Reccing Notes: Okay posting some earlier stuff, before getting into beast trailer inspired. um. wallfic. This is davis focus, focusing on his feelings, how he sees Chloe and what he's give up so she'd be happy (even before Eternal). Pretty darn spot on. Also, happy/hopeful ending.
tobywolf13 is one of my favorite authors, kind of legendary in the chlark world (and awesome at crafting plot, ie her series crusade). The fact that this is Chloe/Davis is just icing on the cake.
by tobywolf13 at her livejournal
569 words, pg, abyss and prey
So, smiling, he guides her gently to his car, buckles her belt for her. He promises that it'll all be alright.
And it's only half a lie because it will be for her.
I.
He watches her back as she gets up from the table, watches the smart blazer, the way her hips move as she leaves him. She's beautiful. She's smart and loyal and she's been this light for him in the last month or two. She feels like salvation and he's not even completely sure what he's being saved from, not sure if it's after a life of never having a home, or even from an empty apartment with nothing more there for companionship than a fish tank and stale pizza. She made his days easier---her smile, her wit, her compassion.
And he has to let her go.
Because even though she can feel it too, she's not his and she might never be.
So he'll wait.
***
II.
He wasn't going to come back. He wasn't going to bother her. He keeps his promises and she was so adamant. He respects her, doesn't want to make things awkward with her and her fiance, truly he doesn't. But it's not about that. It's about getting to the bottom of his past, of finding a way to cope with the blackouts that just won't stop, that only come on more and more frequently. To put to rest suspicions he's had growing since Clark accosted him.
He doesn't think he's involved.
But if only he knew more.
So he goes and sees her and the sunny smile and witty banter makes him want to grab her, hold her in her arms, and kiss her until she says "Jimmy who?" But instead he makes a crack about her reporter's hat and keeps it professional, makes it a deal between them.
He's desperately trying to be the better man.
***
III.
She's crying on his shoulder. Her memories are all gone but he's the one she remembers. It has to mean something. No one has ever cared about him like this, trusted him with all the raw naked faith she has. It means the world to him, but he made his promises. There's a best friend and a fiance waiting for her and he tries to be a man of his word, tries to be the kind of man Chloe thinks he is.
So, smiling, he guides her gently to his car, buckles her belt for her. He promises that it'll all be alright.
And it's only half a lie because it will be for her.
***
IV.
It's out there now. Those words.
He's going to wait and he means it.
He wanted to be better, but he's not. Hell, he's met Olsen, seen the way he's insecure, doesn't trust Chloe. Davis does. He'd always trust her. He just doesn't deserve her. Davis knows he could take care of her, would do it happily for the rest of his life.
Cherishing would be easy.
But he doesn't break up marriages; he won't.
So he offers her a promise and tries to keep it together as she walks away again.
***
V.
She's in his arms, and he's kissing her now. She's finally relenting, finally accepting what they have, finally ready. It helps a lot that a month ago, Lois caught Olsen in the Ace of Clubs with a blonde that wasn't Chloe. Helped more that he had a friend in the court system who could speed through divorce proceedings.
But he waited for her, because she mattered.
He waited for her and now he can feel her soft and warm beneath his hands, can enjoy the soft pressure of her lips on his.
He loves her and now he's never letting her go.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
on the care and feeding of ultimate destroyers
Reccing Notes: Eheh. proactive Davis. ^-^ Chloe hardly knows what hit her. The most sensible way for things to go. You will be grinning ear to ear. Did I mention the Labyrinth references? She's got genius, I say.
by seriousfic at her lj.
2,082 words. pg-13. stiletto
As far as romantic rivals went, he wasn’t addicted to painkillers like Jimmy or ambiguously gay like Clark.
It took him a couple days of watching daytime TV in Chloe’s basement, but Davis started to come to terms with being a space monster. It was like Dr. Phil said. He had to accept the things he couldn’t change, the courage to change the things he could, and the wisdom to know the difference. Davis was pretty sure being a space monster was the first thing. And hey, he was the best space monster out there. The Ultimate Destroyer. That was worth something.
What he really needed to do was accentuate the positive. Sure, he was living in a basement, but it was Chloe’s basement. As far as romantic rivals went, he wasn’t addicted to painkillers like Jimmy or ambiguously gay like Clark. He and Chloe lived together, talked infrequently, and didn’t have sex… it was almost like a loveless marriage! And Maury had a lot to say about loveless marriages.
Well, the first step to putting the fire back in (or rather in for the first time) their relationship was to shake things up! For too long he’d let Chloe cook his food, do his laundry, and dispose of his dead bodies. It was time he helped out around the basement!
Right after Ellen. God, that woman could dance.
***
Chloe came home in a bad mood. Clark had tried to open a charity as the Red-Blue Blur and, because he was shit at delegation, he had put Jimmy in charge of the money. Jimmy had used the money to buy coke. When Chloe had tried to explain to Clark how Jimmy was a photographer/drug addict and not an accountant, Clark had only replied “Well, you were going to marry him.”
Now she had to find a way for Jerry’s Kids to get some mileage out of crack cocaine. And cook dinner for Davis, because God forbid…
Chloe stopped. Weird things were afoot at the Talon. She looked down at the hardwood floor and saw her reflection looking up at her. Then she looked at the wallpaper and was reminded that it had been blue once. She went into the kitchen to find Davis bent over, scrubbing the inside of the oven.
God, the man could bend over.
“Davis, what are you doing out of the basement?”
Davis pulled his head out of the oven. “It’s cold down there. And there are rats. Anyway, I thought that inside of sitting around all day and letting this—“ He lifted his shirt up, revealing the pistols to go with the gun show up in his arms (Chloe didn’t wonder about the Howitzer. Not at all) “—get all fat and flabby, I could help out around the house. It was either that or wonder how Natalia can stay with Frank when she belongs with Olivia.”
“Frank’s a nice guy. Or so I’ve heard.” Chloe put her scarf on the hanger, reuniting it with its four long-missing brothers. “You didn’t have to do any of this. I thought I was taking care of you.”
“You wanna take care of me, find me some more clothes. The buttons on this shirt don’t go all the way up, see?” He opened his shirt like he was posing for a Regency romance cover. “And I think these jeans are a size too small. See? I look like David Bowie in Labyrinth? Chloe?”
Chloe’s eyes were shut and she was shuddering, her lips tightly pursed. She exhaled and opened her eyes, then smiled at Davis. “I’m fine. I just… loved that movie growing up.”
“Me too. I loved Sir Didymus.”
“Yeah. He was nice too.”
“And I made dinner!” Davis went to the dining table, where he pulled a paper towel off a plate of oysters. “Oysters Rockefeller. You do like oysters, right?”
“Well, I tried them once in college…”
“You’ll love these. I think I actually got all the ingredients right?” He gave the oysters a tentative lick. “Tastes fine. You try yours?”
“I’m not sure… you seemed a little shy there.”
“Well, I guess I only have myself to blame if this goes wrong…” Davis slurped the oyster. “Mmmm. Not bad. Maybe if this whole ‘Ultimate Destroyer’ thing doesn’t work out, I can get a job as a short-order chef?”
“Have another. You deserve it.” Chloe pushed her oysters toward him.
“Don’t you want any?”
“Oh, I ate on the way home. I’ll just get some fruit. But you should eat! You need your strength! For things!”
“I guess. After all the take-out we’ve split, I suppose it’s just a little depressing to eat alone.” He slurped another oyster. “Kinda tangy.”
“You’re not alone, Davis.” Chloe grabbed a banana from the island. “See? We’re eating together. Although you should go more slowly. You don’t want to choke.”
“Yeah, I’m just so hungry. It feels like it’s been weeks since I’ve had a meal that isn’t lasagna.”
Davis slowly ate the oyster and Chloe forgot her protest about lasagna being the only thing she knew how to cook in bulk.
“Mmmm,” Davis moaned happily, eyes closed. “I love this recipe! That Rachael Ray knows her stuff.” He reached for another.
Chloe peeled the banana, watching as Davis ate another oyster to feed his insatiable appetite. “You’ve got a little… something…” she muttered.
“Really?” Davis licked his lips. “Did I get it?”
“No, you… again…”
Davis’s tongue slipped out of his mouth, traveling slowly over his lips in a languid turn. “How about now? Chloe?”
Chloe had her eyes closed and was shuddering like someone had opened a window in the dead of winter. She opened her eyes abruptly. “Huh? Oh, I’m fine.” She noticed that the banana had been squished in her hands, cream squeezing through her fingers, and dropped it in the trash. She began to lick her fingers clean. “I think I will have an oyster.”
Chloe didn’t get much sleep that night. Having to listen to Doomsday grunt and moan below her… it made her feel so guilty.
***
The next day, Chloe came home to find Davis mopping up a bloodstain. “Oh! You’re home! Chloe, this guy came by to threaten you and he started causing trouble. I already took care of the body.”
“That’s alright, Davis… oh, God, look at you! You’re covered in blood!”
“Yeah, I was about to take a long shower.” Davis picked up a sponge and began to rub it over his chest. “I’m so sorry, Chlo. Sometimes it’s like the beast inside me, it won’t take no for an answer. It just fills me with this energy, and I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t find something to do with all of it. Some strenuous physical activity to get rid of these sick urges within me. And that guy, I just couldn’t stop myself! I kept going and going and going…” He wrung out the sponge, biceps bulging. “You ever feel like that?”
“No!” Chloe said quickly. “So, you’re dead-set on a shower? Right now? Because I’m feeling kinda dirty. I mean, I fell in some mud.” She opened her coat. “See? It got everywhere.”
“I can rinse that right out.” Davis soaked the sponge in a bucket. “Once you take it off, I mean. When you’re in the shower.”
“Yes, I, um…” Chloe stepped in the bucket. “I mean, at least you were wearing your old clothes when you got splattered with fluids!” She shook the bucket off. “I’d better go take that shower now.”
“Okay, I’ll rinse off in the sink.” Davis went to the sink, where he stripped off the shirt and began dousing himself with water.
“And I’ll be in the shower if you need me… which you won’t, because you can get clean all by yourself… and I’m going to the shower.” Chloe backed up. “Shower, that’s where I’m headed. To the shower.”
“If you’re feeling stressed, I fixed the massaging showerhead for you. It just needed a few screw tightened. Chloe? Are you alright?”
Chloe opened her eyes and stopped shuddering. “Yes! I’m fine! And thanks for the fix-it work, but I don’t think I need the massaging showerhead tonight.”
“Oh, and the water heater broke, so you probably won’t be able to get warm water.”
“Cold shower’s fine!”
***
When Chloe got out of the shower, having had an organic experience with Herbal Essences, she found Davis in his boxers, ironing his wet clothes.
“Davis! Why aren’t you wearing the new clothes I got you?”
“Honestly…” Davis held up the hot pants with ‘Juicy’ printed across the back. “I just don’t think I can pull this off. Or the leather vest, I mean, what do I wear under it?”
“You’re not supposed to wear anything under it! Is what the salesman told me.” Chloe pulled her towel up a little. “Look, I’m sorry. The clothes budget is just a little tight with you eating me out of house and home!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean… sorry. Let me make it up to you.” Davis gently ushered her onto her bed, facedown. “Lie down.”
“What are you doing?” Chloe asked, having a pretty good idea what he was doing.
“Just relax and try to enjoy it. I’m new at this, so tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
Davis opened up her towel.
“No, you’re doing fine… Yeah, make it up to me… make it up to me hard.”
Davis began rubbing her back. Chloe frowned in consternation. Foreplay? But Jimmy said that was just a myth!
Davis’s strong hands ran over every inch of her back, rolling over her shoulder blades, sloping down her sides, kneading against her ribs, and circling his thumb on the back of her neck.
“Davis… are you giving me a massage?”
“Trying to, at any rate. You seem to have a lot of tension.”
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! Chloe bit her lip and reminded herself that Davis was a serial killer destined to kill her best friend. It was bad enough she’d let him into her basement. How much worse would it be to let him into her pants… or her blouse… or her mouth… or into her pants again…
“Chloe, are you cold? You’re shaking.”
Chloe opened her eyes. “I’m fine. Go lower.”
***
“Chloe, what are you doing?”
Chloe turned around, electric screwdriver in hand, to see Davis returning from his jog, taking off his sweat-soaked windbreaker. The electric screwdriver buzzed a few times in her hand.
“Well, you see Davis, I just thought that you might turn into Doomsday while you sleep, so restraints on your bed would keep you from hurting anyone.” She pulled on a leather strap. “See? It’s very sturdy.”
“Good thinking, Chlo!” Davis picked one up and whapped it against his palm. “I can’t wait to try these out. No more waking up from dreams full of violent urges and sick impulses, wondering if I’ve committed a sin. With these, I’ll be totally restrained!” A thought furrowed his brow. “We should be careful about security, though. While I have these on, I’d be completely helpless. Anyone could do anything they like to me and all I’d be able to do was lie there, totally at their mercy. Just imagine what, say, Lex Luthor could do to me if he found me in such a state… Chloe? You alright?”
Chloe opened her eyes and stopped shuddering. “Right in the middle--! That’s it.” She grabbed Davis by the collar and pulled him down to eyelevel with her. “Davis Bloom. I want you to fuck me. Ravish me. Have your way with me. Hold absolutely nothing back. I want to be walking funny in the morning. I want to have to take a long hot bath because my muscles are sore. I want everyone to look at me and think to themselves ‘Holy shit, that girl got fucked.’ Can you go that, Davis? And can you be romantic about it? I want my sex life to be romantic for once. The only thing romantic about Jimmy was the champagne… but not the beer, or the whiskey, or the rum or the part where he kept whispering ‘ew ew ew’ under his breath. No, I want to be made love to and fucked and foreplayed and every other possible way there is to put a penis in a vagina, and then I want to start exploring alternatives in a scientifically rigorous manner. I want. To have. Orgasms.”
Davis ripped open her blouse.
Chloe closed her eyes and shuddered. “Good start.”
by seriousfic at her lj.
2,082 words. pg-13. stiletto
As far as romantic rivals went, he wasn’t addicted to painkillers like Jimmy or ambiguously gay like Clark.
It took him a couple days of watching daytime TV in Chloe’s basement, but Davis started to come to terms with being a space monster. It was like Dr. Phil said. He had to accept the things he couldn’t change, the courage to change the things he could, and the wisdom to know the difference. Davis was pretty sure being a space monster was the first thing. And hey, he was the best space monster out there. The Ultimate Destroyer. That was worth something.
What he really needed to do was accentuate the positive. Sure, he was living in a basement, but it was Chloe’s basement. As far as romantic rivals went, he wasn’t addicted to painkillers like Jimmy or ambiguously gay like Clark. He and Chloe lived together, talked infrequently, and didn’t have sex… it was almost like a loveless marriage! And Maury had a lot to say about loveless marriages.
Well, the first step to putting the fire back in (or rather in for the first time) their relationship was to shake things up! For too long he’d let Chloe cook his food, do his laundry, and dispose of his dead bodies. It was time he helped out around the basement!
Right after Ellen. God, that woman could dance.
***
Chloe came home in a bad mood. Clark had tried to open a charity as the Red-Blue Blur and, because he was shit at delegation, he had put Jimmy in charge of the money. Jimmy had used the money to buy coke. When Chloe had tried to explain to Clark how Jimmy was a photographer/drug addict and not an accountant, Clark had only replied “Well, you were going to marry him.”
Now she had to find a way for Jerry’s Kids to get some mileage out of crack cocaine. And cook dinner for Davis, because God forbid…
Chloe stopped. Weird things were afoot at the Talon. She looked down at the hardwood floor and saw her reflection looking up at her. Then she looked at the wallpaper and was reminded that it had been blue once. She went into the kitchen to find Davis bent over, scrubbing the inside of the oven.
God, the man could bend over.
“Davis, what are you doing out of the basement?”
Davis pulled his head out of the oven. “It’s cold down there. And there are rats. Anyway, I thought that inside of sitting around all day and letting this—“ He lifted his shirt up, revealing the pistols to go with the gun show up in his arms (Chloe didn’t wonder about the Howitzer. Not at all) “—get all fat and flabby, I could help out around the house. It was either that or wonder how Natalia can stay with Frank when she belongs with Olivia.”
“Frank’s a nice guy. Or so I’ve heard.” Chloe put her scarf on the hanger, reuniting it with its four long-missing brothers. “You didn’t have to do any of this. I thought I was taking care of you.”
“You wanna take care of me, find me some more clothes. The buttons on this shirt don’t go all the way up, see?” He opened his shirt like he was posing for a Regency romance cover. “And I think these jeans are a size too small. See? I look like David Bowie in Labyrinth? Chloe?”
Chloe’s eyes were shut and she was shuddering, her lips tightly pursed. She exhaled and opened her eyes, then smiled at Davis. “I’m fine. I just… loved that movie growing up.”
“Me too. I loved Sir Didymus.”
“Yeah. He was nice too.”
“And I made dinner!” Davis went to the dining table, where he pulled a paper towel off a plate of oysters. “Oysters Rockefeller. You do like oysters, right?”
“Well, I tried them once in college…”
“You’ll love these. I think I actually got all the ingredients right?” He gave the oysters a tentative lick. “Tastes fine. You try yours?”
“I’m not sure… you seemed a little shy there.”
“Well, I guess I only have myself to blame if this goes wrong…” Davis slurped the oyster. “Mmmm. Not bad. Maybe if this whole ‘Ultimate Destroyer’ thing doesn’t work out, I can get a job as a short-order chef?”
“Have another. You deserve it.” Chloe pushed her oysters toward him.
“Don’t you want any?”
“Oh, I ate on the way home. I’ll just get some fruit. But you should eat! You need your strength! For things!”
“I guess. After all the take-out we’ve split, I suppose it’s just a little depressing to eat alone.” He slurped another oyster. “Kinda tangy.”
“You’re not alone, Davis.” Chloe grabbed a banana from the island. “See? We’re eating together. Although you should go more slowly. You don’t want to choke.”
“Yeah, I’m just so hungry. It feels like it’s been weeks since I’ve had a meal that isn’t lasagna.”
Davis slowly ate the oyster and Chloe forgot her protest about lasagna being the only thing she knew how to cook in bulk.
“Mmmm,” Davis moaned happily, eyes closed. “I love this recipe! That Rachael Ray knows her stuff.” He reached for another.
Chloe peeled the banana, watching as Davis ate another oyster to feed his insatiable appetite. “You’ve got a little… something…” she muttered.
“Really?” Davis licked his lips. “Did I get it?”
“No, you… again…”
Davis’s tongue slipped out of his mouth, traveling slowly over his lips in a languid turn. “How about now? Chloe?”
Chloe had her eyes closed and was shuddering like someone had opened a window in the dead of winter. She opened her eyes abruptly. “Huh? Oh, I’m fine.” She noticed that the banana had been squished in her hands, cream squeezing through her fingers, and dropped it in the trash. She began to lick her fingers clean. “I think I will have an oyster.”
Chloe didn’t get much sleep that night. Having to listen to Doomsday grunt and moan below her… it made her feel so guilty.
***
The next day, Chloe came home to find Davis mopping up a bloodstain. “Oh! You’re home! Chloe, this guy came by to threaten you and he started causing trouble. I already took care of the body.”
“That’s alright, Davis… oh, God, look at you! You’re covered in blood!”
“Yeah, I was about to take a long shower.” Davis picked up a sponge and began to rub it over his chest. “I’m so sorry, Chlo. Sometimes it’s like the beast inside me, it won’t take no for an answer. It just fills me with this energy, and I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t find something to do with all of it. Some strenuous physical activity to get rid of these sick urges within me. And that guy, I just couldn’t stop myself! I kept going and going and going…” He wrung out the sponge, biceps bulging. “You ever feel like that?”
“No!” Chloe said quickly. “So, you’re dead-set on a shower? Right now? Because I’m feeling kinda dirty. I mean, I fell in some mud.” She opened her coat. “See? It got everywhere.”
“I can rinse that right out.” Davis soaked the sponge in a bucket. “Once you take it off, I mean. When you’re in the shower.”
“Yes, I, um…” Chloe stepped in the bucket. “I mean, at least you were wearing your old clothes when you got splattered with fluids!” She shook the bucket off. “I’d better go take that shower now.”
“Okay, I’ll rinse off in the sink.” Davis went to the sink, where he stripped off the shirt and began dousing himself with water.
“And I’ll be in the shower if you need me… which you won’t, because you can get clean all by yourself… and I’m going to the shower.” Chloe backed up. “Shower, that’s where I’m headed. To the shower.”
“If you’re feeling stressed, I fixed the massaging showerhead for you. It just needed a few screw tightened. Chloe? Are you alright?”
Chloe opened her eyes and stopped shuddering. “Yes! I’m fine! And thanks for the fix-it work, but I don’t think I need the massaging showerhead tonight.”
“Oh, and the water heater broke, so you probably won’t be able to get warm water.”
“Cold shower’s fine!”
***
When Chloe got out of the shower, having had an organic experience with Herbal Essences, she found Davis in his boxers, ironing his wet clothes.
“Davis! Why aren’t you wearing the new clothes I got you?”
“Honestly…” Davis held up the hot pants with ‘Juicy’ printed across the back. “I just don’t think I can pull this off. Or the leather vest, I mean, what do I wear under it?”
“You’re not supposed to wear anything under it! Is what the salesman told me.” Chloe pulled her towel up a little. “Look, I’m sorry. The clothes budget is just a little tight with you eating me out of house and home!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean… sorry. Let me make it up to you.” Davis gently ushered her onto her bed, facedown. “Lie down.”
“What are you doing?” Chloe asked, having a pretty good idea what he was doing.
“Just relax and try to enjoy it. I’m new at this, so tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
Davis opened up her towel.
“No, you’re doing fine… Yeah, make it up to me… make it up to me hard.”
Davis began rubbing her back. Chloe frowned in consternation. Foreplay? But Jimmy said that was just a myth!
Davis’s strong hands ran over every inch of her back, rolling over her shoulder blades, sloping down her sides, kneading against her ribs, and circling his thumb on the back of her neck.
“Davis… are you giving me a massage?”
“Trying to, at any rate. You seem to have a lot of tension.”
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! Chloe bit her lip and reminded herself that Davis was a serial killer destined to kill her best friend. It was bad enough she’d let him into her basement. How much worse would it be to let him into her pants… or her blouse… or her mouth… or into her pants again…
“Chloe, are you cold? You’re shaking.”
Chloe opened her eyes. “I’m fine. Go lower.”
***
“Chloe, what are you doing?”
Chloe turned around, electric screwdriver in hand, to see Davis returning from his jog, taking off his sweat-soaked windbreaker. The electric screwdriver buzzed a few times in her hand.
“Well, you see Davis, I just thought that you might turn into Doomsday while you sleep, so restraints on your bed would keep you from hurting anyone.” She pulled on a leather strap. “See? It’s very sturdy.”
“Good thinking, Chlo!” Davis picked one up and whapped it against his palm. “I can’t wait to try these out. No more waking up from dreams full of violent urges and sick impulses, wondering if I’ve committed a sin. With these, I’ll be totally restrained!” A thought furrowed his brow. “We should be careful about security, though. While I have these on, I’d be completely helpless. Anyone could do anything they like to me and all I’d be able to do was lie there, totally at their mercy. Just imagine what, say, Lex Luthor could do to me if he found me in such a state… Chloe? You alright?”
Chloe opened her eyes and stopped shuddering. “Right in the middle--! That’s it.” She grabbed Davis by the collar and pulled him down to eyelevel with her. “Davis Bloom. I want you to fuck me. Ravish me. Have your way with me. Hold absolutely nothing back. I want to be walking funny in the morning. I want to have to take a long hot bath because my muscles are sore. I want everyone to look at me and think to themselves ‘Holy shit, that girl got fucked.’ Can you go that, Davis? And can you be romantic about it? I want my sex life to be romantic for once. The only thing romantic about Jimmy was the champagne… but not the beer, or the whiskey, or the rum or the part where he kept whispering ‘ew ew ew’ under his breath. No, I want to be made love to and fucked and foreplayed and every other possible way there is to put a penis in a vagina, and then I want to start exploring alternatives in a scientifically rigorous manner. I want. To have. Orgasms.”
Davis ripped open her blouse.
Chloe closed her eyes and shuddered. “Good start.”
Friday, April 24, 2009
hands buried in pockets
First things first, who else near-about died with that Beast trailer? ^-^
Reccing Notes: Anyway, a fix for you which is both angsty and deep. (Also, tastefully hot.) Its about both Clark and Davis here. Chlavis romance. Chlark friendship. angst. (because simply is all about angst) And guess who's kissing at the end? woops. spoilers.
by simplytoopretty at her lj
1722 words. pg. stiletto.
She’s no longer treading water.
Wool against her throat, scratchy fabric against the thin cut, irritating it slightly, a reminder of what has happened. The fabric is heavy on top of her skin, an illusion in truth; the fabric is thin and lightweight. Its weight is all in her mind.
Its weight reminds her of what has happened tonight. Wrapped around her throat, wool against skin, and she can’t forget.
Forgetting is impossible.
Chloe touches the wool resting on top of the cut as Lois talks of how she made up Stiletto in pursuit of an interview with the Red-Blue-Blur. Touches the wool briefly, fingertips brushing against the scratch of the fabric. A reminder of what has happened, what her choices have led to, and she has the urge to confess.
Confession to unburden her mind, perhaps even to unburden her soul: tonight hangs heavy over her.
Lois continues to talk of what she has done. Chloe continues to listen.
Nothing changes.
There is a consistency to her days. Here is the consistency: Chloe lies.
This is something Chloe has done for years, something that has become embedded in her nature. Yet it is different now, even if the concept is the same. There are lies, but not like before.
This is what she has chosen, intentionally or not. This is the result of her choices, and there is no one to blame save for herself.
If Chloe closes her eyes, she would see the sight again. The red splattered across the walls and floor, the red dark on Davis’s skin.
He fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her, his human arms. She remembers this, the press of his skin against her jeans.
“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to,” he mumbled over and over again.
She rested her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. She said, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” over and over again.
Repetition: both of them. What they clung to at that moment, stability in that repetition.
He fell silent eventually, so did she, and if she closes her eyes, she would see this all in vivid clarity. Her eyes stay open.
And Chloe remembers.
There are words that want to escape her lips. The secret she has, one of them, this secret the result of a choice she has made. A bad choice perhaps in the final tally, but Chloe isn’t sure what the final tally will be; there are no assurances at this point. Yet the words stay buried deep inside her, not released into the cool air of the apartment to hang heavy in the space between her and Lois.
The truth is too much. This is what she tells herself.
But she has revealed that there is a choice she made, one that is at least now a bad choice, and she has to stay something. Lois is looking at her expectedly; an eager look for there is comfort in shared stories of decisions made that went wrong. No one makes a decision intentionally planning for it to be the wrong choice.
Some decisions lead to negative consequences. An inevitable reality.
Chloe says, “Jimmy should be at the Ace of Clubs.” A nervous hint of laughter, and then she adds, “I really should remove him from my Facebook friends.”
Her words reveal nothing about the inner demons plaguing her, the decisions she has made that led to tonight’s events. Nothing about the choice to harbor Davis and the monster living inside him, the monster that could easily kill Clark. No true secret left out; everything important stays buried, in a box that might never see the light of day. She wants to be unburdened, yet there are risks involved in this, too many risks, so the secrets stay hidden.
No one can see inside her soul. No one knows the truth, the complete truth, dark and sullied as it is, possessed only in entirety by her. And so she is her only judge.
Lois’s eyes are wide and sad, the disappointment clear; another burden upon Chloe’s soul. She’s never wanted to disappoint her cousin, but she has, once again, and it’s too late to change that.
Choices are made in the blink of an eye.
Made and that’s it: there are no take-backs.
Lois leaves.
Chloe wonders if her cousin has an inkling of the truth. Right now she feels as if she’s treading water with arms and legs growing numb from the effort.
The question is what will happen next.
Choices are made every minute of every waking hour. Not all are equal, some choices are more important than others. Together, these choices add up to define a person.
It is the choices we make that shape our personality and mold our future.
Mere weeks ago she chose to hide Davis. This was her choice, the one she made from the options available, a choice made one part from feelings for him and one part from feelings for Clark, her desire to protect her best friend. Her choice in the end, one Chloe has to live with, day in and day out.
Has to live with it even if the choice has resulted in her feeling that’s she’s slowly but surely drowning. For now she’s treading water.
This will change.
Chill air on her face as she exists the Talon building, orange garbage bags in tow. First one then the second into the garbage bin, the remnants of what her choice to harbor Davis has caused. Remnants tossed away as if it really was that simple.
A man died tonight because of her. A man who would have killed her, but that is no excuse: all children learn in grade school that two wrongs don’t make a right. Wrong is wrong, no way around that.
Her hands feel wet and Chloe raises her hands in the thin, dim light of the alley behind the Talon. The wetness is blood, real blood, lynched through the plastic orange onto her hands. Physical evidence stains her hands, evidence of her sins. Maybe she could have prevented this needless if she had chosen differently, if she hadn’t decided that she could save Clark by harboring Davis, but she made her choice.
A choice made and here are the consequences.
Now there is blood on her hands and the weight of the guilt from her choices presses firmly down on her shoulders, forcing her to sink to the ground. Cement beneath knees, hard and unforgiving; her knees will ache later, but she doesn’t care, not right now, not after all that has happened tonight. Tears sting her eyes and fall upon her cheeks, just like she has fallen upon the ground, her position supplicant.
But nothing changes.
The water level is rising and she could drown any minute now.
Weeks ago she climbed gray cement stairs and locked the door. Her choice made.
The consequences are those she must deal with.
Her footsteps are loud on the basement stairs. Davis meets her at the bottom, his gray sweatshirt similar to the shade of his skin.
Davis asks, “Is it…?”
Chloe nods. “I cleaned up. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Davis steps forward and encloses his arms around her. “Thank you.”
There are tears in eyes, stinging again, but she blinks them away. She says, “I’ll keep you safe.”
She swallows thickly around her words, tasting the truth and lie contained. There is a desire to protect him, but not just for his sake, for Clark, for the world. And now there is what her choices have led to, the death of a man, blood upon her hands. Guilt is heavy on her shoulders, but to tell the truth would be to reveal possibly more than might be safe. Now she is her only judge: it is easier to be one’s judge.
“I know you will.” Davis kisses her forehead. “I love you.”
“I know.”
She feels there is water in her throat and she could choke to death.
A choice made: not to confess.
There are tears in her eyes, prickling, a pain she hates. Her eyes are sore, but she can’t rub at them, not with Clark here. He is watching her, concern etched upon his face.
Chloe says, “I just need a little break.”
A sign of the respect Clark has for her is found in his response. He accepts her words, evening with the doubt in his eyes. He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t fight, just backs off and leaves.
No confession because the truth would be too much. Clark might never forgive her.
Chloe doesn’t think she could live knowing that. Simpler to lie and let him believe those lies because he trusts her.
Lies can remain lies. The truth doesn’t always become revealed: Chloe knows this.
The more she lies, the more entrapped Chloe becomes. The more she feels like she’s drowning, water in her mouth, in her eyes.
Dim, fibrous light in the basement, all there is, allowing shadows to fester in the corners. Chloe has grown used this thready light in the past weeks. This basement, once so unfamiliar, has become a second home.
All this because of one choice. One choice made and so much has changed in her life.
She’s standing across from Davis, near the stairs, near the wall. A small physical space separates them. They are hopelessly entangled in every other respect that isn’t physical.
Davis says, “You’re the only one who can save me.”
Chloe knows this and she replies, “I know. I will do anything for you.”
For him, for Clark: it’s all intertwined, her reasons, her motivations. Nothing can be separated at this point.
Davis’s hands cup her cheeks. Calloused fingers on her skin. “You are amazing,” he says, voice full of awe. He seems to think she is some kind of saint, a holy person whose hands offer forgiveness and who will save him from damnation. His faith is her is alarming.
“No, I’m not. I’m just…me.”
He shakes his head, disagreeing.
Chloe’s eyes flutter shut, unable to stand any longer the look in his eyes. It horrifies her and warms her at the same time, and it’s all too much.
Later, her lips closer over his, hard, lips and tongue meeting. She pushes him against the cement wall.
She’s no longer treading water.
Reccing Notes: Anyway, a fix for you which is both angsty and deep. (Also, tastefully hot.) Its about both Clark and Davis here. Chlavis romance. Chlark friendship. angst. (because simply is all about angst) And guess who's kissing at the end? woops. spoilers.
by simplytoopretty at her lj
1722 words. pg. stiletto.
She’s no longer treading water.
Wool against her throat, scratchy fabric against the thin cut, irritating it slightly, a reminder of what has happened. The fabric is heavy on top of her skin, an illusion in truth; the fabric is thin and lightweight. Its weight is all in her mind.
Its weight reminds her of what has happened tonight. Wrapped around her throat, wool against skin, and she can’t forget.
Forgetting is impossible.
Chloe touches the wool resting on top of the cut as Lois talks of how she made up Stiletto in pursuit of an interview with the Red-Blue-Blur. Touches the wool briefly, fingertips brushing against the scratch of the fabric. A reminder of what has happened, what her choices have led to, and she has the urge to confess.
Confession to unburden her mind, perhaps even to unburden her soul: tonight hangs heavy over her.
Lois continues to talk of what she has done. Chloe continues to listen.
Nothing changes.
There is a consistency to her days. Here is the consistency: Chloe lies.
This is something Chloe has done for years, something that has become embedded in her nature. Yet it is different now, even if the concept is the same. There are lies, but not like before.
This is what she has chosen, intentionally or not. This is the result of her choices, and there is no one to blame save for herself.
If Chloe closes her eyes, she would see the sight again. The red splattered across the walls and floor, the red dark on Davis’s skin.
He fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her, his human arms. She remembers this, the press of his skin against her jeans.
“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to,” he mumbled over and over again.
She rested her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. She said, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” over and over again.
Repetition: both of them. What they clung to at that moment, stability in that repetition.
He fell silent eventually, so did she, and if she closes her eyes, she would see this all in vivid clarity. Her eyes stay open.
And Chloe remembers.
There are words that want to escape her lips. The secret she has, one of them, this secret the result of a choice she has made. A bad choice perhaps in the final tally, but Chloe isn’t sure what the final tally will be; there are no assurances at this point. Yet the words stay buried deep inside her, not released into the cool air of the apartment to hang heavy in the space between her and Lois.
The truth is too much. This is what she tells herself.
But she has revealed that there is a choice she made, one that is at least now a bad choice, and she has to stay something. Lois is looking at her expectedly; an eager look for there is comfort in shared stories of decisions made that went wrong. No one makes a decision intentionally planning for it to be the wrong choice.
Some decisions lead to negative consequences. An inevitable reality.
Chloe says, “Jimmy should be at the Ace of Clubs.” A nervous hint of laughter, and then she adds, “I really should remove him from my Facebook friends.”
Her words reveal nothing about the inner demons plaguing her, the decisions she has made that led to tonight’s events. Nothing about the choice to harbor Davis and the monster living inside him, the monster that could easily kill Clark. No true secret left out; everything important stays buried, in a box that might never see the light of day. She wants to be unburdened, yet there are risks involved in this, too many risks, so the secrets stay hidden.
No one can see inside her soul. No one knows the truth, the complete truth, dark and sullied as it is, possessed only in entirety by her. And so she is her only judge.
Lois’s eyes are wide and sad, the disappointment clear; another burden upon Chloe’s soul. She’s never wanted to disappoint her cousin, but she has, once again, and it’s too late to change that.
Choices are made in the blink of an eye.
Made and that’s it: there are no take-backs.
Lois leaves.
Chloe wonders if her cousin has an inkling of the truth. Right now she feels as if she’s treading water with arms and legs growing numb from the effort.
The question is what will happen next.
Choices are made every minute of every waking hour. Not all are equal, some choices are more important than others. Together, these choices add up to define a person.
It is the choices we make that shape our personality and mold our future.
Mere weeks ago she chose to hide Davis. This was her choice, the one she made from the options available, a choice made one part from feelings for him and one part from feelings for Clark, her desire to protect her best friend. Her choice in the end, one Chloe has to live with, day in and day out.
Has to live with it even if the choice has resulted in her feeling that’s she’s slowly but surely drowning. For now she’s treading water.
This will change.
Chill air on her face as she exists the Talon building, orange garbage bags in tow. First one then the second into the garbage bin, the remnants of what her choice to harbor Davis has caused. Remnants tossed away as if it really was that simple.
A man died tonight because of her. A man who would have killed her, but that is no excuse: all children learn in grade school that two wrongs don’t make a right. Wrong is wrong, no way around that.
Her hands feel wet and Chloe raises her hands in the thin, dim light of the alley behind the Talon. The wetness is blood, real blood, lynched through the plastic orange onto her hands. Physical evidence stains her hands, evidence of her sins. Maybe she could have prevented this needless if she had chosen differently, if she hadn’t decided that she could save Clark by harboring Davis, but she made her choice.
A choice made and here are the consequences.
Now there is blood on her hands and the weight of the guilt from her choices presses firmly down on her shoulders, forcing her to sink to the ground. Cement beneath knees, hard and unforgiving; her knees will ache later, but she doesn’t care, not right now, not after all that has happened tonight. Tears sting her eyes and fall upon her cheeks, just like she has fallen upon the ground, her position supplicant.
But nothing changes.
The water level is rising and she could drown any minute now.
Weeks ago she climbed gray cement stairs and locked the door. Her choice made.
The consequences are those she must deal with.
Her footsteps are loud on the basement stairs. Davis meets her at the bottom, his gray sweatshirt similar to the shade of his skin.
Davis asks, “Is it…?”
Chloe nods. “I cleaned up. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Davis steps forward and encloses his arms around her. “Thank you.”
There are tears in eyes, stinging again, but she blinks them away. She says, “I’ll keep you safe.”
She swallows thickly around her words, tasting the truth and lie contained. There is a desire to protect him, but not just for his sake, for Clark, for the world. And now there is what her choices have led to, the death of a man, blood upon her hands. Guilt is heavy on her shoulders, but to tell the truth would be to reveal possibly more than might be safe. Now she is her only judge: it is easier to be one’s judge.
“I know you will.” Davis kisses her forehead. “I love you.”
“I know.”
She feels there is water in her throat and she could choke to death.
A choice made: not to confess.
There are tears in her eyes, prickling, a pain she hates. Her eyes are sore, but she can’t rub at them, not with Clark here. He is watching her, concern etched upon his face.
Chloe says, “I just need a little break.”
A sign of the respect Clark has for her is found in his response. He accepts her words, evening with the doubt in his eyes. He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t fight, just backs off and leaves.
No confession because the truth would be too much. Clark might never forgive her.
Chloe doesn’t think she could live knowing that. Simpler to lie and let him believe those lies because he trusts her.
Lies can remain lies. The truth doesn’t always become revealed: Chloe knows this.
The more she lies, the more entrapped Chloe becomes. The more she feels like she’s drowning, water in her mouth, in her eyes.
Dim, fibrous light in the basement, all there is, allowing shadows to fester in the corners. Chloe has grown used this thready light in the past weeks. This basement, once so unfamiliar, has become a second home.
All this because of one choice. One choice made and so much has changed in her life.
She’s standing across from Davis, near the stairs, near the wall. A small physical space separates them. They are hopelessly entangled in every other respect that isn’t physical.
Davis says, “You’re the only one who can save me.”
Chloe knows this and she replies, “I know. I will do anything for you.”
For him, for Clark: it’s all intertwined, her reasons, her motivations. Nothing can be separated at this point.
Davis’s hands cup her cheeks. Calloused fingers on her skin. “You are amazing,” he says, voice full of awe. He seems to think she is some kind of saint, a holy person whose hands offer forgiveness and who will save him from damnation. His faith is her is alarming.
“No, I’m not. I’m just…me.”
He shakes his head, disagreeing.
Chloe’s eyes flutter shut, unable to stand any longer the look in his eyes. It horrifies her and warms her at the same time, and it’s all too much.
Later, her lips closer over his, hard, lips and tongue meeting. She pushes him against the cement wall.
She’s no longer treading water.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
round
Reccing Notes: The description goes: Chloe has to stay with Davis. Does that mean she has to hate it?
She really doesn't hate it and you can just see the connection as the ambulence makes its rounds in Metropolis.
Its organic, beautiful and you get a really good sense of who they both are, and who they can be together. Zomg, read it!
by seriousfic at her lj.
1,865 words, pg-13, eternal
He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.
For a moment, they stared across the stairs at each other, the click of the lock closing echoing in the empty space. Chloe tried to ignore the obvious underworld connotations of Davis at the foot of the steps, but she couldn’t help it—as he walked up to her, she felt like Persephone about to be abducted by Hades. It had never occurred to her that Persephone might have gone willingly.
“So how does this work?” she asked, then made an attempt to break the ice. “Do you have to drink my blood?”
“I don’t know. For now, I think we should just stay close.”
She had watched him die, once.
***
As they drove to his apartment, Chloe tried to think of how she’d explain this to Clark. It’s painful to realize she doesn’t know her best friend, not enough to know if he’ll fly off the handle or if he’ll wait. It’s more painful to realize she doesn’t know herself. If Davis were someone else, were Lex, what would she be telling Clark to do? In the middle of the night, it’s easy to believe that daylight was just a fantasy.
She made plans to go to the Kent farm, figure out how often the changes came, the minimum time between them, turn this thing between them into an appointment instead of… Maybe they could even figure out what about Chloe made the beast yield. Distill it.
“Chloe-in-a-can,” Davis said as the streetlights strobed over him. Chloe realized how grim her own attempt at humor had sounded. Joking over chopped onions seemed like a million years ago.
***
She didn’t know why they went to his apartment, now that they were manacled together. It wasn’t fair. His death, as gruesome as it was, gave some catharsis to her feelings toward him and now he was pouring salt on her open wounds.
Davis gulped and told her she could have the bed, collapsed onto the couch before she could say anything. The bedsheets were matted with his scent, the memory of him pressed into the mattress. She slept wrapped up in him, feeling every inch of the distance between them, and wondered if this was her life now.
***
He looked both menacing and pleasing in his sleep, brow furrowed in consternation, lips occasionally parting in a half-noise. Chloe ran a hand over his face and he turned into his touch, his lips brushing the webbing of her hand. She put on coffee.
***
He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.
***
First call was a car accident. Car swerved away from the collision, hit the guardrail. Davis collared the driver, Chloe comforted the other driver who’d called it in. The gurney folded up into the back and Chloe sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the patient. She watched until he disappeared to the hospital and Davis came back with a tray of coffee.
“He’ll be fine,” he said when she didn’t take hers.
“I could’ve helped him.”
Davis squinted as he remembered the time she had told him she was a meteor freak, just dropped it into a conversation, maybe hoping it would drive him off so she’d have an excuse to be stuck with Jimmy. Instead he’d nodded and asked her what it was like, having something like that inside her.
She couldn’t remember her answer.
“He’ll be fine,” Davis repeated, starting up the ambulance. Chloe sipped her coffee and tried to remember when Davis had learned she took it black.
***
A bar fight that got out of hand, a knife, blood. Chloe took one look at him and she reached, her hand starting to glow. Davis stepped in the way, taking the medical kit off his shoulder. She watched as Davis did her job, a helpless feeling crunching her stomach. By the time he finished, another ambulance had arrived to take the patient to the hospital. Davis climbed back into the car with her, peeling off his bloody gloves.
“It kills you,” he said, “healing people.”
“Don’t try to protect me. It never works.”
“The knife missed his vital organs. I know it looked bad, but it wasn’t.” He smiled at her meagerly. “I promise I’ll call if I need you.”
***
Drive-by shooting, clean getaway, two dead and one going that direction. No red and blue blur in sight. Davis pulled the patient into the back of the ambulance, his movements leaden. He looked at Chloe.
“Do it.”
She took a deep breath, forced herself to relax, let the power grow out of that place below her lungs and then spill out of her. It didn’t hurt anymore, that had just been her mind telling her it should hurt. But she did feel faint, her lips turning blue and her eyes turning gray. She fell into her seat as the woman sputtered. Davis sedated her and climbed in beside Chloe.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired. It’ll pass.” She looked at him and offered a weary smile. “It’ll pass.”
***
The next one was just a kid who stepped on a nail. He was crying so hard that Chloe wanted to heal him anyway. While Davis was telling the mother where to find a doctor for tetanus shots, Chloe did. The kid kept crying, but not as much as before. Davis glared at her as they drive off.
“What happens if you heal too much?”
“Didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“What happens?”
“Once… I saw a bright light… like,” she held up her hands, the ones that had glowed so recently. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about controlling it since then.”
“But there is a danger?”
She nodded glumly.
“Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.”
***
A fire. Them and ten other ambulances, four fire engines, the red-blue blur not sticking around once he’d evacuated the building. Chloe felt the wind of his passage and ached to be able to tell him, to believe he’d make things better and not worse.
“You gonna be okay?” Davis asked, and she’d given the briefest of nods before he was pulling her to the triage area. In Davis’s EMT jacket and cap, no one noticed her. “These are the worst,” he said, people breathing in respirators, their skin so black and charred that Chloe couldn’t understand how they were still alive. She bent over them and let the light into them, tears coming to her eyes as her entire body fought down the death she was taking in.
There were always more and Davis ushered her always onward, his hands supporting her. Finally he pulled her in an embrace, whispering “thank you” into her ear, then he sat her down and went to help the rest. No deaths. Not one.
“You know how many times in my career I’ve seen a fire that bad and no one died?” Davis asked her afterward. “You were amazing.”
Chloe was too tired to stay upright and at some point she had slumped down so her head was on his thigh. She couldn’t remember if she’d put it there or he had.
“Are amazing.” He was petting her hair, his big hand running over her head as gently as a wave rolling over the beach, and she felt sated, like she was going to bed after a three-course meal and a glass of wine. Her power had never felt like this before, so right, and on impulse she kissed his knee before her eyes shut.
***
When she woke up most of the night was gone. The clock burned 5 AM. She’d been strapped into the gurney in back, Davis’s jacket under her head, blonde hairs now twined in the fabric.
“You didn’t miss anything,” Davis said when she climbed into the front. “Just a heart attack, and he was fine without you.”
“Good.” She handed him his jacket back. “I’d hate for this to be… I mean, maybe… this could be our regular Saturday night thing?”
He grinned a little. “Amazing,” he repeated.
They drove for a while, awkwardly waiting on the radio.
“How does it feel? Not having to worry about an… attack?” she asked.
“That’s not what’s making me feel this way.”
She leaned over, her lips dancing next to his cheek, and whispered in his ear “What would your boss say about workplace romances?”
The radio buzzed. Gunman in a produce market, two dead, five wounded, including the gunman. Five blocks away. Davis hit the sirens.
***
Chloe caught a glimpse of one of the bodies before its body bag closed up. A jagged tear in the middle of its forehead, with powder burns blackening the eyes. Execution. The market still resonated with violence. Chloe smelled something and was dismayed she recognized it as gunpowder. When had her life gone from nonconformist to freak?
She and Davis hustled past the cops to the victims. First one, middle-aged man, reminded Chloe of her dad. She bent toward him when Davis’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Chloe, he’s the guy.”
She stopped. Tried to imagine those hands wrapped around a gun. “Others first.”
Davis nodded brusquely. In a whirlwind they were at the victims’ sides, Davis distracting the EMTs already there, Chloe grabbing their hands and telling them to hang on as her palm glowed. By the time Davis was leading her out she was dead on her feet. They passed the shooter again. An EMT was using the paddles on it. Shouted “clear” and the shooter burst off the ground with electricity.
“I can help him,” Chloe said, moving forward.
Davis’s hand was locked on her arm.
“Davis?”
“Some people don’t deserve miracles.”
“Isn’t that for God to decide?”
“Clear!” the EMT shouted, and the shooter took another defibrillation.
Davis let go of her arm.
She knelt down beside the shooter, before the EMTs could stop her, and dug her fingers into his arm. “Is he going to be alright?”
The paramedics pulled her back. On the next defibrillation, the man gasped for breath.
***
“He’ll get the help he needs,” Chloe said, when Davis wouldn’t stop being quiet.
“Or a jail cell for the rest of his life.”
“Either way, that’s not our choice to make.”
“You could’ve been killed.” Davis eyed his watch. “Shift’s over. I think I’ll be alright if you want to…”
“I don’t. You mind if we go to my place next?” Chloe rubbed at her eyes after realizing the insinuation. “My toothbrush is there.”
He nodded eloquently and they drove. She rested her head on his shoulder. It’d been a long night and it wasn’t going to get any shorter.
“Chloe, if you had a choice…” Davis turned his head away from her, ashamed. “If you had a choice, would you stay with me?”
“I did have a choice. I made the same one I’ll always make.”
His fingers relaxed a little on the steering wheel. Sometimes, that was enough.
She really doesn't hate it and you can just see the connection as the ambulence makes its rounds in Metropolis.
Its organic, beautiful and you get a really good sense of who they both are, and who they can be together. Zomg, read it!
by seriousfic at her lj.
1,865 words, pg-13, eternal
He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.
For a moment, they stared across the stairs at each other, the click of the lock closing echoing in the empty space. Chloe tried to ignore the obvious underworld connotations of Davis at the foot of the steps, but she couldn’t help it—as he walked up to her, she felt like Persephone about to be abducted by Hades. It had never occurred to her that Persephone might have gone willingly.
“So how does this work?” she asked, then made an attempt to break the ice. “Do you have to drink my blood?”
“I don’t know. For now, I think we should just stay close.”
She had watched him die, once.
***
As they drove to his apartment, Chloe tried to think of how she’d explain this to Clark. It’s painful to realize she doesn’t know her best friend, not enough to know if he’ll fly off the handle or if he’ll wait. It’s more painful to realize she doesn’t know herself. If Davis were someone else, were Lex, what would she be telling Clark to do? In the middle of the night, it’s easy to believe that daylight was just a fantasy.
She made plans to go to the Kent farm, figure out how often the changes came, the minimum time between them, turn this thing between them into an appointment instead of… Maybe they could even figure out what about Chloe made the beast yield. Distill it.
“Chloe-in-a-can,” Davis said as the streetlights strobed over him. Chloe realized how grim her own attempt at humor had sounded. Joking over chopped onions seemed like a million years ago.
***
She didn’t know why they went to his apartment, now that they were manacled together. It wasn’t fair. His death, as gruesome as it was, gave some catharsis to her feelings toward him and now he was pouring salt on her open wounds.
Davis gulped and told her she could have the bed, collapsed onto the couch before she could say anything. The bedsheets were matted with his scent, the memory of him pressed into the mattress. She slept wrapped up in him, feeling every inch of the distance between them, and wondered if this was her life now.
***
He looked both menacing and pleasing in his sleep, brow furrowed in consternation, lips occasionally parting in a half-noise. Chloe ran a hand over his face and he turned into his touch, his lips brushing the webbing of her hand. She put on coffee.
***
He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.
***
First call was a car accident. Car swerved away from the collision, hit the guardrail. Davis collared the driver, Chloe comforted the other driver who’d called it in. The gurney folded up into the back and Chloe sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the patient. She watched until he disappeared to the hospital and Davis came back with a tray of coffee.
“He’ll be fine,” he said when she didn’t take hers.
“I could’ve helped him.”
Davis squinted as he remembered the time she had told him she was a meteor freak, just dropped it into a conversation, maybe hoping it would drive him off so she’d have an excuse to be stuck with Jimmy. Instead he’d nodded and asked her what it was like, having something like that inside her.
She couldn’t remember her answer.
“He’ll be fine,” Davis repeated, starting up the ambulance. Chloe sipped her coffee and tried to remember when Davis had learned she took it black.
***
A bar fight that got out of hand, a knife, blood. Chloe took one look at him and she reached, her hand starting to glow. Davis stepped in the way, taking the medical kit off his shoulder. She watched as Davis did her job, a helpless feeling crunching her stomach. By the time he finished, another ambulance had arrived to take the patient to the hospital. Davis climbed back into the car with her, peeling off his bloody gloves.
“It kills you,” he said, “healing people.”
“Don’t try to protect me. It never works.”
“The knife missed his vital organs. I know it looked bad, but it wasn’t.” He smiled at her meagerly. “I promise I’ll call if I need you.”
***
Drive-by shooting, clean getaway, two dead and one going that direction. No red and blue blur in sight. Davis pulled the patient into the back of the ambulance, his movements leaden. He looked at Chloe.
“Do it.”
She took a deep breath, forced herself to relax, let the power grow out of that place below her lungs and then spill out of her. It didn’t hurt anymore, that had just been her mind telling her it should hurt. But she did feel faint, her lips turning blue and her eyes turning gray. She fell into her seat as the woman sputtered. Davis sedated her and climbed in beside Chloe.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just tired. It’ll pass.” She looked at him and offered a weary smile. “It’ll pass.”
***
The next one was just a kid who stepped on a nail. He was crying so hard that Chloe wanted to heal him anyway. While Davis was telling the mother where to find a doctor for tetanus shots, Chloe did. The kid kept crying, but not as much as before. Davis glared at her as they drive off.
“What happens if you heal too much?”
“Didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“What happens?”
“Once… I saw a bright light… like,” she held up her hands, the ones that had glowed so recently. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about controlling it since then.”
“But there is a danger?”
She nodded glumly.
“Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.”
***
A fire. Them and ten other ambulances, four fire engines, the red-blue blur not sticking around once he’d evacuated the building. Chloe felt the wind of his passage and ached to be able to tell him, to believe he’d make things better and not worse.
“You gonna be okay?” Davis asked, and she’d given the briefest of nods before he was pulling her to the triage area. In Davis’s EMT jacket and cap, no one noticed her. “These are the worst,” he said, people breathing in respirators, their skin so black and charred that Chloe couldn’t understand how they were still alive. She bent over them and let the light into them, tears coming to her eyes as her entire body fought down the death she was taking in.
There were always more and Davis ushered her always onward, his hands supporting her. Finally he pulled her in an embrace, whispering “thank you” into her ear, then he sat her down and went to help the rest. No deaths. Not one.
“You know how many times in my career I’ve seen a fire that bad and no one died?” Davis asked her afterward. “You were amazing.”
Chloe was too tired to stay upright and at some point she had slumped down so her head was on his thigh. She couldn’t remember if she’d put it there or he had.
“Are amazing.” He was petting her hair, his big hand running over her head as gently as a wave rolling over the beach, and she felt sated, like she was going to bed after a three-course meal and a glass of wine. Her power had never felt like this before, so right, and on impulse she kissed his knee before her eyes shut.
***
When she woke up most of the night was gone. The clock burned 5 AM. She’d been strapped into the gurney in back, Davis’s jacket under her head, blonde hairs now twined in the fabric.
“You didn’t miss anything,” Davis said when she climbed into the front. “Just a heart attack, and he was fine without you.”
“Good.” She handed him his jacket back. “I’d hate for this to be… I mean, maybe… this could be our regular Saturday night thing?”
He grinned a little. “Amazing,” he repeated.
They drove for a while, awkwardly waiting on the radio.
“How does it feel? Not having to worry about an… attack?” she asked.
“That’s not what’s making me feel this way.”
She leaned over, her lips dancing next to his cheek, and whispered in his ear “What would your boss say about workplace romances?”
The radio buzzed. Gunman in a produce market, two dead, five wounded, including the gunman. Five blocks away. Davis hit the sirens.
***
Chloe caught a glimpse of one of the bodies before its body bag closed up. A jagged tear in the middle of its forehead, with powder burns blackening the eyes. Execution. The market still resonated with violence. Chloe smelled something and was dismayed she recognized it as gunpowder. When had her life gone from nonconformist to freak?
She and Davis hustled past the cops to the victims. First one, middle-aged man, reminded Chloe of her dad. She bent toward him when Davis’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Chloe, he’s the guy.”
She stopped. Tried to imagine those hands wrapped around a gun. “Others first.”
Davis nodded brusquely. In a whirlwind they were at the victims’ sides, Davis distracting the EMTs already there, Chloe grabbing their hands and telling them to hang on as her palm glowed. By the time Davis was leading her out she was dead on her feet. They passed the shooter again. An EMT was using the paddles on it. Shouted “clear” and the shooter burst off the ground with electricity.
“I can help him,” Chloe said, moving forward.
Davis’s hand was locked on her arm.
“Davis?”
“Some people don’t deserve miracles.”
“Isn’t that for God to decide?”
“Clear!” the EMT shouted, and the shooter took another defibrillation.
Davis let go of her arm.
She knelt down beside the shooter, before the EMTs could stop her, and dug her fingers into his arm. “Is he going to be alright?”
The paramedics pulled her back. On the next defibrillation, the man gasped for breath.
***
“He’ll get the help he needs,” Chloe said, when Davis wouldn’t stop being quiet.
“Or a jail cell for the rest of his life.”
“Either way, that’s not our choice to make.”
“You could’ve been killed.” Davis eyed his watch. “Shift’s over. I think I’ll be alright if you want to…”
“I don’t. You mind if we go to my place next?” Chloe rubbed at her eyes after realizing the insinuation. “My toothbrush is there.”
He nodded eloquently and they drove. She rested her head on his shoulder. It’d been a long night and it wasn’t going to get any shorter.
“Chloe, if you had a choice…” Davis turned his head away from her, ashamed. “If you had a choice, would you stay with me?”
“I did have a choice. I made the same one I’ll always make.”
His fingers relaxed a little on the steering wheel. Sometimes, that was enough.
binding by striking
Reccing Notes: What if Eternal hadn't had some kind of cathartic effect, what if Chloe was cautious and Davis was broken. Would that change anything at all?
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
6892 words, r/nc-17, eternal and beast (kind of)
The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
(Say I come to you by circles.)
Chloe spends eight hours in the cot where she doesn’t fall asleep because fear and guilt churn like two twin monsters in her gut.
The clinch of theirs is more intimate than it ought to be and this isn’t ever something she would have felt comfortable with Jimmy doing or he’d ever have thought of.
Of course, Jimmy never had a monster inside him and he didn’t need the Chloe drug.
She still feels Davis’s arms gentle around her waist, the way he breathes, how underneath it all she feels far too safe. She tries to forget because she’s not Clark, not full of romantic fairy tales that will miraculously make everything right. The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
Pragmatism is sensibility.
It’s the only thing that will keep her from falling to pieces that she can’t put together.
Maybe this means something.
Maybe this is what she needs to believe.
In the morning, she takes Davis’s arms from around her and feels grateful that he hasn’t asked her to stay, not since the first night.
The calm lifts from his face and she’s aware of how stark and sick his skin looks. He might be endowed with a destructive alien DNA but living, waiting in this light is not good for him.
He only has her and she’s taking that too.
“I have to go to work for a few hours. I’ll be back.” She says.
It’s the pretext of a normal life and all that. A steady employment will keep Clark from stalking her for help or worrying.
“Okay.”
His eyes linger on her face, seeing and holding and suffocating her. ‘I’m yours.’ they seem to say even though he hasn’t said a word about that, not since she found out and he was begging her not to run.
He doesn’t need to open his mouth to say it in silence and in roars.
She tries not to look at him as she runs up the steps and out the door.
(Say the line that carries my name keeps me from knowing you)
Still, she knows when it’s time, feels it in every fiber of her being. It’s the hour, of course. 8:00 pm leaves her permanently unsettled.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have left at all, knowing what could come out of the apartment without her.
Doomsday. The Ultimate Destroyer.
It sounds like something out of a bad b movie, and no matter how much she should, she never uses the name. It horrifies her enough and the thought of it as part of that guy she knew changes nothing.
Davis needs her and of course she’s his voice to anchor him to the world. His hands had killed people, countless people, enough to terrify Clark several times over. It must horrify him to be alone with silence after that.
Part of him is still the guy who opened up to her with his fears all that time ago.
Love me. Lie to me. He never says as much, but she knows she won’t be able to try to make him forget, when she can’t. She can’t love him and the worst part is that it’s not all his fault.
He takes the blame anyway.
He wants her and that little fact is hard to bypass when she sleeps pressed up against him every night, but he actively avoids doing anything that would make her uncomfortable.
He doesn’t scare her as much as she does.
She can’t get too close.
She’s fallen in love with the guy who was meant to be a hero and he broke her heart. If she fell in love with the guy who was meant to tear the world apart she would just be asking for it.
(We are held where we call. We know something and are held to what we know.)
Davis needs her now.
Clark catches her halfway out of the Watchtower, almost running to her Beatle in her heels.
He’s big and blocking out the sun, insisting on knowing how she is doing on her own. His concern might have made her twinge a little before. Not now, not when he was coming at someone else’s behest, because suddenly Lois thought she was acting like a widow. Not now.
“She hasn’t seen me in a week.”
“I have, and I think I agree with her. Listen, it’s the MO. You’re running yourself ragged and shutting yourself off. It isn’t healthy.”
By the time she hops in the front seat he’s in the seat beside her all strapped in.
“Clark, any other time would be great. Not now, okay?”
“We need to talk.”
Clark follows her to her door and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. Can he feel the pull, like Davis can, she wonders? Is he just that dense?
“Look, I know you’ve been hurting. Jimmy first and then that Davis…thing. What you did. Killing someone. ”
Killing someone? Killing a friend, with fantastic recuperative abilities and immortality to boot. Who was currently in her basement, while it got that need to kill the Kryptonian again, increasingly worse.
It was just about to bust a way out if she didn’t get the idiot off her doorstep.
No wait, hero.
And she should be thinking of how Clark might be torn apart. Not that this is her last chance. To keep him, not Clark.
A hysterical laugh wants to bubble up in her throat. Care to come in for tea, Clark? That’s what he wants to hear. The knuckle sandwich is on me.
“It shouldn’t have happened. Just because I’ve been busy doesn’t mean I don’t care. You have to let me in for me to help you.”
She expects any moment for a crash, the breaking beyond in the darkness.
He must be in so much pain.
“And what would you do, Clark? Tell me how it would have been if I’d listened? Maybe you could pull out the growing up with the Kents speech for good measure?”
The knot of fear is working its way into her voice but she can’t be too hysterical or he’d know. Maybe he wouldn’t.
“But killing someone…”
Measured. The best lies have a base in truth
“My friend, Clark. I killed my friend.”
After he died Davis got to be all she remembered, the man who saved people and who held her when she cried. Things are not so simple now, but the definition stays. She couldn’t cut the feeling out of it, no matter what.
“Maybe I don’t need your advice. Maybe I need to mourn. You have a world to save. Not me.”
He closes the door gently.
(Say I am a wine you know better than to drink.)
She doesn’t have time to hold her hand in front of the lever and breathe now.
She’s not only unsettled. She’s terrified because she doesn’t have memories of that, doesn’t know what to expect. Her perfectly sensible instinct tells her to run. It’s kept her alive with Lex and Linda.
But Davis will be there, a little bit of him. She’d stopped it before, but it doesn’t make the thought any easier. It could easily rend her limb from limb.
The last bulb has guttered out, and the Talon table crashes into her hip as she stumbles. This time, she feels him before she sees him and he’s not even touching her.
“Davis.” There’s no answer but that strange growling, It trying to push out of his skin.
She can see his shape on the ground, on his knees. This has happened to him before in the cage. In the cage before she’d killed him the first time.
“He’s gone.”
He’s just an outline in the dark, and the outline doesn’t look right at all.
Yet there are no red eyes to stiffen her and send her wheeling backwards.
It/he hugs her around the waist so that it feels her ribs will crack, while he’s on his knees like he were a small child. Her voice comes out too quiet and thin.
“It’s all fine. You’re fine Davis.”
She thinks she finds his shoulder through the torn cloth, a roughness and sharp sting. The blood trickles past her fingers, drying cold in the air.
He’s trying not to breathe, trying not to move because it hasn’t receded yet. Just one quick movement and that could be it for her.
He’s kneeling.
The whole idea is so much like a pilgrimage before the Virgin Mary that she wishes she could laugh. But she can’t, because she can feel the muscles in his cheek twisting and the tension going through him.
Minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Too much longer that the last time.
How can this be enough for him?
I’m sorry he says to her,
“You didn’t hurt me.” she lies. She can feel his breath in warm scared puffs of air through the thin shirt, and wonders if he feels the shudder though her skin. Of course he does, he always does.
“Thank god.” She wonders if it’s just a colloquialism or he believes still. He’s been hit with more than any true-fiction conspiracy novel- learning about being a genetic form from another planet, meant to have no free will and a destiny that was the exact opposite of everything he’d tried to be. He wants to and it breaks her heart.
“Can’t lose you.” It’s stopped and he’s slow in letting go.
These days he doesn’t touch her unless she does first. One of the downsides of having flesh that can easily be pierced through by spikes, but not just that. He sees himself as tainted with the invisible blood on his hands. He'd scrubbed it off and then cooked her dinner once but now that she knows he won't forget it. It was all fine and dandy when he was the hero she wanted to believe in. She thinks maybe she hates him a little for that.
He'd lied and that had been her truth.
He hates himself more than she could though, and she wishes he'd let go. He didn’t have the choice of making it stop.
“Then I take it you missed me.” Her quip falls flat, in part because her voice is wobbling. It’s impossible, the pretence of this. She can’t lie; keep Davis and Clark apart forever, every minute of every second of every day. She’s not that strong, not that anything.
“I’m here now.” She says. She wonders why her, what he thinks he sees.
“You won’t lose me.” Oh, but she can lose him.
She can lose herself.
(She could drop to her knees on the asphalt and try to forget that she was thinking of him just then.
Not Clark. It wouldn’t work.
It would break her; one moment after another held back in a dam until they over spilled. If he leaned forward then; touched her lips with his; she thinks that she would have given him everything, all the crumbling bits of her that should have been running.
She could be one of those moths flying headlong into the light that’s too bright and too blinding and too warm.
I can’t save you, she would want to say. Only she wouldn’t say that when the constant pained look in his eyes was almost hopeful; and the tenderness in his face made her warm, not suffocated. Only she’d draw her hand across his cheek and leave a scarlet mark.
“I trust you. I care about you. I’m tired of being scared.” She’d trust he’d never try to hurt her.
He’d be warm and trembling under her hands, like there was too much that couldn’t be contained. And she’d feel it, trickling its way to her skin. He’d burn.
He’d give everything, take much more. His touch would mark her.)
As it is, he holds her a little too tight and it doesn’t feel like enough.
(Say this water doesn't pull but when you fall takes you altogether in. Say you are in.)
It is destiny, or DNA, or just the hateful actions of worse monsters than anything that they could’ve made him into.
He can’t help hurting her.
She’s covered in blood; she doesn’t know whose blood it is- Oliver’s, Jimmy’s, Clark’s or someone else’s. She couldn’t save them all.
There is smoke and dust and sirens with no one to back them up because anyone who has any sense has fled.
He isn’t merely red eyed, now, but decked at the center of armor and spikes. She wishes she could see something of Davis for one last time, but he’s suffering in something a hundred times worse than hell.
Maybe he can see around them and is struggling from wherever he’s trapped.
All she sees is those eyes, red and burning and for the first time not seeing her at all. It is only on a mission, following a preprogrammed genetic urge.
She should feel just little bloom of self justification now. She’d seen that this would happen, had safe guarded herself.
If she had let herself love him the way she wanted to this would have destroyed her.
(She had no illusions that being with her might have halted the monster taking over. She’s not some princess in a fairytale. She’s not that anything.)
She hadn’t taken the gamble on odds that she could never win. She did right.
She had to have done right.
Only, all she can think is that she lost anyway and that maybe if she had taken that chance, she’d have something more to remember of him.
It slices its way through the door like so much paper, bone spurs scratching on tile, impervious to the slippery carnage.
The fear should be there, and is, but she’s drowning in something that feels like despair.
Davis is gone. She realizes that she didn’t have to let herself love him for losing him to tear her apart.
This is the end. This time it won’t be enough.
Her vision blurs and she braces herself.
(Say the same thing that holds us holds us apart.)
She almost chokes in the air and her lashes stick together wetly. Darkness, blackness, comfort. For a second she thinks that this is death.
She still feels his breath even at the back of her neck, and that light bulb is still guttered out.
That wasn’t the way it happened at all.
Her hands go over his making sure. His skin is still too warm and he’s too encompassing but she leaves them there. He needed her. She needed…
It didn’t have to happen that way.
He learns about the dream. No particulars. Just that it had been a nightmare, and he knew he’d been in it. She doesn’t want him to feel guilty; but the perpetual self loathing is back on his face.
He still offers comfort the only way he knows how. He surrounds her.
This time she eases into his grip and holds on a little too tight. “I trust you.” She says. He returns the grip.
Ask me why. Please. Her defenses are in shambles right now, and she’s choked and needy enough to make the jump.
He just holds her, and then there are none.
(Say we belong to each other.)
Maybe her dream had a basis in truth.
Maybe It’s pull would grow with time so that he got absorbed and locked in its hold forever. And she lost him. Really lost him.
Again, to something that had a deeper hold on him than the grave.
Sensibility tells her that this is the way of things. Everything falls apart.
It was a warning.
One day what they have might not be enough.
It’s a useless one.
What would that change, really?
(Say we sit on some steps together, or a wall. Say something falls.)
That day, she comes home early with six halogen lights in the cramped trunk. She drags them down, one by one, and doesn’t need to ask him if he’d give a girl a hand. I can do that, he says and she says she wouldn’t want to sprain anything. All six end up rigged on the ceiling, banishing the otherworldly shadows and (she thinks) turning her hair a greenish tint.
He squints in the light, stretches up unknowingly revealing the strong, lean lines of his abdomen. She’s trying hard not to think of that now but he straightens the connections so meticulously that she just wants to watch him.
This isn’t gothic doom and gloom. It’s the real world. Anything could happen.
She tries to forget that this is Smallville.
“Now we celebrate.”
(There’s a table behind the coat hangers. The dust comes off easily. )
She’s ready to rail at him if he says he doesn’t need to eat one more time. He seems to catch onto her mood and doesn’t. The coffee is weak and the prepackaged tuna casserole isn’t quite warm but he’s sitting across from her so that she could brush his arm if she leaned all the way across the table and the dishware on her tiptoes.
He eats slowly and she wonders if he tastes it at all. He watches her eat mostly with a mixture of intensity and trying to look away politely and not succeeding. He’s confused, he must be and he won’t jump to conclusions because unlike before there’s no big honkin monster to mess with them.
Sure, maybe she just decided to share the closest to a romantic dinner she’s had in the past two years with the halogen lights. That had to be it.
She can see him, really see him. He’s still too pale but strangely beautiful and his face changes like the water from one emotion to another. He can do vulnerability and caring without needing to give a speech.
She still wants him to joke to keep her from turning into a sap, but he’s too busy swallowing her with his eyes.
She doesn’t know that singular cunning trick about eating to seduce. Maybe you were supposed to lick your fork a lot. She doesn’t want to end up looking like a hungry cat.
She does it the old fashioned way. Dig in, but not too fast. Close your mouth when you chew.
Anyway, it seems to work for him, if the way his eyes roam over her neck and try unsuccessfully to jump away is any indication. Never mind the fact that he still looks hungry.
Part of it is her fault, maybe. She figured if this was her being crazy she could go all out. Clingy green cloth. No sleeves, just straps the width of strings. Neckline dipping below the sternum. Lois had called it a boob shirt.
They may have gotten the lights up, but that was it. There is no heating down here. She hasn’t gotten cold because of him.
In hindsight, the shirt was not such a good idea. Goosebumps pebble her arms and she is not shivering, not a little. Not that much.
He puts his sweatshirt over her shoulders, anyway, and it smells like him.
(Say the language is dry and the wall is low. Say a word gets over the wall.)
She tells him about how she always used to ask pointless questions as a kid. It was part of a game. You told each other things. All truths you had to get off your chest.
A warm up round starts, she jokes, she thinks and pulls out a few embarrassingly horrific high school experiences. He doesn’t have many that would qualify as embarrassing, and more that would qualify as horrific. She sees him as he must have been, a scared kid with no one to pitch a seat in his corner, the one seen as damaged and sent to places that only would’ve damaged him more. Not even through her little venture into stalking would she have guessed the magnitude of it.
He looks at the shiny countertop, and avoids her eyes. He didn’t want to turn dinner into this.
“You can tell me anything.”
He wouldn’t ever try to unburden himself on the feelings of those necks snapping beneath his fingers, she thinks and the fear is back and this isn’t what she wanted either.
At least he’s looking at her again but it’s that look the first time she stopped it, like he sees her as some sort of angel. He’s not taking anything from her, just giving but still she wants to tell him that she can’t breathe. She has no defense against this.
“Just to seal the deal, I’ll tell you something. I still wish Clark hadn’t come by when you were cooking me dinner.”
It’s true, but she doesn’t know what she was doing then. Playing with emotional fire, maybe. She’d dressed up all the way down to her skin that night, but he doesn’t know that.
She knows what she’s doing now, she hopes.
A smile trembles at the corner of his mouth, but even that looks sad. “All of that, I forgot when I was with you.”
That-oh she knows that, how all that time he’d been doing anything, no matter how damaging to hold it back. It had worked, right up to the part he’d died. Then it had screwed with her and sent her sensibility running for the seven hills. That doesn’t change things as they stand.
“You were my only real shoulder, the guy who saved people and everything I needed.
I got used to playing robotic really well and I never had to tell myself what to feel with you.
I trusted no one else like you, with that.” In past tense, maybe not so good. She hadn’t said ‘How could you have let me trust you when you knew?’
He doesn’t look down, never looks down and the little bit of light in his eyes dulls painfully. “I’m so sorry.”
“That night could’ve been fun. We could have watched some horrible chick flick and I’d have fallen asleep on you-your shoulder. Really, it’s practically engrained in the human genome.”
“I would have been lying to you.”
This part horrifies her more than any other. Not the monster with the endless spiky protrusions, not the helpful emt who went after criminals but still people to keep it sated. (Oliver had a few fingers in the investigation and she knows what the corpses looked like, vertebrae twisted and cracked.)
He’d been the only one to give it to her straight since she met him. Bette, the blackouts, her past, Jimmy. It had made her guilty that this happened with no one else.
It had made her whole.
Only he hadn’t told her possibly the biggest secret of all. All because he couldn’t drag her into it.
So he’d come to visit, cooked her dinner, made her feel like herself again when he looked into her eyes and lied so convincingly that she’d have staked her world on it.
He could be lying now, sitting across the table looking into her eyes and lying if he wanted.
But what possible motive could he have for being crushed?
Logically, there’s the pity-trip-getting her to stay to be the med-dispenser or tearing down her walls so she gives in, but anyway it all comes down to her.
And her logic-brain has this way of shutting off when he’s around.
Animalistic roaring in an alley? Oh, that was just fear.
Enough with the thinking.
“Just tell me, in an ideal world, if it were different. You didn’t have to worry about any of this whole screwed up.... mess. What would have happened between us?”
“But it didn’t happen. There can’t be… a point to that now.”
This is the part where she should be swooning into his arms, flailing helplessly, overcome by manly passion.
What is she doing? Crossing her arms over her chest.
“Just answer. That’s the way it goes. If not you lose. Or I get cross at you. Or both.”
“We would’ve talked. You’d been going through a breakup. We would’ve eaten. You might have teased me about my cooking…”
“Don’t forget the guy hugs. I could’ve used the comfort.”
“Those were guy hugs?”
“Yep, an awfully friendly thing to do. Two years ago Clark might have done that, just the same. You know-except for the whole cooking thing.” And then Clark would’ve traded off Lana stories. And shared his horrors at hurting her when he got—excited.
“Clark never cooked me dinner. Or kissed me.”
(Well, Clark had never planted one on her unless she did it first. And after she did, he’d run away, eventually.)
If the mention of Clark’s name makes incisors start popping out, she fancies herself planting herself on Davis’s knee. Not that it would actually happen.
“…So just say in this hypothetical scenario that I was completely over Jimmy and I asked you to stay and we didn’t fall asleep watching a chick flick.”
Awkwa-rd moment.
“I would’ve shown you that he was wrong.”
“He said I didn’t trust him, so he walked away. What makes you so sure he was an idiot? Maybe he was saving himself pain.”
“You’re worth more than a little pain.”
“Yeah, because you love me, right?” She says it quick and joking and won’t think because the words won’t come out otherwise.
No pause. “I do.” He looks up, doesn’t blink and the attempt at levity falls flat. She’s never let him say to her since that time when she’d been running from him and it had been even more messed up than now.
“You’re not just saying that.” A statement. Not a question.
“Let’s say this is the hypothetical scenario.” She draws herself up, won’t break his gaze from across the countertop. “I’m asking you to show me.”
(Say a skin is like that and that what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone is the constellation that guides us.)
He doesn’t push the table over on his way to her, even if it looks like his muscles are having a fight of their own to keep from it. Even under the bright lights he stands out darkly, but this isn’t symbolic.
His eyes are the way she needs them to be.
He breathes and somewhere between then and now his mouth finds hers and his lips move against hers.
She had a thing about breath before doing this. She would have chewed four sticks of gum to banish the remnant tuna salad. It’s kind of easy to forget that she smells like fish when his lips are soft and not tentative in memorizing hers and all of him is close.
In imagination she’s been farther than this, sometimes, but it hadn’t prepared her, for here and now. She hadn’t ever thought it could be so deliberate. Before, the fantasies came in guilty snatches, unplanned moments when everything spiraled. They were sensible ways of dealing manufactured by her brain and over too soon.
This, now…isn’t. Can’t be taken back. She doesn’t care.
The kiss is heady and dizzying so she can’t be blamed for needing more. He makes a small sound and tilts her face and it feels deeper somehow.
She’s catching his words, swallowing them, learning them all over again.
They have so much to show each other and it could last for as long as they need, but it doesn’t because they are both too impatient. Not just her.
His fingers weave and fist through his sweatshirt where it’s draped on her back. She can’t tell herself she hasn’t been waiting for this.
The sweatshirt falls away onto the cement and slips under her foot when she moves closer, but she doesn’t fall because he’s there. His hands are large enough to swallow her arms and they don’t bruise. He’s everywhere, pressed close, and she’s aware of the way they seem to want to fit together. They need to and anything less is not enough.
She feels the shudder again, and of course he does. The throbbing had hurt then, it hurt now. She can hear his breath and she’s not alone in this.
She pushes against him so her knees bump his and he gets the message, clumsily yanking at the tablecloth and sending flimsy paper plates and empty Tupperware clattering to the floor. No magic tricks there.
“I liked that…bowl. What do you say you make it up to me?”
“I can do that.” He says and his voice is different, rougher than she's used to.
He hasn’t got a hair out of place since it’s so short and his shirt isn’t even wrinkled yet, but he’s still panting, still seeing and it’s still hard to breathe. His eyes are dark again, his face frightfully intense and this does not mean he’s some twisted kind of Heathcliff. He’s Davis now, just Davis, she tells herself. .
He can take anything or everything, all at once. But he just looks at her and it starts back up with the kissing, unexpectedly tender and so very focused. Looking. She’s just missing sleeves, for God’s sake, but she feels irrevocably exposed.
Helpless, too, because he’s heavy and she’s on her back and she has to crane her neck to get closer. She’s pinned against hard wood. No control, and she needs control.
She squirms and he supports himself with his arms so it lightens.
The air is cold and his mouth is anything but, sliding in an easy path over the skin above her shoulder blade and the thoughts scatter. The straps are off her shoulders now and she should be worried because this is so... shameless. Something that normal people do after dates and corny movies.
She could be thinking about DNA and destiny and inevitability and how this may be the only thing she has to remember. Normal, she wants normal.
It is a disturbingly easy feeling, his tongue sweeping easily against hers and his hands… She’s not a teenager, but here she is, playing tonsil hockey for all she’s worth.
She should stop with the thinking.
What’s more normal than a full blown make out session?
She’s going to go insane.
There are plenty of ways to be intimate, and maybe this is just another one. Soon he’s going to have enough data for a complete map.
Her shirt is on but it doesn’t matter when his palm is flat on the skin of her waist and then his mouth is there and the muscles clench involuntarily. Her skin is prickling, aware in every inch. It starts to burn as he trails up the underside of her breast and the tank top traps her before falling away. Part of her is warm at least.
She should tell him that she’s half naked and he’s not so this isn’t quite fair but she hasn’t got the voice for proper, articulated speech.
She tries to remember not to get too excited. Clark could hear her heartbeat if he listened in. But then, he has no place here.
It feels like torture but she wants him to keep on like this because when it’s over she can’t tell herself that this is only a rewind or what could have been in a world where there was no weird-ville, no sadistic alien scientists and no need to pretend.
This is what she thinks even when she holds on.
The only thing she has access to is his neck so she presses her lips there and his pulse hammers through her head.
He’s close enough that she doesn’t feel the cold much. Illogically, she’s sweating.
Somehow he doesn’t feel heavy enough now.
She kicks her heels off with a clatter to keep her feet flat on the wood and closes her eyes. Knee high stockings aren’t a barrier and she could make a joke about him having a thing for Catholic uniforms but his fingers are light and lulling. He still has calluses and she wonders how this can be if part of the destroyer’s nature is to heal. His nature. Maybe both of them are, Davis and It, fighting between themselves. Maybe this isn’t so doomed at all. He’d been human again after he died.
His weight pushes into her but her knees widen very slowly. His mouth still roves over hers and he’s warm and before she can think they are moving together.
The warmth and ache is like a drug and his arms shake on her shoulders.
She nudges him gently so she can see his face before she goes too far. He’s sweating, and his eyes have dilated so she can see the brown again but she doesn’t see him trying to distract himself with this. There is no ‘Lie to Me’ this time.
“This is all I have to give.” she says because she’s herself, as likely to cause pain as to save.
He’s been there.
If anything his eyes are warmer now. “You are everything.” He believes this.
Maybe he doesn’t need her to save him. Maybe he needs something to believe in.
Maybe she does too.
(Say we are in. Say my skin draws you. Say what we do with each other goes on.)
This is hurting him.
He’s no help staring at her like that, so she un-tucks the shirt briskly. She feels a little awed when his eyes still slide shut like he is on a high.
This doesn’t happen to her, but it apparently it just did.
The shirt used to be Jimmy’s, back in the days before he started swearing at her in e-mails. He was never coming back for it.
It stretches over Davis’s chest where she can see the muscle jolt at her touch.
His eyes are still closed so she makes an ineffectual effort to yank it over his head. It takes the two of them yanking in opposite directions and this moment is so out of the continuity of everything else that she knows it will be the one she thinks of first.
He isn’t shy touching her; pulling her in and he’s warm everywhere.
She presses her hand to his chest where it ended up and studies him. “I Tarzan, You Jane.” She mutters, aware she got them out of order.
(He seems to get the point of this and then she learns that he is literally warm everywhere.)
He sinks down to her and the sound that comes out of his mouth is like he’s really breathing for the first time since she saw him again.
She focuses on his face because she wants to scream at the sensation, feeling like she is going to break.
It’s quite a lot to take all at once.
But then he pulls away and she thinks the shock must have shown on her face. He’s still breathing deep and she understands what he’s doing.
She feels tensed for something but she reminds herself to relax and its better. He moves slowly at first but every moment soaks her senses in a miasma of heat and moisture and more aching than she thought possible.
It’s almost elemental, merciless and she anchors herself to the way his hands ground her and their eyes connect. It’s like nothing she’s used to. She used to consider the experience a success if she liked it at the time.
Now… Does she like it? Does she like breathing? Does she need it?
The circular motion feels good and maddening and not enough. She reaches for his shoulders for an outlet and when she presses her nails into his skin and they don’t leave marks. It’s such a silly thing, but she wishes she could. She bites her lip instead.
Then he’s pushing into her deeper so she can't think of anything but him, there and this isn’t enough and she murmurs than if she breaks her teeth biting into his shoulder he can pay for the dentures.
It’s like a rip current, one wave and another and then the next will rush past quick and pull her completely under.
Under, and then when she wakes up it’ll be done and the dream will be just that, a beautiful dream.
She doesn’t want it to end.
She’s trembling and trying to hold on to him, and somehow the rest of her gets that idea.
It just happens and his eyelids squeeze tight and maybe he is going to lose it right then. Only his head drops to her shoulder and he struggles to breathe deep.
Lana had told her once that she was afraid that Clark would break when he got excited. Here she is, with something she hasn’t had and maybe needed all this time and she doesn’t want to think of Clark and his tragedies.
Yet, she doesn’t want the power to break Davis.
She can’t give it back.
He moves still, and he's part of her, pulling her farther out into the water. Her neck jerks up and she arches and finds him. He is the center and all that’s left to do is let it crash over them both and hold on.
His forehead meets hers and his eyes are burning. She doesn’t let her eyes close because she needs it to be real.
It is that: terrifying and agonizing and beautiful. Then only beautiful.
(Say we struggle to get in and stay in and not ever leave).
Afterglow. She thinks that is a silly word, because they don’t look like glow sticks.
The truth is her brain is hazy, she feels sticky and the table is not really as smooth as it looks. She hopes she won’t have to pull splinters out.
He’s impossibly warm yet and she has to freeze her fingers to keep them from running down his face. The urge to hum is over whelming.
She thinks she may be happy.
It’s some time later but he’s still there and he holds her closer than he needs to. They are all but wrapped together, anyway. His fingers barely ghost across her back in small circles and she can feel his breath.
He doesn’t say anything and she’s okay with that. She needs to process so she won’t have a mini-freak-out.
Her mind is almost clear by now, like the clutter just burst out in the wake of everything else.
She’d just lain with Davis. Biblically. Not to save the world, to pacify it or to keep him attached to her. Because they’d needed it, she had.
She just conveniently forgot that that the other facet to Davis meant that she’d taken her pure motivations and stomped all over them. She wasn’t a free agent now.
Clark had nothing to do with it.
There should be two options on the table (and the pun isn’t funny). She could get up and leave before she can’t let go or wait for some divine revelation to hit her right between the eyes.
She makes it a point to keep her breathing slow and calm, like sleep. He can probably feel the change in her, as he always did even before she’d learned about the Kryptonian super abilities.
When she’d found him the first time, she didn’t run away right off. He’d killed people. He asked her to and she’d killed him. She didn’t think she could do it again.
It was nothing quantitatively measureable, a feeling that she couldn’t let go of. She’d paused before he said anything because she wanted to be given no other choice. If she’d been sensible everything would’ve fallen apart.
What’s the point in letting go now?
Maybe this is what they’ve got going for them. She doesn’t want to move.
Can’t.
His eyes don’t paralyze her but they are there and open and it’s that look again. She doesn’t ask him what he thinks he sees and just feels grateful that he does.
“I love you.”
He doesn’t add an expectant pause to the end of that sentence. “I just wanted you to know.”
She doesn't have to say anything. He'd give her everything and not ask for it back if that's what she wanted.
But one revelation deserves another and she's through with being scared.
“I’ve been thinking.”
He doesn’t say, ‘So?’ He’s waiting for her again.
“When you told me the truth I was so mad at you I---.”
“Hated me?”
“I did for a little while.”
“I would have hated me.” He bites his lip and doesn’t look away.
She won’t lie.
“I still would have helped you if you’d told me the whole truth.” He’d preferred to die than ask for her help. “Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t live with it. Knowing what I’d done and then pushing it on you. It wasn’t the way it should have been."
He wouldn't have pushed her into anything.
"I wanted to believe it it could all go away just like that. ”
“Nothing went away. You wouldn’t let me alone.
I’d have to talk to my best friend about what I did. I couldn’t cry like any normal person because I had to face that I might not have known you at all. I only remembered the ‘you’ part of it. I hated you for leaving me in the mess. I hated it the fact that everything we had was a lie.”
His face hurts to look at, and he looks about ready to cry.
“It wasn’t like that, not for me.”
“I know.” her palm is on his shoulder like before, and funny how fast things can change.
“And now, do you still?”
“I’m not big on the whole hate sex thing, you know. Besides if we didn’t have anything then I couldn’t have lost you. I wouldn't have been so scared of it.”
The wonder on his face forces out everything, and it feels like she’s really breathing.
(We rise where we fall.)
“Will you come with me?”
He asks her, and his voice wavers on the end of it. She can see everything in his eyes and the hope.
He can take all of her and he still seems to be in wonder that this can happen, that it can really be this simple.
This isn’t supposed to make her heart skip a beat.
It’s still there, the pull to hurt Clark and they are at the mercy of any moment her best friend decides to get over what she said.
Geographical distances make a difference to how bad it is.
This would have been the sensible reason, if she had relied on that.
Clark had just been out in the streets and when the change had come on worse she’d held on when Davis had looked like he was being ripped apart.
The cards have been stacked to fall for all their lives. Davis is always going to fight it. Clark won’t know.
She’s going to be there.
The future is one step after another, but she sees a clear path.
It looks real.
She thinks his hand could engulf hers and maybe it does.
“North, South, East or West. You've got it.”
He reaches for her and this is the truth.
(Say we are the same. Say we come to it simply again.)
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
6892 words, r/nc-17, eternal and beast (kind of)
The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
(Say I come to you by circles.)
Chloe spends eight hours in the cot where she doesn’t fall asleep because fear and guilt churn like two twin monsters in her gut.
The clinch of theirs is more intimate than it ought to be and this isn’t ever something she would have felt comfortable with Jimmy doing or he’d ever have thought of.
Of course, Jimmy never had a monster inside him and he didn’t need the Chloe drug.
She still feels Davis’s arms gentle around her waist, the way he breathes, how underneath it all she feels far too safe. She tries to forget because she’s not Clark, not full of romantic fairy tales that will miraculously make everything right. The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
Pragmatism is sensibility.
It’s the only thing that will keep her from falling to pieces that she can’t put together.
Maybe this means something.
Maybe this is what she needs to believe.
In the morning, she takes Davis’s arms from around her and feels grateful that he hasn’t asked her to stay, not since the first night.
The calm lifts from his face and she’s aware of how stark and sick his skin looks. He might be endowed with a destructive alien DNA but living, waiting in this light is not good for him.
He only has her and she’s taking that too.
“I have to go to work for a few hours. I’ll be back.” She says.
It’s the pretext of a normal life and all that. A steady employment will keep Clark from stalking her for help or worrying.
“Okay.”
His eyes linger on her face, seeing and holding and suffocating her. ‘I’m yours.’ they seem to say even though he hasn’t said a word about that, not since she found out and he was begging her not to run.
He doesn’t need to open his mouth to say it in silence and in roars.
She tries not to look at him as she runs up the steps and out the door.
(Say the line that carries my name keeps me from knowing you)
Still, she knows when it’s time, feels it in every fiber of her being. It’s the hour, of course. 8:00 pm leaves her permanently unsettled.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have left at all, knowing what could come out of the apartment without her.
Doomsday. The Ultimate Destroyer.
It sounds like something out of a bad b movie, and no matter how much she should, she never uses the name. It horrifies her enough and the thought of it as part of that guy she knew changes nothing.
Davis needs her and of course she’s his voice to anchor him to the world. His hands had killed people, countless people, enough to terrify Clark several times over. It must horrify him to be alone with silence after that.
Part of him is still the guy who opened up to her with his fears all that time ago.
Love me. Lie to me. He never says as much, but she knows she won’t be able to try to make him forget, when she can’t. She can’t love him and the worst part is that it’s not all his fault.
He takes the blame anyway.
He wants her and that little fact is hard to bypass when she sleeps pressed up against him every night, but he actively avoids doing anything that would make her uncomfortable.
He doesn’t scare her as much as she does.
She can’t get too close.
She’s fallen in love with the guy who was meant to be a hero and he broke her heart. If she fell in love with the guy who was meant to tear the world apart she would just be asking for it.
(We are held where we call. We know something and are held to what we know.)
Davis needs her now.
Clark catches her halfway out of the Watchtower, almost running to her Beatle in her heels.
He’s big and blocking out the sun, insisting on knowing how she is doing on her own. His concern might have made her twinge a little before. Not now, not when he was coming at someone else’s behest, because suddenly Lois thought she was acting like a widow. Not now.
“She hasn’t seen me in a week.”
“I have, and I think I agree with her. Listen, it’s the MO. You’re running yourself ragged and shutting yourself off. It isn’t healthy.”
By the time she hops in the front seat he’s in the seat beside her all strapped in.
“Clark, any other time would be great. Not now, okay?”
“We need to talk.”
Clark follows her to her door and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. Can he feel the pull, like Davis can, she wonders? Is he just that dense?
“Look, I know you’ve been hurting. Jimmy first and then that Davis…thing. What you did. Killing someone. ”
Killing someone? Killing a friend, with fantastic recuperative abilities and immortality to boot. Who was currently in her basement, while it got that need to kill the Kryptonian again, increasingly worse.
It was just about to bust a way out if she didn’t get the idiot off her doorstep.
No wait, hero.
And she should be thinking of how Clark might be torn apart. Not that this is her last chance. To keep him, not Clark.
A hysterical laugh wants to bubble up in her throat. Care to come in for tea, Clark? That’s what he wants to hear. The knuckle sandwich is on me.
“It shouldn’t have happened. Just because I’ve been busy doesn’t mean I don’t care. You have to let me in for me to help you.”
She expects any moment for a crash, the breaking beyond in the darkness.
He must be in so much pain.
“And what would you do, Clark? Tell me how it would have been if I’d listened? Maybe you could pull out the growing up with the Kents speech for good measure?”
The knot of fear is working its way into her voice but she can’t be too hysterical or he’d know. Maybe he wouldn’t.
“But killing someone…”
Measured. The best lies have a base in truth
“My friend, Clark. I killed my friend.”
After he died Davis got to be all she remembered, the man who saved people and who held her when she cried. Things are not so simple now, but the definition stays. She couldn’t cut the feeling out of it, no matter what.
“Maybe I don’t need your advice. Maybe I need to mourn. You have a world to save. Not me.”
He closes the door gently.
(Say I am a wine you know better than to drink.)
She doesn’t have time to hold her hand in front of the lever and breathe now.
She’s not only unsettled. She’s terrified because she doesn’t have memories of that, doesn’t know what to expect. Her perfectly sensible instinct tells her to run. It’s kept her alive with Lex and Linda.
But Davis will be there, a little bit of him. She’d stopped it before, but it doesn’t make the thought any easier. It could easily rend her limb from limb.
The last bulb has guttered out, and the Talon table crashes into her hip as she stumbles. This time, she feels him before she sees him and he’s not even touching her.
“Davis.” There’s no answer but that strange growling, It trying to push out of his skin.
She can see his shape on the ground, on his knees. This has happened to him before in the cage. In the cage before she’d killed him the first time.
“He’s gone.”
He’s just an outline in the dark, and the outline doesn’t look right at all.
Yet there are no red eyes to stiffen her and send her wheeling backwards.
It/he hugs her around the waist so that it feels her ribs will crack, while he’s on his knees like he were a small child. Her voice comes out too quiet and thin.
“It’s all fine. You’re fine Davis.”
She thinks she finds his shoulder through the torn cloth, a roughness and sharp sting. The blood trickles past her fingers, drying cold in the air.
He’s trying not to breathe, trying not to move because it hasn’t receded yet. Just one quick movement and that could be it for her.
He’s kneeling.
The whole idea is so much like a pilgrimage before the Virgin Mary that she wishes she could laugh. But she can’t, because she can feel the muscles in his cheek twisting and the tension going through him.
Minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Too much longer that the last time.
How can this be enough for him?
I’m sorry he says to her,
“You didn’t hurt me.” she lies. She can feel his breath in warm scared puffs of air through the thin shirt, and wonders if he feels the shudder though her skin. Of course he does, he always does.
“Thank god.” She wonders if it’s just a colloquialism or he believes still. He’s been hit with more than any true-fiction conspiracy novel- learning about being a genetic form from another planet, meant to have no free will and a destiny that was the exact opposite of everything he’d tried to be. He wants to and it breaks her heart.
“Can’t lose you.” It’s stopped and he’s slow in letting go.
These days he doesn’t touch her unless she does first. One of the downsides of having flesh that can easily be pierced through by spikes, but not just that. He sees himself as tainted with the invisible blood on his hands. He'd scrubbed it off and then cooked her dinner once but now that she knows he won't forget it. It was all fine and dandy when he was the hero she wanted to believe in. She thinks maybe she hates him a little for that.
He'd lied and that had been her truth.
He hates himself more than she could though, and she wishes he'd let go. He didn’t have the choice of making it stop.
“Then I take it you missed me.” Her quip falls flat, in part because her voice is wobbling. It’s impossible, the pretence of this. She can’t lie; keep Davis and Clark apart forever, every minute of every second of every day. She’s not that strong, not that anything.
“I’m here now.” She says. She wonders why her, what he thinks he sees.
“You won’t lose me.” Oh, but she can lose him.
She can lose herself.
(She could drop to her knees on the asphalt and try to forget that she was thinking of him just then.
Not Clark. It wouldn’t work.
It would break her; one moment after another held back in a dam until they over spilled. If he leaned forward then; touched her lips with his; she thinks that she would have given him everything, all the crumbling bits of her that should have been running.
She could be one of those moths flying headlong into the light that’s too bright and too blinding and too warm.
I can’t save you, she would want to say. Only she wouldn’t say that when the constant pained look in his eyes was almost hopeful; and the tenderness in his face made her warm, not suffocated. Only she’d draw her hand across his cheek and leave a scarlet mark.
“I trust you. I care about you. I’m tired of being scared.” She’d trust he’d never try to hurt her.
He’d be warm and trembling under her hands, like there was too much that couldn’t be contained. And she’d feel it, trickling its way to her skin. He’d burn.
He’d give everything, take much more. His touch would mark her.)
As it is, he holds her a little too tight and it doesn’t feel like enough.
(Say this water doesn't pull but when you fall takes you altogether in. Say you are in.)
It is destiny, or DNA, or just the hateful actions of worse monsters than anything that they could’ve made him into.
He can’t help hurting her.
She’s covered in blood; she doesn’t know whose blood it is- Oliver’s, Jimmy’s, Clark’s or someone else’s. She couldn’t save them all.
There is smoke and dust and sirens with no one to back them up because anyone who has any sense has fled.
He isn’t merely red eyed, now, but decked at the center of armor and spikes. She wishes she could see something of Davis for one last time, but he’s suffering in something a hundred times worse than hell.
Maybe he can see around them and is struggling from wherever he’s trapped.
All she sees is those eyes, red and burning and for the first time not seeing her at all. It is only on a mission, following a preprogrammed genetic urge.
She should feel just little bloom of self justification now. She’d seen that this would happen, had safe guarded herself.
If she had let herself love him the way she wanted to this would have destroyed her.
(She had no illusions that being with her might have halted the monster taking over. She’s not some princess in a fairytale. She’s not that anything.)
She hadn’t taken the gamble on odds that she could never win. She did right.
She had to have done right.
Only, all she can think is that she lost anyway and that maybe if she had taken that chance, she’d have something more to remember of him.
It slices its way through the door like so much paper, bone spurs scratching on tile, impervious to the slippery carnage.
The fear should be there, and is, but she’s drowning in something that feels like despair.
Davis is gone. She realizes that she didn’t have to let herself love him for losing him to tear her apart.
This is the end. This time it won’t be enough.
Her vision blurs and she braces herself.
(Say the same thing that holds us holds us apart.)
She almost chokes in the air and her lashes stick together wetly. Darkness, blackness, comfort. For a second she thinks that this is death.
She still feels his breath even at the back of her neck, and that light bulb is still guttered out.
That wasn’t the way it happened at all.
Her hands go over his making sure. His skin is still too warm and he’s too encompassing but she leaves them there. He needed her. She needed…
It didn’t have to happen that way.
He learns about the dream. No particulars. Just that it had been a nightmare, and he knew he’d been in it. She doesn’t want him to feel guilty; but the perpetual self loathing is back on his face.
He still offers comfort the only way he knows how. He surrounds her.
This time she eases into his grip and holds on a little too tight. “I trust you.” She says. He returns the grip.
Ask me why. Please. Her defenses are in shambles right now, and she’s choked and needy enough to make the jump.
He just holds her, and then there are none.
(Say we belong to each other.)
Maybe her dream had a basis in truth.
Maybe It’s pull would grow with time so that he got absorbed and locked in its hold forever. And she lost him. Really lost him.
Again, to something that had a deeper hold on him than the grave.
Sensibility tells her that this is the way of things. Everything falls apart.
It was a warning.
One day what they have might not be enough.
It’s a useless one.
What would that change, really?
(Say we sit on some steps together, or a wall. Say something falls.)
That day, she comes home early with six halogen lights in the cramped trunk. She drags them down, one by one, and doesn’t need to ask him if he’d give a girl a hand. I can do that, he says and she says she wouldn’t want to sprain anything. All six end up rigged on the ceiling, banishing the otherworldly shadows and (she thinks) turning her hair a greenish tint.
He squints in the light, stretches up unknowingly revealing the strong, lean lines of his abdomen. She’s trying hard not to think of that now but he straightens the connections so meticulously that she just wants to watch him.
This isn’t gothic doom and gloom. It’s the real world. Anything could happen.
She tries to forget that this is Smallville.
“Now we celebrate.”
(There’s a table behind the coat hangers. The dust comes off easily. )
She’s ready to rail at him if he says he doesn’t need to eat one more time. He seems to catch onto her mood and doesn’t. The coffee is weak and the prepackaged tuna casserole isn’t quite warm but he’s sitting across from her so that she could brush his arm if she leaned all the way across the table and the dishware on her tiptoes.
He eats slowly and she wonders if he tastes it at all. He watches her eat mostly with a mixture of intensity and trying to look away politely and not succeeding. He’s confused, he must be and he won’t jump to conclusions because unlike before there’s no big honkin monster to mess with them.
Sure, maybe she just decided to share the closest to a romantic dinner she’s had in the past two years with the halogen lights. That had to be it.
She can see him, really see him. He’s still too pale but strangely beautiful and his face changes like the water from one emotion to another. He can do vulnerability and caring without needing to give a speech.
She still wants him to joke to keep her from turning into a sap, but he’s too busy swallowing her with his eyes.
She doesn’t know that singular cunning trick about eating to seduce. Maybe you were supposed to lick your fork a lot. She doesn’t want to end up looking like a hungry cat.
She does it the old fashioned way. Dig in, but not too fast. Close your mouth when you chew.
Anyway, it seems to work for him, if the way his eyes roam over her neck and try unsuccessfully to jump away is any indication. Never mind the fact that he still looks hungry.
Part of it is her fault, maybe. She figured if this was her being crazy she could go all out. Clingy green cloth. No sleeves, just straps the width of strings. Neckline dipping below the sternum. Lois had called it a boob shirt.
They may have gotten the lights up, but that was it. There is no heating down here. She hasn’t gotten cold because of him.
In hindsight, the shirt was not such a good idea. Goosebumps pebble her arms and she is not shivering, not a little. Not that much.
He puts his sweatshirt over her shoulders, anyway, and it smells like him.
(Say the language is dry and the wall is low. Say a word gets over the wall.)
She tells him about how she always used to ask pointless questions as a kid. It was part of a game. You told each other things. All truths you had to get off your chest.
A warm up round starts, she jokes, she thinks and pulls out a few embarrassingly horrific high school experiences. He doesn’t have many that would qualify as embarrassing, and more that would qualify as horrific. She sees him as he must have been, a scared kid with no one to pitch a seat in his corner, the one seen as damaged and sent to places that only would’ve damaged him more. Not even through her little venture into stalking would she have guessed the magnitude of it.
He looks at the shiny countertop, and avoids her eyes. He didn’t want to turn dinner into this.
“You can tell me anything.”
He wouldn’t ever try to unburden himself on the feelings of those necks snapping beneath his fingers, she thinks and the fear is back and this isn’t what she wanted either.
At least he’s looking at her again but it’s that look the first time she stopped it, like he sees her as some sort of angel. He’s not taking anything from her, just giving but still she wants to tell him that she can’t breathe. She has no defense against this.
“Just to seal the deal, I’ll tell you something. I still wish Clark hadn’t come by when you were cooking me dinner.”
It’s true, but she doesn’t know what she was doing then. Playing with emotional fire, maybe. She’d dressed up all the way down to her skin that night, but he doesn’t know that.
She knows what she’s doing now, she hopes.
A smile trembles at the corner of his mouth, but even that looks sad. “All of that, I forgot when I was with you.”
That-oh she knows that, how all that time he’d been doing anything, no matter how damaging to hold it back. It had worked, right up to the part he’d died. Then it had screwed with her and sent her sensibility running for the seven hills. That doesn’t change things as they stand.
“You were my only real shoulder, the guy who saved people and everything I needed.
I got used to playing robotic really well and I never had to tell myself what to feel with you.
I trusted no one else like you, with that.” In past tense, maybe not so good. She hadn’t said ‘How could you have let me trust you when you knew?’
He doesn’t look down, never looks down and the little bit of light in his eyes dulls painfully. “I’m so sorry.”
“That night could’ve been fun. We could have watched some horrible chick flick and I’d have fallen asleep on you-your shoulder. Really, it’s practically engrained in the human genome.”
“I would have been lying to you.”
This part horrifies her more than any other. Not the monster with the endless spiky protrusions, not the helpful emt who went after criminals but still people to keep it sated. (Oliver had a few fingers in the investigation and she knows what the corpses looked like, vertebrae twisted and cracked.)
He’d been the only one to give it to her straight since she met him. Bette, the blackouts, her past, Jimmy. It had made her guilty that this happened with no one else.
It had made her whole.
Only he hadn’t told her possibly the biggest secret of all. All because he couldn’t drag her into it.
So he’d come to visit, cooked her dinner, made her feel like herself again when he looked into her eyes and lied so convincingly that she’d have staked her world on it.
He could be lying now, sitting across the table looking into her eyes and lying if he wanted.
But what possible motive could he have for being crushed?
Logically, there’s the pity-trip-getting her to stay to be the med-dispenser or tearing down her walls so she gives in, but anyway it all comes down to her.
And her logic-brain has this way of shutting off when he’s around.
Animalistic roaring in an alley? Oh, that was just fear.
Enough with the thinking.
“Just tell me, in an ideal world, if it were different. You didn’t have to worry about any of this whole screwed up.... mess. What would have happened between us?”
“But it didn’t happen. There can’t be… a point to that now.”
This is the part where she should be swooning into his arms, flailing helplessly, overcome by manly passion.
What is she doing? Crossing her arms over her chest.
“Just answer. That’s the way it goes. If not you lose. Or I get cross at you. Or both.”
“We would’ve talked. You’d been going through a breakup. We would’ve eaten. You might have teased me about my cooking…”
“Don’t forget the guy hugs. I could’ve used the comfort.”
“Those were guy hugs?”
“Yep, an awfully friendly thing to do. Two years ago Clark might have done that, just the same. You know-except for the whole cooking thing.” And then Clark would’ve traded off Lana stories. And shared his horrors at hurting her when he got—excited.
“Clark never cooked me dinner. Or kissed me.”
(Well, Clark had never planted one on her unless she did it first. And after she did, he’d run away, eventually.)
If the mention of Clark’s name makes incisors start popping out, she fancies herself planting herself on Davis’s knee. Not that it would actually happen.
“…So just say in this hypothetical scenario that I was completely over Jimmy and I asked you to stay and we didn’t fall asleep watching a chick flick.”
Awkwa-rd moment.
“I would’ve shown you that he was wrong.”
“He said I didn’t trust him, so he walked away. What makes you so sure he was an idiot? Maybe he was saving himself pain.”
“You’re worth more than a little pain.”
“Yeah, because you love me, right?” She says it quick and joking and won’t think because the words won’t come out otherwise.
No pause. “I do.” He looks up, doesn’t blink and the attempt at levity falls flat. She’s never let him say to her since that time when she’d been running from him and it had been even more messed up than now.
“You’re not just saying that.” A statement. Not a question.
“Let’s say this is the hypothetical scenario.” She draws herself up, won’t break his gaze from across the countertop. “I’m asking you to show me.”
(Say a skin is like that and that what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone is the constellation that guides us.)
He doesn’t push the table over on his way to her, even if it looks like his muscles are having a fight of their own to keep from it. Even under the bright lights he stands out darkly, but this isn’t symbolic.
His eyes are the way she needs them to be.
He breathes and somewhere between then and now his mouth finds hers and his lips move against hers.
She had a thing about breath before doing this. She would have chewed four sticks of gum to banish the remnant tuna salad. It’s kind of easy to forget that she smells like fish when his lips are soft and not tentative in memorizing hers and all of him is close.
In imagination she’s been farther than this, sometimes, but it hadn’t prepared her, for here and now. She hadn’t ever thought it could be so deliberate. Before, the fantasies came in guilty snatches, unplanned moments when everything spiraled. They were sensible ways of dealing manufactured by her brain and over too soon.
This, now…isn’t. Can’t be taken back. She doesn’t care.
The kiss is heady and dizzying so she can’t be blamed for needing more. He makes a small sound and tilts her face and it feels deeper somehow.
She’s catching his words, swallowing them, learning them all over again.
They have so much to show each other and it could last for as long as they need, but it doesn’t because they are both too impatient. Not just her.
His fingers weave and fist through his sweatshirt where it’s draped on her back. She can’t tell herself she hasn’t been waiting for this.
The sweatshirt falls away onto the cement and slips under her foot when she moves closer, but she doesn’t fall because he’s there. His hands are large enough to swallow her arms and they don’t bruise. He’s everywhere, pressed close, and she’s aware of the way they seem to want to fit together. They need to and anything less is not enough.
She feels the shudder again, and of course he does. The throbbing had hurt then, it hurt now. She can hear his breath and she’s not alone in this.
She pushes against him so her knees bump his and he gets the message, clumsily yanking at the tablecloth and sending flimsy paper plates and empty Tupperware clattering to the floor. No magic tricks there.
“I liked that…bowl. What do you say you make it up to me?”
“I can do that.” He says and his voice is different, rougher than she's used to.
He hasn’t got a hair out of place since it’s so short and his shirt isn’t even wrinkled yet, but he’s still panting, still seeing and it’s still hard to breathe. His eyes are dark again, his face frightfully intense and this does not mean he’s some twisted kind of Heathcliff. He’s Davis now, just Davis, she tells herself. .
He can take anything or everything, all at once. But he just looks at her and it starts back up with the kissing, unexpectedly tender and so very focused. Looking. She’s just missing sleeves, for God’s sake, but she feels irrevocably exposed.
Helpless, too, because he’s heavy and she’s on her back and she has to crane her neck to get closer. She’s pinned against hard wood. No control, and she needs control.
She squirms and he supports himself with his arms so it lightens.
The air is cold and his mouth is anything but, sliding in an easy path over the skin above her shoulder blade and the thoughts scatter. The straps are off her shoulders now and she should be worried because this is so... shameless. Something that normal people do after dates and corny movies.
She could be thinking about DNA and destiny and inevitability and how this may be the only thing she has to remember. Normal, she wants normal.
It is a disturbingly easy feeling, his tongue sweeping easily against hers and his hands… She’s not a teenager, but here she is, playing tonsil hockey for all she’s worth.
She should stop with the thinking.
What’s more normal than a full blown make out session?
She’s going to go insane.
There are plenty of ways to be intimate, and maybe this is just another one. Soon he’s going to have enough data for a complete map.
Her shirt is on but it doesn’t matter when his palm is flat on the skin of her waist and then his mouth is there and the muscles clench involuntarily. Her skin is prickling, aware in every inch. It starts to burn as he trails up the underside of her breast and the tank top traps her before falling away. Part of her is warm at least.
She should tell him that she’s half naked and he’s not so this isn’t quite fair but she hasn’t got the voice for proper, articulated speech.
She tries to remember not to get too excited. Clark could hear her heartbeat if he listened in. But then, he has no place here.
It feels like torture but she wants him to keep on like this because when it’s over she can’t tell herself that this is only a rewind or what could have been in a world where there was no weird-ville, no sadistic alien scientists and no need to pretend.
This is what she thinks even when she holds on.
The only thing she has access to is his neck so she presses her lips there and his pulse hammers through her head.
He’s close enough that she doesn’t feel the cold much. Illogically, she’s sweating.
Somehow he doesn’t feel heavy enough now.
She kicks her heels off with a clatter to keep her feet flat on the wood and closes her eyes. Knee high stockings aren’t a barrier and she could make a joke about him having a thing for Catholic uniforms but his fingers are light and lulling. He still has calluses and she wonders how this can be if part of the destroyer’s nature is to heal. His nature. Maybe both of them are, Davis and It, fighting between themselves. Maybe this isn’t so doomed at all. He’d been human again after he died.
His weight pushes into her but her knees widen very slowly. His mouth still roves over hers and he’s warm and before she can think they are moving together.
The warmth and ache is like a drug and his arms shake on her shoulders.
She nudges him gently so she can see his face before she goes too far. He’s sweating, and his eyes have dilated so she can see the brown again but she doesn’t see him trying to distract himself with this. There is no ‘Lie to Me’ this time.
“This is all I have to give.” she says because she’s herself, as likely to cause pain as to save.
He’s been there.
If anything his eyes are warmer now. “You are everything.” He believes this.
Maybe he doesn’t need her to save him. Maybe he needs something to believe in.
Maybe she does too.
(Say we are in. Say my skin draws you. Say what we do with each other goes on.)
This is hurting him.
He’s no help staring at her like that, so she un-tucks the shirt briskly. She feels a little awed when his eyes still slide shut like he is on a high.
This doesn’t happen to her, but it apparently it just did.
The shirt used to be Jimmy’s, back in the days before he started swearing at her in e-mails. He was never coming back for it.
It stretches over Davis’s chest where she can see the muscle jolt at her touch.
His eyes are still closed so she makes an ineffectual effort to yank it over his head. It takes the two of them yanking in opposite directions and this moment is so out of the continuity of everything else that she knows it will be the one she thinks of first.
He isn’t shy touching her; pulling her in and he’s warm everywhere.
She presses her hand to his chest where it ended up and studies him. “I Tarzan, You Jane.” She mutters, aware she got them out of order.
(He seems to get the point of this and then she learns that he is literally warm everywhere.)
He sinks down to her and the sound that comes out of his mouth is like he’s really breathing for the first time since she saw him again.
She focuses on his face because she wants to scream at the sensation, feeling like she is going to break.
It’s quite a lot to take all at once.
But then he pulls away and she thinks the shock must have shown on her face. He’s still breathing deep and she understands what he’s doing.
She feels tensed for something but she reminds herself to relax and its better. He moves slowly at first but every moment soaks her senses in a miasma of heat and moisture and more aching than she thought possible.
It’s almost elemental, merciless and she anchors herself to the way his hands ground her and their eyes connect. It’s like nothing she’s used to. She used to consider the experience a success if she liked it at the time.
Now… Does she like it? Does she like breathing? Does she need it?
The circular motion feels good and maddening and not enough. She reaches for his shoulders for an outlet and when she presses her nails into his skin and they don’t leave marks. It’s such a silly thing, but she wishes she could. She bites her lip instead.
Then he’s pushing into her deeper so she can't think of anything but him, there and this isn’t enough and she murmurs than if she breaks her teeth biting into his shoulder he can pay for the dentures.
It’s like a rip current, one wave and another and then the next will rush past quick and pull her completely under.
Under, and then when she wakes up it’ll be done and the dream will be just that, a beautiful dream.
She doesn’t want it to end.
She’s trembling and trying to hold on to him, and somehow the rest of her gets that idea.
It just happens and his eyelids squeeze tight and maybe he is going to lose it right then. Only his head drops to her shoulder and he struggles to breathe deep.
Lana had told her once that she was afraid that Clark would break when he got excited. Here she is, with something she hasn’t had and maybe needed all this time and she doesn’t want to think of Clark and his tragedies.
Yet, she doesn’t want the power to break Davis.
She can’t give it back.
He moves still, and he's part of her, pulling her farther out into the water. Her neck jerks up and she arches and finds him. He is the center and all that’s left to do is let it crash over them both and hold on.
His forehead meets hers and his eyes are burning. She doesn’t let her eyes close because she needs it to be real.
It is that: terrifying and agonizing and beautiful. Then only beautiful.
(Say we struggle to get in and stay in and not ever leave).
Afterglow. She thinks that is a silly word, because they don’t look like glow sticks.
The truth is her brain is hazy, she feels sticky and the table is not really as smooth as it looks. She hopes she won’t have to pull splinters out.
He’s impossibly warm yet and she has to freeze her fingers to keep them from running down his face. The urge to hum is over whelming.
She thinks she may be happy.
It’s some time later but he’s still there and he holds her closer than he needs to. They are all but wrapped together, anyway. His fingers barely ghost across her back in small circles and she can feel his breath.
He doesn’t say anything and she’s okay with that. She needs to process so she won’t have a mini-freak-out.
Her mind is almost clear by now, like the clutter just burst out in the wake of everything else.
She’d just lain with Davis. Biblically. Not to save the world, to pacify it or to keep him attached to her. Because they’d needed it, she had.
She just conveniently forgot that that the other facet to Davis meant that she’d taken her pure motivations and stomped all over them. She wasn’t a free agent now.
Clark had nothing to do with it.
There should be two options on the table (and the pun isn’t funny). She could get up and leave before she can’t let go or wait for some divine revelation to hit her right between the eyes.
She makes it a point to keep her breathing slow and calm, like sleep. He can probably feel the change in her, as he always did even before she’d learned about the Kryptonian super abilities.
When she’d found him the first time, she didn’t run away right off. He’d killed people. He asked her to and she’d killed him. She didn’t think she could do it again.
It was nothing quantitatively measureable, a feeling that she couldn’t let go of. She’d paused before he said anything because she wanted to be given no other choice. If she’d been sensible everything would’ve fallen apart.
What’s the point in letting go now?
Maybe this is what they’ve got going for them. She doesn’t want to move.
Can’t.
His eyes don’t paralyze her but they are there and open and it’s that look again. She doesn’t ask him what he thinks he sees and just feels grateful that he does.
“I love you.”
He doesn’t add an expectant pause to the end of that sentence. “I just wanted you to know.”
She doesn't have to say anything. He'd give her everything and not ask for it back if that's what she wanted.
But one revelation deserves another and she's through with being scared.
“I’ve been thinking.”
He doesn’t say, ‘So?’ He’s waiting for her again.
“When you told me the truth I was so mad at you I---.”
“Hated me?”
“I did for a little while.”
“I would have hated me.” He bites his lip and doesn’t look away.
She won’t lie.
“I still would have helped you if you’d told me the whole truth.” He’d preferred to die than ask for her help. “Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t live with it. Knowing what I’d done and then pushing it on you. It wasn’t the way it should have been."
He wouldn't have pushed her into anything.
"I wanted to believe it it could all go away just like that. ”
“Nothing went away. You wouldn’t let me alone.
I’d have to talk to my best friend about what I did. I couldn’t cry like any normal person because I had to face that I might not have known you at all. I only remembered the ‘you’ part of it. I hated you for leaving me in the mess. I hated it the fact that everything we had was a lie.”
His face hurts to look at, and he looks about ready to cry.
“It wasn’t like that, not for me.”
“I know.” her palm is on his shoulder like before, and funny how fast things can change.
“And now, do you still?”
“I’m not big on the whole hate sex thing, you know. Besides if we didn’t have anything then I couldn’t have lost you. I wouldn't have been so scared of it.”
The wonder on his face forces out everything, and it feels like she’s really breathing.
(We rise where we fall.)
“Will you come with me?”
He asks her, and his voice wavers on the end of it. She can see everything in his eyes and the hope.
He can take all of her and he still seems to be in wonder that this can happen, that it can really be this simple.
This isn’t supposed to make her heart skip a beat.
It’s still there, the pull to hurt Clark and they are at the mercy of any moment her best friend decides to get over what she said.
Geographical distances make a difference to how bad it is.
This would have been the sensible reason, if she had relied on that.
Clark had just been out in the streets and when the change had come on worse she’d held on when Davis had looked like he was being ripped apart.
The cards have been stacked to fall for all their lives. Davis is always going to fight it. Clark won’t know.
She’s going to be there.
The future is one step after another, but she sees a clear path.
It looks real.
She thinks his hand could engulf hers and maybe it does.
“North, South, East or West. You've got it.”
He reaches for her and this is the truth.
(Say we are the same. Say we come to it simply again.)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
nature
Reccing Notes: gdfgirthdtdfhru!
Seriously. IMHO, the best characterized err.basement fic ever. With plot! just too amazing for words. paraxdisepink captures Chloe, slight snark, all the inner conflict the purity and desperation of their feelings. It is seriously. hot. As in, you might combust.
by paraxdisepink at her lj.
5,720 words, m/nc-17, eternal
She crawled around to face him. Her throat was burning.
She felt like Beauty locked in the Beast’s castle, standing at the top of stairs in a place dark and colorless compared to her apartment above. Her groceries were still on the table outside. Anyone who wandered in and saw them would know she was missing. She listened for footsteps in the Talon above, but it wasn’t like her friends would go into a frenzy searching for her the instant Persephone dropped her bridle. The past few weeks had taught her that much. Sure, Clarkwhooshed in whenever the ever-burdened superhero needed a healthy dose of blonde sidekick, but it was well-past his bedtime and even all-powerful aliens needed their beauty rest.
Chloe took a deep breath. Speaking of all-powerful aliens, she couldn’t ignore the eyes on her back forever, tugging at her like he’d tied a string between the two of them. That was stretching it. Maybe he’d been built to take down a fellow Kryptonian, but he didn’t have some magnetic hypnotic power that could draw her to him against his will. He wasn’t Dracula or Hades or the Phantom for crying out loud. She had the mysterious power here, apparently, one he honestly believed could challenge fate and save the world. Maybe he’d banked on the fact that she couldn’t refuse giving it a try or maybe he’d just gone off the deep end grasping at straws thanks to Clark and his eternal optimism. Whatever the case, she was the one taking the gamble here and the one who had everything to lose.
The thought hardly gave her the boost of courage she needed, but she set her bag down anyway beside the door, clenched her jaw and started back down the stairs to where Davis waited.
His shoulders sagged where he stood in the shadows, and thank God he didn’t look so otherworldly anymore, just tired. She hadn’t realized how frozen he’d been standing until he let out his breath and sank down on the stairs. It had to be terrifying, thinking the one person close to you would abandon you because of something you couldn’t help. Was that what she had intended to do in her hurry to warn Clark, cut herself off from him and cold-heartedly work to find a way to take out this threat to her best friend for good? Davis was what he was, but there were two sides of him. He was more than the kind paramedic who saved people and cooked her dinner – she’d found that out in a pretty quick succession of realities breaking apart like one glass shattering after another – but he was also more than a monster with a mission to kill.
He offered her his hand when she came down to him. His skin was still warm; Chloe thought it would be cold after coming back from the dead. She didn’t know what else to do but let him pull her down on the steps beside him. Silence settled over the two of them like a blanket when she let go of his hand, and she took her time studying the heap of stuff cluttering the basement around them. You’d think she would have noticed the moving truck bringing all this here, but maybe all of it wasn’t his or maybe Oliver had done it – he’d said something about having someone clean out Davis’ apartment. Who or how didn’t matter anymore though. Davis was here now and he couldn’t go anywhere else if what he said was true.
He wasn’t in any big hurry to talk, but she could hear him breathing beside her and she could feel him just a few inches from brushing her shoulder where they sat side-by-side, giving off heat and that brooding vibe that made Clark seem cheerful by comparison. After knowing Davis for months, she’d gotten used to his moody silences. She used to think he was a little too old for the emo thing, but now that the awful pieces had come together she had to give him credit for not being raving mad by now. How many people would continue to function after they’d been told it was their destiny to kill and destroy the world?
A part of her warned not to sympathize. Serial killers preyed on sympathy and sob stories weren’t excuses. But your average Jack the Ripper didn’t have a literal monster inside they couldn’t control. Davis was more like a Kryptonian time bomb struggling to deactivate the trigger, and he had destiny working against him. She remembered needing a personal bomb squad once, but she held herself away from him anyway so they didn’t touch. She closed her eyes and saw him in that Kryptonite cell again, revisited her own shock at what she’d done on instinct and that desperation to say a hundred things before it was too late. It’s like they said, when you couldn’t talk, you communicated. Funny how she couldn’t bring herself to speak now. It was easy to pour your heart out and forgive someone and beg forgiveness when you thought they were dying. But things weren’t washed away so easily when they rose from the grave invulnerable and were sitting right next to you. There were the murders, the threat to Clark, that red-eyed thing he’d turned into in that cell, and the fact that the guy beside her now wasn’t the guy she thought she knew. The Davis who saved lives and promised to always be there was a mask for something that should only exist in a nightmare, and now that the illusion had crumbled she had to make sense of what lay underneath.
“This thing you say I do,” she broke the silence. “How does it work?”
He lowered his head and stared at his hands clasped between his knees. He didn’t like talking about what he was, the other part of him. In fact, he looked a step away from crumbling himself, and the misery in his face made one thing clear between them: if he had any choice in all this he wouldn’t choose this thing with her now, whatever it was, or a life without the monster. He’d choose to die and stay that way. He’d already chosen death once rather than be with her. She couldn’t blame him – no one would want the nightmare he was in – but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “It first happened that night in the ally with Jimmy. You . . . you touched me and stopped the beast inside from coming out. I was human again.”
He looked at her with some of the same amazement she remembered from that night. She had to be the world’s most clueless idiot. She’d heard him growling then and she’d seen something come over his face in the shadows. How could the queen of the weird and unexplained have thought Davis was just thankful to be rescued from a major head injury? But it was like she’d told Clark, she’d been in denial. No one as left out in the cold as she’d been lately wanted to face the fact there was something wrong the one person she could talk to. It didn’t matter anymore anyway. The truth was out now and the question was what to do about it.
Davis drew another breath. He seemed to want to talk now. Considering the secret he’d kept she couldn’t blame him for wanting to unburden himself. “The things I’ve done, Chloe . . .” he said, “I never thought any part of me would be capable of killing people. It’s like I was at war with the beast inside me and the only thing that made sense was hurting as few people as possible. I tried not to – I tried pills, whatever I thought could control it. I just . . .”
He trailed off. War was a good analogy, or an alarming one considering his “father” was the infamous General Zod. War had casualties – like Lex and Sebastian – and soldiers did what was ruthlessly necessary to stop a worse thing from happening. Or maybe Davis wasn’t the soldier fighting on the side of the good guys while his alter ego had a whole other operative. Maybe she was making excuses. Maybe he was the collaborator dancing with the Devil to save his own ass.
“Davis, I don’t think anyone can say what they’d have done in your position.” That was the truth, if nothing else. He’d said the monster inside was his true nature, but as he’d died he’d reverted back to Davis again. What did that mean and did it matter? Weren’t the good guys supposed to help someone who wanted help regardless? But that was Clark’s way, not hers. She prided herself on a more pragmatic way of doing things. But then why was she here?
Clark said they had to talk about what she’d done. But she had nothing for Clark on the subject beyond cold reasoning. He didn’t want to hear what the Davis she’d known had meant to her, that he’d been the only person she could lean on lately, and was it really Clark she owed the explanation? She remembered Davis’ face as he’d laid his hand against hers through the glass. He’d looked at peace, like he could rest now that his secret was out and she was still there. That wasn’t a brutal serial killer. That was a man who wanted to be seen as anything but, paying whatever price necessary to stop the thing inside him.
Chloe swallowed hard against the lump rising in her throat. She’d done enough mourning in the time since, what she hadn’t done is get the truth off her chest and better now while she had the chance than letting it gnaw at her for the rest of her life. “You know, Davis, no one’s life is worth putting the world at risk.” Hers wasn’t. She’d already told Clark that. “But seeing you die . . .”
Her voice cracked and something in him cracked right along with it. “I’m sorry.” His hand came to her back and he said it in the soft Davis voice, the one he used when he told her she could talk to him or that he’d always be there. A part of her wanted to snap at him not to touch her. He’d lied, let her think he was some knight in a blue uniform while he spent his free time killing people. She shouldn’t trust a word he said, let alone let him get this close. But the rest of her ran through the ways the murders weren’t his fault, and instead of seeing him as the monster she couldn’t help feeling the monster was taking him away from her and she wasn’t ready to let go yet.
Her head ended up on his shoulder, and old habits dying hard, his arm wrapped around her. She’d spent a lot of time in his arms lately, usually crying about being the universe’s perpetual soccer ball. She’d felt safe there, and despite everything she knew about him that feeling refused to disappear.
She shifted just enough to look at him. His face was only a few inches from hers practically screaming his lurid exposé of horrific violence, trauma, and loss. Loss, that was just it. She definitely felt like she’d lost something. Chloe bit her lip and swallowed again.
“So just when I’m starting to think I’ve found the right guy, he turns out to be this mass-murdering alien destroyer set to kill my best friend.”
She shouldn’t have said it out loud; his features fell and he looked away, and when his eyelids fluttered and he bit hard into lip she thought he would break down and cry. She couldn’t blame him, after all what was he really but another victim of the apocalyptic soap opera on Krypton? How many had there been now, counting the endless numbers of meteor freaks in Smallville and Metropolis?
But he wasn’t like them. He was a weapon and it was dangerous refusing to see him that way. She tried not to let herself be too aware of the warm arm around her. She could see that it wouldn’t be easy keeping a clear head staying down here with him.
She stayed in the basement with him that night, but she didn’t sleep. She told herself she couldn’t trust him that much yet, so she sat in the corner and tried to straighten some of the mess around her to avoid tripping in the dark. It wasn’t exactly the type of sleepover where you busted out the Ouija bored and gave each other makeovers, or played Truth or Dare so he could ask embarrassing questions such as “how many times have you faked an orgasm with Jimmy?” It wasn’t that type of sleepover at all. Davis crawled in the little cot piled with stuff and tried to rest while she sat and stared at nothing.
He actually fell asleep after an hour, and that gave her time to work out the details of how to keep this little arrangement from blowing up in her face. She had to keep him and Clark apart, that was the first priority, and if she told Clark he might be right about finding another way to avoid the apocalyptic Kryptonian showdown he would huff and puff and say she was playing with fire and making excuses to continue seeing Davis. As for Davis, she could trust him far enough to stay in the basement while she played Watchtower – he had no other choice – but what about –?
A crash echoed from outside. Someone shouted, and then running feet pounded on the sidewalk as whoever was out there tried to get away from the sound – or the thing responsible for the sound. Something heavy flew into the Talon building as though a tornado had kicked up in the middle of the night. Chloe went cold inside. She knew those sounds and there was only one tornado that chased lowlifes at this hour, Clark. Damn him. Why did he have to go red-and-blue-blurring here of all places?
She glanced at Davis. He was still asleep. With any luck this deadly pull toward her best friend didn’t work unless he was consciously aware of Clark’s presence. That wasn’t the only worry though. Her bag of groceries still lay on the table upstairs. If Clark came in and saw them, or gave the place one sweep of his x-ray vision . . .
Luck had apparently abandoned her a long time ago. Davis stirred and made a weak sound like something had gripped him from the inside. He bolted upright, and all of a sudden he was breathing hard, his hands white-knuckled where he balled them into fists and clutched at the blankets.
“Chloe . . .” His voice was rough, coming through clenched teeth. “It’s happening, Chloe. It wants to kill.” In the dark, she could see the muscles in his arms bulging where he wasn’t wearing his sweatshirt anymore. He was trying to hold on, trying to fight, as he must have that night in the alley with Jimmy, but from what he’d said fighting wouldn’t do any good unless she helped him.
“Clark’s outside,” she told Davis as she bolted up from her corner. Her first instinct was to run for the door and warn him. But the Destroyer inside Davis would come after her and Clark if she did and she was here to stand between the two of them and try this other way. If she could save Clark without the fight that would kill them both, if she could tame the thing inside Davis and save him too she had to take the chance.
She made her way to the bed. His face was paler than usual and when he turned to look at her his eyes were glaring red. They pleaded as his face contorted with pain and whatever rage the monster evidently felt. Everything about him pleaded for her to help him, even as he gnashed his teeth and turned his face away to hide the dark spots forming on his skin. His hands shook in the covers, and he braced himself as though knives were cutting through him from the inside.
He could kill her. Worse, if this didn’t work he could crash through the wall and kill Clark. What made him think anything she could do would be enough to stop him? She shouldn’t have trusted him. She couldn’t risk the world on his delusions. But she had no other choice now.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to sit behind him on the bed.
“Okay,” she sucked in a breath. She had to do this, somehow. She’d done it once before. Her hands settled on Davis’ shoulders and she could feel him straining, all rock hard muscle fighting with all his strength to keep the thing in. She could feel its strength too, bubbling under the surface like a force of nature that would stop at nothing to get out. His true nature, he’d said, but she didn’t believe it with the way he was fighting. And at the moment, well aware of its power and its hunger to destroy, she couldn’t blame Davis for doing whatever it took to send it back under the surface, for bringing it blood sacrifices to keep the monster sated in its labyrinth. The cost of letting it get hungry and tear its way out was too high. What did that make her? Theseus who slew the monster or Ariadne who helped him light the way?
She’d stopped it once, Chloe kept repeating to herself. She’d touched him, Davis had said. Her hands were sweating, but they tightened on his shoulders and she told herself she had to say something, something that would anchor Davis to her and keep the thing from overtaking him.
“Davis, you don’t want to do this.” Her voice sounded shrill and small and wasn’t steady enough to soothe anything, let alone a beast. She sucked in a breath and tried again. “You don’t want to hurt Clark.”
He shook his head that he didn’t. She knew he didn’t; he’d tried to warn Clark before he’d transformed in the cage. He made a heavy gulping sound as sweat beaded his forehead and he clenched his hands as though trying to hide something from her. This was agony for him, she could see that, and she was going to abandon him to it earlier and run to Clark. She crawled around to face him. Her throat was burning.
“Davis, look at me. You don’t want to hurt anyone. I know you. You help people.” She believed that, and as much as she tried she couldn’t really believe what he’d said about the murderer being his true nature when she’d seen so much evidence to the contrary. The person he’d been wasn’t a lie, the guy who cared for Bette and Oliver and brought her back to her fiancé despite his feelings for her, the guy who’d confessed he loved her. She didn’t want to lose that guy to this. She bit hard into her lip and choked out, “Davis, come back.”
The gray spots slowly dissolved into his soft fair skin and when he opened his eyes that he’d squeezed shut in pain they returned to their melting brown color. Her mouth fell open. A part of her had been afraid this claim that she calmed the monster was some desperate trick on his part to stay near her, but now that she’d seen it with her own eyes . . . Her touch was stronger than the most advanced alien science. Maybe she’d made the right choice to stay after all. For the first time, she felt that way. Maybe Davis was right too and there was something stronger out there than the Destroyer inside him. Wasn’t there supposed to be a god and wasn’t good supposed to be stronger than evil?
Davis was still breathing hard, and when the strain in him lessened he slumped against her shoulder. He was so heavy she had to put an arm around him to steady him. “I think it’s okay now,” she managed. She shouldn’t hold onto him like this, but she told herself she had to just in case Clark came back and she had to work her mysterious miracle again. A part of her knew Clark wouldn’t come back. One glimpse of the infamous Red-and-Blue Blur was usually enough to send his targets running.
Davis lifted his head from her shoulder once he caught his breath and turned to look at her, and just like the first time in the alley with Jimmy he had that stunned look on his face as though she were some kind of angel, only this time his eyes were wet.
Chloe should have gotten up at that moment, but she couldn’t. No one had ever gazed at her like she was their walking salvation before. He was transfixed, and for the first time she realized her heart was pounding and that she was breathing hard too. There was nothing like the adrenaline rush of a crisis averted, and this was one of the closest calls she’d ever face. She had to say something, break the spell before it led to . . . what?
“Any theories on what just happened?” It wasn’t her meteor ability. That worked by taking his pain into herself. There’d been no pain. Calming him hadn’t taken anything from her at all.
Davis didn’t lower his head in shame this time talking about what he was. The color of his eyes seemed to deepen and he looked as caught up in the rush as her. “Maybe whatever’s between us is enough to keep me human,” he breathed.
She shouldn’t let him talk like that or assume there was anything between them. As far as he knew she’d stayed to keep him and Clark from killing each other. But she couldn’t deny what she’d just seen with her own eyes and she couldn’t keep her fingers from brushing his face that she’d magically turned from white and distorted into handsome and chiseled again. So very, very handsome. Immortality had never looked so alluringly fragile.
Her mouth ended up on his and there was nothing reluctant about it. He made a sound like he was finally quenching a hunger he’d been dying of for a long time and she felt the urgency from him where the terror hadn’t quite let go His lips were soft – she remembered that from the first time he’d kissed her – and she hadn’t felt this kind of warmth in a long time. It should have scared her, letting him get this close, but he wasn’t part of the real world anymore where you had to think about consequences and moving too fast, and what they’d shared a moment ago threw them in intimate territory already. Going a little further didn’t seem to make a difference.
He pulled back to look at her, his fingertips hot where they’d tangled in her hair, and if he’d been amazed by what her touch had done before he was awe-struck now. He didn’t have to tell her he’d waited for this for a long time, and she didn’t have to ask if it was everything he’d hope for. His face told her it was everything and more.
“You had to have been sent to me,” he murmured in a thick voice, his eyes so fixed on hers there was no breaking his gaze. Chloe felt something warm flow through her. He believed this, a fact that had too much evidence behind it from him to ignore any longer. But he had to be grasping at straws by now, and who could trust the sanity of a man who knew eternal rest wasn’t an option? She’d been looking for a purpose since losing her job at the Planet. It couldn’t be this, saving one man. But if she saved him, she saved Clark and the world.
“I love you, Chloe,” Davis went on. “I don’t need you to love me back; I just need you to know how I feel.”
No. He needed her to know that he did feel. She had no doubt that he still wanted to find a way to end it all. Who needed the guilt of leaving someone behind the day he finally succeeded?
“Davis . . .” She didn’t know what she was going to say and he didn’t give her the chance anyway. His mouth found hers again and this time she was the one making soft sounds as the kiss steadily deepened and her lips parted under his.
He kissed her like he was trying to drink her in, and when the tip of her tongue pushed between his lips he shifted and lowered himself from the bed down onto his knees in front of her. He ended up between her thighs with his hands on either side of her, and his lips took their time straying from her mouth to her jaw and her neck. Chloe craned her head back. She hadn’t realized her hands had gripped his shirt, gathering it up in this sudden electric need for bare skin.
He stopped kissing her long enough for her to pull his shirt off, and when her hands ran over the muscles of his arms and his back with a curiosity she couldn’t help she knew just how many lines they were crossing. She should have put a stop to this, told him they couldn’t do this. She was here to help Clark, not fall under Davis’ seduction spell. But his hands were on the buttons of her shirt and the heat of his bare chest bled through the thin material. She wanted that heat. Worse, something was drawing her to it.
Davis had quick fingers. The buttons came undone and the shirt fell away. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath – laundry hadn’t been a priority these past few days – and she couldn’t help feeling vulnerable those eyes that swept over her and devoured. He didn’t say a word; his hands moved over her shoulders, down her arms, and felt huge and hot and strong when they reached her breasts. She let out a faint sound, arching into his touch, and then his mouth resumed its wonderful tingling slide over his skin. He sucked at the place where her neck met her shoulder, moved downward over her collarbone until his mouth settled on her breast. She tried not to jump at the wet heat of his tongue or the fingertips gliding down her back and slipping into the waistband of her pants. Her thighs slid a little further apart, and by the way he was touching her, tasting her skin like he worshipped her, she was pretty sure there wasn’t anywhere he wasn’t willing to put his mouth or his hands. She wasn’t ready to allow that, or maybe she was too impatient for that. Her lower body prickled with little stabs of anticipation and she didn’t need him to tenderly idolize her or coax her into this kicking boundaries aside one kiss at a time. She just needed to get closer.
Chloe pulled his head back up to hers and wrapped her arms around his neck, leaning all her weight into him. He drew her down into his lap, unbuttoning her pants with one hand as he turned the two of them around and pulled her with him all the way down to the floor.
She laid her head back on the ground, kicking the thin material off her legs as he crawled over her on all fours, the muscles of his bare arms bulging where his palms rested flat on the ground. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel the want pulsing through him. It was there in his eyes. They shone with this powerful, predatory light that demanded, “give into me.” He’d always been . . . confrontational compared to certain other men in her life, and now that she couldn’t hide from what he wanted anymore she stared up at him like some helpless captive in a fairy tale, wondering what he was going to do now that he had her in his clutches. His face told her exactly what he was going to do, what Jimmy never could. He was going to make her beg one way or another for him to give her what she’d been running from all this time, and the worst thing was she was halfway there already.
She made a sound when his mouth came down on hers again, open and wet and grinding her head into the floor. It was almost rough, but not painful and not enough. Davis was crouched between her legs but she had to get him closer, get what she knew she’d wanted for a while now before she came to her senses.
Her hands went to his waist, unbuttoning his pants and tugging his zipper down. He was way past aroused, probably painfully, hard and pounding against her palm, and his self-control slipped when she pushed his jeans off his hips, dug her fingers into smooth, damp skin, and thrust her hips up to rub against him.
He was inside her a heartbeat later, and she couldn’t keep quiet then. Neither could he. Her body had to brace itself for the scalding shock and make room for him, and he threw his head back and made a sound in his throat like he’d caught fire. She dug her fingers into his forearms and held on tight when he started a rhythm. She didn’t care if she hurt him. A small part of her wanted to hurt him for not being what she thought he was – the perfect heroic guy who could make her forget about Clark and Jimmy and every other failure in her life. It wasn’t like she could really hurt him anyway in that muscular invulnerable body, not the way he’d crushed her. She clawed at him not to hold back and the friction between went from easy to deep and quick.
He wasn’t hurting her, just increasing the sharp ache inside her each time he pushed in. Maybe she wanted him to hurt her. It’d be easier that way. He was supposed to be the monster and she was supposed to be trapped here sacrificing herself for the good of the world. She wasn’t supposed to like this. She wasn’t supposed to wrap her legs around him, feel the sweat on her thighs, and stare up at him with her mouth open and dry on the verge of yelling something mortifying and totally unlike her such as “Come on, Davis! Fuck me stupid!” If he was too gentle she might have to face the fact that she did like it, that he was still Davis, the guy who held her when she cried, the guy she’d pulled the lever on but wasn’t ready to let go of.
It was as though he read the thought, or maybe something showed in her face. His movements slowed and his mouth melted with hers, perfectly tender now. He sank down on his elbows and her arms folded around him and his slid under her back gathering her close. Her breasts were crushed against the sticky heat of his chest and there was nothing but the closeness and the friction of warm sweat-damp skin. He wasn’t the captor from the story trying to force feelings into her; he just wanted to lose himself in her, hold onto something he believed was worth holding onto, and if she didn’t hold on to him too she was pretty sure she would fall apart right with him.
In that moment Clark didn’t matter, saving the world didn’t matter. Davis was bringing her dangerously close to the biggest climax of her life and all that mattered was that he didn’t stop.
When she came, the pleasure hit her like fireworks bursting deep inside her, one euphoric explosion after another. She closed her eyes and she couldn’t breathe and showers of sparks washed out everything behind her eyes. Her hands kept trying to cling but they were sweaty and slipping. He held her and kept going, like he was trying to wring every little drop of pleasure out of her already overloaded senses. He muttered her name in his soft velvet voice and then he was telling her not to move and he shook in her arms with such force she really was afraid he would break apart right there in her arms. Good thing he was indestructible.
He fell heavy and limp on top of her, his skin damp with sweat and his breath coming hard, just normal human weight and normal human exhaustion. Somewhere in his stupor he remembered that he was over six feet tall and all muscle and he eased off her, curling against her on the floor and staring at her with glazed dark eyes like she was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. He looked so calm, so hopeful. This is what he’d meant when he said stay with him. He’d been drowning in his own terror and pain all this time and he just wanted her to stop it.
Guilt crashed through the euphoric afterglow. They couldn’t have this, and the worst thing was none of the reasons were his fault. She wasn’t Beauty trapped in the dark castle with the monster desperate to break the curse; she was more like some idiotic Juliet who’d fallen for the wrong guy on the wrong side of Kryptonian Family Feud.
The unspoken laws of mistakes and one night stands didn’t have to kick in until the morning though. Chloe stayed where she was, let him curl closer and drape his arm over her. She closed her eyes with a soft sound when his mouth lazily descended on her neck, and before she knew it she was turning to face him, running her hands along his skin. Half her time here, half her in time in the real world. That's what it had to be now. No pomegranate seeds or spells necessary.
See? Isn't she awesomesauce? ^-^ Tell her so!
Seriously. IMHO, the best characterized err.basement fic ever. With plot! just too amazing for words. paraxdisepink captures Chloe, slight snark, all the inner conflict the purity and desperation of their feelings. It is seriously. hot. As in, you might combust.
by paraxdisepink at her lj.
5,720 words, m/nc-17, eternal
She crawled around to face him. Her throat was burning.
She felt like Beauty locked in the Beast’s castle, standing at the top of stairs in a place dark and colorless compared to her apartment above. Her groceries were still on the table outside. Anyone who wandered in and saw them would know she was missing. She listened for footsteps in the Talon above, but it wasn’t like her friends would go into a frenzy searching for her the instant Persephone dropped her bridle. The past few weeks had taught her that much. Sure, Clarkwhooshed in whenever the ever-burdened superhero needed a healthy dose of blonde sidekick, but it was well-past his bedtime and even all-powerful aliens needed their beauty rest.
Chloe took a deep breath. Speaking of all-powerful aliens, she couldn’t ignore the eyes on her back forever, tugging at her like he’d tied a string between the two of them. That was stretching it. Maybe he’d been built to take down a fellow Kryptonian, but he didn’t have some magnetic hypnotic power that could draw her to him against his will. He wasn’t Dracula or Hades or the Phantom for crying out loud. She had the mysterious power here, apparently, one he honestly believed could challenge fate and save the world. Maybe he’d banked on the fact that she couldn’t refuse giving it a try or maybe he’d just gone off the deep end grasping at straws thanks to Clark and his eternal optimism. Whatever the case, she was the one taking the gamble here and the one who had everything to lose.
The thought hardly gave her the boost of courage she needed, but she set her bag down anyway beside the door, clenched her jaw and started back down the stairs to where Davis waited.
His shoulders sagged where he stood in the shadows, and thank God he didn’t look so otherworldly anymore, just tired. She hadn’t realized how frozen he’d been standing until he let out his breath and sank down on the stairs. It had to be terrifying, thinking the one person close to you would abandon you because of something you couldn’t help. Was that what she had intended to do in her hurry to warn Clark, cut herself off from him and cold-heartedly work to find a way to take out this threat to her best friend for good? Davis was what he was, but there were two sides of him. He was more than the kind paramedic who saved people and cooked her dinner – she’d found that out in a pretty quick succession of realities breaking apart like one glass shattering after another – but he was also more than a monster with a mission to kill.
He offered her his hand when she came down to him. His skin was still warm; Chloe thought it would be cold after coming back from the dead. She didn’t know what else to do but let him pull her down on the steps beside him. Silence settled over the two of them like a blanket when she let go of his hand, and she took her time studying the heap of stuff cluttering the basement around them. You’d think she would have noticed the moving truck bringing all this here, but maybe all of it wasn’t his or maybe Oliver had done it – he’d said something about having someone clean out Davis’ apartment. Who or how didn’t matter anymore though. Davis was here now and he couldn’t go anywhere else if what he said was true.
He wasn’t in any big hurry to talk, but she could hear him breathing beside her and she could feel him just a few inches from brushing her shoulder where they sat side-by-side, giving off heat and that brooding vibe that made Clark seem cheerful by comparison. After knowing Davis for months, she’d gotten used to his moody silences. She used to think he was a little too old for the emo thing, but now that the awful pieces had come together she had to give him credit for not being raving mad by now. How many people would continue to function after they’d been told it was their destiny to kill and destroy the world?
A part of her warned not to sympathize. Serial killers preyed on sympathy and sob stories weren’t excuses. But your average Jack the Ripper didn’t have a literal monster inside they couldn’t control. Davis was more like a Kryptonian time bomb struggling to deactivate the trigger, and he had destiny working against him. She remembered needing a personal bomb squad once, but she held herself away from him anyway so they didn’t touch. She closed her eyes and saw him in that Kryptonite cell again, revisited her own shock at what she’d done on instinct and that desperation to say a hundred things before it was too late. It’s like they said, when you couldn’t talk, you communicated. Funny how she couldn’t bring herself to speak now. It was easy to pour your heart out and forgive someone and beg forgiveness when you thought they were dying. But things weren’t washed away so easily when they rose from the grave invulnerable and were sitting right next to you. There were the murders, the threat to Clark, that red-eyed thing he’d turned into in that cell, and the fact that the guy beside her now wasn’t the guy she thought she knew. The Davis who saved lives and promised to always be there was a mask for something that should only exist in a nightmare, and now that the illusion had crumbled she had to make sense of what lay underneath.
“This thing you say I do,” she broke the silence. “How does it work?”
He lowered his head and stared at his hands clasped between his knees. He didn’t like talking about what he was, the other part of him. In fact, he looked a step away from crumbling himself, and the misery in his face made one thing clear between them: if he had any choice in all this he wouldn’t choose this thing with her now, whatever it was, or a life without the monster. He’d choose to die and stay that way. He’d already chosen death once rather than be with her. She couldn’t blame him – no one would want the nightmare he was in – but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “It first happened that night in the ally with Jimmy. You . . . you touched me and stopped the beast inside from coming out. I was human again.”
He looked at her with some of the same amazement she remembered from that night. She had to be the world’s most clueless idiot. She’d heard him growling then and she’d seen something come over his face in the shadows. How could the queen of the weird and unexplained have thought Davis was just thankful to be rescued from a major head injury? But it was like she’d told Clark, she’d been in denial. No one as left out in the cold as she’d been lately wanted to face the fact there was something wrong the one person she could talk to. It didn’t matter anymore anyway. The truth was out now and the question was what to do about it.
Davis drew another breath. He seemed to want to talk now. Considering the secret he’d kept she couldn’t blame him for wanting to unburden himself. “The things I’ve done, Chloe . . .” he said, “I never thought any part of me would be capable of killing people. It’s like I was at war with the beast inside me and the only thing that made sense was hurting as few people as possible. I tried not to – I tried pills, whatever I thought could control it. I just . . .”
He trailed off. War was a good analogy, or an alarming one considering his “father” was the infamous General Zod. War had casualties – like Lex and Sebastian – and soldiers did what was ruthlessly necessary to stop a worse thing from happening. Or maybe Davis wasn’t the soldier fighting on the side of the good guys while his alter ego had a whole other operative. Maybe she was making excuses. Maybe he was the collaborator dancing with the Devil to save his own ass.
“Davis, I don’t think anyone can say what they’d have done in your position.” That was the truth, if nothing else. He’d said the monster inside was his true nature, but as he’d died he’d reverted back to Davis again. What did that mean and did it matter? Weren’t the good guys supposed to help someone who wanted help regardless? But that was Clark’s way, not hers. She prided herself on a more pragmatic way of doing things. But then why was she here?
Clark said they had to talk about what she’d done. But she had nothing for Clark on the subject beyond cold reasoning. He didn’t want to hear what the Davis she’d known had meant to her, that he’d been the only person she could lean on lately, and was it really Clark she owed the explanation? She remembered Davis’ face as he’d laid his hand against hers through the glass. He’d looked at peace, like he could rest now that his secret was out and she was still there. That wasn’t a brutal serial killer. That was a man who wanted to be seen as anything but, paying whatever price necessary to stop the thing inside him.
Chloe swallowed hard against the lump rising in her throat. She’d done enough mourning in the time since, what she hadn’t done is get the truth off her chest and better now while she had the chance than letting it gnaw at her for the rest of her life. “You know, Davis, no one’s life is worth putting the world at risk.” Hers wasn’t. She’d already told Clark that. “But seeing you die . . .”
Her voice cracked and something in him cracked right along with it. “I’m sorry.” His hand came to her back and he said it in the soft Davis voice, the one he used when he told her she could talk to him or that he’d always be there. A part of her wanted to snap at him not to touch her. He’d lied, let her think he was some knight in a blue uniform while he spent his free time killing people. She shouldn’t trust a word he said, let alone let him get this close. But the rest of her ran through the ways the murders weren’t his fault, and instead of seeing him as the monster she couldn’t help feeling the monster was taking him away from her and she wasn’t ready to let go yet.
Her head ended up on his shoulder, and old habits dying hard, his arm wrapped around her. She’d spent a lot of time in his arms lately, usually crying about being the universe’s perpetual soccer ball. She’d felt safe there, and despite everything she knew about him that feeling refused to disappear.
She shifted just enough to look at him. His face was only a few inches from hers practically screaming his lurid exposé of horrific violence, trauma, and loss. Loss, that was just it. She definitely felt like she’d lost something. Chloe bit her lip and swallowed again.
“So just when I’m starting to think I’ve found the right guy, he turns out to be this mass-murdering alien destroyer set to kill my best friend.”
She shouldn’t have said it out loud; his features fell and he looked away, and when his eyelids fluttered and he bit hard into lip she thought he would break down and cry. She couldn’t blame him, after all what was he really but another victim of the apocalyptic soap opera on Krypton? How many had there been now, counting the endless numbers of meteor freaks in Smallville and Metropolis?
But he wasn’t like them. He was a weapon and it was dangerous refusing to see him that way. She tried not to let herself be too aware of the warm arm around her. She could see that it wouldn’t be easy keeping a clear head staying down here with him.
She stayed in the basement with him that night, but she didn’t sleep. She told herself she couldn’t trust him that much yet, so she sat in the corner and tried to straighten some of the mess around her to avoid tripping in the dark. It wasn’t exactly the type of sleepover where you busted out the Ouija bored and gave each other makeovers, or played Truth or Dare so he could ask embarrassing questions such as “how many times have you faked an orgasm with Jimmy?” It wasn’t that type of sleepover at all. Davis crawled in the little cot piled with stuff and tried to rest while she sat and stared at nothing.
He actually fell asleep after an hour, and that gave her time to work out the details of how to keep this little arrangement from blowing up in her face. She had to keep him and Clark apart, that was the first priority, and if she told Clark he might be right about finding another way to avoid the apocalyptic Kryptonian showdown he would huff and puff and say she was playing with fire and making excuses to continue seeing Davis. As for Davis, she could trust him far enough to stay in the basement while she played Watchtower – he had no other choice – but what about –?
A crash echoed from outside. Someone shouted, and then running feet pounded on the sidewalk as whoever was out there tried to get away from the sound – or the thing responsible for the sound. Something heavy flew into the Talon building as though a tornado had kicked up in the middle of the night. Chloe went cold inside. She knew those sounds and there was only one tornado that chased lowlifes at this hour, Clark. Damn him. Why did he have to go red-and-blue-blurring here of all places?
She glanced at Davis. He was still asleep. With any luck this deadly pull toward her best friend didn’t work unless he was consciously aware of Clark’s presence. That wasn’t the only worry though. Her bag of groceries still lay on the table upstairs. If Clark came in and saw them, or gave the place one sweep of his x-ray vision . . .
Luck had apparently abandoned her a long time ago. Davis stirred and made a weak sound like something had gripped him from the inside. He bolted upright, and all of a sudden he was breathing hard, his hands white-knuckled where he balled them into fists and clutched at the blankets.
“Chloe . . .” His voice was rough, coming through clenched teeth. “It’s happening, Chloe. It wants to kill.” In the dark, she could see the muscles in his arms bulging where he wasn’t wearing his sweatshirt anymore. He was trying to hold on, trying to fight, as he must have that night in the alley with Jimmy, but from what he’d said fighting wouldn’t do any good unless she helped him.
“Clark’s outside,” she told Davis as she bolted up from her corner. Her first instinct was to run for the door and warn him. But the Destroyer inside Davis would come after her and Clark if she did and she was here to stand between the two of them and try this other way. If she could save Clark without the fight that would kill them both, if she could tame the thing inside Davis and save him too she had to take the chance.
She made her way to the bed. His face was paler than usual and when he turned to look at her his eyes were glaring red. They pleaded as his face contorted with pain and whatever rage the monster evidently felt. Everything about him pleaded for her to help him, even as he gnashed his teeth and turned his face away to hide the dark spots forming on his skin. His hands shook in the covers, and he braced himself as though knives were cutting through him from the inside.
He could kill her. Worse, if this didn’t work he could crash through the wall and kill Clark. What made him think anything she could do would be enough to stop him? She shouldn’t have trusted him. She couldn’t risk the world on his delusions. But she had no other choice now.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to sit behind him on the bed.
“Okay,” she sucked in a breath. She had to do this, somehow. She’d done it once before. Her hands settled on Davis’ shoulders and she could feel him straining, all rock hard muscle fighting with all his strength to keep the thing in. She could feel its strength too, bubbling under the surface like a force of nature that would stop at nothing to get out. His true nature, he’d said, but she didn’t believe it with the way he was fighting. And at the moment, well aware of its power and its hunger to destroy, she couldn’t blame Davis for doing whatever it took to send it back under the surface, for bringing it blood sacrifices to keep the monster sated in its labyrinth. The cost of letting it get hungry and tear its way out was too high. What did that make her? Theseus who slew the monster or Ariadne who helped him light the way?
She’d stopped it once, Chloe kept repeating to herself. She’d touched him, Davis had said. Her hands were sweating, but they tightened on his shoulders and she told herself she had to say something, something that would anchor Davis to her and keep the thing from overtaking him.
“Davis, you don’t want to do this.” Her voice sounded shrill and small and wasn’t steady enough to soothe anything, let alone a beast. She sucked in a breath and tried again. “You don’t want to hurt Clark.”
He shook his head that he didn’t. She knew he didn’t; he’d tried to warn Clark before he’d transformed in the cage. He made a heavy gulping sound as sweat beaded his forehead and he clenched his hands as though trying to hide something from her. This was agony for him, she could see that, and she was going to abandon him to it earlier and run to Clark. She crawled around to face him. Her throat was burning.
“Davis, look at me. You don’t want to hurt anyone. I know you. You help people.” She believed that, and as much as she tried she couldn’t really believe what he’d said about the murderer being his true nature when she’d seen so much evidence to the contrary. The person he’d been wasn’t a lie, the guy who cared for Bette and Oliver and brought her back to her fiancé despite his feelings for her, the guy who’d confessed he loved her. She didn’t want to lose that guy to this. She bit hard into her lip and choked out, “Davis, come back.”
The gray spots slowly dissolved into his soft fair skin and when he opened his eyes that he’d squeezed shut in pain they returned to their melting brown color. Her mouth fell open. A part of her had been afraid this claim that she calmed the monster was some desperate trick on his part to stay near her, but now that she’d seen it with her own eyes . . . Her touch was stronger than the most advanced alien science. Maybe she’d made the right choice to stay after all. For the first time, she felt that way. Maybe Davis was right too and there was something stronger out there than the Destroyer inside him. Wasn’t there supposed to be a god and wasn’t good supposed to be stronger than evil?
Davis was still breathing hard, and when the strain in him lessened he slumped against her shoulder. He was so heavy she had to put an arm around him to steady him. “I think it’s okay now,” she managed. She shouldn’t hold onto him like this, but she told herself she had to just in case Clark came back and she had to work her mysterious miracle again. A part of her knew Clark wouldn’t come back. One glimpse of the infamous Red-and-Blue Blur was usually enough to send his targets running.
Davis lifted his head from her shoulder once he caught his breath and turned to look at her, and just like the first time in the alley with Jimmy he had that stunned look on his face as though she were some kind of angel, only this time his eyes were wet.
Chloe should have gotten up at that moment, but she couldn’t. No one had ever gazed at her like she was their walking salvation before. He was transfixed, and for the first time she realized her heart was pounding and that she was breathing hard too. There was nothing like the adrenaline rush of a crisis averted, and this was one of the closest calls she’d ever face. She had to say something, break the spell before it led to . . . what?
“Any theories on what just happened?” It wasn’t her meteor ability. That worked by taking his pain into herself. There’d been no pain. Calming him hadn’t taken anything from her at all.
Davis didn’t lower his head in shame this time talking about what he was. The color of his eyes seemed to deepen and he looked as caught up in the rush as her. “Maybe whatever’s between us is enough to keep me human,” he breathed.
She shouldn’t let him talk like that or assume there was anything between them. As far as he knew she’d stayed to keep him and Clark from killing each other. But she couldn’t deny what she’d just seen with her own eyes and she couldn’t keep her fingers from brushing his face that she’d magically turned from white and distorted into handsome and chiseled again. So very, very handsome. Immortality had never looked so alluringly fragile.
Her mouth ended up on his and there was nothing reluctant about it. He made a sound like he was finally quenching a hunger he’d been dying of for a long time and she felt the urgency from him where the terror hadn’t quite let go His lips were soft – she remembered that from the first time he’d kissed her – and she hadn’t felt this kind of warmth in a long time. It should have scared her, letting him get this close, but he wasn’t part of the real world anymore where you had to think about consequences and moving too fast, and what they’d shared a moment ago threw them in intimate territory already. Going a little further didn’t seem to make a difference.
He pulled back to look at her, his fingertips hot where they’d tangled in her hair, and if he’d been amazed by what her touch had done before he was awe-struck now. He didn’t have to tell her he’d waited for this for a long time, and she didn’t have to ask if it was everything he’d hope for. His face told her it was everything and more.
“You had to have been sent to me,” he murmured in a thick voice, his eyes so fixed on hers there was no breaking his gaze. Chloe felt something warm flow through her. He believed this, a fact that had too much evidence behind it from him to ignore any longer. But he had to be grasping at straws by now, and who could trust the sanity of a man who knew eternal rest wasn’t an option? She’d been looking for a purpose since losing her job at the Planet. It couldn’t be this, saving one man. But if she saved him, she saved Clark and the world.
“I love you, Chloe,” Davis went on. “I don’t need you to love me back; I just need you to know how I feel.”
No. He needed her to know that he did feel. She had no doubt that he still wanted to find a way to end it all. Who needed the guilt of leaving someone behind the day he finally succeeded?
“Davis . . .” She didn’t know what she was going to say and he didn’t give her the chance anyway. His mouth found hers again and this time she was the one making soft sounds as the kiss steadily deepened and her lips parted under his.
He kissed her like he was trying to drink her in, and when the tip of her tongue pushed between his lips he shifted and lowered himself from the bed down onto his knees in front of her. He ended up between her thighs with his hands on either side of her, and his lips took their time straying from her mouth to her jaw and her neck. Chloe craned her head back. She hadn’t realized her hands had gripped his shirt, gathering it up in this sudden electric need for bare skin.
He stopped kissing her long enough for her to pull his shirt off, and when her hands ran over the muscles of his arms and his back with a curiosity she couldn’t help she knew just how many lines they were crossing. She should have put a stop to this, told him they couldn’t do this. She was here to help Clark, not fall under Davis’ seduction spell. But his hands were on the buttons of her shirt and the heat of his bare chest bled through the thin material. She wanted that heat. Worse, something was drawing her to it.
Davis had quick fingers. The buttons came undone and the shirt fell away. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath – laundry hadn’t been a priority these past few days – and she couldn’t help feeling vulnerable those eyes that swept over her and devoured. He didn’t say a word; his hands moved over her shoulders, down her arms, and felt huge and hot and strong when they reached her breasts. She let out a faint sound, arching into his touch, and then his mouth resumed its wonderful tingling slide over his skin. He sucked at the place where her neck met her shoulder, moved downward over her collarbone until his mouth settled on her breast. She tried not to jump at the wet heat of his tongue or the fingertips gliding down her back and slipping into the waistband of her pants. Her thighs slid a little further apart, and by the way he was touching her, tasting her skin like he worshipped her, she was pretty sure there wasn’t anywhere he wasn’t willing to put his mouth or his hands. She wasn’t ready to allow that, or maybe she was too impatient for that. Her lower body prickled with little stabs of anticipation and she didn’t need him to tenderly idolize her or coax her into this kicking boundaries aside one kiss at a time. She just needed to get closer.
Chloe pulled his head back up to hers and wrapped her arms around his neck, leaning all her weight into him. He drew her down into his lap, unbuttoning her pants with one hand as he turned the two of them around and pulled her with him all the way down to the floor.
She laid her head back on the ground, kicking the thin material off her legs as he crawled over her on all fours, the muscles of his bare arms bulging where his palms rested flat on the ground. He wasn’t touching her, but she could feel the want pulsing through him. It was there in his eyes. They shone with this powerful, predatory light that demanded, “give into me.” He’d always been . . . confrontational compared to certain other men in her life, and now that she couldn’t hide from what he wanted anymore she stared up at him like some helpless captive in a fairy tale, wondering what he was going to do now that he had her in his clutches. His face told her exactly what he was going to do, what Jimmy never could. He was going to make her beg one way or another for him to give her what she’d been running from all this time, and the worst thing was she was halfway there already.
She made a sound when his mouth came down on hers again, open and wet and grinding her head into the floor. It was almost rough, but not painful and not enough. Davis was crouched between her legs but she had to get him closer, get what she knew she’d wanted for a while now before she came to her senses.
Her hands went to his waist, unbuttoning his pants and tugging his zipper down. He was way past aroused, probably painfully, hard and pounding against her palm, and his self-control slipped when she pushed his jeans off his hips, dug her fingers into smooth, damp skin, and thrust her hips up to rub against him.
He was inside her a heartbeat later, and she couldn’t keep quiet then. Neither could he. Her body had to brace itself for the scalding shock and make room for him, and he threw his head back and made a sound in his throat like he’d caught fire. She dug her fingers into his forearms and held on tight when he started a rhythm. She didn’t care if she hurt him. A small part of her wanted to hurt him for not being what she thought he was – the perfect heroic guy who could make her forget about Clark and Jimmy and every other failure in her life. It wasn’t like she could really hurt him anyway in that muscular invulnerable body, not the way he’d crushed her. She clawed at him not to hold back and the friction between went from easy to deep and quick.
He wasn’t hurting her, just increasing the sharp ache inside her each time he pushed in. Maybe she wanted him to hurt her. It’d be easier that way. He was supposed to be the monster and she was supposed to be trapped here sacrificing herself for the good of the world. She wasn’t supposed to like this. She wasn’t supposed to wrap her legs around him, feel the sweat on her thighs, and stare up at him with her mouth open and dry on the verge of yelling something mortifying and totally unlike her such as “Come on, Davis! Fuck me stupid!” If he was too gentle she might have to face the fact that she did like it, that he was still Davis, the guy who held her when she cried, the guy she’d pulled the lever on but wasn’t ready to let go of.
It was as though he read the thought, or maybe something showed in her face. His movements slowed and his mouth melted with hers, perfectly tender now. He sank down on his elbows and her arms folded around him and his slid under her back gathering her close. Her breasts were crushed against the sticky heat of his chest and there was nothing but the closeness and the friction of warm sweat-damp skin. He wasn’t the captor from the story trying to force feelings into her; he just wanted to lose himself in her, hold onto something he believed was worth holding onto, and if she didn’t hold on to him too she was pretty sure she would fall apart right with him.
In that moment Clark didn’t matter, saving the world didn’t matter. Davis was bringing her dangerously close to the biggest climax of her life and all that mattered was that he didn’t stop.
When she came, the pleasure hit her like fireworks bursting deep inside her, one euphoric explosion after another. She closed her eyes and she couldn’t breathe and showers of sparks washed out everything behind her eyes. Her hands kept trying to cling but they were sweaty and slipping. He held her and kept going, like he was trying to wring every little drop of pleasure out of her already overloaded senses. He muttered her name in his soft velvet voice and then he was telling her not to move and he shook in her arms with such force she really was afraid he would break apart right there in her arms. Good thing he was indestructible.
He fell heavy and limp on top of her, his skin damp with sweat and his breath coming hard, just normal human weight and normal human exhaustion. Somewhere in his stupor he remembered that he was over six feet tall and all muscle and he eased off her, curling against her on the floor and staring at her with glazed dark eyes like she was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. He looked so calm, so hopeful. This is what he’d meant when he said stay with him. He’d been drowning in his own terror and pain all this time and he just wanted her to stop it.
Guilt crashed through the euphoric afterglow. They couldn’t have this, and the worst thing was none of the reasons were his fault. She wasn’t Beauty trapped in the dark castle with the monster desperate to break the curse; she was more like some idiotic Juliet who’d fallen for the wrong guy on the wrong side of Kryptonian Family Feud.
The unspoken laws of mistakes and one night stands didn’t have to kick in until the morning though. Chloe stayed where she was, let him curl closer and drape his arm over her. She closed her eyes with a soft sound when his mouth lazily descended on her neck, and before she knew it she was turning to face him, running her hands along his skin. Half her time here, half her in time in the real world. That's what it had to be now. No pomegranate seeds or spells necessary.
See? Isn't she awesomesauce? ^-^ Tell her so!
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