Smallville: Revelations
Title: Smallville: Revelations
Author: latetothpartyhp / FlyingHigh
For: mygyps17
Rating: PG-13/Teen for language, some violence, and some mentions of sexuality
Warnings: Bullying and some scenes of violence involving a child
Prompts: Summer camp, haunted cabin, jealous & spying Lana. No Clark ignoring Chloe for Lana, no Clana dating, no kryptonite.
Summary: A mysterious apparition is trying to kill a young Smallvillian and it's up to Chlark to save her! Takes place in Season 2 after Vortex and before Heat.
Author's Note: This is my first stab at a prompt, so I'm submitting this with fingers crossed. Also see my note at the end of Chapter 5 and after the Epilogue. Originally posted at the secret_chlark Summer 2012 Gift Exchange.
Table of Contents
Rose hated camp. She hated this camp most of all. Not that she'd been to any other camps, but she knew if she never came back to Camp Chisholm it would be too soon. The food sucked, the “activities” sucked, the lake sucked, and the other campers really, really sucked. The girls in her cabin had all laughed at her when she'd woken up crying, and, even though their Leader-in-Training, Lana, had rounded them all up before breakfast and explained in front of everyone that her mother had died in the tornado in Smallville that spring and they would never make fun of her if they could possibly know what that felt like, everyone in the entire camp had known about it by the end of the day. Not only that, but they also “knew” that she'd wet the bed too, which hadn't happened, thank God, but it didn't help that somehow she'd gotten stuck with a mattress with some kind of vinyl covering designed to make it waterproof. Every time she moved she sounded like a walrus flopping around. It really sucked and was the reason she was trying very hard not to move right now.
If she moved, she'd wake people up and if she woke people up they'd spread more rumors about her. A few days after the crying incident, Misty Stiles had started making fun of her for spending so much time in the toilet stall, as if how long it took Rose to take a dump was any of her business, so Rose had told her to shut up you stupid cow and Misty had gotten mad at her and told everyone in camp who knew what a period was that Rose had gotten hers in the latrine and didn't know what to do about it. Later that afternoon the nurse had cornered her before the daily swim period and asked her if she needed to talk and had totally embarrassed her asking her questions about if she'd noticed her body changing and then told her to go lie down when she started crying again. She had no she'd had no idea how that happened; it just had. One minute the nurse was saying something to her like, “Whenever it happens it'll be natural and normal” and the next she'd just started wailing like a little kid. Afterward Lana had come into the cabin and asked if she wanted to talk and then looked like she was going to burst into tears when Rose yelled “No!”
She just wanted to be left alone. Wanted to watch TV alone in her own living room, wanted to poop alone in her own bathroom, wanted to eat her breakfast alone and supper with her mom and not a hundred other stupid, screaming kids at the same time. Wanted to sleep alone in her own bedroom, on her own mattress that didn't squeak like a freaking trombone every time she … started … crying. Shit. Shit! Rose bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut. She just wanted her mom again. Just her mom, and screw everyone else. Especially her dad, for leaving for her, for not coming for her, for not visiting her ever, for...
She gasped for air, her eyes popping open at the same time. Keeping the noise level down was hard. Of course, once she saw the woman with the white-haired woman eye patch standing at the foot of her bed, it was impossible.
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“Clark, how long have we been coming here to Camp Chisholm?” Pete asked as they strolled to the beach during the afternoon free period. Supposedly the kids were allowed to hang out in their cabins or at the canteen at this time in addition to swimming, but with the heat wave that had hit the state that week, everyone in camp was making straight for the water as soon as the bell rang.
In response, Clark just sort of squinted at him, like he was confused. Seriously, the guy could do five-digit long division in his head but he couldn't count back the number of years to second grade. Some days he was a total space case.
“I don't know. Seven years?” he guessed after he'd thought about it long enough.
“Since we were seven,” Pete corrected him. “Seven years old. We were littler than these squirts,” he said, pointing to the troop of fourth-graders running past them to the lake. “So it's been eight years now, and all that time I have never once seen you get a sunburn.” He pointed to Clark's blindingly bare chest. “Everyone else always came home looking like lobsters.”
“Everyone except you,” Clark interrupted.
“Yeah, well, I got a natural-born edge there, there's no competing with me on that. You, on the other hand? It's like your genes secrete Coppertone. You are the whitest white guy I know, which in Smallville, is saying a lot. You haven't been sneaking into Second Quad, have you?”
“No! Why would I do that?”
“'Cause rumor has it Second Quad is haunted. I just thought maybe what they really saw was you.”
“Very funny,” Clark said. Then he wrinkled his nose up, making his confused face again. “Since when is Second Quad haunted? I've never heard that story before.”
“Since last night. All the little middle-school kids got their panties in a bunch about it. Some girl woke up screaming at someone to leave her alone, so that woke everyone else up, and some of them supposedly saw a woman with an eye-patch who glared at them all and then vanished.”
“You've got to be kidding,” Clark said, throwing down his towel on the one free spot on on the sand they could find.
“If you don't believe me, just ask Lana. She's acting L.I.T.2 for that cabin. She was there.”
Naturally, as soon as the name “Lana” was mentioned Clark started scanning the crowd at the beach, looking for her. Pete was never going to understand what that was all about. Not that Lana wasn't pretty. It was just that Pete preferred women who were shaped like, you know, women. Give him a Drew Barrymore or a Beyonce Knowles any day of the week. But hey, if Clark was into the boyish look, more power to him. It just left the field that much wider open for him.
“Race you to the raft,” he offered, but Clark was on a hunt, and he'd spotted his prey.
“I'm gonna go talk to Lana,” Clark replied.
“Suit yourself,” Pete shrugged. “But I'd work a little more on that tan first if I was you. After last night's trauma she might run screaming in the other direction when she sees you.”
Clark rolled his eyes and stomped away as Pete walked down to the shore. He had to walk carefully: there were a hundred and fifty kids in camp right now and it looked as if every single one of them was on the beach right now. In fact, some of the little guys from the cabin where he was Leader-in-Training Two came running over to show him a turtle shell they'd found and Pete told them it was cool and to go wash their hands. These kids would pick up the nastiest shit and then start popping candy in their mouths. It was crazy. He'd never been that dumb as a kid.
Passing the lifeguard stand, he waved at Jake Roberts, the guard on duty. Jake had been his brother Mark's best friend before graduation, but Pete hadn't seen much of him since he'd left for the aviation program at North Dakota. Jake waved back, but almost immediately turned his attention back to the two female Counselors-in-Training who were standing at the base of the tower. Pete didn't blame him; they were wearing the shortest, tightest Daisy Dukes he'd ever seen. He'd better get himself into the water before he gave the kids any more biology lessons.
Wading out until he was hip-deep in murky waters of Lake Gayle, he plunged in and swam out to the raft. Only kids that had passed their Red Cross Level 4's were allowed on to the raft, which is why it was the perfect place to get away from the little crumb-grabbers. It was also why he was surprised when the first face he saw when he climbed up was Rose Worth. Her mom had cleaned houses once in a while when she couldn't get overtime at the crap factory and sometimes she'd bring Rose with when his mom got on one of her closet re-organizing kicks. Rose was pretty killer on PlayStation for a kid but from what he could tell her mom couldn't really afford stuff like overnight camp or swim lessons.
Of course, what did he know? She'd been, like, a year old during the meteor shower. Maybe she'd been swimming in a kiddie pool when they hit and could breathe underwater now or something.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said back.
“How's...” your mom? He'd been about to ask, but caught himself. “...camp?” he asked instead. “Gotta love all this nature.”
“Not really,” she answered, rolling around some kind of tiny snail-shell thing she'd found across the planks of the raft.
“You're just not giving it a chance. Where else do you get to climb ropes all day and guzzle Mountain Dew Code Red all night?”
“I wish. They freak out if we have pop in our cabin.”
“Seriously? That sucks. What cabin are you in?
She crushed the snail shell with her thumb. “Second Quad.”
“Oh hey! You're the guys with the ghost!”
“Whatever,” she said, and hopped into the water.
Whatever was right, he thought. Try to be nice to someone and that was the thanks he got. Standing up, he looked around to see if there was anyone else he knew on the raft. No girls, but there were a couple of guys on the Granville JV squad he knew from last fall. They were pink and peeling enough to have just come from their three-day trek in the Ozarks.
“Hey, Rickman!” he yelled.
Rickman turned and lifted his hand and that, as he would later tell Chloe, was when everything happened at once. From the shore a girl screamed and every head on in the lake and on the beach swiveled in her direction. Just as they did, the raft rocked, as if everyone on one side had jumped at the same time. Everyone but Pete, that was. Pete lurched and slid, falling back into the water. As he did, he heard another girl scream, this time in the water behind him. It cut off just as he resurfaced, swinging his head in every direction to see, if he could what the hell was going on. Most of the people who'd managed to stay on the raft had fallen and the ones who hadn't were either bobbing in the water like him or scrambling to get back on. He appeared to have been pushed the furthest out by the rocking and couldn't see what was happening on shore, but from all the shouting and pointing he'd guessed a hell mouth must have opened up or something.
Something bad enough that no one else heard the small cry coming again from behind him. At least, no one else who whipped around to see - and, as he would also tell Chloe later, he was not making this up, he swore to God it really happened - a silvery-haired woman with an eye-patch pushing Rose Worth into the water.
“What did you do?!” Chloe would ask on the phone that night and the answer to that he did make up, because even after all the crazy shit that had happened that year he still couldn't quite process a woman appearing out of nowhere to drown little Rose Worth of all people. So when he said, “I didn't even think, I just started swimming toward her,” that was … an embellishment. What really happened was that he yelled the only words his brain could produce, which were, “WHAT THE FUCK?!?”
Then Rose yelled another little yell, only this time it sounded like a word, “Peh-ubbbh” which could have meant “Peter”, which could have meant she saw him, and that's when he started breast-stroking toward her.
As he swam, the eye-patch chick paused. “Why'd she do that?” Chloe would ask from across the miles in Metropolis, but Pete didn't know. “No idea. She just stopped and man, if looks could kill.”
“She looked mad?”
“Enough to kill.”
“But she didn't, right? I mean, the girl's alive, right?”
“Yeah. When I got to Rose she disappeared.”
“You're telling me the girl vanished!?!”
“No! The eye-patch chick vanished.”
“Where'd she go?”
“I dunno. She was just gone.”
“That is weird,” Chloe would tell him. “As in Wall-of-Weird weird. And you said this Rose girl's from Smallville, right?”