timor

Reccing Notes: Finally, my rewrite of the fail. It is quite angsty, and painful, but ultimately hopeful (I think). I could rec it on the grounds of fleshing out of the FAIL convo in Beast, subtle remixes of the episode lines (the ones that weren't FAIL), or a Davis/Doomsday smackdown, or *resolutions*, or zombie geekery, Dr. Emil! or Wuthering Heights references. The simple fact is. Anything is better than THE FAIL. ;)
by vagrantdream at sv_failsday.
27283 words(epic fic), m/nc-17(for some parts), injustice, beast and doomsday (kind of)

He could hear her, every second of every moment, even with his eyes screwed shut and trying his damndest not to.


---
You can muddle love, transmute it, but you can never pull it out of you.
~E.M. Forster, a Room with a View
---

He used to want to be gone, somewhere, under thousands of metric tons of rock where he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. It hadn’t mattered how much he wanted her, needed her then, only what he was, only what he needed to stop. He couldn’t live with it, but he couldn’t die either.
She became the reason he needed to. It hadn’t mattered then, if she loved him, only that he loved her and she was.

None of that had changed when he found the Kryptonite. Then, he had died the first time, come back and she’d become the one to save him.
We load up the car and never look back, she’d said.
Ten miles on the road had turned to fifty, fifty to a hundred and each one stretched the rope tying her to Smallville more. She looked back, couldn’t help but look back and she wasn’t happy.

The more clearly he saw it the more she persisted, pushed for them to go farther, and stayed close by his side.
He’d wanted to be hers, but not like this.
(And yet, they didn’t have a choice.)


---

He tried to make it less painful for her. It got so she was the most comfortable when he was feigning sleep, so he did that; let her believe that he could. (That had stopped when he’d learned what he was.)
Still, he could hear her, every second of every moment, even with his eyes screwed shut and trying his damndest not to.

He didn’t know how his hearing had become like this, the legacy of the monster inside him. Maybe it had been when he had heard her heartbeat racing in fear through the basement door or it had been the whisper of her step in the fortress, when he had believed, wanted to believe that she loved him.

No one ever trusted him without reason. It didn’t happen on the dingy streets, in the beautiful polished city. No one ever looked at him like that before her, like he could be that hero when he’d been up against the ropes.
He thought he couldn’t be a hero with the words Cornfield Killer and his face staring out at him like some alien’s.
She‘d been helping him and they would have found out. Her life would have been a living nightmare, and he wouldn’t let it become that.
I would do anything for you, she’d said, and some part of him read into those words, whispered that she loved him, a little bit, even a little bit.
For the first time he hadn’t wanted to die.


---

Davis heard the truth the first time in an unnamed gas station outside of Metropolis, her voice assuring Clark that she was doing it all for him. It had hurt then, like a knife sliding its way into his chest when he couldn’t feel that any longer, but he’d gone out the door, pressed a silly valentine candy into her hand and she’d smiled like that wasn’t all it was.

They trod the line that they had often enough before. Friends, wavering. That first night, she’d fallen asleep in the car before the first motel they reached, chocolate melting in her jacket pocket.
They’d run out of gas at one of those towns and he knew he had to get her inside, keep her safe. She was so tired she hadn’t budged and he’d had to lift her out of the car. For once it felt like there wasn’t a monster churning against his skin.

He’d gone for supplies even while she slept, because despite her firmness on the matter, It couldn’t tear itself out with less than a hundred yards between them, yet. There wasn’t much there-a couple of flimsy toothbrushes, the kind of beef jerky that looked as if it had been made a hundred years before.
This kind of life was what she was subjecting herself with him.

She’d let him in with her eyes half glued shut from sleep and a course imprint of her sleeve on her cheek. She locked the door on them both looking senselessly, inexplicably happy. She hadn’t been happy before, and he felt something in him springing up in answer.

“They don’t have T-shirts, do they?” They only had the clothes on their backs. He was going to be subjected to some serious shopping.
She’d sunk back down onto the dingy queen-sized bed like it was home, practically knocked him down beside her.

“We’ll manage as long as you don’t roll over in your sleep. I really don’t want to end up a Chloe pancake.”

She hadn’t let it go of the hand that had given her the bag, drew a lopsided circle on his palm.
“We’re all set.” There was just the border to liberation, she told him, and they were really going to pull this off.

He was acutely aware then that was just them with the hotel room door closed and the lights down as if no one would ever know. No one else existed there, and maybe that’s why she had the courage to clamber over to him, kiss him like she was afraid of getting burned, like she would burn him. He hadn’t realized that he’d tugged her down to him until her arms collapsed over him.

The imprints of hundreds of faces seemed to vanish from behind his eyes, and it was easy, too easy to think that the needy sounds she made in her throat were just her. Like maybe hundreds of miles away, away from the life she was leaving behind, they could suddenly exist.
The two layers and a thick jacket weren’t separation at all and he felt heat and warmth and a strange seizing up in his chest, the pulse at her throat fluttering like a caged bird.
He heard her voice, over and over, I can save you Clark, knowing he wouldn’t let her do this. She’d touched his face when he’d frozen, smiled brightly, too hollowly like she was plunging the knife in again and again.

“I thought you wanted…”
She didn’t have to say that, she knew. She’d always known. He felt himself stiffening at her touch, pushing himself up of the mattress, knowing she couldn’t touch him again.

“You’ve always known that, but you never... Why you, why now? ”

“If you have to ask me that, nothing I will say will ever convince you.”

It was okay, he had told her, she didn’t need to keep It happy too.

She’d slammed the thin motel door behind her and it hadn’t happened again.


---

He’d told himself over and over, he would find a way to end it when this got to be too much for her. A part of him told him that that time was now when he heard the sound of her fingers on the keys, always calling Clark on the telephone, always hanging up.

This time she paused like she always did, pressing the buttons almost as if she didn’t want the signal to go through. The phone had rung, had been picked up, and she finally managed to get two words out, “It’s me.”

“Thank God. Don’t hang up.” Clark had said, almost unsteady (he had seen her die) and for once the sound of his voice hadn’t triggered that horrible burn in Davis, Its urge to destroy. Instead it was just the human side that hurt, hearing her voice, for once not sounding as if she’d wanted to run. That was what she wanted, not him, never him.

“How could you not know it wasn’t me?” was all she said, her voice flat, like she wanted not to feel. “It was just another victim of Tess’s play to make you into her hero. Next time don’t believe I’m dead until I mail you the certificate.”

“What was I supposed to believe? You didn’t call me. You didn’t say a word after that. I was worried sick.”

“I didn’t need to. I’m fine.”

“Chloe, you can tell me you’re safe but you’re not. Someone is dead, Chloe. Davis killed Neutron. That at least was true wasn’t it?”

“He couldn’t stop it. He didn’t hurt me. He got me out of the burning car alive.” The transformation had torn the metal to scrap. Davis still heard her nightmares in the dark.

“He killed someone else.” Clark repeated, slowly, as if talking to a child or someone with advanced Stockholm syndrome.

“---who might have killed me. It was just a bad situation.”

“I can get you out; you’ve just got to let me know where you are.”

“That’s what she wants to happen, don’t you see? If you look for me you’ll be playing right into her hands. As long as I stay out of range nothing will happen.”

“What hasn’t happened?”

“I won’t let it.”

“What will you do Chloe? Shut him in the room with you 24/7; make sure he doesn’t ever feel scared or angry or worried?”

“That’s the plan.”

“And what happens when it stops? What happens when you’re not enough any more?”

“It won’t. All the time he’s been around me, he’s been okay somehow. I can’t program him, but what he feels won’t just go away.”

“You’ve got to come back.” She’d stopped then, muffled the headset with her hand because the radio had come on a few rooms away, unfamiliar and Spanish. Every creak of the radiator felt like an unnecessary clue.

“You know I can’t do that. There’s only so far I can go on tempting that genetic coding.”

“He’s a time bomb, Chloe, and not the harmless kind. He’s a danger anywhere. I won’t let you do this for me.”

“I won’t risk either of you ripping yourselves and the world to pieces. I care too much.”

“We wouldn’t. I found a way for it all to be over and you didn’t think so much about the world then, did you?”

“Eternal hell wasn’t ever an answer. He doesn’t deserve to die either.”

“Just like Lex didn’t deserve to die? You don’t want to see him die...”

“He didn’t choose this. He’s not Lex.”

“Dr. Hamilton said you were desperate to cure him before. The black Kryptonite could split the human and Kryptonian sides of Davis. “

“How do you know?”
He hadn’t said anything there.

“You don’t Clark, and as much as I’d like to believe that you’ve found me some kind of magic potion. Doomsday isn’t his dark side, it’s in his DNA. He could be a part of Doomsday, just a part and the split could kill him.”
“You just won’t take that risk.”

“You’ll have to admit that what I’m doing know is the only thing that works. He’s not our guinea pig. He’s as human as you are, and I won’t just...”

“We can work together. We’ll get Davis free. Come on, when have we not being able to fix a problem? You just have to tell me where to find you or just let me know you’re alright.”

“I just did.”

“He’s treating you alright? He isn’t making you…”

“I have to go now.”

“You don’t. You’re not alone okay? We can fix this. I’m getting closer to finding a way every minute. Come home.”
Clark’s voice sounded harder, assured, and heroic. He could have been halfway across the world in a second; it was pointless if she didn’t let him find her.

He could hear the sound of plastic, the phone slipping out of her grasp onto the tiles, and for a moment a strange hitch to her breath.



---

Maybe he wasn’t human, not a whole human, like she thought.
He barely felt cold or heat anymore, but he felt it when she slipped under the covers next to him. He had to restrain himself from reaching out, just anything to sooth her, to tell her that it really would be alright.
She wouldn’t have to do this much longer.

---


Chloe used to think that it would be easy to leave, that once they made it out of Smallville, no one else would know to follow. If she was efficient and calm enough they’d be just fine.
But Tess Mercer had been desperate enough to put a tail on them. Someone else had died.

It had happened five miles on an empty road, with an easy listening country song barely making its way over the radio. She’d been about to sleep, thinking of how to explain it to him. He wanted something, she knew. Something more, something else.

She’d wanted, what had she wanted? To feel needed? To know he was whole? To make him happy like some sort of twisted martyr?
He’d always frightened her seeing through things, seeing through her. Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn’t know what she felt. (Maybe she was waiting for that, an excuse to go back into her shell.)
She’d hurt him and she wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it.

The comfortable pitch black behind her eyes had turned to blue as the electrical cage lit up around the car. It rocked to a stop and she understood the charge was keeping it in place.
It hadn’t been a dream, another of her nightmares and there were four of them out there.

Two to four odds. Decent, but not when he was capable of tearing them all to shreds and himself in the process.
She’d been terrified of that as much as whoever was out there.

He’d sunk his head into the steering wheel so she wouldn’t have to look but the deep red of his eyes struck her. He was already halfway there despite the fact that her hand was on him. “You’ve got to be calm, okay?”

She’d had her Glock awkwardly under the seat; the one legacy of her run in with Linda Lake’s nail gun. If she reached for it she’d be shocked senseless and not any use at all. She had to keep It at bay, it didn’t matter if they were captured, she couldn’t let It kill again.

The police had been searching; perhaps these were just the extra-mutant bounty hunters. They’d be caught, locked up, but he could get them out. Couldn’t he?

“We need to let them catch us. Just trust me on this.”
I trust you, he’d said but he could have crushed the wheel in his bare hands. There was the tension of his skin, something pushing out. She’d murmured something unintelligible and hopefully soothing, dug her nails into his knee too hard.

“We’re coming out, just let us get out. We’ll surrender!” She knew that as soon as the lightning stopped she was going to press on the accelerator, peel on out of there.

They couldn’t know, yet there was no reaction to the figurative white flag.

Then the fire had started and she’d forgotten about calm, slammed her hands on the windows and felt them singe her flesh.
Nothing could’ve stopped It then.

(She knew if she just kept herself out of danger it wouldn’t happen again.)

This was the last time she’d call Clark, just to explain.
Maybe she was Florence Nightingale. Maybe she wanted to save them both and that would be their downfall.
But it was all she knew.

Davis was the Clark she could save; naivety and intensity and tragedy all rolled into one broken package. Davis was the man who, somehow, somehow seemed to see her as the world even though no one ever had before. Davis was the guy fighting when he couldn’t win.

That would have been just her kind of story before, when she’d been optimistic, before Justin Gaines and Lex Luthor, when the words written on newspapers had been truth, when choices had been black and white (not kill a man and save the world).

---

Something was massively wrong.

She should have seen it from the start in the stiffening of Davis’s spine, the way he crouched on the ground

“What is it?”
The covers slipped out behind her, and she left them, didn’t bother to keep herself modest.

“I feel…He’s close.” He tried to say, but his throat moved as if he was about to choke on whatever was pushing itself out.

“That’s impossible, he can’t be here.” But Davis would have no reason to lie.
She could see thicker ridges than his normal muscle on his back, moving under his skin so that they would rip right through.

Suddenly she understood it, the pacifications, the offers of help, the stalling. Clark had just wanted to find them, and this time maybe she wouldn’t be enough. Clark had lied, Clark had…

She fell to her knees in front of him, noticing then, that Davis’s eyes were dark red, as if the corneas had bled and even when she touched him it wouldn’t let off. Maybe he was wrong, he was created for this, and he only had a mission, like a wolf out for blood. Maybe, it didn’t matter what he felt. Maybe they were both village idiots

The fear was there, boiling in her gut and she restrained the urge to flinch back. With a disconnected thought she saw the ashy gray between his knuckles.

His hands had always been capable of dwarfing hers, warming her, but in the past weeks, in her mind’s eye she had only seen them severing a vessel or aorta, tearing Clark apart.

She felt the roughness, like sandpaper pressing into her skin. She drew circles to calm him, like she always had before but now it wasn’t human skin, snagging and tearing into her palm, hurting as she could see the spines starting to push through, turning his chiseled jaw dark and uneven.

“You’re not working, Chloe. I thought...I can’t…”
His eyes were squeezed tightly shut so she couldn’t see the red in them any longer. She felt something akin to horrified paralysis as sharp points began digging through the plain white cotton of his shirt.

“Please leave. You’ve got to get away.”
His hand? sunk into the AC, leaving only deadly looking shreds. The moment she was terrified; as terrified as she’d ever had been of dying.

“Get away! You have to. Please.”

“I can’t.” she said. She couldn’t live in a world where she failed, where he turned into a monster, where he killed Clark, where she let him be lost.
She couldn’t give up on them both now. She wouldn’t remember him like this.
It was simple; if nothing else she’d choose a place to fall.

He wouldn’t be able to speak much longer.

“Davis, I trusted you. Why did you let me come with you if this would happen?”

“I thought…” what was left of his voice was almost animalistic, not human. On his face, further in, the gray was infringing on clean tan skin.
She had to stay calm, act like this would work. She’d been calm, almost calm when she’d touched him that first time in the alley, wanting to let him know he was safe. Maybe it wasn’t about he felt at all.
Maybe it was about what she felt.

“Don’t think.”
She had to remind herself of what she felt, of something besides the panic.

It wasn’t easy to compartmentalize, ignore the fact that his fist as she pulled it from the carpet was cutting into her hand, that she would probably have cuts everywhere later. She imagined the dream, his lips on hers in the darkness, feeling whole. It was almost easy.
Still, her mouth bumped into his too fast, too sudden that she could taste the blood on her lips, on his. They didn’t have time; precious little of him was human now. She needed him to be human.

There was a second where she held still, felt no reaction at all. No matter what had happened, no matter how strained things had been, he couldn’t have closed himself off so much. Maybe she was wrong and there wasn’t enough Davis to hear.
He could have torn her to bits. (She could’ve run.)

Then there was reactive warmth, a movement like a swallow but his eyes were red, nearly uncomprehending. She didn’t need to see this.

Then his arms were hard on her back, spikes tearing into her sensible pajama jacket. With her eyes closed his lips were soft. In the dream she had drawn her hands up and down his back, felt the tension, needed it. In reality her hands on his shoulder blades (no. scapula) stung as the skin nearly scraped off her palms but she couldn’t stop.

They were too near the floor, so it was just a slight movement when he pushed her down, held her neck close enough that it wouldn’t hit the ground, not a stranglehold, not quite but she could feel the force under it all, exactly what he was.

He was heavy when he kissed her again and she could feel almost skin through the tatters on his back, too warm. His eyes weren’t brown again, not yet, but he would come back to himself.

She’d thought that this would be easy. At the touch it would melt away like so much camouflage and he would hold her, and then he would let her draw away if she got scared again.

He’d been like that these past weeks, always waiting for the slightest touch, the slightest word as if it would put him back together again, but never asking. He just needed to be close to her, and she was too full of mixed emotions, and guilt, and knowledge to even give that.

(He’d always waited for her like something out of a fanciful romantic story. He’d been the Beast in the story, the knight on a white horse, the one who gave his heart first.)

This is not the way it was now, his hands hard on her hips moving her closer before she could think, do anything. This wasn’t him, not really; the force pulling her in wasn’t human, but she pretended it was, pretended it was him after a hard day. It was just his hands in her hair; It hadn’t been about to tear out of him moments before.

His hair was soft, damp with sweat like it always was after It started to take control. She felt different, powerful, because no one had ever touched him like this, just after It. He’d been frightened, maybe more than she had.

Listen to me, she wanted to say, you won’t hurt him, you won’t hurt anyone. She doubted he’d even understand if she did so she just smoothed a hand behind his neck, over his forehead wiping away the sweat, like she was blind, noticing vaguely that his skin wasn’t cutting her anymore.

He drew her closer, latched her onto her mouth like a child, and she could feel his breath faster. She was wired to what he felt like, knew this even as she felt his hands through the tearing cloth, too warm. There was no guilt, no fear; no thoughts that what she felt would end up killing her best friend.

(She’d taken him out of the fortress. She couldn’t have imagined Clark trapping him in a prison, a hell where the human part of Davis disappeared forever. It defied everything that was right and true because he’d fought and that died to stay human and the one cure couldn’t involve turning him to a monster forever. She couldn’t let him go, not when he’d been human as he walked to her, fragile, not like some creature about to tear down the world.)

She was going to bring him back to himself, but wasn’t this him, needing her, in that way that made no sense? She’d never had let herself give in then, but she felt a sudden weakness, now, knowing just how much she wanted to. This wasn’t Davis, she had to remember that but there was no stopping the reaction.

This was her, too much tension building in the pit of her stomach, making her move when she should’ve been bolting.
Her knee hitting the side of his hip was the cue he needed before he moved into her completely ignoring the scraps of cloth between them. It was too fast and she felt herself bruising, raw. It had been a while.

He was not quite as careful as he would’ve been. She opened her mouth, waiting for a sound to come out. She was doing this. He was murmuring something, she didn’t think it was coherent and maybe it was best that way.

It wasn’t enough, and he pushed her farther, drawing her knees up, pushing so far that she couldn’t breathe for the heat of it, his skin, hers. It felt like she was choking on air. Those were his hands stroking strongly at her sides, almost too heavy in a way that shouldn’t have been soothing like this.

She was opening then, and it was easy. His eyes were brown on her face, she saw that, knew that it would have been safe to let go now. She couldn’t, something was unfurling in her and it felt like her soul was leaving her.
She pressed her head down so it wouldn’t buckle against the floor and let it go..

It wasn’t easy, it was more tension again and she heard herself, clutching onto his neck like a tourniquet, knowing when this ended it would be gone.

It didn’t end then, as she knew it wouldn’t and he was still moving in jerkily, breath barely brushing against her neck as his mouth worked to say something, for the first time fully himself. He could have said anything, something about how she was beautiful, the only one or she was his always so she closed her eyes, knowing she couldn’t hear it.
He said he was nothing without her like it was some sort of mantra and it hurt just as much.

He looked fragile again and it felt like she was breaking him, breaking herself, tightening her grip until she could feel it moving though them like it was going to crush them both. The rough carpet at her back was the only solid thing because he was shaking as if he’d fall apart. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear a sound that he didn’t make, didn’t think of the time passing or if Clark really knew.

When he fell against her it almost hurt, pulled against her back. He wasn’t a dead weight for long, but even as she loosened up he wouldn’t let her go. She ached, somehow, strangely, wanting him back again.
The look in his eyes made her feel even more exposed even after what had just passed. She said nothing; saw the fear trickling into his eyes, not as bad, not as bad as It had been.

“I’m not hurt.” She told him, closing her hands against his arm so he wouldn’t see the palms flecked with blood. She smiled, she thought she did but it wasn’t enough.

“I’m sorry.” he said, and again, as if she hadn’t been the one pulling him into, tugging until he broke.

“Don’t be dramatic. I like saving the world. I care about you. This was…”
She struggled for a word that she could take back, but the realization was in his eyes and he was going to ask, going to push sometime, maybe not then, but he would. He always got things out into the open.

She couldn’t move then, knew she would, knew she had to and maybe if she tore the bandage off quickly it wouldn’t hurt so much. She felt him breathe, closed her eyes for a moment. Just a moment more.

“I love you.” He said, like someone had just pushed the wind out of his lungs and she felt her throat closing up.

“I know. I know it every day. Just like I know you are something without me.”
She couldn’t be like Oliver, compartmentalize him into a small genetic component. She knew him, in a way that made her right or the most deluded person on the face of the planet. It was something she had to believe.

“You wanted to help people before you met me. You helped them. If I was gone tomorrow you would still want that.”

“If you were gone there would be no me.”

“I don’t understand Oracle speak, Davis.”

“The thing inside you told me I was a camouflage. I didn’t have a choice in what I was and when I got back it was all worse, like there was no way to keep it out. My head, my thoughts, if they could be called that, weren’t the same. With you I feel like… you see me and I can fight again. I can be that guy. You are me.”

“What are you, Heathcliff?” She knew how that story ended, like some sort of ghastly fairytale. She couldn’t be his world, not when she was human, not when she could die and It could be left to tear the world to bits.

“You are Davis, with or without me. So Braniac told you that. Braniac was a computer. He couldn’t understand…”

“Being human?”

“Exactly. You know how I know that? When I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

“You don’t think I can be just a part of it?”

“Of course not.” She said drawing a hand across his neck, slipping on the sweat there. He couldn’t think when she did that she knew. (She wondered if she was lying, afraid of something she did not know. )
A camouflage could not love, or believe it could love, could it? A camouflage crumbled away, and when push came to shove, It had crumbled, with her.

His mouth was against her hair again, breathing in, telling her again as if hearing that made it that much more urgent.
She told him she cared. It wasn’t hard; it was all she could give.
She wanted to save him more than anything in the world and they’d do it. It would get better in time and maybe, they did have a future.
It wasn’t enough.

“You don’t understand. I love you. If I say it enough times maybe you'll hear me. I love you, I love you, I love you. You’re the only one.”

His face crumbled strangely in the light and she saw a strange manic intensity to his face, at once, not healthy. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she had jumped into this too fast.

“It wouldn’t hurt so much if I thought it was just me. You can’t say it. You feel something. You felt it with the smoke and dust and sirens. There was just us, Chloe. It’s not going to change. You don’t want it now, and I know why. Maybe you’re right, but we can still, we can still…”

“We can what? We’re running away from a group of people who want both of our heads on a platter, another that wants yours, and if I ever get scared they could all end up dead. There’s no time to…”

“And if I was free would you love me? Could you if I wasn’t this? If I was just a man you could have a life, you could be near your friends, you could be near Clark.”

It wasn’t meant to go like this. “I’m not exactly in the best state of mind for this you know. Just give it time.”
Time wasn’t what she needed. Resolution. Something she could keep, and she felt him slipping out of her grasp.

That wasn’t enough to calm him anymore, and then he was gone, while she gathered the bits of torn cloth around her in some semblance of dress. He came back to her with a lead box shifting in his hand, nearly falling out of his shaky grip.
“I heard you talking with Clark. If you really think…”

He knelt on the dirty carpet, pulled the lid open and the telltale black stone shone roughly. She didn’t think of how what he’d done to get it, but that he was crazy enough to actually do it. She wasn’t all sure, no matter what she wanted him to believe. He shouldn’t have believed her. “Stop it, Davis, don’t open that box.”

“Why?”

“You’re scaring me.” She placed her hand over it, pressed down on the lid.

“Why? You told me you didn’t think I was just a part. You do, don’t you? You don’t think I’m really whole.” He placed his hand over hers, slipped his other under it as if he had never seen it before. “Do you?” Her held them there smoothed his fingers over the palms, too warm, and she shivered.

“Of course not. “

“I’ll be just like I was when you met me. I’ll be what you need.” He had her hands trapped, in front of her, away from the lid. He wasn’t even trying but her fingers felt encased by iron.

“Right now, I need you to listen. We’re not ready to do this. I'm frightened that if you…”

“You’re always frightened of me. I don’t want you to be frightened.” He repeated, again, hand twitching curiously against hers.

“I don’t need this. You don’t have to…”

“I’ll do this. I’ll be enough I promise.” He whispered, and he didn’t let her stop him. Even as his hand touched the stone the blue light blinded her until all she could see was his face fracturing to bits of gray, It pushing its way out of him like some sort of ghost.

Then it was gone, everything was gone but him, falling against her, another shell shed by the monster.

He wasn’t Davis, wasn’t all, and that strange vacant look to his face was just like those on the dozen of accident victims he’d saved in his life, not yet dead, realizing. Maybe the monster was a part of him; maybe it was triggered for this in case of a separation. Either way, she’d lost.

His skin was cold and she told him that she wanted to save him. I believe you, he said, she hated that he always believed her.

What she hated most were that the last words he said, echoing over and over in her head were that he was sorry, that there was nothing left to save.

---
He used to have a Bible that he read every night. Now, he had the night, her back to him and the little rasp at the end of each of her sleeping breaths, a few hours to make peace.

In the darkness he had said verses over and over in his head, let them blur into each other.
He’d learned them in one home or another, back when people thought he was nothing more than the weak boy who couldn’t play football because of some problem as harmless as low blood sugar.

He had kept that Bible, still, even with the death and dirt under his fingernails. He had been looking for something, some sign that he could be forgiven. Salvation wasn’t even meant for him, not with what he was, not with what he was going to do.

He’d gone to confession. Told himself that he had to stop it somehow, that he couldn’t let the black take control. If he did he’d wake up again, the blood on his hands, not knowing who are how or when. Knowing it could have been children, maybe, parents working twelve hour shifts; people who needed to live.
He had chosen and maybe his hands were dirtier now, maybe he had become that guy, the one who thought he had a right to choose life and death. But they had lived.

He’d gone to confession. Fight evil with good.

But It wasn’t good, it wasn’t right and either way blood was blood and he couldn’t change that. He’d said the prayers over and over under his breath like they had some mystical power and nothing changed.

He knew the words and they felt hollow. She was right there, a foot away, making a choked sound in the darkness. He watched her, just this once.
When she’d touched him he felt saved. It had been enough.

The pain was coming and he knew it was Clark, felt the proximity in every fiber of his being. They only had a few more hours before he would start looking in all the right places.
If Clark could still open the portal, he’d hold it together. The rest wouldn’t matter.
Maybe that would be his salvation.

Love was supposed to cast out all fear and he was afraid.
Maybe it would be like dying, but he needed to remember this.

She thought she could save him and maybe this would hurt her. (Maybe that was the only thing he could do.)
At least she didn’t love him.

---

She jolted against him so hard he was afraid she’d fall out of the cot. “Are you okay?” he asked for the twentieth time, knowing that she wouldn’t give an answer, never did.

This was different. Her flannel covered arms shot out against his skin and she looked as if she wasn’t seeing anything at all. She breathed in once hard, tears at the corner of her eyes from the light when she caught her breath.

Her hands didn’t leave his shoulders, small and always cold. For a second he thought he saw that something, her pupils dilated in the darkness. No, he wanted to see that.

“We have to leave.” She said, and as always, he was caught up with whatever she did.
A few more hours was all. He’d be ready then.

She kept pushing on the gas, one mile under 60, as though that the border would not be far enough.
---

They were in Mexico before they ran out of gas again, and a shanty trailer park was the last place Clark would be looking. She wanted to refill right away, and she had just enough cash to do it.

He’d put his foot down for once, told her that she was either going to rest or he was going to make her. She couldn’t read his eyes.

She wasn’t exactly the best of company, but maybe he wanted some semblance of normalcy, the kind of normalcy that made him brave crowds and people (when the fact that It could tear them apart quite clearly terrified him). He brought her something, grub, Jimmy would have said.

Chloe didn’t know what it was they ate. Davis barely picked at his food like he didn’t need to eat. He wasn’t Clark.

She hadn’t realized how hungry she had been until then, but she couldn’t eat slowly, thinking even then of Clark, or Tess or some sort of government agency on their tail.
She’d almost choked twice, sitting on the hood of the car next to him.

His palm was large and warm in the in-tranquil coolness of the air, smoothing across her back and drawing away just as fast. He barely touched her now, and maybe he had the right idea.

“You okay?” he asked. Maybe he wanted to unburden her.

“Something just went through the wrong tube. If I get food poisoning I’ll let you get the stomach pump, alright?”

It was a silly thing to say because he was dead to that life now, as if Davis Bloome, paramedic had never existed. A part of her would never stop seeing him that way.

“Of course.” He could have smiled before, and now he did, but it was so weighed in everything else that it was a barely a smile at all. She’d thought he cut himself off, and painfully she saw he never had.

She looked at him, really looked at him for the first time in days and he still wouldn’t look anywhere else. She fumbled through the motions of simple eating but she could feel his gaze until she could only see his eyes feverish over hers, strange and wrong.

“I’m going to relax now, I promise.”

She pushed herself all the way back on the hood of the car and felt the coolness of metal, at night un-warmed by blistering hot sun. He was beside her. The foot of space seemed to have shrunk and he hadn’t been like this before.

His hands were warm, and she'd felt them before cooling in her grip, after...

He wasn't dead. He didn't have to die.
She knew then that she would do everything in her power to keep him that way.

She didn’t want him to speak and he didn’t, molded himself to just what she needed. Maybe the dream had some truth to it.

She wanted it to be easy, knew that if she didn’t talk about something she’d get it wrong again. She started babbling somewhere along the line about the constellations, how she couldn’t find a single one, not even here away from all the light pollution.

He knew them all, pointed them out patiently for what must have been an hour. She stopped him more than once, feeling the keys heavy in her hand, only to ask him to start again. There was something different about him talking like this, like he needed it. Like he didn’t want to leave.
She didn’t move away from him, and thought they could wait one hour more.

It wasn’t until Demeter (a toga clad woman she couldn’t see) that he looked away from her. The subtext crept back in that way with Persephone and a dark prince and she wanted him to say what he really meant.

“You could throw in some Jane Eyre references while you’re at it, you know. Or the legend of Isis and Osiris. Or you could make it easier and get out with it. “

“Those are happy endings. Nobody dies, there’s no blood.”

“You really missed out on some great Egyptian legends.”

“I can’t expect you to pretend that none of it happened.”

“I know it won’t happen again, okay? Barring all crazy murderous mutants on our trail we’ve got it under control. Will it be difficult not to panic every second of the day? Not have a good cry, get really angry? Maybe. I might have to permanently give up the Halloween movies because of you. But I mean, seriously, what girl doesn’t want that?”

“It’s not that simple.”

He was in his own little brooding world and she would force him to look at her. She hoped she wouldn’t knock over the paper cup or the takeout while she tried.

“I called Clark.” she said finally. “He had this crazy idea, and I couldn’t let him do it. That’s why I’m dragging you off with me cross country.”

He nodded, didn’t look at her. The split could let that thing inside him out on the world; let it free to destroy her best friend. He wouldn’t ever ask for that.

When he finally did look at her again, it was not in the way she needed.

“This doesn’t have to be forever. If there isn’t enough left of me, I just wanted you to know. I’m…”

She knew what he was trying to say, knew even more that she couldn’t let him finish that sentence.

“You want you to stop saying stupid things. This will work and there will nothing to worry about.”
The metal dug into her hip as she twisted toward him.

“How?”

She couldn’t tell him she saw him as human. The words felt like too much of an omen.

“I know you, okay?” she said. “And I’ll save you kicking and screaming if I have to.”

“You don’t have to save me.”
(Maybe he saw her like that, maybe she was just twisted enough to want to be his own personal angel as long as he needed that.)

“As long as you’re you and we stay on schedule, you’ll save yourself. I’m still running away with you.”
He didn’t go into Clark and Smallville and she almost didn’t think of it. They were going to do this.

“We’ve got the most important thing. I’ve always trusted you a little crazily. You trust me. That’s our whole future right there.”

”Future?” At least he hadn’t gone into a rant about being a monster, but he looked more like she’d hit him. He didn’t think she was lying, he couldn’t think that.

“We’re alive, and that’s more than some people can say. Maybe I don’t say it much, but this isn’t so bad. You’re my friend. This is going to work out. I want it to, more than anything.”

She put her hand shakily on top of the spot where his heart was, feeling the strange hitched movement underneath. No monster this time, just him. She couldn't move, phantom memory or not, felt his hands. Felt, and he hadn't touched her.

“What, you not going to push me away this time?”
He didn’t say a word, but his eyes were almost shut. It had been a lie, all along, pretending this was something else.

(She’d dreamt of leaving Smallville once, to a new life that was hers. With someone that was hers, off to save the world, or at least a little corner of it. When she’d met him the first time, she’d seen that, only that, even when she’d tried not to.
If only, if only he could have been just that guy.)

The lines on his face were softer, not any less painful to see. Whatever they had was hurting him, and logically it shouldn’t have made it feel like her heart was going to beat right out of her chest.

She could reach out to him now and he’d reach back, maybe he couldn’t draw away. He just wanted to be close to her and she was the one that was drawn in, wanting that, needing to know that he was solid and corporeal and not some dream that would slip right through her fingers.

A lean forward, five inches at most would have been easy, taking advantage again. But she couldn’t .
She’d be his friend and she wasn’t going to destroy him this time. She wouldn’t forgive herself for that.

She kissed him where she could, felt the muscles tensed on his cheek relaxing. His fingers brushed through her hair and that one moment was more personal than kissing Jimmy ever could have been.

Maybe she was crazy but this, now, was what she needed; not the thought that they would have forever or that he was human or that there was a happily ever after on the horizon.

She let him keep his arm around her shoulder, thought that maybe sometime, when it wasn’t like this, it would be enough.

He was still against the glass, looking at her and his eyes didn’t look obsessive or crazy or unhinged. Intense, still, and maybe he found what he needed now.

“You should say something. Not gloomy hopefully, so I can relax. You’ve got me on tenterhooks.”
She needed to hear something, anything at all.

“We’re actually going to make it. We can find some place to slow down, build a life together.” His voice didn’t waver, not in the least. He would see this as a life. The thought of life, just him wasn’t so terrifying when he was like this.

“As long as we can keep the Gods from hunting us, I say we have a pretty good chance.” Maybe it was a bad joke.

He looked out, past her, up at the stars again and she knew he was seeing something else, something he wasn’t telling her. He would when he was ready.

“Tell me that one.” She told him, knowing just the configuration of the archer sent to shoot the two lovers down.
Sagittarius, he said and she still thought it looked like the big dipper.

It was only a few minutes longer and she felt tired, too tired to move- like every bit of her was weighted with lead. She wanted to open her mouth, tell him that something was wrong with that food but that he should crank up the car and keep going anyway. They had to get out.

All she did was slump against him, trying to decipher the words making their way past his lips. He had something all planned out to say, but she knew it all.

She could barely keep her eyes open and when she tried to slam her hands against his arm, tell him to make sense, it was like she was moving them through water.

She heard the tinkling of keys into the glove compartment, the dead engine, his voice telling her that she’d be fine now
When he lifted her into the car it looked like he was about to cry.

---

She felt a dull throb at the back of her skull and nothing but cold asphalt when she threw her hand out beside her, looking for him, warmth, something. This wasn’t a dream and she knew Oliver’s voice anywhere.

“What’s going on?”
Clark wasn’t nearby. At least he was safe.

Feeling came back slowly. First, her hands on the asphalt, stinging. The fact that she was half blind in the darkness.
The fact that Davis had gotten them here. Why?

She couldn’t see Davis and she had to, pushed herself up from hands and knees, stumbling. Bart held her back and kept her numb legs from collapsing on the pavement.

He was lying on the floor, his hands bound up in two ridiculous white cuffs he could’ve torn out off in a minute. There wasn’t blood on him, and she knew that the League would never have been able to get either of them if he had fought.

He had let this happen, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. Maybe…

He looked too pale, dead, and she felt that same mindless fear she’d felt before driving her.
He was still breathing; of course he still had to be breathing, it was the ultimate destroyer and nothing could ever kill him while It remained. Nothing they knew of.

“Where’s Clark?” she asked. Oliver gave no answer to that, but she could read Bart’s eyes. He had doubts. She could not tell anything from Dinah, and Oliver had his bow.

“And what did Clark say about this?”

“He’s not involved.”

“He wanted to save Davis.”

“And he won’t be coming any time soon.” Clark’s bag was on the floor, classic satchel on the side. Maybe they had lured him here, got him weakened so he couldn’t get in the way. To teach him a lesson or keep him safe didn’t matter.

She knew what Oliver wanted to do without Clark, what Oliver would try to do. He wouldn’t be able to kill Davis any more than the Kryptonite had and It would come out.

“Let me go!”
She needed to get to Davis, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate enough to kick at the two bodies holding her back.

“Sorry, beautiful.” Bart said. “We can’t let you do that.”

Oliver told her in the same concerned, hardened voice that she couldn’t be his barrier to the world anymore.

“We have to do what we have to.”

Davis wasn’t an immediate threat. The fact that they’d brought her along as some kind of walking sedative proved that Oliver thought so too.

“You don’t have to do anything. You can just let us get away and you won’t have any trouble at all.”

“The thing that’s going to murder Clark counts as trouble? It’s fine if you like this guy, Chloe, if you think you love him, or want to mother him or turn him into some tragic figure. It’s not fine if you go about putting the rest of the world in danger.”

“This thing with me is the only thing that works. He hasn’t killed anyone.”

“Give it time. He will. We’ll stop It first.”

“What part of indestructible don’t you understand? You can’t kill him. The only thing you’ll succeed in doing is forcing more blood onto his hands.”

“We’re just going to put It down so it won’t harm anyone. He won’t be dead, but it won’t destroy Clark, either.”

“You think you can control it.”

She’d stopped struggling by then and maybe that’s why Oliver let her go. She didn’t know the way out even if she got free. They were isolated with metal canisters around them, in one of Queen Industry’s nuclear or geothermal plants. Maybe Oliver planned in dropping him headlong into a nuclear explosion, a volcano, some natural trap she knew nothing about.

“Under the surface It won’t be able to escape to do any harm.”

“--until It claws its way out of the surface. You think you can stop that? Who’s delusional now?”

“See that’s where we’re different. I know I can’t.”
Oliver let her go and she could almost, almost break Bart’s grip. Davis hadn’t hurt her before and he wouldn’t now, she wanted to tell him.

“Stop talking in riddles.”
Davis’s chest was moving up and down shallowly, like it did when he was trying to hold himself calm. He had to be listening.

“You say he’s not human, but that’s what you’re counting on, isn’t it, Oliver?”
He thought Davis would keep It down there while the rock remade itself around him, stripped human flesh from bone, locked around Its armor of spikes. He thought Davis would be able to hold it back, die again and again and again.

“If you create his own personal phantom Zone, you’ll put the human part of him in hell. It’s tantamount to murder.”

“It’s murder to let it go free. Why don’t you let your boyfriend tell you?”

He said they had to do it, nearly motionless and his voice sounded rough again in all the wrong places. It wasn’t so hard to kick herself free then, and the guilt at Bart’s pained face was fleeting.

When she was within two feet of Davis, none of the others would come any closer.

He pushed himself up with the strange white cuffs digging into his wrists, leaving lines on his palms. He looked calm, too calm again, just like he had in the hospital with Jimmy when he’d talked about the morphine pump. He had to be lying.

“This is the one way I know to stop It.” he said as if it would explain everything. “I won’t hurt Clark this way.”
He stayed crouched, as if he was trying not to move toward her now. She did, knowing that he had to see.

“We can deal with this the other way. We’ve done it before. We always do.”
She’d brushed a hand over his cheek, almost forgetting that they were surrounded. His eyes still closed at that, and maybe they would think she was working her magic and let off.

“Before, when we were free, you told me we would build a life together.”

She found herself waiting for him to say something, anything for the second time that night. This time she could read his face.

“You can live now.” He said again, with the same strange fixation she remembered from the dream. Stop it, stop it she said, he wasn't like this, he wasn't like Clark and all the others, taking all the choices from her hands. He couldn't do this to her and he did.

It didn’t matter that she told him she wasn’t going to make it easy for him, that it was a coward’s way out. She asked him where the guy who wanted to even the score went and he said it was the only way he could.

She left Clark, Smallville, everything behind for the first time in her life. She would’ve given her life to him.
She had expected something, too. Not this.

“I don’t want you to do this. Are you listening to me?”
His eyes weren’t red, and this wasn’t about holding it back. She dug her fingers into his shoulders and shook him, waiting for that moment of clarity in his face.

“I wouldn’t have taken you out of the fortress if I wanted this.”

“Clark doesn’t have to live with the guilt now. I’m making the choice.”

“It wasn’t just about him!”

“You can stop now.”

She couldn’t change him, couldn’t guilt trip him, tell him to stop, not because of her maybe but because of all that Clark had done for him. He couldn’t give up on Clark.

“Please.”

His eyes locked onto her face, not hearing that, like this was the last memory he’d ever have. He had been letting her go.

Panic flooded out of her, hurting her and she knew he wasn’t going to stop.
After all she’d done, they’d done; he just wanted to die. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe it was her.

He wouldn’t stay. No one ever did.

“I’m sorry, Chloe.” He said, louder. “This isn’t working.”

He was always quiet, and he didn’t have a right to do this, not now. Not after everything. “Don’t let me do this.”
Maybe this was some sort of signal for Oliver to start.

“It isn’t working. You’re not…”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she grabbed hold of one of his arms, shaking, felt the telltale rippling in his skin

His eyes were red again. Maybe it was the fact that he was surrounded by so many people at once, maybe it was her fear, maybe the genetic urge was all that mattered. Oliver wasn’t going to put him in hell. He was there already.

He'd been there every moment she'd thought she was saving him. She'd been wrong, thinking he could live with a monster inside him just because she told him that that was the only way.

Davis’s breath sped up worse and he threw himself to the ground. Don't let me do this.
He looked at her and his eyes were turning. He looked away from her. He’d never been one to do that even when she wanted to beg him, tell him she couldn’t breathe.

The spikes didn’t just push out, exploding out jaggedly, tearing through his very human looking skin so she could see blood and bone as they went through his sternum.

He charged away before they cut into her. (It wouldn’t matter soon, when he didn’t recognize her.)
He let out a sound like she’d only ever heard come out of It, and she threw herself onto the floor, feeling in the dark.

They should have all been dead already. Maybe she was lying to herself, she always did, but it was like the last thing he did as Davis was give them that time.

Her eyes burned but there wasn’t time to think that she would lose him for real. The black stone fell into her hand easily, burning at her like a heartbeat.
This was Clark’s plan. This was what could never happen.
This is what she was going to do.

Bart got thrown into the wall as he tried to pull her away from that, wood piling breaking apart under his light body. Dinah and Oliver didn’t even get the chance to move, but she could, she had to.

“No!”
Oliver raised the arrow, but before that, before anything the stone was in her hand, thrusting forward into Davis’s skin or whatever else he was made of.

This is the way she had lost him the first time. He couldn’t live with It, and he’d be completely lost if it killed again.
If there was a chance that she could get him free, it had to be enough.

Maybe death, this last thing was mercy, the only thing she could really give him.

The light blinded her, threw her onto her back on the ground but she could see the around the dark warehouse as if it had been lit up.
She could just see the outline of his face, flickering gray, fracturing. Its essence pushed out of him, like a shadow, and he was thrown back.
Half of him was being torn out. She’d done this.

It pushed away from the human skin, gray and looming and his body fell forward. This is where the dream ended, where It vanished like a ghost and the light left his eyes.

He didn’t fall the whole way, trying to suck in breaths for the first time on his own. He grimaced, held steady. There were gaps, raised places on his shirt where it had torn cloth and skin open, and there was still blood there.

He pushed himself up on his hands, instinctively seeking her out across the space between them, still. He was breathing and she couldn’t move, could only scream at him to move, run, something.

Behind him, It loomed up until he turned. He didn’t make a sound, but she heard It, the horrible groan she had first heard as the barn doors collapsed.

She’d just thought of setting Davis free, hadn’t thought of how this could end.
(Had she really been naïve enough to expect it to remain conveniently frozen in midair until they could throw it under a ton of rock?) Clark’s plan had been no plan at all.

When It lunged forward she could only hear the clawed click of its arm, didn’t know if it went through Davis or not. She heard the impact moving through the rock under her, enough to break his skull.

He was human.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear anything but Oliver’s feet on the pavement, lining up for a shot at It.
He yelled to her to move, get herself out of striking range, and she felt like she was moving through water again.

She’d done the right thing. She’d done what Clark said.
In one of those horrifically brave moments she realized that nothing else would matter.

She’d lost Davis. She was going to die.
There were no such things as alien saviors, miracles, second chances.

Then he stood up again.
---


Those four solid concrete walls were the only barriers between It and the outside world. Davis must have hit every one and she found herself fighting the urge to squeeze her eyes shut, expecting every time to be the last.

He wasn’t really fighting, just doing what he could, making headlong rushes where It swatted at him like a fly, trying to stay between it and the rest of them.
Bits of gravel flew up around them, making her eyes water, making it hard to see even that.

Her eyes strained to see the spikes piercing through his hand, the skin immediately closing up. She almost asked herself what he was. But she knew exactly what he was. He was as human as Clark.
Blood dotted the walls where he hit. He hadn’t stopped bleeding.
They clashed and he got up again, but each time It pushed him further into a corner.

Maybe Clark could have stopped it, burned it with his heat vision, something, but Davis wasn’t Clark. Each movement seemed an effort, where he tried to gain control of his powers in seconds, to learn what to do. He hadn’t been doing this all his life, only now.
The effort of using the Kryptonian strength dazed him, and if it caught him on one of those moments…
It couldn’t.

She needed to do something. She didn’t have any useful powers, Bart’s speed, Dinah’s paralyzing scream. She helped people, but she couldn’t help him. He was going to lose.

She could plan things, lay traps; and it was the four of them around them both, as if they contain it. He was the distraction now and they were supposed to have a plan.
They were supposed to be heroes and heroes were supposed to be doing something besides staying alive.

Oliver was the leader, but he hadn’t planned for what she did. He took his arrows out again anyway, aimed from the shoulder, and drew the bolt all the way back.
There’s wasn’t a chance even for a modern Robin Hood to hit targets moving at that speed. He could just as well hit Davis.
A part of her, the big part wanted just to grab hold of his arm keep him from aiming that arrow. She didn’t get a chance to.

It got Davis against the wall first, bashed him against it with Its whole bulk. She fancied she could hear the rock starting to quiver, the small shuddering shocks starting. His hand scrabbled for the water pipe, tearing it out by the sharpened end. He was gasping when he moved- slow, slow enough for her to see.

He plunged it in deep into a poker red eye. Its spikes seemed to rebel against the intrusion and he had to jump back to avoid being impaled.

The sharp end pushed itself out, flew and quivered into the opposite wall near her head.

Her hands had already found their target, the contamination alarms. The sound blared loudly forcing her to the floor so that she thought her eardrums would shatter, far enough to be heard out on the streets.

Clark would hear them. He had to. Without him they didn’t stand a chance.
The logic was simple enough that Oliver would have to see, but by this point she was beyond caring if he did.

The Black Canary’s scream sent them both of them to the ground, but It got up quicker. Davis swayed, but didn’t fall.
He wasn’t moving fast enough to get free anymore and there was no chance that It would stop now. Doomsday destroyed that’s just what it did.

It wouldn’t matter how much Dinah screamed now. It was immune, in the same way it had been to Kryptonite after Davis had died.
Dinah couldn’t help here, but she might help Clark later. “Take her.” That was her voice telling Bart.
To get her out of range would exhaust him as it was. Super strength was not among his abilities.

He only nodded at her, like she was ‘the Watchtower’ and not trembling with nerves, didn’t question it. They were a team.
She knew where she had to be.

She told Oliver to go. He was the only one who knew the end-plan and he could do nothing here. He could still help Clark.
It would be just the both of them in the end.
He told her it was his fight as much as it was hers, and right then she knew it wasn’t.

It had Davis and his head snapped back and forth like an elk carcass in the jaws of a lion. She heard the cracks until It let go and this time the rock didn’t just crumble around him, it broke open when he hit it.

There was rumbling, but it wasn’t the monster now, just thousands of tons of concrete foundation.
They were going to be the ones buried, not the monster.

Rocks and bits of rubble sprayed all around the air and it must have been Oliver that shoved her forward.
There was no time, nothing but the sound of the rock and she couldn’t ask what he was doing, couldn’t grab hold of his shoulder in all that green leather. She heard his footsteps stumbling the wrong way (disorientation or a false sense of bravado.) He hadn’t heard her anyway.
It was suicide for her to go back.

The way out was close; it had to be no more than four yards. She couldn’t see anything but she threw herself as far as she could and didn’t think of the blood trickling down her leg. The monster could tear her to pieces but she would get out of this.

A fist sized stone jammed into her abdomen but she crawled, slipped on her hands and pushed herself up, barely missed stumbling again. They had to get out of range. She heard Oliver running behind her and then nothing but the collapsing stone and dying alarms echoing in her ears.
She couldn’t hear clashing or noise but she couldn’t hold still, pretend to be dead in case It was going to kill her.
Nothing moved.

Once they had smashed past the wall maybe It found dozens of life signatures calling to its need for blood. Maybe a few lives were inconsequential to It now that it had the whole world. It was free and It was going to find Clark without Davis to force it to its feet as soon as she appeared.
It couldn’t have just snapped his neck. Not after everything.
She didn’t know.

She could only see for the few yards around her.
The rock hadn’t buried Oliver completely but one deep gouge to his temple had been enough. There hadn’t been much pain for him, and it all seemed completely impossible.

Anticlimactic.
She’d always imagined him going out in a hailstorm of crazy odds. Not like this and her face stung for a moment before she closed his eyes with her hand.
She couldn’t heal him, just like she hadn’t been able to heal anyone since Braniac took her over.

There was a console in his palm, characters written across it. The key to activating his entire plan right there, for Clark or her to decipher now.

She lifted it out of heavy fingers and limped out to the silence. She still could do something, still.

---


She should’ve been thinking of how to get far enough to warn Clark and maybe they could do something. (Save the hero, save the world, wasn’t that the way she’d thought once?)

She’d stopped.
She’d found Davis twenty feet out, a gout of blood around his head. Not peaceful. Not peaceful at all and that had to mean that he wasn’t dying like he wanted.

She stripped off her jacket briskly, trying to ignore the fact that it was unrecognizable under grime and rock and settled it under his head, watching it go red again.

(Somewhere along the line it had also become about saving the man.) All the thoughts of setting him free were pointless if he didn’t survive.
He was warm still, like the blood making its way out of him and she pushed her hand down on his chest until she could the faint syncopated rhythm of his Kryptonian heart. The strange, adrenaline fueled energy left and her legs folded around her. He was going to live.

She couldn’t get up then, not with the blood that wanted to gush out of her leg and the lightness of her head dizzying her.
She sat there for what must have been minutes, maybe only seconds.

Clark came, took him and her and Oliver’s body out so carefully from under the rubble. His façade was cracking and she’d had the strength to clutch onto his hands then.

He was taking them somewhere they could be safe, but he didn’t understand that she needed to know he would be too.


Maybe he had control of his powers, but he was no god. (Yet, the hardest grip she had was no more of a restraint to him than a cobweb.)
Clark didn’t know the least thing about using Oliver’s device, him go.

She stayed with Davis, a bandage awkwardly wrapped around her leg, knowing he was going to live, understanding the price.
It was unfair. He would’ve died to stop this, wouldn’t have put one more person at risk. And yet if Clark died, she didn’t know if she could forgive him. She couldn't forgive herself.

---

When his eyes snapped open she got this feeling that he wasn’t really seeing her even when he reached up and his fingers bumped into her face. He would’ve been dazed from all those blows he took and his hands weren’t steady like they usually were.

“This is not the afterlife.” She wanted to reassure him. It sounded like she was choking.
No, in heaven or Vahalla or the Elysian fields there most certainly no angels with grit and tears on their cheeks.
“We got you free now.”

He seemed to come back to himself, pulled his hand back too quickly.
He was seeing the marble floor under them, and they were nowhere near the wall he had been thrown through anymore.

“That means It is free now too, isn’t It?”

“Wreaking havoc. Clark’s gone to stop it.”

“It’s going to kill him.”

“Don’t say that!” And maybe he saw it all right then, the recrimination in her face, the bandage coming loose for every time she’d tried to get up and hadn’t been able to.
“He’s been doing this longer than you. It won’t be able to kill him.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I have to, okay? So just, just let me.”

“When I was created-It was made for that. It can’t die. If I had been in there he might have more of a chance.”
Before he would’ve asked her why, disbelieving and now his eyes just did. But that was buried under the thought that it was still for Clark, because of Clark’s guilt.

She didn’t try to answer. There was no more time for a fruitless heart-to-heart talk.
“He still does. If we trap it, it won’t be able to carry out its mission. If I can get to him, I can help him. You’re going to take me.”

“You can’t go bleeding like that.”

“Sure I can. If you can just help me fix a tourniquet and you don’t drop me, it’ll be...”
He lifted her knee, bunched the slacks to her shin, perfectly professional and she hissed at his probing fingers.

“It’s broken. You’ll be at risk near it and you can’t stand up on your own.”

“Carry me then. I have to do this.”

“No, I do. You were right. It’s because of me. I have to do something.”
He tried once to get to his feet and the jacket slid out from behind him, catching new blood.

He didn’t get far before she grabbed hold of that torn shirt of his and pushed him on his back again. She should have been more careful with the cuts he had there but all she knew was that he was too out of breath to attempt right away.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. He’s your best friend and you signed his death warrant because you both wanted to save me.
I can do something now.”

“All you can hope for is to be a distraction. You didn’t exactly get away unscathed yourself.”

“I’m the wild card now. Maybe distraction will be enough.”
It was a suicide mission. When he walked out of there, sped out of there, she knew with complete certainty that he wasn’t coming back.

“You will die.”

“I’ve been ready for that a long time now.”

He didn’t even try to patch up. There was no time for that, and suddenly she wondered what she was playing at, devil’s advocate in a game with no devil.
She’d told herself that they had to fix this. He could. He might, but she wouldn’t let him.

“You don’t want to die.”

Of course he’d tried. Twice.
“After everything, you tell yourself you want to make up for everything. The truth is you can’t know that, not until it happens.”

“You want him to live.”

“I could never want you die.”

“Why are you doing this now?” His eyes were half closed like he was trying to hold something back.
Maybe he longed for something to hear before he marched off for a noble death and she couldn’t give it to him. She wasn’t Beatrice. She couldn’t just tell him something like why when he was going to leave her behind.

“I did all of that because I didn’t want you to die. I didn’t want Clark to die. Fat lot of help that’s doing.”

Clark was dying out there while she waited around like some idiot. She could hear the splinters of wood, the shuddering sound any time he hit the rock and tore through it. Maybe it was all in her head.

“It’s not my fate to kill him anymore. I can stop this.” He said. If she’d ever been able to tell him not to in a solid voice he would have listened. Maybe. Probably.
She couldn’t choose and this was always what destroyed them both.

“Only if you take me with you.”

“If I don’t have a chance, neither do you. Maybe the last thing I can do is keep you safe.” He wasn’t skidding on the marble and he was halfway to getting up.

“That’s what you call it now? You drugged me to keep me safe and look how that has turned out.”

She clutched to his shoulders this time and her grip had some weight. He was afraid of using that strength of his to get out of her grasp, hurting her, and maybe if he didn’t for just few more seconds he could see.

“I’m not letting you do it to me again. I’m not going to lose anyone else.” She thought maybe her voice was hysterical and he didn’t reply to that, face blank.
She hated when he got like this.

Jimmy stepped out of the shadows, he seemed to blend into them now, and there was a gun in his hands-the one fired the tranq dart.

“He won’t do anything, I promise. You can let go of him now.”

“This is not what you think.”
Davis was looking up at her, almost a dead weight and she shifted, tried to lever with her injured leg so she could keep his head from hitting the pavement.

“Please, do it quickly. This thing won’t work for long on him. We’ve got to go keep him from hurting anyone else.
You won’t want to watch this.”

She could hear the nervous yibber of Jimmy’s foot on the pavement. The whites of his eyes were pinkish, stark against the green of his pupils. He was scared.

“Watch what? You think he was going to hurt someone? Jimmy, he wasn’t going to hurt Clark. He’s free of Doomsday now.

“If he did what you said, he doesn’t exactly seem a shining example of human being. He’s killed people without being a horny monster. He did some horrible things to you.”

“He didn’t do anything to me.”

“Chloe, I heard it over the intercom. You don’t have to lie to me any more. Clark trusted me with his secret.”
She wondered, really, just what he had told him.

“He’s amazing, what he does. What wouldn’t you do to protect him?”

“You’d be surprised.”
She shook her head, wordless and pulled at the needle with her fingers. It was too deep.

“If you didn’t then I don’t know you anymore.” That was just the problem, she thought, but he was holding the dart gun out and she didn’t say anything. He was sweating, and he’d been like this on the pills.

“Jimmy, put that down.”
She didn’t know if the pills still affected him, if maybe he would see the monster again regardless of what was there.
“I don’t see myself protecting Clark right now, Jimmy. I see you aiming a dart gun at me.”

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that.”
His hands were shaking and he looked as if he had forgotten he was holding it.

“I bought this place for you, you know. So you could be safe here. I’m buying it back from Oliver. I always hoped you’d see it. “

“It’s lovely, Jimmy, but this is hardly the time...”

“I never stopped believing in us. Just let me help you, now, why don’t you?”

“You’re right. I need your help. Oliver knew what we needed to do. He is trying to help Clark. Davis was trying and being really stupid about it.
You know what they say believe only half of what you hear…”

“And nothing that you see.”
Somehow he recognized the console in her hand, maybe from working with Oliver.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing. But Oliver knows what’s going on. I’ll help you.” he said. “We can protect Clark together.” His eyes had a strange gleam to them like she’d never seen. Jimmy had never been so zealous before. Not her, for sure.
They needed all the help they could get.

“First, we’ll get him out of here, and then maybe you can take me to this plant of Oliver’s. He should come to soon so we won’t have to drag him. “
He put his hands on the dart and pulled, hands unsteady so he almost jabbed Davis again.

“Watch out, there.”

She didn’t know if Jimmy was listening.
“Where’s Oliver?” he asked.

Davis’s eyes were half open now, and Jimmy nearly tripped over his feet to get away before she answered him. Once the drug wasn’t leeching into Davis’s system it wouldn’t keep him down for long.
I’ll go help you, I‘ll go help you, Jimmy said. She could imagine the memories were hard to let go of.

Davis was trying to grab at his neck and she kept his hands away and let his fingers curl around hers instead. He would do more harm than good now.

“Jimmy’s going to help me do this thing with Clark and I just need you to stay put for a little while.” In some ways she was grateful that he was sedated so he wouldn’t try and stop her.

Either way, she expected the stubborn way he fought it, trying to right himself even deprived of speech. If he had wanted to please her, if he had just been a part he wouldn’t have been so infuriating. He’d proven himself real.

There were only a few seconds when she didn’t look back at Jimmy and she was getting ready to pull herself up when she heard a sound, a pop, like all this air had been pressurized and let out at once.

Jimmy was right behind Davis with the bow against his skin, telling her Oliver was dead and when Davis opened his mouth and a dribble of scarlet hit her on the shoulder.
Oliver’s kryptonite arrow was in his back and all she could do was catch his weight, watch his eyes half-open.
It was happening again.

She couldn’t say anything, nothing but the fact that he was human.
Oliver had told him Davis was a camouflage and nothing else, and Jimmy believed him.

“He killed Oliver. He’s not…”
He kept looking at her hands, horrified at the fact that he could actually bleed.

“Davis didn’t kill him. It didn’t kill him. Do you see claw marks anywhere? The entire plant collapsed around our heads!”

“Oliver’s dead because of him. He’s killed people. I saw him.”

“He’s dying! If you don’t get help now, you’ll be more of a killer than he ever was.”

She barely heard Jimmy’s shoes skidding on the marble, couldn’t look past the shaft in Davis’s back, like she was holding parts of him in and if she moved her hand everything would just spill out.

He was no longer immortal and what was left of his indestructibility torn out with It. He’d used up his quota for amazing recoveries now. There was no Jor El to take him to the sky and bring him back, whole.

“Breathe with me, right? Keep breathing.”
She didn’t think he even understood her, and his hand didn’t move from the spot on her face voluntarily.

Maybe he understood she didn’t want him to talk. His eyes were glassy brown and he looked like his entire world hinged on her voice like it used to. Like he believed in her again.

“We’re going to save you, okay? Just listen to my voice. Focus on me.”

It was right at his heart and she knew if she pulled it out he would bleed out all over Jimmy’s semi-cathedral floor. She’d seen a program in Nature once where a man had pulled a stinger out of his chest and died. He would’ve lived.

And yet, she could see the signs; the Kryptonite was poisoning him and spreading through his blood. He would’ve told her what to do, if he had been able to speak, if…
He was supposed to tell her things like this.

Her hand fluttered helplessly over the spot where the shaft didn’t quite pierce through and she kept talking, kept telling him that the ambulance would be there soon. She didn’t know if Jimmy had really gone to get it or if he had just been that desperate to get away.

She knew she couldn’t let it end like this and willed something to happen.
Her tears had healed once but her eyes felt dry and hollow, and the ones that fell did nothing at all.

The veins had spread across his face, dull and green and when he started to choke she dug her fingers in, felt the wood splinters cut into her fingers when the arrow came free.

He breathed once, long and shaky and strange. It wasn’t his last breath. Couldn’t be.
But there was nothing else.

---

Bart found her after the paramedics had gone away.
There were so many casualties already that they needed every available stretcher they could get for the people that could live. There was such a hubub that no one even asked how he’d died.

She’d gotten up with enough support, and Bart mentioned kicking ass and taking names so that she knew Clark was alive. He still needed them.
She just needed a moment.

For once Bart didn’t call her Chloe-licious, or sweetheart or beautiful.
He just looked away from the smudged the blood on her cheek.

Davis—Davis’s body was still there, lying on the floor, and she couldn’t bring herself to close his eyes. Maybe he had found peace, but she hadn’t.

She did her job, sent the keys clicking, hacked into Oliver’s console like she could have done it in her sleep.
The Watchtower opened the Earth and closed it as Clark and It continued their titanic struggle, feeling strangely disconnected from the fear.

He was going to make it out. She’d lost enough already that he had to.
She couldn’t lose any more. She couldn’t lose any more.

When they pulled Clark out, he wasn’t dead. Not quite. It took four men to get him out from under the rock, but he had spurted up, almost flown high enough that he could be saved.

It had taken four days under Earth’s sun for all the burns to heal, not one day in the hospital. Kryptonians had amazing recovery rates, or so she’d heard but that hadn’t helped Davis when it all came down to it.

It wasn’t easy to look into Clark’s face, bruised and marked and bloodied and not see him there. They were brothers after all, Clark said and when he woke she knew he was going to find a reason why it was all his fault.

He was Tess’s hero now, the one who had destroyed the Beast.

If there was no changing destiny, then why did it feel like a lie?

---

When she’d finally reached the Talon that first night the arrow shaft had fallen out of her bloodied jacket. Davis was everywhere in that basement from the neatly pressed sheets of the cot to the bible next to it.

She didn’t go down much anymore.

She was with Clark, watching him heal, talking about nothing at all. She’d needed him to live and he lived and he was everything she really had left.
She kept hearing how it was almost a miracle that he’d survived, from Martha, from Dr. Hamilton.

Rokk had told him that he was going to die that day, set in stone, just because he had saved her when they ‘had’ to destroy her to make sure Braniac was gone.

It was something she had done. Someone else died in his stead.
Destiny had changed.

She went to the basement that night, sat on his bed and closed her eyes, turned the shaft over and over in her fingers. She needed to know, needed to understand why him, why then.

He’d become the man he’d wanted to be and he hadn’t needed her to love him for that. Then he’d died, and she...
He had so much to do, yet.

When she dreamed of him that night he pulled the arrow out of his chest and pressed it into her hands.
---



Chloe woke in the dark, under sheets that smelled like him, clutching at a rosary (his rosary) tangled along the headboard of the cot.
On the road, some nights she used to wonder about how he held on, if he could even believe at all. It had to be tough to wake up and learn that the salvation you believed in wasn’t even meant for you.

In a world with alien saviors, perhaps some great hand of God shouldn’t have seemed too unimaginable at all. Perhaps people just needed to believe in something.

Just like this was probably all in her mind, her guilt, her fear telling her that he wouldn’t leave her.
Yet, she’d seen him and it felt like too much of a message. Maybe wanting to believe was enough.

Before the Planet opened or Clark got through his beauty sleep, she was at the door of a farmhouse demanding that he give her a scalpel so she could cut out whatever was left of the arrow in Davis’s chest.

She looked crazy- make-up less, off balance on the crutch, clutching her jacket to her chest. She sounded crazy, babbling things about dreams but Clark would let her in anyway.

He did, into the tiny closed cellar with the cool, cool air and she could barely breathe because the walls seemed to close in on her.
Davis was lying on a stretcher, the kind Clark must have called in a favor for, the kind Davis had been pushing for the half-of his life before the nightmare really began.

Clark left them (her) alone.
The room was barely lit and it softened Davis’s face, drew shadows across a dimpled chin, across the hollows of his throat. Not tense, like he had been in life. He used to look at her as if she could take that away, and she wondered if she really ever could. She had never seen him like this before.

She reached out a hand and heard nothing except her breath rasping out into the air. He looked at peace and she just wanted him to open his eyes. She needed him to open his eyes.
She stood there for the longest time, leaning hard on the bed, unable to move.

When she finally worked up the courage to push her hands past Davis’s skin, his blood was cool and viscous like it wouldn’t have been pumping in life. His body could have shut itself down.

Her fingers closed around the rock, finally. The thimble sized, darkened green point came out with a sucking sound but she was already listening for him, some foreign sound, the slightest hint of something.

She sat on the fold up chair next to the bed, her bloody hand over his chest where his pulse should have been.
Waiting.

Clark found her that night lying in the stretcher next to him. Her right hand was still over his chest, the fingers of her left running over the red beads, her eyes hollow.

---
There were two burials the next day.

---
Half of the citizens of Metropolis were saying their goodbyes to Oliver.
She leaned on Clark, working not to put any weight on her leg, working not to close her eyes. He was still wan and bruised and he could barely come up with an expression for the few cameras for the pictures that would go in the papers.
They made quite a pair.

The sky was clouded white when the drizzle began.
Hundreds of people in suits cowered under black umbrellas. They looked more inconvenienced than saddened; the CEOs that Oliver had done business with probably every waking day of his life.
No one knew him, them, what they’d done: no one knew. Those same men and women probably believed that the monster rampaging through the streets was some huge hoax.
It was best that way.

Some did know.
Dinah. Bart cowering in the back, away from the thick flanks of businessmen. (Perhaps the temptation to pick a few fat, self satisfied pockets hadn’t left him.)
They said some prayers around the coffin, something for his immortal soul, and Chloe just listened, watched afterwards as people shuffled by his coffin and placed flowers on the bower already on it before it was lowered into the ground.

There was no more lingering resentment, the feeling of being caged. Oliver would have killed without thought, but he’d been helping at the end. He died the way he wanted to.
He was a comrade, whatever else he had thought about her. About what was right for Davis. He’d trusted Davis to die, and it was not like he had faith in anyone. It hadn’t helped either of them in the end.

Chloe couldn’t lean and knock on the wood like Clark did, not wonder what he was apologizing for. She was having enough time supporting herself after two hours, her eyes wanting to slam themselves shut. She knew they couldn’t, knew what would happen if they did.

Tess Mercer was ahead of her dropping an exotic flower onto the coffin, kneeling by it for a bare second. She looked just like one of those old icy print outs from Glamour, contemplating her new position. Then she rose up with all the grace of a stalking cat, and nodded.

They shouldn’t even have been on nodding terms. Lois had gone missing and reappeared, her old self. She said she’d gotten injured in the hubbub as the Planet collapsed around them. There was something different, knowing that lingered in her eyes. Chloe didn’t know where she went, but it wasn’t on a concussion sized trip. As much as Tess had sworn to Clark that she had nothing to do with it, Chloe knew she knew something.

Tess was almost the literal widow of Luthorcorp, now, in complete control of that. More power than she’d had before, if she got the major creditors for Queen Industries at her back.
She’d gotten what she wanted, her alien savior. Death.

She hadn’t come by to harass Clark since he accused her of Lois’s disappearance. She stepped back as if she was blameless in the whole thing.

If she hadn’t pushed Oliver to discover his inner darkness, if she hadn’t been so obsessed with turning Clark into her tool, if she hadn’t sent those goons after them, they would have…

Things might not have changed one bit. Chloe knew more than a lot about alien DNA and pre-programmed genetic urges but for that moment it didn’t seem to matter to her.
They could have had a chance.

Chloe was going to take her down, whatever it took, she almost couldn’t help throwing the gauntlet down, swearing it. A stupid move now.
Clark hadn’t finished with his last words to Oliver. This didn’t even involve him, so he couldn’t exactly stop her, could he?

But then Dinah had an arm on her shoulder, pulling her away for her comfort or her own, she didn’t know.

---
Funerals for front-page serial murderers were less of a production.
It was just the two of them again, she and Clark, rain was dripping onto their faces to the ground and it was getting dark.

Clark had decided to it would be at the center of the Kent farm. This was the place where Davis belonged. Not some grave in the middle of nowhere. This.

She wondered how much of this was his own sense of responsibility and how much was really loss. Of course Clark had lost that last tie he had to his home world.
He’d wanted to save Davis too. He hadn’t needed to.

Clark dug into the dirt on the spot at a human, plodding pace. Something told her he had to do it the human way for this, pushing the shovel deep, getting dirt on his sleeve. Only Clark wouldn’t notice the dirt on his tuxedo.

There was enough room now.

“Not yet.” She said, and she hadn’t been supposed to do this. She’d been looking away; to the ground, anywhere else but him, his body and she couldn’t now.
Davis was dressed like he had been before he’d died, the same rips in the shirt, triangle shaped over pale skin. Someone--Clark had cleaned the blood off him, after that time.
There wasn’t even a coffin.

She had been under an impression, somehow, that it wouldn’t be like this.
It was her, hearing that whispery sound in her head. She couldn’t see the slightest tremor to tell her that he was. Move. Move. Movemovemovemove. Something. Anything would have been enough.

He still looked too alive.
Her hands had looked too dirty and that’s why her mother had made her wash them. Again and again and again.

Clark had told her again and again about the Kryptonite and the poisons and it had been a whole week.

Davis was as pale as he had been in her basement, and his lashes were closed against his cheeks.
Mouth soft, not shut tight like it could have been with rigor mortis by now.
Beautiful. Maybe he was just Kryptonian.

Gravediggers during plague times had been frightened by this, so much that they had exorcised corpses, kept them dead by cramming bricks into their mouths.
The Kryptonite arrow hadn’t killed Clark. On hopeless impulse she pressed her hands to his wrist, and his hand was slack, devoid of even deceptive warmth.

It was really happening and holding on like this banished any illusion from her mind. There was nothing now, no mission, no Clark to save and she should’ve felt something. The same kind of painful emptiness she’d felt that first time.

He’d come back, then and she’d never reached out, not really.
It hadn’t ever been the right time.

She told herself it was the world and Clark even while she was begging him to make her forget all that.
Davis had had known. He’d pushed himself into a corner like some sort of wounded animal when she would have let him do anything in the world.

She could still feel his hands on her, clutching her, pushing her away.

His eyes had told her he wanted her to stay and fight, but they had been cornering her too. If he’d believed her there was no turning back. He was not Jimmy. Not Clark. He wanted everything

She’d run. She was good at that

Maybe if she had been less willing to take that out she’d have something to remember him by. Maybe if he hadn’t been so much of a damned martyr.
Maybe moments were the only things she could keep.

Clark was quiet, maybe praying or talking or saying something she should have listened to, but she stayed on the ground until he’d finished, pulled her up and hugged her tight. She felt cold.

He was waiting for her to put herself back together again.
She was together.

“Do you want to say something?” he said finally, and she couldn’t for the first time.
It was hard to believe this—all this was, really over.

Clark sprinkled in the first fistful of dirt. He’d only ever done it with Lionel and Jonathan. Maybe that was the end to that centuries old Kryptonian family feud.

Maybe destiny was just a fancy word for nothing, but that little revelation had come too late.
The dirt turned to mud on Davis’s cheek, and she had to turn away then.

---
What was death really? Blankness? The absence of feeling?

Davis Bloome had believed that there would always be something left, something to linger after everything, It, passed.
Not a soul maybe, if he had none. Perhaps even a hell for someone who wasn’t even human.
Something.

Everything around him warped, twisted itself into a fever dream. There had been something outside of him. Someone’s face. A voice whispering familiar words. A touch. Something he needed to reach. Something he did not.

His body wasn’t his to command and this time there was no monster inside him to fight. He couldn’t convulse, couldn’t move, but somewhere in this void of light he existed.
Blackness. Suffocating Blackness.

Heaven. Hell.
A memory.

---
Chloe didn’t go home to the Talon. To the basement.

They had to talk, Clark said, so very rationally that she wondered if he had been thinking this the entire time.

She hadn’t been in the Kent farm so long she’d almost forgotten how it looked, had forgotten the artificial warmth of the fire he couldn’t feel.

She didn’t tell him then about all the things she’d never answered on the phone, about the running, about Davis, about the distance until the words stopped choking her. She didn’t tell him about that night.

You can talk to me, he said his eyes soft and blue and pitying, and those weren’t his words to say. He didn’t need to fix her. She had to get past this.

She sat stiffly, clutched her hands over tea and thought that strange look in his eyes couldn’t have been guilt.

Clark broached the Jimmy issue first. She hadn’t heard from him, hadn’t wanted to. Clark didn’t talk about him the same way he had right after the divorce. It was about making peace now, like he was just anyone, not the man she had to go back to.

“I let him find out.” Clark said, and maybe he wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been an arrow in his back. Either way Jimmy had believed just about enough to kill someone.

Clark was soft-voiced and reasonable. As far as Jimmy had known Davis was a murderer. Oliver was dead; he put the pieces together, wrong. The larger cynical part of her wondered how much of that had been about what he wanted to believe.

Why did it suddenly matter now that Davis was dead?

She couldn’t do anything now and she’d never been one for helpless anger. Clark wasn’t holding her hands down to keep them from slamming into something.

“You can’t punish him for that.” He still said, carefully.

“The police would probably pin a medal on him.” She could see it already; ‘Local Photographer takes down the Cornfield killer’. Over a woman, no less, that’s how the paper was likely to print it.

Clark told her Oliver had left Jimmy something and with that, his duties fulfilled, skipped town taking his secret with him. Nothing was left to hold him here, and maybe he could find a cure for his little problem elsewhere.
Just like that.
Clark wasn’t exactly telling her to drag Jimmy back so he wouldn’t reveal it.

“I’m sorry.” Clark said. “You cared about saving, about him and I didn’t want to see it at first. This is because of me. If I had kept you both from leaving…”

“He wouldn’t have died?” It was never as simple as he thought. “If I had trusted either of you more this wouldn’t have happened. “

Jimmy had killed Davis, he’d killed himself, she had killed him too.
She had almost stayed a little bit longer, enough to save him. Jimmy wouldn’t have shot through her to get to him.
She could’ve explained. She hadn’t, not when Clark was getting torn to pieces out there.

“I caused this.” he said doggedly, looking at her, waiting for something, another denial.

She didn’t reassure him. Not that time.
Maybe it was about him after all.
Funny how when she saved someone, she was always blaming them when the other didn’t live.

---

(A statement. The truth and a lie.
It ended.
It would never end for her.)
---

Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Over and over for the past hour.
She didn’t know the words.
She wanted to believe.
She hadn’t heard a rustle, a jolt. He was completely quiet, hands still and callused like a martyrs.

It must have been hours, seconds to her. She stretched out her leg again, pushed her foot in the cast where pins and needles were going through it and moved her hand up where the blood was starting to dry. She didn’t like the quiet, didn’t want to believe she was alone. She wasn’t. Sometimes the sound of her voice was enough.

“Don’t make me wait so long, Davis.” And that felt small.

She reached out to touch his cheek and she felt the firmness of marble. His face hadn’t moved. Not one inch.

She’d closed her eyes, trying to remember how he had been. It couldn’t be just her imagining a new, troubled line to his forehead. The barest shift was something.

The cold of the night, the sound of crickets calling to their mates filled her mind dully, hissed over the whisper of moving cloth as she straightened.
That sound… there barely. Thick. Far off. Fragile. Like a heartbeat under tons of rock. She winced, focused. When she reached for his pulse his fingers tangled against the rosary in her hand.

Davis’s hands were cool, not quite cold, not marble. She felt their pressure, a movement so light she would have missed it had she not been holding her breath.

She pushed herself up beside him, feeling frantically at his face, trying to feel every beginning of a quake, tremor, crevice.
“Breathe. I know you’re in there. Come on, breathe.”

She couldn’t push down on his sternum without hurting him more. She straddled him, ran shaking hands along his face, waiting for a lean in, a nudge. A breath.

He should have been breathing so she tried to make him, tried to push her breath into his lungs, head light and almost wheezing from lack of oxygen. Pushing with all her might.

She had expected blood. He really didn’t taste like much of anything at all. She felt like she was fighting, dying and then somehow his lips weren’t marble anymore, sliding deeply against hers, drawing away.
It was there. It was more than there, the whisper of breath that had never really left him. She would have known.

His eyes opened, and those were his eyes the exact shade of brown she thought she’d never see again.
“Chloe. This. Dream.”

It wasn’t this simple. Couldn’t be.

She was laughing and crying and touching him and he was coughing, pulling more breath into his lungs.

“I knew it. I knew you. I need you.”

“Ditto. I’m dreaming.” He murmured.

“Don’t you ever do that again.”

He reached out and she wasn’t really fending him off.

”Not now, big boy. We’re going to fix that first.”

She hadn’t realized how much she’d loved his almost-not-quite smile until that moment. His chest was moving up and down, real for the moments until she could feel him breathe against her, shifting until she was lying under him after all.

She didn’t get to the protest. She couldn’t.

His hands felt heavy against her neck and the thrum of his body over hers was familiar and alien. Next to him she used to find herself throwing the sheets off, the heat of him trickling past her skin.

This was different. A good different, her hands pushing into his shoulders, the light half-groan he made when his freezing hands drew her leg around him and made her shiver into him. The only warmth seemed to come from somewhere in her chest.

She needed this, she breathed this- the small sounds between them, the near-silence, his eyes warm and pushing everything out of perspective.
Then, impossibly, there was no perspective at all.

She was aware that the silence was not silence at all, screaming out at her, chiming. He didn’t seem surprised, resigned. Something was happening.

“No. You said we’d build a life together.”
He was leaving her arms, skin graying and cooling into stillness. “I can’t stay here. Not now.” she must have heard him say that. She did. He'd been awake. He'd been alive. She'd heard.
When she touched his face, slapped it, trying to get the blood back, his mouth was closed, loose. He was suddenly heavy, so heavy.

“I need this. I need you to stay.” she was pleading, trying to make him move.
It was in her mind, probably all in her mind.
I'm always what you need.
And he was. Not this way. Not this.

She woke that next morning, clamminess heavy on her fingertips, in her throat, in her mouth. Every inch of her seemed to throb, and she hadn’t been touched.

That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. She hadn't been able to make him breathe. He hadn't ever woken up. It had ended softly, without a sound. No movement from him no matter how she shook, or held, or cried. Clark soft voiced, prying her fingers from his cold ones, saying he didn’t hear anything at all.
She did not know which was worse.

---

She got up, light blinking beside her. The chiming.
Missed call, her cell read. Clark Kent.
Her fingers hovered over the numbers, pausing, waiting. She didn’t want to keep this alone. Telling him could sooth it all away, make it numb.
She didn’t call back.

The Watchtower lived.
She had always needed a purpose. The Watchtower was hers and she could get Isis back up again on her own.
Lord knew the world still needed that.

The gang activity had gone up again in the absence of the red and blue blur. His rest and recovery, utter disappearance led to speculation. (Was he a myth? A hoax? Was he dead?) There were shootings every night, not counting the strange things happening with the meteor infected out there.

Tess had been too quiet lately. There had been no more harassment to Clark and it worried Chloe that she had something worse up her sleeve.
The gang didn’t quite fall apart without Oliver. Most of them knew how things were run anyway. Bart, Dinah, AC, Cyborg…. The core structure was all there.

All except Clark.

Clark had all but become a ghost in Smallville. The day after and the day after he called her, kept speaking around things like she was fragile, pushed her for things that she could never tell. Not a day passed when he didn’t bring up Davis, the ‘ordeal’, how she felt about the past. It grew tiring to fight him wanting to pull that out of her every moment of every day, wanting her to let it go. It was the one thing that she could keep.

The first time she called to him it was because the world needed him. “Putting your superhero suit in action?” She’d asked false optimism coloring her voice. He didn’t need to open his mouth for her to know he had come to say goodbye.

He spoke, rote enough that it could have been memorized. The fact that he was here, that Tess and later Jimmy knew his secret had lead to Davis’s death. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. Now that Doomsday had been defeated he had to learn to become what he needed to be.

If he put It into a hole in the ground and expected that was the end of it, he had something coming.

“We didn’t defeat It. It was just another of your lucky breaks.”

It was Oliver’s Plan, Clark said, half-offended. That the magma would destroy it and the rock would reform every time It tore his way out.
She wondered if cluelessness was a sickness that struck all the superheroes in Metropolis.
Oliver had counted on one thing, Davis, to keep it down there. Davis wasn’t and at any moment she expected It to come hurtling out of the ground to cause more destruction.

“That won’t be enough to stop it. Maybe that can thwart it maybe, like Sisyphus. But it will get stronger. On Earth, under Earth…. It’s more of a danger than ever. Davis is not in there, like Oliver planned. It’s not going to try to protect people. For an indestructible creature, forever doesn’t matter.“

“It’s under thousands of metric tons of rock!”

“It’s practically made out of rock! Or something a lot tougher.”

“And if we open the portal and let it out, like you said, I won’t be able to stop it and their sacrifices will be for nothing.”

“There are ways, alright?” There were. Tess had destroyed the Crystal maybe. But there were ways. “I can help you fix this.”

“Just like that? Is it that easy for you Chloe, really? It isn’t for me.”

“And are you willing to take the risk that it’ll burst out of there? If you’re feeling guilt now I can’t even imagine…”

“Just admit you’re hurting. Don’t use me to deal with this.”
She knew what he thought--Chloe Sullivan didn’t deal, she buried it under everything else until it disappeared into her. It had worked well enough for half her waking life.

“Don’t use this to run away, Clark.”

“I’m not. I’m finally taking your advice, like I should have with Tess. Maybe you were right. I’m not human. I’m meant to be stronger. Maybe I shouldn’t forget that.”

“That won’t be the end of it, you know. Jimmy found out because you let him. No one has to be…”

“I’m sorry, I have to leave.”

“And what happens when he finds you?”

“I’ll be ready.”

That’s it. You’re going to leave me alone like this? She’d wanted to ask, demand. If it hadn’t been for him maybe she wouldn’t have known anything about life more complicated than how long it took to publish her next story.

“You want to be a hero. So what about helping people? Your people from something that could rip them apart?”
He was supposed to be her bedrock but he was only himself.

“Clark Kent has to die.” He told her. “---if I’m going to do that.”

He left and she only felt the wind hitting her face.
She hunched over the thousands of papers on kryptonite and comas and exotic poisons, wrapping her arms around herself, feeling some kind of pain. The same emptiness she’d felt even when he was with her.
Clark had left the farm key in her hand.

He’d done this so many times before it was almost habit. It was only to be expected that he’d use Davis as a trigger for another of his little identity crises.
Maybe he would get it right this time.

Operations would go on without him.
She didn’t cry, didn’t close her eyes, didn’t clutch the key so hard it made her bleed. She picked up the phone, pressed in the buttons deep.
Emil Hamilton would be the first new recruit.

In bed that night she felt as if a weight pressed in on her so heavily that she couldn’t breathe. While the Watchtower lived, the word was still out on Chloe Sullivan.

---
There was no Clark, no leader. She was Chloe Sullivan, the Watchtower and she wasn’t defined by those around her anymore.
She’d almost started from scratch. They had a few missions, minor ones, gathering Intel on Luthorcorp/Queen Industries, a few drug busts on a substance that brought on temporary meteor powers. She was relearning how to fire her Glock, how to cover Bart or Dinah’s back. She was learning how to match her research to Emil’s.
They were doing something.

When she was on her on her own, another project began to consume what now passed for her life.
It got so that she lived two lives, one asleep and one awake. Most of her memories lived and unlived twisted themselves, wrapped themselves around him. Every time she slept she saw him die, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to stay awake either. She needed to believe.
She didn’t dream herself surrounded by natives with eyes on the spears, wasn’t putting the eye on the tip of the needle*.

Awake she kept seeing the Kryptonite and wondering why it had killed Davis and never Clark, why Oliver had been so sure that Davis wasn’t going to fight. Oliver had never been a big believer in human or alien nature. If he was going to go Cherokee he could have coated his arrows and dropped him like a buffalo.

She had access to her own research. Amazon bullfrogs were among the very earliest entries into the wall of weird. They weren’t enough.

It was easy enough to hack into Tess’s system, the greatest catalogue of herbs there was.
Well. Not easy.
She’d pulled up hallucinogenic herbs - Datura. Tetrodoxin, a paralyzing poison taken from puffer fish on along the coasts of Haiti.

Dr. Emil was in the lab, creating a tranquilizing agent they were going to load into their guns. The JLA was her now and they weren't going to kill.

“Do you have another suggestion for me? I really don’t think creating a zombie army would fit our best interest.” he said finally, staring down at the printouts she'd pushed into his hands.

A man had claimed to be placed under the voodoo curse and to have come back ten years later.
Ten years, not a week. Ten years.

“No. No. There’s something I need to clear up. Call it professional curiosity.” They rarely talked about Clark, like they rarely talked about him. A few questions, with no real answers had assured them both of that. This was the rare exception.

“If this one, tetrodoxin had been used on Clark he wouldn’t have needed an antidote, right?”

“Not if it was removed. The sun’s energy provides Clark with faster metabolism, a faster immune system to deal with those threats.”

“Without the sun, right in the heart, on a kryptonite arrow.”

“So, in your theoretical scenario, if one of those hit him right in the heart and spread it through his body it would not have allowed him to expel the toxin.”

“Would it have killed him?”

“We can’t know with certainty. If he was completely packed underground the likelihood it that it would have is very hig-” No. It wouldn't. He wouldn't. She felt it.

“I need you to identify it for me.”

“The only way that could be any use would to have a sample of this substance. I can’t work from thin air.”

“I don’t have a water bottle now. Would an arrowhead be enough of a sample for you?”
It was.

---

It was almost midnight and still wet, slippery and she wasn’t using her crutch anymore. She hadn’t asked anyone to come with her. Clark was gone and she didn’t really trust anyone else to do this.

She felt frightened, crazed. Felt.
She was going to desecrate a grave. For Catholics, the grave wasn’t a mere shell for a body, like some part of him lingered there. She hoped.

Maybe this was house of Usher. Maybe she was just officially off her rocker, and just as mad-crazy-nuts as Adella. Maybe she’d just put together the whole conjecture and she’d find a corpse.

She trudged into the mud alone, almost invisible in the black, suffocating sweats. There weren’t many neighbors, and who’d be looking?

It took a few passes of the flashlight to see the stone and the worn palm leaf crucifix on the ground. It was just like they’d left it, but she closed her eyes, listened, really listened.

There was a whisper of a sound, something steady, almost like the drops of water on a leaf. It wasn’t raining.

When she pushed the shovel in the ground, it was heavy, compact with moisture.

Then she could almost hear the sound again, in her ears, under her heartbeat.
Inexplicably, then the dirt was loose around the shovel.

Before she knew it she was clawing into it with her hands.

---




It took only a moment, a jolt of apprehension. Something moved when Davis Bloome ceased to exist and started to be.

Aware, he knew nothing but blackness, unbearable pressure and no air. He tried to make a sound and felt something thick pressing into his throat and mouth. He needed to breathe. More than that, he needed heat, light. He ached for it.

It wasn’t quiet, silent, nothingness, not even the disjointed cries of victims of It in his head to torment him. This was reality, the solid heavy thud of his own heartbeat, someone breathing strange and catching and high so that it almost made him think of her, that first time, calling Clark. Hurting.
(It wasn’t him breathing. He couldn’t breathe.)

He didn’t take time to think of how he had gotten from her arms to here, where here was. He knew that something was calling him. Maybe he had been brought back for some reason, to atone.
Maybe she was right and he didn’t want to die.

Somehow his arms moved a fraction, bound like they’d never been and he had to close his eyes to remember what it felt like. Suddenly the thickness felt like water around him, but as he struggled up, every moment, it was as if more tumbled in, slickly sealing him back.

He could hear and there was something clawing down above him. The sound grew more erratic and still he felt nothing, thought that if he had not died, was not about to be torn apart by some nightmarish vision, he might be going mad.

He was choking and he needed to breathe and he pushed, his hand clasped over a fragile hold, slipping once, twice, clasping harder through the slick black. It felt like a small, cold hand.

It took him all of that moment to make himself hope, to know, to believe it was her. No one else breathed like she did, no one else had the exact beat of her heart. He knew.

Then all he knew was that somehow, there was air, strange and light and wet and he was falling forward onto her, breathing and he could feel her back thudding against the ground, a light gasp of pain.

He fell so hard he was crushing her and he tried to push aside, tried to remember how the rest of him worked. He was moving blind and only his arms seemed to cooperate.

He felt her hand guiding him, one on his shoulder and then not as he rolled off her and a clod of dirt burst from his throat, hacking as his lungs contracted and moved in on each other as if they were new.

He needed to open his eyes, needed to see but he could barely catch his breath to touch his hands to his face. He wasn’t dead but he could be something worse. He expected to find a decaying maw.

He forgot about that when feeling started return, tingling when a cool hand was pushed the mud out of his eyes.
“I buried you.” She said.

He tried to ask, how, something, but it sounded more like an exhale. She replied a quick string of words, something about arrows and zombie frogs and Oliver in Haiti and toxins in his bloodstream. He couldn’t hear so well yet, but he could read her lips, watched the dent on her lower lip where he had always wanted to reach out and touch.

There was a flush to her face, no fear in her eyes and of course this was a dream.

“Zombie?” he got this metal image of himself, gray skinned.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe he was just dying and making up some sort of last minute crazy death dream in his mind where he had everything he wanted. He gave himself over to it with her fingers on his neck, pressing his head into her shoulder in a quick movement.

She didn’t say anymore; shaking with something like tears or laughter. This wasn’t hell, purgatory or even heaven, but it felt like being reborn.

---
Mud, dirt, cold all over her- filling her up with something breaking and broken and tender. “You did it. You came back.” Davis probably couldn’t hear. He’d kept his promise. She made one. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight again.”

She should have been able to talk, say something about how this was a darn close to a miracle as she’d ever seen. It felt like cotton had been stuffed all the way back in her throat and her voice was thin, even with the door closed on them both and the comfortable crackle of the fire in Clark’s fireplace.

She scrubbed at his face, watched his eyes close, knowing that by now he could do it himself. He’d been able to unbutton that shirt of Clark’s before she yanked it off him. He was tense, quivering at odd intervals. He must have been pins and needles all over.

The blood was returning to the rest of him, not like before when he’d nearly collapsed on the way up the rickety steps.

He wasn’t a whisper anymore. She heard him, felt him. So prominent, there in her mind that she didn’t know what to say or really do. She’d fooled herself before, but it didn’t happen the way she would have dreamed it up.

Her hands didn’t shake like they’d wanted to and he didn’t kiss her. She’d fought off the urge to crush him close, still afraid that the old wounds might be there. Words she needed to say didn’t spill out in a steadily. She pretty much repeated herself over and over, his name and that he was going home with her and he had taken far too long.

He’d watched her face so searchingly that she’d doubted he heard a word she said, but then he’d pretty much said it verbatim, slower than she had. But still.

She told him that now he needed to get feeling back, to get cleaned up, to eat and spend some time in the light so that the sun could help cure him, she’d known that much since Clark.

“No objections yet?” she asked, dropping the towel to his chest and this time the words got out all right. Something rumbled out of him. That could mean anything in the world, from the fact that the towel was cold to he liked what she was doing with his hair. “Articulate.” He didn’t quip back at her.

As far as she knew he hadn’t smiled. He had been dazed first, then after the walk up held her so tight she couldn’t pull away to see his face. He hadn’t let her go since, let her poke and prod and smooth and smear the mud, seemingly shocked that he could feel again.

Now that she could see him, she could see that shock. Something else. Not calm. Her mouth worked, wanting to ask a question, changing at the last minute. “We might have to get the mud out of your ears.”

She pulled out of his arms a fraction of an inch, not even that and no farther. “Not yet.” He said.

“So that’s a yes, you do have an objection.”

He didn’t answer; he needed to feel. She couldn’t let it be. She needed the sound of his voice, something more than the steady feel of his skin and pulse. She’d dreamed of him quiet.

“You have to talk to me. I need to know how to help. Is it hard to focus? How’s the vision? Datura was originally meant to take willpower and…”

“None of that.” He closed his eyes convulsively and pulled her in, something that was more pain than pleasure. “You don’t have to say anything.”

He still wasn’t warming up, even though there were blankets on the couch and they were getting mud all over them and the leather seats. He seemed content just to hold her like this, if that was the right word for it. She heard his heartbeat steady like a Trobrian drum. Louder. He wouldn’t let her see his eyes.

“I knew you weren’t meant to die.” Not die. He hadn’t been meant to leave her.
He had to say something, anything.

“Maybe my task wasn’t over.” He said, finally, and she heard, felt the vibrations in his throat. “I get to try and atone for what I—it did.”

At least he acknowledged that he was separate from It. That was more than he had done before. But some, vague small part of her had expected him to be free for a moment longer. He wanted to live. His hands had been reaching up for hers too.

He laughed, a harsh sound, and she wasn’t so sure anymore. “I won’t ever be able to, will I?”

She’d heard his voice like this before, didn’t want to now that he was here, breathing. They could both burn down the world with all their self-blame.
“You managed to save four people already. That’s something.”

“I didn’t.”

“You saved me. You saved Bart, Dinah, and Clark. The three of us would have survived without you there. You bought Clark enough time to trap the thing that was meant to kill him. I’d say you’ve made a start.”

“I couldn’t let it hurt anyone.”
He seemed to look at death charging It as something he needed to do. Not something he did just because, not something heroic.

“You didn’t. So what’s the problem?”

“It came out because I got free.”
She’d seen enough of that to know it didn’t make it any less remarkable. If it had been anyone else, they probably would have run away and the sight of a giant horned thing that topped the creatures from ‘the Mist’.

“I split you, remember? It slowed down because you got free too.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

She pressed her nose into his cool shoulder and felt his pulse race. With anger? Fear? It was right not to value your life above anyone else’s. He seemed to value everyone’s existence above his. Now that he was free the first thing he did was chain himself up with more guilt because he just couldn’t stand to be happy, or he told himself he didn’t deserve it.
They were more alike than he knew.

“I just had to stop It. I let it throw me against a little wall, collapse a building and get away. God knows how many more people it killed when It got out.”

“It’s not like you had any time to learn.”

“If I had only done things differently, not let myself get distracted, hit It harder…”
He wasn’t with her anymore and this was the time he needed to be.

He hadn’t wanted to die, however much he’d repeated that he did. He was holding her not running for a shotgun.
She didn’t need a fantasy world where they were normal people. She just needed him to admit it.

“It’s done. Over. The Planet’s printed a retraction now that the stories of the monster have completely come out. You have a life. We’re here. Let it go.”

“I can never forget that.” He was one to say that. “I shouldn’t. This is all a lie.”

“You should. You get a chance to start over, like we were going to do. You gave me part of my life back.”

“I don’t need to consume your life anymore. I can try to be the guy you met before. You can live.”

“I’m not rejoicing that you don’t need me to keep it back anymore! You’re alive, okay? Part of my life was gone without you.”
He’d had hours of oblivion. He hadn’t been above ground, dreaming of her kissing him, loving him and dying, living every minute he was awake thinking he’d caused the death of someone he cared about.

“You can’t save me again when I wake up to just how much of a monster I was.”

“You weren’t ever a monster. I mean you—not...”

“I can still hear their voices. There were women, children, Chloe.” He wasn’t talking about escapades of the cornfield variety. Somehow, he still had its memories. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. “That’s going to be with me forever.”

“It was like this before, wasn’t it?” He didn’t have to say anything for her to know. “Why didn’t you tell me? Answer with something that’s not about dragging me into this.”

“You’d done enough. I didn’t want to make you think of... It was hard enough. What was I even supposed to say?”

“I’m sorry you’re hurting, but I’m glad.” The moment of realization didn’t appear on his face and his eyes weren’t with her anymore. Panic welled up. As long as he was listening they had a chance.

"You don't have to save me anymore."
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. He had to believe her. He could at least pretend to be happy for her.

“I wish you’d be quiet for long enough to appreciate that you’re actually alive.” She half-hissed at him. He stopped at that long enough that she was able to free herself from his grip, enough to thump him on his chest, hard. She half-expected him to crumble into dust and when he didn’t her hand felt like it was breaking.

She wanted to laugh, happily, crazedly. She would’ve done it again if his wrist hadn’t shot out and caught hers. He shushed her and she didn’t want to be shushed, treated like an invalid or widow for one more second of her life.
Clark’s pacifications she’d gotten used to. Davis’s just made her angry.

He was too damn strong for her to do anything about it so she did a stupid thing. She kissed him harder than she had hit him.

She felt the same terrified feeling, worse than when they were on the run, worse than all those times she dreamed of him when she knew she was going to lose. There was no reset button, and any mistakes she made now one of them would pay for.

She shouldn’t have worried. Or she should’ve worried more. He made a strangled sound and his mouth angled sideways, harder into hers. She could tell by the way his breathing started to pick up that it wasn’t her, reading into things again, lying to herself.

He wanted this. Of course he wanted this and she felt his mouth demanding and slick and not nearly as cold as the rest of him, the clammy cloth on her back bunching under his fingers.

His hands loosened and when she could touch him again she was the one sounding strangled.
It took five seconds longer than before for him to pull away from her. When he stood his eyes were red in the perfectly human way and he was breathing hard.

“You don’t want to do this.” He told her, and she could still taste the earth in her mouth.

The fact that something close to a miracle had happened didn’t mean he believed her. He had a right to believe what he wanted after she’d almost used him before. She had every right to fight him.

“Yes, I do. You can’t say that it’s because of protecting Clark now.”

“You’re distraught.”

“That I am. Maybe I’m having hallucinations, I just dragged your body out of the ground and you’re really not alive at all. Maybe I’m so desperate for you to be alive that this is all in my head. That doesn’t make ….this… any less real. I want to be with you. Clark isn’t here.”

At least Davis didn’t know whose house they were in, whose carpet he was standing on, barefoot and half-naked. He’d probably read all sorts of things into that.

“If he were here you would be with him.”

It was easier to run to something safe. “I’m not Clark,” he said.

“I never wanted you to be Clark!”

“I know. You just wanted to save us both and you let him go. I’m not going to make you do that.” She could take anything but the nobility card. Resentment was fine. Not this.

“I couldn’t just leave a part of who I was behind. He shaped me, and I guess a part of me wanted to be around to know he was protected and safe. I’ve been doing this forever. It wasn’t you. I couldn’t just...walk away from that.”

“I understand.” So convinced, his face smooth. It was so easy for him to say and she wanted to chuck something at his head. He always used that face when he lied.
He was a good liar, she’d give him that, but now she looked really closely at him, the way he stood, half-defensive she wondered how she hadn’t seen through it before.

“Just so we’re clear, I won’t ever want you to be Clark. Clark couldn’t stay and work out the guilt. Clark left.”
It had been the first time she let him.
“I’m talking about neither of us running away.”

Davis didn’t look betrayed this time. He looked like she’d just confirmed something that he’d been thinking all along. He used to listen, read right under what she said when she said it. Maybe that wasn’t enough for him anymore.

“That’s exactly why I can’t let you do this. Every time there’s been ‘we’ it’s been because he was gone. “

“Have you heard the entire drama with Jimmy?” He wasn’t listening.

“Maybe I just don’t really have a place in your life.”

“No. You’re not going to say that. I left with you. I mourned you. I’ve never let Clark go before!”
She needed that, the painful giddy adrenaline rush in her veins. She never thought she would ever feel it again. She actually wanted to break something.

“And I can’t be him for you now that you have.”

“You just twist everything around!”

“I twist everything around?!” There was a catch in his voice when he raised it. “You’re trying to martyr yourself again.”

“Fine, maybe I wanted to be. I wasn’t.”

“You still don’t want this.” He said, quiet again. He started to pick the shirt up off the floor and he wasn’t going to walk away from her like that. Moral high-ground her ass.

“And I want Clark, right? to tell me exactly what I want? You say you can’t be Clark but you’re doing a wonderful job of being his replacement. You are Clark.”

She threw the towel right at his chest like a challenge. One he didn’t take. He caught it, stalked with false calm to the bathroom. He didn’t slam the door.

She went to the windows, yanked the curtains open wide to see the blackness outside. The sunlight in the morning would help him recover if he didn’t decide to do something stupid like stalk on out.

He wasn’t going to. She heard the water come on and briefly considered lighting his clothes on fire.

It took her one minute to be glad there weren’t locks on the door. She wasn’t the one running away, now. It took one angry yank and the sweatshirt landed in the sink. It would have been akin to an invitation if he had been paying any attention.

His back was too her and the water was already running. Maybe he thought she was going to do something vindictive like flush the toilet repeatedly. Maybe he wasn’t hearing her again.

She was going to make him hear her.

She had a vague notion of flinging the underused curtain aside and the freezing drops of water spraying into her eyes and falling to the floor, highlighting parts of her that well---Jimmy would have been a drool-monster.

She respected that Davis was still looking at her face. And hated it.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“When I said I wasn’t going to let you out of my sight, I meant I wasn’t going to.”

He was as angry, scared, something as she was and his fingers were actually twitching in frustration. She felt a strange thrill in not knowing whether he was going pull her to him or tear her apart. In the end he just stood there.

The bathtub was always too small and slippery and if she fell down on it she was probably going to destroy all the progress that the cast made. She didn’t care.

His arm shot out next to her so she didn’t slip and on instinct her hand closed around his, tugged so she was breathing over his shoulder, his chest flush against hers. He was cold.

She soaked in his tension like heat, felt his hands stiff and hesitant but there. He’d never denied her comfort when she needed it.
“I’m afraid.” She said nothing else. Nothing he needed to hear.
The fear wasn’t for monsters or horrors in the dark, it was for this.

“You have to tell me what this means.” He whispered. (She really didn’t know what she was doing, how could she answer that?)

“I know what it feels like, you know. You only know what you’re feeling, you can never know if the other person’s being straight or not.
Don’t you think I’m scared too? You don’t need me anymore. You could just get better and walk on out of here and find a rewarding life helping in orphanages in Rwanda. You could run away from me and my baggage and my Florence Nightingale complex. You could start again.”

“I wouldn’t start like that.”
His eyes, warm and gauging made her feel naked, stripped.

She couldn’t let him stop her. “No one’s ever needed me before you. Clark had his secret, and the world. He would’ve done okay. Out there, I needed you to need me just as much as you thought you needed me.”

She was far too close to him, but she’d been there hundreds of times, already. When she was sure he was dead, and she discovered that she was a sick, sick person.

“I slept in your bed.” She found everything he left behind, one dusty sweatshirt that smelled like him and used it as a pillow. She couldn’t just say it, could she?

“Clark wasn’t the one I was having trouble forgetting.” His arms were loose, not squeezing the breath out of her anymore and he was watching her face. Maybe didn’t believe her. He was going to. Somehow. She needed him to.

She kissed him and he almost didn’t move. He didn’t have to do anything at all. She just needed him to understand. He startled and she shushed him, trailed a hand from his chest to his heart. It wasn’t torn apart under her hands and that tiny action seemed to keep him stock still.

Her sweats were freezing against the tile and it felt like the water was going to run into her nose and she’d never been one to do this. She was still terrified, angry but a part of her felt strangely softened with his fingers curling into her hair, the shuddering sound bubbling from his throat.

“Stop, Please. Stop.” He gasped. Time shifted, or he did, too fast for her to see.

There was no Clark, no thing inside him about to tear down the world. She had let it go. Maybe he wasn’t thinking that now.

“I’ll always need you.” He said, and she knew, understood, felt. His face was dizzy in front of her and he kissed her, after she had… Jimmy never would have done something like that.

The only solid wall faucet was digging into the back of her calf. He was hugging her again and the mud on her palms was smearing on his clean back when she pushed his head into her shoulder.

The cool water had switched off and no mist gathered around them to hide her. Why had she wanted to hide?
She just needed him to know, she told him. His hands made her feel suddenly small and frail when the brushed her waist. Maybe he was listening on another level now.

He was pressing, aggressive, desperate, cold pushing her against the ledge of the tub. If her legs gave way she would fall backwards and break something all over again. He wouldn’t let her.

He stepped over edge and she barely felt herself move but she did. The world swung around crazily in all sorts of directions and her arms were locking around his neck. She had no sense of balance, only clenched tightly to his neck and saw the watery footprints he made up the steps and to some sort of bed. She was hardly looking.

They landed hard. He rolled to the side at the last minute still holding her; hand falling lightly on her casted knee where he had set it before Jimmy shot him. The pressure of his fingers hit her like a dull current.

“It’s still broken. I hurt you when you pulled me out.” If he went back to concerned and noble she could almost scream.
She pushed him and gritted her teeth when her knee hit the rough mattress next to his hips. The tenderness was still there under layers of padded cast.

He shifted to his side again with his hands on her shoulders, without the slightest sign of feeling as the cold water from what was left of her clothes came into contact with his skin. “You shouldn’t put pressure on it.” he said and she half-listened to the words, listened more to the rasp in his voice when she was above him again.

It could have hurt; a bruising, freezing entanglement of limbs. She wanted it to, wanted to claw all the way through her skin to him but she couldn’t.

He didn’t claw. His eyes were only brown when he framed her face, more awkwardly than he would have had he not still been holding her shoulders, keeping her knee for sinking all the way into the mattress. He kissed her and she felt bound. Open. The tension in his face melted away, or maybe she just couldn’t see it. She shivered at his hand, cold on the back of her neck. Lower.

The clasp prickled into her back, seemingly built to enforce chastity. There wasn’t much to take off but he had to do it. It wasn’t just wanting to feel wanted. She knew, instinctively, something, that he needed to get the chance to do this.

It didn’t fall away easy and as her hands moved along his back his mouth was against the black lace, feeling if possible more forbidden than on her skin. He was too gentle, didn’t bite or do any of those things that she’d thought he would do right off, didn’t leave a mark. He just wouldn’t stop.

She couldn’t breathe, the closeness of him making her twist, making her feel like the one who was wide open. He hadn’t wanted to live. Given the choice, he’d chosen. She had almost hated him for that. She feared that part of her; the bigger part wouldn’t ever let her, no matter how this had ended. She needed this.

She pulled down on his forearms and pushed herself against him. It had to cost him too. His eyes were already pushed shut and his fingers trembled from where they touched her sides when he moved gently against her. Something inside her was aching and that was not far enough.

He was telling her to relax, but she couldn’t. Everything wasn’t right yet but that changed nothing. “I should have expected this. You don’t even cooperate in my fantasies.”

His eyes finally opened with something like disbelief with one hand in her grip above his head. Compared to what he could do, this was less than a cobweb. He could use his strength to get free.

“What?”

“You heard me.” She muttered, lacing her fingers through his bigger ones, hoping he’d just let her. This wasn’t a fairytale where the pain happened and then they waited for a happy ever after. They needed now. “You should kiss me again.”
And he didn’t.

His free hand traced its way slowly up her arm and she wondered why she wanted him to see into her. “Tell me something first.” His eyes were too focused, too hot.

“I’m no mind-reader, Davis.” She smiled; she tried to and nearly jumped when his free hand coiled around her other wrist.

“Why did you let him go?” he asked, his breath brushing against her pulse. That wasn’t icy. She closed her eyes and still felt it.

“That’s questioning under duress, you know. “ She flexed her fingers, testing his grip like marble. “I think I wanted him to.”

“Why?” His tongue traced a line sideways over her palm, that long-double lifeline she’d gotten read at a carnival with Clark once.

“He---was gone and it didn’t hurt like. I thought it should’ve. I didn’t feel much. ever since you went DOA on me.” Her fingers prickled, moved involuntarily against his cheek. “I didn’t feel. Much .of. anything.” she repeated. “I thought I’d try to find myself again. I ended up finding you. ”

His eyes didn’t leave hers and she’d been waiting for that moment. He was supposed to say something.
“That wasn’t as hard as I thought.”

He didn’t say anything. He released her so she could move her hand again and she felt frail, again.
“What are you staring at?”

“You.”
His gaze had been easy to read once.

“Just staring? You really should k—“
He shushed her. It didn’t bother her at all. His forehead brushed hers and she felt his lips curving up in a half smile, curving into hers.

She lost count of how much time passed like that, kissing hard between moments when his mouth moved somewhere else, breaking the straps, tearing lace, never breaking her skin. She pressed her nails gently into his shoulders in frustration, shocked when she left small red crescents on his.

It was easy with him. Too easy even with the cold seeping into her bones and making her skin feel sensitive, chafing. Eventually his hands smoothed closer, quicker, a contrast to the softness of his mouth.

She knew what he was going to do. She could have barely felt it with the way he was touching her, not letting either of them quite catch a breath. She knew every crevice or bit of tension in him, knew that she wasn’t thinking clearly enough to remember it quite perfect for later.

She closed her hands against his shoulders again, feeling the prickling closer, a strange ache in her chest. He pushed the sopping cotton until it tangled around her ankles and into the muddy mess around them. She wasn’t unprepared for this but she still had to exhale at the cold of his skin when it met hers completely.

His eyes didn’t leave her face when he came into her. Gravity saw to that, and his arms were holding her up like she weighed nothing at all. He was going to say something but she kissed him before he got the chance, screwed her eyes shut tight at the sharp feeling when he pulled her all the way into his chest. It wasn’t idealized warmth, but she didn’t need that.

He was so close that she barely felt anything but him inside her when the mattress hit her bare back. Dammit. She was under him after all and she couldn’t even care. She needed the now, him, moving in her so that something started to build and she had to clench her hands in his. She took everything but she didn’t feel him lose control, not once. He needed something more to get there.

She could use her question now; ask him what he needed from her, like she didn’t know. She was about to tell him to wait, but right then she started feeling something far more than distant pleasure. Davis, she said. The ‘wait’ kind of sputtered into nothingness.
Then she couldn’t stop herself. It was his name after all.

There was a shift in him with that, and he slowed, possessive in a way she’d never felt. The pressure could just pull her apart from the inside. She was surrendering-control, something. It should have frightened her.

All she could really see was him open mouthed in a different sort of amazement than the first time he said she’d saved him. He was free of that, and he was with her, and he saw her as his. His face was changing, sweat dripping over her, his teeth digging into his lip.

“You are me.” He growled out, and she could never take it back.

He wasn’t like before, and he was. He could never be the guy he had been before this mess, the one who wanted nothing more than to stay and blindly, desperately be all she needed when she didn’t know what that was. He’d wanted to die. She stared up at him barely breathing and realized that it didn’t matter.

He was in her, trembling and rough and wild-eyed, but she wouldn’t have bruises from the way he moved her. She wanted something and he needed something and he was going to make himself bleed before he did her.

“Do it.” She choked it out and her hands didn’t tremble so much when she pulled his head into her shoulder.

Her leg curled up of its own volition, creating friction against his side at the slow drag of his teeth against her neck, finally the deeper sharper pressure into the skin and tendons of her shoulder, like he was holding her in place. He wasn’t pulling out of her, like he couldn’t now. There was only pressure and more pressure and she was cramping, curling into a ball with her arms locked around his shoulders, her elbows digging into his ribs.

Time seemed to measure itself by the sound of his heart and every part of her was tired, so tired. Not yet.
She felt his breath panting at her cheek and his lashes against her face. She didn’t know what she was waiting for exactly but she felt it when he started to shake.

The first bit of warmth spilled into her body, made her jerk like she’d been hit. She heard his heart beating, his voice, far-off and in a tunnel, the word love sounding like the first time he said it, a much hoarser sound. Everything else was one large white noise. She felt that part of her that was still tender and raw flaring to life. Hurting, almost.

His body, his hands were pressing her back down and it happened, once and again dragging itself out so she wondered how she was counting time at all. If she even could.

There was one thing she knew about time. It ran out.
Eventually, he loosened up on her shoulder, eyes hazy and his cool hand gingerly tracing the contour of her jaw.

“This means something.” He said, not even smiling. As if it was something a hundred times more mystifying than just that. She wanted to laugh and cry, settled for breathing his air and trying on a smile.

She still couldn’t stop trembling. Everywhere was prickling and it was going to take a while to return to normal. With the urgency gone, cold was just that, as much as she wrapped herself around him. Of course he noticed that.

He softened, moved out of her, leaning over her to the edge of the bed. She didn’t want him to move away and that alone kept her from collapsing into an insensible lump at his side. He got up and he became the stranger again. Worse, he became unreal.

“Don’t.” Her hand was slipping, shaking and pressing firmly into his cheek. There was a smear of mud there. Mud she had put on it.

“It’ll just be a moment.”

“Nope. You called the shots. It’s my turn now. Why are you trying to leave? ”

“You’re shivering. I’m literally as warm as a dead person. I need to get you something for that.”

“Are you sure not going to go into that corner to have another freak-out?”

“No.”

“So you mean you are? Can’t let you move then.” It wasn’t as hard to reverse positions as she thought, but she would make sure not to let her chin jab into his chest next time. It hurt.

He tightened up and then it was as if he was forcing himself to relax again.

“It’s just a few inches, Chloe.”
He groped under the bed and she snorted when his hand came up empty.

“Come on, what drawer are they in?”

“None. You won’t find anything.” Her face reddened. Clark had stripped down his bed when he left. God, she hadn’t even noticed the walls were his.

“What makes you sure?” She’d been here before. She hadn’t been here. She wasn’t exactly ready to divulge that little bit of Intel. She didn’t want to think of Clark tonight.

For now she could get him to stay here, pretend the biggest things they had to argue about were silly. “We don’t need them. They’re just to keep body heat from escaping. This’ll work a little longer.”

His lips moved against her thumb. “--can’t sleep on top of you.” He said, contradicting himself by nearly jumping on top of her when she tried to reciprocate.

The mud still in her hair smeared a shape under his throat. “Did anyone ever tell you that you have far too much tension?”

“No. This could hurt you.”

She pressed a line down his chest with her mouth, mumbled ‘why?’ halfway through, expecting his answer to be simple. Her broken leg, for one. He ended up saying things about not being to hold onto self-control. She liked that better.

“I would hurt you.”

“What makes you think I don’t want that?” She would have a purple mark under her collarbone, soon.

“We need to talk.” He persisted, words uncharacteristically uncoordinated.

“We are talking.” He looked up, down at her, blinking too quickly when she said she needed him. She kissed the spot over his heart, feeling the blood drum in her ears. He’d bled out all over her hands. “So stay.”

The goose bumps prickled along her skin when his arms came around her again. Maybe he didn’t want to question the moment either. “Okay.”

She stopped counting time.

She felt bruised and alive and knew she couldn’t fall asleep like this.
He was close but she needed to be sure he’d stay.
His hands soothed and teased those thoughts away, too. She didn’t dream.


---

She was cooking. Literally, feeling herself cook with heat. She flailed her hand over her head and nearly clobbered him on the nose.

“MMmmmpph.”
He was heavy. She couldn’t feel her knee and she was sweating just out of the proximity. The sunlight had done its magic.

She pushed him and it really was like pushing a dead person. “No.” he mumbled, digging his fingers in, making marks into the mattress and her. “I’m not losing---.”
“You’re not.”

He shook his head and twisted. Apparently she hadn’t been the only one with nightmares.

“Wake up.” She poked him, not hard and he hugged her harder.

“Yeah?”

“Davis, would you mind? It’s the morning. My leg’s asleep.”

When he shifted around and opened his eyes she could have been worrying about a whole lot of things. The fact that even though she wasn’t getting turned into a Chloe pancake, she was naked and she didn’t have a second pair of clothes. The fact that he was naked and Clark didn’t leave any handy clothes behind that she knew of, not even tights. She was thwarted when, eyes half shut from sleep, he smiled.

“I’m on cast duty then.”
He sat up and waited for her to scoot over. “I didn’t mean right off. We need breakfast. Clothes!”

“What does the order matter?” His eyes were warm, remnants of arousal still there but he wasn’t trying to seduce her.

“So, no sudden urge to follow my ever whim? I think it’s safe to assume you’re not a zombie.”

“We still should take care of it as soon as possible.” He raised an eyebrow, amused when she ducked at the side of the bed. She had been taught some modesty.

“Not the best idea right now.”

“Despite my abysmal track record, I won’t bite.” He could see her shoulder over the side of the bed, by now, the mark he’d made when she rubbed at it. It still tingled.

“Careful you don’t get too self-satisfied.” She muttered, tracing the outline where his teeth had been with her tongue, liking the way that threw him off balance.
She didn’t worry about his staring until his eyes flared red. Kryptonian.

“Close them!”

By the time he had it was too late. Her eyes fell on the once-blue mattress, muddy, smeared, and newly singed. At least it wasn’t on fire.
“You see why I’m not so sure about that.”

“I did that?” He really didn’t know the full spectrum of those powers of his. “I could have killed you.”

“Comes with the territory.”

“This didn’t happen yesterday.”

“You weren’t charged up yesterday. Now I owe Clark a new bed.” She groused. “You just had to pick his, didn’t you?”

“You’ve been in here?”
She really hoped that was jealousy and not his ‘freaking out’ face.

“I used to listen for Martha to holler for him to get up off it. Much to my teenage chagrin, we didn’t have sleepovers. You really proved your point, though.” That was only half a joke and he didn’t get it.

“I didn’t know that it was his room!”
By omission, she did. She couldn’t deny it. Okay, so maybe he felt a little dirty.

“I only noticed afterwards. Don’t you turn this into one of these weird substitution things, because you know that wasn’t what it was about.”

“I told you just what you wanted to hear, didn’t I? “ Among many other things. He didn’t say ‘from Clark’, but he meant it. She opened herself up to him, and all that had changed nothing.

“--you actually think I would do that?“

“You didn’t say a word. What am I supposed to believe?”
Me. You are supposed to believe me.

“You touched me! It’s not like I could think at the time!”
She finally stalked from behind her hiding place. His face was frozen, infuriating. This was one of those make-it-or-break-it moments. If he didn’t believe her now he just wouldn’t.

“Neither could I.” he said, and she was holding her breath.

“So? You made me love you.”

She looked at him, didn’t touch him because he had to make this choice on his own. There was something in his eyes that she couldn’t pin down.

“I believed you the first time.” His mouth tilted up and grazed her neck. “For the record.”

With one of his hands on her knee, she realized she’d been played. “Now, let’s see what we can do about that cast.”

“Not.cute.”

She was not going to laugh, she wasn’t. Her shoulders were quivering and his cheek was pressed against her stomach, arms tentatively around her because this time he could break her bones.

“One more question?” he asked, and his breath brushed the skin right next to her belly-button.

“So as long as we’re doing the life-altering revelations, shoot. “

“What are we going to do?”

“Get clothes, eat breakfast, and I’ll help you get over your tendency to barbeque furniture. In that order.”

“I like it when you go bossy on me.” He said. He wasn’t cold. She was shivering.

“…or, you know, not.”

(It was really simpler than that. And more complex. )
We live.

---

There had been two burials the week before.

---

There was a grave, if it could be called that.
A hole, muddy ground in the middle of the miles of green grass. There was no coffin, no marker, no stone. The dirt was disturbed, a shovel fallen by the wayside. As if someone had taken the body.

There were only two things that remained. One red rose, long since divested of petals.
A seal written in some archaic, unrecognizable language.
The House of El.

---

There was another grave. It was a mausoleum, really, visited by the Queens for generations, when there had been any of them left. Now there were only high stone walls and complete silence.
The large black coffin gleamed like ebony.

A half-veiled woman kneeled close, not mourning. Not exactly.
She known the man after a fashion. He was proud, larger-than-life, principled in his way, adored, vengeful, selfish, self-deceived. Never content.
Worthy enough to be His vessel.

There was no guilt. She was going to give him something better, give him something great.

“You will be remembered.” Tess whispered and the purple stone she placed in his coffin began to glow.
It would begin, soon.


---

(Davis Bloome had thought he’d known the bookend to the story.

He’d imagined the loose press of her light fingers into the home phone, those eleven numbers, and Clark’s voice on the line. He expected a joke about Clark was going to come by for dinners, he’d better believe it and her smile over the table, knowing all of them were free. Which meant this was certainly not what he got.)

Somewhere, after the after the haze of lovemaking, normalcy, or what passed for it, had returned. He’d found himself sitting on a wooden chair, dressed in overalls several sizes too large while she poured coffee into her massive mug, draped in, literally, curtains. She’d improvised. She was good at that.

Her eyes were thoughtful, somewhere else, so focused that he almost hated to break her mood. The phone hadn’t rung at all, and everything was quiet except for the counterpoint chirps of exactly sixty-two birds outside, the slow flow of water in a stream nearby, the rumble of a truck hitting a pothole a mile away, the wheezing cough of the man in the truck as he exhaled from a cigar. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on the sound of her heart, if not the sounds were likely to drive him mad.

“Is everything alright?” he asked, by way of conversation.

“Sure. I know what you’re thinking. No calls, no emails. Disturbing for a technophile, right? Clark disconnected the phones a week ago.” She said, reaching for his cup and pouring it black.

“Don’t you want to get in touch?” She kept pouring, slim fingers steady. “Oh, I don’t even know where he is.” She said.
“He didn’t leave a forwarding address when he left me this place. I bet the Isis computers wouldn’t even get a tracker on him.”

“Oh.”

“Speaking of which, I’ll need to turn in there soon. Duty calls.” She looked up at him, hair still mussed, eyes gauging.

“Okay.” The day got a little dimmer, then but he tried not to let it show. She had a life.

He briefly considered asking her to drive him, too, not knowing where he would go. Maybe the city was still doing cleanup. He needed to do something, reparation, fruitless really but it wouldn’t matter. He had to look at it head on. There were names to find, things to make up for. People had died.

He’d been too happy. All thought of that had flown out of head, and it shouldn’t have.

“You’re brooding again. If I come home and find you like that, I will scream. Isis. Would you like to come with?”

“You’re still counseling? “

“Not so much. It’s more like,’ take counseling or else’ and Oliver’s superhero club mixed together. We’ve even got tranq darts. You know the geek in you can’t miss out on that.
Oh-and there’s someone who will absolutely flip when he meets you.”

“I was thinking of going back to the scene; see if I could do something.”

“You still want to try and fix everything, don’t you?”

“…and it’s punishing and I’ll never be able to, I know. I can’t not try.”

“And I love you for it. But you’ve got to be practical here. People know your face now. It’ll only take a little memory jogging for the whole serial killer mess to come up again. I’m not letting you get speared on someone’s pitchfork.”

“I’ll take responsibility. I’m not going to run from this.”

She didn’t yell at him this time. “Of course not. You’re you.”

He watched the reactions flicker on her face, still amazed at how they flowed, one to the other. Exasperation, affection, was that pride?

“Coming with me is still the best way. If you join the superhero club you can make more of a difference. Good tagline, right?
With that freakishly massive strength of yours you can get people out of wreckage, help us catch some cons…Sky’s the limit, really.
You can wear a mask, like some of us. No one even has to see your face, so it won’t be a risk.”

He looked at her across the table, sipping coffee, waving her free hand, the excited flush back on her face. “I’ll admit to being selfish. It would save me from missing you all the time. Come on, what do you say?”

“You’re right. It’s a good tagline.” A part of him didn’t believe it could be this simple, both of them doing this together.

There was so much to make up for he didn’t know where to start, if he could even be anything that remotely passed for a hero. Looking through her eyes, he believed he could.

“And…? Will you?” She asked; finally, hand out as if to shake on it.

“I do.” He said, catching it in both of his and not letting go.

---

(Three weeks later the real bookend came. The Planet's headline. Massive Takeover of Pentagon: Thwarted. Superman Lives! )
Davis Bloome still hadn’t gotten used to the red and blue.

---

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