malignant drabble series part four

Reccing Notes: It's ending. noooo! There is no sudden lightswitch, or magic fix. We are presented with a compelling and heartbreaking journey with Chloe and Davis as the cancer worsens.

Despite her allergy to happyhappy endings, it won't break your heart completely. Maybe only threequarters of the way. There is some hope.

by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
3625 words, m/nc-17(for one scene), beast
She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.
----
“Please Chloe.” Davis squeezes her hand, brings it to his cheek and holds it against his skin, against the stubble forming on his jaw. Davis hasn’t shaved in three days, hasn’t slept in two, hasn’t done much more than fret and worry and hurt and somehow, in some sympathetic, miserable way, she blames herself for all of this. For hurting him, for the cells inside her brain that mutate to poison in the space inside her skull.

“Okay.” She sighs, gives in, lets the resistance fall way to consent, but the only thing she can feel is the throbbing inside her skull, pulsing with every beat of her heart. Her biological clock is ticking, losing days, minutes, seconds, three weeks to get out of South America and now at best she has three months before she leaves Davis alone in the world he is destined to destroy.

“Mr. Washington, I discussed this with you over the phone.” This doctor is a woman, five feet and nine inches tall in heels. “I can’t begin chemotherapy for your wife. You don’t even have an official record of her diagnoses.”

“We were on our honeymoon in South America; we went to a small, poor clinic. Please.” Davis takes her hand again, his eyes gleam wetly. “We just got married.”

“Alright.” Dr. Dilan sighs and leaves the room, returns a few minutes later, carrying an IV. “This is going to be unofficial; I could lose my license for this.” She extends her arm, and winces when a stainless steel needle pierces her skin. “Are you sure you want me to start it? If the tumors are as bad as they seem, it isn’t going to make much of a difference, and the side effects…”

“I’m a paramedic.” Davis starts the IV drip himself, hands the doctor a wad of cash Chloe doesn’t remember seeing.
Hours later, Davis holds her hair back while she knees in front of a toilet in a small motel in Texas and retches until her entire body burns and there’s nothing left in her stomach but bile and air.


----
She finds herself fading in and out of existence, periods of time where the world is only blurs of color, snatches of conversation, the coolness of porcelain gripped between her fingers, hot bile in her throat. Every three days Davis bribes another doctor, in another state, holds her free hand while IV’s and drugs are injected in her arm, course through her blood and poison her.

She loses her first clumps of hair in run down hotel fifteen hours from the Kansas state lines, stares at the strands of blonde clutched in her fingers and laughs until she cries. By the time they drive into Metropolis, she’s as bald as Lex, and a doctor at the run down clinic in the worst part off the city they can find tells her he’s never seen so many large brain tumors in a patient’s head before.

“I want to see Clark.” It’s the first day in a long time she feels like herself, like who she was before, before Brainiac and Doomsday, when Clark was Kal-El and Davis was only Davis.

“Are you sure?” Davis moves to support her when she stands, steadies her with hands on her hips as she sways, dizzy and sick and nauseous all at once.

“Two and a half months Davis, if we’re lucky.” Time has never been her friend but now it’s her mortal enemy. Time laughs and teases, holds its eternity in her face like a shiny toy that will never be hers. Time is and will always be and she is nothing more than a small, insignificant blip that will fade shortly before mankind does, before the world sinks into permanent darkness that Time will document and disregard. “Chemo isn’t working; Clark is just about the only chance I have.” Something inside her twists blackly, because the logical part of her brain that hasn’t transformed into malignant goo knows that Clark has saved her more times than he can count but now his strength and abilities are useless. She is doomed just as Davis is, cursed in a different way, cursed to end the world with the end of her life while he is cursed to end it with the continuation of his. Antipodes and antithesis and yet somehow so interconnected she can’t tell where Davis’ life and her life separate.

“We’ll go tomorrow.” Davis tries to guide her to bed, to sit, to rest, to simply be, be with him.

“No.” She shakes her head, and everything goes blurry, a swirl of shapes, vicious, sharp pounding in her head, a ringing in her ears; the sound of chirping birds, singing, singing of her impending death. She remembers her first day of kindergarten and the class parakeet, Tweeters, a bright green and gray bird that ate seeds from the palm of her hand and stood on her fingertips. The day her mother left she went to school that day and opened the door to the parakeet’s cage, watched him fly off into the sky and wished that he could find her mom and bring her back to her, clutched in his tiny talons. “We’re going right now.”

“It’s nine thirty.” Davis points to the hotel alarm clock.

“Then it’s nine thirty, get in the car, or I’m going to drive it myself.”
Davis grabs the keys off the nightstand.
----
“Chloe?” Clark hugs her, crushes her against his chest, strong arms and firm muscle, familiar and foreign in one moment. He holds her as though she’ll float away if she doesn’t, as though she isn’t something completely tangible, a shell of herself filled with helium, a ghost flickering between visible and invisible, whole and broken.

“Hi Clark.” She says, and the words escape her mouth as a sigh, a hopeless, dejected, guilty utterance. Clark hasn’t changed since she left, however long ago that was. She can’t remember anymore, time and life are one endless stretch of road behind her, and she’s too focused on the giant chasm visible in her very distant future to look back.

“What happened to you?” Her clothes hang off her bones; she’s drowning in fabric, two sizes too thin and twenty pounds underweight. He glares at Davis, who stands solemnly behind her on the porch, lips pressed together in a thin line.

“Brain tumors, ironic isn’t it? You save my brain from Brainiac and then I get cancer.” She laughs, a bitter sound, something hollow in her throat, sharp where a piece of her sanity breaks loose, cracks and crumbles, broken courage at her feet.

“Oh no.” Clark pulls her to him again, squeezes her so tight, squeezes her like he thinks he can squeeze the cancer out of her with one embrace. “Don’t worry; you’re going to be fine. I’m going to call Oliver and he’ll call the best doctors in the world and you’re going to be fine.”

“After half a dozen rounds of chemo, I’m beginning to think that modern medicine is useless.”

“Don’t say that Chloe. I’ll fix you, I promise, I always do.” Something sparkles in his eyes, something blue and desperate and needy and suddenly the world is just a bit more painful. He loves her and he’s only recently come to terms with it. She wants to laugh again, because she’s always wanted him to look at her like that and now she feels nothing, not even a brief flutter of excitement in her belly. All she feels is pity and sadness and fresh guilt.

“I think pulling Brainiac out of my brain is what caused this.” She says to break the silence, to break that look, that tears her heart into pieces she doesn’t want to have to put back together. She gave up loving him when she was young and naive, when everything in her world was Clark and she was just so damn grateful to be needed, to be special to someone.

“I’ll go to the fortress right now, maybe there’s something there.” Clark kisses her forehead, but self-hatred and blame are heavy in the corners of his mouth.

A rush of wind, and Davis guides her back to the car.
----
Her brain is dying. Scrambling itself into a mass of goo and cells and thoughts. She forgets things, chunks of time, finds herself staring at the wall, Davis’ face so close to hers his breath mists warmly across her cheeks, soothing her with words, stroking the curves of her jaw.

She looks into the mirror early one morning and the face that stares back isn’t hers. It’s the face of a stranger, pale, gaunt, large, sunken green eyes. That isn’t her, isn’t Chloe. It’s someone dying, someone wearing her skin, or her wearing someone else’s skin, living just beneath a stranger’s epidermis. It’s only a game of dress up and pretend like after her mother left and she spent hours in her closet, standing in her mom’s high heeled shoes.

She’s just a little girl in her Mommy’s shoes and she laughs, throws back her head and laughs, primal and giddy. She looks down but her feet are bare, she’s lost Mommy’s shoes and lost her hair but she has to have hair. Has to have it somewhere, she doesn’t see scissors so it has to be there somewhere, has to exist because hair can’t just not exist, not the hair on her head that is just like the hair Mommy has. Mommy’s hair is so long and so pretty and Mommy lets her braid it sometimes and then Mommy does her hair too. She needs to find her hair because it’s like Mommy’s and Mommy is gone so now it’s all she has.

She digs her nails into her scalp, into the fake baldness. Her hair is there underneath; she can feel it, feel it through her nails that aren’t long like Mommy’s or as pretty because Mommy says she’ll spill the polish all over the floor. She presses her fingers in and scrapes, has to find her hair, needs to find her hair, it’s there, it can’t not be there but then her fingers are covered in red. Nail polish on her head and Mommy was right, she spilled it because she isn’t big enough but she still has to find her hair. She scrapes again and digs and the fake baldness doesn’t go away.
It’s Clark who finds her afterwards, bald and bloodied on the bathroom floor.


----
“Chloe.” Clark smells like desperation when he visits her late one Sunday afternoon. It’s possibly her last Sunday, if the timeframe is correct, if her life span can truly be calculated by a doctor with a fuzzy MRI and a frown deeply etched into the corners of his mouth. “I’ve done everything I can think of but…” Clark crumples, shatters like a piece of glass, molds into her, big arms sliding around her waist, burying his face in the crook of her neck like a child. His breath moves hot across her skin, a heated tickle, and Davis watches from the kitchen, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, fingers smelling like grease and salt and soap.

“It’s okay Clark.” It is okay, it’s natural, it’s nearing the end of the cycle of birth and life and death, it’s the candle of her life burning down to the wick, just a misshapen puddle of wax hardening in the darkness. She’s accepted her own mortality, lets it settle hot and sour in her stomach, but the guilt rises in her throat like bile, bubbles up and pops. Davis is going to destroy the world and it is entirely her fault, because her brain is weak, her cells malignant, everything inside her skull is mush and outside she’s nothing more than a withered shell of herself with bandages around her scalp.

“No Chloe, it’s not, I’m supposed to save you. I’m supposed to save you.”

“You can’t save everyone Clark.” He can’t save her, no one can; the pain inside her head and in her soul tells her so. “It’s almost six; you should get to work before Lois sends out a search party for you.” She touches his forehead, his nose, the collar of his shirt, feels skin and cotton.

“I’ll come back to see you tomorrow. Bye Chloe.” Clark kisses her cheek, and she knows there won’t be a tomorrow. This is the way her world ends and it is surprisingly anticlimactic. But after her world comes the world and the old Chloe inside her, the one who loves fresh brewed coffee and warming her skin in the sun won’t let it end.

“I won’t give up Chloe.” Davis settles beside her on the couch, hands damp with dishwater, redolent of strong smelling orange soap.

“I know you won’t Davis.”

“How are you feeling?” He lays the back of his hand on her forehead, presses his fingers lightly into her throat, checking her lymph glands.

“Fine.”

What she doesn’t tell him is that she hasn’t been able to see more than blurry shapes and shades of grey for weeks.

----
Everything she’s capable of seeing is bathed in faint, early morning light when she wakes, flexes her muscles beneath the covers, wriggles her toes just to be sure she’s still alive.

“You’re awake.” Davis sticks his head out of the bathroom, a bleary outline, white shaving cream on the lower half of his face.

“You’re…naked?” She thinks he smiles at her, and she assumes the flash of movement she can see is Davis bringing the razor down his chin.

“I’m wearing pants.” He laughs, a warm, soothing sound, low in the hollow of his throat. “I had to go to the store; they usually frown on naked grocery shopping.”

“The store?” For the last…however many months it’s been, all the days, every headache, each day of dread and responsibility, Davis was never able to leave her. And now, now that he is going to have to leave her, his reason for needing her has gone away.

“Yeah, I…I can go outside without you.” She knows she should smile, should be happy, happy for him, but a part of her twists blackly, because it’s easier to believe her death has an impact, some kind of noble, last ditch effort to try and save the world, rather than the knowledge that once she’s gone she’s only going to sink into oblivion, gone from memory as her flesh and bones are slowly eaten deep inside the earth. “I think it knows Chloe.” Davis rushes to her then, sits on the edge of the mattress, shaving cream dripping off his skin, a splotch of foamy white landing on the back of her hand.

“Knows what Davis?” She manages to find his face, to cup it, fingers sliding slick through shaving cream.

“That it might only have to wait a little while longer before there’s nothing left that can stop it.” Davis nuzzles his cheeks against the palms of her hands, shaving cream dripping off in plops that splatter across the blankets. “And once it can’t be stopped Chloe, I pray to God that I don’t come back.” She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.

“So this is the way the world ends huh?” She breathes into him, across his mouth, onto his skin, kisses him in an awkward movement, touching mouths in one, hesitant press of flesh and certainty. He tastes like shaving cream, saliva, and toothpaste, sour and bitter in his mouth, on his tongue, tasting strongly of desperation and hopelessness, acceptance of what he’s always tried to resist. Davis believes in God and the Devil, heaven and hell, and she can’t imagine what it feels like to be your own Devil, trapped in your own personal hell.

“It seems that way. I’m gonna go finish shaving.” Davis kisses the center of her palm, the sheets rustle as he begins to stand.

“Don’t. Say with me.” She reaches for him, misses, fists her hands in the comforter instead.

“Okay.” He stretches out beside her, smears shaving cream on the pillows. “Are you feeling sick?” She shakes her head; the tumors inside her skull seem to throb from it, aching from the tip of her head down to her toes.

“Not at the moment.” She trails her hand down his chest, over the planes of warm, smooth muscle, touching him softly under his third rib, where he’s ticklish.

“Chloe, no.” He pushes her hand gently away, shakes his head, his face blurring in and out of focus, from color to grey.

“What? You can’t sleep with a girl without hair? You are so shallow.” She teases, tickling him again, walking her fingers along his ribcage, down and down and down until he inhales sharply, draws his hips backwards and shivers.

“Chloe, I can’t, you’re sick.” Davis treats her like she’s glass, cracked and fragile, crumbling and shattering under his touch.

“I’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll heal me.”

“I don’t think my penis can cure cancer.” Davis puts cautious hands on her bare stomach, slides them slowly to her thighs, kneads his fingers in gently.

“You never know until you try.”

“No Chloe.” Davis leans in close and kisses her, remnant shaving cream rubbing off on her jaw, on her flesh as he slides down and kisses all of her, licking a long, clean line down her abdomen. He sucks on her hipbone, hot tongue swiping over skin, lapping at it, like he’s trying to memorize the taste of her, even though he won’t be able to remember her once she’s gone. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His words are muffled against her, absorbed into her, and his fingers curl into the waistband of her panties, but he pulls them down half heartedly. “I love you Chloe.” He kisses the insides of her thighs, grips them with his hands, pushes his fingers so deeply into the muscle it almost hurts, could almost leave bruises if he isn’t careful.

“I love you too.” She does, she thinks she’s probably loved him longer than she can remember, before she left everything for him, before her brain was damaged, before death augmented inside her skull, spread its poison to her cells and tissues. The problem is that she loves him, loves him so damn much that dying is about more than the world, it’s about Davis, about leaving him alone in a world he’s always had to be alone in. “I love you.” She curls her fingers into his short hair, runs them across his scalp, moaning breathlessly when he goes down on her, short, sensuous strokes of his tongue against her. For the briefest of moments, nothing in the world seems to matter except the motions of his mouth, her thighs clamped tightly around his head, the unsteady, shuddering gasps of her inhalations. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou is a steady mantra in her head, on her lips and she groans it again and again and again until her thigh muscles tense one last time before going slack. “You want some help with that?” She asks as Davis undoes his zipper, slides up her body to press his face into her throat, thrusts himself slow and steady against her leg. He mouths words into her skin, prays into her, comes sticky on the inside of her right thigh. “Great” She laughs, wiping shaving cream from her chin. “Now I need a shower.”

“What do you want to do today?” Davis questions after their shower, after she’s clean and scrubbed, after another failed attempt to wash the cancer off her.

“I have something I want to show you.” She tries to tie her shoelaces, but her fingers tremble and she can’t remember what comes after the first criss-cross of the laces. “Somewhere I want us to go.”

“Okay, do you wanna tell me where?”

“It’s a surprise.” She fumbles blindly in the drawer beside her dresser, closes her hand around the smooth, eight sided metal. “Just follow my directions okay?”

“Chloe….why are we here?” She feels Davis shaking, his hand tightening around hers, squeezing it like he’s afraid she’s going to float away if he lets go.

“You trust me right?” She can’t see his uneasy smile, but she can see the bobbing of his head, hear the certainty in his voice when he answers, honest and consenting all at once.

Snowflakes fall softly around her, bitterly cold, melting quickly on her face.

She barely manages to find the crystal and insert it, but the panicked whine Davis makes and the rush of air are her confirmation. It hurts to breath, to speak, and the icy air makes her lungs crackle.

“Chloe, please, don’t make me go in there. You said I didn’t have to go in there. You didn’t let Clark put me in the Phantom Zone.” Davis falls to his knees, wraps his arms around her legs, hides his face against her.

“Don’t make me go in there Chloe; I need to stay with you. You’re not going to die alone Chloe. I’m going to be there, and I’ll hold your hand and cry like a baby. I’m going to bury you and you’re going to have the biggest funeral anyone has ever seen. Jimmy isn’t going to be invited and you’ll be up in heaven with the angels watching, with your parents, with everyone you love who’s gone away, and then when it takes over I’ll be there with you too.”
His tears mingle salty in her mouth when she kisses him, sucks in his sadness, his heartbreak, the acceptance of the inevitable, tastes his fear and his love and gives her own right back.

“You’re not going in there alone Davis. I’m going too. We’ll be there together, forever, and I will never die and you will never be Doomsday.”

“Okay, okay.” His voice breaks, cracks into a half sob that he swallows down. “Lord in heaven, hear my prayers…” He smoothes a cross into his forehead.

“Ready?”

Davis takes her hand, and they leave the world together while the arctic wind blows snow across their footprints.