A/N: I have a thing for post-apocalyptic fanfiction so while I haven't been following season 9 as closely as I probably should to pull this off, I loved the idea of Chloe being the leader of a resistance movement in "Pandora" and I couldn't help but wonder about what Lex would think if he was alive to see the worst of everything he ever predicted or used to justify his actions come to pass. So because I don't think there can possibly be enough Pandora fiction out there (because there's just too much we didn't get to see), this is my probably fairly unique spin on elements of that year. There will be some Chlex. There will be moments of Chlollie, but more than anything . . . this is Chloe's story.
Timeline Notes: Since this fic works off the presumption that since Lois didn't come back and that's what made the future go wonky, none of Season 9 happened exactly the way its shown on screen, allow me a little artistic license with the particulars.
This will be a max of two to three chapters long. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter come from Alan Seeger's WWI poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Death."
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair
----
There is a before and there is an after.
Before she was just Chloe. She was the best-friend, the sidekick, the widowed hacker. Waiting to be seen, to be recognized.
But this is not that Chloe's story. This story belongs to the leader, the fighter, the rebel. Belongs to the woman who came after.
After the towers went online and the sun went blood red.
After anonymity, invisibility became her shield, her weapon. After she loses her name and becomes a legend.
After Zod rose.
And the world went to hell.
After everything changes.
This story belongs to Watchtower.
-----
August 2009
The day construction is completed on the towers. The day Chloe is reborn into something new, someone hacks her system for the first and only time.
She's shutting them out as fast as she can, boxing them in and trying to backtrace, fingers flying across the keyboard when suddenly, inexplicably they're gone.
But not without a trace.
For one terrifying minute every screen goes white with a single message—
IF I CAN FIND YOU, THEY CAN TOO.
RUN.
X
She cuts power to the Watchtower fifteen minutes later. Takes her guns. Takes her laptop. And goes underground.
Above her she can here the screams of people dying, of the world ending. She shuts her ears and closes her eyes and keeps moving.
Somebody has to live to fight.
It's months before she starts to believe she's the one it should be.
-----
They find each other by chance or fate's design. Bits and pieces of humanity that were smart enough, or stubborn enough or lucky enough to escape, scraping by on peanut butter and candy bars and fading hope.
Children without parents, husbands without wives, mothers without families. The remnants, the lose-ends, the orphans. They come together, cling to each other.
They survive.
For the first few days they all talk about the Blur, about how he will save them, how its only a matter of time.
Chloe doesn't have the heart to tell them that as long as the sun is red Clark isn't coming.
They'll figure it out on their own soon enough.
A week in Oliver finds them. He's got ten more following him. A scrappy band of cage fighters and bar brawlers. Life's undesirables . . .
Chloe doesn't think she's ever seen anything more beautiful.
She becomes their leader by default. She didn't intend it, doesn't even want it, but it happens all the same. And every night she walks the line of their sleeping quarters, watches a mother teach her twin toddlers not to cry (they can't afford the noise), a ten year old learn to wrap a wound, a young man sit silent with the engagement ring he'd bought the day the sun went crimson.
After three weeks she can't take it anymore.
She's tired of looking after this patchwork cadre.
So she stops—sends the fathers to scavenge for kryptonite, has Oliver start to teach the women to fight, the children to make arrows and field dressings.
Chloe's done leading victims.
Watchtower starts building an army.
----
September 2009
Six weeks have gone by when Oliver comes to her with news of a prize that almost makes her fall in love . . .
A generator. An honest-to-God gas powered generator.
It's not much but it's enough to run her computer for a few hours every few nights, to start parsing through the files of information she'd managed to take with her.
That's when she finds it. A data burst that isn't hers. Normally she'd never open it, but she's not online and normal stopped being the watchword weeks ago.
When the information starts to decompress, she can't believe her eyes.
It's the mother-fucking jackpot, manna from heaven—maps of the city, schematics of power grids, security codes for the LuthorCorp systems. And while it might not be everything they need, it's a damn good start.
She pulls over Matt and Andrea who used to be engineering students at MetU and hands them pencils and paper.
"Draw. Quickly."
Matt finds her an hour later, out of breath, eyes alight. "You need to see this."
It's an uplink buried deep in the encryption, a possible portal to the outside, to information. It's also a potential hole in their defenses, a way to be tracked. She could put everybody at risk doing this.
But 'at risk' has become their status quo.
She copies the drives, and hands them to Oliver with instructions. "If I'm not back by morning get everyone moved. Don't try to contact me, don't try to find me."
For a moment he looks like he's going to protest, but they both know Oliver stopped trusting his judgment a long time ago. Hers is what they've got left. Instead he just says, "Want to tell me where you're going?"
Shouldering her backpack she curves her lips in something that once might have been called a smile. "Down the rabbit hole."
-----
She waits until she's at least three miles away, into an area that used to be one of Metropolis's less desirable neighborhoods. A lifetime ago, when she'd been scrapping for stories to impress her editors, she'd spent a night down here trying to track down a prostitute who'd lodged a complaint against a deputy mayor before disappearing. At the time, the thing that had impressed her most was the noise, the oppressive cacophony of a world governed by different rules, different timetables.
It's deathly quiet now.
Positioning herself in a doorway with the fastest route back to subway lines, she boots up, starts her timer, and activates the uplink.
Ten seconds.
Thirty.
She's onto the boards, blanketing every one she can think of with post after post. The message is simple – "We are here. We will not lay down. If you are out there, stand up." She signs off with what has become their mantra. "For our world – Watchtower"
Three minutes.
Four.
She's pushing it. She knows it, but who knows when she'll get a chance like this again.
And maybe there's a part of her that's waiting, wondering if X is out there.
At six minutes, she gets her answer. A photo program opens of its own accord and there's an old stock image of the Washington Avenue train station and a time—1:00 a.m. X
It's four miles in the wrong direction from camp. She'll have to book it to make it. And she might be walking into a trap, but . . .
She's already running.
Screw it, their luck has to change sometime, why can't this be the day?
----
The train station is a tactical nightmare. Abandoned cars line the tracks, there's high ground from the old ticketing platforms. In short, except for the multiple escape routes, it's the perfect place for an ambush.
And its such a human idea (what's the point of an ambush when you can easily survive a frontal attack?), that she almost relaxes at the thought.
She still keeps her finger on the trigger of her crossbow. The kryptonite arrow will be just as deadly to a human as a Kandorian. Probably moreso.
The sound of a gun cocking behind her in salutation tells her she'll never get the shot off in time.
Holding up her crossbow in the grip Oliver taught her makes it look like she's giving up, but keeps her options open, she calls out, "I'm a friend."
The barrel comes to rest against the base of her spine, as a gloved hand begins to clumsily pat her down and disarm her with a strange, stilted inefficiency. "Somehow I doubt that."
That voice.
For one moment she thinks she's hallucinating, but when finally the gun is removed from her back, she's not surprised to turn and find a ghost standing in front of her.
"Son of a bitch."
Lex Luthor just lets the corner of his mouth curve up in a half-smile, "And hello to you to."
He's ten times worse for the wear than she is. In the moonlight she can see that one side of his face is scarred almost beyond recognition, and though his left hand is gloved she can see now why the pat-down didn't feel as efficient as it should have been—the two outside fingers are twisted at a strange angle and it's not hard to tell that it doesn't work quite right anymore.
"You're dead."
"Let's just say the rumors of my death . . . have been greatly exaggerated."
"No. Oliver killed you. He told me. The explosion, there was DNA . . ." she trails off, suddenly feeling incredibly stupid as she realizes she's had this conversation with someone before.
Lex leans back against one of the cars, gun pointed down, but still very much in hand. "Please don't tell me you think my ex-wife is the only one capable of faking their death with a genetic clone. I'm vaguely insulted."
"But why?"
"You know the advantage of being dead when people want to kill you? They stop trying."
"You're X."
It's the obvious deduction, and standing here underneath a blood moon in an insane world, she finds she's not even surprised. Maybe a little disappointed. She'd been hoping for an ally, not an old enemy.
He just smiles. "Hello Watchtower."
The sound of that word on his lips, a word that's come to mean freedom, mean survival and the best of what's left in humanity, is enough to make her all too muted emotions suddenly flash white hot, and she snarls, "What the hell are you playing at?"
"Do I look like I'm playing?"
He doesn't. He really doesn't. He looks hard, looks pissed off, looks like tempered metal and edged blades, looks like the last thing on his agenda is anything resembling amusement.
He looks like a weapon she wants in her arsenal.
"So this is what? Penance after your attack dog did this to us?"
"Yes, let's stand here and apportion blame. Because we don't have better things to do." Finally, he holsters the pistol, and reaches out to slide open the door to the box car.
She could kill him now. His back is partly turned, her cross bow is half a pace away. Drop to her knee, come up firing . . . she could make the shot.
But he's human.
He's human and she's seen so many people die.
And revenge is a luxury she can't afford. Not anymore.
Lex finishes pushing open the door and turns back to her, and she can tell from the look in his eyes . . . he knows exactly what she was just thinking.
Still keeping her eyes on his, her peripheral vision on his hands, she lowers herself down slowly, picks up the crossbow. He doesn't move. She reaches out for her knife, finds it over to her right. With a knowing smile, Lex reaches into his pocket with his bad hand, pulls out her Glock and drops it to the ground.
He kicks the gun over to her. "For the record, I wasn't the one who let Mercy off her leash."
No that was Lana. Lana who thought she was doing something so good, cutting off Lex's conduit, showing Tess exactly what kind of man she was working for.
Everyone has been so focused on the master, none of them ever thought to worry about the pet, until it was too late.
Tucking the gun in to the back of her cargo pants, she stands and comes over to the boxcar. There's a black bag sitting there like an offering. Still keeping one eye on him she reaches out and unzips it.
What's sitting there makes her take a faltering step back, suck in a shaky breath.
It's two bars of refined Kryptonite.
Two beautiful, beautiful bars of something that a month ago in this man's hands would have made her blood run cold. Now it makes her giddy and happy, like its Christmas.
How the world has changed.
Lex taps the edge of the car. "Lead-lined, for the shipment of certain sensitive materials. The Kandorians won't know what's here unless they come looking."
She about to ask how he knows that when she sees the faded LuthorCorp logo on the outside . . . God, there's so much about this city he might know, so much he could tell her . . .
He drops a phone on the top of the bag. "That uplinks to network. Don't leave it on, don't spend much time on it. But send me a list of what you need, and I'll get it for you as best I can."
"How did you set up a network they haven't destroyed?"
"Mercy may have taken over the LuthorCorp systems, but . . . they're still my systems."
"You didn't- A LuthorCorp satellite? You hid it on a LuthorCorp satellite."
Lex smiles, "I hid it on all the LuthorCorp satellites."
She has to admit . . . she is the tiniest bit impressed.
And for the first time in weeks, she feels something she's been faking for the sake of others . . .
She feels hope.
Pocketing the phone, she zips up the bag and slings it over her shoulder. Starts to walk away, and then turns back to ask one final question.
"Why are you doing this?"
"I don't like uninvited guests," he pulls out his gun, rechecks the clip, racks a bullet, and adds with glinting, ice-cold eyes, "And I don't kneel."
Now that she believes.
"I'll contact you."
- + - + - + - + -
Final Author's Note – I should point out, this fic came out of a Chlex by Request even I'm doing over on N-S whereby people can prompt me and I will write them at least a ficlet (or in this case more) in exchange for them reviewing someone else's fic that they haven't reviewed before. Athena over there asked for a fic where Lex was in secret contact with Chloe after Oliver presumably killed him in season 8. I couldn't figure out how to do that realistically with out changing the paradigm of everything we knew. And then I realized the events in Pandora did exactly that. So Athena deserves a shout out for getting my mind chugging in this direction. So if you enjoyed this, please let me know, but more importantly in the spirit of the event . . . go review another fic you haven't before.