It'll Give Us Something To Talk About The Next Time We Meet, Part 7a
Title: It'll Give Us Something To Talk About The Next Time We Meet
Author: Flying High / latetothpartyhp
Pairing: Chloe/Oliver, Clark/Tess, ex-Lois/Oliver
Rating: Teen / PG-13
Warnings: Coarse language, violence, brief nudity
Spoilers: For Luthor and Hex
Summary: Oliver has problems. Lois wants out, Tess wants Clark and Clark wants his powers back. If only Oliver could have what he wants... Set in the Luthor-verse about a month after the Finale.
Sequel to Of All The Towns In All The Worlds In All The Parallel Universes, You Had To Walk Into Mine and I Don't Mind A Little Trouble.
Author's Note (and some additional warnings): Many, many thanks to
iluvaqt for beta'ing this and giving me the confidence to keep writing it. This is a JLA-centered story with a Chlollie twist that ya'll should see coming from a mile away (which I write to persuade anyone put off by the lack of Chloe in the first few chapters). Thanks for reading and please let me know what you think!
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7a / Part 7b
He was half-way home when Lois' security team called. She'd left the building, climbed into a cab and was on her way to the Ace of Clubs. All to the good, he thought. Now he wouldn't have to watch Tess and Lois circle each other like a couple of hyenas fighting over a carcass. He had hoped, once upon a time, they might become friends: gone shopping together, cooked Christmas dinners together, threw each other baby showers. Of course that was not anything he could ever admit to anyone, especially not Tess, who was huddled inside her car in a visitor's stall in the garage. She jumped when he knocked and stayed skittish all the way to the penthouse, looking behind her every few seconds and flinching when the bell rang to announce the arrival of the elevator.
Nervous or not, however, her first words when they entered the penthouse, even before she sat, were “Where's Lois?”
“She's meeting some friends,” he replied.
Tess' posture relaxed. “That's convenient.”
“It is,” he said. He noticed she'd left her short trench-coat on, as if having to put it back on would slow her down. “Do you want something to drink?”
“That would be nice,” she said absently.
“What would you like?”
“Oh, I'm sorry. Water's fine.”
“Nothing stronger?”
“No. Not tonight.”
He nodded. “Ice?”
“No. I prefer ambient.”
“Ambient?” he asked as he filled a glass from the filtered tap. “Is that a fancy way of saying 'not too cold'?”
She gave him a nervous little smile. “Sort of. More like room temperature.”
“It's 72 degrees in here.”
“I know. It's a … lab joke.”
“Ah. Science humor. Way above my head.” He handed her the glass and poured himself one as well. He thought he should probably be ready to go as well.
“I don't know. Your head's pretty far up there.”
“And with now the bean-pole jokes.”
“Did kids used to call you that?” she asked, curious.
He looked up from the faucet. “A couple of times, I guess.”
“I went through a big growth spurt right before I left the orphanage,” she said. “Six inches in six months. I tripped over everything.”
“That sounds familiar. I grew a foot between thirteen and fourteen.” He sat himself down in the chair opposite where she huddled over her water.
She raised her glass. “Let's hear it for the Luthor genes.”
“Here, here,” he replied, raising his own.
They both drank, and then a silence settled over them. Tess appeared to zone out for a few seconds, her face settling into an expression of blank anguish. She'd told him Clark had come to her apartment, that he hadn't “been himself”, whatever that meant to her. From Oliver's perspective that would mean that Clark hadn't tried to kill anyone, but Tess obviously had a very different sort of relationship to him.
“What happened, Tess.”
She glanced up, startled, then fidgeted with her glass for a moment. “I have no idea. I really don't. It's possible that I've gone completely crazy.”
“You mean, you imagined Clark showing up at your place and acting weird?”
“No, he definitely did that.”
“Well, what did he do that was so odd?”
She shook her head. “You're not going to believe this.”
“Try me.”
“Alright.” She set her glass on the coffee table, and spreading her arms along the back of the couch, looked him straight in the eye. “He asked me to marry him.”
Oliver had told her to try him. The upside was that she'd confided in him, truthfully. Anything that crazy had to be the truth.
The downside was that, right now, he couldn't say any of the things that were on the tip of his tongue to say.
“Ok,” he answered after a few beats. “Um, aside from the obvious, normally that, in and of itself, doesn't warrant going to ground. If it did I'd have to sell my stock in Tiffany's. Was there anything else he did?”
“Aside from the obvious, no, it doesn't,” she answered, smiling. “Well, let's review. One. He came to my apartment. He NEVER comes to my apartment.”
“Why not?”
“He said we couldn't risk Lionel finding out about us.”
Okay, he couldn't not ask. “There's actually an 'us'? I mean there's … a 'you guys'?” he asked in what he hoped was a normal tone.
She laughed a little. “Surprised?”
“Yes.”
“I'm disappointed in you. I'd have thought you would have had all kinds of perverted suspicions about Clark and me. Guess you didn't inherit as many of the Luthor genes as I thought.”
Nope. He'd had no clue. “I suppose that means Lionel did know.”
“Oh, he knew.”
“So Clark's fears about going to your place were correct but inadequate.”
“Yes, but try telling him that. Which brings us to Two. Clark doesn't do anything he's told. Not if he doesn't want to do it. Tonight, however, I told him to go.”
“And he went?”
“He protested, but he went.”
“So, does that mean I can assume you said no?”
She threw him a look, one he recognized from a dozen fights with Lois. It must be something they taught girls on that special day in fourth grade when they took them into another classroom to talk about “changes”.
“Have you ever said 'no' before?”
She smirked at him.
Oliver supposed that had been a dumb question. Certainly it wasn't a question he wanted an answer to. “Ok, uh, so why did you say 'no' now?”
She picked her glass back up and studied it a little, gathering her composure. It was something he recognized from a thousand fights with himself, weighing what to say and what not to. He wondered if Lex had done it as well, when he wasn't asleep at his desk in the back row or correcting the professors. He probably had. It was another one of Lionel's bequests, unwanted and unavoidable.
“You really are going to think I'm crazy,” she said at last.
“I told you. Try me.”
“I said 'no' because he wouldn't have asked me if I hadn't wished for him to ask me.”
“Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was an 'us', isn't kind of normal to think about getting married?” he asked. Normal, that is, if they'd been planning to appear on My Big Redneck Wedding.
“Yes, I've spent endless hours pouring over back issues of Martha Stewart Weddings in anticipation of this day,” she said dryly. “You misunderstand. I didn't want to marry him. I wished to marry him.”
“Sounds to me like you're having fun with semantics.”
“I'm not. There was this woman I saw outside the bookstore. She was acting strangely, and I followed her.”
Oliver sat up. “Is that why you took off like that?”
She nodded. “I wanted to know why. Turns out she'd heard about the book from Yuri and wanted to make a deal. She told me I could have whatever I wished if I'd just help her get it.”
“So you wished for Clark to propose?” he asked. He realized he was gripping the arms of his chair. He forced himself to relax and let go.
“I didn't come out and say that, no, but it's the only thing I can think of for why. The insane part is I didn't believe her. I just thought she was full of shit. I told her to stay away from me and then I went back to the university.”
“And then you went home and then Clark showed up. Sounds as if there was a bit of a time delay there. If you really 'wished' for this wouldn't it have just poof! … happened?”
“It did. He spent the afternoon getting Lillian's ring out of Lionel's safety deposit box before he came to see me.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment about that. “Was wanting Lillian's ring part of the wish?”
“What? No! Talk about creepy. It's not as if she was really Clark's mother anyway.”
“But he thinks of her as his mother.”
“Yes, but --”
“So maybe that's a clue that this is not what you think it is. Maybe he really wants to marry you - you know, aside from the when-you-wish-upon-a-crazy-woman-you-followed-from-a-money-laundrying-facility-for-the-Russian-mob thing.”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “Do you have any idea what Lionel will do when he learns Clark has that ring? Clark does. Or at least he should. After --”
“After what?”
She studied the glass again. The hunted looked she'd worn earlier had returned. After a moment though she drew a deep breath and lifted her eyes again. “Lionel tried to poison him a few months ago.
“What?” He sat forward. “When?”
She blinked a few times, and he realized he's slammed his own glass on the coffee table so hard some of the water had splashed out. “Soon after he got back from wherever it is he'd gone.”
“From wherever Lionel had gone, you mean.”
She nodded.
He sat back. He couldn't believe they'd missed that. Granted, given the time-frame it was likely before they'd recruited Bart, but - how could they miss that? “Christ.”
“You see the problem.”
He did. He saw the problem, and what a fucked-up problem it was. If Lionel had succeeded, so many other problems would be solved. But to kill his son? A son he had killed to obtain? A son who, as far as Lionel knew, couldn't be killed? Somehow he'd known Clark was vulnerable. Of course he had. He'd known Clark had lost his powers. He probably knew how he'd lost them. And a Traveler son without all the world-changing powers promised by the prophecy wasn't an asset. He was a liability.
But he was still Lionel's son.
“The problem is Lionel's a sadistic bastard,” he said.
Tess gave him a pitying little smile. “Oh, you couldn't be more wrong. Lionel couldn't care less if what he does brings pleasure or pain. The problem is that Lionel spins plans the way a spider spins webs. He's got a web for every purpose and the instant one of us little insects flies into one he's on them like the big, hairy tarantula he is.”
“You think this will interfere with Lionel's plans somehow.” And what plans would those be? he wondered. Tess seemed to have a better bead on them than he did, what with all the inside-gossip pillow-talk she probably did, and oh God, that was not a thought he'd ever wanted to think. On the other hand, that inside gossip might be useful. It was, as Lois would say, a disgusting thought, but it was possible the only way to save Tess might be to use her.
“Let's just say I've never been a Daddy's girl.”
Okay, that was slightly less informative than he'd hoped it would be. “He must have had some plans for you when he took you in.”
“I was an experiment,” she said bitterly. “The unknown variable in his highly controlled household. He wanted to know how the rest of the specimens would react.”
“And how did that go?”
She smiled again, draping her arms again on the back of the couch. “Not as he'd hypothesized. Not that that that stopped him. He just started spinning new webs. It's what he does. It's what he'll do unless the gods themselves come tear up his webs and crush him underfoot.”
“I doubt Arachne had a beard,” he joked.
She shrugged. “You never know. The truth gets distorted when it turns into a myth.”
“I'm surprised that's not what you wished for.”
“I know, right? If I'd any idea she serious I would have. At the least I could have wished for a million more wishes.”
“Not world peace?”
“Do I look like Lisa Simpson to you?”
“Nah, I'm sure you don't want to precipitate an ...” he trailed off, since the alien invasion was already here. That thought brought him back to the purpose of his visit to the bookstore. M.O.I.R.A. Hadn't mentioned anything about wishes but if this woman could grant them ... “Think you could ID her? The woman you talked to earlier?” he asked suddenly.
Tess' eyebrows shot up. “Are we heading on over to the police station?”
He stood up. “Kind of.” He was probably crazy for doing this, but then the whole situation was crazy. And he'd found his lucky arrowhead in the Tower when he'd gone in for his biometric scans. Maybe a little crazy would bring him luck. He grabbed the file-folder with the photo of Zatanna out of his bedroom and brought it back out to her. “Check this out.” He pulled the photo out. Tess took it.