Timor (part 3 of...5)
Title: Timor (portugese for fear, like the shakira song. you better believe I'm gonna change that, sometime. :p )
Rating: T(for this part) , yeaahhh, it's changing next time around. Right now, smackdowns, and blood is flying all over the place. Somebody dies, oh noes. Somebody is high.
Length: Long. for this part, 4268 words.
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
-part one- -part two -- this part-- -part four- -part five-
Those four solid concrete walls were the only barriers between It and the outside world. Davis must have hit every one and she found herself fighting the urge to squeeze her eyes shut, expecting every time to be the last.
He wasn’t really fighting, just doing what he could, making headlong rushes where It swatted at him like a fly, trying to stay between it and the rest of them.
Bits of gravel flew up around them, making her eyes water, making it hard to see even that.
Her eyes strained to see the spikes piercing through his hand, the skin immediately closing up. She almost asked herself what he was. But she knew exactly what he was. He was as human as Clark.
Blood dotted the walls where he hit. He hadn’t stopped bleeding.
They clashed and he got up again, but each time It pushed him further into a corner.
Maybe Clark could have stopped it, burned it with his heat vision, something, but Davis wasn’t Clark. Each movement seemed an effort, where he tried to gain control of his powers in seconds, to learn what to do. He hadn’t been doing this all his life, only now.
The effort of using the Kryptonian strength dazed him, and if it caught him on one of those moments…
It couldn’t.
She needed to do something. She didn’t have any useful powers, Bart’s speed, Dinah’s paralyzing scream. She helped people, but she couldn’t help him. He was going to lose.
She could plan things, lay traps; and it was the four of them around them both, as if they contain it. He was the distraction now and they were supposed to have a plan.
They were supposed to be heroes and heroes were supposed to be doing something besides staying alive.
Oliver was the leader, but he hadn’t planned for what she did. He took his arrows out again anyway, aimed from the shoulder, and drew the bolt all the way back.
There’s wasn’t a chance even for a modern Robin Hood to hit targets moving at that speed. He could just as well hit Davis.
A part of her, the big part wanted just to grab hold of his arm keep him from aiming that arrow. She didn’t get a chance to.
It got Davis against the wall first, bashed him against it with Its whole bulk. She fancied she could hear the rock starting to quiver, the small shuddering shocks starting. His hand scrabbled for the water pipe, tearing it out by the sharpened end. He was gasping when he moved- slow, slow enough for her to see.
He plunged it in deep into a poker red eye. Its spikes seemed to rebel against the intrusion and he had to jump back to avoid being impaled.
The sharp end pushed itself out, flew and quivered into the opposite wall near her head.
Her hands had already found their target, the contamination alarms. The sound blared loudly forcing her to the floor so that she thought her eardrums would shatter, far enough to be heard out on the streets.
Clark would hear them. He had to. Without him they didn’t stand a chance.
The logic was simple enough that Oliver would have to see, but by this point she was beyond caring if he did.
The Black Canary’s scream sent them both of them to the ground, but It got up quicker. Davis swayed, but didn’t fall.
He wasn’t moving fast enough to get free anymore and there was no chance that It would stop now. Doomsday destroyed that’s just what it did.
It wouldn’t matter how much Dinah screamed now. It was immune, in the same way it had been to Kryptonite after Davis had died.
Dinah couldn’t help here, but she might help Clark later. “Take her.” That was her voice telling Bart.
To get her out of range would exhaust him as it was. Super strength was not among his abilities.
He only nodded at her, like she was ‘the Watchtower’ and not trembling with nerves, didn’t question it. They were a team.
She knew where she had to be.
She told Oliver to go. He was the only one who knew the end-plan and he could do nothing here. He could still help Clark.
It would be just the both of them in the end.
He told her it was his fight as much as it was hers, and right then she knew it wasn’t.
It had Davis and his head snapped back and forth like an elk carcass in the jaws of a lion. She heard the cracks until It let go and this time the rock didn’t just crumble around him, it broke open when he hit it.
There was rumbling, but it wasn’t the monster now, just thousands of tons of concrete foundation.
They were going to be the ones buried, not the monster.
Rocks and bits of rubble sprayed all around the air and it must have been Oliver that shoved her forward.
There was no time, nothing but the sound of the rock and she couldn’t ask what he was doing, couldn’t grab hold of his shoulder in all that green leather. She heard his footsteps stumbling the wrong way (disorientation or a false sense of bravado.) He hadn’t heard her anyway.
It was suicide for her to go back.
The way out was close; it had to be no more than four yards. She couldn’t see anything but she threw herself as far as she could and didn’t think of the blood trickling down her leg. The monster could tear her to pieces but she would get out of this.
A fist sized stone jammed into her abdomen but she crawled, slipped on her hands and pushed herself up, barely missed stumbling again. They had to get out of range. She heard Oliver running behind her and then nothing but the collapsing stone and dying alarms echoing in her ears.
She couldn’t hear clashing or noise but she couldn’t hold still, pretend to be dead in case It was going to kill her.
Nothing moved.
Once they had smashed past the wall maybe It found dozens of life signatures calling to its need for blood. Maybe a few lives were inconsequential to It now that it had the whole world. It was free and It was going to find Clark without Davis to force it to its feet as soon as she appeared.
It couldn’t have just snapped his neck. Not after everything.
She didn’t know.
She could only see for the few yards around her.
The rock hadn’t buried Oliver completely but one deep gouge to his temple had been enough. There hadn’t been much pain for him, and it all seemed completely impossible.
Anticlimactic.
She’d always imagined him going out in a hailstorm of crazy odds. Not like this and her face stung for a moment before she closed his eyes with her hand.
She couldn’t heal him, just like she hadn’t been able to heal anyone since Braniac took her over.
There was a console in his palm, characters written across it. The key to activating his entire plan right there, for Clark or her to decipher now.
She lifted it out of heavy fingers and limped out to the silence. She still could do something, still.
She should’ve been thinking of how to get far enough to warn Clark and maybe they could do something. (Save the hero, save the world, wasn’t that the way she’d thought once?)
She’d stopped.
She’d found Davis twenty feet out, a gout of blood around his head. Not peaceful. Not peaceful at all and that had to mean that he wasn’t dying like he wanted.
She stripped off her jacket briskly, trying to ignore the fact that it was unrecognizable under grime and rock and settled it under his head, watching it go red again.
(Somewhere along the line it had also become about saving the man.) All the thoughts of setting him free were pointless if he didn’t survive.
He was warm still, like the blood making its way out of him and she pushed her hand down on his chest until she could the faint syncopated rhythm of his Kryptonian heart. The strange, adrenaline fueled energy left and her legs folded around her. He was going to live.
She couldn’t get up then, not with the blood that wanted to gush out of her leg and the lightness of her head dizzying her.
She sat there for what must have been minutes, maybe only seconds.
Clark came, took him and her and Oliver’s body out so carefully from under the rubble. His façade was cracking and she’d had the strength to clutch onto his hands then.
He was taking them somewhere they could be safe, but he didn’t understand that she needed to know he would be too.
Maybe he had control of his powers, but he was no god. (Yet, the hardest grip she had was no more of a restraint to him than a cobweb.)
Clark didn’t know the least thing about using Oliver’s device, him go.
She stayed with Davis, a bandage awkwardly wrapped around her leg, knowing he was going to live, understanding the price.
It was unfair. He would’ve died to stop this, wouldn’t have put one more person at risk. And yet if Clark died, she didn’t know if she could forgive him. She couldn't forgive herself.
When his eyes snapped open she got this feeling that he wasn’t really seeing her even when he reached up and his fingers bumped into her face. He would’ve been dazed from all those blows he took and his hands weren’t steady like they usually were.
“This is not the afterlife.” She wanted to reassure him. It sounded like she was choking.
No, in heaven or Vahalla or the Elysian fields there most certainly no angels with grit and tears on their cheeks.
“We got you free now.”
He seemed to come back to himself, pulled his hand back too quickly.
He was seeing the marble floor under them, and they were nowhere near the wall he had been thrown through anymore.
“That means It is free now too, isn’t It?”
“Wreaking havoc. Clark’s gone to stop it.”
“It’s going to kill him.”
“Don’t say that!” And maybe he saw it all right then, the recrimination in her face, the bandage coming loose for every time she’d tried to get up and hadn’t been able to.
“He’s been doing this longer than you. It won’t be able to kill him.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I have to, okay? So just, just let me.”
“When I was created-It was made for that. It can’t die. If I had been in there he might have more of a chance.”
Before he would’ve asked her why, disbelieving and now his eyes just did. But that was buried under the thought that it was still for Clark, because of Clark’s guilt.
She didn’t try to answer. There was no more time for a fruitless heart-to-heart talk.
“He still does. If we trap it, it won’t be able to carry out its mission. If I can get to him, I can help him. You’re going to take me.”
“You can’t go bleeding like that.”
“Sure I can. If you can just help me fix a tourniquet and you don’t drop me, it’ll be...”
He lifted her knee, bunched the slacks to her shin, perfectly professional and she hissed at his probing fingers.
“It’s broken. You’ll be at risk near it and you can’t stand up on your own.”
“Carry me then. I have to do this.”
“No, I do. You were right. It’s because of me. I have to do something.”
He tried once to get to his feet and the jacket slid out from behind him, catching new blood.
He didn’t get far before she grabbed hold of that torn shirt of his and pushed him on his back again. She should have been more careful with the cuts he had there but all she knew was that he was too out of breath to attempt right away.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. He’s your best friend and you signed his death warrant because you both wanted to save me.
I can do something now.”
“All you can hope for is to be a distraction. You didn’t exactly get away unscathed yourself.”
“I’m the wild card now. Maybe distraction will be enough.”
It was a suicide mission. When he walked out of there, sped out of there, she knew with complete certainty that he wasn’t coming back.
“You will die.”
“I’ve been ready for that a long time now.”
He didn’t even try to patch up. There was no time for that, and suddenly she wondered what she was playing at, devil’s advocate in a game with no devil.
She’d told herself that they had to fix this. He could. He might, but she wouldn’t let him.
“You don’t want to die.”
Of course he’d tried. Twice.
“After everything, you tell yourself you want to make up for everything. The truth is you can’t know that, not until it happens.”
“You want him to live.”
“I could never want you die.”
“Why are you doing this now?” His eyes were half closed like he was trying to hold something back.
Maybe he longed for something to hear before he marched off for a noble death and she couldn’t give it to him. She wasn’t Beatrice. She couldn’t just tell him something like why when he was going to leave her behind.
“I did all of that because I didn’t want you to die. I didn’t want Clark to die. Fat lot of help that’s doing.”
Clark was dying out there while she waited around like some idiot. She could hear the splinters of wood, the shuddering sound any time he hit the rock and tore through it. Maybe it was all in her head.
“It’s not my fate to kill him anymore. I can stop this.” He said. If she’d ever been able to tell him not to in a solid voice he would have listened. Maybe. Probably.
She couldn’t choose and this was always what destroyed them both.
“Only if you take me with you.”
“If I don’t have a chance, neither do you. Maybe the last thing I can do is keep you safe.” He wasn’t skidding on the marble and he was halfway to getting up.
“That’s what you call it now? You drugged me to keep me safe and look how that has turned out.”
She clutched to his shoulders this time and her grip had some weight. He was afraid of using that strength of his to get out of her grasp, hurting her, and maybe if he didn’t for just few more seconds he could see.
“I’m not letting you do it to me again. I’m not going to lose anyone else.” She thought maybe her voice was hysterical and he didn’t reply to that, face blank.
She hated when he got like this.
Jimmy stepped out of the shadows, he seemed to blend into them now, and there was a gun in his hands-the one fired the tranq dart.
“He won’t do anything, I promise. You can let go of him now.”
“This is not what you think.”
Davis was looking up at her, almost a dead weight and she shifted, tried to lever with her injured leg so she could keep his head from hitting the pavement.
“Please, do it quickly. This thing won’t work for long on him. We’ve got to go keep him from hurting anyone else.
You won’t want to watch this.”
She could hear the nervous yibber of Jimmy’s foot on the pavement. The whites of his eyes were pinkish, stark against the green of his pupils. He was scared.
“Watch what? You think he was going to hurt someone? Jimmy, he wasn’t going to hurt Clark. He’s free of Doomsday now.
“If he did what you said, he doesn’t exactly seem a shining example of human being. He’s killed people without being a horny monster. He did some horrible things to you.”
“He didn’t do anything to me.”
“Chloe, I heard it over the intercom. You don’t have to lie to me any more. Clark trusted me with his secret.”
She wondered, really, just what he had told him.
“He’s amazing, what he does. What wouldn’t you do to protect him?”
“You’d be surprised.”
She shook her head, wordless and pulled at the needle with her fingers. It was too deep.
“If you didn’t then I don’t know you anymore.” That was just the problem, she thought, but he was holding the dart gun out and she didn’t say anything. He was sweating, and he’d been like this on the pills.
“Jimmy, put that down.”
She didn’t know if the pills still affected him, if maybe he would see the monster again regardless of what was there.
“I don’t see myself protecting Clark right now, Jimmy. I see you aiming a dart gun at me.”
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that.”
His hands were shaking and he looked as if he had forgotten he was holding it.
“I bought this place for you, you know. So you could be safe here. I’m buying it back from Oliver. I always hoped you’d see it. “
“It’s lovely, Jimmy, but this is hardly the time...”
“I never stopped believing in us. Just let me help you, now, why don’t you?”
“You’re right. I need your help. Oliver knew what we needed to do. He is trying to help Clark. Davis was trying and being really stupid about it.
You know what they say believe only half of what you hear…”
“And nothing that you see.”
Somehow he recognized the console in her hand, maybe from working with Oliver.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing. But Oliver knows what’s going on. I’ll help you.” he said. “We can protect Clark together.” His eyes had a strange gleam to them like she’d never seen. Jimmy had never been so zealous before. Not her, for sure.
They needed all the help they could get.
“First, we’ll get him out of here, and then maybe you can take me to this plant of Oliver’s. He should come to soon so we won’t have to drag him. “
He put his hands on the dart and pulled, hands unsteady so he almost jabbed Davis again.
“Watch out, there.”
She didn’t know if Jimmy was listening.
“Where’s Oliver?” he asked.
Davis’s eyes were half open now, and Jimmy nearly tripped over his feet to get away before she answered him. Once the drug wasn’t leeching into Davis’s system it wouldn’t keep him down for long.
I’ll go help you, I‘ll go help you, Jimmy said. She could imagine the memories were hard to let go of.
Davis was trying to grab at his neck and she kept his hands away and let his fingers curl around hers instead. He would do more harm than good now.
“Jimmy’s going to help me do this thing with Clark and I just need you to stay put for a little while.” In some ways she was grateful that he was sedated so he wouldn’t try and stop her.
Either way, she expected the stubborn way he fought it, trying to right himself even deprived of speech. If he had wanted to please her, if he had just been a part he wouldn’t have been so infuriating. He’d proven himself real.
There were only a few seconds when she didn’t look back at Jimmy and she was getting ready to pull herself up when she heard a sound, a pop, like all this air had been pressurized and let out at once.
Jimmy was right behind Davis with the bow against his skin, telling her Oliver was dead and when Davis opened his mouth and a dribble of scarlet hit her on the shoulder.
Oliver’s kryptonite arrow was in his back and all she could do was catch his weight, watch his eyes half-open.
It was happening again.
She couldn’t say anything, nothing but the fact that he was human.
Oliver had told him Davis was a camouflage and nothing else, and Jimmy believed him.
“He killed Oliver. He’s not…”
He kept looking at her hands, horrified at the fact that he could actually bleed.
“Davis didn’t kill him. It didn’t kill him. Do you see claw marks anywhere? The entire plant collapsed around our heads!”
“Oliver’s dead because of him. He’s killed people. I saw him.”
“He’s dying! If you don’t get help now, you’ll be more of a killer than he ever was.”
She barely heard Jimmy’s shoes skidding on the marble, couldn’t look past the shaft in Davis’s back, like she was holding parts of him in and if she moved her hand everything would just spill out.
He was no longer immortal and what was left of his indestructibility torn out with It. He’d used up his quota for amazing recoveries now. There was no Jor El to take him to the sky and bring him back, whole.
“Breathe with me, right? Keep breathing.”
She didn’t think he even understood her, and his hand didn’t move from the spot on her face voluntarily.
Maybe he understood she didn’t want him to talk. His eyes were glassy brown and he looked like his entire world hinged on her voice like it used to. Like he believed in her again.
“We’re going to save you, okay? Just listen to my voice. Focus on me.”
It was right at his heart and she knew if she pulled it out he would bleed out all over Jimmy’s semi-cathedral floor. She’d seen a program in Nature once where a man had pulled a stinger out of his chest and died. He would’ve lived.
And yet, she could see the signs; the Kryptonite was poisoning him and spreading through his blood. He would’ve told her what to do, if he had been able to speak, if…
He was supposed to tell her things like this.
Her hand fluttered helplessly over the spot where the shaft didn’t quite pierce through and she kept talking, kept telling him that the ambulance would be there soon. She didn’t know if Jimmy had really gone to get it or if he had just been that desperate to get away.
She knew she couldn’t let it end like this and willed something to happen.
Her tears had healed once but her eyes felt dry and hollow, and the ones that fell did nothing at all.
The veins had spread across his face, dull and green and when he started to choke she dug her fingers in, felt the wood splinters cut into her fingers when the arrow came free.
He breathed once, long and shaky and strange. It wasn’t his last breath. Couldn’t be.
But there was nothing else.
Bart found her after the paramedics had gone away.
There were so many casualties already that they needed every available stretcher they could get for the people that could live. There was such a hubub that no one even asked how he’d died.
She’d gotten up with enough support, and Bart mentioned kicking ass and taking names so that she knew Clark was alive. He still needed them.
She just needed a moment.
For once Bart didn’t call her Chloe-licious, or sweetheart or beautiful.
He just looked away from the smudged the blood on her cheek.
Davis-Davis’s body was still there, lying on the floor, and she couldn’t bring herself to close his eyes. Maybe he had found peace, but she hadn’t.
She did her job, sent the keys clicking, hacked into Oliver’s console like she could have done it in her sleep.
The Watchtower opened the Earth and closed it as Clark and It continued their titanic struggle, feeling strangely disconnected from the fear.
He was going to make it out. She’d lost enough already that he had to.
She couldn’t lose any more. She couldn’t lose any more.
When they pulled Clark out, he wasn’t dead. Not quite. It took four men to get him out from under the rock, but he had spurted up, almost flown high enough that he could be saved.
It had taken four days under Earth’s sun for all the burns to heal, not one day in the hospital. Kryptonians had amazing recovery rates, or so she’d heard but that hadn’t helped Davis when it all came down to it.
It wasn’t easy to look into Clark’s face, bruised and marked and bloodied and not see him there. They were brothers after all, Clark said and when he woke she knew he was going to find a reason why it was all his fault.
He was Tess’s hero now, the one who had destroyed the Beast.
If there was no changing destiny, then why did it feel like a lie?
When she’d finally reached the Talon that first night the arrow shaft had fallen out of her bloodied jacket. Davis was everywhere in that basement from the neatly pressed sheets of the cot to the bible next to it.
She didn’t go down much anymore.
She was with Clark, watching him heal, talking about nothing at all. She’d needed him to live and he lived and he was everything she really had left.
She kept hearing how it was almost a miracle that he’d survived, from Martha, from Dr. Hamilton.
Rokk had told him that he was going to die that day, set in stone, just because he had saved her when they ‘had’ to destroy her to make sure Braniac was gone.
It was something she had done. Someone else died in his stead.
Destiny had changed.
She went to the basement that night, sat on his bed and closed her eyes, turned the shaft over and over in her fingers. She needed to know, needed to understand why him, why then.
He’d become the man he’d wanted to be and he hadn’t needed her to love him for that. Then he’d died, and she...
He had so much to do, yet.
When she dreamed of him that night he pulled the arrow out of his chest and pressed it into her hands.
Endnotes: Yeah, no proper Doomsday because Clark didn't actually die.
Like what you saw in part 1, things are not what they seem. There is meaning to that dream. If you read between the lines the surprise will be given away. Oliver wasn't counting on the just Kryptonite.
Those of you who guessed about the death, darnit you were right.
I was thinking about changing it up just to keep you guessing, but who dies has a massive impact on the plot so... *shuts mouth*
And I noticed to lines that were unintentionally double enterdres, but they made me giggle so I left them.
Thoughts= love, and make the *resolution* come out quicker.