Saving Me, Chapter 1

Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

Manip by Khyla. Used by permission of the artist.

Clark/Chloe
Season 5, after the episode "Void." Follows my story "Beyond the Sunset."
Rating: PG-13
19,000 words
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the WB and DC comics, not to me

Prison gates won't open up for me
On these hands and knees I'm crawling
Oh, I reach for you
Well I'm terrified of these four walls
These iron bars can't hold my soul in
All I need is you
Come please I'm calling
And oh, I scream for you
Hurry, I'm falling...

Show me what it's like
To be the last one standing
And teach me wrong from right
And I'll show you what I can be
And say it for me
Say it to me
And I'll leave this life behind me
Say it if it's worth saving me
-Nickelback, "Savin' Me"

Trust Me, Book 1

Chloe:
Clark Kent and I have been friends forever, and until recently he seemed like a nice, normal Kansas boy to me. But he's not. Not quite, anyway. Ever since the day I learned Clark’s deep, dark secret, he’s always worried I might be in danger. I always laughed at his fears and told him he stressed too much.

But today I had to admit that it looked like maybe Clark was right.

At eight fifty-nine this morning I’d been pelting headlong across the Met U campus, my heavy bookbag on my back and a covered coffee cup in my hand. As usual, I was late for my journalism class. Classes should never be scheduled before eleven, in my opinion. Or maybe noon. Yeah... noon would be even better.

At any rate, as I was zooming across campus, wishing I could run as fast as Clark, this truck stopped next to me. A big guy wearing a ski mask jumped out and made a grab for me.

Guys who intend to ask you out on a friendly date rarely wear ski masks, so I threw the coffee cup into his face, then dropped the bookbag off my back, grabbed it by the strap, and swung it into his stomach, as hard as I could.

He yelled and doubled over, but another guy popped out of the truck and caught me by the wrist before I could get the bag lifted for another blow.

He slammed his fist into my temple, and that was the last thing I knew.

When I woke up, I was in a little cell with three metal walls and a door of iron bars. Not the Hilton, for sure. Not even big enough to be the county jail. I stood up, ignoring the pain in my head, and started to stalk around the cell, trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

“Hello?” I called. “Anyone there?”

“Ah, you’re awake.”

The voice was masculine, but sounded as if it had been distorted mechanically. No face peered through the bars to go with the voice, so I guessed the voice was coming through a speaker.

“Yeah,” I answered, in my sharpest, don’t-mess-with-me voice, “I’m awake. And I’d like to know why the hell I’ve been brought here.”

“I want you to tell me everything you know, Chloe Sullivan.”

I sighed. Obviously some story I was working on for the Daily Planet, the big Metropolis newspaper, had come back to bite me on the ass. I started running through my mental checklist of the stories I was working on, but couldn’t come up with anything so damaging or dangerous that someone might be willing to kidnap me over it. “Any particular subject?”

“Clark Kent,” the disembodied voice said. “I want to know everything you know about Clark Kent.”

I went cold all over. Clark Kent’s been my best friend since eighth grade, but I only discovered he was an alien from the planet Krypton this year. This is information Clark doesn’t voluntarily share with his closest friends, let alone some guy who hires oafs in pickup trucks to kidnap girls off the street. I don’t blame him for being secretive. If I were superstrong, superfast, and could start fires with my eyes, I probably wouldn’t go around advertising the fact, either. Some people are surprisingly intolerant about that kind of thing.

“He’s my friend,” I answered, keeping my voice level. “He’s lived on a farm in Smallville his whole life. Not much to tell, really.”

“I think you know quite a bit more, Miss Sullivan,” the voice said. “And you will tell me all of it. Or you’ll die a very painful death.”

Oh, joy. And to think half an hour before my biggest worry had been that I was late to journalism class. Now I had to worry about dying a painful death, and even worse, dying a painful death before I got my first full cup of coffee. It made me wonder why I'd bothered to get up this morning. And it sure as hell made me wish I'd drunk that cup of coffee faster.

Something I once said to Clark came back to me: I’d die before I’d betray you, Clark.

It looked like maybe I was going to get the chance to prove I really meant it.

Read Chapter 2 here.