Chapter 8: Rooftop Reckoning
The city beneath the storm looked like a spilled circuit board, lights bleeding into the wet darkness, a frantic, dying pulse. Up on the Planet’s roof, the wind was a living thing, howling around the elevator housing, snatching at Lois’s hair and coat. It smelled of ozone, wet concrete, and the faint, ever-present stench of greasy exhaust from the food carts forty stories below.
“It’s not journalism, it’s speculation!” Lois shouted, the words ripped from her mouth and flung into the gale. She advanced on Tess Mercer, who stood silhouetted against the flickering neon of a LexCorp sign, cool and impenetrable as a glacier. “You’re asking me to connect dots that don’t exist! Lionel Luthor’s medical anomalies are not a story. They’re a goddamn privacy violation!”
Tess didn’t flinch. She took a deliberate sip from a paper cup, her eyes gleaming with a predator’s patience. “The public has a right to know if the most powerful man in the city is… unwell. Especially if his condition is… unconventional. Your source at the clinic was solid.”
“My source was terrified!” Lois felt the ghost of Smallville’s quiet spaces, of Lana’s hesitant touch, like a bruise on her memory. It made everything here feel jagged and wrong. “You want me to burn her so you can run a headline that hints at aliens? For Christ’s sake, Tess!”
“I want you to follow the story, Lane. Wherever it leads.” Tess set her cup on a rusted vent. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?You chase. You claw. You don’t get sentimental about coffee shop girls in Nowhere, Kansas.”
The mention of it, so casual, so knowing, was a surgical strike. Lois felt it land, hot and corrosive, in her gut. It wasn’t just about the source. It was about the quiet, the auburn hair fanned on a cushion, the taste of something that felt dangerously like peace. Everything Tess represented—the cold climb, the metallic taste of ambition—threatened to erase that memory entirely.
“Don’t you dare,” Lois whispered, the wind swallowing the words. Then louder, a raw scrape of sound. “Don’t you fucking dare talk about her. You have no idea.”
“I know you came back a day early. I know you’ve been staring at your screen for two days typing nothing. I know distraction when I see it.” Tess took a step closer, the rain spotting her impeccable suit. “She made you soft. You’re hesitating. That gets people dead in our line of work. Or worse, irrelevant.”
Soft. The word was a spark in a gas-filled room. All the coiled, furious energy of the last week—the confusing ache of leaving, the sterile silence of her apartment, the phantom smell of coffee beans and sex—ignited into a white-hot rage.
“Soft?” Lois lunged, not with a fist, but with her whole body, shoving Tess hard against the cold, wet guardrail. The metal vibrated with the impact. Tess’s breath left her in a surprised oof, but her eyes, wide now, didn’t show fear. They showed a keen, dark interest.
“You want a story?” Lois spat, her face inches from Tess’s. The rain lashed them both, mingling with the heated sweat on Lois’s skin. “Here’s a headline. ‘Lane Loses It.’ How’s that for unconventional?”
She kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss. It was an assault. A clash of teeth and fury, a desperate attempt to bite back the feeling, to convert it into something physical, something she could control. Tess met it with equal ferocity, her hands coming up to claw at Lois’s soaked jacket, pulling her closer.
Lois broke the kiss, gasping. “You’re a ruthless bitch.”
“And you’re a hypocrite,” Tess panted, her fingers already working on the button of Lois’s jeans. “You chase truth for a living but you’re lying to yourself right now.”
With a brutal yank, Lois spun her around, bending her over the slick metal rail. The city yawned below, a dizzying void of light and shadow. She shoved Tess’s tailored skirt up, her tights tearing under Lois’s frantic hands. There was no tenderness, no preamble. She freed herself from her own jeans, the cold air a shock on her skin.
She was wet. A hot, shameful flood of arousal that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with power, with obliteration. She spit onto her hand, not for lubrication, but as a crude punctuation of her contempt—for Tess, for herself, for the whole fucking situation. She guided herself to Tess’s entrance, and with one savage thrust, she was inside.
Tess cried out, a sharp, truncated sound swallowed by the thunder. It was tight, almost painfully so, a fierce, clenching heat. Lois froze for a second, the reality of the act—the brutal intimacy of it—hitting her like the wind. Then she moved.
She fucked her with a punishing, mechanical rhythm, her hips hammering against Tess’s ass. Each thrust was a word she couldn’t say. Not.Soft.Not. Lost.Not.Hers. Her fingers dug into the soft flesh of Tess’s hips, sure to leave plum-colored bruises.
“Is this what you want?” Lois growled, leaning over Tess’s back, her mouth against her ear. “Your fucking exclusive? A front-row seat to the breakdown?”
Tess pushed back against her, meeting each thrust. “It’s… a start,” she managed, her voice strained.
The rain plastered their hair, soaked their clothes. Lois’s world narrowed to the slap of skin on skin, the muffled, wet sounds of their joining, the steel rail digging into her stomach. She felt her orgasm building, a storm surge in her core, but it felt detached, a mechanical release for a biological system. She wanted it to feel like winning. It felt like screaming into a void.
“Tell me,” Tess gasped, her knuckles white on the railing. “Tell me what you’re running from.”
And it was there, on the tip of her tongue: green eyes, the smell of pastries, a whispered promise in a storage room. The memory was a soft, warm thing, utterly alien to this cold, sharp edge. It felt more real than the body beneath her, than the city around her. That scared her more than anything.
“I’m not running!” Lois screamed, the words torn from her throat and flung into the Metropolis night. “I’M NOT FUCKING GAY!”
The denial wasn’t for Tess. It was for the ghosts, for the ache, for the terrifying possibility that Lana Lang had carved a space in her that no byline, no scoop, could ever fill. She slammed into Tess one last time, a final, desperate punctuation, and her climax ripped through her like a sheet tearing. It was sharp, pleasure edged with glass, wringing a guttural, broken sound from her chest.
Beneath her, Tess shuddered, her own body clenching rhythmically around Lois as she fell over the edge, her silence somehow more profound than any cry.
For a long moment, they stayed like that, locked together by spent violence and the pouring rain, two figures hunched against the storm. The neon from the LexCorp sign washed over them in a relentless, red wave.
Lois pulled out, the sudden emptiness a cold shock. She staggered back, fumbling with her clothes, her hands trembling not from cold, but from a profound, cellular shame. Tess slowly straightened, pushing her skirt down with a clinical efficiency. She turned, her face unreadable, a trickle of blood at the corner of her lip from where their teeth had collided.
She looked at Lois, really looked at her, past the snarling defiance, past the post-coital dishevelment. Her gaze held no victory, no pity. Just a chilling, analytical clarity.
“Interesting source material,” Tess said, her voice hoarse but composed. She wiped the blood with her thumb. “But you’re going to have to dig deeper, Lane. The surface-level anger piece is getting old.”
She picked up her fallen paper cup, now crushed and overflowing with rainwater, and walked toward the rooftop door without a backward glance. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind her, a final, deafening note.
Alone, Lois gripped the guardrail, her legs buckling. The storm was passing, the thunder retreating to a low grumble. Down in the newsroom, through the rain-streaked glass ceiling, she could see the night shift, tiny and oblivious, moving like ants under fluorescent lights. Her world had been cracked open in a storage room in Smallville, and she had just tried to seal it shut with violence on a rooftop. It hadn’t worked.
The taste in her mouth was no longer of coffee and Lana. It was of rain, and blood, and a lie so vast she couldn’t see its edges. She vomited over the side of the building, a painful, empty heaving that left her hollow.
When she finally straightened up, wiping her mouth, the city’s lights had stopped bleeding. They just stared back, cold and distinct, a map of a labyrinth she had no idea how to navigate.