Chapter Text
“Your pretty skin will soon be brittle scales and hellfire!” The old priestess grinned. “When the others awake, and unite, beneath the standard of Reign.”
“The others?” Supergirl shifted, her brow creasing. This one threat had been bad enough, had stretched the DEO far enough. “What do you mean, others?”
“Worldkillers.” The priestess lifted her hands in prayer, as any other Kryptonian would offer a prayer to Rao. “The Power. The Pestilence. The Purity.”
Supergirl reels. She’d barely survived Reign on her own. She’s about to respond, to say something so that she’s not just standing there, when she hears footsteps.
She turns, and she sees the worst thing she could. A woman in a suit that’s a mockery of her own. Black, where hers is blue. Some twisted skull on her chest, in place of her house’s insignia. A spiked black mask covers the upper half of her face, closed off where Supergirl is open.
“Priestess.” Reign strolls towards them.
“My child, you’ve come!” The crone steps past Supergirl, who’s attention has been consumed by the new arrival. “At last, the time is upon us. Deliver me from this prison, and we shall bring anguish upon our enemies!”
She turns back to Supergirl. The smirk on her face lasts only a moment, before her chest glows with the heat of a Kryptonian’s heat vision. Her hands pull to her chest, and she collapses.
Reign’s eyes keep their glow as she watches the priestess fall. She turns to Supergirl, and she doesn’t need to do anything else to convey just how screwed she is.
“You have your powers here? How?”
“My powers aren’t dependent on something as trivial as a sun.” Her voice echoes, like there’s three of her staring down her prey.
Supergirl didn’t have a drop of her own powers. She’d come to this place because she had to, because there was no other choice, but she’d been split from the allies she’d brought to keep her safe.
“You’re different without your powers.” Reign strolled towards her, her boots clicking against the metal flooring. “Like a child, helpless and afraid.”
“I’m not afraid of you.” She stood tall, and strong, and she didn’t need powers to feel like she could change the world. “Even though we’re enemies, there’s still something that binds us.”
“Save your speech, Super-”
“No, you have to hear me. There is something in you that sees what you’re doing is wrong, that sees the pain you’re causing and regrets it.” She steps forward, and she hopes that the Worldkiller is listening. “You don’t have to be my enemy.”
Reign stands frozen, her head tilted as she listens.
“You want justice in the world, so do I! But we’re not gonna find it by attacking each other.”
“Oh?” The Worldkiller strides forward again, and her voice drops to a whisper. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Supergirl stares her down, even as her eyes start to glow.
“Hey.” A voice shouts behind Reign, and Kara manages to hide her sigh of relief. “Turn around, Dingy Supergirl.”
Reign rounds on the newcomer. She looks harmless enough, just another human, wearing plain human clothes, but her smirk reeks of confidence.
“What’s going on underneath that dark, dark shell of yours?”
The newcomer twists her head, and some kind of distortion is thrown across the room.
Reign stumbles as the blast hits her. She groans, and hunches. Her hands cover her ears and she screams.
Supergirl’s been on the receiving end of that power, knows how it feels to have her worst fears play out in her mind.
“Where- where am I?” Reign’s voice has lost its echo, and it wavers, barely more than a whisper. She twists her hand, looking at the black sleeve that loops over it. “Where am I?!”
Supergirl steps towards the villain, that damn compassion and hope that’s inside her never shutting off. Not even after she watched two people die by Reign’s hand.
“What’s happening?” She looks at Supergirl, and her eyes have changed. They’ve lost their glow, and all she can think is that she looks terrified.
“You’re-” She stops, unsure how to explain this. How to explain to this woman that she’s a supervillain, that she’s on an alien space station lightyears from home.
“K- Kara?”
Wait. She’s in her costume, and only a handful of people know her real name. And not one of them could be the person in front of her. “Reign? How-”
“Ka- Supergirl?”
This person who’s not quite Reign holds her gaze for a moment, before her eyes harden. Her upper lip twitches, and then she leaps from the ground.
She’s gone before Supergirl has a chance to react.
“It was really fun hanging out with you today.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Alex smiles at her newest friend. Ruby may be a kid, but she seemed more switched on than she’d expect for her age. “I don’t know how I would have handled everything without you here.”
Her breakup, she meant. And her broken leg. But especially the heartache of seeing her ex-fiance's things scattered around the apartment.
“I mean, normally I’d lean on my sister. But, she’s out of town.” On a mission. Heading off into space with people she barely trusted.
“Well, I can fill in for her any time, Aunt Alex.” The girl grins up at her, and her heart melts. “Can I call you Aunt Alex? I feel like I should have asked-”
“You can,” Alex laughed. “As long as your mum’s okay with it.”
Right on time, there’s knocking on the door.
“That’ll be her.” Ruby springs to her feet and runs to open the door.
“Hey there!” Sam steps into the room, laughing as Ruby pulls her into a hug. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” she mutters into Sam’s coat.
Sam meets Alex’s gaze, in no hurry to break the hug. “How’d it go?”
“Total disaster. I mean, what a nightmare of a kid you’ve raised.”
“Oh, I know. She’s rough, right?” She smiles down at her daughter. “Hey, I’ll meet you in the elevator?”
Ruby nods, and gives Alex a hug on the way out.
“So, how did it go? How was your trip?”
Sam double takes, lost for words.
“Your work trip.” Alex gives a small chuckle in the silence. “Wow, it must have been really bad if you’ve already blocked it out. It’s okay.”
“I said I had a work trip?”
“Yeah.” Alex nods, but she’s waiting for something to click. For Sam to be joking or to clear something up.
“No, I did. I did. I know I did.” She starts to rummage through her bag. “I know I said that, but I didn’t go anywhere.”
She finds her phone, and she starts to scroll through it.
“Oh, my god. Lena called.” She’s staring at the phone, and her hand starts to shake. “I can’t- sixteen calls. How did I miss this?”
“Are you okay?” Alex tries to be gentle, to not make her friend any more scared than she already is.
“They had a car for me, I never got in the car. I never got on a plane.” She looks up to Alex, and she looks just as confused as Alex is feeling. “How?”
Alex tries to find words, but she has no idea where to start.
“No, no. Ruby said it the other day.”
“What did she-”
“That I was gone. I told her that I was going somewhere, but I didn’t!”
“Sam, just take a deep-”
“No, I don’t know where I’ve been!” She meets Alex’s gaze, and her voice drops to a whisper. “Alex. I think something’s wrong with me.”
“Alex?” Kara stood outside her door, fidgeting with her glasses. “Can I talk to you?”
“Yeah, come in.” She opened the door fully and waved her sister in. She could do with a distraction from whatever had just happened. “Sam and Ruby just left. What’s up?”
“I know I promised J’onn that I wouldn’t bother you with DEO stuff-”
“No, screw that.” She grabbed a bag of popcorn and shuffled to the couch. “You are sitting yourself right down and telling me what’s going on.”
“It’s Reign.” She threw herself down, and Alex suppressed a grimace as the couch slid half a foot. “She came to Fort Rozz and-” She trailed off, staring at the coffee table like it had the answers she needed.
“Come here.” Alex can see the way her sister is hurting, even through the shield she puts up. Too stubborn to take anyone down with her. She pulls her into a hug. “Come on, Kara. Deep breaths.”
Kara shudders, and she only squeezes Alex a little too tight for a human. Hopefully she won’t have a cracked rib to go with her broken foot.
“I wish I could have been there. Could have backed you up-”
“No, Alex.” Kara mumbles into her shoulder. “She would have killed you too. But she…”
“It’s okay.” She pats her back, like she did after Kara had nightmares as a kid. “I’ve got you.”
“It’s not okay!” She sits up, and her eyes are wide. “One of the prisoners we recruited, Psi, used her powers on Reign. And it snapped her out of something. She was scared, and confused, and she recognised me.”
“Psi? The bank robber?” Alex shakes her head. “Look, I know how being hit by that power is, but don’t forget what Reign did to you. She nearly killed you, you can’t just look at how she-”
“It wasn’t like that! Not like when I got trapped in my head. It’s like she was a completely different person. She-” Kara turned from her, and her voice fell flat. “She called out to me.”
“And then what? She left? Even if this other her tried to call out to Supergirl for help, it doesn’t change what you have to do.”
“She didn’t. She didn’t just recognise Supergirl.” Kara pressed her fingers into her temples. “She called out to Kara.”
“That’s-” She realised she’d mirrored her pose, and forced herself to bring her hands back down. “That’s bad. This is really, really-”
“I know!” She sat back, and the couch creaked in the way that it did when Kara tried too hard not to float. “And not even ‘Miss Danvers’, or ‘Kara Danvers’, or-”
“Kara!” Alex caught her sister’s wince. Perhaps her name wasn’t the most reassuring thing to hear right now. “Look, we’ll figure it out. We’ll go to the DEO, and Winn and J’onn and everyone else will help figure this out. And you’ll have me, and Lena-”
“Lena!” Kara’s eyes widened. “What if Lena is Reign? She’s my best friend and I-”
“Lena? Seriously?” At least this was one she could rule out. “Her brother is Lex Luthor. No one on this planet hates Kryponians more than him. Don’t you think he would have noticed?”
Kara was doing that puppy dog eyes thing she always did when she thought about Lena, and just this one time Alex wouldn’t judge her for it.
“You know, if she knew you were Supergirl we could ask her for help.”
“Oh, no. No. I am not ready for that conversation.”
They sat in stunned silence, before Kara met her eyes.
“What if- what if it is Lena? Or someone else I care about? What would the DEO do to them?”
Alex could only guess, but it wouldn’t be good. “The usual approach would be to lock Reign up. Put her in a cell she’ll never escape from. But if you have proof they’re doing this against their will, that there’s something else going on, they might listen.”
“Might?” Kara shook her head. “The DEO is not using my friendship with someone to find them and lock them up with a chance that they might help.”
“So what? You want to hide this from them? For me to hide this from them?”
“There’s someone beneath that costume.” Kara’s face scrunched up in the way that meant she’d made up her mind. “If I can reach out to them, I can talk them down.”
“There it is, there’s my sister.” Alex grinned as her sister threw a pillow at her. “You’ve got enough hope for the entire galaxy.”
Sam Arias ignored the glances of confused workers as she slunk through the open floor of CatCo Media. She was an acting CEO, not a kid being called to the principal's office, and so what if she had to keep reminding herself that?
“Hey.” She crept through the doors of Lena Luthor’s office. Her boss, the one whose business she’d abandoned for reasons she couldn’t remember, and her friend. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, thanks to James.” Lena gave a smile to the man by her desk, and Sam wished that she could have been in his shoes. The one who’d stood beside Lena, rather than been missing while a gunman had tried to kill her friend.
“Do you know why he tried to kill you?”
“Morgan Edge hired him.”
“Edge, again?” The man who’d styled himself as Lena’s rival, who’d always kept a scapegoat between them. “Do you have proof?”
“Circumstantial,” Lena admitted, and spun her laptop around. “The shooter used to work for the National City Tech Conference. Morgan Edge hosts it every year.”
Sam leant down, staring at the image of the man who was trying to kill her friend. That smug, arrogant bastard. “He shouldn’t be alive,” she muttered.
Lena’s brows moved, just the smallest amount, but it spoke volumes to someone who knew her as well as Sam.
“Uhh, you guys want to see this.” James gestured to the wall of TV. A report on the murders of some thugs, the reporter warning that it was about to be graphic.
Lena turned to the screens, but Sam couldn’t tear her eyes away from that portrait of Morgan Edge. That man had caused Lena enough pain.
“Hello?”
Morgan Edge grinned as he heard the confusion of his most hated rival.
“Lena! I heard you were attacked by someone who tried to make it look like that alien thing.” Many would call this rash, but what good was trying to kill someone if you didn’t have fun along the way? “That’s awful. Awful!” He was about to stop, when he caught the glimpse of the tree his PR manager had stuck in his office. “I mean, it’s Christmas!”
“Morgan, you are a vile, despicable scrooge.” Her voice wavered, and he was happy to call that a win. Maybe she’d threaten to kill him again, which was always good for a buzz. “You’re going to die alone, and in prison.”
“In prison?” He suppressed a laugh, just barely. “Well, gotta go. They need me to start the Christmas party.”
He was about to tell his assistant to grab another bottle, when all of the lights shut off.
People screamed, and red flashes lit up the frosted glass of his office. The same kind of laser he’d tried to kill Lena with. He was stumbling towards his panic room when glass shattered behind him.
He turned to face the figure behind him. Little more than a black silhouette with a cloak, some dark version of Supergirl. Though Supergirl never wore a literal mask.
“Ohh, I know you.” He gave his best grin, trying to slow his heart. He’d stared down Lena when she’d come to his office with a loaded gun, how different was this? “You’re the one who pulled that beat down on Supergirl. You could say I’m a fan of your work.”
“I doubt that.” The woman’s voice echoed, like there was a whole chorus staring him down. “This world has sunken into chaos and sin. Too many have eluded judgement.”
“Look, darling, I think you’ve got the wrong place.” He shook his head, laughing off the misunderstanding. “Starting with Supergirl was inspired, but you’ve gotta look at the people who had her back. CatCo media, Lena-”
“Silence!” The supervillain stalked towards him. “Your actions against Miss Luthor drew my attention, but she was wrong about one thing.”
“One thing is a start, but I think you’ll find the list goes a lot-”
“You won’t die in prison.”
Before he can process it, she grabs him by the neck. He can feel his arm snap as she drags him through a window, and his scream is drowned out by the rush of wind in his ears.
“No, don’t!” He can’t hear himself, but the Kryptonian’s smirk suggests that she can. “Whatever you want, I’ll-”
They jolt to a stop, and he screams as his arm bends in ways it shouldn’t.
“I want you to serve as an example.” She glances down, and he realises they’re hundreds of feet from the ground. And right above CatCo.
“So what?” He grits his teeth. “You take down Lena’s guard dog, and now you’re gonna bring her gifts like a cat?”
The villain smirks at him, and he knows that he messed up his last chance.
“Thanks, for making time for me.”
“For you, always.” Lena smiles, and Kara can’t help the way her heart flutters. She glances towards the closed doors of her office, and she raises an eyebrow. “You said you needed to tell me something.”
Kara nods, and she steels herself. She can do this. Maybe it’s not too late, and Lena won’t hate her like she constantly worries she will. She reaches up to her glasses, and-
Something smashes into the balcony outside Lena’s office.
Kara’s immediately looking for a way to duck out, to flee and return as Supergirl so that she can protect her best friend.
“Stay behind me,” Lena orders, and grabs her hand. She’s holding a pistol that she must have grabbed from her desk, and she edges toward the balcony.
Sprawled, indented into the tiles, is Morgan Edge. His body is twisted, and his chest is blackened and burnt.
“Miss Luthor!” Reign descends from the sky and steps toward her. “This man’s wrongs against you have been judged.”
“Stay back,” Lena warns, and she starts to bring up her weapon.
“Lena!” Kara hisses in her ear and grabs her arm. “She’s Kryptonian, it won’t-”
“Kara Danvers is right, Miss Luthor.” Reign looks at the gun, frowning. “And there’s no need for your weapon. Edge brought this on himself.”
Kara’s heart skipped a beat. Reign recognised her, knew her name. Did she remember what had happened on Fort Rozz? Did she know that she was Supergirl?
“You think that you get to decide that?” Lena scoffed. “This was a matter for the justice system.”
“The justice system couldn’t stop this man’s crimes, so I did.” She glances at the crowd that’s watching through the office windows. “Miss Danvers. There’s a man with a camera outside this office. Bring the camera in.”
“She has nothing to do with this!” Lena strides toward Reign. “And we are not your messengers.”
“Yes, you are.” The Kryptonian smirks, and points to the door. “The camera, Miss Danvers. And don’t even think of calling Supergirl.”
She’s staring wide eyed at the villain, until Lena gives her a small nod. She heads to the door, and the entire way she’s trying to find an excuse to slip out.
By the time she opens the door, the crowd has scattered. The camera is sitting there, as though whoever had it knew they’d be incurring Reign’s wrath. Or perhaps they just wanted to run faster.
She pulls it onto her shoulder, and steps carefully into the room. “I don’t actually know how to use-”
“You’re a smart woman, Miss Danvers. Turn it on me.”
Lena nods, and Kara does what she’s told.
“This man was a murderer, condemned by his own actions.”
The camera tips down, and the corpse can be seen. Many viewers won’t recognise him, but it doesn’t take long for the word to get out. Morgan Edge is dead.
“You’ve allowed sin to take root, and fester like a weed. And worst of all, you have looked away.”
The Kryptonian turns to the audience, as though she’s looking into the eyes of countless people across the city.
“Apathy is the greatest sin of all. From now on it will be punished in kind.”
Footage has been spliced in, the woman in black exchanging blows with Supergirl, blurry security footage of her slaughtering people at the docks.
“There will be no more mercy. There will only be justice.”
The woman pauses, then offers something like a smile.
“I’m here to help.”
The video surpasses a million views within minutes.