Notes: Takes place in season four; post-"Blank", let's say. Refers heavily to events from season three's "Crisis."

Exigency

Chloe peered through the windshield of her red VW Beetle as she drove through a light rain. "SMALLVILLE 102.," she saw on a road sign. "The signpost up ahead reads, The Twilight Zone," she intoned gravely, and then whistled a few notes of that show's famous theme. Then her cell-phone rang, so she fished it out of a litter-filled cup-holder and answered it.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Chloe." It was Clark. They chatted briefly, then she half-listened to a short tirade about Lois Lane, then she said goodbye and replaced the phone. God, what a long day--and there were still a couple hours of driving before she was home and could plop herself into a nice hot bath. What an utter waste of time this trip was--why would that jerk make her drive all this way if he had nothing useful to tell her? She switched on the radio--at least she could enjoy some big-city radio for a while before she was out of range; Smallville had a very limited selection of stations. She was scanning her way through the FM band when something just ahead and a little to her left caught her eye, just as she heard an odd rumbling noise; she looked up and was confronted by a terrible sight. An eighteen-wheeler (the trailer had slewed to the side so that the emblazoned LuthorCorp logo was visible) had crashed through the barrier on the overpass above and was plunging toward her.

"Oh, shit," Chloe said, and swerved.

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From the April 29, 2005 Smallville Ledger:
HIGHWAY ACCIDENT KILLS HONOR STUDENT
...Chloe Sullivan, 18, an occasional contributor to this newspaper, died instantly when her car was crushed by a runaway LuthorCorp transport. The driver suffered severe injuries but is expected to recover...

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Clark Kent sat in his loft, alone, staring vacantly out the window. When he had gone down to breakfast, his parents had looked thunderstruck; they immediately sat him down and told him what had happened. He had protested--didn't they remember how we all thought she was dead last year? No, there had to be more to it, something unexplained that someone had missed. He went on like this while his parents looked at him sadly. Inwardly he felt it, though; this had the ring of truth. Chloe hadn't been blown up or murdered by a meteor freak--she had died in a car wreck. It was too ordinary to be a lie.

He did have to be sure, though. He had super-sped his way into the morgue at the Smallville Medical Center to see for himself, and it had broken his heart, to see her mangled body lying there.

Now he sat, and thought. He really couldn't take this, her being dead again. The future stretched out before him, looking grey and bleak without his best friend. He still had people he loved and who loved him, and life would go on--it just wouldn't be much fun.

This was the second bout of grieving he had done up in the loft this year; Alicia Baker had been murdered in the winter. And back then, in thinking about how, before, he had always gotten to his friends in time when they were in danger, he remembered something; that someone else he loved had once died and he'd been able to undo it. Lana had been killed, shot in the back by Adam Knight--one day forward into the future. Before her death, though, she placed a telephone call to Clark that had been received at two separate times; the present, and one day earlier. If he could do what she had done, contact himself in the past, he could avert the tragedy. But how?

He had failed, before; a little less than three months ago. The idea came to him late in the day, perhaps too late, or perhaps Lana's call had been a one-in-a-billion convergence of variables, impossible to reconstruct. Originally, the utility pole outside the teen center had gone down in a storm, falling into a pool of rainwater containing shards of Kryptonite. Clark had tried to recreate this at home; with the reluctant aid of his father in handling the meteor rock. Electricity, telephone lines, water, Kryptonite; he had tried, and failed, not knowing why. He had attended Alicia's funeral the next day; Chloe had come over and comforted him at her grave.

Now it was Chloe who was dead, and he would try again--what else was there to do?

He felt like crying, and restrained himself. "Focus." he said aloud. "Mourn her later." Okay; what could he do to improve his chances this time? Well, he would make the attempt earlier; it was less than twelve hours since the accident. What else? He didn't know--and Chloe was the one he called when he needed something figured out. But was there someone else who could help? The image came to him, of a dark-haired girl sitting at a counter, intently reading a book entitled Theories of Time Travel.

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Lana Lang had called Clark just as he was reaching for the phone to dial her number--she had just heard the news herself. She was crying, and a little incoherent--Clark told her to stay there and he would come over, and she was still crying when he arrived.. He led her outside and into the truck, suggesting they go for a drive.

They had been on the road for a couple minutes when he asked, "Lana, do you remember Adam Knight?"

She stopped sniffling and went quiet, seemingly stunned, then angrily started, "Clark, why on earth would you bring up...of course I remember--"

He cut her off. "He killed you, in the future--but you placed a call that reached me, in the past, and I stopped it."

Lana looked at Clark, taking in his calm, almost cold-blooded demeanour. She was now thinking clearly for the first time since she had heard about Chloe, and she understood, and said tenderly, "Oh. Oh, Clark. I'm sorry, but...I don't think it's possible."

"No; it probably isn't. Gives us something to do, though," he said, a touch sharply. Lana gave no response to this, and they drove on.

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The Kents were away from the farm--they were with Gabe Sullivan. Clark and Lana sat on the porch, where he was telling her about his failed attempt at trans-temporal communication following Alicia's death.

"...and I wasn't thinking very clearly at the time--I might've gotten things mixed up."

Lana was feeling better now that she had something to work on, and said, "Okay; what happened with me before was this: I called the teen center at the same time the telephone pole outside came down. The call went to the cellular transmission tower, then along the telephone wire, and--"

"--through a pool of electrified water containing Kr--meteor rock."

"Um, right, and then to the crisis-line telephone that you answered. But that's just what we know about. Atmospheric conditions could've played a part; there was a storm going on. Or it might've been the time of year, the position of the Earth--."

"But you're right; we don't know about any of that. We can't generate a storm, or change the rotation of the planet."

"No, we can't. Clark, there's also...did you ever consider the possibility that it did work before, with Alicia, but you just weren't able to do anything to prevent her death? You barely got to me in time, even with a warning from the future."

Clark actually hadn't considered this--he did so now. It was possible, of course. He had certainly failed her the first time; why not the second?

Lana echoed that thought. "You aren't infallible--it only seems like you are, sometimes,." she said with a small smile.

He looked at her balefully for a moment, then something occurred to him. "Wait, if this had worked before, wouldn't I remember getting that message and then failing to save Alicia?"

"Maybe not. Who knows if we can affect the reality we're currently in? You might have saved Alicia in the past and not ever known anything about it. Sending a message back to yesterday and preventing Chloe's death might just create a time-line where she lives, in addition to the one you and I are in, where she died. We'd just...go on without her, not knowing if we'd succeeded."

Clark was getting frustrated. "Even if this worked, Chloe would still be dead, here?"

"Maybe, but if so, at least she'd be alive somewhere. Or somewhen, rather," she added diffidently. "Or perhaps we can change the events in our own past. Then, I guess, we would cease to exist--everything that's happened in the past twenty-four hours would suddenly...not have happened, if you follow."

Clark didn't, not really. In his defense, he hadn't seen very many time-travel movies. "So...wait. Wouldn't we lose..." He tried again. "Would we just vanish, and become the Clark and Lana from yesterday, with no memory of this?"

"I guess so. Look, I'm flattered you think I have the answers to these questions, but I only read one book, and they were theories of time travel; no one's actually done it. That we know about, anyway."

His patience ran out. "Well, this isn't getting us anywhere," he said, standing up. "I'll pull down the power and telephone lines; you go inside and get the meteor rock. There's some in the hall closet, on the top shelf; it's in a metal box."

END PART ONE