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Kara’s forgetfulness, serpentine, sweeps through her body at times. She loses grasp of her English at the office vending machine, mumbling jagged mistranslations of the items she wants. She confuses which coins are the largest, dimes or nickels, because they were the same size on Krypton. Currency back home, in her real home, operated in multiples of twelves, anyhow.
Hidden by white knuckles, dollars crumple in her palms. If she’s not careful, she might solidify them by accident. When she was younger she’d come home with green tattoos of Monticello stuck to her hands, or cubes of bills hidden in her socks. A side effect of her strength. Press too hard and the ink will rise from the paper, settling in your skin.
“Kara?”
“Nia - hi, sorry, dumb question - what’s that?” She points at C3 in the glass window of the machine.
“The power bar?”
“Yeah, no, it’s called- um-”
Nia opens her mouth to speak.
“Wait, don’t tell me-” Kara balls up her fist again. “Cajhirrt?” She groans. “Sorry, I must look like a basket case. It’s called - it’s like a granular food, or grainy? it’s got oats and nuts in it, it’s called a- oh! Granola bar!”
Nia takes the dollars from her hand. “You got it.”
“No, I didn’t.” Kara wishes she didn’t hate her English fluency sometimes. “Not when I needed to.”
Nia feeds the money into the machine, gesturing softly at Kara to ask permission without words. (Terrific, Kara thinks, she isn’t even willing to speak to me. All I can do is give her the decaying words of dead languages.)
“You’re not from here,” Nia murmurs. “You lie about it to other people, but not to me. I like that. You trust me. A lot of bilingual people mix up their words. My dad is German and my mom is, uh, from another planet. You wouldn’t believe what Scrabble night is like at my house.”
The cajhirrt clangs and hits the bottom of the vending machine. Kara unwraps the power bar, organic honey and vanilla flavor, and offers half to Nia. Kara’s fingers are sticky with rolled oats and honey as she breaks the granola apart.
“Thanks,” Nia says. “And, if you ever wanna talk about this, I’m happy to listen. Even if I don’t get it.”
“Few people do.” Kara eats her granola bar slowly, and walks back to her desk with Nia. “But… I really appreciate it. I’ll take you up on that sometime, ‘kay?”
Sometimes loss twists inside of Kara’s chest, washing the blood out of the chambers of her heart. Everything is left discolored and dry. A clean slate in the worst way.
Lena walks over to the bed. “Kara?”
She coughs. “Go away. I’m serious - you shouldn’t be around me.”
Day three of the flu, of sneezing and sore throats and cursing out WebMD. (Also, cursing out whoever bought the last package of chamomile at the store.)
It’s been a long week.
“Kara, honey, I want to be with you.”
“I’m gross-” To prove her point, Kara gestures to the blanket of Kleenexes surrounding her legs. “And unlovable, and I’m gonna die in this bed, quarantined like an Italian sailor.”
“Huh?”
“They quarantined sailors! Because they were travel… uh, moving, um - they’re travelavelavelers!”
Lena smirks. “Why, exactly, would they be travelavelaveling?”
“They’re fuckin’ sailors, Lena. Guess!”
Lena decides that, although it’s been difficult to see Kara this miserable, sick Kara is a goddamn delight. “Okay.” She leans in to kiss Kara on the temple and Kara nearly squirms away. But she’s too tired to move, and groans.
“Just one kiss,” Kara mutters.
“Okay, one kiss.”
“Bet you like kissing me ‘cause I’m so cute. I’ve heard bags under your eyes and rat’s-nest hair are in fashion.”
“They are.”
Kara crawls out of the bed just then. “I - I think I have to make soup.”
“We already have soup,” Lena murmurs. These days Kara barely has the strength to brush her teeth, much less to stand up for fifteen minutes as water boils.
“Not the kind I waaaaant. I want zhirnikoj. What my mother used to make.” Kara pauses, one bunny slipper on her foot and the other lost somewhere under the bed. “And I… I can’t have it now. My life sucks. I should just crawl beneath the covers and lose every last speck of hope I’ve got.”
“Um… or we could… maybe not do that?”
“I just - she used to - she would make it every time!” Kara turns to look at Lena quickly, then winces at the soreness in her neck. “If I had the Parsa, or Speckled Hill fever, or that one time I touched a rock penguin and got a scaly rash on my hand-”
Lena has so many questions. Like, first of all, ‘do you have any pictures of rock penguins?’
“She would make zhirnikoj! And crawl into bed with me, and we would read barniy - they’re kind of like graphic novels, except they would actually move. For hours. And if you were really quiet, you could actually talk to Vonahh on the page. And find the silly little easter eggs that they snuck into the… uh, the karponia. It’s like the table of contents.”
(Wait, Kryptonian comic books come with tables of contents? How serious are they?)
Kara groans. “I just…” she swallows and feels the familiar pang in her throat. Stupid swelling. “I just wanna go home.”
Lena sits her back down on the bed and rubs her back. “I know.”
“Home is lien lilies growing by the craggy rock in my backyard, and early afternoons drinking lavender-colored tea with my dad, and the place downtown where you could pay two coins to play with the lasers in the arena. I want to stroll across the street where I grew up and see the animals play-fighting each other, see the fathers and their children running.” Kara swallows. “And I can never go home again.”
Lena knows that Kara has a faded little book of Kryptonian holidays. She schedules calls with Clark, and with her mother on Argo, to keep the language alive. Lena knows that, if she married Kara, their children wouldn’t be fluent. Because Lena isn’t fluent. Kara has said that this isn’t anybody’s fault, but that doesn’t keep the guilt away, not really.
Lena knows that Kara’s memories are relics, erasing and chipping every time she touches them. To recall a memory is an indulgence, because you are changing it 一 morphing, grasping, molding, losing it with every gaze and every brush of your fingertips. Sometimes Kara tries not to touch her memories. Maybe she can keep them enshrined behind museum glass, frozen like moth wings pressed between slides.
But she remembers anyways, and she hates herself for it. She has so few solid memories of Krypton compared to every recent, glowing thing she knows about Earth. On Earth facts are pressed into Wikipedia articles and dusty Ivy-League almanacs. Krypton is not like that. She has to be the museum curator and the fascinated guest.
“I’m really sorry I don’t know how to make… your soup,” Lena mutters. She can’t remember the name.
“It’s okay.” Kara laughs. “I don’t remember either. And, even if I did, most of the foods back home aren’t grown here. They couldn’t survive prolonged exposure to Earth’s sun.”
Kara texts Nia that night. hey. Sorry I haven’t seen you lately - I’ve been out sick. When I get better I think it’d be nice to meet up. Talk about, y’know, alien-planet-homeland stuff.
Lena calls Kara’s mother on the video screen, asking about soup flavors. And, with her biochemistry degree, she manages to make something sortakinda close to zhirnikoj. Lena’s mouth purses as she dips the ladle inside the pot. Who wants to drink something with onions and trumpet flowers in it?
The soup is saffron in color.
Kara grins. Back home zhirnikoj is black, thanks to the spices her mother would add. But poderberry and kelina don’t grow anyplace on this planet. It tastes close enough as is.
And, well, Lena tried to wash her dishes in the sink and hide every trace, but Kara saw how much work went into this. All the failed trials and scrawled ideas. Honestly, it’s a miracle that Kara didn’t make a full recovery before Lena settled on a soup recipe. Their kitchen counters were covered with bowls and open cans of Campbell’s 一 not to mention grocery bags full of leeks and French onions and mushrooms and black peppers.
How much money, exactly, did you spend on this? Kara wants to ask, but her sore throat is still healing and she’s supposed to be on vocal rest.
“I love you,” Kara murmurs instead, reaching out with her foot to tap Lena’s ankle at the table. “N’amen tehjennah ope lodazhei k’yat.”
“What does that mean?”
Kara smiles. “You should open an eccentric soup restaurant. K’monne tylardi nhuy teq L-Corp pluntanz. A good addition to L-Corp’s business portfolio, if you ask me.”
“I’ll think about it.” Lena shrugs and takes another sip of her soup. The flavor’s growing on her.