sacrifice

Reccing Notes: Okay, this is something I needed to read after watching the phone-convo-of-fail at the end of Beast. Deals with Chloe's motivations in a balanced way, there is honest facing of feelings and CHARACTER GROWTH! All in one, somehow perfectly romantic, argument.

by seriousfic at her livejournal
1516 words, pg-13, beast

“I listen to you talking to Clark and I wonder if you’re letting him down easy or you’re letting me down easy. I’m trying to figure out if any girl is enough of a doormat to spend her life with a stranger to save a man who only ever looks at her like a friend.”


They’re driven through two states, and Davis’s hands are getting tighter around the wheel, his foot heavier on the gas, until he puts his hand on Chloe’s thigh. Chloe stops watching the world fly by and turns to him. It’s a bit strange to have human contact now that her life is over.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” His thumb runs along the stitch in her denim. “You used to be a reporter. I thought you’d at least be curious.”

I used to be a lot of things. But what she says is “Sorry, my mind’s a million miles away.”

“In Smallville.” The speedometer needle drifts toward the right and she knows that if it weren’t for her, his eyes would be glowing red. He takes a deep breath and eases off the gas. The last thing the Cornfield Killer needs is to get pulled over. “I tried to kill myself. Do you really think going into some other world is a big deal compared to that?”

Ah. “So why didn’t you go?”

Davis is just picking up steam, though, perfectly in control yet pulling into himself with black hole intensity, perfect love that’s the same as perfect obsession and perfect rage. “I listen to you talking to Clark and I wonder if you’re letting him down easy or you’re letting me down easy. I’m trying to figure out if any girl is enough of a doormat to spend her life with a stranger to save a man who only ever looks at her like a friend.”

That gets a reaction. Chloe looks at him and wonders how that hurts more than Jimmy telling her their marriage was a mistake. What did you think, you could fool him forever? Another voice, softer, whispers What did you think, you could fool yourself forever?

“Stop the car.”

Davis pulls over to the side. It’s the middle of the night, the middle of nowhere, and when Chloe steps outside her shoes hit desert. She can’t remember which one. It doesn’t matter. Midwest, Southwest, she’ll never be seeing it again.

Davis gets out after her, and despite himself, when he shuts the door, the truck rattles. Chloe paces, like she’s going to walk away and forget about Clark and him, but when she turns around he’s waiting, seeing what she’ll do. She doesn’t walk back, so they just shout at each other across twenty feet. It feels good to make her throat raw.

“How can you doubt me? After all I’ve done for you, after all I’ve done for us…”

“Stop!” His voice cuts across hers, booms down the landscape. “It would be one thing if you were lying to me, but lying to yourself… is it really that hard to admit when you want something for yourself?”

“Oh, for God’s sake…” She paces another five steps away from him and is cruelly satisfied to feel his face fall.

“Did you want to get married, or did Jimmy?”

She stops at a cactus, looks back at him.

“Thought so.”

“I wanted to leave with you! It was my fucking idea!” Oh, that could shatter glass. There’s a bottle of water in the backseat that she could sure use right about now, and she would be walking back to get it, argument be damned, if it didn’t feel so good to yell at Davis. Or to have someone yell at her. He has the common courtesy to get mad at her instead of calmly lecturing her like she’s a fucking nine-year-old.

“Let’s go back. Let’s go back to Fortress and fire up the portal again and send me through so you can get back to your real life.” He says it in his normal voice, so calm it hurts more, she has to strain to hear him across the distance and before the end of his first sentence Chloe’s walking back to better hear him.

“Don’t say that.” She remembers how Clark described the Phantom Zone, the howling winds, the ghosts, how both Raya and Kara were pared down into living skeletons by it. And Davis is already little more than a memory of the paramedic with the easy smile who told her not to get married, she can’t imagine anything but the beast being left alive in that hell.

He walks to meet her, his shoes crunching sand beneath his feet. “You think I don’t know I deserve to go to hell? The only reason I didn’t let him throw me in there was you. I thought you’d be… without me…” He turns and sinks against the car, arms out in a crucified V, head hanging down. When she gets within a few paces of him, she falters. “Tell me I never made you happy. Tell me you did it all for Clark. We can go back and send me to the Phantom Zone and… it won’t be so bad.” He wasn’t talking to her anymore. “When I’m the beast, I don’t even feel it. It’ll be just like dying. That was easy too.”

She touches his shoulder, but it’s not enough to repair his equilibrium. Chloe knows she should think about his offer, it’s a good offer, but if it ends with him in the Phantom Zone then… How could he think she was doing more than manipulating Clark?

Because it means she’s ashamed of him. Her feelings for him. The world turns and she’s Clark, he’s Chloe, an unspoken bond that she was satisfied to leave unspoken because it was the best she could get. And she can give more. And she can get more.

“Do you really think I could just live my life, knowing what you were going through?” She presses against his back, her arms buckling around his chest. She can feel his heartbeat, his lungs pushing her body up and lowering it down. “I love you.”

His face breaks, she sees it in the darkened window, but at the same time he lets out this breath, his entire body relaxing. For a while he lets it hang, believing her, finally dropping to his knees. She holds tighter to him, outside the one lit-up car in miles of darkness.

“Then let me know.”

“How?”

“It has to be the truth, Chloe. I can’t live with less.” He turns, looks at her over his shoulder, and she needs to know too. His hand creeps to the back of her neck, like a collar. She thinks of acting, fooling him, but he’s right. It would be better to find out now than suffer the slow death she and Jimmy faced, fairer to let him know and make his choice. She can’t live a lie because she doesn’t want Clark to feel guilty. She can’t let Davis think everything is okay when it’s not.

Is it really that hard to admit when you want something for yourself?

Was she thinking of Clark when she told Davis they’d leave? When she locked the basement door? Did she talk with him for hours because she didn’t want him to get bored or because she loved the sound of his voice and the way he listened to her words, even though she was talking about her dreams and her feelings instead of meteor rocks and terrorists?

If there were no Doomsday, would she be with him? But that was an easy question, because she’d answered it a long time ago. She was with him despite Doomsday, not because of it. Maybe they had just been sharing lunch, but there’d been something more. Something she didn’t have with Jimmy. Something she could’ve had with Clark. Something she wanted for herself, and for him.

He’s still facing her, eyes searching hers. She kisses him, hands cupping his chin and head and running over his back. There was no Doomsday. No Jimmy. No meteor rocks or Clark. Just them.

They stop, Davis trying to stand before he slips and falls on his ass in the sand, and Chloe kisses him again. It’s like there’s a beast in her, one that needs to be satisfied now that it’s awoken. She remembers the dream, the hasty memory of his lips on hers before her wedding, and now it’s so much better because there isn’t anything standing between them. She won’t let it.

“I want this,” Chloe breathes, words hungrily devoured by Davis’s mouth on hers. “I want this.”

His hands are running over her yearning body, feeling every quaver, taking and discarding every stitch of clothing. She feels the perfect crisp contact of sand on her skin, knows she can wash it off at the next motel, knows she’ll still be thinking of this, him, herself. She undresses him and it’s something she wants, needs, can’t live without. Then he’s inside her and how could she want anything but this?

An hour later the sun is coming up and she’s still lying on top of him, dried sweat and caked sand, giggly as a schoolgirl. This is my life now, she thinks, forcing away the weight in her heart that still lingers. I won’t waste it.