Chapter Text
She was disoriented.
That’s why it took her so long. When she kicked her way out of her pod this whole new world screamed back at her. She couldn’t focus--looking at and through everything, smells like nothing she’d ever seen, the air like razors across her skin. She ran away, faster than any ship she'd flown in, and curled up in a ball at the center of a copse of trees.
Real trees. Not the kind grown in a arboretum to teach kids what trees used to be, but ones grown from scratch and coming right out of the ground.
She listened to the creak of them as they grew. Focused on it. Marveled at it.
And when she could finally focus—could open her eyes without seeing across the world—she went back for her ship.
But it was gone.
And Kal-El was too.
And Kara Zor-El was alone.
***
She found Kal in a home made of wood and glass and stones dug out of the earth. The wood was enthralling. She dragged her fingers across it. Rough and almost pliant under her hands.
Wood had been a luxury on Krypton. Stuff made from it found only in museums, or on her uncle’s desk. But on Earth they built entire buildings from it and lived in it.
Kal would know such a different world than the one he should have grown up in.
She floated—because she could float and it was the best feeling in the world besides a hug from her parents—at the window and watched the two adults cradle her cousin like he was their own.
“What should we call him,” the man asked. And he looked to the woman with affection that it made Kara’s heart hurt.
“Clark,” she whispered. “Clark Kent.”
The man laughed. “I always wanted a son.”
And now he had one, fallen straight out of the sky.
***
Kara drifted.
***
She stole clothes from a place called K-Mart. The K sound made her think of Krypton. She liked it there. She would sleep there. Hiding until the staff left for the night and then sitting in front of the wall of televisions. Just absorbing a whole new world while drinking Icee after Icee and eating Oreos.
She really liked the sugar found on Earth.
But people started to notice her. One of them made a comment. Took a step towards her. Asked where her parents were.
So she left. Flew up into the sky and let the wind take her away from K-Mart and Kansas.
She glided towards the sun and eventually reached water and a place the humans called Metropolis.
It thrummed with life. Reminded her of Argos City, but with glass boxes instead of crystal spires. Everyone was going somewhere and few people focused on the world around them.
She disappeared into the city.
Yet her Kryptonian roots were strong. Mottos and ethics tattooed into her very soul.
So she helped. She saved lives and stopped bad guys and always disappeared before anyone could see her face and call out the young girl capable of doing extraordinary things.
She couldn't be her planet's hero or even her cousin's. But she could be their hero. This human race.
***
The plane crash changed everything.
Its engines burned in some gross mockery of Flamebird and the screams of its passengers rung in her ears.
"I don't want to die," a girl whispered to herself and she was no older than Kara.
So little 14 year old Kara flew up into the sky and caught a plane on her back.
They fished her out of the water and assumed she was a passenger. That's why they gave her the name Linda Lee.
"Your parents are gone," the social worker said. There was a sad look on his face. Like the news broke him, but Kara took it well. Her parents had been gone for so long that sometimes she forgot to cry for them.
She went into foster care.
"You're very good at math," the teacher said and Kara wanted to tell her that it was just very easy math for a little Kryptonian girl.
But everyone was impressed and soon she was on scholarship to a school where the children sneered at K-Mart and collected news parents like trading cards.
***
That's where she met Cat Grant.
***
Cat Grant was the meanest, the nastiest, girl at school. She was better at English than anyone else and the teachers all swooned over her writing like they swooned over Kara's math.
But her words could do what knives and bullets could not and left Kara cut to the quick.
“You’re such a lost little girl, Linda Lee.”
Kara didn't have the heart to tell her she was using a dead girl's name.
***
Cat was the cruelest tease, but Kara suffered them. They were, at the very least, clever.
And that was one thing she and Cat agreed on. What was said didn't matter, but it had to be clever.
Kara was very good at English, even if she hated it. Mandarin was her favorite. Still slow and stilted compared to Kryptonian, but not like the thuggish beating of a drum that English and German were.
French was her least favorite.
She stumbled over it. Struggled. The words muddied together. It was also her official language in school.
They wore headphones to practice. Their teacher would listen in. Or not. Sometimes he’d disappear.
Kara stumbled over a conjugation and got confused. Conjugated in German.
The students laughed.
She reached for the right word but found English and then Mandarin instead.
Finally she shouted. In Kryptonian. Loud and clear and hers.
The laugher bubbled into a peel of guffaws with the other students imitating her like she was simple.
But their jokes weren't clever.
So Cat stepped in. She tore them down like trees in a forest faced with an axe.
Then she built Kara up, Just like that little house Kal lived in.
***
They became friends.
Cat said she liked Kara because she was good at math and smarter than the students gave her credit for.
"You just have to stop being so awkward around everyone."
Kara didn't know how to explain it--how painful Earth was. How loud and smelly and ugly and foreign. How laughter was the braying of an animal and smiles felt cruel.
She had trouble "reading" all these funny aliens she was stuck with.
But Cat read her. Just like one of the books her mother edited. So she taught Kara how this new world worked.
She was gentle. Kind. Nothing like the ruthless girl Kara first met.
"Where are you from," she asked one night. They were on the roof and sharing a pack of cigarettes. Kara hated the taste, but loved how the smell blocked out the world.
Cat hated them too, but Kara was sure Cat liked how she looked with them. Cigarette dangling from long, elegant fingers. As careless as the pen she often wore behind her ear when she was sure no one was around.
Kara looked up at the stars. When she squinted she could see it. Rao.
This far away it was a pinpoint of light.
She said, "Indiana."
Cat laughed and rolled onto her side to peg Kara with an amused look. "You are not from Indiana."
Kara took a big puff and exhaled it into the sky. "I am."
"No. You've got an accent. Only sometimes. And that day in French. You spoke some language I've never heard of."
"You've heard of all of them?"
"Enough," she said with a lazy smirk.
Cat never missed a thing. People just assumed. She was great in English and she was a cheerleader, so they just assumed she was a particular kind of girl. They missed the razor wire and sharp glass Cat was made of.
Kara let the muscles in her neck go loose and her head lolled to one side. To face Cat. "Maybe I'm not from Indiana."
"So where are you from?"
"Nowhere you've heard of."
"You could try me. I might surprise you Linda Lee." She said Kara's name like a secret. One shared between just the two of them.
Kara took another drag on her cigarette. "Do you ever think about being up there?"
Cat followed her gaze. "Space?"
Kara nodded. There was a scrape of fabric on rough roof and Cat was repositioning herself. Gently laying her head on Kara's stomach and wordlessly handing her another cigarette.
"What girl doesn't think about being an astronaut."
Kara lit it with the stubby remnant of her cigarette and handed it back. ”I don't want to visit. I want to be there."
Cat took it. The glow caught in her eyes. ”You want to live in the stars?"
"Yeah."
Cat inhaled. Coughed. She smoked because cool girls smoked, not because she liked it. Kara could hear it in the way the smoke rasped around in her lungs.
Sometimes she worried.
Cat moved again, her cheek pressed to Kara's belly. Something hot and wonderful churned in Kara. "We should go together."
"Yeah?"
Cat reached for a strand of Kara's hair, her fingers brushing Kara's sweater. Her breast.
Kara swallowed.
But if Cat had any idea of what she was unraveling she didn't show it. And how could she know? Cat didn't have x-ray vision or super hearing. She was just a girl.
A human girl.
She played with Kara's hair like it was the most natural thing in the world. "I bet it'd be a lot of fun with you as a guide."
Kara's hand hovered over Cat's head. She started to reach down. Stopped.
But Cat's eyes, glittering in the dark caught hers. Dared her not to.
She didn't miss the sigh when her fingers combed through Cat's hair. "What makes you think I'd be a good guide?"
Cat didn't answer. She smiled and Kara smiled back and they lay like that until Cat drifted off to sleep, Kara's fingers still in her hair.
***
They helped each other, Cat the wordsmith and Kara the math “genius”. It was a boarding school and they both had roommates so they’d meet in the library and huddle around their books. Sometimes Cat would ask for help and Kara would lean over and her finger would graze Cat’s elbow.
She’d hear the sharp intake of breath, the quick beat of her heart, and she’d smile to herself and pretend not to notice.
Other times she’d struggle with the language in her books. She couldn’t sound the words out loud. “Idiots” did that and Kara did not want to be branded an idiot. So she’d follow along with a pen, the end of it skating over the page. Cat knew what she was doing, but never commented, at least loud enough for others to hear. She'd scoot in close, her knee bumping Kara's clumsily.
"Which part," she'd whisper, just loud enough for Kara alone to hear.
Sometimes her hand would settle on Kara's back, fingers tracing patterns neither understood.
Other times it would settle on her knee. Just high enough for Kara to flush.
Cat didn't have super powered senses, but with Kara she always knew.
***
They were up later than they should have been.
Finals.
Cat would have to do the math all on her own and Kara needed to have finished the entirety of William Faulkner's Light in August. Intellectually she got the book, but everything was too fragmented for her to follow easily. So she read each page slowly. And twice.
Eventually she groaned and set her forehead in the open pages.
"I hate English."
Cat smirked, too pleased with herself.
Kara ranted. Something she only did in Cat's company. Words falling off her tongue like she was born to the language. But she must have switched at some point because Cat got a funny look in her face.
Kara flushed and tried to remember what she'd been ranting in. She ducked her head and returned to her reading and prayed Cat just chalked it up to her being weird.
"What language is that?"
Cat never missed a beat.
"French?"
"Non," she said, and her accent was enviable. "It's your first language isn't it?"
Kara didn't answer. She stared at the letters until they dissolved into nonsense.
“It's the same one you spoke in language lab. And under your breath when you don't think I'm paying attention."
"You always pay attention. Nothing escapes Cat Grant."
She shrugged her shoulders, but smiled all the same, pleased that Kara had noticed.
And Kara thought that was the end of it.
"Rao." Cat said it carefully. Like she was trying it on for size. Her mouth shaped the word all wrong. Like when Kara spoke French.
But it was fresh air in a mire. Water in a drought. Kara trembled with the suddenness of the word and how quickly it broke through whatever barriers she'd built up.
"You always utter that one," Cat said softly. "I figure it's a curse or—“
"A god."
"From your country?"
Planet. Kara looked at her own hands. Focused on a mole between her thumb and finger. She didn't get moles anymore. Not on Earth. She could stay out all day and not have to worry about moles or burns or cancer.
"Linda."
Cat used the name so carefully. Like it was a fragile thing she'd split apart. It made Kara long to hear her own name--her real name. She thought Cat would say it nicely.
"I knew Linda Lee.”
Kara snapped around. Her heart was in her throat.
But Cat didn’t look any different. She’d just accused Kara, but seemed non-plussed bye the accusation. “Linda is an insufferable know it all and her parents died in Switzerland. She skipped the flight back to stay there with family friends. She wasn’t on the plane with me when it crashed—when they fished you out.”
It had been Cat clutching the arm rests and saying she didn’t want to die. Over and over again.
"Why didn't you say anything?" Kara's voice was barely a whisper.
"It wasn't my business."
The "then" was implied.
"And now?"
Cat cocked her head. "I just want to know your name."
"Why?"
She started to say Linda again. Stopped. “Because…because—“
Kara was fast. Faster than any human or car or plane. She could see the wings of a hummingbird in flight and catch a fly with a finger. But Cat, in the moment, was faster. She darted forward and pressed her lips to Kara's.
It was Kara's first kiss.
She gasped, because she'd never expected--never hoped--for such a thing. And Cat drew back, her heart beating like a jackhammer and worry in her bright green eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said. Like it had been an impulse she couldn't control. An action they should regret.
The last time someone had kissed Kara her whole world had exploded.
This wasn't as cataclysmic. It didn't shatter her. Just shocked her.
Cat reached for her things and started to pack. "That was stupid. I’m stupid. Just forget--"
Kara caught her wrist and tugged her back down into her seat and kissed her again.
The first kiss was memorable only because it was the first. And actually kind of awful. To Cat it must have been like kissing a pylon.
But the second...Kara was ready. She made herself yield. She let herself be kissed. The feel of Cat softly pressed to her, her breath hard and fast and her heartbeat a steady drum.
Cat’s bag dropped with a thump and her hand found its way to Kara’s cheek. She kissed with an open mouth that was so warm and inviting. "Relax," she said against Kara's lips.
She relaxed.
She forgot about what she was and what she could do and where she was from and focused just on what was in front of her, and now pressed against her.
She gasped into the next kiss. An opened mouth one she'd only ever seen in stories. Never hoped to experience herself.
Her hands fell onto Cat's waist and Cat's other hand found its way to Kara's cheek and she was so soft and careful. She cradled Kara like she would be the one that would break.
Kara wasn't terrified. Maybe she should have been. She could kill with a look and cripple with a touch. But Cat made her feel safe.
Cat was home.
But because Kara wasn't paying attention--because she let go--it all went wrong.
A teacher saw them. Separated them. And Cat's mother arrived in a cloud of expensive perfume and old cigarette smoke. She quoted numbers and used words like deviant and that was the end of Linda Lee's tenure at the school.
The last thing she saw, as she looked over her shoulder, was Cat Grant in a window. Face carved of stone.
***
They sent her to a special group home. "To help," they said.
Kara flew away the second night there.
She thought of Cat and tasted bitterness and she thought of home and hurt.
Then she thought of Kal. He was almost four and had thick dark hair like his father and his aunt.
When she appeared in his window his voice was soft with wander. "Are you an angel?"
***
The Kents were very busy with a farm and jobs and a son whose tantrums could level buildings.
They didn't notice the angel living in the barn and when Kal--Clark mentioned her they'd laugh about his imaginary friend.
She helped during the day, when the Kents were busy, and at night she'd repair the messes her cousin had made.
She only showed herself to Kal--no, Clark--at night. She'd crawl into his bed and tell him stories. Sometimes in English. Usually in Kryptonian.
He said he liked the sound and would curl into her chest.
Later, when there was just the lullaby of a sleeping family, Kara would float just above the roof of the barn and watch the stars. They were brighter than they'd been in school. No light polluting their shine.
There was Rao.
She always found it. A dim star. Dull. If she squinted hard enough she thought she could see the dust. Ashes of her world. Her parents. Her friends.
When she cried it wasn't always over Krypton. Sometimes it was over a green-eyes girl who saw through her like she had x-ray vision.
***
Kara didn't get cold or hot, and she didn't sneeze anymore. Or cough.
But Clark did. He had a tantrum so bad Kara intervened, flitting in faster than Martha or Jonathan could see. She raced Clark through fields of corn and wheat, and over forests and cities and she threw him in a lake.
It stopped the tantrum dead, but by then it was too late. Clark's powers were blown out and he got a cold.
Martha gave him medicine and Jonathan read to him while a humidifier blew warm, wet air over him.
Kara stayed, pressed tightly to the wall outside his window and when his adoptive parents were gone she slipped in and hugged him tight and listened to the rattle of air in his chest.
She fell asleep like that one night.
She woke up to Clark's steady breath in her ear. And then another. They were breathing faster. Through the mouth. Like they were terrified. And the quick beat of their heart supported the theory.
She opened her eyes.
Martha Kent was staring at her, tray loaded with oatmeal and orange juice and held in front of her.
It was the first time Kara had ever been so close to her. She could see the start of grey in her hair and the fine wrinkles around her mouth and the spatter of freckles on her nose.
She had a kind face.
Even if she was terrified.
Kara could have said something--anything--but she flew through the window, turning glass to dust as she went.
***
She left Kansas again.
Or tried to.
She carried planes on her back and cars on her shoulders and she never went to Metropolis, to a school where she would have found a green-eyed girl looking wistfully up at the stars.
Kal was five and Kara nearly drowned trying to save a bridge from collapsing. She went back to Smallville, to the barn, and she curled up in the loft where she could see bright slivers of the sky and she slept.
The heat of the sun on her forehead woke her. And footsteps in the barn below.
She crept carefully to the edge. Quiet as the mice in the hay.
Martha Kent was there with a package of Oreos and a gallon of milk. Kara could see the condensation on the jug.
“I thought you might be hungry,” she said. The lilt in her English was nice. Soothing.
Kara was hungry. It gnawed at her insides and threatened to tear her in two.
But she wanted to fly. To flee.
She started to. Braced herself.
Revealed herself.
She heard the sharp increase in Martha's heartrate. Saw the way her eyes widened. Then she swallowed. “The other ship was yours wasn’t it?”
Kara pushed away. Floated down.
Martha Kent gasped, but she didn’t run, and there was no fear in her. At least none Kara could hear.
“When Clark landed we found both y’alls ships, but only Clark. Jonathan went looking for the other one--for you. It was you wasn’t it?”
Kara knelt down by the Oreos. “I like the Double Stuffed ones more,” she said quietly. “Need the calories.”
“Clark does too.”
“Kal.”
“Pardon me?”
“That was the name his birth parents gave him. Kal.”
Martha didn’t disagree. She smiled. Gently. The kind of smile Kara hadn’t received in years. “What about you, sweetheart? What name they give you?”
“Kara.”
“Kara. Is Clark—Kal your brother, Kara?”
“My cousin.”
“I see.” She reached down for the milk. Popped the cap off and took a swig before offering it to Kara. “And y’alls parents?”
“They died. That’s why they sent us here.”
“To save you.”
Kara nodded.
“Kara, I want you to know I’d like to hug you. Is that all right?”
Kara didn’t say anything, because to be perfectly honest she didn’t know if it was all right. She’d hadn’t been hugged—touched since Cat. And before that since her parents. That sensation was always so fleeting. A phantom of a life she’d never have.
But she remembered enough, and desperately needed more.
So Martha Kent wrapped her in her arms and she was soft and smelled like the sheets on Clark’s bed. Her grip was tight. Fearless. She had to know what Kara was capable of, but she didn’t care.
“I got you,” she whispered into Kara’s hair, and Kara realized she was crying and soaking the shoulder of Martha Kent’s shirt. “It’s gonna be okay. You hear me?”
***
And it was.
***
There were two major reasons she took the job at the Daily Planet when she could have worked for the Tribune or the Times or the Gotham City Gazette. One: Perry White offered her more freedom and less oversight than the editors at the other papers. He trusted her even though she was a “snot-nosed kid with more guts than sense”. And two?
Cat Grant was an assistant editor there and it had been nearly a decade since Kara had seen her last.
She didn’t think she’d changed that much. She pulled her hair back now, and she wore glasses, but outside of the movies that wasn’t that significant a difference.
She was positive Cat would see her and give her a slow smile and maybe they wouldn’t be what they had been, but they’d be something.
She grinned and held her hand out. “Kara Kent,” she said with all the enthusiasm she could muster.
Cat glanced up from the copy she was editing and then glanced back down. “I’d be charmed, but you country bumpkins looking to cover more than cow tippings are a dime a dozen, Kara Kent. So pardon me if I don’t make an effort to care about your sad little existence.”
She slashed through the copy with her red pen for emphasis and walked away.
Apparently a ponytail and glasses were as good as a mask shaped like a bat.
Cat Grant had no idea who she was.
Eight years apart and the girl who could see everything was blind.