[Completed] Choices -- Oneshot Updated: 3/22/15 (PG-13ish)

Summary: Chloe POV. It could have all been so different if we had made other choices, but now it is too late...Or is it?
Characters: Chloe and Lex (Chlex)
Timeline: Season 3 - 10+
Rating: PG-13(ish)
WARNING: Some sexual references and situations.

Written from a prompt by lynzie914 on fluffyfrolicker's fem!february comment!ficathon on LJ

in another life I would have chosen you

Amazing banner by malugargula

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http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/phill.../11056_600.jpg

When I close my eyes, I still see you. You haunt the darkness behind my lids. I think about how it could have been if we had made different choices. Better choices. Both you and I could have been better people.

I think about those lost months when you were my world. That bright summer when you were the only bulwark standing between me and the monsters your father sent to find me, kill me, silence me. Those months when you said I was too young. Months when you would back away when it got too intense. Strange how the line between 'feeling good' and 'too intense' wavered so much then.

One day a look was too much. Another day it was a kiss. One day, I even had the buttons of your shirt half undone.

But that never repeated.

I was too young, just seventeen, and you were supposed to be keeping me safe.

But who was keeping me safe from you?

Well, I guess you were.

Now I think you knew I had lost my virginity much too soon. Thrown it away in truth. I wonder if you wanted something better for me. For us. Something more than a rushed, regretted tumble.

I didn't know that then. All I knew was every time you walked away, you left me frustrated and stung during the lonely nights.

Then after an eye blink, suddenly I was Old Enough.

I expected you to be there at my party, with flowers and a prettily wrapped present, but you weren't. I was body-snatched by a witch and you stayed alone in your mansion. I think now you heard about the fool I made of myself after drinking the love punch. How I put myself out there for Clark, only to be shot down again, because you never showed. Were you angry at me?

Unwanted again, I hardened my heart.

Clark didn't want me and neither did you.

Or so I thought.

Turns out you were just waiting for the right moment. Waiting for me to be ready. Not just in the legal sense, but in a real sense. In a way that actually mattered.

But by that time, everything had changed. I had seen my best friend catch a speeding car with his bare hands then disappear in a whoosh of air. I finally knew the secret Clark hid, but all I was filled with were questions.

There was no longer any room in my world for you.

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When I caught you together in the dorm room I shared with Lana, I wondered if you had done it purposefully. Did you intend for me to catch you together, standing just inches apart? If I had come in a minute later, would your lips have been on hers... The way they were once on mine?

Were you satisfied by my reaction? Did my jealous and angry storming of your pretentious castle get your blood up to match mine? I know you still cared for me. No one else can shred a heart like a person that once held it. Your angry digs that day told me so.

Instead of trading barbs, what would have happened if we had started trading kisses, touches, and murmurs instead? If instead of leaving in an angry huff, I had finally undone the rest of those buttons I never before got to touch?

Would you have taken me upstairs to make love to me slowly, or would we have coupled still half-dressed on your pool table?

Knowing what I know now, I wish I had chosen differently. And I wish you had too.

Instead, the confrontation only seems to have driven you to her bed. But still I wonder...when you finally took her, who were you thinking of as you sank yourself hilt-deep? Lana...or me?

********

How is it that dreams can turn so easily to nightmares? Time and again, I was forced to watch as first the boy -- Clark -- and then the man -- you -- that I loved chose another over me. So it really shouldn't have been a surprise that when Jimmy saw me -- and miracle of miracles -- wanted me, that I fell in with him so quickly. He was everything you weren't. Normal, sweet, attentive.

He was a bore.

And I wished he was you.

I had given up everything for Clark's destiny. Even myself. Even you. But suddenly, I thought I could have Jimmy. He was a consolation prize, but I was tired of being alone. I was tired of having only my own hands on my body, even if his were fumbling and sweaty. When he lay under me, I could close my eyes and be filled by whomever I wished.

Even as I guessed you were buried in Lana and I was filled by Jimmy, I was with you.

Were you with me too?

***********

I've attended too many of your weddings. Once to Black Widow, and once to Lana, who killed something else in you. I saw your eyes that day when she was late for the wedding. Fear. Self-loathing. Doubt. I had never seen those things in your eyes when you were with me. I don't think they existed in the world of just the two of us. I wish now that I had said something besides empty platitudes. That when the minister asked for objections, I had spoken. I saw you look my way. I saw the message there. That it wasn't too late.

But it was.

We had let secrets and lies and anger fester between us. What should have been fertile soil for love had turned into something dark and boggy. Too much lay between us now.

Or so we told ourselves.

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So how is it that one dark and stormy night you were at my door? How is it that I took one look at you dripping onto the landing and without a word I let you inside?

By then, you were a monster and we both knew it. This was no fairy tale, where love heals the beast back into a man.

But still I let you in.

Into my home. Into my bed. Into my body.

And damn me forever, into my heart.

It was the first time we should have had years before. Before the we choose different sides. Before I settled. Before you struck out at the hearts of the two people you once loved most -- Clark and I -- with a single blow.

The next day you were taken to prison for Lana's murder.

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When you were free and came to me again, I told myself I had come to my senses. I turned you away. Sent you from me.

You lashed out by seizing another of my dreams.

You bought The Daily Planet.

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It took time, though I'm not sure why. Did you like watching me squirm? Did you think I'd change my mind once again? Or was it just that you finally thought you had some sort of control over me?

We both know that despite my many flaws, I never again let myself be controlled by a Luthor. I had learned that lesson much too well from your father. It was brought us together, after all.

Eventually the time came for you to crush me again. Maybe it was fair. I had crushed you last, if we were keeping score.

So you forced me from my dream, my job, the thing I had wanted most since I was six years old.

You took it from me.

And that I could not forgive.

At least not in that life.

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When you disappeared in the Arctic, I knew you weren't actually dead. If you were, a part of me that still ached with the pain of you might have finally healed. But instead it pulsed with the unsteady beat of a broken heart.

Until one day it didn't and I knew you were dead.

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I married your killer. I still don't know exactly why. Magic paired with a need to belong maybe. Originally, we had fallen in together because of a heartsick pain we each carried. Oliver thought mine was for the dead boy I had married and his killer that had loved me. It wasn't. At least not all of it was. When we married, Jimmy had been a boy I may have one day come to love, but by the time he died, he had morphed into a twisted creature I barely recognized.

I know you know what that is like.

Davis was much the same. He was created to contain the monster Doomsday, but I freed him. Freed the man from The Beast. But like Jimmy -- like you -- his love for me twisted him and the man became a monster as well.

And so one night, heartsick again, Oliver and I fell together. For once, I didn't ask or justify anything to myself. I just let it happen. The man who killed you, had his mouth, his hands, his body on mine and I let it happen. Loved it happening.

Some cultures view the taking of a life as a sacred thing. That when you take a life, you take on a piece of that life. A piece of that person.

So, in a way, I was with you again.

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At night, when I so often lie alone in the bed I should be sharing with my defacto husband, I try to be happy. I try not to think that I settled again. I try not to think Oliver feels the same. That we we really are in love. That I didn't just choose him because I thought I couldn't have you. He is rich and handsome, just like you were, though those things always mattered little to me. What mattered was that you were gone from my life. From all life. You were dead.

But now you aren't and that pulsing pain is back.

Now I'm here at some fundraiser with Oliver to Save-The-Endangered-Something and you're here. Why are you here? You couldn't possibly care about Saving-The-Endangered-Something.

Could you be here for me?

No. I've seen for myself from Watchtower West that you have no memory of your past.

I wonder if we might have a chance without all history of rage, pain, deceit, and loss between us.

But then again, without your past, you wouldn't know anything about us. Or me. I'll be just another face in the crowd. Just another not-pretty-enough first wife of a rich man.

You're walking up to me. What should I call you now? Lex? Mr Luthor? Mr President? You look resplendent in a white suit, and my fingertips suddenly itch to work on the buttons.

Then your eyes meet mine -- your blue to my green -- and with a flash, I see something there. Something like recognition, but somehow more. It was the way you looked at me all those years ago when the world held only us two. When you protected me from the monsters and I fought for you with the truth.

You smile at me, and it isn't the smirk that is so commonly on your face. The expression lightens your eyes and flashes a hint of white teeth.

"I'm sorry, but I have the strangest feeling I know you," you say.

Suddenly we are the only two people in the room, and I have to wonder as I hold your eyes for the first time in this new life of yours...Will we choose each other this time?

I hope we do.

-- THE END --