Title: A Rough History
Author: Savage Midnight
Rating: PG-13 (for swearing)
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em.
Summary: Chloe and Dean; a rough history.
Author's Note: This began as a drabble challenge. And then it turned into a collection of long drabbles that pieced together like so. This is the first cluster of drabbles in the series, five in total. Keep your eyes peeled for more if you enjoy this fic.

---

part i: impressions

They met in a tiny, dark bar in a tiny, dark town outside Kansas. It was the first time in a long time that Chloe Sullivan had ventured anywhere near her old home, and it would be the last.

He swaggered in not an hour before sunrise, sat down beside her and ordered a tequila. He didn't even introduce himself before he turned towards her and told her to back off and go home. And on that rare occasion, she played dumb.

"Come again?"

"We know who you are and what you do," he said, and knocked back his tequila. "Go home. You're screwing things up."

A few years ago Chloe had learned patience, had needed it to survive, and she used it now, sipping her beer slow and easy. She knew who this was, though she'd never had the honour of meeting him until now. And he was right on time.

"'Bout time you showed, Winchester," she said offhandedly. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't."

She saw him freeze out of the corner of her eye and smiled to herself.

Too cocky, she thought. You didn't even know you were being played.

Another swig of her beer and she was straight to the point. "He likes blondes. Always has. The last girl was a mistake. Dye job. That's why he ripped her to shreds."

Anger temporarily forgotten, he replied arrogantly, "We know that already."

"I know. I made sure you did." She paused. "So which one are you? Dean or Sam? I'm guessin' Dean. I heard you were an arrogant little shit."

"Nothing little about me, sweetheart," he deadpanned. "And you're stupid if you think we're going to let you help us."

Chloe shook her head and downed the last of her beer. "No, I'm not stupid enough to think that. But I'm smart enough to know that you're going to help me."

She slid off the barstool then and turned to face him, hitching her bag up on to her shoulder. "I know more about this guy than the both of you put together. And I know how to take him down. You're here because I wanted you here."

She moved towards the door, leaving him to his forgotten drink, and with her parting words, she headed out into the sunrise.

"You know where to find me."

---

part ii: action

She met Sam the second time around and was reminded of Clark. Watching as he hesitantly sat down, legs sprawling out in front of him and his dark, floppy hair falling into his eyes, she imagined him bailing hay and milking cows.

Shifting her gaze to Dean, she smirked to herself at the picture they made. A farmer, a cowboy and a reporter, each of them looking younger than they were and nothing like what they'd become. Hunters. Slayers.

Killers.

There was no preliminaries. She didn't do them.

"Are you in?" she asked.

Sam looked at his brother and Dean looked at her. And then he nodded.

"We're in."

---

It was almost midnight and there were no buses. She'd planned it that way. Picked the area of town where buses dared not to venture so late into the night and planted herself at the empty bus stop. She didn't want any hapless passers-by grilling her about bus times while she reeled in her mark.

She was Cheryl today and she was a waitress, generic and helpless and blonde. Just how he liked 'em.

Chloe didn't do helpless. It took conscious effort to slump her shoulders and lower her head into a posture that screamed victim. Occasionally she eyed the darkness warily and shifted her feet for good measure, but there was a stiffness to her spine and a sharpness in her eyes that belied her anxiety.

"C'mon, shit-for-brains," she mumbled under her breath, shifting her bag higher up her shoulder, uncomfortable with the fact that it weighed so little. She'd brought no weapons with her tonight, only her pepper spray. It was something he would expect a girl like her -- a girl clearly afraid of her own shadow -- to carry. But her other arsenal was safely tucked away in the boot of her car. Not that she would need it. Her mark was human and she didn't kill humans. Too messy.

It didn't mean she didn't miss the weight of her tranq gun or the feel of a blade against her back. They were her trusty sidekicks, but tonight she was being forced to place her trust elsewhere.

"Good plan, Chlo'," she whispered to herself, pulling her hand out from beneath the back of shirt where she'd been unconsciously searching for her weapon.

It wasn't like she really had a choice in how this all played out. Chloe wanted nothing more than to bag this mark for herself; flaunt herself as bait, reel him in, and gut him. But if he saw any sign of a weapon, he'd bail. He liked blondes and he liked victims, and that was the only criteria she had to go on. As Chloe she wouldn't get within ten feet of him. But as Cheryl she could be something they needed... a distraction.

Let Dean and Sam do the dirty work. She didn't have a criminal record and she planned to keep it that way. Dean and Sam did. One more skeleton in their closet wasn't really going to make a difference.

She could live with being bait if the job got done.

---

part iii: change

She saw her colleague get ripped to shreds once. That was the day something changed inside of her and she stopped being just a reporter. She'd been chasing the stories for years by then, always the bad ones because bad news sold better than good news, and she was one of the big shots. Had her own office at the Planet.

And then one of the bad stories happened right in front of her. It took seeing Dana getting mauled by a werewolf to make her realise that bad news happened because people let it.

It wasn't an epiphany. It was just a kind of truth that slotted into her life. There weren't enough Clark Kents and Oliver Queens in the world and the Lex Luthors and the werewolves and the bat-shit crazy meteor freaks were sneaking through the cracks of her neat little universe.

She wasn't a hero. She hated when people called her that. She was still the girl chasing her stories and the next adrenaline rush. Except now her chase had a sharp, hard edge. It had purpose. She watched and she learned and she used what she knew to teach others. And she used it to protect herself.

She'd been a survivor longer than she'd been a hunter. She'd spent her earlier years working reconnaissance for Oliver, and between one mission and the next she demanded training. She liked it when Clark saved her, but she liked it even more when she saved herself, and she wanted to do it more often. Because it was in the back of her mind that she and Clark would eventually grow out of each other. Maybe not permanently, maybe not for decades to come, but it would happen and Chloe wanted to learn how to be Chloe without Clark.

It wasn't like the movies. It didn't take months. It took years. And she gave up, over and over again. Nearly lost it completely when she came home covered in her own blood once too often.

People used to say Chloe was a fighter. She didn't like it when they did. She was stubborn and passionate and determined, but she didn't like the sound of bones breaking or the taste of blood in her mouth. She liked the feel of her weapons, the security they offered, but she didn't like using them. She favoured her tranq gun because it was clean and easy and required minimal amount of violence.

But her biggest weapon was her brain and she liked it that way. She never fucked with an enemy she didn't know inside out. But sometimes -- only sometimes -- knowledge wasn't enough. She learned that the hard way when Dana bounded back into her life on four hairy legs and tried to sink her teeth into the soft flesh of Chloe's neck. Her tranq darts had missed -- twice -- and she lost her gun somewhere between trying to run and trying to hide. It ended with Chloe ramming her brand new, never-been-used steel hunting blade into Dana's skull and leaving Metropolis a few weeks later.

She was a killer by default, not by choice, but letting people think otherwise was a matter of survival. She learnt to get things done quickly and cleanly before things got dirty, before people died and people killed. She planned her hunts with the same efficiency she planned her articles and everything else came down to luck.

Whether it was down to luck or down to her careful planning that she now found herself chained to the wall of an abandoned warehouse with her mark looming over her, she didn't know. But she had a feeling she was about to find out.

---

part iv: resolution

The ice broke, unnatural, because it shouldn't have been there.

Didn't do your homework right, she scolded herself, wincing when she saw Sam crash through the frozen wood and into the water below. She hoped it wasn't as cold as it looked, but given the ice shouldn't have been there in the first place she was guessing anything below it would be just as impossibly chilly.

She was annoyingly helpless, hands chained above her head and her feet stretched out before her as she watched Dean kneel down on the floor of the warehouse to fish around for his brother. Her mark was crouched in front of her, hastily sketching crooked symbols on the ground with a paintbrush thick with her blood and a layer of salt. He was casting nervous glances across at Dean as he worked and she could see the sweat soaking through the white of his shirt.

She stared at him thoughtfully as he did this, and finally she understood.

This man... this frail, human whisper of a man was trading lives for parlour tricks. He painted the floor with their blood, used it as bait to reel the demons in, caging them in cowardice with the salt of their tears. He offered their souls for favours, refusing to give up his own.

And all to turn wood into ice. What a waste.

Chloe sighed irritably as Dean continued to fish for his brother. Her rescue was a while coming yet, and with a huff of impatience she jerked her leg back as far as she could manage in such an awkward position and slammed her foot into the man's back, sending him sprawling across the floor. He yelped loudly, floundering on the floor before he managed to find his feet and stand.

He turned to glare at her, thin face purple with outrage, his once-clean shirt now smeared in her blood and salt.

"You were invading my personal space," she quipped, gaze briefly skimming past him to see Dean hauling Sam up by the arms and propping him up against the side of the building as he coughed and spluttered. Shifting her eyes back to her mark, she let her head fall back against the wall and sighed.

"I am soooooooo bored," she drawled, tapping the heel of her foot against the floor.

She saw him move a second before her leg shot out again, this time aiming upwards. She heard a satisfying moan of pain as her foot connected and with a loud thump he collapsed to his knees in front of her.

That had been too easy. She'd thought that a man so meticulous about his work wouldn't have fallen for the same trick twice, but luck seemed to be on her side tonight. That, and he hadn't expected his victim to fight back. He chose them that way.

"You're not very bright, are you," she said, once he'd recovered, unable to resist the opportunity to taunt the man who had spent months terrorising girls like her. What was the worst he could do? Kill her? Not likely.

He backhanded her instead. Her head snapped sideways under the force and she tasted blood. Turning her head slowly, she glared at him. She hated being bitch-slapped.

"Ow," she lisped. "I bi' my 'ongue."

He smiled at her. Chloe hated it when the bad guys smiled at her. It was just plain creepy.

Shifting slightly, the man reached for something behind him, being sure to pin her legs with his other hand. Not that it would stop her. If she really wanted to kick him again, she could, but it would serve no real purpose. The last time had been her attempt to distract him and right now he was sufficiently distracted with trying to kill her.

"Be a dear and spit, please," he asked politely, holding up the glass jar he'd used as a paint pot for his artwork. It was still tinged red with traces of her blood.

"I prefer to swallow," she said. "It's polite."

His face twisted again, purple creeping up his neck. His hand snapped forward to wrap around her throat and her head thumped into the wall.

"Don't sass me girl. I won't hesitate to slit your--"

He didn't get the chance to finish. His eyes bulged suddenly and his hand loosened on her throat. A second later he slumped against her and with a grimace she stared down at his head resting in her lap

She glanced up to find Dean standing over her, breathing heavily with a plank of wood hanging by his side.

"About time," she grumbled. "I was getting cranky."

---

part v: progression

It's like putting a story to bed. You do it and then you forget about it. You move on to the next thing and you don't dwell. You forget the names and the faces and the tragedies and you move on. You have to, or it drives you crazy.

Chloe's way of putting a story to bed had changed over the years. When once it had involved sending a nice, beautifully structured little story off to print, it now involved beating the bad guy and getting rip-roaring drunk.

Sam and Dean shared her sentiments. She knew they would, because they understood how this all worked. There was no vacation time for them. They lived their life from one case to the next, and they didn't stop until someone -- or something -- put them down.

They took this time to try and remember what they were fighting for. It was hard to fight for humanity when you weren't a part of it, and even if she had to claw her way in, she would do it, if only because she could. Because that's what they were fighting for. The freedom to love and to hate and to get as intoxicated as one was physically capable.

With a sly glance across the bar to find Dean and Sam still arguing over who won their current game of pool, Chloe allowed herself a quiet moment to watch them.

She wasn't like them, she realised. The brothers had each other, and for them that was enough. They didn't need anything or anyone else. But she did. She'd never led a solitary life and she didn't plan on starting now. And if she did?There were people out there that wouldn't allow it. Clark and Oliver, Pete and Lana, and all those that were fighting the good fight right alongside her.

She mentally added Dean and Sam to that list. It was a short one, filled with the few people she trusted implicitly. But the brothers had more than proven their worth tonight and Chloe marked them as formidable allies.

"You're an ass, Dean," she heard Sam say with exasperation as he dug out his wallet and pulled out a twenty. Dean simply smirked, slapped his brother on the back, plucked the note from between his fingers and smarmed, "And it's your round, Sammy-boy."

Chloe shook her head and smiled, lifting her beer to her lips to take one last swallow. As Sam and Dean began setting up the table again, she slid from her stool and slung her backpack over her shoulder.

She was leaving the same way she came in. Unnoticed. No need for goodbyes. She was sure she would be seeing the Winchesters again.

And with that she turned and headed for the door, sliding into the darkness and on towards her next destination.

Star City was beckoning.