Archive of Our Own

Kara hated the city.

Out of all the places she’d been on Earth, the city held the top spot for the worst. Sure, her only other point of reference was an ice fortress in the middle of nowhere, but at least the ice fortress had held charm. Isolated, quiet, beautiful…it had held a serene silence she had hated then. That had changed pretty quickly once they’d entered the city. Now, she would do anything now to go back to the enormous, yawning structure, if only to sit in its quiet and let her thoughts eat away at her heart once more.

Now she couldn’t even lament in silence. Not with the nonstop noise pouring in from outside. Beeping, barking, shouting; the sounds never ceased, not with a wall in its way, not when the sun set, not even when she buried her head under a stack of pillows and screamed into her mattress. She could hear everything, from the incessant ticking of the round device on the kitchen wall to a kid wailing halfway across the city.

Earth’s time-tracking and Krypton’s time-tracking most likely differed drastically, but from what Kara could piece together from the cycle of the yellow sun, she hadn’t been living on Earth for very long at all. She’d stayed at the ice fortress for a handful of sleeping and waking cycles before Kal-El had moved the two of them to the city—the worst decision ever made. She wished she could tell him that, but the language barrier between them remained rigidly unsolvable. He didn’t speak Kryptonian, and she didn’t speak…Earth.

So she remained in the dark about why they’d moved, and kept the few strong words she had for him tucked close to her chest until she found the means to deliver them in a way he would fully understand. Until then, the city held her as its prisoner.

And her first night was miserable.

She gave up on sleeping once the moon reached its peak and it became obvious the roaring of the ground pods outside and the chattering of the Earth people wouldn’t stop with the sun.

Was Earth significantly louder than Krypton, or had she just gained significantly better hearing? She had a feeling it was the latter. Ever since she’d landed, the yellow sun had changed her. Everything broke so easily under in her hands now, and keeping her feet rooted to the ground proved to be a big task when they seemed so determined to lift off of it. It wasn’t so much the world she was in but the body, and the idea didn’t console her. Either by stars or skin, she was trapped with no escape.

At least she had Krypto. He seemed to be adjusting better than she was, lying nestled beside her with his nose shoved into the crook of her neck, snuffling in and out of a restless sleep. Every once and a while he’d startle awake at a noise louder or more abrupt than the rest, but otherwise he slept comfortably tucked in next to her, his little heart beating steadily in his chest.

If she focused on his heartbeat, it became easier to drown out the cacophony of the outside world, and as the moon lowered, so did her eyelids. That first night she dreamed of Krypton, its core collapsing in small, rhythmic bursts, until the pulse faded out and the deafening silence of space wrapped around her, pressing inward like the walls of an escape pod. She woke with tears in her eyes.

As the days dragged on, the most frustrating part of it all became her inability to express what was wrong to Kal. He woke her every morning, although woke was a generous word when she was already awake throughout most of the night. Still, she never got up until she heard the knock on her bedroom door. Why would she? What would she do alone in this house while he was still sleeping? She refused to go outside, afraid the walls were the only thing keeping out an onslaught of noise that would drive her insane; she couldn’t make her own food and relied solely on Kal for meals; playing with Krypto was too loud and, with both their newfound powers, also served to be a bit too dangerous and destructive.

She didn’t know Kal well. What she knew about her cousin existed solely in the realm of what her parents had told her, and although she had been hesitant at first, the crest on his weird outfit told her all she needed to know about who he was.

That, and the message his parents had left him. When she’d heard their voices—her language out of the mouths of her people, something she’d never thought she’d hear again—she’d nearly broken down in tears in the middle of the frigid fortress. Seeing her distress, Kal had quickly turned it off, and finding a way to convince him to play it again was too difficult in her latest bout of overwhelming grief.

So she knew the strange man gallivanting around in his underwear was her cousin, Kal-El, and she knew she was on Earth, and she knew Earth was loud, and she knew she hated her new powers and missed her home more than anything, and she knew, above it all, that finding a way to communicate at all would be torture. Not that Kal seemed to care. He never stopped talking to her. She turned away from him most mornings when he opened her door, mainly because the moment he saw her awake, the nonsensical chattering started and never stopped.

It would take a few more days of refusing to speak or step out of the house or show much of any emotion before Kal would move them to a different location. Later, she’d understand they’d moved out of the Fortress of Solitude to his apartment in Metropolis because he’d needed to show up to work. Not like she’d cared much about his absence at the tie. She’d spent his few hours away from home every day doing nothing all day in her bed in the loud, loud city.

Where the Fortress of Solitude was ethereal and empty, the city, full of noisy extraterrestrials, solidified Kara’s belief about her arrival Earth: pointless. Why was she here, on this miserable planet, when the rest of her people had died alongside their families?

She could not communicate with Kal, but if she could, she would have told him she hated Earth. Would have asked him to take her back to the fortress and leave her alone with the voices of his parents. If only they hadn’t moved. She wanted to hear them speak one more time. Wanted sleep through a full night. Wanted a brief moment of unconsciousness away from her thoughts, and maybe another that wasn’t so brief. It would be nice to sleep forever.

If only her body had not become invincible.

“Where are we landing?” Kara called.

“Just down here.” The roar of the spaceship nearly drowned out Ruthye’s voice, and with Krypto sitting snug in Kara’s lap it was nearly impossible to see solid ground, but she did nothing if not excel in difficult situations. The ship roared to a steady landing and only jerked a bit as it settled onto the soil. “Your ship is very noisy.”

“It’s old.” Truthfully, she’d gotten the ship somewhere above Earth around her eighteenth birthday. It had been broken down and abandoned, floating just within Earth’s gravitational pull, so she’d clung onto it tight and crashed landed it in a strip of the Kents’ farmland. With the their help, she’d worked for a tireless year to get it up and running.

So, yes, it was an old beater of a ship that loved to break down, which meant it was loud as hell. It wasn’t like she was getting paid to hang out in intergalactic bars all day, so they were stuck with it whether Ruthye liked it or not.

The door opened smoothly, and Krypto bowled past Kara to bound across the grass, nose to the ground and tail wagging in the air.

A big field. That’s where they’d landed, backed by a horizon of rolling grassy hills and dotted with several home-like structures that stood so far apart from each other it would be generous to call them neighbors.

“So,” Kara said, “which one’s—”

Small arms wrapped around her midsection and Kara turned, alarmed, as Ruthye hugged her tight. With her eyes squeezed shut, she said, “Thank you. For everything, truly. For helping me on my journey and putting up with me and saving my life and allowing me to celebrate your birthday with you.”

“Whoa, okay.” Tentatively, Kara wrapped her arm around Ruthye’s shoulders and gave her an awkward pat. “Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. I’ll walk you to your aunt’s.”

“I can find it myself just fine.” Ruthye stepped away, avoiding Kara’s eyes. “I wouldn’t want to hold you up.”

“Listen, Ruthye, I have nowhere to be. And really, ethically I should probably be returning you to your aunt, you know?” Who knew if the poor lady even knew Ruthye was alive. For all she knew, Ruthye had died in her family’s massacre. Now what? Her dead niece showed up at her doorstep one random day, with what excuse? I was off seeking revenge on the Brigands with some random fucked up Kryptonian lady. It was her birthday, so we stopped at a couple of yellow sun planets to celebrate afterward. Do not worry, there was no drinking—my friend is quitting. Two days sober, woohoo!

Yeah, sounded like a great plan. As much as Kara did not want to talk to Ruthye’s aunt, it was ultimately the responsible and good thing to do. So…

“Save your goodbyes for a few more minutes.” She patted Ruthye on the shoulder again and headed off toward the field.

Krypto kept up a steady trot beside Kara, but Ruthye followed at a much slower pace. Krypto broke away to nudge at her hand, which tore Ruthye out of whatever thoughts were keeping her in a trance. She noticed Kara staring and gave her a tight smile, picking up the pace to walk alongside her.

“What? Something wrong?” Kara asked. She shook her head, although Kara wasn’t convinced. “Your turn to lead the way.”

With her teeth digging into her bottom lip, she took the lead, marching through the wide field to the distant houses on the horizon. Her nervous disposition put Kara slightly on edge, although she tried not to let it show. If Ruthye was already tense, she didn’t want to add fuel to the fire by mirroring it.

What was she so worried about, anyway? It couldn’t have been saying goodbye. Was it the idea of Kara meeting her aunt? Was she a jerk or something? Nothing Kara hadn’t dealt with before. Have some more confidence in me, kid.

They passed by several of the spaced-out houses until nothing stood before them but a slope covered in what seemed to be a pile of ash and wood. Kara slowed, suspicious, but Ruthye forged onward. She stopped them right in front of the wreckage, which upon closer inspection looked like it had once been a house, too.

Was this her aunt’s house? Fear struck her. What had happened? A fire? But when she turned to Ruthye, her face remained set and solemn, as if she’d known all along this was what they would find.

“Ruthye,” Kara said. Ruthye looked away, shoulders shaking imperceptibly. “What is this? Where’s your aunt?”

Her voice was quiet. It wavered on the acrid air. “I’m sorry. This was my family’s house. There is nothing left of it. Look, Kara, at…what he did.”

Krypto, sniffing at the house’s remains, glanced up with a whine. Nothing left. It was true. If it weren’t for the other houses in the distant fields, she wouldn’t have known what it was at all. She would have walked by it just the same as any other wreckage. Why are we here?

“I’m sorry, Ruthye.” It meant nothing, really, and she knew it. Had witnessed the extinction of her own people and knew the phrase had been wrung dry. No words from any language could erase a feeling that concaved a heart inward so painfully, and despite having multiple languages’ worth of words to work with, she found her tongue uncharacteristically dry of them.

Krypto abandoned the ruins to shove his head under Ruthye’s hand. Her fingers shook as she pet him, her chin raised and her face twisted as she tried—and failed—to fight back tears. They rolled down her cheeks silently, the shake of her frame intensifying against her self-imposed stiffness. Trying to be strong. For who? For you, idiot. Kara’s tongue stuck dryly to the roof of her mouth. Do something!

She touched Ruthye’s shoulder and instantly her resignation snapped. Ruthye collapsed against Kara with a heaving sob, fingers dug into her shirt, wet face pressed into her collarbone. Kara froze for a second before she pulled her closer and squeezed her tight.

“I know,” she said, the words falling numbly from her lips, because It’s okay wasn’t right to say. Of course it wasn’t okay. It shouldn’t have happened. “I know.”

She held her close and breathed with her until Ruthye’s body-wracking sobs died into small, sniffling hiccups. The field around them stood stagnant and silent. Had the families in the other houses been targeted, too? Had they survived? At the very least, they still stood tall and untouched. They must have seen Ruthye’s house go up in flames. She tried not to be too angry that nobody had tried to help.

Ruthye sniffled. Her head shifted on Kara’s tear-stained collarbone. “I do not wish to be a burden.”

“You’re not,” Kara reassured her.

Ruthye stepped away and scrubbed at her eyes. Krypto stared at them, wide-eyed and worried, so she reached down to pet him with a small sniffle, averting her gaze. “I apologize.”

“Don’t sweat it.” It took most of Kara’s willpower not to look down and scope out the wet splotch she could feel on her shirt. Making Ruthye feel bad about it was the last thing she wanted to do when she was already scuffing her feet on the ground, eyes puffy and red.

“I don’t have an aunt,” she admitted quietly.

Kara had figured. Ruthye had lied and tried to convince her to leave her alone with an aunt that didn’t exist. She pressed her lips together and stared despondently down at the wreckage, fighting back anger. What would have happened to her if she’d left her? At the very least she would have gotten herself into trouble at another bar, and then what? Without Kara to intervene…

Maybe she wasn’t doing as good of a job at hiding her frustration as she thought, because Ruthye blurted, “I am truly sorry. I can deal with this all myself, I promise. I did not want you to accompany me because I did not want to interfere with your plans, and I knew, if you knew, you would be too good-hearted to leave me.”

“So you tried to trick me.”

Ruthye kept her chin raised, albeit shakily. “Yes. I can handle myself just fine alone. I have done it before.”

Well, we both know that isn’t true, Kara thought wryly. Sure, to Ruthye’s credit, she had survived—but who knew how long she’d been wandering around beforehand, knocking on strangers’ doors and barging her way into dangerous establishments to mouth off about her valuable possessions. She’d been lucky to even meet Kara that day in the bar, even luckier to stumble across her a second time. That kind of luck ran out fast.

Also, she was thirteen. No matter how well she could “handle herself just fine alone,” Kara—ethically—couldn’t leave her. Her face hurt from scowling down at the house’s ruins; she raised it and saw Ruthye staring, hers shoulders squared courageously.

“So.” She took a deep breath in. “You may leave.”

“I’m not leaving you.” What do I do? Kara was the last person who would know about intergalactic adoption services. Sure, other planets had establishments like orphanages, but throwing Ruthye into one would be cruel if she didn’t understand the system well. Some were borderline evil, and Ruthye had been through enough already. An orphanage was the last place she needed. Then what? “You have nowhere else to go?”

Ruthye hesitated—

“Don’t lie.”

—and shook her head.

Alright. Okay. Cool. So dropping her off at a random place was out of the question, and she didn’t exactly have an any friends on Ruthye’s planet that could take her in. That meant—well, it meant leaving the planet, but Kara had been planning to go back to Earth. Flying around dozens of red sun planets wouldn’t be good for her whole quitting alcoholism thing, and Clark had made it abundantly known she would always have a place to stay with him if needed.

If she always had a place to stay, then maybe…

“Kara, truly, I will be fine on my own. It is not my intention to burden you, I have been a nuisance enough and owe you more than I could ever repay—”

I can’t take her off of her own planet. This was her home. But Kara couldn’t stay on a planet with a red sun. Already, her hands held a slight tremor and a headache teased at the back of her head. A yellow sun could fend off withdrawals just fine, but if she lingered on a red sun planet for too long before the radiation had cleansed it from her system, it would only be a matter of time before she gave back in. So what to do? Stay or go—leave her or take her—I can’t take her off of her own planet. This is her home. I can’t alienate her from that. What about her people? Her culture? It was all here. Earth didn’t have that for her. Kara knew it didn’t.

“—and I will, of course, never forget the debts I owe you—”

“I’m going to Earth.” At once, Ruthye fell silent. “I won’t force you to come with me. If you want to stay, I’ll stay with you until we find a place for you here. But I’m not leaving you. Okay? So…you pick. Come with me to Earth, or we figure something out together here.”

Ruthye hesitated. Kara added, “Earth can be temporary. We can stay with Clark until we figure something out. If you hate it…I can always take you back.”

“Clark?” she echoed. “We would stay with Superman?”

“Yes. He’s the nicest person you’ll ever meet. Total opposite of me, don’t worry. Don’t call him Superman in public, though, that’s a secret.”

Ruthye nodded. “Okay.”

“Yeah? Okay what?”

“I will come with you to Earth.”

Kara, who’d been expecting much more protest from a girl who’d gone so out of her way to lie the first time around, fumbled for a moment on what to say. She landed on, “Okay. Cool, great. Let’s go.” Surprisingly easy. Suspiciously easy. She took a step toward the ship, then paused. “Is there…anything you need from…?” She gestured to the house’s ruins, and Ruthye shook her head.

“I took all that remained.” Her hand skimmed over the hilt of her family sword. She slid it out of its holster and stared down at its glistening blade, freshly cleansed after Kara’s kill. “Although…I would like to visit one place before we go.”

The graves of Ruthye’s family laid only a short distance away from the wreckage of her home, marked by three large piles of rock. Ruthye gathered three more stones to add as Kara did her best to find flowers nearby, before they regrouped by the burial sites and added a new stone and flower on top of each pile.

For a while, they stood in silence, until, with a scratch in her throat, Kara asked, “What were they like?”

So Ruthye told her. Her older brother loved music and pulling pranks; he would irritate her constantly and get on her nerves all the time, yet despite it he was her best friend. Her mother was a steady, determined force with endless courage and comfort who had loved them more than anything. Her father had been passionate about swordsmithing and had always had an answer for every question. They were funny, kind, and most of all honorable. She missed them. Even Krypto sat still and patient by the graves as she spoke, voice catching on the memories, until her voice finally broke one final time and rendered her silent.

As she wiped the corners of her eyes, Kara said, “I’ll take you back here whenever you want. Just ask.”

She had buried her own people back on Krypton as they died. Dozens of graves a day. She would do anything to go back to her planet, even if she had nothing to greet her but tombs.

Ruthye nodded. For the second time that day, she embraced Kara tightly. “Thank you. Your planet is right to praise you as a hero. All planets should.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” While the compliment flattered her, it also sat uncomfortably in her chest. Earth hardly praised her because she was hardly there. Aside from the dull and uneventful articles Clark pushed to include about her in the Daily Planet, nobody spoke about her, because what was there to say? She was hardly a quarter of the hero he was. She didn’t want to let Ruthye down, though. Couldn’t bring herself to say it—I’m not a hero at all. “You ready to go?” Ruthye nodded. “Krypto, come on, buddy.”

The three of them piled into her old, beat-up spaceship, and it rumbled to life, lifting from the ground with a roar.

Sorry, Clark, she thought as the planet’s surface grew smaller and smaller under them, her shaky hands clutching the wheel. Hopefully you like surprises.

Although she put no effort into learning it, Earth’s language came to her whether she liked it or not thanks to Kal, who never stopped talking.

Within the brief period of time she spent living in the ice house and the city house, she learned their morning greeting, which Kal woke her with—or came in with the intention to wake her with—every morning; “breakfast” and “dinner”; “no,” or a negative exclamation of the like, only ever shouted in the direction of Krypto; and “TV,” “bed,” and “table,” all learned exclusively through Kal’s incessant pointing and repeating. She knew “goodbye,” too, as he said it every day before leaving her alone in the city dwelling, along with a jumble of other unfamiliar words.

It took her longer than she’d like to admit to realize his yammering had purpose. He wanted her to pick up the language—he was familiarizing her with it, forcing her to hear it where she otherwise made no effort to seek it out. Was she grateful for it? No. His attempts were rather one-sided. She took in about one percent of everything he uttered, and the rest she blocked out intentionally. She knew she would have to learn it eventually, but as the days dragged by slowly and the nights dragged slower, she found herself less and less inclined to try.

The only thing she had the energy for was nothing. Lying in bed all day did nothing to distract her from her thoughts, which spread out from her head and ate away at her heart the longer she entertained them. The TV became somewhat of an escape. Its loud noise flushed out the ruckus outside and visual content entertained her enough to the point where she didn’t mind her in inability to understand what was being said. Slowly, she transitioned from lazing around in bed all day to lazing around on the couch all day with Krypto and the TV. It was a better arrangement, she had to admit, if only slightly, although nothing could stop her thoughts from drifting after too long.

One of her favorite shows on the TV featured a species with green skin and oddly-shaped heads, who came down from the sky in a ship and fought with the inhabitants of Earth. It was her favorite because it also featured a distinct lack of talking and a great amount of explosions and punching.

She turned it on when she wasn’t in the mood to decipher a new show, which meant she had it on often. This included the day they left the city, where she’d been on her usual spot on the couch, rubbing Krypto’s stomach where he laid sprawled across her chest. The ship onscreen descended onto Earth and the green people spilled out of it and into the dark night. A woman wearing a thin white dress pointed and screamed, “Aliens!”

“Aliens,” Kara muttered. Every word on Earth felt like speaking with a rock in her mouth, clunky and unfamiliar. Krypto cocked his head and whined at her just as the door unlocked.

“Hello,” Kal greeted as he entered, another word she’d learned from exposure. She ignored him as she always did, although Krypto had no reservations about greeting him. He catapulted off her chest with an excited bark.

“No! Krypto!” Kal’s back slammed into the door on impact. He’d learned Krypto’s name from Kara, although he said it in a way that irked her. She blocked out his shouting to focus on the TV’s screams.

Krypto grew bored of him eventually and leapt off to circle the room, sniffing around the carpet in a telltale sign that he’d be pissing on it soon, something else Kal hated. With a hefty sigh, Kara said, “Hey,” in Kryptonian. Kal—wiping dog saliva from his face at the door—turned toward her. She pointed at Krypto.

How quickly he blurred across the room as Krypto squatted almost made her smile. Then they were both gone in a flash that moved toward the open window. She would have been outraged at Krypto’s sudden absence, but she’d learned that, if anything with Kal, she could trust him to bring her dog back. He very much did a few minutes later, depositing the cheerful little guy on the floor with a tired exhale.

He said something. She ignored it. One of the humans took out a projectile weapon and blew the head off of an alien’s shoulders. Kal continued to speak and Kara half-heartedly looked up at him, but he moved around the room as he talked, so she assumed he was chattering to himself again and looked back down.

A man on screen fumbled with his weapon, small pebbles falling from his hands. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath, “shit, shit—”

The image cut into darkness. Kal stood beside the TV with the controller in his hand, looking apologetic, and beckoned at her when she slid her eyes toward him. Great. A familiar gesture. Without a decent way to communicate, they did a whole lot of beckoning and following and lamely repeating things the other didn’t understand. Biting back a sigh, she pushed herself off of the couch to follow.

Oddly enough, he took her to her room, although it couldn’t have been to tell her to sleep. She’d been on Earth long enough to know the sleeping and waking cycles and which time was for going to bed, and that time wasn’t for a few hours yet. From her closet, he took out a bag and placed it on the bed as he pointed and spoke. She bit back another tired sigh. I can’t understand you.

It didn’t seem to deter him. If anything, it encouraged him, because he started to shove her things into the bag. Her clothing; the music device he had given her, which fit neatly over her head and drowned out the outside world; and the device that printed photos. He lifted them and said their names as he tossed them inside: Shirt. Pants. Headphones. Camera. She didn’t have time to remember the words through her sudden anger. Other than the watch in her pocket, those were all her belongings. What did he think he was doing? Throwing them out? Then he passed the bag to her and beckoned her, and it clicked—We’re moving again.

Oh, great. How phenomenal. Another weird trip to a weird place with weird noises and things she didn’t understand. She dug the music device out of the bag and slipped it over her head as she followed him out, turning the sound on high and patting her leg for Krypto to follow her. He leapt into her arms instead, and, everything important to her tucked close to her person, she flung the bag over her shoulder and followed Kal outside.

No amount of music could block out the ruckus of the city. It hit her eardrums like the crack of an explosion, and she ducked her head as she dodged in between the Earth people rushing to and fro. Kal stopped her in front of a square-shaped machine with wheels, one of the little zooming pods the people on Earth traveled in. He opened the side hatch before stepping back and brandishing a hand toward it in invitation. Tentatively, Kara sat inside.

Kal reached over her and pulled a strap over her front, which clicked into place in a small slot by the seat. He stepped back with a smile as Kara frowned and pulled at it. The door slammed shut.

She looked up sharply. What? No matter how hard she yanked at the strap, it didn’t budge. With a shake in her hands, she ripped it free from the slot and tried to stand. She couldn’t; the walls pressed in around her, trapping her, and the panic fully set in. BAM! BAM! The door gave way on the second kick and swung into the crowd, and she burst out of the pod with a strangled gasp.

A few people in the crowd made startled noises as she backed in them, chest heaving. Krypto writhed and barked in her arms, but she held him tight and barely heard him over the shoes on the ground, the honking of the pods, the overlapping crescendo of voices, and the frantic thudding of her own heart. She had to run. Run to where? All around her people swarmed and buildings towered. If she—if she flew, maybe—

A hand touched her arm and she lurched away, gasping. Kal raised his arms placatingly, eyes snapping over to the crowd, where people had started giving them suspicious looks. He spoke to her, low and soothing, as if she were some sort of wild animal. The panicked thudding of her heart erupted into rage.

“I’m not going in that thing,” she hissed. It was all she could get out past the dryness clinging to her mouth, and he obviously didn’t understand a lick of what she’d said. She didn’t bother trying with any more.

He said something back. Patted the pod’s open door like an unruly mount he had to steady, as if patting it would make it seem friendlier. She kept her feet rooted to the ground, clutching Krypto in her shaking hands, and shook her head. Undeterred, he pressed a button inside the door and its window slid downward. He stuck his hand through a gave a tentative thumbs up. She shook her head again and his shoulders slumped.

Why couldn’t they just fly? They’d done it before to get to the city. Or, well, Kal had flown—Kara had tried, but her powers were as wild and uncontrollable as her, and most of her attempts landed her in a new pile of snow each time despite Kal’s best shot at teaching (his “best shot” being lots of talking, hand-waving, and demonstrating). In the end, she’d climbed onto Kal’s back as he flew them to the city instead.

So maybe she didn’t have much flying experience. How was that her fault? She didn’t like them and had only practiced so much at the ice fortress. She would have kept her powers tucked away forever if she could, but a difficulty in controlling them meant she didn’t quite know how to stop them, either. Countless times she’d zoned out long enough for her eyes to bore smoking holes into the carpet, and countless times she’d awoken from her restless sleep at night floating a few inches above her bed. She couldn’t even blow off hot food without a thick layer of ice encasing her spoon. Her powers felt limitless and impossible to control.

The damaged pod door said as much, hanging loosely on its hinges with its damaged side on full display, yet despite all of this, she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

“I’ll fly before I get on that thing,” she said. Kal stared. The message clearly wasn’t getting across, so she pushed herself to the tips of her toes and floated slightly off of the ground, about as much as she could do before things went sideways. His eyes widened and he practically launched himself at her to pull her back down.

“No,” he said, among some other equally as useless things. He jerked his head indiscreetly toward the crowd. What, was it some sort of secret? Great. What’s the point of powers if you have to hide them?

When he felt confident she wasn’t going to shoot off into the sky, he released her shoulders and stepped back. Slowly, he gestured again to the pod, looking apologetic.

Their only option.

Rao, she hated Earth.

She spent the trip with the windows down and her leg bouncing, the seat strap far from her and half of her arm dangling out the side of the pod window. Krypto spent the trip with his eyes fixed keenly on her, ready to tuck himself closer when her hands shook too violently. Kal knew better than to speak, for once, as he steered the pod through the bustling city and onto quieter paths that cut through rolling fields. Not too quiet, though. Kara kept the noise machine on her head as the screech of the city grew faint behind them. It was harder to hear the thud-thud-thud of her heartbeat with them on. Harder to mistake the rumbling Earthen pod as a Kryptonian one cutting through the dead silence of space. It almost worked.

On the way to Kansas, she only threw up twice.

They arrived on Earth in darkness, the moon slicing high into the night sky. Outside of Clark’s apartment door, Kara told Ruthye to stay put.

“I’ll talk to him a bit first,” she told her. “Come in when I call your name.”

Ruthye nodded and Kara pushed the door open gently.

He sat by the window waiting for her. Despite the sun’s radiation reflecting off the moon onto her skin, she still felt oddly jittery as she spoke to him. Nerves, maybe. Disgusting. But Clark took her decision to stay well—was obviously suppressing the urge to jump into the air and clack his heels together in joy—and she had just prepared to launch into announcement two when he noticed Krypto in the chocolate and shot up to reprimand him.

Kara trailed behind him and lingered by the kitchen as he attempted to wrestle the wrapper out of Krypto’s mouth. She gnawed on her thumbnail, but dropped it as Clark turned with the chocolate safely secured in his hand.

“Got it.” He waved the half-destroyed wrapper in the air, then pushed himself up to a stand. “Will he be doing this the whole time he’s here?”

She looked away. “I have something else to tell you.”

“What? Is—is everything okay?”

She’d considered preparing what to say in advance, but she had always been better at winging it. “Don’t be mad. I brought someone with me. I’ll keep her out of trouble, and I promise she’s a good kid, alright? She can be a little bit of a handful, but it’s part of her charm.” He stared, uncomprehending, so she cleared her throat. “Ruthye!”

The door creaked open and Ruthye peeked through. Quickly, she hurried to Kara’s side, who threw an arm around her and gave Clark her most charming smile. “This is my friend Ruthye. Ruthye, say hi.”

“Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan,” Ruthye clarified with a slight incline of her head. “I have heard many good things about you. As my family has been dishonorably slaughtered by Krem of the Yellow Hills and I have no place to stay, Kara has extended an invitation into your home. I…hope that is alright, and I thank you deeply for your generosity.”

“She’ll be staying with us for a while,” Kara translated.

Clark stared for a beat. Clearly—and a bit understandably—Ruthye was throwing him for a bit of a loop. Kara’s shoulders tensed. Would he say no? Was that a possibility? She sighed internally when he broke into a soft smile and held out his hand. “Hey, Ruthye. It’s nice to meet you. Of course you’re welcome here as long as you need.”

Ruthye smiled and stared a bit uncertainly at his outstretched hand. Kara leaned down and murmured, “Hold it and shake it a little. It’s an Earth greeting.” Hesitantly, she reached out and placed her hand in his. He shook it briefly before stepping back and clearing his throat.

“You’ll have to share a room,” he said, “unless one of you wants the couch. I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting extra company. But it’s alright! We’ll make do.”

The room itself had once been Kara’s, although she only ever thought of it as a spare. In her time living in it, she hadn’t decorated it at all, so it sat blank and empty in Clark’s apartment hall. It looked more like a guest room than a child’s, but Ruthye didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t like they had many belongings between the two of them. Aside from what she’d left on her ship, Kara’s pack consisted of (clean?) clothing, a few toiletries, her headphones, a pair of sunglasses, her father’s watch, and a dog toy she’d bought for Krypto on a planet with materials strong enough to last under his superstrength-enhanced bite force. Ruthye had even less than her, merely the clothing on her back and her father’s sword.

While having less to carry around meant better traveling, it also meant Clark, helpful to a fault and painfully awkward when he wasn’t sure what to do, didn’t have much to help them carry. He led them to the room, a location Kara could fully navigate to on her own, and gestured vaguely as they dropped their things, rambling a bit uselessly about its contents: a single bed, a closet, and a window. Real neat stuff.

Neat enough that Kara had no qualms in cutting him off. “You shower first,” she told Ruthye. “I can keep your sword safe, don’t worry. Oh, and you can borrow—” She cut herself off a millisecond before saying my clothes, because her clothes were, if she was being honest, probably not washed. Who could blame her? Keeping up with the laundry was hard in space. It wasn’t like every planet had a laundromat, and the ones that did cost her weird otherworldly money she wouldn’t have known how to use even if she had some. “—some of Clark’s clothes to change into.”

Clark agreed, although Ruthye didn’t look so sure. At first Kara thought her reservations had to do with leaving her sword behind, or getting out of the clothing she’d been wearing for several days now. The real problem became apparent when she said, “Showering?”

So Kara ushered her into the bathroom as Clark picked out some clothes. Ruthye listened intently as she demonstrated how the shower curtains pulled back and forth and how the showerhead attached and detached, then moved on to the water.

“Right is cold,” Kara said. She took Ruthye’s hand and guided it under the water running steadily out from the faucet so she could feel, then twisted the handle in the opposite direction and said, “Left is for hot water. Feel that?” Ruthye flexed her hands under the stream and nodded. “‘kay. To get the water to come out of the showerhead, pull the handle out.” She did so and water erupted from the showerhead. Ruthye ripped her hand away from the faucet quickly. “To stop it, just push it back in.”

Once she felt confident on the controls of the shower, Kara gave her a quick run through of shampoo, conditioner, and soap. Ruthye’s hair looked similar enough to Kryptonian and human hair that it probably wouldn’t burn up or melt or have some sort of disastrous reaction to the products…she hoped.

“That’s it.” She passed her Clark’s chosen clothes, then grabbed a towel from the closet and passed it over to her as well. “This is for drying off. Just leave your dirty clothes on the ground, Clark’ll clean ‘em later. Any questions?”

Ruthye shook her head. “I believe I understand it. Thank you. Back home, we did not have machines like this, only tubs of water we bathed in sparingly.”

“Earth’s a bit different from home, huh?” Krypton, at least, had been a hygienic planet. Although who knew what it had been like in its final moments, with more corpses littering the homes than people to clean them up. Kara patted Ruthye on the shoulder once swiftly and stood, shaking the thought away. “Hey, you’ll do great. Shout if you need me and don’t feel weird about locking the door.”

She found Clark in the kitchen. As she approached, she braced herself for some sort of lecture or interrogation, but instead he pushed himself away from the counter and asked, “Is she alright? Do you need anything?”

“She’s fine.” Kara sat in the chair by the kitchen bar with a sigh, and Krypto perked up from the couch and bounded over to settle at her feet.

“Are you two hungry? I can make something quick.”

Kara shook her head. “We ate on the way here.” She rubbed Krypto’s ear between her fingers with one hand as the other tapped absentmindedly against the countertop. For a brief, blissful moment, the three of them existed in silence. Then Clark spoke.

“Who is she, Kara?”

“Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan,” Kara said wryly. Clark waited until, a bit more softly, she added, “A friend. I picked her up during an…adventure, I guess, off-world. Picked her up like a little leech or disease, really, but she grew on me, and now she’s got nowhere to go. Family was killed by a group called the Brigands, and I couldn’t dump her on a planet by herself when we were done traveling. Yeah, I probably should have told you she was coming, but the decision was last minute, so cut me some slack.”

“You did the right thing,” he said.

She cupped her palm against the side of Krypto’s head and sighed. “Let’s hope.”

“You did. You’re a good person, Kara, even though you pretend like you’re not.” She shrugged; he clasped his fingers together and exhaled. “Is she…the only reason you’re staying?”

She scoffed. “You wish. Ruthye’s here because Earth is where I was heading anyway. You’re stuck with us for a while. Me and Krypto,” she added hurriedly. “Ruthye, I—we’re still working on where she’ll want to go.”

“She can stay as long as she needs,” Clark reassured her. “All of you can. You’re not the gum stuck on my shoes or anything. I’ve missed you. Quite frankly, you being here is going to help lower my blood pressure a lot.”

Kara rolled her eyes. “Glad to know I’m wanted for my presence.”

“My blood pressure rises because I’m worried for you,” Clark said. He reached out to grab her shoulder and she grumbled. “And I’m worried because I love you. We’re family.”

Kara shrugged him off good-naturedly. “Yeah, whatever, cornball. I’m going to go get the room ready for Ruthye.”

“I mean it,” he called after her. “This is your home, too.”

By the time Ruthye finished her shower and dressed, Kara had smoothed out her bedsheets ten times and had been sitting on the edge of the mattress with her head tipped up toward the ceiling for twice as long.

She cracked a smile as Ruthye entered. Clark’s plain black shirt hung baggily off of her frame and bottoms of her checkered blue pajama pants dragged along the floor with each step, and she scowled at Kara when she saw her face.

“Do not laugh. Obviously the clothes do not fit, as they belong to a man with a much larger frame than I.”

“I’m not laughing,” she lied. “Come here.” Ruthye stopped by the bed and she crouched to fold up her pant legs. Ruthye muttered her thanks as she rose and Kara jerked her head toward the bed. “All yours. Get comfy.”

“What about you?” she asked as Kara slipped past her.

“I’ll take the couch. Krypto, keep her company, bud.” Lying at the foot of the bed, Krypto raised his head and cocked it.

“Surely there is a more comfortable alternative,” Ruthye protested.

Kara rested her hand on the doorframe. “The couch is the comfortable alternative.” Ruthye still looked troubled, and she sighed. “I’ve fallen asleep in some crazy places, Ruthye. A couch won’t kill me.”

“It certainly will not be comfortable.”

“No, I’ll sleep like a bug in a rug, or whatever they say.”

“Who has ever said that?”

Kara waved a hand dismissively. “Earth saying.” Nothing but a blank stare in response. She dragged a hand down her face. “Listen. Don’t argue with me. I’m taking the couch.”

Ruthye huffed. “Fine.” She settled rather heavily, as if throwing a tantrum, on the edge of the bed. “I…thank you, then.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

Showering again felt amazing. It had been ages since she’d showered fully, although, like the laundry situation, one could hardly blame her. Staying hygienic in space was rough, too. Some planets had no concept of cleanliness, and with the ones that did, she could never be too sure whether or not their version of a shower would spit out scalding hot acid or regular water. And that was if she figured out how to turn their version of a shower on at all. She’d visited Earth plenty of times over the years simply for a straight shot (or wobbly, depending on how much liquor she had in her system) to the bathroom for a shower. Some visits she’d come and go without seeing Clark at all.

So, yeah, after three of the roughest days of her life with no bathing in sight, she was glad to collapse onto the soft cushions of the couch with her entire body scrubbed clean of its usual stench. She felt so fresh. So…light.

“Be honest with me,” she said, limbs sprawled out like a starfish as Clark approached her with a spare blanket. “Do I usually stink?”

Clark hesitated. “Well, I…I understand maybe space isn’t the cleanest place ever—”

“Don’t be a pussy. Answer the question.”

He pressed his lips together and made a so-so gesture with his hand. “Maybe a little.”

Damn. She’d been expecting the answer, but it still hurt. “Asshole,” she muttered under her breath. She kicked his leg for good measure, and he sucked air in through his teeth sharply.

“Kara, it actually hurts when you do that—and you asked—”

“You should never call a lady smelly,” she yawned, then reached a hand out for her blanket.

“You didn’t really give me a choice.” Alarmingly, he passed over her outstretched arm and tried to lay the blanket over her.

“Don’t tuck me in,” she muttered, slapping his arms away.

“Hm, what?” He pulled the bottom of the blanket over her feet and she swung one up to strike him, but his hand flashed away faster than she could hit.

“I know you heard me, bitch—”

“Stop moving.” Swift as a bullet, he tugged the blanket over her feet. She kicked them off again. “Come on, what is this doing for you?”

“It’s my autonomy,” she bullshitted. He raised his hands in defeat and stepped away.

“Fine, then. Did you check in with Ruthye? Does she need anything?”

She pulled the blanket up to her chin and said, “Yes. No. She’s trying to sleep. Krypto’s with her.” He’d seemed to understand that Ruthye needed him more than Kara did for the night. How well Kara would do without him nearby after his near-death scare was beyond her, but she didn’t want Ruthye to feel alone, so she would suck it up for one night.

She attempted to kick the tossed-up blankets by her feet back over her legs and failed miserably. Clark’s eyes slowly cut their way, and she scowled. “Back off.”

He sighed, but he wore a smile. “Goodnight, Kara.”

“Night, jerk,” she muttered, sitting up to pull the blanket over her feet.

She slipped her headphones on as he flicked the light off in hopes they would help block out the distant nightlife. Past the thrum of the music in her ears, Clark murmured to himself in his room and—ah, no, another smaller, tinnier voice responded to him. A phone call. She rolled onto her side and squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on the music over the honking cars, the whistling wind, the beating of her own heart.

Eventually she slipped into a restless sleep. Between each toss and turn she dreamed of planets that rumbled with deep basslines and animals whose hearts thumped and stuttered in their chests as they walked. When she roused between her feverish dreams, it was to soft murmuring coming from across the apartment or the hitch of her own snore. At one point she woke and panicked when Krypto was out of sight, but once she’d ripped her headphones off, the sound of his tiny heart became clear alongside Ruthye’s soft breathing, and she calmed.

What woke her next, headphones dangling in her hand off the side of the couch and her hair and blankets a mess, were soft footsteps and the occasional clinking dish. She blinked owlishly at Clark as he attempted to move silently through the kitchen. Eventually, he looked over and saw her staring.

He gave a small wave and whispered, “I’m going to work. I’ll be back at four. You still have that phone I bought you, right?”

She nodded. With the sun filtering in through the windows and draping across her like a second blanket, her exhaustion would seep out of her soon, but for now her mind moved sluggishly. Phone. Yeah, she had the phone. Probably. It was somewhere in her bag, maybe. Hopefully it wasn’t dead.

“Text me if you need anything. Really, I mean it.”

The sun, while energizing, also felt really good. She blinked in it slowly, basking in its warmth, and grunted at…whatever he had just said. Her eyes slipped shut again.

When they reopened, the kitchen stood empty and silent. The sun had risen some more, and the incessantly ticking clock on the wall read 9:12am. What struck her awake wasn’t so much the time as it was a single thought—Ruthye. She sat up sharply, but to her relief, she and Krypto were still within earshot, their breathing soft and their heartbeats steady. Sleeping still, then. With a groan she kicked the tangled blankets off of her legs and trudged toward the kitchen.

A sticky note greeted her at the fridge. Plenty of food inside! it read. Remember, TEXT ME if you need anything. I’ll be back at four unless some sort of disaster strikes. Hopefully not, though! Have a good day, you two. P.S. Yes, my card on your phone should still work. Please don’t go overboard.

The card still worked? Sick. Maybe I should try to find that phone.

At 9:30, she knocked on Ruthye’s door and peeked her head inside. “Up and at ‘em, losers,” she said, as Ruthye peered up at her from underneath the covers and Krypto perked up at her side. “We have shit to do.”

Despite Clark’s claim that the fridge held plenty of food, Kara took Ruthye out to a bakery for breakfast. She stuck close to Kara’s side as they walked through the city streets, clearly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people, the daunting height height of the buildings, and the intense loudness of it all. Kara couldn’t blame her. If she had to choose the best place on Earth to show someone from a different planet, a city would be the last place on her list. Of course, it wasn’t up to her—that would be Clark and his dumb career decisions.

The bakery itself was quaint and silent, and the two of them sat at a small table tucked in the corner.

“Here’s my plan,” Kara said as she ripped off the top of her muffin. “We walk through a few shops. Clothing first, get you some stuff to wear that actually fits you. Go home so you can change. Check out the ‘basic necessities at Clark’s place’ situation. Then just wing it. Sound good?”

Ruthye thumbed the edge of her own muffin and eyed Kara’s judgmentally. “I have no objections. …Is the pastry’s intended method of consumption the way you’re doing it?”

Kara stuffed the muffin top into her mouth. “No. But it should be.”

As promised, the first place they hit up sold clothing exclusively. While Kara had no qualms in looking around, Ruthye clung close to her side and showed no interest in searching for anything herself. After the tenth, “What about this?” greeted by more compliance than interest, Kara turned to Ruthye and said, “What’s wrong? You don’t like this place? We can go somewhere else.”

“I like it,” Ruthye said hurriedly. “Why would you think something is wrong?”

“You’re not…” Kara gestured vaguely with her hands. “…enthused enough. You’re going to wear this stuff. If you don’t like it, tell me.”

“I truly have no problem with any of it. I suppose I am simply worried about the monetary cost of it all.”

Kara waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t be. It’s all on Superman.”

“Did he say that?”

“Yes,” she lied. He basically had. Basically was basically the same as literally, right? Or something. “Get cost out of your head. If you like something, say something. That’s the only rule for today.”

Ruthye stared at her with that annoying dubious look on her face, but, thank God, she didn’t protest.

They had more success after that, and left the store with a good selection of clothes in Ruthye’s actual size. They stopped back at the apartment so she could change and Kara could rifle around and scope out the necessities situation. Alarmingly enough, the place had been stocked up nicely—spare toothbrushes, deodorant, floss, food, extra blankets, even pads, for some reason—so she slashed that part of their day off of the list. That left…well, winging it. Maybe some personal shopping for Ruthye. Getting her settled in for her stay, however long it may be.

As long as she needs, her internal Clark reminded her.

And how long would that be, genius? she shot back.

“Kara?” Kara straightened up as Ruthye entered the living in her new clothes, no longer looking goofily swamped. “Do you know how to braid hair?”

Kara raised her eyebrows. “Uh…sure.” The last time she’d braided her hair had been…God, probably one of those first few messy days on Earth, grasping for some sort of familiarity. She’d braided her hair a lot on Krypton. Had braided her friends’ hair and mother’s in her last few frail days alive, just as her mother had braided her own as a child, just to get it away from her face when she vomited. One day on Earth she had braided her hair one messy, final time before she’d lost the will altogether. “I gotta warn you, though, it’s been a while.”

“That’s alright,” Ruthye decided. “Could you braid mine?”

“Sure.” She’d been expecting it—why else would Ruthye have asked?—but her voice still caught. Ruthye sat at her feet by the couch, and she began with a small shake to her hands. The last person whose hair she’d braided, whoever it may have been, was now long dead. Hopefully I still know what I’m doing.

“This planet is rather noisy,” Ruthye said. “Is all of Earth like this?”

“God, no. If it was I would never come back. This is just a city. A lot of places on Earth are way better. Quieter.”

“Like what places?”

“Like, uh…Clark’s parents, they own a farm. No people but them for miles. Lots of land and animals and that’s it. Plus, they’re nice. It’s better over there.”

“His parents?” Ruthye echoed. “But I thought—”

“His adoptive parents,” Kara specified. “He crash-landed on their farm as a baby and they took him in.”

“Truly? What incredible luck.”

“Yeah,” Kara muttered, “he’s a lucky guy.”

She fucked the braid up a bit at the top and had to restart. She worked with her tongue pressed hard between her teeth.

“Did you not get adoptive parents?” Ruthye asked.

She bit down until her tongue throbbed. “No.”

When the braid had reached the length of Ruthye’s shoulder blades, she said, “A farm sounds nice. My family were rock farmers for generations before my father became a swordsmith.”

“Yeah?” A rock farmer? The hell is that?

“Yes. He took up an apprenticeship to support our family better. He and my mother worked very hard to keep my brothers fed, and by the time I was born, he had already mastered the craft.”

Kara frowned. “I thought you only had one brother.”

“It is…complicated. Many of my other older brothers them left before I was born or when I was very young to pursue their own interests. I barely knew them, and at the present moment I do not know where they even are, or if they live still. So, I suppose I have many, but I only truly knew one.”

“You don’t have some way to find them?”

Ruthye shrugged. “Without the help of my parents…”

Right. Well, there goes that idea. “You don’t think they’re out looking for you?”

“If they remember me at all, they most likely believe I am dead.”

Right. Because of the murder. She tied the braid off and leaned back. It looked…decent enough. For someone so out of practice, it was actually borderline good, if she did say so herself. “How’s that?”

Ruthye felt it with her hand and nodded. “Thank you.” In a smaller, quieter voice, she admitted, “The braid I wore before was done by my mother. I tried to redo it by myself but could not manage it past the shaking of my hands.”

Her words struck Kara in the heart like a Kryptonite arrow. Boy, did she know how Ruthye felt. “Whatever you need,” she croaked, then turned her head away to look at Krypto. “Right, bud?”

Krypto cocked his head and whined.

The Earth pod rumbled to a stop on a dirt path facing a large, lone house. As soon as it stilled, Kara kicked the hatch open—successfully ripping off the tape Kal had plastered to the side to keep it from swinging open during their journey—and stumbled into the fresh, open air.

And open it was. Unlike the city, the lone house stood tall and proud on its own rolling expanse of land. Grass and hills, crops and animals. A farm. A quiet farm. Quiet aside from the rustling of the crops, of course, and the distant clutter of the livestock, and Krypto’s tiny beating heart in her arms, or Kal’s steadier one beside her, or her own, or the two coming from inside the house—

Two new heartbeats. Her elation shot steeply into suspicion. She stepped closer to Kal’s side, but he merely grinned at her and beckoned her to follow him toward the house. Great. Hopefully this wasn’t some sort of secondary location. Kal had been sent to Earth to become some sort of conqueror of worlds, hadn’t he? He’d been pretty chill so far, but she still clutched Krypto a little bit tighter as the door to the house swung open.

An older man and woman stepped out of the house and threw their arms around him. He embraced both of them back, grinning ear to ear, as Kara halted a few feet away. Who were these people? They didn’t look his age. They looked old enough to be his parents.

Parents. She narrowed her eyes.

Krypto jostled in her arms, growing excited at the sight of two new people. He kicked and whined, and despite her best efforts to hold him back, he had gained superstrength, too, and wrestled his way out of her grip easily.

He shot through the air in a streak of white fur. “Krypto!” She reached out for him and missed him by just the hair on his tail, and their heads turned just as she thought, Great Rao. They’re totally dead.

Kal grabbed Krypto midair. He thrashed and whined, squirming to break free, but Kal held onto him tightly and said something to the older humans, who laughed and held out their hands. Kara halted at Kal’s side as they scratched Krypto’s ears and let him lick their fingers. She hovered awkwardly, hands feeling empty at her sides without Krypto in her arms, and muttered out an apology.

It being Kryptonian, they didn’t understand, but it still got their attention. The older woman smiled at Kara, who gave a stiff one to her in return. She held a hand out toward her vertically and Kara stared. Unfortunately, everyone else did the same to her. What did they want her to do? Face heating, she took her own hand did the same thing. The woman grasped it and gently shook it up and down. Then her hand fell back to her side and Kara retracted her own quickly, feeling lost. An…Earth greeting, of some sort. Bizarre.

The older man didn’t do it, thankfully, probably because it had become clear to all three of them that she was wildly out of her depth. He inclined his head and said something instead, and, feeling more and more like she was floating blindly in space, she stuttered out an awkward “Hello” in Kal’s language. They smiled brightly and echoed it back to her, which was a relief. At least she could do one thing right.

Kal passed Krypto back to her. She made sure to hold onto him tight, not wanting her hands empty again, not wanting to make a worse first impression than she already had, as the three of them lead her inside.

The house’s interior was bigger, friendlier, and much quieter than Kal’s city dwelling. Her shoulders, wound up tight from the long trip in the pod, relaxed as she followed Kal and the new couple around the house, taking it all in. A dining room with a big table and a handful of chairs, another room with a TV and a couch, a set of carpeted stairs leading upward, and a kitchen already filling the rooms with the rich aroma of something cooking.

They didn’t have her trailing aimlessly after them for too long. Kal turned and beckoned for her to follow him up the stairs, where he brought her to a small, lived-in room. Unlike the one in his apartment, it didn’t seem to be a spare. The walls were painted a nice shade of blue, the bed blankets covered in a checkered design, with a full bookshelf pressed up against the wall, small figurines standing around the corners of every empty surface, and clothing filling the closet. It was someone’s room, or it had been, and she felt pretty safe betting that someone was Kal.

Well, it was hers now, apparently. He took her bag from her and laid it on the bed, gesturing at it, at the whole place, at her, giving her a thumbs up—really spelling it out for her. She placed Krypto gently on the ground and he dropped his nose to the sniff around. Kal hovered in the doorway as she explored the room, examining up the small toy people and slipping out one of the books from the shelf. A thin picture book of some sort, with the drawings and words trapped in squares.

He said something from the doorway. She didn’t spare him a glance, too busy flipping through the pages of flying men punching monsters across their faces. Kryptonians, maybe? But why would Earth have picture books about them? Footsteps descended down the stairs, leaving her alone in her new room.

She laid on her back in bed, flipping through the drawings, trying to piece together the narrative based off of the illustrations alone, until a pair of knuckles rapped against the door. She raised her head from the pages, disgruntled, to see Kal standing in the doorway once more. He brightened up when he saw she had his book, then beckoned her to come. Time to go downstairs and face his Earth parents.

Krypto bounded down the stairs after Kal happily, but Kara paused. Descending down the wall were photos she hadn’t noticed before. Every picture was of the same young boy, who she didn’t recognize at first with his round cheeks, big grin, and mop of black hair. As she walked down the stairs, he took on some familiarity, until it became clear toward the middle that the boy was Kal. He stood in the center of every image—alone and waving, standing between the older couple, sitting on the floor unwrapping colorful boxes. Him, him, him, plastered all over the walls.

She’d been right. These were his Earth parents. A bitter feeling rose in her chest until she stood on the last step scowling at a black and white paper pinned to the wall. Words lined the sides in columns and a photo of Kal in his garish outfit, the one with the underwear, stole attention in the center. Why would they frame that?

So immersed in staring, she somehow missed the sound of footsteps coming up behind her. When a voice spoke by her ear, she nearly shot up into the air like a rocket.

Kal’s Earth mother put a hand on Kara’s arm consolingly, and Kara looked away, face flushed, back to the paper that hung on the wall. Kal’s Earth mother pointed at it. “——Clark,” she said, a single familiar word standing out through what only sounded like gibberish to Kara’s ears.

At least, it sounded familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. She didn’t know what a clark was and certainly didn’t have the lexicon to communicate with this woman, but she might as well contribute with what she did know. She gestured at the image and said, “Kal-El.”

“Kal-El?” the woman echoed, the words rough on her tongue. “No, no, ——Clark.”

Kara stared at her blankly. Was she trying to imply that—? “Isn’t this him? It’s Kal-El. Kal.”

The woman frowned. She gestured to herself and said, “Martha,” then to the picture and said, “Clark.”

Absolutely not. Clark? That was—that was so—! He already has a name! A Kryptonian name! Why would he go by some weird clunky…Earth name? His parents had said it in their message to him. Which he’d listened to, and so had Kara. He was Kal-El, and he knew it. Why should she call him by anything else?

Of course he doesn’t go by Kal. His Earth parents didn’t know Kryptonian. He didn’t, either. He’d been a baby when they found him, and babies didn’t speak. Babies didn’t know their own names. She snatched her hand away from the paper. The noises of the house suddenly irked her, and she tried to shake away the clinking utensils, distant animals, and back-and-forth voices like they were an irritating fly as she made her way to the table.

Kal pulled out a chair for her and she sat with a scowl. His lips turned down in worry. He said something to his Earth mother—Martha, she’d called herself—as he sat, and she replied with a vague hand toss in the direction of the stairs. He replied, and then she, and the back-and-forth continued as he filled a plate in his hand with a selection of unfamiliar meats and greens from the middle of the table. Kara eyed the food as she rubbed Krypto’s head under the table, a little bit impatient to get up and grab her own.

The scowl wiped from her face when slid the plate her way. She would have thanked him if she’d had the words, but she didn’t, so instead she raised the first bite of meat to her lips.

Her plan was to keep to herself and eat in silence, but with an entire table of people determined to speak with her, it fell to dust pretty quickly. Why everyone insisted on jabbering at her when it was very obvious she didn’t understand them was beyond her, and it was getting beyond annoying, but she kept her face as smooth as possible as not to lose her absolute shit at the dinner table.

Martha reintroduced herself. Kal’s Earth father followed by gesturing at himself and saying, “Jonathan,” and then, with dread bubbling up in her stomach, Kara turned to Kal as he did the same and said, “Clark.”

“Clark?” she echoed, unable to keep the despair from her voice. There was no way. “That’s not your name. Your name is Kal-El.”

“——Kal-El?” Martha asked.

Kal shook his head. Sympathy painting his features, he gestured to himself again and said, “Clark,” sounding almost apologetic, before extending a hand toward her.

It hit her, suddenly, where she’d heard the name before. On the first day of her arrival, still wrapped up in her suit from the pod, he had done the same thing he was doing now: pointing at himself and saying his name. He would say “Clark” and then look expectantly at her like he was doing now, and the idea that he was introducing himself had never struck her, because he wasn’t Clark. He was Kal.

But he wasn’t. He wasn’t Kal, nor was he some sort of conquerer of worlds, and to top it all off, he didn’t even speak Kryptonian. Who was he, then? No cousin of mine, she thought bitterly. He might as well be full thing of Earth.

They were all still staring at her. They wanted her introduction, now. Pressing her lips tightly together, she muttered, “Kara.”

Smiles all around the table. She ducked her head over her plate and ate her food in unappetizing nibbles, refusing to lift her it even when she felt their eyes sliding over to her periodically throughout the meal. Eventually, it became too hard to stomach the bites, and she lowered bits and pieces below the table for Krypto to eat instead.

After dinner, she found more comfort in the room with the TV than at the table with its incomprehensible small talk and unsubtle glances. Whatever played on the screen wasn’t the movie she was used to—drawn and colorful, she had a sneaking suspicion it was made for kids, but she didn’t turn it off. From the TV and the table, the unfamiliar language bombarded her, inescapable. She buried her face into Krypto’s fur to drown it all out, focusing on the thud of his heart and the sniffing of his nose against her ear.

It had been hopeless to believe she could live even a sliver of her usual life on Earth with Kal. He was hardly Kryptonian—she might as well have landed on a random Earth man’s property. Could she rely on an Earth man to understand her home? To understand her?

No. Never. It was up to her to adapt, to learn their language, their mannerisms, their culture like a skin she had been born into, just like Kal, who wore the skin so believably he had fooled even himself. She couldn’t rely on him, not in the way she’d been hoping to. Alone. She was alone.

The last real Kryptonian.

“I want to take Ruthye down to the farm.”

Clark glanced up from the pan on the stove. “Like, my parents’ farm?”

“What other farms do we know?”

“Alright, hey, just checking.” He dished the eggs out onto a plate on the counter. “Why? What inspired this?”

“Just…feel like she’d like it better. The city’s too loud and busy. Which is, like, objectively a fact, but I can tell it’s bothering her. I think she’s more used to rural areas.”

She didn’t look up from her cup of orange juice in fear he would see the ulterior motive plastered all over her face. Obviously, the suggestion was for Ruthye first and foremost. But she’d been on Earth for three days and still spent most nights drifting in and out of uncomfortable unconsciousness. She hadn’t lied to Ruthye—it was true that she’d fallen asleep in worse places than a city apartment’s couch. But at least on the floor of a red sun bar, her hearing wasn’t amplified to one million and she had the privilege of being wasted enough that she would pass out sooner or later anyway. And sure, she didn’t need to sleep when the yellow sun charged her like some sort of eternal phone battery, but lying in the dark alone with her thoughts, night after night…

She didn’t prefer it.

He cracked another egg over the pan. “Well, I think it’s a good idea. They’d be thrilled to see you.” Kara rolled her eyes just as he plucked two pieces of toast from the toaster. He caught the motion and frowned. “It’s true, Kara. They worry about you just as much as they worry about me.”

Well, that was just objectively untrue. It didn’t take a genius to recognize the major emotional gap between how much a parent loved their son and how much a parent loved their son’s weird alcoholic off-worlder cousin. Sure, they’d taken her in and had been as warm and welcoming as warm and welcoming got, but it was in their nature to be that way, just as it was in Clark’s. They’d taken her in out of obligation, because they were too kind to reject a young, lost alien girl with nowhere else to go. That, and the big part her blood relation to Clark had probably played. She gave him a look that she hoped communicated her raw disbelief in what he’d said, although it didn’t seem to sway him.

“I mean it,” he insisted. “They ask about you almost every time we call.”

“Let me guess—you guys call once a year?”

“I try to fit in a call every week,” he admitted. Kara raised her eyebrows. Every week? Didn’t they run out of things to talk about? I guess that’s why they ask about me. He passed her her plate and said, “and every week they say, ‘How’s Kara’?”

She took it with a muttered thanks and stabbed a fork into her scrambled eggs with a small scoff. “And what do you say?”

He popped two more slices of bread in the toaster before turning his attention back to the stove. “I tell them I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

“Well, I’m sure they were thrilled to hear I’m safe and sound on Earth.”

“They will be when I call them. I haven’t yet, but we’re scheduled for this Thursday.”

Kara’s fork paused midway to her mouth. “You haven’t called them yet?” He shook his head. “Then who were you on the phone with the night I came back?”

His spatula stilled. The eggs sizzled and popped on the pan. “You know, Kara, the eavesdropping is…a problem—”

She tossed her hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah, it’s rude and invasive, I know. I couldn’t help it. If it makes you feel better, I didn’t hear the conversation. Just that you were on the phone.”

“You’re still having trouble blocking out background noise?”

“Can you answer my question?”

He sighed. “Alright, fine. But don’t go around telling everyone. We’re still…a bit under wraps. It’s complicated.”

Suspicion zinged through her. “Tell anyone what?” Did he have some sort of secret affiliation with someone? Messy, she thought, almost gleefully, until he said—

“About Lois, my girlfriend.”

—and the gears in her head ground to a halt.

Girlfriend?

“Although girlfriend makes it sound childish,” he continued quickly, “but it’s not, it’s serious, Kara. I love her. She knows about me being Superman and we work together at the Daily Planet and—”

Girlfriend? He had a girlfriend? Since when? How come she hadn’t known? This was big news. Her dork of a cousin had a girlfriend, and this was the first she was hearing about it. Why? Her initial shock sank like a stone in a sudden overwhelming bought of sourness. Why? Because you’re never around.

“Kara?”

A whiff of burnt food hit her. Kara sunk her teeth into her toast. “I think you’re burning Ruthye’s eggs.”

He turned back to the stove with a muttered curse—probably dang-it or gosh—and rushed to transfer the eggs onto a new plate.

She took a swing of her orange juice to wash down the bitter feeling rising in her throat. “About time. How long you two been together?”

“A few months now.”

She nearly choked. “And she knows you’re Superman?”

“I know! She’s an incredible investigator,” he gushed. Kara squinted at him in disbelief. “The best at the Planet. She pieced it together on her own.”

Or maybe you just fold easily, Kara thought, but, in a miraculous act of kindness, did not say. Instead, she pointed at his newest plate. “Is that done? Should I call Ruthye?”

“Uh—yes, call her. Which jelly does she like again?”

“The strawberry one. Ruthye!” she hollered, and Clark winced. “Breakfast!”

“Coming!” Ruthye called from the bedroom.

Kara shoveled some eggs onto her toast and scarfed it down. Despite the empty pit that had chasmed its way into her stomach, it was hard to chew and swallow. The food was good, of course it was, but her appetite had disappeared.

“I want you two to meet.”

Kara glanced up. Clark’s eyes flitted over to her but darted back to the toast he was buttering just as quickly.

“You and Lois, I mean,” he continued. “Whenever you want, on your own terms, I don’t care, I just…want you two to meet. I think you’d get along.”

He slid Ruthye’s plate onto the countertop at Kara’s left. Only then, as his hand retracted, did he meet her eyes fully. “She already knows about you. She wants to meet you, too.”

She knows about me? Another odd emotion stirred in her chest, one that, if her mouth hadn’t been full of food, would have left her speechless anyway. Footsteps hurried down the hall, a two-legged and four-legged pair, and quickly she looked away and fought to chew as Ruthye and Krypto joined them for breakfast.

Clark adapted quickly, beaming as they entered. “Yours is right there,” he told Ruthye, gesturing to the open plate. She thanked him as she sat.

Krypto’s chin landed on Kara’s leg and she scratched him behind the ears. Still trying to shake Clark’s last comment out of her head, she said, “How would you feel about getting out of the city for a while, Ruthye?”

Ruthye glanced over. “To where?”

“To the farm I was telling you about, the one Clark’s parents own.”

“They’d be happy to have everyone,” Clark piped in.

Ruthye considered. “I wouldn’t mind going,” she admitted. “The city is very…”

“Noisy? Cramped? A general pain in the ass?” Kara suggested.

“The city is nice,” Clark protested. Ruthye and Kara swapped a dubious look. “It is! It takes some time to adjust to, but with the community, and the places…it’s just as good as anywhere else.”

It wasn’t. Kara had been to many places, ranging from planets whose skies appeared to be trapped in an eternal sunset with wind that blew warmly all year round to ones that reeked like a rotting corpse and had the average temperature of a vat of smoldering lava, and while she could easily say Metropolis cleared some of them, it barely compared to many of the planets she’d been. To the planet she’d come from. Not to mention she had been stuck on the adjusting part for a solid while now, and she was pretty certain by “some time” he didn’t mean several years. She was sure it was nice, but the longer she spent in the city, the more certain she was that it wasn’t for her.

The thought must have been plastered all over her face, because he exhaled without a word from either of them. “We’ll have to wait a day or two to drive down. I need to take time off of work, and—”

“Don’t worry about it. We can just fly, and you can meet us down later.”

Clark raised his eyebrows. “You’re going to fly? What about Ruthye?”

“I’ve flown with Kara before,” Ruthye piped in. “We flew here. Aside from the time she was drunk, it isn’t all that bad.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Kara muttered into the rim of her glass. “I was drugged.”

Clark’s eyes widened. “You were what?”

“Although I would not mind traveling by one of your cars, either,” Ruthye mused. “Flight travel gets uncomfortable.”

“Trust me, car travel is worse.”

“You were drugged?” Clark repeated, a little louder.

Kara tossed out a hand dismissively. “Yellow sun, nothing really happened. It was poison, actually, I think. Threw it back up and I was fine. Flying to Smallville is going to be way faster than going by car. You know I can’t stand that dumb fucking thing.”

Clark blinked a few times, like he was trying to bat away the overwhelming slew of information coming at him with just his eyelids. Then he ran a hand down his face and sighed. “I…guess you two can fly over there. When?”

Kara glanced over at Ruthye questioningly. “As soon as possible?” Ruthye shrugged in assent. “Okay. As soon as possible.”

“Text them first, at least!”

“Duh.” She’d forgotten about that. Shoving her fork into her mouth, she dug through her pocket for her phone—which she had on her, for once—and squinted past the cracks on the screen. How did she text people again…right, the messages app…which was…right around…somewhere…past the one million fractures in the screen…

“I’ll do it,” Clark said.

She made an affronted noise past the fork in her mouth. “I can do it.”

“No, it’s okay, really. I really don’t think you should have that thing in your hand for more than a second. It might shatter.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not my fault Earth technology is so primitive.” Krypton had been light years ahead of Earth when it came to their inventions. Even now the dysfunctionality and weakness of their tech shocked her. Humans could have learned a thing or two from even a beginner engineer on Krypton.

Too bad basically all of our work is gone, she thought, and what was meant to be a wry passing thought put out the spark of any other emotion within her and left her cold with misery.

A few texts later, the Kents confirmed Kara and Ruthye were free to come down whenever. Clark suggested they give them a day to prepare, so they took off first thing the next morning, Kara in her suit and Ruthye on her back with two bags slung over each shoulder. Krypto was in uniform, too, much against both his and Kara’s will, but Clark insisted the Superdog cape was important in letting people know he was friendly and who he belonged to, and Kara wasn’t in the mood to argue.

Smallville was a decent several hours away from Metropolis by car, but in the air they managed to cut the time down to just one. Thirty minutes in they stopped at a gas station so Ruthye could stretch her legs, Krypto could pee, and Kara could order two Slushies from the gawking man behind the counter.

They sat on a curb in the parking lot and drank them while Krypto chased birds on the gas station rooftop. Every once and a while, Kara would glance over at Ruthye and bite back a grin at the sight of her in sunglasses. They were Kara’s, but she’d lent them to Ruthye as a precaution against anyone who tried to snap a photo of Supergirl loitering around in the middle of nowhere with an unidentified companion. It was a safety thing, but seeing Ruthye in them still made her laugh every time she looked over. Not like many people were around—the place was pretty bare aside from the two of them.

“What are Clark’s parents like?” Ruthye asked, scrunching her face up to adjust the frame on her nose.

Kara stirred her straw around. “Nice. Way too nice. You’ll see where he gets it from when you meet them.”

Claws slid on the rooftop. Krypto landed with a yelp in the parking lot and the asphalt cracked under his weight. He sprung back up a second later to shoot after the fleeing birds.

“Where did you stay when you arrived on Earth?”

Kara gave her a wry smile. “You’re asking because I’m not nice.”

“I ask because I am wondering,” Ruthye sniffed.

Krypto had abandoned the birds and now chased his tail among the distant clouds. “I moved around a lot. I was in Clark’s top secret superhero fortress for a while, then his apartment, then the farm. I went back and forth between the last two for a while before I turned nineteen.”

“Where did you go after nineteen?”

She took a long sip of her Slushy. “Space.”

Learning Earth’s language was a struggle.

Faced with the realization she was on her own, she threw herself into studying, but learning a new language from absolutely nothing proved to be a harder challenge than she’d anticipated. She had been a good student on Krypton, but a good student was only as good as her best teacher, and on Earth it was hard for anyone to teach her when the communication barrier was such a big obstacle. To learn, she had to always be learning—at meals, on TV, during everyday tasks, even by herself. Every day consisted of breaking apart the sounds around her like a never ending puzzle, and even alone she found herself running what she’d learned through her head, murmuring them into the quiet darkness of her bedroom instead of trying and failing to sleep.

Kal, at least, seemed determined to help her, but without the ability to explain the meaning behind words and their structure, most of their conversations consisted of picking up an object and saying its name. At breakfast it was table, chair, plate, food; throughout the day it was cow, milk, chickens, eggs, crops; inside the house he taught her couch, stairs, newspaper, book, room, picture, shower. The next morning the words would slip from her mind and he would have to say them all again, and she would have to repeat them until they finally stuck.

Others were harder. Good morning and good night required context; sleep and eat had to be mimed; come and wait took a decent amount of trial and error; and she had to fish words like go, need, and put from gibberish-sounding sentences and piece together their meanings on her own.

Not to mention Kal wasn’t always on the farm. He would disappear for days at a time, returning back sometimes in his weird underwear-outfit (suit, she learned) and other times in regular clothes. Where he went was beyond her. He’d done the same thing in the city. A job, she assumed, although what kind of job required a dress code like that was…not her expertise.

Being alone with Martha and Jonathan wasn’t too bad. They were happy to teach her in his absence. Many mornings and nights, Martha guided her into the kitchen and taught her the names of various foods and actions like cut, stove, fridge, fruit, mix, crack, and bowl. Outside, she would teach her things a little more complex—milking the cows, grooming the horse, herding the goats. Not only did she teach her the names, but how to do them, too, until she could simply name a task and Kara could vanish to do it on her own. Maybe they were just trying to get an extra pair of helping hands on the farm, but she didn’t care. Working all day distracted her from her spiraling thoughts and kept her from sitting alone too long in silence.

Jonathan had things to teach her, too. He taught her fence, barn, wrench, hammer—things around the farm needed fixing, and when they did, he would take her along with him for some extra help. The inventions on Earth were a lot more simple-minded than the ones on Krypton, and at times it gave her an advantage, while at others it made things much more time-consuming and frustrating. He didn’t seem to mind pausing to give her extra help when a tool made no sense to her or she forgot the name of the item he was looking for. He was kind and patient. All three of them were.

Despite the tireless amount of words she learned, the terms to describe time still alluded her. All she knew was it felt like an eternity of waking up in a bed that wasn’t hers to live in someone else’s house in a borrowed room on a planet that would never be home. An eternity, and yet her language skills progressed at what she felt was a child’s pace. She missed ninety percent of the words in sentences not directed at her, and eighty percent of the words in the ones that were. When was the last time she’d sat down and had a conversation with someone? A real, full conversation, one both of them could easily understand?

An eternity, probably. That was how it felt.

She woke one night with the chilling realization that she wasn’t quite sure how old she was.

How did Earth measure time? How long had it been since she landed? What was the date, and how did it measure to the dates on Krypton? Would she ever know what her Kryptonian birthday translated to in Earth time? Would she ever be able to possess the language skills to work with someone on figuring it out? Would she be fifteen forever, stuck speaking in one-word sentences for the rest of her life?

Safe to say, she didn’t sleep that night at all.

The next morning, Kal returned to the farm in his regular clothes. They ate breakfast together, Kara in silence and everyone else in hard-to-understand conversation, before they dispersed for their daily tasks. Kal took Kara and Krypto that morning to the distant field they used for honing her powers.

Kal had things he taught her that nobody else could. Things like “How to fly without knocking yourself on your ass,” “How to beam lasers out of your eyes without sweeping down a whole row of crops,” “How to lift a tractor above your head with one hand,” and the wide range of words that came with it all. Superpowers. One of the many banes of Kara’s existence.

Today they were learning something new, or she assumed so as Kal sat them down in front of a small pile of leaves and twigs and took out a small metallic device.

“Lighter,” he said. Monotonously, she repeated it back at him. He rubbed the top of it with his thumb and a flame erupted from it. Her eyebrows raised. “Fire.”

He brought the lighter down to the twigs and leaves, and within a few seconds the fire spread. It lit the small pile up and reeked of smoke. “Watch,” he said, a word she was still a bit dicey on, then leaned forward and blew.

A puff of icy breath escaped past his lips and billowed over the fire, putting it out. Oh, yes, Kara knew about this one. He leaned back and smiled at her, then assembled a new leaf pile and set it on fire again.

“Now you.” He moved away and gestured at the flame.

The flame flickered slightly as she blew on it, but no ice breath came. She glanced up at Kal, who mimed inhaling deeply. She imitated him, a cold sensation building in her chest, and when the air escaped her lungs it was frigid past her lips. The fire sputtered out in an instant when she blew.

“Good job!” Kal said, as excited as he always was when she pulled off something remarkably simple, and she leaned back without much of a stir of emotion within herself.

He made her try it a few more times until it was clear she could pull it off consistently, then brought her and Krypto down to the pond a way’s away from the house. The water sparkled under the sheen of the sun as they crouched at the bank. Her expression, staring dead and unfeeling up at her, rippled and distorted as Krypto leapt into the water.

Kal laughed. The water sloshed at the bank and he blew freezing wind at it, solidifying it into ice. He lifted the sheet of ice up and showed Kara, then skipped it across the lake. It skipped once, twice, ten times over the water before Krypto caught up to it.

Kara blew a small sheet of ice into existence at the water by her own feet. When she picked it up, it was cold, but it didn’t hurt. The cold used to sting and numb her fingers. Not anymore. The phantom sensation pulsed at her fingertips, but the real sensation didn’t come. She hadn’t felt a physical pain in who knew how long. It should have been a good thing. It was a good thing. She didn’t like pain. But her hand squeezed the ice hard enough to crush it between her fingers and reveal her tight expression in the water’s reflection once more.

Unfeeling.

The smile slipped from Kal’s face. “What?”

She knew what. “What?” was when she pronounced a word incorrectly and they needed her to repeat. “What?” was when she muttered someone’s name to ask for clarification. “What?” was when Krypto barked and whined outside the door, begging for someone to come out and play. She wondered which of the three this one was—confusion, attention, or exasperation.

“What?” Kara echoed back in a mutter, turning her head away. She hadn’t said anything to him. What was his deal?

He gestured to her, then pointed at his face. “You…good?” he tried.

Good? Good was when she did something right. Was he asking if she was…right? Was he implying she’d made the ice wrong? The water from the melting shards dripped between her fingers and onto the grass under her feet. She shrugged. Wasn’t it his job to tell her? He watched her closely for a moment before continuing the lesson a bit slower.

The rest of the day passed in a similarly as dull blur. When dinner rolled around, she kept to herself, and when she finished she dismissed herself from the table without a word to hole away in her room.

Kal, of course, refused to leave her alone. She’d only been flipping through one of the comics for a short period of time, Krypto resting at her feet on the bed, before a knock sounded at the door.

She sighed and put it down. “Yes?”

The door creaked open. Kal gave her a small wave, sat at the foot of her bed, and pulled out his phone. She’d tapped around his phone once before when he was teaching her about them. She hadn’t liked it much. All of Earth seemed to have their technology trapped in boxes, although they didn’t seem to mind the inefficiency of it. She sat up as he tilted the phone her way. On it was a picture of a…crying woman?

She slowly dragged her eyes up to Kal. “…What?”

“Sad,” he said. He swiped—next was a man shouting and furious. “Mad.” He swiped again to show a smiling child. “Happy.” Then a girl resting her chin on her hand with a frown. “Bored.” He ran her through them again—it looked like she was being subjected to some sort of surprise lesson on emotions—and, once she’d repeated them all, he pocketed the phone and asked, “What are you?”

Was he asking her how she felt? She scoffed and turned her head. She was…she was fine. What was the word for fine? Why hadn’t he shown her “neutral”? Where was “okay”? How about “none of your business”?

“What’s wrong?” he pressed, and although his tone was soft, her irritation flared.

“I don’t know ‘wrong,’” she muttered.

“‘Wrong’ is…” He hesitated. Thrummed his fingers against his knee. “‘Wrong’ is mad. Sad.”

“Happy?” she said flatly.

He shook his head. “Happy is good.”

Oh. Okay. So he had noticed her down mood and was hoping for some sort of conversation. Too bad she couldn’t hold a stable one for the life of her. It would be better if he just left. She laid back down and raised the comic to hide her face. “I don’t know.”

“You —— sad,” he said, the word in the middle of his sentence unfamiliar. She ignored him. “Kara—”

“Leave me alone,” she muttered in Kryptonian.

“What?”

“I don’t know.” The comic struck his shoulder and Krypto’s head snapped up with a whine as she lurched from the bed and stormed out of the room.

Martha and Jonathan, still cleaning up after dinner, looked up as she marched past them with Krypto on her heels. She slammed the back door hard enough for something to snap, and for a brief, fiery moment, she considered shooting off into the peach orange sunset and never coming down. How far could she go? How strong was she really? If she streaked into the core of the setting sun, what would be stronger? Its power or hers? Maybe the only thing that could kill her, now, was what had made her so invincible in the first place. A wet nose nudged her hand, and at her side, Krypto whined, eyes round and worried.

The fire in her sputtered out. A breath of ice cold defeat washed over her and she collapsed onto the porch stairs with a choked sob. She couldn’t leave him. Wherever she went, he would follow, and how could she ever do that to him? When she buried her head in her arms, he wrestled his head underneath them so she had something soft to sob into.

She cried for a while, longer than she ever had before, yet her eyes refused to burn and her throat never hurt. She wished they would. After so long, she almost yearned for pain and discomfort, yearned for an aching that didn’t come from within her. Her sobs died down eventually, not through physical exhaustion but the mental strain of it all. Her heart hung empty in her chest. She had wrung it dry, and she had nothing left of it to cry away.

It was as Krypto licked the tears from her cheeks that the back door creaked open. She turned her head away with a sniffle and tried to rub the wetness from her face, to no avail. The twinkling stars still blurred across the black sky. Hiding her tears would be impossible.

I should probably say sorry to him anyway. She didn’t really know the word for that yet, but she could work…something out. Probably. But when she raised her head, Martha greeted her.

With a bit of effort, she settled onto the steps next to Kara and smiled, soft and said. “Hello, dear.”

Kara had heard “dear” a number of times and had thought over its meaning for a while. A term of endearment, although Martha used it on everyone. She looked away with a sniffle. “Hello.”

She didn’t speak immediately. It was interesting—back in the city, the clutter of noise from Earth’s people had drowned out the sound of its natural world, but on the farm, Earth’s nighttime animals were impossible to miss. The distant yipping dogs, the birds that hooted and flew in near silence, the baying cows, the snorting pigs, the clucking chickens. The loudest, most persistent animal of them all remained nameless to Kara. A mob of them emerged only at night, screeching and chirping in chorus together until the sun rose, yet for something so loud, they were awfully hard to spot.

She didn’t know what they were or why they screamed together only at night, although she wasn’t afraid of them because nobody else seemed to be. Nobody else even seemed to hear them. She sometimes wondered if she was the only one who could. Every other animal had been taught to her, so why not them? They screamed for hours but got no attention for it. Martha paid them no mind, as always, as the two of them sat in their song—the wailing of creatures that only ever came out under the lonely moon.

When Kara’s sniffling fell into silence, Martha finally spoke. “What’s wrong, dear?”

This again. She shrugged and stroked at the fur between Krypto’s ears. Maybe they weren’t animals, she pondered. Maybe it was the night itself that screamed. Perhaps it was the sound of the moon, forced to drag itself over the Earth again and again, no way to escape its endless orbit. Krypto pressed his cheek against Kara’s leg and whined. Maybe…if she focused on his face and not the expectant gaze of Martha beside her…

“Sad,” she admitted, her voice cracking.

“Sad?” Martha repeated in a murmur.

She nodded. The obvious next question was why, but no matter what word she fished up, it didn’t fit. No variant of hammer or milk or TV or cow could explain the yawning pit in her chest, growing wider and destroying more and more of her each day.

TV. A word she hadn’t heard for a while resurfaced. It lingered on the tip of her tongue, teetering on the edge. She glanced over at Martha, debating whether or not she should say it. Krypto nudged her hand and she focused on him again, at his wide black eyes and the tilt of his head. “Alien.” The word slipped out in a whisper, and when they did she could no longer look even Krypto in the eyes.

“Alien?” Martha sounded surprised. Maybe Kara wasn’t saying it right. It had been a while since she’d heard it. It was all she knew, though, so she nodded and pointed at herself. She said something else, questioning, although Kara missed every word.

Well, two could play at that game. “That’s what I am,” she said in Kryptonian. The moon floated round and full above them. The harder she stared at it, the more it blurred. One last tear rolled down her cheek and her next words escaped in a broken whisper. “I wish I never came here.”

Martha touched her shoulder. The look in her eyes, soft and sad, nearly sent Kara tipping over the edge again. She fell into Martha’s hug willingly. If she closed her eyes, the warmth almost felt like the arms of her father around her, only this time with no spacesuit in the way.

Ruthye, as predicted, loved the farm.

Clark had been right. Martha and Jonathan were more than happy to welcome them into their home for the week, and any worries she had about how they’d get along with Ruthye died the first day. Ruthye was endlessly curious about Earth’s farming practices and leapt at any and every opportunity to involve herself in them, and Martha and Jonathan were happy to teach her everything she wanted to know. The first two days flew by in a breeze of farm work and companionship that Kara felt out of her depth in.

On the third day, Martha and Jonathan went out to the market early and left Kara alone with Ruthye to tend to the morning chores by themselves. Technically, they didn’t need to be doing any work (Ruthye, at least, didn’t have to—Kara wasn’t so sure about herself), but it was a good way to keep occupied, and the Kents were getting older. Kara would feel guilty if she let an elderly couple work in the heat all day without stepping in to help.

Hence why they were up at the crack of dawn collecting chicken eggs.

The earliness didn’t seem to bother Ruthye, who kept up a steady stream of chatter on their way to the coop about how the farm animals on Earth compared to the ones on her planet. Kara did her best to listen as she unlocked the door and stuck out her foot to block Krypto when he tried to lunge inside.

“So what’s your favorite Earth farm animal, then?” she asked.

“The horse, of course,” Ruthye said haughtily, as if Kara was supposed to know that or something. The door clicked shut behind them, and the chickens barely batted a wing as Krypto ran along the edge of the coop barking at them. “Across all planets, they remain some of the most majestic creatures to grace the galaxy.”

Of course she would be a horse girl. “Martha’ll teach you how to ride the younger one if you ask, you know.”

“Would she?”

“Mm-hm.” Kara crouched by the nesting boxes and waved away the chickens. She slipped a hand under one of the eggs, careful and slow, and passed it up to Ruthye, who took it with less caution.

When they’d successfully robbed the place of its eggs, Ruthye unlocked the coop door so Kara could exit fast enough to full body block Krypto from launching himself into the chicken coop again. As she shut it behind them, she asked, “Why is he so poorly behaved?”

“What? He’s a good boy. Right, Krypto?” Krypto, snarling at the unbothered chickens in the coop, perked up at his name and bounded cheerfully after them, tail wagging.

“He’s trying to murder the livestock,” Ruthye argued.

Kara shrugged. “It’s his natural instincts. The wolf in him.”

“Trained dogs don’t let the ‘wolf’ in them hurt innocent animals.”

“Well, there it is, then. He’s not trained.”

She expected another irritating question about Krypto’s untethered lifestyle. She did not expect Ruthye’s eyes to cut down to the eggs in Kara’s cupped hands, her fingers curled but not touching them, and ask, “Why do you hold them like that?” She held her own in both hands separately, fingers wrapped tight around them.

“I’ll break them on accident if I try to grab them like you.” She didn’t know that for a fact, but it had happened countless times when she’d been living on the farm before. What had once counted as a gentle touch on Krypton would end with a cracked yolk in the palm of her hand on Earth, and she learned that lesson the hard way quickly. After being away from her powers for so long, she was wary about her awareness of her own strength. Why should she trust herself around fragile things?

“I don’t believe that,” Ruthye said.

Kara rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? And what do you believe?”

“I believe you paint yourself out to be much rougher than you actually are.”

It was an unexpectedly genuine answer, and the only thing Kara managed to force past her lips was a small scoff. She didn’t look at Ruthye, who had no idea what she was talking about; instead she marched on, eggs cradled close to her chest.

They made breakfast with the eggs they’d gathered and only burnt a few pieces of toast before they managed to produce an acceptable meal. After breakfast, they made their rounds to check on the other animals, and Kara got to hear all about Ruthye’s opinions on each one, from the gentleness of her favorite cow to how rude one of the goats was to her. Once they’d been tended to, Kara agreed to let Ruthye help her with some repairs on her ship.

The ship itself sat in the distant field she and Clark used to train their powers in. She parked it on the farm for all of her visits—it was the biggest plot of land she knew of that wouldn’t draw too many suspicious eyes—although it didn’t come without its setbacks. One being the fact it was impossible to miss, which meant Martha and Jonathan almost always knew when she arrived on Earth and likewise when she left it. It didn’t sound like much of a setback, but when Kara arrived on Earth in clothing she’d been wearing for three days straight with a hint of alien whiskey still lingering on her breath, the warm and welcoming Kents were the last people she wanted subject to such a disappointing sight.

So, whatever, rushing off whenever she landed always made her feel guilty. She’d explained already that the latest time she’d bolted off was because she’d been in a hurry to introduce Ruthye to Clark and hadn’t been sure how the two of them would react to a surprise visit from another new alien child, but it didn’t stop the guilt from lingering.

Since her ship was out of use, it was a better time than any to work on any longer repairs she’d been putting off. Jonathan had pitched the idea, actually, and would be buying some parts and tools to help her with repairs later, but for the time being she would make do with Ruthye, who knew close to nothing about fixing ships but made up for it in her endless perseverance and nonstop commentary.

She sat outside of the ship while Kara wedged the upper half of her body underneath the belly of the beast itself, where she occasionally stuck a hand out into the open and made a grabby motion. “Gimme that wrench you just had.”

Cold metal pressed against her palm. As Kara tightened a nut back into place, Ruthye’s head lowered into view, peering into the dark underbelly of the ship from the outside. “How are you so knowledgeable on this?”

Kara threw the wrench off to the side. “Knowledgeable on what?”

“How to repair ships. Who taught you?”

Kara lifted a hand to rub the bridge of her nose, momentarily forgetting about the oil coating her fingers, and stifled a groan when it smeared against her skin. She flicked the open panel above her shut and slid out from underneath the ship with a heavy sigh.

Her back hit the side of it with a thunk and Ruthye sat up to follow, her eyes sharp with curiosity. Kara struggled to meet the intensity of her gaze and combated the feeling with a dismissive shrug. “I don’t know, Ru. I helped with a lot of repairs when I first got here. Learned how to fix a tractor up faster than I learned English. Tools transcend language, I guess.”

“I see.”

Kara grabbed a clean rag and wiped the oil off of her face. She kept her face pressed into the fabric for a beat longer than necessary, inhaling the scent of dust, and when she dropped it, Ruthye had already directed her attention to Krypto, who laid on his back and wagged his tail as she rubbed his stomach. She clutched the rag a bit tighter and wet her lips.

“My dad, too.” She wasn’t sure why she said it. Just that, when Ruthye glanced over, she couldn’t meet her eyes. She looked at Krypto instead, who watched her with his head tilted. “He was a scientist. The most renowned inventor on all of Krypton, actually. He…built the force-field to protect Argo City, and, uh, my pod. The one I escaped in.” She closed her eyes and rested the back of her head against the ship. “He taught me some things.” Her hands ripped clumps of grass out of the ground. “He taught me a lot, actually. I wanted…to be a scientist, too.”

She had never told anyone that before. Caged behind her teeth for seven years, stitching itself together in English meticulously learned, the confession finally broke itself out of her. She rubbed her arm and tried to shrug it off. “That’s why I know things. Earth technology is different, but it’s easy to figure out when you’ve got experience and…drive. I guess.” Although most of her drive had burnt up alongside her planet.

“You don’t want to be a scientist anymore?” Ruthye asked.

“I guess not.”

What did Earth’s science have to offer her? What could Earth’s mentors have to teach her that her own father had not already known, and what discoveries would she be able to find that would hold a candle to the everyday wonders of Krypton that she had taken for granted? What could she invent that had not already been invented a thousand times over in the ruins of what had once been her home? Science on Earth was a dull chore to her. Science on Krypton had been magical. Science without her father was an incomplete equation, an unfinished project. It would never work.

The sky blurred and she closed her eyes. Don’t cry in front of her. Don’t put that kind of pressure on her.

“Renowned scientist,” Ruthye echoed. “An honorable career. He must have been a very honorable man.”

Kara swallowed roughly. “He was.”

Get it together, Kara. You’re probably stressing her out. But each breath threatened to send the next into a sob. A wet nose palmed into her clenched fist and she opened it to stroke Krypto on the head as he laid himself across her lap with a whine.

“I wished to be a swordsmith like my father,” Ruthye admitted quietly. “He was teaching me, before…”

Kara exhaled shakily. “Yeah? You’d make a good swordsmith.”

“I hope so. And you would make a brilliant scientist, truly. You have the remarkable intelligence of one.”

Kara laughed self-deprecatingly. “Yeah, right. Don’t lay it on too thick.”

“I am being truthful,” Ruthye said, offended. “You are resourceful, and wise, and quick-thinking, and resilient—”

“I said don’t lay it on too thick.”

“—and irritating,” she finished in a mutter.

“I heard that. Super-hearing, remember?”

“I intended for you to hear,” Ruthye said snobbishly.

Kara barked out a laugh and finally opened her eyes, the pressure behind them dulling. “Thanks, Ruthye. Hey, it’s hot as balls out here. What do you say we take a break?”

“And do what?” Ruthye asked.

Kara slipped her sunglasses on. “Meet a few more animals for you to judge.”

When they arrived at the pond, it was just as Kara remembered it, rippling and gentle under the sunlight, and, just as she was hoping, hosting a small family of ducks. They were a relatively small flock, with a few meandering about in the pond water and a mother with her ducklings scoping out the shore. Kara sat herself and Ruthye down at the roots of a large, shady tree that grew alongside the pond, its branches curling over the water and leaves rustling above them in the breeze.

The ducks perked up as they sat. “They know you,” Ruthye observed.

Kara tossed a handful of duck feed into the water. “More like they know food.” She placed the container between the two of them and said, “Throw some. When they come closer they might eat it out of your hands, if you want that.” She’d been grateful to find the bag of duck feed stored away in the kitchen closet the same as it had always been, despite her time away. Their excitement showed somebody else must have been down by the pond feeding them, unless Ruthye was right and they recognized her face, which she doubted. It had been years since she’d even seen the pond, let alone fed the ducks.

Ruthye glanced over at Krypto, who sniffed around the roots of the tree, seemingly unaware of the birds. “Will he hurt them?”

“Nah, they’re friends.”

“So he knows the difference between a duck and a chicken and chooses to hurt only one?”

Kara threw another handful into the water. “We used to come down here and feed the ducks a lot. He basically grew up with them. And he’s never hurt a chicken before.”

“Because he has yet to catch one,” Ruthye pointed out. The mother duck approached the tree with a handful of tiny ducklings waddling up the bank behind her, and Krypto pressed himself flat against the ground with his tail a blur, sniffing at the ducklings as they passed.

“See?” Kara held out her hand and the mother duck pecked the pellets from her palm. “He wouldn’t hurt a soul.”

She didn’t have to look over to feel the burn of Ruthye’s skepticism.

The ducklings took a liking to Ruthye, pecking the feed from her hands and doing their best to use their small feet to climb into her lap. At first she seemed alarmed by their persistence, but soon enough she had them cupped in her palms and crawling in her lap like a natural born Disney princess.

Eventually, they ran out of feed and the mother duck lost interest in them. As she made her way back down to the pond, most of her ducklings hopped away to scurry after her. Only one stayed behind, dozing in Ruthye’s lap. She placed it on the ground but even then it didn’t budge, still dozing.

Kara raised her eyebrows. “Look like that one likes you.”

“Her family is leaving her behind.” Ruthye sounded genuinely distraught. “We must help.” Swiftly, she balled the small bird up in her hands and hurried down to the bank. Kara followed less urgently and squatted next to her as she slipped the duckling into the water, who finally seemed to realize it had been left behind and quacked frantically on its way to its mother.

The water lapped along the bank and the ducks dipped and splashed for more food beneath the surface. Above the ruffling of feathers, Ruthye murmured, “Earth is very beautiful.”

The duckling mom curled its head in to tuck the lost duckling against its side beside its siblings. “Yeah?” Kara leaned down to blow on the water. A chip of ice formed under her breath, which she picked up and skipped across the pond. When she turned to Ruthye, she was staring at her in disbelief.

“Is there anything you cannot do?”

Kara thought for a moment. “Taxes. I can’t drive, either. Legally, I mean. Don’t have a license. Here, have you ever skipped a rock before? I’ll teach you.”

Ruthye got the hang of it quick enough. After a few dozen tries she managed to skip one twice, and Kara gave her a sharp high-five. It was as she skipped her own across the other side of the pond that Ruthye said, “I have no doubt that I will miss it.”

The rock sank just short of the other side of the bank. “Miss what?”

“Earth.”

Even after learning the language to articulate her feelings, Kara never did try to share them again.

She worked instead. Worked on the farm, worked to learn English, worked to familiarize herself with an unfamiliar world. Worked away her feelings into a hard, incessant ball at the pit of her stomach that she fought to swallow back down every day.

Kara stilled. Even rustling leaves seemed to quiet. “You—yeah?”

“Of course. I was worried to come here, at first. But everyone is so kind, and there is much to do. I have had lots of fun just being with you.”

“Yeah, I…me too. You figure out where you’ll be going? When you leave, I mean. Got a place to stay?”

As her language skills grew, she left the farm more. The market, a horse show, a sports game, countless restaurants. The Kents dragged her along to every event like an extension of themselves, introducing her to cousins and family friends, even when she showed no interest in socializing with them. Kal had died a while ago and Clark took his place, kind and generous and painfully human. Around the time she turned eighteen, Clark took her back to the city. They had yet to translate Kryptonian time into Earth time; what was her alleged eighteenth birthday was really just the three year anniversary of when she crash-landed at the fortress.

It was around then when Clark asked her if she wanted to get a job. “You’re smart,” he told her. “A genius, really. I mean, it’s only been three years and you’re speaking English so fluently already. A job on Earth should be nothing for you.”

To her credit, she tried to work, but every interview felt pointless and no job could tear her mind out of the tar it sank deeper and deeper into day by day. Eventually, Clark sent her back to the farm. “You seem happier there,” was all he told her.

I want you out of my hair, is what he didn’t.

She agreed with him. More than anything, she wanted to be out of everyone’s hair. To be away from Earth entirely. Off the grid. Out of memory.

“I suppose I was not entirely truthful to you,” Ruthye admitted, picking at the grass. “I—do have a brother aware of my existence. I know him well and he would take me in. I suppose I was just stalling.”

“Stalling? Why?”

Her first midnight back on the farm, Kara locked Krypto in the bedroom and shot into the starry night sky alone. Just to see what would happen. Just to see how far she could go, to see how long her tether went before it yanked her back down—how far it went before it choked her. She shot above the wispy clouds, streaked toward the moon, the wind whistling in her ears, the overwhelming noise of Earth growing fainter and fainter behind her.

“The idea of going back frightens me. Being here…it does not feel real, even still. I do not want it to feel real. What is real is my closest family is dead, and if I return…”

“You’ll have to face it,” Kara murmured.

Ruthye sniffled and wiped at her eyes. “I do not want there to be a home without them.”

Space held no sound. Kara wished she could stay forever.

Earth floated below her in a massive ball, the people on it smaller than ants, more impossible to see than atoms. She was an atom herself, misplaced. Who would notice a missing atom? A missing atom that had never quite fit?

How much farther did space go? How much longer could she fly until the yellow sun’s radiation sputtered out and her battery died? Until she became normal again? The idea daunted her. Farther into the dark vacuum of space was an instant death. A silent one; the quiet would wrap around her until the stars blew out and everything became dark. Nobody would find her except for Clark, if he had the brains to search outside of Earth, if he even searched at all.

Of course he would search. He’s Mr. Do Good. But he had more good to do than search endlessly for a girl who’d been nothing but a burden to him. He would stop looking eventually, but he would take care of Krypto. Him or the Kents.

Krypto. Somewhere below her, her small scrappy dog dozed on top of blue blankets and believed he would wake up beside the last girl like him. Was that all that was left? A girl and her dog? Was that enough?

Holding her breath was easy. She could hold it for hours, that much she knew. So she did; closed her eyes and floated in the silence for longer than she could count.

When she opened them again, a beat-up spaceship drifted above her.

“Does he know you’re alive?”

“My brother? I am…unsure. The sooner I return the sooner I soothe his heart, I am sure, however…”

Kara swirled her fingers around in the pond water. “Yeah. I get it. It’s a scary decision.”

Inside, the ship was relatively bare. An empty sink, an abandoned bed, cabinets full of rotting food, sparking electrical wires protruding from the walls. Somebody had lived here once, but not anymore. Could somebody live in it again, if they got it up and running?

Excitement shot through her. An escape. This ship could take her where she wanted to go.

She’d held her breath for long enough and could feel a tightness she hadn’t felt in a while in her chest. She grabbed onto the ship’s wing and dragged it toward Earth.

“It may be stupid, but I feel as if the farther I am from home the easier it is to…escape the feeling, I suppose.”

“I get that. It’ll find you eventually, though. No matter where you are.”

Martha’s scream woke everyone the next morning. Kara was halfway through the door with her eyes barely biting back lasers when she remembered the ship in the field.

After some explanation, they agreed to help her fix it up. When Clark came to visit on the weekend, he seemed unsettled about it. Of course he would be. He had never left Earth before. He claimed he’d come to take Kara back down to the fortress, so the ship’s repairs were delayed a day as they flew to Fortress of Solitude.

There, he gave her a suit, a colorful one like his own. She was grateful he’d ditched the underwear look for hers. The next weekend, he asked her to come to the city with him again—take her new identity for a swing.

She humored him. Went to Metropolis. Saved a few people. The news went wild for it—a second super-person, another alien on Earth. Some hated her, while others went wild for it.

Supergirl, they called her.

“What’s the point, then?” Ruthye whispered. “If escape is pointless?”

“I don’t know. I guess you have to let it catch you.”

She resonated more with the news articles that called her worthless. Unnecessary. A danger to Metropolis. A strange thing that should have never arrived. A mystery nobody had asked for.

She hated being Supergirl. Hated the eyes on her, the mobs of people who demanded to know her, who looked up at her with stars in her eyes, looked up at her with hatred. Why did she have to be important? Why did she have to be known? In another world she had died alongside her loved ones, but in this one she existed on a strange planet as the last of her species, treated like a fascinating anomaly to worship or spite. A hero. And for what? Existing? Living?

She threw herself into working on the ship to get out of playing hero in Metropolis with Clark. Jonathan and Martha could only help so much. They repaired tractors, not rockets, and some of the damages on the ship were beyond their expertise. It turned to Kara, then, to figure things out—through trial and error and through uprooting long-buried memories of invention from days long past with her father.

She only broke down a few times working on the ship. It was ironic—a broken machine for a broken girl.

Despite the complications, the ship was ready to flight a few months after her nineteenth birthday.

“Would that not hurt?”

“Yeah, it will. It’ll hurt more if you never stop running from it, though. Better to tackle it earlier. You’ll heal faster that way. You know, that shit builds up. Gets rougher and rougher and it really starts to bury you alive, and sooner or later you won’t be able to run from something that’s crushing you. You either face it on your own terms, or you face it when you finally crash.”

She moved the few belongings she had into the ship. Clark helped her make a transmission device for calls and messages between them.

“I won’t stop you from going out there and figuring yourself out,” he said. “But I don’t want to lose you.”

She said goodbye to the Kents the morning after the transmission device’s completion. Her hands shook as she hugged them—the whole thing felt very familiar. It’s not the same, she told herself. They’re not your family. This isn’t your home.

Martha made her promise to be back soon. The lie fell from Kara’s lips easily.

“Maybe I should come with you,” Clark stressed as they broke out of their hug.

“You have a city that needs you,” Kara shot back.

“They need you, too.”

She laughed, although it was clear he hadn’t been joking.

Their bodies and waving hands turned small from the cockpit window. Krypto watched the world fly by from her lap.

“Trust me,” Kara said, “you’ll want to face it on your own terms.”

After so long, being normal felt abnormal. On red sun planets, she found herself struggling to pick up items that she’d barely given a second thought to on Earth. At times she jumped up expecting to fly and stumbled when her feet hit the ground instead. Her unfamiliarity with what had used to be the norm made her sick to her stomach.

I won’t stop you from going out there and figuring yourself out, Clark had said. But what did she mean to find?

One way or another, she found herself in a red sun bar. What was meant to be a single trip driven by curiosity turned to another, then another, until it became a regular occurrence. She moved from planet to planet, bar to bar, and it felt good. The days blurred into each other and her memories went with it, spilling into one another until she couldn’t put a finger on their contents, until all her emotions balled up into one knot that she threw up periodically into the bushes of a random bar.

She came home drunk one night, Krypto on her heels, to an incessant beeping sound inside the ship. She stumbled around for a while until she saw the transmission device, lit up and causing a ruckus, and groaned. Clark. She fumbled around with it, trying to reject the call, but in her clumsy-handedness accidentally picked it up instead. He popped onto the screen and she dragged a hand down her face.

“Kara! I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for a while. How are you, are you alright? You look…” He trailed off.

“Like shit,” she finished for him. “Where’s the—the hang up button on this thing?”

He frowned. “Are you…?” Then his face fell, so genuine she almost laughed. “Have you been drinking?”

“Pshh. Nah.” He stared at her and she tossed out a hand. “What? What, okay, fine, yeah. ‘S, like, one night only, dude. Don’…don’t look at me like that.” Where the hell was the hang up—? Oh, there. Great. “Hey, I gotta go, call you back, ‘kay?”

The screen went black before he could respond. Guilt simmered in her stomach, or maybe it was just something trying to come back up. She collapsed into bed and Krypto leapt up after her, pulling at her blankets until they covered her. When he sniffed her face and whined, she turned away.

“I’m scared,” Ruthye admitted quietly.

“Yeah, it is scary. You’ve got people, though. To help you. You’ve got your brother, alright? And all of us down here, even when you leave. Don’t forget that. If you need anything at all, call me, and I’m there.”

Ruthye smiled. “If things go wrong, just call for Supergirl?”

Kara rolled her eyes. “Call for a friend.”

The next night she got too drunk and ran her mouth.

After so long on Earth, pain felt vivid and raw. The crack of the burly lizard-like alien’s fist against her jaw felt almost good. So did her temple smashing against the edge of the table on the way to the ground.

Knocked on her face, she didn’t have the strength in her to lift her head. The room flashed white, red, green, the music rumbling up from the sticky floor into her numb body. Underneath the music was the sound of Krypto, barking his head off from underneath the table. Her face throbbed. A warm, sticky liquid seeped out from her nose and coated her lips and chin. Bleeding. She laughed; choked on the blood as it dripped into her mouth. She’d missed bleeding.

The lizard man’s clawed fist ripped into her shirt collar and lifted her as if she weighed nothing more than the stained shirt on her back. The tips of her shoes just barely skimmed the ground. Up close, the lizard man’s nostrils flared.

“Do it again,” Kara croaked. His jaw clenched and his fist pulled back.

A streak of white shot past her and slammed the lizard man into the table behind him. Kara’s knees hit the ground, and people at the table scattered with various shouts. She staggered to her feet as the man ripped Krypto from his face and threw him into the bar counter with a scream.

When he raised his head, it was covered in blood, gushing from the gash marks in his cheeks and eyebrows. Krypto scrambled to his feet, snarling, but Kara stepped in front of him as the lizard man reared to face him.

“Oh, now you wanna fight?” he spat.

“Brawl it out outside!” one of the bartenders shouted.

Kara swung her fist.

She staggered back to her ship thirty minutes later, bloody and aching. Krypto trailed alongside her with his tail tucked. He, at least, was untouched and unbloodied; when Kara collapsed onto bed her right eye had swelled badly enough that she couldn’t see out of it at all. Something in her abdomen was burning. Her face hurt worse than before, her lip split, her temple throbbing. At least her nose wasn’t bleeding anymore. Too bad everything else was.

Krypto jumped up onto the bed and pressed himself against her with a whine. She ran a hand along his side, pressing where he’d hit the bar counter tentatively.

“Y’aright?” she asked, tongue heavy and coated in a metallic taste, as he sniffed and licked at her bloody cheeks. She pressed her forehead against his shoulder and inhaled shakily. “‘m sorry. You shouldn’ have to…be here. ‘m sorry.” He licked at the parts of her face he could reach as she sniffled—her ears, her cheek, the salty corner of her eye. “You’re all I have.”

She cried herself to sleep with her face in his fur.

“Could I stay on Earth for just a little longer?” Ruthye asked.

“Yeah. Stay for as long as you need.”

Ruthye nodded. She rose to her feet and Kara followed, only to be nearly knocked back by the force of her sudden hug.

“Thank you,” Ruthye whispered.

Her next stop was Earth.

She laid in the sunny fields with Krypto until the bruises on her cheeks healed, her cuts stitched themselves together again, and her hangover cleared. She made herself presentable—dressed in clothes from a pile that didn’t seem too dirty, washed her face off with water, raked her hands through her hair in a poor imitation of a comb. Stood on the Kents’ front porch and knocked. She had what she would say all planned out: I’m sorry I left. I think I need help. I want to start over.

The door didn’t open.

She knocked again. Waited. Peered over to see no car sitting in the driveway. They must be away. So she sat on the porch and watched Krypto roll around in the grass, her knee bouncing, feeling sick to her stomach despite the sun’s healing beams.

A minute passed. Maybe an hour. She bit at the skin on her nails until they bled, then healed under the sunlight, then broke open again and bled and healed and broke open once more.

This was a bad idea, she realized. She stood swiftly and whistled for Krypto, who jumped up and bounded after her. The Kents were busy. Of course they were. They had other things to care about. She didn’t want to burden them with her presence, with her issues. The same went for Clark. Earth didn’t need her. They had moved on without her.

She had no reason to stay.

Her ship lifted out of the field, gone as unnoticed as it had arrived.

They threw a sort of a mini-celebration for Ruthye’s last day on Earth.

It had been Kara’s idea, embarrassingly enough. She didn’t want anything crazy: just one last special event before Ruthye went back to her planet for good. One last fond memory to keep her kicking. More joy, more hope, a few more sparks to keep her fire lit. She was terrified of Ruthye falling into a depression once she was alone with her brother, and although she didn’t voice it, the look in Clark’s eyes when she voiced the idea to him told her what she needed to know about her subtlety.

The celebration was simple: first, a trip down to the mall so she could experience the life of a human teenager. It was just her and Kara, although Clark was there in spirit and in credit card. She let her buy whatever she wanted—clothes, snacks, books, jewelry. Anything she wanted to take home, she could.

Even with the promise of endless goods, Ruthye didn’t want much. A soft pretzel. A blue Slushy. A graphic tee about a movie they’d watched their third day on Earth. And, alarmingly, a photo strip from the photo-booth in the arcade, one she forced Kara into with whines about it being her last day and “Did you not promise me anything I wanted?” So Kara conceded, and took her slip without complaint when Ruthye passed it to her.

“So we will not forget each other,” she said, “even while we’re far apart.”

“As if I could forget the nagging little voice in my ear,” Kara said, but folded it so it wouldn’t crease the pictures and tucked it gently in her pocket.

After the mall they packed up at the farm. Ever since Ruthye had begun soft-launching her departure, cleaning out her ship had become a priority, for her and apparently for everyone else.

They all wanted to help. At first it was humiliating, seeing Clark carry out piles of her unwashed clothes, walking in on Jonathan doing her overflowing dishes, on Martha scrubbing at the dog piss stains on the floor, having to wrangle her own sheets out of Ruthye’s hands as she tried to make her messy bed. Kryptonians were supposed to be clean. They were an intelligent, hygienic species. Transitioning from Krypton to the farm had been hard for the first year for exactly that reason, among many others, and yet the moment she was left to her own devices, her living space became a cluttered, nasty wreck. It was shameful. Shameful to herself, shameful to her people.

Although she noticed a distinct lack of shaming from the others as they willingly volunteered themselves to do her manual labor. Unless she counted Jonathan putting cleaning supplies under her tiny bathroom sink so she would have something on her to “keep things tidy” as shaming, or Martha offering to wash her bedsheets and blankets, or Ruthye suggesting they buy her a better hairbrush because she’d noticed Kara’s was more than a little lackluster, or Clark doing his best to re-potty train Krypto.

Which she didn’t. With time each offer and helping hand stung a little less, until finally, when they’d made more progress together in the past five days than she had in four years, Kara could admit she’d needed the help. And that she appreciated it. She made sure to tell that too them, too, and ignored how delighted it made them.

On Ruthye’s last day, the ship was clean and ready for takeoff. They packed all the stuff Ruthye wouldn’t need for the night inside, and then came phase two of the celebration: dinner.

Kara had never been too fond of restaurants on Earth, with their crowdedness, clinking utensils, and overlapping chatter. On a red sun planet she wouldn’t have thought twice, would have embraced it, even, sought it out; but with her enhanced hearing it tended to become an overwhelming nightmare. Ironic, seeing how most of the places she visited off-world felt like they were created to be exactly that. She was willing to sacrifice some of her comfortability, however, for Ruthye, who had become endlessly curious about food on Earth and deserved a chance to sit down and pick out anything from a menu.

So they found a restaurant for dinner that served an array of foods and, to Kara’s relief, had outdoor sitting, and the five of them (Ruthye, Kara, and the Kents this time) made the best of Ruthye’s last afternoon. As the sun set and spilled peachy orange light across the horizon and onto their skin, they regaled Ruthye with stories of Clark’s childhood, which were funny, and then with stories of Kara’s childhood—significantly less funny.

Too bad Ruthye got a good kick out of it all. “All of her powers?”

“It sure did feel like all of ‘em,” Jonathan said. “Before we could speak to each other, we’d have to usher her out of the house every time it looked like she was about to sneeze. Her powers went off like a bomb every time!”

“Like potty training an explosive dog,” Clark added.

Kara stomped on his foot under the table and he yelped.

“Kara,” Martha scolded.

Kara threw out a hand exasperatedly. “That was rude!”

“I thought it was funny,” Ruthye said traitorously.

Kara glared and pulled her plate closer. “You’re not getting any more of my food.” She threw a fry into her mouth and then dropped one below the table for Krypto, who was being a very good boy and hadn’t tried to fly or beam lasers out of his eyes at all since they’d entered the public eye. “Anyway, I heard Clark has a girlfriend.”

“Kara,” he muttered, but Martha and Jonathan lit up.

“Oh, Lois is wonderful,” Martha said. “Have you two met?”

“Not yet,” Kara admitted.

“I want them to,” Clark jumped in. “I think they’d get along great.”

Jonathan and Martha made share to voice their agreement about that. Alarmingly, so did Ruthye. Kara squinted at her.

“Why are you nodding?”

“You need more Earth friends,” she said, matter-of-fact.

Kara scoffed. “I have plenty of Earth friends.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yeah, it is so.”

“Well, then you would have no trouble naming one Earth friend who isn’t present at this table.”

Damn, she got me there. Kara shrugged and stirred the straw around in her drink irritably. “Well…you know, it’s a small planet.”

“Right.” Ruthye eyed her. “So you should arrange a date to meet Lois.”

Cheeky little know-it-all. Kara flicked a fry at her and deftly changed the subject.

It reappeared later that night as Kara laid in bed and listened to the cicadas screech outside. Earth friends. First meetings. The future. Once Ruthye was back on her planet, what point did she have in staying on the farm? They would never kick her out, but she had a feeling staying on the farm would make her more empty than satisfied. She needed something to do—some sort of purpose.

Clark was the only one awake when she got out of bed the next morning, dawn just barely breaking above the horizon. He poured her a cup of coffee wordlessly, and for some time the two of them sat in silence, holding the warmth of their cups against their hands.

He broke the quiet first, as always. “So, you and Ruthye are leaving this morning.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What do you plan on doing when you come back?”

She shrugged and rubbed her finger against the rim of her mug. “Is your apartment still open?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Always.”

“I guess…the city, then. Try to find a job.”

Clark nodded. He took a long, slow sip out of his cup. When he placed it down again he asked, “Will you meet her?”

If she hadn’t been thinking about it all night, the vagueness of the question would have confused her. “Lois? Sure. Whatever…floats your boat.”

“Well.” He thrummed his fingers against the sides of his cup. “What floats yours?”

Kara smiled at him, wry. “What floats my boat?”

“Yeah. Sure. That’s how you put it.”

She leaned back and sighed. “I guess…meeting your girlfriend. Scoping out the situation. Making sure you’re not making a bad decision. I’ve got to look out for you, you know?”

He laughed softly into his drink. “Oh, definitely.”

Kara eyed her own coffee. She didn’t really need it, since the sun would rouse her more than the drink ever could, not to mention it tasted bad. Clark had made it for her, though, so she felt obligated to drink it anyway.

“Will you meet the Justice Gang?”

Kara raised her eyebrows. “They’re still going by that?”

“The renaming process doesn’t seem to be going too well.”

“I mean…if you want me to.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

He hesitated. “No…no reason.” Her glare stayed put and he broke. “Just wondering if…Supergirl has any plans.”

Knew it. Kara looked away with a shrug. “Not sure she does. I think she’s just seeing where things take her on Earth. And I don’t think she’d be…opposed…to making an appearance here and there. If Metropolis needs her.”

Clark smiled. “They do. Superman does, at least. I haven’t had the time to tell you about the last major disaster. Whole city nearly ripped in two. We definitely needed you then.”

Kara checked the clock on her wall. A while until Ruthye would wake up. She lifted her cup. “Sounds rough.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask—and I’m not mad, I just want to know—but did you…know about the harem I was supposed to have?”

She choked on her coffee.

Safe to say, she had not known about the harem. By the time morning rolled around for the rest of the house, Kara had been thoroughly brought up to date with Clark’s recent troubles. She was in the midst of reassuring him about his Kryptonian parents—“my parents always said there was something weird about them, anyway”—when Ruthye finally rolled out of bed to join them.

Just like that, it was time to leave. They said their goodbyes in the ship field; Ruthye got some words of encouragement from everyone else and Kara got a stern oath to be back as soon as possible with no detours. Then they piled into the ship, the two of them and Krypto, and set off on Ruthye’s journey back home.

“You have a brilliant Earth family,” Ruthye said as the farm outside the windows disappeared under a thick layer of clouds. “You are lucky to have them, I should think.”

Kara wet her lips. Family. “Yeah. I am.”

The trip to Ruthye’s planet took two days. With a few detours (what the Kents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them), it took two and a half. In between landing planets, they got drinks (otherworldly apple juice) and partied (watched a lightshow consisting of jellyfish-like animals floating through the sky, flashing colors neither of their eyes had evolved the capabilities to see properly). When the second and a half day rolled around and they landed in the ship park they’d first met in, a melancholy feeling hung over them both. It seemed to be hanging over Krypto, too, sticking close to Ruthye’s side like he knew she would be leaving soon and was determined to stop it.

That meant it was up to Kara to keep everyone moving. She tossed Ruthye her bag, ushered her out the ship door, and told her to lead the way.

“You’re one hundred percent confident you’re safe with this guy?” He at least better be real this time.

“One hundred percent,” Ruthye swore. They’d been walking for at least twenty minutes now, and a cluster of houses were coming into view. “I have stayed with him plenty of times before. I trust him completely.”

Well, that was good. They trudged on.

Ruthye brought them to a house on the outskirts of a town and knocked on its door. The man who answered practically fell onto his knees in elation at the sight of her, pulling her into a tight, teary hug in a way that made Kara feel terrible for doubting his legitimacy—and for allowing Ruthye to stay away for so long. She stepped forward to introduce herself, an apology for essentially kidnapping his sister on the tip of her tongue, but to her alarm he embraced her, too, and insisted he repay her for bringing Ruthye home safe.

She only tried to deny him for a handful of minutes before she finally threw in a desperate loophole. “You got a place to put a transmission device? One that can make calls across planets.” So he brought them all inside and helped Kara set the device up in the living room.

“Remember,” she said to Ruthye once they’d installed it, “this is for emergencies. If you call, I’ll assume there’s an immediate threat.”

“Does calling to request you visit count as an emergency?” Ruthye asked.

Kara raised her eyebrows. “And what would your immediate threat be?”

“The immediate threat of boredom.”

Ha. “No.”

By the look on Ruthye’s face, it was clear it went in one ear and out the other. Most likely a call would come soon after she left, and it would have nothing to do with whether or not her planet needed Supergirl. She mentally prepared herself for the mini heart attack she would have regardless when the emergency call came in.

Then there was nothing left but goodbye. The back of her eyes stung as she hugged Ruthye one last time, but she refused to cry. If all went according to Ruthye’s infuriatingly stubborn nature, she would speak to her soon enough. Still, the weight of all their adventures piled up on her shoulders as she stepped away, heavier than a skyscraper, digging her feet into the ground.

A skyscraper under a yellow sun. Mentally, she tossed it off and patted at her hip for Krypto to follow her. “Come on, bud.”

Head hanging, he trotted to her side. She slipped her sunglasses on to hide the reason for her blurring vision.

“Thank you again for keeping her safe,” Ruthye’s brother called after her as she left. She waved at him. No problem.

“You must promise to visit!” Ruthye called louder.

“I promise,” Kara tossed over her shoulder. “See ya, kid.”

At the ship, she cleaned up Ruthye’s makeshift bed in silence, tossing the blankets into a newly acquired hamper and deflating the mattress. A familiar heaviness weighed at her heart. Krypto rested his head on her leg and whined.

“She’ll be alright,” Kara told him. “She’s tough. We gotta think about us, now. You know where we’re going next?” He cocked his head. “Home.”

His ears perked up and his tail stirred against the floor.

Home.

It would take two days to travel back to Earth if they skipped out on the detours. For the first time ever, she was alright with that.