Chapter Text
She is holding her baby cousin and telling him about the constellations when it happens, the first tremors in the rock and the fire bursting from the ground. Krypton is falling.
Kara shudders as her parents pull her through the falling city, watching the spires turn to ash as they collapse. “You and Kal are going to a planet called Earth,” her mother is saying in a warm, calming voice as Kara climbs into an escape pod with numb hands. She’s shaking so hard she almost falls back onto the ground, until her father reaches out to help her in. “The radiation of the yellow sun will give you powers. You’ll be able to fly.”
Kara tries to imagine a yellow sun, smaller and brighter than Rao. She thinks of the strange new world where she’ll have to live. She thinks of flying.
She starts to cry.
“Why can’t you come with me?” she asks, her voice choked by sobs.
“The pod wouldn’t be able to support all of us. You’ll have to find Kal once you get to Earth, and help him grow up. You’ll be able to find kind people there-”
And the pod seals shut and Kara only gets a last moment of consciousness, giving in to panic and desperately beating her palms against the cold glass, before it forces her into stasis. She never sees Krypton explode.
*****
It’s funny how the multiverse works. In almost every universe, Kal-El the last son of Krypton makes it to Earth right on time. In most universes, Kara Zor-El is trapped in the Phantom Zone for years before finally reaching her destination.
But in this one, the force of Krypton’s explosion throws baby Kal into the Phantom Zone, and Kara keeps on going. Her pod lands in a field in Kansas, and after the onboard computer runs a diagnostic and confirms that it’s reached the right planet, it awakens its occupant from stasis. Kara blinks up at the glass overhead, pressing her palms to the smooth surface still hot from reentry. The top of the pod slides open with a quiet hiss, and Kara hesitates before climbing out into the cool summer night.
It’s nighttime here, and the stars are shining brightly down on her. Long blades of some kind of grain sway around her, higher than her head, and she runs her fingers along the prickly stalks. In the soft, pale light, they look like they’ve been dipped in silver. Some kind of animal is making a high, metallic chirping noise, and tiny golden lights flicker in the grain around her.
Upon investigating, Kara sees that the lights are tiny animals with wings and bright red heads, whose bodies flash golden when they fly. One of them crawls along her hand, tapping her skin with inquisitive antennae, and she touches it with a tentative finger. It flies away, blinking brightly until she loses sight of it among the stars.
This planet has a single moon, a small round moon that glows pearly white. The moonlight feels soft on Kara’s skin, and as she tilts her head up she feels much stronger and clearheaded. She needs to find someone who can help her, who can find her shelter and help her figure out where Kal landed.
She stands on the tips of her toes to look over the grain and sees a small house in the distance, and starts to make her way through the field towards it.
Once she makes it out of the field, she climbs up the steps- rickety and made of wood- and stands in front of the door, shifting her weight from foot to foot. A light overhead flickers, drawing the attention of many small insects that beat their wings against the bulb. Kara reaches out and opens the outer door, made of a ripped metal screen, and raps on the inner door.
It’s answered a little later by a kindly-looking woman with greying hair and a pointed face. She says something friendly, reaching out to Kara. “My name is Kara Zor-El,” says Kara hesitantly, and immediately feels like an idiot when the woman frowns in confusion. She can’t speak their language, only Kryptonian, so instead she reaches out and catches the edge of the woman’s sleeve and pulls her outside, drawing her to the crashed escape pod.
There is a man, too, with hair likewise starting to turn grey and gentle eyes. They follow her into the field, and she shows them the escape pod. Its sides still shimmer with heat, and a holographic display pops up as Kara passes her hands over it, flickering into static every few seconds but still more or less functional.
They repeat a word over and over again, gesturing towards her when they say it. Alien.
Kara taps her chest. “Kara Zor-El,” she says, hoping they’ll understand her. “Kara.” And they mirror the gesture, smiling nervous but kind smiles.
“Martha Kent.”
“Jonathan Kent.”
Kara looks around, slowly realizing she doesn’t know what to do next, what to say to these people. If she spoke the same language, she might ask if she could spend the night with them before leaving to search for Kal-El. She stifles a yawn, staggering a little and falling against the warm metal side of the escape pod. The two Earth people coo softly at her, and the man picks her up and carries her back to the house. Halfway asleep, she is vaguely aware of lying down on something soft, and blankets being placed over her.
*****
When Kara wakes up, she is floating. She gasps, tumbling to the wooden floor in a tangle of blankets, and looks up. The room is full of a brilliant golden light that makes her eyes ache, and when she looks out the window she sees a pale blue sky and a burning yellow-white sun. She closes her eyes, covering them with her hands to block out the light as she feels herself drifting off the floor again. The light is warm, and impossibly bright, and it tingles and almost burns where it touches her skin.
Martha Kent calls out from the other side of the closed door, her voice concerned. “Kara? Is everything okay?”
“Okay,” replies Kara awkwardly, the unfamiliar word heavy on her tongue. “Is...okay.” She takes a deep breath and pictures herself moving towards the ground, and she sinks until her feet are on the floor again. She can smell food, and she cautiously reaches for the doorknob. The nervous tension in her fingers crushes the metal, and she jerks back, staring at her small hand in surprise before gingerly opening the door with the tips of her fingers. The metal is not damaged any further as she turns the half-crushed knob. Hopefully I can learn to control this, she thinks.
“Good morning,” says Martha warmly.
“Good?”
“Good morning,” she repeats, and then a flurry of words that Kara only catches a little of- Jonathan, and alien, and Kara- but she can still smell food, and she ventures into the warm food-preparing-room and looks around. Every room in the house is flooded with the light of the yellow star, and she can feel it flowing through her like liquid gold. It does not burn now, instead it feels rich and warm and comforting. Kara tilts her head up into a shaft of light and closes her eyes.
“Glad you woke up for breakfast,” says Jonathan.
Breakfast is a word that Martha used earlier. Kara understands that it is the name for the morning meal. Breakfast. Her brain is faster now, faster than fast, learning, changing. Soon enough, she will pick up more words, be able to string them into clumsy sentences.
“Breakfast,” she says, and smiles. She’s very hungry, ravenous in fact. Maybe it has something to do with being in stasis for so long. Or maybe the yellow sunlight.
There are bread rolls with white sugar melted on them (they’re called cinnamon rolls , Kara learns quickly) and strips of fatty meat that’s crisp at the edges (which is bacon ) and something that Kara does recognize, sort of, as a fried vegetable. They’re called potatoes. They taste a little like, but not quite the same as, the plants that grew back at home. Everything is strange here, even the things that could almost be comforting, and Kara starts to tear up.
The Kents hurry to reassure her- okay, they repeat, and Kara wipes the tears from her eyes with the back of her sleeve and smiles bravely and tells them she is okay. She shoves another slice of bacon into her mouth and stands up and walks outside onto the porch, drinking in the strange summer-smelling wind and the golden sunshine. She spreads her arms and throws back her head and rises into the sky, up and up and up until the light burns her skin and she swoops down, tumbling head over heels into a field.
She bounces across the ground, skidding a few feet and landing on her side with her arms and legs tangled underneath her. The impact should have hurt her, but it didn’t. She’s dirty, but not even scratched. She can hear everything around her, animals chirping in the trees and burrowing in the ground and vehicles roaring along a road on the horizon. She thinks if she concentrated enough she could hear the corn growing.
She is a little afraid of herself.
*****
Nobody asks where the Kents found their new daughter, a bright young girl around seven or eight years old, but everyone wonders. And then as the months wear on, and little Kara Kent becomes a permanent feature in Smallville, they stop wondering so much. Kara is kind and bold but a little bit airheaded, and she rarely laughs but she’s always smiling.
“She’s adopted,” says Martha calmly, watching Kara swing back and forth on the playground with her honey-gold hair blowing around her. Sometimes she seems to hang in midair for just a second longer than she should, but aside from a brief double-take by one or two adults, nobody really notices.
Kara grows up drinking in fairytales like water, stories of heroes and hope. She’s always liked legends, Nightwing and Flamebird and Cythonna and Vohc. Earth’s mythologies tell the same stories in different words, and she wonders if every planet is the same in this way. It is some small measure of familiarity, and the words feel like home. This time, the taste of home does not make her cry, but it opens something hungry and aching and impossibly sad in her chest.
Nearly two years after her landing on Earth, she saves two boys who are a few years younger than she is as she walks to the library. A car is careening towards them, brakes broken, and she shoots forwards quicker than quick and grabs both of them and pulls them out of the way. Her feet don’t quite touch the ground, and she tumbles onto her back as she lands to keep the boys from being scratched.
“Kara?” asks the older of the two, all of six years old. He wraps his arms around his little brother. “You saved us! How did you-”
“I was passing by,” says Kara. “I saw the car coming and I tackled you out of the way, I guess.” She shrugs uncomfortably, and both boys seem to believe her small lies. (After all, what else would they believe? Kara Kent, kind and a little silly, who climbs up trees to find missing cats and sells bright pink lemonade and popsicles for charity and had to repeat a grade, can fly ? Can lift two boys as if they weighed no more than feathers? Nobody would ever believe that . It’s what keeps her safe.)
*****
Kara is at the soda fountain on the north end of Main Street with a few kids from school, just about three years after landing on Earth, when it happens. The news is suddenly interrupted by a report of a bombing in Metropolis, and Kara remembers the crumbling buildings of Argo and the way the people screamed as the ground turned molten, and she flies faster than she’s ever flown before, northeast to Metropolis. As she soars overhead, the city takes her breath away, the sunlight glimmering on water and glass and the lights and the color. It reminds her of Krypton, a little- at least, it is more familiar than the towns and endless fields of Kansas.
She lands on the street so hard that the pavement splinters, and she begins to ferry survivors out of the smouldering wreckage, tilting her head to listen for heartbeats buried in the rubble. She lifts a fallen beam into the air, revealing a small boy curled in an air pocket within the tumble of rock and metal. “Hello,” she says, and holds out her hands with a warm smile. The child blinks at the flying girl, sunlight behind her making a radiant halo around her face and arms, and she scoops him up and carries him out onto the street.
The ones who saw her that day say she was an angel, with her golden hair aflame and her eyes like dancing lightning, and she walked through the fire and came out unharmed. They say she lifted a whole building to free children trapped underneath, and she blew the fires out with breath as cold as the arctic wind, and she waved her hand and the rain came down to drown out the flame.
Only some of this is true, of course, but the way people tell it you’d think they were announcing that the sky is blue. It’s a simple fact, the Supergirl is all-powerful and all-wonderful and her eyes shine like pale and dazzling stars.
It was young reporter Lois Lane at the Daily Planet who decided to call her Supergirl, and it stuck. Soon, Supergirl is seen all over the globe, and wherever she goes heads turn and the rumors follow, that she is radiant as the sun, powerful as a supernova and with a smile a thousand times as bright. The sign of the House of El is painted red on her chest, but they say it stands for Strength and Spirit and Supergirl. They say her footprints make craters in the ground, they say she draws the line of Right and Wrong in burning light and did you know she’ll tell no lies, and she’s as quick as an arrow, and-
Truth and Justice and the American Way, they say, and the one thing they never say is that she is only a child, carrying the world in her too-small hands.
*****
She loves Metropolis, and the business and the constant low hum of people make her think of home. Metropolis welcomes her readily, proclaims itself the city of the Supergirl. Tourists wear merchandise that Kara doesn’t quite know how to react to- but in the end, the House of El is gone, and the only memory of it is a child stranded on a world that is not her own, a baby lost somewhere in space, and the symbol that looks much like the Earth letter S emblazoned on a hundred thousand t-shirts and baseball caps. So it doesn’t really matter, in the end.
The tallest building in the city is the Lexcorp tower, and the walls are all made of mirrored glass to look down over the city without being seen. Lex Luthor does many things without being seen, chief among them keeping track of the activities of the planet’s new golden girl. He is among the few people in Metropolis who realizes just how young Kara truly is, freckled and snub-nosed with blue eyes that do not shine anything like burning stars or lightning, but twinkle bright and friendly and childlike.
He doesn’t particularly care.
She is dangerous, not in the way of an angel of death but in the easy reckless way of a child who has no idea of the power she holds. Nothing harms her, not even electricity or sonic attacks (he’s tried both, put advanced weaponry in the hands of a few terrorist cells to test his theories. Nothing works.)
And then an incident occurs in which Supergirl suddenly collapses in a museum exhibit during a press conference after she comes too close to the contents of a display case showcasing minerals fallen to Earth from deep space. A brief investigation isolates the mineral, a small green rock that glows softly when exposed to the light of a yellow sun.
It’s good insurance, for now, and he wears it close to his skin as he continues his work. He sends out expeditions to recover more of the mineral, and begins to systematically search museum displays and back rooms.
He names it Kryptonite.