For ellyfanfiction: as yet untitled
Present for Elly/Gemmiel
Length: about 5,000 words
Request: Daily Planet, futurefic, happy ending with no Clois, Clana, or Chlollie
Chloe tucked her hands a little further into her pockets as she trudged through the slush that was covering the sidewalk all around her. She would normally be using her arm to keep her messenger bag tucked securely into her side, but the fact that her fingers felt as if they were going numb with the cold won out over thoughts of basic city sidewalk traveling possession protection rules. If anyone was standing out in this weather scouting for someone to mug, then she was just cold enough to take her chances. She should have gotten a cab, but she had wanted to soak in the seasonal change in decoration that had happened throughout the downtown area over the last couple of days. She wasn’t sorry about taking the fifteen minute walk from her interview back to her office to do that, but she was sorry that she hadn’t bothered to think about what shoes she was wearing before she did it.
Falling snow was pretty when one was ensconced within the frame of a window sipping at some hot chocolate that had been doctored with a dab of whip cream. Oft tracked through snow that had been partially melting on a Metropolis sidewalk all afternoon was not pretty. It was cold. It was wet. It went everywhere -- including inside of the heels that were doing nothing to keep her toes from feeling as if she had plopped them into an ice bath. She kept walking knowing that the damage was already done and there was no point in trying to flag down someone to take her the last two blocks. Digging her fingers further into her pockets didn’t really make her feel much warmer, but it did make her feel as if she was trying.
She made a mental note that the weather was turning winter, and she needed to function within the reality of that. The next time she stood in front of her closet attempting to decide what would be the best combination to set the first impression tone of a given interview she would completely ignore any of the cute but fundamentally impractical pairs of shoes that she noticed tucked away underneath the bar where her work clothes hung (no matter how well a particular pair might match a given dress). She was choosing boots -- not the showy pair that she had with the heels that were designed to add enough to her height that she had to think carefully about how she was stepping either. She was picking the flat bottomed, lined ones with the fuzzy yarn balls on the strings that hung off of them. They were comfy, and they were warm. She was an award winning journalist whose articles were featured on the front page of the best paper in print (might be just a tiny pinch of bias on her part in that assessment). If she wanted to wear comfortable footwear while conducting her interviews, then that is exactly what she would do -- at least until she managed to forget just exactly how cold she was in this moment.
She took a deep breath as she made her way through the glass doors and felt her shoulders loosening up even as she made a feeble attempt at scraping some of the wet off of her shoes on the already saturated mats that covered the floor of the entry. She was still freezing, but being at The Daily Planet sent a fissure of contentment and relaxation to the core of her being the way she imagined other people felt about going home. The Planet was home for her in a way that her apartment (comfortable as she had managed to make it) was not likely ever to be. The apartment was a place to keep her stuff. It was a place to sleep.
The Daily Planet was the place where she did her living. She knew how that sounded, but she didn’t care. She had weathered enough chiding on the topic from the well-meaning but lacking in understanding in her life. They told her that her philosophy was a sad one; they told her that it was a sign that she did too much working and didn’t leave herself with enough down time. She just learned to avoid the conversations. There was nothing about her job that would make her want to spend further time away from it. This is what she was meant to do -- her calling in life. Spending time cultivating extraneous hobbies or walking away from things that she could be doing simply for the sake of spending time walked away from things she could be doing made no sense to her. Maybe it made sense for people who were merely spending their days doing a job. That wasn’t her.
She had considered asking if they could just put a cot next to her desk once when she was on an all-night typing spree trying to meet a self-set deadline and had grumbled all the way back to her apartment about the time waste of the travel when she was half-asleep at three o’clock in the morning. She had thought better of it later. Sleeping in the middle of the newsroom would probably be awkward, and as wonderful as the DP was, it did not happen to boast a shower. She wasn’t ready to give that up (besides, she had barely enough closet space as it was). And, yes, those were all thoughts she had had in the half-drowsy dose she had been in while making her way back after a scant two hours of sleep to jump back into the thick of things again. She would keep her apartment with its closet space and her carefully selected coffee maker and the collection of pillows that occupied her bed, but The Daily Planet would still always be home for her in a way that she didn’t believe that any other place was capable of being.
She wasn’t embarrassed to shuck her shoes off underneath her desk the moment that she was seated. There were some things that were more important than appearances and professionalism (the prospect of frost bite was one of those things). Losing her sopping pair of shoes (that she knew were likely going to be a lost cause now that they were off her feet and she could survey the damage) came first -- even before delving into the package that was sitting on her desk waiting for her arrival. Her feet were still freezing, but she drew the line at actually tucking them up underneath her in the chair. The newsroom was a little cooler than her preference (or it might just be that she was still in the midst of shivering), but she would warm up eventually. (She, at least, was no longer wet on top of being cold.)
There was nothing written on the package, and that gave her a moment’s pause. There had been threats before. There had even been attempts that put those threats into actions. This, however, seemed to be a fairly innocuous box. Besides, if she never took any chances, then she would never have any sources and would still be writing pet obits and editing classified ads. She slit the tape on the end with her fingernail and pulled the box within the brown paper out to open it. Nestled inside was a pair of slippers. That was all. There was no note. There was nothing else. They were just a pair of brown slippers unremarkable enough that she would likely be able to wear them around the building for the rest of the day without anyone really noticing that she was wearing them. Inside, they were lined with a soft fleece sort of a substance that was heating her hand up just from reaching inside to feel it. It was a little odd -- okay, so it was a lot odd, but Chloe hadn’t lived a typical life and odd was pretty standard fair for her. The timing was pretty perfect for an unexpected gift of footwear, so she slipped them on and nearly sighed out loud at the instant change in temperature that took over her whole body. She would bother to be curious about from whence they came another time. For right now, she had a story to finish and file, and she was going to do it in comfort.
It was later that evening as she took the slippers off in preparation for climbing into her bed (and its beckoning pile of pillows) that she first took time to genuinely wonder about their origins. They really had been a little too perfectly timed, and it was not as though random presents showed up for her at the office every day. When something was delivered, it was usually something along the lines of a small bouquet or a box of candy from an interviewee that appreciated her work. There had even been a fruit basket once from a particularly thankful director of a charity that she had profiled. There were little acknowledgement gifts from various members of the League on occasion, but those were usually not delivered to her workplace. Slippers, however, were definitely a new one. She should be more concerned. The timing absolutely screamed that someone had been watching her, and she had had a multitude of those types of experiences in her life to teach her that that was not a good thing. She, however, couldn’t seem to summon enough energy to be concerned.
What kind of potential psycho left a girl slippers?
It saddened her that she could actually rattle off a list of answers to that question, so she decided to just go to sleep. She could think about it in the morning.
It just so happened that “in the morning” was not conducive to wondering about mysterious presents. She took her job very seriously. She genuinely enjoyed it to the point of near obsessiveness, but she thought everyone should be given a little slack in the grumbling department if a source decided that a quarter after four in the morning was a good time to call with a tip.
Crime, she supposed, didn’t sleep. That meant there were times that intrepid journalists in pursuit of exposing those crimes didn’t get to sleep either. That didn’t mean that she had any illusions about the fact that she functioned much better on the haven’t been to bed yet side of not sleeping than she did at the summoned out of bed in the middle of sleeping side of it, so she filled an entire thermos (a fairly large one at that) with coffee (using every last bit in the container from her cabinet in order to do so). She told herself that she would remember to buy more this time before she went to the shelf only to discover it was gone as had happened the last couple of times that she had run low and set out on the trek from her apartment to the designated meeting spot (and to think how certain members of her family who would remain unnamed had laughed at her and asked what she would ever use that gift card she had won from the camping supply store for). A giant thermos of coffee guaranteed to stay hot for the next six hours was seeming like a very practical purchase, and she mentally patted herself on the back. She did wear the comfy boots for this excursion (and layers, layers were very important), so she figured that she was safe from the wet and cold.
What she wasn’t safe from was the nagging feeling that she was being followed. It wasn’t an unusual feeling on her part (a senior reporter back when she was first getting her start had used the term “meet the source jitters” to describe the prickly feeling on the back of your neck when you were just sure that you should have told someone where you were going even though you knew that a particular source was squirrelly and liable to bolt if there was any indication that someone else was tagging along). She figured it was a common occurrence in the field -- an occupational hazard to be a little bit paranoid. This, however, felt different because she had been followed in the course of her life, and she had been followed by people who sincerely intended to cause her harm. She knew what being watched felt like. This felt like that, but it didn’t feel like the something is wrong brand of being watched that her mind wanted to immediately shift it over to in response to the impression. This felt benign (if someone following you around without your consent could be designated benign), but it was very present.
She decided to shrug it off and focus on the task at hand. This source had been putting her off with excuses to keep from giving her the final pieces she needed for quite some time (the hemming and hawing had reached nearly epic levels), and she was not going to walk into this too distracted too keep him on task now that he seemed ready to finally come to the table. She had pretty good instincts; she should notice if the watching shifted to ill-intent. Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time that one of her stories had crossed boundary lines with potential League business. If one of the members had been keeping a watch on the same people her informant was supplying her with information on, then they would have noticed her involvement and might very well be keeping an eye out for her. It wouldn’t be the first time. The League was a League, but most of the members still did most of their work on their own, and some of them were not very forthcoming in the information sharing department. She might need to send that memo about professional courtesy around again (not that she thought that any of the chronic offenders really read those).
Nineteen hours later, she was buried in a pile of notes, recordings, notes about the recordings, and what she thought might have been copies of about six years’ worth of financial records that appeared to have been copied on a machine that enjoyed leaving blurs and smudges in places designed to make her life as difficult as possible. Her apartment had won out over The Planet as a workspace for once due to the need to spend an obscenely long time under a hot shower after all of her layers and her comfy, warm lined boots had been unable to protect her from the cost of spending nearly half an hour actually standing outside as the sky decided to drop sleet on her, but this story was going to be so worth the shivering and near hypothermia (and she knew from personal experience, sadly, exactly where the line between near hypothermia and actual hypothermia was).
She got up to take a small break to get her coffee maker started only to sit back down when the thought hit her that she hadn’t taken herself shopping yet -- meaning that there was no coffee to be had. Her eyes drifted to the window where she could see that the sleet was continuing unabated. The sound of it now that she was listening for it was making her colder all on its own. The thought of tromping back out into it was not an appealing prospect. She was pretty sure that there was a package of tea stuck in the back of her cabinet that had once been a part of a gift basket. She preferred her coffee, but she didn’t want to spend the time to go on a run at the moment any more than she wanted to brave the weather. She would just have to remember to be more prepared by being a more proactive shopper the next time. Tea wasn’t bad, and it was, most importantly, hot. She didn’t get as far as the tea. Sitting directly behind her cabinet door when she opened it was a large container of her current coffee of choice just waiting for her to open it. She knew it hadn’t been there that morning.
The mysterious gift giving had apparently spilled over into her apartment. It wasn’t the most comfortable of thoughts. She found herself rubbing her hands over her arms and couldn’t be sure that the chill she still felt was the cause of that round of shivering. The coffee wasn’t outside the realm of a Bart kind of offering (and trying to keep him out of her apartment was a battle that she hadn’t bothered fighting), but Bart hadn’t been to Metropolis in ages (and Bart never failed to appear to take credit for his gift giving). It was almost as if . . . Chloe cut the thought off before it could take hold. He hadn’t been around for even longer than Bart, and if he had come back, then he would have other things to do beside bring her comfort presents. She shook it all off and compartmentalized. She had work to finish.
It was the next night (after her story was filed and being printed for the next morning’s front page) when she had been patted on the back and told that she should go get some sleep before she came back to start working on her next byline (her boss might be even more about the job than she was) that she took the time to let her thoughts go back to wandering. She went to the roof of The Planet instead of heading directly to her apartment for an appointment with her pillows. Metropolis was never quiet, but there was a certain amount of distance from the bustle when you were so high up that Chloe found comfortable when she needed to do some heavy thinking.
She wasn’t sure whether she was really doing some heavy thinking or was just trying to double check her sanity levels. She figured she was safe either way -- there was no one else that would be able to hear what she was saying. It would either be heard by the intended recipient or her mental lapse would remain her own.
“If you’re hanging around and leaving me random gifts for some reason, then could you clarify your involvement for me? Otherwise, I’m going to go back to thinking that my imagination is playing tricks on me,” she paused for a moment. “Or that I’m in trouble again and need to start watching my back.”
There was no answer, and she eventually followed her previously received direction and went home to sleep.
The next day is a blur of post front page rituals that culminate in a two hour meeting with legal to make sure they are adequately prepared to handle any attempts at challenges that might arise. It was 2:30 in the afternoon (and she had been running on nothing but coffee and a muffin she had devoured somewhere around 7 in the morning) when she came back to her desk fully intending to jump right back in to editing one of her standard assignments when the smell from the take out bag waiting for her on her desk made her stomach lurch and growl by way of reminding her that she really was hungry and should stop ignoring that fact. The bag proved to contain her standard order that she ran out to get sometimes from a little place a couple of blocks from The Planet. The only difference between this and the previous demonstrations of the fact that someone was watching her was the note scribbled across a napkin in handwriting that she would recognize anywhere.
“It’s not your imagination, but when aren’t you in trouble?”
How was she supposed to respond to that?
The next two weeks were filled with whispers and the city was full of open chatter by the end of the month. Someone was watching the streets -- stopping muggings, preventing underworld deals from proceeding, and even pulling a car back from tumbling down an embankment after an accident.
Chloe kept getting gifts. They did not appear as frequently as those initial three, but they still cropped up from time to time. There was no more communication, but they were clearly showing that he was still watching her. She was less than amused, so she decided to start talking. She picked her rooftop thinking spot, settled in one night, and let any little thing that it occurred to her to say roll off of her tongue.
“I really thought that the whole telescope being used to spy on the neighbors thing was a youthful phase, but I’m starting to believe this whole watch from afar while never acknowledging in person broody habit of yours is something you never outgrew,” came out of her mouth somewhere around the ten minute point of her monologue.
The air displacement behind her let her know that she had garnered his attention, and she turned only to completely lose her train of thought.
“Hmm,” she found herself murmuring. “Up close and in person, that outfit is really . . .,” she trailed off and shook her thoughts back in to their proper places.
“I don’t brood,” he told her crossing his arms across his chest in a move that made him look even more broad shouldered than he already was. Chloe could see why so many in the midst of criminal activities might find him intimidating, but she had known him for too long (and too well) for it to have the same effect on her. She may have semi snorted when she made her reply.
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, Cl . . . .” She didn’t get his name out -- a loud clearing of his throat cut off the word.
“Don’t call me that -- not when I’m . . .,” he half shrugged and gestured at his outfit.
“Fine,” she rolled her eyes and decided to humor him in the interest of getting to the bottom of what he was doing. “Random newly arrived protector of the city that I have certainly never encountered before,” she thought about dialing back the sarcasm a notch but decided just as quickly that she didn’t want to bother. “Should I start looking into filing a restraining order against the potentially creepy stalker who keeps breaking into my apartment?”
“I’m not stalking.” He actually looked hurt. “And I don’t break in -- you always leave the spare key in . . .,” he trailed off in recognition of the expression of challenge on her face and started down another track. “I’m coming back here, Chloe.” He told her in a deliberate tone as if the words were the first line of a speech that he had practiced. “I’m coming back here for good, but I can’t take the kind of chances that I used to take with other people’s safety. I need to make this work, and that means that I have to keep things separate. I need to establish this whole alter ego hero identity as an entity of its own. When that’s successful, then I can come back as me.”
He held up a hand to ward off the question that she was about to ask. “Too many people have gotten hurt because someone figured out there was a secret to find. There have been too many times that it has been sheer luck that things didn’t go worse than they did. I have to mitigate that however I can. I’ve already learned that I can’t not do this -- I just don’t have it in me to not help. I also don’t have it in me to be nothing but Metropolis’s protector, but I can’t leave everyone around me vulnerable either.” His eyes met hers, and she could almost see the reflection of a white room with armed guards staring back at her through them. “Not again.”
“Okay,” she said (because what else could she say to that), “ but where does the whole I’m watching so closely that I know when your shoes are wet factor come into play in this new life strategy of yours?”
“If you would remember to go grocery shopping every once in a while,” he told her (and for a moment she was looking at a fifteen year old him teasing her about skipping lunch to work on The Torch in spite of the changes in age, demeanor, and posture), “ then I wouldn’t have to step in so often.”
“If you think having a personal kitchen delivery service is going to make me more inclined to shopping myself, then you have gravely miscalculated,” she teased back momentarily losing track of all of the things that stood between the them of then and the them of now.
“I knew this would happen,” he stated shaking his head and adjusting his stance until Chloe almost (almost) felt like she was looking at a stranger. She waits for him to keep talking because she has no idea where the comment came from or what about it is leaving that trace of sadness in the eyes that will no longer meet hers directly.
“This is part of why it has to be this way,” he continues after a long pause. “When I’m being this, I can’t be around you.”
She had thought that she was beyond getting her heart swatted by casually uttered words, but she was well on her way to finding out that was not the case before he finished his statement. “I’m too me when I’m with you.”
“What does that even mean?” She inquired trying hard not to let the words come out as sharply as they sounded in her head. She was out of practice in her guardedness of her emotions in front of him; it had been a long time.
“It means that when I’m with you I forget that I’m supposed to be putting on a show,” he answered her so softly that she found herself taking a step closer to him out of instinct to try to catch the words better. “It means that you make me feel like it’s alright if all I am is just me, and I can’t do that when I’m in the suit. I knew that would happen. I knew that I needed to keep my distance when I’m on the clock if you want to call it that. I can’t keep it separate around you, but I knew you would put two and two together as soon as the word started getting around. That’s why the gifts -- I can’t be present in your life until I get things squared away, but I didn’t want you to think that you were being ignored,” his voice sounded tight, “or forgotten. You aren’t anonymous, Chloe,” he told her and she found herself with a throat that was feeling strangely tight as well. “I wanted you to know that. The gifts . . . the gifts were a way to do that until I’m in a place where I can really be here.”
He’s gone before she can get any words out -- that may be just as well because she isn’t sure what she was going to say.
For the next year, Chloe writes the occasional piece about “Superman” and his exploits in Metropolis and further afield. It isn’t anyone at The Planet’s exclusive story. The senior staff passes them around the same way they do the city newspaper standard fare of local politics and holiday festivity covers.
She gets conveniently timed gifts delivered to both her work desk and her kitchen counter. She, sometimes, perches herself on the roof of her workplace to spend an hour or so talking -- about her and her comings and goings, about Superman and repetitions of people’s appreciation, or some words of solace on the occasions where the stories of the day had an ending where everything did not turn out well. She gets used to the feeling of eyes on her as she scouts for stories and meets with sources once again being her normal. He doesn’t come to talk to her again, but there is a scribbled “thank you” on one of the gifts from time to time, and she thinks that the nod of the head that he gave crowds that appeared when he was doing one of his more public deeds always seems to be directed at her if she happens to be around. It is a strange pattern, but it becomes something that feels oddly normal from the sheer repetition of it.
Being called into her editor’s office isn’t uncommon, but having a smirking coworker inform her that it looks like she has finally drawn the show the newbie around short straw is. All she can see when she enters the office is the tall figure with dark hair standing facing away from her (maybe because her eyes have sort of frozen in place as they register what she was seeing).
“Right on time,” her boss’s voice greets her. “I thought I’d have you show our newest addition the ropes today. I understand the two of you went to school together.”
The dark haired man turns and offers a smile while pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I’ll understand if she doesn’t remember,” he states directing his comment toward the man sitting behind the desk. “It’s been a long time, and I don’t do a very good job of staying in touch.”
“Oh, I think I remember,” Chloe offers with a smile of her own. “You know how random things pop up from time to time and make you think of someone. That’s always happening to me.”
“Great,” their supervisor comments deciding he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of trying to decipher what the look between the two of them is saying as they linger in his office without appearing to realize that they are lingering, “everyone knows each other. Now, get out of my office and get to work.”
To say that he is pleased with the number of front page worthy -- some with shared bylines and some not -- stories the two of them bring to his desk for the duration of his tenure would be putting it mildly.
To say that Clark never struggles with finding the balance between who he is and what he does (and all of the ways they intertwine and overlap) would be a lie, but it is successful more than it is not. He keeps going and keeps working at it because he finds that it is worth the effort.
To say that Chloe relearns something that she used to know about how people can be home even more easily than places would be to tell you that their story ends in just the way it should -- with a happy life instead of a happy ending and a well-worn pair of comfy slippers that she pulls out whenever the weather turns back to cold.
The End.
Length: about 5,000 words
Request: Daily Planet, futurefic, happy ending with no Clois, Clana, or Chlollie
Chloe tucked her hands a little further into her pockets as she trudged through the slush that was covering the sidewalk all around her. She would normally be using her arm to keep her messenger bag tucked securely into her side, but the fact that her fingers felt as if they were going numb with the cold won out over thoughts of basic city sidewalk traveling possession protection rules. If anyone was standing out in this weather scouting for someone to mug, then she was just cold enough to take her chances. She should have gotten a cab, but she had wanted to soak in the seasonal change in decoration that had happened throughout the downtown area over the last couple of days. She wasn’t sorry about taking the fifteen minute walk from her interview back to her office to do that, but she was sorry that she hadn’t bothered to think about what shoes she was wearing before she did it.
Falling snow was pretty when one was ensconced within the frame of a window sipping at some hot chocolate that had been doctored with a dab of whip cream. Oft tracked through snow that had been partially melting on a Metropolis sidewalk all afternoon was not pretty. It was cold. It was wet. It went everywhere -- including inside of the heels that were doing nothing to keep her toes from feeling as if she had plopped them into an ice bath. She kept walking knowing that the damage was already done and there was no point in trying to flag down someone to take her the last two blocks. Digging her fingers further into her pockets didn’t really make her feel much warmer, but it did make her feel as if she was trying.
She made a mental note that the weather was turning winter, and she needed to function within the reality of that. The next time she stood in front of her closet attempting to decide what would be the best combination to set the first impression tone of a given interview she would completely ignore any of the cute but fundamentally impractical pairs of shoes that she noticed tucked away underneath the bar where her work clothes hung (no matter how well a particular pair might match a given dress). She was choosing boots -- not the showy pair that she had with the heels that were designed to add enough to her height that she had to think carefully about how she was stepping either. She was picking the flat bottomed, lined ones with the fuzzy yarn balls on the strings that hung off of them. They were comfy, and they were warm. She was an award winning journalist whose articles were featured on the front page of the best paper in print (might be just a tiny pinch of bias on her part in that assessment). If she wanted to wear comfortable footwear while conducting her interviews, then that is exactly what she would do -- at least until she managed to forget just exactly how cold she was in this moment.
She took a deep breath as she made her way through the glass doors and felt her shoulders loosening up even as she made a feeble attempt at scraping some of the wet off of her shoes on the already saturated mats that covered the floor of the entry. She was still freezing, but being at The Daily Planet sent a fissure of contentment and relaxation to the core of her being the way she imagined other people felt about going home. The Planet was home for her in a way that her apartment (comfortable as she had managed to make it) was not likely ever to be. The apartment was a place to keep her stuff. It was a place to sleep.
The Daily Planet was the place where she did her living. She knew how that sounded, but she didn’t care. She had weathered enough chiding on the topic from the well-meaning but lacking in understanding in her life. They told her that her philosophy was a sad one; they told her that it was a sign that she did too much working and didn’t leave herself with enough down time. She just learned to avoid the conversations. There was nothing about her job that would make her want to spend further time away from it. This is what she was meant to do -- her calling in life. Spending time cultivating extraneous hobbies or walking away from things that she could be doing simply for the sake of spending time walked away from things she could be doing made no sense to her. Maybe it made sense for people who were merely spending their days doing a job. That wasn’t her.
She had considered asking if they could just put a cot next to her desk once when she was on an all-night typing spree trying to meet a self-set deadline and had grumbled all the way back to her apartment about the time waste of the travel when she was half-asleep at three o’clock in the morning. She had thought better of it later. Sleeping in the middle of the newsroom would probably be awkward, and as wonderful as the DP was, it did not happen to boast a shower. She wasn’t ready to give that up (besides, she had barely enough closet space as it was). And, yes, those were all thoughts she had had in the half-drowsy dose she had been in while making her way back after a scant two hours of sleep to jump back into the thick of things again. She would keep her apartment with its closet space and her carefully selected coffee maker and the collection of pillows that occupied her bed, but The Daily Planet would still always be home for her in a way that she didn’t believe that any other place was capable of being.
She wasn’t embarrassed to shuck her shoes off underneath her desk the moment that she was seated. There were some things that were more important than appearances and professionalism (the prospect of frost bite was one of those things). Losing her sopping pair of shoes (that she knew were likely going to be a lost cause now that they were off her feet and she could survey the damage) came first -- even before delving into the package that was sitting on her desk waiting for her arrival. Her feet were still freezing, but she drew the line at actually tucking them up underneath her in the chair. The newsroom was a little cooler than her preference (or it might just be that she was still in the midst of shivering), but she would warm up eventually. (She, at least, was no longer wet on top of being cold.)
There was nothing written on the package, and that gave her a moment’s pause. There had been threats before. There had even been attempts that put those threats into actions. This, however, seemed to be a fairly innocuous box. Besides, if she never took any chances, then she would never have any sources and would still be writing pet obits and editing classified ads. She slit the tape on the end with her fingernail and pulled the box within the brown paper out to open it. Nestled inside was a pair of slippers. That was all. There was no note. There was nothing else. They were just a pair of brown slippers unremarkable enough that she would likely be able to wear them around the building for the rest of the day without anyone really noticing that she was wearing them. Inside, they were lined with a soft fleece sort of a substance that was heating her hand up just from reaching inside to feel it. It was a little odd -- okay, so it was a lot odd, but Chloe hadn’t lived a typical life and odd was pretty standard fair for her. The timing was pretty perfect for an unexpected gift of footwear, so she slipped them on and nearly sighed out loud at the instant change in temperature that took over her whole body. She would bother to be curious about from whence they came another time. For right now, she had a story to finish and file, and she was going to do it in comfort.
It was later that evening as she took the slippers off in preparation for climbing into her bed (and its beckoning pile of pillows) that she first took time to genuinely wonder about their origins. They really had been a little too perfectly timed, and it was not as though random presents showed up for her at the office every day. When something was delivered, it was usually something along the lines of a small bouquet or a box of candy from an interviewee that appreciated her work. There had even been a fruit basket once from a particularly thankful director of a charity that she had profiled. There were little acknowledgement gifts from various members of the League on occasion, but those were usually not delivered to her workplace. Slippers, however, were definitely a new one. She should be more concerned. The timing absolutely screamed that someone had been watching her, and she had had a multitude of those types of experiences in her life to teach her that that was not a good thing. She, however, couldn’t seem to summon enough energy to be concerned.
What kind of potential psycho left a girl slippers?
It saddened her that she could actually rattle off a list of answers to that question, so she decided to just go to sleep. She could think about it in the morning.
It just so happened that “in the morning” was not conducive to wondering about mysterious presents. She took her job very seriously. She genuinely enjoyed it to the point of near obsessiveness, but she thought everyone should be given a little slack in the grumbling department if a source decided that a quarter after four in the morning was a good time to call with a tip.
Crime, she supposed, didn’t sleep. That meant there were times that intrepid journalists in pursuit of exposing those crimes didn’t get to sleep either. That didn’t mean that she had any illusions about the fact that she functioned much better on the haven’t been to bed yet side of not sleeping than she did at the summoned out of bed in the middle of sleeping side of it, so she filled an entire thermos (a fairly large one at that) with coffee (using every last bit in the container from her cabinet in order to do so). She told herself that she would remember to buy more this time before she went to the shelf only to discover it was gone as had happened the last couple of times that she had run low and set out on the trek from her apartment to the designated meeting spot (and to think how certain members of her family who would remain unnamed had laughed at her and asked what she would ever use that gift card she had won from the camping supply store for). A giant thermos of coffee guaranteed to stay hot for the next six hours was seeming like a very practical purchase, and she mentally patted herself on the back. She did wear the comfy boots for this excursion (and layers, layers were very important), so she figured that she was safe from the wet and cold.
What she wasn’t safe from was the nagging feeling that she was being followed. It wasn’t an unusual feeling on her part (a senior reporter back when she was first getting her start had used the term “meet the source jitters” to describe the prickly feeling on the back of your neck when you were just sure that you should have told someone where you were going even though you knew that a particular source was squirrelly and liable to bolt if there was any indication that someone else was tagging along). She figured it was a common occurrence in the field -- an occupational hazard to be a little bit paranoid. This, however, felt different because she had been followed in the course of her life, and she had been followed by people who sincerely intended to cause her harm. She knew what being watched felt like. This felt like that, but it didn’t feel like the something is wrong brand of being watched that her mind wanted to immediately shift it over to in response to the impression. This felt benign (if someone following you around without your consent could be designated benign), but it was very present.
She decided to shrug it off and focus on the task at hand. This source had been putting her off with excuses to keep from giving her the final pieces she needed for quite some time (the hemming and hawing had reached nearly epic levels), and she was not going to walk into this too distracted too keep him on task now that he seemed ready to finally come to the table. She had pretty good instincts; she should notice if the watching shifted to ill-intent. Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time that one of her stories had crossed boundary lines with potential League business. If one of the members had been keeping a watch on the same people her informant was supplying her with information on, then they would have noticed her involvement and might very well be keeping an eye out for her. It wouldn’t be the first time. The League was a League, but most of the members still did most of their work on their own, and some of them were not very forthcoming in the information sharing department. She might need to send that memo about professional courtesy around again (not that she thought that any of the chronic offenders really read those).
Nineteen hours later, she was buried in a pile of notes, recordings, notes about the recordings, and what she thought might have been copies of about six years’ worth of financial records that appeared to have been copied on a machine that enjoyed leaving blurs and smudges in places designed to make her life as difficult as possible. Her apartment had won out over The Planet as a workspace for once due to the need to spend an obscenely long time under a hot shower after all of her layers and her comfy, warm lined boots had been unable to protect her from the cost of spending nearly half an hour actually standing outside as the sky decided to drop sleet on her, but this story was going to be so worth the shivering and near hypothermia (and she knew from personal experience, sadly, exactly where the line between near hypothermia and actual hypothermia was).
She got up to take a small break to get her coffee maker started only to sit back down when the thought hit her that she hadn’t taken herself shopping yet -- meaning that there was no coffee to be had. Her eyes drifted to the window where she could see that the sleet was continuing unabated. The sound of it now that she was listening for it was making her colder all on its own. The thought of tromping back out into it was not an appealing prospect. She was pretty sure that there was a package of tea stuck in the back of her cabinet that had once been a part of a gift basket. She preferred her coffee, but she didn’t want to spend the time to go on a run at the moment any more than she wanted to brave the weather. She would just have to remember to be more prepared by being a more proactive shopper the next time. Tea wasn’t bad, and it was, most importantly, hot. She didn’t get as far as the tea. Sitting directly behind her cabinet door when she opened it was a large container of her current coffee of choice just waiting for her to open it. She knew it hadn’t been there that morning.
The mysterious gift giving had apparently spilled over into her apartment. It wasn’t the most comfortable of thoughts. She found herself rubbing her hands over her arms and couldn’t be sure that the chill she still felt was the cause of that round of shivering. The coffee wasn’t outside the realm of a Bart kind of offering (and trying to keep him out of her apartment was a battle that she hadn’t bothered fighting), but Bart hadn’t been to Metropolis in ages (and Bart never failed to appear to take credit for his gift giving). It was almost as if . . . Chloe cut the thought off before it could take hold. He hadn’t been around for even longer than Bart, and if he had come back, then he would have other things to do beside bring her comfort presents. She shook it all off and compartmentalized. She had work to finish.
It was the next night (after her story was filed and being printed for the next morning’s front page) when she had been patted on the back and told that she should go get some sleep before she came back to start working on her next byline (her boss might be even more about the job than she was) that she took the time to let her thoughts go back to wandering. She went to the roof of The Planet instead of heading directly to her apartment for an appointment with her pillows. Metropolis was never quiet, but there was a certain amount of distance from the bustle when you were so high up that Chloe found comfortable when she needed to do some heavy thinking.
She wasn’t sure whether she was really doing some heavy thinking or was just trying to double check her sanity levels. She figured she was safe either way -- there was no one else that would be able to hear what she was saying. It would either be heard by the intended recipient or her mental lapse would remain her own.
“If you’re hanging around and leaving me random gifts for some reason, then could you clarify your involvement for me? Otherwise, I’m going to go back to thinking that my imagination is playing tricks on me,” she paused for a moment. “Or that I’m in trouble again and need to start watching my back.”
There was no answer, and she eventually followed her previously received direction and went home to sleep.
The next day is a blur of post front page rituals that culminate in a two hour meeting with legal to make sure they are adequately prepared to handle any attempts at challenges that might arise. It was 2:30 in the afternoon (and she had been running on nothing but coffee and a muffin she had devoured somewhere around 7 in the morning) when she came back to her desk fully intending to jump right back in to editing one of her standard assignments when the smell from the take out bag waiting for her on her desk made her stomach lurch and growl by way of reminding her that she really was hungry and should stop ignoring that fact. The bag proved to contain her standard order that she ran out to get sometimes from a little place a couple of blocks from The Planet. The only difference between this and the previous demonstrations of the fact that someone was watching her was the note scribbled across a napkin in handwriting that she would recognize anywhere.
“It’s not your imagination, but when aren’t you in trouble?”
How was she supposed to respond to that?
The next two weeks were filled with whispers and the city was full of open chatter by the end of the month. Someone was watching the streets -- stopping muggings, preventing underworld deals from proceeding, and even pulling a car back from tumbling down an embankment after an accident.
Chloe kept getting gifts. They did not appear as frequently as those initial three, but they still cropped up from time to time. There was no more communication, but they were clearly showing that he was still watching her. She was less than amused, so she decided to start talking. She picked her rooftop thinking spot, settled in one night, and let any little thing that it occurred to her to say roll off of her tongue.
“I really thought that the whole telescope being used to spy on the neighbors thing was a youthful phase, but I’m starting to believe this whole watch from afar while never acknowledging in person broody habit of yours is something you never outgrew,” came out of her mouth somewhere around the ten minute point of her monologue.
The air displacement behind her let her know that she had garnered his attention, and she turned only to completely lose her train of thought.
“Hmm,” she found herself murmuring. “Up close and in person, that outfit is really . . .,” she trailed off and shook her thoughts back in to their proper places.
“I don’t brood,” he told her crossing his arms across his chest in a move that made him look even more broad shouldered than he already was. Chloe could see why so many in the midst of criminal activities might find him intimidating, but she had known him for too long (and too well) for it to have the same effect on her. She may have semi snorted when she made her reply.
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, Cl . . . .” She didn’t get his name out -- a loud clearing of his throat cut off the word.
“Don’t call me that -- not when I’m . . .,” he half shrugged and gestured at his outfit.
“Fine,” she rolled her eyes and decided to humor him in the interest of getting to the bottom of what he was doing. “Random newly arrived protector of the city that I have certainly never encountered before,” she thought about dialing back the sarcasm a notch but decided just as quickly that she didn’t want to bother. “Should I start looking into filing a restraining order against the potentially creepy stalker who keeps breaking into my apartment?”
“I’m not stalking.” He actually looked hurt. “And I don’t break in -- you always leave the spare key in . . .,” he trailed off in recognition of the expression of challenge on her face and started down another track. “I’m coming back here, Chloe.” He told her in a deliberate tone as if the words were the first line of a speech that he had practiced. “I’m coming back here for good, but I can’t take the kind of chances that I used to take with other people’s safety. I need to make this work, and that means that I have to keep things separate. I need to establish this whole alter ego hero identity as an entity of its own. When that’s successful, then I can come back as me.”
He held up a hand to ward off the question that she was about to ask. “Too many people have gotten hurt because someone figured out there was a secret to find. There have been too many times that it has been sheer luck that things didn’t go worse than they did. I have to mitigate that however I can. I’ve already learned that I can’t not do this -- I just don’t have it in me to not help. I also don’t have it in me to be nothing but Metropolis’s protector, but I can’t leave everyone around me vulnerable either.” His eyes met hers, and she could almost see the reflection of a white room with armed guards staring back at her through them. “Not again.”
“Okay,” she said (because what else could she say to that), “ but where does the whole I’m watching so closely that I know when your shoes are wet factor come into play in this new life strategy of yours?”
“If you would remember to go grocery shopping every once in a while,” he told her (and for a moment she was looking at a fifteen year old him teasing her about skipping lunch to work on The Torch in spite of the changes in age, demeanor, and posture), “ then I wouldn’t have to step in so often.”
“If you think having a personal kitchen delivery service is going to make me more inclined to shopping myself, then you have gravely miscalculated,” she teased back momentarily losing track of all of the things that stood between the them of then and the them of now.
“I knew this would happen,” he stated shaking his head and adjusting his stance until Chloe almost (almost) felt like she was looking at a stranger. She waits for him to keep talking because she has no idea where the comment came from or what about it is leaving that trace of sadness in the eyes that will no longer meet hers directly.
“This is part of why it has to be this way,” he continues after a long pause. “When I’m being this, I can’t be around you.”
She had thought that she was beyond getting her heart swatted by casually uttered words, but she was well on her way to finding out that was not the case before he finished his statement. “I’m too me when I’m with you.”
“What does that even mean?” She inquired trying hard not to let the words come out as sharply as they sounded in her head. She was out of practice in her guardedness of her emotions in front of him; it had been a long time.
“It means that when I’m with you I forget that I’m supposed to be putting on a show,” he answered her so softly that she found herself taking a step closer to him out of instinct to try to catch the words better. “It means that you make me feel like it’s alright if all I am is just me, and I can’t do that when I’m in the suit. I knew that would happen. I knew that I needed to keep my distance when I’m on the clock if you want to call it that. I can’t keep it separate around you, but I knew you would put two and two together as soon as the word started getting around. That’s why the gifts -- I can’t be present in your life until I get things squared away, but I didn’t want you to think that you were being ignored,” his voice sounded tight, “or forgotten. You aren’t anonymous, Chloe,” he told her and she found herself with a throat that was feeling strangely tight as well. “I wanted you to know that. The gifts . . . the gifts were a way to do that until I’m in a place where I can really be here.”
He’s gone before she can get any words out -- that may be just as well because she isn’t sure what she was going to say.
For the next year, Chloe writes the occasional piece about “Superman” and his exploits in Metropolis and further afield. It isn’t anyone at The Planet’s exclusive story. The senior staff passes them around the same way they do the city newspaper standard fare of local politics and holiday festivity covers.
She gets conveniently timed gifts delivered to both her work desk and her kitchen counter. She, sometimes, perches herself on the roof of her workplace to spend an hour or so talking -- about her and her comings and goings, about Superman and repetitions of people’s appreciation, or some words of solace on the occasions where the stories of the day had an ending where everything did not turn out well. She gets used to the feeling of eyes on her as she scouts for stories and meets with sources once again being her normal. He doesn’t come to talk to her again, but there is a scribbled “thank you” on one of the gifts from time to time, and she thinks that the nod of the head that he gave crowds that appeared when he was doing one of his more public deeds always seems to be directed at her if she happens to be around. It is a strange pattern, but it becomes something that feels oddly normal from the sheer repetition of it.
Being called into her editor’s office isn’t uncommon, but having a smirking coworker inform her that it looks like she has finally drawn the show the newbie around short straw is. All she can see when she enters the office is the tall figure with dark hair standing facing away from her (maybe because her eyes have sort of frozen in place as they register what she was seeing).
“Right on time,” her boss’s voice greets her. “I thought I’d have you show our newest addition the ropes today. I understand the two of you went to school together.”
The dark haired man turns and offers a smile while pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I’ll understand if she doesn’t remember,” he states directing his comment toward the man sitting behind the desk. “It’s been a long time, and I don’t do a very good job of staying in touch.”
“Oh, I think I remember,” Chloe offers with a smile of her own. “You know how random things pop up from time to time and make you think of someone. That’s always happening to me.”
“Great,” their supervisor comments deciding he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of trying to decipher what the look between the two of them is saying as they linger in his office without appearing to realize that they are lingering, “everyone knows each other. Now, get out of my office and get to work.”
To say that he is pleased with the number of front page worthy -- some with shared bylines and some not -- stories the two of them bring to his desk for the duration of his tenure would be putting it mildly.
To say that Clark never struggles with finding the balance between who he is and what he does (and all of the ways they intertwine and overlap) would be a lie, but it is successful more than it is not. He keeps going and keeps working at it because he finds that it is worth the effort.
To say that Chloe relearns something that she used to know about how people can be home even more easily than places would be to tell you that their story ends in just the way it should -- with a happy life instead of a happy ending and a well-worn pair of comfy slippers that she pulls out whenever the weather turns back to cold.
The End.