Timor (part 4 of 5)
Title: Timor (maybe I should rename it... the 101 fear-fantasies of Chloe Sullivan That's a spoiler)
Rating: light?M(for this part) Don't pretend you weren't watching for it. Chloe trying to keep herself together and knowing what she feels. necrophilia-ish vibes which may disturb. or you know, not, you-person-who-made-me-expand-the-idea.
Chloe's going mad, or is she? Plot too, though, and some Davis. Dr. Emil! ZOMBIES! What is this you say about Oliver's plan?
Length: Long. for this part, too lazy for wordcount around 4,000.
Summary: Despite what Davis said, something is between Chloe and the rest of her life. Why does the Clark's plan terrify her so much?
Part of Injustice, but mostly Doomsday. Chloe/Davis, Chloe/Clark something but there's a strain on that too.
-part one- -part two - part three- -this part- -part five-
Chloe woke in the dark, under sheets that smelled like him, clutching at a rosary (his rosary) tangled along the headboard of the cot.
On the road, some nights she used to wonder about how he held on, if he could even believe at all. It had to be tough to wake up and learn that the salvation you believed in wasn’t even meant for you.
In a world with alien saviors, perhaps some great hand of God shouldn’t have seemed too unimaginable at all. Perhaps people just needed to believe in something.
Just like this was probably all in her mind, her guilt, her fear telling her that he wouldn’t leave her.
Yet, she’d seen him and it felt like too much of a message. Maybe wanting to believe was enough.
Before the Planet opened or Clark got through his beauty sleep, she was at the door of a farmhouse demanding that he give her a scalpel so she could cut out whatever was left of the arrow in Davis’s chest.
She looked crazy- make-up less, off balance on the crutch, clutching her jacket to her chest. She sounded crazy, babbling things about dreams but Clark would let her in anyway.
He did, into the tiny closed cellar with the cool, cool air and she could barely breathe because the walls seemed to close in on her.
Davis was lying on a stretcher, the kind Clark must have called in a favor for, the kind Davis had been pushing for the half-of his life before the nightmare really began.
Clark left them (her) alone.
The room was barely lit and it softened Davis’s face, drew shadows across a dimpled chin, across the hollows of his throat. Not tense, like he had been in life. He used to look at her as if she could take that away, and she wondered if she really ever could. She had never seen him like this before.
She reached out a hand and heard nothing except her breath rasping out into the air. He looked at peace and she just wanted him to open his eyes. She needed him to open his eyes.
She stood there for the longest time, leaning hard on the bed, unable to move.
When she finally worked up the courage to push her hands past Davis’s skin, his blood was cool and viscous like it wouldn’t have been pumping in life. His body could have shut itself down.
Her fingers closed around the rock, finally. The thimble sized, darkened green point came out with a sucking sound but she was already listening for him, some foreign sound, the slightest hint of something.
She sat on the fold up chair next to the bed, her bloody hand over his chest where his pulse should have been.
Waiting.
Clark found her that night lying in the stretcher next to him. Her right hand was still over his chest, the fingers of her left running over the red beads, her eyes hollow.
There were two burials the next day.
Half of the citizens of Metropolis were saying their goodbyes to Oliver.
She leaned on Clark, working not to put any weight on her leg, working not to close her eyes. He was still wan and bruised and he could barely come up with an expression for the few cameras for the pictures that would go in the papers.
They made quite a pair.
The sky was clouded white when the drizzle began.
Hundreds of people in suits cowered under black umbrellas. They looked more inconvenienced than saddened; the CEOs that Oliver had done business with probably every waking day of his life.
No one knew him, them, what they’d done: no one knew. Those same men and women probably believed that the monster rampaging through the streets was some huge hoax.
It was best that way.
Some did know.
Dinah. Bart cowering in the back, away from the thick flanks of businessmen. (Perhaps the temptation to pick a few fat, self satisfied pockets hadn’t left him.)
They said some prayers around the coffin, something for his immortal soul, and Chloe just listened, watched afterwards as people shuffled by his coffin and placed flowers on the bower already on it before it was lowered into the ground.
There was no more lingering resentment, the feeling of being caged. Oliver would have killed without thought, but he’d been helping at the end. He died the way he wanted to.
He was a comrade, whatever else he had thought about her. About what was right for Davis. He’d trusted Davis to die, and it was not like he had faith in anyone. It hadn’t helped either of them in the end.
Chloe couldn’t lean and knock on the wood like Clark did, not wonder what he was apologizing for. She was having enough time supporting herself after two hours, her eyes wanting to slam themselves shut. She knew they couldn’t, knew what would happen if they did.
Tess Mercer was ahead of her dropping an exotic flower onto the coffin, kneeling by it for a bare second. She looked just like one of those old icy print outs from Glamour, contemplating her new position. Then she rose up with all the grace of a stalking cat, and nodded.
They shouldn’t even have been on nodding terms. Lois had gone missing and reappeared, her old self. She said she’d gotten injured in the hubbub as the Planet collapsed around them. There was something different, knowing that lingered in her eyes. Chloe didn’t know where she went, but it wasn’t on a concussion sized trip. As much as Tess had sworn to Clark that she had nothing to do with it, Chloe knew she knew something.
Tess was almost the literal widow of Luthorcorp, now, in complete control of that. More power than she’d had before, if she got the major creditors for Queen Industries at her back.
She’d gotten what she wanted, her alien savior. Death.
She hadn’t come by to harass Clark since he accused her of Lois’s disappearance. She stepped back as if she was blameless in the whole thing.
If she hadn’t pushed Oliver to discover his inner darkness, if she hadn’t been so obsessed with turning Clark into her tool, if she hadn’t sent those goons after them, they would have…
Things might not have changed one bit. Chloe knew more than a lot about alien DNA and pre-programmed genetic urges but for that moment it didn’t seem to matter to her.
They could have had a chance.
Chloe was going to take her down, whatever it took, she almost couldn’t help throwing the gauntlet down, swearing it. A stupid move now.
Clark hadn’t finished with his last words to Oliver. This didn’t even involve him, so he couldn’t exactly stop her, could he?
But then Dinah had an arm on her shoulder, pulling her away for her comfort or her own, she didn’t know.
Funerals for front-page serial murderers were less of a production.
It was just the two of them again, she and Clark, rain was dripping onto their faces to the ground and it was getting dark.
Clark had decided to it would be at the center of the Kent farm. This was the place where Davis belonged. Not some grave in the middle of nowhere. This.
She wondered how much of this was his own sense of responsibility and how much was really loss. Of course Clark had lost that last tie he had to his home world.
He’d wanted to save Davis too. He hadn’t needed to.
Clark dug into the dirt on the spot at a human, plodding pace. Something told her he had to do it the human way for this, pushing the shovel deep, getting dirt on his sleeve. Only Clark wouldn’t notice the dirt on his tuxedo.
There was enough room now.
“Not yet.” She said, and she hadn’t been supposed to do this. She’d been looking away; to the ground, anywhere else but him, his body and she couldn’t now.
Davis was dressed like he had been before he’d died, the same rips in the shirt, triangle shaped over pale skin. Someone--Clark had cleaned the blood off him, after that time.
There wasn’t even a coffin.
She had been under an impression, somehow, that it wouldn’t be like this.
It was her, hearing that whispery sound in her head. She couldn’t see the slightest tremor to tell her that he was. Move. Move. Movemovemovemove. Something. Anything would have been enough.
He still looked too alive.
Her hands had looked too dirty and that’s why her mother had made her wash them. Again and again and again.
Clark had told her again and again about the Kryptonite and the poisons and it had been a whole week.
Davis was as pale as he had been in her basement, and his lashes were closed against his cheeks.
Mouth soft, not shut tight like it could have been with rigor mortis by now.
Beautiful. Maybe he was just Kryptonian.
Gravediggers during plague times had been frightened by this, so much that they had exorcised corpses, kept them dead by cramming bricks into their mouths.
The Kryptonite arrow hadn’t killed Clark. On hopeless impulse she pressed her hands to his wrist, and his hand was slack, devoid of even deceptive warmth.
It was really happening and holding on like this banished any illusion from her mind. There was nothing now, no mission, no Clark to save and she should’ve felt something. The same kind of painful emptiness she’d felt that first time.
He’d come back, then and she’d never reached out, not really.
It hadn’t ever been the right time.
She told herself it was the world and Clark even while she was begging him to make her forget all that.
Davis had had known. He’d pushed himself into a corner like some sort of wounded animal when she would have let him do anything in the world.
She could still feel his hands on her, clutching her, pushing her away.
His eyes had told her he wanted her to stay and fight, but they had been cornering her too. If he’d believed her there was no turning back. He was not Jimmy. Not Clark. He wanted everything
She’d run. She was good at that
Maybe if she had been less willing to take that out she’d have something to remember him by. Maybe if he hadn’t been so much of a damned martyr.
Maybe moments were the only things she could keep.
Clark was quiet, maybe praying or talking or saying something she should have listened to, but she stayed on the ground until he’d finished, pulled her up and hugged her tight. She felt cold.
He was waiting for her to put herself back together again.
She was together.
“Do you want to say something?” he said finally, and she couldn’t for the first time.
It was hard to believe this-all this was, really over.
Clark sprinkled in the first fistful of dirt. He’d only ever done it with Lionel and Jonathan. Maybe that was the end to that centuries old Kryptonian family feud.
Maybe destiny was just a fancy word for nothing, but that little revelation had come too late.
The dirt turned to mud on Davis’s cheek, and she had to turn away then.
What was death really? Blankness? The absence of feeling?
Davis Bloome had believed that there would always be something left, something to linger after everything, It, passed.
Not a soul maybe, if he had none. Perhaps even a hell for someone who wasn’t even human.
Something.
Everything around him warped, twisted itself into a fever dream. There had been something outside of him. Someone’s face. A voice whispering familiar words. A touch. Something he needed to reach. Something he did not.
His body wasn’t his to command and this time there was no monster inside him to fight. He couldn’t convulse, couldn’t move, but somewhere in this void of light he existed.
Blackness. Suffocating Blackness.
Heaven. Hell.
A memory.
Chloe didn’t go home to the Talon. To the basement.
They had to talk, Clark said, so very rationally that she wondered if he had been thinking this the entire time.
She hadn’t been in the Kent farm so long she’d almost forgotten how it looked, had forgotten the artificial warmth of the fire he couldn’t feel.
She didn’t tell him then about all the things she’d never answered on the phone, about the running, about Davis, about the distance until the words stopped choking her. She didn’t tell him about that night.
You can talk to me, he said his eyes soft and blue and pitying, and those weren’t his words to say. He didn’t need to fix her. She had to get past this.
She sat stiffly, clutched her hands over tea and thought that strange look in his eyes couldn’t have been guilt.
Clark broached the Jimmy issue first. She hadn’t heard from him, hadn’t wanted to. Clark didn’t talk about him the same way he had right after the divorce. It was about making peace now, like he was just anyone, not the man she had to go back to.
“I let him find out.” Clark said, and maybe he wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been an arrow in his back. Either way Jimmy had believed just about enough to kill someone.
Clark was soft-voiced and reasonable. As far as Jimmy had known Davis was a murderer. Oliver was dead; he put the pieces together, wrong. The larger cynical part of her wondered how much of that had been about what he wanted to believe.
Why did it suddenly matter now that Davis was dead?
She couldn’t do anything now and she’d never been one for helpless anger. Clark wasn’t holding her hands down to keep them from slamming into something.
“You can’t punish him for that.” He still said, carefully.
“The police would probably pin a medal on him.” She could see it already; ‘Local Photographer takes down the Cornfield killer’. Over a woman, no less, that’s how the paper was likely to print it.
Clark told her Oliver had left Jimmy something and with that, his duties fulfilled, skipped town taking his secret with him. Nothing was left to hold him here, and maybe he could find a cure for his little problem elsewhere.
Just like that.
Clark wasn’t exactly telling her to drag Jimmy back so he wouldn’t reveal it.
“I’m sorry.” Clark said. “You cared about saving, about him and I didn’t want to see it at first. This is because of me. If I had kept you both from leaving…”
“He wouldn’t have died?” It was never as simple as he thought. “If I had trusted either of you more this wouldn’t have happened. “
Jimmy had killed Davis, he’d killed himself, she had killed him too.
She had almost stayed a little bit longer, enough to save him. Jimmy wouldn’t have shot through her to get to him.
She could’ve explained. She hadn’t, not when Clark was getting torn to pieces out there.
“I caused this.” he said doggedly, looking at her, waiting for something, another denial.
She didn’t reassure him. Not that time.
Maybe it was about him after all.
Funny how when she saved someone, she was always blaming them when the other didn’t live.
(A statement. The truth and a lie.
It ended.
It would never end for her.)
Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Over and over for the past hour.
She didn’t know the words.
She wanted to believe.
She hadn’t heard a rustle, a jolt. He was completely quiet, hands still and callused like a martyrs.
It must have been hours, seconds to her. She stretched out her leg again, pushed her foot in the cast where pins and needles were going through it and moved her hand up where the blood was starting to dry. She didn’t like the quiet, didn’t want to believe she was alone. She wasn’t. Sometimes the sound of her voice was enough.
“Don’t make me wait so long, Davis.” And that felt small.
She reached out to touch his cheek and she felt the firmness of marble. His face hadn’t moved. Not one inch.
She’d closed her eyes, trying to remember how he had been. It couldn’t be just her imagining a new, troubled line to his forehead. The barest shift was something.
The cold of the night, the sound of crickets calling to their mates filled her mind dully, hissed over the whisper of moving cloth as she straightened.
That sound… there barely. Thick. Far off. Fragile. Like a heartbeat under tons of rock. She winced, focused. When she reached for his pulse his fingers tangled against the rosary in her hand.
Davis’s hands were cool, not quite cold, not marble. She felt their pressure, a movement so light she would have missed it had she not been holding her breath.
She pushed herself up beside him, feeling frantically at his face, trying to feel every beginning of a quake, tremor, crevice.
“Breathe. I know you’re in there. Come on, breathe.”
She couldn’t push down on his sternum without hurting him more. She straddled him, ran shaking hands along his face, waiting for a lean in, a nudge. A breath.
He should have been breathing so she tried to make him, tried to push her breath into his lungs, head light and almost wheezing from lack of oxygen. Pushing with all her might.
She had expected blood. He really didn’t taste like much of anything at all. She felt like she was fighting, dying and then somehow his lips weren’t marble anymore, sliding deeply against hers, drawing away.
It was there. It was more than there, the whisper of breath that had never really left him. She would have known.
His eyes opened, and those were his eyes the exact shade of brown she thought she’d never see again.
“Chloe. This. Dream.”
It wasn’t this simple. Couldn’t be.
She was laughing and crying and touching him and he was coughing, pulling more breath into his lungs.
“I knew it. I knew you. I need you.”
“Ditto. I’m dreaming.” He murmured.
“Don’t you ever do that again.”
He reached out and she wasn’t really fending him off.
”Not now, big boy. We’re going to fix that first.”
She hadn’t realized how much she’d loved his almost-not-quite smile until that moment. His chest was moving up and down, real for the moments until she could feel him breathe against her, shifting until she was lying under him after all.
She didn’t get to the protest. She couldn’t.
His hands felt heavy against her neck and the thrum of his body over hers was familiar and alien. Next to him she used to find herself throwing the sheets off, the heat of him trickling past her skin.
This was different. A good different, her hands pushing into his shoulders, the light half-groan he made when his freezing hands drew her leg around him and made her shiver into him. The only warmth seemed to come from somewhere in her chest.
She needed this, she breathed this- the small sounds between them, the near-silence, his eyes warm and pushing everything out of perspective.
Then, impossibly, there was no perspective at all.
She was aware that the silence was not silence at all, screaming out at her, chiming. He didn’t seem surprised, resigned. Something was happening.
“No. You said we’d build a life together.”
He was leaving her arms, skin graying and cooling into stillness. “I can’t stay here. Not now.” she must have heard him say that. She did. He'd been awake. He'd been alive. She'd heard.
When she touched his face, slapped it, trying to get the blood back, his mouth was closed, loose. He was suddenly heavy, so heavy.
“I need this. I need you to stay.” she was pleading, trying to make him move.
It was in her mind, probably all in her mind.
I'm always what you need.
And he was. Not this way. Not this.
She woke that next morning, clamminess heavy on her fingertips, in her throat, in her mouth. Every inch of her seemed to throb, and she hadn’t been touched.
That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all. She hadn't been able to make him breathe. He hadn't ever woken up. It had ended softly, without a sound. No movement from him no matter how she shook, or held, or cried. Clark soft voiced, prying her fingers from his cold ones, saying he didn’t hear anything at all.
She did not know which was worse.
She got up, light blinking beside her. The chiming.
Missed call, her cell read. Clark Kent.
Her fingers hovered over the numbers, pausing, waiting. She didn’t want to keep this alone. Telling him could sooth it all away, make it numb.
She didn’t call back.
The Watchtower lived.
She had always needed a purpose. The Watchtower was hers and she could get Isis back up again on her own.
Lord knew the world still needed that.
The gang activity had gone up again in the absence of the red and blue blur. His rest and recovery, utter disappearance led to speculation. (Was he a myth? A hoax? Was he dead?) There were shootings every night, not counting the strange things happening with the meteor infected out there.
Tess had been too quiet lately. There had been no more harassment to Clark and it worried Chloe that she had something worse up her sleeve.
The gang didn’t quite fall apart without Oliver. Most of them knew how things were run anyway. Bart, Dinah, AC, Cyborg…. The core structure was all there.
All except Clark.
Clark had all but become a ghost in Smallville. The day after and the day after he called her, kept speaking around things like she was fragile, pushed her for things that she could never tell. Not a day passed when he didn’t bring up Davis, the ‘ordeal’, how she felt about the past. It grew tiring to fight him wanting to pull that out of her every moment of every day, wanting her to let it go. It was the one thing that she could keep.
The first time she called to him it was because the world needed him. “Putting your superhero suit in action?” She’d asked false optimism coloring her voice. He didn’t need to open his mouth for her to know he had come to say goodbye.
He spoke, rote enough that it could have been memorized. The fact that he was here, that Tess and later Jimmy knew his secret had lead to Davis’s death. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. Now that Doomsday had been defeated he had to learn to become what he needed to be.
If he put It into a hole in the ground and expected that was the end of it, he had something coming.
“We didn’t defeat It. It was just another of your lucky breaks.”
It was Oliver’s Plan, Clark said, half-offended. That the magma would destroy it and the rock would reform every time It tore his way out.
She wondered if cluelessness was a sickness that struck all the superheroes in Metropolis.
Oliver had counted on one thing, Davis, to keep it down there. Davis wasn’t and at any moment she expected It to come hurtling out of the ground to cause more destruction.
“That won’t be enough to stop it. Maybe that can thwart it maybe, like Sisyphus. But it will get stronger. On Earth, under Earth…. It’s more of a danger than ever. Davis is not in there, like Oliver planned. It’s not going to try to protect people. For an indestructible creature, forever doesn’t matter.“
“It’s under thousands of metric tons of rock!”
“It’s practically made out of rock! Or something a lot tougher.”
“And if we open the portal and let it out, like you said, I won’t be able to stop it and their sacrifices will be for nothing.”
“There are ways, alright?” There were. Tess had destroyed the Crystal maybe. But there were ways. “I can help you fix this.”
“Just like that? Is it that easy for you Chloe, really? It isn’t for me.”
“And are you willing to take the risk that it’ll burst out of there? If you’re feeling guilt now I can’t even imagine…”
“Just admit you’re hurting. Don’t use me to deal with this.”
She knew what he thought--Chloe Sullivan didn’t deal, she buried it under everything else until it disappeared into her. It had worked well enough for half her waking life.
“Don’t use this to run away, Clark.”
“I’m not. I’m finally taking your advice, like I should have with Tess. Maybe you were right. I’m not human. I’m meant to be stronger. Maybe I shouldn’t forget that.”
“That won’t be the end of it, you know. Jimmy found out because you let him. No one has to be…”
“I’m sorry, I have to leave.”
“And what happens when he finds you?”
“I’ll be ready.”
That’s it. You’re going to leave me alone like this? She’d wanted to ask, demand. If it hadn’t been for him maybe she wouldn’t have known anything about life more complicated than how long it took to publish her next story.
“You want to be a hero. So what about helping people? Your people from something that could rip them apart?”
He was supposed to be her bedrock but he was only himself.
“Clark Kent has to die.” He told her. “---if I’m going to do that.”
He left and she only felt the wind hitting her face.
She hunched over the thousands of papers on kryptonite and comas and exotic poisons, wrapping her arms around herself, feeling some kind of pain. The same emptiness she’d felt even when he was with her.
Clark had left the farm key in her hand.
He’d done this so many times before it was almost habit. It was only to be expected that he’d use Davis as a trigger for another of his little identity crises.
Maybe he would get it right this time.
Operations would go on without him.
She didn’t cry, didn’t close her eyes, didn’t clutch the key so hard it made her bleed. She picked up the phone, pressed in the buttons deep.
Emil Hamilton would be the first new recruit.
In bed that night she felt as if a weight pressed in on her so heavily that she couldn’t breathe**. While the Watchtower lived, the word was still out on Chloe Sullivan.
There was no Clark, no leader. She was Chloe Sullivan, the Watchtower and she wasn’t defined by those around her anymore.
She’d almost started from scratch. They had a few missions, minor ones, gathering Intel on Luthorcorp/Queen Industries, a few drug busts on a substance that brought on temporary meteor powers. She was relearning how to fire her Glock, how to cover Bart or Dinah’s back. She was learning how to match her research to Emil’s.
They were doing something.
When she was on her on her own, another project began to consume what now passed for her life.
It got so that she lived two lives, one asleep and one awake. Most of her memories lived and unlived twisted themselves, wrapped themselves around him. Every time she slept she saw him die, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to stay awake either. She needed to believe.
She didn’t dream herself surrounded by natives with eyes on the spears, wasn’t putting the eye on the tip of the needle*.
Awake she kept seeing the Kryptonite and wondering why it had killed Davis and never Clark, why Oliver had been so sure that Davis wasn’t going to fight. Oliver had never been a big believer in human or alien nature. If he was going to go Cherokee he could have coated his arrows and dropped him like a buffalo.
She had access to her own research. Amazon bullfrogs were among the very earliest entries into the wall of weird. They weren’t enough.
It was easy enough to hack into Tess’s system, the greatest catalogue of herbs there was.
Well. Not easy.
She’d pulled up hallucinogenic herbs - Datura. Tetrodoxin, a paralyzing poison taken from puffer fish on along the coasts of Haiti.
Dr. Emil was in the lab, creating a tranquilizing agent they were going to load into their guns. The JLA was her now and they weren't going to kill.
“Do you have another suggestion for me? I really don’t think creating a zombie army would fit our best interest.” he said finally, staring down at the printouts she'd pushed into his hands.
A man had claimed to be placed under the voodoo curse and to have come back ten years later.
Ten years, not a week. Ten years.
“No. No. There’s something I need to clear up. Call it professional curiosity.” They rarely talked about Clark, like they rarely talked about him. A few questions, with no real answers had assured them both of that. This was the rare exception.
“If this one, tetrodoxin had been used on Clark he wouldn’t have needed an antidote, right?”
“Not if it was removed. The sun’s energy provides Clark with faster metabolism, a faster immune system to deal with those threats.”
“Without the sun, right in the heart, on a kryptonite arrow.”
“So, in your theoretical scenario, if one of those hit him right in the heart and spread it through his body it would not have allowed him to expel the toxin.”
“Would it have killed him?”
“We can’t know with certainty. If he was completely packed underground the likelihood it that it would have is very hig-” No. It wouldn't. He wouldn't. She felt it.
“I need you to identify it for me.”
“The only way that could be any use would to have a sample of this substance. I can’t work from thin air.”
“I don’t have a water bottle now. Would an arrowhead be enough of a sample for you?”
It was.
It was almost midnight and still wet, slippery and she wasn’t using her crutch anymore. She hadn’t asked anyone to come with her. Clark was gone and she didn’t really trust anyone else to do this.
She felt frightened, crazed. Felt.
She was going to desecrate a grave. For Catholics, the grave wasn’t a mere shell for a body, like some part of him lingered there. She hoped.
Maybe this was house of Usher. Maybe she was just officially off her rocker, and just as mad-crazy-nuts as Adella. Maybe she’d just put together the whole conjecture and she’d find a corpse.
She trudged into the mud alone, almost invisible in the black, suffocating sweats. There weren’t many neighbors, and who’d be looking?
It took a few passes of the flashlight to see the stone and the worn palm leaf crucifix on the ground. It was just like they’d left it, but she closed her eyes, listened, really listened.
There was a whisper of a sound, something steady, almost like the drops of water on a leaf. It wasn’t raining.
When she pushed the shovel in the ground, it was heavy, compact with moisture.
Then she could almost hear the sound again, in her ears, under her heartbeat.
Inexplicably, then the dirt was loose around the shovel.
Before she knew it she was clawing into it with her hands.
Endnotes:
*That was Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, in case you’re interested
** heads up to who guesses this. The entire thing ties in with the traditional incubus mythology, I just noticed, except you know dream!Davis is kind of like the ghost of the not-quite-dead-not-quite-yet-lover, not a demon, and a manifestion of Chloe's desires/overactive guilt complex. umm yeah.
I know this is all quite ambiguous. There's still a connection between Chloe and Davis. Explains why she can here him and Clark can't. with her hearrrttt. yes. It's part 4 of 5. Let's see how the reality matches up to the fantasies, shall we?