I am glad you repost. This is very powerful.
Hope :)
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I am glad you repost. This is very powerful.
Hope :)
This must have an update ASAP!! :ohmy: :ohmy:
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
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:
Do we have an update coming soon? *gets down on her knees)
Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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.
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.
: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:
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
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