Good Fences - Chapter One
Summary: Post Conspiracy. Things go from bad to worse when Oliver and Chloe still can't quite make up.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just borrowing.
It always seemed a little too easy, going from Oliver's anger that Chloe had taken the money without asking to their happily taking a vacation together at the inn. So this story is a little bridge between the two.
Chapter One
Chloe marched down the corridor toward Oliver's Luthorcorp office, trying not to let her anger get the best of her. She'd been looking all over town for him. She'd started out calling all of the phone numbers she had for him. She'd tried his apartment, the office, his secretary, his chauffeur, his cell numbers, even his pilot in case he was on his way somewhere. The jet was in the hanger, the limo, the town car, and sports cars were parked, and his secretary hadn't seen him, although she'd been expecting him at the office that morning. Chloe couldn't even ping his cell phone for a location because it was apparently off.
After that, she'd checked his apartment, going so far as to open the secret room. That hadn't alleviated any of her worries. All of Oliver's gear had appeared to still be in place, at which point she'd really started to get nervous. She'd put Watchtower to work scouring hours of video. Unfortunately, there was no sign of him in Metropolis in the last several hours and Oliver owned a fleet of non-descript cars that were kept in strategic places across the city since he couldn't super-speed like Clark or Bart, so one of those vehicles being in one place or another didn't mean anything.
It didn't help that Chloe hadn't actually talked to Oliver in nearly a week. After he found out about her siphoning money to buy the kryptonite weapons, things had been strained to say the least. When he'd had the weapons moved without telling her where, things had taken a distinctly frosty turn. Oliver, as some form of punishment for not telling him about the money, still refused to tell her where the weapons were. Either that or he just couldn't bring himself to talk to her.
Chloe had tried to be patient, but unfortunately, she didn't have time for any more dawdling. They needed the weapons. Zod was on the move, determined to gain Clark-like powers, and she was not willing to let him get ahead of them. If that meant pointing lots of sharp meteorite laced items at him then so be it. She'd come to the decision that morning that she wanted the weapons distributed strategically sooner rather than later. That meant she needed to know where the weapons were and she was tired of Oliver avoiding her.
That decision had led to her increasingly panicked hunt for Oliver. She wasn't scared for him anymore, however. Now she was pissed. She'd missed it the first time she was scanning the video of his office, but after worrying herself sick, she'd looked in all of his usual places one more time only to see Oliver, seemingly dead asleep on the sofa in his office barely visible at the edge of the camera's view. He'd apparently managed to get past his secretary without her noticing.
Chloe's heels clacked loudly as she walked down the hallway toward the office. Asleep. The jerk was asleep while the world was crashing down around them and while she was worrying herself to death that he'd been hurt or kidnapped or about a hundred other scenarios her brain had come up with.
Chloe threw open the door, which refused to slam as she would have liked thanks to the, no doubt, extremely expensive mechanism that let the door open and close almost silently. She then stomped into the office and headed toward the grouping of plush chairs and sofa. Even now she could see Oliver's cell phone sitting on a glass top table, still turned off.
She looked down at him and the second she did, her anger drained away as quickly as it had arisen. The poor guy looked exhausted. His normally tan face was paler than usual and he had dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing jeans instead of the suit he habitually wore to the office and he'd used his jacket as a makeshift blanket to cover up from neck to waist. He still had his shoes on and if Chloe had to guess, he'd just walked in and flopped down, too tired to do anything more than that.
Chloe couldn't help feeling a little guilty. More than anyone, she knew just how much Oliver had to do. He was a CEO for a multi-billion dollar corporation, two of them in fact. Taking over Luthorcorp had been an enormous undertaking. In addition, he had his Green Arrow duties, which he took just as seriously. If he wasn't traveling on business, she knew he was out almost every night fighting, protecting, always moving, always on guard. Once they'd started their… association, she knew that he'd dedicated precious time to her, time that could have been spent elsewhere.
Now that she thought of it, she wasn't sure if the man every really slept. As a matter of fact, she was pretty sure it should be illegal for a man to look that good in a state of perpetual exhaustion. The rest of the world, who didn't do nearly as much as he did, walked around looking like coffee-drinking zombies who'd just fallen out of bed. Jerk.
Which reminded her why she was there. She needed to know where those weapons were.
"Oliver?" she said, her voice sounding loud in the silent office. "Oliver, wake up." When he didn't so much as budge, Chloe stepped closer and shook one of his shoulders. "Oliver, I need to talk to you."
Oliver's eyes blinked open and he began to draw in a deep breath, but he abruptly stopped, wincing and shutting his eyes against the light. "Chloe?" he said, his voice sounding muzzy and barely awake. He opened one eye, wincing again as if his head were killing him, and slowly he managed to focus on her. "What are you doing here?"
"I need to talk to you. We've got a problem." She kept her tone businesslike since she wasn't quite sure how he was going to play this after their misunderstanding about the money. With Oliver it was hard to tell sometimes. He liked to play things close to the vest, which she knew a little something about.
"What time is it?" he said, still sounding mostly asleep.
"It's past noon, Oliver," she said, her voice slightly disapproving. It wasn't like Ollie to be so out of it. At least not since his last round of suicidal binge drinking. "Late night?"
"You could say that." He sighed again, still refusing to move from his prone position.
"Did you hear me?" Chloe snapped, once again getting annoyed. "I said we have a problem."
"Sit down," he ordered, slurring. "Too tall."
Chloe blinked at that, and sat in one of the chairs opposite him. She'd certainly never been called too tall before. She supposed she might be though to a guy who appeared to be either still drunk or so hung-over he didn't even want to raise his head to look at her. Worry began to sneak in again. It hadn't been too long since he'd been a suicidal mess with his face in the gutter. He'd come a long way since then, however, and she didn't think a full spiral was in the works just because of their little tiff. A bout of angry drinking, however, apparently wasn't out of the question.
"Oliver, are you going to sit up and talk to me or not?"
"Hmm… probably not," he said halfheartedly, although it came out sounding closer to "prollynt."
"Can you at least open your eyes?" she shot back. "This is serious, Oliver."
"Hmm…" he said again.
"Damn it, Ollie, I need to know where the weapons are!" she nearly shouted, all pretense gone.
The problem was that there was no response at all. Oliver just continued to lie on the sofa as if he hadn't even heard her.
"Oliver?" Chloe stood and edged closer to him. "Look, I know you don't like how I went about this, but…" She stopped beside the sofa looking down at him, frowning when she still got no response. "Ollie?"
Chloe reached down and shook him by the shoulder again, furious that he'd apparently fallen right back asleep. As she pulled away, Oliver's hand fell from where he'd had it across his stomach and poked out from underneath the jacket that was covering his chest. The action dislodged the jacket slightly and Chloe's eyes widened.
"Oliver, is that blood?"
Chloe grabbed the jacket and jerked it off of him, throwing it to one side. She gasped.
Everywhere. The blood was everywhere.
More soon...
Chapter Two