crossing over

Reccing Note: Turbulence, with Eternal Spoilers. Because they demanded some emotional resolution, dammit.
4231 words. r/nc-17. turbulence.
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.

The solid, sturdy little walls around her fracture in a hundred places at once.

(The whole river
is melting. )

The nurse handed her a bottle of pills which Jimmy snatched from her hand. There were more than a handful of explanations he should’ve heard out. That he was on drugs. That he had been about to brain someone she cared about with a metal pipe.
“First Clark and now Davis.” Clark. Davis. Davis. Clark.
She knew what that was.
“You just don’t trust me,” he’d said, in a way that told her that wasn’t all he meant.

“Why the hell did you even marry me?”
Her mouth felt stiff, and the answer that flew to her head is the last one he’d want to hear. She didn’t remember the wedding, the whys or the whats.
I would’ve given my life to you, she wanted to say. I tried. Didn’t that mean something?
He didn't hear.
It was just her in the middle of the lobby, with the few scattered nurses and orderlies milling around to hear the soap opera unfold.
There were more than one or two tears, she’d swallowed bitter in her throat, as he’d gone in the car (nowhere with her), and she’d caught a bus to the empty apartment.
---
It rains big heavy droplets on the thin window panes; so maybe, just maybe it doesn’t look like she’s crying.
A monster burst into her wedding, she’s slept in the hospital for the past few weeks, she doesn’t have a job, she’s alone and tired. She can’t imagine any other world than this.
Jimmy will come back.
Some things are easy and others are not; and she pretends that she doesn’t feel relief at the quiet absence of him needing to be the center of her little world.

She leans her head on the window and breathes in the night air because she can.
She sees a dark shape on the pavement, blinks and it’s gone. Her imagination works well enough when she wants to believe she’s not alone.
She pulls the blankets from the bed to the couch, and tries to sleep.

(We skim along in great peril)


She has more space to move, to breathe. Slowly but surely the silence is eating her up.
Call somebody. She thinks to herself.
She has only one cell phone that hasn’t been broken out gallivanting on by-gone adventures. No new messages. She can expect Clark to call at ten and no earlier. He’s probably off scoobying with Lois.

She thinks of calling Davis, to say what, she doesn’t know. Maybe she’d spill out an apology that her husband tried to kill him, anything at all, maybe nothing. Three rings and no answer. He’s probably working late. He didn’t get hours off because someone accused him of murder.
---
Maybe Jimmy will come back, maybe he won't.
The second night it rains, she gets the urge to get under the downpour, feel the water soak past her skin. She remembers doing this on the farm when she’d needed to. This is downtown Metropolis, not Smallville; and she feels reckless.
This must be the acceptance stage, the sign that that the obligatory mourning period is over. She dresses and doesn’t bother to comb her hair because it will all stick together soon enough.
The droplets of water are heavy and hard, much less comforting than she remembers and she’s not alone on the dark street.
He’s just standing there soaked to the bottom of his very dark jeans, not shivering half as much as she.
“Davis.”
It looks absurdly like mourning. He doesn’t see her, just gazes up at nothing, because that can’t be her window.

She reminds herself that he is her friend and she isn’t supposed to notice the way the raindrops adhere to his skin.
She tugs at his sleeve and he startles a little. “You in there?”
A shade of something passes over his face. “Chloe?”
“What brings you to this little corner of Metropolis?”
“I heard Jimmy was discharged early. I was just passing by just to see how you were getting along. How’s…”

“He left.” Maybe not the wisest thing to say, considering the state of the both of them; the fact that he’d kissed her that no ‘moving ons’ could obscure. A little more explanation might have been good, something like ‘Oh! It’s not…just, post-wedding jitters.’
It’s important to keep the line in place; because she won’t be Clark.

“I’m sorry.” It’s not like he’s just saying it. Like he actually sees, like he is when he has no reason besides her.
It makes her feel exposed.
She asks instead. “How long have you been doing this?”

---
Zatanna teaches her a lesson. Chloe’s shifted into something different, a little odd. Her dream life, her cousin’s life-- isn’t what she wants anymore.
So, she get’s her job with Oliver back, functioning as a receptionist on the 1-800 Superhero party line. It drives any hint of quiet from her brain. Only that isn’t it, either.
The day after her twenty second birthday she realizes she wants something of her own.


(having to move faster than ice goes under)

There’s neither hide nor hair of Jimmy. When the druggist knows more than she does, she accepts he’s not coming back.
She puts his things in boxes in the closet, and the apartment looks stripped. Soon her research papers fill what used to be his nightstand. She still sleeps on the couch.
The marriage was the biggest mistake of his life. Maybe Jimmy will send annulment papers and the process will be complete, so she can wave the banner of failed wife over her head, not bitterly, not proudly.
Maybe she hadn’t trusted him, and the whole marriage had been her trying to prove to him that she did. Her mistake, too.
----
There are precious few constants in her life, but Davis becomes one.
It’s a strange relationship they have now.
He’s said he’s moved on and she’s at that part of her life just succeeding ‘lacrima’ and preceding ‘le gay divorcee’, the part where she talks a lot. The one where she exorcises old demons, or old husbands. If Davis doesn’t like Jimmy, he doesn’t say it. He listens to her talk about little nuances and things she misses, things that hurt.
He makes her honest.
“I’m not sure he and I ever told each other just the truth, you know?” she tells him.

And this time, more than any other, he’s there. She keeps coming back. It isn’t knowing that she can fall apart in front of him; but that somehow, she can feel herself knotting together, inch by inch.

She sends conventional work applications during the day to places he suggests, closer to the hospital more often than not. She finds him outside, around the apartment, in the little coffee shop around the corner.

Davis is different and the same. Some days, he’ll look almost normal except for an unnatural sheen to his face, like an illness or addiction. Some days, it’s gone completely, and he’s the assured paramedic she met at the start. When she first asks him, he says ‘late shift from hell’. It’s not just that. The blackouts could have had a tie-in to illness. When she tries to look up his old files she finds nothing at all. She keeps searching because she won’t lose him too.
---
Maybe it’s because of neediness, but simple friendly touch becomes easier, slight brushes of their shoulders and his hand under the small of her back as they walk or talk about anything at all. Just relaxed, prolonging contact, as if either or both of them need it.

This is a veneer, of course; and in the words of Gregory House, it has the potential to become charged. She tells herself she can manage this, to be Joan of Arc, the Virgin Queen. That they can need each other without needing everything.
The line remains drawn.
When he walks her to her door she doesn’t ask him in. It shouldn’t feel dangerous, this thing that they have. But it does.
Whatever it is, it is her own.
---
She dreams in puzzles of red, black, and steel gray.
Of him telling her that she saved him, with that exact tone. His voice begging her to run, but not just because he knew those streets at night.
She dreams of an avalanche pushing him under until she can’t see his face or hear his voice.
She never remembers her nightmares.
---
(and still find foothold in the soft floe.)

The first time he kisses her it looks like he’s going to die. It’s not one of those tortured lover’s analogies, but quite literal. The records wing of the Daily Planet catches on fire, he goes in to treat patients, and she’s his emergency contact.
.She finds him in the smoke, writhing on the ground as far from anyone else as he can manage. She can’t see his face, but knows him well enough; knows his touch even under frenzy and fear. His lips against hers aren’t tentative or lustful, just there as if he’s drinking her in, pulling the breath right out of her throat. The solid, sturdy little walls around her fracture in a hundred places at once.
He shoves himself back, apologizes profusely.
She could’ve repeated the old line. “You kissed me.”
She lets it slide.
----
The first night he comes into the apartment he carries a stack of her old Isis files back for her research. She’s not eager to hear the ticking of the clock again, so she gets him to eat something that could be ramen noodles while sitting on the couch with a near half-foot of space between their bodies.
The silence, for once, feels odd and misplaced between them and she’s acutely aware of wanting something painfully.

“You were right before I got married, about, this.” She says. She doesn’t know where it’s Jimmy or the wedding or this thing that’s always been there. This has to be the moment, just when she spills some wild and rambling epiphany about herself, and needing to control things.
“For a while I was a mess and now, not so much.”
She watches his eyes and his face for any sign of recognition that this is the moment where warning bells clang loudly in their respective minds, that maybe the line will be smeared.
“The second day I stopped feeling that. I don’t feel lonely, now, with you.”
“I’ll be here as long as you need me.”
“I don’t mean that way. I mean in the less broad, more personal sense.” It’s a friendly request. Lines only mean something until you cross them.
“So I’m asking you to stay.” He’s supposed to do something besides swallowing quietly in the dark as like she’s choking him.
“I don’t think I should.” She likes to fancy she’s good at reading people, and she can read him like a book.
“Why not?”
“I can’t do this to you. There are things about me…”
“I know you’re a good liar; that moving on thing really knocked it out of the park.” This is going to consume one or the other of them, eventually, she thinks, so it’s better just to head right into it. Firewalk and you don’t get burnt.
Somewhere she read that trust was laying your palm open on someone else’s. He reaches out, or she does. Her palm turns over in his grip.
“I need to tell you something.” He says.

---
(Here all we have is love, a great undulating
raft, melting steadily. We go out on it.)

When he tells her, she can’t speak. This is the one scenario she never even considered. Jimmy hadn’t been experiencing delusions. Davis had lied like a pro, was at the center of it all, the force that sent every carefully constructed brick of her universe whirling into chaos.
The worst part is she can’t bring herself to feel much different.

‘I’m sorry’ he says, over and over, and she thinks he feels more pain at this very moment than she does.
She never asked to be the key to this.
She shies away from him. She needs this distance, needs to be rational, needs to feel cold. He doesn’t try to touch her again.

She wishes she could deal with rage, or with tears, or with forgetting. But she can’t, not when he’s gone and told her, thrown everything on the line because he didn’t want to hurt her. Because he just did.

Because he’s given her means to destroy him, and no villain does that. She can’t do it, no matter how strongly her Clark conscience tells her that he has been cast as the villain.
Her mind skims over the question of what he else he could have done lightly, because there is no answer. He had no choice, until now, and then it had been truth.
“I need to think.” She says. “Please.”

---
Time. Time.
It takes her a day to sort it out.
She has no trouble finding her way to the Daily Planet in her own body this time.
Her throat constricts just a little but she knows she has to do this.
She needs to tell Clark.
Tell him what, tell him what?

She hesitates in front of the desk, thinks of leaving before he will appear; 6’4 in his tailored suit. But apprehension nails her feet to the ground, and she thinks that they’ll find a way to help Davis. They always do.
Clark’s desk is still messy, typical and male, with a few unfinished articles about to hit the press. “Local Paramedic’s Fiery demise” makes the second page.
“I’m sorry.” Clark says.

(We are one another’s floe. Each displaces the weight
of his own need.)

It’s just not physically possible. Davis can’t die. Can’t. Not in the middle of some road in the countryside, not anywhere.
She thinks this until she finds out about the bomb, embedded unnaturally with green rock.
---
When she eats breakfast the next day, it’s at the counter.
The crate of files he’d brought over from Isis remains on the table until it catches dust.
---
There’s nothing but her job.
Watchtower almost destroys the JLA. Or rather, the thing-pretending-to-be-her does. The meteor mutant has an exact copy of her face, a voice that mimics her own. It plays on every bit of her darkness, all of Oliver's fear. The mutual secret society crumbles and Clark knows all about Sebastian and all about Lex. It leaves Oliver with a sore jaw, the operation in shambles, and Chloe more isolated than ever.
It takes on another face, lives free to continue its mission, whatever it is.
The weird has suddenly mushroomed to epic proportions and she’s too empty to care.
---

“Chloe.”
The illusion is just as perfect as it was the first time. She sees Davis at her door, half dressed and smelling of dried blood. There’s a limp, a perfectly human stiffness to his movements. The creature wears his face, and the worst part is she needs it to be his.

“I’m sorry. Don’t run.”
She runs, tosses a chair in its way and keeps going. She doesn’t understand why her again, like this. Torture, perhaps.
But it runs too fast for her too get the key in the lock, get out.

She has to turn back to make sure she has time. There’s none, and it has reached her.
It would be a perfect replica. Almost.
Except for the unnatural sheen of sweat on its face that she knows as his. There’s the straining that she had seen before, half hidden by the dark. The darkness is spreading to his temples and he’s biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, as if he could bleed.
“…touch me. Please.”
She cups her hand under a cheekbone and feels it too sharply. Darkness ebbs away to tanned skin flaked with maroon.
Her fingers come away almost clean.

(hold me up. I won’t hurt you. Though I bay,
I would swim with you on my back until the cold
seeped into my heart)

“Tell me what happened.” She wants to know, needs him to distract her because she hasn’t exactly got training for dealing with Kryptonite flesh wounds. He’s the paramedic; but he can’t be treating himself with the mess that is his shoulder.
“After… after what happened Tess Mercer found me. She told me things; showed me a cage where I didn’t change.”
"The Luthorcorp experiments.”
“I was one of the very first experiments they had. Somehow she knew all about me. I was fine for a while in there. And then she forced me out of it and it got worse. She said the only way to stop it was if I killed the other Kryptonian."
”Clark.”
“I think I threw her across the room and I ran. The car was rigged and when I got out I kept changing faster.”
“That’s what she wanted.”

His skin looks battered, for a lack of a better word. There are red puckered marks around the wound up to his bicep, tiny burns that won’t heal until she finds a pair of tweezers the right size to pull out the little green pellets.
“She sent someone after me. He was just doing his job. I…”

She drops her other hand over his sternum to keep her hand steady. “Keep talking.”
“I found you.” He hisses between his teeth. It’s a big one.
The marks start to shrink on themselves before her eyes, leaving only smooth skin that distracts her unduly.

“If it doesn’t hurt now, I can get you one of the shirts from the closet.” She brushes a hand over his arm just to be sure.
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. The skin could be sensitized, yet.
“Maybe we’d better leave it for now.” If he’s like Clark he won’t get cold without a shirt. She’ll be the one with the problems, all in the name of caretaking.
Caretaking indeed. She’s sitting backwards on his lap checking him. For injuries.

“Anywhere else? You can have the shower.”
This is what she’s going to do, pat him reassuringly on the arm and go get a few towels. Until he makes the noise again, and it’s not like his wrist is sensitized too.
His voice is thick. “I’m fine.”

“”The Kryptonite must have done a number on you. Maybe you should...”
He holds onto her waist firmly, awkwardly. “Don’t go again.” Maybe he needs this right now. She could be his insurance against changing into that thing that scares him. Or something else, she doesn’t know anymore than the look in his eyes.
He’s alive.
Her head fits under his chin, and it’s funny that he does have a heartbeat. Wild and erratic though it may be.
She squeezes her eyes closed and doesn’t understand why she feels scared just this moment.
He means too much.
She could pull back, but that would never put a halt to the spinning in her head. He’s always slipped past her defenses.
He’s scared too; it’s in the way his lips hover inches before invading her space and making everything disappear. Maybe he’s not the only one who’s sensitized. She can feel it in her scalp as his hands slide carefully through her hair, the slight hair on his arms tickling her bare skin.
It’s like this for a while, slow and easy and only pushes the aching farther.
He could make it stop.
She works her position for more leverage and lets herself feel, concentrate on just one sensation and forget the rest. He throws himself into this one act like he is starving and it pulls her under.
The slight wetness of kissing gives way to something else. His tongue slips into her mouth and it’s different, more intense, drives all rationality from her mind. It’s as if they are trying to dive into each other when the act is physically impossible.

He nudges her knees apart to fit closer, keeps one hand carefully bracing the curve of her back against empty air. It’s gentlemanly, almost an oxymoron. They’re on even ground, really doing this all the way; at this very moment his hands could go anywhere. Anywhere at all.

(We are committed.
We are going across this river willy nilly.)

She might as well say it like it is. She pulls back carefully, pushes down the irregularity of her breath the urge to keep moving.

“What do you say we move this?” She couldn’t have declared her intent more firmly had she waved a sign over her head that said ‘I want to have your babies and live in a house with a white picket fence.’
He looks at her, really looks at her with his face full of so much she can’t describe, realizing. It would have meant something wherever it happened, but this…
He reaches her, cradles her like a child, kicks the door open with his foot.

(Where is something solid? Only you and me.)

She’s looking at him now and it’s almost too much to take. He wants her, she knows this. Wanting is simple and primal, if he just wanted her he would not look at her as if he saw her.
It’s dangerous to be exposed, her mind tells her; but this is what she’s always needed. He is.
Where did it all come from?
She feels like one of those cars that has only been driven once, one way. She doesn’t know what to be prepared for; the fear mixes in her gut with the sudden soft feelings. This is the point.
She tosses her plain red shirt into a corner.

It’s not impersonal even when the kissing stops. His mouth slides over her skin as if he’s learning from memory; makes her realize she has feeling in places she’s forgot about, makes her crazy. The sounds that come out of her throat are disturbingly like mewling.
“Davis. Please.”
He reaches the clasp of her bra about the same time she’s ready and then it’s his skin against hers. He’s going to move gently again, she knows, drag it out. She cheats, pushes him under her.
He reacts more strongly the more of him she touches, the slower she does it. It doesn’t matter as much as she wants to feel the warm friction of skin on skin, she doesn’t stop, just letting them brush lightly until he leans into her and she draws back. The reaction is more than instantaneous, his body is tight against hers, and his eyes darken.

“Just so you know that’s what it feels like.” Sorry, he says, and he’s not. Then it’s not slow again.
Her head hits the mattress and he begins to move. Even with two layers between them the sensation is frighteningly strong. Maybe, maybe something will explode. She can’t take it much longer.

It’s easy enough for her to wiggle her way out of the pencil skirt. He is a different case all together. “Of course you’d wear your uniform with a belt.” She tries to help, but only ends up arresting his progress when their fingers tangle together.
She waits for him, feels her stomach do a cartwheel. The mattress is rough, and there haven’t been any sheets on the bed since the first day she came back.

“Protection.” She’s not thinking. She always thinks. He finds the condom in the drawer to the left, Jimmy’s side. Before the wedding Jimmy had bought about ten sealed boxes and waggled his eyebrows suggestively at her. No pain at the thought, this time. This means something.

Davis breaks open the packaging; unkempt, his hair an inch longer than usual; like a boy. Then he reaches her, kisses her slowly, as if they are just kissing and she hadn’t been seducing him quite successfully seconds ago. He always gives her an out.
She pulls him toward her.

At first it’s a little like pain, getting used to something where there was emptiness. It’s been a while, and never, never like this. Her body moves and shifts, accommodates him, this need.
The warmth unfurls slowly, his arms holding her tight, his palm warm at the base of her neck drawing her close. Then it changes and she needs it, needs more, needs everything.

He pushes into her, relentless, catches her mouth again.
The movements are almost unsteady, the bedsprings groan and the sounds he makes are as loud as hers. She strains and manages to hook her ankles around his waist, hears the crash of glass.

Not thought, not sound, eyes drifting in and out of focus. Her breath hitches and he doesn’t stop, pushes her to the edge of a chasm where every muscle of her tightens and strains for release. This is it, she thinks. She’s going to die.
Then he goes completely still within her. Her eyes snap open, find his face. He says her name like he’s wanted to say it for a very long time; kisses her like that first time.
She’s had few orgasms in her life. Maybe one. From what she’s read of them you were supposed to see God, a mountaintop, or strange constellations.
She sees him. Just him.

(anyhow. I love you, I love this fool’s walk.

Afterwards, he pulls her carefully to his chest. She feels boneless and suddenly brave.
They curl together and their skin sticks without the sheets between them. They're okay. Not empty, alone, or getting lost. She knows the world isn't as simple as this moment, but she wants to stay like this.

His smile is warm and his eyes look as if he's going to tell her 'You saved me', again. The thing is saving each other; right here, right now.
"I thought I would never change back. I had to find you."
She still hasn't gotten used to this, this strange new power she seems to have. "I don't know how this works exactly. I used to have the power to heal. But this doesn't hurt me."
She's always suspected, up to a point, that maybe it was him all along. A half whispered "You make me human." is all it takes for her to know. She turns his face toward her own, aware that the light is draining out around them and tries to say it without words.
The time for solutions, figuring out exactly how they fit, how to hold on, comes later.
Right here, right now. She thinks.

(The thing we have to learn is how to walk light.)


Endnotes: named For William Meredith's Poem 'Crossing Over', which I shuffled and generally made a mess of.



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