Fanfiction for star_majesty: The Moment, Part 2 & Epilogue
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.
Read Part 1 here.
The Moment
Part 2
How Clark Got There
It was hard to learn to be a hero. Sometimes, he did not think that people really understood that. There were all these expectations that you were supposed to be good at fixing things just because you had powers. It was not that simple. It had never been that simple -- not even back in the days when he was young and had less perspective on how big the big picture actually was. Fixing was hard. It came with rules and requirements and repercussions when you were wrong -- and there were always going to be times that you were wrong. Having powers did not make you omniscient; having them did not make you have all the answers. You had to learn to use them (and when to not). You had to learn how to use them the right way, how to make good, strategic plans, how to avoid collateral damage, and the best ways to ad lib when all the best laid plans fell apart around your ears. It was hard. It did not just come to you. You did not have an innate sense of how to do it even when you had powers -- maybe even most especially because you had powers. They created more ways in which things could go wrong. It was a learning curve, and Clark had learned to admit that there were times when he was not very good at learning anything without doing it the hard way.
There were other things that he had to learn -- balance chief among them. There were so many things in life that required balance, and balance was one of those things that he knew that he did not learn easily. There were so many things in his life that had been all or nothing -- there were so many things that he had let take up all of his focus so that it deadened the perception of everything around him somehow. He had to learn to do better; he had to learn to be better. He had to learn the difference between the person he was for himself and the person he was for the world. There could be a difference. He had responsibilities (ones that he had chosen to take on) that he needed to live up to, but he had his sense of self to preserve as well. He could be Superman, and he could still be Clark Kent. One of them did not have to destroy the other. It did not have to be all or nothing. He did not have to suffocate under the burdens of his public persona, and he did not have to bury himself under the layers of his private one. He could be a hero, and he could have his own life. It just required -- like all other things did -- that he find the balance between the two (in much the same way that he had to find the balance between the Kal-El that had been born to Jor-El and Lara and the Clark who had been raised by Jonathan and Martha).
He found his learning curve, and he embraced it. He also learned a little bit about trying to force things along the way. He and Lois had tried the wedding thing in nearly all of its permutations. There had been attempts at formal affairs and small gatherings with selective guest lists. They had even attempted eloping when they realized that the scheduled events just did not seem to be working out for them. It turned out that eloping did not work out for them any better. There was always something. There was always a disaster to be averted, the annihilation of the world to prevent, something, anything that got in the way of he and Lois actually making it through a ceremony and saying their I dos.
It was a learning moment in and of itself. He learned to understand that there are some things in life that happen when they happen. There are some things in life that cannot be hastened. There are some things in life that you might want. You might want them deeply, but it is simply the wrong time to have them.
He found a pattern, a method for his life that worked for him. Not least, he learned how to be part of a team. That might have been better termed relearned because there was a time in his life when he had thought that he did a fairly decent job of working with a partner. He had, however, lost that concept somewhere along the way. Being a part of a team had been a struggle for him for a long time. He had gotten it into his head that he had to walk a loner road of bearing the responsibility for the planet as a whole (and a few things from beyond the planet) on his shoulders. As strange as it sounded, what he had really needed to learn how to do was to share. It sounded odd to state it that way (which was part of why he had never tried to put his thoughts on the matter into words for any other person), but it was how it had worded itself out inside of his head. He had to learn to share the burdens; he had to learn to share the responsibilities. The biggest problem with that, of course, was that that type of sharing requires trust. Trust was something that he had struggled with for a very long time. Even when there had been people in his life that he had known he could trust, he did not always do the best job of following through on it. He had not been big on admitting when he was wrong for a chunk of his younger years either, and it had taken some losses and blows to his sense of the way he wanted things to be for him to come to terms with that. He had gotten there (not that he never did any backsliding).
There is a picture that has never left the back of his mind that itches sometimes until he can no longer ignore it. It is the image of the tombstones that he saw once upon a time standing in a nursing home in Smallville. He had been petrified of that vision in his adolescence. That fear had followed him through the beginning of his adulthood as well. He had fought and railed and let it beat him down and expended so much time and energy dreading and fighting against and feeling guilty over it. Part of his growing into whom he wanted to be was the understanding and acceptance that death was a part of living. Loss was a part of living. That did not mean that you courted those things; it did not mean that you welcomed them. It just meant that you treasured instead of fretted; you learned to use the time that you had instead of burying yourself in worry over when it would be over.
Time was something that he might never be completely at peace with, but it was something that he had learned to get along with passably. That time was something that would not move for him the same way it moved for those around him was something that had been pointed out to him at several points along the way, but none of that was the same as actually living through the process.
There had been the difficulties of loss that fell under the category of normal -- his mother, Perry, and some mentors he had had in his early days of taking his work at The Daily Planet seriously had all passed in their time. It had been hard; he had grieved, but it was not the same as when he started to lose the people that were in his own age bracket. It was not the same as when he lost Lois. It was not the same as the first time he buried someone that he had watched grow up and mentored.
He had not always been as composed about that as he was now. There had been anger -- lots of it. There had been a return of his fears about being left alone. There had been a lot of darkness and upset and soul searching, but he had gotten to a place where he understood that it was (and there was nothing that his fretting or rage or putting his fist through walls could do about it). He had avoided cemeteries whenever possible for a long time, but he had moved beyond that as well. They were actually a nice place to do some quiet thinking -- no one wanted to interrupt a man standing in front of a grave after all. It was his parents’ grave he went to when he found himself in need of some reflection time, and he had ended up making periodic visits even when quiet was not his intended purpose.
He left flowers that reminded him of his mother, and he redid the etching on their names whenever it seemed as though the stone was wearing down. He let himself be still (because with all of the life lessons that he had learned throughout the decades he had lived that was the one that he most often found himself struggling with) as he stood in front of the marker labeled Kent and let himself have however much time he needed.
He was on one of his trips back there (the intervals between and durations of his visits as varied as the rest of his days) when it happened. He was placing a bouquet of flowers across his mother’s name when he noticed it. Something was different -- not with the grave or the cemetery. There was something different in the vicinity of the place he had come for a few quiet minutes with his memories. It was a ridiculous thought for him to have because the area around the cemetery was different every time that he came. He usually tuned out the ambient noise around him, but there was something that refused to be tuned out. There was something that was drawing his attention -- something that he was not expecting to hear.
It was not a cry for help or any of the sounds along those lines that were what usually pulled him out of being reflective. This was something else, but he could not figure out what it was. He also did not know why with all the conviction that it was something out of place (which was why it had registered in the first place) that he was sure that the part of him that was processing the sound in the back of his mind was pleased to hear it and felt like it was less something that did not belong and more like something that had been missing and had now returned.
Then, he understood what it was that he thought he was hearing.
To any casual observer (of which there were none), the man standing in front of the grave marker in the cemetery on the outskirts of Smallville would have simply vanished. In reality, he had traveled not so very far away and was standing in the yard of a two story house stock still staring at a window.
He had not misheard. The sound was exactly what his unconscious mind had recognized it as while his conscious mind was too surprised to really do much more than speed himself to see if it was real. It was Chloe. She was sitting curled up on a sofa in the living room of his house (the words formed themselves in his head despite the fact that it had not been his house for lifetimes). He lost track of how long he stared at her from his place in the yard not knowing what to do and almost afraid to blink while she turned the pages of a book and took sips from a mug looking like she had been sitting there in that place doing those things since the beginning of time.
Then, almost as if she had felt him looking at her through the glass, her eyes came up and locked with his. His vision was perfect -- better than. He still could not name what emotion it was that appeared in her gaze when she registered that it was him.
There were those initial moments as he looked around him with a little bit of disbelief followed by those moments when he was staring at the cup of coffee nestled between his hands as if he had never seen such a thing before. He had no idea what to say or where to start. Then, they were both talking. It was like that proverbial dam breaking (and he had been front row center to enough of those over the years to be entitled to use the phrase when it was appropriate).
He had come back, and he had kept coming back. There had been a part of him in the beginning that was a little bit afraid that he would come back once and she would be gone, but that was nothing more than long buried insecurities taking an opportunity to try to rear their heads. They kept talking and talking and talking. There was not a lot of that in his life. There were so many walls built up around his public persona (and even a hefty dollop of pedestal placing despite his best efforts to tamp it down within the League) that unrestrained talking was not a pleasure that he had enjoyed for longer than he cared to think about.
It all happened so smoothly that it felt less like something new and more like something that had always been (despite his excellent memory and knowledge of the contrary). She was sharing stories, he was asking for her perspective, and it was as though they had slipped backwards into something familiar and forward into something novel all at the same time.
Then, it was less about catching up or learning about the people they were now or about what they were working on and how they could help each other with this or that and more about just being with each other.
There were movies to watch and books to discuss. There was popcorn to eat and dishes to be tag teamed after dinners. Mostly, there was a sense of being with someone with whom there was no need for pretenses. He relearned to read the way her eyes said the things that she did not bother to mention out loud. He learned about where she had gone and what she had done, and he shared the details of his own journey with her.
He keeps coming back. When a day has been particularly rough, he sits on her sofa and lets himself lean on someone else. When he is excited about something, the old farmhouse is his first stop. For no reason at all other than the fact that he can, he spends his time in the space that used to be his, has become hers, and might just turn into theirs.
It is a good place that he is in with this turn of events, and he has hard won lessons to his credit about the way that you should treat such gifts.
There are pieces of both of them that they only are when they are with each other. He calls it the hazards of history in his head. It seems an appropriate moniker for the way that there are some things that can only be understood by someone who has lived through them with you. It is like the way siblings who grew up in the same house have a set of family things that make sense to them that outsiders just cannot quite follow. It is like the way that lifelong friends have inside jokes that will never be as funny to anyone else no matter how hard they try to repeat the story to them. It is the way that there are some things that you do not have to explain (that really sort of defy explanation) because the other person just knows because whatever it was belonged to both of you. He and Chloe have that.
They did not always. They had gotten lost (let themselves lose it) from it somewhere along the way, but they have it back. He did not really understand how much he had been missing it until it had reappeared. He had learned to live his life without it, and he figures that the experience must have been similar for her. They had drifted apart or pushed themselves apart or whatever you wanted to call it -- letting go, growing out of, life moving forward, etc. They could throw all kinds of platitudes around on the subject -- pointless ones that made it sound as if what had happened to their friendship had just happened. It had not just happened. The simple fact of the matter is that they had both made choices that led them away. Now, somehow, they had both made choices that led them back.
They did not talk about that. They did not need to talk about that. What mattered was where they were now, the people they were now, and what they were going to do next. What mattered were conversations and eye rolling and smirky smiles and teasing comments and working together again and knowing that it all made sense and that he was not willing to let go of it this time. He was willing to do the work and make the effort and make sure that they kept this.
Because this, he told himself with what could only be termed finality the first time that she fell asleep while they were talking and her head slid over and rested against his arm, was worth it. She was the Chloe who had been his best friend so long ago that there was no one else left to remember it; she was the Chloe who was becoming his best friend again, and he loved them both.
When he realizes (really realizes) where it is that the two of them are (He would say where the two of them are going, but he also realizes that that would be a pointless thought. They are already there; they just have not bothered to put it into words yet.) with each other, he has a few panicked moments because he knows the person he is and what he does and how that has spilled over into the lives of the people around him before. He knows what it is like to deal with bombings and kidnappings and threats and know that the reason that someone is in danger is because of an association with him. He knows what it is to feel responsible for being the reason that negative attention is focused on someone (or a city or a planet) when there was some sort of a vendetta to settle with him (or because someone, somewhere just wanted to hurt him in any way that he could be hurt).
He has also come a very long way from the long ago him who would get it into his head that there was only one possible solution to any problem. He knows better now. He knows that it does not have to be that way. It can be different. It will not necessarily be easy, but it does not have to be the same kind of difficult that he used to know. It does not have to be the same kind of difficult that they used to know (because he knows that Chloe has lived through what it is to be under that type of scrutiny as well). They can find a way to make it work. They will find a way to make it work because he looks at her on some days and sees the expression in her eyes that tells him she is thinking her own version of these thoughts and is drawing the same conclusions.
They are watching a movie for which the only real redeeming quality is the way that it makes her laugh while they are mocking it. He does not think that he would have been able to focus no matter what it was that they chose to watch, so he is happy to be able to slide by with minimal attention. It is not that he is nervous. That sounds a little bit arrogant because he is pretty certain that there is some list of rules about this whole process that require that he be feeling some sort of jitteriness or something along those lines, but he has already decided to leave any rules that other people may have about this sort of thing in the dust and only worry about whether the whole process is sufficiently them.
He turns his head a little to the side to rest his chin against her hair where she is cuddled into his side with her head tucked into his shoulder as she says something else disparaging about plot holes or inconsistent characterization or something else entirely -- the truth is that he has lost track. He is too focused on the way she fits underneath his arm tucked where he can feel it when she breathes or laughs or leans forward to reach for her cup where it is sitting on the table in front of them.
He decides that is what he will do. He will not make some sort of production out of it. He will not be ceremonial. He will push her cup to the side and put the box in its place. She is not looking when she reaches forward; she will touch the box instead. He can do that. It is actually a good idea -- way better than pausing the movie and forcing her to reroute her attention. She will not even notice that he moves. She will just find the box and draw her own conclusions before he starts talking. It works for him; it works for them.
It will be simple, and it will just sort of be there kind of like the way that they have found their way back to each other. That is why he decided not to go for the grand gesture -- the trip to somewhere exotic or the buildup of a whole evening where she would know that something was happening because it was all so out of their normal.
This is their normal -- movie nights and snark and idea exchanges and allowing each other’s help even though they are people for whom relying on others does not come as their default setting. Their normal is the way that he feels when he is sitting on her sofa with his best friend as they do anything or nothing. Their normal is the way his heart stutters just because it is her and it is him and it is them and he feels as though this moment has been here all along waiting for the two of them to be the ones they needed to be and how they needed to be to fit into the places that were waiting for them.
He performs his replacement of her cup with the box without her registering that anything has happened, and he settles back to wait while he reminds her that she should be careful when she starts talking about the next story that she plans to follow.
He is not nervous because he knows that this is what he . . . they should be doing, but he is feeling a little apprehensive about his choices when it comes to the bracelet. He really hopes that she understands what he has done to it because he is not sure whether he can manage to find the right words to explain it, and it is important to him that she knows. The part of him that blew off the ideas for candlelight dinners and flying to other countries reminds him that this is Chloe. She will understand the bracelet because she understands him, and he finds himself tightening the arm that was resting loosely wrapped around her in response to the thought. This is Chloe. This is him. This is them together.
This is going to work. He just needs her to lean forward and reach for a cup that is no longer there.
Epilogue
The Moment Continues
“That’s good,” he repeats still holding the bracelet and shifting so that rather than just touching her fingers he is holding her hand in his. “I mean that it’s good that you like it. I was hoping that you would be willing to wear it,” he places the bracelet so that it is just over the edges of her fingers and waits.
There are tears welling up in her eyes as she bites her lip, but she looks anything other than upset as she slowly nods her head. He grins at her -- a full blown, nothing could possibly break this moment grin. She smiles back at him as the tears escape from her eyes and make their way down her cheeks.
He slides the bracelet to its proper resting place and slides his hand back down to squeeze her fingers. She squeezes back, and they look at each other with teary, goofy grins before he moves his arm around her shoulders and tucks her back against his side.
There will probably be talking later, but this is not the moment for that. This is just the moment for them to lean into each other and simply be.
The End.
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.
Read Part 1 here.
The Moment
Part 2
How Clark Got There
It was hard to learn to be a hero. Sometimes, he did not think that people really understood that. There were all these expectations that you were supposed to be good at fixing things just because you had powers. It was not that simple. It had never been that simple -- not even back in the days when he was young and had less perspective on how big the big picture actually was. Fixing was hard. It came with rules and requirements and repercussions when you were wrong -- and there were always going to be times that you were wrong. Having powers did not make you omniscient; having them did not make you have all the answers. You had to learn to use them (and when to not). You had to learn how to use them the right way, how to make good, strategic plans, how to avoid collateral damage, and the best ways to ad lib when all the best laid plans fell apart around your ears. It was hard. It did not just come to you. You did not have an innate sense of how to do it even when you had powers -- maybe even most especially because you had powers. They created more ways in which things could go wrong. It was a learning curve, and Clark had learned to admit that there were times when he was not very good at learning anything without doing it the hard way.
There were other things that he had to learn -- balance chief among them. There were so many things in life that required balance, and balance was one of those things that he knew that he did not learn easily. There were so many things in his life that had been all or nothing -- there were so many things that he had let take up all of his focus so that it deadened the perception of everything around him somehow. He had to learn to do better; he had to learn to be better. He had to learn the difference between the person he was for himself and the person he was for the world. There could be a difference. He had responsibilities (ones that he had chosen to take on) that he needed to live up to, but he had his sense of self to preserve as well. He could be Superman, and he could still be Clark Kent. One of them did not have to destroy the other. It did not have to be all or nothing. He did not have to suffocate under the burdens of his public persona, and he did not have to bury himself under the layers of his private one. He could be a hero, and he could have his own life. It just required -- like all other things did -- that he find the balance between the two (in much the same way that he had to find the balance between the Kal-El that had been born to Jor-El and Lara and the Clark who had been raised by Jonathan and Martha).
He found his learning curve, and he embraced it. He also learned a little bit about trying to force things along the way. He and Lois had tried the wedding thing in nearly all of its permutations. There had been attempts at formal affairs and small gatherings with selective guest lists. They had even attempted eloping when they realized that the scheduled events just did not seem to be working out for them. It turned out that eloping did not work out for them any better. There was always something. There was always a disaster to be averted, the annihilation of the world to prevent, something, anything that got in the way of he and Lois actually making it through a ceremony and saying their I dos.
It was a learning moment in and of itself. He learned to understand that there are some things in life that happen when they happen. There are some things in life that cannot be hastened. There are some things in life that you might want. You might want them deeply, but it is simply the wrong time to have them.
He found a pattern, a method for his life that worked for him. Not least, he learned how to be part of a team. That might have been better termed relearned because there was a time in his life when he had thought that he did a fairly decent job of working with a partner. He had, however, lost that concept somewhere along the way. Being a part of a team had been a struggle for him for a long time. He had gotten it into his head that he had to walk a loner road of bearing the responsibility for the planet as a whole (and a few things from beyond the planet) on his shoulders. As strange as it sounded, what he had really needed to learn how to do was to share. It sounded odd to state it that way (which was part of why he had never tried to put his thoughts on the matter into words for any other person), but it was how it had worded itself out inside of his head. He had to learn to share the burdens; he had to learn to share the responsibilities. The biggest problem with that, of course, was that that type of sharing requires trust. Trust was something that he had struggled with for a very long time. Even when there had been people in his life that he had known he could trust, he did not always do the best job of following through on it. He had not been big on admitting when he was wrong for a chunk of his younger years either, and it had taken some losses and blows to his sense of the way he wanted things to be for him to come to terms with that. He had gotten there (not that he never did any backsliding).
There is a picture that has never left the back of his mind that itches sometimes until he can no longer ignore it. It is the image of the tombstones that he saw once upon a time standing in a nursing home in Smallville. He had been petrified of that vision in his adolescence. That fear had followed him through the beginning of his adulthood as well. He had fought and railed and let it beat him down and expended so much time and energy dreading and fighting against and feeling guilty over it. Part of his growing into whom he wanted to be was the understanding and acceptance that death was a part of living. Loss was a part of living. That did not mean that you courted those things; it did not mean that you welcomed them. It just meant that you treasured instead of fretted; you learned to use the time that you had instead of burying yourself in worry over when it would be over.
Time was something that he might never be completely at peace with, but it was something that he had learned to get along with passably. That time was something that would not move for him the same way it moved for those around him was something that had been pointed out to him at several points along the way, but none of that was the same as actually living through the process.
There had been the difficulties of loss that fell under the category of normal -- his mother, Perry, and some mentors he had had in his early days of taking his work at The Daily Planet seriously had all passed in their time. It had been hard; he had grieved, but it was not the same as when he started to lose the people that were in his own age bracket. It was not the same as when he lost Lois. It was not the same as the first time he buried someone that he had watched grow up and mentored.
He had not always been as composed about that as he was now. There had been anger -- lots of it. There had been a return of his fears about being left alone. There had been a lot of darkness and upset and soul searching, but he had gotten to a place where he understood that it was (and there was nothing that his fretting or rage or putting his fist through walls could do about it). He had avoided cemeteries whenever possible for a long time, but he had moved beyond that as well. They were actually a nice place to do some quiet thinking -- no one wanted to interrupt a man standing in front of a grave after all. It was his parents’ grave he went to when he found himself in need of some reflection time, and he had ended up making periodic visits even when quiet was not his intended purpose.
He left flowers that reminded him of his mother, and he redid the etching on their names whenever it seemed as though the stone was wearing down. He let himself be still (because with all of the life lessons that he had learned throughout the decades he had lived that was the one that he most often found himself struggling with) as he stood in front of the marker labeled Kent and let himself have however much time he needed.
He was on one of his trips back there (the intervals between and durations of his visits as varied as the rest of his days) when it happened. He was placing a bouquet of flowers across his mother’s name when he noticed it. Something was different -- not with the grave or the cemetery. There was something different in the vicinity of the place he had come for a few quiet minutes with his memories. It was a ridiculous thought for him to have because the area around the cemetery was different every time that he came. He usually tuned out the ambient noise around him, but there was something that refused to be tuned out. There was something that was drawing his attention -- something that he was not expecting to hear.
It was not a cry for help or any of the sounds along those lines that were what usually pulled him out of being reflective. This was something else, but he could not figure out what it was. He also did not know why with all the conviction that it was something out of place (which was why it had registered in the first place) that he was sure that the part of him that was processing the sound in the back of his mind was pleased to hear it and felt like it was less something that did not belong and more like something that had been missing and had now returned.
Then, he understood what it was that he thought he was hearing.
To any casual observer (of which there were none), the man standing in front of the grave marker in the cemetery on the outskirts of Smallville would have simply vanished. In reality, he had traveled not so very far away and was standing in the yard of a two story house stock still staring at a window.
He had not misheard. The sound was exactly what his unconscious mind had recognized it as while his conscious mind was too surprised to really do much more than speed himself to see if it was real. It was Chloe. She was sitting curled up on a sofa in the living room of his house (the words formed themselves in his head despite the fact that it had not been his house for lifetimes). He lost track of how long he stared at her from his place in the yard not knowing what to do and almost afraid to blink while she turned the pages of a book and took sips from a mug looking like she had been sitting there in that place doing those things since the beginning of time.
Then, almost as if she had felt him looking at her through the glass, her eyes came up and locked with his. His vision was perfect -- better than. He still could not name what emotion it was that appeared in her gaze when she registered that it was him.
There were those initial moments as he looked around him with a little bit of disbelief followed by those moments when he was staring at the cup of coffee nestled between his hands as if he had never seen such a thing before. He had no idea what to say or where to start. Then, they were both talking. It was like that proverbial dam breaking (and he had been front row center to enough of those over the years to be entitled to use the phrase when it was appropriate).
He had come back, and he had kept coming back. There had been a part of him in the beginning that was a little bit afraid that he would come back once and she would be gone, but that was nothing more than long buried insecurities taking an opportunity to try to rear their heads. They kept talking and talking and talking. There was not a lot of that in his life. There were so many walls built up around his public persona (and even a hefty dollop of pedestal placing despite his best efforts to tamp it down within the League) that unrestrained talking was not a pleasure that he had enjoyed for longer than he cared to think about.
It all happened so smoothly that it felt less like something new and more like something that had always been (despite his excellent memory and knowledge of the contrary). She was sharing stories, he was asking for her perspective, and it was as though they had slipped backwards into something familiar and forward into something novel all at the same time.
Then, it was less about catching up or learning about the people they were now or about what they were working on and how they could help each other with this or that and more about just being with each other.
There were movies to watch and books to discuss. There was popcorn to eat and dishes to be tag teamed after dinners. Mostly, there was a sense of being with someone with whom there was no need for pretenses. He relearned to read the way her eyes said the things that she did not bother to mention out loud. He learned about where she had gone and what she had done, and he shared the details of his own journey with her.
He keeps coming back. When a day has been particularly rough, he sits on her sofa and lets himself lean on someone else. When he is excited about something, the old farmhouse is his first stop. For no reason at all other than the fact that he can, he spends his time in the space that used to be his, has become hers, and might just turn into theirs.
It is a good place that he is in with this turn of events, and he has hard won lessons to his credit about the way that you should treat such gifts.
There are pieces of both of them that they only are when they are with each other. He calls it the hazards of history in his head. It seems an appropriate moniker for the way that there are some things that can only be understood by someone who has lived through them with you. It is like the way siblings who grew up in the same house have a set of family things that make sense to them that outsiders just cannot quite follow. It is like the way that lifelong friends have inside jokes that will never be as funny to anyone else no matter how hard they try to repeat the story to them. It is the way that there are some things that you do not have to explain (that really sort of defy explanation) because the other person just knows because whatever it was belonged to both of you. He and Chloe have that.
They did not always. They had gotten lost (let themselves lose it) from it somewhere along the way, but they have it back. He did not really understand how much he had been missing it until it had reappeared. He had learned to live his life without it, and he figures that the experience must have been similar for her. They had drifted apart or pushed themselves apart or whatever you wanted to call it -- letting go, growing out of, life moving forward, etc. They could throw all kinds of platitudes around on the subject -- pointless ones that made it sound as if what had happened to their friendship had just happened. It had not just happened. The simple fact of the matter is that they had both made choices that led them away. Now, somehow, they had both made choices that led them back.
They did not talk about that. They did not need to talk about that. What mattered was where they were now, the people they were now, and what they were going to do next. What mattered were conversations and eye rolling and smirky smiles and teasing comments and working together again and knowing that it all made sense and that he was not willing to let go of it this time. He was willing to do the work and make the effort and make sure that they kept this.
Because this, he told himself with what could only be termed finality the first time that she fell asleep while they were talking and her head slid over and rested against his arm, was worth it. She was the Chloe who had been his best friend so long ago that there was no one else left to remember it; she was the Chloe who was becoming his best friend again, and he loved them both.
When he realizes (really realizes) where it is that the two of them are (He would say where the two of them are going, but he also realizes that that would be a pointless thought. They are already there; they just have not bothered to put it into words yet.) with each other, he has a few panicked moments because he knows the person he is and what he does and how that has spilled over into the lives of the people around him before. He knows what it is like to deal with bombings and kidnappings and threats and know that the reason that someone is in danger is because of an association with him. He knows what it is to feel responsible for being the reason that negative attention is focused on someone (or a city or a planet) when there was some sort of a vendetta to settle with him (or because someone, somewhere just wanted to hurt him in any way that he could be hurt).
He has also come a very long way from the long ago him who would get it into his head that there was only one possible solution to any problem. He knows better now. He knows that it does not have to be that way. It can be different. It will not necessarily be easy, but it does not have to be the same kind of difficult that he used to know. It does not have to be the same kind of difficult that they used to know (because he knows that Chloe has lived through what it is to be under that type of scrutiny as well). They can find a way to make it work. They will find a way to make it work because he looks at her on some days and sees the expression in her eyes that tells him she is thinking her own version of these thoughts and is drawing the same conclusions.
They are watching a movie for which the only real redeeming quality is the way that it makes her laugh while they are mocking it. He does not think that he would have been able to focus no matter what it was that they chose to watch, so he is happy to be able to slide by with minimal attention. It is not that he is nervous. That sounds a little bit arrogant because he is pretty certain that there is some list of rules about this whole process that require that he be feeling some sort of jitteriness or something along those lines, but he has already decided to leave any rules that other people may have about this sort of thing in the dust and only worry about whether the whole process is sufficiently them.
He turns his head a little to the side to rest his chin against her hair where she is cuddled into his side with her head tucked into his shoulder as she says something else disparaging about plot holes or inconsistent characterization or something else entirely -- the truth is that he has lost track. He is too focused on the way she fits underneath his arm tucked where he can feel it when she breathes or laughs or leans forward to reach for her cup where it is sitting on the table in front of them.
He decides that is what he will do. He will not make some sort of production out of it. He will not be ceremonial. He will push her cup to the side and put the box in its place. She is not looking when she reaches forward; she will touch the box instead. He can do that. It is actually a good idea -- way better than pausing the movie and forcing her to reroute her attention. She will not even notice that he moves. She will just find the box and draw her own conclusions before he starts talking. It works for him; it works for them.
It will be simple, and it will just sort of be there kind of like the way that they have found their way back to each other. That is why he decided not to go for the grand gesture -- the trip to somewhere exotic or the buildup of a whole evening where she would know that something was happening because it was all so out of their normal.
This is their normal -- movie nights and snark and idea exchanges and allowing each other’s help even though they are people for whom relying on others does not come as their default setting. Their normal is the way that he feels when he is sitting on her sofa with his best friend as they do anything or nothing. Their normal is the way his heart stutters just because it is her and it is him and it is them and he feels as though this moment has been here all along waiting for the two of them to be the ones they needed to be and how they needed to be to fit into the places that were waiting for them.
He performs his replacement of her cup with the box without her registering that anything has happened, and he settles back to wait while he reminds her that she should be careful when she starts talking about the next story that she plans to follow.
He is not nervous because he knows that this is what he . . . they should be doing, but he is feeling a little apprehensive about his choices when it comes to the bracelet. He really hopes that she understands what he has done to it because he is not sure whether he can manage to find the right words to explain it, and it is important to him that she knows. The part of him that blew off the ideas for candlelight dinners and flying to other countries reminds him that this is Chloe. She will understand the bracelet because she understands him, and he finds himself tightening the arm that was resting loosely wrapped around her in response to the thought. This is Chloe. This is him. This is them together.
This is going to work. He just needs her to lean forward and reach for a cup that is no longer there.
Epilogue
The Moment Continues
“That’s good,” he repeats still holding the bracelet and shifting so that rather than just touching her fingers he is holding her hand in his. “I mean that it’s good that you like it. I was hoping that you would be willing to wear it,” he places the bracelet so that it is just over the edges of her fingers and waits.
There are tears welling up in her eyes as she bites her lip, but she looks anything other than upset as she slowly nods her head. He grins at her -- a full blown, nothing could possibly break this moment grin. She smiles back at him as the tears escape from her eyes and make their way down her cheeks.
He slides the bracelet to its proper resting place and slides his hand back down to squeeze her fingers. She squeezes back, and they look at each other with teary, goofy grins before he moves his arm around her shoulders and tucks her back against his side.
There will probably be talking later, but this is not the moment for that. This is just the moment for them to lean into each other and simply be.
The End.