In The End.
She’s going to tell him today, finally tell him that she’s leaving the old Kent farm, leaving him to decide whether he is working or playing.
To her, he’s always doing both.
She’s tried to do it before, tried so hard to leave his side, but then he comes to her in the dead of the night, and a firestorm sweeps over her body as his cold fingers burn from the inside to out. His tongue strikes her like a match, trailing a sense of cynicism, because she knows that he knows, and he’ll try to coax all he can from her being.
She has lusted after him for so long now, she doesn’t even notice when he falls into her bed, fallen by ambition and blood, like diamonds cut with their own dust.
Once upon a time, she’d thought that true love would never die. Now, it seems to have faded.
But his hands graze the underside of her breast, and his lips close around it and she’s heady with arousal, and the fact that he can smell it means that she’s a goner. It only serves to spur him on.
And he touches her, thick fingers digging into the flesh of her hip, and she knows he’ll leave bruises, but she likes it that way, another memoir to keep her focused, his mark, his. Everything makes sense.
He nestles himself at the base of her curls, and she’s anxious, she wants to reach out to him, to fill him with meaning. Reason is the natural order of truth, even he is not eternal.
She trembles against him as he thrusts, his size affirming his strength because she can feel him nudge at the neck of her cervix and she’s under no illusion. And he moans her name, it’s barely audible, but she can hear it tumble from his tongue, a litany of vowels and consonants, he believes in her.
But she sits here, on the edge of her bed, he calls it their bed now, it’s expected of her. Or perhaps, she just closes her mind against the knowledge that he’s probably shared it with others, that it’s probably tainted now, and that he himself can’t stand to look at it.
She packed her bag weeks ago, stashed it in the back of her closet, and hoped that his x-ray vision would not alert him.
She will leave here holding her head high, holding within her hand, the greatest element of success, pride within herself. She’s no longer afraid of her baron beginnings, she’s a fighter. Clark has always told her that.
He watches her, always watching his Chloe. He’s destroyed her soul with his negligence and his sensibility suffers. Between the covers she is sacred, but even then he is taking her for granted. A livid flower had prospered, trying to reach the sun. Now her petals wilt, and the unbearable stench of decay is his consolation. The harm he sustains, he carries with him. He suffers by his own fault.
The last son of Krypton.
He can’t bear to lose her.
But his life is a cycle, meetings, departures, friends discovered and lost, precious time and broken memories of a happy yesteryear.
He’s never been good at goodbye.
He knows that he’s content with the shadow, that she could be, and would be his bright guiding light. But change is certain and it should not constitute occasion for sadness, not when the interim is his happiness.
They will go their ways. Her to die, he to live. Which one is better? He’s been asking himself since the dawn of deliverance. Myths have always condemned those who look back. So he runs. He runs and he runs, stirring a storm of revolution. He has yellow sunshine at his disposal, though the roads are dusty, and the miles test his imagination, he’ll always find tables of plenty and the progress of preservation.
She herself relies on the beauty of independence, despite their origins, the similarities outweigh the differences. She relies on herself, and he has always been lonely.
She fiddles with the hem of her sweater, she’s taken to wearing them lately, says that they keep her warm when she can’t shake the chill from her bones. She’s nervous; he can hear her heart beating, she’s far from excited.
He hopes that his father will forgive him.
He won’t see her off; he knows she’ll be back. She knows not what she carries with her.
In the end, the Universe has a purpose, though they might remain strange to one another, two friends, two lovers, attracted by the virtue of affinity, they have always been compatible.