Shameless Upon Waking
NC-17 Fanfiction
SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers up to Scare in Season 4.
Disclaimer: Smallville, the characters therein, and all affiliated copyrighted materials are owned by the WB. This is a work of fanfiction not intended for profit or infringement, only for the pleasure of fans of the series.
A/N: Post-Bound and Scare, Chloe and Lex cope with prying eyes, greatest fears, secret lovers and the return of Lionel. Did I say this would be six chapters? That was the old plan, and of course I’m extending it. With all this plot and character development it leaves woefully little room for smut.
And I should remind people, I make things up instead of doing research. If it sounds made up, it probably is. If I had an excuse I’d give it, but really it’s just laziness.
Cuteness warning: Beware the cute.
Chapter Six
Chloe settled the bulky snowsuit down as she fastened James into the booster seat his father had transferred to her little bug. Jimmy had been called in for a shift at the plant and she was the semi-regular short notice babysitter, when his wife Connie was also at work. She was one of the reporters at The Smallville Ledger and a reliable source of tips and information.
They were a cultured, educated couple who had moved for Jimmy’s job as Head of Catalytic Management at LexCorp’s fertilizer plant. When Connie had started the job as a reporter they had asked Gabe if Chloe would be willing to watch a then two year old James when their work schedules took them both away in the evenings.
It was one of the few normal teenage girl experiences she had, and she had grown close to the little family. Connie had a journalism degree and had taken on some mentoring of Chloe’s ambitions in that direction. Jimmy sometimes put his honours math degree at her disposal, since Clark was no longer available for homework help.
And James was the best little boy she had ever met. He was nearly a math prodigy and a genuinely sunny person. If the comments she got from other people when she took him places were any indication, he was also extremely well-behaved.
“Ready for lift off!”
She smiled at his energy. For someone so young he rolled with the punches like a pro. These days when confronted by an overly interested billionaire she wasn’t sure whether she should be running for the hills or checking her underwear at the door.
“Okay, let me just say goodbye to your new friend and we’ll go,” she said, putting her bag next to James’ little backpack on the floor. She shut the door and turned to a grumpy Lex.
“So, you’re officially a hopelessly misogynistic bastard now? Is ‘congratulations’ appropriate or would it only soil you coming from a woman?”
He winced and took a step toward her, as Chloe sneered at him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is about you to makes me dumber than Clark is with Lana. I don’t know why I’m here or what I thought I was doing, and I am very, very stupid.”
Her silence was worst than a diatribe of abuse and Lex started to fidget.
“So, why are you here?” His unusually timid question had her exhaling forcefully on a disbelieving squeak. Even with his tail between his legs he was pushy.
“You’re so far into your own press that you can’t imagine not knowing something if you want to. This is impossible,” she said, taking a step closer to him and lowering her voice. “Any current association we have is a secret, and it’s not going to be very secret for very long if you follow me around to places you would never normally be seen.”
He shifted his shoulders indecisively and Chloe interpreted it as an inability to judge his best action. His best action in this circumstance was the one that would piss her off the least, and though she knew the answer she wasn’t inclined to help him.
“I’m really sorry,” Lex said, his shoulders slumping. She was never going to speak to him again and he couldn't really blame her. Now all that was left was to wait for her to tell him so.
Damn him and his painfully sincere apologies, she thought. I can’t be mad at him now.
“Just try to remember before you do something like this again,” she sighed. “I can deal with the security guard, I can deal with the secrets, but I’m not going to be the skeleton in your closet. As far as the rest of the world knows we’re not even friends. We put your father in prison, lived together for two days, you took me to a morgue, you killed me and then you brought me back to life; that’s not a relationship, it’s a David Lynch movie.”
His lip quirked as her forgiveness became clear. Chloe smiled but fought a full-fledged grin.
”It’s not funny, do you want to be the creepy guy from a David Lynch movie?”
The smirk blossomed into his super smirk. She usually only saw it when he was removing her clothing.
“There’s some pretty hot sex in those movies,” he said.
She turned the Luthor eyebrow on him and he pulled his face back into a mild expression.
“I’m going to go now, so James can get his hot chocolate. Don’t get any weirder than you already are.”
Chloe turned back to her car and then paused, swinging her arms idly.
“Do I really make you dumber than Clark is with Lana,” she asked, looking over her shoulder at Lex.
He nodded and she hid her pleasure at the confidence.
“Don’t hit your head getting into your car, then,” she said, before throwing herself into the drivers seat.
He sat in the BMW and waited until she pulled away, thinking about her. She was sweet and decent when he expected her to be fiery, and fiery when he expected her to get sappy and sentimental. She let him off the hook so many times he was beginning to think there was nothing he could do to make her really upset at him, but the desire to please her was still present. He knew her better than he’d known anyone for years, but he was constantly surprised by her.
When he was eleven he had bought firecrackers from a classmate and taken them to an out of the way part of the garden to set them off near dusk. The matches he used were cheap ones from a cardboard book and he burned his fingers dozens of times, stubbornly trying to get the string of fireworks to light. He hadn’t known why it was so important to see them burn away, just that it was. His mother was gone, his father was away and he wanted more than anything to set something off.
It was almost dark and there were voices ringing through the garden, calling for him, but Lex had stayed hidden. He didn’t like to be in the dark but he was determined.
There was a small pile of burnt out matches at his feet and he was getting frustrated when he realized there was only one left in the book. It was his last chance and he hunched his shoulders over the fragile flame and held it to the fuse. His fingers were hurting so much there were tears in his eyes, but Lex kept his arms steady. A breeze started blowing over the burning cardboard but he ignored it.
Finally, blissfully, the fuse sparked and flame started its run toward the red discs. He dropped it on the ground and watched the small bursts of colour overtake each one, blackening it. There was a relief in having accomplished it, in having disobeyed and even in burning himself. It had been a bad experience until it turned good and he knew it was something he had needed.
Chloe made him feel that level of importance in ordinary details and she was equally difficult to define. Sometimes it was so tenuous but he could always see the reward if he kept trying. Like that damn book of matches he sometimes worried he would eventually get to his last chance without realizing it.
He didn’t want to go home yet, and Lex wondered how much leeway he could count on in one day. He was suddenly feeling like a cup of Martha Kent’s hot chocolate.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++
Chloe carried two cups of hot chocolate back to the table and smiled at James. He had opened his backpack and pulled out the notebook she had given him a month ago. He liked math and did addition and subtraction for fun.
His small calculator, shaped like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, was open next to his left elbow. Tiny fingers wrapped around an oversized pencil and his notebook was open to a reference page of numbers. He had been using children’s notepads with animals and bright pictures on them, but one look at Chloe’s reporter’s notebook had convinced him he needed something more ‘professional.’ She had granted the request and found that he was getting more use out of the larger pages and sturdier binding.
He looked up as she put the cup in front of him and smiled.
“I’m going to figure out ages again,” he told her.
Chloe nodded and slid into the booth beside him. His favourite math problem was to subtract one person’s age from another’s. He had a list of people he knew and their ages. As was his custom he started subtracting Chloe’s age from his father’s. Next he would do the same for his mother and finally himself. Jimmy was the oldest and he got the distinction of being the largest number, his son’s particular interest in math. To him bigger numbers meant more equations he could make and more buying power at the local candy store.
Lex would get along great with that attitude, she thought.
She fished her own notebook out of her bag and uncapped a pen, writing down some story ideas for The Torch. It was slowing down with Christmas approaching, but there were a few oddities to report.
A few minutes later she glanced at James to find him looking toward the door. He was midway through a subtraction and Chloe looked to see what had distracted him.
Of course he didn’t listen.
Lex was entering the coffee shop brushing snow off his shoulders and pulling off his leather gloves. He was wearing one of his public faces of polite indifference and she looked back in time to see James scoot on his slippery snowsuited bottom out from the table. His clumping footsteps across the floor had everyone looking at the rather stunned billionaire as the boy made a beeline for him.
“Alex! Are you here for hot chocolate too?!”
Just when I was congratulating myself on having an easy job, Chloe ruefully mused. Everyone in the packed coffee house was looking between James, Lex and herself as the boy reached his destination. She wondered what her boyfriend’s reaction would be.
“Hello James,” he said kindly, bending his knees and flawlessly picking up the unresisting boy. It was entirely possible everyone’s mouth had dropped to their kneecaps with the easy gesture.
Chloe was just trying to reconcile a large upswing in her desire for him. Goodness, there must be some way to make him unattractive, but she’d never seen it. Tired, sick, dirty, asleep, angry, sad - all gorgeous. And now she had to deal with adorable Lex relating to a child. It made her biological clock threaten to tick madly.
“I believe this is yours,” he said to her, carefully depositing James in front of his things. “I see you found your hot chocolate. I hope it’s to your satisfaction?”
James nodded and Chloe aped the gesture. She wanted to jump Lex so badly if she wasn’t babysitting it might have happened despite all the eyes on them.
“Hello, Lex,” she managed. “Everything’s fine, thanks.”
He nodded and smiled genuinely and Chloe had to take a long sip of hot chocolate to prevent her lips from launching at him.
“Do you want to sit with us,” James asked, and she watched in horror as Lex sat down across from her.
His mild expression did nothing to make her calmer, but she forced a polite smile. Say hi to the nice man you’re not having a steamy secret affair with.
“What brings you here?”
He was tempted to answer the real reason, but there was little gain in causing a scene twice in an hour.
“Just checking up on the place,” Lex said. “I thought it might be a good night to sample some of Martha’s Christmas cookies. Clark tells me her gingerbread is not to be missed.”
James looked up from his notebook at the mention of cookies and his eyes slid to Chloe searchingly. She caught the glance and pinned Lex with a disapproving glare before nodding.
“One gingerbread cookie of normal size, and just one, even if it’s stuck to another one and in some definitions might be considered two in one,” she said, sliding out of the booth. James followed and she took his hand as they walked to the counter. Lex followed behind a few seconds later.
Because Chloe was walking with a remarkably short person they all arrived at the counter at the same time. She hoisted James up to sit on one of the barstools and gave Martha a smile.
“Hi, we received a spurious and underhanded tip that there might be gingerbread cookies,” she said, and Clark’s mother’s smile practically glowed.
“Absolutely,” she said, producing a tray of elaborately decorated figures so detailed each had shoes, pants, coats and hats in addition to their little icing faces. James wiggled and Chloe reached out to put a steadying hand on his back, finding that Lex’s hand had gotten there first.
If I get pregnant anytime soon I’m blaming gingerbread cookies, she thought with exasperation. Lex and babies and happy smiles swirled through her mind and she tried to combat it by concentrating on her birth control pills.
Martha watched as the two young people waited patiently for the little boy to make his decision. His eyes ran hungrily over the tray, resting on each cookie in deliberation. Chloe and Lex were both holding him on the barstool and at the ready if he should start to fall, and they were huddled closer together than two virtual strangers should find comfortable.
“That one,” James declared, pointing at a brightly dressed dessert.
She put it on a plate and regarded him critically. “Have you been behaving yourself, James?”
He nodded vehemently and Chloe backed him up.
”He’s been very good.”
Martha retrieved a small pastry bag from behind the counter and traced a ‘J’ and a ‘W’ on the little gingerbread lapels. “There you go, then,” she said. “Enjoy.”
Chloe tried to pay for the treat and Lex waved her away. “It’s on me.”
She smiled weakly at Martha in what she hoped was a neutral way. If Lex didn’t quit giving her personal attention he was going to raise suspicions. As it was, if someone had seen them in the parking lot and at The Talon it wasn’t that far to jump to the right conclusions.
“Thank you,” she said, and gave a prompting nudge to James.
“Thank you.”
Once the boy and the cookie were safely back at the table, Chloe found herself unable to remember what she had been writing down. Sighing, she folded the notebook and put it back in her bag. Watching James as he happily ate bits of the cookie between making it dance around was soothing in one way, but it didn’t help her calm down from the high of watching Lex dote on a small child.
“Chloe?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, sweetie,” she corrected. “Drink some hot chocolate and swallow what’s in your mouth.”
Lex returned to the table with his own mug of hot chocolate and gingerbread cookie. He didn’t really want either, but he would be willing to sacrifice both to Chloe’s young charge for a few minutes of conversation with her.
Martha had told him that she had been babysitting for the Wards for years, since Jimmy Ward had moved to Smallville to work at the plant. He had been chagrined to realize he had so little idea of his employees’ names. However, knowing there was a Mrs. Ward had made him feel a lot better about the kiss he had witnessed earlier.
“I’m glad my mom and dad had to work tonight,” James said.
“Why is that,” she questioned.
He shrugged and bit a foot off his cookie, chewing it up before answering. Lex waited as he looked at Chloe earnestly.
“Cause when you were gone all summer I had a dumb babysitter. She wanted me to play with cars.”
He said the word cars like it was a virulent form of plague and Chloe laughed before composing herself. “I’m sure she wasn’t dumb, James, it’s just some people don’t think doing math is playing.”
The boy’s little head nodded and he picked up his pencil again. He seemed a little sad and she put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him. She had missed him over the summer as well.
“Why don’t you use Lex’s age?”
Two sets of green eyes turned to him and he felt nervous.
“My age?”
“Yeah, how old are you? I’m this many!”
James repeated his gesture from the hallway but without his mittens, and Lex could see he was holding up two fingers on each hand. “I don’t have enough fingers. I’m 24.”
The dark head bent over his notebook and Lex looked to Chloe for guidance. She met his eyes mildly and sipped her hot chocolate.
“20 and 6,” James said a surprisingly short time later.
Chloe nodded and he turned to his calculator to check the numbers while she explained to the puzzled billionaire.
“He likes to subtract ages of the people he meets from each other,” she said. “He’s hoping to eventually meet someone who’s 100.”
Lex took a look at the equations and found they were not only correct, they were amazingly neat and tidy. “Do his parents know he does this?”
“His father is your Head of Catalytic Management, he taught him how,” Chloe said.
He nodded and watched as the little fingers punched numbers quickly into the green calculator. With every equation he checked he made a small mark next to it on the paper. He could remember doing similar things as a child, but never having his father spend the time to teach him or even to appreciate the projects despite how advanced they had been for someone his age.
I’ll do better with my own kids, he thought.
Which of course brought his eyes back to a certain blond reporter, who blushed attractively when she seemed to catch a hint of his intentions toward her. He smirked and she looked away quickly, watching James complete more math problems with a proud smile. Lex soon joined in and wrote some simple equations for him to solve.
Almost an hour later the boy yawned impressively and Chloe looked at her watch.
“Okay buddy, I think it’s time to head home,” she said.
James gave her a vaguely irritated look and turned to talk to Lex. “She’s bossy sometimes.”
“Only with good reason, I’m sure,” Lex replied. “Sometimes we need someone else to tell us what the best thing for us is.”
Chloe rolled her eyes at him before James could turn back and catch the rude gesture. She put his jacket back on and wiped icing from his fingers before wrestling his hands into their mittens. His hat went on easily and she shrugged into her own jacket.
“Goodnight Lex,” she said, slinging her bag and James’ little backpack over her shoulder. It was harder to get the boy up into her arms than it had been earlier and the pack slid down around her wrist to dangle. She couldn’t right it without putting him back down and Lex stood up to help.
Pushing the strap back up, he let go and it fell down once again.
“Why don’t I walk you to your car,” he offered.
Chloe knew she should refuse but James was slumping heavily onto her left side. With the bags around her other arm she would barely be able to unlock the door.
“I’d appreciate it,” she said, smiling.
He really is a very good man.
Martha Kent watched as Lex held the door for Chloe and the child, his hands wrapped comfortably around a shoulder bag with a large flower on it and a brightly coloured backpack with pictures of flying robots. It wasn’t an image that deserved the strange looks it got from the other patrons.
Because she knew from the moment she met him, Lex Luthor was a family man without a family.
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Excellent line, beautiful chapter. :applause:
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