Land of Confusion, Chapter 5

Clark/Chloe
Season 6, following my story "Wherever You Will Go"
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the CW and DC Comics, not to me.
Read Chapter 4 here.

Chloe awakened from a restless sleep with the awareness that something was wrong. She lay quietly, staring into the rafters above, visible in the dim gray light. Outside the barn, the air rang with birdsong.

Dawn, she thought. It was dawn, and Clark wasn't back yet.

Clark?

Tentatively, she reached out through their bond. She felt an awareness of him, the sort of basic awareness she always felt.

Clark was alive. But he wasn't responding.

He was asleep, then, or possibly unconscious. Probably unconscious, she decided, becoming aware of a vague sensation of wrongness. Something bad had happened. She could feel the echo of it through their bond.

Her heartbeat accelerated, and she sat up, rubbing her eyes to get rid of the sleepiness. Clark was in trouble. Somehow she needed to help him.

The problem was that Clark was in Metropolis-- a hundred miles away. Even if she started walking right now, she couldn't be there for days. Unlike Clark, she didn't possess superspeed.

Of course, it was always possible to catch a ride. A few people still had functioning cars, and were able to obtain fuel somehow. But if hitchhiking had been dangerous in the old days, it was virtually suicidal now. And she was pregnant. She had a baby to think of.

But Clark needed her. She could feel it.

She closed her eyes, feeling the echo of wrongness, and made her decision.

Clark was in trouble. And she'd do anything she could to help him.

She always did.

*****

Oliver Queen looked down at the big guy he'd shackled to a metal chair. Ollie had taken up the life of a vigilante a few months ago, when every last asset he owned had been seized-- no, "redistributed"-- by the Luthor administration.

Up until that moment, Ollie had led the life of a playboy billionaire, dabbling in charity and fashionable causes, donating money he could easily spare, and getting lots of publicity and press for it.

In retrospect, it embarrassed the hell out of him how little he'd cared for anyone besides himself. Sure, he'd styled himself as a philanthropist. But the truth was, he'd just been giving money away for himself, because it made him look good.

And God knew he hadn't been giving away much, considering all he had. He hadn't really been putting himself out there for other people. Even after everything went to hell, he hadn't given nearly as much money as he could have.

All that had changed when Lex had seized his assets. Everything he owned, everything he'd inherited from his parents, everything he'd earned on his own, was now going to underwrite Luthor's pet projects, while Ollie was out on the street. And it wasn't just him, either. Every wealthy person in the country had been drained dry by the Luthor administration.

Suddenly Ollie wasn't a world-famous billionaire, who could get anything he wanted whenever the notion took him. Suddenly he'd found himself living among Metropolis' homeless, with nothing but the clothes on his back and his beloved bow.

And he wasn't alone on the streets. An awful lot of people-- the former rich, poor, and middle class-- were right there with him.

Ollie's first reaction to his financial loss had been fury. That was his money, damn it, and he didn't appreciate having it stolen by the snot-nosed kid he'd beaten up in boarding school, even if the snot-nosed kid was now calling himself "President" Lex. Filled with righteous indignation, he'd donned a costume to figure out exactly what the hell Lex was funding with his money.

What he found shocked the hell out of him.

Apparently Lex Luthor had been systematically kidnapping people with weird paranormal abilities and experimenting on them for years. And now he was using the knowledge he'd gained from his experiments, and from the alien invader he'd vanquished, to create superhumans. Superhumans under his control.

A superhuman army.

Horrified by the conditions these poor hapless people were being kept in, and the appalling experiments that were being run on them, Ollie had managed to break a few of them out. And for the past month he and his friends had spent every waking minute trying to help out Metropolis, and trying to undercut Lex's administration. They worked their asses off, trying to save the superpowered and the ordinary alike, struggling to restore justice to the streets of the city.

And then, a week ago, this guy had shown up.

Ollie looked the guy over. He was still unconscious, probably due to the green meteor rocks embedded in the handcuffs. He was a really big guy. Only a few inches taller than Ollie, but built like a brick wall, massive and broad. Not fat, not at all. Just a big tower of muscle.

His head was shaved, the way most guys' heads were nowadays, but you could see a faint shadow on his scalp that indicated his hair would be dark if he let it grow in. He wore tattered jeans, ancient workboots, and a blue t-shirt with a big red and gold S on it. Ollie wasn't sure what the S stood for, but everyone who'd seen the guy had reported seeing the S, so apparently it was important.

Big and muscular though the guy was, there'd been a gentle look in his eyes, an honest, straightforward expression that had made Ollie like him straight off. Even so, he was a little wary. He'd heard enough about the guy through the grapevine to know he had some pretty impressive superpowers, and he wondered if he was one of Lex's creations... or something else entirely.

Ollie intended to find out.

Read Chapter 6 here.