somnium

Reccing Notes: I did not disappear on you, see? This fic is the sequel to Illusion (an AU telling of Beast). Involves (in varying degrees) Zod, a pregnancy, a power struggle and a sacrifice.

by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
15828 words, m/nc-17, injustice and doomsday (kind of)

This is a cruel parody, and a little part of her whispers that it’s all she’ll ever have, now.

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(This is not the way it was supposed to be.)

Blackness. The space, roughly three feet by eight feet, the dizzying motion of a vehicle. Cuffs, hauling her wrists above her, as if she is some kind of animal on a meat hook. A gag in her mouth and aching in her legs, in her arms, heaviness. A sudden sweet sickness in her throat.

She wants to think, knows she must, but the memories are too strong now.

She had been buried alive once. After the air ran out she’d started to jerk and buckle to because there was just no way to get oxygen. The impact, skin against wood and she didn’t have to feel anymore. It wasn’t the oblivion that she had the nightmares about, but those moments where the air thinned and everything started getting black and she would have done almost anything for that air.

Stupid, but the similarities should be enough to give her a panic attack now. They don’t, scatter in her brain dully.

She has to think.

The air is cold like the morgue drawer after the first time she died, enough that she must be north again.

How far north she doesn’t know.

She knows she needs to get back to Davis before it is too late.

Her wrists chafe painfully against each other and no matter how high she stretches she can’t get them over the hook. The MO is too deliberate and whoever planned it knew her, somehow. It wasn’t some random psycho trying to kidnap her.

It was…who? Who would want this?

Her mind feels dull, sluggish. Whoever it was knew enough to knock her out.

If she had been awake, if she had been panicked there wouldn’t have been a chance they’d get far before being in shreds. Whoever took her knew about him.

She only remembers the short walk to the car, on her way back to the hotel. A sting- a tranquilizer she should have been ready for.

When she and Davis had gotten out of Smallville every mile they drove felt like it was closer to danger but she hadn’t voiced it. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. They were supposed to have time.

She didn’t want to worry him with something that just might have been all in her head.

The paranoia still remained, though. She made it so they never stopped for more than four hours, changed names, kept out of sight, switched cars. She did everything she could to hide their trail but she didn’t exactly have a miniature army to wipe away traces like when she’d worked with Lex.

The rooms got reserved under Smith, Jones, sometimes even Sullivan (paid in cash) when the hours just got too long and lack of real, comfortable sleep glued her eyes shut.

He’d park the car and get her up the stairs, easy like a child, and no one questioned the newlywed explanation.

They’d shared a room, with paint strips peeling off the walls, with a cot and the blinds drawn all the way down. It was dark, like those times he had slept in the Talon basement. Only she was there now, and things had changed since then between them. Built up.

Now when he’d watch her or touch her or even breathe, she felt that something twist between them again. (Desperate, unhealthy maybe- because she was supposed to be his humanity and sometimes she felt only weak, panicked and needy-nothing like the girl who could get them out of this alive.)

She’d felt that, needed to force the panic down so she didn’t let him get to the tender exploration that she remembered and made her stomach twist. They had to be fine.

She’d felt cloth rasping against her back and bunching in her hands, the way he shook to go slow but then she pushed for everything, hard and fast as if even then the future would catch up with them both.

There had been one hour for sleep until she‘d stir in the cot beside him, feeling like someone from ‘the Fugitive’ and he’d be awake. He never slept after they were together.

“Please, we need to move now.” She’d say.

(They had been almost to the border, before.)
-----------

She’d felt weaker the last morning, unable to swallow one bite of food before rejecting it violently. She’d listened to what he said a hodgepodge of ‘This is too much for you. We should slow down. You should rest.’ She was too tired to appreciate how he could just say the things flat out, honestly or to hate how even then he seemed to be loathing himself.

“A few minutes. We will keep going.” she’d said, violently enough to set her off again.

He’d been disproportionately panicked enough to go halfway out the door to get her something despite the fact she’d never let him leave the room without her.

It was easy enough to shrug off. With the way they’d been living it was only to be expected that she’d get food poisoning, and he couldn’t, not for long, with his DNA. He’d wiped the hair out of her eyes regardless of the traces of vomit on the ends. “There’s no doubt you’re the paramedic.” she’d told him. “I’m gross.”

“Liar.” He’d said, not a trace of that admittedly normal human repulsion.

His sick-of-worry face stayed in place even as he dribbled her careful sips of water from a bottle.

“You shouldn’t run yourself ragged. I can’t watch you like this. I can’t watch while you…”

“While I get us away? What part of super powered alien best friend don’t you understand? We need to get another continent away and then I can think of taking a vacation. I can’t let him find you and or let both of you start lunging at each other like two alien Alpha males.”

“I won’t lunge. I’m with you now.”

She remembered that well enough, when the darker part of him had fallen away as soon as she’d appeared in the fortress.

“All I’m asking is that you rest a little, okay?”

Then he’d held onto her arm, expectantly and she’d pushed herself up, feeling her legs weak, like the muscles were just marionettes strings. Strangely enough, she wanted to smile. Figured that that was the one time that stubborn streak of his emerged.

“Oh, fine, if it makes you happy.”

That’s my girl he said, and she wondered how it could feel so right to go from a savior to someone’s girl in a minute flat.

She’d curled willfully close under his arm, and his hand tightened a little at her side. This was something normal. She’d wanted that, needed that from him, for him.

There was a little rearranging, because he had too much muscle to be a downy pillow. “How’s that?” he’d asked and she felt something all at once more powerful than the weakness that came on with the sound of his voice, before, the emotion underneath the momentum.

Something of the panic welled up weakly and died again. The feelings hit her heavy, too soft and she’d thought maybe it was okay, they could stay one more day.

She could let herself be happy.
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Even with the dull throb in her head she knows there’s nothing to push on, no exploitable opening for her trapped like this.

There’s not enough air and she has to gulp in through her mouth.

There’s air. There’s air still if only she breathes slow enough. If she panics he’ll feel it, It will, and she won’t let that happen to him again.

It would bring him here for whatever plan they had-a super weapon, a way to kill him again, strip his mind and leave only the beast.

They wanted him and they weren’t going to find him.

Davis is still in the motel. He has to be. Whoever it is won’t get anything from her.

She’ll find him, if only she can get free. They can get out of this.

Her lungs are pulled up too much to get deep breaths but its fine.

She won’t panic. When that door opens she’ll do anything to get out. Until then she has to fight not to get sick all over again.

It’s pointless to shut her eyes, but she does anyway.

When she does it’s easier to think he’s there, a lean cloth covered line at her back

It’s easier to breathe.

By the time she’s thrust out, her legs don’t have the strength to hold her up any more. Thankfully there’s a hand hauling her up by the back of her jacket to break her fall.

Four of them, there are four; she can see the shadows of four; that at least.

Her eyes are unused to the light, and she doesn’t open them right off, refuses to give into the indignity of squinting.

“Give her a little more time to come to.” The voice is low, clipped, still accented and girlish like it had been at the explosion. Not scared now.

The girl who tried to burn her to death shouldn’t be a friendly voice to her, but she’d known Davis too. It’s a link to Davis, however weak. If she learned the truth, maybe she wasn’t so hopeless after all.

“Bette?” she breathes.

“It’s Plastique.”

------------
They tie her to a chair in what smells nauseatingly like a smoky garage. At least she isn’t gagged.

“Where is he?” Bette asks, once and again, and again. They’re all there and she answers the same way every time. She doesn’t know.

They have to tire eventually. The second one has sparks flying from his fingers, and she knows that he would have no problem sending them straight through her, but the time hasn’t come for that, not yet. He leaves first.

And it’s easier to put the fear back then.

She stops talking until there are only the two of them, and that’s the first time she can say his name. Bette had to remember about being in a cage, had to know that whatever else, he was human too.

“He isn’t hurting anyone. You know this is wrong.”

“Wrong? I’ve read the papers. What is he, the Cornfield killer now? One oxygen mask only goes so far.” Bette says. “And stop with the Girl Scout routine. I didn’t like it then and I really hate it now.

“So now you’ve traded in the black t-shirts for black leather. Good to know. You have changed haven’t you? You’re more trapped than ever.”

“You’re the one who’s tied to a chair. As soon as this gig is up I’m out of here.”

“Just like that? You’re an investment. And then when the least of you does one thing against Tess Mercer’s master plan you’ll be over. She won’t be content once this is over. All that freedom is an illusion.”

“She got me free, and didn’t treat me like the others. She just wants this one thing done.”

“For the hero to destroy the monster? Kind of idealistic isn’t it?” They are both her boys, and neither of them can die. If she doesn’t get free they will.

“She didn’t put it quite like that, but yes. Whoever he is has to step up sometime.”

“And just because she wants him to he will succeed. What if he doesn’t? You’d die for that?”

There must have be a flicker there, because that girl had never believed blindly.

By the time her wrists are strapped into the restraints it’s gone again.

She could ask what they are but she remembers them too well. The white, deceptively thin meteor maximizing cuffs always meant pain. When she’d been strapped to a table, they’d cut to see just how much she could heal and she couldn’t stop the feeling of skin pulling over bone. She has no powers now.

She can’t panic. She can’t.

There are three of them now, Bette-Plastique, the angry one, and a hollow looking woman who does nothing but watch her face from the corner of the room.

They don’t ask her many questions, really, and she answers, lies for every one. She’s nearly mastered the art by now. They still don’t stop, and she gets to thinking maybe the truth isn’t what they wanted either.

“Tell us where he really is and that will be enough.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Bette toys with a sword, too thick and dull at the edges to cut painlessly. The flourish is unnecessary.

“Are you going to run me through or is this some twisted game you play to get over boredom?” Chloe asks. “I’ve been more intimidated by my principal.”

“We’ll get started, then.” The rat-like man say, presses a hand onto her wrist.

They aren’t all there and she’s a little grateful for that. The electrical currents send a dull shock through her veins and the agony is something like coming back to life.

It only takes five minutes for her to start shaking, six more until she cries out, but she fights the panic down. The girl in the corner watches her face until, dizzied, she sees herself step out of the room.

The pain stops and she understands why they wanted her fear.

“You know where to find Kent.” Bette tells the other, matter-of-factly loosening the cuffs on her wrists.

Chloe wretches all over her polished leather boots.
----------

Clark Kent wants the Black Kryptonite and Oliver Queen finally understands that it is just another copout.

He’d had made the tough decisions his entire life, had known when there was a threat and how to stop it.

The Kryptonite ring burns in his hand, a dull reminder. Actions had costs, necessary ones and Clark couldn’t see that.

“You have to find it and kill it.”

“I’ll do something.” Clark replies. He always does.

“She was sure enough about him to take him out of the fortress. She called me. There haven’t been… incidences.”

“I know she’s been your friend for years Clark but that doesn’t suddenly make her the oracle.

Didn’t it ever occur to you that she might not be the most unbiased party in all this? Just because she found it hard to resist tall, dark and doomsday doesn’t mean she knows what she’s taking on.”

“That’s why I’m going to find her, and maybe there will be a way to separate…”

“Separate what? He’s not real, Clark not the way that you are. You were born. He was just implanted DNA created to destroy. Now I might not have a master’s degree in alien science, but I know the difference.”

“He’s still got a human side.”

“Correction: What he thinks is a human side. Who’s to say than when separated out it won’t be as destructive as the other half? I know it’s not pretty but killing both is a necessary sacrifice.”

“I won’t believe that.”

“I don’t care if you do. Handle it. It’s what real heroes do,” he tells Clark’s turned back, and fights down the irritation, knowing he won’t listen.

---------

Clark Kent thinks of how he’ll find another way until he finds Chloe again, at the edge of a forest, about to be run over by a truck. It’s hard to recognize her, but certain things, her expressions; her tears are like he remembers.

He shouldn’t think damaged, but he does.

She’s barelegged, except for the jacket and he tears through what was left of Martha’s clothes to find her something. She says nothing. When she does speak, it’s slow and soft, like she’s choosing her words.

The smallest noise and the coffee cup rattles in fragile fingers, a symptom he’s seen one too many times for it not to scare him. All the clues have been pointing to this.

Davis had never left her alone.

“Any good I thought I saw in him, Clark, it’s gone. Neutron wasn’t the first he…” she closes her eyes, holds onto his hands like they are a lifeline, and for the second time it tears him apart what this has done to her.

“You’ve got to kill that Beast.” she says, eyes steady and he fights down the flicker of unease.

She leaves the farm for the Talon, borrows Lois’s key to get in. I just need to be home, she tells him, and maybe she needs to be alone after all of that.

Three days later, when Clark finds her, the characteristic marks cover her until she’s barely recognizable. There is one white cuff on her wrist.
---------

The Daily Planet goes to overdrive with the Cornfield Killer stories, and Oliver’s contacts get a sighting just outside of Smallville. The Luthor mansion has been destroyed and thankfully Tess Mercer was out in Metropolis.

This time Clark Kent doesn’t need Oliver Queen or Tess Mercer or anyone else to tell him what to do.

(Clark knows he’s supposed to save people, find a way to help even the worst of them. But when he finds what used to be Davis Bloome, for the first time he feels something akin to a thirst for revenge.)

It’s a lot, large enough that no one would hear anything happen for miles.

Then, for the second time in his life Davis is in the fortress, feeling the backlash of cold Arctic wind.

Clark lets him go and he lands on the wall with the impact of a throw much harder than before. Ice crystals fly out, blinding them both. He doesn’t stay down for long, holds curiously stiff, muttering, crouched on the ground. Chloe. He won’t hurt Clark. He won’t kill him. He means too much too her. This is important.

The crystal is in Clark’s fist but It is blocking the portal.

“Get up.”

Davis’s body is not monstrous, probably due to taking up the old habits again. There is a strange panic in his movements, the click of his fingers against his arm like he’s already snapped.

“Why did you do that?”

“I was looking for Chloe. What did you do to Chloe?” Clark had to have done something.

“She left you.”

“She was coming back.” His head twists to keep him in sight and Clark sees imagines a rabid dog with jaws snapping. Of course this had been the way he was. Always watching, turning her into a shadow of what she had been.

“She wouldn’t have come back to you after the things you did.”

“I loved her.”

“Is that what you call it, now? She wanted to help you and you destroyed her. I found her running from a team of mutants but the only person she was scared of was you. “

(They’d left and she’d pushed them every step of the way, always one mile farther. Maybe it wasn’t because she loved him, but she had cared. A sudden image forms in Davis’s mind of her forcing down the disgust of being with him until she couldn’t any more.

She’d only had to say so and he would have let her free. He’d have come back and gone through that portal.

No.

She’d told him to stay. )

“It wasn’t like that. You’re wrong.”

“You’re lying to yourself. The crazy thing is I was still thinking of way to help until she turned up dead.”

Anger, that’s anger but how easy would it be to feign for a man who led a double life. How could Clark lie about that?

“Where have you taken Chloe? You took her away.”

It’s hard to force out when every muscle is on fire, Clark’s blood singing to him. One punch, just one would be easy, to hold it down again.

“You want keep her and but her back in her little box. You want me to believe that so you can.”

Soon Davis is going to start constructing his own twisted version of Romeo and Juliet and Clark can’t take it anymore.

Whatever was human in him is crumbling fast, and Clark realizes that he might not even know what he’d done.

“Chloe Sullivan is dead.” It comes out measured and it’s anything but. Clark can still see the blood.

“You’re lying.” Doomsday’s fist rams into him and he can feel the blow richochet back through bones, the dig of graying, spiking claws into skin. Clark sees that Davis Bloome is not human, he never was human. The pupils stand out stark scarlet on its face.

“Stop LYING!” Davis roars. It’s easy then to let go, because every blow he strikes is one closer to the truth, and he feels for once, something more than pain. He was made for this. He had to do this.

“You’re… good... at that yourself.”

It’s not the blows, but the fact that they keep coming, the sheer weight of them exploiting a weakness. Clark throws his weight forward feeling the bones in his hands crack and resetting themselves in a split second, his lungs pinched with air.

“You should know plenty about that. “ Clark’s throat is burning so he’s not calm not, lets the sound cut into the night air. “You killed her!”

Clark slams Its head into the ground with as much force as he can muster, feels the weight on his spine and in his back. He can’t sway, not now. He’s got to finish this.

Viscous blood drips from the corner of Its mouth, and it stays stunned, suddenly human eyes glittering strangely.

“No.”

“You.killed.her.” he repeats again, inches back so he can plunge the crystal to its place. The red surrounds them, chaotic and bloody, swirling. If going into the zone is what it takes Clark will do it. There is no attack this time.

The shifting of bones and scales under skin is unceasing and yet It stays curiously still. It had no right to look like this was pain. “I’d never hurt her. I couldn’t. It couldn’t.” It’s a childish defense mechanism, and the part of Davis Bloome that has changed doesn’t stop, wavers completely into human form.

“How many blackouts have you had since she disappeared? In one of those you did.”

“I don’t care what you say. Let me see her, just…let me see her.”

“You want to see her? Take a long good look.”

Davis knows her face underneath the blood, and this is just like the photographs of the creature in his locker.

“Doesn’t that look like your work?”

“No.” and again “No.” and he won’t let go of the photograph, breathes in, strange, wringing breaths. Why?

“You’re getting worse, Davis. She saved you and then you killed her.”

“Stop saying that! I wouldn’t ever hurt her.” (Even then he knows that he doesn’t know. Ever since she’d gone everything had coalesced into blackness and tiny moments of ’d had to find her. It had to, and It wasn’t human, it was everything that wasn’t human.).

“She’s gone. There’s no one left save you.”

“She’s not. I’d know, somehow. I’d feel it, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I?!!” The plate spurs are cutting out of its human fists again. Clark should kill it somehow. It would be easy.

“I saw what happened to her, Davis.”

It/he doesn’t move there and for a moment Clark sees that maybe this wasn’t about living. Maybe it was about her.

“We were fine. We were going to make it to the border and across so I wouldn’t ever get the way I was again. She’d changed me. I wanted to make her happy. We would’ve been happy.”

“Then why did she leave?”

Clark looks at him with something like pity, and God it burns.

“She just disappeared. I couldn’t feel her anymore. I always felt something.”

“You know, don’t you, deep down? She was never safe with you. Maybe you wanted her to be but as soon as she wasn’t your perfect dream...”

“I just kept thinking that I had to be human. When she looked at me it felt like I could be. I never was, was I? Not if….that…” The uncoiling energy casts him in a demonic light and there are many facets writhing underneath this human skin. This time Davis is holding it in check, barely. “You have to kill me.”

“I won’t.” Clark says, knowing that this is worse.

Davis doesn’t struggle even when Clark gets close enough to slam him right into the mouth of the portal.

This would be his hell.

(Chloe had seen it like that, and It deserved it, deserved it all. She hadn’t wanted him to do this, before. She’d seen something human there, but that part was insignificant compared to the rest.)

She is dead. This isn’t right. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. She is dead and for a moment Davis wishes to God she’d never met him.

“There’s nothing left to hold you here.” Clark says.

Davis’s eyes are red, and he closes them for a split second. When he opens them again Clark can see the brown shift from brown to red to reddened brown again.

“I know.” His face convulses and the change starts again, but it’s already too late for that.

As the tendrils of red start to take hold of his body, it seems to Clark if he’s waiting.

----------

The angry one, Leech, said that they should kill her. She could unravel the entire plan if she showed up alive. Plastique was the only one against it. She doesn’t know what words were exchanged but somehow, she’s still here.

Apparently one of the conditions was Plastique as her baby sitter while the rest of them reported in.

Chloe hasn’t talked in two hours. She’d thought maybe if she didn’t she could think of a plan, any plan. But she knows that time is running out and it is the only thing she can do. Any pleas to be let go would fall on deaf ears, and guilt is much the same. She asks questions, somehow, anything.

“You are using me aren’t you? Making it seem like I want Clark to kill Davis?”

“It’s a little more complex than that. But that’s the gist of it.”

“And you don’t feel anything?”

“That friend of yours gave me a free ticket for Bella Reeve so forgive me if I don’t feel any warm fuzzy feelings.”

“And what about Davis? He helped you.”

“I don’t hate him. This is just my job.”

“And yet here you are keeping me alive just to let him die? “

“Yes. I don’t take chances. You need to stay alive.”

“Why? What makes me so damned important?”

“You’re not a monster for one. He won’t hurt you. If this friend of yours loses then we’re all set. I’m safe, you’re safe. You won’t let It kill me. If the plan goes through I might even let you go to go play girl scout with Kent again.”

“One of them will be dead. You are just responsible for this as Tess. You are Tess. He’s human, too. They’re both still human.“

“Just listen to yourself. They didn’t get punished with this. They were born for it..”

Chloe knows she’s not going to get out. She’s losing everything, why not her dignity too. Her vision blurs and her chest rises and falls with a ridiculous ‘unh’ sound. If she could only twist her hands out to breathe.

“Tell me you’re not going to be sick again.” Plastique just looks at her. Chloe hadn’t expected comfort.

She pushes Chloe’s chair up against the wall, close to an empty bucket, keeps her gloved hands on the wood.

“You can’t do anything if they decide to tear each other to bits. I will let you go, just not now. ”

“Does that get you through the day?” She won’t look a Plastique, studies the careful layer of grime on the floor instead. “You’re no different from the others.” She realizes she still can’t stop crying, wonders how much of that the metal digging into her bones and how much is sadness.

“Look. This isn’t personal.” Chloe doesn’t care to understand this sudden need to be sincere. She just needs three seconds longer to get the momentum.

“When Doomsday dies you’ll be free.”

Chloe throws her head forward, rams her forehead into Plastique’s nose hard enough to crack her skull open. Davis isn’t going to die.

The chair topples over them both and she can barely see, but she does it again and again and again until Plastique isn’t moving anymore.

Somehow Chloe manages to wriggle out under the dead weight of the chair.

When/if Plastique wakes up she’s probably going to set her a pyre. Chloe slams her cuffed hand over her just for more time, drags her wrists against the stinging metal.

Maybe it is the adrenaline, but when her hands come completely free she only feel the strange wetness of blood. Healing came in handy for things like that.

There are no alarms, just this little hideout for the four of them. Tess doesn’t know about her.

The red droplets leave a trail on the white pavement. There’s no time to block it and the rest will find her. She is counting on the fact that she’ll find someone else first.
-----------

Five days.

One hundred twenty miles of hitchhiking highways and there isn’t even a body to mourn.

He wasn’t fighting very hard, Clark tells her quietly, calmly, as if she is going to scream and cry and rage. She doesn’t, only feels like she’s fallen into a fever dream and she’s going to wake any minute.

She asks, he answers, measured, too measured. He had done it because if the Destroyer side had been capable of killing her, It wouldn’t have been saved, no matter what. He hadn’t hurt her, not ever, until now.

His name was Davis, she says.

The crystal is destroyed. Clark hadn’t wanted to take the chance that It could get free again, after what it had done to ‘her’.

“How could you not know it wasn’t me?” she tells him, once and again, and maybe that other story was what he wanted to believe about Davis, about them both.

“You wanted to save him.” If nothing else, she had told herself that she was his handhold to staying human. That he couldn’t lose that, but failure never felt like this.

“I wanted to think I did, you know? That maybe he was the you that I could save. I was lying. I was lying the whole time. I think that maybe I just loved him.” (She’d never told him that, not once, but he’d held onto her like she didn’t have to.)

The words are heavy, a grindstone on her neck, dragging her under. This is worse than the numbness.

“If I had known it would have been so different, you’ve got to believe me. We would’ve found a cure, Black Kryptonite, something.”

Clark’s hands are warm, safe like she remembers, propelling her out into the light, never enveloping her.

There has to be another way to get him free, he tells her.

They’ll fix this, they always do.

----------

Seven Days.

Just enough time to be centuries in the Zone. (Time passed differently there.)

Clark knows and there might be a way, a backdoor for the family of Jor-El, a key only he could unlock.

She knows what Clark’s risking, doing this. They’re risking more than one phantom brought out in the backlash, and anything else could possibly get out.

Maybe it’s for her; maybe it’s the guilt.

She watches him paint his blood on the crystal floor and they’re so close.

Clark reminds her over and over how this might not be what they need. “He might not even know you.”

She knows enough about Krypton to understand that the zoners changed and became only shreds of the former selves. Less than a day had almost killed Clark.

There might be almost nothing of Davis left, but it’s a chance.

He looks whole, scattered, marked by blood and dust. His eyes are too uncomprehending to be warm. She says his name and that doesn’t change.

“I remember something about you.”

She catches him before he collapses hard and feels a sharp prickle in her abdomen with his weight. She runs her hands over his face, smoothing away the dust and dirt.

His eyes are opened, boring into hers.

She tells herself she can let herself be happy, tries to forget the foreboding in that.
------------

He never goes to the basement. The apartment is his too, now, under his ownership and protection.

She’s happy with playing nursemaid, even when physically he’s completely sound.

He’s affectionate only when she is, keeps control. She doesn’t once feel like she’s drowning. They never get far, and maybe it’s romanticism, but she wants him to be completely whole first.

She knows he isn’t.

He can recall snatches of the past, now, and goes through each of their memories. He listens to every story she has about Clark.

Maybe it’s true; maybe the zone had changed him.

Clark never comes by, so she has to go out to see him. He’s close by still, and the proximity makes it worse.

Davis never transforms completely and doesn’t hide it from her when the change starts. She holds onto him, full of the dull fear that it won’t work anymore. He tells her, eyes harried, that it’s like It wants to rip out.

“It’ll only ease one way. I feels like everything else is a substitution.”

He’ll keep fighting; she tells him she trusts that. Of course, I always do for you. I’m just so tired, he says.

She tells herself it’s just the fear, but the things that never would have nagged at her do. She gets sick with surprising frequency, finds herself crying by the toilet bowl in the dark. He reaches out to her, smoothly pulls her up.

“Come back to bed.”

She misses the look in his eyes.
---------

Clark hasn’t seen Chloe in three days, contents himself with ten minute phone calls three times a day.

He asks her how Davis is and she always answers something affirmative, ‘better’ sometimes, ‘okay’ on others.

There hasn’t been a resurgence of violence on the streets for a long time now.

Clark fills her in on the Planet. Lois. Her latest story.

If not the silence grows, and he has nothing else to tell her, not yet.

Davis’s condition worsens with proximity to him, he learns. He won’t venture to the Talon until he has a solution for him. For Chloe.

There is one way he knows, only one, and Oliver has the key to that. They differ on this, and if Clark asks for it now he’d know.

So Clark Kent finds himself blurring into the Queen mansion past the video cameras, in the vault past all the pass codes, in the center of the little fortress.

There are so many things here. Technologies, weapons, things he barely spares a glance.

There’s a Kryptonite ring in a lead box. A familiar ring, carved out of the same rock that fell from the first meteor shower.

L.L.

The Black Kryptonite is forgotten.
--------

Oliver looks into his eyes, admits to protecting him when he was unwilling to protect himself.

“Lex Luthor was past help. He’d been set on his course so long he couldn’t get off.”

“So you killed him, just like that. He could’ve changed.”

“Stop. Just stop. I’m getting tired of your righteousness. You wanted to carry on your dysfunctional enmity, that’s fine. I was your friend. I needed to stop him. I knew what he’d done.

I’d do it again if that’s what it would take to make you see. I'm your friend, Clark. I'm willing to do what it takes to protect you.”

“You’re not my friend, Oliver.”

Something dies in Clark then.

Chloe sees that this is finally a cage to him.

“Davis, I know you want to pull your end of this, but you can’t go out of the apartment. You’re a wanted man.”

“The papers have stopped putting my face on the front page.”

“The Tess Mercer still knows what you look like, even if you don’t remember her.”

“Mercer?”

“The woman with the Clark/Jesus complex. She killed you once and only the thought that Clark killed you keeps her from trying again. You see?”

“Clark Kent, savior?” He repeats, curiously detached. “She killed me.”

“I see how it is. We’ll pack. “

“Don’t be silly. I understand. I’ll stay inside until you’re ready to say goodbye to this place.”

That night, Chloe tosses and turns into the empty spot he’s left behind.
--------

On her third marketing deal in Budapest, Tess Mercer finally understands everything.

It’s too bad she had to die to find out.
--------

That small blue line is the second most terrifying Chloe Sullivan has seen in her life. It all comes together, the bleeding gums, the exhaustion, the sicknesses.

She’d been on the hormone, then. It couldn’t have happened, couldn’t have, but impossibly it did.

She doesn’t know what it is. Thoughts of his brown eyes are offset with thoughts of something tearing its way out of her. It would be born with the same DNA that had been implanted into Davis.

She imagines it covered in Clark’s blood.

There can be only one person more scared of this than she is. I can’t, he’d said, before she’d told him that nothing would happen.

She holds off telling him for all of twelve minutes.

She restrains herself from asking ‘what are we going to do?’ just sticks to the facts. She needs to hear something from him, even if it is an exclamation of horror.

If she went through with it, it would probably kill her. He’d been so scared of this.

His face is shuttered down, worst than she thought. She thinks maybe she should shake him, clenches her hands between her knees instead.

“I know this is…”

“Sudden?”

That’s it, it isn’t to him. He doesn’t look surprised, and she can see an almost amused smile teasing at the corners of his mouth.

“You knew.” Maybe he’d developed X-Ray vision overnight; maybe he hadn’t told her not to alarm her. “Is this a phase? You haven’t run around, screaming your head off.”

“We are together, and it is mine. I am glad.” he says.

In an ideal world this would have been right, but now she would have expected him to reach out and hold her, pace, anything but this.

“We don’t know how what it could do. I don’t… I should get this taken care of, somehow.”

“No.” His voice never sounded like this before. “You won’t be harmed.”

“Is that the comfort talking? That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re going to have my child.” He touches her abdomen heavily as if favoring her with a blessing. “It will be a boy. Powerful. I can feel it.”

This isn’t Davis, alarmist and protective to a fault.

She has a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach, feels pulled into another world.

Lana had described an incident like this in perfect detail, only it had not-been Lex then, that Dark Thursday. With his ideas of humans and hybrids, General Zod had nearly destroyed their world and created it in Krypton’s image.

He’d been in the zone. Davis had been a spitting image of him.

It’s all she can do to keep from stepping back.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing. Fear. I don’t want to die bringing the last son of Krypton into the world.”

“That’s not why you drew back just then.”

He tilts his head to the side, watches her, and she understands she’d seen what she wanted to see, because she’d needed to, because she couldn’t let go. Every movement is reptilian, nothing like Davis had been.

She has to warn Clark.

“So that is how it is. I’m afraid I cannot let you leave.”

He’s true to his word and she’s the one caged. He blocks the door with his body, sets her back on the couch as if she is some sort of plaything.

“What’s gotten into you, Davis?”

“That’s not right. Try again.”

He’s seen the truth in her eyes and is only further enraged when she denies it. “My name, say it.”

He holds her around the neck lightly, patiently, smiling and everything about him is so wrong. He is free and Davis is in hell.

“Imposter. Liar. Monster. ”

There isn’t enough air.

“Try again.”

It’s almost a relief then, because she can hate.
----------

The Mercer funeral is a smaller than would have been expected. Everyone had met Tess Mercer, from tycoons several nations away to small informants at the edge of the law.

She left no public will and the company assets are quickly meted out to charity and investors. The only people left to attend are those who do so out of duty, or those who truly mourn.

Clark Kent appears out of both.

Within the mansion, he found the Veritas journal and a strange purple orb.

----------

Chloe is incapable of escaping this time and there is almost nothing she wouldn’t give for her Braniac powers once more. She could have touched Zod, overwhelmed his mind and she could have fought back. Instead, she has words and a gap of time to fill, facts to learn, a plan to create.

“What did you do to him?”

“Nothing.”

“You took his body and you did nothing. I’m beginning to understand your philosophy. Explains why your people loved you enough to send you there.”

“I didn’t need to take his body. He permitted it.”

“You’re lying. Davis would have fought you. He would’ve…” He fought to stay human so hard he’d died for it. He’d seen her as his soul. He had to have had a reason beyond her.

“He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to die. Because of you.”

“Nothing dies within the Zone.”

“True enough. He was new to the---trials of that place. Weak, didn’t have experience in any of it. Not through in any fault of his design. He was created to be great, but he was flawed.

There was barely enough of him left to fight. Souls in the zone are just animals really, no identity, just rage.

Only the exceptional, those with missions beyond mere human desires can remain. It’s what made me different. It is what will make me great.”

“He’s suffering, still, isn’t he?”

“He suffers. Maybe now you understand what Kal El did to me. Only seven days and it was enough to make my son lose himself.”

He speaks softly now and he knows she’s trying to appeal to her memories. “Perhaps he won’t suffer much longer.” The worst part is that it works, and her own personal hydraulics start going again.

“You hate Kal a little bit for that, don’t you? Perhaps a part of you will rejoice when I get him out of the way.”

She might be pathetic enough to break down in front of an alien dictator but that is pushing it.

“I’ll rejoice when he sends you to wherever you came from.”

“Would you really?” Everything about Zod is finely crafted manipulation, while Davis had been wide open, broken, true.

Her voice isn’t fit to answer him. “I didn’t think so.”

She squeezes her eyes closed so maybe when she opens them the image will vanish. He knows.

A tear pushes out beneath her eyelashes and she turns towards the light of the window, away. She won’t give him another weapon for his little arsenal.

Only it’s worse because it could have been Davis sliding a hand under that tear, following the line from cheek to chin.

(He could have touched her like that, if she hadn’t pushed him, if they’d had time.) This is a cruel parody, and a little part of her whispers that it’s all she’ll ever have, now.

“What are you doing?” His hand pushes the tear away, lingers.

“Offering comfort, of course. It’s a human ritual, is it not? I would have thought you would be pleased.”

She slaps his had away sharply, feels like she just hit a cement block.

“You don’t offer comfort. You force it and you have no reason to comfort me. I don’t want your comfort. You’re lying again.”

“Believe me, I don’t want to give it.”

“Then why?”

“He was strong willed, this one. He left an imprint of sorts. This body remembers you. “

“How stupid do you think I am?”

“Perhaps I lied. Perhaps I carry him with me. “

“I’m really not that stupid. Just, don’t---don’t touch me again.” Her hand closes, inopportunely around the pair of scissors she used to open the packets.

“Are you going to attempt to stab me? From my experience human women do that.”

“Not unless you come closer.”

“Don’t exert yourself. It is unhealthy for the child.

I already have what I want from you. The rest will pass.”

He doesn’t watch her like he usually does, and the entire monitor is overrun by Kryptonian symbols.

He’s going to go after Clark. As measured as he pretends to be, his hate is great enough that he won’t be able to restrain himself until his plan is complete.

“The serial killer stuff still stands. When you leave you will be hunted down.” She tells him casually.

“They can’t do anything to me.”

“I can. I won’t let you hurt him.”

If Zod, could have laughed, he would have. Instead, he smiles and where Davis’s smiles had always been tainted with sadness, his are with cold.

“You’re smarter than the other one. But you’re human. You can no more stop me than anyone else.”

“As soon as you walk out that door you know what I’m going to do. Tie me up in ropes, chain me, leave me in the little corner by the door? If there’s a wall I’ll use that. I won’t be alive for your little plan when you get back.”

“Perhaps you underestimate my capacity to restrain you.”

“Are you really willing to take that chance?” He stops at that.

“I’m human. Without me you won’t have your perfect little super weapon, just a bunch of dead human cells.
I think this is called a stalemate.”

----------

She notices things about him. How he’s human most of the time now, never in agony, like he doesn’t even have to bother with controlling the transformations.

He watches her like a hawk. She suspects he’d go into the bathroom with her was it not below him, just to make certain she is not going to do something desperate. He has super-hearing for that.

She’s protecting Clark and the world the only way she can. This time it’s ironic because Zod won’t let her out of sight. Whatever comes out of her will cause the destruction unless she does something to stop it.
His sense of self importance is her best tool.

She says she would have expected him to be off razing the Pentagon by now.

“Things will be done differently this time around.”

“You say so, I don’t see anything different. You still wanted to use him, use this child to do your dirty work. It is a sick, sick thing to do.”

“He was the perfect weapon. These human nuclear devices have unpleasant consequences.”

“Mass death? Mutated cows? Giant walking stick bugs? I’ll say so. It’s so much better when everyone is dead.
And everyone keeps dying. So you destroy everything, create your own Xanadu when your best weapon will destroy it all. Pardon me if I think you’re a very poor example of strategic planning.”

“It wouldn’t have destroyed my planet.”

“It is unstoppable, you told me yourself.”

“I don’t have a taste for wanton destruction. Power, yes, wielded decisively. Not destruction. I would not have had created something that I could not control.”

“So you thought you could just switch It off, just like that?”

“Of course. Then he would have just served when he was needed. Just like this one will learn to control his strengths and obey me.”
“Your son, relegated to your personal assassin. He was human. He wanted to live. Do you have any idea?”

“Don’t insult his lineage. Like any creation he was bound to have his defects. He was never human. If he had fulfilled his mission I would have had less of a trouble before me.
This is correctable. You are close.”

He doesn’t touch her, like before, raises his hand half a room away and she can feel something inside shift at the motion. Her stomach is practically flat yet, but he makes it feel like something is ripping out her insides. The nausea is back, worse than ever, but she holds onto the counter for support, gasping until it passes.

“You’ll only fail again, you know. You underestimate Clark.”

“He didn’t notice before with that imposter. What makes you think he’d notice now? He’s guilty enough already after what he has done.
He’ll just let himself see you, radiant, expecting. A proud father, happy for the first time in his life."

“You are not it--his father. Davis felt. You’re nothing like Davis.”

If she could kill him she would. She keeps her face stony, fights down the urge to give a hysterical peal of laughter. There had been a way for Davis. There had been a way.


She learns it now, now that he is completely gone.

----------

She begins having dreams, of herself living still with his eyes on her, watching while her---child tears its way out of her, mutates, destroys, consumes.

There are people, walking like cattle on the streets; sometimes she sees Lois’s face, sometimes Clark’s, sometimes Lex’s, there among them.
She doesn’t want to look, can’t but she hears everything.

It’s a living nightmare that she can’t stop, not for the life of her, and sometimes she thinks she doesn’t let herself. After it all, she sees him as he really is--- a small boy with sandy hair and his father’s open eyes.

He sobs, hugs her around the knees as the blood rubs onto her skirts. “It’s okay. You’re fine.” She tells him, kneeling; rubbing small circles into his back, feeling something, hers.

Zod smiles down upon them.
“My fine, strong boy. He’s almost ready.”
-----------
It comes to her easily that she doesn’t care about dying now. Davis is gone. If she lives Clark dies. What does she have left?

What would he turn this child---whatever it was, into?
It becomes merely an issue of method and opportunity.

Zod doesn’t know that Davis had become immune to Kryptonite and she counts on that.
After that drugged summer in Metropolis, Clark had given her one thing. A fist sized lump of Kryptonite in a lead box.

She locks herself in the closet with her old Glock. She’d spent nearly a year’s worth of her writing wages on it after she started thinking that Lionel might kill her. She never thought she’d need it like this.
She can do this.


She doesn’t need to calculate trajectory. Right over her abdomen. The bullet will go right through her.
He hears the cocking of the trigger and is at the door in a second. He can tear it off its hinges. She doesn’t doubt it, but that’s why she presses the lump of Kryptonite, there, right up against the lock. The rattling stops.

“You may be super powered but you don’t want to take the risk on it, do you? I’ve figured out some things about phantoms. You keep your original powers and your original weaknesses. You won’t come through this door. I can knock you out with this. You’d be weaker than a human.”


Silence and then words again. She needs to do this. She can’t think.
“Maybe I was lying. Maybe you were right. Maybe he was defective enough when he sired the child was human. Maybe it’s completely human.”

“You never let off, do you? Goodbye.”

“That’s the last thing you will have of him, you know. In this body, the children that are born to me are different than his would have been. Children resemble their fathers in the years following birth. Oh, it’s nothing, just a mass conglomeration of cells-maybe, but you are killing him. just like Kal did.”

Her hand trembles and that split second is all the time he needs to tear through the wall from the other side, take the gun from limp fingers. All that is left of it is a twisted hunk of metal.

“I couldn’t...” Not again. She won’t do this now.

His lip curls, slightly, “Of course not. You’re human.”

She knows sobbing. With the hormones it takes just a little encouragement to become a storm.

“He used to touch me.” She says between breaths. “All his life he wanted to be human. He saw me.”

“As you say, I am not him.” He repeats coolly, leaves her on the plaster covered carpet.

“I need him.” She tells him, quietly before he turns his back completely; knowing every second what this must look like, a pathetic human heap desperate for illusion. She expects him to kick her any moment.

She bends her head nearly to the ground, knowing that this is the only thing that touches him, the feeling of complete power.
“You humans need so many things.” He says.

Before he leaves her there, her hand closes around the skin of his ankle.
He doesn’t even deign to look at her until seconds later when the connection roars to life.

He struggles then, with all of his Kryptonian strength and it feels like her wrists are going to tear open at the force of it, but she barely notices, feels literally as if her skin is burning. She’s healing, still, but she is using it to isn’t Davis, isn’t Clark or Lois, like anyone else she’s ever touched. He is the parasite that took control of Davis, destroyed him and he is wrong.

It feels like she is pushing herself out of her skin right up to the point where he collapses into a heap on the floor. She presses the green rock right over his heart, just for now, just in case.
She stumbles down the steps, barely able to stand.
There were dramatic changes to the body. Love, Hate, Obsession.
She’d healed.
The shock will wear off Zod soon and he can’t wake up free.

Help me. She says aloud.
Clark still knows the sound of her voice.
She doesn’t let him take Zod alone.

“You need me for this.” She says. “I can fix this.”
Clark doesn’t know what she’s expecting to happen. Maybe one of those old style exorcisms where she forces the unclean spirit out of Davis’s body.
Then it would be empty. Dead. A shell, nothing else.

-----------
They’re in the fortress again.

This time, instead of bringing someone back, Clark is going to send him away. He had been that guilty, that stupid that he’d brought Zod through. He could’ve torn the world to pieces and Clark would have brought it all down upon their heads.

There is no crystal and Clark knows he doesn’t need it to correct what he’s done. Now he knows.
As he starts to draw the first symbol on the strangely warm ice, she catches him, stops him.
If she’s capable of this small miracle, then Davis has to still be alive, out there.

“It’s too dangerous. The first time I brought Zod through, the next time what else can come through?”

“You know me, right Clark? Then you understand. I can’t give up, while there’s a chance.”

“You want a reason? Fine. I’m pregnant.”

“How?”

“Please tell me I don’t have to explain this now of all times.”

“I just don’t understand how it could happen. You---he…”

“We were close.”

“So are we. That doesn’t mean we ever…you know.
I just find it a little hard to believe you’d put yourself at risk like that. You read the Kawatchee legends before I did! You knew it wasn’t out of the realm of probability that you would get like this. You’re expecting me to believe you just...”

“Believe it.”

“I have to be sure.”

“How much detail do you want to convince yourself, now? A scene by scene replay? That’s just not happening.”

“I’ll just use the facts then. Jor El said Doomsday had a mission. What if part of it was this was passing those genes on?”

“That wasn’t it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The same part of me that makes me sure that you aren’t going to give up, either. You know, don’t you? Davis doesn’t deserve this. You said you’d always find another way. “

Clark eyes squint out at her, heat vision.
“Go right ahead and look at it then; it’s not a violation of my privacy. Do you find it all, ten fingers, ten toes? Any spiny protrusions ?“

It takes all of a minute until he says he’ll do it and she isn’t agitated, isn’t troubled.
“You expected this all along, didn’t you?” He asks
“If you didn’t I really wouldn’t know you too well, would I?”
She always knows Clark.

----------
“I need to trap him before we can do anything.”

It’s as if Clark knows, feels that the orb is the way. The energy is there, a void, a temporary cage. Within it he can read the past, knows the story of every prisoner ever held there.

“I’m going in there too. I have to control him.”

“It’s dangerous. You just betrayed him. He will try and kill you.
He could try to use your mind instead of Davis’s.”

The fear churns there, once, because she knows that level of mental violation, knows that he can take all her memories and twist them until a shell is left. Davis is experiencing that, even now. She has a chance.

“Do it.” she says.

He 's holding the crystal in both hands, and his face is as if he is losing her.
“Clark. Trust a Watchtower’s instincts, why don’t you?”

Clark nods at last and then under his touch the space widens, expands, closes until she only sees the ice walls all around her and the prone body on the floor, stirring for a moment before she feels his hands at her throat.
She smiles.

“What is this?” Zod demands.

“If you want it in French. Oubliette. The little place of forgetting. How would you like to be forgotten?”

“If I am trapped, you are too. When you go free, so will I.”

“You don’t understand, do you? You’ve taken everything. I hope Clark forgets me.”

“So you will put yourself in the grasp of someone you hate because he makes you think of what you had? I can see why you humans are so easy to manipulate.”

“It doesn’t matter. His body will be trapped here forever. You can’t escape now.”

“Oh, and you will tell me I could, if only I flew out of this body, left it all behind, yes? I wonder how much of this Kal will take back.” Suddenly, bizarrely, his hands change until she can feel sandpaper on her skin. “Doomsday could not harm you because of Davis’s feelings for you. As you say, I am not Davis.”

“And I am not just human.”

Touching It now hurts like it never did; sweat pours from her eyes with every recession, as she forces the scarlet of his eyes down. She’s going to hold on until he’s weak, until It absorbs so much that It can’t possibly change again.

Clark can’t come into this. She can’t break her concentration.
Around them, the force…field… flickers and vanishes completely.

----------
“So this is what the house has come to. The second time I see you, Kal El and you disappoint me again. You could not even do that one job properly.”

Pale, brown eyed at last; he flies at Clark. Around them she can see only red, swirling like a maw about to swallow them whole.

Clark will lose, she knows this. He is strong but he is inexperienced compared to a hardened killer.

One of them plunges back, straight into the jagged crystal and it’s the wrong one.
Strange shapes swirl and pass over them both, swirling over Zod’s head, things like him. She is afraid.

“If you had been a good son you would have killed them. You are like Jor El. You won’t face up to responsibility. You may die for it.”

Zod can’t seem to choose a way, and for a moment his hand trembles on the crystal. Zod’s hand would not tremble.

Clark pushes himself up, tripping over the crystal bed and she can’t see the rest. “You first.” He says, gently.

The next thing she sees is the point buried halfway into Zod’s chest.
It’s gone as soon as that, with the same vague irritation on his face and it begins again.
Zod doesn’t need to punch hard and Clark finds himself thrown against every wall of the fortress.
Yet he recovers.

Zod doesn’t tire, is filled with a sort of maniacal energy, but he seems to turn on himself, alternately swaying and stopping then throwing himself at Clark with all the energy of a wounded tiger.

He turns to her, once, and that is disbelief. She knows Davis’s eyes for the second before Zod turns them to ice again.
He told her he’d stay

He rushes Clark headlong, and one hand is on his throat. Clark makes a muffled sound, grasps hold of it, trying to push it away.
She knows this is Zod now, knows this is Davis too, knows that if Zod makes Davis kill Clark like this, he will have completed his mission to destroy them all.

“You said you’d stay with me once.” She says, hoping he hears, ignoring the space, ignoring the fact that there’s no way that she can get there fast enough.

His hands tremble on his windpipe. She breathes the words over and over, as if Davis really can hear her over all of the voices screaming inside him.

Davis stops, dazed and that’s enough time for Clark to send him back, straight across to the wall, dislodging shards of crystal.

He keeps still as Clark keeps coming, keeps hitting and its as if any blows back that he could give are held by an invisible hand.

Clark takes the orb, pushes it right into him and then she can see it, solidified, for a moment Zod’s face filled with monstrous rage. Then it’s gone, the light dies and she can only see the blood dripping over the crystals, freezing like Arctic ice. He can’t be dead, not after all this. She goes to him and doesn’t get there quick enough.

This time is different.
His head lolls forward, his eyes are dazed looking into hers but then they are soft again for one comprehending second.

“I found you.” He says, as if he’s forgotten the shape of the words.
Then he collapses face down onto the ice.

------------
Clark has enough strength to transport them all three of them, somehow. Just barely. The blood on Clark’s mouth drips onto a spot on the white bedroom carpet.

“Thank you.” She tells him, clutches at his shoulders for comfort once (he could have died) and he gasps.

“Ouch! Chloe! The ribs.”

“Oops.” He makes a face so petulant that it must be him, knowing just what she needs.

“Sorry, Mr. Super---.”

“Please don’t say dude. Lois calls the RBB that and I’ll never live it down.” He grins at her, all at once boyish and heroic and good. One of his eyes is nearly swollen shut.

“You saved me again, you know.” She tells him.

“You forgot ‘the world’. After I nearly let it get destroyed.”

“By taking that risk you saved us both. I don’t know how I can ever thank you for that. If you hadn’t helped maybe he…wouldn’t be here now.”

“I don’t know about that. I had a feeling you would have dragged out the entire intergalactic council.”

“There isn’t an…”

“You would have found one.
Besides, I shouldn’t have given up on him.”

“On Davis?” she asks, but he’s already gone.

----------
The world has just escaped a potential apocalypse and the light outside is still too bright, too cheery.
(Yet, they are alive.)

Davis is laid out in her bed now and it’s hard to believe he is. She’d touched him and touched him and tried to heal him and nothing came out.
Maybe she stripped away all her healing powers just to throw it back into permanent dormancy. Maybe this means that when the child is born, (if it is born with the monster DNA) she won’t be able to recover.
Maybe she’ll die.
Now, she only wants him to live.

She cleans most of the blood off him on her own, smearing it on torn, ratty shorts. She can’t just clean it away because the gouges are still there, black in contrast to lightly tanned skin.

He’s mortal enough now, and the jagged cuts that wouldn’t have touched a Kryptonian are all over him still. Her knees feel shaky from all of this, from nothing. It must look worse than it is.
She cleans off the crusting residue on his face. When he stirs, she jolts so hard she almost drops the sponge.

He shouldn’t be conscious, but he is and his lips move dryly against her finger.

“I…” he tries to say, probably the beginning of some short exclamation, something like love or a joke about he always wanted his own personal nurse. That’s his voice, not too smooth, all pain and ragged edges.
“I know.”
God he can’t even talk now, and she needs, needs just to know.

“I’m just, I’m…” She knows what she must look like face not red, but wet and pale and stark. Her face can’t crumple, not now.

“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
His eyes are on her face when they close. She keeps watching the steady rise and fall of his chest so they don’t remind her of death.

------------

There are five hours where she doesn’t sleep. By then the blood has soaked through bandages to the white sheets.

The worse bandage is right at his side where the crystals cut him that last time. She reaches over the bed for more gauze and Neosporin, knowing he would do this so much better.

She’s not exactly as tall as the King-sized bed is wide, so she braces herself on the mattress, realizes too late that she could fall onto him like this, actually hurt him.

She doesn’t. His hands touch her shoulders where they reach out and she lets him pull her with him down to the bed, careful to roll to his side.

“How long have you been awake?” she asks him, and he shakes his head, swallows.

“Just now.”
Maybe she shouldn’t talk. Maybe he just needs to feel again.
He holds her clumsily on his side, arms wrapping around her so hard that she almost feels her ribs crack.

“Davis, I know Eve had one more rib than Adam but I still want to keep all of mine.”
Nevertheless, she nudges her head into the spot between his neck and shoulder, the only place she is sure he hadn’t been hurt. The chill to his skin shocks her. He’d always been too warm, and this is another exigent reminder of new found mortality.

She presses closer, taking the cold too and she notices that he’s keeping as much contact at he can, won’t stop touching her, eyes closed tightly.

She pulls to see his eyes are red-rimmed brown, only brown, like the first time he’d told her about the blackouts, the first time she had seen him fall apart. Suddenly there’s a painful void there, one that she needs to fill.
“You’re mine, too.”

He kisses her once, pulls her in sharply and his teeth almost, awkwardly graze her upper lip before he does it again, soft and gentle enough it makes her hurt. She can’t leave it at that; can’t breathe then.

Her hand pushes behind his head, and she lets him get as close as he can. She can taste life and death as he breathes quick.

It comes back-the tears, the healing burning its way through her skin. After everything, she is alive. He is. He hasn’t left her. Everything--- all of it, she could forget right here, and if she doesn’t do something now she won’t be able to stop. Somewhere there his hand has found a way under the unrecognizable shirt to her back.

He stops as soon as she stiffens against him. He’s going to reopen some of the old wounds.
She realizes, dimly, that he’s shaking.
“You were dead, I thought you were dead. I thought I…”

“Shh... I need to have a good cry about that myself.”
She tells him what happened, toning down the details about Tess’s gang and him.
She tells him about the baby, suddenly scared to get the words out. For a moment she thinks she might have well poured alcohol all over him. He’s back to thinking she’ll die again, and its all she can do to keep him from turning the guilt on himself. It takes a half an hour of half truths before he’s almost calm again. (There isn’t even a risk because he had only passed on the human part of him. Clark has certified it a hundred percent human. She’s not scared.)

If anything he believes her, and there’s a lingering, something in his eyes that makes her think that maybe it will be okay.
He doesn’t tell her what happened.

He breathes as if he is trying to hide and she should be patient and comforting. He’s solid and alive and literally escaped from a fate worse than death. That should be enough, but it’s never enough. She won’t let him hold that all by himself.

“Something happened to you out there. You’ve got to tell me what you remember.”

“I barely remember it, now.”

“Is that why you won’t look at me? Please.” He’s on the verge of it.

She’d gotten a barely glancing description once from Clark. “There wasn’t a real sun, was there? Just deserts that went on for miles.”
He talks simply, uses short words but she gets the picture of creatures rushing, going through him until he couldn’t feel, couldn’t think because they were becoming him, taking his thoughts.

“They don’t just attack the travelers. They tear each other apart. It’s all they know.”

“You couldn’t defend yourself.”

“At first I didn’t. I wanted to die. I needed to die because I knew what I had done to you.”

That was one of his memories, not a true one, but a memory nevertheless.

“You didn’t do anything to me.”
“Didn’t I? If you hadn’t tried to protect me they wouldn’t ever had touched found you because of me.”

“They found me because of me. You died.”

"I didn't."
“I saw your face. It would start again, just the same. Eventually, I started to adapt. I was made for defending myself. I became that thing and I don’t even know what happened then. I didn’t feel anything.”

He’s seeing something else, some other place.
“He said you were hurting.” He had been so different, it was impossible to think the two of them inhabited the same universe, much less carried the same basic DNA.

“Every time, it cost me. The blackouts got longer, and I knew that after a while I wouldn’t change back. Every memory I lost brought me closer to becoming just like them. So I learned how to hold It back.”
“And they killed you while you were human. Why? To punish yourself?”

“When I stayed human I knew who I was. After what he said happened to you, I knew I wasn’t. No matter what I was, you changed me. You were me and I’d ripped your life to pieces.
I couldn’t let you go.”

(Words can only do so much and she doesn’t completely believe him when he says that it’s not bad, just the meds talking.) He won’t ever forget it, she knows.

“Then don’t.” she tells him.
She doesn’t say anything then just lets him hold on, tries to rock him as if he is a child she can comfort.
It’s not synched but it's right.
She brushes the streak of grit on his cheek and he smells like rock and gravel, underneath that the earthy, clean smell she knows as only him.

He starts to kiss her again and he’s very slow about it. She’s never had this before; she’d never let him give it and she realizes what there is to this. His fingers tangle with hers and she feels almost complete.

It’s kind of hard to tell when comfort changes to burning again. His hands are on her back, holding her and she can feel the heat of his skin again, his proximity, a painful tenderness in her breasts through the cloth where they brush again his skin.
She must make a sound, and he draws her up over him and when his back hits the pillow he finds her neck. It’s hard enough not to pull him in him in closer just there, to leave a mark, leave something.

She moves against him and his eyes close just for a moment before he does it again, a little harder, raising sensation exactly the way she remembers.

She tells herself to ease back because she doesn’t know how many chances she can take before this hurts him, if it doesn’t already. The sensitivity is estrogen, and relief and him so close. She shouldn’t be thinking of doing this now, not with the way he was hurt, but even when he looks up at her skin prickles where she needs him to touch.

They need to talk, deal with the truth instead of toning it down. He hadn’t told her everything that happened there; she’d just lived the past few weeks with a psychopath wearing his face.

Going to bed won’t cure all those issues, but this is something entirely separate from that.
She needs this, this feeling, because only now can she be sure that he will always be with her and that no one else can touch that. Her hands feel fragile in his but she still tightens them, tightens them more until he has to roll over her to reach.

She presses her lips to his jaw, quick and scattered, as if he will vanish again.
He doesn’t take it faster when he could, kisses the side of her face like water, lost and she knows just then why Zod had felt wrong from the start.

The bedclothes slip behind them to where she can see the bandage on his torso, for a second can see the other, darker marks on his back and she wishes she could heal him.

Then he lowers himself on her just enough that she wants to cry out, pressing his elbows into the mattress again, so gentle and keeping her from the sudden fulfillment her body seems to need.

The light is streaming in through the open window and she can hear the traffic outside, a slow steady buzz undercutting her quickening breath. Anyone could hear and a little part of her thrills at this. So much of them has been about hiding, and now, finally.

There are no blinds, no curtains drawn and she can see the lines of his face clearly. He’s not so pale as before, but everything is that has passed is written in his face.

He’s holding himself together, barely, and the fact that he still can is another one of those tiny miracles.
His face is steady beneath her hands, turning into her grip, getting closer.
“I could never forget this.” Maybe to her, maybe to himself.

She wants to ask him what he remembers, what he had almost told her. He’s beautiful and breakable and she doesn’t know anything but him, that moment.
With a thick tightness in her throat she realizes that this is the closest to the truth she’s ever had. She’d almost lost that.
Why is it always death with them?

She smothers his mouth, just to keep the words and their potentially pain away, so many that they could choke her. He only takes it all, easing it into slowness but the rest of him is tense as if she just lit a fire under him.
His hands move quickly and before she knows it her skin is brushing against tense muscle (what little of him that isn’t marked) and rasps against the bandage.

She wants the warmth now, just barely restrains herself from sliding her hands to his back to pull him close. She kisses his neck instead, waiting, knowing that now of all times he will start talking.
“I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking. The baby…”

“You’re careful. Only one month. It’s in ancient debunked myths 101, trust me.”
She barely finishes the sentence before he’s on her again.

She’s always been the one to push; but waits, knowing that he needs this, now. His lips rove her neck and it feels like a century before the clasp snaps open under his fingers.

He looks at her like she’s the most precious thing in his world and honest to God she’s blushing, everywhere. She wants to let lose with a quip over how he’s seen it all before; but then it dawns on her that he hasn’t, not once, during all their running.

His mouth runs in a lazy line, neck to collarbone down and she doesn’t have time to prepare for the hypersensitivity she feels, all at once like being hit with an electrical wire. His mouth coaxes sounds out of her that probably do make it out the window and she drags her fingers though his hair, thinking once of their child, nursing, and for once feels no fear.

This is nothing like that and when she tries to arch up, finally when it gets too strong she collapses into his arms, close under her. She wants to say it then, something about them, the both of them, a family, the fact that with him and only with him does this feel safe.

His eyes burn her again, somehow wet, full of the same kind of tenderness and he must know.

She follows the lines up and down his arms, runs them flat down his chest, skirting near edge of the gauze, lower, not breaking contact for a second. She’s making peace now, and yet she lets him guide her back again, so that his forearms slide under her back completely and there are only centimeters to bridge.

She kisses him that way, feels the blood pump under his skin, the bones, how even now his muscles are tense and trembling. Her thoughts unravel as she feels the tension, him pushing her tight. He freezes halfway in her, eyes shut and she feels completely captured.

And still, he stays, brushing his hands along her face as if he’s a blind man and she can feel him.

She tells him that she trusts him and that he won’t hurt her, won’t hurt either of them. (He had. He’d been gone.)
“It’s not. It’s not that.” He says and she waits, again, for the right word, the right moment, knowing that even if he doesn’t know how to answer this will be enough. Just this, connected, everything. When he finally does speak it’s so quiet that she would have missed it had she not been listening so hard.

“I’d pick one memory of you until every hair, every detail, every thing you said was just the way I remembered.”

“A good memory?” She asks, barely, not wanting to break the moment again.

“That night you’d wrapped that yellow scarf so tight around your neck that I was scared you’d hurt yourself, and you’d washed your hands with laundry soap. There was blood on my face and you touched me.
I could almost convince myself that it was the real world and the rest was all a dream and when they did it… it was easy to give up the rest.
The memory wasn’t you.”

She doesn’t need to ask, knows that’s how Zod had taken control, knows that’s why the Zone had hurt him so many times. He’d been in hell and it figured the one thing he was afraid of was losing his, albeit painful, memories of her. He needs to make new ones

“Oh.” Suddenly, she doesn’t want him to move, finally focusing on the feelings building between them both.
It doesn’t matter suddenly then about what she needs, only what is.

“I love you, you know.”
And she’d fantasized about saying this, but never quite with this reaction. His shoulders shake so much that she thinks he might just hyperventilate and she pats his hair not knowing what else to do.

“Could you say it again?”

“I love you.”
His eyes watch her face still, needy, maybe because they are just three little words that he’d always lived without. She hadn’t told him until she thought it was too late.

“Again.”

“I love that you are always too careful with me. I love that when I’m gross you’re not afraid to touch me. I love that you would hold onto a memory that hurt. I love that I can’t see anything but you. I love that you made it out of hell and came back to me. I love that every second I am with you I know. I love you.
I can never un-love you.”

“Sorry.” He says quietly. “It just feels like I’ve been waiting for that for a very long time.”
Literally centuries in a time loop of torture makes that the biggest understatement in the world.

“You can tell me what else you remember or you can just tell me you love me back.”
He tells her he does, so much and the hands going everywhere are his.

She feels a frenzy. Her head snaps back into the pillow and she’s careful to keep her hands on his shoulders.

Then his mouth slides against hers, hard and sweet and he’s deeper now, so close to her that the bandages are pressed right against her waist. She pushes her knees open wide enough that they won’t hit him when he moves. Through the haze of warmth she hears him exhale sharply.

“It’s nothing.” He says, but when he pulls her closer she can see them, stark and black where the blood has been.

“That’s a whole lot of nothing,” but his eyes open up again and he holds onto her and moves with her until she only knows that she needs.
He’s heavy enough that she can’t arch up and it feels so unbearably smooth that she doesn’t know how she controls the impulse to wrap her legs fully around him, weak as they feel. She can’t cry out and all the remaining energy is focused on where they meet.

She thinks she must be saying his name, unable to look away from his face, needing to know, and she feels raw.

His eyelashes struggle open and closed again when he thrusts harder, and then he is shuddering inside her and it’s only a few seconds before everything shatters.

------------

When she comes to, he’s pulled the covers around them both and it’s almost impossible to believe that this can really be this simple.

His face as he turns her toward him is tender, almost peaceful, and that draws her in. He kisses her good afternoon and she’s back on top of him in a minute flat despite the rawness. When her hands slide under his back she pulls them back immediately, remembers what she’d been trying to do in the first place. He’d been hurt.

“We have to change your bandages.” She says, but his eyes are almost glazed over and she’s pretty sure that pain is not what causes his protest when she slips off him.

“Stay. It’s all done.”

“I’ll just check.”
She drags the end of the sheet around her (it’s cold) grabs onto the bed again because her knees feel funny.
She can see the old bandages, smeared dark red, neatly in the garbage can.

“There’s something I kind of wanted to show you.”
He slips the sheet off his abdomen and she can see only the curves of muscle there. Impossibly the bandage is gone, not a black mark or gouge in sight.

“This has to be a dream.”
(Maybe she’s going to wake up to see Zod and his entire little race of pod-people.)

“I was kind of hoping for a wow.” He jokes, hand out trying to catch hers, missing because she’s too far away from him.

“It’s not out of me.” He says, finally, trying at a smile but she can see the sadness it masks.

“That’s impossible.” It took every once of power she had just to switch It off. She’d known what she was doing.

“When he was in you, Zod told me you weren’t human.” It looks as if she got a knife and stuck into him, as if she really could. His face is open, wounded and he could be thinking this was all because she had wanted him to be human.

“Chloe?” She grabs hold of his hand just in case he gets ideas.

“I got so mad at him I wanted to… never mind that. I get it .
Your DNA is Kryptonian. It’s not like they came and ferried human DNA several galaxies away to do their experiments. Barring a few fantastic recuperative abilities you are…”

He doesn’t hesitate in grabbing hold of her.
She smiles into his shoulder.
“Davis.”

His mouth opens and closes and he looks peaceful for real. “Yeah.” He whispers. “Me.”

---------
They don’t really set up for supper until that evening. He cooks something that is certainly not mac and cheese, and she leans on his back as he sets the dishes on trays. They are a family now.

She’s so tired that finds herself dozing in the couch while another commercial plays its background music and the empty plates clink in the sink. She’ll never be tired enough not to notice when he slips onto the couch beside her.

She expects him to lean her into his shoulder but she doesn’t expect the way his hands move gently over the light bump in the cloth of her stomach. She holds her breath because this is the first time, and covers them with her own.

--------------
“We can’t stay here.” She tells him later. “We can pack up, take a road trip and go slower this time. No one will be chasing us.”

Despite the fact that the papers have stopped printing pictures of his face, he hasn’t been declared dead. If they stay it will be only a matter of time before he gets turned in.


He can’t show up at his job, or his old apartment, can’t take out anything from his old accounts. It’s as if he never even existed, and she doesn’t like it that somewhere, deep down he thinks that he can’t give her anything without that.

There are paramedics everywhere down south, even firefighters if he really wants to start from scratch. She knows he wants this. He will build a life for them. This just isn’t the right place.

She tells him about the picture of their future she used to have before, in an adobe hut in the Amazons with the mosquitoes buzzing around them.

This doesn’t seem like too much of an admission now after all that she’s said, but it seems to mean a lot to him. He pulls her into his lap and the remote falls over the armrest when he reaches for her again. She wants to laugh at the domesticity of it, the sudden lightness she feels.

“I haven’t even got to the part about drawing water from a well, yet, Davis.”

He’s smiling, actually smiling and his hands on her skin are wet with the dishwater. She doesn’t quite get to that part.
----------

(This time they’re not running. He isn’t about to die, she isn’t, and the blood between them is a different kind. It’s the two of them in a world where good things happen.
She doesn’t think of a thing tearing its way out of her, tearing down the world. She doesn’t wonder if she will die when the eight months are up.
She thinks of him. She thinks of herself. She thinks of something that’s theirs.
Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be all along. )


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Endnotes for Clarification
The white cuff. the white CUFF!was the same power device that were used to amplify meteorite powers. Hence the shifter from Tess's gang could maintain her guise as Chloe after death. And Tess had her killed to frame Davis.

Davis's body got possessed by Zod, Davis was Davis, and Chloe made a sacrifice to get Davis back. (She lost her healing, and if that is a Doombaby on the way, things don't look so good for her.)

---> more later if needed. If you're wondering about Zod's motive for killing Tess, it wasn't pride. It was anger at a disloyal minion. She plotted to get him free for Clark to kill him, because she learned Clark didn't kill Davis.

The Lex mentions and Clark's sort of guilt over his death means he will be present for the sequel, which may be very subtexty.

Doomsday didn't just disappear. Chloe put him into sleeper mode. By pouring all her healing into Davis's body she flicked off that switch that Zod could manipulate in his phantom form.


Title from the Latin word for Illusion/Dream