A/N: I am taking a moment to talk about the science or more to the point the lack thereof in this fic. While I actually have an undergraduate degree in the sciences, I've pretty much forgotten all of it. I just know enough to really screw shit up. On top of that lets face it, we're talking about kryptonite. Realism this is not. So frankly I'm making stuff up. While I'll work to keep it logical and consistent, if you're picky about things like scientific accuracy . . . skim.
A/N2: To those of you who have felt moved enough by this fic to review. I thank you.
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Chapter 6B
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Shit. She'd sat up way too fast and her head was pounding in retaliation. Pressing the heels of her hands against her temples, Chloe squeezed her eyes shut and tried to convince herself she had not said all the things she was pretty sure she had.
She felt incredibly stupid and vulnerable. She absolutely could not afford to be doing this. She hadn't really thought about that summer in such specific detail in years, and she'd never dreamed about it. She could not be doing it now, couldn't get the memory of a Lex who had probably never even existed mixed up with the cold hard reality of him.
Just at that moment, she became aware of Lex's hand still on her bare ankle. Snatching it back as though burned, she hissed as her left thigh started to cramp at the movement. "Shit."
"Stop moving. You're making it worse." Lex snapped as he got up off the couch.
She didn't know how he could move around in the near darkness, but she was so grateful he hadn't turned on the lights, it kept her from having to look at him, having to see the derision she just knew would be there. Maybe she hadn't really said what she thought she'd said. Maybe he didn't realize who she thought she'd been talking to, for all he knew Jimmy was an insomniac, or she used to fall asleep in Clark's barn.
"Here." He pressed two pills into her palm. "It's Tylenol." She wasn't really processing things very quickly and when she didn't immediately move to take them, he sighed in exasperation, added two more. "Christ. Mix them up and I'll take two."
Finally having it sink in that Lex was actually trying to take care of her, or at least keep her from throwing up on his couch, she tossed back three of the pills and reached out blindly for the water, by now realizing that his eyes must have adjusted to the darkness awhile ago. Sure enough, she heard the twist of a cap, and felt the cool glass of the bottle against her palm.
"Thanks," she muttered, sounding more resentful than grateful.
And she was resentful, bitterly so. She desperately needed him to go back into his original packing, all hermetically sealed and untouchable. Needed him to have sharp edges and blatantly selfish motives. More than anything she needed to remember that this Lex would never watch her sleep or stand sentinel against anything, because despite everything she might be doing to remind him she was a person, this Lex didn't care about her at all.
Which was hard when he was sitting next to her on the couch, gently massaging out the cramp in her left thigh following the same pattern as the physical therapist he'd hired.
"Stop touching me."
He didn't.
"I said-"
"I'm ignoring you. Stop being childish. Or are you actually going to throw a tantrum until I call Marta in on a Sunday morning?"
That got her to shut up. Partly because she couldn't stand the idea of being that needy and demanding to the one person on Lex's staff she actually liked, and because somehow the threat of calling in the physical therapist helped moved his touch back into the realm of the impersonal, a business transaction.
He was just doing this because she was of no use to him damaged.
God knows he'd told her that often enough these past few weeks.
"Lay back down." It wasn't a suggestion, wasn't a command, just a neutral instruction. The kind any doctor or masseur might issue. She followed it automatically, letting him stretch her left leg out and then bicycle it back to her chest, over and over until the assisted movement started to have the desired effect, loosening her muscle and lessening the pain.
It was a good thing the room was still dark because otherwise she might feel self-conscious about doing this in her short club skirt. But then it really didn't show much more than the little running shorts and sports bras she usually wore during tests as an alternative to dignity stripping hospital gowns, and this whole situation was so blatantly asexual maybe she wouldn't have felt self-conscious at all.
She was still glad she didn't have to test the theory.
Eventually she stopped worrying about it, just gave herself over to the fact that this was reducing the pain in her leg as the Tylenol helped to relieve her headache.
"Better?" he asked after awhile.
Chloe nodded, then remembering he might not be able to see her, said, "Yeah. Thanks."
She actually meant it this time.
Lex immediately released her leg, and got up off the couch. Oddly it left her feeling vaguely . . . abandoned.
Not doing this, Chloe. You are not being this stupid. She knew it was a weakness with her, that for all her seeming independence, for all her cynicism and ability to believe the worst in people, she needed them too much, forgave too easily. She'd proven that over and over with every friend, with Clark, with Lana and even Lois to some extent.
But not with Lex. She might need his money, his resources, but she didn't need him.
Sitting back up, slowly this time, she reached over and flicked on the lamp hoping the light would help to strip away the remnants of memory that were clouding her judgment.
It almost worked.
He was standing over by the desk, just outside the light, and the shadows that played across his features gave them edges, menace, all the things she'd come to expect, almost rely upon. But then he looked over, and for a moment seeing him watching her from the shadows like that was so reminiscent of her dream-memory, that she thought she saw a flicker of something long forgotten in his gaze, a possessive kind of protectiveness so familiar from that summer together.
It was gone just as fast as it registered, but it left her shaken all the same.
"We can revisit this later if you're not feeling up to it."
She couldn't tell whether he meant it as a challenge or a reprieve. But she knew how she had to take it, if for nothing else than her own sense of perspective. Shrugging indifferently she crossed her arms, looked back at him, and lied. "I'm fine, so unless you've got somewhere to be . . ."
"I think we've established my lunch plans will have to be rescheduled anyway," Lex replied with an ironic quirk of his lips. Still there was an acerbic note in his voice that gave her pause, and not for the first time Chloe found herself wondering if Lex was really as blind to Lana's growing reservations as he sometimes appeared to be.
She tried to imagine how Jimmy would react if she'd left him the same kind of voicemail Lana had, if he'd known she was out there somewhere suffering through a massive hangover. He'd want to come and take care of her, would feel rejected if he wasn't allowed.
Suddenly it all made a bizarre, horrible kind of sense. She was the surrogate! All of this strange, disconcerting attention Lex had been giving her was nothing more than frustrated care, displaced concern they both knew Lana wouldn't welcome.
It should have made her feel better, having everything back in its proper place. But it didn't. She felt used and secondary and pissed.
And down in some tiny, unacknowledged corner of her heart, she felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy. Maybe there was something inherently dishonest, slightly selfish, about living in a relationship when you knew the other person wasn't one hundred percent there, but it was a dishonesty she understood instinctively and painfully. Because she knew, with awful clarity, that she would be the same way, that if Clark had ever once been less than he was, had ever let his need for someone overwhelm his moral rigidity enough to use her for comfort or companionship, she would let him, would hold onto whatever pieces he gave her with all the grasping desperation and willful blindness Lex was exhibiting now.
They were both so emotionally needy and fucked-up, it was amazing they'd never . . .
Clamping down viciously on that stray thought, she reached for the thick file still lying on the coffee table. "Then we might as well do this now. Save me another trip into Metropolis."
Deliberately avoiding looking at him again, she flipped open the file and started to page through the data, trying to reconcile the raw numbers with what she remembered Lex telling her before she'd fallen asleep.
They'd been having a problem over the past few weeks with understanding the movement of kryptonite in her body. While there had been some debate about whether or not the 'infection' (for lack of a better word) would be diffused across her entire body or localized to a specific organ system or cell-type, all of the scientists had apparently expected it to at least be stable.
It was anything but.
The kryptonite moved. A lot. Like a restless hobo, it would spend a few days in her musculature, then hop on over to her bones, take a ride through her bloodstream and vacation in her lymphatic system. At first this had led Lex's scientific staff to suggest that maybe the trigger was whatever would cause the kryptonite to stay stable, that the electrical shocks might work in the same way electricity apparently worked in a laboratory setting causing cells to become permeable for purposes of transformation, and the development of an ability was nothing more than the random whim of where the kryptonite happened to be the most concentrated at the time.
But things weren't panning out that way. While the electrical pulses had definitely drawn it towards her leg upon application, it always seemed to take up its wandering ways after a few days grace.
So they'd taken a few steps back, tried to refocus on the basics . . . like how and why the kryptonite moved in the first place.
It had meant a welcome reprieve from the electrical shocks but more samples, more needles, and longer sessions of monitoring.
She sighed in frustration. "I feel like we're chasing shadows. I mean what if the concentrations never stabilize?"
"We think they do." Lex replied absently.
"Oh, well, if you think they do, then it must be so." It was the perfect cue for a snarky comeback, a sardonic observation, but Lex didn't say anything. Suddenly, there was a palpable tension in the room. Chloe's hand stilled on a line of data and she closed her eyes in sickening realization, gritted her teeth. "You don't think, do you?"
She counted the beats of silence, could practically hear him making the decision about whether to give her an answer at all. "No."
"You know, don't you?"
"Yes."
"How?" Her voice had gone harsh, choked on the word. "How do you know?"
"Chloe." The hard warning in his voice was all she needed to hear, confirmed everything in one sickening moment.
She swallowed hard against the disgust clawing away at her insides. She'd known this. Known he was experimenting on meteor freaks, and yet she'd consciously chosen to ignore it, relegated it to some separate corner of her mind as having nothing to do with her.
Lex's crimes. Lex's sins. Not hers.
But if she was benefiting from it? If that research was informing hers, if what she was doing with Lex was changing what he did in 33.1? Was she any better? Did she have any moral high-ground from which to judge?
"Get me the Levitas."
Another pause, another horrible extended moment of decision, then . . . "No."
She was up off the couch and across the room before she knew what she was doing. "I want my three questions. Don't tell me you're backing out of our deal. Get me the Levitas."
"No."
"I should have known."
Lex had risen as well shutting his computer as he did so in one fluid motion. "You're upset and irrational, and I'm not going to give you the means to intentionally destroy yourself over this."
"Oh please," she scoffed, "You're just worried about yourself."
"No. I'm not." His voice was low and matter of fact and almost sad. And she was vividly reminded of his threat when they began this. There were places he wouldn't let her tread, not without repercussions.
Violent, deadly repercussions.
Chloe backpedaled hard, almost tripping over the coffee table. Lex reached out to steady her, but she shook him off. "I can't do this. I- I'm not doing this, anymore."
He didn't make any move to stop her, just watched her as she gathered up her purse and jacket. But when she got to the door, he spoke.
"Two hundred and seventeen."
Not releasing the doorknob, she turned to stare at him. "What?"
"The number of violent, unexplained deaths in Smallville since the first meteor shower." Putting his hands in his pockets, Lex faced her, "It's murder rate is three times that of any other town its size. I bet it would take you two hands to count the number of attempts on your life by meteor-freaks. I know I've lost count."
"You're talking as though being a meteor-freak makes them less than human."
"Name one person with a potentially dangerous ability who's used it for good."
Chloe opened her mouth and then closed it. Lex smiled, resigned and unsurprised. "That's what I thought."
The thing was of course she could think of one person. One person who could make you believe there truly was good in this world, but then Lex had never gotten the chance to see that, not the way she had. As far as Lex knew nothing good had ever come from the sky.
"You're talking like its something predetermined. Human nature doesn't work that way. Just because a person has an ability doesn't mean they're going to turn into some dangerous psycho."
"Then why are you here?"
The knowing question stopped her short. Because Lex was right. She'd been driven by that exact fear, by the certainty that being turned-on, given an ability would drive her right over the edge the way she'd seen happen with countless others.
Unable to give herself or him any kind of answer, Chloe just shook her head and fled out into the daylight.
Didn't find a way to breath again until she got to her car.
Broke down the moment she slid behind the wheel.
Chloe didn't know how long she sat there, crying in punishing sobs that wracked her entire body until it ached. But when she finally calmed down enough to look up, it was to find Lex watching her from the doorway of the lab.
She jammed her key into the ignition, started her car, and went to pull out. Then her eyes fell on the dashboard clock and her hand stopped on the gear shift.
12:28 P.M.
Five and a half hours. At the most generous estimate the time she and Lex had spent talking and reviewing data and fighting had taken maybe three, three and half hours. Four if she was being self-delusional.
It still left an hour and half unaccounted.
An hour and a half Lex had let her sleep on that couch.
An hour and a half when he had had nothing to do but watch her, sit sentinel. Do all the things he wasn't supposed to do because he wasn't the Lex she remembered.
Except apparently, he was.
She felt like she didn't understand anything anymore.
