Everything In This World

By Viv

*~*~ Part Eleven ~*~*

Chloe's good mood had officially been shot to hell.

She wandered aimlessly around the Torch office, unable to concentrate on anything work-related. Her mind couldn't stop whirling and analysing the implications of what Clark had revealed to her that morning. It was just so unreal. Her mind had gone through a thousand permutations of how Clark might theoretically discover his (very well hidden) feelings for her, but this just happened to not have been one of those said permutations. Hence, Chloe was kind of confused.

Scratch that, she was definitely confused. And in turmoil and panicked. Did she also mention that she was confused?

She was telling herself over and over that this wasn't happening. Not now that things had been going marginally well for her.

"Knock, knock." Lana's soft voice echoed in the silence of the office as she entered. "We missed you at lunch today." Lana smiled as she sat down. "Pete was loudly lamenting the fact that he was short one best friend."

"Are you sure he wasn't actually lamenting about his short best friend?" Chloe joked, trying to dispel the gloom of her own mood. "You know I can get kind of annoying at times." She shuffled her hastily notes back and forth in front of her.

"Do you want to go get a coffee?" Chloe abruptly said.

Lana's eyes widened in surprise, but she quickly recovered. "Okay." She looked at the messy state of Chloe's desk, notes and journals opened and tagged haphazardly everywhere. "But don't you have work to do?"

Chloe waved her protest away. "I can't really work right now."

Immediately Lana's face transformed into one of concern. "Is everything okay?"

Chloe bit her lip. This was definitely something she couldn't tell Lana. Insanely jealous as she was of Lana's beauty and popularity, she nevertheless knew that there was a genuinely nice girl lurking underneath that glamour and beauty. Chloe liked to think that she was a better person than that.

"I'm just down ... generally. That's all." She quickly put her coat on, a bizarre fur covered creation she had picked up on a rare shopping trip at Metropolis a few months before. "Okay, I'm ready."

As Chloe shut the door behind her, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was doing something horrible to Lana by the mere fact of breathing and being her friend.

***

"So, what did you want to talk about?" Lana asked as she settled onto the soft, lumpy confines of the couch at the Talon. She looked curiously at Chloe, reaching for her iced coffee on the table in front of her.

"What makes you think I wanted to talk about anything?" Chloe asked, aware that she wasn't doing a very good job of feigning ignorance. These were the times that made her wish that she could lie at the drop of a hat. The ability would be useful as a reporter and god knew that it would have been useful now.

Lana threw her a look that clearly agreed with Chloe's assessment of herself.

Chloe sighed, putting down her coffee. "Do you ever think it's weird that we're friends?"

"Weird?" Lana asked, completely puzzled.

"Yeah." Chloe didn't know where exactly she was going with this. "You know, we kind of have - I mean, we had, the whole Clark thing to deal with. Normal people wouldn't have ... dealt."

Lana smiled impishly. "What makes you think we're normal?"

"Well, given that we're currently living in the meteor capital of America, you're probably right." Chloe dropped her gaze. "But I mean - after the whole me blowing my top at Clark thing. You didn't have to be my friend."

"I didn't -"

"Come on Lana, we both know that you tried way too hard to stay friends with me. Don't get me wrong," Chloe hurried on, "I'm eternally grateful for it - you had no idea how much I needed someone to talk to, but ... why did you try so hard?"

Lana seemed to ponder her question carefully before she spoke. "I guess ... true friends are few and far between. And I didn't want to lose a good friend over a boy, even if it was Clark." A gentle smile graced her face, and Chloe could almost see the halo forming around Lana's head. Did the girl have to be so damn nice and sincere, and - nice?

She made Chloe feel like the devil incarnate, that was, if the devil was a short blonde chick with runaway hair and a modicum of funky taste in clothes.

Chloe swallowed down the bile of guilt that rose up from her insides.

"What's with the twenty/twenty?" Lana asked, her curiosity peaking by the moment. "What's this about Chloe?"

Chloe shrugged her shoulders casually, hoping to throw off Lana's suspicions - whatever they may be. It wasn't until this moment that Chloe realised what a truly nice person Lana was, and what a good friend she had been to Chloe. And now, knowing what Chloe knew about Clark's feelings for her, she felt - and she couldn't emphasise this enough - really awful.

Really, really awful.

"I guess I've always just wondered. You know, I wouldn't have done what you did in your place."

Lana smiled, twisting Chloe's insides into knots of self-loathing. "I'm sure you would've done the same thing in my place." She leaned back as she took another sip of her iced coffee, her lustrous hair cascading like a perfectly groomed waterfall over her shoulders. She still looked confused at Chloe's train of thought.

Lana brows knotted in confusion. "Did something happen between you and Clark?" She asked instinctively.

If Chloe had had the ability to leap out of the chair and zoom away at hyper speed, there would have been a Chloe-sized shape through the window right about now. As things stood however, Chloe was still Chloe which meant that she had to confront Lana's accurate perception head on and lie as best she could.

"No." She swallowed, hating the way her voice squeaked in confusion. There was that not being able to lie to her friends thing again. "Nothing to do ... with him. No Clark confusion whatsoever." She nodded and smiled wanly at Lana, who was giving her a strange look.

Either Lana was preoccupied with her own thoughts or Chloe had credited her with too much perception. Whatever was the case Chloe was relieved when Lana decided to drop the topic.

Instead her frown deepened. She pursed her lips as she said, "Clark disappears a lot, doesn't he?" At Chloe's confusion, she elaborated, "You've noticed it, right? One minute you're doing something with him, the next he says he's got to go."

"But Clark's always been like that. He goes off once in a while to do his ... Clark thing."

"I guess it's a little more noticeable now that we're going out." She gave a small, nervous chuckle. "It's strange. We spend so much time together, and we know each other so well that I would've thought there wouldn't be that much mystery about him. But there is ... mystery I mean. I can't help feeling that there's something about him that he won't ever tell me. I'm scared that no matter how long we know each other or how much I love him, he won't ever tell me. I hate thinking that there's always going to be something about Clark I'll never know." A single tear coursed down the delicate contours of her face. "Most of the time we're so connected, and that's what makes me so ..."

Chloe stretched out and placed a comforting hand on Lana's shoulder as she looked on in compassionate silence. Lana just looked so forlorn and lost and sad. A million miles from the happy, popular image that she regularly portrayed to outsiders. "I thought being paranoid was my deal." Chloe joked, trying to lighten the mood.

It brought a tiny laugh from Lana, as she hurriedly wiped away her tears. "I sound like a wet blanket, don't I?"

Chloe shook her head in sympathy. "No. You're being normal. Clark does disappear - a lot - and gets mixed up in a bunch of crazy stuff with no sane person reason for it. It's weird, it's almost like ... he's got a secret identity or something." She reached out and handed Lana a Kleenex. "Have you tried talking to him about it?"

She nodded mutely.

"And let me guess," Chloe continued, "he says 'I can't tell you what's going on at the moment, but trust me when I say it's important'. And then he runs off."

Lana gave a small laugh at Chloe's attempted impersonation of Clark. "More or less." She looked hard at Chloe, as if struggling with some inner decision. Staring straight into her eyes, Lana said sombrely, "I'm also pretty sure he still has feelings for you."

And for the umpteenth time that day, Chloe wondered what she had done wrong in her previous life to deserve so much guilt in the space of one day.

(c) July 2002