two in a wreck

Reccing Notes: Hex. with Davis. Chloe's wish changes, with near painful consequences.
cracky? snarky? angsty? It is an amalgum.

4895 words, r/nc-17, hex
You wanted this. Zattanna had said.

Two of us in one wreck can surely stand a better chance than each on our own.
A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen

Jimmy had called her Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale!
Florence Nightingale, in a world where she could have easily been Elizabeth Blackwell. Except of course, that she had no job; and she’d been dumped.
She felt self-righteous and wronged and the worst bit of all, she didn’t even have a talk show to let it out on. If she called Clark he’d get back to Lana or Lois getting drunk and kissing him again, and then…
No. Just no.

This had been meant to be happily ever after. Save your best friend, get fired. Counsel people, have them turn into psycho-murderers. Protect the one person who was there for you from getting his brains clobbered out, get an oral annulment. Either the world was screwed up or she was.
Probably both.
Now it was really quiet, when with Jimmy it used to be a game of baseball, or a conversation about digital cameras littered with 80s references. Apparently that was all out the window.
Jimmy didn’t need her. Never did.
They weren’t the one true thing. She hadn’t been his world, not in the way Clark had been hers. They’d been comfortable. Right. Good friends, maybe. Easy? No comment.

If they were going to crumble two weeks after the wedding and the ICU, why had he asked? For that matter, why had she accepted? They could have just kept the plastic rings on, shaken hands on it…
She’d ended up like this a hundred times before, always a failed date that ended in a homicide attempt or the 2021st time Clark proved to her that he didn’t need her.
She looked into the mirror, at her red nose and the smile-that-tried to-be-a-smile and failed miserably. Her voice sounded reedy when she told herself she was going to be heroic again.
--------
Maybe she could find something to do, something that would not be the colossal failure that Isis was. At the hospital, maybe. Davis had given her suggestions before, she told herself. She had to know how he was, after everything.
It’s not like she was sewing the letter ‘A’ in scarlet on her blouse. He was a friend that couldn’t help the unwitting role he’d played. It would have been him, or Clark, or somebody else.
She dialed once, twice, a third time. His apartment phone, because that’s where that’s where she would have gone after someone attempted to kill her. She got redirected to the main desk, where someone asked if she wanted to fill the vacancy.
Strange, yes, but maybe he’d moved in case Jimmy brought a bulldozer next time.

(Davis had told her about the blackouts, scared to death. He’d howled. He’d begged her to run in the alley in that same tone of voice. And she’d touched him, then nothing.)

There were no fairytales.
Jimmy was on meds. Davis could’ve been disoriented. Davis would have had to have lied, back there in the hospital room.
No.

Even if the crazy theory was true then he’d have to stay close, very close. She found Davis in the downpour across the street from the Talon window.

He almost jumped that time. “Chloe?” He kept looking at her mouth and she wondered if maybe she’d forgotten to get the Ben and Jerry’s off it.
He nodded, shook his head a few apartments behind him.
“I brought some meds for one of my patients down here and…”
“I know what they say about taking your job seriously, but that is above and beyond the call of duty.” She neglected to mention that the last few apartments were still under construction.
“Come on in, for God’s sake.”
He stood in the doorway and dripped water stains onto the rug, didn’t come in, and that did make sense in the context of things. “Come in. Jimmy’s gone off to…somewhere…to find his calling. I think he discovered his inner street fighter.” Still. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. He has a secret and loyalty complex, and the meds. And I have too high of an attractive friend ratio. It’s about a noisy as the tomb of the dead in here and I could use the company.”
She was temporarily distracted when a fat droplet of water slid down his eyebrow, off his eyelash, down his neck…
She meant he was dripping, thoroughly dripping, like he was about to get pneumonia or at least a very, very bad cold with wheezing.
He wasn’t shivering. Shock. He might be critical. If she was Florence Nightingale, she was a very bad one. Her stomach wasn’t supposed to do cartwheels. She seized firm hold of his sleeve and yanked him in, slammed the door.

“Chloe, is this okay?” Oh, she remembered high school. Always leave a shoe in the door when you were with a boy lest you got tempted to. ahem.
She’d grown up. Really.
“Of course it is. I like being with you. You need to get dry. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that. ”
She could have declared him in dire need of chicken soup if he hadn’t let out a whoosh of air like she had hit him. “but, it’s not just that now.”
Then said he had to tell her something. Last time he’d said that, he’d been telling her not to get married. Maybe he was going to ask her to get annulment papers and…
“It’s a beast.” He said.
“Come again?”
-------
He had been turned into a great big party crasher, after Braniac had sagely decided that she was what he needed to drive Doomsday crazy and be his Bride of…
Nuts. All of it. Like one of those teen melodramas that ran in theaters right next to Twilight. It was not like he could prove it without tearing her roof off.
“This is all because of me, isn’t it?”
It all came together like a ruinous puzzle. There was nothing to say and her mouth opened and closed like a fishes, twice. Then she closed it again.
He was telling the truth.
--------
“So, let me get this straight, I touch you and then it goes away?”
She wasn’t looking at him she tested the idea, couldn’t. Held one of his big, slightly too warm palms between her fingers and thought that he was still there. If not for that It could crush her, breaking this already tiny human life of hers into tinier, bite sized bits.

The idea that she’d been used as a trigger for his darker side, and was now the walking sedative to hold it back was perfect, twisted irony.
The red and blue blur and the destroyer with a man trapped inside. She told herself that this way; she could keep them both safe.
--------
It was nothing like an excuse to pet him.
She learned to recognize the signs and hold a hand carefully over his shoulder over a layer of fabric. Murmur reassurances that she didn’t think she believed anymore, until the darkness drew away and Clark lived for one more day.
----------
They didn’t talk much. She hated it more than a little, the way this great gaping hole had swallowed her connection to the man who she could talk to, really talk to. She hated it even as her mind spit out recriminations that she wouldn’t ever, ever say. I fell apart, I trusted you, you held me together and you lied.
He’d told the truth when it counted. But that exact moment, when she was scared to death it was her, throwing Jimmy into the danger zone of the weird and the weirder, it was. Davis and she. The comfort of the moment, the warmth of being safe twisted into something destructive and chaotic.
----------
(What never added to her angst was the fear that maybe this was all she was to him now, a convenience to keep the monster at bay. She’d lived her life as a convenience, but he’d given and given and never expected anything in return.
Words. Words could lie easily. His face couldn’t.)
---------
She never knew how big a part of her had been invested in the easiness before.
It appeared, weeks later in packing the things in Jimmy’s room, preparing for a new phase of life. She needed a purpose. She needed a man, or in this case, a husband like a fish needed a bicycle.
It didn’t matter how frustrated she felt.
She had the sudden urge to kick the Dummies Guide to the Kama Sutra straight across the room. Or… never mind… Instead, she muttered to herself.
“I didn’t trust him. That’s why he left.”
Davis helped with the packing of course, watched as she put the things in boxes to be sent to the new address. “I’m sorry, Chloe.” He said.

“He would’ve left anyway.”

“But not like that. I put you in that position.”
“Don’t feel so bad. I wasn’t exactly taking preventive measures. We all trust who we will, I suppose.”
It came naturally, that.
“It wasn’t right.”
“I was just so scared that he’d… I couldn’t think.
I think I could’ve guessed it, eventually. You howled so loud you could have given King Kong a run for the money.”

He watched her as if he expected her to send something flying at his head, as if he would take it and everything else. She chuckled because her deadpan delivery was losing its touch.
He loosened up, and for once didn’t say ‘I’m sorry’ five times consecutively that next half hour. It almost felt easy.
Oh, she wasn’t ready to jump off of the deep end, trust again, just that same way.
They were friends, though, and wasn’t that the way everything started?
---------
He saw himself as the monster. Sometimes she thought he only ate because she made the food, set it squarely between them on the tiny table. He never told her details of what happened, but it was there, on his face sometimes. The sight of an overturned dumpster, broken glass, red...
She stopped cooking Italian.
---------
She’d grown used to it, the touch. His skin was warmer than a normal, like Clark’s and not, his grip reminding her of security and forgetfulness.
Davis was all that Clark was and he wasn’t. He was her friend. And he wasn’t.
From her experience friends did do this. Talk. Care. (once in a while, if they remembered to and they weren’t busy saving the world.)
Friends didn’t get caught up in it, didn’t look at you like you were the world.
She was married. She wasn’t leading him on. She couldn’t control the way she looked back, what he saw, what he felt, holding too close. Anything.
Sometimes, she wondered what it would be like to kiss him again before trying to forget the look on his face.
She couldn’t have stopped it if she wanted to.
---------
They never locked the doors, because they couldn’t keep things like that between them.
It was that howl again, and she wondered how it had slipped past her last time.
9 A.M. She’d overslept and he was going to go through it again. She flung herself against the door layered in at least three of the teddies that Lois had helpfully swapped for her favorite sweats in the wardrobe. The shirts would slip awkwardly off of the shoulder at the worst moments.
Shoulders, arms….refreshingly human. All of him conspicuously missing any spikes. His head was tilted up and he was in pain, but …not that kind.
“Oh.”
Her sleeve was sopped with shampoo from her headlong rush.
“Oh.” She forced herself to put it gently at the side of the stall. She was a married woman. She was not thinking of that.
“It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before.”
But she really, really hadn’t.
“I’m going…I’m going to…get coffee.”

--------
Maybe she fooled herself, but it held together somehow. It had to. She wasn’t Florence Nightingale. She was selfish, wanted to hold on to this one thing that was utterly hers. She couldn’t live without a purpose. And somewhere, somehow, he’d become it.


-------
Davis went to church once or twice, one of those old gothic places that weren’t nearly large or dark enough to be a cathedral. They held hands in the pew and a few children giggled, made kissy faces.
She thought his hand tightened, a little. He went into one of those confessionals and she thought that she could go, too. Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been four years since my last confession.
She could’ve done that, only she couldn’t help what she wanted, sometimes.

--------
She always knew she’d discover the major downside to making 21st birthday pacts with her cousin. She and Lois had planned their respective birthday’s years ago, when she had dreams of tearing open the underground corruption in the city and Lois had wanted to be a taxi driver. Lois, being Lois, had made the reservations in advance in something way more posh than the Talon.
Chloe gets a wake up call at six a.m. to meet her there.

She makes her best effort with a green and blue froth concoction of a dress that could have been worn to a modern ballet. The nylon snags, but there’s no helping it now. She’s going to be ridiculously happy. Then she’s coming home.

The restaurant is dark, lit with dim lamps so that they can barely see their way around.
Things at the planet have changed overnight and now these people are the movers and shakers of Lois’s world. There are a few familiar faces- Lois, Oliver (with Clark’s present, the Tales of the Weird and Unexplained), Perry White... Chloe wonders suddenly when Tess Mercer had become ‘her’ friend.

She gets a cupcake, a comment on the sweet release of death, and then Lois is out of there, onto her next mission.
Davis receives the obligatory glares from Oliver, none from Lois; and somehow gets trapped in the corner. She thinks those look an awful lot like permanent markers the girls are shoving into his hands. (She sometimes wishes she’d watched Battlestar Galactica.)

There’s no time to think of that because Oliver is already dragging her away. “I have to talk to you.”
“If it’s about the Lex thing, this is not the time.”

“Of course not. I just wanted to know how my favorite sidekick was.” A gin tonic with an Olive. Of course.
“How many of those babies did you drink Oliver?”

“That’s not important. Listen, I need your help for this secret mis—”
Tess comes over smiling in a Lex way, with a bottle of Pinot Grigio (Vintage 1924 and slightly moldy).
“--how do you feel about opera? In Carmen, there’s this dancer who’s a spy and her husband runs away. You should cheer up. Don’t plunge a dagger into your heart. It’s not that bad, Chloe. I’m here for you.”
Chloe thinks she nods in all the appropriate places before he disappears. She hopes she can find her way through the aged, dancing execs to find Davis and maybe get the heck away.

Only Oliver gets back first, brings over a woman with heavily made up eyes and a look like a Tarot card. She is taller than Chloe by almost half a foot, wearing boots and a shirt. Nothing much more than fishnet stockings, really.
“So I hear you’ve had a bad day.?”
“Not really.” She had been just fine.
“Let’s see what we can do about that.” The woman says.
Chloe keeps thinking that the people are like walls and she isn’t where she should be.
Birthday. Remember. She’s going to be ridiculously happy.
It only happens once in a lifetime.
“Make a wish. Any wish.” the large cupcake holds steady and the candle flame wavers in front of her.
She waits the appropriate time and blows on the candle. The smoke twists and she wheezes. The woman’s caught up with Oliver again.
Some kind of magic.

Clark calls to wish her a happy birthday with a voice that sounds that far off. He has super speed and she is grateful that he always has more important things to do now.
The reception clears up only at the mention of Davis.
“How could you invite him? The guys obviously got eyes for you, and he’s the reason your marriage broke up. It’s a given that maybe the serial killer thing was a bit much, but…”
There was no obvious with Clark.
“He’s my friend and deserves to be here as much as you or anyone else. Jimmy thought you had eyes for me for God’s sake.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“I don’t know where— ”
“--You could have invited him. He likes bullfighting very much so he might even say something nice to you.”
“He’s--what?”
“Sorry, Chloe--can’t talk now. Call waiting. Lois needs my help in Mexico with the president of the Tequila council.”

--------
Two more times around, she really doesn’t understand what Oliver’s getting at. She creeps her way back to the corner, finds Davis sitting there, looking at her. Not that there’s anything unusual about that at all, but his eyes...
Too many people, no wonder.
She gets into the seat next to him behind the potted plant. “We’re getting out of here soon.” She pats his shoulder in the most appropriate way possible, just in case It is getting antsy again. He doesn’t let her move her hand, holds onto it like a vise for a few seconds before letting go.
“You’re so beautiful.” The champagne makes her lightheaded and giddy and ridiculously touched.
“Thanks, that’s….nice.” Actually, a bit more than that. It’s been a long time since anyone has said anything like it, in just that way. It’s been even longer since anyone looked like they meant it.

He looks high. Did super beings even sweat? Clark only used to when there was kryptonite.

“You okay though? You don’t look too good.” She touches his forehead. He leans into the touch and she lets herself enjoy it for the moment until pulls her off balance onto him, turns it into something else entirely. His lips are warm (nothing like Clark) and she can’t or won’t pull away this time. It’s natural and its good and she feels like her IQ has gone for a hike.

(Married! Separated!
Florence Nightingale. Gloria Steinem.
It isn’t working.)
She doesn’t know what lead to this. On some level, maybe but why now? She can feel his thumb moving gently through the strap of the dress at the place where skin meets cloth. She wonders if he knows how strong he is, if this is why he handles her like she will crumble. His hands are heavy on her shoulders and she wants there to be bruises come morning, wants to be able to feel before the inevitable happens and they go back to their world and nothing.
(This isn’t easy like she thought. Its no transgression, it’s an abyss and she’s teetering. He’s waiting for her to hold out her hand, jump off. This is her tether to reality.)

She remembers a time when he was almost blatant. Then this had come along and he looked and nothing. They’re pressed together so close that she will have bruises; right now it feels like he wants to push her farther into the dark. The plants are kind of big.

She thinks this until he leans his head back, tries to breathe. “I’m sorry.” His eyes look almost drugged, and he hasn’t touched anything since they arrived.
“Davis?” she shakes him on the other shoulder and he makes the sound again. “If you do it again...”
“Do what?”
“-that... I won’t be able to stop myself. Something’s happening.”
“Come on.”
He doesn’t stumble exactly, follows her, fingers trembling as they brush her hand. She keeps her hand clamped firmly about his wrist; catches Zatanna at the doorway.
“What did you do?”

“I just make it happen, sweetie. At that very moment you wanted …”
“I don’t. Do you hear me, I don’t.”

She’s gone.
Chloe doesn’t know what excuse she makes exactly. Something to do with Gabe and Dinner. She doesn’t particularly care if someone sees that they leave together.
------
He looks ill and wild, but she’d anything but relieved when he locks himself in the bathroom.
“This is stupid. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I can help you control it.”
He doesn’t answer.
“I swear; I’m going to come in.”

She knows how to make lock picks as a legacy of Bart. She finds a paperclip, just the right size and that’s all it takes.
He’s in the corner, in the shower behind a nearly transparent pane. Still. Not speaking.
The water is running loudly and she can still hear him breathe behind the dark gray pane. She can’t get used to the fact that there are no goose bumps on his arms even though he’s curled around himself. That defense mechanism she’s seen often enough.

“Talk to me.”
“I crossed the line. I’m sorry.” This is easy, now he’s going to retreat into his appropriate friend corner and she can be Joan of Ark again. Joan of Ark died.
“Because of something that was my fault. I had some champagne.” (all of two sips) “and I wasn’t exactly fighting you.”

She can keep talking. Sensible reporter voice.
He’d sounded like he was dying.

“If you aren’t coming out, I’m going to have to come in and get you.
She slips a hand to turn off the water, almost shrieks as it lands all over her back. “That’s freezing.”
“I don’t feel it.”
He’s like Clark, of course not.
“But apparently you do feel something. Does it hurt?” She knows it does, because the prickly gray spots are coming over his skin again.

She touches him before it goes any farther. She’s hardly Chyna, so there’s no way she’s going to lever him out.
“Stop it. You know –a friend was like that once. If rocks fell out of the sky it was his fault. If someone failed a final it was his fault, if L-someone’s hair got cut it was his fault …”

“He wasn’t like this. If I lose control, you die.”

“Point is; I don’t. Remember? Let’s get you out of here.” He listens to that. “And the other thing is fine. We’re friends—we cut each other breaks. So lean on me.”
It’s less literal and more figurative. She can’t exactly offer him her shoulder even if he looks like he’s about to get a major case of the shakes because well, he’s naked and…under the influence.

“Now why mustn’t I touch you? I mean; we’ve got one thing going for us, never mind that it’s completely crazy. It works.”
She unclenches his fingers from around the pane. He could shatter the thing. His eyes slip shut.
“So that doesn’t hurt, now. That’s fine.
You are going to drink something hot, I’ll fix macaroni and we sleep. Or you sleep; whatever.” She sounds like a mother hen.
She pats his shoulder, careful to let go quick enough. “I feel almost cheated. No protests?”
He goes non-verbal, and she’s pretty sure he’s worse now.
Is that rumbling? “Do anything you want.” He’s grabbed onto the knob next to the pane and it comes right off.
“I can’t believe that’s a turn on. I’m starting to think you won’t get better until…” And his eyes snap open and maybe that’s not the conscious response she was aiming for.
“Maybe it’s like pon farr. You know duel to the death or... It’s an alien thing, just ask doctor Spock. We can fix that.”
“I can’t let you do this because you pity me.” The way he swallows makes a little pattern over his collarbone.
“Well, I’m frustrated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. It’s your fault.
Besides, I care about you. A lot. I don’t want to see you hurt.” She could have said that to anybody, really, but he’s the first person to hold his breath when she does it. She wonders if he can count the times anyone’s ever said something like that to him.
He sounds a little raw. “And I need you…I’m sorry, Chloe.” She moves forward a little closer, lets her cheek rest against his neck.
She could be brave, do something really crazy, but she remembers that she’s got words and that’s all she’s got, and not even they come out the way she wants. He’s got to be brave for her.
She keeps her hand there and doesn’t move it, lets him move it for her. Closer, right over the beat.
Then, it’s not like a mauling, not really. It’s the pressure of his lips, eager, but anything but fumbling. This has only happened twice and he knows her too well. It gets hard to breathe, hard to reason and the tile is cold. He’s so warm.
She’s got to be a little twisted. She enjoys the almost animalistic sounds he makes, how desperate it all is, doesn’t feel pathetic because her breathing is all out of whack and she’s trying to get him closer.

Her extra hand finds purchase on the wall even as she’s lifted up. Her hair is messy and wet, blinds her so she can only see his features through it. She can let herself feel. “Davis, listen to me. I’m doing this too.” Those are his eyes, minus the fact that they’re not trying to avoid her appearance so she won’t be discomfited.
You wanted this. she’d said.
She’s no Virgin Mary. “I’ve done this.” She chokes out, mostly for her own benefit.
With only one man. Only one.
Teeth scrape very gently against her neck, and the folds of the dress drape uselessly around her, knot in his fingers, tear.
She can’t be in control now. Thin sheer material is like wearing nothing, just sticking everywhere and she’s not invulnerable to cold.
(This can be just what she needs right now, but its not just. It doesn’t have to mean any more, but it does.)
She can’t unfeel this, can’t stop from moving against him, trying to memorize the details.
This is all almost chaste, the way his lips linger on her breastbone. That is not meant to be an erogenous zone.
The tingling on her skin builds with soreness, nylon feels chafing.
A warm hand slides up her knee feels through the rip. Deepens it, sends a strange bolt of something though her. The loose touch changes, becomes more directed. And she wants… wants…
She buckles against the corner of the glass, doesn’t try to be quiet because she needs him to see just what this might do, wants to see him as it begins.
His arms hook underneath her knees, lift her up with no effort at all. It’s cinematic to be spun around and kissed just for a few seconds. But there’s open air everywhere behind her and her legs instinctively clamp tighter around his waist. She could fall.

He’s close now. Not close enough. She grabs on for dear life, tighter than a tourniquet, tries to blot out all other thoughts. The kiss is gentle and soft and the intensity of it burns. Maybe this is for all of the times they’ve kept to those lines, drawn them in the sand. Maybe this is who they are.
She want's to freeze this moment, because she may never have it again.
There are practically no barriers at all, and she can feel his hands in the indentations on her back, ribs and spine and bone. She’s free to touch where she pleases, runs her hands along his arms with a drugged fascination; takes it farther. Watches as he holds his breath.
It should be ridiculous that he feels fragile to her. They are learning each other now as if they have time.
Like everything, it’s pushed aside when a heavier sensation builds and pulls her down. She pulls him in with a messy choked sound.

The shower tile is cold and hard, and water sticks to her sin like vapor. She exhales from the shock of the warmth and the cold, his voice telling her that she’s everything and the world and Chloe.
He moves into her quietly, watches her eyes, looks as if another bit of him is cracking. They move together, irregular fumbling, eager and needy. They adjust.
She hasn’t got her feet on the ground. She could fall, but it would be into him. The angle is different that anything she’s ever felt; gravity pushes her down to him.

Soon enough she’s straining for closeness. Her breathing picks up quickens with his, whatever’s between them. Her body struggles to hold him inside, pulls itself taunt. His name comes disjointedly from her lips, heavy, basic and complex.

She can’t stop the shuddering once it begins, feels it move through them both, but he keeps on. The second time hits her on the heels of the first and she thinks that maybe the human body’s not meant to take this.
The blackness starts at the edge of her vision and she bites into his shoulder slightly, trying to keep it together because they need this.

He whispers her name just once into her skin and then he’s shaking too, still pulling her closer, not letting go. They must be breaking the laws or destiny, or gravity or sanity.
It’s all too much. Or too little.
“I love you.” He says, and quite suddenly she can’t breathe. Her lips part and something strangled comes out.

Just this moment. Just this second.
She’s not going to forget it as long as she lives.

Her legs won’t hold her to make her way out, but he does, wraps his arms around her waist even as the coverlet is soaked in sweat and them.

---------
She wakes up to her phone ringing in her bag, the sounds of ‘I get knocked down’ blearing too cheerfully from her cell. Maybe it’s Clark, passing on one of Jimmy’s birthday messages after some very tactful editing, or Lois calling to complain about the greasy hair of the pilot.

Somehow during the past hour, Davis has ended up with one leg slung over hers, half-trapping her. She’s warm now, feels his breath calm and easy by her ear. He’s sleeping and he’s never...
She's going to get used to this.

She closes her eyes again, burrows closer and hopes she can get used to that same opening riff for the next hour.
She really loves being a feminist.
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Endnotes: A Doll's House, because the dratted husband reminds me of Jimmy, only he uses less four letter words.


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