Notes: Much love for all the comments! Onto part 2, which may just be the last part, unless the comments say otherwise. we'll see. ;)

She notices things about him. How he's human most of the time now, never in agony, like he doesn't even have to bother with controlling the transformations.

He watches her like a hawk. She suspects he'd go into the bathroom with her was it not below him, just to make certain she is not going to do something desperate. He has super-hearing for that.

She's protecting Clark and the world the only way she can. This time it's ironic because Zod won't let her out of sight. Whatever comes out of her will cause the destruction unless she does something to stop it.
His sense of self importance is her best tool.

She says she would have expected him to be off razing the Pentagon by now.

"Things will be done differently this time around."

"You say so, I don't see anything different. You still wanted to use him, use this child to do your dirty work. It is a sick, sick thing to do."

"He was the perfect weapon. These human nuclear devices have unpleasant consequences."

"Mass death? Mutated cows? Giant walking stick bugs? I'll say so. It's so much better when everyone is dead.
And everyone keeps dying. So you destroy everything, create your own Xanadu when your best weapon will destroy it all. Pardon me if I think you're a very poor example of strategic planning."

"It wouldn't have destroyed my planet."

"It is unstoppable, you told me yourself."

"I don't have a taste for wanton destruction. Power, yes, wielded decisively. Not destruction. I would not have had created something that I could not control."

"So you thought you could just switch It off, just like that?"

"Of course. Then he would have just served when he was needed. Just like this one will learn to control his strengths and obey me."
"Your son, relegated to your personal assassin. He was human. He wanted to live. Do you have any idea?"

"Don't insult his lineage. Like any creation he was bound to have his defects. He was never human. If he had fulfilled his mission I would have had less of a trouble before me.
This is correctable. You are close."

He doesn't touch her, like before, raises his hand half a room away and she can feel something inside shift at the motion. Her stomach is practically flat yet, but he makes it feel like something is ripping out her insides. The nausea is back, worse than ever, but she holds onto the counter for support, gasping until it passes.

"You'll only fail again, you know. You underestimate Clark."

"He didn't notice before with that imposter. What makes you think he'd notice now? He's guilty enough already after what he has done.
He'll just let himself see you, radiant, expecting. A proud father, happy for the first time in his life."

"You are not it--his father. Davis felt. You're nothing like Davis."

If she could kill him she would. She keeps her face stony, fights down the urge to give a hysterical peal of laughter. There had been a way for Davis. There had been a way.
She learns it now, now that he is completely gone.

She begins having dreams, of herself living still with his eyes on her, watching while her---child tears its way out of her, mutates, destroys, consumes.
There are people, walking like cattle on the streets; sometimes she sees Lois's face, sometimes Clark's, sometimes Lex's, there among them.
She doesn't want to look, can't but she hears everything.
It's a living nightmare that she can't stop, not for the life of her, and sometimes she thinks she doesn't let herself. After it all, she sees him as he really is--- a small boy with sandy hair and his father's open eyes.

He sobs, hugs her around the knees as the blood rubs onto her skirts. "It's okay. You're fine." She tells him, kneeling; rubbing small circles into his back, feeling something, hers.
Zod smiles down upon them.
"My fine, strong boy. He's almost ready."

It comes to her easily that she doesn't care about dying now. Davis is gone. If she lives Clark dies. What does she have left?
What would he turn this child---whatever it was, into?
It becomes merely an issue of method and opportunity.

Zod doesn't know that Davis had become immune to Kryptonite and she counts on that.
After that drugged summer in Metropolis, Clark had given her one thing. A fist sized lump of Kryptonite in a lead box.
She locks herself in the closet with her old Glock. She'd spent nearly a year's worth of her writing wages on it after she started thinking that Lionel might kill her. She never thought she'd need it like this.
She can do this.

She doesn't need to calculate trajectory. Right over her abdomen. The bullet will go right through her.
He hears the cocking of the trigger and is at the door in a second. He can tear it off its hinges. She doesn't doubt it, but that's why she presses the lump of Kryptonite, there, right up against the lock. The rattling stops.

"You may be super powered but you don't want to take the risk on it, do you? I've figured out some things about phantoms. You keep your original powers and your original weaknesses. You won't come through this door. I can knock you out with this. You'd be weaker than a human."

Silence and then words again. She needs to do this. She can't think.
"Maybe I was lying. Maybe you were right. Maybe he was defective enough when he sired the child was human. Maybe it's completely human."

"You never let off, do you? Goodbye."

"That's the last thing you will have of him, you know. In this body, the children that are born to me are different than his would have been. Children resemble their fathers in the years following birth. Oh, it's nothing, just a mass conglomeration of cells-maybe, but you are killing him. just like Kal did."

Her hand trembles and that split second is all the time he needs to tear through the wall from the other side, take the gun from limp fingers. All that is left of it is a twisted hunk of metal.

"I couldn't..." Not again. She won't do this now.

His lip curls, slightly, "Of course not. You're human."

She knows sobbing. With the hormones it takes just a little encouragement to become a storm.

"He used to touch me." She says between breaths. "All his life he wanted to be human. He saw me."

"As you say, I am not him." He repeats coolly, leaves her on the plaster covered carpet.
"I need him." She tells him, quietly before he turns his back completely; knowing every second what this must look like, a pathetic human heap desperate for illusion. She expects him to kick her any moment.

She bends her head nearly to the ground, knowing that this is the only thing that touches him, the feeling of complete power.
"You humans need so many things." He says.

Before he leaves her there, her hand closes around the skin of his ankle.
He doesn't even deign to look at her until seconds later when the connection roars to life.
He struggles then, with all of his Kryptonian strength and it feels like her wrists are going to tear open at the force of it, but she barely notices, feels literally as if her skin is burning. She's healing, still, but she is using it hurt. He isn't like Davis, isn't Clark or Lois, like anyone else she's ever touched. He is the parasite that took control of Davis, destroyed him and he is wrong.

It feels like she is pushing herself out of her skin right up to the point where he collapses into a heap on the floor. She presses the green rock right over his heart, just for now, just in case.
She stumbles down the steps, barely able to stand.
There were dramatic changes to the body. Love, Hate, Obsession.
She'd healed.

The shock will wear off Zod soon and he can't wake up free.

Help me. She says aloud.
Clark still knows the sound of her voice.
She doesn't let him take Zod alone.

"You need me for this." She says. "I can fix this."
Clark doesn't know what she's expecting to happen. Maybe one of those old style exorcisms where she forces the unclean spirit out of Davis's body.
Then it would be empty. Dead. A shell, nothing else.

They're in the fortress again.

This time, instead of bringing someone back, Clark is going to send him away. He had been that guilty, that stupid that he'd brought Zod through. He could've torn the world to pieces and Clark would have brought it all down upon their heads.

There is no crystal and Clark knows he doesn't need it to correct what he's done. Now he knows.
As he starts to draw the first symbol on the strangely warm ice, she catches him, stops him.
If she's capable of this small miracle, then Davis has to still be alive, out there.

"It's too dangerous. The first time I brought Zod through, the next time what else can come through?"

"You know me, right Clark? Then you understand. I can't give up, while there's a chance."

"You want a reason? Fine. I'm pregnant."

"How?"

"Please tell me I don't have to explain this now of all times."

"I just don't understand how it could happen. You---he…"

"We were close."

"So are we. That doesn't mean we ever…you know.
I just find it a little hard to believe you'd put yourself at risk like that. You read the Kawatchee legends before I did! You knew it wasn't out of the realm of probability that you would get like this. You're expecting me to believe you just..."

"Believe it."

"I have to be sure."

"How much detail do you want to convince yourself, now? A scene by scene replay? That's just not happening."

"I'll just use the facts then. Jor El said Doomsday had a mission. What if part of it was this was passing those genes on?"

"That wasn't it."

"What makes you so sure?"

"The same part of me that makes me sure that you aren't going to give up, either. You know, don't you? Davis doesn't deserve this. You said you'd always find another way. "

Clark eyes squint out at her, heat vision.
"Go right ahead and look at it then; it's not a violation of my privacy. Do you find it all, ten fingers, ten toes? Any spiny protrusions ?"

It takes all of a minute until he says he'll do it and she isn't agitated, isn't troubled.
"You expected this all along, didn't you?" He asks
"If you didn't I really wouldn't know you too well, would I?"
She always knows Clark.

"I need to trap him before we can do anything."

It's as if Clark knows, feels that the orb is the way. The energy is there, a void, a temporary cage. Within it he can read the past, knows the story of every prisoner ever held there.

"I'm going in there too. I have to control him."

"It's dangerous. You just betrayed him. He will try and kill you.
He could try to use your mind instead of Davis's."

The fear churns there, once, because she knows that level of mental violation, knows that he can take all her memories and twist them until a shell is left. Davis is experiencing that, even now. She has a chance.

"Do it." she says.

He 's holding the crystal in both hands, and his face is as if he is losing her.
"Clark. Trust a Watchtower's instincts, why don't you?"

Clark nods at last and then under his touch the space widens, expands, closes until she only sees the ice walls all around her and the prone body on the floor, stirring for a moment before she feels his hands at her throat.
She smiles.

"What is this?" Zod demands.

"If you want it in French. Oubliette. The little place of forgetting. How would you like to be forgotten?"

"If I am trapped, you are too. When you go free, so will I."

"You don't understand, do you? You've taken everything. I hope Clark forgets me."

"So you will put yourself in the grasp of someone you hate because he makes you think of what you had? I can see why you humans are so easy to manipulate."

"It doesn't matter. His body will be trapped here forever. You can't escape now."

"Oh, and you will tell me I could, if only I flew out of this body, left it all behind, yes? I wonder how much of this Kal will take back." Suddenly, bizarrely, his hands change until she can feel sandpaper on her skin. "Doomsday could not harm you because of Davis's feelings for you. As you say, I am not Davis."

"And I am not just human."

Touching It now hurts like it never did; sweat pours from her eyes with every recession, as she forces the scarlet of his eyes down. She's going to hold on until he's weak, until It absorbs so much that It can't possibly change again.

Clark can't come into this. She can't break her concentration.
Around them, the force…field… flickers and vanishes completely.

"So this is what the house has come to. The second time I see you, Kal El and you disappoint me again. You could not even do that one job properly."
Pale, brown eyed at last; he flies at Clark. Around them she can see only red, swirling like a maw about to swallow them whole.
Clark will lose, she knows this. He is strong but he is inexperienced compared to a hardened killer.

One of them plunges back, straight into the jagged crystal and it's the wrong one.
Strange shapes swirl and pass over them both, swirling over Zod's head, things like him. She is afraid.

"If you had been a good son you would have killed them. You are like Jor El. You won't face up to responsibility. You may die for it."
Zod can't seem to choose a way, and for a moment his hand trembles on the crystal. Zod's hand would not tremble.
Clark pushes himself up, tripping over the crystal bed and she can't see the rest. "You first." He says, gently.

The next thing she sees is the point buried halfway into Zod's chest.
It's gone as soon as that, with the same vague irritation on his face and it begins again.
Zod doesn't need to punch hard and Clark finds himself thrown against every wall of the fortress.
Yet he recovers.

Zod doesn't tire, is filled with a sort of maniacal energy, but he seems to turn on himself, alternately swaying and stopping then throwing himself at Clark with all the energy of a wounded tiger.
He turns to her, once, and that is disbelief. She knows Davis's eyes for the second before Zod turns them to ice again.
He told her he'd stay

He rushes Clark headlong, and one hand is on his throat. Clark makes a muffled sound, grasps hold of it, trying to push it away.
She knows this is Zod now, knows this is Davis too, knows that if Zod makes Davis kill Clark like this, he will have completed his mission to destroy them all.

"You said you'd stay with me once." She says, hoping he hears, ignoring the space, ignoring the fact that there's no way that she can get there fast enough.
His hands tremble on his windpipe. She breathes the words over and over, as if Davis really can hear her over all of the voices screaming inside him.

Davis stops, dazed and that's enough time for Clark to send him back, straight across to the wall, dislodging shards of crystal.
He keeps still as Clark keeps coming, keeps hitting and its as if any blows back that he could give are held by an invisible hand.
Clark takes the orb, pushes it right into him and then she can see it, solidified, for a moment Zod's face filled with monstrous rage. Then it's gone, the light dies and she can only see the blood dripping over the crystals, freezing like Arctic ice. He can't be dead, not after all this. She goes to him and doesn't get there quick enough.
This time is different.
His head lolls forward, his eyes are dazed looking into hers but then they are soft again for one comprehending second.

"I found you." He says, as if he's forgotten the shape of the words.
Then he collapses face down onto the ice.

Clark has enough strength to transport them all three of them, somehow. Just barely. The blood on Clark's mouth drips onto a spot on the white bedroom carpet.

"Thank you." She tells him, clutches at his shoulders for comfort once (he could have died) and he gasps.

"Ouch! Chloe! The ribs."

"Oops." He makes a face so petulant that it must be him, knowing just what she needs.

"Sorry, Mr. Super---."

"Please don't say dude. Lois calls the RBB that and I'll never live it down." He grins at her, all at once boyish and heroic and good. One of his eyes is nearly swollen shut.

"You saved me again, you know." She tells him.

"You forgot 'the world'. After I nearly let it get destroyed."

"By taking that risk you saved us both. I don't know how I can ever thank you for that. If you hadn't helped maybe he…wouldn't be here now."

"I don't know about that. I had a feeling you would have dragged out the entire intergalactic council."

"There isn't an…"

"You would have found one.
Besides, I shouldn't have given up on him."

"On Davis?" she asks, but he's already gone.

The world has just escaped a potential apocalypse and the light outside is still too bright, too cheery.
(Yet, they are alive.)

Davis is laid out in her bed now and it's hard to believe he is. She'd touched him and touched him and tried to heal him and nothing came out.
Maybe she stripped away all her healing powers just to throw it back into permanent dormancy. Maybe this means that when the child is born, (if it is born with the monster DNA) she won't be able to recover.
Maybe she'll die.
Now, she only wants him to live.

She cleans most of the blood off him on her own, smearing it on torn, ratty shorts. She can't just clean it away because the gouges are still there, black in contrast to lightly tanned skin.

He's mortal enough now, and the jagged cuts that wouldn't have touched a Kryptonian are all over him still. Her knees feel shaky from all of this, from nothing. It must look worse than it is.
She cleans off the crusting residue on his face. When he stirs, she jolts so hard she almost drops the sponge.
He shouldn't be conscious, but he is and his lips move dryly against her finger.

"I…" he tries to say, probably the beginning of some short exclamation, something like love or a joke about he always wanted his own personal nurse. That's his voice, not too smooth, all pain and ragged edges.
"I know."
God he can't even talk now, and she needs, needs just to know.

"I'm just, I'm…" She knows what she must look like face not red, but wet and pale and stark. Her face can't crumple, not now. "I'll be here when you wake up."
His eyes are on her face when they close. She keeps watching the steady rise and fall of his chest so they don't remind her of death.

There are five hours where she doesn't sleep. By then the blood has soaked through bandages to the white sheets.
The worse bandage is right at his side where the crystals cut him that last time. She reaches over the bed for more gauze and Neosporin, knowing he would do this so much better.

She's not exactly as tall as the King-sized bed is wide, so she braces herself on the mattress, realizes too late that she could fall onto him like this, actually hurt him.
She doesn't. His hands touch her shoulders where they reach out and she lets him pull her with him down to the bed, careful to roll to his side.

"How long have you been awake?" she asks him, and he shakes his head, swallows.

"Just now."
Maybe she shouldn't talk. Maybe he just needs to feel again.
He holds her clumsily on his side, arms wrapping around her so hard that she almost feels her ribs crack.

"Davis, I know Eve had one more rib than Adam but I still want to keep all of mine."
Nevertheless, she nudges her head into the spot between his neck and shoulder, the only place she is sure he hadn't been hurt. The chill to his skin shocks her. He'd always been too warm, and this is another exigent reminder of new found mortality.

She presses closer, taking the cold too and she notices that he's keeping as much contact at he can, won't stop touching her, eyes closed tightly.
She pulls to see his eyes are red-rimmed brown, only brown, like the first time he'd told her about the blackouts, the first time she had seen him fall apart. Suddenly there's a painful void there, one that she needs to fill.
"You're mine, too."

He kisses her once, pulls her in sharply and his teeth almost, awkwardly graze her upper lip before he does it again, soft and gentle enough it makes her hurt. She can't leave it at that; can't breathe then.

Her hand pushes behind his head, and she lets him get as close as he can. She can taste life and death as he breathes quick.
It comes back-the tears, the healing burning its way through her skin. After everything, she is alive. He is. He hasn't left her. Everything--- all of it, she could forget right here, and if she doesn't do something now she won't be able to stop. Somewhere there his hand has found a way under the unrecognizable shirt to her back.

He stops as soon as she stiffens against him. He's going to reopen some of the old wounds.
She realizes, dimly, that he's shaking.
"You were dead, I thought you were dead. I thought I…"

"Shh... I need to have a good cry about that myself."

She tells him what happened, toning down the details about Tess's gang and him.
She tells him about the baby, suddenly scared to get the words out. For a moment she thinks she might have well poured alcohol all over him. He's back to thinking she'll die again, and its all she can do to keep him from turning the guilt on himself.
It takes a half an hour of half truths before he's almost calm again. (There isn't even a risk because he had only passed on the human part of him. Clark has certified it a hundred percent human. She's not scared.)

If anything he believes her, and there's a lingering, something in his eyes that makes her think that maybe it will be okay.
He doesn't tell her what happened.

He breathes as if he is trying to hide and she should be patient and comforting. He's solid and alive and literally escaped from a fate worse than death. That should be enough, but it's never enough. She won't let him hold that all by himself.

"Something happened to you out there. You've got to tell me what you remember."

"I barely remember it, now."

"Is that why you won't look at me? Please." He's on the verge of it.

She'd gotten a barely glancing description once from Clark. "There wasn't a real sun, was there? Just deserts that went on for miles."
He talks simply, uses short words but she gets the picture of creatures rushing, going through him until he couldn't feel, couldn't think because they were becoming him, taking his thoughts.

"They don't just attack the travelers. They tear each other apart. It's all they know."

"You couldn't defend yourself."

"At first I didn't. I wanted to die. I needed to die because I knew what I had done to you."

That was one of his memories, not a true one, but a memory nevertheless.

"You didn't do anything to me."
"Didn't I? If you hadn't tried to protect me they wouldn't ever had touched found you because of me."

"They found me because of me. "

"You died."

"I didn't."

"I saw your face. It would start again, just the same. Eventually, I started to adapt. I was made for defending myself. I became that thing and I don't even know what happened then. I didn't feel anything."

He's seeing something else, some other place.
"He said you were hurting."
He had been so different, it was impossible to think the two of them inhabited the same universe, much less carried the same basic DNA.

"Every time, it cost me. The blackouts got longer, and I knew that after a while I wouldn't change back. Every memory I lost brought me closer to becoming just like them. So I learned how to hold It back."

"And they killed you while you were human. Why? To punish yourself?"

"When I stayed human I knew who I was. After what he said happened to you, I knew I wasn't. No matter what I was, you changed me. You were me and I'd ripped your life to pieces.
I couldn't let you go."

(Words can only do so much and she doesn't completely believe him when he says that it's not bad, just the meds talking.) He won't ever forget it, she knows.

"Then don't." she tells him.
She doesn't say anything then just lets him hold on, tries to rock him as if he is a child she can comfort.
It's not synched but it's right.
She brushes the streak of grit on his cheek and he smells like rock and gravel, underneath that the earthy, clean smell she knows as only him.

He starts to kiss her again and he's very slow about it. She's never had this before; she'd never let him give it and she realizes what there is to this. His fingers tangle with hers and she feels almost complete.

It's kind of hard to tell when comfort changes to burning again. His hands are on her back, holding her and she can feel the heat of his skin again, his proximity, a painful tenderness in her breasts through the cloth where they brush again his skin.
She must make a sound, and he draws her up over him and when his back hits the pillow he finds her neck. It's hard enough not to pull him in him in closer just there, to leave a mark, leave something.

She moves against him and his eyes close just for a moment before he does it again, a little harder, raising sensation exactly the way she remembers.

She tells herself to ease back because she doesn't know how many chances she can take before this hurts him, if it doesn't already. The sensitivity is estrogen, and relief and him so close. She shouldn't be thinking of doing this now, not with the way he was hurt, but even when he looks up at her skin prickles where she needs him to touch.
They need to talk, deal with the truth instead of toning it down. He hadn't told her everything that happened there; she'd just lived the past few weeks with a psychopath wearing his face.

Going to bed won't cure all those issues, but this is something entirely separate from that.
She needs this, this feeling, because only now can she be sure that he will always be with her and that no one else can touch that. Her hands feel fragile in his but she still tightens them, tightens them more until he has to roll over her to reach.

She presses her lips to his jaw, quick and scattered, as if he will vanish again.
He doesn't take it faster when he could, kisses the side of her face like water, lost and she knows just then why Zod had felt wrong from the start.

The bedclothes slip behind them to where she can see the bandage on his torso, for a second can see the other, darker marks on his back and she wishes she could heal him. Then he lowers himself on her just enough that she wants to cry out, pressing his elbows into the mattress again, so gentle and keeping her from the sudden fulfillment her body seems to need.

The light is streaming in through the open window and she can hear the traffic outside, a slow steady buzz undercutting her quickening breath. Anyone could hear and a little part of her thrills at this. So much of them has been about hiding, and now, finally.
There are no blinds, no curtains drawn and she can see the lines of his face clearly. He's not so pale as before, but everything is that has passed is written in his face.

He's holding himself together, barely, and the fact that he still can is another one of those tiny miracles.
His face is steady beneath her hands, turning into her grip, getting closer.
"I could never forget this." Maybe to her, maybe to himself.
She wants to ask him what he remembers, what he had almost told her. He's beautiful and breakable and she doesn't know anything but him, that moment.
With a thick tightness in her throat she realizes that this is the closest to the truth she's ever had. She'd almost lost that.
Why is it always death with them?

She smothers his mouth, just to keep the words and their potentially pain away, so many that they could choke her. He only takes it all, easing it into slowness but the rest of him is tense as if she just lit a fire under him.
His hands move quickly and before she knows it her skin is brushing against tense muscle (what little of him that isn't marked) and rasps against the bandage.
She wants the warmth now, just barely restrains herself from sliding her hands to his back to pull him close. She kisses his neck instead, waiting, knowing that now of all times he will start talking.
"I wasn't, I wasn't thinking. The baby…"

"You're careful. Only one month. It's in ancient debunked myths 101, trust me."
She barely finishes the sentence before he's on her again.
She's always been the one to push; but waits, knowing that he needs this, now. His lips rove her neck and it feels like a century before the clasp snaps open under his fingers.

He looks at her like she's the most precious thing in his world and honest to God she's blushing, everywhere. She wants to let lose with a quip over how he's seen it all before; but then it dawns on her that he hasn't, not once, during all their running.

His mouth runs in a lazy line, neck to collarbone down and she doesn't have time to prepare for the hypersensitivity she feels, all at once like being hit with an electrical wire. His mouth coaxes sounds out of her that probably do make it out the window and she drags her fingers though his hair, thinking once of their child, nursing, and for once feels no fear.

This is nothing like that and when she tries to arch up, finally when it gets too strong she collapses into his arms, close under her. She wants to say it then, something about them, the both of them, a family, the fact that with him and only with him does this feel safe.
His eyes burn her again, somehow wet, full of the same kind of tenderness and he must know.

She follows the lines up and down his arms, runs them flat down his chest, skirting near edge of the gauze, lower, not breaking contact for a second. She's making peace now, and yet she lets him guide her back again, so that his forearms slide under her back completely and there are only centimeters to bridge.

She kisses him that way, feels the blood pump under his skin, the bones, how even now his muscles are tense and trembling. Her thoughts unravel as she feels the tension, him pushing her tight. He freezes halfway in her, eyes shut and she feels completely captured.
And still, he stays, brushing his hands along her face as if he's a blind man and she can feel him.

She tells him that she trusts him and that he won't hurt her, won't hurt either of them. (He had. He'd been gone.)
"It's not. It's not that." He says and she waits, again, for the right word, the right moment, knowing that even if he doesn't know how to answer this will be enough. Just this, connected, everything. When he finally does speak it's so quiet that she would have missed it had she not been listening so hard.

"I'd pick one memory of you until every hair, every detail, every thing you said was just the way I remembered."

"A good memory?" She asks, barely, not wanting to break the moment again.

"That night you'd wrapped that yellow scarf so tight around your neck that I was scared you'd hurt yourself, and you'd washed your hands with laundry soap. There was blood on my face and you touched me.
I could almost convince myself that it was the real world and the rest was all a dream and when they did it… it was easy to give up the rest.
The memory wasn't you."

She doesn't need to ask, knows that's how Zod had taken control, knows that's why the Zone had hurt him so many times. He'd been in hell and it figured the one thing he was afraid of was losing his, albeit painful, memories of her. He needs to make new ones

"Oh." Suddenly, she doesn't want him to move, finally focusing on the feelings building between them both.
It doesn't matter suddenly then about what she needs, only what is.

"I love you, you know."
And she'd fantasized about saying this, but never quite with this reaction. His shoulders shake so much that she thinks he might just hyperventilate and she pats his hair not knowing what else to do.

"Could you say it again?"

"I love you."
His eyes watch her face still, needy, maybe because they are just three little words that he'd always lived without. She hadn't told him until she thought it was too late.

"Again."

"I love that you are always too careful with me. I love that when I'm gross you're not afraid to touch me. I love that you would hold onto a memory that hurt. I love that I can't see anything but you. I love that you made it out of hell and came back to me. I love that every second I am with you I know. I love you.
I can never un-love you."

"Sorry." He says quietly. "It just feels like I've been waiting for that for a very long time."
Literally centuries in a time loop of torture makes that the biggest understatement in the world.

"You can tell me what else you remember or you can just tell me you love me back."
He tells her he does, so much and the hands going everywhere are his.

She feels a frenzy. Her head snaps back into the pillow and she's careful to keep her hands on his shoulders.
Then his mouth slides against hers, hard and sweet and he's deeper now, so close to her that the bandages are pressed right against her waist. She pushes her knees open wide enough that they won't hit him when he moves. Through the haze of warmth she hears him exhale sharply.

"It's nothing." He says, but when he pulls her closer she can see them, stark and black where the blood has been.
"That's a whole lot of nothing," but his eyes open up again and he holds onto her and moves with her until she only knows that she needs.
He's heavy enough that she can't arch up and it feels so unbearably smooth that she doesn't know how she controls the impulse to wrap her legs fully around him, weak as they feel. She can't cry out and all the remaining energy is focused on where they meet.

She thinks she must be saying his name, unable to look away from his face, needing to know, and she feels raw.
His eyelashes struggle open and closed again when he thrusts harder, and then he is shuddering inside her and it's only a few seconds before everything shatters.

When she comes to, he's pulled the covers around them both and it's almost impossible to believe that this can really be this simple.
His face as he turns her toward him is tender, almost peaceful, and that draws her in. He kisses her good afternoon and she's back on top of him in a minute flat despite the rawness. When her hands slide under his back she pulls them back immediately, remembers what she'd been trying to do in the first place. He'd been hurt.

"We have to change your bandages." She says, but his eyes are almost glazed over and she's pretty sure that pain is not what causes his protest when she slips off him.

"Stay. It's all done."

"I'll just check."
She drags the end of the sheet around her (it's cold) grabs onto the bed again because her knees feel funny.
She can see the old bandages, smeared dark red, neatly in the garbage can.

"There's something I kind of wanted to show you."
He slips the sheet off his abdomen and she can see only the curves of muscle there. Impossibly the bandage is gone, not a black mark or gouge in sight.

"This has to be a dream."
(Maybe she's going to wake up to see Zod and his entire little race of pod-people.)

"I was kind of hoping for a wow." He jokes, hand out trying to catch hers, missing because she's too far away from him.

"It's not out of me." He says, finally, trying at a smile but she can see the sadness it masks.

"That's impossible." It took every once of power she had just to switch It off. She'd known what she was doing.

"When he was in you, Zod told me you weren't human." It looks as if she got a knife and stuck into him, as if she really could. His face is open, wounded and he could be thinking this was all because she had wanted him to be human.

"Chloe?" She grabs hold of his hand just in case he gets ideas.

"I got so mad at him I wanted to… never mind that. I get it .
Your DNA is Kryptonian. It's not like they came and ferried human DNA several galaxies away to do their experiments. Barring a few fantastic recuperative abilities you are…"

He doesn't hesitate in grabbing hold of her.
She smiles into his shoulder.
"Davis."
His mouth opens and closes and he looks peaceful for real. "Yeah." He whispers. "Me."

They don't really set up for supper until that evening. He cooks something that is certainly not mac and cheese, and she leans on his back as he sets the dishes on trays. They are a family now.

She's so tired that finds herself dozing in the couch while another commercial plays its background music and the empty plates clink in the sink. She'll never be tired enough not to notice when he slips onto the couch beside her.

She expects him to lean her into his shoulder but she doesn't expect the way his hands move gently over the light bump in the cloth of her stomach. She holds her breath because this is the first time, and covers them with her own.

"We can't stay here." She tells him later. "We can pack up, take a road trip and go slower this time. No one will be chasing us."
Despite the fact that the papers have stopped printing pictures of his face, he hasn't been declared dead. If they stay it will be only a matter of time before he gets turned in.

He can't show up at his job, or his old apartment, can't take out anything from his old accounts. It's as if he never even existed, and she doesn't like it that somewhere, deep down he thinks that he can't give her anything without that.

There are paramedics everywhere down south, even firefighters if he really wants to start from scratch. She knows he wants this. He will build a life for them. This just isn't the right place.
She tells him about the picture of their future she used to have before, in an adobe hut in the Amazons with the mosquitoes buzzing around them.

This doesn't seem like too much of an admission now after all that she's said, but it seems to mean a lot to him. He pulls her into his lap and the remote falls over the armrest when he reaches for her again. She wants to laugh at the domesticity of it, the sudden lightness she feels.

"I haven't even got to the part about drawing water from a well, yet, Davis."
He's smiling, actually smiling and his hands on her skin are wet with the dishwater. She doesn't quite get to that part.

(This time they're not running. He isn't about to die, she isn't, and the blood between them is a different kind. It's the two of them in a world where good things happen.
She doesn't think of a thing tearing its way out of her, tearing down the world. She doesn't wonder if she will die when the eight months are up.
She thinks of him. She thinks of herself. She thinks of something that's theirs.
Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be all along. )

Endnotes:
I was given this fic idea by a request from davrosfan. As per the request, Davis's body got possessed by Zod, Davis was Davis, and Chloe made a sacrifice to get Davis back. (She lost her healing, and if that is a Doom-baby on the way, things don't look so good for her.)

Clarifications --- Zod's motive for killing Tess wasn't pride. It was anger at a disloyal minion. She plotted to get him free for Clark to kill him, because she learned Clark didn't kill Davis.

Doomsday didn't just disappear. Chloe put him into sleeper mode. By pouring all her healing into Davis's body she flicked off that switch that Zod could manipulate in his phantom form.

Any comments/crit very much needed/appreciated. :D