Chapter 3: The Booby Trap
The shower’s sterile, recirculated water did nothing to scrub the feeling from her skin. Kara stood under the jets, her forehead pressed against the cool crystal wall. The physical exhaustion was profound, a deep ache in muscles that rarely complained. But the other feeling, the hollow, shame-tinged clarity, was worse. She had said the truth in the aftermath, and the truth, it seemed, was a cold companion.
She found the clothing he’d left for her on a bench outside the shower stall. Not her suit, which lay in shredded, pink-tinged rags near the medical table. These were simple Fortress-issue garments: gray, form-fitting trousers and a tunic of some advanced material that felt both weightless and warm. They were utilitarian, sexless. A dismissal.
She dressed slowly, listening. His heartbeat was a steady, low drum from the central chamber. Steady, but not calm. There was a restless rhythm to it she recognized.
When she walked back into the main chamber, he was at the central console, his back to her. He’d changed as well, into a similar gray tunic and pants. He was studying a holographic projection of a solar array, but his shoulders were tight, his focus a brittle shell.
“The containment field is stable,” he said without turning. “The pink K radiation has dropped to negligible levels. Your system should be clear.”
“Is it?” she asked, her voice quiet.
He didn’t answer. The hum of the Fortress filled the silence.
She moved closer, not to him, but to the medical bay. The examination table still showed the faint scuff marks from their struggle. The broken restraint lay on the floor. She picked it up, the polymer smooth and cool in her hand. It was designed to hold a Kryptonian. He’d made it. He’d broken it.
“You left this,” she said.
He finally turned. His face was a mask of weary control. “It served its purpose.”
“Did it?” She took a step towards him, the restraint swinging gently from her fingers. “It held me. Then you unlocked it. You chose to.”
“A mistake.” The word was harsh, final.
“One you’re going to punish yourself for. And me.” She was in front of him now, close enough to see the faint, almost invisible lines of tension around his eyes. “You’ll send me back. You’ll go home to Lois. You’ll try to forget.”
“Yes.”
“You won’t, though.” She let the restraint drop. It clattered on the floor. “Your heart is still beating too fast, Kal. I can hear it. It hasn’t slowed since you were inside me.”
He flinched. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Say it?” She reached out, her fingertips brushing the center of his chest, feeling the powerful thud beneath. “Your body remembers. It’s screaming for it again. Right now.”
He caught her wrist. His grip was like iron, but there was no heat in it, no push. It was just… containment. “It’s over, Kara.”
“Prove it,” she whispered.
She moved faster than he anticipated. It wasn’t a fight for dominance, not this time. It was a precise, calculated diversion. Her free hand shot to the console behind him, her fingers flying over a sequence only another Kryptonian would know. A soft hiss-chunk echoed from the architecture above.
He looked up, just for an instant.
That was all she needed. Her captured wrist twisted with impossible leverage, breaking his hold. In the same motion, she shoved him backward, straight into the open archway of a secondary analysis chamber. He stumbled, off-balance.
The heavy crystal door slid shut with a definitive thoom.
He was at the door in a microsecond, his palms flat against the transparent crystal. “Kara! Open this.”
She stood on the other side, shaking her head slowly. On the outside of the door, she tapped another command. From recesses in the frame, four thick manacles, cousins to the one she’d broken, slid out with a smooth mechanical purr. “Solar-fortified polymers,” she said, her voice echoing slightly in the chamber. “You told me. Designed to hold a Kryptonian.”
“What are you doing?” His voice was low, dangerous.
“Showing you,” she said, her eyes locked on his through the crystal. “You want to pretend it was the rock? Let’s take the rock out of the equation. Let’s see what’s left.”
She entered a final command. The inner chamber’s atmospheric processors whirred. A visible jet of pale blue gas hissed from a vent near the ceiling, enveloping him.
“Neutron dispersant,” Kara said, watching his expression shift from anger to confusion, then to dawning realization. “Temporarily inhibits the photonic absorption in our cells. Sunlight still feeds you, but the pipeline is… throttled. For the next ten minutes, you’re as strong as I am. No more. No less.”
He tested the manacles. They held. He strained, the cords in his neck standing out. The crystal of the door vibrated but didn’t crack. A flicker of something—panic, anger, arousal—crossed his face.
She smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile. Then she tapped the control to open the door.
It slid open. He stood there, fettered, powerless to break free, staring at her as she stepped into the chamber with him. The door sealed again behind her.
“Now,” she breathed, the word hanging in the sterile air. “Let’s see what you really want.”
She approached him slowly. He didn’t speak. His chest rose and fell with sharp breaths. She stopped inches from him, her eyes roaming over his trapped form. With deliberate slowness, she raised her hands to the fastening of her tunic. She pulled it apart. The fabric whispered open, revealing the full, heavy curve of her breasts, the pink tips already hardened in the chamber’s cool air.
She saw his eyes drop, saw the involuntary swallow in his throat.
“You look at her,” Kara said softly, stepping closer so her bare skin almost brushed his clothed chest. “You look at your Lois, and you see a soul. You see a dream.” She took his trapped hands in hers and placed them, manacles and all, against the lush warmth of her breasts. “But you look at me, and you see a body. A Kryptonian body. You see the ghost of a world you lost.”
She moved his constrained hands, making him knead her flesh. His resistance was a feeble tremor. “You feel that, Kal? The weight of it? The reality?” She leaned in, her lips brushing his ear. “You’ll never be able to go back to your flat-chested wife now that you feel these beauties around you.”
The vulgarity, the cruel comparison, was a weapon. It shattered his last pretense of dignity.
With a guttural sound, he lunged against the restraints, not to break free, but to get closer. He buried his face between her breasts, his mouth hot and hungry against her skin. He sucked a nipple deep into his mouth, biting, laving it with his tongue.
“That’s it,” she moaned, her fingers tangling in his hair, holding him to her. “No more thoughts. No more wife. Just this.”
She guided his mouth from one breast to the other, and he went eagerly, voraciously. His hips thrust forward against the empty air, the thick outline of his erection straining against his trousers. Kara grinned, a predator’s smile. She unfastened his pants, pulling them down just enough to free his cock. It sprung out, thick and already dripping.
“Look at you,” she murmured, stroking him slowly, feeling him pulse in her hand. “So desperate for it. And you think you can just walk away?”
She pressed her breasts together around his shaft, creating a soft, suffocating valley of flesh. The feeling was instant, overwhelming. He threw his head back, a ragged cry tearing from his lips.
She started to move, rocking her upper body, sliding his cock between the slick, soft press of her tits. The heat was intense. The visual was devastating. His eyes were glued to where he disappeared and reappeared between her pale breasts, coated now with a glistening sheen of his own pre-come and her sweat.
“Fuck,” he choked out, his hips jerking helplessly. “Kara… God…”
“That’s it,” she purred, increasing her pace, squeezing tighter. “Come all over them. Mark them. Let this be the image burned into that perfect memory of yours. Not her face. This. My tits wrapped around your fucking cock.”
He was unraveling, his superhuman control atomized by sensation and taboo. His breath came in short, sharp gasps. “I’m… I’m gonna…”
“Do it,” she commanded, her voice fierce. “Paint me.”
With a strangled roar that was equal parts agony and ecstasy, he came. The release was violent, pulsing jet after jet of hot come over her cleavage, her throat, splashing up to her chin. She kept moving, milking him through every last shudder, until he was spent, sagging against his restraints, gasping.
Slowly, she pulled back. She looked down at the mess glazing her skin, then back up at his shattered, bliss-blanked face. She swiped two fingers through the wetness on her chest and brought them to her lips, tasting him.
She smiled, a slow, dirty, victorious thing.
“See?” she whispered, her voice husky. “No pink Kryptonite in the air. Just you. And me. And the truth.”
Outside the chamber, the containment field around the pink rock fragments flickered, its steady hum dipping for a fraction of a second before stabilizing. A single, almost imperceptible wisp of pink energy drifted into the atmosphere of the main hall, dissolving like smoke.
Inside the chamber, still locked in his bonds, Clark’s head hung low. He was staring at the floor, at the evidence of his surrender pooling there. He didn’t see the faint, lingering glow that had returned, deep and stubborn, to the center of Kara’s blue eyes.