Erase: Chapter Forty-Four (44/50)
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Summary: After Chloe is found siphoning money from Oliver's company in order to purchase Kryptonite weapons, she realizes that she losing her sense of humanity. She decides that the only way to escape from who she is becoming is to erase her memories and start over. Oliver has 4 months to stop her before it's too late.
Spoilers: Up to Conspiracy, and then I write my own way.
A/N: Anyone miss me?
***Two Years Ago***
He was sending out an email when the elevator to the Clock Tower opened and Chloe stepped out. “I need you to let me borrow your sunglasses for a second.”
This was the third time this month since the 33.1 facility with the girl that they almost missed. She never mentioned it, but he knew she was still taking it to heart. He pressed send on his email and closed the lid of his laptop.
“Chloe”, he greeted, ignoring her request and putting his feet up on the desk. “Nice to see you, how are you doing?”
She pulled her laptop out of her messenger bag and flipped up the cover. “i can’t believe I never thought about this before- do you remember when Lex started mixing radioactive material in with his bombs to contaminate the surviving 33.1 victims and Victor and I built that program to detect radioactive material?”
He nodded. “Yeah, Lex ended up accidentally giving away the locations of the bombs. Which was great work, by the way.”
She smiled at the compliment as she reached into her bag. “I’ve got something better.” She started wildly plugging the cords into various parts of her computer and typing.
“He’s been putting in fake facilities and we’ve been falling for it, but they don’t have kryptonite in them. He’s color-coded every room so he can make a switch any time he wants and know where to put it all, but they’re not active. He can’t experiment on them without the meteor rock. So it got me thinking about the program that we developed with the radioactive material. Victor and I fooled around with the code.”
“You developed something that can spot Green K”, he finished, in awe. “Chloe, this is incredible.”
“I developed a program that will scan a building for large amounts of it”, she corrected. “That’s the only glitch. If there’s a small amount, I don’t think we can pick up on it, so I don’t think it’ll do Clark a lot of good, but it’ll help us.” She took a breath. “Which is why I need your sunglasses.”
Days without Chloe Sullivan: 97
The coordinates were more exact than he was expecting, and pinned Lana down to an apartment building in Tokyo. He showed the super a picture of Lana and told him that they spent the night together, that he forgot his watch and needed to get it.
The super didn’t let him in, but narrowed down where she lived. Oliver said that he would wait for Lana to get back, and then picked the lock once he was alone. It was a good change from Lucy’s machine gun security, especially since Bart wasn’t here.
The apartment was small, plain, and clean. Oliver wasn’t sure how long Lana had been living here; the place hadn’t been personalized at all. Either Lana was ready to leave at a moment’s notice, or the memories were too hard.
He let out a breath when he realized that there was the chance that maybe Lana erased her memories too.
Maybe he was wrong. After all, she had gone from small town girl to co-owner of the Talon to Mrs. Luthor to starting up the Isis Foundation, to kryptonite-charged super gal the last time he heard. The last time he saw her, it was like Clark was a Buddhist monk and Lana was one of his disciples, trying to learn from his wisdom. Clark could do no wrong in her eyes. He used to be like that. Didn’t work out.
The door opened and Lana closed it behind her. “Don’t tell me you’re still looking for Lex.”
He turned around. So Lana didn’t erase her memories after all. “I was looking for you.”
She looked alarmed all of a sudden. “Is Clark okay?”
Oliver let out a laugh. “You know, I have no idea.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Chloe disappeared”, he said, trying to read her face. No change in expression. “After that, it kind of gets fuzzy.”
“Someone kidnapped her?”
Yeah, the beating around the bush was getting old.
“She left town”, he told her, cutting to the chase. “You know that.”
“Excuse me?” She asked
“I know she called you”, he explained. “I know you’re helping her to erase her memories. I don’t know if I’m too late, but I’m here to take her back home.”
“Chloe is home”, he heard Lana say. “You have thousands of employees. If you need something, have one of them do it. Google it yourself.”
“Chloe is not my search engine”, Oliver replied, getting angry now. “She has a destiny and she has a greater good to fulfill. I’m taking her back home.”
“She’s fulfilled her greater good”, Lana concluded. “She’s had years of service. She’s done. She’s retired.”
Like hell. That wasn’t Chloe speaking. That was Lana.
“Did she say that?” Oliver inquired.
“She didn’t have to. She came to me.”
“Is her memory intact?” Oliver asked
“Why?” Lana prompted. “Is she only useful to you for the things that she knows?”
“We’re a team”, he answered, frustrated. “She’s not a computer. She’s not just an employee. You know Chloe, she’s different.”
“We’re all different”, Lana replied stiffly.
Oliver shook his head. Lana may have been special to Clark and coveted by Lex, but Oliver never understood what all of the hype was about. He could see how Lana’s body was almost rejecting the idea that Chloe was special instead of her.
“I bet it’s nice to have her around again”, he started casually. “She’s your best friend, it’s like having a piece of Smallville around, right?”
She shook her head. “She’s not here, Oliver. If you wait around my apartment, Chloe’s not going to show up.”
Well that was something helpful.
“I bet you still miss it all. The Talon, having Chloe and Clark around. I bet having her in your life again is like having a bit of Clark by your side, right?”
“Clark is always with me”, she answered.
Oliver shook his head. “No, Clark is always with Lois. He moved on from you.”
She tilted her head, like she knew he was going for a blow. “We both had to”, she responded.
“So you’re seeing someone?” Oliver pressed.
“I don’t need someone to have a higher purpose”, she answered.
His breath hitched for a second. That answer sounded like something Chloe would say.
“You know, there are Kandorians threatening to attack the planet?” Oliver asked. “But Clark’s embracing them like family. Chloe had weapons to help us lowly humans survive, but you’re the greatest weapon of them all. Two seconds in a fight and you’d knock them all out.”
“If Clark wants to help them, then that’s the right call”, Lana told him.
“Even if innocent people end up dead?”
“Clark won’t let that happen.”
Oliver shook his head. This idealism is what got Jimmy killed. Humanity wasn’t as clean and white as Clark believed that it could be, and that was something that they all learned the hard way. Chloe taught him to trust in his own instincts again instead of being blindly led on by Clark. Chloe taught him that they needed to be a team and that they needed to work together instead of going with their own agendas. If Lana was speaking like this, if she still viewed Clark this way, then she didn’t know what they had all been through.
Either Chloe hadn’t told her what had been going on, or Lana wasn’t listening.
“Is that what Chloe’s been telling you?” He asked. “That Clark won’t let something bad happen?”
“You said that you don’t even know what Clark’s been up to”, Lana brought up. “How do you know that his plan is going to fail? The world’s still going, isn’t it? Whatever he’s doing must be working somehow. What have you been doing in the meantime? Chloe’s been gone for months. You’re not even in the news anymore. You were Green Arrow. What the hell are you doing with yourself?”
“I’ve been looking for Chloe.”
“Why?” Lana asked. “You’re Oliver Queen. There’s nothing that you can get from her that you can’t get from someone else.”
“What do you have her doing, huh?” He asked. “What can possibly be more fulfilling than the greater good?”
“Staying alive.”
Oliver looked her straight in the eye. “You were there at the wedding. You saw the perfect, normal, little life that Clark wanted for her, and you saw Doomsday rip it to shreds.”
She was silent for a second, looking out of the window before turning back to him. “That was different.”
“Looks like the same thing to me. Looks like people ripping out her memory and dumping in a normal life and it turning everything upside down.”
“She wants it this time.”
Oliver felt a pit in his stomach. He froze for a second, unable to process that. She wants it? She wants a life without purpose? He couldn’t understand it. He lived a life without a purpose, but accompanied by copious amounts of alcohol. She didn’t have a problem with pulling him back then.
“She’s...happy?” He asked slowly. “Happy without any of it?”
Lana shrugged. “She could be, if she can let it go.”
He could fight the smile on his face. “But she can’t.”
“She going through a process. She needs to give herself more time, let herself be selfish.”
“She needs to come back to Kansas”, Oliver told her. “She needs her life’s purpose back. I can help her with her memory, if it’s too late.”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing there for her.”
“Except for her childhood memories and her family. Lois is still there.”
“I’m looking out for her”, Lana said, frustrated. “You haven’t been there long enough to realize how it all is. You don’t understand how good it feels to get away from it all.”
“It’s good for you because you have your own purpose. You’re taking Chloe’s away”, Oliver argued. “You’re letting her float around without a direction!”
“No, I’m letting her keep her own direction. I’m keeping her away from billionaires with their own agendas!”
“Don’t lump me in with Lex Luthor”, Oliver shot back fiercely. “We are not the same.”
There was a familiarity in her stance and in the look in her eyes- she saw it from Clark sometimes right before he sped away. He grabbed her arm and tried to stop her, but she pushed him against the wall and left.
He picked himself back up and turned around, rolling his eyes at the crack in the wall.
“Well, that’s just great”, he muttered aloud to nobody in particular.
***
“So, tell me- does the suit still fit, or has all of that time at Watchtower made you put on some weight?” He heard Mia tease on the phone.
“Are you going to ask me if I can still shoot an arrow too? Because I’m pretty sure I proved you wrong the last time you tested me on it.”
“Just trying to keep you alive.”
“Thanks, kid”, he responded dryly.
“So Lana’s rich, right? Divorced from a billionaire and all of that. How many apartments in Tokyo do you think she has?”
“Last I checked, she put all of her money into starting the Isis Foundation”, he told her.
“So why don’t you just hang around her apartment and wait for her to eventually show up?”
“You know better than that”, he answered, shooting a zipline arrow out, and resisting the tug forward when it caught on. “Don’t let someone else have the upperhand.”
“She’s the same as a burglar now?”
Oliver ziplined across with one arm, keeping a close look on everything with his sunglasses switched on Kryptonite detection. Nothing yet. “You know me, I’m a big fan of justice.”
“Free will too. What happens if she doesn’t want to come back?”
“Lana said she can’t let go. Maybe it’s not too late, maybe she still has her memories intact and she wants to back out. I know Chloe, okay?”
“Lana and Clark are her childhood friends, right? Both of them say to leave her alone. What if you’re wrong?”
“Then I’ll let Chloe tell me that I’m wrong.”
The building next to his was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a restaurant- either Lana was in there, or someone was using meteor rock with the hibachi.
“I’ve got to go”, he said, hanging up on Mia.
He dropped down the side of the building and changed into street clothing before going into the restaurant. He told the hostess that he was meeting someone there, and spotted Lana with a blonde wig.
He sat down across from her. “So”, he started, resting back in his chair. “What’s good to eat here?”