Reccing Note: Yes, I'm posting something heartbreaking. You have been warned. This is Bride, had it gone another way. Clark never defeats Brainiac. Doomsday is unleashed.
And Chloe...
by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
2740 words. R. bride. Leave her the love. or, poke her into writing something happy. She likes it, I think.
The world comes into view slowly.
The world comes into view slowly. Pain pounds inside his head and behind his eyeballs; throbbing pressure with every heartbeat. The sky above is an angry gray, dark like pencil graphite on fresh white paper, frosty and shaded. He can’t tell if it’s night or day, can’t see the sun or the moon behind the clouds. The street is littered with rubble; shattered glass and broken concrete. Cars lie overturned, their alarms blaring, echoing loudly in the silence. Orange flames lick up from twisted metal and black rubber tires, engines long dead as gasoline leaks from the cars in rivers, running red down the pavement.
Gasoline isn’t crimson, shouldn’t smell like death and copper.
-
His hands gleam maroon in the soft, orange light that flickers from the fires. His skin is wet and sticky, crusted scarlet, torso and chest marked with droplets; as though he’s taken a shower in blood, walked through a mist of it. Broken glass cuts the bottoms of his bare feet as he pads across the asphalt. The ground is a sickly warm, like it too is drenched in fresh blood. He walks naked and vulnerable through familiar city blocks, but never sees another person. He finds a mangled body in front of a department store. The bloody mass of splintered bone and torn muscle barely resembles a human. He slips red soaked jeans from partially severed thighs and slips them on, continues walking through desolate streets.
Weak cries draw him to a dark apartment; the door hangs off its hinges, swings slowly in the evening breeze. The wind carries the scent of decomposition, tastes like ash and burning. An infant lies on plush, white carpet, skin stretched tightly over its bones, hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. Its mother rests on the floor beside it, flies buzzing in and out of her mouth, maggots wriggling in her eyes. The baby is a tiny thing, fragile in his hands. The child quiets in his arms, nuzzles against his bare chest. He makes a bottle in the kitchen, boils water that barely trickles from the tap. When he finally offers the formula to the baby, he realizes that it has long since died.
He carries the sad, little corpse in his arms for miles.
-
Smallville is in the same state as Metropolis. Everything is bent and broken; once green rows of corn are black and singed, withered and titled to the left. Clark’s farm is empty. Jimmy is not in his and Chloe’s apartment. Rats run through the streets, feast on piles of rotting flesh and bone. There isn’t a man or woman left in sight. The small town is utterly silent except for wailing alarms and the howls of dogs.
He remembers what not-Chloe said to him about his destiny in the structure made of glittering ice and crystals as their breath rose in wispy clouds of heat.
He wonders if he is truly responsible for the end of the world.
-
He’s heard that hope springs eternal. After three days of solitude his spring runs dry. Every city is the same, every city is empty, every street he walks has bodies that have been cold for days. He asks the sky why he is left conscious, why it does not maintain control of his skin and roam the terribly empty world. The sky doesn’t answer.
The rain that splatters on his skin is hot like tears, and afterwards his flesh stings and sizzles.
-
He’s lying on a hotel bed when he hears the patter of footsteps in the hallway. He darts to his bruised and exhausted feet, dashes through the door he locked and bolted. Not because there are people to keep out, but because he needs to keep himself in. There is a brief flash of brown hair around a corner, tan and dirty skin. He follows the sound of harsh, ragged breathing, frightened sobs and desperation.
The pursuit ends on the hotel rooftop. The person he’s been chasing is a young woman, in her mid twenties. There are clean patches on her dirt smeared face from where her tears washed the skin clean. She stares at him with bright blue eyes, wide with recognition. She doesn’t recognize him; she recognizes the sight of another human being. He can’t be sure this isn’t an illusion; it would never let anyone survive it’s tsunami of destruction.
“Hi.” He hasn’t spoken to anyone other than himself in days. His voice is faint and raspy, hoarse with lack of use.
“Please don’t hurt me.” She trembles, hands covering her face, slowly backing away from him.
“I won’t. I’m a paramedic, I can help you.” There’s a cut on her arm that smells of infection, a line of pus oozing from the wound. Her pale cheeks are full and flushed with fever, sweat forms on her skin in beads. “My name is Davis Bloom.”
“I’m Carolyn Shullz.” Carolyn smiles but won’t approach him, steps backwards when he moves forward.
“Do you know what happened? How long has the world been this way?” He has been alone for five and a half days, doesn’t know if he can take another second of it.
“Nine days. Whatever it was attacked exactly eleven days ago. It destroyed everything, every fucking thing in just forty-eight hours.” Fresh tears spill down her cheeks, wash away more blood and grime. “I hid in the cellar. I wish I hadn’t.” Three quick steps and she’s standing on the ledge, hair moving in the wind. Clothes that once must have fit are now baggy and loose around her body.
“Please.” He begs, throat thick and heavy. “I don’t want to be on my own again.”
“I’m sorry.”
She drops from sight; her body hits the street below with a thud.
-
His feet lead him to a military base, a stone compound with a tall metal fence. He walks in without protest. An alarm sounds but there is no one around to answer it, no one left alive. He’s killed and devoured all, brought about the end of his world.
“There you are.” What lives within Chloe’s body beckons him. His muscles move against his volition, until he’s face to face with what isn’t Chloe. Her eyes are filmed over with grey, a steely metallic color, dark circles of purple beneath her eyes, sallow skin. Chloe’s body moves mechanically, driven by a collection of inhuman impulses, lines of computer code rather than human thought. “You’re in your human form. Interesting.” Cold, steel-like hands cup his face, examine him.
“Chloe.”
“Chloe Sullivan is gone. You know that.”
“Who are you?” He finally asks, staring at soft, pretty features; the face he’s memorized and dreamt of.
“I am Brainiac.” Monotone voice, pale lips forming words.
“What did I do?” Outside a crow pulls bits of flesh from a dead soldier.
“What you were programmed to. You brought this pitiful planet and its people to extinction. Now it’s time to move onto another world.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Would you rather stay here?” Brainiac laughs, dry and hollow; a robotic sound emerging from Chloe’s vocal chords.
“Are you giving me a choice?”
“You are expendable. With a new body, I can build new tools when I desire.” Brainiac tilts Chloe’s head to the side, stares at him with dull grey irises. “You also have no control over your actions. I can use you until every planet in this universe is empty.” His limbs are stiff and aching. “Or, you can come with me and I will give you time with your precious Chloe Sullivan.” Brainiac smiles cool and mechanical. “Obey me and I will free her mind for an hour each day.”
He stares at the smoke filled sky for a long time, then takes Chloe’s hand in his, and the ground vanishes from beneath his feet, until he and Chloe surge into the abyss.
He absorbs it all, the sights and sounds, the rush of wind and air and the universe.
Colors contort and shimmer before his eyes, swirl into long, bright streaks. He absorbs it all, the sights and sounds, the rush of wind and air and the universe in his ears as the star speckled sky moves by. The expanse of black dotted with white diamonds looks the same every second, every minute, every…moment of warped time and reality. He focuses on what used to be Chloe’s hand, now is bones and flesh and muscle controlled by mechanical impulses, an extension of a supercomputer. Her skin is cold, icy, like metal; stainless steel covered with a thin layer of epithelial tissue.
The blur and corruption of sensation ceases and he’s standing on a planet that isn’t his.
-
The sky is a dingy orange on this world. The clouds are hoary, hanging low in the sky, elongated and strange, curling into odd spirals that never move, even when the wind blows hot and sour. The air smells of distant cities; he can see buildings looming in the distance, constructed from bright red material; they sparkle like gemstones in the white light of the star that functions as the sun.
“Where are we?” He asks quietly, wiping away the sweat that is forming on his skin in beads under the intense heat of the new world.
“The name of this planet should not concern you.” Brainiac chuckles, using Chloe’s voice, a low, almost computerized sound, hollow and dry. “You’re going to be destroying it.” Brainiac picks up a handful of soil, rolls it between Chloe’s pale, slender fingers until Brainiac holds a small, scarlet crystal between Chloe’s thumb and index finger. “This is the planet Latsyrc. The people here forge immense cities from natural resources. They’ve filed down entire mountains for this.” Brainiac tosses the shiny, crimson pebble to him; he catches it in his right hand. It is warm from sitting in the sun. “Keep it as a souvenir; you’ll want to remember each of the worlds you reduced to nothing.” Brainiac laughs again; the sound of dry leaves rustling across pavement.
“I want to see Chloe.” He slips the rock into his pocket, into the jeans that are fetid of human blood and death; sickly bitter of copper and rotten flesh.
“No.” Brainiac moves like liquid, crosses the ground quick and silent; a stream of data moving through cyberspace. “You’ve done nothing to deserve it. Show me progress, then you may have your reward.”
He blinks and he’s left alone beneath a foreign sky.
-
He walks over a mile to the city, marvels at the smooth, flawless walls of red crystal; the streets carved from soil. He sees people for the first time in days. A child clings to his mother’s hand and points at him, speaks in a language he doesn’t understand, then waves shyly, hides his face against his mother’s leg afterwards. Around him happiness and normality travel on sidewalks, men and women chat, children giggle, running and playing in the street that doesn’t have cars.
He smells food, passes a restaurant where people are seated, feasting on unfamiliar plant matter and meat. He walks inside and immediately a man shouts something to him, sounding angry and irritable. When he doesn’t respond, just stares, the man tries another language, then another, until he says in thickly accented English.
“You cannot walk around like that.”
“I’m sorry, I…I’m new to this planet.” His chest is completely bare and several young women blush as they scurry past him. “My home…it was destroyed.” Sympathy flashes on the man’s face, bronze skin and purple irises relaxing and no longer threatening.
“I give condolences. I am Namor, here.” He is offered clothing, a shirt made from a material similar to cotton, soft and smooth against his skin. He slips it over his head with a smile, utters a thank you and leaves.
The planet has no idea what is to become of it.
-
He wakes in darkness, to a moon that fills up more than half of the night sky, bathing everything in silver light. His new clothes are gone and a plume of dark smoke rises in the distance while orange flames lick at the buildings of this new world. His mouth tastes strange; liquid is smeared to his flesh, a bright, cerulean blue sticky fluid. He spits and his saliva is tinged blue. He idly wonders what his body is bathed him, what strange substances are abundant here.
He walks the now silent, deserted street, and more blue liquid laps at his feet, splashes beneath each step. The smoke from the fires thins enough to allow moonlight to permeate it, and the horrors he’s committed become visible. Bodies lie everywhere. Crumpled in heaps of whatever composes their anatomy. He sees something that resembles bone protruding from what must have once been a beautiful woman, what is now a pile of decomposing genetic material. Blue is a puddle around her and he realizes that on this planet the people bleed blue, not red. The street is flooded with blood and he vomits hot onto the ground, vomits up more blue and stringy muscle, chunks of meat he does not remember eating.
Tears leak from his eyes, burn at his skin until they drip into the blood of the innocent.
-
He seeks out Brainiac, finds him thirty-five miles away, staring blankly at a large screen, eyes wide and dulled over, filmed over gray. Brainiac is unresponsive; Chloe’s eyes remain fixed in place, never blinking. He doesn’t understand.
He retreats into the corner, leans against cool crystal as blood dries and hardens on his flesh.
-
Brainiac finally moves after hours of waiting, turns and gazes at him. Chloe’s face is expressionless, cold and hard, rigid, unyielding, like metal rather than living skin and muscle. There are dark, dark half circles beneath Chloe’s eyes and her skin is five shades too pale, sallow and beginning to cling to her cheekbones.
“I did what you asked.” He tells Brainiac, reaching out to touch Chloe’s face.
A bit of Chloe’s flesh comes away in his hand.
-
He stares at Chloe in terror, his heart beating rapidly in his thoracic cavity, fast and painful, seemingly thudding against his ribs. Chloe’s skin in his hand is icy; he tosses it away, shudders as it plops wetly onto the ground, familiar, red blood in his palm.
“What’s happening?” He demands, throat thick and heavy.
“Humans are pathetically weak.” Chloe’s voice is hoarse, monotone and barely more than a whisper. “This body cannot handle the change in atmosphere and light.” Brainiac speaks and blood wells up from Chloe’s mouth, droplets on Chloe’s lips. “It is dying. I must find a new one.” Brainiac moves slowly, but never alludes to pain. He doesn’t know if Brainiac can even feel it.
“What happens when you find a new body?”
“The old one reverts back to its normal consciousness.” Brainiac smiles at the hope in his eyes; Chloe’s gums are bleeding, crimson staining her white teeth.
“So Chloe will come back?”
“For a time, her body is close to death.”
His heart slowly shatters into a dozen shards that crumble in his chest and land in the pit of his abdomen.
-
“Did you find me a body?” Brainiac is panting heavily when he returns, the body of a man thrown over his shoulder.
“Yes.” He has no control over his body as is lays the still living man down, all two hundred pounds of lean, intimidating muscle, broad chest and shoulders, powerful biceps.
“Good.” Brainiac stands, doesn’t possess the energy to walk, instead Brainiac crawls and the flesh of Chloe’s knees is abraded away by the crystal floor, is left in trails of red and white on the ground. “Once I have my new body, you will finish what you have already begun.” Outside there is life and only a modicum of destruction. He’s destroyed little more than half of the planet.
“No. I won’t. You said yourself you can create more of me. Do it, I’m tired of killing.” Brainiac watches him thoughtfully.
“You truly desire to stay here on this planet, with the dying object of your pitiful affections?” Chloe’s voice is a croak.
“I do.”
“Fine.” Brainiac presses Chloe’s bleeding lips to the man’s and there is a flash of light, then man is on his feet, looking at the world with dull grey eyes. “I have already absorbed information; you may stay here on this planet for the rest of your days.”
He blinks, and Brainiac vanishes.
-
“Chloe!” He rushes to her body, cradles her in his lap, holds skin that is warm and alive, but cooling with incipient death. Green eyes stare up at him, going cloudy, beginning to film over with mortality.
“Davis.” Chloe coughs up blood; it splatters hotly on his chest.
“I’m sorry.” He apologizes, crying, sobbing because he’s destroyed worlds but now his own is literally ending in his arms.
Chloe reaches up, strokes his face with slender fingers, then goes still and silent.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
eventually, each of us turns into a ball of chaos
Reccing Notes: So when I first read this I thought ouch. Then I read it again. And again. This is jaded! Chloe, post-turbulence. the sheltering happens from a Davis perspective. But the most amazing part to me, is how wings4music dove into Davis's head and showed how really pure the 'chaos' of his feelings could be. The ending might just break your heart.
786 words. PG. post-turbulence
by wings4 music at wings_for_craft
Davis used to feel pity on those warped by possession and an overrun love. Davis used to swear he wouldn’t pursue something that had tragedy written all over it. Davis used to rely on, believe in, know himself.
~*~
Davis had heard--had seen throughout his life that pinning one’s hopes, one’s life on another person wasn’t healthy. People were built to depend on others, but people were meant to depend on themselves before anyone else. To throw that to hell and instead hinge your life on someone else--it tends to unhinge (or further unhinge in some cases) said dependent.
“If he won’t have me, he won’t have anyone else!” was a scream he’s heard once or twice as a paramedic as the person screaming this was being pushed into a cop car, their unfortunate victims waiting to be saved by him and people of the like.
Davis used to feel pity on those warped by possession and an overrun love. Davis used to swear he wouldn’t pursue something that had tragedy written all over it. Davis used to rely on, believe in, know himself.
*
“You saved me.”
That thing inside him faded, literally drew away, at the combination of her words and touch. As did that memory of him inside that ice fortress with an overtaken Chloe insisting that it was all programming, that those feelings were programming and that he and she would only work together to work towards them advancing that which they really were--monsters, Davis called them. The monsters they were meant to become.
The memory became nothing more than a warning. An incorrect warning. She saved him.
*
He fought another sort of beast when he heard that Jimmy left Chloe.
Something semi-grateful, semi-hateful that he didn’t have the right to feel. Chloe wasn’t anyone’s and she was always free, but Jimmy was gone. Chloe, of course, was adamant in believing he would return; Jimmy just needed a cooling off period, she would insist. Davis didn’t know how he could leave her in the first place, and he just wanted to knock some--
And he had to stop himself. Had to stop the hatred towards Jimmy for hurting Chloe, had to stop the smile that nearly formed every time he remembered that Chloe’s husband was gone. He had to stop.
*
She didn’t cringe, she didn’t tremble, she didn’t run. They both realized at that point that on some level, she had always known.
“Davis,” she had said with such a stoic, calm voice, you never would have guessed that she wasn’t staring directly at the monster that ruined her wedding day and put her marriage at risk. As if she saw a man not guilty of a thing ‘stead of an animal guilty of everything.
“Davis,” she repeated, no louder or firmer tone, just with the same ease, she repeated his name. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that he was half sitting, half lying against a brick wall, shaking. But there was a sweater thrown across the front of his chest, and he heard her voice--“hey.” She touched his hand, and he was the one to flinch away.
“It’s just me,” she said. Yes, on some level she had always known what he really was, or perhaps what he really wasn’t. Whatever the case, she was there, and she wasn’t running.
*
He tried to kiss her but that she did walk away from.
*
“Eventually, each of us turns into a ball of chaos,” she whispered as she looked down at her cup of coffee. She grinned for half a second, and then glanced over at him.
“We all…each of us…” She blinked back a tear or two, sipped at her mug, then tucked some hair behind her right ear. “I know what you become sometimes, Davis, and I know you think it best to just make yourself disappear sometimes, but the thing is, we all just want to disappear sometimes. Because everyone eventually becomes a ball of chaos. It’s what unites the human race--or pardon, it’s what unites all living organisms.”
“Then…what is it that separates us living things?” he asked.
She smiled tightly. She had the answer but it wasn’t for him to discover through her.
*
He was leaving. He didn’t have much of a choice.
She had left. She said it wasn’t that she was fed up or that she was tired. She said she was becoming responsible for something that could ruin her soul.
He didn’t see any ruptures or corruptions in her soul when she was keeping him in. He saw warmth, compassion, and beauty in her for not running away and helping him. This was their chaos. Their mad disorder of a life compacted by the beast within him and her aide. Chaos nonetheless, but a beautiful one at that.
It was in the snap of that second in which he realized she had seen their ball of chaos as corrupted whereas he had seen it as beautiful, that he knew what it was that separated them.
And then Davis was lost to himself.
786 words. PG. post-turbulence
by wings4 music at wings_for_craft
Davis used to feel pity on those warped by possession and an overrun love. Davis used to swear he wouldn’t pursue something that had tragedy written all over it. Davis used to rely on, believe in, know himself.
~*~
Davis had heard--had seen throughout his life that pinning one’s hopes, one’s life on another person wasn’t healthy. People were built to depend on others, but people were meant to depend on themselves before anyone else. To throw that to hell and instead hinge your life on someone else--it tends to unhinge (or further unhinge in some cases) said dependent.
“If he won’t have me, he won’t have anyone else!” was a scream he’s heard once or twice as a paramedic as the person screaming this was being pushed into a cop car, their unfortunate victims waiting to be saved by him and people of the like.
Davis used to feel pity on those warped by possession and an overrun love. Davis used to swear he wouldn’t pursue something that had tragedy written all over it. Davis used to rely on, believe in, know himself.
*
“You saved me.”
That thing inside him faded, literally drew away, at the combination of her words and touch. As did that memory of him inside that ice fortress with an overtaken Chloe insisting that it was all programming, that those feelings were programming and that he and she would only work together to work towards them advancing that which they really were--monsters, Davis called them. The monsters they were meant to become.
The memory became nothing more than a warning. An incorrect warning. She saved him.
*
He fought another sort of beast when he heard that Jimmy left Chloe.
Something semi-grateful, semi-hateful that he didn’t have the right to feel. Chloe wasn’t anyone’s and she was always free, but Jimmy was gone. Chloe, of course, was adamant in believing he would return; Jimmy just needed a cooling off period, she would insist. Davis didn’t know how he could leave her in the first place, and he just wanted to knock some--
And he had to stop himself. Had to stop the hatred towards Jimmy for hurting Chloe, had to stop the smile that nearly formed every time he remembered that Chloe’s husband was gone. He had to stop.
*
She didn’t cringe, she didn’t tremble, she didn’t run. They both realized at that point that on some level, she had always known.
“Davis,” she had said with such a stoic, calm voice, you never would have guessed that she wasn’t staring directly at the monster that ruined her wedding day and put her marriage at risk. As if she saw a man not guilty of a thing ‘stead of an animal guilty of everything.
“Davis,” she repeated, no louder or firmer tone, just with the same ease, she repeated his name. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that he was half sitting, half lying against a brick wall, shaking. But there was a sweater thrown across the front of his chest, and he heard her voice--“hey.” She touched his hand, and he was the one to flinch away.
“It’s just me,” she said. Yes, on some level she had always known what he really was, or perhaps what he really wasn’t. Whatever the case, she was there, and she wasn’t running.
*
He tried to kiss her but that she did walk away from.
*
“Eventually, each of us turns into a ball of chaos,” she whispered as she looked down at her cup of coffee. She grinned for half a second, and then glanced over at him.
“We all…each of us…” She blinked back a tear or two, sipped at her mug, then tucked some hair behind her right ear. “I know what you become sometimes, Davis, and I know you think it best to just make yourself disappear sometimes, but the thing is, we all just want to disappear sometimes. Because everyone eventually becomes a ball of chaos. It’s what unites the human race--or pardon, it’s what unites all living organisms.”
“Then…what is it that separates us living things?” he asked.
She smiled tightly. She had the answer but it wasn’t for him to discover through her.
*
He was leaving. He didn’t have much of a choice.
She had left. She said it wasn’t that she was fed up or that she was tired. She said she was becoming responsible for something that could ruin her soul.
He didn’t see any ruptures or corruptions in her soul when she was keeping him in. He saw warmth, compassion, and beauty in her for not running away and helping him. This was their chaos. Their mad disorder of a life compacted by the beast within him and her aide. Chaos nonetheless, but a beautiful one at that.
It was in the snap of that second in which he realized she had seen their ball of chaos as corrupted whereas he had seen it as beautiful, that he knew what it was that separated them.
And then Davis was lost to himself.
start. stop. reset
Reccing Note: Different. 50 prompts. Chloe and Davis with some comic! alternate universe elements thrown in. How they begin, how they end, how they begin again.
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
1644 words. pg-13. abyss.
She doesn’t attribute it to luck, when at her call he materializes out of the chaos of the explosion to help with the injured girl.
Out of the ocean depths, soundlessly moving
Up from my memories disturbing and deep
#28 – Fortune-
She doesn’t attribute it to luck, when at her call he materializes out of the chaos of the explosion to help with the injured girl.
#03 -Young-
He sees her trying to help the runaway (unaware of the coldness of the homes and the danger on those streets) and he thinks that despite the strength in her, she’s young and vulnerable, and he wishes he could be the one to keep her safe.
#27 -Hide-
He tells her the first time he wakes covered in blood; spills out a fear that there’s darkness buried so deep he’s afraid he’ll never wrench it out of him; and he knows he couldn’t hide anything from her if he tried.
#05 –Wrong-
When it all blows over, she thinks that it’s wrong to be this easy with him even as the plastic ring feels like a lead weight on her finger.
#47 -Harm-
The strange sick need to be close to her persists knowing she’s engaged, that he can’t touch her; that other part of him stirs and he fears for the first time that it will be the harm he won’t be able to protect her from.
#01 –Motion-
She’s in motion- memory-less, lost, and running into his arms before he can remind himself that she’s not his to keep.
#17 -Vision-
Work with the dying and wounded has never left him much room for superstition, but dreaming every night that it’s her blood on his hands undoes him like no vision would.
#07 -One-
If it hadn’t been for her that night, asking that one broken question, “What did I tell you about me?”, he might have managed to walk away from Smallville forever.
#12 – Wait-
She sees that strangeness in him, and apologizes (she should have known he’d be tired after another late shift) and tells him she’ll wait on the couch until he’s slept.
44 – Wall-
In his room, he backs himself into the wall and prays that he’ll be able to hold it back; but suddenly there’s only black.
#22 -Mad-
He shakes her awake like a man gone mad, and she asks him why he didn’t say he was meteor infected.
#16 -Need-
She tells him she’ll be there and wishes she could put into the words the ways she needs this as much as he does.
#06 – Gentle-
It’s almost gentle with her, despite the fact that it’s programmed to tear everything to bits; and she could almost laugh to imagine herself as the maiden in King Kong.
#39 – Torn-
She thinks that maybe she’s truly mad when she doesn’t feel torn at leaving behind an apartment, a fiancée and a life that doesn’t feel like her own.
#38 – Wash
When she moves in they’re still conflicted, but when they start taking turns on laundry wash (and she recognizes every unmatched set of his socks) she thinks they’ve started to become domestic.
#02- Cool
While some part of her shrinks back from the pull(its too much to be real), the cool-headed part of her acknowledges that they can only come so close to each other before they intersect.
#31 -Book-
It becomes a habit of hers to tell him all about the books he’d never gotten the chance to read as a boy; he always asks her how they end and sometimes she tells him, sometimes she just says that they chose their own endings and hopes against hope it is true.
#34 -Sing-
Chloe has only one memory of singing publicly, on a karaoke stage with Lois (‘Your Cheating Heart’ at the top of her voice, visualizing Clark, kicking the habit), and this second time its Davis and Sinatra, he hates Sinatra and she finds herself mouthing along with the words.
#35 -Sudden-
There is no sudden shift between them; just a look, her hand open against his and a slow trembling kiss that becomes much, much more.
#32 -Eye-
Chloe’s not afraid of the chaos, where everything around them is twisting and churning because for this moment they are that one still place at the center of it all.
#10 – Learn-
She learns more than she could have in a secret scoop from what he says and doesn’t say, that night.
#18 -Attention-
She paid attention to every word, so later she asks him exactly how many of these fantasies he’s had about her; and they get to every single one.
#49 -Hunger-
There’s always a strange intense feeling in him when they are like this (a hunger for something deep within her that no one else sees) that he thinks it should frighten her, but then she smiles or teases him and it eases.
#30 – Ghost-
When they ghost into Metropolis, they are surprised to find themselves face to face with Clark and a bunch of clandestine superheroes known as the JLA.
#48 - Precious-
When they join the team there’s tension, because Chloe is the one thing Davis (whatever that thing is inside him) can’t live without, and there’s no doubt that if it was her or the entire world, it would chose her.
#40 –History-
Despite the fact that she loves the parts of him that are nothing at all like Clark, he can’t help the feeling that there’s a normalcy to their history that he can never touch.
#08 – Thousand-
The first time she heals him during the change; it feels like she’s dying a thousand deaths over and over again.
#42 – Bother
When Oliver complains about never getting an unbothered night of sleep when they hit the road as a team, Chloe doesn’t remember them being that loud.
#13 -Change-
“I’ve changed, Davis”, she says, and she wants to laugh and cry because the Chloe she thought she was and the one she really was are merging until she doesn’t know who they are anymore.
#36 –Stop-
He doesn’t ever say ‘It’s fine’ or fill her thoughts with empty promises, but that he’ll get to know her as she is now, and she stops.
#15 – Hold-
True to his word, he does, and eventually she learns that he’s the one thing that holds both parts of her together.
#45 -Naked-
The change always leaves him like this (despite Lois’s jokes that Davis helping out in his natural state after missions would be a public service) something about Chloe feels oddly maternal, like she wants to shield him from the world.
#43 -God-
Unlike Clark, there will be no deification for him- in missions he is the battering ram (always with her to hold him back), and because of what he was created to be, there will always be those who think the earth would be better with *it* gone.
#19 -Soul-
He doesn’t really think there will be an afterlife for what he is (a human shell bred with deadly bits of genetic matter); but he knows that while she lives he has a soul.
#23 -Child-
Conception is impossible for both of them (her healing factor automatically neutralizes any external threat and he never wants to pass on the coding of it in his DNA to anyone else) but she still longs to see her own child looking back at her with his eyes.
#25 –Shadow-
The invasion of Gog falls over earth like a shadow (effectively gaining mass control of humanity) until only their small team- Clark, Oliver and his League, she and 'the one who was meant to be the ultimate destroyer' are standing in its way.
#04 - Last
They make their last stand trapped in Metropolis-Clark crumples with the Kryptonite, Chloe when the mind probes start, and Davis loses it when he sees her eyes go blank.
#21 -Fool-
Only a fool would not see what a deal I’m offering, in Gog’s words, this mortal life of yours or the world, and he (thinks of the many ways the creature has of ripping part her memories and her mind along the tears that have already been made), and he hears your humanity or the one chance she has to live.
#26 -Goodbye-
She’s slumped over a semi-conscious Clark and (he’s not jealous, he knows her) all he can think is that he’ll never get the chance to say goodbye.
(A spirit that urges me restlessly onward)
#33 – Never-
She’d never imagined that it would turn out like this, with his face plastered over the papers, headlines on the creature that saved Earth from Gog, as if he had been a symbol and not a man.
#20 –Picture-
She hates seeing the sensationalistic descriptions, wants to rip the papers to shreds every time, but she never does because she sees her last picture of him staring out at her.
#24 - Now
Now, Metropolis is whole, the little gaps in her memories are healing over and (it in Davis) has been transported to a time before his sentience, before he ever knew her and she can’t let herself believe that it means they never existed at all.
#09 - King-
After he’s gone she starts to think of Clark as the king in a chess game, always protected, the last to fall; and she can’t help hating him a little more each day.
#46-Drive-
She finds herself following leads again, reading any sketchy mentions of parallel times and looking for dangerous bits of alien technology buried deep within her memories.
#37-Time-
Time passes between the next day and the next, and Kal-El worries that she lives alone with the hope and the timelines she creates on the walls.
#41 –Power-
She hacks her way into the compound, finds (Gog’s right hand lieutenant) in a cell, and even without Braniac’s mind twisting power, she thinks that if it wasn’t for that tiny piece of rock, she would have no problem pulling all the memories from his mind.
#14 -Command-
She could be throwing herself into a trap, a broken time continuum, to a place she can never return from, but as she speaks her command into the last bit of Gog’s time traveling device, she’s sure.
(A dreaming that haunts me, awake and asleep.)
#11– Blur-
Everything blurs when she opens her eyes to smoke and chaos, but when he tells her his name is Davis Bloome, inexplicably, it steadies again.
Endnotes: (The poem was Out Of the Ocean Depths, Louis L'Amour.)
by vagrantdream at her/my livejournal.
1644 words. pg-13. abyss.
She doesn’t attribute it to luck, when at her call he materializes out of the chaos of the explosion to help with the injured girl.
Out of the ocean depths, soundlessly moving
Up from my memories disturbing and deep
#28 – Fortune-
She doesn’t attribute it to luck, when at her call he materializes out of the chaos of the explosion to help with the injured girl.
#03 -Young-
He sees her trying to help the runaway (unaware of the coldness of the homes and the danger on those streets) and he thinks that despite the strength in her, she’s young and vulnerable, and he wishes he could be the one to keep her safe.
#27 -Hide-
He tells her the first time he wakes covered in blood; spills out a fear that there’s darkness buried so deep he’s afraid he’ll never wrench it out of him; and he knows he couldn’t hide anything from her if he tried.
#05 –Wrong-
When it all blows over, she thinks that it’s wrong to be this easy with him even as the plastic ring feels like a lead weight on her finger.
#47 -Harm-
The strange sick need to be close to her persists knowing she’s engaged, that he can’t touch her; that other part of him stirs and he fears for the first time that it will be the harm he won’t be able to protect her from.
#01 –Motion-
She’s in motion- memory-less, lost, and running into his arms before he can remind himself that she’s not his to keep.
#17 -Vision-
Work with the dying and wounded has never left him much room for superstition, but dreaming every night that it’s her blood on his hands undoes him like no vision would.
#07 -One-
If it hadn’t been for her that night, asking that one broken question, “What did I tell you about me?”, he might have managed to walk away from Smallville forever.
#12 – Wait-
She sees that strangeness in him, and apologizes (she should have known he’d be tired after another late shift) and tells him she’ll wait on the couch until he’s slept.
44 – Wall-
In his room, he backs himself into the wall and prays that he’ll be able to hold it back; but suddenly there’s only black.
#22 -Mad-
He shakes her awake like a man gone mad, and she asks him why he didn’t say he was meteor infected.
#16 -Need-
She tells him she’ll be there and wishes she could put into the words the ways she needs this as much as he does.
#06 – Gentle-
It’s almost gentle with her, despite the fact that it’s programmed to tear everything to bits; and she could almost laugh to imagine herself as the maiden in King Kong.
#39 – Torn-
She thinks that maybe she’s truly mad when she doesn’t feel torn at leaving behind an apartment, a fiancée and a life that doesn’t feel like her own.
#38 – Wash
When she moves in they’re still conflicted, but when they start taking turns on laundry wash (and she recognizes every unmatched set of his socks) she thinks they’ve started to become domestic.
#02- Cool
While some part of her shrinks back from the pull(its too much to be real), the cool-headed part of her acknowledges that they can only come so close to each other before they intersect.
#31 -Book-
It becomes a habit of hers to tell him all about the books he’d never gotten the chance to read as a boy; he always asks her how they end and sometimes she tells him, sometimes she just says that they chose their own endings and hopes against hope it is true.
#34 -Sing-
Chloe has only one memory of singing publicly, on a karaoke stage with Lois (‘Your Cheating Heart’ at the top of her voice, visualizing Clark, kicking the habit), and this second time its Davis and Sinatra, he hates Sinatra and she finds herself mouthing along with the words.
#35 -Sudden-
There is no sudden shift between them; just a look, her hand open against his and a slow trembling kiss that becomes much, much more.
#32 -Eye-
Chloe’s not afraid of the chaos, where everything around them is twisting and churning because for this moment they are that one still place at the center of it all.
#10 – Learn-
She learns more than she could have in a secret scoop from what he says and doesn’t say, that night.
#18 -Attention-
She paid attention to every word, so later she asks him exactly how many of these fantasies he’s had about her; and they get to every single one.
#49 -Hunger-
There’s always a strange intense feeling in him when they are like this (a hunger for something deep within her that no one else sees) that he thinks it should frighten her, but then she smiles or teases him and it eases.
#30 – Ghost-
When they ghost into Metropolis, they are surprised to find themselves face to face with Clark and a bunch of clandestine superheroes known as the JLA.
#48 - Precious-
When they join the team there’s tension, because Chloe is the one thing Davis (whatever that thing is inside him) can’t live without, and there’s no doubt that if it was her or the entire world, it would chose her.
#40 –History-
Despite the fact that she loves the parts of him that are nothing at all like Clark, he can’t help the feeling that there’s a normalcy to their history that he can never touch.
#08 – Thousand-
The first time she heals him during the change; it feels like she’s dying a thousand deaths over and over again.
#42 – Bother
When Oliver complains about never getting an unbothered night of sleep when they hit the road as a team, Chloe doesn’t remember them being that loud.
#13 -Change-
“I’ve changed, Davis”, she says, and she wants to laugh and cry because the Chloe she thought she was and the one she really was are merging until she doesn’t know who they are anymore.
#36 –Stop-
He doesn’t ever say ‘It’s fine’ or fill her thoughts with empty promises, but that he’ll get to know her as she is now, and she stops.
#15 – Hold-
True to his word, he does, and eventually she learns that he’s the one thing that holds both parts of her together.
#45 -Naked-
The change always leaves him like this (despite Lois’s jokes that Davis helping out in his natural state after missions would be a public service) something about Chloe feels oddly maternal, like she wants to shield him from the world.
#43 -God-
Unlike Clark, there will be no deification for him- in missions he is the battering ram (always with her to hold him back), and because of what he was created to be, there will always be those who think the earth would be better with *it* gone.
#19 -Soul-
He doesn’t really think there will be an afterlife for what he is (a human shell bred with deadly bits of genetic matter); but he knows that while she lives he has a soul.
#23 -Child-
Conception is impossible for both of them (her healing factor automatically neutralizes any external threat and he never wants to pass on the coding of it in his DNA to anyone else) but she still longs to see her own child looking back at her with his eyes.
#25 –Shadow-
The invasion of Gog falls over earth like a shadow (effectively gaining mass control of humanity) until only their small team- Clark, Oliver and his League, she and 'the one who was meant to be the ultimate destroyer' are standing in its way.
#04 - Last
They make their last stand trapped in Metropolis-Clark crumples with the Kryptonite, Chloe when the mind probes start, and Davis loses it when he sees her eyes go blank.
#21 -Fool-
Only a fool would not see what a deal I’m offering, in Gog’s words, this mortal life of yours or the world, and he (thinks of the many ways the creature has of ripping part her memories and her mind along the tears that have already been made), and he hears your humanity or the one chance she has to live.
#26 -Goodbye-
She’s slumped over a semi-conscious Clark and (he’s not jealous, he knows her) all he can think is that he’ll never get the chance to say goodbye.
(A spirit that urges me restlessly onward)
#33 – Never-
She’d never imagined that it would turn out like this, with his face plastered over the papers, headlines on the creature that saved Earth from Gog, as if he had been a symbol and not a man.
#20 –Picture-
She hates seeing the sensationalistic descriptions, wants to rip the papers to shreds every time, but she never does because she sees her last picture of him staring out at her.
#24 - Now
Now, Metropolis is whole, the little gaps in her memories are healing over and (it in Davis) has been transported to a time before his sentience, before he ever knew her and she can’t let herself believe that it means they never existed at all.
#09 - King-
After he’s gone she starts to think of Clark as the king in a chess game, always protected, the last to fall; and she can’t help hating him a little more each day.
#46-Drive-
She finds herself following leads again, reading any sketchy mentions of parallel times and looking for dangerous bits of alien technology buried deep within her memories.
#37-Time-
Time passes between the next day and the next, and Kal-El worries that she lives alone with the hope and the timelines she creates on the walls.
#41 –Power-
She hacks her way into the compound, finds (Gog’s right hand lieutenant) in a cell, and even without Braniac’s mind twisting power, she thinks that if it wasn’t for that tiny piece of rock, she would have no problem pulling all the memories from his mind.
#14 -Command-
She could be throwing herself into a trap, a broken time continuum, to a place she can never return from, but as she speaks her command into the last bit of Gog’s time traveling device, she’s sure.
(A dreaming that haunts me, awake and asleep.)
#11– Blur-
Everything blurs when she opens her eyes to smoke and chaos, but when he tells her his name is Davis Bloome, inexplicably, it steadies again.
Endnotes: (The poem was Out Of the Ocean Depths, Louis L'Amour.)
leap
Reccing Note: This has become my Smallville Universe, no matter how the show eventually works out. Read and marvel at three dimensional Chloe and Davis and an ending which is not an ending, but the best way to start.
chloe pov.
8411 words. m/nc-17. bride and onwards.
by paraxdisepink at her livejournal. Drop her oodles of love!
Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.
Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.
I found an apartment – a hole in the wall in the less than privileged part of town – but considering my shortage in the funds department hot water and a leak-free roof made the place feel like the Luthor mansion. I dusted off my rusty old reporter’s hat and tried for a job with The Daily Star - lets face it I had no other useful skills. After a few weeks of eating nothing but Top Ramin and living in a cable-less void the job came through, thanks to some recommendations from a few old pals at The Daily Planet. Not exactly my dream paper, but journalism brought me back to much-needed familiar ground and a real writer would scrawl her stories on empty walls if she had to. Luckily it didn’t come to that. I guess the Star figured a girl fired by the notorious Lex Luthor on questionable grounds had to have a knack for uncovering something she shouldn’t have.
If only they knew.
I had to admit, my craving for the bizarre and unexplained had suffered a bit considering that my metaphorical Wall of Weird had expanded into a veritable museum over the years and that my passion for Truth carried the taint of hypocrisy given that I sat on the biggest secret in the history of civilization and could heal death with nothing more than my mind. That passion had died the minute I understood what exposing a real secret like Clark’s could cost him and saw a full-on funeral when I learned I had a secret of my own to hide. I’d die before I betrayed Clark and others like me, and I refused to be the one to yell “fire’ in the proverbial theater for the sake of breaking the story of a lifetime and making a name for myself. So I dedicated my poisoned pen to working toward Justice instead, and slowly my enthusiasm for my one and only craft revamped itself. The world was rife with corruption like Luthorcorp’s to expose, and everyday heroes who deserved a moment in the spotlight. Maybe as a planet we weren’t ready for super-powered extraterrestrials walking among us, but the world sure needed a strong dose of integrity and hope. As long as I worked for that I had a purpose. My job meant something again. It made me one of the good guys.
Star City was every bit as much of a concrete labyrinth as Metropolis, and I tried not to look like a lost Freshman on the first day of high school learning my way around. I found the delis, the Chinese, and of course the all-important source of the substance I thrived on – caffeine.
That’s where I saw him, one afternoon during my lunch break, sitting alone at a table outside, staring into an espresso I doubt he had any intention of drinking. My first instinct when I recognized his close-cropped dark hair and chiseled features was to run as fast as I could. Memories came back like lightning flashes, Clark beaten bloody and dead in my arms, the Fortress exploding in red light . . . Guilt washed over me, along with an ocean’s worth of apprehension. What he’d been . . . and God how close I’d let him get. I felt like I was lingering at the edge of a cliff all over again, a bare inch from plunging over.
If I planned on running, I missed my chance. Davis raised his head and those dark eyes met mine, and I felt their pull from across the sidewalk. I spent a small eternity flailing for what to do, but it was too late to hide and acknowledging him didn’t mean I had to let my guard down.
He lowered his face as I started toward him, and when his hand tightened around his coffee I thought he would be the one to make a run for it. My apprehension doubled. Did he have a reason to run? He definitely adopted the cornered animal look when I stopped in front of him.
“Chloe . . .” he breathed, half surprised, half pained, as though they very sight of me opened a wound. I bit hard into my bottom lip. But it was a little too late to count the hundred reasons why coming over here was a mistake.
“What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the question neutral. I didn’t exactly buy into the notion of random chance these days so long as Brainiac remained on the loose. Davis and I running into each other in the same city at the same coffee shop pinged my eerie coincidence meter big time.
Davis’ mouth moved, on the verge of either an explanation or an apology, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words and he shrugged instead, frowning down at his espresso as though it could provide as good an answer as anyone. I hate to admit, I’d never seen anyone look so lost.
“Just trying to live with myself, I guess.”
I did a mental recoil at that. I’d forgotten his knack for drawing attention to pink elephants, at least compared to the super-powered extra-terrestrial companion I’d left behind who was like the Oracle at Delphi in comparison. But it wasn’t like we could just make small talk and pretend the nightmare hadn’t happened. I looked both ways over my shoulder and pulled a chair out. Maybe I’d handed in my membership card to the save the world club, but I couldn’t let go of who I’d been and what I’d done.
“No more extra-curricular escapades of the dark and scary?” Mayhem and mass murder wasn’t exactly light-hearted, broad daylight, coffee shop subject matter, but how else could I ask if there was a monster in our midst ready to tear the city apart.
He shook his head. He looked so worn down, like he had a thousand-ton weight resting on him that he couldn’t shake off. I thought I’d seen Clark look that way a time or two, but never like this. “No, thanks to whatever you guys did – or something did. No more black-outs, no more waking up covered in blood. Not that I sleep much, just in case.”
Clearly he didn’t sleep at all. Shadows ringed his eyes and he looked paler than usual. How could I blame him? Who on earth would sleep soundly after finding out they took sleepwalking to a whole new mass-murdering degree?
“You super-speeded your way out of Metropolis in no time flat – figuratively speaking, of course.”
It wasn’t like Clark and I expected him to come to tea after Clark and Davis’ other half had fought to the death in the Fortress, and there was no way Davis knew the whole story of why he was standing here – sitting here – today, but part of me had never stopped seeing him as the friend I’d made before the weird and apocalyptic kicked in. I guess I’d expected a goodbye. Clark took his hasty exit as a sign of suspicion. Maybe I believed him. I didn’t know anymore.
Never one to beat around the bush, Davis heaved a sigh and pushed his espresso away. “Come on, Chloe, it was the right thing to do after the damage I’ve done. My first instinct was to put a bullet in my brain the second I was sure it’d do any good, but the more I thought about it, the more that felt like the easy way out. I’ve got to clean up the mess, make amends somehow, even the score, right?”
No one could blame him for wanting to end it all considering what he’d been, but my stomach turned at the thought of him blowing his brains out. I couldn’t tell him why, not when I doubted I’d done the right thing in the first place. Clark definitely didn’t think so.
“Davis, that thing didn’t even look like you. It took you over. You had no control.”
It was the truth, and it’d be cruel not to give him that little consolation when he looked so destroyed. But I couldn’t convince him, and once again he shook his head. “I tried telling myself that, Chloe. It doesn’t matter. That thing was part of me, when it committed those crimes, it was me in there. When it carried you –”
He stopped, and I looked down at my hand for the wedding ring that wasn’t there anymore. Maybe I could handle the pink elephants, but I wasn’t ready for the glaring red ones. I cleared my throat and tried for damage control on the dangerous and discomfiting factor.
“So . . .? What are you doing here?”
He glanced down at his leather jacket and white shirt. It was still strange to see him without his uniform. “Same. Drive an ambulance; pull people out of car wrecks and swimming pools, that sort of thing. I try to do whatever else I can. Help people, right wrongs. It’s like dropping pennies into a volcano. Feel like it’s never enough.”
All this sounded familiar. Only Clark didn’t have an inferno of remorse to fill, just his own survivor guilt. Or maybe he did, in his irrational Clark way. Both meteor showers had brought unimaginable destruction upon Smallville and the world around it, alien threats, violent meteor types . . . But none of us who knew Clark’s secret would ever think to blame him for any of it, not even Lana, who’d lost her parents because of him.
I left Davis to go back to work, but I couldn’t get him out of my head the rest of the day. I wondered if I should avoid that coffee shop from now on or whether I should tell someone back in Smallville he’d turned up. I wasn’t ready for Clark to rush in pointing fingers though, or to admit that sitting with him my heart had broken just a little at the misery he lived with. I decided to handle the matter my way, dust off my Scooby hat, and do some under the radar investigating.
Turns out Davis rented a house with three other guys, and while I couldn’t exactly line them up for exclusive interviews I did learn there hadn’t been any unsolved grizzly murders in the city in the three months since Davis had moved here and that one of his roommates had worked as his partner the entire time.
The Daily Star building stood right smack in the middle of downtown, a handy vantage-point for a girl who kept her eyes peeled to catch a glimpse of my very own beautiful disaster every now and then. Star City had as much 24/7 street crime as Metropolis, and at least once a day I saw the flashing red lights and heard the sirens of an ambulance peeling into the hospital across the street. Davis and his partner would rush out in their blue uniforms, running into the ER at a speed that could have rivaled Clark’s with gunshot victims and kids stabbed in gang fights. I saw him wander off more than once after he delivered them, peeling off bloody latex gloves white-faced and sick. I saw the memories of waking up to what the monster had done playing in his mind. I couldn’t imagine it, reliving a starring role as the villain in his own personal horror movie over and over.
I saw him when he wasn’t in uniform too, carrying boxes of toys, or old clothes, or food to the Goodwill a couple blocks down, and he went into the nearby cathedral once or twice a week. I saw a man who had become obsessed with good deeds, with filling his waking hours with every altruistic act he could think of.
Or maybe it was just another Brainiac scheme for my benefit. I couldn’t be sure anymore, so I did the smart thing for once in my life and maintained my distance.
That plan failed one evening after work. I was struggling to carry half my desk in a flimsy cardboard box down the back stairs when a low voice echoed from behind me.
“You know, they do make digital picture frames. Would make things a whole lot lighter.”
I jumped. No girl liked surprises on a darkened street growing emptier by the minute, and no one liked the feeling they’d been watched. I turned to find Davis leaning against the back wall of the Star building with his blue uniform jacket zipped up to his neck, flashing a dimpled smile that reminded me of the days when everything had been new and innocent in cute paramedic friend land – if it had ever been innocent. My mind raced with questions. What was he doing here? How long had he been standing there? And how did he know when I got out of work?
His smile slipped when he realized he’d startled me and his features fell back into that perpetually self-loathing mask. “I’m scaring you. I’m sorry. I was on my way to get coffee and I saw you coming through the door with your hands full. You looked like you were having a hard time, so . . .”
He shrugged and straightened to go. My gaze immediately dropped to my box full of old pictures of Jimmy and Clark, maybe because I couldn’t bring myself to look at the man in front of me. How could he get past what he’d been if I of all people who had a PHD in all things Krypton and knew better still treated him like a monster?
“No, it’s just . . . “ I balanced my burden on my hip and pushed my hair out of my face with my free hand, forcing out a nervous laugh. “I’ve been off in lala-land all day, and . . .”
Davis’ eyes went to my box and he nodded. I tried not to notice the mixture of guilt and disappointment on his face when he saw the pictures of Jimmy, but he didn’t say a word about Jimmy, or Clark either for that matter.
“How about I help you take those to your car and let you get home?” he offered instead, in a sad, quiet voice that knew I’d lied to him about being startled. It forced me to really look at him. His face was so innocent and so honest, a guy who just wanted to help somebody, who was desperate to, because he feared more than anything that if he stopped being the exact opposite of everything the monster was for half a second it would wake and tear its way right through him.
I was afraid of the same thing, for the city, for my conscience, and of course for Clark, but I found myself handing Davis my heavy box anyway. “Actually, I don’t have a car anymore. I . . . kinda had to sell it for rent money before I landed my job with the Star.” I blushed a little and tried not to look down at my shoes in embarrassment. Poor financial planning wasn’t my usual.
One side of his mouth curved up and he nodded. Maybe he thought I was getting more street-wise these days. Or maybe not. He glanced over his shoulder down the dark side-street I’d been prepared to head down before he’d caught me. “Well, uh . . .” He started to hand my box back, but I stopped him before he could.
“My apartment’s a couple blocks down, if you’d care to give a packrat in distress a helping hand.”
His face lit up. He hadn’t expected that. Neither had I, honestly. Maybe I was laying a trap for myself showing him where I lived. Maybe . . .
As we walked he told me about the calls they’d gotten that day, two mysterious accidents at the Luthorcorp plant which proved everyone’s favorite multi-national Satan hadn’t abandoned operation Clandestine Evil Lab by a long shot. I tried not to grill him for too many details, or blather on about the searing exposé I could write. I could almost pretend he was a normal guy I was afraid of scaring off with my old persistence and enthusiasm. But when we reached my doorstep on the ground floor I remembered all too clearly what he’d been.
“Well, Chloe,” he said in that low, deep voice that could melt a girl if she wasn’t careful, or maybe just send chills down her spine. He stared at me under the porch light with eyes that wanted to pull me into another dimension where there was just the two of us.
I cleared my throat and took my box from him. I didn’t dare invite him in.
We crossed paths more often after that, usually by chance – or what looked like chance anyway. My duties as up-and-coming reporter took me to newsworthy crime scenes, outside government buildings with bomb threats, and of course the ominous Luthorcorp plant. Davis was more than willing to feed me the inside scoop on any given incident, which he and his comrades-in-blue usually attained from the on-scene police if not firsthand, and police hated reporters. I met his partner, who spent more time looking down my shirt then he did resuscitating victims of the minor explosion at the plant that had us all gathered outside that morning, but the two of them saved three people that day anyway.
This was too easy, I kept telling myself. Davis was too clean, too perfect. I had to be falling into a trap.
A week passed without any sign of him, and as the days went by this gnawing wariness grew in the pit of my stomach. But there were no mysterious massacres or homicidal rampages throughout the city, and I did my best to convince myself Davis would come to me if he had a blackout. What else could I do, other than pray I hadn’t made the worst mistake possible?
I worked late one evening, and ever a worshipper at the altar of junk food decided to venture a few blocks behind the hospital and go for pizza. When I came out – stuffed with pepperoni, breadsticks, and more calories worth of Pepsi than I cared to count – I heard shouting and running footsteps coming from down the street. Someone called for help just as a car screeched around the corner. The shouts grew louder and a girl screamed. My heart began to pound
I slipped behind a concrete pillar and pressed my back against it, peeking my head past it just enough to make out what I could in the patches of shadows and the orange glow from the streetlights. The bright lights of another car blinded me as it sped up the road, either oblivious to what was happening or in a rush not to get involved. The girl screamed again. She was begging for her life, or someone’s life. A dark blur tore through the bushes at the far end of the parking lot, darting toward her at lightning speed. A gunshot rang out, and then another and another. I heard swearing, someone who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The woman started to cry and the car peeled away. I could hear the teenager in the passenger seat as it sped past me, yelling at the driver to “get the fuck out of here before whatever that guy is comes after us.”
Everything went quiet. I let out the breath I’d been holding and stepped out from my hiding place, cold all over. I should have went the other way, done my best Clark impression and made my own hasty exit, but my out-of-the-ordinary radar beeped bigtime inside my head. Something had scared off the guys in the car – no, not just something. My worst fear come true.
Two bodies lay facedown on the sidewalk when I came closer, a dark distinctive stain between them. One was just another teenager holding onto to a yellow iPod in one hand, the other . . . The girl had crouched against the street sign, her hands over her eyes as she hyperventilated and sobbed. She wasn’t hurt, but the other two . . .
The smaller one scrambled to his feet and didn’t bother looking at me. He grabbed the girl by the arm and the two of them took off running. Maybe I should have called out to them, asked them what they’d seen, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the other figure on the ground, and didn’t I know the answer?
He rolled over and started to sit up, rubbing his eyes when he saw me. He’d always talked about not remembering the blackouts and waking up in strange places covered in blood, but he didn’t look the least bit disoriented now, or the least bit bothered by the blood smearing one side of his face down to his neck. I pressed one hand to my stomach, ready to spew up my dinner. How could I have been so stupid?
“Chloe . . .?” Davis looked genuinely shocked to see me and hurried to his feet, but his expression was more concern than horror at being caught in the act. “Chloe, what are you doing here? This isn’t exactly the best part of town as you can see. I just saved one drive-by victim. I bring in enough of them in my daily routine without adding your name to the list.”
I snapped my mouth shut on the verge of demanding when he’d dispensed with the hulking-out altogether and started prowling for victims with a human face. The blood was running from a mark on his temple, and another along his collarbone just above his shirt, and he clamped a hand around his left arm and sucked in a breath, in pain. He’d been shot. I ran over in my mind what he’d just said.
“You saved that kid,” I breathed in a mix of relief and disbelief, and the inevitable selfish vindication. “That car was coming for him and you jumped in front of the bullet. You weren’t –“
You weren’t going to hulk out and tear him to pieces I was going to say, but police sirens sounded in the distance and Davis had stopped listening, too busy glancing frantically over his shoulder in their direction.
“Look, I have to get out of here. I can’t exactly stick around and let them see me.”
He started to walk away, but I caught up to him. Why would he run when that kid’s brains would be splattered all over the sidewalk right now if not for him?
“You’re bleeding,” I insisted. “You have to get to a hospital.”
Davis shook his head and growled a little too fiercely, “No hospitals.” He relented when he saw I didn’t understand. “I don’t get hurt that easily, Chloe. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
I looked him over now that we had rounded another corner and my mouth fell open. The marks on his temple and neck weren’t minor graze wounds as I’d originally thought. The bullets had gone right through him and he was healing right before my eyes.
He saw what I was staring at and pressed his lips together tight, disgusted with himself. “Guess there’s still some of that thing in me after all. At least something will actually go through me this time, instead of just shattering.”
So that was why he didn’t want the police to see him, and no wonder the thugs in the car had made a run for it. They’d shot him three times and he hadn’t died. I’d seen this with Clark a hundred times, but with Davis . . . I stopped myself. I didn’t want to see remnants of the monster, or a potential re-run of our own little slasher flick. I wanted to see the guy who’d saved a kid’s life. Besides, Clark didn’t bleed. This couldn’t be anything Kryptonian.
“Is this a habit? Jumping in front of bullets?”
He nodded, reluctantly, as though it were something to be ashamed of. “It’s like I said, I try to do what I can. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I walk the streets. I figure with enough bad things going on in this city there’s got to be something out there I can do, right?”
I nodded, proud. If someone had extra-human abilities, they should use them for good. God knows we’d seen that go the other way more often that not back in Smallville. “Sounds like someone has one foot in the superhero business.” The word seemed to shame him even more and he stared down at the concrete as we walked, shaking his head. My heart went out to him. In his book “hero” meant doing good for the sake of it, the way he’d been when I’d met him in Metropolis eons ago. Balancing the scales didn’t count. I laid my hand on his arm. “Why don’t you come with me and get yourself cleaned up?”
I walked him back to my place. It was funny or maybe just pathetic how my sense of caution went right out the window the instant he showed a heroic streak. But if he planned on re-growing any bony protrusions and tearing me to shreds a flimsy door and the paper-thin walls of my apartment wouldn’t save me.
He washed the blood off his face and neck in my kitchen sink, and then shrugged out of one sleeve of his jacket and washed his arm off too. The wounds had pretty much healed by then, leaving the skin of his rather nice bicep perfectly smooth. I was a little disappointed when he put his jacket back on, but did my best to conceal it as he took a seat at my kitchen table. I’d never shied away from the fact that I found him attractive, but this wasn’t a time for ogling.
I didn’t have anything but Coke to offer him, but he didn’t mind. He barely drank anyway, just stared at the can until I could feel him starting to brood again. God, he could give Clark a run for his money, but unlike Clark he had moping rights for the next ten years and his sorrows consisted of something more meaningful than a failed relationship with Lana.
I draped my coat over a chair and sat next to him. “You’re really taking this redemption thing to heart, aren’t you?” The giving to charity, throwing himself into his job, the nighttime vigilance . . . Lex Luthor often talked about fresh starts, but that usually involved more duplicitous projects that speared him deeper into the realm of Evil Overlord with a tinge of megalomania. This was different, actions coming from a man in pain who’d only ever wanted to help people and didn’t use an abusive past as an excuse for his transgressions.
Davis frowned at the tabletop. Looking at him, I could scarcely believe those chiseled features had ever morphed into a killer’s. “The day-to-day’s hard, Chloe,” he sighed. “I just want to go back and do whatever it takes to stop that thing from hurting anyone and I can’t. I can’t fight it, and I can’t change it, no matter how much I want to scream that animal isn’t who I am, that I would die before I killed anyone. I feel like . . .” He ran a hand over his face. “I’m not good with words, Chloe.”
He didn’t have to be. I understood. There was no peace for him, and there was no one to share the burden either. Everything he knew about himself and the world had been ripped apart, and he was alone now, and part of that was my doing.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He raised his head and his eyes settled on mine. Something in his face was pleading so badly for something to hold onto I couldn’t look away, and just when he had me he caught me off guard.
“Is this a good time to ask what you’re doing in Star City?”
I broke away from his gaze and lowered my head. Maybe it was the softness in his voice, maybe it was because I felt cornered by the question although I’d known it would come eventually. I touched my ring finger, only to let my hand fall when I remembered it was empty. I felt naked with nothing there, sitting so close to him. My only tactic was to force a smile.
“It was just time to get away, you know?”
He saw right through my hollow attempt at avoidance – he’d always had a talent for that – and he gently pressed, “From the man you married and your best friend?”
Clark. I sank back in my chair and folded my arms, on the verge of crumbling. I hadn’t talked about Clark to anyone, not even Lois. How could I when the secret identity safe version wouldn’t explain anything? I drew in a deep breath. Evading only worked for so long.
“Clark and I had a fight – sort of.” It was more like me losing it on him in the barn while he fumbled to deflect my anger with noble excuses and a blank, hurt expression. For the first time I’d felt like he really was from another planet. Why couldn’t he understand? Davis waited for the rest, and if he was sitting there ready to listen why not tell him? He knew everything – Brainiac, Krypton, the Fortress. Almost everything. “Remember that time I lost my memory and was hanging all over you like a second coat?” His lips twitched in the tiniest involuntary smile. My face went hot, and I ploughed onward before he could say anything. “It wasn’t amnesia – well not your garden variety anyway – and it wasn’t that drug that cured me. After you left, Clark took me to the Fortress. It was Brainiac, and in the process of curing me he made the executive decision to erase all the . . . shall we say classified knowledge I’ve acquired of him over the years. I woke up and four years of my life was gone, just like that.”
Davis’ eyes went wide. He’d learned to take the paranormal in relative stride, but this tested his limits. “Your best friend? He erased your memory?” Color flooded my face. I felt like such an idiot repeating this. “That’s what he did with you after I injected you with that sedative? Carried you off unconscious and erased your memory? Does he rape passed-out girls at frat parties too?”
I opened my mouth to defend him. I never thought I’d hear Clark’s name and the R-word in the same sentence, not the bumbling flannel-clad farmboy I spent five years of my life thinking couldn’t hurt a fly and who bolted like a cat when any other woman but Lana showed interest in him. But Davis had hit on something. My stomach twisted in a knot and I wished I could just sink down and disappear into the floor. It was either that or cry, and I’d done enough crying over Clark Kent in the past ten years.
“It’s just . . . I never thought I’d feel victimized by someone I loved so much, you know?”
“Chloe . . .” Davis’ eyes went velvet soft and he laid his hand over my own. A surge of something shot through me at this touch. His skin was warm and his fingers strong curling around mine. “What he did was pretty fucked up. Back in Metropolis I used to think I was the luckiest guy on the planet because you remembered I existed from day to day. I couldn’t imagine thinking I had the right to pick and choose.”
That wrenched a giddy smile from me, despite myself. I couldn’t help it; I wasn’t exactly used to being on the receiving end of that sort of flattery. “Who forgets a hot guy in uniform who finds homes for street kids?” I tossed back. I couldn’t keep from wondering what would have happened had I not worn an off-limits ring back then. Davis had been so dedicated to helping people, so kind, like some dream guy materializing out of the smoke that day of the explosion in Metropolis. That ring was the only thing that kept my feet on the ground, before the nightmare swept us all way of course.
He flashed me that unforgettable dimpled grin, and for a moment we stared at each other, well aware that he hadn’t let go of my hand and that the room had gotten dangerously warmer. “And Jimmy,” Davis prompted in his low, soft voice, “was he in on this too?”
I couldn’t shake my head fast enough. “No, no. Jimmy’s . . .” Jimmy’s the sweet, dependable guy I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with, a nice normal life with a dog and a job and maybe some kids. But who I was kidding? I’d once scoffed at “normal,” and I couldn’t keep using Jimmy just to go through the motions of something I wanted to hide behind now that my craving for the strange and unexplained had come back to bite me in the ass.
“You didn’t tell him.”
Those words hit home and I wanted to wrench my hand away. But it was just the guilt welling up again that I wanted to run from. The lies I’d told, the double life I’d lived in the same apartment as my supposed other half . . . “Davis, how could I? His life would never be the same, and I couldn’t be the one who brought him into this. Look what it’s done to us?” Turning over a new leaf and stepping back from Clark as I’d originally planned wouldn’t change anything. The secrets were still there, the walls I couldn’t let Jimmy behind, for his own good, for Clark’s own good. I couldn’t let him be second anymore either, marry one guy while another took center stage in my life.
Davis nodded. He knew better than anyone how learning the ugly and impossible truth of aliens and monsters and supercomputers destroyed your life, but he was content to let the subject of Jimmy lie. He’d never thought much of the two of us as a match anyway. “Do you think you’ll ever trust Clark again?”
I swallowed hard. It killed me that I had to ask myself that question. “I want to.” I wanted him to be Clark again, the Clark I thought I knew who understood where the line was and would never use his powers to hurt anyone. “After eight years of a front row seat to the Clark and Lana show I know what an idiot he can be when he thinks he’s protecting someone, but . . .“
“But you trust me.”
His hand tightened around mine, and I’d have to be blind not to see the hope in his face. I glanced around my apartment, overly conscious of the fact that we were alone. That was ridiculous. We’d been alone dozens of times before, at the Isis foundation, in his car. He’d been my friend for God’s sake. When I couldn’t remember anything but him I’d felt safe with him. A part of me knew that wasn’t all Brainiac’s doing.
I couldn’t answer, or maybe I didn’t want to answer. I just smiled at him and said in a small voice, “Davis, I’m glad you’re here.” I meant it. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him, not the monster, but the friend I used to talk to, who saw through me and meant it when he promised he’d always be there, and not just when Lana ran off with another guy. I couldn’t let the monster claim that man as his last victim.
He smiled back, not his charming half smile, but a real smile that lit up the room ten times brighter than that light bulb he’d changed for me the day we met. That smile drew me toward him though I should have pulled away. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His eyes had always been so melting, and his mouth . . . I didn’t need Brainiac to lure me, I was doing fine on my own. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine, and when his mouth touched my own I thought my knees would have given way were I not sitting down.
His hand came to my face to pull me closer and this time I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, not when his mouth was so warm and full and soft and when he took his time tasting mine. His thumb stroked along my jaw all the while, so featherlight and gentle I shivered and melted all at once.
He was the one who pulled away, slowly lowering his hand from my face as though he had to force himself to do it. His eyes gleamed almost feverishly and his cheeks were flushed from kissing me. He looked absolutely tortured.
“I’m sorry.” His chair squeaked on my linoleum floor as he pushed himself up from the table. “This isn’t right. I should go.”
My heart clenched. I felt like someone was tearing off another limb when I had enough trouble standing already. I didn’t want him to go.
“Davis . . .”
I got up before he could make it to the door. There I was hovering at the edge of the cliff again, but this time I jumped off on my own head first. This little dance between us was ridiculous. I knew the truth; I saw it with my own eyes in the Fortress. I had nothing to fear from him anymore. I grabbed him by the shoulders before he could make a grab for the doorknob.
“Davis, stay.”
He didn’t move. He went rigid under my hands, afraid to come closer. I knew him. I knew why, and my hands tightened.
“It’s okay now. You don’t have to close yourself off anymore.” And I didn’t have to hide from the fact that this is what I’ve feared all this time, not the monster resurfacing, not the killer. This. “Stay.”
He stared at me, frozen and wrestling with himself. We both knew how much he wanted me, but his guilt and his hate for himself stretched like a great big ocean between us and for a moment I doubted anything I did or said could convince him to make the leap across. I let go of his jacket and waited.
My heart stopped when he gave in and came toward me, and my courage wavered on the verge of winking out entirely. Maybe I was making a big impulsive mistake here. Maybe this was the part of the movie where the monster emerged and tore me to pieces. He stepped forward and drew me close to him in one motion, wrapping one arm around me and then the other. His hand slid all the way up into my hair and I barely had time to latch an arm around his neck before he smothered my mouth with his again.
This wasn’t like the first kiss – the second kiss, actually – patient and tentative and asking nothing really but that I notice how he felt. I’d asked him for something this time and he was ready to give it to me exactly the way it was – no holding back. His tongue slid into my mouth and my head spun. I had to stretch up on my toes to give back as good as he gave, but I didn’t care. Clark would have to be on red meteor rock the size of Kansas to kiss me like that. Davis was starved for me, too starved for shyness and hesitation.
His arm tightened around my back and he pressed me close against the length of his body, and all of a sudden he was everywhere. His heart raced against my chest and his hips leaning into mine, and below that . . . After three years on and off with Jimmy a guy’s arousal wasn’t anything shocking. But this was different. I’d never been with anyone but Jimmy and we weren’t two fumbling teenagers as inexperienced as the other. This was raw, real hunger, and Davis wasn’t the least bit embarrassed that I could feel him hard and pounding through our clothes.
I wanted those clothes gone. I wanted more than just his mouth and the hot, sweet taste of his tongue against mine. I pushed his jacket off one arm at a time and got my hands under his shirt. He shuddered when my fingers grazed bare skin, all heat and hard muscle.
Before I knew it I’d kicked my shoes off and he was walking me backward through my tiny apartment with his arms still around me and his mouth sucking the skin behind my ear. We stopped in the kitchen doorway, where I arched my head back and let the wet heat of his lips trail down to my neck. My hands went to his shirt again, struggling to yank the pesky thing off him while my mind still worked. He had to pull away from me so I could twist it up over his head, leaving one side of my neck cold and tingling and begging for the pressure of his mouth back. But he didn’t move, too busy staring down at me, and I was too busy staring at him, bare-chested before me. Clark was a regular beefcake fantasy, but he was superhuman. This was all from working out and heavy lifting. I ran my hands down Davis’ chest, watching his face as I traced all that beautiful sculpted muscle. He closed his eyes and held his breath as though trying to keep himself from cracking to pieces. He didn’t stay still for long though. His warm hands took their time sliding up my arms, practically swallowing me with his eyes as he inched his fingers under the straps of my sundress and pushed the thing off my shoulders.
I stood there in my underwear, cold and burning up inside at the same time. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, or his hands. They slid around to my back and unclasped my bra, and when it hit the floor the moment of truth loomed toward us at lightspeed.
Davis didn’t disappoint. His eyes burned into me and his face was so chiseled and intense I shivered at the heat coming from him. “I want you, Chloe.” He half whispered, half panted, his fingertips resting against my sides. “I want you more than Clark could, or Jimmy, or anyone else.”
I always shrank away from Jimmy when he talked like this. The guilt would swell up, the secrets, until I felt like I had to hide from him in my own skin. But I didn’t have to this time. I stretched up to kiss Davis and my hands went back to his chest, stroking over all that perfect muscle all the way down to the zipper on his jeans.
He kicked his tennis shoe off, and let his pants and boxers fall. My pulse throbbed like crazy now that I pressed against naked skin. At this rate, I was ready to drag him down and do it there on the floor if we had to, but he lifted me up, carrying me toward the bedroom, kissing my shoulder, my jaw, the top of my breast – anywhere he could reach.
I fumbled for a condom in the nightstand drawer the instant my head hit the mattress – leftovers from my Jimmy days – squirming for him to hurry up. Lightning may as well have crashed through me when he pushed into me. My eyes went wide and my mouth opened with a sound that wouldn’t quite come. He was so . . .there, scalding inside me, staring down at me with his eyes glazed over, breathing hard. I titled my hips up toward him and pulled him down onto my mouth again. My hands went everywhere when he started to move, over his back, his hair, the muscles of his arms. This wasn’t like my fantasies of Clark or all those times with Jimmy where I only felt the pleasure through the wall of guilt and the secrets I kept. There wasn’t a wall, just Davis, pushing as deep in me as he could get and kissing me hard, devouring me inside and out and throwing himself into this like he’d never get the chance again.
I ended up flat on my back with my legs tangled around his, my mind spinning from a climax that should have blown the top of my head off. He collapsed on top of me, panting for breath, and when I uncurled my fingers from his shoulders I saw that I’d left red marks on his skin. I felt so . . . I didn’t have the word. Like I was looking up at the precipice I’d jumped from only to find the fall wasn’t so steep after all, or better yet like a little kid who’d conquered a fear and went around clamoring let’s do that again! while the grown-up part of me choked up at the risks all over again.
Davis rolled off me with a small shudder and a low sound in his throat. I missed him inside me the minute he was gone, in the little tingling aftershocks and slight soreness as I stretched out. He sank down against my side and draped an arm across me, looking over at me with the most disarmingly dazed smile.
“I feel like I’ve died and woken up in another life.”
I smiled too and let my arms settled around him, but the afterglow dimmed a little. There was still that one thing I hadn’t told him
“Funny you should say that . . . “ I laughed unsteadily.
He caught on, as he always did, and I could feel him bracing himself for another blow to his comprehension and sanity. That left me no choice but to tell him. I had no reason not to. I didn’t have the right not to. Besides, adding another brick to my castle of secrets was the last thing I wanted. I rested my head back against the pillow and drew a deep breath.
“When you were separated from that Ultimate Destroyer thing in the Fortress, you didn’t survive.” We didn’t exactly know how that separation had happened. We didn’t know what he was, part phantom and part human or an elaborate hybrid of genetic matter and Kryptonian DNA. Either way, he had only been part monster. One minute he and Clark had been embroiled in a rematch in the Fortress, the next . . . Clark had struck the killing blow, with another dagger Jor-El had given him. Only the Fortress had exploded in eerie red light that had somehow sucked the Destroyer into the sky. Brainiac, Jor-El had explained to Clark afterward. He had retracted his ultimate weapon before Clark could destroy it, to use it again and let it evolve in a more powerful form.
I’d found Davis crumpled on the ice, lifeless and covered in blood from the blows Clark had dealt during the battle – his own blood, just like Clark after their first fight. My arms tightened, and my eyes watered. Davis had looked so broken there in the cold, the Ultimate Destroyer’s last kill.
He was looking up at me in confusion. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I brought you back,” I told him. I brought him back just like I had with Clark. “It’s something I can do, heal people.”
His mouth fell open, and he pushed himself up on his elbows. But it wasn’t my meteor power that stunned him. “You saved me?” His eyes went so wide, like he was seeing me for the first time and I was a saint or an angel or . . . “Why?”
Well that was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? I didn’t exactly stop and dig for the inside scoop at the time. I just ran to him and reached out with my gift.
You told me if I found real love to hold onto it, a part me wanted to answer. The rest of me froze. Was that even a word I could use when it came to him?
My hand came up on its own, and I stroked his cheek with my fingertips. “Davis, I saw the man you were,” I told him gently. “You were one of the good guys. You deserved a chance.”
He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch so easily I don’t think he was aware of it. The emotion flooding his face was ten times stronger than the raw need we’d just satisfied.
“I’m going to try to live up to that, Chloe,” he murmured. “A guy doesn’t get that kind of second chance every day.” I couldn’t do anything but smile at him. Protecting kids on dark streets and saving lives day after day was a good start.
He lowered himself on top of me, his mouth settling on the base of my throat and when I didn’t stop him he took his time moving steadily lower. I let my eyes fall closed. No one had ever kissed me like I was made of solid gold before, and I never thought anyone who knew the whole truth would. My breathing quickened when he didn’t relent, and I twisted under him. Any lower and Davis would have to put his CPR skills to good use.
And speaking of reviving, maybe it was time I gave myself a chance too, instead of pushing my dreams aside out of some idiot belief that standing in Clark’s shadow was the only way to do good in the world, or that if I showed him enough loyalty he’d finally notice me. That didn’t mean I had to stop caring about him. I ran my hand through Davis’ short hair and whimpered at the wet glide of his tongue across my stomach. Maybe it was time I gave us a chance. Everything was easy with him and so clear-cut. How could anyone hold him accountable for something inside him against his will? And maybe Clark had my dream job at the Daily Planet and careened toward something with my cousin at super-speed, I had my own career at the Star ahead of me and a guy who’d shown his own heroic colors. Maybe it was time we made our own Lois and Clark story.
~ The end.
See?
Leave her lots of love. ^-^
chloe pov.
8411 words. m/nc-17. bride and onwards.
by paraxdisepink at her livejournal. Drop her oodles of love!
Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.
Leaving Smallville was like tearing off a limb. Or better yet, chewing one off. I found myself so hellbent on getting out of a trap I didn’t realize how crippled I was until I tried standing again.
I found an apartment – a hole in the wall in the less than privileged part of town – but considering my shortage in the funds department hot water and a leak-free roof made the place feel like the Luthor mansion. I dusted off my rusty old reporter’s hat and tried for a job with The Daily Star - lets face it I had no other useful skills. After a few weeks of eating nothing but Top Ramin and living in a cable-less void the job came through, thanks to some recommendations from a few old pals at The Daily Planet. Not exactly my dream paper, but journalism brought me back to much-needed familiar ground and a real writer would scrawl her stories on empty walls if she had to. Luckily it didn’t come to that. I guess the Star figured a girl fired by the notorious Lex Luthor on questionable grounds had to have a knack for uncovering something she shouldn’t have.
If only they knew.
I had to admit, my craving for the bizarre and unexplained had suffered a bit considering that my metaphorical Wall of Weird had expanded into a veritable museum over the years and that my passion for Truth carried the taint of hypocrisy given that I sat on the biggest secret in the history of civilization and could heal death with nothing more than my mind. That passion had died the minute I understood what exposing a real secret like Clark’s could cost him and saw a full-on funeral when I learned I had a secret of my own to hide. I’d die before I betrayed Clark and others like me, and I refused to be the one to yell “fire’ in the proverbial theater for the sake of breaking the story of a lifetime and making a name for myself. So I dedicated my poisoned pen to working toward Justice instead, and slowly my enthusiasm for my one and only craft revamped itself. The world was rife with corruption like Luthorcorp’s to expose, and everyday heroes who deserved a moment in the spotlight. Maybe as a planet we weren’t ready for super-powered extraterrestrials walking among us, but the world sure needed a strong dose of integrity and hope. As long as I worked for that I had a purpose. My job meant something again. It made me one of the good guys.
Star City was every bit as much of a concrete labyrinth as Metropolis, and I tried not to look like a lost Freshman on the first day of high school learning my way around. I found the delis, the Chinese, and of course the all-important source of the substance I thrived on – caffeine.
That’s where I saw him, one afternoon during my lunch break, sitting alone at a table outside, staring into an espresso I doubt he had any intention of drinking. My first instinct when I recognized his close-cropped dark hair and chiseled features was to run as fast as I could. Memories came back like lightning flashes, Clark beaten bloody and dead in my arms, the Fortress exploding in red light . . . Guilt washed over me, along with an ocean’s worth of apprehension. What he’d been . . . and God how close I’d let him get. I felt like I was lingering at the edge of a cliff all over again, a bare inch from plunging over.
If I planned on running, I missed my chance. Davis raised his head and those dark eyes met mine, and I felt their pull from across the sidewalk. I spent a small eternity flailing for what to do, but it was too late to hide and acknowledging him didn’t mean I had to let my guard down.
He lowered his face as I started toward him, and when his hand tightened around his coffee I thought he would be the one to make a run for it. My apprehension doubled. Did he have a reason to run? He definitely adopted the cornered animal look when I stopped in front of him.
“Chloe . . .” he breathed, half surprised, half pained, as though they very sight of me opened a wound. I bit hard into my bottom lip. But it was a little too late to count the hundred reasons why coming over here was a mistake.
“What are you doing here?” I tried to keep the question neutral. I didn’t exactly buy into the notion of random chance these days so long as Brainiac remained on the loose. Davis and I running into each other in the same city at the same coffee shop pinged my eerie coincidence meter big time.
Davis’ mouth moved, on the verge of either an explanation or an apology, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words and he shrugged instead, frowning down at his espresso as though it could provide as good an answer as anyone. I hate to admit, I’d never seen anyone look so lost.
“Just trying to live with myself, I guess.”
I did a mental recoil at that. I’d forgotten his knack for drawing attention to pink elephants, at least compared to the super-powered extra-terrestrial companion I’d left behind who was like the Oracle at Delphi in comparison. But it wasn’t like we could just make small talk and pretend the nightmare hadn’t happened. I looked both ways over my shoulder and pulled a chair out. Maybe I’d handed in my membership card to the save the world club, but I couldn’t let go of who I’d been and what I’d done.
“No more extra-curricular escapades of the dark and scary?” Mayhem and mass murder wasn’t exactly light-hearted, broad daylight, coffee shop subject matter, but how else could I ask if there was a monster in our midst ready to tear the city apart.
He shook his head. He looked so worn down, like he had a thousand-ton weight resting on him that he couldn’t shake off. I thought I’d seen Clark look that way a time or two, but never like this. “No, thanks to whatever you guys did – or something did. No more black-outs, no more waking up covered in blood. Not that I sleep much, just in case.”
Clearly he didn’t sleep at all. Shadows ringed his eyes and he looked paler than usual. How could I blame him? Who on earth would sleep soundly after finding out they took sleepwalking to a whole new mass-murdering degree?
“You super-speeded your way out of Metropolis in no time flat – figuratively speaking, of course.”
It wasn’t like Clark and I expected him to come to tea after Clark and Davis’ other half had fought to the death in the Fortress, and there was no way Davis knew the whole story of why he was standing here – sitting here – today, but part of me had never stopped seeing him as the friend I’d made before the weird and apocalyptic kicked in. I guess I’d expected a goodbye. Clark took his hasty exit as a sign of suspicion. Maybe I believed him. I didn’t know anymore.
Never one to beat around the bush, Davis heaved a sigh and pushed his espresso away. “Come on, Chloe, it was the right thing to do after the damage I’ve done. My first instinct was to put a bullet in my brain the second I was sure it’d do any good, but the more I thought about it, the more that felt like the easy way out. I’ve got to clean up the mess, make amends somehow, even the score, right?”
No one could blame him for wanting to end it all considering what he’d been, but my stomach turned at the thought of him blowing his brains out. I couldn’t tell him why, not when I doubted I’d done the right thing in the first place. Clark definitely didn’t think so.
“Davis, that thing didn’t even look like you. It took you over. You had no control.”
It was the truth, and it’d be cruel not to give him that little consolation when he looked so destroyed. But I couldn’t convince him, and once again he shook his head. “I tried telling myself that, Chloe. It doesn’t matter. That thing was part of me, when it committed those crimes, it was me in there. When it carried you –”
He stopped, and I looked down at my hand for the wedding ring that wasn’t there anymore. Maybe I could handle the pink elephants, but I wasn’t ready for the glaring red ones. I cleared my throat and tried for damage control on the dangerous and discomfiting factor.
“So . . .? What are you doing here?”
He glanced down at his leather jacket and white shirt. It was still strange to see him without his uniform. “Same. Drive an ambulance; pull people out of car wrecks and swimming pools, that sort of thing. I try to do whatever else I can. Help people, right wrongs. It’s like dropping pennies into a volcano. Feel like it’s never enough.”
All this sounded familiar. Only Clark didn’t have an inferno of remorse to fill, just his own survivor guilt. Or maybe he did, in his irrational Clark way. Both meteor showers had brought unimaginable destruction upon Smallville and the world around it, alien threats, violent meteor types . . . But none of us who knew Clark’s secret would ever think to blame him for any of it, not even Lana, who’d lost her parents because of him.
I left Davis to go back to work, but I couldn’t get him out of my head the rest of the day. I wondered if I should avoid that coffee shop from now on or whether I should tell someone back in Smallville he’d turned up. I wasn’t ready for Clark to rush in pointing fingers though, or to admit that sitting with him my heart had broken just a little at the misery he lived with. I decided to handle the matter my way, dust off my Scooby hat, and do some under the radar investigating.
Turns out Davis rented a house with three other guys, and while I couldn’t exactly line them up for exclusive interviews I did learn there hadn’t been any unsolved grizzly murders in the city in the three months since Davis had moved here and that one of his roommates had worked as his partner the entire time.
The Daily Star building stood right smack in the middle of downtown, a handy vantage-point for a girl who kept her eyes peeled to catch a glimpse of my very own beautiful disaster every now and then. Star City had as much 24/7 street crime as Metropolis, and at least once a day I saw the flashing red lights and heard the sirens of an ambulance peeling into the hospital across the street. Davis and his partner would rush out in their blue uniforms, running into the ER at a speed that could have rivaled Clark’s with gunshot victims and kids stabbed in gang fights. I saw him wander off more than once after he delivered them, peeling off bloody latex gloves white-faced and sick. I saw the memories of waking up to what the monster had done playing in his mind. I couldn’t imagine it, reliving a starring role as the villain in his own personal horror movie over and over.
I saw him when he wasn’t in uniform too, carrying boxes of toys, or old clothes, or food to the Goodwill a couple blocks down, and he went into the nearby cathedral once or twice a week. I saw a man who had become obsessed with good deeds, with filling his waking hours with every altruistic act he could think of.
Or maybe it was just another Brainiac scheme for my benefit. I couldn’t be sure anymore, so I did the smart thing for once in my life and maintained my distance.
That plan failed one evening after work. I was struggling to carry half my desk in a flimsy cardboard box down the back stairs when a low voice echoed from behind me.
“You know, they do make digital picture frames. Would make things a whole lot lighter.”
I jumped. No girl liked surprises on a darkened street growing emptier by the minute, and no one liked the feeling they’d been watched. I turned to find Davis leaning against the back wall of the Star building with his blue uniform jacket zipped up to his neck, flashing a dimpled smile that reminded me of the days when everything had been new and innocent in cute paramedic friend land – if it had ever been innocent. My mind raced with questions. What was he doing here? How long had he been standing there? And how did he know when I got out of work?
His smile slipped when he realized he’d startled me and his features fell back into that perpetually self-loathing mask. “I’m scaring you. I’m sorry. I was on my way to get coffee and I saw you coming through the door with your hands full. You looked like you were having a hard time, so . . .”
He shrugged and straightened to go. My gaze immediately dropped to my box full of old pictures of Jimmy and Clark, maybe because I couldn’t bring myself to look at the man in front of me. How could he get past what he’d been if I of all people who had a PHD in all things Krypton and knew better still treated him like a monster?
“No, it’s just . . . “ I balanced my burden on my hip and pushed my hair out of my face with my free hand, forcing out a nervous laugh. “I’ve been off in lala-land all day, and . . .”
Davis’ eyes went to my box and he nodded. I tried not to notice the mixture of guilt and disappointment on his face when he saw the pictures of Jimmy, but he didn’t say a word about Jimmy, or Clark either for that matter.
“How about I help you take those to your car and let you get home?” he offered instead, in a sad, quiet voice that knew I’d lied to him about being startled. It forced me to really look at him. His face was so innocent and so honest, a guy who just wanted to help somebody, who was desperate to, because he feared more than anything that if he stopped being the exact opposite of everything the monster was for half a second it would wake and tear its way right through him.
I was afraid of the same thing, for the city, for my conscience, and of course for Clark, but I found myself handing Davis my heavy box anyway. “Actually, I don’t have a car anymore. I . . . kinda had to sell it for rent money before I landed my job with the Star.” I blushed a little and tried not to look down at my shoes in embarrassment. Poor financial planning wasn’t my usual.
One side of his mouth curved up and he nodded. Maybe he thought I was getting more street-wise these days. Or maybe not. He glanced over his shoulder down the dark side-street I’d been prepared to head down before he’d caught me. “Well, uh . . .” He started to hand my box back, but I stopped him before he could.
“My apartment’s a couple blocks down, if you’d care to give a packrat in distress a helping hand.”
His face lit up. He hadn’t expected that. Neither had I, honestly. Maybe I was laying a trap for myself showing him where I lived. Maybe . . .
As we walked he told me about the calls they’d gotten that day, two mysterious accidents at the Luthorcorp plant which proved everyone’s favorite multi-national Satan hadn’t abandoned operation Clandestine Evil Lab by a long shot. I tried not to grill him for too many details, or blather on about the searing exposé I could write. I could almost pretend he was a normal guy I was afraid of scaring off with my old persistence and enthusiasm. But when we reached my doorstep on the ground floor I remembered all too clearly what he’d been.
“Well, Chloe,” he said in that low, deep voice that could melt a girl if she wasn’t careful, or maybe just send chills down her spine. He stared at me under the porch light with eyes that wanted to pull me into another dimension where there was just the two of us.
I cleared my throat and took my box from him. I didn’t dare invite him in.
We crossed paths more often after that, usually by chance – or what looked like chance anyway. My duties as up-and-coming reporter took me to newsworthy crime scenes, outside government buildings with bomb threats, and of course the ominous Luthorcorp plant. Davis was more than willing to feed me the inside scoop on any given incident, which he and his comrades-in-blue usually attained from the on-scene police if not firsthand, and police hated reporters. I met his partner, who spent more time looking down my shirt then he did resuscitating victims of the minor explosion at the plant that had us all gathered outside that morning, but the two of them saved three people that day anyway.
This was too easy, I kept telling myself. Davis was too clean, too perfect. I had to be falling into a trap.
A week passed without any sign of him, and as the days went by this gnawing wariness grew in the pit of my stomach. But there were no mysterious massacres or homicidal rampages throughout the city, and I did my best to convince myself Davis would come to me if he had a blackout. What else could I do, other than pray I hadn’t made the worst mistake possible?
I worked late one evening, and ever a worshipper at the altar of junk food decided to venture a few blocks behind the hospital and go for pizza. When I came out – stuffed with pepperoni, breadsticks, and more calories worth of Pepsi than I cared to count – I heard shouting and running footsteps coming from down the street. Someone called for help just as a car screeched around the corner. The shouts grew louder and a girl screamed. My heart began to pound
I slipped behind a concrete pillar and pressed my back against it, peeking my head past it just enough to make out what I could in the patches of shadows and the orange glow from the streetlights. The bright lights of another car blinded me as it sped up the road, either oblivious to what was happening or in a rush not to get involved. The girl screamed again. She was begging for her life, or someone’s life. A dark blur tore through the bushes at the far end of the parking lot, darting toward her at lightning speed. A gunshot rang out, and then another and another. I heard swearing, someone who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The woman started to cry and the car peeled away. I could hear the teenager in the passenger seat as it sped past me, yelling at the driver to “get the fuck out of here before whatever that guy is comes after us.”
Everything went quiet. I let out the breath I’d been holding and stepped out from my hiding place, cold all over. I should have went the other way, done my best Clark impression and made my own hasty exit, but my out-of-the-ordinary radar beeped bigtime inside my head. Something had scared off the guys in the car – no, not just something. My worst fear come true.
Two bodies lay facedown on the sidewalk when I came closer, a dark distinctive stain between them. One was just another teenager holding onto to a yellow iPod in one hand, the other . . . The girl had crouched against the street sign, her hands over her eyes as she hyperventilated and sobbed. She wasn’t hurt, but the other two . . .
The smaller one scrambled to his feet and didn’t bother looking at me. He grabbed the girl by the arm and the two of them took off running. Maybe I should have called out to them, asked them what they’d seen, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the other figure on the ground, and didn’t I know the answer?
He rolled over and started to sit up, rubbing his eyes when he saw me. He’d always talked about not remembering the blackouts and waking up in strange places covered in blood, but he didn’t look the least bit disoriented now, or the least bit bothered by the blood smearing one side of his face down to his neck. I pressed one hand to my stomach, ready to spew up my dinner. How could I have been so stupid?
“Chloe . . .?” Davis looked genuinely shocked to see me and hurried to his feet, but his expression was more concern than horror at being caught in the act. “Chloe, what are you doing here? This isn’t exactly the best part of town as you can see. I just saved one drive-by victim. I bring in enough of them in my daily routine without adding your name to the list.”
I snapped my mouth shut on the verge of demanding when he’d dispensed with the hulking-out altogether and started prowling for victims with a human face. The blood was running from a mark on his temple, and another along his collarbone just above his shirt, and he clamped a hand around his left arm and sucked in a breath, in pain. He’d been shot. I ran over in my mind what he’d just said.
“You saved that kid,” I breathed in a mix of relief and disbelief, and the inevitable selfish vindication. “That car was coming for him and you jumped in front of the bullet. You weren’t –“
You weren’t going to hulk out and tear him to pieces I was going to say, but police sirens sounded in the distance and Davis had stopped listening, too busy glancing frantically over his shoulder in their direction.
“Look, I have to get out of here. I can’t exactly stick around and let them see me.”
He started to walk away, but I caught up to him. Why would he run when that kid’s brains would be splattered all over the sidewalk right now if not for him?
“You’re bleeding,” I insisted. “You have to get to a hospital.”
Davis shook his head and growled a little too fiercely, “No hospitals.” He relented when he saw I didn’t understand. “I don’t get hurt that easily, Chloe. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
I looked him over now that we had rounded another corner and my mouth fell open. The marks on his temple and neck weren’t minor graze wounds as I’d originally thought. The bullets had gone right through him and he was healing right before my eyes.
He saw what I was staring at and pressed his lips together tight, disgusted with himself. “Guess there’s still some of that thing in me after all. At least something will actually go through me this time, instead of just shattering.”
So that was why he didn’t want the police to see him, and no wonder the thugs in the car had made a run for it. They’d shot him three times and he hadn’t died. I’d seen this with Clark a hundred times, but with Davis . . . I stopped myself. I didn’t want to see remnants of the monster, or a potential re-run of our own little slasher flick. I wanted to see the guy who’d saved a kid’s life. Besides, Clark didn’t bleed. This couldn’t be anything Kryptonian.
“Is this a habit? Jumping in front of bullets?”
He nodded, reluctantly, as though it were something to be ashamed of. “It’s like I said, I try to do what I can. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I walk the streets. I figure with enough bad things going on in this city there’s got to be something out there I can do, right?”
I nodded, proud. If someone had extra-human abilities, they should use them for good. God knows we’d seen that go the other way more often that not back in Smallville. “Sounds like someone has one foot in the superhero business.” The word seemed to shame him even more and he stared down at the concrete as we walked, shaking his head. My heart went out to him. In his book “hero” meant doing good for the sake of it, the way he’d been when I’d met him in Metropolis eons ago. Balancing the scales didn’t count. I laid my hand on his arm. “Why don’t you come with me and get yourself cleaned up?”
I walked him back to my place. It was funny or maybe just pathetic how my sense of caution went right out the window the instant he showed a heroic streak. But if he planned on re-growing any bony protrusions and tearing me to shreds a flimsy door and the paper-thin walls of my apartment wouldn’t save me.
He washed the blood off his face and neck in my kitchen sink, and then shrugged out of one sleeve of his jacket and washed his arm off too. The wounds had pretty much healed by then, leaving the skin of his rather nice bicep perfectly smooth. I was a little disappointed when he put his jacket back on, but did my best to conceal it as he took a seat at my kitchen table. I’d never shied away from the fact that I found him attractive, but this wasn’t a time for ogling.
I didn’t have anything but Coke to offer him, but he didn’t mind. He barely drank anyway, just stared at the can until I could feel him starting to brood again. God, he could give Clark a run for his money, but unlike Clark he had moping rights for the next ten years and his sorrows consisted of something more meaningful than a failed relationship with Lana.
I draped my coat over a chair and sat next to him. “You’re really taking this redemption thing to heart, aren’t you?” The giving to charity, throwing himself into his job, the nighttime vigilance . . . Lex Luthor often talked about fresh starts, but that usually involved more duplicitous projects that speared him deeper into the realm of Evil Overlord with a tinge of megalomania. This was different, actions coming from a man in pain who’d only ever wanted to help people and didn’t use an abusive past as an excuse for his transgressions.
Davis frowned at the tabletop. Looking at him, I could scarcely believe those chiseled features had ever morphed into a killer’s. “The day-to-day’s hard, Chloe,” he sighed. “I just want to go back and do whatever it takes to stop that thing from hurting anyone and I can’t. I can’t fight it, and I can’t change it, no matter how much I want to scream that animal isn’t who I am, that I would die before I killed anyone. I feel like . . .” He ran a hand over his face. “I’m not good with words, Chloe.”
He didn’t have to be. I understood. There was no peace for him, and there was no one to share the burden either. Everything he knew about himself and the world had been ripped apart, and he was alone now, and part of that was my doing.
I put my hand on his shoulder. He raised his head and his eyes settled on mine. Something in his face was pleading so badly for something to hold onto I couldn’t look away, and just when he had me he caught me off guard.
“Is this a good time to ask what you’re doing in Star City?”
I broke away from his gaze and lowered my head. Maybe it was the softness in his voice, maybe it was because I felt cornered by the question although I’d known it would come eventually. I touched my ring finger, only to let my hand fall when I remembered it was empty. I felt naked with nothing there, sitting so close to him. My only tactic was to force a smile.
“It was just time to get away, you know?”
He saw right through my hollow attempt at avoidance – he’d always had a talent for that – and he gently pressed, “From the man you married and your best friend?”
Clark. I sank back in my chair and folded my arms, on the verge of crumbling. I hadn’t talked about Clark to anyone, not even Lois. How could I when the secret identity safe version wouldn’t explain anything? I drew in a deep breath. Evading only worked for so long.
“Clark and I had a fight – sort of.” It was more like me losing it on him in the barn while he fumbled to deflect my anger with noble excuses and a blank, hurt expression. For the first time I’d felt like he really was from another planet. Why couldn’t he understand? Davis waited for the rest, and if he was sitting there ready to listen why not tell him? He knew everything – Brainiac, Krypton, the Fortress. Almost everything. “Remember that time I lost my memory and was hanging all over you like a second coat?” His lips twitched in the tiniest involuntary smile. My face went hot, and I ploughed onward before he could say anything. “It wasn’t amnesia – well not your garden variety anyway – and it wasn’t that drug that cured me. After you left, Clark took me to the Fortress. It was Brainiac, and in the process of curing me he made the executive decision to erase all the . . . shall we say classified knowledge I’ve acquired of him over the years. I woke up and four years of my life was gone, just like that.”
Davis’ eyes went wide. He’d learned to take the paranormal in relative stride, but this tested his limits. “Your best friend? He erased your memory?” Color flooded my face. I felt like such an idiot repeating this. “That’s what he did with you after I injected you with that sedative? Carried you off unconscious and erased your memory? Does he rape passed-out girls at frat parties too?”
I opened my mouth to defend him. I never thought I’d hear Clark’s name and the R-word in the same sentence, not the bumbling flannel-clad farmboy I spent five years of my life thinking couldn’t hurt a fly and who bolted like a cat when any other woman but Lana showed interest in him. But Davis had hit on something. My stomach twisted in a knot and I wished I could just sink down and disappear into the floor. It was either that or cry, and I’d done enough crying over Clark Kent in the past ten years.
“It’s just . . . I never thought I’d feel victimized by someone I loved so much, you know?”
“Chloe . . .” Davis’ eyes went velvet soft and he laid his hand over my own. A surge of something shot through me at this touch. His skin was warm and his fingers strong curling around mine. “What he did was pretty fucked up. Back in Metropolis I used to think I was the luckiest guy on the planet because you remembered I existed from day to day. I couldn’t imagine thinking I had the right to pick and choose.”
That wrenched a giddy smile from me, despite myself. I couldn’t help it; I wasn’t exactly used to being on the receiving end of that sort of flattery. “Who forgets a hot guy in uniform who finds homes for street kids?” I tossed back. I couldn’t keep from wondering what would have happened had I not worn an off-limits ring back then. Davis had been so dedicated to helping people, so kind, like some dream guy materializing out of the smoke that day of the explosion in Metropolis. That ring was the only thing that kept my feet on the ground, before the nightmare swept us all way of course.
He flashed me that unforgettable dimpled grin, and for a moment we stared at each other, well aware that he hadn’t let go of my hand and that the room had gotten dangerously warmer. “And Jimmy,” Davis prompted in his low, soft voice, “was he in on this too?”
I couldn’t shake my head fast enough. “No, no. Jimmy’s . . .” Jimmy’s the sweet, dependable guy I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with, a nice normal life with a dog and a job and maybe some kids. But who I was kidding? I’d once scoffed at “normal,” and I couldn’t keep using Jimmy just to go through the motions of something I wanted to hide behind now that my craving for the strange and unexplained had come back to bite me in the ass.
“You didn’t tell him.”
Those words hit home and I wanted to wrench my hand away. But it was just the guilt welling up again that I wanted to run from. The lies I’d told, the double life I’d lived in the same apartment as my supposed other half . . . “Davis, how could I? His life would never be the same, and I couldn’t be the one who brought him into this. Look what it’s done to us?” Turning over a new leaf and stepping back from Clark as I’d originally planned wouldn’t change anything. The secrets were still there, the walls I couldn’t let Jimmy behind, for his own good, for Clark’s own good. I couldn’t let him be second anymore either, marry one guy while another took center stage in my life.
Davis nodded. He knew better than anyone how learning the ugly and impossible truth of aliens and monsters and supercomputers destroyed your life, but he was content to let the subject of Jimmy lie. He’d never thought much of the two of us as a match anyway. “Do you think you’ll ever trust Clark again?”
I swallowed hard. It killed me that I had to ask myself that question. “I want to.” I wanted him to be Clark again, the Clark I thought I knew who understood where the line was and would never use his powers to hurt anyone. “After eight years of a front row seat to the Clark and Lana show I know what an idiot he can be when he thinks he’s protecting someone, but . . .“
“But you trust me.”
His hand tightened around mine, and I’d have to be blind not to see the hope in his face. I glanced around my apartment, overly conscious of the fact that we were alone. That was ridiculous. We’d been alone dozens of times before, at the Isis foundation, in his car. He’d been my friend for God’s sake. When I couldn’t remember anything but him I’d felt safe with him. A part of me knew that wasn’t all Brainiac’s doing.
I couldn’t answer, or maybe I didn’t want to answer. I just smiled at him and said in a small voice, “Davis, I’m glad you’re here.” I meant it. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him, not the monster, but the friend I used to talk to, who saw through me and meant it when he promised he’d always be there, and not just when Lana ran off with another guy. I couldn’t let the monster claim that man as his last victim.
He smiled back, not his charming half smile, but a real smile that lit up the room ten times brighter than that light bulb he’d changed for me the day we met. That smile drew me toward him though I should have pulled away. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His eyes had always been so melting, and his mouth . . . I didn’t need Brainiac to lure me, I was doing fine on my own. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine, and when his mouth touched my own I thought my knees would have given way were I not sitting down.
His hand came to my face to pull me closer and this time I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, not when his mouth was so warm and full and soft and when he took his time tasting mine. His thumb stroked along my jaw all the while, so featherlight and gentle I shivered and melted all at once.
He was the one who pulled away, slowly lowering his hand from my face as though he had to force himself to do it. His eyes gleamed almost feverishly and his cheeks were flushed from kissing me. He looked absolutely tortured.
“I’m sorry.” His chair squeaked on my linoleum floor as he pushed himself up from the table. “This isn’t right. I should go.”
My heart clenched. I felt like someone was tearing off another limb when I had enough trouble standing already. I didn’t want him to go.
“Davis . . .”
I got up before he could make it to the door. There I was hovering at the edge of the cliff again, but this time I jumped off on my own head first. This little dance between us was ridiculous. I knew the truth; I saw it with my own eyes in the Fortress. I had nothing to fear from him anymore. I grabbed him by the shoulders before he could make a grab for the doorknob.
“Davis, stay.”
He didn’t move. He went rigid under my hands, afraid to come closer. I knew him. I knew why, and my hands tightened.
“It’s okay now. You don’t have to close yourself off anymore.” And I didn’t have to hide from the fact that this is what I’ve feared all this time, not the monster resurfacing, not the killer. This. “Stay.”
He stared at me, frozen and wrestling with himself. We both knew how much he wanted me, but his guilt and his hate for himself stretched like a great big ocean between us and for a moment I doubted anything I did or said could convince him to make the leap across. I let go of his jacket and waited.
My heart stopped when he gave in and came toward me, and my courage wavered on the verge of winking out entirely. Maybe I was making a big impulsive mistake here. Maybe this was the part of the movie where the monster emerged and tore me to pieces. He stepped forward and drew me close to him in one motion, wrapping one arm around me and then the other. His hand slid all the way up into my hair and I barely had time to latch an arm around his neck before he smothered my mouth with his again.
This wasn’t like the first kiss – the second kiss, actually – patient and tentative and asking nothing really but that I notice how he felt. I’d asked him for something this time and he was ready to give it to me exactly the way it was – no holding back. His tongue slid into my mouth and my head spun. I had to stretch up on my toes to give back as good as he gave, but I didn’t care. Clark would have to be on red meteor rock the size of Kansas to kiss me like that. Davis was starved for me, too starved for shyness and hesitation.
His arm tightened around my back and he pressed me close against the length of his body, and all of a sudden he was everywhere. His heart raced against my chest and his hips leaning into mine, and below that . . . After three years on and off with Jimmy a guy’s arousal wasn’t anything shocking. But this was different. I’d never been with anyone but Jimmy and we weren’t two fumbling teenagers as inexperienced as the other. This was raw, real hunger, and Davis wasn’t the least bit embarrassed that I could feel him hard and pounding through our clothes.
I wanted those clothes gone. I wanted more than just his mouth and the hot, sweet taste of his tongue against mine. I pushed his jacket off one arm at a time and got my hands under his shirt. He shuddered when my fingers grazed bare skin, all heat and hard muscle.
Before I knew it I’d kicked my shoes off and he was walking me backward through my tiny apartment with his arms still around me and his mouth sucking the skin behind my ear. We stopped in the kitchen doorway, where I arched my head back and let the wet heat of his lips trail down to my neck. My hands went to his shirt again, struggling to yank the pesky thing off him while my mind still worked. He had to pull away from me so I could twist it up over his head, leaving one side of my neck cold and tingling and begging for the pressure of his mouth back. But he didn’t move, too busy staring down at me, and I was too busy staring at him, bare-chested before me. Clark was a regular beefcake fantasy, but he was superhuman. This was all from working out and heavy lifting. I ran my hands down Davis’ chest, watching his face as I traced all that beautiful sculpted muscle. He closed his eyes and held his breath as though trying to keep himself from cracking to pieces. He didn’t stay still for long though. His warm hands took their time sliding up my arms, practically swallowing me with his eyes as he inched his fingers under the straps of my sundress and pushed the thing off my shoulders.
I stood there in my underwear, cold and burning up inside at the same time. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, or his hands. They slid around to my back and unclasped my bra, and when it hit the floor the moment of truth loomed toward us at lightspeed.
Davis didn’t disappoint. His eyes burned into me and his face was so chiseled and intense I shivered at the heat coming from him. “I want you, Chloe.” He half whispered, half panted, his fingertips resting against my sides. “I want you more than Clark could, or Jimmy, or anyone else.”
I always shrank away from Jimmy when he talked like this. The guilt would swell up, the secrets, until I felt like I had to hide from him in my own skin. But I didn’t have to this time. I stretched up to kiss Davis and my hands went back to his chest, stroking over all that perfect muscle all the way down to the zipper on his jeans.
He kicked his tennis shoe off, and let his pants and boxers fall. My pulse throbbed like crazy now that I pressed against naked skin. At this rate, I was ready to drag him down and do it there on the floor if we had to, but he lifted me up, carrying me toward the bedroom, kissing my shoulder, my jaw, the top of my breast – anywhere he could reach.
I fumbled for a condom in the nightstand drawer the instant my head hit the mattress – leftovers from my Jimmy days – squirming for him to hurry up. Lightning may as well have crashed through me when he pushed into me. My eyes went wide and my mouth opened with a sound that wouldn’t quite come. He was so . . .there, scalding inside me, staring down at me with his eyes glazed over, breathing hard. I titled my hips up toward him and pulled him down onto my mouth again. My hands went everywhere when he started to move, over his back, his hair, the muscles of his arms. This wasn’t like my fantasies of Clark or all those times with Jimmy where I only felt the pleasure through the wall of guilt and the secrets I kept. There wasn’t a wall, just Davis, pushing as deep in me as he could get and kissing me hard, devouring me inside and out and throwing himself into this like he’d never get the chance again.
I ended up flat on my back with my legs tangled around his, my mind spinning from a climax that should have blown the top of my head off. He collapsed on top of me, panting for breath, and when I uncurled my fingers from his shoulders I saw that I’d left red marks on his skin. I felt so . . . I didn’t have the word. Like I was looking up at the precipice I’d jumped from only to find the fall wasn’t so steep after all, or better yet like a little kid who’d conquered a fear and went around clamoring let’s do that again! while the grown-up part of me choked up at the risks all over again.
Davis rolled off me with a small shudder and a low sound in his throat. I missed him inside me the minute he was gone, in the little tingling aftershocks and slight soreness as I stretched out. He sank down against my side and draped an arm across me, looking over at me with the most disarmingly dazed smile.
“I feel like I’ve died and woken up in another life.”
I smiled too and let my arms settled around him, but the afterglow dimmed a little. There was still that one thing I hadn’t told him
“Funny you should say that . . . “ I laughed unsteadily.
He caught on, as he always did, and I could feel him bracing himself for another blow to his comprehension and sanity. That left me no choice but to tell him. I had no reason not to. I didn’t have the right not to. Besides, adding another brick to my castle of secrets was the last thing I wanted. I rested my head back against the pillow and drew a deep breath.
“When you were separated from that Ultimate Destroyer thing in the Fortress, you didn’t survive.” We didn’t exactly know how that separation had happened. We didn’t know what he was, part phantom and part human or an elaborate hybrid of genetic matter and Kryptonian DNA. Either way, he had only been part monster. One minute he and Clark had been embroiled in a rematch in the Fortress, the next . . . Clark had struck the killing blow, with another dagger Jor-El had given him. Only the Fortress had exploded in eerie red light that had somehow sucked the Destroyer into the sky. Brainiac, Jor-El had explained to Clark afterward. He had retracted his ultimate weapon before Clark could destroy it, to use it again and let it evolve in a more powerful form.
I’d found Davis crumpled on the ice, lifeless and covered in blood from the blows Clark had dealt during the battle – his own blood, just like Clark after their first fight. My arms tightened, and my eyes watered. Davis had looked so broken there in the cold, the Ultimate Destroyer’s last kill.
He was looking up at me in confusion. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I brought you back,” I told him. I brought him back just like I had with Clark. “It’s something I can do, heal people.”
His mouth fell open, and he pushed himself up on his elbows. But it wasn’t my meteor power that stunned him. “You saved me?” His eyes went so wide, like he was seeing me for the first time and I was a saint or an angel or . . . “Why?”
Well that was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? I didn’t exactly stop and dig for the inside scoop at the time. I just ran to him and reached out with my gift.
You told me if I found real love to hold onto it, a part me wanted to answer. The rest of me froze. Was that even a word I could use when it came to him?
My hand came up on its own, and I stroked his cheek with my fingertips. “Davis, I saw the man you were,” I told him gently. “You were one of the good guys. You deserved a chance.”
He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch so easily I don’t think he was aware of it. The emotion flooding his face was ten times stronger than the raw need we’d just satisfied.
“I’m going to try to live up to that, Chloe,” he murmured. “A guy doesn’t get that kind of second chance every day.” I couldn’t do anything but smile at him. Protecting kids on dark streets and saving lives day after day was a good start.
He lowered himself on top of me, his mouth settling on the base of my throat and when I didn’t stop him he took his time moving steadily lower. I let my eyes fall closed. No one had ever kissed me like I was made of solid gold before, and I never thought anyone who knew the whole truth would. My breathing quickened when he didn’t relent, and I twisted under him. Any lower and Davis would have to put his CPR skills to good use.
And speaking of reviving, maybe it was time I gave myself a chance too, instead of pushing my dreams aside out of some idiot belief that standing in Clark’s shadow was the only way to do good in the world, or that if I showed him enough loyalty he’d finally notice me. That didn’t mean I had to stop caring about him. I ran my hand through Davis’ short hair and whimpered at the wet glide of his tongue across my stomach. Maybe it was time I gave us a chance. Everything was easy with him and so clear-cut. How could anyone hold him accountable for something inside him against his will? And maybe Clark had my dream job at the Daily Planet and careened toward something with my cousin at super-speed, I had my own career at the Star ahead of me and a guy who’d shown his own heroic colors. Maybe it was time we made our own Lois and Clark story.
~ The end.
See?
Leave her lots of love. ^-^
the storm
Reccing Note: Companion to Prey. Davis introspective, because you know you want to get into his head.
the storm
503 words. pg. s8 prey
by capriciouswind at her livejournal. Yes. the love.
Outside and within, a storm rages on.
Not for the first time, he arrived home to an empty apartment. He had been absolved of any crimes, rewarded as a hero, yet all he could feel was weary and defeated.
Davis moved to open the curtains to try and shed some light into his dark, damp apartment. Looking out the window, he frowned, noticing the cloud formations on the horizon and a flash of lightening in the distance. A storm was rolling in, despite the sunshine that had illuminated the sky earlier. It was a sign for sure. He sighed heavily and tossed his hat and jacket on the nearby table and sat himself down in his recliner. He closed his eyes for a moment, visualizing what had happened earlier in the day.
“I think it’s best if I don’t see you for awhile,” she said. And before giving him any chance to respond, she walked away.
As he watched her, his hands had clenched the edge of the table to prevent him from chasing after her and convincing her otherwise of her parting words.
He had moved in too fast. He had said too much, too soon. He knew it as soon as the words had flown out of his mouth. When he saw her playing with the ring on her left hand, he knew that she wasn’t ready to admit anything yet. But in his need for her, he grew hasty and greedy. He needed her to know how he felt before something bad happened. Something that he couldn’t control. Something that he didn’t even fully understand himself.
Now, alone in his apartment, Davis chastised himself. Davis spoke the truth when he told Chloe that love was a foreign word to him. All his life, he moved from foster home to foster home. Sometimes he was abused. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he was cared for. Sometimes he wasn’t. Regardless, Davis didn’t have high expectations of people, nor did they have them of him. So he really shouldn’t have expected anything from Chloe Sullivan.
Yet he did. He expected so much.
The sound of thunder interrupted his thoughts and Davis stood up to peer outside again. The rain was growing heavier by the second. He wondered where Chloe was at that moment. He wondered if she was staring outside a window, thinking about him. Or if she was she running through the storm, trying to escape the harsh pellets of raindrops that fell overhead? Or was she with Jimmy or Clark, giving them her warmth and comfort. Giving them her love.
The unfamiliar feeling of hatred suddenly coursed through his body, along with the familiar dark ache in the pit of his stomach. As the storm in Metropolis grew, so did the storm within himself. While his eyes grew heavier and began to close, he pictured Chloe's smiling face. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to protect her from the storm that raged within him, but now Davis feared that she would be the first casualty.
Before the blackness overtook him, he briefly wondered why he thought that.
*
drop the love. ^-^
the storm
503 words. pg. s8 prey
by capriciouswind at her livejournal. Yes. the love.
Outside and within, a storm rages on.
Not for the first time, he arrived home to an empty apartment. He had been absolved of any crimes, rewarded as a hero, yet all he could feel was weary and defeated.
Davis moved to open the curtains to try and shed some light into his dark, damp apartment. Looking out the window, he frowned, noticing the cloud formations on the horizon and a flash of lightening in the distance. A storm was rolling in, despite the sunshine that had illuminated the sky earlier. It was a sign for sure. He sighed heavily and tossed his hat and jacket on the nearby table and sat himself down in his recliner. He closed his eyes for a moment, visualizing what had happened earlier in the day.
“I think it’s best if I don’t see you for awhile,” she said. And before giving him any chance to respond, she walked away.
As he watched her, his hands had clenched the edge of the table to prevent him from chasing after her and convincing her otherwise of her parting words.
He had moved in too fast. He had said too much, too soon. He knew it as soon as the words had flown out of his mouth. When he saw her playing with the ring on her left hand, he knew that she wasn’t ready to admit anything yet. But in his need for her, he grew hasty and greedy. He needed her to know how he felt before something bad happened. Something that he couldn’t control. Something that he didn’t even fully understand himself.
Now, alone in his apartment, Davis chastised himself. Davis spoke the truth when he told Chloe that love was a foreign word to him. All his life, he moved from foster home to foster home. Sometimes he was abused. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he was cared for. Sometimes he wasn’t. Regardless, Davis didn’t have high expectations of people, nor did they have them of him. So he really shouldn’t have expected anything from Chloe Sullivan.
Yet he did. He expected so much.
The sound of thunder interrupted his thoughts and Davis stood up to peer outside again. The rain was growing heavier by the second. He wondered where Chloe was at that moment. He wondered if she was staring outside a window, thinking about him. Or if she was she running through the storm, trying to escape the harsh pellets of raindrops that fell overhead? Or was she with Jimmy or Clark, giving them her warmth and comfort. Giving them her love.
The unfamiliar feeling of hatred suddenly coursed through his body, along with the familiar dark ache in the pit of his stomach. As the storm in Metropolis grew, so did the storm within himself. While his eyes grew heavier and began to close, he pictured Chloe's smiling face. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to protect her from the storm that raged within him, but now Davis feared that she would be the first casualty.
Before the blackness overtook him, he briefly wondered why he thought that.
*
drop the love. ^-^
hiding your soul in your solitude
Reccing Note: If there's any fic that delves into Davis pov from the start and throws you into this pairing headlong, this might as well be it. I know that's what it did for me.
hiding your soul in your solitude
960 words. pg13. s8 abyss
by viennawaits at infishbowls
A lot had gone through his head when he’d first seen Chloe.
Your face is my light he says
The day shines better for the view
The birds talk among themselves
Their words tell tales of you. – Zap Mama, Nostalgie Amoureuse
*
A lot had gone through his head when he’d first seen Chloe. Cute and steady, even though the block looked like a disaster area—was a disaster area—and he’d wanted to ask her out, prolong contact; all the good stuff.
Then Clark had appeared like a fashion spread for GQ-fucking regular guys over and Davis had held it in, but not given up. There was something and nothing going on between Chloe and Clark.
He’d decided to try and offered to help out with Bette.
Maybe, maybe if Davis had been quick and rushed them both into a mistake before vending machine jewelry and exclamations of engagements were announced, maybe things would be different.
He’d gotten caught up in the ego-stroke of his effect on her. He should’ve kissed her anyway instead of playing it straight, spouting sappy lines about love and holding it in that she had surprised him; woken him up.
*
Within hours of meeting Chloe, he’d told her about running away.
He’d wanted to tell her more, about all of it, every home, every black out, wanting to help people, every thing.
This led to potentially career destroying favors that involved discovering that Chloe’s attractive male friend ratio is disgusting and her friends are blind, deaf, and dumb.
*
He has other worries; the blood on his hands when he wakes up sometimes.
The rosary.
*
He hates Clark. Hates how Chloe looks at him. Davis hates that Clark is there when he wakes up feeling broken. He hates that there isn’t much to hate about Clark, but he walks away anyway.
He’s always taken care of himself.
*
Davis was almost sick, pleasantly sick, but wary to indulge.
There was that weird shadow creature and the blood that still wasn’t his.
Then there’s Chloe who’d caught him, believed in him, and let him fall apart in front of her. Davis had never thought he was subtle about his feelings, but he’d been hoping for something more.
Sweep her off her feet; kiss her and never stop.
*
He wakes up alleys, beds, and homes that aren’t his, with blood on his hands, on his clothes and in his hair.
He washes it off and moves on, tells himself it’ll get better.
*
Davis tries to talk to Lois once. Chloe is still avoiding him so when he approaches Lois’ desk he expects the wary look. It answers a lot of questions for him.
She doesn’t remember what happened and immediately starts talking about Jimmy. “I don’t know you that well, and even though I think Chloe could do so much,” Lois blanched and then corrected herself. “My maid of honor dress is already picked out and everything.”
They face each other, both uncomfortable, and just wait. He runs through three different scenarios. He could stab her, pay back and all of that, he could smile and lie, or he could leave.
He chooses a combination of the latter two, “I just want Chloe to be happy.” Lois smiles, still uncomfortable and gestures towards her desk. “I have work.”
*
He tries things out. Jumping off of skyscrapers is his personal favorite. It makes him feel like a god as he lands on his feet, putting dents into the pavement.
Sometimes he dies, but he always comes back. Stronger, better than ever.
*
Everything is new. He has been given a new body, a beautiful new body. As he gives himself over to the blackouts, Davis knows that the answers are somewhere on the other side.
*
Davis learned a long time ago not to invest in fantasy. So when Chloe approaches him, wide-eyed and scared, saying “You’re the only one I can trust,” Davis waits.
He’d wanted to be the only one, but not the only one.
*
Chloe takes his hand, “I can remember wanting to kiss you.”
Davis tries to take his hand back. “You’re engaged.”
Chloe scoffs, “I don’t remember him. I remember you and I feel like that’s for a reason. You do too or you wouldn’t have said anything about Jimmy being the wrong one.”
“Eventually, probably soon you’re going to remember and I’m not going to take advantage of you.”
Her grip on his hand had tightened and he could’ve broken it easily, but he chooses to hang on.
“You may not feel comfortable kissing me and you don’t have to kiss me back, but I’m going to kiss you now because I want to.”
Her tongue flicks against his bottom lip and he breaks, gives in. He kisses her back with a desire for much more than she could ever give back to him.
*
Davis has never been the nicest guy and Chloe feels like his center of gravity.
*
There’s something new to Chloe when she shows up the next morning, something more than just her knowing.
“We need to talk.”
“I wish it had happened differently, but I’m not sorry I kissed you.”
Her lips turn up for a moment; “We can’t see each other anymore.”
“You kissed me.”
She’s shaking her head and reaching behind her for the doorknob. “I don’t blame you, but that never should’ve happened. You were right last night we both knew that. It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t lost my memory.”
“That’s not true.”
Chloe’s not looking at him now. “I have to go.”
*
Many thanks to viennawaits. Drop her some love and find more of her stuff at infishbowls ! ^-^
hiding your soul in your solitude
960 words. pg13. s8 abyss
by viennawaits at infishbowls
A lot had gone through his head when he’d first seen Chloe.
Your face is my light he says
The day shines better for the view
The birds talk among themselves
Their words tell tales of you. – Zap Mama, Nostalgie Amoureuse
*
A lot had gone through his head when he’d first seen Chloe. Cute and steady, even though the block looked like a disaster area—was a disaster area—and he’d wanted to ask her out, prolong contact; all the good stuff.
Then Clark had appeared like a fashion spread for GQ-fucking regular guys over and Davis had held it in, but not given up. There was something and nothing going on between Chloe and Clark.
He’d decided to try and offered to help out with Bette.
Maybe, maybe if Davis had been quick and rushed them both into a mistake before vending machine jewelry and exclamations of engagements were announced, maybe things would be different.
He’d gotten caught up in the ego-stroke of his effect on her. He should’ve kissed her anyway instead of playing it straight, spouting sappy lines about love and holding it in that she had surprised him; woken him up.
*
Within hours of meeting Chloe, he’d told her about running away.
He’d wanted to tell her more, about all of it, every home, every black out, wanting to help people, every thing.
This led to potentially career destroying favors that involved discovering that Chloe’s attractive male friend ratio is disgusting and her friends are blind, deaf, and dumb.
*
He has other worries; the blood on his hands when he wakes up sometimes.
The rosary.
*
He hates Clark. Hates how Chloe looks at him. Davis hates that Clark is there when he wakes up feeling broken. He hates that there isn’t much to hate about Clark, but he walks away anyway.
He’s always taken care of himself.
*
Davis was almost sick, pleasantly sick, but wary to indulge.
There was that weird shadow creature and the blood that still wasn’t his.
Then there’s Chloe who’d caught him, believed in him, and let him fall apart in front of her. Davis had never thought he was subtle about his feelings, but he’d been hoping for something more.
Sweep her off her feet; kiss her and never stop.
*
He wakes up alleys, beds, and homes that aren’t his, with blood on his hands, on his clothes and in his hair.
He washes it off and moves on, tells himself it’ll get better.
*
Davis tries to talk to Lois once. Chloe is still avoiding him so when he approaches Lois’ desk he expects the wary look. It answers a lot of questions for him.
She doesn’t remember what happened and immediately starts talking about Jimmy. “I don’t know you that well, and even though I think Chloe could do so much,” Lois blanched and then corrected herself. “My maid of honor dress is already picked out and everything.”
They face each other, both uncomfortable, and just wait. He runs through three different scenarios. He could stab her, pay back and all of that, he could smile and lie, or he could leave.
He chooses a combination of the latter two, “I just want Chloe to be happy.” Lois smiles, still uncomfortable and gestures towards her desk. “I have work.”
*
He tries things out. Jumping off of skyscrapers is his personal favorite. It makes him feel like a god as he lands on his feet, putting dents into the pavement.
Sometimes he dies, but he always comes back. Stronger, better than ever.
*
Everything is new. He has been given a new body, a beautiful new body. As he gives himself over to the blackouts, Davis knows that the answers are somewhere on the other side.
*
Davis learned a long time ago not to invest in fantasy. So when Chloe approaches him, wide-eyed and scared, saying “You’re the only one I can trust,” Davis waits.
He’d wanted to be the only one, but not the only one.
*
Chloe takes his hand, “I can remember wanting to kiss you.”
Davis tries to take his hand back. “You’re engaged.”
Chloe scoffs, “I don’t remember him. I remember you and I feel like that’s for a reason. You do too or you wouldn’t have said anything about Jimmy being the wrong one.”
“Eventually, probably soon you’re going to remember and I’m not going to take advantage of you.”
Her grip on his hand had tightened and he could’ve broken it easily, but he chooses to hang on.
“You may not feel comfortable kissing me and you don’t have to kiss me back, but I’m going to kiss you now because I want to.”
Her tongue flicks against his bottom lip and he breaks, gives in. He kisses her back with a desire for much more than she could ever give back to him.
*
Davis has never been the nicest guy and Chloe feels like his center of gravity.
*
There’s something new to Chloe when she shows up the next morning, something more than just her knowing.
“We need to talk.”
“I wish it had happened differently, but I’m not sorry I kissed you.”
Her lips turn up for a moment; “We can’t see each other anymore.”
“You kissed me.”
She’s shaking her head and reaching behind her for the doorknob. “I don’t blame you, but that never should’ve happened. You were right last night we both knew that. It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t lost my memory.”
“That’s not true.”
Chloe’s not looking at him now. “I have to go.”
*
Many thanks to viennawaits. Drop her some love and find more of her stuff at infishbowls ! ^-^
Friday, March 27, 2009
Welcome Post
First of all, welcome to The Chloe Davis Fic Archive. I hope you enjoy your stay. :)
The general rules apply. No spamming, no Chloe/Davis bashing, no bashing of other posters. You all are here, though, so you're smart people. So...
There's a Point to This: After much trawling the web, I realized that there isn't one place where Chloe/Davis Shippers have a comprehensive archive of fiction. This is my attempt to remedy this, backed by *extensive research*. So there you have it.
What's Chloe/Davis, you ask? That is the pairing of Chloe Sullivan and Davis Bloome from the fandom Smallville. If you want to know more, go to their official site. Read the quotes, watch the clips. Learn their story. Or watch them on the show, whatever floats your boat.
Why Chloe/Davis?
I could start with a lengthy deconstruction of the gothic fairytale, the hero fighting to stay human, and the heroine who keeps him human. I could, but that's what metas for. I'll just say this pairing has connection and enormous possibilities, and in the Smallville Universe connected to me personally like no ship I have ever seen before.
That's my ramble. I'll let the fics say the rest.
The fics are collected from all over the net, only posted here with the authors permission. Since blogger is connected to pretty much any blogging site possible and this particular one allows anonymous comments, leave feedback if you enjoy something you read. It keeps the writers going. A word or sentence does it. Believe me, I've been there.
Now that that's over with... Next up, our very first fic.
Endnotes: If searching for fic (as I get more up) you can use the episode tags to find the time in which they are set in the SV universe.
The general rules apply. No spamming, no Chloe/Davis bashing, no bashing of other posters. You all are here, though, so you're smart people. So...
There's a Point to This: After much trawling the web, I realized that there isn't one place where Chloe/Davis Shippers have a comprehensive archive of fiction. This is my attempt to remedy this, backed by *extensive research*. So there you have it.
What's Chloe/Davis, you ask? That is the pairing of Chloe Sullivan and Davis Bloome from the fandom Smallville. If you want to know more, go to their official site. Read the quotes, watch the clips. Learn their story. Or watch them on the show, whatever floats your boat.
Why Chloe/Davis?
I could start with a lengthy deconstruction of the gothic fairytale, the hero fighting to stay human, and the heroine who keeps him human. I could, but that's what metas for. I'll just say this pairing has connection and enormous possibilities, and in the Smallville Universe connected to me personally like no ship I have ever seen before.
That's my ramble. I'll let the fics say the rest.
The fics are collected from all over the net, only posted here with the authors permission. Since blogger is connected to pretty much any blogging site possible and this particular one allows anonymous comments, leave feedback if you enjoy something you read. It keeps the writers going. A word or sentence does it. Believe me, I've been there.
Now that that's over with... Next up, our very first fic.
Endnotes: If searching for fic (as I get more up) you can use the episode tags to find the time in which they are set in the SV universe.
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