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
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
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!
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.
Love all your stories...I'm glad you're getting back around to finishing this one.
Yay, I'm so happy this story is getting updated! I hope your Chlex muse is here to stay because I love your stories.
Ok, you did it! You got me hooked!!
And now, you gotta suffer the consequences!
Yes, that means more updates!
NOW!
Please, soon?
Pretty Please?!?!It's such a great story! And I want to know what happens next! *waiting impatiently*
Come join the dark side. We have cookies.
Yumm!
Annnnnd Lex Luther!!!
Double Yummmmmmmm!!
Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
- Matt Frewer
Pretty please update soon!!!!!!!!!!!
Okay, stay calm.... There's more, right? Right??????????????????????
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
Last edited by scifichick774; 16th October 2008 at 17:06. Reason: coding issue
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