A slow smile finally traced its way across Chloe Sullivan's mouth as
she leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. Music was echoing from
the inadequate speakers on her grape iMac. She always felt a little more
in-control at her desk at The Torch. Things seemed to make more sense.
The smile grew slightly as she thought about the irony of how many times
she'd written articles of things that made no sense here. She relaxed back
into her chair and resolved not to think of it, not to think about anything
for a while.
"What's up, Chloe? You never listen to music when you work on the paper," a familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.
"Pete!" she replied energetically as her eyes flew open and she sat up in her chair. "I'm not working on it, exactly," she explained as she straightened the green sweater she was wearing, "I was taking a little break. What are you doing here? I thought we were going to work on your story tomorrow." Arranging a stack of folders on her desk, she felt as though she looked acceptably professional, again, and stopped fidgeting. She hated the thought of looking like an amateur in this room.
With undue struggle, Pete managed to shirk his enormously overloaded backpack and deposit it on a disorganized, wooden desk with a loud thump. He grinned apologetically at his friend for the noise, and said, "Actually, I was looking for Clark. He was supposed to meet me down by the track and he never showed." He kept looking around the room as though he expected Clark to appear behind a filing cabinet or desk.
Chloe's brow wrinkled in confusion, and she gasped, "Clark Kent? Reliable, prompt Clark Kent didn't show? Are you sure you had the time right?"
Her show was met with a sardonically raised eyebrow. "If that's all the better you can do, you really need to work on your sarcasm," he said.
"You're right," agreed Chloe. "I should have asked if you'd gotten Alicia Brody to go out with you, been accepted to Yale, or if you'd been elected governor of the State of Denial you're apparently living in. What are you doing with Clark, anyway?" She inwardly cursed herself, knowing that the tone in her voice had betrayed just how interested she was in what Clark might be up to without her. She attempted to keep her face impartial and thought, 'Not like Pete probably doesn't know. It's not as though he's blind and insensitive and obsessed with perfect little cheerleader bodies with perfect little cheerleader faces and . . .'
Apparently her derailed train of thought wasn't as well hidden as she'd hoped, because Pete interrupted it by saying, "Are you alright? I was going to have Clark go check on a friend with me. I haven't heard anything from him in a while." He picked up his backpack, again, and looked as though he was about to say his goodbyes.
"Wait," Chloe exclaimed as she stood up, "I'll go with you. It doesn't sound like anything you'd want to do alone, and it sounds like a mystery. Who knows what you might find?" The look on her face had changed to an excited one, her huge smile electrically charged.
Her enthusiastic, hopeful smile, however, was met by an uneasy grimace from her friend. "Chloe," he awkwardly began. "I don't want this to turn into a Hardy Boys thing. I'm just worried about a friend, and I want to go see how he is."
"Oh, I see," Chloe interrupted before he could say more. She could feel the color rise in her cheeks. It may have been from either embarrassment or anger, but she didn't want to think about which, right now. "You don't want me involved because I'm going to-What, I'm going to turn it into just another story? I'm your friend, Pete. Since when did everybody decide that all I am is a journalist?" As soon as she heard herself say the words, she knew that the warmth in her cheeks was from embarrassment. It was her own fault if people saw her as only a journalist. She tracked down every story with tenacious zeal, and often paid no mind to whatever consequences may have followed. She gulped hard and tried to keep a stern look on her face, but she was beginning to feel nauseated. Never did she imagine that one of her best friends would see her that way, or that maybe they'd be right to.
The look on Pete's face was both sympathetic and worried. He apparently knew when it was time to walk on eggshells around her. "Look, Chloe. It's not that. It's that my friend . . ." he trailed of with a look of hopelessness. "My friend has some things in his life he'd rather not let people know about. It's not that I don't trust you - you know I'd trust you with my life. It's just that I don't want him . . ." He seemed unable to finish.
"You don't want him to end up on the Wall of Weird, is that it?" she finished angrily. The nerve! First to say that he trusted her, and then to say . . .
"Well, to be honest with you, yes," his words broke into her thoughts. He looked so pained and sorrowful. It broke Chloe's heart to see Pete like this. She knew that he'd suffer anything to be honest with her, and that it was probably torturing him to have to hurt her by saying that.
She reached out her hands to grab him by the shoulders, and ducked into his sight since he'd started looking at the ground. "Hey. That won't happen." Her words were filled with considerably more compassion than they had been. "Let's go see this friend of yours, and we'll catch up with Clark later. I promise to leave my camera behind and my news hounding to a minimum. I'll just be your friend."
It never stopped amazing Chloe how quickly Pete could whip out that grin of his for his friends, when he knew they needed it. "Alright, let's go," he said, as he shrugged the weight of his backpack onto his shoulders again, and led Chloe out of the Torch.
The door to the low cupboard swung open to reveal several blue and green bags of powdered milk stacked on top of each other, gigantic aluminum canisters filled with who-knew-what, and more of the sealed gallons of water she'd seen in the last cupboard. The smell added age to cupboard. The whole house smelled old, somehow.
Chloe put her fists to her hips as she straightened up, and asked, "Does this friend of yours know something about the apocalypse the rest of us don't?"
As Pete crossed behind her to the next room, flashlight in hand, he let out one of his chuckles. "Did you see a store nearby?" he asked, flashing her another grin behind her head. "Besides, he doesn't get out much. The farthest I've ever seen him was still about a mile from the main road on one of his pre-dawn jogs. That's why I was surprised to see all the doors locked in the middle of the day." His hands gestured wildly as he talked, causing the light source to dance all over the house.
"Speaking of which," Chloe started, her brow wrinkling in confusion and a touch of irritation, "how did we get in? Am I the only one who doesn't know how to pick deadbolts? And what's with all the 'pre-dawn' and the flashlights and the lights not having light bulbs? And the boards on the windows? What is this guy, part vampire?" She noticed that her own hands seemed to be a little out of control, too, and quickly thrust them into her pockets. Maybe that'd keep her from looking senseless for a few more minutes.
A shrug from Pete, along with his face scrunched into some kind of apology, met her questions as he turned towards her. "Look, Chloe. I told you. I can't answer any of your questions about Tyler. If you want to know why he does what he does, you'll have to ask him." He drew his hands together and Chloe supposed he was trying to plead.
She walked past him into the hallway without looking at his face, muttering, "Right, if we ever find him," under her breath.
"What was that?"
Chloe allowed herself a slight grin before she turned to see him with that pathetically cute wrinkled brow of confusion on his face. "I said, 'Bright lights must blind him.' Why? What'd you think I said?"
"That's exactly what I thought you said." The look on his face seemed both unconvinced and unimpressed, however.
Turning around, she allowed herself another small smile for about half a second, before she lost all traces of humor. "Oh no, Pete. Look at this!" Her voice clearly reflected the shock and worry she felt.
"Oh, man," her friend quietly exclaimed. He came to kneel beside her and examined the fallen monitor, shining the flashlight on its cracked glass surface. "This is bad. You think this means something happened to him?"
Her arms folded across her stomach as she stared down at him, and she shook her head slowly. "It doesn't look good, Pete." She stepped around him to see if she could see anything else by the dim light in the room. Thin golden shafts streamed into the room from between the boards on the window and onto the desk.
Instinctively, her hand reached out to touch the green streaks she saw illuminated in the sunlight. Whatever it was had dried already, but it flaked off easily onto her finger. "Do you have any idea what this stuff is?" She walked slowly towards Pete while holding her finger closer to her eye to examine it. With barely any light, though, it was hardly productive.
Pete had barely shown the flashlight on her finger before swinging it back to the monitor. "I don't know, but there's more of it on the screen, here."
Chloe took a quick, mental inventory of her emotions as Pete's small light illumined the same dried green substance on the broken screen. A sour tickle clutched inside her lungs, and she couldn't figure out where it was coming from. She wasn't nervous, she wasn't scared, and she didn't even care all that much about this friend of Pete's.
She couldn't concentrate on what she was feeling, though. It was like there was nothing but a lump of cotton where her heart was, that kept absorbing whatever tactic she tried to prod it with. Instead, she decided to set her mind to the facts around her. The sourness retreated and she felt better attacking something she knew had an answer.
Pete's friend was missing. If he said that his friend didn't take trips to the corner market, who was she to disagree? Especially with all those cans of lima beans stowed over the fridge. If she were the neurotic shut-in apparently awaiting the end of the world, those would be can after can of coffee beans, and precious little else. Maybe some canned Big Macs. Besides, if the world ended and she were desperate for food, she could always invade the Kent farm. She was certain they would practice food storage. Somehow, she got the feeling that there was enough in their storm cellar to save an entire civilization from the brink of extinction.
What was she thinking about again? Right, facts. There had been some kind of violence here. She didn't know what the green stuff was, but she was certain it wasn't good. Not on a broken monitor like that. But why just a monitor? Nobody kicked doors down these days? Maybe she really was the only one who didn't know how to pick a deadbolt. Where were the scattered papers, the upended chairs, or the cushions strewn about that years of Matlock and Perry Mason had taught her were hallmarks of this sort of thing?
The scattered papers, maybe, she could explain. A man who doesn't get out much probably doesn't spend a lot of time at the post office. Personal letters, shopping, bills, and even junk mail probably only came to this man online. Well, not the junk mail. That'd be too much to ask for, she supposed. But for the rest, she couldn't imagine Tyler needing anything but his computer. Which, until very recently, was hooked up to that brutalized monitor. His computer, which . . . was still turned on?
The green LED gazed steadily at her, while a nearby yellow one winked at her occasionally. "Hey, I've got an idea," she stated, straightening up and pulling her friend with her by his shirt. Her finger pointed to the computer humming happily in the corner, and she suggested, "Why don't we go grab another monitor, and see what had somebody worked up enough to smash a monitor, while leaving the rest of the house alone?"
Pete gave an excited, "Ha!" and clapped his hands together once. "It's always good to see Chloe Sullivan work her magic. Clark's house is the closest; let's see if he's there."
Chloe smiled at the compliment, not knowing exactly what he may have meant by it, but flattered just the same. "I thought you didn't want me to get all Nancy Drew on you. What's with that little cheer of yours?"
"That was before. You know, when life wasn't at risk." Pete's voice sounded light and joking. Despite his words, he was obviously relieved to have a plan of action. "Besides, Nancy Drew? I think you're more Mary Tyler Moore meets Ace Ventura."
Her face took on all the characteristics of mock shock. "Did you just compare me to Jim Carrey, Tenspeed? Hey, wait. Was that Mary Tyler Moore thing a crack at my sweater?"
"Tenspeed? What does that even mean?"
"You did pick the deadbolt . . ."
She led him out of the house with the smile fading to a satisfied grin. In no time, they'd find this Tyler . . . Tyler . . . Tyler what? Why didn't she know his last name?
The sour feeling yanked again at her lungs.
* * *
Tyler opened his eyes to nothing. Black, emptiness, nothing. He was used to living in the dark, so for him not to make out any shapes at all would have been worrisome, if he could only think clearly enough to be worried.
A dull roar enveloped him. Not a roar, a hum. Here and there, he heard creaking metal. He figured he was in a car. Yes. There were the bumps, and the vibrations of the road.
'I'm going to the hospital,' he thought, still thinking his way through the liquid concrete in his brain. 'Ben just hit me with a metal pole, and he's taking me to the hospital to tell me I'm a freak.'
He relaxed, knowing he wouldn't have to worry until after he'd gotten the bad news. Which he hadn't gotten yet.
If his face had been visible, it would have been the very study of confusion. Slowly, he reasoned out that if he hadn't been called a freak, yet, then he wouldn't know he was going to be called a freak. That meant being called a freak was in the past. And that meant he wasn't going to the hospital.
It did not, however, explain the pain in his head, or where he was going, or why he was someplace dark, and in a car, and going somewhere he didn't know about.
The confusion was getting worse. He closed his eyes and tried to keep his train of thought, but the gravel wall around it kept sliding around and on top of it. He didn't know what he was thinking about, or why.
Where was he, again? Darkness.
He had to think! He needed to wrap his claws around one thought and hold onto it, to keep sane, to keep his focus.
Ben! Ben would help him. That was his one thought. He could just wait. He could close his eyes and wait, and when whatever this was had finished, he could go to his little brother.
He was the only one Tyler could turn to. The only one who would keep him safe. Ben was the only person he could rely on when his world didn't make sense, as it hadn't made sense so many times before.
Right then, his world made as little sense as it ever had. If he had noticed that sleep had replaced his confusion, he would have been grateful indeed.
* * *
"Shoes!"
The single, clear word rang out through the house. It was actually a few moments before Martha Kent had realized that it was her own voice that had shouted so loudly. Honestly, did they think she couldn't hear the mud squelching around on her just-cleaned kitchen floor? She swore, if raising two farm-boys hadn't turned into the most amazingly rewarding life she could have hoped for, it would have driven her absolutely mad.
"Sorry, mom!" came her son's reply, just as loud as her admonishment had been. She closed her eyes in exasperation and wondered why she bothered. The two men in her life seemed certain that being raised in a barn gave them license to behave like it. She and Clark were both in kitchen. Shouting was barbaric.
She shook her head, the bright, red pony-tail she had her hair tied in swinging behind her. She continued spreading her off-white mixture onto the parchment paper as she talked over her shoulder. "Wash up for supper. I forgot how long this takes to bake, so dessert's going to be a little late."
No sooner had the words exited her mouth than her son's fingers entered her mixing bowl. "Mmm. It's good. What is it?"
"Clark! Get your fingers out of there. They're not even clean," she yelped at him, trying to push his huge frame out of the way with her hips. "It's pavlova."
Clark chuckled and moved towards the sink to wash his hands. "Pavlo-what? How are you supposed to know how anything tastes, if I'm not here to help you?"
"It's pavlova, and you love it. Now get out of my kitchen unless you can help in some kind of constructive way." She got another chuckle rather than shooing him out of the room. He was just lucky she was vulnerable to Kent charm. The pity was that most of it seemed to consist of being a smart-aleck with no decorum. Why couldn't she have been a pushover for well trimmed nails or a large vocabulary instead of 'Kent charm' and the limitless compassion that came with it?
"Wow. I'm already drooling."
"Is that why you're late?" she asked. "You've been hanging around Gabe Sullivan again and have a pocket full of puns to-Oh, no, Clark! Not your jacket again." She had turned to see the tattered remains of yet another jacket slung over a kitchen chair. There wasn't enough thread in all of Smallville to repair this one, either. She grabbed his arm out of the sink and started going over it for scrapes and bruises.
"Are you alright? What happened?" Her eyes were twice their usual size and full of concern.
Clark just laughed quietly and rolled his sleeves down as she tried to continue her inspection. "I'm fine, mom. If bullets bounce harmlessly off my chest, I think I can handle a simple green-faced monster." His words were light, but Martha thought he was hiding a good deal more worry than he was letting on.
"I want you to be more careful. You never know where those meteor rocks are going to show up. And green faced monsters? What is going on, Clark?"
Clark kissed his mother on the head, a gesture she guessed was meant to calm her, and he walked quickly out of the kitchen. "I'll tell you and dad all about it over supper. Just let me go tell him it's ready, and stop worrying so much about me. I'm fine." The look in his eyes told her that he needed to get it off his chest, so she just sighed to herself and tried to be patient until he was ready to talk about it.
She opened the oven and put the pavlova in, setting the timer. As she started getting things ready to eat, she pulled the jacket off the chair and hugged it close to her chest. She used its sleeve to wipe at a tear that had slid from her eye. For the millionth time, she wished that she could protect her baby.
"What's up, Chloe? You never listen to music when you work on the paper," a familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.
"Pete!" she replied energetically as her eyes flew open and she sat up in her chair. "I'm not working on it, exactly," she explained as she straightened the green sweater she was wearing, "I was taking a little break. What are you doing here? I thought we were going to work on your story tomorrow." Arranging a stack of folders on her desk, she felt as though she looked acceptably professional, again, and stopped fidgeting. She hated the thought of looking like an amateur in this room.
With undue struggle, Pete managed to shirk his enormously overloaded backpack and deposit it on a disorganized, wooden desk with a loud thump. He grinned apologetically at his friend for the noise, and said, "Actually, I was looking for Clark. He was supposed to meet me down by the track and he never showed." He kept looking around the room as though he expected Clark to appear behind a filing cabinet or desk.
Chloe's brow wrinkled in confusion, and she gasped, "Clark Kent? Reliable, prompt Clark Kent didn't show? Are you sure you had the time right?"
Her show was met with a sardonically raised eyebrow. "If that's all the better you can do, you really need to work on your sarcasm," he said.
"You're right," agreed Chloe. "I should have asked if you'd gotten Alicia Brody to go out with you, been accepted to Yale, or if you'd been elected governor of the State of Denial you're apparently living in. What are you doing with Clark, anyway?" She inwardly cursed herself, knowing that the tone in her voice had betrayed just how interested she was in what Clark might be up to without her. She attempted to keep her face impartial and thought, 'Not like Pete probably doesn't know. It's not as though he's blind and insensitive and obsessed with perfect little cheerleader bodies with perfect little cheerleader faces and . . .'
Apparently her derailed train of thought wasn't as well hidden as she'd hoped, because Pete interrupted it by saying, "Are you alright? I was going to have Clark go check on a friend with me. I haven't heard anything from him in a while." He picked up his backpack, again, and looked as though he was about to say his goodbyes.
"Wait," Chloe exclaimed as she stood up, "I'll go with you. It doesn't sound like anything you'd want to do alone, and it sounds like a mystery. Who knows what you might find?" The look on her face had changed to an excited one, her huge smile electrically charged.
Her enthusiastic, hopeful smile, however, was met by an uneasy grimace from her friend. "Chloe," he awkwardly began. "I don't want this to turn into a Hardy Boys thing. I'm just worried about a friend, and I want to go see how he is."
"Oh, I see," Chloe interrupted before he could say more. She could feel the color rise in her cheeks. It may have been from either embarrassment or anger, but she didn't want to think about which, right now. "You don't want me involved because I'm going to-What, I'm going to turn it into just another story? I'm your friend, Pete. Since when did everybody decide that all I am is a journalist?" As soon as she heard herself say the words, she knew that the warmth in her cheeks was from embarrassment. It was her own fault if people saw her as only a journalist. She tracked down every story with tenacious zeal, and often paid no mind to whatever consequences may have followed. She gulped hard and tried to keep a stern look on her face, but she was beginning to feel nauseated. Never did she imagine that one of her best friends would see her that way, or that maybe they'd be right to.
The look on Pete's face was both sympathetic and worried. He apparently knew when it was time to walk on eggshells around her. "Look, Chloe. It's not that. It's that my friend . . ." he trailed of with a look of hopelessness. "My friend has some things in his life he'd rather not let people know about. It's not that I don't trust you - you know I'd trust you with my life. It's just that I don't want him . . ." He seemed unable to finish.
"You don't want him to end up on the Wall of Weird, is that it?" she finished angrily. The nerve! First to say that he trusted her, and then to say . . .
"Well, to be honest with you, yes," his words broke into her thoughts. He looked so pained and sorrowful. It broke Chloe's heart to see Pete like this. She knew that he'd suffer anything to be honest with her, and that it was probably torturing him to have to hurt her by saying that.
She reached out her hands to grab him by the shoulders, and ducked into his sight since he'd started looking at the ground. "Hey. That won't happen." Her words were filled with considerably more compassion than they had been. "Let's go see this friend of yours, and we'll catch up with Clark later. I promise to leave my camera behind and my news hounding to a minimum. I'll just be your friend."
It never stopped amazing Chloe how quickly Pete could whip out that grin of his for his friends, when he knew they needed it. "Alright, let's go," he said, as he shrugged the weight of his backpack onto his shoulders again, and led Chloe out of the Torch.
The door to the low cupboard swung open to reveal several blue and green bags of powdered milk stacked on top of each other, gigantic aluminum canisters filled with who-knew-what, and more of the sealed gallons of water she'd seen in the last cupboard. The smell added age to cupboard. The whole house smelled old, somehow.
Chloe put her fists to her hips as she straightened up, and asked, "Does this friend of yours know something about the apocalypse the rest of us don't?"
As Pete crossed behind her to the next room, flashlight in hand, he let out one of his chuckles. "Did you see a store nearby?" he asked, flashing her another grin behind her head. "Besides, he doesn't get out much. The farthest I've ever seen him was still about a mile from the main road on one of his pre-dawn jogs. That's why I was surprised to see all the doors locked in the middle of the day." His hands gestured wildly as he talked, causing the light source to dance all over the house.
"Speaking of which," Chloe started, her brow wrinkling in confusion and a touch of irritation, "how did we get in? Am I the only one who doesn't know how to pick deadbolts? And what's with all the 'pre-dawn' and the flashlights and the lights not having light bulbs? And the boards on the windows? What is this guy, part vampire?" She noticed that her own hands seemed to be a little out of control, too, and quickly thrust them into her pockets. Maybe that'd keep her from looking senseless for a few more minutes.
A shrug from Pete, along with his face scrunched into some kind of apology, met her questions as he turned towards her. "Look, Chloe. I told you. I can't answer any of your questions about Tyler. If you want to know why he does what he does, you'll have to ask him." He drew his hands together and Chloe supposed he was trying to plead.
She walked past him into the hallway without looking at his face, muttering, "Right, if we ever find him," under her breath.
"What was that?"
Chloe allowed herself a slight grin before she turned to see him with that pathetically cute wrinkled brow of confusion on his face. "I said, 'Bright lights must blind him.' Why? What'd you think I said?"
"That's exactly what I thought you said." The look on his face seemed both unconvinced and unimpressed, however.
Turning around, she allowed herself another small smile for about half a second, before she lost all traces of humor. "Oh no, Pete. Look at this!" Her voice clearly reflected the shock and worry she felt.
"Oh, man," her friend quietly exclaimed. He came to kneel beside her and examined the fallen monitor, shining the flashlight on its cracked glass surface. "This is bad. You think this means something happened to him?"
Her arms folded across her stomach as she stared down at him, and she shook her head slowly. "It doesn't look good, Pete." She stepped around him to see if she could see anything else by the dim light in the room. Thin golden shafts streamed into the room from between the boards on the window and onto the desk.
Instinctively, her hand reached out to touch the green streaks she saw illuminated in the sunlight. Whatever it was had dried already, but it flaked off easily onto her finger. "Do you have any idea what this stuff is?" She walked slowly towards Pete while holding her finger closer to her eye to examine it. With barely any light, though, it was hardly productive.
Pete had barely shown the flashlight on her finger before swinging it back to the monitor. "I don't know, but there's more of it on the screen, here."
Chloe took a quick, mental inventory of her emotions as Pete's small light illumined the same dried green substance on the broken screen. A sour tickle clutched inside her lungs, and she couldn't figure out where it was coming from. She wasn't nervous, she wasn't scared, and she didn't even care all that much about this friend of Pete's.
She couldn't concentrate on what she was feeling, though. It was like there was nothing but a lump of cotton where her heart was, that kept absorbing whatever tactic she tried to prod it with. Instead, she decided to set her mind to the facts around her. The sourness retreated and she felt better attacking something she knew had an answer.
Pete's friend was missing. If he said that his friend didn't take trips to the corner market, who was she to disagree? Especially with all those cans of lima beans stowed over the fridge. If she were the neurotic shut-in apparently awaiting the end of the world, those would be can after can of coffee beans, and precious little else. Maybe some canned Big Macs. Besides, if the world ended and she were desperate for food, she could always invade the Kent farm. She was certain they would practice food storage. Somehow, she got the feeling that there was enough in their storm cellar to save an entire civilization from the brink of extinction.
What was she thinking about again? Right, facts. There had been some kind of violence here. She didn't know what the green stuff was, but she was certain it wasn't good. Not on a broken monitor like that. But why just a monitor? Nobody kicked doors down these days? Maybe she really was the only one who didn't know how to pick a deadbolt. Where were the scattered papers, the upended chairs, or the cushions strewn about that years of Matlock and Perry Mason had taught her were hallmarks of this sort of thing?
The scattered papers, maybe, she could explain. A man who doesn't get out much probably doesn't spend a lot of time at the post office. Personal letters, shopping, bills, and even junk mail probably only came to this man online. Well, not the junk mail. That'd be too much to ask for, she supposed. But for the rest, she couldn't imagine Tyler needing anything but his computer. Which, until very recently, was hooked up to that brutalized monitor. His computer, which . . . was still turned on?
The green LED gazed steadily at her, while a nearby yellow one winked at her occasionally. "Hey, I've got an idea," she stated, straightening up and pulling her friend with her by his shirt. Her finger pointed to the computer humming happily in the corner, and she suggested, "Why don't we go grab another monitor, and see what had somebody worked up enough to smash a monitor, while leaving the rest of the house alone?"
Pete gave an excited, "Ha!" and clapped his hands together once. "It's always good to see Chloe Sullivan work her magic. Clark's house is the closest; let's see if he's there."
Chloe smiled at the compliment, not knowing exactly what he may have meant by it, but flattered just the same. "I thought you didn't want me to get all Nancy Drew on you. What's with that little cheer of yours?"
"That was before. You know, when life wasn't at risk." Pete's voice sounded light and joking. Despite his words, he was obviously relieved to have a plan of action. "Besides, Nancy Drew? I think you're more Mary Tyler Moore meets Ace Ventura."
Her face took on all the characteristics of mock shock. "Did you just compare me to Jim Carrey, Tenspeed? Hey, wait. Was that Mary Tyler Moore thing a crack at my sweater?"
"Tenspeed? What does that even mean?"
"You did pick the deadbolt . . ."
She led him out of the house with the smile fading to a satisfied grin. In no time, they'd find this Tyler . . . Tyler . . . Tyler what? Why didn't she know his last name?
The sour feeling yanked again at her lungs.
* * *
Tyler opened his eyes to nothing. Black, emptiness, nothing. He was used to living in the dark, so for him not to make out any shapes at all would have been worrisome, if he could only think clearly enough to be worried.
A dull roar enveloped him. Not a roar, a hum. Here and there, he heard creaking metal. He figured he was in a car. Yes. There were the bumps, and the vibrations of the road.
'I'm going to the hospital,' he thought, still thinking his way through the liquid concrete in his brain. 'Ben just hit me with a metal pole, and he's taking me to the hospital to tell me I'm a freak.'
He relaxed, knowing he wouldn't have to worry until after he'd gotten the bad news. Which he hadn't gotten yet.
If his face had been visible, it would have been the very study of confusion. Slowly, he reasoned out that if he hadn't been called a freak, yet, then he wouldn't know he was going to be called a freak. That meant being called a freak was in the past. And that meant he wasn't going to the hospital.
It did not, however, explain the pain in his head, or where he was going, or why he was someplace dark, and in a car, and going somewhere he didn't know about.
The confusion was getting worse. He closed his eyes and tried to keep his train of thought, but the gravel wall around it kept sliding around and on top of it. He didn't know what he was thinking about, or why.
Where was he, again? Darkness.
He had to think! He needed to wrap his claws around one thought and hold onto it, to keep sane, to keep his focus.
Ben! Ben would help him. That was his one thought. He could just wait. He could close his eyes and wait, and when whatever this was had finished, he could go to his little brother.
He was the only one Tyler could turn to. The only one who would keep him safe. Ben was the only person he could rely on when his world didn't make sense, as it hadn't made sense so many times before.
Right then, his world made as little sense as it ever had. If he had noticed that sleep had replaced his confusion, he would have been grateful indeed.
* * *
"Shoes!"
The single, clear word rang out through the house. It was actually a few moments before Martha Kent had realized that it was her own voice that had shouted so loudly. Honestly, did they think she couldn't hear the mud squelching around on her just-cleaned kitchen floor? She swore, if raising two farm-boys hadn't turned into the most amazingly rewarding life she could have hoped for, it would have driven her absolutely mad.
"Sorry, mom!" came her son's reply, just as loud as her admonishment had been. She closed her eyes in exasperation and wondered why she bothered. The two men in her life seemed certain that being raised in a barn gave them license to behave like it. She and Clark were both in kitchen. Shouting was barbaric.
She shook her head, the bright, red pony-tail she had her hair tied in swinging behind her. She continued spreading her off-white mixture onto the parchment paper as she talked over her shoulder. "Wash up for supper. I forgot how long this takes to bake, so dessert's going to be a little late."
No sooner had the words exited her mouth than her son's fingers entered her mixing bowl. "Mmm. It's good. What is it?"
"Clark! Get your fingers out of there. They're not even clean," she yelped at him, trying to push his huge frame out of the way with her hips. "It's pavlova."
Clark chuckled and moved towards the sink to wash his hands. "Pavlo-what? How are you supposed to know how anything tastes, if I'm not here to help you?"
"It's pavlova, and you love it. Now get out of my kitchen unless you can help in some kind of constructive way." She got another chuckle rather than shooing him out of the room. He was just lucky she was vulnerable to Kent charm. The pity was that most of it seemed to consist of being a smart-aleck with no decorum. Why couldn't she have been a pushover for well trimmed nails or a large vocabulary instead of 'Kent charm' and the limitless compassion that came with it?
"Wow. I'm already drooling."
"Is that why you're late?" she asked. "You've been hanging around Gabe Sullivan again and have a pocket full of puns to-Oh, no, Clark! Not your jacket again." She had turned to see the tattered remains of yet another jacket slung over a kitchen chair. There wasn't enough thread in all of Smallville to repair this one, either. She grabbed his arm out of the sink and started going over it for scrapes and bruises.
"Are you alright? What happened?" Her eyes were twice their usual size and full of concern.
Clark just laughed quietly and rolled his sleeves down as she tried to continue her inspection. "I'm fine, mom. If bullets bounce harmlessly off my chest, I think I can handle a simple green-faced monster." His words were light, but Martha thought he was hiding a good deal more worry than he was letting on.
"I want you to be more careful. You never know where those meteor rocks are going to show up. And green faced monsters? What is going on, Clark?"
Clark kissed his mother on the head, a gesture she guessed was meant to calm her, and he walked quickly out of the kitchen. "I'll tell you and dad all about it over supper. Just let me go tell him it's ready, and stop worrying so much about me. I'm fine." The look in his eyes told her that he needed to get it off his chest, so she just sighed to herself and tried to be patient until he was ready to talk about it.
She opened the oven and put the pavlova in, setting the timer. As she started getting things ready to eat, she pulled the jacket off the chair and hugged it close to her chest. She used its sleeve to wipe at a tear that had slid from her eye. For the millionth time, she wished that she could protect her baby.