When you died in that cage, it felt like the meteor rock was a killing a part of me.-needed it. Chloe knows this Davis, still. She'll find him a cure; but first she has to walk away. but...
A twist on 'obsessive' Davis. I hope.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
9691 words, nc-17, beast
(He won’t ever know. They can go on like this. It’s all downhill from here.)
Her muscles tense at the first heavy step behind her, wanting to crunch into a small ball behind the stairs.
I’d do anything for you; won’t you just let me have this? Us? (The conversation is over before it begins.)
The answer is in the vaguely dangerous (panicked?) look in Davis’s eyes. Where she sees freedom for them both, he sees a cage away from her.
No doctors. Chloe gives in-just smiling, and wishes for the other Davis, the one she could talk to, not the tortured fixated stranger of the past month. His eyes go from dark and searching to tentative again and the quirk to his mouth doesn’t completely reach his eyes. He reminds her of the little boy he must have been sometimes, looking for approval. Anything she can bring herself to give.
His gaze teeters against hers for a moment. What would it take for him to kiss her like this, she wonders?
There in Davis’s eyes. She thought she saw the old him for a minute. She should go.
“I’ll see you later then?” Chloe pushes her smile quickly under the tension again and hopes he doesn’t notice.
“Okay. See you.” Davis is already turning away, hand at his jaw again-eyes trapped in that cycle of worry and fear all over again. As if he’s trying too hard not to make her uncomfortable.
She can honor this-stalemate between them. Only. Chloe’s halfway to taking a step up those stairs, when she realizes she doesn’t believe like he does.
Chloe Sullivan has come to know Murphy’s law far better than anyone has the right to. Maybe she’d married the one guy that never made her heart pound, but that was the way life went eventually.
Years back, when Clark kissed her and wanted to talk about ‘them’, she had to hide behind the first guy she saw. Clark was one of those guys. He would always love Lana, no matter what he wanted to think. She wasn’t going to open herself up to that kind of hurt again. She would date (Jimmy). She’d watch Clark fall for Lana all over again. She just had to be ready for cleanup, after.
Her attraction for the ‘weird’ hadn’t ended there. When she had it together enough to set a wedding date, Davis had to appear out of the smoke and ash. He’d locked eyes with her, not at Lana or Lois. There was a connection between them, he’d said. And what stung the most is that she’d as much as told him that herself. He was, in every way, hers, a more dangerous version of Clark.
She had Braniac and he had the Ultimate Destroyer, and when they had to wake up to it all- a resentful ‘husband’, a collapsed barn, a few hundred bodies in a field later… it had become the truth.
Serial killer or not, blurry photographs in a police folder or not-she was the one pressing her hand against his and feeling that long-neglected part of her wither as Davis’s hand slid from the glass.
Maybe she is enough to calm the murderous thing inside him. Maybe whatever she has with him is enough that leaving Smallville won’t destroy all of that Chloe Sullivan. Maybe that is the one thing that went right. They are hiding under those assumptions. But what are the odds that that will hold together?
One in a billion is generous. The longer they don’t search for a cure, the longer Davis trusts just this thing between them… the greater the chances that it won’t be enough.
Their clock is ticking. With no bomb squad, no backup-this is hers to deal with. Problems used to be good things-once upon a time-hell-even fun with Braniac’s considerable abilities to back her up. But there is that part of her- that part of her that died with him once, that can’t take the chance again. Will Davis take that too?
Davis doesn’t even notice. Maybe his world will just become her, eventually. What else could she have expected really? Davis thinks she is his cure. His whole cure.
And with the knowledge of what he could do otherwise Chloe doesn’t completely blame him.
Clark made a seemingly irrelevant comparison. He could have been Davis if he had been found by someone else in that field. Davis was born with the Destroyer in his DNA and Clark could do anything with his abilities that he wanted.
But Clark had parents… And who hadn’t loved him at one point in time? Davis had been alone and shut himself off for most of his life because of that darkness he could never fully see in himself. He just has her to love. Of course he won’t want to take a chance with that either.
The ironic part, of course, is now that he has her admission, now that he has her, he’s become a stranger. One who needs her, but won’t be honest with himself. This Davis just watches her from a corner as if she’s his definition. Too closely- as if he’ll lose control of it all if she goes, or if their roles make the barest shift. She’s the stupid martyr; he’s the beast. He did love her, once. She knows this. It’s not just obsession, even now, but this screwed up situation leaves room for little else.
Chloe walks gingerly up the steps, all of the DNA that she can think to retrieve in a used water bottle in her purse. It should be enough for Dr. Hamilton to work with- to analyze, to slow, to something. Dr. Hamilton is not Oliver. Davis doesn’t need to know.
There is no reason to feel guilty for it.
(She wants normal. She wants normal so much she could scream it out. She wants normal with him. That’s the worst part.)
Normal isn’t staying awake all night, leaning tentatively against that wall on a guy’s cot, not being able to give him consolation for being alive and falling asleep just when the sun should be rising. Normal isn’t blood on your hands and sloshing in garbage bags as you know who saved you. As you know what saved you. Normal isn’t saying everything that you feel out loud and trying to convince yourself it’s for your best friend just so you can banish the guilt.
(It’s not a lie. It’s a half-truth, and that’s the worst kind.) Chloe Sullivan loves Clark Kent; she’s loved him since he was about five and looked around the classroom with great big blue eyes. Whatever form that takes, he’s shaped her. And she will leave him behind.
Davis is the one she is clinging to now. That piece of her she can’t let go of. No amount of revision will change that.
But she walks up the steps and away. He’s going to let her go. It’s become a habit with both of them. Davis l-feels whatever he does, tries to protect her tender feelings and she treads on eggshells, just not to set that other part of him off.
She remembers the first night Davis came back. Back to life, that is. When this all started. It was easy to remember the bodies then, and the hurting part of her went under lock and key.
He couldn’t ever die. He had no hope left. Nothing but the very flimsy strength of the great intangible between them both.
His eyes had pled for her to say anything honestly. Chloe hadn’t; locked them both behind that door and sat two feet away from him on the cot, hands clenched on her knees until almost morning. Until somehow her head had settled on his shoulder.
She’d dreamed of burying bodies with him in that field that night. Then the car exploded around him and she shrieked and scarred her hands on the heated glass.
Chloe had brought lunch down when she woke up, looked across at him for the first time, to his intrusive eyes and sweaty clenched hands. He’d locked himself here. He wasn’t her enemy. He couldn’t be more.
She handed him a fork, tried on a smile and her eyes watered. They didn’t talk about anything important.
Davis didn’t know then; she could lie as well as he could. Maybe he had. Maybe he had been more streetwise than she thought from the start. Maybe after one lie it’s impossible to believe the truth. That would break anyone, eventually.
Either way, she hasn’t changed the game. The truth hasn’t changed a thing. She is safe. Chloe closes her eyes, her hand on the veranda and propels herself forward.
He won’t ever know. They can go on like this. It’s all downhill from here.
Her muscles tense at the first heavy step behind her, wanting to crunch into a small ball behind the stairs. The man with the fake name of AJ and the body in ribbons never ran. But this is Davis.
Striding. Efficient. Not like at all like It. Aggressive? Maybe he heard the crinkle of the bottle.
He won’t snap. No matter what-that isn’t him.
She’s always on tenterhooks. Chloe turns slowly, no reason to let him think she is afraid. Paranoia and guilt, that’s all. Maybe he wants to say goodbye again.
“Davis? What is it?”
He looks childlike- innocent down here. A consequence of the dim light wanning his skin more than it should be- the light that had painted him a surrealist portrait of white and red. They should be irreconcilable, the helpless victim of nature and the accomplice of it.
Chloe, he always repeats now, like he needs to say her name aloud to ground himself.
Half-concealed not-guilt burns her cheeks. Chloe looks down and it doesn’t show. Her gaze lingers on his fingers trapping her hand over the flimsy metal veranda, lingers on hers always gravitating to his. He doesn’t look threatening, then he never had to her. The rest of them are a different case entirely.
Chloe forces her eyes down to his-dark and absent the conviction-never the fear, catching the tail end of what he’s saying. “You don’t want to forget this.” He says.
Her gun is loose in his other hand, butt out. It was the first precaution she took after that little attack. Plenty of people would want to kill the devil’s advocate if they knew. The safety’s always on. She hasn’t fired it since Dark Thursday.
By now leaving, she gives him his opening.
“Is it safe for you out there?” Out in Metropolis, for someone less streetwise than he? She’d been doing this for years before there was a knife at her throat. One step above him, just slightly at the height advantage-Chloe feels easy to break.
“I wish I could do more to protect you.” He whispers. If he hadn’t wanted to protect her, they could be harmlessly in love and running away. Or she could have died, stabbed in the throat.
He’d protected her already, once.
“Davis… whoever comes. No repeat performances.”
(She doesn’t like to think that she tainted him, but with her, it had been the first time he hadn’t had even deceptive control of what he’d done since he’d known what he was capable of.)
Davis doesn’t answer and she waits. Promise.
“Yes.” He says, but he doesn’t want to say it.
“There’s no reason to worry. I won’t let them get to you.” She will fire point blank before anyone else crosses the threshold to the basement.
Chloe slides her hand over the handle to where his fingers cradle the inactive trigger. Steadies it in her palm and eases it away from him. He looks down at the wood steps. They will never be free of invisible evidence of blood.
“I wish I could go with you.” he says. “Out there.” Different arguments bubble in her throat. You’d be recognized. She’d told him that.
“It’s just, every time you walk out that door, I just keep thinking that this will be the last time I see you.”
The old Davis would have acknowledged the personal stalker tendencies in that. This one…
“Any biological aspects to this I should know about?” She asks.
“I feel less and less like myself.” Chloe doubts he means a subtle change of character. What next, this-Davis starts to vanish into a Beast that puts its head on her lap and rampages through the few competent superheroes left in Metropolis?
“-when you’re not here to remind me.” comes as an afterthought. She knows what he really meant.
He knows. This makes a small part of her less alone and a bigger part sure that she’ll make the right choice when she walks on out to get him that help.
“We’ll be fine.” She says. That assurance has always been empty.
He doesn’t say anything more, but actions speak louder than words. There’s no aggression to him like this, eyebrows crinkling painfully. He knows she doesn’t think so even in this incarnation.
“In case we’re not.” Davis knows how to speak the words gently enough that she doesn’t want to run. He invades what’s left of her space and pressing his lips to hers, brief and hard. She has no time to react. When it ends her throat feels dry and empty.
“I love you. I won’t stop.” He doesn’t look down, eyes level with hers. He’d said it before. Then he had nothing to lose. Now she thinks she does. Maybe she is getting a do-over.
“Davis-what is this?”
“I--” he bites his lip, and as inappropriately drawn to the fullness she sees there, she listens. “Must have rehearsed this a dozen times. It didn’t come out right. Braniac. Getting away. None of this matters like knowing what we feel, now. That’s what I count on, not anything else. Even if the-road ends here.”
Another one of the signs. Chloe can’t be amused because he looks so sincere.
He might have said that before (dozens of times), but he’s never completely closed the space, the last two steps vanishing in a moment. Chloe feels the gun tumbling from her fingers and falling heavy on the first step, tumbling through the gap. Doesn’t follow it with her gaze.
“I thought what happened, destroyed everything but… there’s something here still. It’s not going to change. Some part of you…I feel it.” His eyes are level with hers, drift to her lips when she wets them. She’d never thought she’d see that half smile again. Chloe scrubs her hand across her mouth in an unconscious protection. A parody of thought.
Davis does a forgotten thing. He touches her. His fingers run along her hand in the gentlest of contacts, pulling it away from her lips. He outlines them as if he had time at all, his thumb lingering on the lower one. Davis had always been tactile, though pdas hadn’t been his way of life.
He’d kissed her something like that the first time, one bitter fiancé ago and she’d stood alone in that alley, going hot and cold in guilt. Chloe knows for certain that she won’t be getting her little mission done for the next two hours, even if it’s just because she’s gone to lock herself in her closet to hyperventilate. He actually wants her. Now.
She can’t breathe.
“Davis…” Whatever signal pathways her hormones are activating between her legs, the lowest common denominator is it’s not all that simple. When was the last time she’d taken the pill? A year ago?
He draws his hand away. Hers wavers on his shoulder in a gesture that should be friendly, but just isn’t. We’ve talked about this. I don’t want to talk about it any more.
“Tell me it’s just me.” Davis’s voice is a little deeper than she’s used to hearing. Nerves? “I’ll stop.” He murmurs, lips tracing lightly at the pulse of her neck. Her heart feels like it’s going to rattle out of her chest. That has always been the answer.
The second kiss is gentler, somehow more passionate. He draws her down, warmth scalding on the surface of her lips. The ragged ends of her nails catch in his jacket. She can’t feel her feet on the step anymore, and she realizes he’s picked her up with as much effort as it would take her to pull a book from a shelf. Her arms wrap around his neck instinctively. She’s always been afraid of falling far.
One step. Another. Unsteady. He walks them down the steps backwards, the human way and she’s still astonished at the speed. She laughs breathlessly as he stops halfway down, tracing the irregular bumps of the vertebrae in his neck with shell-shocked fingers. This part of him is so human it seems like a lie to call him anything else.
They’re not moving anymore, but her hands do that for her, throwing his jacket to the floor with the dull slap of fabric. He pulls her to him lips sliding to hers sweet and so deep her hands go still. This makes no sense in context. She wants this.
His hand fists in her hair, unsettling the fuchsia collar at her neck. Chloe feels a surge of white-hot lust, a need for more of the same and oblivion from it all. She kicks the sensible heels off her feet as his palm reaches her back and loosens the belt to her jacket. It flutters to the floor and she steals a breath. She doesn’t have Kryptonian lungs. Maybe this is just another of her fantasies.
Davis stops long enough so she can stand, rubbing her legs together, suddenly cold without him. She’d thought he would take her to what they’d called his bed for so long. It would mean something.
Instead, her bare feet curl on the rug at the center of the room and the barest fission of unease returns to her. When she’d come down here she’d dropped her key in a pool of blood. Had to cover it up somehow. The rug mirrors its origin, scarlet and black lines. Like he’s supposed to mirror what he was made to be.
“We don’t have to do this here, right?” she whispers, breaking the silence with her secret panic. No, not here all of places, a symbol of what she was willing to do. Had Davis consciously chosen it? Had that other side of him?
“Where would be better? We’ll go there.”
It’s his look that changes things- it must be that. Desperate and loving and out of control. She looks at him, at the unfriendly gray cot where she’d let him sit lonely until morning. That’s not what she wants either.
“Nowhere.” For Whom the Bell Tolls; Mr. Kent and after him Clark hated it. It is all shades of gray.
Chloe takes a step forward and kisses Davis like she would have if she hadn’t ever been running. It’s simple, declarative intent and she runs her hands along his arms as if she can pet him into some comfort again.
When he pulls away his voice is rough and hands curl around her wrists. “You’ve got to tell me. I don’t want to make this one of the memories you need to forget.”
It’s a stunning realization, the very simplest one. If she had choose to keep this memory, or let the uglier ones go. She’d keep this.
Chloe lifts her hands to his face, traces the familiar lines blind. Remembers or imagines the blood. Maybe she can let go.
“Forget that. You were never one of them.” He was never a memory, but the force around which they congregated and twisted into something more-into this her. Chloe wonders if that’s a complete truth or the farthest from the lie she knows.
He kisses her palm, watching, and his eyes remind her of another him.
“We’ll take it slow.” (Memories, this may be the best one in a while.) She feels light.
He frees her hands and she slides them past the sensible gray shirt, not wanting to bunch it just because he is easier to feel.
“That sounds fine to me. But are you sure?”
Her skin feels the contrast, smooth heat and neutral grey roughness, the muscled planes of his chest where his breath halts in and out. The she can’t stop it.
Chloe wonders just how much work it would take to get that shirt off. Do Kryptonians have to be so ungodly beautiful? Or literally hot to the touch? He shuts his eyes, and tenses a little, a sound growling in the back of his throat. Not too slow, then.
She is actually more willing to bet he’s up for super speed. She doesn’t stop there, can’t until her hand curves gently around the source of all that warmth.
“Absolutely certain?”
Davis is definitely feeling urgent and she is more than a little warm as to where. Is this too fast? She can’t bring herself to feel guilt, not when his eyelashes brush shut like that, and it is because of her, before she tried to get him that way.
“Chloe...” His voice sounds choked and he seems tense to knock them both over. Some feeling tingles up her spine as his breath stops.
For someone with a pretty non-existent sex life (even when it existed) it’s a signal. She’s 25% terrified (What if he’s perfect and something is just wrong with her?); 75% down with screwing risks because the passage of time for them is the biggest risk of all.
“I just wanted to show you. We don’t have to do it all.” He swallows when she draws her hand back. “I want you.”
She doesn’t answer in words, doesn’t take the step back that it would take to pull off her clothes properly. Ditto. He watches so closely that she thinks his world would hang on this moment if he had any more in it than her.
The trembling in her hands as she slides off her slacks isn’t manufactured. She has old habits, coaching and playacting, and it’s good just to let those go. He’s still holding her and she hasn’t looked away. The remnants of shame wake in her even as he closes the slice of space between them, breath warm and quick. Out of control and wholly hers. Is this the way she wanted him? Is she pulling the strings right?
His arm trails at her side, fingers closed tight. There is only relief at the respite from loneliness. This part is real. She can be lover or prey. No difference.
Davis pushes against her, first tentatively then needily, his body a weight she can’t move anymore than one of the concrete walls around them. Unless she says the word. Chloe leans her forehead against his shoulder, her fingers tracing at the V where she can feel his blood? pound..
His hands cradle her back; the jacket pools under her bare legs like a dress. Davis’s eyes run down the trail the cloth has taken down her thighs, linger on this new territory before dropping prudently to the bright scarlet under her feet. They burn more luminous and darker in this light; she can’t make out the smile in her distorted reflection. It’s there.
She is stripped of guises, still somehow clothed. Not much, a short black shirt she’d never have worn if she was at her old job again, peddling amazing lies at Tess Mercer’s Planet.
“Oh yes.” She says.
He pulls to her, onto him, and she has no balance, one arm over his back. He smothers her mouth and his hands stray down spine, lingering and rubbing at the small cold spots and making her gasp and arch into him.
In the urgency, Chloe’s stranglehold on the handbag over her shoulder is loosened by his careful fingers. Davis’s hand falls against her purse, the few life changing cells in that water bottle, like it wouldn’t have if she had been able to walk away. She stiffens, mouth flush against his. Breath loud in her ears. One is going to be more important.
“Chloe, hey. Are you..? You’re not sure.”
A tiny absent part of her likes that his breath is rough. Davis holds her by the shoulders, squinting in that way that tries to see and is cute without trying. He is less sure than her fantasies.
He’s let the purse fall now. She should go finish that, come back when they have a chance.
What she says is, “Maybe we could slow down.”
She closes her eyes, lets it go at the gentle, deliberate brush of lips at the corner of her mouth. Familiar, but she’d been dreaming of doing it before. She can’t not let him in again. He’s trying to make this work.
Minutes later she is tugging down on his hand, overcome by gentleness more cathartically than force.
The thick weave of the rug presses patterns into her knees. She leans into his shoulder, completely in his arms, bare knees pressing roughly over his clothed ones. This doesn’t hurt him.
Chloe slides the shirt away for something-even ground-and this doesn’t mean she’s going fast. He swallows, highlighting the spot above his collarbone to her searching eyes. Muscle tenses under her fingertips and his skin looks painfully white instead of reddened and painted over by blood. Half of it makes her hurt, that even now he can be beautiful. That he can still look at her this way after he’s been locked in darkness with only a few old articles of hers for company.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing; it’s been instinct for her, once stroking his back through his shirt in and alley to comfort him and wanting more after she hadn’t even thought before tazering Jimmy in the back. She rearranges her fingers, just brushing over his nipple, the air suddenly hot and thick when he hardens all over. Pain. Somehow just what she wanted.
Davis makes an uncontrolled sound in the back of his throat like she is pulling something painful out of him. He shifts over her, settles her back steady on the red red rug. Her skin feels warmer than the thick cotton or—anything has the right to make her. She digs her fingers into his knee. What had she planned for now, a slow teasing seduction, or this?
Big firm hands knot the cloth under her and pull it away before she can think. A conjurer’s trick. Her hair spills out from under the shirt over her forehead and eyes. He hasn’t said much and there is the question he won’t ask. She shivers a little, distracted at the slow lustful? movement of his hand against her knee and the stillness in his eyes. Stutters out the answer like so much air.
“You matter to me.” More than she’ll tell him. Now. This will always be more than just releasing the tension he creates by his very existence.
Chloe does want to make this about something more than biological ticking clocks and the slow crumbling of her barriers. In case they get nothing more. She kisses the slightest asymmetrical line of his forehead, pleasant warmth curdling in the pit of her stomach. Absent of speech, his lips just brush against her skin. Just a careful exhale of breath as she kisses his cheek, forehead, eyebrow, jaw. Not tense now, not set, not hard with fear. This should transcend words. He’s seen her lies, knows them as intimately as she’s trying to learn him now.
Her mind is abuzz with snippets of words and a—tender kind of pain. Something is moving under his skin, and for once it is not darkness. Her greatest tragedy is she feels she can change him, not just the human part that held onto her, felt guilt and hated himself enough that when she killed him he saw her as his savior. To her Davis will always be the centerpiece; and his ‘true nature’ the flawed camouflage that tries to push out of his skin.
His mouth tilts her head back, harder now, a tease of moisture. Careful, careful teeth across sensitized epidermis. She cranes her neck back, the rough imprint of cloth across naked skin. A sign of submission and a fire racing through her skin.
This wouldn’t be so bad, would it? If they don’t go to the doctor, they can still exist. He’ll trust her and they can run together, half a world away where Clark can find them in moments. Where Clark will find them in moments.
Think now. Stop now. Think.
Chloe nudges her head against Davis, skin tingling and protesting when touch tapers to just feeling his heat over her. Her mouth opens to say something, maybe when he talks she can think less. All that comes out is a murmur. She bites into her lip, not the best idea now or the best because his fingers are gentle and there and suddenly she isn’t abusing it any more. She whispers she won’t break and they can have this and they’ll get away; she half believes. It’s his eyes. His damnable eyes always asking.
“I just can’t stop thinking.” She breathes. She wants to so much.
Chloe tells herself she has a modicum of control, still. The ability to show him, to make him react, to cut him free. She rubs her knee against his back, skin on skin and his fingers glide there, knee to thigh and so close that she wants to move and go very still. Feel.
“Worried?”
Davis whispers and for someone with Kryptonian strength she can barely feel him. Her skin prickles in the wake of the not-quite touch. She’s more worried he’ll stop.
“No. I’m—what do you mean?”
His tone isn’t (intended to be) dark and seductive, just hesitating-matter of fact and she realized he’s not talking about now but disappearing to the rest of the world. Why does he always have to know the questions to ask?
“There are just a lot of loose ends.”
And danger, don’t forget the danger associated with going to Metropolis’s underbelly without the help of the contacts she can rely on. She is going to erase her identity, remove the paper trail that tied Chloe Sullivan to whoever she has become now
“Maybe I can help you.” Davis volunteers, hopeful. Oh, he’d make it easy somehow. He’d make it so easy she’d forget to think straight. His thumb is drawing circles on the inside of her knee and he only has to touch her a little more.
Chloe should be thinking on the mountain of lies she’ll invariably construct.
“Davis, unless you can charm my Beatle off a bridge along with a suicide note about your death, no.”
(It is a good enough plan, if cheesy. Clark is as subtle as a brick.) If she tears her eyes up and tells Clark it was all to protect him he’ll never stop coming after them. If Davis could change her that much, then isn’t dying is the same?
So, she’ll have to hurt Lois and about everyone else who knows her until the real solution and she can have both parts of her life. She only hopes she can hold onto Davis then.
“What?” Davis closes his eyes and the floodgates of that expression open up again. She’s no angel.
(From a distant viewpoint Chloe understands this. She’s setting up herself with him in opposition to everything she has been able to hold onto until now. Maybe forever. And for a guy who literally glowed vulnerability when she believed he couldn’t be a killer…)
“Why?” he asks.
“Clark had to take me home after... I was pretty broken up after you died on me.”
“I won’t do it again.” Davis’s voice is thick with the emotion. Conviction.
“The best way is let me take care of you.”
Davis doesn’t want a guardian. He wants to be with her. And he’d proven himself perfectly capable of taking care of her in the past.
Chloe draws a small pattern on his shoulder, catching his gaze again. “And if you want--- you can come with me, out of here for a while. Just us.” Maybe the dark underbelly of Metropolis will be enough to hide them both for a little while. He won’t have to go mad with panic about the danger she’s in. Won’t have to leave this place and transverse the streets all on his own.
Chloe leans up and rubs a hand across his chest, cups his jaw. It’s quivering and his eyes are so open. When did they get from decidedly not-talking to getaway plans?
“I want to make you happy.” He whispers.
But somewhere in the interim he’s started believing that he can only do that if he hides away in some dark hole to wait for his destiny. It felt harder for her, hand against that glass and Clark had told her what the Kryptonite must have felt like for him like burning at one layer and then another layer of successive skin, leaving a quivering mass of nerves and cells and rawness under the guise of a latticework of black veins.
Why does the thought still hurt?
She lunges up for his mouth, just to make it easy, misses and hits his eyelid. He catches the hint enough that she’s flat on her back seconds later. The drench of cold at just the thought of him and death melts away under bold fingers. He kisses her again, erratic and it’s punctuated with reassuring murmurs.
He won’t let it hurt anyone else. They’ll find a place. He’ll always love her. And oh, he will do everything. She can just let go, let go and they are going to be so happy. A little single-minded, but he’s here isn’t he?
He just moved and he is heavy and she’s got to thank whoever the Kryptonians worship for making them. All he has to do was shift like that… She digs his hands into his hair and clenches her legs unevenly around his waist.
We’ll make it, he says, and part of her asks how that idealistic thought is connected to him making her like this.
“Davis. We will.” And when the heat of the moment passes… what then? Clark is still some savior of humankind and Davis is so right there. (Chloe Sullivan loves feelings when she can deal. But right now. Oh. Oh.)
“Yes. I-Yes. Please, shut up, Davis.”
In her haze of mounting something she realizes he is wearing jeans and they’re tighter and he’s not up to doing this the proper way now. She doesn’t move because doing that means she has to lose contact. This is not the time for this and it is and she just needs to touch all of him or as much as she possibly can.
Somewhere this got much messier, and his tongue in her mouth and he tastes like-what does anyone taste like really- and when her tongue skims along his teeth he gives that back. He’s breathing (she can taste it) harder than she thought was possible, breathing like he’ll never stop.
Davis braces his hands on the rope-like tassels on the carpet. They just fall away like they were never attached at all. Maybe something else would work better. She would suggest the hard floor but there is a chance his nails would gauge the concrete and Clark would be suspicious enough about her disappearance without some concrete proof of ‘the other Kryptonian’. She relocates his hands to close around each other. He can’t break his own bones.
She drops a hand to bring him closer, circles her hand too slow to be deft really and he starts to really move into and out of her grip. This is new. He doesn’t say anything, but she can read him now more than ever and she doesn’t see just blind pleasure there. She’s not a role to him-but herself. She can swear that when they are not looking at each other it all goes still. His eyes are a still place, piercing and wondering and grounding as when she first looked at him. Davis saw her and maybe he still does. She can’t move. When she loses her concentration her hand closes around empty air. He is moving in her. She can feel cloth against her, but it’s him.
Then there is just the sound of his roughening breathing and the soapy, clean male scent of him under all those clothes. Her soap, she brought it down that first night, thick with the scent from showering when she told herself she just had to think about him and Clark and her choices for that night. She’d tentatively hugged him and when he’d relaxed enough, she’d packed most of her bath things down here in the creaky shower. He’d found this one.
She feels fulfilled, somehow, at a detail no one else will ever know but her. He could just let it go right now, before she reaches orgasm and she’d like it. No one will have him just like this. Then he starts to hit something really good and she thinks she might just die if she doesn’t. She arches up, half sitting, into his lap and he is perfect…
Then he does go still, a (polite) oath stuttering out of him. His knees take a hit on the carpet. Her head spins and Chloe feels completely out of it.
He’s not moving. She’s not quite dead, but everything throbs, the shadow of a bruise.
“I am so sorry.” He says, shifts away from her, on his hands and knees on the carpet. He fumbles, not looking at her and she can’t talk. Everything aches terribly and without him it’s just freezing.
“Sorry. I can’t.” He says.
“It’s okay.” Maybe all males are the same. “This has happened to me before. It’s no biggie.”
Then awkwardly. “Davis-Did you…”
Did you come already, she was going to ask. Davis had turned away and she couldn’t tell. That question irritated Jimmy even after he had agreed to work on what was missing in their relationship. What they could anyway. Something is to be said for when for a girl who is too honest. She’d never talked about it after that.
Davis, mouth open, takes a look at her, disheveled and comforting. His shoulders start to shake, just a little before he schools them into a reassuring smile. Kisses her again. And-oh hello.
“No, Chloe, I had to get the…” Condom. Oh great. Now she just volunteered information about that little part of her life.
“Condom?”
Chloe shakes her head. Part of it is being somewhat questionably protected, what are hormone things to…whatever he is. But she needs to feel all of him in her. Consuming. Close. Dangerous. No barriers, not now.
She watches him, watches his fingers, not exactly as assured as he had been holding an oxygen mask or holding people still when she’d gone to meet him on his on hours. Unsteady, more like when she’d watched him clean the blood off the floors without meeting his eyes. Why is it always blood?
He has to smile at her, has to brush the hair out of her face like she’s something special before settling over her again. She almost resents it. She can’t feel so heavy or grave-not when he looks free like this. Maybe her honesty goes a long way, too.
“You’re ---beautiful.” Like another memory. “And Chloe, I promise. You’ll know.”
She could be caught here forever, kissing him, mouth tasting his smile. The fly of his jeans catches in the cotton, frail lace she wears. Then his hand brushes that down, closes against her hip. He thrusts shallow, desperate too, rubs slick against her thigh, her last preparation. His eyes are reddening with unbearable heat, an attempt at control. So this is how it happens. A jolt, warm and there so very perfect and she’s never needed anything quite like for this to be real.
It’s a swift, almost predatory movement and he enters her easily. It doesn’t hurt like she thought it would, maybe because the threat of him is something she’s tries to pull in. Smooth and rock-solid and unpredictable and oh so like she couldn’t have imagined before he came into her life. Chloe holds his shoulders for leverage and starts to move against him, moves him in her with a shuttering breath. She’s been ready for what seems like forever.
It’s his forehead against hers, fingers stumbling patterns across her skin. His body moving against hers, completely hers, for the first time and she feels a clenching in the core of her. His knees hook over hers and his smile burns away to an expression that could be agony.
Davis rocks and pushes hard, holds her tight to him. Loosens enough that she has time to show him where, eyes watering and locked on his. There and again, that’s it. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t break her out of the solid rush of the sensation because he has to know. He slams a little farther in; moving past a particularly sensitive bunch of nerves and a moan builds in her throat. She throbs, uncomfortably intense so she needs to find out.
She tugs him forward, arms all the way around him, struggles with her grip until he is deeper, more prominent, blocking out everything else. ‘Yes, there’ spills past her lips anyway. This bold isn’t her, but is now, trying to possible give him more access and why didn’t she cheerlead so she could do splits? Something about this seems to spurn him on.
Chloe whispers oh over and over and she’s never felt this moving her into something mindless. She wouldn’t be able to stay still if she was strapped down. She sucks in a thick breath, finds the small smile in Davis’s eyes again and slings a tight leg over his hip. A few flyaway strands of his hair slap his forehead when he forces his eyes completely open to meet hers.
There’s something breath-stopping about it. He’s getting close. Instead of saying something like ‘oh fuck’ his fingers thread through her own. Clasp. With his strength, he could grind her bones to powder in the throes of passion. She squeezes more and doesn’t let go.
His breath has sped so that it’s echoing down here. She sounds like she’s dying. Clark won’t hear, but if he was standing right in the room she wouldn’t notice.
Davis wants something else. He throws his head back a little, on his hands and knees for seconds to get it together. Then rolls her to her side gently, without moving out of her. It’s a good thing because she’s lost touch with the surroundings. Her focus is narrowed to him and how long it takes him to settle her down. Start the rhythm again.
She looks up at him, the roof, the cobwebs in the corner, blinking up like a stunned thing. The light is stronger here. This is better for him, his face tells her. The better to see you with.
“I love this.” Not yet I love you. So close.
She trails a hand along the swallow in his throat. His hand slides between her neck and the floor, and keeps it from hurting just trying to reach him. Reach him she does, bites into his shoulder at the pleasure of having him inside her, warm and good and real when he gets frantic again.
He moves her and her back is finally free in the open air. Chloe’s at a loss of what to do with control. She presses her knuckles on the ground by his head, holds his grip, tries to pick it up where he left off. Nothing has changed and he’s still here and before she knows any self-consciousness has flown right out of her head. If only the thoughts could do that.
Harder, she whispers, voice thick, hoping she hasn’t set her set herself up for that many more consequences. She’s human and he’s so intense. She’s never going to let him go even after she’s through with getting him cured even if he can’t trust in the truth of this again. It could be easy. So… easy... She’d just have to give it up. Just leave it behind.
She shoves at Davis a little, warmed even then by the way he pulls her to his chest to smooth her landing under him. Sweat trickles down her collarbone. Her spine feels bruised against the hard weave, but it’s less than nothing to her now.
If he’s scared she can’t see it. He pushes out anything but the heat inside her, inside her… and his eyes are a holding hers, even now, when it’s a struggle not to break into a flurry of blinks and hide. She’s looked for him- and in this violentmadcrazytrance, clenching tight, being moved- there can be no one else but him.
She comes hard, feels it everywhere at once, like being thrown from midair and here begins the descent to Earth. She shudders, claws at his back, trying to find some sort of hold onto reality. Even the light is so black now. Chloe can’t see, but touches his sweat and blood under her fingernails and his skin is closing up already anyway. The pleasure swamps her so she clings more fiercely- hears her voice climb an octave, and she didn't know she was making a sound. He- she’s not thinking words now- breathes hard against her ear; he feels that. If he were anyone else he’d have marks on him like he was wrestling with an angry lynx.
So he sinks onto her and she only draws blood in the places she already hasn’t. She’s a willing captive, trapped by thick warmth in his eyes. Free now and she doesn’t have to tell him not to hold back because this is the farthest from holding back he could be.
It’s too much, too much, but she can’t just stop feeling it now. Davis’s eyes blur on her and his free hand fists on itself because it’d break the tassels, the concrete and (her). His other hand is in hers and the pressure is not more than she can take.
The sound in her ears is blown out and everything is ringing out in a distracting tintinnabulation. She wonders if she’ll ever pry her nails out of his skin. She could settle for just breathing. When he doesn’t stop she thinks she never will again.
Release is approaching for him too. She hopes it’s soon and that it never ends because she doesn’t know if it’ll happen again. When Davis does she knows, his fingers tightening almost imperceptivity in her own. His lips hit hers and her eyes can’t focus on what his look like. There’s a dart of pain almost as strong as the pleasure had been.
Then she feels him shake, spilling himself into her. Alien DNA and she doesn’t know how long ago she took the protection but they’re going to do this and if she ends up pregnant with deadly babies she’s too far gone to think of it now. She still can’t hear Davis make a sound, feels the warm pressure of his lips on the side of her face and his mouth forming words. She can’t make the appropriate response.
The pain is ebbing and it gets better because my god is he warm, and something about the residual pleasure starts to offset the pain into something softer but no less powerful. She doesn’t stop, grinds closer into the slow staccato of him. Feels completely relaxed. Safe. Protected. Wonderful.
The exhale of breath is the first thing she hears, sticking in her throat and then leaving her. She feels like she rode out some wave and just barely managed to bob up again. His heartbeat hasn’t calmed much, either, but she loosens her fingers from his hand, tries to rub it into calmness.
Dark lashes flutter open to hers, and Davis catches her looking the instant she starts. His eyes still consume her, but she’s seen everything cresting in them. The hunger for that again frightens her.
The endorphins are still swimming in the back of her head. Chloe hopes her smile doesn’t look medicated. That was good for me, was it good for you?
Then on impulse, she kisses his neck. Davis groans a little, head sinking back down again. His fingers brush softly against her back. Ow.
“We should have been more careful.” He whispers, all medical concern. She feels like she can’t hide in more ways than one.
She’d been more than eager to have it all. To push at his boundaries and be pushed back. In the moment, being like that hadn’t seemed odd to her at all, not with how he felt, but in hindsight she’d been demanding and more than a little manic in getting what she wanted. She hadn’t intended to make him feel inhuman again.
Davis shakes his head before the thought materializes.
“It’s not you. I really needed you.” He says, doesn’t whisper it out now. “I always do.”
Chloe honestly doesn’t know how to answer.
Realizing, he tugs at her hair. Davis blows out a long breath, a comically exaggerated whine.
“But when I said you’d know, I still wanted to last more than a minute. You could’ve tried not to thwart me.”
Chloe settles down again, mumbling. “We didn’t agree I wasn’t going to push you.”
He still wants to get her and her bruises off the floor. Chloe wants nothing more than to curl up, lips at his neck and hold him for a while where she doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to do anything at all.
Davis puts a shaky hand on the floor and lifts himself out of her, the dazedly open look not out of his eyes. She wants to squeeze at him, lifts a limp hand to his face. When he stays still she clings to his shoulders, slippery and shining like they had been wet with blood. Makes it so he has to move them both like one fused piece.
She can smell what they just did and this is so beautifully messy. So much more than she thought. So much more of a sacrilege. At least the hateful, coarse nature of the carpet had its use.
Davis doesn’t slip, swings her up into his arms, puts her down his threadbare gray sheet. She shifts back so he can fit too, at least for the few hours before she leaves again.
Davis slips down on her, taking off his shoes and she is perversely scared that he is going to start this up another way and no oh she can’t take it. This is the first time ever… He settles over her, head against her chest, black lace sticking to his cheek. Somehow the clasp has come undone.
Chloe blows out air through her mouth, quirking up to look at his face. Sees a little of the old Davis peeking through, the affectionate tilt of an eyebrow and the smile he can’t cover with his hand.
He’ll listen.
“Davis, I’ve got to tell you something….”
Well. It isn’t exactly a fantasy. As close to him as she feels right now, she can’t tie it all up with a bow.
Davis, I’ve got to tell you something. I want you to go for the treatment.
The decision to be with him and her yearning to stop the thing in him are two separate things. Yet, Chloe’s the first to admit that the timing looks suspect. She’d only started to come onto him when he got close. What would that look like, whoring herself off to distract him so she could get what she really wanted? He just had to get into her space.
(Chloe remembers feeling violated by Clark that way by just a couple of words in front of a table of crowded people. It’s that much uglier when you let it go all the way.) It can break you.
Chloe doesn’t say it. Doesn’t want to ruin this for Davis- not when he’s free of the tension and fear and helplessness for once. He’ll find out later. The purse is four yards away, hidden from his sight. In a few hours maybe Dr. Hamilton will still be waiting.
“You’ve got me. This is easy.” Chloe says, her voice comes back, strong. “We’re doing this every night whether you want to or not.”
He presses his mouth deep into her shoulder, as if to communicate that won’t be a problem. (If he can still trust her after all this.)
Davis picks, picks at the lace and here they are, nothing between them but one thing. The biggest thing.
She knows what Lois would say. Boyfriend problems, seduce it out of him. Half of Chloe jumps at the challenge, the other part of her reminds her that he deserves better.
Later, Chloe stretches under him, back aching from the stiffness of the floor. It is an alien feeling-the tickling weight of his head between her breasts, his ribcage moving in and out in exhausted breath. Maybe it is a testament to them. Maybe he will sleep unlike all those other times, pacing in the basement, afraid. In the silence she starts to feel alone again.
Chloe runs her fingers through the back of his hair, hands shaking. It’s not like she chooses to. It’s not like she’s ever been able to choose where she loves, however much she’s wanted to.
She bites back a laugh because all she’s really done is exacerbated the situation, proved that she wants him more than anything she’s ever wanted in her life. No need to sound bipolar.
Chloe doesn’t hear much out of him an hour later, a soft, unintelligible murmur when she shifts out from under him.
Even as she’s half out of bed, his arm stretches across the tiny space, fingers lingering on her cheek. She wants nothing more than to stay with him and whatever he feels. Logic tells her even that will be gone unless she’s willing to take the preventive measures.
She kisses him on the forehead and goes to pick up her clothes. On the cot, Davis breathes out, hand rubbing the space she left behind.
“Do you have to go now?” He slurs, voice thick with sleep.
She tries to hide the fact that she wants to go tense as a board. After a moments thought she climbs back in next to him, jacket over her knees, trying hard not to blush at the gently possessive way he leans her close, breathes out relief. She can have this a little longer.
“I can get ready.” He says.
Chloe’s not going to go to the dangerous underground where she needs to be protected. Yet, she all but said he could come.
She should tell him the truth. But she doesn’t want to destroy the illusion of happiness just yet. She has to.
“I’m going to the—”
“To see the doctor.” He responds, even before looking at the contents of the purse she’s just upended.
She hadn’t counted on this. He’d heard everything, the crinkle of the bottle and the drop pauses in her admittedly rampant emotions.
“What did you say?” She hears his smooth, too-deep intake of breath. She can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“The hearing. It’s something I’m starting to get.”
“You didn’t say anything.” Her voice is not as steady as his, she pulls back, disentangles herself. Just minutes ago she was worrying she’d betrayed him.
“Chloe, can you honestly say you wanted me to?”
She can’t.
“Is that why you followed me?” She looks deep into his eyes, scans them and the twist of his mouth, not sure what that means.
“No.” he whispers. “I just--- needed to know. I know you want to save me.”
That’s enough for her, maybe it is for him. She lets his arm come around her again, ever conscious that he hasn’t said a word about it either way. Davis doesn’t let her go and he doesn’t want to leave her or this place. He can stop her as easily as she can blink.
“Please listen, Davis. He can help.” She’s got to try, the unspoken argument already on her lips. She needs this more than he does.
“You said yourself, it’s getting harder, it doesn’t matter how you feel. How can we have this if we’re not even sure how long it’ll last?” Chloe blinks fast. If only it was just the exhaustion of just having to say so much. She knows how it was like to lose him in a moment and it must be worse watching him gradually disappear.
“I won’t leave you again.” He says, voice carefully neutral. “Don’t take the DNA.” Chloe’s heart plummets.
“I want to live with you and die with you and I can’t do it like this.” She says finally. She can’t. She will, but…
What can she really do, beg and plead until it falls on deaf ears, make him when he’d promise her anything? Would it even matter? She can love him but she can’t change him, isn’t that the old adage?
At least think about it a little before you break my heart.
“No, Chloe.”
“I see.” She says, deceptively soft, looks back down at Davis’s hand, on her like a shackle. She feels frail again.
His fingers move up, stroke her cheek, intimate as a kiss. She tells herself to just look away but she can’t. Or won’t.
Davis’s eyes don’t look obsessive. She sees all of him, all of him that’s she’s ever known there and she can’t regret falling in deeper by the second. Not when she has that.
“I mean you might want to take the subject in person.” Davis whispers, nudging his forehead against hers. “We’ll go see him if it means that much. I want this, too.”
She kisses him over the forgotten water bottle and realizes she never wanted to leave.
Murphy’s law tells Chloe that everything falls apart. What it never says is that if you have the courage to bring them back together, the pieces fit again.
[Years later, when being together doesn’t necessarily mean blood soaked floors and bloody bits of Clark, they start up Isis again. Clark still hasn’t completely forgiven her for the suicide note. He’ll get over it.
Davis is exactly himself, counseling kids and better that her at it. Who else could claim to have beat out the Universes Ultimate destructive being with a little help from science? It’s not a lonely existence at all- a little crowded at their shared room; and there will always be an excess of love there. Moreso now than ever.
Emil Hamilton drops by once in a while, now the world’s only doctor with a mastery of Kryptonian genetic code. It’s a regular occurrence.
Chloe rubs a hand over one of her looser work shirts, already getting tight. This is her bi-weekly checkup. Everything is in order, he says. No deadly monster babies. Just two perfectly normal ones showing up on the sonogram. (Davis had gone pale at the news, a reflex born of expecting something dark to spring out of him. Then he’d seen them- just two small 3d images and his eyes had just glowed.)
“You made the right choice.” Emil says out of the blue. “If you hadn’t brought him in, I would have looked at the cells and given up hope.”
Emil delivers that compliment that same way he delivered their test results. Deadpan.
“Your husband is right. You really are quite remarkable.”
A smile quirks over the side of Chloe’s mouth. If only he’d known it was Davis’s idea. ]
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