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 back. 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.

Endnotes: An update for... you know who you are. XD

Next up, memories and a choice.