Work Text:
You meet, rather fittingly, in rehab.
Not the drug sort of rehab, although you maybe have a few problems in that area, too, even if you’d never admit it. No, it’s—well, they don’t call it superhero rehab, and you don’t think of yourself as a superhero, or really any kind of hero, but that’s what it is, really. The place they send all the broken and misbehaving aliens, part-aliens, mutants, etc. to learn how to pretend to be normal again. Coulson forced you to go, with good intentions and fatherly smiles and a gentle insistence that you get help.
You show up to your first group therapy session with both your arms in casts, the bones inside fractured almost beyond repair. Your hair is unwashed; you’re wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday. She shows up in perfectly fitted jeans, a bright blue sweater, and a polka dot button-up, pushing her glasses up her nose nervously and looking for all the world like a normal college student, or maybe a reporter or something: casual, put-together, normal.
Your first thought is that she’s pretty. Your second is that she doesn’t belong here.
When you’re called on to “share”, you mumble something about Lincoln dying, about running away. You even throw in something about Ward, which is a wound long since healed with barely a scar. You don’t mention your parents, or your childhood, or the way your powers keep you up at night sometimes because you can feel everything around you. You don’t talk about how you’ve watched your friendships slipping away from you, or how the way Jemma had looked at you after San Juan still haunts you sometimes. You don’t talk about how you had begged the Ghost Rider to kill you.
Kara says something vague about a dead cousin, which you only catch part of, since you tuned out of the session the moment you were done speaking. Her voice is flat, calm, and you can tell that, whatever really brought her here, it isn’t a death in the family.
“You’re Quake,” Kara says to you at dinner. She’s sitting across from you. It seems as though everyone else in the room has a clique, or a friend, or something to determine where they sit. Neither you nor Kara, apparently, have a place. You haven’t looked up since she sat down, and you don’t at her words.
“Apparently,” you say, not in the mood for conversation. Kara doesn’t seem to pick up on your reluctance, though, because she continues talking.
“I’m Kara,” she says. “I’m an alien.” You glance up at that.
“Alien,” you say. “Not Inhuman or mutant or—“
“Alien,” Kara repeats. Then she breaks into a grin, and the expression is far too happy for this place, sweet and wide and sunny. “I’m not used to saying that out loud.” You—you sort of get that, you guess. Aliens get even more crap than Inhumans do, which is saying something.
“No reason to hide here,” you comment, gesturing at the room as a whole with your fork. Kara shakes her head.
“It’s kind of freeing, right?” she says, devouring her mashed potatoes faster than humanly possible–which makes sense, since she isn’t human, apparently.
“Speak for yourself,” you scoff. “Prison’s still prison, therapy included or not.” Kara’s face falls slightly, and you immediately feel an unwanted twinge of regret at being the reason for her smile fading.
“Prison?” she repeats. “This isn’t a prison.” You smirk bitterly.
“You can wear your own clothes and have your own room,” you say. “But you eat on a schedule, can’t have pointy objects, and can’t leave.” You shrug, returning to your lukewarm dinner. “Sounds like prison to me.”
“I don’t want to be here either, you know,” Kara says suddenly, her tone upset, pushing on her glasses. The action seems to be a nervous tic of some sort. “But I can still make the most of it.”
“You can,” you agree. “And I can be bitter and angry and eat my weirdly moist saltines in quiet.” Kara takes the hint, picking up her dinner tray with a huff and wandering away, finding someone else to bother.
You almost want to call after her as she walks away.
Kara sits with you again at breakfast the next morning. Instead of arguing with you, she tells you about her sister. She doesn’t even seem to expect a response; she simply talks about Alex, and Alex’s girlfriend, and Alex’s job as a scientist (the more she talks about that, the more you get the feeling that Alex isn’t being entirely truthful with Kara about the details of her work). There are plenty of pauses where you could speak up if you so chose, but Kara doesn’t seem bothered when you don’t. She appears perfectly happy to monologue to you about her life.
It’s—it’s oddly pleasant, actually. Kara is an entertaining storyteller, and she clearly loves her sister more than anything, and it’s certainly nicer listening to her than eating by yourself in silence. And if you take the opportunity to memorize the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, well, no one is there to call you out on it.
That day in therapy, Kara talks about being adopted, and her voice is a little less firm, a little less confident, a little more honest. When it’s your turn, you tell an anecdote about a particularly bad foster home you were in when you were fifteen. You twist it, make it funny instead of disturbing. Kara looks at you from across the circle as a few others laugh, her eyes piercing enough to make you just a bit uncomfortable.
The pattern continues: Kara sits with you at meals and talks about nothing of great importance, and you contribute only minimally. You deflect during therapy, and you sleep poorly, causing a few minor earthquakes while you dream of blood and fire and an alien with Ward’s face and your mother pulling the life from your veins. A week in, you go to the small infirmary and get your casts removed.
And then, almost two weeks into the program, something changes. Kara is talking to you at dinner, telling you about her best friend back home. Lena something, an engineer from some rich family, who had reacted…poorly when Kara told her the truth about her heritage. Kara’s voice stumbles slightly as she speaks, and you can tell that this is a sensitive subject for her. This time, for some reason, when she pauses, you speak up.
“My, um,” you say quietly, unsure if you’re allowed to speak. Kara looks at you encouragingly, and you continue. “One of my best friends, Jemma. When I got my powers, she…she kept trying to find ways to get rid of them, to suppress them. She treated them like they were a disease or something. She wanted to cure me.”
“But there’s no cure,” Kara says. “They’re a part of you.”
“Exactly,” you say, relieved that she understands. “This is who I’m supposed to be. I wasn’t complete before. I’m not different now, I’m just…I’m more me. It felt like she was trying to get rid of a piece of me.” Kara nods, and—it’s nice. It’s nice, talking to Kara, knowing she understands.
“Did she understand, eventually?” Kara asks. There’s something in her tone, something that makes it clear that the question is more than a friendly inquiry, that Kara has something riding on the answer.
“I don’t think humans will ever understand, not really,” you say. “But she accepts it better, now.” It’s not the answer Kara wanted, you think, but you can’t bring yourself to lie to her, even to make her feel better.
“Tell me more about Jemma?” Kara asks. You hesitate for a moment. Kara smiles at you, encouraging and guileless, and you launch into a story about the S.H.I.E.L.D. hub and a tranq gun and the absolute worst liar you’ve ever met. Kara listens intently, laughing at all the right points and shaking her head in exasperation as you recant Jemma’s terrible attempts at half-flirting, half-excuses, and you find yourself thinking about how pretty she is when she laughs.
The next day in therapy, you talk about anger. You talk about rage and lashing out and self-destruction, and you hold Kara’s gaze across the circle the whole time, pretending you’re talking to her alone. She doesn’t look away.
That night, you don’t have any nightmares.