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It was a new day in Metropolis and Kara Zor-El was ready to live it!
Or at least she would be, if waking up wasn’t so… difficult. After battling so many threats these last few weeks, she had earned herself some extra time of rest, hadn’t she? She could sleep in for a bit longer if she wanted to; not getting up at her allotted time would have been met with severe consequences in her past, but right here, right now, lazing around was not frowned upon.
She finally opened her eyes, realizing she, as many times before, was gently floating several meters above the ground. Her head was very close to colliding with the ceiling of Kal-El’s apartment. If only her cousin was as wealthy as Jimmy Flamebird, he could afford to live in a more spacious place!
“But Kara,” he had explained to her once when she had brought up the topic, “I have memories here. of me, Lois, and Jimmy. And of you too. Happy ones. Stains on the walls or cracks on the ceiling remind me of those moments and make me feel… happy.”
She had raised an eyebrow at that explanation.
“Sorry,” Kal-El had said, looking away uncomfortably. “I know it sounds stupid. Don’t worry, we could…”
“No, Kal-El,” she interrupted him, holding his left hand as softly as she could.
Her eyes drifted to one of the walls, a small corner of the living room she had taken for herself. It was where she kept empty packages from her many food outings with Jimmy Flamebird, several of the scarves he had bought for her because they ‘matched her eyes,’ and many, many photographs she had taken with him stuck to the wall. Right on top of all of them was the very first one she had taken with him, the first day she stepped onto this wonderful planet.
“I understand the importance of memories,” she had told her cousin, realizing that those moments had more weight than the deficiencies of the small flat.
Coming back to the present, Kara stretched slowly with a smile. Doing things at a different pace that didn’t involve superspeed was always a pleasant activity. She immediately started thinking about the many things she could do with her cousin and her favorite humans, only to remember that they weren’t going to be here. Their human duties as reporters had them working on an exclusive on the other side of the country, and Kara had to let them go. They would be back tomorrow; she could handle herself for a mere fourteen hours. She was a strong Kryptonian warrior!
So she immediately went to the kitchen, used her superspeed to prepare a sandwich, and added many, many raw eggs to the filling, giggling when she realized that since Kal-El wasn’t here, there was no one who could forbid her from doing these types of things.
She accompanied her meal with a full half hour of binge-watching. Her attention span was completely absent, considering she flipped through the 500 channels on Kal-El’s TV until she found something that caught her interest.
“Oh… Human behavior examples!” she said to herself, grabbing her notepad and writing down as much data as she could while watching those "infomercials." Definitely a gold mine of information!
A small pile of dust under the TV table suddenly caught her eye, and she decided that she could help Kal-El by cleaning the apartment. After all, he always complained about how tiring and problematic the activity was, even with superpowers. So, she flew to the kitchen and grabbed the mop. She was going to master the art of cleaning, and her cousin would be proud of this achievement!
But as soon as she grabbed the item, the handle broke in half. Stupid and cheap human plastic! She looked around, wondering how she could reunite the two pieces, only to realize the best tool for this job was herself. So, she focused her heat vision…
And turned the plastic into molten goo and ash. She threw everything to the floor, panicking when she saw the enormous charred surface she had left on the floorboards. She flew to the entrance of the apartment, grabbed Kal-El’s welcome rug, and covered her crimes and failures with it. All done!
After such a challenge, she found herself missing the peace and tranquility that sleep brought. She scanned the room and immediately came up with an alternative. Yes, she was going to stay awake, but she was going to crave maximum comfort while doing so! She flew around the room, grabbing pillows and bedsheets and stacking them, building a Fortress that would put the one that belonged to Kal-El to shame. She immediately occupied it, sighing happily as she wrapped the many scarves Jimmy Flamebird had gotten her around herself, one after the other.
Thinking about the photographer brought a small blush to her face. Their dating competition had been left in the past, but she still hadn’t found the time to express her feelings for him in a proper way. When she talked to Lois Lane about her concerns for the future, the human replied:
“Don’t worry. When the moment comes, you’ll know exactly what to say and what to do.”
Considering that moment hadn’t happened yet, she supposed the best thing she could do was wait.
In the meantime, she had her memories. Her eyes moved to the place that housed her many, many treasures, but just a second later, her heart skipped a beat.
There was something missing.
The photo of her and Jimmy Flamebird, with his face covered in ice cream, was gone from the wall, nowhere in sight. She immediately flew to the wall, destroying her fortress with a sonic boom caused by her sheer panic. She inspected the wall. Maybe the piece of duct tape had failed its sacred duty of holding the picture to the surface? But the photograph wasn’t on the ground, nor behind the couch, nor among her pile of empty food containers.
Her panic turned into fear. This couldn’t be happening! She ripped up the floorboards, thinking perhaps the slim piece of paper had fallen through a minuscule crack, but there was nothing there. She punched the floor again, breaking a water pipe and screaming in rage when a little column of water smashed into her face. She resolved her small crisis by twisting the small metal tube around itself, not caring about what could happen if the water pressure became too strong. She punched the couches away, ripping through the very few pillows that were still there.
Her fortress! Maybe in her excitement, she had unknowingly carried the photo there. She searched for it, to no avail. Then, desperately, she moved the bed away, ripped up more floorboards, and looked below the TV table, not even caring about the destruction she caused when she pushed the television against the kitchen counter and beyond.
Nothing.
Her most prized possession wasn’t there.
“Ah, Kara, a failure as always.”
Her blood ran cold as soon as she registered that voice.
Brainiac rose from the complete devastation she had caused in the small apartment. Even though he didn’t have eyes, she could feel the hateful way he looked down at her.
“I destroyed you,” she muttered, trying to ignore the tremors assaulting her body. “You exist no more, Brainiac!”
“You may have wiped out my physical form,” the robot said, floating above her and crossing his arms. “But I will always exist in your mind. I may be gone, but every time you fail, every time your pathetic attempts at heroism end in ruins, every time you let down everyone around you, I will return to haunt you.”
“I haven’t failed! This is simply a setback!”
Brainiac laughed, his cold sadism shaking the Kryptonian once more.
“Same old Scion, with your same old pathetic excuses!” the specter in her mind yelled. “Whether your task is to conquer and destroy a civilization or to take care of an irrelevant piece of cellulose, your inadequacy remains the same.”
“It is NOT irrelevant!” Kara countered.
“Ah, you see?” the apparition replied, twisting his head at an impossible angle. “You retort about the importance of the object, not about the fact that you are inadequate.”
“I… I don’t…”
“You keep proving my original point, Scion,” Brainiac snarled. “You are still such, such a failure.”
Kara remembered the last time she had felt this way, her mind under Brainiac’s control, unable to fight back. In that moment, the voices of Kal-El, Jimmy, and Lois had woken her up. They had held onto her body as if their touch alone could break the evil robot's influence over her. And they had succeeded.
But they weren’t here now. She was beyond help. She was all alone.
“You are alone, and you always will be,” Brainiac insisted.
She shook her head fiercely. No, that wasn’t true. That simply couldn’t be true!
She put her hands over her face, her fingers suddenly brushing against something on her wrist, a piece of plastic she had always cherished as a symbol of Jimmy Flamebird’s love and care for her.
The Flamebird watch. She wasn’t alone. She could call for help!
She gently touched the dial, only to freeze at the last instant.
“What’s the matter, Scion?” Brainiac whispered in her mind. “You aren’t sure this will work, am I mistaken?”
“Kal-El will come. He will help. Everyone will help me.”
“Perhaps,” Brainiac conceded, to her surprise. But the machine only stared at her colder as he added, “They will help you, and then they will immediately hate you for interrupting them. For being so weak and useless. For asking for help with such trivialities.”
“They… they will…”
“They will help, and they will hate you. Both of those things are true, Kara.”
She remained silent, completely frozen in place. She couldn’t fight this alone, but asking for help felt like too much of a risk. She couldn't bear to put all those wonderful relationships in jeopardy.
“They will not hate you, Kara,” another voice said.
She looked up. Brainiac was seemingly gone. Standing amid the quiet, disastrous apartment was a little boy.
“They love you. We love you,” a young Kal-El said softly, gently floating toward her. “You can always ask for help. We won’t be mad at you, I promise.”
His small hand rested atop the watch. Kara braced herself, ready to make the call, when the room suddenly turned pitch black and her cousin’s mirage vanished into nothingness.
“Delusional child,” Brainiac’s voice boomed. The darkness around her flooded with sickening shades of blood red and glowing green kryptonite, cold, uncaring, and painful. “And to think I once considered you an apex Kryptonian warrior, when you are nothing more than a fragile pawn. A broken tool. A useless…”
“I am NOT!” Kara shouted, filled with raw rage.
She slammed her palm down against the watch, finally making the call.
Mere moments of waiting extended into an eternity as her watch sent the signal. It beeped continuously, but no one picked up. As her pleas found no response, she wasn't sure if it had been only three seconds or three years. It didn’t matter at this point. Brainiac laughed victoriously behind her, taunting her once more.
“You see? The novelty has worn off. The humans and that weak cousin of yours are occupied with their own matters, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but much more important than the inadequate relic of a long-dead world.”
She didn’t answer. It didn’t matter what she said to her own mind. If this was a battle she had to fight alone, it might as well be considered lost. She closed her eyes, knowing too well she was safe from any physical attacks. She just hoped her mind could hold on for the next agonizing fourteen hours until her friends were back.
“Assuming they will be back,” Brainiac chided. “That is not a guarantee, Kara. After all, humans are so, so fragile, aren’t they? With their feeble muscles, their weak willpower, and their bad Earth brains.”
She had said those exact words before. She had thought those things. This was nothing new to her; this was her old self talking directly to her now. The mighty Kryptonian warrior in her black armor, decimating entire cities just as easily as she was demolishing her own psyche right now. This new ghost was enveloped in black, floating right alongside her old mentor.
“Give up on them, just as they have given up on you,” Brainiac said.
The other apparition merely said one word.
“Comply.”
And Kara cried for all response, rivers of tears escaping her eyes as Brainiac and the specter of her previous life cackled at her weakness.
“Aunt Kara!”
Until suddenly, she heard another voice. She looked down at her wrist, realizing her watch was displaying a wobbly, static-filled shape of Jonathan Kent’s face.
“Aunt Kara!” he repeated, his voice echoing through the speaker.
She remembered now. He was still here in Metropolis, in the present day. He had refused to go back to the future, terrified that the threat of Cyborg Superman hadn't been entirely wiped out. But deeper than that, he was scared to return to a future he might no longer recognize. What if time had changed so much that he didn't even exist anymore, at least, not as the person he was now?
It was an understandable concern, at least in Kal-El’s and Lois Lane’s opinions. Truth be told, with the timeline now altered, Jonathan could vanish from existence right in front of their eyes.
“I just… want to spend more time with you guys,” he had told them back then. That single sentence had melted both of his parents’ hearts, but Kara had initially interjected.
“You will have your parents in your future, Jonathan Kent,” she had told him. “Everyone will be alive and well. You will have the ability to spend time with your loved ones.”
“Maybe. But the Jon of that future won’t be me," he had pleaded. "Could I… just stay here?”
She could still recall the deep fear in his eyes. The paradox caused by his own time travel would either rip him out of the timeline swiftly or replace him with a totally different version of himself. But here in the past, they hoped the natural forces of the universe would take just a bit longer to catch up with him.
At least, that was the theory. So, Kal-El and his mate had agreed to live with a version of their future son who might cease to exist at any given moment. They had made that decision almost three months ago, and so far, time itself seemed to be lenient on young Jonathan Kent. After all, the boy had already lost so much.
So, here he was now, a true Kryptonian warrior in the making, calling out to his aunt in pure anguish at the sight of her crying.
“Are you okay?” Jon asked again. Kara could only shake her head, still crying, still unable to move or even utter a single word.
“Still pathetic,” Brainiac reminded her.
“Don’t worry,” Jon said firmly, just as the communication abruptly cut off.
He appeared by her side almost instantaneously. Kara barely had time to register the deafening crash as Jon flew straight through the apartment window, shattering the glass into a million pieces. He slammed into the floorboards and instantly wrapped his arms around her, hugging her tightly as she broke down once more.
“Don’t worry,” he muttered again, and she held onto him, hoping he was strong enough to endure her Kryptonian grip.
He was. She knew he was.
“I’m here, Aunt Kara,” was the only thing he said.
And once again, a few seconds stretched into an infinity. But now, Kara felt the grounding comfort of the mighty warrior she knew her nephew to be. The ghosts of Brainiac and her old self faded away as reality settled back in. She took a look around, finally registering the absolute mess she had generated.
“This looks like a pig’s stable,” she muttered.
A dry chuckle escaped the other Kryptonian. “A pigsty, Aunt Kara,” he corrected her, still not letting her go. “A sty is for pigs. A stable is for horses.”
“I see… Who taught you that?”
“You did! You taught me everything, silly!” he replied with a warm, radiant smile, only to immediately frown. “Wait, all this disaster… oh no, is this the photograph incident? Mom, Dad, and Uncle Jimmy are away and you were all alone. How could I forget?”
“You… know about this?” Kara asked, feeling a fresh wave of sadness. “Is this stupid mistake of mine so legendary in the future that I actually told you about it?”
“What? No! Don’t worry about the disaster, this is just a normal Monday for us! The important thing is the picture!”
“It is… To me, at the very least. I know it sounds dumb.”
“Hey, don’t say that!” Jon said, shaking his head as he finally broke the hug. “Memories are important! Pictures are important!”
He reached into his pockets, pulling out the photograph of Kal-El and Lois holding him as a baby, the only connection he had left to his original timeline. According to his mother, Jon sometimes spent minutes staring at it, terrified that the image could shift or simply vanish at any moment, signaling the end of his existence as he knew it.
Then again, that hadn’t happened yet. Time was being kind to him, and Kara truly hoped that kindness would extend for eons to come.
“You are wise beyond your years, Jonathan Kent,” she said softly.
He grinned at the compliment. “Like I said, Aunt Kara, this is important. After all, this is the day where you...”
He cut himself off, slapping both hands over his mouth. Kara raised an eyebrow, noticing the muffled laughter escaping his lips and the way a furious blush painted his face red.
“... Well, spoilers! But, never mind that. I know where your picture is, and I know exactly who has it!”
“An enemy!” Kara shouted angrily, “I see, I have told you this story because this is one of my many epic battles!”
“Nope,” Jon replied as he happily floated in the air.
“Perhaps it has vanished into a pocket dimension? Is this a grand search and rescue mission?”
“Nooope,” Jon repeated, his smile growing even wider.
“It was that darned orange cat from the neighboring apartment, wasn’t it?”
“No-nox!” Jon said.
Kara frowned. His future colloquialisms could be so confusing at times.
“Also, be nice to Streaky,” he added. “You’ll come to love him, I’m sure of that!”
“I will never care for that embodiment of chaos.”
He laughed again, then extended a hand toward her. “Come with me and I’ll show you, okay?”
"But your intervention will change the future, Jonathan." she muttered, unsure.
"Not really, this is just me helping to shape it," her nephew explained, then without skipping a beat, he added, “Trust me, Aunt Kara.”
The ghosts of Brainiac and her past as a conqueror weren’t there to fill her mind with doubt anymore. None of them would ever be able to understand how much this mattered to her, not in the way the young man did.
“Always, Jonathan Kent,” she said, taking his hand.
Clark, Lois, and Jimmy were barely done with the first of the many interviews they had scheduled for that day. They were climbing down the steps of a building’s entrance when the Kryptonian suddenly stopped.
“Oh,” he simply said.
“Oh? Oh, what?” Lois questioned.
Clark pointed his finger to the east, directly at the skies as he explained, “We have guests!”
Immediately, a sonic boom of epic proportions exploded above their heads. Right at the spot Superman had indicated, Kara and Jon came flying down, landing in front of the reporters and cracking the cement.
“Hey, Uncle Jimmy! We are looking for your picture with Aunt Kara!” Jon screamed at the top of his lungs.
“This couldn’t wait?” Lois complained.
“Yeah, kiddo. We told Kara we were busy today and-”
Jon practically teleported behind his parents, putting a hand on each of their shoulders as he whispered conspiratorially, “Sssshh… Mom and Dad, keep quiet. This is history in the making.”
They had no option but to obey as they watched Jimmy approach Kara, rummaging through his backpack for something.
“I don’t know how Jon knew that I had it, but here,” Jimmy said, smiling as he handed her the photograph.
Kara took it in her hands, realizing it was now beautifully framed.
“I know how much you like that picture, but it’s constantly exposed to the air, or in danger of being splattered by ranch sauce. Plus, the morning sun always hits that corner of the room. So, I framed it! Super protective, UV-reflecting glass developed in STAR Labs and everything!”
“I… I trashed the apartment looking for it,” Kara confessed, looking down in shame. “Kal-El, I destroyed your precious memories of that place.”
“Memories are not something that you can destroy, Kara,” her cousin replied, without an ounce of hatred in his voice.
“The place is utterly trashed, though,” Jon commented.
“Great!” his mom said happily. “That will give us an excuse to paint the walls yellow like I’ve always wanted to!”
Kara smiled when she saw the way her cousin and his partner immediately started discussing what to do with their place next. They didn’t look mad at her in any way, nor were they even worried about the destruction she had caused. Jimmy Flamebird, on the other hand, looked incredibly regretful.
“Sorry, Kara. I wanted to give you the picture this morning before our trip, but you were sleeping and you looked so peaceful. I should have left you a note, or something. I…”
Kara didn’t say a word. She simply looked at him, wondering how a human being could be so kind, attentive, and all-around perfect.
“I just wanted to protect your favorite thing.”
Don’t worry. When the moment comes, you’ll know exactly what to say and what to do.
Lois’ words echoed in Kara’s mind as she realized this was the exact moment she had been waiting for. Her brain worked in overdrive, trying to come up with the best way to express how thankful she was for the human in front of her. But all of a sudden, any plans she could construct were completely swept away by waves of improvisation and sincerity.
“You are my favorite thing, Jimmy Flamebird,” she said.
And before he could even react to that declaration, she flew toward him, cupped his cheeks with her hands as softly as she could, and kissed him right on the lips. It was a very human thing to do, she supposed, expressing her feelings in a rash, impulsive way. She smiled internally when she felt Jimmy freeze, and she did her best to ignore the squeal that came out of her nephew’s mouth.
“Aunt Kara told me once about her first kiss with Uncle Jimmy,” Jon whispered, knowing full well she could hear him, “but the story doesn’t do it justice.”
Kara decided that she would like to know a bit more about these stories of hers later, but right now, her focus was entirely on the human whose lips were still locked with hers. She wondered if she was doing this right; after all, he wasn’t moving an inch. He didn’t even seem to react to what was happening.
Perhaps this is not something he actually wanted, she considered for a brief moment. Maybe I read his gift wrong. Maybe he was simply being friendly and...
She let him go suddenly and regretfully, shaking once more in fear of a definitive, certain rejection on his part.
But with a speed that could almost be considered inhuman, Jimmy wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her close to him once more, and kissed her again. Kara melted under the sensation. Her whole body was enveloped by a comforting warmth as he placed a hand on the back of her head, his fingers intertwining with her short hair.
She wasn’t sure exactly why, but suddenly, she was crying all over again. Her human partner pulled back from the kiss, giving her a look full of worry and concern. She wiped at her face, muttering a brief promise about "being fine," then felt another wave of emotion when Jimmy’s fingers gently brushed under her eyes, clearing away any trace of moisture from her skin before kissing her once more.
She happily leaned into the contact, pressing her whole body against his, and floated just a few inches off the ground. She would have laughed at the way her wonderful partner’s feet kicked the air uselessly, if not for the fact that her lips were occupied with her new preferred pastime.
Oh, now that she had discovered how good it felt to kiss him, she was going to demand this from Jimmy every single day. That was, of course, assuming he wanted the same thing, a question that didn’t really need an answer, considering the tight, desperate way he was holding her right now.
A few moments later, his feet started to kick more frantically. Kara panicked yet again, flying back down to the pavement and letting him go, wondering if she had accidentally hurt him.
Jimmy stumbled down the remaining steps, doubling over as he stared at the ground, flailing like a fish out of water. He raised a single finger, and Kara anxiously waited for confirmation that he was alright.
“I… need to… breathe…” he wheezed after a moment, his chest heaving and his face completely red.
Kara laughed wholeheartedly, flying right back to his side to look into his eyes.
“Oh, Jimmy Flamebird, your lack of endurance amuses me!”
He stared up at her with a beautiful mix of tenderness and feigned offense.
“It’s my first time kissing Supergirl! What did you expect?”
“A better performance for your second, third, and fourth times!” Kara replied sincerely, doing her best to ignore how her own blushing face was a perfect imitation of Jimmy’s.
He didn’t reply to her banter. Instead, he simply took her hands and gave her a brief, gentle peck on the lips, (something that somehow felt even better than all their previous contact, as impossible as that seemed). They exchanged looks, frozen in time and lost in each other’s eyes, until a sharp voice cut them off.
“Sorry for breaking up the moment, love-flamebirds, but we have a bunch of interviews to finish!”
Jimmy glared at Lois Lane, and the warrior part of Kara’s heart couldn't help but notice how his angry, serious expression made him look incredibly attractive to her.
“Lois! You are interrupting our first kiss!”
“Oh, a best friend interrupting a first kiss? I wonder if that has ever happened before!” Lois countered with a smirk.
“I already apologized for that a thousand times! We were about to be wiped out by Mxy… Mxy… whatever his name was!” Jimmy sputtered.
Kara was ready for a full-on bickering battle between the two humans, but all of a sudden, Jimmy took a deep breath, shook his head, looked at her, and said, “So… about those second, third, and fourth times you mentioned…”
She blushed madly at that, and she wasn't entirely sure why. Kal-El had explained the concept of "panicking" at something Lois Lane said many times before, and she had always thought it was absolute nonsense. One should be comfortable around a loved one at all times! But right now, she was experiencing that panic firsthand, and it felt equal parts mortifying and amazing.
“Well,” she said, taking a little step back, “you have lots of human responsibilities, Jimmy Flamebird.”
“That I do,” her partner said, scratching his chin. “But I know how to fix that!”
He climbed the steps toward Kal-El and Jon, taking off his satchel and backpack and handing them over to the younger Kryptonian.
“Congratulations, Jonathan Kent!” Jimmy said, grinning. “You are the Daily Planet’s brand new intern photographer!”
“Really?” the time traveler questioned.
Jon practically started to vibrate in place, and his father had to put both hands on his shoulders to prevent him from flying into the stratosphere right then and there.
“Yup! Do you know how to…?”
“I do know how to adjust the aperture, frame a shot, and manage exposure lines! You taught me everything about it!”
“Well, that’s settled!” Jimmy said, clapping his hands together as he returned to his girlfriend’s side. “Now, Kara and I have lots of things to talk about and lots of things to do!”
“Jimmy Flamebird, is kissing perhaps among those ‘lots of things to do’?”
“Yuuuuuup!” Jimmy said, blushing as intensely as she was. He giggled as she swept him up into her arms and flew away.
As she and Jimmy made their way back toward the apartment, Kara’s mind already started racing on how to clean up at least a tiny corner of the wreckage to maximize her kissing practice, while she focused on holding her precious (and very blushing) human against her chest, smiling when she saw the way Jimmy gripped their picture against his body. Amidst her happiness, her ears caught Jon’s excited voice echoing from below one last time.
“Yay! Family time!”
The Kryptonian warrior smiled widely at that, infinitely grateful to Jonathan Kent of Earth, the young hero who had managed to chase away the ghosts of her past and build a bridge to a brighter, much more loving future.
She truly hoped that one day, in this timeline and in this world, she would be able to return the favor.