Chapter 2: Polar Heat - The Fortress Betrayal
The flight north was a silent, brittle thing. He carried her not in his arms, but gripped by her bicep, her body rigid as a steel beam beside him. The Arctic wind screamed around them, but beneath it, he could hear the frantic, rabbit-quick pulse in her throat, the grinding of her teeth. The pink Kryptonite wasn’t spent; it was simmering under her skin, a rogue star trapped in a human-shaped cage.
The Fortress’s crystalline doors slid shut behind them, sealing out the world. Inside, the usual blue-white glow was corrupted. Shattered fragments of the pink rock pulsed in a containment field near the medical bay, casting the grand chamber in a sickly, neon-pink candy light. It painted the ancient Kryptonian statues with garish shadows, turning their solemn faces into leering masks.
“You see?” he said, his voice echoing in the vast space. “This is what it does. It distorts. It corrupts.”
Power Girl wrenched her arm from his grip. She was sweating, a fine sheen on her forehead. Her pupils were blown wide, swallowing the blue of her eyes. “It clarifies,” she hissed, echoing her words from the rooftop. But here, in the sterile silence, it sounded less like a seduction and more like a symptom. She took a step towards him, then stumbled, catching herself on a smooth obsidian console. A low moan escaped her lips, one of pain laced with something else. Want. Raw, unprocessed want.
“The medical bay,” Superman said, forcing his voice to be steady. “I have restraints made of solar-fortified polymers. They’ll hold you until your system flushes the toxins.”
She laughed, a jagged sound. “Restraints? You’re going to tie me up, Kal? After what you did to me on that roof?” Her eyes locked onto his. “You liked it. You came so hard inside me I felt it in my teeth.”
A bolt of shame and unwanted memory lanced through him. The feeling of her, the crushing tightness, the shameless noise she’d made. He pushed it down. “That was the contamination. For both of us. This is the cure.”
He moved fast, a blur of red and blue. He had her wrist in his hand, pulling her towards the open archway of the medical bay. She didn’t fight immediately. She let him guide her to the central examination table, a slab of polished crystal that glowed with soft internal light. He reached for the first restraint, a thick band of matte-gray material anchored to the table’s base.
As the clasp clicked shut around her left wrist, she moved.
It wasn’t a struggle of brute strength against strength. It was fluid, a sudden, sinuous twist that brought her other hand up, fingers tangling in his hair. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him. It wasn’t like the rooftop’s aggressive tease. This was deep, hungry, and desperate. Her tongue pushed into his mouth, and he could taste it—the cloying, sweet-metallic tang of the pink Kryptonite on her breath. It flooded his senses, a dizzying rush that made his knees weak.
He broke the kiss, panting. “Kara, no.”
“Yes,” she breathed. Her free hand grabbed the front of his suit, yanking him down so his body was pressed against hers on the table. He could feel every curve, the heat of her through both their suits. Her hips rolled up, grinding against the stiff bulge in his leggings. “You think this is a sickness. It’s not. It’s the truth we always ignore. The weight of a world on your shoulders… let me carry it with you. Let me fuck it away.”
His resolve, already cracked, began to shatter. The rational part of his mind screamed about Lois, about duty, about the slow, methodical destruction of everything he’d built. But that part was being drowned out by a deeper, older drumbeat. The feel of a compatible body. The promise of release without caution. Of being understood, in the most primal way possible.
He looked down at her. The restraint held one wrist. The other hand was fisted in his cape, pulling him closer. Her chest heaved. The pink light played over the desperate need in her face, a need that mirrored something he’d refused to name in himself for years.
With a snarl that was half anguish, half surrender, he bent his head and took the neckline of her leotard in his teeth. The material was tougher than terrestrial fabric, but to him, it was paper. He ripped it downward in one violent tug, exposing her from throat to navel. The sound of tearing fabric was obscenely loud in the chamber.
She cried out, arching her back. “Again.”
He tore the rest, leaving the garment in tattered ruins around her waist. Her breasts were bare, the nipples hard in the cool air. He took one in his mouth, sucking hard, biting down just enough to make her gasp. His hand shoved between them, fingers tearing through the remains of her shorts and underwear. He found her wet, so wet, already swollen and ready.
“The other wrist,” she commanded, her voice husky. “Unlock it.”
He stared at her, his breath ragged. This was the point of no return. Binding her was treatment. Freeing her was complicity.
His finger flew to the restraint clasp. It clicked open.
In an instant, her freed hands were on him. She flipped their positions with a surge of strength, pinning him back onto the cold, hard crystal table. The shock of the icy surface against his bare back was nothing compared to the fire of her mouth on his chest, her teeth scraping down his sternum. She tore his suit open the rest of the way, her hands frantic, shoving the material down over his hips.
She rose over him, straddling his thighs, her eyes blazing with pink-tinged triumph. She reached between her own legs, guiding him, slick and throbbing, to her entrance. She didn’t lower herself slowly. She dropped, taking him in one swift, brutal impalement.
He shouted, a raw, choked sound that echoed off the crystalline walls. She was a furnace, a velvet fist squeezing him tighter than anything on Earth could. She began to move, riding him with a furious, piston-driven rhythm, her hips slapping against his. Each descent was a claim. Each rise a dare.
“You see?” she grunted, leaning forward, her breasts swaying above his face. “No lies up here. No ‘what ifs.’ Just this. Just my cunt milking your cock.”
He grabbed her hips, his fingers digging into the super-dense muscle. He met her thrust for thrust, driving up into her from below. The table groaned under the force. The sound of their joining was wet, rhythmic, animalistic. He could see every flicker of pleasure on her face, could feel her inner muscles beginning to clench and spasm.
“Don’t stop,” she begged, her composure breaking. “Oh, fuck, Kal, don’t you dare stop.”
He sat up, wrapping his arms around her, still buried deep inside her. He stood, lifting her with him, her legs locking around his waist. He carried her, still connected, to a clearer space of the floor, and drove her down onto her back. He pinned her wrists above her head with one hand, the other hooking under her knee, spreading her wider, changing the angle.
He fucked her then. Not as a lover, not as a hero. As something elemental. The pace was relentless, a punishment and a prayer. She screamed, her back arching off the floor, her nails scraping grooves in the crystal beneath her.
“I’m… I’m coming!” she shrieked, her body bowing tight as a wire.
Her climax triggered his. It was a detonation, a whiteout behind his eyes. He roared, a sound that shook tiny fractures into the distant ceiling icicles, as he emptied himself into her in great, pulsing waves. He collapsed atop her, their sweat-slicked bodies sticking together in the frigid air.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the low, malignant hum of the pink Kryptonite in its cage.
Slowly, he pushed himself up. The pink glow in her eyes had faded to a dim ember. She looked spent, hollowed out. The fever had broken, for now. She looked up at him, her expression unreadable.
He stood, pulling the tattered remains of his suit around him. The evidence of what they’d done was between her legs, dripping down her inner thigh. The sight sent a fresh wave of nausea through him.
He turned his back on her, walking stiffly toward the control console. “The decontamination shower is through that arch,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ll… find you something to wear.”
From the floor, her voice came, quiet and clear of its earlier madness. “And then what, Kal? You drop me back in my universe? Pretend this never happened?” A bitter, exhausted laugh. “It happened. For hours. And you know the worst part?”
He didn’t turn. He couldn’t.
“The worst part,” she whispered, “is that even without the pink rock… I’d still want you. And you’d still want me. You just won’t admit it.”
He stood frozen, listening to the soft, pained sound of her pulling herself up from the floor, the slow, barefooted walk towards the showers. Her words hung in the air, heavier than any Kryptonian stone, and he had no power left to lift them.