Come Sail Away, Chapter 1

Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Epilogue

Clark/Chloe
Season 6
Rating: PG-13
6100 words
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the CW and DC Comics, not to me.
The music is "Come Sail Away," by Styx.

I'm sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea
I've got to be free, free to face the life that's ahead of me
On board, I'm the captain, so climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow on every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on

A perfect world doesn't need a Superman. - Geoff Johns, Infinite Crisis

Clark Kent drifted slowly over the dark, silent cornfields. This floating thing wasn't as hard to master as he'd feared. He wasn't having any trouble keeping his altitude, and he'd only lost his concentration and fallen twice tonight. He was keeping pretty close to the ground, only about thirty feet up, just in case it happened again. Because even though he was invulnerable, he didn't really enjoy slamming into the dirt. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it was... unpleasant.

The problem was, he couldn't figure out how to go faster, and he couldn't really change course. He'd worked at this for several nights now, but he just wasn't sure how to change his trajectory and speed. Right now it was a lot like sailing-- he went where the winds took him. There was a light breeze tonight, and it gently pushed him to the east. It was a slow way to travel, particularly for a guy who could break the speed of sound, but he didn't mind. It was relaxing.

Besides, he didn't have anything better to do on a Friday night.

He tried to push the bitter thought aside. There had been a time when he would have hung out with his best friend Chloe Sullivan, but now she had a boyfriend. Jimmy Olsen. A really nice guy who just happened to make Clark's back teeth grind together. Not that Clark was jealous, not at all. He just happened to find Jimmy annoying.

But he was happy for Chloe. Really. He just kind of missed her sometimes. There had been a time when he'd hung out with her almost every night. And now he only saw her a few times a week, and usually only for a few minutes at a time. They still called each other every day, but that wasn't quite the same thing.

The truth was, he missed her an awful lot.

He was trying to carry on with his life without seeing Chloe on a daily basis, but it wasn't easy. The boredom and loneliness had driven him to new pursuits, namely, the floating. He'd been hanging out in his loft one night, very, very bored, and very, very lonely, when he'd glanced at the open window and thought: I wish I could just float away. Impulsively, he'd stepped out of the window into the spring night.

And found himself hanging in midair.

He'd taken to drifting across Smallville's fields every night, before the moon rose in the sky. He didn't want to be spotted, because it was hazardous to his health to be seen doing weird and inhuman things like floating in midair. That kind of thing could get him locked up in Belle Reve, or a LuthorCorp lab, if he wasn't careful. And until he figured out how to go faster and change his trajectory, he couldn't just duck out of sight if someone saw him.

His mom would kill him if she knew he was doing this. She'd always raised him to conceal his abilities, and to take no unnecessary risks. She was even more paranoid about it now that she was a state senator, with a whole lot to lose if anyone discovered her son was an alien from the planet Krypton.

But he couldn't not do this. Now that he knew he could float, he needed to figure out how it worked, and how he could control it. Every time he'd developed new powers, they'd been kind of erratic for a while. It invariably took some effort to learn to control them.

He'd been drifting through the night in a kind of trance, his mind drifting along with his body, but suddenly his superhearing became aware of footsteps beneath him. He stared intently at the ground, but couldn't see anything in the darkness, since night vision wasn't one of his abilities. But there was definitely someone down there, silently stalking him.

He thought about drifting to the ground to confront them... and suddenly he was falling.

He slammed into the ground hard, grunting as the air was driven out of his lungs. Falling to the ground didn't hurt him the way it would hurt a human, but he didn't particularly like it, either.

Footsteps ran toward him, and he rolled over to confront his stalker.

Chloe Sullivan was smiling down at him.

"The floating's pretty good," she said. "But I really think your landing technique needs work."

Read Chapter 2 here.