lithophane

Reccing Notes: The third installment of the universe started by lathe and continuing in vessel. Just by way of explanation, a lithophane is an etched artwork in translucent porcelain that reveals a three dimensional picture with depth and detail. This has fic relevance. really. ^^

by vagrantdream at her/my journal
2633 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)

Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
I. The One Who is All.

The foundation was named for Isis, she'd told Lana, the Eqyptian goddess of love, and life, and healing. She saw Isis as the nurturer; the one who went to the ends of the earth for only one person, brought Ra to his knees.

i. Lana had seen the Isis Foundation a front for anti-Luthorcorp operations; only later as a place where the meteor-infected got on their feet. It was like a ward for patients with non-terminal diseases, a stopping place until they stepped into the whole wide world again. Isis was not meant to be a prison.

ii. Davis was looking for a prison, kept himself walled from the world the only way he could. He wasn’t like all the other cases that she’d tried to help meteor infected, all those times she’d failed miserably. The other meteor mutants had wanted the connection of seeing other people like themselves. He needed to stay as far away from others as possible.

iii. She never actually wrote anything on that pad of hers. It was another typical gesture of avoidance, like reading her first love letter out loud. She told Davis he couldn’t stay. She’d found him through coincidence and good guesswork. Someone else could find him just as easily, and if something happened they’d both be torn to bits.
“I’m a risk wherever I go, Chloe.”
“…I don’t think my apartment would work, considering... I was thinking you should come with me to Isis. That’s kind of the purpose of the place.”
“I can’t go there. I can’t just go into a room with other people. I might hurt somebody.”
“Isis has been closed down for almost a month. The friend who gave it to me kind of became the project. There’s no steady traffic in and out of the building, and I couldn’t get more tenants to come in.”

iv. “It’ll be safe.” So sure. He’d seen it there, the raw commitment with ‘her kids’ at Isis, the belief that she could help them, the pain after one of them had turned out to be a sadistic killer. He was the one person she’s helping, and he thought that he’d do everything he could to do this, whatever they were attempting. It was almost easy to think he wouldn’t break her heart in that hour when he felt just human.

v. (He didn’t have anything to take with him but those injections and neatly folded changes of clothes already packed in a red canvas bag.) It looked to her as if they’d been there for a week.

II. She Who Seeks Shelter

The blood red lettering over the wall reminds her of blood, the sacred pendants entombed with pharaohs. Isis was also the Queen of the Underworld, of death. Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
(Chloe doesn’t have a plan, not in the true sense of the word. He’ll be down there and she’ll be…around, kind of like a warden. The Queen of the Underworld, indeed.)

i. She’s careful to lock the front and basement door behind them, merely visual protections that can splinter to bits. (She doesn’t let herself think of what could happen next, what she’ll have to do to keep him inside.) It won’t come to that.

ii. He’s got about an hour left before he takes the injections again. He barely pays attention to the look of where he’s going to live. The dust on the boxes of documents, the fact that there’s only one corner where he can possibly sleep. She pretends to clean ineffectually, wonders how long it’ll be when until she forces him to come out with it.

iii. There, in the half opened bag, are her excuses. She doesn’t know how she’ll get the drugs analyzed exactly, but it always pays to be prepared.
“Give me.” He puts the needle in her palm so fast he almost drops it. It’s not subtle when he goes to the corner of the room, as far as he can from her personal space.

“Any particular reason you want to melt into the wallpaper, there?” He stiffens, and his eyes tell her the rest. “So it was a bad nightmare.”
“You died, that’s not just a bad nightmare, that’s...” (When she walks it’s not like the construct used to, but he can’t move any farther backwards and he’s trapped. Two yards left between them and it hurts.)
“My dad used to tell me that if you have dreams like that, they never ever come true.” “They’re frequent. The drugs cause trances and I saw you…”
“You may have some alien stuff going on, but I don’t think you’re Nostradamus. You’re not transforming or on meds now. Nothing will happen. I can’t really help if you act like a scared rabbit.”
Her hand hovers above his and he shudders. In the dream everything didn’t sound so sensible. “You’ve got to be okay with this.” The particulars blur so he’s not sure how long her hand lingers or what the exact words in what she says.
(She had healing once and she doubts it’s possible for her to be hurt; he doesn’t have to shut himself off.) There’s more than triumph, and something a little sad, in her smile.

iv. It’s all in the small steps. When he does take the drugs, she locks the door between them. Part of it is because he doesn’t want her to see him like that; part of it is because she has her own task to deal with. She wonders how he’ll react to the bandages on her left palm and the paper towels soaked in blood.

v. He’s the paramedic, still. When the bandages fall apart he resets them for her so they don’t chafe. It’s the barest touch, and it lingers like a phantom limb.

vi. She wants to reassure him, tell him that she won’t die, that he won’t hurt her. Only they’ve never been able to keep lies between them, and the scarlet marks her like a brand. “We’ll figure out something.” she says.

III. Lady of the Words of Power
She’s no great lady of magic; possesses no magic touch to make this right, no abilities than will suddenly make this easy.

i. It’s been a week of looking over her shoulder every minute, telling Clark about her work with Lana, telling Jimmy nothing because he won’t ask and she doesn’t know what she’d answer anyway. The threads to her old life keep her in limbo, but his desperation drives her as her own. She feels locked into research and hope.

ii. The drugs she analyzes on the Isis computers were just that. Drugs that ought to have been fatal to any human being; that his body is resisting more every single time. The only way they could possibly work if they were something like Kryptonian viruses capable of adapting at It’s own speed, like the ones that had changed Lionel Luthor; destroyed. Human drugs give him only a few weeks before time runs out. There are some sketchy research projects on DNA inactivation; where the risks outweigh the possible benefits almost ninety percent, where the Davis she knows could vanish forever just as easily as it.

iii. No idea is worth discarding at this point. She even buys steaks, bloody and raw, as if they will satisfy Its bloodlust.

iv. The next time he blurs into her life, Clark finds her with four packages of steak in her arms. He says nothing at first; neither does she. She’s perfectly aware she’s been shopping for two the past weeks; and she doesn’t want him to be. He pushes the cart behind her.
“Are you alright, Chloe? You’ve been distant lately. Jimmy’s worried. I know you need time to process, but so early after you’ve married, you two should really spend more time...”
Of course that was the reason he’d always wanted to see her.
“Thanks for the help, dear Abby. That work with Lana is more time consuming than you’d think”
“I talked to Lana.” He says. There went her alibi, but he won’t just go out and say it.
She wants to be able to shock that noble look off his face, just once. Something like ‘yes, Clark, I’ll confess to the torrid affair.’ Once she would have expected him to ask for the punch line. Now, he might actually believe her. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
“I want to help you, Chloe.” He tells her, looks like it’s actually him in pain when he doesn’t ever worry if he has tomorrow. (She thinks it’s become a reflex for him.)
“We both know how that turned out, don’t we?”

v. She should feel worse about it, in hindsight. Clark’s been having a tough time of it lately, with discovering that not all people fawn over acts of heroism, powers like his. Linda Lake just takes it to a whole new level by turning him into something from War of the Worlds, tearing down any comfort in the life he’s constructed.


vi. Chloe can’t be around Clark now, not when there are people calling out for blood. Not when there are just two thin doors between the world outside and Davis and her. She would feel much calmer if Linda didn’t remember her at all.

IV. The Brilliant One in the Sky

She’d always wanted to see the carvings in the sacred temple: My veil no mortal has hereto raised. The cool stone face, at once distanced and comforting. Invulnerable. She’s never been good disguising things or putting up fronts. They come up thin and flimsy and she thinks he must see through them in a minute.

i. She used to be able to hide behind words. ‘Engaged’ should have been so much flimsier than ‘married’. But she doesn’t feel any firmer, any farther from him at all.

ii. Despite what it might seem like, there’s nothing to sneeze at; nothing at improper at all. They have been friends, have seldom touched. He still looks at her like she’s at the center of everything and that’s as far as it goes.

iii. She’s the only one to initiate touch, at moments where she can’t take the space and the gaps between. When she does hug him there is no change rippling through him, no drugs in his system. She can still feel the unsteadiness of how he draws in breaths, even as his hands come up to her back.

iv. She finds her lie in the dull look in Jimmy’s face. He finally throws the word ‘affair’ out as a challenge as she packs the lunches one morning. (She disappears for stretches at a time; he knows she’s not thinking of him as she sleeps, there’s something about her that he doesn’t understand.) Her eyes feels raw but she looks at him steadily until he stabs his fork angrily into his omelet. “I don’t know you.” He says. She knows he’s right.

v. (She’s lost her capacity to lie to herself. She doesn’t deny that she feels that pull toward Davis, like gravity. There’s a mix of desire, comfort and protectiveness that she never tries to define; that she can’t voice because that’s not who they are.)

vi. Maybe she’s always known that she was in as deep in this as he was. Davis spends more and more of his time in a haze of pain, and those moments he is with her everything has a purpose and she feels like she has something. For a little while.

vii. She won’t deny the feelings, something all at once more and less complicated anything she ever felt for Clark. She thinks ‘affair’ is an ugly word, exactly the Jimmy would see it if he could.

V. Mistress of the House of Life
(He lives in a room that’s like a box, but everything about his life is more normal than he can remember. )

i. She forces him to eat, plays music by Bach and Handel, draws him out. All of this, in some hope that it’ll keep him human.

ii. It’s easy to remember to have faith in his humanity when she lingers everywhere in his conscience. It’s the details, how she tucks a pen behind her ear, drops references a mile a minute, reaches out when he least expects it.

iii. They talk plans; she lines up every outlandish idea that can possibly be of help. He watches when she stacks piles and piles of research texts on each other and he catches them before they topple. No one else will have these moments, for however long they last.

iv. Even when she’s gone, she keeps an old red jacket hanging over the couch, a scent he recognizes. It’s easy to close his eyes, fall into the deception. She’s not his. She’s married, and he doesn’t have the right to thoughts like that. Right or wrong, these are the memories he calls on when it begins.

v. She’s never seen him change. He can’t be sure what is quite real with the drugs, what he really sees versus what happens. But sometimes he feels it sparking of some parts of him, an arm flickering with spines; worse the thick heaviness in the back of his skull. He tries, squeezes his eyes shut, goes to a good memory, and remembers that some nights she sleeps with her back to the door.

vi. Pain is better than the oblivion. The drugs don’t cause him quite so much pain now, leave in their wake curiously blank moments to infringe on him, when his mind feels like its going, floating off into oblivion.

vii. It starts out small increments-seconds lost, minutes. He doesn’t think he changes, stays in his place and she’s been safe so far. Oblivion is what he fears most, no conscious control, no pain. If he lets go, these are the moments when he could easily become a monster in human form; when he can’t control what his body will do.

VI. Moon Shining Over the Sea

She’ll have to make a choice soon; cut ties with one world or the other because she can’t live in both. When she does it, everything will change. The world will be turned on its head, and she won’t be swayed by what used to be her life.

i. Lois. Clark. Jimmy. They were her life, once. They can’t always be. Soon, she thinks. Soon. Not just yet.

ii. She leaves the foundation for a trip with Lois, a girl’s night out. Lois is cross at the farm boy again for reasons unknown, but they make it a pact not to speak of anything important. It’s just time with where she is just Lois’s cuz, time she wishes she had to give.

iii. Things don’t go as planned. They end up walking on their own through ugly, un-crowded streets, two girls in impractical shoes. Easy targets for a couple of thugs. She ducks and weaves ungracefully; wallops one with her purse. Lois incapacitates the other with a pair of heels. Stilettos; perfectly fierce…

iv. That becomes Lois’s plan, something to draw attention away from Clark. A dramatic description of her superhuman prowess, a few exaggerations should do the job; maybe even stall the front page. Maybe she won’t ever say it out, but Clark is the center of her life.

v. Chloe thinks that that was her once. (When she drops her as the anonymous source in her latest column, Lois thinks it still is.)

vi. Clark and Lois, Jimmy…They have each other. They’ll be alright. And she has him. (Chloe thinks she is ready now.)

I.
Regardless of what she said, she never really understood Isis; never understood the counseling, what her role meant. But she’s living it now. It’s unavoidable how it all merges; shapes her into the girl who’s willing to go to the ends of the earth. The one who’s going to open that door and face it all.
Life, love, home and death.
Isis. She thinks she almost understands the name.

She who makes the Right Use of the Heart.

Endnotes: Header titles taken from Egyptian mythology, the book of the dead.