malignant drabble series part 1

Reccing Notes: Can I say chloomroadtripfic? It's right there with chloe's chlark angst(you can feel it and ouch!), but this is so, so sweet. No really, xxamlaxx writes Chloe and Davis like you won't believe. I would have loved the second part as a postscript to the ep. but there is a twist and poor davis! poor chloe!(the reason for the title) read part 2!

by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
1410 words, g, beast
She rents them a room in a small motel on the outskirts of Mexico City.
----
Chloe learns the world for Davis has never changed. To him existence is desolate loneliness, miles of road ahead and behind him, but not a single soul on earth who remembers his face, the dimple in his chin and the lines in the corners of his mouth. His knuckles are white in the darkness; skin stretched tightly over bone as he grips the steering wheel, jaw rigid and solemn. The car trembles and shakes and bounces, while the pavement beneath its tires morphs into dirt, rabbit holes and piles of sand.

“Are you sure we can get through?” Davis breaks the silence, exhales in one long, slow breathe, dims the headlights and eases his foot from the gas pedal.

“One hundred dollars American? We can get through.” She assures him, and the miles of chain link fence before them stretches out for miles along the vast expanse of quiet, yellow desert. The night air smells like dust and dryness, cigarette smoke and beer as she rolls down her window, holds a crisp one hundred dollar bill between her fingers. “We’re on our honeymoon but our passports won’t be ready for another three weeks.”

“No passport. Yes.” The man’s face is hidden in the shadows when he takes the money from her hand. He marks something on a sheet of paper and snaps a picture, cuts two Polaroid’s and pastes. “Bienvenidos Mr. and Mrs. Washington.”

Davis drives through the open space in the fence, presses the pedal to the floor with his weight.
---

She rents them a room in a small motel on the outskirts of Mexico City. The plaster walls are cracked and crumbling, with paint that peels in long, dingy white flakes, sprinkling onto the dark blue carpet floor like snow.

The television reception is all blurs and static, low murmurs in Spanish. The lights flicker and fade, surge and finally die, until the only light filters through the dirt streaked window. Davis yawns and stretches in the afternoon sunlight, shrugs his shirt off and slides beneath the patchwork quilt sewn by work hardened hands.

“Come to bed Chloe.” Davis pulls the blankets up to his shoulders, pats the empty space beside him on the mattress.

“In a minute.” Cloudy water sputters from the faucet, slows to a lukewarm trickle. Blood is slowly pounding against the inside of her skull, an augmenting ache, pressure behind her eyes. She splashes water on her face, lets the droplets trickle to her collar while she dry swallows an Advil, chews the chalky pill and swallows.

“Thank you for all of this.” Davis wants to curl around her, reaches a hand out to brush the side of her hip instead. His fingers are warm through the denim of her jeans, but the pain inside her head is unbearable, throbbing and stinging.

Too many hours of driving and too much stress, too little time for goodbyes. Clark’s face is burned onto her eyelids, stares at her in shock and awe and betrayal when she closes her eyes. He begs her for the proclamation of loyalty she can never give, because as much as she wants to stand by his side for eternity, Davis needs her to keep up, keep him from falling into the declivity of murder, when his humanity gives way to instinct and destruction.

“You must miss your friends.”

“You’re my friend now Davis.”
Davis will never be Clark, but he spoons up against her back in his sleep, a long, heated line of cloth covered muscle, and his warmth almost chases away her headache.

---
“Where should we go?” Davis asks around a mouthful of a greasy taco purchased from a tiny wooden shack that functions as both a house and restaurant.

“Somewhere away from people.” She unfolds the map from the glove compartment, smoothes out wrinkles in the paper, spreads it flat against the dashboard.

“Remote part of the rainforest in Brazil?” Davis sucks green salsa off his thumb; a low hum of happiness and pleasure in his throat.

“My Portuguese is lousy.” She tries to picture a home under the canopy of green leaves, bright exotic flowers but the vision in her mind is interrupted by a fresh stab of pain in her forehead, one that ripples through her brain.

“You okay?” Davis opens a bottle of water, holds it out to her; extends the modicum of comfort he has to offer.

“It’s just a headache.” The bottle of aspirin beneath her seat is nearly empty. Five days and two lonely, white pills rattle against the plastic sides. She rolls one white oval between her fingertips, swallows it down with a mouthful of lukewarm water.

“Swine Flu?” He suggests, smiling, cheeks bulging with food and humor. Davis acts like he never has before, relaxed and jocose, smiling bright and white. He has her to himself and she pretends the flicker of green possession in his eyes hasn’t grown, isn’t more prominent, hasn’t completely consumed his gaze. Davis claims love and Clark warns obsession, but the former and the latter are so deeply meshed, intertwined and mixed that she doesn’t know what Davis feels and doesn’t want to know. This is all for Clark and she repeats the mantra late at night, when she wakes and can feel his eyes on her in the silver moonlight, when his fingers brush back strands of her hair while she feigns sleep, when he presses close in his dreams.

“Funny.” She thinks of Clark and the piglet he raised the summer they were fourteen, but those times are gone and now her memories are going to be of Davis. “There’s a town thirty miles down the road, we should make it there before the car runs out of gas.”

“Lie back, take a nap, it’ll get rid of your headache.”
The pain in her head persists; it has since her last conversation with Clark.
---


Davis buys them a little house in a village in Chile. Over three weeks of driving on dusty, unpaved roads, full of bumps and holes and rocks. Their shack has one window, without a pane of glass, just an open square that lets in golden sunlight and buzzing insects. The floor is dirt and nights it rains the water seeps in from beneath the door and in the morning she walks barefoot in mud, makes coffee by boiling water in while mud squishes cool and sticky between her toes. They don’t have a proper bathroom; just a metal tub in the corner of what she supposes is their living room and a cracked mirror on the wall, streaked and filthy with ribbons of fractures.

“Hmm, what’re you doing?” Davis murmurs as she slips from bed, tiptoes silently across the dusty ground, steps on a patch of grass sprouting near the bathtub.

“Just getting some water.” She puts on the pair of sandals their neighbor made for her, walks out the door, waits until Davis settles back down on the mattress, pulls the blankets up over his head. Then she creeps back inside, slaps at the tickle on her calf; the mosquito crawling on her skin. Five days in the four mud walls and rusty tin roof covered over with soil and leaves.

It isn’t the future she’d imagined; mosquitoes buzzing in the air, in the heat and moisture, beads of sweat perpetually forming on her skin. Davis’ t-shirt is too hot for her skin and she shrugs it off, free because Davis is asleep and night is the only time that belongs to her, when she can wallow in her misery and her happiness and the vicissitudes of her own life. Even in the blackness and the dearth of moonlight the ache behind her eyes persists, has never truly dissipated. It just hurts, lightning strikes of agony inside her skull cavity. She’s beginning to think it’s more than stress, that this is her punishment for leaving, that the hurt inside her head is the same ache of betrayal that Clark is feeling somewhere in Smallville.

Something hot is on her skin, above her lips and she moves to the broken mirror, wipes dust from the cracked pane of glass. Blood is seeping from her nostrils, black in the dim, dim light of the moon and stars. Suddenly she knows it can’t be psychological and something inside her head is very, very wrong. For all the promises she’s made and all she’s supposed to do, there is no chance now that she is going to outlive Davis Bloome; the world is seemingly destined for destruction.
She watches the red trickle over her mouth and wonders if Davis can even die.