| WHAT WE HAVE LOVED |

This is my first attempt at Smallville fanfiction. I've been a Chloe/Clark shipper since the beginning, so don't expect very much of anyone else. Also note that some parts may not exactly follow where the show has went nearing the end of the first season. Enjoy!

Obligatory Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Smallville characters, but, if I had the choice, I'd make Tom Welling my manservant. All events in this piece are fictional and are from the matrix of my own mind. Please don't steal. It's wrong.

Prologue :

She had always been a writer. At the age of four, she was writing with a stubby red crayon in her hand and sometimes on the living room wall. When she was ten, she discovered the wonderful medium of word processing and spent many hours clacking away at the keyboard. As a teenager, she was the editor-in-chief for her school newspaper. Although the themes that she chose to tackle varied at different points of her life, she adhered to one aspect of her writing: truth. And now, as her journalistic career seemed to be blossoming, she was reminiscing.

There was a time when all she could seem to write about was romance. She would spend copious amounts of time in the library, looking for the latest Danielle Steele novel and, when she had just completed sexual education in biology class, the risqué tales of damsels in distress and their brave heroes. She was thirteen at the time of her first finished novella and it was titled Love Conquers All. But even though her stories were fictitious tales about the hardships of love, there remained some truth from her own fundamental desires as one on the verge of womanhood.

Today, as she was cleaning out her storage room, she spied and thusly opened a dusty cardboard box labeled "Smallville". She excavated the loosely bound novella and chuckled at her cliché choice of a title. She ran her fingers gingerly over the cover page, which she had devised herself as a simple and minimalistic design. "Written by Chloe Sullivan," she read to herself in the privacy of her small house, almost surprised to hear her birth name. Her penname today hadn't nearly as much personality as the girl named Chloe years ago. But that was why she had created her penname in the first place, to start life anew. She remembered the months it took her to write this piece, which now lay suffocated among the other miscellaneous detritus from her years in Smallville. She tried to remember the high school she had attended and the newspaper she had run and the family she hardly saw, but all that flooded her mind were two powerful but gentle blue eyes.

Chloe shook her head now, trying to shut out those intrusive eyes. She tossed the little fairy tale that the child version of her had concocted into the box and began to shut it. But something stood out before her gaze; a letter she had placed in a blue envelope, crinkled and faded with age, poked out from the corner of the box. The seal still hadn't been licked shut. She remembered so precisely the day she wrote it and the realization that it would never be mailed to its desired recipient. Those two blue eyes that she both feared and loved would never see it, for the letter revealed far too much of her soul. If her feelings in that letter were read, her soul would be as open and vulnerable as a fresh wound. But when she was younger, when those knowing eyes looked at her and only her, vulnerable was all she felt.