Title: The Butterfly Effect
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark/Lex
Categories: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort
Length: Medium (11,673 words)
Warnings: self medical experimentation, drug use, suicidal thoughts and threats of homicide, spoilers through season 1x6 "Hourglass"

Author on LJ: spike21
Author Website: The Spike

Summary:
Lex can't let the Cassandra thing go.

Review:
Driven by his curiosity, Lex experiments on himself trying to replicate Cassandra's ability to see into the future. The Kents find him later, out of his mind and raving, and take him back to the farm and debate how to help him.

Lex's stream-of-consciousness sections are intense and bizarre and drag you right along with him as he experiences multiple possible futures inter-spliced with the present; and just like with Cassandra, when they touch Clark can see what he sees, too. All they can see are terrible futures, and both are freaked out, while Martha and Jonathan try to help. Surrounded by possible horrors, with only terrible options as solutions, Clark finally figures out a way, the only way, for everything to be okay.

Intense and trippy and twisty, this fic is a wild ride, and one I come back to again and again. Mind the warnings, but know that there is a happy resolution and the ride is totally worth it.

"All those futures, all those things you saw. Wait--" as Lex closes his eyes, turns his head away. "Wait. Listen. The basics. Complex systems are highly dependent on initial conditions, right?"

The Butterfly Effect