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seriousficTitle: The Villain Of The Story
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,218
Author’s Note: Betaed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vagrantdream.
Characters/Pairings: Chloe/Davis, Clark/Lois, Lionel, Lex, Eric Summers,
Last Part: Chapter 19
Next Part: Chapter 21
Summary: Doomsday has come to Smallville.
Davis tried to dodge Red Eyes, but it wasn’t after him. It lunged into Clark, so close Davis felt the wind of its passage, then it was pinning Clark to the ground.
It was growing. Davis could see horns and bone spurs tearing out of Eric’s body as its skin thickened to a gray, corpse-like pallor. Its muscles grew like tumors, opening up the tears his spikes had made. The end of the transformation was more beast than man. It roared in Clark’s face with a mouth of sharp daggers.
Clark shoved it away; the beast hit the second level of the room, fell. It landed on its feet like a cat. For all its bulk, the thing was agile. It lunged again for Clark, who blurred out of the way. No sooner had the beast landed than its arm lashed out and caught Clark. It threw him through the wall, deep into the horizon. After a jubilant howl, the thing looped after Clark on all fours.
Davis fell to his knees, trembling, just one more piece of debris settling.
”What the fuck was that thing?” Lex finally asked.
“Me,” Davis said.
***
Lois struggled to see through the rain-hammered windshield with more concentration than she ever used when she actually was driving. Chloe’s fingers were white-knuckled on the wheel and she stared straight ahead as if she could see all the way to the Luthor mansion.
A fencepost struck the windshield, building a glass spider-web over a third of it.
Lois screamed. “Pull over! Chloe, stop this car right now!”
“He needs me!” Chloe shouted back, nerves frayed to the breaking point.
“Look out!”
Chloe jammed on the brakes and her tiny car hydroplaned wildly, the jerking headlights giving them a glimpse of the gray mass bounding across the road. Enough to see it wasn’t human.
The Volkswagen came to a stop, halfway off the road. Chloe unbuckled her seatbelt and got out.
“Where are you going?” Lois cried.
“Whatever that thing was, Davis will be between it and innocent people. That’s where I’ll find him.” She pulled her hood on. “Go find a ditch, lie down in it. When this is all over, you have to tell the world what happened here. You have to write Smallville’s obituary.”
***
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death...”
“Davis, I think this is one of those times when God is most likely to help those who help themselves,” Lex cut in.
Davis didn’t move, except to cross himself. “Amen.” He started in on an Our Father.
Lex looked out the hole in the wall, which might as well have been a hole in a submarine for how much water was getting in. Distantly, he could see the graceful funnel of a twister, winding its way through Smallville like a ballet.
“Vault,” he decided, linking his arms under Davis’s shoulders. “Help me!” he shouted to Lionel.
“Lex, that thing’s only purpose is to kill Clark—“
“Dad!” Lex craned his neck back. “Sageeth isn’t in him anymore. It’s loose. You want to stop it, this is the man who knows how. Now help me or get out of my way.”
Lionel got Davis’s legs.
***
Clark saw stars. He kind of liked it; it had never happened to him before. They were all sorts of colors…
He shook his head. He was in town square, at the bottom of a crater filling with run-off. It was at least fifteen feet deep at the center, which was where he was. A sense of déjà vu gripped him, though he couldn’t say why.
No sooner had he recovered than a hand like a vice was crushing his head. It shoved him down under the water. Clark thought of Lois. His eyes burned.
Instantly, every drop of water in the crater turned to steam. The beast reared up, roaring as its flesh peeled away. Anything else would’ve had the decency to die. Red Eyes struck Clark with a closed fist, claws breaking off in his chest, and Luthor flew back into a man-sized sewer tunnel, throwing up sparks where he scraped the sides.
He fell asleep to the sound of the metal tunnel groaning as Red Eyes forced its way in.
***
The Luthors set Davis down amidst the treasure of a thousand cultures and he began another Hail Mary. As Lionel got the door, Lex shook Davis by the collar. “You listen to me, farmboy. Listen! That’s my brother out there, fighting that monster! So if you can stop praying for your immortal soul long enough to tell us how to stop it—“
“Me?” Davis laughed like glass breaking. “I’m not praying for me. I probably don’t even have a soul. I’m praying for you. All of you people, given this extraordinary gift, and what do you do? You try to figure out how to patent it, and kill people with it, and use it to get laid. What’s the point of fighting it? Our ability to control the world has finally outraced our ability to control ourselves. We’re an endangered species. All we can do now is hope that God gets it right next time.”
“Davis, you can’t condemn the entire human race on the actions of a few. Of course you’ve seen blood. You’re a First Responder. It’s your job to see evil and heal it. But you can’t lose faith that there’s another world out there, where people love and…”
“There isn’t,” Lionel said gravely.
Lex looked up at him. “Could you pick a worse moment?”
“If you’re saying it gets easier, son, you’re wrong. It does not, let me assure you.” Lionel crouched down in front of Davis. “‘Fallen’ is the, ah, nicest way I can put it. The human heart can justify any betrayal, any harm, any depravity.”
Davis’s eyes shot up, as if to say ‘you’d know’. Lionel pressed on.
“So we fight, we sweat, we bleed to make this world of ours run a bit smoother, because it’s all we can do. If you want to lie there like a martyr and wait for the Kingdom of Heaven, that’s your decision. But I’m going to move the world.” Lionel’s voice rose, his eyes burning as hot as Davis’s ever had, his face turning red. “I will push it, shove it, throw myself against it until I’m black and blue to move it one tiny inch…!”
Lionel took a deep breath. He met Davis’s eyes. He exhaled. “So at the end of the day, those I love will have a brighter future. Maybe I‘m not the best man to lead the world. But at least I’m trying. Now, my son is in danger. Please.”
He got down on his knees in front of Davis.
“I beg you. If there’s anything you can do… help my boy.”
Davis looked at Lionel and was struck by the sheer pleading in his eyes. The muscles of his jaw clenched, his lips pressing into a thin line, then parting. His eyes shifted, looking from father to son and back again. He closed his mouth. Drew himself up to his full height. Turned to Lex, his face lit by the green glow of a piece of meteor rock. “Either of you own a Hummer?”
***
Clark woke up to a pain in his foot. He looked down to see the beast had bitten off his shoe and two of his toes. Screaming, Clark kicked at it with his other foot. Destruction rippled through the beast and into the undersized sewer tunnel. The Richer Scale jogged. The creature shrugged off Clark’s blows and planted its arms on either side of it. With a modicum of strength, it began to rend open the tunnel.
Clark scooted backward, heels and elbows, as he realized what it was doing. Rising water lapped at him, plastered his clothes to his skin. Debris fell into the splitting tunnel, breaking on Clark and splashing him when it landed in the water under him.
The beast ripped the tunnel open, burying Clark in moss-covered bricks. Clark broke free, kicked away as the beast reached for him with its freed arm. The hand closed just short of his ankle. Clark blew sheer cold at it, freezing the tunnel into ice. The beast immediately began to hammer through.
Clark scrambled on all fours, grabbing the lowest rung of a tunnel and pulling himself up. In seconds, he had butted the manhole cover away and was pulling himself into open air.
He picked up the heavy lid and stood over the manhole, waiting for the beast to hit the bottleneck.
“C’mon, you son of a bitch,” he muttered to the deserted street. “You got a taste of me. Now come up here and eat my—“
A gray hand burst out of the asphalt and hooked on Clark’s leg, then flung him sideways through a parking meter and into a display window. Clark saw everything turn black again.
***
Gabe Sullivan had just recovered from hearing a tree fall through his picture window when he heard a new sound. The roar of a V8 engine as (he looked through a boarded-up window) a black Hummer barreled onto his frown lawn and skidded to a stop just shy of his porch. Davis leapt out wearing, of all things, a paramedic’s uniform. “Hey, Mr. Sullivan. Is Chloe home?”
Gabe threw open the door. “Get inside! Jesus! What the heck is going on?”
Davis assumed a thoughtful expression, like he was thinking of how best to sum it up, before he settled on “Some serious shit. But no, really, is Chloe here? I kinda need to talk to her.”
“She’s not here. She went to the cemetery.”
“Oh.” Davis’s mask cracked almost imperceptibly. “I guess I’ll meet her there. Well, when you see her again, tell her… tell her I… tell her she was right about me. And take care of her, will you? She is way more special than she realizes.”
“I know,” Gabe said, confused. “I will.”
Davis looked past Gabe. “Hey, can I borrow that shotgun?”
***
Clark felt his back being cut to ribbons as he was dragged out of the storefront. He wondered how bad it was if a little glass could cut him. Then he saw the beast standing over him and realized that very soon, it wouldn’t matter.
“What are you?” Clark spat, along with a good deal of blood.
The beast stood over him, a thunderhead made flesh. Its mouth opened like a gash widening. “Doom,” it said in a voice as deep as the grave.
It stomped on him and Clark felt a rib go. A kick, and there went another. He rolled over, closing in on himself, trying to protect himself like a fetus in the womb. The rain stung his many wounds like a thousand red-hot needles working their way deeper and deeper.
For a moment the barrage stopped (that was what it felt like, like an artillery barrage), then the beast fell on all fours and bit into his neck. Blood, thick and hot, rolled down Clark’s back as the beast shook him in its jaws, swiping his body through brick and mortar, slapping him against the sidewalk.
Then he heard a V8 engine.
Davis snapped the headlights on an instant before the H2 hit Red Eyes, letting it see who was in the driver’s seat. The glare blinded it and then, collision. As big and tough as the beast was, it was much less an immovable object than the Hummer was an irresistible force.
The car ripped the beast off Clark and punched it through the sliding doors into the supermarket, snapping it through three aisles before burying it in the frozen foods section. The beast was smashed through the doors, through the trays of frozen goods, and into the stacks of beer cartons behind the walkway. Its face dented the hood and oozed blood.
Davis, for his part, lifted his bloody head off the wheel to see the beast slumped on the hood of his totaled car. “Hello again,” he muttered.
A hand clawed into the hood like the talons of a gargantuan bird of prey landing. The other hand scraped down the hood like a spider’s legs.
Davis hit the release button on his seatbelt. It didn’t release.
“Oh, fuck my life.”
The beast shoved the Hummer back and up with all its might. The H2, tearing through ceiling tiles and florescent lights, cleared the store before it even came back down. Davis stomped on the brakes, but he might as well have been stomping on the radio. He saw a gas station rearing up in the rear-view, then he spun the wheel. The Hummer veered into the deep crater Clark had made when he landed.
Davis felt his back wrench when the rear door splashed down. He tried his door. It wouldn’t open. Water was rising up the backseat. He snatched Gabe’s shotgun from the passenger seat and smashed out the windshield with the rifle butt. He wiggled out, pulled himself on top of the H2’s grille to see Clark, in a watery pool of his own blood, and the beast limping towards him.
Davis leapt onto stable ground and felt his ankle scream with pain. He leaned on the shotgun as a crutch, took a few steps away from the crater, then brought it up. He fired a shot into the beast. A shower of sparks against its bony hide was the only response. It took another step and dragged itself closer to Clark.
Davis pumped the shotgun, breathing hard now. Pain was coming in from all over his body and spots were appearing and disappearing in front of his eyes, but he shoved those to the back of his mind. He took careful aim again, and fired again. The beast’s chest exploded like the Halloween he’d lit a firecracker in a pumpkin. Blood and gristle dribbled out of the hole. The beast just snorted and walked through what was left of the storefront.
Clark was directly in front of it, sprawled on the sidewalk with an arm down in the gutter. Davis fired a third shot over him, into the beast’s crushed leg. The thing roared as bone chips flew out the other side of its leg.
Davis racked another shot, sending pain shooting through his arm. “Come on and die, you son of a bitch!” Davis screamed, firing and blowing up a bone spur.
The beast reached down, took hold of Clark. Its hand covered his entire head. It hoisted him up like a rag doll.
Davis threw the gun aside. “Eric Summers!”
The beast paused, like a dog hearing a whistle.
“You wanna know why Holly won’t go out with you? It’s because everyone knows you’re the biggest fucking loser in Smallville!”
The creature’s head slowly rotated to look at him.
“I mean, really now. Is there a single limp-dick idiot in this town more pathetic than you?” Davis walked backward. “You smell like a fucking junkyard. All you ever do is whine about how girls won’t go out with you, like you have some God-given right to see their panties. It’d almost be amusing, only you’re such a bitch about it.”
Clark slipped through the beast’s fingers as it focused all its attention on Davis, who was walking around the crater.
“And now you have superpowers and whoa, big surprise, you still can’t get laid. Maybe if you spent a little less time masturbating and a little more time actually being nice to people, someone would bother to get to know you? Just a theory, shithead.”
The beast roared, smashed the ground with its fist. Water exploded up, chips of concrete shooting everywhere. Davis felt them sting his face.
“Let’s just face it, Eric. Even with superpowers, you’re still just a pale reflection of me! And now you’re a fucking bug-eyed monster and you still bore me to tears. It’s literally astonishing that a human being could be such a huge fucking disappointment. I mean, no wonder your daddy’s ashamed of you. He wanted a son, and you’re just this… sniveling mass of polyp.”
The bone spurs retracted a short way into the beast’s body, its face twitched, and then the spikes shot out longer than ever. It roared again, louder than ever.
“Come on, motherfucker! Come get me! I’m right here!”
The beast surged forward, shouldering a parked car out of its way. The Studebaker flew end over end down the street. Davis turned and ran, pushing his way into a Laundromat… not fast enough. The beast impacted the doorway, slapping against his back. Davis went flying, slamming into a washing machine, cracking its window. He tasted blood. Sound thundered in his ears as the beast crashed trough the doorway in a shower of debris.
Davis scrambled for the back door, feet slipping on the cold linoleum, going on all fours when he had to. He just managed to get out of the way as the beast pounced, coming so close a bone spur ripped a line through his flapping jacket. The thing took out a bank of washing machines. The impact jarred Davis off his feet and he landed on his elbow, sharp pain piercing his body.
He laid on his back, every hurt in his body mobbing him. Please, God… I don’t wanna die…
He heard a hiss. Electricity.
Through the flapping backdoor, he could see downed power lines.
Davis slipped the Luthors’ Kryptonite out of his pocket.
He fought his way to his feet as the beast pulled itself loose from the wall.
Their eyes locked, brown and red.
Davis ran, rolling over a line of dryers and sprinting for the door. The beast was right on his ass, smashing through the dryers. Davis registered one flying overhead and punching through the wall. He heard the beast roar and dropped down, skidded on the wet floor as its hand closed above him, then the glowing EXIT sign was casting its light on him. He rocketed through the door, felt the rain slap his face, took in the power lines. He was holding the Kryptonite in one hand. He dove for the power lines with the other, grabbed one by the rubber coating…
Felt a massive hand close on his leg.
Davis whirled around, jabbing the power line at the beast. It grabbed his arm with its other hand, stopping the power line cruelly short of its face. Davis felt his bones break as it squeezed. He screamed.
The beast took its time lifting him up, jagging his broken bones against each other. Davis screamed until his voice went ragged. He was above the beast’s head, crucified. The beast fell to one knee, a sharp spur on its leg waiting for Davis. The beast roared out its triumph.
Davis looked down to see the beast’s knee was resting in a puddle.
“Yeah, so’s your mother,” he said.
And dropped the power line into the water.
The last thing he heard was Chloe calling his name.
Author’s notes: Well, that was… intense.
Clearly, one of the big opportunities from turning Eric Summers into Doomsday was to have this blow-out confrontation between Davis and Doomsday, where Davis has snapped but decided to take Doomsday with him, almost. And of course there is Davis trash-talking Eric, which I think some of you will appreciate. Since this is Davis vs. Doomsday, you gotta have some way of pwning Eric in there, and this fits.
Of course, all the Luthor stuff comes a little full circle here, with Lex and finally Lionel able to talk Davis into opposing Doomsday. For whatever reason, I wanted to subvert the cliché where the hero’s girlfriend or bestie or mentor talks him into saving the day, and actually have the villain, who is very ends-justify-the-means in a way no other member of the cast is, talk Davis out of his funk.
Of course, one of the problems of doing these author’s notes is that I wrote this fic a while ago, got it betaed, revised it, started posting it, and now I’m writing this just before I’m posting it. So if you ask “hey, how come Lionel calls Davis bubba instead of pal?”, I’m just like
This is why writing porn is easier. I can just get away with saying “because it’s hot.”
I did actually want to post it yesterday, but it needed just a little more clean-up. Just, like, sixty words that got cut out, but I think they make a difference. Well, one more to go, then I close all these tabs to Smallville comms.
Fandom: Smallville
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,218
Author’s Note: Betaed by
vagrantdream.Characters/Pairings: Chloe/Davis, Clark/Lois, Lionel, Lex, Eric Summers,
Last Part: Chapter 19
Next Part: Chapter 21
Summary: Doomsday has come to Smallville.
Davis tried to dodge Red Eyes, but it wasn’t after him. It lunged into Clark, so close Davis felt the wind of its passage, then it was pinning Clark to the ground.
It was growing. Davis could see horns and bone spurs tearing out of Eric’s body as its skin thickened to a gray, corpse-like pallor. Its muscles grew like tumors, opening up the tears his spikes had made. The end of the transformation was more beast than man. It roared in Clark’s face with a mouth of sharp daggers.
Clark shoved it away; the beast hit the second level of the room, fell. It landed on its feet like a cat. For all its bulk, the thing was agile. It lunged again for Clark, who blurred out of the way. No sooner had the beast landed than its arm lashed out and caught Clark. It threw him through the wall, deep into the horizon. After a jubilant howl, the thing looped after Clark on all fours.
Davis fell to his knees, trembling, just one more piece of debris settling.
”What the fuck was that thing?” Lex finally asked.
“Me,” Davis said.
***
Lois struggled to see through the rain-hammered windshield with more concentration than she ever used when she actually was driving. Chloe’s fingers were white-knuckled on the wheel and she stared straight ahead as if she could see all the way to the Luthor mansion.
A fencepost struck the windshield, building a glass spider-web over a third of it.
Lois screamed. “Pull over! Chloe, stop this car right now!”
“He needs me!” Chloe shouted back, nerves frayed to the breaking point.
“Look out!”
Chloe jammed on the brakes and her tiny car hydroplaned wildly, the jerking headlights giving them a glimpse of the gray mass bounding across the road. Enough to see it wasn’t human.
The Volkswagen came to a stop, halfway off the road. Chloe unbuckled her seatbelt and got out.
“Where are you going?” Lois cried.
“Whatever that thing was, Davis will be between it and innocent people. That’s where I’ll find him.” She pulled her hood on. “Go find a ditch, lie down in it. When this is all over, you have to tell the world what happened here. You have to write Smallville’s obituary.”
***
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death...”
“Davis, I think this is one of those times when God is most likely to help those who help themselves,” Lex cut in.
Davis didn’t move, except to cross himself. “Amen.” He started in on an Our Father.
Lex looked out the hole in the wall, which might as well have been a hole in a submarine for how much water was getting in. Distantly, he could see the graceful funnel of a twister, winding its way through Smallville like a ballet.
“Vault,” he decided, linking his arms under Davis’s shoulders. “Help me!” he shouted to Lionel.
“Lex, that thing’s only purpose is to kill Clark—“
“Dad!” Lex craned his neck back. “Sageeth isn’t in him anymore. It’s loose. You want to stop it, this is the man who knows how. Now help me or get out of my way.”
Lionel got Davis’s legs.
***
Clark saw stars. He kind of liked it; it had never happened to him before. They were all sorts of colors…
He shook his head. He was in town square, at the bottom of a crater filling with run-off. It was at least fifteen feet deep at the center, which was where he was. A sense of déjà vu gripped him, though he couldn’t say why.
No sooner had he recovered than a hand like a vice was crushing his head. It shoved him down under the water. Clark thought of Lois. His eyes burned.
Instantly, every drop of water in the crater turned to steam. The beast reared up, roaring as its flesh peeled away. Anything else would’ve had the decency to die. Red Eyes struck Clark with a closed fist, claws breaking off in his chest, and Luthor flew back into a man-sized sewer tunnel, throwing up sparks where he scraped the sides.
He fell asleep to the sound of the metal tunnel groaning as Red Eyes forced its way in.
***
The Luthors set Davis down amidst the treasure of a thousand cultures and he began another Hail Mary. As Lionel got the door, Lex shook Davis by the collar. “You listen to me, farmboy. Listen! That’s my brother out there, fighting that monster! So if you can stop praying for your immortal soul long enough to tell us how to stop it—“
“Me?” Davis laughed like glass breaking. “I’m not praying for me. I probably don’t even have a soul. I’m praying for you. All of you people, given this extraordinary gift, and what do you do? You try to figure out how to patent it, and kill people with it, and use it to get laid. What’s the point of fighting it? Our ability to control the world has finally outraced our ability to control ourselves. We’re an endangered species. All we can do now is hope that God gets it right next time.”
“Davis, you can’t condemn the entire human race on the actions of a few. Of course you’ve seen blood. You’re a First Responder. It’s your job to see evil and heal it. But you can’t lose faith that there’s another world out there, where people love and…”
“There isn’t,” Lionel said gravely.
Lex looked up at him. “Could you pick a worse moment?”
“If you’re saying it gets easier, son, you’re wrong. It does not, let me assure you.” Lionel crouched down in front of Davis. “‘Fallen’ is the, ah, nicest way I can put it. The human heart can justify any betrayal, any harm, any depravity.”
Davis’s eyes shot up, as if to say ‘you’d know’. Lionel pressed on.
“So we fight, we sweat, we bleed to make this world of ours run a bit smoother, because it’s all we can do. If you want to lie there like a martyr and wait for the Kingdom of Heaven, that’s your decision. But I’m going to move the world.” Lionel’s voice rose, his eyes burning as hot as Davis’s ever had, his face turning red. “I will push it, shove it, throw myself against it until I’m black and blue to move it one tiny inch…!”
Lionel took a deep breath. He met Davis’s eyes. He exhaled. “So at the end of the day, those I love will have a brighter future. Maybe I‘m not the best man to lead the world. But at least I’m trying. Now, my son is in danger. Please.”
He got down on his knees in front of Davis.
“I beg you. If there’s anything you can do… help my boy.”
Davis looked at Lionel and was struck by the sheer pleading in his eyes. The muscles of his jaw clenched, his lips pressing into a thin line, then parting. His eyes shifted, looking from father to son and back again. He closed his mouth. Drew himself up to his full height. Turned to Lex, his face lit by the green glow of a piece of meteor rock. “Either of you own a Hummer?”
***
Clark woke up to a pain in his foot. He looked down to see the beast had bitten off his shoe and two of his toes. Screaming, Clark kicked at it with his other foot. Destruction rippled through the beast and into the undersized sewer tunnel. The Richer Scale jogged. The creature shrugged off Clark’s blows and planted its arms on either side of it. With a modicum of strength, it began to rend open the tunnel.
Clark scooted backward, heels and elbows, as he realized what it was doing. Rising water lapped at him, plastered his clothes to his skin. Debris fell into the splitting tunnel, breaking on Clark and splashing him when it landed in the water under him.
The beast ripped the tunnel open, burying Clark in moss-covered bricks. Clark broke free, kicked away as the beast reached for him with its freed arm. The hand closed just short of his ankle. Clark blew sheer cold at it, freezing the tunnel into ice. The beast immediately began to hammer through.
Clark scrambled on all fours, grabbing the lowest rung of a tunnel and pulling himself up. In seconds, he had butted the manhole cover away and was pulling himself into open air.
He picked up the heavy lid and stood over the manhole, waiting for the beast to hit the bottleneck.
“C’mon, you son of a bitch,” he muttered to the deserted street. “You got a taste of me. Now come up here and eat my—“
A gray hand burst out of the asphalt and hooked on Clark’s leg, then flung him sideways through a parking meter and into a display window. Clark saw everything turn black again.
***
Gabe Sullivan had just recovered from hearing a tree fall through his picture window when he heard a new sound. The roar of a V8 engine as (he looked through a boarded-up window) a black Hummer barreled onto his frown lawn and skidded to a stop just shy of his porch. Davis leapt out wearing, of all things, a paramedic’s uniform. “Hey, Mr. Sullivan. Is Chloe home?”
Gabe threw open the door. “Get inside! Jesus! What the heck is going on?”
Davis assumed a thoughtful expression, like he was thinking of how best to sum it up, before he settled on “Some serious shit. But no, really, is Chloe here? I kinda need to talk to her.”
“She’s not here. She went to the cemetery.”
“Oh.” Davis’s mask cracked almost imperceptibly. “I guess I’ll meet her there. Well, when you see her again, tell her… tell her I… tell her she was right about me. And take care of her, will you? She is way more special than she realizes.”
“I know,” Gabe said, confused. “I will.”
Davis looked past Gabe. “Hey, can I borrow that shotgun?”
***
Clark felt his back being cut to ribbons as he was dragged out of the storefront. He wondered how bad it was if a little glass could cut him. Then he saw the beast standing over him and realized that very soon, it wouldn’t matter.
“What are you?” Clark spat, along with a good deal of blood.
The beast stood over him, a thunderhead made flesh. Its mouth opened like a gash widening. “Doom,” it said in a voice as deep as the grave.
It stomped on him and Clark felt a rib go. A kick, and there went another. He rolled over, closing in on himself, trying to protect himself like a fetus in the womb. The rain stung his many wounds like a thousand red-hot needles working their way deeper and deeper.
For a moment the barrage stopped (that was what it felt like, like an artillery barrage), then the beast fell on all fours and bit into his neck. Blood, thick and hot, rolled down Clark’s back as the beast shook him in its jaws, swiping his body through brick and mortar, slapping him against the sidewalk.
Then he heard a V8 engine.
Davis snapped the headlights on an instant before the H2 hit Red Eyes, letting it see who was in the driver’s seat. The glare blinded it and then, collision. As big and tough as the beast was, it was much less an immovable object than the Hummer was an irresistible force.
The car ripped the beast off Clark and punched it through the sliding doors into the supermarket, snapping it through three aisles before burying it in the frozen foods section. The beast was smashed through the doors, through the trays of frozen goods, and into the stacks of beer cartons behind the walkway. Its face dented the hood and oozed blood.
Davis, for his part, lifted his bloody head off the wheel to see the beast slumped on the hood of his totaled car. “Hello again,” he muttered.
A hand clawed into the hood like the talons of a gargantuan bird of prey landing. The other hand scraped down the hood like a spider’s legs.
Davis hit the release button on his seatbelt. It didn’t release.
“Oh, fuck my life.”
The beast shoved the Hummer back and up with all its might. The H2, tearing through ceiling tiles and florescent lights, cleared the store before it even came back down. Davis stomped on the brakes, but he might as well have been stomping on the radio. He saw a gas station rearing up in the rear-view, then he spun the wheel. The Hummer veered into the deep crater Clark had made when he landed.
Davis felt his back wrench when the rear door splashed down. He tried his door. It wouldn’t open. Water was rising up the backseat. He snatched Gabe’s shotgun from the passenger seat and smashed out the windshield with the rifle butt. He wiggled out, pulled himself on top of the H2’s grille to see Clark, in a watery pool of his own blood, and the beast limping towards him.
Davis leapt onto stable ground and felt his ankle scream with pain. He leaned on the shotgun as a crutch, took a few steps away from the crater, then brought it up. He fired a shot into the beast. A shower of sparks against its bony hide was the only response. It took another step and dragged itself closer to Clark.
Davis pumped the shotgun, breathing hard now. Pain was coming in from all over his body and spots were appearing and disappearing in front of his eyes, but he shoved those to the back of his mind. He took careful aim again, and fired again. The beast’s chest exploded like the Halloween he’d lit a firecracker in a pumpkin. Blood and gristle dribbled out of the hole. The beast just snorted and walked through what was left of the storefront.
Clark was directly in front of it, sprawled on the sidewalk with an arm down in the gutter. Davis fired a third shot over him, into the beast’s crushed leg. The thing roared as bone chips flew out the other side of its leg.
Davis racked another shot, sending pain shooting through his arm. “Come on and die, you son of a bitch!” Davis screamed, firing and blowing up a bone spur.
The beast reached down, took hold of Clark. Its hand covered his entire head. It hoisted him up like a rag doll.
Davis threw the gun aside. “Eric Summers!”
The beast paused, like a dog hearing a whistle.
“You wanna know why Holly won’t go out with you? It’s because everyone knows you’re the biggest fucking loser in Smallville!”
The creature’s head slowly rotated to look at him.
“I mean, really now. Is there a single limp-dick idiot in this town more pathetic than you?” Davis walked backward. “You smell like a fucking junkyard. All you ever do is whine about how girls won’t go out with you, like you have some God-given right to see their panties. It’d almost be amusing, only you’re such a bitch about it.”
Clark slipped through the beast’s fingers as it focused all its attention on Davis, who was walking around the crater.
“And now you have superpowers and whoa, big surprise, you still can’t get laid. Maybe if you spent a little less time masturbating and a little more time actually being nice to people, someone would bother to get to know you? Just a theory, shithead.”
The beast roared, smashed the ground with its fist. Water exploded up, chips of concrete shooting everywhere. Davis felt them sting his face.
“Let’s just face it, Eric. Even with superpowers, you’re still just a pale reflection of me! And now you’re a fucking bug-eyed monster and you still bore me to tears. It’s literally astonishing that a human being could be such a huge fucking disappointment. I mean, no wonder your daddy’s ashamed of you. He wanted a son, and you’re just this… sniveling mass of polyp.”
The bone spurs retracted a short way into the beast’s body, its face twitched, and then the spikes shot out longer than ever. It roared again, louder than ever.
“Come on, motherfucker! Come get me! I’m right here!”
The beast surged forward, shouldering a parked car out of its way. The Studebaker flew end over end down the street. Davis turned and ran, pushing his way into a Laundromat… not fast enough. The beast impacted the doorway, slapping against his back. Davis went flying, slamming into a washing machine, cracking its window. He tasted blood. Sound thundered in his ears as the beast crashed trough the doorway in a shower of debris.
Davis scrambled for the back door, feet slipping on the cold linoleum, going on all fours when he had to. He just managed to get out of the way as the beast pounced, coming so close a bone spur ripped a line through his flapping jacket. The thing took out a bank of washing machines. The impact jarred Davis off his feet and he landed on his elbow, sharp pain piercing his body.
He laid on his back, every hurt in his body mobbing him. Please, God… I don’t wanna die…
He heard a hiss. Electricity.
Through the flapping backdoor, he could see downed power lines.
Davis slipped the Luthors’ Kryptonite out of his pocket.
He fought his way to his feet as the beast pulled itself loose from the wall.
Their eyes locked, brown and red.
Davis ran, rolling over a line of dryers and sprinting for the door. The beast was right on his ass, smashing through the dryers. Davis registered one flying overhead and punching through the wall. He heard the beast roar and dropped down, skidded on the wet floor as its hand closed above him, then the glowing EXIT sign was casting its light on him. He rocketed through the door, felt the rain slap his face, took in the power lines. He was holding the Kryptonite in one hand. He dove for the power lines with the other, grabbed one by the rubber coating…
Felt a massive hand close on his leg.
Davis whirled around, jabbing the power line at the beast. It grabbed his arm with its other hand, stopping the power line cruelly short of its face. Davis felt his bones break as it squeezed. He screamed.
The beast took its time lifting him up, jagging his broken bones against each other. Davis screamed until his voice went ragged. He was above the beast’s head, crucified. The beast fell to one knee, a sharp spur on its leg waiting for Davis. The beast roared out its triumph.
Davis looked down to see the beast’s knee was resting in a puddle.
“Yeah, so’s your mother,” he said.
And dropped the power line into the water.
The last thing he heard was Chloe calling his name.
Author’s notes: Well, that was… intense.
Clearly, one of the big opportunities from turning Eric Summers into Doomsday was to have this blow-out confrontation between Davis and Doomsday, where Davis has snapped but decided to take Doomsday with him, almost. And of course there is Davis trash-talking Eric, which I think some of you will appreciate. Since this is Davis vs. Doomsday, you gotta have some way of pwning Eric in there, and this fits.
Of course, all the Luthor stuff comes a little full circle here, with Lex and finally Lionel able to talk Davis into opposing Doomsday. For whatever reason, I wanted to subvert the cliché where the hero’s girlfriend or bestie or mentor talks him into saving the day, and actually have the villain, who is very ends-justify-the-means in a way no other member of the cast is, talk Davis out of his funk.
Of course, one of the problems of doing these author’s notes is that I wrote this fic a while ago, got it betaed, revised it, started posting it, and now I’m writing this just before I’m posting it. So if you ask “hey, how come Lionel calls Davis bubba instead of pal?”, I’m just like
This is why writing porn is easier. I can just get away with saying “because it’s hot.”
I did actually want to post it yesterday, but it needed just a little more clean-up. Just, like, sixty words that got cut out, but I think they make a difference. Well, one more to go, then I close all these tabs to Smallville comms.
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Date: 2009-09-15 11:00 pm (UTC)Oh wow, seriously, I actually need to calm down after reading that, it was so intense.
I don't think that I can say anything to adequately express how much I love this chapter, so I think I'll just say that the last line was like icing on an already to-die-for cake. It just brought the whole Davis circle back to the beginning without really resolving anything (since that's what next chapter's for (I hope)).