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12 January 2009

Dry County

Smallville is facing a drought, and it's up to Clark and Chloe to figure out what to do about it.
Early season 5
Rating: Older Teen
1.
Smallville was dying, being slowly baked to dust beneath the glare of the unrelenting sun.
Chloe Sullivan drove her VW up the drive of the Kent farm, watching a plume of dust rise behind her car. Her tires crunched over soil totally devoid of moisture. She saw Clark and his father, Jonathan, in the fields. Jonathan was bent down, and he held up a hand, allowing dust to spill between his fingers. He shook his head, and Clark’s shoulders slumped.
Opening the car door was like opening an oven door. Heat enveloped her, stealing her breath when she stepped out of the cool interior of her air conditioned car. She closed the door, and Clark looked up, hearing her even across the field.
“Chloe?”
Martha Kent stood in the front door. “I’m glad you’re here. I could use your help.”
Chloe hurried up to the house. Inside, on the floor, was a box. “You got an air conditioner?”
“I finally talked Jonathan into it,” Martha said. Her face was flushed, and her hair was slicked around her face, matted with sweat. “This heat wave is too much for me. Help me lug it into living room?”
“Sure.”
Chloe and Martha were still struggling with the heavy unit when Clark sped up to them. “You should have called for help,” he said, opening the box. He lifted the air conditioner easily, and in a few minutes he had it set up properly. Cool air was soon blowing into the room.
“I’ll make iced tea,” Martha said, once she’d cooled off in front of the vent. Clark was the only one of them who wasn’t sweating, or flushed from the heat.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Clark said.
Chloe had never seen him so worried before. He looked at her with eyes that seemed too old for his age, and she reached out to him. His arm was hard as steel, and yet warm. She felt an old familiar longing for him that she quickly squashed. They were just friends, and he didn’t want more than that from her. She’d accepted that fact a long time ago.
“There’s got to be something you can do,” she said, leading him over to the couch. The only sound in the room was the hum of the air conditioner and the distant sound of Mrs. Kent mixing ice into the tea in the kitchen.
“I know you haven’t known for long that I’m an alien, Chloe, but I’m also not God. I can’t change the weather.”
“Clark, you can do too many amazing things. Those gifts are bound to be useful to save your farm.”
“I’m not stealing water, Chloe. We’re on conservation—”
Chloe snapped her fingers, getting that wide-eyed look she got when she had a sudden inspiration. “Ice! Ice is water, right?”
Clark looked at her blankly. “So?”
“So, you could go up north and get a chunk of it, bring it back and then use your heat vision to melt it over your farm.
“And what about everybody else in Smallville?” Clark said. “If our crops thrive while theirs die—”
“They’ll think you’re sneaking water, I know. But if you brought back enough ice to water everyone’s crops, just once or twice a week…”
Clark looked ready to dismiss her idea. He sank into the cushions of the couch and stared out of the window, his hair blowing in the breeze of the air conditioner. Chloe took advantage of the time to admire his masculine beauty. He had such full, red lips, and the most beautiful green eyes she’d ever seen. Her heart swelled with love for him.
“Once or twice a week?”
“It couldn’t hurt to try,” she said, grinning. She’d gotten through to him.
“Carry an iceberg back from the north pole? That’s a daunting task, even for me.”
“You can do it, Clark. And you don’t have to take a whole iceberg, just a sizeable chunk. You may have to make a couple of return trips during the night to get enough ice to cover all of Lowell county, but you could do it.”
“What are you two plotting?”
Jonathan Kent came into the living room with a tray that was loaded down with tall glasses of Martha’s sweet iced tea. Chloe drank half of hers down in one, and then sat back to sip the rest while Clark explained what he wanted to try.
“That’s awfully risky, son,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know....”
“We’ve got to do something, Dad. We had a dry winter and spring, and we haven’t even seen any rain this summer.”
“What if someone sees you? I’m sorry, son, but you just can’t risk it.”
“We need the water! I’ll go at night—”
“Clark, the answer’s no.”
Sighing in frustration, Clark got up and stormed from the room. Clark had been arguing with his father a lot, lately. Chloe looked awkwardly at Jonathan and then followed Clark back out into the heat and into the barn.
“Clark, wait.”
He was already up the stairs by the time she caught up with him, pacing the stifling hot loft. The muscles in his back were knotted.
“Clark—”
“Can you believe how unreasonable he is?” Clark said. “It’s a good plan, Chloe, but if he thinks it comes from me he balks at it.”
“I’m sure that’s not true, Clark. He just wants to keep you safe.”
“If it were up to him I’d never use my abilities to do anything worthwhile. I’m sick of hiding what I am.”
That was the first time Clark had ever said anything like that to her, though he’d been voicing dissenting comments about his father a lot, especially since Lana had gone back to college rather than getting back together with him like he’d wanted. Was he merely acting out in rebellion, or out of grief over Lana moving on, or did Clark really want to learn to use his abilities for good?
“You’re eighteen now, Clark. You don’t have to obey every word your parents lay down now.”
Clark sighed. A lot of the tension faded from his shoulders. “Encouraging me to rebel against my father?”
The barn was stifling, so much so she could hardly breathe. Chloe fished a cube of ice from her glass and ran it over the hot skin of her chest. “No. I’m encouraging you to follow your heart, to be your own man.”
The ice melted against her chest at once, sending a small rivulet of water between her cleavage and down the flat plane of her belly. She hissed at the cold, but then she began to enjoy it. She was lost in the cool sensation of ice melting on her skin until the table in front of her burst into flames. She yelped and fell back into the cushions, while Clark scrambled to put out the flames. He was blinking furiously, and once the flames were out, he rubbed at his eyes.
“Did you do that?” she asked.
“Yeah, sorry. It’s a hormonal reac—it’s accidental,” he said, suddenly changing track.
“You said hormonal,” Chloe said. “What got your hormones raging?”
“Nothing,” he said defensively.
A grin tugged at Chloe’s lips. She’d been rubbing ice on her chest, and she knew Clark had been watching her do it. She dug out another cube.
“Was it the ice?”
Clark gulped and reached out, taking her glass. He drained the watery tea left inside. “I’ll go get you a refill,” he said, and then zoomed from the barn, leaving Chloe a little confused, excited, and disappointed.
She’d had an effect on Clark, she’d gotten him hot, but he was clearly uninterested in pursuing anything physical with her. She waited for him to return with the tea, and when she did, she took the glass and cleared her throat, ignoring the big singe mark on the table in front of the couch. She’d go back to business. After all, she was good at that—at least with Clark.
“So, we need to plan how we’re going to do this,” she said.
Clark looked at her, thoughtfully, as though he wanted to say something, but then thought better of it.
“Right,” he said, and took a sip of her tea.
More coming soon

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