Something; Smallville
Name: Chris
Title: Something
Fandom: Smallville
Genre: General
Rating: K
Summary: Pete. Lana. A lifetime of musical discussion. Post Season 7.
In third grade, Billy Mason stole Lana’s lunch box and threw it on top of the old shed out by the edge of the playground where the janitor kept his tools. Lana always hated the tool shed; it was dark and small and she was almost positive there had to be snakes lurking nearby.
So she cried. There was no way to get it back. She wasn’t about to go near that shed and only a baby would have told a teacher.
Really, she was too old to be crying over a lunch box, but it was her favorite Monkees lunch box-pink and orange and had the words to ‘I’m A Believer’ written around the edges in loopy writing. Lana remembered watching the show with her mom and had begged her Aunt Nell to buy it for her at a yard sale for twenty minutes.
Pete always hated to see girls cry. And he felt bad for Lana. She didn’t have any parents and had to live with her Aunt Nell who rarely smiled and frankly, scared Pete a little. He couldn’t imagine being Clark and living next door to her.
That was why he didn’t mind his mother yelling at him for the tear in his new jeans. It wasn’t as if he could just leave the lunch box up there and let Lana cry. That would have been too mean.
Ironically enough, it had been Pete that found Lana’s old pink lunch box, scratched and nicked and bent out of shape, in the attic of the Talon while he and Chloe helped her prepare for the first movie night. He’d laughed, thinking of the way Lana’s face had lit up when he gave it back to her, the complete sincerity in her thank you made him blush and stammer, walking away as soon as he could.
He turned back at the last second and yelled out to her, “Hey, Lana?”
“Yeah?”
Lana’s hair got caught up by the wind, playing around her face while she waited for whatever it was he had to say.
Gesturing to her lunch box, Pete asked. “Who are those guys?”
Lana smiled. “The Monkees. My mom loved them.”
Something contagious passed between them at that moment-smile to smile, memory to memory. “Yeah,” he told her, “my mom does too. She plays them in the car.”
The next time he saw Lana’s Monkees lunchbox, it was about a year after she moved in with the Sullivans; studying one night at Chloe’s and Lana’s door had been open when he went to the upstairs bathroom. Even then, seven years later, the memory of the bright smile on Lana’s face made him smile himself, just as big and just as bright as she had.
…0…
Lana was the one who first introduced Pete to The Beatles Freshman year. They were lab partners in Biology 101. Whitney had been hanging around the door to the lab before class, glaring at any guy that dared to come near his girl. But when her eyes fell on Pete with a small smile and she nodded her head towards one of the tables, Whitney hadn’t seemed to mind. They had talked a bit at football tryouts the day before and Pete had been very firm that attached girls were not his thing.
It was well into September, just starting to turn chilly outside, when she settled onto the lab stool beside him, humming happily like she was off in her own world.
“Hey,” he nudged at her arm, keeping his voice low so Mr. Wallace wouldn’t realize he was talking instead of taking notes about supernovas and red dwarf stars. “What are you singing?”
She smiled, titling her head in to whisper back, “I’m humming, not singing.”
Pete chuckled and was rewarded by a dirty look from Betsy Oaks at the front of the room. No doubt because he was disrupting her attempt at Best Student Ever and wanted him to know definitively that she did not appreciate it.
Instead of drawing more attention to himself, he opted to scribble a note in his Bio notebook and slid it towards her; What are you humming then?
Something was his answer. Just one word, Something. He looked at it for several minutes; like it would make more sense the longer he looked at it.
I’m almost positive your grammar is off. Don’t you need more than one word to make a whole sentence?
Who’s the one with the A in English?
Who sings that song anyways?
He heard her laugh, a smile visible on her face in his peripheral vision, and slide the book back towards him-The Beatles.
How old are you again?
The Beatles are timeless. With that, she pulled a CD out of her backpack and placed it on the lab table, her eyebrows raised at him in a type of challenge.
Pete never backed down from a challenge. He slipped the disc into his own bag and promised to listen to it that night, and could just barely make out her singing under her breath.
“I don't want to leave her now, you know I believe and how.”
Later on, when Whitney cornered him and asked why he was passing notes with his girlfriend in class, all it took was the words Beatles for the older boy’s anger to deflate with a laugh and a smile, saying “If she’s trying to convert you too, I feel for you man.”
He’d laughed it off then, but Pete loved the CD-a Greatest Hits anthology, going as far as to buy his own copy after returning Lana’s and later on it was the first one he loaded into his first iPod.
…0…
When Lana first woke up from her catatonic state, she heard Elton John playing on the small radio beside her bed. Before she even had a chance to wonder where she was or where Clark might be, she thinks back on the day she was working at the Talon, filling sugar shakers as Pete Ross tried and failed to charm his way into a date with Missy Preece.
The memory is something she hasn’t thought of in years. It was just one part of one day that hadn’t really made an impact on her at the time. Not besides giving Pete a latte on the house any way.
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand.
It felt like there was sand in Lana’s brain. Everything was muddled, tangled irreparably around in knots she had no idea how to begin to undo. She had no idea where she was, or why, and then it hit her. Brainiac.
Summer was in full bloom outside her window. Lush blooms littered the small space she could see and there were butterflies milling about in the late afternoon sun. It was a beautiful day.
The nurse got her the information she wanted right away-the phone numbers they had copied down from her cell phone before her Aunt Nell took it to her house in Metropolis along with Lana’s clothes and the picture of her and Clark she carried in her wallet.
This wasn’t the first time Lana woke up in a hospital with a dim recollection at best of what brought her there. It was, however, one of the only times she didn’t want Clark at her side, trying as best he could to soothe her.
One of the last numbers on the piece of paper the nurse brought her was the most recently added. She need a way out-of everything.
“Hello?”
“Pete,” Lana’s voice cracked, probably due to the tears welling up in her eyes that she later blamed on not talking for so long, “I need your help.”
…0…
“Sideways,” Lana said simply. “It’s the best song Citizen Cope has ever had.”
Nodding, Pete shifted the tour bus down, slowing as they pulled from the main highway to a small side road that would allow them more anonymity. She shifted closer to the vent blowing out the warm air. Whoever had decided to drive through Minnesota in December was going to buy her an electric blanket she decided.
“You could always go back to bed.” Pete’s eyes never strayed from the road, but
She could hear the worry lacing his words and it warmed her internally. The entire crew kidded them both about how protective Pete had become of her over the preceding months. Then again, they didn’t know the story of how Lana had broken down in tears when Pete had pulled up in his rental car at the Chicago bus station. After that, they kept the conversations neutral, only delving into the painful stuff when it jumped up and blindsided them-like the Daily Planet someone left on the bus table with the front page byline of Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
So they played a game started two months earlier when an unexpected downpour put the concert on hold for three hours. That night’s category, pulled from a pile of playing cards, was love songs ironically enough.
“And leave you up here all alone?” She grabbed the packet of Twizzlers on the dashboard and settled back on the floor by the door separating them from the rest of the crew asleep in their bunks. “I’d never forgive myself.”
If someone had told Lana that she would someday wind up on a rock tour bus, being a roadie with a bunch of guys she didn’t know and Pete Ross playing surrogate guard dog, she would have wondered if Kryptonite had the power to slip her into an alternate dimension. But that was the way her life had turned out and, miracle of all miracles, she loved it.
She loved the crash course in what Benny the tattooed vet of their little group deemed ‘good music.’ She loved the ironically calming air of chaos that always surrounded their life on the road; never knowing what state you’d be in come morning, the onslaught of candy fights at two am, seeing no other people but each other and the band for weeks on end except from backstage at shows. Lana had spent her entire life searching for normal. Being a roadie was about as far from ‘normal’ as one could get, and she relished the idea that her new job would raise more than a few eyebrows back in Smallville.
Pete’s eyes flicked ever so briefly to her face, a lopsided grin etched into his features. “I think you’d get over it when your feet stopped freezing.”
“You’re just trying to skip your turn,” she muttered, tucking her feet under herself subconsciously. “Favorite love song?”
He pondered for a moment, as if the fate of the free world rested precariously on his answer. Lana watched him chew his bottom lip in the glow of passing headlights. Finally he took a deep breath and said “Last Kiss.”
It shocked her for a moment. Pete had arguably the most diverse and eclectic musical taste of them all; prone to get up singing 80’s era Run DMC in the mornings only to switch to humming Tchaikovsky (another that Lana had introduced him to) a few moments later. With the whole word to choose from, it stumped her for him to pick something so tragic.
“Really? But it’s so morbid. Especially the Pearl Jam version,” she argued. A vision of the song in question played in her head and she pulled her up to her chest. Car crashes were not good to ponder on the open road in the middle of the night.
Never wavering in his driving, he countered her protest. “It’s not morbid. It’s about undying love. He spends his whole life with the goal of seeing her again someday.”
“In the after life.”
“He loved her,” Pete declared, enough passion and conviction in his voice to stop anything she might have said in response. “His whole life, he loved her.”
“You're asking me will my love grow, I don't know, I don't know. You stick around now, it may show,” played in her head; distant and faded like an old record. It sounded something like a memory to Lana of a moment in time she’d somehow forgotten without meaning to.
“Must be something,” she mused. “To love someone like that.”
“And how,” Pete grinned down at her, but not for a second did she think he’d swerve on the icy road.
The bus heater, which was prone to fits of temper that involved sweltering temperatures and sputtering sounds, whirred loudly and sent an additional supply of heat in the direction of Lana’s feet. Pulling her blanket tighter around her shoulders, she settled against the driver’s seat, her head against the warmth of Pete’s knee. “Your turn.”