South Of The Kingdom
...how much time can
be left before...
we'll turn away, and
begin the life I've heard tell of?
The light is less, there. One of us
has betrayed the other.
-Carl Phillips, "Just South of the Kingdom"
Chloe wakes up shivering, pulling the silk sheet over her naked body and curling up into a ball. Lex isn't in the bed, but she expected that. He said something about an early meeting in London and not being there when she woke up.
Some women might resent that. Chloe's learned to deal with it and has actually done it to him a few times, just to even the score.
A blast of wind almost sends her sheet flying off the bed, and she turns over to see that the balcony doors are wide open. A lean figure stands in the shadows, arms crossed and cape flapping in the wind.
She rolls her eyes at how dramatic he can be sometimes. There's never a simple way with Clark.
He steps into the room, blue and red fluttering to a calm as he stands at the foot of her bed. Her instincts tell her to hug the flimsy sheet closer to her body, to hide her shame, but she's just had sex with the richest man in the world and fuck if she's going to let Clark make her feel like she's back in high school.
Outside the city is dark, her clock reads 4:06 in angry red lights, and she remembers that she has an eight AM screaming session with her editor. It's enough to make her growl, "What the fuck do you want, Clark?"
He's taken aback, she can tell, by her hostility, by her blatant nudity, but mostly by the sight of her in the same bed he used to sleep in.
He was looking for Lex, but she knows he won't say it.
Clark tosses a newspaper onto the bed, which she didn't see him pull out and she wonders where on that tight suit he keeps things like that. It's The Daily Planet, and the front page headline screams at her in bold black letters that she's engaged. Engaged to a billionaire playboy, engaged to the most eligible bachelor. Engaged to Lex.
"You should have seen my editor. She was livid. Couldn't believe that The Daily Planet scooped her star reporter's engagement announcement," Chloe tells him as she stares at the grainy picture of her and Lex getting into a limo after some charity event. Something to do with sick children. She can't really remember.
"I know," Clark finally says. "I wrote it."
Chloe glances at the paper again, skims for the byline, and smiles ruefully. "I guess I should have read the thing. Nothing but good thoughts, I hope?"
"Unbiased journalism," he says curtly and folds his arms, puffing out his chest and looking down at her. "You taught me that."
Self-righteous prick, she thinks.
"How did you find out anyway?" she asks and stares up at him suspiciously, meeting blue eyes that can see through walls. He doesn't answer, and Chloe reminds herself to get the walls reinforced with lead. "So what is this, Clark?" she says and her voice is as sharp as knives. She's so tired of fighting but doesn't know how to stop. "Did you come here to warn me about Lex? Did you come here to rescue me?"
And she knows that none of those things are true, because he didn't come here for her at all. He came to see Lex, maybe to convince him not to go through with this marriage, maybe to beat the living crap out of him, maybe to fuck him.
But Chloe doesn't dare say these things out loud, because that is the one subject no one talks about. They don't talk about how Clark might be gay but too scared and too Kansas to ever own up to it. They don't talk about that one night during freshman year of college when he came into her dorm room in tears, whispering that he kissed a boy, oh god, he was so drunk and he kissed this boy, and then fucked her just to prove that he was straight. She didn't stop him because it was what she had wanted all through high school, and maybe the only way to get Clark was to catch him off guard and off balance. Crying and greedy and angry, but it had to be better than not having him at all.
That's what she believed for the longest time, until she walked in on Clark and Lex fucking in his dorm, on top of his desk, too caught up in each other to notice that she had opened the door and then quietly left.
Later, when Chloe wouldn't return his phone calls and locked her door on him, he kept asking why, with those earnest eyes of his, why couldn't they talk anymore like they used to? And she wanted to scream, Because you're fucking using me! but knew that it wouldn't have done any good. He wouldn't get it because he's Clark and he never gets it.
Another blast of cold wind tears through the room and this time she does lose her sheet. She grabs it before it flies off the bed and pulls it back over her naked body. Clark looks away in an attempt to be gentlemanly but they left pretenses behind a long time ago.
"You don't know what kind of person he is. You don't know the things he's done," Clark says dejectedly, and something in his voice tells her that this is from personal experience.
"You mean that he's bad? That he's killed more people than I can imagine? That he's tried to kill you?" she snaps back at him. That last part hurts him more than anything else she could have said. "He knows he can't hurt you. That's why he tries so hard."
Except that.
"Why are you two doing this? What is this about?" he asks almost desperately.
"Did it ever cross your mind that we might be in love?" she says and shivers under the sheet.
"You're not in love. You can't be in love," he replies and goes to close the balcony doors. With his back turned, he says, "He's just using you. He's using you to get to me."
"Not everything is about you, Clark. He's trying to move on."
"By marrying my best friend?" he asks incredulously, turning back around to face her.
She narrows her eyes until they're slits and glares at him. "We haven't been friends in a long time."
"And whose fault is that?"
"Yours! It's your fault, Clark!" she exclaims out of frustration. "For lying to me about everything. About this," – she waves her hand at his costume – "about Lex, about what I meant to you!"
"I didn't set out to hurt you," he says and it's not as much of an apology as it should have been.
"Yet here we are anyway." She clenches her jaw and tells him in a steely voice, "You're not going to stop me from marrying Lex."
Clark is angry, hurt, confused. He looks around the spacious bedroom, at the surroundings that are probably so familiar to him, and he can't comprehend how Chloe is the one that ended up in the bed.
"How did this even happen?" he asks, in a voice that isn't looking for answers. He sounds defeated.
"I was involved with his father," she answers anyway and Clark looks up at her with startled eyes. He's wondering what exactly she means by involved but she won't give him the satisfaction of an explanation. "We all know how dangerous that can be. Lex offered to help me get out of my... arrangement, and I accepted. But then Lionel died, taking all his secrets with him." She says matter-of- factly, "We realized we had no one left but each other."
"You had me," he replies firmly, eyes steady on hers and so sincere she almost laughs at how strongly Clark can believe in something that's just so wrong.
"I didn't have you, Clark," she states simply, not even angry anymore. "You were never there." He takes that in for a moment, sitting down at the edge of her bed and staring out the large windows at the Metropolis skyline.
"He had me," he says softly, and it's the closest he's ever gotten to admitting what really went on between him and Lex.
She blinks in surprise but after a moment, answers stiffly, "I wouldn't know anything about that."
It's a line she's heard a million times before at press conferences and interviews, and it sounds just as false when she's saying it. She's tough enough to yell at Clark in the middle of the night with nothing on save a thin sheet, but for some reason the topic of him and Lex is just something she does not want to deal with. It's too hard, she thinks, to talk about how the man she still might be in love with is really after the man she's supposed to be in love with.
She might not love Lex, but she knows who he is. For all his mysteriousness, she had him easily pinned down for what he really was the first time she met him – a man who had everything and still wanted more. In that way she knows more about Lex than she'll ever know about Clark, and there are a lot worse things in a marriage than the lack of love. There will never be games between her and Lex, there will never be secrets. He knows her too well to ever try to keep any of his shady dealings hidden from her, because that would just pique her reporter interest and he'd read about it the next day in the paper. Keep your enemies closer, they say, and having Chloe as his wife is probably the only way to shut her up.
He has other reasons too, she knows, and not all of them are unrelated to Clark or dissimilar from her own, despite what she said earlier. She might be a pawn in Lex's plot to hurt Clark but that doesn't mean he isn't one in hers.
And the sex is good. She can't forget that one.
Clark is staring at the small Picasso hanging on the wall behind her but he's not really focused on it. His brow is furrowed and his mouth is turned down in a frown, but she doesn't have the first clue as to what he's thinking. For as farmboy and honest as he is, Clark is the one person in the world that she can't figure out. She just can't read him like she can other people, but then again, he's not people. It's so easy to forget that he's not human even when he's in that ridiculous costume of his, because Clark fucks things up in a very un-Superman-like way as well as the next human being.
He turns to look at her, his mouth soft and almost smiling, but there's a hardness in his eyes that she recognizes. He's about to do something cruel.
Clark starts to crawl across the bed slowly, moving closer until he's almost on top of her.
"What are you doing?" she asks breathlessly. He pulls the sheet off her body with one smooth yank, sending chills all over her naked body.
"What you want, Chloe. What I want," he answers and he's close enough that she can smell smoke on him. He must have been saving people from fires before he came here.
"You don't want me, Clark. I'm never the one you want."
He ignores her and kisses her anyway, softly at first but soon he has his tongue in her mouth and his hand on her breast. She breaks the kiss to come up for air and in that one instant he's already undressed, his costume on the floor next to the bed. His lips are back on hers so fast that she barely notices they were gone in the first place.
When he slides into her, she arches her back and grabs the top of the headboard for leverage. Clark is hard and fast and not unlike that first time in college when he fucked her in a drunken stupor. Except this time, she manages to come and although the orgasm isn't as strong as the ones she had with Lex a few hours ago, it's still powerful enough to make her cry out. Clark finishes soon after her, although there isn't the rush of warmth inside of her like there usually is with human men. That had been her first clue back in college that there was something severely different about Clark, even more so than what she had suspected in high school.
Whatever softness and tenderness he possessed to seduce her in the first place is gone now. His square jaw is clenched and he looks angry, although she can't tell if it's at himself or her. Probably at Lex.
"You should leave," Chloe says evenly.
"I want what I came here for," he answers tersely and in a flash is dressed in his costume again.
"What exactly is that?" she asks even though she knows that the answer is Lex. He came here for Lex but settled for fucking her instead and she thinks that she will always be a pawn in somebody's plot to hurt somebody else.
Clark doesn't answer. She looks towards the bedroom door and tells him, "Mercy probably heard me."
Sure enough, there's the pounding of footsteps muffled on carpeted floors that grow louder and closer. Mercy kicks the door open, a gun in her hand and she aims it directly at Clark. Chloe can tell that she's not surprised to see him, because they all know there's no one else in the world who could have reached the penthouse of the most secure building in the city. Clark stands in the middle of the room with a haughty smile on his face and his arms crossed over his chest. Mercy matches his smirk with her own.
"These aren't metal bullets in this gun," Mercy says and even Chloe doesn't need super-vision to see the faint green glow coming from the barrel. Clark eyes grow wide and then he's gone in a blur of red and blue, the balcony door slamming violently behind him.
Mercy looks over at Chloe, at her messy hair and sweat-soaked sheet, before lowering the gun.
"Mr. Luthor is not going to be happy about this," she tells her in a clipped voice and slips the weapon into the waistline of her uniform.
"Tell him whatever you want. It won't make a difference anyway," she answers and waves her hand to get rid of Mercy, who leaves without saying another word.
Mercy's fierce loyalty to Lex is enough to make Chloe jealous, although not in the way a fiancée should be. She envies the simplicity of Mercy's feelings, her ability to cast aside any and all other thoughts about the man she loves to do the one thing that he wants from her in the first place – her job. Chloe thinks it'll never be that easy for her with any of the men in her life. It'll never be as uncomplicated as them wanting and her giving, or the other way around.
Chloe falls back onto her pillow, exhausted in ways that don't have anything to do with sex. She wants nothing more than to fall asleep and then wake up tomorrow, pretending that none of this happened. She knows that Lex will come back from his business trip doing the same, and they'll keep up the pretense that this isn't about Clark because that's just what they do.
But the sun is rising, and she has to go to work soon. Chloe throws opens the balcony doors and steps out into the crisp air of early morning, wrapping herself in the sheet. Far in the distance, she can hear the sirens of fire trucks.
She pretends not to search the skies.