Story: nothing i can say
Summary: Post-'Requiem' AU, Chloe doesn't make Oliver say cruel things because she thinks them first and Oliver doesn't have to self-destruct because he has somewhere to hide.
Notes: lanternicity over at LJ and I both agree that Chloe and Oliver should've started making out when they ran into each other at Isis at the end of 'Requiem.' So it's not just me.
Disclaimer: There are way too many hot men wearing shirts on Smallville.
He's been broken, is all she can think. She knew from the very moment that she met Oliver Queen that his moral compass wasn't just a little askew but quite possibly permanently set off-track. But this—cold blooded murder? This is entirely new.
"Oliver," she begins, and then stops because she knows that she doesn't have much of a foot to stand on when it comes to the morality of murder. The thing is—Chloe did the unthinkable to protect Clark, and she did it under the sway of a crazy psycho. Chloe killed for love. (So she tells herself.)
Oliver killed Lex in cold blood. And he did it for revenge.
He turns to leave, but Chloe is having a hard time picturing what exactly he's going to be doing to celebrate something a grisly as Lex Luther's eternal demise—except maybe drinking and sex, and both of those are on the no-call list when one has just been blown up a few days ago—so she reaches out and tries for his arm.
She manages to secure his wrist instead, but it's enough to catch his attention.
"It's okay," she says, because she knows that even if the self-loathing isn't in his eyes yet, it will catch up with him in a few days.
The look he gives her is cold, but frankly Chloe's cousin is Lois Lane and he has nothing on her in the ice-factor department. "It's okay," she repeats, and the smile she gives him is really, terribly fake, and she's losing her audience here, so she tries for something else, something like "Don't leave yet."
"Chloe," he says, almost exasperated, and his shoulder half-rolls under his jacket, and Chloe is rather forcibly reminded of Davis. Coiled tension, tight shoulders, hunched back—as she lists his symptoms in her head she feels like she's writing a bad novel.
"Oliver," she says back, lifting an eyebrow and hoping for levity. He doesn't smile, and so she drops her brow and drops her gaze and settles her line of sight somewhere around his kneecaps. "Ollie," she continues, praying that her voice isn't as tremulous as it sounds reverberating through her skull, "it'll be okay."
It's a really stupid thing to say.
How okay is it really?
(The first kiss is light and surprising, although with a couple of cracked ribs he certainly isn't moving at Green Arrow speeds, and she must be out of it to let him in that close. But it's nice, gentle for an Oliver Queen who must be falling to pieces.)
She wonders if okay includes a world where she doesn't have to look over her shoulder for Lex, where they can be sure that once a 33.1 facility is closed there won't be another springing up as a replacement, like an international game of Whackamole, where she and Jimmy can—
(The second is along her jaw, up the line of skin to her ear, and from this position she can smell the hospital-issued soap they used to scrub his hair, and the wrist she used to have secured is now worried free and pressing at the small of her back.)
She and Jimmy can—
(The third is, regrettably, entirely on her part. He tastes like copper.)
She and Jimmy can—
(Oh fuck.)
"We're all a little self-destructive, Sidekick," he tells her as his teeth clamp down on the lobe of her ear. "And everything will be okay. Now it will." For a few seconds his body presses hers backwards over the arch of the conference table, and her knee comes up almost automatically to cradle his hip, but by then he is already peeling away from her and gone.
It takes her a few minutes to pull herself back together, and when she does she reaches for her purse on the table and her cell phone inside it, the guilty voice in the back of her head prodding her to call the hospital and see how her husband is.
(Next to her bag is a little toy monkey with a syringe through its heart.)
Confession: I also wrote this because I totally thought when the shot went from Oliver to his hands during the Killers music sequence, the monkey was going to be there. And I still think that would've been awesome. And here is Oliver/Chloe semi-smexiness, plus awesomeness. Yessir, that's how 'Requiem' should've ended.
Thoughts?