Breaking the Day

Title: Breaking the Day
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Angsty Chlark
Spoilers/Timeline: Post Season 7
Disclaimer: I own very little, certainly not these characters. Please don’t sue!
Author’s Notes: Written spoiler-free after season 7. Twisted therapy for the question of what would happen if there was no rescue.

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He finds her in the last place he thought to look.

Naked as the day she was born, she glides confidently across the black depths of Crater Lake. The pre-dawn haze would render her anonymous to anyone but him.

A consummate city girl, Chloe Sullivan was always terrified to swim in water she couldn’t see. He only stopped here because he was out of options.

“Chloe?” He calls, not sure what should come next.

She turns at his voice, treading water steadily.

After watching him a moment, she cuts a clean path through the water until she reaches the shallows. Then she stands and stalks toward him without a hint of embarrassment.

“Clark.” Her voice is steady, but after all these years, he recognizes the knife edge to it.

Her eyes dare him to comment. Something tells him he’ll regret it.

“I waited for you.” He offers instead.

“I told you not to.” She runs a hand through her hair and twists the ends over one shoulder. She’s still soaked and it takes every ounce of willpower to keep his gaze on her face.

“Like that ever stopped you.” He retorts.

“That was…before.” Apparently, it is as bad as he thought. He held out hope that he’d failed Chloe again and somehow gotten her release date wrong.

“Chloe, let me take you home.”

A mockery of a smile twists at her features. “You forget, Clark. I have no home.”

“Then you can stay with me.”

“Why?” She advances until her breasts brush against him, her voice dropping. “Why would you want to take in a stranger?”

“You’re not a stranger, Chloe. You’re practically family.”

“Oh, but I am, Clark. You don’t know me, no matter what you think.” She drops the smile and plants a hand on his chest before pushing off and bending to retrieve her dress. The anger isn’t hard to see.

“You don’t know me.” She repeats, slipping the sundress over her head. “I doubt you ever did.”

“Of course I know you.”

“No. You don’t know what I’m capable of. What I’m willing to do to survive.” His stomach drops at the tears in her eyes.

“I don’t believe you.” He whispers. “You’d never betray me.”

“You’re right.” The smile makes a shaky return before crumbling a bit. “But I don’t have much of a problem betraying myself.”

He wants to be sick when she stalks back over.

“You want some company at the farm, Clark? It’s been five years. I had to learn some pretty amazing tricks to survive with a $2 million price on my head in a minimum security facility. If you’re lonely, I’m happy to compensate you for the trouble.”

“Chloe, no.” He’s not ashamed when his voice breaks.

“Don’t you dare.” She grinds. “Don’t you dare pity me. I made it. I survived, damned it. I should be dead a dozen times over, but I’m not. So don’t you try to feel sorry for poor Chloe. Poor Chloe did what no one could. What you weren’t willing to do. She beat Lex Luthor at his own game.”

She’s still breathing hard, and he can’t check the tears.

“He took five years of my life. God only knows how much more from others. He almost killed you and he wouldn’t have stopped going after either of us until he was dead or incapacitated. What I did? Was mercy.”

He thinks of the last time he saw Lex, curled into the tightest ball possible in the corner of his cell. It’s not hard to imagine what Chloe shared with him when he finally came to finish the job personally. Obviously, even the billionaire’s most brilliant researchers didn’t anticipate that particular quirk to her gifts.

Not for the first time, Clark curses Lex’s bigotry. If he hadn’t been confined to a Kryptonian coffin, he could have freed Chloe in a heartbeat, protected the purity that used to shine in her smile.

All that’s left is single-minded determination. Even that seems to have failed her now that Lex is incapacitated and Clark is free.

“Give it to me.”

She recoils, and it’s the first sign of real emotion since he found her rotting away in federal prison.

“No.”

“Please.” He’s not ashamed to beg. The burden of guilt is too big, and anything is preferable to being responsible for the light going out in her eyes. Inaction was her undoing.

She squares her jaw, and he aches at the gesture. “It’s mine. Not yours.”

“But I…”

“You nothing, Clark. You can’t fix this, and I’m not willing to.” She takes a shaky breath. “It’s mine, and you don’t get to take that away from me.”

He nods, not understanding in the least, but terrified he will lose her completely if he pushes. She follows him back to the truck and the ride to the farm is silent.

The girl he loves is fading away before his eyes. The night lingers, and Clark fights the urge to clutch at her physically to be sure she’s not just a figment.

He wonders, if Lex hadn’t planned so well, what today might have held for the girl who could never let go and the boy who was always too late. He tucks those dreams away to the rhythm of her heartbeat and wishes for daybreak, instead.

End