Spoilers: vaguest of refs to some early season one eps.
Life is not a problem to be solved,
but a reality to be experienced.
-Soren Kierkegaard
The day passed, in fact, far quicker than Clark would have liked. After giving him some initial time for 'recovery' his parents had set him to work on his regular chores, which, even though they could be tackled at super-speed, still managed to disturb the many turbulent thoughts racing around in his mind. He would have preferred some more time to write in this diary, to try and sort everything out in his head…but 'real life'called him away. There were chores to be done, deliveries his mother needed help with. Granted, they were mindless tasks, part of the annoying humdrum of his everyday life on the Kent Farm, but it wasn't as if he could allow his mind to wander…
He knew how careful he had to be now with this new secret – and just as the other one was kept under wraps by using his powers sparingly, the truth about him and Lex could not be betrayed by the blushes, the dreamy smiles, or the painful guilty looks that came with thinking about last night, this morning, and the evening to come.
He was used to the burden of a deception, but not in his own home. At one point, when they'd all been having an afternoon snack in the kitchen, he'd had to make a hurried excuse to get away, he felt so claustrophobic. It had happened before of course…even before he knew Lex reciprocate his feelings. Just occasionally, he'd suddenly feel out of control, and the whole pressure of hiding, of suppressing his feelings would just become too much.
And now it was worse. Because the truth was, he was starting to panic. His sleep had finally allowed him to look upon this whole thing with some clarity, and all he could see ahead were lies. To make this work he'd have to lie to his parents, he'd have to live yet another secret life, trying to constantly remember what face he had to wear to his friends, at school, around his parents, and around Lex. A double life had always been bad, but now…
For the first time in his life, he found himself without a single person to whom he could be completely honest with. And he just saw that situation carrying way ahead into the foreseeable future, a future that had always been so uncertain anyway…
He was filled with a growing rage, and a growing desperation that things were only going to get more complicated. Why couldn't anything be simple for him? Why had the world decided to not only make him a freak once, but twice over?
None of this had been helped by an untimely visit.
The one spare hour he'd had to try and capture but a tiny part of all that had happened, and all that he was feeling, in his diary, was the hour that Chloe had decided to drop by.
A mixture of his super-speed, X-ray vision, and the kind of hearing that comes only to the paranoid teenager allowed him to hide his diary and replace it with a magazine before she reached the upper level of the barn.
"Hey, how's my favourite socialite doing?" Chloe called out playfully before meeting Clark's tired, dark eyes.
"Woah." She said, taken aback. In all that they'd been through over the past several months, with the fire, her 'ice' stalker, and all the other life-and-death moments Chloe had seen Clark in, he had never truly lost his innocent perfect look of the hero-type. But now, before her, was a tired, on-edge Clark, visibly wired and nervous. She'd never seen him so…restless. Apart from all the times he kept mysteriously running off, the Kents' son was about as dependable-looking and laidback as you could get. But now Clark seemed full of a nervous kind of energy.
She could see how he tried to hide it. How he forced a carefree smile and called back "Hey" with as normal a sounding voice as he could. But she knew Clark, and every single day she watched him more intensely than he could ever guess, blind an idiot as he was. She saw how his eyes darted nervously, how he subtly tried to avoid meeting her gaze, tried to keep from having to fully face her, by busying himself tidying the junk on the table.
" So, did you and Pete had a good time last night?" Clark said, trying desperately to throw attention off himself for a second.
Chloe's frown stayed on her face for a moment or two as she answered slowly, distractedly.
"Oh, last night, yeah, we met up with some people." She said steadily, but with a frown on her face as she watched him.
"Oh, who?" Clark asked, daring to flash her a warm smile.
Chloe's eyes narrowed.
"Just, ah, Kim and Todd from History…" she remembered why she'd come. "But, hey, enough about our tedious Friday night drinking coffee - I want to hear all about your evening with the who's who of Metropolis."
She relaxed down into the sofa next to Clark, who was making a mental effort not to wring his hands nervously.
Of course she'd want to talk about last night…Clark thought, chastising himself for not preparing for this earlier. She's a reporter after all, always looking out for the gossip…but what can I possibly tell her? I was barely there ten minutes...
"Yeah, it was…good." he tried to say confidently. Damn, he needed more than that, and he needed to say it with some enthusiasm. He found himself nodding and smiling. "It was a lot of fun."
Chloe looked surprised.
"Really? I figured it'd either have been absolutely wild and 'debauched'-" She said with a teasing grin, "or , the more likely scenario, you'd have been bored to tears with stock tips and rich-kid backstabbing."
Clark kept his smile, and raised his hands helplessly.
"What can I say? It was a bit of both I guess." Dammit, where'd that come from? He quickly tried to give a sly kind of grin as if to show he was just teasing.
She seemed to buy it as she gave an amused little laugh at yet another of Clark's less than helpful comments about anything Lex related. Even from the very beginning he'd never given any intriguing bits of gossip about anything he saw or heard at the mansion, or any of the billionaire's son's wild activities. It was pretty much up to the town to make them up themselves, and it had taken Chloe a long time to figure out why Clark wasn't willing to use his position as Lex's pet project to share the truth about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Eventually though, she'd realised. Clark really was that decent. He was that loyal and that good-natured. And that was why she could never convince herself that he wasn't the best guy she had ever known. That was why she couldn't stop herself from loving him.
She was the one looking away now, trying to keep her composure. Eventually though she turned back to her friend and clasping her hands in her lap she gave a kind smile.
"So… you want to tell me what really happened?"
The panic on Clark's face couldn't be hid. Immediately his eyes were avoiding hers, but all the time he was trying to keep that casual smile on his face…
"What do you mean?"
Chloe shook her head in disbelief.
"C'mon Clark, you look really….weird today." He knew this.He knew how it had to work. He gave her a half-questioning, half-offended look.
She shrugged apologetically.
"Well, you do...you look, different. Stressed." A thought dawned. "Oh Clark, don't tell me Lex completely abandoned you last night with that crowd…I mean, if he did, I'm sorry, but you know we always warned you-"
Clark interrupted, with more anger than he'd wished.
"God, no Chloe, it wasn't anything like that!" he stood up suddenly and paced around, trying to calm down , to focus his anger, to try and express himself and his frustration without blurting out something he'd regret.
"Lex isn't what you think he is." He said eventually, turning towards her with a hard gaze. "He doesn't just see me as some 'amusement', Chloe, though I know you think that. I see it in your eyes. But he's not like that. He's my friend." His expression softened. " I just wish you guys would give him a chance."
Chloe shook the guilt away from her face. She'd known in her heart that one day this argument had had to come – someone like Lex couldn't just come and start hanging out with Clark without disrupting his relationship with his 'normal' friends. She'd never wanted to be the jealous type, she'd just tried to see this thing as an opportunity to look at another world, to see how people like Lex ticked. But then she'd started suspecting that Lex was encouraging the normally shy Clark to pursue Lana. After all, before Lex had arrived in their lives, Clark had barely been able to go near the girl without turning into a total klutz…and now? She saw how Lana looked at him sometimes, she saw the guilty curiosity around this suddenly confidant, understanding Clark Kent, saviour of her precious Talon.
Not to mention Lex's bad influence on Clark. Oh, there hadn't been a sign of it yet, but the way Clark was always defending that guy, someone nobody trusted…She was scared that her friend's innate sense of decency and morality might be tainted by too many 'words of wisdom' from Lionel Luthor's son.
" I don't trust him Clark. " She said quietly. "I admit that." She watched as his grit his jaw in frustration, and hurriedly continued in a pleading voice, for the moment forgetting the fact that with all of this, Clark had avoided answering her original question…
"I'm sorry, I know I really have no grounds for it, and yes, I'm probably just influenced by…by prejudice, and by the Luthor reputation….but there's just something too false about him Clark. It…it just makes me wonder what he's hiding."
"Well maybe its not your place to wonder Chloe!" He yelled.
Clark had never raised his voice to her like that. Never.
Oh God, she thought as she sat there stunned. This is it…this is what I've been afraid of…this is Lex's influence finally breaking through.
She swallowed back her tears, her anger, and stood up, clinging tightly to the strap of her purse in a clear indication of her readiness to leave.
"Clark, I know he's rich." She said hoarsely, trying to hide the hurt, the bitterness, "And I'm sure when he arrived in town with, with his flashy cars, his suave 'worldly-wise' attitude, and that damn ego, that you were impressed-"
"Chloe-"
"No, listen!" She begged. "Listen to me Clark…I'm sure that when he started showering you with attention, whatever his true motives were, that you wanted to take the opportunity to escape from this small-town life for a while – I know, because to be quite honest, I cant say I wouldn't have felt the same in your position."
She advanced a little and looked at Clark with pleading eyes.
"But as much as I respect you, and…care for you Clark, I can't help but think you're just blinded by the money and the power. I don't think you allow yourself to see the true character of the guy behind it all."
There, she'd said it. Said what Clark had always suspected deep down that she'd thought, but always told himself she could never say…He'd always told himself that she would think more of him than that, that she wouldn't think him so damned gullible.
The words were out of his own mouth before he could stop them.
"You really think I'm just some innocent, boring, naïve farmer's son, Chloe?" His voice was full of feeling as he leaned in close and said quietly, "You have no idea who I am anymore."
And with that he was stalking away, furious at her, at himself, of how he'd taken all his rage at his situation out on her.
~ ~ ~
Chloe was still holding back the tears as she made her way off the Kent farm. Just as she was heading out into the road though, she found herself face to face with Martha, just coming back from some work in the fields. Luckily she was too busy carrying a load of tools in her arms to pay much attention to the young girl's pale face.
" Oh hi, Chloe, did you catch up with Clark?" Martha asked.
Chloe struggled to keep her voice bright and chirpy, the way everyone expected her to be.
"Oh yeah Mrs. Kent, though he was looking, ah, a little worse for wear…" God she just wanted to get out of here. She wanted to get away from whatever change Clark had gone through, form all the questions racing around in her head…the most prominent of them: what could possibly have happened in one night?
Martha was smiling.
"Ah well you didn't see him when he turned up this morning."
It was incredible how such a casual, light-hearted comment could cause such a cold dread to come over Chloe.
" This…this morning?" she asked quietly.
Martha laughed as she readjusted the load in her hands, propping them up against the fence. She rolled her eyes.
"Oh, apparently Clark's knowledge of cocktails left a little to be desired, and Lex had to put him up for the night in a spare room. Hardly the sort of guest I raised my son to be but…well, he seems to be feeling the effects." She whispered conspiratorially. " Accident or not, I don't think he'll be going after the liquor again."
All Chloe could do was nod and smile, and eventually give her goodbyes.
She took the burden of those words with her on the long walk home. For she knew Clark well…and this last year or so, there'd of course been the odd occasion when they could have got their hands on some alcohol if they wanted…they were teenagers after all. But Clark had never been into it. Not ever. He always mumbled something about wanting to stay in control.
If Clark had stayed out all night, it wasn't because he'd been drunk.
Innocent. Naïve. Boring. All the things Clark had basically said he wasn't any more, his voice full of anguish at her view of him.
There was no way on earth Lex Luthor could look at Clark as an equal. No matter what Clark said, she would always agree with Pete that Lex must just find simple, inexperienced Clark Kent amusing.
Chloe was not naïve. And she was starting to make a career about jumping to conclusions, because in Smallville, those conclusions were usually right.
She saw it all now, everything coming into place with what appeared to her to be a terrible clarity
Oh, Lex Luthor had looked after Clark last night all right. He'd probably smirked triumphantly as he hired some slut to make sure his young friend had a real good time.
She wanted to be angry with Lex, with Clark for being such a fool. But all she could do was try to keep the sobs from pouring out as she thought of how Clark could possibly put his Lana infatuation aside for some girl he'd just met, but not give her, his closest friend, a second glance…
TBC