Chapter Text
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Argo City, Krypton, on the eve of its death…
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“Father! Father please, wait—” Kara, young and scrawny, dressed in her beautiful white graduation clothes, clawed at her father’s skinsuit even as they rushed down the hall. She spotted Jor-El being tugged along by a quietly sobbing Lara, who clutched infantile Kal-El to her chest with a lone arm. He swept them both into his arms and sped forward with a burst of panicked energy. “ Uncle! Uncle please. There is space I know there is space . You only have to—”
“There is no space,” Zor-El growled, breathing stuttered by his unshed tears as the ground beneath them trembled. With a deep breath he banished the cries he would have otherwise let free; his child needed him strong . He grasped Kara by her biceps, lifting her from the floor to throw her up and into the prototype starcraft.
“Father— mother! ” Kara rose from her seat, nails scrabbling at the outer hull of her starcraft to reach Alura. “Mother come, please, there is space I know there is space. I will make space—”
“No, my sweet girl.” Alura leaned against the hull of the sleek starship, thin and long, all smooth transitions to better avoid debris. She pressed a kiss to the space between Kara’s brows. “There is room for you and for Kal-El. That is enough.”
They had never told her there was only space for the two of them.
A sharp boom! was followed by the tilting of the floor. In the opposing construction nursery Kal-El was already strapped into his starcraft, the bubble top locked into place. Lara remained beside her child, cooing at him through the glass as he screamed at the top of his little lungs. Jor-El rushed over to Kara and his brother, while Alura sprinted to his wife. Their panic left them in a frenzy, rushing to and clutching anyone and everyone that they loved and would lose.
“Do you remember?” Jor-El looked frantic as the bubble top closed over Kara’s vessel. “The games we played? The navigator’s championship in Kandor? Do you remember how you moved the controls and rationed plasma to divert debris?”
Kara nodded, palms against the glass. She remembered winning the navigator’s championship—traversing holographic mazes and solving complex engine troubles with more efficiency and skill than any other contestant—and how it had looked like her father and uncle were on the verge of tears. She had never seen such relief and hope in their eyes. It had been strange, but all she had done was bask in their hugs and praise. “Uncle please—”
“Sweet girl—” Jor-El pressed his palm over the space where Kara’s was. He was crying, but like Zor-El he didn’t sob. “Sweet girl there was only ever space for the two of you.”
“Uncle please how—”
“Remember all of those ships in the nurseries? All of them destroyed? Do you remember the games where you lost?” Jor-El’s fingers curled, as if he would push them through the glass and pull Kara free. “They were tests. The ships: prototypes—all of them. Eventually you began to win. I need you to win again, sweet girl. Okay?”
Kara nodded, even as she banged her fists against the glass and fought against the belts that tried to pull her safely into her seat. Dammit, she didn’t want to leave—she couldn’t leave. How could she leave them? Her mother and father, her aunt and uncle? What of her other cousins? What of her grandfather? How could she abandon her family?
But then Kara spotted Kal-El, wailing still in his pod just over Jor-El’s shoulder. Her uncle had labored over these ships to give her and Kal a chance.
But a chance at what?
“It’s the same as it was in the games.” Jor-El looked away as Kara began kicking at the glass. Good reasons be damned, she swore there was room for someone else, but her uncle knew better. The ship rocked in its cradle. He locked eyes with his brother. They were out of time. “You told me you were willing, sweet girl. Willing to fight.”
“I am fighting!” Kara howled. She grasped the controls to yank at them in frustration and slammed her open palm down on the dashboard. “Uncle there’s space— ” she choked on a sob as the floor gave way. The last image of her mother and father was of them running to her, and of her uncle embracing his wife for last time as they reached out for their son. “Mother!”
For a moment, there was silence. Kara couldn’t hear herself even as she screamed with such an intensity that her throat bled. The universe flowed in slow motion as the sixty-story laboratory crumbled and Kara’s ship fell, barely detaching from the nursery in time. Her freefall lasted only moments before the stardrive activated and launched her up and away from her dying home.
In the distance, through her tear-blurred vision, Kara could see Kal-El’s ship. Blue and gold, just like her own, with a spherical thruster at the back beneath the extended stardrive. Jor-El’s design. She had watched him cut the steel for the hull of that prototype. Number 2-1-6.
“Warning: Implosion imminent. Ship within blast radius.”
“Redirect all available power to rear particle shields for two-one-six and two-one-seven.” Kara grasped the manual navigation controls and flipped the covers for the weapon array buttons. Illegal to install outside of regulated construction nurseries, but the Council was lost and soon there would be no one left to arrest, or anyone to do the arresting.
She rubbed harshly at her cheeks, wiping away tear tracks, and trained the railguns to the space just before Kal-El’s speeding vessel. Debris from Krypton’s profligacy orbited the planet, and she would need to clear the way. The aim assistants would keep her focused on not hitting her cousin, but Kara would pull the trigger.
“We have ignored instinct for so long, sweet girl. Your father is right when he says that no compass is greater than that in our chest. Feel the truth and never hesitate—never again.”
Reflected in the bubble top, Kara watched Krypton’s tall silver spires cripple and fall, and the planet expanded, bursting in a rise of sickly orange light.
It reminded her of a sunset.
The sheer power of the dying planet launched Kara far, far away from her cousin, into a system even farther away from their new home.
Earth was lost to her for twenty-four years.
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North Pacific Ocean, Earth, on the day of a strange arrival…
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Homesick but satisfied, Superman flew high above the water, fearful of getting his fragile cell phone wet.
“I should be back home in about a half hour, Lois. We can get takeout from that Chinese place you love.”
“Good. You’ve been gone too long. Perry’s been talking about firing you.”
“You told him I had the flu, right?”
“The man’s never even seen you sweat, Smallville. He called bullshit the moment I went into his office.”
“Nuts. Okay. Make that fifteen minutes.”
Clark could practically hear Lois’ smile. “The balcony door is unlocked, Smallville. Just give a girl some warni—”
Clark’s phone crumbled to bits in his fist as he shot forward, disrupting the ocean with a sonic boom as he rushed to catch a blue and gold… rocket headed straight for the water.
‘It… it looks like mine.’ His ship. Pod. Whatever anyone wanted to call it. Blue and gold, with the spherical thruster in the back and the strange, supercharged engine emitting silver light that distorted the world like a blanket of heat. There were strange add-ons here and there, all dark, gritty metal—too harsh-looking to be a part of the original design—but otherwise it was kin to Clark’s own.
With pursed lips and a brow furrowed in concentration, Clark pushed himself, and Superman caught the ship like a football.
The bubble top was old, scratched beyond the point of buffing it new, but Clark could still see the sole passenger—there was only room for one. A young woman, slim and lean in tattered white clothes. Blonde hair was sloppily braided over her shoulder. Spit and blood were dry around her nostrils and lips, and it caked some of the holes in her clothes. A quick scan with his x-ray vision told Clark that there was no lasting damage aside from a few scars that were still pink.
What caught his eye, and caught his breath in his throat, was the symbol stitched into her jacket with silver thread. Most of it was stained with blood, but Clark would know it anywhere.
Superman’s S . Hope. What had Jor-El called it?
“El mayarah.”
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Smallville, Kansas, thirty minutes after the arrival of Clark’s kin…
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Martha Kent watched from the porch as that girl touched Clark’s face with a reverence that had no conceivable explanation except one.
Family.
Long, long lost family.
She was tall like Clark, but slim—malnourished, even—with those entrancing blue eyes that Martha could see from across the way with little issue. Dark golden hair shone inhumanly in the afternoon sunlight. She looked like a goddess, and in filthy clothes beside Superman in full regalia... that was saying something.
The girl trailed her fingers over Clark’s chiseled face, across his sharp jaw, and Martha wondered what exactly this girl saw when she looked at her son. She couldn’t see Superman—he was an Earth phenomenon—and she couldn’t see Clark, because he was a Kent phenomenon. Who did she see?
She spoke gibberish. What had Clark called it? Kryptahniuo—or Kryptonese for simple folk like his mother.
The girl cupped Clark’s face, her own shining with love and a grief so strong she had Martha clutching at the porch fence in the midst of her own sympathy pain.
Martha recognized one thing out of the girl’s fast-paced speech: a name. Jor-El. She’d heard it a lot those past few years as Clark researched his origins. Jor-El. His blood father.
Though she’d be loathe to admit it, Martha turned away when the girl fell to her knees, grasping fistfuls of Clark’s supersuit as she keened in agony.
She howled Jor-El and Zor-El and Rao, and Martha could feel the tang of blood in her mouth; she had bitten her tongue. She closed her eyes and willed the fear and the mistrust and the jealousy away. It didn’t leave her completely, but she would be damned if she let it stay and sit within her without a fight. This girl had nothing. No one but Clark.
Martha gripped the doorframe, strength slowly seeping into her bones.
No one but the Kents.