Fic: Gestalt Therapy Courtesy Chloe Sullivan
Fic: Gestalt Therapy Courtesy Chloe Sullivan
Summary:In the shared verse of Meta!Chloe and Immortal!Dean, Chloe kept her unaging status a secret from Dean for several hundred years. This is what happened when he finally found out.
Author: pen37
Fandoms: Supernatural/Smallville/Highlander
Rating: G
Beta:Strangevisitor7 and Clarksmuse
Takes place after Against Her Will, which is Chapter 4 of The Five Times Immortal!Dean met Meta!Chloe met Immortal!Dean. The entire series can be found here.
Dean sat in the strange quarters, and stared blankly at the walls. Chloe Sullivan is alive.
Chloe Sullivan is alive. Alive is Chloe Sullivan. Chloe Sullivan alive is. No matter how many times he said it, the words seemed strange. They were English. But they as well have been written in Sanskrit, for all the sense it made.
She couldn’t be alive. She’d been mortal. He’d followed her career. Felt the strange pang of regret when she’d died in some kind of -- helicopter crash.
But that had been a lie.
Her words from their last conversation in the cockpit rang in his head. You weren't just a tool. You were a fully-stocked tool truck. With a tool trailer hitched on to the back, and your own tool warehouse supplying extra wrenches.
She’d lied to him. All along. Like he’d been some kind of chump.
The door snapped open, and Duncan stuck his head in. “Thought I’d find you in here moping.”
“I don’t mope,” Dean growled at him.
“Sorry. Brooding then.”
Dean responded with the one-finger salute.
“No thanks, you get up to that enough without my help.”
“Ha Ha,” he said dryly.
Without waiting for an invitation, Duncan came into the room, and sat on the other end of the bunk. “So the cute little blonde that you pined over is actually alive. What’s your problem?”
“I did not pine.”
“That’s right. Because you don’t pine.” Duncan said slowly, as if speaking to a ten-year-old. “Look, you had quite the lingering non-crush on her, if what Richie told me is any indication. Now . . . she’s alive and from the looks of things, not going to die. This looks like a win-win situation to me.”
Dean frowned at him. “Then you’re missing the part where she’s been playing me for a sucker for the past couple hundred years.”
“Is she? To hear Methos tell it, she’s been stumbling into and out of trouble, all the while practically bending-over-backwards to keep you, us, Immortals out of it and safe. Which strikes me as ironic, considering the way you behaved back when the two of you were doing the UST dance.”
“Chloe getting into trouble. Now that sounds like standard operating procedure,” Dean said sarcastically.
Duncan pinned him with that look. The one that usually meant: I’m going to illustrate my point by bringing a hurting down on you. The one that usually led to hours of intense sword drills.
“Maybe we should stop verbally fencing and address the real issue?”
“I thought we were?” Dean raised his eyebrows.
“And I suppose the fact that she’s here and alive, and Sam isn’t has nothing to do with your current tantrum.”
Dean glared at him.
“It’s a perfectly natural response, Dean. They’re the same age. Both of a similar temperament: both tenacious researchers. Both absolutely single-minded in their pursuit of what they see as right. The fact that she’s suddenly here, back from the dead, as it were, and Sam isn’t. That’s got to have you thinking about how unfair everything is.”
In response, Dean looked down at his hands.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” Duncan stood and headed toward the door. As he passed, he patted Dean’s shoulder. “I would hate for another couple hundred years to go by with the two of you avoiding each other. Even Immortal life is too short to be avoiding good friends.”
***
She really hated spending too much time away from her ship. Okay, technically the ship belonged to Methos. But she was the one who maintained it. Back when he bought it, she’d spent six months playing ship rat: crawling through it and personally re-wiring it. Then taking the engine apart bolt-by-bolt and putting it back together the right way. Then re-writing the ship’s onboard navigation system to be just a touch more responsive.
It may be Methos’s ship, but it was her baby. And in the time she’d been gone, he’d played merry hell with the engines. And then tried to fix the damage himself. She’d told him what they could and couldn’t do. But did he listen? She snorted at that. Get kidnapped by one crazy Kryptonian cult, and everyone else falls apart.
The sound of heavy footsteps coming down the metal steps to the engine room signaled to her that she wasn’t alone. Dean or Duncan, she thought as she reached for a wrench that had obviously been trying to escape. Methos’s steps are lighter.
A hand closed around the wrench and slid it over into her grasp.
“Thanks.”
“Welcome.” Dean’s voice sounded hostile with anger.
Chloe sighed. So they’d hit that point. The one where he realized that she’d pretty much kept the fact that she was an unaging mutant from him for hundreds of years. Honestly, she’d been expecting it sooner. She tightened the wrench around a bolt and tried to lean into the handle to torque it loose.
“So were you ever going to tell me?” he growled out.
“Dean.” She let out a snarl of frustration. Methos always tightened things up too tight. “At what point was I supposed to tell you? I knew you for about half-a-year. And that was hundreds of years ago. At the time, being open about being Meta was like accepting an invitation to The Island of Dr. Moreau.”
Dean slipped his arms around either side of her, took hold of the wrench, and loosed the bolt easily. “You think any of us were like that?”
“I didn’t know you at first.” Chloe turned in his arms, still clutching the wrench and keeping it between them. “And by the time I felt like I could trust you - my silence had a momentum of its own. Every time I started to tell you, you would make some kind of perverted crack that kept me from saying anything out of spite.”
“So is the old man the only one who knew?”
“And by that line, I assume you mean Methos. But no,” she sighed. He was not going to like hearing this, either. “Richie knew, too.”
“Really?” he said tightly. “You’ll share with Richie but not with me?”
“I didn’t mean for him to find out,” Chloe said with a frown. “Remember that last hunt? When I fell out of that window?”
His eyes took on the distant look of remembrance. “Thought you broke your neck.”
“I did,” she said flatly. “Richie saw. You can’t just lie your way out of something like that and I made him promise not to tell until I was ready. Guess I never was.”
“So did you two date?”
She rolled her eyes at him. After all this time, what right did he have to play jealous boyfriend?
“What is it with you, Dean? I knew you for six months, and in that time you stole two kisses. If you think I owed you something, you should have made your intentions clear. Instead - you were out with a different girl each night.” She bit off her retort mid-rant. She was opening up a can of worms that she really didn’t want to open up. “Look, I saw you from a distance once or twice over the years. You didn’t look like you missed me too terribly. And I was up to my neck in the kind of trouble that you guys didn’t need to be involved in. Richie has been - there for me,” she trailed off uncertainly. Her eyes cut left, as if she were looking for some way to escape the conversation.
“I could have been there for you,” he said petulantly.
“It’s a two way street, dude. You could have picked up the phone.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
Dean looked troubled by her words. He released her as if she’d burned him and backed away. “Guess I could’ve.” He tucked his hands in his pockets, leaned against the drive system, and shrugged. “So where’d you learn to work on engines?”
“It was me or Methos. And if I left it up to him, we’d wind up stranded in deep space with a limited air supply.” She grinned at him. “I love the man like a brother, but I once heard him refer to a telephone as one of those new-fangled far-speaking devices of Edison’s. Of course, he could’ve been picking on me for all the age jokes.”
Dean looked down as if trying to hide the smile that was creeping across his face. “So,” his right hand crept up to rub the back of his neck, and at last he looked up at her. “Why don’t you show me what this baby can do?”
“Not a lot right now,” Chloe passed him her wrench. “But if you’ll help me put the drive system back together the way it’s supposed to go - as opposed to the way Methos thinks it’s supposed to go, it’ll dance circles around anything else out there.”
“Throw in a cooler of beer, and you’ve got a deal.”
Chloe smiled at that. She’d never been adept at speaking Dean’s language, but as best she could tell, he’d called a truce. Given their equally volatile tempers, she wondered how long it would last.
Summary:In the shared verse of Meta!Chloe and Immortal!Dean, Chloe kept her unaging status a secret from Dean for several hundred years. This is what happened when he finally found out.
Author: pen37
Fandoms: Supernatural/Smallville/Highlander
Rating: G
Beta:Strangevisitor7 and Clarksmuse
Takes place after Against Her Will, which is Chapter 4 of The Five Times Immortal!Dean met Meta!Chloe met Immortal!Dean. The entire series can be found here.
Dean sat in the strange quarters, and stared blankly at the walls. Chloe Sullivan is alive.
Chloe Sullivan is alive. Alive is Chloe Sullivan. Chloe Sullivan alive is. No matter how many times he said it, the words seemed strange. They were English. But they as well have been written in Sanskrit, for all the sense it made.
She couldn’t be alive. She’d been mortal. He’d followed her career. Felt the strange pang of regret when she’d died in some kind of -- helicopter crash.
But that had been a lie.
Her words from their last conversation in the cockpit rang in his head. You weren't just a tool. You were a fully-stocked tool truck. With a tool trailer hitched on to the back, and your own tool warehouse supplying extra wrenches.
She’d lied to him. All along. Like he’d been some kind of chump.
The door snapped open, and Duncan stuck his head in. “Thought I’d find you in here moping.”
“I don’t mope,” Dean growled at him.
“Sorry. Brooding then.”
Dean responded with the one-finger salute.
“No thanks, you get up to that enough without my help.”
“Ha Ha,” he said dryly.
Without waiting for an invitation, Duncan came into the room, and sat on the other end of the bunk. “So the cute little blonde that you pined over is actually alive. What’s your problem?”
“I did not pine.”
“That’s right. Because you don’t pine.” Duncan said slowly, as if speaking to a ten-year-old. “Look, you had quite the lingering non-crush on her, if what Richie told me is any indication. Now . . . she’s alive and from the looks of things, not going to die. This looks like a win-win situation to me.”
Dean frowned at him. “Then you’re missing the part where she’s been playing me for a sucker for the past couple hundred years.”
“Is she? To hear Methos tell it, she’s been stumbling into and out of trouble, all the while practically bending-over-backwards to keep you, us, Immortals out of it and safe. Which strikes me as ironic, considering the way you behaved back when the two of you were doing the UST dance.”
“Chloe getting into trouble. Now that sounds like standard operating procedure,” Dean said sarcastically.
Duncan pinned him with that look. The one that usually meant: I’m going to illustrate my point by bringing a hurting down on you. The one that usually led to hours of intense sword drills.
“Maybe we should stop verbally fencing and address the real issue?”
“I thought we were?” Dean raised his eyebrows.
“And I suppose the fact that she’s here and alive, and Sam isn’t has nothing to do with your current tantrum.”
Dean glared at him.
“It’s a perfectly natural response, Dean. They’re the same age. Both of a similar temperament: both tenacious researchers. Both absolutely single-minded in their pursuit of what they see as right. The fact that she’s suddenly here, back from the dead, as it were, and Sam isn’t. That’s got to have you thinking about how unfair everything is.”
In response, Dean looked down at his hands.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” Duncan stood and headed toward the door. As he passed, he patted Dean’s shoulder. “I would hate for another couple hundred years to go by with the two of you avoiding each other. Even Immortal life is too short to be avoiding good friends.”
***
She really hated spending too much time away from her ship. Okay, technically the ship belonged to Methos. But she was the one who maintained it. Back when he bought it, she’d spent six months playing ship rat: crawling through it and personally re-wiring it. Then taking the engine apart bolt-by-bolt and putting it back together the right way. Then re-writing the ship’s onboard navigation system to be just a touch more responsive.
It may be Methos’s ship, but it was her baby. And in the time she’d been gone, he’d played merry hell with the engines. And then tried to fix the damage himself. She’d told him what they could and couldn’t do. But did he listen? She snorted at that. Get kidnapped by one crazy Kryptonian cult, and everyone else falls apart.
The sound of heavy footsteps coming down the metal steps to the engine room signaled to her that she wasn’t alone. Dean or Duncan, she thought as she reached for a wrench that had obviously been trying to escape. Methos’s steps are lighter.
A hand closed around the wrench and slid it over into her grasp.
“Thanks.”
“Welcome.” Dean’s voice sounded hostile with anger.
Chloe sighed. So they’d hit that point. The one where he realized that she’d pretty much kept the fact that she was an unaging mutant from him for hundreds of years. Honestly, she’d been expecting it sooner. She tightened the wrench around a bolt and tried to lean into the handle to torque it loose.
“So were you ever going to tell me?” he growled out.
“Dean.” She let out a snarl of frustration. Methos always tightened things up too tight. “At what point was I supposed to tell you? I knew you for about half-a-year. And that was hundreds of years ago. At the time, being open about being Meta was like accepting an invitation to The Island of Dr. Moreau.”
Dean slipped his arms around either side of her, took hold of the wrench, and loosed the bolt easily. “You think any of us were like that?”
“I didn’t know you at first.” Chloe turned in his arms, still clutching the wrench and keeping it between them. “And by the time I felt like I could trust you - my silence had a momentum of its own. Every time I started to tell you, you would make some kind of perverted crack that kept me from saying anything out of spite.”
“So is the old man the only one who knew?”
“And by that line, I assume you mean Methos. But no,” she sighed. He was not going to like hearing this, either. “Richie knew, too.”
“Really?” he said tightly. “You’ll share with Richie but not with me?”
“I didn’t mean for him to find out,” Chloe said with a frown. “Remember that last hunt? When I fell out of that window?”
His eyes took on the distant look of remembrance. “Thought you broke your neck.”
“I did,” she said flatly. “Richie saw. You can’t just lie your way out of something like that and I made him promise not to tell until I was ready. Guess I never was.”
“So did you two date?”
She rolled her eyes at him. After all this time, what right did he have to play jealous boyfriend?
“What is it with you, Dean? I knew you for six months, and in that time you stole two kisses. If you think I owed you something, you should have made your intentions clear. Instead - you were out with a different girl each night.” She bit off her retort mid-rant. She was opening up a can of worms that she really didn’t want to open up. “Look, I saw you from a distance once or twice over the years. You didn’t look like you missed me too terribly. And I was up to my neck in the kind of trouble that you guys didn’t need to be involved in. Richie has been - there for me,” she trailed off uncertainly. Her eyes cut left, as if she were looking for some way to escape the conversation.
“I could have been there for you,” he said petulantly.
“It’s a two way street, dude. You could have picked up the phone.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
Dean looked troubled by her words. He released her as if she’d burned him and backed away. “Guess I could’ve.” He tucked his hands in his pockets, leaned against the drive system, and shrugged. “So where’d you learn to work on engines?”
“It was me or Methos. And if I left it up to him, we’d wind up stranded in deep space with a limited air supply.” She grinned at him. “I love the man like a brother, but I once heard him refer to a telephone as one of those new-fangled far-speaking devices of Edison’s. Of course, he could’ve been picking on me for all the age jokes.”
Dean looked down as if trying to hide the smile that was creeping across his face. “So,” his right hand crept up to rub the back of his neck, and at last he looked up at her. “Why don’t you show me what this baby can do?”
“Not a lot right now,” Chloe passed him her wrench. “But if you’ll help me put the drive system back together the way it’s supposed to go - as opposed to the way Methos thinks it’s supposed to go, it’ll dance circles around anything else out there.”
“Throw in a cooler of beer, and you’ve got a deal.”
Chloe smiled at that. She’d never been adept at speaking Dean’s language, but as best she could tell, he’d called a truce. Given their equally volatile tempers, she wondered how long it would last.