Chlollie Fanfic: Disintegration, Chapter 3
Banner by peachmacaroons
Runner by go_clo
Title: Disintegration
Author: BabyDee1
Pairing: Chlollie
Rating: NC-17 (this chapter PG13)
Warnings: Re-writes for 8.01 (Odyssey)
Timeline: Season 8 episodes, from Odyssey - Doomsday
Disclaimer: All characters belong to the CW & DC comics.
Summary: Chloe and Ollie’s relationship gets fractured through a series of miscommunications and interferences. Fourth Book in the Chlollie series, sequel to Slingshot, Trajectory and Misdirection.
Feedback: …in spades. :-)
Read previous chapter here.
Read story from the beginning here.
Chapter 3
A series of images flashed before her eyes, but Chloe Sullivan barely even blinked.
On and on they went, pictures of a hundred and one different things fluttering on the screen before her like butterflies. After sixty seconds, the sensor attached to her temples beeped softly, and the images stopped.
“Okay, take your time with this one because I know it’s difficult,” a disembodied voice said over the intercom.
Chloe almost snorted in disdain. Difficult? She no longer knew the meaning of the word.
“Barn, tiger, car, hammer, tree, building, cup, phone, toaster, house, doll, football, book, umbrella, bench, paper-clip,” she replied swiftly in a single breath.
“Excellent,” he said, sounding pleased. “And the rotation algorithm?”
“11.52 images per second.”
“My God.” The door to the back room opened and the now familiar face of her analyst, whom she simply knew as ‘Ray’, stepped out from behind the two-way glass in his little office. He took his glasses off and stared at her in surprise.
“That was…incredible.”
“Okay, so I’m smarter than the average, but that doesn’t give the Government the right to turn me into their own personal guinea pig!” she protested, yanking off the sensors and jumping out of the chair.
“Chloe, what you can do…you’re special,” he went on, ignoring her protests. He always ignored her, she noticed. Probably having a geek-gasm.
He went on. “Your cognitive thinking just beat our fastest supercomputer. And to think this all happened practically overnight…” he paused and stared at her. “Amazing. How did you do it?”
“I’ve told you a million times; I didn’t do anything!” she insisted. “I passed out, and when I woke up, I was different.”
Once again, she was ignored. “I want to do another test,” he murmured to himself as he scribbled some data on his clipboard.
“No. I know my rights, Ray,” she shot back. “I’m not giving you anything until you get me a little thing called a court date and a new friend called a lawyer.”
Ray’s eyes suddenly turned cold. “Might I remind you, Chloe, that when you hacked into a NASA database and downloaded classified information you forfeited your rights to pretty much anything?”
“That happened by accident, I swear!”
“Sure, it did,” he replied, completely unconvinced.
“I’m not a spy!” she cried. “I don’t deserve to be detained in some low-rent, Gitmo-wannabe.”
“You’d prefer the real Gitmo?” he joked, and chuckled at his own lame humour.
Chloe was not amused. “I just want to go home,” she mumbled sullenly.
“Then it would be in your best interest to assist us with our investigations,” he said smoothly. “If you do, we’ll let you go home in no time. Fail to cooperate, and we’ll make sure you get convicted for leaking state secrets to the United States’ enemies. You’ll rot in a Federal prison for twenty years. At least.”
“Fine,” she said under her breath and climbed back into the hateful chair. “What do you want?”
He entered some data onto his handheld computer, and a matrix of figures cascaded down her screen.
“Embedded within this 1,024-bit cypher are the cell phone numbers of terrorists,” he explained. “We’ve been trying to isolate the numbers, but the encryption has proved too difficult for us to break.” He tapped the screen with his finger. “You help us with this, and I’ll make sure that security is relaxed in your quarters and arrange for you to enjoy special privileges.”
That didn’t sound like such a bad deal. She didn’t for one minute trust him to deliver on it, but she supposed could do a lot worse than bag a couple of terrorists for her country.
Chloe squinted briefly at the screen. Within seconds, her brain automatically began filtering information from the jumbled-up figures falling in front of her.
“5-5-5, 7-2-1-4,” she read off immediately.
Ray quickly recorded the details she’d given him and entered them into his palmtop computer; no doubt sending them onto some other government colleague, she surmised.
“Good,” he said. “There are at least two more numbers in there. Can you isolate them also?”
She squinted at the screen again. “5-5-5, 3-6-0-7.”
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, his eyes lighting up as he sent that through as well. “And the third?”
“5-5-5, 4-” she stopped abruptly and paled as a number more familiar to her than her own materialised before her eyes…a number she had on speed-dial, but hadn’t used in months.
Oh, God.
“These aren’t the phone numbers of terrorists,” she breathed. Her eyes widened and she stared at her captor in horror as everything became clear.
“You’re not the DDS.”
Ray maintained his habit of ignoring her as he penned down the four digits she’d given him and paused. “What are the last three digits, Chloe?” he said dryly.
She had to act fast. With a quick move, she reared back and kicked him hard in the chest with both heels.
***
He was completely unprepared for the attack, and felt the full force of the double-heeled blow.
Ray roared in pain and clutched his injured chest, and his loathsome clipboard fell and landed in her lap. Chloe picked it up and whacked him in the face with it, sending both him and one of his front teeth spinning.
She didn’t wait to see if he lost consciousness. The clipboard clattered to the floor, and in a flash she was out of her chair, out the door and streaking down the corridor as fast as her feet could carry her.
“Get back here!” he yelled. A siren blared, and her heart sank as a red flashing light lit the corridor.
Damn it. She thought she’d have more time…
Her heart pumped painfully as she picked up speed. She got to the end of the very long corridor and dashed around the corner-
-straight into the arms of an armed guard, who swiftly tackled her to the floor. She fell with a thud, and winced as her arms were roughly grabbed and cuffed behind her back. A flurry of footsteps surrounded her as she was hoisted to her feet and unceremoniously dragged back to the stark examination room.
“Nice try,” Ray snarled as he strapped her back into the chair. She glared at him, noting with satisfaction that he was favouring his left side, his tooth was missing, his glasses were broken and there was a spreading bruise across the side of his face where she’d whacked him.
A sharply suited man walked into the room and gave her a hard stare. She glared back at him, noticing that he too was sporting a black-eye that make-up hadn’t quite covered up.
He gave her one more withering look before addressing Ray directly.
“Find the third at all costs,” he growled in clipped tones. “Those bastards have given me nothing but grief all week.”
Ray nodded. “Yes, Mr Regan. My apologies for the slip-up, sir.”
Regan wasn’t appeased. “Lose her again, and you’ll have a whole lot more to be sorry for,” he warned.
Ray gulped as his boss exited the room. Chloe smirked at his discomfort, happy to see that the net was closing in on her captors.
“Oh sure, laugh now,” Ray mocked. “We’ll see who’ll be laughing when I tighten the screws on you, bitch. You can kiss all those privileges goodbye, even if you do give us what we want.”
He stalked off and went back behind his screen, but even his threatening words did nothing to dampen her elation.
Those bastards have given me nothing but grief all week.
For the first time since her incarceration, she smiled, her heart suffused with warmth.
Oliver was coming for her. And from the sound of things, he wasn’t too far away.
***
Chapter 4…