She watches Gabriel sleep and wonders if it should have been a different name she gave him. She wonders so many things about how they go here. She doesn't understand any of it. Five years ago the world seemed bright with possibilities, at least for her cousin and her cousin-in-law, for the League as well.
Chloe left that all behind. She'd had to.
One night of weakness on both her and Clark's parts had led to a mistake that had to be hidden at all costs, not just to keep Lois from intense pain she hadn't earned, but to save her son.
Clark's son.
Even at The Star City Register , Elizabeth Cochran was too visible, too famous with her own byline and writing nationally syndicated headlines. Likewise, it wouldn't have taken long for J'onn, psychic that he was, to realize that Chloe's pregnancy was anything but normal. Not that Gabriel had come with many, save a bit of floating in her sleep and the occasionally random flare up of super strength.
It was nothing she couldn't lie about at work, but something a telepath would know.
Oliver knew.
She'd told him the baby wasn't his from the start, that while they were on yet another break while he romanced Dinah, that she'd met someone else. A dalliance that had come with a price.
Oliver said they could make it work and she'd let herself believe it for a while.
Until five months in when she'd accidentally shattered the granite in his kitchen, slamming her fists down in the middle of a fight. He knew then whose child it was. She'd sworn him to secrecy, blackmailing him with his love for Lois the way years ago he'd done with her and Clark. She could tell from the way he always had asked about her cousin after their phone calls that he still longed for The Daily Planet's finest.
In all honesty, Chloe and Oliver could agree that it would crush Lois and neither of them wanted to do it, although, sometimes, Chloe wondered in the back of her mind if Lois hadn't known somehow, if that's why even with the hundreds of emergencies Clark used to respond to every week, that Lois held off marrying him for seven years because of a son who shouldn't exist.
Did it matter anymore?
Sometimes, Chloe wished to God she'd hurt Lois, torn down her fantasies and illusions, just once realized that making her cousin and Clark happy was not the best thing. Ironically, it wasn't even because she loved Clark. No, as much as she lived and breathed for Gabriel, as much as it pained her that he had Clark's shaggy hair and green eyes, Chloe would never love Clark again.
She couldn't after what he'd become.
No, it had been wrong to let Lois date and eventually marry Clark because of her cousin's demeanor and attitude. Lois worshipped Clark like a god. Chloe'd always assumed the adoration was a good thing. Lord knew that between Lana's xenophobia and Clark's own self-hatred over his origins, that perhaps Lois's unconditional love would help him, bring out the man he could be. Her cousin, though sometimes thoughtless, had been a good woman once, a true Sullivan-Lane.
What had changed?
When had everything The General stood for become obsolete? When had she let the world crumble at her feet just for a man's love?
The cousin she knew who'd come to avenge her murder would never do that. Even the confused woman in love with Grant Gabriel-and there that name still haunted her-that woman never would have let this happen, let Clark fall so hard.
She sighed and blew out the oil lamp in her son's room. No point in wasting fuel. They were some place safe, as safe as the could be considering, and he could be in the dark a few hours longer. After all, like his father, he could see inhumanly well in it.
Once she read her son, their son , stories of Superman's heroics, tales of a father he could never know. God, had it only been five years since those bed time stories? Chloe blinked. It might has well have been a century. Five years ago, Clark Kent broke. The natural progression that she should have seen coming, would have if she weren't hiding in Singapore, married to a man she didn't care about to preserve the lie about her son's origins. Once, Chloe knew Clark's every thought and he knew hers.
The day he murdered Lex Luthor and assumed control of the United States and, shortly after, the world, she should have seen coming.
Clark wasn't a god. He wasn't infallible or unaccountable for his actions. Lois's love was blind faith and idolatry, she'd propped up his ego so much that he'd forgotten himself that he wasn't a deity. He'd started even earlier make life and death decisions, but different ones.
Chloe should have known but she was busy trying to raise a super powered toddler in Asia. She should have noticed the real crime statistics in Metropolis, the way that more and more criminals were being killed in "underworld turf wars." She wondered if Bruce knew it, had noticed the pattern by 2016. She assumed he had and that it was never The Joker who'd broken his neck and left him dead in The Narrows.
She should have known all along and maybe, even with Gabriel and her guilt and a million other distractions, she just didn't want to see it.
Clark had started killing to dole out his justice and then he'd realized he could "do better" by ruling humans with strength, by following everything Jor-El had trained him to do. How Lois could smile and encourage him and then willingly become his queen, Chloe couldn't understand. There was love and even adoration but why couldn't her cousin see it? That Clark was not God and that, now, there was nothing heroic about him.
Not after the despotic rule and the death camps for anyone who opposed him, not after the purgings and the steep drop in the world's population for anyone not following Team Kal-El.
She shivered.
Going underground had been the only way.
Clark would come for his son because, like her, he knew that only a Kryptonian could hope to stop him. It was why Conner Kent had been immolated trying to stop him. Conner was young and untrained, had never had much of a chance because he didn't understand combat. He'd been a college kid against a full grown, full blooded Kryptonian.
Ludicrous his chances.
It's why every day she wished to God, the real one, that Kara hadn't left to who knew when with the Legion ring.
Underground wasn't a metaphor either. She lived now with one other survivor in a cave system in the Andes, some place remote and frigid, where she planned to keep her son safe. With his resources, Lex Luthor could see to that.
Oh yes, she'd saved him, brought him back as surely as she once had Lois in Reeve's Dam.
Going full term with Gabriel, for whatever reason, had unblocked her ability, maybe it was a balance-something Kryptonian broke her and something Kryptonian would save her. It didn't matter. What did is that she'd traveled, her special boy in tow, to Metropolis to the Luthor family plot and dug Lex up in the night.
She'd had a hell of a time recovering from the pain of reviving third degree burns.
Lex had to be saved. No questions asked. With Bruce gone, there was no one else she knew with the power or the acumen to one day stand against a god. One who, thank whoever was watching out for them, recovered his memory with her jump start as surely as she'd recovered her powers with Gabriel's.
Five years.
Five years spent living together with the resources he'd squirreled away. Five years in a cave and a small house in the Peruvian wilderness. Five years of waiting.
She had at least ten more to go.
Gabriel after all was only ten. He was learning so fast with Lex's training how to harness his powers, how to meditate and concentrate. They'd start fencing and hand to hand soon, as ridiculous a thought as it was for a Kryptonian to need to learn SEAL training.
Lex had had it once for whatever good it did him.
But they'd need everything, every pearl of wisdom from Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, of Napoleon and Julius Caesar.
They had a son to raise, together, a couple clinging to each other on cold nights, waiting, all their hopes pinned on one day.
The day Gabriel would kill his father.
Maybe she should have named him Michael instead.