FIC: "Reunion", Part 20 of ?? (PG-13) (Smallville)
Previous Parts
Twenty
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
Malevolent giggle.
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
Chloe Sullivan turned in bed, ready to whack whoever it was that was bugging her so early on a Saturday morning - and then suddenly realized who it was. “God, Lois,” she started to say and then -
Mopey Clark.
Aliens.
UFO landing in front of the Kents’ barn.
Clark is an alien.
- she remembered the events of the previous evening.
Lois smirked at her. “It all just hit you, didn’t it?” her cousin said in her “I’m the big sister and I know all” tone. “All the you-know-what about you-know-who from yesterday.”
Chloe scooted up into a sitting position and hugged her pillow. “Yeah,” she told Lois. “For a minute, it was like a dream or something, and then I realized you were here and it all came back to me.”
Lois sighed. “Okay, I’m giving you from now until you get out of the shower to finish brooding and angsting and all of that about this stuff, all right? I get enough of that stuff from him, Chlo, and something tells me we’re going to get a ton of it over the next couple of days. I don’t need it from you, too. And neither does Mrs. Kent - who, speaking of which,” Lois added, glancing dramatically at her watch, “is expecting us pretty damn soon for breakfast.”
“That’s it?” Chloe asked, a little surprised. “You just sleep on it and go, ‘Okay. Whatever.’ and move on?”
Lois sat down - flopped was perhaps the better word, with her hair starting to fall out of the towel wrapped around her head, turban-like - on the bed. “Chloe,” she said, “you know me. You know how I do things. Okay, so I was surprised - shocked even - by what we found out yesterday. I admit to freaking out a little in the beginning, and I don’t blame anyone - you included - for having some freaking out of their own about all of this. It’s a big surprise. But there are a lot of things about you and me that are different - even if we are Best Cousins Forever,” she added. “And maybe it’s just not as big a shock for me - I’ve only known the guy a year. Actually, not even an entire year. And I’ve always thought he was weird - almost in an endearing sort of way, I guess - especially considering how we met.” She paused. “Remind me to ask him what the hell that was all about sometime. I bet it was something alien-y after all,” she said with a momentary frown, and then returned to what she had been saying. Chloe barely had time to blink. “But you - you’ve known him for ages. Of course it’s going to be a bigger deal for you, since you’ve always thought he was just a guy, and you’ve been doing this whole investigate-the-weirdness-that-is-Smallville thing forever. So brood on it if you want, on your own time, by yourself. Don’t encourage him. Don’t encourage anyone - there’s enough weirdness already without one more bucket of extra crispy angst. I’d at least like to think I’ve dealt with it, you know?”
“Huh,” Chloe said.
“What?” Lois demanded.
Chloe shook her head. “It’s just…I was expecting more from you or something. More freaking out. I should have known better,” she admitted. And it was true: Lois wasn’t easily fazed. Chloe liked to pride herself on taking things in stride, especially after the last four years of meteor freak escapades, but the truth was that Lois was the unflappable one. “I should have known you’d handle this better than me.”
Lois smiled and then, fluidly, and strangely reminiscent of something Clark had done to her the evening before, stood up and pulled her out of and off of the bed. The top sheet and single thin blanket - it was June, after all, and Kansas wasn’t exactly known for having a temperate climate - slid to the floor. “Hey!” Chloe exclaimed.
“Just doing my duty, Chlo,” Lois told her. “Shower. Dress. Coffee. And then we’re off to the Kents’ for another day of ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto’.”
“Ugh. Wizard of Oz jokes after all these years, Lo? I thought you gave that up.”
“It’s Kansas. Oz jokes are never out of season, especially to those of us privileged enough to consider it not home, but a lovely place to visit,” her cousin said with a smirk. “Especially Smallville. I mean, come on! Weirdness abounds. I have to do something to stay sane.”
“And you said you were done freaking out,” Chloe countered with a smirk of her own.
“Just go make yourself presentable, okay?”
Chloe laughed to herself, gathering up her bathrobe and mentally searching her wardrobe. Hm. What does one wear to a breakfast with aliens? she asked herself, laughing a little at the question as she stepped into the bathroom.
Apparently, if she was to use Lois as an example, one wore normal clothes: slightly worn jeans, a plain short-sleeved shirt (in a shade of blue that one of these days was going to make someone ask if Lois and Clark purposefully dressed alike, or were just fraternal twins - about five seconds before Lois threatens to break that person’s nose), and old tennis shoes. She discovered this as she came back into her room fifteen or twenty minutes later, rubbing at her hair with her towel, and was greeted by Lois’s backside as Miss Unflappable tied the laces of the aforementioned sneakers. Chloe sighed at the unfairness of a world in which Lois got all of the tall, long-legged genes (Lucy was more average, and given to big-heeled shoes to make up for it), and she got all the defective short ones. Before she could make any snarky comments, Lois was finished and stood up, flipping her ponytail with the reckless abandon of someone who could grow their hair long and make it look good.
There was a reason why Chloe always cut her hair.
“Done angsting for the morning?” Lois asked as she turned around.
Chloe dropped her towel by the door and opened her dresser in search of clean underwear. “I guess,” she admitted. “I’m awake now - that’s a start, right?”
Lois grinned. “I’ll get you some coffee and we’ll get going, okay?”
Chloe sighed. Apparently her answer had satisfied whatever crazy rubric her cousin was grading her against. “Okay,” Chloe said and then watched as Lois walked - no, pranced maybe - out the door.
She has way too much energy for - she glanced at the clock - seven in the morning. Especially pre-caffeination.
Chloe shook her head and began to dress.
Lois drove, to Chloe’s consternation and despite her insistence that she was completely awake. “It’s not like I don’t drive to school just like this five days a week,” Chloe said, trying not to yawn. Saturdays were her days to sleep in - especially after being up past midnight the evening before.
“You’re not going to win, Chlo,” Lois told her, slipping on sunglasses against the early morning light. “Besides, I want to pick your brain about a few things and now’s the best time.”
“Let me guess,” she replied. “These things have to do with Clark and the whole alien thing. I thought we weren’t supposed to encourage brooding today.”
Lois grinned. “You’re absolutely right,” she said, turning onto a long-familiar road that led out of Smallville proper and into the farmland that surrounded it. “But this isn’t about indulging the Lord of the Angst. This is a fact-finding mission.”
Occasionally Lois overdid the military lingo, but given who her father was, Chloe couldn’t blame her for it. Most of the time. “Okay,” she finally told Lois. “Get on with it.”
“Cool. I made a list in my head this morning and if we’re lucky, I might actually remember all of it. First up: why did Clark punch his birth dad?”
“I don’t know.”
Lois frowned. “You don’t know?” she asked.
“He hasn’t told me,” Chloe explained. “I can guess, though.”
“Then guess.”
“There’s some misunderstanding where Clark thinks Jor-El sent him to Earth to conquer and rule the planet.”
Lois laughed so suddenly and so energetically that she nearly lost control of her car. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, Clark said something to me yesterday kind of in that direction, but I didn’t really believe it. I mean, Smallville? I’d sooner believe Lana was the wannabe Caesar.”
“Lois, you heard what Jor-El said yesterday, about that Zod guy,” Chloe told her. “My guess is that somehow Zod did something so that Clark thought he was Jor-El, and considering Clark was, like, three when the Kents adopted him and all this trouble has been in the last couple of years, Clark couldn’t tell the difference.”
“Well, there goes my BS-o-meter all shot to hell,” Lois muttered and sighed heavily. Chloe supposed that brooding didn’t count if Lois was doing it herself; she prided herself on seeing through ‘crap’ and the idea that she’d misread Clark would definitely bug her for a while.
“Last couple of years, huh?” Lois finally continued. “I don’t suppose there was something along the lines of Lex Luthor almost killing Clark with a car in that timeframe, was there?”
Chloe frowned for a moment and then realized what Lois must have been referring to. “Freshman year, just before Homecoming. Lex ran his car into the river and Clark saved his life. Why?”
“Because of something Clark said yesterday, when he said that thing about taking over the planet,” Lois replied. “While you and Mrs. Kent were at the hospital. We were arguing - well, ranting is probably more like it, him complaining about the supposedly impressive suck that is his life - and he said something about Lex hitting him with his car and that was how he found out he was an alien in the first place. That that was what made his folks finally tell him.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” Chloe admitted. “That’s about when he started acting a little different. More brood-y and angst-y and sitting up in the loft all the time. I guess I thought it was a woe-is-me-Lana-barely-knows-I-exist thing.”
“Guess you were wrong,” Lois said, a little absently, pulling to a stop.
“Yeah,” she agreed - and then realized that they were stopped for no apparent reason. It was simply an empty field. It didn’t even look planted. “Lois?”
“I thought you might like to know,” Lois told her with a mischievous grin, “where the aliens landed. At least there’s no crop circle where Lara parked - that really would have brought the crazies out of the woodwork, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “It really would have.”
“Done?” Lois asked.
Chloe shrugged. “It’s not like their ship is still sitting there, you know? It’s in the Kents’ barn.”
“Yeah,” Lois replied. “Freaky, huh?” Her hand moved as if to shift into ‘drive’ but she paused and turned towards Chloe. “It kind of reminds me of an RV.”
Chloe frowned. “What?” she asked.
“I mean, just think about it a sec. I know you didn’t see inside, but I did, and it’s like a big, black Winnebago. A goth Winnebago.”
Chloe snorted against her will. A joke about it being Darth Vader’s RV - Clark had tortured her and Pete with the original trilogy the summer before freshman year - popped into her head. Luckily, she stopped it before it managed to reach her mouth. The mental image of Clark as Luke Skywalker also caught her off guard, and she kept it inside as well.
Lois would never have let him live it down.
“What?” Lois protested. “It’s an intergalactic RV, it’s black, and there’s been enough angst surrounding it the last ten or twelve hours to fuel Dawson’s Creek for a full season.”
Chloe laughed. “Okay, okay,” she said, throwing up her hands in surrender. “You’re right. It’s a goth intergalactic Winnebago. And you’re the one who gets to explain it to Jor-El.”
“Lara, actually,” Lois muttered. “She’s the pilot.” She shifted into drive and they finally got going again. “Second question,” Lois said as if nothing had happened since Chloe had answered the last one. “What’s this about Jor-El visiting Earth in the sixties?”
Chloe remembered now that she’d admitted to her cousin that she knew something about it. “You have to know that Clark hasn’t told me all the details,” she warned Lois. “Obviously there are some secret alien things that I don’t know about-”
Secret. “Ever since I read that newspaper article I've been having memories from 1961.” And then I asked - something about past lives? Or genetic memory - and Clark got that thoughtful look on his face…
And then when Mayor Tate was arrested, everyone says he was raving about how the ‘drifter’ had come back from the dead to haunt him…Clark and Jor-El look pretty damn similar - if you slicked back his hair, put him in a leather jacket, and he super-sped away before Sheriff Adams or anyone could see him -
“Chlo? You okay?”
Chloe shook off the year-old memory and filed it away for a future Clark interrogation. Just how did he have those ‘visions’ or ‘memories’ or whatever anyway? “Yeah,” she said out loud. “I’m fine. It’s just…I remember something and then I realize that Clark must have been hiding something about his involvement, you know?” She paused only to breathe and then answered Lois’s question. “Jor-El was on Earth - in Smallville, even - in June of 1961. He had an affair with Lana’s great-aunt Louise-”
“What is it with those Lang girls and Kryptonian guys?” Lois muttered a little incredulously. Chloe chose to ignore the comment, though she itched to correct her - it was Lana’s mom’s aunt, so technically she’d been a ‘Potter girl’ - and continued with her answer: “ - and Louise was murdered. And then Jor-El disappeared - must have gone back to Krypton then - but Clark thought he might have been the one who killed her.”
“Yeah, ‘cause a guy who wants his kid to conquer our backwards little planet isn’t going to think murder’s a big deal,” Lois said sarcastically. “I can kind of see how Smallville might have gotten a bit confused.”
Chloe shrugged. Frankly, she was still confused by a lot of it. It was going to take a while to untangle everything. “Well, in the end it turned out Clark was wrong. Mayor Tate - well, he was just Officer Tate back then - had paid Lex’s grandfather to kill Jor-El because Mayor Tate was jealous - he had a major thing for Louise-”
“Again I say,” Lois interrupted, “what is it about these Lang girls? And Lex’s grandfather? Are you kidding me?”
“Would I kid about this? And Potter girls, actually - and apparently Louise died by accident. I’m guessing that Jor-El got shot at but since he’s like Clark, he didn’t get hurt, but somehow Louise did.”
“Well, that must have majorly sucked.”
It did, Chloe admitted, and of course the guy who’d actually pulled the trigger, Lex’s grandfather, was long dead, but things had worked out in the end: Louise’s husband’s name had been cleared, Mayor Tate had admitted to everything and was now rotting away in jail, and Jor-El seemed to have gotten over it. More than just gotten over it, actually, based on what little she’d seen of Jor-El and Lara together.
Plus, there’s the fact that Clark exists in the first place.
She shook off that line of thought and turned back to Lois. “Any other facts that you wanted to find?” Okay. That turn of phrase wasn’t as funny as it was in my head.
Lois bit her lip. “What happened last night?” she asked, a kind of cautious tone in her voice. “When Clark ran off and went back to the house? He’d been acting a little funny, but he just took off - is he really okay, like he said?”
At this rate, Chloe knew she shouldn’t have been surprised at Lois’s sudden change, from sarcastic and a little judgmental to worried and hesitant, but she was. Sometimes she was almost convinced that Lois didn’t really like Clark, or at least saw him as a necessary evil attached to Mr. and Mrs. Kent, who she did like, but apparently she was wrong - and wasn’t just the last twenty-four hours that was leading her to rethink her cousin’s attitude, though the revelations of the last evening probably helped. “He was pretty much okay by the time we left last night, by the time you and Lara and Jor-El got back, even. I mean, you were right this morning when you said there’s going to be more angst and brooding and everything - clearly, Clark has issues that we can’t even imagine - but there’s been at least a little bit of progress on his part in sorting them out.”
“But what happened?” Lois pressed. “Why did he freak out and run back to the house? He has issues-with-a-capital-I, I get that, but what set him off?”
“You know how their ship is black and shiny? Apparently, it reminds Clark of the ship Jor-El sent him to Earth in.”
“I’m assuming it’s a wee bit smaller.”
Chloe shrugged. “I would guess so, but I’ve never seen it. And never will, I guess. Clark blew it up two years ago.”
Lois slammed on the brake. Thankfully, they were in the middle of nowhere. “He blew up his spaceship?”
Chloe waited a moment, catching her breath from the sudden panic that Lois’s braking talents had produced. “Yes.”
Lois stared at her with disbelief. “But why?” she asked incredulously.
“Because of the whole Zod thing, I imagine,” she told her cousin. “Apparently the whole take-over-the-planet thing started with his spaceship. It takes a lot for Clark to get mad - really mad - but when he does, he sometimes does take things to extremes.” Looking back, Chloe figured it had something to do with holding things in. If Clark acted on every little thing that pissed him off, Smallville would have been rubble ages ago, between the super-strength and the fire-from-the-eyes thing alone. However it was that the Kents taught Clark to hold in his impulses over the years, it seemed to have worked, if maybe a little too well. Clark needed to find a better way of dealing with things than blowing up spaceships and punching his birth father.
Then again, those could have been really extreme, isolated incidents. The whole Clark-is-an-alien thing was still new; she hadn’t figured everything out quite yet.
“So that’s it? Lara’s space ship reminded him of his spaceship, which he blew up for what seems to me like an okay reason - I mean, you know how I reacted when Dad got pissed off because I wasn’t ever going to join the Army like a good girl - and that’s what made him freak out?”
Chloe tried her best not to remember the tales of Lois’s rebellion and focused on the here-and-now. “That was part of it,” she ceded.
Lois frowned. “And the rest?”
“Remember I told you that Mrs. Kent lost her baby in a car accident?” When Lois nodded, she continued: “The explosion, when Clark blew up the spaceship, apparently is what caused the accident.”
Lois slumped in her seat. “God. Yeah, okay, that’s worth freaking out over. Now I’m surprised he was as okay as he was when I got back!” She turned to Chloe. “He really told you all about it?”
“Maybe not everything,” Chloe told her, “but enough to understand. You won’t tell him that I told you, will you? He didn’t say anything, but this was kind of a big private thing, you know?” And knowing how hard he’s tried to keep his secrets in the past…
“Of course not!” Lois exclaimed. “Are you kidding? What he told you - what you told me - is huge. I mean, it’s good to know because now I can make some sense out of all his guilt and brooding beyond the whole alien thing, but I totally get the whole privacy-and-secrets thing.” She started the car forward again. “Wow. That makes a lot more sense now. Mostly because it made no sense before.”
They drove on in silence a few more minutes and soon came to the Kent farm. Chloe felt nervous - she’d been running on adrenaline all the previous evening. God, I hope I don’t do anything stupid because I’m tired, she thought to herself. The strange look on Lois’s face seemed to echo that thought.
Lois parked beside the old familiar pick up truck. “Ready?” she asked, a little subdued.
Chloe nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
They entered through the kitchen door, as they always did. The unlocked door had been so foreign to Chloe in the beginning - didn’t they know that someone would come right in and steal something, even if you had three bolt locks? Metropolis was a world away from Smallville, even then, and thirteen-year-old Chloe had been shocked. But now eighteen-year-old Chloe was cool with it and it felt as natural as anything else - more natural than a lot of things in Smallville.
The house was silent, their footsteps echoing a little as they crossed the old wood floor. Chloe looked around nervously - it was pushing eight o’clock, if not later, and this was a farming family. Aliens aside, Clark and Mrs. Kent should have been up by now, even on a weekend. And farmers really couldn’t afford to embrace something as critical to her existence as sleeping in on a Saturday.
“Clark?” Chloe called out, stepping towards the couch. Maybe they’d missed Clark outside? “Mrs. Kent -”
Even as she spoke, she saw Lara in one of the chairs near the big couch, holding her hand over her mouth and shaking her head. What? Oh! ‘Be quiet’ - not quite exactly universal, but close enough. She nodded as she reached the back of the couch and then looked down, Lois at her heels. Clark was asleep on the couch, still covered by a blanket, though the neatness of it made her think that maybe Lara had done the ‘mom’ thing and straightened it not too long ago. Behind her, Lois giggled softly at the sight.
Chloe bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly, looking straight at Lara. She might not understand the words, she told herself, but maybe that doesn’t always matter. “We have to wake him up.”
Lara said and did nothing, save for looking a little puzzled and watching them.
Chloe set her purse on the floor and the reached over the back of the couch and shook Clark’s shoulder. “Clark! Clark! Wake up!” she said, not quite whispering. What is it that Mr. Kent always says? “Clark, the cows don’t milk themselves, you know!”
He rolled over and blinked at her. “Zhem te, nami,” he mumbled and then closed his eyes again. Well, Chloe assumed it was mumbled. She had no clue what he had said. Behind her, Lara made a noise and she turned around to find Clark’s birth mother trying to hold in laughter and barely managing to do so. “What did he say?” she asked with honest curiosity, though she knew that there probably wouldn’t be an answer - not in English, anyway. But if Lara was laughing, then Clark must have actually said something that sounded like the Kryptonian language.
There was a heavy footfall on the stairs and then, with amusement, Jor-El’s voice broke into the room. “He asked for five more minutes of sleep, Chlo-ee,” he said, joining them. He walked over to Lara and dropped a kiss on her forehead - and then on her lips, which she returned wholeheartedly. Apparently Clark’s hugging instinct came from an innate lack of embarrassment over PDAs. “And then,” Jor-El continued, “he called you nami. This word, small children call a mother.”
Lois snorted softly. “Ah, isn’t that sweet,” she said. “Smallville called you Mommy.”
“Hush, you,” Chloe told her, but she was secretly as amused as everyone else seemed to be. Apparently some things were universal - and apparently Clark remembered a little more of Krypton than he thought he did.
TBC
Twenty
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
Malevolent giggle.
Poke.
Poke.
Poke.
Chloe Sullivan turned in bed, ready to whack whoever it was that was bugging her so early on a Saturday morning - and then suddenly realized who it was. “God, Lois,” she started to say and then -
Mopey Clark.
Aliens.
UFO landing in front of the Kents’ barn.
Clark is an alien.
- she remembered the events of the previous evening.
Lois smirked at her. “It all just hit you, didn’t it?” her cousin said in her “I’m the big sister and I know all” tone. “All the you-know-what about you-know-who from yesterday.”
Chloe scooted up into a sitting position and hugged her pillow. “Yeah,” she told Lois. “For a minute, it was like a dream or something, and then I realized you were here and it all came back to me.”
Lois sighed. “Okay, I’m giving you from now until you get out of the shower to finish brooding and angsting and all of that about this stuff, all right? I get enough of that stuff from him, Chlo, and something tells me we’re going to get a ton of it over the next couple of days. I don’t need it from you, too. And neither does Mrs. Kent - who, speaking of which,” Lois added, glancing dramatically at her watch, “is expecting us pretty damn soon for breakfast.”
“That’s it?” Chloe asked, a little surprised. “You just sleep on it and go, ‘Okay. Whatever.’ and move on?”
Lois sat down - flopped was perhaps the better word, with her hair starting to fall out of the towel wrapped around her head, turban-like - on the bed. “Chloe,” she said, “you know me. You know how I do things. Okay, so I was surprised - shocked even - by what we found out yesterday. I admit to freaking out a little in the beginning, and I don’t blame anyone - you included - for having some freaking out of their own about all of this. It’s a big surprise. But there are a lot of things about you and me that are different - even if we are Best Cousins Forever,” she added. “And maybe it’s just not as big a shock for me - I’ve only known the guy a year. Actually, not even an entire year. And I’ve always thought he was weird - almost in an endearing sort of way, I guess - especially considering how we met.” She paused. “Remind me to ask him what the hell that was all about sometime. I bet it was something alien-y after all,” she said with a momentary frown, and then returned to what she had been saying. Chloe barely had time to blink. “But you - you’ve known him for ages. Of course it’s going to be a bigger deal for you, since you’ve always thought he was just a guy, and you’ve been doing this whole investigate-the-weirdness-that-is-Smallville thing forever. So brood on it if you want, on your own time, by yourself. Don’t encourage him. Don’t encourage anyone - there’s enough weirdness already without one more bucket of extra crispy angst. I’d at least like to think I’ve dealt with it, you know?”
“Huh,” Chloe said.
“What?” Lois demanded.
Chloe shook her head. “It’s just…I was expecting more from you or something. More freaking out. I should have known better,” she admitted. And it was true: Lois wasn’t easily fazed. Chloe liked to pride herself on taking things in stride, especially after the last four years of meteor freak escapades, but the truth was that Lois was the unflappable one. “I should have known you’d handle this better than me.”
Lois smiled and then, fluidly, and strangely reminiscent of something Clark had done to her the evening before, stood up and pulled her out of and off of the bed. The top sheet and single thin blanket - it was June, after all, and Kansas wasn’t exactly known for having a temperate climate - slid to the floor. “Hey!” Chloe exclaimed.
“Just doing my duty, Chlo,” Lois told her. “Shower. Dress. Coffee. And then we’re off to the Kents’ for another day of ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto’.”
“Ugh. Wizard of Oz jokes after all these years, Lo? I thought you gave that up.”
“It’s Kansas. Oz jokes are never out of season, especially to those of us privileged enough to consider it not home, but a lovely place to visit,” her cousin said with a smirk. “Especially Smallville. I mean, come on! Weirdness abounds. I have to do something to stay sane.”
“And you said you were done freaking out,” Chloe countered with a smirk of her own.
“Just go make yourself presentable, okay?”
Chloe laughed to herself, gathering up her bathrobe and mentally searching her wardrobe. Hm. What does one wear to a breakfast with aliens? she asked herself, laughing a little at the question as she stepped into the bathroom.
Apparently, if she was to use Lois as an example, one wore normal clothes: slightly worn jeans, a plain short-sleeved shirt (in a shade of blue that one of these days was going to make someone ask if Lois and Clark purposefully dressed alike, or were just fraternal twins - about five seconds before Lois threatens to break that person’s nose), and old tennis shoes. She discovered this as she came back into her room fifteen or twenty minutes later, rubbing at her hair with her towel, and was greeted by Lois’s backside as Miss Unflappable tied the laces of the aforementioned sneakers. Chloe sighed at the unfairness of a world in which Lois got all of the tall, long-legged genes (Lucy was more average, and given to big-heeled shoes to make up for it), and she got all the defective short ones. Before she could make any snarky comments, Lois was finished and stood up, flipping her ponytail with the reckless abandon of someone who could grow their hair long and make it look good.
There was a reason why Chloe always cut her hair.
“Done angsting for the morning?” Lois asked as she turned around.
Chloe dropped her towel by the door and opened her dresser in search of clean underwear. “I guess,” she admitted. “I’m awake now - that’s a start, right?”
Lois grinned. “I’ll get you some coffee and we’ll get going, okay?”
Chloe sighed. Apparently her answer had satisfied whatever crazy rubric her cousin was grading her against. “Okay,” Chloe said and then watched as Lois walked - no, pranced maybe - out the door.
She has way too much energy for - she glanced at the clock - seven in the morning. Especially pre-caffeination.
Chloe shook her head and began to dress.
Lois drove, to Chloe’s consternation and despite her insistence that she was completely awake. “It’s not like I don’t drive to school just like this five days a week,” Chloe said, trying not to yawn. Saturdays were her days to sleep in - especially after being up past midnight the evening before.
“You’re not going to win, Chlo,” Lois told her, slipping on sunglasses against the early morning light. “Besides, I want to pick your brain about a few things and now’s the best time.”
“Let me guess,” she replied. “These things have to do with Clark and the whole alien thing. I thought we weren’t supposed to encourage brooding today.”
Lois grinned. “You’re absolutely right,” she said, turning onto a long-familiar road that led out of Smallville proper and into the farmland that surrounded it. “But this isn’t about indulging the Lord of the Angst. This is a fact-finding mission.”
Occasionally Lois overdid the military lingo, but given who her father was, Chloe couldn’t blame her for it. Most of the time. “Okay,” she finally told Lois. “Get on with it.”
“Cool. I made a list in my head this morning and if we’re lucky, I might actually remember all of it. First up: why did Clark punch his birth dad?”
“I don’t know.”
Lois frowned. “You don’t know?” she asked.
“He hasn’t told me,” Chloe explained. “I can guess, though.”
“Then guess.”
“There’s some misunderstanding where Clark thinks Jor-El sent him to Earth to conquer and rule the planet.”
Lois laughed so suddenly and so energetically that she nearly lost control of her car. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, Clark said something to me yesterday kind of in that direction, but I didn’t really believe it. I mean, Smallville? I’d sooner believe Lana was the wannabe Caesar.”
“Lois, you heard what Jor-El said yesterday, about that Zod guy,” Chloe told her. “My guess is that somehow Zod did something so that Clark thought he was Jor-El, and considering Clark was, like, three when the Kents adopted him and all this trouble has been in the last couple of years, Clark couldn’t tell the difference.”
“Well, there goes my BS-o-meter all shot to hell,” Lois muttered and sighed heavily. Chloe supposed that brooding didn’t count if Lois was doing it herself; she prided herself on seeing through ‘crap’ and the idea that she’d misread Clark would definitely bug her for a while.
“Last couple of years, huh?” Lois finally continued. “I don’t suppose there was something along the lines of Lex Luthor almost killing Clark with a car in that timeframe, was there?”
Chloe frowned for a moment and then realized what Lois must have been referring to. “Freshman year, just before Homecoming. Lex ran his car into the river and Clark saved his life. Why?”
“Because of something Clark said yesterday, when he said that thing about taking over the planet,” Lois replied. “While you and Mrs. Kent were at the hospital. We were arguing - well, ranting is probably more like it, him complaining about the supposedly impressive suck that is his life - and he said something about Lex hitting him with his car and that was how he found out he was an alien in the first place. That that was what made his folks finally tell him.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” Chloe admitted. “That’s about when he started acting a little different. More brood-y and angst-y and sitting up in the loft all the time. I guess I thought it was a woe-is-me-Lana-barely-knows-I-exist thing.”
“Guess you were wrong,” Lois said, a little absently, pulling to a stop.
“Yeah,” she agreed - and then realized that they were stopped for no apparent reason. It was simply an empty field. It didn’t even look planted. “Lois?”
“I thought you might like to know,” Lois told her with a mischievous grin, “where the aliens landed. At least there’s no crop circle where Lara parked - that really would have brought the crazies out of the woodwork, huh?”
“Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “It really would have.”
“Done?” Lois asked.
Chloe shrugged. “It’s not like their ship is still sitting there, you know? It’s in the Kents’ barn.”
“Yeah,” Lois replied. “Freaky, huh?” Her hand moved as if to shift into ‘drive’ but she paused and turned towards Chloe. “It kind of reminds me of an RV.”
Chloe frowned. “What?” she asked.
“I mean, just think about it a sec. I know you didn’t see inside, but I did, and it’s like a big, black Winnebago. A goth Winnebago.”
Chloe snorted against her will. A joke about it being Darth Vader’s RV - Clark had tortured her and Pete with the original trilogy the summer before freshman year - popped into her head. Luckily, she stopped it before it managed to reach her mouth. The mental image of Clark as Luke Skywalker also caught her off guard, and she kept it inside as well.
Lois would never have let him live it down.
“What?” Lois protested. “It’s an intergalactic RV, it’s black, and there’s been enough angst surrounding it the last ten or twelve hours to fuel Dawson’s Creek for a full season.”
Chloe laughed. “Okay, okay,” she said, throwing up her hands in surrender. “You’re right. It’s a goth intergalactic Winnebago. And you’re the one who gets to explain it to Jor-El.”
“Lara, actually,” Lois muttered. “She’s the pilot.” She shifted into drive and they finally got going again. “Second question,” Lois said as if nothing had happened since Chloe had answered the last one. “What’s this about Jor-El visiting Earth in the sixties?”
Chloe remembered now that she’d admitted to her cousin that she knew something about it. “You have to know that Clark hasn’t told me all the details,” she warned Lois. “Obviously there are some secret alien things that I don’t know about-”
Secret. “Ever since I read that newspaper article I've been having memories from 1961.” And then I asked - something about past lives? Or genetic memory - and Clark got that thoughtful look on his face…
And then when Mayor Tate was arrested, everyone says he was raving about how the ‘drifter’ had come back from the dead to haunt him…Clark and Jor-El look pretty damn similar - if you slicked back his hair, put him in a leather jacket, and he super-sped away before Sheriff Adams or anyone could see him -
“Chlo? You okay?”
Chloe shook off the year-old memory and filed it away for a future Clark interrogation. Just how did he have those ‘visions’ or ‘memories’ or whatever anyway? “Yeah,” she said out loud. “I’m fine. It’s just…I remember something and then I realize that Clark must have been hiding something about his involvement, you know?” She paused only to breathe and then answered Lois’s question. “Jor-El was on Earth - in Smallville, even - in June of 1961. He had an affair with Lana’s great-aunt Louise-”
“What is it with those Lang girls and Kryptonian guys?” Lois muttered a little incredulously. Chloe chose to ignore the comment, though she itched to correct her - it was Lana’s mom’s aunt, so technically she’d been a ‘Potter girl’ - and continued with her answer: “ - and Louise was murdered. And then Jor-El disappeared - must have gone back to Krypton then - but Clark thought he might have been the one who killed her.”
“Yeah, ‘cause a guy who wants his kid to conquer our backwards little planet isn’t going to think murder’s a big deal,” Lois said sarcastically. “I can kind of see how Smallville might have gotten a bit confused.”
Chloe shrugged. Frankly, she was still confused by a lot of it. It was going to take a while to untangle everything. “Well, in the end it turned out Clark was wrong. Mayor Tate - well, he was just Officer Tate back then - had paid Lex’s grandfather to kill Jor-El because Mayor Tate was jealous - he had a major thing for Louise-”
“Again I say,” Lois interrupted, “what is it about these Lang girls? And Lex’s grandfather? Are you kidding me?”
“Would I kid about this? And Potter girls, actually - and apparently Louise died by accident. I’m guessing that Jor-El got shot at but since he’s like Clark, he didn’t get hurt, but somehow Louise did.”
“Well, that must have majorly sucked.”
It did, Chloe admitted, and of course the guy who’d actually pulled the trigger, Lex’s grandfather, was long dead, but things had worked out in the end: Louise’s husband’s name had been cleared, Mayor Tate had admitted to everything and was now rotting away in jail, and Jor-El seemed to have gotten over it. More than just gotten over it, actually, based on what little she’d seen of Jor-El and Lara together.
Plus, there’s the fact that Clark exists in the first place.
She shook off that line of thought and turned back to Lois. “Any other facts that you wanted to find?” Okay. That turn of phrase wasn’t as funny as it was in my head.
Lois bit her lip. “What happened last night?” she asked, a kind of cautious tone in her voice. “When Clark ran off and went back to the house? He’d been acting a little funny, but he just took off - is he really okay, like he said?”
At this rate, Chloe knew she shouldn’t have been surprised at Lois’s sudden change, from sarcastic and a little judgmental to worried and hesitant, but she was. Sometimes she was almost convinced that Lois didn’t really like Clark, or at least saw him as a necessary evil attached to Mr. and Mrs. Kent, who she did like, but apparently she was wrong - and wasn’t just the last twenty-four hours that was leading her to rethink her cousin’s attitude, though the revelations of the last evening probably helped. “He was pretty much okay by the time we left last night, by the time you and Lara and Jor-El got back, even. I mean, you were right this morning when you said there’s going to be more angst and brooding and everything - clearly, Clark has issues that we can’t even imagine - but there’s been at least a little bit of progress on his part in sorting them out.”
“But what happened?” Lois pressed. “Why did he freak out and run back to the house? He has issues-with-a-capital-I, I get that, but what set him off?”
“You know how their ship is black and shiny? Apparently, it reminds Clark of the ship Jor-El sent him to Earth in.”
“I’m assuming it’s a wee bit smaller.”
Chloe shrugged. “I would guess so, but I’ve never seen it. And never will, I guess. Clark blew it up two years ago.”
Lois slammed on the brake. Thankfully, they were in the middle of nowhere. “He blew up his spaceship?”
Chloe waited a moment, catching her breath from the sudden panic that Lois’s braking talents had produced. “Yes.”
Lois stared at her with disbelief. “But why?” she asked incredulously.
“Because of the whole Zod thing, I imagine,” she told her cousin. “Apparently the whole take-over-the-planet thing started with his spaceship. It takes a lot for Clark to get mad - really mad - but when he does, he sometimes does take things to extremes.” Looking back, Chloe figured it had something to do with holding things in. If Clark acted on every little thing that pissed him off, Smallville would have been rubble ages ago, between the super-strength and the fire-from-the-eyes thing alone. However it was that the Kents taught Clark to hold in his impulses over the years, it seemed to have worked, if maybe a little too well. Clark needed to find a better way of dealing with things than blowing up spaceships and punching his birth father.
Then again, those could have been really extreme, isolated incidents. The whole Clark-is-an-alien thing was still new; she hadn’t figured everything out quite yet.
“So that’s it? Lara’s space ship reminded him of his spaceship, which he blew up for what seems to me like an okay reason - I mean, you know how I reacted when Dad got pissed off because I wasn’t ever going to join the Army like a good girl - and that’s what made him freak out?”
Chloe tried her best not to remember the tales of Lois’s rebellion and focused on the here-and-now. “That was part of it,” she ceded.
Lois frowned. “And the rest?”
“Remember I told you that Mrs. Kent lost her baby in a car accident?” When Lois nodded, she continued: “The explosion, when Clark blew up the spaceship, apparently is what caused the accident.”
Lois slumped in her seat. “God. Yeah, okay, that’s worth freaking out over. Now I’m surprised he was as okay as he was when I got back!” She turned to Chloe. “He really told you all about it?”
“Maybe not everything,” Chloe told her, “but enough to understand. You won’t tell him that I told you, will you? He didn’t say anything, but this was kind of a big private thing, you know?” And knowing how hard he’s tried to keep his secrets in the past…
“Of course not!” Lois exclaimed. “Are you kidding? What he told you - what you told me - is huge. I mean, it’s good to know because now I can make some sense out of all his guilt and brooding beyond the whole alien thing, but I totally get the whole privacy-and-secrets thing.” She started the car forward again. “Wow. That makes a lot more sense now. Mostly because it made no sense before.”
They drove on in silence a few more minutes and soon came to the Kent farm. Chloe felt nervous - she’d been running on adrenaline all the previous evening. God, I hope I don’t do anything stupid because I’m tired, she thought to herself. The strange look on Lois’s face seemed to echo that thought.
Lois parked beside the old familiar pick up truck. “Ready?” she asked, a little subdued.
Chloe nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
They entered through the kitchen door, as they always did. The unlocked door had been so foreign to Chloe in the beginning - didn’t they know that someone would come right in and steal something, even if you had three bolt locks? Metropolis was a world away from Smallville, even then, and thirteen-year-old Chloe had been shocked. But now eighteen-year-old Chloe was cool with it and it felt as natural as anything else - more natural than a lot of things in Smallville.
The house was silent, their footsteps echoing a little as they crossed the old wood floor. Chloe looked around nervously - it was pushing eight o’clock, if not later, and this was a farming family. Aliens aside, Clark and Mrs. Kent should have been up by now, even on a weekend. And farmers really couldn’t afford to embrace something as critical to her existence as sleeping in on a Saturday.
“Clark?” Chloe called out, stepping towards the couch. Maybe they’d missed Clark outside? “Mrs. Kent -”
Even as she spoke, she saw Lara in one of the chairs near the big couch, holding her hand over her mouth and shaking her head. What? Oh! ‘Be quiet’ - not quite exactly universal, but close enough. She nodded as she reached the back of the couch and then looked down, Lois at her heels. Clark was asleep on the couch, still covered by a blanket, though the neatness of it made her think that maybe Lara had done the ‘mom’ thing and straightened it not too long ago. Behind her, Lois giggled softly at the sight.
Chloe bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly, looking straight at Lara. She might not understand the words, she told herself, but maybe that doesn’t always matter. “We have to wake him up.”
Lara said and did nothing, save for looking a little puzzled and watching them.
Chloe set her purse on the floor and the reached over the back of the couch and shook Clark’s shoulder. “Clark! Clark! Wake up!” she said, not quite whispering. What is it that Mr. Kent always says? “Clark, the cows don’t milk themselves, you know!”
He rolled over and blinked at her. “Zhem te, nami,” he mumbled and then closed his eyes again. Well, Chloe assumed it was mumbled. She had no clue what he had said. Behind her, Lara made a noise and she turned around to find Clark’s birth mother trying to hold in laughter and barely managing to do so. “What did he say?” she asked with honest curiosity, though she knew that there probably wouldn’t be an answer - not in English, anyway. But if Lara was laughing, then Clark must have actually said something that sounded like the Kryptonian language.
There was a heavy footfall on the stairs and then, with amusement, Jor-El’s voice broke into the room. “He asked for five more minutes of sleep, Chlo-ee,” he said, joining them. He walked over to Lara and dropped a kiss on her forehead - and then on her lips, which she returned wholeheartedly. Apparently Clark’s hugging instinct came from an innate lack of embarrassment over PDAs. “And then,” Jor-El continued, “he called you nami. This word, small children call a mother.”
Lois snorted softly. “Ah, isn’t that sweet,” she said. “Smallville called you Mommy.”
“Hush, you,” Chloe told her, but she was secretly as amused as everyone else seemed to be. Apparently some things were universal - and apparently Clark remembered a little more of Krypton than he thought he did.
TBC