madness

Reccing Notes: Chloe. Davis. Eternal. basement. + Chloe thinking a lot. Done after much laborious work to satisfy myself. Now I'll even Rec it to you.


A continuation of Eternal where Chloe realizes that death *does*change everything. Possibly not in the way you're thinking.
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
4631 words, r/nc-17, eternal


It’s ironic, the perfect little martyrdom that gives her the chance to jump off the cliff feet first.



"You can't change your fate." "Why not?"
Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin


It’s true that nothing ever changes, not for her.
She’s undefined, forever watching everything play out, recording it neatly in her mind.
Clark is destined, someday to become that great hero. Just as Davis…is…was to become his adversary. Only he didn’t; wouldn’t; had left her human; had looked at her and almost smiled as the Kryptonite burned his skin.
She’d grabbed hold of the lever, and pulled.
She’d killed him.
She’d done the right thing, she tells herself over and over.
The world is safe and a little part of her doesn’t want to believe, thinks that maybe this is one of those stupid dreams she gets every once in a while, like when she wakes up in a world where Lex is President or she’s become her mother. (She won’t wake up soon, dial the first number on her cell, listen to his voice and laugh at how absurd she is.) She keeps seeing Davis’s face.

---------

Her only picture of Saegath is still in the fire where Clark poked it in. The flames flicker their way easily around it, curl the edges. He’s left by now, and she’s grateful he chose to philosophize, didn’t ask her what about Davis. She blathered on about safety and the world and protecting him. It made it all that easier to shut down.

---------
She pulls things out of the refrigerator, lets the half empty Tupperware container sit on the table untouched. Leftovers, he’d said to call them.
He would have come by.

She remembers a social anthropology class she took on a whim once; that it was a custom in the South, to mourn like this. She pushes a fork into the cold vegetables; thinks it would be freeing to let tears and salt mingle together.
Acceptance.
She’s not ready for that.

So she does a stupid thing, replays the entire dinner start to finish in her mind.
She must have said something about not knowing Jimmy even as he listened, watching as he cut himself on the slip of a knife. She remembers the something behind the look in his eyes. If only she’d been able to ask him then, maybe…
Maybe is a big word.
---------
Later, she finds herself walking her way through the produce section, piling leafy and green things into her cart, avoiding the onions.

She knows she’s going to go in as Watchtower for a few more hours tonight. Tomorrow, she’ll seek out Clark, even if he doesn’t need her source as an archiving index. She had been so convinced they wouldn’t fall back into their old pattern. She could have had her own life, somebody to talk with, only now…

Clark is familiar, unchanging, solid. He could make her forget.
She can be remarkable at self deception when she wants to be.
---------
She’s not so remarkable that she’d conjure him alive in the Talon basement. Solid, immortal? and un-ghostlike.
He’d lost his chance to be free.

He’s far stronger than Clark now, and destiny, destiny tells her that no matter what he’ll have to try and kill her best friend eventually.
There’s something about her that seems to calm the---murderer---inside of him, he says.

Only she’s never been that girl. Lana, maybe she’d believe, but she’s not some idealized image of sweetness and light. She’s always been simply Chloe Sullivan, friend. Chloe Sullivan, sometimes girl-friend and the worst mistake of someone’s life.
So much has changed since she met him.
---------
“Will you stay with me?”

It’s not much of a choice really, but she knows, knows the look on his face as she walks up the steps. Her expression has shut down somewhere along the line because she needs to think she’s doing this for the right reason. The door, Clark and out there. She has to face it.

It’s the single easiest and hardest choice of her life.
She could be pressed into the wall, heroic; saving the world because that’s what she has learned to do. Only that isn’t the reason at all.
It’s ironic, the perfect little martyrdom that gives her the chance to jump off the cliff feet first.
One step, after another, away and to the door where she doesn’t look at his face, doesn’t see the wreckage there.
This is the sound of her future, a bolt sliding into place.
-------
His eyes swallow her whole, burn her like Clark’s cocked heat vision never did. He thought she was going to leave.
What to say? Welcome back to the land of the living? I missed you? Yes.

She says nothing. Her tongue seems to stick at the back of her throat and she can’t trust herself, not right now, needs distance before she does something really stupid like burst into tears.
He looks the same to her, a dark shirt, street clothes. She wonders where he got them, doesn’t want to ask.
She walks back to cot, brushes past him solid and broken.

“This should do.”
They’d talked as friends did, connected and he’d listened and become her shoulder. She’d flirted with the idea that they could have something more. Before now, before she’d learned about the darkness of it all, before she yelled he lied, before they circled around that desk and he’d asked her the one thing she couldn’t do. The thing she did.

He swallows, his mouth works. “Thank you.” He doesn’t say anything else, not ‘you must really love me’, not even ‘why?’ (He’d always asked, but it’s not right now.) Helping someone can be just that. She’s staying in a dark room with this when she could be running.

“It’s not much of a sacrifice.” She says. Only this moment is finding her cracks and re-breaking them all over again. It hurts to be in the same room and miss him so.
She can imagine what Clark must have seen, outlines of skeletons underlying wheat and dirt. Davis was doomed to this no matter what he did, and he’d tried. He died for it.

She hastily fluffs the pillows, watches as they kick up clouds of dust she can’t see in the half light.

He takes the leftover bedding and starts to set up something on the floor, crouches like a man who hadn’t been dead earlier. He’s not saying anything, just instinctually moves toward it, is going to lie there curled up not to make her uncomfortable.
Over a yard away.

She tries to think she’d been terrified of him for all of one minute, legacies of it fresh on her mind. She remembered thinking that his hands could have choked the life out of someone before he tried to keep her from leaving. He’d been gentle and murderers weren’t gentle. She’s been fooled before.
Maybe she’s stupid, should be running now. Now all she can think of is his hands and the catch in his throat. ‘I love you’ still hangs there.

She sees Davis the man, her friend, not the vigilante killer with the hundreds of bodies.
He looks weary.

“Don’t do that. We don’t know what could be scurrying down there.”

“I can’t die, Chloe. I’m pretty sure one rat or a dozen won’t kill me.” He doesn’t fight her anyway.
She pulls the bedclothes out of a gentle grip, notices how he instinctively tries to prolong the contact even through cloth. His eyes are slightly red rimmed the way they were before. He said he couldn’t live with himself.

“How’ve you been holding up?”

“It made sure I healed already. It was barely a day, this time.”

“Keep talking. For a guy who’s been dead you look very good. But that’s not what it’s about, is it?”

“How can you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You’re here, in the dark with me and you ask me how I’m holding up.”

“Stop changing the subject. What about the dying?” The Kryptonite had been everywhere in that cage, Clark had yelled out, and Davis had hadn’t made a sound. She knows too well exactly what Kryptonite is.

“It didn’t last. And it wasn’t so bad.”

“Liar. It hurt.” Understatement.

“There’s not enough pain to make up for what I’ve done.”

“Now I feel like I’m in the middle of Ivanhoe.”

“You saw that field. There must be more. The thing is I don’t know. I always wanted to make myself believe that I wasn’t hurting people. This has been going on for years. Ever since I landed, I guess.”

“You remembered something?”

“In that cage, right before…the first time it happened.”

“If somehow, I managed to hold it back, save thousands of people, it won’t be enough. There were hundreds of people in that cornfield. I tried to redirect as though I could control it so it wouldn’t get out.”

“You went vigilante.”

“Junkies, drug dealers…Chloe, they didn’t deserve to die.
You know what I did? I went to a confessional, convinced myself that I could be doing good. And deep down, I knew. If I died like that a thousand times, it would be less than I deserved.”

“That wasn’t you.” She doesn’t know how it was created, as a genetic experiment joined to the ship for some vendetta against the House of El. It’s a worse punishment for him; trapped inside a monster that’s the exact opposite than everything he’s tried to be.

“It never should have been.”

“You couldn’t have stopped it.”

“That’s the thing, maybe I could’ve. With you it never happened. If I had been stronger…”

“Davis, you could hardly convince yourself to be in love with the entire planet for God’s sake.” There. She’s acknowledged it, and he’s not avoiding her eyes. There’s a lot there, pain and that something that’s always made her feel hot and cold at once, but he’s not pushing it. His chuckle is hollow; nothing like a chuckle should sound like.
“I can’t convince myself of very much these days.”
Clark said something like that the first time Lana had left him, the first time he’d discovered that he could hurt people he cared about. “You don’t deserve to hear this.”

“I need to. That’s what friends do. Remember Jimmy?”

“That was before, this. If it hadn’t been for me…”
If it hadn’t been for him she might not have learned how little she trusted the man she’d told herself she’d spend her life with. He was at the center of it all, but he held her together.

And now, he’s letting it all catch up to him. He can hurt as much as she does. Monsters don’t hurt, don’t feel guilt. He’s alive. She’s here, isn’t she?
She closes her hand over his sleeve, gingerly shakes it. Wonders if maybe the phantom pain lingers in the back of his mind, knows it’s not near to what he’s putting himself through.

“You were willing to give up your life. That means something.” If it had gone according to plan, he wouldn’t be here, now. She’d be a floor up, still trying to tell herself she did right.

“I came back.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you died.” She can’t define what that means, what she felt that moment. She hopes the words mean something to him.

“You died.”

She doesn’t know how this works, how her arms somehow slide their way over his shoulders, dig into street rough material and her breaths come out choppy.
It’s all too much. Finding him, losing him, finding him again.

He holds her, gently, not too tight, like she’ll shatter, but his pulse hammers by her ear. Things never change.
They always end up like this.
------
There is no movement except for her breathing as it she gets it to obey. He’s not quite as tall as Clark and her cheek reaches his shoulder and settles there.
She’s been in this position for innumerable times.

It’s could be easy enough. She just has to scrub at her eyes, a little. Her face never gets red when she cries.
It’s time to pull back and give a watery smile, now. She says something about her inner drama queen before she runs out of words.
It’s there, suffocating her still. She needs it to stop.
He’s going to stay and listen to her cry.
He doesn’t say anything, merely gathers her against him again, eyes shut, apparently oblivious to the havoc her nails are wreaking on the threading of his remaining shirt. He’s as desperate to hold on as she is.

‘Will you stay with me?’ had sounded so very overt, but it wasn’t. He’s being her shoulder again and she wants him to push her into telling him why even though she has no answer.
It terrifies her.

She could compartmentalize before it gets out of hand. She’s always fallen hard, thrown herself into things that eluded her, and then told herself she needed things she didn’t. Clark, she thinks. He knows. Jimmy. He knows that too.

Conscious choice or not, it happens with their eyes shut and he startles at the sensation.
It’s a second of paralysis where his breathing is shallow and his hands ball up behind her back. Then his mouth opens under hers, instinctive and soft, and so, so careful that she forgets this is a cliff and she’s a lemming jumping off.
She thinks he shouldn’t feel this warm.

He doesn’t take it much farther but she knows she’s not going to sleep in her neat little corner, alone. He leaves a trail of fire everywhere he touches and she bends toward him because it hurts, feels empty if he doesn’t.

Scattered bits of thoughts press upon her about how this isn’t like her, and how it doesn’t fit with her role, her little life in that corner room, and the sidekick and the red and blue blur’s best friend. Is she betraying him now? Maybe He’ll see it that way. But the fact that Davis wasn’t there and there was nothing obliterates everything else.
Need hurts almost as much as the empty ache and she can’t seem to control herself, buries her nails in cloth, shuts her eyes and pulls.

‘Stop’, she’d said before.
He doesn’t feel her up, barely brushes her jaw with his lips before he pulls back this time. She’s grateful he doesn’t stop touching her, even for a little while.
She keeps his fingers on the bare skin of her shoulder, tangles them and feels a strange tingling to her core. Can she really be doing this?

“Chloe, what…” He breathes hard, in and out, and his fingers are unsteady in the perfectly human way. “I’ve torn your world upside down. You don’t need to…”
His face is stripped, no charm, no masks. Fear.

She was never scared unless she had something to lose. She sees it with astonishing clarity, what this means. Maybe this is what it looks like from the outside, her needing to purge herself of him, this.
It makes some part of her ache.

It’s not obligation, or some twisted way of obscuring pain. “This is about me, too.” He wants to believe her.
She won’t go all philosophical; tell him how death changes things.
She settles for “I need to know you’re alive.”

This feels like taking advantage, knowing how he feels and not saying anything back because she doesn’t know what it means. It gathers this wordless churning in her gut until she buries her head in his neck. She can feel him swallow.

“Hey, I normally don’t before the first date either.” She says.

Jimmy she’d wanted in that same curious way she’d wanted to be liked for something other than a best bud. She hadn’t needed so much she’d wanted to be sick of it.
She’s only gone out with Davis once, if it could have been called that, in her apartment. They’d talked. That could have ended like a date. She doesn’t know.
Maybe they’ve been dating in some manner since they first met, when she told him those little things she never told anyone else. Maybe they’ve been going this way all this time.
She’s not Persephone, he’s not holding out pomegranate seeds, and this is a natural part of who they are. She wants him to be able to let go, forget.
“You can cook me dinner afterwards and you’ve got a deal.”
She sees for a half second, exactly what she needed.

He kisses her very slowly this time and she can hear him breathe. She suspects he’s holding back because of the painful lightness of his touch through the baggy dress shirt, under it. Maybe he’s just a romantic.
She’ll give him that.

She doesn’t make a move to remove it, feels ridiculously turned on by the fact that he can get it open without sending the little pearl buttons skittering to the floor. Slight stubble rasps against her neck, her collarbone, the strap of the sensible jog bra before he returns to her mouth again.
There’s no cloth for her fingers to bunch in only shifting, warm muscle. He’s just skimming the surface, sending ripples where she wasn’t aware they could reach. The churning in her stomach is moving lower and she wants him to get so close she forgets about little physical foibles like skin.
No other recourse, she hooks her leg around his, drags him closer and they’re clothed and oh god.
His breathing is staggered.

The wall would be fine. Only there’s a Bronte poster that her eyes keep falling into. The greatest tragedy, Cathy married the mistake.
“Bed.” It’s all she can to link her arms around his neck before she lands.

His eyes are almost black. He’s steady, surrounding and safe in a way that she hasn’t known before. Not like she imagined Clark would be, once upon a time. Different.

He’s also dangerous, this is, and the reality of what they are going to do suddenly crashes in on her. She stops the impatient wriggling without thinking. Her body protests it sorely.
She can’t feel his weight yet, because he’s been watching her this entire time. His eyes linger on her face and almost frighten her. She’s never been someone’s world before.

They stay there awhile until she can force her eyes to snap open.
She trusts him.
His fingers trail softly across her cheek, comfort now. He smells clean and masculine. He is saying something. Something about how he’d stop, he’d promise and if anything started to hurt…

“Davis, I’m no virgin sacrifice.” They’re sharing breathing room. “You know why. I talk too mu--” This need isn’t quite so basic.
He’s back to going slow again, trying to be soothing and not quite succeeding.
Various articles of clothing litter about them and his palm glides large and warm up from her knee, thumb hooks around the last barrier and pushes it aside.
They’ve never been here before.

“Is this okay?”
It is dark yet, the shadows don’t hide his face completely, the raw need. She draws a hand carefully up his arm ad swallows. Maybe this, the dark is her form of self-punishment. She wishes this could be in a bed with clean sheets and she could be able to look at him, really look at him.

“It will be, you...” Her voice doesn’t sound like her own, breathy, like the wind is being forced out of her lungs. There’s no going back from this so she might as well go out with a bang.
She leans forward and licks him.
He makes a sound against her mouth and she pulls him closer, forgets about the fear. Then he’s everywhere over and around and through her and she forgets to breathe for a moment.

He’s even more careful now than before, kissing her face like one blind and so full of something that transfixes her. He let’s out a shaky breath as he holds her.
She can be in control of this if she needs to. Her mind is drugged with the warmth and unyielding pressure and the need for so much more.
She’s not backed into a corner so she can only pull on his shoulders weakly.
It’s slick and easy and close to unbearable, when she can feel how much he’s holding in. He’s prolonging these moments in her because he doesn’t know if this will be the last time.
A memory. He needs a memory.
She wants to give him that.
Her memories come together in jumbles- terror and too many tears, his eyes closing, and her hand on the lever. He’s alive now, but it plays in an endless loop. She feels raw again.
It gets to be too much.
She needs feeling, needs him to drive all thought from her mind. She can’t control her unsynchronized almost slamming movements, what must be the equivalent of very rough sex in human terms. She’s going to give herself bruises.
Underneath the pleasure on his face there’s something else. A lot of pain. He needs to know she’s safe.
She’s got to slow down.
They even out. He kisses her again, moves over her, murmurs endearments and her name and things he doesn’t even realize he says. She keeps her bossy needs for closeness to gentle touches. She lets her eyes fall closed, feels pushed to the edge and kept there.
He’s the farthest from a monster with her.

And the thoughts trickle in on her again.
He said he’d known that when he was around her it got pushed back. If he was the monster around her she could have ended up torn to bits in that alley. He didn’t have to die. He’d still tried to end it.
The revelation hits her like a punch in the gut, and not even the feeling of him pushes it away.
He can sense the shifting in her mood; pulls off, doesn’t smother her. Harsh breaths tickle her throat and his eyes are concern and worry.

“Why did you do it?” He knows what she’s saying before she spells it out, like always. It’s the noble, heroic sacrifice and dying and leaving her all alone.
It’s that same look. He’s not going to lie. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to be screaming in a second, so you better tell me now.”
Damn thinking. Damn it. Damn him, like everyone else, making that choice for her.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I’d killed people.”

“I could have helped you.”

“When I found you, you were terrified and rightly so. You should hate me.”

“I don’t.”

“If I had walked right up to you and asked you to save me it would have been a life of slavery, and you don’t deserve that.” It’s there in the subtext. She might have hated him eventually.

“You could have lived.”

“I meant what I told you, but I wasn’t going to use that. That’s just how it works.”

“Oh. About wanting to die?”

That’s not it. “…loving you.”

“Oh. Oh.”
He could have told her still, and then she would have done something. Not this, but something. He put the world and what he thought she wanted ahead of him. If he hadn’t then he wouldn’t have been the Davis she---fell--cared for.
Where did that come from?

“When I did that it felt like a killed myself a little bit. I won’t be able to take it again.” Her face feels wet and she feels little and tired. Maybe she wouldn’t have known. Maybe they wouldn’t have been here.
Maybe.

The way the words transform his face should be out of place. So many years on his own. He’s not shutting himself off from her.
She feels something well up, only not so urgent, just the need to be close.
Her hair falls messily around him, light on dark and he moves through her in slow burn. Their palms fit together and there’s no glass between them this time.
She has the word for it now, thinks she knows what she felt.
It was hope.

It lasts and for that time she realizes she’s never felt as incredibly close to anyone in her whole life. But no matter how gentle he is, he gets deeper, pressure builds until there’s nothing but clutching and jerking and warmth and the terrible concentration on his face.

The sobs she makes don’t matter, not the dark, not tomorrow. Now.
It feels right, perfectly natural. His mouth slides quietly over hers and then the fluttering starts deep takes hold of her thoughts and squeezes them all out but one.
Tears always meant something.
Black dances in front of her eyes in strange patterns and everything clenches and convalesces so hard she thinks she may just pass out.
Love. Maybe she’s always known.

Aftershocks hit her right about the time he goes still and warmth overtakes her again. He leans closer to kiss her again, sedately. Some of her hair has tangled against his ear and she smiles into his mouth.
This could be just a little late for both of them now; but its not.
“Stay.” She says.
-----

She doesn’t know if dawn has broken yet. There are no windows, there’s no natural light to track the passage of time. She thinks it must be about 9 a.m.
Clark will be calling and she doesn’t need to give him an excuse to drop by. If they meet again--. Just, desperate measures.

Davis sleeps like a kid does, with one arm dangling off the edge of the bed and another holding her close to his side like a life sized teddy bear. He doesn’t snore, not exactly, but makes a tiny huffing sound when she attempts to nudge free.
She manages after three attempts.
He’s so deeply asleep that he just nudges into the warm space she’s left behind.
She can’t believe it but feels enormously self satisfied. Kryptonian. She’s worn him out.
The satisfaction fades because she doesn’t know what that will mean for her when she tries to stand.
She’s pleasantly sore but the entire lower half of her body moves like a plank. They’re close, but they’re not the same. She’s very human.
And what? She’s loved. She’s happy.
This is most certainly going to happen again. She has a lifetime for this

She’s going to die.
And after that, she can’t be there to hold onto Davis. It has a chance again. Oh, he’ll fight, she knows. There will still be Clark, his purpose. Years will pass and one day he will be lost in the melee.
She’s human. Not some goddess.
Just human, now.
Probably.
Not quite
Maybe.
There’s a chance, however slim, that Braniac hasn’t burned out her meteor power.
She needs to know.

-----

She finds the one butcher’s knife in the Talon basement by trial and error, stashed in the armory with the baseball bats. She’s not going to do anything melodramatic or dangerous like stab herself in the chest. She’s not going to take that risk.
Instead, she finds a spot on her arm away from a vein and makes the cut long and shallow. She’d forgotten how much it stung.
Her blood flows sluggishly over the old towel.
She closes her eyes and waits to feel the almost-forgotten sensation of flesh knitting itself together.

And of course this is the exact moment he chooses to show up
The broken horror in his face makes her mute for a second. This does look melodramatic.

“No. No.”
He presses the towel expertly into her arm, holds it above shoulder level, and scrambles for another with his free hand. The stinging is gone and replaced by the realization that she hasn’t told him, not really. All relationships face this, but theirs just has the added factor of his ultimate destroyer and her intimacy issues. He can’t possibly know more than she tells him.
He’d said she’d loved her, and she’d never said it back. She’d gotten all weepy. She’d left him in bed while she sliced her arm open.

He says he’ll never touch her again if she’ll just live. It hurts.

“This isn’t what it looks like. I should have told you but it’s not like we got the chance.
Remember, I knew all about meteor powers? The counseling came from a special place.”
She needs him to listen because doesn’t ever want to ever see him look this destroyed again.

“For goodness sake, Davis. I’m not pulling the Frankenstein’s bride routine. Watch.”
She manages to get his hands away long enough to scrub the towel over the wound.
Clean. Perfectly clean.

“It appears you’re stuck with me.” There’s nothing but his face, incredulous and wide open; his throat as he swallows. She thinks that he’s beautiful.

Brain on. She’s not going to stumble now. “I think I neglected to mention that I loved you.” Her voice cracks only a little and then disappears altogether.
The bloody towel leaves a stain on his side but it doesn’t matter.

Things change.
--

Endnotes: Due kudos go to Alanis Morrisette for her song Madness. It's all angsty and conflicted and tragically lovely. It got me into the frame of mind for Chloe in this. Also Onegin because. well. Onegin!


Drop the love if you wanna. Or a quibble. a word? is love. ^-^