this tornado loves you

Reccing Notes: So remember that time after Eternal where we were all going 'Chloe locked the door, omygod she locked the door?' Well, I was in horrible withdrawal so I wheedled my flist and the lovely simplytoopretty wrote this. She's (usually) a Chloe/Clark writer, and one of the best. Her Chlavis is among my favorites because she handles every facet of their relationship, including Chloe's insecurities and Clark's lingering effect on her.

Chloe's terrified of the implications the beast and Davis's apparent immortality will have for her best friend, but there's something between them, anyway. Just read between the lines, at all that remains unsaid as that line is crossed. It will break your heart. And you will come back for more.

by simplytoopretty at her livejournal
771 words, r, eternal

Instead she finds herself nodding her head, muttering, “Yes,” unable to resist what she feels. A part of her is horrified at what she’s doing, but the larger part is rejoicing in her decision. Chloe descends the stairs slowly, an almost creep. Her feet against the cement stairs are nearly soundless. Her left hand grips the wooden railing as she climbs down the stairs, darkness surrounding her. The light is bad and the shadows litter every corner.

At the bottom of the stairs she pauses. To call out or to wait for him to notice her arrival: her mind is unsettled. A part of her would like to return up the stairs and pretend she was never down here.

The choice is taken away from her.

“You’re back,” Davis says as he comes forward, out of the dark gloom. His clothing consists of dark gray sweatpants and a dark green shirt. In contrast, his skin is white, almost the color of chalk.

There are lights in the basement, but only one is functional. It’s the one directly above where she stands, at the base of the stairs. Pale yellow light that barely penetrates the dimness.

“You’re back,” he repeats, relief evident in his voice. Guilt sweeps over her: a part of her had desperately wanted to run away once she got down here. He needs her and a part of her just wants to run.

She shouldn’t be here, yet she is. There’s a pull between them, she can’t deny it, and it frightens her. There’s been nothing like this in her life before.

Davis moves, closing the distance between them. A slice of air between their bodies. She tilts her head slightly to see his eyes, those dark pools that entrance and terrify her at the same time. His hand falls upon her cheek, a gentle caress, nothing monstrous about it. His palm is warm and she wants to lean into his touch.

Yet she shouldn’t. He is, after all, a killer. A part of her screams that killing is his nature; she’s torn between sympathy and revulsion. The sympathy side is winning out, the side that sees his nature as a battle he has lost in the past but one he may be able to win in the future.

It seems to depend on her. This knowledge weighs on her, a burden she can’t simply shrug off.

“I missed you,” Davis says. His thumb is brushing her cheek.

“Davis…”

“I need you.”

Chloe closes her eyes. It’s heady to hear these words, this admission. His fingers are beneath her chin, lifting her head just a bit, and then his lips are landing on hers. A light, soft pressure: tentative exploration.

He pulls back, his hands threaded through her hair now. He looks at her eyes, assessing it seems, and then says, “I want all of you.”

Her throat is dry and she swallows quickly. “I…what do you mean?”

“I want to know all of you.”

The answer she should give is a firm no. Instead she finds herself nodding her head, muttering, “Yes,” unable to resist what she feels. A part of her is horrified at what she’s doing, but the larger part is rejoicing in her decision.

His lips are on hers again and she can barely think; there’s a pounding in her head and it dominates everything. Fingers fumble with clothing, removing as much as nothing. His sweatpants, her jeans, their shoes. The items of clothing abandoned on the cold basement floor for now.

There’s a couch, in the corner, in the darkness. Davis presses her against the wall, her cotton shirt and jacket a barrier between the cement and her fragile skin.

“Here?” he says.

The light from the lamp just reaches them where they are. Darkness permeated.

“Here,” Chloe says. Here is with her back against the hard wall. Here is where things are real and gritty and everything that she needs.

He pushes into, their bodies joining intimately. Her fingers clutch at his cotton-covered shoulders as he thrusts in and out of her willing body. Their eyes are locked, their gaze never breaking. His eyes are dark and she gets lost in them. She can’t think.

When he comes, he says, “I love you.”

She bites her lip, unable to return the words as her orgasm washes over her. Pleasure spreads and there was already the pounding in her head and yet she still bites her lip to keep quiet. Despite what she feels, that tug between them, she can’t hand over that last element.

His eyes register his disappointment as they disentangle their bodies.

On her lips are the words I’m sorry.

But Chloe doesn’t say those words.

the flip side of hellfire

Reccing Notes: Hopeless after his resurrection in Eternal, Davis makes the one sacrifice he has left. His own personal hell for Clark and the world. Chloe follows him to the Phantom Zone, and their chances of survival start trickling down. Written because I wanted to see Chloe pushed to an unreasonable extreme for having to give Davis up over and over. Also, there needs to be more phantom zone pronz.

by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal

2871 words, nc-17, eternal/beast

"I'm not going to spend my life missing you, you know."

Davis held her eyes over the crackling air of the fortress. It seemed to her that the black crystal was still, poised over the portal that would take him to hell.



When she'd been with Davis she had always been moving. When she met him she took slow, tentative steps to something that called to her; the guilt was rust in her mouth. Then she'd broken into a run , a blank slate and the comforting heat of him. he'd brought her back. When he'd told her he'd wait her feet were standing still but the bottom had fallen out of her world.

Then, the crisis point- the equivalent of nuclear devastation under his skin and headlines that screamed cornfield killer. She chased after him in betrayal and sparks of the last love she had left. They'd run away together if that was what it came down to.

Chloe had never said the right words, not that she'd missed him, what she felt. Davis had tried return the equilibrium to her world, change it to the way is was before he'd turned it. He'd bring Jimmy back to her on drug recovery but Chloe had seen the ugliness underneath. As his last magic trick-he was going to disappear.

"Don't." She said.

"This way the world can have Clark." You can have Clark, his eyes said; he'd known that Clark had taken front and center if not for who he was but what he did. So Davis was leaving to a vapid wasteland, the only place she could never get him back.

"I'll have nothing." It struck Chloe that she'd always wanted her own Kryptonian hero and he was doing it the only way he could. He didn't even know.

"I'm sorry. I won't take another life"

"I'm giving you mine."

"What if I don't want it?" The lie was the set of his shoulders, the way the man who looked the world head on could not look at her face.

"It's yours. I feel something."

Chloe knew that an honest admission of what he felt would be too much for him. He moved and before she knew it she was swung into his grasp. She held his eyes-bewildered heat and hope as his thumb traced her cheek. He closed his eyes first as the red maw swirled around them . She closed a fist over his. Davis kissed her and it was too passionate, deep and full of a thousand promises that would never be fulfilled.

"I want you." She said, but her wanting had never changed the world.

Davis took a step back and his mouth formed a true smile again, that kind she could never stay away from. "Good to know I hadn't completely lost it."

"I'm not going to spend my life missing you, you know." Chloe told him; she was going to live.

She reached out a hand and brushed his sleeve; his eyes flickered. When they fell into the other world together, she thought maybe she could find her equilibrium.



Chloe struck the sand of the phantom zone with paralyzing impact in her side. Davis had shielded her from the brunt of the impact, but even then her body ached like she had landed on hot steel. Davis's face pressed against her shoulder and she felt the muscles work against her skin.

"You stayed with me." he whispered. There was fear, the soft rush of breath like you heard in a romance movie. He was heavy on her and she shivered. “Don’t move.” He whispered into her neck. She fantasized about this very situation, but his tone was all wrong, wary. Chloe touched at his face, feeling the tension coiled up in him. He was hearing something she could not.

Clinging to Davis, she heard nothing more threatening than shifting sands before it struck. Chloe had considered the Phantom Zone a place for wraiths, hostile ghosts, not living, hungry predators for too long.

Something slimy and razor-sharp wound over her ankle and yanked. It whip-lashed her and by extension Davis into the air. Chloe landed in a rolling heap, freezing when she wasn’t holding onto him anymore. She was the aperitif. Chloe dangled upside down in the air before the gaping hole of a mouth, rows and rows of needle-like teeth and vaguely she heard Davis yelling for her. It had her too tight. She gasped in a breath and smelled the ripe, rotting fragrance of decaying blood. She struck out blindly, blood painfully rushing to her brain. The eyes.

Chloe was plucked from the air like a doll, skin rasping. She had half a mind to kick out but she recognized the raspiness. Davis was half-transformed, his skin warring on warped black and his eyes red. He deposited her on the ground softly. A whip of sound took him from her sight, but she heard it roar out of him. There were wet, slicing noises- the impact of thick bony plates on muscled, fleshy tentacles. The tide turned as Doomsday was crushed into that maw of a mouth, let out a howl. Chloe had never been so afraid. She forced herself to limp up because she could be a distraction.

She heard the gurgle as Doomsday tore its claws through its belly at the last moment. The tentacled creature fell with a nauseating impact, and the red eyes that held hers over the carcass looked-almost- protective.





Doomsday must have taken her miles, to a decently sized cave free of tentacled monsters. It stopped short of the opening, as if knowing it’s sized would crumble the cave and kill her if it tried to find comfort for itself. The red sun beat down on it, lighting black scales to dirty orange parts of its side crusty black. Was it…bleeding?

Chloe crawled forward, dragging her leg behind her and laid a hand on it’s side. Her fingers came away sticky and it made a little hissing sound, scrabbling back a few steps. She used to touch Davis like this and it had helped him turn back.

“Thank you. Hold still. I’m going to help you.” It wasn’t sentient in the same way Davis was, but it understood survival, could hear the soothing tone to her voice and stopped scrabbling away. Chloe had to get half out of the cave to reach the looming form. It collapsed into the sand with a thump.




Davis must have woken up about an hour later. The horrific silence of this place and his jerkily breathing body made it seem like years. Davis was sentient though; the very first thing he did was pull out of her clinging grip to assess the situation and reset her ankle. His eyes were terrified and betrayed and loving; Chloe almost wished another tentacled monster appeared just to banish the awkwardness.

“You’re hurt.”

“So are you.” She indicated the black blood mixing with his own, starker on his bare skin and the muscle there. Down girl.

Davis knew how to deal with his own injuries, but she prodded at the uninjured skin. There were three claw-marked gauges tainted with oozing black venom right under his pectoral. The blood was more jarring on Davis and Chloe could see how it cut through to the muscle.

“I’ll be fine.” Davis insisted, moving closer to the light at the cave mouth, dazed from the venom. Chloe wrapped an arm around him and pulled him back. His body was complacent and his eyes didn’t look in the shape to argue with her.

“The sun is red here so Kryptonians won’t heal. You'd be better off here.”

“Straight from the mouth of the professor of Kryptonian history, M.D.” Davis’s was sweating thickly; it was probably some sort of paralyzing drug but he was lifting an eyebrow, making an effort to smile and set her at ease.

Unwillingly, Chloe felt the corner of her mouth curl up into a smile. “That’s P.H.D, actually. You need to let me suck the venom out.”

His eyes widened for a fraction of a second only. He wasn’t Clark. He knew they couldn’t mop ineffectually at it and expect the poison to go away. “Come on, Davis.”

“Be careful.”

Davis held still when she pressed her lips to his chest and sucked. It didn’t feel awkward or unnatural at all. His skin was much hotter than hers, a raspy smattering of hair and skin sensitive enough to goose-bump as soon as her mouth touched him. Vaguely, Chloe wondered what his skin tasted like. She couldn’t find out like this.

She had to be extra careful not to swallow a drop because the poison would kill her in seconds. His head tilted back when she started drawing on his blood. His breaths shifted to quick and she should have been thinking about how much pain instead of how beautiful his eyes looked when they slammed shut. His hand found purchase on her waist and pulled at her top, fingers shaking.

Chloe froze as his fingers touched her skin and tried not to move much when she spat out the poison into the sand. Her mouth was numb. He was hurt, shaking against her, barely moving otherwise. She had him for the rest of her life but she didn’t know if that amounted to much more than a day for either of them.




Davis had barely said a word since he woke, but he was starting to recover his speech. She’d been curled up next to him for nearly three hours before he finally whispered.

“Why did you do it?”

She clenched her fist and loosened it. It was hard to be mad at him. Davis had been trying to save her all along, saved her from getting turned into a yet another afterthought and she didn’t even know if he was going to heal.

“Because I’m selfish and stupid enough to be in love with you. I can’t watch you go into hell alone, and I don’t want that guy I care about to disappear because no one, not even him will make an effort to make things right.”

Davis looked at her, one of his tender, searching looks. By the end of it she wanted to shift her eyes down. “I want to spend my life with you. And if it’s just you, that’s fine too.”

His lips parted. “I don’t think it’s that long.”

Chloe straightened. “You’re not making it any longer by fantasizing about sending me back so you can get back to what you really want and invite more of those things to lunch on you. I get it.”

“I just didn’t want you to give your life up for me, Chloe. It’s not worth it.”

There was his problem. The blackouts and the blood and death had messed him up into seeing himself as nothing more than a shell unworthy of feelings from anyone. If it had been her he would have been the first one to speak on her behalf.

“Stop talking.”

“You’re the only one to ever love me.” His eyes were wet, like when he’d said it to her the first time. “I didn’t want you to suffer for it.” Davis crawled back from her a little further.

“I chose it, so deal.” If she reached an arm out she could get him to hold her again. She wouldn’t. She wasn’t sorry. She was just feeling cold. Desert nights were even colder here than in real deserts.

“I didn’t mean it that way. I do want you here.” he said very softly. “You’re the only one.” He kept looking at her and got closer, probably to get his jacket. Chloe ignored him and sat up to wipe the poison taste from her mouth again, only to close her eyes at he licked softly at her chaffed ankle. She hadn’t expected him to return the favor. He kissed her knee and up her thigh. She held her hands stiff because they were coated in red and she was angry and she wanted nothing more than to slide them into his hair.

When he kissed her mouth the response was automatic, wanting and squirming and not having to manipulate him into not dying. His mouth was parching and hot and flush on hers, (somehow even warmer than the rest of him) and his hands were on her face like he was holding her so she wouldn’t get away. If he wanted to play it like that- Chloe scratched at his neck and he shifted her down. No doubt about his intentions now.

There was sex that was about lust, sex that was about anger, sex that was about yearning and soft feelings and this was neither and all of them. He bit at her mouth to be let in, warm humid, living heat and Chloe sucked on his tongue. His mouth fumbled under her jaw line before his mouth teased wetly between her breasts and trailed down her abdomen. White-hot heat started to spike through her. Davis dragged himself up her like some sort of animal and she knew he smelled it.

Chloe raised herself to her knees and tore at her jacket, missing the warmth but counting on him to be the heat. If she didn’t deal with the clothes he would and this was the only pair she would have for a long time. She let them drop. Her forehead slouched into his shoulder and he pressed between her legs with sudden electric pressure, hesitated and watched her eyes and seeing some invisible thing, pushed his cock inside. Chloe’s eyes watered, he was in her rough and so deep it ached.

She’d wondered sometimes, how it would be, if it would hurt. She couldn’t connect it with the vague stirrings with Jimmy that vanished as soon as he rolled over. Davis seemed like too much passion, too much for her too handle. Maybe she’d been right. Davis pulled her forward, palms huge against her face and he was just hard inside her, not doing anything at all. Chloe felt like some part of her displaced and left only room for him. She started it, aligning them to kiss him better, shifting her hips against his.

His hands closed over them and he kissed her roughly, pausing to push her into a cold, rasping wall. Chloe wanted to let him know it was uncomfortable but he’d dropped his head into her shoulder, pulsing and hot and doing something at last. Chloe’s eyes fixed on the ominous cave mouth and closed and she could have sworn she saw sparks.

Davis's skin thrummed over hers, her hands tried unsuccessfully to sooth the blood dripping from the reopened cut in his side and clawed at his ass instead. Davis hissed a slow breath from between his teeth and rolled her against the wall- clutching at her shoulders, elbows, her hips like he couldn’t get close enough.

In any other place, it could have been rationalized as an effort to save one or both of them. It was out of their hands now. His hands wrapped and fisted in her hair, his mouth at buried itself against her throat, almost as if he was trying to forget about everything that surrounded them. Davis hated not being able to save her from what he saw as his punishment; he took his and his evil alien parent’s responsibilities upon himself, that’s just how he was. Chloe understood. He rocked a little more violently and what she needed to say parched and cracked in her throat with a small orgasmic sound. She was drenched in heat and the blood roared in her ears.

The pleasure was like plummeting; complete freefall, waiting for another impact. It was coming, quivering through her overtaxed nerve endings again and Davis notched his head into her shoulder. She bit into her lip and drew blood and she couldn’t taste the venom anymore so she licked at his neck and his skin tasted like salt. Black closed over the sides of her vision, but she felt him tossing and quivering and his hands stroking over her knee when he spilled into her. Then her knees went.

Her arguments about his culpability issues were temporarily halted by her inability to string two sentences together. Davis carried her to the corner and she curled around his arm, steering clear of the injured parts. She was warmed by the erratic sound of his heart and him but she was sticky and cold. She groped for her jacket and curled the arm of it around him.

“I don’t deserve you.” He said softly, tracing at her nose with a blunt finger. “Because of you I have a reason to go on.” He rolled over and looked at her with earnest eyes. “I’ll take care of you.” Chloe nudged his shoulder and his hands seemed to develop a will of their own. “I’ll get to know the terrain. You can explain the phantoms, we can catalog the species and learn which to avoid, I’ll learn to control the beast…”

Chloe breathed in the scent of his skin and felt her ankle prickle under his roving, curious weight. She could see it already-he’d catch her things to eat with his hands and come home naked and they’d probably die of acute sexual exhaustion.

Davis pulled her hands over her head and kissed her wrists. They had a lot a time to make up for, and she’d almost forgotten what they had been arguing about. But she took advantage of the last moment to make her point.

“I’m still not sorry I came.”

oppression

Reccing Notes: Wowowow. This is one of those fics that I read and gets better every time. I think, sometimes with a ship like this, it can be easy to get lost in the initial chemistry and the feelings. This however, takes into context Davis's intended fate as set by his father and Chloe's fears and desire to protect and how that factors into the sexual relationship between them. It's beautiful and packs quite a few emotional punches in the gut.

by nonky at her livejournal

1275 words, nc-17, eternal

Chloe was fucking her anxiety about Davis’ future, fucking her fear and her rage on his behalf. There was nothing in the world that was going to make up for his terrible life, and she didn’t want him to find that out. She wanted him to walk around with a hopeful outlook that was completely without justification. She wanted him to believe the world was full of good people who really deserved to live.

He thought it was the choice of movie.

Davis was happily cuddled on her sofa, his jeans rumpled under her flexing toes. Chloe was wearing a dress that was short and stretchy. It didn’t look like a work outfit, but it wasn’t so fancy it made him feel weird in his jeans and t-shirt. Instead of hiking up when she bent into crazy positions next to him, it made room for her legs to do what they were doing. Her foot danced lightly over his knee, naked skin rubbing him with subtle enticement.

It was about war; a father who was a general and a son who was a reluctant soldier being groomed for advancement.

Chloe had a good father. He was a kind man with her best interests at heart. He was also a good deal more invested in survival than she was, so he lived out of state and at a safe distance. She didn’t resent him. She resented Clark’s fathers; Jonathan Kent and Jor-El, both of them so certain Clark’s welfare was worth lives and sanity. She resented Zod, who had turned a tiny bit of his son into a creature that didn’t know what it was.

“I want you to be a man,” The general on the television yelled. “I want you to kill who you have to kill!”

If there was some kind of warrior tradition involved, or a legitimate war to be fought, she might be able to see Zod’s side of things, or Jor-El’s. But there was no glory in creating a killing machine to live in a world that didn’t value super-soldiers. There was no key to the city awaiting aliens who finally got around to showing up to conquer Earth for the poor, dumb Earthlings’ own good.

“I don’t want to be a man like you,” the son screamed, yanking off the uniform jacket that he obviously disliked. “I don’t want to be a man if that’s what it takes!”

Chloe didn’t have daddy issues, but every man in her life had them. She had been in the middle of Clark’s and Lex’s; and now Davis’ were a part of her daily life. Zod was a father who had sent him alone to a hostile world, expecting Davis would find a way to scuttle around in the shadows until he was old enough to have powers. He was a father who instilled nothing but psychosis and killing rage, yet expected to be greeted with love and obedience.

On the movie, the young man was freeing prisoners. One of them asked him to escape with them, but he was going to stay behind and take his punishment. It was going to get him killed, and he was going to savour the humiliation of his father as he was blindfolded and shot.

Davis was going to pay for Zod’s sins, over and over again. He was going to feel every life he’d taken, knowing it was only partially a choice and not a real one at that. Davis killed in small numbers so the rising urges didn’t trigger a permanent transformation. He found a solution that was the best of a terrible situation. He did as much good in his life as he could manage. He didn’t want to be part of anyone’s agenda. He wasn’t bitter and destructive. He was good in a way that couldn’t be programmed or overruled.

The general was taking the news badly. He ripped down his citations for bravery and sobbed out grief and rage.

She turned on her hip, swinging one leg over Davis’ lap and yanking the skirt high. He went along with her immediately. Davis slouched lower to kiss her, and let his head hang back so she could lean on his chest. Her hands fumbled for his belt and slipped his zipper open. She palmed him gently and kneaded at the engorging flesh. He tried to slow her down with his hands catching her elbows. Chloe wasn’t going to fall for that. She slowed down only when her dress was pulled up to her waist, and his cock was poised to let her ride him until they passed out.

The general was talking to his troops about honour. He said it was about dying for something worthwhile. He said it was a choice.

She was glad the soft cotton of the dress showed every panty line, because it made her go without underwear. Chloe screwed herself down on Davis with a laboured hum issuing from her throat. She arched and grasped until it worked for her. He was still, probably stunned at her propelling them from casual dating to bareback straddling in a single minute. His hands rubbed up and down her thighs, stroking the muscles that lifted her over him.

The young man must have been at the firing range, because the movie had the jarring silence every sound editor used before a gunshot.

Chloe was fucking her anxiety about Davis’ future, fucking her fear and her rage on his behalf. There was nothing in the world that was going to make up for his terrible life, and she didn’t want him to find that out. She wanted him to walk around with a hopeful outlook that was completely without justification. She wanted him to believe the world was full of good people who really deserved to live.

The movie was silent, driving her crazy with the anticipation.

Davis was driving her crazy, too. He was into it, well past any fear of hurting her or thrusting too hard. He was showing more restraint in his submissive pose than Chloe was in the power position. She ground on her inherited daddy issues, showed them the way to go to hell with each downward plunge of her body. Davis was trying to soften things by cupping her breasts. He flicked at her nipples and ran his knuckles down her belly. He dabbed at her clit with a licked fingertip.

The television let loose a volley of shots, lingering on indulgently as the son’s body was falling.

Chloe didn’t turn around, and she jammed her tongue in Davis’ mouth. She didn’t want him to see that, not on a movie or in life. She didn’t want that to be him, even figuratively. He couldn’t stay dead, but he was perfectly able to die in agony. She pressed hard with her hips, felt bony strikes as he lifted her in the motion. He was supposed to look like his father. It made her want to scratch his cheeks and leave bloody marks.

There was silence.

She screamed into it. Davis was jolting underneath her knees, nearly throwing her off. He held on to her like a hug, but it was more for safety. He was a force in the universe and she was latched on to him like a comet. He was meant for great things. He was meant for her, and she would make that enough.

The ending of the movie droned about melodramatic loss and sacrifice.

Chloe let herself relax into Davis’ arms and the warm dampness between her legs. She put her face against his neck and he shivered. He wasn’t some tactical advantage to her, but he was under her control. The great muckity-mucks of Krypton could suck her recently bouncing ass, because they weren’t getting the planet or any lost son from it without her interference.

Maudlin music signaled the movie was over.

“The next movie I get won’t be so scary,” Davis whispered gently, running fingertips over her cheeks. One hand smelled like her pussy, and she turned her mouth to nip it gently.

A/N: In case anyone asks, the movie is non-existent; or rather, it's a composite of a lot of movies that I stirred together to inspire some porning from a certain reporter and the paramedic she's stalking.

insensible visitors with oral fixations

Reccing Notes: I introduce you to your very first post-eternal zombiesmut! I teased nonky into writing this, she teased me into writing davis-as-a-werewolf-smut. I think I won most because her writing it just that good. Chloe is feeling empty and bloody-handed after Davis dies in Eternal, and guess where he-goes, half-alive, after digging his way out of his grave?

by nonky at her livejournal

3853 words, nc-17, eternal

His flat palm patted along her hair, as if his fingers weren't working to rifle through and mess it up. She gathered a small bundle and he leaned in to take it in his lips, drawing it along and slightly into his mouth. His nose mushed into her jaw and he gasped quietly.


If Chloe hadn't been feeling so numb, she would have thought before moving to cease the knocking at her office door.

She wouldn't have answered a violently panicked pounding. It was late and she was in no shape to deal with a crisis. She was alone, Clark was keeping well clear of her bloody hands, and she was wallowing in the knowledge that she had looked Davis in the eye as his soul left his body. Danger to herself didn't even strike her emotions with any resonance. Attackers didn't knock on unlocked doors.

Later, much later, she would admit she was probably asking for a punishment to find her. Since Davis Bloome met her, he'd put his job on the line because she asked, then forgiven Jimmy kidnapping and trying to kill him. He was nothing but a sweet, supportive, respectful man who was driven to help people. The monster wasn't real to her. Davis was real, and she had killed him to protect a friend who couldn't look at her anymore.

She loved Clark, but Krypton could go to hell. That dead rock had ruined so many days of her life, and she was barely a freak. Every new discovery told her the Kryptonians didn't care they were exporting their problems to Earth and an unsuspecting race with less advanced technology. Her home had become the battleground for a world that no longer existed.

The anger made her rough as she opened the door, then left her entirely. Chloe felt her shoes slip backward as Davis wrapped her in his arms. She held on while he pressed his weight down and shuffled clumsily closer. She shut her eyes and tried not to think about how it had to be a dream. He was hurting her a little bit with the press of his arms directly over her shoulders, so she swayed them to get some relief. He smelled the same, and there was no horrific coating of blood or liquid kryptonite on his clothing.

Just believe it for a few minutes, she told herself. Just take it and soak it in. I know he's lost, I know I lost him, but I don't have to know it when I'm asleep.

Davis' cool dry skin didn't feel dead against her cheek, and Chloe tilted her chin back like it was muscle memory. His palm covered most of that side of her face. She had a flicker - The Beast crouched in front of her as she wept, entreating her, trying as best it could to comfort before it picked her up.

"Chloeeee," he growled, but it was a man-growl from a rusty human voice.

She met his eyes and saw the tiniest response in them. He was there, somewhere deep and probably not crawled out of his grave yet. She had killed him, and she would find him, too.

"It's me, Davis. I'm here. I'm glad to see you." So obscenely glad; she was falling into this hard.

Everyone else came back from the dead, so why not the cute paramedic who was destined to kill Clark? She didn't recall going to sleep, or even sitting down. Her body ached with the long night and she knew herself to be alert. She was holding Davis and stretching up to reach him was pulling the middle of her back. Every other hug from him had been glorious with comfort and warmth. This was a big, complicated feeling but not altogether pleasant.

Chloe found that if she moved herself with inching steps back, he would follow. She pulled him into the office and kicked the door shut. This time she locked it. Her hand returned to feel along Davis' side. It rose and fell with breathing. He made noises and gave every indication of being alive. She didn't think she'd gone this crazy, so she started to plan what a reasonably sane person would do in her situation.

“Davis? Can we sit down,” she asked him, waving toward the too-pink sofa. “My neck can't keep this up forever.”

She kept inching them around the furniture, and he let her push him down to the sofa. Both of his big, capable hands latched on to her wrist and Chloe smiled. “No, I'm not leaving. Just let me get to my laptop and I'll come back with you.”

He was looking up at her with a serious, helpless expression. She dropped down next to him and he let go of her hand. Chloe moved it over to his leg and rubbed his knee. There was no denying she was traumatized, but what he'd been through was worse.

“Does it hurt?”

His brow furrowed, his eyes narrowing as if in great effort, but eventually Davis nodded. He took her hand from his knee and brought it up to his chest. He touched her fingertips to his chest and lowered his hand, leaving her the choice of moving her own away. Chloe spread her fingers and looked into his brown eyes. His heart was beating strong despite her betrayal.

There was a sudden wave of heat rising up her face, then she was crying on him, making whining sounds and shaking. Davis cuddled her and he was the one to rock them this time. He was silent, but she could feel him wanting her to be comforted. He pried her away from his wet shirt and his lips curved gently on her eyelids. He lapped and kissed her tears away, and she was so fascinated by it Chloe forgot she was crying at all.

His flat palm patted along her hair, as if his fingers weren't working to rifle through and mess it up. She gathered a small bundle and he leaned in to take it in his lips, drawing it along and slightly into his mouth. His nose mushed into her jaw and he gasped quietly. She absorbed the quiet and wondered how he could feel so big and masculine, but also like a favourite puppy in her arms. She just wanted his eyes to light up like before, and know he would be okay.

Davis stood suddenly with his arms clamped around her waist. She gulped as he turned them around, fumbling a bit as he fit her on her back on the sofa. He held her down with one hand while he climbed up next to her. His hip fit next to her, but he had to put a lot of his weight on her belly. Davis let her wiggle around for a minute until the pressure was evenly distributed. He ran an arm under her neck like a pillow.

It was inevitable that she would go to sleep that way. Davis had made them both surprisingly comfortable and he was purring in his throat to the tune of something she'd heard on the radio a few times. He felt like safety. She had long ago decided to ignore information taken from movies about monsters and freaks. There was no legitimate reason why a person who had miraculously survived, or even been reanimated, would crave human flesh or be at all dangerous. The worst effect of Davis in his present state was that she'd have to condition her hair to make up for the way he was holding strands of it in his mouth to gnaw between his lips.

She turned her head toward him and felt him kiss the bridge of her nose. Chloe went to sleep with a smile.


Sunlight woke her, and forced Chloe to admit she was really entangled with a Davis who couldn't seem to speak or think beyond the instinctive tactile compulsion they had always denied between them. She poked him until he got up and offered his hand to help her.

Still a gentleman, even after you kill him, she thought absurdly.

There was a small fridge in her inner office, and Chloe took him by the hand to lead the way to scavenge something for him There was no handbook for coming back to life, but common sense was always useful. He liked warmth; to be touched and talked to. He knew her and was able to recognize simple instructions. Rest had made his shaking abate.

He was just a grown-up Kryptonian man who had had a few rough days, and she had played this out with Clark more than once. She packed the meagre breakfast into her purse and locked up behind them. Davis followed her up the stairs slowly, having to watch his feet a few times, but he made it without falling.

Chloe sat Davis on the low lounger someone from another office had brought up. The roof was shared, though she was the only one who spent such long hours in the building. It used to be Isis that made her so late to leave for home, but now it was an emotional need to be away from her former home with Jimmy. She sank down on her knees in front of Davis and looked at the horizon. The sun was coming up, and if Davis was anything like Clark, he'd soak up the radiation and recover.

He gripped her hand as she stood, but Chloe shushed him gently. It had been a long night, nearly pinned by his weight as he chewed on her hair and mumbled words that weren't English if they were words at all. She towed her purse over by the handle, taking a bottle of orange juice and a shrink-wrapped pack of beef jerky out. It wasn't going to do much for him physically, but the normal motions and sensations of eating would bring him back to himself. She showed him both, and he took them out of her hands to lay them aside.

"Davis," she complained, but smiled. His hands were working much better after a few hours of practice groping her hair and clothes. Each finger moved independently and with the steadiness she expected from such a good paramedic. He even curved his mouth into a tiny smile as he gave an apologetic little shrug.

He pulled her down to sit with him, nuzzling her face as he kissed her mouth. Chloe found nothing lacking in it, all the passion and self he had thrown at her unexpectedly was present in the sweet toying of his tongue. He even cupped her face the same and pulled back with a twinkle in his eyes.

"You're feeling better. I'm glad," she told him. "But we're not up here for that. The sun should help you."

He immediately leaned away to strip off his sweater and t-shirt. Davis gave a brief shiver as the cool morning hit his skin, and she relented. Holding him, Chloe ran her hands over his back. He snuggled in and proceeded to grope her thighs.

"How are you making horny zombie come-ons charming," she wondered out loud. He made a small, strangely spaced exhale she realized was the tiniest laugh.

If he wasn't so cold she might have indulged him, but his skin was freezing. All moisture seemed to have leeched out, and it made painfully harsh scrubbing sounds just from being touched. Chloe nudged him back and opened the juice. He took it with a hint of irony. "No, it's not the cure, but you need fluids. I don't have an IV kit around, Mr. Paramedic."

She watched him as he drank it cautiously, obviously having trouble swallowing the first few times. As the juice wet his throat, she could see the minute flinches stop. Davis reached for the beef jerky himself, and opened it eagerly. He had to do a lot of chewing, but he ate it all and politely tucked the wrapper in his pocket.

“Okay,” she told him sternly. “If you've come around enough not to litter, you should be able to talk to me, now.”

His look was more layered than any zombie should be able to convey, a kind of rueful admiration for her demand but no attempt to answer. Davis tipped his head back and sighed deeply. The sunlight made his pale skin glow softly. Chloe couldn't help but smile as she watched him shift the muscles in his back. He stretched and curled up and unfurled like a big cat. His eyes remained shut when she reached behind his head and kneaded the back of his skull. Chloe's lap was instantly full of Davis, his upper body yearning to her.

“Your back is twitching like crazy. Here, let me see if I can get that calmed down.” She touched a cramping spot and he took a deep breath. Chloe felt around the spot with her fingers, knowing he was tense with agony. “I'm sorry.”

Davis gave a little huff of air that sounded like a dismissal of her apology. She tried another part of his back and the tightness under her fingertips told her it was torturous. Her hands would only make things worse and spread the cramping around. She stood up and moved around to the other side of the lounger. Davis followed her with his eyes, finally turning his head forward as Chloe sat cross-legged behind him. She licked her lips and pressed them gently on the back of his shoulder.

Sometimes Davis had looked at her with bottomless need, and she'd known anything she wanted to do to him would be welcome. Before she'd killed him, Chloe had been flattered. She ran her palms over her own knees to dry up nervous sweat. They reached around his waist and held each other. He relaxed into the possessive action and tipped his chin to his chest. Davis was terrifying in surrender.

Her tongue came out to lap gingerly on the cramping muscles. She ran it upward with a solid stroke, letting the skin get warm and wet. They were swaying together, his willing slump a tribute to his trust. Chloe pushed the thoughts out of her way and kept finding those angry knots of tension. The flat of her tongue worked out most of them, and the others loosened under her knuckles. She ran out of problem areas and just admitted to herself that she was enjoying it. Giving a tongue bath to an undead Davis Bloome was the best thing that had happened to her in years.

Her arms around him moved up his chest and hugged him back to her body. He was damp and heated from her mouth, soaking out the blouse that was wrinkled from sleeping in it. Chloe rose to her knees and licked the back of his neck, following the tendons to his ear. Davis moved faster than he could have a half hour before, breaking her hold around his waist and slipping out of the rest of his clothes.

Metropolis was still in the quiet mode of very early morning, but Davis' pale buttocks flexing as he stripped felt like a beacon. She watched him and waited for him to turn. He stretched to the sun, reached up for it like his fingers could close around it and take the energy more directly. For someone so white-skinned, the sun suited him. He turned and smiled at her with more than a hint of flirtation. His cock stood firm against his belly.

“Thank you,” Davis told her softly. He pulled her to her feet, watched her struggle for even a stupid reply. Chloe's legs shuffled awkwardly together and he opened her shirt with more dexterity than she had with the silly pearl buttons.

“I'm glad,” she blurted out, tears in her eyes. “I'm glad it didn't work. I didn't want you to die.”

His soft, senstive mouth could make all the distinct shapes of quiet, considerate emotions. It curved down into a frown of sympathy. Davis didn't think of himself, she'd suspected. He only thought of how his problems could hurt other people. He wasn't sad for his continued suffering but for her suffering over his death.

“It means more that you were willing to try, because you didn't want it to happen,” he explained. “I didn't want to die, either, not when you put your hand up to mine. Maybe it's all my own fault for changing my mind.”

Warm palms parted her blouse and pushed it away. Chloe shrugged out of it and kicked her shoes off. She couldn't stop staring into his eyes now that they were sending out those conflicting waves of warmth and caution. She hauled her pants off and pressed on him. Panties didn't keep her from getting the whole heat of his arousal. She bent her arms around and unclasped her bra. The morning would be bright and warm enough if they were touching.

Davis was down on his knees in front of her, fingers down the sides of her panties. He pulled at them and they eased away with the last of her reservations. It was so clear that all of their meetings came to this moment. It was so easy between them because it was supposed to happen.

He looked up at her as she stepped out of the last of her clothing. Davis was glowing with desire and she squeezed with her thighs until the dizzy thrill of it faded back to an ache. His face moved between her legs and his tongue slicked along the curls there. He pulled them straight and crunched them between his teeth gently, being careful not to pull.

“Chloe, I won't be . . .” He trailed off and stood up, digging two fingers up into her and pumping them. She held on to his arms and quivered. Her body swept in to tease up along his front, and Davis gritted his teeth. “This first time I won't be able to wait for you. I'm sorry.”

She honestly didn't care, cared even less when he used his massive strength to pick her up and lower her to the lounger like some kind of museum piece. It was one thing to be picked up and saved, and another visceral coiling to feel cherished by it. Chloe opened herself as wide as he needed, trying to help as he settled between her legs and lined up. She looked up at him, surrounded by a mellow glow of sunlight – alive.

“I love you,” she smiled.

He was nearly gone before he got inside. She cried out at the shock of the sudden penetration, but she was ready. Davis made her even wetter as he stiffened and came hard. He grunted her name and started a slow, even rhythm. Chloe stroked his back and enjoyed the hard feeling of him filling her. She knew he was going to go soft and it wouldn't be enough time for her.

The closeness was nice, and he would make it up to her on another day. He had just come back from the dead, and she'd heard worse excuses for disappointing her sexually.

“Davis, it's okay, we're okay,” she told him after a few minutes. He was still hard, but that had to be fading fast. Her legs slid up in an embrace along with her arms. “It's okay.”

“We could be better,” he said deeply, his voice holding a joking lilt. “Close your eyes and feel the sun, Chloe. We'll come together this time.”

He sounded assured of himself, and so matter of fact. She realized she'd been forgettting again that he was Kryptonian. Not only was he very strong, his endurance was amazing. He wasn't still hard, he was hard again. She chuckled to herself and relaxed back into the cushion. Davis' hand slid under her neck and picked her up. He kissed her smoothly, his tongue lightly flavoured like juice. They breathed in sync. Her hands found his shoulder blades and clung to them like handholds on a mountain. He was big above her, mostly off her skin but close enough to heat the parts that weren't getting any sun. Every thrust sent bursts of pleasure sparking along her abdomen and up her chest.

“That's good,” she mumbled. “Really good.”

“Gets better, soon.”

He lowered her down and came down on her himself, letting his weight touch her all over. Her breasts crushed as her nipples dragged with raw friction. Davis's mouth was on her neck, catching her hair in it, too, in a way that didn't seem like an accident. He chewed on her skin through the curtain of hair, and she turned her head to help. Her feet braced and he cupped her hips.

“Davis!” Twelve hours ago she had been sobbing on the floor, watching as Oliver's men carried away his body. His body now was so completely engrossing there was no resemblance. Davis moved in her, pulling all the way out and shoving hard past the instinctive clench of her body. He was leaving marks on her hips and forcing her muscles into the kind of orgasm that was nearly painful. She opened her eyes to a stellar view of his rapt expression, a flare of morning light bleaching all details about the sky behind him.

Chloe was so hot, so restless. She bit her lip and it wasn't enough. Her nails dug in. She kicked at his legs and pounded her hips up to meet him as he came down into her. She kissed him and made loud, muffled noises of effort. Her wet hair flicked over her face and Davis nudged it off with his nose. He was looked at her, gazing deeply from brown eyes that she'd given up on ever having gaze at her again.

“Go on, Chloe, go,” he urged her.

The pinch to her clit happened at the same time as the nip on her chin and bruising grip on her ass. The unleashing of force everywhere dazzled her for a long, loud shout, then brought it all back to her center. Davis was pulsing come down into her again, and she let herself enjoy the hot recklessness of it. His head tossed as he jerked in her arms. She clamped her legs around him and kept him there, basking in the heat of Davis and the sun that was recharging him.

“You're alive,” Chloe whispered with awe, once her voice was back.

“More than ever,” he confirmed in a peaceful tone. “Did you mean what you said”

Her mouth went dry, and he pulled out to let her drink some juice. Chloe nodded uncertainly, “I did. I don't understand how you can love me, now, but there's no point in taking back something that's true.”

Davis reached out as if to hug her, but he held her chin for a punishing bite to her lip. She wrinkled her nose at him and rubbed at her pout. “Don't understand it. Just know it. Love was never meant to make sense. I came back because I love you. I don't know how it works. I don't really care.”

She didn't care either. They curled up under the sun and listened to the parking lots nearby fill with cars and people. His fingers wrapped themselves in her hair and lifted it gently to slide the golden strands along his lips.

By the morning cigarette breaks, Chloe and Davis escaped to her car and left the roof to her neighbours.

lithophane

Reccing Notes: The third installment of the universe started by lathe and continuing in vessel. Just by way of explanation, a lithophane is an etched artwork in translucent porcelain that reveals a three dimensional picture with depth and detail. This has fic relevance. really. ^^

by vagrantdream at her/my journal
2633 words, pg-13, infamous and eternal (in a very AU manner of speaking)

Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
I. The One Who is All.

The foundation was named for Isis, she'd told Lana, the Eqyptian goddess of love, and life, and healing. She saw Isis as the nurturer; the one who went to the ends of the earth for only one person, brought Ra to his knees.

i. Lana had seen the Isis Foundation a front for anti-Luthorcorp operations; only later as a place where the meteor-infected got on their feet. It was like a ward for patients with non-terminal diseases, a stopping place until they stepped into the whole wide world again. Isis was not meant to be a prison.

ii. Davis was looking for a prison, kept himself walled from the world the only way he could. He wasn’t like all the other cases that she’d tried to help meteor infected, all those times she’d failed miserably. The other meteor mutants had wanted the connection of seeing other people like themselves. He needed to stay as far away from others as possible.

iii. She never actually wrote anything on that pad of hers. It was another typical gesture of avoidance, like reading her first love letter out loud. She told Davis he couldn’t stay. She’d found him through coincidence and good guesswork. Someone else could find him just as easily, and if something happened they’d both be torn to bits.
“I’m a risk wherever I go, Chloe.”
“…I don’t think my apartment would work, considering... I was thinking you should come with me to Isis. That’s kind of the purpose of the place.”
“I can’t go there. I can’t just go into a room with other people. I might hurt somebody.”
“Isis has been closed down for almost a month. The friend who gave it to me kind of became the project. There’s no steady traffic in and out of the building, and I couldn’t get more tenants to come in.”

iv. “It’ll be safe.” So sure. He’d seen it there, the raw commitment with ‘her kids’ at Isis, the belief that she could help them, the pain after one of them had turned out to be a sadistic killer. He was the one person she’s helping, and he thought that he’d do everything he could to do this, whatever they were attempting. It was almost easy to think he wouldn’t break her heart in that hour when he felt just human.

v. (He didn’t have anything to take with him but those injections and neatly folded changes of clothes already packed in a red canvas bag.) It looked to her as if they’d been there for a week.

II. She Who Seeks Shelter

The blood red lettering over the wall reminds her of blood, the sacred pendants entombed with pharaohs. Isis was also the Queen of the Underworld, of death. Davis can’t die; he can only live, trapped and Isis is the prison of his choosing.
(Chloe doesn’t have a plan, not in the true sense of the word. He’ll be down there and she’ll be…around, kind of like a warden. The Queen of the Underworld, indeed.)

i. She’s careful to lock the front and basement door behind them, merely visual protections that can splinter to bits. (She doesn’t let herself think of what could happen next, what she’ll have to do to keep him inside.) It won’t come to that.

ii. He’s got about an hour left before he takes the injections again. He barely pays attention to the look of where he’s going to live. The dust on the boxes of documents, the fact that there’s only one corner where he can possibly sleep. She pretends to clean ineffectually, wonders how long it’ll be when until she forces him to come out with it.

iii. There, in the half opened bag, are her excuses. She doesn’t know how she’ll get the drugs analyzed exactly, but it always pays to be prepared.
“Give me.” He puts the needle in her palm so fast he almost drops it. It’s not subtle when he goes to the corner of the room, as far as he can from her personal space.

“Any particular reason you want to melt into the wallpaper, there?” He stiffens, and his eyes tell her the rest. “So it was a bad nightmare.”
“You died, that’s not just a bad nightmare, that’s...” (When she walks it’s not like the construct used to, but he can’t move any farther backwards and he’s trapped. Two yards left between them and it hurts.)
“My dad used to tell me that if you have dreams like that, they never ever come true.” “They’re frequent. The drugs cause trances and I saw you…”
“You may have some alien stuff going on, but I don’t think you’re Nostradamus. You’re not transforming or on meds now. Nothing will happen. I can’t really help if you act like a scared rabbit.”
Her hand hovers above his and he shudders. In the dream everything didn’t sound so sensible. “You’ve got to be okay with this.” The particulars blur so he’s not sure how long her hand lingers or what the exact words in what she says.
(She had healing once and she doubts it’s possible for her to be hurt; he doesn’t have to shut himself off.) There’s more than triumph, and something a little sad, in her smile.

iv. It’s all in the small steps. When he does take the drugs, she locks the door between them. Part of it is because he doesn’t want her to see him like that; part of it is because she has her own task to deal with. She wonders how he’ll react to the bandages on her left palm and the paper towels soaked in blood.

v. He’s the paramedic, still. When the bandages fall apart he resets them for her so they don’t chafe. It’s the barest touch, and it lingers like a phantom limb.

vi. She wants to reassure him, tell him that she won’t die, that he won’t hurt her. Only they’ve never been able to keep lies between them, and the scarlet marks her like a brand. “We’ll figure out something.” she says.

III. Lady of the Words of Power
She’s no great lady of magic; possesses no magic touch to make this right, no abilities than will suddenly make this easy.

i. It’s been a week of looking over her shoulder every minute, telling Clark about her work with Lana, telling Jimmy nothing because he won’t ask and she doesn’t know what she’d answer anyway. The threads to her old life keep her in limbo, but his desperation drives her as her own. She feels locked into research and hope.

ii. The drugs she analyzes on the Isis computers were just that. Drugs that ought to have been fatal to any human being; that his body is resisting more every single time. The only way they could possibly work if they were something like Kryptonian viruses capable of adapting at It’s own speed, like the ones that had changed Lionel Luthor; destroyed. Human drugs give him only a few weeks before time runs out. There are some sketchy research projects on DNA inactivation; where the risks outweigh the possible benefits almost ninety percent, where the Davis she knows could vanish forever just as easily as it.

iii. No idea is worth discarding at this point. She even buys steaks, bloody and raw, as if they will satisfy Its bloodlust.

iv. The next time he blurs into her life, Clark finds her with four packages of steak in her arms. He says nothing at first; neither does she. She’s perfectly aware she’s been shopping for two the past weeks; and she doesn’t want him to be. He pushes the cart behind her.
“Are you alright, Chloe? You’ve been distant lately. Jimmy’s worried. I know you need time to process, but so early after you’ve married, you two should really spend more time...”
Of course that was the reason he’d always wanted to see her.
“Thanks for the help, dear Abby. That work with Lana is more time consuming than you’d think”
“I talked to Lana.” He says. There went her alibi, but he won’t just go out and say it.
She wants to be able to shock that noble look off his face, just once. Something like ‘yes, Clark, I’ll confess to the torrid affair.’ Once she would have expected him to ask for the punch line. Now, he might actually believe her. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
“I want to help you, Chloe.” He tells her, looks like it’s actually him in pain when he doesn’t ever worry if he has tomorrow. (She thinks it’s become a reflex for him.)
“We both know how that turned out, don’t we?”

v. She should feel worse about it, in hindsight. Clark’s been having a tough time of it lately, with discovering that not all people fawn over acts of heroism, powers like his. Linda Lake just takes it to a whole new level by turning him into something from War of the Worlds, tearing down any comfort in the life he’s constructed.


vi. Chloe can’t be around Clark now, not when there are people calling out for blood. Not when there are just two thin doors between the world outside and Davis and her. She would feel much calmer if Linda didn’t remember her at all.

IV. The Brilliant One in the Sky

She’d always wanted to see the carvings in the sacred temple: My veil no mortal has hereto raised. The cool stone face, at once distanced and comforting. Invulnerable. She’s never been good disguising things or putting up fronts. They come up thin and flimsy and she thinks he must see through them in a minute.

i. She used to be able to hide behind words. ‘Engaged’ should have been so much flimsier than ‘married’. But she doesn’t feel any firmer, any farther from him at all.

ii. Despite what it might seem like, there’s nothing to sneeze at; nothing at improper at all. They have been friends, have seldom touched. He still looks at her like she’s at the center of everything and that’s as far as it goes.

iii. She’s the only one to initiate touch, at moments where she can’t take the space and the gaps between. When she does hug him there is no change rippling through him, no drugs in his system. She can still feel the unsteadiness of how he draws in breaths, even as his hands come up to her back.

iv. She finds her lie in the dull look in Jimmy’s face. He finally throws the word ‘affair’ out as a challenge as she packs the lunches one morning. (She disappears for stretches at a time; he knows she’s not thinking of him as she sleeps, there’s something about her that he doesn’t understand.) Her eyes feels raw but she looks at him steadily until he stabs his fork angrily into his omelet. “I don’t know you.” He says. She knows he’s right.

v. (She’s lost her capacity to lie to herself. She doesn’t deny that she feels that pull toward Davis, like gravity. There’s a mix of desire, comfort and protectiveness that she never tries to define; that she can’t voice because that’s not who they are.)

vi. Maybe she’s always known that she was in as deep in this as he was. Davis spends more and more of his time in a haze of pain, and those moments he is with her everything has a purpose and she feels like she has something. For a little while.

vii. She won’t deny the feelings, something all at once more and less complicated anything she ever felt for Clark. She thinks ‘affair’ is an ugly word, exactly the Jimmy would see it if he could.

V. Mistress of the House of Life
(He lives in a room that’s like a box, but everything about his life is more normal than he can remember. )

i. She forces him to eat, plays music by Bach and Handel, draws him out. All of this, in some hope that it’ll keep him human.

ii. It’s easy to remember to have faith in his humanity when she lingers everywhere in his conscience. It’s the details, how she tucks a pen behind her ear, drops references a mile a minute, reaches out when he least expects it.

iii. They talk plans; she lines up every outlandish idea that can possibly be of help. He watches when she stacks piles and piles of research texts on each other and he catches them before they topple. No one else will have these moments, for however long they last.

iv. Even when she’s gone, she keeps an old red jacket hanging over the couch, a scent he recognizes. It’s easy to close his eyes, fall into the deception. She’s not his. She’s married, and he doesn’t have the right to thoughts like that. Right or wrong, these are the memories he calls on when it begins.

v. She’s never seen him change. He can’t be sure what is quite real with the drugs, what he really sees versus what happens. But sometimes he feels it sparking of some parts of him, an arm flickering with spines; worse the thick heaviness in the back of his skull. He tries, squeezes his eyes shut, goes to a good memory, and remembers that some nights she sleeps with her back to the door.

vi. Pain is better than the oblivion. The drugs don’t cause him quite so much pain now, leave in their wake curiously blank moments to infringe on him, when his mind feels like its going, floating off into oblivion.

vii. It starts out small increments-seconds lost, minutes. He doesn’t think he changes, stays in his place and she’s been safe so far. Oblivion is what he fears most, no conscious control, no pain. If he lets go, these are the moments when he could easily become a monster in human form; when he can’t control what his body will do.

VI. Moon Shining Over the Sea

She’ll have to make a choice soon; cut ties with one world or the other because she can’t live in both. When she does it, everything will change. The world will be turned on its head, and she won’t be swayed by what used to be her life.

i. Lois. Clark. Jimmy. They were her life, once. They can’t always be. Soon, she thinks. Soon. Not just yet.

ii. She leaves the foundation for a trip with Lois, a girl’s night out. Lois is cross at the farm boy again for reasons unknown, but they make it a pact not to speak of anything important. It’s just time with where she is just Lois’s cuz, time she wishes she had to give.

iii. Things don’t go as planned. They end up walking on their own through ugly, un-crowded streets, two girls in impractical shoes. Easy targets for a couple of thugs. She ducks and weaves ungracefully; wallops one with her purse. Lois incapacitates the other with a pair of heels. Stilettos; perfectly fierce…

iv. That becomes Lois’s plan, something to draw attention away from Clark. A dramatic description of her superhuman prowess, a few exaggerations should do the job; maybe even stall the front page. Maybe she won’t ever say it out, but Clark is the center of her life.

v. Chloe thinks that that was her once. (When she drops her as the anonymous source in her latest column, Lois thinks it still is.)

vi. Clark and Lois, Jimmy…They have each other. They’ll be alright. And she has him. (Chloe thinks she is ready now.)

I.
Regardless of what she said, she never really understood Isis; never understood the counseling, what her role meant. But she’s living it now. It’s unavoidable how it all merges; shapes her into the girl who’s willing to go to the ends of the earth. The one who’s going to open that door and face it all.
Life, love, home and death.
Isis. She thinks she almost understands the name.

She who makes the Right Use of the Heart.

Endnotes: Header titles taken from Egyptian mythology, the book of the dead.

round

Reccing Notes: The description goes: Chloe has to stay with Davis. Does that mean she has to hate it?
She really doesn't hate it and you can just see the connection as the ambulence makes its rounds in Metropolis.
Its organic, beautiful and you get a really good sense of who they both are, and who they can be together. Zomg, read it!
by seriousfic at her lj.
1,865 words, pg-13, eternal

He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.



For a moment, they stared across the stairs at each other, the click of the lock closing echoing in the empty space. Chloe tried to ignore the obvious underworld connotations of Davis at the foot of the steps, but she couldn’t help it—as he walked up to her, she felt like Persephone about to be abducted by Hades. It had never occurred to her that Persephone might have gone willingly.

“So how does this work?” she asked, then made an attempt to break the ice. “Do you have to drink my blood?”

“I don’t know. For now, I think we should just stay close.”

She had watched him die, once.

***

As they drove to his apartment, Chloe tried to think of how she’d explain this to Clark. It’s painful to realize she doesn’t know her best friend, not enough to know if he’ll fly off the handle or if he’ll wait. It’s more painful to realize she doesn’t know herself. If Davis were someone else, were Lex, what would she be telling Clark to do? In the middle of the night, it’s easy to believe that daylight was just a fantasy.

She made plans to go to the Kent farm, figure out how often the changes came, the minimum time between them, turn this thing between them into an appointment instead of… Maybe they could even figure out what about Chloe made the beast yield. Distill it.

“Chloe-in-a-can,” Davis said as the streetlights strobed over him. Chloe realized how grim her own attempt at humor had sounded. Joking over chopped onions seemed like a million years ago.

***

She didn’t know why they went to his apartment, now that they were manacled together. It wasn’t fair. His death, as gruesome as it was, gave some catharsis to her feelings toward him and now he was pouring salt on her open wounds.

Davis gulped and told her she could have the bed, collapsed onto the couch before she could say anything. The bedsheets were matted with his scent, the memory of him pressed into the mattress. She slept wrapped up in him, feeling every inch of the distance between them, and wondered if this was her life now.

***

He looked both menacing and pleasing in his sleep, brow furrowed in consternation, lips occasionally parting in a half-noise. Chloe ran a hand over his face and he turned into his touch, his lips brushing the webbing of her hand. She put on coffee.

***

He pulled some strings, brought her along on the nightshift. She saw an attack start and stop. He seized as something pressed up against his skin from the inside, then panted for long moments as it retracted. She hadn’t realized how much it hurt.

***

First call was a car accident. Car swerved away from the collision, hit the guardrail. Davis collared the driver, Chloe comforted the other driver who’d called it in. The gurney folded up into the back and Chloe sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the patient. She watched until he disappeared to the hospital and Davis came back with a tray of coffee.

“He’ll be fine,” he said when she didn’t take hers.

“I could’ve helped him.”

Davis squinted as he remembered the time she had told him she was a meteor freak, just dropped it into a conversation, maybe hoping it would drive him off so she’d have an excuse to be stuck with Jimmy. Instead he’d nodded and asked her what it was like, having something like that inside her.

She couldn’t remember her answer.

“He’ll be fine,” Davis repeated, starting up the ambulance. Chloe sipped her coffee and tried to remember when Davis had learned she took it black.

***

A bar fight that got out of hand, a knife, blood. Chloe took one look at him and she reached, her hand starting to glow. Davis stepped in the way, taking the medical kit off his shoulder. She watched as Davis did her job, a helpless feeling crunching her stomach. By the time he finished, another ambulance had arrived to take the patient to the hospital. Davis climbed back into the car with her, peeling off his bloody gloves.

“It kills you,” he said, “healing people.”

“Don’t try to protect me. It never works.”

“The knife missed his vital organs. I know it looked bad, but it wasn’t.” He smiled at her meagerly. “I promise I’ll call if I need you.”

***

Drive-by shooting, clean getaway, two dead and one going that direction. No red and blue blur in sight. Davis pulled the patient into the back of the ambulance, his movements leaden. He looked at Chloe.

“Do it.”

She took a deep breath, forced herself to relax, let the power grow out of that place below her lungs and then spill out of her. It didn’t hurt anymore, that had just been her mind telling her it should hurt. But she did feel faint, her lips turning blue and her eyes turning gray. She fell into her seat as the woman sputtered. Davis sedated her and climbed in beside Chloe.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just tired. It’ll pass.” She looked at him and offered a weary smile. “It’ll pass.”

***

The next one was just a kid who stepped on a nail. He was crying so hard that Chloe wanted to heal him anyway. While Davis was telling the mother where to find a doctor for tetanus shots, Chloe did. The kid kept crying, but not as much as before. Davis glared at her as they drive off.

“What happens if you heal too much?”

“Didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“What happens?”

“Once… I saw a bright light… like,” she held up her hands, the ones that had glowed so recently. “But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about controlling it since then.”

“But there is a danger?”

She nodded glumly.

“Okay. That’s all I needed to hear.”

***

A fire. Them and ten other ambulances, four fire engines, the red-blue blur not sticking around once he’d evacuated the building. Chloe felt the wind of his passage and ached to be able to tell him, to believe he’d make things better and not worse.

“You gonna be okay?” Davis asked, and she’d given the briefest of nods before he was pulling her to the triage area. In Davis’s EMT jacket and cap, no one noticed her. “These are the worst,” he said, people breathing in respirators, their skin so black and charred that Chloe couldn’t understand how they were still alive. She bent over them and let the light into them, tears coming to her eyes as her entire body fought down the death she was taking in.

There were always more and Davis ushered her always onward, his hands supporting her. Finally he pulled her in an embrace, whispering “thank you” into her ear, then he sat her down and went to help the rest. No deaths. Not one.

“You know how many times in my career I’ve seen a fire that bad and no one died?” Davis asked her afterward. “You were amazing.”

Chloe was too tired to stay upright and at some point she had slumped down so her head was on his thigh. She couldn’t remember if she’d put it there or he had.

“Are amazing.” He was petting her hair, his big hand running over her head as gently as a wave rolling over the beach, and she felt sated, like she was going to bed after a three-course meal and a glass of wine. Her power had never felt like this before, so right, and on impulse she kissed his knee before her eyes shut.

***

When she woke up most of the night was gone. The clock burned 5 AM. She’d been strapped into the gurney in back, Davis’s jacket under her head, blonde hairs now twined in the fabric.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Davis said when she climbed into the front. “Just a heart attack, and he was fine without you.”

“Good.” She handed him his jacket back. “I’d hate for this to be… I mean, maybe… this could be our regular Saturday night thing?”

He grinned a little. “Amazing,” he repeated.

They drove for a while, awkwardly waiting on the radio.

“How does it feel? Not having to worry about an… attack?” she asked.

“That’s not what’s making me feel this way.”

She leaned over, her lips dancing next to his cheek, and whispered in his ear “What would your boss say about workplace romances?”

The radio buzzed. Gunman in a produce market, two dead, five wounded, including the gunman. Five blocks away. Davis hit the sirens.

***

Chloe caught a glimpse of one of the bodies before its body bag closed up. A jagged tear in the middle of its forehead, with powder burns blackening the eyes. Execution. The market still resonated with violence. Chloe smelled something and was dismayed she recognized it as gunpowder. When had her life gone from nonconformist to freak?

She and Davis hustled past the cops to the victims. First one, middle-aged man, reminded Chloe of her dad. She bent toward him when Davis’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Chloe, he’s the guy.”

She stopped. Tried to imagine those hands wrapped around a gun. “Others first.”

Davis nodded brusquely. In a whirlwind they were at the victims’ sides, Davis distracting the EMTs already there, Chloe grabbing their hands and telling them to hang on as her palm glowed. By the time Davis was leading her out she was dead on her feet. They passed the shooter again. An EMT was using the paddles on it. Shouted “clear” and the shooter burst off the ground with electricity.

“I can help him,” Chloe said, moving forward.

Davis’s hand was locked on her arm.

“Davis?”

“Some people don’t deserve miracles.”

“Isn’t that for God to decide?”

“Clear!” the EMT shouted, and the shooter took another defibrillation.

Davis let go of her arm.

She knelt down beside the shooter, before the EMTs could stop her, and dug her fingers into his arm. “Is he going to be alright?”

The paramedics pulled her back. On the next defibrillation, the man gasped for breath.

***

“He’ll get the help he needs,” Chloe said, when Davis wouldn’t stop being quiet.

“Or a jail cell for the rest of his life.”

“Either way, that’s not our choice to make.”

“You could’ve been killed.” Davis eyed his watch. “Shift’s over. I think I’ll be alright if you want to…”

“I don’t. You mind if we go to my place next?” Chloe rubbed at her eyes after realizing the insinuation. “My toothbrush is there.”

He nodded eloquently and they drove. She rested her head on his shoulder. It’d been a long night and it wasn’t going to get any shorter.

“Chloe, if you had a choice…” Davis turned his head away from her, ashamed. “If you had a choice, would you stay with me?”

“I did have a choice. I made the same one I’ll always make.”

His fingers relaxed a little on the steering wheel. Sometimes, that was enough.

binding by striking

Reccing Notes: What if Eternal hadn't had some kind of cathartic effect, what if Chloe was cautious and Davis was broken. Would that change anything at all?
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
6892 words, r/nc-17, eternal and beast (kind of)

The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
(Say I come to you by circles.)
Chloe spends eight hours in the cot where she doesn’t fall asleep because fear and guilt churn like two twin monsters in her gut.
The clinch of theirs is more intimate than it ought to be and this isn’t ever something she would have felt comfortable with Jimmy doing or he’d ever have thought of.
Of course, Jimmy never had a monster inside him and he didn’t need the Chloe drug.

She still feels Davis’s arms gentle around her waist, the way he breathes, how underneath it all she feels far too safe. She tries to forget because she’s not Clark, not full of romantic fairy tales that will miraculously make everything right. The danger didn’t just vanish because Davis had gone and died and snatched a piece of her and had never given it back.
Pragmatism is sensibility.
It’s the only thing that will keep her from falling to pieces that she can’t put together.
Maybe this means something.
Maybe this is what she needs to believe.

In the morning, she takes Davis’s arms from around her and feels grateful that he hasn’t asked her to stay, not since the first night.
The calm lifts from his face and she’s aware of how stark and sick his skin looks. He might be endowed with a destructive alien DNA but living, waiting in this light is not good for him.
He only has her and she’s taking that too.

“I have to go to work for a few hours. I’ll be back.” She says.
It’s the pretext of a normal life and all that. A steady employment will keep Clark from stalking her for help or worrying.
“Okay.”
His eyes linger on her face, seeing and holding and suffocating her. ‘I’m yours.’ they seem to say even though he hasn’t said a word about that, not since she found out and he was begging her not to run.
He doesn’t need to open his mouth to say it in silence and in roars.
She tries not to look at him as she runs up the steps and out the door.

(Say the line that carries my name keeps me from knowing you)

Still, she knows when it’s time, feels it in every fiber of her being. It’s the hour, of course. 8:00 pm leaves her permanently unsettled.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have left at all, knowing what could come out of the apartment without her.

Doomsday. The Ultimate Destroyer.
It sounds like something out of a bad b movie, and no matter how much she should, she never uses the name. It horrifies her enough and the thought of it as part of that guy she knew changes nothing.

Davis needs her and of course she’s his voice to anchor him to the world. His hands had killed people, countless people, enough to terrify Clark several times over. It must horrify him to be alone with silence after that.
Part of him is still the guy who opened up to her with his fears all that time ago.
Love me. Lie to me. He never says as much, but she knows she won’t be able to try to make him forget, when she can’t. She can’t love him and the worst part is that it’s not all his fault.
He takes the blame anyway.

He wants her and that little fact is hard to bypass when she sleeps pressed up against him every night, but he actively avoids doing anything that would make her uncomfortable.
He doesn’t scare her as much as she does.
She can’t get too close.
She’s fallen in love with the guy who was meant to be a hero and he broke her heart. If she fell in love with the guy who was meant to tear the world apart she would just be asking for it.

(We are held where we call. We know something and are held to what we know.)
Davis needs her now.
Clark catches her halfway out of the Watchtower, almost running to her Beatle in her heels.
He’s big and blocking out the sun, insisting on knowing how she is doing on her own. His concern might have made her twinge a little before. Not now, not when he was coming at someone else’s behest, because suddenly Lois thought she was acting like a widow. Not now.
“She hasn’t seen me in a week.”

“I have, and I think I agree with her. Listen, it’s the MO. You’re running yourself ragged and shutting yourself off. It isn’t healthy.”

By the time she hops in the front seat he’s in the seat beside her all strapped in.

“Clark, any other time would be great. Not now, okay?”

“We need to talk.”
Clark follows her to her door and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it. Can he feel the pull, like Davis can, she wonders? Is he just that dense?

“Look, I know you’ve been hurting. Jimmy first and then that Davis…thing. What you did. Killing someone. ”
Killing someone? Killing a friend, with fantastic recuperative abilities and immortality to boot. Who was currently in her basement, while it got that need to kill the Kryptonian again, increasingly worse.
It was just about to bust a way out if she didn’t get the idiot off her doorstep.
No wait, hero.
And she should be thinking of how Clark might be torn apart. Not that this is her last chance. To keep him, not Clark.

A hysterical laugh wants to bubble up in her throat. Care to come in for tea, Clark? That’s what he wants to hear. The knuckle sandwich is on me.

“It shouldn’t have happened. Just because I’ve been busy doesn’t mean I don’t care. You have to let me in for me to help you.”
She expects any moment for a crash, the breaking beyond in the darkness.
He must be in so much pain.

“And what would you do, Clark? Tell me how it would have been if I’d listened? Maybe you could pull out the growing up with the Kents speech for good measure?”

The knot of fear is working its way into her voice but she can’t be too hysterical or he’d know. Maybe he wouldn’t.
“But killing someone…”
Measured. The best lies have a base in truth

“My friend, Clark. I killed my friend.”
After he died Davis got to be all she remembered, the man who saved people and who held her when she cried. Things are not so simple now, but the definition stays. She couldn’t cut the feeling out of it, no matter what.

“Maybe I don’t need your advice. Maybe I need to mourn. You have a world to save. Not me.”
He closes the door gently.

(Say I am a wine you know better than to drink.)
She doesn’t have time to hold her hand in front of the lever and breathe now.

She’s not only unsettled. She’s terrified because she doesn’t have memories of that, doesn’t know what to expect. Her perfectly sensible instinct tells her to run. It’s kept her alive with Lex and Linda.

But Davis will be there, a little bit of him. She’d stopped it before, but it doesn’t make the thought any easier. It could easily rend her limb from limb.

The last bulb has guttered out, and the Talon table crashes into her hip as she stumbles. This time, she feels him before she sees him and he’s not even touching her.

“Davis.” There’s no answer but that strange growling, It trying to push out of his skin.
She can see his shape on the ground, on his knees. This has happened to him before in the cage. In the cage before she’d killed him the first time.
“He’s gone.”

He’s just an outline in the dark, and the outline doesn’t look right at all.
Yet there are no red eyes to stiffen her and send her wheeling backwards.
It/he hugs her around the waist so that it feels her ribs will crack, while he’s on his knees like he were a small child. Her voice comes out too quiet and thin.

“It’s all fine. You’re fine Davis.”
She thinks she finds his shoulder through the torn cloth, a roughness and sharp sting. The blood trickles past her fingers, drying cold in the air.

He’s trying not to breathe, trying not to move because it hasn’t receded yet. Just one quick movement and that could be it for her.
He’s kneeling.
The whole idea is so much like a pilgrimage before the Virgin Mary that she wishes she could laugh. But she can’t, because she can feel the muscles in his cheek twisting and the tension going through him.
Minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. Too much longer that the last time.
How can this be enough for him?

I’m sorry he says to her,
“You didn’t hurt me.” she lies. She can feel his breath in warm scared puffs of air through the thin shirt, and wonders if he feels the shudder though her skin. Of course he does, he always does.

“Thank god.” She wonders if it’s just a colloquialism or he believes still. He’s been hit with more than any true-fiction conspiracy novel- learning about being a genetic form from another planet, meant to have no free will and a destiny that was the exact opposite of everything he’d tried to be. He wants to and it breaks her heart.
“Can’t lose you.” It’s stopped and he’s slow in letting go.

These days he doesn’t touch her unless she does first. One of the downsides of having flesh that can easily be pierced through by spikes, but not just that. He sees himself as tainted with the invisible blood on his hands. He'd scrubbed it off and then cooked her dinner once but now that she knows he won't forget it. It was all fine and dandy when he was the hero she wanted to believe in. She thinks maybe she hates him a little for that.
He'd lied and that had been her truth.
He hates himself more than she could though, and she wishes he'd let go. He didn’t have the choice of making it stop.

“Then I take it you missed me.” Her quip falls flat, in part because her voice is wobbling. It’s impossible, the pretence of this. She can’t lie; keep Davis and Clark apart forever, every minute of every second of every day. She’s not that strong, not that anything.

“I’m here now.” She says. She wonders why her, what he thinks he sees.
“You won’t lose me.” Oh, but she can lose him.
She can lose herself.

(She could drop to her knees on the asphalt and try to forget that she was thinking of him just then.
Not Clark. It wouldn’t work.
It would break her; one moment after another held back in a dam until they over spilled. If he leaned forward then; touched her lips with his; she thinks that she would have given him everything, all the crumbling bits of her that should have been running.

She could be one of those moths flying headlong into the light that’s too bright and too blinding and too warm.
I can’t save you, she would want to say. Only she wouldn’t say that when the constant pained look in his eyes was almost hopeful; and the tenderness in his face made her warm, not suffocated. Only she’d draw her hand across his cheek and leave a scarlet mark.

“I trust you. I care about you. I’m tired of being scared.” She’d trust he’d never try to hurt her.
He’d be warm and trembling under her hands, like there was too much that couldn’t be contained. And she’d feel it, trickling its way to her skin. He’d burn.
He’d give everything, take much more. His touch would mark her.)

As it is, he holds her a little too tight and it doesn’t feel like enough.

(Say this water doesn't pull but when you fall takes you altogether in. Say you are in.)

It is destiny, or DNA, or just the hateful actions of worse monsters than anything that they could’ve made him into.
He can’t help hurting her.

She’s covered in blood; she doesn’t know whose blood it is- Oliver’s, Jimmy’s, Clark’s or someone else’s. She couldn’t save them all.

There is smoke and dust and sirens with no one to back them up because anyone who has any sense has fled.
He isn’t merely red eyed, now, but decked at the center of armor and spikes. She wishes she could see something of Davis for one last time, but he’s suffering in something a hundred times worse than hell.
Maybe he can see around them and is struggling from wherever he’s trapped.

All she sees is those eyes, red and burning and for the first time not seeing her at all. It is only on a mission, following a preprogrammed genetic urge.
She should feel just little bloom of self justification now. She’d seen that this would happen, had safe guarded herself.
If she had let herself love him the way she wanted to this would have destroyed her.

(She had no illusions that being with her might have halted the monster taking over. She’s not some princess in a fairytale. She’s not that anything.)

She hadn’t taken the gamble on odds that she could never win. She did right.
She had to have done right.
Only, all she can think is that she lost anyway and that maybe if she had taken that chance, she’d have something more to remember of him.
It slices its way through the door like so much paper, bone spurs scratching on tile, impervious to the slippery carnage.
The fear should be there, and is, but she’s drowning in something that feels like despair.

Davis is gone. She realizes that she didn’t have to let herself love him for losing him to tear her apart.
This is the end. This time it won’t be enough.
Her vision blurs and she braces herself.

(Say the same thing that holds us holds us apart.)
She almost chokes in the air and her lashes stick together wetly. Darkness, blackness, comfort. For a second she thinks that this is death.
She still feels his breath even at the back of her neck, and that light bulb is still guttered out.
That wasn’t the way it happened at all.

Her hands go over his making sure. His skin is still too warm and he’s too encompassing but she leaves them there. He needed her. She needed…
It didn’t have to happen that way.

He learns about the dream. No particulars. Just that it had been a nightmare, and he knew he’d been in it. She doesn’t want him to feel guilty; but the perpetual self loathing is back on his face.
He still offers comfort the only way he knows how. He surrounds her.
This time she eases into his grip and holds on a little too tight. “I trust you.” She says. He returns the grip.
Ask me why. Please. Her defenses are in shambles right now, and she’s choked and needy enough to make the jump.
He just holds her, and then there are none.


(Say we belong to each other.)
Maybe her dream had a basis in truth.
Maybe It’s pull would grow with time so that he got absorbed and locked in its hold forever. And she lost him. Really lost him.
Again, to something that had a deeper hold on him than the grave.
Sensibility tells her that this is the way of things. Everything falls apart.
It was a warning.
One day what they have might not be enough.
It’s a useless one.
What would that change, really?

(Say we sit on some steps together, or a wall. Say something falls.)

That day, she comes home early with six halogen lights in the cramped trunk. She drags them down, one by one, and doesn’t need to ask him if he’d give a girl a hand. I can do that, he says and she says she wouldn’t want to sprain anything. All six end up rigged on the ceiling, banishing the otherworldly shadows and (she thinks) turning her hair a greenish tint.
He squints in the light, stretches up unknowingly revealing the strong, lean lines of his abdomen. She’s trying hard not to think of that now but he straightens the connections so meticulously that she just wants to watch him.

This isn’t gothic doom and gloom. It’s the real world. Anything could happen.
She tries to forget that this is Smallville.
“Now we celebrate.”
(There’s a table behind the coat hangers. The dust comes off easily. )

She’s ready to rail at him if he says he doesn’t need to eat one more time. He seems to catch onto her mood and doesn’t. The coffee is weak and the prepackaged tuna casserole isn’t quite warm but he’s sitting across from her so that she could brush his arm if she leaned all the way across the table and the dishware on her tiptoes.

He eats slowly and she wonders if he tastes it at all. He watches her eat mostly with a mixture of intensity and trying to look away politely and not succeeding. He’s confused, he must be and he won’t jump to conclusions because unlike before there’s no big honkin monster to mess with them.
Sure, maybe she just decided to share the closest to a romantic dinner she’s had in the past two years with the halogen lights. That had to be it.

She can see him, really see him. He’s still too pale but strangely beautiful and his face changes like the water from one emotion to another. He can do vulnerability and caring without needing to give a speech.
She still wants him to joke to keep her from turning into a sap, but he’s too busy swallowing her with his eyes.

She doesn’t know that singular cunning trick about eating to seduce. Maybe you were supposed to lick your fork a lot. She doesn’t want to end up looking like a hungry cat.
She does it the old fashioned way. Dig in, but not too fast. Close your mouth when you chew.

Anyway, it seems to work for him, if the way his eyes roam over her neck and try unsuccessfully to jump away is any indication. Never mind the fact that he still looks hungry.

Part of it is her fault, maybe. She figured if this was her being crazy she could go all out. Clingy green cloth. No sleeves, just straps the width of strings. Neckline dipping below the sternum. Lois had called it a boob shirt.

They may have gotten the lights up, but that was it. There is no heating down here. She hasn’t gotten cold because of him.

In hindsight, the shirt was not such a good idea. Goosebumps pebble her arms and she is not shivering, not a little. Not that much.
He puts his sweatshirt over her shoulders, anyway, and it smells like him.

(Say the language is dry and the wall is low. Say a word gets over the wall.)
She tells him about how she always used to ask pointless questions as a kid. It was part of a game. You told each other things. All truths you had to get off your chest.

A warm up round starts, she jokes, she thinks and pulls out a few embarrassingly horrific high school experiences. He doesn’t have many that would qualify as embarrassing, and more that would qualify as horrific. She sees him as he must have been, a scared kid with no one to pitch a seat in his corner, the one seen as damaged and sent to places that only would’ve damaged him more. Not even through her little venture into stalking would she have guessed the magnitude of it.
He looks at the shiny countertop, and avoids her eyes. He didn’t want to turn dinner into this.

“You can tell me anything.”
He wouldn’t ever try to unburden himself on the feelings of those necks snapping beneath his fingers, she thinks and the fear is back and this isn’t what she wanted either.

At least he’s looking at her again but it’s that look the first time she stopped it, like he sees her as some sort of angel. He’s not taking anything from her, just giving but still she wants to tell him that she can’t breathe. She has no defense against this.
“Just to seal the deal, I’ll tell you something. I still wish Clark hadn’t come by when you were cooking me dinner.”

It’s true, but she doesn’t know what she was doing then. Playing with emotional fire, maybe. She’d dressed up all the way down to her skin that night, but he doesn’t know that.
She knows what she’s doing now, she hopes.

A smile trembles at the corner of his mouth, but even that looks sad. “All of that, I forgot when I was with you.”
That-oh she knows that, how all that time he’d been doing anything, no matter how damaging to hold it back. It had worked, right up to the part he’d died. Then it had screwed with her and sent her sensibility running for the seven hills. That doesn’t change things as they stand.

“You were my only real shoulder, the guy who saved people and everything I needed.
I got used to playing robotic really well and I never had to tell myself what to feel with you.
I trusted no one else like you, with that.” In past tense, maybe not so good. She hadn’t said ‘How could you have let me trust you when you knew?’
He doesn’t look down, never looks down and the little bit of light in his eyes dulls painfully. “I’m so sorry.”

“That night could’ve been fun. We could have watched some horrible chick flick and I’d have fallen asleep on you-your shoulder. Really, it’s practically engrained in the human genome.”

“I would have been lying to you.”

This part horrifies her more than any other. Not the monster with the endless spiky protrusions, not the helpful emt who went after criminals but still people to keep it sated. (Oliver had a few fingers in the investigation and she knows what the corpses looked like, vertebrae twisted and cracked.)

He’d been the only one to give it to her straight since she met him. Bette, the blackouts, her past, Jimmy. It had made her guilty that this happened with no one else.
It had made her whole.
Only he hadn’t told her possibly the biggest secret of all. All because he couldn’t drag her into it.
So he’d come to visit, cooked her dinner, made her feel like herself again when he looked into her eyes and lied so convincingly that she’d have staked her world on it.

He could be lying now, sitting across the table looking into her eyes and lying if he wanted.
But what possible motive could he have for being crushed?
Logically, there’s the pity-trip-getting her to stay to be the med-dispenser or tearing down her walls so she gives in, but anyway it all comes down to her.
And her logic-brain has this way of shutting off when he’s around.
Animalistic roaring in an alley? Oh, that was just fear.

Enough with the thinking.

“Just tell me, in an ideal world, if it were different. You didn’t have to worry about any of this whole screwed up.... mess. What would have happened between us?”

“But it didn’t happen. There can’t be… a point to that now.”

This is the part where she should be swooning into his arms, flailing helplessly, overcome by manly passion.
What is she doing? Crossing her arms over her chest.

“Just answer. That’s the way it goes. If not you lose. Or I get cross at you. Or both.”

“We would’ve talked. You’d been going through a breakup. We would’ve eaten. You might have teased me about my cooking…”

“Don’t forget the guy hugs. I could’ve used the comfort.”

“Those were guy hugs?”

“Yep, an awfully friendly thing to do. Two years ago Clark might have done that, just the same. You know-except for the whole cooking thing.” And then Clark would’ve traded off Lana stories. And shared his horrors at hurting her when he got—excited.

“Clark never cooked me dinner. Or kissed me.”
(Well, Clark had never planted one on her unless she did it first. And after she did, he’d run away, eventually.)

If the mention of Clark’s name makes incisors start popping out, she fancies herself planting herself on Davis’s knee. Not that it would actually happen.

“…So just say in this hypothetical scenario that I was completely over Jimmy and I asked you to stay and we didn’t fall asleep watching a chick flick.”
Awkwa-rd moment.
“I would’ve shown you that he was wrong.”

“He said I didn’t trust him, so he walked away. What makes you so sure he was an idiot? Maybe he was saving himself pain.”
“You’re worth more than a little pain.”

“Yeah, because you love me, right?” She says it quick and joking and won’t think because the words won’t come out otherwise.
No pause. “I do.” He looks up, doesn’t blink and the attempt at levity falls flat. She’s never let him say to her since that time when she’d been running from him and it had been even more messed up than now.
“You’re not just saying that.” A statement. Not a question.

“Let’s say this is the hypothetical scenario.” She draws herself up, won’t break his gaze from across the countertop. “I’m asking you to show me.”

(Say a skin is like that and that what we have consumed gives us light and what is gone is the constellation that guides us.)
He doesn’t push the table over on his way to her, even if it looks like his muscles are having a fight of their own to keep from it. Even under the bright lights he stands out darkly, but this isn’t symbolic.

His eyes are the way she needs them to be.
He breathes and somewhere between then and now his mouth finds hers and his lips move against hers.
She had a thing about breath before doing this. She would have chewed four sticks of gum to banish the remnant tuna salad. It’s kind of easy to forget that she smells like fish when his lips are soft and not tentative in memorizing hers and all of him is close.

In imagination she’s been farther than this, sometimes, but it hadn’t prepared her, for here and now. She hadn’t ever thought it could be so deliberate. Before, the fantasies came in guilty snatches, unplanned moments when everything spiraled. They were sensible ways of dealing manufactured by her brain and over too soon.
This, now…isn’t. Can’t be taken back. She doesn’t care.

The kiss is heady and dizzying so she can’t be blamed for needing more. He makes a small sound and tilts her face and it feels deeper somehow.
She’s catching his words, swallowing them, learning them all over again.

They have so much to show each other and it could last for as long as they need, but it doesn’t because they are both too impatient. Not just her.
His fingers weave and fist through his sweatshirt where it’s draped on her back. She can’t tell herself she hasn’t been waiting for this.

The sweatshirt falls away onto the cement and slips under her foot when she moves closer, but she doesn’t fall because he’s there. His hands are large enough to swallow her arms and they don’t bruise. He’s everywhere, pressed close, and she’s aware of the way they seem to want to fit together. They need to and anything less is not enough.

She feels the shudder again, and of course he does. The throbbing had hurt then, it hurt now. She can hear his breath and she’s not alone in this.
She pushes against him so her knees bump his and he gets the message, clumsily yanking at the tablecloth and sending flimsy paper plates and empty Tupperware clattering to the floor. No magic tricks there.

“I liked that…bowl. What do you say you make it up to me?”

“I can do that.” He says and his voice is different, rougher than she's used to.

He hasn’t got a hair out of place since it’s so short and his shirt isn’t even wrinkled yet, but he’s still panting, still seeing and it’s still hard to breathe. His eyes are dark again, his face frightfully intense and this does not mean he’s some twisted kind of Heathcliff. He’s Davis now, just Davis, she tells herself. .

He can take anything or everything, all at once. But he just looks at her and it starts back up with the kissing, unexpectedly tender and so very focused. Looking. She’s just missing sleeves, for God’s sake, but she feels irrevocably exposed.

Helpless, too, because he’s heavy and she’s on her back and she has to crane her neck to get closer. She’s pinned against hard wood. No control, and she needs control.
She squirms and he supports himself with his arms so it lightens.

The air is cold and his mouth is anything but, sliding in an easy path over the skin above her shoulder blade and the thoughts scatter. The straps are off her shoulders now and she should be worried because this is so... shameless. Something that normal people do after dates and corny movies.
She could be thinking about DNA and destiny and inevitability and how this may be the only thing she has to remember. Normal, she wants normal.

It is a disturbingly easy feeling, his tongue sweeping easily against hers and his hands… She’s not a teenager, but here she is, playing tonsil hockey for all she’s worth.
She should stop with the thinking.
What’s more normal than a full blown make out session?

She’s going to go insane.
There are plenty of ways to be intimate, and maybe this is just another one. Soon he’s going to have enough data for a complete map.
Her shirt is on but it doesn’t matter when his palm is flat on the skin of her waist and then his mouth is there and the muscles clench involuntarily. Her skin is prickling, aware in every inch. It starts to burn as he trails up the underside of her breast and the tank top traps her before falling away. Part of her is warm at least.

She should tell him that she’s half naked and he’s not so this isn’t quite fair but she hasn’t got the voice for proper, articulated speech.
She tries to remember not to get too excited. Clark could hear her heartbeat if he listened in. But then, he has no place here.

It feels like torture but she wants him to keep on like this because when it’s over she can’t tell herself that this is only a rewind or what could have been in a world where there was no weird-ville, no sadistic alien scientists and no need to pretend.
This is what she thinks even when she holds on.

The only thing she has access to is his neck so she presses her lips there and his pulse hammers through her head.

He’s close enough that she doesn’t feel the cold much. Illogically, she’s sweating.
Somehow he doesn’t feel heavy enough now.

She kicks her heels off with a clatter to keep her feet flat on the wood and closes her eyes. Knee high stockings aren’t a barrier and she could make a joke about him having a thing for Catholic uniforms but his fingers are light and lulling. He still has calluses and she wonders how this can be if part of the destroyer’s nature is to heal. His nature. Maybe both of them are, Davis and It, fighting between themselves. Maybe this isn’t so doomed at all. He’d been human again after he died.

His weight pushes into her but her knees widen very slowly. His mouth still roves over hers and he’s warm and before she can think they are moving together.
The warmth and ache is like a drug and his arms shake on her shoulders.

She nudges him gently so she can see his face before she goes too far. He’s sweating, and his eyes have dilated so she can see the brown again but she doesn’t see him trying to distract himself with this. There is no ‘Lie to Me’ this time.

“This is all I have to give.” she says because she’s herself, as likely to cause pain as to save.
He’s been there.
If anything his eyes are warmer now. “You are everything.” He believes this.
Maybe he doesn’t need her to save him. Maybe he needs something to believe in.
Maybe she does too.

(Say we are in. Say my skin draws you. Say what we do with each other goes on.)

This is hurting him.
He’s no help staring at her like that, so she un-tucks the shirt briskly. She feels a little awed when his eyes still slide shut like he is on a high.
This doesn’t happen to her, but it apparently it just did.
The shirt used to be Jimmy’s, back in the days before he started swearing at her in e-mails. He was never coming back for it.
It stretches over Davis’s chest where she can see the muscle jolt at her touch.

His eyes are still closed so she makes an ineffectual effort to yank it over his head. It takes the two of them yanking in opposite directions and this moment is so out of the continuity of everything else that she knows it will be the one she thinks of first.
He isn’t shy touching her; pulling her in and he’s warm everywhere.

She presses her hand to his chest where it ended up and studies him. “I Tarzan, You Jane.” She mutters, aware she got them out of order.
(He seems to get the point of this and then she learns that he is literally warm everywhere.)

He sinks down to her and the sound that comes out of his mouth is like he’s really breathing for the first time since she saw him again.
She focuses on his face because she wants to scream at the sensation, feeling like she is going to break.
It’s quite a lot to take all at once.
But then he pulls away and she thinks the shock must have shown on her face. He’s still breathing deep and she understands what he’s doing.
She feels tensed for something but she reminds herself to relax and its better. He moves slowly at first but every moment soaks her senses in a miasma of heat and moisture and more aching than she thought possible.

It’s almost elemental, merciless and she anchors herself to the way his hands ground her and their eyes connect. It’s like nothing she’s used to. She used to consider the experience a success if she liked it at the time.
Now… Does she like it? Does she like breathing? Does she need it?

The circular motion feels good and maddening and not enough. She reaches for his shoulders for an outlet and when she presses her nails into his skin and they don’t leave marks. It’s such a silly thing, but she wishes she could. She bites her lip instead.

Then he’s pushing into her deeper so she can't think of anything but him, there and this isn’t enough and she murmurs than if she breaks her teeth biting into his shoulder he can pay for the dentures.

It’s like a rip current, one wave and another and then the next will rush past quick and pull her completely under.
Under, and then when she wakes up it’ll be done and the dream will be just that, a beautiful dream.
She doesn’t want it to end.
She’s trembling and trying to hold on to him, and somehow the rest of her gets that idea.
It just happens and his eyelids squeeze tight and maybe he is going to lose it right then. Only his head drops to her shoulder and he struggles to breathe deep.

Lana had told her once that she was afraid that Clark would break when he got excited. Here she is, with something she hasn’t had and maybe needed all this time and she doesn’t want to think of Clark and his tragedies.
Yet, she doesn’t want the power to break Davis.
She can’t give it back.

He moves still, and he's part of her, pulling her farther out into the water. Her neck jerks up and she arches and finds him. He is the center and all that’s left to do is let it crash over them both and hold on.

His forehead meets hers and his eyes are burning. She doesn’t let her eyes close because she needs it to be real.
It is that: terrifying and agonizing and beautiful. Then only beautiful.


(Say we struggle to get in and stay in and not ever leave).
Afterglow. She thinks that is a silly word, because they don’t look like glow sticks.
The truth is her brain is hazy, she feels sticky and the table is not really as smooth as it looks. She hopes she won’t have to pull splinters out.

He’s impossibly warm yet and she has to freeze her fingers to keep them from running down his face. The urge to hum is over whelming.
She thinks she may be happy.

It’s some time later but he’s still there and he holds her closer than he needs to. They are all but wrapped together, anyway. His fingers barely ghost across her back in small circles and she can feel his breath.

He doesn’t say anything and she’s okay with that. She needs to process so she won’t have a mini-freak-out.
Her mind is almost clear by now, like the clutter just burst out in the wake of everything else.

She’d just lain with Davis. Biblically. Not to save the world, to pacify it or to keep him attached to her. Because they’d needed it, she had.
She just conveniently forgot that that the other facet to Davis meant that she’d taken her pure motivations and stomped all over them. She wasn’t a free agent now.
Clark had nothing to do with it.

There should be two options on the table (and the pun isn’t funny). She could get up and leave before she can’t let go or wait for some divine revelation to hit her right between the eyes.

She makes it a point to keep her breathing slow and calm, like sleep. He can probably feel the change in her, as he always did even before she’d learned about the Kryptonian super abilities.
When she’d found him the first time, she didn’t run away right off. He’d killed people. He asked her to and she’d killed him. She didn’t think she could do it again.

It was nothing quantitatively measureable, a feeling that she couldn’t let go of. She’d paused before he said anything because she wanted to be given no other choice. If she’d been sensible everything would’ve fallen apart.
What’s the point in letting go now?

Maybe this is what they’ve got going for them. She doesn’t want to move.
Can’t.

His eyes don’t paralyze her but they are there and open and it’s that look again. She doesn’t ask him what he thinks he sees and just feels grateful that he does.
“I love you.”
He doesn’t add an expectant pause to the end of that sentence. “I just wanted you to know.”

She doesn't have to say anything. He'd give her everything and not ask for it back if that's what she wanted.
But one revelation deserves another and she's through with being scared.

“I’ve been thinking.”
He doesn’t say, ‘So?’ He’s waiting for her again.

“When you told me the truth I was so mad at you I---.”

“Hated me?”

“I did for a little while.”

“I would have hated me.” He bites his lip and doesn’t look away.
She won’t lie.

“I still would have helped you if you’d told me the whole truth.” He’d preferred to die than ask for her help. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t live with it. Knowing what I’d done and then pushing it on you. It wasn’t the way it should have been."
He wouldn't have pushed her into anything.

"I wanted to believe it it could all go away just like that. ”

“Nothing went away. You wouldn’t let me alone.
I’d have to talk to my best friend about what I did. I couldn’t cry like any normal person because I had to face that I might not have known you at all. I only remembered the ‘you’ part of it. I hated you for leaving me in the mess. I hated it the fact that everything we had was a lie.”

His face hurts to look at, and he looks about ready to cry.
“It wasn’t like that, not for me.”

“I know.” her palm is on his shoulder like before, and funny how fast things can change.
“And now, do you still?”

“I’m not big on the whole hate sex thing, you know. Besides if we didn’t have anything then I couldn’t have lost you. I wouldn't have been so scared of it.”

The wonder on his face forces out everything, and it feels like she’s really breathing.

(We rise where we fall.)

“Will you come with me?”
He asks her, and his voice wavers on the end of it. She can see everything in his eyes and the hope.
He can take all of her and he still seems to be in wonder that this can happen, that it can really be this simple.
This isn’t supposed to make her heart skip a beat.

It’s still there, the pull to hurt Clark and they are at the mercy of any moment her best friend decides to get over what she said.
Geographical distances make a difference to how bad it is.
This would have been the sensible reason, if she had relied on that.

Clark had just been out in the streets and when the change had come on worse she’d held on when Davis had looked like he was being ripped apart.

The cards have been stacked to fall for all their lives. Davis is always going to fight it. Clark won’t know.
She’s going to be there.
The future is one step after another, but she sees a clear path.
It looks real.

She thinks his hand could engulf hers and maybe it does.
“North, South, East or West. You've got it.”
He reaches for her and this is the truth.

(Say we are the same. Say we come to it simply again.)