The Palest Ink
Title: The Palest Ink
Author: latetothpartyhp
Rating: PG
Genre: drama
Spoilers: none
Pairing: Chlark, some mentions of past Chlollie
Warnings: Impending character death
Summary / Author's Note: At the end of her life, Chloe has one last secret to reveal to Clark.
The palest ink outlasts the most retentive memory.
- Chinese Proverb
She closed her eyes and listened. The repetition of the ocean, tons of water rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling. She was tired today. At nights the echo of the waves through the house kept her awake, but today it tired her. She closed her eyes and remembered. The ocean always made her think of A.C. She wasn't supposed to call him that anymore, she knew that, but he'd been missing for years and she can't offend anyone in her head. Besides, she knew him when. Allowances should be made.
The waves crash and she remembers them all. Bart and Victor. Dinah. How ugly that had gotten, and so silly. She should go up to Seattle and see her; it had been - how long had it been? She didn't remember. No, she did. Not since before the funeral. Not since then. Had it been that long? Ridiculous. She would book a flight tomorrow. She'd do it now but she was so tired. So heavy. It felt good to be tired. She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept the night.
Old habits died hard. Connor had ripped out most of her equipment years ago, or he'd thought he'd had. The last few months she'd spent re-designing her new, illicit system. It had been fun, hiding something from someone again. Or thinking she had. It was their little game, and it kept her sharp. Alert. Conscious. Sane.
Funny how the old fears were always the strongest fears. No matter how irrational, they never really went away. Decades of reality could not displace them. They became companions, those old stand-byes. When nothing else could be depended upon, they were still there. Today she felt like petting them, thanking them. After years of facing them, she could finally just sit and enjoy the day with them.
And someone else. The air around her fluttered, and she heard a soft thump.
“Oh, what do you want?” she asked, not opening her eyes.
“I was just in the neighborhood.”
“I'll bet. Well, I'd offer you something, but as I'm sure you know from your method of approach, Mira's got the afternoon off and I'm too lazy to go get anything.”
“Too grumpy, it sounds like.” She could hear him smiling. She propped one eye open. Yes, smiling, the big...
She opened the other eye and sat up. “I'm an old lady, Clark. We're allowed certain privileges. One of them is grumpiness when our naps are interrupted.”
“Well I've known you since before you discovered coffee was the magic elixir of all-nighters, so I'm allowed to interrupt,” he retorted.
That was true. He was another old stand-bye, there whether you wanted him to be or not. “Let's go get us some of that, then.” She stood and he was at her side, his hand on her elbow. “Oh for God's sake; if I couldn't walk from the house to here and back again, that spastic son of mine would have locked me in.”
He looked guilty, which she expected, and scared, which she had not.
“Connor told you,” she said. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. His huge, wet eyes said it for him. She sighed. “Ok. Let's just sit here then.”
She moved back to the lounge and eased herself back down as gracefully as she could. She didn't want fussing and goodness knew he didn't need any more reminders of how bad it really was. Three months, the doctor had said. Four on the outside, and her only thought had been: Too long. He didn't need to know that. What on earth had Connor been thinking? That was the problem with never aging, she supposed. Clark looked the same now as when Connor was five. In a tiny piece of Connor's mind, Clark was still the man who could make everything better.
“Sit,” she ordered. He complied. And that, she supposed, was the great advantage of aging. Certain elders, you either did what they told you to do or you risked looking like surly teenager. But you had to go on the offensive, hitting early and often, otherwise you'd find your equipment removed for real and pre-chewed food being shoved down your throat by some 12-year-old twit with dual masters' degrees in geriatric nursing and baby talk. Luckily she'd had a lot of practice over the years with this particular twit.
She wrapped an arm around him and closed her eyes. She heard the waves. She couldn't imagine what he heard. She had wanted too, so many times. She remembered the awe she had felt, learning what he could do, and the envy. To hear everything, or to focus on anything you wanted. She hadn't been able to understand how anyone could not use an ability like that constantly - the leads he could have gotten as a reporter!
She understood better, a little, after she'd gotten knocked up. He'd swooped in one day to look at some surveillance photos but had ended up staring at her, slack-jawed and a little confused. After congratulating her, and Ollie, and his fight with Ollie, he'd told her there were some sounds that inundated him, that he could never turn down. Once he'd heard Connor swishing around, doing the butt dance on her bladder, he couldn't not hear him. It felt too personal, he said. As if he were intruding.
Said the boy who'd never learned to knock. There was a first for everything, she'd guessed. For both of them. Before her pregnancy, she'd brushed off his desire for humanity as a personal problem for so long she'd never pondered how separated from the ordinary he was. She realized then how what happened every day, willfully or not, to enough couples that the planet now sustained over seven billion people, was completely out of his reach. She saw it in his eyes, every time they met, until Connor was born and for years afterward. Without meaning to, she'd exercised a power he would never have.
Now she was doing it again. Dying. Without so much as a by-your-leave. Well, this time she really couldn't help it. Nature had a way of being pretty hard-assed about that particular biological imperative. The old fears, though -- he had his too. She felt him shaking and wrapped her other arm around him.
"Connor said you're refusing treatment," said he after some moments.
"I've read that book. Lots of crappy characterization, innane plot, and no payoff. I don't want to waste anyone's time."
"How is it a waste?" She could hear his puppy-dog eyes. She propped an eye open. Oh yeah. Baby cocker spaniels had nothing on him. Once more she opened the other eye.
"I'm selfish, Clark. All I want at this point are good drugs and a sturdy diaper. Especially the drugs."
"That really would be a waste."
Which is where his separation from the ordinary got a little tiresome. "That's where you're wrong. I want to be as high as possible when I can no longer control my movements or bodily functions."
"But you won't be yourself."
"No. I won't. But that will be because of the tumor, not the drugs."
Unluckily, he'd gotten plenty of practice over the years at deflecting deterrence. "Connor still needs you. He's going to need you for as long as he can have you."
"Connor is 67 years old. What he needs is a scotch-and-soda at the end of the day and for those 'damn kids' to stop tearing through his lawn."
"I still need you."
She tried to smile. "You knew I couldn't be your back-pocket girl forever."
He stood, angry. "That is the most inappropriate... "
Was it? She was the fall back, last one standing, the only one who had known him when he was just a kid who could run really fast and liked to "star gaze" in his barn loft. Even Lex was gone. The world had marveled over the tears Superman had shed for his arch-nemesis. They didn't know the Lex who resided in Superman's memory, or the boy who resided in Luthor's. When she was gone the last memory of that boy would go with her. Only Superman would be left.
She sighed. "Clark, please sit. Please. I want to talk to you. You're here now, I might as well tell you something."
He sat, frowning. She'd been putting this off, one thing and another, etc. She'd been afraid. She'd promised him. But there were only three months left, four on the outside, and her memory was bound to fail before they were through. Maybe this was the universe's way of bullying her into confessing. "Connor's been named my financial executor, of course. That shouldn't be a problem. He knows what he's getting and what's being donated. The problem is the papers. I've done some writing. A memoir."
His frowned deepened, but he nodded. She continued. "Connor hasn't read it. No one has. I wanted you to be the first, because, anything I write about my early life is going to include you. A lot of you, actually. There's stuff... I wrote about you saving Lex in the Porsche. And Lana from Greg Arkin. And me from Justin. And ... other stuff. About the summer you ran away. Not the ring obviously, but what you did. It's everything I remember, everything I clipped, minus the little rocks. Took me months to fudge around those. It's all in long-hand, no digital files anywhere. Just a couple of copies stashed various places.
So. You can either accept the position as literary executor of my estate, or, if you want, I can tell you exactly where all the manuscripts are right now and you can go heat-vision them and no one's the wiser."
He said nothing. Another advantage, she thought, of little-old-lady-hood. She could hide her big, fat, broken promise behind it. She braced herself for the accusation -- old habits died hard -- but none came. Instead, he asked: "Why?"
She closed her mouth around the retort that had been forming and her eyes against his face. She was tired. And today was the day she had to sit next to that last fear and put an arm around it.
"I don't know." She looked at him again, still with the cocker spaniel eyes, and sighed. "Why does anyone write anything? Why did you write?"
"It was my job! Chloe, anyone could have found those papers. Do you know how much danger you put yourself in? And you can't tell me why?"
"A. Thank you so much for the vote of confidence, you sound just like Mira when she congratulates me on being able to dress myself, and B. Nobody knows who I am. I introduce myself to people as Connor Hawke's mother and I can tell they're shocked I'm not already dead. Nobody is expecting anything from me anymore."
"Is that it? You want to be remembered?"
"No, I've got Connor and Mira, God help me. They know all my dirty little secrets. And I've got you. But you! You don't have anyone. Well, you have Connor, but thirty years from now, give or take a few, he'll be gone too. And then there won't be a soul left on this earth to remember you were just another kid who put in his time artificially inseminating the cows on his dad's farm."
Much to her satisfaction, his face turned a healthy shade of rubine red. "Oh, you put that in there? And you did it all for me?"
"I thought it was important that people get a feeling for the setting, yes. But no, I only did it mostly for you. It was partly for me. You asked me why? I had to. I had this story in me all these years and I never once thought of writing it down. Then Lois died. I was trying to write her eulogy, and it just came out. I couldn't stop. I'd forgotten how obsessive it can be to write. I remember I used to love that feeling. And it was my last chance to feel it."
Once again, he was silent and frowning. He stared past her to the ocean, at all that gravity-bound water striving for freedom and never quite making it. She waited. It was a big decision he had to make, whether to forgive her, whether to destroy the manuscripts. She didn't know if he would be able to wrap his mind around it. For a decades he had wanted the ordinary, told himself if he pretended hard enough he could be ordinary. Which had meant hiding. Lying. Now she was suggesting something else: Ordinariness through admission. He'd tried it once before and that had ended badly. She herself had told him to go to ground. But that had been so long ago, before his alter ego had become a beloved global celebrity and his family crest the most recognized brand logo on the planet (all proceeds donated to charity, of course).
Would the world be able to accept that their hero had a checkered past, that he had made mistakes, that he had allowed lust and greed and especially fear to govern him? There would be those, the cynical and disappointed, who would not. There would be schadenfreude. But there would be others who would love him the better for it, would welcome him as a brother redeemed, an inspiration for all those who had fallen and gotten up again.
And he would be ordinary. A hero with feet of clay, perhaps, but one of many, no longer the lonely Last Son of Krypton. If he didn't immediately destroy it. He would at least look it over, wouldn't he? Her stomach turned to feathers. The most exciting part about completing a story is not finishing it, but having someone else read it. She closed her eyes and listened, let the sound crash over her. There would be no one left, soon. No one left to protect with his silence, unless he learned to remove his invulnerable shell. But that was his decision. Her eyes were dry and heavy. She hoped whatever drugs they prescribed helped her sleep.
"I'll talk to Connor," he said.
"Okay."
And that was it.
He wouldn't say no, not to her wizened face, but he would to her son, the decision-maker. He could hide behind her age too. She could push, but it was done. Of course Connor, being her son, and Ollie's, would keep a copy for himself. She'd seen to it that he could.
She smiled at that, took his hand, settled her head on his shoulder.
"Will you stay until Mira comes?"
"And after. As long as you need me to."
She nodded, and heard the waves fall. She'd forgotten how good he felt. But she could feel him now, and remember what she wanted to. All the really good moments had been at his side.