Chapter 52: "I'LL SHOW YOU THAT I'M RIGHT"

KAREN

The arctic blaze was calming. In the summer, she could sit there and bathe in the sun without end. And in the winter, the endless dark and the howling winds isolated her perfectly from the rest of the world. 

It was little surprise that Kara would want this all to herself. The effect was rather spoiled by sharing it. Of course, Karen didn’t resent Kara. Well, that wasn’t true, she resented Kara for a lot of things. Her naivety, her popularity, the loving family she’d received as a child, and indeed, the security her world had benefited from, while Karen’s was being torn to pieces. 

But she didn’t resent Kara for having the Fortress. She resented Clark. Karen was stronger, older, more skilled, and more experienced. She didn’t need to be on a team to protect the world. But Clark had given Kara the fortress. 

People always talked about how wonderful Clark had been, how strong, how kind. But Karen knew better. She couldn’t say how warmly he’d welcomed her counterpart, but she knew that he’d always viewed her with a hint of suspicion and disapproval. It would have been one thing, if she’d caught him looking, which she could only feel would have been perfectly natural, despite them being theoretically related. What wasn’t natural was the patronizing sternness with which he’d at least subconsciously displayed toward her life choices. He’d hated her. For the longest time, she’d assumed it was out of some old-fashioned ideas about acceptable female behavior, but after his will was read she came to accept that it was her personality, not her body which had offended him. 

She flirted, briefly, opening up the Fortress all herself and having a poke around before  Manheim and Kara showed up. It had been a while since she was last inside. Not that there was anything special in there anyway, just a lot of old trophies and some tech that would make her homesick. 

She dismissed the notion. She had to appear chummy when Kara got here. Rooting around in what essentially was her second house, after what they’d gone through together, was not a great way to demonstrate that she was improving. She still wasn’t entirely sure she believed that she’d hallucinated Kara saying those awful things to her. But she had experienced so many strange and terrible things in her career as a hero, it would have been foolish to dismiss the possibility, especially after what happened with Kate. 

She also couldn’t help but feel bad for Kara, after all she’d recently been through. Even if Kara had said those things, that didn’t mean she deserved to be poisoned and shot or to have the people she trusted so deeply suddenly turn on her. Back on Earth-2, Karen had relied on her fellow superheroines to stay sane during Darkseid’s invasion. If one of them had turned on her, she wasn’t sure what she’d have survived. 

She turned an eye to the blackened sky and smiled when she saw Kara, carrying a bright yellow car. Karen had been atrocious to her in the past, she had no right to be so surprised when Kara bit back. But the two of them shouldn’t have been at each other’s throats. Having relieved so much emotional baggage to Manheim, it was suddenly obvious that Kara was just as trapped by Clark’s expectations as Karen had been. 

Karen’s life had been defined by violence, destruction, defiance, and determination. She’d rarely had the opportunity to feel as meek as she did when she lifted up out of the snow and approached Kara’s descending form.

KATE

She lay on the king-sized mattress, in the darkness of the Wayne Manor. It was dark, but not as dark as it could have been. Her eyes, trained by decades of nocturnal activity, found the light in the glow of the garden lantern and the flash of lightning through the grand cathedral windows lining the room’s exterior. She rolled over, pawing at the satin sheets for the warmth of an itchy childhood quilt or a coarse barracks cover. She left all those things behind, back in Belgium, buried under the blood-stained snow. Even the silkiness of Sophie’s arms around her or the stink of Renee’s chap-stick-stained cigarettes were gone. All that was left was that great black pit, the one where, at the bottom, countless photos had gathered of two smiling redheaded twins, pale and plagued by innocence. 

Sometimes that pit seemed to be so big it was impossible to ignore and sometimes it felt like the only thing keeping her above it was the sinew steel of a notoriously unreliable tightrope. Sometimes she wondered why they hadn’t taken her instead of Beth. Sometimes she wondered which of the two of them was worse off.

But there was something new, something brighter than all the shadow-cast romances in her monochromatic life. Something colorful, something grown like a thorn-spiked rose in the flowerbed of her chest. Kate had felt like this once before. 

It was the time that Poison Ivy had kissed her. She’d done the same to Dinah and Zatanna as well, making them fight their friends, so the league would be too busy to stop her plan to put an end to civilization. And Kate had been…happy. The sickly sweet pheromones had crept up her nostrils and tickled her brain with bright pink fog and it had felt exactly how she’d imagined love would feel like as a little girl, back when she still thought she’d end up with the prince, not the princess. It was the ability to give all of yourself to someone without ever needing anything in return. 

Then Diana had cut off Ivy’s head and the heady pink fog was gone and she was alone. Again. 

But it was back. Except…except…except He wasn’t just using her. He…cared for her. The rational part of her mind, the part that was all steel and pain and days locked in a cell surrounded by the most gruesome pictures imaginable, said that his care was still a kind of sickness. That any affection she might receive from him was only a result of his pride that he had beaten her, that he had reduced her to a lovesick fool. But it seemed to her so inconsequential at the moment if that love was real or not. Only people who had not truly experienced how terrible reality could be claimed that a bad truth was better than a nice lie. Only philosophers drew a distinction between faux happiness and earned joy. 

It seemed to Kate that she had spent her entire life searching for something to fill that awful pit with. First, it had been the approval of her father, then the purpose of service. Then booze, then pussy, then vigilantism. But there was no justice in the world, no scales on which actions could be valued as right or wrong at the end of the day. Come to think of it, with how easily she and everyone she loved could be mind-controlled, replaced, altered, rewritten, and undone by forces seemingly beyond anyone’s control, there was no truth either. 

That just left love. Not merely the hot streak of lust in the belly, or the ache for companionship in the heart, but something more, something which scientists had tried to eliminate through explanation however they could. But failed. No one knew why people did the things they did and loved the ones they did. Kate used to hate the women, who protected their abusers. Or the idiots who wrote letters to serial killers in prison. There was release in loving someone without believing they might change. There was release in finding someone willing to hurt you. Sometimes the hurting was the only thing that made sense, the only protection from something worse. 

It reminded her of something awful Bruce had once told her, while they were scoping out Oswald’s casino. “Gambling addicts aren’t addicted to winning, they're addicted to losing.” That’s what he’d said. 

People gambled for the same reason they drank and smoked and rutted even when there was more pain than pleasure in it. It wasn’t for the high, it was for the burning in the lungs, the pricking of the skin as the needle went in. It was the reason why she and the women she’d mentored went out every night and let the scum of the city beat them. They were no different than the whores who trotted up and down the lanes, waiting for someone to punish them for being alive so that their pimps wouldn’t have to. Everyone was a junkie, it was just a matter of what their fix was. 

It was suddenly obvious to her that she needed to get them out. Cassandra and Stephanie and Charlotte and Harper and Cheyenne and even Barbara…they were all as addicted to the pain as she was. Convinced that if they punched the brick wall of humanity enough, it would somehow get better. 

What she had with him, the rape, the defilement, the degradation, the dehumanization…it was so much more honest, wasn’t it? Someone wanted her and he had taken her. And now she would help him take others because she couldn’t bear to grow old watching more young people throwing away their lives like she had. The depredations of his depraved harem were far preferable to the thankless existence of self-inflicted martyrdom. 

That was why she loved him. Yes, she loved him because he made the pit go away. But it wasn’t just that. He liked something about her. Yes, her tits and her ass, but also her obedience. Being a whore for him was not a thankless task, it came with rewards worth savoring. It came with the security of self-inflicted stupidity, relying on his judgment, however terrible would always be preferable to relying on her own. She was nothing without him, her whole life one gaping mistake ready to be plugged with his dick and all his hare-brained horniness. 

She would show that to him. She would present to him slaves worthy of his humiliations. Not just their sleek sexy bodies pressed tight into ill-fitting outfits for his admiration, but their souls bent to kiss his toes. 

She dug herself into the ultra-soft mattress, dragging a hand down the front of her undershirt. Then with her other hand, she grabbed one of the pillows and stuffed it between her legs, while she bit down on the other and stifled her own, endless frustration. Yes, the world was full of stupid, pain-addicted bitches, waiting to be fucked and spanked by him. And he’d chosen her to help him.

She’d never felt so…needed. 

LOIS

“You said you’d have proof about this virus here,” Lois said, rubbing her now mitten-clad hands up and down her coat sleeves to create heat. “So…where is it?”

Manheim smiled. “You’ll have to forgive me, Miss Lane, if I check on Miss Starr first. I promised her this was a safe place and I trust you won’t be publishing about anything you see or hear here without her and Kara’s consent.”

“Of course,” Lois said. She was tired of this dickwad implying that he was more in touch with either of these girls than she was. 

“Don’t worry,” Kara said, after closing the doors behind them. “You’ll see what we’re working with soon.”

Lois frowned. Kara wasn’t acting normally, not by any means. She was…well, happier wasn’t the right word for it. She was smiling more and there was a lightness to her, for sure. But it wasn’t…natural. Lois had seen Kara when she was excited before and this…wasn’t it. There was something else going on and she was going to find out what. All of this, the fighting between superheroines, Manheim’s sudden appearance, Kara’s change in mood, all of it was connected. Maybe it was a virus, maybe it was something else. But Lois had to find out what and for now, that meant cooperating with this manipulative bastard. 

That didn’t mean she had to like it. 

“Kara, you wouldn’t mind showing Lois to the kitchen so she can make us all hot cocoa, would you?” Manheim asked. 

Karen looked confused. Kara just beamed. “Of course.” She said and when she did, she got a dreamy look in her eyes like Manheim was the most fetching guy in the world.

“Wait, what-?!” Lois didn’t even get a chance to curse the prick out, she was already being swept up by Kara and carried through the halls of the fortress at incredible speed and dropped off in front of the kitchen counter. 

“Kara, this-this is insane!” She said, turning to face her. “You can’t seriously like that he treats women like this!” 

Kara frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He just assumed that I’d make a drink for him. It was the same thing as when we met for coffee, he acts like I-like I’m his housewife or something!” Lois said, stomping her heel down onto the hard glacial floor.  “It is not acceptable for any man to act in that way, not in this day and age!”

Kara sighed. “Lois, he asked you to make coco for all of us.”

“But he means for him! He’s the only other human, you and Karen aren’t cold.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t want coco.” Kara actually looked offended as she said that. 

“But you didn’t ask for coco. He didn’t ask for coco, he assumed I’d make it and you played along like it was perfectly natural!” Lois said. 

“Lois, he wants you to feel useful. He’s helping us deal with a world-scale threat. He thought you would enjoy doing something like this, rather than sitting around shivering and taking notes.” Kara was getting irate with her. Kara never got irate with her before! It had always been the two of them teasing Clark about how serious he could be. 

She’d thought they were friends. 

“Is that what you really think of me? You think I should just make drinks for him when he asks me to because he’s doing me a favor showing me all this?” Lois asked. She already knew the answer, but she wanted Kara to hear that, to hear how insane that sounded. Lois was just trying to get to the truth, to help the world understand why what had happened had happened. And now Kara was turning against her, siding with the cowardly misogynist who’d tried to undercut her accomplishments and her expertise every chance he got. 

“Lois, right now you’re acting like the stereotype that everyone imagines when they think of a feminist. You’re acting like you’re above doing the simplest favors just because you’re famous…” Kara folded her arms. “Frankly, you’re embarrassing me.”

She left before Lois could respond, but for a while, Lois was too shocked by what Kara had just said to answer anyway. Then, finally, she turned, shaking her head, and set to work. (LOIS: +10 SP)(-29SP) If this is what it took to get to the truth, to get Manheim to slip up, she’d do it. Something was wrong with Kara, that was obvious. But it wasn’t important, right now. What was important was getting to the truth. 

She finished making the cups of coco, finding the warmth of the stove and the smell of cinnamon and melting marshmallows actually quite relaxing. She refused, however, to carry the cups to everyone. They could get their own damn coco, she wasn’t a fucking maid. 

As she carried her mug to where Manheim was talking with Karen. They were making some kind of small talk and Karen had actually said something which was making Kara laugh and that was definitely not right. 

As she stepped out onto the little balcony where they were, she saw that they were in front of a massive crystalline computer and that Manheim was sitting in front of it, intently shifting the placement of specific gemstones. Clark had tried to explain to her once, how each crystal was embedded with strands of data about Kryptonian society and technology. She’d ended up kissing him just to make him shut up. 

Now Manheim was shifting each piece of the computer around seamlessly. She’d only ever seen one human take to Kryptonian technology so easily. Lex Luthor.

“What are you doing?” She asked, blowing softly on her cup as she stepped closer.

Manheim looked up briefly and looked the slightest bit ticked off (which gave her immense satisfaction after the horseshit he’d pulled at the cafe). Then he returned to his work without answering. 

“He’s setting up the hologram to show us a picture of the microorganism,” Kara answered. 

Lois caught Karen’s eye and then said. “So, tell me about this virus…we didn’t really get to talk about it at our interview.”

“No, you were too busy sniping at my love life,” Manheim said, removing one of the crystals and placing it down next to the mantle. 

“Lois, is that true?” Kara asked. 

Lois looked at her and then at Manheim. 

“Yeah, she couldn’t believe that you and I were together,” Manheim said, standing up and planting one on Kara as he walked over to her. Her hyper-concentrated muscles turned to pudding in his arms and she looked like she would have swooned if she wasn’t so irritated with Lois. 

“You two are together?” Karen looked just as shocked as Lois had been when she first heard it.

“Yeah, he’s great ain’t he?” Kara said with the tiniest crack of a smile, 

“Well, you’re not so bad yourself, now are you?” Gerry said with a smirk. Lois noticed Karen’s pose change then. Her shock dissipated, replaced by something else and she seemed to, shift lower so that she was leaning against the railing with her lower back instead of her butt and so that as she leaned forward, her chest demanded even more attention than normal. 

“Oh, stop it,” Kara said, in a way that begged for him to go on.

“Any man would be lucky to have a girl as beautiful and intelligent and funny…” 

With every word, Karen seemed to grow more disconcerted, continually shifting her pose and eventually drawing closer so that she was almost leaning towards the couple as if trying to wedge herself between them. 

“Okay, seriously stop it,” Kara said, rolling her eyes.

“You saved my life,” Manheim said. 

Kara stared back up at him with absolute adoration. “Of course, I did.” 

“I’d save you any day,” Karen said, pressing her bosom into the back of Manheim’s head.

Lois felt like she’d gone mad right then. Apparently for super-powered blondes, this schlubby, anti-social geek was catnip. 

Kara gave Karen a look, not like she was angry with her for flirting with her man but like…like she enjoyed the lip-biting hunger in Karen’s eyes. Then she turned to Lois and glowered. 

“You really gave Gerry a hard time over that?”

Lois looked again, between Kara and “Gerry” and then at Karen who’d seemed to grow even more agitated that her overt flirting had just been brushed past. 

“I’m sorry-” She began.

“No. I don’t want you to apologize to me.” Manheim said, holding up a hand. “I want you to apologize to Kara. You thought that she would be as superficial as you. I want you to apologize for it.” 

Lois grew pale. 

Kara folded her arms. “Yeah. Me too.” 

Lois glared at them both and put her hands on her hips. “Fine…I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry for assuming.” 

(LOIS: +40 SP)(11SP)

Manheim turned back to the device and Karen leaned down across from him to give him a better view, while Kara marched up to Lois.

“Thank you.” She said. “You’re the closest thing I have to family, so it means a lot that you trust me and my decisions.” Then she hugged Lois and whispered in her ear. “I know things have been rough for you since the funeral…but I’m always here if you need to talk.”

Lois wanted to ask Kara outright then, what was going on here, why she was acting like this was normal. But she knew that she wouldn’t get to the truth without Manheim’s help.

Then the computer lit up and the hologram that Manheim had promised appeared above the array, a glittering projection of a petri dish with little squiggly lines in it. 

“Now, this is some of the virus I’ve extracted from Kate’s bloodstream. I only kept one sample but I’m concerned the more there is, the more powerful its psychic abilities are.” 

Lois squinted at the fuzzy image. It looked like every picture of bacteria she’d ever seen. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but given how dramatic Manheim’s earlier statements had been, she’d envisioned something more alien. 

“How’d you find out about this thing?” She asked, stepping closer to the display and ignoring the fact that Karen was all but rubbing her cleavage against Manheim’s shoulders. It was strange, but Manheim was the expert here and if he wasn’t reacting to whatever was happening, then she probably shouldn’t either. Offending yet another person after today's missteps seemed like a terrible idea. 

Manheim stood up too quickly and bumped into Karen’s chest. He actually looked flustered for a moment and her seductive smile seemed to grow. “Well, I didn’t find out about it until I started treating Peggy Carter. In the process of curing her, I figured out the molecular structure of the microorganism wasn’t hydrogen-based. I didn’t theorize it came from Karen’s universe though until I treated Batwoman and the Fortress’ computers identified the virus as Kryptonian in nature.” 

Karen straightened suddenly. “But when I was in my capsule, I learned about Kryptonian biology for years. There was no mention of a virus like the one you’ve described.”

Again, Manheim hesitated and Lois felt a little tingle of glee that he was being thrown off his game. Simultaneously, there came fear with the excitement. Manheim was in charge of all of this, he was the key to Lois finding the truth. If he didn’t know what he was doing what the hell were the rest of them going to do?

“Well, we think it was created as a biological weapon, like Doomsday or Rogol Zaar,” Kara said. “I talked with Jor-L’s memory through the holograms and he didn’t have any information about it though, probably because it came from your universe and not this one.”

Karen frowned but before she could respond, Manheim had gotten the ball rolling again already. 

“Kara’s so brilliant. She’s been helping me piece together why the virus might be influencing people in this way and why it seems to only be affecting women so far.”

Karen’s frown turned into a glare and she stuffed her arms under her chest, pushing her cleavage up and outwards. 

“And why is that?” Lois asked, trying to ignore the bulging breasts about to explode out of Karen’s skin-tight suit.

Manheim turned back to the crystals and began shifting them around again. “I can’t say for sure, but I believe it was designed to cause the wives and daughters of Krypton’s top scientists and generals to murder them. The only question is how it survived when Karen’s reality was destroyed.”

Karen stepped past Lois. “You think I carried them. That I might still be infected. Why didn’t you have me quarantine immediately?”

Manheim glanced over. “Well, I’m still not sure the vector through which the virus spreads. Obviously, it has some mental connection with other instances of itself, but I can’t say for certain if it is contracted through breath or sweat or…other means.” 

Karen deflated even more, and all her friskiness suddenly vanished.

“What do you mean?” 

“He thinks it might be an STD.” Kara supplied. “But that theory can’t be one hundred percent true because Batwoman and Peggy only touched each other, right?” She asked. 

Manheim smiled slightly and nodded. “That’s another possible explanation, the virus is actually a combination of a latent Kryptonian infection that survived inside Karen, which then mutated and joined with an STD that Batwoman may have been suffering from.”

Lois stared at Karen in shock. “You had sex with Kate?”

Karen was more mortified by this revelation than she seemingly had been from her earlier behavior toward Manheim. 

“I didn’t know you knew Batwoman’s civilian name,” Manheim said, finishing whatever he’d been doing with the Kryptonian computer. “I didn’t mean to out you either, Karen. I assumed you and Lois were close and she’d know about the relationship between you and Batwoman.”

Karen was still blushing, but she also looked unexpectedly humble. “It’s…it’s okay…yes, I…I didn’t know I might be…carrying something.” 

“It’s not your fault,” Manheim said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “The virus may well have been affecting your behavior before you attacked Kara.”

With that, he turned to Lois. “I’ll need to run some tests now with Powergirl and Supergirl. I assume you have an article to write.”

Lois nodded and turned to leave. Whatever weird sexual tension was between the three of them, she didn’t want to be anywhere near it. It was a distraction from what was really going on. Plus, this would give her a chance to look around the Fortress and see if there were any other inconsistencies she could use against Manheim.

“Oh, Lois?”

She paused on the bridge of ice which extended onto this platform. 

“Could you please bring the rest of that coco you made?”

Lois gritted her teeth, then nodded. Fine, if that’s what it took, fine. He’d regret treating her this way and turning Kara against her when she published the-

“Actually, it’s probably all cold by now. Make another batch, would you?”

When Lois came back, carrying the coco on a tray like a fucking waitress, Manheim was flirting with Kara again and Karen was back to rubbing herself against them both and moving with the languid language of seduction. Lois felt like she was seeing something she shouldn’t be. 

She hurried past them and set the tray down, shivering beneath her coat. No sooner had she turned to sprint back out of there than an arm reached under her coat and snagged around her waist. 

“Aw, thanks, Miss Lane,” Kara said. But she said it like she and Manheim and Karen were all a bunch of horny teenagers and Lois was the overeager MILF serving them drinks by the pool. Lois was certain it was just her imagination until she felt Kara’s fingers press into her bum. 

She was so shocked she could do nothing but stand there and shiver while Kara’s warm hand dug into the short skirt beneath her coat. 

“Kara is so pretty, isn’t she? She’s such a pretty girl.” Manheim said, pressing himself into Lois’ back while Karen nibbled at his neck and ear. With nothing to hold onto except Kara’s sturdy frame, Lois had no choice but to allow her head to go over Kara’s shoulder as if they were hugging. But they weren’t hugging. Kara’s hand was under the fur coat, pressed tight to one ass-cheek and Manheim’s hard-on was pressing into the small of her back.

She was just a little raven-haired sex pet sandwiched between the two of them, an aperitif for their depraved appetites.

“Tell Kara she’s a pretty girl,” Manheim ordered, his hands on Lois’ shoulders, massaging them gently through the fur-lining, through the blazer beneath. His voice was low and his breath was hot on her ear. 

She wanted to scream, to start clawing at them. But they were her ride home. Maybe Karen would stop necking on Manheim long enough to notice this was wrong, and maybe she wouldn’t. Lois couldn’t take that chance. Especially Karen’s help meant that she never found out what was really going on, what it was that Manheim was hiding. 

Well, she knew one thing he’d been hiding. She could feel it stiffening against her back as Kara rubbed her cheek against her neck gently and squeezed Lois’ ass harder than Clark ever had. 

“You’re a pretty girl,” Lois said, her voice cracked and ugly to her own ears. (LOIS: +66 SP)(77SP) She felt like crying, but there wasn’t the normal pain in her chest. There was something drier, more empty, breaking apart in her lungs. 

“Good girl.” Manheim drew himself away and Lois felt his hand swat her ass. It stung, but she barely registered the pain.

“It’s so good having you around again.” Kara said, squeezing her slinky body against Lois’. “We’ll catch up later, m'kay?”

Lois nodded, vacantly, and then Kara slapped her ass on the other side, sending Lois tip-toeing away, wondering what on Earth had just happened. As she left, she heard Manheim saying something to Karen.

“I’m gonna need you to take off your clothes, so I can look for signs of the infection.”