smallville Fic: torque
Continuation of Lathe, Vessel, Lithophane and Crucible.
Title Explanation- Torque- a force that causes a rotation around a central point..
Notes: So late because the plot proved very stubborn indeed. But you've got it, paraxdisepink . I hope no one wants to shoot me for posting this so late because you will later. What can I say, Chloe demanded angst.
Follow the cut for it.
I. (Her father used to tell her that half a battle was presentation. The best gamblers knew how to bluff and bluff well, how to never let their opponents know that anything was the matter.) Maybe that’s why she never played; Chloe couldn’t ever help but see the stakes.
i. Just a year ago Linda Lake had tried to kill her with a nail gun and now she is leaving business cards underneath her door.
ii. (Chloe doesn’t know exactly how Linda Lake got back. There had been a car accident, she’d read. Linda Lake had been a casualty; they’d found what had to be her remains. Maybe she’d escaped again, through some trick of chance. Maybe she lost her powers. Maybe she had died and come back. Among meteor freaks, things like death are relative.)
iii. In the end all that matters is that Linda has found her, and that she’s watching her like a rat in a cage. She won’t come in. That’s not her style. She expects her to run, so Chloe needs to do the opposite of what she anticipates, be like any normal girl with a live in boyfriend.
iv. Linda Lake already has her little army of listeners, her ammo trained on Clark, so that he can’t move without being monitored or watched; accused of being a monster. She may just be lacking a few more nails for his coffin.
v. Chloe has no illusions that this is a sincere request. (Linda had known that Chloe would commit felonies without blinking for her best friend; that she’d never help dig his grave knowingly.) She couldn’t have known about the mind wipe, or anything else to change that.
vi. The deal with Stiletto had vanished as soon as it had come.
vii. Chloe doesn’t want to think about the last option, about something to do with Davis. Maybe the drugs, the missing person thing, the investigation… any of those could have tipped her off.
viii. Linda is by no means a clever adversary, but she’d find out given the time.
ix. (With Linda Lake the well won wisdom is for Chloe to dig in her heels, play right out of her hands, because there is nothing she can do to her without hurting those she cares about.) And Linda can. She can do so much.
x. That’s just why they won’t be staying.
II. “In an honest game, you aren’t scared to turn your cards up.” Gabe Sullivan used to say. (It didn’t matter if the stakes were against you, if maybe there was no way to win.) You accepted that; played them to the very end.
i. Linda Lake can’t be listening in this time. Chloe knows Davis has been up all night and he would have noticed water trickling under the front door.
ii. Chloe doesn’t try to mute the sounds of drawers slamming, finishes packing in twenty minutes; that leaves her an unhealthy expanse of time to struggle to block out the sound of the clock. She pulls things out from under the coffee table, burning what little mail she has, anything that could be a sign of their passing. She automatically slips the worn Bible covered with brown paper into the bottom of her bag.
iii. Two hours. The steps and floor gleam unnaturally with cleanness but she can still visualize the phantom stains. There was the trash bag with her ruined shoes and clothing; all gone as if they never existed.
iv. But it’s not clean and it won’t ever be. She won’t be able to rent this place out in good faith.
v. It is still as dark as it was last night. She gets the bizarre idea that maybe everything was just a dream and no time passed at all. Nightmares and all, she doesn’t want it to be.
vi. He’s in the corner by the only wall that they haven’t had to mop up. His shoulders shift as soon as she moves into the room. “Morning, Davis.” Her voice is uncharacteristically rough, and she tries to grasp other words to say.
vii. Intimacy changes relationships; she’s heard the warning hundreds of times. She hasn’t really thought about this. (With the one limited experience with the morning after she had; no one had been around to talk.)
viii. The corner of his mouth quirks up just a little and he makes an effort to relax his customary huddle, arms around his knees, back to the wall so she won’t worry. She realizes that she’s not the only one to see phantom stains. (Maybe intimacy is looking at someone and knowing.)
ix. When she holds him she can smell the vague stinging of cleaners on his shirt. He rubs her back unconsciously, just like they started out, him comforting her on the pretense of it being the other way around. Maybe his grip is a little closer, but they’ve been far, far closer than that in so many ways.
x. “Hey, you okay? You know, all creepy nightmares in the shadows excluded?” (He’s spent hours in this.) If she wants to forget he must want to vanish.
xi. He just murmurs an unconvincing affirmation in her ear and she realizes that he won’t do anything else unless she wants him to. Wait. He’d come into this fully prepared for it to be the last time. And she thought she was the one with issues.
xii. (She wishes there was a way to deal with this, quantifiably and certainly. She won’t tell him that she can never be the type of girl to get things out of her system because he knows that.)
xiii. She draws back, palms on his shoulders, no clutching this time. It happens, he leans in softly, not too far, not too forceful. Maybe there’s that same desperation mixed with everything else, but hopeless doesn’t feel like this. Her insides feel like a curious ball of unresolved frustration and mush.
xiv. “I missed you.” She can joke now, tell him how there are some benefits to having a personal heater, tease him about missing the charming mortal invention called pillow talk. His face is stripped bare and it stops her.
xv. (There’s still the vague fission of nervousness, because so much has changed and nothing and she’s at the brink all over again.) But the choice is not jumping off the ledge that first time, but learning to land over and over again.
xvi. “I want this-I want you.” It’s not ‘this moment’ but ‘however long we’ve got’. Not the exact words. He holds her tighter and breathes. Close enough.
III. The Ace of Clubs is the strongest card in the deck, the one that brings together all the other cards, the one that can very well turn the odds in your favor. It’s more than a little ironic that it’s the card of death, too.
i. “We have to leave.” She says.
ii. Some woman is leaving the equivalent of polite death threats under the door, and Chloe doesn’t shrink back from the why of it. But he can see the tension through her, hiding behind her self-deprecating expression.
iii. Of course, Clark and Lois are locked in their little world of reporters and camera flashes, purposefully blind. He wonders if they even see their role in this.
iv. So it’s just the both of them, he and Chloe, their little world preparing to fall apart. And she wants them to get away.
v. He can see it already. Driving in the dark, her completely trusting before the white wipes any trace of him from his brain. “We can’t.”
vi. “Not that again. See, I’ve worked it all out. Two hour rides, I drive. We’ll rent apartments and you can take the medications. It should take us three weeks to get over the border.” He’s not the only one with painful hope.
vii. “There’s more to it than that, Chloe. I’m losing so much time that I can’t remember half the time I’m supposed to be awake now.” He keeps talking because he has to get it out before she responds, contradicts him, makes it all sound so reasonable.
viii. “You can’t just run from the big monster because I might look like this. I think it might be taking me over.”
“So it wants to merge with you, but you’re not transforming. It’s not exactly made to be stealthy. That doesn’t make sense.” “What I am doesn’t make sense.”
“We’ll argue about this later. You have got to eat. Come on, up with you.” They fit, the way she loops her shoulder under his, as if he is injured. His bones can’t break, and he can’t bleed, but he feels almost frail.
ix. He used to think could save her from whatever was in him, that when worst came to worst he’d manage to it somehow. Now that means leaving her to the mercy of everything out there, isolated. That’s no choice at all.
x. (He thinks that even before that she’s carved her place in him, now. She’s everything in him that holds Davis together, part of him, closer than the touch of skin. Maybe it happened somewhere in between ‘don’t’ and ‘I want this’. He can’t take Chloe from him any more than he can tear unbreakable flesh.)
xi. There’s little more than a wide bowl of chips and pasta sauce for breakfast. He’s forcing himself to eat. She only manages to get two teaspoons of it down her throat before she gives up. She never noticed the viscosity, the ugly brilliant scarlet of it before.
xii. “If you haven’t come out from behind that door how bad could it be? Maybe you just can’t move, and you go into shock from fighting against it.” “I don’t know what’s happening. It could be anything at all.” She understands that, how he needs to control, to know especially when it comes to her. “It could be nothing, too.”
xiii. “We’re in more danger if we say here. Linda will have no trouble leading her loyal troupe to our door…”
“So you’re afraid that…”
“Afraid doesn’t even start to cover it. I spent some time in one of those places. You know how you read about those experiments in second World War, where they considered imperfect people perishable experiments? Well, in places like you aren’t human, no matter how harmless. They want you to feel as much pain as you can, they want to watch as the meteors push their way through and you heal so they can start it over again. I learned more about death than I wanted to know. There’s worse, places like Bella Reeve.”
It would just tear it down.
“Sure, then they’d find that you’d be the perfect super weapon. They’d lock you inside of it and what they’d make you do would destroy you completely.”
She lets the fork clatter into the plate, drops the pretense of conversation.
“And that’s not going to happen. You hear me? It’s not.”
xiv. There are two eggs in the refrigerator. She wonders how long they’ll hold out. “You need to get out of here for a little while.”
“I think we have enough for tonight, if you don’t mind chicken soup.”
“You look like you want be sick.”
“And I should. It better make me sick every day for the rest of my life because if it doesn’t, I’m not me, anymore.”
xv. Somehow he gets her to do it ‘for him’. “Don’t open the door for anyone. Not Clark, not Lois...” They haven’t visited her since she left Jimmy, but there’s no reason to let her guard down. “Okay.” He helps her clear the half full dishes on the table. It still worries her, leaving him alone like this. Maybe this is what it’s like to get clingy.
xvi. She hesitates and it isn’t pity. Her eyes don’t lie and she can stand to squeeze his shoulder that way, when half of the time it’s not even skin. She’s so willing to hold onto him that she’ll grab onto danger with both hands. She doesn’t change her mind easily.
xvii. She’s as close to hunted as she can be without fleeing. She won’t be alone in this. Human, he can be that buffer, keep her safe.
xviii. “I’ll be fine.” He says. It takes half an hour until the flickers of white start push their way through.
IV. Gabe used to hand Chloe the jokers before they shuffled the deck, because they never played with them. Jokers turn a game on its head in an instant, make you look at it in a whole different way.
i. Oliver Queen understands the difference between caution and foolhardiness. It was cautious to warn Linda Lake, persuade her to stop dragging names out. It became foolhardy, perhaps, when she seemed to know so much more than what she was using. (She’d laughed at him, dropped a few allusions to double lives and that crack about never revealing her sources.)
ii. It was clear enough. Chloe, if turned to her side, could break down everything.
iii. He doesn’t come in as the Green Arrow. The complex is mostly abandoned but some guy in a green spandex walking out in the daylight will still be noticed.
iv. It’s easy enough to deal with the lock, but the darkness bothers his eyes. There are no photographs or negatives hidden in unobtrusive places. Like no ones been living in there at all.
v. The lights flick on and the paramedic is in the room. Oliver can’t rein in the instinct to turn sharply, but doesn’t jump, he never jumps. It’s been years since he’s been caught.
vi. “What are you doing here?” The man had saved his life, but he’s being searched for on charges of murder.
vii. He doesn’t speak. It’s not theft, because the negatives are his in a manner of speaking. He has a right to them. They’re his.
viii. It makes perfect, twisted sense. Of course he would blackmail Chloe into keeping him here; of course he would catch Oliver getting his own blackmail back.
ix. That’s simple enough to deal with. He’s a civilian. A few aikido hits is all it will take. Two of his best moves, and there’s no expression on the medics face. Oliver’s hand aches, like the last time he (tried) to hit Clark.
x. The wall is unyielding, against the back of his skull, a little harder than necessary to inflict real pain. He suspects that its only control that keeps him from smashing out the side.
xi. The Green Arrow has nothing but a lock pick. He thinks irony’s a bitch.
V. Longtime gamblers may know every nick and bend in that pack of cards. You expect them him to know their secrets, but they don’t. If it all comes down to numbers, how do they win? You try not to think 'intuition', but you do.
i. It’s been almost an hour. The clawing fear in her stomach should mean nothing. (Fate, predestination, omens stopped meaning anything a long time ago.)
ii. But she’s lived every day of her life with the weird and unexplained. Her hand goes automatically to her phone, dials Isis. Two and a half rings.
iii. “Davis.” His voice sounds wrong, like he’s being squeezed.
“Oliver’s here.”
“What’s he doing there?” No answer. Of course he hadn’t come over for tea. She had those negatives, her little wall between her little world and accused murderess, the knot that bound her to the whole mess.
He knew. He knew now.
“You’ve got to let him go. Davis?” She can still hear his breathing. “Wait, there until I get back. Keep him there.” “You with me?” His speech is stunted, and this is it, she thinks.
iv. (She’s sure not to throw the door open. She doesn’t know what to prepare for here. If he’s not Davis she might as well sign her death warrant.)
v. Oliver is dressed impeccably, bruised and a little bloodied up around the mouth. Alive. She thinks those are phone cables that he’s immobilized with.
vi. Davis moves easily around him. She doesn’t understand what this is exactly. I may not look like a monster but that’s when I’m most dangerous. There’s something almost predatory about the way he moves. It’s Davis and not Davis and she doesn’t know how to deal with that.
vii. “He didn’t think you would want me here.” His hands are rough, dig into her upper arms so they’ll leave a bruise. The same planes and angles on his face, his eyes are still brown and there’s an absence of the softness there, but something... “I do. And whatever happens that’s how it’s going to be.” She’s told him that before, maybe in not so many words; maybe he understands the way she says them now, still.
viii. The touch might help, somehow, so she smoothes a hand over his sleeve non-threateningly. That’s human skin under her fingers, nothing less. He stiffens. He may be different now, but there’s some of him down there.
ix. She can’t explain exactly how this leads to this, him kissing her first, so hard that it hurts, like he’s claiming some sort of ownership over her. This is not a struggle for domination and she has to draw him back to himself, somehow; but she’s matched and overcome and more than a little lost in the overwhelming physicality of it.
x. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nevertheless she’s crushed to six foot something of fully aroused male. This has the potential to go pretty far and Oliver is the room, watching.
xi. (This is the antithesis of what she remembers. He’s always so controlled.) There’s no red k and she’s pretty sure Doomsday isn’t coded to seduce human women into stupidity.
xii. So some part of Davis, but not all of Davis. Psychology class. Psychology class. Why didn’t she pay more attention to the droning professor? Ego, super ego and...
xiii. It’s pretty hard to extricate herself from his grip. The Id is not evil, as and of itself. She runs her fingers over the nearly numb spots on her jacket covered arms, forces the breaths to come slow, won’t consider the ramifications yet. “If we leave now, they can’t find us.” She thinks he understands that.
xiv. Oliver isn’t gagged, and with the garbled sound of his voice she realizes that a few of his teeth could be broken. “What do you think ..? People in danger.” Something like that. “I can’t explain now. Why did you come here, Oliver?” The silence is answer enough.
xv. (He’s alive and safe, and Davis is fracturing.)
xvi. “I’ve got a deal for you. Keep your mouth shut for a few hours and you won’t ever see me again. Don’t worry, it’s all here.” She doesn’t untie him, leaves the door locked from the outside.
xv. It’ll buy them an hour or two, maybe. That has to be enough.
VI. It isn’t wise just to play by chance; yet that is the entire point. Pick a card, any card and learn as you go.
i. Two pieces of packed luggage go into the trunk.
ii. She has no time to switch cars. Her beatle is too recognizable, but it can’t be helped. They have to get out here now. Oliver will tell Clark as soon as he’s free, and they need to ditch it before then.
iii. Clark can’t know about Alaska, because that dream of hers she’d always kept for her own.
iv. Besides that, they have a tiny car, a map, estimated times. There’s no real plan, maybe she lied to herself the entire time.
v. There’s the additional snag that Davis can’t interact with anyone else he remembers, and she’s pretty sure he’s not going to be helping in the escape. It’s all about want, not need or who he is now.
vi. She pulls open the car door open herself, suddenly afraid that he could accidentally rip it off its hinges. He hadn’t tried to do much and Oliver might still need about a year at the dentists before he can flash a smile for the tabloids.
vii. (That’s why Davis was so scared. She realizes that the true strength he has access to, even human he could crush her bones with one misstep.)
viii. This is a part of Davis, not all. So she expects the force behind that, how it ends up almost like an attack.
ix. It starts in the front seat of a car for God’s sakes, with the crackly plastic digging into her hipbone. Discomfort mixes with her body’s natural reaction to being close to him. Her mind could be shutting of, with his pushy, warm mouth on hers and a weird hum of urgency that comes from adrenaline, but it doesn’t.
x. He’s fast and his mouth knows just the place on her neck that sends her head flailing back towards the window.(She acknowledges that she needs just to hold on to something, forget Oliver, who may just have given Linda an opening, who could have brought Clark and hundreds of witch hunters right to them.) She wants to be able to speak.
xi. He doesn’t seem bothered by trivialities like words. He’s like redK Clark, only this part of Davis isn’t willing to grab on the nearest warm body he finds, he’s fixated on just her and he’s not afraid of what he might do, like he always was. No words, no ‘wait’ and she can’t watch his eyes.
xii. This feels like a betrayal, like she’s bearing witness to all the things Davis keeps buried deep down and this isn’t Davis at all. Not all of him. She misses Davis, and won’t let him go through this almost lobotomized, like that perfect plastic bride. When she has him, she wants all of him, not one part. She’s never defined it but there it is.
xiii. (It happened to her just once, like this. Clark had been about to leave, go to the center of the chaos and she’d held on until she realized that she could always hold a corner of him. Just that corner, that piece that was her friend and looked down on her with big blue eyes. Something tore then.)
xiv. When there’s only one of you who loves it’s not so bad. You pull the rejected pieces to yourself, nurse the wounds and wrap them up in some dark place to find later.
xv. It never works when it ties you both. There’s no way to patch it, reverse the damage. This is different because this is a piece of Davis and she wants the whole man and she won’t have him for more than snapshots and she l-.
xvi. (In her mind the word flows logically. She won’t say it because maybe the word is her kiss of death. She used to be able to say it, to Moriah, to dad, to Clark however indirectly in the center of the fortress. Look where they were now.)
xvii. Other words come easier. “Stop.” She wants Davis and this isn’t it.
xviii. Maybe it’s stupid to expect words like that to work on a primal fraction of the human mind. Maybe he won’t hear the words, but more physical languages. The Id is about want, not need.
“Stop, please. We need to get away first. You want to get away first, remember?” He freezes halfway through, before the rip in the shoulder of her shirt exposes too much. She pulls the rest together so it looks halfway decent. “I don’t think it’ll exactly do if I go in dressed in shreds.”
xix. “Just relax, erm.” She doesn’t know what to call him now, and he barely speaks. She backs out, pushes on the accelerator, sure they’re not over 60.
xx.His hand stays heavily on her knee and she feels and ignores the pins and needles.
Davis will be back soon.
VII. You don’t just play with cards, you build with them. You can have a House of Cards built perfectly. It doesn’t matter how gentle you are, pull just one of the bases down and the whole thing crumbles.
i. “Welcome back to the world of the living.” He pushes himself back in the seat, taking in the strange flashing lights in the dark, the toll booth behind them. “What did I do this time?”
ii. She sees the beginning of a freak-out happening, reaches a hand out to his knee. “You made sure I’d never have to buy guard dogs again. What do you remember?” “I was in the kitchen…”
iii. It takes him all of five seconds to see the finger shaped bruises on her arms. Her nerves are still in high gear and she tries not to swerve. Of course he would react like this, throwing himself to the side of the car window. “I hurt you.”
iv. “Oh, these old things. It’s the shadows. You didn’t. It’s complicated.” “Those weren’t there this morning.” It’s a quick condensed version, Oliver, the phone call. She leaves out the broken teeth, for now.
v. “So the good part is we know what’s going on.” “What’s going on? You’re getting hurt, I’m in this car and pretty soon whatever that was will just come out again.” He says ‘You should have left me.’ nearly too soft for her to hear. That was never an option, not with who she is now. It’s startling final that it won’t ever be. “You’re stuck with me now, and I’m driving.”
vi. Four minutes and she knows he’s drifting ‘somewhere in his sea of self loathing’. Despite the fact that they’re different, he’s Davis, all of Davis. He’ll be afraid to touch her, and she won’t have that. “I’ll pull over and let you give me a checkup.”
vii. This is what she’s been afraid of. She can’t not look at him with that careful look in his eyes, checking the marks, watching her face. Her stomach twists strangely and she feels like she needs words, any words, even if they’re not the right ones.
viii. “They’re not ever that big. With human males it happens all the time. Never mind the fact that your conscious self wasn’t around to regulate your strength, and you still didn’t…” “What was I?” “So there is a theory by Freud…Freud, the psychologist.” He was raised Catholic.
ix. “If it’s been trying to take you over, this is your minds way of dealing with it. Splintering into bits, so there’s more of the human part of you out there. Really, it’s pretty remarkable.” She knows this way of dealing won’t work for long without breaking him beyond repair no matter how unnatural and engineered he thinks he is.
x. (It’s more than inevitable that Clark will find them soon. She has turn him to helping by some miracle. There has to be a way for Davis, for them, that doesn’t involve broken memories or a mind torn wide open.)
xi. By the time they reach the seedy hotel room, he’s taken the wheel and his hands are steady now. Her voice feels worn and not even the armrest next to his shoulder can keep her eyes from fluttering open and closed. There has to be time. There are things she has to say, and she’s going to because that’s the way it’s going to be.
xii. She thinks of that book she read once, where there’s nothing left to do but scribble on the margins ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ She breathes, lets herself soak in the sound of his very normal, very human, breath. There’s time. There’s got to be. She’s borrowed enough trouble for the night.
VIII. In gambling, there are games of skill and games of chance and the lines are indistinct between each. Games of skill rely on predicting an opponent’s move, letting them act and make themselves their own trap. No one plays with the odds stacked against them. That’s why it’s really very simple. If they make the choices of their own free will, you just wait until all the variables come together just right…
i.(Linda Lake never liked to get her hands dirty. It used to be easy before. Currents, water, nothing could touch her. She misses that, hates the solidity of her body now. But now she’s relegated to pulling the strings, a spider seated in the enormous web. She doesn’t think she minds it. Just one little tug.)
ii. Chloe wants nothing more than to fall out on the bed, but it is 8:45, and she knows that fifteen minutes is not enough time.
iii. Davis needs her to be out of the room. He's got the nightmares of the first day they met again, and this is his way to keep her safe.
iv. He’s going to take the drugs before she gets back, he’ll be frozen in the corner of the wall and she’ll want to hold on very badly.
v. She shuffles down to the management for one or two towels; and he goes three-quarters of the way with her because this is one of those places he’s so familiar with.
vi.(Maybe it’s one of the selfish little yearnings to keep the human memories of her held fast for when it tries to batter them down again.)
vii. He recognizes the smell of her skin, now. Maybe it’s a legacy of it but it’s comforting, if just to know she’s there, alive.
viii. That’s how he knows someone else got past the locked door before he recognizes that the blonde hair is not the same exact shade as Chloe’s.
ix. “What are you?” (He knows already, of course, because he can feel the strange pain again. This woman is hunting Chloe and for once he wishes Chloe will be less efficient, out of sight. He’s got a monster inside him and there’s very little she can do to him.)
x. “That’s not the question, is it? What are you?” She toys almost absently with a tiny pistol in her hand, something that poses not the least threat to him, but could end Chloe’s life with one well-placed shot.
xi. He doesn’t consciously try to control the force behind his lunge toward it. It takes one very little twist in the metal for bullets and casings to come apart in his hand. The casings drop clumsily from his fingers as the edges sharpen, their tint grays and he can feel the skin breaking between his knuckles.
xii. He knows how it wants to bring an end to this. It’s the sickly sweet feeling, blood pounding through his ears, overpowering him. It’s irrational because he’s Davis Bloome now, and Davis Bloome is not it, he won’t kill anyone.
xiii. Davis Bloome can’t let himself be frozen, leave Chloe in a corner with that woman waiting to spring at her from the shadows.
xiv. This isn’t the recommended way to deal with this, turn his back to an open threat. He has four minutes to neutralize her and to stop it, in that order.
xv. As it is, his near-human fingers fumble for injections that he doesn’t find. All the vials are cracked open, bleeding toxins and life into the chipped sink.
xvi. “I knew that would get you to pay some attention. Those were illegal, weren’t they?” That woman is crazy, stalking toward him. Whatever is in him is a hundred times more dangerous than she is, and he can barely see through the red mist in his eyes.
xvii. (Chloe will be back in a few minutes, to this. He won’t let her find him covered in red again, won’t be the dark thing behind her nightmares.)
xviii. “Get away.” He doubts his voice will be human enough for her to hear in a moment. Chloe will know something’s wrong. He told her to run.
xix. “No, I don’t think I will. I’ll just wait up a few more minutes, right here, for you to greet Chloe.” She’s holding a lump of green rock in her palm. “Insurance.” It stirs up strange and dizzying images- a boy with a clean shaven head, mock fighting, a tank, darkness.
xx. He moves forward and for the very first time in a long time he can feel something boiling and bubbling over his skin. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I’m safe from you, but you’re not safe from this.”
xxi. “Listen. It’s very simple. She’s been abducted by a monstrous creature. Superman will be here after she is. (She’s always collected you boys.) He’ll find her, all bloody and torn, and in the end one or the other of you will die, but it doesn’t matter. The world will finally see.”
xxii. “You feel it already, don’t you?” This isn’t trembling, now. It’s more like a jolt. Seconds, minutes-Chloe will be back through that door before it rips her apart.
xxiii. Chloe. She’d kill Chloe and this time he’d be the weapon. Blonde hair, green eyes, a strange feeling in the back of his throat. No one person mattered more than anyone else, once. Then one person meant everything. What’s left of Davis Bloome knows that this means something.
xxiv. He doesn’t or can’t hear the rest of the words; they are meaningless to him now. He doesn't know if it's him or it rushing forward, on legs that changing, clumsy. The spikes will pierce through the woman, keep her trapped. Maybe the burning in his flesh means it’ll die too.
I. Presentation-knowing how to take a gamble. Probability- knowing how many times a coin lands heads or tails. Instinct-just knowing.
Davis Bloome used to think they could only mean so much.
Lowest common denominator? You got only so many second chances before they ran out.
Endnotes: Don't fire me. the words kinda led here for the time being. The end action has unintended consequences. And there is a part 6! It may have smut.
Random explanations: Linda Lake sent Oliver in his freaky quest. It was a manipulation of Chloe and Davis to a certain extent.
Also, the Id! Davis scene kind of morphed into Chloe introspection. The book Chloe mentions in xi of VII is I Capture a Castle. And yes, you know what the words are
This part pushes things a little further with Chloe and Davis. In Crucible, there was that situation; now there's this one. yes I will be cryptic.It makes me feel like James Joyce or something
So, So, (ready for this?) What did you think?
Title Explanation- Torque- a force that causes a rotation around a central point..
Notes: So late because the plot proved very stubborn indeed. But you've got it, paraxdisepink . I hope no one wants to shoot me for posting this so late because you will later. What can I say, Chloe demanded angst.
Follow the cut for it.
I. (Her father used to tell her that half a battle was presentation. The best gamblers knew how to bluff and bluff well, how to never let their opponents know that anything was the matter.) Maybe that’s why she never played; Chloe couldn’t ever help but see the stakes.
i. Just a year ago Linda Lake had tried to kill her with a nail gun and now she is leaving business cards underneath her door.
ii. (Chloe doesn’t know exactly how Linda Lake got back. There had been a car accident, she’d read. Linda Lake had been a casualty; they’d found what had to be her remains. Maybe she’d escaped again, through some trick of chance. Maybe she lost her powers. Maybe she had died and come back. Among meteor freaks, things like death are relative.)
iii. In the end all that matters is that Linda has found her, and that she’s watching her like a rat in a cage. She won’t come in. That’s not her style. She expects her to run, so Chloe needs to do the opposite of what she anticipates, be like any normal girl with a live in boyfriend.
iv. Linda Lake already has her little army of listeners, her ammo trained on Clark, so that he can’t move without being monitored or watched; accused of being a monster. She may just be lacking a few more nails for his coffin.
v. Chloe has no illusions that this is a sincere request. (Linda had known that Chloe would commit felonies without blinking for her best friend; that she’d never help dig his grave knowingly.) She couldn’t have known about the mind wipe, or anything else to change that.
vi. The deal with Stiletto had vanished as soon as it had come.
vii. Chloe doesn’t want to think about the last option, about something to do with Davis. Maybe the drugs, the missing person thing, the investigation… any of those could have tipped her off.
viii. Linda is by no means a clever adversary, but she’d find out given the time.
ix. (With Linda Lake the well won wisdom is for Chloe to dig in her heels, play right out of her hands, because there is nothing she can do to her without hurting those she cares about.) And Linda can. She can do so much.
x. That’s just why they won’t be staying.
II. “In an honest game, you aren’t scared to turn your cards up.” Gabe Sullivan used to say. (It didn’t matter if the stakes were against you, if maybe there was no way to win.) You accepted that; played them to the very end.
i. Linda Lake can’t be listening in this time. Chloe knows Davis has been up all night and he would have noticed water trickling under the front door.
ii. Chloe doesn’t try to mute the sounds of drawers slamming, finishes packing in twenty minutes; that leaves her an unhealthy expanse of time to struggle to block out the sound of the clock. She pulls things out from under the coffee table, burning what little mail she has, anything that could be a sign of their passing. She automatically slips the worn Bible covered with brown paper into the bottom of her bag.
iii. Two hours. The steps and floor gleam unnaturally with cleanness but she can still visualize the phantom stains. There was the trash bag with her ruined shoes and clothing; all gone as if they never existed.
iv. But it’s not clean and it won’t ever be. She won’t be able to rent this place out in good faith.
v. It is still as dark as it was last night. She gets the bizarre idea that maybe everything was just a dream and no time passed at all. Nightmares and all, she doesn’t want it to be.
vi. He’s in the corner by the only wall that they haven’t had to mop up. His shoulders shift as soon as she moves into the room. “Morning, Davis.” Her voice is uncharacteristically rough, and she tries to grasp other words to say.
vii. Intimacy changes relationships; she’s heard the warning hundreds of times. She hasn’t really thought about this. (With the one limited experience with the morning after she had; no one had been around to talk.)
viii. The corner of his mouth quirks up just a little and he makes an effort to relax his customary huddle, arms around his knees, back to the wall so she won’t worry. She realizes that she’s not the only one to see phantom stains. (Maybe intimacy is looking at someone and knowing.)
ix. When she holds him she can smell the vague stinging of cleaners on his shirt. He rubs her back unconsciously, just like they started out, him comforting her on the pretense of it being the other way around. Maybe his grip is a little closer, but they’ve been far, far closer than that in so many ways.
x. “Hey, you okay? You know, all creepy nightmares in the shadows excluded?” (He’s spent hours in this.) If she wants to forget he must want to vanish.
xi. He just murmurs an unconvincing affirmation in her ear and she realizes that he won’t do anything else unless she wants him to. Wait. He’d come into this fully prepared for it to be the last time. And she thought she was the one with issues.
xii. (She wishes there was a way to deal with this, quantifiably and certainly. She won’t tell him that she can never be the type of girl to get things out of her system because he knows that.)
xiii. She draws back, palms on his shoulders, no clutching this time. It happens, he leans in softly, not too far, not too forceful. Maybe there’s that same desperation mixed with everything else, but hopeless doesn’t feel like this. Her insides feel like a curious ball of unresolved frustration and mush.
xiv. “I missed you.” She can joke now, tell him how there are some benefits to having a personal heater, tease him about missing the charming mortal invention called pillow talk. His face is stripped bare and it stops her.
xv. (There’s still the vague fission of nervousness, because so much has changed and nothing and she’s at the brink all over again.) But the choice is not jumping off the ledge that first time, but learning to land over and over again.
xvi. “I want this-I want you.” It’s not ‘this moment’ but ‘however long we’ve got’. Not the exact words. He holds her tighter and breathes. Close enough.
III. The Ace of Clubs is the strongest card in the deck, the one that brings together all the other cards, the one that can very well turn the odds in your favor. It’s more than a little ironic that it’s the card of death, too.
i. “We have to leave.” She says.
ii. Some woman is leaving the equivalent of polite death threats under the door, and Chloe doesn’t shrink back from the why of it. But he can see the tension through her, hiding behind her self-deprecating expression.
iii. Of course, Clark and Lois are locked in their little world of reporters and camera flashes, purposefully blind. He wonders if they even see their role in this.
iv. So it’s just the both of them, he and Chloe, their little world preparing to fall apart. And she wants them to get away.
v. He can see it already. Driving in the dark, her completely trusting before the white wipes any trace of him from his brain. “We can’t.”
vi. “Not that again. See, I’ve worked it all out. Two hour rides, I drive. We’ll rent apartments and you can take the medications. It should take us three weeks to get over the border.” He’s not the only one with painful hope.
vii. “There’s more to it than that, Chloe. I’m losing so much time that I can’t remember half the time I’m supposed to be awake now.” He keeps talking because he has to get it out before she responds, contradicts him, makes it all sound so reasonable.
viii. “You can’t just run from the big monster because I might look like this. I think it might be taking me over.”
“So it wants to merge with you, but you’re not transforming. It’s not exactly made to be stealthy. That doesn’t make sense.” “What I am doesn’t make sense.”
“We’ll argue about this later. You have got to eat. Come on, up with you.” They fit, the way she loops her shoulder under his, as if he is injured. His bones can’t break, and he can’t bleed, but he feels almost frail.
ix. He used to think could save her from whatever was in him, that when worst came to worst he’d manage to it somehow. Now that means leaving her to the mercy of everything out there, isolated. That’s no choice at all.
x. (He thinks that even before that she’s carved her place in him, now. She’s everything in him that holds Davis together, part of him, closer than the touch of skin. Maybe it happened somewhere in between ‘don’t’ and ‘I want this’. He can’t take Chloe from him any more than he can tear unbreakable flesh.)
xi. There’s little more than a wide bowl of chips and pasta sauce for breakfast. He’s forcing himself to eat. She only manages to get two teaspoons of it down her throat before she gives up. She never noticed the viscosity, the ugly brilliant scarlet of it before.
xii. “If you haven’t come out from behind that door how bad could it be? Maybe you just can’t move, and you go into shock from fighting against it.” “I don’t know what’s happening. It could be anything at all.” She understands that, how he needs to control, to know especially when it comes to her. “It could be nothing, too.”
xiii. “We’re in more danger if we say here. Linda will have no trouble leading her loyal troupe to our door…”
“So you’re afraid that…”
“Afraid doesn’t even start to cover it. I spent some time in one of those places. You know how you read about those experiments in second World War, where they considered imperfect people perishable experiments? Well, in places like you aren’t human, no matter how harmless. They want you to feel as much pain as you can, they want to watch as the meteors push their way through and you heal so they can start it over again. I learned more about death than I wanted to know. There’s worse, places like Bella Reeve.”
It would just tear it down.
“Sure, then they’d find that you’d be the perfect super weapon. They’d lock you inside of it and what they’d make you do would destroy you completely.”
She lets the fork clatter into the plate, drops the pretense of conversation.
“And that’s not going to happen. You hear me? It’s not.”
xiv. There are two eggs in the refrigerator. She wonders how long they’ll hold out. “You need to get out of here for a little while.”
“I think we have enough for tonight, if you don’t mind chicken soup.”
“You look like you want be sick.”
“And I should. It better make me sick every day for the rest of my life because if it doesn’t, I’m not me, anymore.”
xv. Somehow he gets her to do it ‘for him’. “Don’t open the door for anyone. Not Clark, not Lois...” They haven’t visited her since she left Jimmy, but there’s no reason to let her guard down. “Okay.” He helps her clear the half full dishes on the table. It still worries her, leaving him alone like this. Maybe this is what it’s like to get clingy.
xvi. She hesitates and it isn’t pity. Her eyes don’t lie and she can stand to squeeze his shoulder that way, when half of the time it’s not even skin. She’s so willing to hold onto him that she’ll grab onto danger with both hands. She doesn’t change her mind easily.
xvii. She’s as close to hunted as she can be without fleeing. She won’t be alone in this. Human, he can be that buffer, keep her safe.
xviii. “I’ll be fine.” He says. It takes half an hour until the flickers of white start push their way through.
IV. Gabe used to hand Chloe the jokers before they shuffled the deck, because they never played with them. Jokers turn a game on its head in an instant, make you look at it in a whole different way.
i. Oliver Queen understands the difference between caution and foolhardiness. It was cautious to warn Linda Lake, persuade her to stop dragging names out. It became foolhardy, perhaps, when she seemed to know so much more than what she was using. (She’d laughed at him, dropped a few allusions to double lives and that crack about never revealing her sources.)
ii. It was clear enough. Chloe, if turned to her side, could break down everything.
iii. He doesn’t come in as the Green Arrow. The complex is mostly abandoned but some guy in a green spandex walking out in the daylight will still be noticed.
iv. It’s easy enough to deal with the lock, but the darkness bothers his eyes. There are no photographs or negatives hidden in unobtrusive places. Like no ones been living in there at all.
v. The lights flick on and the paramedic is in the room. Oliver can’t rein in the instinct to turn sharply, but doesn’t jump, he never jumps. It’s been years since he’s been caught.
vi. “What are you doing here?” The man had saved his life, but he’s being searched for on charges of murder.
vii. He doesn’t speak. It’s not theft, because the negatives are his in a manner of speaking. He has a right to them. They’re his.
viii. It makes perfect, twisted sense. Of course he would blackmail Chloe into keeping him here; of course he would catch Oliver getting his own blackmail back.
ix. That’s simple enough to deal with. He’s a civilian. A few aikido hits is all it will take. Two of his best moves, and there’s no expression on the medics face. Oliver’s hand aches, like the last time he (tried) to hit Clark.
x. The wall is unyielding, against the back of his skull, a little harder than necessary to inflict real pain. He suspects that its only control that keeps him from smashing out the side.
xi. The Green Arrow has nothing but a lock pick. He thinks irony’s a bitch.
V. Longtime gamblers may know every nick and bend in that pack of cards. You expect them him to know their secrets, but they don’t. If it all comes down to numbers, how do they win? You try not to think 'intuition', but you do.
i. It’s been almost an hour. The clawing fear in her stomach should mean nothing. (Fate, predestination, omens stopped meaning anything a long time ago.)
ii. But she’s lived every day of her life with the weird and unexplained. Her hand goes automatically to her phone, dials Isis. Two and a half rings.
iii. “Davis.” His voice sounds wrong, like he’s being squeezed.
“Oliver’s here.”
“What’s he doing there?” No answer. Of course he hadn’t come over for tea. She had those negatives, her little wall between her little world and accused murderess, the knot that bound her to the whole mess.
He knew. He knew now.
“You’ve got to let him go. Davis?” She can still hear his breathing. “Wait, there until I get back. Keep him there.” “You with me?” His speech is stunted, and this is it, she thinks.
iv. (She’s sure not to throw the door open. She doesn’t know what to prepare for here. If he’s not Davis she might as well sign her death warrant.)
v. Oliver is dressed impeccably, bruised and a little bloodied up around the mouth. Alive. She thinks those are phone cables that he’s immobilized with.
vi. Davis moves easily around him. She doesn’t understand what this is exactly. I may not look like a monster but that’s when I’m most dangerous. There’s something almost predatory about the way he moves. It’s Davis and not Davis and she doesn’t know how to deal with that.
vii. “He didn’t think you would want me here.” His hands are rough, dig into her upper arms so they’ll leave a bruise. The same planes and angles on his face, his eyes are still brown and there’s an absence of the softness there, but something... “I do. And whatever happens that’s how it’s going to be.” She’s told him that before, maybe in not so many words; maybe he understands the way she says them now, still.
viii. The touch might help, somehow, so she smoothes a hand over his sleeve non-threateningly. That’s human skin under her fingers, nothing less. He stiffens. He may be different now, but there’s some of him down there.
ix. She can’t explain exactly how this leads to this, him kissing her first, so hard that it hurts, like he’s claiming some sort of ownership over her. This is not a struggle for domination and she has to draw him back to himself, somehow; but she’s matched and overcome and more than a little lost in the overwhelming physicality of it.
x. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nevertheless she’s crushed to six foot something of fully aroused male. This has the potential to go pretty far and Oliver is the room, watching.
xi. (This is the antithesis of what she remembers. He’s always so controlled.) There’s no red k and she’s pretty sure Doomsday isn’t coded to seduce human women into stupidity.
xii. So some part of Davis, but not all of Davis. Psychology class. Psychology class. Why didn’t she pay more attention to the droning professor? Ego, super ego and...
xiii. It’s pretty hard to extricate herself from his grip. The Id is not evil, as and of itself. She runs her fingers over the nearly numb spots on her jacket covered arms, forces the breaths to come slow, won’t consider the ramifications yet. “If we leave now, they can’t find us.” She thinks he understands that.
xiv. Oliver isn’t gagged, and with the garbled sound of his voice she realizes that a few of his teeth could be broken. “What do you think ..? People in danger.” Something like that. “I can’t explain now. Why did you come here, Oliver?” The silence is answer enough.
xv. (He’s alive and safe, and Davis is fracturing.)
xvi. “I’ve got a deal for you. Keep your mouth shut for a few hours and you won’t ever see me again. Don’t worry, it’s all here.” She doesn’t untie him, leaves the door locked from the outside.
xv. It’ll buy them an hour or two, maybe. That has to be enough.
VI. It isn’t wise just to play by chance; yet that is the entire point. Pick a card, any card and learn as you go.
i. Two pieces of packed luggage go into the trunk.
ii. She has no time to switch cars. Her beatle is too recognizable, but it can’t be helped. They have to get out here now. Oliver will tell Clark as soon as he’s free, and they need to ditch it before then.
iii. Clark can’t know about Alaska, because that dream of hers she’d always kept for her own.
iv. Besides that, they have a tiny car, a map, estimated times. There’s no real plan, maybe she lied to herself the entire time.
v. There’s the additional snag that Davis can’t interact with anyone else he remembers, and she’s pretty sure he’s not going to be helping in the escape. It’s all about want, not need or who he is now.
vi. She pulls open the car door open herself, suddenly afraid that he could accidentally rip it off its hinges. He hadn’t tried to do much and Oliver might still need about a year at the dentists before he can flash a smile for the tabloids.
vii. (That’s why Davis was so scared. She realizes that the true strength he has access to, even human he could crush her bones with one misstep.)
viii. This is a part of Davis, not all. So she expects the force behind that, how it ends up almost like an attack.
ix. It starts in the front seat of a car for God’s sakes, with the crackly plastic digging into her hipbone. Discomfort mixes with her body’s natural reaction to being close to him. Her mind could be shutting of, with his pushy, warm mouth on hers and a weird hum of urgency that comes from adrenaline, but it doesn’t.
x. He’s fast and his mouth knows just the place on her neck that sends her head flailing back towards the window.(She acknowledges that she needs just to hold on to something, forget Oliver, who may just have given Linda an opening, who could have brought Clark and hundreds of witch hunters right to them.) She wants to be able to speak.
xi. He doesn’t seem bothered by trivialities like words. He’s like redK Clark, only this part of Davis isn’t willing to grab on the nearest warm body he finds, he’s fixated on just her and he’s not afraid of what he might do, like he always was. No words, no ‘wait’ and she can’t watch his eyes.
xii. This feels like a betrayal, like she’s bearing witness to all the things Davis keeps buried deep down and this isn’t Davis at all. Not all of him. She misses Davis, and won’t let him go through this almost lobotomized, like that perfect plastic bride. When she has him, she wants all of him, not one part. She’s never defined it but there it is.
xiii. (It happened to her just once, like this. Clark had been about to leave, go to the center of the chaos and she’d held on until she realized that she could always hold a corner of him. Just that corner, that piece that was her friend and looked down on her with big blue eyes. Something tore then.)
xiv. When there’s only one of you who loves it’s not so bad. You pull the rejected pieces to yourself, nurse the wounds and wrap them up in some dark place to find later.
xv. It never works when it ties you both. There’s no way to patch it, reverse the damage. This is different because this is a piece of Davis and she wants the whole man and she won’t have him for more than snapshots and she l-.
xvi. (In her mind the word flows logically. She won’t say it because maybe the word is her kiss of death. She used to be able to say it, to Moriah, to dad, to Clark however indirectly in the center of the fortress. Look where they were now.)
xvii. Other words come easier. “Stop.” She wants Davis and this isn’t it.
xviii. Maybe it’s stupid to expect words like that to work on a primal fraction of the human mind. Maybe he won’t hear the words, but more physical languages. The Id is about want, not need.
“Stop, please. We need to get away first. You want to get away first, remember?” He freezes halfway through, before the rip in the shoulder of her shirt exposes too much. She pulls the rest together so it looks halfway decent. “I don’t think it’ll exactly do if I go in dressed in shreds.”
xix. “Just relax, erm.” She doesn’t know what to call him now, and he barely speaks. She backs out, pushes on the accelerator, sure they’re not over 60.
xx.His hand stays heavily on her knee and she feels and ignores the pins and needles.
Davis will be back soon.
VII. You don’t just play with cards, you build with them. You can have a House of Cards built perfectly. It doesn’t matter how gentle you are, pull just one of the bases down and the whole thing crumbles.
i. “Welcome back to the world of the living.” He pushes himself back in the seat, taking in the strange flashing lights in the dark, the toll booth behind them. “What did I do this time?”
ii. She sees the beginning of a freak-out happening, reaches a hand out to his knee. “You made sure I’d never have to buy guard dogs again. What do you remember?” “I was in the kitchen…”
iii. It takes him all of five seconds to see the finger shaped bruises on her arms. Her nerves are still in high gear and she tries not to swerve. Of course he would react like this, throwing himself to the side of the car window. “I hurt you.”
iv. “Oh, these old things. It’s the shadows. You didn’t. It’s complicated.” “Those weren’t there this morning.” It’s a quick condensed version, Oliver, the phone call. She leaves out the broken teeth, for now.
v. “So the good part is we know what’s going on.” “What’s going on? You’re getting hurt, I’m in this car and pretty soon whatever that was will just come out again.” He says ‘You should have left me.’ nearly too soft for her to hear. That was never an option, not with who she is now. It’s startling final that it won’t ever be. “You’re stuck with me now, and I’m driving.”
vi. Four minutes and she knows he’s drifting ‘somewhere in his sea of self loathing’. Despite the fact that they’re different, he’s Davis, all of Davis. He’ll be afraid to touch her, and she won’t have that. “I’ll pull over and let you give me a checkup.”
vii. This is what she’s been afraid of. She can’t not look at him with that careful look in his eyes, checking the marks, watching her face. Her stomach twists strangely and she feels like she needs words, any words, even if they’re not the right ones.
viii. “They’re not ever that big. With human males it happens all the time. Never mind the fact that your conscious self wasn’t around to regulate your strength, and you still didn’t…” “What was I?” “So there is a theory by Freud…Freud, the psychologist.” He was raised Catholic.
ix. “If it’s been trying to take you over, this is your minds way of dealing with it. Splintering into bits, so there’s more of the human part of you out there. Really, it’s pretty remarkable.” She knows this way of dealing won’t work for long without breaking him beyond repair no matter how unnatural and engineered he thinks he is.
x. (It’s more than inevitable that Clark will find them soon. She has turn him to helping by some miracle. There has to be a way for Davis, for them, that doesn’t involve broken memories or a mind torn wide open.)
xi. By the time they reach the seedy hotel room, he’s taken the wheel and his hands are steady now. Her voice feels worn and not even the armrest next to his shoulder can keep her eyes from fluttering open and closed. There has to be time. There are things she has to say, and she’s going to because that’s the way it’s going to be.
xii. She thinks of that book she read once, where there’s nothing left to do but scribble on the margins ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ She breathes, lets herself soak in the sound of his very normal, very human, breath. There’s time. There’s got to be. She’s borrowed enough trouble for the night.
VIII. In gambling, there are games of skill and games of chance and the lines are indistinct between each. Games of skill rely on predicting an opponent’s move, letting them act and make themselves their own trap. No one plays with the odds stacked against them. That’s why it’s really very simple. If they make the choices of their own free will, you just wait until all the variables come together just right…
i.(Linda Lake never liked to get her hands dirty. It used to be easy before. Currents, water, nothing could touch her. She misses that, hates the solidity of her body now. But now she’s relegated to pulling the strings, a spider seated in the enormous web. She doesn’t think she minds it. Just one little tug.)
ii. Chloe wants nothing more than to fall out on the bed, but it is 8:45, and she knows that fifteen minutes is not enough time.
iii. Davis needs her to be out of the room. He's got the nightmares of the first day they met again, and this is his way to keep her safe.
iv. He’s going to take the drugs before she gets back, he’ll be frozen in the corner of the wall and she’ll want to hold on very badly.
v. She shuffles down to the management for one or two towels; and he goes three-quarters of the way with her because this is one of those places he’s so familiar with.
vi.(Maybe it’s one of the selfish little yearnings to keep the human memories of her held fast for when it tries to batter them down again.)
vii. He recognizes the smell of her skin, now. Maybe it’s a legacy of it but it’s comforting, if just to know she’s there, alive.
viii. That’s how he knows someone else got past the locked door before he recognizes that the blonde hair is not the same exact shade as Chloe’s.
ix. “What are you?” (He knows already, of course, because he can feel the strange pain again. This woman is hunting Chloe and for once he wishes Chloe will be less efficient, out of sight. He’s got a monster inside him and there’s very little she can do to him.)
x. “That’s not the question, is it? What are you?” She toys almost absently with a tiny pistol in her hand, something that poses not the least threat to him, but could end Chloe’s life with one well-placed shot.
xi. He doesn’t consciously try to control the force behind his lunge toward it. It takes one very little twist in the metal for bullets and casings to come apart in his hand. The casings drop clumsily from his fingers as the edges sharpen, their tint grays and he can feel the skin breaking between his knuckles.
xii. He knows how it wants to bring an end to this. It’s the sickly sweet feeling, blood pounding through his ears, overpowering him. It’s irrational because he’s Davis Bloome now, and Davis Bloome is not it, he won’t kill anyone.
xiii. Davis Bloome can’t let himself be frozen, leave Chloe in a corner with that woman waiting to spring at her from the shadows.
xiv. This isn’t the recommended way to deal with this, turn his back to an open threat. He has four minutes to neutralize her and to stop it, in that order.
xv. As it is, his near-human fingers fumble for injections that he doesn’t find. All the vials are cracked open, bleeding toxins and life into the chipped sink.
xvi. “I knew that would get you to pay some attention. Those were illegal, weren’t they?” That woman is crazy, stalking toward him. Whatever is in him is a hundred times more dangerous than she is, and he can barely see through the red mist in his eyes.
xvii. (Chloe will be back in a few minutes, to this. He won’t let her find him covered in red again, won’t be the dark thing behind her nightmares.)
xviii. “Get away.” He doubts his voice will be human enough for her to hear in a moment. Chloe will know something’s wrong. He told her to run.
xix. “No, I don’t think I will. I’ll just wait up a few more minutes, right here, for you to greet Chloe.” She’s holding a lump of green rock in her palm. “Insurance.” It stirs up strange and dizzying images- a boy with a clean shaven head, mock fighting, a tank, darkness.
xx. He moves forward and for the very first time in a long time he can feel something boiling and bubbling over his skin. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I’m safe from you, but you’re not safe from this.”
xxi. “Listen. It’s very simple. She’s been abducted by a monstrous creature. Superman will be here after she is. (She’s always collected you boys.) He’ll find her, all bloody and torn, and in the end one or the other of you will die, but it doesn’t matter. The world will finally see.”
xxii. “You feel it already, don’t you?” This isn’t trembling, now. It’s more like a jolt. Seconds, minutes-Chloe will be back through that door before it rips her apart.
xxiii. Chloe. She’d kill Chloe and this time he’d be the weapon. Blonde hair, green eyes, a strange feeling in the back of his throat. No one person mattered more than anyone else, once. Then one person meant everything. What’s left of Davis Bloome knows that this means something.
xxiv. He doesn’t or can’t hear the rest of the words; they are meaningless to him now. He doesn't know if it's him or it rushing forward, on legs that changing, clumsy. The spikes will pierce through the woman, keep her trapped. Maybe the burning in his flesh means it’ll die too.
I. Presentation-knowing how to take a gamble. Probability- knowing how many times a coin lands heads or tails. Instinct-just knowing.
Davis Bloome used to think they could only mean so much.
Lowest common denominator? You got only so many second chances before they ran out.
Endnotes: Don't fire me. the words kinda led here for the time being. The end action has unintended consequences. And there is a part 6! It may have smut.
Random explanations: Linda Lake sent Oliver in his freaky quest. It was a manipulation of Chloe and Davis to a certain extent.
Also, the Id! Davis scene kind of morphed into Chloe introspection. The book Chloe mentions in xi of VII is I Capture a Castle. And yes, you know what the words are
This part pushes things a little further with Chloe and Davis. In Crucible, there was that situation; now there's this one. yes I will be cryptic.It makes me feel like James Joyce or something
So, So, (ready for this?) What did you think?