round

Reccing Notes: The description goes: Chloe has to stay with Davis. Does that mean she has to hate it?
She really doesn't hate it and you can just see the connection as the ambulence makes its rounds in Metropolis.
Its organic, beautiful and you get a really good sense of who they both are, and who they can be together. Zomg, read it!
by seriousfic at her lj.
1,865 words, pg-13, eternal

He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.



For a moment, they stared across the stairs at each other, the click of the lock closing echoing in the empty space. Chloe tried to ignore the obvious underworld connotations of Davis at the foot of the steps, but she couldn’t help it—as he walked up to her, she felt like Persephone about to be abducted by Hades. It had never occurred to her that Persephone might have gone willingly.

“So how does this work?” she asked, then made an attempt to break the ice. “Do you have to drink my blood?”

“I don’t know. For now, I think we should just stay close.”

She had watched him die, once.

***

As they drove to his apartment, Chloe tried to think of how she’d explain this to Clark. It’s painful to realize she doesn’t know her best friend, not enough to know if he’ll fly off the handle or if he’ll wait. It’s more painful to realize she doesn’t know herself. If Davis were someone else, were Lex, what would she be telling Clark to do? In the middle of the night, it’s easy to believe that daylight was just a fantasy.

She made plans to go to the Kent farm, figure out how often the changes came, the minimum time between them, turn this thing between them into an appointment instead of… Maybe they could even figure out what about Chloe made the beast yield. Distill it.

“Chloe-in-a-can,” Davis said as the streetlights strobed over him. Chloe realized how grim her own attempt at humor had sounded. Joking over chopped onions seemed like a million years ago.

***

She didn’t know why they went to his apartment, now that they were manacled together. It wasn’t fair. His death, as gruesome as it was, gave some catharsis to her feelings toward him and now he was pouring salt on her open wounds.

Davis gulped and told her she could have the bed, collapsed onto the couch before she could say anything. The bedsheets were matted with his scent, the memory of him pressed into the mattress. She slept wrapped up in him, feeling every inch of the distance between them, and wondered if this was her life now.

***

He looked both menacing and pleasing in his sleep, brow furrowed in consternation, lips occasionally parting in a half-noise. Chloe ran a hand over his face and he turned into his touch, his lips brushing the webbing of her hand. She put on coffee.

***

He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.

***

First call was a car accident. Car swerved away from the collision, hit the guardrail. Davis collared the driver, Chloe comforted the other driver who’d called it in. The gurney folded up into the back and Chloe sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the patient. She watched until he disappeared to the hospital and Davis came back with a tray of coffee.

“He’ll be fine,” he said when she didn’t take hers.

“I could’ve helped him.”

Davis squinted as he remembered the time she had told him she was a meteor freak, just dropped it into a conversation, maybe hoping it would drive him off so she’d have an excuse to be stuck with Jimmy. Instead he’d nodded and asked her what it was like, having something like that inside her.

She couldn’t remember her answer.

“He’ll be fine,” Davis repeated, starting up the ambulance. Chloe sipped her coffee and tried to remember when Davis had learned she took it black.

***

A bar fight that got out of hand, a knife, blood. Chloe took one look at him and she reached, her hand starting to glow. Davis stepped in the way, taking the medical kit off his shoulder. She watched as Davis did her job, a helpless feeling crunching her stomach. By the time he finished, another ambulance had arrived to take the patient to the hospital. Davis climbed back into the car with her, peeling off his bloody gloves.

“It kills you,” he said, “healing people.”

“Don’t try to protect me. It never works.”

“The knife missed his vital organs. I know it looked bad, but it wasn’t.” He smiled at her meagerly. “I promise I’ll call if I need you.”

***

Drive-by shooting, clean getaway, two dead and one going that direction. No red and blue blur in sight. Davis pulled the patient into the back of the ambulance, his movements leaden. He looked at Chloe.

“Do it.”

She took a deep breath, forced herself to relax, let the power grow out of that place below her lungs and then spill out of her. It didn’t hurt anymore, that had just been her mind telling her it should hurt. But she did feel faint, her lips turning blue and her eyes turning gray. She fell into her seat as the woman sputtered. Davis sedated her and climbed in beside Chloe.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just tired. It’ll pass.” She looked at him and offered a weary smile. “It’ll pass.”

***

The next one was just a kid who stepped on a nail. He was crying so hard that Chloe wanted to heal him anyway. While Davis was telling the mother where to find a doctor for tetanus shots, Chloe did. The kid kept crying, but not as much as before. Davis glared at her as they drive off.

“What happens if you heal too much?”

“Didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“What happens?”

“Once… I saw a bright light… like,” she held up her hands, the ones that had glowed so recently. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about controlling it since then.”

“But there is a danger?”

She nodded glumly.

“Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.”

***

A fire. Them and ten other ambulances, four fire engines, the red-blue blur not sticking around once he’d evacuated the building. Chloe felt the wind of his passage and ached to be able to tell him, to believe he’d make things better and not worse.

“You gonna be okay?” Davis asked, and she’d given the briefest of nods before he was pulling her to the triage area. In Davis’s EMT jacket and cap, no one noticed her. “These are the worst,” he said, people breathing in respirators, their skin so black and charred that Chloe couldn’t understand how they were still alive. She bent over them and let the light into them, tears coming to her eyes as her entire body fought down the death she was taking in.

There were always more and Davis ushered her always onward, his hands supporting her. Finally he pulled her in an embrace, whispering “thank you” into her ear, then he sat her down and went to help the rest. No deaths. Not one.

“You know how many times in my career I’ve seen a fire that bad and no one died?” Davis asked her afterward. “You were amazing.”

Chloe was too tired to stay upright and at some point she had slumped down so her head was on his thigh. She couldn’t remember if she’d put it there or he had.

“Are amazing.” He was petting her hair, his big hand running over her head as gently as a wave rolling over the beach, and she felt sated, like she was going to bed after a three-course meal and a glass of wine. Her power had never felt like this before, so right, and on impulse she kissed his knee before her eyes shut.

***

When she woke up most of the night was gone. The clock burned 5 AM. She’d been strapped into the gurney in back, Davis’s jacket under her head, blonde hairs now twined in the fabric.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Davis said when she climbed into the front. “Just a heart attack, and he was fine without you.”

“Good.” She handed him his jacket back. “I’d hate for this to be… I mean, maybe… this could be our regular Saturday night thing?”

He grinned a little. “Amazing,” he repeated.

They drove for a while, awkwardly waiting on the radio.

“How does it feel? Not having to worry about an… attack?” she asked.

“That’s not what’s making me feel this way.”

She leaned over, her lips dancing next to his cheek, and whispered in his ear “What would your boss say about workplace romances?”

The radio buzzed. Gunman in a produce market, two dead, five wounded, including the gunman. Five blocks away. Davis hit the sirens.

***

Chloe caught a glimpse of one of the bodies before its body bag closed up. A jagged tear in the middle of its forehead, with powder burns blackening the eyes. Execution. The market still resonated with violence. Chloe smelled something and was dismayed she recognized it as gunpowder. When had her life gone from nonconformist to freak?

She and Davis hustled past the cops to the victims. First one, middle-aged man, reminded Chloe of her dad. She bent toward him when Davis’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Chloe, he’s the guy.”

She stopped. Tried to imagine those hands wrapped around a gun. “Others first.”

Davis nodded brusquely. In a whirlwind they were at the victims’ sides, Davis distracting the EMTs already there, Chloe grabbing their hands and telling them to hang on as her palm glowed. By the time Davis was leading her out she was dead on her feet. They passed the shooter again. An EMT was using the paddles on it. Shouted “clear” and the shooter burst off the ground with electricity.

“I can help him,” Chloe said, moving forward.

Davis’s hand was locked on her arm.

“Davis?”

“Some people don’t deserve miracles.”

“Isn’t that for God to decide?”

“Clear!” the EMT shouted, and the shooter took another defibrillation.

Davis let go of her arm.

She knelt down beside the shooter, before the EMTs could stop her, and dug her fingers into his arm. “Is he going to be alright?”

The paramedics pulled her back. On the next defibrillation, the man gasped for breath.

***

“He’ll get the help he needs,” Chloe said, when Davis wouldn’t stop being quiet.

“Or a jail cell for the rest of his life.”

“Either way, that’s not our choice to make.”

“You could’ve been killed.” Davis eyed his watch. “Shift’s over. I think I’ll be alright if you want to…”

“I don’t. You mind if we go to my place next?” Chloe rubbed at her eyes after realizing the insinuation. “My toothbrush is there.”

He nodded eloquently and they drove. She rested her head on his shoulder. It’d been a long night and it wasn’t going to get any shorter.

“Chloe, if you had a choice…” Davis turned his head away from her, ashamed. “If you had a choice, would you stay with me?”

“I did have a choice. I made the same one I’ll always make.”

His fingers relaxed a little on the steering wheel. Sometimes, that was enough.