace back?"
Wordlessly, Leo held it out as Lana snatched it from her and stormed off.
"Don't worry about me. I'll see myself out," Leo said to the horse.
***
Lana kept her mad-on going until she got to Fordman's.
"Lana!" her oblivious boyfriend greeted her as she stomped up to him.
"We need to talk," she said shortly and dragged him outside. "Where were you before the game on Saturday?"
"Can we talk about this later? I've got to get back to work."
"It's a simple question, Whitney."
"I was warming up."
"So you didn't grab Clark Kent and hang him up in a field?"
"Lana, it was just a prank."
"'Just a prank'!?! Do you know how people on crosses die, Whitney?"
"Yeah, but we're careful."
"What does that mean? Has someone . . . been hurt?"
Whitney started babbling. "Not for a long time. 16 years. We learned our lesson and now we put their elbows on the crossbar. It helps support them so that it doesn't happen again."
Lana was appalled, she backed away saying, "I don't know, Whitney. I think I need some . . . time to think about all of this."
Then she hurried away, trying to ignore Whitney's cry of "Lana!" from behind her.
***
Clark brought over Leo's produce order and decided to see if she was up for a visit. He took the opportunity to explore Leo's office a little and found a little toy harbor with little toy ships.
Leo entered the room and greeted Clark with, "Save any lives on the way over? You keep it up and you could make a career out of it."
"I was just dropping off your produce. Planning an invasion?"
"My father gave this to me when I was nine."
"Cool gift."
"It wasn't a gift," she informed him haughtily, "It was a teaching tool. This," she held up a female figure, "was Cleopatra VII Philopater. The Cleopatra you probably know from school.
"This," she held up a male figure, "was Mark Antony, Cleopatra's husband. Well, one of her four husbands."
"Like a harem?"
Leo thought about this, "Not really, though she did have two husbands at a time for a while. The Ptolemies married family members. Often it was their siblings. Cleopatra may have been the result of such a sibling marriage.
"Anyway, Cleopatra's only brothers were much, much younger than she, but she married them for form's sake. One at a time.
"During her marriage to her first brother, she was also married to Julius Caesar. He was the father of her eldest son, Caesarion."
"Like the surgery?"
"It means 'little Caesar,' and no, not like the pizza chain.
"When Caesar died, his will adopted Octavian, whom you know as Augustus, and named him heir.
"Her fourth husband, Mark Antony, took offense at this slight and made it his life's goal to get Octavian to cede control of the empire to Caesarion, which led to the Battle of Actium," she pointed to the toy, "and then to the end of the line of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs."
"So where's Octavian?"
"Oh!" Leo flipped part of the 'harbor' over and revealed a small island with built-up walls. "Here." She reached under the wall and pulled out another male figure.
"I keep him hidden, because I don't like him much."
"I'd imagine not. Though it sounds like all of the men in her life gave Cleopatra a lot of trouble."
"Which was exactly Daddy's point. Well, one of them. He said that she was a powerful woman who made herself dependent on men who didn't respect that power.
"The other was that, because of this dependence on these Roman men, she made herself dependent on Roman military power. However, since they were Roman, when the going got rough, the legions had a tendency to desert, leaving Cleopatra woefully undermanned.
"That's why he sent me here."
"To build an army?"
Clark didn't know that Leo could blush, but she did. "More or less. He wants me to know that I'm never going to be dependent on a man. To . . . build an empire of my own."
"Starting with the fertilizer plant."
She nodded, "Along with any other business ventures that may come my way."
***
Tears in her eyes, Lana ran up to her bedroom. It was over. She could never go out with Whitney again. To think that he could possibly treat human life so casually.
She looked down at the necklace in her hand. Now, instead of a memorial to her parents, all she could see when she looked at it was Whitney explaining that no one had died in over a decade.
She opened her top dresser drawer, took out the box Nell had given her with the necklace, carefully placed her necklace inside it, and closed the book on that chapter of her life.
***
The next day, Clark walked up to the Fortress of Solitude, where he found Lana looking through his telescope at her house.
Surprised, he greeted her, "Lana."
"Your mom said I could wait up here. I hope you don't mind. This is an amazing place."
"My dad built it. Calls it my fortress of solitude."
"I didn't know you were into astronomy."
"Th-that's a hobby."
"Did you know you can see my house from here?"
"No. Really?" He yelped. He moved the telescope's focus off of her house. "You know, we've lived a mile apart our whole lives and you've never come over."
"And you're wondering what I'm doing here now."
"Not that I don't enjoy the company, but yes, I was."
"I found out about what Whitney did to you. The whole scarecrow thing and I came to make sure you were all right."
"I'm fine."
"He had no right to do that to you - did you know that you could have died?"
Clark just blinked at her, finally saying, "Who told you?"
"Leo Luthor. And when she told me that people die from being *tied* up on crosses - well, I had to see Whitney. He told me that he knew that. Someone died in 1985."
"What are you gonna do?
"I'm not sure. I thought I knew Whitney. Now I wonder what else I've been blind to in my life."
"I notice that your necklace is gone."
"I can't wear it anymore. I loaned it to Whitney, and now all I can think of when I wear it is that someone died, and that you could have died."
She looked deeply into Clark's eyes long enough that Clark cleared his throat and shifted back and forth on his feet before breaking eye contact.
"It sounds kind of weird, but it's made from a fragment of the meteor that killed my parents. Nell had it made. Gave it to me the day she officially adopted me and told me that life is about change. Sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's beautiful, but most of the time it's both. I better go. I'm glad you're okay, Clark."
***
Later that afternoon, Lana was feeding her horse when Greg Arkin appeared out of nowhere. "Hi, Greg," she said cautiously.
"It's time."
"Time for what?"
"For us."
With the proportional strength of an insect, or perhaps an arachnid, Greg grabbed Lana and began to walk away ignoring her feeble attempts to escape.
Whitney, just arriving to try to make up with Lana, saw them, but was too far away to catch them. As he headed back toward his truck, he saw Clark approaching.
"Are you here to bother Lana?" Clark asked.
"I came to try to make up with her, but someone just carried her away. I think it was Greg Arkin."
"Which way did he go?"
"He headed off into the woods."
"I think I know where he's going."
"Great, I'll drive."