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seriousficTitle: The Villain Of The Story
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,140
Author’s Note: Betaed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vagrantdream.
Characters/Pairings: Chloe/Davis, Lex, Eric Summers,
Last Part: Chapter 17
Next Part: Chapter 19
Summary: If a secret’s big enough, it won’t stay buried.
Things were so easy after Chloe got out of the hospital. All traces of guilt fled Davis when he saw how Chloe smiled at him, without an inkling of accusation or regret. It was like they’d walked out of a minefield and onto safe ground, comfortable and well-worn. They hadn’t slept together since the night at the bar, but when he touched her, his hands didn’t stop at her waist or bra and she didn’t want them to.
On Sunday they went to see Spider-Man, Davis in his Sunday suit, jacket still in the car, collar popping up without a tie. Chloe giggled when she smoothed it down, like it was a running joke. They sat next to each other in the back-row, a bucket of popcorn on his lap and a cup of soda between them, the big plastic kind that cost more but came with as many refills as you liked. Sometimes Davis would put his hand under Chloe’s skirt, just squeezing her upper thigh in casual intimacy, and sometimes Chloe would put her foot up on Davis’s lap and let him rub it.
Only once did he think of the Red. Someone in the front row laughed with the braying superiority of Eric and it made Davis tense up, flashing on Justin’s mangled body. No, that wasn’t his problem anymore, that wasn’t even a problem. He could handle Eric, he could steer him back on course. He had to. What else could he do about it?
It wasn’t like he had been a hundred percent sure about Justin. Maybe Gaines would’ve gone bad. Maybe Chloe would’ve gotten hurt. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
Chloe picked his arm up and looped it over her shoulders, throwing in a fake yawn as she snuggled closer to him. Davis smiled and ran a hand through her hair. This was nice. This was worth it.
After the movie they filed out, losing themselves in the excited murmur of the crowd. Chloe leaned under Davis’s right arm, her hand in his left pocket. “Enjoy the show?”
“It was a little clichéd, don’t you think?”
“Clichéd? He didn’t get the girl at the end. How is that clichéd?”
Davis guided them out one of the backdoors, avoiding the log-jam by the front doors. “If they really didn’t want to be clichéd, her name would have been Gwen Stacy and she would’ve died at the end.”
Chloe knuckled him lightly in the kidney. “That’s for being a nerd who supports sexist storytelling tropes.”
“Keep doing that, makes me feel invincible.” Davis squeezed Chloe tighter to his side as they walked past the dumpster that was the alley’s only other occupant. “I don’t know, it just seemed to do everything you’d expect to see in a superhero story. He got his powers, he used them to get back at his tormentors, he got the girl, he fought the bad guy… anyone could’ve come up with that story. And they probably would’ve had a better Green Goblin costume.”
“Well, I had a good time.”
“Then that makes it all worth it. That, and the M&Ms I snuck in.”
They pricked his ears in a way he could never explain. Five of them, coming from behind. Davis automatically shifted himself between them and Chloe. They were big guys, all of them, the smallest about 5’9. Leathers, muscles, tats. One of them had a nose ring like a pig.
“Nice night for a walk,” one of them said, the one in tattered jeans.
“Definitely,” Davis said, slowly backing up, covering Chloe as she picked up on his cue and stayed behind him.
“Raises thoughts of… enterprise, in a young go-getter’s soul.”
Davis took out his wallet, slowly. Pulled a stack of tens from the billfold, calmly dropped it on the ground. Kept backing up. “All I got.”
“Not everything you got,” another one said, this one in an Army jacket full of brass chains. He looked past Davis at Chloe. Gave her a smile full of rotten teeth.
Someone with the sleeves torn off his shirt took out a rattling length of chain and rotated it with a heavy whistling sound. Whiss, whiss, whiss…
Chloe took out her taser. Davis didn’t dare glance back, but he was pretty sure the mouth of the alley was forty yards away. Or was it fifty? If they just kept backing up, if they just got close enough to the street…
But then, it was pretty dark, and he hadn’t seen a headlight sweep by in a while. Smallville always did roll its sidewalks up when American Idol came on. The gang members were bathed in shadow, making it hard to keep them straight. Like they were just silhouettes.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Davis said, which was what he’d heard in an old TV show.
“Won’t be any trouble. For us. Or you, if you step aside.”
“Not happening,” Davis said, still very calm. His hands didn’t shake.
“Still no trouble,” the leader said as his wingman flipped out a butterfly knife. “Dukes, take him.”
Dukes lunged forward, blade catching the light with blinding glare. Davis didn’t try to avoid it. He knew you couldn’t ward off a knife with bare hands. He just cocked a fist and swung. Dukes ran right into it; as his knife sunk into Davis’s gut, Davis’s fist imploded his nose. His momentum, plus Davis’s Sunday punch. It sent him to the ground, face red and gooey. Davis stomped on his groin for good measure.
Second guy came in, swinging the chain at him. A few feet of it, at least. More than enough to do real damage. Davis caught it with his fist, knuckles flaming with pain, then backhanded it into a thug that’d been flanking him. It landed in his throat, and Davis heard something break. The man he’d taken the chain away from stood there dumbly, as if he couldn’t grasp why his hands were empty. Davis swung the chain like a whip, snaking it around his throat and then yanking him to the ground so hard his scalp split on the concrete.
“Drop it!” the leader said. In the confusion, he’d slipped past Davis. Put his hands on Chloe. He had her in a chokehold. Beside them, the fourth thug was twitching on the ground. Chloe’s taser had fallen next to him. “One wrong move and I’ll turn her spine into a pretzel, swear to fucking God!”
Davis dropped the chain. When it hit the ground, it didn’t break like a rosary would.
“Alright. You just stay there,” the man said. He was sweating copiously. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, hit speed-dial. He was making his way backward, like Davis had been doing a few moments ago. “My boy’s gonna bring the car around. Me and blondie are gonna go for a little ride. You, you might wanna call 911, get that thing looked at.”
“This?” Davis asked, as he pulled the knife out of his stomach. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt.
Someone picked up on the other end of the man’s phone, but he didn’t notice. “What the fuck?” He tightened his arm around Chloe’s neck. Put the phone to his ear. “Come get me. I know, come get me!”
Davis spun the knife in his fingers, feeling the heft, the weight, the contours. Blood was moving down the front of his shirt and over his belt buckle. He took a step forward.
”Hey! Hey! Stay back! I’m warning you!”
Davis took another step. And another. The knife danced between his fingers.
“What the fuck are you doing? You think I won’t do it! I will fucking end her!” The man stopped moving to put a hand on Chloe’s chin, like a commando about to break someone’s neck.
“Davis…” Chloe pleaded.
Davis took one last step and stopped, taking a deep breath.
They weren’t that far apart anymore.
“Strip darts,” he said.
He threw the knife.
It hung in the air, Davis watching it grimly, Chloe instinctively shying out of its path, the man’s eyes just growing wide as it got closer and closer and closer. Then it hit. The blade sunk into his forehead, right through the bridge of his nose, right down to the hilt. The man stood there. His eyes looked redder.
He fell down.
Not looking back, Chloe ran to Davis. “You’re bleeding!”
“Yeah,” Davis said, pressing a hand against his wound to staunch the bleeding. “I do that when I get stabbed. It’s a habit of mine.”
Chloe had her cell phone out, was dialing 911, was saying a lot of helpful things that Davis couldn’t hear.
“Just so you know, I had a really lovely evening,” Davis said.
***
Lex was picking petals off a flower one by one, his brow furrowed as if he were pronouncing love or hate with each one. Loves me, loves me not…
Davis tried to sit up. His stomach hurt. It was a good hurt, an honest hurt.
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Davis recognized the room he was in. It had been Chloe’s. Or, Chloe’s had been like his. It was a hospital. They probably prided themselves on how all the rooms looked alike.
“Is Chloe alright?”
Lex turned back to Davis. He wore a long dark coat over a silk shirt, purple. “She’s fine. Sleeping. They had to drag her out of here.”
”How long have I been out?”
“A little over a day. They had to give you surgery. That knife cut some organs on its way out.”
Davis pulled down his sheets. A few inches over his boxers, a bandage covered his stomach. “It was worth it.”
Lex turned back around, picked up an extravagant basket of flowers that he now set by Davis’s bed, next to the call button. “Every hack author I’ve read talks about the hospital smell, so I thought I’d substitute something more pleasant.” He picked a white rose from the arrangement, smelled it. “I remember as a child, I was so confused how something beautiful could hurt to touch.” He lowered the flower from his nose. “I’m not confused anymore.”
Davis looked around some more. There were some Get Well Soon cards, signed by friends and family. He picked one up to see a picture of a woman in a star-spangled bikini. It read ‘get well soon so you can come back and play.’ It was signed by Lois. She meant well.
“Who were those guys?” Davis asked, assuming Lex would know.
“Intergang members from Metropolis. They were hiding out in Smallville. Probably would’ve passed right through if you hadn’t stood up to them. You’re a hero.”
“Pull the other one,” Davis mumbled.
“It’s funny, but sometimes it takes something like this to remind you how fleeting life is.” Lex walked to the foot of Davis’s bed, idly rotating the flower in his hand. “If you’d died, it wouldn’t have been as my friend. So even if this isn’t anything like the right time or place, I’d like to say I’m sorry for earlier. I was out of line in distrusting you.”
“It’s alright. I haven’t been the greatest friend either.”
“Maybe in the future we’ll be wise enough to stop petty grievances from coming between us.” Lex slotted his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ll phone Chloe to tell her you’re up. If you need anything, just ask.”
“I’m fine.”
Davis laid back and breathed in the scent of the flowers for a few minutes. A nurse came in to take his temperature and ask him how he was feeling; she wrote his answers down and hung the chart at the foot of his bed. A few minutes after that, his parents walked in.
Jonathan was bursting with false cheer; Martha was more subdued. They told him Lex was paying for his treatment. Davis didn’t tell him that he didn’t know if the one with the torn sleeves had survived, didn’t even care anymore. He thought he’d come so far.
Martha said they should leave, to let him get some rest, and Davis didn’t argue. When he was alone, he peeled down the bandage on his stomach. The hole in him was jagged, red stitched with green sutures. He touched it once. Felt cold.
Chloe came in. She was holding Lex’s rose. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Something wrong?” he asked her, pulling the sheets up to his chest.
She took a moment, rolling her head as if to indicate everything. “You’re okay. That’s enough.” She took a step closer, the door shutting behind her. “How’re you?”
“I’ve had worse.”
Chloe laughed small. “Funny.” She sat down on one of the chairs his parents had used, hands still pursed together, fidgeting. “The doctors say they’ve never seen anyone heal so fast.”
“Guess I have a lot to live for.” Davis forced a smile for her. He couldn’t let this slip away. Not her. He couldn’t lose her.
Chloe nodded like she had something stuck in her throat.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? The one who threatened you.”
“Yes,” Chloe said, thinking of a million ways to make it better, to tell him the cops wouldn’t be arresting him, to tell him he did the right thing.
“Good.”
It was just a word, but it sounded so final. Chloe told herself he didn’t mean it. She knew how this went, how guilty he would feel about saying that, thinking it, later on.
“Do you need anything?” she asked.
Davis reached out. She took his hand and he inexorably pulled her next to him, scooting back across the bed to make room for her until she was lying next to him, her hair spilling across the same pillow.
“The important thing is you’re okay. We’re okay.” She didn’t let go of his hand.
“Of course I’m okay. I’m always… okay.” He looked away, like he had found something in the nothingness to stare at. “Good is out of the question, but I can be okay… I still remember the way you looked at me that time. Like I was a hero. I didn’t deserve that.”
“Would you like to be alone?”
“No, Chloe, but I don’t think it’s up to me. I live. I always live. I thought that was a blessing, but it was a prison sentence. Like Cain, I have to live with what I’ve done.”
“It was him or me, Davis. I’m glad you chose me.”
“It wasn’t the first time I killed someone,” Davis said. His head rotated to look at her. “It wasn’t even the first time I killed someone by throwing a knife.”
Chloe was locked there, a dead weight next to him. Her hands were pinned to his like she was trying to squeeze the truth out of him. “I know. Harry Volk…”
“No!” Davis’s face flashed with sudden pain, sudden tears. “I killed them. All of them. Greg Arkin, Sean Kelvin, Bob Rickman… there were others.” He rolled closer to her, saw her shy away. “Earl Jenkins. I murdered Earl.”
“No. I don’t believe you.” Chloe couldn’t stop shaking her head. “You’re delusional, it’s all in your head.”
“I was possessed by a demon. Or an angel. Is there a difference? Something fallen.” The memories raged inside Davis, forcing their way out. He couldn’t stop. He never could. “It gave me these powers and I used them to hunt the demons. I thought they were demons. I don’t know anymore. I started out trying to protect people, but there was this thing in me. I called it the Red.
“It made me—” He winced as he remembered the blood. There had been so much blood. “It used me. But I got rid of it. On the field trip, I was struck by lightning. And it went into Eric.” The violent march of his memories stopped. He lingered on Eric, quietly, mournfully. All that hope, gone. “I tried to guide Eric down the right path, but he wouldn’t listen. And now I’m here, because the Red changed me.
“Even now that it’s gone, it still lingers. I can hear things and see things that you…” He closed his eyes, tried to forget that knife floating through the air. “I know how to hurt people. I tried to do the right thing. I tried…” he reached for her.
She reared back, falling out of the bed, lying on the floor. “Is this some kind of joke? Chloe Sullivan, catnip for serial killers?”
“It’s the truth, Chloe. The gospel truth.”
Chloe got up slowly, pulling herself up on the back of a chair. Even when she was standing, she didn’t let go of it. Her fingers had white knuckles. “You need to rest. You need to get some sleep, Davis, right now.”
“Stay away from Eric. I don’t think he can control the Red, not like I could.”
Chloe let go of the chair. Backed away. “Go to sleep, Davis.”
She closed the door behind her.
***
Davis lay there, letting thoughts wash over him like a rising tide. He couldn’t draw his mind away from the fight, the blood and the terror and the knife spinning through the air. He was a killer. He would never be anything but a killer.
But he wasn’t the only one. Intergang mobsters, holing up in Smallville. Why would they take the risk of mugging someone? Why were they there?
He reached for the flowers. He had to lean over to get them, stitching lightning into his wound. Once he had pulled it closer, he carefully drew back each petal and every stem.
The microphone was black, like the first spot of mold on rotting food.
“You’re a real shitty friend, Lex.” Davis crushed the microphone.
He’d set it up. He knew everything.
***
Eric watched Holly as she ate with her friends, gossiping and laughing. He would so like to tell her how beautiful she was, how perfect she was, but he couldn’t think of a way to keep his praise from sounding creepy. Why’d girls have to make it so difficult, dressing like sluts and then whining whenever men looked, as if they didn’t want men to look, goddamn hypocrites…
“Holly, would you like to get some coffee sometime?” he asked, but it came out as a squeak. And she was twenty feet away anyway.
Eric walked closer, a few steps, then leaned against the wall. He could hear what she was saying if he strained.
She was talking about how Lex Luthor had run the Luthorcorp plant into the ground, and now it turned out he was some kind of meteor freak. Eric looked at a newspaper machine, the headline screaming out Luthor’s secret, as Holly wished someone would do something about that freak.
Eric smiled, his eyes the lightest shade of red.
Author’s notes: This chapter covers 1x20 Obscura
Chloe had to find out. And of course, it had to happen just when things were looking up. But of course, things never were looking up. Eric was a psycho, Lex set the muggers on him. And with that false hope gone, Davis goes into freefall. Three chapters to go, guys.
Setting this story in season one did give me something to play with. Since this is the summer of Spider-Man, I thought it’d be fun for Davis and Chloe to go see it and lampshade some of the genre conventions they’re all laboring under.
I did have some fun writing the fight scene, because it’s just so PROTECT TINY BLONDE even without powers. Davis gets a knife in the gut and he… pretty much ignores it, which is a kind of stoicism that’s always fun to write. And the little call-back to his killing of Jeff Palmer is a great way to start off this avalanche of all the trauma he’s been through, almost like a veteran’s flashback. This is the point where Davis starts to come completely unhinged and, well, we’ll see if he can fight that.
On a similar note, we have Lex taking a big lunge toward the Dark Side, and in the classic Lex Luthor fashion of manipulating everyone. Then there’s Eric, who despite being a complete villain, is still unable to talk to Holly, and in the next chapter they’re all going to collide. Plus, it has one of my favorite Chloe moments to write, which you’ll see right in the first line.
From here on out, the roller coaster is going downhill.
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,140
Author’s Note: Betaed by
vagrantdream.Characters/Pairings: Chloe/Davis, Lex, Eric Summers,
Last Part: Chapter 17
Next Part: Chapter 19
Summary: If a secret’s big enough, it won’t stay buried.
Things were so easy after Chloe got out of the hospital. All traces of guilt fled Davis when he saw how Chloe smiled at him, without an inkling of accusation or regret. It was like they’d walked out of a minefield and onto safe ground, comfortable and well-worn. They hadn’t slept together since the night at the bar, but when he touched her, his hands didn’t stop at her waist or bra and she didn’t want them to.
On Sunday they went to see Spider-Man, Davis in his Sunday suit, jacket still in the car, collar popping up without a tie. Chloe giggled when she smoothed it down, like it was a running joke. They sat next to each other in the back-row, a bucket of popcorn on his lap and a cup of soda between them, the big plastic kind that cost more but came with as many refills as you liked. Sometimes Davis would put his hand under Chloe’s skirt, just squeezing her upper thigh in casual intimacy, and sometimes Chloe would put her foot up on Davis’s lap and let him rub it.
Only once did he think of the Red. Someone in the front row laughed with the braying superiority of Eric and it made Davis tense up, flashing on Justin’s mangled body. No, that wasn’t his problem anymore, that wasn’t even a problem. He could handle Eric, he could steer him back on course. He had to. What else could he do about it?
It wasn’t like he had been a hundred percent sure about Justin. Maybe Gaines would’ve gone bad. Maybe Chloe would’ve gotten hurt. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
Chloe picked his arm up and looped it over her shoulders, throwing in a fake yawn as she snuggled closer to him. Davis smiled and ran a hand through her hair. This was nice. This was worth it.
After the movie they filed out, losing themselves in the excited murmur of the crowd. Chloe leaned under Davis’s right arm, her hand in his left pocket. “Enjoy the show?”
“It was a little clichéd, don’t you think?”
“Clichéd? He didn’t get the girl at the end. How is that clichéd?”
Davis guided them out one of the backdoors, avoiding the log-jam by the front doors. “If they really didn’t want to be clichéd, her name would have been Gwen Stacy and she would’ve died at the end.”
Chloe knuckled him lightly in the kidney. “That’s for being a nerd who supports sexist storytelling tropes.”
“Keep doing that, makes me feel invincible.” Davis squeezed Chloe tighter to his side as they walked past the dumpster that was the alley’s only other occupant. “I don’t know, it just seemed to do everything you’d expect to see in a superhero story. He got his powers, he used them to get back at his tormentors, he got the girl, he fought the bad guy… anyone could’ve come up with that story. And they probably would’ve had a better Green Goblin costume.”
“Well, I had a good time.”
“Then that makes it all worth it. That, and the M&Ms I snuck in.”
They pricked his ears in a way he could never explain. Five of them, coming from behind. Davis automatically shifted himself between them and Chloe. They were big guys, all of them, the smallest about 5’9. Leathers, muscles, tats. One of them had a nose ring like a pig.
“Nice night for a walk,” one of them said, the one in tattered jeans.
“Definitely,” Davis said, slowly backing up, covering Chloe as she picked up on his cue and stayed behind him.
“Raises thoughts of… enterprise, in a young go-getter’s soul.”
Davis took out his wallet, slowly. Pulled a stack of tens from the billfold, calmly dropped it on the ground. Kept backing up. “All I got.”
“Not everything you got,” another one said, this one in an Army jacket full of brass chains. He looked past Davis at Chloe. Gave her a smile full of rotten teeth.
Someone with the sleeves torn off his shirt took out a rattling length of chain and rotated it with a heavy whistling sound. Whiss, whiss, whiss…
Chloe took out her taser. Davis didn’t dare glance back, but he was pretty sure the mouth of the alley was forty yards away. Or was it fifty? If they just kept backing up, if they just got close enough to the street…
But then, it was pretty dark, and he hadn’t seen a headlight sweep by in a while. Smallville always did roll its sidewalks up when American Idol came on. The gang members were bathed in shadow, making it hard to keep them straight. Like they were just silhouettes.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Davis said, which was what he’d heard in an old TV show.
“Won’t be any trouble. For us. Or you, if you step aside.”
“Not happening,” Davis said, still very calm. His hands didn’t shake.
“Still no trouble,” the leader said as his wingman flipped out a butterfly knife. “Dukes, take him.”
Dukes lunged forward, blade catching the light with blinding glare. Davis didn’t try to avoid it. He knew you couldn’t ward off a knife with bare hands. He just cocked a fist and swung. Dukes ran right into it; as his knife sunk into Davis’s gut, Davis’s fist imploded his nose. His momentum, plus Davis’s Sunday punch. It sent him to the ground, face red and gooey. Davis stomped on his groin for good measure.
Second guy came in, swinging the chain at him. A few feet of it, at least. More than enough to do real damage. Davis caught it with his fist, knuckles flaming with pain, then backhanded it into a thug that’d been flanking him. It landed in his throat, and Davis heard something break. The man he’d taken the chain away from stood there dumbly, as if he couldn’t grasp why his hands were empty. Davis swung the chain like a whip, snaking it around his throat and then yanking him to the ground so hard his scalp split on the concrete.
“Drop it!” the leader said. In the confusion, he’d slipped past Davis. Put his hands on Chloe. He had her in a chokehold. Beside them, the fourth thug was twitching on the ground. Chloe’s taser had fallen next to him. “One wrong move and I’ll turn her spine into a pretzel, swear to fucking God!”
Davis dropped the chain. When it hit the ground, it didn’t break like a rosary would.
“Alright. You just stay there,” the man said. He was sweating copiously. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, hit speed-dial. He was making his way backward, like Davis had been doing a few moments ago. “My boy’s gonna bring the car around. Me and blondie are gonna go for a little ride. You, you might wanna call 911, get that thing looked at.”
“This?” Davis asked, as he pulled the knife out of his stomach. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt.
Someone picked up on the other end of the man’s phone, but he didn’t notice. “What the fuck?” He tightened his arm around Chloe’s neck. Put the phone to his ear. “Come get me. I know, come get me!”
Davis spun the knife in his fingers, feeling the heft, the weight, the contours. Blood was moving down the front of his shirt and over his belt buckle. He took a step forward.
”Hey! Hey! Stay back! I’m warning you!”
Davis took another step. And another. The knife danced between his fingers.
“What the fuck are you doing? You think I won’t do it! I will fucking end her!” The man stopped moving to put a hand on Chloe’s chin, like a commando about to break someone’s neck.
“Davis…” Chloe pleaded.
Davis took one last step and stopped, taking a deep breath.
They weren’t that far apart anymore.
“Strip darts,” he said.
He threw the knife.
It hung in the air, Davis watching it grimly, Chloe instinctively shying out of its path, the man’s eyes just growing wide as it got closer and closer and closer. Then it hit. The blade sunk into his forehead, right through the bridge of his nose, right down to the hilt. The man stood there. His eyes looked redder.
He fell down.
Not looking back, Chloe ran to Davis. “You’re bleeding!”
“Yeah,” Davis said, pressing a hand against his wound to staunch the bleeding. “I do that when I get stabbed. It’s a habit of mine.”
Chloe had her cell phone out, was dialing 911, was saying a lot of helpful things that Davis couldn’t hear.
“Just so you know, I had a really lovely evening,” Davis said.
***
Lex was picking petals off a flower one by one, his brow furrowed as if he were pronouncing love or hate with each one. Loves me, loves me not…
Davis tried to sit up. His stomach hurt. It was a good hurt, an honest hurt.
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Davis recognized the room he was in. It had been Chloe’s. Or, Chloe’s had been like his. It was a hospital. They probably prided themselves on how all the rooms looked alike.
“Is Chloe alright?”
Lex turned back to Davis. He wore a long dark coat over a silk shirt, purple. “She’s fine. Sleeping. They had to drag her out of here.”
”How long have I been out?”
“A little over a day. They had to give you surgery. That knife cut some organs on its way out.”
Davis pulled down his sheets. A few inches over his boxers, a bandage covered his stomach. “It was worth it.”
Lex turned back around, picked up an extravagant basket of flowers that he now set by Davis’s bed, next to the call button. “Every hack author I’ve read talks about the hospital smell, so I thought I’d substitute something more pleasant.” He picked a white rose from the arrangement, smelled it. “I remember as a child, I was so confused how something beautiful could hurt to touch.” He lowered the flower from his nose. “I’m not confused anymore.”
Davis looked around some more. There were some Get Well Soon cards, signed by friends and family. He picked one up to see a picture of a woman in a star-spangled bikini. It read ‘get well soon so you can come back and play.’ It was signed by Lois. She meant well.
“Who were those guys?” Davis asked, assuming Lex would know.
“Intergang members from Metropolis. They were hiding out in Smallville. Probably would’ve passed right through if you hadn’t stood up to them. You’re a hero.”
“Pull the other one,” Davis mumbled.
“It’s funny, but sometimes it takes something like this to remind you how fleeting life is.” Lex walked to the foot of Davis’s bed, idly rotating the flower in his hand. “If you’d died, it wouldn’t have been as my friend. So even if this isn’t anything like the right time or place, I’d like to say I’m sorry for earlier. I was out of line in distrusting you.”
“It’s alright. I haven’t been the greatest friend either.”
“Maybe in the future we’ll be wise enough to stop petty grievances from coming between us.” Lex slotted his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ll phone Chloe to tell her you’re up. If you need anything, just ask.”
“I’m fine.”
Davis laid back and breathed in the scent of the flowers for a few minutes. A nurse came in to take his temperature and ask him how he was feeling; she wrote his answers down and hung the chart at the foot of his bed. A few minutes after that, his parents walked in.
Jonathan was bursting with false cheer; Martha was more subdued. They told him Lex was paying for his treatment. Davis didn’t tell him that he didn’t know if the one with the torn sleeves had survived, didn’t even care anymore. He thought he’d come so far.
Martha said they should leave, to let him get some rest, and Davis didn’t argue. When he was alone, he peeled down the bandage on his stomach. The hole in him was jagged, red stitched with green sutures. He touched it once. Felt cold.
Chloe came in. She was holding Lex’s rose. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Something wrong?” he asked her, pulling the sheets up to his chest.
She took a moment, rolling her head as if to indicate everything. “You’re okay. That’s enough.” She took a step closer, the door shutting behind her. “How’re you?”
“I’ve had worse.”
Chloe laughed small. “Funny.” She sat down on one of the chairs his parents had used, hands still pursed together, fidgeting. “The doctors say they’ve never seen anyone heal so fast.”
“Guess I have a lot to live for.” Davis forced a smile for her. He couldn’t let this slip away. Not her. He couldn’t lose her.
Chloe nodded like she had something stuck in her throat.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? The one who threatened you.”
“Yes,” Chloe said, thinking of a million ways to make it better, to tell him the cops wouldn’t be arresting him, to tell him he did the right thing.
“Good.”
It was just a word, but it sounded so final. Chloe told herself he didn’t mean it. She knew how this went, how guilty he would feel about saying that, thinking it, later on.
“Do you need anything?” she asked.
Davis reached out. She took his hand and he inexorably pulled her next to him, scooting back across the bed to make room for her until she was lying next to him, her hair spilling across the same pillow.
“The important thing is you’re okay. We’re okay.” She didn’t let go of his hand.
“Of course I’m okay. I’m always… okay.” He looked away, like he had found something in the nothingness to stare at. “Good is out of the question, but I can be okay… I still remember the way you looked at me that time. Like I was a hero. I didn’t deserve that.”
“Would you like to be alone?”
“No, Chloe, but I don’t think it’s up to me. I live. I always live. I thought that was a blessing, but it was a prison sentence. Like Cain, I have to live with what I’ve done.”
“It was him or me, Davis. I’m glad you chose me.”
“It wasn’t the first time I killed someone,” Davis said. His head rotated to look at her. “It wasn’t even the first time I killed someone by throwing a knife.”
Chloe was locked there, a dead weight next to him. Her hands were pinned to his like she was trying to squeeze the truth out of him. “I know. Harry Volk…”
“No!” Davis’s face flashed with sudden pain, sudden tears. “I killed them. All of them. Greg Arkin, Sean Kelvin, Bob Rickman… there were others.” He rolled closer to her, saw her shy away. “Earl Jenkins. I murdered Earl.”
“No. I don’t believe you.” Chloe couldn’t stop shaking her head. “You’re delusional, it’s all in your head.”
“I was possessed by a demon. Or an angel. Is there a difference? Something fallen.” The memories raged inside Davis, forcing their way out. He couldn’t stop. He never could. “It gave me these powers and I used them to hunt the demons. I thought they were demons. I don’t know anymore. I started out trying to protect people, but there was this thing in me. I called it the Red.
“It made me—” He winced as he remembered the blood. There had been so much blood. “It used me. But I got rid of it. On the field trip, I was struck by lightning. And it went into Eric.” The violent march of his memories stopped. He lingered on Eric, quietly, mournfully. All that hope, gone. “I tried to guide Eric down the right path, but he wouldn’t listen. And now I’m here, because the Red changed me.
“Even now that it’s gone, it still lingers. I can hear things and see things that you…” He closed his eyes, tried to forget that knife floating through the air. “I know how to hurt people. I tried to do the right thing. I tried…” he reached for her.
She reared back, falling out of the bed, lying on the floor. “Is this some kind of joke? Chloe Sullivan, catnip for serial killers?”
“It’s the truth, Chloe. The gospel truth.”
Chloe got up slowly, pulling herself up on the back of a chair. Even when she was standing, she didn’t let go of it. Her fingers had white knuckles. “You need to rest. You need to get some sleep, Davis, right now.”
“Stay away from Eric. I don’t think he can control the Red, not like I could.”
Chloe let go of the chair. Backed away. “Go to sleep, Davis.”
She closed the door behind her.
***
Davis lay there, letting thoughts wash over him like a rising tide. He couldn’t draw his mind away from the fight, the blood and the terror and the knife spinning through the air. He was a killer. He would never be anything but a killer.
But he wasn’t the only one. Intergang mobsters, holing up in Smallville. Why would they take the risk of mugging someone? Why were they there?
He reached for the flowers. He had to lean over to get them, stitching lightning into his wound. Once he had pulled it closer, he carefully drew back each petal and every stem.
The microphone was black, like the first spot of mold on rotting food.
“You’re a real shitty friend, Lex.” Davis crushed the microphone.
He’d set it up. He knew everything.
***
Eric watched Holly as she ate with her friends, gossiping and laughing. He would so like to tell her how beautiful she was, how perfect she was, but he couldn’t think of a way to keep his praise from sounding creepy. Why’d girls have to make it so difficult, dressing like sluts and then whining whenever men looked, as if they didn’t want men to look, goddamn hypocrites…
“Holly, would you like to get some coffee sometime?” he asked, but it came out as a squeak. And she was twenty feet away anyway.
Eric walked closer, a few steps, then leaned against the wall. He could hear what she was saying if he strained.
She was talking about how Lex Luthor had run the Luthorcorp plant into the ground, and now it turned out he was some kind of meteor freak. Eric looked at a newspaper machine, the headline screaming out Luthor’s secret, as Holly wished someone would do something about that freak.
Eric smiled, his eyes the lightest shade of red.
Author’s notes: This chapter covers 1x20 Obscura
Chloe had to find out. And of course, it had to happen just when things were looking up. But of course, things never were looking up. Eric was a psycho, Lex set the muggers on him. And with that false hope gone, Davis goes into freefall. Three chapters to go, guys.
Setting this story in season one did give me something to play with. Since this is the summer of Spider-Man, I thought it’d be fun for Davis and Chloe to go see it and lampshade some of the genre conventions they’re all laboring under.
I did have some fun writing the fight scene, because it’s just so PROTECT TINY BLONDE even without powers. Davis gets a knife in the gut and he… pretty much ignores it, which is a kind of stoicism that’s always fun to write. And the little call-back to his killing of Jeff Palmer is a great way to start off this avalanche of all the trauma he’s been through, almost like a veteran’s flashback. This is the point where Davis starts to come completely unhinged and, well, we’ll see if he can fight that.
On a similar note, we have Lex taking a big lunge toward the Dark Side, and in the classic Lex Luthor fashion of manipulating everyone. Then there’s Eric, who despite being a complete villain, is still unable to talk to Holly, and in the next chapter they’re all going to collide. Plus, it has one of my favorite Chloe moments to write, which you’ll see right in the first line.
From here on out, the roller coaster is going downhill.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-04 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-04 05:12 pm (UTC)Poor Davis. Everything is falling apart and Chloe better not care/ignore his serial-killer-spurt, dammit!!! *stomps foot*
And, I just have to say, LMFAO at Davis' Spiderman issues... Though I didn't take issues with the Spiderman movies (...because, you know, I don't exactly care about Spiderman. it's just not my flavour of superhero-sobet) it is also MY first instinct to blurt out all the continuity issues in the movies as well, seconds after leaving the theatre. I, too, get called a nerd. Just not in the joking, loving tone Chloe uses.
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Date: 2009-09-04 06:53 pm (UTC)I can't wait to see how Chloe process this.
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Date: 2009-09-05 12:26 am (UTC)But I have to say this is so far my favorite chapter. It's one those MORE AWESOME THAN TWILIGHT (the scene where Bella is threatened) things. RIGHTEOUS VIOLENCE. I'm sorry, but if you want to prey on small unarmed girls (or cut them up, like in "Stilletto") you deserve what you get. This was awesome and Davis is awesome. I don't even care if that's wrong. Sad to see him come unhinged though. Poor things. And I'm wondering if the Spider-Man talk is a clue to an ending where the "hero" doesn't get the girl.
And Lex, the wierd thing about him, as manipulative and cunning and as driven by ulterior motives as he is, it doesn't mean he doesn't care.
Poor Davis. *hugs him*
And Chloe . . . I know she doesn't have the luxury canon!Chloe had of understanding the lack of free will thing in regards to DD, but let's hope she took some of the Buffy morality to heart. Davis is the kind of "monster" who wants to be redeemed and those are the ones the heroes are supposed to help. I just hope she understands that not killing wasn't an option for him and that he did the best he could. But now that he'll lose her, for a time at least, he's definitely going lose his shit.
I think the veteran analogy is a good one. I think I've used the war/soldier comparison with him before. I mean, is killing "bad" people to control an unstoppable alien influence so it doesn't destroy innocents bad? Yes, of course. But is it worse than dropping depleted uranium bombs on Iraqi civilians in the Service because you want some college money? IMO, no.
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Date: 2009-09-06 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-07 03:26 am (UTC)Stop hitting on Davis, Lex.
>Something fallen.
More accurate than he thinks.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-15 06:35 pm (UTC)http://twitter.com/#search?q=Chloe%2FDavis