Reccing Notes: An introspective look through Chloe's eyes at Davis. Really deals with the whole Doomsday aspect. At last their story comes to a climax.... and yet...
Be warned of the cliffie!
1146 words, pg-13/light m, beast
by somethingmore28 at ff.n
She imagines they are one and the same, that he ends where she begins and that she can follow this path forever.
Davis Bloome doesn’t sleep. He knows he could if he tries but as his body adjusted to the changes the beast brought forth within him, the need to sleep blurred away. To be truthful he is grateful for this, because the moment he slips away he sees the empty faces, hears the silent cry of death.
He remembers every face, recalls the searing desire to end the rhythmic pulse of life. There were days when he would hide inside, cut himself off from the world, as if he could suddenly dissipate into the walls of his apartment. He would starve himself, use every tool possible to tear his body apart. Nothing worked. He could not die.
And then there he was, the fragmented metal of the handcuff lying shattered on the ground, the beast brewing within as he fought for it to stop.
Her voice, warm gentle fingers pressing into his shoulder, and the angered silence of the beast.
“You saved me.”
Chloe’s body stirs beside him, and it’s only then that he realizes he has spoken out loud. He stills himself, in a way that very few people can and hopes that he hasn’t woken her from her slumber.
Sleepy eyes meet his, wide and alert, “Davis.”
‘So much for that.’
“Go back to sleep,” he urges her gently, pulling the blanket tighter around her tangled body.
It is too late; she is awake and staring at him curiously. “Do you? Sleep I mean?”
The answer is on the tip of his tongue, but he waits a beat, should he tell her?
“I could, but I don’t need too.” Another beat. “I don’t really need to eat either, it just feels weird not too.” It makes him feel more human, but he doesn’t tell her this.
There is a silence, but for once it is not weighted, it just is. Chloe turns her head to take in her surroundings, the damp wooden porch, the darkened night sky seasoned with stars, Davis’s form huddled protectively around her. She smiles lightly, not quite understanding why.
“This isn’t so bad.”
Davis hesitates, “Well if you ignore everything that lead to this moment, then no it isn’t.”
Chloe tilts her head back until she can get a good look at the sky above them. “I’m not ignoring it, I’m accepting it.”
“You can accept that I’m a killer,” as soon as the words are out he regrets them, wills them to get lost in the endless abyss above. His body tenses, she’s facing him now, he can feel it, but doesn’t know if he can handle the look in her eyes. Eventually he is forced to as her fingers pull his chin towards her. The words he is met with surprise him.
“Why didn’t you tell me that I could help you keep the beast at bay—before the kryptonite?” she adds to clarify.
This he believed was obvious, “Do you honestly think I would subject you to this if there was any other way?” He sighs, the sound is all too familiar, before reaching up to stroke the skin at her temple; his words are barely audible, “I wish I could take it all away.”
Chloe can still see the blood on her hands, can still feel the weight of the mangled corpse and wonders briefly what a 100 mangled bodies feels like. She reaches up, running her fingers lightly across his forehead; her voice is as hushed as his.
“Me too.”
Davis knows what he wants, knew the moment the smoke cleared and something inside of him fell into place. From the moment they met she became a force in his life, a pull, towards humanity. Sometimes he hates her for that.
She is the light that casts his shadow, allowing the darkness to follow, yet never consume.
Chloe watches the flurry of emotions play over his features, wishing she could smooth them away with her fingers. He looks broken, like scattered stars in the night sky.
She will never find all the pieces to put him back together; he’s left too long a trail.
“I wanted it to be you.” The words are sudden, but she’s known for some time. Somehow it’s easy, like gravity at work. “When I was walking down the aisle, I wanted it to be you.”
For a moment he is paralyzed, fear can be crippling, he is already imagining that he has lost her.
She brings his palm to her lips, fills it with gentle kisses before slipping it under her shirt. He slowly comes back to life.
She is on top of him now, straddling his waist as she bites the skin along his neck. His hands are pressing into the flesh of her back, moaning in response to her tongue sliding along his collarbone.
Chloe kisses along his jaw, lifts her head up until she can face him, her breathing is ragged and her mind is at a loss with the feel of him under her. She digs her pelvis into his, eliciting something primal from Davis.
“Wait,” he barely manages to get out.
A small smile tugs at her lips, “That’s not really an option.”
He returns the smile, before brushing his lips lightly against hers. “I may not feel this tomorrow, but you definitely will, you think you can make it to the bed without attacking me.” Davis is already picking her off the floor and into his arms as he is says this. She bites into the soft flesh at the base of his neck and Davis laughs in response.
“I’m not making any promises.”
…
Davis is everything inside of her, she is the world and he is her anchor.
He explores every part of her, taking his time, as If he is memorizing her inch by inch. It is excruciating and she doesn’t want it to stop, just closes her eyes as he takes her into oblivion.
…
Their bodies are a tangled mess of limbs, his head on her chest, her legs wrapped in his. She imagines they are one and the same, that he ends where she begins and that she can follow this path forever.
…
Davis gently presses his lips against Chloe’s shoulder, careful not to budge her sleeping form as he extricates his arm from around her. She moans lightly in protest and he controls the inherent need to return to her side.
The light from the moon illuminates his path as he heads toward the door. Grabbing his sweater along the way, he is careful to shut the door lightly behind him, taking one last look at Chloe before returning his gaze to the stars above.
Throughout his life he’s heard many theories about stars, some scientific, some religious. He remembers treating a man who claimed that stars were the souls that never made it to heaven or hell, cursed to burn forever yet allowed to watch over those they love.
“Stars die too,” he’d wanted to say, but held his tongue.
Davis slips his hand into the pocket of his sweater. The screen lights up as he dials the number. He waits.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
malignant drabble series part four
Reccing Notes: It's ending. noooo! There is no sudden lightswitch, or magic fix. We are presented with a compelling and heartbreaking journey with Chloe and Davis as the cancer worsens.
Despite her allergy to happyhappy endings, it won't break your heart completely. Maybe only threequarters of the way. There is some hope.
by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
3625 words, m/nc-17(for one scene), beast
She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.
----
“Please Chloe.” Davis squeezes her hand, brings it to his cheek and holds it against his skin, against the stubble forming on his jaw. Davis hasn’t shaved in three days, hasn’t slept in two, hasn’t done much more than fret and worry and hurt and somehow, in some sympathetic, miserable way, she blames herself for all of this. For hurting him, for the cells inside her brain that mutate to poison in the space inside her skull.
“Okay.” She sighs, gives in, lets the resistance fall way to consent, but the only thing she can feel is the throbbing inside her skull, pulsing with every beat of her heart. Her biological clock is ticking, losing days, minutes, seconds, three weeks to get out of South America and now at best she has three months before she leaves Davis alone in the world he is destined to destroy.
“Mr. Washington, I discussed this with you over the phone.” This doctor is a woman, five feet and nine inches tall in heels. “I can’t begin chemotherapy for your wife. You don’t even have an official record of her diagnoses.”
“We were on our honeymoon in South America; we went to a small, poor clinic. Please.” Davis takes her hand again, his eyes gleam wetly. “We just got married.”
“Alright.” Dr. Dilan sighs and leaves the room, returns a few minutes later, carrying an IV. “This is going to be unofficial; I could lose my license for this.” She extends her arm, and winces when a stainless steel needle pierces her skin. “Are you sure you want me to start it? If the tumors are as bad as they seem, it isn’t going to make much of a difference, and the side effects…”
“I’m a paramedic.” Davis starts the IV drip himself, hands the doctor a wad of cash Chloe doesn’t remember seeing.
Hours later, Davis holds her hair back while she knees in front of a toilet in a small motel in Texas and retches until her entire body burns and there’s nothing left in her stomach but bile and air.
----
She finds herself fading in and out of existence, periods of time where the world is only blurs of color, snatches of conversation, the coolness of porcelain gripped between her fingers, hot bile in her throat. Every three days Davis bribes another doctor, in another state, holds her free hand while IV’s and drugs are injected in her arm, course through her blood and poison her.
She loses her first clumps of hair in run down hotel fifteen hours from the Kansas state lines, stares at the strands of blonde clutched in her fingers and laughs until she cries. By the time they drive into Metropolis, she’s as bald as Lex, and a doctor at the run down clinic in the worst part off the city they can find tells her he’s never seen so many large brain tumors in a patient’s head before.
“I want to see Clark.” It’s the first day in a long time she feels like herself, like who she was before, before Brainiac and Doomsday, when Clark was Kal-El and Davis was only Davis.
“Are you sure?” Davis moves to support her when she stands, steadies her with hands on her hips as she sways, dizzy and sick and nauseous all at once.
“Two and a half months Davis, if we’re lucky.” Time has never been her friend but now it’s her mortal enemy. Time laughs and teases, holds its eternity in her face like a shiny toy that will never be hers. Time is and will always be and she is nothing more than a small, insignificant blip that will fade shortly before mankind does, before the world sinks into permanent darkness that Time will document and disregard. “Chemo isn’t working; Clark is just about the only chance I have.” Something inside her twists blackly, because the logical part of her brain that hasn’t transformed into malignant goo knows that Clark has saved her more times than he can count but now his strength and abilities are useless. She is doomed just as Davis is, cursed in a different way, cursed to end the world with the end of her life while he is cursed to end it with the continuation of his. Antipodes and antithesis and yet somehow so interconnected she can’t tell where Davis’ life and her life separate.
“We’ll go tomorrow.” Davis tries to guide her to bed, to sit, to rest, to simply be, be with him.
“No.” She shakes her head, and everything goes blurry, a swirl of shapes, vicious, sharp pounding in her head, a ringing in her ears; the sound of chirping birds, singing, singing of her impending death. She remembers her first day of kindergarten and the class parakeet, Tweeters, a bright green and gray bird that ate seeds from the palm of her hand and stood on her fingertips. The day her mother left she went to school that day and opened the door to the parakeet’s cage, watched him fly off into the sky and wished that he could find her mom and bring her back to her, clutched in his tiny talons. “We’re going right now.”
“It’s nine thirty.” Davis points to the hotel alarm clock.
“Then it’s nine thirty, get in the car, or I’m going to drive it myself.”
Davis grabs the keys off the nightstand.
----
“Chloe?” Clark hugs her, crushes her against his chest, strong arms and firm muscle, familiar and foreign in one moment. He holds her as though she’ll float away if she doesn’t, as though she isn’t something completely tangible, a shell of herself filled with helium, a ghost flickering between visible and invisible, whole and broken.
“Hi Clark.” She says, and the words escape her mouth as a sigh, a hopeless, dejected, guilty utterance. Clark hasn’t changed since she left, however long ago that was. She can’t remember anymore, time and life are one endless stretch of road behind her, and she’s too focused on the giant chasm visible in her very distant future to look back.
“What happened to you?” Her clothes hang off her bones; she’s drowning in fabric, two sizes too thin and twenty pounds underweight. He glares at Davis, who stands solemnly behind her on the porch, lips pressed together in a thin line.
“Brain tumors, ironic isn’t it? You save my brain from Brainiac and then I get cancer.” She laughs, a bitter sound, something hollow in her throat, sharp where a piece of her sanity breaks loose, cracks and crumbles, broken courage at her feet.
“Oh no.” Clark pulls her to him again, squeezes her so tight, squeezes her like he thinks he can squeeze the cancer out of her with one embrace. “Don’t worry; you’re going to be fine. I’m going to call Oliver and he’ll call the best doctors in the world and you’re going to be fine.”
“After half a dozen rounds of chemo, I’m beginning to think that modern medicine is useless.”
“Don’t say that Chloe. I’ll fix you, I promise, I always do.” Something sparkles in his eyes, something blue and desperate and needy and suddenly the world is just a bit more painful. He loves her and he’s only recently come to terms with it. She wants to laugh again, because she’s always wanted him to look at her like that and now she feels nothing, not even a brief flutter of excitement in her belly. All she feels is pity and sadness and fresh guilt.
“I think pulling Brainiac out of my brain is what caused this.” She says to break the silence, to break that look, that tears her heart into pieces she doesn’t want to have to put back together. She gave up loving him when she was young and naive, when everything in her world was Clark and she was just so damn grateful to be needed, to be special to someone.
“I’ll go to the fortress right now, maybe there’s something there.” Clark kisses her forehead, but self-hatred and blame are heavy in the corners of his mouth.
A rush of wind, and Davis guides her back to the car.
----
Her brain is dying. Scrambling itself into a mass of goo and cells and thoughts. She forgets things, chunks of time, finds herself staring at the wall, Davis’ face so close to hers his breath mists warmly across her cheeks, soothing her with words, stroking the curves of her jaw.
She looks into the mirror early one morning and the face that stares back isn’t hers. It’s the face of a stranger, pale, gaunt, large, sunken green eyes. That isn’t her, isn’t Chloe. It’s someone dying, someone wearing her skin, or her wearing someone else’s skin, living just beneath a stranger’s epidermis. It’s only a game of dress up and pretend like after her mother left and she spent hours in her closet, standing in her mom’s high heeled shoes.
She’s just a little girl in her Mommy’s shoes and she laughs, throws back her head and laughs, primal and giddy. She looks down but her feet are bare, she’s lost Mommy’s shoes and lost her hair but she has to have hair. Has to have it somewhere, she doesn’t see scissors so it has to be there somewhere, has to exist because hair can’t just not exist, not the hair on her head that is just like the hair Mommy has. Mommy’s hair is so long and so pretty and Mommy lets her braid it sometimes and then Mommy does her hair too. She needs to find her hair because it’s like Mommy’s and Mommy is gone so now it’s all she has.
She digs her nails into her scalp, into the fake baldness. Her hair is there underneath; she can feel it, feel it through her nails that aren’t long like Mommy’s or as pretty because Mommy says she’ll spill the polish all over the floor. She presses her fingers in and scrapes, has to find her hair, needs to find her hair, it’s there, it can’t not be there but then her fingers are covered in red. Nail polish on her head and Mommy was right, she spilled it because she isn’t big enough but she still has to find her hair. She scrapes again and digs and the fake baldness doesn’t go away.
It’s Clark who finds her afterwards, bald and bloodied on the bathroom floor.
----
“Chloe.” Clark smells like desperation when he visits her late one Sunday afternoon. It’s possibly her last Sunday, if the timeframe is correct, if her life span can truly be calculated by a doctor with a fuzzy MRI and a frown deeply etched into the corners of his mouth. “I’ve done everything I can think of but…” Clark crumples, shatters like a piece of glass, molds into her, big arms sliding around her waist, burying his face in the crook of her neck like a child. His breath moves hot across her skin, a heated tickle, and Davis watches from the kitchen, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, fingers smelling like grease and salt and soap.
“It’s okay Clark.” It is okay, it’s natural, it’s nearing the end of the cycle of birth and life and death, it’s the candle of her life burning down to the wick, just a misshapen puddle of wax hardening in the darkness. She’s accepted her own mortality, lets it settle hot and sour in her stomach, but the guilt rises in her throat like bile, bubbles up and pops. Davis is going to destroy the world and it is entirely her fault, because her brain is weak, her cells malignant, everything inside her skull is mush and outside she’s nothing more than a withered shell of herself with bandages around her scalp.
“No Chloe, it’s not, I’m supposed to save you. I’m supposed to save you.”
“You can’t save everyone Clark.” He can’t save her, no one can; the pain inside her head and in her soul tells her so. “It’s almost six; you should get to work before Lois sends out a search party for you.” She touches his forehead, his nose, the collar of his shirt, feels skin and cotton.
“I’ll come back to see you tomorrow. Bye Chloe.” Clark kisses her cheek, and she knows there won’t be a tomorrow. This is the way her world ends and it is surprisingly anticlimactic. But after her world comes the world and the old Chloe inside her, the one who loves fresh brewed coffee and warming her skin in the sun won’t let it end.
“I won’t give up Chloe.” Davis settles beside her on the couch, hands damp with dishwater, redolent of strong smelling orange soap.
“I know you won’t Davis.”
“How are you feeling?” He lays the back of his hand on her forehead, presses his fingers lightly into her throat, checking her lymph glands.
“Fine.”
What she doesn’t tell him is that she hasn’t been able to see more than blurry shapes and shades of grey for weeks.
----
Everything she’s capable of seeing is bathed in faint, early morning light when she wakes, flexes her muscles beneath the covers, wriggles her toes just to be sure she’s still alive.
“You’re awake.” Davis sticks his head out of the bathroom, a bleary outline, white shaving cream on the lower half of his face.
“You’re…naked?” She thinks he smiles at her, and she assumes the flash of movement she can see is Davis bringing the razor down his chin.
“I’m wearing pants.” He laughs, a warm, soothing sound, low in the hollow of his throat. “I had to go to the store; they usually frown on naked grocery shopping.”
“The store?” For the last…however many months it’s been, all the days, every headache, each day of dread and responsibility, Davis was never able to leave her. And now, now that he is going to have to leave her, his reason for needing her has gone away.
“Yeah, I…I can go outside without you.” She knows she should smile, should be happy, happy for him, but a part of her twists blackly, because it’s easier to believe her death has an impact, some kind of noble, last ditch effort to try and save the world, rather than the knowledge that once she’s gone she’s only going to sink into oblivion, gone from memory as her flesh and bones are slowly eaten deep inside the earth. “I think it knows Chloe.” Davis rushes to her then, sits on the edge of the mattress, shaving cream dripping off his skin, a splotch of foamy white landing on the back of her hand.
“Knows what Davis?” She manages to find his face, to cup it, fingers sliding slick through shaving cream.
“That it might only have to wait a little while longer before there’s nothing left that can stop it.” Davis nuzzles his cheeks against the palms of her hands, shaving cream dripping off in plops that splatter across the blankets. “And once it can’t be stopped Chloe, I pray to God that I don’t come back.” She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.
“So this is the way the world ends huh?” She breathes into him, across his mouth, onto his skin, kisses him in an awkward movement, touching mouths in one, hesitant press of flesh and certainty. He tastes like shaving cream, saliva, and toothpaste, sour and bitter in his mouth, on his tongue, tasting strongly of desperation and hopelessness, acceptance of what he’s always tried to resist. Davis believes in God and the Devil, heaven and hell, and she can’t imagine what it feels like to be your own Devil, trapped in your own personal hell.
“It seems that way. I’m gonna go finish shaving.” Davis kisses the center of her palm, the sheets rustle as he begins to stand.
“Don’t. Say with me.” She reaches for him, misses, fists her hands in the comforter instead.
“Okay.” He stretches out beside her, smears shaving cream on the pillows. “Are you feeling sick?” She shakes her head; the tumors inside her skull seem to throb from it, aching from the tip of her head down to her toes.
“Not at the moment.” She trails her hand down his chest, over the planes of warm, smooth muscle, touching him softly under his third rib, where he’s ticklish.
“Chloe, no.” He pushes her hand gently away, shakes his head, his face blurring in and out of focus, from color to grey.
“What? You can’t sleep with a girl without hair? You are so shallow.” She teases, tickling him again, walking her fingers along his ribcage, down and down and down until he inhales sharply, draws his hips backwards and shivers.
“Chloe, I can’t, you’re sick.” Davis treats her like she’s glass, cracked and fragile, crumbling and shattering under his touch.
“I’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll heal me.”
“I don’t think my penis can cure cancer.” Davis puts cautious hands on her bare stomach, slides them slowly to her thighs, kneads his fingers in gently.
“You never know until you try.”
“No Chloe.” Davis leans in close and kisses her, remnant shaving cream rubbing off on her jaw, on her flesh as he slides down and kisses all of her, licking a long, clean line down her abdomen. He sucks on her hipbone, hot tongue swiping over skin, lapping at it, like he’s trying to memorize the taste of her, even though he won’t be able to remember her once she’s gone. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His words are muffled against her, absorbed into her, and his fingers curl into the waistband of her panties, but he pulls them down half heartedly. “I love you Chloe.” He kisses the insides of her thighs, grips them with his hands, pushes his fingers so deeply into the muscle it almost hurts, could almost leave bruises if he isn’t careful.
“I love you too.” She does, she thinks she’s probably loved him longer than she can remember, before she left everything for him, before her brain was damaged, before death augmented inside her skull, spread its poison to her cells and tissues. The problem is that she loves him, loves him so damn much that dying is about more than the world, it’s about Davis, about leaving him alone in a world he’s always had to be alone in. “I love you.” She curls her fingers into his short hair, runs them across his scalp, moaning breathlessly when he goes down on her, short, sensuous strokes of his tongue against her. For the briefest of moments, nothing in the world seems to matter except the motions of his mouth, her thighs clamped tightly around his head, the unsteady, shuddering gasps of her inhalations. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou is a steady mantra in her head, on her lips and she groans it again and again and again until her thigh muscles tense one last time before going slack. “You want some help with that?” She asks as Davis undoes his zipper, slides up her body to press his face into her throat, thrusts himself slow and steady against her leg. He mouths words into her skin, prays into her, comes sticky on the inside of her right thigh. “Great” She laughs, wiping shaving cream from her chin. “Now I need a shower.”
“What do you want to do today?” Davis questions after their shower, after she’s clean and scrubbed, after another failed attempt to wash the cancer off her.
“I have something I want to show you.” She tries to tie her shoelaces, but her fingers tremble and she can’t remember what comes after the first criss-cross of the laces. “Somewhere I want us to go.”
“Okay, do you wanna tell me where?”
“It’s a surprise.” She fumbles blindly in the drawer beside her dresser, closes her hand around the smooth, eight sided metal. “Just follow my directions okay?”
“Chloe….why are we here?” She feels Davis shaking, his hand tightening around hers, squeezing it like he’s afraid she’s going to float away if he lets go.
“You trust me right?” She can’t see his uneasy smile, but she can see the bobbing of his head, hear the certainty in his voice when he answers, honest and consenting all at once.
Snowflakes fall softly around her, bitterly cold, melting quickly on her face.
She barely manages to find the crystal and insert it, but the panicked whine Davis makes and the rush of air are her confirmation. It hurts to breath, to speak, and the icy air makes her lungs crackle.
“Chloe, please, don’t make me go in there. You said I didn’t have to go in there. You didn’t let Clark put me in the Phantom Zone.” Davis falls to his knees, wraps his arms around her legs, hides his face against her.
“Don’t make me go in there Chloe; I need to stay with you. You’re not going to die alone Chloe. I’m going to be there, and I’ll hold your hand and cry like a baby. I’m going to bury you and you’re going to have the biggest funeral anyone has ever seen. Jimmy isn’t going to be invited and you’ll be up in heaven with the angels watching, with your parents, with everyone you love who’s gone away, and then when it takes over I’ll be there with you too.”
His tears mingle salty in her mouth when she kisses him, sucks in his sadness, his heartbreak, the acceptance of the inevitable, tastes his fear and his love and gives her own right back.
“You’re not going in there alone Davis. I’m going too. We’ll be there together, forever, and I will never die and you will never be Doomsday.”
“Okay, okay.” His voice breaks, cracks into a half sob that he swallows down. “Lord in heaven, hear my prayers…” He smoothes a cross into his forehead.
“Ready?”
Davis takes her hand, and they leave the world together while the arctic wind blows snow across their footprints.
Despite her allergy to happyhappy endings, it won't break your heart completely. Maybe only threequarters of the way. There is some hope.
by xxamlaxx at her livejournal
3625 words, m/nc-17(for one scene), beast
She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.
----
“Please Chloe.” Davis squeezes her hand, brings it to his cheek and holds it against his skin, against the stubble forming on his jaw. Davis hasn’t shaved in three days, hasn’t slept in two, hasn’t done much more than fret and worry and hurt and somehow, in some sympathetic, miserable way, she blames herself for all of this. For hurting him, for the cells inside her brain that mutate to poison in the space inside her skull.
“Okay.” She sighs, gives in, lets the resistance fall way to consent, but the only thing she can feel is the throbbing inside her skull, pulsing with every beat of her heart. Her biological clock is ticking, losing days, minutes, seconds, three weeks to get out of South America and now at best she has three months before she leaves Davis alone in the world he is destined to destroy.
“Mr. Washington, I discussed this with you over the phone.” This doctor is a woman, five feet and nine inches tall in heels. “I can’t begin chemotherapy for your wife. You don’t even have an official record of her diagnoses.”
“We were on our honeymoon in South America; we went to a small, poor clinic. Please.” Davis takes her hand again, his eyes gleam wetly. “We just got married.”
“Alright.” Dr. Dilan sighs and leaves the room, returns a few minutes later, carrying an IV. “This is going to be unofficial; I could lose my license for this.” She extends her arm, and winces when a stainless steel needle pierces her skin. “Are you sure you want me to start it? If the tumors are as bad as they seem, it isn’t going to make much of a difference, and the side effects…”
“I’m a paramedic.” Davis starts the IV drip himself, hands the doctor a wad of cash Chloe doesn’t remember seeing.
Hours later, Davis holds her hair back while she knees in front of a toilet in a small motel in Texas and retches until her entire body burns and there’s nothing left in her stomach but bile and air.
----
She finds herself fading in and out of existence, periods of time where the world is only blurs of color, snatches of conversation, the coolness of porcelain gripped between her fingers, hot bile in her throat. Every three days Davis bribes another doctor, in another state, holds her free hand while IV’s and drugs are injected in her arm, course through her blood and poison her.
She loses her first clumps of hair in run down hotel fifteen hours from the Kansas state lines, stares at the strands of blonde clutched in her fingers and laughs until she cries. By the time they drive into Metropolis, she’s as bald as Lex, and a doctor at the run down clinic in the worst part off the city they can find tells her he’s never seen so many large brain tumors in a patient’s head before.
“I want to see Clark.” It’s the first day in a long time she feels like herself, like who she was before, before Brainiac and Doomsday, when Clark was Kal-El and Davis was only Davis.
“Are you sure?” Davis moves to support her when she stands, steadies her with hands on her hips as she sways, dizzy and sick and nauseous all at once.
“Two and a half months Davis, if we’re lucky.” Time has never been her friend but now it’s her mortal enemy. Time laughs and teases, holds its eternity in her face like a shiny toy that will never be hers. Time is and will always be and she is nothing more than a small, insignificant blip that will fade shortly before mankind does, before the world sinks into permanent darkness that Time will document and disregard. “Chemo isn’t working; Clark is just about the only chance I have.” Something inside her twists blackly, because the logical part of her brain that hasn’t transformed into malignant goo knows that Clark has saved her more times than he can count but now his strength and abilities are useless. She is doomed just as Davis is, cursed in a different way, cursed to end the world with the end of her life while he is cursed to end it with the continuation of his. Antipodes and antithesis and yet somehow so interconnected she can’t tell where Davis’ life and her life separate.
“We’ll go tomorrow.” Davis tries to guide her to bed, to sit, to rest, to simply be, be with him.
“No.” She shakes her head, and everything goes blurry, a swirl of shapes, vicious, sharp pounding in her head, a ringing in her ears; the sound of chirping birds, singing, singing of her impending death. She remembers her first day of kindergarten and the class parakeet, Tweeters, a bright green and gray bird that ate seeds from the palm of her hand and stood on her fingertips. The day her mother left she went to school that day and opened the door to the parakeet’s cage, watched him fly off into the sky and wished that he could find her mom and bring her back to her, clutched in his tiny talons. “We’re going right now.”
“It’s nine thirty.” Davis points to the hotel alarm clock.
“Then it’s nine thirty, get in the car, or I’m going to drive it myself.”
Davis grabs the keys off the nightstand.
----
“Chloe?” Clark hugs her, crushes her against his chest, strong arms and firm muscle, familiar and foreign in one moment. He holds her as though she’ll float away if she doesn’t, as though she isn’t something completely tangible, a shell of herself filled with helium, a ghost flickering between visible and invisible, whole and broken.
“Hi Clark.” She says, and the words escape her mouth as a sigh, a hopeless, dejected, guilty utterance. Clark hasn’t changed since she left, however long ago that was. She can’t remember anymore, time and life are one endless stretch of road behind her, and she’s too focused on the giant chasm visible in her very distant future to look back.
“What happened to you?” Her clothes hang off her bones; she’s drowning in fabric, two sizes too thin and twenty pounds underweight. He glares at Davis, who stands solemnly behind her on the porch, lips pressed together in a thin line.
“Brain tumors, ironic isn’t it? You save my brain from Brainiac and then I get cancer.” She laughs, a bitter sound, something hollow in her throat, sharp where a piece of her sanity breaks loose, cracks and crumbles, broken courage at her feet.
“Oh no.” Clark pulls her to him again, squeezes her so tight, squeezes her like he thinks he can squeeze the cancer out of her with one embrace. “Don’t worry; you’re going to be fine. I’m going to call Oliver and he’ll call the best doctors in the world and you’re going to be fine.”
“After half a dozen rounds of chemo, I’m beginning to think that modern medicine is useless.”
“Don’t say that Chloe. I’ll fix you, I promise, I always do.” Something sparkles in his eyes, something blue and desperate and needy and suddenly the world is just a bit more painful. He loves her and he’s only recently come to terms with it. She wants to laugh again, because she’s always wanted him to look at her like that and now she feels nothing, not even a brief flutter of excitement in her belly. All she feels is pity and sadness and fresh guilt.
“I think pulling Brainiac out of my brain is what caused this.” She says to break the silence, to break that look, that tears her heart into pieces she doesn’t want to have to put back together. She gave up loving him when she was young and naive, when everything in her world was Clark and she was just so damn grateful to be needed, to be special to someone.
“I’ll go to the fortress right now, maybe there’s something there.” Clark kisses her forehead, but self-hatred and blame are heavy in the corners of his mouth.
A rush of wind, and Davis guides her back to the car.
----
Her brain is dying. Scrambling itself into a mass of goo and cells and thoughts. She forgets things, chunks of time, finds herself staring at the wall, Davis’ face so close to hers his breath mists warmly across her cheeks, soothing her with words, stroking the curves of her jaw.
She looks into the mirror early one morning and the face that stares back isn’t hers. It’s the face of a stranger, pale, gaunt, large, sunken green eyes. That isn’t her, isn’t Chloe. It’s someone dying, someone wearing her skin, or her wearing someone else’s skin, living just beneath a stranger’s epidermis. It’s only a game of dress up and pretend like after her mother left and she spent hours in her closet, standing in her mom’s high heeled shoes.
She’s just a little girl in her Mommy’s shoes and she laughs, throws back her head and laughs, primal and giddy. She looks down but her feet are bare, she’s lost Mommy’s shoes and lost her hair but she has to have hair. Has to have it somewhere, she doesn’t see scissors so it has to be there somewhere, has to exist because hair can’t just not exist, not the hair on her head that is just like the hair Mommy has. Mommy’s hair is so long and so pretty and Mommy lets her braid it sometimes and then Mommy does her hair too. She needs to find her hair because it’s like Mommy’s and Mommy is gone so now it’s all she has.
She digs her nails into her scalp, into the fake baldness. Her hair is there underneath; she can feel it, feel it through her nails that aren’t long like Mommy’s or as pretty because Mommy says she’ll spill the polish all over the floor. She presses her fingers in and scrapes, has to find her hair, needs to find her hair, it’s there, it can’t not be there but then her fingers are covered in red. Nail polish on her head and Mommy was right, she spilled it because she isn’t big enough but she still has to find her hair. She scrapes again and digs and the fake baldness doesn’t go away.
It’s Clark who finds her afterwards, bald and bloodied on the bathroom floor.
----
“Chloe.” Clark smells like desperation when he visits her late one Sunday afternoon. It’s possibly her last Sunday, if the timeframe is correct, if her life span can truly be calculated by a doctor with a fuzzy MRI and a frown deeply etched into the corners of his mouth. “I’ve done everything I can think of but…” Clark crumples, shatters like a piece of glass, molds into her, big arms sliding around her waist, burying his face in the crook of her neck like a child. His breath moves hot across her skin, a heated tickle, and Davis watches from the kitchen, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, fingers smelling like grease and salt and soap.
“It’s okay Clark.” It is okay, it’s natural, it’s nearing the end of the cycle of birth and life and death, it’s the candle of her life burning down to the wick, just a misshapen puddle of wax hardening in the darkness. She’s accepted her own mortality, lets it settle hot and sour in her stomach, but the guilt rises in her throat like bile, bubbles up and pops. Davis is going to destroy the world and it is entirely her fault, because her brain is weak, her cells malignant, everything inside her skull is mush and outside she’s nothing more than a withered shell of herself with bandages around her scalp.
“No Chloe, it’s not, I’m supposed to save you. I’m supposed to save you.”
“You can’t save everyone Clark.” He can’t save her, no one can; the pain inside her head and in her soul tells her so. “It’s almost six; you should get to work before Lois sends out a search party for you.” She touches his forehead, his nose, the collar of his shirt, feels skin and cotton.
“I’ll come back to see you tomorrow. Bye Chloe.” Clark kisses her cheek, and she knows there won’t be a tomorrow. This is the way her world ends and it is surprisingly anticlimactic. But after her world comes the world and the old Chloe inside her, the one who loves fresh brewed coffee and warming her skin in the sun won’t let it end.
“I won’t give up Chloe.” Davis settles beside her on the couch, hands damp with dishwater, redolent of strong smelling orange soap.
“I know you won’t Davis.”
“How are you feeling?” He lays the back of his hand on her forehead, presses his fingers lightly into her throat, checking her lymph glands.
“Fine.”
What she doesn’t tell him is that she hasn’t been able to see more than blurry shapes and shades of grey for weeks.
----
Everything she’s capable of seeing is bathed in faint, early morning light when she wakes, flexes her muscles beneath the covers, wriggles her toes just to be sure she’s still alive.
“You’re awake.” Davis sticks his head out of the bathroom, a bleary outline, white shaving cream on the lower half of his face.
“You’re…naked?” She thinks he smiles at her, and she assumes the flash of movement she can see is Davis bringing the razor down his chin.
“I’m wearing pants.” He laughs, a warm, soothing sound, low in the hollow of his throat. “I had to go to the store; they usually frown on naked grocery shopping.”
“The store?” For the last…however many months it’s been, all the days, every headache, each day of dread and responsibility, Davis was never able to leave her. And now, now that he is going to have to leave her, his reason for needing her has gone away.
“Yeah, I…I can go outside without you.” She knows she should smile, should be happy, happy for him, but a part of her twists blackly, because it’s easier to believe her death has an impact, some kind of noble, last ditch effort to try and save the world, rather than the knowledge that once she’s gone she’s only going to sink into oblivion, gone from memory as her flesh and bones are slowly eaten deep inside the earth. “I think it knows Chloe.” Davis rushes to her then, sits on the edge of the mattress, shaving cream dripping off his skin, a splotch of foamy white landing on the back of her hand.
“Knows what Davis?” She manages to find his face, to cup it, fingers sliding slick through shaving cream.
“That it might only have to wait a little while longer before there’s nothing left that can stop it.” Davis nuzzles his cheeks against the palms of her hands, shaving cream dripping off in plops that splatter across the blankets. “And once it can’t be stopped Chloe, I pray to God that I don’t come back.” She’s heard that death is not an end, only another beginning, but her death is quite literally the end, to everything.
“So this is the way the world ends huh?” She breathes into him, across his mouth, onto his skin, kisses him in an awkward movement, touching mouths in one, hesitant press of flesh and certainty. He tastes like shaving cream, saliva, and toothpaste, sour and bitter in his mouth, on his tongue, tasting strongly of desperation and hopelessness, acceptance of what he’s always tried to resist. Davis believes in God and the Devil, heaven and hell, and she can’t imagine what it feels like to be your own Devil, trapped in your own personal hell.
“It seems that way. I’m gonna go finish shaving.” Davis kisses the center of her palm, the sheets rustle as he begins to stand.
“Don’t. Say with me.” She reaches for him, misses, fists her hands in the comforter instead.
“Okay.” He stretches out beside her, smears shaving cream on the pillows. “Are you feeling sick?” She shakes her head; the tumors inside her skull seem to throb from it, aching from the tip of her head down to her toes.
“Not at the moment.” She trails her hand down his chest, over the planes of warm, smooth muscle, touching him softly under his third rib, where he’s ticklish.
“Chloe, no.” He pushes her hand gently away, shakes his head, his face blurring in and out of focus, from color to grey.
“What? You can’t sleep with a girl without hair? You are so shallow.” She teases, tickling him again, walking her fingers along his ribcage, down and down and down until he inhales sharply, draws his hips backwards and shivers.
“Chloe, I can’t, you’re sick.” Davis treats her like she’s glass, cracked and fragile, crumbling and shattering under his touch.
“I’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll heal me.”
“I don’t think my penis can cure cancer.” Davis puts cautious hands on her bare stomach, slides them slowly to her thighs, kneads his fingers in gently.
“You never know until you try.”
“No Chloe.” Davis leans in close and kisses her, remnant shaving cream rubbing off on her jaw, on her flesh as he slides down and kisses all of her, licking a long, clean line down her abdomen. He sucks on her hipbone, hot tongue swiping over skin, lapping at it, like he’s trying to memorize the taste of her, even though he won’t be able to remember her once she’s gone. “I don’t want to hurt you.” His words are muffled against her, absorbed into her, and his fingers curl into the waistband of her panties, but he pulls them down half heartedly. “I love you Chloe.” He kisses the insides of her thighs, grips them with his hands, pushes his fingers so deeply into the muscle it almost hurts, could almost leave bruises if he isn’t careful.
“I love you too.” She does, she thinks she’s probably loved him longer than she can remember, before she left everything for him, before her brain was damaged, before death augmented inside her skull, spread its poison to her cells and tissues. The problem is that she loves him, loves him so damn much that dying is about more than the world, it’s about Davis, about leaving him alone in a world he’s always had to be alone in. “I love you.” She curls her fingers into his short hair, runs them across his scalp, moaning breathlessly when he goes down on her, short, sensuous strokes of his tongue against her. For the briefest of moments, nothing in the world seems to matter except the motions of his mouth, her thighs clamped tightly around his head, the unsteady, shuddering gasps of her inhalations. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou is a steady mantra in her head, on her lips and she groans it again and again and again until her thigh muscles tense one last time before going slack. “You want some help with that?” She asks as Davis undoes his zipper, slides up her body to press his face into her throat, thrusts himself slow and steady against her leg. He mouths words into her skin, prays into her, comes sticky on the inside of her right thigh. “Great” She laughs, wiping shaving cream from her chin. “Now I need a shower.”
“What do you want to do today?” Davis questions after their shower, after she’s clean and scrubbed, after another failed attempt to wash the cancer off her.
“I have something I want to show you.” She tries to tie her shoelaces, but her fingers tremble and she can’t remember what comes after the first criss-cross of the laces. “Somewhere I want us to go.”
“Okay, do you wanna tell me where?”
“It’s a surprise.” She fumbles blindly in the drawer beside her dresser, closes her hand around the smooth, eight sided metal. “Just follow my directions okay?”
“Chloe….why are we here?” She feels Davis shaking, his hand tightening around hers, squeezing it like he’s afraid she’s going to float away if he lets go.
“You trust me right?” She can’t see his uneasy smile, but she can see the bobbing of his head, hear the certainty in his voice when he answers, honest and consenting all at once.
Snowflakes fall softly around her, bitterly cold, melting quickly on her face.
She barely manages to find the crystal and insert it, but the panicked whine Davis makes and the rush of air are her confirmation. It hurts to breath, to speak, and the icy air makes her lungs crackle.
“Chloe, please, don’t make me go in there. You said I didn’t have to go in there. You didn’t let Clark put me in the Phantom Zone.” Davis falls to his knees, wraps his arms around her legs, hides his face against her.
“Don’t make me go in there Chloe; I need to stay with you. You’re not going to die alone Chloe. I’m going to be there, and I’ll hold your hand and cry like a baby. I’m going to bury you and you’re going to have the biggest funeral anyone has ever seen. Jimmy isn’t going to be invited and you’ll be up in heaven with the angels watching, with your parents, with everyone you love who’s gone away, and then when it takes over I’ll be there with you too.”
His tears mingle salty in her mouth when she kisses him, sucks in his sadness, his heartbreak, the acceptance of the inevitable, tastes his fear and his love and gives her own right back.
“You’re not going in there alone Davis. I’m going too. We’ll be there together, forever, and I will never die and you will never be Doomsday.”
“Okay, okay.” His voice breaks, cracks into a half sob that he swallows down. “Lord in heaven, hear my prayers…” He smoothes a cross into his forehead.
“Ready?”
Davis takes her hand, and they leave the world together while the arctic wind blows snow across their footprints.
rolling on the ashes
Reccing Notes: The continuation to burned beyond recognition, where Chloe does not insist on flannel nightgowns. I think she's really outdone herself here. Equal parts IC Chloe and Davis voice, fluffyangst on the run, and an affirmation of life.
by nonky at her livejournal
1912 words, m/nc-17, post-beast
Every muscle he had bunched, contracted, tried to crunch him small enough to fit in her pocket and sleep spooned around her ear with golden hair as his blanket. He could turn into mini Beast and kill bugs in her apartment.
Chloe spent most of two days very quietly sitting in the passenger seat, letting him drive because he told her it relaxed him. She probably knew it was more complicated than that – Davis considered himself a reasonably intellectual man when he wasn't being a murderous beast. She'd never talked down to him or flaunted what she'd gotten in the cerebral department. She wasn't unfeeling of his . . . feelings.
And yes, she'd seduced him into letting her give up her entire life and everyone she knew, but he thought the road trip would be good for her, too. They'd get ice cream in all the states they passed through, and visit local museums. They'd see giant plaster sculptures of bread-basket type icons. Maybe a giant bread-basket. They could have some good times making fun of that. He was resolved not to assume any kind of physical relationship because they'd had sex once.
Which was why he startled to find her hand on his thigh. She'd touched him; lots of rubbing, massaging, lingering times meant to soothe the urge to mash living humans into concentrated blood orange juice. She'd hugged him even before they knew his sanity depended upon it, so the touch wasn't irrational or extraordinary.
Except he was FUCKING driving, and she had to know touching there was code for FUCKING, and he had enough trouble not falling on his face and sobbing when a song came on the radio about being a man not good enough for his woman, so it was pretty FUCKING inconsiderate of such a beautiful, caring, wonderful angel to just-
Davis didn't remember pulling over, unclasping his responsibly fastened seat belt, or setting on her like a werewolf. He didn't have that problem, specifically, nor had The Beast slipped out. He was exactly himself, which mean he had sliced the wheel sharply right, probably chewed out of his seat belt and dragged her until her knees were in his armpits. Chloe's mouth let go with a little kissing noise he adored.
“Jesus, Chloe,” he mumbled, looking down at how she was wedged behind the gear shift. “I'm sorry. You just can't . . . “
He had to swallow, hard, because he had never really told her she couldn't do something. He had tried to make her feel warm and fuzzy about her engagement to another man. He had babbled all sorts of nonsense to keep her looking at him. When he ran into her at the hospital he'd surged with glee that she was there. It wasn't right to be so delighted she or someone near her needed medical attention. Later, when it was her new husband recovering from wounds The Beast had inflicted, it was just sick.
“Okay, I'm sorry,” Chloe murmured, her eyes glowing with humour. She glanced at the mechanism next to her and fingered the knob. “Um, do you think you could pull me all the way over to your side so I can get out of this?”
Maybe she was only holding it so they didn't slip into reverse and start rolling, but Davis could sense her hand wrapping around that thing. He'd never been a car guy. No money when he was younger meant he'd been happy to have something reliable with wheels. But he was starting to get how you could love a woman because she loved your car.
He helped her to sit in his lap, her knees around his legs. It was the only way to get her out of the entanglement. Her face turned to look down and he blushed. His body apparently included Chloe as a missing limb, one that it wanted to reattach.
“I didn't mean to freak you out. I just thought we might find a hotel and relax for a while. We've been making good time. No one is going to recognize you by now. And your arm,” she sighed, “Every time you turn the wheel or shift, it moves, and the muscles all get outlined.”
Davis didn't know what to say. He should remind her they were in several world's worth of trouble and needed to keep running. He should help her back to her own seat and remind her to buckle herself in. Then the whole lonely orphan, finally found someone, don't screw it up, Davis, pressure twitched, and his body flexed. Every muscle he had bunched, contracted, tried to crunch him small enough to fit in her pocket and sleep spooned around her ear with golden hair as his blanket. He could turn into mini Beast and kill bugs in her apartment.
He wasn't getting oxygen to his brain, Davis knew it. He was expected to say something to her idea and he didn't remember English. He was going to have to pantomime desperate, or relearn nodding.
Chloe had put her palms on his chest, enthralled as she notched him a little bit past shame. He'd never been unable to find a girl who liked him well enough to sleep with him. He wasn't this terribly undersexed. She blinked, flinging her head back and pushing her breasts closer to him.
I can be a good slut, he thought. Maybe I always was and never paid attention to it. Good to know I'm a huge whore without any sense of romance or capacity for patience. Self-knowledge is power. At least a few of the foster homes were Catholic, almost, and I've heard that helps.
“I've never been a biter,” she told him, undulating on top of him like some goddess bestowing favours. “It's frankly disturbing how much I look at your neck. And I like that you're gentle, but if you're going to be gentle with me all the time we need to have more sex to meet my groping requirement.”
Davis knocked the back of his head into the seat, reminding himself that he was gentle because she was sweet, deserving and intimidatingly small. One slip from big, square indestructible hands and she'd have broken bones. He was having trouble remembering his hands were the problem, since hers were down on his waist. Chloe opened his belt and slinked down to fit with his legs under the steering wheel.
“Okay, you said something about biting and I'm sure this isn't the place, either,” he mumbled. He could reach her shoulders and try to pull but she'd hit her head down there and he couldn't take her to a hospital. Maybe Chloe being little was just his problem. She hummed suggestively as his zipper lowered. She seemed to be doing great.
“Chloe? We don't have a lot of privacy here. We'll go to a hotel. It will be nice. Oh, damn it!”
She had him exposed, his hard-on hot in her grasp. Davis slumped down in the seat and flicked off the lights. Chloe always won, and she made sure he won, too.
They'd been driving at night, during the hours her friends would be able to look for them. They stopped at noon and checked into the nearest place with a bed and shower. It had been two days and one shower each since the first time they made love. The first day on the run had drained the euphoria of freedom, and they slept without undressing. They had to have washed each other off, but Davis felt as connected to her as that initial instant of contact.
“I don't know how much time we'll have or if we'll get away,” Chloe told him, stroking her palms down gently. “You're beautiful. You make me feel beautiful. You deserve to have someone who cares for you.”
She could talk him into anything. Davis tried not to pant or whimper as her hands worked him slowly. He moved his legs wider and she ducked up to place a wet kiss on the side of his cock. She arched further into his lap and put both hands high on his thighs.
“Davis, this is the non-crazy part of who we are together. I'm not going to pretend it's easy, or as simple as our bodies, but I can't get at your soul the same way. I want you.”
She stared into his eyes, pretty face soft and loving. He wanted it to be true. Chloe was careful with words. She never promised more than she could give. Hypnotized, he nodded, his fingers sliding easily into her bright hair.
She pushed his t-shirt up and took him delicately into her mouth. Gnawing arousal blazed through his torso. He'd read books about this all-encompassing woman who sounded more magical than human. He'd never thought it would happen to him, or even appeal. Chloe's hot breath surrounded him, drifted around his flesh like the hot fog in his mind.
Her tongue flicked at his head, shaping him as her hand wrapped lower on his shaft. Chloe pumped her fingers surely. She let out a muffled noise and moved her mouth away. Davis forced his eyes open, staring down at her. She licked her lips slowly, tipped his cock up straight, and bit the thin skin carefully. Her slick teeth ran over him, gathering a mouthful as she tipped her chin. Her lips plumped as she sucked. Blood flow stopped to the inessential majority of his body.
She released him and took a deep breath, positioning them so she could move her head and shoulders forward as her mouth drew on him strongly. One of his hands fumbled from her hair and Davis closed it around her free hand. She encouraged him with moans and sighs, whipping her tongue expertly as he pulsed harder.
He had moments – not blackouts – where it didn't seem possible he had anyone, let alone Chloe. Davis leaned back into the seat and let himself wonder if he wasn't dreaming his salvation in an alley somewhere. Perhaps reality had broken him. But there was no imagining how she edged closer, climbing up more into his lap as he fought the motion in his hips. Her hands tightened, anchored him, and he came with a harsh bark of sound.
He supposed there was nothing left to be shy about, but he looked out the window as she licked him clean. Davis helped her climb back up on the seat and stuffed himself back into his jeans before holding her. Chloe nuzzled his face, moved in to kiss him, and redirected at the last second to his cheek. Chloe Sullivan, she killed, she loved, she lied, she forgave and she swallowed; getting to know her was an altered state.
“You know, this doesn't count as road head,” she said happily. “You pulled over.”
“I have crazy ideas about not rolling vehicles,” he explained.
“That's a weird hang-up, but I'll tolerate it.”
Chloe climbed over to her own seat and they buckled in securely. She watched him start the engine and turn the lights on. Davis hesitated and glanced at her suspiciously.
“You're, uh, going to warn me before you try something like that again, right,” he asked. “That was a lot of fun, but I've never even made out in a car, so you'll have to give me a few seconds to not kill us in a fiery, explosive crash.”
Her smile held more than a hint of mischief, but she nodded agreeably. Her hand covered his on the gearshift and tickled his thumb. Davis chuckled under his breath, accepting his new fate. He'd let her take care of him, and he was going to be saved and then some. Other than some safety concerns, he wouldn't argue.
He hadn't really been using his soul for anything, and Chloe would return it better than new.
You. yes you. Go fangirl her! XD
by nonky at her livejournal
1912 words, m/nc-17, post-beast
Every muscle he had bunched, contracted, tried to crunch him small enough to fit in her pocket and sleep spooned around her ear with golden hair as his blanket. He could turn into mini Beast and kill bugs in her apartment.
Chloe spent most of two days very quietly sitting in the passenger seat, letting him drive because he told her it relaxed him. She probably knew it was more complicated than that – Davis considered himself a reasonably intellectual man when he wasn't being a murderous beast. She'd never talked down to him or flaunted what she'd gotten in the cerebral department. She wasn't unfeeling of his . . . feelings.
And yes, she'd seduced him into letting her give up her entire life and everyone she knew, but he thought the road trip would be good for her, too. They'd get ice cream in all the states they passed through, and visit local museums. They'd see giant plaster sculptures of bread-basket type icons. Maybe a giant bread-basket. They could have some good times making fun of that. He was resolved not to assume any kind of physical relationship because they'd had sex once.
Which was why he startled to find her hand on his thigh. She'd touched him; lots of rubbing, massaging, lingering times meant to soothe the urge to mash living humans into concentrated blood orange juice. She'd hugged him even before they knew his sanity depended upon it, so the touch wasn't irrational or extraordinary.
Except he was FUCKING driving, and she had to know touching there was code for FUCKING, and he had enough trouble not falling on his face and sobbing when a song came on the radio about being a man not good enough for his woman, so it was pretty FUCKING inconsiderate of such a beautiful, caring, wonderful angel to just-
Davis didn't remember pulling over, unclasping his responsibly fastened seat belt, or setting on her like a werewolf. He didn't have that problem, specifically, nor had The Beast slipped out. He was exactly himself, which mean he had sliced the wheel sharply right, probably chewed out of his seat belt and dragged her until her knees were in his armpits. Chloe's mouth let go with a little kissing noise he adored.
“Jesus, Chloe,” he mumbled, looking down at how she was wedged behind the gear shift. “I'm sorry. You just can't . . . “
He had to swallow, hard, because he had never really told her she couldn't do something. He had tried to make her feel warm and fuzzy about her engagement to another man. He had babbled all sorts of nonsense to keep her looking at him. When he ran into her at the hospital he'd surged with glee that she was there. It wasn't right to be so delighted she or someone near her needed medical attention. Later, when it was her new husband recovering from wounds The Beast had inflicted, it was just sick.
“Okay, I'm sorry,” Chloe murmured, her eyes glowing with humour. She glanced at the mechanism next to her and fingered the knob. “Um, do you think you could pull me all the way over to your side so I can get out of this?”
Maybe she was only holding it so they didn't slip into reverse and start rolling, but Davis could sense her hand wrapping around that thing. He'd never been a car guy. No money when he was younger meant he'd been happy to have something reliable with wheels. But he was starting to get how you could love a woman because she loved your car.
He helped her to sit in his lap, her knees around his legs. It was the only way to get her out of the entanglement. Her face turned to look down and he blushed. His body apparently included Chloe as a missing limb, one that it wanted to reattach.
“I didn't mean to freak you out. I just thought we might find a hotel and relax for a while. We've been making good time. No one is going to recognize you by now. And your arm,” she sighed, “Every time you turn the wheel or shift, it moves, and the muscles all get outlined.”
Davis didn't know what to say. He should remind her they were in several world's worth of trouble and needed to keep running. He should help her back to her own seat and remind her to buckle herself in. Then the whole lonely orphan, finally found someone, don't screw it up, Davis, pressure twitched, and his body flexed. Every muscle he had bunched, contracted, tried to crunch him small enough to fit in her pocket and sleep spooned around her ear with golden hair as his blanket. He could turn into mini Beast and kill bugs in her apartment.
He wasn't getting oxygen to his brain, Davis knew it. He was expected to say something to her idea and he didn't remember English. He was going to have to pantomime desperate, or relearn nodding.
Chloe had put her palms on his chest, enthralled as she notched him a little bit past shame. He'd never been unable to find a girl who liked him well enough to sleep with him. He wasn't this terribly undersexed. She blinked, flinging her head back and pushing her breasts closer to him.
I can be a good slut, he thought. Maybe I always was and never paid attention to it. Good to know I'm a huge whore without any sense of romance or capacity for patience. Self-knowledge is power. At least a few of the foster homes were Catholic, almost, and I've heard that helps.
“I've never been a biter,” she told him, undulating on top of him like some goddess bestowing favours. “It's frankly disturbing how much I look at your neck. And I like that you're gentle, but if you're going to be gentle with me all the time we need to have more sex to meet my groping requirement.”
Davis knocked the back of his head into the seat, reminding himself that he was gentle because she was sweet, deserving and intimidatingly small. One slip from big, square indestructible hands and she'd have broken bones. He was having trouble remembering his hands were the problem, since hers were down on his waist. Chloe opened his belt and slinked down to fit with his legs under the steering wheel.
“Okay, you said something about biting and I'm sure this isn't the place, either,” he mumbled. He could reach her shoulders and try to pull but she'd hit her head down there and he couldn't take her to a hospital. Maybe Chloe being little was just his problem. She hummed suggestively as his zipper lowered. She seemed to be doing great.
“Chloe? We don't have a lot of privacy here. We'll go to a hotel. It will be nice. Oh, damn it!”
She had him exposed, his hard-on hot in her grasp. Davis slumped down in the seat and flicked off the lights. Chloe always won, and she made sure he won, too.
They'd been driving at night, during the hours her friends would be able to look for them. They stopped at noon and checked into the nearest place with a bed and shower. It had been two days and one shower each since the first time they made love. The first day on the run had drained the euphoria of freedom, and they slept without undressing. They had to have washed each other off, but Davis felt as connected to her as that initial instant of contact.
“I don't know how much time we'll have or if we'll get away,” Chloe told him, stroking her palms down gently. “You're beautiful. You make me feel beautiful. You deserve to have someone who cares for you.”
She could talk him into anything. Davis tried not to pant or whimper as her hands worked him slowly. He moved his legs wider and she ducked up to place a wet kiss on the side of his cock. She arched further into his lap and put both hands high on his thighs.
“Davis, this is the non-crazy part of who we are together. I'm not going to pretend it's easy, or as simple as our bodies, but I can't get at your soul the same way. I want you.”
She stared into his eyes, pretty face soft and loving. He wanted it to be true. Chloe was careful with words. She never promised more than she could give. Hypnotized, he nodded, his fingers sliding easily into her bright hair.
She pushed his t-shirt up and took him delicately into her mouth. Gnawing arousal blazed through his torso. He'd read books about this all-encompassing woman who sounded more magical than human. He'd never thought it would happen to him, or even appeal. Chloe's hot breath surrounded him, drifted around his flesh like the hot fog in his mind.
Her tongue flicked at his head, shaping him as her hand wrapped lower on his shaft. Chloe pumped her fingers surely. She let out a muffled noise and moved her mouth away. Davis forced his eyes open, staring down at her. She licked her lips slowly, tipped his cock up straight, and bit the thin skin carefully. Her slick teeth ran over him, gathering a mouthful as she tipped her chin. Her lips plumped as she sucked. Blood flow stopped to the inessential majority of his body.
She released him and took a deep breath, positioning them so she could move her head and shoulders forward as her mouth drew on him strongly. One of his hands fumbled from her hair and Davis closed it around her free hand. She encouraged him with moans and sighs, whipping her tongue expertly as he pulsed harder.
He had moments – not blackouts – where it didn't seem possible he had anyone, let alone Chloe. Davis leaned back into the seat and let himself wonder if he wasn't dreaming his salvation in an alley somewhere. Perhaps reality had broken him. But there was no imagining how she edged closer, climbing up more into his lap as he fought the motion in his hips. Her hands tightened, anchored him, and he came with a harsh bark of sound.
He supposed there was nothing left to be shy about, but he looked out the window as she licked him clean. Davis helped her climb back up on the seat and stuffed himself back into his jeans before holding her. Chloe nuzzled his face, moved in to kiss him, and redirected at the last second to his cheek. Chloe Sullivan, she killed, she loved, she lied, she forgave and she swallowed; getting to know her was an altered state.
“You know, this doesn't count as road head,” she said happily. “You pulled over.”
“I have crazy ideas about not rolling vehicles,” he explained.
“That's a weird hang-up, but I'll tolerate it.”
Chloe climbed over to her own seat and they buckled in securely. She watched him start the engine and turn the lights on. Davis hesitated and glanced at her suspiciously.
“You're, uh, going to warn me before you try something like that again, right,” he asked. “That was a lot of fun, but I've never even made out in a car, so you'll have to give me a few seconds to not kill us in a fiery, explosive crash.”
Her smile held more than a hint of mischief, but she nodded agreeably. Her hand covered his on the gearshift and tickled his thumb. Davis chuckled under his breath, accepting his new fate. He'd let her take care of him, and he was going to be saved and then some. Other than some safety concerns, he wouldn't argue.
He hadn't really been using his soul for anything, and Chloe would return it better than new.
You. yes you. Go fangirl her! XD
binary
Reccing Notes: This fic is born of the sv_failsday challenge. ![[info]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sxw9V2YkaPdInIRPJXEQa6d8dutS_xybLJc-Wj4Zqmr9FX04NfdvWXMXxbSoWLS0Gzl3JJCZbRm0Gy_fglZcTpfyq9pvHY9diRDOZyFp61Qw=s0-d)
paraxdisepink won first place for the longfic. So.... She gave me a prompt. Davis: red!k.
It turned out a very, very AU take in the same time line as Bride. Shippier. A Braniac infected Chloe goes to Davis when her memories start disappearing again.
Binary: Characterized by or consisting of two parts or components; twofold. The same system used in computer code.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
16479 words, m/nc-17, abyss and bride (in a manner of speaking).
He was acting his own tragedy, his own scene from a naïve romantic movie, believing that could be enough.
[Davis Bloome had waited exactly two days, nine hours and twelve minutes for Chloe Sullivan. ‘I’ll wait for as long as it takes’, he’d told her then, full of that same kind of romantic blindness he’d told himself he’d never have.
(She had her own life already and he never wanted to be that guy, the one who wrecked the relationship of someone he claimed to love for his own sake. She had her fiancé and it wasn’t even as if she even knew what she felt for him anyway.)
But he would wait. He had to wait. That was the only thing he had. He hadn’t expected it to be like this.
He didn’t know what he expected really. He hadn’t expected to find her in the middle of road screaming sirens and smoking ash of all things. He hadn’t expected her to be about to marry another man or to believe in him when no one else in their sane mind would. He hadn’t expected her to run back to him, broken and remembering only him, after saying she shouldn’t see him anymore. After that little problem had been taken care of by the prick of his needle no less, he hadn’t been able to fight it any longer. She’d walked away for real.
The old adage was to let someone go and if they came back to you they were yours. That’s what he’d looked at love like before, tentative movements towards some greater connection, something that meant something. It meant something. She knew things about him that no one else did, little secrets he’s hid away inside himself completely deep. He would have given it all to her if she asked. The connection was there and it hurt like a limb had been cut from him, a burning gaping hole left by something that wasn’t even his to keep.
It sounded silly to talk about that, agony, like one of those epic love stories with the violin playing mournfully in the background, those where you know you’ve lost before you’d even begun. Loving her had hurt even as it fulfilled; and a little part of him had always seen it that way.
That was even before he started waking up in the middle of a horror movie, on a floor covered in his blood, completely healed. Before he shattered knives with his skin, before he learned that there was more to the blackouts than he knew. Before he learned that he was a creature created to destroy and this little nine-to-five, everyday hero world he’d created for himself was a complete lie.
She was the only thing that was real and he just couldn’t let go. Forget that it was her wedding in twenty four hours.
Forget that he didn’t have control of himself and it was all he could do to drive by Isis every morning and not stop, just give into temptation once. She didn’t call him and he didn’t go to her door.
This wasn’t fatal attraction. He needed to be around her like he needed to breathe, but the first time he’d stopped breathing he’d woken right back up after the pain had stopped fogging his mind.
He’d wait. ]
----
All she had to do was go to their place to find him. He was on his one break that day, some uneaten whole-wheat sandwich in front of him, absorbed in something. She did not know how he managed to look that…healthy, when he picked at his food.
Chloe knocked on the tabletop with her fist to break him out of his little world, half wanting to hide again. This was all too urgent, too serious. Too late for that. “Chloe.” he said. His eyes seemed to light up under all that brooding and it was alright.
“I thought you’d be…” off planning your wedding, maybe?
“Well I’m just letting loose right now. Being a free agent.” Code for alone, stranded and without a car.
She settled into the chair across from him, hugging her oversized bag to her chest, noticing the way his eyes scanned her face for a clue as to what. She kept her lungs moving, blew the air in and out and tried not to get lost in them. There was nothing to feel guilty about, she told herself. He was her friend, and attraction wasn’t the be-all, end-all of it.
It wasn’t as if Jimmy would get out of his mood just to be jealous that she was confiding in someone else. Clark she wouldn’t go to because… last time he’d panicked more than she had. He couldn’t just listen. He’d haul her back to Jimmy again and she wasn’t exactly ready for that.
She could count on Davis, lord knows she had before, and a little part of her felt guilty for setting his whole world upside down because she needed him to be her shoulder. He had…feelings for her and she was just rubbing salt in the wounds.
“I thought Jimmy…”
“Jimmy and I are on break.” (If forgetting her fiancées name for the second time in the week counted as a break.) “I’ve been losing chunks of time again.”
She told the whole story, racing through forgetting Jimmy’s name, another hospital MRI with Jimmy in the same room and nothing getting better. She should have known that Davis’s miracle cure with the needle, like anything too sudden and convenient, wouldn’t work.
She just wanted to go home but Jimmy had gotten right in the doctor’s face and threatened to sue. She’d dragged him away and suffice to say he wasn’t happy about that. It wasn’t far to walk within the same hospital.
“And he just left you alone like that?” Davis straightened in his chair, eyes full of something unreadable. “That was--”
“He was pretty vehement. And I haven’t exactly made it easy for him these past weeks. I mean the memory going MIA and not being there to support him through the whole wedding thing…Stuff was bound to build up under the surface.”
There was stuff beneath the surface alright, if Jimmy’s rant about being the only one trying for them was something to go by. Any groom would have done it. She shouldn’t have expected him to do anything else.
“That didn’t make it any less wrong.”
“Well, he didn’t leave me at first.”
There was the thing. She’d kind of walked out on his little hospital rant and when she’d come back two minutes later their car had been gone.
She glanced at the clock, one in the afternoon, and realized he’d run out of lunch break.
Here she was spilling all her problems to Davis on the only hour he had. Maybe she really was a bitch.
“You haven’t even had anything to eat. I’m just--- I’m sorry. I should let you get back.”
“Don’t say ever say that, not to me. You’re not going to be alone. Just wait a minute.” He stood up, paramed jacket clinging to well-defined shoulders and she’d looked down at his cup of coffee. Or tried. “The coffee might help. I know it’s kind of your sustenance.”
It wasn’t until after he came back that she realized that he’d taken the rest of the day for a ‘family emergency’. He had this idea that maybe he could help, pulling some strings and getting her an appointment somewhere. She didn’t want to start that again. The memories were just going and maybe it had always been set that way, just like it had for her mother.
“I’ve researched the hell out of it. There’s nothing you can really do. I just want to…” She just wanted to let go of it.
“I kind of take preventive measures, anyway.” She said finally, withdrawing almost everything from her bag.
“You carry notes with you?”
“Pictures, photographs, the whole shebang. A mini-dossier.” There was one for each of them- Clark, Jimmy, him, Lois.... So far his was the only one she never really needed. He was there, completely there. Crystal clear.
The rest of them weren’t and she half-expected them to come tearing around the corner with all their demands and stories that she would not remember. Angry. They were her whole life, but they terrified her, now.
She jerked at the sound of a siren, cool brown liquid spilling all over the front of her blouse. She hastily put down the cup and fanned it away from the files, mopping, making a bigger mess.
“You can say I’ve been on tenterhooks. And I kind of need a ride.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Do you have a bathroom?”
He looked at her, almost startled.
She didn’t want to go to the Talon, home or whatever it was supposed to be. She didn’t want to stay out here, with the sound of cars and traffic and so many people. She just wanted to feel safe.
“I was thinking we could go back to your place if you have to change anyway. Talk.”
The idea of being alone with him didn’t fill her with apprehension. He wasn’t one of those creepy guys who purposely made things happen to take you back their places and have their way with you. He was her entire world once and he could have given her any story he wanted. The mean romantic comedy cliché, ‘we’re married!’ He’d taken her back to her place and her friends and her life instead.
“As long as you need.” There was this look on his face, like he wasn’t seeing anything but her. Tender somehow. Bereft of something. He had learned to shut himself off from almost everybody. And then she just had to go and open him up again.
He shouldn’t have looked like that. It gave her a crazy sudden urge to reach out and touch him, anywhere, didn’t matter. His hand, his shoulder. They used to touch.
She didn’t do it of course. The ring on her finger winked in the light, Jimmy’s actual ring, the ruby that cost him so much.
----
Davis didn’t know what shirt she was about to change into. She was out in about a minute, still in her old clothes, sitting on the couch that adjoined to what he just called his kitchen these days.
There were no masks, no flattering remarks designated to fool him into thinking everything was okay. Sometimes it hurt her to smile. Like her teeth would fall out, she said. Like she was lying just doing it.
“It’s amazing what talking can do. See?” She laughed (something wrong about it somehow) and blotted her cheek with her-his sleeve. “I couldn’t have done this with anyone else.”
Of course, she could with him. It was easy. So easy, like nothing in life was meant to be. Like nothing that could last.
She twisted the very small red ring around and around on her finger and he didn’t want to look at it. It didn’t matter. She would be okay, she’d have to be. Then she would go back to her real life once everything was perfect enough for the people in it.
She was only his in pain; and he hated to see her in it.
“I have to figure out some stuff before I go back. Then maybe…” Maybe what? Guys who did that once would do it again, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. It would be petty.
“And if you don’t? Will you walk down that aisle?” Her wedding had been set for tomorrow. He knew. The invitation was on his desk, spotless; his first crumpled letter to her pressed atop it. He must have rewritten it a dozen times.
“I’m sure about the wedding. It’s like getting married is the important thing in the world.” She didn’t smile, she was convinced. Maybe he was just lying to himself about her settling for Jimmy. “I’m just not sure about—marrying--- him. I’m not sure about myself either, but then why would I think that? I think I’m just going crazy.”
“Worrying about yourself going crazy is not crazy. I do it all the time.” He had come to her certain he was something worse than a killer, and he wasn’t completely sure that wasn’t true.
“Maybe.”
“If you were crazy you might have flown into a rage at me disagreeing. You’re not crazy.”
She pushed her mouth into a smile. “I kept thinking that I’d tell him he deserved someone who wasn’t. Someone who could really want what he wanted. It’s just like….something in me stopped me every time. Crazy.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Which part?”
“Both. You’re worth more than that. We’ll get something decent in you and you’ll relax and it will be amazing how much more can change.” Maybe he could cook again. He barely bought food for himself but there was enough to get by. She blinked at him, quickly, eyes watering again.
“How do you do that? Make it all feel insignificant?” She was already telling herself to say goodbye to her life before it was taken from her. He wasn’t about to let her do that.
He felt something in him loosen, tighten up worse than ever when her arms came around him. He closed his eyes to keep it down and her scent overwhelmed him, something clean like the shampoo she used, her skin. She just needed comfort. But she never seemed to go to anywhere else for it.
“…just letting me unload on you, and I’m sorry I’m totally acting like that girl in Cyrano de Bergerac. I don’t know what I would have done without you here.”
There was another scent, much stronger. He shifted his head over her shoulder and dragged her closer. She didn’t protest, skin hot, burning and her fingers knotted as if she was about to tear through the jacket. It wasn’t like he didn’t feel it enough already.
The pain didn’t ebb at all, more like a physical ache and soon she was going to find out exactly how much if he didn’t stop. Why would he stop? He kissed the side of her head, a breath from her forehead, and let himself feel the slide of her hair, light and delicate under his fingertips. The scent... He wanted her. He needed…
Her hand settled finally, palm flat on his neck and he heard her breath snag, softly. That did it. His mouth found its way lower to the shell of her ear and she stiffened, making a tiny noise in her throat. “Davis. What are you doing?”
He didn’t do this; he spouted things about true love and holding on. He’d given her space and time and nothing had gone away. He assumed she wasn’t ready; but now he could suddenly see through all of that, he could feel it like her body, corporeal in his arms. She didn’t say stop.
“I think you know.” He’d said this after he knew that she would always have him. He was too lost to appreciate the symmetry.
He turned her head, pressing his forehead into hers and fastening her mouth to his own. She returned the kiss for a brief second before jerking her mouth away, eyes red. “I just wanted to talk,” she whispered, voice light and painful. “I just—“
Then again, it was like that time, must have been the first time, and her lips clung. Her taste was headier, marked by sweat and desperation and he wanted it all.
She felt it and her hands made a flailing movement, loosening her small fingers from the cloth and pulling one hand to the back of his neck again, putting the heat there too. The scent of her wanting made it hard to breathe, and somehow he most have let go of her hair to put his hand much lower. She curved into him so easily.
She dragged her mouth against his, eyes closed. She let go with a gasping sound, recited something small and ardor-blocking like “Jimmy, I can’t do this to Jimmy.” off a list.
He was aware she wanted him to say something; maybe he was supposed to apologize. That wasn’t what was really going on. He dropped his head into her shoulder and breathed in there, liked the way her neck moved under the lightest pressure.
“Why are you doing this to me, Davis?” Her pupils were constricted like she’d been staring at the light for too long. “I must love Jimmy. I am going to marry Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?” Oh yes. The fiancé, the one that yelled in hospitals.
“I don’t like him.” He said into her collarbone. Being reminded of that guy dropping Chloe in the middle of nowhere really should have stopped it right there, but she craned her neck back and forth again and that just wasn’t putting the ambulance in reverse.
“I know you don’t. I d--do. I just don’t remember why.”
“We should make a list.”
He followed the little bumps of the vertebra on her neck all the way down until the sleeve of her jacket tickled his ear and her muscles jumped. He did not understand why she wore so many jackets.
“He is nice, most of the --time.”
Plenty of people were nice. Chloe’s cousin, Lois? had been nice and a little spacey before she stabbed him and claimed to be his mother. He hadn’t ever thought of marrying her.
He hadn’t really thought of anyone else when there was Chloe. Chloe, warm and quite, quite willing. He had been an idiot not to see that sooner. When he bit she let out a little rush of air like ‘Oh, that is nice’. Maybe she thought that was nicer than Jimmy.
“—He- said he’d wait until I was ready to tell him things. For a while.”
“What things?” he thought he could be doing better things than talking, but she wanted him to, a little.
“My secrets.”
“What secrets?”
Her mouth was half open and her forehead crumpled. “I don’t know. Something I told you?”
His hands settled onto her waist, feeling the inward and outward motion of her ribcage as she stared at him. He had to tell her something, he knew. It was important.
“…I must have told him some things. When I worried.”
“Not now. You’re telling me.” His lips felt dry and he fought the movement that wanted to happen. “Why?”
“You’re real.”
“He’s real, too.”
“Then maybe I just trust you more.”
She wasn’t trying to smile and he wanted to tell himself to slow down but his hands needed her skin again, slipped closer to her navel. Her scent was changing, and there was less fear. More of something. Or maybe there was more fear.
“Anything else?”
“The seating chart. The cake table? I liked where he put the cake table.”
“That’s a hard one.”
“Did you ever feel like you didn’t exist without him?” He had, with her.
“So who are we really talking about?”
Her face was half-thoughtful, a quarter-melancholy, maybe a little resentful. She wrapped one arm quavering behind his shoulder, fingers drifting at the base of his neck, again, and he supposed that was answer enough.
There were too many obstructions. The green collar, pleasing when it opened to show her throat before, was binding. He tore down but the heat never overwhelmed him until her hands fell beside his and she attempted to slip the thing off her shoulders.
Cloth caught around her wrists and he tugged on one of the ends, pulling it tight when she didn’t try to wriggle free. She stretched, automatic, exposing the shelf of her breasts under flimsy, clinging cloth. She watched his face as he made the knot, blowing in and out, staggered in anticipation. He wasn’t doing what she wanted, pulling her to her feet, fingers dipping into the curve of her spine, running right under sensible lace. Her eyes were wide, almost accusing and she licked dry lips.
He let it go and she let him lift her, wrapped her bound hands deep against his neck. She kissed him the opposite way, trying to keep her breath down, stopping once, for a moment, eyes searching and confused.
“I don’t want to stop this. I can’t.”
It felt like she was going to vanish in his arms when they hooked under her, but then again nothing else existed.
The bed was better of course, his bed, and for a moment his breath hitched as she pushed herself back on it, crumpling dark blue sheets. He’d thought of her there. But it was just a second, his eyes burned and he needed more than that. He undressed, mostly and her eyes did not look cornered.
His hands went to her hips, feeling big and clumsy on the green cloth. She had been wearing that the second time he met her, when he’d thought that a girl could not care about people like that and at the same time have such pretty ankles. It landed, somewhere.
“C’mon then.” She patted the bed in front of her and didn’t whisper it in a breathy voice; she didn’t need to. Her hands tugged at the bottom of his shirt. She didn’t get a chance to pull it away before he’d tangled his hands in her hair and pushed her down.
He felt like he wanted to bury himself right there. His hands caught up, wandered up her knees, maybe a little too hard but her breath got faster and her scent was unlike anything.
She pulled him over, tentative fingers skittering against his chest under the cloth. Maybe he didn’t need his other senses.
“This is crazy. We’re both crazy. I might forget everything tomorrow.” The sun outlined her skin in gold. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Of course not.” She was inches away and it felt like he could just breathe her in. “You just have to say ‘stop’. “
Her mouth quivered at the corner, in pain or amusement he would never know. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He hadn’t been able to let go at all.
“--and mean it.” he continued, shirt landing in the corner.
“Cute.” She wiggled her way from under him and he had an idea. “Let’s see how that bravado holds up, shall we?”
She had smiled that way at him, once, teasing but it wasn’t as if they did anything about it. His thumbs couldn’t be gentle as they brushed her nipples, hard already, and she seemed to like that, but not enough to stop.
One of her hands curiously trailed down his arm, and he wondered at her fascination. The other was almost gentle, tickling at his ribs and trailing down and down and down until he couldn’t be.
“Oh.”
He ground his teeth and pulled her fingers closer and knew he would let her do whatever she wanted, thought of warmth and connection moistureanddarknessandsound. “Oh.” Her eyes were somehow pleased and her mouth drew him before she moved down. Her fingers were a tight ring and his shoulders tightened at the wetness and awkward, sensuous movements of her mouth just there, right there. She moved her other hand up to his hip and he could feel little currents radiating out from it, making everything burn so that it was all he could do not to roll over her.
Moisture fogged his vision and her face danced on the inside of his eyelids. He bucked, too hard and she made a startled noise in the back of her throat. He wrapped his fingers around her arms and tugged her head into his chest. Her eyes were glazed and he could barely open his again and it still wasn’t enough. He needed to be in her, of her.
Her fingers didn’t slacken until he pushed himself higher, nudged his knee between her legs and pressed. She was rubbing up against him and the burn was screaming out at him just to let it all go. The ring on her finger dug into his skin and he wanted it gone. He wanted to claim her completely. It was far too soon.
She didn’t think so, fought a bit when he bit a line down her shoulders, nips really. Her hands flailed and he caught them, rolled once, twice. She found a hold around his waist and she was bearing down slow, a little breathless. His mouth fell open, and she was everywhere. She thought she’d won.
He nudged inside, a little higher than really deep, brushing in once and again and again, just barely, pretending he had all the time in the world. It was little bit of a sensory overload, her scent sharpening with anticipation and her teeth and her shoulders finally shaking when she collapsed under him. He felt the pulse at her wrists thrumming wildly, fingers keeping them over her head. She was looking up into his eyes, like she was half-awake and barely holding it all in. He wanted to hear her breath hitch.
It started slowly. He felt the warmth, heat licking at him. Gradually felt himself pushing too far, perhaps more force than she could take. He couldn’t stop.
Short flat nails bit into his back and hauled against him and he didn’t know when he had let go of her hands, or put his somewhere else. There were little quivers going through her and there were no sounds that weren’t short and choppy, the dull slam of the headboard, her breath. It wanted to take him.
He nudged his head just under her shoulder, into the curve of her elbow and felt her give. His fingers kneaded along her back, an unsuccessful distraction. The second time for her, her heels had already locked around his shoulders with the nylon that had not completely fallen away, straightening, pushing. Her head had fallen back and she was twitching and trembling hard, trying to breathe.
“Can’t. No.”
He could hear her, but it was like a disconnect, like this something had complete control now. He would be the one thing she could never forget.
“No. No. oh--- Yes.”
She squeezed hard with her knees, trying to keep the twitches down and only pulling him in. Her head tossed and jerked like she was being choked but she was moving to him, looking for another kind of intimacy. She didn’t quite get to kiss him. The closest they got were harsh pants, together.
It crested so it could not hold longer, and this wasn’t slow or teasing, it was. His forehead forced her neck back onto the mattress and she felt like she was going be pounded to bits. He was grateful that he could even think about that.
He saw her eyes wide open and fluttering, mouth swollen, face contorted. He felt the softness of skin and depth and texture quivering though him, heightened as he thrust. The burn wanted all that, wanted more, and he just needed her in a way that made this lack of control seem mild. There was something like affection in her eyes and she was the only world he knew for those moments before it all crashed over him.
----
It was a long while before Chloe could get free from under him and the covers or she remembered she had a voice again. She wasn’t thinking of anything more complex that if she could crawl far enough to catch a discarded pillow.
“I wasn’t aware that could be done.” She said, not knowing if it was what he’d done to her or just letting the conflicting thoughts go. Her voice came out a little worn around the edges. This was real.
Davis was watching her, mouth soft, taking in air like he had to catch his breath. She could not look away. He hadn’t moved one bit besides that, which was a bad or good thing because the covers were down around his hips. She looked at his face mostly, mostly, and guessed he wouldn’t have minded if that wasn’t the case. She never felt like she had to look away.
This felt right.
His jaw was smooth and he looked, no not relaxed, but close enough. She felt light and giddy and a little afraid again. She kissed him and called his hands rubbing up and down her shoulders before it happened. She felt every bit as safe and connected to him as she’d ever been when he’d had her on her back. But safe, safe was helpless too.
She crawled back over to him and tried to find a place to settle, somewhere comfortable and couldn’t. Either he was all tensed up or he was just built that way. His eyes hooded when her breast brushed over the spot right over his heart. Oh no, certainly not, not this quickly. “What are you on, Red Bull?”
He was Davis; she expected a teasing analysis of this, or a little bit of cuddling. His brown eyes were more reddish than she’d ever seen them, seeking and then almost confused when she tried to slow him down.
Chloe was Chloe and memory or no memory she got to the bottom of things. “Hey. Hey. Davis!” She tried to sift out the part of him that had been all careful and emotional and the part that was all need and he didn’t seem to like that too much. The words gathered and died a quick death.
His mouth glided steadily and lightly against her abdomen, where it hadn’t been before. She felt a light, unbroken buzz of energy crackling from his touch into her or maybe that was the other way around. She literally was deaf to everything, even the low appreciative sound he made when she stilled completely. She was going to have to move later. They had to talk about the hundred and one things they were completely ignoring. He was just driven now.
He shifted, hard arms wrapping around her shoulders and teeth sinking into her shoulder blade. He started to move, almost violent, fingers digging into her bare skin, keeping her flush against him. A bead of his sweat slid down her back. She froze, only halfway at the sensation of opening from the inside.
Then it was simple for Chloe- the rush of euphoria and lights large and strong and green dancing behind her eyes, a picture she could never catch. Oversensitivity spilled over into pain and when she screamed everything just seemed to slow, dramatically, drastically close. His head tipped into her hair, hard and he shook all over until she knew he was feeling it too. Helpless together was good.
Sometime later his hand caught the fingers that had blindly curled into his face and she couldn’t do anything but slump back against his chest. Some disconnected part of her knew she was just about to miss what was supposed to be her wedding and she should have felt very bad about that. She had to be there. It was not because of the groom—oh, she could not remember why but it did not matter, because she would not have felt like this. Real.
Davis’s hands were running along her fingers, impatient and she saw why. He eased the ring off and while the circlet looked dwarfed in his hand, his chest heaved, strange and uncomfortable. She pulled it away; fingers slick, and let it go to roll under the bed.
“Happy now?” she asked finally, freeing her hands and pulling the sheets around them like mummy wrappings. She covered his mouth, a little wary. “I got that, nonverbally just fine, believe me.”
Something of the frightening tension seemed to leave him, and he kissed her palm. “I’m happy.” He said it almost as if that was surprising. He looked worn down but his eyes were clearing, a far cry from the emptiness before. Half smiling. And she wanted to kiss him again.
“It hurts less now.” He whispered, finally. She had an idea of what he was trying to say, but things deserved to be lighter, for a little while.
“I just think you just had a beef with that thing.”
----
Davis woke up disoriented, from a dream, not his usual nightmare. Colors danced all inside his eyelids and he could not for the life of him understand what they meant. Chloe was sleeping the sleep of the dead, one arm limp over his chest and he didn’t want to move.
The smell of sex was heavy in the air, and he remembered, really remembered the trail of clothes and the warmth of skin, the things she had let him do and done right back. But the memory was a little hazy, not all it could have been. He had held her and there was that need pounding through his head, overpowering everything else. She’d been talking about her fears, Jimmy but she’d pulled him in anyway.
He had always imagined it would go much slower, and when/if they made that step it would be more romantic, dinner with flowers and candles and mariachis at her window.
It had been rough. He’d held her down. Her green jacket was in sight, all twisted up like a makeshift rope. He pulled the sheet away and saw the corresponding marks on her wrists, a light brown. Her fingers had flexed, she’d been that much closer and he’d found that very—
Horror and an unsettling twist of arousal warred in him. It wasn’t in his head. He loved her. Was that the only way he could show that love?
It didn’t feel like that when she finally opened her eyes, make-upless cheek a little red, her voice drowsy with sleep.
“It’s very, very hot in here.” She stretched and knocked the sheet away, leaning over the bed to pick up scattered things, her bag, her phone where the light blinked red, her skirt, her blouse. Her arms were not the only places he had bruised.
“Again?” She laughed. “I could have taken this if you hadn’t kept me busy.” ” Her eyes looked into him even as she smiled and feigned exasperation.
He drew his eyes a little away and tried to get the worried look off his face. She looked happy enough and he didn’t want her to deal with an early morning freakout.
She was asking about the air conditioning. “Your hands are big and sweaty.” She said by way of explanation. “A bath would be fine.”
“I have a shower.” Maybe when she came back he’d have gathered his thoughts enough to find a way to not hurt her, explain the whole crazy story. Maybe there wasn’t a way. It was one thing to go to sleep with someone and their issues. It was quite another to go to bed with a friend and wake up…with whatever he was.
He couldn’t drag her into this, but how broken would she feel if he was lying to her all along? She had enough lies in her life. She didn’t know how long she had either. But she had enough pain too.
She hopped up, pulling his hand behind her and he knew he would not.
“I was going to make breakfast.” He half protested. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“You can make fettuccini if you want, later.” She went on and on about saving water, ecology and knowing he was the socially responsible type. It didn’t matter about his talking about the size of showers. The fight was lost. She was Chloe.
A little piece of him knew it wasn’t just about him. She was talking every minute, trying to seduce him or keep him with her for a reason. She was scared he’d leave, or she wanted to feel close to someone. He wondered if this was what she used to have to do with Jimmy. She made a crack about padded shower walls, and he wanted to prove to her it wasn’t just about wanting sex.
He busied himself finding soap, his back to her, trying to remember that. “You could host a party in here.” She said. “I don’t know what you were on about.” She stepped almost innocently under the hot running water and where the droplets sprayed him, he couldn’t feel the temperature on his skin.
He could feel her and jumped a little when her palms circled on his shoulders, pulling him back under the spray. “Do you have a towel somewhere?” He remembered, third closet to the right. “Just forget it.” she said, said, eyes a little hazy and not from the water.
She took the soap and her fingers shook, just a little. “I can help with that.” He said.
It was not sexual, his fingers brushing between her thighs, cleaning the sweat and remnants of what they did away. Maybe this was taking care of her.
He felt her shoulders quivering and it wasn’t in pleasure. “Something’s wrong, Chloe. You can talk to me.” She didn’t answer.
It was almost like dancing, her hair clumpy and wet against the spot where the knife had shattered on his sternum. She didn’t know about that part of him, but she knew the way he’d been last night. This wasn’t the problem. Her arms were around him tight, not like she was afraid of what he could do. She didn’t even move as his hands brushed over the ugly bite mark on her shoulder.
He would plead if he had to. “It’s the only way I can help. You’ve got to let me help you.”
There was change in the way she breathed, and he knew he’d been right.
“Can you tell me who Clark Kent is?”
That was the name she’d seen on the telephone. Her best friend, at least he’d been once. She’d forgotten all about him before. It was just happening again and she knew somehow. He turned away and he was actually pacing in the shower.
“You have files on all of them; maybe they can jog your memory.”
“I don’t care about those.” she said. The question hung unasked in the air, How long will I remember you?
They were there, the both of them and their ghosts. They were with her broken memories. They were where the blood had swirled down the drain and where he’d finally had to see what he was.
“You’re everything I’ve got, now.” She whispered, and the tentative smile made it look as though she was going to break apart. “I came to you.” She had the first time, and he’d taken her back to them. This was the second time, and that had to mean something.
He turned to face her and part of him was heartsick. What kind of guy made himself into someone’s whole world? What kind of guy wanted to be?
He held her and patted her back, and told her he would be there always because he would. He’d be there, just as long as she existed. He was built that way. They’d find a way out of this.
They stayed there for the longest time and he tried to push away the feeling that this was their place, that this was their one moment before it all broke down.
----
“Let me take you out.” Davis had said, and she’d known that it was important to him to make her feel special. He’d always been a romantic. She remembered him like she didn’t remember anyone else.
It was their fourth day, the fourth day of her whole life and they’d gone out to a Chinese restaurant, to a little corner booth. He was telling her about her life and holding her hand from across the table, and halfway through her head felt like it was going to shatter.
There were colors, colors everywhere, green ones and zeros beneath her eyelids. She’d felt this once before. She couldn’t remember hitting her head against the tabletop, but she must have. Then, he was holding her face, eyes clear on hers, voice steady and firm and they were going to the hospital.
She knew the hospital. Not there. “Please! I don’t want to go back.” Her grip on his hand felt tenuous, like a string that was slowly being cut. “I want to stay with you. Don’t make me go back.”
There was just one color-green and she wanted it to stop, stopstopstop, but it was like that was in her, telling her, HER and nothing and no one could stop it.
“There’s a place called Isis. Take me there. Davis.” he heard. But it wasn’t Chloe who said those words.
It wasn’t Chloe’s eyes who flashed silver, or her voice or her hands on those computer monitors. She was a computer whiz, Davis knew that. But she could not change them at a touch. The screens blinked, green and spinning and the world around them seemed to freeze.
The thing inside her told him what he was, what he was going to do, what he could not help. It was every single one of his nightmares and more. “There is someone you are going to kill.” It said. It drew close, Chloe’s breath cool, her face beautiful, but hard and cold steely the way she never could be.
Davis did not know where Chloe was, but he had to get her back. Words would not bring her back to him, but he told her he loved her, that his feelings were real, that he was here. She felt something too, he’d always known and she just had to reach out and they’d be okay. They’d be fine.
He was acting his own tragedy, his own scene from a naïve romantic movie, believing that could be enough.
“Feelings? That was the program I was running to get you to me.”
It should haven been just like the ground, everything true he had left, was knocked out from under him. But a part of him knew that if it had been it could not be a lie any longer. Not if he felt; not if nothing had changed. He loved her. He always would.
He was holding her body by the shoulders, shaking, waiting from a sign in her cloudy eyes.
“I’m here, Chloe, just listen to me. Focus on me.” She had known him when he hadn’t known himself. She would know him now somewhere down there.
What had happened between the both of them couldn’t have been just program too. Everything she said she felt, every little moment couldn’t have been manufactured by a computer that couldn’t possibly understand. She’d trusted him.
But Chloe didn’t come back.
“She could do nothing without me, my direction or my consent. “ It was ahead of him, her eyes, her lips so close, drawn and white and horrifying. “I started the program.”
“No. That wasn’t...” It was real, it had to be.
“Real? A few memories, a little nudge in your direction, intimacy. She really did break you in.”
“No. Chloe...”
“She never had a choice. Clark Kent destroyed this girl you believe you love. He took every little bit of what made her her and left that much more room for me.”
Clark, her memories, the thing inside her, what he was. It was all connected. Everything was.
“I’m not going to join you; I’m not going to kill him or anyone.” He just needed to stop it and make him get Chloe back. If this alien--- Clark had destroyed her he might want to tear the answer out of him, make him fix this, but he would not hurt someone she had loved.
“I’m not asking. You have no choice. By connecting yourself to this human, you have connected to me.”
There was another program. It used Chloe’s same hands to clamp down over his wrist, and the blackness followed quickly, rippling over him. Painful transformations, it had called them, but that was nothing. It was nothing interspersed snatches of images, screams, fire, sparks of plugs and streets plunging into darkness. A different kind of burning and eyes that were never hers.
He had to remember something, he knew, but that part of him was shrinking to the black. He saw only scarlet, red and blue. If he destroyed that then maybe the pain would just stop.
Davis could not feel the rage of love leaving him. He just could not feel her.
----
After Braniac took Chloe’s mind, it had been like existing in a cage- a seamless cage with four coded walls that went on and on forever. Chloe couldn’t hear, she couldn’t see, but she knew something horrible was happening. There was Clark, and there was Davis and she knew now exactly what the green was, flashing back behind her eyes. She knew why they were mirrors. Doomsday and the Red and Blue Blur. Naman and Sageeth.
She had all her memories here, just like a computer chip with a backup drive. In order to take everything from her, Braniac had to have taken a copy. She finally was whole again but that did not matter. They were all going to die and Davis was going to disappear forever if she did not get out.
She had to take herself back and she did not know how. She slammed her hands up against the green and it sent an unpleasant tingle into her skull. Someone could not know that much and not go mad. It was fluid information, moving through her and around her like a horrible maze. Maybe she had to be fluid, part of it. Maybe that was the only way to get out.
She defined herself by her life and she let the memories flow through her, one by one, let them pass from her into the walls, into the numbers and letters. She felt Clark’s lips against her forehead and Davis’s eyes across a room, paper in her hands and words in her throat. She was Chloe Sullivan; friend and lover, fighter and aid. She was every single thing she’d ever done and all she would not lose.
(She was free.)
---
Her skin smelled burned like she had been struck by lightning. She knew where she was well enough, the gleaming crystal of the fortress. Her hand was against the largest crystal and she didn’t have much time before she had to fight for control again. There were three bodies around her, a man with his hand stiff on a strange curved knife; like an Aztecs sacrificial blade. She knew that Braniac feared this, felt it like the overflow of words and Kryptonian symbols in her mind. He was trying to take control again.
She was almost blind, swamped by the sound and symbols but she groped for the blade and felt it bite into her palm. The noise ebbed. She didn’t pay attention to the rest of them; saw nothing but the titanic struggle ahead of her. There were Clark and Davis; she used the names loosely because they were not just themselves anymore. Davis had become this great, black, horrifying thing and Clark barely looked human, he was that bloodied. They were exchanging blows fast, but It had the upper hand and every time Clark smashed into a wall, he took longer getting up and it circled him like a predatory animal. When he didn’t get up…
She had to stop them. She was human, a meteor freak at the most and they were full-blooded Kryptonian. She couldn’t exactly talk them down, she couldn’t fight, and she couldn’t get near enough to touch either of them. Maybe Brainiac didn’t need to get free for it all to go to hell. She had Braniac’s programming, she had information; she had this thing between them, between the three of them really. All she could think to do was think really hard, so she did, screamed out in her mind. But Braniac was not with her.
The last thing she thought was of waiting until Clark was downed to get close enough to It. Maybe be the last sacrifice and hope that woke Davis up. He’d said he loved her.
When Clark fell, she reached him first, but he could not see her. Blood had leaked into his eyes. She could not reach out to Davis inside It; just put herself in the space in front of Clark’s broken body. It reached her first, thrust a massive hand forward, for Clark maybe, and she felt herself break, a thousand tiny razor like imprints opening up her side. That was not Davis anymore. For once the pain, the thoughts and her memories overwhelmed her, leaked out like a power surge.
It held her up with one massive fist and the blood leaked out over her side. She screamed herself raw, and maybe that startled it. It released her and she fell, crawling on hands and knees and its fist fell upon her again, pushed her back straight down on the ice. She ignored the bite of it, like thousands of tiny diamonds on her skin and waited for it to crush her spine.
Nothing happened, not even the sweet release of death. She panted in and out; the weight putting a strain on her lungs and slowly, so slowly, it felt like it was barely a weight at all. She turned and saw it, still, somehow insect like, but the eyes changing scarlet to brown, the burden lightening.
It felt like forever until it retreated, like the shell of an enormous crustacean, leaving Davis, bloody and naked, behind. It was still inside him but she didn’t push his hand from her back, grabbed hold of the cool fingers and squeezed. ‘I did all this?’ his eyes seemed to ask her and she couldn’t tell him anything.
She thought about secrets, about his keeping his literal monster locked away while he knew every one of hers. Secrets and lies, hadn’t she heard that every minute of her damned life? Before, he told her what he suspected and she’d ignored the signs. He just hadn’t shouted it out.
Clark was bleeding a few feet away. She should have felt disloyal for leaving him behind for the man inside the monster that had nearly killed him. But she wasn’t a cool, logical supercomputer.
Davis had made her feel. She just wasn’t the same anymore. He was bleeding out, too. She wanted him to see something besides carnage when it all ended. She needed to.
Chloe dragged herself halfway to Davis before the dried blood on her skin started freezing. Her head fell just short of his side but the air around him was warm still; she’d always remember he was warm.
“I couldn’t pull you into that again.” He’d choked out and she didn’t want to waste their last moments on that. “I didn’t know it was this.” He whispered and she believed him, that was the worst part.
It changed nothing.
Clark plunged the sacrificial knife straight into Davis’s back before he collapsed. It wasn’t heroic, if was ugly, blood leaking from his punctured lung. Heroes made tough decisions. He’d made his first, and last.
Davis was sorry (why was he sorry?) and he loved her and he was already dead. They were both good as dead, leaving her, and she was trapped in a tomb of ice and glass.
Several things happened then. She felt her body stiffen and something dark pushing out of her, into the icy fortress walls, over Davis, turning it all to black. Braniac was retreating from the dead and the dying, pulling its ultimate tool of destruction right with it.
Her eyes clouded and she felt something return to her, the tears.
She didn’t think of what happened if she could not. There was no choosing, not for her. She reached out her hands, shaky from blood loss and touched them both, tried to feel their pain as well as her own. She was pain.
She still hadn’t woken up, pale and bruised under the covers. Davis hadn’t been able to sleep watching her, saying every prayer he’d ever learned in Sunday school, but Clark left the room more than once. “She’ll pull through,” he said, eyes sure. “She’s done it before.” As if he expected it.
At times like this Davis wondered just how much they shared that he had not. He wondered how much of that Clark had taken from her. He didn’t feel mindless rage, but his knuckles itched with the urge to wipe that look off of Clark’s face. She was close and probably dying and he could not.
Maybe Clark let him stay because he was looking pretty messed up himself, the cuts and burns the powerful side of him had left on It just starting to heal on his skin. But Clark wouldn’t ever let him alone with her for two minutes even holding her hand, as if he would climb all over her like some depraved madman.
He knew what Clark thought of him. Of what they’d been. A biological drive and computer coding. A nudge, Braniac had said. Maybe a little part of her felt that attraction, but it had just been blown out of proportion. That’s why she hadn’t been able to stop. Chloe had probably lived a waking dream and he had just wanted to believe it was all her.
“She was alone and vulnerable and you kept her away from her friends. You might have not known about Braniac, but you used her.” Clark said. Forget that those friends of hers hadn’t given one thought to why she couldn’t trust them enough to come back. Davis said nothing. That was Chloe’s secret to keep or give away. It didn’t matter about Braniac, all or any of that to him. He loved her. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt like this.
Clark was a passive guy, but Davis didn’t doubt from the look on his face that he wanted to toss him out. Physical ejection wouldn’t work for long with Davis. He didn’t know if he was quite human anymore. He wasn’t exactly dead. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if he was pounded into the dirt. Whatever had happened, whatever she thought of him now; he wouldn’t abandon Chloe. If nothing else, they had been friends, real friends. She needed a friend.
“And what do you think she’ll see a friend when she sees you?” Clark kept on. “She was the construct’s tool to bring you into full power. She couldn’t have controlled what she did with you. She betrayed the man she was going to marry and she didn’t have a choice. She’s strong, but she can’t let all that go.”
That was what Clark wanted to believe. Chloe had cared. It he had hurt her so much she just should have let him die. Davis tried to push away the thought that maybe after all this, there would be too many memories for that. If Chloe wanted him to go, he would. Not before.
Clark sat forward, looked straight at him; broad face pushing Chloe from sight. “Let me tell you about Chloe. She’s always wanted to save people...”
She didn’t actually have feelings for you.
Maybe it had been a bad moment, but something inside of him had broken, snapped. The idea that it wasn’t just the lie, but who she was that lead her to care about making him live burned him. He could have been anyone else, Clark said, so damned reasonable, right before blocking his way back in the door. If he’d ever thought he’d loved her, he would let her go.
It all came to a head then, what Clark had done, what he had, the fact that she wasn’t breathing. It was Davis who swung at him, right in the middle of a hospital hallway, blinded by something in his eyes. Clark hit back.
“She will wake up, without you.” Clark said, his own mouth bloodied. “I don’t want to fight you.”
But Clark had already won. Maybe he was really the monster. Davis had hurt Clark because he was in pain. Chloe wouldn’t have wanted him to. Chloe just wanted to save him. That’s what she did, she told him once. Not even being able to know she would live hurt more than the blood in his mouth.
Davis knew about packing up and moving; efficiently and quickly; place to place when they wouldn’t have you anymore.
But he couldn’t leave her. She was more than a temporary resting place, she was home and every part of him rebelled against giving that up.
She hadn’t been in her right mind, Clark said. It was never about him. But she had been broken and she’d trusted him, somehow. There was a world’s worth of difference between relying on someone and giving them your whole heart. If she’d ever wanted it or not, she had his.
She’d needed him. They’d been standing together in that very kitchen. She hadn’t known her name and he’d repeated it to her over and over and over. She couldn’t expect it to be that way forever, she’d said, terrified and half afraid she was going to lose him too. She never expected it. She never thought she could deserve anything; but she did, so much. He felt like she was going to pull all the breath from his lungs. He was hers. He wanted to show her.
He’d bought her a ring the next day. It was soon, crazy timing, but then nothing about them had been normal. It shouldn’t have been right to talk about engagement or marriage right after she’d called it off to another man. But he’d been sure, so sure that it was her-all her feeling something. It didn’t have to mean anything more than that if she hadn’t wanted it to. He’d wanted to give her something real. He’d had the ring in his hand, ready, more sure than anything in his life.
The white wrapping paper around the box crinkled in his hand. He’d been with her, holding her hand until it wasn’t her there, anymore. Maybe she had loved him, a little, all on her own. Maybe she could have. Maybe they could have made it.
He put the ring there, on the table, had shaky. Maybe it was selfish to drag it all out again and she would just want to forget. He didn’t want to leave her, ever. He had to, but he needed her to know what he felt, how he would always feel.
The last thing he did in Metropolis was drop his apartment key into Clark’s hand. It would be hers now. It was the one thing he could do. It held his last message to her. Not his last. Not his last.
----
Chloe woke up in a room with white bed sheets, alone except for Clark. He was alive and coming along well, if the strength of his hug was anything. She waited a few drawn out seconds. If he was alive then…
“Where’s Davis?” she asked.
He’d been lucky. Clark had given him a chance to start over far away.
Chloe’s stomach plummeted. “He didn’t want to see me?” She expected Braniac’s takeover to be poison, to rip him apart inside. The knowledge that you were yanked around like a puppet on a string and everything you’d felt was a lie was capable of plenty. She would know.
He might have lost that connection to her, but the Davis she knew wouldn’t run. “You forced him away, didn’t you?”
“He destroyed half the city, Chloe. What did you really expect me to do?” Clark sounded like Oliver now.
“Gosh, I don’t know, maybe let him see if I was alright?”
“Can you honestly tell me you would have wanted that after what he did?”
“What exactly did he do?”
Clark paced, arms crossed over his chest, face floundering.
“In order for Braniac to have complete control over the destroyer, he would have needed a connection. A physical connection. Garth explained it to me before…before he…was murdered.”
“..the sex.”
“I’m so sorry, if I had been a better friend, I could have found you first.”
“It happened. There were two of us.” She remembered just how much of the two of them there were.
“You were distraught and not in your sane mind, controlled by Braniac. Davis took advantage of that and didn’t even tell you who or what he was. He kept you away so he could… You were pretty beat up when I brought you in.”
“I—Braniac--I wanted to stay away. I wanted…” that. Chloe knew she could better defend her actions if she knew exactly how much of each had played in. But she was too busy trying to separate which parts of her had been just her and which parts hadn’t been. The bigger part of her, just begging for that little push to jump right into what she’d wanted all along.
And Davis… “That wasn’t all him. There was some red kryptonite involved.”
“How the h---how in the world did he stumble on that?”
"Jimmy’s engagement ring was studded with a red rock which I did not remember, because all my memory on the subject was completely wiped clean. You remember your little summer, don’t you? Bits and snatches? There were women for you. With him, there was just me.”
“You don’t have to justify it. He felt something, but he just took…”
“ took? You‘re trying to say rape delicately, aren’t you?” Clark was one to talk about that. He had taken her mind.
“I don’t even know if I can trust you again, so save the compassion. You took my memories away. I asked you, Clark.”
Clark heard very little of that part. He apologized and looked on with sad eyes. He wasn’t sorry. He was willing to do whatever just so she would patch it all up with Jimmy and go back to being the girl who could drop it all to help him.
But Chloe could not (would not) patch it up with Jimmy, not after vanishing for three days. He looked at her and his eyes were so mechanic, mouth petulant. So where have you gone this time?
What was there to say? I happened to use your cheap meteor ring on a friend of mine. We lived together for three days and had hours and hours of sex. Eventually, an alien supercomputer burst out of my brain and turned him into a spiky monster. Before we could destroy too much of Metropolis, Clark (he’s an alien Jesus by the way), stabbed him in the heart. And I healed them both and you’re totally going to think I love them more than you. One of them is somewhere in I-don’t-know-where, the other I’m currently not talking to, but you’d probably be right.
Chloe could have lied, but she was tired of lies- telling them or receiving them. She was standing in front of Jimmy at the door of the apartment, wan in the set of clothes she left the hospital with, but not caring to be perfect for his little world anymore.
She just pulled out the cheating card. Red rocks and computer codes were fine, but it all came down to that in the end. She’d done that in every other sense of the word; going to Davis and trusting him and not this life she was supposed to serve honor and obey. Red rock or coding or no coding, she had imagined her life with him and she hadn’t wanted to come back.
Jimmy yelled a little, said quite a few words she didn’t even know how to repeat and her head felt less heavy than it had in a long time. They weren’t the one true thing. He didn’t sound as if he loved her at all. With her little Braniac-inspired trip and her deep rooted attraction to Davis, she hadn’t betrayed love.
“I always knew there was something going on with you. I just took it, like everything else. You never wanted anything I had to give. You wanted, what was that you call it again, a ‘friend’?” He slammed the door and she cemented that little theory of his by moving into Davis’s apartment that very day.
----
Moving. She didn’t get all that far. Her luggage stayed in a pile at the door. The clothes she had used were already in Davis’s closet, next to those pressed uniforms of his. Still there. Where had he gone?
She sat at his table, her face against the smooth grained wood and tried to push the memories back. She needed to pull them out, to process. She thought she’d be angry, angry and hurt at him.
But the resentment never came. She felt it, but it was on Clark, on Brainiac, on her whole damn world for taking the one thing she had completely and turning and soiling it. Davis had been her friend before he’d been more, and where was he now, in some far off place, trying to put himself back together after all of it. He hadn’t control of himself or what he felt, and maybe that had broken him.
She didn’t know what she’d expected. For them to mutually bond over being used and carelessly tossed aside? She hated that she couldn’t just cling to him and cry. She hated that it had taken her friend too.
Chloe didn’t have memories of the blood when the Destroyer came to life, computer code, all that information being sucked into her extremities like lightning. It had been Braniac using her to direct it all. She was just his tool then.
But Chloe’s memories of Davis were crystal clear. There had been more than one day, all the other memories disappearing like so much dust. The first morning had turned to the next, and she realized he had taken his vacation just to be close to her. There wasn’t that much to be close to.
She’d felt like a shadow. Her temples ached; everything ached so she felt like something could just burst out and more than once she sat over the table, scanning through the memory loss books and wanting to cry like a little girl. She didn’t recognize the faces on the files, but he had been there, bringing the remnants of her back out.
They’d danced in his kitchen to an old vinyl record, something British and completely unlike him, she couldn’t remember the name. She didn’t have anything but him, irrevocably. She’d forgotten her own name for the first time that day; and she hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He’d had as good as made a vow, but who could live their whole life with a woman who knew no more than a child? She couldn’t expect that.
Something had changed in his eyes there, and his face was soft, compassionate and denying, but his eyes were set, determined like she couldn’t move him. He would have told her something. Instead, he pulled her back into their swaying dance, there, standing in the middle of the floor.
He seemed extra determined to make her feel cherished. When he finally joined her than night, he was gentle and unhurried and perversely that made her cry out all the more. She felt loved. That had been the first time he said those words. Not feelings, love. Maybe the uncontrollable need had been a program, but that, that was all Davis. “I promise. I promise.” he’d said. He wasn’t here.
He hadn’t left even any sign, any indication other than that he was trying to get free and wanted to make it up to her somehow. But he was Davis and Davis wouldn’t have…
She saw the bundle.
There was a ring. Deceptively small, a glimmering stone that must have cost half his salary. No letter, no explanation. Just a ring, there, like he wanted her to find it.
What kind of guy made love to you, loved you, left you a ring and nothing else?
She was alone. She’d always known he could break her heart.
----
Once she had known less than that. She’d barely been Chloe and she’d known Davis. It didn’t matter what else she lost. She would always remember his name.
Davis-he was….cuddling with her? He exhaled slowly, in and out against her skin and she bit back a shudder. He was asleep.
Davis looked like a young boy, face pressed against her stomach. He’d been a foster kid, hadn’t grown up like she must have. It must have been a lonely life, home to home, carrying his entire life in one of those black garbage bags. Physical affection had been the exception rather than the rule and now it was like he was trying to make up for that absence of touch.
She knew more about his childhood than she did hers. She must have had one. A mother and a father and a nice red –bricked house. She had to think of the things and people that had been important to her. He’d been helping her do that.
But increasingly her world was becoming all him and she thought she minded the loss of the rest of it less than he did. Maybe they’d been together forever, she thought. Maybe he was her family now. She’d been crying, she hadn’t known why, and he was there and wasn’t that what family meant?
He twisted, cheek lodging itself firmly in her thigh. No, no. He had to be like that. His breath seemed to displace the thoughtful part of her mind, but she couldn’t let that happen. She pressed her head back against the pillow and tried to think.
In this fantasy life of hers she worked, somewhere, at something she liked to do. She knew the names of the people around her. She got home early, precisely at six, to fumble about in anticipation or fall out on the couch. An hour later he came home to her, uniform wrinkled and he’d always iron with the shirt off because she made holes.
Come here. Please, she’d say and he would pad over, measured steps a little faster because he could pick her up and swing her and carry her off if she wanted. He’d kiss her hard like always, a little sweaty because it was burning hot. He’d tell her about the people he saw today, two old ladies who never baked and a boy with the cast on his leg and she would smile because he was so him. His eyes would be light and optimistic but she wouldn’t be able to smile for long.
She’d be seeing the half open collar of his, and the long sleeves making him sweat and she wouldn’t help him with the rest. He would go content and still as her fingers wandered over the heavy cloth and ask her what she was doing but his muscles would seem to fight with themselves as she felt the texture of it in her teeth.
Every girl loves a man in uniform, she said. In uniform?, he’d tease and his breath would catch as that second button went. Yes, yes, tell me more, she’d say, breathing in skin and sweat and a little lust. His voice would get low; a little stumbling and he’d start again.
The zipper would be a hard one but then she would just be wondering at how he could overheat so and she’d meet his eyes, blinking, filling up the world before she slipped down on him. Target. Found it.
He’d jolt a little but his callused hands on her neck and back would be too careful, always trying not to break her. The rest of him would be fighting it and yes and she would feel like she was bobbing for apples and his voice would just …
“Good Morning.” He said.
“Did I wake you up?” she asked. He was just happy, hoping it was a good day for her too.
“No. I was up.” It had nothing to do with—her skin turned all at once terribly hot and terribly cool when he seemed to slow down to breathe. His lips pressed gently at her hipbone, and she was almost certain he was doing it on purpose.
“I know you. You’re a terrible liar. What did I say?”
“Yes.“ he fingered her slippery hand, awfully close to where she had…. Oh. deargodno. “Then you said yes again.”
“Funny dream. I wish I could remember it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you do that. It’s my job.”
“---you really don’t need to…umm…” His eyes were closed, nose nuzzling into her, slow like she was…some sort of cute animal. Or food.
“What is that about turnabout and fair play?” he sounded almost philosophical but that look was definitely not. He hadn’t shaved yet and he was prickling—her fingers slid against his neck, hesitant and a little jumpy.
She had little room for shame with him. He’d probably found his way to every other inch of her but being kissed there... From small, scattered bits of memories, she knew this should have made her uncomfortable. She hadn’t let…someone else do that. It was …private…too embarrassing…intimate…
Let go, he said.
She needed to backpedal but she found herself frozen by the look of him. His tongue was a little rough on her and then... she twisted her ankle into one of the gaps in the sideboard.
Now, awake, she wanted to take that sideboard and deconstruct into little pieces, but she was no Kryptonian. Not like was, had been with his intensity and his eyes and that way he had of making the fear just vanish. Everything that he’d touched just hurt. Her most of all.
But Chloe Sullivan knew hurt. What was there to do after that? You lived. That was the most basic part. You cried to someone, a friend. You changed how you dressed, you found yourself a hobby, you dyed your hair some obscene color.
Chloe Sullivan had no friends to cry to except Lois and half the time Lois gave her a message from Clark. So she cut her hair off, ignored the rest of her world and picked up the pen again.
Clark came by and talked to himself. She didn’t exorcise the memories. She couldn’t do that, couldn’t exorcise Davis. He’d rooted himself deep. It seemed impossible that he would just go.
She didn’t understand his message until a week after, at his desk trying to scratch out something, anything, with her pen. There was a small pad of notepaper, a message written over and over in his writing. She’d written much the same thing herself, once, lovesick on a pad of pink paper and waited for her heart to break.
I’ll let you go for now, hoping one day you’ll fly back to me. Hoping one day you’ll fly back to me.
A sign was all she needed. Just one word. Chimbote.
----
[Chloe Sullivan could wait no more than one week, twenty two hours, three minutes for Davis Bloome. She could not wait, but she had not been the Watchtower for nothing. She could track like nobody’s business.
It took nine hundred miles of jet gas, and hours on the road where she thought she was jumping in feet first, like she only had once before. Maybe she was chasing after a memory of something beautiful and tragic and irreplaceable. Something that had never been hers.
Each mile that disappeared made her think that maybe he would wake up and see it had been just an endless stream of numbers running in both of their heads-or just his. Maybe he wouldn’t love her anymore. Maybe she…Maybe Clark would lecture her on this someday. She couldn’t not try. She found herself waving down a guide for directions, the sun beating down on her face and turning her already worthy tan a tad darker.
She saw him coming out of a clinic, if it could be called that, flushed with the heat, in nothing like his uniform had been. What he wore looked like grimy scrubs, but he was still Davis, still running headlong into things and trying to save people. His hair was different, longer, as if he wasn’t quite taking care of himself.
Then it was like before, that moment they say when you see that person and everything freezes around you and all that is left is yourself, the small shirking part of you, exposed so you can never draw it back again.
He found her eyes in it all, like he always did. This couldn’t be a lie. She felt like someone was reaching into her chest and squeezing. There was so much pain in him, just like there was in her, but that was not all.
He caught her in his arms there in the center of a plaza in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t have to say words, so many words before he could get any out. Somehow he seemed to see it all already, just like he saw her. Maybe not all.
She would remember that her smile wasn’t quite perfect, and wouldn’t care that this wasn’t quite their place. “It hurts to smile doesn’t it?” She whispered. His hand shifted around hers, fingers brushing over her knuckles and her smile did not hurt then, not in the least. His eyes were soft and shocked and then his hand was warm cradling hers. There was just one ring on her finger, with only one stone. It wasn’t red.]
----
Epilogue:
Davis thought she was going to demolish the wall. He wasn’t quite invulnerable, but he wasn’t quite human either, or up there on the self-control meter and she was pushing hard. Maybe he’d be the battering ram; he wasn’t stopping her. She was warm and real and alive and there was no cold glint in her eyes. It had been weeks.
Not that he was complaining about the wall. It worked enough in the context that it had become home, one of the four working walls of an isolated adobe hut. When the rain beat on the roof, a few strategically placed buckets did the trick. After the rain, the air was richly populated with mosquitoes, and last night it hadn’t been. This was the only place they could go.
Oh, they’d held out for a while. She’d held onto him and talked and he’d stared and stared. She had told him about her latest projects, a cross-country Isis group and her own special assignment for a newspaper for the Star. She needed room and board, she told him, almost-straight-faced. A party sized shower could make or break it. She remembered every single moment; she knew. She was still here. He wondered if it still marked her.
They stayed caught up there. How was the clinic? It let him get back by the bootstraps. Her eyes scanned his, half-gentle, half-something-else-entirely and her lips gave a nervous gleam. He had to learn to be the curandero too. That was really very handy for the exorcisms. He hadn’t been able to let go of her hands yet, fingers closed around a symbol of something. She turned her face into his shoulder, smile half-forming and it had been hard not to pick her up right then.
He’d half succeeded, brushed the new bangs from her eyes and felt like he was kissing her for the first time again. Nothing of the past had ever really happened for them, but it had and the memories were strong. It was hard not to think of her body twisting under his with the unexpected hunger of her response.
He’d never expected it but he had hoped. It was more than hope, Chloe with a stranglehold on his shoulders, pressing him against the wall, wrestling her mouth into his. This was so out of place with everything else, the Spartan surroundings, the knowledge and the emptiness and the memories of the cold, cold eyes and the blood he could only half remember.
She was sixteen hours on coffee, unfettered caution and a rush. He bent closer and her back bowed, pulling, leading him, thumbs brushing over his closed eyes, his back, the back of his neck, breath in unsteady puffs. Maybe she was thinking of sparing the wall too.
This wasn’t just it: he had expected she would break down and hold him and they’d be able to deal. He’d be able to fix that. But he couldn’t fix this. It was not broken. There was something slower and more intimate in her touch than it had been before. His hands didn’t know where to stop, hooked into the loops of those slacks of hers and tugged and she had the zipper undone before he could blink. Just a little more. No tugging. She had to know. They had to talk.
She wasn’t looking at him, though. In the distraction she had turned back over her shoulder, looking for a place to settle. There was one bed, a cot really, but the two of them could fit on it. He could almost visualize the thoughts whirring in her head. He really shouldn’t have.
His mouth opened with the reasons they should take it slow and nothing came out. Well something came out, but it wasn’t words. It wasn’t enough. He’d never noticed how overwhelmingly comfortable she was with imbalance, up and down, suspended. Her elbows rested on his shoulders and her mouth barely slipped against his own, her hands actually catching in his hair. His head spun like there was no air in all the world and he needed...
He was supposed to make them something permanent; give her something, not throw her around like some caveman. His fingers hovered over her shoulders, noticing then that the bruises had all gone. He slipped her down again, throat trembling at her little groan. Showed where his thoughts were at. But he was not the last survivor of the bony monster for nothing. “I love you and that’s why I want you to…”
She rubbed at his chest under the torn V of his shirt, fingers unbelievably gentle and the blood went rushing straight to his groin. “Want what?” It was easy to remember how it was.
He just had to close his eyes…think of the bruises and holding still and not where her hands were at. Take it slow. Yes. Take it slow. Two minutes later, he had partially succeeded in slowing himself down, but Chloe was a special case.
“We need to talk” he said.
“So talk.” Before he’d halfway opened his mouth, she leaned down and bit his chin, catlike and unmoving. “Dimples.” she said. He rubbed at his jaw and wondered if she was on the human equivalent of catnip. Sensing his hand might not be as receptive, she circled to the cloth of his shirt. Maybe there were human equivalents of the rocks. The Chloe he knew…. well the one he knew…didn’t bite like….ohh…
"I’m a little wound up.” she said, and her pristine, white shirt hit the floor running. The floor was dirty. Not dirty, in the slobbish way but literally made of dirt and his fingers were fighting to twist the straps of her undershirt. He had a will. He did.
“No. Not yet.” He whispered. It wasn’t a fight. She wasn’t completely sure how much had been her; but then again she really didn’t seem to need anything in her to.
She made a great play of running her fingers along the wall behind him and catching the little flakes under her nails. He closed his eyes, because it wouldn’t work if two different parts of him were sending different signals.
“I need you, you need me, I don’t see what the problem is.”
“We can find a way back, slowly. “ Considering the mixed up nature of their history they had to take time to sort it all out. There were no Machiavellian alien supercomputers, no bony destroyers to deal with. They had time to really get to know each other, again, as they were. This was what he’d wanted, the romance and the chance to make her fall like any normal guy with a girl he loved.
They didn’t need to ‘be together’ to be together. At least not right away. She didn’t look convinced, rolling her jeans up to her knees like she would have sleeves. She really remembered too much about him. “Please understand.”
“Because you are you, you’re telling me I’m going to be celibate.”
She prepared for bed, right there, taking one of his shirts from the wash basket. There was sweat all over that shirt and she knew where the clean clothes were. Oh hell. It was like he was on her by proxy.
It was gentlemanly to turn toward the wall. Facing the wall was like putting his nose into a grindstone, literally. Painful and logically…ridiculous. Of course he could turn to her but then she would look at him and then…. The last thing he wanted was it to end up into something panicked and desperate and unsatisfying. She wanted to feel alive, but that wasn’t all they were about.
He hadn’t asked her how much she remembered and she hadn’t asked how long he kept that secret of his. He told her things, short silly things that must have been romantic in some place and time. For them- that affection, always there, and that banter had become a cushion to walk on when everything else held a fear of falling too far to ever get back again. Everything fell down.
“I feel real now.” She said, clambering behind him.
Her arms brushed against the back of his, her pupils pinpricks in the light. There was no buzz of static noise in the back of his mind, no painful burn in his skin. He wanted to be close to her. Maybe if she just stayed and they didn’t move from this spot ever again...
She settled there, breathed on him and it was hard not to move.
“So you want emotional things.” She said, chin against his back. “I’ll give you emotional things. ”The letter. No one’s ever told me that. No one ever meant it.” Her hands were on the scrubs, tugging them up over his head and a corner of a sleeve snagged under him, against the mattress.
He knew and didn’t really believe in spite of this, her hands being all over him before. It was one thing to convince yourself, to know that someone loved you once. When you had the rug pulled out under you, you had to learn it all over again, regardless of what you saw or felt deep. “What are you doing?” was all he could ask.
“It’s hot.” Chloe said, tracing invisible tattoos, whorls into his skin and he couldn’t make himself ease down. Her touch prickled like warmth, normal human (her) warmth, not like static.
“You were used, too, not just me. You’re scared and that’s okay. You don’t need to move.” That was pretty darned impossible.
“But I need to give you a chance to…” to what, to love him, to trust him again? She could have hidden at that, the thought of Braniac or coding. But the part that had trusted him, that part was all her. She was trusting him.
She thought he wanted her to talk about love, and she’d always been afraid of it.
Her whole life had been one carefully constructed balance; always at the nature of tipping over. She’d loved the Weird and Unexplained, and somehow that had been the guiding compass of her heart. Love Clark, but don’t hold your breath. Stop holding your breath and then backpedal like the devil is at your heels. Find yourself the farthest thing from that and tell yourself you’re happy. Be his friend; help him, that’s all you can do. Don’t let any of it get to you. But it was her fatal flaw, her one salvation. Davis had gotten to her.
Maybe- Chloe did not know what love was. No one ever scared her and made her feel safe. No one ever needed her, or wanted to show her that completely. “Then you were gone and I didn’t have anything.” Do you understand?
She didn’t touch, didn’t tease anymore, but he felt her breath like a warm mist. “Maybe this is what it’s like to learn.” He was disturbed that he couldn’t keep his touch light.
“I don’t want to break you.” She was strong, she had a front, but underneath he thought he’d find that the both of them had deep-matching scars.
“Don’t you think I’m scared of the same thing?” she whispered, waiting. His forehead touched hers and a corner of her mouth slanted up, otherwise.
There were principles. He didn’t want to risk this new clean beautiful thing they had but there would always be a risk here. They didn’t work out alone. Was it so bad to learn together? So he kissed her, much harder than he’d intended. And she took the invitation.
“I still have to take you out.” He protested, but he must have pushed her head back, muffled words in her throat. It had been weeks, but it felt like forever and the scattered impressions whirred by him fast.
They were warmth and light and the thick feel of heat gathering in his palms, moving down her, moving in her. The slow, taunt impact of the mattress under his back. The way she settled over him, eyes soft at the movement, perfectly aligned. He breathed through his mouth. Being with her, trapped in the corner by the wall, he felt like every tissue of his body wanted to gravitate to her, bone and muscle, only held back by resisting issues. He loved her. There could be nothing else.
“We’re still learning, so I luff you.” She smiled, not conflicted, not confused at all. “Our own word.”
The pressure for nownownow was off and there was time for exploration. He learned things, how tension jumped through her calves, how most of her would give a curious little jolt at a certain spot behind her knee. Her hands trailed along with his, following, mimicking and there came a point when what they learned and what they needed were two different things.
She couldn’t hurt him with her hands and nails scraping against his back and he wasn’t hurting her pulling her down. There wasn’t much cloth to deal with and her hands snarled against his, freeing all of him under her body.
He tried to keep his hands firm but not bruising, holding her knees apart as if she needed any help. He felt hesitant smoothness and a moment’s worth of intensity like this was all they needed. Then it was as if she would not stop pushing it farther. Gentle was not exactly the word for it. Feeling was all he knew and the world was suddenly being robbed of air. He was trapped this time. She had control and that was what she needed, to know that it was all her choice what this became. If he survived it.
Keeping still was a harder task than it seemed, and he reacted as strongly as he had before, fighting the pull to bury himself deep and not quite winning. She pushed her head back, leaning into him, being pushed up and away. She was quaking, breasts bouncing lightly against his chest through the semi rough cotton of the shirt, not controlled. But she would never shift her eyes and they were tender.
She was too. He wasn’t about to let himself forget that, but when he touched her she seemed to want more. “Healing, remember?” He didn’t want to hurt her but it was automatic. His hands moved their way up to her shoulders, massaging and pushing deep enough in the muscle to bruise.
Her fingers clenched in his suddenly and he could feel the short nail bitten ends in his palms. She mewled and he thought of catnip again. She was slowing then, trying to hold on and it should have been easier. He smiled; face turning half agonized as her muscles went into spasm.
“---told you—I was wound up.” She licked a bead of sweat off his cheek and her eyelashes fell against his forehead. “Let go.”
She was trying to rush him, but her hands kept floundering, making their way back to his arms, stroking as if he wasn’t really there. He had to notice this, remember the details. Every single one. But it was like his eyes were opening and closing, spastic. It shouldn’t have been possible to feel this much.
They needed something to hold onto and he couldn’t force the trembling feeling down. He leaned up on his elbows. They needed to be close. It was easy then her mouth opening against his, slow and unhurried, tongue running gently against the seams of his teeth. Not lustful, not chaste. Affirming, I’m here. They hadn’t been able to quite—oh damn.
His eyes slammed shut and he must have made a sound, everything squeezing out of him and coming out rough, leaving him spent and shaking. “I’m here. I’m here.” She was murmuring little things, trying to....comfort him?
And she was touching his hair, slowing in circles but she was still drawn tight and her breath was snagging. Spoiled, she said. She had; but she wanted more. She was desperate for it. There was a fire in him again, not screaming or blinding but a pleased warmth spreading through his skin. A sensitivity to her, of her. He wanted to make her happy, free of everything left to tether her to the ground.
She seemed transfixed by the creeping fingers to the inside of her thigh. Her breath was hanging unfinished in the air, encouraging and he didn’t need unnaturally keen sense to know how close she was. His hand crept higher and he had to remember that she was breakable, but he was absorbed in clinging warmth and need and the look on her face.
His free fingers twisted at the nape of her neck and she was rocking, single-minded. Her lips fell against his wrist, feeling the pounding there and she was shaking and making this keening fractured sound in her throat like she just had.
She came down, little irregular shocks going through her frame and she couldn’t move farther than the circle of his arms. He never wanted her to. His hand moved up her neck, smoothing over unbelievably shorter hair. Oh, they had the rest beat, she said. Her head tucked into the notch between his jaw and neck, breathing and it felt like part of him, long last had been reattached. But he was still waiting.
----
Time passed differently here. Davis had to await a disaster call to go on duty again, but every moment he was with Chloe he knew he could easily forget it. They were alone and without the connections to the outside world that a communications expert like her needed like food. They hadn’t really thought about food all the way into that night either.
His home? was cut off from everything else, a two hour walk away from good eats. There were no worries about neighbors pounding on the walls demanding quiet, she grinned. Leave it to her to find the silver lining.
She’d just had a grueling flight though and eventually she was actually sleeping, making a slow whuffling sound into his chest. He put her cheek on the fluffed pillow, didn’t want her to bruise when he slid out from over her, fumbling in the dark, stepping out into the dark night. He’d said they would make their way back once; but this time would be different. Every time it was different, but he refused to think of that now.
Regardless of what she thought, he would change it. But first he had to rouse her, preferably by crawling in next to her. She noticed that. “Come with me, just for a second?”
“I’m happy where I am.” She murmured, curling cat-like into him. (Since when had she learned that?). He was clothed, thank god. It couldn’t be too hard, but it was. She had disturbingly grabby fingers and a soft mouth.
“This is much better.” she whispered, like it was a dirty word, kissing the movement out of his throat and he had to stop her. Had to. Had to.
He leapt up, gathered the two ends of his collar back together, hands moving in dazed slowness. Thoughts. Sentient thoughts.
“Just trust me okay? I have to show you something.” He couldn’t betray his resolution now. He smoothed the sweaty hair away from her ear and held out his hand. “Please?”
“Stop with that face. You’ve won. You might as well cover my eyes while you’re at it.” She grumbled.
She took his hand finally, fingers curling into it. He guided them; closed them over the shutter pull and she didn’t pull right away. She looked so small with the shirt hanging over her shoulder. Vulnerable, like he could have broken her if he ever pushed to hard. “Okay.”
She yanked back on the rope and squinted at the shower of red falling all around her. Rose petals, red as blood. Right outside, the slow strum of guitar strings came to life. There were three voices, bass and tenor, a little rough around the edges. /Recuerda aquella tarde que yo te conoci/
She turned back to him, eyes comically wide, accusing. “You just had the last word, didn’t you? Romance forsooth!”
He shrugged, eyebrows perking and hands sweating. Wait for it.
/Olle esta canzion lleva alma corazon y vida…/
There were three mariachis, mustached and in wide brimmed hats, amiable enough that they agreed to trouping on out in the middle of the night for a few Soles. She was a pretty girl? They’d asked. They didn’t know the half of it.
/Alma para conquistarte, Corazon para quererte y vida para vivirla junta a ti./
Chloe closed her eyes, tapped her fingers to the beat of the solo. She was eclectic; he’d noticed that sharing rides with her to Isis sometimes.
He wanted to learn all those things, too, whatever this thing between them ended up being. He tried to keep back the rustle of sound from the gravel on his knee.
“You’re going to ask me to marry you.” She was kneeling on level with him, knees scraping on the dirt.
“How--?”
“Heart, Soul and Life. Intermediate Spanish. We special coverage reporters need diverse educations.” Her voice wasn’t light and flirting, it was frail.
“And…will you..?” She hadn’t even opened her eyes yet, and the impending words froze in his throat.
What did this look like to her, like he wanted the white dress, a pretty girl on his arm, the flashing camera? Like he wanted to grab onto her with two hands and not let her go? Chloe was his riddle and half the time he didn’t know how to hold on to that answer.
When you find love hold onto it, he’d told her once and maybe he was holding on too tight, too soon. She wanted him, he knew that, but maybe she didn’t want forever. She’d just gotten out of that.
(He didn’t want perfect. He wasn’t Jimmy.) He’d wanted to say ‘It’s out there. It’s open.’ in a less dramatic way than letting her find him. Something she could enjoy for once. He didn’t want her to cry.
Her cheek was wet when her lips hit his and there wasn’t really another explanation. She kissed him harder and he couldn’t breathe. She’d done this before. This part of them was easy, but he wanted the more complex to part to be too. He drew a hand along her cheek, slid it between her insistent lips and his. She wasn’t saying a word now, ducking her head into his neck to avoid his eyes.
“You don’t have to answer today or tomorrow. I just thought it would be nice…” His stomach did a slow turn on itself and this was another one of their moments.
It felt like she had been waiting since forever.
“What else did you think I meant by that ring?” The tentative, almost cobweb-like weight of her hands felt extra sharp and extra real. “I do.” She blinked fast and didn’t turn her away, kept them fixed on his face. “Say something?”
He understood the fear in her eyes then. Not of losing everything; but having it all. She wasn’t running and he wasn’t waiting and this meant something. He remembered what if was like to smile.
The music had long since fallen into a confused jumble but the universe had shrunken, narrowed into this microcosm of their moment.
His arms barely caught up to hold her tight and she didn’t squirm this time, didn’t try to wriggle herself closer so that he would lose his mind and they could forget what it all meant. Her hands drew up his back and stayed there like they were content to rest there forever.
There were many things Davis would remember that night.
The gist was simple. He’d waited. She had. They weren’t waiting any longer.
----
Endnotes: Just for explanation.
Chloe losing her memory after *the cure* in Abyss? Well this fic, along with allowing me to jump into the red!k thing, allowed me to really bring in some spec at the time. What if Clark's mindRAPE (yes I'm saying it) instead of loosening Braniac's hold on Chloe, strengthened it. This fic works on that assumption, as well as Jor-El being unable to fully 'cure' Chloe and a remnant of Braniac staying within her.Green flickers? OMG what is he trying to do with Chloe and Davis?
This also works on the assumption of Braniac pushing the wedding to go through.because we all know that was the only reason a smart girl like Chloe could want to marry something like JimmyHenry. Braniac was trying to activate Doomsday, and Davis's emotions were his only way of doing that. So then he attempted to use the connection with Chloe and we all know how that turned out.
paraxdisepink won first place for the longfic. So.... She gave me a prompt. Davis: red!k.It turned out a very, very AU take in the same time line as Bride. Shippier. A Braniac infected Chloe goes to Davis when her memories start disappearing again.
Binary: Characterized by or consisting of two parts or components; twofold. The same system used in computer code.
by vagrantdream at her/my journal
16479 words, m/nc-17, abyss and bride (in a manner of speaking).
He was acting his own tragedy, his own scene from a naïve romantic movie, believing that could be enough.
[Davis Bloome had waited exactly two days, nine hours and twelve minutes for Chloe Sullivan. ‘I’ll wait for as long as it takes’, he’d told her then, full of that same kind of romantic blindness he’d told himself he’d never have.
(She had her own life already and he never wanted to be that guy, the one who wrecked the relationship of someone he claimed to love for his own sake. She had her fiancé and it wasn’t even as if she even knew what she felt for him anyway.)
But he would wait. He had to wait. That was the only thing he had. He hadn’t expected it to be like this.
He didn’t know what he expected really. He hadn’t expected to find her in the middle of road screaming sirens and smoking ash of all things. He hadn’t expected her to be about to marry another man or to believe in him when no one else in their sane mind would. He hadn’t expected her to run back to him, broken and remembering only him, after saying she shouldn’t see him anymore. After that little problem had been taken care of by the prick of his needle no less, he hadn’t been able to fight it any longer. She’d walked away for real.
The old adage was to let someone go and if they came back to you they were yours. That’s what he’d looked at love like before, tentative movements towards some greater connection, something that meant something. It meant something. She knew things about him that no one else did, little secrets he’s hid away inside himself completely deep. He would have given it all to her if she asked. The connection was there and it hurt like a limb had been cut from him, a burning gaping hole left by something that wasn’t even his to keep.
It sounded silly to talk about that, agony, like one of those epic love stories with the violin playing mournfully in the background, those where you know you’ve lost before you’d even begun. Loving her had hurt even as it fulfilled; and a little part of him had always seen it that way.
That was even before he started waking up in the middle of a horror movie, on a floor covered in his blood, completely healed. Before he shattered knives with his skin, before he learned that there was more to the blackouts than he knew. Before he learned that he was a creature created to destroy and this little nine-to-five, everyday hero world he’d created for himself was a complete lie.
She was the only thing that was real and he just couldn’t let go. Forget that it was her wedding in twenty four hours.
Forget that he didn’t have control of himself and it was all he could do to drive by Isis every morning and not stop, just give into temptation once. She didn’t call him and he didn’t go to her door.
This wasn’t fatal attraction. He needed to be around her like he needed to breathe, but the first time he’d stopped breathing he’d woken right back up after the pain had stopped fogging his mind.
He’d wait. ]
----
All she had to do was go to their place to find him. He was on his one break that day, some uneaten whole-wheat sandwich in front of him, absorbed in something. She did not know how he managed to look that…healthy, when he picked at his food.
Chloe knocked on the tabletop with her fist to break him out of his little world, half wanting to hide again. This was all too urgent, too serious. Too late for that. “Chloe.” he said. His eyes seemed to light up under all that brooding and it was alright.
“I thought you’d be…” off planning your wedding, maybe?
“Well I’m just letting loose right now. Being a free agent.” Code for alone, stranded and without a car.
She settled into the chair across from him, hugging her oversized bag to her chest, noticing the way his eyes scanned her face for a clue as to what. She kept her lungs moving, blew the air in and out and tried not to get lost in them. There was nothing to feel guilty about, she told herself. He was her friend, and attraction wasn’t the be-all, end-all of it.
It wasn’t as if Jimmy would get out of his mood just to be jealous that she was confiding in someone else. Clark she wouldn’t go to because… last time he’d panicked more than she had. He couldn’t just listen. He’d haul her back to Jimmy again and she wasn’t exactly ready for that.
She could count on Davis, lord knows she had before, and a little part of her felt guilty for setting his whole world upside down because she needed him to be her shoulder. He had…feelings for her and she was just rubbing salt in the wounds.
“I thought Jimmy…”
“Jimmy and I are on break.” (If forgetting her fiancées name for the second time in the week counted as a break.) “I’ve been losing chunks of time again.”
She told the whole story, racing through forgetting Jimmy’s name, another hospital MRI with Jimmy in the same room and nothing getting better. She should have known that Davis’s miracle cure with the needle, like anything too sudden and convenient, wouldn’t work.
She just wanted to go home but Jimmy had gotten right in the doctor’s face and threatened to sue. She’d dragged him away and suffice to say he wasn’t happy about that. It wasn’t far to walk within the same hospital.
“And he just left you alone like that?” Davis straightened in his chair, eyes full of something unreadable. “That was--”
“He was pretty vehement. And I haven’t exactly made it easy for him these past weeks. I mean the memory going MIA and not being there to support him through the whole wedding thing…Stuff was bound to build up under the surface.”
There was stuff beneath the surface alright, if Jimmy’s rant about being the only one trying for them was something to go by. Any groom would have done it. She shouldn’t have expected him to do anything else.
“That didn’t make it any less wrong.”
“Well, he didn’t leave me at first.”
There was the thing. She’d kind of walked out on his little hospital rant and when she’d come back two minutes later their car had been gone.
She glanced at the clock, one in the afternoon, and realized he’d run out of lunch break.
Here she was spilling all her problems to Davis on the only hour he had. Maybe she really was a bitch.
“You haven’t even had anything to eat. I’m just--- I’m sorry. I should let you get back.”
“Don’t say ever say that, not to me. You’re not going to be alone. Just wait a minute.” He stood up, paramed jacket clinging to well-defined shoulders and she’d looked down at his cup of coffee. Or tried. “The coffee might help. I know it’s kind of your sustenance.”
It wasn’t until after he came back that she realized that he’d taken the rest of the day for a ‘family emergency’. He had this idea that maybe he could help, pulling some strings and getting her an appointment somewhere. She didn’t want to start that again. The memories were just going and maybe it had always been set that way, just like it had for her mother.
“I’ve researched the hell out of it. There’s nothing you can really do. I just want to…” She just wanted to let go of it.
“I kind of take preventive measures, anyway.” She said finally, withdrawing almost everything from her bag.
“You carry notes with you?”
“Pictures, photographs, the whole shebang. A mini-dossier.” There was one for each of them- Clark, Jimmy, him, Lois.... So far his was the only one she never really needed. He was there, completely there. Crystal clear.
The rest of them weren’t and she half-expected them to come tearing around the corner with all their demands and stories that she would not remember. Angry. They were her whole life, but they terrified her, now.
She jerked at the sound of a siren, cool brown liquid spilling all over the front of her blouse. She hastily put down the cup and fanned it away from the files, mopping, making a bigger mess.
“You can say I’ve been on tenterhooks. And I kind of need a ride.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Do you have a bathroom?”
He looked at her, almost startled.
She didn’t want to go to the Talon, home or whatever it was supposed to be. She didn’t want to stay out here, with the sound of cars and traffic and so many people. She just wanted to feel safe.
“I was thinking we could go back to your place if you have to change anyway. Talk.”
The idea of being alone with him didn’t fill her with apprehension. He wasn’t one of those creepy guys who purposely made things happen to take you back their places and have their way with you. He was her entire world once and he could have given her any story he wanted. The mean romantic comedy cliché, ‘we’re married!’ He’d taken her back to her place and her friends and her life instead.
“As long as you need.” There was this look on his face, like he wasn’t seeing anything but her. Tender somehow. Bereft of something. He had learned to shut himself off from almost everybody. And then she just had to go and open him up again.
He shouldn’t have looked like that. It gave her a crazy sudden urge to reach out and touch him, anywhere, didn’t matter. His hand, his shoulder. They used to touch.
She didn’t do it of course. The ring on her finger winked in the light, Jimmy’s actual ring, the ruby that cost him so much.
----
Davis didn’t know what shirt she was about to change into. She was out in about a minute, still in her old clothes, sitting on the couch that adjoined to what he just called his kitchen these days.
There were no masks, no flattering remarks designated to fool him into thinking everything was okay. Sometimes it hurt her to smile. Like her teeth would fall out, she said. Like she was lying just doing it.
“It’s amazing what talking can do. See?” She laughed (something wrong about it somehow) and blotted her cheek with her-his sleeve. “I couldn’t have done this with anyone else.”
Of course, she could with him. It was easy. So easy, like nothing in life was meant to be. Like nothing that could last.
She twisted the very small red ring around and around on her finger and he didn’t want to look at it. It didn’t matter. She would be okay, she’d have to be. Then she would go back to her real life once everything was perfect enough for the people in it.
She was only his in pain; and he hated to see her in it.
“I have to figure out some stuff before I go back. Then maybe…” Maybe what? Guys who did that once would do it again, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. It would be petty.
“And if you don’t? Will you walk down that aisle?” Her wedding had been set for tomorrow. He knew. The invitation was on his desk, spotless; his first crumpled letter to her pressed atop it. He must have rewritten it a dozen times.
“I’m sure about the wedding. It’s like getting married is the important thing in the world.” She didn’t smile, she was convinced. Maybe he was just lying to himself about her settling for Jimmy. “I’m just not sure about—marrying--- him. I’m not sure about myself either, but then why would I think that? I think I’m just going crazy.”
“Worrying about yourself going crazy is not crazy. I do it all the time.” He had come to her certain he was something worse than a killer, and he wasn’t completely sure that wasn’t true.
“Maybe.”
“If you were crazy you might have flown into a rage at me disagreeing. You’re not crazy.”
She pushed her mouth into a smile. “I kept thinking that I’d tell him he deserved someone who wasn’t. Someone who could really want what he wanted. It’s just like….something in me stopped me every time. Crazy.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Which part?”
“Both. You’re worth more than that. We’ll get something decent in you and you’ll relax and it will be amazing how much more can change.” Maybe he could cook again. He barely bought food for himself but there was enough to get by. She blinked at him, quickly, eyes watering again.
“How do you do that? Make it all feel insignificant?” She was already telling herself to say goodbye to her life before it was taken from her. He wasn’t about to let her do that.
He felt something in him loosen, tighten up worse than ever when her arms came around him. He closed his eyes to keep it down and her scent overwhelmed him, something clean like the shampoo she used, her skin. She just needed comfort. But she never seemed to go to anywhere else for it.
“…just letting me unload on you, and I’m sorry I’m totally acting like that girl in Cyrano de Bergerac. I don’t know what I would have done without you here.”
There was another scent, much stronger. He shifted his head over her shoulder and dragged her closer. She didn’t protest, skin hot, burning and her fingers knotted as if she was about to tear through the jacket. It wasn’t like he didn’t feel it enough already.
The pain didn’t ebb at all, more like a physical ache and soon she was going to find out exactly how much if he didn’t stop. Why would he stop? He kissed the side of her head, a breath from her forehead, and let himself feel the slide of her hair, light and delicate under his fingertips. The scent... He wanted her. He needed…
Her hand settled finally, palm flat on his neck and he heard her breath snag, softly. That did it. His mouth found its way lower to the shell of her ear and she stiffened, making a tiny noise in her throat. “Davis. What are you doing?”
He didn’t do this; he spouted things about true love and holding on. He’d given her space and time and nothing had gone away. He assumed she wasn’t ready; but now he could suddenly see through all of that, he could feel it like her body, corporeal in his arms. She didn’t say stop.
“I think you know.” He’d said this after he knew that she would always have him. He was too lost to appreciate the symmetry.
He turned her head, pressing his forehead into hers and fastening her mouth to his own. She returned the kiss for a brief second before jerking her mouth away, eyes red. “I just wanted to talk,” she whispered, voice light and painful. “I just—“
Then again, it was like that time, must have been the first time, and her lips clung. Her taste was headier, marked by sweat and desperation and he wanted it all.
She felt it and her hands made a flailing movement, loosening her small fingers from the cloth and pulling one hand to the back of his neck again, putting the heat there too. The scent of her wanting made it hard to breathe, and somehow he most have let go of her hair to put his hand much lower. She curved into him so easily.
She dragged her mouth against his, eyes closed. She let go with a gasping sound, recited something small and ardor-blocking like “Jimmy, I can’t do this to Jimmy.” off a list.
He was aware she wanted him to say something; maybe he was supposed to apologize. That wasn’t what was really going on. He dropped his head into her shoulder and breathed in there, liked the way her neck moved under the lightest pressure.
“Why are you doing this to me, Davis?” Her pupils were constricted like she’d been staring at the light for too long. “I must love Jimmy. I am going to marry Jimmy.”
“Jimmy?” Oh yes. The fiancé, the one that yelled in hospitals.
“I don’t like him.” He said into her collarbone. Being reminded of that guy dropping Chloe in the middle of nowhere really should have stopped it right there, but she craned her neck back and forth again and that just wasn’t putting the ambulance in reverse.
“I know you don’t. I d--do. I just don’t remember why.”
“We should make a list.”
He followed the little bumps of the vertebra on her neck all the way down until the sleeve of her jacket tickled his ear and her muscles jumped. He did not understand why she wore so many jackets.
“He is nice, most of the --time.”
Plenty of people were nice. Chloe’s cousin, Lois? had been nice and a little spacey before she stabbed him and claimed to be his mother. He hadn’t ever thought of marrying her.
He hadn’t really thought of anyone else when there was Chloe. Chloe, warm and quite, quite willing. He had been an idiot not to see that sooner. When he bit she let out a little rush of air like ‘Oh, that is nice’. Maybe she thought that was nicer than Jimmy.
“—He- said he’d wait until I was ready to tell him things. For a while.”
“What things?” he thought he could be doing better things than talking, but she wanted him to, a little.
“My secrets.”
“What secrets?”
Her mouth was half open and her forehead crumpled. “I don’t know. Something I told you?”
His hands settled onto her waist, feeling the inward and outward motion of her ribcage as she stared at him. He had to tell her something, he knew. It was important.
“…I must have told him some things. When I worried.”
“Not now. You’re telling me.” His lips felt dry and he fought the movement that wanted to happen. “Why?”
“You’re real.”
“He’s real, too.”
“Then maybe I just trust you more.”
She wasn’t trying to smile and he wanted to tell himself to slow down but his hands needed her skin again, slipped closer to her navel. Her scent was changing, and there was less fear. More of something. Or maybe there was more fear.
“Anything else?”
“The seating chart. The cake table? I liked where he put the cake table.”
“That’s a hard one.”
“Did you ever feel like you didn’t exist without him?” He had, with her.
“So who are we really talking about?”
Her face was half-thoughtful, a quarter-melancholy, maybe a little resentful. She wrapped one arm quavering behind his shoulder, fingers drifting at the base of his neck, again, and he supposed that was answer enough.
There were too many obstructions. The green collar, pleasing when it opened to show her throat before, was binding. He tore down but the heat never overwhelmed him until her hands fell beside his and she attempted to slip the thing off her shoulders.
Cloth caught around her wrists and he tugged on one of the ends, pulling it tight when she didn’t try to wriggle free. She stretched, automatic, exposing the shelf of her breasts under flimsy, clinging cloth. She watched his face as he made the knot, blowing in and out, staggered in anticipation. He wasn’t doing what she wanted, pulling her to her feet, fingers dipping into the curve of her spine, running right under sensible lace. Her eyes were wide, almost accusing and she licked dry lips.
He let it go and she let him lift her, wrapped her bound hands deep against his neck. She kissed him the opposite way, trying to keep her breath down, stopping once, for a moment, eyes searching and confused.
“I don’t want to stop this. I can’t.”
It felt like she was going to vanish in his arms when they hooked under her, but then again nothing else existed.
The bed was better of course, his bed, and for a moment his breath hitched as she pushed herself back on it, crumpling dark blue sheets. He’d thought of her there. But it was just a second, his eyes burned and he needed more than that. He undressed, mostly and her eyes did not look cornered.
His hands went to her hips, feeling big and clumsy on the green cloth. She had been wearing that the second time he met her, when he’d thought that a girl could not care about people like that and at the same time have such pretty ankles. It landed, somewhere.
“C’mon then.” She patted the bed in front of her and didn’t whisper it in a breathy voice; she didn’t need to. Her hands tugged at the bottom of his shirt. She didn’t get a chance to pull it away before he’d tangled his hands in her hair and pushed her down.
He felt like he wanted to bury himself right there. His hands caught up, wandered up her knees, maybe a little too hard but her breath got faster and her scent was unlike anything.
She pulled him over, tentative fingers skittering against his chest under the cloth. Maybe he didn’t need his other senses.
“This is crazy. We’re both crazy. I might forget everything tomorrow.” The sun outlined her skin in gold. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Of course not.” She was inches away and it felt like he could just breathe her in. “You just have to say ‘stop’. “
Her mouth quivered at the corner, in pain or amusement he would never know. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He hadn’t been able to let go at all.
“--and mean it.” he continued, shirt landing in the corner.
“Cute.” She wiggled her way from under him and he had an idea. “Let’s see how that bravado holds up, shall we?”
She had smiled that way at him, once, teasing but it wasn’t as if they did anything about it. His thumbs couldn’t be gentle as they brushed her nipples, hard already, and she seemed to like that, but not enough to stop.
One of her hands curiously trailed down his arm, and he wondered at her fascination. The other was almost gentle, tickling at his ribs and trailing down and down and down until he couldn’t be.
“Oh.”
He ground his teeth and pulled her fingers closer and knew he would let her do whatever she wanted, thought of warmth and connection moistureanddarknessandsound. “Oh.” Her eyes were somehow pleased and her mouth drew him before she moved down. Her fingers were a tight ring and his shoulders tightened at the wetness and awkward, sensuous movements of her mouth just there, right there. She moved her other hand up to his hip and he could feel little currents radiating out from it, making everything burn so that it was all he could do not to roll over her.
Moisture fogged his vision and her face danced on the inside of his eyelids. He bucked, too hard and she made a startled noise in the back of her throat. He wrapped his fingers around her arms and tugged her head into his chest. Her eyes were glazed and he could barely open his again and it still wasn’t enough. He needed to be in her, of her.
Her fingers didn’t slacken until he pushed himself higher, nudged his knee between her legs and pressed. She was rubbing up against him and the burn was screaming out at him just to let it all go. The ring on her finger dug into his skin and he wanted it gone. He wanted to claim her completely. It was far too soon.
She didn’t think so, fought a bit when he bit a line down her shoulders, nips really. Her hands flailed and he caught them, rolled once, twice. She found a hold around his waist and she was bearing down slow, a little breathless. His mouth fell open, and she was everywhere. She thought she’d won.
He nudged inside, a little higher than really deep, brushing in once and again and again, just barely, pretending he had all the time in the world. It was little bit of a sensory overload, her scent sharpening with anticipation and her teeth and her shoulders finally shaking when she collapsed under him. He felt the pulse at her wrists thrumming wildly, fingers keeping them over her head. She was looking up into his eyes, like she was half-awake and barely holding it all in. He wanted to hear her breath hitch.
It started slowly. He felt the warmth, heat licking at him. Gradually felt himself pushing too far, perhaps more force than she could take. He couldn’t stop.
Short flat nails bit into his back and hauled against him and he didn’t know when he had let go of her hands, or put his somewhere else. There were little quivers going through her and there were no sounds that weren’t short and choppy, the dull slam of the headboard, her breath. It wanted to take him.
He nudged his head just under her shoulder, into the curve of her elbow and felt her give. His fingers kneaded along her back, an unsuccessful distraction. The second time for her, her heels had already locked around his shoulders with the nylon that had not completely fallen away, straightening, pushing. Her head had fallen back and she was twitching and trembling hard, trying to breathe.
“Can’t. No.”
He could hear her, but it was like a disconnect, like this something had complete control now. He would be the one thing she could never forget.
“No. No. oh--- Yes.”
She squeezed hard with her knees, trying to keep the twitches down and only pulling him in. Her head tossed and jerked like she was being choked but she was moving to him, looking for another kind of intimacy. She didn’t quite get to kiss him. The closest they got were harsh pants, together.
It crested so it could not hold longer, and this wasn’t slow or teasing, it was. His forehead forced her neck back onto the mattress and she felt like she was going be pounded to bits. He was grateful that he could even think about that.
He saw her eyes wide open and fluttering, mouth swollen, face contorted. He felt the softness of skin and depth and texture quivering though him, heightened as he thrust. The burn wanted all that, wanted more, and he just needed her in a way that made this lack of control seem mild. There was something like affection in her eyes and she was the only world he knew for those moments before it all crashed over him.
----
It was a long while before Chloe could get free from under him and the covers or she remembered she had a voice again. She wasn’t thinking of anything more complex that if she could crawl far enough to catch a discarded pillow.
“I wasn’t aware that could be done.” She said, not knowing if it was what he’d done to her or just letting the conflicting thoughts go. Her voice came out a little worn around the edges. This was real.
Davis was watching her, mouth soft, taking in air like he had to catch his breath. She could not look away. He hadn’t moved one bit besides that, which was a bad or good thing because the covers were down around his hips. She looked at his face mostly, mostly, and guessed he wouldn’t have minded if that wasn’t the case. She never felt like she had to look away.
This felt right.
His jaw was smooth and he looked, no not relaxed, but close enough. She felt light and giddy and a little afraid again. She kissed him and called his hands rubbing up and down her shoulders before it happened. She felt every bit as safe and connected to him as she’d ever been when he’d had her on her back. But safe, safe was helpless too.
She crawled back over to him and tried to find a place to settle, somewhere comfortable and couldn’t. Either he was all tensed up or he was just built that way. His eyes hooded when her breast brushed over the spot right over his heart. Oh no, certainly not, not this quickly. “What are you on, Red Bull?”
He was Davis; she expected a teasing analysis of this, or a little bit of cuddling. His brown eyes were more reddish than she’d ever seen them, seeking and then almost confused when she tried to slow him down.
Chloe was Chloe and memory or no memory she got to the bottom of things. “Hey. Hey. Davis!” She tried to sift out the part of him that had been all careful and emotional and the part that was all need and he didn’t seem to like that too much. The words gathered and died a quick death.
His mouth glided steadily and lightly against her abdomen, where it hadn’t been before. She felt a light, unbroken buzz of energy crackling from his touch into her or maybe that was the other way around. She literally was deaf to everything, even the low appreciative sound he made when she stilled completely. She was going to have to move later. They had to talk about the hundred and one things they were completely ignoring. He was just driven now.
He shifted, hard arms wrapping around her shoulders and teeth sinking into her shoulder blade. He started to move, almost violent, fingers digging into her bare skin, keeping her flush against him. A bead of his sweat slid down her back. She froze, only halfway at the sensation of opening from the inside.
Then it was simple for Chloe- the rush of euphoria and lights large and strong and green dancing behind her eyes, a picture she could never catch. Oversensitivity spilled over into pain and when she screamed everything just seemed to slow, dramatically, drastically close. His head tipped into her hair, hard and he shook all over until she knew he was feeling it too. Helpless together was good.
Sometime later his hand caught the fingers that had blindly curled into his face and she couldn’t do anything but slump back against his chest. Some disconnected part of her knew she was just about to miss what was supposed to be her wedding and she should have felt very bad about that. She had to be there. It was not because of the groom—oh, she could not remember why but it did not matter, because she would not have felt like this. Real.
Davis’s hands were running along her fingers, impatient and she saw why. He eased the ring off and while the circlet looked dwarfed in his hand, his chest heaved, strange and uncomfortable. She pulled it away; fingers slick, and let it go to roll under the bed.
“Happy now?” she asked finally, freeing her hands and pulling the sheets around them like mummy wrappings. She covered his mouth, a little wary. “I got that, nonverbally just fine, believe me.”
Something of the frightening tension seemed to leave him, and he kissed her palm. “I’m happy.” He said it almost as if that was surprising. He looked worn down but his eyes were clearing, a far cry from the emptiness before. Half smiling. And she wanted to kiss him again.
“It hurts less now.” He whispered, finally. She had an idea of what he was trying to say, but things deserved to be lighter, for a little while.
“I just think you just had a beef with that thing.”
----
Davis woke up disoriented, from a dream, not his usual nightmare. Colors danced all inside his eyelids and he could not for the life of him understand what they meant. Chloe was sleeping the sleep of the dead, one arm limp over his chest and he didn’t want to move.
The smell of sex was heavy in the air, and he remembered, really remembered the trail of clothes and the warmth of skin, the things she had let him do and done right back. But the memory was a little hazy, not all it could have been. He had held her and there was that need pounding through his head, overpowering everything else. She’d been talking about her fears, Jimmy but she’d pulled him in anyway.
He had always imagined it would go much slower, and when/if they made that step it would be more romantic, dinner with flowers and candles and mariachis at her window.
It had been rough. He’d held her down. Her green jacket was in sight, all twisted up like a makeshift rope. He pulled the sheet away and saw the corresponding marks on her wrists, a light brown. Her fingers had flexed, she’d been that much closer and he’d found that very—
Horror and an unsettling twist of arousal warred in him. It wasn’t in his head. He loved her. Was that the only way he could show that love?
It didn’t feel like that when she finally opened her eyes, make-upless cheek a little red, her voice drowsy with sleep.
“It’s very, very hot in here.” She stretched and knocked the sheet away, leaning over the bed to pick up scattered things, her bag, her phone where the light blinked red, her skirt, her blouse. Her arms were not the only places he had bruised.
“Again?” She laughed. “I could have taken this if you hadn’t kept me busy.” ” Her eyes looked into him even as she smiled and feigned exasperation.
He drew his eyes a little away and tried to get the worried look off his face. She looked happy enough and he didn’t want her to deal with an early morning freakout.
She was asking about the air conditioning. “Your hands are big and sweaty.” She said by way of explanation. “A bath would be fine.”
“I have a shower.” Maybe when she came back he’d have gathered his thoughts enough to find a way to not hurt her, explain the whole crazy story. Maybe there wasn’t a way. It was one thing to go to sleep with someone and their issues. It was quite another to go to bed with a friend and wake up…with whatever he was.
He couldn’t drag her into this, but how broken would she feel if he was lying to her all along? She had enough lies in her life. She didn’t know how long she had either. But she had enough pain too.
She hopped up, pulling his hand behind her and he knew he would not.
“I was going to make breakfast.” He half protested. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“You can make fettuccini if you want, later.” She went on and on about saving water, ecology and knowing he was the socially responsible type. It didn’t matter about his talking about the size of showers. The fight was lost. She was Chloe.
A little piece of him knew it wasn’t just about him. She was talking every minute, trying to seduce him or keep him with her for a reason. She was scared he’d leave, or she wanted to feel close to someone. He wondered if this was what she used to have to do with Jimmy. She made a crack about padded shower walls, and he wanted to prove to her it wasn’t just about wanting sex.
He busied himself finding soap, his back to her, trying to remember that. “You could host a party in here.” She said. “I don’t know what you were on about.” She stepped almost innocently under the hot running water and where the droplets sprayed him, he couldn’t feel the temperature on his skin.
He could feel her and jumped a little when her palms circled on his shoulders, pulling him back under the spray. “Do you have a towel somewhere?” He remembered, third closet to the right. “Just forget it.” she said, said, eyes a little hazy and not from the water.
She took the soap and her fingers shook, just a little. “I can help with that.” He said.
It was not sexual, his fingers brushing between her thighs, cleaning the sweat and remnants of what they did away. Maybe this was taking care of her.
He felt her shoulders quivering and it wasn’t in pleasure. “Something’s wrong, Chloe. You can talk to me.” She didn’t answer.
It was almost like dancing, her hair clumpy and wet against the spot where the knife had shattered on his sternum. She didn’t know about that part of him, but she knew the way he’d been last night. This wasn’t the problem. Her arms were around him tight, not like she was afraid of what he could do. She didn’t even move as his hands brushed over the ugly bite mark on her shoulder.
He would plead if he had to. “It’s the only way I can help. You’ve got to let me help you.”
There was change in the way she breathed, and he knew he’d been right.
“Can you tell me who Clark Kent is?”
That was the name she’d seen on the telephone. Her best friend, at least he’d been once. She’d forgotten all about him before. It was just happening again and she knew somehow. He turned away and he was actually pacing in the shower.
“You have files on all of them; maybe they can jog your memory.”
“I don’t care about those.” she said. The question hung unasked in the air, How long will I remember you?
They were there, the both of them and their ghosts. They were with her broken memories. They were where the blood had swirled down the drain and where he’d finally had to see what he was.
“You’re everything I’ve got, now.” She whispered, and the tentative smile made it look as though she was going to break apart. “I came to you.” She had the first time, and he’d taken her back to them. This was the second time, and that had to mean something.
He turned to face her and part of him was heartsick. What kind of guy made himself into someone’s whole world? What kind of guy wanted to be?
He held her and patted her back, and told her he would be there always because he would. He’d be there, just as long as she existed. He was built that way. They’d find a way out of this.
They stayed there for the longest time and he tried to push away the feeling that this was their place, that this was their one moment before it all broke down.
----
“Let me take you out.” Davis had said, and she’d known that it was important to him to make her feel special. He’d always been a romantic. She remembered him like she didn’t remember anyone else.
It was their fourth day, the fourth day of her whole life and they’d gone out to a Chinese restaurant, to a little corner booth. He was telling her about her life and holding her hand from across the table, and halfway through her head felt like it was going to shatter.
There were colors, colors everywhere, green ones and zeros beneath her eyelids. She’d felt this once before. She couldn’t remember hitting her head against the tabletop, but she must have. Then, he was holding her face, eyes clear on hers, voice steady and firm and they were going to the hospital.
She knew the hospital. Not there. “Please! I don’t want to go back.” Her grip on his hand felt tenuous, like a string that was slowly being cut. “I want to stay with you. Don’t make me go back.”
There was just one color-green and she wanted it to stop, stopstopstop, but it was like that was in her, telling her, HER and nothing and no one could stop it.
“There’s a place called Isis. Take me there. Davis.” he heard. But it wasn’t Chloe who said those words.
It wasn’t Chloe’s eyes who flashed silver, or her voice or her hands on those computer monitors. She was a computer whiz, Davis knew that. But she could not change them at a touch. The screens blinked, green and spinning and the world around them seemed to freeze.
The thing inside her told him what he was, what he was going to do, what he could not help. It was every single one of his nightmares and more. “There is someone you are going to kill.” It said. It drew close, Chloe’s breath cool, her face beautiful, but hard and cold steely the way she never could be.
Davis did not know where Chloe was, but he had to get her back. Words would not bring her back to him, but he told her he loved her, that his feelings were real, that he was here. She felt something too, he’d always known and she just had to reach out and they’d be okay. They’d be fine.
He was acting his own tragedy, his own scene from a naïve romantic movie, believing that could be enough.
“Feelings? That was the program I was running to get you to me.”
It should haven been just like the ground, everything true he had left, was knocked out from under him. But a part of him knew that if it had been it could not be a lie any longer. Not if he felt; not if nothing had changed. He loved her. He always would.
He was holding her body by the shoulders, shaking, waiting from a sign in her cloudy eyes.
“I’m here, Chloe, just listen to me. Focus on me.” She had known him when he hadn’t known himself. She would know him now somewhere down there.
What had happened between the both of them couldn’t have been just program too. Everything she said she felt, every little moment couldn’t have been manufactured by a computer that couldn’t possibly understand. She’d trusted him.
But Chloe didn’t come back.
“She could do nothing without me, my direction or my consent. “ It was ahead of him, her eyes, her lips so close, drawn and white and horrifying. “I started the program.”
“No. That wasn’t...” It was real, it had to be.
“Real? A few memories, a little nudge in your direction, intimacy. She really did break you in.”
“No. Chloe...”
“She never had a choice. Clark Kent destroyed this girl you believe you love. He took every little bit of what made her her and left that much more room for me.”
Clark, her memories, the thing inside her, what he was. It was all connected. Everything was.
“I’m not going to join you; I’m not going to kill him or anyone.” He just needed to stop it and make him get Chloe back. If this alien--- Clark had destroyed her he might want to tear the answer out of him, make him fix this, but he would not hurt someone she had loved.
“I’m not asking. You have no choice. By connecting yourself to this human, you have connected to me.”
There was another program. It used Chloe’s same hands to clamp down over his wrist, and the blackness followed quickly, rippling over him. Painful transformations, it had called them, but that was nothing. It was nothing interspersed snatches of images, screams, fire, sparks of plugs and streets plunging into darkness. A different kind of burning and eyes that were never hers.
He had to remember something, he knew, but that part of him was shrinking to the black. He saw only scarlet, red and blue. If he destroyed that then maybe the pain would just stop.
Davis could not feel the rage of love leaving him. He just could not feel her.
----
After Braniac took Chloe’s mind, it had been like existing in a cage- a seamless cage with four coded walls that went on and on forever. Chloe couldn’t hear, she couldn’t see, but she knew something horrible was happening. There was Clark, and there was Davis and she knew now exactly what the green was, flashing back behind her eyes. She knew why they were mirrors. Doomsday and the Red and Blue Blur. Naman and Sageeth.
She had all her memories here, just like a computer chip with a backup drive. In order to take everything from her, Braniac had to have taken a copy. She finally was whole again but that did not matter. They were all going to die and Davis was going to disappear forever if she did not get out.
She had to take herself back and she did not know how. She slammed her hands up against the green and it sent an unpleasant tingle into her skull. Someone could not know that much and not go mad. It was fluid information, moving through her and around her like a horrible maze. Maybe she had to be fluid, part of it. Maybe that was the only way to get out.
She defined herself by her life and she let the memories flow through her, one by one, let them pass from her into the walls, into the numbers and letters. She felt Clark’s lips against her forehead and Davis’s eyes across a room, paper in her hands and words in her throat. She was Chloe Sullivan; friend and lover, fighter and aid. She was every single thing she’d ever done and all she would not lose.
(She was free.)
---
Her skin smelled burned like she had been struck by lightning. She knew where she was well enough, the gleaming crystal of the fortress. Her hand was against the largest crystal and she didn’t have much time before she had to fight for control again. There were three bodies around her, a man with his hand stiff on a strange curved knife; like an Aztecs sacrificial blade. She knew that Braniac feared this, felt it like the overflow of words and Kryptonian symbols in her mind. He was trying to take control again.
She was almost blind, swamped by the sound and symbols but she groped for the blade and felt it bite into her palm. The noise ebbed. She didn’t pay attention to the rest of them; saw nothing but the titanic struggle ahead of her. There were Clark and Davis; she used the names loosely because they were not just themselves anymore. Davis had become this great, black, horrifying thing and Clark barely looked human, he was that bloodied. They were exchanging blows fast, but It had the upper hand and every time Clark smashed into a wall, he took longer getting up and it circled him like a predatory animal. When he didn’t get up…
She had to stop them. She was human, a meteor freak at the most and they were full-blooded Kryptonian. She couldn’t exactly talk them down, she couldn’t fight, and she couldn’t get near enough to touch either of them. Maybe Brainiac didn’t need to get free for it all to go to hell. She had Braniac’s programming, she had information; she had this thing between them, between the three of them really. All she could think to do was think really hard, so she did, screamed out in her mind. But Braniac was not with her.
The last thing she thought was of waiting until Clark was downed to get close enough to It. Maybe be the last sacrifice and hope that woke Davis up. He’d said he loved her.
When Clark fell, she reached him first, but he could not see her. Blood had leaked into his eyes. She could not reach out to Davis inside It; just put herself in the space in front of Clark’s broken body. It reached her first, thrust a massive hand forward, for Clark maybe, and she felt herself break, a thousand tiny razor like imprints opening up her side. That was not Davis anymore. For once the pain, the thoughts and her memories overwhelmed her, leaked out like a power surge.
It held her up with one massive fist and the blood leaked out over her side. She screamed herself raw, and maybe that startled it. It released her and she fell, crawling on hands and knees and its fist fell upon her again, pushed her back straight down on the ice. She ignored the bite of it, like thousands of tiny diamonds on her skin and waited for it to crush her spine.
Nothing happened, not even the sweet release of death. She panted in and out; the weight putting a strain on her lungs and slowly, so slowly, it felt like it was barely a weight at all. She turned and saw it, still, somehow insect like, but the eyes changing scarlet to brown, the burden lightening.
It felt like forever until it retreated, like the shell of an enormous crustacean, leaving Davis, bloody and naked, behind. It was still inside him but she didn’t push his hand from her back, grabbed hold of the cool fingers and squeezed. ‘I did all this?’ his eyes seemed to ask her and she couldn’t tell him anything.
She thought about secrets, about his keeping his literal monster locked away while he knew every one of hers. Secrets and lies, hadn’t she heard that every minute of her damned life? Before, he told her what he suspected and she’d ignored the signs. He just hadn’t shouted it out.
Clark was bleeding a few feet away. She should have felt disloyal for leaving him behind for the man inside the monster that had nearly killed him. But she wasn’t a cool, logical supercomputer.
Davis had made her feel. She just wasn’t the same anymore. He was bleeding out, too. She wanted him to see something besides carnage when it all ended. She needed to.
Chloe dragged herself halfway to Davis before the dried blood on her skin started freezing. Her head fell just short of his side but the air around him was warm still; she’d always remember he was warm.
“I couldn’t pull you into that again.” He’d choked out and she didn’t want to waste their last moments on that. “I didn’t know it was this.” He whispered and she believed him, that was the worst part.
It changed nothing.
Clark plunged the sacrificial knife straight into Davis’s back before he collapsed. It wasn’t heroic, if was ugly, blood leaking from his punctured lung. Heroes made tough decisions. He’d made his first, and last.
Davis was sorry (why was he sorry?) and he loved her and he was already dead. They were both good as dead, leaving her, and she was trapped in a tomb of ice and glass.
Several things happened then. She felt her body stiffen and something dark pushing out of her, into the icy fortress walls, over Davis, turning it all to black. Braniac was retreating from the dead and the dying, pulling its ultimate tool of destruction right with it.
Her eyes clouded and she felt something return to her, the tears.
She didn’t think of what happened if she could not. There was no choosing, not for her. She reached out her hands, shaky from blood loss and touched them both, tried to feel their pain as well as her own. She was pain.
She still hadn’t woken up, pale and bruised under the covers. Davis hadn’t been able to sleep watching her, saying every prayer he’d ever learned in Sunday school, but Clark left the room more than once. “She’ll pull through,” he said, eyes sure. “She’s done it before.” As if he expected it.
At times like this Davis wondered just how much they shared that he had not. He wondered how much of that Clark had taken from her. He didn’t feel mindless rage, but his knuckles itched with the urge to wipe that look off of Clark’s face. She was close and probably dying and he could not.
Maybe Clark let him stay because he was looking pretty messed up himself, the cuts and burns the powerful side of him had left on It just starting to heal on his skin. But Clark wouldn’t ever let him alone with her for two minutes even holding her hand, as if he would climb all over her like some depraved madman.
He knew what Clark thought of him. Of what they’d been. A biological drive and computer coding. A nudge, Braniac had said. Maybe a little part of her felt that attraction, but it had just been blown out of proportion. That’s why she hadn’t been able to stop. Chloe had probably lived a waking dream and he had just wanted to believe it was all her.
“She was alone and vulnerable and you kept her away from her friends. You might have not known about Braniac, but you used her.” Clark said. Forget that those friends of hers hadn’t given one thought to why she couldn’t trust them enough to come back. Davis said nothing. That was Chloe’s secret to keep or give away. It didn’t matter about Braniac, all or any of that to him. He loved her. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt like this.
Clark was a passive guy, but Davis didn’t doubt from the look on his face that he wanted to toss him out. Physical ejection wouldn’t work for long with Davis. He didn’t know if he was quite human anymore. He wasn’t exactly dead. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if he was pounded into the dirt. Whatever had happened, whatever she thought of him now; he wouldn’t abandon Chloe. If nothing else, they had been friends, real friends. She needed a friend.
“And what do you think she’ll see a friend when she sees you?” Clark kept on. “She was the construct’s tool to bring you into full power. She couldn’t have controlled what she did with you. She betrayed the man she was going to marry and she didn’t have a choice. She’s strong, but she can’t let all that go.”
That was what Clark wanted to believe. Chloe had cared. It he had hurt her so much she just should have let him die. Davis tried to push away the thought that maybe after all this, there would be too many memories for that. If Chloe wanted him to go, he would. Not before.
Clark sat forward, looked straight at him; broad face pushing Chloe from sight. “Let me tell you about Chloe. She’s always wanted to save people...”
She didn’t actually have feelings for you.
Maybe it had been a bad moment, but something inside of him had broken, snapped. The idea that it wasn’t just the lie, but who she was that lead her to care about making him live burned him. He could have been anyone else, Clark said, so damned reasonable, right before blocking his way back in the door. If he’d ever thought he’d loved her, he would let her go.
It all came to a head then, what Clark had done, what he had, the fact that she wasn’t breathing. It was Davis who swung at him, right in the middle of a hospital hallway, blinded by something in his eyes. Clark hit back.
“She will wake up, without you.” Clark said, his own mouth bloodied. “I don’t want to fight you.”
But Clark had already won. Maybe he was really the monster. Davis had hurt Clark because he was in pain. Chloe wouldn’t have wanted him to. Chloe just wanted to save him. That’s what she did, she told him once. Not even being able to know she would live hurt more than the blood in his mouth.
Davis knew about packing up and moving; efficiently and quickly; place to place when they wouldn’t have you anymore.
But he couldn’t leave her. She was more than a temporary resting place, she was home and every part of him rebelled against giving that up.
She hadn’t been in her right mind, Clark said. It was never about him. But she had been broken and she’d trusted him, somehow. There was a world’s worth of difference between relying on someone and giving them your whole heart. If she’d ever wanted it or not, she had his.
She’d needed him. They’d been standing together in that very kitchen. She hadn’t known her name and he’d repeated it to her over and over and over. She couldn’t expect it to be that way forever, she’d said, terrified and half afraid she was going to lose him too. She never expected it. She never thought she could deserve anything; but she did, so much. He felt like she was going to pull all the breath from his lungs. He was hers. He wanted to show her.
He’d bought her a ring the next day. It was soon, crazy timing, but then nothing about them had been normal. It shouldn’t have been right to talk about engagement or marriage right after she’d called it off to another man. But he’d been sure, so sure that it was her-all her feeling something. It didn’t have to mean anything more than that if she hadn’t wanted it to. He’d wanted to give her something real. He’d had the ring in his hand, ready, more sure than anything in his life.
The white wrapping paper around the box crinkled in his hand. He’d been with her, holding her hand until it wasn’t her there, anymore. Maybe she had loved him, a little, all on her own. Maybe she could have. Maybe they could have made it.
He put the ring there, on the table, had shaky. Maybe it was selfish to drag it all out again and she would just want to forget. He didn’t want to leave her, ever. He had to, but he needed her to know what he felt, how he would always feel.
The last thing he did in Metropolis was drop his apartment key into Clark’s hand. It would be hers now. It was the one thing he could do. It held his last message to her. Not his last. Not his last.
----
Chloe woke up in a room with white bed sheets, alone except for Clark. He was alive and coming along well, if the strength of his hug was anything. She waited a few drawn out seconds. If he was alive then…
“Where’s Davis?” she asked.
He’d been lucky. Clark had given him a chance to start over far away.
Chloe’s stomach plummeted. “He didn’t want to see me?” She expected Braniac’s takeover to be poison, to rip him apart inside. The knowledge that you were yanked around like a puppet on a string and everything you’d felt was a lie was capable of plenty. She would know.
He might have lost that connection to her, but the Davis she knew wouldn’t run. “You forced him away, didn’t you?”
“He destroyed half the city, Chloe. What did you really expect me to do?” Clark sounded like Oliver now.
“Gosh, I don’t know, maybe let him see if I was alright?”
“Can you honestly tell me you would have wanted that after what he did?”
“What exactly did he do?”
Clark paced, arms crossed over his chest, face floundering.
“In order for Braniac to have complete control over the destroyer, he would have needed a connection. A physical connection. Garth explained it to me before…before he…was murdered.”
“..the sex.”
“I’m so sorry, if I had been a better friend, I could have found you first.”
“It happened. There were two of us.” She remembered just how much of the two of them there were.
“You were distraught and not in your sane mind, controlled by Braniac. Davis took advantage of that and didn’t even tell you who or what he was. He kept you away so he could… You were pretty beat up when I brought you in.”
“I—Braniac--I wanted to stay away. I wanted…” that. Chloe knew she could better defend her actions if she knew exactly how much of each had played in. But she was too busy trying to separate which parts of her had been just her and which parts hadn’t been. The bigger part of her, just begging for that little push to jump right into what she’d wanted all along.
And Davis… “That wasn’t all him. There was some red kryptonite involved.”
“How the h---how in the world did he stumble on that?”
"Jimmy’s engagement ring was studded with a red rock which I did not remember, because all my memory on the subject was completely wiped clean. You remember your little summer, don’t you? Bits and snatches? There were women for you. With him, there was just me.”
“You don’t have to justify it. He felt something, but he just took…”
“ took? You‘re trying to say rape delicately, aren’t you?” Clark was one to talk about that. He had taken her mind.
“I don’t even know if I can trust you again, so save the compassion. You took my memories away. I asked you, Clark.”
Clark heard very little of that part. He apologized and looked on with sad eyes. He wasn’t sorry. He was willing to do whatever just so she would patch it all up with Jimmy and go back to being the girl who could drop it all to help him.
But Chloe could not (would not) patch it up with Jimmy, not after vanishing for three days. He looked at her and his eyes were so mechanic, mouth petulant. So where have you gone this time?
What was there to say? I happened to use your cheap meteor ring on a friend of mine. We lived together for three days and had hours and hours of sex. Eventually, an alien supercomputer burst out of my brain and turned him into a spiky monster. Before we could destroy too much of Metropolis, Clark (he’s an alien Jesus by the way), stabbed him in the heart. And I healed them both and you’re totally going to think I love them more than you. One of them is somewhere in I-don’t-know-where, the other I’m currently not talking to, but you’d probably be right.
Chloe could have lied, but she was tired of lies- telling them or receiving them. She was standing in front of Jimmy at the door of the apartment, wan in the set of clothes she left the hospital with, but not caring to be perfect for his little world anymore.
She just pulled out the cheating card. Red rocks and computer codes were fine, but it all came down to that in the end. She’d done that in every other sense of the word; going to Davis and trusting him and not this life she was supposed to serve honor and obey. Red rock or coding or no coding, she had imagined her life with him and she hadn’t wanted to come back.
Jimmy yelled a little, said quite a few words she didn’t even know how to repeat and her head felt less heavy than it had in a long time. They weren’t the one true thing. He didn’t sound as if he loved her at all. With her little Braniac-inspired trip and her deep rooted attraction to Davis, she hadn’t betrayed love.
“I always knew there was something going on with you. I just took it, like everything else. You never wanted anything I had to give. You wanted, what was that you call it again, a ‘friend’?” He slammed the door and she cemented that little theory of his by moving into Davis’s apartment that very day.
----
Moving. She didn’t get all that far. Her luggage stayed in a pile at the door. The clothes she had used were already in Davis’s closet, next to those pressed uniforms of his. Still there. Where had he gone?
She sat at his table, her face against the smooth grained wood and tried to push the memories back. She needed to pull them out, to process. She thought she’d be angry, angry and hurt at him.
But the resentment never came. She felt it, but it was on Clark, on Brainiac, on her whole damn world for taking the one thing she had completely and turning and soiling it. Davis had been her friend before he’d been more, and where was he now, in some far off place, trying to put himself back together after all of it. He hadn’t control of himself or what he felt, and maybe that had broken him.
She didn’t know what she’d expected. For them to mutually bond over being used and carelessly tossed aside? She hated that she couldn’t just cling to him and cry. She hated that it had taken her friend too.
Chloe didn’t have memories of the blood when the Destroyer came to life, computer code, all that information being sucked into her extremities like lightning. It had been Braniac using her to direct it all. She was just his tool then.
But Chloe’s memories of Davis were crystal clear. There had been more than one day, all the other memories disappearing like so much dust. The first morning had turned to the next, and she realized he had taken his vacation just to be close to her. There wasn’t that much to be close to.
She’d felt like a shadow. Her temples ached; everything ached so she felt like something could just burst out and more than once she sat over the table, scanning through the memory loss books and wanting to cry like a little girl. She didn’t recognize the faces on the files, but he had been there, bringing the remnants of her back out.
They’d danced in his kitchen to an old vinyl record, something British and completely unlike him, she couldn’t remember the name. She didn’t have anything but him, irrevocably. She’d forgotten her own name for the first time that day; and she hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He’d had as good as made a vow, but who could live their whole life with a woman who knew no more than a child? She couldn’t expect that.
Something had changed in his eyes there, and his face was soft, compassionate and denying, but his eyes were set, determined like she couldn’t move him. He would have told her something. Instead, he pulled her back into their swaying dance, there, standing in the middle of the floor.
He seemed extra determined to make her feel cherished. When he finally joined her than night, he was gentle and unhurried and perversely that made her cry out all the more. She felt loved. That had been the first time he said those words. Not feelings, love. Maybe the uncontrollable need had been a program, but that, that was all Davis. “I promise. I promise.” he’d said. He wasn’t here.
He hadn’t left even any sign, any indication other than that he was trying to get free and wanted to make it up to her somehow. But he was Davis and Davis wouldn’t have…
She saw the bundle.
There was a ring. Deceptively small, a glimmering stone that must have cost half his salary. No letter, no explanation. Just a ring, there, like he wanted her to find it.
What kind of guy made love to you, loved you, left you a ring and nothing else?
She was alone. She’d always known he could break her heart.
----
Once she had known less than that. She’d barely been Chloe and she’d known Davis. It didn’t matter what else she lost. She would always remember his name.
Davis-he was….cuddling with her? He exhaled slowly, in and out against her skin and she bit back a shudder. He was asleep.
Davis looked like a young boy, face pressed against her stomach. He’d been a foster kid, hadn’t grown up like she must have. It must have been a lonely life, home to home, carrying his entire life in one of those black garbage bags. Physical affection had been the exception rather than the rule and now it was like he was trying to make up for that absence of touch.
She knew more about his childhood than she did hers. She must have had one. A mother and a father and a nice red –bricked house. She had to think of the things and people that had been important to her. He’d been helping her do that.
But increasingly her world was becoming all him and she thought she minded the loss of the rest of it less than he did. Maybe they’d been together forever, she thought. Maybe he was her family now. She’d been crying, she hadn’t known why, and he was there and wasn’t that what family meant?
He twisted, cheek lodging itself firmly in her thigh. No, no. He had to be like that. His breath seemed to displace the thoughtful part of her mind, but she couldn’t let that happen. She pressed her head back against the pillow and tried to think.
In this fantasy life of hers she worked, somewhere, at something she liked to do. She knew the names of the people around her. She got home early, precisely at six, to fumble about in anticipation or fall out on the couch. An hour later he came home to her, uniform wrinkled and he’d always iron with the shirt off because she made holes.
Come here. Please, she’d say and he would pad over, measured steps a little faster because he could pick her up and swing her and carry her off if she wanted. He’d kiss her hard like always, a little sweaty because it was burning hot. He’d tell her about the people he saw today, two old ladies who never baked and a boy with the cast on his leg and she would smile because he was so him. His eyes would be light and optimistic but she wouldn’t be able to smile for long.
She’d be seeing the half open collar of his, and the long sleeves making him sweat and she wouldn’t help him with the rest. He would go content and still as her fingers wandered over the heavy cloth and ask her what she was doing but his muscles would seem to fight with themselves as she felt the texture of it in her teeth.
Every girl loves a man in uniform, she said. In uniform?, he’d tease and his breath would catch as that second button went. Yes, yes, tell me more, she’d say, breathing in skin and sweat and a little lust. His voice would get low; a little stumbling and he’d start again.
The zipper would be a hard one but then she would just be wondering at how he could overheat so and she’d meet his eyes, blinking, filling up the world before she slipped down on him. Target. Found it.
He’d jolt a little but his callused hands on her neck and back would be too careful, always trying not to break her. The rest of him would be fighting it and yes and she would feel like she was bobbing for apples and his voice would just …
“Good Morning.” He said.
“Did I wake you up?” she asked. He was just happy, hoping it was a good day for her too.
“No. I was up.” It had nothing to do with—her skin turned all at once terribly hot and terribly cool when he seemed to slow down to breathe. His lips pressed gently at her hipbone, and she was almost certain he was doing it on purpose.
“I know you. You’re a terrible liar. What did I say?”
“Yes.“ he fingered her slippery hand, awfully close to where she had…. Oh. deargodno. “Then you said yes again.”
“Funny dream. I wish I could remember it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you do that. It’s my job.”
“---you really don’t need to…umm…” His eyes were closed, nose nuzzling into her, slow like she was…some sort of cute animal. Or food.
“What is that about turnabout and fair play?” he sounded almost philosophical but that look was definitely not. He hadn’t shaved yet and he was prickling—her fingers slid against his neck, hesitant and a little jumpy.
She had little room for shame with him. He’d probably found his way to every other inch of her but being kissed there... From small, scattered bits of memories, she knew this should have made her uncomfortable. She hadn’t let…someone else do that. It was …private…too embarrassing…intimate…
Let go, he said.
She needed to backpedal but she found herself frozen by the look of him. His tongue was a little rough on her and then... she twisted her ankle into one of the gaps in the sideboard.
Now, awake, she wanted to take that sideboard and deconstruct into little pieces, but she was no Kryptonian. Not like was, had been with his intensity and his eyes and that way he had of making the fear just vanish. Everything that he’d touched just hurt. Her most of all.
But Chloe Sullivan knew hurt. What was there to do after that? You lived. That was the most basic part. You cried to someone, a friend. You changed how you dressed, you found yourself a hobby, you dyed your hair some obscene color.
Chloe Sullivan had no friends to cry to except Lois and half the time Lois gave her a message from Clark. So she cut her hair off, ignored the rest of her world and picked up the pen again.
Clark came by and talked to himself. She didn’t exorcise the memories. She couldn’t do that, couldn’t exorcise Davis. He’d rooted himself deep. It seemed impossible that he would just go.
She didn’t understand his message until a week after, at his desk trying to scratch out something, anything, with her pen. There was a small pad of notepaper, a message written over and over in his writing. She’d written much the same thing herself, once, lovesick on a pad of pink paper and waited for her heart to break.
I’ll let you go for now, hoping one day you’ll fly back to me. Hoping one day you’ll fly back to me.
A sign was all she needed. Just one word. Chimbote.
----
[Chloe Sullivan could wait no more than one week, twenty two hours, three minutes for Davis Bloome. She could not wait, but she had not been the Watchtower for nothing. She could track like nobody’s business.
It took nine hundred miles of jet gas, and hours on the road where she thought she was jumping in feet first, like she only had once before. Maybe she was chasing after a memory of something beautiful and tragic and irreplaceable. Something that had never been hers.
Each mile that disappeared made her think that maybe he would wake up and see it had been just an endless stream of numbers running in both of their heads-or just his. Maybe he wouldn’t love her anymore. Maybe she…Maybe Clark would lecture her on this someday. She couldn’t not try. She found herself waving down a guide for directions, the sun beating down on her face and turning her already worthy tan a tad darker.
She saw him coming out of a clinic, if it could be called that, flushed with the heat, in nothing like his uniform had been. What he wore looked like grimy scrubs, but he was still Davis, still running headlong into things and trying to save people. His hair was different, longer, as if he wasn’t quite taking care of himself.
Then it was like before, that moment they say when you see that person and everything freezes around you and all that is left is yourself, the small shirking part of you, exposed so you can never draw it back again.
He found her eyes in it all, like he always did. This couldn’t be a lie. She felt like someone was reaching into her chest and squeezing. There was so much pain in him, just like there was in her, but that was not all.
He caught her in his arms there in the center of a plaza in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t have to say words, so many words before he could get any out. Somehow he seemed to see it all already, just like he saw her. Maybe not all.
She would remember that her smile wasn’t quite perfect, and wouldn’t care that this wasn’t quite their place. “It hurts to smile doesn’t it?” She whispered. His hand shifted around hers, fingers brushing over her knuckles and her smile did not hurt then, not in the least. His eyes were soft and shocked and then his hand was warm cradling hers. There was just one ring on her finger, with only one stone. It wasn’t red.]
----
Epilogue:
Davis thought she was going to demolish the wall. He wasn’t quite invulnerable, but he wasn’t quite human either, or up there on the self-control meter and she was pushing hard. Maybe he’d be the battering ram; he wasn’t stopping her. She was warm and real and alive and there was no cold glint in her eyes. It had been weeks.
Not that he was complaining about the wall. It worked enough in the context that it had become home, one of the four working walls of an isolated adobe hut. When the rain beat on the roof, a few strategically placed buckets did the trick. After the rain, the air was richly populated with mosquitoes, and last night it hadn’t been. This was the only place they could go.
Oh, they’d held out for a while. She’d held onto him and talked and he’d stared and stared. She had told him about her latest projects, a cross-country Isis group and her own special assignment for a newspaper for the Star. She needed room and board, she told him, almost-straight-faced. A party sized shower could make or break it. She remembered every single moment; she knew. She was still here. He wondered if it still marked her.
They stayed caught up there. How was the clinic? It let him get back by the bootstraps. Her eyes scanned his, half-gentle, half-something-else-entirely and her lips gave a nervous gleam. He had to learn to be the curandero too. That was really very handy for the exorcisms. He hadn’t been able to let go of her hands yet, fingers closed around a symbol of something. She turned her face into his shoulder, smile half-forming and it had been hard not to pick her up right then.
He’d half succeeded, brushed the new bangs from her eyes and felt like he was kissing her for the first time again. Nothing of the past had ever really happened for them, but it had and the memories were strong. It was hard not to think of her body twisting under his with the unexpected hunger of her response.
He’d never expected it but he had hoped. It was more than hope, Chloe with a stranglehold on his shoulders, pressing him against the wall, wrestling her mouth into his. This was so out of place with everything else, the Spartan surroundings, the knowledge and the emptiness and the memories of the cold, cold eyes and the blood he could only half remember.
She was sixteen hours on coffee, unfettered caution and a rush. He bent closer and her back bowed, pulling, leading him, thumbs brushing over his closed eyes, his back, the back of his neck, breath in unsteady puffs. Maybe she was thinking of sparing the wall too.
This wasn’t just it: he had expected she would break down and hold him and they’d be able to deal. He’d be able to fix that. But he couldn’t fix this. It was not broken. There was something slower and more intimate in her touch than it had been before. His hands didn’t know where to stop, hooked into the loops of those slacks of hers and tugged and she had the zipper undone before he could blink. Just a little more. No tugging. She had to know. They had to talk.
She wasn’t looking at him, though. In the distraction she had turned back over her shoulder, looking for a place to settle. There was one bed, a cot really, but the two of them could fit on it. He could almost visualize the thoughts whirring in her head. He really shouldn’t have.
His mouth opened with the reasons they should take it slow and nothing came out. Well something came out, but it wasn’t words. It wasn’t enough. He’d never noticed how overwhelmingly comfortable she was with imbalance, up and down, suspended. Her elbows rested on his shoulders and her mouth barely slipped against his own, her hands actually catching in his hair. His head spun like there was no air in all the world and he needed...
He was supposed to make them something permanent; give her something, not throw her around like some caveman. His fingers hovered over her shoulders, noticing then that the bruises had all gone. He slipped her down again, throat trembling at her little groan. Showed where his thoughts were at. But he was not the last survivor of the bony monster for nothing. “I love you and that’s why I want you to…”
She rubbed at his chest under the torn V of his shirt, fingers unbelievably gentle and the blood went rushing straight to his groin. “Want what?” It was easy to remember how it was.
He just had to close his eyes…think of the bruises and holding still and not where her hands were at. Take it slow. Yes. Take it slow. Two minutes later, he had partially succeeded in slowing himself down, but Chloe was a special case.
“We need to talk” he said.
“So talk.” Before he’d halfway opened his mouth, she leaned down and bit his chin, catlike and unmoving. “Dimples.” she said. He rubbed at his jaw and wondered if she was on the human equivalent of catnip. Sensing his hand might not be as receptive, she circled to the cloth of his shirt. Maybe there were human equivalents of the rocks. The Chloe he knew…. well the one he knew…didn’t bite like….ohh…
"I’m a little wound up.” she said, and her pristine, white shirt hit the floor running. The floor was dirty. Not dirty, in the slobbish way but literally made of dirt and his fingers were fighting to twist the straps of her undershirt. He had a will. He did.
“No. Not yet.” He whispered. It wasn’t a fight. She wasn’t completely sure how much had been her; but then again she really didn’t seem to need anything in her to.
She made a great play of running her fingers along the wall behind him and catching the little flakes under her nails. He closed his eyes, because it wouldn’t work if two different parts of him were sending different signals.
“I need you, you need me, I don’t see what the problem is.”
“We can find a way back, slowly. “ Considering the mixed up nature of their history they had to take time to sort it all out. There were no Machiavellian alien supercomputers, no bony destroyers to deal with. They had time to really get to know each other, again, as they were. This was what he’d wanted, the romance and the chance to make her fall like any normal guy with a girl he loved.
They didn’t need to ‘be together’ to be together. At least not right away. She didn’t look convinced, rolling her jeans up to her knees like she would have sleeves. She really remembered too much about him. “Please understand.”
“Because you are you, you’re telling me I’m going to be celibate.”
She prepared for bed, right there, taking one of his shirts from the wash basket. There was sweat all over that shirt and she knew where the clean clothes were. Oh hell. It was like he was on her by proxy.
It was gentlemanly to turn toward the wall. Facing the wall was like putting his nose into a grindstone, literally. Painful and logically…ridiculous. Of course he could turn to her but then she would look at him and then…. The last thing he wanted was it to end up into something panicked and desperate and unsatisfying. She wanted to feel alive, but that wasn’t all they were about.
He hadn’t asked her how much she remembered and she hadn’t asked how long he kept that secret of his. He told her things, short silly things that must have been romantic in some place and time. For them- that affection, always there, and that banter had become a cushion to walk on when everything else held a fear of falling too far to ever get back again. Everything fell down.
“I feel real now.” She said, clambering behind him.
Her arms brushed against the back of his, her pupils pinpricks in the light. There was no buzz of static noise in the back of his mind, no painful burn in his skin. He wanted to be close to her. Maybe if she just stayed and they didn’t move from this spot ever again...
She settled there, breathed on him and it was hard not to move.
“So you want emotional things.” She said, chin against his back. “I’ll give you emotional things. ”The letter. No one’s ever told me that. No one ever meant it.” Her hands were on the scrubs, tugging them up over his head and a corner of a sleeve snagged under him, against the mattress.
He knew and didn’t really believe in spite of this, her hands being all over him before. It was one thing to convince yourself, to know that someone loved you once. When you had the rug pulled out under you, you had to learn it all over again, regardless of what you saw or felt deep. “What are you doing?” was all he could ask.
“It’s hot.” Chloe said, tracing invisible tattoos, whorls into his skin and he couldn’t make himself ease down. Her touch prickled like warmth, normal human (her) warmth, not like static.
“You were used, too, not just me. You’re scared and that’s okay. You don’t need to move.” That was pretty darned impossible.
“But I need to give you a chance to…” to what, to love him, to trust him again? She could have hidden at that, the thought of Braniac or coding. But the part that had trusted him, that part was all her. She was trusting him.
She thought he wanted her to talk about love, and she’d always been afraid of it.
Her whole life had been one carefully constructed balance; always at the nature of tipping over. She’d loved the Weird and Unexplained, and somehow that had been the guiding compass of her heart. Love Clark, but don’t hold your breath. Stop holding your breath and then backpedal like the devil is at your heels. Find yourself the farthest thing from that and tell yourself you’re happy. Be his friend; help him, that’s all you can do. Don’t let any of it get to you. But it was her fatal flaw, her one salvation. Davis had gotten to her.
Maybe- Chloe did not know what love was. No one ever scared her and made her feel safe. No one ever needed her, or wanted to show her that completely. “Then you were gone and I didn’t have anything.” Do you understand?
She didn’t touch, didn’t tease anymore, but he felt her breath like a warm mist. “Maybe this is what it’s like to learn.” He was disturbed that he couldn’t keep his touch light.
“I don’t want to break you.” She was strong, she had a front, but underneath he thought he’d find that the both of them had deep-matching scars.
“Don’t you think I’m scared of the same thing?” she whispered, waiting. His forehead touched hers and a corner of her mouth slanted up, otherwise.
There were principles. He didn’t want to risk this new clean beautiful thing they had but there would always be a risk here. They didn’t work out alone. Was it so bad to learn together? So he kissed her, much harder than he’d intended. And she took the invitation.
“I still have to take you out.” He protested, but he must have pushed her head back, muffled words in her throat. It had been weeks, but it felt like forever and the scattered impressions whirred by him fast.
They were warmth and light and the thick feel of heat gathering in his palms, moving down her, moving in her. The slow, taunt impact of the mattress under his back. The way she settled over him, eyes soft at the movement, perfectly aligned. He breathed through his mouth. Being with her, trapped in the corner by the wall, he felt like every tissue of his body wanted to gravitate to her, bone and muscle, only held back by resisting issues. He loved her. There could be nothing else.
“We’re still learning, so I luff you.” She smiled, not conflicted, not confused at all. “Our own word.”
The pressure for nownownow was off and there was time for exploration. He learned things, how tension jumped through her calves, how most of her would give a curious little jolt at a certain spot behind her knee. Her hands trailed along with his, following, mimicking and there came a point when what they learned and what they needed were two different things.
She couldn’t hurt him with her hands and nails scraping against his back and he wasn’t hurting her pulling her down. There wasn’t much cloth to deal with and her hands snarled against his, freeing all of him under her body.
He tried to keep his hands firm but not bruising, holding her knees apart as if she needed any help. He felt hesitant smoothness and a moment’s worth of intensity like this was all they needed. Then it was as if she would not stop pushing it farther. Gentle was not exactly the word for it. Feeling was all he knew and the world was suddenly being robbed of air. He was trapped this time. She had control and that was what she needed, to know that it was all her choice what this became. If he survived it.
Keeping still was a harder task than it seemed, and he reacted as strongly as he had before, fighting the pull to bury himself deep and not quite winning. She pushed her head back, leaning into him, being pushed up and away. She was quaking, breasts bouncing lightly against his chest through the semi rough cotton of the shirt, not controlled. But she would never shift her eyes and they were tender.
She was too. He wasn’t about to let himself forget that, but when he touched her she seemed to want more. “Healing, remember?” He didn’t want to hurt her but it was automatic. His hands moved their way up to her shoulders, massaging and pushing deep enough in the muscle to bruise.
Her fingers clenched in his suddenly and he could feel the short nail bitten ends in his palms. She mewled and he thought of catnip again. She was slowing then, trying to hold on and it should have been easier. He smiled; face turning half agonized as her muscles went into spasm.
“---told you—I was wound up.” She licked a bead of sweat off his cheek and her eyelashes fell against his forehead. “Let go.”
She was trying to rush him, but her hands kept floundering, making their way back to his arms, stroking as if he wasn’t really there. He had to notice this, remember the details. Every single one. But it was like his eyes were opening and closing, spastic. It shouldn’t have been possible to feel this much.
They needed something to hold onto and he couldn’t force the trembling feeling down. He leaned up on his elbows. They needed to be close. It was easy then her mouth opening against his, slow and unhurried, tongue running gently against the seams of his teeth. Not lustful, not chaste. Affirming, I’m here. They hadn’t been able to quite—oh damn.
His eyes slammed shut and he must have made a sound, everything squeezing out of him and coming out rough, leaving him spent and shaking. “I’m here. I’m here.” She was murmuring little things, trying to....comfort him?
And she was touching his hair, slowing in circles but she was still drawn tight and her breath was snagging. Spoiled, she said. She had; but she wanted more. She was desperate for it. There was a fire in him again, not screaming or blinding but a pleased warmth spreading through his skin. A sensitivity to her, of her. He wanted to make her happy, free of everything left to tether her to the ground.
She seemed transfixed by the creeping fingers to the inside of her thigh. Her breath was hanging unfinished in the air, encouraging and he didn’t need unnaturally keen sense to know how close she was. His hand crept higher and he had to remember that she was breakable, but he was absorbed in clinging warmth and need and the look on her face.
His free fingers twisted at the nape of her neck and she was rocking, single-minded. Her lips fell against his wrist, feeling the pounding there and she was shaking and making this keening fractured sound in her throat like she just had.
She came down, little irregular shocks going through her frame and she couldn’t move farther than the circle of his arms. He never wanted her to. His hand moved up her neck, smoothing over unbelievably shorter hair. Oh, they had the rest beat, she said. Her head tucked into the notch between his jaw and neck, breathing and it felt like part of him, long last had been reattached. But he was still waiting.
----
Time passed differently here. Davis had to await a disaster call to go on duty again, but every moment he was with Chloe he knew he could easily forget it. They were alone and without the connections to the outside world that a communications expert like her needed like food. They hadn’t really thought about food all the way into that night either.
His home? was cut off from everything else, a two hour walk away from good eats. There were no worries about neighbors pounding on the walls demanding quiet, she grinned. Leave it to her to find the silver lining.
She’d just had a grueling flight though and eventually she was actually sleeping, making a slow whuffling sound into his chest. He put her cheek on the fluffed pillow, didn’t want her to bruise when he slid out from over her, fumbling in the dark, stepping out into the dark night. He’d said they would make their way back once; but this time would be different. Every time it was different, but he refused to think of that now.
Regardless of what she thought, he would change it. But first he had to rouse her, preferably by crawling in next to her. She noticed that. “Come with me, just for a second?”
“I’m happy where I am.” She murmured, curling cat-like into him. (Since when had she learned that?). He was clothed, thank god. It couldn’t be too hard, but it was. She had disturbingly grabby fingers and a soft mouth.
“This is much better.” she whispered, like it was a dirty word, kissing the movement out of his throat and he had to stop her. Had to. Had to.
He leapt up, gathered the two ends of his collar back together, hands moving in dazed slowness. Thoughts. Sentient thoughts.
“Just trust me okay? I have to show you something.” He couldn’t betray his resolution now. He smoothed the sweaty hair away from her ear and held out his hand. “Please?”
“Stop with that face. You’ve won. You might as well cover my eyes while you’re at it.” She grumbled.
She took his hand finally, fingers curling into it. He guided them; closed them over the shutter pull and she didn’t pull right away. She looked so small with the shirt hanging over her shoulder. Vulnerable, like he could have broken her if he ever pushed to hard. “Okay.”
She yanked back on the rope and squinted at the shower of red falling all around her. Rose petals, red as blood. Right outside, the slow strum of guitar strings came to life. There were three voices, bass and tenor, a little rough around the edges. /Recuerda aquella tarde que yo te conoci/
She turned back to him, eyes comically wide, accusing. “You just had the last word, didn’t you? Romance forsooth!”
He shrugged, eyebrows perking and hands sweating. Wait for it.
/Olle esta canzion lleva alma corazon y vida…/
There were three mariachis, mustached and in wide brimmed hats, amiable enough that they agreed to trouping on out in the middle of the night for a few Soles. She was a pretty girl? They’d asked. They didn’t know the half of it.
/Alma para conquistarte, Corazon para quererte y vida para vivirla junta a ti./
Chloe closed her eyes, tapped her fingers to the beat of the solo. She was eclectic; he’d noticed that sharing rides with her to Isis sometimes.
He wanted to learn all those things, too, whatever this thing between them ended up being. He tried to keep back the rustle of sound from the gravel on his knee.
“You’re going to ask me to marry you.” She was kneeling on level with him, knees scraping on the dirt.
“How--?”
“Heart, Soul and Life. Intermediate Spanish. We special coverage reporters need diverse educations.” Her voice wasn’t light and flirting, it was frail.
“And…will you..?” She hadn’t even opened her eyes yet, and the impending words froze in his throat.
What did this look like to her, like he wanted the white dress, a pretty girl on his arm, the flashing camera? Like he wanted to grab onto her with two hands and not let her go? Chloe was his riddle and half the time he didn’t know how to hold on to that answer.
When you find love hold onto it, he’d told her once and maybe he was holding on too tight, too soon. She wanted him, he knew that, but maybe she didn’t want forever. She’d just gotten out of that.
(He didn’t want perfect. He wasn’t Jimmy.) He’d wanted to say ‘It’s out there. It’s open.’ in a less dramatic way than letting her find him. Something she could enjoy for once. He didn’t want her to cry.
Her cheek was wet when her lips hit his and there wasn’t really another explanation. She kissed him harder and he couldn’t breathe. She’d done this before. This part of them was easy, but he wanted the more complex to part to be too. He drew a hand along her cheek, slid it between her insistent lips and his. She wasn’t saying a word now, ducking her head into his neck to avoid his eyes.
“You don’t have to answer today or tomorrow. I just thought it would be nice…” His stomach did a slow turn on itself and this was another one of their moments.
It felt like she had been waiting since forever.
“What else did you think I meant by that ring?” The tentative, almost cobweb-like weight of her hands felt extra sharp and extra real. “I do.” She blinked fast and didn’t turn her away, kept them fixed on his face. “Say something?”
He understood the fear in her eyes then. Not of losing everything; but having it all. She wasn’t running and he wasn’t waiting and this meant something. He remembered what if was like to smile.
The music had long since fallen into a confused jumble but the universe had shrunken, narrowed into this microcosm of their moment.
His arms barely caught up to hold her tight and she didn’t squirm this time, didn’t try to wriggle herself closer so that he would lose his mind and they could forget what it all meant. Her hands drew up his back and stayed there like they were content to rest there forever.
There were many things Davis would remember that night.
The gist was simple. He’d waited. She had. They weren’t waiting any longer.
----
Endnotes: Just for explanation.
Chloe losing her memory after *the cure* in Abyss? Well this fic, along with allowing me to jump into the red!k thing, allowed me to really bring in some spec at the time. What if Clark's mindRAPE (yes I'm saying it) instead of loosening Braniac's hold on Chloe, strengthened it. This fic works on that assumption, as well as Jor-El being unable to fully 'cure' Chloe and a remnant of Braniac staying within her.
This also works on the assumption of Braniac pushing the wedding to go through.
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