FIC: Real (Smallville - Clark, Lana)
Post-Mortal, spoilers up to and including. Short. Clana.


Real

"I've thought about this a lot," says Lana.

"Me too," lies Clark, his heart beating faster. He's thought about kissing her. He's thought about sliding his arms around her waist and dancing with her the way he did at prom. He's never thought that they ever could, that they really might. Any time his mind strayed close a part of him recoiled, because Lana was everything that he wanted and he couldn't stomach the idea of violating that with his alienness. But he's real now, human, in a human body, and having shed his unnatural skin and become real, he can slide his fingers into her hair, bend his forehead to rest against hers and know that everything is perfect. It can't be a lie if this is the truth he believes.

When she kisses him, his bruised mouth hurts.

Her skin is flame-warm. From the distance of the hearth-rug, the fire seems welcoming, softening the darkness without driving it out. Clark doesn't remember a hundred conversations late at night in front of a different fire, the flicker of fascination and friendship. He thinks of beginnings, not ends. Lana's apartment is painted in red and green but those colours don't have to mean anything.

This, it's who he is, not an alien who wasn't supposed to be here, but a truer version of himself. Having her and being this are the same; wanting her and wanting to be this had always been mixed up in his head. She'll never know the journey he's taken to get here. She'll never know the part of him that he'd kept hidden, the dark cellar, the part that had been rewarded once with a red truck and a blue ribbon that his father had made him give back.

"Clark, what is it?" she says, touching his face.

"I love you," he says.

Everything before the sun set on Jor-El is a dream. The freaks are doubly freaks now that they're tied to his freakish past but they're under lockdown. Chloe knows, and he's uncomfortable with that . . . the past doesn't matter, it shouldn't linger in the remade present. With Chloe he has to say, This is who I am now. With Lana he can close his eyes and think, This is who I've been all along. The proof is her tentative fingers at the corner of his mouth, the pain there, her concern when she sees it in his eyes. Lana believes in the person he wants to be, and isn't that what love is?

.