"INSIDE" (Prologue "One cold night")

DISCLAIMER: Not mine.

WARNINGS: Not really, no. But when needed, there will be chapter warnings (so far I can't think of any).

AUTHOR'S NOTE: You might find the prologue familiar, it uses a scene from Link's 7th chapter as source.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For those who don't remember all the events having taken place in the prior stories of the arc (Link and Knall) or those who really don't want to read them but are enjoying this one, there's a complete account on characters and events happened so far more than enough to get a fresh start at the end of this prologue. Includes, like the stories, spoilers for Smallville Season 8 and an indirect mention regarding season 9's episode 'Kandor'. All canon concerning Smallville goes up until 8x22 'Doomsday' and occasionally mentions things from Season 9. For those who have not read Link or Knall, take into account that the Parachutes Arc is set in an alt. Smallville future, set in 2020.

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This story ranges from the moment Knall ended, the night of July 14th, 2020, right after Clark and Lois find out about Chris, until the morning of August 30th, when Inside closes quite a few doors and sets the scenario for the series conclusion, Parachutes, to take place.

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The Clocktower, Gotham City. 29th May 2020.

My heart's beating faster. I know this rush of adrenaline all too well. Dinah would probably crack up at me for getting hormonally high by sitting in front of a computer.

Barbara smiled at the thought of her best friend, and trying to relax her body, she breathed deep and let out a long sigh.

"Fifth IP wasted in two hours. I must've broken a new record," she mumbled. She had circumvented all firewalls from Lex's security system and had just downloaded an important pack of intel. She started decrypting when her phone rang. As alphanumeric information appeared on the screen she discriminated the useless data from the potentially useful one. The first set of information to appear were coordinates and time spans. Looked like Lex had a wide network of facilities that he used at random. She stocked that intel apart; if those locations had already been used, the information would be pointless right now. While she worked on that, she heard a phone ringing and took it without checking who was calling.

"Oracle."

Her decrypting software caught a set of image and video files. She tried to open them.

"Babs, you're talking through your private cell."

Dick's voice took her from the screen for a second, making Barbara realize her mistake. "Dammit! I'm sorry, Dick, I'm just in the middle of something."

The files did not open, so she typed a few commands. She would not get a clear visual, but at least maybe one or sneak peaks of the records, probably from surveillance tapes. Barbara didn't quite listen to Dick, but she knew he'd said something about Donna and the mission, so she continued the conversation casually.

"Donna wasn't overreacting when she talked big," she said while she typed. A few seconds later, one of the videos started to show something. "Dick, I have to go."

"What is it, Babs?," asked Dick recognizing the change in Barbara's tone.

The video file she had cracked showed the surveillance tape of one of the cameras inside what seemed to be Lex's lab.

It was a pan-tilt-zoom camera, so she had a complete visual of the space, and the state-of-the-art informatics' infrastructure was not what caught her attention. Her eyes focused on two pods standing in the middle of the room.

She held her breath as she saw two human forms inside them. One of them was an adult woman; but the other one seemed to contain a young man, a teenager.

Spending more time in trying to get a clear visual on their faces would be reckless, and Barbara's mind worked like clockwork to quickly prioritize; it was utmost important to secure the intel. There would be time to check it later.

Mumbling an 'I love you' to Dick, she placed the phone by the keyboard and shut all the Internet connections as well as her security servers, hoping she had been fast enough to avoid having to blow up her headquarters for a third time.

Satisfied, she went to grab something to eat. She may not be showing yet, but the baby was starting to claim its space and needs inside her body. Yes, it had definitely been a good idea to call Chloe. Time for her to seriously slow down, she had earned it.

Hooboy, Dick and Dinah were going to spoil her rotten. That? Oh, that was going to be tough.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES: There is a record of Barbara blowing up her quarters at least twice if I remember correctly. The current Clocktower, however, resembles the original one.

MUSIC INFO: Björk 'Headphones'. Perfect to imagine Babs alone in the Clocktower with all those computers around. As soon as I leave a link to the music, will post in author's notes.

*****

PARACHUTES ARC: THE CHARACTERS AND MAIN EVENTS SO FAR

Lois and Clark, unmarried (just because Lois doesn't want to) but forever in love; working on the Daily Planet since like always. Mainly following Smallville, but with a few comic canon events, the main one being Chris, biological son of Zod and adopted by Clark and Lois almost as soon as he got to Earth (which in reality means as soon as Lois was convinced she wanted to give it a try). Lois still carries a great pain due to the loss of Chloe, more than a decade ago, at the hospital from the severe wounds inflicted by Zod.

Suspecting that a returned Lex, surprise candidate to the current Presidential elections, wants more than the mere fact of living inside the White House, Lois has a nasty public encounter with him during a public rally (Link), which leaves her out of the follow-up of the campaign and the candidates at the Planet, but otherwise completely engaged in digging out all the dirt concerning Luthor. All overprotective on her, Clark asks her to stay out of it, because there's already have been a death related to this, and he'll do it even asking Oracle for help. He believes that they need to catch some murderers before Lois can get to any information available. And amid all this chaos, including also a job offer from Perry about some foreign correspondence in investigative journalism, Lois' biological clock decides to start ticking. So after a lot of thinking and talking, Lois and Clark decide they are going to try to have a baby. At that moment they receive a call from Ollie: they have located several Luthor facilities, and Chris was being held captive in one of them. Inside starts with them going to the Watchtower to visit Chris.

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Ollieand Dinah, married and in love to the very core. Ollie, following a possible evolution from Smallville canon, has become the leader of the JLA. Friend to Lois and Clark to infinity and beyond, still acts as the hero Green Arrow, but his role as the Leage's head strategist also gets him off the field to assign teams and design protocols. Worried about the well-being of Dinah, who has just lost her best friend, he's there for her no matter what. He is the one who helped Chloe disappear from Smallville (see Chloe's profile below) and who supported her in every possible way. Dinah has only been a few episodes in Smallville, so her past in here is mainly from comic canon (Green Arrow and Birds of Prey). Works in the field, and together with Ollie and Clark, is one of the few aware of Oracle's new and secret identity. Loves her husband, loves her friends and while mourning and dealing with the loss of her best friend Babs, has had a key role in Dick's and Helena's road to recovery from their loss. Inside, she's still reeling from the pain of Babs' death.

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Chloe Sullivan, aka Ella Hunt, aka Oracle. Thinking it was the best way to protect her beloved cousin Lois, after all the turmoil coming from Doomsday (including Lois disappearing and Chloe thinking her dead and of course Jimmy's demise) and almost dying at Zod's hand (out of Smallville's 9th season, in here the real Zod comes with the orb, causes havoc and tries to kill her), Chloe decides to fake her death and get away from Metropolis. She is helped by Ollie and asks him and Clark to respect her decision. Over more than ten years there is no contact with Clark, and all relationship with Ollie is strictly professional. Due to the loss of a leg when she is attacked by Zod, Chloe spends her first months after her faked death in Gotham, where she meets at the hospital a woman named Barbara Gordon, ignoring that Barbara, also known as the first Batgirl, is Oracle, the older version of Chloe's Watchtower, stationed in Gotham City. And also ignoring that Barbara knows who Chloe Sullivan is, and is currently working with Batman in trying to know more about this new emerging group of superheroes calling themselves the Justice League. Both women will eventually develop a good friendship, and even when Chloe finally moves to London, assuming the identity of Ella Hunt, she helps Oracle from time to time. At the beginning of Link we learn that due to happy personal circumstances affecting Barbara, Chloe is going to take over Oracle for a few months. Barbara's death changes everything, and Chloe makes the decision of going back to the States, to Gotham City, assuming Oracle's identity permanently, accepting Ollie's offer to work for the League full-time and focusing on trying to find out what is Lex planning with both his meteoric political career and his clandestine laboratories, the last of which yielded the body of a kryptonian boy named Chris. She still knows it is not safe to go back to Metropolis, but, once more in order to protect Lois, she talks to her as Oracle trying to get her cousin away from the danger a mission in diapers dealing with Lex Luthor and at least three mysterious assassins poses. She discovers that the kryptonite is an element with the similar atomic structure than uranium thus explaining the high levels of radioactivity no doubt responsible of the fast effects on kryptonians. Her current assignment is to work with Bruce in both solving the case of Barbara's murder, for which she ultimately needs to decrypt all the information downloaded the night of the crime, and finding out what's been going on at Luthor's facilities, so the final goal, getting Lex behind bars once and for all, can be achieved. Maybe then she can think of coming back?

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Barbara –Babs– Gordon, Oracle. Unknown to Smallville world, but undoubtedly (IMHO) the mirror in which SV writers looked when they decided to make Chloe kick-ass-Watchtower. She rocks. Daughter of Commissioner Gordon and the first Batgirl ever until The Joker shot her, leaving her paraplegic and tied to a wheelchair for life. She found her way to make a difference again: she became Oracle and founded a group of women who would go throughout the world in all kinds of missions. It all started when she recruited Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, who would eventually become her best friend. Her love life is also full. She's happily engaged to sweet, cute Dick Grayson, aka original Robin, aka Nightwing, and recently discovered she was pregnant, so she's going to start taking things easy until her friend Chloe Sullivan takes over during her maternity leave. She's working on surveillance on Lex Luthor as a personal request from Superman, and during a mission where she leads a few members of the League (Link) she discovers something very, very big. Before compromising anything she secures all the information, but a minute too late. Fatality occurs and Babs is murdered, leaving her friends and family desolate and with a very well encrypted set of highly valuable information, now left for Chloe to decipher.

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Dick Grayson, Nightwing. Completely and utterly in love with Babs, he's the happiest guy on the planet (Clark is the happiest guy on the universe). Her death leaves him crushed, inconsolable, desolate and without a reason to live, but unwilling to commit suicide. He opts to carry on through a path of vengeance and violence against which Bruce advises him. Only with the help of Dinah he will start, timidly, to move on amongst the pain.

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Bruce Wayne, Batman. I know there are many reasons for not having Batman in Smallville (I think same as Wonder Woman), but he's too good to avoid here. Batman is a nice counterpart of Clark, he's not called the Dark Knight without reason, but there is something nobody can deny him, and that is his sense of Justice. He will always do the right thing, as painful as it sometimes can be. For those not reading comics, I think he resembles a lot the Nolan-verse version of the hero, especially the second film. So, deeply hurt by the death of Barbara, for him, for Dick and for Babs' father, he is determined to find her murderers, for what he tells Ollie he will step out of the League so he can use all of that time for that and leave the group's resources available for other matters until he comes up with the identities of Barbara's killers. Ollie will assign Chloe to work with him, because of the Luthor involvement, knowing that wherever Lex is, things get very messy. Bruce cannot avoid the feeling that Clark, who had asked Barbara to investigate him, is partly responsible for her death, and if this is proven, he'll take any necessary measure to have Justice served.

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Lex Luthor, Superman's nemesis. Obviously did not die in that explosion (Smallville 8x14...ugh) and made a return sometime in the future (Parachutes' past), taking back his company but not the Daily Planet, that Tess Mercer had sold to Ollie, who's the actual sole owner. He's decided to take over the White House through the political via and is doing quite good in the Presidentials so far, including a marvelous first rally in which he had the pleasure of verbally beating Lois Lane herself, although later he is unexpectedly punched back by a random civilian also attending the event (Link). Thanks to his seemingly flawless surveillance system, he detects the so-called Oracle and prepares a trap, both for her and the League, who are close to finding out about his secret experiments. On a brilliant strike, he misleads the League and murders Barbara Gordon, who he believes is Oracle. Continuing his plans, that include playing the panic card once he's leading the States through biological threats, he has a set back when unexpectedly a covert triple mission of the League discovers three of his labs, one of them keeping the kryptonian boy known to the world as Chris Kent.

Helena Bertinelli, Huntress, second member recruited by Babs for Birds of Prey. With violent tendencies, after Babs' murder she decides to step out, aware that if she doesn't, sooner than later there will be a blood bath. She gets some help from Dinah, and by the end of Knall, just like Dick, she seems to be doing much better, and is finally back in track.

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Along the stories, other characters, familiar to Smallville or just from DCU have appeared, mainly as supporting roles in missions or light chats. Some of them (a few reappearing in Inside): Martha Kent (retired from the politics, currently living in Smallville), Perry White (chief editor of the Daily Planet. He follows comic canon, but I'm sure that when Smallville brings him back, he will be very much alike); Lana Lang (currently living in New York and leading her own life, provides Lois with all the information she has on Luthor, helping Lois in her investigation –Knall–); Donna Troy aka Troia (comic canon, sister of Diana Prince, living in NY, works with the League and the Titans, a subsidiary of the JLA*; very good friends with Dick); Bart Allen (follows Smallville canon, so in 2020 he's older than in the comics; appeared in Link); Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman (very much indeed, comic canon. She calls Clark Kal (which pisses Lois off a lot), and has a very deep respect for Miss Lane; she's a very serious but sweet woman, fierce warrior when needed; sister of Donna Troy, good friend of Dinah; member of the League); Commissioner James –Jim– Gordon (Barbara's father, head of Gotham City's police department. Despite the pain, he has, like Batman, a very deep sense of justice, and he's the one telling his caped friend that he must control the increasingly violent Nightwing. Batman has an enormous respect and affection for him); Zinda (the third mobile member of Birds of Prey, pilot, made a few appearances already), James –Jimmy– Bartholomew Olsen (younger brother to Smallville's Henry James –Jimmy– Olsen, tragically dead in Smallville 8x22. Following Perry's request on finding a new photographer, Lois goes through several resumes her boss has given her, mainly because the new recruit will mainly work for her and is almost out of breath when among the solicitants she finds a smiling freckled face reading James Olsen (Knall). He's had no further role so far). Tess Mercer (she has not appeared personally, but has been mentioned quite a few times. A merge herself of comic/movie characters, Tess is from Smallville and Smallville only, so full SVcanon there. According to Link, she disappeared from the face of the Earth once Lex returned, probably demoted to seek tropical plants in some island); Isabel Parker (random invented civilian confronting Lex in his rally during Link, and pissing Mr. Luthor off a lot).

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*JLA: is what could become in this universe. Being Ollie the head and founder, and being Ollie someone used to manage a big corporation such as Queen Industries, the League is a very well oiled engine, with hierarchies, meetings and protocols, contracts and subsidiary groups in areas where permanent bases are needed, such as the Titans, who also have their fair amount of independency. Members have total liberty to lead their lives and choose their own missions, but unless they have good motives, they will always be available for the League. No one has complained so far and the system works almost perfectly.

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And I think this is pretty much it. If anyone sees something or someone missing, please do tell, my reviewers know I'm always happy to clarify and explain any doubts. Thanks and enjoy the story.