Chlark Fanfic: Agenda, Chapter 5
Title: Agenda
Author: BabyDee1
Pairing: Chlark
Rating: NC-17 (mostly PG-13)
Warnings: None
Timeline: Futurefic; follows Season 8’s Injustice & Failsday Doomsday
Disclaimer: All known characters belong to the CW & DC comics.
Summary: More than a decade after the Doomsday Rampage, Clark makes a shocking discovery that changes his life forever.
Feedback: …makes me squee. :-)
Written for the 2011 smallvillebbang long Fanfic challenge. Many thanks to twinsarein for all her tireless organisation and support!
Beta’ed by legendarytobes& The Fallen Sky at KSite.
Art by sylvanelfmistre& go_clo.
Read previous chapter here.
Read story from the beginning here.
Chapter 5
“Okay, so…how do you want to do this?” Clark asked.
Gabby shrugged. “Whatever you say, dude; you’re the parent here.”
“What if you take her through her paces like you said your parents did with you?” Chloe suggested. “See if we can identify a trigger for her heat vision and learn to control it.”
Clark nodded. “Sounds like a plan. What were you doing when it first activated?”
“I, uh...” Gabby fidgeted and glanced at her mother. “Would you think me horrible if I asked you to leave?”
Chloe gaped. “What?”
“Just for now, Mom,” she said gently. “I just…I can’t do this with you here. It’s kinda hard to explain, but---”
“Hey, say no more,” Chloe said with a forced smile as she got up. “I banish you from the room often enough, I suppose payback was inevitable.”
“It’s nothing personal!” she called after her mother’s retreating back.
Chloe didn’t reply. They watched as she walked stiffly towards one of the bedrooms and closed the door behind her.
“Should we go to the balcony?” he offered. “There’s a nice view of the city from there, and I have some yellow tulips on the ledge that you might like.”
“Er…okay,” she decided, and he stood back as she walked through to the fairly large balcony. “These are Mom’s favourites,” she added absently, brushing a finger along one of the brightly coloured petals.
“I know.” It was why he grew them, and why he always kept one in a vase on his bedside table; their sunny hue reminded him of her hair, shimmering in the firelight as he made love to her...
He looked up to find Gabby staring at him oddly, and quickly dragged his mind back on topic.
“So…heat vision, huh?” he said awkwardly.
“She nodded. “Yup.”
“How did it activate?”
She gave a wry smile. “Long story. I was walking home from school, when I saw this kid who was being bullied on the corner. By the time I got to where she was, the mean girls had taken all her money. She was pretty shook up and really upset, so I took her for an ice cream and gave her what was left of my money so she could take a cab home.”
“Only it meant you got home late instead,” he surmised.
“Understatement,” she said dryly. “Needless to say, Mom went totally ballistic.”
“Where the hell have you been?” she had screeched. “You selfish, inconsiderate little brat, I’ve been going crazy wondering where you are!”
“You could have called my cell!”
“I did!” Chloe had screamed. “It was switched off!”
Gabby made a wry face. “Oops.”
“Oops?” Chloe echoed, her voice rising dangerously. “Oops?? Are you kidding me?”
Gabby shook her head vehemently. “I didn’t mean to be flippant---”
“And I don’t mean to punish you, but there we go,” her mother replied grimly, folding her arms. “To your room, Gabriella. And don’t come out until you’re old enough to vote.”
Her jaw dropped. “Are you grounding me?”
“After the irresponsible way you behaved tonight, what did you expect?”
Gabby shook her head. “No, you don’t understand!”
“I never do, do I?” she said tartly. “Whenever you mess up, that’s your ready-and-waiting excuse - Mom doesn’t understand you. Well, I’ve had enough of it for one night. Upstairs, Gabby. Now.”
“But I wasn’t being irresponsible---”
“No? You don’t call, you don’t text…you just waltz in here at eleven o’clock at night and expect me to give you a pat on the back?”
“If you’ll just let me explain---”
“Not another word!” she thundered. “I’m sick to death of your backtalk, Gabby. Got to your room, and I don’t want to hear a peep out of you unless it’s to tell me your sorry. Go!”
She’d glanced at Bruce for help, but in typical fashion he didn’t get involved. With as much energy she could muster, she’d stomped to her room, slamming the door shut as loudly as she could.
“I just sat on my bed, staring at the wall, silently seething at the injustice of it all,” she said. “She didn’t even let me explain, she just punished me when all I’d done was offer somebody some help. And Bruce; well, he knows better than to get involved when Mom’s disciplining me. Don’t get me wrong; he’s great, and I love him. But he’s more like an uncle, not a father figure. And I resented Mom for taking that away from me.
She paused briefly. “It hurt that I didn’t have a father to fight my corner, and I just was just so upset and angry at everything,” she continued. “My head began to get really hot, and I thought it was just because I was angry - but then I noticed that the paint was blistering off the wall in front of me, right at the spot that I was staring at.”
She fell silent, suddenly looking much younger than her thirteen years.
“Go on,” he prompted after a little while.
She fidgeted, playing nervously with her fingernails. “I stared in horror as this bizarre, blackened hole started spreading on the wall, and I could smell the smoke…and then my eyes started itching and stinging, and my head felt so hot that I thought it was going to explode, and then all of a sudden…”
“It’s okay,” he soothed when she stopped again. “Go on…”
She swallowed. “I just…everything went warm and orange, and I could feel this energy emanating from my eyes,” she said, tears now falling down her face. “The pressure eased up in my head immediately, but the streams of fire hit the wall and it ignited immediately.”
“What happened then?”
“I screamed for Mom. She came running in, and just…stared at the wall in shock, for a second. Then she ran across the room and grabbed me and rushed me outta there. Bruce ducked his head in, saw what had happened and dashed back in with a fire extinguisher and put the fire out.
“When we’d both calmed down, he told Mom that she needed to tell me the truth about myself,” she said quietly. “He put a hand on my shoulder and told me that everything was going to be okay, that I had nothing to worry about, and that I was completely normal. Then he left.”
“Is that when your Mom told you about me?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry you were so frightened,” he said softly. “And I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
She smiled up at him with teary eyes. “You’re here now,” she said softly. “That matters to me.”
The fell into an easy silence for a while and gazedx out at the sights of the city, each of them occasionally glancing at the other.
“So…what was your first thought?” Clark asked after a while. “When your mom told you I was your father?”
She smiled. “I was calm; but then, I already knew.”
“You knew?” he echoed.
She nodded sagely. “I found out when I was ten.”
“How?”
“Her yearbook,” she answered. “I’d seen her thumbing through it a couple of times, and I didn’t give it much thought. Then one day I decided to see what she looked like in high school, and voila - there you were on the Most Likely to Remain Best Buds page, standing right beside her.” She grinned. “It was like looking in a mirror.”
“But why didn’t you ever tell her you knew?”
She paused. “Because she must have had a good reason for never telling me who my father was,” she said quietly. “He may have abused her, or been a violent criminal or in prison. Maybe, like my grandfather did to my mom, he just walked away one day and never looked back. I didn’t know. But for her to never mention him at all, I knew it had to be something serious. So I decided not to rock the boat.
“I did ask who you were, though, one afternoon,” she went on, playing with a yellow flower petal. “I walked downstairs with the yearbook and asked who the hottie best bud was. She went white as a sheet.”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, that you were an old school friend who used to work on the school paper occasionally. I asked her why she’d never mentioned you if you’d been so close, and she said you lost contact after High School when you went on some ‘Arctic Expedition’.” She smiled, a faraway look in her eyes. “Six months later, Superman showed up in Metropolis, and everything became clear; I was half-alien.”
“I prefer the term mixed-race myself,” he said lightly, making her laugh, even though her eyes were still sad.
“I just wish she could have told me…”
“Gabriella…your mother didn’t tell you who I was because she was trying to protect both of us,” he said gently. “The world isn’t too kind to people who are different, and there are those that would harm you if they knew your true origins.”
She nodded. “I know; I know. And they could use me to get to you, and make you do stuff for them; bad stuff,” she added seriously.
“That’s right,” he answered. “Your mother loves you too much to ever put you in that position.”
“I never stopped thinking about you,” she whispered with a smile. “Once I’d seen the yearbook I went searching in the attic and found a hard drive full of pictures of you and Mom, including the ones from the Spring Formal. I told myself that you’d escort me to a father-daughter dance one day.’”
He sighed heavily. “Gabriella, I’m so sorry I missed so much of your life. If I’d known---”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I already told you, none of it was your fault.”
“Neither was it your mother’s. She was trying to protect you,” he insisted, determined not to lay any blame at Chloe’s door, either.
“I know that now,” she said. “And I love her, I really do. I just…I wanted my father, you know? And she knew where you were and she kept us apart.
“That’s why I started acting up,” she admitted. “I guess I was passively-aggressively trying to get her to open up about you. I just wanted a chance to know you. I never dreamed I might have inherited your powers.”
“I’m so glad you did,” he said softly.
She looked up at him and grinned. “Me, too.”
****
Chapter 6...