First, Happy New years to you all! It's been awesome getting to know many of you, reading , chatting Chlavisy things. I look forward getting to know more of you this 2010. ;)
First post of the year!
Reccing Notes: In case you've been reading along, xxlamlaxx has a way of tackling this ship that is both beautiful and intensely dark. In this fic, she tackles the full cast of smallville with mental disorders. This really typifies her writing and takes you into a surreal world (similar but far darker and more disorienting than the lex-centric 'asylum'.) Davis believes that God speaks to him and meets Chloe. The connection between the three leads Chloe, Davis and Lex elevates it to a visceral experience. You can't be sure of anything- but do you need to be? Warning for slash (davis/lex, no really!), a whle flotaella of disturbed behaviors, and unusual (!) bloody imagery.by
xxamlaxx at
her livejournal5553 words, nc-17, au universe (that makes me think of
asylum)
“God draws pictures behind my eyelids and they look like you.”
The smooth filed down and polished plaster of the white washed walls is as cold beneath his fingertips as the needle stuck into his skin some nights or the multicolored pills he swallows that taste of chalky bitterness like lemon dust. He can spread his palms flat against them, trade his warmth for the wall’s coldness, press them there until his arms tremble and heat blooms where the paint was ice. There are times when he thinks he can push his hands right through the wall, he thinks he can because God tells him so. God whispers to him through the walls and the ceiling and through the window, words warped and curling so they can fit between the bars and through panes of glass. God talks to him and angels do too, their voices so loud he can’t drown them out, even when he clasps his hands tight over his ears and hums, screams the Lord’s prayer into the air.
“God will deliver me from evil.” He announces to the walls and to the world and to them, needle sliding beneath his skin.
-
Davis paints on mornings when God is quiet, his head empty and hollow, echoing space of nothingness he fills with ideas, with each stroke of his brush across the page. Blue is his favorite color, soft looking like raindrops on a window, shimmering on the surface of the glass, blue like the washed out sky, speckled with cotton white clouds that dance and bob like white boats with white sails drifting on the blue, blue sea. God lives in the sky and the sky is blue so God is probably blue too, blue as water that is blue as life so God is life. He’s smearing God across the paper in random swirls and patterns, elegant spirals and spatters because sometimes he likes to think and while he thinks he leaves the brush pressed where his line began and the paint drips down in heavy trails and bubbles that creep their way towards the floor. The nurses tell him it’s pretty but their words are meaningless, as empty as his head when God is busy. The only words in the world that matter are the ones from God and the angels.
Jimmy likes to watch him paint, sits in his favorite orange plastic chair, arms bound in a straight jacket because he can’t be trusted with his own fingers. Jimmy scratches at the needle marks where he used to inject himself until they bleed, become thick and infected, oozing pus and blood that Jimmy licks away with the tip of his tongue; nursing his wounds as a cat does. Jimmy doesn’t have voices in his head like Davis, doesn’t get to hear God and the angels singing, always has to be alone inside his mind. Jimmy laughs and laughs and can’t remember how to speak. The nurses say he overdosed on heroin and now he’s damaged, too many cells in his brain dead and gone.
The doctors think he doesn’t understand when they talk about him, scribble things down in his chart and watch him paint. They use the words obsessive and monomania and schizophrenic but Davis has medical training too. He knows what a mental illness is, and being a devout, chosen vessel for the words of the Lord doesn’t make him sick. It makes him better than the rest of them, it makes him holy and powerful and special. Special like his momma told him he was every night she tucked him into bed, lay close beside him, smelling of flower perfume and the diner she worked in while they said prayers together, her big hands folded over his small ones, two triangles stacked together in testament to the Lord.
He’s tracing the shadows the light cast on his canvas in a dusky blue water color the morning when the nurses escort two new patients from their rooms. The man is impressively tall, taller than anyone, the tallest man Davis has ever seen, taller than God maybe. Tall with dark hair and blue eyes, eyes bluerer than the paint on his brush, the paint drying crusty on his fingertips. His eyes are bluerer than God and it’s wrong for something to be so blue without being holy. He has bandages up and down his arms, brown spots where blood seeped through and dried itchy against his skin. He’s holding hands with a girl who is smaller than him and not blue at all, her hair yellow as the sun shining or the flicker of the florescent light above his head, eyes green as grass and the minty, sea foam green color of the nurses’ scrubs, green as the markers they keep in the rec room. She’s green, not blue, but that’s okay because he isn’t blue either, no one can be blue but God. She has bandages on her arms and wrists, band aids stuck on her palms, wrapped around her fingers. She and the blue man sit where the nurses direct them, side by side on the couch that’s just as white as the linoleum floors. He holds her hand and strokes her hair, brushing the strands back as if they’re gold and her eyes are the glazed dead with emptiness, the marble-like effect of medication, white and red and blue and yellow pills collected in clear plastic cups.
Davis doesn’t take the pills because he has a choice, because they make God angry and leave him, leave him so he’s all alone inside his head and the emptiness is louder than God and the angels ever could be. The silence is loud enough to hurt his ears and make his ear drums tremble, writhing inside his skull, his tongue numb and fuzzy while the world is cloaked in a slow, clear fluid so thick he can barely move. The new ones are clearly attempted suicides and their first day they don’t get a choice, get held down and pumped full to the brim, veins buzzing with the poison running through their blood. Soon enough the blue man’s hands stop moving, lips stop forming shapeless, useless words that no one but the girl can hear and the two slump back together, bandaged fingers laced and thoughts lost to the world.
He paints the blue man and the girl but after the paint dries all he can see on the canvas is blue and God.
-
The blue man and the girl have visitors almost every day. Davis can see them talking in the visitors room, the blue man and the girl’s hands stuck together like they’ve been glued, because they have. Davis saw the two of them pour a bottle of glue onto the table earlier that morning and lather their hands with it, clasp hands so tight white squelched out of the lines between their fingers. Later the doctors have to pry their hands apart and some of their skin rips off and peels away.
“They’re really fucked up.” Lex doesn’t have hair and his short term memory is crap. Lex has been here longer than anyone Davis knows, been here since he was a kid. They said Lex smothered his baby brother to death with a pillow and got sent here for rehabilitation. It was a different time back then, a different medical era and they sent enough electricity through his brain to cook a couple dozen bags of popcorn. The story goes that they gave him so much electroshock it killed off all his hair follicles, but Lex says during a therapy session the machine sparked and burned his curly hair away, now he shaves his head once a week, because it makes it easier to think without too much hair to suppress his thoughts. “I guess we all are though, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
God’s crooning sweet and low in his ear and Lex’s eyes melt out of his face, dribbling down his cheeks in waxy puddles. God is testing his faith; God wants to see if his heart is pure. God is all he has in the world. God is love and life and he has both.
“You and I aren’t.” God tells him how rationale he is, how sane, how this is all a test, how he will someday be a saint for his suffering, for the needle marks in his forearms and the pills stacked in a neat pile beneath his bed the days he pretends to swallow them down, hides them neatly beneath his tongue. God tells him to save them, so he can join him in heaven soon, when he’s ready. God tells him to do a lot of things, to bite his tongue, bash his skull against the mirror, rip the faces off all nonbelievers, the unfaithful and the sinners, cleanse the ward by spilling the blood of the guilty. And he will, when it is time.
“You think you talk to God.” Lex raises his eyebrow, fingers numbly shuffling a well worn deck of cards. Lex’s mother sent them to him when he first came here, before she died; the last gift Lex ever received from his family.
“I do talk to God.” He talks to God and the angels and it is so beautiful to hear their voices rising higher and higher, higher than the stars or the sun or the sky.
“Of course you do Davis.” Lex hums, laughing, smile creeping into the corners of his mouth, wrinkling the skin where it was smooth, twisting his face unnaturally. Lex has the blood of his little brother on his hands and God lets Davis see it, the bloody smudges on the cards and table top that the nurse is going to have to wipe away later. Lex drips blood everywhere he walks, trails of red up and down the hallways. Lex is made of blood and he likes to see it, hides the lines beneath the sleeves of his shirt, rows and rows of scars grown over pink and white, the freshest at the crease where his elbow and upper arm meet, blood pooled and crusted into the hollow there, only where Davis is allowed to see. He and Lex are friends and sometimes God tells him to do things to Lex so he does them. It makes God laugh when he sucks Lex’s cock in the darkness, on his knees by Lex’s bed, head bowed in a different type of prayer. Lex touches his hair and touches him back, a hand on his dick, tongue and mouth too, unaware of the sin in it all. The sin is so humid those nights he thinks Lex has to be able to smell it, to taste it, a salty bitterness in the back of his throat. God makes him sin like this because God wants to forgive him for it. God needs him to sin so Davis will need him, even though Davis will always need God regardless of his transgressions. “I’m leaving at the end of the week.” Lex shuffles his cards again and God laughs in the back of his brain, a secret, delighted laugh. And you shall be cleansed of your sins. “My dad says he wants me to come home.” Lex is scared and trembling beneath his skin, deep in his bones, in the places God made Davis touch.
“It’s God’s will that you go.”
He watches Lex shuffle his cards over and over as God howls deep in his skull.
-
He hides his face in Lex’s neck so God doesn’t have to see his face while Lex fucks him. God praises him mucky deep good boy good boy with each shift of his thighs, the curl of his leg around Lex’s waist. Lex fucks him so hard it hurts to breathe, the ache in his soul settling into a burn between his thighs, a hitch in his breath as he gulps in air in mouthfuls, one palm against the wall. He does everything God asks of him but this will always be the hardest, the stretch and sting inside him with every flex of Lex’s hips. It hurts to be two people like this, to be connected, and the sin eats him alive, a corrosive deadly acid that nibbles away at bits of his soul.
“God yeah.” Lex groans, head tilted backwards, his throat long and white and lean in the darkness. “I’m going to miss you Davis.” Lex pulls out, fingers passing through the sticky that’s already drying on his stomach, the stickiness of his sin and shame, broken pride and unyielding obedience. He won’t miss you. God hisses, a slow and sleepy hiss, familiar and lazy like an old friend. Because God is his friend, his best friend, the only friend he’ll ever need.
“No you won’t.” Lex plants a kiss beneath his jaw, licks a droplet of sweat from his skin, lips wet and open, too warm against his overheated flesh.
“God tell you that?”
“God tells me everything.” He says, bringing the sheets up over his shoulder, God quiet and tired between his ears.
“I know he does.”
Lex leaves his room and one of the angels sleeping in his eyelashes sings to him.
-
“My name is Chloe.” The girl dances her way to him, swaying as she crosses the floor, lighter on her toes than air. Her hair shines like sun and God enjoys it, God wants him to rip it out and keep it as his own, store a bit of that sun in his pocket for a rainy day. “The doctors say there’s someone inside your head too.” God writhes violently, lurching and twisting, black as venom, commanding him to strike. She knows she knows and with the blood of the unrighteous you shall be reborn. “I know you’re not crazy. My mom had God inside her head too.” God calms and settles to a collected whisper deep in the cells of his brain. “I just wanted to tell you that Clark and I don’t think you’re insane.” The blue man is waiting for her, for Chloe and she dances back, singing like an angel, singing like one of his angels, sweeter than God and all the other voices in his head. They kiss and God orders him to watch it, the wet push of Clark’s tongue into her mouth through her open lips, her hands curling around his jaw, natural and free of sin, expressed in the light instead of the dark, the air clean and no longer bittersweet. God wants him to be free of sin with Chloe, he’s sure of it, sure because God tells him; God who is his father in heaven, the creator of his soul and all that was and ever will be.
Clark and Chloe draw pictures together in the rec room, putting strange symbols onto paper that no one can read but them. They talk about Krypton and Jor-El and Kal-El and an entire world just beyond the stars and God grows angry with their blaspheme. There is one world and it is God’s greatest work, one people who are God’s chosen people and they live here on a planet that orbits the yellow sun. God gave life to man through Adam and Eve who betrayed his trust, who fell from grace, fell because they were dirty and undeserving, they heard God speak from his mouth yet they did not listen. Davis hears God speak and God’s every word is law to him, every word sacred, as veritable as the paragraphs in his bible that he knows by heart. Some of the nurses leave to help prepare lunch and Chloe and Clark walk off, their drawings scattered across the table.
The two of them lay together like man and wife and Davis witnesses it all, God grinning ear to ear in his head, God’s cheeks muscles stretched wide, each of his white teeth exposed and glorious, pure white and blinding somewhere Davis can’t see. What he can see is Clark and Chloe through the crack in the door of Clark’s room, the broad expanse of Clark’s back and the gleam of Chloe’s skin where her body isn’t covered, the flex of her fingers where her arm dangles over the edge of the bed. She breathes in moans that travel straight to his dick, that make him want more than God does. God tells him to touch but he thinks that even if God said no he’d still be sliding a hand into his pants, gripping hold of himself and sighing. This is a sin as well; he is made of sin lately, sin in the fibers that compose his mortal soul. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy Name. Thy kingdom come. He leans his back against the solid coolness of the doorframe, his hand seeking out the warmth in his front. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. God is silent for the first time in days and he is high in the silence, the silence that burns, that makes him want to bleed, that has him feeling too empty inside, hollow when he needs to be full. At the moment there is only heat growing low in his belly, angels singing for him off in the distance.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
-
Jimmy is laughing, laughing and laughing, and his laughing has God laughing as well, the two of them laughing and laughing, the noise bouncing off the walls and reverberating off the bones of his skull, ringing and ringing laughter in his head that clashes with the sound of Chloe screaming. Chloe’s cheeks burn red with anger, so hot they could burn, would burn Davis if he touched them, if he reached up like God wanted and smashed her cheeks between his hands, held them so tight her bones ground together when he pushed them in, wrecked her face to make it his, mold the pretty bones and pretty skin into God’s image. He has dreams where he pulls Chloe’s skin off bit by bit, plucks her hair out one by one, until she’s a bald, faceless, nameless thing, grotesquely beautiful and delightfully ugly, a bloody, mutilated body that God guides him to correct. He remakes her and then she is stunning, pure and solidly constructed as God wanted, holier than the Virgin Mary or his mother, all porcelain and grass and the hottest, most blinding light he could steal from the sun.
“What did you do to him?” Chloe screeches, a desperate, pathetic wail, struggling as her hands are seized by security, legs kicking in an attempt to break free. Her slippered foot collides with the jaw of one of the nurses and blood gushes down from her slip lip, right through her fingers, a puddle of red right on the floor, mixing where Lex’s blood always used to be. The floor is blood again and it is as though nothing in this place ever changes. “What did you do to Clark?”
“Chloe.” Clark is no longer blue; he just stands tall and colorless, droplets of the nurse’s blood staining the cuffs of his new jeans, the freshly ironed flannel of his shirt. “They didn’t do anything to me.”
“Clark they got inside your mind! They put a chip in, a chip made of Kryptonite and if you don’t’ fight it they’re going to control you! They can read your thoughts Clark, they can, they can!” Chloe babbles, her insanity as visible as God’s voice is audible in his hears. Chloe is like Jimmy and Pete and Lex. Lex who murdered, who cut himself at night and smiled, rubbed his own blood slick and messy on his fingertips. Pete who’s bipolar, who some days is the brightest, bubbliest thing Davis has ever seen and other times just sits on the couch and sobs, listless as he lies motionless, his tears sliding wet and salty down his cheeks. Jimmy who broke himself not because of God or the Devil, who broke himself out of his own selfish pleasures and now laughs in place of words, laughs that mean no and yes and please and someone help me and I don’t want to be alone. Chloe is just like them and God pities them all, and Davis pities them too. He pities those who have lost the integrity of their sane and rationale mind, because he is persecuted for the same reason, all because mankind is unable to see how splendid it is to give oneself up entirely to a greater power. God speaks so loud they could hear if they tried, if they look a moment to listen.
“Can’t you hear yourself Chloe?” Clark takes her face in his hands and Davis waits for his flesh to sizzle, for Chloe’s anger to make him burn; char the skin of his hands black. “You sound crazy right now.”
“That’s because they brainwashed you Clark! They took your thoughts out and they scrubbed them clean before they put them back.” God writes poems to Chloe’s insanity and croons for his misguided daughter, for those who cometh to God can find their way. In the darkness thou shall find the road God preaches to Chloe who is too lost to hear, who is burning Clark with her anger and frustration, drowning in her own helpless abandon, the wild frenzy she has worked herself into.
“Chloe, take the pills, please, you’ll get better.” God yells at Clark, at the pills, pills that make a person fuzzy and dizzy and weak, turn their brains to mush that can’t receive the divine glory of God. “Please.”
“Clark if I take the pills they’ll get inside my head and I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be a robot.”
“Chloe.” Clark sighs, pulls his hands away and they haven’t been burned or blistered, smooth and unblemished. “I’m going to come visit you soon.” Clark presses a kiss to her cheek and Davis watches Clark’s affection slop off Chloe’s skin in a wet, sickly motion, decaying and dying on the floor, screaming that God and Davis can hear. “Take care.”
-
Gods words become jumbled, ramblings mixed together, churned together like meat in a grinder, cut and rolled together until he can’t tell where one sentence begins and another ends. It’s a constant stream of wordswordswords, God talking fast and low and deep. God tells him to slit his wrists, call his mother, eat the pills beneath his mattress, and set fire to the city and watch it burn because and in the storm the evil will be consumed in holy fire and from the ashes the pious will emerge. God instructs him to go to Chloe and take her, ravage her mouth with his tongue, seek absolution from his past sins between her thighs, in the act that is most sacred.
“I can fly you know.” Chloe states just loud enough for him to hear, her hands working furiously across the white wall of the rec room, smearing the plaster with paint, writing her name in green, green walking up the wall in phantom handprints, Chloe’s body against the wall leaving smudges of sponged on green. “No one believes me but I can. I’m an alien and I can fly higher than the buildings, higher than the world.” Chloe paints symbols across the wall and the symbols come alive and run for him, chase each other before scurrying back, spelling out God’s name in twisted, gnarling letters, crooked like the bones of arthritic fingers.
“That’s impossible. Aliens aren’t real. God created man and animal and man and animal alone.”
“If you can talk to God, why can’t I be an alien? My mother was an alien too, I know it. She’s waiting for me back home. Where’s your mother, do you know where your mother is?” He has his brush and he puts blue to join Chloe’s green, land and water, blue and green, life and eternity blending together, their own version of the globe painted on the wall.
“My mother is in heaven.” God allows his mother to speak to him sometimes, when it’s late at night and he can’t sleep because he’s watching the air crawl in spider-like molecules across the ceiling, wicked spiders that would crawl into his brain and eat it if God wasn’t keeping it safe.
“My mom talked to God all the time Davis, everyday, and she thought she could fly too. Why can’t God want people to fly?” He doesn’t know and God won’t tell him. God has gone quiet and he hates to be without God’s constant murmuring.
“I don’t know.”
“I bet he does, he just keeps it a secret. I bet we could both fly if we tried. I could take you flying with me Davis.” Chloe spins and the paint on the bottoms of her bare feet helps her spin, slick and wet and squelchy, her feet drying green. “Clark didn’t want to fly with me, but you would if I asked, wouldn’t you?” Her hands cradle his face and where she touches him he’s green, her green burning over God’s blue, turning him a new color. “C’mon.” Chloe giggles, dancing to a rhythm that doesn’t exist outside her own mind. “Let me teach you how to fly. You could learn to fly like an angel.” God doesn’t let man fly; only angels can fly; only angels and he isn’t an angel. He’s a dirty, sinful man blessed with the glory of God in his heart, the undivided attention the Lord.
“I think you might be an angel.” Her hair is the color of a halo, made of gold and sunshine and love.
“I’m not an angel.” She laughs, her teeth outline sickly in green, lime colored saliva leaking from the corners of her mouth, horrendously bizarre, like he’s had one too many of the little yellow pills after breakfast. “Honey, I’m not even close.” She doesn’t see what she is. She’s an angel, she’s green to his blue and together they make the world.
“I think you’re my angel.” Her skin is crusty with paint beneath his fingertips, her hair stringy green and gold. “God draws pictures behind my eyelids and they look like you.” The green seeps from between her lips even as she kisses him. There is no sin in the kiss, no evil, no snakes and demons wriggling in and out of Chloe’s eyes, crawling into him from their hiding spots behind her teeth. He tastes green and angel but the flavor is surprisingly bitter, viscous on his tongue, alive and vibrating; a little heartbeat in his mouth. He thinks he might have God inside his mouth, God spreading down his throat. He’s swallowing more of God and God gets louder. “You’re my Eve but instead of falling I’m going to fly with you.” She slurps some blue from him and when they part her lips are blue-green pretty.
“Then before we fly I want to sin with you.”
“It’s not sin.” He protests, lapping blue and green from the skin beneath her lips. “It’s nature. You can tame the beast of my sins.” Chloe doesn’t understand yet she moves, liquid like green down the hallway, through the clean that was once Lex’s blood and before that the sluggish, slow crawling black curls of misery. They lay back on his bed, spreading green and blue there, the sheets sticking tacky to his back as they dry.
Chloe’s his angel floating above him, pants descending past her thighs, bunching in the crooks of her knees, the soft white places the sun can’t touch. She sinks right down, flush onto him, and it is slick, too hot and heavenly. He supposes it could very well be heaven, if she’s an angel or even God. He touches the firmness of her breasts, faded blue fingerprints across the suppleness of an angel’s skin. There is no shame in the slow rolling waves of pleasure, the drum tight muscles in his stomach. Chloe’s his Eve and he’s Adam. A true man of God but he won’t fall. God groans yes over and over in his own prayer while he breathes, pushing where Chloe presses, her hands on his chest for balance and grinds; weight on his hips like God’s words on his shoulders. He comes with God’s name on his lips, with a short burst of a prayer from his childhood. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. He’s high, higher than the clouds, higher than he’s ever been, out of his own body, suspended up and looking down at the actions of his body.
“You ready?” The concrete is sun warmed under his bare feet; the wind feather light and icy cool. Chloe’s hands are bathed in blood, red splattered messily over the green while half of her face is a spotted green, paint peeling off in scale-like flakes. “I had to you know. They were going to keep me in that prison. They were going to get inside my head and suck out the truth with a big rubber hose, like how you siphon gas from someone’s car. They just put their mouths around one end and suck out you.” She drops her sharpened toothbrush, bright purple plastic splashed with crimson. “We’re going to fly so high you’ll be able to see God.” Chloe offers her hand and he grasps hold of it, climbs with her up onto the ledge. Over the sound of the wind God beckons:
Come to me.
-
“Davis, what are you doing?” The voice floating through his ears isn’t God’s, the one wrapping tight around his brain, words are choking, heavy things, God’s words are weights upon his shoulders, so numerous he weighs more than the earth, more than the sun. He’s heavy with the burden of God and truth and absolution. “Davis?” Lex’s face is white washed and gray.
“Come with me.” Chloe tugs his sleeve and his hand glides, sliding wet in a thick, wobbling line.
“I’m going with Chloe.”
“Davis, Chloe left two weeks ago. She isn’t here anymore.” Lex stares into the nearly empty glass, the red pooling in the center, spreading out to touch the sides, forming a rectangle of blood, dripping dripping down and he listens to it trickle, the rush and ripple of hot, hot blood. This is his blood and when he’s gone all the faithless can drink and believe, for this is his wine and his bread and his religion. “What happened to the fish I bought you? The blue one, Clark, what happened to him?”
“Clark was too blue. Things can’t be that blue. Only God is that blue. He was too blue so they fixed him and his blue went away and now he isn’t God anymore.”
“Oh fuck.” Lex looks up on the wall where he strung up Clark’s blue that he found floating. He kept it close because God asked him to and Chloe asked him to and Chloe is God and an angel in one. “Hold on okay? I’m going to call the doctors and they’re going to fix those cuts right up.” He’s bleeding too much. Lex knows that, Lex used to bleed more than anyone, his blood in quivering, steaming puddles up and down the hall.
“No, it’s alright. I’m going to be with God.” In the Kingdom you will rest say God and Chloe, Chloe who is God, perched on his shoulder. Death is a glittering, golden thing, diamonds and snowflakes, shimmering and the world is a hazy, twisty dying thing just like he is.
“Screw that, I’m not letting you die.” Lex moves and Davis plants the shard of aquarium glass deep in Lex’s throat, blood gushes out and God rushes in.
“I did it.” The blood travels down his arms when he raises them, shiny red fingers splayed wide towards the blue, blue sky. “I spilled blood for you, it’s all for you God. I give his life and my life to worship you.”
Inside his head Chloe laughs and together they dance in a growing puddle of his and Lex’s blood.
Next up, I'll bring you something happy, smutty, or both. ;)
