Chapter Text
Lana woke up and immediately knew the ceiling was wrong.
Not her ceiling at all, it was so much brown paneling. She sat up and the movement felt strange—weirdly easy, she felt powerful. Her hands looked enormous against the plaid comforter. Eww, plaid.
These are Clark Kent's hands, she thinks.
She looked down at herself—at Clark's flannel pajamas, at his broad chest, at legs that went on forever. Her heart hammered. Okay. Okay, this was fine. Weird, but fine. She'd heard about meteor-induced body swaps before. Smallville had a support group for this kind of thing, probably.
Then she reached for the lamp on the nightstand and accidentally crushed it.
The ceramic base crumpled like tissue paper in her grip. Shards tinkled to the floor.
Lana stared at the destruction in her palm. She flexed the fingers experimentally. Crushed ceramic fell away. She touched the nightstand, barely a brush of fingertips, and the wood splintered. Okay…
"Oh God."
She stood up too fast and knocked the bed several feet across the floor with a loud scrape and thud.
"Oh God. Oh my God."
What else could this body do? She looked at her arms—Clark's arms—and tried to remember every impossible thing she'd ever seen him survive. She could see right through the door, oh no. Lana blinked frantically and her vision returned to normal.
This couldn't just be super strength was it? This was—how much strength? How fast could she move? Could she fly? Did Clark fly?
Her breathing picked up. The floor creaked under her feet and she froze, terrified she'd fall through to the kitchen. How the hell did he even walk around?
Clark woke up to pink.
Pink canopy. Pink walls. Pink floral bedspread. A teddy bear was clutched in his hands—tiny hands, delicate hands—and he could feel long hair spilling across the pillow.
He sat up and looked down at himself.
Lana's burgundy tank top and white pajama pants. Lana's body.
"Great," he muttered in Lana's voice, of course, that was going to take some getting used to.
He rubbed his face—her face—and tried to think. This wasn't the weirdest thing that had happened to him. Last month he'd been temporarily split into two people. Before that, he'd aged ninety years in a weekend. Body swap? That was practically normal.
The question was whether to tell anyone.
His parents would want to help, but they'd also panic. Lana must be at his house, in his body, with his powers—
Clark's stomach dropped. She'd have his powers. She'd have all of them. Well, at least she was a trustworthy person.
He needed to get to Lana and then go to school and find Chloe and Pete. They could help investigate while he and Lana kept up appearances. Easy.
He stood and immediately stumbled. The center of gravity was all wrong. He caught himself on the vanity and accidentally met his own reflection.
Lana's face stared back at him. Her wide eyes. Her delicate features. Her hair, which was currently a disaster.
This was fine. He could do this.
Clark opened the closet and scanned the options. Everything was so...pastel. Or floral. Or lacy. He finally found a red t-shirt in the back—the only actual red shirt in the entire closet—and grabbed a pair of indigo blue jeans. He needed a sweater. Lana had to have a sweater.
In the bottom drawer, he found it. His old red sweater, the one from middle school that he'd assumed he lost. He pulled it on and was struck by how well it fit now. He wasn't drowning in it. Lana's body actually filled it out. She must have borrowed it years ago.
He dressed quickly and tried not to think too hard about the mechanics of it all.
As he laced up Lana's shoes—sneakers, thank God, not those ballet flats, at least she was a cheerleader—his mind drifted back to yesterday. The school theater. The air system filtration was spewing out weird green mist. They'd found an enormous butterfly creature underneath the stage, its wings glowing with meteor rock residue. It had been poisoning everyone at rehearsal. They hadn't meant to kill it. Clark had pushed Lana out of the way when it lunged and they'd both fallen into its chrysalis. Clark's heat vision had cut it in half, he couldn’t control it well yet.
Yeah. That was probably what did this.
Lana made it downstairs through sheer force of will and prayer that she wouldn't break anything else. She’d spent around twenty minutes getting pants on without ripping them to shreds. She found Clark's only pair of pants that wasn't blue jeans and they were still jeans, but a least they were black. She got on a white under shirt and found a butter-yellow button down—crumbled in the back of the closet—to wear over it. Lana Lang was not leaving the house in the color blocks of Clark Kent, even if she was wearing his face. She spent ten more minutes getting ready to open the door without crushing the knob and she managed it.
Jonathan and Martha Kent were at the kitchen table. Breakfast laid out. They looked up when she entered, and their faces did that parent thing—instant warmth, instant love.
"Morning, son," Jonathan said.
Lana's chest constricted and she almost started crying right there. This was it, loving parents. She slid into Clark's usual seat, moving mindfully, and reached for the orange juice. She poured with excruciating control and managed not to shatter the glass.
"You okay, Clark?" Martha asked. "You seem tense."
"I'm fine." The voice rumbled out of her chest, deep and wrong. "Just...thinking."
Lana ate mechanically not wanting to get too daring with her movements but she was getting a handle on it. The scrambled eggs tasted great. Her mind was racing.
Did anyone else know about Clark's abilities? Could she ask that without it being suspicious?
"Mom? Dad?" She set down her fork, it was totally unbent, she noted proudly. "Does anyone else know? About... me?"
Jonathan and Martha exchanged a glance looking surprised and a little worried.
"Of course not, son," Jonathan said firmly. "We would never put you in danger like that."
"I know you wouldn't." Lana swallowed hard. "I was just wondering if I could share it. One day."
Martha reached across the table and squeezed her hand—Clark's hand. "One day, when you're an adult, you can share it with someone you trust completely. Someone who loves you for who you are."
Lana nodded. “Okay, thank you, Mom”, Lana’s voice almost broke on that; Clark was lucky to have them. So lucky… Lana stared at her plate. Clark's plate. Clark's secret. Clark's entire impossible life.
She needed to find him.
Clark slipped out of Lana's house before Aunt Nell could corner him for breakfast. He had a plan: meet Lana on the bus, get to school, find Chloe, solve the mystery, switch back. Simple. He didn’t want to test his acting skills with Nell.
Then he saw the silver Porsche in the driveway.
Lex stepped out, smiling, and Clark's entire body relaxed at the familiar sight. "Hey, Lex," he said automatically. "What are you doing here?"
The words came out in Lana's voice, of course but Clark was still surprised.
Lex's smile widened. "Good morning to you too." He moved closer, totally casual and confident, and opened the passenger door. "I'm here to take you to Metropolis, obviously. The fundraiser? Your speech?"
"My—right. The speech." Clark's mind spun. He could make an excuse. Say he was sick. But then Lana would have to deal with it later, and it was for her parents' foundation, she'd been working on this for weeks.
"Are you ready?" Lex asked. "We should leave soon if we want to beat traffic."
Clark adjusted the backpack on his shoulder—Lana's backpack—and hoped the speech was inside. "Yeah. Let's go."
He climbed into the Porsche, and Lex pulled out of the driveway. Clark stared out the window at Smallville rolling past and tried to figure out how he was going to pull this off.
Act natural. Give the speech. Get back before anything went really wrong.
How hard could it be?
Lex noticed that Lana was acting differently today. Not a bad different—actually, he was enjoying it. She was being sarcastic, almost sardonic, giving him more pushback than usual. And that outfit, was she not wearing a bra? It was hard to tell under the Clark-core sweater.
They were going about 70, “Lex, have you gotten a speeding ticket in every county in Kansas?”
“Not yet.”
“Better hurry up then; you always break the law with those vanity plates for all to see?”
“Usually,” Lex grinned.
Clark wasn't worried. The relationship between Lana and Lex couldn't be too different from his own friendship with Lex. Everything was going fine. He probably wouldn’t have to tell him the truth, Clark thought.
That is until Lex's hand landed on his knee.
Clark almost jumped out of his skin. Lex's thumb moved in a small circle against the denim, like this was the most natural thing in the world.
"It really turns me on," Lex said, voice dropping lower, "when you talk to me like that."
Clark's brain short-circuited. His face burned. Was this—was this normal between them? Or was this actually harassment? Should he say something now—
"I've been thinking about you all morning," Lex continued, his voice dropping even lower. "About last weekend. That thing you did with your mouth? I haven't been able to stop replaying it."
Oh God. Oh no. No, no, no.
Ambiguous flirtation this was not. Lex and Lana had been together. Like, explicitly together.
"Keep your hands on the damned wheel!" Clark blurted out, voice cracking.
Lex laughed, pulling his hand back but looking thoroughly amused. "Are you blushing?"
"No."
"You absolutely are. What's gotten into you today?" Lex's eyes sparkled with mischief. "You were all over me on the last road trip to the city."
Clark wanted to throw himself out of the moving car. "I'm just—nervous. About the speech. Because my dead parents founded this nonprofit." He said it bluntly, hoping the mention of the Langs would kill whatever mood Lex was in.
Lex's expression softened immediately. "You're going to be amazing. You always are." His voice turned warm, affectionate in a way that made Clark's stomach twist. "And don't worry—I have the penthouse suite reserved for after. You can relax once the performance is over."
The penthouse. Suite. For after.
Clark would find a way out when the time came. He'd fake food poisoning. He'd—if worst came to worst and Lex actually tried to make a move on him, he'd just have to tell him the truth. Even if it meant revealing the body swap. And revealing that he knew about Lex and Lana’s secret affair now.
Underneath the panic, anger simmered. Lex was dating a high school student. Clark had listened to Lex give him advice about Lana, had watched Lex play the supportive friend, the wingman—and the entire time, Lex had been with her. Sleeping with her.
Clark's hands clenched in his lap. Lana's small hands.
Then again. He wasn't Lana's boyfriend. They didn't owe him explanations about their relationship. He didn't have a right to know.
But they'd still lied to him. Both of them had.
"What are you thinking about over there?" Lex asked. "Your face is telling quite a story."
Clark jerked the backpack up from the floor, pawing through it with some force. "It's nothing," he grunted, sounding exactly like himself—like Clark—and nothing like Lana.
Lex's laugh was delighted. "That was an excellent impression of Clark Kent."
Clark tried not to clench his jaw like a freak. He found the speech transcript and pulled it out, along with a folder of neatly labeled source materials. Thank God Lana was organized.
"Is that Clark's sweater?" Lex asked, glancing over at the red pullover. His voice had gone soft again, indulgent. "It looks small—he must have given it to you years ago."
"Yeah," Clark muttered.
"It's really cute that he brings you so much comfort." Lex smiled, looking genuinely content. Happy.
Clark stared down at the speech, words blurring on the page. He focused on reading, on memorizing, on anything except the fact that Lex Luthor thought he was cute for being Lana's emotional support friend. All while Lex himself got to take her to Metropolis penthouses and probably on fucking helicopter rides. He felt like he might actually cry.
This was going to be a very long day.