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“How are you feeling?”
It’s dark out, but the air still clings like it’d done when she first stepped out of the ship, fever warm and cloyingly wet. The metal roof of the Kents’ garden shed creaks as Kal-El makes his way towards her.
His steps are probably meant to be gentle. Reassuring even.
They aren’t.
He’s worried about you, Kara tells herself sternly. You fell out of a spaceship and started screaming because you have legs. It’s not like he doesn’t have a good reason.
Still. She doesn’t want to talk to him.
Kara pulls her knees closer, ignoring the way her bones ache. It’s probably just aftereffects from the gene redistribution fluid. This body is only a few days old, after all.
Such an odd concept, bones. They seem so inefficient — so much clumsier than the flexible membranes and semi-pliable exoskeletons of her childhood. She should probably ask Kal how he keeps track of which direction each joint is supposed to bend.
Wait.
Kal asked her a question. She should probably respond.
“I’m fine,” she tells him, for lack of anything better to say. She pretends to focus on the cows shuffling along the edges of the fence. Hopes he takes the hint and goes back inside.
He settles in beside her anyway. “You know, you don’t have to be fine,” he says, tone infuriatingly careful. “For you, it’s like it all happened yesterday. You lost your whole family. I can’t even imagine.”
Something hard and painful swells below her uvula, and Kara has to swallow it down. Her body is new, she tells herself firmly. All these terrifying sensations are probably just normal maintenance.
She’ll get used to it eventually.
The legs and the walking and the strange, guttural noises they make with their flapping lips — it would all come with time.
Probably.
She still doesn’t look at him though.
It’s not like she’s not grateful to him and the Kents for taking her in — she is. It’s just.
It’s hard for her.
Hard to look at this strange alien — with all that horrid black fur sprouting out the top of his skull and those unbending, stick-straight bones, all slotted together like cogs in a machine — and see family.
He doesn’t look a thing like Jor-El. Doesn’t even look like a person, really.
But then, neither does Kara. Not anymore at least.
Bad thought. Don’t think about that.
For a while, they just sit and watch the cows amble peacefully into the barn. Ayrshire cows, Mr. Kent said they were called. Massive, hulking beasts with wiry white and brown fur and great, bulging eyes like a manta-lion. They’re alien and unnerving too, in the same way Kal-El and Mr. and Mrs. Kent are — all harsh, hard steps and vapid stares — but for some reason, she likes looking at the cows better.
It’s… more removed, somehow.
Less personal.
After a while though, just as the final, glaring streaks of Earth’s white-bright sun flare gold against the horizon and go out, the last of the Ayrshires disappears inside the barn.
And then it’s just the two of them.
Detached, Kara watches as Mr. Kent closes the barn door behind the last of them. With the sun gone, the air has finally started to cool somewhat, and it prickles along her skin like the winds back home.
Maybe, if she makes some kind of excuse, Kal will go back inside.
Then, without warning, her body quakes — a sudden, hard jerk as all her muscles go rigid, clenching around her bones like cobra-wyrms.
She slams her eyes shut instinctively. It’s normal, she recites to herself, even as her breath catches in her throat. You’re adjusting. The hard little nubs of bone in her mouth shudder against each other, and she clenches her jaw shut to keep them still. Human bodies do all sorts of random, unexpected things.
Just because it’s uncomfortable doesn’t mean she’s dying.
More importantly, she doesn’t want to freak out over something supposedly commonplace again. She already humiliated herself enough when she stumbled out of the ship, calling for a baby that grew up years ago in a language she can’t even speak with this clumsy human tongue.
She’s supposed to be the responsible one. The one who knows what’s going on.
Her body spasms again, and her hands clench involuntarily as Kal looks over at her.
But Kal just eyes her for a moment, then shrugs out of his jacket, wrapping it around her shoulders like a blanket. It’s still warm from his body heat. Everything on this planet is so warm.
But something in it must do the trick, because the random muscle spasms slow, then stop.
Kal goes back to watching the horizon.
This is starting to get awkward.
“Do you even remember it?” Kara blurts out suddenly, when the silence stretches too long to bear. She used to be polite, back home. Good with people.
She doesn’t know how to talk to him — to this strange, alien creature who claims to be her baby cousin.
When he shifts a bit, confused, she rushes to clarify. “Krypton, I mean.”
It doesn’t matter what he says, she tells herself firmly, tracing a line of rust on the roof with one of the tiny, unwieldy appendages at the end of her arm. Doesn’t matter if he remembers it or not.
Either way, it won’t change anything.
Kal takes too long to think it over. Then — “A little bit,” he says slowly, the upper half of his face creasing like paper. “Or — I don’t know.” His tongue darts out, pink and slimy, wetting his lips. “I think I dream about it sometimes. The fires. The screams.”
Kara chances a glance his way, hoping against hope he won’t catch her eye. She doesn’t like looking at him. The thin skin of his face wraps too tight around the hard globule of bone underneath, clings at him like the stomach lining of a tiger-wyrm around its prey. Like he’s something dead.
He’s hideous. A monster out of a children’s story.
He’s all she has left.
Swallowing down another painful lump in her throat (it’s fine it’s normal don’t panic over nothing), Kara shifts, leaning into his side. He’s warm — warmer than the jacket around her shoulders — like a rock left out in the sun.
“I hate that that’s all you remember,” she says bitterly, letting her eyes fall shut. “Rao above, Kal. It was our home. You should remember more than just screams .”
Do not worry, my children, for a just universe is always forthcoming. That was what the disciples of Rao always said in the morning prayers. A just universe, which will take all the things that should and make them be .
If you ask Kara, there’s a lot of things that should be true. But there’s a whole lot more, she thinks, that shouldn’t be.
She shouldn’t have to see this warped body every time she looks down at herself. Shouldn’t have to remember the silent, searing pain as her capsule snapped her protective epidermal platelets one by one and dissolved the skin underneath into a million screaming proteins, storing them away until it came time to slot them back together and turn her into Something Else.
(They shouldn’t be the last ones left. She shouldn’t still hear the screams.)
But the universe isn’t just, and truth be told, with the disciples all dead, she doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. So instead of thinking, she just stares at the inside of her eyelids, watching the faint green afterimage of the sunset smudge its way across the purple-black darkness of her vision.
It’s peaceful, almost. Meditative.
She only startles a little bit when Kal leans back into her, resting the side of his head against the top of hers. Tentatively, she settles back into his side again, letting herself relax a bit more.
It’s — comforting.
Like when she was small, and her mother would drape her body flush against Kara’s, squeezing her so tightly into her membranous, cilia-coated folds that she couldn’t see one speck of light from the outside world.
Or when her dad would take her on his back and sweep across the fields behind the citadel. The wind across her back. The sun in her eyes. The exhilarated slip-slide of her cilia across his spinal plates, and the knowledge that he would always, always catch her.
Kara exhales, slow and deliberate. It comes out shaky. Feels wet in her throat.
(She is never going to see either of them ever again.)
Back home, she always had an excellent Driluk face, but Kal must pick up on some kind of ultra-special human body language thing she hasn’t learned yet, because he wraps an arm around her shoulders, and when he speaks next, his voice is soft and gentle in her ear.
“I’ve got the recordings Jor-El left me,” he starts, low and non-threatening, the thrum of his voice vibrating through his chest, “but uh. He usually focuses on other stuff in those. Ethics. Morality, sometimes. Reaching my full potential. That sort of thing.”
Yeah. That sounds like Uncle Jor.
Kal fidgets a bit, awkward, and Kara realizes with a start that he probably doesn’t know how to talk to her either. “Do you think — could you tell me about it?” he asks, quieter now, more hesitant. “About Krypton? And what it was like before?”
Kara takes a minute to answer.
Strictly speaking, she’d never held him much, as a baby. Her aunt and uncle had grown… private, towards the end. Paranoid. Never speaking to anyone but each other, or sometimes Kara’s father, although those conversations ended in raised voices and slammed privacy curtains more often than not.
She hadn’t understood why they were so angry. Not back then.
But they’d made an exception, just after Kal’s hatching. Let Kara and her parents huddle round Aunt Lara and the baby, still swaddled tight in medical sensors and antibacterial foam.
When Aunt Lara first passed him to her, Kara had tried to give him back. After all, she’d never held a baby before, and he’d been so soft — unexpectedly so — the protective platelets along his spinal epidermis still in the process of firming up.
She’d been afraid she would break him.
But then Aunt Lara settled him a bit more firmly against her, folded him more securely into the sensitive cilia beneath Kara’s membrane, and Kal nestled in close and just started purring like his life depended on it.
And all she could think to herself was: Oh. So this is what it feels like.
He was so small then. Her baby cousin.
Back in the here and now, Kara’s face twists, and — and she doesn’t know what it means. Hasn’t had this body long enough to know if it’s from a smile or a frown. Her chest feels so tight she thinks she might be dying, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. “Oh, Kal,” she whispers, eyes trained unwaveringly on the horizon.
If she squints, she can almost pretend the redness along the horizon is the sky back home.
But that thought makes her face twist up even more, so she just closes her eyes against it. Presses her face into Kal’s shoulder and does her best to picture how the red, red sun sparkled against the sea.
“It was beautiful.”