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The chains around her wrists had been constants. They were part of her life just as much as the arena and the cell she slept in at night. A sign of strength and power. A marker of her victories.
Then Superman came and taught them it was anything but. They were forms of control, a symbol of what Mongul-Who-Was wanted them to be. But they were not slaves, he told them. He led them to freedom.
The first time he tried to remove Otho’s chains, after they’d created a small camp in the tunnels where Mongul would not find them, she refused. She pulled away from his gentle (too gentle, too strange) touch and hid her hands behind her back.
Truth and justice. She trusted in the Superman. She would fight alongside him. She even believed what he said about their iron. The thought of losing it though made her stomach twist and her chest seize.
After Mongul-Who-Is became Mongul-Who-Was, when they were preparing to descend to Earth, Superman approached her again. He sat next to her and patiently waited while she fought with herself. Finally she held her hands out. Superman barely had to touch the chains to break them. She stared at the iron on the ground and ached for the feeling around her wrists.
On Earth, while he introduced them to his family, she scratched at where the chains had been. Every time Superman’s wife or son looked her way, she pressed her fingers deeper into her skin. And when they were shown to their room and argued for a mat on the floor rather than the uncomfortably soft bed, she grabbed the sheets with no hesitation and wrapped them tightly around her wrists. She wished they were heavier. Superman looked at her and frowned but she met his gaze with a steely one of her own and he said nothing even as Osul followed her lead.
When she learned about bracelets, she begged Lois until she had an array of every color and weight and size. Some days she wore a single bracelet, light and easily forgotten, that she would absentmindedly play with while at school or watching movies with her family. Those were the good days.
After nights dreaming of Warworld, she’d have four bracelets hanging from her wrists, the smallest ones she owned. The ones that pressed the most against her skin and felt like chains. And on the days where every movement and sound made her tense, when she couldn’t let Osul out of her sight unless something bad happened to him, when her eyes flashed with an anger and pain that she couldn’t control, she would wear as many bracelets as she possibly could.
Osul eventually stopped wrapping the sheets around his wrists. He wore bracelets only to accessorize. But even as weeks became months became years, Otho wrapped her wrists up every night and wore bracelets in the day and pretended they were chains. And she hated herself for it every moment.
They had been tools of oppression, they had been Mongul’s visual signs that they were slaves, they were nothing to be proud of. But when she felt weak and small, or terribly lost in a world where kindness wasn’t a word whispered in hushed, disgusted tones, it made her feel strong.
She had earned iron when barely of age to fight in the arena. She had defeated warriors stronger and mightier than her. She had done things that made her feel sick, that were anathema to the House of El, and she wished she could forget them. Everything she hated was everything that made her strong. Perhaps one day she would feel safe on this planet and let go of her chains for good. Perhaps one day she wouldn’t feel trapped by Warworld. For now, the only comfort she could take was that the chains were hers and hers alone. No one would own her again.