smallville fic: pygmalion (davis/lex): flying isn't easy.
To paraxdisepink , because I blame her for all of this. YAY. I also blame her for the fact that I couldn't just make Davis and Lex get it on, there had to be plot, particularly world-ending plot and daddy issues and pain. So, next time, just tell me if there will be spankings and I'm THERE.
Clone!Davis/Lex (with background Clark/Lex and Chloe/Davis), 2nd person, Pandora Alt. Reality. As Zod is taking control of earth, Davis becomes Lex's second chance. R/nc-17. Slash.
There were imperfections to the cloning process, of course. The accelerated aging, the single-minded focus. The first trials were an exaggeration of your obsessions. You’d wanted to get under Lana’s skin, see what Clark saw, know what Clark thought was beautiful, be that. The first time to make yourself over you try and separate he and Lana. Clark is going to kill you-that other you. It dies in that explosion.
You never try to make yourself over again.
It’s disappointing, somehow- that Clark doesn’t feel you’re alive- just like you feel him in your bones- walking above ground wearing the hero’s face. Lana got the invulnerability but as you heal, you grow to understand that you are the suit. You’ve healed from the broken bones and the internal bleeding in the fortress- enough for your purposes. You’ve stopped aging by now. You’re a freak.
You have all the time in the world to find a way to stop him. You have ears on every move Clark makes; all over the Planet- in that office you had so meticulously prepared for Tess, planted on her auditory nerves. You wonder how you’re going to kill them both.
Clark replaces you with a man that calls himself Mason and then Zod. Clark says he’s the closest to a brother he’ll ever know. He won’t give up on him. Chloe doesn’t want another Doomsday situation. You wonder where you’ve heard that before. Davis Bloome. They dumped their last Kryptonian in a shallow grave. You think maybe he was the one they should have tried saving.
You remember Davis as the boy holding out your plastic toy and asking you if you were warrior angel. Lionel had disappeared him into the night after he grew bored of him. You’d thought he’d become something like you, but he’d been more like Clark, doing a thankless job and saving lives. It took kindness to kill him. He’s in an unmarked grave, dirt shoveled over his peaceful face.
You drag him out- find a gaping hole over the clean white skin of his breastbone. Clark had wanted to split him. Split his DNA in half- the good with the bad- a consciousness that was all at once the monster’s and his- right down the center. He hadn’t lost his mind. There just hadn’t been much of it left You’d heard the uproar. All that and he’d killed a drug addict. Truly a psychopath. (Clark always destroys what he tries to fix.)
His body is still beautiful in a dark way- in the strong, lean lines of his shoulders, heavy brows and the soft indent of his chin. You wonder how strong he was- how it broke out from under his skin. When you’d met him you thought it was an affectation, the way he would hold his head down, try not to be seen. He did such a good job Lionel didn’t see who he was and what. He could have done good in the world.
You extract what you need from the body. You’ve perfected the process by now. You doze in the same room with the tank sometimes, talk to him like he’s Clark and your only friend in the world. You tell him about the solar towers- the urban legends of the flying killers out in the streets, how you’re both going to take them down. Sometimes his body will thrash in the water and the pit of your stomach will drop. You have to do this right, at least.
He breaks the tank open, one day, smashes his head through the glass to your side. Blood covers his face, there’s a tranquilizing gun in your hand. He just shudders in the middle of the room. “Why am I here?”
At first he’s skittish, like an animal in a cage. But then he gets used to seeing you. He speaks like a man and not a boy. He was a paramedic and that’s the extent of what he knows. He doesn’t remember the murder or the Kryptonite or even her. You don’t tell him what he is. You want to believe he’ll trust you when he finds out; you’re the one who can help.
Davis is your most perfect creation but he’ll never be all yours. He has memories of loving, of being cared for. There’s something about the way he’ll toss and turn at night, the way he’ll sleep, like he’s winding hair around his fingers, not his own.
He has never been anything but grateful, kind without any pretenses. He cleans up after himself, asks you questions about you, doesn’t go out of his way to shut you out. There is no missing the vague, searching look in his eyes as he watches you. Didn’t you look at Clark like that?
The night he doesn’t come back you know he’s finally remembered his own name. Davis is more perceptive than Clark. He’s found Chloe by now. You imagine they’ll have brown-haired, green-eyed babies.
He doesn’t need you.
When he comes back to you he’s covered in blood. She’s shot him full of bullets.
Chloe’s been telling herself that he was a monster, a thing, that the real Davis Bloome wasn’t ever real. But if she knew he was here with you, what would she be willing to do to get him out of your clutches?
He’s huddled in the corner of the room. The blood is covering him like a fatality, but he’s completely healed underneath. He’s still holding onto the casings, rolling them in his fingers, forehead full of tears. The sight is lunatic, ugly, but he is beautiful. Davis’s eyes aren’t dead like Zod’s or Clark’s and that’s why it hurts you so much. Davis is shaking, looking right through you, pliable.
You approach with your hands open in front of you. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, you think sometimes. It’s that she wasn’t brave enough to show it. You don’t think he forgets her, but he never tries to go back.
Davis tries to break through to the first of Zod’s assassins you decide take down- Ailah. The brain-washings, being hunted… He knows how that feels. He can help her get away from her General.
Her face is hard and there is shellshock in her eyes. “Get away? Why? Why would he want you?” She slashes his face with a sword. He is fighting his instincts hard. The back of his shirt is straining with something that’s no longer skin.
His back is to you and you can’t get a clear shot. He’s gone off script. That is stupid. She’s trained in killing and obeying. There is no one she has left to care about. She doesn’t respond to him, but her eyes are fixed on you. You know the first person she’s going to sink her blade into.
When she lights the air on fire around him and charges you, the spikes come out of his hands and he lets out this sound, this inhuman sound. His knuckles are black and he looks so afraid. When he drags her in you hear her neck snap.
They’re both dead in minutes. She’s not coming back.
He’s harder to deal with than Clark in some ways. He has a conscience, not a list of principles. He hates what he has to do, hates himself, makes it no secret. He doesn’t let you shape him, but he’s willing to listen.
Davis is a time bomb waiting to go off. He’s Zod’s carbon copy, Zod’s engineered son. His killing instincts can’t be controlled, can barely be molded. You watch him try in the alleys of the city, eyes bubbling over with the crimson of blood. Those kills are quick and neat and amazingly humane for all the power that’s shifting under his skin. There is no police attention. Drug dealers and pimps are becoming negligible to Zod’s genocides.
He hates himself, but the red skies and the way human homes grow emptier by the day sickens him. He knows why Zod made him. “I destroy everything I touch.”
You sit beside him. He doesn’t uncoil from where he sits. Your shoulder is close enough to brush his, and he’s warm enough to send a shock through you. You pretend, for yourself, that his voice drops a little. “I won’t become what he wants. I won’t wipe out everyone that’s left. This has to stop, Lex.”
Your plan involves risk, but he just wants to die.
“Are you asking me for my advice?” You joke. “Never thought that would happen.”
You resist the urge to push him for something that’s beyond his notice, that should be below yours. You won’t beg him to stay.
He nods.
“Then get close enough to touch him.”
“I know you’ve been preparing him to kill Clark.” Chloe has a gun to your head. “Clark made a bad call trying to befriend Zod. You were just waiting for an excuse to do it, though, weren’t you?”
This isn’t about Clark. She’s been tailing you for months, trying to find Davis, to kill him. “I’ve known his secret longer than you. I wanted to help him.” She asks you what right do you think you have, to bring him back to life again. She asks you if you know what he’s capable of.
You tell her Davis is dead, looks like Clark made another bad call. She flinches and you have the bow out of her grip.
“He wouldn’t have lived very long after you put the Black Kryptonite in his system, anyway. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Who knew it would be so easy to break Doomsday, right? You’ve never seen the man you shot before in your life.”
“How did he know me?”
“You made an impression on the real one.”
She doesn’t even try to take it away. Move at all. “I have to see him. “ She says, hard voice all ragged at the edges. “I didn’t think that was possible.” It’s the most honest she’s been with you since you can remember. Her face is crumpled up. “I just wanted to save him. I wanted…” You wonder how long that one will last her.
“You were looking for an excuse. Tell Clark not to come after him or I’ll kill him. Don’t come back.”
You hold the bolt on her until you get to the other side of the doors. Drop it there. Looks like you’re on the same side now, anyway. You still wish you could shoot.
She had him. She wanted him and what he made her feel. But when it came down to it, her phobias won her over and she did what she was told. She threw Davis away so easily. That dead one was the boy you remember. That boy was your only friend.
But Chloe never knew him like you know this Davis. She’ll never feel what you felt the first time he came back to you, arms and wrists sticky with blood.
You pity her.
You don’t have illusions. Davis doesn’t want you the way you want him to. He was alone and then ran away for the most traumatic part of his life with a woman that he loved more than anything else in the world. You would have guessed he was straight by nature. But living in a box will do something to you.
This is your last chance. Probably the last chance you will get. Davis looks like a drunk or maybe an ex-convict, stubble shading the lower half of his face. It suits him. He tells you he can handle it, but he hasn’t eaten anything. Doesn’t touch the wine. You hoped you could celebrate.
The plan goes into action tomorrow. The Kryptonite gas is finally ready. You’re going to let him be taken for crimes against his Kandorian heritage, and they’ll let Zod do the honors. Davis has the Ultimate Trojan Horse inside him, and they can’t hold out against both. You’re so close to everything you’ve wanted. The air feels scarce.
You think he must be letting you when you push fingers in his collar, kiss him hard on the mouth. He’s holding himself straight and tense against the chair. Nerves scream inside you, this sick feeling in your chest like you’re doing something cruel and you know it.
Davis could be stunned. He could be angry. You half-want to push him away, let him be- but then you’re on the floor and his shoulder is brushing yours, his eyes fixed and calculating. He’s so careful when he draws you back into him again. There are calluses on his hands. His mouth feels soft but you know better.
Davis is what he does. Sex for Davis is more than a purpose, more than biding time until the next battle. It’s a key into the person he thought he was, once. You wonder what he was like for Chloe. He knows what it is like to give, doesn’t understand that’s not what you need.
You want him to be ripped out of himself, you need the animal to come to the surface and remind you that this is dangerous and what you’re doing with him is hundreds of times more foolish than Clark. You want him to trust you like he never trusted her. You don’t let him take off his pants himself, drag down the zipper and watch his throat tighten.
He’s looking for comfort, any kind of comfort. But he looks you in the eyes when he finally touches you too and it doesn’t feel insincere. It is pleasant. Practiced, medically sanctioned touch.
He has such a command of himself, even now. It’s illogical. You hit him. He doesn’t feel it, it’s a glancing blow. But it does. There’s a bloody tint to his eyes when he turns you to your side, the thrum of battle heat in your chest when you’re on your knees.
It’s been years since anyone’s been inside you, and it’s no easier this time, not at first. You muffle your reactions into your palm. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You realize you’re panting.
He’s blunt inside you, far too forceful and deep inside to be like anyone before. He doesn’t go too quickly, doesn’t demand too much. It’s like he’s measuring the void inside you and only giving what you can take. That isn’t it. He has power, but to use it, he has to accept it. He has to accept what he can do. His fingers wrap around your root, grip and squeeze the thoughts out of your head.
You grit your teeth and move with him behind you, wrap your fingers around his because this may be the one time you can.
His mouth braces in hair that was never at your nape. You can feel the heat of him breathing out, there, the weight of his body bearing down on your own. Heat is spreading all over your skin. You’re fighting it, hoping your body will hold out. You want him to understand.
You want to tell him stop it, stop controlling just this once but his name comes out like a breath. Gathering, gathering deep. Then his fingers are on your arms and he’s really pushing you.
He makes a cry for the first time, something too surprised to be a yell- too deep and harsh to be a scream. The thing inside him is drum tight in his chest, pounding through to your spine, up through the bruises on your arms. It’s a burst of blindness when you come, the heat of him and the bright sunspots behind your eyes like you’ve taken flight. You can’t move, can barely speak, and he gets off without you asking. It’s hard to lie at times like this. You wonder what to say, what he usually talks about afterwards. His mouth looks bitten and red but there are no lines around it now.
You pant and lay on your side, search that gleam in his eyes for the recognition you need. He reaches a hand out and carefully wipes the blood from your bitten lip. Looks at you without making an effort to move or run, like you don’t need anything but this.
It strikes you that you aren’t thinking of Clark. You haven’t been thinking of Clark for a very long time.
It’s going to end soon.
The solar towers are online again, despite the constant sabotages over the firewall. Zod trusts no one. Tess dies of an arrow to the gut before you can find out what he’s planning.
The rag-tag band of humans that call themselves the rebellion are showing their holes. Their assaults on the towers are scattered and poorly executed bloodbaths for the most part, but they make a good distraction. Oliver blows himself up and a few of Zod’s soldiers besides. They survive and he doesn’t, but it shakes them to know that there is someone that can filter past their defenses. It’s time to act.
Zod wants Davis more than anything in the world. He’s the perfect Trojan horse. Chloe knows this game you’re playing and maybe that’s why you chose to trust her to be the giftgiver. Davis holds completely still as she puts the cuffs on him. Her face is grimacing and twisting but she tells him nothing.
Davis watches you and you think you know where he stands. It’s not the promise of Chloe’s gratitude that’s calling to him. It’s the impulse, the power in him that he hates. Zod is slaughtering men like animals and has hard coded him to. Killing his father will make it stop, only it never will.
Chloe hands him in and you watch from the vent. Father and son are like twins-one shackled, one with nothing in his eyes. Davis doesn’t kneel until he’s pushed down. He doesn’t say anything either. Zod wants a reaction. Zod wants him to follow orders because there’s nothing of him left to fight. Davis is his son.
But right now he’s the culprit that’s killed his best operatives. Zod walks around him, examines his face and body like a plastic figurine. Chloe’s a non-entity in this strange transaction. “He’s a close enough resemblance, not what I hoped for, but you’ll be paid.”
Zod jerks his jaw up, and cups it with manicured nails. Smirks lightly as Davis is now looking straight into his face with the darkness in his eyes. There is something sickening about Zod touching him. “He smells human.”
Chloe’s lucky that Zod is so focused on the goods. It looks as if she wants to whip out a crossbow any second.
Zod pulls out a blade, a shade of something akin to nausea passing over his face. Kryptonite? He braces a ringed hand on his upper arm to keep Davis from jerking away. “My son, do you think this can kill you?” Davis’s skin strains, black veins snaking across his chest, cutting off his air.
“You know the answer to that.”
“The more you come back, the more it will hurt.” Davis doesn’t scream easily anymore, so Zod contents himself with digging the blade into his cheek. “You’re not afraid, so what is making you weak? Don’t you want to kill the one who brought you in?”
Chloe stands stiff in the shadows and watches. She doesn’t look like she’s enjoying the view this time. “Do you fancy you love the humans? They’re primitive; don’t appreciate the value of life. They handed you over to me, boy; you think this one will shed a tear when I gut you? You think, maybe, she’ll do it to save her own skin?”
Davis is already struggling in the manacles. Zod turns to Chloe, looks her over, the quiver on her back and the primitive battle gear. She should be primed to take the blade from him, make it quick. Her focus wavers between one and the other, hand straying to the arrow at her side. Zod jabs the dagger with a quick motion into her throat. Davis lunges, bone plates on his hands snapping against the metal. You recognize the raw sound in Davis’s throat.
Chloe is dead before she hits the ground. “She didn’t capture you. She is worthless.” Zod is watching Davis’s eyes, finally glinting the slightest shade of red. “So- she wasn’t the one. I’ll find whoever it is.”
“She’ll be the last human I see you kill.” Davis says softly.
“You’re going to live a long time, son.”
Zod walks away, and the soldiers converge on Davis. You can’t see him anymore, but you feel every time he dies. Not too long now. It can’t be too long.
The gas will kill all the Kryptonians inside in the next seven hours, but you find yourself delivering mercy killings with Kryptonite bullets to the ones that are too far gone. They remind you of yourself.
Zod dies slower than the others. You can hear the noises on the roof. Dictatorial platitudes, bones through invulnerable flesh. Then everything is quiet. You find Davis up there, naked and covered in green particulates, feeding his remains into the flames. There isn’t much left of Zod to find anyway, and now no off chance that some zealous disciple will resurrect him from bone fragments and ash. Davis’s eyes are calmer than before. You think he may have finally accepted his power.
The last thing you do is take the solar towers offline, crawling under the machinery with Chloe’s viral USB drive. You look at them just once, think of what you could do with them. Then you think of the calm in Davis’s eyes and watch them go dead.
Davis glances down at Chloe’s body just once before he pulls you to your feet, slings your arm over his shoulder. You’re grateful. The place is rigged to blow.
It no longer feels like a fall when you kiss him. It feels like you can fly over every last mistake in your life and ignore what you see. Maybe, in some twisted way, it was meant to be like this. He’ll catch you.
Only, the skin of his jaw is growing weathered, breakable. He’s aging faster than he should. It’ll be a month before he’s gone.
You feel the loss of him to your very marrow. Clark’s disappearance is almost an afterthought. Davis has died for you- over and over for you. You wish you could die for him.
No one knows him but you so you take the shovel and bury him yourself. You should be thinking of finishing what you both started, create a Kryptonite toxin while the rest of Zod’s forces are still weak. With Davis it had felt right, and now you’re just a bitter, tired man with very little conscience left.
You kneel on the ground over his body. There is no God, but he’d been raised Catholic. You don’t pray. You think of how you have to wipe the rest of them out, think you might have been happy. You don’t have power anymore. You rub your eyes, hate the smoothness of your face because it’s so unlike his.
There’s a cloud over your mind and it’s everything he was. You used to think the Luthor name would become something more than a legacy of blood. There are people who’ve survived, the ones that have dug themselves into the wildernesses outside the major cities. They’ve started to filter back to what’s left of Metropolis. The world needs leadership now, someone who will gather back the shreds of the world’s dignity and execute the prisoners you’ve taken. Someone who will follow through whatever that requires. You don’t know if you’re that man anymore.
(You’ll do it better this time. You have to.)
Fingers bump at the glass of the tank. He’s naked, completely vulnerable in there. He doesn’t know you.
You break the glass and catch him in the shoulder when he struggles to you, away from you, you don’t know. You tell him- “I’m here. The world needs you.”
Davis reaches for your face with the impersonal tactility of a newborn. You close your eyes. Unclench your fists and sob. The dirt is still sticky on your fingers, on the inside of your nails.
Endnotes: I must be evil, but yes, that conclusion means that Davis/Lex's eternally epic love was cyanided by Clark and his stupid ideas. BUT at least they get to live together forever, or sorts, or Lex does with a new Davis clone every time. You know he would.
(Next up- finally that half crazy?cannibal Davis/Chloe fic oonaseckar , y/y? )
Clone!Davis/Lex (with background Clark/Lex and Chloe/Davis), 2nd person, Pandora Alt. Reality. As Zod is taking control of earth, Davis becomes Lex's second chance. R/nc-17. Slash.
There were imperfections to the cloning process, of course. The accelerated aging, the single-minded focus. The first trials were an exaggeration of your obsessions. You’d wanted to get under Lana’s skin, see what Clark saw, know what Clark thought was beautiful, be that. The first time to make yourself over you try and separate he and Lana. Clark is going to kill you-that other you. It dies in that explosion.
You never try to make yourself over again.
It’s disappointing, somehow- that Clark doesn’t feel you’re alive- just like you feel him in your bones- walking above ground wearing the hero’s face. Lana got the invulnerability but as you heal, you grow to understand that you are the suit. You’ve healed from the broken bones and the internal bleeding in the fortress- enough for your purposes. You’ve stopped aging by now. You’re a freak.
You have all the time in the world to find a way to stop him. You have ears on every move Clark makes; all over the Planet- in that office you had so meticulously prepared for Tess, planted on her auditory nerves. You wonder how you’re going to kill them both.
Clark replaces you with a man that calls himself Mason and then Zod. Clark says he’s the closest to a brother he’ll ever know. He won’t give up on him. Chloe doesn’t want another Doomsday situation. You wonder where you’ve heard that before. Davis Bloome. They dumped their last Kryptonian in a shallow grave. You think maybe he was the one they should have tried saving.
You remember Davis as the boy holding out your plastic toy and asking you if you were warrior angel. Lionel had disappeared him into the night after he grew bored of him. You’d thought he’d become something like you, but he’d been more like Clark, doing a thankless job and saving lives. It took kindness to kill him. He’s in an unmarked grave, dirt shoveled over his peaceful face.
You drag him out- find a gaping hole over the clean white skin of his breastbone. Clark had wanted to split him. Split his DNA in half- the good with the bad- a consciousness that was all at once the monster’s and his- right down the center. He hadn’t lost his mind. There just hadn’t been much of it left You’d heard the uproar. All that and he’d killed a drug addict. Truly a psychopath. (Clark always destroys what he tries to fix.)
His body is still beautiful in a dark way- in the strong, lean lines of his shoulders, heavy brows and the soft indent of his chin. You wonder how strong he was- how it broke out from under his skin. When you’d met him you thought it was an affectation, the way he would hold his head down, try not to be seen. He did such a good job Lionel didn’t see who he was and what. He could have done good in the world.
You extract what you need from the body. You’ve perfected the process by now. You doze in the same room with the tank sometimes, talk to him like he’s Clark and your only friend in the world. You tell him about the solar towers- the urban legends of the flying killers out in the streets, how you’re both going to take them down. Sometimes his body will thrash in the water and the pit of your stomach will drop. You have to do this right, at least.
He breaks the tank open, one day, smashes his head through the glass to your side. Blood covers his face, there’s a tranquilizing gun in your hand. He just shudders in the middle of the room. “Why am I here?”
At first he’s skittish, like an animal in a cage. But then he gets used to seeing you. He speaks like a man and not a boy. He was a paramedic and that’s the extent of what he knows. He doesn’t remember the murder or the Kryptonite or even her. You don’t tell him what he is. You want to believe he’ll trust you when he finds out; you’re the one who can help.
Davis is your most perfect creation but he’ll never be all yours. He has memories of loving, of being cared for. There’s something about the way he’ll toss and turn at night, the way he’ll sleep, like he’s winding hair around his fingers, not his own.
He has never been anything but grateful, kind without any pretenses. He cleans up after himself, asks you questions about you, doesn’t go out of his way to shut you out. There is no missing the vague, searching look in his eyes as he watches you. Didn’t you look at Clark like that?
The night he doesn’t come back you know he’s finally remembered his own name. Davis is more perceptive than Clark. He’s found Chloe by now. You imagine they’ll have brown-haired, green-eyed babies.
He doesn’t need you.
When he comes back to you he’s covered in blood. She’s shot him full of bullets.
Chloe’s been telling herself that he was a monster, a thing, that the real Davis Bloome wasn’t ever real. But if she knew he was here with you, what would she be willing to do to get him out of your clutches?
He’s huddled in the corner of the room. The blood is covering him like a fatality, but he’s completely healed underneath. He’s still holding onto the casings, rolling them in his fingers, forehead full of tears. The sight is lunatic, ugly, but he is beautiful. Davis’s eyes aren’t dead like Zod’s or Clark’s and that’s why it hurts you so much. Davis is shaking, looking right through you, pliable.
You approach with your hands open in front of you. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, you think sometimes. It’s that she wasn’t brave enough to show it. You don’t think he forgets her, but he never tries to go back.
Davis tries to break through to the first of Zod’s assassins you decide take down- Ailah. The brain-washings, being hunted… He knows how that feels. He can help her get away from her General.
Her face is hard and there is shellshock in her eyes. “Get away? Why? Why would he want you?” She slashes his face with a sword. He is fighting his instincts hard. The back of his shirt is straining with something that’s no longer skin.
His back is to you and you can’t get a clear shot. He’s gone off script. That is stupid. She’s trained in killing and obeying. There is no one she has left to care about. She doesn’t respond to him, but her eyes are fixed on you. You know the first person she’s going to sink her blade into.
When she lights the air on fire around him and charges you, the spikes come out of his hands and he lets out this sound, this inhuman sound. His knuckles are black and he looks so afraid. When he drags her in you hear her neck snap.
They’re both dead in minutes. She’s not coming back.
He’s harder to deal with than Clark in some ways. He has a conscience, not a list of principles. He hates what he has to do, hates himself, makes it no secret. He doesn’t let you shape him, but he’s willing to listen.
Davis is a time bomb waiting to go off. He’s Zod’s carbon copy, Zod’s engineered son. His killing instincts can’t be controlled, can barely be molded. You watch him try in the alleys of the city, eyes bubbling over with the crimson of blood. Those kills are quick and neat and amazingly humane for all the power that’s shifting under his skin. There is no police attention. Drug dealers and pimps are becoming negligible to Zod’s genocides.
He hates himself, but the red skies and the way human homes grow emptier by the day sickens him. He knows why Zod made him. “I destroy everything I touch.”
You sit beside him. He doesn’t uncoil from where he sits. Your shoulder is close enough to brush his, and he’s warm enough to send a shock through you. You pretend, for yourself, that his voice drops a little. “I won’t become what he wants. I won’t wipe out everyone that’s left. This has to stop, Lex.”
Your plan involves risk, but he just wants to die.
“Are you asking me for my advice?” You joke. “Never thought that would happen.”
You resist the urge to push him for something that’s beyond his notice, that should be below yours. You won’t beg him to stay.
He nods.
“Then get close enough to touch him.”
“I know you’ve been preparing him to kill Clark.” Chloe has a gun to your head. “Clark made a bad call trying to befriend Zod. You were just waiting for an excuse to do it, though, weren’t you?”
This isn’t about Clark. She’s been tailing you for months, trying to find Davis, to kill him. “I’ve known his secret longer than you. I wanted to help him.” She asks you what right do you think you have, to bring him back to life again. She asks you if you know what he’s capable of.
You tell her Davis is dead, looks like Clark made another bad call. She flinches and you have the bow out of her grip.
“He wouldn’t have lived very long after you put the Black Kryptonite in his system, anyway. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Who knew it would be so easy to break Doomsday, right? You’ve never seen the man you shot before in your life.”
“How did he know me?”
“You made an impression on the real one.”
She doesn’t even try to take it away. Move at all. “I have to see him. “ She says, hard voice all ragged at the edges. “I didn’t think that was possible.” It’s the most honest she’s been with you since you can remember. Her face is crumpled up. “I just wanted to save him. I wanted…” You wonder how long that one will last her.
“You were looking for an excuse. Tell Clark not to come after him or I’ll kill him. Don’t come back.”
You hold the bolt on her until you get to the other side of the doors. Drop it there. Looks like you’re on the same side now, anyway. You still wish you could shoot.
She had him. She wanted him and what he made her feel. But when it came down to it, her phobias won her over and she did what she was told. She threw Davis away so easily. That dead one was the boy you remember. That boy was your only friend.
But Chloe never knew him like you know this Davis. She’ll never feel what you felt the first time he came back to you, arms and wrists sticky with blood.
You pity her.
You don’t have illusions. Davis doesn’t want you the way you want him to. He was alone and then ran away for the most traumatic part of his life with a woman that he loved more than anything else in the world. You would have guessed he was straight by nature. But living in a box will do something to you.
This is your last chance. Probably the last chance you will get. Davis looks like a drunk or maybe an ex-convict, stubble shading the lower half of his face. It suits him. He tells you he can handle it, but he hasn’t eaten anything. Doesn’t touch the wine. You hoped you could celebrate.
The plan goes into action tomorrow. The Kryptonite gas is finally ready. You’re going to let him be taken for crimes against his Kandorian heritage, and they’ll let Zod do the honors. Davis has the Ultimate Trojan Horse inside him, and they can’t hold out against both. You’re so close to everything you’ve wanted. The air feels scarce.
You think he must be letting you when you push fingers in his collar, kiss him hard on the mouth. He’s holding himself straight and tense against the chair. Nerves scream inside you, this sick feeling in your chest like you’re doing something cruel and you know it.
Davis could be stunned. He could be angry. You half-want to push him away, let him be- but then you’re on the floor and his shoulder is brushing yours, his eyes fixed and calculating. He’s so careful when he draws you back into him again. There are calluses on his hands. His mouth feels soft but you know better.
Davis is what he does. Sex for Davis is more than a purpose, more than biding time until the next battle. It’s a key into the person he thought he was, once. You wonder what he was like for Chloe. He knows what it is like to give, doesn’t understand that’s not what you need.
You want him to be ripped out of himself, you need the animal to come to the surface and remind you that this is dangerous and what you’re doing with him is hundreds of times more foolish than Clark. You want him to trust you like he never trusted her. You don’t let him take off his pants himself, drag down the zipper and watch his throat tighten.
He’s looking for comfort, any kind of comfort. But he looks you in the eyes when he finally touches you too and it doesn’t feel insincere. It is pleasant. Practiced, medically sanctioned touch.
He has such a command of himself, even now. It’s illogical. You hit him. He doesn’t feel it, it’s a glancing blow. But it does. There’s a bloody tint to his eyes when he turns you to your side, the thrum of battle heat in your chest when you’re on your knees.
It’s been years since anyone’s been inside you, and it’s no easier this time, not at first. You muffle your reactions into your palm. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You realize you’re panting.
He’s blunt inside you, far too forceful and deep inside to be like anyone before. He doesn’t go too quickly, doesn’t demand too much. It’s like he’s measuring the void inside you and only giving what you can take. That isn’t it. He has power, but to use it, he has to accept it. He has to accept what he can do. His fingers wrap around your root, grip and squeeze the thoughts out of your head.
You grit your teeth and move with him behind you, wrap your fingers around his because this may be the one time you can.
His mouth braces in hair that was never at your nape. You can feel the heat of him breathing out, there, the weight of his body bearing down on your own. Heat is spreading all over your skin. You’re fighting it, hoping your body will hold out. You want him to understand.
You want to tell him stop it, stop controlling just this once but his name comes out like a breath. Gathering, gathering deep. Then his fingers are on your arms and he’s really pushing you.
He makes a cry for the first time, something too surprised to be a yell- too deep and harsh to be a scream. The thing inside him is drum tight in his chest, pounding through to your spine, up through the bruises on your arms. It’s a burst of blindness when you come, the heat of him and the bright sunspots behind your eyes like you’ve taken flight. You can’t move, can barely speak, and he gets off without you asking. It’s hard to lie at times like this. You wonder what to say, what he usually talks about afterwards. His mouth looks bitten and red but there are no lines around it now.
You pant and lay on your side, search that gleam in his eyes for the recognition you need. He reaches a hand out and carefully wipes the blood from your bitten lip. Looks at you without making an effort to move or run, like you don’t need anything but this.
It strikes you that you aren’t thinking of Clark. You haven’t been thinking of Clark for a very long time.
It’s going to end soon.
The solar towers are online again, despite the constant sabotages over the firewall. Zod trusts no one. Tess dies of an arrow to the gut before you can find out what he’s planning.
The rag-tag band of humans that call themselves the rebellion are showing their holes. Their assaults on the towers are scattered and poorly executed bloodbaths for the most part, but they make a good distraction. Oliver blows himself up and a few of Zod’s soldiers besides. They survive and he doesn’t, but it shakes them to know that there is someone that can filter past their defenses. It’s time to act.
Zod wants Davis more than anything in the world. He’s the perfect Trojan horse. Chloe knows this game you’re playing and maybe that’s why you chose to trust her to be the giftgiver. Davis holds completely still as she puts the cuffs on him. Her face is grimacing and twisting but she tells him nothing.
Davis watches you and you think you know where he stands. It’s not the promise of Chloe’s gratitude that’s calling to him. It’s the impulse, the power in him that he hates. Zod is slaughtering men like animals and has hard coded him to. Killing his father will make it stop, only it never will.
Chloe hands him in and you watch from the vent. Father and son are like twins-one shackled, one with nothing in his eyes. Davis doesn’t kneel until he’s pushed down. He doesn’t say anything either. Zod wants a reaction. Zod wants him to follow orders because there’s nothing of him left to fight. Davis is his son.
But right now he’s the culprit that’s killed his best operatives. Zod walks around him, examines his face and body like a plastic figurine. Chloe’s a non-entity in this strange transaction. “He’s a close enough resemblance, not what I hoped for, but you’ll be paid.”
Zod jerks his jaw up, and cups it with manicured nails. Smirks lightly as Davis is now looking straight into his face with the darkness in his eyes. There is something sickening about Zod touching him. “He smells human.”
Chloe’s lucky that Zod is so focused on the goods. It looks as if she wants to whip out a crossbow any second.
Zod pulls out a blade, a shade of something akin to nausea passing over his face. Kryptonite? He braces a ringed hand on his upper arm to keep Davis from jerking away. “My son, do you think this can kill you?” Davis’s skin strains, black veins snaking across his chest, cutting off his air.
“You know the answer to that.”
“The more you come back, the more it will hurt.” Davis doesn’t scream easily anymore, so Zod contents himself with digging the blade into his cheek. “You’re not afraid, so what is making you weak? Don’t you want to kill the one who brought you in?”
Chloe stands stiff in the shadows and watches. She doesn’t look like she’s enjoying the view this time. “Do you fancy you love the humans? They’re primitive; don’t appreciate the value of life. They handed you over to me, boy; you think this one will shed a tear when I gut you? You think, maybe, she’ll do it to save her own skin?”
Davis is already struggling in the manacles. Zod turns to Chloe, looks her over, the quiver on her back and the primitive battle gear. She should be primed to take the blade from him, make it quick. Her focus wavers between one and the other, hand straying to the arrow at her side. Zod jabs the dagger with a quick motion into her throat. Davis lunges, bone plates on his hands snapping against the metal. You recognize the raw sound in Davis’s throat.
Chloe is dead before she hits the ground. “She didn’t capture you. She is worthless.” Zod is watching Davis’s eyes, finally glinting the slightest shade of red. “So- she wasn’t the one. I’ll find whoever it is.”
“She’ll be the last human I see you kill.” Davis says softly.
“You’re going to live a long time, son.”
Zod walks away, and the soldiers converge on Davis. You can’t see him anymore, but you feel every time he dies. Not too long now. It can’t be too long.
The gas will kill all the Kryptonians inside in the next seven hours, but you find yourself delivering mercy killings with Kryptonite bullets to the ones that are too far gone. They remind you of yourself.
Zod dies slower than the others. You can hear the noises on the roof. Dictatorial platitudes, bones through invulnerable flesh. Then everything is quiet. You find Davis up there, naked and covered in green particulates, feeding his remains into the flames. There isn’t much left of Zod to find anyway, and now no off chance that some zealous disciple will resurrect him from bone fragments and ash. Davis’s eyes are calmer than before. You think he may have finally accepted his power.
The last thing you do is take the solar towers offline, crawling under the machinery with Chloe’s viral USB drive. You look at them just once, think of what you could do with them. Then you think of the calm in Davis’s eyes and watch them go dead.
Davis glances down at Chloe’s body just once before he pulls you to your feet, slings your arm over his shoulder. You’re grateful. The place is rigged to blow.
It no longer feels like a fall when you kiss him. It feels like you can fly over every last mistake in your life and ignore what you see. Maybe, in some twisted way, it was meant to be like this. He’ll catch you.
Only, the skin of his jaw is growing weathered, breakable. He’s aging faster than he should. It’ll be a month before he’s gone.
You feel the loss of him to your very marrow. Clark’s disappearance is almost an afterthought. Davis has died for you- over and over for you. You wish you could die for him.
No one knows him but you so you take the shovel and bury him yourself. You should be thinking of finishing what you both started, create a Kryptonite toxin while the rest of Zod’s forces are still weak. With Davis it had felt right, and now you’re just a bitter, tired man with very little conscience left.
You kneel on the ground over his body. There is no God, but he’d been raised Catholic. You don’t pray. You think of how you have to wipe the rest of them out, think you might have been happy. You don’t have power anymore. You rub your eyes, hate the smoothness of your face because it’s so unlike his.
There’s a cloud over your mind and it’s everything he was. You used to think the Luthor name would become something more than a legacy of blood. There are people who’ve survived, the ones that have dug themselves into the wildernesses outside the major cities. They’ve started to filter back to what’s left of Metropolis. The world needs leadership now, someone who will gather back the shreds of the world’s dignity and execute the prisoners you’ve taken. Someone who will follow through whatever that requires. You don’t know if you’re that man anymore.
(You’ll do it better this time. You have to.)
Fingers bump at the glass of the tank. He’s naked, completely vulnerable in there. He doesn’t know you.
You break the glass and catch him in the shoulder when he struggles to you, away from you, you don’t know. You tell him- “I’m here. The world needs you.”
Davis reaches for your face with the impersonal tactility of a newborn. You close your eyes. Unclench your fists and sob. The dirt is still sticky on your fingers, on the inside of your nails.
Endnotes: I must be evil, but yes, that conclusion means that Davis/Lex's eternally epic love was cyanided by Clark and his stupid ideas. BUT at least they get to live together forever, or sorts, or Lex does with a new Davis clone every time. You know he would.
(Next up- finally that half crazy?cannibal Davis/Chloe fic oonaseckar , y/y? )