Fallout (NC-17) 8 September, 2009 - Complete

[scifichick774]

Title: Fallout
Author: scifichick774
Rating: NC-17
Category: Drama/Dark Angst Chloe/Lex
Spoilers: Anything through the spoilers for ‘Memoria’ at Kryptonsite is fair game.
Summary: Lex recovers lost memories, Chloe finds out the truth of her own past, and both have to deal with the fallout that ensues.
Disclaimer: Obviously not mine. I’m just playing with the imaginary characters’ lives for fun and not for profit.
Feedback: Yes. I’m addicted.
Archival: Sure – just let me know where.
Author’s Note: *WARNING* This fic is going to deal with really sensitive issues, including but not limited to rape, postpartum depression, infanticide, and adultery. So, if you’re squeamish or just can’t stand a dark fic, then please don’t read it.

~*~*~*~

Lex’s eyes moved rapidly behind closed lids and the thin layer of sweat that had started seeping from the pores on his head began to bead into tiny balls. As the treatment began, he inwardly cursed himself for the way he couldn’t get rid of the way his stomach knotted or the inevitable regurgitation he knew would follow. It always did.

“Try to relax, Lex,” Dr. Garner said, his voice not just looming over Lex, but enveloping him in a fog as he entered a dreamlike state. Garner checked the monitors on the equipment that Lex was hooked up to and then glanced back at the young man when everything checked out alright. After the surprise seizure activity they had encountered during his third session, almost two months ago now, Garner had been meticulously careful with Lex’s therapy. “Where are you?” he finally asked.

“L---lab,” Lex answered, pausing at the start of the word as he swallowed down a wave of severe queasiness.

Garner nodded once in understanding, even though Lex couldn’t see him. Every patient constructed an internal visual to represent how their memories were stored. The most common was a hallway with a never-ending series of doors; but Lex’s mind had immediately jumped into an enormous lab, filled with bottles and vials, some on high shelves with stoppers that couldn’t be removed. Garner knew immediately that those were the ones they needed to access.

“Look around. Does anything catch your attention?” he asked.

Lex’s breathing came in deep, yet rapid draws of air. He needed to stay off his physical reaction to the treatment in order to access his missing memories. For the last two and a half months, it had been the same frustrating situation again and again. He knew what he wanted to get to, but his body always ended up overriding his will and he’d be jerked out of the treatment by the overwhelming need to throw up.

‘Not again,’ he told himself. He wasn’t going to keep putting himself through hell for no reason. He was a Luthor, damn it. He would get what he wanted.

He scanned the imaginary lab, his eyes darting over the vast array of bottles that were within his reach in favor of the ones that weren’t. Then he saw it. The same small row of plugged bottles that always seemed to be calling to him; the liquids contained within practically glowing, taunting him with the memories that lay within.

“Yes,” he said after a bit, vaguely remembering that Garner had asked him the question with the expectation of getting an answer in return.

Garner once again looked at the monitors, his lips pursing thoughtfully when he saw a couple of the readings begin to spike, just as they had countless times before. Whatever Lex had buried in his mind, his subconscious was apparently intent on keeping it out of reach.

“Just…inch your way over to it,” Garner said. “Go nice and slow. There’s no rush.”

It was easier said than done. By nature, Lex was not a patient man, and he couldn’t get over the feeling that he had been deprived of his memories for long enough. Still though, he forced himself to do as Garner told him, proving to himself that he could get that which was out of his reach, even if it took forever.

He slid a tall ladder over the track that lined the shelves in the lab and took a tentative step onto it. It was steady, but with every rung he climbed, the feeling of heaviness and nausea pushed down on him. Finally within reach, he stretched out his arm and clasped his fingers around the neck of one of the bottles, only to lose his balance and send his body and the bottle crashing to the ground.

Garner watched as Lex’s body began to shake uncontrollably, his head lolled back on the table as a giant seizure overcame him. He rushed over to where he had set aside a sedative in case of that reaction and swiftly unwrapped a sterile syringe to plunge into the small vial to withdraw the medication.

The second the bottle shattered, Lex was transported into a memory that he had repressed long ago. Not one from his missing seven weeks of time, but from when he was much younger and his mother was still alive.

“Is Julian okay? I heard him crying,” he said, finding himself in the body of his former self instead of simply watching the memory from afar.

“He’s sleeping,” Lillian informed him.

“But I heard him crying,” Lex protested. “He ---”

“There’s nothing to worry about, sweetheart. Julian’s happy now.”

The sound of breaking glass made the memory spiral and Lex found himself reliving another instance on that same day, cradling his baby brother in his arms, the swaddled mass unmoving in his embrace. He was singing a gentle lullaby; not to keep Julian asleep, but rather the opposite, hoping for some sign that his worst fear hadn’t come to pass.

Shattered glass sounded again and Lex could almost feel the imaginary pain of the shards of the beaker cutting into his skin. Once again pulled out of the memory, he was thrust into another that had originally taken place only hours before the other two.

He was eavesdropping outside of the room his parents and Julian were in. The sound of his wailing baby brother was calling to him, but he knew better than to interrupt his parents when they were arguing. And there was no doubt in Lex’s mind that they *were* arguing – even if he couldn’t make out their words over Julian’s crying, he knew by the tones of their voices that yelling would likely ensue, and that hitting and throwing things would soon follow.

Suddenly Julian calmed and Lex poked his head into the room for just a second to see what happened. The image of his father holding his brother in his arms was enough to calm his nerves and spark his jealousy at the same time. His father never gave him the time of day unless it was to berate him for berate him for something, to ‘toughen him up’ for the real world. And yet, here was the same man, lovingly holding his younger sibling.

And then he heard his father speak.

“It’s unnatural for a mother not to bond with her child.”

Lex could almost sense his mother glaring at the man.

“You’re going to let down Julian like you let down Lex,” Lionel continued. “Is that what you want?”

“I didn’t *want* any of this,” Lillian replied harshly, making Lex’s heart sink and his hands tremble ever so slightly. “And don’t you dare imply that I don’t love my son. Just because Lex is a sweet, sensitive boy instead of a cold-hearted bastard, you think I’ve failed him as a mother?! How dare you?!” she ranted.

“He’s a Luthor, Lillian,” Lionel said simply. “And I might remind you, despite your efforts to the contrary, you are as well. It’s time you started acting like it.”

Parts of the three memories began to spin through Lex’s mind, buzzing around until the pieces of the puzzle finally fit together and he awoke from the medicine-induced hypno-therapy session with a struggled gasp for air.

“Lex – are you alright?” Garner asked worriedly. “I thought I lost you there for a minute.”

His breath now coming in heavy pants, Lex attempted to focus on Garner. But his vision was blurry, and the need to throw up rapidly took over his body. He broke off the partial eye contact and turned his head to spew the contents of his stomach onto the tiled floor.

~*~*~*~

The next day…

The ‘treatment’ at the Summerholt Institute had been early the previous day and Lex still didn’t feel well. Unfortunately, now he had a feeling it was due to the repressed memories that had resurfaced and not the drugs that had been pumped into his system – though the sedative Garner had injected him with had made him feel lethargic well into that morning.

He was glad that his father wasn’t set to come back form his business trip until the next day. He needed time to sort through his revelations and the emotions he had that surrounded them.

His mother, one of the only lights in his otherwise dark and dreary existence, had killed his brother – or at least that’s what he firmly suspected. He had blamed himself for the death for so long, as his father had to engage in very little manipulative conversation to convince him that he was the responsible party. It had forced him to have a breakdown when he was younger and, apparently, to block out anything relating to the incident at all.

Lex rubbed at the dull ache that was starting to grow in his neck. His mother killed Julian. He was sure it had something to do with severe post-partum depression, mixed with twisted guilt over allowing his father to impregnate her again in the hopes of getting a son who was more like him than he was.

In a horrific way, Lex could almost understand her reasoning. She didn’t want another child to endure the same emotionally torturous upbringing he had. And even though he didn’t approve of what she had done, he could certainly forgive her for it.

A sharp pain stabbed behind Lex’s eye and he winced before raising his hand once again, this time to massage his closed eyelid.

‘Maybe I should have taken the day off like Garner told me to,’ he thought ruefully.

No. He didn’t need rest. He needed…what? Revenge? Restitution? An apology from his father for driving his mother to the brink of insanity and then beyond? An explanation for why his father had been such an asshole to him his entire life?

Lex let out a sigh. He knew he’d never get any of those things and the headache that was drilling through his skull was a more pressing matter than contemplating what his ‘new’ memories meant for him.

He unlocked and opened one of his desk drawers and then pulled out a bottle of prescription pain medication. He had to take the capsules more and more frequently, since the experimental medication that Garner used left him with a hangover-like effect for days after the treatment had been done.

Swiftly removing the lid, he tapped a couple of the red and white colored capsules into his hand and placed them on his tongue, pushing them down his throat with a swallow of water he took from the glass on his desk.

Lionel, who stood in the doorway unnoticed, arched an eyebrow.

“Are you ill, son?” he asked in a taunting, mocking manner, taking a few steps into the office when Lex turned his throbbing head to glare at him.

“Headache,” Lex informed him curtly. “I thought you were in Edge City until tomorrow.”

“You sound unhappy to see me,” Lionel observed with some amusement.

Lex wanted to shrug, or roll his eyes, or *something*, but all he could do was give his father a blank stare. This was the man who single-handedly made his mother go crazy, who he alone now held responsible for his brother’s death, and who had made his life nothing short of a living hell because he couldn’t stand for him to possess any kind of a soul.

Perhaps it was the lingering after-effects of the medication, or his long-buried memories brought to light, but Lex found himself unable to keep his next words from slipping off his tongue.

“When have you ever known me to be happy to see you?”

Lionel smirked and then tsked, shaking his head with false hurt.

“Such hostility. So, tell me…what have I done to earn your disdain this time?”




TBC...

[hfce]

Wow :ohmy: more please...




Hope :huh:

[Ellidyay]

*shivers* I hate Lionel. Thanks so much for writing this Kris. Tis muchly fantastic and I can't wait to see where you take it. ^-^ Poor Lex, poor Julian, Poor Lillian for getting stuck with a shmuck like the MB. You're the best, as is your writing. Dont give up now!

Rachael

[Clannadlvr]

Kris! So many of your wonderful fics in rotation!! It's always a pleasure to see another one...

What I really love about what you've begun here is Lex's perspective on his father and mother. Even though he's just remembered that his mother killed Julian, Lex is more than willing to switch the blame to his father. It's amazing to see how the emotional stress Lionel has put him under for all of these years has become a monster beyond its master's control. Lionel, in an attempt to control his son and manipulate him, has set the stage for a major rebellion.

I love the way you're describing the characters here, Kris. Really nicely done...

[autumngold]

I'm so glad that you are writing another story, even if it has to be in the angst section!! What horrible memories Lex has of his childhood!! I hope he gets strong enough to find out the whole truth, as horrible as it must be!! :chlexsign3:

[MissMed03]

WOW! Excellent chapter, update soon please :worship2: :worship2:

[ColumbiaBlue]

Good start! Update soon!

~Manda

[Calliope]

A new fic?! :huh: You're amazing!

I'm looking forward to seeing Chloe's entrance into the mix, but I'm also apprehensive given the forum and the beginning warning message. Well, I'm ready for it. Bring it on! :chlexsign3:

[carebear72884]

hmm...this is going to be a very intresting fic to say the least, i can't wait for more, i have always wondered about Lillan and Jullian and all that and such, i am so exited for the eppy about them and i am exited for your fic, so hurry up and update.

[katspell]

thanks for picking up the plot lead that the writers on the show have just been leaving sitting there.

I'm really interested, please post soon!!!

[divine02us]

GREAT start. Very interesting.

I look foward to reading future chapters.



Diana

[miss_sixty1115]

Really interesting start... I want more! :biggrin:

Julie ;)

[WolviesLover]

Very cool. It's always fun to see Lex trying to deal with his past. Update soon?

[gina]

Amazing start! I'm really interested in seeing more insight into Lex's childhood. And I can't wait to see how Chloe will fit into all this.

Please update soon!

[Jen1388]

Okay I was just about to depart to beddy byes, then I saw your name beside this fic and thought... OMG MUST READ!

And I'm soooooooo glad I did! What a superb start!

This line: "His breath now coming in heavy pants" My eyes kinda skimmed across it, and it seemed really rude... I actually had to read that 3 times to finally get it.
I know... my sick twisted little mind is perverted!

Great chapter!

Pleaseeeeeeeeee update soon! (... I am willing to wait a little longer for Anyone's Game, if ya update this :ohmy: ) I didn't just say that! :devil:
Okay maybe not that fic, cause it's my favourite... but well... you get my drift, please give us more! :chlexsign1: ;)

[moultipass1]

How come I'm only finding it now? That was great, loved the whole lab thing, can't wait for more!

Moultipass :chlexsign4:

[autumngold]

Please, please update this story!! I love how you give us the chance to know more about Lex and his past!! Very intense and sad!! I can't wait for you to include Chloe's story!! I'm sorry that I'm so impatient since this story must be very hard to write!! :worship2: Can't wait for your next chapter!! :yay2: :chlexsign4: :yay2:

[scifichick774]

A/N: When reading this, please keep in mind that I stopped watching the show before any of the new eppies started. From what my friends have told me, this subject has now been touched on, so just ignore the show since the canon obviously won't be the same.

~*~*~*~*~

“Why would I be upset with you, Dad? Just because you drove my mother into insanity, practically forcing her to kill my brother so he wouldn’t be raised like I was ---”

“What are you rambling on about?” Lionel asked; intoning just the right amount of confusion in his voice to make Lex wonder whether what he had remembered was the truth or not. However, the look of guarded contempt in his father’s eyes told him that it was.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said through gritted teeth. “For years I didn’t remember what really happened; I let you convince me that I was responsible. How could you do that to your own son?”

Lionel squared his jaw, but stood his ground. He lifted a freshly poured glass of scotch to his lips and then steeled his gaze at his son.

“Because you were responsible, Lex. If not directly, then certainly indirectly. Perhaps things could have been different if you had been a little braver and not cowered in fear every time I spoke to you; maybe then…”

Lex let out a short, sharp, sardonic bark. How very like his father to turn things around when he brought something up that he didn’t want to deal with.

“Maybe if you hadn’t continually reminded me of my ‘inadequacies’ every second you actually paid attention to me then I wouldn’t have been so scared of you,” Lex said, taking a menacing step toward Lionel. The action was clear, even if the underlying sentiment remained unspoken. ‘Have been…’ Past tense.

Lionel stalked a few steps closer to him, his spine stiff and straight to show his full height in the defensive posture.

“I was trying to make you strong – make you a Luthor. At the time I had no way of knowing that you had inherited too many of your mother’s genes for that to ever happen.”

Lex squared his shoulders. Screw patience and self-control. His head was throbbing and his father’s visit was unwelcome before he started openly insulting him and his mother.

“Well, thank God for that,” he seethed. “Because I’d rather have Julian’s fate than ever end up like you. Tell me Dad, how does it feel to have no one be able to tolerate being around you for anything more than business meetings?”

Lionel’s nostrils flared.

“You’re treading on very dangerous ground, Lex. Be careful you don’t lose your footing.”

“I could say the same for you,” Lex retorted coolly. “But since I’m in a generous mood, I think I’ll settle for: this is my house. If you ever speak like that about mom here again, I’ll have you shot for trespassing.”

Lionel let out a derisive scoff.

“You’re acting a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?”

Lex gave him a tight grin.

“What I think is that you’ve overstayed your non-existent welcome. I suggest you leave now.”

~*~*~*~

Two Days Later…Late at Night…

A surprised, yet entirely delighted gasp released from Chloe’s throat. Had she finally come across the missing pieces of evidence she needed against Lionel Luthor? It certainly appeared so. Lionel was nothing short of spectacular in covering the tracks of his indiscretions, but apparently it wasn’t good enough since she had just hit the motherload.

Amazing what things were forgotten in the Metropolis Police Department’s old files warehouses. Sure, she had broken the law to get in there, but it had paid off. The long-buried file on the arson incident that killed Lionel’s parents had all of the missing links she hadn’t been able to find elsewhere.

Copies of the original insurance reports and the investigating officer’s personal notes, combined with the bank records she had hacked into and the cover-up file that was public record would give the FBI a hell of a case against Lionel for the murder of his parents in addition to the ongoing investigations into his considerably less-than-legal business practices.

Using her digital camera, she took as many close-up shots of the evidence as she could, also documenting the location where she found the dusty box in the warehouse, and then removed the memory card from the camera and replaced it with a clean one. She had learned her lesson well enough from her other dealings with Lionel and she wasn’t about to lose her proof this time.

Chloe was on a high from finally finding the missing pieces in the Lionel Luthor mystery, and knew she had to tell Lex as soon as possible.

But wait.

He didn’t even remember her theory that Lionel killed his own parents for the insurance money, and that the sum he received was what set up the beginnings of Luthor Corp; that his entire life, his entire inheritance had been built on the blood of his grandparents.

Well, crap.

There wasn’t exactly an easy way to break it to him either, was there? She had been nervous enough the first time around and his increasingly unpredictable mood swings weren’t doing much to make her anymore comfortable in telling him now.

Still…he had a right to know. Lionel had been as much of a jerk, if not more than, to him as to anyone. If Lex could never get his father’s love, then he at least deserved vengeance for the torment the man had put him through.

She ducked around a corner to avoid being seen by one of the warehouse’s many security officers. At least the Metropolis P.D. had been overly confident in their opinion that nobody but them would want to go digging through old boxes of closed cases and not installed security cameras because of it. When the coast was clear, she took off in a sprint; heading for the back door she had broken in through.

She needed to get back to Smallville and she needed to do it now.

~*~*~*~

Lex felt miserable. After complaining to Garner about the side effects of his latest treatment, he had been given a shot of some dark blue liquid and told to stay in bed no matter what for the next few days. He wasn’t told what the medicine was, nor did he especially want to know. He just wanted it to work.

But, seeing as how he was now technically on day two of his prescribed bed rest and didn’t feel any better, he decided that some activity – however minimal – might help his condition; overriding the traitorous thought that he just wanted to get out of bed.

His decision couldn’t have been worse.

Halfway down the hall, the chemicals in the medication began to mix with the small amount of natural endorphins that his body released because of the physical movement, causing an unexpected effect. He fell against the wall as his mind was overcome with things that were long forgotten; things that should have stayed that way.

Falling off a horse when he was six…demons that haunted his nightmares when he was three…walking in on his father fucking his mistress after visiting his mother in the hospital…losing control of his car and hitting Clark before driving off the bridge and being immersed in icy water…finding a teenage boy tied up like a scarecrow in the middle of a filed…seeing the sky start to fall…dreaming his mom never died and reveling in the happiness he felt when she divorced his dad…the room where he kept every piece of information on his obsession with what Clark really was…toasting with Helen over their new life together…being tortured and hung up like a slab of meat by someone trying to avenge their sister’s suicide…telling Chloe he would protect her from his father…barely resisting the urge to kill Adam when he saw him sneaking longing glances at the blonde reporter…being beat to a pulp on a regular basis in boarding school…giving Clark Lana’s necklace and wondering at the sick expression on the boy’s face when he opened the box it was in…making love to Chloe in his bed…Clark throwing him against a car and realizing that his best friend wasn’t human…

Lex crumpled to the ground, no longer able to support his own weight because of the sick feeling that wracked his body. How many of the jumbled images he had just been forced to endure had been real and how many had merely been forgotten dreams?

His mother being alive had obviously been a fabrication concocted by his broken heart, and he was fairly certain he had never seen real demons – though after everything he’d witnessed in Smallville, he wasn’t completely ruling it out.

All of the stuff about Clark, no matter how fantastic and surreal, seemed genuine. Genuine enough for him to know better than to openly confront the young man a second time. No. He’d have to be secure in the knowledge that he knew, even if Clark didn’t admit to it.

Then there were the images of Chloe. He hadn’t remembered being anything more than friendly acquaintances with the young woman when he suggested they join forces to find information to use against his father. But now… God. Had he slept with her? Were they involved before the electro-shock therapy erased seven weeks’ worth of his memories?

He closed his eyes and cringed in pain as he futilely tried to remember. His mind was unwilling to focus on her or any specific memories regarding her though and he found himself clutching at his twisting stomach. He would have thrown up had he ingested any food in the last few hours.

Lex pulled himself up to a sitting position and leaned the back of his smooth head against the cold wall. His breath slowed to short, shallow draws of air as he tried to force the queasiness from his system. The flashes of Chloe’s face seemed so very far away now; headached fatigue slowly lulling his body into slumber.

He may not remember whether his memories of Chloe were fact or fiction, but he recalled with painful detail of how they made him feel. Confused, angry, disgusted with himself…warm, loved…protected. He sighed. He’d have to confront her about it and risk making an ass out of himself if the images had only been dreams. There was no other way. With that last thought, his breath evened out and his head slipped down to the floor as he fell asleep.

“I'll protect you, Chloe. You have my word. But in order to do that, I need to know what you found out about my father.”

“Have you ever heard of a man named Morgan Edge?” Chloe asked, sliding a file across to him.

“Before he was killed, he was the biggest crime lord in Metropolis,” Lex answered, opening the file and seeing a newspaper article with a picture of the man in question. He read the headline silently to himself. ‘Morgan Edge – Metropolis Crime Lord Missing, Believed Dead.’

Chloe nodded.

“He was also your father’s closest childhood friend.”

Lex’s head began to swim. The implications were more than a little disturbing and definitely reason for his father to come after Chloe if she knew some truth that Lionel had paid a lot of money into burying permanently.

He stood up and walked over to her. She was going to leave; he could practically feel it. He had to stop her. He needed her allegiance more than she needed his. He needed *her*. Suddenly thankful for the fact that she never backed away when he invaded her personal space, he stepped closer to her and somewhat hesitantly palmed her cheek.

He leaned down, brushing his lips against hers and no longer caring about the consequences of his actions when he felt her warm breath hitch against his skin. But, she wasn’t pushing him away. Quite the opposite in fact, as she began to reciprocate the kiss, her hands resting on his chest until the embrace deepened and his skin prickled with the sensation of her fingers caressing his bare scalp.

Lex’s eyes jolted open; his heart racing and his breathing coming out as fast and shallow pants for air. Had it been a dream or a repressed memory? Or perhaps a little of both? Either way, it left him with a feeling unlike anything he could remember experiencing before.

He knew then that he loved Chloe – or at least he had. So why hadn’t she said anything about their previous relationship in all the time they’d been working together? Was it all in his mind? Had he never really acted on his feelings for her? It seemed improbable given his tendency to rush into intimacy, but he couldn’t say for sure since his mind was still heavily clouded; especially when he tried to remember specifics.

He was shaken from his pondering by a darkening in his peripheral vision. He glanced up, twisting his side a little so he could look straight on at the figure looming over him to his side.

His butler. It could have been worse, he thought to himself. It could have been his father, come to make his life hell once again; or Clark, stopping by to brood about his complicated love life and carefully evading topics of discussion that were actually important. Or worse yet, it could have been the butler that Lionel originally hired for the castle. That man would have reported Lex’s odd behavior to his true employer in a heartbeat.

As it was though, his butler kept any judgments or inquiries he might have to himself; his expression totally impassive as he took in the sight of Lex Luthor waking up after sleeping on a hallway floor in royal purple silk pajamas covered by a long, thin, black robe.

“I know that it’s…early,” he started.

Lex said nothing. Perhaps there was a chance that the butler thought he had simply been sleep walking.

“What time is it?” he asked, his voice coarse and tired.

“A little after two, sir.”

Oh.

“Miss Sullivan is here to see you,” the butler continued. “I told her that you were asleep, but I’m afraid she was rather…insistent.”

Lex took in the information without betraying any emotions he felt and then nodded once.

“Give me ten minutes and then show her to my office.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lex watched as the butler turned and began to walk away, shakily pushing himself up to a standing position after the man was out of view.

His feet felt like lead under his weak legs, but he had to get changed to meet Chloe. For whatever reason, she had sought him out in the middle of the night. And regardless of what kind of shape his body and mind were in, he was determined to finally get some answers.



TBC…

[santija]

ooohhhhhhh!!!

I love I love I love it!!!

well I love all your fics, you know that!!
Update, now, yes go, go update!!

[autumngold]

Thank you so much for updating this story!! Your latest chapter is brilliant!! You are such an excellent author!! :worship2: Your cliff hangers are evil though!! :biggrin: Please update soon!! I can't wait to see what their meeting is like, whether Lex will mention any of his dreams to her!! I love this story!! :heart: :chlexsign4: :love:

[LarkLuthor]

More please! Soon!!!!!

Lark

[Clannadlvr]

Oh, I love how you're making us unsure as to what exactly happened between Chloe and Lex...his thoughts and memories are so jumbled that we're not sure what is a fantasy and what was reality.

Great touch! Also, neat how much you guessed as far as the storyline of the show without having watched recent episodes. Of course, I'm loving your Chlexy spin on it!

[hfce]

Oh more please....




Hope :)

[siwla]

(joining the chorus) ...more, more, more, please, oh great one! :worship2:

siwla

[Kit Merlot]

This is a great update! I like Lex telling off Lionel, and Chloe getting the goods on him :biggrin:

Now, Lex's dream about Chloe--it actually happened right? This isn't another mindbending twist of yours, is it??

Upate soon-PLEASE!!

[autumngold]

This is really such an intriguing story!! I can't wait until Chloe gives Lex some of the answers he's been looking for!! Will he still continue with the treatments? Will Chloe be completely honest with Lex, or will she lie to protect him? Will Lex and Chloe start to work together again against Lionel? Sorry for all of the questions, but this is such a great story and I can't wait to read more!! :puppyeyes: You are such a great author!! Thanks for all of your wonderful stories!! :clap: :heart: :chlexsign4: :heart: :clap:

[Via]

Great! ... Great ... Have I already said your story was great? Please update ( and the sooner's the better).

[AlabamaWorley]

I guess I never replied to this the first time I read it. It's really an intriguing plot, I can't wait to see where it goes!

[scifichick774]

By the time Lex finally arrived at his office, he was thankful that he had told his butler to wait ten minutes before showing Chloe there. Though he was still slightly dizzy, some of his strength had returned to him – and he knew he was going to need every ounce of it if he was going to go out on a limb and confront Chloe about something that may or may not have happened during his missing time.

So wrapped up in his own thoughts and going over all the possible ways she might react when he brought up the topic, he was ill-prepared for how seeing her in person was going to effect his emotional state. The very sight of the fiery blonde nervously pacing his office, clad in black attire that clung to her like a second skin, was enough to make him freeze in the office doorway. Chloe seemed to sense his presence and swung around to face him.

He hoped he wasn’t drooling. Literally. The pharmaceutical therapy he’d been subjecting himself to didn’t do wonders for keeping even the most basic bodily reactions in check. Casually, he pretended to yawn and lifted a hand to his mouth to cover it – and check to make sure there wasn’t anything dripping out.

“Hey,” Chloe greeted with an upward tilt of her head. But no smile, Lex mentally noted. “Sorry to wake you up, but this couldn’t wait.” Without waiting for a response, she walked over to him and held out a disk. “You’ll want to look at this.”

“Alright,” Lex replied, taking the disk from her. “I don’t suppose I get a hint as to what this is about?”

“I found it.”

Lex had already started toward his desk, so he was forced to glance over his shoulder at her to shoot her a questioning look. “It?”

“The evidence you need to connect your dad to his parents’ murder. I found it,” Chloe rushed out excitedly.

Whoa. Whatever he’d been expecting to hear, that wasn’t it.

Lex’s heartbeat sped up, pumping an inordinate amount of blood and endorphins through his veins. If Chloe had really located the elusive missing evidence, then very soon he could be out from underneath his father’s thumb once and for all.

The computer whirred as it opened up the contents of the disk, and Lex’s eyes grew wide with excitement as he enlarged each of the pictures one by one that had been taken and read through the documents that would bring Lionel Luthor to justice.

True to her word, Chloe had done it. Where a mere twenty minutes before Lex had felt like he was ready to die, he now felt like he was on top of the world and completely invincible. He was smiling broadly, and somewhat manically, but Chloe didn’t back away. She shared his joy in this moment of triumph.

“There’s an open ‘twenty-four hours’ rush delivery service in Metropolis, so I took advantage of it and sent a copy to the FBI agents we talked to,” she said, glossing over the fact that she had paused instead of coming directly there, so she could upload the memory card to her laptop and made multiple disks of the material from that. He didn’t need to know how deep her paranoia concerning his father ran and she felt no immediate need to enlighten him. “I guess I could have waited to tell you, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes,” Lex agreed. “Thank you, Chloe…for everything.”

Chloe gave him an imperceptible nod of her head and a tired smile before glancing over at the door and then back to him.

“It’s late. I should go,” she said. “You should probably expect a call from one of those agents some time tomorrow. Good night, Lex.” She hadn’t taken more than two steps toward the door before Lex called out to her.

“Chloe?”

She stopped and turned, the look on her face one of concern; reflecting the tone he had used himself, Lex supposed.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. Chloe raised her eyebrows in an unspoken motion for him to continue. “I’ve been having these…not memories exactly, but…flashes…of things that might have happened during my missing time.”

“Oh?” Chloe said, hoping that the dim light of the room would hide what she knew was her rapidly paling skin.

“This might sound strange, but…were we…did we…?” Lex trailed off uncomfortably. Confronting someone about a sexual encounter was one thing; not knowing whether it really happened was another. “Did we sleep together?”

“Once,” Chloe said quietly after a moment went by and she got up her nerve to actually answer him.

“Once,” Lex repeated. And she was just now telling him this? Just now telling him that they’d been involved in a physical relationship, regardless of how brief it was? “Chloe…”

“There were extenuating circumstances,” Chloe interrupted shortly. “You had just gotten into a big fight with your dad and …it doesn’t matter. It didn’t happen again and it doesn’t change anything.”

Lex felt his stomach drop out. Chloe was being delicate with her words.

Chloe was rarely delicate with her words.

When residing in a place like Smallville, it was best to get to the point and get to it without skirting the issue. Which made Lex wonder why Chloe was speaking the way she was now. She’d admitted that they’d slept together, so her honesty wasn’t in question, but her carefully chosen words made him think – made him know – that there was more to it than what she was telling him.

“Chloe…”

“Like I said, it’s late and I should go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Lex.”

~*~*~*~

Fifteen minutes and Chloe was still shaking uncontrollably. Of all the things Lex could have remembered, his mind has chosen that particular memory. Still, he must not be recalling it with any sort of accuracy or he wouldn’t have brought it up. Or maybe he would; maybe it was different from a man’s perspective, especially one who had been so hopped up on rage-like adrenaline that he couldn’t think straight at the time.

Chloe winced and tried to regain control of her own body’s reactions. She could get past this. She had once before and she could again. It wasn’t Lex’s fault that his father had his psychiatrist prescribing who the hell knew what for him, or that Lionel had taken advantage of that chemical reaction and continually provoked him until he got the response he’d been looking for and Lex had eventually gone off the deep end.

Absently, she lifted one hand off the wheel and brought her fingertips up to the jagged scar that was concealed well by the flippy ends of her blonde hair. Her pads of her fingers quivered over the mark as if it were some secret that was never to be spoken of; which, in this particular instance, it was.

Instinctually, she stepped back from the personal space she so easily invaded when she saw the feral look in his eyes. She’d never seen him like this; he was always in control, even when he was angry. But now his composure had been replaced by something unrestrained, something wild…something dangerous.

A long, manicured hand reached out and roughly grabbed the back of her head; its fingers tangling into her hair so if she moved any direction but forward and quickly, she would feel a stinging pain on her scalp from her hair being tugged and torn.

Wide eyes begged Lex to answer questions she never got a chance to ask, as he slammed his lips down against hers and pulled the rest of her body flush against him with his other hand. With one simple yank of her hair in the exactly the right spot, her head leaned backward just enough to open her jaw and Lex drove his tongue inside with a ferocity that had less to do with passion and more to do with an internal hunger that needed to be satiated.

It was when she felt her tongue start to act of its own volition and barely start to slide against his that she began to fight. She might be attracted to Lex, but his actions were too sudden and too out of control to entirely be his own; and she didn’t cherish the thought of her first time being with someone who was clearly under some kind of chemical influence assisted by restrained rage at his father and may or may not really know who she was at the moment because of it.

She pushed against his chest, but he was too big, too strong, and the only gain she made wasn’t more than putting an inch of space between them before he growled warningly and brought his mouth to hers again. Then she kicked him. Because they were so close together, it didn’t do as much damage as it could have, and it only seemed to fuel the anger that was going on in his mind.

Chloe ripped her lips away from his and reveled in her moment of victory until she realized it was just that; a moment. Lex’s lips found her neck and his teeth and tongue soon followed, earning a gasp from her throat and enough time for him to move her back toward his office desk without her realizing it.

“Did you let him touch you?” he murmured menacingly into her ear, sending a shiver through her body that was equal parts pleasure, fear, and confusion.

“What are you talking about?”

A fierce push behind her knees brought her back to seeing the whole situation rather than concentrating on his words like she had developed a tendency to do whenever he spoke. You missed a lot if you didn’t pay strict attention to every inflection and innuendo that the Luthors infused their sentences with.

Like now, for instance. Lex wasn’t horny, he was angry; livid even. Chloe still hadn’t figured out why, but since he had started to assault her when they’d never had a physical relationship and was now uttering insanely jealous questions at her while pushing her back onto his desk, she assumed that her previous thought was correct and he didn’t realize who she was.

One glance at his eyes seemed to confirm it. His pupils were dilated to the point where barely any of the grey-blue that usually lay there could be seen and small red blood vessels had begun to show themselves in the increasingly smaller white areas.

She knew that he’d been talking – fighting – with his father directly before her visit and although she didn’t believe Lionel would forcibly administer any sort of drug to his son, she didn’t put it past him to work with Lex’s therapist to give him medication that wasn’t what she said it was.

In fact, that was the reason for her visit in the first place. It paid to have friends in every sort of job possible and her friend, Sean, had been able to confirm with a little lab work that the capsule she’d stolen from one of the many prescription bottles Lex had been given wasn’t what the label claimed it was.

Damn. In retrospect, she probably just should have called to tell him, but she hadn’t wanted to risk the phone being bugged and Lionel hearing the conversation.

It was when Lex lifted her longer skirt and grabbed her bare thighs to push them apart that her true sense of self-preservation kicked in. Taking advantage of the fact that Lex had brought her legs up and bent them for easier access, she repositioned them and kicked both of them hard against his chest.

The movement took him off guard and sent him stumbling backward, but the kick wasn’t strong enough to send him far and he was back gripping her arms hard and shoving her back down from the half-sitting up position that she had been able to raise herself into.

If possible, he seemed more determined now; his mind so fully focused on his task that he didn’t realize he’d forced the back of her head to hit the sharp frame of his flat-screen computer monitor, or that the impact was enough to slice long and deep through her skin and draw a hefty amount of blood from the wound.

Pain shot through her and she wailed out a sharp cry that went unheeded and quite probably unnoticed. Chloe closed her eyes, stopped fighting, and lay completely still. Resisting Lex’s drug-induced mania only hit her back ten-fold and though she obviously didn’t want to be raped, she definitely didn’t want to die.

Cool air danced over her exposed skin and licked at the edge of the crimson liquid streaming from her head wound. She was rapidly becoming dizzy and disoriented and absently thought that she might be losing more blood than she initially believed.

She didn’t remember her panties being removed from her body, but the sensation of him punishingly thrusting his stiff cock into her unaroused body was unmistakable and unforgettable. She tried to scream again, but the cry stuck halfway up her throat as if strangled by the pain she felt. Lex pushed in and out of her; his fast and frenzied thrusts thankfully bringing him to climax quickly.

When Chloe awoke after blacking out, she found herself in a dark bedroom lit only by a dim crescent-moon hovering in the sky outside. Her heart raced in panic as she turned to see Lex’s face attached to the body that was curved up against her with one arm draped lazily over her torso. Whatever high he had been on before, he seemed to be fast asleep now.

That evening’s horrifying events flew through her head and she sorely scrambled away from him and off the bed. She lifted a hand up to the back of her head and felt the sticky, congealed blood that had matted her hair over her wound and helped it forma still liquidy, gel-like scab over the wound that laid underneath. Unfortunately, she knew if the cut had been severe enough to drain an amount of blood that would make her pass out, then it would need stitches to heal completely.

Fuck.

She couldn’t think straight. She was too dizzy and an overall soreness complimented the bruising pain she felt in most parts of her body. But instinct quickly took over rational thought and she threw on the clothes she could find before darting out of the room, her heartbeat thumping loud and fast in her ears as she tried to close the door without waking Lex up.

Chloe rested her forehead on the steering wheel and breathed deeply to try to calm herself down while waiting for the late night train to hurry up and get out of her way so she could go home. She didn’t need this now. She didn’t need to remember when she’d gotten so good at forgetting.

She rushed to his office, grabbed her purse, and sped away from the Luthor Estate as fast as she could possibly go. She could already feel that the temporary scab was giving way to the new swell of blood brought on by the surge of panic and adrenaline, and she’d need to get help soon or she’d lose more blood than she could replenish on her own.

But, she also knew they’d ask questions that she couldn’t answer if she went to the hospital. She didn’t have a choice. She didn’t want to die and lying to the doctor on call would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to lie to her dad about it; especially when he’d wind up taking her to the hospital anyway.

She took a sharp turn onto the road that led to the hospital and prayed that no one she knew was working the graveyard shift.

The railroad blockers went up and Chloe pressed on the gas pedal. She’d been startled and shaken when Lex brought the whole thing up. Except he hadn’t; not really. Who knew what he really remembered and what his mind had delicately conjured up so he wouldn’t lose his weak grasp on sanity again? She didn’t – and she wasn’t about to ask.

Besides, she’d managed to push the memory aside before, she could do it again. She’d kept her part of the deal and found the information that could bring down the man who she truly blamed for everything, even if he wasn’t physically responsible. She wouldn’t need to consort with either one of them again and there was no reason to force Lex to live with something he had no control over at the time by telling him the truth.

She just hoped he saw it the same way.

[asharnanae]

:ohmy: Oh Damn, now this is one fic that just riped me in two! Great wrieting. :worship2:

[hfce]

I am glad you repost. This is very powerful.


Hope :)

[xxasaxx]

This must have an update ASAP!! :ohmy: :ohmy:

[Queen Of Tact]

OMG Kris!!!! That was wow, and i do mean WOW... I can't even think of what lex will do when he finds out the truth... Poor Chloe..... lionel is an evil bastered for doing that to lex... lex would have never tried to hurt chloe like that.......



I can't wait for more....



CC

[autumngold]

I know that I told you before, but I can't help but tell you again how much I love this story!! Poor Chloe, having to live through that awful experience!! What is Lex going to do when he realizes what really happened? Thank you for the update!! I can't wait to read more of this incredible story!! :wub: :chlexsign4: :wub:

[Jen1388]

Do we have an update coming soon? *gets down on her knees)

Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[kezz]

Wow, very well done! This is great, very sensitively written.

I've wondered a few times if a story along these lines would come out of Chloe working so closely with Lex during his drug induced insanity. I'm very glad to see that Chloe blames Lionel and not Lex for the assault. Poor Chloe and poor, poor Lex, he may well lose his grip on his sanity again if he ever finds out what happened.

Please update soon, this is too good to abandon.

Kezz....x.x.x.

[scifichick774]

A/N: And here's where Chloe's storyline finally comes in. Back to both of them in the next chapter though. This one's for Blue.

~*~*~*~

Chloe managed to get almost seven hours of restless sleep in before the sound of the doorbell chiming woke her up for good. Knowing that her dad was probably up because he was accustomed to rising early after working the early shift for so many years, she turned onto her side and curled her legs up beside her, snuggling her head further into her pillow in an effort to go back to sleep.

After being forced to relive painful memories the night before, she wasn’t particularly feeling up to personally dealing with whoever the visitor at the door was, and found herself thankful for the somewhat thin walls they put in newer houses when she heard footsteps downstairs and the click of the door being unlocked.

Most likely, it was someone innocuous anyway; a delivery driver, one of Lana’s many admirers who just wasn’t bright enough to realize she opened the Talon every Saturday morning so she wouldn’t have to work the evening shift, or possibly even a neighbor stopping by to chat.

She hadn’t made much of an effort (or any effort, really) to get to know the neighbors in their new subdivision, but she knew her father had since losing his job. Or rather, the neighbors made an attempt to get to know him; many of them commiserating with him over the evil plague of Smallville that was the Luthor family.

Chloe squeezed her eyelids shut tighter, but to no avail. She was awake, even if she didn’t want to be; and the memories she’d successfully pushed into a dark corner of her mind were now once again at the forefront, making her a shaky jumble of nerves and mixed emotions.

So even though she’d heard mumbled voices downstairs for a good ten minutes after the doorbell rang, when a quiet knock came at her bedroom door, her body stiffened and her heart pounded unreasonably fast in her chest.

“Chloe…honey? Are you up?” Gabe Sullivan asked from the hallway.

“Yeah,” Chloe croaked out after a couple of beats. “Give me a second.”

The problem with a severe adrenaline rush was the physical downer that almost always followed through to the next day. Because of sneaking into a guarded warehouse and actually finding the information she had long been looking for, Chloe’s sore muscles now heartily protested as she pushed herself up to a sitting position and then swung her legs over the side of the bed.

She might not have been able to sleep without having nightmares, and now she couldn’t sleep at all, but she wasn’t entirely sure she was capable of getting up to meet the day head on either. She padded her way over to the door and removed a plush bathrobe – a birthday gift from Lana, so naturally it was pink – off the hook on the bedroom’s side of the door. It took but a moment to slide it on over her makeshift pajamas of a t-shirt and sweatpants and she tied it closed just before she turned the doorknob and opened the door.

“Hey,” she greeted, offering her father a tired smile to conceal the jumpiness going on in her thoughts.

“Hey,” Gabe returned, his lips set in a grim line.

Uh-oh.

Despite everything her dad had been through in his life, Chloe knew that he was essentially like she was; an eternal optimist who was easily hurt but a pro at covering it up. It didn’t hurt that the residents of Smallville weren’t exactly the most observant bunch of people on the planet.

Nevertheless, he’d risked waking her up earlier than she’d normally be up on a Saturday morning and was now looking at her like he wished she could read his mind so she wouldn’t have to deliver the bad news out loud; and Chloe couldn’t help but think that something was terribly wrong because of it.

She frowned. “What’s going on?” she asked quietly, not entirely sure she wanted the answer. The town they lived in could provide any number of answers to that question and none of the ones that leapt to mind were good.

“You…um…you need to get dressed and come downstairs. There are some…just get dressed. I’ll tell them you’ll be a few minutes.”

Chloe furrowed her brow in confusion and immediately opened her mouth to ask a host of questions, but closed it again when her dad forced a very weak, but supportive grin onto his lips, pushing up the corners of his mouth by mere millimeters. She watched as he turned to walk back down the hallway to the stairs, then she shut the door and her stomach sank in realization.

The FBI.

It had to be them. No one else visiting at that time in the morning on a weekend could put her father in such a sour mood.

Unless she’d been caught on security cameras she didn’t know about the previous night…

Yes. A visit from the Metropolis Police Department to arrest her for breaking and entering would definitely be enough to make her normally good-spirited dad’s emotional state to slide into something so morose.

Fuck.

Even though she was sure Lex would post her bail – after all, she’d broken the law getting information for him – the repercussions of her actions could do long-lasting damage to her relationship with her father.

She shed the robe and pajamas, hastily throwing them onto her unmade bed while at the same time already starting to dig through her closet for an outfit she could get into quickly. She had no great desire to be arrested, but the sooner she got downstairs, the less time her dad would have to spend listening to the officers berate him for raising his daughter the way he had. She could spare him that at least; especially since there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way he’d raised her.

She settled on comfortable, faded light blue jeans and a shamrock-green long-sleeved, boatneck t-shirt. She looked in the full-length mirror hanging on her wall and frowned. The clothes were fine – nice even, considering that she refused to change out of her fuzzy bear-paw slippers since real shoes would indicate that she knew she was going to be arrested and therefore knew what she’d done was wrong.

Unfortunately, no matter how presentable her outfit looked or didn’t look, her hair was unsalvageable. She’d have to wash it and style it to get rid of the damage wearing a hat last night had caused and that obviously wasn’t an option. She’d have to settle for the next best thing.

She grabbed an ugly red bandana that would be horribly mismatched to her outfit and opened the door to walk to the bathroom. If she had to go through the humiliation of being arrested, she wasn’t going to have grimy teeth for her mug shot, which she told herself she would stubbornly smile for regardless of the rules. In her mind, she had done nothing wrong; and Lionel Luthor would be going away for a long time because of it.

She brushed her teeth and washed her face, and then wetted her hairbrush and started tugging it through her disheveled hair. Thankfully, it looked worse than it actually was and she was able to brush her now damp hair back sleekly before putting the bandana over the top of it and tying it at the base of her head in the back.

Satisfied with the overall result (and the fact that her dad hadn’t yelled for her to hurry up yet), she took a deep breath and blew it out, left the bathroom, and headed for the stairs. The site she caught halfway down the staircase made her pause. Four men were standing in the foyer, apparently waiting for her to come downstairs. That in itself wasn’t totally out of the ordinary, but it was very different from what she had been expecting to see, so she was taken off guard.

One of the men was, of course, her father. She vaguely recognized the man standing next to him as her dad’s attorney (and she supposed hers as well), Stephen Wycott. The other two were harder to place and after a moment she came to the decision that she’d probably never met them. They were impeccably dressed in expensive suits, and money – at least where she was concerned – usually meant Luthor. And since she was fairly certain that Lex would want to get their stories straight together rather than separately, a foreboding cloud now hung over the two strangers in her eyes; the two men who, most probably she realized, worked for Lionel Luthor.

Nothing like one Luthor to take her mind off the other…

“Chloe,” her dad greeted again, jerking her from her thoughts.

“Dad…what’s going on?”

“You didn’t tell her?” one of the strangers asked.

Gabe gave him a partial glare out of the corner of his eye. “She just got up,” he explained through gritted teeth.

The other stranger huffed a disapproving breath out of his nose at the mounting tension and stepped forward after Chloe finished descending the stairs. Apparently he wanted to get down to business, and that was just fine with her – even if the business in question was most likely her imminent demise.

“Miss Sullivan,” he acknowledged with an English accent, offering her his hand to shake. “My name is William Barnes, and this is Charles Tremley,” he said, motioning with his head toward the other stranger.

Good for you.

Damn, Chloe wished she could say the sarcastic remark out loud. But her dad was giving her a warning look, so she tampered down what her normal, natural response would be for being woken up after a fitful night’s sleep and simply shook Barnes’s hand.

“Mr. Barnes,” she returned. “Mr. Tremley.”

She didn’t claim it was a pleasure to meet them; her nerves were too on edge to observe niceties at the moment and the jerks had woken her up early – well, early for her – on a Saturday morning. She hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet and now that it was clear that the visitors weren’t police officers or the FBI, and from the way Barnes introduced himself, not working for Lionel Luthor either, she found herself far less tolerant of them than she would have been not ten minutes before.

“Well, let’s get on with this,” Tremley said. “No sense in wasting time.”

Chloe was about to ask what he was talking about when he started to open his briefcase and drew out what looked like a swab kit that they used at hospitals for lab work samples. Her eyes grew wide and they darted over to silently plead with her dad for him to tell her what was going on. Gabe stubbornly refused to meet her inquiring gaze though and she was forced to turn her attention back to Tremley.

“Get on with what exactly?” she asked.

“We’re here to get a DNA sample from you,” Tremley answered with a note of confusion in his voice, wondering why Chloe didn’t know about it.

“O-kay,” Chloe strung out. “Why?”

Barnes cast an incredulous glare at Gabe. “You haven’t told her anything?”

Gabe folded his arms defensively across his chest, but didn’t bother to respond to the question. “Maybe we should take this to the living room.”

Chloe nodded absently and followed the others to the living room, shooting her dad a questioning look and frowning when he ignored her silent plea for information and simply motioned for her and the attorneys to sit down instead.

“Chloe…” Wycott began uneasily, though she gave him points for remembering her first name. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but your mother died a little over two months ago.”

Oh.

She hadn’t been expecting that.

Not that anyone ever does.

“She mentioned you in her will,” Barnes said, taking up where Wycott left off. “And not to be impolite, but your…existence…came as a surprise.”

Oh again.

Yes, Chloe knew that her mom had abandoned her, but to cut her out of her life so completely that no one even knew she’d ever had her; quite honestly, that was a bit more knowledge than she needed or could handle.

She fought back the tears that welled up in her eyes and rubbed at her stomach, which now felt knotted and uncomfortable.

“Most notably to her husband, Sir Gregory Holcombe,” Barnes continued, and Chloe realized that he could have been talking all that time and she just hadn’t realized it.

She blanched, but forced herself to look at the men sitting across from her. She was sure her face was pale and drawn, and she knew her hands were starting to shake, but she had to hold it together until they left her house and then she could break down in private.

“So, the DNA sample…” she started, inwardly cursing how wobbly her voice came out. “It’s to what? Prove I’m her daughter?”

The men exchanged looks and it seemed to be silently agreed upon that Gabe should be the one to respond.

“No,” he said gently. “It’s to see whether you’re mine.”

Startled, Chloe’s eyes widened. Tremley coughed into his fist to get her attention.

“Actually, it’s to see if Holcombe is your biological father,” he informed her. “Your mother was still married to Mr. Sullivan when she and Sir Gregory first met and began courting, but according to him, there was approximately a year’s time in which they stopped seeing each other so she could try and make her marriage work. That period, narrowed down from the dates on saved letters, seems to correspond with the time when she would have been pregnant with you.” Seeing Chloe’s discomfort, he frowned sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

Chloe shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she rasped out, her voice hoarse and strained with emotion. “I was five when she left us. If she was seeing someone else all that time, why wouldn’t she have just left before?”

And if she was the other guy’s daughter, why didn’t her mother take her with her?

“As I understand it, she was quite resistant to ending her marriage to simply hop into another one. And there were legalities and arrangements that would have needed to be taken care of, of course.”

“Oh.” It actually came out of her mouth this time, but it was meek and distant as Chloe’s mind immersed itself in a self-protecting numbness.

She didn’t want what they were saying to be true; she wanted to call them all liars and kick them out of her house. But they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t believe there was a cause. Still, whatever reason they had, she didn’t understand it, and the part of her that clamored for information at any cost took over.

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I get that my mom didn’t tell anyone about me, but why bother to have the test now? I’ll be eighteen in like, six months, so even if I am…his…there wouldn’t be a custody issue. So what purpose would having the test done at all serve other than to satisfy his curiosity?”

Barnes and Tremley both gave her incredulous stares, while Wycott simply blinked in astonishment. Her dad seemed proud, but anxious to hear the lawyers’ answers to her question.

“Miss Sullivan,” Barnes began calmly, though his voice held an edge of reprimand that Chloe couldn’t quite grasp the purpose behind.

Was he upset that she hadn’t moved past the stage of shock to break down in tears over her mother’s death? Or maybe he expected her to hold his client in as high regard as he did even though she’d never heard of him until now. Then there was the possibility that he was just an asshole.

“Gregory Holcombe is…well, he’s a very wealthy man to put it quite bluntly.” Barnes stopped and stared at Chloe in disbelief when she didn’t seem particularly interested or impressed. “As for requesting the DNA test; he was rendered sterile by a severe onset of shingles as an adult. It occurred shortly after your mother began their year-long separation, and the doctors believed it was triggered by the emotional stress surrounding that. If you are indeed his daughter, you’d be his only heir.”

Chloe pinched the bridge of her nose. She wondered if they’d be upset if she excused herself from the room to get some headache medication and simply neglected to come back. It had to be worth a shot. It was way too early in the morning to be expected to deal with all of the information they’d dumped on her.

She sighed. Maybe it was time she started unloading some information of her own.

“You need to understand…I haven’t spoken to my mom since she left us,” she began quietly, unsure of how steady she could make her voice come out. “A few years ago, I found out where she was living and wrote to her, but my letter was returned unopened with a heartfelt ‘Return to Sender – Sender Unknown’ scrawled across the envelope in her handwriting.” She paused and drew in a breath to calm herself. “So if you expect me to do a DNA test on the off-chance that I might be my mom’s widower’s daughter, a man who she didn’t feel fit to inform that I even existed until she died, then you have another thing coming.”

There was a deathly silence for but a moment until Wycott ended it by standing up and taking a few steps toward her, giving her a sympathetic look that she just wanted to shove down his throat.

“You don’t have a choice, Chloe,” he said, holding a slip of paper out to her in his hand. “Your dad and I have been trying to fight it, but Holcombe has a lot of connections. They’ve got a court order. I’m sorry.”

Chloe felt like she’d been slugged in the stomach. Not only had her mom died two months ago, but her dad had known about it all that time and hadn’t told her. Her heart sank and she felt physically ill in her confusion.

“Now, if you’ll just open your mouth so I can get the sample, we’ll be on our way and leave you be,” Tremley said, holding a long medical swab up in his hand and tipping it back and forth between his fingers.

Chloe spent the next fifteen minutes in a daze; complying with having her saliva swabbed, staring unblinkingly at the attorneys as they bid her and her father goodbye, and barely noticing when she was left alone in the house with only her dad and her jumbled thoughts and emotions as company.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, Chloe,” Gabe said, hands in his pockets as he took a tentative step toward his daughter. “It’s just that you’ve been through so much this year. Losing your column at the Planet, people trying to kill you because of a hypnotic email virus, that accident that ruined your new car…”

Chloe cringed. The car accident in question had been staged to cover up her altercation with an out of his mind Lex, so her dad wouldn’t ask any questions when the hospital sent him the bill after their insurance took care of part of it. Well…she supposed they were even on the keeping secrets front then.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just…I’m tired. I think I’m going to go back to bed.”

“Okay, sweetheart.”

But then Gabe caught a glimpse of something as Chloe turned her back to him to head toward the stairs; something he usually didn’t see because she generally wore her hair down rather than pulled back. Even if her damp hair was slicked beneath a bandana, it was pulled away from the scar that she had just been unwillingly reminiscing about the night before. His fingers reached out to skim it and Chloe’s body stiffened in shock and horror.

“When’d you get that?”

Chloe closed her eyes and swallowed. No kind of car accident – and certainly not the one that she’d made up and lied about – could explain her having a deep scar that shape and size near the base of her skull in the back.

Fuck.

“I’m…not sure,” Chloe lied, her voice wavering as unbidden memories flashed behind her eyelids and made her want to scream and sob all at the same time. “Like you said, I’ve been through a lot this year.”

“Yeah,” Gabe said after a moment, but Chloe could tell he was suspicious of her answer. “Well, you have a good nap.” She was three steps away from him before he continued in voice that was half-teasing, half-scornful. “You didn’t come in until three this morning after all.”

Crap.

[autumngold]

:yay: This new chapter is beyond excellent!! :worship2: I love your writing so much!! :love: You really made my day with your updates to Nightcap and Fallout!! Can't wait to read more!! You're the best!!!!! :applause: :chlexsign1: :applause:

[Queen Of Tact]

Well, personaly they would have taken me to jail, cause i would have told them they could kiss my ass if they wanted my DNA... I'm sorry but if my mom had left me when i was 5, and married the guy she had been sleeping around with by the looks of it for a long time now... Then on the off chance I was "his' daughter sent people to get my DNA I would have laughed in there face.. And said something to the fact like "I'm sorry but your looking at my father....

Gabe and Chloe (most of all Chloe) don't need this added with everything else going on in their lives... And way do i get the feel were there is one rich guy another one isn't far behind.....


Great ch hon... I really do like this fic...

CC

[bluemoongirl23]

Yay Update! That is then followed by hissing sounds towards the suits. Like poor Gabe and Chloe need more crap. Wonderful update. If that rich dude expects Chloe to be jumping for joy, he's got another thing coming!

Great update hon,

Blue

[hfce]

Oh this is getting crazy more please...



Hope :)

[asharnanae]

:biggrin: fantastic chappy!

[AlabamaWorley]

Excellent! This was definitely not what I was expecting, it's really an interesting turn of events. Thanks for the update!

[carebear72884]

That was great, :biggrin: I can't belive I forgot about this fic, I haven't read any of it since the begaining...update soon, I want to know what is going to happen.

[Béatrice]

Fabolous!!! :clap:

More... pleaseeeeeeeeee!!!

[kezz]

Okaaayy, can we all say HUH?! This certainly took a new twist.

When is Lex gonna find out what happened? Will anybody else find out what happened? How is Lex gonna react when he does find out? Is Chloe Gabe's or her mother's widower's daughter? What exactly has this got to do with the rest of the plot?????

Oh just shut me up with another update already or I'm likely to keep asking questions 'til you've forgotten what it was you were going to write and then my questions will never be answered!

In all seriousness (is that even a word?) I loved the update and I nearly fell out of my chair when they first asked for her DNA sample thinking that someone else had found out about the assault and they were going to try Lex for rape.

More soon please?! :worship2:

Kezz.....x.x.x.

[scifichick774]

A/N: *points to story summary on first page* Sorry if it seemed like I was throwing a wrench into the story, but rest assured that everything has been planned.

~*~*~*~*~

Two Weeks Later…

Chloe Sullivan prided herself on being able to handle just about everything that life threw at her. She dealt with the heartbreak of unrequited love, the broken emotions of being consistently lied to by people she cared about, she’d been put in the hospital by meteor freaks so many times that she’d lost count, she’d sat through grueling interrogations about a certain evil billionaire, and she’d gone on as if nothing had happened after being raped by said billionaire’s son.

She’d been able to deal with all of that, but in the end, all it took to undo her was a single sheet of paper.

99.87% match for paternity.

That was…pretty definite.

Her legs gave out and she crumpled to the ground, her body shaking all over. She felt cold and she felt numb. There was no small voice in the back of her head to reassure her that things would be alright. There were no images of what the future might hold for her now – or even memories of the past that she’d been trying so desperately to forget. There was just nothing; an all-consuming void that drained the spark right out of her.

What the hell was she supposed to do now?

~*~*~

Dark circles sat under his eyes and his weary muscles showed their pain even through his expensive clothing; Lex Luthor had definitely looked better. Garner grimaced. He could see that the pharmaceutical therapy sessions had been taking their toll on the younger Luthor’s body; and if the frantic phone call he’d received in the middle of the previous night was any indication, then the treatments were affecting Lex’s mind as well.

He was sure that no memory was worth subjecting yourself to that kind of torture and he was surprised and dismayed that Lex kept coming back time and time again, searching for answers that may not even exist. Garner sighed and it alerted Lex to his presence. The bald man’s head snapped to look at the doctor and the doctor frowned at him.

“Your next session isn’t for another week and a half,” he informed Lex gruffly, leaving the unspoken question dangling in the air between them. What are you doing here?

“I can’t sleep.”

“The pills I gave you aren’t helping?”

“No,” Lex answered. “They help me fall asleep, but…”

“But?”

Lex sat down and buried his head in his hands. It was an expression of helplessness and defeat and Garner was wary and uneasy at seeing it on a man who usually exuded such self-confidence.

“I keep seeing things,” Lex said so quietly that Garner almost didn’t catch what he said. “Bad things. I can’t tell what’s real from what’s not and they’re starting to creep into my head when I’m awake.”

“Ah,” Garner said with sudden understanding. He folded his arms across his chest and adopted an ‘I know everything’ stance. The look was not uncommon for him. “It sounds like you’re experiencing some deterioration between your synaptic nerves and neural processing. It has only presented itself in ten percent of our ongoing experiments, but you should be fine if we discontinue treatment now.”

“We can’t.”

“You have to. You’ll risk losing your mind if you don’t.”

“I have to know what’s real,” Lex said, too tired and desperate to care if his words came out pleadingly. “I have to know if…”

If I hurt her…if I *raped* her…

“I have to know,” he whispered.

Garner shook his head. “Whatever it is that’s haunting you isn’t going to go away with the knowledge of whether it actually happened or not. And your body is already having a hypersensitive reaction to the drugs we’re using. If we keep going, you could end up trapped in your own mind, reliving that memory, or nightmare, or whatever the hell it is, for the rest of your life. Think about it. Do you really want to take that risk?”

Lex closed his eyes and clamped his shaking hands together so his agitation – his fear – wouldn’t be as visible.

“I have to know,” he repeated.

Garner sighed again. “Is there any other way you can find out?” he asked. “Because I’m telling you now, if you don’t lose your sanity with the next session, then there’s a good chance you’ll lose your life.” He stepped closer to Lex and noted the utter anguish etched on his features. “If it’s a real memory and not just a figment of your imagination, then there should be some outside way to verify it.”

Lex rested his forearms on his thighs and hung his head. There was another way. He’d already hired someone to break into Smallville Community Hospital to see if there were any records of a rape victim matching Chloe’s description coming into the Emergency Room during his ‘missing’ seven weeks of time. He’d received the results in a sealed manila envelope yesterday.

He hadn’t opened it yet.

He wanted his nightmares to be only that and the weight of the envelope alone let him know that there was a very real chance that they weren’t. But it appeared that he didn’t have a choice. He’d have to open the envelope and face his demons head on; he just hoped he’d be able to live with himself afterward.

~*~*~

Truth be told, he hadn’t expected the test results to be positive. But there it was in black and white in front of him.

He had a daughter.

He had a daughter who he’d never known existed.

Gregory blew out a long breath that he didn’t consciously realize he’d been holding in. He was trapped in a cyclone of emotions that weren’t easily handled one at a time, let alone when combined with each other. He was shocked, elated, bitter, hurt, and angry all at the same time.

How could his Alice never tell him? No clue, no hint, no…anything.

He would need to learn more. Though no amount of investigation could provide him with the real answers he sought, he could at least find out what his daughter’s (his daughter) life had been like up to that point and how best to build the foundation for a relationship with her from now on.

~*~*~

Three Days Later…

Nothing he’d relived through his nightmares could have prepared Lex for what he was now looking at. He’d finally gathered the courage to confront his demons head on and was now really wishing that he hadn’t.

Severe laceration…seven stitches…signs of rape…massive bruising and tearing…evidence of forced entry…

And if he thought the medical reports were bad, they were nothing compared to the pictures. Logically, he understood the reasoning behind them. They were proof that it had happened; snapshots of the results of a brutal crime to use as evidence in a court of law.

Except they hadn’t been.

According to the reports, Chloe lied and said it was too dark to make out who her attacker was. Smallville, Kansas was a town with a lot of farmland and not a lot of anything else. The only lights on at night were the streetlamps downtown and those on residents’ homes. Nothing would have lit the area where Chloe claimed the incident occurred, so the doctors believed her. The police believed her. There was no reason not to.

Lex turned away from the images, closing his eyes for a moment as a sickening nausea swept over him. This time it had nothing to do with the drugs he’d been taking and everything to do with facing the horrific reality of what he’d done to Chloe.

No amount of apologizing was ever going to make up for what his family had done to her. Clark may have temporarily broken her heart, but the Luthors had managed to put some permanent chinks in the already thin armor that was her spirit.

To make matters worse, Lex knew there was no atonement. He’d never be able to even be in the same room with her again. He wouldn’t be able to say he was sorry for the things he’d personally done to her because he’d be too sick from projecting the severely wounded photos he had just been looking at onto her now seemingly normal self.

Normal. There was a relative term if ever he’d heard one.

When he first met Chloe, she was energetic and fully of spunky wit. Over time, he’d witnessed her withdrawing more and more into herself, but the changes had been so gradual and slow in progression that he didn’t realize what was happening. Given the attention span of the Smallville populace in general, he doubted that anyone had.

He slammed his eyelids closed again and tried to focus on his breathing. It didn’t work. Flashed of a night he wished had never happened intermingled with images of the results, with the scanned photos of Chloe’s blood and dark purple bruising in the shape of his fingers.

His stomach lurched and his heart felt like it shattered into a million irreparable pieces. With the memories of the truth came cruel reminders of how he felt about her at the time; how he felt about her now and just hadn’t realized it until he’d started to remember his missing time.

He loved her.

He loved her and he destroyed her.

Lex buried his face in his hands. For once, he had no idea what to do. What plan of attack could there be when he himself was the enemy? He dragged his hands down his face and opened his eyes. He felt drawn and defeated.

As much as he’d like to make his father the scapegoat for his current situation, he couldn’t. His dad may be responsible, inadvertently if not directly, for everything else that had gone horribly wrong in his life, but this…this was all his own doing and he had no one to blame but himself.

The realization broke something inside him and when he turned his attention back to the contents the manila envelope had held, he stared down at the pictures and medical files in a dead, expressionless haze. His heart and mind completely separated themselves from the information, refusing to deal with the indescribable pain he felt moments before; with the hurt he’d been trying to ignore for almost two weeks.

At the bottom of the file, buried beneath the almost illegible scrawl of the doctor’s notes, was something that caught his attention and shoved his brain back into gear. A handwritten page on a small sheet of hospital stationary.

Just FYI – it looks like someone else has been into the victim’s records in the past couple of days. Couldn’t trace the computer signature, but anyone who can afford an anonymous address would probably go for the hard copies as well. Thought you’d want to know.

It wasn’t signed and it wasn’t addressed, but Lex knew who it was from and that it was to him just the same. He also had a good idea who was digging through Chloe’s medical records.

Fuck.

A fiery anger began to burn within him. His father couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could he? He was probably looking for something like allergies to medication, for some way he could get rid of the girl that was becoming more than a simple inconvenience to him without making it look like he had anything to do with her death.

Suddenly, the plan of attack that had eluded him before came into crystal-clear focus. There was more than one enemy and his father was the one on the offensive. He remembered telling Chloe that he’d protect her from Lionel Luthor, and if he couldn’t allow himself near enough to her to give her the apology she deserved, then he could at least keep his word.

She wouldn’t be hurt by his family again.

[asharnanae]

:ohmy: EEKKKKK!!! OMG!!! rip my heart out why don't you!!! Damn, aghhhh, blubber blubber, god, this fic is just D-A-M-N!!!!!!!!

:worship2: :worship2: :worship2:

[AlabamaWorley]

Wow, that was a quick return! Thank you, thank you!

I'm glad this new "father" isn't planning on just barging in and trying to take over Chloe's life. She's been through enough for someone who is essentially just a kid, mature though she may be. And Lex... *sigh* Poor, tortured Lex. Excellent work.

[lexodus]

This story breaks my heart. :crygreen: I'm so addicted to it, though.

[hfce]

Oh wow :cryblue: I feel so bad for her.


Hope :cryblue:

[autumngold]

Your new chapter is excellent!! I'm so glad that Lex knows the truth!! I just hope he kills Lionel!! It won't make up for what he's done, but it would be a start!! Poor Chloe!! Thank you for the update!! I'm so addicted to this story!! :yay: :chlexsign3: :yay:

[Béatrice]

What an amazing chappy!!! :clap: Bravo.

Awww Poor Chloe. :cryblue: :cryblue:

I'm glad Lex finally realizes that he loves Chloe and i hope he'll find a good way to get into her good books.

I beg you to update. :worship2: Pleeeease.

[kezz]

Wow what a powerfully written chapter! Well done you!

But seriously, this chapter just broke my heart, I think it's time the two of them talked. Some much needed healing is necessary now, don't you think?

Please update soon! :worship2:

Kezz....x.x.x. :wub:

[FroggyJump]

That was great. There are so many reactions that have to come out of that chapter such as the way that Gabe is going to react to not being her biological father?, what is Gregory going to do? And how is Lex going to fix things with Chloe while she tries to protect him?

It was nice to get answers. Nice update

[hateSmallvilleLoveChlex]

:ohmy: get me addicted and then don't update! :rage: That is cruel!!!! get back here right this instant!

[kezz]

Hey you where the frig did you go? You know there's a word for someone who gets you all worked up then leaves you hanging. (Tease!) :eyebrows:

Now get your butt back here and update please. Or :hammer:

OK so I'm not a violent lunatic really, but be fair, you write a fantastic few chapters then disappear. It's enough to make the Dalai Lama throw a hissy fit!

Kezz...x.x.x.

[Janet]

:o


Wow....


Can't wait to see what happens next!!!



Update please? :biggrin:

[Finding Beauty]

I love this story so far, I can't wait to read more!

[randa]

i cant believe i just started reading this!
it's so good and there is just so much going on!

cant wait for more


randa

[Buri_23]

Please, please update!! I really like this story alot.

[divine02us]

Yup, this fic needs to be updated.....please.


D

[Jen1388]

Sci... come on! *gets down on her knees* Where is the next update? I'm dying to know what happens!!!

Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[Czech Angel]

Yeah I'm joining the bandwagon. Please update. I know its weird, but i'm really looking forward to reading more about Adam having a thing for Chloe. That's awesome

[scifichick774]

The corners of Gregory’s mouth pulled into a quirky grin. On his desk laid a large box full of the information on the daughter he never knew he had. It definitely paid to hire the top investigators in their field; anyone else might have been able to capture some random snapshots and anything in the public records system, but this…this would give him a comprehensive view of the young woman Chloe had grown to be and some of the things that helped make her that way.

“I appreciate this, Gavin,” he said, sliding a penknife across the packing tape and then opening the box.

“I appreciate the money,” Gavin replied with a smirk. “So is this girl really your daughter?”

“That’s what the DNA test said.”

“Wow.”

“Indeed.”

“No, I meant…wow, maybe I should fill you in on some of the stuff you’re going to see in there.”

Gregory looked up from where he had already plucked out a file containing the most recent information on Chloe. “Why? Is something wrong with her?”

“Not with her…not exactly anyway,” Gavin said with a frown. “But the town she lives in…despite its size, it’s not all that safe. I feel it’s only fair to warn you that she’s gotten hurt – really hurt – more than once.”

“Why would her ---” Gregory stopped himself before he said the word ‘father’. Now that he knew the truth of Chloe’s parentage, he was finding it increasingly difficult to accept the fact that his deceased wife hadn’t ever told him about it. “Why would Mr. Sullivan keep them in Smallville if it’s so dangerous?”

“Is there really any safe place to live anymore?” Gavin replied with a shrug. “I doubt she’d have fared any better in Gotham, which was where his only other job offer was before they moved to Smallville. He probably thought the small town life would be better for her than going from Metropolis to an even bigger, darker city.”

Gregory absently nodded a couple of times. He supposed he could understand that argument, but at the same time, it seemed like Gabe should have caught on that Smallville wasn’t quite the peaceful sanctuary he had envisioned after Chloe’s first two times of getting seriously injured.

Even with Gavin’s preparatory speech, he wasn’t ready for what he saw when he purposefully dug through the paperwork for the medical files. He thought there might be a couple of car accidents here and there, perhaps some altercations with an overzealous ex-boyfriend, but not anything resembling the thick stack of records that now lay on top of his desk.

Good grief.

Chloe’s insurance company could keep the local hospital in business with just her caseload alone if the size of the pile was any indication.

He drew in a slow, steadying breath and then looked over at Gavin. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

Gregory nodded complacently and set the folder down. He would look through it later, when he was alone and had some alcohol in him to dull whatever emotional reactions might spring up as a result of receiving the information.

He sifted through some of the other material in the box and then grabbed a large manila envelope that contained candid pictures of Chloe taken from afar with a telescopic lens. He was glad he’d ordered the photographs before he found out that she was his daughter, as he had a feeling that he wouldn’t have gotten a genuine overall view of her otherwise.

Gregory knew he certainly hadn’t looked the same after finding out; he could only imagine from what he’d heard that Chloe was in shock as well. A sad grin lifted the corners of his mouth as he began to gaze down at the pictures.

She had blonde hair like his late wife, but his green eyes. It looked like she got his cousin’s nose and…oh.

His mother’s smile.

He felt a lump of emotion rise up in his throat and though he tried to swallow it down, he dared not speak for he was certain that his voice would wobble and crack.

There was a picture of her and her…dad…eating dinner at a restaurant. They looked far more companionable than he would have thought, but he supposed that was to be expected given that Gabe had been forced to raise her alone. The ‘laws of the house’ were probably relaxed quite a bit after Alice left in an effort to keep Chloe from feeling disconnected and abandoned.

Which, essentially, she was, Gregory thought glumly.

Then there were pictures of her with her friends. There was a pretty Asian girl who wore entirely too much pink (a color that was, at the very least, photographically unflattering against her skin tone in the first place) and a black boy too near Chloe’s height to be wearing the letterman’s jacket he had on.

The next few photos showed her with a much taller boy with dark hair and pale skin who had jagged (but gleamingly white) teeth, another boy with dark hair and pale skin but who had rosy cheeks, a charming smile, and a somewhat unsettling intensity in the way he looked at Chloe, and a girl with her long blonde hair pulled up into a ponytail (who only appeared in one of the shots, so Gregory assumed she and Chloe were probably only acquaintances).

And then there was a bald man in an expensive suit who looked to be about five years older than the rest of them. Gregory frowned. The young man in the picture looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. He held the picture up for Gavin to see and gave him an inquisitive expression.

“Lex Luthor,” Gavin said. “Lionel Luthor’s son.”

Gregory’s eyebrows rose. “And his business with Chloe?”

“His father moved him to Smallville a few years ago and she’s interviewed him a couple of times, but from what I could tell, they seem to be friends.”

Gregory made no comment except for a short grunt of a hum to acknowledge that he’d heard the other man. He had to admit that the younger Luthor didn’t look particularly threatening, but the apple never fell far from the tree and he knew the elder Luthor well enough to wish he didn’t. The man was a snake, pure and simple, and a poisonous one at that.

He flipped to the next picture.

The boy with the intense gaze again. He and Chloe were laughing about…something. Damn. He should have asked for video as well.

“Boyfriend?” he asked, holding that photo up much as he had the last one.

“No. She doesn’t have one currently. That’s Adam Knight.” Gavin stopped and pocketed his tongue in his cheek in a pensive gesture. “A bit disconcerting, that. He’s dating her friend, Lana, but is…highly protective of your girl there. Struck me as odd, so I didn’t a little digging and all his records are new.”

“New?”

“Fabricated, I’m guessing. Most likely was put in the Witness Relocation Program or something along those lines. I didn’t delve too deep just because you wanted information on Chloe, not him.”

Gregory nodded. He’d have to keep that in mind for later.

Last picture.

His eyes narrowed and Gavin cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“Yeah…didn’t think you’d like that one.”

“What does he want with her?”

“Up until a few months ago, she was doing some research for him. Couldn’t find out what – it wasn’t on her home or school computer or any of his that I could get into.”

“He’s keeping it well-guarded. It must be important.” Gregory furrowed his brow. “So, why hire a high school student to look into it?”

“Chloe’s smart, incredibly resourceful…practically fearless even though she’s gotten in her share of scrapes,” Gavin answered with admiration in his tone. “And,” he said, a smile quirking on his lips, “I just recently came across some information that says she may be working with Luthor’s kid to help him bring down the old man.”

Gregory’s eyes widened. “Do you think that’s why she took the job for him in the first place?”

“You’d have to ask her to be sure, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”

Something akin to pride, but closer to a pleased smugness cross Gregory’s face. “Hotels in the area?”

Gavin smirked and leaned back in his seat. “Bottom of the box.”

~*~*~*~

He tried to act collected…innocent…but he wasn’t sure he could keep the mask in place for long when they started into a detailed discussion about his father and the evidence that Chloe had found on him.

How time changes things, he thought. Just a week ago he would have been chomping at the bit for this meeting with the FBI on the plan to bring down the head of the LuthorCorp empire, and now…now all he could think about was how there wouldn’t be an arrest or a trial because his father would be dead and gone before any of that had a chance to occur.

One of the agents took a quick glance around the office and Lex raised an inquiring eyebrow. Both of the agents had been there before, so why they’d expect something to change in such a short time was beyond him. Of course, being suspicious was probably second nature to them – just as it was to him. Suspicion prompted fear, fear prompted survival. That’s what it was all about.

“Shouldn’t Miss Sullivan be here for this?” the agent asked.

Lex inwardly bristled, but congratulated himself on not letting his discomfort over the mere mention of Chloe’s name show outwardly. “I’m afraid she had a previous engagement today, Agent Loder.”

In truth, he hadn’t even told her about the meeting. If he had, then she would have come and he wouldn’t have been able to face her because he now remembered the pain he had caused her. He was protecting her.

Loder arched his eyebrow in questioning and Lex allowed his mouth to curl into a forced half-grin. “School.”

“Ah,” Loder said. “Well, I suppose that’s alright. This is really just a perfunctory meeting anyway. We just wanted to tell you that the information Miss Sullivan sent to us has been verified and we’ve obtained the original documents. An arrest warrant has been put out for your father and will be acted upon sometime…” he stopped and glanced at his watch, “…in the next couple of hours.”

“That’s good news,” Lex said, though he was actually wondering how he could have his father’s accident pushed up to accommodate the new time frame, all while not incidentally alerting the FBI to his plan.

“It is,” Loder agreed. He paused and smiled at Lex, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “I suppose I’ll see you again when the pre-trial prep comes up. Our lawyers will let you and Miss Sullivan know when.”

They said their goodbyes, shook hands, and Lex inclined his head at the other (mercifully quiet) agent as an impersonal farewell. Then he crashed.

He barely remembered sitting down in his chair, only focusing on the way his hands were trembling as he rested his head in them.

He wondered if Dr. Garner could make him forget again.

~*~*~*~

He was two hours into his plane flight before he summoned the courage to take a look at Chloe’s medical files. Strangely, nothing else he’d ordered had felt like a tremendous invasion of privacy, but this…this made him feel guilty. Especially since he already knew that the news wasn’t good.

He took a sip of his scotch and skimmed through the first few pages, absolutely horrified by what he was seeing. As with most medical charts, the more recent visits to the hospital were up front and the latter stuff was toward the back. Chloe’s rape was just behind an incident where she was ‘attacked by a friend who had been brainwashed’.

What the hell?

Gregory didn’t think it was possible, but the reports stayed as grim as the first few; from being pushed out a window at the Luthor castle to being buried alive by a police officer bent on making a name for himself, Chloe had not just had accidents, but had been intentionally injured by several members of the Smallville community.

~“Is there really *any* safe place to live anymore?”~

Despite the initial logic behind Gavin’s reasoning, Gregory was beginning to think that any place in the world would be safer to live than Smallville, Kansas.

Now he just needed to convince Chloe of that.

[kitten]

*goes off to cry*

But it's a compliment with a story like this, really great chapter yet again. Just angsty great.

[autumngold]

This story is so good, but so sad!! Will Lex ever be able to face Chloe again? Will Gregory convince Chloe to move? Please, please let Chloe be able to face what happened to her and forgive Lex!! This is such an excellent story!! I can't wait til your next post!! :worship2: :chlexsign4: :worship2:

[Jen1388]

Yay! You updated! OMG it's so bloody brilliant!

Damn it, but I'm upset! That ended far too quickly, and now I wish I hadn't looked on here, so that I could save the update until later.

I know, I'm sad... unfortunately I can't help it.

Please update soon! I wanna see how Lex reacts when he sees Chloe. And Chloe when she meets Gregory.

[Béatrice]

Sorry to disappoint you, Gregory, but Chloe'll stay in Smallville with Lex even if it's unsafe town.
Please come back :yay: :chlexsign3:

[nokchan]

Thank god you updated!

All I have to say

[hfce]

Great update and gregory :rolleyes: she is not yours. :tease:



Hope :cool:

[S.Ann Smith]

*dances* yay an update



More soon please

[divine02us]

Oh wow

It's back! :yay:


Great update, can't wait for the next part.


D

[lexodus]

WHY? Why did you have to take Chloe away from Gabe? I hope she gives this "new daddy" a piece of her mind for going into her business. Poor Lex. It must suck to be him right now. Thank you for the update.

[Finding Beauty]

I wish I hadn't read this chapter so fast because I now want the next one to come around soon.

I'm not sure where I stand as far as Chloe's 'real' father is concerned. I understand that he's curious, but it's an invasion of her privacy. But then I think about the fact that Chloe's mom basically kept him in the dark about it and I feel sorry for him.

I'll wait to see whether he's a good guy or not.

As far as Lex and Chloe...I trust you to make it work in the best possible and most fitting way. I just can't wait to see where that leads.

[LazyBanana]

Awesome story. Please update soon!

[randa]

dun, dun, dun...*scary music* :biggrin:

great stuff, and i cant wait for the next update!

randa

[Sunny]

Come back here, now! I want moooorrreeeee.....

[scifichick774]

Gabe frowned and ran a hand over his face. Raising one teenage girl was expensive enough; having two live under his roof while he was the only provider was a disaster. The sad fact of the matter was that soon things were going to get pretty tight in the Sullivan household and he didn’t relish seeing the Chloe and Lana’s reactions to the news when he told them.

He had a feeling that Chloe would be understanding, because she always had been in the past, but Lana was a different story altogether. She was a sweet girl, but a bit naïve from having her Aunt Nell endlessly spoil her with material possessions for so many years. Though she understood that her stables charged her almost all of her take-home wages for continued care of her horse, she didn’t get that it also took money to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table.

What it came down to was that she didn’t understand the concept of prioritizing. She had essentially been raised to believe that she was the priority above all else and anything she wanted was temporarily elevated to her same status until she got it. He sighed. She was going to start crying about how unfair her life was when he told her that she would need to start paying for her new clothes out of her own paycheck.

As he sat at the desk in his home office, he couldn’t help thinking that he may have made a mistake in not urging Chloe to meet her biological father. It was no secret that the man had money, and if the two of them hit it off and formed some kind of relationship, he might be willing to provide for some of the expenses that college would inevitably bring.

He sighed again. In the end, he had left it up to Chloe, saying that his own feelings on the matter were irrelevant and that she was the one who needed to make the decision for herself. Stupid supportive parental conscience. If he’d been able to push his pride away, he might not have been so ambivalent about the whole thing; he might not have to feel as bad about telling his daughter that unless he found another job soon, they might have to dip into her college fund to pay for day to day living expenses.

He closed his eyes and smoothed a hand over his thinning hair. There were a lot of maybes, might’s, and what-ifs in that scenario and absolutely no guarantee that things would have gone like that at all. No attempts at communication had been made by either side and there was the very real possibility that Holcombe was having as much of a problem accepting the situation as he and Chloe were.

The sound of the doorbell’s chime jarred him from his thoughts and he sluggishly raised himself up from his chair to walk to the front door. A quick glance at the clock on the wall told him that it was two o’clock in the afternoon and since it was a Saturday, that meant that his unexpected visitor could be just about anyone.

Not having had the same unfortunate experiences with the more colorful residents of Smallville that Chloe and Lana had run into, he didn’t bother to take a look through the peephole to see who was on the other side. He unlocked the door and opened it, offering a tired if not congenial grin to the stranger on the other side.

“Can I help you?”

“Gabe Sullivan?” Gregory asked, already knowing the answer. Gavin’s investigative work had been extensive and there was no mistaking the man in front of him as anyone other than the man who had been pointed out as her ‘father’.

“Yes,” Gabe answered warily. Normally, his tone wouldn’t have been anywhere near as suspicious as it came out, but the stranger’s British accent was thick and he had an uncomfortable knot twisting in his gut at the sight of him.

“Gregory Holcombe,” Gregory said, politely holding out a hand for him to shake.

Gabe frowned and then nodded once, reaching out to shake the man’s hand quickly and get the perfunctory greetings out of the way. “I had a feeling you might show up.”

“Is she home?”

“On a Saturday?” Gabe asked with a mocking arched eyebrow. “You’re joking, right?”

“A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed, but I can’t say that I don’t understand your predicament. I’ve been having some trouble with all of this as well.”

Gabe nodded again and stepped aside, motioning with his arm for Gregory to come into the house. “Maybe we should talk.”

“I think that would be a good idea.”

~*~*~*~

She felt alone. Emotionally distanced from everything and everyone around her, Chloe was barely getting through each day. She’d been damaged before, so the heartbreak that inevitably followed was nothing new, but this time was…different.

The hurt had morphed into something cold and icy that numbed her from the inside out, but nearly enough. She still felt every bitter pang and every merciless stab. She was broken. And the worst part wasn’t that her friends didn’t know what to do or say, but that they didn’t seem to notice at all.

Had she really been so invisible all this time that the people who were supposed to be the closest to her couldn’t tell that she was going through something? Lana broke a nail and people took the day off to commiserate with her. Whereas she was raped, the mother who had abandoned her as a child died, and she found out that her father wasn’t her biological father and her friends still greeted her like life was full of flowers and sunshine.

Of course, she hadn’t told them. Out of the many things happening in her life at the moment, not one of them had a good way to be brought into a conversation.

No, Lana. I ordered an espresso, not an extra foamy latte. And by the way, I’ve been thinking about killing myself.

No, no. Not because of the coffee.

Maybe it was a good thing that no one had asked why she constantly had dark rings under her eyes as of late; good that her circle of friends (if they could be called that) were so self-involved not to have even noticed. It was a double-edged sword to be sure. Damned if they mentioned it because they’d blame her for hiding things from them, and damned if they didn’t because it proved once and for all that she truly was the outcast she’d always felt like she was.

And then there was Lex. She wasn’t sure that she considered him a friend, and didn’t know why she expected him to be different than anyone else, but she felt a sad, hollow twisting in her heart when she realized he wasn’t. On either count. He wasn’t a friend and he wasn’t any different than the rest of the people in town. She’d gotten him the information he needed and he proceeded to shut her out of his life – just like everyone else – at least until the next time they needed something.

“Whoa. What the hell happened to you?”

Chloe looked up from her where her absent gaze had been blurrily focused on her coffee cup to find Adam Knight sitting across from her at her table. Great. That was exactly what she needed; Lana’s bickering amour du jour.

“I think you stole my line,” she answered. “You’ve been M.I.A. for the almost a week now.”

Adam gave her a one-shouldered shrug as if it was nothing – or rather, as if it was nothing that he was going to answer honestly. “Hospital in Metropolis for additional testing and the effects of their experiments kind of lingered.”

Oh. So, she guessed he *did* answer it honestly. Well, there a first time for everything, right?

“Your turn,” Adam said, making eye contact with her and then keeping it. Truthfully, Chloe thought it was a little unnerving after having gotten used to people turning the other way when they saw her coming.

“It’s a long story,” she said, bringing her now lukewarm cup of coffee up to her lips to take a sip.

“Always an eloquent dodge,” he commented, causing a grin to quirk at the corners of her mouth. “But, unlike most of Smallville’s sterling intellectual minds, I don’t have the attention span of a fly, so give.”

“My mom died.”

Any teasing expression that remained on Adam’s face dropped with her comment. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry,” he said, thought it was clear that the sentiment was said to be polite rather than out of any genuine feeling over what had happened. “So, is that why you’re going for the night clerk at a convenience store look?”

“Sadly, no. It would be a lot easier if I could blame it on that though.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Chloe glanced around the Talon’s main ‘dining’ room. There weren’t a lot of people, but Smallville lived up to its name and rumors spread like wild fire from the most innocent of eavesdropping individuals.

“Ah. It’s one of those kinds of things,” Adam said knowingly. “I can keep a secret, you know.”

She looked back at him. “I know. But it’s not you I’m worried about.”

Adam raised his eyebrows in surprise, but didn’t bother to argue with her. Instead, he leaned forward, letting his own gaze dart around the Talon for any signs that someone might be listening to their conversation. “We can go somewhere else,” he offered in a hushed voice.

It was tempting. Very tempting. But even if they went somewhere else to actually talk, people would notice them leaving together and jump to the same assumptions that they always made. And seeing as how she lived with the young man’s temperamental girlfriend, she decided that any amount of relief she might feel from getting the weight of the world off her shoulders by spilling her guts to him wasn’t worth it.

“I ---”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but your father told me I might find you here.”

Both Chloe and Adam twisted and looked up to see who the unfamiliar voice belonged to, and while he was technically a stranger to both of them, Chloe recognized him immediately. For there stood a man she wasn’t sure she would ever meet in person - a man she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to meet in person.

“What are you doing here?” Her words weren’t mean or accusatory, just bleak and lacking any kind of emotion whatsoever.

“I see you’re taking the news about as well as I have been.”

The corners of her lips began to lift on their own, but they didn’t make it far before they fell again. “To be honest, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be taking it. It’s…a lot to absorb.”

Gregory sullenly nodded a couple of times in understanding. Planning conversations in one’s head was always a much easier task than going through with them with another person. He could only guess how the person was going to respond, he couldn’t control it.

Adam looked back and forth between them. Obviously there was something more going on in Chloe’s life than just her association with the Luthors, and if he was reading the signs of her stilted interaction correctly, then this stranger was a large part of it. Resigning himself to the fact that he wasn’t going to get any answers today, he stuck out his hand.

“Adam Knight.”

“Gregory Holcombe,” Gregory returned, shaking his hand for but a moment.

Adam rose from his seat and shared a meaningful look with Chloe. “Later, okay?”

She nodded. At the time, she wasn’t sure she meant it, but it wasn’t as if she had anyone else to talk to about what was going on.

Gregory took Adam’s place at the table and they sat there just looking at each other for a few minutes until Chloe sighed and took another sip of her coffee. It was completely cold now and she grimaced as the bitter liquid that was once palatable when heated now made her taste buds want to curl up and die.

She lowered the mug but kept her hands wrapped around it in a nervous gesture. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I should think the answer would be obvious, but in case it wasn’t, I didn’t know how much your Mr. Knight knew about our…situation.”

“Your investigators didn’t tell you everything you wanted to know?”

Gregory’s eyes widened for a split second. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected her not to find out after everything he’d read on her, but he still carried the confident arrogance that money brought with it and it through him for a loop that something he’d had done so discreetly had been found out by a high school student. Even if she was his daughter.

“They told me enough to warrant a visit,” he began carefully. Chloe raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but this town seems as if it has been less than kind toward you…physically speaking. I was concerned.”

Concerned. He didn’t even *know* her; how could he be concerned?

Because that’s how normal people are, she reminded herself. People who haven’t had their minds’ warped by Smallville’s unique atmosphere actually care about other living beings besides themselves.

She sighed. “It’s not just me,” she said. “Almost everyone I know has been in and out of the hospital several times a year since we moved here.”

“And you don’t think that’s a sign that you should leave?”

“Well, sure. But, as is the case for most underage dependants, I don’t really get a say in the matter.”

“I’ve spoken to your father…” Gregory started after a moment of pensive silence.

Something in Chloe’s stomach started to twist; not nervousness or apprehension, this rapidly coiling sensation was more akin to dread; a sense of impending doom that she could do absolutely nothing about. The hands clasped around her cold cup of coffee began to tremble.

“He said that you might need to move after this whole business with Luthor is done with.”

She was shaking all over now. The icy interior that had kept her marginally shielded against a breakdown for the last week cracked and crumbled under the intensity of her biological father’s intense stare and the implication of his words. It seemed surreal and heartbreaking, but she could tell at a glance that Gregory was being honest with her and that meant that her dad had betrayed her by going back on his promise to let it be her decision whether she would search out her. The only person she had left on her side and he’d let her down.

Chloe swallowed down the lump of hurt feelings that suddenly rose up in her throat and shakily pushed her chair away from the table to stand. She shook her head apologetically, frantically reaching for her bag while pointedly ignoring making eye contact with Gregory again.

“I…I can’t do this now…I’m sorry,” she hurriedly rambled out, jolting toward the front door and out of the coffee house as fast as she possibly could.

Her mind was a blur of thoughts and mixed emotions and she could barely see through the tears that were welling up in her eyes. She barely mumbled an apology as she bumped into someone and then kept bounding away, determined to get away from there even if she didn’t have another destination in mind.

Footsteps pounded on the concrete behind her and she was sobbing by the time a hard grip tugged at her elbow and spun her around, almost making her lose her balance because of it. Then she saw who it was. Worry etched over every inch of his face, Adam didn’t bother to ask her what was wrong again and pulled her into his embrace instead.

She buried her head against his chest and unabashedly wept, totally unaware and uncaring of the fact that other bore witness to her sudden and seemingly inexplicable emotional collapse.



TBC

[Queen Of Tact]

Ur back!!!!! yeah, Kris is back!!!! *jumps up and down*
Great update hon...... Poor Chloe....


CC

[hfce]

Oh I feeel so bad for Chloe. :cryblue:

[AlabamaWorley]

Such a good fic - I'm really glad you're giving Adam some human being time. He had a lot of potential that was wasted on Lana. I'm interested to see what will happen now that new father knows she was raped.

[autumngold]

Thank you so much for updating this fabulous story Kris!! What a wonderful New Years Day present!! Even though I wish it was Lex, I'm glad that Chloe has someone who cares about her!! I still don't trust Adam though!! Please post more soon!! I can't wait to read Lex's reaction when he finds out who Chloe's father really is!! :yay: :chlexsign3: :yay:

[FroggyJump]

Such depressing thoughts. This was a nice little update. I find it hard to read that Gregory is able to just come into town and want Chloe to go with him, I really feel for Gabe. can't wait for the next installment

[Kit Merlot]

Wow, this story is heart wrenching!

But I like Adam isn this story and I hope he can help Chloe deal.

Excellent!

[Jen1388]

as always, fantastic update! I'm just so pulled in by this fic, it's amazing... and that was a really really great update, how do you manage it? I mean there's not even any Lex or Chlex in it, but it still rocks serious butt... I think it's the Chloe and Adam interaction:p Call me whatever, but i'm loving it

(Great now I've got the stupid mcdonalds, 'buy one, get one free, ooo I'm loving it' advert in my head.)

Update soon!!!

[Sunny]

I think that I'm going to love Gregory... I don't know why... lol... Great update... more please!

[randa]

this is so amazing and great and sad and heart-wenching...i love it all!



randa

[lexodus]

God! I love this story!!! :yay: Of course, I'm a total Chlexer, but I wouldn't mind any Chloe/Adam either. It seems like a natural thing, go back and watch Delete. Either way, this story is so good!!!!! :yay:

[norahcynthia]

Wow, I've just got through reading all of the parts to this story and I am just amazed :worship2: . This is such a powerful and heartbreaking story so far, very dark but absolutely fascinating. And very intriguing! I hope it gets updated soon, I'm interested to see how it all turns out.

[zelda]

:yay: Please update soon. I'm really curious to see where the Adam thing goes.

[Blu_FireFly81]

Please update soon!

:worship2: :worship2: :worship2:


:chlexsign4:

[Sunny]

Plllleeeaasseee... update!

[Shy Butterfly]

wow this is a great story!!!!

please continue soon!!!!

[starmoon]

More please I want to read more.

[suspension of disbelief]

ei, why haven't you update this...it's been far too long....what would make you update?....

[welshy]

I hope there's going to be more

[suspension of disbelief]

we want an update!!!.... please....

[Whenyoufall]

This is wonderful, hope you're planning on updating soon.

[Jen1388]

Okay... where's the update? Come on! This is like on the last page? How did that happen... don't think we've forgotten about this story Kris... we want an update!!!:D

[Leo Princess]

Update, por favor!

[darkangel]

Please update. This is a very good fic.

[starmoon]

please update soon i realy want to read more.

[Nadia_]

This fic needs some serious update!!

I would just really like to read more! It's such and interesting plot!

Please update!

[kimmie]

This fic is in desperate need of an update, so please come back!!!

Kimmie

[Possibilities Unknown]

Oh! Great story! I notice that yo uhaven't updated in a while...wanna make me happy and update soon :D I absolutly adore this story and that would be so awesome :D

[gecko]

please update with a cherry on top?

[Gaia]

It's not nice that a story like this has to be in a graveyard...not nice at all.
You really can't leave it here..because it needs to be updated...like right away.
Please
Pretty please
Pretty please with a cherry on top...ans chocolate as well
Please?

[txalb]

This is one that I cannot wait to see finished. I really hope you haven’t abandoned this one. I love the storyline and I really want to see how you plan to resolve the major issues that they are going to be facing soon. Personally I don’t see how it would be possible to overcome the rape but I really want to read how it plays out.

Hope you continue soon and thanks for writing.

txalb

[Kikina]

Pleeeeease, continue writing this story.It´s too good to be abandoned ;)

[eternitychlex]

I just found this story and it is amazing............I hope you will continue it.........Please update............I find this story magnificent, and I can not wait to see what happens next.............

[rockadaisy]

I AGREE. just found it, love it, please come back and finish it.

amazing story. please?

[starmoon]

great story so far please update it i can't wait to find out what happend next.

[peapod]

you are cruel for leaving it there. CRUEL!!!!

[scifichick774]

A/N: You have my sincerest apologies for the long delay on this one. Recently, my muse decided to rekindle her affection for this ship, so hopefully she'll continue to keep the love until I'm able to finish this fic. Thank you all for your patience.

~*~*~

He'd known he couldn't keep Chloe at arm's length forever. She was too stubborn to let anything get in her way when she really wanted something – even if the obstacle was made up of good intentions.

Still, that didn't mean that he had to completely fall victim to her persistence, and thereby destroy both of their futures.

He made sure he was sitting behind his desk by the time his butler showed her into his office. If he couldn't invade her personal space, maybe the urges to touch her and breathe in her scent wouldn't be as strong.

He'd always been very good at immersing himself in denial.

He wondered why the tactic was failing him now.

No. He knew why.

He had been in love with her, and still might be if he let himself get close enough to her to rekindle those feelings.

In love with a woman he'd hurt badly enough that she would never love him back.

The prospect was terrifying.

But despite his fear and his resolution to act in his best interests for once in his personal life, when she came through the door, he found himself rising to greet her; not because of the manners he'd been forced to learn at an early age, but because the usually spunky reporter looked as though her world had just fallen apart.

“Chloe?” He moved toward her out of reflex, temporarily forgetting that all of his recent brooding had been for a reason, and that the small comfort he could offer her probably wouldn't be welcome. “What's wrong? What happened?”

His father might be in federal custody, but he harbored no delusions about how far the man's control reached. One cryptic phone call to his lawyers would be all that was needed to ensure that one of the lead witnesses for the prosecution would find herself more concerned with her personal safety than with convicting him.

“Everything,” she said dully and then waited a beat before making a flippant motion with her hand in the air. “But I didn't come here to complain.”

Which made her the first person in the last person in at least a week who hadn't, he thought dourly.

“I just wanted to tell you . . . I thought you deserved to hear it from me . . . ”

She trailed off and took in a large draw of air. She refused to meet his eyes when she started talking again, and he rightly took it as a bad sign of what was coming.

“It looks like I'm going to be moving after the trial. Maybe even before.”

He furrowed his brow. Gabe hadn't mentioned anything about finding another job – or even looking for one – and the man was a conscientious enough worker to make sure he didn't burn his bridges behind him.

Lex supposed there was the possibility that Chloe's mom had returned to factor herself into the equation, but it seemed a slim chance in his mind. Admittedly, he didn't know much about Gabe's ex-wife, but the little he did know didn't lend itself to her re-emergence into their lives at such a late date.

She'd abandoned Chloe and Gabe and she hadn't fought for custody when the divorce was finalized; why she would suddenly ask for rights now when her daughter was so close to not legally needing to be in anyone's custody was beyond him.

“Why?”

It was a simple question that never had a simple answer. He somehow doubted now would prove to be the exception to that rule, but he wanted to hear what she had to say anyway.

She sighed and skirted around him, moving toward one of the chairs on the visitors' side of his desk. She dropped down onto it, the picture of exhaustion.

The only time he'd ever seen her looking so poorly was when she was in the hospital. The thought didn't raise his spirits. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

He chose the seat next to hers rather than the one on the other side of his desk where he'd been planning to stay throughout the entire visit. He should have remembered how badly his plans had a tendency to come out when they weren't business-related.

“To make a really long story short: my mom died.”

What?

He knew he wasn't as informed about town gossip as he used to be, simply because other things – namely recovering his lost memories and his father's arrest and incarceration – had obviously taken precedence, but it seemed to him as if that should have been one piece of news that made it to his ears, via Clark at least, or maybe even Lana.

“Apparently she mentioned me in her will, which came as a huge surprise to her husband since he didn't even know I existed.”

“Go on.”

She frowned and cast her eyes down to her hands, where the fingers of her left hand were twisting a ring around on one on her right. “She was cheating on my dad before she even got pregnant with me. With the guy she ended up marrying. She . . . I guess, according to the lawyers, they took a break of about a year during their courtship, and letters that he saved have dates on them that suggest that time correlated with her pregnancy with me.”

. . . Oh.

Oh, fuck.

He knew what she was going to say now; there was nothing else that could explain the dim of the fire that used to be in her eyes.

“Anyway, her husband thought I might be his . . . you know, biologically. I had to take a DNA test to see if I was.”

“And?”

His voice cracked with emotion, but Chloe didn't notice.

“Yeah.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “And he did his research when he found out. He managed to convince my dad that it's not safe here and that I should move.”

The first point was difficult to argue. The second, however . . .

Well, that was difficult, too.

He didn't want her to move, for obvious reasons, but he couldn't deny that she would be a dozen times safer living anywhere else.

Hell, war zones were safer than Smallville.

She shook her head – a slow, morose movement of disbelief – and his attention was drawn back to the conversation.

“The whole thing's really messed up,” she said and then sighed. “Anyway, Mr. Holcombe apparently has connections—” She made air quotes as she said the word. “—and he's talking to the FBI right now to see if they'll let me just record video testimony so I can leave sooner.”

Lex didn't think he was gaping, but he wouldn't have been surprised to find out he was. He felt like he'd taken a sucker punch to the gut – or several, he reflected with an inner wince – and the body's first reaction to that would be to open his mouth to let his groan of breath out.

The second would be to immediately curl in upon itself in sort of a standing fetal position.

He thought he might be able to keep from doing that just yet, but he wouldn't place any bets on his ability to hold it together after Chloe left his office.

“Mr. Holcombe?” he asked instead. His voice hovered over the line between defensive and angry, but at least it didn't sound shaky or distraught like he really felt.

“Bio-Dad,” she said, her language slipping into the snarky vocabulary he was more familiar hearing from her.

Too familiar.

Comfortably familiar.

The ache that squeezed his heart and threatened to lodge his stomach up into his throat actually eased a little when she spoke that way to him. It meant she was relaxed in his presence.

It meant that maybe, just maybe, she'd forgiven him even though he would never be able to forgive himself.

“Gregory Holcombe.”

And there was the confirmation he'd been dreading.

Fuck.

He'd heard the man was in town, of course, but since Holcombe hadn't approached him and didn't seem to be sniffing around any of his local business ventures, he'd assumed he was there for something that didn't involve him.

He was wrong.

Anything having to do with Chloe involved him. Even if he was trying to pretend it didn't.

“He's rich, apparently, but I'd never heard of him until the lawyers showed up at my house for a DNA sample.” She paused and looked away. “I guess Dad was fighting them in court about it for months. He just never bothered to mention it to me.”

Her pain was palpable and even at the risk of coming across sounding like Jonathan Kent during one of his lectures on how everyone else should live their lives, he couldn't help trying to ease it.

“He probably didn't want to believe it, Chloe. It's a lot easier to ignore a problem if you don't talk about it.”

He very nearly added, 'Take it from me. I have a lot of experience in that area', but didn't. He was glad his brain was swifter than his tongue – at least today.

“Still,” she said.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

For everything.

“It's hard to believe you're moving. I can understand your dad not wanting to tell you about Holcombe until he had no choice, but I'm surprised that he's willing to let you leave with someone who may as well be a complete stranger.”

Chloe shrugged. “He would have had to soon anyway. Not the 'stranger' part, but this is my senior year, so . . . ”

“College.”

“Yeah.”

Right. But he'd always assumed she would go to one of the universities in Metropolis; chase her dream of becoming a reporter for the Daily Planet on her own merits instead of his father's influence.

Metropolis was close, relatively speaking. He could have still seen her on a regular basis.

England, where his memory told him Holcombe lived, was . . . far too far away.

“That's part of the reason Dad wants me to go, I think. He didn't come right out and say so, but I know it hasn't been easy lately, financially speaking.”

Lex leaned forward. “Why didn't you say anything? You know I would have—”

“I think it's safe to say that you've had your own problems to deal with. And things haven't been bad enough at home for me to start asking my friends for money.”

He suspected they would never get that bad in her mind. Even if she and her father were reduced to living in a homeless shelter, she wasn't the sort of person who asked for that kind of help.

Unlike some of his other so-called friends.

And thinking of that, Chloe's words echoed in his head; taunting him to the point where he had to say something or risk losing his mind.

Again.

“Is that what you consider me? A friend?”

Not a manipulative bastard or a drug-addled rapist?

Even just being considered an associate would have cheered him immensely.

But a friend.

He hadn't even dared hope for that; not after he recovered bits and pieces of his memory that suggested she had every reason to despise him.

She looked confused. “Well . . . yeah. I mean, I thought so. You don't think we're—”

“Why didn't you tell me?” he blurted out.

He didn't sound like he thought he had a right to the information, like he imagined Clark or Lana might have. He sounded hurt.

And that was strange, he thought, because wouldn't he have been more upset if she had told him he raped her?

Chloe blinked. “I . . . kind of thought you already knew, Lex. True, we don't exactly pal around like some friends, but . . . I thought it was pretty obvious.”

He met her confused gaze with an unrelenting stare. “I don't mean that, Chloe. I agree, I think we're friends.”

Or he hoped so, anyway.

“Okay. So . . . ?”

“So why didn't you tell me what I did to you when I was under the effects of the drugs my father was feeding me?”

He couldn't say 'rape'. Not out loud.

It was hard enough to come to terms with it in his own mind, and honestly, he wasn't sure he had completely.

Not yet.

Chloe's lips parted, but she quickly closed them and scrambled out of her seat. She didn't rush to the door, though. In fact, she didn't try to leave at all.

Instead, she put distance between them by walking over to the window – a tremendous display of her part, considering what had happened to her there years before.

“You remember.”

It was a statement, not a question.

He rose from his seat, but allowed her to keep the safety she must have felt the space between them provided her. “Not exactly. I asked you if we'd slept together because I kept . . . ” He stopped and then started over. “I kept having dreams, even when I was awake. But they were frustrating jumbles of truth and fiction. I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. I saw – I dreamed – a few snippets of what felt like memory. Of the two of us. The first one was so short that I could only get the image of us . . . together.”

He didn't tell her that the emotions he'd felt while viewing it inside his head were nothing like the ones he vaguely recalled he felt from when he assaulted her in reality. His fantasy had been much more loving than the actual experience, and he doubted she would appreciate hearing about his emotions when she had been subjected to the worst of them.

“That's when I asked you. After hearing your response, I had a few more flashes.”

He stared at the back of her head, wishing she would turn around to face him, and at the same time praying she wouldn't. Confessions were always easier when they weren't made face to face, but at the same time, she deserved the truth.

“I looked into your hospital records to see if they were just nightmares or if they could be confirmed.”

Even if he felt bad about it, he didn't apologize, because he'd needed to know.

He hoped she understood.

He would accept the consequences if she didn't.




tbc

[Kit Merlot]

Kris, I am beyond thrilled that you are continuing this fic--even if it is an emotional and heart-wrenching story!

I do like that Lex is talking to Chloe about what happened, and that Chloe feels that she can still trust him.

[tatie87]

Yeah an update. I'm so excited you wrote more on this story. I love this plot. I can't wait to see what happens next.

[Starangel148]

Emotional chapter. I want to know why Chloe is reacting so calmly to this. Update soon.

[zho9]

Emotional chapter. I want to know why Chloe is reacting so calmly to this. Update soon.

I agree, I still can't believe how placid she seems, that can't be a good thing to just push aside something so traumatic. Denial is never good. This is just gut-wrenching and I can't wait for the next update.

Welcome back and thank you for updating this story!

[emnorth2002]

*bounces with glee* I know, I know, I'm greedy for wanting more of this when I also want more of Repercussions, and Compliance Issues, and Ball and Chain, and hey, I'd really love if you wrote . . .

Wait, that's not what I wanted to say when I started this message. Erm, sorry about that. I get easily distracted, especially when it comes to lovely, shiny Krisfic.

Anyway, I fell in love with this ship because of your wonderful stories, and I'm beyond thrilled that your muse has you thinking along these lines again. And what a terrific update! Hurray for Chlex interaction, and Lex finally being the one to hear (pretty much) the whole story of what she's going through simply because he's the one who bothered to ask, and listen to her answer. And I'm loving the way your Lex is so desperate for any sign of . . . well, anything other than loathing from Chloe that he takes hope from the tiniest things. It's heartbreakingly sweet, and all so wonderful that I can't wait to see more!

But hey, that's not to say that I wouldn't like more Repercussions, or Compliance Issues, or Ball and Chain, or . . . *wink* You get the idea.

:-)
Em

[hfce]

I am shocked beyond belief. I never thought I would see another Chlex fic from you. I am so happy. I had to go back in my memory for this one. What a great update welcome back. :)

[michelle_19781997]

I'm so happy you're back. Your stories were always some of the best out there.

[somethingeasy]

Oh WOW, Kris, I am ecstatic that you’ve chosen to come back to Chlex again. I’ve loved your fics, and I always mourned the fact that the Forum lost one of it’s strongest (and hottest) writers the day you decided to leave. I’m really glad that you’ve decided to take up this fic again and complete it. It’s a very gut-wrenching, emotionally traumatizing story… and I LOVE a good measure of angst, anguish and trauma inside any fic. Add in a good measure of self-loathing from Lex, and my day is made, LOL!

I read through the chapters preceding this one, and I am enthralled by the plot line that has been built up so far. I did mention that I love to see characters suffering? Which means that, even as I was cringing, I revelled in the way that Chloe has been emotionally (and physically) neglected, beaten, violated and traumatized to the point where she’s almost completely lost her spirit as well as her will to live. The idea of CHLOE having that exuberant spark nearly snuffed out of her… it’s enough to make any reader weep.

The rape scene was brutal, Kris! I loved how you made it clear that Chloe did NOT ‘enjoy it’ even the slightest bit. It was horrible, brutal, violent and agonizingly painful for her. It’s really no wonder that Chloe ended up nearly emotionally deadened from the experience… not only the rape itself, but also the fact that NO-ONE noticed or comforted her after her trauma. The poor thing!

I also really enjoyed how even Lex felt such horrendous trauma and self-hatred once he remembered everything that had happened. It’s going to be interesting to see how he manages to balance out his longing and desire to be with Chloe against his wish to keep her safe and happy (logic dictates, his presence will only bring her misery and harm).


He made sure he was sitting behind his desk by the time his butler showed her into his office. If he couldn't invade her personal space, maybe the urges to touch her and breathe in her scent wouldn't be as strong.

He'd always been very good at immersing himself in denial.

He wondered why the tactic was failing him now.

No. He knew why.

He had been in love with her, and still might be if he let himself get close enough to her to rekindle those feelings.

In love with a woman he'd hurt badly enough that she would never love him back.

The prospect was terrifying.

I loved how the chapter started with Lex battling away his extreme, desperate desire for Chloe while at the same time in complete and utter despair about being in love with a woman who would never return his feelings. I love seeing Lex when he’s desperately longing for something (or someone) that he knows he knows he’s NEVER going to get…

LOL! I especially liked the self-assessment he made about his tendency to throw himself into denial. I think it’s that same sense of denial that will have him try to push for a relationship with Chloe even though logic, reason, sanity and common-sense will keep telling him it’s HOPELESS! Oh, this is going to be GOOD!

It was a great plot twist to give Chloe an ‘out’ from this town in the shape of a long-lost biological father. Although it made me scream to imagine some upstart usurper coming out of the woodwork to tell Chloe Sullivan that her beloved father was not actually her ‘real dad’. I felt so BAD for both Chloe and Gabe… especially for Gabe. His wife left him for another man, and now he finds out that this ‘other man’ is trying to lay claim on Chloe as well. How awful!

I really enjoyed how Chloe broke the news of her moving to Lex… and his mind immediately started listing out all kinds of ridiculous, frantic explanations about WHY that was happening. It was a pretty good guess for him to think that Moira Sullivan was involved somehow, although he didn’t guess the specifics quite right.


He didn't want her to move, for obvious reasons, but he couldn't deny that she would be a dozen times safer living anywhere else.

Hell, war zones were safer than Smallville.

Heh, this IS something that Lex is going to find hard to argue and fight against. On one hand, he needs Chloe to stay close to him, because he loves her and… well… he just needs her. But on the other hand, what kind of a selfish bastard would he be if he tried to manipulate or force Chloe into staying in a town with the mortality rate of a war zone?


“The whole thing's really messed up,” she said and then sighed. “Anyway, Mr. Holcombe apparently has connections—” She made air quotes as she said the word. “—and he's talking to the FBI right now to see if they'll let me just record video testimony so I can leave sooner.”

ooooh, the idea of a video testimony is a GOOD one. Actually it’s something that should have been done before. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think a video testimony actually gains more weight and legal relevance if a witness is somehow killed anytime between making the video and the trial. Lionel wouldn’t dare to hurt Chloe while there’s a video of her statement ready to go on for his trial… not unless he wants to give her video the relevance of a ‘dying statement’.


Lex didn't think he was gaping, but he wouldn't have been surprised to find out he was. He felt like he'd taken a sucker punch to the gut – or several, he reflected with an inner wince – and the body's first reaction to that would be to open his mouth to let his groan of breath out.

The second would be to immediately curl in upon itself in sort of a standing fetal position.

I LOVED this! I loved seeing the visceral PAIN that has come over Lex when he hears that Chloe is going to be ‘leaving him’. I loved the description about how it was like a ‘sucker-punch to the gut’. Fantastic, Kris!


“Bio-Dad,” she said, her language slipping into the snarky vocabulary he was more familiar hearing from her.

Too familiar.

Comfortably familiar.

The ache that squeezed his heart and threatened to lodge his stomach up into his throat actually eased a little when she spoke that way to him. It meant she was relaxed in his presence.

It meant that maybe, just maybe, she'd forgiven him even though he would never be able to forgive himself.

LOL! I also enjoyed her snarky ‘Bio-Dad’ quip. I wonder whether Gregory minds that term. But I think it’s great that Chloe is making a point of distinguishing between her dad and ‘Bio-Dad’.

Heh, and I also loved the way that Lex is clutching at any straw or indication that Chloe might be able to forgive him. Even a spark of her old sense of humour in his presence has given him such HUGE hope, relief and happiness. Heh, he’s determined to grasp onto any sign of possible reconciliation that he can see… no matter how small and seemingly insignificant.


Right. But he'd always assumed she would go to one of the universities in Metropolis; chase her dream of becoming a reporter for the Daily Planet on her own merits instead of his father's influence.

I suppose this is something that both Gabe and Chloe are using to comfort themselves. But the truth is that there’s a WORLD of difference between her leaving to go off to college, and her leaving to go off with ‘another father’. Poor Gabe!

It WAS very interesting to see how Lex was devastated by the idea of Chloe going off to England instead of Metropolis. It seems like, despite his knowledge that his presence is probably NOT something that Chloe would welcome, he STILL had plans (at the back of his head) to seek out her company in Smallville as well as in Metropolis. Heh, I guess he always knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep a ‘respectful distance’ from her for too long.


“Is that what you consider me? A friend?”

Not a manipulative bastard or a drug-addled rapist?

Even just being considered an associate would have cheered him immensely.

But a friend.

He hadn't even dared hope for that; not after he recovered bits and pieces of his memory that suggested she had every reason to despise him.

Heh, like I mentioned… he’s clutching at whatever straws and signs he can get. Chloe gave an off-hand comment about them being friends, and he POUNCED on that casual comment like it was a life preserver. LOL! You can see he’s already building himself up, ready to start wooing her… convincing himself that he stands a chance at earning her love and desire as WELL as he forgiveness.


“So why didn't you tell me what I did to you when I was under the effects of the drugs my father was feeding me?”

He couldn't say 'rape'. Not out loud.

It was hard enough to come to terms with it in his own mind, and honestly, he wasn't sure he had completely.

Not yet.

Oh dear heavens! He actually brought it up! He addressed this huge, nasty, monstrous ‘thing’ between them. Wow! He’s actually a great deal braver than I would have imagined… OR a great deal more desperate. I guess he’s hoping that they might be able to deal and move past this, if they start by talking about it.


Chloe's lips parted, but she quickly closed them and scrambled out of her seat. She didn't rush to the door, though. In fact, she didn't try to leave at all.

Instead, she put distance between them by walking over to the window – a tremendous display of her part, considering what had happened to her there years before.

Poor Chloe! I can’t imagine how frightening it must be for her… to have that issues brought up in THIS particular place. This is probably the worst place to being up those memories… Lex will probably be beating himself up for being an idiot for not thinking before he brought up this topic… over HERE of all places!


He didn't tell her that the emotions he'd felt while viewing it inside his head were nothing like the ones he vaguely recalled he felt from when he assaulted her in reality. His fantasy had been much more loving than the actual experience, and he doubted she would appreciate hearing about his emotions when she had been subjected to the worst of them.

hmmm, actually I think it will help Chloe to hear about these ‘gentle, tender, loving fantasies’… although not right now, not while the wound is still so stark and fresh.

I’d love to see how the rest of this conversation continues in future chapters. I look forward to reading them, Kris. Good luck!

Hmmm, I don’t suppose I can also convince you to get started on the sequel to the Chruce/Chlex fic ‘The Deal’, can I? pretty please? :beg:

Anyhow, welcome back to the Forum. It’s fantastic to see you here again, and I am SO pleased that you’re started writing Chlex again!

[lj715]

How did I miss this update? SO glad you returned , excellent update.

[txalb]

I have to say that it took me a couple seconds of looking at the new post to figure out where I'd heard of the story before... and then I shrieked like a little girl. This was a great update and I hope your Chloe/Lex muse doesn't abandon you again. Thanks for writing.

[lilinny]

I can't believe you're back!! I'm so happy! You wrote some great strories back then and this story is no different. This story is so heart wrenching. I can't wait for more. If I hadn't said it yet, welcome back!!

[sbrown1016]

I am sooooo glad to see you writing again. Your stories got me hooked on chlex oh so long ago.

[TabbyG]

I can't wait until this story is updated. I want to know how Lex will react when the Sullivans leave Smallville. That might be an epic argument especially when both of Chloe's father's find out she is "invloved" with Lex Luthor.

[starmoon]

more please write more i can't wait to find out what lex does next.

[gecko]

such an amazing update after so long, i love the fact that chloe and lex are talking about what happened between them and that chloe has told him what's going on in her life and him not hearing it through the grapevine. great work, can't wait for the next part and how chloe answers lex's question.

[pipersmum]

Love this story and I am intrigued to see if Adam turns out to be a good guy or a bad guy also will Chloe move away ??? So Lex has finally got up the courage to ask Chloe about the rape I think it will do him good to hear her response. I can't wait to read more of this :)

[TabbyG]

This story is turning out to be one of my very favorites. Lex and Chloe's fathers might go head to head when they find out what happened. This is a great story

[Goldielocks]

OMg i just found this fic and it's already on my top 10 fics to read.... Please update as soon as you can, I'll be waiting for that update!

[Gaia]

How did I not notice your return? I'm a horrible reader.
Anyway- loved the update.
Who is Chloe's new dad anyway- Lex knows him...so he has to be someone big. Evil even maybe. Worse than Luhtors?
And Adam....hmmm...is he evil or good...we need to know.

[smugirl]

Love all your stories...I'm glad you're getting back around to finishing this one.

[nana]

Yay, I'm so happy this story is getting updated! I hope your Chlex muse is here to stay because I love your stories.

[Tanschana]

Ok, you did it! You got me hooked!!
And now, you gotta suffer the consequences!
Yes, that means more updates!
NOW! :yeahbaby:
Please, soon?
Pretty Please?!?! :beg: It's such a great story! And I want to know what happens next! *waiting impatiently*

[eternitychlex]

Pretty please update soon!!!!!!!!!!!

[Thaís]

Okay, stay calm.... There's more, right? Right??????????????????????

[scifichick774]

A/N: Sorry for the delay. My SV muse is rather fleeting these days. Just so I don't get flayed for the last part of this, I feel the need to tell you that the Chloe/Adam interaction in this fic isn't going to turn romantic, but their friendship is necessary to further the plot of the fic.

~*~*~

Chloe sighed and glanced away from him again. He was obviously still waiting for an answer, but she doubted that he would ever really accept any answer she was able to give him.

And she wasn't sure she had one that she could put into words anyway.

“Do you have any idea how much I've been through since my dad and I first moved here?”

Her voice was little more than a whisper, but she still somehow managed to choke on it. She imagined that was because her subconscious knew what she was saying was the wrong way to approach the problem. Unfortunately, it failed to offer an alternative, so she was forced to continue.

There was a significant pause before he replied, his voice just as rough and full of emotion as hers was. “A lot.”

“Yeah. A lot. I'm not going to lie and tell you I wasn't hurt when . . .” When he raped her. Oh, yes. She was hurt. Badly. Physically and emotionally. All things considered, she thought she'd done a good job of numbing the pain enough to carry on, though; and without the help of therapy or drugs, at that.

She took a steadying breath and then plowed forward. “I knew you'd be hurt worse if I suddenly stopped working with you and blamed it on the fact that you committed a crime you couldn't even remember. Hell, one you weren't even really responsible for because of all the drugs your dad had you on. It just . . . it seemed easier to live in denial-land and pretend the whole thing never happened. If you didn't remember, didn't look at me weird all the time, then I thought it would be easier to forget.

“And yes, I'm aware of how totally screwed up that makes me sound, but if I'd never learned to compartmentalize my feelings, then I would have wound up dead a long time ago.”

It was a babbled out excuse, lacking logic in more than a couple areas, but after finally giving in to a very public breakdown recently – and dodging Adam's phone calls and text messages since then – it was the best explanation she could give him.

Anything more coherent and she would be risking mentally reliving events that had taken a long time to wipe from her waking mind. She couldn't afford to be so vulnerable again; not with everything that was happening.

She watched as Lex's lips parted to speak, and then closed again so he could swallow instead. Since he hadn't been drinking anything, she assumed the action was to rid himself of the lump that had risen up into his throat.

She empathized.

“Chloe.” He sounded pained. “I—”

“It wasn't your fault,” she said shortly, wanting very much to drop the topic.

Or fall through a trap door in the floor.

Surely Lionel would have made some 'improvements' to the castle's blueprints when he had it brought over from Scotland.

And if he hadn't, he should have. A trap door to eliminate pesky intruders and unwelcome visitors would fit in perfectly with his evil villain persona.

“Extenuating circumstances or not, you can't say that I'm not to blame.”

“Yes, I can.”

Victim's prerogative.

Of course, she wasn't going to tell him that. It was a flimsy justification; enough to keep her from going out of her mind and start rocking back and forth in the corner of a hospital room, but probably not enough for Lex to buy into it.

She gave her head a quick shake. “I didn't come here to talk about this.”

And since she was likely to lose her last grip on sanity if they continued, she was going to put an end to it right now.

“I just wanted to let you know . . . you know. About Holcombe; about me probably leaving. I didn't want you to think I was skipping out on you.”

He didn't nod, he didn't tip his head to the side. He didn't do anything but stand there, his expression grave and filled with immeasurable pain and confusion.

“Well. That's it.”

Her heart was beating triple time, fueling her panic with incredible blood flow, and urging her to get out of there before she broke down again, this time in front of one of the few people she could scarcely afford to.

“I'll just . . . go.”

She turned toward the door and started walking, and she even made it within a few feet of the exit before Lex finally spoke, his voice so quiet that she almost missed it.

“Chloe?”

She stopped, but didn't look back or reply.

“I'm sorry.”

Her breath caught, and not in a good way. Rather, she felt like all the air had been ripped from her lungs in the worst imaginable way. She'd spent a full ten minutes sobbing uncontrollably in Adam's arms less than a week ago, but the cathartic release she'd convinced herself she gained from it clearly hadn't been enough.

Her voice was closer to a weep when she responded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

~*~*~

Gregory frowned. Gavin was the best private detective money could buy and he didn't doubt his findings, it was just that they didn't make any sense.

“He was dead?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Not a faked death to get away from dangerous criminal elements or—”

“No. He was really dead,” Gavin said. “From what I've been able to gather, and it isn't much, it looks like Lionel Luthor has been running some less than legal experiments at some of his lesser known shadow companies.”

“Playing God,” Gregory mused.

“That's not who I would have picked to compare him to, but sure.”

He let out a short huff of amusement and turned his attention back to the information that had been gathered at his request. “So I suppose that leaves the question: what purpose could Luthor have possibly had for bringing a high school student back from the dead?”

“My best guess?”

“Please.”

“Military applications. Quite a few governments would shell out lots of money for something that would bring back soldiers who have already been trained, at least long enough to try and win whatever war they're engaged in at the time.”

“Long enough?”

“The system . . . it's not perfect. Don't get me wrong, even with all the problems, it's still a miracle that Luthor's people were able to come up with something like this, but like I said, there are glitches in the mechanics. Several of them. The primary one being that the specimen – Adam Knight in this case – is reliant on some kind of medication to stay alive. Something about a virus or antigen . . . I wasn't able to get everything. Luthor keeps better security on the things he knows can put him away for good if they were found out.”

Gregory grimaced. “Chloe's . . . attached to him. To Knight.”

“I noticed.”

“She had a bit of a breakdown last week after we first met. He ran to comfort her and wouldn't let anyone near her any time they dared take a step in her direction.”

“Well, you'll be leaving soon enough, so it won't really matter, will it?”

“No. I suppose not.”

“If it makes you feel any better, he's a good kid compared to some of the people she could be hanging out with. He's basically a living corpse and he's slightly sociopathic, but neither is his fault. The first is because of Luthor, the second because of the town. I swear there's something in the water. I've never seen anything like this in all my life, and I've seen a lot of things.”

“More reason to get Chloe out of here as soon as possible. Speaking of . . . she's set to give video testimony against Luthor this Friday.”

“Ah. Do you think he'll send someone to . . . uh . . . take care of the problem, so to speak?”

“I think that's a reasonable assumption. I'm flying over some of my own security detail to cover her, but somehow I doubt that will dissuade him.”

“You need me to do anything?”

“I'm not sure yet. Perhaps. I'll keep you posted.”

~*~*~

Holcombe must have had a lot more contacts than she originally thought, because it seemed as though the feds were only too happy – too quick – to jump at his say-so. Agent Loder said it was just because her taping video testimony was a good idea, not because her biological father knew all the right strings to pull, but she'd been around master puppeteers for too long not to recognize one when she saw him in action.

Chloe grumbled under her breath. The FBI had been quick to agree to Holcombe's proposal, but that had been the only quick part about any of it. Actually taping her testimony took freaking forever – three hours of her life she would never get back, to be precise.

By the time it was over, she felt like they'd grilled her just as ruthlessly as Lionel Luthor's lawyers would have done if she'd been allowed to show up for court – although, she thought, that was probably the point – and every brain cell she had that was left standing was begging her to collapse from exhaustion.

The drive home from Metropolis hadn't provided any kind of respite since her dad wanted her to reassure him she was okay every five minutes, therefore, she was about to get really angry, really fast, at whoever the idiot was who was throwing pebbles at her window to get her attention.

Yes, she'd turned her cell phone off – for a reason! – but that was no excuse for whatever moron was down there to be waking her up from a much needed afternoon nap. They were probably trying to get Lana's attention, anyway, and didn't realize her windows were on the other side of the house.

Or that school had only been out for an hour and a half, so the brunette girl was at the Talon instead of at home.

Some stalker they were.

With a groan, she hauled herself off the bed, still fully clothed because she'd opted to simply flop down onto the top of the comforter the second she got home and into her room. She padded over to the window, ready to tell off the jackass who'd woken her up, and then stiffened in surprise.

Adam?

She opened the window and gave him what she hoped was an expression that conveyed her feelings on him showing up out of nowhere when she'd been so deft at avoiding him, but because of her bone-deep exhaustion (and God, who knew how her hair and makeup looked after she'd been napping for a couple of hours), she probably just looked like a zombie.

“Adam. What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

With anyone else, she would have come back with a snide remark about the fact that they were living in the twenty-first century and there were these handy little inventions known as phones, but Adam wasn't like the other people in Smallville. He was smart, and since he'd shown up to throw pebbles at her window instead of just going to the front door where her dad could serve as sentry, he undoubtedly knew that she'd been dodging his calls, as well as going out of her way to avoid him and the conversation she knew would inevitably follow.

Damn.

“Give me a minute. I'll come down.”

Assuming the ever-so-sly bodyguards Holcombe had assigned to her in case Lex's dad tried anything that morning were still hanging around.

It was a fair assumption that they weren't, though, she thought, since Adam was on the property and they hadn't removed him from it. But one could never be sure. They might just not see him as a potential threat since he was around her age.

Their mistake, if that was the case.

Everyone in Smallville was a potential threat.

If Holcombe was going to keep up the 'princess in the tower' treatment with her, she would have to make sure his lackeys knew what was what.

Of course, they probably didn't run across all that many meteor freaks over in England . . .

“No, you stay there. I'll come up.”

. . . What? How did he expect to . . . ?

Oh.

He was at her window almost as soon as he was done talking. He wasn't quite as fast as Clark, since she was able to see Adam moving, but she would certainly never be able to climb a tree and scurry across one of the big branches that fast.

It was impressive; enough so that she wondered what else the medication he was forced to take was doing for him other than keeping him alive.

He gave her a lopsided grin as he swung his legs over the window ledge and hopped into her room. “That's an interesting look for you.”

“If that's supposed to be a nice way to say I look like hell, I already know,” she said with a grin of her own.

She'd been avoiding him for valid reasons, but that didn't mean she hadn't missed him, because she had. A lot.

She raked a hand through what she assumed was her messy hair, hoping it would somehow revert back to its pre-nap look with the action. “I did the video testimony thing against Lionel Luthor this morning. We had to get up super early to get to Metropolis on time, and I've had one dinky little cup of coffee the entire day.”

“Ouch. It's a miracle you're even awake, then.”

She glared at him, but there was no real heat to it. “I wasn't.”

“. . . Oh. Sorry.”

Chloe shrugged and moved to sit down on the chair at her desk. That left him the option to remain standing or to sit on her bed, but either way, she figured she was safe.

A tiny voice at the back of her head dared to ask, 'Safe from what?', but she quickly squelched it.

And then she sighed. She'd been acting like an idiot. Adam wasn't her enemy; he wasn't even like the rest of her friends – he wouldn't torment her over what had happened. He wasn't like that. “I owe you an apology.”

A single arch of his eyebrow was all the response she received.

“Ever since the other day – the other week . . . I'm just embarrassed. I don't break down all that often, and when I do, it's definitely not in front of anyone.”

“So . . . you're sorry that you cracked or are you sorry for avoiding me afterward?”

There was a hint of teasing in his voice, but it wasn't tinged with mocking or rebuke like it would have been from Clark or Lana, or even Pete. Instead, it held a note of acceptance, of forgiveness, and her heart warmed a little at the thought.

She grinned sheepishly. “Both. Mostly the latter, though, because so much has happened that I need to tell you about and . . .” She stopped with a blush. “You said you needed to talk to me, and here I am, chewing off your ear. Sorry again. Why did you come over?”

He sat down, perched on the edge of her bed, and leaned forward. “I just wanted to make sure you were alright. You haven't been answering the phone—” He held up a hand when her lips parted to apologize again. “It's okay. I understand. Really. But then Lana brought up the fact that she hadn't seen you around . . .”

“Oh.” Lana didn't bring up anyone or anything unless it was how that person, place, or thing related to her and her life. “She saw my meltdown, I take it?”

“Heard about it.” He paused and from the look on his face, she had a sneaking suspicion that she wasn't going to like what he was about to say. “She asked me why you were so upset that you were sobbing in my arms in front of everybody.”

She grimaced. Her instincts had been spot-on again, but this was one time when she wished they hadn't. “What did you tell her?”

He smirked then, light and cocky. “The truth.”

“The truth?” she repeated numbly.

He didn't even know the truth; not all of it anyway. Not even half.

“That it was none of her business, and if you wanted her to know, you'd tell her.”



tbc

[hfce]

What an interesting update. It was good but left me wanting more. Please update soon. :)

[Kit Merlot]

You know, I like the Adam/Chloe friendship and if Lana's insecure and worried about their being close, then that just makes it that much cooler:D

I'm glad you are continuing this great fic--can't wait to see what happens next;)

[emmie]

I love this story.....can't wait to read the next chapter.

Please update soon!!!!!!!

[somethingeasy]

I was really happy to see that you updated again. I’ve seriously missed your writing. I liked the beginning of this chapter…. It started just the way I like ‘em… lots of trauma, anguish and angst, LOL! Perfection!

I’ve been waiting a long time for Chloe’s answer to Lex’s question… actually, I’ve been waiting so long that I kind of forgot the question that had been asked, and had to check back a chapter to see where it last left off.

I appreciated Chloe’s answer, and how she made it clear that she wasn’t remaining quiet about the rape for Lex’s benefit as much for her own. I can’t imagine what a horrifying experience it must have been, but different people have different ways of dealing with trauma. Chloe’s chosen way was the compartmentalize the grief, trauma and anguish… separate herself from it, and never think about what happened.

It probably wasn’t the healthiest way of dealing with her trauma… burying it deep inside to fester, but it allowed her to go on for a little while until she was ready to deal with it properly at least. I’m assuming that she’s going to be finding herself a therapist or a psychiatrist at SOME point in the future?

I loved the note that Chloe made to herself that forgiving Lex is her ‘victim’s prerogative’. It’s a strange, but effective way of gaining back control of the situation for herself. She WAS a victim, but as the victim, she has certain rights… which includes the right to forgive as well as choose how to deal with her trauma on her own terms.

I liked the way that the chapter touched on how Lex was suffering too. Not as much as Chloe of course… but he feels a substantial amount of horror and repulsed self-loathing over his contribution to the situation. I think he desperately wanted, and needed Chloe to scream at him and call him a hateful monster. He wanted her to be angry and PUNISH him somehow for what he had done. After all, in Lex’s eyes, punishment is a good first step towards atonement and a ‘proper’ kind of forgiveness that he can EARN.

Having Chloe just forgive him on ‘victim’s prerogative’ probably makes him feel even worse about the situation that he already did.

Oooh, and now it seems like we’re getting some very interesting details on the strange circumstances about Adam Knight too. So Adam is a walking Luthor experiment? Does this automatically make Adam dangerous? He WAS just described as ‘sociopathic’ just now. Or at least, a danger to anyone to tries to make friends with him and/or protect him? This is SO not what Chloe needs right now… yet more dangerous complications in her life. Poor girl!

I didn’t know WHAT to make of the situation when Adam came knocking (literally) at Chloe’s window. What was he doing there? Was he experiencing some kind of emergency, implanted prerogative or something? I was preparing myself for any kind of a tense, suspenseful, terror-filled situation.

So it was with a certain sense of relief when I found out that Adam was ‘only’ doing a typical teenaged boy thing of trying to get a girl’s attention, and nothing more sinister than that. He only wanted to talk… and perhaps get an explanation about why Chloe has been avoiding him lately. It’s rather sweet to see the extreme measures that Adam will take on in order to maintain his friendship with Chloe actually. Chloe needs stubbornly loyal and clingy friends like this in her life ;)

Hopefully this friend will be exactly what Chloe needs to recover from her ordeal. I still think that a much needed therapist is also in order… as well as a proper confrontation/conversation with Lex… but having an all-supportive friend is always a plus in any given situation.

I’m really happy to see you’ve started writing again. I look hugely forward to more chapters in the future.

Hmmm, and I don’t know whether I’ll get lucky, but I’m also going to put in a request for a sequel to Chruce/Chlex fic that you wrote some time back called ’The Deal’. I thought it was an awesome fic, and it ended on a note filled with such angsty potential. I’d love to see how that story would continue… IF you’re interesting in continuing of course… no pressure and no obligation.

Thanks again for posting, and I look forward to the next chapter. Good luck and best regards.

[ChloeLovesLex]

Finally all caught up on this one. You've done an excellent job so far and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Is Chloe really going to leave Smallville or will Lex somehow find a way to stop her? What is going to happen between the two of them now?

Continue soon!

[lilinny]

Love it! Want more of it!!!

[BellaMR]

I'm glad you've decided to come back and try to finish this fic. I've read your other stories and I really enjoy your writing. I can't wait to see where this story leads us.

[athena]

Please dont`t let us hanging there. I`ll start begging - please update soon! Too good to be forgoten.

[Nimmie]

Hi, this is a good fic nice au premise and bodes well for plot twists to further torture young Lex. Wonderful. I'm gonna happily return to my lurking corner and paitiently wait for a heap of updates.....

Thank you
N

[ThraceC]

Ok. I'm the ultimate lurker. I've never posted to anyone and I've been a member for... at least 6 months. I've been reading many fics, mostly from the archives and your stories put you in my top 5 favorite authors on this site. I'm really enjoying this fic, I can't wait to see how it evolves. So, for whatever it's worth, I'm coming out of the shadows to ask you to please finish this story. when you can.

Thanks.

[autumngold]

Thank you so much for continuing this story!! I'm so glad that Lex and Chloe had a chance to talk, even though it was so hard for both of them!! I hope that Chloe really allows herself to heal, instead of just trying to hide from the pain that is her life!! I can't imagine the pain she is going through right now, and with no friends except Adam to help her it must be so difficult!! You're an amazing author and I really appreciate you updating this fic!! Is there anyway we can bribe your muse so that it feels more like writing Chlex?!! This story deserves it!! ;)

[ThraceC]

Any chance you'll ever take this one out of the graveyard???? Pretty Please?

[scifichick774]

Lana stayed late at the Talon, claiming that someone called in sick and she had to cover their shift—which meant she didn't come home to confront her about what had happened with Adam.

Instead, she sent Clark to do it for her.

In retrospect, Chloe thought, she should have expected the move. Lana wasn't good with confrontations and had a disturbing tendency to avoid them if she could, usually by passing the task onto someone else.

She sighed. Clark had adopted his stubborn look—feet planted hip-width apart, arms folded across his chest, eyes narrowed—and didn't appear as though he would let it slip any time soon.

'Adam's my friend' apparently wasn't a sufficient answer to his accusatory 'What were you thinking? How could you do this to Lana?' questions, but she'd had to try. She had precious little energy and it needed to be spent packing up her wardrobe and the most important mementos of her life, not explaining how the real world worked to her former best friend, a boy who had already made up his mind that she was the scarlet woman in a love triangle that didn't even exist.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” she said and placed another pair of folded jeans into the open suitcase on her bed.

How it had escaped Clark's notice that she was packing up the majority of her possessions was beyond her, but he hadn't asked why she was doing so, and because of the way he'd jumped to take Lana's side, she wasn't going to point it out. Yes, she was bitter and her actions were ever so slightly mean spirited, but she didn't think she owed him a goodbye, or even an explanation of why she was leaving, if he wasn't a good enough friend to realize that she was.

“Adam's my friend, Clark; one of my closest ones for a while now.”

“I think I would have noticed.”

“Yeah? I thought you would have, too,” Chloe replied snidely, but then shook her head to clear away the anger. She didn't want to spend the time she had left in Smallville fighting with someone she had once thought she was in love with. She didn't think that anymore, obviously, but she didn't want to end their relationship on a sour note either. “I love you like a brother, Clark...”

True enough, she thought. Especially when one considered that family members were always the first suspects in homicide investigations.

“But you don't always see things unless they directly relate to you.”

She motioned at the suitcase on her bed with a flippant wave of her hand, ignoring her resolution not to tell him anything he didn't ask from just minutes before. “Point in case. Did you even wonder why I'm packing up my entire freaking room? Why there are moving boxes in addition to the baggage?”

She tried to sound and look as calm and collected as she could, but she was pretty sure that wasn't much. From the startled expression on Clark's face, Chloe surmised that all of her anger and frustration and hurt had all welled up to mix in her statement.

Lord knew she felt them all, just under the surface; waiting to erupt in a spectacular explosion of emotion.

“What?”

“Exactly,” she said, and though she was tempted to return to her packing, she kept eye contact with him instead. “You and Lana both have an uncanny ability to overlook anything and everything unless it somehow effects you. Adam and I haven't kept our friendship a secret. Heck! We were having coffee together at the Talon right before I had my meltdown.”

Clark squirmed where he stood, but Chloe couldn't take any pleasure in his discomfort like she thought she would; not even a small, petty, 'So, there!'

A part of her still wanted to, but for once it looked like understanding had finally lit in her friend's eyes and remorse quickly after that.

Or maybe she was just projecting her hopes for him onto what she was really seeing. Sadly, that seemed more plausible.

She sighed again and then went back to packing, albeit considerably slower than before. “I assume you came over here because Lana told you that Adam was seen comforting me during my breakdown last week, right? But you didn't ask why I suddenly fell apart, just why I chose your crush's boyfriend to blubber on. How do you think that makes me feel, Clark?”

“I... God, I'm sorry, Chloe. I didn't know... Lana didn't say anything about... that.”

A mirthless laugh passed through her lips. “Again: not exactly observant. She probably got the information secondhand from her gossiping cheerleader buddies—who, of course, only focused on the fact that Adam was hugging me instead of the reasons behind it.”

Clark dropped his gaze to the floor and ran one of his big hands around the back of his neck. It was another embarrassed gesture, one that normally would have had her rushing to apologize for being bitchy to him—because of a combination of a lifetime of insecurity and the feelings she used to harbor for him—but now...

Now she said nothing.

“So you're... uh... going on a trip?”

Ever the dreamer, she thought. There wouldn't have been anything wrong with that if he stuck to dreams about his own life and future, but when his delusion spread to anything that remotely came in contact with him—say his former best friend, for instance—it became a problem.

Clark found it easier to lie to himself, even when the facts were staring him right in the face, than to accept reality and try to work with it. As a reporter, a seeker of the truth, her opinion of that particular character quirk had rapidly gone from 'kind of cute' to 'incredibly annoying'.

“I'm moving.”

The blouse she was holding was folded with shaking hands and then placed in her suitcase with entirely too much care. It was that or just ball the thing up and shove it in there roughly, and Chloe didn't think her poor garment ought to pay the price for Clark Kent being clueless and insensitive.

He was silent for a long moment before she heard a hint of a chuckle pass his lips, startling her enough to make her look up at him.

He thought she was joking?

She stared at him blankly until the grin slid from his face, replaced by the same kind of surprised, horrified expression he generally only used when someone's life was in danger and he didn't think he would be able to rescue them in time.

“You're serious? But Lana... She would have said...”

“I thought we already established that she's not the most observant person,” she said with a glare, but then shook her head tiredly. He didn't get it. He just didn't. And as long as he had his Lana-goggles on, he never would. “I'll give you the abridged version since I need to hurry up and have all this packed by tomorrow.”

It went unsaid that taking time to explain herself to him cut into the precious few waking hours she had left, but she hoped this was one of the few rare times that he actually read between the lines.

“I found out recently that my mom had an affair when she and my dad were married. According to the DNA test I was forced by law to take, I was the product of that affair. Bio-dad wants to get to know me, and since he has the kind of money that can pay for college and keep me surrounded by bodyguards to protect me from Lionel Luthor's wrath, he and my dad conspired to send me to live with him. Hence the packing.”

Speaking of bodyguards, she wished that Holcombe hadn't given them pictures of her so-called 'safe' friends. She was glad her dad told her that was the case, since she'd been wondering how Adam slipped past them, but she sort of would have liked some say in who they let through and didn't.

Currently, they were being very Special Forces and keeping to the shadows unless a potential threat showed up, and since it was Smallville—emphasis on the small—and Lionel wasn't an idiot who would strike back the very same day she gave testimony, they hadn't really been visible at all.

“Lex's dad? Why would—?”

Wow. He really was out of the loop.

She would have thought that Lex might have mentioned something about his father being arrested, even if it was only in passing when Clark was over at his house chewing his ear off about things he had no real interest in.

“I testified against him this morning. I researched, I found evidence he paid corrupt cops to bury, and I testified for the FBI. The evidence is enough to put him away for a long time if his high-priced lawyers can't find a way around it. I'd say it's a safe bet that he's going to look for revenge at some point.”

Clark furrowed his brow and then gave her his patented kicked-puppy expression. “Why didn't you tell me about any of this?”

Why would she?

It was the reply that immediately came to mind, but Chloe kept her snark to herself this time. This conversation might very well be the last one she ever had with him; she had to drive home how much his willful ignorance of her feelings—of her life—had hurt her or she would hold on to that pain forever.

She had enough pain to last her a lifetime. She had to let some of it go.

“About what? My paternity? My investigating Lionel Luthor? Why didn't I tell you, Clark? I think a better question is: Why didn't you ask? Adam noticed that something was going on the second I wound up in the hospital. Before that, even. So did Lex for that matter—and you'd think if anyone had a right not to notice it would be him with everything else he has going on in his life.”

It was a deflection that wouldn't have worked if Clark had paid even a little more attention to her, but since he hadn't, he didn't catch the inflections in her voice that would have clued him onto the fact that Lex had already known about everything because they'd been working together.

And that he'd immediately understood the reasons behind her currently screwed-up mental state once he regained his own sanity enough to ask.

She frowned. She wasn't sure what it said about her that she'd so easily forgiven Lex for the things he'd done—which could actually be considered criminal in a court of law—but she couldn't find it in her heart to give Clark a second chance.

Maybe it didn't say anything, she thought. Maybe she was just tired of giving Clark second chances when he'd never once shown remorse for his actions.

Lex had shown remorse the second he remembered what he had done under the influence of powerful psychotropic drugs and he hadn't stopped showing it even after she had made it clear that she didn't blame him for what happened.

She couldn't imagine Clark ever reacting that way if he and Lex somehow switched places. Instead, he would probably do the same thing he always did in an uncomfortable situation with consequences: pretend the whole thing never happened and avoid her until he thought she'd forgotten about it.

Even though it broke her heart a little to do so, she couldn't help thinking that the move to England might be a good thing. She could finally make a break from her bad habit of constantly forgiving people who didn't deserve it.

Like Clark. And Lana.

But then, she would be leaving people behind who her heart had come to depend on and she didn't know if she could live without.

Like her dad—her real dad, the one who'd raised her, not just contributed his genetic material.

And Adam. The knowledge that she was probably going to lose him forever soon anyway—since the only thing keeping him alive was the drug Lionel's labs had come up with and many of them would be shut down during his stint in prison—didn't ease the pain in her chest in the slightest.

And Lex.

There were too many conflicting emotions that sprung up when she thought of him; she needed the time and space that her move would provide her to sort through them.

She just hoped that by the time she was done that she won't have lost him forever, too.

[scifichick774]

Some people called him a genius; a mastermind at all things relating to business.

A smaller number of people called him a sociopath.

He was quick to accept the praise, but Lex could have done without the condemnation. He'd had enough of the latter during his childhood and early adult years to last him a lifetime, and no one knew the reasons behind the choices he made—couldn't know, because he was very good at making his past all but disappear—so he hardly thought they were in a position to come to rash conclusions about his character.

He had done a lot of things that the majority of the populace would consider terrible in his life, he was willing to admit that to himself if no one else. But could those things really be that terrible if he felt no remorse for his actions?

Every plan had its pitfalls and casualties—was he the monster some members of the press made him out to be simply because he was willing to acknowledge and accept that aspect of business instead of wasting his time trying to find a compromise that didn't exist?

He thought not.

In regards to his personal life, on the other hand...

Lex sighed softly. He was the only passenger on his private jet and none of the crew was close enough to hear him, so it was safe to indulge in a rare moment of showing weakness. Truth be told, he hadn't really had a personal life for a long time now and he knew it.

He'd had companions, of course; women to fill the void at his side when he needed to be seen in public. Women to warm his bed for a night here and there when he needed to prove to himself that he was still human.

But in the end, they weren't anything more than props and accessories. A couple had wormed their way into his bank vault, but none had made it into his heart.

None had even come close.

Not since Chloe.

Ah, he thought. That must be the reason he was suddenly feeling so maudlin.

He generally only traveled internationally for business when his well-paid underlings needed his presence—and the power that came with it—to close a deal. Thus far in his career, he'd been forced to attend only seven such meetings, as video conferencing was usually sufficient.

It probably would have been adequate for this deal as well, but the possible sale of one of his subsidiaries was to Gregory Holcombe, Chloe's biological father, and the temptation to possibly find out anything about her that his investigators hadn't already told him was too great for him to turn down the opportunity.

Cameras could only capture so much, after all, and he found himself abnormally hungry for details.

Chloe and Clark had a falling out before she left Smallville, and while Clark seemed confused and indignant about it, he had no trouble placing the blame for the fight solely at Chloe's feet. Lex was willing to bet an exorbitant sum that the truth was substantially different from the farm boy's version, and he'd been careful to keep an eye on Chloe from a distance ever since then.

From what he'd been told and shown, he knew that she'd been severely depressed for a period of almost six months after she first moved to England, not just because she had left her previous life behind against her will, but because her friend—and one of his father's twisted projects—Adam Knight had died (this time for good) within a few weeks of when she moved.

He knew that she came back from that depression stronger than ever, but he didn't know what the cause of her sudden turnaround had been, nor did his detectives offer up any possible theories.

He knew that she'd had a couple of boyfriends here and there over the last five years, but no one she let herself get close to.

He'd noted more than once that they were alike in that respect—and he'd always been pleased when the men she saw flitted out of her life because they realized that her regard for them wasn't as strong as what they felt for her.

It was too much to hope that the feisty blonde would show up at the meeting he had with Holcombe, since all reports indicated she was very busy with her last year of university classes and not all that interested in taking over the family business when she graduated.

But still, there was the flicker of a wish, a spark that smoldered deep down inside him, that desperately wanted her to prove his investigators wrong.

The steward—male, as he'd had too many negative experiences with female staff thinking they could become the next Mrs. Luthor if only they interrupted his strategic planning time with offers of sexual favors—came by to tell him to fasten his seatbelt because the plane was going to begin its descent.

He obliged, but his mind hardly noted the minor task as he performed it, nor were his thoughts really on the meeting he had scheduled with Holcombe like they would normally be. Instead, his mind was focused on the one person in his life who he actually felt regret for hurting, and the impossible hope that she might some day truly forgive him.

~*~*~

The meeting was fairly straightforward; nothing that couldn't have been accomplished without him flying across the Atlantic to be there.

Both his and Holcombe's people had hashed out most of the terms of the agreement weeks ago and the lawyers had written up preliminary paperwork accordingly. This just happened to be the only mutual break both he and Holcombe had in their schedules and Chloe's father didn't like to delegate 'the important stuff' to people below him in the company—which meant he took on a lot more work than he needed to, Lex thought, but it was difficult to argue when the man was so successful.

Sir Holcombe probably would have been willing to go over the paperwork with a couple of the LexCorp vice presidents, rather than waiting for him personally, but Lex had wanted to be there for other reasons, and since he was the boss, he got what he wanted.

Most of the time, that was.

He had yet to rid himself of the increasing nuisance that was Superman, unfortunately.

And Chloe hadn't been present at the meeting.

He hadn't really expected her to be, but God, he'd wanted it.

“Lex!”

His entire body went stiff with surprise. He hadn't thought he would actually see her—especially not when he had just convinced himself that he'd been a fool for hoping. But there she was, stepping off the lift he'd been impatiently waiting to arrive to take him downstairs.

A smile split his lips the second he recovered. “Chloe.”

She looked amazing. A little older, a lot more confident, and as gorgeous as ever. He would have said 'more so', but that wasn't possible.

The photographs his detectives took hadn't done her justice.

She stepped off the elevator and didn't even hesitate before moving forward to greet him with a hug. People didn't generally give him hugs—ever—so he was slower to return it than he should have been, and disappointed when she pulled away too quickly for his liking.

“Greg said he was meeting with you today.”

Greg, he thought with a smirk. He almost felt bad for Holcombe. Regardless of how long Chloe had been living with him in England, Gabe Sullivan would always hold the title of 'Dad'.

“I was hoping to see you.”

She was?

“But... You probably have a lunch appointment already, don't you? I thought we could try and catch up, but...” She sighed. “I should have just skipped class. Sorry.”

“I don't already have lunch plans,” he admitted with a grin.

If the expressions on his lawyers' faces were anything to go by, the twist of his lips probably looked maniacal. Either that or they were in shock over hearing him admit that he didn't already have plans when it was so out of character for him to do so on the occasions that someone essentially cornered him like Chloe had.

Her bright, beaming smile was worth all the questions he would have to field from his employees later.

“Really? So, you want to...?”

He took a step forward and rearranged his position so he could comfortably put his hand on the small of her back. He never would have made such a bold move in the time that directly followed the recovery of his memories, but years had passed since then. They had both changed and she didn't seem to harbor any of the ill will he would have expected—that she was completely entitled to.

“Absolutely.”

Absolutely, he repeated in his head. Because seeing Chloe wasn't the closure the emotionless pragmatist part of him was hoping it would be if he ran into her again. Rather, it ignited that part of him he'd given up on a long time ago.

Life was offering him a second chance. If he chose not to take it, then their reunion could be the end of the story his head had long thought it would be.

But if he grasped at it like he wanted to, then it could be the beginning his heart had dreamt of.

He smirked again.

When he looked at it that way, it was hardly a choice at all.




The End

[lexie]

Well, as anybody can attest on these forums, I hardly ever read NC-17 fiction, but I´ve read several fics of yours and- when I saw an update after so long- I copied and pasted the whole thing and read it in one sitting. This was a lovely fic and I´m really happy it didn´t end up in the graveyard for ever.

Finishing it the way you did, with the right amount of hope after everything Lex and Chloe had suffered, was the perfect ending.

Now, I´m crossing my fingers for your Chlex muse to inspire you to keep penning more stories with this ship.:blinkkiss

[hfce]

Thanks for finishing this story. It was a great ending. I miss your fics. :D

[ThraceC]

Wow! I had lost hope that this fic would ever be finished! Thank you so much! Does this mean you're back at NS and writing chlex again? Or did you finish this off for closure?

I do hope you are inspired to write again, I have adored so many of your fics.
Thanks for a great finish for a great story.

[autumngold]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the hopefully ending to this incredible story! Stupid Clark, I can't believe that he didn't notice what was going on in Chloe's life and then thinks it's her fault. Dumb alien! I'm glad that Chloe was able to recover from all of the pain she had to go through and come out stronger in the end! I'm so glad that there is a chance for her and Lex to have their happy ending! Thank you for coming back and finishing this heartbreakingly wonderful fic!

[wdge]

Wow. I figured I would read a quick, fun story before bed. Instead, I'm up much later than I planned and that was alot more intense than I planned - but, I couldn't stop reading!

[curi]

I just really wanted to say hi to you here. And prod your muse to visit Smallville via Wolf Lake.

Hi.

*cattle prods muse*

[malugargula]

Great fic!!! Really deep and well written

[swirly268]

Very emotionally charged, but I really liked it.

[jenwin23]

This is a well written story, the emotion is kind of muted, but as Chloe and Lex are our narrators and they are both somewhat underwater in the story, it works.

[asarstar]

I'm so glad this got finished. I know it can be hard to go back to a story after so long, but you managed it seamlessly.

<3 the ending on a note of hope.

[Ami Rose]

Very emotionally charged, but I really liked it.

Same here! Had me almost to tears! Great fic!