Title: Strange Love.
Author: Lucy Mars
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I've got nothing witty to say. Really, they don't belong to me, but I'll return them when I'm done.
Summary: Their love, it was a strange love. Chloe and Lex. This is a future fic. How I see Lex becoming evil and him and Clark becoming enemies.
A.N: I would like to thank all my betas for their help and encouraging words. You know who you are. Give yourselves a hand, I couldn't have done this without you.
Prologue:
She's forgotten what the fresh morning mist feels like on her hot face. The air here is stale and thick with lies, desperation and anger. The air at home was never like this. At home, she would tilt her face to the sky and feel refreshed with the tranquility that it was intoxicated with.
She can't recall the sound of silence that accompanied every Kansas night. The silence she lives with now is neither peaceful, nor comforting. The dark sounds here just lull her into a restless sleep filled with memories she just wants to forget and one face she knows will haunt her to her grave.
The gentle beauty of swaying fields of grass under the hand of the hot summer breeze eludes her. All the lines are blurred with pain and once sharp images have been reduced to muddled shades of grey. She can't bring up the memories that she locked away for prosperity, because she's stoned her heart off to even herself. It was the only way she could survive. It wasn't her choice. She'd been given none.
The water's rising and it's rising fast. There used to be days that she could deceive herself into believing that she could tread the cold black water for a little while longer, that her time wasn't up yet, but she knows that her time is rapidly coming to an end. All the things she still wants to do and still needs to do will be left undone.
The water's risen up to her neck and soon, she'll be immersed in it.
Soon, she'd be dead.
Clutching a simple silver band in her frail hand, Chloe tenderly ran her calloused index finger over the simple words etched in side the ring and on her heart.
'In vestigio, e vestigio.'
'At that moment.'
It so little, but like them, it said so much. A dead language and a bare ring were how he decided to express what they meant to him. At that moment, when they were together and the world was locked away by a single door, everything was all right. They were together and for a few stolen moments, it was just the two of them and nothing else mattered. No world, no prying eyes, no wife for them, and for Chloe, most importantly, no reminder of what waited for her once she decided to return to reality.
Of course it had to be Latin. Only he would give her a gift with his message encrypted in dead language and carved in the hidden recesses of cold metal. Over all the years and after all the clandestine moments that they shared, it had been the only gift he'd ever given her that she cherished. She didn't need the extravagant gifts or the useless toys that Lex showered her with during the long stretches of time she spent alone. All she needed was the ring because it was the only evidence of them she had.
It was the only thing she had kept since she'd let him, and belief that they had a future together, go.
It was, quite simply, all that she cherished anymore. She held her life in her hands. Figuratively, and literally.
Slipping the simple band onto her finger, Chloe knew that there was only one thing left to do. It was finally time to go home.
End of Prologue.
TBC.