Chapter Text
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future…
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
— Voyager Spacecraft Statement by President Jimmy Carter. July 29, 1977.
The first time you die, you’re thirteen years old. You’re lost and alone, sealed in your pod, falling and falling and falling. Your mind shuts down and your frantic body stills, and there in your chrysalis you spend twenty four years, just waiting to become.
Inside a cocoon, a caterpillar doesn’t just become a butterfly (not that you think you are a butterfly; you just think about cocoons a lot). The creature must first cease to exist. Metamorphosis implies death—of a sort, at least. Death of the thing that came before.
The before breaks down into a genetic soup, digests itself until, like a planet razed, nothing remains but dust and water, yet somehow it retains the memory of the after that it’s meant to become. The proteins rearrange themselves, form eyes and legs and wings, and what emerges bears no resemblance to the thing that went in, the thing that was lost.
Conservation of mass, you always tell yourself. When you find yourself looking up again, lost again, trapped among the stars—conservation. Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, so nothing is lost. Everything that Krypton once was still exists, or so physics says. It’s just scattered across light years and galaxies and any of the myriad dimensions and universes you know must exist.
But the memory of Krypton? The stories and the voices and the lives that vanished when the mass of the planet was sown across the galaxy? Those memories live inside your matter alone.
You are the Voyager probe, a golden record launched into space to tell the story of your people long after they are gone. Your memories are infallible, gilded by the light of Earth’s yellow sun until they are as permanent as etchings on cold metal.
A golden record, a cosmic message in a bottle. A baby floated downriver in a basket of chrome, sent across the Milky Way with a wish and a prayer to guide you.
* * *
The second time you die, you’re twenty five. You feel the echoes of your first death, the same trappings around the edges, only this time it doesn’t feel like losing.
“I’ll join my mother,” you say to J’onn. “We’ll be together in Rao’s light.” And you find yourself believing it.
You aren’t lying when you say you’re at peace with it. You aren’t simply telling J’onn what he wants to hear so he’ll let you go (though you’re so used to doing that by now that sometimes you have a hard time distinguishing between what you want and what they need).
A calm settles over you that is more powerful than anything you’ve ever experienced. You register absently how cold the vacuum of space is—it must be cold, there are crystals of ice frosting your lips in a way that even your freeze breath does not back on Earth—but all you feel is warm.
You’re falling, you notice. You shouldn’t be, not when you’ve flown this high, when the Earth’s gravity can no longer reach you, when there’s nothing left to pull you home again—you should be floating, orbiting forever, trapped again like you were in the Phantom Zone. But there you are, falling again.
You’re falling again, your bones too heavy for your leaden muscles, only this time you remember what it felt like to fly. This doesn’t feel so different, as it turns out.
You remember how far you had to fall before the first time you flew, through light years of space onto the surface of a planet with a yellow sun, before you ever knew you even could.
* * *
It’s Alex, in the end.
(It’s always Alex).
You flew too high for the Earth to pull you back, but not too high for her. She’s your gravity, your beacon, the North Star that guides you home.
* * *
Afterward, you think about that moment a lot—those few minutes (or seconds, or hours, you’re not quite sure exactly how long it was) before Alex was able to reach you, those moments you spent floating between the Earth and the yellow sun, adrift once more in the vacuum of space. You think you must have felt weightless then, more so even than when you fly above the Earth.
Because in that moment, you were done. No more crosses to bear, no more capes or lives or worlds, living or dead, sitting on your shoulders. Nothing left but you and the darkness of space and the warmth of Rao’s light.
Those spaces are where you’ve always existed. The in-betweens—the dark gaps between the stars, the silences between words. The empty spaces inside you that once housed all the people you loved. You are made of those spaces, defined by the things you lack instead of the things you are, like a constellation—more void than stars, more loss than person.
Sometimes you wonder if Earth is more of an in-between than the Phantom Zone ever was, only a detour before you can finally find your way home.
Because here’s the thing: you didn’t die. Not at thirteen, not at twenty five. You lived.
You wonder when the two words began to mean the same thing.
You stop keeping track, stop counting the number of times you should have died but you didn’t, because this—this life—is the gift that you were cursed to bear.
You were never meant to be just a girl, someone who is born and lives and dies. You are a gilded symbol of hope, a vessel tasked to carry something greater than one person, and you realize that will outlive everyone on this planet.
It’s okay, you tell yourself. You’ve done this before. Loss is written into your DNA. You are built for this. Like flying, like falling—losing is something your body remembers how to do.