Fanfiction for star_majesty: The Moment, Prologue & Part 1...
Author’s Note -- This present is for star_majesty. The request specified that the story be post series, Chlark together, and a happy ending. This begins post series, meanders its way to Chlark together, and ends (I think) happily.
There was to be no “Fever” letter, adultery, or Jimmy Olsen. Check, check, and check. I hope, star_majesty, that there is at least one part of this story that will make you smile. :-)
Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
The Moment
Prologue
The Moment
“Is that . . .,” she starts to ask blinking at the piece of jewelry nestled in the lining of the case she has just opened. She reaches out one finger to touch it but stops short as she looks up at him with eyes that are wide and curious and maybe just a little bit hesitant.
“Yeah,” he answers the question that she never finished voicing. “Mostly,” he adds after a beat. “I added something to it,” he tells her sounding something that is not quite nervous as he watches her face carefully. She raises her eyebrow as if to ask him to elaborate. He reaches into the case and pulls out the bracelet before turning it so that she can see the inside of the circle.
“Here,” he points to a thin line of gold that has been inlaid all the way around the interior. “I used their wedding bands -- Mom’s and Dad’s. I melted them down and worked them into the bracelet.” He shrugs his shoulders a little as if he is trying to downplay the importance of his words, but the expression on his face tells an entirely different story. The action means something to him. That line of gold that he is tracing out with his finger means something to him. She reaches out and places her hand over top of his and gives him a soft, encouraging smile.
“It’s beautiful,” she tells him. It is possible that she is referring to the craftsmanship being displayed. It is possible that she is referring to the meaning behind the gesture. It is possible that she is referring to both. He watches her trace the line of gold for herself (the bracelet still being held by him) for a moment before he speaks again in a tone that has lost the trace of whatever that not quite nervous emotion was.
“That’s good,” he tells her reaching out to catch her still tracing fingers with the hand that is not still holding the bracelet out for her inspection. He squeezes her fingers slightly and catches her eyes giving her a hopeful smile.
Part 1
How Chloe Got There
She is sitting at the tiny kitchen table in her efficiency apartment letting the sun coming through the window warm her up as she scans through articles on the screen in front of her when the longing hits her. She misses the smell of newsprint. It is a deceptively simple thought that is immediately followed by not so simple consequences. That one acknowledgement that she misses the ink and paper smell that had been so much a part of the life that she had once upon a time opens a floodgate of memories and nostalgia. She gets swept up in the rush and finds that she can no longer make out the words in front of her because her vision has gone blurry from the tears that are welling up in them.
She is homesick in a deep, unshakable way that refuses to be pushed back down. She decides that the only way to get her emotional overload to stop short circuiting is to figure out what exactly it is that she is missing that is creating this response. She has been so good about keeping herself busy (and so focused on keeping herself on track to keep the things she needs to keep her secrets secret) that she has not had such a round of tears and feelings of missing something since the early days of walking away from Star City. She rolls the word homesick around in her head and, for once, gives her brain free rein to wander wherever it would like to go.
It has been a very long time since she has had something that was truly deserving of the word home. Star City had been the last place that she had really felt that way about, and it was not Star City itself so much as the people she had there that made it that. For the first time in more years than she cares to count, she lets herself remember what that felt like -- to have a place where she actually belonged instead of just a place to be because she had to be somewhere. The first set of memories that she allows to wash over her are of her son.
Her baby boy was beautiful. All her skill as a writer, all her gift for using words, and all her ability to look at a situation with rationality and logic were overthrown by the tiny person that they placed in her arms. Everything she had ever thought she had known was dwarfed in comparison to the certainty that overtook her when she looked down into the little eyes that were still squinting against the unfamiliarity of the light. She knew then that she would do anything to protect that little boy that was snuggling against her as if he was confident that she could be trusted to guide and shelter him in the strange new world in which he found himself. She had broken away from drinking in the sight of his little face for a moment to make eye contact with the other important person in the room. Ollie had looked awestruck (and a little overwhelmed). She had watched the play of emotions across his features as they resolved themselves into the same expression that she could feel on her own and known that they were on the same page. Maybe all parents felt that way the first time they looked into their child’s eyes; maybe it was different for them with their first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be abandoned (because intention to leave or not does not change the way it feels to be left behind when you are a child). Oliver had leaned forward and brushed the sweat drenched hair away from her forehead before placing a kiss there, had taken the hand that she had pulled away from the baby to hold out to him, and squeezed her fingers. She had felt her breath hitching in wonder at the moment.
Those moments had been her home; the two of them had been her home. The life that she had made with them had been her home.
She had kept doing some work for the JLA. She did not bury herself in it, but she made herself available. There were things that she could do for them, and she did them happily -- reveling in the fact that she had finally figured out the balance between being a respected and necessary helper and letting other people’s lives swallow up her own. She had learned that lesson via the experience route. There was a tension to the balance, but it was entirely doable. It was easier (she found) to keep herself where she needed to be when she had people around who were willing to question her choices -- not accept without it occurring to them to ask, not handing out dictates for what she should do, but willing to ask if she was where she needed to be. Besides, she had had her little boy to pull her back from letting other things swallow her whole; she had had Ollie.
Oliver was not something that she had expected (but, then again, she can honestly say that neither was being a mother). Dark places, abandonment issues, the frustrations inherent in knowing truths (sometimes horrible truths) that you could not drag out into the light of day, and what it was like to decide that there was nothing to be done but to handle something yourself and let the consequences fall where they may -- Oliver got all of those things. There had been times that it had been a deeply scary prospect to be faced with (spending her life with a man who understood things that she could not always find a way to explain so well), but she had learned how not to run from scary. She had learned that scary does not have to end badly. There was such a thing as taking chances and having them work out well. There was such a thing as working your way through the scary to get to the good that was waiting just beyond it. She had not always known that -- she had not always been willing to trust that, but she had gotten to that place with her life (with him). She had been happy.
She had had Oliver and their little boy and the family that they had been making. She had had the members of Justice that were a mix of extended family and very good friends and people that she knew had her back. She had gotten to help save the world on occasion and help to make it better more often than that. She did not know how to live her life devoid of that (she still does not).
So, she had done her part to make the world better with Justice, and she had done her part to make the world better by getting back to her first love. She had become a reporter again, and it had felt wonderful. She was writing stories -- big ones and little ones and all the ones in between that kept the news cycle going and offered people the information that they needed to have (and sometimes did not want) along with a little bit that they wanted (but did not really need).
She was a teller of truths and a righter of wrongs just as she had always known she would be in the dreams of her childhood. She had not realized how much of a hole the lack of that had left in her life until she had gotten back to it. She has never experienced quite the same level of giddy as she did on the first day that she found herself at a desk in a newsroom with the buzz of anticipation and the chatter of her new coworkers and the sense of impending something settled all around her. There had been many times in her life when she thought that she was feeling something similar, but they all paled in comparison somehow to that moment of returning after she had really, truly known what it was like to have left it behind for what she had thought was for good.
She had learned that you did not have to leave behind all the dreams of your youth, and the dreams of your youth did not have to prevent you finding new dreams that you did not know that you wanted until you had found them. Having the balance between her old dreams and her new ones was worth the life in the public eye that she had to exist within in order to get it.
She lets the contentment she recalls settle in around her and finds that she is not feeling any less homesick than she was right after the longing for newsprint hit her. She is okay with that. It was good to let herself feel those things again even with the little pings of sadness that come along with them.
It had been sudden in the sense that she did not recognize it until the awareness that she was homesick sort of sprang full force upon her, but she realizes when she looks back that it has been creeping up on her by degrees for ages. It might even be (she decides) that homesick is the wrong word to use, but she does not think that the phrase “mesick” actually exists (although she also decides that it most definitely should). She has known plenty of people in the course of her life who have gone through similar phases; she has gone through it before herself. This time, however, she does not just want to remember the girl that she used to be or try to get her footing back from an occasion when she was slipping close to a ledge that she did not want to tumble off of -- there is that sense of nostalgia for what she referred, a rather long time ago, to as “Chloe 1.0.” There is also something else underneath of it. She wants something else, so she goes home -- not to the one in California that was made up of people who are no longer there.
With the way that she is currently feeling, the only place that works for the description of home is Kansas. There were a lot of years when the word “home” coming out of her mouth in Kansas meant Metropolis (even when she knew differently inside her head). That is not where she finds herself driving.
She has learned a lot about herself and other people and the person she wants to be and how she wants to do her helping. She would not give up one bit of it -- they were all hard learned lessons that she paid for dearly. None of that stops the sharp intake of breath when she sees the sign out in front of where her driving has brought her. She wants it (more than anything she has wanted for quite some time), and she has the ability to have it. She buys the place, and she cannot stop the smile that refuses to be held back when she is walking out of the realty office with the paperwork in her hand.
She has good memories in this place despite the fact that there are not so happy memories as well. She has learned to take the lessons learned from the bad memories and leave them to just be while keeping the good memories to be cherished. She feels content the moment she walks through the door, and she thinks that maybe it has less to do with the memories the place hosts and more to do with the way she feels that this is a safe place to let her memories be out in the open. She has spent a lot of her life hiding a lot of things. She is in essence still hiding here in the house that she found that she could not pass up, but it does not feel like hiding. It feels like being home -- a real home as opposed to the temporary residences where she is always looking ahead to when she will have to leave with which she has contented herself for what now feels like far too long.
It has been that way since her baby’s baby placed her baby in her arms. She knew then that she could no longer stay where she was. She was pushing the limits of attention drawing. Oliver was already gone. She had switched to freelance articles under a variety of pennames over a decade before in an attempt to head off suspicion. It was time for her to go. She had uttered that phrase to herself a number of times since. She no longer bothered asking (even herself within the confines of her head) why it had to be that way. She had learned that you could ask all the questions you wanted when it came to all things Kryptonite related, but you should not have very high expectations when it came to getting answers. All the rules of science seemed to bend and twist when confronted with the substance, and her aging process (or lack thereof) was no exception. She did not bother to wonder anymore; she merely lived her life around it. She let the countdown clock of her time limit keep its watch in the back of her mind and kept moving forward every time that it ran down -- until now.
The barn that she knew is long gone, but the original house is still standing. It has been remodeled and repaired (quite often she is sure), but it is still the house that she knew underneath the repairs and redecorations (she swears that the first time she walks into the kitchen she can smell pie baking). She settles in and opts not to do much mixing with the current locals. It is her MO sometimes even though she has hidden in plain sight more often over the years. She enjoys the break. She enjoys the quiet. She enjoys the indulgence. She even puts her hair back to blond. She hangs up pictures of places she has traveled. She sends in her freelance stories. She soaks in the privacy and the lack of pressure that the once Kent homestead affords her. It might be that it is all in her head. It might be that she could have had this in any place where she stopped to give herself breathing room, but she does not think that that is true. In fact, it does not matter whether or not it is true because this is the only place that she has ever stopped to give herself that chance.
She lets her memories (the ones that she no longer spends her time trying not to think about) drift farther back -- all the way to the ones that match the house in which she is sitting. She thinks of a kind woman with willing words of wisdom for a motherless girl and the unobtrusive way those words were delivered on all of the occasions that she had been too proud to ask for them. She thinks of a thoughtful man and the first time she had caught him moving her car so that he could add air to her tires when he noticed that the rear passenger side was a little low. She thinks of being a teenager and hanging out with her two best friends when they still knew how to just be kids. She thinks about a time when there was no name (from her perspective anyway) for what it is that gives her such a long list of memories to sort through while she paints walls and arranges furniture. She is in a good place. She is in a happy place, and she decides that her impulse buy is one of the best ideas that she has had in a very long time.
One day, she looks up to see a figure in the yard. There he is standing outside clearly visible through the window. She did not exactly expect him, but it is not really surprising that they would run across each other at some point. It has happened from time to time over the years even before she came back to Kansas and his official home territory. He is a hero, and she is a reporter. There were times that they ended up in the same place at the same time, but it has been at least a dozen years since the last occasion when they exchanged nods of recognition in passing as he hurried off to contain a crisis while she hurried off to submit a story about one. It has been at least a dozen more since they last actually exchanged words. This is different. There is no crisis. There is no crowd. There are just the two of them staring at each other through a pane of glass. She is the first to move.
She opens the door and stands slightly to the side in invitation, but she does not say anything. She does not know what to say. “Hi” seems too awkward somehow and “Come in” seems too weird given that she is standing beside the door of his childhood home. He comes in despite her silence, and he does not break it. He pauses for a moment as he looks around the room before he sinks into one of her chairs. He does not sit back, and he does not look very relaxed. She does not see anything on his face that indicates that he is upset, but she would be the first to admit that it has been a very long time since reading his facial expressions has been an ingrained habit. She decides that she thinks he looks overwhelmed by something, so she walks away (still not breaking the silence between them) to get him a cup of coffee (but, mostly, to give him a moment on his own to gather his thoughts). She uses the time in the kitchen to try to sort out the jumble of thoughts in her head into some semblance of order.
He takes the cup from her hand as he nods a thank you. She sees the corners of his mouth twist up a bit, but the lack of words between them continues. She does not know what he is thinking, but she knows that she feels like there are so many things to say that she cannot quite latch on to where to begin. Then, someone says something. She cannot say (even later when her head is a little clearer) who said something first or even what it was that was said. All she knows is that some sort of a wall has come down from between them and both of them are talking in a rush and listening so intently to try to not miss anything that anyone would think that the fate of the world was resting on the conversation that they are having. The words that were absent at the start of the visit are flowing like the both of them have been storing them up for a lifetime and are afraid that they are going to run out of time before they get to say them all.
She forces herself to take a deep breath and to slow down. She reminds herself that this is not just a nod in passing moment. It is not even a whispered “try to stay out of trouble” as they head in their different directions moment. They have time. There is plenty of time if they want to take it, and she thinks that they do. He mirrors her change of conversational pace, and he loses a lot of the tension that she saw when he entered. He leans back in his seat, looks like he is truly settling into the chair he has claimed, and sips at the coffee cradled between his hands. They take turns telling about where they have been lately and what they have been doing. He does not ask her how she ended up in this house. She does not ask him why he ended up standing in the front yard.
“It’s so good to see you,” he tells her placing his hand over hers when she reaches out hours later to collect the cup that has found its way to the low table between them. She smiles at him and reciprocates the sentiment as he makes his way out the door.
He comes back. It is spotty at first, but it gradually becomes a regular occurrence.
They talk. They call it catching up in the beginning, but it becomes something else. They are visiting. They are falling back into a friendship. There are cups of coffee and slices of pie. There are movie nights and pizza dinners. There are requests for help and volunteering to assist before help can be asked for between them. It is nice, and (beyond that) it is comfortable. For the first time in a long time, she is not finding herself keeping a mental tally in the back of her head of all the things that she needs to remember for the next time she uproots her life and becomes someone else. Part of her starts to wonder if this is something that she can keep. When the voice in the back of her mind pipes up to try to tell her that she cannot stay, another voice counters with a sincere why not?
Is there a reason that she cannot keep it? Is there a reason that she has to leave this behind? She missed this. She missed them. She missed the boy she had known who finished her thoughts for her out loud and whose expressions she translated without needing to think about it. She missed that grin that he gets when he is truly in the moment and the weight of the world is not attempting to balance itself on his shoulders.
She misses having someone around who gets her -- the her that is all of her and not just the her that she is letting people see at the moment. She misses having someone around who gets the her that she has not been able to be with anyone else for so long because she had never decided it was worth risking the explanations. There is a part of her that cringes at that thought. There is a part of her that backs away from the saying of the words out loud because they make it sound like this is only important to her because Clark already knows, and that is wrong. It is so very wrong. She does not want this because it is somehow easy. The truth is that it is not easy. There is so much that Clark does not know. There are so many things about her that Clark was not a part of, but this Clark (the one who reaches over and swipes toppings off of her pizza while they are huddled together on her couch talking about what they are working on) is someone that she is willing to share with and willing to explain to because this whole process of them together slipping back every day closer to being each other’s best friends again is worth making the explanations -- both the good and the bad ones.
It is worth letting someone in on the person she is who also knows the person she used to be and watching him reconcile the two in his head and come to accept that while she offers him the same courtesy. She likes knowing him. She likes being known. She pushes back against that voice that kept her moving for so long and tells it that its time for being listened to has come to an end. She does not need it any longer. She can keep going even while she keeps all of her memories, and she can let herself make new ones that are worth keeping. That is where she is, and she does not want to lose that (or him). She is willing to take risks to keep it. She is willing to make the effort to keep it.
Clark has grown into the man she always knew he was capable of being, and she is so proud of him that she struggles to find the proper words to tell him how she feels. There is a piece of her that will always be the secret keeper and help dust off and pull back upper of heroes, and along with their friendship, she appreciates the way she is being included once again in that realm (not that she has ever been completely out of the loop, but her role has been far removed from the front lines for a very long time). She can even admit that there is a part of her that was saddened that despite all of her years of having Clark’s back that she was out on the fringe instead of sitting in a front row seat when he grew into the Superman role. They lost a central piece of what made their friendship work somewhere along their journey, but it was, obviously, not gone forever. They are back to that. She is providing insight and a sounding board. She is (in practice even though not in any sort of official capacity) once again a member of a team.
She wants to keep that-- she wants to keep all of that. She knows that that is something that is easier said than done. She knows that there is a minefield of issues to navigate in order to stay where it is that she every day wants more to stay and be part of what she every day wants more to have a part of being. She knows what it is like to walk the road of personal relationship with someone who does what Clark does. Being a family member, being a friend, and being something beyond that are not easy roads to walk. Having the public know that you have any sort of connection to someone with such a public persona causes a myriad number of difficulties that range from chronic invasions of your privacy to the downright dangerous painting of a target on your back. She has lived through that already.
She spent a life with Oliver under the scrutiny of a public who never forgot what her husband’s second job was. She raised a child under those conditions. She dealt with gossip columnists on the one hand and villains with vendettas on the other. She knew exactly what could happen (she had lived through nearly everything that could happen). She had done it once because it was what she had to do to keep the life that she had wanted, but she also knew that she did not want to live through it again -- not if it was something that could be avoided. That level of tension was not something that she wanted, and she already did enough looking over her shoulder as it was.
That made where she was headed with Clark a potential problem. She had never understood how it was that Clark managed to make his dual identity work. Maybe it was just her, but she could never see a picture of Superman in those early days without wondering how everyone who had ever met him did not look at it and go “Hey, that’s Clark Kent.” Somehow, it seemed to work for him, and it was one more of those things having to do with all things Kryptonian that she had learned not to try to question too closely (not because she did not wonder, but because she had embraced the fact that there never were any satisfactory answers). The fact remained that she did not want to take any unnecessary chances that she would end up shoved back into the public eye for anything besides the limited exposure she maintained through her writing.
It is not one of the days that they are doing any hero business when it happens. They are having a hanging out night sitting together on the couch in her living room. There is a movie playing in front of them, but they have only been semi-paying attention to it -- just enough attention, in fact, to thoroughly make fun of it. Everything from the lack of plot to the failure to adequately establish character relationships has taken a hit from the two of them as they share a bowl of popcorn.
They had even been doing a little talking about other things in between eye rolling and laughing at each other’s commentary. They had talked about the story that she was working on (Clark, in a way that was once familiar and has become familiar once again, was reminding her to be careful). They had talked about the downswing in crime in Metropolis proper lately and how that always seemed to be a precursor to something big coming down the pipeline.
She was reaching without looking for her cup when her fingers, instead, brushed something soft that her head had identified as velvet before her eyes moved down to look at it. It was a box -- a jewelry box. She looked at it and blinked before she looked over at Clark. She actually had to pull back to do that because she had been sitting with her head resting against his shoulder. She saw the expression on his face, and she knew what was coming despite the fact that the box resting on the table was too large to contain a ring.
This was just a normal night for them. It was nothing out of their ordinary. Maybe it should have been romantic or a production or something different, but this, somehow, felt like them. It was them. The two of them just fit with their balance of truth and justice crusading and their need to be people who were just being people having downtime. The two of them just fit with each other, and the casual appearance of a velvet encased jewelry box in the middle of snarking at a badly made (and written) movie in between the popcorn and coffee just fit them.
He picked the box up and handed it to her (she was, apparently, not moving quickly enough for his liking), and she opened it.
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Part 2...
There was to be no “Fever” letter, adultery, or Jimmy Olsen. Check, check, and check. I hope, star_majesty, that there is at least one part of this story that will make you smile. :-)
Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
The Moment
Prologue
The Moment
“Is that . . .,” she starts to ask blinking at the piece of jewelry nestled in the lining of the case she has just opened. She reaches out one finger to touch it but stops short as she looks up at him with eyes that are wide and curious and maybe just a little bit hesitant.
“Yeah,” he answers the question that she never finished voicing. “Mostly,” he adds after a beat. “I added something to it,” he tells her sounding something that is not quite nervous as he watches her face carefully. She raises her eyebrow as if to ask him to elaborate. He reaches into the case and pulls out the bracelet before turning it so that she can see the inside of the circle.
“Here,” he points to a thin line of gold that has been inlaid all the way around the interior. “I used their wedding bands -- Mom’s and Dad’s. I melted them down and worked them into the bracelet.” He shrugs his shoulders a little as if he is trying to downplay the importance of his words, but the expression on his face tells an entirely different story. The action means something to him. That line of gold that he is tracing out with his finger means something to him. She reaches out and places her hand over top of his and gives him a soft, encouraging smile.
“It’s beautiful,” she tells him. It is possible that she is referring to the craftsmanship being displayed. It is possible that she is referring to the meaning behind the gesture. It is possible that she is referring to both. He watches her trace the line of gold for herself (the bracelet still being held by him) for a moment before he speaks again in a tone that has lost the trace of whatever that not quite nervous emotion was.
“That’s good,” he tells her reaching out to catch her still tracing fingers with the hand that is not still holding the bracelet out for her inspection. He squeezes her fingers slightly and catches her eyes giving her a hopeful smile.
Part 1
How Chloe Got There
She is sitting at the tiny kitchen table in her efficiency apartment letting the sun coming through the window warm her up as she scans through articles on the screen in front of her when the longing hits her. She misses the smell of newsprint. It is a deceptively simple thought that is immediately followed by not so simple consequences. That one acknowledgement that she misses the ink and paper smell that had been so much a part of the life that she had once upon a time opens a floodgate of memories and nostalgia. She gets swept up in the rush and finds that she can no longer make out the words in front of her because her vision has gone blurry from the tears that are welling up in them.
She is homesick in a deep, unshakable way that refuses to be pushed back down. She decides that the only way to get her emotional overload to stop short circuiting is to figure out what exactly it is that she is missing that is creating this response. She has been so good about keeping herself busy (and so focused on keeping herself on track to keep the things she needs to keep her secrets secret) that she has not had such a round of tears and feelings of missing something since the early days of walking away from Star City. She rolls the word homesick around in her head and, for once, gives her brain free rein to wander wherever it would like to go.
It has been a very long time since she has had something that was truly deserving of the word home. Star City had been the last place that she had really felt that way about, and it was not Star City itself so much as the people she had there that made it that. For the first time in more years than she cares to count, she lets herself remember what that felt like -- to have a place where she actually belonged instead of just a place to be because she had to be somewhere. The first set of memories that she allows to wash over her are of her son.
Her baby boy was beautiful. All her skill as a writer, all her gift for using words, and all her ability to look at a situation with rationality and logic were overthrown by the tiny person that they placed in her arms. Everything she had ever thought she had known was dwarfed in comparison to the certainty that overtook her when she looked down into the little eyes that were still squinting against the unfamiliarity of the light. She knew then that she would do anything to protect that little boy that was snuggling against her as if he was confident that she could be trusted to guide and shelter him in the strange new world in which he found himself. She had broken away from drinking in the sight of his little face for a moment to make eye contact with the other important person in the room. Ollie had looked awestruck (and a little overwhelmed). She had watched the play of emotions across his features as they resolved themselves into the same expression that she could feel on her own and known that they were on the same page. Maybe all parents felt that way the first time they looked into their child’s eyes; maybe it was different for them with their first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be abandoned (because intention to leave or not does not change the way it feels to be left behind when you are a child). Oliver had leaned forward and brushed the sweat drenched hair away from her forehead before placing a kiss there, had taken the hand that she had pulled away from the baby to hold out to him, and squeezed her fingers. She had felt her breath hitching in wonder at the moment.
Those moments had been her home; the two of them had been her home. The life that she had made with them had been her home.
She had kept doing some work for the JLA. She did not bury herself in it, but she made herself available. There were things that she could do for them, and she did them happily -- reveling in the fact that she had finally figured out the balance between being a respected and necessary helper and letting other people’s lives swallow up her own. She had learned that lesson via the experience route. There was a tension to the balance, but it was entirely doable. It was easier (she found) to keep herself where she needed to be when she had people around who were willing to question her choices -- not accept without it occurring to them to ask, not handing out dictates for what she should do, but willing to ask if she was where she needed to be. Besides, she had had her little boy to pull her back from letting other things swallow her whole; she had had Ollie.
Oliver was not something that she had expected (but, then again, she can honestly say that neither was being a mother). Dark places, abandonment issues, the frustrations inherent in knowing truths (sometimes horrible truths) that you could not drag out into the light of day, and what it was like to decide that there was nothing to be done but to handle something yourself and let the consequences fall where they may -- Oliver got all of those things. There had been times that it had been a deeply scary prospect to be faced with (spending her life with a man who understood things that she could not always find a way to explain so well), but she had learned how not to run from scary. She had learned that scary does not have to end badly. There was such a thing as taking chances and having them work out well. There was such a thing as working your way through the scary to get to the good that was waiting just beyond it. She had not always known that -- she had not always been willing to trust that, but she had gotten to that place with her life (with him). She had been happy.
She had had Oliver and their little boy and the family that they had been making. She had had the members of Justice that were a mix of extended family and very good friends and people that she knew had her back. She had gotten to help save the world on occasion and help to make it better more often than that. She did not know how to live her life devoid of that (she still does not).
So, she had done her part to make the world better with Justice, and she had done her part to make the world better by getting back to her first love. She had become a reporter again, and it had felt wonderful. She was writing stories -- big ones and little ones and all the ones in between that kept the news cycle going and offered people the information that they needed to have (and sometimes did not want) along with a little bit that they wanted (but did not really need).
She was a teller of truths and a righter of wrongs just as she had always known she would be in the dreams of her childhood. She had not realized how much of a hole the lack of that had left in her life until she had gotten back to it. She has never experienced quite the same level of giddy as she did on the first day that she found herself at a desk in a newsroom with the buzz of anticipation and the chatter of her new coworkers and the sense of impending something settled all around her. There had been many times in her life when she thought that she was feeling something similar, but they all paled in comparison somehow to that moment of returning after she had really, truly known what it was like to have left it behind for what she had thought was for good.
She had learned that you did not have to leave behind all the dreams of your youth, and the dreams of your youth did not have to prevent you finding new dreams that you did not know that you wanted until you had found them. Having the balance between her old dreams and her new ones was worth the life in the public eye that she had to exist within in order to get it.
She lets the contentment she recalls settle in around her and finds that she is not feeling any less homesick than she was right after the longing for newsprint hit her. She is okay with that. It was good to let herself feel those things again even with the little pings of sadness that come along with them.
It had been sudden in the sense that she did not recognize it until the awareness that she was homesick sort of sprang full force upon her, but she realizes when she looks back that it has been creeping up on her by degrees for ages. It might even be (she decides) that homesick is the wrong word to use, but she does not think that the phrase “mesick” actually exists (although she also decides that it most definitely should). She has known plenty of people in the course of her life who have gone through similar phases; she has gone through it before herself. This time, however, she does not just want to remember the girl that she used to be or try to get her footing back from an occasion when she was slipping close to a ledge that she did not want to tumble off of -- there is that sense of nostalgia for what she referred, a rather long time ago, to as “Chloe 1.0.” There is also something else underneath of it. She wants something else, so she goes home -- not to the one in California that was made up of people who are no longer there.
With the way that she is currently feeling, the only place that works for the description of home is Kansas. There were a lot of years when the word “home” coming out of her mouth in Kansas meant Metropolis (even when she knew differently inside her head). That is not where she finds herself driving.
She has learned a lot about herself and other people and the person she wants to be and how she wants to do her helping. She would not give up one bit of it -- they were all hard learned lessons that she paid for dearly. None of that stops the sharp intake of breath when she sees the sign out in front of where her driving has brought her. She wants it (more than anything she has wanted for quite some time), and she has the ability to have it. She buys the place, and she cannot stop the smile that refuses to be held back when she is walking out of the realty office with the paperwork in her hand.
She has good memories in this place despite the fact that there are not so happy memories as well. She has learned to take the lessons learned from the bad memories and leave them to just be while keeping the good memories to be cherished. She feels content the moment she walks through the door, and she thinks that maybe it has less to do with the memories the place hosts and more to do with the way she feels that this is a safe place to let her memories be out in the open. She has spent a lot of her life hiding a lot of things. She is in essence still hiding here in the house that she found that she could not pass up, but it does not feel like hiding. It feels like being home -- a real home as opposed to the temporary residences where she is always looking ahead to when she will have to leave with which she has contented herself for what now feels like far too long.
It has been that way since her baby’s baby placed her baby in her arms. She knew then that she could no longer stay where she was. She was pushing the limits of attention drawing. Oliver was already gone. She had switched to freelance articles under a variety of pennames over a decade before in an attempt to head off suspicion. It was time for her to go. She had uttered that phrase to herself a number of times since. She no longer bothered asking (even herself within the confines of her head) why it had to be that way. She had learned that you could ask all the questions you wanted when it came to all things Kryptonite related, but you should not have very high expectations when it came to getting answers. All the rules of science seemed to bend and twist when confronted with the substance, and her aging process (or lack thereof) was no exception. She did not bother to wonder anymore; she merely lived her life around it. She let the countdown clock of her time limit keep its watch in the back of her mind and kept moving forward every time that it ran down -- until now.
The barn that she knew is long gone, but the original house is still standing. It has been remodeled and repaired (quite often she is sure), but it is still the house that she knew underneath the repairs and redecorations (she swears that the first time she walks into the kitchen she can smell pie baking). She settles in and opts not to do much mixing with the current locals. It is her MO sometimes even though she has hidden in plain sight more often over the years. She enjoys the break. She enjoys the quiet. She enjoys the indulgence. She even puts her hair back to blond. She hangs up pictures of places she has traveled. She sends in her freelance stories. She soaks in the privacy and the lack of pressure that the once Kent homestead affords her. It might be that it is all in her head. It might be that she could have had this in any place where she stopped to give herself breathing room, but she does not think that that is true. In fact, it does not matter whether or not it is true because this is the only place that she has ever stopped to give herself that chance.
She lets her memories (the ones that she no longer spends her time trying not to think about) drift farther back -- all the way to the ones that match the house in which she is sitting. She thinks of a kind woman with willing words of wisdom for a motherless girl and the unobtrusive way those words were delivered on all of the occasions that she had been too proud to ask for them. She thinks of a thoughtful man and the first time she had caught him moving her car so that he could add air to her tires when he noticed that the rear passenger side was a little low. She thinks of being a teenager and hanging out with her two best friends when they still knew how to just be kids. She thinks about a time when there was no name (from her perspective anyway) for what it is that gives her such a long list of memories to sort through while she paints walls and arranges furniture. She is in a good place. She is in a happy place, and she decides that her impulse buy is one of the best ideas that she has had in a very long time.
One day, she looks up to see a figure in the yard. There he is standing outside clearly visible through the window. She did not exactly expect him, but it is not really surprising that they would run across each other at some point. It has happened from time to time over the years even before she came back to Kansas and his official home territory. He is a hero, and she is a reporter. There were times that they ended up in the same place at the same time, but it has been at least a dozen years since the last occasion when they exchanged nods of recognition in passing as he hurried off to contain a crisis while she hurried off to submit a story about one. It has been at least a dozen more since they last actually exchanged words. This is different. There is no crisis. There is no crowd. There are just the two of them staring at each other through a pane of glass. She is the first to move.
She opens the door and stands slightly to the side in invitation, but she does not say anything. She does not know what to say. “Hi” seems too awkward somehow and “Come in” seems too weird given that she is standing beside the door of his childhood home. He comes in despite her silence, and he does not break it. He pauses for a moment as he looks around the room before he sinks into one of her chairs. He does not sit back, and he does not look very relaxed. She does not see anything on his face that indicates that he is upset, but she would be the first to admit that it has been a very long time since reading his facial expressions has been an ingrained habit. She decides that she thinks he looks overwhelmed by something, so she walks away (still not breaking the silence between them) to get him a cup of coffee (but, mostly, to give him a moment on his own to gather his thoughts). She uses the time in the kitchen to try to sort out the jumble of thoughts in her head into some semblance of order.
He takes the cup from her hand as he nods a thank you. She sees the corners of his mouth twist up a bit, but the lack of words between them continues. She does not know what he is thinking, but she knows that she feels like there are so many things to say that she cannot quite latch on to where to begin. Then, someone says something. She cannot say (even later when her head is a little clearer) who said something first or even what it was that was said. All she knows is that some sort of a wall has come down from between them and both of them are talking in a rush and listening so intently to try to not miss anything that anyone would think that the fate of the world was resting on the conversation that they are having. The words that were absent at the start of the visit are flowing like the both of them have been storing them up for a lifetime and are afraid that they are going to run out of time before they get to say them all.
She forces herself to take a deep breath and to slow down. She reminds herself that this is not just a nod in passing moment. It is not even a whispered “try to stay out of trouble” as they head in their different directions moment. They have time. There is plenty of time if they want to take it, and she thinks that they do. He mirrors her change of conversational pace, and he loses a lot of the tension that she saw when he entered. He leans back in his seat, looks like he is truly settling into the chair he has claimed, and sips at the coffee cradled between his hands. They take turns telling about where they have been lately and what they have been doing. He does not ask her how she ended up in this house. She does not ask him why he ended up standing in the front yard.
“It’s so good to see you,” he tells her placing his hand over hers when she reaches out hours later to collect the cup that has found its way to the low table between them. She smiles at him and reciprocates the sentiment as he makes his way out the door.
He comes back. It is spotty at first, but it gradually becomes a regular occurrence.
They talk. They call it catching up in the beginning, but it becomes something else. They are visiting. They are falling back into a friendship. There are cups of coffee and slices of pie. There are movie nights and pizza dinners. There are requests for help and volunteering to assist before help can be asked for between them. It is nice, and (beyond that) it is comfortable. For the first time in a long time, she is not finding herself keeping a mental tally in the back of her head of all the things that she needs to remember for the next time she uproots her life and becomes someone else. Part of her starts to wonder if this is something that she can keep. When the voice in the back of her mind pipes up to try to tell her that she cannot stay, another voice counters with a sincere why not?
Is there a reason that she cannot keep it? Is there a reason that she has to leave this behind? She missed this. She missed them. She missed the boy she had known who finished her thoughts for her out loud and whose expressions she translated without needing to think about it. She missed that grin that he gets when he is truly in the moment and the weight of the world is not attempting to balance itself on his shoulders.
She misses having someone around who gets her -- the her that is all of her and not just the her that she is letting people see at the moment. She misses having someone around who gets the her that she has not been able to be with anyone else for so long because she had never decided it was worth risking the explanations. There is a part of her that cringes at that thought. There is a part of her that backs away from the saying of the words out loud because they make it sound like this is only important to her because Clark already knows, and that is wrong. It is so very wrong. She does not want this because it is somehow easy. The truth is that it is not easy. There is so much that Clark does not know. There are so many things about her that Clark was not a part of, but this Clark (the one who reaches over and swipes toppings off of her pizza while they are huddled together on her couch talking about what they are working on) is someone that she is willing to share with and willing to explain to because this whole process of them together slipping back every day closer to being each other’s best friends again is worth making the explanations -- both the good and the bad ones.
It is worth letting someone in on the person she is who also knows the person she used to be and watching him reconcile the two in his head and come to accept that while she offers him the same courtesy. She likes knowing him. She likes being known. She pushes back against that voice that kept her moving for so long and tells it that its time for being listened to has come to an end. She does not need it any longer. She can keep going even while she keeps all of her memories, and she can let herself make new ones that are worth keeping. That is where she is, and she does not want to lose that (or him). She is willing to take risks to keep it. She is willing to make the effort to keep it.
Clark has grown into the man she always knew he was capable of being, and she is so proud of him that she struggles to find the proper words to tell him how she feels. There is a piece of her that will always be the secret keeper and help dust off and pull back upper of heroes, and along with their friendship, she appreciates the way she is being included once again in that realm (not that she has ever been completely out of the loop, but her role has been far removed from the front lines for a very long time). She can even admit that there is a part of her that was saddened that despite all of her years of having Clark’s back that she was out on the fringe instead of sitting in a front row seat when he grew into the Superman role. They lost a central piece of what made their friendship work somewhere along their journey, but it was, obviously, not gone forever. They are back to that. She is providing insight and a sounding board. She is (in practice even though not in any sort of official capacity) once again a member of a team.
She wants to keep that-- she wants to keep all of that. She knows that that is something that is easier said than done. She knows that there is a minefield of issues to navigate in order to stay where it is that she every day wants more to stay and be part of what she every day wants more to have a part of being. She knows what it is like to walk the road of personal relationship with someone who does what Clark does. Being a family member, being a friend, and being something beyond that are not easy roads to walk. Having the public know that you have any sort of connection to someone with such a public persona causes a myriad number of difficulties that range from chronic invasions of your privacy to the downright dangerous painting of a target on your back. She has lived through that already.
She spent a life with Oliver under the scrutiny of a public who never forgot what her husband’s second job was. She raised a child under those conditions. She dealt with gossip columnists on the one hand and villains with vendettas on the other. She knew exactly what could happen (she had lived through nearly everything that could happen). She had done it once because it was what she had to do to keep the life that she had wanted, but she also knew that she did not want to live through it again -- not if it was something that could be avoided. That level of tension was not something that she wanted, and she already did enough looking over her shoulder as it was.
That made where she was headed with Clark a potential problem. She had never understood how it was that Clark managed to make his dual identity work. Maybe it was just her, but she could never see a picture of Superman in those early days without wondering how everyone who had ever met him did not look at it and go “Hey, that’s Clark Kent.” Somehow, it seemed to work for him, and it was one more of those things having to do with all things Kryptonian that she had learned not to try to question too closely (not because she did not wonder, but because she had embraced the fact that there never were any satisfactory answers). The fact remained that she did not want to take any unnecessary chances that she would end up shoved back into the public eye for anything besides the limited exposure she maintained through her writing.
It is not one of the days that they are doing any hero business when it happens. They are having a hanging out night sitting together on the couch in her living room. There is a movie playing in front of them, but they have only been semi-paying attention to it -- just enough attention, in fact, to thoroughly make fun of it. Everything from the lack of plot to the failure to adequately establish character relationships has taken a hit from the two of them as they share a bowl of popcorn.
They had even been doing a little talking about other things in between eye rolling and laughing at each other’s commentary. They had talked about the story that she was working on (Clark, in a way that was once familiar and has become familiar once again, was reminding her to be careful). They had talked about the downswing in crime in Metropolis proper lately and how that always seemed to be a precursor to something big coming down the pipeline.
She was reaching without looking for her cup when her fingers, instead, brushed something soft that her head had identified as velvet before her eyes moved down to look at it. It was a box -- a jewelry box. She looked at it and blinked before she looked over at Clark. She actually had to pull back to do that because she had been sitting with her head resting against his shoulder. She saw the expression on his face, and she knew what was coming despite the fact that the box resting on the table was too large to contain a ring.
This was just a normal night for them. It was nothing out of their ordinary. Maybe it should have been romantic or a production or something different, but this, somehow, felt like them. It was them. The two of them just fit with their balance of truth and justice crusading and their need to be people who were just being people having downtime. The two of them just fit with each other, and the casual appearance of a velvet encased jewelry box in the middle of snarking at a badly made (and written) movie in between the popcorn and coffee just fit them.
He picked the box up and handed it to her (she was, apparently, not moving quickly enough for his liking), and she opened it.
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Part 2...