Title: Chronos: Anon, Ante, Bis, Now
Author: Treesh Aradia
Rating: PT
Disclaimer: Not mine
Spoilers: "Spirit" and the previous stuff I think
Summary: When we get what we want, we realise what we want is what we need but have lost. What happens when the threads of time allow for a singular moment for it all to change?

A/n: It's so complicated, I hope this helps: Chloe/Lois are dead in the future. Yes, I am an evil bitch. Lana/Clark are married and before you start firing all your salvos at me, she's dead too and the ending justifies the means, REALLY. This fic is dark or at least angsty. It deals with random scenes/flashbacks. The future is at the mercy of Pylea an evil race, don't worry, it's not in any canon history, i just thought the name sounded cool and cruel race don't really play a big part in this fic. This is also unbeta'd and un spellcheck'd. (summary of londwinded a/n: think Terminator.)

Chronos: Anon, Ante, Bis, Now

Anon

It wasn't like he had much to do; his life had been ripped to shreds in a span of a few seconds.

If he was really being truthful, his life wasn't much a few years back anyway. But now, he felt the certainty of acetic tears on his pillow at night. His wife died yesterday.

Pulled the rug from under her.

Pulled the plug.

On Her.

And he sat in the cool metallic chair by the edge of her bed that very night, by the standard hospital windows, facing her soon to be lifeless body, watching the doctors as they wrote in their clean little files. The priest had left already, rites been said. Nothing to do but watch as the monitor rang a drab singular note.

Life on the line, lifeline.

Life and line, monitor and line.

And the tell tale singular sound that life that has just past.

If he were a little bit more cynical, a tad bit bitterer, he would have laughed at the irony of it all. He, Superman, was pretty much invincible, man of steel… super. And yet, the one thing that could break him now was the petite women that now breathed no more.

His last reason for living. Lana. His mind rings out, as if in mentally speaking it, like a prayer on his jaded lips, he would remember her forever.

He, however, knew the limitations of the human mind, how it would gradually forget. Bit by bit, it would lose the once assumed immortal memories. Beginning with the colour of clothes she wore, then the way she moved about the kitchen, then the shape of her body, outlined in moonlight while she was snug under her blanket. And lastly the smile, her warm smile.

As if in thinking of his wife, now deceased, his mind conjures different women, in a different time.

The school paper editor cum reporter and her flair for investigative work…he vaguely remembers the way her blonde hair stuck out at odd ends as she sat concentrating on a new big story…Chloe was and could have been the best. And Clark feels the start of tears at how unfair it is that he has forgotten the sound of her voice, his voice of reason, most of the time.

Then as if compelled by some external force he remembers the sloppy ponytail and snark, the pink dress and sneeze. The way her hair blew in the zephyr of the afternoon, while she rolled her eyes at something he said. He never could forget the day he found the secret side of her, the side forced to the surface when her sister appeared. He never really found her annoying, but that day, he knew he liked her. He saw then the start of genuine affection and friendship.

And when she really smiled - like the smile she gave him while they crazy danced the night of his prom to 'Somebody Told Me' - the curve of her lips could rewrite history…

He laughs to himself, without the bitterness, as he realizes how well he could still remember her. She always was the exception. Nine years could not blur the shape of her face, the brown of her eyes nor the curve of her lips. He remembered all he had of her. He loved her, and he never ever got the chance to fully realize how much. She will be the one that got away.

The one who died before he could really save her.

Her and Chloe.

And the effulgence of the memory dimmed, shifting to scenes in a darker period in his life. The memory of the call that came for him that night nine years ago, the one that informed him that his two best friends had died in a car crash en route to Las Vegas during their end of school road trip. He should have gone, should have packed his camping gear and back pack, should have but didn't. Instead, he found himself with a ticket to Paris and Lana at his side.

He recalls the day after their prom, their conversation at the Kent's porch and how they were going to start afresh.

He agreed, for he was Clark and she was Lana, the girl he loved. He never really figured out why the picture he found himself visually recreating in his mind had brown eyes and cynical eyes.

Now even Lana has left him. All he had now was the world at possible peril, and a gem that turned time arbitrarily to a moment that needed correction.

Chronos bis, time revisited.

It was a shame that the JLA had it configured to only a year back when the seeds of the Pylea army were only being planted. Taking the gem, Clark instigates the process by smashing it onto the ground.

And the last thoughts he had as he fell into the wide portal was one of a woman in a pink prom dress.

Ante

He dreamt like everybody else. Sequences of thoughts and hope conflated into the subconscious, yoked into one big pile of what could have been. For he almost always dreamt of the what could have been.

With her.

And like every dream sequence, there was repetition and in his, it was always stained with the repugnance of death, like a putrid smell calling on a wonderfully sunny day. He hated it, he knows, even before the dream goes broken asunder.

He's in the backseat again, and Chloe is driving the curves along the terrain, while she seats juxtaposed with her cousin, arguing with him about…well just arguing. And he doesn't give a fig about anything save the way she looks, the way she tilts her head just so, how she watches him as she tries to get him riled...

"Smallville, take a picture! It'll last longer."
"It doesn't matter; you're like the thorn in my side, there forever."

And then it starts to unravel. He tears his eyes away from her and onto the road ahead. He hears the sickening sound of metal on metal, hears their scream, and watches as they get thrown out of the car from the sheer force of impact…

"LOIS!" He jerks forward in bed, panic, tears and sweat evident. It takes him a minute to realize where he was, and where he wasn't. And who has placed a hand on his back, whispering calming words of it's ok, just a dream, not real.

But it was real, for them. He could almost smell the tangy scent of blood…

Lana never questioned why hers was the name on his lips, the only one he shouted at the very last end.

She knew the answer years before.

Yet chose to ignore it, and all the signs that there was something else between them.

The best ones always start that way.

And now she is in her own little purgatory hell, being punished for her selfishness. With a man who loved her but didn't. She wondered if anyone else had experienced what it was like to share her husband's heart with a dead girl who was 'rude, bossy…only a friend'.

But she knows she has to atone, and for the sake of repentance and her sanity, she doesn't say anything as her husband sobs for the girl he loved and have realized (only after she was gone) he loved above all else.

Lana was sure about that.

And so she sleeps on her side and neglects the fact that she ruined all their lives by her choices. For it were her choices that made everything come to play.

She just wished one day, he would have the courage to end it, to end them and their sham of a marriage. For she had no courage left to do so, to take away the only thing he now obsesses about as a way to deal with the regret and guilt of Chloe and Lois's death. She could not make that decision, in fear it was ultimately wrong, so it had to be his.

However she knew that by morning he would chalk it up to nightmares and leave it at that, forgetting his tears he cried the night after night after night before and his heart that never really felt whole…

Lana, the good wife. She would smile and they would pretend they were still in love.

She didn't know what else to be if not that.

Bis

"The Gem of Epochia has the capability to act as a gateway for the user, and only the user, to a specific thread in time where there is need for modification. In our case, that will be approximately three hundred days ago, about the time Pylean soldiers first landed and infiltrated our societal system. It is to our belief that they have been residing at the fringes of LV.

According to the myth, once shattered, the future and past self melds into one being until the gem of that timeline is found and broken again by the user. It is extremely important that the gem is found and broken, for if someone else shatters it, the previous user, that would be you Clark, would relive the years all over again. And the thread of time would suffer dire consequences of epic proportions. Stop the Pyleans, find the gem and return. Nothing else should be changed.

Nothing else can be, only what the gem indicates through its divine powers and signs. Now not much is known about how much of yourself now will be entirely conscious in the host's body, your past self, but that's a much better chance than the rest of us. No one really knows how the physical body will be able to sustain the travel and with your invulnerability, Clark, you are our only hope…"

Kent Farm, 2005. (Countdown to Recollection, Day One)

"Well, well, well, look who's decided to sleep in this fine afternoon! Wakey, wakey Clarkie! There are cows to milk and hay to stack."

Blink. Register, and the sleep induced mind awakens. "Lois?"

"No, Sid Vicious, can't you tell from my brown hair and non eye-liner eyes?"

The girl snarks like the professional she was.

Is.

And suddenly, he feels the world spin about and beyond its axis, and in his mind's eyes he sees flashes of images of funny looking costumes, a big red gem, spandex and weird bat like masks…

He groans, thinking how dreams were seldom commonsensical.

"Very funny, Torpedo. What time is it?"

"It's noon. You've been sleeping since you got home from school last evening. I know, 'cause I let Shelby lick your face after eating dog chow and you didn't budge an inch. And hello? What is with the name calling? I think you are taking far too many liberties, Smallville!" The feigned annoyance and genuine confusion over her newly founded nick was mirrored in Clark's otherwise amused-with-Lois face.

Torpedo?

"Can you blame me? You are quite numbing, Lois. In a good way of course." He smiles, pleased with his justification. She was.

An eye brow arches, and a, "are you flirting with me?"

He smiles enigmatically, and leaves her in his wake as he carries out his usual ablutions.

"Well, I'll be damned."

A smile.

Kent Farm, 2005. (Countdown to Recollection, Day Two)

"Hey Clark. I booked the rental car, and the road map is already in my bag. Now all we need to do is get the camping equipment and potato chips."

"Hey Chloe." Clark greeted, slightly lacking in his usual demeanor as he saw his friend approach his locker.

The blonde stopped walking, noticing something off with her friend. "Are you ok? You seem a little different."

"Yeah, a little tired."

He didn't look tired. Clark never got tired. Bored or wary maybe. But tired? Huh. "Huh."

"What?"

He looks at her slightly irritated and she decides to lay off the Russian inquisition for today and instead says, "oh nothing. So anyway, you're coming right with us right? I mean the three amigos need the third amigo. Or it'd be the two amigos and that's just wrong."

He laughs at her, missing their corridor chats. Now it was his turn to stop. He saw her just yesterday.

"Clark? You alright? You have to come. Who else would help us girls carry our stuff?"

"Huh? Oh, yah, of course I will."

"Great. Lois and I are going prom dress shopping later. You want to come with?"

Chloe's sly look warned Clark of the numerous hours they would take and the numerous shopping bags (not prom related - they tended to deviate their attention at the mall) he would have to end up carrying, if only to have him embarrassed. Lois was a bad influence on Chloe as she has long since stopped helping him from the bully, and went on to the side of Anakin.

And speak of the devil.

"Hey Chloe, Smallville."

"Hey Lo." Chloe greeted, happy there was someone else to coerce their friend in a little trip to the mall. If anything, Lois would do it for the sheer knowledge of knowing she can manipulate him. Chloe laughed at how easy she could do it, and from the looks of it, she would say she was winning the bet she hedged with Pete over the internet of when they would get together. She was a whole two weeks short but she had faith. The trip would help. As would she. Heh. But for now…

"Clark won't come prom dress shopping with us."

Lois' eyes grew wide, and she feigned a horrified gasp. "Chivalry really is dead! The last of its kind has conformed."

Clark rolls his eyes. However he couldn't help but absorb the image she cut in her white tank top and surprisingly, pink plaited skirt and hair untied with big brown eyes… she was numbingly beautiful without knowing, even with the sarcastic smile now evident on her face.

And as the two started their usual game of who could get the other riled up first, Chloe stayed behind to watch the beginnings of something inevitable.

Maybe she wouldn't have to wait that long to win the bet after all.