Nin (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nindulgence) wrote,@ 2003-04-14 11:14:00 |
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Ninfic (SV): "Siege" (3/3)
Siege (3/3)
Chloe dove for her cell phone. Lex had already donned his heads-up display sunglasses and was listening to a report that he clearly found unsatisfactory.
"Cleon?" she shouted. "Speak up, I can barely hear you--are you back at the station?"
Chloe kept one ear open for Lex's conversation. "Why am I only hearing about this now?" he demanded.
"I stopped to tape an accident at Church and Liberty," said Cleon. "I'm still here."
"Is Redmond clear?"
"No, it's jammed too."
"Then you'd better run for it. Go to the Skyreach Hotel--use the side door we always use--and get Maia to express you to the roof. Promise her tickets to the MetMusic Awards if you have to. I'll see what I can get from here."
From the sound of it, Cleon was already running. "Will do," he replied, and began to sign off.
"Wait!" yelled Chloe. "Do we know who it is?"
"No idea," Cleon panted. "Could be the crazy green guy again, could be the chick with the lasers...could be somebody new."
"Damn." Chloe clipped her cell phone back on her belt, and checked the charge on the mini-cam in her shoulder bag.
To her left, Lex was ignoring his assistants' attempts to drag him inside. "Show me!" he snapped, pressing the left temple of his HUDsuns and frowning in concentration.
Chloe looked up. She had a clear view of the skies along Constitution Avenue, but in every other direction the horizon was blocked by banners, public buildings, and trees. She had to get to more open ground.
She ran down the steps, against the stream of students following their teachers back into the safety of the courthouse, and plowed into a crowd of people still milling around at street level, looking up at the sky and pointing. "Don't be tourists!" she shouted at them, belatedly recalling that most of them probably were tourists. "You can't see him," she explained. "He's too fast."
A few of the sightseers blinked at Chloe in incomprehension; many of them just ignored her. Suddenly, a deeper, more distant siren sounded over the continuing cacaphony of the car alarms.
"Do you hear that?" Chloe yelled. "That's the city Sky Alert. You have to get inside, for your own safety."
One man scoffed at her. "If the guy's faster than a bullet, he's fast enough to stop anything from falling on us."
Idiot, Chloe thought fiercely. "You want to know why these lunatics keep getting away? Because Superman has to keep breaking off mid-battle to look after people like you." Whirling, she caught the arm of a passing teacher. "You--get your students to escort as many of these people inside as they can. Some of them may not speak English--try to make them understand what's going on."
The young man nodded, then called after her as she pushed through the crowd and broke into a run. "Hey, where are you going?"
Good question, thought Chloe, as she sprinted across the small plaza towards the intersection of Constitution and University. At the light, she paused, and glanced over at her own determined face on the "Chloe Confronts!" poster adorning the bus shelter beside her. You look like you know what you're doing, she thought wryly. Care to help me out? Turning back to the street, she flinched at a series of crunches as a driver stopped suddenly and was hit by the three cars behind him. All along University Street, people were pulling over, getting out of their cars and looking up at the sky.
"Get inside!" she yelled at them as she zigzagged around the gridlocked vehicles. "Don't any of you watch the PSAs?"
The roof of the Metropolis Reference Library offered a fair view of the surrounding skies, but getting to it would take too long. It was rare for one of these encounters to last more than a few minutes: Chloe didn't want to risk missing the action entirely. She ran past the library, making for the northeast entrance to Memorial Park.
The little plaza just inside the park gates looked deserted, but on second glance Chloe saw two of its elderly pigeon-feeders, Mrs. Watts and Mr. Penniman, taking cover under the heavy concrete benches. Mr. Penniman waved at her as she jogged past.
Panting a little, Chloe ignored the gentle curving ramp leading up Monument Hill and climbed straight up the hill itself, towards the small rotunda and stylized bronze helicopter of the Vietnam Veterans' Monument. The most recent addition to the park's war memorials, it stood alone at the top of a natural rise that had been built up further when the monument was installed, so that from the circular contemplation garden at the top of the hill, one could now see straight across the park to the city's financial district. Chloe knew from experience that if you climbed the rotunda, the view was even better, but she also knew she couldn't do it without a boost. She jumped up onto the low wall surrounding the garden, and ran along it to the south side of the hilltop. Fishing her mini-cam out of her bag, she squinted at the downtown skyline, looking for signs of Superman under fire.
She caught a few distant flashes, and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the top of the Metrobank tower. It looked like she wasn't going to get much more than that, and Chloe had just resigned herself to being out of luck this time when something exploded directly over the park, momentarily blinding her with the brilliance of its flash.
Disoriented, Chloe nearly stepped back off the wall. She swayed precariously before catching her balance, then blinked and refocused her mini-cam. A cloud of steam was billowing up from Victory Pond: whatever hit it had just missed the park's open-air bandstand. There was no sign of either Superman or his adversary. Chloe stayed on the wall long enough to get a good shot of the pond, then jumped down and braced herself as she scanned the sky overhead. There was no use catching the next blast on camera if she was going to break her neck in the process.
"Not good enough, Chloe," said a hard-edged voice behind her. "Come on."
Chloe didn't take her eye from the viewfinder. "You go, Lex," she replied. "I'm doing my job."
"You can't see him," said Lex impatiently. "He's too--"
"I know he's too fast. But the crazies usually aren't. And even Superman sometimes pauses for a second. Or gets caught on camera when a human eye couldn't see him."
"You'll get a blur at most."
"You don't understand. When it comes to Superman, a blur can lead the evening news."
"I thought you had sworn off...stories like this."
Chloe grimaced, erased the last few seconds of footage, and switched to recording with the sound off. Lex was being circumspect, but on the subject of Superman, Chloe had long ago trained herself to be more than a little paranoid. "Not during a Sky Alert, Lex. Every reporter in the city is pointing a camera overhead right now. It would
look strange if I didn't."
"So tell them you were overpowered," said Lex, and suddenly Chloe felt him wrench the camera out of her grasp with one hand, while pulling her towards the rotunda with the other.
"Hey!" she protested, almost more surprised than angry. Brute force wasn't a persuasive technique she would have expected from Lex: it wasn't his style. Nevertheless, he had her arm in a grip that was bruisingly hard. Lex was stronger than he looked.
"That was too close, Chloe. Don't make me explain the physics of falling debris to you."
"Give me the camera, Lex!"
He held it out of her reach, directly over the flagstones of the garden path. "Get inside or I drop it."
He would do it, too. Lex Luthor seemed to have made it his mission today to sabotage her every story. "I'll get under cover if you give me the camera," she bargained, choosing to ignore the fact that he had already dragged her most of the way there.
"Fine," he replied, yanking her inside. Chloe snatched back the mini-cam, tossed her shoulder bag against the wall, and stationed herself to the left of the rotunda's west entrance, just in time to catch a second flash exploding over the park. This one shook the ground beneath them.
She felt an arm slip between her waist and the archway as Lex came up behind her, trapping Chloe in her position against the wall. "Don't even think about going back out there," he said firmly.
Distracted by the unexpected warmth of him against her back--she had always thought of Lex as being cold as the stone in front of her--Chloe took a moment to process what he had said. Irritated, she turned her head to glare at him. "Much as I appreciate your concern, Lex," she replied evenly, "I fail to understand why you would ditch your own bodyguard in a crisis just to play at being mine."
Lex looked down at her, unfazed. "My assistants are busy herding tourists at the moment. That teacher you delegated looked he could use some help."
"And you? Aren't you supposed to be on the phone with your broker right now, single-handedly saving the MSE from crashing or whatever it is you do during these attacks?"
"Already taken care of."
"That still doesn't explain why you're he--" Another flash, the brightest yet, and Chloe had to concentrate on not dropping the mini-cam as the accompanying tremor knocked them both to the ground. Outside the doorway, clods of grass and earth thudded down on the contemplation garden, snapping stems and burying flowers. Chloe sneezed as the air filled with a haze of dust.
Lex listened for a few moments, then rose to his feet, brushed the dirt off his suit, and extended a hand to Chloe. "If I hadn't come, you would have been outside when that hit."
Chloe snorted. She reached over to her bag, tucked the camera safely inside, then took Lex's hand in a harder grip than necessary as she pulled herself up to face him. "I've survived worse. And the way I do my job really isn't your business."
"But the way I do mine is yours? How fair is that?" Lex hadn't let go of her hand, and Chloe tugged at it experimentally. He still didn't let go. Suddenly Chloe found herself reluctant to press him further on the subject of why he had followed her here.
The ground shook again, just a little this time, and there was a faint gleam outside the northern entrance to the rotunda. The battle was moving away from them.
Chloe looked back at the hand enclosing her own.
"There's something that you and I need to talk about, Chloe," Lex said softly. "I think you're as aware of it as I am, and I don't think we should avoid it any longer." He released her hand at last, and reached for the small Keyring on his left little finger. "I want you to come to the penthouse tonight. I'll be in meetings early this evening, but I can see you at nine o'clock." Lex slipped the ring from his hand, put it into hers, and closed her fingers around it. "The concierge will let you up, and this will get you inside. I'll try not to keep you waiting."
Chloe blinked, and tried to figure out whether she just been propositioned. The situation made it seem unlikely, and the words themselves were innocuous, or could be; it was the velvet tone that had crept back into Lex's voice and the confident intimacy with which he touched her that made the invitation sound more like an assignation than a business appointment. Would it be naive to interpret that as anything but his usual manner--the one that could sometimes make even Lex's presentation of an annual report to his shareholders sound like a seduction--or would it be naive not to? Either way, the masterfulness of the invitation put her back up. "I'm not going to be waiting, Lex," Chloe retorted. "I'm not going to your apartment. And for future reference, there's an old-fashioned thing called actually asking a girl that's been known to go quite a long way towards winning us over to...whatever it is you're suggesting."
Lex smiled thinly. "Don't misunderstand me, Chloe. I need to discuss a certain subject, and you're the only one in Metropolis I can discuss it with. And--because it's a sensitive topic--I'd prefer to talk about it in an environment that I know is secure."
Well, that answered that question--though Chloe noticed he still hadn't asked. "What exactly is there to discuss?"
"As I said, it's sensitive."
Chloe waved at the empty space around them. "We're the only two here. Everyone else in the city is hiding indoors or looking up at the sky. So what is it?"
"Off the record, Chloe."
"It pretty much has to be, doesn't it?" she replied. "If it's that subject we're talking about. What is it?"
Lex studied her face, measuringly, for a moment or two, then tilted his head towards the ruined garden outside the doorway. "It's this, Chloe. It has to stop."
Chloe followed his gaze, uncomprehending. "What has to stop?"
Lex looked back at her. "Everything. The battles, the property damage, the increasing danger to every person in this city."
"You want to stop the crazy-battles? How are you planning on doing that?" Chloe remembered Lex on the courthouse steps, shouting "Why am I only hearing about this now?" into his HUDsuns. She wondered what kind of an early-warning system he had set up for himself.
"Why do the crazies keep coming to Metropolis?"
Chloe shrugged. "To challenge Superman. Because they can't get it through their heads that he's stronger than they are."
"Exactly."
"What do you mean, exactly?"
"Superman's become this city's Everest. They attack us because he is here."
Chloe stiffened. "You're not saying all this is Superman's fault?"
"He may not initiate the destruction. But he is, ultimately, its cause."
Chloe shook her head in disbelief. "How can you say that? You were one of his strongest supporters in the early days, when people were still afraid of him and the police kept calling him a vigilante. And when the mayor came around and gave him the key to the city, you were right there on the platform along with every other big name in the city."
"That was back when he was fighting small-time crooks and stopping accidents, Chloe. No one predicted that catching muggers and saving out-of-control schoolbuses was going to make him--and us--a target for dangerous psychotics from around the globe, not to mention across the galaxy." Lex stopped and took a deep breath. He didn't look any happier with what he was saying than Chloe was to hear it. "Things have changed," he went on at last, "and unless we do something about the situation, they're never going to change back. This city is under siege, and it will be as long as Superman calls it home."
"But he's already called it home. He can't just take that back."
"No," Lex agreed. "But if there were to be a falling-out of some kind, like the business with the city unions two years ago..."
Chloe gaped at him. "You want Superman to break up with Metropolis?"
"Yes."
Chloe laughed, a little hysterically. An image of Superman giving the "Let's just be friends" speech to the mayor had popped into her head. No doubt Clark preferred to moon disconsolately over dark, beautiful Gotham City, she thought.
"Chloe," Lex said sharply. "Consider this logically for a moment. Superman rescues people worldwide, and the crazies he protects us from come from everywhere, even from other planets. If he's a hero for any place, it's Earth itself; it makes no sense for him to attach himself to one city. It was sentimental of him to do it."
"But--where do you want him to go?"
"There are any number of deserted areas on the planet that would make far more appropriate battlegrounds than downtown Metropolis. He could base his operations at any one of them."
"But his fortress is impenetrable. They won't attack him there: they'll keep threatening as many human lives as they can in order to draw him out."
"So let them take some other city hostage for a change. Metropolis has played punching bag for these lunatics for too long."
"You're really serious about this, aren't you?" Chloe looked hard at the man who had once been her rival as Clark's closest friend. Lex wasn't as good at hiding his emotions as he thought he was: the problem for anyone trying to read him lay in figuring out what those emotions meant, given that Lex was always operating on several levels at once.
Something clicked in Chloe's mind and a new idea occurred to her. "Is this going to be your campaign platform? Get rid of Superman? You'll be tarred and feathered. The people love him."
"The tourists love him. Most people in the financial sector are getting tired of seeing their insurance rates skyrocket."
"So you'll get corporate donations. You won't get votes."
"You think Superman owns the working-class demographic? You're wrong. The city unions still aren't happy about the incident with the Lakeside Highway Bridge."
Chloe bristled. "That was an emergency. He and the city both apologized, and Superman has never done anything to interfere with union jobs since."
Lex shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many of them still call him Superscab. Look, Chloe, I'm not saying it'll be a landslide. I know how much he's loved." Lex walked to the north archway as another flicker of light appeared over the city. He looked out for a few moments, then turned back towards her. "A lot will depend on the media."
Chloe stared, then turned away from him and reached for her shoulder bag. "I'm not having this conversation."
"You're a self-declared advocate for the citizens of Metropolis," Lex said behind her. "Use your judgment. What do you really think is best for them?"
Chloe stopped. She put her hand to the curved wall of the rotunda and slowly leaned against it until her forehead rested against the cool stone. Her mind was racing, her heart beating faster than it had in the midst of the crazy-battle.
"Have you talked to him about this?" she asked quietly.
"I think you know that he and I haven't been on speaking terms for some time."
Chloe brushed her hand against the stone. The incisions under her fingers formed names: Hiram Walden, James Walecki, Marlon Walker. Young men of Metropolis caught up in a conflict not of their own making. Chloe wondered where their families lived now.
She turned her back to the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Lex was silent, leaning in the archway, watching her.
"He'll talk with you if you ask him to," Chloe said slowly. "There is something to what you're saying, Lex, and if he agrees with you--agrees that Metropolis would be safer if he were to back off from it a little--then, maybe, your plan could work." She squinted at Lex as another faint flash lit the steel-blue sky behind him. "But if he wants to stay, and you fight him on this...you'll tear the city apart."
"That's your opinion as a reporter?"
Chloe shook her head. "That's my opinion as someone who knows what you're both capable of. He's as stubborn as you are, Lex, and when he feels he's in the right, he can be just as unyielding. Think very carefully before you take a public stand against him."
Lex nodded. "And if worse comes to worst...whose side will you be on?"
Chloe shook her head again and stood, brushing dust from her jeans and jacket. "It's getting late. I have to get some more footage of the impact sites and get back to the station." She slung her bag over her shoulder and was almost out the west archway when he stopped her.
"Chloe."
He hadn't moved, hadn't even raised his voice. Just said her name, and she stopped. Chloe smiled ruefully. She was as bad as that crowd he had quelled back at the courthouse. She was still smiling a little as she turned to face him.
Lex looked surprised. He quirked an eyebrow at her as he shifted against the stone. "If I were to ask you to come to the penthouse--would that really go a long way with you?"
Caught off guard, Chloe nevertheless replied without missing a beat. "Hypothetically, yes."
"In reality, no?" Lex eased away from the wall and moved towards her.
"Yes," answered Chloe. "I mean, no--in reality, no."
"Why the difference?" Lex stood close enough that she had to tilt her head to look up at him.
"I'm a reporter, Lex. I have to remain unbiased."
Lex leaned in even closer. "You've never been unbiased towards me, Chloe. First, you resented me for taking Clark's time away from you and Pete. Then you felt an understandable sense of schadenfreude when my friendship with him fell apart for pretty much the same reasons yours had. You're grateful to me for my help during your father's illness, but you still wonder whether I had ulterior motives for what I did. And you've been attracted to me since that night at the journalism awards, at least, but you're afraid of what might happen if you act on it."
"I'm not afraid."
"You have more passionate responses to who I am and what I do than almost anyone in this city, Chloe Sullivan. So how can you say that you're unbiased?"
Chloe resisted the urge to step back. From the beginning, she had prided herself on being willing to stand up to Lex Luthor. "I can say it because I haven't made up my mind about you. Most people in this city have: half of them think you're God's gift to Metropolis and half of them think you're the spawn of a capitalist Satan, but the point is that they've already decided that you're one or the other. I see elements of both in you, Lex--the person who wants power because of the good he can do with it, and the person who wants it for its own sake--and I know that you're not one or the other...not yet. And I won't decide which one you are until you do."
Lex's eyes widened, but otherwise he barely moved a muscle. He just stood there, watching Chloe, too quiet and too close.
"Absolute objectivity," he said at last. "That's a noble goal. But you're forgetting something, Chloe."
"And that would be?"
"That it doesn't exist. In reporting, as in science, the act of observing influences the event observed. And what you see," Lex murmured, gently brushing a fingertip along the arch of her eyebrow, "depends very much on what you look for."
There was a moment when Chloe thought he might say something else, then he glanced at the watch on his upraised wrist and eased back a little.
"And now we both have to go," Lex said matter-of-factly. "Keep the ring, Chloe."
"Keep the what?" Chloe followed him out into the dirt-littered garden as he headed for the path back to the courthouse. She set her bag down by the garden wall and reached for her mini-cam. "I don't have the--" She trailed off as she looked down and saw the Keyring to Lex's penthouse on her right ring finger. She couldn't for the life of her recall putting it on.
"Huh. Must be my inner klepto coming to the fore. Hold on a second."
Lex wasn't stopping.
"Lex!" The ring wasn't coming off easily, but there was hand lotion somewhere in her bag, if she could find it. Lex turned, but kept walking slowly backwards, with his hands in his pockets and a very faint smile on his face.
Chloe stopped tugging at the Keyring. She glanced down at the platinum band consideringly, then gave Lex her most challenging look. "If you leave this with me, you know what I'll do with it."
"I have a fair idea."
"I'll use it to sneak into your home office while you're out and snoop through your files."
Lex didn't stop smiling. "My files are well protected."
"I might get lucky," countered Chloe. "I'm a very experienced snooper."
"I'm willing to take that chance," said Lex, watching her for a moment longer. "Are you?"
Then he turned and kept walking down the path to the courthouse.
~
My thanks to Hope for answering questions about American idiom. Any infelicities that remain are my own. Feedback is always welcome, and constructive criticism doesn't make me cry. Thanks for reading.
~
Siege (3/3)
Chloe dove for her cell phone. Lex had already donned his heads-up display sunglasses and was listening to a report that he clearly found unsatisfactory.
"Cleon?" she shouted. "Speak up, I can barely hear you--are you back at the station?"
Chloe kept one ear open for Lex's conversation. "Why am I only hearing about this now?" he demanded.
"I stopped to tape an accident at Church and Liberty," said Cleon. "I'm still here."
"Is Redmond clear?"
"No, it's jammed too."
"Then you'd better run for it. Go to the Skyreach Hotel--use the side door we always use--and get Maia to express you to the roof. Promise her tickets to the MetMusic Awards if you have to. I'll see what I can get from here."
From the sound of it, Cleon was already running. "Will do," he replied, and began to sign off.
"Wait!" yelled Chloe. "Do we know who it is?"
"No idea," Cleon panted. "Could be the crazy green guy again, could be the chick with the lasers...could be somebody new."
"Damn." Chloe clipped her cell phone back on her belt, and checked the charge on the mini-cam in her shoulder bag.
To her left, Lex was ignoring his assistants' attempts to drag him inside. "Show me!" he snapped, pressing the left temple of his HUDsuns and frowning in concentration.
Chloe looked up. She had a clear view of the skies along Constitution Avenue, but in every other direction the horizon was blocked by banners, public buildings, and trees. She had to get to more open ground.
She ran down the steps, against the stream of students following their teachers back into the safety of the courthouse, and plowed into a crowd of people still milling around at street level, looking up at the sky and pointing. "Don't be tourists!" she shouted at them, belatedly recalling that most of them probably were tourists. "You can't see him," she explained. "He's too fast."
A few of the sightseers blinked at Chloe in incomprehension; many of them just ignored her. Suddenly, a deeper, more distant siren sounded over the continuing cacaphony of the car alarms.
"Do you hear that?" Chloe yelled. "That's the city Sky Alert. You have to get inside, for your own safety."
One man scoffed at her. "If the guy's faster than a bullet, he's fast enough to stop anything from falling on us."
Idiot, Chloe thought fiercely. "You want to know why these lunatics keep getting away? Because Superman has to keep breaking off mid-battle to look after people like you." Whirling, she caught the arm of a passing teacher. "You--get your students to escort as many of these people inside as they can. Some of them may not speak English--try to make them understand what's going on."
The young man nodded, then called after her as she pushed through the crowd and broke into a run. "Hey, where are you going?"
Good question, thought Chloe, as she sprinted across the small plaza towards the intersection of Constitution and University. At the light, she paused, and glanced over at her own determined face on the "Chloe Confronts!" poster adorning the bus shelter beside her. You look like you know what you're doing, she thought wryly. Care to help me out? Turning back to the street, she flinched at a series of crunches as a driver stopped suddenly and was hit by the three cars behind him. All along University Street, people were pulling over, getting out of their cars and looking up at the sky.
"Get inside!" she yelled at them as she zigzagged around the gridlocked vehicles. "Don't any of you watch the PSAs?"
The roof of the Metropolis Reference Library offered a fair view of the surrounding skies, but getting to it would take too long. It was rare for one of these encounters to last more than a few minutes: Chloe didn't want to risk missing the action entirely. She ran past the library, making for the northeast entrance to Memorial Park.
The little plaza just inside the park gates looked deserted, but on second glance Chloe saw two of its elderly pigeon-feeders, Mrs. Watts and Mr. Penniman, taking cover under the heavy concrete benches. Mr. Penniman waved at her as she jogged past.
Panting a little, Chloe ignored the gentle curving ramp leading up Monument Hill and climbed straight up the hill itself, towards the small rotunda and stylized bronze helicopter of the Vietnam Veterans' Monument. The most recent addition to the park's war memorials, it stood alone at the top of a natural rise that had been built up further when the monument was installed, so that from the circular contemplation garden at the top of the hill, one could now see straight across the park to the city's financial district. Chloe knew from experience that if you climbed the rotunda, the view was even better, but she also knew she couldn't do it without a boost. She jumped up onto the low wall surrounding the garden, and ran along it to the south side of the hilltop. Fishing her mini-cam out of her bag, she squinted at the downtown skyline, looking for signs of Superman under fire.
She caught a few distant flashes, and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the top of the Metrobank tower. It looked like she wasn't going to get much more than that, and Chloe had just resigned herself to being out of luck this time when something exploded directly over the park, momentarily blinding her with the brilliance of its flash.
Disoriented, Chloe nearly stepped back off the wall. She swayed precariously before catching her balance, then blinked and refocused her mini-cam. A cloud of steam was billowing up from Victory Pond: whatever hit it had just missed the park's open-air bandstand. There was no sign of either Superman or his adversary. Chloe stayed on the wall long enough to get a good shot of the pond, then jumped down and braced herself as she scanned the sky overhead. There was no use catching the next blast on camera if she was going to break her neck in the process.
"Not good enough, Chloe," said a hard-edged voice behind her. "Come on."
Chloe didn't take her eye from the viewfinder. "You go, Lex," she replied. "I'm doing my job."
"You can't see him," said Lex impatiently. "He's too--"
"I know he's too fast. But the crazies usually aren't. And even Superman sometimes pauses for a second. Or gets caught on camera when a human eye couldn't see him."
"You'll get a blur at most."
"You don't understand. When it comes to Superman, a blur can lead the evening news."
"I thought you had sworn off...stories like this."
Chloe grimaced, erased the last few seconds of footage, and switched to recording with the sound off. Lex was being circumspect, but on the subject of Superman, Chloe had long ago trained herself to be more than a little paranoid. "Not during a Sky Alert, Lex. Every reporter in the city is pointing a camera overhead right now. It would
look strange if I didn't."
"So tell them you were overpowered," said Lex, and suddenly Chloe felt him wrench the camera out of her grasp with one hand, while pulling her towards the rotunda with the other.
"Hey!" she protested, almost more surprised than angry. Brute force wasn't a persuasive technique she would have expected from Lex: it wasn't his style. Nevertheless, he had her arm in a grip that was bruisingly hard. Lex was stronger than he looked.
"That was too close, Chloe. Don't make me explain the physics of falling debris to you."
"Give me the camera, Lex!"
He held it out of her reach, directly over the flagstones of the garden path. "Get inside or I drop it."
He would do it, too. Lex Luthor seemed to have made it his mission today to sabotage her every story. "I'll get under cover if you give me the camera," she bargained, choosing to ignore the fact that he had already dragged her most of the way there.
"Fine," he replied, yanking her inside. Chloe snatched back the mini-cam, tossed her shoulder bag against the wall, and stationed herself to the left of the rotunda's west entrance, just in time to catch a second flash exploding over the park. This one shook the ground beneath them.
She felt an arm slip between her waist and the archway as Lex came up behind her, trapping Chloe in her position against the wall. "Don't even think about going back out there," he said firmly.
Distracted by the unexpected warmth of him against her back--she had always thought of Lex as being cold as the stone in front of her--Chloe took a moment to process what he had said. Irritated, she turned her head to glare at him. "Much as I appreciate your concern, Lex," she replied evenly, "I fail to understand why you would ditch your own bodyguard in a crisis just to play at being mine."
Lex looked down at her, unfazed. "My assistants are busy herding tourists at the moment. That teacher you delegated looked he could use some help."
"And you? Aren't you supposed to be on the phone with your broker right now, single-handedly saving the MSE from crashing or whatever it is you do during these attacks?"
"Already taken care of."
"That still doesn't explain why you're he--" Another flash, the brightest yet, and Chloe had to concentrate on not dropping the mini-cam as the accompanying tremor knocked them both to the ground. Outside the doorway, clods of grass and earth thudded down on the contemplation garden, snapping stems and burying flowers. Chloe sneezed as the air filled with a haze of dust.
Lex listened for a few moments, then rose to his feet, brushed the dirt off his suit, and extended a hand to Chloe. "If I hadn't come, you would have been outside when that hit."
Chloe snorted. She reached over to her bag, tucked the camera safely inside, then took Lex's hand in a harder grip than necessary as she pulled herself up to face him. "I've survived worse. And the way I do my job really isn't your business."
"But the way I do mine is yours? How fair is that?" Lex hadn't let go of her hand, and Chloe tugged at it experimentally. He still didn't let go. Suddenly Chloe found herself reluctant to press him further on the subject of why he had followed her here.
The ground shook again, just a little this time, and there was a faint gleam outside the northern entrance to the rotunda. The battle was moving away from them.
Chloe looked back at the hand enclosing her own.
"There's something that you and I need to talk about, Chloe," Lex said softly. "I think you're as aware of it as I am, and I don't think we should avoid it any longer." He released her hand at last, and reached for the small Keyring on his left little finger. "I want you to come to the penthouse tonight. I'll be in meetings early this evening, but I can see you at nine o'clock." Lex slipped the ring from his hand, put it into hers, and closed her fingers around it. "The concierge will let you up, and this will get you inside. I'll try not to keep you waiting."
Chloe blinked, and tried to figure out whether she just been propositioned. The situation made it seem unlikely, and the words themselves were innocuous, or could be; it was the velvet tone that had crept back into Lex's voice and the confident intimacy with which he touched her that made the invitation sound more like an assignation than a business appointment. Would it be naive to interpret that as anything but his usual manner--the one that could sometimes make even Lex's presentation of an annual report to his shareholders sound like a seduction--or would it be naive not to? Either way, the masterfulness of the invitation put her back up. "I'm not going to be waiting, Lex," Chloe retorted. "I'm not going to your apartment. And for future reference, there's an old-fashioned thing called actually asking a girl that's been known to go quite a long way towards winning us over to...whatever it is you're suggesting."
Lex smiled thinly. "Don't misunderstand me, Chloe. I need to discuss a certain subject, and you're the only one in Metropolis I can discuss it with. And--because it's a sensitive topic--I'd prefer to talk about it in an environment that I know is secure."
Well, that answered that question--though Chloe noticed he still hadn't asked. "What exactly is there to discuss?"
"As I said, it's sensitive."
Chloe waved at the empty space around them. "We're the only two here. Everyone else in the city is hiding indoors or looking up at the sky. So what is it?"
"Off the record, Chloe."
"It pretty much has to be, doesn't it?" she replied. "If it's that subject we're talking about. What is it?"
Lex studied her face, measuringly, for a moment or two, then tilted his head towards the ruined garden outside the doorway. "It's this, Chloe. It has to stop."
Chloe followed his gaze, uncomprehending. "What has to stop?"
Lex looked back at her. "Everything. The battles, the property damage, the increasing danger to every person in this city."
"You want to stop the crazy-battles? How are you planning on doing that?" Chloe remembered Lex on the courthouse steps, shouting "Why am I only hearing about this now?" into his HUDsuns. She wondered what kind of an early-warning system he had set up for himself.
"Why do the crazies keep coming to Metropolis?"
Chloe shrugged. "To challenge Superman. Because they can't get it through their heads that he's stronger than they are."
"Exactly."
"What do you mean, exactly?"
"Superman's become this city's Everest. They attack us because he is here."
Chloe stiffened. "You're not saying all this is Superman's fault?"
"He may not initiate the destruction. But he is, ultimately, its cause."
Chloe shook her head in disbelief. "How can you say that? You were one of his strongest supporters in the early days, when people were still afraid of him and the police kept calling him a vigilante. And when the mayor came around and gave him the key to the city, you were right there on the platform along with every other big name in the city."
"That was back when he was fighting small-time crooks and stopping accidents, Chloe. No one predicted that catching muggers and saving out-of-control schoolbuses was going to make him--and us--a target for dangerous psychotics from around the globe, not to mention across the galaxy." Lex stopped and took a deep breath. He didn't look any happier with what he was saying than Chloe was to hear it. "Things have changed," he went on at last, "and unless we do something about the situation, they're never going to change back. This city is under siege, and it will be as long as Superman calls it home."
"But he's already called it home. He can't just take that back."
"No," Lex agreed. "But if there were to be a falling-out of some kind, like the business with the city unions two years ago..."
Chloe gaped at him. "You want Superman to break up with Metropolis?"
"Yes."
Chloe laughed, a little hysterically. An image of Superman giving the "Let's just be friends" speech to the mayor had popped into her head. No doubt Clark preferred to moon disconsolately over dark, beautiful Gotham City, she thought.
"Chloe," Lex said sharply. "Consider this logically for a moment. Superman rescues people worldwide, and the crazies he protects us from come from everywhere, even from other planets. If he's a hero for any place, it's Earth itself; it makes no sense for him to attach himself to one city. It was sentimental of him to do it."
"But--where do you want him to go?"
"There are any number of deserted areas on the planet that would make far more appropriate battlegrounds than downtown Metropolis. He could base his operations at any one of them."
"But his fortress is impenetrable. They won't attack him there: they'll keep threatening as many human lives as they can in order to draw him out."
"So let them take some other city hostage for a change. Metropolis has played punching bag for these lunatics for too long."
"You're really serious about this, aren't you?" Chloe looked hard at the man who had once been her rival as Clark's closest friend. Lex wasn't as good at hiding his emotions as he thought he was: the problem for anyone trying to read him lay in figuring out what those emotions meant, given that Lex was always operating on several levels at once.
Something clicked in Chloe's mind and a new idea occurred to her. "Is this going to be your campaign platform? Get rid of Superman? You'll be tarred and feathered. The people love him."
"The tourists love him. Most people in the financial sector are getting tired of seeing their insurance rates skyrocket."
"So you'll get corporate donations. You won't get votes."
"You think Superman owns the working-class demographic? You're wrong. The city unions still aren't happy about the incident with the Lakeside Highway Bridge."
Chloe bristled. "That was an emergency. He and the city both apologized, and Superman has never done anything to interfere with union jobs since."
Lex shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many of them still call him Superscab. Look, Chloe, I'm not saying it'll be a landslide. I know how much he's loved." Lex walked to the north archway as another flicker of light appeared over the city. He looked out for a few moments, then turned back towards her. "A lot will depend on the media."
Chloe stared, then turned away from him and reached for her shoulder bag. "I'm not having this conversation."
"You're a self-declared advocate for the citizens of Metropolis," Lex said behind her. "Use your judgment. What do you really think is best for them?"
Chloe stopped. She put her hand to the curved wall of the rotunda and slowly leaned against it until her forehead rested against the cool stone. Her mind was racing, her heart beating faster than it had in the midst of the crazy-battle.
"Have you talked to him about this?" she asked quietly.
"I think you know that he and I haven't been on speaking terms for some time."
Chloe brushed her hand against the stone. The incisions under her fingers formed names: Hiram Walden, James Walecki, Marlon Walker. Young men of Metropolis caught up in a conflict not of their own making. Chloe wondered where their families lived now.
She turned her back to the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Lex was silent, leaning in the archway, watching her.
"He'll talk with you if you ask him to," Chloe said slowly. "There is something to what you're saying, Lex, and if he agrees with you--agrees that Metropolis would be safer if he were to back off from it a little--then, maybe, your plan could work." She squinted at Lex as another faint flash lit the steel-blue sky behind him. "But if he wants to stay, and you fight him on this...you'll tear the city apart."
"That's your opinion as a reporter?"
Chloe shook her head. "That's my opinion as someone who knows what you're both capable of. He's as stubborn as you are, Lex, and when he feels he's in the right, he can be just as unyielding. Think very carefully before you take a public stand against him."
Lex nodded. "And if worse comes to worst...whose side will you be on?"
Chloe shook her head again and stood, brushing dust from her jeans and jacket. "It's getting late. I have to get some more footage of the impact sites and get back to the station." She slung her bag over her shoulder and was almost out the west archway when he stopped her.
"Chloe."
He hadn't moved, hadn't even raised his voice. Just said her name, and she stopped. Chloe smiled ruefully. She was as bad as that crowd he had quelled back at the courthouse. She was still smiling a little as she turned to face him.
Lex looked surprised. He quirked an eyebrow at her as he shifted against the stone. "If I were to ask you to come to the penthouse--would that really go a long way with you?"
Caught off guard, Chloe nevertheless replied without missing a beat. "Hypothetically, yes."
"In reality, no?" Lex eased away from the wall and moved towards her.
"Yes," answered Chloe. "I mean, no--in reality, no."
"Why the difference?" Lex stood close enough that she had to tilt her head to look up at him.
"I'm a reporter, Lex. I have to remain unbiased."
Lex leaned in even closer. "You've never been unbiased towards me, Chloe. First, you resented me for taking Clark's time away from you and Pete. Then you felt an understandable sense of schadenfreude when my friendship with him fell apart for pretty much the same reasons yours had. You're grateful to me for my help during your father's illness, but you still wonder whether I had ulterior motives for what I did. And you've been attracted to me since that night at the journalism awards, at least, but you're afraid of what might happen if you act on it."
"I'm not afraid."
"You have more passionate responses to who I am and what I do than almost anyone in this city, Chloe Sullivan. So how can you say that you're unbiased?"
Chloe resisted the urge to step back. From the beginning, she had prided herself on being willing to stand up to Lex Luthor. "I can say it because I haven't made up my mind about you. Most people in this city have: half of them think you're God's gift to Metropolis and half of them think you're the spawn of a capitalist Satan, but the point is that they've already decided that you're one or the other. I see elements of both in you, Lex--the person who wants power because of the good he can do with it, and the person who wants it for its own sake--and I know that you're not one or the other...not yet. And I won't decide which one you are until you do."
Lex's eyes widened, but otherwise he barely moved a muscle. He just stood there, watching Chloe, too quiet and too close.
"Absolute objectivity," he said at last. "That's a noble goal. But you're forgetting something, Chloe."
"And that would be?"
"That it doesn't exist. In reporting, as in science, the act of observing influences the event observed. And what you see," Lex murmured, gently brushing a fingertip along the arch of her eyebrow, "depends very much on what you look for."
There was a moment when Chloe thought he might say something else, then he glanced at the watch on his upraised wrist and eased back a little.
"And now we both have to go," Lex said matter-of-factly. "Keep the ring, Chloe."
"Keep the what?" Chloe followed him out into the dirt-littered garden as he headed for the path back to the courthouse. She set her bag down by the garden wall and reached for her mini-cam. "I don't have the--" She trailed off as she looked down and saw the Keyring to Lex's penthouse on her right ring finger. She couldn't for the life of her recall putting it on.
"Huh. Must be my inner klepto coming to the fore. Hold on a second."
Lex wasn't stopping.
"Lex!" The ring wasn't coming off easily, but there was hand lotion somewhere in her bag, if she could find it. Lex turned, but kept walking slowly backwards, with his hands in his pockets and a very faint smile on his face.
Chloe stopped tugging at the Keyring. She glanced down at the platinum band consideringly, then gave Lex her most challenging look. "If you leave this with me, you know what I'll do with it."
"I have a fair idea."
"I'll use it to sneak into your home office while you're out and snoop through your files."
Lex didn't stop smiling. "My files are well protected."
"I might get lucky," countered Chloe. "I'm a very experienced snooper."
"I'm willing to take that chance," said Lex, watching her for a moment longer. "Are you?"
Then he turned and kept walking down the path to the courthouse.
~
My thanks to Hope for answering questions about American idiom. Any infelicities that remain are my own. Feedback is always welcome, and constructive criticism doesn't make me cry. Thanks for reading.
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