Okay...so I'm painfully aware that the time between updates keeps getting longer, but my reason this time was because I kind of had a lot of bad things happen at once that made me really stressed out and sort of slowed everything down for a while. I won't go into details because I'm NOT fishing for sympathy, and honestly, you're here to read about Emmeline, not hear me rant about what's wrong with my life.
I apologize that we've been in something of a slump, but you can partially blame the writers for that. Season 5 was not their strongest, and I'm doing my best to work with what I've got...
So...sorry for the wait, but here is the next chapter!
Clark entered a darkened house with a bag of groceries in his hands. "Mom?" he called out, wondering where she had gone at such a late hour.
The lights clicked on and a chorus of voices rang out, "Happy birthday, Clark!"
To his surprise, his mother, Lois, Chloe, and Emmeline stood in the kitchen with a banner and balloons and streamers. Lois tossed confetti in his direction.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," Martha smiled. "We got you, didn't we?"
Chloe raced over to the counter and retrieved a small blue cake with four candles. "Look. And Lois even made her world-famous rum cake for you."
"From scratch," Lois boasted.
Clark looked down at the misshapen, poorly-frosted attempt of a cake. "Wow, I never would have guessed."
"You should have seen the first two," Chloe smiled.
Lois rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand. "Come on, presents before cake!"
"Come on, birthday boy, sit down," Martha said as she took the groceries from his arms.
Clark sat down at the small table in the kitchen where a stack of presents stood before him.
Lois tossed a red-wrapped present in front of him. "Open it."
"Wow."
He opened the present and saw that it was a red-bound journal with his initials engraved in gold writing on the bottom right corner. He looked up at Lois questioningly.
"Not that you're the 'Dear Diary' type, but since you keep everything to yourself…I thought it might help."
"And since I'm on an intern budget, I figured I could just comp you a couple of those IOUs that you owe me," Chloe told him.
"Thank you."
"Here's my present," Emmeline smiled as she handed him a small rectangular object.
Clark eagerly opened the gift and found it was a brand new DVD of his favorite movie.
"I had to search pretty hard for that, but it's a restored version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it comes with deleted scenes and exclusive interviews with surviving members of the cast."
"Wow, how did you find something like this?"
"My dad may have helped me out."
"Thank you so much."
"You're welcome."
Clark looked over at the other presents, pausing when he noticed a blue envelope with his name on it. "That's Dad's handwriting."
Martha gently handed it to him. "I found it in his desk."
With slight trepidation, Clark opened up the envelope and pulled out two thick slips of glossy paper. "Two tickets to the Wolverines game in Milwaukee. Right behind home plate."
"Yeah, your dad and his baseball. There was no one in the world that he'd rather watch a game with."
Clark's fingers trembled as he held the tickets in his hand. He missed his father and this was a painful reminder of just how much.
Emmeline comfortingly put her hand to his shoulder, but there were no words she could say to make that kind of pain go away.
She knew that better than anyone.
"Okay, Clark, I am the president of 'Ghost Believers Anonymous', but your dad 'Hamleting' you?" Chloe asked upon receiving news that Clark's father's ghost had told him he had to kill Lionel Luthor in order to prevent many people dying.
"Chloe, I know how it sounds," Clark insisted.
Chloe sighed. "Alright, hand me a cloak and call me Horatio."
"Great. Now what could be so bad that my Dad would want Lionel Luthor dead to stop it?"
"Maybe it has something to do with him knowing, you know, where you really came from."
"I think that's a part of it, but there's got to be something more."
"Well, if Lionel is hatching some sort of an evil scheme, it would explain why he's been sitting on your secret."
"Maybe something's already in motion. Chloe, someone tried to blackmail my mom with security footage of me using my abilities."
"What?"
"Guess which billionaire came to the rescue."
"All right, say this ghost of your dad's is right. And then we go and dig through Lionel's closet, and we find a smoking gun. Then what?"
"Depends what it was."
"Would it? I mean, is there anything we could find that would make Clark Kent kill someone?"
Emmeline sighed heavily. She knew that Jonathon really hated Lionel Luthor, but he would never be the kind of person to ask Clark to kill someone. She felt it would've been more like Jonathon to plead that Clark save Lionel before his actions resulted in people dying.
On the other hand, did Jonathon's request really mean that Lionel dying was the only option?
The three of them headed over to LuthorCorp to see what they could find on Lionel's computer. After that…they'd have to work out the whole 'kill-Lionel' thing.
Clark started to open the door, but Chloe quickly stopped him. "Wait, Clark, the alarm. I cloned the transponder from Lionel's key port so we could override the digital cipher." She quickly swiped the fake card through the port to open the door. "I need a night life."
"Don't we all?" Emmeline asked.
They slowly entered the office, and Emmeline shut the doors behind them so no one could catch them technically committing a crime.
"Let's look for anything my dad might be warning me about," Clark said.
Chloe quickly took a seat at the computer while the other two searched through various file folders on the desk. "Okay, it might take a minute. I can't exactly search for a file called 'My Evil Scheme'. Clark, have you thought about the fact that if Lionel knows your secret he might have told…"
"Lex?" Clark finished. "Knowledge is power. Lionel would never level the playing field."
"Well, I guess this is one of those rare times when we have to put our faith in the Luthor family dysfunction." She tried to enter a password into the computer, but it was incorrect. "Locked out."
"Check his calendar."
"All right, I'm multitasking as fast as I can." She quickly pulled up Lionel's schedule for the month of May and saw something interesting for the 5th. "Leon Rowland?"
"Who's that?"
"It looks like Lionel has an interview scheduled tomorrow with the Inquisitor's top reporter regarding something called 'The Weapon'."
Another event for Thursday of next week popped up saying Lionel had a meeting at the Pentagon.
"Then at the Pentagon," Clark sighed.
"Looks like the mysterious weapon is the hot topic this week."
"Maybe it's not so mysterious."
"Wait, you think that you might be the weapon Lionel's talking about?"
"That doesn't make sense," Emmeline said. "You told me Lionel said he hadn't shared your secret because it would change your destiny. Regardless of if we believe in destiny or not, wouldn't telling the government to use you as a weapon change that destiny more than anything?"
"Maybe Lionel just said that so I'd be off his trail. I knew we couldn't trust him."
"Okay, now before I tell you any of this, you have to promise you'll keep a cool head and backburner those American Psycho instincts, okay?" Chloe explained firmly.
"Chloe, what is it?" Clark asked.
"I pulled up your dad's phone records, and unless Lionel was selling long-distance plans, he was desperate to get ahold of your dad. There are at least 20 calls logged in those last few weeks."
Clark looked at the phone log in concern. "My dad said he died protecting my secret. Maybe that's how he found out Lionel knew about me. When did the calls stop?"
"…They didn't. Lionel talked to your dad an hour before he died."
"Think Lionel was just congratulating him?" he said icily.
"Not unless he did it in person. Lionel's cell call came through a tower in Jansen's Field. That's only a mile away from your house."
"Lionel was there? Lionel was there the night my dad died."
Emmeline was willing to put her faith in people, and Lionel had shown a rather dramatic change in character ever since his bout in prison, but this didn't look good.
And if she found out that someone had been alone with her mother before she died and resulted in her death before the meteors or the cancer, she would never be able to forgive them.
As it turned out, while Lionel was indeed there the night Jonathon died, his intentions had been mostly noble.
Clark nearly killed Lionel in a furious rage while the ghost of his father urged him to complete the horrific task.
And he'd been so close.
His fingers shook as he tried to will himself not to take another human life, no matter how evil that life had been in the past.
When Clark had hit the supposed ghost with a blast of heat vision, it revealed that it was not a ghost at all. But things got weirder when Lionel, his eyes clouded with white, touched the 'ghost' and revealed him to be Fine before dissolving him completely.
"So hell freezes over and no one even bothers to tell me?" Chloe asked when Clark brought Lionel in with various Kryptonian writings.
"Chloe, listen, Mr. Luthor has been writing these. Seems to be some sort of warning, but I can't decipher it."
"Well, unfortunately, my Kryptonian's a little rusty. What about—?"
"I don't know what any of this means, Miss Sullivan," Lionel interrupted when she looked over at him. "I am simply the oracle. I believe the answers could be found with a visit to your Fortress."
Clark's eyes hardened. "Last time someone talked me into taking them to the Fortress, it was a trick to release General Zod."
"Yeah, I have plans this weekend, so if we could protect Smallville from the wrath of Krypton's deadliest villain, that would be great," Chloe bit out.
"And someone tried to kill me saying my death would help Zod reign and I would not like to die right now," Emmeline added.
Lionel gave them a resigned look. "Ancient hieroglyphics were deciphered by finding repeated—"
"Repeated patterns," Chloe finished. "Yeah, I know. So let me scan this and see if we got any."
"Why would Fine wanna expose himself now?" Clark asked.
"He's afraid I'm going to help you," Lionel answered. "To stop what he and Lex are planning to do."
"Which is what?" Chloe posed.
"Fine has been helping Lex to develop a virus so lethal, it could bring humanity to the brink of extinction. LuthorCorp scientists completed the project today."
"So the weapon isn't Clark, it's this virus."
"Yes."
Clark looked down at the writings. "Maybe that's what this pattern is trying to warn me against."
"I have a strong sense that this warning I have been entrusted to pass on is related to something more terrible even than the virus."
"Maybe the virus is just a part of it."
"Yeah."
"Do you have access to the lab?"
"No, I don't know where it is."
Chloe paused before looking up at them. "I think we know someone who does."
Clark gave a frustrated sigh. This could only go poorly.
Unsurprisingly, Lana was not happy about Clark breaking into her dorm room to try to find out where Lex's lab was, but she did reluctantly tell him the location.
However, when Clark arrived, Lex was on the floor, Fine was gone, and the lab was in the process of being destroyed along with all traces of the virus they had been creating.
And when Chloe hit him with a message in the Kryptonian symbols that read 'Zod is coming', he had no idea what was going to happen next or what he was supposed to do.
Emmeline slowly stepped up into the loft, and Clark quickly hid the piece of paper with the message on it. He knew that Emmeline's last experience with Zod nearly coming to Earth wasn't memorable, and he didn't want her to get freaked out just yet.
Ignorance was bliss, at least for the time being.
"Why does it feel like we can never catch a break?" she sighed as she smiled. "I swear, the second we figure one thing out, something else pops up."
Clark smiled sheepishly. "If only you had known what you were getting into when you joined the Torch all those years ago."
Emmeline laughed as she took a seat next to him. "I know that present from your dad kind of brought up a lot of different emotions."
"I've been trying so hard to move on. But…I forgot how much I really miss him."
"You don't have to move on. You can miss him for the rest of your life, and that will be perfectly okay. You know, I think that…he'd still want you to go…and enjoy yourself. I don't know much about baseball, but I could go with you."
Clark tightened his fists.
Emmeline realized how that must've sounded. "Oh, geez, I-I didn't mean to say I was replacing him or making light of him not being able to go or anything like that, I just thought I'd offer. But that was really stupid of me. I'm so sorry."
"Em," Clark said gently. "I wasn't mad. Just…frustrated. But…I'd really like to go with you…if you can make it."
Emmeline smiled. "I'm looking forward to it."
