Gone – Forty-Fourth Chapter
Military Base
Rory put her ear to the door as she telekinetically clicked the lock open. Somebody's in there, she told Clark.

Well find out who it is, Clark tapped the side of his head.

Rory focused her telepathy on the person inside. The thoughts were slightly blurry – probably because Rory hadn't used her mind-reading for a while – but Rory quickly realised it was Lois.

Safe, she told Clark before opening the door.

Lois looked up in surprise as the twins slipped quickly inside.

"Considering your father has a yard full of tanks out there, do you really think it's a good idea to be rifling through his files?" Rory asked playfully as she sauntered over to her friend.

"Didn't seem to slow you guys down," Lois replied, going back to the files. "I gotta say I'm impressed, though, that you could sneak onto a military base undetected. Especially with him slowing you down. What are you two doing here?"

"Looking for you," Clark answered innocently. "I think your dad's working with Lex Luthor. I saw one of his cigars in his library."

"I knew it," Lois exulted, grinning. "What do you know? My dad and the king of the trust fund kids."

She put her father's log book on his desk and started going through it as quickly as she could.

"They're trying to cover up something to do with Chloe," Clark told her seriously. "If he finds us in here-"

"I can handle him, Clark," Lois assured him. "Besides, if you think that chopper recital was something, you should have seen the escort I had for prom."

"Wow," Rory said sympathetically, "and I thought my father was overprotective."

Lois smiled sardonically as she said, "I guess when he lost my mom, he kind of cracked, and ever since... well, he's been scared of losing me too."

Clark looked down apologetically and saw a picture of General Lane, a pretty blonde woman who looked a little like Lois, and a little girl who resembled the woman.

Lois glanced over and saw what he was looking at.

"I can actually talk about it, you know," she told him, amused by his sympathy. "She died when I was six."

"I'm sorry," Clark and Rory said simultaneously.

"Don't be," Lois shrugged. "Unless you're the idiot who was driving drunk and crashed into her."

Lois picked up another logbook and handed it to Clark. "Make yourself useful."

Rory leaned over Lois's shoulder, double-checking her logbook.

Clark soon saw something strange. "Nellie Blye?"

Rory frowned as Lois said cheerfully, "I know. Can you believe that after 15 years, my dad is finally getting some action? I'm kinda happy for the old geezer."

"She died nearly 80 years ago," Rory told Lois. Her thoughts quickly jumped to the vengeful spirits Sam had told her of; what did Nellie Blye want?

"But it says in his day calendar that he's been taking R&R with her at least once a week," Lois realised, confused.

"She was one of the first undercover reporters," Rory explained.

"And she was Chloe's hero," Clark said significantly.

Everything suddenly clicked in Rory's mind. Nellie wasn't a spirit, but a codename...

Lois sat at the desk, stunned. She searched for more details on 'Nellie Blye'.

"It says here she's at... 2348 Walnut Street," Lois said, relieved. Her quest was almost over.

She heard a burst of air, and when she looked up, the Wonder Twins were gone.

2348 Walnut Street
Rory and Clark supersped onto the front porch of the house. The door was slightly ajar and they could hear pop music playing inside.

They stepped through the door, ready for anything. A desk with an open laptop on it sat close to the door.

Clark looked up and saw a door at the end of the hallway, bouncing on its hinges... almost as though somebody had just gone through it.

Rory, on the other hand, was looking around. "Clark," she caught his attention, pointing to one of the walls, which was covered in a Wall-of-Weird replica.

"Chloe?" Clark yelled, going closer to the wall.

Rory turned away from it, looking at the laptop. A stain of all-too-familiar red on the carpet caught her eye.

She inhaled sharply. Clark turned to look at her and saw the smear too.

His gaze quickly moved to a second smear, and then to a third on a door. He rushed to the door, bursting through it into a scene from a crime show.

Rory followed him. Inside the room were two apparently dead officers, one slumped against the wall and the other hunched over a chair.

Rory gasped, her hand going to her mouth. Clark went to the man over the chair and checked his pulse.

"Nothing," he said, his voice unintentionally harsh. He looked up at Rory and his eyes drifted to the man now standing next to her.

Rory followed his line of sight and focused on the man.

Lex Luthor.

Kent Farm
"I thought you wanted to go talk to Lionel," Sam said with gritted teeth as Dean began to whistle Metallica for the fifth time.

"Nope," Dean replied, popping the 'p'. "I'm waiting for you to find something. You need to wait here for Rory's call, remember."

"Well, I can't find anything, all right?" Sam responded, agitated.

"Come on, there must be something," Dean complained. "Something LuthorCorp's bought recently. A place she could be hiding out."

"Dean," Sam said, exasperated, "I'm going through properties that LuthorCorp's bought recently, and there's nothing..."

He trailed off as he noticed something in the older records. He leaned forward, double-checking intently.

"What?" Dean asked.

"It says here that LuthorCorp bought an old foundry not long before Lionel was arrested," Sam told Dean absently. "And they isn't being used for anything."

"An abandoned foundry?" Dean questioned quizzically.

"At least it's not an abandoned warehouse. Check it out," Sam ordered him. He quickly read the address of the screen, which Dean repeated back to him before leaving.

Ten minutes later
Rory stood on one side of the room, her stillness a contrast to her brother's pacing back and forth. Coincidentally, this pacing kept him in between her and Lex, who was talking furiously on his cell phone.

"How long does it take to locate her?" he asked angrily. There was a pause and he yelled, "Well, do it!"

He hung up the phone and turned to the twins, unable to stop his eyes returning to Rory every few seconds. "I was trying to protect her," he attempted to explain.

"You had a tracking bracelet on her wrist," Clark pointed out in rage. "You couldn't have thought she was that safe."

"I had to take every precaution," Lex replied staunchly.

Clark stopped pacing and walked straight over to Lex, looking him in the eye. "You looked me straight in the eye and told me she was dead."

"Look, sometimes you have to do the right thing no matter what the cost," Lex said steadfastly, staring Clark down.

"Even if that cost is Chloe's life," Clark shot back, fear for his friend making him furious.

"Clark, if it wasn't for me, Chloe would have died in that explosion," Lex revealed.

Rory stood behind Clark, only half-listening to their conversation. Most of her consciousness was concentrating on stretching her mind-reading power to its very limits, searching for Chloe.

"I felt responsible for Chloe, so I had the investigators watching her," Lex said distantly. "They found a detonating device in the safe house. My father hired someone to make sure Chloe never made it to the witness stand."

Lex's voice faded even further into the background as Rory stretched her mind out, further than she'd ever gone before. She touched briefly on Dean's mind – he was driving out to the old foundry.

Why? Rory found herself wondering, distracted. Using her common sense, she connected the dots very quickly – Chloe was out there, or there was a possibility she was there.

Rory opened her eyes, just in time to see Lex get a message on his PDA.

"She's at –" Lex began, not looking at either of the twins.

"-the old foundry," Rory said with him. She supersped out, not waiting for his response.

Foundry
Dean pulled out his gun and entered the foundry, almost totally silent. He made sure the gun was pointed wherever he looked and began to move quickly through the massive room.

It was full of vision-obscuring steam and pipes.

He had almost reached one particularly bad spot of steam when he heard footsteps, running towards him.

Dean held the gun straight in front of him, ready to fire.

A blonde girl ran through the steam, glancing over her shoulder to see if she was being followed. She turned back and, upon seeing Dean, skidded to a halt.

"Chloe?" he asked harshly.

The blonde asked aggressively, "Why?"

He grabbed her arm, pulling her away and back the way he'd come. She struggled furiously as he explained roughly, "My name is Dean Winchester, I'm a friend of Clark and Rory's."

She stopped struggling then.

Dean kept glancing back at her as they ran; she was very pretty, in small-town kind of way.

Distracted by one of his split-second glances, he didn't see the man until it was too late.

Next thing he knew, there was a hand around his throat. The hand tightened and began to feel somewhat... metallic?

Dean used his failing strength to lift his legs and struck out at his captor. Unfortunately, his efforts seemed futile, and he could feel his breath getting weaker.

He could hear Chloe's gasping breaths next to him and began scrabbling for his spare gun, having dropped the first one when he was grabbed.

He managed to grab a hold of it, but before he could cock it, he was thrown to the side, landing awkwardly on top of Chloe.

Rory
Rory burst through the door of the foundry, Clark only a minute or so behind her. She listened for the thoughts of her friends, taking the most direct path to them as soon as she had their location.

She stopped in an instant, taking in the scene before her. A man held Chloe by the throat in one hand and Dean in the same way with his other hand. Both hands appeared to be made of metal.

The man heard her and threw the two to the side, knocking Chloe out. Dean landed on top of her and the man turned to face Rory, revealing himself to be more of a boy than a man.

Rory raised her hands and forced Metal-Boy away from her, throwing him high into the air. She strode towards him as he stood from the debris his impact with several pipes had created.

He turned, morphing his arm into a giant blade of shining metal. Rory lifted her arms, crossing them and creating a shield to protect herself. Sparks flew from the impact and Rory pushed him away once more.

She made a fist and punched him, hard, in the stomach. However, Metal-Boy turned his whole body into the strange metal and she fell through his body, landing next to a vat of red-hot liquid.

Rory rolled over to face her enemy. He stood over her, lifting his blade arm to finish her off.

Rory lifted her hands in self-defence and fire burst from them, engulfing the boy. He screamed once before his whole body deteriorated into thousands of tiny drops of liquid metal.

Rory half-lay on the ground, holding herself up with her arms and panting.

"Holy crap," she heard a familiar rough voice say. "That was awesome."

She rolled onto her feet and walked back towards where she'd left Dean and Chloe. Clark sped in a second later, glaring at his sister.

She rolled her eyes and said, "I'm fine, Clark."

"I wanna be able to do that," Dean said enthusiastically. "I didn't know you could make fi-"

"Shush!" Rory hissed at him as Chloe stirred.

Clark was beside her in an instant. "Chloe? Chloe, are you okay?"

Chloe opened her eyes and saw Clark. She began to laugh, happiness, relief and hysteria fighting for a place in the joyful noise. She sat up and hugged Clark tightly.

"Chloe, I was afraid I'd lost you," Clark said in her ear, grinning hugely.

Clark helped Chloe to her feet and she saw Rory.

Rory was grinning just like Clark. She held her arms out and Chloe hugged her tightly, taking a while to let go just as she had with Clark.

"What are you doing here?" Clark asked Dean, frowning suddenly.

Dean shrugged. "Sam found out LuthorCorp had bought this foundry. I figured it was worth a look."

"Sorry, uh, who are you?" Chloe asked Dean, bemused yet unable to wipe the smile off her face.

Dean held out his hand for her to shake. "Dean Winchester, remember? Tried to save you, failed miserably?"

She nodded, half-laughing as she took his hand and shook it.

"Come on, Clo," Rory said, putting her hand around Chloe's shoulder. "Let's go."

Kent Farm
Dean walked into the loft, sighing. Smallville was a much stranger place than he'd given it credit – the kind of place where he could almost feel at home, if it wasn't for hunting.

"Dean?"

Dean turned and saw his brother standing at the top of the stairs.

"I saw Jason again," Sam told him, almost timid.

"And?" Dean wasn't in the mood for witty banter or long conversations.

"He'll be here within the next few days," Sam said. "And it looks like he'll be sticking around for a while."

"So, once we run into him, we tell him about Dad, we pack up and we leave," Dean said gruffly.

Sam snorted incredulously. "And how exactly do we do that? 'Oh, hello, Jason, long time no see, eh? By the way, Dad's dead now too, the thing that killed our mother is still out there and we have no way of finding it. Nice to see you, bye now!'"

Dean mulled this over for a minute before saying shortly, "That is perfect, Sammy."

Sam sighed, exasperated. "Dean, look. I know you don't wanna stick around for too long, but I would like to see Jason for more than five seconds, especially seeing as we've come all this way."

"Sammy," Dean had had enough. "I only came out to this place because you wanted to come. And we both know that you didn't want to come because of Jason."

Sam looked at the ground wordlessly.

"Now, look, Sammy," Dean went on. "I'm happy that you like her so much, especially considering A) how awesome she is, B) the fact that she can take care of herself and C) the fact that she can control fire, but you're not going to do anything! So what's the point?"

"The point is I feel guilty, Dean," Sam burst out suddenly. "I mean, did you not see her face when she told us about Luthor? She was scared of what I'd think. Yes, I like her. Much, much more than I should. But the problem is that I think she likes me just as much."

"And you're afraid she'll get hurt?" Dean asked. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Sammy, she's strong and she can take care of herself. So listen. We stick around for Jason, we wait a little while, as soon as I find a hunt we are gone, understood?"

Sam nodded sullenly.

"And then we come back here in between hunts," Dean finished.

Sam's head snapped up to look at his brother. "What?"

"Jason is family," Dean said faux-casually. "We owe it to him to at least keep in touch, right?"

Sam grinned happily.

A/N Hope the whole Sam/Rory being angsty and STUPID isn't annoying anybody too much... but they're going to stick to schedule. I'm writing as quickly as possible, I desperately want to get to the even better parts.

See, now that we've gotten to the fourth season, the next major milestone is... *drumroll* the END of the fourth season! Yeah, not hard to guess, but still. Shall be fun.

And, GUESS WHAT? One of my friends told me that her second cousin is Miles Millar, as in the creator of Smallville Miles Millar! I know! Awesome! I was insanely excited. :o)

I'd just like to say that you guys are seriously the best readers ever. Thank you. :o)

PS – Suspended disbelief rocks, people. Over and out.