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doranwenCan't seem to get this passage from Alone, by The Die Hard, out of my head lately . . . bolded the line that keeps running around . . .
Note: This fic takes place right after the episode Scare, wherein Chloe discovers her mother is in a psychiatric institution because she went crazy--and that what she has is hereditary and Chloe could get it too. Also, wherein everyone got locked into major nightmares due to a weird virus thing.
He looked up at her from under his bangs, an unconscious gesture from when he was small and trying to be apologetic for having broken something that mere human strength could not have endangered. "Would it help if I said I appreciate that?" He hoped that she would understand that the lack of force in his voice was from sympathy for her distress, from walking-on-eggs carefulness in trying not to hurt her any more by accident, not from any lack of conviction. "It's just.... Some of the things about me are things no one really wants to know. I wouldn't be doing you any favors to unload on you, Chloe. Especially not right now."
Anger flared in the emotions warring for control of her, anger that she all too obviously tamped down the same way she was holding terror and grief in rein. You don't trust me. He could read it as easily as he could the slight tightening on his parents' face when he told them a little lie, to try to spare them any more burdens from their strange son.
You don't trust me to be able to deal with whatever you're going through. You think I can't handle it.
You don't believe in me.
"You might," she forced out, "try me. I might appreciate the distraction."
Chloe's pain cut into Clark worse than the green rocks had ever been able to do. His own nightmare, he was realizing, had been mercifully brief -- and relatively trivial. It was a generic and abstract summation of fears, nothing based in reality.
Chloe's was one she had to live with in the waking world as well.
Note: This fic takes place right after the episode Scare, wherein Chloe discovers her mother is in a psychiatric institution because she went crazy--and that what she has is hereditary and Chloe could get it too. Also, wherein everyone got locked into major nightmares due to a weird virus thing.
He looked up at her from under his bangs, an unconscious gesture from when he was small and trying to be apologetic for having broken something that mere human strength could not have endangered. "Would it help if I said I appreciate that?" He hoped that she would understand that the lack of force in his voice was from sympathy for her distress, from walking-on-eggs carefulness in trying not to hurt her any more by accident, not from any lack of conviction. "It's just.... Some of the things about me are things no one really wants to know. I wouldn't be doing you any favors to unload on you, Chloe. Especially not right now."
Anger flared in the emotions warring for control of her, anger that she all too obviously tamped down the same way she was holding terror and grief in rein. You don't trust me. He could read it as easily as he could the slight tightening on his parents' face when he told them a little lie, to try to spare them any more burdens from their strange son.
You don't trust me to be able to deal with whatever you're going through. You think I can't handle it.
You don't believe in me.
"You might," she forced out, "try me. I might appreciate the distraction."
Chloe's pain cut into Clark worse than the green rocks had ever been able to do. His own nightmare, he was realizing, had been mercifully brief -- and relatively trivial. It was a generic and abstract summation of fears, nothing based in reality.
Chloe's was one she had to live with in the waking world as well.
