An Exceptional Young Woman--Part 14/23
Title: An Exceptional Young Woman
Category: Smallville
Rating: Teen/PG13
Genre: Friendship/Romance
Pairing: Chloe/Oliver
Warnings: AU, barely detectable OOC
Summary: Chloe gets thrown out of Smallville High, landing her in boarding school, or more specifically, the sister school to Excelsior Academy. What will she think when she meets the young Oliver Queen?
banner by sarcastic_fina
--14--
Chloe wasn't necessarily sure how she ended up on the floor of Diana's room, but she had. She looked around her vaguely. Diana's room was neat and tidy and elegant...not unlike Diana herself. The bedspread and various accessories were all a pretty shade of dark red.
Red like blood. Blood. Duncan's death must have been a bloody, gruesome, awful one.
She tried. She tried so hard to wrap her mind around the idea that that sweet boy was gone, but she couldn't. Nothing made sense. How could Lex have been driven to the brink like that? From the way Diana had described it...it had been horrible, absolutely horrible to watch. He'd snapped. Utterly lost his mind and just...attacked Duncan.
She forced herself to back up...retrace everything. Maybe if she reviewed all the details, then they would sink in.
Geoff and Alden had stolen a test for Oliver.
That made sense. The pieces fit. How stressed and sleep-deprived Oliver had been, getting worse and worse as the play got continually more demanding. She thought of the way he got so defensive at the slightest accusation that he didn't care about his grades. Chloe didn't know whether or not Oliver had known what Geoff and Alden were planning. She didn't even know if he would use the answers or not. That could have gone either way. But it made sense that stealing the test would be Geoff and Alden's solution to their friend's inevitable meltdown.
Okay. Fact: Geoff and Alden had stolen a test for Oliver.
Moving on.
Duncan and Lex had caught them at it.
Okay. Also reasonable. Right place at the right time...erm...depending on your perspective.
So, fact: Duncan and Lex had caught them stealing the test.
Then...then...yes, this was where things got sticky...then, Duncan had wanted to turn them in. That was simple enough. Okay. But Lex...Lex tried to...for goodness sake, the best way to phrase it was blackmail. He tried to blackmail Geoff and Alden and Oliver into being friends with him and Duncan, in exchange for not turning them in. Poor, deluded kid.
And Oliver...Chloe shut her eyes. Oliver had...gone along with it? Was that the best way to describe it? Somehow she didn't think so. First of all, there was a sense of protecting Geoff and Alden getting lost in the mix somewhere. Whether or not Oliver would have used the stolen test, he wouldn't have wanted his friends to be handed over. That was an inherent part of his personality. He was too loyal for that. Even if he had--and Chloe couldn't be certain that he would have--taken the moral high ground, he would have appreciated what his friends had done for him, and it would have been the height of dishonor to him to let them get caught. But then Oliver's utter disdain for Lex Luthor had to be taken into account. That was key. She wasn't sure that Oliver had necessarily gone along with the blackmail...he would have looked on Lex's attempt to force friendship with them with total contempt. But he wouldn't have strictly turned Lex down, either...because he had to protect his friends.
So Lex had had to persuade Duncan...of course. Because if Duncan took the high road, then Lex lost out on what he wanted more than anything: popularity, acceptance. To Lex, the stakes couldn't be any higher. But Duncan wouldn't go along with it. Chloe sympathized. She wouldn't have, either. Duncan saw it in black and white. Geoff and Alden had done something wrong and deserved to be justly punished. What use did he have for fake friends? He had a real friend in Lex.
And that had been the point where all hell broke loose. Diana had described how the boys had discovered Lex and Duncan in the midst of confrontation. Oliver had tried to interrupt...to make Duncan see reason. Not to convince him he wanted fake friends, per se, but to convince him not to turn Oliver's buddies in. By this time, though Duncan didn't want anything to do with them and had made that fact abundantly clear.
And then Lex snapped.
The fight broke out...one Chloe couldn't picture even if she would let herself. She just couldn't picture the awful brawl that Diana had described. How Lex could...she shook the thought away. Either way, Lex had attacked Duncan. Oliver had tried to pull them apart, shortly joined by Geoff and Alden when it got really out of hand. When Duncan finally broke free of Lex, he'd staggered--bruised and bloody--into the street and then--
Chloe let out an involuntary gasp, her eyes flashing open again in an attempt not to permit the image to enter her mind's eye. She didn't want that image to haunt her.
It had all happened the day before Chloe's return trip. The stolen test had been forgotten in all the madness, and Duncan's death had been written off as an accident. None of the boys--Oliver, Geoff, Alden, Lex--none of them had seen real consequences for what had happened.
But they did, Chloe corrected herself. What consequence could be worse than seeing Duncan die? Detention or expulsion wouldn't do justice to what they're dealing with. They paled in comparison.
Which was why Diana was panicking. Claire hadn't left her room all day. She was claiming it was all her fault. Chloe supposed she was experiencing guilt for letting Alden get away with so much for so long.
Meanwhile, Geoff and Alden were going through the motions. Attending classes and actually doing their work...which in itself was extremely odd because they normally avoided school work at all costs. They didn't speak to anyone but each other, and even then only briefly.
Oliver had not been seen or heard from since, but Diana had her suspicions that he, like Claire, had shut himself in his room.
"And what makes you think I can help?" Chloe asked finally, speaking for the first time to Diana in fully ten minutes.
Diana looked at her pleadingly. "Chloe, you're the only one among us who doesn't have any blood on her hands. You're the only one who can convince them it wasn't their fault. Geoff and Alden will bounce back. I'm not saying it hasn't effected them, but they're resilient. They can handle this."
"Claire and Oliver, though?" Chloe prompted weakly.
Diana shook her head sadly. "You know how Claire will take it. She's beating herself up relentlessly. She wasn't even directly involved and she sees it as all her fault. Besides, you know how high-strung she is. She'll never be able to erase the image of the fight and then the car hitting him from her mind. She'll drive herself mad, Chloe."
Chloe closed her eyes and tried not to let herself fall apart completely. She had to ask. "And Oliver?"
Diana looked out the window into the dark, overcast night. "I think you know better than anyone how he's taking it, Chloe."
Chloe nodded. She did. Much as she hated to admit it, she suspected she'd seen more of the real Oliver Queen in her short time at St. Joan's than most of his friends had in the past few years. Oliver, if he was still alive--God willing--was currently contemplating suicide.
She wondered what she could possibly say to any of them. Despite Diana's naive faith in her, she didn't have the slightest idea what to say or do that could even remotely help anyone.
She sighed, glancing at the clock. "Diana?"
Diana looked up.
"I won't be in classes tomorrow. Tell them my plane got in so late I'm still asleep."
Diana nodded.
Chloe glanced at her with concern. "Diana, are you okay? How are you handling this?"
Diana's shoulders lifted halfheartedly and then slumped. "I...I guess I feel guilty, too. I don't think it was my fault, but I feel guilty, like there had to have been something I could have done." She sighed sadly. "And I'll never forget what I saw, either. I'll be a hundred, and I'll still see Duncan Allenmeyer like it was just this morning." She shut her eyes tightly, and a tear slid down her cheek. "Chloe, it will haunt me until the day I die."
Chloe rose and wrapped her arms around Diana, rocking her and rubbing her back in a soothing motion. "It'll be okay, Diana. Somehow, it always is."
Chloe stayed the night in Diana's room, as a means of ensuring that Diana slept. Once again, however, sleep eluded Chloe, who so desperately needed it. She lay next to Diana on the little twin bed and stared wide-eyed out the dark window, alone with her thoughts.
The next morning, Chloe retrieved two cups of coffee, some fresh fruit, a couple of crescents, and a pair of piping hot, freshly baked cinnamon rolls. Thus laden, she knocked on Claire's door.
It took only a little persuasion to get Claire to let her in, but much more to coax her into eating. In the end it was the coffee and the cinnamon rolls that did the trick. Having not eaten in over a day, Claire was no match for such methods of persuasion.
It was still more difficult to get her to listen.
"Claire, honey, I know you feel guilty, but you can't take this on yourself. No one could have seen that coming for a million miles."
"You did," Claire accused and praised simultaneously. "You saw from the beginning how wrong it all was and you never once put up with it."
Chloe shook her head. "But I didn't. I couldn't have possibly known that something like this would happen. And you know, if you're being fair, Alden and the boys were getting better. Nobody ever expected the five of them to suddenly get chummy, but ever since you put your foot down with Alden, I haven't heard him make one wisecrack at the boys. Things just escalated. Even if he'd never made fun of Lex and Duncan a day in his life, Lex still would have envied and resented them for their status. It couldn't be helped. This is high school. We all pretend they don't, but clicks exist. It's just how it works."
Claire had nodded sadly as she picked dejectedly at the cinnamon roll. "I know it's rational to look at it that way, Chloe, but I just can't. I can't help but feel like I should have done something. Maybe I could have stopped it."
But Chloe shook her head. "But you can't think like that. You can't play the 'what if' game or you'll go mad. Maybe it's fate, or God, or something else, but you just can't change the past. You've just got to push forward and learn from what's happened so that you don't make the same mistakes twice.
Claire had taken this to heart, and Chloe left her to consider Chloe's words in solitude. She would be okay. She just needed time. Time healed all wounds.
After leaving Claire, however, Chloe was faced with the daunting task of confronting Oliver. It would have been so easy to shirk it off, to pretend he wasn't her responsibility and she didn't care what he did with himself...especially now.
But the trouble was, Chloe found that she did care. Very much. Especially now. The blasted, arrogant, self-centered jerk had gotten under her skin. She shuddered to think what was going through his mind at the moment. She didn't have the faintest idea of what she could say or do for him. By all reasonable definitions of the word, she and Oliver weren't even friends. But she had to do something. She had to try. If only because she had promised Diana.
She didn't bring food or any other kind of leverage when she went to Exelcior's that afternoon. She simply stood empty-handed in front of Oliver's door, breathing heavily, talking herself out of running away. She knocked.
Nothing.
She knocked again.
Still nothing.
"Oliver?" she asked anxiously. She received no answer. But he was in there. She knew he was in there. "Oliver, it's Chloe. Please let me in." She waited and still there wasn't even the slightest stir on the other side of the door. "Oliver, please," she whispered, wondering why she couldn't seem to find her full voice. "Please talk to me."
She waited for what felt like an eternity before she sighed in resignation.
"Fine. I'm breaking in," she warned him. She pulled out of her pocket the lock-picking kit she had taught herself to use by the time she turned thirteen and started fiddling with the lock on Oliver's door until it finally gave way and let her in. She stood up from the ground and stashed the kit before she dared look at him.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, arms resting on his knees, head bent, and staring at the ground like it might suddenly open up to reveal the Hellmouth and put him out of his misery. Chloe could only guess that he hadn't moved from that position once since shutting himself in there.
"Oliver?" she asked tentatively.
"What do you want?" he asked without looking at her. Chloe almost visibly flinched. There was none of the usual spark or fire in his voice, none of the flirtation or flattery or charm that he always ladled on for her. Just him.
"I wanted to make sure you were all right. Diana--" she paused. "I was worried about you."
Oliver scoffed. Then he looked up at her, his face hard, "Let's hear it, then." Chloe caught her breath at the broken expression of agony in his eyes.
"Hear what?" she breathed.
"The condemning sermon you've prepared for just such an occasion. Come on. I've earned it. If I'm not as bad as you said from the first, then I'm worse. Let's hear it. I'm looking forward to it."
Chloe closed her eyes, her throat tightening at his words. "I didn't come here to condemn you, Oliver."
He turned away from her again, eyes fixing back on the floor. "Then you're lying to yourself."
"I'm not," she said quietly, moving to close the space between them. "Oliver, as much as I would love to blame you for all the world's problems if I had the opportunity, this was not your fault." He didn't respond. "Oliver," she whispered, reaching out a hand to touch his arm as she knelt down in front of him. "You can't blame yourself for something you couldn't have done anything about."
Oliver stared at her hand on his arm.
"As much as it sucks, you can't save everyone. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and there's nothing anybody could have done to stop it."
He continued to stare at her hand.
"It's--it's going to be all right," she promised quietly. Then, not certain what compelled her to do it, she moved her hand from his arm to his cheek, unsuccessfully trying to get him to look at her. "You do know that, don't you?"
He still didn't say anything, didn't move, just kept his eyes on the spot on his arm where her hand had been.
Chloe closed her eyes, suddenly wanting to cry. Resigned, she began to stand, her hand sliding from his face as she did, but he caught it in his own. "Please don't go," he said hoarsely.
Heart aching for him, Chloe nodded. She gently pulled him down to the floor with her, where he leaned against his bed and she lay curled up against his chest. She slipped a hand in his and laced their fingers together.
A moment passed before she spoke again, unable to push something from her mind. "Oliver?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for worrying about me the past couple of days."
He gave a short, voiceless laugh, and Chloe had the impression that he was shaking his head at her, although she couldn't see. "Any time, bright eyes."
She closed her eyes, leaning her head against his chest in exhaustion. She wondered vaguely how it was possible that she was so comfortable with this...with him. She couldn't explain it. Somehow, all her issues with him didn't seem to matter. There was just...this moment, now. And in that moment, he needed her, so she was there, and it made sense. Distantly her mind acknowledged the fact that he had wrapped his arms around her and seemed to be holding onto her for dear life, but she didn't really notice because at that moment something truly wonderful happened.
Chloe fell asleep.
Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five; Chapter Six; Chapter Seven; Chapter Eight; Chapter Nine; Chapter Ten; Chapter Eleven; Chapter Twelve ; Chapter Thirteen; Chapter Fourteen; Chapter Fifteen; Chapter Sixteen; Chapter Seventeen; Chapter Eighteen; Chapter Nineteen; Chapter Twenty; Chapter Twenty-One; Chapter Twenty-Two; Chapter Twenty-Three; Epilogue
Category: Smallville
Rating: Teen/PG13
Genre: Friendship/Romance
Pairing: Chloe/Oliver
Warnings: AU, barely detectable OOC
Summary: Chloe gets thrown out of Smallville High, landing her in boarding school, or more specifically, the sister school to Excelsior Academy. What will she think when she meets the young Oliver Queen?
banner by sarcastic_fina
--14--
Chloe wasn't necessarily sure how she ended up on the floor of Diana's room, but she had. She looked around her vaguely. Diana's room was neat and tidy and elegant...not unlike Diana herself. The bedspread and various accessories were all a pretty shade of dark red.
Red like blood. Blood. Duncan's death must have been a bloody, gruesome, awful one.
She tried. She tried so hard to wrap her mind around the idea that that sweet boy was gone, but she couldn't. Nothing made sense. How could Lex have been driven to the brink like that? From the way Diana had described it...it had been horrible, absolutely horrible to watch. He'd snapped. Utterly lost his mind and just...attacked Duncan.
She forced herself to back up...retrace everything. Maybe if she reviewed all the details, then they would sink in.
Geoff and Alden had stolen a test for Oliver.
That made sense. The pieces fit. How stressed and sleep-deprived Oliver had been, getting worse and worse as the play got continually more demanding. She thought of the way he got so defensive at the slightest accusation that he didn't care about his grades. Chloe didn't know whether or not Oliver had known what Geoff and Alden were planning. She didn't even know if he would use the answers or not. That could have gone either way. But it made sense that stealing the test would be Geoff and Alden's solution to their friend's inevitable meltdown.
Okay. Fact: Geoff and Alden had stolen a test for Oliver.
Moving on.
Duncan and Lex had caught them at it.
Okay. Also reasonable. Right place at the right time...erm...depending on your perspective.
So, fact: Duncan and Lex had caught them stealing the test.
Then...then...yes, this was where things got sticky...then, Duncan had wanted to turn them in. That was simple enough. Okay. But Lex...Lex tried to...for goodness sake, the best way to phrase it was blackmail. He tried to blackmail Geoff and Alden and Oliver into being friends with him and Duncan, in exchange for not turning them in. Poor, deluded kid.
And Oliver...Chloe shut her eyes. Oliver had...gone along with it? Was that the best way to describe it? Somehow she didn't think so. First of all, there was a sense of protecting Geoff and Alden getting lost in the mix somewhere. Whether or not Oliver would have used the stolen test, he wouldn't have wanted his friends to be handed over. That was an inherent part of his personality. He was too loyal for that. Even if he had--and Chloe couldn't be certain that he would have--taken the moral high ground, he would have appreciated what his friends had done for him, and it would have been the height of dishonor to him to let them get caught. But then Oliver's utter disdain for Lex Luthor had to be taken into account. That was key. She wasn't sure that Oliver had necessarily gone along with the blackmail...he would have looked on Lex's attempt to force friendship with them with total contempt. But he wouldn't have strictly turned Lex down, either...because he had to protect his friends.
So Lex had had to persuade Duncan...of course. Because if Duncan took the high road, then Lex lost out on what he wanted more than anything: popularity, acceptance. To Lex, the stakes couldn't be any higher. But Duncan wouldn't go along with it. Chloe sympathized. She wouldn't have, either. Duncan saw it in black and white. Geoff and Alden had done something wrong and deserved to be justly punished. What use did he have for fake friends? He had a real friend in Lex.
And that had been the point where all hell broke loose. Diana had described how the boys had discovered Lex and Duncan in the midst of confrontation. Oliver had tried to interrupt...to make Duncan see reason. Not to convince him he wanted fake friends, per se, but to convince him not to turn Oliver's buddies in. By this time, though Duncan didn't want anything to do with them and had made that fact abundantly clear.
And then Lex snapped.
The fight broke out...one Chloe couldn't picture even if she would let herself. She just couldn't picture the awful brawl that Diana had described. How Lex could...she shook the thought away. Either way, Lex had attacked Duncan. Oliver had tried to pull them apart, shortly joined by Geoff and Alden when it got really out of hand. When Duncan finally broke free of Lex, he'd staggered--bruised and bloody--into the street and then--
Chloe let out an involuntary gasp, her eyes flashing open again in an attempt not to permit the image to enter her mind's eye. She didn't want that image to haunt her.
It had all happened the day before Chloe's return trip. The stolen test had been forgotten in all the madness, and Duncan's death had been written off as an accident. None of the boys--Oliver, Geoff, Alden, Lex--none of them had seen real consequences for what had happened.
But they did, Chloe corrected herself. What consequence could be worse than seeing Duncan die? Detention or expulsion wouldn't do justice to what they're dealing with. They paled in comparison.
Which was why Diana was panicking. Claire hadn't left her room all day. She was claiming it was all her fault. Chloe supposed she was experiencing guilt for letting Alden get away with so much for so long.
Meanwhile, Geoff and Alden were going through the motions. Attending classes and actually doing their work...which in itself was extremely odd because they normally avoided school work at all costs. They didn't speak to anyone but each other, and even then only briefly.
Oliver had not been seen or heard from since, but Diana had her suspicions that he, like Claire, had shut himself in his room.
"And what makes you think I can help?" Chloe asked finally, speaking for the first time to Diana in fully ten minutes.
Diana looked at her pleadingly. "Chloe, you're the only one among us who doesn't have any blood on her hands. You're the only one who can convince them it wasn't their fault. Geoff and Alden will bounce back. I'm not saying it hasn't effected them, but they're resilient. They can handle this."
"Claire and Oliver, though?" Chloe prompted weakly.
Diana shook her head sadly. "You know how Claire will take it. She's beating herself up relentlessly. She wasn't even directly involved and she sees it as all her fault. Besides, you know how high-strung she is. She'll never be able to erase the image of the fight and then the car hitting him from her mind. She'll drive herself mad, Chloe."
Chloe closed her eyes and tried not to let herself fall apart completely. She had to ask. "And Oliver?"
Diana looked out the window into the dark, overcast night. "I think you know better than anyone how he's taking it, Chloe."
Chloe nodded. She did. Much as she hated to admit it, she suspected she'd seen more of the real Oliver Queen in her short time at St. Joan's than most of his friends had in the past few years. Oliver, if he was still alive--God willing--was currently contemplating suicide.
She wondered what she could possibly say to any of them. Despite Diana's naive faith in her, she didn't have the slightest idea what to say or do that could even remotely help anyone.
She sighed, glancing at the clock. "Diana?"
Diana looked up.
"I won't be in classes tomorrow. Tell them my plane got in so late I'm still asleep."
Diana nodded.
Chloe glanced at her with concern. "Diana, are you okay? How are you handling this?"
Diana's shoulders lifted halfheartedly and then slumped. "I...I guess I feel guilty, too. I don't think it was my fault, but I feel guilty, like there had to have been something I could have done." She sighed sadly. "And I'll never forget what I saw, either. I'll be a hundred, and I'll still see Duncan Allenmeyer like it was just this morning." She shut her eyes tightly, and a tear slid down her cheek. "Chloe, it will haunt me until the day I die."
Chloe rose and wrapped her arms around Diana, rocking her and rubbing her back in a soothing motion. "It'll be okay, Diana. Somehow, it always is."
Chloe stayed the night in Diana's room, as a means of ensuring that Diana slept. Once again, however, sleep eluded Chloe, who so desperately needed it. She lay next to Diana on the little twin bed and stared wide-eyed out the dark window, alone with her thoughts.
The next morning, Chloe retrieved two cups of coffee, some fresh fruit, a couple of crescents, and a pair of piping hot, freshly baked cinnamon rolls. Thus laden, she knocked on Claire's door.
It took only a little persuasion to get Claire to let her in, but much more to coax her into eating. In the end it was the coffee and the cinnamon rolls that did the trick. Having not eaten in over a day, Claire was no match for such methods of persuasion.
It was still more difficult to get her to listen.
"Claire, honey, I know you feel guilty, but you can't take this on yourself. No one could have seen that coming for a million miles."
"You did," Claire accused and praised simultaneously. "You saw from the beginning how wrong it all was and you never once put up with it."
Chloe shook her head. "But I didn't. I couldn't have possibly known that something like this would happen. And you know, if you're being fair, Alden and the boys were getting better. Nobody ever expected the five of them to suddenly get chummy, but ever since you put your foot down with Alden, I haven't heard him make one wisecrack at the boys. Things just escalated. Even if he'd never made fun of Lex and Duncan a day in his life, Lex still would have envied and resented them for their status. It couldn't be helped. This is high school. We all pretend they don't, but clicks exist. It's just how it works."
Claire had nodded sadly as she picked dejectedly at the cinnamon roll. "I know it's rational to look at it that way, Chloe, but I just can't. I can't help but feel like I should have done something. Maybe I could have stopped it."
But Chloe shook her head. "But you can't think like that. You can't play the 'what if' game or you'll go mad. Maybe it's fate, or God, or something else, but you just can't change the past. You've just got to push forward and learn from what's happened so that you don't make the same mistakes twice.
Claire had taken this to heart, and Chloe left her to consider Chloe's words in solitude. She would be okay. She just needed time. Time healed all wounds.
After leaving Claire, however, Chloe was faced with the daunting task of confronting Oliver. It would have been so easy to shirk it off, to pretend he wasn't her responsibility and she didn't care what he did with himself...especially now.
But the trouble was, Chloe found that she did care. Very much. Especially now. The blasted, arrogant, self-centered jerk had gotten under her skin. She shuddered to think what was going through his mind at the moment. She didn't have the faintest idea of what she could say or do for him. By all reasonable definitions of the word, she and Oliver weren't even friends. But she had to do something. She had to try. If only because she had promised Diana.
She didn't bring food or any other kind of leverage when she went to Exelcior's that afternoon. She simply stood empty-handed in front of Oliver's door, breathing heavily, talking herself out of running away. She knocked.
Nothing.
She knocked again.
Still nothing.
"Oliver?" she asked anxiously. She received no answer. But he was in there. She knew he was in there. "Oliver, it's Chloe. Please let me in." She waited and still there wasn't even the slightest stir on the other side of the door. "Oliver, please," she whispered, wondering why she couldn't seem to find her full voice. "Please talk to me."
She waited for what felt like an eternity before she sighed in resignation.
"Fine. I'm breaking in," she warned him. She pulled out of her pocket the lock-picking kit she had taught herself to use by the time she turned thirteen and started fiddling with the lock on Oliver's door until it finally gave way and let her in. She stood up from the ground and stashed the kit before she dared look at him.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, arms resting on his knees, head bent, and staring at the ground like it might suddenly open up to reveal the Hellmouth and put him out of his misery. Chloe could only guess that he hadn't moved from that position once since shutting himself in there.
"Oliver?" she asked tentatively.
"What do you want?" he asked without looking at her. Chloe almost visibly flinched. There was none of the usual spark or fire in his voice, none of the flirtation or flattery or charm that he always ladled on for her. Just him.
"I wanted to make sure you were all right. Diana--" she paused. "I was worried about you."
Oliver scoffed. Then he looked up at her, his face hard, "Let's hear it, then." Chloe caught her breath at the broken expression of agony in his eyes.
"Hear what?" she breathed.
"The condemning sermon you've prepared for just such an occasion. Come on. I've earned it. If I'm not as bad as you said from the first, then I'm worse. Let's hear it. I'm looking forward to it."
Chloe closed her eyes, her throat tightening at his words. "I didn't come here to condemn you, Oliver."
He turned away from her again, eyes fixing back on the floor. "Then you're lying to yourself."
"I'm not," she said quietly, moving to close the space between them. "Oliver, as much as I would love to blame you for all the world's problems if I had the opportunity, this was not your fault." He didn't respond. "Oliver," she whispered, reaching out a hand to touch his arm as she knelt down in front of him. "You can't blame yourself for something you couldn't have done anything about."
Oliver stared at her hand on his arm.
"As much as it sucks, you can't save everyone. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and there's nothing anybody could have done to stop it."
He continued to stare at her hand.
"It's--it's going to be all right," she promised quietly. Then, not certain what compelled her to do it, she moved her hand from his arm to his cheek, unsuccessfully trying to get him to look at her. "You do know that, don't you?"
He still didn't say anything, didn't move, just kept his eyes on the spot on his arm where her hand had been.
Chloe closed her eyes, suddenly wanting to cry. Resigned, she began to stand, her hand sliding from his face as she did, but he caught it in his own. "Please don't go," he said hoarsely.
Heart aching for him, Chloe nodded. She gently pulled him down to the floor with her, where he leaned against his bed and she lay curled up against his chest. She slipped a hand in his and laced their fingers together.
A moment passed before she spoke again, unable to push something from her mind. "Oliver?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for worrying about me the past couple of days."
He gave a short, voiceless laugh, and Chloe had the impression that he was shaking his head at her, although she couldn't see. "Any time, bright eyes."
She closed her eyes, leaning her head against his chest in exhaustion. She wondered vaguely how it was possible that she was so comfortable with this...with him. She couldn't explain it. Somehow, all her issues with him didn't seem to matter. There was just...this moment, now. And in that moment, he needed her, so she was there, and it made sense. Distantly her mind acknowledged the fact that he had wrapped his arms around her and seemed to be holding onto her for dear life, but she didn't really notice because at that moment something truly wonderful happened.
Chloe fell asleep.
Chapter One; Chapter Two; Chapter Three; Chapter Four; Chapter Five; Chapter Six; Chapter Seven; Chapter Eight; Chapter Nine; Chapter Ten; Chapter Eleven; Chapter Twelve ; Chapter Thirteen; Chapter Fourteen; Chapter Fifteen; Chapter Sixteen; Chapter Seventeen; Chapter Eighteen; Chapter Nineteen; Chapter Twenty; Chapter Twenty-One; Chapter Twenty-Two; Chapter Twenty-Three; Epilogue