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seriousficTitle: The Villain Of The Story
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,926
Author’s Note: Betaed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vagrantdream.
Characters/Pairings: Davis/Chloe, Lex, Eric Summers
Last Part: Chapter 13
Next Part: Chapter 15
Summary: Chloe and Davis go on a date.
You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?
It was a beautiful day in Smallville, sunny but with a cool breeze and plenty of shade for relief. Davis wore a straw hat that shaded his eyes. Despite the heat that put trickles of sweat at the small of his back, he welcomed Chloe’s body warmth when she grappled with him, occasionally kamikazing into his side as they walked along, trying playfully to dislodge him from his steady stride. It was like they were kids along. Davis felt a smile on his face and realized he didn’t have to fake it.
A hand slapped Davis’s ass. He turned to Chloe. “Was that you?”
Chloe looked up from the ice cream cone she was licking with pronounced innocence. She grinned devilishly. “Yeah. Sorry to use you as a sex object, but Holly and Lana were talking about us, so I thought we might as well give them something to talk about.”
“Well, so long as it’s not Old Man Jeb.” Davis looked back at the man who’d just passed him. They waved when they noticed each other looking.
“I’m just so sick of those bitches!” Chloe gestured so animatedly Davis was worried her ice cream was going to fall off its cone. “I dated Justin for one month before he died, but just because I didn’t check myself into a monastery they treat me like a black widow.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m very happy you’ve moved on.”
“Are you?” Chloe asked as they passed under the dappled shade of an elm tree. Davis kissed her briefly on the lips, trying to be reassuring, and she smiled, trying to be reassured. “Hey, give me your hand.”
“When will I get it back?” Davis joked, holding it out.
Chloe locked her fingers in his and they started moving again. David felt the dainty softness of her hand, almost lost in his. Her hair brushed his upper arm when she leaned in close to whisper in his ear, her breath hitting his cheek when she pulled away, always to return. It was easy to believe the whole hellish business was just a nightmare, dissolving with the morning dew. He so wanted to believe.
Davis smelled smoke.
It was obvious no one else had detected it yet. He steered them down a street toward it, and by the end of the block he could see the flames licking out of the Beanery’s windows, a crowd of soot-stained refugees and onlookers crowding outside like antibodies to an infection. Two were crying, a couple, the woman sobbing “My baby! My baby!”
“Oh, that poor woman,” Chloe said, while Davis could only roll his eyes. Who the hell leaves a baby in a burning building? What, did you just forget about it? He let go of Chloe’s hand.
“Wait here,” he said before thrusting himself into the crowd. They gave ground before the big guy with the bad attitude. In a moment, he was close enough for the heat to bring up his sweat. He didn’t know if he believed in redemption. He didn’t even know if he believed in God. But doing the right thing… that he could believe in.
He went into the flames.
***
It was hot, of course. Like the blast of air when you opened an oven, multiplied by a hundred. Davis felt his skin blister and knew it wouldn’t heal for a long time. He kept low. He didn’t know how much the Red had left in him, or how it had scarred him, but his senses were more acute than many’s. Soon, he heard a baby’s cries. Upstairs.
He moved, hit the stairwell and followed the smoke up. The baby wailed again, other side of the door. Davis pulled his sleeves over his hands and turned the knob.
Next room, flames were spreading fast. Half the room was an inferno. He saw the baby’s stroller. The flames were between them and widening. Davis didn’t give himself time to think. He turned a long table toward the flame, hopped up on it, and ran. His jump carried him over the flames, hot air shooting up his pant legs like liquid heat, then he landed and the ground ripped itself away from him with noisy claws.
He fell through the floor, grabbing hold of a ceiling beam to suspend himself above the firestorm below. His shoes were melting, vulcanized soles dripping down. He tried to pull himself up as the baby’s cries dwarfed the sound of cracking wood. One leg. He just had to get one leg up over the ledge and then he could die or whatever.
“Whoa. What an uncomfortable looking situation.” Davis looked up. Eric stood over him, the baby in his arms. She was crying. “I think you should stop playing hero, Kent. You’re not very good at it.”
“Help me!”
“Oh, now you need my help.” Eric paced, his feet treading dangerously close to Davis’s fingers. “But when a demon’s fucking your girl, then you don’t need my help. Then, you deny me.”
“Eric, for God’s sake—“
“God.” Eric knelt down in front of Davis, speaking like he’d just had a brainstorm: “Why don’t you pray to God? Ask him to put out the flames?” He tickled the baby’s chin—“Coochie-coo!”—snapped back to Davis. “Do it!”
Davis felt the strength bleeding out of his hands. “God, please put out the flames.”
“I don’t think He heard you. Louder.”
“God! Put out the flames!”
“He’s not listening to you, Davis. Why would He? You’re Judas.”
“Eric, I can’t hold on!”
“Say please.”
“Please.”
“You don’t have to stress out, Davis. I heard you.” Grabbing Davis by the wrist, he pulled him up. “You should be more careful. I won’t always be there to help you.”
***
Eric emerged from the fire a golden hero, singed but not burnt, cradling the baby in one arm and with Davis slung over the shoulder of the other. Davis felt sunlight strike his eyes, then he was set down and had an oxygen mask pressed to his face. He gulped greedily.
A hand laced with Davis’s and he recognized Chloe’s fingers. He forced himself out of his haze to slip off the mask and tell her he was alright. She nodded and pushed the mask back over his mouth before kissing the clear plastic. “My hero.”
Nearby, Eric was being interviewed by the local news. Davis tried to turn away from him and focus on Chloe, but the sounds of his arrogance were hard to ignore.
“Local boy makes good,” Lex intoned in his signature half-sarcasm. He noted how Chloe shifted herself protectively in front of Davis. “You, on the other hand, should probably leave the rescue work to the First Responders.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” Insisting to Chloe he was fine, Davis took off the oxygen mask. “So what brings you to Smallville, Lex? I kinda thought the city council had taken out a restraining order against you.”
“They wish. I was just in the neighborhood on some business, but it can wait.”
Davis breathed out of the oxygen mask.
***
Davis was still coughing when the paramedic finally got around to pronouncing him fit to walk home, late that evening. Chloe was back in good spirits, joshing with Davis about his heroics. She didn’t seem to care that they were ineffectual, just that he’d tried.
“I’m thinking of taking up Buddhism, actually,” Chloe giggled, her arms wrapped around his waist.
“That’s okay, when you die I’ll put in a good word with God,” Davis joked right back. “We’ll try to put you in one of the nicer circles of hell.”
“Mmm. And you’ll come visit?”
“I’ll bring Aquafina.”
They passed a newspaper machine, Chloe’s eyes darting to it like a glutton’s to chocolate. When she saw the headline of the Daily Planet, Davis felt her stiffen. He brushed his fingers through her hair protectively. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“You see the headline in this morning’s DP? ‘Monsters Among Us.’”
“I don’t get the Planet.”
“I have a subscription. Cancelled as of this morning. Some reporter named White did a story on Justin’s death. He knows about the meteor-infected, threw up a bunch of statistics about our murder rate. He’s making it out like our town is under attack.”
“Maybe it is,” Davis muttered dully.
Chloe stopped to look at him. “They aren’t all bad. Justin. Justin was good.”
The sun set and they walked in the pools of light spilling out of the different houses, not thinking about what was going on behind those shut windows and closed doors. Chloe’s house was ahead of them. Gabe’s car wasn’t in the driveway. The lights were off. Chloe’s keys clinked together as she pulled them out of her pocket. She unlocked the door. The porch shaded them from the streetlights, making Chloe half-shadow.
“Lovely night,” Davis said, his voice not silencing the crickets’ chirping.
“Yeah.” Chloe leaned against the unlocked door, a bar of light thrown across her golden hair. “You wanna… do something?”
His night vision was good enough to see her eyes, the hesitance, the slight expectancy, the small anticipation. It made him want things he had no right to. He took a deep breath he hoped she couldn’t see. “It’s late. I should go.”
“Don’t you want to at least feel my tits?” She tried to play it off like a joke, dazzling smile plastered across her face, but he’d known her long enough to hear the sincerity underneath.
His heart raced. It wasn’t just the offer, it was how she’d said it, so bold and unafraid and everything he wanted it to be. Just a normal guy, making out with his normal girlfriend. Like nothing lurked behind them and nothing loomed ahead of them.
Justin was good. She wasn’t over him. Would she ever be? He wasn’t being buried in dirt, he was being buried in nostalgia and young love and might-have-been.
“I’ll settle for a goodnight kiss,” Davis said, trying to defuse the sudden awkwardness with aww-shucks charm.
“Okay, yeah…”
It was brief, unsatisfactory, like chewing ice cubes after you’d skipped breakfast. When he walked away it was with his hands fisted in his pockets, wondering when his perfect life would get back on-track.
***
“So, how’d your date go?” Lois asked, although it was pretty obvious by the way Chloe was lazily prodding her ice cream.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Hm?”
“And not, you know… there?”
“Oh.”
Lois decided that if Chloe got to have ice cream, then this conversation could do with a beer for her.
“Lois, how do you let a guy know you want to have sex without being a slut?”
“You wore that top? I think he knows.”
Lois finished her bottle and opened another as Chloe ran through the date, from the comfortable intimacy into the unbearable awkwardness at the end.
“Performance anxiety,” Lois pronounced, killing her second beer and none the worse for wear.
“He’s a virgin? That is so sweet…”
“Well, that’s one word for it. So just relax. He’d probably at home right now, just as nervous as you are.”
***
The morning paper had an interview with Eric ‘Superboy’ Summers. Davis thought Chloe would probably be overjoyed with that, countering the public perception of the slowly emerging meteor freaks, Kansas’s open secret. People who were supposed to stay in nightmares. Davis drank his orange juice and read the interview. When Eric said he was doing God’s will, Davis’s fingers twitched so hard he almost ripped the paper in half.
Author’s notes: This chapter covers 1x16 Stray.
Here, I really wanted to move into the Eric Summers plot and spell out this new act. Davis obviously has only this much control over Eric, yet he can’t jeopardize it because that would mean he’d lose Chloe. So he’s almost deluding himself over Eric, which can’t last forever.
I should note that Lex isn’t getting the reset button hit on knowing something’s up with Davis (not to be too punny, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and shouldn’t the fact that Clark has a secret be enough of a secret?). He’s taking his time on this because he has his own agenda, which will become apparent with the next chapter. Yes, it is a Luthor chapter. But don’t you worry, there’ll be enough Chloe and Lois for everyone.
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,926
Author’s Note: Betaed by
vagrantdream.Characters/Pairings: Davis/Chloe, Lex, Eric Summers
Last Part: Chapter 13
Next Part: Chapter 15
Summary: Chloe and Davis go on a date.
You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?
It was a beautiful day in Smallville, sunny but with a cool breeze and plenty of shade for relief. Davis wore a straw hat that shaded his eyes. Despite the heat that put trickles of sweat at the small of his back, he welcomed Chloe’s body warmth when she grappled with him, occasionally kamikazing into his side as they walked along, trying playfully to dislodge him from his steady stride. It was like they were kids along. Davis felt a smile on his face and realized he didn’t have to fake it.
A hand slapped Davis’s ass. He turned to Chloe. “Was that you?”
Chloe looked up from the ice cream cone she was licking with pronounced innocence. She grinned devilishly. “Yeah. Sorry to use you as a sex object, but Holly and Lana were talking about us, so I thought we might as well give them something to talk about.”
“Well, so long as it’s not Old Man Jeb.” Davis looked back at the man who’d just passed him. They waved when they noticed each other looking.
“I’m just so sick of those bitches!” Chloe gestured so animatedly Davis was worried her ice cream was going to fall off its cone. “I dated Justin for one month before he died, but just because I didn’t check myself into a monastery they treat me like a black widow.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m very happy you’ve moved on.”
“Are you?” Chloe asked as they passed under the dappled shade of an elm tree. Davis kissed her briefly on the lips, trying to be reassuring, and she smiled, trying to be reassured. “Hey, give me your hand.”
“When will I get it back?” Davis joked, holding it out.
Chloe locked her fingers in his and they started moving again. David felt the dainty softness of her hand, almost lost in his. Her hair brushed his upper arm when she leaned in close to whisper in his ear, her breath hitting his cheek when she pulled away, always to return. It was easy to believe the whole hellish business was just a nightmare, dissolving with the morning dew. He so wanted to believe.
Davis smelled smoke.
It was obvious no one else had detected it yet. He steered them down a street toward it, and by the end of the block he could see the flames licking out of the Beanery’s windows, a crowd of soot-stained refugees and onlookers crowding outside like antibodies to an infection. Two were crying, a couple, the woman sobbing “My baby! My baby!”
“Oh, that poor woman,” Chloe said, while Davis could only roll his eyes. Who the hell leaves a baby in a burning building? What, did you just forget about it? He let go of Chloe’s hand.
“Wait here,” he said before thrusting himself into the crowd. They gave ground before the big guy with the bad attitude. In a moment, he was close enough for the heat to bring up his sweat. He didn’t know if he believed in redemption. He didn’t even know if he believed in God. But doing the right thing… that he could believe in.
He went into the flames.
***
It was hot, of course. Like the blast of air when you opened an oven, multiplied by a hundred. Davis felt his skin blister and knew it wouldn’t heal for a long time. He kept low. He didn’t know how much the Red had left in him, or how it had scarred him, but his senses were more acute than many’s. Soon, he heard a baby’s cries. Upstairs.
He moved, hit the stairwell and followed the smoke up. The baby wailed again, other side of the door. Davis pulled his sleeves over his hands and turned the knob.
Next room, flames were spreading fast. Half the room was an inferno. He saw the baby’s stroller. The flames were between them and widening. Davis didn’t give himself time to think. He turned a long table toward the flame, hopped up on it, and ran. His jump carried him over the flames, hot air shooting up his pant legs like liquid heat, then he landed and the ground ripped itself away from him with noisy claws.
He fell through the floor, grabbing hold of a ceiling beam to suspend himself above the firestorm below. His shoes were melting, vulcanized soles dripping down. He tried to pull himself up as the baby’s cries dwarfed the sound of cracking wood. One leg. He just had to get one leg up over the ledge and then he could die or whatever.
“Whoa. What an uncomfortable looking situation.” Davis looked up. Eric stood over him, the baby in his arms. She was crying. “I think you should stop playing hero, Kent. You’re not very good at it.”
“Help me!”
“Oh, now you need my help.” Eric paced, his feet treading dangerously close to Davis’s fingers. “But when a demon’s fucking your girl, then you don’t need my help. Then, you deny me.”
“Eric, for God’s sake—“
“God.” Eric knelt down in front of Davis, speaking like he’d just had a brainstorm: “Why don’t you pray to God? Ask him to put out the flames?” He tickled the baby’s chin—“Coochie-coo!”—snapped back to Davis. “Do it!”
Davis felt the strength bleeding out of his hands. “God, please put out the flames.”
“I don’t think He heard you. Louder.”
“God! Put out the flames!”
“He’s not listening to you, Davis. Why would He? You’re Judas.”
“Eric, I can’t hold on!”
“Say please.”
“Please.”
“You don’t have to stress out, Davis. I heard you.” Grabbing Davis by the wrist, he pulled him up. “You should be more careful. I won’t always be there to help you.”
***
Eric emerged from the fire a golden hero, singed but not burnt, cradling the baby in one arm and with Davis slung over the shoulder of the other. Davis felt sunlight strike his eyes, then he was set down and had an oxygen mask pressed to his face. He gulped greedily.
A hand laced with Davis’s and he recognized Chloe’s fingers. He forced himself out of his haze to slip off the mask and tell her he was alright. She nodded and pushed the mask back over his mouth before kissing the clear plastic. “My hero.”
Nearby, Eric was being interviewed by the local news. Davis tried to turn away from him and focus on Chloe, but the sounds of his arrogance were hard to ignore.
“Local boy makes good,” Lex intoned in his signature half-sarcasm. He noted how Chloe shifted herself protectively in front of Davis. “You, on the other hand, should probably leave the rescue work to the First Responders.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” Insisting to Chloe he was fine, Davis took off the oxygen mask. “So what brings you to Smallville, Lex? I kinda thought the city council had taken out a restraining order against you.”
“They wish. I was just in the neighborhood on some business, but it can wait.”
Davis breathed out of the oxygen mask.
***
Davis was still coughing when the paramedic finally got around to pronouncing him fit to walk home, late that evening. Chloe was back in good spirits, joshing with Davis about his heroics. She didn’t seem to care that they were ineffectual, just that he’d tried.
“I’m thinking of taking up Buddhism, actually,” Chloe giggled, her arms wrapped around his waist.
“That’s okay, when you die I’ll put in a good word with God,” Davis joked right back. “We’ll try to put you in one of the nicer circles of hell.”
“Mmm. And you’ll come visit?”
“I’ll bring Aquafina.”
They passed a newspaper machine, Chloe’s eyes darting to it like a glutton’s to chocolate. When she saw the headline of the Daily Planet, Davis felt her stiffen. He brushed his fingers through her hair protectively. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“You see the headline in this morning’s DP? ‘Monsters Among Us.’”
“I don’t get the Planet.”
“I have a subscription. Cancelled as of this morning. Some reporter named White did a story on Justin’s death. He knows about the meteor-infected, threw up a bunch of statistics about our murder rate. He’s making it out like our town is under attack.”
“Maybe it is,” Davis muttered dully.
Chloe stopped to look at him. “They aren’t all bad. Justin. Justin was good.”
The sun set and they walked in the pools of light spilling out of the different houses, not thinking about what was going on behind those shut windows and closed doors. Chloe’s house was ahead of them. Gabe’s car wasn’t in the driveway. The lights were off. Chloe’s keys clinked together as she pulled them out of her pocket. She unlocked the door. The porch shaded them from the streetlights, making Chloe half-shadow.
“Lovely night,” Davis said, his voice not silencing the crickets’ chirping.
“Yeah.” Chloe leaned against the unlocked door, a bar of light thrown across her golden hair. “You wanna… do something?”
His night vision was good enough to see her eyes, the hesitance, the slight expectancy, the small anticipation. It made him want things he had no right to. He took a deep breath he hoped she couldn’t see. “It’s late. I should go.”
“Don’t you want to at least feel my tits?” She tried to play it off like a joke, dazzling smile plastered across her face, but he’d known her long enough to hear the sincerity underneath.
His heart raced. It wasn’t just the offer, it was how she’d said it, so bold and unafraid and everything he wanted it to be. Just a normal guy, making out with his normal girlfriend. Like nothing lurked behind them and nothing loomed ahead of them.
Justin was good. She wasn’t over him. Would she ever be? He wasn’t being buried in dirt, he was being buried in nostalgia and young love and might-have-been.
“I’ll settle for a goodnight kiss,” Davis said, trying to defuse the sudden awkwardness with aww-shucks charm.
“Okay, yeah…”
It was brief, unsatisfactory, like chewing ice cubes after you’d skipped breakfast. When he walked away it was with his hands fisted in his pockets, wondering when his perfect life would get back on-track.
***
“So, how’d your date go?” Lois asked, although it was pretty obvious by the way Chloe was lazily prodding her ice cream.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Hm?”
“And not, you know… there?”
“Oh.”
Lois decided that if Chloe got to have ice cream, then this conversation could do with a beer for her.
“Lois, how do you let a guy know you want to have sex without being a slut?”
“You wore that top? I think he knows.”
Lois finished her bottle and opened another as Chloe ran through the date, from the comfortable intimacy into the unbearable awkwardness at the end.
“Performance anxiety,” Lois pronounced, killing her second beer and none the worse for wear.
“He’s a virgin? That is so sweet…”
“Well, that’s one word for it. So just relax. He’d probably at home right now, just as nervous as you are.”
***
The morning paper had an interview with Eric ‘Superboy’ Summers. Davis thought Chloe would probably be overjoyed with that, countering the public perception of the slowly emerging meteor freaks, Kansas’s open secret. People who were supposed to stay in nightmares. Davis drank his orange juice and read the interview. When Eric said he was doing God’s will, Davis’s fingers twitched so hard he almost ripped the paper in half.
Author’s notes: This chapter covers 1x16 Stray.
Here, I really wanted to move into the Eric Summers plot and spell out this new act. Davis obviously has only this much control over Eric, yet he can’t jeopardize it because that would mean he’d lose Chloe. So he’s almost deluding himself over Eric, which can’t last forever.
I should note that Lex isn’t getting the reset button hit on knowing something’s up with Davis (not to be too punny, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and shouldn’t the fact that Clark has a secret be enough of a secret?). He’s taking his time on this because he has his own agenda, which will become apparent with the next chapter. Yes, it is a Luthor chapter. But don’t you worry, there’ll be enough Chloe and Lois for everyone.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 11:20 pm (UTC)But we kind of like it. A lot.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-18 03:51 am (UTC)1. Eric Summers needs to die a horrible death. Either that or Davis needs to bend him over a table and show him whose boss haha
2. Chloe needs to grab Davis, shove him against a wall and blow him.
That is all.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-18 04:26 am (UTC)