"The Bittersweet Ballad of Pete Ross" A Chlark Fic, Chapter One
Title: The Bittersweet Ballad of Pete Ross
Author: The Satyr Icon
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Set in Icon AU; Freshman Year
Classification: Smallville; Chloe/Clark; Pete Ross; het_fic
Disclaimer: All characters, references, and other things pertaining to 'Smallville' are property of the WB, DC Comics, Tollin-Robins, Al Gough & MilesMillar, and J. Siegal & J. Shuster; I am just writing for fun, and if I owned them, all would be good and clean in the World.
Summary: Pete and Clark go camping, but why is Chloe coming along? and why does that infuriate Pete?
Word Count: 46,164
Written: Start: Plot: December 2004 Actually Writing: July 2006 Finished: August 2007
Prologue link
http://the-satyr-icon.livejournal.com/63235.html#cutid1
~The Bittersweet Ballad of Pete Ross~
~CHAPTER ONE~
2001, freshman year, Smallville High School, freshman hallway, at locker 486A...
Things change.
Pete Ross' ability to play basketball improved somewhat, but it was in another one of his favorite sports, football, where he had blossomed. In the fall, he had been on the Smallville High football team, the Crows, and, even though the football season was over, he still wore his red and yellow Letterman's jacket proudly. He earned it the hard way, going from former head coach Walt Arnold's assessment of a fullback with "not having a lick of natural talent" to being new head coach Ziegler Quigley's starting running back on the team, using what Quigley called "his truckload of heart" while helping senior starting quarterback Whitney Fordman get Smallville High all the way into the "Cornfield Classic", the class 4A high school football championship. Pete was no longer a scrawny pipsqueak, but a muscular young man, from working out with his older brothers and with his teammates in the school's weight room; he was short in stature, but a big man on campus.
"Hiiiii, Pete," Felice Chandler greeted while Pete glided by her locker. She was a very pretty blonde girl, one of the popular people at Smallville High because she was on the pom-pom squad (deputy head-cheerleader), and Freshman Year Drama Club President. She was fully aware of the effect that her curves had on the boys at school, primarily Pete. He smiled back; they weren't a serious couple, but they had already had their fair share of good times. He had been dating Erica Fox, another cute classmate, but after the bloody events at the recent carnival, they were broken up.
"Hey hey hey," Pete said with a sly grin, sliding towards her with a confidence that started in kindergarten but forged on the football field. He was a couple of inches shorter than Felice, especially now that she wore pumps that matched her pink angora sweater and tartan pleated skirt. He stood close to her.
Felice leaned against her locker, and gave her back a subtle arch. "What's up this weekend?"
"Nothing much," Pete smiled. "Maybe I'll do some homework, or maybe you and me will be at the Meteor Mike's for some tasty Meteorburgers and later a scary movie at the Talon Saturday night?" Felice nodded eagerly; Pete was smooth.
"I'll call you tonight," She said. Pete liked the content of her calls and his knowing grin made her blush. He spun on his Timberlands and started back down the hallway when he remembered something. He hustled back over to Felice.
"I can't make it this Saturday. I'm going on a camping trip," Pete informed her. His hand rested on her hip. "I'm really sorry."
"Oh." Felice was disappointed, but happy to feel his hand back on her hip. "Soon though, okay?"
"Gotcha." Pete leaned up and in and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and whispered a few sweet nothings and Felice bit her lip. She dove in and kissed back on the lips, a hint of more to come. Pete left smiling, walking back down the hallway. He greeted several teammates and few other girls as he walked; some of them wanted to talk to him but he had his mind set on his destination. He needed to remind Clark of their annual camping trip. The short, muscular teen turned the corner in the school's hallway, smiling at the sight of his best friend putting books in his locker.
The inter-personal dynamics were suddenly different for Pete and Clark. They were still best friends, Clark was still bigger, stronger, and faster than Pete and still smarter, too. Pete was still a 'ladies' man', having dated Felice and a few other girls. But Pete was finding it harder to get the time to be the 'older brother' to 'school' Clark on the finer things of being a teen in Smallville, Kansas. And talking about girls was moot.
That was because Clark now had a girlfriend, Chloe Sullivan.
At first, Pete was really happy with the fact that his best friend actually talked to Chloe, the new girl from the big city of Metropolis, on the very first day of class in 8th grade, and not be a total spazzoid around her. It delighted Pete that Chloe was interested in Clark. Sure, Clark was still shy and didn't flirt with her like Chloe did with him (he basically didn't know how; he once complimented with "Your hair is shiny"), but Pete liked being the match-maker, helping out when she passed notes to him, and after class, answer Chloe's questions about Clark as she was getting to know his friend better, and Pete did the same for Clark about the girl. Pete had a front row seat watching Clark and Chloe go from 'like' to 'unspoken love'. Finally, in high school, the couple became official boyfriend/girlfriend. The big city girl and the small town boy. The reporter and the boy-Friday. Pete was ecstatic. At first.
Then weird stuff began to occur in Smallville around that time, more so than usual. Stuff like people, usually teens, acting very strange. Most were affected by green meteor rock fragments that were scattered all over Lowell County after the Great Meteor Strike twelve years before. "Meteor freaks" was the term commonly used by Chloe to label these affected people. These 'freaks’ somehow had powers that they tended to use those powers for evil purposes, and they seemed to come out of the woodwork almost every week. Chloe and Clark, for some crazy reason, took it upon themselves to investigate the who, what, where, why, and when when the weird stuff happened, and they would track down a "freak", and defeat him before the local sheriff and the police could get involved. Pete would help them, too. If they had let him know what was going on in town.
But more and more often, it was just Clark and Chloe, Chloe and Clark. It was always "them", "us", "we", Chloe and Clark on the case, Clark and Chloe in the local newspaper, the Smallville Ledger or the high school's paper, the Torch. Clark and Chloe and Clark and Chloe, all the damn time. It wasn't like he hated Clark for having a girlfriend, or even Chloe for falling for his friend, but Pete hated being the third wheel with them. He even had to play third wheel when Clark was around his new friend, millionaire Lex Luthor. And since Lex's father seemingly double-crossed the Ross family on a business deal, there wasn't any way in Hell that Pete could ever be Lex's friend. Pete wasn't going to play third wheel for anyone.
"Hey, Bro." Pete said cheerfully, rolling up onto his friend's side. He patted Clark on his red windbreaker, and Clark grinned at the sight of his friend. "You know what this weekend is?"
Clark searched his friend's face an idea. No one's birthday. Nothing happening with Chloe. He didn't have a clue. "No."
"Wa-what?" Pete was taken a back. Elephants wished they had Clark's ability of recall. "C'mon, man...you have to know what this weekend is all about." Shock gave into annoyance as Pete looked at the blank expression on Clark's face. "Okay...three hints, goof." Clark smiled. Only Pete could call him names. Well, it was only him at one point. "First hint...sandwiches."
"Baseball?" The new pro baseball season had started and Clark and Pete usually went to catch a game between the hometown Metropolis Knights and a visiting team. He wondered if Chloe would want to catch a Smallville Meteors minor league game.
"Clark...sandwiches remind you of a baseball game?" Pete's annoyance with his taller buddy was rising.
"Another hint." Clark reached and grabbed his science book. Then he grabbed a notebook.
"Okay." Pete didn't like that Clark wasn't even trying. "Sandwiches, flannels and jeans."
"Bro." A small smile appeared on Clark's face while he looked down at his friend, "That's every day for me."
Pete mentally kicked himself in the butt. "Okay...that was a bad clue." He thought of something that his friend could easily understand. "The Shaggy Man."
The small smile grew on Clark's face. "The camping trip."
"Did someone say 'The Shaggy Man' out loud?"
Clark stepped back. A small blonde girl stepped up from behind him and smiled up at Clark, and then slipped herself between the locker and the tall boy, wedging herself between her boyfriend and their friend. Pete frowned. "No Shaggy Man," Clark informed Chloe. "Just camping."
"The Shaggy Man is so much cooler than elective lodging," she snarked; the joy of hearing her boys talk about some supernatural phenomena that she totally believed in was dashed by something she thought was totally absurd. Then she started thinking about it. "Unless the camping trip was an expedition to get some evidence that The Shaggy Man exists." She handed Clark her huge book bag and pulled out her laptop, fired it up, punched in a password, then accessed a file. "There's been some Bigfoot sightings in Smallville. You locals call him The Shaggy Man, though...but there have been no sightings in the last four years."
Clark and Pete just stared at her; Chloe had a penchant for getting information, any information and linking it with Smallville. It was her gift, as well as her burden. "Why are you looking at me like that? Both of you?"
"The camping trip is not about Bigfoot or The Shaggy Man," Clark said at the intrepid investigator. She frowned. "We go camping every year." Clark filled her in on what The Shaggy Man meant to him and Pete, about the tracks they found on one of their camping trips.
"That's so cute!" She giggled at her boys' sense of wonder; they'd totally could hang with her back when they were ten years old. "So...this camping thing is just for fun, not some fact-finding expedition?"
"We hike a couple of miles or so early in the morning," Pete started, making sure he'd say all the stuff that would make Chloe lose any interest in the trip. "We carrying all of our gear. Then we hunt and fish. And we have to deal with the wild animals and bugs."
"Bugs?" Chloe's mind flashed to former classmate Greg Arkin, a "meteor freak" that seemed to have bug-like powers. She remembered that she, Clark and Pete broke into Greg's house, and found Greg's mom decaying in a web-covered cocoon.
"Big bugs," Pete emphasized with spreading his hand out wide, "and blood-sucking mosquitoes at night." Clark tried not to laugh when she scrunched her nose."And there's no closets or dressers, we have to wear dirty clothes...Clark could work up some mighty bad stank"
"Hey!" Clark carefully socked his friend in the arm. Pete rubbed the spot.
"Bleh." She made a face and stuck out her tongue like she was going to be sick. "Sounds like too much work." Pete nodded and so did Clark. "You know what?" Her pretty face framed by flippy blonde hair went from Pete to her boyfriend. "I've never been on a camping trip. My dad wanted to go on one after my mom left but could you imagine me out on the woods? No electricity, no Chloe."
Pete was about to say "good", but Clark piped up.
"It's really not all bad," Clark laughed. "When we do fish, if we catch anything, we put back into the water," Clark let his girlfriend know. "My mom makes the food for the trip. We don't hunt with rifles, we hunt with cameras. That's how I got that picture of that raccoon you like so much." Pete looked wide-eyed at his friend make the camping trip sound more appealing. The running back saw the gleam in the editor of the school paper's eye return. Clark added the coup d'etat to Pete's plans to leave Chloe out. "We make s'mores at night and eat them, and if I remember my telescope, we look at the stars. And we do bring extra clothes to change into in the tents even though it's just one or two nights. We have fun"
Chloe used to daydream about Clark wearing more than his usual flannels and jeans, but now she thought about him being all outdoorsy. She liked the rugged image. "When you put it that way, that does sound fun. When is this 'wildman retreat' happening?"
"This weekend," Pete said, and Clark nodded.
"Okay, I'm piqued by this whole 'back to nature' boys' thing that you two do," Chloe said, turning off her laptop, putting it in the bag that she still allowed Clark to hold and smiled to her friends. "If my dad says okay, I'm in."
"You can't go." The voice was Pete, and he said it with a slight edge. The passing bell chimed and students started to head to their classes.
Chloe turned to him, and stared at him in the eyes, looking down a bit; they were almost the same height, maybe she was taller if she wore her Doc Martens. And she was almost always in her black Docs. "And why not? Hmm?"
"Because it would be weird," Pete said lamely and looked at his taller friend for some support, but Clark kept quiet; he knew better than to tell Chloe that she couldn't go somewhere, to hold her back from where she was heading.
"Pete, we live in Smallville," She announced, her arms gesturing wildly, "home of weird, land of the strange...where Chloe Sullivan goes camping!"
Clark smiled; Chloe had a rather unique fashion sense, and wondered what she'd look like in a flannel and jeans. His smile grew wider. "That I'd like to see."
She got on her tippy-steel-toes and kissed Clark on the cheek. "Come on, you two. Let's get to our classes. Tardies get detentions," She reminded them and triumphantly flounced away.
"Bro," Pete leaned in, mad. "It was our chill time. Ours. Thanks for ruining it." He shoved past Clark and stomped off. He didn't didn't look back at Clark at all.
Clark stood dumbfounded, alone in the hallway wondering what had happened. Then he shook his head and zipped at super speed to his Geography class upstairs, slowed down to human speed and managed to get into his chair before the tardy bell.
Chapter Links
Prologue ~ One ~ Two ~ Three ~ Four ~ Five ~ Six ~ Seven ~ Eight ~ Nine ~ Ten ~ Eleven ~ Twelve ~ Thirteen ~ Fourteen ~ Fifteen ~ Sixteen ~ Epilogue
The Satyr Icon