You wake to the sterile, humming silence of a government lab, the taste of cryo-fluid still sharp on your tongue. Your last memory is of cold, of darkness, of defeat at the hands of the blue boy scout. Then, a face swims into focus, banishing the fog. Lois Lane. Her dark hair frames a face etched with a tension you’ve never seen before, a forced calm that doesn’t reach her purple eyes.

“Easy,” she says, her voice softer than the hard-nosed reporter’s tone you’re used to. “It’s over. You’re free.”

You try to move, to snarl, to summon a weapon from the ether, but your limbs feel like your own. There’s no alien compulsion, no psychic leash. Just the raw, unfiltered agency you haven’t known in years. And her. She explains it all, standing just out of arm’s reach. Brainiac. Control. Her father, General Sam Lane, and an offer. A job. Your skills, your unique hatred, directed at a singular target: Superman.

“You have a choice,” Lois says, and the words feel like a trap. But her gaze holds yours, and in it, you see something that makes your cold, villainous heart stutter—a flicker of the old, fierce Lois, buried under layers of someone else’s programming. She’s using you, you know it. Using the pathetic, persistent crush you’ve nursed for her across battles and headlines. And the worst part? It’s working. Because for her, even a version of her forced to ask, you would consider anything.

You take the job. For her.

The desert is a vast, burning crucible. The transport hums beneath you, carrying the payload: Kryptonite bombs, designed not just to wound, but to saturate the very atmosphere, to make Earth a tomb of green death for the Last Son of Krypton. Lois’s voice crackles over the comms, strained, a note of genuine warning breaking through the Brainiac-imposed calm.

“He’s coming. Steel. He knows. He’s going to try to stop you.”

A grim smile touches your lips. Let him try. You’re not doing this for the General, or for petty revenge. You’re doing it for the woman who looked at you—you, a recurring nightmare in her husband’s life—and saw a person who could choose. You owe her this victory. You will carve it from the sky itself.

You breach the launch coordinates. The console lights up, a symphony of impending doom. In the distance, a silver figure streaks toward you, sunlight glinting off his armored form. Steel. The righteous fury of the Superman family. You feel no fear, only a cold, determined clarity. Your fingers dance over the controls, initiating the sequence. The desert air shimmers with the rising heat of activation.

For Lois, you think, as the first silo groans open. For the chance she pretended to give you. The cost will be dire. It will make you the greatest monster in human history. It will burn every bridge, every shred of potential redemption. But as the countdown hits zero and the first missile screams into the azure sky, painting it with an emerald trail, you feel a strange peace. You finally did something for her. And in your twisted heart, that feels like a kind of love.