It'll Give Us Something To Talk About The Next Time We Meet, Part 1
Title: It'll Give Us Something To Talk About The Next Time We Meet
Author: Flying High / latetothpartyhp
Pairing: Chloe/Oliver, Clark/Tess, ex-Lois/Oliver
Rating: Teen / PG-13
Warnings: Coarse language, violence, brief nudity
Spoilers: For Luthor and Hex
Summary: Oliver has problems. Lois wants out, Tess wants Clark and Clark wants his powers back. If only Oliver could have what he wants... Set in the Luthor-verse about a month after the Finale.
Sequel to Of All The Towns In All The Worlds In All The Parallel Universes, You Had To Walk Into Mine and I Don't Mind A Little Trouble.
Author's Note (and some additional warnings): Many, many thanks to iluvaqt for beta'ing this and giving me the confidence to keep writing it. This is a JLA-centered story with a Chlollie twist that ya'll should see coming from a mile away (which I write to persuade anyone put off by the lack of Chloe in the first few chapters). Thanks for reading and please let me know what you think!
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7a / Part 7b
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Seven-thirty. An hour until dark. It wasn't his night for patrol, but, given an hour or two, he'd be out there anyway. He and Dinah had set up a random hodge-podge of dates and times, Dinah being firmly of the opinion that what they lacked in numbers they needed to make up for in surprise. Occasionally he'd miss a date and then double up later as a penalty. Of late, he'd been doubling and tripling up for the hell of it. Every day he spent reviewing reports and listening to presentations was another day spent like a rubber band, pulled tighter and tenser until he was released to the streets. In a suit, decisions were complicated: how many people would be affected, in how many years, for how many dollars? Every choice meant consequences for thousands. Millions. In his gear, decisions were simple, like they'd been on the island: observe, follow, intercept, prevent. Every other thought, every other feeling melted away.
Dinah, of course, would have a fit. Since gearing up was a last-minute decision on his part, he'd argue that the pattern was still random and she'd argue that over-exposure would just make things worse if they had to pull back for some reason, “say, if you're injured,” she'd reason, “which, knowing the way you operate, is pretty much a given.” Been there, done that, he thought. Given that his choice tonight was either risking a few bullets or accumulating a little more liver damage, he chose the bullets. Chicks dug scars. Cirrhosis, not so much.
Of course, life being what it was, even he, billionaire CEO of Queen Industries, didn't always get to make his own choices.
“Mr. Queen? There's a Victor Stone here to see you.”
“I don't recall anything in the book for a Victor Stone.”
“Jerry Saffire emailed earlier today hoping you could squeeze him in while he was in town. Said he was some kind of wunderkind in Personal Projects.”
“Jerry say anything else?”
“Just that the guy was hitting all his targets and more and you would definitely want to take a look.”
Right. Which meant that Victor had hacked into his boss' boss' email account to tell him he'd flown all the way from Star City to discuss his extra extracurricular activities.
“Fine. Show him in.”
The door buzzed and Victor walked in, Gina evidently not feeling a Personal Projects wunderkind needed to be handed off personally with a local spring water or a fair-trade cup of coffee.
“Mr. Stone.”
“Mr. Queen. Thanks so much for taking the time to see me this evening.”
“Not at all.” Oliver eyed the door. The room should be sound-proof once it shut, but there was no guarantee Gina wouldn't buzz herself in with a tea-cart if that's what she took it into her head to do. “If Jerry says I'll want to take a look, then I'll want to take a look.”
“Great. Great. What I have here is - “
“Just a second, will you?” Oliver interrupted, picking up his phone. “Gina, would you mind running down to Fuji Ya and grabbing the usual? Great, thanks.” He brought up her office cam feed on his monitor and made sure she got up to leave. “Sorry about that, Mr. Stone. We've got about 20 minutes. Show me what you got.”
“Ok. Unless - is now a bad time?”
“Yes, but you're here and it's now.” Oliver checked the feed again. She was gone. “Next time, if you can, try to arrange something a little more in advance. If people get used to seeing you in and out of here at odd hours the very best we can hope for is that they'll think I'm practicing for the other team.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“You think it'll help your chances with the women of Metropolis?”
Victor raised a brow. “Concern noted, but I'm based in Star City now. First up,” he said, tapping a few icons on his touch-pad and handing it to Oliver.
“What am I looking at?
“It's a schematic for a nano-virus.”
“And?” Oliver made an impatient gesture with his hands.
“Seriously? I spent the last week analyzing this intel, flew out here on the red-eye, and you're not gonna give me five of the twenty minutes you can fit me into to explain why before you get snippy?”
“Vic - “
“No, no. It's cool. You know what I think'll work better in the future is if I set up some kind of drop with Dinah. That way - “
Oliver froze. He just - Dinah - no. Just no.
And, ok, he was being a dick. “Look, man, I'm sorry. I'm having a hard time focusing today, but obviously you wouldn't be here if it wasn't critical.”
“Is something going on?” Victor asked. He looked slightly obligated and still a lot peeved, and it was team business so Oliver thought it wouldn't be a great idea to tell him he was mad because his patrol had been delayed.
“No. Yes. But it's personal.”
“So, based on your earlier comments, does this mean you're tired of living a lie?”
His delivery was so dead-pan Oliver couldn't help smirking. “And here I was finally thinking I could open up to someone.”
“I do not judge. And if you do need to talk I guess we can do that too.”
Oliver considered that. He'd made a promise, to himself more than to her, but he'd already trusted the other man with one or five other momentous secrets. “Lois … broke up with me,” he said, and - ouch. Saying it out loud like that … it was real now.
Victor's eyes widened. “Whoa. That is rough. I'm sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Did this just happen?”
“Last night. Well, were been fighting a few days ago and she took off. Said she needed some space to think, and then when she came back it was for her stuff. I managed to get her to hold off for awhile, asked her to stay at least until she found a place of her own, but I don't think it bought us any time. She met with a real estate agent this morning.”
“She obviously doesn't hate you then. Maybe when she gets some more space she'll decide she doesn't like it.”
“You haven't met Lois, have you? Whatever she decides to do, she does. No looking back. And apparently I don't need her enough, whatever that means,” Oliver said. Actually, that was unfair. He knew what she meant, even if he didn't want to know. She meant that, before, she had been his haven. His home. Now more often than not she was the snoring figure next to him in the bed when he finally crawled into it in the wee hours of the morn.
He didn't see that changing any time soon.
“Then you have to show her you do,” Victor answered. “If that's what you want to do,” he added when the silence became sufficiently awkward.
“Yeah. So. Nano-virus. That would be a very small virus.”
Victor nodded. They were moving on. “Well, in a way, all viruses could be considered nano-sized machines. What we have here is a virus that has been engineered to for a very specific function. Once it invades a living dermal cell, it immediately starts copying itself, and once it has reached a critical mass inside the cell, it begins to secrete a protein similar to that found in spider silk. This protein then binds to the cell membrane. Spider silk, as I'm sure you know, has an incredible tensile strength.”
“And does it impart this tensile strength to the membrane?”
“From the results we found, I'd say yes.”
“It's essentially creating invisible full-body armor.”
"And wait -- there's more." Victor flicked the schematic away and a molecular formula replaced it.
"What's this?"
"Growth hormone. We think."
"You're not sure?"
"Well, it's not human growth hormone, and it doesn't match the growth hormone of any other species that's been documented." Victor flicked through a few more images, some drawings and some equations. "This, we think, is an attempt to configure the nano-virus to deliver the hormone." He flicked -- more molecular diagrams, simpler than that for the growth hormone. "This is some kind of metal alloy. Titanium and some other mineral. We don't know what."
Oliver stared at the image on screen. He knew what the other mineral was. He'd known since Patty'd died. "It's meteor rock."
Victor stared. "You sure? 'Cuz -- "
"Yes. I'm sure. Does any of the data you downloaded include financials? Billing? Emails or phone logs?"
"No bills of sale. We have some purchase orders and vendor invoices. Most of that goes back a few years."
"How many?"
"Five or six. They're dated 2005, a few early 2006. And then a few more from about three months ago."
“2005. Would that have been - “ began Oliver.
“During my bionic guinea pig phase,” finished Victor. “And I'm guessing Clark revived the project for the same reason Lex started it. He's not planning to sell this tech to the DoD. He wants the powers it could give for himself.”
In the short time Oliver had known him Victor had struck him as cool and calm, someone who could discuss the minutia of disembowelment in the same even tone as he could the last Superbowl outcome. The testiness earlier had been a surprise, but understandable - the intel Victor had was urgent, and he'd been a asshole. But Victor was back to his somewhat preternaturally controlled self now as he discussed, unperturbed, how he'd been tortured, the methods that might have been tried but weren't, and his own conclusion as to why. And no, Oliver didn't think that just because he had practically cried in front of the man over being dumped; it was more like the information and the delivery were connected.
“Ok. So that's terrifying. Are you, uh - how you holding up, knowing this?”
“Knowing that Ultraman may return?”
“That too. I was thinking more of, you know, memories. And stuff.”
Victor gave him a hard look, then shook his head. “If you gotta know, I haven't slept in 72 hours, not that it matters really anymore, but that in itself is part of the problem. I really won't ever need to sleep again, if I can keep myself juiced up. The upside to that is that I am more capable than than the average person is to find this motherfucker and blow him out of the water and I am going to use those capabilities. Now, the time-and-date history on most of these files most of what he's added to Lex's work has been theoretical. There's a good chance that little or none of this is functioning hardware yet. But we can't - “
The office door buzzed and Oliver casually minimized the diagram on Victor's device as Gina let herself in.
"That was fast," he told her.
"It's a Monday," she shrugged.
"Careful, I'll stop thinking of you as a miracle worker." Gina glowed, and Oliver reminded himself to find some way to promote her out of his office before that got out of hand. "I'll be heading out after I finish with Victor here."
"I'll see you in the morning then." She floated out and Victor smirked.
"Maybe letting her think you bat for the other team isn't such a bad idea," he said.
Oliver snorted. "She's had my wedding to another woman in the book for the last six months. She's drawn little hearts and flowers around the date. You think me coming out of the closet would slow her down at all?"
“You haven't told her?”
“I did mention the hearts and flowers?”
“Well, yeah, but, people gotta know. The caterer's gotta know, right?”
“No, people don't gotta know. People can mind their own damn business for once.” Oliver maximized the metal alloy diagrams again. "If he was planning to use this himself, that means the meteor rock no longer weakens him. If he does this, he'll have most of his old powers back, and we'll have no way of stopping him."
"Did you not hear me before? You say that as if we'd let that happen."
“Did I?” Oliver asked. “What I meant was we got a couple of hours to kill before happy hour. Feel like saving the world?”
Victor grinned. Oliver grinned. He couldn't help it. Victor got it, and it was fun to be with someone who got it. In fact if there was any more spontaneous bonhomie in the room he probably would find himself suddenly in the other dugout. Fortunately Victor and his relentless practicality intervened with a suggestion: “Well, like I was going to say before, we can't assume he hasn't moved forward with this. The first step is, now that we know what's on those servers, we gotta erase it.”
“First step, yeah. Second step is erase the back-up. He's a Luthor. He'd have a Plan B.”
“He had those servers housed in a barn. I'd say they were the back-up. Second step is we find the lab, if there is one.”
“Ok. So now we find the lab. If there is one.” He studied the touch-pad screen again, as if it might hold some geographical clues. Victor, however, leaned back in his, tapping his fingers on the armrest.
“What?”
“He's running this out of Cadmus,” Victor said. “I've been doing some research. Cadmus was gutted after Lex died, most of the staff transferred to projects in LuthorCorp proper. It still exists on paper, but my guess is Lionel would be surprised to learn there was money going through it.”
“Why would that be?”
“Back-up servers in a barn, for one thing. For another, deliveries are all being made to the old address, but when I checked it out earlier today the space was empty. So he's not using the lab that's on LuthorCorp's books - he's gone underground. He's using the Cadmus name as a front for the vendors, for credit history maybe, but he's hiding what he does from anyone in the company or the government who might wander by, and my guess is he's probably funding it personally. He doesn't want Lionel to know. And you know him better than I do, but Lionel strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn't like not knowing.”
“No. No he doesn't. But telling him doesn't mean he'd tell us anything in return.”
“Maybe he would. He's been giving all those interviews, talking about how you saved his life and how he realizes his mortality now and what's important in life.”
Oliver laughed, a big, mirthless laugh from the depths of his belly. “You think he means a word of that? It's a PR stunt. He had to find some way to explain where the hell he was all those weeks. And he's probably enjoying goading Clark in the media, telling the world about his new favorite son. From the looks of it, it's working.
“I'll tell you what, if Lionel helped us, there would be a price on that help. At the very least he'd want an invitation to the wedding to bolster his image and at most he'd want an uncomfortable number of shares in QI and God knows what else. I'm not willing to give him any of those things at this point. Sorry.”
Victor nodded. “Alright, but as it is you know we're just treading water.”
Oliver slumped back in his chair. “I know.”