Everything In This World

By Viv

*~*~ Part Five ~*~*

"Chloe?"

Chloe muffled a scream as she leaped up from behind the tombstone. Her heart drummed furiously in her ears against the stillness of the cool night air as she beheld a dark form in front her, slim and slight but eerily still, like a creature lying in wait for prey. She brought a hand to her thumping chest, breathing deeply as recognition dawned. "Lana?" She gasped.

Lana emerged from the shadows, a sheepish expression adorning her face. "Did I scare you?"

"Ah ... not really." Chloe brushed back messy tendrils of blonde hair as she straightened herself up. "At least, not in the me dying from shock kinda way."

"Sorry." Lana said quietly as she appraised Chloe's still shocked expression. "It's pretty easy to creep up on people in a graveyard."

Chloe raised her eyebrows. "You don't say."

Lana laughed sheepishly, folding her hands into the pockets of the dark grey fleecy jacket she wore on top of her pink t-shirt. Her normal curtain of perfectly straight, dark brown hair was tied up in a practical ponytail, wisps escaping to curl slightly over her delicate features. She looked like an extremely messy China doll in sweats.

She stared penetratingly at Chloe with beautiful, iridescent coloured eyes, and for the first time Chloe understood why the male population of Smallville had such an entrenched fascination with Lana Lang.

"This may be a stupid question, but ..." Lana began, her forehead creasing in concentration, "what are you doing here?"

Chloe was about to retort by asking the same question, before she recalled Clark telling her about Lana's regular nocturnal visits to her parents in the cemetery. "I was ..," she rolled her eyes at her own stupidity, "I was feeling lonely, and maudlin, and depressed so I thought I'd come soak it up. The depression that is."

"And you couldn't do this during the day?" Lana smiled faintly, and if it had come from anyone else Chloe would have described it as patronising. But with Lana ... it was hard to tell.

It suddenly struck Chloe how much Lana was a mystery to her. A mystery to even the entire town maybe. On the surface, Lana had everything - the beauty, the personality ... the intelligence. Sure, she had had to deal with growing up without her parents, but despite that Chloe knew that half the girls in the town would swap places with Lana in a heart beat. To everyone that looked at her, saw her, she was the perfect girl, because she was beautiful and intelligent and had compassion and warmth to spare.

So much so that it had been easy for Chloe to just take her at her word. To mistake Lana's image for the real Lana hiding underneath. Lana seemed so open, so guileless in her genuine warmth towards others, that it had been easy to believe that was all there was. To take for granted the fact that Lana was pretty much an open book; that because Lana was open and friendly, she actually *was* open and friendly.

But now Chloe realised that in fact, Lana wasn't quite that open. In a flash of understanding, Chloe could see that everything had been buried under the polished veneer of the fairy princess, the perfect cheerleader, the perfect Prom Queen that she had wrought for herself. And even though half the time she wasn't any of those things, the unreality of her aura clung to her, refusing to be shaken off or discarded.

Lana was wrapped in an isolation of her own making. Cozened away from the world because she was ethereally beautiful, delicate, graceful, friendly and genuine. She was unreal.

"Do you feel sad, Lana?" Chloe asked abruptly.

Lana frowned. Chloe was satisfied that she at least looked a little put out. "What do you mean?"

Chloe shook her head, unsure of why she was saying these things, unsure of why she wanted to know more about Lana so badly. "It's just ... you always look so happy. You know, with everything ... nothing seems to touch you." Lana looked on, her face expressionless, her very immobility and stillness annoying Chloe enough to continue. "I know you must have problems like everyone else ..." she drifted off, quickly recalling the many meteor-induced situations over the past year, "but you always seem to come out unscathed. You never put a foot wrong, everyone loves you or wants to be you, and through it all ... you're just there. You're Lana."

Lana's eyes hardened, and Chloe was surprised by the vehemence that came out of her voice. "Yeah ... I'm just there." She took her hands out from her pockets and folded them roughly across her chest, turning away from Chloe as she spoke. "I'm perfect. Like somebody's dream ... I'm not real."

Chloe was stunned by the bitterness in Lana's voice. After a while, Lana asked her, "You know what happened last year, with the Nicodemus flower?" Chloe nodded slightly, recalling the bits and pieces of information that were lodged somewhere in her brain. She knew that Lana had been infected with the flower, and that it had made her do things that she normally wouldn't have done, like wanting to cut a few classes with Whitney and trying to seduce Clark.

Lana continued in the same, deathly bitter voice. "I did all these things. I didn't remember at first, but the memories came back to me a few days later. I wanted to cut class with Whitney. I tried to seduce Lex ..." Chloe's brows shot up in surprise. "... I offered to go skinny dipping with Clark. I felt so free." Lana swivelled just enough for Chloe to catch the hardness of her expression in profile. "And people thought that was okay, because I was infected."

Lana swung gracefully on her heels, staring intently at Chloe as she approached her. "You see, it wasn't really me. It wasn't really ... perfect Lana ... doing all those things."

Chloe blinked. "And ... was it you?" she asked, not sure whether she really wanted to know the answer.

Lana smiled, a strange half-mysterious, half-tortured smile that Chloe could never have imagined gracing Lana's face if not for the fact that she was actually witnessing it now in front of her. Chloe swallowed several times, licking suddenly dry lips as her mind whirled with Lana's revelations. It seemed strange that Lana had chosen to confide in her, especially now with the Clark situation standing between them. They had been getting closer before the whole Prom debacle last year, but ever since then Chloe had been careful to insulate herself against Lana and Clark as much as possible.

"I'd like to think it was."

With that Lana strode past, leaving Chloe standing in the middle of the deserted cemetery, furiously wondering whether she had just witnessed a side of Lana Lang that no one had ever glimpsed before.

(c) July 2002