Super Wishes and Leotard Dreams, Chapter 12

Then K-9T’s telepathic ping split my skull like a lightning bolt—*Alpha priority. Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Navy ordered to fire upon unarmed survivors of sunken IRGCN fast boats in 30 seconds. Estimated casualties: 50 souls.*

The sky fractured into a blur of blue and gold as I accelerated, molecules screaming against my skin like a thousand lit matches. The Gulf vanished beneath me in a streak of turquoise—then Persia’s coastline rose from the horizon like a rusted blade. I decelerated just enough to register the scene: six mangled hulls bobbing in the froth, their decks sheared open like tin cans, fifty olive-clad figures-Iran Republican Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) personnel-clinging to debris with the sluggish desperation of men who’ve been treading water for minutes. Above them, the rotorwash from two Seahawks churned the sea into white chaos, their miniguns swiveling with mechanical precision.

One breath. That’s all it took to analyze the geometry of impending slaughter—the lead helo’s gunner already sighting along his infrared scope, his finger a twitch away from turning those bobbing heads into pink mist. My heat vision flared, slicing through the helo’s armor plating to sever the minigun’s hydraulic feed before the gunner could exhale. Molten metal dripped into the strait as I materialized between the survivors and their would-be executioners, my cape snapping like a war banner in the downdraft.

The second Seahawk banked hard, its copilot’s voice crackling over the radio: *”Jesus Christ—it’s Superwoman! Abort engagement, abort—”* Too late. My superbreath hit their tail rotor with the force of a hurricane, sending the bird into a controlled spin toward open water. I caught it one-handed before the skids could kiss the waves, the pilots’ frantic panting echoing inside my skull as their heartbeat stuttered against my palm.

I grabbed both helos “by the scruff of the neck” and flew to the nearby USS GERALD FORD. The deck shuddered under my boots as I planted both Seahawks down like recalcitrant toddlers, their rotor blades still twitching. Sailors scrambled back as the steel groaned under sudden weight redistribution—not every day two helicopters get deposited by a seven-foot goddess in stilettos.

*K-9T. Tell the Kryptonians to assemble on Ford. Now.* The telepathic summons sliced through my team’s consciousness with the precision of a scalpel.

Twenty seconds later . . They came in streaks of color that would’ve blurred human vision—Superman’s crimson cape cutting through the salt-spray like a blade, Supergirl’s golden curls whipping behind her as she decelerated from Mach 12 with a sonic pop that sent deck crew ducking. Cir-El arrived last, her landing awkward but precise, the new Kryptonian still getting used to her own impossible musculature.

I filled in my teammates about the potential slaughter of unarmed sailors, just as the Admiral’s polished Oxfords clicked against the deck plating with the precision of a metronome, his crisp whites starched stiff enough to stand on their own. He paused three paces from our assembled Kryptonian lineup—close enough for protocol, far enough to bolt if necessary (not that he’d get far)—and swallowed hard. “I was just following orders,” he said, his voice tinny against the wind. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork in rough seas.

I let the silence stretch until it hummed. The scent of his cortisol spiked sharp in my nostrils—burnt sugar and gun oil. Behind him, the Ford’s bridge windows framed a dozen pale faces pressed to the glass.

“Admiral,” I said, slow as syrup, “the last guy who said that got hanged at Nuremberg.” My knuckles popped involuntarily.

The Admiral’s polished shoes scuffed against the deck plating as he shifted his weight. His gaze remained locked on the steel beneath us, as if the answers might be etched between the non-slip grooves. Superman stepped forward, his shadow swallowing the man’s crisp white uniform. “Orders like these,” he rumbled, voice thickening with disapproval, “they don’t come through channels. Who gave them to you?”

The Admiral’s throat worked—I could hear his carotid thumping against his collar. “National Command Authority,” he whispered. “Direct from the Oval. No JCS validation, no paper trail.” His fingers twitched toward his breast pocket before aborting the motion. “Just… Signal Chat.”

Supergirl’s heat vision flickered gold in her widened eyes. “They wanted you to commit war crimes through social media?”

The Admiral’s pupils dilated like ink blots under my gaze—I didn’t need mind control, just the unblinking stare of a goddess who’d seen empires crumble. His fingers twitched toward his comms badge before I pulsed the command directly into his motor cortex. *Rescue. Treat. Humanely.* The synaptic override made his limbs jerk like a marionette as he barked orders to launch SAR helos, his voice hollow but precise. Two MH-60s scrambled off the deck, their rotor wash flattening the sea below into a temporary mirror that reflected my crossed arms and tapping stiletto.

“They were going to strafe them,” Superboy said, his voice eerily calm beneath the rage. His fingers twitched at his sides—not nervous energy, but the suppressed need to break something. “Like frigging fish in a barrel.”

Powergirl was the first to step forward, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. “Tell me we’re not just standing here,” she said, the heat vision flickering behind her blue eyes like lit fuse. The tarmac beneath her boots cracked, spiderwebbing outward in jagged lines.

Superman’s cape rippled in the sudden wind as I turned, my back to the admiral. My husband said. “It’s time to pay the president a visit.” Superman asked with pent-up rage, “Where would we find that murderer?”

The words tasted like something between prophecy and inevitability when they left my lips. “He’s always there,” I said, watching the others’ faces tighten with understanding. Superman’s jaw flexed once—just enough for me to know he’d already mapped the flight path in his head.

The air screamed past us in a blur of color and pressure—Los Angeles sprawled beneath like a circuit board suddenly frozen mid-pulse as we decelerated from incredible speeds. My cape snapped behind me like a flag caught in a hurricane. Below, the manicured greens of the golf course in his Malibu mansion grounds looked absurdly peaceful, dotted with figures scrambling like ants sensing a quake.

I ordered, “Kryptonians, please secure the perimeter. Take out his security gently, but firmly. Make them go nighty-night. Superman and I will pay the president a visit.”

The president’s golf ball was mid-air when his caddy suddenly dropped the flag. I saw the moment his brain registered our silhouettes against the California sun—the way his grip on the club faltered, his mouth slackening like a marionette with cut strings. His vice-president and two other oligarchs, didn’t look that much better. “Perimeter secure,” A few Kryptonians’ voices echoed through our superhearing, punctuated by distant thumps of bodies hitting grass. Lara added a clipped confirmation; she’d neutralized the snipers on the mansion roof before they’d even chambered rounds. In an instant, the golf course was ours.

Our boots touched down on the manicured grass with deliberate, earth-shaking weight—the kind of impact that sends divots flying and makes rich men flinch. The president’s golf club slipped from his fingers, clattering against the cart path cement as Superman and I folded our arms across our chests, our capes settling like storm clouds behind us. His Secret Service detail was already unconscious in the bushes, courtesy of the Kryptonians’ precision strikes.

Not beating around the bush, I asked the president with fury in my voice, “Did you order the genocide of the unarmed Iranian survivors in the Strait of Hormuz?”

The president’s smug smile made my heat vision flicker behind my retinas—that same smirk he’d worn during press conferences while signing deportation orders. “Sure. But you have no proof,” he said, dusting imaginary lint off his polo shirt like we were discussing tax reforms, not a massacre murder. His collar lapels caught the sunlight—tiny American flags winking at me as if this were all some patriotic joke.

The president’s smirk faltered when Superman took a single step forward—just one—but the ground shook with the tectonic certainty of an earthquake. I saw his pulse jump in his carotid artery, smelled the sour tang of adrenaline leaching through his designer cologne.

The president recovered his composure with a theatrical sigh, straightening his polo collar as if we were nothing more than an inconvenient paparazzi interruption. His gaze dragged down my body with deliberate slowness—lingering on the crest across my chest—before smirking at Superman. “Guess the old saying’s true,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Behind every great man, there’s a woman with bigger tits.” He winked at my husband. “Or in your case, Benna—sorry, *Ben*—was it the dick or the superpowers that finally made you man enough to keep her?”

My hand shot out, gripping Superman’s wrist just as his muscles coiled beneath that alien weave—his heat vision flickering dangerously behind narrowed eyes. The president’s smirk widened at the restrained fury, his tongue darting out to wet his lips like a predator savoring the flinch of prey. “Oh, we know *everything* worth knowing,” his vice-president drawled, adjusting his belt with performative nonchalance. Their gaze raked over my body again, lingering on the swell of my hips before snagging on the crest between my breasts. The president added to his lieutenant’s admission, “Especially when freaks like you can’t stop preening on social media. What was it? #TransAndTerrific? #SuperwomanAfternoon Delights?”

“Yeah,” the vice-president added, his lips curling around a toothpick as he raked his eyes over my body with the same clinical detachment one might use to inspect livestock. “Gotta say, Superwoman—that hourglass figure’s almost convincing. Almost.” He blew out a laugh that smelled of bourbon and contempt. “What’d you do, sweetheart? Pray the gay away so hard it gave you tits?”

“You chauvinistic, egotistical excuses for a human beings!” I hissed. Enraged, I again asked, “Mr. President, was it your intention to conduct war crimes of Iran.”

His fingers intentionally grazed the underside of my breast just as the confession left his lips—“Damn right we were. All’s fair in love and war. They would have deserved it.” The admission slithered out between his tobacco-stained teeth, accompanied by that same reptilian grin. He looked at Superman and mockingly motioned like he was lifting a pair of breasts and said with a giggle, “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

I couldn’t take it anymore. The fury that had been simmering beneath my skin erupted like solar plasma—my heat vision lashing out in twin crimson beams before I even realized I’d made the decision. The president’s smirk froze mid-sentence, his polo shirt igniting first before his flesh blackened and split like overripe fruit. The vice-president only managed half a step backward when my gaze swung to him, his bourbon-scented breath catching fire in his throat as his skull superheated from the inside out. Their ashes settled on the manicured grass before the other two oligarchs in their foursome could blink, their tanned faces draining of color like sand through an hourglass.

The second the ashes scattered across the grass, my stomach lurched like I’d been punched with kryptonite. A scream tore from my throat—half anguish, half horror—before my boots left divots in the turf as I rocketed skyward fast enough to rupture eardrums. Below me, Ben’s outstretched hand and the shocked faces of our family blurred into streaks of color as I broke the sound barrier.

The air at Everest’s summit should have frozen my lungs solid—should have peeled the skin from my bones in seconds. Instead, I just stood there, cape whipping violently against the thin atmosphere, staring at my hands like they belonged to someone else. The same hands that had cradled Asher when he was six and burning with fever, that had typed strategy-laden sentences late into the Virginia nights, that had traced Benna’s—no, *Ben’s*—jawline when we rediscovered each other. Now they were weapons. Now they were stained. I had broken “my no-killing rule”-the core of my moral code-out of anger.

I stared absent-mindedly at the fragile humans climbing the summit. The Sherpa waved back hesitantly, his frostbitten fingers clutching an oxygen mask like a rosary. His group stared up at me—this seven-foot-tall weeping goddess in spandex standing in the snow—before quickly looking away, as if witnessing something too private. Or too dangerous. My tears froze instantly against my cheeks, tiny diamonds of remorse shattering against the rocks below. The wind howled around me, but I barely heard it—my own pulse roared louder in my ears. I flexed my fingers, half-expecting to see blood dripping from them despite knowing the heat vision had vaporized everything instantly. No traces. No evidence. Just the ghost of their smug faces burned into my retinas like afterimages from a camera flash.

The sobs tore through me like seismic waves—each one cracking something deeper inside my ribcage than my invulnerable body should allow. I clawed at my breasts, as if I could physically rip out the memory of their faces disintegrating under my gaze. The S-shield felt suddenly grotesque against my palms, its alien weave now just a branding iron for hypocrisy.

The embrace came slowly—not tentative, but deliberate, giving me every chance to pull away if I wanted to. I didn’t. The scent of ozone and faint bergamot from Superman’s aftershave cut through the thin Himalayan air, grounding me before his arms even settled around my waist. His chest pressed warm against my chest, the S-shield on his suit indenting slightly into my breasts. He didn’t speak. Just held me while the wind screamed around us, his heartbeat steady against my ribs. I’d heard him approaching from three continents away—the familiar sonic boom of his flight path arcing over Jakarta, the deceleration over Nepal, the way his boots crunched snow two seconds before he touched down. But I hadn’t turned around. Some part of me wanted him to find me like this: broken, guilty, waiting.

His fingers traced the edge of my cape without tugging—an anchor, not a restraint. “They were going to kill dozens and it would have established precedent ,” Superman murmured at last, his breath warm against my ear despite the subzero wind. “You we’re in the right.”

“I know,” I whispered back, the words barely forming before the wind snatched them away. My throat felt scraped raw—not from cold, but from screaming into the void for minutes. “But that doesn’t mean I get to play executioner.” The snow beneath us groaned as I shifted, my six-inch stilettos sinking deeper.

Superman’s grip tightened around me—not enough to hurt, never enough to hurt—but enough to make his point. His lips brushed the shell of my ear, rough with stubble yet unbearably tender. “But you don’t get to drown in this alone.”

Then I realized that I had to stop playing God, to get back to my faith, to ask forgiveness. The weight of my stilettos in the snow felt absurd suddenly—like trying to anchor judgment in shifting ice. I lifted my gaze from the crumpled S-shield underfoot to my husband’s steady hazel eyes. “Fly me to the church.” I whispered. My fingers curled into his cape. “I need to humble myself.”

Superman didn’t hesitate—his arms locked around my waist, my cape tangling with his as we shot upward, the Himalayas shrinking beneath us in a blur of white and gray. I let him do the flying as I was deep in thought. The wind should have ripped the breath from my lungs, but my invulnerability rendered the sensation moot, leaving only the visceral awareness of his grip—solid, grounding—as Virginia Beach suburbs materialized on the horizon. My stilettos skimmed the church’s limestone steps as he set me down gently, the scent of old incense and polished wood seeping through the cracked oak doors.

With a quick sweep of my x-ray vision—more reflex than intention—I was happy to see the priest’s skeletal outline bent over the confessional screen. The old lady ahead of me gasped when she turned and found seven feet of spandex-clad divinity looming behind her. Her wrinkled fingers clutched rosary beads like lifelines. “Bless me,” she whispered, not to the church, but to my crest. I forced a smile, acutely aware of how my six-inch stilettos tilted me forward like some avenging angel.

When it was my turn, I hesitated—not at the act of confession, but at the absurdity of my spandex stretching against the worn velvet kneeler. The confessional door groaned as I ducked inside, my cape pooling around the cramped space like liquid fire. Through the lattice, I caught the silhouette of Father McCallister’s hunched shoulders. His breathing hitched when my voice emerged—too resonant, too young—saying the words I’d practiced since Everest: *”Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last confession.”*

The pause that followed was thick enough to choke on. I rushed ahead. *”I murdered the president and vice-president with my heat vision this morning.”* My whisper cracked like glacial ice. *”They were about to strafe unarmed sailors. I could’ve restrained them—should have—but I…”* My hands flexed, phantom warmth lingering in my palms. *”I saw their souls twist when they confessed to worse crimes. Like watching tumors metastasize behind their eyes.”*

Father McCallister’s breathing stopped entirely for three seconds—a detail my superhearing caught with painful clarity. The confessional’s wood creaked as he shifted, his shadow leaning closer to the lattice. *”My child,”* he began, then faltered. I watched through the wood grain as his wrinkled hands tightened around his rosary. *”it is for God alone to judge the weight of your actions. But confession offers more than absolution—it offers guidance.”* His voice carried the brittle patience of someone who’d heard impossible things before and chose to believe anyway.

The words landed like a stone in still water—unexpected, rippling through me with a weight I hadn’t anticipated. Father McCallister’s voice, suddenly steady, carried an authority that didn’t feel entirely his own. *”God will provide signs of your forgiveness,”* he said, and for a fleeting moment, the confessional’s stale air seemed charged with something electric. My cape, pooled around my boots, twitched as if caught in a breeze that wasn’t there. Then, just as quickly, the moment passed. The penance was laughably simple—a few Hail Marys, murmured in the pews before I left—but the dismissal felt incomplete, like a sentence cut short before the period.

The cathedral doors groaned like a living thing when I pushed them open—too hard, always too hard now—and sunlight hit my face in a sudden slap of warmth. The Kryptonians were clustered on the steps like a pack of stray gods, capes flickering in the wind, all watching me with varying degrees of concern. Superman’s boots left the ground before I’d fully descended the steps, his body angled toward me like a compass needle finding north.

Superbabe, my mom, looked me up and down with compassion. Then, I sensed, she saw that I had recomposed myself and found some peace. She asked, “What next, Superwoman?”

I closed my eyes using my superbrain, calculating all the variables of what was to come at the speed of light. I reopened my eyes and said, “We need to visit the Speaker of the House. To give direction.” The word “direction” tasted bitter on my tongue—like swallowing ash from a fire I’d lit myself. Superman’s hand hovered near my elbow, his fingers twitching like he wanted to anchor me but wasn’t sure he should. Behind us, Supergirl’s cape snapped in the wind like a flag at half-mast.

The air screamed past us as we tore through the stratosphere—a sonic boom rippling behind our capes as Washington’s skyline materialized below in a sudden blur of marble and steel. The Capitol dome gleamed like a misplaced crown jewel beneath us, its symmetry almost mocking in its perfection. I could see my target was there in her office as expected. My boots hit the west terrace with enough force to spiderweb the stone beneath me, Superman landing beside me in a controlled hover just as Lara and Alura streaked past to secure the south entrance. Within seconds of arriving at the historic building, the Kryptonians secured it just like we did at the golf course.

The air smelled of panic and polished marble. Superman moved before I could blink, his cape slicing through the rotunda’s stale air as he zeroed in on a CNN crew gaping near the press pool. The reporter’s microphone clattered to the floor when he lifted her gently by the waist like she weighed nothing. “History’s happening,” he growled, and the way her cameraman scrambled to follow told me everything about the raw power in that voice.

The Speaker’s office door loomed like a dam holding back chaos, its dark wood grain pulsing under my microscopic and x-ray vision as I counted six Secret Service agents’ heartbeats thundering on the other side. Kara’s fingers tightened around the Bible’s gilt-edged pages—the same nervous tremor she’d had when reading bedtime stories to Crystal years ago. Superbabe flexed her shoulders, her cape shifting like a living shadow behind her. “Found Justice Holloway mid-sermon in the chapel,” she murmured. “Took some… persuasion to get him moving.”

The lock surrendered to my fingers like wet clay—no sound, no resistance, just the faintest warmth of metal bending to my will. Beyond the door, six slumped figures in dark suits lay strewn across the Speaker’s antechamber like discarded puppets, their weapons still holstered. Superman’s cape brushed the carpet as he stepped over them, his boots silent. “You’re getting smoother with the your mental suggestions,” he murmured, and the pride in his voice almost made me forget the weight of what we were doing. Almost.

Justice Holloway’s bible thudded onto the mahogany desk as I adjusted the CNN camera’s focus with a microscopic twitch of my heat vision. The lens whirred—too slow, human-slow—so I reached out and manually twisted it to capture the Speaker’s ashen face in perfect clarity. “Madam Speaker,” I said, pouring calm into my voice like honeyed bourbon, my fingers brushing her shoulder with feather-light precision. The neural pathways in her amygdala smoothed under my touch before she even registered the contact. “Breathe with me. In… and out. That’s it.”

The Speaker’s pulse stuttered against my fingertips—rabbit-quick, shallow—as I let the telepathic reassurance seep into her mind like warm ink. *”Not a coup”*, I said out loud for the camera and it whispered along her synapses. *”Not tyranny. Just the opposite”* Her pupils dilated, the CNN camera catching the exact moment her fear crested and broke. Behind me, Superbabe shifted her weight, the scent of silk rolling off her cape as she thumbed through Holloway’s Bible to Ezekiel. A pointed choice.

“Madam Speaker,” I continued, letting my voice resonate with the kind of warmth that could thaw glaciers—or congressional gridlock, “we’re here to encourage a constitutional transition of power.” My hand lingered on her shoulder, not to intimidate, but to steady. The CNN camera’s red light blinked like a nervous heartbeat. “You kowtowed to a regime that built gas chambers. But I believe you can *un*kowtow. I believe you can work within the constitutional system and work for all of Americans not just one party. The Kryptonians will monitor to make sure of that.”

The Speaker’s breath hitched—not from fear now, but something sharper, brighter—as my words carved new neural pathways behind her widening eyes. I watched the exact moment the idea took root: synapses firing like dominoes tipping into revelation. Her manicured fingers trembled against the desk’s edge, but her voice emerged steady. “You’re proposing… oversight.”

“Not proposing,” I corrected, my voice dropping to a register that made the mahogany desk vibrate faintly. The CNN camera’s plastic casing creaked under the subsonic ripple. “Demanding.” My cape flared without wind, casting a scarlet eclipse across the constitutional law textbooks lining the wall. “Oversight with teeth. No hatred or fear in governance. We demand inclusion of all marginalized groups and dignity for all humans within U.S. borders. What say you, Madame Speaker?”

The Speaker’s fingers twitched toward the gavel—not to wield it, but to anchor herself. Her throat worked silently before words emerged, polished but unsteady. “If I… accept this arrangement, what guarantees do I have that you Kryptonians don’t”—her gaze flicked to the CNN camera—“become the very tyrants you claim to oppose?”

The Speaker’s question cut through the tension like a scalpel—precise, clinical, exposing raw nerves beneath. I felt Superman ’s presence behind me, not just as backup but as counterbalance. His silence was deliberate. He knew this was my moment to answer. I let my cape settle against the Speaker’s desk like a bloodstain drying—deliberate, unavoidable. “Govern well,” I said, each syllable sharp as a shard, “and we won’t have to step in and be the tyrants you fear.”

The Speaker gulped and solemnly said, “I accept.”

The Chief Justice’s fingers trembled slightly against the Bible’s thin pages as the Speaker—no, the *President* now—repeated the oath, her voice steady where her hands weren’t. The CNN camera zoomed in tight enough to catch the way her knuckles whitened around the leather-bound text, the same way mine had around the edge of the confessional booth under an hour earlier. Behind me, Kara shifted her weight—her cape whispering against Superbabe’s boots—and I didn’t need X-ray vision to know she was biting her lip raw.

The President stood straighter as we turned to leave, her shoulders squaring under the weight of the office like she was testing its fit. I caught her reflection in the polished marble: a woman who’d just been handed the nuclear codes and a loaded gun in the same breath. My smile wasn’t performative when I paused at the door; I meant it. “We’ll check in,” I said, and the plural *we* did heavy lifting—Kryptonians, democracy, the ghosts of every internment camp survivor-past and present.

The marble floor muffled our footsteps as we exited—four gods in spandex leaving a mortal to rule. Kara’s cape brushed against a discarded protest sign (*KRYPTONIANS = TYRANTS*) crumpled near the door; she didn’t flinch when it crunched under her boot. Outside, the winter air smelled like gunpowder and frozen roses—some idiot had planted memorial flowers in the Capitol lawn in late winter. The wind carried the scent of burnt rubber and adrenaline as our capes snapped behind us—ten streaks of red against the bruised D.C. sky. Alura was the first to lift off, her boots leaving cracks in the marble steps that would fuel conspiracy theorists for decades. I hesitated just long enough to catch the new President’s pulse spiking behind bulletproof glass—her heartbeat thrumming like a trapped bird against my superhearing. Mic drop. The Kryptonians left the building.

Later that night, my husband and I retreated to our spacious master bedroom suite to relax. Superman’s cape pooled at the foot of our bed like spilled wine, his boots kicked off haphazardly near the ensuite bathroom where steam still curled from my earlier shower. I traced the golden S on his chest with my fingertips—the alien fabric warm from his skin, vibrating faintly with stored solar energy. “We should talk about today,” he murmured, catching my wrist when my touch lingered too long over his heartbeat.

Superman’s grip tightened around my wrist as my knees gave out—not from exhaustion, but from the weight of it all crashing down at once. The dam broke without warning, ugly and raw, my sobs muffled against the sculpted planes of his chest. “I executed two men today,” I choked out, fingers digging into the indestructible fabric of his suit like it could anchor me. “We had to act like the adults in the room. I—we—*restarted a government* like it was some friggin software update.”

Superman’s fingers threaded through my hair, grounding me as my tears left dark streaks on his suit. “They were going to kill unarmed sailors,” he murmured into my crown, lips brushing the ridge of my brow. “You heard the confessions. You heard the mini-guns click.”

His words should have comforted me. But the truth lodged in my throat like a kryptonite shard—because I didn’t just smell the poison. I’d tasted the president’s terror when my heat vision severed his spine, felt the exact moment his synapses short-circuited into nothingness. My eidetic memory replayed it in Dolby Vision.

The weight of his words settled into my bones like sunlight after a storm. Superman’s cupped my face with impossible gentleness. His thumbs brushed away tears. “You saved more lives today than you ended,” he whispered, and the certainty in his voice was a lifeline thrown across the abyss of my doubt.

I held him in my arms when surprisingly sleep came over me. A Kryptonian doesn’t sleep.

The void pressed against my skin like liquid obsidian, thick and infinite. I couldn’t blink—didn’t need to—but the absence of stars, of light, of *anything* prickled along my nerves despite my invulnerability. I couldn’t move. I could not talk. It was the same exact dream as when the Voice talked to me as Jensen over a month ago. Then the Voice came, vibrating through my bones before forming words: *”I am the goddess Innana.”*

The voice thundered through the void like a collapsing star, vibrating through my ribs until my teeth ached. *”You were meant to rule them, not plead with them!”* Shadows coagulated into a towering feminine silhouette—obsidian skin threaded with constellations, eyes burning supernova-white. Her hair writhes like solar flares. *”I gave you three times Superman’s strength so you could *break* their systems, not kneel before their podiums!”*

“I wanted to see if the power would go to your head. But then you acted and so prim and proper! ” the goddess sneered, her voice etching cracks in the void’s fabric. A constellation flared across her chest. *”First, my protégés He and She were too blood thirsty. Now you were too moral.”* Her laughter scorched my eardrums. *”It was a test. And you failed. Oh, and by the way. You’re pregnant. You nymphomaniac!”*

The words hit me like a comet to the gut. *Pregnant.* The void around us pulsed with sickly green light as Inanna’s smirk widened, her celestial hair coiling around my throat—not choking, just *possessing.* “Your little *heat vision tantrum* at hole 13?” She tapped my forehead with a finger that burned cold. “That was 70% progesterone talking. Congrats, by the way. Kryptonian-Human hybrid. Only takes one time when you’re ovulating—just ask Lara.”

Before I could process that Lara and I were pregnant, Inanna flicked her wrist—a motion like tearing parchment. The void rushed in “You’re not worthy of this reality or your gifts,” she hissed, her voice carving fissures in the space-time continuum itself.

The ejaculate cooled against my thighs as my lungs remembered how to inhale—real, ragged gulps of air that tasted like cheap laundry detergent and the ghost of microwave popcorn. My fingers scrambled over my own body—*my male body*—the familiar paunch, the coarse chest hair, the stubble rasping against my palm when I clutched my face. The Wonder Woman bikini bottoms were twisted uncomfortably under my grey sweat shorts, the satin seam digging into my hipbone where the elastic had rolled during… whatever erotic hell that was.

The watch face gleamed mockingly—11:05 PM, February 17^th. My pulse throbbed in my temples as I swung my legs off the bed, the Wonder Woman fabric still wedged uncomfortably against my hip. The carpet fibers prickled against my bare feet, too real, too textured compared to the dreamlike sheen of Kryptonian senses. Or had that been the dream? My hands trembled as I flicked on the bathroom light.

The bathroom lights buzzed like an angry wasp trapped behind frosted glass. I gripped the vanity’s edge, knuckles whitening, as if the reality bleeding through my fingertips might dissolve again. The mirror showed no trace of the godlike warrior I’d been moments ago—just a middle-aged academic with an average build and sandy-blonde, grey-templed hair, his hazel eyes blown wide with panic. A fleck of dried toothpaste crusted at the corner of my mouth. The mundane horror of it nearly buckled my knees.

I am indeed Jensen Jenkins, the former Superwoman, again!