Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
The Moment
"Is that . . .," she starts to ask blinking at the piece of jewelry nestled in the lining of the case she has just opened. She reaches out one finger to touch it but stops short as she looks up at him with eyes that are wide and curious and maybe just a little bit hesitant.
"Yeah," he answers the question that she never finished voicing. "Mostly," he adds after a beat. "I added something to it," he tells her sounding something that is not quite nervous as he watches her face carefully. She raises her eyebrow as if to ask him to elaborate. He reaches into the case and pulls out the bracelet before turning it so that she can see the inside of the circle. "Here," he points to a thin line of gold that has been inlaid all the way around the interior. "I used their wedding bands - Mom's and Dad's. I melted them down and worked them into the bracelet." He shrugs his shoulders a little as if he is trying to downplay the importance of his words, but the expression on his face tells an entirely different story. The action means something to him. That line of gold that he is tracing out with his finger means something to him. She reaches out and places her hand over top of his and gives him a soft, encouraging smile.
"It's beautiful," she tells him. It is possible that she is referring to the craftsmanship being displayed. It is possible that she is referring to the meaning behind the gesture. It is possible that she is referring to both. He watches her trace the line of gold for herself (the bracelet still being held by him) for a moment before he speaks again in a tone that has lost the trace of whatever that not quite nervous emotion was.
"That's good," he tells her reaching out to catch her still tracing fingers with the hand that is not still holding the bracelet out for her inspection. He squeezes her fingers slightly and catches her eyes giving her a hopeful smile.
How Chloe Got There
She is sitting at the tiny kitchen table in her efficiency apartment letting the sun coming through the window warm her up as she scans through articles on the screen in front of her when the longing hits her. She misses the smell of newsprint. It is a deceptively simple thought that is immediately followed by not so simple consequences. That one acknowledgement that she misses the ink and paper smell that had been so much a part of the life that she had once upon a time opens a floodgate of memories and nostalgia. She gets swept up in the rush and finds that she can no longer make out the words in front of her because her vision has gone blurry from the tears that are welling up in them.
She is homesick in a deep, unshakable way that refuses to be pushed back down. She decides that the only way to get her emotional overload to stop short circuiting is to figure out what exactly it is that she is missing that is creating this response. She has been so good about keeping herself busy (and so focused on keeping herself on track to keep the things she needs to keep her secrets secret) that she has not had such a round of tears and feelings of missing something since the early days of walking away from Star City. She rolls the word homesick around in her head and, for once, gives her brain free rein to wander wherever it would like to go.
It has been a very long time since she has had something that was truly deserving of the word home. Star City had been the last place that she had really felt that way about, and it was not Star City itself so much as the people she had there that made it that. For the first time in more years than she cares to count, she lets herself remember what that felt like - to have a place where she actually belonged instead of just a place to be because she had to be somewhere. The first set of memories that she allows to wash over her are of her son.
Her baby boy was beautiful. All her skill as a writer, all her gift for using words, and all her ability to look at a situation with rationality and logic were overthrown by the tiny person that they placed in her arms. Everything she had ever thought she had known was dwarfed in comparison to the certainty that overtook her when she looked down into the little eyes that were still squinting against the unfamiliarity of the light. She knew then that she would do anything to protect that little boy that was snuggling against her as if he was confident that she could be trusted to guide and shelter him in the strange new world in which he found himself. She had broken away from drinking in the sight of his little face for a moment to make eye contact with the other important person in the room. Ollie had looked awestruck (and a little overwhelmed). She had watched the play of emotions across his features as they resolved themselves into the same expression that she could feel on her own and known that they were on the same page. Maybe all parents felt that way the first time they looked into their child's eyes; maybe it was different for them with their first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be abandoned (because intention to leave or not does not change the way it feels to be left behind when you are a child). Oliver had leaned forward and brushed the sweat drenched hair away from her forehead before placing a kiss there, had taken the hand that she had pulled away from the baby to hold out to him, and squeezed her fingers. She had felt her breath hitching in wonder at the moment.
Those moments had been her home; the two of them had been her home. The life that she had made with them had been her home.
She had kept doing some work for the JLA. She did not bury herself in it, but she made herself available. There were things that she could do for them, and she did them happily - reveling in the fact that she had finally figured out the balance between being a respected and necessary helper and letting other people's lives swallow up her own. She had learned that lesson via the experience route. There was a tension to the balance, but it was entirely doable. It was easier (she found) to keep herself where she needed to be when she had people around who were willing to question her choices - not accept without it occurring to them to ask, not handing out dictates for what she should do, but willing to ask if she was where she needed to be. Besides, she had had her little boy to pull her back from letting other things swallow her whole; she had had Ollie.
Oliver was not something that she had expected (but, then again, she can honestly say that neither was being a mother). Dark places, abandonment issues, the frustrations inherent in knowing truths (sometimes horrible truths) that you could not drag out into the light of day, and what it was like to decide that there was nothing to be done but to handle something yourself and let the consequences fall where they may - Oliver got all of those things. There had been times that it had been a deeply scary prospect to be faced with (spending her life with a man who understood things that she could not always find a way to explain so well), but she had learned how not to run from scary. She had learned that scary does not have to end badly. There was such a thing as taking chances and having them work out well. There was such a thing as working your way through the scary to get to the good that was waiting just beyond it. She had not always known that - she had not always been willing to trust that, but she had gotten to that place with her life (with him). She had been happy.
She had had Oliver and their little boy and the family that they had been making. She had had the members of Justice that were a mix of extended family and very good friends and people that she knew had her back. She had gotten to help save the world on occasion and help to make it better more often than that. She did not know how to live her life devoid of that (she still does not).
So, she had done her part to make the world better with Justice, and she had done her part to make the world better by getting back to her first love. She had become a reporter again, and it had felt wonderful. She was writing stories - big ones and little ones and all the ones in between that kept the news cycle going and offered people the information that they needed to have (and sometimes did not want) along with a little bit that they wanted (but did not really need).
She was a teller of truths and a righter of wrongs just as she had always known she would be in the dreams of her childhood. She had not realized how much of a hole the lack of that had left in her life until she had gotten back to it. She has never experienced quite the same level of giddy as she did on the first day that she found herself at a desk in a newsroom with the buzz of anticipation and the chatter of her new coworkers and the sense of impending something settled all around her. There had been many times in her life when she thought that she was feeling something similar, but they all paled in comparison somehow to that moment of returning after she had really, truly known what it was like to have left it behind for what she had thought was for good.
She had learned that you did not have to leave behind all the dreams of your youth, and the dreams of your youth did not have to prevent you finding new dreams that you did not know that you wanted until you had found them. Having the balance between her old dreams and her new ones was worth the life in the public eye that she had to exist within in order to get it.
She lets the contentment she recalls settle in around her and finds that she is not feeling any less homesick than she was right after the longing for newsprint hit her. She is okay with that. It was good to let herself feel those things again even with the little pings of sadness that come along with them.
It had been sudden in the sense that she did not recognize it until the awareness that she was homesick sort of sprang full force upon her, but she realizes when she looks back that it has been creeping up on her by degrees for ages. It might even be (she decides) that homesick is the wrong word to use, but she does not think that the phrase "mesick" actually exists (although she also decides that it most definitely should). She has known plenty of people in the course of her life who have gone through similar phases; she has gone through it before herself. This time, however, she does not just want to remember the girl that she used to be or try to get her footing back from an occasion when she was slipping close to a ledge that she did not want to tumble off of - there is that sense of nostalgia for what she referred, a rather long time ago, to as "Chloe 1.0." There is also something else underneath of it. She wants something else, so she goes home - not to the one in California that was made up of people who are no longer there.
With the way that she is currently feeling, the only place that works for the description of home is Kansas. There were a lot of years when the word "home" coming out of her mouth in Kansas meant Metropolis (even when she knew differently inside her head). That is not where she finds herself driving.
She has learned a lot about herself and other people and the person she wants to be and how she wants to do her helping. She would not give up one bit of it - they were all hard learned lessons that she paid for dearly. None of that stops the sharp intake of breath when she sees the sign out in front of where her driving has brought her. She wants it (more than anything she has wanted for quite some time), and she has the ability to have it. She buys the place, and she cannot stop the smile that refuses to be held back when she is walking out of the realty office with the paperwork in her hand.
She has good memories in this place despite the fact that there are not so happy memories as well. She has learned to take the lessons learned from the bad memories and leave them to just be while keeping the good memories to be cherished. She feels content the moment she walks through the door, and she thinks that maybe it has less to do with the memories the place hosts and more to do with the way she feels that this is a safe place to let her memories be out in the open. She has spent a lot of her life hiding a lot of things. She is in essence still hiding here in the house that she found that she could not pass up, but it does not feel like hiding. It feels like being home - a real home as opposed to the temporary residences where she is always looking ahead to when she will have to leave with which she has contented herself for what now feels like far too long.
It has been that way since her baby's baby placed her baby in her arms. She knew then that she could no longer stay where she was. She was pushing the limits of attention drawing. Oliver was already gone. She had switched to freelance articles under a variety of pennames over a decade before in an attempt to head off suspicion. It was time for her to go. She had uttered that phrase to herself a number of times since. She no longer bothered asking (even herself within the confines of her head) why it had to be that way. She had learned that you could ask all the questions you wanted when it came to all things Kryptonite related, but you should not have very high expectations when it came to getting answers. All the rules of science seemed to bend and twist when confronted with the substance, and her aging process (or lack thereof) was no exception. She did not bother to wonder anymore; she merely lived her life around it. She let the countdown clock of her time limit keep its watch in the back of her mind and kept moving forward every time that it ran down - until now.
The barn that she knew is long gone, but the original house is still standing. It has been remodeled and repaired (quite often she is sure), but it is still the house that she knew underneath the repairs and redecorations (she swears that the first time she walks into the kitchen she can smell pie baking). She settles in and opts not to do much mixing with the current locals. It is her MO sometimes even though she has hidden in plain sight more often over the years. She enjoys the break. She enjoys the quiet. She enjoys the indulgence. She even puts her hair back to blond. She hangs up pictures of places she has traveled. She sends in her freelance stories. She soaks in the privacy and the lack of pressure that the once Kent homestead affords her. It might be that it is all in her head. It might be that she could have had this in any place where she stopped to give herself breathing room, but she does not think that that is true. In fact, it does not matter whether or not it is true because this is the only place that she has ever stopped to give herself that chance.
She lets her memories (the ones that she no longer spends her time trying not to think about) drift farther back - all the way to the ones that match the house in which she is sitting. She thinks of a kind woman with willing words of wisdom for a motherless girl and the unobtrusive way those words were delivered on all of the occasions that she had been too proud to ask for them. She thinks of a thoughtful man and the first time she had caught him moving her car so that he could add air to her tires when he noticed that the rear passenger side was a little low. She thinks of being a teenager and hanging out with her two best friends when they still knew how to just be kids. She thinks about a time when there was no name (from her perspective anyway) for what it is that gives her such a long list of memories to sort through while she paints walls and arranges furniture. She is in a good place. She is in a happy place, and she decides that her impulse buy is one of the best ideas that she has had in a very long time.
One day, she looks up to see a figure in the yard. There he is standing outside clearly visible through the window. She did not exactly expect him, but it is not really surprising that they would run across each other at some point. It has happened from time to time over the years even before she came back to Kansas and his official home territory. He is a hero, and she is a reporter. There were times that they ended up in the same place at the same time, but it has been at least a dozen years since the last occasion when they exchanged nods of recognition in passing as he hurried off to contain a crisis while she hurried off to submit a story about one. It has been at least a dozen more since they last actually exchanged words. This is different. There is no crisis. There is no crowd. There are just the two of them staring at each other through a pane of glass. She is the first to move.
She opens the door and stands slightly to the side in invitation, but she does not say anything. She does not know what to say. "Hi" seems too awkward somehow and "Come in" seems too weird given that she is standing beside the door of his childhood home. He comes in despite her silence, and he does not break it. He pauses for a moment as he looks around the room before he sinks into one of her chairs. He does not sit back, and he does not look very relaxed. She does not see anything on his face that indicates that he is upset, but she would be the first to admit that it has been a very long time since reading his facial expressions has been an ingrained habit. She decides that she thinks he looks overwhelmed by something, so she walks away (still not breaking the silence between them) to get him a cup of coffee (but, mostly, to give him a moment on his own to gather his thoughts). She uses the time in the kitchen to try to sort out the jumble of thoughts in her head into some semblance of order.
He takes the cup from her hand as he nods a thank you. She sees the corners of his mouth twist up a bit, but the lack of words between them continues. She does not know what he is thinking, but she knows that she feels like there are so many things to say that she cannot quite latch on to where to begin. Then, someone says something. She cannot say (even later when her head is a little clearer) who said something first or even what it was that was said. All she knows is that some sort of a wall has come down from between them and both of them are talking in a rush and listening so intently to try to not miss anything that anyone would think that the fate of the world was resting on the conversation that they are having. The words that were absent at the start of the visit are flowing like the both of them have been storing them up for a lifetime and are afraid that they are going to run out of time before they get to say them all.
She forces herself to take a deep breath and to slow down. She reminds herself that this is not just a nod in passing moment. It is not even a whispered "try to stay out of trouble" as they head in their different directions moment. They have time. There is plenty of time if they want to take it, and she thinks that they do. He mirrors her change of conversational pace, and he loses a lot of the tension that she saw when he entered. He leans back in his seat, looks like he is truly settling into the chair he has claimed, and sips at the coffee cradled between his hands. They take turns telling about where they have been lately and what they have been doing. He does not ask her how she ended up in this house. She does not ask him why he ended up standing in the front yard.
"It's so good to see you," he tells her placing his hand over hers when she reaches out hours later to collect the cup that has found its way to the low table between them. She smiles at him and reciprocates the sentiment as he makes his way out the door.
He comes back. It is spotty at first, but it gradually becomes a regular occurrence.
They talk. They call it catching up in the beginning, but it becomes something else. They are visiting. They are falling back into a friendship. There are cups of coffee and slices of pie. There are movie nights and pizza dinners. There are requests for help and volunteering to assist before help can be asked for between them. It is nice, and (beyond that) it is comfortable. For the first time in a long time, she is not finding herself keeping a mental tally in the back of her head of all the things that she needs to remember for the next time she uproots her life and becomes someone else. Part of her starts to wonder if this is something that she can keep. When the voice in the back of her mind pipes up to try to tell her that she cannot stay, another voice counters with a sincere why not?
Is there a reason that she cannot keep it? Is there a reason that she has to leave this behind? She missed this. She missed them. She missed the boy she had known who finished her thoughts for her out loud and whose expressions she translated without needing to think about it. She missed that grin that he gets when he is truly in the moment and the weight of the world is not attempting to balance itself on his shoulders.
She misses having someone around who gets her - the her that is all of her and not just the her that she is letting people see at the moment. She misses having someone around who gets the her that she has not been able to be with anyone else for so long because she had never decided it was worth risking the explanations. There is a part of her that cringes at that thought. There is a part of her that backs away from the saying of the words out loud because they make it sound like this is only important to her because Clark already knows, and that is wrong. It is so very wrong. She does not want this because it is somehow easy. The truth is that it is not easy. There is so much that Clark does not know. There are so many things about her that Clark was not a part of, but this Clark (the one who reaches over and swipes toppings off of her pizza while they are huddled together on her couch talking about what they are working on) is someone that she is willing to share with and willing to explain to because this whole process of them together slipping back every day closer to being each other's best friends again is worth making the explanations - both the good and the bad ones.
It is worth letting someone in on the person she is who also knows the person she used to be and watching him reconcile the two in his head and come to accept that while she offers him the same courtesy. She likes knowing him. She likes being known. She pushes back against that voice that kept her moving for so long and tells it that its time for being listened to has come to an end. She does not need it any longer. She can keep going even while she keeps all of her memories, and she can let herself make new ones that are worth keeping. That is where she is, and she does not want to lose that (or him). She is willing to take risks to keep it. She is willing to make the effort to keep it.
Clark has grown into the man she always knew he was capable of being, and she is so proud of him that she struggles to find the proper words to tell him how she feels. There is a piece of her that will always be the secret keeper and help dust off and pull back upper of heroes, and along with their friendship, she appreciates the way she is being included once again in that realm (not that she has ever been completely out of the loop, but her role has been far removed from the front lines for a very long time). She can even admit that there is a part of her that was saddened that despite all of her years of having Clark's back that she was out on the fringe instead of sitting in a front row seat when he grew into the Superman role. They lost a central piece of what made their friendship work somewhere along their journey, but it was, obviously, not gone forever. They are back to that. She is providing insight and a sounding board. She is (in practice even though not in any sort of official capacity) once again a member of a team.
She wants to keep that- she wants to keep all of that. She knows that that is something that is easier said than done. She knows that there is a minefield of issues to navigate in order to stay where it is that she every day wants more to stay and be part of what she every day wants more to have a part of being. She knows what it is like to walk the road of personal relationship with someone who does what Clark does. Being a family member, being a friend, and being something beyond that are not easy roads to walk. Having the public know that you have any sort of connection to someone with such a public persona causes a myriad number of difficulties that range from chronic invasions of your privacy to the downright dangerous painting of a target on your back. She has lived through that already.
She spent a life with Oliver under the scrutiny of a public who never forgot what her husband's second job was. She raised a child under those conditions. She dealt with gossip columnists on the one hand and villains with vendettas on the other. She knew exactly what could happen (she had lived through nearly everything that could happen). She had done it once because it was what she had to do to keep the life that she had wanted, but she also knew that she did not want to live through it again - not if it was something that could be avoided. That level of tension was not something that she wanted, and she already did enough looking over her shoulder as it was.
That made where she was headed with Clark a potential problem. She had never understood how it was that Clark managed to make his dual identity work. Maybe it was just her, but she could never see a picture of Superman in those early days without wondering how everyone who had ever met him did not look at it and go "Hey, that's Clark Kent." Somehow, it seemed to work for him, and it was one more of those things having to do with all things Kryptonian that she had learned not to try to question too closely (not because she did not wonder, but because she had embraced the fact that there never were any satisfactory answers). The fact remained that she did not want to take any unnecessary chances that she would end up shoved back into the public eye for anything besides the limited exposure she maintained through her writing.
It is not one of the days that they are doing any hero business when it happens. They are having a hanging out night sitting together on the couch in her living room. There is a movie playing in front of them, but they have only been semi-paying attention to it - just enough attention, in fact, to thoroughly make fun of it. Everything from the lack of plot to the failure to adequately establish character relationships has taken a hit from the two of them as they share a bowl of popcorn.
They had even been doing a little talking about other things in between eye rolling and laughing at each other's commentary. They had talked about the story that she was working on (Clark, in a way that was once familiar and has become familiar once again, was reminding her to be careful). They had talked about the downswing in crime in Metropolis proper lately and how that always seemed to be a precursor to something big coming down the pipeline.
She was reaching without looking for her cup when her fingers, instead, brushed something soft that her head had identified as velvet before her eyes moved down to look at it. It was a box - a jewelry box. She looked at it and blinked before she looked over at Clark. She actually had to pull back to do that because she had been sitting with her head resting against his shoulder. She saw the expression on his face, and she knew what was coming despite the fact that the box resting on the table was too large to contain a ring.
This was just a normal night for them. It was nothing out of their ordinary. Maybe it should have been romantic or a production or something different, but this, somehow, felt like them. It was them. The two of them just fit with their balance of truth and justice crusading and their need to be people who were just being people having downtime. The two of them just fit with each other, and the casual appearance of a velvet encased jewelry box in the middle of snarking at a badly made (and written) movie in between the popcorn and coffee just fit them.
He picked the box up and handed it to her (she was, apparently, not moving quickly enough for his liking), and she opened it.
How Clark Got There
It was hard to learn to be a hero. Sometimes, he did not think that people really understood that. There were all these expectations that you were supposed to be good at fixing things just because you had powers. It was not that simple. It had never been that simple - not even back in the days when he was young and had less perspective on how big the big picture actually was. Fixing was hard. It came with rules and requirements and repercussions when you were wrong - and there were always going to be times that you were wrong. Having powers did not make you omniscient; having them did not make you have all the answers. You had to learn to use them (and when to not). You had to learn how to use them the right way, how to make good, strategic plans, how to avoid collateral damage, and the best ways to ad lib when all the best laid plans fell apart around your ears. It was hard. It did not just come to you. You did not have an innate sense of how to do it even when you had powers - maybe even most especially because you had powers. They created more ways in which things could go wrong. It was a learning curve, and Clark had learned to admit that there were times when he was not very good at learning anything without doing it the hard way.
There were other things that he had to learn - balance chief among them. There were so many things in life that required balance, and balance was one of those things that he knew that he did not learn easily. There were so many things in his life that had been all or nothing - there were so many things that he had let take up all of his focus so that it deadened the perception of everything around him somehow. He had to learn to do better; he had to learn to be better. He had to learn the difference between the person he was for himself and the person he was for the world. There could be a difference. He had responsibilities (ones that he had chosen to take on) that he needed to live up to, but he had his sense of self to preserve as well. He could be Superman, and he could still be Clark Kent. One of them did not have to destroy the other. It did not have to be all or nothing. He did not have to suffocate under the burdens of his public persona, and he did not have to bury himself under the layers of his private one. He could be a hero, and he could have his own life. It just required - like all other things did - that he find the balance between the two (in much the same way that he had to find the balance between the Kal-El that had been born to Jor-El and Lara and the Clark who had been raised by Jonathan and Martha).
He found his learning curve, and he embraced it. He also learned a little bit about trying to force things along the way. He and Lois had tried the wedding thing in nearly all of its permutations. There had been attempts at formal affairs and small gatherings with selective guest lists. They had even attempted eloping when they realized that the scheduled events just did not seem to be working out for them. It turned out that eloping did not work out for them any better. There was always something. There was always a disaster to be averted, the annihilation of the world to prevent, something, anything that got in the way of he and Lois actually making it through a ceremony and saying their I dos.
It was a learning moment in and of itself. He learned to understand that there are some things in life that happen when they happen. There are some things in life that cannot be hastened. There are some things in life that you might want. You might want them deeply, but it is simply the wrong time to have them.
He found a pattern, a method for his life that worked for him. Not least, he learned how to be part of a team. That might have been better termed relearned because there was a time in his life when he had thought that he did a fairly decent job of working with a partner. He had, however, lost that concept somewhere along the way. Being a part of a team had been a struggle for him for a long time. He had gotten it into his head that he had to walk a loner road of bearing the responsibility for the planet as a whole (and a few things from beyond the planet) on his shoulders. As strange as it sounded, what he had really needed to learn how to do was to share. It sounded odd to state it that way (which was part of why he had never tried to put his thoughts on the matter into words for any other person), but it was how it had worded itself out inside of his head. He had to learn to share the burdens; he had to learn to share the responsibilities. The biggest problem with that, of course, was that that type of sharing requires trust. Trust was something that he had struggled with for a very long time. Even when there had been people in his life that he had known he could trust, he did not always do the best job of following through on it. He had not been big on admitting when he was wrong for a chunk of his younger years either, and it had taken some losses and blows to his sense of the way he wanted things to be for him to come to terms with that. He had gotten there (not that he never did any backsliding).
There is a picture that has never left the back of his mind that itches sometimes until he can no longer ignore it. It is the image of the tombstones that he saw once upon a time standing in a nursing home in Smallville. He had been petrified of that vision in his adolescence. That fear had followed him through the beginning of his adulthood as well. He had fought and railed and let it beat him down and expended so much time and energy dreading and fighting against and feeling guilty over it. Part of his growing into whom he wanted to be was the understanding and acceptance that death was a part of living. Loss was a part of living. That did not mean that you courted those things; it did not mean that you welcomed them. It just meant that you treasured instead of fretted; you learned to use the time that you had instead of burying yourself in worry over when it would be over.
Time was something that he might never be completely at peace with, but it was something that he had learned to get along with passably. That time was something that would not move for him the same way it moved for those around him was something that had been pointed out to him at several points along the way, but none of that was the same as actually living through the process.
There had been the difficulties of loss that fell under the category of normal - his mother, Perry, and some mentors he had had in his early days of taking his work at The Daily Planet seriously had all passed in their time. It had been hard; he had grieved, but it was not the same as when he started to lose the people that were in his own age bracket. It was not the same as when he lost Lois. It was not the same as the first time he buried someone that he had watched grow up and mentored.
He had not always been as composed about that as he was now. There had been anger - lots of it. There had been a return of his fears about being left alone. There had been a lot of darkness and upset and soul searching, but he had gotten to a place where he understood that it was (and there was nothing that his fretting or rage or putting his fist through walls could do about it). He had avoided cemeteries whenever possible for a long time, but he had moved beyond that as well. They were actually a nice place to do some quiet thinking - no one wanted to interrupt a man standing in front of a grave after all. It was his parents' grave he went to when he found himself in need of some reflection time, and he had ended up making periodic visits even when quiet was not his intended purpose.
He left flowers that reminded him of his mother, and he redid the etching on their names whenever it seemed as though the stone was wearing down. He let himself be still (because with all of the life lessons that he had learned throughout the decades he had lived that was the one that he most often found himself struggling with) as he stood in front of the marker labeled Kent and let himself have however much time he needed.
He was on one of his trips back there (the intervals between and durations of his visits as varied as the rest of his days) when it happened. He was placing a bouquet of flowers across his mother's name when he noticed it. Something was different - not with the grave or the cemetery. There was something different in the vicinity of the place he had come for a few quiet minutes with his memories. It was a ridiculous thought for him to have because the area around the cemetery was different every time that he came. He usually tuned out the ambient noise around him, but there was something that refused to be tuned out. There was something that was drawing his attention - something that he was not expecting to hear.
It was not a cry for help or any of the sounds along those lines that were what usually pulled him out of being reflective. This was something else, but he could not figure out what it was. He also did not know why with all the conviction that it was something out of place (which was why it had registered in the first place) that he was sure that the part of him that was processing the sound in the back of his mind was pleased to hear it and felt like it was less something that did not belong and more like something that had been missing and had now returned.
Then, he understood what it was that he thought he was hearing.
To any casual observer (of which there were none), the man standing in front of the grave marker in the cemetery on the outskirts of Smallville would have simply vanished. In reality, he had traveled not so very far away and was standing in the yard of a two story house stock still staring at a window.
He had not misheard. The sound was exactly what his unconscious mind had recognized it as while his conscious mind was too surprised to really do much more than speed himself to see if it was real. It was Chloe. She was sitting curled up on a sofa in the living room of his house (the words formed themselves in his head despite the fact that it had not been his house for lifetimes). He lost track of how long he stared at her from his place in the yard not knowing what to do and almost afraid to blink while she turned the pages of a book and took sips from a mug looking like she had been sitting there in that place doing those things since the beginning of time.
Then, almost as if she had felt him looking at her through the glass, her eyes came up and locked with his. His vision was perfect - better than. He still could not name what emotion it was that appeared in her gaze when she registered that it was him.
There were those initial moments as he looked around him with a little bit of disbelief followed by those moments when he was staring at the cup of coffee nestled between his hands as if he had never seen such a thing before. He had no idea what to say or where to start. Then, they were both talking. It was like that proverbial dam breaking (and he had been front row center to enough of those over the years to be entitled to use the phrase when it was appropriate).
He had come back, and he had kept coming back. There had been a part of him in the beginning that was a little bit afraid that he would come back once and she would be gone, but that was nothing more than long buried insecurities taking an opportunity to try to rear their heads. They kept talking and talking and talking. There was not a lot of that in his life. There were so many walls built up around his public persona (and even a hefty dollop of pedestal placing despite his best efforts to tamp it down within the League) that unrestrained talking was not a pleasure that he had enjoyed for longer than he cared to think about.
It all happened so smoothly that it felt less like something new and more like something that had always been (despite his excellent memory and knowledge of the contrary). She was sharing stories, he was asking for her perspective, and it was as though they had slipped backwards into something familiar and forward into something novel all at the same time.
Then, it was less about catching up or learning about the people they were now or about what they were working on and how they could help each other with this or that and more about just being with each other.
There were movies to watch and books to discuss. There was popcorn to eat and dishes to be tag teamed after dinners. Mostly, there was a sense of being with someone with whom there was no need for pretenses. He relearned to read the way her eyes said the things that she did not bother to mention out loud. He learned about where she had gone and what she had done, and he shared the details of his own journey with her.
He keeps coming back. When a day has been particularly rough, he sits on her sofa and lets himself lean on someone else. When he is excited about something, the old farmhouse is his first stop. For no reason at all other than the fact that he can, he spends his time in the space that used to be his, has become hers, and might just turn into theirs.
It is a good place that he is in with this turn of events, and he has hard won lessons to his credit about the way that you should treat such gifts.
There are pieces of both of them that they only are when they are with each other. He calls it the hazards of history in his head. It seems an appropriate moniker for the way that there are some things that can only be understood by someone who has lived through them with you. It is like the way siblings who grew up in the same house have a set of family things that make sense to them that outsiders just cannot quite follow. It is like the way that lifelong friends have inside jokes that will never be as funny to anyone else no matter how hard they try to repeat the story to them. It is the way that there are some things that you do not have to explain (that really sort of defy explanation) because the other person just knows because whatever it was belonged to both of you. He and Chloe have that.
They did not always. They had gotten lost (let themselves lose it) from it somewhere along the way, but they have it back. He did not really understand how much he had been missing it until it had reappeared. He had learned to live his life without it, and he figures that the experience must have been similar for her. They had drifted apart or pushed themselves apart or whatever you wanted to call it - letting go, growing out of, life moving forward, etc. They could throw all kinds of platitudes around on the subject - pointless ones that made it sound as if what had happened to their friendship had just happened. It had not just happened. The simple fact of the matter is that they had both made choices that led them away. Now, somehow, they had both made choices that led them back.
They did not talk about that. They did not need to talk about that. What mattered was where they were now, the people they were now, and what they were going to do next. What mattered were conversations and eye rolling and smirky smiles and teasing comments and working together again and knowing that it all made sense and that he was not willing to let go of it this time. He was willing to do the work and make the effort and make sure that they kept this.
Because this, he told himself with what could only be termed finality the first time that she fell asleep while they were talking and her head slid over and rested against his arm, was worth it. She was the Chloe who had been his best friend so long ago that there was no one else left to remember it; she was the Chloe who was becoming his best friend again, and he loved them both.
When he realizes (really realizes) where it is that the two of them are (He would say where the two of them are going, but he also realizes that that would be a pointless thought. They are already there; they just have not bothered to put it into words yet.) with each other, he has a few panicked moments because he knows the person he is and what he does and how that has spilled over into the lives of the people around him before. He knows what it is like to deal with bombings and kidnappings and threats and know that the reason that someone is in danger is because of an association with him. He knows what it is to feel responsible for being the reason that negative attention is focused on someone (or a city or a planet) when there was some sort of a vendetta to settle with him (or because someone, somewhere just wanted to hurt him in any way that he could be hurt).
He has also come a very long way from the long ago him who would get it into his head that there was only one possible solution to any problem. He knows better now. He knows that it does not have to be that way. It can be different. It will not necessarily be easy, but it does not have to be the same kind of difficult that he used to know. It does not have to be the same kind of difficult that they used to know (because he knows that Chloe has lived through what it is to be under that type of scrutiny as well). They can find a way to make it work. They will find a way to make it work because he looks at her on some days and sees the expression in her eyes that tells him she is thinking her own version of these thoughts and is drawing the same conclusions.
They are watching a movie for which the only real redeeming quality is the way that it makes her laugh while they are mocking it. He does not think that he would have been able to focus no matter what it was that they chose to watch, so he is happy to be able to slide by with minimal attention. It is not that he is nervous. That sounds a little bit arrogant because he is pretty certain that there is some list of rules about this whole process that require that he be feeling some sort of jitteriness or something along those lines, but he has already decided to leave any rules that other people may have about this sort of thing in the dust and only worry about whether the whole process is sufficiently them.
He turns his head a little to the side to rest his chin against her hair where she is cuddled into his side with her head tucked into his shoulder as she says something else disparaging about plot holes or inconsistent characterization or something else entirely - the truth is that he has lost track. He is too focused on the way she fits underneath his arm tucked where he can feel it when she breathes or laughs or leans forward to reach for her cup where it is sitting on the table in front of them.
He decides that is what he will do. He will not make some sort of production out of it. He will not be ceremonial. He will push her cup to the side and put the box in its place. She is not looking when she reaches forward; she will touch the box instead. He can do that. It is actually a good idea - way better than pausing the movie and forcing her to reroute her attention. She will not even notice that he moves. She will just find the box and draw her own conclusions before he starts talking. It works for him; it works for them.
It will be simple, and it will just sort of be there kind of like the way that they have found their way back to each other. That is why he decided not to go for the grand gesture - the trip to somewhere exotic or the buildup of a whole evening where she would know that something was happening because it was all so out of their normal.
This is their normal - movie nights and snark and idea exchanges and allowing each other's help even though they are people for whom relying on others does not come as their default setting. Their normal is the way that he feels when he is sitting on her sofa with his best friend as they do anything or nothing. Their normal is the way his heart stutters just because it is her and it is him and it is them and he feels as though this moment has been here all along waiting for the two of them to be the ones they needed to be and how they needed to be to fit into the places that were waiting for them.
He performs his replacement of her cup with the box without her registering that anything has happened, and he settles back to wait while he reminds her that she should be careful when she starts talking about the next story that she plans to follow.
He is not nervous because he knows that this is what he . . . they should be doing, but he is feeling a little apprehensive about his choices when it comes to the bracelet. He really hopes that she understands what he has done to it because he is not sure whether he can manage to find the right words to explain it, and it is important to him that she knows. The part of him that blew off the ideas for candlelight dinners and flying to other countries reminds him that this is Chloe. She will understand the bracelet because she understands him, and he finds himself tightening the arm that was resting loosely wrapped around her in response to the thought. This is Chloe. This is him. This is them together.
This is going to work. He just needs her to lean forward and reach for a cup that it no longer there.
The Moment Continues
"That's good," he repeats still holding the bracelet and shifting so that rather than just touching her fingers he is holding her hand in his. "I mean that it's good that you like it. I was hoping that you would be willing to wear it," he places the bracelet so that it is just over the edges of her fingers and waits.
There are tears welling up in her eyes as she bites her lip, but she looks anything other than upset as she slowly nods her head. He grins at her - a full blown, nothing could possibly break this moment grin. She smiles back at him as the tears escape from her eyes and make their way down her cheeks.
He slides the bracelet to its proper resting place and slides his hand back down to squeeze her fingers. She squeezes back, and they look at each other with teary, goofy grins before he moves his arm around her shoulders and tucks her back against his side.
There will probably be talking later, but this is not the moment for that. This is just the moment for them to lean into each other and simply be.