Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

i.

“So this is it, huh? The D-E-O.”

Root drags the letters out, ignoring the half dozen agents who have suddenly turned to face her, weapons raised, and instead craning her neck to admire the various screens lining the walls of the war room.

“Relax, Sam, they’re not going to shoot me.” She strides casually into the room, hands tucked into pockets of her jeans.

“And that goes for you, too, Marvin,” she adds as she comes to a halt in front of J’onn. “Relax.” She’s within arm’s reach, he could grab her or shoot her with the gun he still has aimed at her chest, but he just stares, eyes narrowed, waiting.

“A mutual friend sent us your coordinates. She told us you might be in need of some assistance? Well… we’re it.”

//

Shaw’s not gonna relax, she doesn’t ever get to fucking relax anymore because Root keeps pulling shit like this and of course it’s up to Shaw to make sure she doesn’t get herself killed or eaten by an alien or something—because apparently that’s a thing that could happen now. That’s the world we live in. Fucking aliens.

(About fucking time, though, if we’re being honest. Things are finally getting interesting.)

And maybe Root’s right. Shaw reads the hesitance (curiosity, more like) in the room in front of them and sighs, rolling her eyes as she reins in her trigger finger. No one’s getting shot today. (Damn.)

Still—still—Shaw’s point still stands. Just because they’re probably not getting eaten by an alien this time around doesn’t mean Root gets to just throw herself into the waiting jaws of one every time her robot girlfriend feels like phoning home. Yep, Shaw’s definitely still mad that Root dragged her into the fucking desert for this and didn’t even tell her about the whole “extra-normal” part of it until they were free-falling at 12,000 feet above ground level. Definitely mad. Not at all distracted by the fucking beautiful weaponry lining every last inch of this place.

But damn. It is beautiful. Even Shaw hasn’t seen half this tech before; she doesn’t remember the last time that’s happened.

Fucking aliens.

ii.

“Holy shit holy shit you’re Root—the Root.”

Root just smiles cloyingly as she watches Winn scramble up from his seat.

“Kara- Kara, this is the Root who designed the FBI trojan horse of 2009, the null worm that infected over 7 million computers worldwide in less than a week… wow. I-I’m… wow. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Kara mutters, I’m not even gonna pretend I know what any of those words mean, as she tries not to laugh at Winn’s excitement.

Root smiles again, less condescendingly this time, but there’s something distant in her eyes, like she’s slipped slightly out of phase.

“That was a long time ago.”

iii.

Shaw should probably hate her. Everything about her, from the primary-colored spandex to the sunshine and rainbows she’s got coming out her damn ass to the excessive puppy-dog eyes—

Okay so maybe there’s a precedent for certain people slipping through the cracks. Maybe Shaw has a type, when it comes to the people she can tolerate. Maybe it helps if they’re more puppy than human.

No, that’s not it. People like that are still, as a general rule, fucking unbearable.

But there’s something about this girl. Sure, she has all these emotions and occasionally she’ll look like she just wants to be held, but there’s a toughness about her, an iron core underneath it all that is unbreakable in a way that has nothing to do with her superpowers, and that’s—well, it’s not something that Shaw ever anticipated. That this girl who laughs with her whole body at the slightest provocation might have a silence in her too, a part of her that keeps her separate from everyone else, that keeps her quiet beneath all the inexorable optimism and exuberance.

Quiet—and angry.

It finally clicks for Shaw, really clicks, when she sees Kara fight for the first time. They’re in the field, and Shaw’s on the roof of a neighboring building watching through a rifle scope. This kid is still more brawn and moxie than technique, but Shaw can tell she has it in her, that thing that you can’t teach. She’s singularly devoted to the mission, has a protective instinct and a penchant for self-sacrifice embedded in her bones like marrow—and superpowers on top of that? Part of Shaw is itching to get into that kryptonite training room to spar with her, to be the one who gets to temper this ball of raw energy into a force to be reckoned with.

(Sometimes she misses the early days at the ISA, and the Marines before that. Training the new recruits. Leaving a mark—invisible, not recognizable as hers in any way, but there all the same.)

She’s moderately impressed by what she sees. But then something in Kara snaps, and suddenly she’s not a girl in tights anymore. She’s so young sometimes; sometimes she really is still just a kid. But in this moment, she is not. She’s not a girl or a superhero or a being from another planet.

Kara is a thousand years old, and she is ephemeral. She is carved out of stone, out of steel, and she is immaterial, nothing but light and heat and burning.

She screams with everything that Shaw has never been able to voice, focuses everything she is, everything she ever was, into her fists and her eyes and this one single moment.

Her rage is not built on hate, or fear, or a thirst for revenge. There’s grief, yes, Shaw recognizes that. But it’s also something purer, more dangerous. This thing that’s erupting out of Kara in a literal blinding light, it’s rooted in something ancient, eternal. Elemental. It’s woven into the fabric of the universe.

Sameen can feel it from half a block away, how ready Kara is to offer herself up, to give up her body because that’s the only thing she has left to give, to burn through all of herself until there’s nothing left.

A solar flare. A supernova.

Shaw sits back on her heels.

“Well damn, Supergirl.”

iv.

Now the sister—the sister, Shaw takes to immediately. Because Alex gets it, what it’s like to have one of these puppy-humans (-aliens, whatever, close enough), more hurricane than person, in your charge. What it means to be responsible for pulling them back from the edge by the beltloops every time they get too close and pulling them back together when all the universes they hold inside them threaten to burst through their skin. What it is to be the human anchor that grounds someone who is destined for greater things, to be the one who saves the savior.

They fall into an easy camaraderie. Alex, with her healthy appreciation for high-powered firearms, good whiskey, and personal space in equal measure (finally, someone normal around here), she never pushes, never builds up any expectations that Shaw knows she can’t live up to, never asks for anything more than Shaw can give. Never tries to give anything more than Shaw can accept. Alex has her own reasons, different from Shaw’s, but it’s still a relief.

Danvers is a soldier, that much is clear from the way she carries herself, the way she approaches problems, the way she fights.

It’s rare for Shaw to find a sparring partner who can keep up with her, challenge her. They’re not quite evenly matched, physically. Alex may have a superhuman sister to practice with, but Shaw is, well, Shaw. But Alex surprises her, sometimes.

It’s different than sparring with Reese (sparring with Root—let’s not even go there). Reese is all power, blunt and relentless, like waves breaking on the shore. There’s no subtlety about the way he fights, he doesn’t need it. You can see his next move coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re fighting him. He just keeps coming and coming, wave after wave, wearing you down bit by bit like the rocky cliffs that line the coast.

Alex is all subtlety. She’s clever, quick—she has to be. She came up fighting opponents whose sheer strength she, with her human body, could never hope to match. She’s a human caught in a gods’ war, and she knows it. She fights like each movement might be her last, like any tiny slip might be the one that kills her, because those are the stakes she faces every time she sets foot on the battlefield. She’s calculating, always watching, waiting, biding her time until she can land a single deliberate, measured strike. Because that’s how you survive when you’re a human fighting against forces of nature.

That’s not something you pick up in basic training, it’s not even something they teach the goddamn Delta Force. It’s something that gets drilled into your body over the course of a lifetime when you grow up with an alien sleeping in the top bunk, and when you’re recruited into your agency by a Martian Commanding Officer.

Sameen’s crossed paths with a lot of soldiers in her life, all with different backgrounds, different training.

Alex is something else entirely.

And she keeps finding ways to surprise Shaw; she’s constantly changing, adapting, learning, so she can keep Shaw off-balance (and sometimes literally flat on her back). That doesn’t happen very often (or ever).

Sparring with Alex is something new for the first time in ages. It’s interesting.

Shaw doesn’t hate it.

v.

Shaw keeps catching Alex trying to stitch up her own wounds. She’s got good technique.

“I could have been a doctor, once,” is all Alex offers by way of explanation.

“Yeah. Me too.”

vi.

There’s that one night, after a particularly close call with the latest apocalyptic threat, that they all agree to never speak of again in the future.

After debriefing at HQ, Kara flies straight home to Cat’s, but the rest of them are still too amped—the kind of amped you can only get from the feeling of death brushing the back of your neck—to call it a night. So after a few drinks each out of the not-so-secret, not-entirely-sanctioned stash that Alex keeps in the bottom drawer of the desk in her office, she invites them all over to her place.

No one really knows what the pretense is supposed to be, or if Alex even offered one at all.

By the time they stumble into the backseat of the cab, Root’s already practically mounting Shaw. Lucy sinks leisurely into the center seat, pulling Alex in behind her, and leans her head back so it rests lightly on Alex’s shoulder. She brazenly watches Root and Shaw, expression open and soft in the way that she gets about three drinks in, mildly intrigued by the way they move together—like they’ve been doing this for years, like the rhythm is written into their muscle memory.

She grabs Alex’s hand and starts tangling their fingers together, a lazy smile on her lips.

Alex takes another swig from the bottle in her lap, and then another, until she’s smiling, too, shameless and carefree, back down at Lucy.

//

Alex shows up at the DEO three hours early the next morning and can’t meet anyone’s eyes for about a week. Root and Lucy show up sporting matching unconcealed bruises and unrestrained grins, sharing blatant glances like they’re two seconds away from high-fiving.

Sameen shows up for work and does her job.

When Kara asks her what the hell happened last night, because apparently Shaw’s the only one of the four of them capable of acting like a goddamn adult, she just rolls her eyes and grunts children under her breath.

vii.

When Root meets Maxwell Lord, purported technological genius and (allegedly) aspiring supervillain, she laughs.

He laughs, too.

He probably shouldn’t have.

//

When Shaw meets General Lane, she stands at attention and salutes. She’s still a soldier, after all.

Then she says, “With all due respect, sir—”

—and punches him in the face.

viii.

One day, Shaw comes home to find Gen sitting at the kitchen counter with her toes digging into the fur of a sleeping Bear curled at her feet, determinedly making her way through the biggest ice cream sundae this planet has ever seen.

(Shaw’s gonna have a talk with her about raiding people’s fridges without permission. Breaking and entering is one thing, but come on. Gen used the last of the handmade Belgian chocolate Root picked up in Brussels a few Secret Machine Missions ago—Shaw calls them their couples’ retreats—when she was in town to… something about infiltrating NATO? Whatever. The point is, Gen turned gourmet, nigh irreplaceable chocolate into hot fudge and poured it over a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s. Unacceptable.)

But for now she just tosses her keys onto the counter and sighs. She grabs a spoon and drops herself onto the barstool next to Gen’s.

“How the hell did you even get here?”

“Airplane.”

“Airplane?”

“Big steel thing with wings. Flies.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept. How did you get on one?”

“I bought a ticket online. Took a cab to the airport, got onboard, and took off.”

Shaw narrows her eyes. “Don’t you have school?”

“Spring break.”

It’s February.

Shaw shrugs.

“You got past the locks on the front door,” Shaw says through a mouthful of ice cream and banana. “Not bad.”

“Yeah, Root got me a new set of lock picks for my birthday.”

Shaw freezes with her spoon halfway to her mouth and glares into the security camera that she knows Root’s hidden in the corner of the room. Gen just licks a drop of melted ice cream that’s inching its way down her wrist and continues smiling happily to herself.

Okay so maybe that’s two conversations Shaw needs to have—one about proper respect when it comes to food and one about proper restraint when it comes to not grooming impressionable children for a life of crime.

//

She ends up bringing Gen in with her to the DEO the next day. It’s breaking a dozen kinds of protocol, but it was either that or tell the kid to stay at the safehouse and let a twelve-year-old try to tail her to a black-ops facility in the middle of the desert on her own.

J’onn is appropriately furious when he comes in to see her spinning in the chair next to Vasquez at mission control, but John (the other John) just chuckles softly, shakes his head, and somehow talks the Director down.

When Supergirl arrives, Gen nearly falls out of her chair in excitement. She pokes at Kara’s shoulder and asks about her superpowers and her senses and her alien physiology until Kara bursts into laughter and finally concedes, dragging the kid down the hall to talk science with Alex.

Shaw mutters something about, sure, you put on some spandex and a cape and suddenly you’re automatically the coolest person in the room.

And then Root’s behind her, leaning her body into Shaw’s, lips ghosting along the shell of Shaw’s ear as she whispers, “I’m sure we can do something about getting you a cape.”

ix.

Gen insists that she wants to learn about all the aspects involved in being a superhero, including the whole ‘living a double life behind a secret identity’ business.

“For research purposes,” she says.

(She figured out that Kara was Supergirl in about five seconds. She made Shaw in the field, after all, and that was like three years ago. Plus, Kara really is terrible at keeping secrets.)

So, somehow, Kara finds herself riding up the CatCo elevator one morning with a grinning Gen practically bouncing at her side.

She makes Gen promise to stay in her office, even if she has to run out in the middle of the day on Supergirl business, and Gen nods along. It’s a little less than convincing considering Kara has to steer her bodily away from the main bullpen when they arrive on the 40th floor.

Gen does make good on her word for most of the day, sitting cross-legged on the couch in Kara’s office with some article drafts and a red pen that she’s all too happy to put to good use. (Kara had to find something for her to do all day. Turns out Gen’s not a half-bad copyeditor.)

Supergirl does eventually get called away, though, and Gen’s self-control only goes so far.

School had let out early for Carter that afternoon and he’s sitting on the couch in Cat’s office with his homework, waiting for his mom to get out of a meeting, when Gen sneaks out of Kara’s office and wanders down the hall to the bullpen.

Kara makes it back to CatCo in record time considering she was up against three hostiles at once, but she’s not all that surprised to find her office empty. She gets a text from James telling her that Gen is in Ms. Grant’s office. Sighing as she superspeeds out of her suit, she thanks Rao that at least the kid is still in the building.

An hour later, Cat comes back to her office to find Carter and Gen sitting on the floor with papers spread out across the coffee table in front of them, animatedly comparing notes about Supergirl’s photovoltaic capabilities and her maximum flight speed and the limits of her superhearing. The girl herself, meanwhile, has been pacing anxiously in front of Cat’s desk for a solid twenty minutes.

Still standing in the doorway, Cat meets Kara’s eyes across the room. She raises her brows pointedly, and Kara, still not quite sure how she let this happen, just offers a beleaguered shrug in response and silently mouths, I’m sorry?

Cat is fully ready to be upset. When she’d agreed to allow Gen (“A foster kid, Cat, just like I was, only she wasn’t lucky enough to get sent to a family like the Danvers…”) to tag along with Kara today, it was under the condition that she would not set foot on the main office floor. Kara is an utterly hopeless disciplinarian, and Cat hates how endearing she finds that fact.

But then her son looks up and immediately runs over for a hug, and Cat forgets that the word discipline even exists in her vocabulary.

So maybe they’re both a little hopeless.

He asks if Gen can come home with them for dinner, and the yes, alright has barely left Cat’s mouth before Carter’s already darting back to help Gen gather their pages of notes (and calculations and diagrams and what looks like a sketch of one Vitruvian Kryptonian).

Kara comes up behind Cat, sliding her arms around her waist, and has the decency to look a little sheepish when she leans in to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

x.

“I understand you’ve had some less-than-friendly interactions with cybernetic interfaces in the past—” J’onn laughs dryly at that “—but trust me, Tars Tarkas, the Machine is on our side.”

Root steps back after she finishes hooking up the final monitor and she looks over at J’onn. He’s standing with his hands on his hips, glaring at the words now appearing across the main command center displays as if he can stare down an artificial superintelligence.

Root looks at the screens and smiles, that bright, dreamy smile reserved just for Her.

“And honestly,” she continues as she turns her attention back to J’onn. “Shimmering cobalt body paint? She has better taste than that.”

//

Harold admires his handiwork and grins, a bouyant, hopeful smile that he hasn’t smiled since the early days of building the Machine with Nathan.

Thanks to alien technology, the Machine really can fit into a suitcase now, and in Her entirety, not just the core heuristics. They patch Her main servers into the processors onboard Kara’s pod—it’s the most complete and functional piece of alien tech the DEO has on site and available for use; the computing power and data compression capabilities are beyond anything humans could hope to achieve in decades at the very least, by Harold’s estimation.

Your child is a dancing star, Finch says softly to himself (to the pod that fell from space, to Her).

She truly does see everything now, things both of this world and not.

She still sends them numbers. Sometimes they’re the same as before, social security numbers that correspond to violent crimes involving ordinary people. But now sometimes the people involved are not so ordinary. The data provided by the DEO’s surveillance tech enables Her to track extra-normal activity as well. She starts detecting metahuman threats and hostile alien attacks; she sees it all before it happens and sends it to them just as she always has, packaged in numbers and a voice in Root’s ear.

//

She speaks to Kara, too, sometimes.

No one really understands the relationship Kara has with the Machine, not even Root. They only know that Kara starts spending less and less time in Alura’s hologram room and more time with Her.

When Alex asks her about it, Kara responds, “My mother is dead. Her AI is… just a memory.”

The Machine is real. Alive.

Kara likes to sit inside her pod to talk to Her. Everyone else is content to read what She has to say on the command center screens, to voice their own thoughts aloud to the room and trust that She will hear them. But Kara climbs back into the pod that carried her two thousand light years, through space and time, and brought her to Earth, and she seals herself in.

She never talks about the time she spends in her pod, alone with the Machine. And it never becomes so frequent that it raises too much concern. But it does settle into a habit, a ritual of sorts.

Alex notices that Kara tends to turn to the Machine after particularly trying days—the days when it becomes all too apparent that she can’t save everyone, when she comes home with blood on her hands.

She’s different when she comes out of the pod. Calmer. Like she’s steeled herself again, prepared to once more shoulder this world that she’s been tasked to carry. (Well, she wasn’t quite tasked with it. She had a choice, but she chose to carry it anyways. She chooses it every day, every time she puts on the suit.)

Alex makes sure no one disturbs her sister when she’s in her pod.

Kara doesn’t have a direct line to the Machine, she’s not an interface like Root is. The Machine is not part of Kara like She is part of Root, like Root is part of Her. But sometimes, Kara can feel Her presence even when she’s nowhere near the DEO, when she’s ten thousand feet up and halfway across the country.

Sometimes, at the edges of Kara’s consciousness, Her name gets mixed up with Rao’s.

Kara can feel Her in the stars, a silent watcher in the skies. Kara protects the Earth and She protects Kara. Dark and warm and safe, and everywhere at once.