Notes: Chloe, Davis. Beast Deleted Scene. Chloe wants to find a cure for Davis, but first she has to walk away. He follows.
Don't say it didn't have romantic and smutty possibilities. ;)
I'd do anything for you; won't you just let me have this? Us? (The conversation is over before it begins.)
The answer is in the vaguely dangerous (panicked?) look in Davis's eyes. Where she sees freedom for them both, he sees a cage away from her.
No doctors. Chloe gives in-just smiling, and wishes for the other Davis, the one she could talk to, not the tortured fixated stranger of the past month. His eyes go from dark and searching to tentative again and the quirk to his mouth doesn't completely reach his eyes. He reminds her of the little boy he must have been sometimes, looking for approval. Anything she can bring herself to give.
His gaze teeters against hers for a moment. What would it take for him to kiss her like this, she wonders?
There in Davis's eyes. She thought she saw the old him for a minute. She should go.
"I'll see you later then?" Chloe pushes her smile quickly under the tension again and hopes he doesn't notice.
"Okay. See you." Davis is already turning away, hand at his jaw again-eyes trapped in that cycle of worry and fear all over again. As if he's trying too hard not to make her uncomfortable.
She can honor this-stalemate between them. Only. Chloe's halfway to taking a step up those stairs, when she realizes she doesn't believe like he does.
Chloe Sullivan has come to know Murphy's law far better than anyone has the right to. Maybe she'd married the one guy that never made her heart pound, but that was the way life went eventually.
Years back, when Clark kissed her and wanted to talk about 'them', she had to hide behind the first guy she saw. Clark was one of those guys. He would always love Lana, no matter what he wanted to think. She wasn't going to open herself up to that kind of hurt again. She would date (Jimmy). She'd watch Clark fall for Lana all over again. She just had to be ready for cleanup, after.
Her attraction for the 'weird' hadn't ended there. When she had it together enough to set a wedding date, Davis had to appear out of the smoke and ash. He'd locked eyes with her, not at Lana or Lois. There was a connection between them, he'd said. And what stung the most is that she'd as much as told him that herself. He was, in every way, hers, a more dangerous version of Clark.
She had Braniac and he had the Ultimate Destroyer, and when they had to wake up to it all- a resentful 'husband', a collapsed barn, a few hundred bodies in a field later… it had become the truth.
Serial killer or not, blurry photographs in a police folder or not-she was the one pressing her hand against his and feeling that long-neglected part of her wither as Davis's hand slid from the glass.
Maybe she is enough to calm the murderous thing inside him. Maybe whatever she has with him is enough that leaving Smallville won't destroy all of that Chloe Sullivan. Maybe that is the one thing that went right. They are hiding under those assumptions. But what are the odds that that will hold together?
One in a billion is generous. The longer they don't search for a cure, the longer Davis trusts just this thing between them… the greater the chances that it won't be enough.
Their clock is ticking. With no bomb squad, no backup-this is hers to deal with. Problems used to be good things-once upon a time-hell-even fun with Braniac's considerable abilities to back her up. But there is that part of her- that part of her that died with him once, that can't take the chance again. Will Davis take that too?
Davis doesn't even notice. Maybe his world will just become her, eventually. What else could she have expected really? Davis thinks she is his cure. His whole cure.
And with the knowledge of what he could do otherwise Chloe doesn't completely blame him.
Clark made a seemingly irrelevant comparison. He could have been Davis if he had been found by someone else in that field. Davis was born with the Destroyer in his DNA and Clark could do anything with his abilities that he wanted.
But Clark had parents… And who hadn't loved him at one point in time? Davis had been alone and shut himself off for most of his life because of that darkness he could never fully see in himself. He just has her to love. Of course he won't want to take a chance with that either.
The ironic part, of course, is now that he has her admission, now that he has her, he's become a stranger. One who needs her, but won't be honest with himself. This Davis just watches her from a corner as if she's his definition. Too closely- as if he'll lose control of it all if she goes, or if their roles make the barest shift. She's the stupid martyr; he's the beast. He did love her, once. She knows this. It's not just obsession, even now, but this screwed up situation leaves room for little else.
Chloe walks gingerly up the steps, all of the DNA that she can think to retrieve in a used water bottle in her purse. It should be enough for Dr. Hamilton to work with- to analyze, to slow, to something. Dr. Hamilton is not Oliver. Davis doesn't need to know.
There is no reason to feel guilty for it.
(She wants normal. She wants normal so much she could scream it out. She wants normal with him. That's the worst part.)
Normal isn't staying awake all night, leaning tentatively against that wall on a guy's cot, not being able to give him consolation for being alive and falling asleep just when the sun should be rising. Normal isn't blood on your hands and sloshing in garbage bags as you know who saved you. As you know what saved you. Normal isn't saying everything that you feel out loud and trying to convince yourself it's for your best friend just so you can banish the guilt.
(It's not a lie. It's a half-truth, and that's the worst kind.) Chloe Sullivan loves Clark Kent; she's loved him since he was about five and looked around the classroom with great big blue eyes. Whatever form that takes, he's shaped her. And she will leave him behind.
Davis is the one she is clinging to now. That piece of her she can't let go of. No amount of revision will change that.
But she walks up the steps and away. He's going to let her go. It's become a habit with both of them. Davis l-feels whatever he does, tries to protect her tender feelings and she treads on eggshells, just not to set that other part of him off.
She remembers the first night Davis came back. Back to life, that is. When this all started. It was easy to remember the bodies then, and the hurting part of her went under lock and key.
He couldn't ever die. He had no hope left. Nothing but the very flimsy strength of the great intangible between them both.
His eyes had pled for her to say anything honestly. Chloe hadn't; locked them both behind that door and sat two feet away from him on the cot, hands clenched on her knees until almost morning. Until somehow her head had settled on his shoulder.
She'd dreamed of burying bodies with him in that field that night. Then the car exploded around him and she shrieked and scarred her hands on the heated glass.
Chloe had brought lunch down when she woke up, looked across at him for the first time, to his intrusive eyes and sweaty clenched hands. He'd locked himself here. He wasn't her enemy. He couldn't be more.
She handed him a fork, tried on a smile and her eyes watered. They didn't talk about anything important.
Davis didn't know then; she could lie as well as he could. Maybe he had. Maybe he had been more streetwise than she thought from the start. Maybe after one lie it's impossible to believe the truth. That would break anyone, eventually.
Either way, she hasn't changed the game. The truth hasn't changed a thing. She is safe. Chloe closes her eyes, her hand on the veranda and propels herself forward.
He won't ever know. They can go on like this. It's all downhill from here.
Her muscles tense at the first heavy step behind her, wanting to crunch into a small ball behind the stairs. The man with the fake name of AJ and the body in ribbons never ran. But this is Davis.
Striding. Efficient. Not like at all like It. Aggressive? Maybe he heard the crinkle of the bottle.
He won't snap. No matter what-that isn't him.
She's always on tenterhooks. Chloe turns slowly, no reason to let him think she is afraid. Paranoia and guilt, that's all. Maybe he wants to say goodbye again.
"Davis? What is it?"
He looks childlike- innocent down here. A consequence of the dim light wanning his skin more than it should be- the light that had painted him a surrealist portrait of white and red. They should be irreconcilable, the helpless victim of nature and the accomplice of it.
Chloe, he always repeats now, like he needs to say her name aloud to ground himself.
Half-concealed not-guilt burns her cheeks. Chloe looks down and it doesn't show. Her gaze lingers on his fingers trapping her hand over the flimsy metal veranda, lingers on hers always gravitating to his. He doesn't look threatening, then he never had to her. The rest of them are a different case entirely.
Chloe forces her eyes down to his-dark and absent the conviction-never the fear, catching the tail end of what he's saying. "You don't want to forget this." He says.
Her gun is loose in his other hand, butt out. It was the first precaution she took after that little attack. Plenty of people would want to kill the devil's advocate if they knew. The safety's always on. She hasn't fired it since Dark Thursday.
By now leaving, she gives him his opening.
"Is it safe for you out there?" Out in Metropolis, for someone less streetwise than he? She'd been doing this for years before there was a knife at her throat. One step above him, just slightly at the height advantage-Chloe feels easy to break.
"I wish I could do more to protect you." He whispers. If he hadn't wanted to protect her, they could be harmlessly in love and running away. Or she could have died, stabbed in the throat.
He'd protected her already, once.
"Davis… whoever comes. No repeat performances."
(She doesn't like to think that she tainted him, but with her, it had been the first time he hadn't had even deceptive control of what he'd done since he'd known what he was capable of.)
Davis doesn't answer and she waits. Promise.
"Yes." He says, but he doesn't want to say it.
"There's no reason to worry. I won't let them get to you." She will fire point blank before anyone else crosses the threshold to the basement.
Chloe slides her hand over the handle to where his fingers cradle the inactive trigger. Steadies it in her palm and eases it away from him. He looks down at the wood steps. They will never be free of invisible evidence of blood.
"I wish I could go with you." he says. "Out there." Different arguments bubble in her throat. You'd be recognized. She'd told him that.
"It's just, every time you walk out that door, I just keep thinking that this will be the last time I see you."
The old Davis would have acknowledged the personal stalker tendencies in that. This one…
"Any biological aspects to this I should know about?" She asks.
"I feel less and less like myself." Chloe doubts he means a subtle change of character. What next, this-Davis starts to vanish into a Beast that puts its head on her lap and rampages through the few competent superheroes left in Metropolis?
"-when you're not here to remind me." comes as an afterthought. She knows what he really meant.
He knows. This makes a small part of her less alone and a bigger part sure that she'll make the right choice when she walks on out to get him that help.
"We'll be fine." She says. That assurance has always been empty.
He doesn't say anything more, but actions speak louder than words. There's no aggression to him like this, eyebrows crinkling painfully. He knows she doesn't think so even in this incarnation.
"In case we're not." Davis knows how to speak the words gently enough that she doesn't want to run. He invades what's left of her space and pressing his lips to hers, brief and hard. She has no time to react. When it ends her throat feels dry and empty.
"I love you. I won't stop." He doesn't look down, eyes level with hers. He'd said it before. Then he had nothing to lose. Now she thinks she does. Maybe she is getting a do-over.
"Davis-what is this?"
"I--" he bites his lip, and as inappropriately drawn to the fullness she sees there, she listens. "Must have rehearsed this a dozen times. It didn't come out right. Braniac. Getting away. None of this matters like knowing what we feel, now. That's what I count on, not anything else. Even if the-road ends here."
Another one of the signs. Chloe can't be amused because he looks so sincere.
He might have said that before (dozens of times), but he's never completely closed the space, the last two steps vanishing in a moment. Chloe feels the gun tumbling from her fingers and falling heavy on the first step, tumbling through the gap. Doesn't follow it with her gaze.
"I thought what happened, destroyed everything but… there's something here still. It's not going to change. Some part of you…I feel it." His eyes are level with hers, drift to her lips when she wets them. She'd never thought she'd see that half smile again. Chloe scrubs her hand across her mouth in an unconscious protection. A parody of thought.
Davis does a forgotten thing. He touches her. His fingers run along her hand in the gentlest of contacts, pulling it away from her lips. He outlines them as if he had time at all, his thumb lingering on the lower one. Davis had always been tactile, though pdas hadn't been his way of life.
He'd kissed her something like that the first time, one bitter fiancé ago and she'd stood alone in that alley, going hot and cold in guilt. Chloe knows for certain that she won't be getting her little mission done for the next two hours, even if it's just because she's gone to lock herself in her closet to hyperventilate. He actually wants her. Now.
She can't breathe.
"Davis…" Whatever signal pathways her hormones are activating between her legs, the lowest common denominator is it's not all that simple. When was the last time she'd taken the pill? A year ago?
He draws his hand away. Hers wavers on his shoulder in a gesture that should be friendly, but just isn't. We've talked about this. I don't want to talk about it any more.
"Tell me it's just me." Davis's voice is a little deeper than she's used to hearing. Nerves? "I'll stop." He murmurs, lips tracing lightly at the pulse of her neck. Her heart feels like it's going to rattle out of her chest. That has always been the answer.
The second kiss is gentler, somehow more passionate. He draws her down, warmth scalding on the surface of her lips. The ragged ends of her nails catch in his jacket. She can't feel her feet on the step anymore, and she realizes he's picked her up with as much effort as it would take her to pull a book from a shelf. Her arms wrap around his neck instinctively. She's always been afraid of falling far.
One step. Another. Unsteady. He walks them down the steps backwards, the human way and she's still astonished at the speed. She laughs breathlessly as he stops halfway down, tracing the irregular bumps of the vertebrae in his neck with shell-shocked fingers. This part of him is so human it seems like a lie to call him anything else.
They're not moving anymore, but her hands do that for her, throwing his jacket to the floor with the dull slap of fabric. He pulls her to him lips sliding to hers sweet and so deep her hands go still. This makes no sense in context. She wants this.
His hand fists in her hair, unsettling the fuchsia collar at her neck. Chloe feels a surge of white-hot lust, a need for more of the same and oblivion from it all. She kicks the sensible heels off her feet as his palm reaches her back and loosens the belt to her jacket. It flutters to the floor and she steals a breath. She doesn't have Kryptonian lungs. Maybe this is just another of her fantasies.
Davis stops long enough so she can stand, rubbing her legs together, suddenly cold without him. She'd thought he would take her to what they'd called his bed for so long. It would mean something.
Instead, her bare feet curl on the rug at the center of the room and the barest fission of unease returns to her. When she'd come down here she'd dropped her key in a pool of blood. Had to cover it up somehow. The rug mirrors its origin, scarlet and black lines. Like he's supposed to mirror what he was made to be.
"We don't have to do this here, right?" she whispers, breaking the silence with her secret panic. No, not here all of places, a symbol of what she was willing to do. Had Davis consciously chosen it? Had that other side of him?
"Where would be better? We'll go there."
It's his look that changes things- it must be that. Desperate and loving and out of control. She looks at him, at the unfriendly gray cot where she'd let him sit lonely until morning. That's not what she wants either.
"Nowhere." For Whom the Bell Tolls; Mr. Kent and after him Clark hated it. It is all shades of gray.
Chloe takes a step forward and kisses Davis like she would have if she hadn't ever been running. It's simple, declarative intent and she runs her hands along his arms as if she can pet him into some comfort again.
When he pulls away his voice is rough and hands curl around her wrists. "You've got to tell me. I don't want to make this one of the memories you need to forget."
It's a stunning realization, the very simplest one. If she had choose to keep this memory, or let the uglier ones go. She'd keep this.
Chloe lifts her hands to his face, traces the familiar lines blind. Remembers or imagines the blood. Maybe she can let go.
"Forget that. You were never one of them." He was never a memory, but the force around which they congregated and twisted into something more-into this her. Chloe wonders if that's a complete truth or the farthest from the lie she knows.
He kisses her palm, watching, and his eyes remind her of another him.
"We'll take it slow." (Memories, this may be the best one in a while.) She feels light.
He frees her hands and she slides them past the sensible gray shirt, not wanting to bunch it just because he is easier to feel.
"That sounds fine to me. But are you sure?"
Her skin feels the contrast, smooth heat and neutral grey roughness, the muscled planes of his chest where his breath halts in and out. The she can't stop it.
Chloe wonders just how much work it would take to get that shirt off. Do Kryptonians have to be so ungodly beautiful? Or literally hot to the touch? He shuts his eyes, and tenses a little, a sound growling in the back of his throat. Not too slow, then.
She is actually more willing to bet he's up for super speed. She doesn't stop there, can't until her hand curves gently around the source of all that warmth.
"Absolutely certain?"
Davis is definitely feeling urgent and she is more than a little warm as to where. Is this too fast? She can't bring herself to feel guilt, not when his eyelashes brush shut like that, and it is because of her, before she tried to get him that way.
"Chloe..." His voice sounds choked and he seems tense to knock them both over. Some feeling tingles up her spine as his breath stops.
For someone with a pretty non-existent sex life (even when it existed) it's a signal. She's 25% terrified (What if he's perfect and something is just wrong with her?); 75% down with screwing risks because the passage of time for them is the biggest risk of all.
"I just wanted to show you. We don't have to do it all." He swallows when she draws her hand back. "I want you."
She doesn't answer in words, doesn't take the step back that it would take to pull off her clothes properly. Ditto. He watches so closely that she thinks his world would hang on this moment if he had any more in it than her.
The trembling in her hands as she slides off her slacks isn't manufactured. She has old habits, coaching and playacting, and it's good just to let those go. He's still holding her and she hasn't looked away. The remnants of shame wake in her even as he closes the slice of space between them, breath warm and quick. Out of control and wholly hers. Is this the way she wanted him? Is she pulling the strings right?
His arm trails at her side, fingers closed tight. There is only relief at the respite from loneliness. This part is real. She can be lover or prey. No difference.
Davis pushes against her, first tentatively then needily, his body a weight she can't move anymore than one of the concrete walls around them. Unless she says the word. Chloe leans her forehead against his shoulder, her fingers tracing at the V where she can feel his blood? pound..
His hands cradle her back; the jacket pools under her bare legs like a dress. Davis's eyes run down the trail the cloth has taken down her thighs, linger on this new territory before dropping prudently to the bright scarlet under her feet. They burn more luminous and darker in this light; she can't make out the smile in her distorted reflection. It's there.
She is stripped of guises, still somehow clothed. Not much, a short black shirt she'd never have worn if she was at her old job again, peddling amazing lies at Tess Mercer's Planet.
"Oh yes." She says.
He pulls to her, onto him, and she has no balance, one arm over his back. He smothers her mouth and his hands stray down spine, lingering and rubbing at the small cold spots and making her gasp and arch into him.
In the urgency, Chloe's stranglehold on the handbag over her shoulder is loosened by his careful fingers. Davis's hand falls against her purse, the few life changing cells in that water bottle, like it wouldn't have if she had been able to walk away. She stiffens, mouth flush against his. Breath loud in her ears.
One is going to be more important.
Endnotes:
Of course there's more. I'll post in parts if anyone's interested in the rest.