Fic: Love, War and Remembrance (3/5)
Fic: Love, War and Remembrance (3/5)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: Sam visits Sarah. Dean and Chloe figure out what to do with all those tacky gifts that they didn't ask for in the first place.
Author: pen37
Beta: Strangevisitor7
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: NC-17
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
This fic is dedicated to Clarksmuse. Happy Birthday Katie!
Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5
“What did I tell you? Hunters give the best gifts!” Dean grinned up at Chloe from the custom-made Knife set that Bobby had sent them.
“Yeah, yeah. Your friends are more awesome than mine,” Chloe said as she frowned over the nesting dolls that Lucy had sent them from Russia. Her attached note made mention that she was currently posing as the long-lost heir to a country that had been dissolved sometime in the mid-eighties.
Chloe looked over the gift dubiously and decided that one, she needed to let Lois know what was going on in case Superman had to bail her baby cousin out, and two, Lucy had inherited the Lane gene for tacky.
“What are those?” Dean asked as he started testing the edge on one of the largest knives in the set.
“Knowing Lucy? Probably whatever priceless artifacts she was able to stuff down her bra when Kremlin security wasn't looking,” Chloe muttered.
“Awesome,” he said sarcastically. “Just what we need. Stolen tacky knick-knacks.”
“Well, If we can't return them to their rightful owners, we can always regift them,” Chloe said. “Ollie and Dinah will probably get married some day and you never cared that much for him anyway.”
“There is that,” Dean admitted with a slight grin.
“Till then,” she shoved the dolls into his hands. “Find some out-of-the-way place to store these in.”
As Chloe reached for the next box, Dean turned toward her computer desk - which seemed to have the only drawers in the house. When he slid open the bottom drawer, he found a framed photo of Chloe and some guy wearing military fatigues.
“Hey Chloe,” he said as he stared at the photo. “Who's this?”
Chloe glanced over his shoulder at the photo and shrugged. “That's Daniel MacKenzie.” She chuckled. “Haven't thought about him in a while.”
“What is he like an old boyfriend or something?” Dean frowned at her.
“No,” Chloe rolled her eyes. “I told you about him.”
“When?”
“Remember when we met? I told you about the blood mages in Corto Maltese.”
Off his confused look, Chloe gave him a patient smile. “I was doing a series called The Metahumans Next Door. For part of it, I was imbeded with Metahuman Special forces in a war zone. One of them was the kid of a hunter: Daniel MacKenzie.”
Dean raised his eyes skyward as he thought about that. “I think . . . That sounds sorta familiar.”
“Mac thought I was a hunter,” Chloe explained. “Which helped me remember my first visit to the Roadhouse. And ultimately led me to you and Sam.”
Dean grinned at that and put his arm around her. “We should totally thank that dude.”
Chloe nodded and then started shoving unwanted gifts into spare drawers. Dean watched her work as he tried to recall everything he'd heard about her time in Corto Maltese. Chloe had always been tight-lipped about the secrets she held. But over the months that they'd been together, she'd reluctantly given them up.
So Dean now wondered why he didn't know more about her time in the war zone. She'd made vague mention of encountering bloodmages there. The subject had come up again, when they'd run across a similar group in Tulsa. And then Lex had dropped some vague, ominous sounding innuendo during the time they'd been held captive in his secret lab.
Between dealing with Meg and finding Chloe again, Dean wasn't surprised that he'd let the subject drop. But now it was on his mind again.
“Hey Chloe?”
“Yeah?”
“A while back, Lex said something about your time in Corto Maltese.”
“I can only imagine,” Chloe rolled her eyes. Then she looked at his shaky smile, and her lips twisted into a frown. “Whatever he said is really bothering you, isn't it?”
“Sorry, I just . . .” Part of him wanted to say that it was none of his business, but the larger part wanted to know what the hell Lex Luthor thought he knew about Chloe.
“Here,” She motioned toward the futon that doubled as a couch and their bed.
Dean put the picture back in the drawer and walked reluctantly over to the futon. Chloe sat next to him, and put her head on his shoulder. When he draped his arm over her own shoulders in a comforting move, she sighed.
“The story came at a good time. We'd thought that Superman had been killed by Doomsday, and there were all these Superman wannabes stepping up to take his place. Lois was barely holding together in Clark's absence, and I was burning my candle at both ends with the rest of the League trying to fill his tacky red boots.”
Dean snorted at that.
“The hardest part was that we didn't have the right to grieve properly,” Chloe said softly. “Clark was among the missing. Superman was dead. And since Superman belongs to the world, we couldn't even bury Clark as a family.”
“I was . . . I guess you could say I was running,” Chloe shrugged. “Getting some space so that I could work things out for myself in my head. Plus, there had been a 33.1 facility on the island that we shut down back in the day. I'm sure if Lex was laying the innuendo down, there was probably some payback in his motives.”
“What happened while you were there?” Dean asked. “With the blood mages? Didn't you say that you and that dude were the only survivors”
“We were,” Chloe frowned at the memory. “We started finding the signs while on a routine patrol. Markings and things that made Mac think of the blood magic cults he used to see when he when he was little.”
Her eyes took on a distant, haunted look that made Dean think that maybe the reason he hadn't heard much about it was that she didn't like to talk about it.
“We tracked them down into a ravine. Mac took me with him to scout things out. Since I grew up in Smallville, I had a certain edge when it came to dealing with the weird,” she said with a self-depreciating smile. “That's when things went south. The rest of the group got impatient waiting. They were pretty confident. Why shouldn't they be, with all those powers?” She chuckled bitterly.
“They never thought they would encounter something they couldn't handle. Before Mac and I could do anything, they were captured.”
Chloe turned her head into Dean's shoulder in a way that left him no doubt that she was fighting back tears. Dean put his arms around her shoulders and rocked her.
“You know what the irony of it all is? We could have saved them. Mac could channel anyone's powers into anyone else. If he could have gotten close enough, he could have channeled my powers into the others. But we couldn't get close enough. All we could do was call for reinforcements. By the time they came, it was too late.
“The reinforcements thought that we were facing superior numbers,” Chloe said. “They pulled us out And the official report is that we blundered into several divisions of hostile forces. But in reality - it was my introduction to demons.”
Dean stroked her hair in a comforting manner as he cast his mind around for something to say. “You know it's not your fault, don't you?” he asked.
“Intellectually,” she whispered.
He shook his head and cradled her face in his hands.
“No, Chloe. It's not your fault. If you could have gotten close enough to help, then those guys would have gotten you, too.” He pressed his forehead to hers, and shut his eyes. “And then where would I be?”
“Probably not the proud owner of a broken ceramic chicken,” she laughed shakily.
He grinned at her. “See? I would have really missed the boat on that one.”
Gently, he brushed away her tears. Then, a thought occurred to him.
“Hey, why don't we go out?”
“Aren't we always out these days?” Chloe asked. “I thought you wanted to eat something that didn't come out of a 7-11 microwave.”
“Darlin', I love you. But you can't cook.”
“Says who?” She frowned.
“Come on,” he cajoled. “We'll find a pool hall, get some dirty food and I'll spend a few hours and we'll see how much of our fortune as I can possibly lose.”
“You don't lose at pool,” Chloe snarked.
“Then maybe I'll just play you for a few hours,” Dean said, his voice growing husky. “And we'll change the stakes.”
Chloe was a halfway decent pool shark in her own right. She'd learned almost in self-defense, since bikers rarely mess with a chick who can hold a table. More than once, they'd earned more cash out of a hustle because people automatically assumed that the cute little blonde couldn't play worth a damn.
“I like that idea,” Chloe's own voice took on an intrigued tone. “Winner gets to choose when, where and how?”
“Hell yeah,” Dean grinned at her.
She leaned forward and left a quick kiss on his lips. “Okay. Let me change.”
Dean tucked his hands behind his head as he watches her walk over to the Japanese screen that her wardrobe rack was hidden behind. Suddenly, a new thought occurred to him. “Hey Chloe?” You still have that dress that you wore that time you were possessed by the witch?”