Open Your Eyes, Chapter 3

Clark/Chloe
Season 8, MHE for "Legion"
Rating: Adult. If you're under eighteen, please go elsewhere now.
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the CW and DC Comics, not to me.
Read Chapter 2 here.

Chloe felt much more like herself once she'd showered and changed. Clark had given her an old pair of his mom's jeans, which were loose, but not too bad, and a yellow t-shirt. She pulled on the clean clothes, finger-combed the tangles out of her wet hair, and headed for the door, stepping over the bloodied wedding gown that lay in a heap on the floor.

All that dark burgundy marring the pristine white satin made her shudder. Ugh. She couldn't really remember the wedding, no matter how hard she tried. When she focused, quick, scattered flickers of fear and screaming and blood echoed dimly in her mind.

Her wedding day was supposed to be the happiest day of her life, and yet all she could remember were brief flashes of horror, like the disjointed memories of a nightmare.

No. There was more. She concentrated harder, and managed to remember walking down the staircase, with Clark beside her. He'd been smiling, and she'd smiled back, happy to be next to him.

The memory was strangely vivid in her mind, and she wasn't sure why. It was as if the only time she'd been Chloe Sullivan during the entire wedding had been while she was on Clark's arm.

She focused harder, and remembered dancing with Clark, remembered him smiling into her eyes as they talked. She couldn't remember what they'd been talking about, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that they'd been together, their arms around each other, staring deeply into each other's eyes...

You're not married to Clark, she reminded herself. You're married to Jimmy Olsen. And he needs you.

From something Clark had said, she'd formed the impression that Jimmy had been very badly hurt, and had been flown to a specialist in Star City. Chloe might not be quite certain how she'd wound up married to Jimmy, but she didn't like the thought of him being that badly injured, either. She knew she needed to fly out to see him.

She wasn't even sure how she'd wound up married to Jimmy, but since she'd apparently gone through with the wedding-- or at least her body had-- she figured she had an obligation to provide some support to the poor guy.

In the meantime, though, she was hungry. A techno-exorcism could do that to a girl. She headed down the stairs, but hesitated at the sound of voices, pausing a few steps from the bottom.

"God, we are so lucky." The tenor voice of Garth, the redheaded kid. "If we'd killed her--"

"Shut up, Garth." The dark-haired guy, Rokk, who was apparently the leader. "Kal has superhearing, remember? Or don't you know anything about history?"

History? Since they were concerned about "Kal" overhearing, she guessed Clark was doing some cleanup in the barn, or otherwise not in the kitchen. She cautiously took another step down, instinctively avoiding the stair that had always creaked. She knew as much about the Kent house as Clark did.

"I don't think any of us knows a damn thing about history." The woman's voice. "If we did, we wouldn't have ever considered killing Kal's..." Her voice trailed off, as if she were listening intently. At last she spoke again.

"Come on down the stairs, Chloe. We know you're there."

Busted. Chloe wondered if the woman-- Imra, they'd called her-- had superhearing like Clark. She went the rest of the way down the stairs, and stuck her head around the corner. The three of them were congregated near the refrigerator, sipping cautiously at Cokes.

"Feeling better?" Imra asked.

Chloe nodded. "Yes. But I'm still very confused."

"You will likely never recover all of those memories," Imra said. "Brainiac has been taking over your body for much of the past several months, according to what Kal has told us."

Chloe settled down on a stool and cocked her head. "Why do you call him Kal?"

A sudden, guilty exchange of looks. At last Rokk said, very carefully, "How much do you know about him, uh, Chloe?"

She noticed his hesitation before her name, and frowned a little. "I know all his secrets," she said. "But the question is, how do you know them?"

A long silence. At last Rokk spoke.

"We're from the future," he said.

Chloe's first instinct was to roll her eyes and snark, Uh-huh, sure you are. But she remembered the note of horror in Garth's voice as he'd whispered, "We could have totally altered everything."

At any rate, she'd encountered an awful lot of strange things over the years. So she held her snark firmly in check.

"How far into the future?" she asked instead.

"The thirty-first century."

That, Chloe thought, was a hell of a long way to have traveled. "And you came back to help Clark get rid of Brainiac?"

"Only because someone from our century interfered," Rokk answered. "Otherwise we would have let history run its course."

She nodded. "So you're not supposed to interfere with things."

"That's right."

"Has anything been altered?"

Garth snorted. "You ask a lot of questions. I guess that's why you're a reporter."

She blinked at him, surprised that he knew about her erstwhile career. "I'm not a reporter. Not any more."

"You're going to be," he said, earning himself another bonk on the head from Rokk.

The idea that she might go back into journalism, and even be remembered as a journalist, pleased her, and she offered him a cajoling smile.

"So am I ever going to work for the Planet again?"

Rokk stepped slightly in front of Garth. "The less you know about your future, the better," he said firmly. "As soon as Kal gets back, we'll say our goodbyes and get going."

She understood why it was probably best if he didn't tell them too much about the future. Even so, she couldn't quite help voicing a protest. "But there's so much we could learn from you."

Imra smiled at her.

"Kal already knows everything he needs to know in order to achieve his destiny," she said. "And so do you."

Read Chapter 4 here.