Archive of Our Own

This is the story she tells the world:

Her name is Kara Zor-El.

Nine-and-ten solar cycles old.

Cousin of Kal-El, daughter of Krypton.

Four-and-ten solar cycles had she seen pass when her homeworld of Krypton perished. With the mission of watching over baby Kal-El, she was sent to the planet Earth, but her escape pod was thrown off-course and marooned in the dimensional void known as the Phantom Zone.

When she finally arrived on Earth, it was to find her cousin a grown man. Superman, he’d dubbed himself. The saviour of this planet.

To the world, she is Supergirl. She used to be Kara Danvers, and before that Linda Lang: now, she goes by whatever name people choose for her, whatever name’s prettiest and gets her drinks for cheapest. She’s supposed to be a hero. She’s supposed to look after her adoptive family. She’s supposed to work a day job, barista at the Big Belly Burger, but the manager’s a doddering old lady who still mails her paychecks even though she hasn’t shown up since the first week, two or was it two and a half Earth solar cycles ago.

Not that she has any use for the money. No matter how long Kal likes to lecture her, and oh, does Kal love the sound of his own voice.

In every language Kal twists around in circles. Coiled conundrums and logical loops. He wrings his hands about all those human customs and ways of life and the need for the two of them to fit in, the need to be like the people of this planet. Morals and piety and daily good deeds. One step after another.

It’s easy for him. He never knew any different. He’s on the side of the humans, pathetically so, and if he’s happy then she has no right to stand in his way.

Let him dwell in this dream, she tells herself. Let him roost like a cuckoo chick, tucked in the nest of the supposed angels. Tricking himself into believing he is one of them.

She never stays on Earth for long, anyways.

Kara remembered little when she arrived on Earth. Retrograde amnesia, a common side effect from prolonged stays in the Phantom Zone. She still remembers little now, but more than Kal and the Danvers—the couple into whose arms Kal had practically shoved her into—suspect.

Enough to know that she should keep acting out this lie.

If she’s being honest to herself, Kara likes the Danvers somewhat. More than she liked her previous guardian, Lana Lang, at least, though by no means is this an indictment of Lana. It’s not even a good thing. Really, she hoped she would only tolerate them at best.

Kal had first tossed her to his work friend Lana like an orphaned Zuurt kid to a nursing ewe, and for a few days she’d taken on the moniker of the long-lost niece, Linda Lang. Then, out of wits, he’d referred to his adoptive parents for help, and Ma and Pa Kent, they’d dug up those old family friends called the Danvers from some place called “Midvale, Utah”.

The Danvers are suffocatingly kind. Like a noose of scented silk wrapped around her throat. She knows the sensation because she’s felt it before, found herself on either end of the rope. The Danvers have another daughter: Alex, five-and-ten, roughly the same age as Kara. Yet, whenever Kara lays eyes on her, she has the feeling that she’s observing a newborn child rather than an adolescent. Too innocent, too trusting, wariness tempered by that youthful glitter of curiosity. The mouse that has yet to fall into the trap, the hand that has not touched the flame.

It sickens her. Sufficiently so that she tells Kal she doesn’t want to stay with the Danvers either.

Cousin Kal is unbothered. We’ll find the right family eventually, he maintains. Have a little patience, and for now, stay with the Danvers. Worse case, you stay with them for only four solar cycles, if you think of it. Once you pass ten-and-eight on Earth, you get to frolic about on your own.

Were it up to Kara, she would be forgoing this whole charade of human gobbledygook altogether. Skip straight to the conclusion: leave her to her own devices. She knows how to care for herself. During Krypton's final days, children were separated from their birth mothers and fathers at the tender age of two-and-ten: to be sent to the Academies if they were rich and fortunate, the military camps if they were not.

On Krypton, there was no space for affection. Love was not a virtue but a burden, a weakness to be snipped out with prejudice. On this planet, at least in some places, the opposite appears to hold true.

Krypton is lost. Scattered into nothingness, into the infinite void between stars. But if you travelled to the ruins of that once-mighty planet and asked the belts of asteroids and the trails of glittering dust, the ashy bones of an empire lost to cosmic time, this might be the story you find:

Her name is Kara Zor-El.

Daughter of disgraced nobles Alura In-Ze and Zor-El, traitors to Krypton.

At two-and-ten, in exchange for her life, she was sent to the frontlines as a soldier of her homeworld. The order, pronounced by her own aunt and uncle. Conquer worlds for the glory of Krypton, she was told, so that your life may find some value to your true family and your soul repentance for the subversive deeds of your forefathers.

Aunt Lara was holding her babe throughout that sham of a trial. Suckling at her breast, a tiny tuft of wispy hair and wrinkly skin poking out from the folds of his blanket. It crossed Kara’s mind that once upon a time, Lara, Jor, herself, her parents, they’d all been helpless little bundles of flesh and fat and bone who depended on their families for every moment of survival. Like any animal in Krypton, any predator and dangerous beast. Like all the denizens of the worlds Krypton had conquered, had wantonly slaughtered.

So she was taught by her parents. A small defiance against Kryptonian doctrine. Death by a thousand cuts.

“Is it not fitting?” Uncle Jor-El asked from the perch of his marble throne. “That your daughter fights in the very wars your failed coup aimed to stop?”

“Our fates will not change the fate of Krypton,” Father shot back. Still defiant, he and Mother, despite the Kryptonite shackles on their wrists, the blood running freely from a hundred abrasions over their tattered bodies. “Violence will soon finish its destined circle. Engulf this very planet in the flames with which we bathed this whole galaxy. Civil war, with Krypton’s annihilation as the only possible outcome. And I—I say we deserve to burn."

“You always liked to talk big, Brother.” A dismissive wave of Jor’s hand, and they’re hauled up from the floor, all three of them, by the royal guards. “Execute my brother and sister-in-law. Take the child away.”

The humans call it TRAPPIST-1e. Kara calls it the best mosh pit on this arm of the galaxy, shaka brah. Three times the mass of the Earth slung round and round an M-dwarf. One hundred kilometres of perpetual cumulonimbi, shrouding the planet’s surface in neverending storms. She comes here because the people of this planet are experts at partying on rainy days. It’s all they’ve ever known.

The booze on this planet is especially potent. Something something, underground greenhouses and high humidity and the chemical composition of the soil. She never did pay attention to her science classes, neither on Krypton nor on Earth. She’s more of a scholar of history.

Ah, the universal invariants between civilizations. War, alcohol, debauchery.

“Where do you come from, angel?”

Pretty, the girl Kara’s chosen for tonight. Or maybe it’s a boy. Or one of those unisex alien species. They’re broad and muscular with six big calloused palms, scaly skin dappled with silvers and indigos and soft azures like dusk under a blue sun. All four pupils are dilated like they could swallow her alive with vision alone. That’s enough for Kara.

“Rimbor.” The lie slides off Kara’s tongue like butter.

“The crime pit? That’s a really long way to go.”

The ethanol has settled in her bloodstream, dragging her body into that pleasant feverish haze. Flashing between woozy light and sultry darkness, the raucous chorus of shouts, the stench of sweat and tangy drugs, the delicious heat of pressed bodies. Pellets of rain drum their own machine-gun rhythm against the glass roof. There’s a song pounding in the background. In terms of Terran music it’s closest to 80s electropop, a medley between ABBA and ELO, except the instruments are playing in the wrong part of the auditory spectrum for human ears.

“Running around in a mask gets old after a while.” She throws back the bottle of shitty Thanagarian brandy, lets the last drops of Hawkgirl’s birthday gift dribble down her gullet. “Gotta—gotta get away, once every few cycles, find some place to cool down.”

“I believe you.”

They pry the bottle from her shaky grip, slot it to the side. Wrap one pair of hands around her wrists. Lean close to her ear, roll their tongue in a seductive purr.

“I won’t lie. I wouldn’t mind a tour in whatever spaceship you arrived here in.”

Up, the edge of her lip goes. Kara never smiles for them fully. Only halfway.

“Everyone asks the same.”

A kiss is pressed to the hollow of her throat.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

She never gives the answer outright.

“Show me first.”

Meaningless, each of her couplings end up being. Any fathomable place and position—on a fluffy bed, in a chair, against the floor or a wall, sunbaked stones or fields of scratchy grass, floating far above in the sky—she doesn’t care about any of it. Seldom are they strong enough to make her feel any different. Even with the red sun, infrared frequencies weakening her body from a goddess’ form to a demigod’s, nothing ever suffices. She was a soldier, and her body is a weapon. Her body is meant to slaughter, to destroy. Beyond that, what purpose could she ever have?

At least her cousin has his delusions of protectorhood to find comfort in. Kara was robbed of that fantasy before it could even emerge.

At six-and-ten, Kara remembers Krypto.

She’s in English class, some discussion on a book from some bygone human age, and she stands up and asks to be excused to the washroom. Walks out of the classroom and out the front door, leaps away in a blur.

As expected, Kal’s at the Daily Planet. Just starting as an assistant photographer, but from the rate at which he’s collecting money shots of Superman—cough, cough, himself—he’s bound to find a permanent position within the next few months.

“Kal.”

By the way he jumps, adorably nervous, how he feigns fumbling with his cup of coffee like he’s just another run-of-the-mill employee, she almost believes the facade. She can see why no one would ever suspect him of being Superman. Far too trusting, all these weak and delicate humans.

It would almost be worth the trouble of outing him in front of his colleagues. Not today, though. Today, she needs her uniform.

“K-Kara?”

“Where’s my uniform, Kal.”

“It’s—um—”

“Did she just call you Kal, Clark?”

An eagle-eyed woman paces, briskly, from her desk, her checkered skirt swaying around her knees, and she looks Kara once over. She reminds Kara of her drill sergeant back on Krypton, another figure she’s recently recalled: grey-haired, straight like a taut cable, singular eye latching onto every detail and connecting all the dots like a Brainiac on overdrive.

“Oh, hey Lois—”

“Morning, Clark. I just asked you a question about this friend of yours who’s managed to stumble into our office.”

Kal actually succeeds in toppling a stack of papers from his desk, this time. His ears are flushed cherry-red as he stoops down to pick it all up.

“Um, erm, it’s a nickname she’s had for me since we—we were kids!”

Lois, or whatever the woman’s called, raises an eyebrow.

“And she is?”

“Cousin!” Finally picking up the last sheet of something utterly trivial and ridiculous, Kal swivels around to address the immediate vicinity of bemused coworkers. “Hello everyone, this is my cousin Kara. I’m sure she’s pleased to meet you all. She’s, um—in high school and she’s come over to visit in Metropolis and I may have mixed up our loads in the laundry machine and lost track of where her school uniform is—”

“I don’t have all fucking day, Kal.”

“Ooh,” some sleek-haired jackass at the desk labelled ‘Jimmy Olsen’ hoots, “looks like Clark’s baby cousin’s got a potty mouth!”

“Shut your own runny mouth, you overgelled douche.”

“Ah, I’m offended!”

“—but she thinks it may have gotten accidentally thrown into my duffel bag along with my gym clothes,” Kal huffs in a single uninterrupted breath, “so would you please excuse me while I go to the lockers with Kara and check if it’s there?”

The last words are uttered in a mumbled garble that’s cut off as he all but drags her down the hall, down the elevators to the main floor of the building and to some janitor’s exit which Kara is almost certain he uses for his heroic escapades from work.

“How did you even get here—you know what, I don’t even want to know.” Textbook-like, the Kryptonian tumbles from Kal’s mouth. Formal, stilted, not a trace of any of the ten dialects it had once existed as. “What can I help you with, Kara?”

“I told you, I need my uniform.”

“This isn’t funny.” Kal sighs, whisking his glasses off his face. “You can’t just barge into my office while I’m working. We agreed on this: if there’s an emergency that requires superpowers, you don’t get yourself involved, you call me—”

“This is something I have to do myself, Kal.”

“And why on Earth would you need a high-tech Kryptonian spacesuit for—”

“I had a dog.”

Kal-El, the absolute peak of Kryptonian biology, with the strength to crack planets and speed across entire galaxies on a casual marathon, he blinks stupidly for a good ten seconds as he digests her words. Kara counts the time.

“Sorry, what?”

“I remembered I had a dog, you corn-faced dumbass, and I might still have the dog. He could be alive somewhere. This is my mission. I have to go search for him. I have to know for sure.”

Her cousin heaves a long-winded exhale.

“Then I’ll go look. I’ll ask Perry White later for a few days of sick leave—”

“Which part of ‘my dog’, ‘my uniform’, and ‘my mission’ did you miss?”

“I can afford to take some time off work,” her cousin fires back. “You, on the other hand, should be staying in class—”

“Like I’ll learn anything in these stupid Earth schools.”

“We’ve been over this, Kara. Us and the Danvers. It’s not just about education, it’s about blending in, learning how Earth’s society works—”

“I’m not one of those human hatchlings, Kal!”

She kicks at the dumpster, what was meant to be a symbolic tap of her foot, but her strength sends it careening into the far wall. 

“I’ll never become one of them. I’ll never become like you. No matter how hard you try.”

“I—I don’t want you to be human, Kara. Or a hero like me. I just want you to live a normal, peaceful life.”

“If that’s your goal, you’re delusional.”

“I try to remain hopeful.”

Kara doesn’t know if it’s that foolishly beautiful tone from his throat, or the maddening dullness of the last two solar cycles of life, or if something is fundamentally wrong inside of her, something broken that breaks a little further in this instant. Maybe it’s a combination of all those factors that drives her next reckless sentence:

“I’ll promise you, right now, that you won’t get anywhere. Because Krypton made sure of it.”

She regrets the words the moment they slip carelessly from her mouth; the moment Kal’s face shifts from his infuriatingly mild vexation to an almost childish blend of fragility and confusion.

“What do you mean by that, Kara?”

This would be an ideal moment to fly into the sun, were there any chance she wouldn’t get hauled back by the ankles the moment she initiates the stunt.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s clearly not nothing,” Kal seizes. “Ever since your memories started coming back, ever since—since that trip to the Fortress, you’ve been acting differently.”

“Maybe it’s the ‘adolescent hormones’?” She wags her fingers in air quotes, her voice cracking up a semitone at the same time.

“Kara, you couldn’t bring yourself to watch that holo of my parents. You’re remembering more things about Krypton, and you aren’t telling me any of it. You don’t tell me anything, Kara. This is my people as much as it’s yours.”

“What are you getting at, Kal?”

“I want to give you space, but—just know that if you need anyone to lend you an ear on those matters, I’ll always be here—”

“Will you give me my uniform,” she snaps, “or will I have to go back up to your office and announce to everyone who Clark Kent is behind his hypno-glasses?”

He lets out a resigned little exhale. Like air leaking from a balloon, a baby mongoose trying out his first breath. In other circumstances, she might find this adorable.

“If you get grounded, don’t say I didn’t try to stop you.”

Kara first meets Krypto on Dheron.

The Dheronians, just like the people of Krypton, draw energy directly from the light of stars—white dwarfs, in their case. They’re peaceful, yes, but they can fly through space, they have strength sufficient to shake planets, and their technology is on par with Krypton’s.

In Krypton’s eyes, it’s reason enough to declare war.

So, at three-and-ten, Kara Zor-El is sent to the battlefield. So it happens that her commanding officer, General Zod, is actually a Dheronian mole, and sells out the entire Kryptonian expeditionary corps to their planet’s newest foe.

The whole invading force was meant to die in that initial ambush. By some miracle Kara survives. Not for long, though. Slumped in a crater of her own making on one of Dheron’s many moons, folded up in a ball with her hands tucked around the gash in her stomach. A Dheronian soldier gutted her open with a Kryptonite spear. Blood, thick and oily and gouache-red, seeps through the gaps of her fingers. Draining out of her body, the warmth is, dripping into the coarse lunar sand.

Dheron’s sun is an orb of icy flame flaring in the heavens. The sky is black and white, bleached of all its wondrous colours. She welcomes the cold. She welcomes the throbbing pain. Anything is better than the empty void inside her chest where her heart used to beat. Nothingness above all else. 

Warm, sloppy goop splashes against her cheek.

“Heh. I must be dreaming.”

Curiously, a hairy snout nuzzles her ear. Nips at the shell of cartilage, breathes a hot and musty gust of air like a musician blowing into a reed.

“Rao’s sent his little pet to collect me.”

With what little strength she has left, she tilts her head to the side. Beholds the smallest, scruffiest excuse of a canine she’s met in her now-admittedly short life.

“Hiya, little guy. Would you mind g-going back to the light? Give them a little warning. Tell my—” she coughs, a shiver wracking her body, flecks of red spraying from her mouth “—tell my parents I’m s-sorry—”

“Look, brother! There’s a little girl at the bottom of the crater!”

“It’s a Kryptonian, look at the insignia on her chest—”

“Who cares? She’s a kid, and she’s bleeding out! Kykō?”

The voice, the Dheronian woman or the local or whoever, she whistles and the dog by Kara’s head perks to attention.

“Listen to me carefully, Kykō! Grab her by the scruff of her uniform—” the dog bites her hair, a sharp rip that contrasts the fiery ache along her midsection “—no, that’s her scalp you dummy, her uniform, grab the cloth around her neck and make sure not to tear it—”

Incredibly, inch by inch, Kara feels her body dragged up the slope of the crater. A lance of electricity shoots through her insides: her head lolls sideways, she’s forced away from the glare of Dheron’s nascent star and down toward her feet, at the trail of red mingling into the sand. Like water seeping into flour.

“Shit, shit, she’s passing out—get Grandmother, Brother, and a stretcher, and as many clean wrappings as you can—”

She thinks she sees her mother before her vision goes dark. Her father too. She isn’t sure, because she doesn’t remember either parent ever wearing a bodysuit with a red cape and the family seal emblazoned on their chests.

Then again, it’s just a dream.

Kara doesn’t believe in gods.

She believed in them, once. Prayed for the deliverance of her parents, for her own deliverance from this life.

They didn’t answer. So she stopped asking.

Guy Gardner is one straightforward son of a bitch. Kara loves him for it.

“What do you know about Krypton?”

National City, at night and from on top of its skyscrapers, is a city of playing cards. Steel and concrete for the cardstock sheets, glass for the glossy coatings. The rippling shimmer of lights like fluorescent paint left to glow in the dark.

She can imagine herself destroying it all. Less than one minute, it would take. Her cousin would never make it in time.

“It’s located in an elliptical galaxy outside the Local Group,” the Lantern replies automatically. “Something like seven point two, point three megaparsecs from this dear ole’ planet. At least, from what you’ve told me, the ruins of it are.” He frowns, the only sign of empathy he allows himself to show. “Why the question?”

“Curiosity.” She gives an idle shrug, sips from her carton of AriZona iced tea. “I grew up on Krypton, and we never saw any Lanterns show up in our sector.”

“That’ll be because of the Phantom Zone. Distorted bubble of spacetime around the galaxy, literal radiation ocean filled with cosmic strings and dimensional wrinkles that tears apart anything that tries to pass into plasma goop. It’d be suicide for anyone to try to enter or exit.”

“Well, me and cousin dearest managed.”

“Exactly why I’ll maintain that you Kryptonians are the craziest bastards to ever roam this universe.

Reflexively, she chuckles. “That’s an understatement.”

They’re sitting on the rooftop of LordTech’s National City headquarters, and Guy Gardner’s smoking from a fat cigar, and for the first time in her life she’s decked in her full blue-and-red costume with a trenchcoat draped on top. She’s got a shopping bag in her lap, with a little red cape tailored for Krypto inside. A wise man on the television once told her to “every day, once a day, give yourself a present”. You can’t say she’s not trying her best to follow through.

The expedition for her dog went well. She found Krypto hunkered up in the ruins of one of Krypton’s old mining facilities in the outskirts of the planetary system. She’d left on a Friday and she returned on a Sunday. Threw some guilt-trip explanation of homesickness and nostalgia at the Danvers and they swallowed it up in mere seconds. They didn’t even blink at the fluffy white canine in her arms.

“You’re finally wearing the suit.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guess it means Supe’s taken the training wheels off your ankles.”

“Please, bitch. Like my cousin dearest could ever dream of controlling me.”

A sharp, piercing caw of laughter. “Who’d have thought the Boy Wonder would have such a spunky little brat as his niece?”

“Cousin, you dingus.”

He flicks his wrist in repudiation. “Still, it’s gotta mean something. This new getup. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of what you’ll do in the future.”

The carton of pop is empty: she tosses it over the edge. It’ll fall to the sidewalk. Not hit anyone, hopefully. Guy raises an eyebrow but says nothing of it.

“Meaning?” Lightly, she asks the question, though she knows exactly what Guy means to say.

“Are you planning to take on some moniker as a hero?” Another long, languorous drag of smoke. “Of course, you’re free to answer no. This is simple personal curiosity. Strictly off the record.”

Almost, she bursts into giggles, there and then. Instead, Kara turns her eyes to the sky. At the smattering of stars, winking in and out of existence, barely visible amidst the glare of artificial light. The Moon, slice of a soft crescent dangling over some distant mountain like the half-open portal to another world.

“The world’s already got Superman. What use could I be?”

“Many Dheronians believe that we are a splinter species from Krypton. That once upon a time, we were but one people, one world. Some ancient branch of the Kryptonian evolutionary tree, long detached and lost to the eddies of both planets’ histories.”

Grandmother turns out to be an ancient healer who likes talking in circles. Babbles out history lessons like she’s reciting spiritual mantras as she crushes herbs, mixes medicines, boils cloths and prepares poultices. She dwells in a tiny hut on the border of a lunar oasis, compacted mud for walls and straw for the roof. In the centre of the floor, Kara’s occupying a bedroll, woven from some kind of hollow-stemmed plant.

“Some went even further. Some said that life was born at the very moment of our universe’s creation itself.” The old woman shuffles over to Kara’s bedside, hands her a shallow bowl of soup. “Every living being, in every world, can find its common ancestor in the instant of cosmic genesis. In a sense, we’re all connected.”

“How about you?” Kara croaks. “Wh-what do you believe?”

“That it’s all a matter of perspective. Now, drink.”

The fluid is bitter, thick and cloying and sticky in her throat. Kara downs it without thinking twice. For some reason the woman doesn’t want her dead. She would have bled out in that crater were that the case. She wouldn’t be here, sipping hot soup, a thick layer of bandages wrapped around her waist.

A part of Kara can’t help but think she’s still on the brink of death. Stretching out her final moments with this dream.

“Of course, some questions are more tangible than others. Where is the distinction drawn between living and unliving? Is the boundary not continuous? I would even push this question: who is to say we are unique in the cosmos? By the law of large numbers, given a sufficiently large universe, there must exist some world out there containing a sentient species that is physiologically similar to the Dheronians.” To the window, the crone goes next, poking her head out the blinds. “Same for the Kryptonians. Impossibly far away, even for the might of both our species. I can only imagine what that world would look like.”

“Shared blood won’t stop them from killing us all off,” cuts in the Brother, from next to the door.

“No. It will not.”

The dog chooses this moment to make his presence known. Scurrying after some tiny blur of a rodent across the floor, it leaps into Kara’s lap. Pokes its head, left, right, then calms down and settles.

“He likes me,” Kara states dully.

“His name is Krypto,” the Sister jumps in. She’s seated next to the fire, peering into its flickering orange tongues. “ Kykō, in our ancestral tongue. While Krypton may have forgotten our common roots, we have not.”

Kara is reminded of a play they used to put on in the Great Amphitheatre of Argo. She forgets the title, but she recalls that there was a king who’d been going mad with power, and a trio of old shamans warning him—to no avail—of his terrible fate. Grandmother, Brother, and Sister might as well have been plucked directly from that production, costumes and mannerisms and all. Silver hair and flowing cream robes, plain yet tasteful, the polar opposite of Krypton’s standard sleek-black military garb. Cryptic words that make her head spin like a star thrown around a black hole.

“You must go,” Grandmother enunciates.

“But—but she’s not fully healed!” To Kara’s surprise, it’s Brother who reacts first. “Her injuries were severe, almost fatal, she must rest…”

“If she stays any longer, she will die like us.”

Sister swallows loudly.

“You, you saw the future again?”

“Only glimpses, mere flashes. Silt stirred from the riverbed by the currents of fate. But I saw enough.”

The crone turns back to Kara. Fixes her with blue eyes like newborn stars, crystalline and alight with sudden intensity. 

“Dheron is doomed. Despite our best efforts, our armies have been decimated. Krypton will not falter in its efforts to annihilate us. For when an empire has no more wars to fight abroad, it will turn upon itself. Burn to cinders from within.”

“That doesn’t have to be the end of your story,” Kara mutters. “You could run—”

“Fate is an ever-shifting construct. Perhaps I am wrong: it would not be the first time.” Clasped, her hands are, in rough and bony palms stained in all colours with age. “Regardless of the outcome, we will never abandon our land. But this is not your land, your world, your people, Kara Zor-El. It is, however, your choice.”

Kara sets the bowl down on the floor. Clears out her throat: feels flakes of dried blood crumble from her nasal cavity, flutter down her esophagus.

“What would you have me do?”

From his perch in her lap, Krypto gazes into her face. Tilt her head sideways. The dog follows. Ears curved in the shape of a silent question.

“Is that not the enigma?” Twitch of a wrinkled smile. “The answer is yours to find.”

“Did you know, Kara?”

Kal has chosen the slope of Olympus Mons, on Mars, to broach this conversation. Minus seventy degrees Celsius with snowflakes of frozen carbon dioxide drifting through the air. The booze in her messenger bag is frozen solid. Next to no oxygen, so she can’t light a cigarette either. Knowing her cousin, this is definitely deliberate.

She should have thrown back a drink before coming here.

“Know what?” Kara fires back, coyly.

“That my parents sent me here to invade and enslave this planet, rule over humans, that this was their idea of love—”

He punches the face of the dead volcano. A thunderclap, like the discharge of a thousand Kryptonian cannons, and somewhere on the other side there’s a landslide that will slough off half of Olympus’ landmass. The Martians will likely throw a hissy fit. She can’t bring herself to care.

Earth might be more interesting than Kara’s given it credit for. She leaves for a week, and humanity finds out the truth about Krypton before Kal himself. Almost crucified him for it, too. She thinks she should be feeling some empathy for her cousin, but she can’t, because that part of her that could feel soft emotions has long been excised from her system.

“Kara. What was Krypton really like?”

Enrolled in the Girl Scouts, at five-and-ten, she’d been sent off to something called a summer camp that was vaguely military in nature, the closest resemblance to Krypton she’d seen: but the similarities had ended when one of the girls had stumbled out of the forest screaming for help, and the counselors went out, then they called in the police, because a body had been found in a gulley amidst the trees.

Flicker, she saw it, over all those girls’ faces, and she sees it now on Kal’s. The piercing of beautiful illusions. The loss of youthful innocence.

She rummages deeper through her bag. Finds a popsicle she’d acquired at—where was it again? Some party or another, hundreds of light years away. If she doesn’t remember the name of the planet, it mustn’t have been important. Rave must have been shitty as hell. The popsicle, she would have snatched it from the snacks, for later, and it’s probably laced. Better than nothing.

Pop the packaging off, stuff it in her mouth. The chill barely registers on her taste buds.

“How much do you want to know?”

“Do you want to talk about your … parents?”

She’s five-and-ten, kneeling in a field pockmarked by odd grey stones. A cemetery, Jeremiah Danvers calls it. Where humans bury the deceased. A strange custom, she muses, though she doesn’t voice the thought aloud.

On Krypton, the dead were burned, the ashes flung into the red sun as fuel for Rao’s insatiable hunger.

“They’re dead.”

“I’m—sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. They passed a long time ago.”

They leave flowers by the grave marker. Hyacinths and white roses. Eliza Danvers, it says, beloved. She was confined to a wheelchair shortly after Kara came into the Danvers’ lives, diagnosed with a human illness called cancer. Passed away, some short months after. As the Danvers’ ward, Kara took on the responsibility of mourning by their side.

Fragile, transient, ephemeral. Human lives are as fleeting as the shifting swirls of nebulae.

“If you don’t mind me asking, how were they like?”

“I looked more like Mother, but in character I was more akin to Father.” English is a peculiar tongue, Kara finds, glottal and nasal, jagged corners and sharp bends. Particularly focused on the teeth. “Mother liked to take me to theatre productions. Historical dramas, mostly. Father was more of a wanderer. They … fought a lot. Aunt Astra's job was to find compromises between the two of them.”

It’s as much truth as she dares speak. Sparse to shield her from holes in her story, with enough details to delay more questions.

“Did they love you?”

She halts at the unexpected question.

“Well, they taught me almost everything I know, and I complied with their wishes. I was the child they wanted.”

The light of Rao reborn, they’d called her. Kara, Lady of Beauty and Grace, who chained and tempered Rao in the ancient scriptures and would do so again in this era. Herald of a new age, of peace and kindness and prosperity in their galaxy.

“And if you weren’t?”

Yes, she wants to answer. Even if she wasn’t the child they wanted, they would have loved her. Even though, now, she’s failed her one last mission, even though she can’t and likely never will follow through, she still wants to believe they would love her all the same. Are watching her at this very moment, from the bliss of Rao’s light, smiling from the other world.

“I suppose so,” she says.

The dog won’t leave her.

“Kykō, Krypto—whatever. You’ve got to stay here. Here.” She points at the borehole worming its way through the hollowed-out asteroid, her last pit stop before Krypton. “I’m going somewhere dangerous. Not safe for a dog.”

Dheron is already ashes and stardust. Krypton has descended into civil war, just as her mother and father, as the Dheronian crone had foreseen. The star system is already splintering, fragmenting into radioactive rubble and shards of broken spacetime. 

Soon, nothing will be left of the planet of Rao’s might, the cradle of conquerors.

Mournfully, Krypto whines.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” She cups his head, winces from the soreness in her abdomen as she crouches down to his level. “I’ll be back soon. Then we’ll go back to Dheron. You hear me? We’ll go back home.”

Slightly appeased, the dog seems to be at her words. She can’t find it in herself to feel relieved. She’s lying in all respects, after all. To Krypto and to herself.

“There’s something I need to check. I promise I’ll be fast. All will be well.”

If she could hate herself even more, she would.

“I know things haven’t been great between us—”

“No kidding, Alex.”

Kara’s adoptive sister has her laptop opened on the tiny folding desk of the lecture hall, a notebook sprawled open in her lap. She looks like she belongs here. The meticulous and dutiful law student, aiming for a cushy and well-paid position in the upper echelons of bureaucracy.

“We can talk later, Kara.”

“Now’ll do.”

“The lecture’s going to start in a couple of minutes, I’ll clear my schedule for the rest of the afternoon—”

“And I’m going to be off-world, Alex. There’s a rager some local baron is throwing in the Great Magellanic Cloud, and I don’t want to be late.”

There’s a few other students in the lecture hall, all following her with suspicious eyes. She’s perfectly aware of the impression they’re forming of her. At best, she’s some drunk freshman who crawled out of last weekend’s sorority hazers and couldn’t quite get the high out of her system. At worst, she’s a dropout. Or a stripper. Her costume surely isn’t helping matters: poking out from under her tattered coat, brilliant blue and skin-tight, a red skirt and matching leather boots that do wonders to showcase her legs. Someone who gets horny dudes off by pretending to be female Superman. They aren’t so far from the truth.

Kal did tell her to choose something more practical. This was as far as he’d let her go, her prudish twat of a cousin.

“Alex, what’s it like to be human?”

Her adoptive sister blinks.

“To … be human?”

“Yes, to be human. To be so abominably weak that I could blow out your eardrums just by talking a little loud. Snap your neck with a flick of my fingers, rip a hole through your chest by poking too hard.” She slumps into the seat next to Alex’s. “Kal once told me it’s normal to feel this way. Intrusive thoughts, psychology, the usual ontological quackery. But Kal’s never been bothered by it. Of course, because he’s fucking Superman.”

Kara’s fist closes around an eraser. If she throws it hard enough, would it fly into outer space? Or would it blow up against the wall of the auditorium and bring the building crashing down?

“Perhaps we’re weak,” Alex muses, “but that doesn’t stop us from getting up when we fall, trying again and again.”

“Cousin dearest says the same. That he’s human, because no matter how hard it gets he’ll keep putting one foot ahead of the next, keep walking until he reaches the light or whatever bullshit.” In spite of herself, Kara chortles. “But how about when—when no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t?”

Alex blinks, this time tinted with alarm.

“Kara—”

“Forget about it.” Kara makes to stand. “Forget I asked that.”

“If there’s something, anything, bothering you—”

“I said forget about it!”

Alex isn’t scared. She picks at a dog ear in her notebook, more contemplative than anything. She should be scared. Anyone with a sane mind should be scared of Kara—Rao, she swears even Kal is afraid of her, at times.

She’s an interstellar nuke on a countdown, and she wears the timer proudly on her bosom.

“It’s human, too. To fall down and not be able to get up on our own.”

Between her fingers, Alex twirls a mechanical pencil. Back and forth, like the swing of a pendulum, the orbit of a planet.

“Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do by yourself. You put one foot up and you’ll hurt yourself even more. Hurt the people around you too, the people you know in the depths of your heart care for you.”

The pencil drops from her hand, drops to the floor, graphite snapping, but Alex makes no move to pick it up. Moves her hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose instead.

“This is about me, isn’t it?”

“Alex—”

“I know you don’t want to hear it. I know, and I’m not going to make any excuses. But I’ve thought about this for years, and I—I just want to put this out there.” Alex raises her free hand. “I’m sorry for ever even contemplating that you shouldn’t be a part of our family. You came in, my parents fawned over you, then Mom died and I felt so alone, so I did the first thing I could think of, I—I blamed you for Mom’s death.”

“It’s fine, Alex, it’s all cool.”

“Just—I want you to know that I don’t hate you.” Alex sniffles, wiping her eyes and nose with the back of her blouse sleeve.

“Not even a tiny bit? Not jealous of your superstrong flying alien sister?”

“Okay, maybe a little—”

“There’s that knuckleheaded human girl.”

Her body moves almost of its own accord: swooping in from behind, hands lacing together over Alex’s shoulders, her chin resting on top of Alex’s head. She smells like lavender and fresh paper, as she always has.

Alex’s voice drops to a murmur.

“If you ever need someone to pick you up, Kara, know that I’ll always be here. Dad too. Your cousin. No matter where you are, what you’ve been through, we’ll come whenever you call.”

Kara looks up. Looks to the clock over the chalkboard, ticking away the seconds and minutes and hours. Days, months, years.

“I’ll try my best to remember.”

She stumbles into Kal’s apartment on a Friday night. Her costume is in ruins, her vision is blurry from a black eye, and she thinks she finds him and his girlfriend—Lexa? Louise?—kissing in the kitchen, but her head is as light as the one time she swallowed an entire stellar hydrogen cloud for a dare so she might just be hallucinating the whole thing.

“Kara?” He tears away from Lois—yes, that’s her name. Looks over the rips in her uniform, the blood matting her shoulder, the bruises splattered like ink on her bare skin. Agitation creeps into his breaths. “You’re hurt—what—who did—”

“Nothing I didn’t ask for.”

A good soak of sunlight in the morning and she’ll be as good as new! Really, there was no need to come to Kal’s place, now that she’s thinking it through. Why is she here again? She was headed for her flat back in National City. Maybe she came to get Krypto from Kal’s super secret lair in the South Pole. She furrows her eyebrows. That could have waited until tomorrow—

Next she knows, her face has crashed into a table. She thinks it’s smashed. She thinks she might have puked a little.

“Holy shit!”

“Don’t worry, Lena, I didn’t feel a single thing.”

“It’s—it’s Lois.”

“I knew that.”

Gods, her head spins. She needs a bath. Preferably a lava bath, or a sauna in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter, but in the absence of either she’ll settle for scalding water.

“Your cousin Kara,” Lois rambles on. “She’s Supergirl. The one who helped you fend off that rogue planet—”

“Lois, she’s hurt!”

“Right.” Lois saunters off toward the first aid kit. “Right right right right.”

Kal’s making a phone call, the Danvers from the snatches she hears, and Kara has the sudden urge to giggle. Why would they care about the weird alien girl who uprooted their perfect little family? They don’t need her, she doesn’t need them.

“—she’s drunk, Jeremiah, and I think someone hurt her. Don’t worry about plane tickets, I’ll grab you and Alex and fly you over once I make sure she’s stable—”

Stable. Hah. She doesn’t think she’s been stable in any of her solar cycles.

“I need a bath,” she wheezes.

“Yes, that’s her, Alex—Lois, could you draw her a bath?”

Long, nimble fingers pry her from the floor. Haul her to a cubicle of sterile white lights and creamy tiles, a smooth receptacle that’s got to be the bathtub. She’s making a mess of Kal’s apartment. Or is it his girlfriend’s? Rao deliver her soul, she hopes they don’t break up because of her. That would be a real pity. They’re so cute together.

Adeptly, Lois is undoing the buckles along the belt of her uniform. like she’s done this a thousand times.

“You do this with Kal in bed?”

The journalist, to her credit, only falters for a fraction of a second. “I’m not going to talk about my love life with my boyfriend’s younger cousin.”

“Fair enough.”

Lois finishes undoing the last buckle.

“I’m going to take the costume off now.”

“There’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Kara giggles. “On the outside, it’s the same as for you. The wonders of convergent evolution.”

She should have expected Lois’ next reaction. As the fabric of the nanoweave shirt is rucked up, Lois freezes at the sight of her abdomen. Traces, with her eyes, the ragged scar slicing Kara’s skin from hip to navel.

“Old injury,” Kara mumbles in explanation. Thankfully, Lois doesn’t press any further.

She’s been divested of her skirt and her underwear, submerged under a thick coating of foam and soapy water that reaches up to her collarbone, and Lois is gone—she says she’s gone downstairs, to give her and Kal both some space—when Kal walks over from the kitchen. He stops outside the bathroom threshold, back pressed to the outside wall, head turned religiously away.

“Are you feeling better?”

Has Kara Zor-El ever gotten ‘better’? It’s a question she’s long given up answering.

“And if I say no?”

She hears him hitch his breath.

“Then—then I’d ask what’s wrong. Ask … what I could do to help.”

Idly, she pokes at an iridescent bubble with her tongue. It tastes like lemons and salt. Later, she’ll blame the haze for her next words.

“I came to Earth to kill you.”

Beyond the door, Kal stills into stone.

“Back on Krypton, my parents were plotting to overthrow yours. Supposedly, it would have brought about peace. I tell myself it would have been better than the Krypton I grew up with.” She turns to her left shoulder: watches the drip-drap of blood from the toothmarks on her left shoulder into the bathwater. “I—I knew your parents. They were evil, Kal. Killed my mother, my father—your aunt and uncle—and left me for dead on the frontline of their newest war. When I heard that Krypton was about to be destroyed, that you—Jor-El and Lara’s infant son—were being sent to some unexpecting planet millions of light years away, I knew what I had to do.”

“So you stole a ship. You came here.”

“I followed you to Earth. Followed you, so I could put an end to the cycle of Krypton’s violence.”

She squints, lets her vision wander beyond the wall and into the living room. Settle on a photo frame by the mantelpiece: a Polaroid, “S + LL” inside a heart of water vapour, traced on a limpid sky.

“But the Phantom Zone threw me forward in time. When I arrived on Earth you were already a grown man. And against all odds, a good man. No matter how hard I tried to pry deeper, to look for that rotten core I thought was festering below the surface, I couldn’t find it. Because it never existed.”

“Kara—”

“I drink. I smoke. I’ve taken every substance known to sentient life in this galaxy, and then some. Six days out of seven I fly away from this planet and I go to interstellar bars and I shoot myself high, I find some pretty soul and I fuck them senseless, Kal, but I never get any of that—that buzz out of my head. None of it goes away.” She shakes her head. “I’m a horrible person, Kal. A hollow shell without any purpose.”

“Your past doesn’t have to define you—” 

“Do you know how it feels to destroy a planet? You could do it with flight alone. Zooming around some poor world at a hundred times the speed of sound, until the very atmosphere ignites from the friction. Been there, done that.”

“Kara,” and now he’s slipping into Kryptonian, “listen to me…”

“I could take everything from you. I could take apart this whole planet so easily. Hogs my mind, this thought does, on every bad day. No one could stop me—and no, not even you. You’re practically a Boy Scout. Did you train as a soldier of Krypton? Have you torn entire civilizations asunder? Do you know how to fight and win wars of annihilation? No!” She slams her palm into the lip of the tub, leaving a hand-shaped gouge in the metal. “You don’t know me, Kal. No matter how many lectures you give me, how many pretty empty words you say to my face—”

She yelps, because all of a sudden Kal’s kneeling by her side, cradling her palms like they’re the most precious and delicate things in the whole wide cosmos.

“It’s like living in a world made of cardboard, isn’t it?”

Kara’s never been able to reconcile the three parts of him: her baby cousin Kal-El, the human Clark Kent, and the hero Superman. Until now. She can see all three layers of him at this moment. Like sketches made on translucent paper, layered on top of one another.

“Always taking constant care not to break something, to break someone. Never allowing myself to lose control, even for a moment, or someone could die. Every hour of every day. It’s maddening. I’m always thinking of the moment—the moment I snap.”

There’s water splashing onto his wrists, his sleeves, but he holds on tight.

“If it’s hard for me, then I—I don’t know how it is for you. I won’t pretend to know. But if I do know anything about you, it’s this: you’re unbelievably strong. You’re a good, kind, decent woman, Kara. I’m certain of this. I’ve lived this. Nothing you say will change this.”

There are bruises on her wrists and he strokes them, feather-light, until the tension in her arms seeps away and her hands sag into his.

“I let them hurt me.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I let them bite me, slap me, toss me about, and whenever someone manages to leave marks I’m thrown over the edge. Doesn’t this disgust you? Doesn’t it make you sick?” Kara tries to huff out a laugh, a loud laugh drenched in insanity, but in the end she only manages a tiny hoarse whimper. “Your poor, broken, pathetic mess of a cousin."

When did she start crying? Thick fat droplets of salty fluid, smearing whatever remained of her mascara all over her face, dripping into the bath. Her whole body is sore. Filthy down to the marrow. She wants to leave. She wants to sink into this bath, never to reemerge. She wants to start over, flip a new page. See, despite everything, where the world takes her next.

She chokes down the ball roiling in her throat.

“You’re an anomaly, Kal. Did you know that?”

“People tell me so all the time.”

Kara shuts her eyes and chooses to believe.