binding by striking

Reccing Notes: What if Eternal hadn't had some kind of cathartic effect, what if Chloe was cautious and Davis was broken. Would that change anything at all?
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
6892 words, r/nc-17, eternal and beast (kind of)

The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
(Say I come to you by circles.)
Chloe spends eight hours in the cot where she doesn’t fall asleep because fear and guilt churn like two twin monsters in her gut.
The clinch of theirs is more intimate than it ought to be and this isn’t ever something she would have felt comfortable with Jimmy doing or he’d ever have thought of.
Of course, Jimmy never had a monster inside him and he didn’t need the Chloe drug.

She still feels Davis’s arms gentle around her waist, the way he breathes, how underneath it all she feels far too safe. She tries to forget because she’s not Clark, not full of romantic fairy tales that will miraculously make everything right. The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
Pragmatism is sensibility.
It’s the only thing that will keep her from falling to pieces that she can’t put together.
Maybe this means something.
Maybe this is what she needs to believe.

In the morning, she takes Davis’s arms from around her and feels grateful that he hasn’t asked her to stay, not since the first night.
The calm lifts from his face and she’s aware of how stark and sick his skin looks. He might be endowed with a destructive alien DNA but living, waiting in this light is not good for him.
He only has her and she’s taking that too.

“I have to go to work for a few hours. I’ll be back.” She says.
It’s the pretext of a normal life and all that. A steady employment will keep Clark from stalking her for help or worrying.
“Okay.”
His eyes linger on her face, seeing and holding and suffocating her. ‘I’m yours.’ they seem to say even though he hasn’t said a word about that, not since she found out and he was begging her not to run.
He doesn’t need to open his mouth to say it in silence and in roars.
She tries not to look at him as she runs up the steps and out the door.

(Say the line that carries my name keeps me from knowing you)

Still, she knows when it’s time, feels it in every fiber of her being. It’s the hour, of course. 8:00 pm leaves her permanently unsettled.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have left at all, knowing what could come out of the apartment without her.

Doomsday. The Ultimate Destroyer.
It sounds like something out of a bad b movie, and no matter how much she should, she never uses the name. It horrifies her enough and the thought of it as part of that guy she knew changes nothing.

Davis needs her and of course she’s his voice to anchor him to the world. His hands had killed people, countless people, enough to terrify Clark several times over. It must horrify him to be alone with silence after that.
Part of him is still the guy who opened up to her with his fears all that time ago.
Love me. Lie to me. He never says as much, but she knows she won’t be able to try to make him forget, when she can’t. She can’t love him and the worst part is that it’s not all his fault.
He takes the blame anyway.

He wants her and that little fact is hard to bypass when she sleeps pressed up against him every night, but he actively avoids doing anything that would make her uncomfortable.
He doesn’t scare her as much as she does.
She can’t get too close.
She’s fallen in love with the guy who was meant to be a hero and he broke her heart. If she fell in love with the guy who was meant to tear the world apart she would just be asking for it.

(We are held where we call. We know something and are held to what we know.)
Davis needs her now.
Clark catches her halfway out of the Watchtower, almost running to her Beatle in her heels.
He’s big and blocking out the sun, insisting on knowing how she is doing on her own. His concern might have made her twinge a little before. Not now, not when he was coming at someone else’s behest, because suddenly Lois thought she was acting like a widow. Not now.
“She hasn’t seen me in a week.”

“I have, and I think I agree with her. Listen, it’s the MO. You’re running yourself ragged and shutting yourself off. It isn’t healthy.”

By the time she hops in the front seat he’s in the seat beside her all strapped in.

“Clark, any other time would be great. Not now, okay?”

“We need to talk.”
Clark follows her to her door and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. Can he feel the pull, like Davis can, she wonders? Is he just that dense?

“Look, I know you’ve been hurting. Jimmy first and then that Davis…thing. What you did. Killing someone. ”
Killing someone? Killing a friend, with fantastic recuperative abilities and immortality to boot. Who was currently in her basement, while it got that need to kill the Kryptonian again, increasingly worse.
It was just about to bust a way out if she didn’t get the idiot off her doorstep.
No wait, hero.
And she should be thinking of how Clark might be torn apart. Not that this is her last chance. To keep him, not Clark.

A hysterical laugh wants to bubble up in her throat. Care to come in for tea, Clark? That’s what he wants to hear. The knuckle sandwich is on me.

“It shouldn’t have happened. Just because I’ve been busy doesn’t mean I don’t care. You have to let me in for me to help you.”
She expects any moment for a crash, the breaking beyond in the darkness.
He must be in so much pain.

“And what would you do, Clark? Tell me how it would have been if I’d listened? Maybe you could pull out the growing up with the Kents speech for good measure?”

The knot of fear is working its way into her voice but she can’t be too hysterical or he’d know. Maybe he wouldn’t.
“But killing someone…”
Measured. The best lies have a base in truth

“My friend, Clark. I killed my friend.”
After he died Davis got to be all she remembered, the man who saved people and who held her when she cried. Things are not so simple now, but the definition stays. She couldn’t cut the feeling out of it, no matter what.

“Maybe I don’t need your advice. Maybe I need to mourn. You have a world to save. Not me.”
He closes the door gently.

(Say I am a wine you know better than to drink.)
She doesn’t have time to hold her hand in front of the lever and breathe now.

She’s not only unsettled. She’s terrified because she doesn’t have memories of that, doesn’t know what to expect. Her perfectly sensible instinct tells her to run. It’s kept her alive with Lex and Linda.

But Davis will be there, a little bit of him. She’d stopped it before, but it doesn’t make the thought any easier. It could easily rend her limb from limb.

The last bulb has guttered out, and the Talon table crashes into her hip as she stumbles. This time, she feels him before she sees him and he’s not even touching her.

“Davis.” There’s no answer but that strange growling, It trying to push out of his skin.
She can see his shape on the ground, on his knees. This has happened to him before in the cage. In the cage before she’d killed him the first time.
“He’s gone.”

He’s just an outline in the dark, and the outline doesn’t look right at all.
Yet there are no red eyes to stiffen her and send her wheeling backwards.
It/he hugs her around the waist so that it feels her ribs will crack, while he’s on his knees like he were a small child. Her voice comes out too quiet and thin.

“It’s all fine. You’re fine Davis.”
She thinks she finds his shoulder through the torn cloth, a roughness and sharp sting. The blood trickles past her fingers, drying cold in the air.

He’s trying not to breathe, trying not to move because it hasn’t receded yet. Just one quick movement and that could be it for her.
He’s kneeling.
The whole idea is so much like a pilgrimage before the Virgin Mary that she wishes she could laugh. But she can’t, because she can feel the muscles in his cheek twisting and the tension going through him.
Minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Too much longer that the last time.
How can this be enough for him?

I’m sorry he says to her,
“You didn’t hurt me.” she lies. She can feel his breath in warm scared puffs of air through the thin shirt, and wonders if he feels the shudder though her skin. Of course he does, he always does.

“Thank god.” She wonders if it’s just a colloquialism or he believes still. He’s been hit with more than any true-fiction conspiracy novel- learning about being a genetic form from another planet, meant to have no free will and a destiny that was the exact opposite of everything he’d tried to be. He wants to and it breaks her heart.
“Can’t lose you.” It’s stopped and he’s slow in letting go.

These days he doesn’t touch her unless she does first. One of the downsides of having flesh that can easily be pierced through by spikes, but not just that. He sees himself as tainted with the invisible blood on his hands. He'd scrubbed it off and then cooked her dinner once but now that she knows he won't forget it. It was all fine and dandy when he was the hero she wanted to believe in. She thinks maybe she hates him a little for that.
He'd lied and that had been her truth.
He hates himself more than she could though, and she wishes he'd let go. He didn’t have the choice of making it stop.

“Then I take it you missed me.” Her quip falls flat, in part because her voice is wobbling. It’s impossible, the pretence of this. She can’t lie; keep Davis and Clark apart forever, every minute of every second of every day. She’s not that strong, not that anything.

“I’m here now.” She says. She wonders why her, what he thinks he sees.
“You won’t lose me.” Oh, but she can lose him.
She can lose herself.

(She could drop to her knees on the asphalt and try to forget that she was thinking of him just then.
Not Clark. It wouldn’t work.
It would break her; one moment after another held back in a dam until they over spilled. If he leaned forward then; touched her lips with his; she thinks that she would have given him everything, all the crumbling bits of her that should have been running.

She could be one of those moths flying headlong into the light that’s too bright and too blinding and too warm.
I can’t save you, she would want to say. Only she wouldn’t say that when the constant pained look in his eyes was almost hopeful; and the tenderness in his face made her warm, not suffocated. Only she’d draw her hand across his cheek and leave a scarlet mark.

“I trust you. I care about you. I’m tired of being scared.” She’d trust he’d never try to hurt her.
He’d be warm and trembling under her hands, like there was too much that couldn’t be contained. And she’d feel it, trickling its way to her skin. He’d burn.
He’d give everything, take much more. His touch would mark her.)

As it is, he holds her a little too tight and it doesn’t feel like enough.

(Say this water doesn't pull but when you fall takes you altogether in. Say you are in.)

It is destiny, or DNA, or just the hateful actions of worse monsters than anything that they could’ve made him into.
He can’t help hurting her.

She’s covered in blood; she doesn’t know whose blood it is- Oliver’s, Jimmy’s, Clark’s or someone else’s. She couldn’t save them all.

There is smoke and dust and sirens with no one to back them up because anyone who has any sense has fled.
He isn’t merely red eyed, now, but decked at the center of armor and spikes. She wishes she could see something of Davis for one last time, but he’s suffering in something a hundred times worse than hell.
Maybe he can see around them and is struggling from wherever he’s trapped.

All she sees is those eyes, red and burning and for the first time not seeing her at all. It is only on a mission, following a preprogrammed genetic urge.
She should feel just little bloom of self justification now. She’d seen that this would happen, had safe guarded herself.
If she had let herself love him the way she wanted to this would have destroyed her.

(She had no illusions that being with her might have halted the monster taking over. She’s not some princess in a fairytale. She’s not that anything.)

She hadn’t taken the gamble on odds that she could never win. She did right.
She had to have done right.
Only, all she can think is that she lost anyway and that maybe if she had taken that chance, she’d have something more to remember of him.
It slices its way through the door like so much paper, bone spurs scratching on tile, impervious to the slippery carnage.
The fear should be there, and is, but she’s drowning in something that feels like despair.

Davis is gone. She realizes that she didn’t have to let herself love him for losing him to tear her apart.
This is the end. This time it won’t be enough.
Her vision blurs and she braces herself.

(Say the same thing that holds us holds us apart.)
She almost chokes in the air and her lashes stick together wetly. Darkness, blackness, comfort. For a second she thinks that this is death.
She still feels his breath even at the back of her neck, and that light bulb is still guttered out.
That wasn’t the way it happened at all.

Her hands go over his making sure. His skin is still too warm and he’s too encompassing but she leaves them there. He needed her. She needed…
It didn’t have to happen that way.

He learns about the dream. No particulars. Just that it had been a nightmare, and he knew he’d been in it. She doesn’t want him to feel guilty; but the perpetual self loathing is back on his face.
He still offers comfort the only way he knows how. He surrounds her.
This time she eases into his grip and holds on a little too tight. “I trust you.” She says. He returns the grip.
Ask me why. Please. Her defenses are in shambles right now, and she’s choked and needy enough to make the jump.
He just holds her, and then there are none.


(Say we belong to each other.)
Maybe her dream had a basis in truth.
Maybe It’s pull would grow with time so that he got absorbed and locked in its hold forever. And she lost him. Really lost him.
Again, to something that had a deeper hold on him than the grave.
Sensibility tells her that this is the way of things. Everything falls apart.
It was a warning.
One day what they have might not be enough.
It’s a useless one.
What would that change, really?

(Say we sit on some steps together, or a wall. Say something falls.)

That day, she comes home early with six halogen lights in the cramped trunk. She drags them down, one by one, and doesn’t need to ask him if he’d give a girl a hand. I can do that, he says and she says she wouldn’t want to sprain anything. All six end up rigged on the ceiling, banishing the otherworldly shadows and (she thinks) turning her hair a greenish tint.
He squints in the light, stretches up unknowingly revealing the strong, lean lines of his abdomen. She’s trying hard not to think of that now but he straightens the connections so meticulously that she just wants to watch him.

This isn’t gothic doom and gloom. It’s the real world. Anything could happen.
She tries to forget that this is Smallville.
“Now we celebrate.”
(There’s a table behind the coat hangers. The dust comes off easily. )

She’s ready to rail at him if he says he doesn’t need to eat one more time. He seems to catch onto her mood and doesn’t. The coffee is weak and the prepackaged tuna casserole isn’t quite warm but he’s sitting across from her so that she could brush his arm if she leaned all the way across the table and the dishware on her tiptoes.

He eats slowly and she wonders if he tastes it at all. He watches her eat mostly with a mixture of intensity and trying to look away politely and not succeeding. He’s confused, he must be and he won’t jump to conclusions because unlike before there’s no big honkin monster to mess with them.
Sure, maybe she just decided to share the closest to a romantic dinner she’s had in the past two years with the halogen lights. That had to be it.

She can see him, really see him. He’s still too pale but strangely beautiful and his face changes like the water from one emotion to another. He can do vulnerability and caring without needing to give a speech.
She still wants him to joke to keep her from turning into a sap, but he’s too busy swallowing her with his eyes.

She doesn’t know that singular cunning trick about eating to seduce. Maybe you were supposed to lick your fork a lot. She doesn’t want to end up looking like a hungry cat.
She does it the old fashioned way. Dig in, but not too fast. Close your mouth when you chew.

Anyway, it seems to work for him, if the way his eyes roam over her neck and try unsuccessfully to jump away is any indication. Never mind the fact that he still looks hungry.

Part of it is her fault, maybe. She figured if this was her being crazy she could go all out. Clingy green cloth. No sleeves, just straps the width of strings. Neckline dipping below the sternum. Lois had called it a boob shirt.

They may have gotten the lights up, but that was it. There is no heating down here. She hasn’t gotten cold because of him.

In hindsight, the shirt was not such a good idea. Goosebumps pebble her arms and she is not shivering, not a little. Not that much.
He puts his sweatshirt over her shoulders, anyway, and it smells like him.

(Say the language is dry and the wall is low. Say a word gets over the wall.)
She tells him about how she always used to ask pointless questions as a kid. It was part of a game. You told each other things. All truths you had to get off your chest.

A warm up round starts, she jokes, she thinks and pulls out a few embarrassingly horrific high school experiences. He doesn’t have many that would qualify as embarrassing, and more that would qualify as horrific. She sees him as he must have been, a scared kid with no one to pitch a seat in his corner, the one seen as damaged and sent to places that only would’ve damaged him more. Not even through her little venture into stalking would she have guessed the magnitude of it.
He looks at the shiny countertop, and avoids her eyes. He didn’t want to turn dinner into this.

“You can tell me anything.”
He wouldn’t ever try to unburden himself on the feelings of those necks snapping beneath his fingers, she thinks and the fear is back and this isn’t what she wanted either.

At least he’s looking at her again but it’s that look the first time she stopped it, like he sees her as some sort of angel. He’s not taking anything from her, just giving but still she wants to tell him that she can’t breathe. She has no defense against this.
“Just to seal the deal, I’ll tell you something. I still wish Clark hadn’t come by when you were cooking me dinner.”

It’s true, but she doesn’t know what she was doing then. Playing with emotional fire, maybe. She’d dressed up all the way down to her skin that night, but he doesn’t know that.
She knows what she’s doing now, she hopes.

A smile trembles at the corner of his mouth, but even that looks sad. “All of that, I forgot when I was with you.”
That-oh she knows that, how all that time he’d been doing anything, no matter how damaging to hold it back. It had worked, right up to the part he’d died. Then it had screwed with her and sent her sensibility running for the seven hills. That doesn’t change things as they stand.

“You were my only real shoulder, the guy who saved people and everything I needed.
I got used to playing robotic really well and I never had to tell myself what to feel with you.
I trusted no one else like you, with that.” In past tense, maybe not so good. She hadn’t said ‘How could you have let me trust you when you knew?’
He doesn’t look down, never looks down and the little bit of light in his eyes dulls painfully. “I’m so sorry.”

“That night could’ve been fun. We could have watched some horrible chick flick and I’d have fallen asleep on you-your shoulder. Really, it’s practically engrained in the human genome.”

“I would have been lying to you.”

This part horrifies her more than any other. Not the monster with the endless spiky protrusions, not the helpful emt who went after criminals but still people to keep it sated. (Oliver had a few fingers in the investigation and she knows what the corpses looked like, vertebrae twisted and cracked.)

He’d been the only one to give it to her straight since she met him. Bette, the blackouts, her past, Jimmy. It had made her guilty that this happened with no one else.
It had made her whole.
Only he hadn’t told her possibly the biggest secret of all. All because he couldn’t drag her into it.
So he’d come to visit, cooked her dinner, made her feel like herself again when he looked into her eyes and lied so convincingly that she’d have staked her world on it.

He could be lying now, sitting across the table looking into her eyes and lying if he wanted.
But what possible motive could he have for being crushed?
Logically, there’s the pity-trip-getting her to stay to be the med-dispenser or tearing down her walls so she gives in, but anyway it all comes down to her.
And her logic-brain has this way of shutting off when he’s around.
Animalistic roaring in an alley? Oh, that was just fear.

Enough with the thinking.

“Just tell me, in an ideal world, if it were different. You didn’t have to worry about any of this whole screwed up.... mess. What would have happened between us?”

“But it didn’t happen. There can’t be… a point to that now.”

This is the part where she should be swooning into his arms, flailing helplessly, overcome by manly passion.
What is she doing? Crossing her arms over her chest.

“Just answer. That’s the way it goes. If not you lose. Or I get cross at you. Or both.”

“We would’ve talked. You’d been going through a breakup. We would’ve eaten. You might have teased me about my cooking…”

“Don’t forget the guy hugs. I could’ve used the comfort.”

“Those were guy hugs?”

“Yep, an awfully friendly thing to do. Two years ago Clark might have done that, just the same. You know-except for the whole cooking thing.” And then Clark would’ve traded off Lana stories. And shared his horrors at hurting her when he got—excited.

“Clark never cooked me dinner. Or kissed me.”
(Well, Clark had never planted one on her unless she did it first. And after she did, he’d run away, eventually.)

If the mention of Clark’s name makes incisors start popping out, she fancies herself planting herself on Davis’s knee. Not that it would actually happen.

“…So just say in this hypothetical scenario that I was completely over Jimmy and I asked you to stay and we didn’t fall asleep watching a chick flick.”
Awkwa-rd moment.
“I would’ve shown you that he was wrong.”

“He said I didn’t trust him, so he walked away. What makes you so sure he was an idiot? Maybe he was saving himself pain.”
“You’re worth more than a little pain.”

“Yeah, because you love me, right?” She says it quick and joking and won’t think because the words won’t come out otherwise.
No pause. “I do.” He looks up, doesn’t blink and the attempt at levity falls flat. She’s never let him say to her since that time when she’d been running from him and it had been even more messed up than now.
“You’re not just saying that.” A statement. Not a question.

“Let’s say this is the hypothetical scenario.” She draws herself up, won’t break his gaze from across the countertop. “I’m asking you to show me.”

(Say a skin is like that and that what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone is the constellation that guides us.)
He doesn’t push the table over on his way to her, even if it looks like his muscles are having a fight of their own to keep from it. Even under the bright lights he stands out darkly, but this isn’t symbolic.

His eyes are the way she needs them to be.
He breathes and somewhere between then and now his mouth finds hers and his lips move against hers.
She had a thing about breath before doing this. She would have chewed four sticks of gum to banish the remnant tuna salad. It’s kind of easy to forget that she smells like fish when his lips are soft and not tentative in memorizing hers and all of him is close.

In imagination she’s been farther than this, sometimes, but it hadn’t prepared her, for here and now. She hadn’t ever thought it could be so deliberate. Before, the fantasies came in guilty snatches, unplanned moments when everything spiraled. They were sensible ways of dealing manufactured by her brain and over too soon.
This, now…isn’t. Can’t be taken back. She doesn’t care.

The kiss is heady and dizzying so she can’t be blamed for needing more. He makes a small sound and tilts her face and it feels deeper somehow.
She’s catching his words, swallowing them, learning them all over again.

They have so much to show each other and it could last for as long as they need, but it doesn’t because they are both too impatient. Not just her.
His fingers weave and fist through his sweatshirt where it’s draped on her back. She can’t tell herself she hasn’t been waiting for this.

The sweatshirt falls away onto the cement and slips under her foot when she moves closer, but she doesn’t fall because he’s there. His hands are large enough to swallow her arms and they don’t bruise. He’s everywhere, pressed close, and she’s aware of the way they seem to want to fit together. They need to and anything less is not enough.

She feels the shudder again, and of course he does. The throbbing had hurt then, it hurt now. She can hear his breath and she’s not alone in this.
She pushes against him so her knees bump his and he gets the message, clumsily yanking at the tablecloth and sending flimsy paper plates and empty Tupperware clattering to the floor. No magic tricks there.

“I liked that…bowl. What do you say you make it up to me?”

“I can do that.” He says and his voice is different, rougher than she's used to.

He hasn’t got a hair out of place since it’s so short and his shirt isn’t even wrinkled yet, but he’s still panting, still seeing and it’s still hard to breathe. His eyes are dark again, his face frightfully intense and this does not mean he’s some twisted kind of Heathcliff. He’s Davis now, just Davis, she tells herself. .

He can take anything or everything, all at once. But he just looks at her and it starts back up with the kissing, unexpectedly tender and so very focused. Looking. She’s just missing sleeves, for God’s sake, but she feels irrevocably exposed.

Helpless, too, because he’s heavy and she’s on her back and she has to crane her neck to get closer. She’s pinned against hard wood. No control, and she needs control.
She squirms and he supports himself with his arms so it lightens.

The air is cold and his mouth is anything but, sliding in an easy path over the skin above her shoulder blade and the thoughts scatter. The straps are off her shoulders now and she should be worried because this is so... shameless. Something that normal people do after dates and corny movies.
She could be thinking about DNA and destiny and inevitability and how this may be the only thing she has to remember. Normal, she wants normal.

It is a disturbingly easy feeling, his tongue sweeping easily against hers and his hands… She’s not a teenager, but here she is, playing tonsil hockey for all she’s worth.
She should stop with the thinking.
What’s more normal than a full blown make out session?

She’s going to go insane.
There are plenty of ways to be intimate, and maybe this is just another one. Soon he’s going to have enough data for a complete map.
Her shirt is on but it doesn’t matter when his palm is flat on the skin of her waist and then his mouth is there and the muscles clench involuntarily. Her skin is prickling, aware in every inch. It starts to burn as he trails up the underside of her breast and the tank top traps her before falling away. Part of her is warm at least.

She should tell him that she’s half naked and he’s not so this isn’t quite fair but she hasn’t got the voice for proper, articulated speech.
She tries to remember not to get too excited. Clark could hear her heartbeat if he listened in. But then, he has no place here.

It feels like torture but she wants him to keep on like this because when it’s over she can’t tell herself that this is only a rewind or what could have been in a world where there was no weird-ville, no sadistic alien scientists and no need to pretend.
This is what she thinks even when she holds on.

The only thing she has access to is his neck so she presses her lips there and his pulse hammers through her head.

He’s close enough that she doesn’t feel the cold much. Illogically, she’s sweating.
Somehow he doesn’t feel heavy enough now.

She kicks her heels off with a clatter to keep her feet flat on the wood and closes her eyes. Knee high stockings aren’t a barrier and she could make a joke about him having a thing for Catholic uniforms but his fingers are light and lulling. He still has calluses and she wonders how this can be if part of the destroyer’s nature is to heal. His nature. Maybe both of them are, Davis and It, fighting between themselves. Maybe this isn’t so doomed at all. He’d been human again after he died.

His weight pushes into her but her knees widen very slowly. His mouth still roves over hers and he’s warm and before she can think they are moving together.
The warmth and ache is like a drug and his arms shake on her shoulders.

She nudges him gently so she can see his face before she goes too far. He’s sweating, and his eyes have dilated so she can see the brown again but she doesn’t see him trying to distract himself with this. There is no ‘Lie to Me’ this time.

“This is all I have to give.” she says because she’s herself, as likely to cause pain as to save.
He’s been there.
If anything his eyes are warmer now. “You are everything.” He believes this.
Maybe he doesn’t need her to save him. Maybe he needs something to believe in.
Maybe she does too.

(Say we are in. Say my skin draws you. Say what we do with each other goes on.)

This is hurting him.
He’s no help staring at her like that, so she un-tucks the shirt briskly. She feels a little awed when his eyes still slide shut like he is on a high.
This doesn’t happen to her, but it apparently it just did.
The shirt used to be Jimmy’s, back in the days before he started swearing at her in e-mails. He was never coming back for it.
It stretches over Davis’s chest where she can see the muscle jolt at her touch.

His eyes are still closed so she makes an ineffectual effort to yank it over his head. It takes the two of them yanking in opposite directions and this moment is so out of the continuity of everything else that she knows it will be the one she thinks of first.
He isn’t shy touching her; pulling her in and he’s warm everywhere.

She presses her hand to his chest where it ended up and studies him. “I Tarzan, You Jane.” She mutters, aware she got them out of order.
(He seems to get the point of this and then she learns that he is literally warm everywhere.)

He sinks down to her and the sound that comes out of his mouth is like he’s really breathing for the first time since she saw him again.
She focuses on his face because she wants to scream at the sensation, feeling like she is going to break.
It’s quite a lot to take all at once.
But then he pulls away and she thinks the shock must have shown on her face. He’s still breathing deep and she understands what he’s doing.
She feels tensed for something but she reminds herself to relax and its better. He moves slowly at first but every moment soaks her senses in a miasma of heat and moisture and more aching than she thought possible.

It’s almost elemental, merciless and she anchors herself to the way his hands ground her and their eyes connect. It’s like nothing she’s used to. She used to consider the experience a success if she liked it at the time.
Now… Does she like it? Does she like breathing? Does she need it?

The circular motion feels good and maddening and not enough. She reaches for his shoulders for an outlet and when she presses her nails into his skin and they don’t leave marks. It’s such a silly thing, but she wishes she could. She bites her lip instead.

Then he’s pushing into her deeper so she can't think of anything but him, there and this isn’t enough and she murmurs than if she breaks her teeth biting into his shoulder he can pay for the dentures.

It’s like a rip current, one wave and another and then the next will rush past quick and pull her completely under.
Under, and then when she wakes up it’ll be done and the dream will be just that, a beautiful dream.
She doesn’t want it to end.
She’s trembling and trying to hold on to him, and somehow the rest of her gets that idea.
It just happens and his eyelids squeeze tight and maybe he is going to lose it right then. Only his head drops to her shoulder and he struggles to breathe deep.

Lana had told her once that she was afraid that Clark would break when he got excited. Here she is, with something she hasn’t had and maybe needed all this time and she doesn’t want to think of Clark and his tragedies.
Yet, she doesn’t want the power to break Davis.
She can’t give it back.

He moves still, and he's part of her, pulling her farther out into the water. Her neck jerks up and she arches and finds him. He is the center and all that’s left to do is let it crash over them both and hold on.

His forehead meets hers and his eyes are burning. She doesn’t let her eyes close because she needs it to be real.
It is that: terrifying and agonizing and beautiful. Then only beautiful.


(Say we struggle to get in and stay in and not ever leave).
Afterglow. She thinks that is a silly word, because they don’t look like glow sticks.
The truth is her brain is hazy, she feels sticky and the table is not really as smooth as it looks. She hopes she won’t have to pull splinters out.

He’s impossibly warm yet and she has to freeze her fingers to keep them from running down his face. The urge to hum is over whelming.
She thinks she may be happy.

It’s some time later but he’s still there and he holds her closer than he needs to. They are all but wrapped together, anyway. His fingers barely ghost across her back in small circles and she can feel his breath.

He doesn’t say anything and she’s okay with that. She needs to process so she won’t have a mini-freak-out.
Her mind is almost clear by now, like the clutter just burst out in the wake of everything else.

She’d just lain with Davis. Biblically. Not to save the world, to pacify it or to keep him attached to her. Because they’d needed it, she had.
She just conveniently forgot that that the other facet to Davis meant that she’d taken her pure motivations and stomped all over them. She wasn’t a free agent now.
Clark had nothing to do with it.

There should be two options on the table (and the pun isn’t funny). She could get up and leave before she can’t let go or wait for some divine revelation to hit her right between the eyes.

She makes it a point to keep her breathing slow and calm, like sleep. He can probably feel the change in her, as he always did even before she’d learned about the Kryptonian super abilities.
When she’d found him the first time, she didn’t run away right off. He’d killed people. He asked her to and she’d killed him. She didn’t think she could do it again.

It was nothing quantitatively measureable, a feeling that she couldn’t let go of. She’d paused before he said anything because she wanted to be given no other choice. If she’d been sensible everything would’ve fallen apart.
What’s the point in letting go now?

Maybe this is what they’ve got going for them. She doesn’t want to move.
Can’t.

His eyes don’t paralyze her but they are there and open and it’s that look again. She doesn’t ask him what he thinks he sees and just feels grateful that he does.
“I love you.”
He doesn’t add an expectant pause to the end of that sentence. “I just wanted you to know.”

She doesn't have to say anything. He'd give her everything and not ask for it back if that's what she wanted.
But one revelation deserves another and she's through with being scared.

“I’ve been thinking.”
He doesn’t say, ‘So?’ He’s waiting for her again.

“When you told me the truth I was so mad at you I---.”

“Hated me?”

“I did for a little while.”

“I would have hated me.” He bites his lip and doesn’t look away.
She won’t lie.

“I still would have helped you if you’d told me the whole truth.” He’d preferred to die than ask for her help. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t live with it. Knowing what I’d done and then pushing it on you. It wasn’t the way it should have been."
He wouldn't have pushed her into anything.

"I wanted to believe it it could all go away just like that. ”

“Nothing went away. You wouldn’t let me alone.
I’d have to talk to my best friend about what I did. I couldn’t cry like any normal person because I had to face that I might not have known you at all. I only remembered the ‘you’ part of it. I hated you for leaving me in the mess. I hated it the fact that everything we had was a lie.”

His face hurts to look at, and he looks about ready to cry.
“It wasn’t like that, not for me.”

“I know.” her palm is on his shoulder like before, and funny how fast things can change.
“And now, do you still?”

“I’m not big on the whole hate sex thing, you know. Besides if we didn’t have anything then I couldn’t have lost you. I wouldn't have been so scared of it.”

The wonder on his face forces out everything, and it feels like she’s really breathing.

(We rise where we fall.)

“Will you come with me?”
He asks her, and his voice wavers on the end of it. She can see everything in his eyes and the hope.
He can take all of her and he still seems to be in wonder that this can happen, that it can really be this simple.
This isn’t supposed to make her heart skip a beat.

It’s still there, the pull to hurt Clark and they are at the mercy of any moment her best friend decides to get over what she said.
Geographical distances make a difference to how bad it is.
This would have been the sensible reason, if she had relied on that.

Clark had just been out in the streets and when the change had come on worse she’d held on when Davis had looked like he was being ripped apart.

The cards have been stacked to fall for all their lives. Davis is always going to fight it. Clark won’t know.
She’s going to be there.
The future is one step after another, but she sees a clear path.
It looks real.

She thinks his hand could engulf hers and maybe it does.
“North, South, East or West. You've got it.”
He reaches for her and this is the truth.

(Say we are the same. Say we come to it simply again.)