Archive of Our Own ^beta

Children can only grow

from something you love

to something you lose.

Kara watches Krypton explode in the silence of space.

There are only her own shuddering breaths, the sobs grating at her vocal chords, her palm smacking against the domed glass of the pod—she is alone. The last gasps of her planet do not reach her ears. She calls out for her mother, then her father, then her mother again. The glass is cold against her hand. Space is cold. Krypton is never cold; they figured that out long before the House of El even merged with the House of Zed.

Kara thinks, as she watches as the shockwave that was once her world gets closer, then closer, that maybe she can feel the heat of it. The burn. Rao's last gift.

And then she’s waking up in golden sunlight.

A man stands over her. He wears her family’s crest. In the moments it takes him to reach a hand out towards her, Kara tries to wipe away the tears she’s just cried only to find that her cheeks are dry.

The man is Kal-El. The sunlight seeps into her skin and everything is loud and fragile. The rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference, she thinks. The voice in her head sounds like her father.

Kal-El leads her by the hand to a house that Kara will one day feel safe and comfortable in, but in the moment is just a building. Their interactions are stilted and awkward, expectations smacking up against reality. He is not a baby. Kara is not dead. Neither are what the other anticipated.

And, of course, he can’t speak their language. Kara’s language. 

“Why are you touching my hand?” Kara asks him. The heat of his palm slowly warms her chilly fingertips.

Kal’s dark eyebrows furrow into an expression Kara can remember her uncle Jor making just last week, over lunch. “I can’t understand you,” he says. 

His words are strange to her ear, all high-pitched noise with wide mouth sounds. It’s like he’s speaking with his head instead of his throat. Kara hates it. She wants to growl and yell from down in her chest and click her tongue in all of the rude Thanagarian words Aunt Astra wasn’t supposed to teach her. 

But Uncle Jor is gone. Aunt Lara is gone. Thara, and Uk-Tar, and Tima Tul-Vok are gone. Aunt Astra is gone—has been gone—and Kara is no longer alone. She puts her hand on her cousin’s chest, against the crest that binds them to their duty, and says, “El Mayarah.” 

Kal looks desperately confused. Slowly, he removes her hand from the blue and red of their house. Quickly, he leaves.

She learns English in a week, memorizes the grammar and the vocabulary and the conjugations. The muscles of her mouth get used to wrapping around vowels in the distinct way that sounds just right for this section of the specific portion of land she crashed into. She learns so she can fit in. Disappear. Kara learns English to communicate with the only family she has left only to find that it wasn’t ever really about the language at all. 

Kal-El doesn’t call. Being a teenager is more than the right parts of speech. 

Her parents sent her away, and Kal leaves her behind. Kara takes to sitting on the beach and watching the push and pull of the waves. In, out, back in, back out again. Earth only has one moon; it’s gargantuan in relation to planet size, but the tidal patterns are predictable.

Alex straps herself to a board and tries to balance on the writhing water. A whole ocean at their disposal, teeming with life, and humans play on it. 

Having a sister isn’t what she thought it might be. Nothing is how she thought it would be.

Alex corrects her pronunciation with poorly hidden frustration. Eliza takes to reading the newspaper out loud in her quiet, almost musical voice. Kara spends most mornings with her head down on the dining room table, trying to focus only on Midvale’s local news and not the pod of dolphins a mile out. Jeremiah gives her a fun fact about birds every day. Jeremiah gives her a pair of glasses that make this world just the tiniest bit more bearable. Jeremiah tries, at one point, to give her a hug.

Humans are strange. Kara can kill one just by breathing, or tripping, or blinking wrong. They still fight wars with each other all the time and yet they’re always touching. They touch people they’ve only just met—it’s expected that they touch someone they’ve only just met, with their hands, the very things used to create and invent and pray. 

It doesn’t matter much to her. Kara can’t touch anything without destroying it, anyway. Rao is a universe away, and yet His power is at her fingertips.

Kara is never cold here. It does not feel like His blessing.

Her first few weeks with the Danvers are a crash course in human culture. The patterns of meals and work and leisure aren’t hers, but they’re sometimes just recognizable enough to provide some comfort. That is, except for the times they provide fury instead. Krypton is gone and somehow people still sing. Kara takes deep breaths and wipes her tears away. Krypton is gone, but the universe is still filled with song.

Comfort. Fury. Kara, somewhere in the middle.

On Friday nights, the Danvers light candles and eat a soft, almost-sweet braided bread that Kara can’t get enough of. The first few times she tries to tear herself a piece, the bread left in both of her hands ends up squished into tiny, compact balls. Alex drizzles a golden, viscous liquid onto her piece, which is still fluffy perfect. Honey, she says. Kara tries it and almost cries.

“What are you saying?” Kara asks Jeremiah, her mouth still full.

“A prayer,” he tells her, “for our religion. It’s in a language called Hebrew.”

There are still so many languages on Earth. Kara doesn’t know how anyone gets anything done. 

She wakes up with an unfamiliar sun and thinks about the morning prayers she used to say every day, that she thought she would say for the rest of her life. She sits on the windowsill and watches the sky go pink and orange and then light blue. I will remember you in every dawn, she thinks. It’s a kind of oath. Alex is asleep across the room, and Kara never manages to make a sound.

Kara can’t talk about much. The Danvers get used to that, and in turn adapt in their own ways. Eliza takes to sitting on the beach with her while Alex and Jeremiah surf. 

Surf, noun: a mass or line of foam formed by waves breaking on the seashore or a reef. 

Surf, verb: to stand or lie on a surfboard and ride on a wave towards the shore. 

It’s a homonym, which is an English word that sounds the same and is spelled the same, but has a different meaning. English is so—flat. It runs out of sounds so quickly that they have to use the same ones to mean multiple things. If she thinks about it too long she gets a headache. 

If she thinks about it too long, a lot of things ache. 

Eliza sits by her in the sand, usually with a cup of rich-smelling, bitter-tasting coffee. Kara splits her time between watching the surfers (noun: a person who rides a wave towards the shore while sitting or lying on a surfboard, OR noun: a person who spends time using the internet) and Eliza. At least, she watches until a seagull (a seabird of the family Laridae in the suborder Lari) inevitably approaches and she gets distracted.

Birds aren’t the only strange thing about Earth, but they’re the easiest thing for Kara to latch on to. They have hollow bones, and their eyes take up 50% of the space in their head. Kara wants to tell Thara about them. She wants to understand how they glide so easily, where they learned to migrate. After everything, Kara still wants to learn. She tries to push it down along with every other Kryptonian urge, but it keeps bubbling back up. She wants to break everything down to its base components and build it back up again, just the way Ukr —her father, her father— taught her, only there’s too much to learn. 

Sometimes, Eliza and Jeremiah and Alex will all repeat the same phrase at each other. I love you, or just love you, because in English you can drop the subject of the sentence if there’s enough context. Kara thinks it’s another way to say goodbye, because she can think of eleven different ways they said goodbye on Krypton and English seems to have some variety there, too. 

Only Jeremiah also says it first thing in the morning and whenever Eliza buys Doritos at the grocery store. He says it almost every time he hangs up the phone, even that one time he was ordering something called a pizza.

Alex laughed and laughed, loud and grating in Kara’s ears. Jeremiah had chuckled along and then told Kara that he just knew that she would love pineapple on her pizza. 

Kara eats three pizzas that night. She also tells the pizza place that she loves them over the phone. The dictionary says that as a noun, love means an intense feeling of deep affection, and as a verb means to feel deep affection for (someone). It’s painfully vague, and Kara’s time on Earth has taught her that English is far from a literal language. 

Alex regularly claims to be starving to death, and when Kara eventually transitions to attending school she discovers that people use the word literally to mean the exact opposite of its definition. There’s slang and sarcasm and idioms, all tumbling up in Kara’s head, mashing up against their Kryptonian counterparts, a mirror image through warped glass. ‘Yeah, no’ means no and ‘no, yeah’ means yes. ‘Yeah, right’ also means no, except for when it means yes, but ‘yeah’ and ‘right’ both mean yes on their own. Except sometimes ‘right’ can also mean no. Eliza and Jeremiah try to help, and Alex does not. 

Afternoons are when she learns the most, sitting on the couch with Jeremiah and watching MTV. It’s how she meets JC and Justin and Lance and Joey and Chris. It’s how she’s introduced to what people on Earth call dancing. It’s not like any kind of dancing that Kara’s seen before. Their bodies move in ways that she can’t fathom—she goes so long without blinking that her eyes burn and she’s afraid she’ll blast a hole in the TV.

Jeremiah laughs his way through MTV Diary and fills in the blanks in Kara’s understanding where he can. Mostly, he just sits with her and offers her the majority of his snack of the day.

“Doritos are the bee’s knees,” he tells her, licking orange dust off of his fingers. “Thanks again, honey,” he calls out. “Love you!”

Honey, Kara thinks. Sweet and sticky drizzled on a piece of challah. Human. Wonderful. As far from being hers as she is from Krypton’s ruins.

“Love you, too!” Eliza says from the kitchen. 

Jeremiah offers Kara the crinkly-loud, terrible awful bag. She has a Dorito. It is the bee’s knees. 

On the TV, Britney Spears is wearing a crop top. Kara has another Dorito and keeps watching in rapt silence.

“Kaipahdh tov guhlogho krighiu w:tov dovrrosho doliu, Kara,” her mother says, one of her hands heavy on Kara’s shoulder. It’s an old Kryptonian proverb, one that Kara has heard a hundred times before, and she isn’t sure why her mother felt the urge to wake her up to say it. 

‘The brightest intentions can make the darkest shadows.’ 

It’s usually a warning, but Kara hasn’t even done anything. She wants to ask what her mother and Aunt Astra had to talk about that was so secret she had to be sent away.

“Ieiu?” 

The hand leaves her shoulder. “Okhahsh.” The call to sleep, usually a plea, sounds more like a command. 

Kara obeys.

“I love when it’s misty in the morning,” Alex tells her. 

“I seriously love Green Day,” Alex tells her.

“I love you,” Alex tells the chocolate chip cookie she’s halfway through devouring. 

Kara thinks: shovuh, maybe, or satogh. Ukiem. Khehth. Rrahdhuhs. Maybe even :zrhueiao— she heard Uncle Jor say that, once, and had been ushered out of the room by her mother.

Love. None of Kara’s words quite fit. She wishes English was a little more specific.

Her first year on Earth passes in three superpowered blinks of her eyes. Her first year on Earth stretches to last longer than the thirty-three years she’s been alive. She loves the Danvers. She hates the Danvers. She wants her mom, or her dad, or her aunt. She thinks she might want Eliza to give her a hug, but isn’t sure how to ask for one.

They decide to celebrate Kara’s Earth-Birthday. The effort to make an otherwise traumatic day a celebration is appreciated, even though it’s pretty transparent. Kara doesn’t explain that birthdays are new to her, because her Earth-Birthday is pretty much a Name Day anyway. 

Kara Danvers. She does the math exactly once to calculate what her original Name Day would be on Earth, and never tells a soul when it is. No one would be able to pronounce her name right, anyway. Their voice boxes aren’t shaped for it.

Eliza gets three sheet cakes from the Gelson’s down the street. They put little candles in it and sing a song with her name slotted into it this time, instead of Eliza’s or Alex’s or Jeremiah’s, which Kara likes. It’s the fourth time she’s heard it, and the fourth time she’s heard them say, “make a wish!”

Wish, noun: a desire or hope for something to happen, typically in the form of a request or instruction. 

Wish, verb: to feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that is not easily attainable; to want something that cannot or probably will not happen; to silently invoke a hope or desire, especially in a ritualized way. 

When she blows the candles out, she can’t think of any goal she has the power to enact, so she just closes her eyes and pretends. She eats two of the sheet cakes. They’re the bee’s knees, and also the cat’s pajamas. 

“I hope you know that we love you so much, Kara,” Eliza tells her after handing her a card filled with soft English words, and Kara can feel the significance of it. She realizes it’s a shift in formality, the place where she would stop using honorific noun prefixes if she were still on Krypton. 

But Kara isn’t on Krypton, and there will never again be a time where she will be welcomed to refer to someone with the most pared back Kryptonian words available. She speaks a different language now, with her voice and with her body, and all of her time with the Danvers’ has shown her that this is a moment of call and response. 

“I love you, too,” she says, and holds her arms out for a hug.

“You’ll journey to Earth to look after your cousin,” her mother tells her, eyes steady. “The yellow sun will give you great powers, Kara. You will do extraordinary things.”  

Kara’s embarrassed to have eyes that shine with tears. “I won’t fail Kal-El,” she vows. “Or you.”

An explosion rocks the launch tunnel. Her father’s face is drawn.

“You must go,” her mother says. “Now.” She takes Kara’s face in her palms and presses a kiss to her forehead. The touch feels like a last goodbye—a blessing—a divine protection.

Kara knows she must go. She turns and takes one step towards the pod, then another. She knows they don’t have time. She knows her place in her planet’s shaky future. She understands.

Despite that, it’s Kara who turns and rushes back for a hug. Her mother returns it, hands light against her shoulders, but it’s Kara who initiates, who breaks from her duty. Only for a second. 

Later, she will wonder if that second is what made the difference between Kal and Clark.

Later, she will wonder if a Kryptonian who forsakes duty for touch was ever really a Kryptonian at all.

“Tell me about Krypton,” Alex says from across the room. 

It’s late. Alex hasn’t been sleeping well recently, and Kara hasn’t been sleeping well since her pod crashed into this planet. It would be one thing to dream of Krypton’s explosion over and over again, but the majority of her nightmares are just silence. Silence and darkness and cold. Being trapped. Being alone. 

“We didn’t have any oceans,” Kara says. 

“What?”

“I mean, they existed once, but by my time they were long gone. All our water got recycled.”

“What about, like, the water cycle? Rain?”

“Argo City didn’t have any weather.”

Rustling comes from Alex’s side of the room. “What?”  

“We had a protective layer.” Kara sighs, frustrated. She knows she isn’t explaining it right. “I don’t know exactly what it was made of, exactly, but it protected the city. There was a lot of pollution; it curved over us, like our own private atmosphere.”

“Like a dome?”

“Sure.”

“Like The Simpsons Movie?” 

Kara throws her pillow across the room, satisfied that it finds its mark by Alex’s gasp. They sit in silence until Kara’s ears pick up the tiniest sound coming from her sister’s bed. 

“Spider-pig, spider-pig, does whatever a spider-pig does—”

“Alex,” Kara half groans, half giggles. 

“Can he swing, from a web? No he can’t, he’s a pig. Look out!” 

Begrudgingly, Kara joins in for the final line. “Here comes spider-pig.”

Krypton is gone and the universe is still filled with song. 

Kara sits on the beach and watches the ocean ebb and flow.

She thinks grief comes in waves.

“This is perhaps the most important prayer we ever learn, Kara,” her father tells her, crouched down to speak to her face to face. “It binds us together, each who have lived under Rao’s Light, unto eternity.”

Kara reaches out and latches onto the El family crest that pins together her father’s robes. 

“Without it,” he continues, “we would be lost. It is our duty to guide our family home.”  

“Our family?” Kara asks.

Her father smiles at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “We are all the children of Rao, little star. Siblings for all time that He burns, and it is His will that a Kryptonian never be alone, in life or death. Listen carefully, alright? This is how it begins: You have been the sun of our lives.”

Jeremiah dies. 

Kara learns how a single death can feel as catastrophic as 1.4 billion. 

On the roof, Kara silently points to the space in the sky where Krypton once was. Alex’s gaze follows her finger and understands without asking. With a strong enough telescope, Kara knows that they could still see Krypton spinning around her god. Light travels so slowly; Kara is blessed and cursed to live within sight of a time that will never be hers again.

“Dad and I used to make wishes on stars,” Alex says. Her voice is wet. “I don’t remember when we stopped.”

It’s a very human thing, a wish. Kryptonians made oaths and vows, bound themselves with duty and sacrifice through prayer and public service, but they never wished. “Do you get a wish for each star?” Kara asks. That would make a lot of wishes. Very human, in her experience.

“No, just the first one you see at dusk. Dad always said, um—” Alex clears her throat. “‘Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight; wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.’ And then he’d close his eyes and scrunch up his face like this,” Alex demonstrates, exaggerating to make Kara laugh, “and make his wish. He never told me what he wished for, though.”

“Why not?”

“Said that meant it wouldn’t come true. You know, like birthdays.”

Kara finds Rao’s space in the sky and whispers the words that Alex taught her. She shuts her eyes and scrunches up her face and makes her wish.

She never says what she wished for. It doesn’t come true.

“Alex is my Sister,” Kara tells people. In her head, when she translates the sentence back into Kryptonian, she uses the most honorific prefix and most possessive base-root. Sister. It’s a version of the word Kara only vaguely remembers from her early childhood, from when her mother still spoke of Aunt Astra with warmth. 

No one else hears what Kara is saying. There is no one left who would understand it. In English, calling someone by their name means familiarity, intimacy; Kara can’t ever quite seem to get across how she was raised with the opposite mindset. To have a relationship with someone was to speak it into every interaction—daughter, father, cousin, aunt. Sister. It rings hollow without the foundation of her culture to hold it up. Still, it’s what she says every time. Alex is her Sister. 

Sometimes, she thinks Alex hears it. Sometimes, she thinks she hears Alex say it back. 

Kenny dies. Kara stops trying to weigh a single death. 

“Alex,” Kara says in the mayhem of Midvale High School’s cafeteria, “I’d rather be human than lose you.”

Alex goes off to college and Kara picks up Earth languages like they’re pretty shells on the beach. German in two days, Spanish in three. She understands spoken French well enough, but gives up on reading or writing it after only a few hours. Cantonese to English dictionaries stack up inside of her locker, get flipped through under the desk during Physics. Korean and Urdu never really click the way she wants them to; te reo Māori takes an afternoon. Midvale High requires that she learn a foreign language for at least two years—Alex had taken Spanish and scowled over A- after A-. When Kara is picking over summer break, already bemoaning having to sit through yet another class where she’ll have to pretend to know far less than she really does, Alex takes the list from her hands and slides a finger down the options.

“Don’t bother with Latin,” she says, plopping herself down onto Kara’s bed. “It’s a dead language. All you do is translate poetry.” Kara is adept enough at Alex’s tones of voice to tell what she thinks of poetry.

“Dead language?”

“No one speaks it anymore. It was a language of a civilization that fell, like, over a thousand years ago. French or Spanish are so much cooler.”

Kara nods and lets Alex talk bitterly about Vicki Donahue’s French accent. When the time comes, she signs up for Latin. It’s the easiest language she’s ever learned, and also the hardest.

Every poem invokes their gods. Sing in me, Muses. Kara closes her eyes in class and tries to remember the Science Guild’s oath of service. The Greeks and Romans began their great works of art with humble requests to do godly matters justice. On Krypton, it was how they began experiments, step one of their similar-yet-different scientific method. She hears it in her father’s voice, sees his hands working over the lab table in his home office. May Rao shine His light upon His wonders, so that I may see them. 

She hears his laugh, still. She doesn't think she'll ever get good enough at English to put it into words.

Kara’s Latin teacher sends a note home to Eliza, asking if everything is alright. He can’t help but notice that Kara spends much of each class wiping away tears in the back row.

Kara dreams that she is alone. It’s always a nightmare. 

When she wakes, the sounds of the Earth slam into her ears, the worst drum solo from the worst of the punk bands Alex loves so much. 

You are not alone, everything screams at her. It’s never much of a relief.

Nick Collado takes Kara out for ice cream. She even manages to kiss him without breaking his nose. 

“How was it?” Alex’s tinny voice asks through the phone. Kara’s tempted to mute it and see if she could stretch her hearing to Stanford. “Did you get, you know, butterflies?”

“He…didn’t bring me butterflies,” Kara says haltingly. “Was I supposed to bring him—”

“Figure of speech,” Alex interrupts. She sounds tired. “Sorry, my bad. It’s, like, the feeling you get in your stomach when you have a crush on someone. A fluttery kind of thing. So, butterflies.”

“Oh.” Kara frowns. “Is that how Spencer makes you feel?”

“Uhm. Yeah, totally. He’s great. Listen, if this Rick kid makes you feel uncomfortable—”

“Nick,” Kara corrects, rolling her eyes.

“Whatever. You break his nose, right? Don’t even pull your punch. Then I’ll come break it again.”

“He’s in the marching band, Alex. I think I can take care of myself.”

“Ugh, you would go for a nerd.”

“Okay, Stanford.”

“Hey, did I tell you I think I got Mom to agree to let you come visit over your Fall Break? There’s a few lectures you could sit in.” Alex clears her throat strangely. “If you wanted,” she adds. 

Kara squeals into the phone. “Obviously I want to,” she says. “Is it true that the dining hall is all you can eat?”

Alex’s laugh is loud enough that Kara could swear her hearing got all the way to Palo Alto. 

“I mean, it wasn’t all that different, was it?” Alex asks, years later, halfway to tipsy and hogging the potato chips. “You had—you know, jobs, and families, and hobbies. Religion.”

“What?” Kara asks, thoroughly lost, mostly paying attention to The Mummy Returns. “What wasn’t different?”

“Krypton. That’s why your parents picked here, right? Because it was similar?”

Kara freezes with a handful of popcorn suspended above the bowl. Slowly, she opens her hand and lets it fall. “No,” she says quietly. 

“Huh?”

“It wasn’t similar,” she says. Her voice is low, but firm. “It wasn’t similar at all.”

“Oh.” Alex shifts on her side of the couch, inches closer. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I know.” Kara eats a handful of popcorn. “They knew I would blend in, but also that the yellow sun would keep me…untouchable. Everything else…” She shrugs. “Well, you remember when I first got here.”

“Right.” Alex sounds chagrined. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Kara says, waving her hand. “I get what you were trying to say. I’m too human to be Kryptonian and too Kryptonian to be human, yeah?”

“Kara—”

“Alex,” Kara interrupts. “We’re missing the movie. CGI Scorpion Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is about to show up and fight Brendan Frasier.”

“Okay,” Alex agrees. She passes the potato chips across the couch and doesn't apologize. “Okay.”

Nick from the marching band doesn’t last. Neither does Spencer, or at least Kara has stopped hearing about him by the time she makes it up to Palo Alto. She’s too busy wrapping Alex up in all of the hugs they’ve missed in their months apart to ask about it.

The class Alex is taking to fill her humanities credit is about etymology. Kara marvels at how heterogeneous Earth is, even after all this time. “I’d skip it,” Alex tells her on their walk over to the lecture hall, “but there’s a guest lecturer today, all the way from Tokyo. It’s going to be on our unit quiz for sure.”

There are bruise-like bags under Alex’s eyes. Kara can smell just how recently her sister has been out partying, and doesn’t say a word about it. Years down the line, this will haunt her.

The lecture hall is big and loud. Kara winces as squeaky desk after squeaky desk is unfolded, pressing the temple tips of her glasses down until the lead deadens the sound just a bit more. Alex winces at the sound, too, and rubs at her temples. Two peas in a pod, Kara thinks. Birds of a feather, fly together. 

“In America, people usually start lectures with a joke,” the guest professor says after the room has hushed at her appearance, “but in Japan, they start with an apology. So, I’m sorry I don’t have a joke.”

Kara laughs. A glance to her left shows that even Alex is cracking a smile. Kara finds the lecture is engaging, both because of the natural charisma of the professor and because of the subject matter. Krypton’s five languages had long since been unified by the time Kara’s great-great-great-great grandparents were born. Still, after everything, her brain strains out for new information, for something fresh to learn. She wonders if Earth’s sun will ever burn it out of her.

“There’s the literal meaning of words,” the professor says towards the middle of her talk, “and there’s the cultural meaning. There’s the words you say, and there’s the message you convey—the two aren’t always the same. To people who speak only one language, that might be difficult to understand, but it’s not difficult to begin to recognize the implied understanding behind what someone says. In America, I might say ‘thank you’ in any number of settings, even when I’ve just been handed something that I’ve bought. In Beijing, saying ‘thank you’ in that situation would be utterly befuddling. I have heard shopkeepers ask well-meaning tourists, ‘thank me for what?’ This is only one tiny example of the cultural foundations in language.”

Someone’s chair squeaks terribly to their left. Alex’s hand finds its way to Kara’s elbow. Her fingers wrap around a tense forearm, and Kara is grateful. Touch isn’t something that really makes her uncomfortable anymore, and certainly not from Alex or Eliza. From them, it’s grounding—the tiniest reminder that she hasn’t floated off into space.

“In my career, I’ve found it particularly difficult to translate works of English into Japanese, and vice versa,” the lecturer continues. “Japanese in particular has words you don’t say—‘no’ is the most common issue, because it’s terribly rude to do so literally. We have ways to convey that, of course, but the word itself is almost never spoken. The amount of business deals that has confused is surely in the hundreds, if not thousands. The example that shocks most Americans, though, is something else: I love you.”

Kara’s tapping fingers go still against her knee. Alex’s hand is still squeezing her arm, but Kara can barely feel it. 

“I've never told my mother that I love her. She’s never told me that she loves me.” The lecturer pauses, takes in the surprised faces in the room, then smiles. “I love that moment of shock when I give this talk. If I were to translate the sentence I just said into Japanese, I’d replace ‘love’ with a compound word: big-like. Especially in modern day Japan, it has about the same colloquial meaning. I like baseball, but I big-like soccer. It’s usually translated to English as love, but it’s not quite the same. Culturally, it’s not something we explicitly say to each other with any kind of frequency. 

“When we return home in Japan, we say ‘tadaima’ as we walk through the door. Whoever is in the house when someone else arrives says ‘okaerinasai.’ It’s a cultural practice like any other, simply announcing that you have come home and having others welcome you home.” With a wry smile, the lecturer adds, “I’ll even admit to instinctively saying ‘tadaima’ as I came back to the apartment I lived in alone, sometimes. When you’re raised with something, it builds its way into you. 

“When I was younger, a good friend’s parents got divorced. It was the only divorce I had ever heard of at the time, and so none of our friends really knew what to do or say. The first time my friend went to his father’s new apartment, he entered and said ‘konichiwa,’ or ‘hello.’ His father burst into tears. By not saying ‘tadaima’ when he entered, he was saying ‘this is not my home. You are not my family.’”

Kara uses just the tiniest bit of super speed to reach up and swipe away a tear before it can race its way down her cheek. She’s pretty sure Alex doesn’t notice. The rest of the lecture is interesting, but Kara struggles to focus. She’s thinking about Guild Ceremonies and Name Days and morning prayers. She’s thinking about Krypton, or maybe her parents. By the time she tunes back in, the lecture is almost finished. 

“I mentioned earlier,” the woman says, “that my mother doesn’t tell me she loves me. I’m not upset by that. I don’t explicitly say ‘I love you’ to her, either. Instead, when she calls me, I pick up the phone. She tells me to wear my jacket, and I agree. She makes sure I’m always eating enough, and getting good exercise. I make a point of visiting her often. When I walk into her house, I always announce that I’m home.” The guest lecturer smiles at them. “Thank you.”

Kara leads the room’s applause with claps loud enough to make Alex put a hand on her knee as a gentle reminder. 

“That was cool,” Alex admits, only a little grudgingly. Kara strains to focus on her voice over the chatter of a full lecture hall all putting away notebooks and zipping up bags. “You picked a good week to visit. Did you like it?” 

“Mhm.” 

Alex reaches into her bag and pulls out the fancy noise canceling headphones she uses when she’s studying. Kara puts them over her ears with a small smile. Tadaima, she thinks, all these miles away from Midvale.

Alex takes her hand and leads her out of the lecture hall. Kara can tell she’s gripping as hard as she can. She can barely feel it, and she thinks the ghost of pressure sounds a little bit like okaeri. 

In Alex’s dorm room, curled up and poking elbows into stomachs in her twin extra long bed, Kara tells her sister about the musical their high school is doing that spring. Alex’s roommate is sleeping over at her boyfriend’s and offers her bed, but Kara isn’t about to turn down free Alex cuddles. Her sister is made of nightmare repellent, and the fact that it’s just the two of them means they can actually, really talk. 

“It’s called Into the Woods,” Kara says. “It’s about fairy tales, I think.”

“Kara.” Alex already sounds apologetic. “I don’t think it’s the best idea—”

“I’m not going to audition.”

“Oh.”

“I thought, maybe—they always need people to move sets, and stuff. Help with the costumes.”

“That sounds fun.”

“You’re a bad liar.”

Alex pinches her, frowns when her thumbs feel it more than Kara’s arm. “I think you’ll have fun, alright? Just don’t go lifting the whole stage or anything.”

“Duh.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Mm.”

“Kara,” Alex sing-songs. “Come on, what did you want to ask?”

Kara fiddles with the edge of the blanket. “Mr. O’Neil said—the whole point is that it’s fairy tales everyone knows, right? And the show, like, surprises you because you think you already know the story. You know the ‘happy ending,’ but it shows after that. It shows you what happens when things don’t end the way you thought they might.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and I don’t—I want to understand without having to ask questions that make everyone look at me weird. Like I’m stupid.”

Alex reaches out and wraps her in an awkward, well-meaning hug. “What are the stories?”

“Um, I wrote them down, one sec.” Kara is gone and back with a windy rustle of blankets, now holding a crumpled post-it. “The first one is Cinderella.”

“We didn’t watch that one? There’s a Disney movie.”

“There is?”

“Yeah, it’s one of the older ones. We’ll watch it together—what are the rest?”

“Jack and the Beanstalk?”

“Jack climbs a magic beanstalk and finds the land of giants in the sky. I remember, uh—the giant says, ‘fee, fi, foe, fum,’ and tries to eat him, I think? Jack takes a bunch of stuff and runs down the beanstalk and manages to chop it down while the giant is on it so he falls to his death. Jack gets rich. The end.”

Kara’s eyes are wide. “Humans are so weird.”

Alex pokes her nose. “What’s next?”

“Rapunzel.”

“Girl in a tower with long hair. A prince finds her and climbs her hair to get to her.”

“Her hair?” 

“Yeah, it’s super long. He says, like, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!’ And then he climbs it.”

“Why doesn’t he take the stairs?”

“There aren’t any. The hair is the only way up.”

“How did she get up there, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that all that happens? He just climbs her hair?”

“I think they get married? Maybe look that one up.” 

“Fine. The last one is Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Oh, I always liked that one. So, there’s this wolf…”

When she gets back to Midvale, Kara teaches herself Japanese. It takes a whole week. 

In the spring, she signs up for the stage crew for Into The Woods. 

Grief is a cup overflowing; you can pour more water in, but the size of the vessel itself doesn’t change. 

Kara paints columns of cardboard into trees, browns and dark blues and greens mixing together on her palette. The slow, frictionless drag of the paintbrush becomes meditative, until she’s blinking to awareness at the end of free period with paint streaked across the thighs of her jeans. 

A tree stretches up into the flyspace of the theater where there was once a cardboard tube. Kara saw it in her head and then painted it real. Mr. O’Neil comes by and gives her an approving smile, overjoyed to have a potential new student for the tiny theater department. 

“A little less blue next time,” he says, “but fantastic work, Kara.”

Kara looks up at her cardboard tube, remembering too late that trees on Earth aren’t blue at all. The bowbuck tree that stretched outside of her window and lit up like a crystal in Rao’s Light, the blue and red leaves that made it an unofficial symbol of her House—it’s gone. 

Has been gone. For decades.

“Actually,” Mr. O’Neil backtracks, panicked by her silence, “I think it does work. It looks like it’s in the shadows! Brilliant, really. I wish you’d signed up for crew as a freshman.”

“Thanks,” Kara mutters, still looking up into the darkness of the space above the stage. “I’m gonna be late for Latin. See you after school.”

She runs her fingers over the dried paint on her jeans all throughout the rest of the school day, all the way through rehearsal, on the bus trip where she skips her regular stop and goes further downtown.

The surly employee at the local art shop is remarkably patient in explaining which canvases and acrylics Kara might want to start with. She finds it’s easy, once she starts: she closes her eyes and sees Krypton. She opens her eyes and paints it. 

Sometimes, she closes her eyes and tries to hear her father's laugh. It gets harder. She never manages to paint it right.

Backstage, Kara helps Missy Eldrige do a quick change from Cinderella’s servant rags to her ball gown. It’s just their first dress rehearsal, but Missy takes every rehearsal so seriously. Kara focuses on keeping her hands gentle and steady on the velcro of the dress so she doesn’t get distracted by Missy’s glossy hair or sweet smile. 

“Thanks, Kara,” she whispers. “Do you have the slippers?”

“Y—yeah,” Kara stutters. She bends over to steady the shoes, still a little tacky from the gold spray paint. Missy balances with a hand on her shoulder and slides them on. 

Little Red Riding Hood is singing with the Wolf a few feet and twenty ellipsoidal lights away. It’s Kara’s least favorite song in the whole show, and usually overwhelmingly loud, but when she looks up and sees Missy in her full Cinderella outfit it’s hard to hear anything besides the heavy thumping of her own heart.

“You’re all set,” Kara mumbles. 

“‘Well how can you know what you want / Till you get what you want / And you see if you like it?’” Missy sings. “‘What I want most of all / Is to know what I want.” 

“‘When you know you can’t have what you want / What’s the profit in wishing?’” The Baker’s Wife—Emma, the junior—sings back. 

In the wings, shrouded in darkness, Kara thinks about birthday candles and the weight of her House.

She wishes Kal-El would call.

“I’m so proud of you, Kara,” Eliza says, grabbing her face with both hands. “Who knew I had an artist in my house?”

“Eliza,” Kara mutters, blushing furiously. Her adoptive mother had come to the show despite Kara’s protests and brought a giant bouquet, even bigger than the ones that some of her classmates who were actually in the show got. “It was just some trees.”

“And that moon, and the little cottage, don’t think I didn’t see your name in the program. Head Painter.” She smacks a kiss onto Kara’s cheek. “So proud of you.”

Kara accepts the praise, as strange as it feels to excel at something she never tried under His gaze. “Thanks.”

Eliza’s mouth twists into something like disappointment. “Alex wanted to come,” she starts, “but she couldn’t make it down.”

“I wasn’t even in the show,” Kara says. “I told her she didn’t have to.”

“Well, she wanted to,” Eliza insists, “but alright. How about some ice cream to celebrate? I stocked up this afternoon.”

Kara’s stomach grumbles. “They didn’t even let me bring snacks backstage, Eliza, it was horrible.” 

Laughing, her adoptive mother leads her towards the exit. “I figured the Baker’s bread had to be a prop or else it wouldn’t stand a chance of lasting to that first scene.”

“Rude,” Kara says, smiling into her flowers. The scents of the bouquet slam into her nostrils and drown out the faint BO from teeangers who have been singing under heavy stage lights for two hours.

She keeps the bouquet in her room until it dies, and then throws it away. Death can linger, if you aren’t careful.

“You will be the youngest to join the Guild in generations, little star,” her father says. His robes are a deep blue, pinned by their House crest in brilliant red. He reaches across the lab table to show the crystal’s projection—her proof of turbulence—and throws his hands up in amazement. “What a triumph for the House of El.”

“El Mayarah, Ukr,” Kara says, her cheeks aching with her grin. “I’ll get to join you in your other labs now, too.” 

He laughs his biggest laugh—the one that gurgles in his throat a little—and reaches out to brush her bangs out of her eyes. “I prefer you to your Uncle Jor any day. You’re a much better singer.”

Kara scrunches up her nose. “Ukr.”

“You get it from the House of Ze, you know that.” His playful smile shifts into something more sincere. “What a perfect match Rao saw, to give us you. We are so proud to witness your journey, my daughter. The House of El is yours to carry.”

His words settle on her shoulders; instead of weighing her down, they straighten her spine and strengthen her muscles. Duty is not so difficult when you are made for it.

Her second semester at National City University, Kara signs up for a studio art class. It’s only supposed to be an elective, something to help her along with the hobby she’s sunk herself into, but by the time she stumbles out of her first three hour class with charcoal hiding in the grooves of her hands she knows it’ll be far more than that. Twice a week, she sets up her easel and surrenders to the stroke of a pencil, a pen, a paintbrush. 

The House of Ze had members in the Artist Guild, she thinks. A cousin of the aunt of her mother’s father. She can’t quite remember. There's no one to ask.

Kara draws the crystalline structures of Argo City entirely by accident. Her professor calls it le fantastique, and Kara keeps Krypton to her living room from then on out. It’s a human hobby, and so Kara tries to paint human things. She mostly fails. In the end, the paintings she submits are just reflections of how she feels.

By her senior year, Studio Art with a focus in painting is sitting stubbornly in the major category of her online registration forms. Her professors pour over abstract painting after abstract painting, picking apart her technique and composition. Kara closes her eyes and feels, and then she opens her eyes and paints.

“When you told me it was mostly red and green, I was afraid it would look like Christmas threw up in here,” Alex tells her after wandering through her senior showcase. “But it doesn’t.”

Kara rolls her eyes. “Thanks.”

Alex stops them in front of the biggest piece. It’s the darkest of them all. Kara struggles to look directly at the swirling blacks and grays, the purposeful way she’d warped the edges of the canvas to give it a fishbowl effect. Her sister has no such problem, and stares at it without even blinking for so long Kara is afraid her eyeballs will dry up. 

To their left are canvases filled with red, and to their right canvases filled with green. Kara anxiously arranged and rearranged her pieces, nervous that they screamed out to the world I’m an alien who misses her red sun and still can’t get over how green everything is here, but Alex had said it was okay.

Alex is still staring at the central piece.

“Alex?”

Her sister finally blinks. “What’s this one called?” She asks.

Kara looks at the twisting galaxy of shadows and feels everything she’d felt in the two weeks it had taken her to finally put the paintbrush down. “Agony,” she says.

Alex grabs onto her hand. “I’m really proud of you,” she says. 

Kara isn’t sure she’s talking about the showcase. “Thanks,” she responds.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, tangled up in brambles a hundred feet thick, Kara begins to dream in English.

During her break on an unusually quiet day at Noonan’s, Kara grabs a napkin and a pen and tries to figure out her future. She can’t be a barista forever—she probably can’t even stretch it another two months before she gets fired for eating so much of the product—so she needs a plan.

Kara used to know what her future held. She knew it like the future’s palms were her own, like she could feel the grooves and edges of a lifetime of service to the Science Guild and the House of El. She thought it suited her well, back when her world was washed with red. 

The window she sits by looks out onto a tree; the late spring leaves are a deep green, illuminated by pale golden light. Blue and red are colors for Metropolis, now.

Kara had a life with a perfect match set up for her, only now that match is dead, and she needs a job that pays more than minimum wage. 

She writes down what she knows on the napkin, pressing so lightly she can barely feel the pen between her fingertips. The first thing she jots down is the exact equation for turbulence, but she scratches it out a moment later. 

Next, she scrawls:

Noonan’s sometimes gives away the pastries that didn’t sell during the day right before they close. It’s all about timing. 

That’s important to remember, she thinks, especially for when she’s not able to steal a fresh cinnamon roll out of every batch. She needs something else to put down, something human, that will corral her to a human kind of career, and the first thing that comes to mind is: 

A wish is a dream your heart makes. 

She frowns down at the napkin. That isn’t right. She crosses it out. 

There’s a crash sixteen blocks away, the squeal of brakes and someone gasping in pain. Kara keeps her gaze down and writes:

Out of the 2,350 pizza places in National City, there are 236 that recognize me. 

Pizza delivery won’t be more than Noonan’s pays, and she’ll definitely end up eating the product. That’s a bust. 

She stops, her pen hesitating against the napkin until the ink bleeds into one big spot. English flows from her hand easily now, as effortlessly as the way she used to be able to program a Kelex unit. Putting the words in the right order, knowing that they’ll be understood, it’s…soothing.

Kara looks at her ink-messy napkin and takes five deep breaths. There are three minutes left in her break. She can’t stand the sight of what she’s written, so she turns towards the window again. Across the street, the CATCO sign flickers. Kara remembers the grains of wood in the Danvers’ dining room table against her forehead, hears Eliza’s smooth voice reading the local news. 

What I want most of all, she thinks, a faint melody running through her mind, is to know what I want. 

Kara sighs. CATCO, then. It’s a better idea than anything she’s come up with on her own. 

The back of the napkin, crumpled up and thrown in the trash on the northeast corner of Booker and 13th Street, reads: 

People who love you can hurt you anyway. You can love people and hurt them anyway. It’s all about timing. 

Broken promises taste like ozone. 

Kal grew up just fine without me, happy and loved and untraumatized. It’s all about timing. 

Everyone leaves. 

Kara wishes she could explain exactly why Cat Grant makes her homesick, but even while completely surrounded by words and sentences and paragraphs and articles, she can’t manage to define it. 

Maybe it’s the way other humans balk at her blatant disregard to conventional social norms, or how relentlessly private she is, or even the way she relaxes into her position of authority, as though she was born for it. Sometimes Kara glances up from her desk and gets hit in the chest with it, and has to focus hard to remember the phone number of the photographer that Ms. Grant trusts with men’s fashion shoots. 

Earth is nothing like Krypton, except for all the moments that it is. Kara can never decide whether that makes it easier or harder.

Her hours are certainly worse than they were at Noonan’s, although the pay is enough to almost support her particular proclivity for Chinese takeout—which is saying something. She refuses CATCO’s insurance and babbles to distract when they try to ask her why, taking the extra money with visions of sugar-plums dancing in her head, or something. It's easier to blend in if she says a lot, because then no one really notices when she messes up an idiom or can't remember if it was John Adams or Adam Smith who played Ben in Parks and Recreation. She drowns out their confusion by chattering on about the weather, or a dog she saw that morning, or about the latest Beyoncé album. She comes off as a little kooky, hopefully a little sweet, annoyingly a little dumb, and altogether forgettable.

Kara keeps her head down. She does her job, and eats a lot of dumplings, and spends time with her sister. She takes the bus to work and breathes deeply and calmly on the elevator ride up to her floor. She doesn’t take sick days, but she fumbles office supplies and stumbles over thin air and chats non-stop about just about everything when people ask her questions. For all intents and purposes, she is completely and absolutely normal. 

This is what I want, she tells herself, like the broken oath she made the last time she saw her parents hasn't left a scar over her psyche.

This is what the House of El wanted, she tells herself, rubbernecking the TV behind Ms. Grant's desk that shows Superman holding up a crumbling building in Miami. Kal-El is strong of heart and spirit, and while he calls it something else entirely, he lives by the Eleven Virtues of Girod. He does Krypton and their House proud—her own pride over her involvement in that outcome is irrelevant.

This is what I want, she tells herself.

Then a plane starts to fall out of the sky.

Kara guides the plane to water and feels selfish and noble and Kryptonian and thinks: this is what I want.

Alex storms in, frustrated with being saved, at being alive, and Kara paints nothing but red and blue bowbuck leaves dancing in the wind for weeks and weeks and weeks.

She remembers sleeping past firstprayer, the lazy opening of her eyes first focusing on the glow of Rao’s rays on the fluttering branches. Red made redder. Blue stark against it like blood against her skin. 

Shame curdles in her belly at how she cherishes the days she neglected to wake before Rao to greet Him, at how she holds them closest to her heart. Her mother, calling for her from somewhere else in the apartment, her voice chastising. Kara, staying in bed for just a moment longer, watching the leaves shiver in His light. 

It never really felt like sleeping past firstprayer. Kara thinks it was maybe a kind of prayer within itself, and when she dons her House’s crest once more, all her canvas sees is leaves in morning sunlight. 

“I can’t believe we’re going to be working together!” Kara squeals and wiggles around on the couch, sending it skidding a foot to the left. “Oh, uhm, sorry.”

“Kara,” Alex groans. “Come on, can you not—stop grinning at me!”

“You’re grinning back!”

“I’m not,” Alex insists, rubbing at her mouth as though that will make the smile stay away. She's mostly given up on being annoyed at Kara's impulsive save. “I’m—this is serious, okay? This isn’t sister night out in the desert; it’s dangerous. Really dangerous.”

Kara bites at her lip. “Okay,” she agrees begrudgingly. 

“Thank you.”

“But we get to wear such cool outfits!”

“Kara.” 

“Oh, come on Alex, your all black tactical look is so cool, don’t pretend it’s not.” She shuffles across the couch, more careful this time, until she’s right in her sister’s space. “Do you do, um—like the little somersaults they do in movies? Like in Mission: Impossible?”

Alex grabs a throw pillow and starts beating her with it. “Be more professional,” she says, timing a hit with each word. 

Kara beams through it, hair knocked wild but otherwise unfazed. “That’s not a no,” she says, triumphant. “Can we have codenames? Can I call you—”

“No,” Alex interrupts. “You can call me Agent Danvers, Supergirl.”  

"Agent Danvers," Kara echoes in a deep voice. "Do your super agent friends know that you cry watching Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard?"

Alex points a finger in her face. "You won't if you want me to keep buying you donuts after training."

Kara opens her mouth, then closes it. Pouts. "Yeah, whatever," she mutters.

Kara soars above National City, the blue of the sky her backdrop, the red snap of her cape dancing in the wind. Her skin hums in the sunlight, and for the first time in years she lets go.

“Daughter of Alura,” the Branx growls. “We meet at last.”

On Krypton, once your first Name Day had passed, anyone was free to call you any part of the name you were given, familial or individual.

“I didn’t know you were looking for me,” Kara says, bringing her hands up to her hips. 

But if people had a connection to you, if there was any kind of intimacy, no matter how tangential, they would just name you by that relationship.

The Branx flexes all four of his arms and snarls. “I will achieve my vengeance through you!”

Cousin of Kal-El. Niece of Astra. Friend of Thara, Neighbor of Arun Dul-Ve, Classmate of Twe Rok. Daughter of Zor. Daughter of Alura. 

“I don’t think you will,” Kara tells the Branx softly. “I’m sorry about that.”

On Earth, Kara. Always Kara.

The Branx charges. Kara digs her heels into putty-soft concrete and braces for impact.

Kara’s world burns red once more, only it is not Him. It twists her up inside, finds all the loose and fractured parts and spits them out, until she’s watching herself terrorize the city she’s sworn to protect. 

It’s the worst kind of nightmare, because it isn’t a nightmare at all. It’s all Kara, all hidden inside of her, broken oaths that pour cleanly like water into a cup, just waiting for the right moment to come out. Once the Red Kryptonite is purged from her system, once she has sobbed herself hoarse upon waking to a broken armed Alex in the DEO, Kara spends weeks turning her face away from the sun. 

She wonders if the parts of herself she’d most like to bury are the Kryptonian or the human.

“Kara,” Alex says softly, “I’m worried about you.”

Kara stays stubbornly curled up on her side. She didn’t move when Alex let herself into the apartment, or found her buried in her covers, or sat tentatively on the edge of the bed, and she’s not going to move now that Alex is speaking gently and stroking her hair. “I’m fine,” she says.

The pit that lives where her stomach should be is dark and heavy. It sucks in everything around it, a black hole shocked back to life by a black mercy. She feels twelve years old. She feels fifty-seven years old. She feels too much.

“I don’t think you are,” Alex says, her voice cracking. The covers shift around and then Kara feels the feather weight of her sister wrapping around her. “I’m here, okay? I’m sorry that I’m not…” She exhales shakily. “Whatever I can do. I’m right here.”

Kara turns her face into the pillow and cries.

Astra dies. Astra is killed. Astra is—gone. Astra joins their people in the night sky, and leaves Kara behind.

Kara sits cross legged in the clouds and listens to “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods. 

She’s relieved that Astra spoke to her in English. She doesn’t know what she would’ve done, what she would’ve agreed to, if she once again heard her language flow like a breeze through the trees. If she’d said Kara’s name just right, had hit the first consonant in the way no one on Earth seems to be able to—

Well. Kara’s relieved, is the point.

People make mistakes

Fathers, 

Mothers,

People make mistakes.

Holding to their own

Thinking they’re alone.

"This is what humans wear, zhi?" Mon-El asks, gesturing at his outfit.

Kara's stomach turns over. It's only a syllable, a simple yes in a language that Kara thought she'd love to hear spoken once more, but it's all wrong. It comes without Kal's flat pronunciation, but the confident way it slips from Mon-El's mouth doesn't soothe the part of her that's always raw and stinging. Something about the way that his Daxamite accent wraps around her syllables and her words makes her want to throw up. 

“We should focus on your English,” she says. “It’ll be hard for you to integrate if you don’t.”

Kryptonian is a dead language, she doesn’t say. No one speaks it anymore. It was a language of a civilization that fell years and years and years and years—

-He’s a very nice Prince.

-And?

-And…it’s a very nice ball!

-And?

-And…when I entered they trumpeted.

-And the Prince?

-Oh, the Prince. 

-Yes, the Prince.

-Well, he’s tall.

-Is that all?

“Come in, Agent Danvers,” Kara says.

Her earpiece crackles. “You’ve got Danvers, Supergirl.” 

“The Eagle has landed.”

There’s the silence of loose static, then, “what?” 

“The Eagle,” Kara stresses, “has landed.” 

“Supergirl,” her sister says, her voice all exasperation, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

Kara pouts. “The Kaolokian showed up with the sonic weapons he’s selling.”

“So, say that,” Alex mutters. “Backup team en route to you, Supergirl. Bust ‘em up.” 

“Copy that, Thing 2.”

“Hold on, why the fuck am I Thing 2—”

“Going off coms,” Kara says cheerfully. “Catch you on the flip side.”

-Did you dance? Is he charming? They say that he’s charming.

-We did nothing but dance.

-Yes…and?

-And it made a nice change!

-No, the Prince.

-Oh, the Prince.

-Yes, the Prince.

-He has charm for a prince, I guess.

-You guess?

-I don’t meet a wide range…and it’s all very strange.

Lena Luthor’s water bottle reads Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Mens et Manus on one side. “Mind and hand,” Kara says. The phrase tickles something in the back of her head.

Lena raises her eyebrows. “You know Latin?”

“I—” Kara’s face goes hot. “I took a few years of it in high school. Nothing serious.” She gets back to her list of questions, only stuttering a little as she tries to ease back into the interview.

Later, patrolling high above the rooftops of National City, Kara thinks of her father. The memory strikes her quickly and without warning, a rare day where she got to go into work with him, where she got to take in the looping architecture of the Guild she knew she would one day devote her life to. The stylized Kryptonian text had stretched across the entrance: creation of reasoning through sinew. 

It sounds better in Kryptonian, but Kara thinks she likes the Latin version just as much. 

She thinks it's noble, to try and live outside of the shadow your family casts. It's human, in the best way possible.

She thinks of Lena, often. She thinks, sing in me, Rao. 

-Did he speak? Did he flirt? Could you tell right away he was royalty? Is he sensitive, clever, well-mannered, considerate, passionate, charming, as kind as he's handsome, as wise as he's rich, is he everything you've ever wanted?

-Would I know?

-Well, I know.

-But how can you know what you want ‘till you get what you want and you see if you like it?

She invites Lena over to watch Beauty and the Beast with her, unaware that it’s going to kickstart a tradition she will build into her heart. Lena likes Belle, and Kara likes seeing someone with too much unfamiliar power learn how to touch someone else gently. It’s a safe movie to watch with a friend. It’s not Lilo and Stitch, or the Little Mermaid. Kara doesn’t have to hide her sniffles as a little blue alien finds a family or a red haired mermaid loves a world she struggles to understand. 

But Kara can sing along with Gaston’s song to make Lena laugh, and she seizes the opportunity with aplomb. Lena laughs and laughs, her nose scrunched up, sinking into Kara’s couch like it was made for her. There are still faint giggles coming from the other cushion when the scene changes, when the cold feeling of space seeps through Kara’s mind. 

Krypton is gone, she thinks, and you’re singing. 

Belle finds her way to the Beast—to Adam, Kara corrects herself. His name is Adam. It’s only when Lena’s soft, warm hand covers her own that she realizes the kernels of popcorn in her hand more resemble cornmeal. Kara isn't hungry.

“Sorry,” she says, feeling her face flush. “This part always scared me a little.” She dusts the fragments into the mostly empty bowl. 

“It’s okay.” Lena keeps her hand outstretched on the couch between them. After taking a deep breath and focusing on her control, Kara reaches out to grab onto it. 

Their hands stay clasped for the rest of the movie. Kara can only half pay attention; she’s too focused on keeping her grip loose and casual, on not letting the barely sweet scent of Lena’s perfume get to her head. 

“You know,” Lena says over the credits, “sometimes, when I look at you…” 

“What?”

“Your eyes are so sad,” Lena whispers. “Sometimes I swear I’ve never seen anyone so sad before.”

It’s a little moment, in the grand scheme of things. Kara deflects with a joke and cajoles Lena into cracking open a carton of rocky road, but later she’ll wish that she’d sat in it for a moment longer. That she’d let Lena see, for just a second. Just a breath. She’ll wish that she’d said, sometimes I think the same thing about you, but in Kara's experience wishes are fickle, untrustworthy little things.

What I want most of all is to know what I want.

When you know you can’t have what you want what’s the profit in wishing?

Under a mountain of blankets, curled up around her laptop with salty-wet cheeks, Kara watches a grainy YouTube video of the original broadway cast of Into the Woods. 

“Leave,” the pixelated Cinderella says, turning her back on her straying husband.

“Is that what you truly want?” The Prince asks. When Cinderella nods, he adds, “I shall always love the maiden who ran away.”

“And I the far-off Prince,” Cinderella responds.

Every speck of humanity she struggled to understand made sense once she looked at it through the lens of two and a half hours of a musical about folk stories. The beats and pauses, the turns of phrase, the relationships pulled together and torn apart. Kara understood. She just didn’t think she would be coming back to keep understanding.

The atmosphere sags with lead. Kara can taste it with every breath, and she finds, now that she’s finally been the one to stay behind, to send someone else away—she doesn’t think it was the dull side of the knife after all.

“Sometimes people leave you,” Kara mumble-sings, eyes fixed on the dark horizon to the east, “halfway through the wood.” 

She takes a deep breath, inhales the grime and smog and salt air. With a squint of her eyes, she begins to detect the slightest brightening of the sky. 

“Others may deceive you,” she continues. “You decide what’s good. You decide alone.”

A pigeon flaps its way to the AC window unit the floor below. It settles there, fluffs up its feathers, and begins to coo. 

“But no one is alone,” Kara whispers. 

The quiet sounds of night shift workers making their way home are slowly drowned out by alarm clocks and screeching teapots. The sky breaks into brilliant orange and pink and everything in between—the first rays hit Kara’s skin and the rush of overstimulation that comes with it almost stings. 

Earth’s sun is not her God. The only red rays it ever sheds are illusions and refractions. This sun gives her abilities beyond the most daring fantasies, and she sees how that could be worth worship, but that doesn’t make it Him. Faith doesn’t have anything to do with proof and power. Rao’s light shines on debris; Kara wonders if He too is lonely, and longs to cast her shadow once more.

The day has properly dawned. Across the city, a gentle series of chimes are the precursor to the slight increase of Lena’s heart rate. 

Kara closes her eyes. “I wish,” she says. 

Maggie leaves. Alex is something adjacent to broken, haphazardly glued together by her desire for the future she wants. Her sister had truly let herself want for the first time, had been swept away by it, only to find out that it wasn’t exactly the right want for the life she was building.

Kara doesn’t know how humans do it, filled up to their ears with wishes, guarding them like secrets. It’s exhausting.

She plants her sister on her couch. She buys six family size bags of Doritos, and the two of them get their fingertips progressively more and more covered in orange dust as they chug through the Fast and Furious franchise. It won’t fix anything, but she hopes it might help.

“How is it,” Alex says twenty minutes into Tokyo Drift, her voice stuffy, “that Doritos are just so fucking good?”

Kara holds up a little orange triangle, squints until she can make out the little crystalline structures of salt. “Crow’s toes,” she says. 

Alex blinks, frowns, then cracks a smile. “Dog’s nightgown.”

Kara throws a Dorito at her sister, who’s laughing like Kara can’t even seem to remember. “Weak sauce, Agent Danvers.”

“You know, some people say 'dog's bollocks'.'” 

"No they don't."

"I swear! It's a thing in, like, England."

"Humans are so weird."

“Why am I not surprised that you love musicals?” Lena asks, grinning as Kara advocates hard for the Sound of Music. 

“Lena,” Kara says in a scandalized tone. “Do you not love musicals?”

Lena is already laughing. 

“This isn’t a laughing matter! You grew up in Metropolis, Lena, are you seriously telling me you don’t love Phantom of the Opera? Wicked?”

Lena makes a valiant effort to squash her smile. “The Luthors were more actual opera people, I’m afraid. Never made it to the musicals, but I’ve seen La Boheme at least six times.”

“But not Rent?” 

With a slightly self-conscious wince, Lena shakes her head. 

“Okay, well,” Kara stalls, trying to cool her reaction to refrain from making Lena feel bad. She reaches for the popcorn on the table, even though she swore to herself she wouldn’t start it until they picked something to watch. “Well, that’s fine! We can watch some together, if you want to. I mean, not all of them are good movies, but that’s—oh my gosh you’ve never seen Into the Woods.”

“They just made a movie,” Lena says proudly, clearly pleased that she’s tuned into some kind of pop culture. 

“Right,” Kara confirms, her voice weak. “Yeah, totally, there’s that, but also the original cast recorded a performance and I think maybe that’s a better way to experience the show? Obviously we can watch whatever you want to, it’s fine with me. Totally. I mean, Bernadette Peters is kind of hard to top—I’m still so confused how she lost the Tony that year—”

“Kara,” Lena interrupts, starting to laugh. “Breathe.”

Kara breathes.

“We can watch whatever version you’d like,” she soothes. “This one, it’s your favorite? Into the Woods?” She says it carefully, like she’s committing it to memory.

“Yeah, probably,” Kara says, like she doesn’t know every tricky line and note. “I mean, it’s definitely up there.”

Lena props an elbow on the back of the couch and leans in. Her eyes are intense, like she’s the one with x-ray vision. “What do you like about it?”

“It’s really complicated,” Kara starts immediately, the words tumbling out of her like she was waiting for someone to ask. “Like, it never really goes the way you expect it to, but that’s the best part. It takes all of these fairy tales—Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood—and it smashes them together in one big story, so they’re all in and out of each others’ lives and, like, progressing each others’ plots. They get their happy endings, but then you get to see what happens after that, and it isn't what any of them anticipate. Their lives don't work out the way they thought they would, and they all have to deal with that, you know? And all of the characters are so real. They’re so complex, I feel like every time I see it the actor finds a new way to read the lines. Um, yeah,” she finishes lamely. 

Lena’s closer than she was when Kara started ranting. She reaches out and takes only a single piece of popcorn—yet another reason for Kara to marvel at her—and asks, “complex how?”

“They all want something,” Kara says, staring right into piercing green. “They’ve all got a wish, but those wishes don't turn out the way they think they will. There’s this song near the end where this character, the Baker’s Wife—”

“She doesn’t have a name?” Lena interrupts.

“They’re both just called the Baker and the Baker’s Wife.”

“So, she’s defined by her husband? Barf.”

Kara throws a piece of popcorn at her. “Can I finish?”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“She has this song called ‘Moments in the Woods.’ It’s kind of—well, she’s just slept with Cinderella’s Prince kind of out of nowhere—”

“She cheats on the Baker?” Lena interrupts again.

“Yeah.” Kara munches on another handful of popcorn. “And then she sings about it, you know? Because it’s a—”

“—a musical.”

“Exactly, yeah. And the song is kind of about, like—how you can want two opposing things, one more realistic and one more of a fantasy, and ultimately you kind of have to choose between them. Only, sometimes you get them both, but only for a second. And after that second, when you’re back to having only one of those things, you see the distinction between them more clearly. Because you’ve had them both. Only it can’t ever last.”

“What does she choose?” Lena asks. Her face got more and more pensive as Kara spoke, and her voice has grown quieter to reflect it. “Or who does she choose, I guess.”

“Well, she recognizes that the Prince is just a fantasy of the woods. If that was her life, then it wouldn’t be special at all, right? It was special because it was fleeting, and it can’t ever be her life. So, she picks the Baker, technically,” Kara says, picking out a particularly buttery piece of popcorn. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“No?”

“It’s a spoiler.”

“I don’t mind.”

“She dies right after.”

“Oh.”

“I really love the song, though,” Kara continues. “I don’t know, I’ve found myself listening to it recently. The way she’s caught between two things she wants…it can apply to a lot.”

Lena’s eyebrow quirks up. “Like, say…cinnamon bun or cruller?”

Kara snorts. “Yup.” Another handful of popcorn. “Anyway, each song is kind of like that. Makes you think. I guess that’s why it’s my favorite.” She’s reaching for more, her mouth still full, when Lena’s hand grips her wrist. 

“Kara.” Lena’s thumb strokes along her pulse. “What’s on your mind?”

Kara swallows hard. “I just feel like—do you ever feel like you’ve trapped yourself into a choice? Like you wanted to have it all, so you refused to choose, only you didn’t realize that in itself was a choice?”

Lena scooches closer, slips her grip from Kara’s wrist so that they’re holding hands. “I do run one of the largest business conglomerates in the world,” she says airily. “I might have an experience or two with choices.”

“But you always make the right choice,” Kara protests feebly. The grip Lena has on her hand feels like it's sending sparks all the way up her arm, across her chest, slowly filling her up with warmth. “You always know what to do.”

“I’m glad it comes off that way, but that’s far from the truth,” Lena admits. “I’m only human, Kara. So are you. It comes with the territory. Try not to let it twist you up so much, alright?”

Kara smiles so she won’t cry. “Right,” she agrees.

People make mistakes.

Fathers,

“Hi, Uncle Jor,” Kara says quietly, gazing at the blue flicker of the hologram. Its light bounces off the ice sheets of the Fortress.

“Greetings, Kara Zor-El,” he says. “How can I help you?”

“Oh, I don’t have a question,” she admits. “You just, um…” She clears her throat. “Everyone always said that you and Ukr looked alike, you know? I never saw it.”

“Zor-El and I were often mistaken for each other,” the hologram says. 

“Yeah,” Kara agrees. “I see it now.”

Mothers,

Kara lands on the asteroid with Mon-El, and together they wander, on edge, until she ends up with her hand pressed against a stone slab carved with Kryptonian. She blinks, focuses, and her brain finally starts to pick out the words.

“‘And on Earth the soul is lost in destruction,’” she reads under her breath.

“Kara?”

“‘May their flames forever burn in Rao’s Light.’” Her fingers trace the dips and curves of the characters. “This is a Kryptonian memorial.”

“This is Krypton?”

“No.” Kara recalls the view from J’onn’s spaceship as they descended, the dome stretched over a crystalline city. “Argo.”

Half a dozen Kelex units surround them, demanding they identify themselves, but a clear, confident voice commands them to stand down. Kara turns to face it and sees—her aunt?

I’m sorry, she hears in the back of her head, I’m not authorized to give you that information. 

“Mom?” she asks.

Later, she won’t know who hugged who first; all she’ll know is the way her mother’s fingers had clutched at her shoulders, her arms, the back of her head. How she’d smelled the same, how Kara was both twelve and fifty-seven at the same time.

She'll remember her own name, whispered into her hair, pronounced perfectly.

Their reunion is all rushed questions, the Kryptonian stumbling off Kara’s tongue. Kara forgets to cover her face as she cries, but she doesn't feel the burn of embarrassment, even as the security guards around them respectfully avert their gazes as her mother brushes the tears from Kara’s cheeks.

“We didn’t know that your father’s shield would keep us alive,” her mother says, her voice breaking. “We never would have sent you away if we knew. I—I thought you lost to the Phantom Zone.” She takes a step back, clasps her hands in front of her, the very image of her ghostly hologram back on Earth.

Kara closes her eyes and breathes. It’s everything she ever wanted to hear, landing just like she had, years too late.

“If you didn’t know I was alive and you weren’t searching for me," her mother continues, "what brought you here?” 

Kara tries to focus on her mission, tries to stamp down the emotions clawing their way up her throat, and mostly succeeds. It’s a jumble of sentences, a not nearly detailed enough account of the Worldkillers, but the concern that sparks in her mother’s eyes is enough to get her through it. 

“I stopped two of them but one remains. Reign. She’s terrorizing Earth. She’s murdering indiscriminately, hurting the people I—” The words halt in her mouth, and the rest of the sentence tumbles out of her in her adopted language. “Hurting the people I love. We think we found something that could stop her, and we followed its radiation signature here.”

Her mother’s chin drops. “Harun-El,” she says.

Everybody makes

One another's

Terrible mistakes

All the times Kara’s thought of Rao, has imagined her life as a fully fledged member of the Science Guild, has tried to picture the match she would build her life with, she never once thought that she would wake up one day and no longer want to be a Kryptonian. 

She never thought she would once again walk the crystal streets of Argo only to long for National City’s concrete slabs. She never thought, if given the chance to return home, she would find that it wasn’t home any longer. 

Kara’s lived on Earth longer than she lived on Krypton, and lived in the Phantom Zone longer than both times combined. Home is a tricky word; Kara hears it and thinks Alex. Eliza. James, Winn, J’onn, Catco, Chinese food, Noonan’s, everything green. 

Lena. Lena. Lena. 

“And you think of all of the things you’ve seen,” Kara mumble-sings into the reverberation of J’onn’s ship, the pinprick stars all around her. “And you wish that you could live in between. And you’re back again, only different than before.” She breathes in, then out. “After the sky.”

"Are you singing?" Mon-El asks.

Krypton is not gone.

"Yeah," Kara answers.

“Hey, Kal—Clark,” Kara corrects, pausing for a second to consider deleting her message and starting again before continuing on. “It’s Kara. I just got back from the Fortress and noticed the Kryptonian program was pulled up, and uh…” She blows out a big breath. “I know it was hard, when I was younger, for me to, I don’t know—” The laugh that comes out of her throat sounds only a little strangled. “Rao, we both know I was obnoxious about you speaking Kryptonian, and I’m sorry. I’d love to help you out, if you, uhm…if you’d want that. Yeah. Uh, call me back. Love you.”

Sister night. Ice cream, and Thai food, and old episodes of Psych. 

“What’d you end up doing this week?”

Kara hums around a spoonful of Phish Food. Lena's been out of town since last Saturday. “Saw a play,” she says. 

“Which one? Into the Woods again?”

“No, it was called Where We Belong.”

Alex swaps out her carton—salted caramel—with Kara’s. “Never heard of it. Good?”

“It was a one woman show.” Kara takes a big bite. “It was really good. I’ve kind of been…I don’t know, upset? Ever since I saw it. But it was good.”

Alex grunts her worried grunt, which is different from her annoyed grunt and amused grunt. “What was it about?”

“Shakespeare,” Kara says. “Colonialism. Language.” She taps her spoon against the melting ice cream. “Duty to your culture and your ancestors,” she adds, “and…flying. A lot about flying.”

Alex’s hand, cold from where she’s been clutching sweating cardboard, strokes back Kara’s loose and messy hair. “Sounds like a lot,” she says quietly. 

Kara covers her eyes with one hand only a moment before the tears start to fall. “Something she said,” Kara warbles, “the playwright, she said that in her culture, no matter where you go, you can no more leave the land of your home than leave behind a leg.” Her tears are hot against her palm. 

“Oh, Kara,” Alex whispers, shifting closer and taking the ice cream from her lap. She pulls her into a hug next, where Kara can hide her tears in a soft t-shirt. “Shh. Hey, I’m right here.” Her hand rubs along Kara’s back. 

Slowly, carefully, Kara drops more and more of her weight against Alex’s shoulder. As long as she doesn’t do it all at once, she isn’t really that much heavier than a human, and once she’s done she can truly relax. She can cry and be held, and that’s all she has to do think about. 

“There you go,” Alex mumbles. “Let as much of it out as you want, yeah?”

Kara nods weakly. “She also said, um—” She clears her throat. “‘We all have ancestors at our backs,’” she quotes. 

“Sounds like it was a good one.”

“It was. It just…”

“…made you sad?”

“Little bit. I’m glad I saw it, though. It was kind of cathartic.” With a deep breath, she sits back and wipes her cheeks. “Thanks.”

Alex pushes her hair out of her face again. “Any time.” 

“I think sometimes it would be easier if I had English words in Kryptonian,” Kara says, “and Kryptonian words in English.”

Alex slumps back into the couch cushions, but latches onto Kara’s hand. “How so?”

“Some things—from both places—they just don’t translate right. I've tried with other languages, too, but it can be hard to even explain to myself what I mean.” 

“Like what?”

Kara sighs. “Love is very different. In English it’s so…all encompassing. Kryptonian is a lot more specific, but doesn’t cover as much.”

“Like, different words for romantic and platonic kinds of love?” 

“Yeah,” Kara says with a furrowed brow. “Yeah. Romantic love, that’s the blank spot.”

Alex sits up again. “Blank spot? There wasn’t…”

Kara’s chest aches at Alex’s casual use of the past tense. “There’s no word for that,” she says. 

“But there were marriages,” Alex says. “Your parents were bonded; you told me about their bracelets.”

“They were matched,” Kara confirms, blushing and wishing she knew why. “And they—they loved each other, certainly, but it wasn’t like here. Marriages were more contracts between houses. Ze and El more than Alura and Zor.”

“Arranged marriages, then.”

Kara wrinkles her nose. “But that comes with all sorts of Earth connotations,” she complains, “and my parents did love each other. They never would have stood on the Jewel of Honor and bound themselves in Rao’s Light if they didn’t.”

“But it was different,” Alex says. “That's what you mean by wishing you had the right words?”

Kara deflates, nods. “Yeah.”

“Do you…” Alex licks her lips, then starts again. “Do you feel romantic love in the way we define it on Earth?”

Kara tries her best to smile. “That’s a good question,” she says. “I…think so?”

Alex looks stricken. “Have you felt pressured into—”

“No,” Kara cuts her off. 

Alex closes her eyes and exhales, the line of her shoulders all relief. 

“But at the same time,” Kara continues slowly, “I’ve never been quite sure if the way I feel about sex is the way my partner does. Even when it’s been good and fun, it’s always felt…human.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No," Kara admits. "Maybe it did, once, but now..." She shrugs. "Actually, can I, um—can I ask you something?”

“Duh.”

“I don’t want to upset you.” Kara squeezes her hand the tiniest bit. “It’s really just a question.”

Alex looks dubious, but still says, "go for it.”

“Why’d you push me so hard into Mon-El?” There’s no accusation or hurt in her voice, just plain curiosity.

"Oh." Alex’s expression shutters. Her thumb grazes across Kara’s knuckles. “It was so…new for me, to be with someone who made me feel more like myself. Revelatory. Like all the pieces of myself I thought were broken were really just waiting for the puzzle to fit into, you know?” Her lower lip trembles. “And there’s so much I can’t share with you, even though I want to,” she says. “So much I can’t understand, even when I’m trying so hard to. Like right now. I know you feel like you have to shut a part of yourself off, like you have to hide, and I thought, maybe—I thought he might be able to give you a little piece of home. You could share a piece of yourself and know it would be understood.” She smiles sadly. “He could be someone you could talk to.”

Kara exhales shakily, hot pressure behind her eyes again. She knows Alex is talking more about language, but still feels the need to say, “I can talk to you.” 

“But it’s not the same.”

“It’s better,” Kara insists, rash and honest. “Home is more than—than planet proximity, or similar grammatical patterns. It’s acceptance, and inside jokes, and…” Her voice trails off. 

“And?” Alex prompts. 

“Ukiem.” Kara makes sure to look her Sister in the eye as she says it. 

“Ukiem,” Alex echoes terribly. 

Kara can’t help but think of the A- in Spanish that marred Alex’s otherwise perfect high school transcript. “The affection and devotion you hold for family,” Kara translates. “One of Krypton’s kinds of love.” When Alex’s lip starts to tremble again, Kara says, “you’re my Sister, Alex. We’re…” She searches for a phrase Alex will understand. “We’re like two peas in a pod.”

Alex slumps into her, messy limbs and grasping fingertips. Kara knows with absolute certainty that she has been heard. 

All right, what do you want?

Have to make a decision.

Why not stay and be caught?

Should I give that a thought,

What would be her response?

But then what if she knew

Who I am when I know

That I'm not what she thinks

That she wants?

“Well, frankly I’m only working with Supergirl to save Sam because I have no other choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what’s that old adage: ‘never meet your idols, it’ll only lead to disappointment?’”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, Supergirl’s not all truth and justice like she pretends to be. You know she had James break into L-Corp and search my private vault?”

“I—I’m sure she had a really good reason.”

“Of course, James didn’t do it.”

“Really?”

“Well, no. We’ve been dating each other for months. He knows me and he trusts me, and I trust him. Supergirl went behind my back and used my personal relationships against me. That’s something my mother would do. She crossed a line. I can never trust her again.”

But then how can you know

Who you are 'til you know

What you want? Which I don't

So then which do you pick—

Where you're safe, out of sight

And yourself, but where everything's wrong?

Or where everything's right

But you know that you'll never belong?

“The otters should be—” Lena frowns down at the map in her hand. “To our right? I think?”

Kara snorts into her third ice cream cone of the day. “You think?”

Lena glares at her, but her twitching lip gives away her true feelings. “I have three PhDs, Kara. The fault is with the map, not me.”

Chortling, Kara reaches out to pry said map from her grasp. “It's a map of a zoo, how hard can—oh, wow.”

“Put that Studio Art major to use, Ms. Danvers, and please interpret that piece of abstract art so that we get to the otters before the feeding starts.” In her most serious tone, she adds, "it's Squid Wednesday, and I don't want to miss it."

“You think you cover up the disdain in your tone of voice when you mention my degree, but you never quite do,” Kara teases, rotating the glossy, flimsy map ninety degrees. “I think we’re next to that green blob right now?”

“That’s the flamingos.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s the lemurs, see?” Kara points awkwardly with her pinky, the rest of her hand still wrapped tightly around her rapidly melting ice cream. She takes a massive bite to keep from having a totally sticky hand for the rest of the day and ends up smearing pistachio all over her chin.

“Oh, I think I see it now, we’re—Kara,” Lena interrupts herself, giggling. “You’re a mess, darling, come here.”

Kara lets Lena wipe her face with a napkin, grinning around her cold mouthful. 

“I should’ve known agreeing to go to the zoo with you would just mean buying you ice cream every fifteen feet,” Lena jokes, softly dragging the napkin across the dip below Kara’s lower lip. “How you never get a brain freeze, I’ll never know.”

Kara feels strangely fragile in her grasp, even as they stand in direct sunlight. “You want to see the otters eat lunch just as bad as me,” she protests after swallowing a little too quickly. “This is a perfect day off.”

Lena hums, squinting at Kara’s face and then finally stepping back with a sharp nod. “Maybe so,” she says. “We’re going that way?”

“Think so.” Kara raises her ice cream to her mouth again, and her brief exhale before she takes a bite covers one side of the scoop in frost. She pops nearly the whole thing in her mouth to hide the evidence.

Lena looks up from putting the map in her purse and starts laughing. “It’s like watching an anaconda eat. You should have your own exhibit.”

Kara mumbles an unintelligible complaint and starts walking—hopefully—towards the otters. She sticks one hand out in Lena’s direction, scoffing at the wary look she gets in response. Around the dessert still in her mouth, she says, “it’s not sticky, I promise. Ice cream was in this one.” She wiggles the still tacky fingers.

Lena takes her clean hand and moves closer, so their arms brush with every step. She lets Kara lead them to the otters, her grip loose but unyielding.

Kara looks over at her, sees the curve of her jawline and catches a whiff of perfume. The neckline of her blouse is low, the cut of her lipstick a harsh ruby. A tree casts long shadows across the pathway, but Kara burns.

She slows her gait to walk by Lena’s side. She warms her breath to ask what Lena wants to see after the otters have been fed. She softens her touch, so that Lena might hold on for just a moment longer.

Or, then, what if I am?

What a Prince would envision?

“Lena Luthor,” Kara says slowly, a grin taking over half of her face. “What’s this?”

Lena wanders back over from the kitchen with a newly full glass of wine clutched in one hand and blanches when she sees what Kara has found. “I can explain—”

“That you’re a secret romantic?” Kara crows. She flips open the back cover of the book. “‘Nizar Qabbani was revered by generations of Arabs for his sensual and romantic verse,’” Kara reads. “ Sensual. Lena, you’ve been holding out on me.”

Lena flops down onto her pristine white couch, not even coming close to spilling a drop of her red wine. “Holding out?” She repeats, bringing her glass up to take a liberal chug. “One of our first fights was about The Iliad.” 

“Because you said your favorite part was the Catalogue of Ships!” Kara protests, slipping right back into their disagreement. She shakes the book of poetry. “No one who gave that answer would have a book of sensual and romantic verse hanging about.”

“Here I am,” Lena says with a lazy grin, “a conundrum wrapped in a riddle.”

Kara’s mouth tries to smile back, but she bites down on it at the last moment. “I’ve heard you say, on multiple occasions,” she continues on, holding up a finger to keep Lena from interrupting, “that if you wanted to waste your time with humanities classes you would’ve ‘just gone to an Ivy League.’”

“I took economics,” Lena says with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s a humanities course.”

“Oh my gosh.” Kara flops down onto the other side of the couch, the book held tight to her chest. “How are you my best friend?”

Lena taps a dramatic finger against her chin. “Maybe it’s something to do with my open mind? Evidenced by, say, a book of poetry?”

Kara’s heart does something terrible in her own chest. “You’ve read it?”

“Mm.” Her gaze lingers on the book briefly, then comes back up to meet Kara’s eyes. “Twice, actually. Wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything with my STEM oriented bachelor’s, masters, or PhDs.”

Kara laughs and tosses the book over to Lena’s side of the couch. “What’s your favorite, then, Dr. Dr. Dr. Luthor?”

Lena puts her—now nearly empty—glass of wine on the coffee table and takes the book with a little laugh she’d never admit was a giggle. “It was a short one,” she says, flipping through the pages. “Brevity and wit, and all that.”

“Of course.”

“Here it is: ‘My Lover Asks Me.’” She flips the book around, open to the correct page, and holds it out for Kara to take.

Kara grasps the spine gently and runs a reverent finger down the tiny stanza on the page. “My lover asks me,” she reads, “‘What is the difference between me and the sky?’ / The difference, my love / Is that when you laugh / I forget about the sky.’” 

She looks up to see Lena draining the last of her wine.

“Who did the translations?” Kara asks softly. She has an inkling that Lena will know the answer.

“Frangieh and Brown,” Lena says. “What did you think?” Her words come out overly enunciated, the way they always do when she’s even a little nervous.

“Beautiful.” Kara closes the book with a quiet snap. “You’ve got good taste.”

“Isn’t art subjective?”

Kara rolls her eyes. “Well, yeah, but some things are just gorgeous. Van Gogh’s Cafe Terrace at Night. Dali, The Persistence of Memory. Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. That poem.” She puts the book on the coffee table.

“Broadway Boogie Woogie?” Lena echoes. “You’re joking.”

“If I learned the MIT football chant for you, you can learn about Mondrian,” Kara scoffs.

“We have a football team?” Lena asks. There's genuine shock in her voice. “Who do we play, Girl Scout Troop #42?”

“Lena.” 

“I honestly didn’t know!”

“You said we’d go to a game the next time you had to go to Boston, instead of just doing the Museum of Science again.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious I was joking,” Lena admits, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “What’s the chant?”

With flaming cheeks, Kara chants, “Secant, Tangent, cosine, sine, 3 point 1 4 1 5 9! Integral, radical, Mu, DV, slipstick, sliderule, MIT!” 

“No,” Lena groans through her laughter, “that’s so nerdy.”

“Well, we’re going to be cheering it together next time we’re in Boston,” Kara threatens. “So get memorizing.”

Lena must hear something sincere in her voice, because she asks, “Why football? Why not the MFA or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? If you’re going to be picking our outing, I mean. Did Jeremiah…”

“No.” Kara picks at one of her fingers, the familiar, acidic guilt crawling back up her throat. “No, he hated football, actually. And my parents weren’t really athletic, either, I just—there’s this ritual to it, you know? To all sports, really. Weird rules that everyone follows because that's just the way it's done. That's the part I like to watch that, I think.”

“You’re the most fascinating person I know.”

“Lena,” Kara complains, blushing furiously.

Lena smiles. Her expression is only a little devious. “What? You are.”

Kara just buries her face into the back of the couch, hating the feeling in her chest, her stomach, her heart.

“Kara,” Lena says, her voice soft. Kara can smell the wine on her breath all the way from the other side of the couch, their stretched out legs between them. 

“Mm?” She raises her head, faces stunning green with an aching throat.

“You know I think you’re brilliant, don’t you?” Lena’s eyebrows pucker together with concern. “I’m only ever just teasing.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?” Lena sighs, one side of her mouth lifting slightly. “You really do understand most of my science babble better than most of my colleagues, and that’s—not that you wouldn’t be brilliant if you didn’t,” she hastily corrects herself. “I know that different people have different strengths, and your profession is such a noble one. And…you’re laughing.”

“Lena.” Kara shakes her head. “You don't have to worry about me. I know, okay? Promise.” She pauses, then says, “I know you.” 

“Mortifying,” Lena drawls.

“‘Mortifying,’” Kara repeats, affecting an exaggeratedly airy tone of speaking, a purposefully bad impression. 

Lena laughs.

And Kara forgets.

Must it all be either less or more?

Either plan or grand?

Is it always ‘or?’

Is it never ‘and?’

“You’re a writer, Kara,” Lena says, not even visibly tipsy on the whiskeys she’s been knocking back since they left Kaznian air space. “You have to have a favorite word.”

“Oh, I have to, huh?” Kara tries to joke. 

Lena kicks off her heels and props her feet up on the chair facing her, the one to Kara’s right. Kara wishes the private jet weren’t so small—it’s like she’s drowning in the scent of Lena’s perfume.

“Yes,” Lena says. “It doesn’t even have to be in English. Ex nihilo nihil fit.” 

“That’s a phrase,” Kara objects, “phrases are different from words.”

“Kara Danvers. Will you stop—being a party pooper, and distract me?”

Kara bursts into laughter. “Party pooper? Have you ever said that before?”

“Kara,” Lena whines.

“Okay, okay,” Kara agrees, slouching in her seat as she thinks. “There’s, ah—” She clears her throat. “There’s a language in India called Boro, and it has this word: onsra. It’s the bittersweet feeling you get when you know a love won’t last.”

Lena puts her once-again empty tumbler down. “That’s sad,” she says quietly. 

“Mm.” Kara looks out the window at the clouds, trying her best not to think of the desperate way Lena had wrapped her up in a hug, relieved down to the bone that she was safe. Onsra. Do they both feel it?

“Do you speak that?” Lena asks suddenly. “Boro, you said? I know you took Latin, and I’ve heard you speak Spanish—”

“No,” Kara lies. What’s an inch added on top of a mile? “No, I just saw it somewhere.”

-Why you do

What you do

That’s the point

All the rest of it

Is chatter.

-No, it’s not.

-If the thing you do 

Is pure in intent

If it’s meant

And it's just a little bent

Does it matter?

-Yes!

-No, what matters 

Is that everyone tells tiny lies

What’s important, really, is the size.

-What?

“I killed my brother for you, for our friends! Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

I'll be better off there

Where there's nothing to choose

So there's nothing to lose

Kara manages to watch Into the Woods all the way through to Cinderella's big song, ‘On the Steps of the Palace.’ It’s a comfort more than anything else, a pure fantasy in a world where people sing when they feel too much to talk, and she knows it well enough that she doesn’t have to really pay attention. It’s mindless. Kara doesn’t want to think, not when she can curl up under her coziest blanket and watch Cinderella decide to leave a single shoe behind for her prince.

“Wait, though thinking it through—things don’t have to collide,” the Cinderella on screen sings, a relieved expression on her face. “You know what your decision is: which is not to decide.” 

Kara reaches for the TV remote and turns it off with a shaking thumb. The flimsy piece of plastic, the soft buttons and acrid batteries—they all shatter like spun sugar, and rain down on her couch like snow. Her tears follow not long after.

I wish,

more than anything,

more than the moon,

“I swear I wished on every shooting star and four leaf clover for that Betty Spaghetty doll,” Kelly says, laughing her way through most of the words. “The black one, I think her name was Hannah? She had purple hair. Oh, I drove my mom crazy begging for purple hair. A mohawk, too. It’s stunning she didn’t know I was a lesbian until I told her.” 

Alex groans and hides her face behind one hand. “I did the thing where you flip your ponytail up under a hat to make it look like you’ve got short hair at least once a week. Always hidden in the bathroom where no one would see, too. Is that not the most LGBT thing in the fuckin’ world, or what?”

“Oh, babe.” Kelly unsuccessfully smothers a giggle. “I’m going to tease you about that for the rest of time.”

Alex rolls her eyes. “Okay, purple mohawk. Is there some fancy psychologist term for that? Like, baby gay experimenting with a heavy dose of terror?” 

“‘Sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched,’” Kara mumbles. 

Kelly’s laugh peters out as she glances over at Kara, who’s either staring at or through the wall. “Is that a Kryptonian saying?” She asks, carefully curious.

“What?” Kara snaps back to Alex’s living room. “No, that’s from Into the Woods. You know, the musical?”

Alex groans. “Kara, don’t start.”

“I didn’t even sing anything!” 

“You were about to.”

Kara rolls her eyes. She’s not not tired, but she gets up anyway. She doesn’t really feel up to socializing. “I’m gonna smack the grass, I think.”

Kelly blinks at her and then glances over to her girlfriend.

“Hit the hay,” Alex translates.

Kara wrinkles her nose. “Right. Alliteration.”

“Stick to the food idioms, kiddo.”

“Mm. Night.”

“Goodnight, Kara,” Kelly says.

“Love you,” Alex calls out once Kara has one foot swung out of the window. In English, you can sometimes drop the subject of a sentence if there's enough context.

“Love you, too,” Kara responds, shooting off into the sky in the next moment. The air is colder than usual, but Kara doesn’t mind. She can't feel anything at all.

I wish,

more than life,

The Baker’s Wife asks, “will we find each other in the woods again?” 

Cinderella’s Price steps away. “This was just a moment in the woods,” he sings. “Our moment, shimmering and lovely and sad. Leave the moment, just be glad for the moment that we had. Every moment is a moment in the woods.” He kisses her grandly, romantically, over the top the way everything on a stage has to be. “Goodbye,” he says. 

And Kara is sobbing. In her ten years of humming along to Sondheim, she’s seen herself in the golden slippers of Cinderella and the wolf’s pelt of Little Red. She’s even sometimes seen herself as the Baker, or his Wife, or Jack. Once, with Rapunzel’s aria flowing through her mind, she had even imagined herself in a tower, alone. 

But she’s never—Kara has never—

She thinks of Evan Diaz, all suave 6 feet of him, of the confident way he stood on Midvale High's stage, and the line that got a riotous laugh in each of the three performances: I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

Her sister picks up on the first ring. “Alex,” Kara says, her voice trembling, “I’m—”

“Where are you?” Alex asks, her voice hard, on the edge of panic. “Are you okay?"

“I’m the Prince,” she sobs. “I’m not the Baker’s Wife, or Cinderella, or—or…” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m Prince Charming,” she wails. 

There’s static from the other side of the phone. “I’ll be there in fifteen,” Alex says. “Kelly’s gonna come with, okay? You're okay. I'll be there soon.”

Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood.

Do not let it grieve you.

No one leaves for good.

“Easy there, :zhao,” Clark says. 

“I can walk, Smallville,” Lois grumbles. 

Kara tilts her head to the side. Her cousin has gotten better with his Kryptonian, but his accent will never be natural—he can never quite make the consonants sound guttural enough, and the clicks never hit at the right spot. It’s like trying to understand a toddler. “You’re going to need to work on that accent for the baby,” Kara jokes, careful to keep her voice light.

Clark groans. “I know, I know. Sometimes even the hologram can’t understand me.”

“C’mon, try again. I’ll even poke at your vocal chords if you want. What were you trying to say?”

Her cousin clears his throat with intention, careful to form his sounds from the back of his mouth. “:Zhao,” he repeats.

Kara winces. “What?”

Clark blushes. “You know, like love. :Zhao.” 

“That’s not…” Kara’s voice trails off into nothing. “Where did you learn that?”

“Um, the dictionary?” Clark sounds unsure. “You know, the one in the Fortress. That’s where I’ve been learning everything.”

Lois’s gaze bounces between the two of them, her eyebrows raising. “Let’s do vocab later, yeah? There’s a couch in there with my ass’s name on it.”

“Of course,” Kara rushes to say, stepping aside. “Is my little cousin getting you enough 2AM ice cream and stuff?”

Lois pats her cheek as she goes past. “You’ve always been my favorite, Kara.”

Later, in the Fortress, ice beneath Kara’s boots, she carefully slots a crystal into place. The hologram flickers into a solid image before her. 

“Hi, Uncle Jor.”

Her uncle’s image blinks calmly at her, as affable in pixels as he had been in life. “Greetings, Kara Zor-El. How can I help you?”

“Were you in love with Aunt Lara?” 

She thinks she sees the set of his mouth shake, but it’s just the connection of the crystal. “Yes,” he says. There’s no hesitation. 

“Okay,” Kara says. “Thanks.”

She shuts down the crystal, chewing at her lip, and moves over to the database. The Kryptonian dictionary is already pulled up—Kal—so she doesn’t have to do much. Just types out l-o-v-e and hits enter. 

At first glance, it’s all words she knows. Shovuh, non-familial affection, only for animate objects. Ukiem, for the way you hold a family member close in mind and spirit. Satogh, a kind of specific attachment used for inanimate objects and sometimes animals. 

And then, as easily as scrolling to the next hit on the list: 

:Zhao, noun: romantic, erotic love; sexual attraction. 

:Zhaol, verb: fornicate, copulate, or mate. 

Kara gapes at the screen. “What the fuck?”

Careful the wish you make.

Wishes are children.

For the first time in years, Kara powers up her own crystal and looks at the image of her mother. 

“Greetings, Kara Zor-El,” the hologram says. Always English.

“Did you love Zor-El?” Kara asks. She already knows the answer she’ll get.

“I am not programmed to give you that information.”

“Ieiu. Love Ukr rriv?”

“I’m sorry. I am not programmed to give you that information.”

Kara swallows hard. “:Zhao Ukr rriv?”

“I’m sorry. I am not programmed to give you that information.”

The hologram of Alura In-Ze only ever responds with the same phrase, with the neutral and flat sounds of Kara’s adopted language. She could actually call her mother, could even go and visit Argo, but this has answered her question just as solidly. The terrible truth, the warm gun, is that every question Kara could ask her mother can be answered just as well by the ghostly collection of pixels. The lack of a response is just as good as the stilted words her mother would probably give her if she made her way to Argo.

Kara isn’t human. Kara isn’t Kryptonian, either. She’s lived just as long in either place, and now she doesn’t fit right no matter which side of the line she stands on. She loves hugs and dancing and letting herself cry. Her soul feels settled helping a species that stumbles so often and yet always has people trying so hard to kind. More than anything, Kara loves. Her Sister, Eliza, J’onn, her friends. Lena. 

Lena. 

Lena, :Zhao. 

Kara, four years too late.

Kara sees her people in every sunrise. She sees her God in every act of creation her hands form. She lives by the Eleven Virtues of Girod. She lives in a way she hopes would make her father proud.

She’s come to expect the burn of the yellow sun on her skin. Sometimes she isn’t sure where she ends and where the power begins. She hates tempering her every action to keep from hurting people—she isn’t sure what use she would be if she couldn’t hurt people.

Supergirl. Kara Danvers. Her, somewhere in the middle.

Be careful before you say:

Listen to me.

Children will listen.

On the summer solstice, Kara flies to the middle of the desert and kneels in the sand. 

“Are you there, Rao?” She asks. “It’s me, Margaret.”

Then she laughs until she cries.

Guide them along the way,

Children will listen.

Children will look to you for which way to turn.

To learn what to be.

“Are you staying the night?”

Kara stuffs another piece of challah in her mouth. “Sure,” she says, sucking the remnants of some honey off her fingers.

Eliza smirks at her. “Then you’d better stop eating all of the challah, sweetheart.”

“Why?” Kara pouts. “I love your challah.”

“So, you don’t want me to make it into french toast tomorrow for breakfast?”

Eliza’s hair whips around her, the table emptying before her eyes catch up, Kara sitting serenely across from her with an empty placemat. She looks to the side and sees the remaining bread carefully packaged for the night. “That’s what I thought,” she says. 

Kara speaks before she loses her nerve. “Can I ask you something?” 

Eliza’s eyes go soft. “Of course. Always, Kara.”

“What made you choose Jeremiah to be your life partner?”

Her adoptive mother’s face lights up in a dazzling smile. “Oh, there were a lot of reasons. He made me feel so smart, like he could talk to me for hours and never get tired. He really listened when I spoke, and I liked that he did that with everyone; I knew that would be such a wonderful trait in a father.” She pauses, her eyes far away. “And he was good. Truly good. He always did what he believed in.” Eliza blinks and focuses on Kara again, her smile a little shakier than before. “I knew I wanted to be a part of any kind of life he built.”

Kara nods. “Those are good reasons,” she says softly, thinking of the way Lena used to fall quiet whenever Kara spoke, like Kara herself was a complicated equation worth every speck of attention she had.

“Why the sudden curiosity? Do you think there’s potentially someone like that in your life, sweetheart?”

Kara tries to smile, fails. “In my life?” she asks. “No.”

Kal’s Kryptonian to English dictionary defines shahrrehth as hope, but Kara thinks it’s really more like optimism. 

Kryptonite cannons lock onto her hovering figure outside of Mount Norquay. Kara raises her hands and stays put.

“I am Kara Zor-El,” Kara says, staring into a crystal the exact shade of her own eyes, of her father’s eyes, her uncle’s. “I’m entrusting a record of all my knowledge and experiences into the crystals you see before you in the hope that they will bring guidance to others, whenever they need it, now that I’m…” The words fade before they can make it to her mouth, but she finds them again. “Now that I’m gone.”

She clears her throat. Will Alex need these, one day, to learn something about another species? Will Kal, hoping she knows something his father didn’t? Will Lena, trying to finish her latest invention, only missing a pesky little equation for turbulence? Will Lena, just to stare? Kara would. Kara still does, sometimes.

The Fortress stretches above her with shards of ice forty feet tall. It’s been so long since Kara was cold.

“This is my legacy download,” she says. “Audio-visual, volume one.”

We disappoint,

We leave a mess,

We die, but we don't.

Kara dreams of silence and cold. She dreams of loneliness. She dreams of her father.

We disappoint

In turn I guess,

Forget, though, we won't.

“Sleep,” Alex tells her, some hazy, painful amount of time later, guiding her shaky limbs into a sun bed. “You need to rest, to heal, you’re—you’ve been gone so long.”

“I can’t sleep,” Kara says, aching all over. “I can’t. I won’t. I’m not going back, I’m—tell Ukr—”

“Hey, hey,” Alex interrupts. She smooths her hands over Kara’s hair. “Shh. You’re not going anywhere. I’m here. You’re home. You’re home.”

“Tadaima,” Kara whispers, and promptly passes out.

Do you know what you wish?

Are you certain what you wish is what you want?

If you know what you want,

Then make a wish.

Noonan’s looks the same, smells the same, even sounds the same. The gurgle of the espresso machine and the low chatter wash over Kara like the tide while she waits in line, her mind far away. How long ago had she sat in that familiar window seat and looked up at the CATCO building, stumbled her way into this future?

Would she have tagged along with Clark to that interview if she’d followed a different whim? It’s all about timing, she thinks. Noonan’s has raised the price of the slices of banana bread by 50 cents. 

Kara unlocks her phone and texts Alex they pay me in woims while she stews over the new price. A slice or six of banana bread sounds just about perfect for the afternoon she’s had, but the lemon poppyseed muffins are positioned so beautifully in the display case…

Her phone vibrates in her hand. It’s a Venmo notification: Alex has sent her 50 cents. Kara’s jaw drops. The audacity—

“Kara! It’s been ages. What can I get you?”

Kara looks up to find that she’s at the front of the line. “Hi, Krystal! Um, two slices of banana bread please, and two of the lemon poppyseed muffins. Oh, and cinnamon roll.”

Krystal smirks at her. “Anything else?”

In the display case, the raspberry tart glistens as though a spotlight is shining on it. “Throw in a raspberry tart?”

“Chocolate chip cookies just got out of the oven,” Krystal says, logging Kara’s order into the register.

“You’re dangerous.” Kara sighs. “Please add three chocolate chip cookies as well.”

“Of course. That enough to satisfy you?”

“Ugh, I wish,” Kara says, “but cut me off there.” She hands over Alex’s credit card. There are two tip jars, one with a photo of her cousin and the other with a photo of Wonder Woman. Kara drops a tip in Diana’s jar and forges Alex’s signature with a smile. 

She takes a seat by the window and watches the early morning sun slant across the buildings around her. The light burns gold and orange, sparks warmth deep in Kara’s chest, and she does the math and knows that Rao’s Light has been reaching Earth for years now. 

Had He cast her shadow, all those years ago, when she walked into that interview with Cat Grant? Had He illuminated the penthouse office that L-Corp’s CEO made her own?

Kara won’t ever know, but it’s enough. It’s a little like closing your eyes, and scrunching your face up tight, and making a wish.

I thought one was enough,

It's not true.

It takes two of you.

Kara comes back, and Lena leaves. Canada, then Ireland, Kara's senses following her on the way even as she tries to focus in on National City.

"I'm so happy you're home," Alex says on the first sister night since her return.

"Me, too," Kara says, glad that the English word for 'home' allowed so much emotional variety.

"Oh, you have an eyelash," Alex says, reaching out and thumbing it off of Kara's cheek. She holds up her hand. "Make a wish."

Kara blows it away, keeping her breath warm and gentle, and makes her wish.

The edges of her hearing pick up the steady thump of a familiar heartbeat, and Kara smiles.

If you know what you want,

Then make a wish.

Lena arrives at game night ten minutes late, still dressed for the business dinner where she’d been trying to woo donations for her foundation from fellow heiresses. Her dress wraps tight around her hips and droops low across her chest.

It’s dark outside, but Kara burns.

You came through.

When the journey was rough,

It took you.

Alex swears her future to Kelly’s on a beautiful, sunny day.

Kara images the Jewel of Truth and Honor below her own feet and knows there can only ever be one person to stand with her. She looks across the aisle at her and, in a single breath, feels more than entire generations of Kryptonians.

It takes care.

It takes patience and fear and despair

To change.

Though you swear to change,

Who can tell if you do?

It takes two.

Kal calls her to Metropolis to help take care of some kind of interdimensional hippopotamuses. They’re particularly thick-skinned and bloodthirsty; Kara ends up finishing up by herself after Kal is knocked unconscious by a vicious kick. 

It leaves her muscles sore, and she winces at the bruises that bloom over her cousin’s chest as he reclines under Lena’s latest sun lamps. 

“These are pretty nifty,” he says, squinting at the rapidly fading bruise along his ribs. “Thanks again, Miss Luthor.”

“Any time, Mr. Kent.” She taps at her tablet and sends another unsubtle glance in Kara’s direction.

“I’m fine,” Kara says once again. “Kal needs it more than me, look at him.” She pokes at one of the yellow spots on his stomach. 

“Ow,” he protests, smacking her hand away. 

“Forgive me for not being confident that you know all the potential harm that could be caused by rampaging multiverse hippos,” Lena says dryly. 

Kara isn’t listening. She’s looking at her cousin’s stomach, frowning hard. 

“What?” Kal asks, sounding a little self conscious. 

“You have an outie,” Kara says. 

“So do plenty of people,” he responds, oddly defensive. 

“It’s usually random chance,” Lena adds. 

“No,” Kara says, shaking her head slowly. “Plenty of us don’t, Kal.”

His head tilts in confusion, but Lena breathes in sharply like she understands. Kara is already stripping out of the top half of her suit, letting it pool around her waist. Kal looks more confused; Lena looks vaguely faint. 

“Kryptonian belly buttons look like this,” she tells him, pointing to her own. “Exactly like this. Every single one of them. That…” She shakes her head. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“It’s…just a belly button,” Kal says. 

“It’s not.” Kara’s chest feels a strange, phantom pressure—maybe the hippos didn’t leave her unscathed after all. “The Birthing Matrix made sure—”

“The what?”

Kara sits down hard enough on the lab’s little rolly-stool that one of the wheels cracks. 

“Test tube babies, I believe,” Lena says, her voice soft. “Right, Kara?”

“For thousands of years.” She blinks hard against the hot feeling in her eyes. “I have to go.”

Lena calls out after her, but Kara is already three miles away, heading towards the Fortress at top speed. 

“I was made in a test tube?” Kal asks, his voice growing fainter and fainter. 

“No, Mr. Kent,” Lena sighs. “I don’t think you were.”

Kara’s mind races as she tunes out San Francisco’s sirens and Vancouver’s music festival. If Kal wasn’t—if Kryptonians really did—  

“Uncle Jor,” Kara gasps out, barely powering up the crystal before she begins, “how was Kal-El conceived?”

Her uncle’s visage, tinged blue, stays as even as it always does. Kara aches to remember what his smile looked like. “Through sexual intercourse,” he says. “Lara and I believed the modern Kryptonian deference to the Birthing Matrix to be an insult to Rao’s Will. We decided to—”

“Gross,” Kara interrupts. “That’s all I needed, thanks.”

She powers the crystal down. Her suit is still peeled down to her waist; she looks down at her belly button and tries to restructure everything she knows about her own culture. The parts of herself she assumed human bump up against the parts of herself she thought were Kryptonian. The older she gets, the less of a difference she sees. With a groan, she powers the crystal back up.

“Did you and Aunt Lara—” Kara covers her face with both hands and manages to ask, “did you have sexual intercourse purely for the purpose of conception?”

“No,” her uncle says. “We performed sexual intercourse frequently for pleasure.”

Kara slams her hand down on the crystal, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Ew ew ew ew,” she mutters.

She briefly imagines the cross-galaxy phone call to her mother and decides to deal with this one on her own.

Slotted spoons don’t hold much soup, 

but they can catch the potato.

Sister night takes a dramatic, mildly terrifying turn when Alex leans over to smell Kara’s drink and immediately keels over. 

“Aren’t you a scientist?” Kara yelps as her sister groans into the floor. “You’re supposed to waft, Alex. Waft!” She mimics the gesture even though Alex’s eyes are firmly shut. “Not stick your nose in deadly-to-humans alien alcohol!” 

“‘M fine,” Alex slurs. “Smells like burning.”

“That’s your brain cells,” Kara mutters, frantically dialing M’gann to make sure that she doesn’t have to rush her sister to a hospital. M’gann laughs at her, but says that Alex will be fine. 

Kara is far less excited for the next call she has to make. Kelly picks up on the third ring, right as Kara manages to get Alex’s limp, delicate, and uncooperative body onto the couch. “Hey, so Alex is totally fine,” Kara starts, trying to get ahead of the disaster. 

“Kara,” her sister-in-law says. “What did you two do?”

“It was literally all her fault,” Kara complains, trying to get Alex to take a sip of water. “She stuck her nose in my not-for-humans drink and took a giant sniff of it and now she’s super drunk. Totally not my fault.”

“I dropped her off fifteen minutes ago!” 

“M’gann says she’ll be fine! She didn’t physically touch any of it—c’mon, Alex, just drink the—”

“S’that Kelly?” Alex asks. Her droopy eyelids raise a bit. “Hi, honey!” 

To Kara’s incredible relief, Kelly laughs. “Oh, you’re in for an evening, Kara,” she says. “Have fun! Bring my hungover wife back tomorrow after she’s had her first coffee, please.”

Kara pouts. “Fine,” she mutters. “I’ll see you then. Give Esme a kiss for me.”

And so, Kara finds herself on alien-alcohol-inhibited Alex babysitting duty. After the blind panic starts to fade, it’s actually funny—Kara has gotten used to ‘Mom Alex.’ This Alex, who misses her mouth six times in a row trying to eat a piece of goldfish, is highly entertaining. 

Plus, it means Kara gets to pick the movie, even though it’s technically Alex’s turn. She gleefully begins Hairspray, but misses most of the beginning trying to get some food and water into Alex’s system. 

“Have you seen’er face?” Alex asks, batting ineffectively at the spoonful of applesauce Kara is trying to get her to eat. 

“Tracy Turnblat’s? No, because I’m trying to get you to eat something, drunky.”

“No,” Alex says, her voice petulant. “No. Best face.”

“The best face?” Kara pauses, smirking. “Are you about to get mushy?” 

Alex sighs dreamily. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Kara goads, shoving the applesauce in her sister’s mouth at the first sign of her dropped jaw. 

“So pretty,” Alex says, her mouth full. “You’ve seen her.” 

Kara giggles. “She’s my sister-in-law, so yeah. I’ve seen her.” 

Alex makes a noise that’s halfway between a groan and a sigh. A grigh? Soan? Kara will brainstorm later. “She is, Kara. You know why?”

Kara feeds her another spoonful of applesauce. “‘Cuz you married her?”

Alex’s arms shoot up. “‘Cuz I married her! Put a ring on that face.” 

“Yeah?”

“Mm. Pretty face. And butt.”

Kara snorts and digs her phone out to send Kelly an update: she’s talking about how pretty you are, think we’re all good here.

Kelly texts back a crying emoji, then a laughing one, and Kara sighs in relief. She’s in the clear. 

“‘M so lucky, Kara.” 

“Yeah? Why’s that?” Kara wipes at Alex’s mouth with a napkin to clear away some rogue applesauce. 

“I was so—thanks—so sad, before. After, I mean. Maggie. Sad, sad, sad. Lonely.”

Kara’s heart contracts into something sharp and painful in her chest. She puts the applesauce on the coffee table. “Alex…”

“I thought, maybe not for me. Figured it out too late. But I was wrong!” She smiles, grins really. “‘Cuz I met Kelly and s’like I lit up from the inside out,” Alex explains. “Poof.”

“Lit up, huh?” Kara muses, running a hand through Alex’s hair. 

“Mm.”

“Not butterflies?”

“No,” Alex says, dragging out the vowel. “Bufferties aren’t real. Kelly’s chemistry.”

“Chemistry?”

“Always a reaction,” Alex slurs, slumping back into the couch cushions. “No matter what. She breathes, I react. She makes me…a halogen.”

Kara bites her lip. “That’s so cute.”

“Yeah. Yeah, my seven valence electrons latch onto her wandering atoms like crazy. Whew.”

“And now it’s gross.”

“‘S beautiful, Kara. I’m fluorine and she’s carbon, you know? We’re bound in sexy, holy, Teflon matrimony.”

“Please stop. I regret bringing this up.” 

“Does Lena know you—” Alex hiccups. “—you hate science? And love?” 

Kara pokes her sister in the cheek, laughs when she reaches up to swat her away a solid four seconds too late. “Shut up.”

“Ooh, I’m Kara,” Alex mocks. “I’m an alien from an advanced swivilization and I spit on your primitive science.”

Laughing, Kara grabs a throw pillow and begins to swat her sister with it. 

“I’m super in love but can’t admit it because my species is so superior,” Alex continues. “Whatta load of baloney. You turkey.”

Kara gapes at her. “Turkey?” She asks, scandalized. 

“You heard me. So you do love kinda different on Krypton—who cares! What’s gonna make you happy, huh?”

Kara sighs. “I’m not the only person in this equation, Al.”

“And yet the equation is balanced,” Alex nearly yells, sitting up quickly and then flopping down again with a groan. “Oh. Dizzy.”

Kara makes a sympathetic noise and manages to get her sister to slowly sip some water. “Better?” 

Alex just grunts, eyes firmly shut. 

With her sister not looking at her, with the knowledge that she probably won’t remember this conversation, Kara says, “it’s not about Kryptonian customs. We had romance, and passion, and lust. I just…I was a child, and almost everyone around me was ashamed of it, and I’m not—” Kara clears her throat. “I’m not ashamed of what I feel. There’s…other things between us.”

“I could arrange your marriage, if it made you feel better,” Alex offers. Kara isn’t sure she’s joking. 

“Thank you,” Kara eventually decides to say, “but that isn’t necessary.” 

“Mmkay. Don’t say I didn’t try.”

Kara rolls her eyes. “Alright, Alex.”

“You know that show you love?” Alex gestures blindly to the TV where Hairspray is still playing. “With the trees.”

“Into the Woods,” Kara says, even though Alex totally knows what it’s called. 

“Yeah. Well, you know, ‘opportunity is not a lengthy visitor,’ Kara.”

Kara’s jaw drops. “Did you watch Into the Woods without me? Alex, what in the actual—”

“Kelly likes it,” Alex admits, her tone wrought with guilt. “She said she gets why you love it. I’m surrounded.”

“Can’t believe you,” Kara grumbles. “Did you at least—”

“Yeah, I made her watch the stage recorded version. Chill out, loser.” Alex raises an uncoordinated hand to make a loose L shape, slaps it to her forehead, and settles back into the couch. “Your trees were better.”

“What?”

“The ones you painted. Mom still has the pictures. They were better.”

Kara sniffles. “Suck up,” she says weakly. 

“I know you are but what am I?”

“Oh my god.”

Alex starts to giggle. “You know what Esme said the other day?”

Kara lets her change the subject, both relieved and annoyed that she’s slurring less and becoming more coherent. “What?”

“She comes up all serious, right? And she’s like, ‘Mommy, I have to tell you something.’ So serious. So, I’m locked in. Ready for anything. I’ll kill someone, you know? You know. Anyway, she just pulls up one pant leg and points at her shin and goes, ‘I have a mosquito bite.’”

Kara grins as Alex dissolves into peals of laughter. “What did you say?” 

“I got her some AfterBite and called Aunt Lena for her so she could say a magic spell to make the itch go away.” 

Kara flops back against the couch in an imitation of her sister. “You’re gonna make me cry.”

“Ugh, don’t. You get so snotty.” 

“You’re snotty.”

“M’not. Just drunk.”

Kara’s conscience twinges again, even though it really was Alex’s fault for sticking her nose in alien substances. “You’re not feeling better?”

“No, I’m good. I’m good. Good good good.”

Kara is dubious. “Okay.”

“Tell me a story, Aunt Kara,” Alex says with a lazy grin. “I wanna have a few Kryptonian ones up my sleeve.”

Kara really thinks she really might cry, but she rallies. “Um, alright. Well, there’s Rak-Tul and the Great Eruption. That one’s kind of fun.”

“Is it scary?”

“No, it has a happy ending. Rak-Tul is guided by Rao’s Light to a beautiful mountain, filled with life. Rak-Tul had spent their life wandering and lonely, a…well, there’s a word for it in Kryptonian, but it basically just translates to ‘one-without-house.’ Anyway, Rak-Tul thanked Him for eyes to see His rays and build creations there that He might cast shadows on, and for the opportunity to build bonds of family with His other children, but they misunderstood His guidance. Rao showed them that way as a warning, knowing that before long the mountain would erupt. Rak-Tul realized their error—and their true purpose in being guided to the mountain—when raising to greet Him in the sunrise, when Rao best illuminated the luster along the mountain. It’s because of Rak-Tul’s pious nature that they saw His light and evacuated the mountain and saved every life from the Great Eruption. Some versions have a really funny talking H’Raka who licks the metal from the mountainside and delays His warnings. When I was little, the Gold Volcano—”

“Wait, gold volcano?”

“You know, the Gold Volcano,” Kara says, vaguely waving a hand. “It erupted gold instead of magma. I’ve told you about that. Anyway, when I—”

“You’re absolutely fucking with me,” Alex says, eyes still closed. “Y’never said jack shit about a gold volcano.” 

“It was one of Krypton’s three wonders,” Kara insists. 

“Oh, yeah?” Alex asks, voice dripping with sarcasm. “What were the other two, the forest of money trees? The Fountain of Youth?”

Kara pouts. “The Fire Falls and the Rainbow Canyon,” she mutters. 

“Gay.”

Kara throws another pillow at her, gentle as she can. It still connects with a loud woomf. “Yeah, we all went down to the Rainbow Canyon to celebrate ‘Alex Danvers Is A Big Lesbian’ Day. It was in June.”

Alex chortles into the pillow, rocking so hard with her laughter that she nearly rolls off the couch. 

“Are you laughing at the cultural practices of my dead planet?” Kara asks, mouth twitching into a smile. “Low blow, Alex.”

Alex giggles a slow decrescendo, eventually calming enough to remove the pillow from her face and hug it to her chest. Kara speeds to the kitchen and fills up another glass of water for her, holds it out for Alex to take while the wisps of her hair are still being blown around. 

Alex sits up and drinks it dutifully, moving her legs out of the way to give Kara a place to drop. She watches to make sure her sister drinks it all, then takes the glass so she can flop back down. 

The living room is quiet. Kara stretches her hearing past Alex’s heartbeat, past Carmen in the next building belting along to Celine Dion, past all the noise and love and anger of National City, right up until the lub-dub of Lena, four and a half miles away. 

“So it wasn’t a precious metal?” Alex asks. 

Kara blinks back to her loft. “What?”

“Gold. It wasn’t valuable.”

“Oh. No. It’s too soft to really do anything with. I mean, it conducts, but that’s about it. Fancy jewelry was always more…created, if that makes sense. Alloys, stainless steel, that sort of thing.” Kara breathes in, then out. “We never did value our natural resources.” 

Alex hums. “Your painting in Lena’s office,” she says. “Gold Volcano?”

Kara has no idea when or why Alex has ever been in Lena’s home office, but she nods. “Gold Volcano,” she confirms. 

They fall back into quiet. On the screen, Link sings about living without love.

“Kara?”

“Yes?”

“Feel funny.”

“Still dizzy?”

“Little bit. Love you.”

In English, you can sometimes drop the subject if there’s enough context. To do so in Kryptonian would be unthinkable—they started every sentence with a verb, followed by subject and object, mashed together and servant to the action itself. What is intent without action? To love someone in Kryptonian: love is passed to you from me.

“I love you, too.”

What I want most of all

Kara thinks about butterflies and chemistry and being listened to.

She wants.

She lives by the virtue of shahrrehth.

She wishes.

is to know what I want.

“Lena.”

“Kara.” Lena opens the door to her apartment a little wider. “Did we have plans? I—”

“No,” Kara interrupts. “Sorry, I just…” She shrugs. “I wanted to talk. Can I come in?”

“Of course.” She steps aside, but not far enough that Kara can avoid brushing up against her as she steps into the familiar smells of Lena’s apartment. “You’re always welcome here.”

“That’s good. That’s…good.” She repeats lamely, not sure at all where to start.

“Do you want a drink? I made some tea not too long ago.”

Kara blanches, glancing down at her watch. “Oh, Rao, it’s late, isn’t it? I’m so sorry, Lena, I can go—”

“Hey, wait a moment,” Lena says, laughing lightly. “Breathe. It’s alright. You know I wasn’t going to sleep for a while yet.”

“Right.” 

“Living room?”

“Um, sure, yeah.” 

Lena puts a hand on her elbow and walks her in, her socked feet padding softly on the hardwood floor. Kara belatedly realizes she never took off her own shoes and starts to hover.

“You’re like my own balloon float,” Lena jokes, nudging her towards the couch. “I wear my shoes inside all the time, don’t worry.”

“You’re so weird,” Kara says, well aware that her tone of voice couldn’t be called anything but enamored. She stands again, resisting the call of the couch and the ease with which she could just transition this into lighthearted movie night.

Lena stops short a few feet from her, picking up on Kara’s nervous energy. Her hands disappear into the sleeves of her old MIT hoodie, and her expensive sweatpants are a little too long. She looks cozy. Kara wants to nuzzle into her neck and press kisses there until neither one of them can breathe.

“I think, um,” Kara begins before she does something drastic, “I think we need to talk.”

The mildly wary expression on Lena’s face deepens. “Oh?”

Kara nods. “Well, I think I need to talk. To explain some stuff, if that’s okay?”

Lena’s head tilts. “Like what?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, since I’ve been back,” Kara says. “I’ve realized a lot, both about myself and my actions, and I don’t—I never want to keep myself from you again. I want you to know me.”

“Kara.” One of Lena’s hands twitches forward and inch before retreating back into her sleeve. 

“Losing you…” Kara starts. She clears her throat, a quick and harsh little sound. “I thought I had imagined how terrible it would be. I thought that the fear of that, of how devastating it could be, was a huge part of what kept me from telling you for so long, but…” She trails off again, eyes wet. “I was wrong.”

“Kara,” Lena says again. Her eyes are so suddenly guarded Kara could scream, really and truly scream. 

“I didn’t tell you because I was selfish.” Clenching her jaw, she forces herself to add, “and a hypocrite. But that wasn’t all.” She takes a cautious step forward. “I hadn’t imagined how terrible it would be, because then I did lose you, and it was so much worse.”

Lena’s brow relaxes. “I know,” she mumbles. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” Kara interrupts, “because—” She flounders for a second, not because she doesn’t know what to say but because she does. “Losing you was like losing a whole world.”

Lena’s irises glisten with the rush of tears. The walls between them have been knocked flat by a de facto nuclear blast, turned into no man’s land, and so Lena knows the entire weight behind Kara’s words. She can see right across, right into Kara’s soul it feels like. Kara thinks Lena has always been able to cut straight to the quick of her. 

Lena takes a step closer to meet her halfway. She reaches up to rest a hand on Kara’s collarbone, gentle but sure. “You haven’t lost me,” she says. “I’m right here.”

“I felt like sometimes I deserved it,” Kara gasps out, suddenly sobbing. “When I was stuck there. I—all I could think about was…”

Lena tugs her in, tucks her face against her worn, soft hoodie. Kara gets tears and snot all over it. She curls her fingers into the loose fabric around Lena’s waist, careful not to rip it. Careful not to be too much. 

“You can let that go, darling,” Lena whispers into her hair. “Let that go now. Breathe it out.”

“But I hurt you,” Kara whimpers. The shame of it still curdles her blood, but she can’t help but pull herself in closer, until their hipbones touch. 

“And I hurt you,” Lena says back, hands rubbing up and down her shoulders. “And here we are anyway.”

Kara lifts her head and sniffles. She can feel how hot her face is from all the crying, and blushes even hotter. If she were wearing her glasses, she’s sure they’d be fully fogged up. “Here we are,” she repeats, unclenching her hands and smoothing out Lena’s sweatshirt. Kara keeps stroking along her sides for far longer than is necessary, but Lena doesn’t complain.

Lena just looks at her, chin barely tilted up, and smiles. There's an ironic twist to it, the silent commiseration of how much they've both come through to end up right where they began. “I like it here,” she says, half an admission and half an obvious truth.

Kara laughs wetly. “I do, too.” She doesn’t mention just how wide her answer spreads. “I, uhm—I had an interesting conversation with Alex at sister night.” The subject change comes out more than a little haltingly. 

“Oh?” Lena raises an eyebrow and makes no move to step away. “When you got her drunk on alien booze?”

“Did Kelly tell everyone,” Kara nearly whines. “It was Alex’s fault, anyway, and I made sure—” 

“Kara,” Lena laughs, her breath puffing onto Kara’s cheek, “I know it was an accident. What did you talk about?”

Kara takes a deep breath, begrudgingly takes a hand off of Lena to wipe the tear tracks off her face. She wants to be eloquent, to give a true Supergirl speech, but that wouldn’t be right. Lena's heard too much from Supergirl, too much from Kara Danvers. She needs something in the middle. She needs something real.

“We talked about, um, how it’s so difficult for me to connect to humans, sometimes,” Kara says. “How I overcompensate. How most of the reason I wanted James was because he knew I was an alien but wanted Kara, and didn’t quite think of them as the same. How I dated Mon-El because he only saw the alien, and how I thought all of that was gone until then, and then he couldn't see any of the rest of me. And mixed up between them…” Kara raises a hand to tuck a wandering lock of Lena’s hair behind her ear. “Mixed up between them was you.”

Lena's jaw twitches. Kara can see her pupils dilate. “Me?” 

“The way you made me feel,” Kara says. She feels stripped back; a different kind of solar flare. “Make me feel. Like you saw me. Like you only ever wanted me. Like…” She struggles to find the words in English, and finally lands on, “like you saw me before I even knew how to see myself. You saw Kara Zor-El, even though I thought she was...” Kara takes a deep breath. "Gone. I thought I'd never be her again, only I've been me the whole time."

“What are you saying?” Lena asks, her voice trembling. Kara knows she wants a specific answer, a hypothesis all the way through to the conclusion. Probably a controlled variable, too.

“That I never knew all the ways I could love, or—or want, until I knew you. Until you knew me.” Kara cups Lena’s face in her palms as delicately as she can. “Ukiem khap rrip.” Her heart pounds, and then she says what she truly feels. “:Zhao khap rrip.”

Lena’s fingers twist in the collar of her shirt. “And how,” she chokes out, a fresh tear slipping down her face, “would you translate that? Exactly.”

Kara grins. It’s exactly the response she should’ve expected. “You are my family,” she says. “I love you.” She reconsiders that and leans in until their noses touch. “You are my love,” she whispers.

Lena’s shoulders shudder, but when Kara jerks back to check she’s smiling as she cries. “My vocal chords won’t be able to make the sounds right,” she says. “At least, I’ve never been able to make it sound right.”

Kara’s nearly bowled over by that, by the fact that Lena looked up those words and practiced them. She strokes her hands over Lena’s hair and tries to keep her voice from sounding too pathetically desperate. “Please,” she asks. “Please say it.”

Lena’s blush is His perfect red glow. “Ukiem khap rrip,” she says slowly. Her accent is almost musical, airy and perfect, as good as flying. “:Zhao khap rrip.”

Kara, embarrassed and stitched together again, cries big, fat tears for the second time that evening. “Did you DuoLingo that or,” she asks between shaky breaths. 

“I asked Brainy for a dictionary,” Lena says. She’s crying too, at least. “Kara.”

“Mm?”

“Kara,” she murmurs again. “I want to ask for something, but whenever I tried to pronounce it I sounded like I was saying, well…” 

“What?” Kara asks. She would give anything.

Lena bites at her lip. “A dhaikh.” 

Kara clears her throat to prevent a snort. “Not a hard kuh,” she explains. “More of a suh kind of sound." She lets her throat relax, flows into the easy speech that Clark probably won't ever reach. "Dhaikh. Like ‘dice,’ almost, with more syllables.” One of her hands weaves into Lena’s hair, the other drops down to trace along her jawline. 

“Kara Zor-El Danvers,” Lena says, only a touch impatient. “Are you going to kiss me or what?” 

Kara leans in and kisses her until her chest is filled with bright warmth, until her heart is brimming with Rao’s light, bursting out of her and casting shadows as long as her love. 

Maybe even longer. 

In the Phantom Zone, Kara had often looked up to find her father watching over her. She sometimes thought herself eight instead of twenty-eight, sick with Argo Fever. 

“Ukr,” she had asked once, slurred out words turning to fog the moment they passed her lips. “Have you ever made a wish?”

“I don’t understand,” her father had said from where he sat beside her. His posture was perfect. “What do you mean by wish?”

“It’s a kind of desire,” Kara explained. “A kind of goal you want to see come to fruition.” 

“I have no means to enact my goals from here,” Zor-El said, his face drawn. “I have made my peace.”

“A wish is different,” Kara said, frustrated with her inability to explain. “You don’t make it reality. It comes from elsewhere, even though it’s what you want. It’s a little like hope.”

Her father scratched at his beard. “Fascinating,” he had said. “This comes from humans, I assume?” 

“Yes.”

“To hold such desire and yet do nothing to form the world into it…” He smiled, a scientist through and through, truly overjoyed to try and pick apart a complicated concept. “I did not think human culture to be so…flippant. Who may enact these wish?” 

“That’s not really part of it,” Kara said. “Sometimes it’s their God. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all—it can be anyone or anything. It’s more about speaking what you want to the universe. To yourself.”

“They believe their God gives because they ask?”

“Some of them. Their fables often have people making the wrong wish, or wishing for something they don’t understand the ramifications of. There is a whole category of mythological creatures that fulfill wishes with terrible twists. Unforeseen consequences. Oftentimes, the moral of those stories is that it’s better not to wish at all, because what you think you want isn’t what you actually want. Most humans…” Her voice broke, but she continued on. “Most humans make their wishes silently and never share them. They believe that’s how you make them become reality in the specific way you desire.”

Zor-El shook his head. “What wonders you have seen, my daughter. Seen and understood. You are the infinity of our House.” 

Hot tears made their way down Kara’s face. In the frigid wasteland of the Phantom Zone, they burned her cheeks. 

“Do you wish, my little star?” 

“Yes,” she had said, unsure if her voice held shame or pride. 

“And what do you speak to the universe? To yourself?”

Kara had reached out to touch her father’s hand where it rested on his knee. She convinced herself that she felt it; she convinced herself that he was real. 

“Lena,” she said. “My wish is named Lena.”

Kara presses her forehead against Lena’s. With the very hands she uses to create and invent and pray, she cups Lena’s face and doesn’t see a difference. “The warmth of Rao shines on me through you,” she whispers in Kryptonian. 

What she means is I love you. 

What she means is I’m home. 

..