Chapter 2: Soft as Steel
A woman should soften but not weaken a man. --Sigmund Freud
The first time Clark had been transported to Almerac, Maxima had dragged his unconscious body along the streets of the capitol city by his cape.
This second time, he was teleported directly into Maxima's throne room. He was still trapped in the transparent 'cell' they'd held him in on the ship—it was an ingenious prison, formed of a spherical, dimension-bending portal. When Clark attempted to stick his hand through it, his hand re-entered the sphere at the antipode of its exit point. Initially he'd been fascinated by the fact that if he stood in the center and reached straight above his head, he could grab his own foot. This simultaneously felt like he was grabbing the foot of an unseen person above him, and that his own foot was being grabbed by an unseen person reaching up through the floor.
After about the first hour of hyperspace travel, the novelty of the portal-cell had worn off, and Clark had more or less accepted that he wasn't going to be able to escape from it.
Now Maxima was striding towards him, her golden cloak billowing out behind her, crimson-copper hair glinting fiercely beneath a golden headdress.
Clark took a breath as she approached.
"Maxima, this isn't--"
She showed him her palm, not looking at him. "Silence!"
Clark felt like his words had been stuffed back down his throat as his lips were psionically sealed shut.
Maxima strode right past him to confront the guards who had accompanied him. Before either of them could react, she drew her sword, loosed a fearsome battle cry, and lopped off both their heads.
"Mmmnn!" Clark tried to shout in protest. But the warrior queen was already undoing her work. The blood flew back into the open necks, the heads floated back through the air and settled into place, and the fatal slashes sealed shut with a glow of golden light.
Five seconds after they'd been decapitated, both of the guards were on their knees, wheezing for breath, hands clutching their freshly-healed throats.
"How dare you bring him before me in disgrace?" she seethed, pointing back at Clark. "You filthy thieves, undressing him was to be MY right and mine alone!"
"But… your Majesty…" one of the guards panted. "We didn't--"
"Be thankful that I spare your wretched lives," Maxima declared. "And begone!"
The guards looked at each other, and bolted for the door.
Maxima put away her sword, and pivoted on the frighteningly tall heels of her boots.
Clark swallowed.
"You may speak now," Maxima told him.
"—gah," Clark gasped, finding his voice released. "You…you've become more powerful since the last time we met."
Her eyes changed color, from brown to amber, as she smiled. "I was a mere girl the last time we met, Kal-El. Now I am the true Queen of Almerac. My authority over this world is supreme. Now then: I do not wish to insult you further by keeping you unclothed. My slaves were not aware of the Kryptonian cultural aversion to uncovered flesh." She looked him over from head to toe, skillfully measuring, and with a snap of her fingers Clark felt silky fabric knit itself across his skin. An instant later, he was fully dressed—in the red-and-gold raiment of Kryptonian royalty.
The portal-cell vanished with a dismissive wave of Maxima's hand. "There," she said, clearly satisfied with her work. "Now you are as you should be."
Clark sighed. "Maxima. Thanks for the clothes, but I should be home with my wife, not here with you."
She turned her back on him, her shoulders tense. "You know I can control your mind, if you become… uncooperative," she said after a moment.
"Yes, you could… but would you?" Clark asked, making it as gentle a challenge as possible.
She spun around again, and her eyes had darkened to burnt orange. "Let's hope we don't have to find out. Do not forget that the fate of your Earth hangs in the balance. Resist me out of loyalty to your human mate, and you will never see her again."
Sensing that he probably wasn't going to win the argument at that point, Clark decided to back down. "All right," he said, hoping to calm her. "I understand that. They explained it to me on the ship."
In response to his apparent acceptance of defeat, the harshness faded from Maxima's expression. "I know you don't want to be here, Kal-El, but it won't be as horrible as you think. We are supremely compatible. And we will be honoring our heritage, you and I."
The warrior queen's voice turned wistful. "Our civilizations shared such powerful history, once. My mother used to tell me there would never again be a race of men as glorious or noble as yours. That's why I am sure I've made the right choice. For the future of Almerac."
She stepped in, closer, her feet poised like a dancer, and reached for his face. Clark didn't remember that he was still wearing his glasses until she was ever-so-delicately pulling them away from him.
"These lenses you wear," she mused, suddenly changing the subject. "I don't understand how they disguise you." On a royal whim, she put the glasses on, and was instantly transformed into the most dangerous-looking fantasy of a red-haired librarian. "After all, the point is that you can see through them, is it not?"
Clark couldn't help but smile a little. "I can see through them, yes. But from the other side of them, looking in, sometimes other people can't. Sometimes they can only see what they expect."
She blinked. "And what do they expect, when they see you wearing these?"
Clark searched for as brief an explanation as possible. "Well…for starters, on Earth, only people with weak eyes wear them."
Maxima looked as if Clark had just revealed the most precious secret in the universe. "How ingenious," she exclaimed, taking the glasses off and staring at them in wonder. "Their 'Superman' would never pretend to have weak eyes."
From anyone else, that would have almost definitely been a sarcastic comment. But Clark got the distinctly uncomfortable impression that her reaction was completely genuine.
Sensing but misinterpreting Clark's discomfort, Maxima suddenly looked worried. "That is… you don't actually have weak eyes, do you?"
"Um, no," Clark admitted, slightly confused by her concern.
"Of course you don't," she purred right away, as her own eyes became rather sly-looking. As she had tried on the glasses her eyes had reverted to their standard chestnut brown, but now they were swirling past amber and heading right on to gold, reflecting her excitement.
"I am suddenly impatient," Maxima announced, and grabbed Clark's wrist. "Come with me."
Later that night, several galaxies away, Bruce's cell phone rang again. He picked it up, noted the number, and answered it.
"Lois."
"Hi Bruce." No stress in her voice, not yet—just the barest hint of curiosity. "Hey, I have a quick question for you."
"Go ahead."
"…Any chance you've heard from Clark today? He literally disappeared from the office and hasn't come home yet."
Bruce heaved a silent sigh. "He called me this afternoon," he related.
"Oh, good," Lois said, her tone revealing that she had been slightly worried after all.
"He told me he's been kidnapped and transported off-world by intergalactic bounty hunters," Bruce informed her. He could almost hear her roll her eyes through the phone.
"Intergalactic bounty hunters, eh? Well, I'm not surprised. He actually missed dinner tonight—and he'd never do that without at least being kidnapped by intergalactic bounty hunters. Did he say where they're taking him?"
"Almerac."
"Almerac?" she repeated, her tone instantly turning dangerous. "Ugh, that must mean Maxima is after him again."
"Yes," Bruce confirmed.
"So… why'd he call you? Does he expect you to go rescue him or something?"
Bruce frowned into the phone. "It sounded like he only had time for one call, and he needed advice about how to handle Maxima."
Lois 'hmm'ed into the phone, exasperated. "Look, I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have the number that he called from? Because I would really love to try and call him back."
Bruce quirked an eyebrow. He hadn't thought about checking the number. Granted, he'd quite deliberately stopped thinking about the entire incident, but still. He probably should have checked the number.
"Hang on," he said, and looked at his register of incoming calls. He quirked his eyebrow again as he discovered that the number Clark had called from was approximately twelve thousand digits long. He really had to hand it to these new Lextel phones—in retrospect, he supposed some of the technology used to create them had come from Brainiac.
He punched a few buttons and put the phone back to his ear. "I'm sending it to you now. I'm not sure if you'll be able to call it, though."
"Thanks," Lois said. "I'll give it a try and let you know how it turns out."
Elsewhere, aboard a certain Almeraci hunting ship, an extremely nervous young crewman was about to deliver some bad news to his Captain.
"Excuse me, Captain Lobo? Sir?"
"What the frack do you want, Scumswab?"
The young crewman winced. "Sir, I've got our communications bill here, sir."
"Frag the bill. Why the hork aren't we out of this fraggin' orbit yet? I thought I told those bastiches to get us underway."
"Yes sir, you did tell them that, sir, but…" he squeezed his eyes shut, bowed his head, and held up the bill with trembling hands. "…we won't receive clearance to depart this orbit until we pay our bill, sir!"
"Give me that," Lobo grumbled, snatching the bill from his subordinate. He looked at it. Blinked. And looked at it again.
The farthest corners of the ship vibrated a little, resonating with his exclamation: "WHAT THE FRACK!"
Back on the main deck, the helpless crewman had fallen to his knees in fear.
"Scumswab!" Lobo hollered at him.
"Yes sir?" he whimpered.
"Who's the fraggin' bastich who ran up a sixteen billion-pingal communi-fraggin'-cations bill?"
"Sir, I don't know sir!"
"Well you sure as hork better find the frack out!"
"Right away sir!" the crewman saluted and fled.
Moments later, he grabbed the ship's communications officer by the collar, panting for breath.
"What's the matter?" the comm officer demanded.
"It's the captain," the crewman gasped. "He's upset. He wants to know who's responsible for the bill."
The comm officer blanched. "But I have no way of knowing! It could have been anyone!" he pulled up a couple of screens and began tapping them, producing various charts and graphs. "Believe me, I've been trying to narrow it down. This is the call they're charging us for— But see here? And here? It just says, 'unknown.' It went out over an open hyper-relative line."
"What would it take for us to find out who made that call?" the crewman pleaded.
The comm officer shook his head in despair. "A miracle."
Suddenly a little light on one of the screens started blinking, indicating an incoming call. A very, very miraculous incoming call.
Lois bit her lip as the phone rang. And rang. And rang again. She glanced up at a picture framed on the wall over the desk. It was a photo of her and Clark. Kissing. Ocean. Honeymoon.
She felt a keen, lonely pang and refocused her attention on the ringing phone, annoyed at herself. This was no time to be pining away in romantic nostalgia—for goodness sakes, he hadn't even been gone for an entire day yet!
"Heh… Hello?"
Lois narrowed her eyes. The voice was strange. Probably an alien—but definitely not her alien. "Who is this?" she asked.
"…This is Her Majesty's vessel Spleenwrencher," came the wavering response. Lois tapped her finger on the desk. Whoever was on the other end sounded absolutely terrified.
Patience, she told herself, and sure enough, it paid off. "…Ah, hello?" the strange voice asked again, even more nervous-sounding than before.
Lois decided to go with a terse tone rather than a sympathetic one. Presumably, these were the people who had kidnapped her husband. "…I'm still here. "
"…yes… good… ah… may we ask who is calling, please, uh, ma'am?"
Lois thought fast. She was obviously dealing with minions here. Minions who were currently serving under Maxima's matriarchy. Male minions currently conditioned to accept female reign. It was a risk, but she decided to take it.
"This is the Empress," she declared in her most imperial voice.
"Oh, uh, yes ma'am, of course," the terrified voice said. "But, um, I'm sorry ma'am… we uh, we're having some trouble with our communications equipment and your transmission registration isn't, uh, showing up here, so,"
"I don't have time for this," Lois warned.
"Wait! Please don't hang up ma'am!"
"What?" Her tone left no doubt that she was appalled by such an audacious request.
"Just ask her!" begged a voice in the background. "It's our only chance!"
Lois smirked. "Ask me what?" she demanded.
"Ma'am, if it pleases the Empress, ma'am, save the lives of your humble servants! We have one question…"
"Ask it," Lois commanded, letting just a bit of royal benevolence seep into her voice.
"Yes ma'am. Um, our question is, do you know who activated this comm line earlier? To make a hyper-relative call from somewhere on our ship?"
This was very interesting. Lois frowned and started tapping her finger on her desk again. "Of course," she said, and then wasted no time taking advantage of their relief. "But I sense that you have some dire need for that information. And so I will not give it to you unless you swear to me, that no matter what the peril, you will let me speak with that person after I give you their name."
"We swear!" the voice said, sounding like it was about to burst into tears. "Oh, Empress, we swear it! Just tell us who it was, ma'am!"
"I'm not accustomed to trusting the oaths of the desperate," Lois warned them, surprising herself by just how much she was getting into this 'Empress' role. "Swear to me by—" She thought fast. What was it that aliens cared about? She looked around. Desk. Newspaper. Daily Planet. "—your planet," she declared. "Swear to me, by the fate of your homeworld, that you will not fail to get this certain person on the line."
"We swear," the minion repeated, more solemnly this time. "By the planet Nurdge, may she prosper eternally, we swear."
No matter how many unbelievable things she encountered as the wife of the world's greatest superhero, there were still moments when she half expected a TV show camera crew to come popping out of the closet to tell her it was all some kind of joke. And this was one of those moments. Silently she counted to three, and when the camera crew didn't appear, she sighed.
"Very well," the Empress said gravely into the phone. "As you are probably aware, your vessel was recently sent on an errand by an old acquaintance of mine, Queen Maxima of Almerac."
"Yes ma'am," the minion reported faithfully.
"Earlier today, operatives from your vessel captured Kal-El of Krypton, also known as Superman of the planet Earth, and he's the one who made the call." She paused, took a quick breath, and made sure that her voice stayed steady. "Now. No matter what it takes, you will let me talk to him."
Meanwhile, Clark was feeling trapped. Flirting with her, teasing her, making her anticipate something that wasn't going to happen… there was no way he could manage any of that nonsense that Bruce had been talking about. Women like Maxima, usually villainesses, they flirted with Superman. They teased him. He didn't tease them back. It just wasn't in his character.
And now there was only one thought in his mind:
Lois will kill me.
Maxima was standing in front of him, or more accurately, against him, her thighs pressing warmly against his. She was running her hands down his sides, her thumbs dragging slowly over each of his ribs. "What's wrong?" she half-whispered, and sucked just a little as she kissed his chin. As she pulled her lips away from him she tried to search his eyes, but he was looking absently at the wall behind her.
"Look at me," she commanded, and he did, his expression almost cold. "…Why won't you respond?"
"You can stand here and pet me all day, Maxima, and it's not going to make a difference," Clark answered. "Not a lot of people seem to realize this, but it's actually my greatest power."
"What are you talking about?" Maxima asked flatly.
"Self-control. It's an absolute necessity when your world's as fragile as mine."
Maxima narrowed her eyes. "So it is your self-control which keeps you so soft? Very well. That is easily overcome… I must merely excite you enough."
She looked around the room once, and then tugged at his hands. "Come. Lie with me on the bed."
Clark had had some pretty strong misgivings about this entire scenario since the moment he'd been captured, but suddenly those negative feelings tripled in intensity. Lois will kill me. He felt his skin crawl as if he were about to start sweating. There had to be a logical, peaceable way out of all this, but what was it? When was the time to just say 'no' and that be the end of it? If he refused her now, would she really make good on her threats?
He wasn't sure. He couldn't risk it. Lois will kill me.
Maybe if he just stayed disinterested long enough…
Maxima reclined across her mattress with a single motion of supreme seductive confidence that only the romanticized likes of Cleopatra could imitate. She beckoned once for Clark to join her, and he waited just long enough to see the first hint of anger creep into her face before doing so.
The bed was amazingly plush and instantly comfortable, in spite of everything. Before Clark could marvel too long at that fact, however, he felt Maxima's hands on his chest, sliding under his arms. And with no more effort than it would have taken to lift a pillow, she picked him up and repositioned him so that he was quite exactly on top of her.
Clark blushed—he was somewhat used to picking Lois up and moving her around in bed in a similar fashion, but nobody had ever picked him up and positioned him like that before. At least, not in anything remotely like this context.
Suddenly he was in trouble. The thought of Lois doing anything other than killing him had been the wrong thing to think about.
"That's better," Maxima murmured, settling into place beneath him. "Now… to break down these boundaries of yours… I think I must get you to do something that I know you've never done with your 'fragile' human wife."
Clark tensed, immediately distrusting the direction of the conversation. But there was another stray thought of Lois. Maxima sensed his reaction through his expression, if not from his body. "Ah… do you like that?" she asked. "When I mention your wife? Is that what you need?"
"Maxima, please," Clark said, trying not to beg. "Leave Lois out of this."
"As you wish," she replied, but then smirked. "Although for her sake, I do hope her 'man of steel' isn't always this weak. Come now…I'm more than ready for you. Do that Kryptonian thing."
Clark blinked. She might as well have asked him to turn into a giant frog.
"…What Kryptonian thing?"
She looked up at him, blushing excitedly. "Why, you dirty… you're going to make me spell it out, aren't you?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about!" Clark protested.
"With your eyes," she said, and took a deep breath. "Burn me."
"What!?"
Out of nowhere, she slapped him across the face. "Do not disappoint me," Maxima warned, frowning. "I've waited long enough for you to gather your courage."
Completely at a loss, Clark focused on the hand that had just hit him, and zapped it with a quick blast of his heat vision.
"On the hand?" she mused. "How sweetly chaste of you. But I want it. Here."
"In your eyes?" Clark asked in disbelief.
"Yes of course, in my eyes, you insolent boy. You don't know what you're doing? You've never wished to look into your wife's eyes when you take her to bed?"
"Not with heat vision!"
She bared her teeth at him, unconvinced. "Do it to me. Now."
Reluctantly, Clark obeyed, staring into her eyes and letting everything turn red. It wasn't long before Maxima began to arch her back, slowly moving between him and the mattress, seemingly caught up in the throes of some kind of ecstasy.
Clark began to worry. It was ridiculous to think that his heat vision had some sexual function… wasn't it? He'd never even considered such a thing. If he associated heat vision with any sort of feeling, it was rage, not romance. His heat vision definitely came a little more readily when he was angry. Sometimes, if he was angry enough, his eyes would burn almost spontaneously. But he'd never had the slightest inkling of a desire to use his heat vision on—
Suddenly he recalled his worst recurring nightmare: burning Lois to death. With his eyes.
The memory of those awful dreams was enough to turn the blazing red beams off faster than a switch.
"Why'd you stop?" Maxima gasped. She cupped his face with her hands. "More!"
He found his heart was beating a little faster. He tried to gather his thoughts. "Maxima, I don't like this," he said. "I… it isn't something I'm comfortable with."
"You're doing wonderfully," she breathed, pulling herself closer to him. "It's magnificent. Keep going. You must."
Clark fought past the ghost of his nightmares to summon his heat vision once again. He reasoned that pleasing Maxima this way was a better alternative than other things he could be doing to her. And she was really getting into it. Perhaps this would be enough for her—or at least enough to buy him a little more time to figure out how to convince her to let him go without impregnating her.
The burning light continued to sear into her eyes, as steady and as hot as Clark could manage without actually trying to kill her. "Oh—" she gasped, her body seizing up. "…Almost!"
Tears ran down her cheeks. Realizing what those tears were, Clark stopped again, horrified.
Maxima's nails dug into his shoulders. "What's the matter with you?" she demanded. "Don't you feel it? Doesn't this arouse you?"
"No!" Clark exclaimed, in complete honesty. "Your eyes—they're bleeding!"
"Just a little. It doesn't concern me. Now do it again!"
"Maxima, I can't. It's hurting you."
"I love it," she declared, hooking her legs around both of his. "And I promise that you'll enjoy it as well—but you must push me a little farther first."
"No." He made a significant effort to escape from the vise of her legs, which failed as she reached up with one hand and grabbed him where his jaw joined his throat.
"This is your final chance before your actions become involuntary," she informed him. "Choose to obey me, or I will enslave your mind."
Clark looked at her, and realized with a sinking feeling that he was going to have to back down again. "…All right," he conceded.
She nodded, and let go of his neck, lying back in breathless expectation.
Now Clark was truly upset. Biting his lip, he let his eyes glow red and blaze into hers once more, and after only a handful of seconds Maxima was writhing beneath him.
Disturbed by how rapidly she was losing herself in whatever it was that she was feeling, Clark dared to turn up the intensity just a little—and it had an immediate result.
"Yes," she hissed, and within the red field of his vision, her eyes began to shine with their own hot, white-gold light—and suddenly she was projecting her own energy back at him, electrifying his entire body with her psionic power.
Instantly he felt a strange thrill—this was different, something he'd never felt before. He'd been blasted with various kinds of laser vision and energy beams from all sorts of eyes, but not like this. It wasn't painful, it was… like adrenaline, only more. Hotter. More urgent. And it was personal-- this was something he had drawn out of her, something he'd provoked. And it was up to him to quell it, to overpower and defeat it.
He vaguely remembered Bruce's advice about dominating a fight, and realized that he had more energy than ever to devote to his heat vision. He let that energy go, streaming from his eyes, challenging her, and Maxima met that challenge more than ably.
"You feel it now, don't you?" she asked, as furious red and brilliant white light blazed between them.
"…Yes," Clark confessed in a breath, finding it nearly impossible to think or speak. So much for self-control—he felt like he'd gone crazy. There was more to be done, physically, than just staring her down. He'd never felt so wild, so out of control of his own libido. It was horrible—and he was suddenly aware that there was just one way to resolve it—
He was going to make love to her—he had to.
And just as soon as he came to that realization, he heard Lois's voice behind him:
"…Clark?!"
...to be continued!
Author's note: Buwah hah hah ha, this is so much fun. Poor Clark. For all you readers out there, I sincerely apologize. I know I probably really disturbed some of you with all of this. This is just proof that I'm a freak, I guess-- but I laughed so much writing this, I can't help but be proud of myself, even if Clark probably hates me now. hee hee hee... Also, this is going to be four chapters now, instead of three. Sorry for the long wait, too-- I haven't had time to get on the internet in weeks. Can you believe it's almost Christmas?? Man, I can't wait to read the new DCU holiday special! I hope it's a good one...
