A/N: These two together totally grew on me like a fungus, man. And for some reason, it was just so much easier to write this than a Clark/Lana, though I'm not sure why. Anyway! Lyrics from "Don't Do Sadness/Blue Wind" from the Broadway musical Spring Awakening, which is fun and awesome and pretty much breathed this into being. For Michael, as always. Leave a review if you like; comments make my day and my week and my life, so thank you in advance!

Or may be cool to be a little summer wind:
Like once through everything
And then away again
With the taste of dust in your mouth all day
But no need to know
Like sadness, you just sail away
---
"Don't Do Sadness/Blue Wind"
From Spring Awakening

wild

It's so much harder than it should be.

It's Clark Kent who starts it, at the end of the first memorable meteor freak encounter, over police siren lights and smoking windows and the homecoming dance nearly ruined and a boy wanting to send lightning through everything and then away again.

It's Clark with his rural charm and gorgeous eyes and pretty mouth telling Chloe Sullivan (who, me?) that he's "always gonna be here for you. You know that. Right?"

"Yeah," Chloe says, with an unconvincing smile. "I do. I'll be there, you know, for you, too."

And Clark lets it drop, the moment done, the sentiment spoken.

Clark lets it drop the way he always lets things drop.

And Chloe can't help but think: The problem is that you need to be there for everyone else, too.

I want you just to be here for me. Always.

Is that too much to ask?

---

She's convinced she's going crazy to still like Clark the way she does.

Especially when Chloe thought she had everything solved.

Back when she thought Clark was Amish. Back when she thought Smallville's Daily Planet kiosk was the holiest thing in the meteor rock town. Back when she made him take her around his farm and ran off with his first kiss after saying now we can be friends.

It was supposed to be done and dead and buried.

And throughout the string of meteor freaks and sifting through the layers of the Wall of Weird and hacking into Smallville Medical's files on autopsy reports, it gets buried and reburied and reburied.

Despite all this, she still doesn't like other girls getting too close when she knows their intentions.

Despite all this, she's trying to spend as much time as she possibly can with him.

Despite all this, she picks the dream dress up anyway, a very elaborate affair with unnecessary amounts of pink organza and utterly skintight and utterly girly. It is something so amazingly unlike her that the saleswoman asks, nervously, "Are you sure you want this shade, dearie?", as if perhaps a tomboyish green or blue would suit her better.

She's convinced Clark they're just friends, because he's good at taking things at face value. She's convinced him because he's so good at lusting hopelessly after Lana, following her shadow like a stray desperate dog.

She's convinced him because he's so good at dropping things.

But she hasn't convinced herself, because she knows face value is usually hiding something. She hasn't convinced herself because she follows Clark's shadow the way Clark follows Lana's.

She hasn't convinced herself because she can never let things go.

---

And she doesn't even know it, but in that pink dress she's bright with organza and gorgeous with dreams, and she's so hard for him to stand.

She's like meteor rock turning his veins cold, like meteor rock cracking his veins, and he's not superman or superalien (classifications are so whatever); he is oh so hopeless little boy caught between something unattainable and something equally pretty and much closer.

It can give her so much power, but if she notices this, it does not stick in her head.

This is something that he's so thankful for, because Chloe's the kind of girl who always takes notes of things, who always presses beyond normal privacy limits. In Chloe's world there's no such thing as ashes swept under a rug or something hiding behind a curtain. Everything has a trail. And she follows it.

What he doesn't know is that she's focused on something else Clark's doing.

Her heels cast her up high, not nearly as high as Mr. Kent who grew when most boys stayed short, but tonight her hopes are so low. Because even if Lana is away, she's not getting all of Clark. She is getting most-of-him, while inside some-of-Clark is still worried about her.

She has a boyfriend going into the Marines, for Christ's sake, she wants to yell at him, she'll be more than fine. So you don't have to worry about her and you can come down to Earth again and I want all of you here, Clark Kent, all of you, here, right now!

But she can't cause a scene over something so totally ridiculous. It is so unlike her.

And so she settles for getting close.

She can feel Tic-Tacs on his breath and hopes hers is still okay, warm and pleasant like summer wind, and she is so unbearably, so amazingly close.

Then the warning comes, trapping them inside the gym, wind tearing through corn fields and bales of hay outside while they stand there in their finest.

Chloe curses the timing, but, despite everything, she still lets her heart soar up a little, warmed by spring thawing and summer dreams.

So it serves her right to turn her back on him for two seconds and get, effectively, finally, stood up.

And she was about to say, I'm so happy to be here (with you), Clark, thank you.

Pete comes up behind her, fingertips trying to adjust his cummerbund, and says, hey, you okay? and Vivica, who makes very good arm candy, she looks concerned, too, and apologizes for Clark's behalf.

And Chloe smiles and says she's okay, of course she is, it's not like she was expecting anything else.

It's not like she even wanted one of those picture-perfect proms like you see in the movies.

Because she's just Chloe Sullivan, just your average journalism freak with a fondness for the bizarre and inexplicable.

And Chloe, she doesn't dream about those kinds of things.

(At least, not out loud.)

---

It's the only way out she can think of.

She tells Clark that maybe they should just be friends, that maybe they're okay with where they're at right now.

She tells her father that she doesn't get why she can't be normal like other girls and drown her sorrows into a pint of ice cream and then, re-energized, go to the boy in question, kiss him with all she has, and make him forget Lana (and every other girl while she's at it).

And her father, echoing throughout mountain ranges of LutherCorp paperwork, her father says, "Chloe, honey, you've never been normal."

He says it in the loving father sort of way, full of appreciation and bias and years since he has been her age.

And she says, quietly, accepting, "I know."

And for the first time in her life, Chloe Sullivan, queen of the freaks, watcher of the weird, passionate and happy and confident in her quirkiness, for the first time Chloe Sullivan wants nothing more than to be normal.

---

(Chloe knows that she doesn't know a lot of things.

One of the things she doesn't know is that Clark Kent, her own Clark, is on the other side of town, looking up at the same dark sky and the same pockmarked moon and the same faraway stars.

One of the things she doesn't know is that Clark Kent wants to be normal, too.

If only, they both think, simultaneously, parallel to each other. I'd give everything to be normal.)

---

But there is nobody listening to them.

No star shoots down from the sky.

No meteor accident makes it happen.

They are on their own, swinging their sorrows dry, cut free and loose like kite strings.

It's so much harder than it should be.

---