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“Do you want to come to a festival with me this weekend?” Kara asks Alex, and Alex turns to watch her fiddle with the stem of her wine glass. Everyone else has left now though, it’s just the two of them on the couch at Kara’s apartment, curled up on opposite corners with the remains of a pizza box in the middle like that makes the distance normal.
It’s what their new normal has been, at least, since Mon-El left, since Maggie turned Alex down and Alex… figured out why it had taken her so long to figure out she was gay in the first place. Wine that Kara doesn’t actually like and Netflix and girl talk with Kara telling Alex about work, Alex telling Kara about the few dates she’d been on before she couldn’t bear doing it anymore.
Kara asking Alex to go somewhere with her is new. Still, Alex makes a face at the suggestion. “You want to go to a Christmas market?” she asks. She can’t think of what other kind of festival Kara could be talking about—Chanukah just ended and there are still red and green lights everywhere, overwhelming like they are every year.
Kara looks up, startled. “No! Totally not Christmas related, I promise.” She hesitates and then forces a smile. “It’s for an alien holiday, Volkvan. I saw a flyer at the bar yesterday.”
An alien holiday. Of course aliens have holidays, Alex works with aliens, spent years living with one, but it’s not something she’s thought of. Kara has never mentioned any Kryptonian holidays, even though she clearly got the concept and was always excited to learn about the Danvers’ holidays as a kid.
“Sounds great,” Alex says, reaching out to tangle her hand with Kara’s on instinct, before she realizes what she’s doing. A small smile spreads across Kara’s face at the contact, and it’s hard to look at, to have that directed at her right now, like staring into the sun. Alex lets her hand drop before it can be too much. Sisters don’t hold hands, and they don’t cuddle on the couch, not if one of them is gay at least, and Alex is going to be a good sister.
*
“M’gann is really excited,” Maggie says when Alex asks her about it the next night. Their relationship was strained for a few weeks after Alex came onto Maggie, but after she got over that, after Alex realized it wasn’t really Maggie she had feelings for in the first place, they’ve been slowly settling into the kind of friendship they had before—with more shit-talking all around and less embarrassing starry eyes from Alex. “I am too. This is the first time the city has given a permit to the alien community for something this big.”
“How big?” Alex asks. She’s curious, and Kara hasn’t really told her anything. She did track down the poster at the bar when she got here, but it’s written in Trader’s, and Alex, embarrassingly for how many aliens she works with and how common the language is, isn’t really fluent. The spoken language is based off Daxamian, as the main runners of the intergalactic slave trade when it started, and Daxamian is similar to, yet really not the same as, Kryptonian, which Alex can read but barely speak… which would maybe be helpful if it weren't for the fact that written Trader's uses a completely different set of characters. Alex feels bad for wishing things in the bar were written in English too.
“Ask me about how many fire permit applications I’ve filled out,” Maggie says, and sinks another ball.
That sounds promising. Or interesting, at least.
“Planning to go meet some alien girls?” Maggie asks eventually, when Alex doesn’t reply, and Alex’s stomach feels like it’s twisting up in knots.
“No, Kara wanted to go,” she says, as casually as she can, and it’s stupid, that she’s having to use her lie detector training from work just to get through conversations with friends, but that’s where she’s at now, she guesses. “Do you want to come with us?”
She regrets the invitation as soon as she’s made it, a forced attempt to sound casual about the whole thing. It’s a relief when Maggie just grins and tells her she’ll be working security all night, but maybe she’ll see Alex there.
*
The night of, Kara shows up at the front door of Alex’s apartment in robes with a big crest on the chest, and Alex hauls her inside so no one can see before she even gets a proper look at the outfit.
“You bring your family with you, to Volkvan,” Kara says, gesturing down at her clothing, and it’s not the crest of the house of El, it’s the In-Ze crest. Astra’s crest, what used to be Kara’s mother’s crest, and Alex is frozen, looking at it. “I thought this would be a little less conspicuous.”
And then Kara is handing her a garment bag, and part of Alex knows before she opens it, but it’s still…
“You’re supposed to literally bring your family with you too,” Kara says, looking at Alex with a question in her eyes, and… family. That’s what she and Kara have called each other for so long now but it’s never felt more like just a human disguise than it has the past few weeks. Kara has never looked quite as alien as she does right then, standing in Alex’s apartment in a clearly handmade robe but looking so tall and proud—the scion of two great houses, all alone on Earth except for her cousin. She’s beautiful like this, not hiding anything, and hurts to look at her.
Alex looks down at the robes instead, fingers the crest. Kara isn’t a sewer, like Winn is—Alex can see a few rough lines, some missing hems—but she is an artist. The lines of the embroidery are clean, sharp, feel like they leap off the fabric. It makes sense, when she thinks about it, Kara giving her the robe. For years, they’ve been pretending Alex is Kara’s human family to help her disguise herself on Earth. Now Alex can return the favour, disguise herself as Kara’s Kryptonian family to go to this festival with her.
It’s still painful, pulling it on after she’s shucked the sweater she was going to wear—she can’t look at the crest on her body, the crest of Kara’s real family, who Alex killed. She looks at Kara instead, who makes a delighted noise and squeezes her in a hug so tight Alex can barely breathe.
*
Kara flies them both there, because it’s probably the least conspicuous option. They don’t usually do this other than for missions or emergencies, and as tonight is neither, Alex can just take in the feeling of being held, Kara’s arms tight around her back, one leg hooked between Alex’s calves to keep her legs elevated, Alex’s face right by Kara’s neck. The cold air biting at her face anyway, the feeling of weightlessness, of falling and being buoyed up.
And then they’re close enough to see it, and the festival is massive. It has to stretch at least ten city blocks, all completely covered in white and yellow lights, filled with bonfires and brightly coloured stalls and even what looks like several boxing rings.
It looks a little like a Christmas market, honestly, but Alex isn’t going to tell Kara that. She knows there are a lot of cultures that have some sort of winter solstice celebration, so it makes sense aliens would too, and the lack of Christmas music is already putting this one way ahead in her books.
“Do you know what the music is?” Alex asks as they get closer, knowing Kara will hear her despite the noise getting louder as they approach. It sounds kind of like ska but punctuated by occasional shrieking.
“An appeal to Ughashi—kind of like big mole things—not to eat their children,” Kara says. “And for pickles, I think?” It’s not the kind of answer Alex was expecting—Kara has clearly done her research.
No one bats an eye when they touch down, and the festival is even more intense from the inside. Huge, light-up tentacled kites fly from the surrounding warehouses, and smells from portable cooktops burn Alex’s nostrils.
There are more humans here than she expected there to be too, and Alex recognizes some of them as patrons at the bar or clearly here with an alien, but some of them just seem to be tourists, gawking at the huge sculptures looming off to the side or in alleyways, at the tentacle kites, at the aliens themselves. A cheerful army of alien servers brings drinks around, and Alex wonders how all of this is being paid for. And how many members of the NCPD’s science division are here tonight, and how long exactly it took Maggie and M’gann to sort out the permits first.
When Alex looks to Kara she’s just taking it all in, eyes shining, and then she smiles at Alex, asks, “What do you want to do first?”
*
The boxing rings are for ritual combat, Kara tells her when they approach one of them. “It’s non-binding, but it’s an honour to win anyway.”
It’s an obvious choice. Alex loves sparring, and the chance to spar with several alien species she would only get to face in actual combat situations with the DEO is too good to pass up. Plus, it looks fun. And it can be a break, a little bit. They’ve been here for less than half an hour and already it’s overwhelming, Kara in robes, Kara looking at her with shining eyes… the robe feels heavy on her shoulders, the weight of pretending to be something to Kara she’s not, that she can’t be, and she wonders if it comes close to what Kara has felt all of these years, hiding herself to be human. But that was hiding Kara, and this is making Alex stick out in a way she really shouldn’t.
They stand at the edge of the ring, watching a Traga’athrim lift a human-looking Volkodan—the species this holiday belongs to—into the air with four tentacles then slam him down into the ground after, sand coming up in a cloud around them.
After they watch a few bouts, Alex gets in line for one of the rings. They have human-sized gear, because of the Volkodan and probably the other human-passing aliens, and it’s a relief to pull off the robe and pass it to Kara to hold onto. Alex selects a practice sword from the rack of weapons and steps into the ring.
She wins three rounds, Kara cheering her on the whole time.
“That’s my champion,” Kara says to another alien, warm, and it makes Alex feel all squirmy inside, because she likes the way that sounds but she knows it isn’t true.
It’s distracting enough anyway that the Kragarian she’s fighting gets in a lucky shot, and then she’s down for the count, lying winded on the sand, too out of it to pull herself back into the fight.
Which is when she hears a shout in what sounds distinctly like Kryptonian, and Kara is in the ring with her. She’s wearing no protective gear whatsoever, her robe is girded up around her bare thighs (and Alex needs to not be staring) and she’s grappling with the Kragarian. Alex scrambles out of the way, slipping under the ropes walling the ring off and grabbing her own robe from where Kara left it hanging on the side.
The rest of the fight doesn’t take long, and then Kara is clasping arms with the defeated Kragarian quickly before she’s beside Alex outside of the ring, looking her over for injuries.
“I’m fine, Kara,” Alex says, embarrassed, making a motion of swatting at her, though she has too many years of experience with Kara’s powers to actually try that.
“You didn’t get up,” Kara says, sounding actually concerned, which makes Alex both warm inside and exasperated.
“Fighting aliens is actually my job,” she says, and then looks around to make sure no one heard, because it sounds bad saying it like that, and that’s not her whole job anymore. “He wouldn’t have kept hitting me, you know, you didn’t have to rush in there.”
“Of course I did,” Kara tells her, frowning. “You’re here acting as a member of my house, I had to defend your honour.”
As a member of Kara’s house. That’s better and worse than Kara calling her family all at the same time, but warmth blooms in Alex’s chest at the thought of Kara defending her honour, even though she absolutely doesn’t have to.
“Well, are you going to keep fighting then?” She asks her, because that’s how it works, why she was able to do three matches in a row.
Kara shakes her head, grinning. “I don’t want to be here all night.”
This is familiar, this is the thing Alex has been missing, and she grins back at Kara, says “that’s cocky of you.”
“You think you can beat me, human?” Kara asks, and the words sound like they’re something out of an old sci fi movie but Kara is clearly amused by herself, and it’s the way Kara used to tease Alex too: after they first got comfortable around each other, before all of the secrets started.
“Bring it on, alien,” Alex tells her, and before she can think better of it, lunges at her.
They haven’t tussled like this since last year, used to only do it in Kara’s apartment after Kara came out as Supergirl, but this is a place Kara doesn’t have to hide her strength either, and it feels good being physical like this in a casual way, like cuddling on the couch but less… charged.
It’s only a little embarrassing when Alex ends up flung over Kara’s shoulder on her tummy, Kara’s arm around her thighs to hold her there and her arms dangling uselessly over Kara’s back. Alex spits out blonde hair, tells Kara to put her down while Kara just laughs, carries her away from the boxing ring.
Kara doesn’t want to actually fight Alex in one of the other rings without Kryptonite to even the playing field, and Alex doesn’t want to argue (she still thinks she could take Kara), so they do carnival games instead, betting on who can win the most prizes. Alex tries to get rid of the advantage of Kara’s powers by distracting Kara as much as she can during her turns, puffing air into her face, searching for the few spots where she’s ticklish.
They end up coming out almost even, but marksmanship counts for more than strength for most of the games, and Alex wins a four gallon jar of pickled fish as a prize. She leaves with a jealous alien kid in line behind them.
Kara keeps looking to her, eyes bright, and it takes Alex an embarrassingly long time to realize Kara’s looking at her to see if she’s enjoying herself. She is.
*
Alex has never minded Christmas lights in the first part of December—does mind the constant “holiday” music in stores, but after getting back from spending the last few days of Chanukah in Midvale, the days leading up to Christmas itself always feel like this weird in-between time, the rest of the world rushing around for something that has no meaning for Alex.
The festival feels like a different world altogether, full of alien scents and sounds in a way the bar isn’t, and most everyone talking in both Trader’s and English. There are lights, and it feels festive, but it’s something other, so that even if this isn’t a holiday Alex celebrates, it doesn’t chafe.
It’s fascinating getting to watch Kara here with the other aliens. She laughs with vendors manning the booths, tells recent refugees about alien friendly places, other than the bar, and how National City is becoming a haven for people like them… It’s like seeing her in a completely different light, closest to how she was with Alex when it was just the two of them in one of their apartments, their room in Midvale, but still other somehow. She moves differently, too, all languid muscle, none of the awkwardness she’s adopted as part of her human persona.
That’s the shift: Kara’s not pretending to be human. She isn’t the human disguise Alex’s family—Alex—spent so long trying to make fit her, for her own protection, she’s the last daughter of Krypton, and seeing her here, it’s more than just a title.
Part of the reason Alex didn’t want to learn Kryptonese as teenagers, when Kara wanted to teach her, was because Kara had learned English in two weeks when she first came to stay with them—Alex was tired of feeling like she didn’t measure up. She still ended up learning the written language, of course, she had to, to build the Alura AI, but she still doesn’t speak it, still wishes she had let Kara teach her when she wanted to. Not just because Alex would have been able to speak her language with her at the end of it, but because now she knows the act of teaching would have been a gift too, allowing Kara to be more herself in Midvale, to feel that connection to Krypton even as she was having to act more and more human.
Despite all of it, Kara brought Alex here tonight, to this festival where she can be her Kryptonian self. Alex is starting to think that means something.
They see M’gann briefly—she’s far too busy making colourful drinks for enthusiastic Volkodan to actually visit—and Alex catches sight of Maggie once around the perimeter, chatting with a Zugarra girl wearing the biggest, loudest Christmas sweater Alex has ever seen. They don’t see anyone else they know, and it’s nice, that it ended up just being her and Kara here, in the way that it’s always nice when this happens—even though it’s the kind of true thing that’s hard for Alex to say out loud.
“I thought about trying to cover this for Catco, but I wanted to bring you instead,” Kara says, smiling at her, like mind-reading is one of her powers, and Alex fake-shoves her, trying not to bask too obviously under the weight of Kara’s full attention. No Maggie, no boys, just the two of them, just like it used to be.
*
All of the games made Alex hungry, and Kara is always hungry, so they wander over to the part of the festival where the food smells are coming from. That ends up being where the weapons are too, and Alex gets distracted looking at those and leaves Kara in charge of getting food.
In retrospect, she should have known better. They end up with an outdoor picnic table’s worth of some of the strangest-looking dishes Alex has ever seen, Kara continuously dashing back to grab more. At least she’ll probably eat most if not all of it, and Kara promises everything has been verified by the stall owners and her own keen sense of smell as human edible.
That doesn’t mean everything actually tastes good to a human, but Alex finds a few things that are mostly familiar, and Kara keeps passing her things from her plates that she promises Alex will like. (She’s right too, of course.)
As they eat, Alex can’t help but watching the crowds of aliens at the other picnic tables around them too. They eat with knives from their belts, fingers, tubes from their necks, mandibles… some of them are just wearing human clothing, but a lot of them aren’t, and Alex can’t figure out why even some of the human-passing Volkodan are wearing things that look so different from each other. Most of them are robes, sort of like Kara’s, but with wildly different colours, symbols, everything.
“What do—” she starts to ask, then rolls her eyes, accepts the mouthful of whatever it is on a stick that Kara is holding out for her. It’s delicious. Alex is going to be so full. “What do the robes symbolize?” she tries again when her mouth is slightly less full of food.
“It’s a festival about family, like I said,” Kara says. “The Volkodan’s genes change based on their planet, and they travel a lot. They wear their heritage on their clothing to remember it, even when their bodies forget, so the different designs mean they—or their families—have been to different planets.”
Family, like Kara keeps saying. The way she looks at Alex, Alex can almost believe it. Maybe she hasn’t ruined everything with her stupid feelings after all, maybe they can go back to being how they were… before. As close to family as they could be, an alien and a human.
“So they’re like Kryptonians, huh?” she asks, smirking at Kara. “Slapping their crest everywhere?”
Kara smiles back at her, smug. “Only on things that belong to us.”
Alex chokes on her drink, because fuck, Kara can’t just say things like that, and Kara laughs, pats her gently on the back. It’s a slow realization: this whole night has sort of felt like a date—more than that, a good date. And it’s not that Alex has ever forgotten that Kara’s an alien, but Kara’s gotten so good at hiding that, even before the weird tension of the last few months, that it’s been easy to forget what that meant. Kara the Kryptonian feels a lot less like Alex’s sister.
It doesn’t mean Alex is ever going to say anything to Kara about her newfound feelings for her, but they still have that connection, strained though it’s been. Maybe it means they can go back to the way things were before, cuddling on the couch, Alex not having to watch how long her hugs are… all of it. Maybe they can be something like family again: happy together.
*
And then, of course, the music starts getting louder and Kara tells her it must be time for dancing. The picnic tables are pulled away, and people fill the spaces in the street they left, and…
The first dance is intricate and definitely alien and is somehow, inexplicably, set to the Macarena. The sharp juxtaposition with something so firmly human is jarring, especially after a whole evening of seeing the whole festival as really an alien event other than the out of place Christmas sweaters.
Kara starts giggling uncontrollably. “Are you getting the same flashbacks to high school I am?” she asks.
“I can’t believe you thought all human dances were like this,” Alex teases, and Kara makes a face at her.
“Between this and the YMCA how was I supposed to know?”
The humans on the dance floor actually start doing the Macarena, and some of the aliens start incorporating the jump-turn into their dance, and it’s an odd mishmash of motions.
“May I have this dance?” Kara asks, hand out, and Alex grins, takes it, lets Kara lead her out onto the ‘floor’ that is actually a closed-off intersection decked out in fairy lights. Neither of them know the alien dance so they do the Macarena with the humans, which is surreal, and then a pop song comes on and Alex actually dances.
She hasn’t really gone out since J’onn pulled her out of the drunk tank, was too busy at first and then didn’t want to go back to any part of that life, but dancing is something she’s missed, just letting the music flow through her. And Kara moves closer, dancing with her, sure of her body in a way Alex hasn’t seen before, because she definitely didn’t move like this when she was in high school and it’s not like Alex ever let Kara see her clubbing days.
This is good too, the back and forth with a partner, especially because it’s Kara and they know each other so well—this is just an extension of that.
Alex is just looking up to grin at Kara when the song changes to slow piano. Some of the Volkodan (more identifiable now by their clothes) start moving closer to their human dance partners and wrapping them up, floating up in the air to hover with them, metres above the street.
Kara holds out her arms, grinning back at her. This might be a bad idea, slow dancing together, but right now Alex can’t bring herself to care. She steps into Kara, wraps her arms around her as Kara does the same, and then they’re floating up too. It’s nice. Kara is a furnace, always, and she’s starting to get a little chilly beneath the robes; it’s December, even if it is National City. And Alex always likes it when Kara holds her. She rests her head on Kara’s shoulder, letting herself relax into the swaying motions, watching the other dancers swirl around to the music at varying heights, floating higher and lower as the music swells and ebbs. Alex thinks it’s an Adele song.
“Can they all fly?” Alex murmurs, keeping her voice low so hopefully no one other than Kara will hear her.
“I think it’s still in their genes from one of the last couple planets they or their parents were on,” Kara says. “It isn’t a complete shift with each move. You could ask someone though,” she adds, just when Alex was starting to think about the research she could be doing. Asking someone makes sense. If it was a Kryptonian thing, she would ask Kara. That’s probably a better way to start thinking about alien research: talk to the aliens involved, especially if they’re the friendly, throw huge parties type and unlikely to try biting her head off for it.
“I might,” she says, and then, “this is nice.”
“I’ve missed you,” Kara says, her voice almost too low for Alex to hear, and Alex aches with the thought that it’s been her doing this to them. “It is,” Kara says, at a more human audible volume. “I like flying with you.” She takes them higher up in the air in a lazy corkscrew motion before floating back down.
“Show off,” Alex says around the lump in her throat, and Kara laughs.
*
Alex ends up talking to a human and a Volkodan, who are standing so close together it looks like they’re trying to meld into one person. They’re in a relationship with a small group of other Volkodan and humans milling around the festival somewhere, and happily answer Alex’s questions—probably, she realizes, because of her robe. Yes, they float, but they don’t fly, and their genes change based on their planet but also their partners, which explains the variation Alex kept noticing.
“She had these beautiful eye ridges when we met,” the human says, looking adoringly up at his partner, who still isn’t quite human-passing at about seven feet tall and with a light dusting of scales on her face. The Volkodan blushes bright green. Beyond them, Kara is helping set up another bonfire with another Volkodan. Alex really has no idea how they got permits for so many fires in this neighbourhood, especially since it’s so heavily industrial, but they are good for keeping warm, at least.
“How long have you been with your alien for?” the Volkodan asks Alex, with a twist of her lips that shows she knows it’s a strange question, because even though on Earth ‘alien’ has become code for ‘not human’, really both humans and all of the other species here are alien to this woman.
It takes Alex a minute to realize the Volkodan is talking about Kara, who is now coming over to them with the other Volkodan in tow.
Even though tonight sort of feels like a date it absolutely is not, and Alex is opening her mouth to say that they’re not together when she realizes that’s really not the question she’s being asked. A festival about family, Kara kept saying, as she dressed Alex in her crest, fought for Alex’s honour, made sure she was feeding her properly… tonight Alex almost believes it again. This alien knows they’re different species. It’s a jarring thought, because when they first came here Alex thought Kara was disguising her in the robes, but obviously that would only work on the humans. Chosen family is exactly the thing she’s being asked about.
“Since we were teenagers,” she says, as Kara and the other Volkodan reach them.
As it turns out, the huge sculptures around are actually parade floats, and Alex and Kara’s new friends lead them off to the side to find a good place to watch. Deceptively strong aliens push the giant structures through the middle of the street, visitors scrambling out of their way at first and then eventually hanging back between the stalls to form a route for them.
The floats are massive, easily three stories high each, and with each new marvel she sees—not all of them were visible from the street—Alex’s respect for Maggie’s bureaucrat-convincing capacities increases tenfold. It takes her a while to figure out what they’re supposed to be, but then one that looks like a miniature Earth with some sort of scary-looking paper mache humans and other aliens comes through, and… they’re planets. Given the theme tonight, they’re probably planets where the Volkodan have lived before. The Volkodan Alex was talking to before confirms it when she asks, and Alex is just turning to ask Kara if she’s seen any of these other planets when she catches sight of the stricken look on her face. Alex thinks she’s looking at the Earth float for a minute but it’s the one behind it—a sculpture of some horned aliens on a frozen world.
“Hey,” Alex says, grabs Kara’s arm, ducks her face, trying to get Kara’s attention. “Are you okay?”
Kara nods in a way that looks automatic, the learned human response to that question, and then she hesitates, jerks her head away from the crowd a little.
Alex follows her, and they’re almost to the edge of the cordoned off area when Kara finally speaks.
“Krypton didn’t have holidays,” she says, looking at Alex with those ‘don’t be mad’ eyes even though Alex has no idea what she’s supposed to not be mad about. “Or… not holidays like this, and like you have here, with dancing and decorations and food. But we had space travel. So… I used to come to this festival as a kid.”
The comment about the food Alex was about to make dies on her lips.
“My Aunt Astra used to take me every year. It was on Tha’ar, just one system over—the float I was looking at. Krypton didn’t really have any aliens living there.” Kara worries her lip, looks so human again. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to come out of guilt or obligation, I just wanted to share this with you.”
There’s this hopeful look on her face, like this will somehow be fine, and Alex feels sick. Of course, Kara used to come here with her aunt. All this time she’s spent running around with Kara, pretending to be part of her house, and Alex is the reason Kara doesn’t have a family, can’t bring her real family here. She stumbles away from Kara, starts scrambling to get the robe off, can’t bear to be wearing it anymore.
“What are you doing?” Kara asks, grabbing her hands to stop her.
“I killed the last person who brought you here,” Alex snaps, and oh god, she’s going to cry too, of course she is, she can’t even manage to not make this all about herself too. “I can’t wear this, Kara! This is her crest, and I’m her murderer!”
“This is my crest,” Kara says, and her eyes are glowing, and she’s trembling, holding Alex’s arms at her sides now, and Alex shakes. “My family’s crest. We’re wearing it to honour her memory, Alex, to honour my mother’s memory, and all of my family. I gave this to you!”
“How could you?” Alex says, can’t cover the sob she chokes out because Kara still has her hands. “We talk about being sisters, and you say you brought me here as your family, but how could I mean anything to you after what I did?”
Kara jerks back, letting go of Alex’s hands in shock, and Alex runs. She can’t be here. She can’t believe she had just about convinced herself this was okay—it can’t be, and it’s all her fault.
Running is useless. Kara catches her, pressed against her back, strong arms wrapped around her, boxing her in.
“You mean everything to me,” Kara says, and she’s crying too. “I know things have been weird lately, but I thought coming here would help, and it did. It can. You need to let her go, Alex. Both of you acted in ways you thought were honourable. It was a warrior’s death. She would have…” Alex can hear the wet sound of Kara swallowing back tears. “She would have thought you were wonderful, if she met you on Krypton.”
In another world, where it didn’t explode and Alex didn’t help force Kara to hide who she was. Not in Kara’s perfect world of the Black Mercy, where she was on Krypton and Alex wasn’t there with her.
Kara loosens her hold and turns Alex so they’re facing each other again, lets go of her carefully. Alex doesn’t run. There’s no point. The street is empty around them—everyone else is still watching the parade.
“I love you,” Kara says. “I chose you, to share this with you, to wear my family’s symbol. You’re my home here, Alex.”
She can’t be. She looks up, trying to stop the tears from flowing so she can figure out how to tell Kara that when she sees it. She barks out a harsh laugh. They’re standing under mistletoe. A whole huge arch of it, stretching from one side of the street to the next. “Of course,” Alex says. “This is what they’d take from Earth culture. The most fucked up holiday tradition.”
“It’s not mistletoe,” Kara says. She’s closer now, and her voice is quieter. “I mean, it is, but that’s not the tradition. It’s Ghatrean. It means you have to tell a new truth.”
A new truth. There have been so many lies between them, so many half-truths, whether necessary or not, and Alex can think of a lot of new truths she can tell Kara, but only one that will get her to stop looking at Alex like she hung the fucking moon.
“I want to kiss you,” she says, voice raw. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since before I realized what that meant, and it’s why it took me so long to figure out I was gay, and why I stopped dating, and—”
Kara’s lips are on hers, salty with tears. There is an arm around Alex’s neck, her back, holding her up, cracking her open. Alex sobs into it, pushes back into Kara’s mouth, and then she has to pull away, it’s too much—there are strong arms holding her up, her and Kara shaking against each other.
“It’s okay,” Kara says into her hair, voice wet, and Alex shakes her head. It can’t be. She had a plan, and she ruined it by telling Kara, telling her to push her away because she shouldn’t want Alex to be in her life like that, but Kara kissed her—“It’s okay, it’s okay.”
The parade music keeps playing. Traffic moves around them. Eventually, Kara turns back so she can look into Alex’s face. “I’m going to tell you a truth now,” she says, like she hasn’t done enough of that already. “I’ve always wanted you to join my house for real. From the moment you crawled under the table when I was hiding from the popcorn maker.”
There is a weight crushing Alex’s chest—she can’t breathe under it.
“I can’t,” she croaks. “Kara, I’m not worthy, I’ve done so much to hurt you.” And Kara kissed her—
“It doesn’t matter if you’re worthy,” Kara says, and her eyes flash again and then she just looks pained. “You don’t have to meet some imaginary standard for me to love you, Alex. That’s now how it works, I just… I just do. It matters if I choose you. It matters if you choose me too.”
Alex is crying again, and she leans forward, puts her head on Kara’s shoulder, lets Kara hold her up, like when they’re flying. She tries to let the words reach that part of her that sounds like her mother’s voice, is always telling her she doesn’t measure up.
Choose to love Kara—not the feelings, Alex has never had any choice in that, but the act of it. Choose to let Kara love her too, even when she thinks she doesn’t deserve it, even when she thinks it might break her open.
They have been breaking, not a fast wreck but a slow, withering of their relationship, death by a thousand forced smiles, things unsaid. Tonight has thrown it into sharp relief.
Kara is running a hand through her hair, keeps talking softly to her. “I want to kiss you too, you know. I mean in case it wasn’t obvious. But we don’t have to do that either, we just… we need to find a way to fix this.”
That’s all Alex wants too. To fix what’s been cracking. To stay with Kara—for Kara to stay with her.
It doesn’t make it an easy choice, but she knows it’s the right one.
“If I join your house,” Alex says. “Will you teach me how to speak Kryptonese?”
“Yes,” Kara half-sobs half-laughs, hugs her tighter, and Alex squeezes back.
Kara has been Alex’s human sister, Alex’s responsibility, the person Alex wants to protect over everything, but that’s never been all of it. Kara is not of this Earth, will never be of this Earth in the way that Alex is, despite Alex’s family’s past efforts, and it’s better this way. After over a decade of Kara being Alex’s human family, now Alex can try to be Kara’s Kryptonian family. And then maybe they can just belong to each other.
“Can I kiss you again?” Alex asks, and it’s not even about that, it’s just that she wants to be as close to Kara as she can, wants to lie on the couch pressed tight against her, wants to crawl into her skin, and Kara says,
“Please,”
And Alex does.
*
Later, Kara tells Alex that on Tha’ar, where Volkvan was held in the snowy part of the planet, the floating tentacle kites (supposedly representing the Volkodan’s true forms), are symbolically set on fire at the end of the festival and released into the night. Kara is pretty sure Maggie couldn’t get the permits for that. (Alex thinks Maggie would have shut that idea down really quickly without even trying—bonfires in this city are miracle enough. She’s going to have to ask her about it, next time. Maggie is going to be so smug, about her and Kara—Alex thinks maybe by the next time they see each other she’ll be less shaky about it, more ready for teasing.)
They pull the kites down instead, and burn them in the bonfires. The souls of their ancestors. Kara has another crest she embroidered on a scrap of fabric, hidden in her robe, and she burns that too. And it hurts to watch, but after a year, finally, it feels like a good, clean hurt, no longer something festering.
And then all of the lights are turned off, and somehow, despite the light pollution from the city, the sky looks like it’s full of stars.
All of the Volkodan and some of the other aliens are standing very still, and they start singing, slowly turning to look up at the sky. It’s beautiful, and haunting, and there are some gaps Alex thinks might be notes her human ears just can’t hear.
After a minute of this, Kara joins in too. She’s never looked less human, never looked more like the small, proud girl who came to Alex’s house unexpectedly one day, and it makes Alex ache to look at her.
Alex’s Stargirl. Alex’s home. Alex’s ridiculous alien who, when the ceremony is done, wants to fly across the city to find a doughnut place that’s still open.
Kara is warm at Alex’s side, and Alex wraps an arm around her waist, pulls her in close, feels Kara’s answering squeeze around her back. Alex starts singing too. She doesn't know the melody, but she knows Kara, can follow the rises and dips of her voice, and it feels good, feels like connection, to Kara and to the whole new world opening up around them.
Alex is going to be Kara’s too, in all the ways she can.