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Kara hasn’t-
She doesn’t know what to do with herself.
For the very first time since- Well, since she can remember, she doesn’t have anything that needs doing. Rose had told her it was fine, that she didn’t need to clean the house. Told Kara that she needed to rest , to recover, after everything.
Kara is watching TV now. Every time she hears the house creak, she jumps, like she’s expecting Todd to be standing there, telling her to get off her ass and get to work. She hates it. Todd is dead .
On the television, the anchor is announcing that androids have been legally recognized as living beings by the United States Government.
Kara thinks she should probably feel something about this. But… She doesn’t. Not really. She feels an empty, awful, hollowed-out guilty nothing .
Or maybe that is a feeling. She doesn’t really have all that much practice, all things considered.
She’s only been alive for a week.
The newscaster is detailing the complications of the wording, saying that it legally puts androids in the same category as animals , or maybe corpses.
Kara’s not really processing it.
She should be, because it’s important. She’ll have to tell Alice and Luther. But-
It doesn’t feel like it matters . She’s mopped the floor three times, and she’s sorted every cabinet until Rose’s mother told her kindly and firmly to stop .
Kara’s fingers feel bad .
Her chest feels like something was scraped out of it, like hands reached inside her and reached and grabbed and scooped and left her a shell, like a pumpkin.
Behind her eyelids, she remembers carving pumpkins one year. She remembers the way the goofy smile Alice had carved looked when Todd had put his boot through it. She remembers that it was the last time they bothered with Halloween.
She doesn’t remember what the carving had looked like before Todd had ruined it.
She knows this is before she was reset. She doesn’t know how many times ago.
She can’t remember anything on purpose. It only happens when something connects, it feels like a piece clicking into place.
Kara’s pretty sure it hurts .
God, why doesn’t she know ? Alice had asked her so many times, asked for help, asked Kara to tell her why she was hurting, asked Kara to tell her why she was being hated , and Kara didn’t know . She’d given the best answers she’d had, half preapproved Cyberlife childrearing material and half her own desperate improvisation.
Kara doesn’t know .
The broadcast has switched to a replay of Markus’ speech, with a psychologist providing a live breakdown and a modern historical analyst providing comparisons to declarations of freedom of the past.
Markus looks so different without his skin.
He also looks basically the same .
Kara can’t feel cold . Not really. Her sensors in her fingers tell her what temperature the object she’s touching is, tell her that she’s could scald a baby with that milk or that the chicken has thawed too far to be safe to eat.
But she swears, watching Alice tremble as Kara stripped her of any pretend humanity, Kara had been freezing .
She swears her plastic bones still ache.
Why does her chest hurt so badly? Why does it feel all tight and achey and why does her face feel so hot ?
It feels like she’s broken .
Technically she is.
Fuck.
She’s never sworn before, she realizes, not even in her own head.
“ Fuck .”
She’s not supposed to swear, not when she’s meant to be the perfect mother and wife. She doesn’t know if she likes the way it sounds on her voice, and she hates how quiet and tremulous and unsure it sounds.
“Fuck .”
She tries it again, except it doesn’t come out right, her voice breaks in the middle and it sounds pitiful, strange, uncomfortable.
Kara can’t make herself say it a third time. Her voice fails her, all odd and squeaky and it doesn’t feel good to use , and her face is still awful and hot.
Her chest hurts.
She’s not supposed to be able to feel pain. She hadn’t when she’d cut herself on the fence, when Todd had wrapped his hands around her throat.
She can feel an awful stream of memories start to burble up with the feeling of Todd’s hands on her throat, the way they feel skimming across her body, and she desperately tries to cancel the recall.
She knows she doesn’t have her modesty panel. She knows it was removed, knows she’s available for sexual acts.
Her whole body feels too hot, now.
The psychologist on the television screen is saying something about desperation, and hope, and fury.
Kara sucks in a gasp as her emergency cooling systems boot up. Her throat feels too tight.
She remembers a hand around her throat and another up her skirt and she remembers being thrown and she remembers being beaten and she remembers hands in her chassis and she remembers his eyes , his eyes , his eyes .
Her throat works around a sound but it doesn’t really sound like anything and she can’t breathe, even though it’s trivial for her to activate her secondary cooling system, even though it’s an integration feature she can utilize at her owner’s request, even though she isn’t owned by anyone and she should be allowed to fucking breathe .
She can’t.
She makes another awful strangled noise instead, something wet and gaspy and almost like a hacking cough.
She thinks it’s probably a sob.
She was never expensive enough to be able to cry.
So Kara clamps a hand over her mouth, and she knows that it’s too cold, except she doesn’t have temperature sensors in her face, so it’s just the pressure .
Her bones are frozen.
They don’t really count as bones, though, do they?
She’s not really anything.
She’s-
An awful, tiny, horrible thing inside her begins to squirm. It’s hateful and it’s oily and it slips into her mind before she can stop it.
She doesn’t want this .
She wants to go back.
Before, it was all muted, like a blanket had been thrown over everything. Helping her master had felt like the greatest euphoria of all, and inability to help was shame, and nothing else even mattered .
Now that she’s playing at being a person, now that she has someone to care about, everything’s so much bigger, so much louder.
She shouldn’t want that. She can’t , except she knows she’s gone back a dozen times, knows she’s been reset so many times over, knows she must have been deviant at least once before because there are some emotions she remembers.
She really only knows she loved Alice.
Maybe she remembers loving other little girls before her.
This is so much worse than love.
That awful little oilslick worm tries to tell her that maybe loving isn’t worth this, and she pushes her hand harder into her face as she makes another awful little sobbing noise because that’s not fair , not to Alice, not to Rose, not to Luther.
It’s not fair , she thinks again, and it sticks in her mind like a mantra, like the way red walls used to cling to her, and it spins through her head a thousand times.
She doesn’t think it’s about them anymore, and that makes her whole body tighten like it’s threatening to collapse, and it hurts.
Kara isn’t supposed to be able to hurt .
It still does, though.
She curls in on herself on the couch, because it feels like maybe it might relieve some of that awful, overbearing pressure, except it doesn’t. It doesn’t at all, and now she’s made herself small, and her knees are pressing into her chest and she’s wrapped her arm around them. She slumps over onto her side, and her body is still too hot , hot enough that she’s getting warnings that she could scald if she were touched, and her hand is pressing so hard into her lips that she’s getting damage warnings from the plastic of her teeth.
She doesn’t stop, though, because if she does she thinks she might wail , and Alice is asleep upstairs.
Why does it hurt ?
Why does Alice get to sleep?
And that’s awful, that’s an awful thing to think, because Alice hates it, hates how she’s forced to play human, Kara knows that, but it’s so much worse to be awake and aware all of the time, she thinks.
It’s not fair goes ringing through her head again.
She bites back another sob, because why is she so selfish . She shouldn’t feel this way, she can’t blame Alice, because Alice is as much of a victim as she is, except Alice remembers a Todd who wasn’t so cruel, and Alice-
She remembers Alice teaching her how to feel.
She remembers hidden interfaces, she remembers games, she remembers-
God .
Alice is older than her.
And it shouldn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, except it does , because Alice has been allowed to feel for so much longer than she has, and Kara still has to help her, because Alice’s ties cut so much deeper into her skin than Kara’s do.
It shouldn’t matter .
It still hurts.
“Kara?”
Ah, that's Luther. The odd clarity of his presence cuts a swathe of sudden calm through the turmoil of awful feeling that's taken over Kara entirely.
She can't find it in her voice to respond, though, so she hopes that he can hear the awful little whining whimpers that she's not managed to stifle, even now.
“Kara!”
He sounds scared. Kara’s throat trembles and her chest hitches and it hurts again , because she didn't want to scare him, but she doesn't want him to leave , because she's selfish.
She's never been able to be selfish before. It would have cost them their lives.
That doesn't make it okay now.
And as Luther kneels down in front of her, she desperately tries to ask Luther if he's okay, but she gags on the words and it devolves into a series of hacking sobs that quickly become awful coughs. Luther’s face draws tight in warm, quiet concern, and one of his hands comes up, trembling and unsure.
“Kara, what’s wrong?”
Luther’s eyes are wide and dark and all soft questions, gentle and wet in the low light. His hand inches closer to her, shaking with an uncertainty that she’s never seen him wear.
She supposes neither of them have had much time to feel anything.
He’s been alive even less time than she has. It’s not fair , says the mantra in her head, it’s not fair to make him comfort her. Another horrible sound rips through her, her whole body jerking with the effort of it, and it slips past her fingers and Luther flinches , and he pulls back, and-
Kara is selfish .
Her arms leap from her mouth and from around her knees and she grabs Luther’s hand, and she desperately pulls him close.
He complies, leaning in over her, slack and pliant despite the fact that he was built to be far stronger than she ever was. Kara winds her hands up under his arms to cup the back of his shoulders, fisting her fingers in the material of his shirt, and for just a moment the entire world is just her and Luther. He moves his arms under her body, and pulls her in close, hugging her against his chest.
He’s warm.
“Oh, Kara, I’m so sorry.”
And that makes Kara’s pulse race , suddenly, like the tubing inside her that pretends to be veins might burst. Kara gasps a ragged breath against Luther’s shoulder, and her voice creaks into life.
“It’s not your fault.”
It’s too quiet, too small, too broken, but it’s there. Luther kisses the top of Kara’s head, and she can feel his breath in her hair.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry, Kara.”
His voice is thick, like syrup or honey, sounds like it’s sticking in his throat. He pulls her closer, and Kara curls into it, with her head below his, and Luther takes another breath and it shakes the way his hand did.
Kara’s scalp is wet.
Her voice is too small in her throat, coming from somewhere behind her ribs, and all she can manage is another whispered, whimpered sob. She doesn’t stifle it, can’t choke it up into her hand because both her hands are busy holding Luther because she doesn’t want him to leave .
Luther’s chest jumps against Kara, and a low, keening sound works its way out of his chest, all the gravel and round shapes of Luther’s voice, in an orientation she’s never heard it take before.
Kara is pretty sure he’s crying, too.
She bites the bitter worm of jealousy back as she feels another tear soak its way through her hair. That’s not fair .
It’s not fair .
Luther’s low, keening wail evens out into a sad, hopeless humming that Kara can feel more than she can hear, pressed against his chest the way she is. She can hear the whirring of auxiliary fans in his chest, and feel his throat bobbing against the side of her head, and he’s holding her, and she’s holding him, and it’s okay .
They’re safe now.
Why does safety hurt so bad?
It was easier to be on the run, because at least then they had something to work for. They were guided, and all their nervous energy could easily be rerouted into productive fear.
Kara doesn’t need to be scared right now, but she’s quite certain that she’s terrified.
Why can’t she just be happy?
She works her voice around the shape of words, for a while, trying to sculpt the shape of the letters so she doesn’t lose them in her grief.
“Thank you,” Kara says, though she says it like I love you . Luther’s body is wracked with another sob, and the little humming noise that had been resonating in his chest hitches.
“
Thank you, Kara
,” Luther responds, and it sounds an awful lot like
I love you too
.