4
Chloe would rather relive the day of Clark and Lois's first not-wedding than walk into the small room that had been afforded to her and George for the night. She stood on the threshold, unable to cross, until George noticed her and nodded. Gesturing to one of the twin beds, he sat down on the other. "Come in Chloe, we need to talk."
She swallowed and took her place on the bed closest to the door. It was a battle to force herself to look him in the eyes. "Where do you want to start?"
George sighed and surprised her a little by staying calm. Perhaps all the shocks had overloaded his system. Of course, George was good in an emergency; in his line of work, he had to be. "Have you ever told me a single true thing?"
"I wasn't lying these last five years. You've been the first man in my life to treat me like more than a convenience, possession or an afterthought. I do love you for that."
He nodded, "But at first, I was convenient for you."
Chloe sighed and started to pick at the threads on the bedspread. "At first, you were what I needed to keep Christopher safe, yes. It was easier to hide his real identity with a father in the picture than me alone."
"I see."
"Then you were so good to us, especially to Christopher, and how could I not love you for it?"
"Apparently not enough to explain the lies you'd created, Chloe. I want it all now. I want the truth flat out from you. What don't I know about you still?"
She laughed, a bitter, brittle sound. "Everything."
"Chloe-"
"No, I'm serious. I...'Elizabeth Cochran' is an alias. I was born 'Chloe Anne Sullivan' in Metropolis in 1987. I moved with my dad to Smallville, Kansas in the fall of 2000 when he got a job managing the fertilizer plant that was one of the original acquisitions of LuthorCorp, back when it was all agricultural."
George was still, his face showing no reaction. "Then where did 'Chloe Sullivan' go?"
"I...it's a decade long story. I can't possibly hit all the high and low points in a single conversation. I can give you the big spots."
"Please do."
She sighed. "Clark and I have been best friends from before he ever hit his first real growth spurt. No kidding. The day I met him, he was barely taller than I was. He showed me around the middle school and his farm and we'd been friends ever since. I...if we're being honest, I fell for him the first day. He was so sweet and earnest, not at all like the types I knew in the city."
"And did you know then that he was different?"
She shook her head. "Smallville was a bizarre town, before Queen and Wayne Industries and LuthorCorp all took turns cleaning up the rocks there, they'd managed to poison the town-higher cancer rates of course-but something else."
"I don't understand."
She sighed and pulled at another thread. "The rocks were mutagens. They changed people, gave them powers. To be honest, we spent a lot of high school just trying to graduate in one piece. You name it, it happened: werewolves, fat sucking vampires, kids who could paralyze you with a touch. It went on and on."
"Werewolves?"
"Rock-induced powers, not in the traditional sense, no," she clarified, thinking of Kyla.
"Alright, I'm following, I think."
"We were on the paper with our friend Pete and then a little in our senior year when Lois had to repeat a grade that fall. I...we sort of Scoobied around a lot."
"Scoobied?"
"We investigated the weird and unusual in Smallville and brought it to light. The thing that's always been true about me, that would always be the truth about me, is that I'm a reporter. Mom reported for The Metropolis Journal and I always knew I was going to be a journalist too. I didn't know for sure Clark had powers, no, but he was always the one on the scene saving people. He'd come up with the worst excuses, but I couldn't prove he was different and it scared him so badly for me to press him. Somewhere along the way in ninth grade, I just started accepting that 'adrenaline' made him do it. Then a mutual friend of ours set Clark up."
"How?"
"She...Alicia wasn't very stable…the meteor rocks come with that. A lot of the people changed by them are mentally ill," she said, taking a few deep breaths, trapped thinking about her mother before she could continue. "Alicia was one of them, but she wanted people to know about Clark so he'd be out like she was. I...she set up this car accident with us in it and teleported us out last minute. Clark showed up and caught a car, an honest to God car in front of me and then I knew for a fact what I'd always suspected was true."
"Then you what? Became his sidekick?"
"I didn't tell him for the longest time. I wanted him to come to me with it. After everything with Alicia...she was killed in a hate crime of a sort...it hit me how hard it had to have been for him. People really hated her for what she could do, for what she had done, and I think I realized how scared he was of people hating him too or worse."
"Like the way Flynn wants Christopher," George supplied.
"Yes. So I let him tell me in his own time. I don't think he was ever going to, if you want to know the truth, but, long story short, I sort of got dragged to the tundra the first time he ever activated the Fortress of Solitude."
"The what of what?"
"It's not as threatening as it sounds," she hedged, having no idea to explain its apparent ability to block out the sun should it be programmed to. "It's an archive of knowledge from Krypton. Clark found a way to build they day we graduated from high school but I got beamed there with him and he couldn't lie anymore. I...we made a very good team and his mission sort of became mine. I didn't have an ability; I was just a gifted hacker and researcher, sort of the brains for his muscle. Not that Clark's not smart. It's more that he works better bouncing ideas off of someone else, like a sounding board."
"And you had to 'die' because?" George asked patiently.
"This is where it gets complicated."
"Gets?"
"Tangled," she corrected. "I had a latent meteor rock infection. I used to be able to heal the dead. I saved Lois after she'd been stabbed once. Lex Luthor too after a near fatal shooting. It burned itself out basically by the time I was 21. I really only had the ability for little over a year. It was enough time for the wrong types of people to notice me, to have been taken and experimented on for over a month. For a while, I was pretty fucking traumatized, quit journalism, tried to be counselor for the meteor infected who still had active abilities. I was terrible at it by the way. It wasn't me. It's when I started losing myself a lot. It's when a lot of things started falling apart."
He frowned and glanced at the door, as if searching something out. "Your work life or your personal one?"
"Both," she said, refusing to acknowledge that she was crying. "I can't even begin to explain this to you but I'll try. Once upon a time, Doomsday wasn't just a monster but was tied to a human being, a total Jekyll and Hyde deal. He stalked me, became infatuated with me, and none of us knew at the time it was Doomsday, least of all his human side Davis. I was confused and adrift and got comfortable with him as friends and he wanted more to it and it just got so out of control. I was getting married to Henry Olsen, well I called him Jimmy. However, that year I was getting married to him, and...I just...it was a mess. Davis wasn't capable of love, but he was obsessed. Details left out. He killed Henry and Henry managed to kill Davis and Clark blamed himself for the whole mess because he didn't eliminate Davis when he had the chance because even if Davis was tied to Doomsday, he was human, and Clark doesn't take lives. He can't."
"So Doomsday, for lack of better terms, killed your first husband?"
She nodded. "Henry worked at the DP with Clark and Lois, had worked there with me when I still was an employee. He was Clark's friend and Clark took it hard. I took it worse because I blamed myself too and it was my fault. I could have made so many different choices. I could have stopped Davis before it got too far, I know I could have. I...that's when everything changed between Clark and me, inside of me, with him. I don't think either of us have really been ourselves since."
"Okay, following," George said.
"I got obsessed with the Justice League. It had disbanded after everything with Doomsday, so I started building it back up. I created the first real base for it in Metropolis, in an actual Watchtower. The satellite's named for it. But I did it so wrong. I didn't have a life or a balance or an anything. It was me and monitoring the city with this computer and satellite system that could hack anything sixteen or eighteen hours a day. I didn't sleep; I lost a bunch of weight because I wasn't eating. I lived in the city but barely spoke to Lois and Clark and I were talking, nominally. When he needed help with his mission, I gave, but we weren't friends anymore. We couldn't trust each other. I started doing extremely unethical things-no one died or got hurt-but they weren't the right way to run Watchtower either. I eventually even shut the whole Tower down and begged Clark to let me quit."
"Did he?"
"He talked me back into it for running recon in a battle with Zod, actually, but Clark's always had that way with me. He'd say that he needed me and I'd crawl through lava, do anything no matter what it cost me."
"You said Clark was different?"
"The Blur, obviously that was who he was before Superman came around, same symbol, same M.O. For a while he was good at it, and then after Henry was murdered, he changed. He was cold and hollow and emotionless. He'd gotten training at the Fortress and cut himself off from his humanity. When he came back later that summer, he wasn't the boy I'd known at all except in one way."
"Which was?"
Chloe laughed again, really braying was more like it. "He was in love with a beautiful girl with long brown hair. He has a type, you know. The unattainable and the inhumanly gorgeous. When we were in high school and college, he'd been in love with Lana Lang and everything revolved around her."
George frowned. "Like the gossip from Linda Lake?"
She nodded. "It was probably more sordid than she got if you want to know the truth. That didn't last for a lot of reasons, but he rebounded and I honestly don't know when. He left the Watchtower after Henry's funeral swearing humanity made him weak and when he came back to the city Lois was all he would think about besides patrolling." She laughed again. "He'd pole vaulted from Lana to Lois and hadn't spared me a glance. It was so hard that year and I think it drove my seclusion more if you want to know the truth. If I even left the tower, tried to be social, I'd see them together. Even at 'work,' he'd hem and haw and worry over telling Lois his secret when she was obviously so hot for the Blur she'd have loved him more for revealing it. It burned."
"Chloe-"
"It burned that I wasn't good enough and I tried to date again, to find solace at first with no strings sex with Oliver and then he was pressuring me for more, talking about 'I love yous' and gifts and just everything in between. I think people say shit like that when the world is ending, Lord knows he did with Zod. I'd be lying to myself even if I didn't admit that half of why I faked my death was that my life as 'Chloe Sullivan' wasn't worth living."
"What was the other half?"
"I was told that something bad was coming for the League and that one of us had to go underground, stay apart from it, because when the time came we couldn't all be together. I faked my death and erased every record there'd ever been of 'Chloe Sullivan' and hid for seven months and when the VRA backers in the military took the others, Clark included, I swooped in and saved them. I just didn't have the energy to go back to life at the Watchtower, once I'd been really freed from it, to lose myself again, to become someone so Machiavellian and cold. So I left Smallville and tried to work for a while at The Star City Register. I even was married for a few months to Oliver Queen. It started as a drunken mistake at a bachelor party. We tried to make it work, but he married whom he thought was good old Watchtower and couldn't handle the reporter side of me I was re-embracing and I, well, I'd faked my own death to stop being so hot and heavy with him. It wasn't ideal."
"Where the Hell does Clark being Christopher's father even come into this between Henry, Davis and Oliver and Lois on the other side?" George asked, his patience wearing thin.
"Everything I've ever done, since I was thirteen years old, has been because of him. Whether I did it to spite him or to curry favor or even to try escaping him, it's always been about Clark and I think it's as pathetic as you do, trust me, but I can't stop. God knows I've tried. I 'killed' myself to escape it. I moved across the planet. I can't make what I feel stop and probably never will. I...leaving Smallville after I saved the Justice League was because of Clark, oh God was it ever. I could have been a reporter at the Planet. Tess would have hired me; we were friends of a sort."
"But you didn't want to be."
She was crying full out now, feeling like she was sixteen again and walking into Clark's loft the night of Lex and Helen's rehearsal dinner. "I was never going to sign up again for a life where I had to watch him be happy with someone else and smile and encourage and act like a door mat. I did that for eight fucking years with Lana. Then I did it for almost a year with my own cousin who'd never given Clark the goddamn time of day before she found out he was the Blur. I mean, there was a bit of something there around the time of my wedding to Jimmy or Henry, whoever, but I think it was more Lois realizing she wasn't the one ahead in the getting married department even though she was older than I. I mean, she jumped so fast into fangirling the RBB and then was obsessed with The Blur. Sycophantly so."
She stopped and took long, deep gulps of air. George watched and waited for her to calm but made no move to comfort her. She couldn't blame him.
"Whenever you can," he said.
She nodded and, tears streaming down her face, began again. "I couldn't be at the DP. I couldn't. She was already top reporter there, everything I'd wanted, and I have to start back with an alias and a new look in the fucking basement on the helpline. I'd have to work and try and readjust to a career I'd lost, all while she was getting assignments to see the mayor. I'd have to watch them at lunch across the cafeteria, pretend not to notice them coming rumpled out of closets. I couldn't do it. I'm only human, lost powers or not."
"So you buried 'Chloe Sullivan' and her mission as field operator at Watchtower and tried to make do with Oliver and The Star City Register ."
"Yes, and even after Oliver and I called it mutually off, even after I was used to being single again, I could have made it there. I was doing well at the Register. I had my own slot in the foreign affairs section and was working my way into a weekly column, I know I was."
"Then what happened?"
"Lois broke up with Clark. They'd tried to get married the day Superman came out, but everything with Darkseid and the planet heading toward Earth...obviously was not the day to get married, you know?"
"I can see how that'd complicate things."
"So they set it aside for about a year, just take a year to get used to life engaged in the city and the new demands 'Superman' was putting on their time and on their schedule."
"She dumped him because he was never around?" George asked and it was a good enough guess.
He'd been a decorated lieutenant for the Gotham City P.D. before going into foreign service, starting at the Hong Kong embassy before making his way to Singapore. Chloe knew her husband had had tons of friends get divorced because the rigors of the cop lifestyle. It was something she half-hoped he'd understand, that hiding Christopher had been more than even sparing feelings, that it had been also about her mission, about protecting Clark. She'd been the go-to girl for the JLA for so long, for her best friend for so long, and, even now, there were secrets that weren't hers to tell.
She nodded. "I…it's hard. People live for the job. The League's not different from the Gotham P.D., George. You know that. For the League it's even worse. There's no one but us. If there's an invasion or a natural disaster? No one is really capable of dealing with it but us."
"People like the Joker or Clayface or whoever too?"
"Yes," she said, rocking back and forth on her heels. "There's this group of amazing people I was loyal to first, you know? Their mission has always been my mission, since I was just in college. I don't know how not to be the job , even if I mostly just consult."
"So you were being a noble cuckold?" he asked, tone bitter.
Ouch.
"I was doing the best for a son with a heritage no one could ever know, and for my best friends whose secrets I promised to keep. Like I said, it's the price of being a hero. It's driven a lot of people from me. I guess you're the latest. It almost ended Clark and Lois, even after they were this close to being married."
"So your cousin had Superman, and she dumped him out of the blue?" George asked, blinking back in confusion.
She laughed. "Clark's not as impressive as you'd think, but I guess you'd have to have known him twenty years to get that."
"Seems like it."
"StilI," Chloe continued, "I honestly don't know what Lois was thinking. She kicked him out of the apartment and he had no place to go but to my spare bedroom. Whatever mood swing she was in, it only lasted two weeks and all was well again in Lois and Clark's Dreamland."
"But he was staying with you and-"
Chloe nodded and swiped at her eyes. "I'm only human, right? He might not be, technically, but I'm not infallible. Hell, neither is he. He's no saint; don't let the cape fool you. I tried so hard the first week but I had come off of three years of romantic upheaval between two annulled marriages and a psychotic alien stalker and he was so upset and he saw me. God, I know that just once he finally saw me as not just best buddy Chloe and I caved. I knew it was a mistake the minute I did it. I knew things like that don't happen to me. And I was right because he was back in her bed the moment she beckoned for him."
"Jesus."
"Yeah, and I was okay with that. I made the mistake. I forgot the first rule of my relationship with him, which is he doesn't love me like that. I just let myself believe something that wasn't real. I was going to be okay, really. I had my day job at the Register and by night I had a protege of sorts I was training for the League."
"You're serious?"
Chloe nodded. "Yeah, she eventually moved to Gotham after I left the States. She changed costumes and is acting as Batgirl currently but she's a phenomenal hacker, far better than I ever could be."
"Whoa."
"Yeah, but I got pregnant and the side effects set in and I couldn't even lie or hope it was somehow Oliver's, which would have been an impossible mathematical stretch anyway. By the time I was eight weeks in, I was exhibiting super strength."
"So you ran?"
She nodded. "I had Oliver call in a favor at the DP and was in Singapore within seventy-hours of realizing I was carrying Clark's child. You know the rest."
"I...you said you were two months along when we got married."
She shook her head. "I was five, maybe twenty-two weeks, but I wasn't showing much yet. I'd already been underweight from years of living on coffee and stress. My friends in Metropolis would have noticed the weight gain. You didn't know the difference."
"And I was your dupe. The next way in the line of Henry and Oliver for you to get away from Clark Kent?"
"At first. I couldn't let them know. Clark and Lois...they were happy and they didn't deserve my mess. Lois didn't deserve what I'd done, and I needed a way to hide Christopher not just from them but from men like Flynn."
"Like I said, I was convenient."
Chloe sighed heavily, and rubbed her nose. "Yes, at first you were. I didn't really expect to like you as much as I do. I...in a world where there'd never been a Clark in my life, you're exactly the man I could have loved the way you deserve. I do love you; I am fond of you."
"I'm just not him?"
"You weren't worth the secret. I've carried a large burden on my shoulders since I was eighteen years old and everything that falls to Hell around me is the price I pay for the honor."
"You sound like a groupie."
"I'm not, but someone has to protect him. Lois pays her prices. Lord knows she's an abduction magnet for every whacko with a grudge against Superman. Clark's human parents paid it like crazy, especially his father. Lana. Me. We all pay the price for knowing him. The loneliness is mine and, after I was fired from the Planet in college, I thought it would be my fucking career too. For a while I had you and Christopher and then I had The DP again and my Pulitzer. It was more than I'd hoped for."
"Not what you wanted."
"I don't get what I want. He doesn't love me. He can't love me the way I love him. So I just get to try moving on. I swear to god that's what I was doing with you. Trying to make the best out of my life."
"And what? You were going to hide from me forever the fact that Christopher wasn't my son? I mean how long has he been invulnerable and strong, Chloe?"
"I didn't know...I don't even think he knew he was invulnerable until this morning. But I've been helping him hide his strength for about two years."
"Were you ever going to tell me or was it going to be some joke you two played on me. The 'daddy doesn't know' game?"
"I know I'd have had to tell you when he got his heat vision. I was waiting it out, frankly, until he was a teenager. Even if he is biologically Clark's, I wanted him to be yours, for you to raise him. I didn't even want it to be a question who you were to him because you're an amazing father and because Christopher worships you."
"How generous of you, Chloe," he said, shaking his head. "What a mess you've made."
"Believe me, I know."
