Notes: Next part! The shit actually hits the fan, I think. Many thanks to anyone who's sticking with this.

When Chloe arched into him she sounded like she was being pried open, smooth flesh and muscle and bone. (It saw it as beautiful, and deep in the back of his skull the association sickened him.) He couldn't stop.

Davis had never felt like he was being wholly possessed by something. The blackouts had been there as long as he could remember, but he hadn't ever gotten to a point where choosing was impossible while conscious at least.

He braced his hands on either side of her, fingers knotting, digging into a tangle of her hair and her neck swung into his shoulder. Davis couldn't smother the sound and didn't try to- let it wash over him with a flinch. It knew the softer places of her, knew this.

The feel of her tight around him-shoving down hard-it felt like he was digging himself into the only place he could ever be safe. Davis had the urge for nothing between them- not the tickling layers of cloth, not the barrier of thin plastic that would keep her safe. She'd know everything and maybe she'd see more than his blood coated reflection in her mirror, sometime. It wouldn't ever be enough.

Chloe's ankle slid tight on his back, twisted and went limp. Came back with more desperate pressure. She choked out, "So that's… how…", or 'too hard', choked out his name in monosyllabic mumbles that rang in his ears like wordless thunder. She was warm and his. His. He was made to…

The closer he got the more it seemed to elude him, even with aggressive clutching just under his shoulders-desperation he get there to end her agony. The small throaty sounds she made turned into full blown screams and sickly sweet elation rushed through him, like he was flying (red bobbing, in blackness –lashing out---tearing through hundreds upon hundreds of thick cornering bodies)…

Davis slid a palm under her shoulder blades-pushed up- until the only think he could see or think or hear was the mingled textures of their breathing in the dark. Bucking carefully. She kissed him, lips tasting like blood. His head felt light, nearly bloodless and every bit of tension in him careened out of his control. He could feel the pulse moving under his eyelids, felt the tell-tale flutter of her muscles around him again. There was no stopping this time-and the feelings were going to drag him over the edge. He wanted so much it hurt, but he locked it- there in ugly broken sounds, behind his lips.

Chloe's shoulders shook against the redoubled onslaught and the sounds in her broke again. Sweat coated Davis's palms on the ground, closer now, safe. Chloe couldn't possible curl any closer. She smoothed her palm against his mouth, his breath and tried to pull the sounds out. The simple awe in the movement, in her eyes jarred him.

He couldn't let go enough before whole body just gave up. Darkness, Chloe couldn't see much in the darkness. Davis would think that the red haze was just his mind- that it wasn't red eyes that locked onto green ones.

(He would learn, Braniac was right. Emotion was flawed. Humans and non-humans both had an extraordinary capacity for self-deception. )
For then, he slumped down like a boneless weight. Rolled with effort, felt safe inside her. Chloe seemed too exhausted to even say her own name, much less pull away. She wasn't broken. She pulled shaky fingers through the back of his hair.

Hers was matted and tangled, a halo that had gotten a little misaligned by clumsy fingers. He told her that, like it was some amazing revelation, half-stunned to hear just his own voice pitched a little hoarse.

Davis felt safe, ignored ten years of carefully layered protections. They were holding on, curled together on the dusty carpet. So normal, if sexual intercourse on dusty carpets could be counted on as normal. Chloe's back trembled.

"Hey, you gotta tell me what's wrong." He rubbed her back, palm down- not too hard Davis; there was no wall of cushioning cloth between them and she was so small. "Did it hurt?"

"Didn't notice." She was convulsing-still shaking-laughing.

"And this is funny."

"Yes. I just had my first orgasm and you're telling me I have nice hair."

Chloe wrapped her arms around his neck-he didn't feel the weight of the cells in fragile bones and skin-he felt her. And in Davis's mind, for just one moment, maybe his biggest problem was that he'd never understand girls.


Clark fell asleep half way through the flight, slumped his head over the arm rest. He didn't look quite so needy and frightened, and Lex thought that maybe they had been almost as close as he said they were. It gave him more time to wonder exactly what kind of weapon had pulverized a man's skin in patches and left them both unharmed. What kind of power. There would be time for that later. Now he had to look at the control.

It had entirely too many buttons and switches on it, looked like something you saw on Stargate. Lex didn't understand how he understood the readouts. He just did. Maybe he had worked on experiments as a part of globe trotting.

The green symbols stood for hormones-testosterone, adrenaline, hallucinogens, variations of anabolic steroids that caused rages in normal patients. It was quite ingenious. The terrorist had made it so that the patient's system produced each of these hormones on his or her own. Someone was turning this operative psychotic; and he and Clark were going to stop him before he carved a few people up thinking they were demons from hell. But that wasn't the punch line at all.

Lex found just how the thing worked. He dug the chip out of the back of the control with a weird Aztec-like knife he found in his pocket. Pried the tracking device out and held it between his fingers. They could find their experiment now.

His head felt so light, heavy with intelligence and he doubted he even saw the chip at all. The world blackened before his eyes for a moment, glowing green.

Lex must have dozed off, because when he woke up, Clark was pacing the floor, looking good as new. A strange gray powder sifted between his fingers and fell to the expensive travel rug.

"If we don't know where it is, I don't know how we are supposed to find this thing."


Jimmy didn't know why he was following Lana around like a puppy. He could have been calling his parents or at least little bro Henry. He just didn't. (And all and all he had to admit she was kind of hot.)

So he made another pass at her, and she looked prettily, girlishly offended. Then she smiled and her nose crinkled up, and Jimmy thought, oh well Henry had his comic books.

"I don't know if my job will still be there." Lana had said down-heartedly, once they got practically evacuated from the wreck of the hospital- by more broody types in uniforms. "It's making Sundae's." Of course. "You want to come back and see it?"

"Well, it's still awfully dangerous out here. Do you know kung fu?"

She blushed a 'no'.

Jimmy hoped Lana didn't expect him to protect her with big strong manly arms in case there were more crazy-ass monsters or zombie people running around. (He could weight lift. And kick box like a motherfucker- if he wanted to.)
For now, he walked behind her.


The first thing Chloe did when she woke up was to feel the space beside her. It couldn't have been caused by hallucinogenic expired coffee; the pillow was still very warm.

The whole night had been a blur to her (what a cliché) but she actually knew why it happened. They'd stumbled back-home- to her apartment a few hours later. Davis had remembered just where her room was as if he had night vision.

"We're doing this every night, whether you want to or not."

Davis hadn't even looked properly shocked- let that look of his melt into a kind of concentration. The door slammed behind her because she was too caught up to see it click shut properly. Davis's hands, Davis's smell (tinged with small remnants of theatre dust), Davis's everything and her heart going too fast even with her meteor infection. Enough to know that this thing with him wasn't ever letting up. The rough, involuntary sounds that she didn't think were all just because of her- like he really was made of some deeper, darker instinct that she was.

She must have passed out, sometime around there. Now Chloe felt tired- nerves thrumming with a fearful, anticipating kind of energy, the things they had done replayed themselves in as close to full definition as they could in her head. Mostly, maybe- she felt like burrowing against the thick warmth of his skin. Talking about her issues, which she was on her way to getting over. Talking with him, not at the empty space he left behind.

Davis was here. Not that she'd ever thought he was the one-night kind of guy. But he was here. She could actually talk to him.

" 'morning." She mumbled through the quilt. He didn't say 'Good Morning'. Just her name. His voice was deeper than usual, ragged, thick. The energy in her went up a few notches.

Sweat trickled down her thigh as she shoved aside the veritable mound of pillows. She would say more once she thought of something that meant anything other than 'Davis, fuck me into oblivion-again'. Chloe blinked the sleep from her eyes.

Davis stood by the window, staring out at the first sunlight they'd seen in days. It would have made a nice picture, straight from a harlequin romance cover really if he hadn't looked about 2.5 seconds from going into convulsions and throwing up. That put a dampener on it.

"Next time my jerky is three months past the expiration date; I'll throw it out, okay?"

Davis had known she was awake, before she had. He didn't turn toward her though, wiped a palm over his face, as if to conceal his expression or hold something back.

"Don't tell me this is another attack of 'I'm a danger to you.' "

Chloe pushed herself up, crept up behind him, looped a weak arm around his waist. One bodily fluid wasn't quite different from another after all.
Davis was giving off enough head to power a small building and for once he didn't seem to relax or tighten under her touch. He just kept on shaking. She started getting more 'this is wrong vibes' when his skin started to feel different, hard and plate like under the surface.

"I'm going to hurt you. I - I'm going to leave." This was not just something he'd said because he wanted to save her the trouble of mopping her tiny bathroom's floor.

Davis fingers squeezed hers briefly and she winced. Watched the jagged lines forming on her palms in curious fascination. Maybe, he was a little dangerous. As he turned to her, his dark eyes glowed in a mindless kind of excitement that made the pit of her stomach ache in fear. She didn't back away.

He breathed in, looking into her eyes and she couldn't see anything she recognized behind them, until slowly, dawning, as if a spell had been broken his eyes widened and he moved so fast it nearly sent her reeling into the windowsill. "I did- I would." He grated.

His eyes had changed since that moment- red, bleeding into the pupils, like the blood had overrun from their usual melting brown depths. His skin was flushed, almost as if he was high. He had told her it started this way. He couldn't get away from the sun.

It rose while Davis stumbled a little further into the corner, wracked with shudders, sending a bookcase crashing to the ground. The wood splintered against his skin. His eyes weren't quite focused on her anymore and his face started to warp and bevel, tearing like a paper mache mask. It had to be a drug releasing in or near him, turning him…

"It's okay." Chloe pleaded. "I'm not going to get hurt again." She'd seen Clark's eyes like that. She thought she just had to get close enough to check for the offending red kryptonite. She couldn't see it anywhere on him. "Let me see if I can..."

"No." It could have been a sound caught between a sob and a laugh. "You've got to stay." The voice wasn't Davis anymore, just rage, vocal cords warping like the rest of him. Before she could see more he circumvented the open doorway- sent the thick wood swinging off its hinges and crashing back onto the floor right beside her.

Chloe stood very still against the wall-mind racing before she doubled her path back into the bedroom. Something was turning him into this. Weapon. She couldn't forget how his face had contorted in the mirror, dark and jagged. She knew Davis- the good guy paramedic and definitely-not-one-night-stand, but she did not know that.

Davis had been to the edge of panic when he told her to protect herself. But in the end Chloe didn't take either her gun or her tazer with her when she walked out the door. She had one dull kitchen knife, with liquid kryptonite smeared over the blade.

Chloe didn't feel like a heroine, nearly paralyzed like one of those hapless bystanders in horror movies, the ones so stupid you almost wished they'd die. She wasn't unafraid, but she knew exactly where he had been going.

You didn't love someone and then turn away and give up when they were at their worst. No matter how inhuman that was. She was going to follow him, if she could ever hope for that.


Lex's suggestion had been less than helpful. If worse came to it, they'd have to find Fine's weapon by the trail of bodies it left behind. It was a long shot to look for Milton Fine's first experiment, since, in an unpleasant technicality, Milton Fine didn't exist.

Clark paced the floor of the mansion as Lex made use of his seedier contacts to attempt it, barely winging it through each conversation. He sidestepped through each question with that manic, frightful energy he had pursued their friendship at first. It had sent Clark backpedaling at the fear of what happened when he got what he wanted. Lex had always wanted more.

Now Lex was only part of himself without those years and the broken trust between them. He was safe, for the meantime. Clark awkwardly straightened the bust of Plato, watched Lex's deft fingers hanging up the black polished phone, tension building in his stomach. What if they never found this thing and it fulfilled its purpose? What if Braniac had really destroyed a part of Lex he could never get back? What if…?

Chloe had joked that his alien powers had been closer to density than seeing into the future. And if they were- he could afford to be stupid once. He put some of his speed into the movement, held the phone down before Lex dialed the next call in the list of hundreds, slipped an arm around his shoulders. It was like trying to hold onto a test tube without breaking it. Living, breathing… Lex patted him on the back like he was just learning to do it again.

"Thank you for doing this." Clark breathed, relieved that his voice was working again.

"You're welcome. Clark?" Lex was caught off guard enough that he didn't say anything about being able to help more if he actually did make the calls.

Lex's fingers tightened over his neck. He'd held onto too tightly, unnaturally so, Lex had to know something was up with him. But Lex's eyes were only searching and gray when he looked into them. The lies felt like meshes tightening on his skin.

Clark had meant to say something about being sorry, he was just scared.
He said, "I can't do any of it without you." Maybe some intangible that was Lex still remembered. A smile built at the corner of Lex's mouth and his hand whispered across his mouth like a brand. Here lay the fear.

(This had to be something he could take back.)


Maybe Davis had left hoping that the thick, heavy walls would be the genies bottle that held him in. But he wasn't within those walls yet. He ran like he had been afraid to before, heard thudding dully in his chest, constricting, moment by moment as his bones twisted and cracked, as the tissues warped and tore over their new shape. He could taste his blood on his tongue. And it wasn't as terrifying as he'd thought. Kind of beautiful.

When the senses returned full-force he heard like he heard Chloe breathe. Sound was everywhere. Heartbeats, racing and thrumming in his eardrums, becoming bigger than his thoughts. Bigger than the entire world. He thought his eardrums would rupture, but instead, the heartbeats were all in his head- the stink of blood in his nose. They knew what he was- they were coming- that's why they were beating like this-to make him mad, to end him and he had to live. He was made to live.

Davis knew where the torment came from, this heartbeat. He moved like a creature mad because as drunk on this as he was, he knew whose it was. Hers. He could hold it a little longer. Davis ran so she could not follow and took it along for the ride. Past hollowed bricks and buildings until all that was left to feel and think was of somewhere it would all stop. But it only got louder.

Davis collapsed. Bricks screeched as thick dense plates bumbled to a standstill. He couldn't see where he was. He couldn't see anything. Thick walls could hold this noise back. Thick walls were not enough. Everything needed to be quiet. He was going to make it quiet.

It wasn't quiet. The gravel crunched a hundred feet from Davis's twisted face- twisting still- his bones were cracking and he just had to give into it, give in... Not like this. Someone was after him. The sound of the walk was slow, like something dragging itself along. Too soft to understandably do any damage. It was the sound of a muted predator.

"Oh hello." A soft voice whispered. Davis would have known this voice. He'd stopped Charlie once after all. But Davis panicked, fighting. He did not know the voice, but the hundreds of bodies torn apart. It wanted to kill. To It Charlie was just another body, just another heartbeat that gave off a feeble screaming sound, a hollow, bullet-marked body made of skin and nerves.

When It broke through Davis's hold it rushed forward, effortlessly slicing though bricks. It was close to its prey. It let out a roar, and Davis knew they couldn't move.

"Not this time, bad dog."

The just rehabilitated, frayed electrical wires wrapped around Davis's- their body with a screaming sound. An electric shock shot through Davis- stringing spikes and a half-human face up in a gruesome mockery of a carcass. The electricity kept intensifying. The smell of rage and fear came off of Charlie, burning at their senses like bleach.

And then strangely, all the sounds started slowing- coming to a standstill and Davis couldn't move in the warped body of his. Blackened spikes began to slowly shrink like Styrofoam. Inside him, It screamed out enraged terror. But it could do nothing with him fighting. It had taken enough energy to change form.

Davis tried to move a clawed arm. Nothing happened. The electricity gave off one last arc- glowing white hot. Then the poles collapsed, pinning him down under their weight. This was just his dream, only different. Everything was different. The female-mates-Chloe's heartbeat was still far away. She wouldn't have to see this. The sounds wouldn't break her open.

"When I told you she wasn't worth it, I meant it. Bitch damaged me." The voice said conversationally. Charlie was all over blood, blood on his arm, soaking the legs and fly of his grubby jeans. Charlie's face swam in front of Davis's eyes like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

"I wonder what it will do to her pretty heart to see her present before she comes along to Daddy. You- lying here- darling good hero boy. Her pet fried by two-bit con man. You are a sight to see." Charlie smiled, kneeling close enough that the downed wires didn't touch him.

The effect of it was ruined as blood and spittle flew over Davis's face. Most of Davis's thoughts were pushed out by the high still swimming through him. It was curiously quiet, no more images of blood. He felt warm. The noise could stop. He wasn't going to kill Charlie out of revenge, out of brutal instinct. He wasn't going to kill them all. Maybe this death could be a long sleep and when he woke up he would be human and she'd tell him they'd find a way to make it.

"Girlfriend's not worth it. But you are worth it. I wonder what the boss could do with your heart. Can you imagine, I'll die, but I will have done my job. I will have done better. Two for the price of one."

"No."

He squeezed his eyes shut and lunged against the wires. Maybe, the dream was supposed to have poetic justice to it. Chloe wasn't going to die. He'd do it again. But Davis was too weak yet. When he tore at the wires, they just tightened, holding out against skin they could not pierce.

"You didn't think she could do that to Charlie? Her after you-then-rest. Nice."

"I'll stop you." Davis choked out.

As if to prove him wrong, Charlie walked away, grimy trench coat brushing an electrical wire.

"It was never you. It was just your heart. You can give up now." He said. Then Davis couldn't hear much but Charlie's squalling heartbeat, a blade with no fingers behind it pushing and pushing into the skin under his sternum. The slickness of blood because, he hadn't been killed like this.

He wasn't enough to save her. And if he let himself be he would kill. It was her or them. Chloe would have to leave the apartment and he'd wait like some stalker. Then she'd fight and the knife would cut a just little deeper because Charlie liked his games. And he'd have let it happen- wasn't he playing the hero.

It was a small, v-shaped cut, and Davis could see just the hilt. Already halfway around his heart. Maybe aliens had no real hearts. Black rippled under his skin, his arms as if the darkness in him could stop it through appearance alone.

The knife never stopped moving. It was slowly, steadily pushed away like a foreign bit of matter.
Charlie began to sweat and the wires tightened on Davis like a noose. Davis laughed, red swimming behind his eyes and out of them. It all made perfect sense now. He had already died.

"Do it, damned dog..."

And when the electric wires finally broke open- buzzing and fizzing, when Charlie's knife hit the gravel with a sharp clink, when the air rushed by him with a hollow sound, Charlie's blood ran red on the pavement and that horrible sputtering heartbeat stopped, Davis didn't feel the blood burning his hands. The knife caught on a claw and broke into a token he no longer understood.

It let out a howl, and crashed through the nearest doorway. There was no reason to it. Smell, sight, sound faded into one unbearable sense. Addicting. Freeing. Nothing. Take it down before it takes you down. Take it if it can harm you. Everything can harm you. Everything will hurt you. Make it stop.

Beams and marble walls crumpled to the ground. Metal and cloth tore with an unsatisfying rending in the empty theatre. There was nothing more to kill there. There was nothing to kill there until there was.


Clark closed his eyes tightly. As if now, perhaps, at last, he was losing some of his innocence. His lips were dry, not the least bit chapped, smooth like long shot of whiskey after a staff meeting, Lex must have had them. All bruising, desperate force and unresolved something, not just youth and unblemished life. Lex didn't remember if he had done this before, with him, point blank. But it was instinctual to know what it was like to want something, to give in. This felt more real than the rest.

Clark kept his hands to Lex's shoulders and the skin bruised. He needed this. It wasn't an intrusion, not really. Lex could have thought they had been this way, if not for that small fact. He had wanted something from Clark. And now, now, he didn't quite get it, anticipation burning under him like embers.

When he pulled back Clark's eyes were glazed, something slumbering coming to the surface again, quickly hidden. It was unlikely it was guilt- what would he have done to feel guilty for, an his age, with his eyes?

Lex thought, at least, before, in this ancient alternate life of his, he had actually known who he was involved with instead of just the why. He needed to know something true besides the untraceable enemy they were trying to fight.

What was in him that made Clark look so broken?
"I'm afraid of how this will end." Clark had answered. "Of what will happen- with- this thing. It's everything, Lex."
Lex was a novice at living, but he knew the sound of a lie.

After he had gone, Lex didn't go back to the phone. He picked up a half-finished glass of wine, it must have been his, and leaned over the toppled newspapers on the floor. The Pentagon, torn into by something inhumanely powerful. The incineration of three-quarters of its occupants without the fire alarms even being triggered. He read that article over, then the next until they all seemed a fever dream.

All similar. One common factor.

Lex closed his eyes. The shards cut into his fingers, shattered into miniscule pieces on the clear marble. Perhaps, perhaps he had cleaning to come in for that.


The path was littered with empty, broken bricks and felled electricity poles. Then all Chloe had to do was follow the trail of red, like the clumsy swathe of a painter's brush. She didn't know who it had been, knew she was stupid, knew what had done it and it was close. The sound of Chloe's breath slowed to a trickle outside the theatre's thick walls. She didn't touch the door, crept up several sets of fire escapes on the winding, towering eyesore, hands brutally close against the brick.

Her knife hand shook enough to send the blade tumbling when she heard the bricks breaking open on the opposite side. She didn't have much time, so she had to get it right now. She was at the top already, anyway.

She swung the door open a crack. She couldn't see anything but black from here. The sound silenced the renewed barrage of terrifying breakage, though.
It was moving down there. It heard her breathing all the way up here, in the same way Davis would have. She doubted it was going to come for her to scratch its ears.

Chloe took a shaky step forward as the door and half the wall broke away. There, a towering hulk of sharp black spikes and two glowing red eyes. The jagged outline that had torn right through Davis's skin. The double barred door broke before it hit the bottom, like a splintered child's toy. She didn't scream, didn't make a sound.

It lunged forward with one swift, brutal motion. Chloe tripped back over her own feet, teetering over the edge. One step farther and she would kill herself all on her own. She wasn't dead yet.

It let out a grating, baying sound that made her want to clasp her hands over her ears. It was caught between the two very thickest of the brick walls. One clawed protrusion pitifully trapped under the metal bar, and for the smallest moment, she thought that maybe it was afraid of pain too. Stupid thought. She had half a minute tops, before it was free and she was dead. Had she really expected a show-and-tell of the mindless dark thing that had always terrified Davis?

One more step. It smelled like rust. She could almost imagine how the show-and-tell would go, too. You know what your deepest darkness looks like Davis? It's like a porcupine. She was closer to crazy than she thought.

Davis hadn't wanted her to go mad. He saved people. He'd nearly gotten himself killed twice because he wanted to make sure she was safe. This was the one thing she could imagine was stronger than anything. Stronger than whatever they were doing to him. Strong enough to bring him back.

Chloe waited until It started to tear the metal away from its black talons. Then she jumped.

Tears of pain sprung to the corners of Chloe's eyes as she landed, fall half broken by a sharp body. After a panicked, sharp scrabble, it tore itself away. She slid the rest of the way against the wall, barely managing to keep her head off the ground. If it had swatted her away she would be dead. Chloe was pretty sure her left arm was broken. It refused to move so much as to lift itself. (At least it wasn't her right hand.)

Her eyes had no such paralysis. She watched as the creature didn't magically turn into Davis. It didn't lunge toward her this time, red eyes holding her entranced for a single moment before it tore off against the opposite wall to destroy its surroundings with renewed fervor. Chloe flinched as a warped chair frame hit the wall beside her. Maybe some remnant of Davis understood her pain.

Around them were just the shredded opulent fabrics, crumbled bits of wall. Torn scraps of metal. After a time, the tearing sounds stopped, but she didn't get up even then, in the dark. The theatre was completely silent before she moved again. And It-he-they were both lying there. The transformation wasn't instantaneous. Black gave way to graying skin- then Davis was lying there, pale and covered with bloody thick soot and rock instead of just blood. It wasn't all his or her blood, of course it wasn't.

Chloe wondered how used he would feel when he woke up- tried to imagine how horrible it would be to have all her worst fears about herself confirmed in one moment. To know that it might not ever stop. She thought, with sudden desperate clarity, that those green walls Davis had seen as a boy hadn't been an accident. That he'd been an experiment. He had been turned into Braniac's weapon to defeat Clark and to destroy the world and everything Davis had wanted to do with his life. The least she could do was try to stop it. He'd trusted her.

Now. The sun was starting to shine in through the gap in the side of the wall. The sun should have fueled Davis's transformations and his strength, and in the dark it shouldn't have. Something was making him like this, she repeated in her head. Like before, she shifted his head into her lap, but he didn't stir. Her fingers combed through the hair at the nape of his neck. Davis had looked back at her, that time, with an innocent intensity that made her feel nothing else mattered.

It was time, now. The kitchen knife dug into her hand. Chloe should have been glad he wasn't awake. If he were she could have talked to him, and it would have made her feel better. Now...

He was like anyone else, she should have known. It wasn't easy. Her breath hitched. Fifteen minutes later, she closed her fingers over it, his blood pooling to the ground.


Davis woke warm, face wet, unable to budge an inch. His ears were still curiously stunned after the shock. He knew what death was supposed to be like, and it wasn't this. He was just awake again. He could smell blood on him and around him. He could smell Chloe's skin.

Davis lurched up, eyes opening to her still face and the red everywhere. He just managed to catch the back of her head before she fell. She was breathing. He had to cure her-fix her- she shouldn't have come. He squeezed his eyes shut, blood pounding in his chest, knowing he would open them. Chloe was covered in blood, enough to have sustained a heavy stomach wound. He eased her down onto the ground, once plush carpet, now a newly revealed, crumbling foundation. If he could find it... If there was less blood…

Davis almost jolted when fingers wrapped around his and pulled his hand over her chest.
"Hey, there, sleeping beauty." Chloe whispered. Her eyes were puffy, weary but her heartbeat was overpoweringly steady as it couldn't have been if she was bleeding out. "I told you I'd be fine."

Davis did the instinctual thing and pulled her close, relieved to find her warm, just like he remembered. He'd woken up tens of times after a blackout, fear like acid in his mouth. He'd started to fear more than anything that it would have been her he woke up to, quiet and still. She'd defied expectation. She always did.

He pulled her into his lap. She was alive and he couldn't help it. Chloe's fingers settled easily against his shoulders, blood on them too, but unhurt. In no time at all, her nails scratched at his skin she had wrapped her arms around his neck so tight. The rest of him had no trouble remembering how warm she was even if he wanted nothing more than hold her. For any other two people in the world, this would be awkward.

Chloe just stared at him, blinked, kissed him hard on the mouth. When he let her go she was wincing. Down boy.
"It's the shoulder." She said finally. "I…fell. That's it."

It had to be a whole lot more than that. She looked like she'd made it through the apocalypse, again. She had, he had been it- and he knew now. Every single person who had died in that hospital…all of those today.
It hadn't started to sink in, it never could when she touched him- but with her arms close around him, he started to wonder what else she was touching on his skin.

"Do you know..?" He asked; it sounded marginally less horrifying than, 'how many people did I kill?'

"It's mostly yours." Chloe held up her bloodier hand, a small, barbed chip of metal in her palm. "I took this out of the back of your head. You really scared me and…"

He imagined Chloe. His head cradled on her lap, blood pouring out. Oh. She wasn't sure he'd wake up.

The smudge of blood over her forehead had leaked into her eye, and she wiped it away, messily and one armed. He wanted to do it- was halfway to lifting his hand and just going with it. But he saw the marble around them, what was left of the only bomb safe spot in Metropolis. He let his hand drop to his side-thinking- she had been afraid he'd die. Not like the real fear wouldn't set in when the relief cooled. He couldn't assume.

Chloe's eyes followed his hand, mouth turning down into one of her smiles wasn't a smile at all but she kept going.
"Someone was using you, Davis. This would have been your trigger; whenever they wanted you to do something... it wasn't you. I mean, I knew something was wrong, you looked like you were on drugs, and then the cerebral cortex was dispensing all of these messed up signals…"

"I killed someone today. I'm sorry." He said. "I had to choose."

"You didn't have a choice. It's okay to admit it." Chloe looked about ready to raise her voice, just the empty place between them. "You- I mean-when you changed-you didn't kill me. I would have sworn you-it-the thing-whatever was scared of me."

"Charlie." Davis said.

They found Charlie just outside the theatre. He was lying on his stomach, almost peacefully, no face torn to shreds, not like the others. Davis curled his fingers into fists that he loosened quickly. After what he had wanted to do to Chloe, had almost done, it was less than he had deserved. If she had seen his eyes just then…

A small detail caught Chloe's gaze. It was the knife, the knife Charlie had tried to use on her. She didn't look frozen this time, eyed the bits of it under the body with clinical curiosity. The hilt was missing.

"I guess, he's going to need to be buried sometime." She was probably thinking of something like protecting him from suspicion, but Davis wondered how many more bodies the police would be cleaning off the street. How many he'd torn apart.

In the spot of time it took him to think that, Chloe had rolled the body over.

A clawed flower of blood bloomed from Charlie's chest where his heart had been. His eyes were open; his face a caricature of what it had been in life. That smile. Like he had watched with enraged glee as it was out plucked out, beating. The knife hilt was in his hand, pushed through-Davis knew a heart when he saw it.

The clincher. She hadn't screamed. Chloe looked away from the body and sprinted off into one of the few shadows left with the uncontrollable urge to gag.

Davis didn't even try to stop her. Somehow the loss of everything he had left to love left him curiously paralyzed in the wake of all he hated. It was dangerous out there. She wasn't running from out there. He could see why she was running.

He sank down onto the floor. Looked. The body seemed to have some sort of hypnotic hold on him. A horrific piece of artwork you expected to see in your dossier of arty serial killer victims instead of wild animal attacks. It had all been there, in the back of his mind.

For the first time Davis really saw that no matter what he told himself about saving people and how much fear he buried underneath the surface, it wouldn't matter.

He flexed his fingers, saw his nails were all black underneath. This was what he had been. This was what he was. And if he was truthful, the feeling hadn't left him. He had his senses and he could feel it still, roiling in the back of his skull, the unnamed darkness he had tried to hide from over these years. In a flash of insight he knew it wasn't going to stop.

Davis didn't know how much time had passed before he heard the next thing. All he knew is that Chloe was there, wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve. The nerves hadn't quite left her eyes, but she had mastered them now.

"I just needed a moment."

His eyes burned and he swiped at them. His fingertips came away wet and scarlet, as if tears could make them bleed again.

"I'm sorry this happened to you." She was kneeling, in front of him, near that as it if didn't exist at all. "You want to save everyone. I know how much it's hurting you."

It wasn't a nameless feeling of foreboding. He'd torn out Charlie's heart, like that. It was all too real now.
"This was me. I can't- I just can't disassociate anymore." She would have been better off if she had taken the excuse to run and run and never stop.

It's okay. Gotcha. Chloe nudged into his shoulder, her back turned to the sight of Charlie's face frozen in its eternal smile. It wasn't going stop. Not for her. Not for this.

And even as Davis thought it, knew it, she pulled her clean hand up to lean against his face. Held it up with the uninjured one until it dropped limply to her side. The sun lit her up like some portrait of the Madonna, something not even the darkness would touch.

"Let me take you home." She whispered.