Love Over Time 2/?
Title: Love Over Time 2/?
Rating: PG-13
Summary: It should have been the obvious from the start, two young men traveling from the future...
Notes: I need to thank novadelphine for doing the editing. And also thanks to dhfreak for the banner! This story will not be super long. Maybe three chapters. But long ones.
Chloe gasped in panic, pulling air greedily into her lungs. She was finding breathing nearly impossible and it took her a moment to realize that the problem was because of the young man lying heavily upon on her chest.
“Chloe?”
The voice was familiar, but she barely noticed it as she bent her head forward and grasped the face buried against her neck. If Oliver hadn’t been standing to her side, she would have thought it was his blond head and it hit her then that she hadn’t been dreaming.
“Oh no.” Chloe yanked Connor’s head from her neck to find his eyes closed and his body unmoving. She sat up, trying to hold him against her so he didn’t slip onto the floor, but the others were already there helping her. “Lay him down,” she instructed as she quickly moved off the sofa to make room.
“Chloe, be careful,” Clark warned gently.
“I’m fine,” she snapped as she sat on the edge of the sofa and pressed her fingers to the young man’s throat. No pulse. Fighting back tears as she remembered her dream, she turned quickly to the group. “He can heal?”
Elliot nodded. “But it never works right. I mean it never works when he wants it to.”
She turned back to the young man lying next to her. “Has he died before?”
“No,” Elliot answered thickly. “He hasn’t tried healing anything worse then some non-fatal bullet wounds. Usually we just brought them to yo-.” He stopped abruptly, realizing what he was about to say.
“Sometimes, when I would heal, I would pick up on bits and pieces of people, flashes of memories and feelings,” Chloe murmured. “When Connor healed me I think I saw one of his memories, something from his past…”
Suddenly, everything clicked for Chloe and she realized just who Connor was and why he reminded her so very much of Oliver; why he had memories of her caring for him as a boy. Swallowing thickly, her eyes went from Elliot to Clark and back again, putting more puzzle pieces together in her mind. Elliot’s eyes widened in panic as he watched her, realizing the discovery she’d made. She opened her mouth to speak, but Elliot shook his head urgently and the pleading in his eyes silenced her.
“Are you okay?”
Chloe turned dazedly and found Oliver leaning against a table, almost at eye level with her. “Yea, I’m fine.” She met his eyes for a brief second, wanting to say something, but unable to bring herself to do it.
“Why don’t we move him out of here,” she said instead looking expectantly to Clark before she stood and turned to Elliot. “I’d like a word with you.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You know the two of you are creating a mess here, don’t you think?” Chloe asked the young man in front of her.
“It wasn’t like we had a choice,” Elliot argued. “We didn’t know what Cheshire was planning until it was too late.”
“And Clark? Lois?” Chloe leaned forward to whisper harshly. “Is Cheshire after them or you?”
He ground his teeth together. “Both, I guess. If she can’t take him out, she’ll go after my Mom, knowing what that will do him and what that’ll mean for me.”
“And Oliver, does he know?”
“No.” Elliot shook his head quickly. “It wasn’t our intention for it to happen like this. We thought Cheshire would go after my Dad first.”
Chloe could see he was honestly upset, so she did her best to back off a little. “I have kryptonite here,” she sighed. “I never even thought she’d be bold enough to try for it.”
“She likes a challenge,” he shrugged. “Plus, facing off against Connor would have been a bonus for her. She has a personnel vendetta against him and the Green Arrow and I’m willing to bet she was thrilled with the prospect of killing you so she could ruin Oliver’s life and eliminate Connor in the process.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stepping over debris, Oliver surveyed the damaged Watchtower for anything out of the ordinary. He stopped when he came to the spot where he’d found Connor and Chloe, remembering the sight of the young man shielding her body so protectively. A bow, a cross bow and arrows were scattered on the floor and he recognized the equipment as his own; spares that he kept stashed at the Watchtower. He thought of what he’d seen during the fight, how he’d watched their visitor from the future take aim at the women in green. Thing was, the young man hadn’t hit her.
He swung around towards to the area where the assassin had been standing, his eyes scouring for some clue and finding yet another arrow; one he hadn’t fired at Cheshire. Picking it up, he studied the tip. There wasn’t a spec of blood on it, which meant it hadn’t made contact with anyone, but the once sharp metal was completely ruined, so he knew it had hit something. Something hard.
Then he remembered Cheshire’s words to Connor.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll hit you next time.”
In the heat of the moment, Oliver had assumed she meant that Connor had avoided her shot, but now he was beginning to wonder otherwise. Oliver walked throughout the tower, flipping on every light, and then started slowly pacing the floor, taking his time. At some point during his search, Chloe and the other young man entered the main room again. He could feel the two pause and share a glance, wondering what he was up to, but neither said anything and after a moment, they went in separate directions; Chloe towards the back bedroom where they’d left Connor and Elliot in search of Clark.
Normally he would have said something to Chloe, explain himself and what he was doing, but he was determined to find what he knew was there. He was on the floor, searching beneath the computer desks when he’d finally found what he was looking for. The bullet had rolled far underneath the desk, but he was able to reach it and when he pulled it out and held it up, the first thing he noticed was the familiar mark for the arrow’s tip. Glancing around again to be sure he was alone, he went over to Chloe’s computers and thanks to the fact that the Tower’s security was provided by Queen Industries, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be able to view the video footage of the fight.
After their run in with the Dark Archer, Chloe had made a point of keeping a certain amount of equipment on a back up generator. The video feed was one of them.
As he worked to pull up the footage, he glanced towards her bedroom, expecting her to appear at any moment. He’d prefer to view it on his own, but if she walked out he’d be honest. There was no reason for him not to look at it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chloe stayed with Connor for the good part of an hour, but knowing how long it had taken her to recover from such feats of healing, she figured it could be a while yet before he woke. In the back of her mind she considered the worst, but quickly pushed that aside. When she walked back into the tower Oliver was still there, as she had expected, but this time he was sitting on the sofa, two arrows lying across his lap.
“What’s wrong?” She asked and watched as his eyes flickered to the side, landing on the large monitor before turning back to her.
He waited silently for her reaction as she took in the paused video of the fight with Cheshire. Her lips pursed together and he had his answer.
“So you knew,” he mumbled.
“Just then,” Chloe admitted. “Up to that point, he hadn’t told me anything about myself. Though, now that I think about it I can see Cheshire was threatening to kill me as a way to kill Connor.” She noticed the two arrows again in his lap. “What’s that?”
Oliver grasped the arrows below the head and surveyed them again. “Do you know how hard it is to stop a bullet with an arrow? Let alone two?”
“You could do it,” she said softly, acknowledging the thing they were both too aware of.
“And there is no way he could be lying? Somehow-.”
“No,” Chloe interrupted, shaking her head as she looked at him with pity. “Oliver, are you serious? That memory I saw,” she shook her head, “it… it was more then I would have expected, and I-.” She stopped again, swallowing. “I don’t-.” Her words broke off as she found it impossible to speak. It still clung to her, that one memory of Connor’s, warming her and making her feel things she hadn’t in a long time, things that she hadn’t wanted to feel again.
“Chloe...” He sighed and stood up, placing the arrows to the side as he made his way over to stand in front of her. Wrapping an arm around her body, he pulled her close to his chest. “We agreed that it was nothing, that it was for the best that we ended it, remember?”
“I know,” she cried into his chest. She wasn’t normally prone to breaking out into tears - especially over the past couple of years - but the memory had affected her more than she would have liked.
“Then what happened?” Oliver asked, but wasn’t necessarily expecting an answer. He figured neither one of them knew. She only shook her head, still crying against him. “What did you see?”
“It was nothing,” Chloe shook her head. “It was just something simple.” She wanted to tell him, she really did, and maybe in time she could, but not now. Not only was it too hard to put into words, but she had a feeling he wasn’t ready to hear it.
“Then why are you upset?” He tried, not wanting to pry, but needing some hint about what she’d seen, some hint of the supposed future.
“It was good,” she admitted. “Almost too good. It was his memory and I could feel how he felt. He loved me, and I loved him just as much.”
Just then, someone cleared their throat and the two jumped apart to find Clark standing there awkwardly.
“Can we talk?” Clark asked, trying not to notice how close they still seemed to be standing to one another.
Chloe nodded and automatically started towards Clark, only to stop and face Oliver one more time.
“Oliver, his memory, he loves you too. He wants be just like you.”
He watched her resume her march over to Clark, leaving him frozen for a moment as her tried to absorb what she’d just said, what she had left him to think over. No matter how many times he replayed what had happened he just couldn’t fully understand it, because in his mind there was no way that the twenty-something man in the back bedroom was his son, even if the evidence was stacked against him. There was no way he and Chloe went against their previous decision to never cross the friendship line again, even if he still thought about her whenever his mind wandered. Even if he kept catching himself watching her whenever she wasn’t looking, even if all he wanted was to touch her again.
It didn’t matter. There was no way that years from now he found himself in the happy scene she’d just described, even if she now believed in it so positively.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chloe sat in the cushioned chair that Clark had brought in for her hours ago, typing away at her laptop, waiting. Ten hours she waited and then, finally, he gasped. She shoved her laptop onto the table and slid over to sit on the edge of the bed. He grasped wildly for purchase on the mattress, digging his fingers into it. His wide green eyes stared up at the ceiling, almost appearing to not really be seeing.
“Your okay,” Chloe pressed her hands to his chest and forced him to settle back into the bed. “Your fine,” she whispered, combing her fingers through his blond hair. Hair that felt just like Oliver’s.
Slowly, the blackness began to fade to grey and, eventually, a blur of colors began to sharpen before his eyes. “Mom?”
She stilled her hand on his hair. “Connor.”
Then he saw her, younger then he remembered and it all came rushing back. “You’re alive!” He sat up and looked down at himself. “I’m alive.”
“Yea, you saved us,” she said with a soft smile.
“How? When I tried I couldn’t even-.”
“Empathy,” Chloe revealed. “The first time I healed-.”
“Lois. You said you were upset.” Chloe nodded in response and it took him a moment to realize that she’d figured it all out. “You know,” he whispered and she nodded again. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped himself, needing to know specifically what she knew. “What do you know exactly?”
“Cheshire said you were a Queen,” Chloe told him softly, trying her best to keep the conversation light, despite their current situation. He wasn’t ten, had quite a few inches on her and probably outweighed her by nearly 100 pounds, but she remembered how he’d clung to her as she’d laid there dying; how he’d cried. “There is only one person I know who can deflect a bullet with an arrow.”
He looked at her again and then quickly glanced away. “When you heal,” she continued, “sometimes there’s a transfer of memories and feelings.” Chloe paused, waiting to see if there was any kind of recognition in his face, but his features remained stoic, so like Oliver’s. “I saw something. A memory.”
He turned back to her, knowing exactly which memory he had grasped to when he’d been fading away. “The bow,” he murmured and when she nodded her confirmation, he sighed. “You, well my Mom,” he started, “is always pretty supportive of my decisions, even some of the dangerous ones.”
“But?” Chloe heard it coming. For some reason she expected something else, not the small smile that slipped over his face.
“Not my Dad. He was always paranoid always insisting I was going to go out and get myself killed one day. For the first eight years of my life he forbade me to even step near a bow and arrow.” Connor chuckled softly to himself. “It was around that time that you walked in the house with a brand new bow in hand, made especially for me, and you slammed it on Dad’s desk and said he had to teach me or else you were sending me to Gotham City so I could train to be Robin.”
She couldn’t help but smile at the image in her head. “Did it work?”
“You don’t stop bullets unless you learn from the best.” He smirked to himself as he recalled how his father bellowed through the house for him to get outside in five minutes.
“Not too fond of Batman?” Chloe inquired, unable to ignore the way her spirits were lifting as she listened to the story.
“They’re too much alike to stand in a room with one another for more than five minutes.” She smiled in response, but Connor quickly moved away from the moment. “Does he know?”
Chloe felt the grin fade from her lips. “He suspected a little when he saw the extra bow, but he knew the whole story once he found the security footage from your fight with Cheshire. It has audio.”
He nodded, not all that surprised.
“And I know that Clark and Lois are Elliot’s parents.” He seemed slightly shocked that she had learned so much. “Just me though” she assured him. “He didn’t tell me, I just put it together after I realized your connection to us and I remembered you saying you two were childhood friends. I can’t imagine having a son whose best friend was Kryptonian who could be anyone else’s son. Besides, I’ve known Clark and Lois a long time, I can recognize certain traits.”
He nodded in understanding. “We need to find this woman though,” Chloe stated. “I’m worried about her getting her hands on some kryptonite, even though I’m monitoring all locations. Plus, I’m worried about Lois. If she got into here so easy, Lois could be in big trouble. If it comes down to it, Clark will protect her, but I don’t want to risk exposing him, especially if she has kryptonite...”
He nodded. “I get it.”
“Look,” Chloe stood up, pursing her lips together nervously. “There’s something else you should know. Oliver, he doesn’t…” her voice trailed off with a sigh as she tried to figure out how to explain Oliver’s reluctance. “He doesn’t understand this. I think it scares him.”
“I’m not surprised,” Connor admitted, biting back his disappointment. He’d always strived to impress his father, to make him proud, even if it hadn’t been necessary most of the time. Chloe seemed slightly surprised by his easy acceptance. “I’ve lived with him for twenty years,” Connor shrugged. “He’s emotionally stubborn.”
At that thought Chloe couldn’t help but laugh, although it held no happiness. “And I’m not?”
“You changed,” Connor said simply and moved towards the doorway.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Two hours spent patrolling and Oliver hadn’t found a thing. No sign of the villainess from the future and definitely no clarity about the situation with Chloe and Connor. As he made his way slowly back into the Tower, the sound of voices caught his ear and he paused outside the double doors, looking in to see the two people on his mind sitting next to one another at the large desk.
“So how old are you?”
Connor turned to Chloe and grinned slyly. “I can’t tell you that. Besides, don’t you have any better questions then that?”
Chloe turned to him and couldn’t help but smile in return. “Would you tell me if I asked?”
“Noooo.” He shook his head and turned back to the monitor, smiling again as he heard her laugh softly next to him. “Can I ask you something?”
“Assuming it changes nothing...” Chloe turned back to her keyboard and continued her work as she awaited his questions. Monitoring for Cheshire had yielded no results, so she had widened her searches.
“You and...” Connor paused as he chose his next words, “Oliver, you don’t seem...”
She’d suspected he might be a bit curious about the state of her relationship with Oliver. From what she could tell, Connor had only ever known them as happily married and she assumed that her future self hadn’t shared the details about how it had all started.
“Together?” Chloe supplied helpfully and she couldn’t help but notice concern in his eyes. “It’s complicated.”
“You like each other right?” He asked bluntly. She frowned at his question and turned away. It wasn’t the confirmation he wanted, but it was enough. “Then what’s the problem?”
“Things. Just other things,” she shrugged, avoiding his questions. It wasn’t as if she was about to tell Connor that the brief thing she and Oliver had started has been in secret and consisted mostly of sex. It wasn’t until they realized they were actually starting to have feelings for one another that they made the decision to end it.
“Well, those things must not have been as important as you think,” Connor stated plainly, his response causing her to turn and look at him, slightly shocked. “I’m just saying,” he continued. “It didn’t stop you in the end and the two of you are perfectly happy. I mean, as early as I can remember, the two of you were really happy and to see the way both of you are now...” Connor shrugged and scrunched his face. “I don’t remember the two of you ever being so...morbid?”
“Nice,” Chloe muttered as she turned back to her work. “Things have been difficult lately. We’ve all gone through a lot of changes over the past couple of years and it’s taken some adjusting to.”
“I know, trust me. I know about Jimmy, about Davis, about Zod, Dad-,” Connor stopped himself when he realized what he said. “I know about Oliver’s other issues before you helped him. Which, by the way, I never got full details about. How did you help him exactly?”
“Put it this way,” Chloe smiled. “If there was a twelve step program for him, I shoved it all into one step.”
Connor rolled his eyes, realizing that even the younger version of his mother wasn’t going to reveal that certain gray area of her life. “Anyway, the point is I know about all that stuff.” She sighed and turned back to her work, obviously unimpressed. “But it didn’t make a difference in the end and, trust me, this won’t be the last time the world is in danger, but you usually got through it by working together… Not to say the two of you didn’t argue… Actually you do that a lot.”
She heard Connor snort slightly and she couldn’t help but grin herself.
“Da-,” he stopped himself again, then just shook his head, tired of trying to catch himself. “Dad always said that you’re both too hard headed to agree all the time.”
The double doors swung open at that moment and Chloe turned to spot Oliver entering, hood pushed back, glasses and bow in his hands. He stopped just within the door and looked at her.
“But he does love you.”
Chloe looked at Connor, shocked for a moment. Then he grinned and just the sight of him pulled at her heart. If she wasn’t dreaming and none of this was a lie, she had to admit, she and Oliver had managed to produce a perfect kid. He was down-to-earth, confident, brave, and apparently, hadn’t suffered any ill effects from their secret lives like they had. It didn’t hurt either that it was Oliver’s smile on his face. She couldn’t help but smile back.
“Chloe, can we talk?”
She turned at the flat tone in Oliver’s voice, catching the way he was watching her and Connor closely. Offering a sharp nod, she turned back to Connor and stood. “I’ll be right back. Let me know if anything changes.”
He nodded and let his eyes follow her as she moved out of the main room, noting the way his father’s eyes did the same, but never once looked in Connor’s direction. He wasn’t surprised, Connor knew that tone of his father’s voice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“What are you doing?” Oliver whispered harshly once they entered her bedroom.
Chloe looked towards the main room they had just left with confusion and then back up into his face. “What are you talking about?”
“Look I know it appears that kid is-.” He couldn’t get himself to say it. Instead he shook his head, trying to wipe the thought from his memory. “The point is you’re getting attached. I can see it in your face. You’re not even trying to keep your distance from him? What happens when he goes back and this whole future he’s talking about doesn’t-.” He stopped at the stricken look on her face.
“Doesn’t happen?” Chloe bit out angrily. “Don’t worry Oliver, I’m not going to try and talk you into marriage or being a sperm donor.” She sighed, trying to calm her nerves and let go of her anger towards him. Oliver hadn’t even talked to Connor yet, he didn’t understand. “You won’t even talk to him.”
“Why? He’s going back? What’s the point?” He couldn’t get his mind around the sudden hurt on her face. It wasn’t like Chloe to be so emotional, but this kid had done something to her, something that no one had been able to do over the past couple of years. In just a matter of hours, Connor had managed to break down all the walls she had built to keep everyone out, himself included.
“I don’t know Oliver,” she responded sarcastically. “I guess there isn’t any.”
He watched her turn away and knew that she wasn’t going to let this go. The rift between them would grow even farther if he let her walk away. “Chloe...” He grabbed her arm and pulled her back around. She stopped, waiting, leaving the ball in his court. “I do care about you. It’s just that-.”
“It’s not enough,” Chloe said through the lump in her throat, hating herself for falling apart in front of him.
It wasn’t until he saw the tears in her eyes did he realize that there was no turning back for her. Whatever she had seen, whatever Connor had told her, she wanted it, and it involved him. Oliver couldn’t wrap his mind around it, the fact that she wanted that future with him. “Chloe, I-.” The door opened and he was almost relieved for the interruption, because he had no idea what he was going to say.
Elliot poked his head in, trying to ignore the fact that he had clearly just walked in on an argument. “We found Cheshire.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Next: Love Over Time 3/3