It'll Give Us Something To Talk About The Next Time We Meet, Chapter 12
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!
Table of Contents
Neither Dinah nor Bart responded to the texts he sent on the way out of the school, but he was given no time to worry over that fact. Gina, alerted, he was sure, by Kasich, called him as soon as he'd climbed into the cab of the truck. It really was called Smallville for a reason, he thought as she patched in Legal. Someone had seen him and called someone, who called someone, who had called someone in Queen Industries. He reassured them all the way back to the farm that he hadn't contacted any of the claimants and had not made any statements to the press. Once on the helicopter he made sure to pause between each exhale and inhale, read through the white paper, and made a list of notes that he emailed to Gina once they landed. He left the helipad feeling calm, confident, and ready to rip Bart a new one when he called.
“Status report,” he ordered.
“Man, you gotta get back to the Watchtower.”
“Is Victor there?”
“No. But this situation is getting out of hand. Ninjastriker bailed. No sign of him at his place, and a lot of his equipment's missing too.”
Oliver unlocked the Lexus. “Where there any signs of struggle?”
“You know, you hear that on TV all the time but I never know what it means.”
Oh for the love of... “Was there anything broken, any furniture knocked over, any trails of blood leading to a dying man?”
“Some drawers were dumped out.”
So the place had been tossed, and Stuart had either gotten wind of it and gone underground or whoever had done the search had gotten him. Or, he thought, his stomach tightening a little as he pulled into traffic, he had done the tossing on his own. Leaving in a hurry or covering his tracks?
“Boss?” Bart asked.
“Where's Dinah? Has she checked in?”
“She went to work.”
“To work work? At the station?”
“Watchtower told her to go. Said it was a big newsday.”
Oliver felt his heart begin to pound again. “Watchtower is supposed to be with Lois.”
“Boss, it's not my fault you like 'em stubborn.”
“You're saying Watchtower is still at the Watchtower.”
“Yep.”
He started to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, only to remember that hand needed to steer the car. “Okay. I'll be there in five.”
* - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - #
She'd found some clothes, he saw. Some jeans and a Metropolis PD t-shirt that had to have come from Dinah, and a red hoodie that had to have come from Bart. It also looked as if she'd found a comb and some lip-gloss, although not, apparently, a bra.
She spared him no more than a glance before re-absorbing herself with whatever was happening on her screen. She did, however, ask: “Did Lois get to the safe house alright?”
“Yeah. But you would know that if you'd gone with her like you were supposed to”
She gave him a longer look this time, one that posed no questions and made many statements with its blankness. He sighed and walked over to her. “Chloe.”
She returned to her typing.
“Chloe.” He slid his hand under her chin, pulling her face towards his. The flesh was willing, it seemed, but the spirit was strong. Her eyes stayed on the monitor, darting between an explosion of red dots covering the great state of Kansas.
“It's ‘Watchtower ‘until the mission's complete,” she told him as he slid his hand back and into his pocket. “We need to keep our focus. I stayed because there was no one to available to run the operation. You were … wherever you were; Impulse says your other non-cybernetic geek's disappeared; and today could make or break Canary's career; there was no way she could be MIA today and not jeopardize her job. You needed me,” she said, looking up at him finally.
Oliver gripped his arrowhead - her arrowhead - and stared back. What he needed was to be able to send her back to her own world in one piece.
“This is what I do,” she added when he didn’t respond. “Anyway, your security wouldn't have stood a chance against Lois and I together.”
He tried not smirk at that, and failed. It was apropos. Sometimes you knew you'd fail but you knew you still had to try. “It's not safe here.”
“Really? Ten bucks says Cyborg would pick it over wherever he's at now.”
Point. Game over. “Okay.” He exhaled a long breath. “Do you have any ideas on where that might be.”
“Not at any LuthorCorp property in Kansas. But the Show-Me state is an easy drive from here and the company does own warehouse space over there.”
“What about family holdings? In order to find the farm Victor put together a list of real estate Clark held privately.” He leaned over her. Her hands flew up off the keyboard and he tapped a few keys of his own. “Have Bart check these out,” he said, straightening.
She nodded, her hands slowly coming back down to the desk top. “That'll help. There is one other possibility.” She paused to give him an uncertain look.
“What is it?”
“On my side of the fence, Superman - that's the new moniker, by the way - has the mother of all snow forts up in the Arctic.” She pulled up The Blur's M.O.I.R.A. entry. “Emphasis on the word 'fort'. Not only is it a giant artificial intelligence containing enough data to make the Library of Congress hang its head in shame, but it has some pretty nifty extraterrestrial weapons technology to boot.”
“Why didn't you mention this before?”
“Aside from assuming you’d done the reading? I was hoping I wouldn't have to. The thing was a little complicated to create. First Clark had to sort of fuse together some Kryptonian rocks called 'Elements,'” she said. Oliver felt his stomach sink. “...and then plant the combined elements in the snow up in the high latitudes,” she continued. “I’ve been looking, but I haven't been able to spot it on any satellite scan of the region, so I'd hoped he hadn't gotten around to doing all that over here. ”
“No. He has it. It's there,” Oliver said.
“So, you knew about it?”
“No. But I knew about the Elements. I learned about them today.”
“He found them?”
“Yes.” Just one that he knew of for sure, but he wouldn't bet a wooden nickel against the possibility that Clark had found the rest.
She nodded. “Okay, that definitely adds a double-plus to the ungood. The upside is that there are ways of getting there that don't involve super-speed. Back home there's a cave in the Kawatche system in Lowell county that acts a teleportation platform. If that chamber exists over here we should be able to teleport ourselves to the Fortress. We just need the key, and my Clark had a bad habit of leaving it in the lock.”
Oliver couldn't imagine any Luthor being so sloppy. “No. My Clark would never do that. And there's no way of knowing where he would keep it.”
“Mine carved out a hollow in a copy of Tom Sawyer and stuck it in a his desk drawer.”
“It probably helped that no one was about to lift anything from the house of a mortgaged-to-the-hilt farm family.”
“True,” she said just as a breeze descended on them both before transforming into Bart.
“It's been a few minutes,” she said.
“I got tamales. I figured I can't be the only one who's starving. We got pineapple and we got pork.”
“One of each, please,” she answered. “How was Missouri?”
“Sucky.” He swallowed the half of the tamale he'd shoved in his mouth. “And no Cyborg. Not at any of the addresses you gave me.”
“Then I guess now's the time to re-strategy, as an old not-friend used to say. How do you feel about going back to where you've been?”
“Is 'unhappy' an option?”
“This time you'd been looking for something rather than someone: a disc, shaped like an octagon, that has a few symbols on it, like this,” she said, sketching a few lines on a scrap of printer paper, “around the edges. It could be in a hollowed-out book, it could be in his underwear drawer, it could be --”
“In a safe, or in a vault, or on his person,” interrupted Oliver.
Chloe frowned at him. “The alternative is a grid search of the Arctic for something that may be disguised with an alien cloaking device.”
“At least it would be larger than a breadbox! Worst-case scenario, he runs straight into it, bangs his head, comes back and tells us where it is.”
“Or at the right speed he runs straight through the walls without even knowing they’re there.”
“I would know it was there,” Bart said.
“”You'd have him searching for a needle in a haystack.”
Chloe turned back to Bart. “Have you ever done a systematic grid search of a featureless landscape?”
“I... no.”
“So we'd have to slow him down so we can maintain a fix on him and he doesn't start running around in circles,” she argued, turning back to Oliver. “Plus, you did hear the parts about ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘alien weapons’, right? We can't send him up there without back-up and there's no way to get back-up up there in time without Bart hauling each person up individually. If Cyborg's up there our best bet for getting him out is to go as a team, and that means finding the key.”
Everything she said made sense and if he hadn’t just had the meeting he’d had with Jason, it would have been the route he’d have gone down. But he had, and he knew if they wanted Victor alive and whole and home today, they were going to have to bring Clark to them. “That is pointless and you know it, Chloe!”
“Elizabeth,” Bart corrected.
“Watchtower,” Chloe said. She crossed her arms. “Fine. What do you suggest?”
He ignored her stiffened stance and turned to Bart. “Can you really run through stuff, like she said?”
Bart flicked his eyes over to Chloe. “Um, I don’t know. Is this something Other Me can do?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. Oliver didn't glance over but her voice sounded a little less frigid than it had. “He does it by vibrating at the same speed as the molecules in whatever he wants to go through.”
Bart snickered. “Vibrates, huh?”
“Bart, focus!” Oliver barked.
Bart rolled his eyes, then assumed an expression of what he probably thought profundity looked like to respond to Chloe. “That sounds right in theory. But what works in theory doesn't always work in practice.”
“It does,” Chloe assured him. “I've seen him do it. I bet,” she said in a suddenly low voice, “that right now, you could go through that wall right there.” She pointed to the wall separating the great room of the penthouse from the elevator foyer and gave Oliver a raised-eyebrow stare. He almost laughed, but Bart was straightening up and he didn't want to ruin the momentum she was creating.
“Oh, well, that. Sure,” Bart said. He walked over to the wall and gave it an appraising once-over. “Totally. I just need to, you know, vibrate.” He held up his right hand and ran it over the wall's surface. Oliver caught Chloe's eye and grinned. Chloe shushed him with her hand and pointed back to the wall, where Bart's arm had disappeared up to the elbow. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Yeah. We are going to do this.”
With that he was gone.
And back.
And gone.
And back.
“See?” he asked. “Just like told you! So where do I vibrate next, boss?”
Oliver found himself smiling almost as broadly as Chloe and Bart. “I was thinking the bathroom.”
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!
Table of Contents
Neither Dinah nor Bart responded to the texts he sent on the way out of the school, but he was given no time to worry over that fact. Gina, alerted, he was sure, by Kasich, called him as soon as he'd climbed into the cab of the truck. It really was called Smallville for a reason, he thought as she patched in Legal. Someone had seen him and called someone, who called someone, who had called someone in Queen Industries. He reassured them all the way back to the farm that he hadn't contacted any of the claimants and had not made any statements to the press. Once on the helicopter he made sure to pause between each exhale and inhale, read through the white paper, and made a list of notes that he emailed to Gina once they landed. He left the helipad feeling calm, confident, and ready to rip Bart a new one when he called.
“Status report,” he ordered.
“Man, you gotta get back to the Watchtower.”
“Is Victor there?”
“No. But this situation is getting out of hand. Ninjastriker bailed. No sign of him at his place, and a lot of his equipment's missing too.”
Oliver unlocked the Lexus. “Where there any signs of struggle?”
“You know, you hear that on TV all the time but I never know what it means.”
Oh for the love of... “Was there anything broken, any furniture knocked over, any trails of blood leading to a dying man?”
“Some drawers were dumped out.”
So the place had been tossed, and Stuart had either gotten wind of it and gone underground or whoever had done the search had gotten him. Or, he thought, his stomach tightening a little as he pulled into traffic, he had done the tossing on his own. Leaving in a hurry or covering his tracks?
“Boss?” Bart asked.
“Where's Dinah? Has she checked in?”
“She went to work.”
“To work work? At the station?”
“Watchtower told her to go. Said it was a big newsday.”
Oliver felt his heart begin to pound again. “Watchtower is supposed to be with Lois.”
“Boss, it's not my fault you like 'em stubborn.”
“You're saying Watchtower is still at the Watchtower.”
“Yep.”
He started to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, only to remember that hand needed to steer the car. “Okay. I'll be there in five.”
* - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - # - - * - & % @ - #
She'd found some clothes, he saw. Some jeans and a Metropolis PD t-shirt that had to have come from Dinah, and a red hoodie that had to have come from Bart. It also looked as if she'd found a comb and some lip-gloss, although not, apparently, a bra.
She spared him no more than a glance before re-absorbing herself with whatever was happening on her screen. She did, however, ask: “Did Lois get to the safe house alright?”
“Yeah. But you would know that if you'd gone with her like you were supposed to”
She gave him a longer look this time, one that posed no questions and made many statements with its blankness. He sighed and walked over to her. “Chloe.”
She returned to her typing.
“Chloe.” He slid his hand under her chin, pulling her face towards his. The flesh was willing, it seemed, but the spirit was strong. Her eyes stayed on the monitor, darting between an explosion of red dots covering the great state of Kansas.
“It's ‘Watchtower ‘until the mission's complete,” she told him as he slid his hand back and into his pocket. “We need to keep our focus. I stayed because there was no one to available to run the operation. You were … wherever you were; Impulse says your other non-cybernetic geek's disappeared; and today could make or break Canary's career; there was no way she could be MIA today and not jeopardize her job. You needed me,” she said, looking up at him finally.
Oliver gripped his arrowhead - her arrowhead - and stared back. What he needed was to be able to send her back to her own world in one piece.
“This is what I do,” she added when he didn’t respond. “Anyway, your security wouldn't have stood a chance against Lois and I together.”
He tried not smirk at that, and failed. It was apropos. Sometimes you knew you'd fail but you knew you still had to try. “It's not safe here.”
“Really? Ten bucks says Cyborg would pick it over wherever he's at now.”
Point. Game over. “Okay.” He exhaled a long breath. “Do you have any ideas on where that might be.”
“Not at any LuthorCorp property in Kansas. But the Show-Me state is an easy drive from here and the company does own warehouse space over there.”
“What about family holdings? In order to find the farm Victor put together a list of real estate Clark held privately.” He leaned over her. Her hands flew up off the keyboard and he tapped a few keys of his own. “Have Bart check these out,” he said, straightening.
She nodded, her hands slowly coming back down to the desk top. “That'll help. There is one other possibility.” She paused to give him an uncertain look.
“What is it?”
“On my side of the fence, Superman - that's the new moniker, by the way - has the mother of all snow forts up in the Arctic.” She pulled up The Blur's M.O.I.R.A. entry. “Emphasis on the word 'fort'. Not only is it a giant artificial intelligence containing enough data to make the Library of Congress hang its head in shame, but it has some pretty nifty extraterrestrial weapons technology to boot.”
“Why didn't you mention this before?”
“Aside from assuming you’d done the reading? I was hoping I wouldn't have to. The thing was a little complicated to create. First Clark had to sort of fuse together some Kryptonian rocks called 'Elements,'” she said. Oliver felt his stomach sink. “...and then plant the combined elements in the snow up in the high latitudes,” she continued. “I’ve been looking, but I haven't been able to spot it on any satellite scan of the region, so I'd hoped he hadn't gotten around to doing all that over here. ”
“No. He has it. It's there,” Oliver said.
“So, you knew about it?”
“No. But I knew about the Elements. I learned about them today.”
“He found them?”
“Yes.” Just one that he knew of for sure, but he wouldn't bet a wooden nickel against the possibility that Clark had found the rest.
She nodded. “Okay, that definitely adds a double-plus to the ungood. The upside is that there are ways of getting there that don't involve super-speed. Back home there's a cave in the Kawatche system in Lowell county that acts a teleportation platform. If that chamber exists over here we should be able to teleport ourselves to the Fortress. We just need the key, and my Clark had a bad habit of leaving it in the lock.”
Oliver couldn't imagine any Luthor being so sloppy. “No. My Clark would never do that. And there's no way of knowing where he would keep it.”
“Mine carved out a hollow in a copy of Tom Sawyer and stuck it in a his desk drawer.”
“It probably helped that no one was about to lift anything from the house of a mortgaged-to-the-hilt farm family.”
“True,” she said just as a breeze descended on them both before transforming into Bart.
“It's been a few minutes,” she said.
“I got tamales. I figured I can't be the only one who's starving. We got pineapple and we got pork.”
“One of each, please,” she answered. “How was Missouri?”
“Sucky.” He swallowed the half of the tamale he'd shoved in his mouth. “And no Cyborg. Not at any of the addresses you gave me.”
“Then I guess now's the time to re-strategy, as an old not-friend used to say. How do you feel about going back to where you've been?”
“Is 'unhappy' an option?”
“This time you'd been looking for something rather than someone: a disc, shaped like an octagon, that has a few symbols on it, like this,” she said, sketching a few lines on a scrap of printer paper, “around the edges. It could be in a hollowed-out book, it could be in his underwear drawer, it could be --”
“In a safe, or in a vault, or on his person,” interrupted Oliver.
Chloe frowned at him. “The alternative is a grid search of the Arctic for something that may be disguised with an alien cloaking device.”
“At least it would be larger than a breadbox! Worst-case scenario, he runs straight into it, bangs his head, comes back and tells us where it is.”
“Or at the right speed he runs straight through the walls without even knowing they’re there.”
“I would know it was there,” Bart said.
“”You'd have him searching for a needle in a haystack.”
Chloe turned back to Bart. “Have you ever done a systematic grid search of a featureless landscape?”
“I... no.”
“So we'd have to slow him down so we can maintain a fix on him and he doesn't start running around in circles,” she argued, turning back to Oliver. “Plus, you did hear the parts about ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘alien weapons’, right? We can't send him up there without back-up and there's no way to get back-up up there in time without Bart hauling each person up individually. If Cyborg's up there our best bet for getting him out is to go as a team, and that means finding the key.”
Everything she said made sense and if he hadn’t just had the meeting he’d had with Jason, it would have been the route he’d have gone down. But he had, and he knew if they wanted Victor alive and whole and home today, they were going to have to bring Clark to them. “That is pointless and you know it, Chloe!”
“Elizabeth,” Bart corrected.
“Watchtower,” Chloe said. She crossed her arms. “Fine. What do you suggest?”
He ignored her stiffened stance and turned to Bart. “Can you really run through stuff, like she said?”
Bart flicked his eyes over to Chloe. “Um, I don’t know. Is this something Other Me can do?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. Oliver didn't glance over but her voice sounded a little less frigid than it had. “He does it by vibrating at the same speed as the molecules in whatever he wants to go through.”
Bart snickered. “Vibrates, huh?”
“Bart, focus!” Oliver barked.
Bart rolled his eyes, then assumed an expression of what he probably thought profundity looked like to respond to Chloe. “That sounds right in theory. But what works in theory doesn't always work in practice.”
“It does,” Chloe assured him. “I've seen him do it. I bet,” she said in a suddenly low voice, “that right now, you could go through that wall right there.” She pointed to the wall separating the great room of the penthouse from the elevator foyer and gave Oliver a raised-eyebrow stare. He almost laughed, but Bart was straightening up and he didn't want to ruin the momentum she was creating.
“Oh, well, that. Sure,” Bart said. He walked over to the wall and gave it an appraising once-over. “Totally. I just need to, you know, vibrate.” He held up his right hand and ran it over the wall's surface. Oliver caught Chloe's eye and grinned. Chloe shushed him with her hand and pointed back to the wall, where Bart's arm had disappeared up to the elbow. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Yeah. We are going to do this.”
With that he was gone.
And back.
And gone.
And back.
“See?” he asked. “Just like told you! So where do I vibrate next, boss?”
Oliver found himself smiling almost as broadly as Chloe and Bart. “I was thinking the bathroom.”