Fanfic / On the Run

On the Run by Chunk127 is a Smallville/The Fast and the Furious crossover starting around the beginning of what would have been the sixth season for Smallville and Fast & Furious. Following a series of tragic losses after his confrontation with Zod, Clark is on the run after Lex learnt of his secret, which leads to him rescuing Letty Ortiz from her near-death experience just before he’s informed that Chloe has been killed. Realising that Letty was hunting the person responsible for Chloe’s death, Clark and Letty join forces to continue Clark’s investigation, which leads to Dominic Torretto and his family gaining a new member and learning more about the wider universe.

On the Run contains examples of:

• Already Met Everyone: Invoked, as while Clark didn’t met everyone in Dom’s crew before the main events, he did meet a couple of key people;
  • Clark and Gisele met when Clark was acting as Kal during his time on Red K when he took on Black Mask’s operations in Metropolis.
  • Twinkie acts as Clark’s mechanic to create his car for the races because he owes Clark a favour after Clark saved his life.
• Batman Gambit: Letty is able to help Clark beat Dom in a street race by using her knowledge of how Dom will act, advising Clark when to attack Dom and when he should hang back to avoid taking a beating himself.
• Better the Devil You Know: Clark notes that one reason he doesn’t kill Lex is because he wants to rescue Lex’s meteor freak captives, as any potential successor might just kill the prisoners whereas Lex is too obsessed with his own vision of himself as a "savior" to eliminate potential sources of genetic material.
• Beware the Nice Ones: After Letty has spent some time helping Clark, she compares him to a mix of Brian and Vince; he's generally a kind man, but once someone angers him he's a very dangerous person to cross.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Giselle keeps some of the blue k cuffs so she can teach Clark how to fight for real.
• Canon Immigrant: Invoked; while set in the Smallville universe, Oliver Queen’s supporting cast now includes Felicity Smoak, John Diggle and Thea Queen (although Oliver is dating Lois rather than Felicity or Black Canary).
• Composite Character: Herman Reyes, the villain in Fast Five, is actually an alias for Clark’s old foe Morgan Edge.
• Crossover Relatives: Brian O’Conner is a cousin to Chloe Sullivan, giving Dom’s team another reason to consider her family.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Ultimately Braga’s attempt at a distraction with his various drivers is ended when Clark takes every last driver out of their cars at superspeed.
• Death by Adaptation: Opens with the reveal that Martha Kent died in the plane crash caused by Dark Thursday, and is followed by the Jor-El AI in the Fortress being destroyed by Lex Luthor (who has learnt Clark's secret) and the Martian Manhunter being killed by the would-be Bizarro in the body of Raya. Later on, Hobbs kills Lex Luthor after Lex's actions led to the deaths of most of Hobbs' team when he manipulated them into going after Clark, and Tess explicitly kills Leo and Santos when they just essentially left the series after events in Rio.
• Decoy Leader: Letty basically sets up Clark to be this when he enters his first race to find the man who killed Chloe and tried to kill Letty; since Letty can’t take part in the race herself, she gives Clark tips on how to compete, to the extent that he’s able to beat Dom Toretto in a street race despite Clark’s lack of experience.
• Demoted to Extra: Owen Shaw, the villain of Fast & Furious 6, is killed and his team taken over by Tess Mercer as part of her campaign to avenge Lex’s death.
• Detective Patsy: Ultimately Lex sends Hobbs and his team after Clark to be a complex version of this, discreetly providing them with a single blue kryptonite bullet in each ammo chamber so that Clark will be weak enough to be captured, the intention being for Lex’s forces to then kill Hobbs’ team and take Clark to Lex.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Clark adapts his car with a kryptonite booster for extra speed, but when he has to save his car from an explosion set off by Dom and Brian, he reflects that he should have used a less explosive fuel.
  • On the other hand, later on Clark is still able to threaten Tess when she’s wearing a blue kryptonite necklace, as even without his powers he’s still bigger and stronger than her.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Rather than being shot during the confrontation in Rio, Vince makes a Heroic Sacrifice to help stop Doomsday during a battle in Spain.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Lex muses that Clark’s B+ grade average from high school reflects an attempt at this, as nobody could keep up a marking scheme like that unless they were actively trying to hide something.
• Due to the Dead: With Lex Luthor actively hunting Clark as an 'alien invader', Clark recognises that he can't go to Chloe's funeral without turning it into a potential catastrophe as Lex's forces try to capture him, refusing to taint Chloe's memory like that. As a result, Letty volunteers to attend in Clark's place, leaving a memento for Chloe that only she, Clark and Pete Ross would understand.
• Evil Counterpart: During the events depicted in Fast & Furious 6, Roman again notes that Owen Shaw's group are basically the evil counterparts of their own team, with Tess Mercer replacing Owen and the addition of the amnesic Chloe Sullivan and the actively-evil Davis Bloome to counter Letty and Clark.
• Exact Words: When questioning Braga about Chloe’s death, Clark promises he’ll drop Braga off on the other side of the city… and it’s only after Clark’s left that Braga realises Clark left him in the local police station.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • When Lana and Lex learn that Clark is Kryptonian they immediately treat him as a threat despite all the evidence that Clark hasn't hurt anyone, to the point that Lana expresses disgust that she let Clark touch her.
  • After the final battle with Doomsday, Amanda Waller tries to have Clark contained as a potential threat even after he just saved the world, and is only prevented from doing so when Mister Nobody shows up to point out that if the superhuman alien without a brain nearly tore Spain apart it's not a good idea to make an enemy of the one that can think.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Letty and Clark form a good bond after he saves her life, and once Dom learns that Letty’s alive he affirms that he owes Clark a great deal for his help.
• Frame-Up: Lex ultimately goes so far as to accuse Clark of Chloe’s murder.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the final battle with Doomsday, Vince deliberately provokes the monster into going after him to delay it until the planned explosives go off to trap it underground.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • When Lex has Clark captive in a car, Lex and Bizarro-in-Raya are knocked about and left unconscious when the car is sent rolling off-balance, while Clark stays in one place as he’s tied down.
  • Later in the same fight, the Phantom reveals she used gold kryptonite to turn herself into a true kryptonian, but this leaves her vulnerable when Clark and Letty trigger Clark’s green k booster to go off in her face.
• Honey Trap: Eva Greer assists Clark’s campaign against Lex by posing as a potential one-night-stand, leaving once she’s gotten Lex’s fingerprints all over her dress.
• Honorary True Companion: Ultimately Chloe basically becomes this to Dom's crew once Clark learns that she survived her death and was manipulated into aiding Lex and Tess due to her amnesia. Once her memory is restored, when Hobbs tries to arrest Chloe for the crimes she committed with Mercer's crew, Dom makes it clear to Hobbs that his team consider Chloe family due to her ties to Clark and Brian despite none of those present having met her before now.
• I Owe You My Life: Clark calls on an old favour to put together a car to infiltrate Braga’s gang.
• I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: Invoked when Clark saves Hobbs and some of his team from Lex’s soldiers; since Clark literally took a bullet to save Hobbs’ life (and that bullet was green kryptonite), they all decide to ignore his superhuman abilities.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: Clark doesn’t bother saying it out loud as Lex clearly isn’t thinking rationally, but as he has to deal with more of Lex’s hired goons, he reflects that if he truly was the monster Lex believes he is Clark would have killed Lex ages ago.
• In Love with the Mark: Gisele and Clark met when Black Mask sent her to kill him, only for the two to develop deeper feelings for each other.
• Kryptonite Factor: In Fast Five, the safe is laced with Kryptonite as Herman Reyes is Morgan Edge working with Lex Luthor, justifying why the team need to actually carry out a heist to take the safe rather than just send Clark in to tear it out by himself.
• Like Brother and Sister: Clark immediately confirms that he loves Chloe when Giselle asks after Chloe is revealed to be alive, but has to subsequently clarify that he means he loves Chloe like Dom loves Mia.
• Majority-Share Dictator: Lex is ruined when most of Luthorcorp’s stockholders sell their shares in the company to the Queens, giving Oliver and Thea a fifty percent stake even before Lionel sells his ten percent shares to give the Queens complete control.
• Misplaced Retribution: Invoked when characters point out that Tess is after Clark and Dom’s team for revenge over Lex’s death when Hobbs is the one who actually shot Lex and that was because of Lex's own crimes; Clark just observes that for Luthors, there’s always someone else to blame.
• Mythology Gag: At one point Letty is shown using the alias Rain Ocampo (Resident Evil (2002)), which she considers a stupid name.
• Never My Fault: Lex proclaims that his betrayal is all Clark’s fault for not trusting him, overlooking how Lex is actively planning to dissect Clark to prepare for an “alien invasion” when Lex has no evidence Clark’s ever done anything but help people.
• Only in It for the Money: As in canon, Roman was willing to abandon the job in Rio until he heard the scale of the money involved.
• The Only Way They Will Learn: After Dom left Letty following their last night together, Letty delays telling him she’s alive after Clark saved her to teach Dom a lesson about taking her for granted.
• Out-Gambitted: When Amanda Waller tries to take Clark into ‘custody’ while he’s healing after the fight with Doomsday, Mister Nobody shows up to make it clear that nobody higher up wants her to provoke Clark or Dom’s team.
• Robbing the Mob Bank: As well as the canon mission in Rio, Clark also did this to Black Mask’s gang when he was acting as Kal in Metropolis.
• Role Swap AU: Chloe and Letty basically swap roles following Letty’s confrontation with Braga, Chloe presumed dead while Letty becomes Clark’s friend after he saves her life.
• Shipping Torpedo: The fic basically opens with Clark destroying any possibility of Lana ending up with him or Lex, as he tricks Lex into confirming that he drugged Lana to fake a pregnancy and Lana expresses disgust at the idea that she let an alien touch her.
• Shower of Awkward: At one point Clark walks into a shower while unaware that Letty was already in there, prompting Dom to muse whether Letty or Clark will kill him for that mistake first.
• Something Only They Would Say: Dom starts to suspect Clark is more than he seems when Clark mentions how “a real driver always knows what’s in his car”, advice that Dom received from his father and passed on to those close to him such as Vince and Letty.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: When Clark decides to go after Lex with a group of meteor freaks, he freely admits that most of his team are just united because they dislike Lex rather than any of them being real friends; Molly Griggs in particular is only helping him because they both hate Lex more than they dislike each other.
• That Man Is Dead: Chloe’s abilities brought her back to life after she was shot in the head, but she was left with total amnesia until Clark found a way to reboot her memory.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Ultimately Hobbs kills Morgan Edge and Lex Luthor with three close-up shots each, shooting them in the lungs and head.
  • When Tess attempts to have Lex’s name cleared, she threatens to use the Kryptonian computer virus that caused Dark Thursday to throw Earth back into the Dark Ages if her demands aren’t met.
• Unrequited Love: Han is still in love with Giselle as in canon, but never brings up his feelings as he recognises that she’s happy with Clark.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Clark starts out as this; Giselle reflects that he’s just used to bulldozing through everything in his way.
• Willfully Weak: At one point Clark puts on blue k cuffs so that he can spend more time hitting Lex without risking killing him.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: When Clark admits his fear of losing control to Giselle, she counters that the fact that he let himself get talked down from killing Alicia’s killer shows that his control is better than he thinks, as if he really could lose control he would have just killed the other man in that moment of rage.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Braga is defeated far more easily than in canon, only for the team to face the new threat of the Bizarro-Phantom (now in the body of Raya) and her new “alliance” with Lex Luthor.