FIC: "Reunion", Part 14 of ?? (SV) - PG-13 for language
Previous Parts
Part Fourteen
“Hard at work as usual, I see.”
The voice caught Chloe off-guard and she nearly dropped her PDA. “Lex!” she exclaimed in surprise. “Hi!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down beside her. He always had a strange kind of grace in his movements - kind of like Clark in those rare moments that he wasn’t clumsy and tripping over himself - that reminded her of some kind of predator. A big cat, maybe - like a panther.
A bald panther.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, Chloe,” he continued. “I hope I didn’t ruin your concentration.”
“It’s all right,” she said, a little nervously. “Just going through some old articles. Keeping myself busy,” she added. It was true, but it didn’t strike to the heart of what she was actually doing. She kept a copy of all her ‘Wall of Weird’ stories on her PDA - for a variety of reasons: to alleviate boredom, to keep a record separate from the school computers, to access the information in an emergency, in case the latest meteor freak she encountered was similar to one she’d seen before. It had never occurred to her that when she finally learned Clark’s secret, she’d be glad she had these copies so she could back and see how, almost from day one, the meteor freak stories were also a chronicle of Clark’s growing hero complex. At the very moment Lex had interrupted her, she’d been realizing just how often - if you read between the lines, even lines that she herself had written - Clark had saved the day.
“May I ask why you’re here at the hospital on a Friday night?” he asked.
She didn’t entirely trust Lex; too many anomalies were popping up around him, and she’d noticed that his relationship with Clark was truly strained these days. She was glad, of course, that he’d helped her and her dad out over the summer, but something wasn’t right. She would have to be careful: Lex obviously didn’t know Clark’s secret, and Clark didn’t want him to.
“Mr. Kent had another heart attack,” she finally told him. He would have found out eventually.
But he didn’t seem as surprised as she would have expected. It was as if he had only asked her to confirm something he already knew - or, she realized, to give the impression that he hadn’t known.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. She supposed to the casual listener it would have sounded sincere. “Are you here keeping Clark company?”
There were things that she could tell him, she supposed, without giving it all away. Things that - like Mr. Kent’s heart attack - he’d find out anyway. “No,” she said. “I drove Mr. and Mrs. Kent here to the hospital.”
He frowned. “And Clark?”
She supposed it did seem strange that Clark wasn’t here, with his dad in the hospital again. “He was out with Lois, running errands, when it happened. The doctor says Mr. Kent’s going to be fine and he’ll probably go home tomorrow, so Mrs. Kent told him not to bother coming.”
He gave her a scrutinizing look, masked by faux concern, but she did her best to maintain the casual-but-concerned expression she’d been wearing most of the evening. After a few moments he nodded and then stood up with that same dangerous grace. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that Mr. Kent is going to be all right.” Straightening the collar of his coat, he said, “I know I’m not his favorite person, but do you suppose he’d be offended by a get-well-soon card?”
Chloe was a little taken aback by the question - it wasn’t the first thing you expected someone like Lex Luthor to say. She almost dropped her PDA again. “Uh, no, I guess not. I mean, I guess it would be okay,” she stammered.
“Well, then,” he said, “have fun reading.”
And with that, he left.
Chloe breathed a sigh of relief. The whole keeping-the-hero’s-secret business wasn’t as easy as it was in the movies. Unnerved, she stood up, slipping her PDA into her bag, and walked down to Mr. Kent’s room.
Mrs. Kent sat beside him in one of those really uncomfortable chairs, just holding his hand as he slept. Chloe closed the door as softly as she could. “How is he?” she asked.
Mrs. Kent looked tired, but relieved. “He’s going to be just fine, they say,” she said. “I never thought I’d be more thankful for our - visitors - as I am right now.”
Chloe noted her pause and the strange emphasis she’d put on ‘visitors’. Great. This is just like the movies, right down to the code words. I guess there’s no way to find out if this is a safe place to talk about this stuff. “I’m glad to hear it,” she finally said.
“I know it’s getting late,” Mrs. Kent continued, “and I know there are - pressing issues - at home, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay a bit longer. Just to - just to know for sure that he’ll be all right.”
Pressing issues. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. “Sure. I don’t mind. As long as you want. Well,” she amended, “as long as you think Clark and Lois can stand each other. I wouldn’t want to go back and find out that World War Three had broken out while we were gone.”
Mrs. Kent laughed softly, smiling. “They do make things entertaining, don’t they?” she said with a conspiratorial grin. Then her expression turned a little serious. “I think they’ll be able to control themselves, given our visitors. They might not have a lot of call for their best behavior, but I think both of them have an idea of what it is, and that this might be a good time to bring it out.”
Chloe grinned at that herself. “I guess you’re right,” she replied. “I had a visitor of my own just now,” she added soberly. At Mrs. Kent’s puzzled look, she explained: “Lex.”
Mrs. Kent paled slightly, her face slightly yellow in the institutional light of the hospital room. “What did he say?”
“He asked what was going on, why I was here,” Chloe told her. “I told him that Mr. Kent had had a heart attack.” She summarized the already brief conversation for Mrs. Kent, including the ‘cover story’ for why Clark wasn’t there. “I know it wasn’t the best story of all time,” Chloe admitted, “but it was the best I could come up with on short notice.”
Mrs. Kent nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Chloe. We’ll sort it all out.”
Chloe noted that she didn’t tack on the requisite ‘eventually’ to the end of that sentence. Crap, she thought to herself, sitting down in the corner chair. I hope I didn’t screw this up.
Lex Luthor knew he wasn’t always a perfect judge of behavior - cf. his two spectacularly failed marriages - but he knew something of human character, and for once his mind and his gut were in agreement: Chloe Sullivan lied to me.
He mused over it as he walked out to his car. He had left the mansion the moment he heard that Jonathan Kent had been brought into Smallville’s provincial little medical center. Long before he approached Chloe, he’d been briefed on Mr. Kent’s condition - including the unknown compound in his blood - by a nurse in his pay. He had been surprised to realize that Clark was nowhere to be found; he had expected him to be by his father’s bedside, and when Chloe said otherwise, he knew then and there that something was not right about the situation.
The mysterious drug in Mr. Kent’s system could have been brushed aside - once he’d had a full analysis of it, of course - as yet another Smallville oddity, but the fact that Clark was supposedly agreeing to stay away from his father’s sickbed was out of character. He knew, of course, albeit retroactively of Clark’s absence two summers earlier, and his truly mysterious absence the previous summer, each time with a parent in the hospital for some part of that time, but something about this situation was different. Chloe Sullivan’s part in it this time marked it as well.
The Porsche roared to life and he sped out of the parking lot, almost dangerously lost in thought. Something is not right. What is Chloe hiding?
When the answer came to him, he hit the break so quickly that the car nearly spun. He pulled off to the side and climbed out, only barely remembering to pull the key out of the ignition and slip it into his pocket. He slammed the door shut and circled the car before punching it and then, his fist smarting, he kicked it. “Fuck! God damn it!”
Chloe knows Clark’s secret.
It was so obvious now: Mr. Kent’s heart attack had to have something to do with it, and something about that was preventing Clark from being there. And for some reason, Chloe had been let in on the secret - but why? Did she see something she shouldn’t have? Or did he finally trust her enough to just spit it out? ‘Oh, hey, Chloe, wanna hang out and eat pizza and watch a movie? Or, and by the way, I’m - ’
He paused in his mental rant: he still wasn’t sure what Clark’s secret had to be. For a while, he’d assumed he was a run-of-the-mill meteor mutant, one of the few that hadn’t yet become destructive - not unlike himself, and that had given him a little comfort. If Clark was a mutant, too, and was still the same old Clark, then there was hope for him, too. But something wasn’t quite right about that, and now he was just grasping at straws, trying to come up with a suitable explanation for Clark’s apparent abilities. There were rumors of others with abilities, people who had never been exposed to meteor rocks, people who seemed to have some innate difference. That was the next most likely answer: that Clark was one of these genetically-different people. But the fact that he happened to be adopted by a couple in what would become the meteor capital of the world, a town that - given a little time - would become overrun by dangerous meteor mutants, seemed too coincidental. And if it was genetic, then there was a good chance that one or both of his birth parents had some kind of special ability - but his investigations had proved fruitless. And his father had refused, after all this time, to explain why the same fake adoption agency that had swept Lucas under the rug had supposedly placed Clark into the Kents’ care.
Whatever it is, Chloe Sullivan knows.
He climbed back into the Porsche and soon shot off, with a new destination in mind. ‘He was off with Lois, running errands.’ Did that mean that Chloe’s loud-mouthed cousin knew the truth now, as well? Or at least knew something? Chloe was a smart girl, and clearly knew something of how to lie, but she wouldn’t have mentioned Lois Lane unless she was involved in some way as well: the first rule of lying was to keep it as close to the truth as possible.
His father had taught him that.
As he pulled up Hickory Lane, he dug through his glove compartment with one hand. Where the hell is it? Soon enough he had found a pair of opera glasses, exactly where he had stuffed them eons before, behind worthless paperwork, a 9-mil, and his favorite sunglasses. Properly calibrated, these things can let you know if Medea has clogged pores from the nose-bleed section - they can damn well peak inside the Kent farmhouse and tell me something about what’s going on in there.
He stopped at a fair distance from the house - far enough that, provided Clark’s mutation (or whatever) didn’t include super-hearing, he probably would never know that he was there, but close enough for the opera glasses. It was dark; he didn’t expect to see much. He noted the Kents’ two vehicles, the blue pickup and the little sedan he sometimes saw Mrs. Kent driving, in their places in the driveway. A relatively new SUV sat beside them - Lois’s car, he presumed. He had seen Chloe’s car at the hospital. And then he turned his attention to the house itself. He had been there often enough to know that there were windows conveniently facing the driveway that were frequently left uncovered - the living room, if he remembered correctly.
And then he hit paydirt.
He frowned against the cold metal of the opera glasses. That’s not Clark…is it? He watched the man pace restlessly. It certainly looked like Clark: tall, dark-haired, broad shoulders. But then a woman he didn’t recognize at all entered the frame: a tall ash-blonde woman - too blonde for Lois Lane, who he had noticed had the atrocious habit of lightening what he suspected was originally a gorgeous shade of dark brown. But the blonde soon smiled and kissed the man, and Lex knew then for sure that he wasn’t Clark Kent. No. This man is…too mature?
Another expletive escaped his lips.
Whoever else these two people might be, there was a very good chance they were Clark Kent’s birth parents.
He glanced at his watch. It had been half an hour since he left Chloe at the hospital. Another moment, he told himself. And then I’ll leave - and if the fates are with me, I won’t pass Chloe and Mrs. Kent on the road. He picked up the glasses again and peered at the farmhouse. The couple had broken their embrace - and now he had his answer.
That’s Clark between the two of them. I’d swear my life to it.
So, Clark Kent’s birth parents were in town. Was that what sent Mr. Kent to the hospital? Is his heart that fragile? No, that couldn’t be it: the man would barely be able to walk between the house and the barn if that was case, let alone perform even a fraction of his usual chores. Maybe not the simple fact of it, but something related, then. Did they make demands concerning Clark? Did they demonstrate abilities even more unusual than whatever Clark is capable of?
Moment’s up, Alexander, he told himself. Time to get going. At the very least, he realized as he started the engine and carefully backed out of the lane, he knew where Clark was for the moment. Not that he expected a good boy like Clark Kent to be out and about at this hour, even on a Friday, but he had proof that he was at home and - presumably - unavoidably occupied for the time being.
This would be the perfect time for another look at the caves.
TBC
Part Fourteen
“Hard at work as usual, I see.”
The voice caught Chloe off-guard and she nearly dropped her PDA. “Lex!” she exclaimed in surprise. “Hi!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down beside her. He always had a strange kind of grace in his movements - kind of like Clark in those rare moments that he wasn’t clumsy and tripping over himself - that reminded her of some kind of predator. A big cat, maybe - like a panther.
A bald panther.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, Chloe,” he continued. “I hope I didn’t ruin your concentration.”
“It’s all right,” she said, a little nervously. “Just going through some old articles. Keeping myself busy,” she added. It was true, but it didn’t strike to the heart of what she was actually doing. She kept a copy of all her ‘Wall of Weird’ stories on her PDA - for a variety of reasons: to alleviate boredom, to keep a record separate from the school computers, to access the information in an emergency, in case the latest meteor freak she encountered was similar to one she’d seen before. It had never occurred to her that when she finally learned Clark’s secret, she’d be glad she had these copies so she could back and see how, almost from day one, the meteor freak stories were also a chronicle of Clark’s growing hero complex. At the very moment Lex had interrupted her, she’d been realizing just how often - if you read between the lines, even lines that she herself had written - Clark had saved the day.
“May I ask why you’re here at the hospital on a Friday night?” he asked.
She didn’t entirely trust Lex; too many anomalies were popping up around him, and she’d noticed that his relationship with Clark was truly strained these days. She was glad, of course, that he’d helped her and her dad out over the summer, but something wasn’t right. She would have to be careful: Lex obviously didn’t know Clark’s secret, and Clark didn’t want him to.
“Mr. Kent had another heart attack,” she finally told him. He would have found out eventually.
But he didn’t seem as surprised as she would have expected. It was as if he had only asked her to confirm something he already knew - or, she realized, to give the impression that he hadn’t known.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. She supposed to the casual listener it would have sounded sincere. “Are you here keeping Clark company?”
There were things that she could tell him, she supposed, without giving it all away. Things that - like Mr. Kent’s heart attack - he’d find out anyway. “No,” she said. “I drove Mr. and Mrs. Kent here to the hospital.”
He frowned. “And Clark?”
She supposed it did seem strange that Clark wasn’t here, with his dad in the hospital again. “He was out with Lois, running errands, when it happened. The doctor says Mr. Kent’s going to be fine and he’ll probably go home tomorrow, so Mrs. Kent told him not to bother coming.”
He gave her a scrutinizing look, masked by faux concern, but she did her best to maintain the casual-but-concerned expression she’d been wearing most of the evening. After a few moments he nodded and then stood up with that same dangerous grace. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that Mr. Kent is going to be all right.” Straightening the collar of his coat, he said, “I know I’m not his favorite person, but do you suppose he’d be offended by a get-well-soon card?”
Chloe was a little taken aback by the question - it wasn’t the first thing you expected someone like Lex Luthor to say. She almost dropped her PDA again. “Uh, no, I guess not. I mean, I guess it would be okay,” she stammered.
“Well, then,” he said, “have fun reading.”
And with that, he left.
Chloe breathed a sigh of relief. The whole keeping-the-hero’s-secret business wasn’t as easy as it was in the movies. Unnerved, she stood up, slipping her PDA into her bag, and walked down to Mr. Kent’s room.
Mrs. Kent sat beside him in one of those really uncomfortable chairs, just holding his hand as he slept. Chloe closed the door as softly as she could. “How is he?” she asked.
Mrs. Kent looked tired, but relieved. “He’s going to be just fine, they say,” she said. “I never thought I’d be more thankful for our - visitors - as I am right now.”
Chloe noted her pause and the strange emphasis she’d put on ‘visitors’. Great. This is just like the movies, right down to the code words. I guess there’s no way to find out if this is a safe place to talk about this stuff. “I’m glad to hear it,” she finally said.
“I know it’s getting late,” Mrs. Kent continued, “and I know there are - pressing issues - at home, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay a bit longer. Just to - just to know for sure that he’ll be all right.”
Pressing issues. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. “Sure. I don’t mind. As long as you want. Well,” she amended, “as long as you think Clark and Lois can stand each other. I wouldn’t want to go back and find out that World War Three had broken out while we were gone.”
Mrs. Kent laughed softly, smiling. “They do make things entertaining, don’t they?” she said with a conspiratorial grin. Then her expression turned a little serious. “I think they’ll be able to control themselves, given our visitors. They might not have a lot of call for their best behavior, but I think both of them have an idea of what it is, and that this might be a good time to bring it out.”
Chloe grinned at that herself. “I guess you’re right,” she replied. “I had a visitor of my own just now,” she added soberly. At Mrs. Kent’s puzzled look, she explained: “Lex.”
Mrs. Kent paled slightly, her face slightly yellow in the institutional light of the hospital room. “What did he say?”
“He asked what was going on, why I was here,” Chloe told her. “I told him that Mr. Kent had had a heart attack.” She summarized the already brief conversation for Mrs. Kent, including the ‘cover story’ for why Clark wasn’t there. “I know it wasn’t the best story of all time,” Chloe admitted, “but it was the best I could come up with on short notice.”
Mrs. Kent nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Chloe. We’ll sort it all out.”
Chloe noted that she didn’t tack on the requisite ‘eventually’ to the end of that sentence. Crap, she thought to herself, sitting down in the corner chair. I hope I didn’t screw this up.
Lex Luthor knew he wasn’t always a perfect judge of behavior - cf. his two spectacularly failed marriages - but he knew something of human character, and for once his mind and his gut were in agreement: Chloe Sullivan lied to me.
He mused over it as he walked out to his car. He had left the mansion the moment he heard that Jonathan Kent had been brought into Smallville’s provincial little medical center. Long before he approached Chloe, he’d been briefed on Mr. Kent’s condition - including the unknown compound in his blood - by a nurse in his pay. He had been surprised to realize that Clark was nowhere to be found; he had expected him to be by his father’s bedside, and when Chloe said otherwise, he knew then and there that something was not right about the situation.
The mysterious drug in Mr. Kent’s system could have been brushed aside - once he’d had a full analysis of it, of course - as yet another Smallville oddity, but the fact that Clark was supposedly agreeing to stay away from his father’s sickbed was out of character. He knew, of course, albeit retroactively of Clark’s absence two summers earlier, and his truly mysterious absence the previous summer, each time with a parent in the hospital for some part of that time, but something about this situation was different. Chloe Sullivan’s part in it this time marked it as well.
The Porsche roared to life and he sped out of the parking lot, almost dangerously lost in thought. Something is not right. What is Chloe hiding?
When the answer came to him, he hit the break so quickly that the car nearly spun. He pulled off to the side and climbed out, only barely remembering to pull the key out of the ignition and slip it into his pocket. He slammed the door shut and circled the car before punching it and then, his fist smarting, he kicked it. “Fuck! God damn it!”
Chloe knows Clark’s secret.
It was so obvious now: Mr. Kent’s heart attack had to have something to do with it, and something about that was preventing Clark from being there. And for some reason, Chloe had been let in on the secret - but why? Did she see something she shouldn’t have? Or did he finally trust her enough to just spit it out? ‘Oh, hey, Chloe, wanna hang out and eat pizza and watch a movie? Or, and by the way, I’m - ’
He paused in his mental rant: he still wasn’t sure what Clark’s secret had to be. For a while, he’d assumed he was a run-of-the-mill meteor mutant, one of the few that hadn’t yet become destructive - not unlike himself, and that had given him a little comfort. If Clark was a mutant, too, and was still the same old Clark, then there was hope for him, too. But something wasn’t quite right about that, and now he was just grasping at straws, trying to come up with a suitable explanation for Clark’s apparent abilities. There were rumors of others with abilities, people who had never been exposed to meteor rocks, people who seemed to have some innate difference. That was the next most likely answer: that Clark was one of these genetically-different people. But the fact that he happened to be adopted by a couple in what would become the meteor capital of the world, a town that - given a little time - would become overrun by dangerous meteor mutants, seemed too coincidental. And if it was genetic, then there was a good chance that one or both of his birth parents had some kind of special ability - but his investigations had proved fruitless. And his father had refused, after all this time, to explain why the same fake adoption agency that had swept Lucas under the rug had supposedly placed Clark into the Kents’ care.
Whatever it is, Chloe Sullivan knows.
He climbed back into the Porsche and soon shot off, with a new destination in mind. ‘He was off with Lois, running errands.’ Did that mean that Chloe’s loud-mouthed cousin knew the truth now, as well? Or at least knew something? Chloe was a smart girl, and clearly knew something of how to lie, but she wouldn’t have mentioned Lois Lane unless she was involved in some way as well: the first rule of lying was to keep it as close to the truth as possible.
His father had taught him that.
As he pulled up Hickory Lane, he dug through his glove compartment with one hand. Where the hell is it? Soon enough he had found a pair of opera glasses, exactly where he had stuffed them eons before, behind worthless paperwork, a 9-mil, and his favorite sunglasses. Properly calibrated, these things can let you know if Medea has clogged pores from the nose-bleed section - they can damn well peak inside the Kent farmhouse and tell me something about what’s going on in there.
He stopped at a fair distance from the house - far enough that, provided Clark’s mutation (or whatever) didn’t include super-hearing, he probably would never know that he was there, but close enough for the opera glasses. It was dark; he didn’t expect to see much. He noted the Kents’ two vehicles, the blue pickup and the little sedan he sometimes saw Mrs. Kent driving, in their places in the driveway. A relatively new SUV sat beside them - Lois’s car, he presumed. He had seen Chloe’s car at the hospital. And then he turned his attention to the house itself. He had been there often enough to know that there were windows conveniently facing the driveway that were frequently left uncovered - the living room, if he remembered correctly.
And then he hit paydirt.
He frowned against the cold metal of the opera glasses. That’s not Clark…is it? He watched the man pace restlessly. It certainly looked like Clark: tall, dark-haired, broad shoulders. But then a woman he didn’t recognize at all entered the frame: a tall ash-blonde woman - too blonde for Lois Lane, who he had noticed had the atrocious habit of lightening what he suspected was originally a gorgeous shade of dark brown. But the blonde soon smiled and kissed the man, and Lex knew then for sure that he wasn’t Clark Kent. No. This man is…too mature?
Another expletive escaped his lips.
Whoever else these two people might be, there was a very good chance they were Clark Kent’s birth parents.
He glanced at his watch. It had been half an hour since he left Chloe at the hospital. Another moment, he told himself. And then I’ll leave - and if the fates are with me, I won’t pass Chloe and Mrs. Kent on the road. He picked up the glasses again and peered at the farmhouse. The couple had broken their embrace - and now he had his answer.
That’s Clark between the two of them. I’d swear my life to it.
So, Clark Kent’s birth parents were in town. Was that what sent Mr. Kent to the hospital? Is his heart that fragile? No, that couldn’t be it: the man would barely be able to walk between the house and the barn if that was case, let alone perform even a fraction of his usual chores. Maybe not the simple fact of it, but something related, then. Did they make demands concerning Clark? Did they demonstrate abilities even more unusual than whatever Clark is capable of?
Moment’s up, Alexander, he told himself. Time to get going. At the very least, he realized as he started the engine and carefully backed out of the lane, he knew where Clark was for the moment. Not that he expected a good boy like Clark Kent to be out and about at this hour, even on a Friday, but he had proof that he was at home and - presumably - unavoidably occupied for the time being.
This would be the perfect time for another look at the caves.
TBC