Gift for purple_moon123, part two
Title: Masquerade, part two
Request: After Season 1, Gabe and Chloe move and she reunites with Clark on his first day at The Daily Planet
Type: Fic
For: purple_moon123
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 12, 665
Summary: Chloe hasn’t seen Clark in ten years, but some feelings never change.
Author’s Note: Per the prompt, nothing past Vortex (2.01) applies to what happened with Chloe and Clark. Also this Cat Grant is very much the Lois and Clark version and even Perry here has a bit of Elvis-inspired love.
Chapter Two
“Why are we here so early?” he asked.
She sighed. “Lex asked that I did that for him, and I obliged.”
Clark frowned back at her. “You talk like you and Lex Luthor are friends.”
Chloe snorted. That was too small a word for what they were to each other. It really depended on what day of the week you asked. First, he’d saved her life and fostered her life in witness protection her summer before senior year. It had worked to his advantage, of course. Her detective work and secret testimony had put Lionel behind bars where he’d died of cancer before the appeals even went through. LexCorp only existed because she’d helped leverage it for him. There’d been something hot and heavy in college, she could admit that. And Lex was excellent at what he did. For a while, she really thought they might end up married.
They’d been engaged her senior year, and then he’d gotten to into his projects, into going over and subsuming Lionel’s damn Level Three research (and she’d been right all along about Earl Jenkins), and he wasn’t the Lex she’d always cared about anymore.
Sometimes, yes, they got together for drinks. Sometimes, they butted heads at conferences, and, on the rarest of days, she’d see him at a function or make small talk at a gala and it would almost seem like things were possible, but there was something cold there now, something so very much like his father, and Chloe couldn’t reach past that anymore.
She was scared over how much Level Three had expanded in the last four years, and she worked hard on exposing the underbelly of LexCorp. She hadn’t managed her smoking gun yet, but she would, and playing nice with Lex helped her facilitate that.
“Did I say something wrong? Ms. Lane, you don’t have to treat me like I’m an idiot.”
“I’m not. I’m just not convinced you’re up to my standards for having a partner.”
“Is anyone?”
Chloe stilled. To be fair, they’d tried giving her partners before. Perry’d started with this idiot photojournalist Jimmy Olsen and then tried moving to this sycophantic ass named Jeff. Cat had come closest to being a workable partner. She seemed vapid but underneath was as incisive and dangerous as an asp. Chloe at least respected the other woman’s mind if not her wardrobe, but no human could work near Cat for long. It was how she’d gotten reworked over to the advice column. Solo ventures were best for Cat Grant. But it wasn’t her fault there’d been a total of five completely unsuitable people sent to work with her.
She wasn’t the problem
She wasn’t.
“Not yet, but maybe you’ll surprise me.” She sighed and leaned against the polished marble of LexCorp’s lobby. “Look, Clark, I should let you know that we’ve met.”
“I don’t think we have.”
She rolled her eyes. “I really think we have. Not everyone gives a girl a copy of The Tales of the Weird and Unexplained out of nowhere on their first day in Smallville.” She smirked, amused by the dumbfounded look on his face. “Also, if you still bury your lead as badly as you did over chess team articles and lunch menus, then we’re in deep trouble.”
Strong arms were around her and she let him do it, knew she was going to cave on that much. For a few hours, it had been kind of fun seeing his confusion. He clearly thought she looked familiar---and duh, she didn’t look that different, so she wasn’t bleaching anymore, so what---but he hadn’t been able to place her. But the masquerade wasn’t fun long term and, frankly, it had been far too long since she’d even heard news of Clark Kent before she wanted her own inside scoop.
“Chloe! What happened to your hair?”
She laughed and pulled away from him. “It’s called the natural look and since when do you have glasses?”
“I, uh, had this accident on the farm in junior year, actually. It’s not 20/20 anymore but for a while they thought I’d be blind.”
She frowned. Pete had never mentioned that. Weird. “Oh, then they look nice.”
“Nah, I know they’re lame but they won’t sign off on contacts,” he said. “So the name?”
“Trouble with a certain bearded billionaire we all used to know and hate. I could get my life back in order but he’d gotten me blacklisted everywhere. My cousin is military and never had a damn bit of interest in using her own name to publish so she said I could borrow it as pseudonym. If Lois actually read the paper, I’m sure she’d be excited at how often her name’s above the fold.”
“Cool,” he said. “So then that covers ten years sure.”
Chloe quirked her head at him. “And that sounded bitter.”
“You never even emailed! You went off to Metropolis and I know you emailed Pete and Lana, but I even tried to call a few times and my emails got bounced back and why?”
She had a press conference in ten minutes and it was hard enough on good days to see Lex and play their usual cat and mouse. Chloe was not tearing open Spring Formal wounds ten years later and going into the usual battle of wills that was a LexCorp event out of it. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
“Of course I’d care.”
She shrugged. “Clark, look, this is awkward as Hell. Once, I thought we were good friends.”
“We were.”
“And then I tried to do more and you clearly wanted to be with Lana that night and ran off and it sucked, okay? I figured once we agreed to be just good friends that there really wasn’t much to say to each other. It’s not just you, though. Lex is the only person from Smallville I even talk to anymore, outside of some business catch up with Pete down at the D.A.’s office. Lana and I stopped talking before I even got my license.”
He frowned and those same green eyes were so wounded, even under thick frames. “I missed you. Friends talk to each other. Just because you decided we weren’t dating doesn’t mean you had to block me out of your life.”
“My life was in Metropolis, and you were stuck on a farm, Clark. What did we really have in common?” she bit back, hurrying into the opened press conference room, trying not to notice how badly he was slouching now that she’d yelled at him. It was a big city. He’d have to toughen up to survive here. Not her problem.
Not anymore.
**
Clark’s cape ruffled behind him in the wind. He was staking out Lex’s holding by Suicide Slums. The presentation today had been impressive, if you didn’t know better. They were raving about a breakthrough LexCorp had made in anti-aging skin cream. Chloe’d bitched about it all the way back to The Planet. Lex was acting like he’d revolutionized human science and she’d been sorely frustrated to find out it was just a cosmetics pitch. At least she had been, until he’d handed her the readouts from the R&D report. She’d skimmed that and he’d pointed out anything with the chemistry she couldn’t follow.
The results of the cream weren’t miraculous.
They were impossible, unless something else was involved. He was betting that Lex had found himself a meteor mutant with anti-aging abilities. Kryptonite-based experiments never worked. Even back his senior year of high school, there’d been that utter disaster with the nightmare spore created in part with meteor rock enhanced supplements. That was still better than the superheated Green K that had blackened and split both of them for a few days. No, Lex had been working with the meteor rocks long enough to know that machines or animals, possibly, could be worked over with the Kryptonite but humans reacted unpredictably.
Clark was very much afraid that some unlucky Smallville citizen was being held against their will and milked and exploited in order to give socialites perfect skin.
But the damn building was thoroughly sound proofed and was shielded with lead. Lex was more than suspicious. He didn’t know what Clark was, but damn if he hadn’t tried to figure it out, but he knew a lot about the people from the Black Ship that had come and Clark had stopped shortly before creating the Fortress and training. Lex was being paranoid and careful, and that made Clark even more certain someone with powers was locked away there.
He’d prefer not to have to break into the holding facility if he didn’t have to, but the security meant his heightened senses weren’t going to help him.
“It was supposed to be an easy reconnaissance day,” he grumbled, before blurring through the door. What he didn’t expect as he twisted the lock open and walked eased into a corner of the hallway was to see a familiar figure already crawling through a window. Chloe was wearing all black and a ski cap, but there was no mistaking her green eyes. He’d thought he’d been mistaken earlier because of the name, but the eyes were still hers, as bright and mischievous as they’d been long ago in the loft. “Excuse me?”
Chloe frowned back at him. “The Hell? Wait so Lex’s security has a circus uniform now?”
“No,” Clark said, affecting a deeper voice. He’d practiced that with his family as well as making sure he did his hair differently and not having glasses, of course. Besides, Mom liked to point out that in the outfit, which was ceremonial thank you, no one was looking at his face. “I’m here to figure out what Luthor’s got going on.”
Chloe frowned. “So you’re not from LexCorp?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Do you?” he countered. “You seem to be enjoying the gas station robbery look.”
“Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” she said. “I don’t buy anything about his miracle formula. The chemistry on that’s not even possible.”
See, and he’d told her that. He was so a good reporting partner. “I was concerned too with rumors I’d been hearing.”
“Where?” she snorted. “At Barnum and Bailey? Look, even that Bat-Guy is stealth. Are you serious?”
“I always am, Ms. Lane,” he replied as he started down the hall.
As they went, he fried whatever cameras or recording devices he heard whirring away. There hadn’t been any security yet, but Clark wasn’t concerned. Lex’s at the mansion had always sucked, and he’d gone to great pains to hide this particular holding. Guards were surely around but maybe he hadn’t put a ton on the perimeter, figuring that it being hidden so deeply would deter most. Chloe stepped next to him, fairly stealthy for a human, and he figured that she no longer wore chunky boots helped with that. They rounded a corner and came to a massive iron door that was locked with an electronic switch.
Chloe automatically slung the backpack from off her shoulder and started pulling out a tablet. “I can get this hacked but it could take a few hours to crack the code, I hope, and cut the power.”
Clark smirked at her. “Let me get it.”
“What you’re gonna juggle it to death?”
“No,” he said, pulling the door from its hinges as if it were silly putty (and with him, they might as well have been).
Chloe whistled and her eyes went wide. “Whoa. You don’t happen to have lived in Smallville before? Play with rocks as a kid?”
Clark swallowed hard as he set the door aside. She didn’t need to connect him to his alter ego, not at all. “I don’t know the place. Sorry, and I’m not a fan of rocks, period.” At least that part was true. “Shall we?”
“Sure,” she said, sighing and then adding in a whisper. “Is it pathetic that this is the closest to a date I’ve had in three years?”
Clark wanted to add that it was the closest to one he’d had since Lana had dumped him for Jason, but that was a huge way to blow his cover and more embarrassing than he could admit to. While, in theory, he’d learned a lot about control at the Fortress, well, in practice, he’d never done certain things and that was not something even if he were himself (having dual identities was already confusing) that he’d just casually discuss with Chloe at the water cooler.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Seriously,” she hissed. “What do I even call you and whoa.”
He frowned and turned the corner a second after her. Then he stopped; Clark couldn’t go further if he wanted to. The room before him was lit up with a sickly green glow and it was concentrated at the far corner. He was just on the edge of where the Kryptonite was really concentrated. There were at least five cots set up before him and, chained to each of them, where thin, skeletal patients who were as bald as Lex was.
“The Hell?” Chloe demanded, stepping forward. “What’s going on?” She made it to the first patient and the person barely reacted to Chloe’s touch. She picked up the woman’s (he thought it was at least) and read the band on it. “Subject 2245---Sheila Hubbard, heightened immunity.”
Clark blanched and wished he could go any further into the room. Chloe already had her camera out and was taking pictures of everything. Sheila was his neighbor’s niece. She’d lived on the farm, actually, with Ben for a few years after college. She’d been close with his parents and just disappeared about two years back. No one had known what had happened to her. It wasn’t even that she’d gone nuts and been sent to Belle Reve first. No, she’d just been snatched into thin air.
Chloe read off the others. “Daniel Kim, Simone Simmons…they all have a designation and a suspected power. We have a hypnotist and a telekinetic. Where did he get them from?”
“What about the girl, the one in the far corner, the one with the most tubes in her?”
Chloe turned around and glared at him. “So you can rip doors off hinges but you can’t help me? What kind of a vigilante are you?”
“I can’t and I can’t explain why, but trust me, look up the last girl, please.”
“Sure, whatever, huh. 3452---Subject Emily Dinsmore III, anti-aging.” Chloe scowled, her nose twitching up like a rabbit. “Why the third? Who does that?”
Clark knew. The original Emily had drowned and then Mr. Dinsmore had engineered another who aged too fast. Lex must have found the resource and expanded. “Ms. Lane we have to go.”
“We can’t leave them here! He’s hurting them.”
Clark understood that but they didn’t have a lot of time and if they started disconnecting things, there was every chance that alarms would sound. “Ms. Lane, they’re catatonic and, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, okay? I can’t go in there.”
“Why not?”
Clark crossed his arms over his chest. “There’s a valid reason but I can’t explain it. If I cross the threshold any further, you’ll be having to try and drag me out of here. We’ll get the images to the authorities and get them out, okay, but we can’t help them now if they can’t move under their own power.”
“The little girl is six!”
“And she’s on a ventilator. If you take her off, she might not survive until we get her help. I promise I’ll help you, Chloe, but you have to retreat for right now.”
“Fine,” she said, stomping out and after him.
It wasn’t till later that night after he stopped a bank robbery that Clark realized he’d called Chloe by her actual name, by a name he shouldn’t have known.”
Request: After Season 1, Gabe and Chloe move and she reunites with Clark on his first day at The Daily Planet
Type: Fic
For: purple_moon123
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 12, 665
Summary: Chloe hasn’t seen Clark in ten years, but some feelings never change.
Author’s Note: Per the prompt, nothing past Vortex (2.01) applies to what happened with Chloe and Clark. Also this Cat Grant is very much the Lois and Clark version and even Perry here has a bit of Elvis-inspired love.
Chapter Two
“Why are we here so early?” he asked.
She sighed. “Lex asked that I did that for him, and I obliged.”
Clark frowned back at her. “You talk like you and Lex Luthor are friends.”
Chloe snorted. That was too small a word for what they were to each other. It really depended on what day of the week you asked. First, he’d saved her life and fostered her life in witness protection her summer before senior year. It had worked to his advantage, of course. Her detective work and secret testimony had put Lionel behind bars where he’d died of cancer before the appeals even went through. LexCorp only existed because she’d helped leverage it for him. There’d been something hot and heavy in college, she could admit that. And Lex was excellent at what he did. For a while, she really thought they might end up married.
They’d been engaged her senior year, and then he’d gotten to into his projects, into going over and subsuming Lionel’s damn Level Three research (and she’d been right all along about Earl Jenkins), and he wasn’t the Lex she’d always cared about anymore.
Sometimes, yes, they got together for drinks. Sometimes, they butted heads at conferences, and, on the rarest of days, she’d see him at a function or make small talk at a gala and it would almost seem like things were possible, but there was something cold there now, something so very much like his father, and Chloe couldn’t reach past that anymore.
She was scared over how much Level Three had expanded in the last four years, and she worked hard on exposing the underbelly of LexCorp. She hadn’t managed her smoking gun yet, but she would, and playing nice with Lex helped her facilitate that.
“Did I say something wrong? Ms. Lane, you don’t have to treat me like I’m an idiot.”
“I’m not. I’m just not convinced you’re up to my standards for having a partner.”
“Is anyone?”
Chloe stilled. To be fair, they’d tried giving her partners before. Perry’d started with this idiot photojournalist Jimmy Olsen and then tried moving to this sycophantic ass named Jeff. Cat had come closest to being a workable partner. She seemed vapid but underneath was as incisive and dangerous as an asp. Chloe at least respected the other woman’s mind if not her wardrobe, but no human could work near Cat for long. It was how she’d gotten reworked over to the advice column. Solo ventures were best for Cat Grant. But it wasn’t her fault there’d been a total of five completely unsuitable people sent to work with her.
She wasn’t the problem
She wasn’t.
“Not yet, but maybe you’ll surprise me.” She sighed and leaned against the polished marble of LexCorp’s lobby. “Look, Clark, I should let you know that we’ve met.”
“I don’t think we have.”
She rolled her eyes. “I really think we have. Not everyone gives a girl a copy of The Tales of the Weird and Unexplained out of nowhere on their first day in Smallville.” She smirked, amused by the dumbfounded look on his face. “Also, if you still bury your lead as badly as you did over chess team articles and lunch menus, then we’re in deep trouble.”
Strong arms were around her and she let him do it, knew she was going to cave on that much. For a few hours, it had been kind of fun seeing his confusion. He clearly thought she looked familiar---and duh, she didn’t look that different, so she wasn’t bleaching anymore, so what---but he hadn’t been able to place her. But the masquerade wasn’t fun long term and, frankly, it had been far too long since she’d even heard news of Clark Kent before she wanted her own inside scoop.
“Chloe! What happened to your hair?”
She laughed and pulled away from him. “It’s called the natural look and since when do you have glasses?”
“I, uh, had this accident on the farm in junior year, actually. It’s not 20/20 anymore but for a while they thought I’d be blind.”
She frowned. Pete had never mentioned that. Weird. “Oh, then they look nice.”
“Nah, I know they’re lame but they won’t sign off on contacts,” he said. “So the name?”
“Trouble with a certain bearded billionaire we all used to know and hate. I could get my life back in order but he’d gotten me blacklisted everywhere. My cousin is military and never had a damn bit of interest in using her own name to publish so she said I could borrow it as pseudonym. If Lois actually read the paper, I’m sure she’d be excited at how often her name’s above the fold.”
“Cool,” he said. “So then that covers ten years sure.”
Chloe quirked her head at him. “And that sounded bitter.”
“You never even emailed! You went off to Metropolis and I know you emailed Pete and Lana, but I even tried to call a few times and my emails got bounced back and why?”
She had a press conference in ten minutes and it was hard enough on good days to see Lex and play their usual cat and mouse. Chloe was not tearing open Spring Formal wounds ten years later and going into the usual battle of wills that was a LexCorp event out of it. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
“Of course I’d care.”
She shrugged. “Clark, look, this is awkward as Hell. Once, I thought we were good friends.”
“We were.”
“And then I tried to do more and you clearly wanted to be with Lana that night and ran off and it sucked, okay? I figured once we agreed to be just good friends that there really wasn’t much to say to each other. It’s not just you, though. Lex is the only person from Smallville I even talk to anymore, outside of some business catch up with Pete down at the D.A.’s office. Lana and I stopped talking before I even got my license.”
He frowned and those same green eyes were so wounded, even under thick frames. “I missed you. Friends talk to each other. Just because you decided we weren’t dating doesn’t mean you had to block me out of your life.”
“My life was in Metropolis, and you were stuck on a farm, Clark. What did we really have in common?” she bit back, hurrying into the opened press conference room, trying not to notice how badly he was slouching now that she’d yelled at him. It was a big city. He’d have to toughen up to survive here. Not her problem.
Not anymore.
**
Clark’s cape ruffled behind him in the wind. He was staking out Lex’s holding by Suicide Slums. The presentation today had been impressive, if you didn’t know better. They were raving about a breakthrough LexCorp had made in anti-aging skin cream. Chloe’d bitched about it all the way back to The Planet. Lex was acting like he’d revolutionized human science and she’d been sorely frustrated to find out it was just a cosmetics pitch. At least she had been, until he’d handed her the readouts from the R&D report. She’d skimmed that and he’d pointed out anything with the chemistry she couldn’t follow.
The results of the cream weren’t miraculous.
They were impossible, unless something else was involved. He was betting that Lex had found himself a meteor mutant with anti-aging abilities. Kryptonite-based experiments never worked. Even back his senior year of high school, there’d been that utter disaster with the nightmare spore created in part with meteor rock enhanced supplements. That was still better than the superheated Green K that had blackened and split both of them for a few days. No, Lex had been working with the meteor rocks long enough to know that machines or animals, possibly, could be worked over with the Kryptonite but humans reacted unpredictably.
Clark was very much afraid that some unlucky Smallville citizen was being held against their will and milked and exploited in order to give socialites perfect skin.
But the damn building was thoroughly sound proofed and was shielded with lead. Lex was more than suspicious. He didn’t know what Clark was, but damn if he hadn’t tried to figure it out, but he knew a lot about the people from the Black Ship that had come and Clark had stopped shortly before creating the Fortress and training. Lex was being paranoid and careful, and that made Clark even more certain someone with powers was locked away there.
He’d prefer not to have to break into the holding facility if he didn’t have to, but the security meant his heightened senses weren’t going to help him.
“It was supposed to be an easy reconnaissance day,” he grumbled, before blurring through the door. What he didn’t expect as he twisted the lock open and walked eased into a corner of the hallway was to see a familiar figure already crawling through a window. Chloe was wearing all black and a ski cap, but there was no mistaking her green eyes. He’d thought he’d been mistaken earlier because of the name, but the eyes were still hers, as bright and mischievous as they’d been long ago in the loft. “Excuse me?”
Chloe frowned back at him. “The Hell? Wait so Lex’s security has a circus uniform now?”
“No,” Clark said, affecting a deeper voice. He’d practiced that with his family as well as making sure he did his hair differently and not having glasses, of course. Besides, Mom liked to point out that in the outfit, which was ceremonial thank you, no one was looking at his face. “I’m here to figure out what Luthor’s got going on.”
Chloe frowned. “So you’re not from LexCorp?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Do you?” he countered. “You seem to be enjoying the gas station robbery look.”
“Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” she said. “I don’t buy anything about his miracle formula. The chemistry on that’s not even possible.”
See, and he’d told her that. He was so a good reporting partner. “I was concerned too with rumors I’d been hearing.”
“Where?” she snorted. “At Barnum and Bailey? Look, even that Bat-Guy is stealth. Are you serious?”
“I always am, Ms. Lane,” he replied as he started down the hall.
As they went, he fried whatever cameras or recording devices he heard whirring away. There hadn’t been any security yet, but Clark wasn’t concerned. Lex’s at the mansion had always sucked, and he’d gone to great pains to hide this particular holding. Guards were surely around but maybe he hadn’t put a ton on the perimeter, figuring that it being hidden so deeply would deter most. Chloe stepped next to him, fairly stealthy for a human, and he figured that she no longer wore chunky boots helped with that. They rounded a corner and came to a massive iron door that was locked with an electronic switch.
Chloe automatically slung the backpack from off her shoulder and started pulling out a tablet. “I can get this hacked but it could take a few hours to crack the code, I hope, and cut the power.”
Clark smirked at her. “Let me get it.”
“What you’re gonna juggle it to death?”
“No,” he said, pulling the door from its hinges as if it were silly putty (and with him, they might as well have been).
Chloe whistled and her eyes went wide. “Whoa. You don’t happen to have lived in Smallville before? Play with rocks as a kid?”
Clark swallowed hard as he set the door aside. She didn’t need to connect him to his alter ego, not at all. “I don’t know the place. Sorry, and I’m not a fan of rocks, period.” At least that part was true. “Shall we?”
“Sure,” she said, sighing and then adding in a whisper. “Is it pathetic that this is the closest to a date I’ve had in three years?”
Clark wanted to add that it was the closest to one he’d had since Lana had dumped him for Jason, but that was a huge way to blow his cover and more embarrassing than he could admit to. While, in theory, he’d learned a lot about control at the Fortress, well, in practice, he’d never done certain things and that was not something even if he were himself (having dual identities was already confusing) that he’d just casually discuss with Chloe at the water cooler.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Seriously,” she hissed. “What do I even call you and whoa.”
He frowned and turned the corner a second after her. Then he stopped; Clark couldn’t go further if he wanted to. The room before him was lit up with a sickly green glow and it was concentrated at the far corner. He was just on the edge of where the Kryptonite was really concentrated. There were at least five cots set up before him and, chained to each of them, where thin, skeletal patients who were as bald as Lex was.
“The Hell?” Chloe demanded, stepping forward. “What’s going on?” She made it to the first patient and the person barely reacted to Chloe’s touch. She picked up the woman’s (he thought it was at least) and read the band on it. “Subject 2245---Sheila Hubbard, heightened immunity.”
Clark blanched and wished he could go any further into the room. Chloe already had her camera out and was taking pictures of everything. Sheila was his neighbor’s niece. She’d lived on the farm, actually, with Ben for a few years after college. She’d been close with his parents and just disappeared about two years back. No one had known what had happened to her. It wasn’t even that she’d gone nuts and been sent to Belle Reve first. No, she’d just been snatched into thin air.
Chloe read off the others. “Daniel Kim, Simone Simmons…they all have a designation and a suspected power. We have a hypnotist and a telekinetic. Where did he get them from?”
“What about the girl, the one in the far corner, the one with the most tubes in her?”
Chloe turned around and glared at him. “So you can rip doors off hinges but you can’t help me? What kind of a vigilante are you?”
“I can’t and I can’t explain why, but trust me, look up the last girl, please.”
“Sure, whatever, huh. 3452---Subject Emily Dinsmore III, anti-aging.” Chloe scowled, her nose twitching up like a rabbit. “Why the third? Who does that?”
Clark knew. The original Emily had drowned and then Mr. Dinsmore had engineered another who aged too fast. Lex must have found the resource and expanded. “Ms. Lane we have to go.”
“We can’t leave them here! He’s hurting them.”
Clark understood that but they didn’t have a lot of time and if they started disconnecting things, there was every chance that alarms would sound. “Ms. Lane, they’re catatonic and, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, okay? I can’t go in there.”
“Why not?”
Clark crossed his arms over his chest. “There’s a valid reason but I can’t explain it. If I cross the threshold any further, you’ll be having to try and drag me out of here. We’ll get the images to the authorities and get them out, okay, but we can’t help them now if they can’t move under their own power.”
“The little girl is six!”
“And she’s on a ventilator. If you take her off, she might not survive until we get her help. I promise I’ll help you, Chloe, but you have to retreat for right now.”
“Fine,” she said, stomping out and after him.
It wasn’t till later that night after he stopped a bank robbery that Clark realized he’d called Chloe by her actual name, by a name he shouldn’t have known.”