Chapter 12: Redemption

The night everything came to a head was not planned in advance. Just a set of circumstances that finally aligned themselves in the right way.

Ursa's boobs had ached all day long. Terrell had no qualms about extracting every last precious drop from them, even after she'd told him several times that pumping out that final bit really hurt her.

"Do you have to take every last drop?" she'd plaintively wailed.

"If you'd quit trying to hunt down and destroy it all I wouldn't need so much," he nastily snapped back at her.

Stalemate.

That ache matched the dull ache in her heart now that she knew he was also cheating on her daily.

The smell of another woman couldn't escape her super nose, no matter how strong the soap he used afterwards was. Despite Terrell's many fine words, he never did have any intention of changing anything at all about himself.

Terrell was in a foul mood as well. His latest bitch wasn't following his instructions. And when he'd slapped her to get her back in line, her sister heard about it and had called the cops on him. With Ursa refusing to do anything more than the minimum right now for him each night, he couldn't count on her to bail him out of trouble, and too much heat was always a bad thing.

When Ursa didn't come to him fast enough to suit him he called her "Just another bitch," and slapped her for the first time as well.

While that slap didn't physically hurt her any more than it ever would have, Ursa's suffering heart finally exploded.

"THAT'S IT!" she shouted at him. "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU DO TO ME ANYMORE. WE NEVER HAD ANYTHING REAL HERE, AND I KNOW I'M WORTH MORE THAN THAT!"

With that, Ursa flew out the open door and across her balcony to stand on empty air thirty feet beyond it. And she refused to even acknowledge Terrell's existence.

Terrell coaxed, whined, pleaded, threatened, ranted, and screamed, all to no avail.

Finally, charged up on a dose of her milk that Ursa hadn't found that day, Terrell stormed out and launched himself across the intervening space at her.

It was at that point the Terrell realized that, despite what her alien milk may have given him, it had never included the ability to fly. Nor to be invulnerable himself to massive injury, even while it could heal him quickly from any lesser harm.

The long fall to the ground below seemed endless. But in truth it only lasted long enough for Ursa to realize that this had been a mistake that she would never make again.

Epilogue

Hard lessons learned, Ursa flew off and confessed her mistakes to Kal-El. He assured her that any DVDs that made their way to Ms. Lane would quietly disappear before Lois ever saw them. And it wasn't like he'd never made a mistake in his life either.

Then Ursa set out again into the night to locate a partner to relieve her crushing loneliness. This time, however, she had a far better idea of her needs from any new partner — and a far better opinion of herself to help her find the right one.