Work Text:
Kal gives her six months to come around. After that she’ll become like the Batman.
And Diana refuses to see her.
They put the Batman’s son on guard duty for Kara, waiting day in and day out outside the red sun cell. She doesn’t need mind reading to tell it’s a task that annoys him- he’s an arrogant boy, and has been since Kara met him. He wants to do more.
He’s more restless now than he ever was. His fingers drum against the top of his katana, he scowls more, he paces. There’s something impossibly on edge about him now.
It reminds Kara of herself, as much as she doesn’t want to feel bad for him.
It’s the second week of the cell, of the sun, and she hasn’t spoken to him once, and he hasn’t bothered to try talking to her. But there’s been no one else, and endless silence, unless you count the sound of him throwing batarang after batarang after batarang against the prison wall.
Which, admittedly, is starting to get on Kara’s nerves. “Hey. Damian.”
He doesn’t stop. Or look at her. Clang.
“Hey. Damian. Quit it.”
“I’m not talking to you. And no.” Clang.
“Gods. What are you, fifteen?” He’s sixteen. Diana told her that, because apparently jokes about his age are the only thing that get under his skin. That and his father.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“I’m serious. Stop it.”
Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
“This isn’t making me more likely to want to come over to your side, boomerang boy.”
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“Damian, I’m sorry about your father.”
Clang.
She bites her lip, paces back and forth in the cell again. There are really limited things to do in the red sunlight; she can pace, she can sit, she can think, she can sleep. She can listen to Damian hit the wall with his stupid batarangs eight thousand times.
“Hey. Damian.”
Clang. Clang.
“You wanna know about one of my powers? Kal doesn’t know about this one. I don’t think he can even do it.”
C-Clatz.
He misses this time. The batarang goes tumbling down, down, down the cell shaft. It makes Kara’s stomach turn, a little, listening to how long it takes to fall to the bottom. Then she looks at Damian again. “So yes, huh.”
Finally, he looks at her. He’s not wearing that silly little mask anymore- now he’s all sharp cheeks and cold dark eyes. Kara never understood that, the masks that some of these metahumans wear. If you know an earthling’s name, what else is there for them to hide?
Damian says, “If you think there’s some way of tricking me, you’re sorely mistaken. I’m the greatest detective in the world.”
She smiles at him. “I’m not from your world.”
This time the batarang hits the glass of her cell. She jumps back, startled, then huffs. “Jeez! It was a joke. Let a girl blow off some steam, will you?”
The batarang comes back into his hand. “Not having an easy enough time letting off steam in the sun chamber?”
There’s an awkward beat, then Kara blinks. “Was- oh. Was that a joke?”
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry. Take it easy, birdy. My brain’s starting to get addled, I’m having difficulty recognizing very funny jokes.”
He doesn’t look back at her, but his jaw untightens, slightly. It’s an improvement from the last two weeks. Kara decides to keep it at it. It’s not like things are gonna get much worse for her if she pisses off her prison guard. “So do you wanna know about my secret powers or not?”
“You don’t have any secret powers. Otherwise you’d be out of there.”
She rolls his eyes. Boys are so boring. That probably doesn’t change from planet to planet. “It’s not a power for fighting. It’s barely even a power. It’s more like… uhm. Hmm. I guess you could call it a trick? Or a skill? Maybe there’s no good Earth word for it. Your languages are hard, you know. There are so many words and still so many things you can’t say.”
Damian scoffs, says, “spare me,” but at the very least he stops throwing the batarang. He comes up to the glass of the cell, crosses his arms, looks her in the eyes. It’s a quiet relief, being looked in the eye. It makes her feel more solid. “So? What is it then. Show me.”
If she says I’m already doing it she knows he’ll just get annoyed and stalk away again. So instead she says, “It’s not really something I can show you. It’s actually… an old trick my mother showed me back on Krypton. It was just silly spiritualism then. I think you would call it ESP? Either way, it was just a joke back on my planet. But when I do it here on Earth, if I really look… I can see people’s souls.”
And he laughs at her.
She knew he would. She laughs too, then says, “Yours is green. And it’s in your left arm.”
That makes him stop laughing. He just looks at her, makes a move to touch his own arm, then feels silly and holds still. The misstep makes him feel weak and he glares at her, angry again. “Bullshit.”
Kara keeps smiling. Guileless. It’s a good word. No guile. No reason to lie. “You don’t have to believe me. But I see it. It’s right near your elbow.”
This time he does touch his elbow, the hard bone of it. The green is coming from the underside, where his skin is soft, but Kara doesn’t correct him. She says instead, “Like I said, it’s an old Kryptonian thing. Not something you could learn here on Earth if you didn’t already know how to do it. I haven’t told Kal or Diana about it. There was never enough time. But even if I told him I don’t know if I could teach him how.”
Something flashes in Damian’s eyes, and Kara sees it move and knows the emotion intrinsically, even if it goes too fast for her to recognize it. Then he looks away from her again. He says, “Even if you’re not bullshitting, what’s the point of being able to do it? It’s a card teller’s trick. There’s no value to it.”
Kara’s mother, tracing her fingers over her face, through her hair. Your soul is a star, Kara. Yellow. So bright. With that kind of soul you’ll never get lost. A kiss to her forehead.
But Kal’s lackeys don’t sting her. She’s Supergirl. She’s stronger than any of them are. She says, “Maybe not to a thug. But it’s a good skill to have in this kind of world. It’s not like heat vision or whatever it is Kal uses. Even if someone’s heart has stopped or if their mind is somewhere else, if I can still see their soul, I know they’re still... there. I can still save them.”
That gives him pause. A long moment’s pause. His eyes flick to the right- Diana told once that when a person does that, it means they’re remembering something. Kara had asked her. Diana looked to the right a lot when they were together.
Then he scoffs again, takes two steps back from the cell, and turns away.
Kara doesn’t hate Damian. He reminds her of her. Angrier, less powerful. Maybe just as confused.
So she says, “The Batman’s soul is blue. It’s right above his sternum. It’s still there. I saw it.”
The thing about souls is that they aren’t like hearts. They don’t pulse, or speed up, or ache.
But Kara can see Damian’s heart too, so that’s a moot point.
He says, slowly, without turning around, “Whether or not there’s a little blue light in his chest or not. He’s dead to me.”
It’s a good thing no one can see Kara’s heart. She feels naked enough in this prison as is. “I don’t understand you. He’s your father. He’s your family.”
“That’s not me,” he says, and she doesn’t have to see through his bones to tell he’s gritting his teeth. “I didn’t choose him. I don’t want his life. He’s not my father. Superman is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real father.”
A real father. Kal, raising a boy to be this cruel.
“Kal is my real family,” she says. “And he put me in here. I love him more than anyone still living, and he put me in here! You chose that over a man who loved you? Who would have let you kill him if it brought you peace?”
Kara can see hearts, the organ. Not hearts the metaphor. She doesn’t know if she makes the son of the Batman feel anything. He doesn’t turn back around.
She does. She turns, and leans up against the wall of her cell, and sits down. Now all that’s left to do is think or sleep.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Think, then.
After a long, long while of listening to Damian throw his batarangs, faster and faster and with crescendoing fury, Kara says, mostly to herself, “Maybe family just means something different on Earth than it did at home.”
At least, after that, the batarangs stop.
---
Kara doesn’t get a lot of visitors. Probably because everyone on Earth who liked her is dead now. There’s Damian, who’s just her guard, and then there’s Kal, who’s too busy ruling the world to see her too often. He visits for a couple of minutes every week, just to see if she’s ready to join his Legion of Doom yet.
It doesn’t do a lot to make a girl feel loved.
This week he comes in, all purple and silver, beedy glowing eyes like the last time. It makes her sick to look at him, so she doesn’t. She kicks idly at the wall of the cell.
It reverberates.
“Kara. Look at me, please.”
“I’m nearly eighteen years older than you, you know,” she says to her toe, and kicks the cell wall again. “You don’t have any right to boss me around.”
“Kara.”
She hates the way he says her name, especially like that- beneath all the command and the aspirations of godhood, there’s this cautious note of amusement, like he wants to believe this banter is coming from somewhere swayable. Like she really is just some kid cousin he can poke fun at and be forgiven.
Like he didn’t slam her within a prison of a world and a sun of a prison and told her he’d eat her brain if she didn’t agree to kill for him.
Kara looks at him. Kal-El. There was so much of Jor-El in his face when she first saw him. It had felt like going home.
The strong jaw is still there. Everything else is gone.
She says, “I still need some time to think.”
“All this sun isn’t good for you,” he says, touching the glass sympathetically. “I remember being in there. It was terrible.”
Against her better judgment, she bares her teeth. “Was it.”
He withdraws his hand. His eyes don’t hold emotion anymore- Kara wishes she could see them soften, go hard, something. There’s nothing there to read. To believe in.
So she lifts up her right hand in a backwards L, closes one eyes, and holds it out to frame Kal with. A makeshift looking glass.
The soul is there. Not as bright as a baby’s, not as starry. But red, as it has always been, since the day Kara first saw it. Right where the symbol of Rao used to sit proudly on his chest.
It’s only as big as a pupil now. She struggles to see it.
But he can see her looking. Instantly, he recognizes the movement. “Damian told me you had a power I didn’t know about.”
Of course he did. Kara scowls, and lowers her hand. “That was supposed to be a secret between friends.”
Kal pouts. The discrepancy between his drooping mouth and still-empty eyes makes Kara’s stomach lurch. “Are we not friends?”
Kara scratches, hard, at where the sun lamps are beating down on her back. Then she raises her eyebrows.
Gracefully stepping back from the question, Kal substitutes in, “Are you and Damian friends?”
Shrugging, Kara looks down at her boots again. “Dunno. We were pretty tight but then he stopped returning my calls.”
That makes him laugh. It’s a familiar sound. “Your grip on human lingo is amazing. How did you learn about phone calls?”
She looks back up. No jokes now. A real staredown. “You may not know this about me, Kal,” she says. “But I’m a quick learner.”
That sobers him up. He says, “What did you tell Damien, Kara.”
“What did he tell you?” she says. It’s testing Damien more than him. Thinking of the Batman and his little blue light.
Kal says, “Not much. Just that you had a spiritual power. He said it was difficult to explain.”
Maybe she and Damian actually are friends. She smiles at Kal. “I can see souls. It’s not very special in terms of combat. Or healing, even. I just told Robin about it to hear the sound of my own voice. And to make him stop throwing his batarangs at the wall. You should confiscate those.”
His head inclines, slightly. “What do you mean, souls?”
“Just lights,” she says. “Inside people’s bodies. I don’t know if they’re really souls. My mother taught me how to see them a long time ago.”
“Do you think you could teach me?”
She is so tired of this conversation, suddenly. She just wants him to leave. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, Kal. I think it has to do with love.”
Honestly, she’s not even sure it’s going to hurt his feelings till he exhales like she’s stabbed him. It feels a little less worse than it used to.
He says, “Kara, I wish you would trust me.”
“Oh, huh,” she says, and this she can say to his face. “I wish I wasn’t trapped in this sun lamp. I wish my pod hadn’t been blasted thirty years off course. I wish I could look at you and see my family and not Brainiac. Lots of regrets up in the sunsphere today. Please leave. Please leave. I can’t look at you anymore.”
And he just does.
He doesn’t even say goodbye to her. The last thing he says before the doors slide shut is, “You’re breaking Diana’s heart, you know.”
It’s a cruel thing to say. It’s so cruel because it matters so little to him, how Diana feels, how Kara crumples to her knees on the floor of the cell when he leaves.
Sit. Pace. Sleep. Think.
She picks sleep. She sleeps for three days straight. Damian is there when she wakes up, and she says, “Damian,” and he says nothing.
---
Diana comes two months in.
Kara is trying to sleep when she hears, “Prolonging the inevitable is pointless, Kara. You are no service to anyone in here, least of all to yourself.”
She sits up so fast she nearly hits her head on Kal’s metal circular contraption, then scowls and rubs at her wrists. They’ve been very crappy pillows and even worse fists. “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”
“I know you don’t have hypnosis,” Diana says carelessly. She doesn’t wait for Kara to rise to keep speaking, just continues on, voice flat. “You’re wasting your time and your abilities in here. I know you have no intention of ending up like Bruce, no matter how long you wait in this contraption. Just agree to Kal’s terms and help us begin rebuilding.”
When Kara finally turns to look at her, there’s blood on one of Diana’s cheeks. She’s uninjured. It’s not hers.
For a flash of a second, Kara remembers the pretty smiling clown girl, Harleen or what’s her name. How Diana had held the sword to her throat without blinking once. How red her blood had been against powdered skin. “Where have you been,” Kara says.
Carelessly, Diana flecks the blood of her cheek. It’s not even dry. It just smudges. “Themyscira. Reinstalling order.”
The island of the Amazons. Diana had showed it to her, once, flying high above its lush green scape and its sky-blue oceans. Impossibly beautiful. Devastatingly quiet. Diana had said, that is my home. Someday I will take you there. “Reinstalling order. You mean killing everyone who gets in your way?”
Diana’s eyes flash. It stings worse than seeing Kal had; he had looked so different, bonded to Brainiac’s ship, chrome and purple. Diana still looks like the woman Kara had trusted. She says, “I would never kill an Amazon.”
It’s what she had said then. It was the reason she hadn’t taken Kara to Themyscira back then. But that was before Brainiac. “So you made them your puppets instead. Is that right?”
She doesn’t get an answer.
All those women. Purple and chrome. Kara turns away. “You were better off killing them.”
“I disagree. They’re much more useful alive than dead.”
That sparks her. She spins back around. “How can you say that? Don’t you have any respect for people?”
Eyes still cold. Diana says, “I have a great respect for people. I have no respect for those who would seek to harm them. Or stand in the way of those who would keep them from being harmed.”
“I don’t mean people in the hypothetical,” Kara says. “I mean real people. With thoughts. And lives.”
Diana glares at her. That’s something. “I don’t expect an alien child like you to understand the cruelty of Earth. The world must be held with a fist if it’s meant to be kept safe.”
Kara almost wishes Damian was here. At least then the room wouldn’t feel so empty. Maybe she could make more jokes. Instead she says, “With a fist? God, you and Kal, you’re as bad as Damian, you’re all such hypocrites- there’s no peace in the world if there’s no world! Having a real world means people who can feel things! Who can think! And make choices!”
“That is a privilege that is dwindling from you day by day,” Diana snaps. “Look at yourself. You have the blood of a god. Do you really want to become the lackey of your cousin when you could be this world’s savior?”
The way she says that, the lackey of your cousin, with such derision, makes Kara pause. Look at her again. The way her jaw is grit, the way her fists curl up.
Once, Diana had said, I believe in your cousin. I believe in the world he wanted to build. Her eyes had been bright. Her hands open.
Kara says, “Did you ever really love Kal?”
That startles Diana. It takes some of the coldness out of her eyes. She says, in surprised honesty, “I have always loved Clark, Kara. Very much.”
“No, I mean,” and Kara hates this, the struggling with words. It makes her feel like the child all these humans assume her to be. “I mean did you love him. The way you say you love him. The way Lois Lane did.”
If that hurts Diana, Kara can’t see it. It does make her heart speed up though, which means she’s a liar, some way or another. All she says is, “You are stronger than Kal-El. You know it. You’ve beaten him in a fight before, and you only have one year of his thirty of training.”
It’s such a non sequitur that it makes Kara take a step closer to the glass. As if it could be a hearing problem. “What?”
Diana touches the glass. Her fingers are so long. When Kara had first met her, she thought maybe her mother was wrong and Earth was a planet for angels; she had never in her life seen someone so beautiful. She still hasn’t. She still wishes she had Diana’s hands, or at the very least, could touch them back.
Instead she has to ball up her hands, and keep them away from the glass.
Diana leans in so close, her lips almost touching the glass, like a kiss. She says, “If you don’t like this world, then change it. If you believe in its freedom, save it. Learn to repurpose yourself for the world you are in. That is my lesson to you.”
When Diana had opened her pod and held out her hand, she had said, this world is a crueller one than the one you have left. Learn to lower yourself until you can raise others up with you. This is my lesson to you.
Kara hadn’t understood the lesson then. She had forgotten about it, in the face of the end of the world. It comes back to her now, in a flash hotter than the sun lamps, and her eyes widen. “Diana-”
But Diana is already leaning away. Hands off the glass, back into fists. Loudly, she repeats, “As I have said. You are wasting yourself in here.”
And she turns, and starts to walk away.
Diana’s soul is blue. Like the Batman’s. It sits between her shoulder blades, and is bright like a star.
The kind of soul that never gets lost.
Kara Zor-El watches her leave, and then sits on the floor again, and waits for her cousin to free her.