Reccing Notes: Taking a break from medieval epic!fic to bring you...an epic fic. Post-eternal, into Beast, deals with that whole span of time after Davis leaves the basement. (It's never been done before. I know, okay. ;) )
And in character thinky Chloe. Something the show never really had the courage to explore.
by nonky at her livejournal
4511 words, m/nc-17, beast
"We knew this would hurt."It seems like I've been here before, Chloe Sullivan thought over the dry strike of the bolt sliding past the crack in the basement doors. Down in the underworld with a monster of my own free will. All we need now is for the power to go out and lightening to shatter the gloom.
She always tried to be confident in her choices when they mattered, because she needed to set an example for Clark and Lois. They were ditherers, hopelessly stuck on trying to figure out all the ways things could turn before they did something. Chloe had to be the one to actually do something, and she'd learned not to bother with all the possibilities. The possibilities were infinite, but inside her head she was infinite, too.
Her purse was shoved up her bent arm to hang as she went over the particulars; practical issues first. The social, philosophical, legal, spiritual and personal could wait. Her hand went to the bolt and opened it with a clack, echoed as Davis took a frantic step and spoke a low moan.
“Please.”
None of this was his fault. Every action he'd been able to choose for himself was good and altruistic. She blinked hard and answered softly. “I just bought groceries. I'm going to get the bag, okay?”
She needed a few seconds to breathe before she could back down there and sit with a serial killer. She needed something normal, like the rye bread and turkey she'd been looking forward to only a few minutes ago. Better yet, she needed ice cream even though her mouth was too dry to eat anything.
She let her arm fall and the purse slid to sit on the top step. That probably wasn't enough to make Davis feel better, so she turned and sank down to sit next to it. Her boots pulled off slowly, her heart racing as she waited for anything to happen. But Davis didn't move, she didn't move, and when her feet were bare, Chloe stood up and walked into The Talon. She glanced around as she hurried back to the table. She hauled the bag up so hard the edge ripped, so she hugged it to her chest as she went back. Oddly enough, when she'd closed and bolted the door she felt safer.
Davis was standing where she'd left him, his face blatantly open and needy. Chloe gave him as much of a smile as she had, and set the groceries down. He looked at her bare feet and blinked. “Your feet are going to be cold,” he ventured hoarsely.
She put the bag down on the table and looked toward the makeshift bedroom he'd put together. “I don't wear shoes at home. Can I borrow some socks?”
He kept his vulnerable face pointed at her, even as he moved to the cot and pulled socks out of his backpack. Chloe had been displaced once, too, trotted underground to a tiny house on the outskirts of Smallville to see if Lex's protection outlasted his father's will to be free. She hadn't been entirely innocent, but she hadn't been a killer. At the time, she hadn't known she was a meteor freak. She had yet to be possessed and trapped inside her own body, her will defunct as she struggled impotently.
Dealing with damaged men who possessed too much power over everyone they encountered should be rather natural. She should know better than to fall for the old 'you make me a better man' line. That was how nice girls ended up locked in basements multiple times with known killers. Chloe glanced around at the old movie posters and wondered why she didn't just move far away.
Davis came back with a pair of socks far too big for her, extending them way out from his body. Even as he yearned toward her, he stopped himself from approaching too closely. He was trembling.
“Davis, you're shaking,” she said evenly. “Are you sick?”
She had turned on the liquefied Kryptonite and watched him scream. His eyes had gone blood red and she still hadn't been able to see the shadowy monster in him. Most of what she'd seen past the human skin of Davis Bloome was incredibly human suffering. When he was himself he was intrinsically, almost intimidatingly honest. For all the horror of his beast, it was patently honest. He was a truer being than anyone. He'd been raised by no one, influenced by no community. He'd been willing to die to protect a world in which he'd never found a home.
“No, I'm fine,” he lied eagerly. “I feel much better now that you're here.”
She had to take the socks and put them on now that she'd asked for them. They traded places at a careful distance and Chloe sank onto the cot with a little sigh. Neither of them could look as her toes disappeared into the too-big socks. She stood up with a little bounce of overwrought pep.
“You need some dinner. Let me make you a sandwich. I have, uh, turkey on rye. You have to be hungry living on soda crackers and bottled water.”
He hurried around the small space with the same open expression, his face nearly glowing with the drain of anxiety. She had shown up and he simply relaxed. There would be no fighting or moralizing – he was just glad to see her. Chloe didn't even remember how long it had been since someone had that reaction to her presence. She took the napkins for plates and put together simple sandwiches with dull plastic knives. It was only after she'd spread mayonnaise on his that she thought to ask him if he liked it. He just nodded happily, and she realized he wasn't going to complain. If a mob threw open the doors and tried to kill him; he was a killer and deserved it. If the sky fell down; everyone knew that happened in Smallville. If she left; he wasn't really a man to begin with, let alone a prospective dinner date. He tried and failed and that was the end of his expectations.
But he was alive, and no more suicidal than she felt. They were living some kind of Travis Bickle morality play, but they had ideas of what to do. They had a way to get through the night.
Davis ate like the slapdash meal was something special, and she picked at her own sandwich. He seemed to count out everything from the number of times he chewed to the sips of milk he took between bites. There had been a foster kid in her fifth grade class who did the same thing. She had wanted to ask if it had anything to do with knowing there was no dinner that night, but hadn't known how. Davis had been in need of a good meal many times, so now she knew. Starvation followed you.
Chloe waited until he was finished and pulled out the container of ice cream, feeling a new wave of shame rise in her cheeks. She had killed him a day ago. She didn't deserve ice cream. Davis just looked at her with warm gratitude, stood up to get two plastic spoons, and handed one to her insistently.
“I can't eat dessert unless you do,” he told her. “Please? I know you threw away most of your sandwich wrapped in the napkin.”
He looked at her. He paid attention with his eyes and his intellect. He noticed her more than she noticed him, and not just to court the same kind of regard from her. If she never turned toward him again, Davis would see her just the same.
“I went to sleep last night . . . thinking I'd killed you, and when I woke up this morning I realized I'd done more than that,” she said quietly. “I gave up on you. I took an easy way out when you offered it to me. I've never given up on anyone like that, and there's no excuse.”
He put the spoons down. The row of movie seats shifted as he sat down next to her. His hand moved toward her clenched together fists, hesitated, dropped toward her leg, then he just folded up the arm between them. Davis set his chin on the crown of her head, coaxing her arms to his heartbeat.
“You didn't kill me. You were trying to save me. You did the best you could,” Davis said calmly. “I was desperate and you helped me even though it was terrible for you. Clark wanted to help, but he just made things worse. You did something to end my suffering.”
A thick feeling in her throat made her swallow hard. “But I failed.”
“Your intention,” he said huskily, “Was to save me. You were thinking of me like no one else ever has.”
She needed a better word than trust for the credit he wanted her to take from his reassurance. Trust wasn't that impregnable and flawlessly shining with hope. You couldn't feel trust flowing out of somebody else's skin into your own. You couldn't feel it fall from his words and sink into the top of your head.
Davis leaned them forward, took one hand off Chloe, and plucked the top off the ice cream. He shaved a curl of it into a spoon and brought it to his mouth. The sugary scent triggered a tiny amount of hunger, and she sighed.
He fed her the next spoonful, lowering it to her face and waiting for her to open her mouth. The cold plastic soothed the indents where she'd been biting her lips unconsciously. A strand of blond flicked into view and Davis pushed it back as he fed her again.
“I heard ice cream makes girls better,” he joked. “Now I know it works.”
Chloe tipped her face up, sneered at him mildly and gave him a little belly punch. “What about you? You seem to be feeling better, too.”
Davis gave her the container of ice cream, and she had to use two hands to his one big palm to hold it steady. Brown, brown, brown eyes fixed on her, and he rested his head on the arm draped behind her. She wondered how his square, defined features could look so much like a boy after a long, busy day at the circus. He was tired but so content. Any frightening moments were forgotten. He had burned off all the ragged energy in his body, and now he could sleep.
He was alive, so maybe she could sleep, too. Or maybe she had less reason to shut her eyes than she'd ever had before – not counting watching the back of a certain unnamed son of Krypton. She was very small next to their Kryptonian problems, and she could only stretch so far. She wouldn't fool her mundane human self into believing she could be everything to him. She was enough, for now, and that was enough for her until she could work on her life.
It was plenty that Davis was obsessed with her; making it a mutual feeling would make her too in love to protect him. He looked hungry again, a different kind of hunger and one that wouldn't be sated easily. She'd longed to be somebody's favourite, their absolute necessity. She'd willed Clark's killer into existence.
Like all her most ridiculous ideas, it wouldn't leave her alone. Chloe knew her wishes didn't bend reality, but she felt like it was some ironic twist just for her and Clark. The man of her dreams was half monster, and that monster was Clark's worse nightmare. It killed humans because it wasn't from Earth. It didn't feel anything for anyone.
She wasn't even going to tell herself she wasn't in love with Davis Bloome, because that had been the easy part. They'd had a gradual fall into a deep, deep hole, and there was something with red eyes in there with them. It didn't want to hurt her, but it would slice through the bones of anyone who tried to put her back on solid ground.
Davis had a rather tight grip on her, anyway, and it was more than needing her to calm himself. She knew he had tried to keep away for her safety. She hadn't been running away screaming at any point – even knowing their friendship would bother Jimmy. Some crazy day of the last year, she'd chosen Davis. He was better for her than Jimmy – stronger and able to dominate her attention in a way Jimmy never would. But he was a part of a greater whole that felt like the end of the world.
She didn't want to betray anyone, but no one else in her life had faith in her. Davis was the only one. She knew that was love blinding him, but it was really her intention to do her best. Fuck Clark and his two ancestral homes, standing above everyone and crossing his arms petulantly. Fuck Oliver's rapidly degenerating moral superiority.
As she saw it, the most important thing she had in common with Davis was that she didn't have much more to lose except her bid to help him. She would quiet the Beast and find a home for this dear, solemn man who kissed her tears even as his own eyes were filling up. Maybe she'd stay there with him.
Chloe took the remaining groceries upstairs and put them away, her chest aching. She shut down Isis for the week and sat in the basement, for most of the next day. He slept, looking like he'd never been able to rest before. She faked working, but really drilled herself on her choices, pushing at the weak spots.
She'd known it was right even before she had to wake him from a nightmare and hold him. Brainiac might have calculated their meeting, but it hadn't understood the results. She'd use that underestimation for all it could be worth.
Davis didn't mind the basement. He was used to being more active, so he paced a lot, but he had Chloe and entertainment. She'd brought books and a portable DVD player for him. They ate meals together. She sat with him sometimes when he was falling asleep, and it helped. The dreams took hours to fight back through the calm of Chloe's gentle glances over to his bed.
There wasn't much adjustment to be made. He'd known her very well, and they were in tune. He couldn't go outside, and she tried not to be gone too long. He'd had to call her down a few times in the middle of the day, but once The Talon closed she usually arrived on her own. Burden though he was, Davis never found any resentment or irritation in her eyes. He could swim in the sympathy there, wrap himself in pity. It didn't matter – his pride had fallen in five minute battles every time he saw her. Anything was better than the tiny moments of spotting her at the hospital. She'd always been on her way to another man. The one time she'd really wanted him, he'd had to admit her impairment and return her home.
Davis couldn't ignore his empathy for the man lucky enough to have Chloe and think he'd be keeping her. He couldn't imagine losing her after feeling that security. He couldn't even think of a way to get over it. The sickening fear that she was only temporary for him didn't stop him from weaving complex fantasies.
He started obsessing about how the outside world would see them, if he wasn't a presumably dead serial killer plastered on front page news and she wasn't a freshly divorced respectable humanitarian. Davis thought about what other people would see if he and Chloe could just appear somewhere new and start over with the world. He thought he could probably be more impressive and confident, because he felt very insecure even in the span between words as they talked. He stood in the bathroom and watched his face as he thought of Chloe, and it made him look weak, sad, petulant and sometimes bitter. He was sure he could do better if he just maintained his calm.
Devoted worked, and it spoke volumes, which saved him embarrassing or scaring her with hugely emotional confessions. She likely knew it all, but if he said it she had to rebuke it – because this whole thing was crazy, and in her circle of friends it was wrong.
The cheating would be simple compared to the betrayal. He'd known that, too. The rival wasn't Jimmy, not really, and the rivalry wasn't romantic anyway. Chloe and Clark had history. She had the reporter firmly placed in a friend slot, but her engagement obviously disturbed him. Clark didn't want to have Chloe all to himself, but the idea of not being her top priority seared him. He wasn't man enough to be in love with her, but he felt it deeply.
The difference, Davis thought, was that he wanted to connect with Chloe, and only a mutual desire would feel satisfying. Clark wanted to connect to Chloe, to keep her around and nearby, but he wasn't thinking about her side of the arrangement.
The point was less about what had gone on as what could go on if the fantasy of a new start came true. Looking at Chloe with other people had shown him how he wanted to be seen with her. He wanted not to loom over her, but to lean easily down to meet her. He wanted every time he touched her to look gentle but substantial. He wanted people to look and not wonder how they could be together. He wanted to be assumed to be her boyfriend. He wanted people to sense a bond between them that put them a little apart from everyone else. They would need all the protection they could get.
It seemed The Beast had a tolerance even to her presence, and had been pushing further up Davis' throat whenever her back was turned. Chloe couldn't imagine it as a physical sensation other than choking from inside out. She hauled him back to the basement and tried not to yell because he would never believe it was not his fault – blaming him didn't seem fair.
She shouldn't have blurted her plan in the panic, but it needed to be said while they were both able to hear it. Her heart beat so fast, entirely for him. She'd never considered one moment where The Beast might hurt her. It had its chance and she was left without a scratch. She had wondered a time or two if it was The Beast that loved her instead of Davis. She was not sure what to do with that idea except blame it on Clark and Lana's endless perfect non-existent love.
Her love was real. It was love for Clark and Lois and the regular joe citizens of Metropolis she couldn't name. It was also love for Davis, and she was content he was worth loving. His love for her – beautiful and glittering as it was – didn't need to reward her. If the end of his suffering was the disappearance of his long, searching looks in her direction, she would be happy he'd found self-sufficiency.
It was genuine when she reached for him, holding his hands and letting him feel her shake. It was her impulse to lean in and kiss him, making him release a sigh that echoed like she wounded him. They sighed together, utterly tragic.
“Davis,” she whispered, mouthing his name more than putting a sound to it. Her palms rubbed up and down his chest, seething with the urge to rip through to his skin. Chloe closed her eyes and wished hard, trembling.
“Chloe,” he groaned. His hands left her body, stopped holding her back and pulled her in. They held her face and stroked with his thumbs. She couldn't breathe, couldn't even think about anything except kissing.
Davis was drilling his tongue into her mouth, sucking and bending around her. His hands roamed her hips and hesitated. Chloe tipped up to her toes and he was grabbing her ass. Painful arousal started throbbing between her legs. She rubbed up on him. There was a bed, somewhere. There was the floor or a wall. Anything would do. If she had to, she could float.
He tried to fight her, but she was Chloe. She overpowered him with no effort and he wanted to please her. He wanted to make something easy for her again. There had to be another side to the terror and guilt, and if it was a tumultuous joining he could do that. He could cut out another bit of his heart and gift it to her.
The decision was made with noises and caresses, his body finally orienting them toward the corner of the basement he called a bedroom. They got rougher with each other as clothes came off. He couldn't make his hands understand they had to be gentle. They wanted to melt her to him, just press harder because she didn't for one second demur. He kept grabbing, correcting, then grabbing again.
She liked his fingers digging in, liked that he needed her uncompromisingly. He would be ashamed to hurt her, but there wasn't room for it between them. He was bigger than judgment or sanity.
It took a very long nervous time to get them both on the cot, naked, underneath a blanket because he knew she was cold even if she didn't complain. Chloe kissed him softly, her hands roaming his back until she held on at his waist. Davis nudged her open, paused, and took a deep breath. He wasn't going to scare her, He longed for intimacy but he didn't need to force it. It would build as she grew comfortable. He couldn't take it without it being given – wouldn't do that to her anyway.
Her head tipped back on the cold, thin pillow and Chloe shut her eyes. She didn't expect pain but she knew it was going to hurt somehow. The situation alone hurt and she was inviting more misery with every moment she kept drawing nearer to Davis. Her legs opened around him, tried and failed to prop on the bed. She curled them behind his back and he moaned, nuzzling her neck rather innocently. She was all he wanted, and she found herself intimidated by that need to be held.
He pushed in, his chest heaving with exertion she knew he was holding back for her sake. Tensing her muscles was an impulse she couldn't fight off. He wasn't being rough, but she was practically in tears.
“Chloe,” he whispered, raising his head to look at her. She bit her lip and tried to urge him on with her hands. “No, I'm hurting you. I'm sorry, I'll go.”
Her face twisted and she was definitely crying, but she held on to him and looked into his eyes. “You're not hurting me. I don't want to stop. It hurts, but we knew that, didn't we? We knew this would hurt,” she told him.
He looked nervous but he continued the slow, tender thrust. It sank into her easily, his cock smooth and warm and his body trembling. They both shivered as he held all the way in. She blinked at him and found a smile that made him slump down into her arms and squeeze her hard.
Clark had asked her how she knew it wasn't Brainiac's programming making her attracted to Davis. The short answer was that she knew. The long answer was that she felt such a mutual wave of longing, affection and love for him that it was utterly beyond Brainiac's capabilities to fake. She could almost believe they had gone to bed a million times before, held each other once a day at least for years of her life. He was entrenched the second she looked up to see him. He delighted her soul before she knew his name.
“I love you,” he said, and she pretended not to hear. She couldn't say it back.
Chloe turned her mouth to kiss along his neck, and he drew back to hover over her. She wished he could be less haunted and anxious about her. She was there, they were both together for whatever happened. She couldn't think of anything else.
“Davis.” Soft, trying to be comforting, trying to say just enough without leading him on. It was the only word left.
He nodded, moving steadily as they knitted their mouths and wrestled softly to lead the kiss. He moaned when she brought her hands up to cup his head. Anyone who could turn away from this would be the worst kind of heretic.
Home, he was home, and it was a real place, not just a foster kid's dream. He moved in her and felt the strength of her body respond, sending his muscles to go faster. Her blond hair gleamed like an angel's halo. She lifted up to him and he could only wonder at the generousity. She pulled her mouth away and started gasping, her hips ending every lift with a flick to the side.
She had once called it willpower to reject him, and now Chloe knew it was cowardice. She felt the cot shake and rock under them. Her leg bent higher, up to his chest, and Davis held it tenderly. He looked down into her eyes and used the new angle. His hand slipped under her head, much more comfortable than the pillow.
The emotions just slipped through her fingers and Chloe quivered as he moved, hitting exactly right inside her and outside. Her hands covered the vulnerable curve of his neck. Davis closed his eyes, moving with gentle strength. She arched and pulled on him, but he was nearly gone. She was nearly gone. All that remained was to admit it.
She loved him, wanted to step into his personal hell and make it their home. She loved him too much to play fair and be left behind.
“Run away with me, Davis,” Chloe whispered, pecking at his jaw as he struggled to find his conscience. “I'll be your home if you'll just let me save you.”
He was filled with fire, filled with it like religion promised and never delivered. Filled with her. Davis nodded, and felt Chloe jerk her hips up to him. Her hands around his neck tightened, nails digging in. She moaned, long and low, pleasure stretching her cheeks sharp. He caught her mouth and thrust into her body frantically.
Dizzying pressure let go, leaving him grinding as he emptied into her. Chloe twitched her leg and he let it down. He put his face on her damp neck and soaked in grace.
“Did you mean it,” she asked. “You'll come with me.”
He wasn't really sure there was anywhere else except wherever Chloe was. He traced her collarbone and nodded. “We'll go wherever you want, Chloe. Anywhere.”
They left with cheeks still reddened, and bodies aching with the incongruent desires to rest up and to fall back into the cot. Chloe's hand rested next to his, calming him as they drove past cars full of people who knew his face. He never doubted her. There was no room left.
Let her know what you thought (because fandom neeeddds fics like this). XD
Monday, July 20, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
empty roads (part one)
Reccing Notes: Okay, so something truer to the Chloe/Davis dynamic around Beast than beast itself, as per Eternal. IMHO. How to put this in genre, angst/fluff/really awesome character interaction? Just trust me. ;)
2418 words, pg-13, beast and eternal
by somethingmore28 at ff.n
He isn’t this giant question mark, a puzzle to be solved; he lays out all the pieces, leaves a trail of bread crumbs in his path.
Jelly filled doughnuts are her favorite, the kind with vanilla icing and sprinkles. She never told him that. There are a lot of things she doesn’t have to tell him. So many tidbits of her personality that just fall into place around him. As a child her mother would hold Chloe in her arms and rub gentle circles into her back. When she was upset or crying it was the only thing that ever soothed her. Davis came by one night after Jimmy torpedoed out of her life. She remembers the way he looked at her, something akin to reverence, much more so to pain. Somehow he knew the exact spot.
They are a few states beyond nowhere. After awhile it becomes easy to lose track, and much easier to disappear. Somehow she imagined there would be banter of some sort, that he would try to make light conversation. Instead there are hours of silence with him barely even looking at her and with every mile the knuckles on the steering wheel just seem to get whiter. Once she thought it was because he was turning, and put her hand on his shoulder, it was one of the few times he looked at her.
“I’m fine.” He practically forced out.
They find the small cabin in the woods, a safe house of sorts Lana told her about, because of course in their messed up lives they would eventually need a place to hide out. It’s not too shabby, wouldn’t quite go far enough to say quaint. There is one bedroom, and once the food is put away Davis is asleep on the couch. She’s not entirely sure he needs it, but he sleeps anyways, maybe it’s to give her a reprieve, maybe to get some space in their now space-less lives. Either way she is grateful.
She grabs a blanket and walks out onto the porch, leaves the door slightly ajar. It’s one of those old fashioned porch swings, the kind the Kent’s have. She really doesn’t have the energy for nostalgia. Instead she just curls up on the chipped wood and tries to remember easy. She’d told him once that everything between them was easy. Maybe she jinxed it, broke the spell once it was said out loud. No she thinks, it isn’t magic, it’s just some cruel twist of Kryptonian destiny and her doomed love life.
Chloe has trouble discerning what is real. What is Davis, what is the beast, what part of them is Kryptonian programming, decides to go back to remembering easy. But all she remembers is this.
“This is completely unnecessary, but very much appreciated. I should warn you though I go through these pretty quickly.”
Davis smiles at her that dimpled boyish grin. She really can’t help but smile back. The box of doughnuts lies on the table in front of them, Chloe happily bites into hers.
“I guess it’s my way of apologizing for yesterday, I kind of got sidetracked at work.” He hopes his face doesn’t falter as the lies slip through his teeth.
“Oh this more than makes up for it, besides, saving lives gives you some leeway.” She laughs, it’s genuine, and he wants to record it to memory. “I swear it’s like all my friends suffer from a hero complex. It’s going to rub off on me, one day you’ll see me donning a cape and saving the world.”
The smile on his face looks more like a cringe and she resists the urge to brush it way. He does that thing again, gets all contemplative and looks down at his hands.
“I’m not a hero.” There is a graveyard of bodies, blood in all of his clothing and a monster inside of him.
She tilts her head to the side to get a better look at his face, he does this from time to time too, pulls away like it’s a sin to be around her.
Her voice is gentle, she’s not sure why. “You save people,” it’s a reflex really, to put her hand over his, at least it gets him to look up. It’s way too cheesy to tell him he’s saved her. She wishes he wouldn’t look at her like that, no one looks at anyone like that, the feeling behind those eyes are just inconceivable.
Maybe it’s also a reflex that he doesn’t let go of her hands. It doesn’t bother her; in fact it just feels nice. Besides his expression softens, the muscles in his body seem less tense. And she thought Clark carried the weight of the world.
Why does he let the words spill out around her, he’s about to do it again.
“That’s not why I do it. Well not why I started anyways.”
She moves a bit closer and gives him the floor, lets him move at his own pace. He’s so honest sometimes it scares her, she’s so used to denial and doubt. His body leans into the couch now; his head falls back and turns to her.
“When I was 12 I was in a car accident.”
She squeezes his hand, another reflex she thinks, it’s not like she needs proof he’s okay when she’s sitting right next to him.
“A woman pulled me out of the car, she was this complete stranger. But she held me until the ambulance got there. I was pretty out of it but I still remember her trying to comfort me. For those few minutes of panic and terror she’s all I remember. It’s like she was all there was left in the world, the only thing to hold onto. For a few minutes her voice and her presence were everything.”
This feels all too familiar.
“My whole life I wanted to be something more than just a pay check or a bottle opener. Even if just for a moment, to be someone’s everything.”
If there was ever anything between them, any walls she’s built they dissipate, the way imaginary things sometimes do.
“The wanting to save people part didn’t come till much later.”
They are so close she can smell his breath; it’s coffee and doughnuts and something distinctly Davis. He isn’t this giant question mark, a puzzle to be solved; he lays out all the pieces, leaves a trail of bread crumbs in his path. They sit like this for some time, exchange a few pointless words, mostly they just take each other in. It feels wrong she tells herself, what’s one more lie in a lifetime?
“They’re going to go stale.”
“Huh?”
The index finger, still underneath her palm points towards the box of doughnuts. Right, she thinks, things go stale in reality.
“Can’t have that happen can we?” Another almost smile. She grabs a doughnut with her free hand, knows that eventually she should extricate her other hand from his. The jelly leaves a trail along her lips, and she licks it off. He’s slightly tense again, a different kind of apprehension in his eyes.
And suddenly he’s reaching out to her, suddenly she’s leaning in. A smile erupts from his lips as he wipes the excess jelly off the side of her mouth with his thumb. She should feel embarrassed, but just feels something else entirely as he sucks the jelly off his own thumb.
“Thanks,” she’s sheepish as she tries to regain her composure. He leans in and takes a bite from her doughnut.
“You’re welcome.” They laugh. It gets easier to breathe.
It’s one of the memories she’s been pushing away for weeks now. It’s easy for her to think that saving Davis is a mere consequence of saving Clark Kent, sacrificing herself for the world. That everything she did for him was out of necessity, that she never really had a choice. But it’s a lie riddled in the truth wrapped in sincerity and guilt and everything she’s not willing to admit.
Chloe Sullivan decided to save Davis Bloome long before that basement in the talon.
There’s a stirring at the door, she turns to find Davis leaning against it, arms across his chest like he’s set on something. She looks down and realizes she’s still holding the chocolate heart in her hands. There’s distance between them, and this is weird for her. It isn’t the physical distance that she has tried to maintain for “boundary issues.” It’s a different kind of distance. She pulls her legs closer to her body, silently offering him the seat next to her.
He glances at the seat, and she can see him struggling with something. She likes to think she can read him, but then again he has lied to her one too many times. He keeps his distance.
His terse voice cuts through the silence, it would have been a relief had it not been for the words that came out.
“We have to go back to Smallville.”
Panic. “What are you talking about, we can’t go back. There’s a reason we left Davis.”
There’s a resolute look in his eyes and it scares her more than she’s willing to admit.
“It’s easier here. Being around you, away from Smallville. It makes me feel like myself again, like Davis Bloome and not just this ... thing. You don’t understand what it was like, I felt like I was suffocating there, like it was trying to squeeze the humanity out of me anytime you weren’t there.“
The blanket gets pushed to the ground as she confronts him, fear, panic and confusion are not a lovely combination. “All the more reason we shouldn’t go back, you’re not making any sense.”
He steps away from her and it’s something she isn’t used to, throws her a little. It’s like he needs to be as far as he can without really leaving her. “This isn’t going to work, I can’t be glued to you forever.”
Forever, it lingers there. Her mortality and his eternity will cross paths eventually.
“We’ll deal with that when we get there,” the urge to reach out to him is consuming her.
“And what about the mean time. Chloe you deserve more than this, more than being chained to me and throwing out mutilated corpses. You deserve a life, without all of this.”
Without you she thinks, how much easier it would all be if he didn’t exist. The thought is immediately erased, like it always is. The panic doesn’t stop, just keeps pushing its way to the surface.
“I asked you to leave with me Davis, this is my idea.” It’s not a lie she thinks.
“I know you’re not doing this for me, I’m not as delusional as you think.”
“I would do anything for you.” Had she really said that?
“The phantom zone, whatever it is, if it can keep me away from this world than it’s the best option.” He can’t even look at her when the words come out, just turns away from her, the same steely expression on his face.
It’s spilling out now, the panic, overflows, breaches the meniscus. “No Davis you don’t know what you’re talking about. The phantom zone isn’t some closet sized prison cell, its forever. And without me doomsday will take over. The minute you enter that place Davis Bloome ceases to exist.”
The muscles in his body are so tense, and she knows her touch can make it all go away. His face is rigid, unwilling, “It’s not much of a price to pay.”
It’s too much. Like being kicked in the gut over and over again, new bruises meeting the old. She wants to fight back.
“We should go to the fortress alone, I don’t know if I can control myself with Clark around.” He’s facing her again.
It catches him off guard, the way she rams her fists into his chest, he stumbles onto the ground taking her with him. She can hear him screaming at her to stop, knows that he only cares about her getting hurt. Her face is burning with tears, body shaking with the force of her emotions, rage, pain, confusion, everything. Davis gets a hold of her wrists, pins them together over his chest.
“Chloe you’re going to hurt yourself, you need to stop.”
It’s consuming, the pain that is eating away at her. Defeated, her body goes limp and now she’s lying on top of Davis struggling to breathe. He’s doing it again, rubbing her back in a way that feels way too intimate, like he knows her in all the right ways.
There are words being spoken, they don’t quite register and she lets them sink into the world around her. It’s bizarre that as her sobbing subsides she can hear the rhythmic beating of his heart and it feels like a part of her, like she could set her watch to it.
They lie there in a silence that can’t be characterized as comfortable. Nothing about them is comfortable. Everything about them is hard and impossible and all the words in between. But the truth is she doesn’t want comfort, her life is beyond assurance and empty promises. She has seen too much, done too much she can never take back and somehow this moment beyond comfort is enough. He is enough. It’s the scariest thing in the world and yet she breathes a little easier.
The sky gains a few shades of night, scattered pinpricks of bleeding stars and the only time she knows falls in tempo with his heart beat. His fingers graze the small of her back, hers fumble with the bottom edges of his shirt. Pretty soon it will be too dark to see much of anything and the thought of being cloaked in darkness feels too much like home.
“I’m not crazy.” Maybe it’s from the insecurities she harbors from her mother’s (albeit meteor induced) insanity; maybe it’s to convince herself, either way it must be said.
She can feel him tip his chin forehead, “I’m an alien sent to earth as genetic batter designed to be the world’s ultimate destroyer. I’m not exactly making judgments. Well that’s not true; I’m actually kind of judging you for not being crazy.”
There’s a hint of a smile on his lips, she doesn’t look up, can just feel it in the way his body shifts.
He reaches over till he can grab a hold of the blanket long left neglected on the ground and pulls it over their intertwined bodies. It takes a while for her to face him, what she finds is her reflection in his eyes. There is a calm in the lines of his face, and when she lets her fingers run the length of it, from temple to chin his eyes flicker closed.
“You’re all I have left too you know.”
A heart beat later, eyes still closed and words barely above a whisper. “Chloe, you are all I ever had.”
2418 words, pg-13, beast and eternal
by somethingmore28 at ff.n
He isn’t this giant question mark, a puzzle to be solved; he lays out all the pieces, leaves a trail of bread crumbs in his path.
Jelly filled doughnuts are her favorite, the kind with vanilla icing and sprinkles. She never told him that. There are a lot of things she doesn’t have to tell him. So many tidbits of her personality that just fall into place around him. As a child her mother would hold Chloe in her arms and rub gentle circles into her back. When she was upset or crying it was the only thing that ever soothed her. Davis came by one night after Jimmy torpedoed out of her life. She remembers the way he looked at her, something akin to reverence, much more so to pain. Somehow he knew the exact spot.
They are a few states beyond nowhere. After awhile it becomes easy to lose track, and much easier to disappear. Somehow she imagined there would be banter of some sort, that he would try to make light conversation. Instead there are hours of silence with him barely even looking at her and with every mile the knuckles on the steering wheel just seem to get whiter. Once she thought it was because he was turning, and put her hand on his shoulder, it was one of the few times he looked at her.
“I’m fine.” He practically forced out.
They find the small cabin in the woods, a safe house of sorts Lana told her about, because of course in their messed up lives they would eventually need a place to hide out. It’s not too shabby, wouldn’t quite go far enough to say quaint. There is one bedroom, and once the food is put away Davis is asleep on the couch. She’s not entirely sure he needs it, but he sleeps anyways, maybe it’s to give her a reprieve, maybe to get some space in their now space-less lives. Either way she is grateful.
She grabs a blanket and walks out onto the porch, leaves the door slightly ajar. It’s one of those old fashioned porch swings, the kind the Kent’s have. She really doesn’t have the energy for nostalgia. Instead she just curls up on the chipped wood and tries to remember easy. She’d told him once that everything between them was easy. Maybe she jinxed it, broke the spell once it was said out loud. No she thinks, it isn’t magic, it’s just some cruel twist of Kryptonian destiny and her doomed love life.
Chloe has trouble discerning what is real. What is Davis, what is the beast, what part of them is Kryptonian programming, decides to go back to remembering easy. But all she remembers is this.
“This is completely unnecessary, but very much appreciated. I should warn you though I go through these pretty quickly.”
Davis smiles at her that dimpled boyish grin. She really can’t help but smile back. The box of doughnuts lies on the table in front of them, Chloe happily bites into hers.
“I guess it’s my way of apologizing for yesterday, I kind of got sidetracked at work.” He hopes his face doesn’t falter as the lies slip through his teeth.
“Oh this more than makes up for it, besides, saving lives gives you some leeway.” She laughs, it’s genuine, and he wants to record it to memory. “I swear it’s like all my friends suffer from a hero complex. It’s going to rub off on me, one day you’ll see me donning a cape and saving the world.”
The smile on his face looks more like a cringe and she resists the urge to brush it way. He does that thing again, gets all contemplative and looks down at his hands.
“I’m not a hero.” There is a graveyard of bodies, blood in all of his clothing and a monster inside of him.
She tilts her head to the side to get a better look at his face, he does this from time to time too, pulls away like it’s a sin to be around her.
Her voice is gentle, she’s not sure why. “You save people,” it’s a reflex really, to put her hand over his, at least it gets him to look up. It’s way too cheesy to tell him he’s saved her. She wishes he wouldn’t look at her like that, no one looks at anyone like that, the feeling behind those eyes are just inconceivable.
Maybe it’s also a reflex that he doesn’t let go of her hands. It doesn’t bother her; in fact it just feels nice. Besides his expression softens, the muscles in his body seem less tense. And she thought Clark carried the weight of the world.
Why does he let the words spill out around her, he’s about to do it again.
“That’s not why I do it. Well not why I started anyways.”
She moves a bit closer and gives him the floor, lets him move at his own pace. He’s so honest sometimes it scares her, she’s so used to denial and doubt. His body leans into the couch now; his head falls back and turns to her.
“When I was 12 I was in a car accident.”
She squeezes his hand, another reflex she thinks, it’s not like she needs proof he’s okay when she’s sitting right next to him.
“A woman pulled me out of the car, she was this complete stranger. But she held me until the ambulance got there. I was pretty out of it but I still remember her trying to comfort me. For those few minutes of panic and terror she’s all I remember. It’s like she was all there was left in the world, the only thing to hold onto. For a few minutes her voice and her presence were everything.”
This feels all too familiar.
“My whole life I wanted to be something more than just a pay check or a bottle opener. Even if just for a moment, to be someone’s everything.”
If there was ever anything between them, any walls she’s built they dissipate, the way imaginary things sometimes do.
“The wanting to save people part didn’t come till much later.”
They are so close she can smell his breath; it’s coffee and doughnuts and something distinctly Davis. He isn’t this giant question mark, a puzzle to be solved; he lays out all the pieces, leaves a trail of bread crumbs in his path. They sit like this for some time, exchange a few pointless words, mostly they just take each other in. It feels wrong she tells herself, what’s one more lie in a lifetime?
“They’re going to go stale.”
“Huh?”
The index finger, still underneath her palm points towards the box of doughnuts. Right, she thinks, things go stale in reality.
“Can’t have that happen can we?” Another almost smile. She grabs a doughnut with her free hand, knows that eventually she should extricate her other hand from his. The jelly leaves a trail along her lips, and she licks it off. He’s slightly tense again, a different kind of apprehension in his eyes.
And suddenly he’s reaching out to her, suddenly she’s leaning in. A smile erupts from his lips as he wipes the excess jelly off the side of her mouth with his thumb. She should feel embarrassed, but just feels something else entirely as he sucks the jelly off his own thumb.
“Thanks,” she’s sheepish as she tries to regain her composure. He leans in and takes a bite from her doughnut.
“You’re welcome.” They laugh. It gets easier to breathe.
It’s one of the memories she’s been pushing away for weeks now. It’s easy for her to think that saving Davis is a mere consequence of saving Clark Kent, sacrificing herself for the world. That everything she did for him was out of necessity, that she never really had a choice. But it’s a lie riddled in the truth wrapped in sincerity and guilt and everything she’s not willing to admit.
Chloe Sullivan decided to save Davis Bloome long before that basement in the talon.
There’s a stirring at the door, she turns to find Davis leaning against it, arms across his chest like he’s set on something. She looks down and realizes she’s still holding the chocolate heart in her hands. There’s distance between them, and this is weird for her. It isn’t the physical distance that she has tried to maintain for “boundary issues.” It’s a different kind of distance. She pulls her legs closer to her body, silently offering him the seat next to her.
He glances at the seat, and she can see him struggling with something. She likes to think she can read him, but then again he has lied to her one too many times. He keeps his distance.
His terse voice cuts through the silence, it would have been a relief had it not been for the words that came out.
“We have to go back to Smallville.”
Panic. “What are you talking about, we can’t go back. There’s a reason we left Davis.”
There’s a resolute look in his eyes and it scares her more than she’s willing to admit.
“It’s easier here. Being around you, away from Smallville. It makes me feel like myself again, like Davis Bloome and not just this ... thing. You don’t understand what it was like, I felt like I was suffocating there, like it was trying to squeeze the humanity out of me anytime you weren’t there.“
The blanket gets pushed to the ground as she confronts him, fear, panic and confusion are not a lovely combination. “All the more reason we shouldn’t go back, you’re not making any sense.”
He steps away from her and it’s something she isn’t used to, throws her a little. It’s like he needs to be as far as he can without really leaving her. “This isn’t going to work, I can’t be glued to you forever.”
Forever, it lingers there. Her mortality and his eternity will cross paths eventually.
“We’ll deal with that when we get there,” the urge to reach out to him is consuming her.
“And what about the mean time. Chloe you deserve more than this, more than being chained to me and throwing out mutilated corpses. You deserve a life, without all of this.”
Without you she thinks, how much easier it would all be if he didn’t exist. The thought is immediately erased, like it always is. The panic doesn’t stop, just keeps pushing its way to the surface.
“I asked you to leave with me Davis, this is my idea.” It’s not a lie she thinks.
“I know you’re not doing this for me, I’m not as delusional as you think.”
“I would do anything for you.” Had she really said that?
“The phantom zone, whatever it is, if it can keep me away from this world than it’s the best option.” He can’t even look at her when the words come out, just turns away from her, the same steely expression on his face.
It’s spilling out now, the panic, overflows, breaches the meniscus. “No Davis you don’t know what you’re talking about. The phantom zone isn’t some closet sized prison cell, its forever. And without me doomsday will take over. The minute you enter that place Davis Bloome ceases to exist.”
The muscles in his body are so tense, and she knows her touch can make it all go away. His face is rigid, unwilling, “It’s not much of a price to pay.”
It’s too much. Like being kicked in the gut over and over again, new bruises meeting the old. She wants to fight back.
“We should go to the fortress alone, I don’t know if I can control myself with Clark around.” He’s facing her again.
It catches him off guard, the way she rams her fists into his chest, he stumbles onto the ground taking her with him. She can hear him screaming at her to stop, knows that he only cares about her getting hurt. Her face is burning with tears, body shaking with the force of her emotions, rage, pain, confusion, everything. Davis gets a hold of her wrists, pins them together over his chest.
“Chloe you’re going to hurt yourself, you need to stop.”
It’s consuming, the pain that is eating away at her. Defeated, her body goes limp and now she’s lying on top of Davis struggling to breathe. He’s doing it again, rubbing her back in a way that feels way too intimate, like he knows her in all the right ways.
There are words being spoken, they don’t quite register and she lets them sink into the world around her. It’s bizarre that as her sobbing subsides she can hear the rhythmic beating of his heart and it feels like a part of her, like she could set her watch to it.
They lie there in a silence that can’t be characterized as comfortable. Nothing about them is comfortable. Everything about them is hard and impossible and all the words in between. But the truth is she doesn’t want comfort, her life is beyond assurance and empty promises. She has seen too much, done too much she can never take back and somehow this moment beyond comfort is enough. He is enough. It’s the scariest thing in the world and yet she breathes a little easier.
The sky gains a few shades of night, scattered pinpricks of bleeding stars and the only time she knows falls in tempo with his heart beat. His fingers graze the small of her back, hers fumble with the bottom edges of his shirt. Pretty soon it will be too dark to see much of anything and the thought of being cloaked in darkness feels too much like home.
“I’m not crazy.” Maybe it’s from the insecurities she harbors from her mother’s (albeit meteor induced) insanity; maybe it’s to convince herself, either way it must be said.
She can feel him tip his chin forehead, “I’m an alien sent to earth as genetic batter designed to be the world’s ultimate destroyer. I’m not exactly making judgments. Well that’s not true; I’m actually kind of judging you for not being crazy.”
There’s a hint of a smile on his lips, she doesn’t look up, can just feel it in the way his body shifts.
He reaches over till he can grab a hold of the blanket long left neglected on the ground and pulls it over their intertwined bodies. It takes a while for her to face him, what she finds is her reflection in his eyes. There is a calm in the lines of his face, and when she lets her fingers run the length of it, from temple to chin his eyes flicker closed.
“You’re all I have left too you know.”
A heart beat later, eyes still closed and words barely above a whisper. “Chloe, you are all I ever had.”
crucible
Reccing Notes: In case you were wondering where I was going with this series, the plotplotplot starts here. The format is still experimental. Remember the spoilers about the thug that happened in Stiletto. Well this was my take on it before the episode aired.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
4876 words, m/nc-17, beast (in a manner of speaking),
She had seen birth and death before and thought them to be different.
She had seen birth and death before and thought them to be different.
T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi
I. Chloe Sullivan is focused on the here and now. She’s almost stopped thinking of danger outside of her little world.
i. She lets herself in with the key around her neck, two enormous green apples balanced precariously on the tray.
ii. Davis should be out of the trance by now. She’d told him to take a walk outside, just for a little while. The time he can go without a shot is down to forty five minutes, but he knows she worries about the worrisome pallor that constant hours in the dark have brought to his skin.
iii. She doesn’t have a hand to turn up the light. Shutters are drawn, but she can make out the vague form of the pile of reference texts toppled messily into her path. She’ll deal with it later. No hands.
iv. She has hands enough to send the tray flying behind her when she feels the cool pressure of a knife at her throat. It doesn’t help, leaves her completely unarmed, arms pinioned to her sides. She has to stand on her toes to keep the sharpness from slicing into her trachea.
v. The smell is stifling and dirty, too hot breath and tobacco. “Care to introduce me to your little friend?” A voice that sounds like yesterday’s liquor. It’s not about Davis. Can’t be about him. She’s been careful.
v. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. Word on the street tells me you can hook me up with a nuisance called Stiletto.”
“Hate to break it to you buster, but if you’re looking to score some shoes this isn’t the way to go about it.”
“Stop lying, bitch. Your little friend. Where is she?”
“All I know is that you are a demented Jack-the-Ripper wannabe. Let me go!” A kick to his shin and he makes no reaction but tightening his grip.
“I’m in the position of power here, you may notice.”
She watched a video about how to defend from a man holding a knife. To poke him in the eyes was the big thing, but she can’t move her fingers without breaking them. She can’t knee him, trapped like this. She should turn his weight against him, but she doesn’t know anything other than verbal judo.
vi. “Let me go and I might decide not to send you to prison for assault.”
“One question and it can all be over.”
“I don’t know anything.” More pressure. Her neck is cold; the feeling is liquid like a few drops of blood.
“Let me refresh your memory. You’ve been coming this way with lots of food; every single day for the past week. Little lady like you couldn’t eat that much. So, I’m thinking we might be pretty close to that friend of yours.” “Maybe I have an appetite.”
“I don’t like wasting time. Next time you lie, I make you bleed it out.” He doesn’t tighten the knife anymore, presses one corner down more firmly than the rest of it and she won’t heal from that.
vii. She’s got to survive now.
“I’ll take you to her.”
“That’s better.” The knife encircles her neck from the back now and she walks stiffly.
“What’s in it for me?”
“I might decide not to slice you up too bad.” She considers tripping, taking him down for a few seconds. But he’s been here longer and she can see less than he can in this dark. She finds the knob, pushes in the key. Her hand wants to start trembling. But she stiffens, pulls it open. “You first.” He’s going to push her ahead of him, walk one step above her. She won’t be able to lock him in or get away.
vii. She walks down one step, another, a third; he moves heavily behind her. The fourth step she jerks her head down, nearly smacks it on the rail, crouches. The momentum throws him forward and she scrambles to throw herself behind the heavy wood, turns the key, tries to block out the sounds of his body hitting the cement.
viii. She might not have killed him, she thinks. She’s injured him, badly and she can’t afford to stay and wait. She’s got minutes to find Davis outside, pack a few texts; they’ll go on the lam somehow, where they can’t be found. It’ll be the end of her life as Chloe Sullivan.
ix. (She can’t have killed him. She can’t have.)
x. She thinks she’s done worse than that when she hears that sound for the second time in her life.
II. She doesn’t know how she keeps behind the door for the seconds until the human sound smothers and there’s nothing at all.
i. He’d made her promise. There’s another thirty minutes, painstakingly counted out before she pulls it open.
ii. There’s nothing on the stairs, and there’s no body at the bottom of the steps. She can see ripped fabric first, knows whatever is left of the thug will confront her as soon as she gets down. She did this, forced Davis into everything he never wanted to be again.
iii. (Maybe the transformation won’t be over. She can die now, just like anybody else.)
iv. Davis will be down there and he’s going to wake up with blood on him. She pushes the trembling down and tries not to see what she does.
v. They’re both tossed on the cement, equally caked in it; only one of them is breathing. Davis is not aware yet. She pulls what’s left of the other together, isolates, and doesn’t drag for fear of leaving marks. Brings bags; thick and black to bind it up. Her green suit jacket is a study in contrasts.
vi. She’s still scrubbing at her hands when he wakes.
III. His consciousness passes from white to shades of black; the scent around him is all too familiar. He isn’t this, he won’t be and the evidence is coating him, taunting. (This is all he can be.)
i. He can almost taste the sickly sweet, dizzying emptiness it leaves in its wake. He wants to double over the sink and make it go. But she’s there, back to him. She should never have to see. He pushes himself back toward the wall; finds it covered too.
ii. He doesn’t know who the hapless victim was this time. It has finally caught up to him and things between them will never be the same again.
iii. Her shoulders move, releasing barely hitching breaths obscured by the run of water. She’s holding so much back and she’s seen. (It’s one thing to hear it from his lips, to decide logically that she wants to save him. This was never in the cards and he can’t expect…)
iv. “Chloe?” His hands are crusted brown and the familiar sickly nausea won’t ebb. It isn’t pushing at his mind, and he knows what it all means. She doesn’t turn toward him and he doesn’t blame her.
v. He doesn’t see anyone else; doesn’t remember anything since the last injection. Her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and the blood is on her too.
vi. The things start to piece themselves together, and he doesn’t want to believe. In those lost minutes he could have looked liked himself, been It…done things. Hurt her.
vii. She wouldn’t turn toward him if she had been hurt. “Chloe. What did I…” he steadies her elbows, pulls her around gently. She doesn’t jump at the light pressure; she as pliant as a life-size doll. No bruises on her arms. He almost startles when her head buries itself onto what’s left of his shirt. “Oh god. I’m sorry.” He thinks she’s trying to say, and doesn’t understand.
viii. The floor around him is almost spotless and he drips onto it. His hands were once talons, so he doesn’t think of how it got to soak up to his elbows.
ix. “We’ll get you cleaned up.” The sink runs, sputters out icy water. There are towels. More than the time when she got that scar.
x. She speaks, the words come out and he thinks that she’s still trying to distract herself. Her touch is gentle, and he closes his eyes for the minute it lasts. The water flows pinkish as it comes off his neck, his arms; his face.
IV. They tell you jokingly that true friends help you hide the bodies. Both of them may have had true friends and false friends and none would be here now. There’s something else to this.
i. There are the black bags, too familiar, which they move. The smell of death is everywhere and he tries to push down the very human nausea. He’s lived as a paramedic and he’s felt this before, she hasn’t and yet she stays.
ii. Its savagery, something worse than a mauling is not something fit for her eyes. All because he’s not capable, strong enough.
“Don’t, Davis.” She throws all the authority she can in her voice and it still comes out shaky. “It was me.”
iii. A minute passes, two, in silence. He knows the hidden horror because he’s had it, feels it even now because he doesn’t feel pity with it. “He was going to kill you.”
iv. (He used to believe life was equally important; no one meant more than anyone else. Maybe this is the start of him, changing. But this is Chloe and he wonders how many of the tenets of his life break when it comes to her).
v. “So I beat him to the punch. I told myself I was going to knock him down the steps and lock him down here just while we got away…And instead I made a stupid mistake, used you as a weapon. I was supposed to stop this.”
vi. She almost retches twice through their morbid task; but keeps on methodically despite the speed. She never thought that she would use the knowledge from books on forensics, a viewing or two of Dexter, this way.
vii. They have only forty-five minutes and she watches him for all the little signs she’s gotten to know so well. He’s on tenterhooks but he’s not going to let her on her own, still worried for her even though she just murdered a man.
viii. She’s no saint. When they finish she won’t be the one to keep her mouth shut.
V. His time is up and he waits for the change that doesn’t come.
i. The fact that it got free buys him time; it’s no longer moving restlessly in the back of his skull, fighting against its bonds. He may have a whole night free of the change to see what it has done.
ii. Under Clorox and stinging antiseptic, the room is still redolent of the sickening scent. It’s completely changed, killed in this room now. He used to picture days upon days of drugs where it didn’t break free; tried so hard to believe it was not a lie.
iii. She’s stayed safe, somehow, because of blind luck, because of its first victim. He’s learned not to trust luck. It could snap past that barrier next time, it could be her blood staining his hands, her eyes.
iv. No matter what he does, this always seems to follow and he wants to tear both parts of himself from the other before it’s too late. If he can’t do it, maybe the other Kryptonian can.
v. (Despite the fact that they’ve been on the outs lately, Clark might be strong enough to stop him somehow, find away to neutralize the threat before she gets into the crossfire. The one who’d called himself her best friend owes her that much.)
vi. He’s been excellent at lying to himself so far, but she won’t be the casualty. “You’ve seen it now. It can’t get better.” He won’t sugarcoat things, not now. He hasn’t told her about the white outs, where he doesn’t feel pain or drugs or it; where he thinks it’s adapting, trying and seizing control of his rational mind
vii. “How do I know that it won’t be you laying there next time?” She can’t come up with an infallible answer. He’s Davis; and he’s fighting.
viii. Another barrier broken and it’ll keep pushing itself past its restraints. He’s not strong enough. She refuses to believe.
ix. “I’m going to try and live up to that. When I go this time you’ve got to let me go and not look for me.”
VI. It is not a matter of digging in her heels and waiting until one of them topples. He’s got to see.
i. “Were you listening to anything I said? You don’t get to punish yourself for my mistakes.” There’s the bag still red and the blood is hardly visible. “It’s killed again.” The taste of blood will bring it out again faster.
ii. “It doesn’t matter where you go, don’t you see? You don’t get to do this, play the noble hero card. Not now.” She tugs the luggage from his hands and he lets it fall. He won’t need it where he’s going.
iii. (He’s making excuses to watching her face even tinged in anger. This is their moment, and for the first time he realizes it’s not that only that she cares. Inexplicably, she needs him, too.)
iv. “Fine. You want to hear something? I opened the door too early. Fifteen minutes too early. Do I look dead to you?” She looks straight, challenges; doesn’t tell him he was human at the time. Omission is truth when the situation calls for it. “If you leave it’s because you want to, not because of me. So don’t.”
v. (He used to like logic. Probability, the things he could measure. The numbers are against him and he’s not going to gamble.)
vi. It’s a principle. She can’t let him go and he can’t let her be hurt. Go. Go. If he says it out he knows she won’t move, will let the door close behind him. “Do you want to go?” He’d have weeks left before the memories would start to fade again. “I-” He doesn’t want to think about how much it will be like tearing apart.
vii. “Don’t, Davis.” It’s not a command and her face is opened up, like light that vanishes when she sees his hand on the door. Maybe, he thinks, he’s hurting her already. There’s no Clark, no Lois, no Jimmy for her now. She’ll be alone in a room with too many ghosts. “No.” It wavers on the edge of his breath, almost defiant.
viii. She’s Chloe Sullivan; she’s got a sure-fire remark for every minute and the words are clumsy, conceal and reveal too much. (She wants to say how everything else has almost gone away; how this little room has become her life, now.) “I trust you.” He’s the only one. She wishes he could trust in himself; that he didn’t have to ask ‘why’. She wants to intercept the words before they leave his mouth, about how she can care when he’s ‘this’ because he isn’t.
ix. There’s no evidence she can give for instinct, so she finally falls back on the one thing that’s already been said. “I think you know why.” She used to mock lines like that, as they were repeated in countless tired romances as the music swelled. The cheesiness of the moment does not escape her but he looks as if she gave him the world. (Maybe it’s not the words as much as the fact that they can’t be taken back, the fact that she doesn’t want to.)
x. He’s doesn’t listen to the words as much as the way she says them and he understands. The gap closes. Words want to build in the back of his throat, how there are things she still needs to know, so many things that can’t possibly be easy.
xi. This is the second time it happens and he’s not prepared for it. She moves first. Her lips are on his and the soft sensation is insistent, hiding under the surface, mirrored. He can taste bitter coffee, her, blood from the split on her lip. His hands are tight on her shoulders; she’s breakable. He draws back and loosens his grip, tries to breathe. He’s never wanted to smile more than now.
xii. She’s still looking at him with that expression, seeing more than he manages to say. The aching returns, a slow nervous flutter (she burns the white and black from the back of his mind until there’s just her image in his eyes). There’s a cut on her jaw that he’s careful to avoid when he frames her face. He kisses her and he’s nothing if not human.
Not yet.
VII. And it’s just that easy.
i. Davis is not pushing her, fingers barely tangled in her hair. He kisses constantly, opened mouth meeting hers with no intrusion of tongue. Pulling her to him, holding on. There’s intensity to everything that makes it hard to breathe. She stretches up, clutches to his shoulders. She can have this. He’s here, regardless of what this could have done, what she could have lost. Even with her eyes closed she’s aware of that one purple stain stark against her sleeve; drops her jacket onto the floor. She tells herself this hasn’t made her reckless. The goose bumps form on her arms and when his hands slide up her shoulders she feels it more than she should. Her skin is vulnerable and safe. (They go on, and she knows where this leads.)
ii. She manages to hold on, arching into him, unable to think further than this impossible 'now'. She forgets about visions of scrubbing her hands, the knot in her stomach that lingers like fear. She can’t afford to forget, not… “Not here.” She chokes out. It feels too much like a portent, and she can’t take that. Not when she needs them to be just them. She can’t make the rest of it go away, and maybe she doesn’t know what she’s playing at; but she believes. Steadies her breath, opens her eyes into his, shakily draws a thumb across his cheek. “Come with me.”
iii. His eyes are dark in the light, there’s fear there, but less, and a word about the danger doesn’t leave his lips. Don’t, she’d said. He’s so open and trusting and she hates that she could break him. There’s the danger there, but there’s him too. She won’t give moth to flame allegories. Right now he’s the man, and her friend and the one thing she won’t let go of. It’s built so far down it’s her foundation. She’s making this choice sober. She links her fingers though his, tries not to look at the steps as she walks, focuses on the warmth of his grip. Somehow she propels them, up and away, out of the dark.
iv. It’s brighter here, even with one of the light bulbs knocked out, sobering. She’s taking that step out to the ledge for the first time. It’s never felt like her skin was anymore than that; when physical sensation could ever change her.
v. She’d kept herself on a pill, a habit, although time passed and there was no need. She remembers how it used to be, sometimes pleasant and sometimes numb, never with the lights on. So she could pretend that it couldn’t have been any face but hers, so he never saw when her thoughts went to another place. (Maybe the hesitant, old Chloe would feel guilty for this, for the once-husband called Jimmy and a nightstand with a wedding ring laid out there.)
vi. But not her, not when the things she’s already said feel more like vows than anything she ever remembers. So she keeps leading, looks into his face. His fingers clutch onto hers. He won’t ever voice the fear now, not when he’s afraid of hurting her. She wants to give him reassurance; wants to tell him that they can have this always and he won’t break her heart. Instead, she lets herself feel the fear until it vanishes to him.
She pretends it is the first time.
VIII. They never say the words out between them.
i. She doesn’t say and he doesn’t ask, and he hopes she understand what he means to. She pulls at his hands. The couch, too red, symbolic; there’s no where else to go in this room.
ii. He doesn’t know what the custom for this is, it’s normal to be caught like this, like two teenagers. It’s just what people do.
iii. But he isn’t ‘people’. He used to dream of another world, another time where they could have been this. Where feeling could come first and he’d repeat phrases like ‘I love you’ over and over.
iv. As it is, they have only hours. Maybe they can’t go on like this, a guy only gets so many second chances before the door shuts; and she can’t go throwing herself to his salvation when it may only break her. But he can’t stop, not when he sees the question in her eyes. There’s fear, and he thinks he has it too. He can be anything for her now, this moment. She feels like his.
v. Her knees hit the arm of the couch, he does and when she makes a sound it knocks the wind out of him. He doesn’t know what his invulnerable body could do to her. His skin shatters knives. Even his human weight could crush her. He quickly pulls his weight off. “Are you?” “Just cold.” She makes a tiny discontented sound and lunges forward to pull him back with her. He hesitates.
vi. He can’t help seeing the marks on lightly tanned skin, the bruise over her breastbone; the deeper jagged cut under her chin. “We should look at that.” It’s a reflex, how he traces the outside of the mark, gauging the severity. “Mr.-uhh… got a bit knife-happy.” If she hadn’t been coming here for him, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. “Stop that. He came because of a project of Lois’s. He wanted to find her and I wouldn’t tell him.” “How’d he find out?” “Word on the streets. You know reporters.” He knows what that means. Some soft justification, like ‘Lois just forgot to say I was the source.’ Lois could have gotten Chloe killed. He can feel the whiteness again, seizing up; wanting to tear through something. He squeezes his eyes shut, thinks of climbing off and locking the door. Her voice draws him out of visions of paralysis and scarlet mist. “Hey, I’m still here.” She draws his hand to her chin. “See? You won’t hurt me.”
vii. It’s a contradiction. He’s the one with the psychotic monster in him and he’ll hurt her if he goes. Don’t. “So give a girl a little help?” Her lips are swollen, her face is flushed but it’s all pushed behind the gentle look in her eyes. He wonders for a moment if it will ever see what he sees at this moment; if it can download these memories. She leans forward, brushes her lips across the side of his mouth. It has no place here. “It’s hot and all, but don’t think so much, Davis.”
viii. He braces himself against the sides of the couch, leans down because it must hurt her to angle like that. Sensations. Her thin shirt rides up a little and his hand stumbles she keeps it there. It barely skims flesh because one misstep could leave a bruise. He wants to take it farther, feels the prickle under his skin, the need for warmth, her. The only place she’s safe is where his skin doesn’t touch hers.
ix. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. But she responds; flips them over so that he almost thinks she learned one of those Japanese wrestling disciplines. She’s half kneeling at either side of him this time and the burning pushes anything but those sounds and monosyllabic thoughts from his mind. Pulling away, coming back; teasing. Legs at the side of his hips effectively trapping him before his hands tug her down again. Sounds that she doesn’t realize she makes. It’s physically painful to come this close and not merge.
x. He’s breathing faster now, strangely reminiscent of the change, but so, so different. She doesn’t look scared. Just throws various articles haphazardly behind her with the arm that’s not touching him. He’s still mostly dressed. The hands on the buttons of his serviceable cotton shirt don’t shake until barely calloused palms brush the pulse on his neck.
xi. The rough materials rub between them, strangely unneeded barriers that seem to shed sparks as they get kicked away. Red leather, cold as it sticks to his back. Then, a shock of skin and he realizes the air is making her cold. She draws closer and they are actually doing this. “Chloe, promise you’ll tell me if…” “I will stop your mouth.” It should be out of the place, this; the way she nearly laughs, pulls out old Shakespearean references like they have time. “Just let it happen.”
xii. Blond hair teases at his cheek as everything freezes. Warmth and heat, and he won’t shut his eyes. The first hesitant movement together and it feels like he’s sinking into his skin, just his human skin and there’s nothing else. This moment of oneness is all they have; and he feels her heartbeat over him. He feels himself drifting, moving to nowhere and everywhere.
xiii. He wants it to stay, but the movements get wilder, his pulse races in something akin to desperation. It’s dangerous to hold on to tightly, and this is going to have to end. “Davis.” Her eyes flicker open and closed and there’s sweat damp on her temple. He feels the tightening, can read the signs. “Wait.” He says. He reaches up, breathes her air; pretends this is not an end. Kisses her with every breath left. Finds himself pushed deeper, feels the trembling overtake them and then doesn’t know of the cry is his or her own.
xiv. He’s spiraling back, feeling the sweat growing cold on both of them. He rolls them over carefully in the small space and they barely manage to stay on, limbs tangled over the edge of the couch. His nose somehow brushes her neck and she shivers so that the movement goes through him.
xv. When everyday physical sensations return he finds the afghan, always thrown haphazardly over the chair arm, unfurls it and pulls it over her shoulders. Rumpled hair, a tired warm smile. “Hey.” It’s in the little things, how she smoothes back hair that is too short to need it, the quickness of emotions that play across her face. He thinks she must see it to. Something clenches in his gut, and he can’t help the smile. This is everything.
xvi. The afghan scratches lightly, and her head rests on his arm. There are soft words, theoretical questions set in a world that has a future for both of them. And he lets himself fall.
xvii. An hour, two; her breaths fall evenly against his chest and time and place realign. There’s a giddy joy dizzying him, mixing with the all too familiar fear. (He wonders how it can ever return after this. He knows it will.)
xviii. Time will pass whether he clings or not. He won’t be able to be without her; and before the end he’ll have to let her go. He holds in the convulsing need to pull her closer, to hold on with desperate fingers to sand. He unclenches his fingers, presses a cheek to the top of her head; waits until the dawn. (He’s not anything but human, not now.)
Not now.
IX. Her dreams cloud her eyes with blood she’s spilled and tears. It’s still an unpleasant jolt to wake.
i. The sun filters in, shines uncomfortably in her eyes without warming her. The leathery texture of the couch feels cold without his warmth; and she feels that strange blooming of feeling that makes her want to hang on to him.
ii. She realizes they won’t ever be able to sleep together, side by side.
iii. The afghan is tucked carefully around her shoulders, even now and his scent lingers on her skin. Then, the thought hits her that there’s no trace of him.
iv. After the initial panic, she notices her clothes are neatly folded over the coffee table and the key dangles in the basement lock, ready to be turned. It’ll be two hours before she opens it again.
v. It’s illogical that she doesn’t feel guiltier, more frightened. Soon it will crest on her, what all of this means.
vi. The dreams tell her things that she can’t bring herself to accept yet. There’s dirt under her fingernails and somewhere out there there’s a fresh grave.
vii. They aren’t safe at Isis any longer. She finds a map, draws out a path, thinks of Alaska and tries to reason out how they’ll handle the car ride.
viii. The signs are all down now. So it shocks her to find a small business card shoved under the crack of the door. Who leaves calling cards these days, anyways?
ix. Linda Lake. She’d failed in her destruction mission of Clark and now she wanted fuel for the fire. The hasty, ugly scrawl on the back. Appointment?
x. Two more hours left.
I. Chloe Sullivan can’t just see the here and now. There’s the future because she has to believe in it. There is a future because this is her whole little world now.
Comments= XD
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
4876 words, m/nc-17, beast (in a manner of speaking),
She had seen birth and death before and thought them to be different.
She had seen birth and death before and thought them to be different.
T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi
I. Chloe Sullivan is focused on the here and now. She’s almost stopped thinking of danger outside of her little world.
i. She lets herself in with the key around her neck, two enormous green apples balanced precariously on the tray.
ii. Davis should be out of the trance by now. She’d told him to take a walk outside, just for a little while. The time he can go without a shot is down to forty five minutes, but he knows she worries about the worrisome pallor that constant hours in the dark have brought to his skin.
iii. She doesn’t have a hand to turn up the light. Shutters are drawn, but she can make out the vague form of the pile of reference texts toppled messily into her path. She’ll deal with it later. No hands.
iv. She has hands enough to send the tray flying behind her when she feels the cool pressure of a knife at her throat. It doesn’t help, leaves her completely unarmed, arms pinioned to her sides. She has to stand on her toes to keep the sharpness from slicing into her trachea.
v. The smell is stifling and dirty, too hot breath and tobacco. “Care to introduce me to your little friend?” A voice that sounds like yesterday’s liquor. It’s not about Davis. Can’t be about him. She’s been careful.
v. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. Word on the street tells me you can hook me up with a nuisance called Stiletto.”
“Hate to break it to you buster, but if you’re looking to score some shoes this isn’t the way to go about it.”
“Stop lying, bitch. Your little friend. Where is she?”
“All I know is that you are a demented Jack-the-Ripper wannabe. Let me go!” A kick to his shin and he makes no reaction but tightening his grip.
“I’m in the position of power here, you may notice.”
She watched a video about how to defend from a man holding a knife. To poke him in the eyes was the big thing, but she can’t move her fingers without breaking them. She can’t knee him, trapped like this. She should turn his weight against him, but she doesn’t know anything other than verbal judo.
vi. “Let me go and I might decide not to send you to prison for assault.”
“One question and it can all be over.”
“I don’t know anything.” More pressure. Her neck is cold; the feeling is liquid like a few drops of blood.
“Let me refresh your memory. You’ve been coming this way with lots of food; every single day for the past week. Little lady like you couldn’t eat that much. So, I’m thinking we might be pretty close to that friend of yours.” “Maybe I have an appetite.”
“I don’t like wasting time. Next time you lie, I make you bleed it out.” He doesn’t tighten the knife anymore, presses one corner down more firmly than the rest of it and she won’t heal from that.
vii. She’s got to survive now.
“I’ll take you to her.”
“That’s better.” The knife encircles her neck from the back now and she walks stiffly.
“What’s in it for me?”
“I might decide not to slice you up too bad.” She considers tripping, taking him down for a few seconds. But he’s been here longer and she can see less than he can in this dark. She finds the knob, pushes in the key. Her hand wants to start trembling. But she stiffens, pulls it open. “You first.” He’s going to push her ahead of him, walk one step above her. She won’t be able to lock him in or get away.
vii. She walks down one step, another, a third; he moves heavily behind her. The fourth step she jerks her head down, nearly smacks it on the rail, crouches. The momentum throws him forward and she scrambles to throw herself behind the heavy wood, turns the key, tries to block out the sounds of his body hitting the cement.
viii. She might not have killed him, she thinks. She’s injured him, badly and she can’t afford to stay and wait. She’s got minutes to find Davis outside, pack a few texts; they’ll go on the lam somehow, where they can’t be found. It’ll be the end of her life as Chloe Sullivan.
ix. (She can’t have killed him. She can’t have.)
x. She thinks she’s done worse than that when she hears that sound for the second time in her life.
II. She doesn’t know how she keeps behind the door for the seconds until the human sound smothers and there’s nothing at all.
i. He’d made her promise. There’s another thirty minutes, painstakingly counted out before she pulls it open.
ii. There’s nothing on the stairs, and there’s no body at the bottom of the steps. She can see ripped fabric first, knows whatever is left of the thug will confront her as soon as she gets down. She did this, forced Davis into everything he never wanted to be again.
iii. (Maybe the transformation won’t be over. She can die now, just like anybody else.)
iv. Davis will be down there and he’s going to wake up with blood on him. She pushes the trembling down and tries not to see what she does.
v. They’re both tossed on the cement, equally caked in it; only one of them is breathing. Davis is not aware yet. She pulls what’s left of the other together, isolates, and doesn’t drag for fear of leaving marks. Brings bags; thick and black to bind it up. Her green suit jacket is a study in contrasts.
vi. She’s still scrubbing at her hands when he wakes.
III. His consciousness passes from white to shades of black; the scent around him is all too familiar. He isn’t this, he won’t be and the evidence is coating him, taunting. (This is all he can be.)
i. He can almost taste the sickly sweet, dizzying emptiness it leaves in its wake. He wants to double over the sink and make it go. But she’s there, back to him. She should never have to see. He pushes himself back toward the wall; finds it covered too.
ii. He doesn’t know who the hapless victim was this time. It has finally caught up to him and things between them will never be the same again.
iii. Her shoulders move, releasing barely hitching breaths obscured by the run of water. She’s holding so much back and she’s seen. (It’s one thing to hear it from his lips, to decide logically that she wants to save him. This was never in the cards and he can’t expect…)
iv. “Chloe?” His hands are crusted brown and the familiar sickly nausea won’t ebb. It isn’t pushing at his mind, and he knows what it all means. She doesn’t turn toward him and he doesn’t blame her.
v. He doesn’t see anyone else; doesn’t remember anything since the last injection. Her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and the blood is on her too.
vi. The things start to piece themselves together, and he doesn’t want to believe. In those lost minutes he could have looked liked himself, been It…done things. Hurt her.
vii. She wouldn’t turn toward him if she had been hurt. “Chloe. What did I…” he steadies her elbows, pulls her around gently. She doesn’t jump at the light pressure; she as pliant as a life-size doll. No bruises on her arms. He almost startles when her head buries itself onto what’s left of his shirt. “Oh god. I’m sorry.” He thinks she’s trying to say, and doesn’t understand.
viii. The floor around him is almost spotless and he drips onto it. His hands were once talons, so he doesn’t think of how it got to soak up to his elbows.
ix. “We’ll get you cleaned up.” The sink runs, sputters out icy water. There are towels. More than the time when she got that scar.
x. She speaks, the words come out and he thinks that she’s still trying to distract herself. Her touch is gentle, and he closes his eyes for the minute it lasts. The water flows pinkish as it comes off his neck, his arms; his face.
IV. They tell you jokingly that true friends help you hide the bodies. Both of them may have had true friends and false friends and none would be here now. There’s something else to this.
i. There are the black bags, too familiar, which they move. The smell of death is everywhere and he tries to push down the very human nausea. He’s lived as a paramedic and he’s felt this before, she hasn’t and yet she stays.
ii. Its savagery, something worse than a mauling is not something fit for her eyes. All because he’s not capable, strong enough.
“Don’t, Davis.” She throws all the authority she can in her voice and it still comes out shaky. “It was me.”
iii. A minute passes, two, in silence. He knows the hidden horror because he’s had it, feels it even now because he doesn’t feel pity with it. “He was going to kill you.”
iv. (He used to believe life was equally important; no one meant more than anyone else. Maybe this is the start of him, changing. But this is Chloe and he wonders how many of the tenets of his life break when it comes to her).
v. “So I beat him to the punch. I told myself I was going to knock him down the steps and lock him down here just while we got away…And instead I made a stupid mistake, used you as a weapon. I was supposed to stop this.”
vi. She almost retches twice through their morbid task; but keeps on methodically despite the speed. She never thought that she would use the knowledge from books on forensics, a viewing or two of Dexter, this way.
vii. They have only forty-five minutes and she watches him for all the little signs she’s gotten to know so well. He’s on tenterhooks but he’s not going to let her on her own, still worried for her even though she just murdered a man.
viii. She’s no saint. When they finish she won’t be the one to keep her mouth shut.
V. His time is up and he waits for the change that doesn’t come.
i. The fact that it got free buys him time; it’s no longer moving restlessly in the back of his skull, fighting against its bonds. He may have a whole night free of the change to see what it has done.
ii. Under Clorox and stinging antiseptic, the room is still redolent of the sickening scent. It’s completely changed, killed in this room now. He used to picture days upon days of drugs where it didn’t break free; tried so hard to believe it was not a lie.
iii. She’s stayed safe, somehow, because of blind luck, because of its first victim. He’s learned not to trust luck. It could snap past that barrier next time, it could be her blood staining his hands, her eyes.
iv. No matter what he does, this always seems to follow and he wants to tear both parts of himself from the other before it’s too late. If he can’t do it, maybe the other Kryptonian can.
v. (Despite the fact that they’ve been on the outs lately, Clark might be strong enough to stop him somehow, find away to neutralize the threat before she gets into the crossfire. The one who’d called himself her best friend owes her that much.)
vi. He’s been excellent at lying to himself so far, but she won’t be the casualty. “You’ve seen it now. It can’t get better.” He won’t sugarcoat things, not now. He hasn’t told her about the white outs, where he doesn’t feel pain or drugs or it; where he thinks it’s adapting, trying and seizing control of his rational mind
vii. “How do I know that it won’t be you laying there next time?” She can’t come up with an infallible answer. He’s Davis; and he’s fighting.
viii. Another barrier broken and it’ll keep pushing itself past its restraints. He’s not strong enough. She refuses to believe.
ix. “I’m going to try and live up to that. When I go this time you’ve got to let me go and not look for me.”
VI. It is not a matter of digging in her heels and waiting until one of them topples. He’s got to see.
i. “Were you listening to anything I said? You don’t get to punish yourself for my mistakes.” There’s the bag still red and the blood is hardly visible. “It’s killed again.” The taste of blood will bring it out again faster.
ii. “It doesn’t matter where you go, don’t you see? You don’t get to do this, play the noble hero card. Not now.” She tugs the luggage from his hands and he lets it fall. He won’t need it where he’s going.
iii. (He’s making excuses to watching her face even tinged in anger. This is their moment, and for the first time he realizes it’s not that only that she cares. Inexplicably, she needs him, too.)
iv. “Fine. You want to hear something? I opened the door too early. Fifteen minutes too early. Do I look dead to you?” She looks straight, challenges; doesn’t tell him he was human at the time. Omission is truth when the situation calls for it. “If you leave it’s because you want to, not because of me. So don’t.”
v. (He used to like logic. Probability, the things he could measure. The numbers are against him and he’s not going to gamble.)
vi. It’s a principle. She can’t let him go and he can’t let her be hurt. Go. Go. If he says it out he knows she won’t move, will let the door close behind him. “Do you want to go?” He’d have weeks left before the memories would start to fade again. “I-” He doesn’t want to think about how much it will be like tearing apart.
vii. “Don’t, Davis.” It’s not a command and her face is opened up, like light that vanishes when she sees his hand on the door. Maybe, he thinks, he’s hurting her already. There’s no Clark, no Lois, no Jimmy for her now. She’ll be alone in a room with too many ghosts. “No.” It wavers on the edge of his breath, almost defiant.
viii. She’s Chloe Sullivan; she’s got a sure-fire remark for every minute and the words are clumsy, conceal and reveal too much. (She wants to say how everything else has almost gone away; how this little room has become her life, now.) “I trust you.” He’s the only one. She wishes he could trust in himself; that he didn’t have to ask ‘why’. She wants to intercept the words before they leave his mouth, about how she can care when he’s ‘this’ because he isn’t.
ix. There’s no evidence she can give for instinct, so she finally falls back on the one thing that’s already been said. “I think you know why.” She used to mock lines like that, as they were repeated in countless tired romances as the music swelled. The cheesiness of the moment does not escape her but he looks as if she gave him the world. (Maybe it’s not the words as much as the fact that they can’t be taken back, the fact that she doesn’t want to.)
x. He’s doesn’t listen to the words as much as the way she says them and he understands. The gap closes. Words want to build in the back of his throat, how there are things she still needs to know, so many things that can’t possibly be easy.
xi. This is the second time it happens and he’s not prepared for it. She moves first. Her lips are on his and the soft sensation is insistent, hiding under the surface, mirrored. He can taste bitter coffee, her, blood from the split on her lip. His hands are tight on her shoulders; she’s breakable. He draws back and loosens his grip, tries to breathe. He’s never wanted to smile more than now.
xii. She’s still looking at him with that expression, seeing more than he manages to say. The aching returns, a slow nervous flutter (she burns the white and black from the back of his mind until there’s just her image in his eyes). There’s a cut on her jaw that he’s careful to avoid when he frames her face. He kisses her and he’s nothing if not human.
Not yet.
VII. And it’s just that easy.
i. Davis is not pushing her, fingers barely tangled in her hair. He kisses constantly, opened mouth meeting hers with no intrusion of tongue. Pulling her to him, holding on. There’s intensity to everything that makes it hard to breathe. She stretches up, clutches to his shoulders. She can have this. He’s here, regardless of what this could have done, what she could have lost. Even with her eyes closed she’s aware of that one purple stain stark against her sleeve; drops her jacket onto the floor. She tells herself this hasn’t made her reckless. The goose bumps form on her arms and when his hands slide up her shoulders she feels it more than she should. Her skin is vulnerable and safe. (They go on, and she knows where this leads.)
ii. She manages to hold on, arching into him, unable to think further than this impossible 'now'. She forgets about visions of scrubbing her hands, the knot in her stomach that lingers like fear. She can’t afford to forget, not… “Not here.” She chokes out. It feels too much like a portent, and she can’t take that. Not when she needs them to be just them. She can’t make the rest of it go away, and maybe she doesn’t know what she’s playing at; but she believes. Steadies her breath, opens her eyes into his, shakily draws a thumb across his cheek. “Come with me.”
iii. His eyes are dark in the light, there’s fear there, but less, and a word about the danger doesn’t leave his lips. Don’t, she’d said. He’s so open and trusting and she hates that she could break him. There’s the danger there, but there’s him too. She won’t give moth to flame allegories. Right now he’s the man, and her friend and the one thing she won’t let go of. It’s built so far down it’s her foundation. She’s making this choice sober. She links her fingers though his, tries not to look at the steps as she walks, focuses on the warmth of his grip. Somehow she propels them, up and away, out of the dark.
iv. It’s brighter here, even with one of the light bulbs knocked out, sobering. She’s taking that step out to the ledge for the first time. It’s never felt like her skin was anymore than that; when physical sensation could ever change her.
v. She’d kept herself on a pill, a habit, although time passed and there was no need. She remembers how it used to be, sometimes pleasant and sometimes numb, never with the lights on. So she could pretend that it couldn’t have been any face but hers, so he never saw when her thoughts went to another place. (Maybe the hesitant, old Chloe would feel guilty for this, for the once-husband called Jimmy and a nightstand with a wedding ring laid out there.)
vi. But not her, not when the things she’s already said feel more like vows than anything she ever remembers. So she keeps leading, looks into his face. His fingers clutch onto hers. He won’t ever voice the fear now, not when he’s afraid of hurting her. She wants to give him reassurance; wants to tell him that they can have this always and he won’t break her heart. Instead, she lets herself feel the fear until it vanishes to him.
She pretends it is the first time.
VIII. They never say the words out between them.
i. She doesn’t say and he doesn’t ask, and he hopes she understand what he means to. She pulls at his hands. The couch, too red, symbolic; there’s no where else to go in this room.
ii. He doesn’t know what the custom for this is, it’s normal to be caught like this, like two teenagers. It’s just what people do.
iii. But he isn’t ‘people’. He used to dream of another world, another time where they could have been this. Where feeling could come first and he’d repeat phrases like ‘I love you’ over and over.
iv. As it is, they have only hours. Maybe they can’t go on like this, a guy only gets so many second chances before the door shuts; and she can’t go throwing herself to his salvation when it may only break her. But he can’t stop, not when he sees the question in her eyes. There’s fear, and he thinks he has it too. He can be anything for her now, this moment. She feels like his.
v. Her knees hit the arm of the couch, he does and when she makes a sound it knocks the wind out of him. He doesn’t know what his invulnerable body could do to her. His skin shatters knives. Even his human weight could crush her. He quickly pulls his weight off. “Are you?” “Just cold.” She makes a tiny discontented sound and lunges forward to pull him back with her. He hesitates.
vi. He can’t help seeing the marks on lightly tanned skin, the bruise over her breastbone; the deeper jagged cut under her chin. “We should look at that.” It’s a reflex, how he traces the outside of the mark, gauging the severity. “Mr.-uhh… got a bit knife-happy.” If she hadn’t been coming here for him, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. “Stop that. He came because of a project of Lois’s. He wanted to find her and I wouldn’t tell him.” “How’d he find out?” “Word on the streets. You know reporters.” He knows what that means. Some soft justification, like ‘Lois just forgot to say I was the source.’ Lois could have gotten Chloe killed. He can feel the whiteness again, seizing up; wanting to tear through something. He squeezes his eyes shut, thinks of climbing off and locking the door. Her voice draws him out of visions of paralysis and scarlet mist. “Hey, I’m still here.” She draws his hand to her chin. “See? You won’t hurt me.”
vii. It’s a contradiction. He’s the one with the psychotic monster in him and he’ll hurt her if he goes. Don’t. “So give a girl a little help?” Her lips are swollen, her face is flushed but it’s all pushed behind the gentle look in her eyes. He wonders for a moment if it will ever see what he sees at this moment; if it can download these memories. She leans forward, brushes her lips across the side of his mouth. It has no place here. “It’s hot and all, but don’t think so much, Davis.”
viii. He braces himself against the sides of the couch, leans down because it must hurt her to angle like that. Sensations. Her thin shirt rides up a little and his hand stumbles she keeps it there. It barely skims flesh because one misstep could leave a bruise. He wants to take it farther, feels the prickle under his skin, the need for warmth, her. The only place she’s safe is where his skin doesn’t touch hers.
ix. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. But she responds; flips them over so that he almost thinks she learned one of those Japanese wrestling disciplines. She’s half kneeling at either side of him this time and the burning pushes anything but those sounds and monosyllabic thoughts from his mind. Pulling away, coming back; teasing. Legs at the side of his hips effectively trapping him before his hands tug her down again. Sounds that she doesn’t realize she makes. It’s physically painful to come this close and not merge.
x. He’s breathing faster now, strangely reminiscent of the change, but so, so different. She doesn’t look scared. Just throws various articles haphazardly behind her with the arm that’s not touching him. He’s still mostly dressed. The hands on the buttons of his serviceable cotton shirt don’t shake until barely calloused palms brush the pulse on his neck.
xi. The rough materials rub between them, strangely unneeded barriers that seem to shed sparks as they get kicked away. Red leather, cold as it sticks to his back. Then, a shock of skin and he realizes the air is making her cold. She draws closer and they are actually doing this. “Chloe, promise you’ll tell me if…” “I will stop your mouth.” It should be out of the place, this; the way she nearly laughs, pulls out old Shakespearean references like they have time. “Just let it happen.”
xii. Blond hair teases at his cheek as everything freezes. Warmth and heat, and he won’t shut his eyes. The first hesitant movement together and it feels like he’s sinking into his skin, just his human skin and there’s nothing else. This moment of oneness is all they have; and he feels her heartbeat over him. He feels himself drifting, moving to nowhere and everywhere.
xiii. He wants it to stay, but the movements get wilder, his pulse races in something akin to desperation. It’s dangerous to hold on to tightly, and this is going to have to end. “Davis.” Her eyes flicker open and closed and there’s sweat damp on her temple. He feels the tightening, can read the signs. “Wait.” He says. He reaches up, breathes her air; pretends this is not an end. Kisses her with every breath left. Finds himself pushed deeper, feels the trembling overtake them and then doesn’t know of the cry is his or her own.
xiv. He’s spiraling back, feeling the sweat growing cold on both of them. He rolls them over carefully in the small space and they barely manage to stay on, limbs tangled over the edge of the couch. His nose somehow brushes her neck and she shivers so that the movement goes through him.
xv. When everyday physical sensations return he finds the afghan, always thrown haphazardly over the chair arm, unfurls it and pulls it over her shoulders. Rumpled hair, a tired warm smile. “Hey.” It’s in the little things, how she smoothes back hair that is too short to need it, the quickness of emotions that play across her face. He thinks she must see it to. Something clenches in his gut, and he can’t help the smile. This is everything.
xvi. The afghan scratches lightly, and her head rests on his arm. There are soft words, theoretical questions set in a world that has a future for both of them. And he lets himself fall.
xvii. An hour, two; her breaths fall evenly against his chest and time and place realign. There’s a giddy joy dizzying him, mixing with the all too familiar fear. (He wonders how it can ever return after this. He knows it will.)
xviii. Time will pass whether he clings or not. He won’t be able to be without her; and before the end he’ll have to let her go. He holds in the convulsing need to pull her closer, to hold on with desperate fingers to sand. He unclenches his fingers, presses a cheek to the top of her head; waits until the dawn. (He’s not anything but human, not now.)
Not now.
IX. Her dreams cloud her eyes with blood she’s spilled and tears. It’s still an unpleasant jolt to wake.
i. The sun filters in, shines uncomfortably in her eyes without warming her. The leathery texture of the couch feels cold without his warmth; and she feels that strange blooming of feeling that makes her want to hang on to him.
ii. She realizes they won’t ever be able to sleep together, side by side.
iii. The afghan is tucked carefully around her shoulders, even now and his scent lingers on her skin. Then, the thought hits her that there’s no trace of him.
iv. After the initial panic, she notices her clothes are neatly folded over the coffee table and the key dangles in the basement lock, ready to be turned. It’ll be two hours before she opens it again.
v. It’s illogical that she doesn’t feel guiltier, more frightened. Soon it will crest on her, what all of this means.
vi. The dreams tell her things that she can’t bring herself to accept yet. There’s dirt under her fingernails and somewhere out there there’s a fresh grave.
vii. They aren’t safe at Isis any longer. She finds a map, draws out a path, thinks of Alaska and tries to reason out how they’ll handle the car ride.
viii. The signs are all down now. So it shocks her to find a small business card shoved under the crack of the door. Who leaves calling cards these days, anyways?
ix. Linda Lake. She’d failed in her destruction mission of Clark and now she wanted fuel for the fire. The hasty, ugly scrawl on the back. Appointment?
x. Two more hours left.
I. Chloe Sullivan can’t just see the here and now. There’s the future because she has to believe in it. There is a future because this is her whole little world now.
Comments= XD
malignant drabble series part 3
Reccing Notes: This part will break your heart after part 2. It's hot too. And Davis is proactive, just like I love in the show. And I'm going to say it. theirloveissopure.
by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
1033 words, m/nc-17, beast
"We're going to fix this."
---
“I didn’t transform the entire time we were apart, isn’t that great?!” Davis beams at her from the driver’s seat, bright, white smile plastered to his face, painted deep into his facial muscles.
“It’s fantastic Davis.” She pops another pill, rolls it around on her tongue, crushes it into bitter powder between her teeth. “I told you leaving the country would make things easier.”
“It has Chloe.” Davis switches on the radio; every song is in Spanish. “Do you want to stop at a hotel for the night or keep driving?” He asks as city lights become small orbs of yellow in the distance, stretched in front of and behind them. “This is the last area with hotels for another eight hours.”
“Let’s stop.” The throbbing behind her eyes has resumed its cruel game, intensifies and augments, mocking her, because now she knows what it is, what is occurring inside her skull. Five hours since her diagnoses and she thinks she can feel her neurons mutating, growing back in malignant clusters of cells; biological poison building beneath layers of meninges.
“Are you feeling alright Chloe? You aren’t yourself.” Davis stops the car, reaches over to touch her face, brushes his thumbs across the dark circles beneath her eyes.
“It’s nothing.” She waves away his concern, pushes his hands from her cheeks.
“I don’t believe you.” Davis sighs in one long exhalation of breath, one rise and fall of his chest. “Something is different about you. You seem preoccupied. I’m happy Chloe, I can’t remember a time when I’ve been this happy, but if you aren’t happy, then let me know now, because I don’t want to put my feelings above yours.” Soft and vulnerable, wide brown eyes, pursed lips; exposed and raw and open. Davis is the epitome of altruism, the embodiment of the struggle between good and evil, the true nature of man and his inner conflictions. He deserves more than she can give him, more than her pitiful, damaged brain cells can give him.
“Davis, don’t worry about me.” Her seat belt unbuckles with a click. “You’re the one with real problems.” She slides into his lap in one movement, over the arm rests between them, her back against the steering wheel; proximity and heated breath on her face, misting warmly across her skin.
“Chloe..” A barely audible whisper, soft and disbelieving.
“Shhh.” Her fingers curl around the nape of his neck, palm flat against the flesh, and one smooth tug brings their mouths together. Davis inhales in surprise, sucks the air from her mouth, her lungs, her body, draws out a bit of her, the life, love, impending death and perpetual sickness. His tongue pushes into her mouth after a moment of hesitation, brief concern, lazy and wet and hot against hers, excited explorations, gliding along her teeth.
Her free hand works its way between them, trails down his chest, slips beneath the waistband of his jeans. The button of his pants is undone by her fingers, his belt torn away with a flick of her wrist. His shirt is soon to follow, her clothing too, until everything is bare skin and warmth, her thighs on either side of his hips, knees pressing into the upholstery of his seat. Then she sinks down, settles onto him, listens to him breathe, watches him run his fingers along the pale skin of her chest, pull at the black lace of her bra. Davis clutches her, holds her tight, tips his head back against the seat. It ends when Davis shudders, when every muscle in her body tenses and ripples, gives way to ecstasy, so blindingly intense and hot she can do little more than press her forehead to Davis’ shoulder and pant and pant and pant while she slowly comes down from the unbelievable high.
“Once we’re inside” She kisses his collarbone, drags her lips over it, tastes salt and sweat and his skin. “There’s something I need to talk with you about.”
----
“What was it you needed to tell me?” Davis yawns hours later, one long, lean expanse of muscle and bare skin, sprawled out on his stomach and watching her. She wrings water from her damp hair, wipes away clear droplets from her stomach, from her legs, from between her breasts.
“Davis.” She sighs, slumps down beside him, smiling when he walks his fingers up her thighs, presses a warm, wet kiss to her hip.
“If you’re worried I might be pregnant, it’s okay, I’m on the pill.” Davis makes her laugh, lightens the hot weight of dread in the pit of her abdomen.
“Funny.” She places a palm flat on his back, presses it deep into his shoulder blade, feels heat and skin and muscle relaxing beneath her fingertips. “It’s serious.”
“Are you okay?” Concern glistens in his brown eyes as he pushes himself up on his elbows, leans in and rests his forehead on the small of her back. His breath mists hotly over her skin, raises goose bumps on her flesh.
“No. No I’m not.” And then he’s sitting up, staring intently into her eyes, his hands heavy over the back of hers.
“Are you unhappy? I told you…” She silences him with a finger against his lips, brushes her thumb over them.
“You know how I haven’t been feeling well?” Davis nods, reaches up and cups her face, presses his fingers gently into her temples. “I had an MRI today at the hospital while you were collecting medical supplies. I have a brain tumor, sort of.”
“How…how can you sort of have a brain tumor?” Davis swallows thickly, and she can almost hear a piece of his soul crack and shatter.
“Removing Brainiac did something to my brain, destroyed the cells. Now they’re growing back malignant.”
“How long do you have?” He finally asks, eyes glistening.
“Three to four months.”
She lets Davis cling to her, bury his face in her shoulder, hold her so tightly she almost can’t breathe. It’s heat and skin on skin, his mouth on her collarbone, her throat, her jaw.
“Get packed.” He says after a long, long time, when she’s half asleep, fingers absently stroking the soft skin at the nape of his neck.
“Why?”
“We’re going back to Metropolis.” Davis pulls her into a hug, until she’s flat against his chest. “We’re going to fix this.”
by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
1033 words, m/nc-17, beast
"We're going to fix this."
---
“I didn’t transform the entire time we were apart, isn’t that great?!” Davis beams at her from the driver’s seat, bright, white smile plastered to his face, painted deep into his facial muscles.
“It’s fantastic Davis.” She pops another pill, rolls it around on her tongue, crushes it into bitter powder between her teeth. “I told you leaving the country would make things easier.”
“It has Chloe.” Davis switches on the radio; every song is in Spanish. “Do you want to stop at a hotel for the night or keep driving?” He asks as city lights become small orbs of yellow in the distance, stretched in front of and behind them. “This is the last area with hotels for another eight hours.”
“Let’s stop.” The throbbing behind her eyes has resumed its cruel game, intensifies and augments, mocking her, because now she knows what it is, what is occurring inside her skull. Five hours since her diagnoses and she thinks she can feel her neurons mutating, growing back in malignant clusters of cells; biological poison building beneath layers of meninges.
“Are you feeling alright Chloe? You aren’t yourself.” Davis stops the car, reaches over to touch her face, brushes his thumbs across the dark circles beneath her eyes.
“It’s nothing.” She waves away his concern, pushes his hands from her cheeks.
“I don’t believe you.” Davis sighs in one long exhalation of breath, one rise and fall of his chest. “Something is different about you. You seem preoccupied. I’m happy Chloe, I can’t remember a time when I’ve been this happy, but if you aren’t happy, then let me know now, because I don’t want to put my feelings above yours.” Soft and vulnerable, wide brown eyes, pursed lips; exposed and raw and open. Davis is the epitome of altruism, the embodiment of the struggle between good and evil, the true nature of man and his inner conflictions. He deserves more than she can give him, more than her pitiful, damaged brain cells can give him.
“Davis, don’t worry about me.” Her seat belt unbuckles with a click. “You’re the one with real problems.” She slides into his lap in one movement, over the arm rests between them, her back against the steering wheel; proximity and heated breath on her face, misting warmly across her skin.
“Chloe..” A barely audible whisper, soft and disbelieving.
“Shhh.” Her fingers curl around the nape of his neck, palm flat against the flesh, and one smooth tug brings their mouths together. Davis inhales in surprise, sucks the air from her mouth, her lungs, her body, draws out a bit of her, the life, love, impending death and perpetual sickness. His tongue pushes into her mouth after a moment of hesitation, brief concern, lazy and wet and hot against hers, excited explorations, gliding along her teeth.
Her free hand works its way between them, trails down his chest, slips beneath the waistband of his jeans. The button of his pants is undone by her fingers, his belt torn away with a flick of her wrist. His shirt is soon to follow, her clothing too, until everything is bare skin and warmth, her thighs on either side of his hips, knees pressing into the upholstery of his seat. Then she sinks down, settles onto him, listens to him breathe, watches him run his fingers along the pale skin of her chest, pull at the black lace of her bra. Davis clutches her, holds her tight, tips his head back against the seat. It ends when Davis shudders, when every muscle in her body tenses and ripples, gives way to ecstasy, so blindingly intense and hot she can do little more than press her forehead to Davis’ shoulder and pant and pant and pant while she slowly comes down from the unbelievable high.
“Once we’re inside” She kisses his collarbone, drags her lips over it, tastes salt and sweat and his skin. “There’s something I need to talk with you about.”
----
“What was it you needed to tell me?” Davis yawns hours later, one long, lean expanse of muscle and bare skin, sprawled out on his stomach and watching her. She wrings water from her damp hair, wipes away clear droplets from her stomach, from her legs, from between her breasts.
“Davis.” She sighs, slumps down beside him, smiling when he walks his fingers up her thighs, presses a warm, wet kiss to her hip.
“If you’re worried I might be pregnant, it’s okay, I’m on the pill.” Davis makes her laugh, lightens the hot weight of dread in the pit of her abdomen.
“Funny.” She places a palm flat on his back, presses it deep into his shoulder blade, feels heat and skin and muscle relaxing beneath her fingertips. “It’s serious.”
“Are you okay?” Concern glistens in his brown eyes as he pushes himself up on his elbows, leans in and rests his forehead on the small of her back. His breath mists hotly over her skin, raises goose bumps on her flesh.
“No. No I’m not.” And then he’s sitting up, staring intently into her eyes, his hands heavy over the back of hers.
“Are you unhappy? I told you…” She silences him with a finger against his lips, brushes her thumb over them.
“You know how I haven’t been feeling well?” Davis nods, reaches up and cups her face, presses his fingers gently into her temples. “I had an MRI today at the hospital while you were collecting medical supplies. I have a brain tumor, sort of.”
“How…how can you sort of have a brain tumor?” Davis swallows thickly, and she can almost hear a piece of his soul crack and shatter.
“Removing Brainiac did something to my brain, destroyed the cells. Now they’re growing back malignant.”
“How long do you have?” He finally asks, eyes glistening.
“Three to four months.”
She lets Davis cling to her, bury his face in her shoulder, hold her so tightly she almost can’t breathe. It’s heat and skin on skin, his mouth on her collarbone, her throat, her jaw.
“Get packed.” He says after a long, long time, when she’s half asleep, fingers absently stroking the soft skin at the nape of his neck.
“Why?”
“We’re going back to Metropolis.” Davis pulls her into a hug, until she’s flat against his chest. “We’re going to fix this.”
lithophane
Reccing Notes: The third installment of the universe started by lathe and continuing in vessel. Just by way of explanation, a lithophane is an etched artwork in translucent porcelain that reveals a three dimensional picture with depth and detail. This has fic relevance. really. ^^
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
2633 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)
Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
I. The One Who is All.
The foundation was named for Isis, she'd told Lana, the Eqyptian goddess of love, and life, and healing. She saw Isis as the nurturer; the one who went to the ends of the earth for only one person, brought Ra to his knees.
i. Lana had seen the Isis Foundation a front for anti-Luthorcorp operations; only later as a place where the meteor-infected got on their feet. It was like a ward for patients with non-terminal diseases, a stopping place until they stepped into the whole wide world again. Isis was not meant to be a prison.
ii. Davis was looking for a prison, kept himself walled from the world the only way he could. He wasn’t like all the other cases that she’d tried to help meteor infected, all those times she’d failed miserably. The other meteor mutants had wanted the connection of seeing other people like themselves. He needed to stay as far away from others as possible.
iii. She never actually wrote anything on that pad of hers. It was another typical gesture of avoidance, like reading her first love letter out loud. She told Davis he couldn’t stay. She’d found him through coincidence and good guesswork. Someone else could find him just as easily, and if something happened they’d both be torn to bits.
“I’m a risk wherever I go, Chloe.”
“…I don’t think my apartment would work, considering... I was thinking you should come with me to Isis. That’s kind of the purpose of the place.”
“I can’t go there. I can’t just go into a room with other people. I might hurt somebody.”
“Isis has been closed down for almost a month. The friend who gave it to me kind of became the project. There’s no steady traffic in and out of the building, and I couldn’t get more tenants to come in.”
iv. “It’ll be safe.” So sure. He’d seen it there, the raw commitment with ‘her kids’ at Isis, the belief that she could help them, the pain after one of them had turned out to be a sadistic killer. He was the one person she’s helping, and he thought that he’d do everything he could to do this, whatever they were attempting. It was almost easy to think he wouldn’t break her heart in that hour when he felt just human.
v. (He didn’t have anything to take with him but those injections and neatly folded changes of clothes already packed in a red canvas bag.) It looked to her as if they’d been there for a week.
II. She Who Seeks Shelter
The blood red lettering over the wall reminds her of blood, the sacred pendants entombed with pharaohs. Isis was also the Queen of the Underworld, of death. Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
(Chloe doesn’t have a plan, not in the true sense of the word. He’ll be down there and she’ll be…around, kind of like a warden. The Queen of the Underworld, indeed.)
i. She’s careful to lock the front and basement door behind them, merely visual protections that can splinter to bits. (She doesn’t let herself think of what could happen next, what she’ll have to do to keep him inside.) It won’t come to that.
ii. He’s got about an hour left before he takes the injections again. He barely pays attention to the look of where he’s going to live. The dust on the boxes of documents, the fact that there’s only one corner where he can possibly sleep. She pretends to clean ineffectually, wonders how long it’ll be when until she forces him to come out with it.
iii. There, in the half opened bag, are her excuses. She doesn’t know how she’ll get the drugs analyzed exactly, but it always pays to be prepared.
“Give me.” He puts the needle in her palm so fast he almost drops it. It’s not subtle when he goes to the corner of the room, as far as he can from her personal space.
“Any particular reason you want to melt into the wallpaper, there?” He stiffens, and his eyes tell her the rest. “So it was a bad nightmare.”
“You died, that’s not just a bad nightmare, that’s...” (When she walks it’s not like the construct used to, but he can’t move any farther backwards and he’s trapped. Two yards left between them and it hurts.)
“My dad used to tell me that if you have dreams like that, they never ever come true.” “They’re frequent. The drugs cause trances and I saw you…”
“You may have some alien stuff going on, but I don’t think you’re Nostradamus. You’re not transforming or on meds now. Nothing will happen. I can’t really help if you act like a scared rabbit.”
Her hand hovers above his and he shudders. In the dream everything didn’t sound so sensible. “You’ve got to be okay with this.” The particulars blur so he’s not sure how long her hand lingers or what the exact words in what she says.
(She had healing once and she doubts it’s possible for her to be hurt; he doesn’t have to shut himself off.) There’s more than triumph, and something a little sad, in her smile.
iv. It’s all in the small steps. When he does take the drugs, she locks the door between them. Part of it is because he doesn’t want her to see him like that; part of it is because she has her own task to deal with. She wonders how he’ll react to the bandages on her left palm and the paper towels soaked in blood.
v. He’s the paramedic, still. When the bandages fall apart he resets them for her so they don’t chafe. It’s the barest touch, and it lingers like a phantom limb.
vi. She wants to reassure him, tell him that she won’t die, that he won’t hurt her. Only they’ve never been able to keep lies between them, and the scarlet marks her like a brand. “We’ll figure out something.” she says.
III. Lady of the Words of Power
She’s no great lady of magic; possesses no magic touch to make this right, no abilities than will suddenly make this easy.
i. It’s been a week of looking over her shoulder every minute, telling Clark about her work with Lana, telling Jimmy nothing because he won’t ask and she doesn’t know what she’d answer anyway. The threads to her old life keep her in limbo, but his desperation drives her as her own. She feels locked into research and hope.
ii. The drugs she analyzes on the Isis computers were just that. Drugs that ought to have been fatal to any human being; that his body is resisting more every single time. The only way they could possibly work if they were something like Kryptonian viruses capable of adapting at It’s own speed, like the ones that had changed Lionel Luthor; destroyed. Human drugs give him only a few weeks before time runs out. There are some sketchy research projects on DNA inactivation; where the risks outweigh the possible benefits almost ninety percent, where the Davis she knows could vanish forever just as easily as it.
iii. No idea is worth discarding at this point. She even buys steaks, bloody and raw, as if they will satisfy Its bloodlust.
iv. The next time he blurs into her life, Clark finds her with four packages of steak in her arms. He says nothing at first; neither does she. She’s perfectly aware she’s been shopping for two the past weeks; and she doesn’t want him to be. He pushes the cart behind her.
“Are you alright, Chloe? You’ve been distant lately. Jimmy’s worried. I know you need time to process, but so early after you’ve married, you two should really spend more time...”
Of course that was the reason he’d always wanted to see her.
“Thanks for the help, dear Abby. That work with Lana is more time consuming than you’d think”
“I talked to Lana.” He says. There went her alibi, but he won’t just go out and say it.
She wants to be able to shock that noble look off his face, just once. Something like ‘yes, Clark, I’ll confess to the torrid affair.’ Once she would have expected him to ask for the punch line. Now, he might actually believe her. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
“I want to help you, Chloe.” He tells her, looks like it’s actually him in pain when he doesn’t ever worry if he has tomorrow. (She thinks it’s become a reflex for him.)
“We both know how that turned out, don’t we?”
v. She should feel worse about it, in hindsight. Clark’s been having a tough time of it lately, with discovering that not all people fawn over acts of heroism, powers like his. Linda Lake just takes it to a whole new level by turning him into something from War of the Worlds, tearing down any comfort in the life he’s constructed.
vi. Chloe can’t be around Clark now, not when there are people calling out for blood. Not when there are just two thin doors between the world outside and Davis and her. She would feel much calmer if Linda didn’t remember her at all.
IV. The Brilliant One in the Sky
She’d always wanted to see the carvings in the sacred temple: My veil no mortal has hereto raised. The cool stone face, at once distanced and comforting. Invulnerable. She’s never been good disguising things or putting up fronts. They come up thin and flimsy and she thinks he must see through them in a minute.
i. She used to be able to hide behind words. ‘Engaged’ should have been so much flimsier than ‘married’. But she doesn’t feel any firmer, any farther from him at all.
ii. Despite what it might seem like, there’s nothing to sneeze at; nothing at improper at all. They have been friends, have seldom touched. He still looks at her like she’s at the center of everything and that’s as far as it goes.
iii. She’s the only one to initiate touch, at moments where she can’t take the space and the gaps between. When she does hug him there is no change rippling through him, no drugs in his system. She can still feel the unsteadiness of how he draws in breaths, even as his hands come up to her back.
iv. She finds her lie in the dull look in Jimmy’s face. He finally throws the word ‘affair’ out as a challenge as she packs the lunches one morning. (She disappears for stretches at a time; he knows she’s not thinking of him as she sleeps, there’s something about her that he doesn’t understand.) Her eyes feels raw but she looks at him steadily until he stabs his fork angrily into his omelet. “I don’t know you.” He says. She knows he’s right.
v. (She’s lost her capacity to lie to herself. She doesn’t deny that she feels that pull toward Davis, like gravity. There’s a mix of desire, comfort and protectiveness that she never tries to define; that she can’t voice because that’s not who they are.)
vi. Maybe she’s always known that she was in as deep in this as he was. Davis spends more and more of his time in a haze of pain, and those moments he is with her everything has a purpose and she feels like she has something. For a little while.
vii. She won’t deny the feelings, something all at once more and less complicated anything she ever felt for Clark. She thinks ‘affair’ is an ugly word, exactly the Jimmy would see it if he could.
V. Mistress of the House of Life
(He lives in a room that’s like a box, but everything about his life is more normal than he can remember. )
i. She forces him to eat, plays music by Bach and Handel, draws him out. All of this, in some hope that it’ll keep him human.
ii. It’s easy to remember to have faith in his humanity when she lingers everywhere in his conscience. It’s the details, how she tucks a pen behind her ear, drops references a mile a minute, reaches out when he least expects it.
iii. They talk plans; she lines up every outlandish idea that can possibly be of help. He watches when she stacks piles and piles of research texts on each other and he catches them before they topple. No one else will have these moments, for however long they last.
iv. Even when she’s gone, she keeps an old red jacket hanging over the couch, a scent he recognizes. It’s easy to close his eyes, fall into the deception. She’s not his. She’s married, and he doesn’t have the right to thoughts like that. Right or wrong, these are the memories he calls on when it begins.
v. She’s never seen him change. He can’t be sure what is quite real with the drugs, what he really sees versus what happens. But sometimes he feels it sparking of some parts of him, an arm flickering with spines; worse the thick heaviness in the back of his skull. He tries, squeezes his eyes shut, goes to a good memory, and remembers that some nights she sleeps with her back to the door.
vi. Pain is better than the oblivion. The drugs don’t cause him quite so much pain now, leave in their wake curiously blank moments to infringe on him, when his mind feels like its going, floating off into oblivion.
vii. It starts out small increments-seconds lost, minutes. He doesn’t think he changes, stays in his place and she’s been safe so far. Oblivion is what he fears most, no conscious control, no pain. If he lets go, these are the moments when he could easily become a monster in human form; when he can’t control what his body will do.
VI. Moon Shining Over the Sea
She’ll have to make a choice soon; cut ties with one world or the other because she can’t live in both. When she does it, everything will change. The world will be turned on its head, and she won’t be swayed by what used to be her life.
i. Lois. Clark. Jimmy. They were her life, once. They can’t always be. Soon, she thinks. Soon. Not just yet.
ii. She leaves the foundation for a trip with Lois, a girl’s night out. Lois is cross at the farm boy again for reasons unknown, but they make it a pact not to speak of anything important. It’s just time with where she is just Lois’s cuz, time she wishes she had to give.
iii. Things don’t go as planned. They end up walking on their own through ugly, un-crowded streets, two girls in impractical shoes. Easy targets for a couple of thugs. She ducks and weaves ungracefully; wallops one with her purse. Lois incapacitates the other with a pair of heels. Stilettos; perfectly fierce…
iv. That becomes Lois’s plan, something to draw attention away from Clark. A dramatic description of her superhuman prowess, a few exaggerations should do the job; maybe even stall the front page. Maybe she won’t ever say it out, but Clark is the center of her life.
v. Chloe thinks that that was her once. (When she drops her as the anonymous source in her latest column, Lois thinks it still is.)
vi. Clark and Lois, Jimmy…They have each other. They’ll be alright. And she has him. (Chloe thinks she is ready now.)
I.
Regardless of what she said, she never really understood Isis; never understood the counseling, what her role meant. But she’s living it now. It’s unavoidable how it all merges; shapes her into the girl who’s willing to go to the ends of the earth. The one who’s going to open that door and face it all.
Life, love, home and death.
Isis. She thinks she almost understands the name.
She who makes the Right Use of the Heart.
Endnotes: Header titles taken from Egyptian mythology, the book of the dead.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
2633 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)
Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
I. The One Who is All.
The foundation was named for Isis, she'd told Lana, the Eqyptian goddess of love, and life, and healing. She saw Isis as the nurturer; the one who went to the ends of the earth for only one person, brought Ra to his knees.
i. Lana had seen the Isis Foundation a front for anti-Luthorcorp operations; only later as a place where the meteor-infected got on their feet. It was like a ward for patients with non-terminal diseases, a stopping place until they stepped into the whole wide world again. Isis was not meant to be a prison.
ii. Davis was looking for a prison, kept himself walled from the world the only way he could. He wasn’t like all the other cases that she’d tried to help meteor infected, all those times she’d failed miserably. The other meteor mutants had wanted the connection of seeing other people like themselves. He needed to stay as far away from others as possible.
iii. She never actually wrote anything on that pad of hers. It was another typical gesture of avoidance, like reading her first love letter out loud. She told Davis he couldn’t stay. She’d found him through coincidence and good guesswork. Someone else could find him just as easily, and if something happened they’d both be torn to bits.
“I’m a risk wherever I go, Chloe.”
“…I don’t think my apartment would work, considering... I was thinking you should come with me to Isis. That’s kind of the purpose of the place.”
“I can’t go there. I can’t just go into a room with other people. I might hurt somebody.”
“Isis has been closed down for almost a month. The friend who gave it to me kind of became the project. There’s no steady traffic in and out of the building, and I couldn’t get more tenants to come in.”
iv. “It’ll be safe.” So sure. He’d seen it there, the raw commitment with ‘her kids’ at Isis, the belief that she could help them, the pain after one of them had turned out to be a sadistic killer. He was the one person she’s helping, and he thought that he’d do everything he could to do this, whatever they were attempting. It was almost easy to think he wouldn’t break her heart in that hour when he felt just human.
v. (He didn’t have anything to take with him but those injections and neatly folded changes of clothes already packed in a red canvas bag.) It looked to her as if they’d been there for a week.
II. She Who Seeks Shelter
The blood red lettering over the wall reminds her of blood, the sacred pendants entombed with pharaohs. Isis was also the Queen of the Underworld, of death. Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
(Chloe doesn’t have a plan, not in the true sense of the word. He’ll be down there and she’ll be…around, kind of like a warden. The Queen of the Underworld, indeed.)
i. She’s careful to lock the front and basement door behind them, merely visual protections that can splinter to bits. (She doesn’t let herself think of what could happen next, what she’ll have to do to keep him inside.) It won’t come to that.
ii. He’s got about an hour left before he takes the injections again. He barely pays attention to the look of where he’s going to live. The dust on the boxes of documents, the fact that there’s only one corner where he can possibly sleep. She pretends to clean ineffectually, wonders how long it’ll be when until she forces him to come out with it.
iii. There, in the half opened bag, are her excuses. She doesn’t know how she’ll get the drugs analyzed exactly, but it always pays to be prepared.
“Give me.” He puts the needle in her palm so fast he almost drops it. It’s not subtle when he goes to the corner of the room, as far as he can from her personal space.
“Any particular reason you want to melt into the wallpaper, there?” He stiffens, and his eyes tell her the rest. “So it was a bad nightmare.”
“You died, that’s not just a bad nightmare, that’s...” (When she walks it’s not like the construct used to, but he can’t move any farther backwards and he’s trapped. Two yards left between them and it hurts.)
“My dad used to tell me that if you have dreams like that, they never ever come true.” “They’re frequent. The drugs cause trances and I saw you…”
“You may have some alien stuff going on, but I don’t think you’re Nostradamus. You’re not transforming or on meds now. Nothing will happen. I can’t really help if you act like a scared rabbit.”
Her hand hovers above his and he shudders. In the dream everything didn’t sound so sensible. “You’ve got to be okay with this.” The particulars blur so he’s not sure how long her hand lingers or what the exact words in what she says.
(She had healing once and she doubts it’s possible for her to be hurt; he doesn’t have to shut himself off.) There’s more than triumph, and something a little sad, in her smile.
iv. It’s all in the small steps. When he does take the drugs, she locks the door between them. Part of it is because he doesn’t want her to see him like that; part of it is because she has her own task to deal with. She wonders how he’ll react to the bandages on her left palm and the paper towels soaked in blood.
v. He’s the paramedic, still. When the bandages fall apart he resets them for her so they don’t chafe. It’s the barest touch, and it lingers like a phantom limb.
vi. She wants to reassure him, tell him that she won’t die, that he won’t hurt her. Only they’ve never been able to keep lies between them, and the scarlet marks her like a brand. “We’ll figure out something.” she says.
III. Lady of the Words of Power
She’s no great lady of magic; possesses no magic touch to make this right, no abilities than will suddenly make this easy.
i. It’s been a week of looking over her shoulder every minute, telling Clark about her work with Lana, telling Jimmy nothing because he won’t ask and she doesn’t know what she’d answer anyway. The threads to her old life keep her in limbo, but his desperation drives her as her own. She feels locked into research and hope.
ii. The drugs she analyzes on the Isis computers were just that. Drugs that ought to have been fatal to any human being; that his body is resisting more every single time. The only way they could possibly work if they were something like Kryptonian viruses capable of adapting at It’s own speed, like the ones that had changed Lionel Luthor; destroyed. Human drugs give him only a few weeks before time runs out. There are some sketchy research projects on DNA inactivation; where the risks outweigh the possible benefits almost ninety percent, where the Davis she knows could vanish forever just as easily as it.
iii. No idea is worth discarding at this point. She even buys steaks, bloody and raw, as if they will satisfy Its bloodlust.
iv. The next time he blurs into her life, Clark finds her with four packages of steak in her arms. He says nothing at first; neither does she. She’s perfectly aware she’s been shopping for two the past weeks; and she doesn’t want him to be. He pushes the cart behind her.
“Are you alright, Chloe? You’ve been distant lately. Jimmy’s worried. I know you need time to process, but so early after you’ve married, you two should really spend more time...”
Of course that was the reason he’d always wanted to see her.
“Thanks for the help, dear Abby. That work with Lana is more time consuming than you’d think”
“I talked to Lana.” He says. There went her alibi, but he won’t just go out and say it.
She wants to be able to shock that noble look off his face, just once. Something like ‘yes, Clark, I’ll confess to the torrid affair.’ Once she would have expected him to ask for the punch line. Now, he might actually believe her. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
“I want to help you, Chloe.” He tells her, looks like it’s actually him in pain when he doesn’t ever worry if he has tomorrow. (She thinks it’s become a reflex for him.)
“We both know how that turned out, don’t we?”
v. She should feel worse about it, in hindsight. Clark’s been having a tough time of it lately, with discovering that not all people fawn over acts of heroism, powers like his. Linda Lake just takes it to a whole new level by turning him into something from War of the Worlds, tearing down any comfort in the life he’s constructed.
vi. Chloe can’t be around Clark now, not when there are people calling out for blood. Not when there are just two thin doors between the world outside and Davis and her. She would feel much calmer if Linda didn’t remember her at all.
IV. The Brilliant One in the Sky
She’d always wanted to see the carvings in the sacred temple: My veil no mortal has hereto raised. The cool stone face, at once distanced and comforting. Invulnerable. She’s never been good disguising things or putting up fronts. They come up thin and flimsy and she thinks he must see through them in a minute.
i. She used to be able to hide behind words. ‘Engaged’ should have been so much flimsier than ‘married’. But she doesn’t feel any firmer, any farther from him at all.
ii. Despite what it might seem like, there’s nothing to sneeze at; nothing at improper at all. They have been friends, have seldom touched. He still looks at her like she’s at the center of everything and that’s as far as it goes.
iii. She’s the only one to initiate touch, at moments where she can’t take the space and the gaps between. When she does hug him there is no change rippling through him, no drugs in his system. She can still feel the unsteadiness of how he draws in breaths, even as his hands come up to her back.
iv. She finds her lie in the dull look in Jimmy’s face. He finally throws the word ‘affair’ out as a challenge as she packs the lunches one morning. (She disappears for stretches at a time; he knows she’s not thinking of him as she sleeps, there’s something about her that he doesn’t understand.) Her eyes feels raw but she looks at him steadily until he stabs his fork angrily into his omelet. “I don’t know you.” He says. She knows he’s right.
v. (She’s lost her capacity to lie to herself. She doesn’t deny that she feels that pull toward Davis, like gravity. There’s a mix of desire, comfort and protectiveness that she never tries to define; that she can’t voice because that’s not who they are.)
vi. Maybe she’s always known that she was in as deep in this as he was. Davis spends more and more of his time in a haze of pain, and those moments he is with her everything has a purpose and she feels like she has something. For a little while.
vii. She won’t deny the feelings, something all at once more and less complicated anything she ever felt for Clark. She thinks ‘affair’ is an ugly word, exactly the Jimmy would see it if he could.
V. Mistress of the House of Life
(He lives in a room that’s like a box, but everything about his life is more normal than he can remember. )
i. She forces him to eat, plays music by Bach and Handel, draws him out. All of this, in some hope that it’ll keep him human.
ii. It’s easy to remember to have faith in his humanity when she lingers everywhere in his conscience. It’s the details, how she tucks a pen behind her ear, drops references a mile a minute, reaches out when he least expects it.
iii. They talk plans; she lines up every outlandish idea that can possibly be of help. He watches when she stacks piles and piles of research texts on each other and he catches them before they topple. No one else will have these moments, for however long they last.
iv. Even when she’s gone, she keeps an old red jacket hanging over the couch, a scent he recognizes. It’s easy to close his eyes, fall into the deception. She’s not his. She’s married, and he doesn’t have the right to thoughts like that. Right or wrong, these are the memories he calls on when it begins.
v. She’s never seen him change. He can’t be sure what is quite real with the drugs, what he really sees versus what happens. But sometimes he feels it sparking of some parts of him, an arm flickering with spines; worse the thick heaviness in the back of his skull. He tries, squeezes his eyes shut, goes to a good memory, and remembers that some nights she sleeps with her back to the door.
vi. Pain is better than the oblivion. The drugs don’t cause him quite so much pain now, leave in their wake curiously blank moments to infringe on him, when his mind feels like its going, floating off into oblivion.
vii. It starts out small increments-seconds lost, minutes. He doesn’t think he changes, stays in his place and she’s been safe so far. Oblivion is what he fears most, no conscious control, no pain. If he lets go, these are the moments when he could easily become a monster in human form; when he can’t control what his body will do.
VI. Moon Shining Over the Sea
She’ll have to make a choice soon; cut ties with one world or the other because she can’t live in both. When she does it, everything will change. The world will be turned on its head, and she won’t be swayed by what used to be her life.
i. Lois. Clark. Jimmy. They were her life, once. They can’t always be. Soon, she thinks. Soon. Not just yet.
ii. She leaves the foundation for a trip with Lois, a girl’s night out. Lois is cross at the farm boy again for reasons unknown, but they make it a pact not to speak of anything important. It’s just time with where she is just Lois’s cuz, time she wishes she had to give.
iii. Things don’t go as planned. They end up walking on their own through ugly, un-crowded streets, two girls in impractical shoes. Easy targets for a couple of thugs. She ducks and weaves ungracefully; wallops one with her purse. Lois incapacitates the other with a pair of heels. Stilettos; perfectly fierce…
iv. That becomes Lois’s plan, something to draw attention away from Clark. A dramatic description of her superhuman prowess, a few exaggerations should do the job; maybe even stall the front page. Maybe she won’t ever say it out, but Clark is the center of her life.
v. Chloe thinks that that was her once. (When she drops her as the anonymous source in her latest column, Lois thinks it still is.)
vi. Clark and Lois, Jimmy…They have each other. They’ll be alright. And she has him. (Chloe thinks she is ready now.)
I.
Regardless of what she said, she never really understood Isis; never understood the counseling, what her role meant. But she’s living it now. It’s unavoidable how it all merges; shapes her into the girl who’s willing to go to the ends of the earth. The one who’s going to open that door and face it all.
Life, love, home and death.
Isis. She thinks she almost understands the name.
She who makes the Right Use of the Heart.
Endnotes: Header titles taken from Egyptian mythology, the book of the dead.
vessel
Reccing Notes: The continuation to Lathe, davis pov this time. Again in the infamous-as-canon-AU universe, with the experimental format. Updating with this because the next installment of the series is almost finished. XD
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
1578 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)
Davis Bloome is no longer a paramedic, not the everyday hero going through the tickertape parade. He tells himself that he’s a shell that woke up.
I.
Davis Bloome is no longer a paramedic, not the everyday hero going through the tickertape parade. He hasn’t stepped forward and declared to the world all he is.
He may not be real, but he can’t let himself believe that he’s just the ultimate destroyer, because then that's all he will be.
He tells himself that he’s a shell that woke up.
i. There used to be messages to his cell phone, about the same time every day. Chloe’s voice, full of familiar surrounding warmth, concern and guilt. A voice that meant she was cured of that construct inside of her.
ii. He remembers it well, cold, terrible; just like whatever was in him. They were the same. One wanted to absorb, one wanted to destroy. He knew there was nothing of her left, even as Chloe’s hands and Chloe’s face had sealed him in that crystal. He would have promised anything if her eyes would just come back.
iii. It was like the story of the monkey’s paw. You wished, you wished, you got your wish, and then you had nothing left. (It was sick, he’d thought, that the last memory he’d ever have of her would be tainted with cold.)
iv. After about seven days the messages tapered off into emptiness. He still replayed them.
II.
He’s kept his promise. He’s hasn’t returned to the Metropolis general. He’s probably been fired by now; but he’s not human. It’s not like he needs to eat.
i. He’s found a way to hold it in him, just maybe. There are drugs that freeze the spikes within his body, keep them from piercing through, stiffen every inch of human skin, and fill his mind with images he doesn’t ever want to see again. He needs to and deserves to see them a thousand times over because they all came from what he was. What he can become again.
ii.The human side, for a while, has some relief. There are lapses of hours without blackouts. He pretends he is Davis. There are hours where he tries, does anything he can do to help, anything that doesn’t involve his past. He thinks he’s fooling himself. Doing Samaritan deeds will never make up for what he is.
iii. He hears the name Chloe Sullivan a lot more, now and understands. She spends her day shying away from reporters, hiding away from the world where Superman is a household name. He knows she’s not happy.
iv. He hasn’t ventured near Isis. It’s the only right thing he can do by her. What was once Davis Bloome, paramedic, is really a shell, covering the darkness that can rip her to shreds. She’s cured now. There’s no guarantee that she’ll be safe. He won’t risk her.
v. There is nothing human about him, no vulnerable epidermis, no normal human heart, just a genetic camouflage; there is no way that going to confession can clear his soul. She’s still his salvation
III.
Maybe it’s inevitable that this patchwork of vain hope he’s constructed will fall apart. Just not today.
i. Every other part of him is geared toward her more intensely than before. He replays memories, until he can picture every detail, the clutch of her fingers against the fabric of his uniform, the nervous gleam of moisture on her lips, her face warring between openness and fear, a split second when it felt like he had something.
ii. He still dreams of her, of the memories. But they are just that, snapshots that leave him feeling broken. He can’t hold her there, can’t tell her to stay because he’s afraid that the day will come that there won’t be anything left of him to see her anymore.
iii. He should have been prepared for the fact that it was meant to evolve into something darker, more destructive. The injections hold it frozen, sometimes for just hours now. The lapses are shortening again. The supply of injections is depleted faster every time.
iv. Even dreams of her become touched by death. (He sees her reaching out to him as it takes hold. It’s her hand on his shoulder, her face so convinced and trusting. Believing him. A traitorous little part of him wants it, can feel himself instinctively leaning into the touch. He needs to yell at her, tell her to move, now that he knows. He can’t move the sound past his vocal cords. He’s frozen, the drugs fighting his way through the shell encasing him. He can’t control it, no more than he can voice anything. He can’t say a word even as the spikes break their way across his skin, pierce her.) He knows her eyes.
v. It’s not working and he knows it. He slides the needle into his arm and his fingers tremble like those of the addict’s he’s put on IVs.
IV.
He has to believe it will get better; or simply end. (He doesn’t have that choice.)
i. It’ll be two hours this time; maybe less, maybe more. For once he doesn’t see the images, and wonders if it is trying to purge itself of guilt. Limbo is a relief that he doesn’t deserve.
ii. He can still see, still hear. There’s the opening a shutting of doors behind the wall, the rattle of the knob. No, he thinks, not now. He hopes it’s the landlord taking him for a stoner again. (No one else knows who he is, here.)
iii. “Davis! I know you’re in there. Open the door, will you?” He knows her voice. The knob rattles once, twice, stops altogether. She’ll leave, he thinks. She’s got to.
iv. There’s no tell tale twist of key before the door swings open. She’s there again, filling the gaps between dream and reality; but that was a dream and this isn’t. He knows how it ends and he can’t let it happen. He realizes he can’t move.
V.
Chance is not kind.
i. “Davis. Are you okay?!” It feels like fire and not a single fiber of muscle twitches. A rattle from human lungs. “Davis.” She crouches on her knees on the unremarkable carpet, close enough that he can smell freesias. One inch, one inch would be enough. Its one thing to feel pain, another to feel the grief before it happens. She touches him and she dies.
ii. This is where the dream starts. He can feel slight tremors building in his shoulders. Any moment she’s going to reach out and...
iii. She’s different. There’s nothing tactile about how she stays a whole six inches away. “I wish I could make you relax, but I have a feeling that’s not happening.” The small tan hand holding the discarded needle transfixes him. “So this is how you’re dealing with it. Somehow, I doubt this is FDA approved.” (She’s got an hour where he can’t argue. She starts at the beginning.)
iv. He can speak, and she’s said almost all he needed to say. She knows about the destruction of the wedding, the fact that he’s changing, what he is before he says a word. She’s already latched onto her goal and that’s that. He expects her to draw up a chart any minute.
“You’ll be in danger. There’s a chance that without that computer inside of you, or whatever program it was supposed to be running, it’ll destroy you. You want to help me but I can’t let you do whatever you are going to do. ”
“Does it look like I have a plan? I’m going to be here, and try and figure out one.”
v. This is too much like before. He can’t keep still; she’s watching him like he deserves to be held when she knows. He feels weak; thinks that he’s going to crumble and seal her fate.
“It’s different. Don’t you see? Before, I was scared. Now, I know what I am and you can’t just… I’m not an innocent man. I’m a murderer.”
His fingers clench and unclench and he’s perfectly aware that his nails can’t make the slightest scratch on his skin.
Something flickers across her face and she doesn’t move.
“That makes me even more qualified to help.”
She thinks of her hands, the signals flat lining over the hospital bed, the twist of loyalty inside her and something much darker. Oliver saying they were in the same boat. The fact that she couldn’t find Sebastian no matter how many discharge records she went through.
“I think I may be too.”
VI.
(He could still try to do the right thing. Keep with the injections until everything starts spiraling again; until he can’t remember her face and she can go back to the life that she’s running from.
That doesn’t sound right.)
i. “I’m here to be your friend. I know when I… was that, it’s what I needed most. I won’t let you do this thing alone.” He doesn’t have to try to believe that.
ii. She looks at home in the center of his empty kitchen, not frightened, not anything but Chloe, and when she asks him to tell her word-for-word what the construct said, it feels like he’s talking about someone else.
iii. She never even pauses over the fact that he’s not real, not in the same way she is. “The way I see it, it doesn’t matter. You know Descartes right? You think, therefore you are. If you were just a bit of coding you wouldn’t be fighting this.”
He thinks that just at much about her as it does about him.
I.
Davis Bloome is a part of the monster that wasn’t made to wake up. His skin shouldn’t hold chaos underneath without cracking, but he has to believe it can.
Sometimes its almost easy to.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
1578 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)
Davis Bloome is no longer a paramedic, not the everyday hero going through the tickertape parade. He tells himself that he’s a shell that woke up.
I.
Davis Bloome is no longer a paramedic, not the everyday hero going through the tickertape parade. He hasn’t stepped forward and declared to the world all he is.
He may not be real, but he can’t let himself believe that he’s just the ultimate destroyer, because then that's all he will be.
He tells himself that he’s a shell that woke up.
i. There used to be messages to his cell phone, about the same time every day. Chloe’s voice, full of familiar surrounding warmth, concern and guilt. A voice that meant she was cured of that construct inside of her.
ii. He remembers it well, cold, terrible; just like whatever was in him. They were the same. One wanted to absorb, one wanted to destroy. He knew there was nothing of her left, even as Chloe’s hands and Chloe’s face had sealed him in that crystal. He would have promised anything if her eyes would just come back.
iii. It was like the story of the monkey’s paw. You wished, you wished, you got your wish, and then you had nothing left. (It was sick, he’d thought, that the last memory he’d ever have of her would be tainted with cold.)
iv. After about seven days the messages tapered off into emptiness. He still replayed them.
II.
He’s kept his promise. He’s hasn’t returned to the Metropolis general. He’s probably been fired by now; but he’s not human. It’s not like he needs to eat.
i. He’s found a way to hold it in him, just maybe. There are drugs that freeze the spikes within his body, keep them from piercing through, stiffen every inch of human skin, and fill his mind with images he doesn’t ever want to see again. He needs to and deserves to see them a thousand times over because they all came from what he was. What he can become again.
ii.The human side, for a while, has some relief. There are lapses of hours without blackouts. He pretends he is Davis. There are hours where he tries, does anything he can do to help, anything that doesn’t involve his past. He thinks he’s fooling himself. Doing Samaritan deeds will never make up for what he is.
iii. He hears the name Chloe Sullivan a lot more, now and understands. She spends her day shying away from reporters, hiding away from the world where Superman is a household name. He knows she’s not happy.
iv. He hasn’t ventured near Isis. It’s the only right thing he can do by her. What was once Davis Bloome, paramedic, is really a shell, covering the darkness that can rip her to shreds. She’s cured now. There’s no guarantee that she’ll be safe. He won’t risk her.
v. There is nothing human about him, no vulnerable epidermis, no normal human heart, just a genetic camouflage; there is no way that going to confession can clear his soul. She’s still his salvation
III.
Maybe it’s inevitable that this patchwork of vain hope he’s constructed will fall apart. Just not today.
i. Every other part of him is geared toward her more intensely than before. He replays memories, until he can picture every detail, the clutch of her fingers against the fabric of his uniform, the nervous gleam of moisture on her lips, her face warring between openness and fear, a split second when it felt like he had something.
ii. He still dreams of her, of the memories. But they are just that, snapshots that leave him feeling broken. He can’t hold her there, can’t tell her to stay because he’s afraid that the day will come that there won’t be anything left of him to see her anymore.
iii. He should have been prepared for the fact that it was meant to evolve into something darker, more destructive. The injections hold it frozen, sometimes for just hours now. The lapses are shortening again. The supply of injections is depleted faster every time.
iv. Even dreams of her become touched by death. (He sees her reaching out to him as it takes hold. It’s her hand on his shoulder, her face so convinced and trusting. Believing him. A traitorous little part of him wants it, can feel himself instinctively leaning into the touch. He needs to yell at her, tell her to move, now that he knows. He can’t move the sound past his vocal cords. He’s frozen, the drugs fighting his way through the shell encasing him. He can’t control it, no more than he can voice anything. He can’t say a word even as the spikes break their way across his skin, pierce her.) He knows her eyes.
v. It’s not working and he knows it. He slides the needle into his arm and his fingers tremble like those of the addict’s he’s put on IVs.
IV.
He has to believe it will get better; or simply end. (He doesn’t have that choice.)
i. It’ll be two hours this time; maybe less, maybe more. For once he doesn’t see the images, and wonders if it is trying to purge itself of guilt. Limbo is a relief that he doesn’t deserve.
ii. He can still see, still hear. There’s the opening a shutting of doors behind the wall, the rattle of the knob. No, he thinks, not now. He hopes it’s the landlord taking him for a stoner again. (No one else knows who he is, here.)
iii. “Davis! I know you’re in there. Open the door, will you?” He knows her voice. The knob rattles once, twice, stops altogether. She’ll leave, he thinks. She’s got to.
iv. There’s no tell tale twist of key before the door swings open. She’s there again, filling the gaps between dream and reality; but that was a dream and this isn’t. He knows how it ends and he can’t let it happen. He realizes he can’t move.
V.
Chance is not kind.
i. “Davis. Are you okay?!” It feels like fire and not a single fiber of muscle twitches. A rattle from human lungs. “Davis.” She crouches on her knees on the unremarkable carpet, close enough that he can smell freesias. One inch, one inch would be enough. Its one thing to feel pain, another to feel the grief before it happens. She touches him and she dies.
ii. This is where the dream starts. He can feel slight tremors building in his shoulders. Any moment she’s going to reach out and...
iii. She’s different. There’s nothing tactile about how she stays a whole six inches away. “I wish I could make you relax, but I have a feeling that’s not happening.” The small tan hand holding the discarded needle transfixes him. “So this is how you’re dealing with it. Somehow, I doubt this is FDA approved.” (She’s got an hour where he can’t argue. She starts at the beginning.)
iv. He can speak, and she’s said almost all he needed to say. She knows about the destruction of the wedding, the fact that he’s changing, what he is before he says a word. She’s already latched onto her goal and that’s that. He expects her to draw up a chart any minute.
“You’ll be in danger. There’s a chance that without that computer inside of you, or whatever program it was supposed to be running, it’ll destroy you. You want to help me but I can’t let you do whatever you are going to do. ”
“Does it look like I have a plan? I’m going to be here, and try and figure out one.”
v. This is too much like before. He can’t keep still; she’s watching him like he deserves to be held when she knows. He feels weak; thinks that he’s going to crumble and seal her fate.
“It’s different. Don’t you see? Before, I was scared. Now, I know what I am and you can’t just… I’m not an innocent man. I’m a murderer.”
His fingers clench and unclench and he’s perfectly aware that his nails can’t make the slightest scratch on his skin.
Something flickers across her face and she doesn’t move.
“That makes me even more qualified to help.”
She thinks of her hands, the signals flat lining over the hospital bed, the twist of loyalty inside her and something much darker. Oliver saying they were in the same boat. The fact that she couldn’t find Sebastian no matter how many discharge records she went through.
“I think I may be too.”
VI.
(He could still try to do the right thing. Keep with the injections until everything starts spiraling again; until he can’t remember her face and she can go back to the life that she’s running from.
That doesn’t sound right.)
i. “I’m here to be your friend. I know when I… was that, it’s what I needed most. I won’t let you do this thing alone.” He doesn’t have to try to believe that.
ii. She looks at home in the center of his empty kitchen, not frightened, not anything but Chloe, and when she asks him to tell her word-for-word what the construct said, it feels like he’s talking about someone else.
iii. She never even pauses over the fact that he’s not real, not in the same way she is. “The way I see it, it doesn’t matter. You know Descartes right? You think, therefore you are. If you were just a bit of coding you wouldn’t be fighting this.”
He thinks that just at much about her as it does about him.
I.
Davis Bloome is a part of the monster that wasn’t made to wake up. His skin shouldn’t hold chaos underneath without cracking, but he has to believe it can.
Sometimes its almost easy to.
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