Gea
12th February 2004, 00:50
Rating: PG
Summary: after her father’s death, Chloe’s life becomes a quest for love.
Category: angst. A lot. I mean *a lot*.
Spoilers: up to Asylum.
Disclaimer: everything belongs to the respective owners.
A/N: there’s a reference to Mnemosyne who, for those not familiar with Greek mythology, is the personification of memory.
To Aimee, whose help made this readable. Also, to Sara: happy b-day! And Sa:*mwah*
Unconditional Love
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Chloe was staring at the tap.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Dropping her head back on the edge of the bathtub with a slow, tired motion, she hoped with all her might for the headache that had been plaguing her since morning to let her be.
“Just be patient.” She told herself.
She wished she’d left the window open to fight the stifling summer sultriness, even more so from the humidity of the hot water filling the bathtub, but she’d rather the flies stayed out.
Looking out of the open door she could see plenty of pictures covering the corridor wall, taken as memories of a particular event or just of an every day smile.
If her father had been alive there would have been a picture of her in the carefully planned elegance of a spring formal dress together with the handsome Mark Walden. Mark had asked, she had refused and the dress had stayed in the closet. In the end she had found something else to do that night.
If her father had been alive there would have been a lot more pictures. But this wasn’t the case. Her father was dead. If. If. If. How many ‘ifs’ had she thought in those months, not wanting to believe that wishes didn’t change reality. A heart attack was much more real than whatever prayer she might have said in those five months as an orphan. Her mother sure hadn’t changed her mind on the relationship she broke off twelve years before. Despite being the one person in the world who should have, she hadn’t loved her daughter then, she never had. The Kents had had her guardianship until three months before her emancipation petition had been accepted, with no opposition from the woman who was still, as far as law was concerned, her mother, but who didn’t even spare her a call. A paperwork matter, really, with Gabe’s first rate life insurance, Lex’s lawyers and Judge Ross’ support. She had been living on her own since.
Chloe had researched; she’d wanted to know how much Gabe had suffered, if he had realized what was happening. Oh yes. Gabe had had all the time to be taken from the plant to the hospital; he had held on as long as he could repeating his daughter’s name like a mantra, but not long enough for Chloe to arrive from school. She had said goodbye to an inanimate corpse.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
The headache was finally subsiding. The silence was probably helping. She wondered for how long she would be alone in the house. She didn’t have that many visitors these days. A while back Lana, who by then was compelled to uproot from Smallville and move in with Nell, had planned to spend the following week of the holidays with Chloe, but she wouldn’t be coming anymore after the previous week’s developments. All considered, no one had a reason to knock on her door. Maybe the postman for a registered letter, but that would imply a sender too.
Martha had checked up on her the day before. Just a call, no longer than twenty very awkward seconds, but surprising nonetheless, considering neither Clark, nor Pete, nor Lana, nor Jonathan, nor Martha herself had addressed a single word or glance to her since the week before. A week to the day, when in an uncontrollable crying crisis she had confessed to Clark that she was working for Lionel Luthor, and Clark hadn’t listened to anything else. And as she’d searched for the words to explain that she hadn’t gotten those bruises by falling down the stairs, the door had already been slammed in her face.
Still, Martha had called. Strange thing is the maternal instinct. Chloe put a hand on her belly. “It’s probably genetically lacking in my family.”
Plick. Plick. Plick.
“Plick. Plick. Plick.“ She whispered, a little more than a sigh. She was still deciding if it was an annoying or a comforting sound.
Opening to slits the eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed, she tried to focus on one particular picture between the many. If she’d wanted to stop on each of them, she could have gone through the story of her life; it was all there. Her, more or less at seven, sulking and waiting under the tree in which the neighbour’s cat had found refuge; but not before jumping on her head and scratching her while running from her attempts to have it in the right pose for a picture to go with her article in the school paper. She would have gotten rid of the embarrassing memento a long time ago, had her father not smiled every time he passed it. The last birthday party in Metropolis. Her trying to keep her father upright on the skating rink. Ah, here it was. The party for the third anniversary of the Talon resurrection. Lana with a proud smile, Clark and Pete, strangely enough, side by side with Lex.
Lex.
In the hours after her father’s death, while Chloe had been trying to tune out the voices of a sobbing Lana who’d been explaining how to face the pain from her experience of losing both parents, of Clark and Pete who hadn’t stopped asking what could they do and offering suffocating hugs to her and her roommate, of Jonathan who’d been spouting platitudes on what a great person Gabe had been, of Martha who’d been insisting she eat, Lex had come in and done something that managed to penetrate the fog wrapped around her. He’d taken her hand, excused them, taken her upstairs and on the second try he’d found her bedroom. The closed door behind them, a look between them. Chloe had seen the understanding of someone who knew what it meant to lose the only person who loved you unconditionally, and realizing it. When he’d offered her an embrace, she’d accepted it, long and silent.
In spite of everything that had happened between them afterwards - the phone calls in the middle of the night, the coffees at the Talon, the meetings in his study, the nights in his bed – Chloe was sure that hug had been the only moment of genuine intimacy between them, in which Lex had just been Lex, honest, straight, sincere.
There had been displays of affection. She’d received it from Lex, but never love, because the latter needed trust to be born. An abused dog will not let people caress him anymore. As it was undeniable that Lex enjoyed her company, however concealed from the outside world, all the same Chloe had understood he wouldn’t ever trust anyone completely again. That’s why she’d never asked if that afternoon he’d run back from Metropolis to her house out of respect he’d felt for Gabe, or because she’d been Clark’s friend, or he’d been trying to keep the promise to protect her, pronounced in seven weeks that Chloe deep down was convinced had never been forgotten or at least had been remembered. She believed that if Lex wanted to know something, he would find the means to, whatever they might be. He would’ve never been satisfied with the half-truths he’d been fed; he’d never been deterred by walls of silence before. He had too many completely innocent but extraordinarily appropriate questions and satisfied smirks, a drive too staunch, for Chloe to accept that he didn’t know what happened. Not that she could prove her theory, and by no means had she wanted to, nor had she asked him because she didn’t want to hear more lies than necessary while being looked straight in the eye.
If Lex had really wanted to pretend, she’d chosen not to oppose to it. So as a self proclaimed Mnemosyne, Chloe had told him the entire story of how she’d surrendered to anger and temptation, offered him again information on Lionel, Morgan Edge and his grandparents. And she’d listened and nodded when the offer had come, this time different; simply protecting her hadn’t seemed to fit the necessity of the situation. He’d told her to keep on working for his father, pretending to double-cross Lex to gain further news on Clark; and lastly, to actually deepen the investigation on their common friend. Obviously they would have had to decide together what to pass on to Lionel to keep him quiet and she had to follow his lead. After all Lex had been at this his entire life; he knew how to play the game.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
And then it happened. The moment she’d set foot back in the mansion, under shock, with bruises she would later justify with a fall down the stairs and the smell of Lionel and alcohol on her, Lex had listened to her. She’d seen anger in his eyes while she’d tried to control her broken voice, but after a firm but fleeting embrace, the veil had been drawn again. Keeping a steady grip on her shoulders, he’d held her gaze and promised his father would never come near her again. He had called a doctor of his acquaintance in order to examine her and collect evidence. The cold instruments had violated her again for proof that she had known would have been bargain material. The blinding flashes of a camera had recorded every bruise on her body; Lex had asked for photographs that would have served as his ace. She hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t cared that he’d taken all the proofs and that she wouldn’t get public justice. The meaning of Lex’s request had been crystal clear to her: she was to be the icing on the cake he’d been patiently cooking for years.
Lionel had never tried to contact her again. Chloe was sure that the reason was, more than Lex’s threats, the disgust he was feeling for himself to have let rage for finding out she’d been deceiving him and far too much alcohol make him lose control. Therein lay the reason why Lex had also wanted the photographs: in exchange for a painless abdication, he was leaving Lionel out of prison, while at the same time safeguarding the Luthor name, but he would not let the opportunity to exploit his father’s guilt and rub salt into a very much open wound pass him by.
Chloe didn’t need to check her monthly bank statements to know there’d be a substantial crediting. Together with that, came admittance letters from colleges all over America and Europe, to whom she’d never sent applications.
Three days later Lionel Luthor had publicly announced his retirement from the business scene and his beloved son Lex as the new Luthorcorp CEO, who with his leadership would undoubtedly bring the corporation to a new era of prosperity. The picture of father and son clasping hands had graced every newspaper front page.
None of those hands had touched her ever again.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Seeing two blue lines showing her the day after pill wasn’t one hundred percent effective and Clark slamming the door in her face without giving her time to explain all that had happened, Chloe was sure of two facts: one, she would never be alone anymore because there was a growing little creature inside of her, who was going to love her unconditionally from its first breath. Two, she would forever hate it with every fibre of her being.
She’d been searching for love, she’d found it too late, because she was no longer able to love back.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Slowly, using her arms as leverage, she leaned forward until she reached the tap. In the mess that was her life, she wanted everything to be in order. As much as possible, given the actual circumstances. The dishes were done, the clothes washed and ironed, the house was cleaned and tidied like it had been on the day they had moved in. Who would have ever thought she had it in herself to be the perfect housewife? In the misted full length mirror beside the bathtub she caught a glimpse of her little satisfied smile as she stopped, with a firm turn, the seeping water. The vague reflection of her face on the glass was cut in half by a small drop of condensed water trickling down. Chloe tried to follow its lazy zig zagging pattern as it made its slow descent, but the heat rising from the edges of the bathtub lent a steamy, hazy feel to the room, making it hard to concentrate on it. Even the details of the wrought bronze frame of the mirror were blurred. The stifling humidity, while constrictive, at the same time made her want to lean back and relax into its embrace. Closing her eyes, she let go of her hold and slid backwards, creating small waves in the darkened water.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
In the last second before losing consciousness she asked herself how much longer the blood would have kept on dripping from her slashed wrists. Too late to research it now.
Plick. Plick. Pl...
Summary: after her father’s death, Chloe’s life becomes a quest for love.
Category: angst. A lot. I mean *a lot*.
Spoilers: up to Asylum.
Disclaimer: everything belongs to the respective owners.
A/N: there’s a reference to Mnemosyne who, for those not familiar with Greek mythology, is the personification of memory.
To Aimee, whose help made this readable. Also, to Sara: happy b-day! And Sa:*mwah*
Unconditional Love
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Chloe was staring at the tap.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Dropping her head back on the edge of the bathtub with a slow, tired motion, she hoped with all her might for the headache that had been plaguing her since morning to let her be.
“Just be patient.” She told herself.
She wished she’d left the window open to fight the stifling summer sultriness, even more so from the humidity of the hot water filling the bathtub, but she’d rather the flies stayed out.
Looking out of the open door she could see plenty of pictures covering the corridor wall, taken as memories of a particular event or just of an every day smile.
If her father had been alive there would have been a picture of her in the carefully planned elegance of a spring formal dress together with the handsome Mark Walden. Mark had asked, she had refused and the dress had stayed in the closet. In the end she had found something else to do that night.
If her father had been alive there would have been a lot more pictures. But this wasn’t the case. Her father was dead. If. If. If. How many ‘ifs’ had she thought in those months, not wanting to believe that wishes didn’t change reality. A heart attack was much more real than whatever prayer she might have said in those five months as an orphan. Her mother sure hadn’t changed her mind on the relationship she broke off twelve years before. Despite being the one person in the world who should have, she hadn’t loved her daughter then, she never had. The Kents had had her guardianship until three months before her emancipation petition had been accepted, with no opposition from the woman who was still, as far as law was concerned, her mother, but who didn’t even spare her a call. A paperwork matter, really, with Gabe’s first rate life insurance, Lex’s lawyers and Judge Ross’ support. She had been living on her own since.
Chloe had researched; she’d wanted to know how much Gabe had suffered, if he had realized what was happening. Oh yes. Gabe had had all the time to be taken from the plant to the hospital; he had held on as long as he could repeating his daughter’s name like a mantra, but not long enough for Chloe to arrive from school. She had said goodbye to an inanimate corpse.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
The headache was finally subsiding. The silence was probably helping. She wondered for how long she would be alone in the house. She didn’t have that many visitors these days. A while back Lana, who by then was compelled to uproot from Smallville and move in with Nell, had planned to spend the following week of the holidays with Chloe, but she wouldn’t be coming anymore after the previous week’s developments. All considered, no one had a reason to knock on her door. Maybe the postman for a registered letter, but that would imply a sender too.
Martha had checked up on her the day before. Just a call, no longer than twenty very awkward seconds, but surprising nonetheless, considering neither Clark, nor Pete, nor Lana, nor Jonathan, nor Martha herself had addressed a single word or glance to her since the week before. A week to the day, when in an uncontrollable crying crisis she had confessed to Clark that she was working for Lionel Luthor, and Clark hadn’t listened to anything else. And as she’d searched for the words to explain that she hadn’t gotten those bruises by falling down the stairs, the door had already been slammed in her face.
Still, Martha had called. Strange thing is the maternal instinct. Chloe put a hand on her belly. “It’s probably genetically lacking in my family.”
Plick. Plick. Plick.
“Plick. Plick. Plick.“ She whispered, a little more than a sigh. She was still deciding if it was an annoying or a comforting sound.
Opening to slits the eyes she hadn’t realized she’d closed, she tried to focus on one particular picture between the many. If she’d wanted to stop on each of them, she could have gone through the story of her life; it was all there. Her, more or less at seven, sulking and waiting under the tree in which the neighbour’s cat had found refuge; but not before jumping on her head and scratching her while running from her attempts to have it in the right pose for a picture to go with her article in the school paper. She would have gotten rid of the embarrassing memento a long time ago, had her father not smiled every time he passed it. The last birthday party in Metropolis. Her trying to keep her father upright on the skating rink. Ah, here it was. The party for the third anniversary of the Talon resurrection. Lana with a proud smile, Clark and Pete, strangely enough, side by side with Lex.
Lex.
In the hours after her father’s death, while Chloe had been trying to tune out the voices of a sobbing Lana who’d been explaining how to face the pain from her experience of losing both parents, of Clark and Pete who hadn’t stopped asking what could they do and offering suffocating hugs to her and her roommate, of Jonathan who’d been spouting platitudes on what a great person Gabe had been, of Martha who’d been insisting she eat, Lex had come in and done something that managed to penetrate the fog wrapped around her. He’d taken her hand, excused them, taken her upstairs and on the second try he’d found her bedroom. The closed door behind them, a look between them. Chloe had seen the understanding of someone who knew what it meant to lose the only person who loved you unconditionally, and realizing it. When he’d offered her an embrace, she’d accepted it, long and silent.
In spite of everything that had happened between them afterwards - the phone calls in the middle of the night, the coffees at the Talon, the meetings in his study, the nights in his bed – Chloe was sure that hug had been the only moment of genuine intimacy between them, in which Lex had just been Lex, honest, straight, sincere.
There had been displays of affection. She’d received it from Lex, but never love, because the latter needed trust to be born. An abused dog will not let people caress him anymore. As it was undeniable that Lex enjoyed her company, however concealed from the outside world, all the same Chloe had understood he wouldn’t ever trust anyone completely again. That’s why she’d never asked if that afternoon he’d run back from Metropolis to her house out of respect he’d felt for Gabe, or because she’d been Clark’s friend, or he’d been trying to keep the promise to protect her, pronounced in seven weeks that Chloe deep down was convinced had never been forgotten or at least had been remembered. She believed that if Lex wanted to know something, he would find the means to, whatever they might be. He would’ve never been satisfied with the half-truths he’d been fed; he’d never been deterred by walls of silence before. He had too many completely innocent but extraordinarily appropriate questions and satisfied smirks, a drive too staunch, for Chloe to accept that he didn’t know what happened. Not that she could prove her theory, and by no means had she wanted to, nor had she asked him because she didn’t want to hear more lies than necessary while being looked straight in the eye.
If Lex had really wanted to pretend, she’d chosen not to oppose to it. So as a self proclaimed Mnemosyne, Chloe had told him the entire story of how she’d surrendered to anger and temptation, offered him again information on Lionel, Morgan Edge and his grandparents. And she’d listened and nodded when the offer had come, this time different; simply protecting her hadn’t seemed to fit the necessity of the situation. He’d told her to keep on working for his father, pretending to double-cross Lex to gain further news on Clark; and lastly, to actually deepen the investigation on their common friend. Obviously they would have had to decide together what to pass on to Lionel to keep him quiet and she had to follow his lead. After all Lex had been at this his entire life; he knew how to play the game.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
And then it happened. The moment she’d set foot back in the mansion, under shock, with bruises she would later justify with a fall down the stairs and the smell of Lionel and alcohol on her, Lex had listened to her. She’d seen anger in his eyes while she’d tried to control her broken voice, but after a firm but fleeting embrace, the veil had been drawn again. Keeping a steady grip on her shoulders, he’d held her gaze and promised his father would never come near her again. He had called a doctor of his acquaintance in order to examine her and collect evidence. The cold instruments had violated her again for proof that she had known would have been bargain material. The blinding flashes of a camera had recorded every bruise on her body; Lex had asked for photographs that would have served as his ace. She hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t cared that he’d taken all the proofs and that she wouldn’t get public justice. The meaning of Lex’s request had been crystal clear to her: she was to be the icing on the cake he’d been patiently cooking for years.
Lionel had never tried to contact her again. Chloe was sure that the reason was, more than Lex’s threats, the disgust he was feeling for himself to have let rage for finding out she’d been deceiving him and far too much alcohol make him lose control. Therein lay the reason why Lex had also wanted the photographs: in exchange for a painless abdication, he was leaving Lionel out of prison, while at the same time safeguarding the Luthor name, but he would not let the opportunity to exploit his father’s guilt and rub salt into a very much open wound pass him by.
Chloe didn’t need to check her monthly bank statements to know there’d be a substantial crediting. Together with that, came admittance letters from colleges all over America and Europe, to whom she’d never sent applications.
Three days later Lionel Luthor had publicly announced his retirement from the business scene and his beloved son Lex as the new Luthorcorp CEO, who with his leadership would undoubtedly bring the corporation to a new era of prosperity. The picture of father and son clasping hands had graced every newspaper front page.
None of those hands had touched her ever again.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Seeing two blue lines showing her the day after pill wasn’t one hundred percent effective and Clark slamming the door in her face without giving her time to explain all that had happened, Chloe was sure of two facts: one, she would never be alone anymore because there was a growing little creature inside of her, who was going to love her unconditionally from its first breath. Two, she would forever hate it with every fibre of her being.
She’d been searching for love, she’d found it too late, because she was no longer able to love back.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
Slowly, using her arms as leverage, she leaned forward until she reached the tap. In the mess that was her life, she wanted everything to be in order. As much as possible, given the actual circumstances. The dishes were done, the clothes washed and ironed, the house was cleaned and tidied like it had been on the day they had moved in. Who would have ever thought she had it in herself to be the perfect housewife? In the misted full length mirror beside the bathtub she caught a glimpse of her little satisfied smile as she stopped, with a firm turn, the seeping water. The vague reflection of her face on the glass was cut in half by a small drop of condensed water trickling down. Chloe tried to follow its lazy zig zagging pattern as it made its slow descent, but the heat rising from the edges of the bathtub lent a steamy, hazy feel to the room, making it hard to concentrate on it. Even the details of the wrought bronze frame of the mirror were blurred. The stifling humidity, while constrictive, at the same time made her want to lean back and relax into its embrace. Closing her eyes, she let go of her hold and slid backwards, creating small waves in the darkened water.
Plick. Plick. Plick.
In the last second before losing consciousness she asked herself how much longer the blood would have kept on dripping from her slashed wrists. Too late to research it now.
Plick. Plick. Pl...