FIC: Things Remembered
Title: Things Remembered
Author: tobywolf13
Rating: PG
Summary: Chloe doesn't go off with Jimmy in Doomsday but stays to fight. Things unravel from there.
Warning: Character death (as there SHOULD BE with DOOMSDAY)
Notes: One shot for now, not sure if it's worth continuing
"You have to come with me. Clark said so."
It's the dumbest order Chloe has ever heard so, of course, it had to come from Clark originally. There was a monster on the loose---one foretold to kill her best friend---the Justice League had just finished betraying her and Clark both, and somehow, in the middle of all of it, Jimmy Olsen knew everything and was asking her and Davis to leave the factory with him.
"Where are we supposed to go?" she hissed, getting unsteadily to her feet and following wherever Dinah was stalking off to. She wast still Watchtower, goddamn it, and she was Clark's sidekick beside. If there were going to be a battle, she'd be at his side like always.
Jimmy's hand was on her shoulder, pulling her back. "Clark said that I had to take you and Davis to my wedding gift."
Her eyes went wide. "Wedding gift? You mean beyond all those wonderful voicemails you left me or the divorce papers?"
"I...there's this loft."
She narrowed her eyes. "How could you afford it? We had to scrimp by and the only reason we could afford a wedding was that Lois was the planner and that Clark gave us the barn."
"I...it's not important right now. There's this apartment on the other side of the city and it's safe and that's where Clark wants you."
She rolled her eyes. "Clark wanted a lot of things, but he doesn't always get them. I'm staying with the League, mostly because I don't trust Ollie at all and if Clark needs someone here to detonate the device when it's time, I can do that."
"But Chloe!"
She shook her head and gritted her teeth. "There's no 'but Chloe' here. You did what you did and I'm not married to you anymore and I don't listen to orders from Clark. If you want to be useful take Davis."
Davis, who had finally recovered from the split, was on his feet. He was hovering close to her and had one hand on her shoulder. Chloe flinched and hoped that no one noticed the reaction, not now. She didn't like being crowded by anyone, not after everything that had happened on the road, and having Davis and Jimmy both hemming her in, made her feel claustrophobic. Still, this was where they'd come to. She'd faced Brainiac and aliens and every mutant Smallville had to offer. She wouldn't back down from the three men, Clark included, who thought they knew what was best for her.
"Chloe. I think we need to go." He was swaying and there was blood on the edges of his mouth.
She shook her head. "No, I have to stay. Jimmy, Davis is hurt."
"He's not!"
She placed a hand gently to Davis's ribs and he winced, his breath wheezing out as he moved. "I think he broke ribs. Some empty loft isn't going to help anyone. Please, you want to be part of the League and help Oliver, then help me . I need you to take him to Met Gen right now. Someone has to look over him. It's not just the split, I mean Doomsday threw him across the room when he left. Please."
"I don't want to leave you," Davis pestered, leaning closer to her. Part of her wanted him there. She'd worked so damn hard to save him, but it would mean nothing if he died in some explosion in a factory. He needed medical care and they were running out of time until Clark would be back.
And he would be back.
He'd found the solution where no one but the beast had to die and now she knew he'd find a way to make it work.
"Chloe, please, Clark said---" Jimmy wheedled.
"Then Clark can be mad at me. Now," she said, shoving Jimmy toward the exit. "Move!"
***
The battle was a blur for her. There was arguing between her and Oliver and finally, of all people, Dinah stepping to her defense. Chloe never thought a woman who'd tried to kill her could be trusted, but she was the one who made the argument, the one that made sense.
"You've seen Watchtower's bloodwork. If anyone can survive what's coming, it's her."
She knew that, knew that being left her to pull the lever was a suicide mission, but it was hers because it was the end of the world and she promised to stand by Clark even beyond that. So that was what it left, the League, and she no longer wanted to work with any of them, retreating after the explosives had been set and her with her hand on the lever, waiting for Clark.
He arrived with a bang, a loud concussion that left the entire factory shaking to its foundation. She watched or tried to as the beast and Clark traded blows, his fists pounding hard into spiked flesh, heavy talons tearing into her friend's flesh. They moved faster then and all she could do was react to the feel of it, to the force of the impact, to the sight of black and blue blurs and crumbling support beams.
They wouldn't even need her.
They'd bring the house down on their own.
Finally, the blur---so fast, god, like a rocket---slammed deep through the pipes leading to the geothermal layers below. She didn't even have to hear Clark's shout then.
It was time.
She pulled the lever and the rest was silence.
***
It took Oliver's crew six days to do its digging. They found her body the first day, crumpled under a large metal girder, crushed beyond recognition. They'd taken her to Ollie's penthouse, to the special facilities he had hidden away between floors, for her to be cared for by Emil. They spend the next six days digging down. Clark had tried to jump to leap those feet out before the explosion. He'd made it back about 100 feet from the surface, but it hadn't been far enough.
Maybe it was the blows from the beast or the explosion or a synergy from both, but Clark was as dead as she was when they pulled him out. The only difference was that on the seventh day, she woke up, bruised but breathing.
Clark hadn't.
So she waited. She waited for weeks. Waited while Oliver yelled at her to move along with things. Waited while Davis and Jimmy both kept calling her on her cell. She understood Davis. He was lost in the world, and human for the first time. He needed someone, but it couldn't be her, not now. She already had one displaced Kryptonian to deal with, one who had to wake up.
Except he didn't.
She and Martha waited six weeks, they even had Oliver fly them to the Arctic to try and reactivate the dead fortress, but it was gone. She cried over him daily, but even though she'd been able to wake up again, to heal herself, her powers weren't recovered enough from Brainiac to save him.
Martha made the call.
They buried him in the height of the June heat and she remembered very little. She'd cried so hard and let Bart hold her because she could manage to trust him a little. Davis had no place at the funeral. It wasn't his fault what the beast had done, not after it was separated from him. She didn't want him to see Clark's casket, to blame himself.
He was already beating himself up over Metropolis.
God, he and Clark were so alike. The two of them really were brothers, and Davis was the only one left. The beast, the Blur, and Clark were all gone.
The fortress dead.
There was only one person left on Earth now with any tie to Krypton.
And Chloe couldn't look at him because of it, not yet.
Jimmy was there but he'd made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her and Oliver...she blamed him for all of this. She'd given up her life, found a solution for Davis, at least for a time, and then he'd kidnapped them, outraged the beast, let it loose on an unsuspecting and still reeling city.
No, she leaned on Bart's shoulder and cried and felt Martha caress her hair.
Too much, all of it.
She and Martha were the last left standing by the grave. Chloe had left tulips, fresh and white, on the coffin, dropped them there as a last goodbye, and then couldn't make herself leave. Martha couldn't move either.
Her voice was so quiet when she spoke and it sounded older, so much more frail than Martha's fifty years. "Kara's still looking for Kandor. There's no way to reach her until she comes home and then...I don't know what she'll do."
Chloe nodded and gripped the other woman's hand so tightly she thought she'd break it. "Does J'onn know when?"
"No," so hollow. "He says five years at the earliest. But then she'll come home and..." Martha started crying again, her shoulders shaking furiously, and Chloe had to hold her.
"She'll be back. I don't believe that the House of El ends like this, that's Clark's blood family ends like this."
"I don't know who to be mad at. Were we wrong? If Jor-El saw this coming and that's why Clark needed training, then maybe we caused it by keeping him away. Did I hamper him?"
Chloe held the other woman as she cried, her wails keening across the field beyond Kent farm. "No," she said, rubbing large circles over Martha's back. "No. Nothing could have stopped this."
And her words feel hollow. Clark could be alive perhaps, wandering the Phantom Zone, trapped there with Davis, but at least alive.
There could have been something different, if only she'd spoken sooner, done something smarter, been the hero she'd tried so hard to be.
"Chloe?"
"Yes?"
"I'm on leave from the Senate for a while and the farm feels so empty. I know you still have The Talon but..."
It's really Lois's name on the lease.
You lived there with Jimmy.
It was Clark and Lana's first.
"I'd love to come home with you."
***
It's July and Chloe has no plans of her own. ISIS is closed down, Lana having diverted the money into funding her own purposes and that scares Chloe just a little. The Planet wouldn't have her back and the other papers are leery of employees who have incurred Luthor wrath multiple times. Even then, her paper isn't what it was. Tess still prints sensationalist stories about The Fallout (her term, especially trademarked for the DP), and literally has Lois chasing ambulances, trying to expose scandals in the hospitals treating the wounded after the monster's rampage.
Scandals that aren't there.
Even Lois is making noises about quitting.
She was Watchtower, but not now.
Not with everything she sees. Oliver has always been questionable, the thievery he started with, the continued bombings and terrorist actions of the JLA, but she won't work with murderers. She won't work alongside a man who'd shoot Clark in the back and leave him poisoned, or the people who'd let that happen.
She has nothing.
No more than Martha has. So the spend long summer days together, working the farmland, what's left and not leased to the Hubbards. A city girl all her life, she learns to garden and weed, to groom horses, to bake. They spend their weeks providing for The Talon and a few restaurants in town.
Apparently, Chloe Sullivan has a domestic bone in her body.
But it doesn't soothe anything, this living death.
And she cries at night because nothing can replace her best friend, because he wasn't her best friend.
She plays their last phone conversation over and over in her mind.
I'll spend every second looking for you.
She's already found Clark or what's left of him, and she's so alone because she's lost the man she loved, still loves.
***
She's sick with grief or she thinks she is and she has gotten to the point where her stomach won't agree with anything. Eight weeks since Clark's death and she's lost five pounds already from vomiting. She tries hiding it from Martha but even the scents of nutmeg and cinnamon for the bread they bake sets her off.
But that's not the least of her problems.
The biggest one is on her doorstep when she beats Martha home from Talon deliveries.
Davis Bloome looks thinner too. There are dark circles under his eyes and she can tell he hasn't slept in two months either, that he's as haunted as she is.
She fakes a smile and starts to lie. She learned so well covering for Clark. "Davis, I got your voice mails. I was meaning to call you."
His expression darkened. "You seem so busy here."
"Martha's lost everything. Clark's Kryptonian father took her husband and now Clark's dead. I've been trying to help her."
"What about me?" He asked, moving in closer and cupping her cheek.
She shivered. He made her feel so much, such a pull, but Brainiac's programming is long gone without the Doomsday half of him, and everything she loved the most about Davis is what she's always loved in Clark. He's her friend and what happened on the run...it doesn't matter any more.
She was scared and he wasn't himself and she needed to calm the beast any way she could, even when the calming touches stopped. She'd had no choice but to give him everything to save the people and towns around them
To save the whole damn world.
It didn't mean more than that.
Not now, not with Clark gone.
"I don't know. I'm sorry. Martha was---"
"What about us?" He leaned down to kiss her and she turned away.
"There's no beast to calm."
His hand is still around her wrist. "That wasn't all this was and you know it."
"I don't," and the confusion is coloring her words.
Clark, Davis. Kal-El, Doomsday.
She didn't know anymore.
"He's gone, Chloe."
That snapped her back to reality faster than anything. It was a cold chill sweeping over her. "Get off the porch."
"I didn't---"
"You did mean it." She said, gritting her teeth. "I don't care if he's gone. I can't right now, Davis. Emil is taking care of any medical complications for you. The League has offered you a place running data like it does for Jimmy and Oliver is handling the legal stuff. I can't be what you need."
"That's not how it used to be."
"You used to be a monster and I used to have Kryptonian code in my brain," she snapped, pushing forward to the door. "I have to go."
"I'm not just going away. I'm not like Jimmy and Clark. They left. I won't."
"I don't want you," she replied, twisting the knob and she hated that she meant it. All she wanted was Clark and she couldn't stand to be with Davis while the pain was so raw. He reminded her of Clark so badly and even if they did anything, even if she acted on the lingering passion between them, she'd be using him to replace Clark.
She wouldn't do that and Davis deserved better.
"Chloe!"
"I can't," she finished slamming the door.
She skipped dinner that night, lying curled in a ball on Clark's bed, in his room.
The nausea was roiling again and she blamed the stress. She blamed it for so many things---the sickness, the nausea, the smells that overwhelm her. It's even messed up her...
"Oh God," she bolted upright then, knowing with icy certainty that there was more to everything that grief, that there was a reason for the lingering feelings for Davis she can't quite quell, something more than old code or facing down the beast together.
Or even more than what she did those last nights on the road.
Well, actually, it was because of what she did.
Chloe closed her eyes and pulled her knees to her chest and cried.
It was the only thing she could think of to do.
Author: tobywolf13
Rating: PG
Summary: Chloe doesn't go off with Jimmy in Doomsday but stays to fight. Things unravel from there.
Warning: Character death (as there SHOULD BE with DOOMSDAY)
Notes: One shot for now, not sure if it's worth continuing
"You have to come with me. Clark said so."
It's the dumbest order Chloe has ever heard so, of course, it had to come from Clark originally. There was a monster on the loose---one foretold to kill her best friend---the Justice League had just finished betraying her and Clark both, and somehow, in the middle of all of it, Jimmy Olsen knew everything and was asking her and Davis to leave the factory with him.
"Where are we supposed to go?" she hissed, getting unsteadily to her feet and following wherever Dinah was stalking off to. She wast still Watchtower, goddamn it, and she was Clark's sidekick beside. If there were going to be a battle, she'd be at his side like always.
Jimmy's hand was on her shoulder, pulling her back. "Clark said that I had to take you and Davis to my wedding gift."
Her eyes went wide. "Wedding gift? You mean beyond all those wonderful voicemails you left me or the divorce papers?"
"I...there's this loft."
She narrowed her eyes. "How could you afford it? We had to scrimp by and the only reason we could afford a wedding was that Lois was the planner and that Clark gave us the barn."
"I...it's not important right now. There's this apartment on the other side of the city and it's safe and that's where Clark wants you."
She rolled her eyes. "Clark wanted a lot of things, but he doesn't always get them. I'm staying with the League, mostly because I don't trust Ollie at all and if Clark needs someone here to detonate the device when it's time, I can do that."
"But Chloe!"
She shook her head and gritted her teeth. "There's no 'but Chloe' here. You did what you did and I'm not married to you anymore and I don't listen to orders from Clark. If you want to be useful take Davis."
Davis, who had finally recovered from the split, was on his feet. He was hovering close to her and had one hand on her shoulder. Chloe flinched and hoped that no one noticed the reaction, not now. She didn't like being crowded by anyone, not after everything that had happened on the road, and having Davis and Jimmy both hemming her in, made her feel claustrophobic. Still, this was where they'd come to. She'd faced Brainiac and aliens and every mutant Smallville had to offer. She wouldn't back down from the three men, Clark included, who thought they knew what was best for her.
"Chloe. I think we need to go." He was swaying and there was blood on the edges of his mouth.
She shook her head. "No, I have to stay. Jimmy, Davis is hurt."
"He's not!"
She placed a hand gently to Davis's ribs and he winced, his breath wheezing out as he moved. "I think he broke ribs. Some empty loft isn't going to help anyone. Please, you want to be part of the League and help Oliver, then help me . I need you to take him to Met Gen right now. Someone has to look over him. It's not just the split, I mean Doomsday threw him across the room when he left. Please."
"I don't want to leave you," Davis pestered, leaning closer to her. Part of her wanted him there. She'd worked so damn hard to save him, but it would mean nothing if he died in some explosion in a factory. He needed medical care and they were running out of time until Clark would be back.
And he would be back.
He'd found the solution where no one but the beast had to die and now she knew he'd find a way to make it work.
"Chloe, please, Clark said---" Jimmy wheedled.
"Then Clark can be mad at me. Now," she said, shoving Jimmy toward the exit. "Move!"
***
The battle was a blur for her. There was arguing between her and Oliver and finally, of all people, Dinah stepping to her defense. Chloe never thought a woman who'd tried to kill her could be trusted, but she was the one who made the argument, the one that made sense.
"You've seen Watchtower's bloodwork. If anyone can survive what's coming, it's her."
She knew that, knew that being left her to pull the lever was a suicide mission, but it was hers because it was the end of the world and she promised to stand by Clark even beyond that. So that was what it left, the League, and she no longer wanted to work with any of them, retreating after the explosives had been set and her with her hand on the lever, waiting for Clark.
He arrived with a bang, a loud concussion that left the entire factory shaking to its foundation. She watched or tried to as the beast and Clark traded blows, his fists pounding hard into spiked flesh, heavy talons tearing into her friend's flesh. They moved faster then and all she could do was react to the feel of it, to the force of the impact, to the sight of black and blue blurs and crumbling support beams.
They wouldn't even need her.
They'd bring the house down on their own.
Finally, the blur---so fast, god, like a rocket---slammed deep through the pipes leading to the geothermal layers below. She didn't even have to hear Clark's shout then.
It was time.
She pulled the lever and the rest was silence.
***
It took Oliver's crew six days to do its digging. They found her body the first day, crumpled under a large metal girder, crushed beyond recognition. They'd taken her to Ollie's penthouse, to the special facilities he had hidden away between floors, for her to be cared for by Emil. They spend the next six days digging down. Clark had tried to jump to leap those feet out before the explosion. He'd made it back about 100 feet from the surface, but it hadn't been far enough.
Maybe it was the blows from the beast or the explosion or a synergy from both, but Clark was as dead as she was when they pulled him out. The only difference was that on the seventh day, she woke up, bruised but breathing.
Clark hadn't.
So she waited. She waited for weeks. Waited while Oliver yelled at her to move along with things. Waited while Davis and Jimmy both kept calling her on her cell. She understood Davis. He was lost in the world, and human for the first time. He needed someone, but it couldn't be her, not now. She already had one displaced Kryptonian to deal with, one who had to wake up.
Except he didn't.
She and Martha waited six weeks, they even had Oliver fly them to the Arctic to try and reactivate the dead fortress, but it was gone. She cried over him daily, but even though she'd been able to wake up again, to heal herself, her powers weren't recovered enough from Brainiac to save him.
Martha made the call.
They buried him in the height of the June heat and she remembered very little. She'd cried so hard and let Bart hold her because she could manage to trust him a little. Davis had no place at the funeral. It wasn't his fault what the beast had done, not after it was separated from him. She didn't want him to see Clark's casket, to blame himself.
He was already beating himself up over Metropolis.
God, he and Clark were so alike. The two of them really were brothers, and Davis was the only one left. The beast, the Blur, and Clark were all gone.
The fortress dead.
There was only one person left on Earth now with any tie to Krypton.
And Chloe couldn't look at him because of it, not yet.
Jimmy was there but he'd made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her and Oliver...she blamed him for all of this. She'd given up her life, found a solution for Davis, at least for a time, and then he'd kidnapped them, outraged the beast, let it loose on an unsuspecting and still reeling city.
No, she leaned on Bart's shoulder and cried and felt Martha caress her hair.
Too much, all of it.
She and Martha were the last left standing by the grave. Chloe had left tulips, fresh and white, on the coffin, dropped them there as a last goodbye, and then couldn't make herself leave. Martha couldn't move either.
Her voice was so quiet when she spoke and it sounded older, so much more frail than Martha's fifty years. "Kara's still looking for Kandor. There's no way to reach her until she comes home and then...I don't know what she'll do."
Chloe nodded and gripped the other woman's hand so tightly she thought she'd break it. "Does J'onn know when?"
"No," so hollow. "He says five years at the earliest. But then she'll come home and..." Martha started crying again, her shoulders shaking furiously, and Chloe had to hold her.
"She'll be back. I don't believe that the House of El ends like this, that's Clark's blood family ends like this."
"I don't know who to be mad at. Were we wrong? If Jor-El saw this coming and that's why Clark needed training, then maybe we caused it by keeping him away. Did I hamper him?"
Chloe held the other woman as she cried, her wails keening across the field beyond Kent farm. "No," she said, rubbing large circles over Martha's back. "No. Nothing could have stopped this."
And her words feel hollow. Clark could be alive perhaps, wandering the Phantom Zone, trapped there with Davis, but at least alive.
There could have been something different, if only she'd spoken sooner, done something smarter, been the hero she'd tried so hard to be.
"Chloe?"
"Yes?"
"I'm on leave from the Senate for a while and the farm feels so empty. I know you still have The Talon but..."
It's really Lois's name on the lease.
You lived there with Jimmy.
It was Clark and Lana's first.
"I'd love to come home with you."
***
It's July and Chloe has no plans of her own. ISIS is closed down, Lana having diverted the money into funding her own purposes and that scares Chloe just a little. The Planet wouldn't have her back and the other papers are leery of employees who have incurred Luthor wrath multiple times. Even then, her paper isn't what it was. Tess still prints sensationalist stories about The Fallout (her term, especially trademarked for the DP), and literally has Lois chasing ambulances, trying to expose scandals in the hospitals treating the wounded after the monster's rampage.
Scandals that aren't there.
Even Lois is making noises about quitting.
She was Watchtower, but not now.
Not with everything she sees. Oliver has always been questionable, the thievery he started with, the continued bombings and terrorist actions of the JLA, but she won't work with murderers. She won't work alongside a man who'd shoot Clark in the back and leave him poisoned, or the people who'd let that happen.
She has nothing.
No more than Martha has. So the spend long summer days together, working the farmland, what's left and not leased to the Hubbards. A city girl all her life, she learns to garden and weed, to groom horses, to bake. They spend their weeks providing for The Talon and a few restaurants in town.
Apparently, Chloe Sullivan has a domestic bone in her body.
But it doesn't soothe anything, this living death.
And she cries at night because nothing can replace her best friend, because he wasn't her best friend.
She plays their last phone conversation over and over in her mind.
I'll spend every second looking for you.
She's already found Clark or what's left of him, and she's so alone because she's lost the man she loved, still loves.
***
She's sick with grief or she thinks she is and she has gotten to the point where her stomach won't agree with anything. Eight weeks since Clark's death and she's lost five pounds already from vomiting. She tries hiding it from Martha but even the scents of nutmeg and cinnamon for the bread they bake sets her off.
But that's not the least of her problems.
The biggest one is on her doorstep when she beats Martha home from Talon deliveries.
Davis Bloome looks thinner too. There are dark circles under his eyes and she can tell he hasn't slept in two months either, that he's as haunted as she is.
She fakes a smile and starts to lie. She learned so well covering for Clark. "Davis, I got your voice mails. I was meaning to call you."
His expression darkened. "You seem so busy here."
"Martha's lost everything. Clark's Kryptonian father took her husband and now Clark's dead. I've been trying to help her."
"What about me?" He asked, moving in closer and cupping her cheek.
She shivered. He made her feel so much, such a pull, but Brainiac's programming is long gone without the Doomsday half of him, and everything she loved the most about Davis is what she's always loved in Clark. He's her friend and what happened on the run...it doesn't matter any more.
She was scared and he wasn't himself and she needed to calm the beast any way she could, even when the calming touches stopped. She'd had no choice but to give him everything to save the people and towns around them
To save the whole damn world.
It didn't mean more than that.
Not now, not with Clark gone.
"I don't know. I'm sorry. Martha was---"
"What about us?" He leaned down to kiss her and she turned away.
"There's no beast to calm."
His hand is still around her wrist. "That wasn't all this was and you know it."
"I don't," and the confusion is coloring her words.
Clark, Davis. Kal-El, Doomsday.
She didn't know anymore.
"He's gone, Chloe."
That snapped her back to reality faster than anything. It was a cold chill sweeping over her. "Get off the porch."
"I didn't---"
"You did mean it." She said, gritting her teeth. "I don't care if he's gone. I can't right now, Davis. Emil is taking care of any medical complications for you. The League has offered you a place running data like it does for Jimmy and Oliver is handling the legal stuff. I can't be what you need."
"That's not how it used to be."
"You used to be a monster and I used to have Kryptonian code in my brain," she snapped, pushing forward to the door. "I have to go."
"I'm not just going away. I'm not like Jimmy and Clark. They left. I won't."
"I don't want you," she replied, twisting the knob and she hated that she meant it. All she wanted was Clark and she couldn't stand to be with Davis while the pain was so raw. He reminded her of Clark so badly and even if they did anything, even if she acted on the lingering passion between them, she'd be using him to replace Clark.
She wouldn't do that and Davis deserved better.
"Chloe!"
"I can't," she finished slamming the door.
She skipped dinner that night, lying curled in a ball on Clark's bed, in his room.
The nausea was roiling again and she blamed the stress. She blamed it for so many things---the sickness, the nausea, the smells that overwhelm her. It's even messed up her...
"Oh God," she bolted upright then, knowing with icy certainty that there was more to everything that grief, that there was a reason for the lingering feelings for Davis she can't quite quell, something more than old code or facing down the beast together.
Or even more than what she did those last nights on the road.
Well, actually, it was because of what she did.
Chloe closed her eyes and pulled her knees to her chest and cried.
It was the only thing she could think of to do.