Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
It started with a tulip. Okay, so it really started with a tulip, a cheesy line about being from the future, and a smile. It was cute, and she was willing to admit that a guy (even an obviously on the immature side one) showing her some attention with no apparent evil plans to try to take over Smallville or to attempt to kill her was a nice change of pace. She wasn't naive - she knew that there had to be something up with him. Her money was on him being a runaway. (The Kents tended to be magnets for strays.) She had smiled and enjoyed the moment and then went on about her day.
There was a typically vague excuse for both his presence and his disappearance, and she figured that she would never see him again. She was right about that, but she still saw traces of him. The first occasion happened after the whole debacle with Mikhail Mxyzptlk. There was a tulip just sitting there waiting for her at her desk with a slip of paper wrapped around the stem. For one brief moment of insanity, she had thought it might be from Clark. The signature at the end of the note quickly disabused her of that notion. He had left her an email address along with a repetition of his chorus of compliments. She was torn between being concerned and admiring his persistence.
She wrote to him (although parts of her better judgment told her that it was a really bad idea). Her last attempt at keeping in touch with someone via email had not ended very well. She did it anyway. She wasn't sure that she really expected him to write back, and she was saddened by the fact that she found herself making lists of his potential ulterior motives. She was distracted by other things soon enough. She did, after all, live in Smallville where the chronic drama of life only ever seemed to let up in the summer (which it most definitely was not). The two of them were writing back and forth on a regular basis before she even realized that it had happened.
There were sporadic deliveries of a single tulip that appeared in different places (including one on the pillow of her bed that she felt was crossing some sort of an invisible line). He would never tell her how he was making that happen in the same way that he was never specific about where it was that he was. She figured that Metropolis was plenty big enough to hide a multitude of runaways (and close enough to arrange for the occasional flower delivery). It was another mystery in her life (and she already had plenty of those to juggle), but his messages made her smile.
She found herself venting to him after the LuthorCorp toxin incident (most details omitted because she might enjoy having someone in her life who she actually felt listened to her, but there were still some things that she just was not going to discuss with someone who was still practically a stranger). She had a whole slew of suspicions that she had no practical ways to confirm or dismiss after Alicia had arranged for Clark's display, but she kept all thoughts along those lines to herself.
The emails became her constant in all of her confusion about Clark. How was it that she could feel like she knew her friend so much better and so much less all at the same time? She looked forward to the four or five minutes that she could take every time that a new email appeared to just pretend that everything else didn't exist. It felt good to be able to laugh over his silliness and respond in kind and not feel like there was something huge hanging over her while she did that.
She had sent him a copy of her article and a snarky description of the whole prom queen issue, but she had not heard anything back from him before she was getting ready for the dance. She was hardly in the best of moods, so she could not decide whether it was a shame that he hadn't sent some teasing comments to make her smile or it was just as well because she would not have been in an appropriate humor to appreciate them.
Then, everything went crazy.
He had been doing better about the whole stealing thing, but there was that whole precedent about desperate times and desperate measures. If ever there was a desperate situation, it was the one that was happening in the school that he had just sped away from in search of appropriate supplies. Chloe all dolled up with a crown perched on her head sitting all by herself watching everyone else dance was nothing short of a crime.
So, he was in a desperate situation. And, it wasn't really stealing. He was borrowing. He was definitely borrowing. The whole outfit would be returned before the proper owner even realized it was gone, but he knew that the type of rescue mission that he was about to engage in required something out of his normal realm of hoody and sneakers. He was back at the door of the auditorium before he realized that he had forgotten something else. Another quick trip found him standing in the doorway deciding how best to handle this. He had plenty of lines (not that they usually worked the way that he wanted them to), but he liked to think that the two of them were beyond lines by now.
She was smart and funny, and he liked to think that they had become friends. What he needed in this moment was for that wistful look that he had glimpsed on her face earlier to completely disappear. He hadn't meant to actually stop and stay. It had been another one of his run bys on his way to somewhere else that he had taken to making a habit. He liked the smile that she got when she thought no one was watching her when she noticed another one of the flowers that he left for her.
He was glad that he had decided to try again after the initial brush off, but he hadn't quite worked up the courage to talk to her in person again. The whole electronic communication thing seemed to be working for them, and he didn't want to do anything to mess that up. He had not been able to resist the lure of peeking in at her prom though, and the look on her face had sent him scrambling into a change of plans. He could do this. He could make this night better.
He worked his way up behind her and leaned forward to place the tulip on the table in front of her. She spun around so quickly that for a moment he thought maybe she had siphoned off some of his speed. There might be awkward explanations or questions coming, but he would field them as they came. The expression on her face was totally worth it, and he had a feeling that there might be a lot more face to face appearances in their future.