Title: The One That's Gonna Find You
Author: Karen U/revivingophelia
Pairing/Character: Chloe Sullivan/Bruce Wayne
Disclaimer: No one you recognize belongs to me
Rating: M/R
Summary: After the events of Doomsday, Chloe leaves Kansas for a new beginning... and a new hero to help.
Spoilers: for Batman - post Batman Begins, pre-Dark Knight. For Smallville - post Doomsday
Warnings: language, violence, adult situations.
Prologue
Six months.
She sat quietly in the building, looking around at the stained glass, her hands clasped in her lap. It had been six months since it had all happened... Since Jimmy had been murdered, dying in her arms... Since she'd discovered that when it came to Davis Bloome, the man and the monster were apparently one and the same. Six months since Dinah, Bart, and Oliver had gone to Jimmy's funeral only to disappear afterwards. Six months since Clark Kent had walked out of the very building where she now was, the man that had been her best friend for so long telling her that he was turning his back on his human side. Turning his back on her. They were gone now, all of them. Or if they weren't gone, they were certainly avoiding her. She couldn't say it didn't hurt; it did. It tore through her, knowing that she'd been left behind by them all... Left behind by everyone. Even Lois... Lois, who had returned from the future with no memories of it. Lois, who was now the sole confidant of the Blur... Though she had no idea that the Blur was actually Clark Kent.
The blonde woman shook her head, lifting a hand to push it through her short blonde hair. She'd tried at first. Tried to pull things together, to get the others working together again... And maybe they were working together, at least a bit... But that was just Dinah and Bart and Victor and AC. They teamed up when they had to, and Bart made sure she knew they were all okay, but that was all she got. They never asked for help, never brought anything to her, and she hadn't seen Clark or Oliver - or heard from them - at all. Clark was off trying to save the world by himself, nearly getting caught on film a few times, but not once did he seem to notice... and not once had he stopped by to acknowledge her or thank her for getting rid of any evidence that would have allowed him to be ID'd. And Oliver? No one knew where Oliver was. Or, if they did know, they sure as hell weren't telling her.
No one was telling her much of anything these days. Even Bart's messages never went much beyond telling her that they were all fine. They were fine, but she wasn't. She wasn't going to say that she hadn't made mistakes. Obviously she had. She'd done everything she could to try and save Clark... To try and save both Clark and Davis, to keep them from killing each other, to try and free Davis from Doomsday... And this was how it ended. The others walking away, and her? She was here, in the building that Jimmy had bought, the blood stain still marking the place where he'd died six months before. No amount of scrubbing had been able to get it out, not completely. It never would.
Chloe let out a shaky breath, eyeing the boxes that were all around. All of her things: she'd moved them out of her old place and brought them here, but she hadn't put any effort into unpacking. She lived off takeout when she remembered to eat, and she pulled clothes out of boxes when she needed something to wear, but just about everything else was still packed away... Except the computers. All of her computers from Isis were here, unpacked, hooked up and ready to go, but there had been no one to call on her to use them. No one at all.
The heroes were gone, doing who knows what. Saving people, she supposed, though she wasn't so sure that was on Oliver's agenda at the moment, and AC seemed to have gone back to vandalizing whaling boats. Or, at least, she was pretty sure it was him. The footage she had hacked into and erased certainly looked like him. Not that he knew she'd gotten rid of the footage for him or anything. He probably hadn't known there was footage, just like she figured Clark had never known he'd been caught on tape as well. So here she was, still protecting their secrets, but not getting so much as a hello from anyone besides Bart. It was enough to make a girl rethink her career path... Not that she hadn't done *that* before. She'd gone from reporter to freak counselor to professional sidekick and now... Maybe it was time to go full circle.
Maybe it was time to be a reporter again.
Maybe it was time to be more.
Chloe stood up slowly, carefully picking her way around boxes until she reached a table in the room, her hand reaching out to touch the newspaper that lay there... A newspaper that she now had a job offer from. It wasn't anything huge, and she knew the main reason she'd gotten the job was because the paper was in dire need of reporters. It wasn't exactly the safest town in the world. But then again, she didn't do safe. She hadn't played it safe in years, and she figured she'd pretty much already lost everything, so it didn't make much sense to start playing it safe now. She had money tucked away, money that no one knew about, because there had been no way that she was going to tell Clark that Lionel Luthor had left her money in his will. He would've started looking for ulterior motives, and Chloe just preferred to think of it as an apology for trying to kill her when she was seventeen... not to mention that any money that went to others didn't go to Lex. So she had the money for a move, she had a new job in a new town... and she had a new purpose in life as she planned her move to Gotham City.
She was going to find out who Batman was.
And she was going to help him.
