Chapter Text
Clark found her three days later.
Not because she was hiding—Kara never bothered with that—but because she drifted. From city to city, bar to bar, gravity optional, attachment not. She stayed just long enough for the noise to dull, for the ache to settle into something bearable, and then she moved again.
This place was small. A nowhere town with a cracked highway sign and a bar that smelled like old wood and citrus cleaner. No cameras. No whispers. No one who knew what a cape meant.
Kara sat at the bar, boots hooked around the rung of the stool, shoulders loose in a way that suggested carelessness but wasn’t. A glass rested in her hand, untouched for several minutes.
Clark stood behind her before sitting.
“Kara.”
That got her attention.
Not her name—but the tone.
The big brother voice.
The one that came with worry and restraint and quiet disappointment, wrapped so carefully it thought itself kind.
She didn’t turn right away.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
“I wanted to give you space.”
She let out a soft, humorless breath. “That’s never what this is.”
They sat in silence. Clark ordered water. He always did. Habit. Control. The way he kept himself steady.
Kara noticed.
“You don’t have to pretend,” she said. “They don’t know you here.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“You always say that.”
She lifted her glass and drank.
The taste pulled memory with it—sharp and crystalline.
Krypton had favored clarity.
Even its alcohols were meant to be remembered, not forgotten.
Her mother’s hands braided her hair the night before evacuation. Fingers steady. Voice calm.
Do not be afraid, she had said. If the worst comes, we will be remembered correctly.
Clark shifted beside her.
“You can’t keep doing this,” he said gently.
“Doing what?”
“Self-destructing.”
Her jaw tightened.
“I’m coping.”
“This isn’t coping.”
“It is for me.”
He sighed—not angry. Just tired. The kind of tired that comes from loving someone you don’t know how to help.
“You can’t disappear every time it hurts,” he said. “You have responsibilities. People who need you.”
That landed wrong.
“You came after me,” she said, finally turning to face him.
“You left them. The city. Your job. Your life.”
Her eyes sharpened.
“Funny how that’s responsibility when you do it.”
Clark blinked. “That’s not—”
“You don’t even hear it,” she said. “Do you?”
He swallowed.
“I’m just saying there’s a healthier way to grieve,” he said carefully. “Talking. Being around people. Letting yourself move forward.”
Reasonable. Measured. The kind of sentence people trusted him for.
Kara laughed—quiet, disbelieving.
“Forward to where?”
He hesitated.
“I miss Krypton too,” Clark said. “I do. I think about it all the time. About the family I never knew. A whole life I lost before it even started.”
She stared at him.
“But I can’t let it consume me,” he continued. “I chose to build something here. To honor what I lost by living.”
The words settled.
Then shattered.
“You chose,” Kara repeated.
“Yes.”
“You chose because you had something to choose from.”
Clark frowned. “Kara—”
“You mourn a life you might have lived,” she said.
“I mourn one I did.”
The bar felt smaller.
“I remember the sound the planet made,” Kara continued.
“Did you know planets make sounds when they’re dying?”
She swallowed.
“Krypton screamed. Not all at once. Slowly.”
Her fingers curled against the bar.
“The gods are not that kind.”
Clark felt something bruise inside his chest.
“I was sent away old enough to know what I was leaving,” she went on.
“Old enough to understand that I was being given an impossible task.”
Another sip.
Cold. Silence. Time folding wrong.
“Protect the baby,” she said. “That was my purpose. That was the last thing they asked of me.”
Clark shook his head. “You didn’t fail.”
“I blinked,” Kara said.
“And you were grown.”
The words landed cleanly. Final.
“You didn’t need me,” she said.
“You had a family. A world that welcomed you. You became something incredible without me.”
“I still need you,” Clark said quickly.
“Not like that,” she replied.
“Not in the way that mattered then.”
He felt it then—too late.
Not the anger.
The distance.
She wasn’t accusing him.
She was stating fact.
“Krypton had death rites,” Kara said after a moment. “Did you know that?”
Clark hesitated. “I—”
“No,” she said gently. “You didn’t.”
She stared into her glass.
“We believed the dead lived on as long as they were remembered accurately. Names mattered. Stories mattered. The order they were told in mattered.”
Her voice thinned.
“If someone misremembered, it wasn’t just a mistake. It was a second death.”
Clark’s breath caught.
“I’m the last one who knows how it was done,” she said.
“The words. The pauses. The meaning behind them.”
She looked at him then, eyes bright with something close to fear.
“What happens when I start to forget?” she asked quietly.
“What if I already have?”
Clark opened his mouth. Closed it.
“There’s no one left to correct me,” Kara said.
“No one to say that’s wrong, that’s not how we grieved, that’s not what that word meant.”
Her hands trembled slightly. She curled them into fists.
“Krypton is still dying,” she whispered.
“It’s just doing it through me now.”
Clark reached for her hand—not as Superman, not as a savior, but as someone who finally understood the shape of what he could never fix.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“I know,” Kara replied.
That hurt him more than anger ever could.
“I don’t want to forget,” she said.
“Even if it destroys me.”
He squeezed her hand—not to stop her grief, not to fix it, but to stay.
And in that small, quiet place, Superman finally understood the shape of her pain—not as something he could share, but as something he would always stand beside, knowing it would never be his to carry.