Archive of Our Own

Kara could lift anything from a small tractor to a toppling skyscraper.

That meant—good news!—relocating small tractors and stopping skyscrapers from crushing innocent civilians was a walk in the park. It also meant she could pop open the top of any jar lid with ease and, even better, screw them on as tightly as she wanted just to irritate Clark. But all things had their downsides, and superstrength was no exception.

For one, remembering the limit to her own strength. So she’d broken one, two, maybe a few dozen appliances in her lifetime. Maybe she’d punched a few walls in on accident or broke a few dishes by scrubbing too rough. Once or twice she’d hit Clark a bit too hard in a bout of playfulness and give him a gnarly bruise. So what? It would heal within seconds. No, superstrength had another, more dire downside:

Expectations.

“You alive back there?”

“Absolutely thriving,” Ruthye huffed back.

Kara stepped over a gnarled tree root and adjusted the massive pack on her shoulder with a glance back at her, where she followed a smaller distance away with the straps of her own backpack gripped tight. “Don't lose your head just yet. We don’t have much longer to go.”

“Good. We have been walking for ages.”

Thirty minutes, but close. “Imagine how I feel.” Where Ruthye held one backpack, Kara had two over separate shoulders, one carrying their sleeping bags and tent over her back, and a food bin tucked under one arm.

Ruthye, seeing all of this, turned her head as if to stop seeing. “I’d imagine you feel nothing, since you possess a superstrength I do not.”

See? Although she was right, Kara turned her head away with a scoff. Expectations.

They trudged on through the woods, the bugs buzzing around their heads and the sun beating down past the branches overhead. Ruthye’s breathing grew labored as the minutes stretched on, and Kara would have offered to carry her bag, too—was just about to, really—when the trees began to part in familiar places. Up ahead, Krypto turned and barked, and Kara straightened to attention.

“Just up here!” She shoved past the foliage and pushed past the many branches until the trees broke away abruptly into a small dirt clearing. Triumph rose within her; from the center of the clearing, Krypto circled around to woof at her proudly. “See?” she said to Ruthye, who halted and hovered at the edge of the clearing. “What did I say?”

Her eyes raked over it dubiously as Kara dropped her bags in the center. “Is this it?”

“Well. It’s not set up yet, but yes. Now get your butt over here.” She sat on the bare forest floor and wrestled open the food bin. “We can take a break before we start.”

So they sat in the dirt and gnawed on dried mangoes, Ruthye catching her breath and Kara rolling the fuzzy mechanics of a tent around in her head. Once she’d finished, Ruthye took a sip of her water and said, “Could you not have flown us here instead of walking?”

“If I flew I would have had to put on my suit,” Kara said. “And if anyone saw Supergirl shooting off into a random forest somewhere, they’d want to know where she was going. I don’t feel like dealing with some douche who wants to kill me while we’re here.”

“You could take an attacker on easily,” Ruthye protested.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to.”

Ruthye didn’t have an argument for that. Taking it as a win, Kara poured some water into a bowl for Krypto, who bounded out from the foliage to drink. “Good boy for finding the campsite, buddy,” she said, ruffling the fur between his ears, and his tail blurred through the air.

Ruthye insisted on helping with the tent. She learned fast, so after wrestling with it for some time Kara gave up the task to her entirely. She could repair a broken ship in a flash, but if she spent one more second trying to read the tiny print on the tent’s manual her body would erupt into a solar flare, and she couldn’t afford to be burning down forests right now.

She handled the rest of the set up instead, compiling a few placeholder sticks for a campfire, throwing up their chairs, and re-freezing the cooler ice with a gust of freezing air. Ruthye finished setting up the tent in record time like the little prodigy she was, and Kara kicked the food bin inside before helping her unravel their sleeping bags.

Afterward, they stood outside and admired their work. “Not too shabby, huh?” Kara said.

“Not at all,” Ruthye answered. “Now what do we do?”

“Well, you are putting some stuff on.” She pulled a bag out from the inside of the tent and dug out a tube of sunscreen. “Here, get some of this and rub it on your face.”

Ruthye caught it with a frown. “Why? What is it?”

“It stops the sun from burning you. It’s a bajillion degrees out here, so you need it. Here, you need this, too.” She popped the lid off of a can of bug spray and shook it.

“And what is this one for?” Ruthye asked as Kara sprayed her legs and the cuffs of her sleeves. She scrunched her nose. “It is repugnant.”

“It’s so the Earth bugs don’t chew you up and give you malaria, so lets hope they think the same thing.” She tossed the bug spray back into her bag. “Why haven’t you put the sunscreen on?”

She fiddled with the cap a bit and startled when Kara snatched it out of her hands. “I can do it!” She dodged away when Kara dabbed some onto her finger and reached toward her.

“Stop squirming,” Kara said, swiping the sunscreen onto her nose. “And stop scrunching your face like that.”

Ruthye stilled and fixed her scowl, although her eyebrows stayed stubbornly furrowed. “You are so irritating,” she muttered. “What’s malaria?”

“It’s a disease. There’s a bug here that sucks your blood and gives it to you. But not here here. It’s rare where we are, so don’t freak out.”

“Bugs do not frighten me,” Ruthye declared. “Truly, I believe you are being extreme. On my planet, I am in the sun with no protection and deal with plenty of pests without any repellent. Daily.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not on your planet.” She rubbed the last of the sunscreen into the skin on Ruthye’s cheeks and popped the cap onto the tube with a nod, satisfied with her work. “A yellow sun’s hotter, anyway, and we don’t know how the bugs or sicknesses on this planet compare to the ones on yours. You can’t just fly into solar radiation and feel all better. It’s called a precaution.”

“It’s called being overbearing,” Ruthye muttered. Kara shoved her—gently—before chucking her bag back into the tent. “So what do we do now?”

Kara checked the sky, where the sun hung promisingly low. She didn’t really have a way to measure the exact time, but… “Are you hungry?”

All and all, they’d timed their hike up to the campsite well. She sent Ruthye to dig through the cooler for food and Krypto to fetch a few big sticks from the forest as she set up a ring of rocks for the campfire. Ruthye crouched beside her as she snapped the thick branches into smaller segments and piled them together in the ring, then closed an eye and beamed a laser at it until it erupted into a gentle flame.

“Your powers are awfully convenient,” Ruthye observed as Kara stood and dusted off her hands. She held up the cold packet of hot dogs and added, “I retrieved this for you.”

“Thanks. Here, pull your chair up and I’ll teach you an age old camping tradition.”

She took two thin, long sticks (courtesy of Krypto, who now rolled around in the dirt a few feet away) and pulled out a pocketknife. She passed Ruthye hers and demonstrated how to whittle the top of it down, although she didn’t need much demonstration. When she took the pocketknife from Kara, she carved the stick up swiftly and easily with a technique that reminded Kara much of whetting a sword.

Once she was finished, Kara shoved the top of the stick into the open flame. “Then you burn the tip of the motherfucker in the fire,” she said. “Just roast the germs alive.” Ruthye copied her. “When you’re done with that…” She slipped a hot dog onto the top and passed Ruthye her own. “You burn that motherfucker alive.”

“And this is an age old camping tradition?” Ruthye said skeptically as she lowered her hot dog into the fire.

“Sure. Probably. Who knows? I’m not from here.”

“You seem to know a lot about this planet’s traditions and customs for someone who is not from here.”

“Well.” Kara braced her elbows on her knees and watched the flames jump from the ring and lap at the meat. “When you live somewhere for a few decent years, you pick some things up.”

“And in the years you were here, you did this ‘camping’ a lot?”

“Sure. Yeah. Enough times.” The pad of her thumb rubbed against the stick’s rough bark. “Clark used to bring me when the city got too loud. Thought I needed some peace and quiet.”

The first time he’d taken her camping her English had been lacking, and because of it he hadn’t been able to adequately explain where they were going. He’d merely driven them up to the woods, and she’d hiked after him into their depths without much fear of where they were headed. The serenity of it had calmed something turmoiling in her—the crackling flame of the campfire, the twinkling stars, the screeching of the insects at night. Landing on Earth had been flitting from one storm to another, the world loud, chaotic, and foreign, tossing her this way and that, from cold arctic fortresses to bustling cities to unfamiliar farms with barely a second to breathe.

In the woods, the storm fell silent. In its place, she discovered Earth’s nature: animals with dozens of legs and small shimmering wings, some the size of freckles, thriving in a world so much bigger than them. The woods made noise she leaned into instead of shutting out—the songbirds, the rain, the sighing of the wind through the creaking branches and rustling leaves. Camping showed her a side of Earth she had never seen before. It showed her its beauty.

But the quiet of the storm around her forced her to confront the one broiling within her chest, the one that made a wreckage of her heart and stole its whipping winds from her lungs. Finally still, she had nothing to toss her or twist her away from the memories that chased her. They roamed free in the woods, far from the storm, where they stalked her in the foliage and watched her from the shadows at night. When the songbirds fell silent, they whispered at her from the bushes, and no matter which way she turned, they bared down on her from behind with their breath at her neck.

They bit unprompted, sometimes when the sun beat mercilessly in the sky and other times when the cold night winds slipped in through the zipper of their tent. They favored her at her most vulnerable in the dead of night. While she clawed for sleep, her memories slunk out from the shadows and into their tent. It didn’t matter if she curled in on herself or covered her head. No amount of twisting and turning dissuaded them: they wanted her heart, and without the storm raging around her, they would get it. They dug their claws into her impenetrable flesh and dug it right out of the cavity of her chest. Her family. Her friends. Her home. By the time she and Clark packed up their camping gear at the end of the trip, she felt empty. The woods had tracked her down and ate what lie left in her chest. The city would come again and stir her up anew. It would repeat, over and over, twin storms brewing together, whirling around each other in a petrifying dance—the one inside her and the one around her.

Which storm weighed her down the most? Not Earth. Earth could be beautiful. It was the sun that caged her—in bars of invincible flesh, in an unbreakable skull that housed a restless beast that, now abandoned, now fed only on itself to survive. What would it take to silence both the world and her mind? Her first time camping taught her not just the beauty of Earth, but the finality of it. On Krypton, she learned helplessness, and in the woods its chasm deepened.

“I see,” Ruthye said. “And did you not?”

Kara blinked her way out of her spiraling thoughts. “Did I not what?”

“Need peace and quiet.”

“I don’t know.” She leaned back in her chair and sighed. The sky had taken on a deeper blue, speckled with the first stars of the night. “It was kind of a love-hate relationship.”

“Why did you suggest we go, then?”

She rotated her stick, hot dog rolling in its fiery demise. Ruthye, with an ever-watchful eye, copied her. “For one, it is fun—just objectively. Two, the city was pissing me off. Too loud. Plus, you already saw a lot of it. I didn’t want to bore you on your second visit with all the things you already experienced.”

Ruthye hummed thoughtfully.

“It’s been a while since I was out here, anyway.” Kara lifted her hot dog and examined it. “I wanted to give it another shot. See…how the woods have changed.”

The trees’ shadows stretched tentatively into the campsite clearing. They lacked their normal piercing gaze. At her feet, Krypto stretched across the dirt and watched the flickering fire. When the night breeze blew, it rose and fell like a whispering voice, but his ears didn’t twitch, and cautiously, her shoulders loosened.

“I guess I just wanted to show you the cool things Mother Nature has to offer,” she finished. “Now pull that hot dog out of the fire before you char it to dust.”

Ruthye’s opinion on hot dogs went as followed: they were good, but kind of disgusting, and while she enjoyed it, she would never eat two back-to-back. They reminded her of an animal back on Holzherr that farmers harvested from the animals’ young, killing half of the mother’s litter and keeping the other half for breeding in a practice Kara found to be unnecessarily cruel.

“Why kill the babies?” she asked as she roasted another hot dog for Krypto, who watched the meat rotate with his tongue lapping eagerly at his chops.

“That’s when the meat is best for harvesting,” she explained. “As they age, their muscles and fat grow tough and their taste decreases in quality.” Kara must have been making a face, she hurried to add, “It is widely discussed as a…problematic endeavor on my planet. There is much debate about the cruelty of it all, although I do not see why, as it is obviously brutish and unnecessary, seeing how the meat itself and the subsequent suffering is not nearly a good enough reason to excuse such ruthless slaughter.”

“Well, I can’t say they’re much better over here.” She brought her stick down to Krypto, who snatched the hot dog up and wolfed it down in seconds. “I couldn’t even tell you how they make these things, but I hear it’s not pretty.”

“Did they do stuff like that on Krypton?” Ruthye asked.

Krypton. The wind hissed through the leaves in a ruffling laugh. “I…never really learned a lot about it. Had bigger problems. But yeah.”

“So every planet can be ugly, then.” She sounded bitter; muttered it at their dancing fire like it was to blame.

Kara tried not to flare with anger at the implication of Krypton being ugly. She knew Ruthye didn’t mean it like that. Instead she sighed and leaned back, tipping her head to look up at the night sky. “I’ll tell you something. On your planet, Holzherr. Do they look at the stars?”

“Of course.”

“And what do they say about them?”

Ruthye frowned and leaned back, too, fingers clasped together and lips pursed in thought. “My father used to tell me a new star was born with every child. That I had one and he did, too, and so did my mother and each of my brothers. He said the hours of night were the saddest hours, and that’s why we only saw them at night. He said they were there to keep us company when the nights grew cold and lonely. That although we do not know which stars were ours, just knowing they were out there was enough. Each star is an eye that watches over us. An eye that lives or has lived. And because they watch over us, they understand what we are going through, and because they understand, we are never truly alone even if it feels as if we are.”

“Huh,” Kara said.

“It’s childish,” Ruthye murmured.

“No. No, I like it. You know, on Earth, Ruthye, they have constellations.” She stretched a hand out toward the sky. “And…I will be honest with you, I don’t know them. I know there’s one called Orion, and there’s one with a name that sounds like Ursula, like the lady from The Little Mermaid, and I never bothered to learn the rest. But humans like to map them out and look for them in the sky, and some of them come with stories.” She balled her hand into a fist and tucked it against her lap. “Now I kind of wish I knew one.”

“It’s alright,” Ruthye said. “The concept is fascinating. Drawing shapes in the sky and making stories. Humans are creative.”

“Yeah,” Kara said. She took a deep breath. “I remember…on Krypton. There were trees that grew leaves in the spring. During the day the leaves were bare and came in all sorts of colors, but at night the stars would burn little white patterns onto them, and in the mornings the patterns would still be there. The sunlight turned them blank again pretty fast, but if you woke up early enough, you could get one before the pattern disappeared. If you kept it out of the sun all day, it’d become permanent. We collected them a lot as kids. Woke up early just to run around in packs to find them. Passed around the ones with the prettiest patterns in school the next day. We would trade them.” She rubbed her thumb against the palm of her trembling hand. “They felt different than the leaves on Earth. I can’t…remember how. Softer, I think.” She closed her eyes. “Yeah. They were softer.”

“They sound beautiful,” Ruthye said. “I wish I could see one.”

“Yeah. Me too.” She ducked her head and cleared her throat, rubbing swiftly at the sides of her eyes before taking a deep breath and straightening up. “So I guess my point is, yeah, every planet’s got something ugly going on. Being alive is a little ugly. But every planet’s got something nice, too.”

“Like stars,” Ruthye mused. “Every planet has stars. So no planet is alone.”

Kara thought of Krypton, floating amiss in space, its people dead from radiation poisoning. Quiet. Lonely. Decaying on its own in a silent vacuum.

No planet is alone.

“Yeah,” she said. “I like the way you think.”

The next morning Kara woke them early.

Personally, she had no qualms with it, since the sun filtering in through the tree branches put enough pep in her step to get her through an entire lifetime of never sleeping again. Ruthye, on the other hand, who had stayed up just as late as she had the night before and needed sleep for sustenance, had more trouble waking.

“Why must we rise so early?” she groaned, shoving her face into her arms and worming deeper into her sleeping bag.

Kara wrestled two water bottles into the sides of her backpack. “So we have time to hike there and back in time for dinner. Now get up before I sic Krypto on you.”

“Let me sleep just a minute more,” Ruthye murmured into her arms.

“Krypto!”

Krypto’s head poked through the tent flaps and Kara jerked her chin toward Ruthye, who was already drifting off again. She turned away as he leapt and bit back a smile at the sound of Ruthye’s startled oomph. “Krypto!”

“I warned you.”

“He’s—stop it!” The rustling of a sleeping bag and a series of excited whimpers from Krypto graced her ears. That, and— “Ew! Do not lick me! Kara, recall him!”

Kara shrugged. “Sorry. He doesn’t know any recalls.”

“You lying—!” She broke off with a very teenaged groan. Kara glanced over as she dragged herself out of her sleeping bag, one sleeve wiping at her face. Krypto bounded after her, tongue lolling happily. “I am awake.”

She turned her head away to hide her grin.

Ruthye finished packing the hiking bag while Kara started the fire for breakfast, which were a stack of pancakes wrapped in tinfoil that Clark had made for them the day before. Really, they had him to thank for their entire short food supply. The moment Kara had pitched camping with Ruthye to him, he’d leapt into food prepping for them and refused to take You don’t have to do that for us for an answer.

Thankfully, because Kara wasn’t much of a cook herself, and would have most likely had them living off of cereal and hot dogs the whole trip. She also didn’t have a license, and Clark refused to let her drive illegally, so he’d been the one to drive them down to the edge of the woods and would be the one to pick them up again when their three days were up. It had taken a bit of back-and-forth arguing to convince him he didn’t need to help her carry their stuff up to the campsite, too. Although all and all, he had been a pretty valuable asset, and she definitely owed him.

They didn’t have anything to rest the pancakes on for reheating, so they folded and speared them with their roasting sticks from the night before and held them over the fire with prayers to various different gods that they wouldn’t fall. They didn’t, so they ate them on paper plates with a small transportable container of syrup as the fire died out.

“How long will this hike be, again?” Ruthye asked as Kara double-checked that their backpack had everything and she (very reluctantly) reapplied sunscreen and bug spray.

She zipped it shut and swung it over a shoulder. “Few hours. Why, you don’t want to go?”

“I do! I’m merely wondering. You know, people who experience physical exhaustion during long strenuous activities tend to want to know how long and strenuous they are going to be.”

“Alright, smart-ass,” Kara muttered. “Krypto, you ready, boy?”

Sniffing around the bushes, Krypto perked up and bounded over.

Despite Kara’s dismissal of Ruthye’s comment, it rattled in her head as they hiked. Unlike Clark, she knew physical exhaustion intimately from her childhood on Krypton and her frequent trips to red sun planets. But Krypton had been a long time ago, and on most red sun planets she wasn’t exactly looking after her body. How tired would Ruthye get? How could she fix it?

She’d had the same concern about her vulnerability to the sun and insects. Ruthye had been joking when she called her overbearing, but figuring out how to keep a small, easily breakable child safe in the middle of the woods when she herself could take a meteor to the spine and walk it off with minor bruising was harder than she was getting credit for.

So she kept an eye out for any changes in Ruthye’s breathing as they walked and glanced back occasionally to study her face. It helped that she didn’t have to carry anything. The backpack was all Kara’s, light as a feather and stocked full. Krypto, also free of burden, raced ahead of them to sniff at rocks and roots and chase rabbits into the treeline. The morning was peaceful and the woods were nice, but no trip with Ruthye was a quiet one.

“Did you hike this way with Clark on your trips?”

Kara kicked a rock ahead of her. “Once. Don’t worry, I remember where to go. The path’s run down.”

“Do other people camp here a lot?”

“Who knows?”

Ruthye frowned. “Well, how do we know if we’re alone?”

“The closest group of people I can hear is a family at a cabin at the edge of the woods. They’re probably a few hours away. If I can’t hear any people, it means there’s no people.”

“Really?” She sounded awed. “How far can you hear?”

“Too far.”

Obviously not a satisfactory answer for the girl who needed to know everything. “Well, what’s the farthest thing you can hear right now?”

Kara kicked the rock again, gripping the straps of the backpack tightly. What could she hear? The distant lake, the running streams, the creaking branches, the rustling leaves. Small songbirds chittered in the trees and squirrels dashed through the bushes. A family of deer, hooves and teeth in the grass. But they weren’t the farthest. The cabin family, maybe. Their voices were faint. But last night, past the cabin family, she’d heard a fox cub yip. And she could hear the road they’d driven in on just fine. Had heard the occasional rumbling car throughout the night past the rising and falling murmuring of her head. Two hours down the road, was it the city she heard? Were those voices? Honking cars? If she closed her eyes, she felt certain that they were.

When she opened them again, Ruthye watched her with a careful eye. Kara turned her head away and shrugged. “It kind of blends together,” she admitted. “Hard to tell what’s close and what’s far.” Under her breath, she added, “Metropolis, maybe.”

Ruthye stumbled over a rock. “But we’ve traveled ages from there!”

“Watch your step,” Kara grunted.

“I thought the city was loud for me. How do you tolerate it?”

She laughed. “Why do you think I was on a red sun planet when we met? I don’t.”

That silenced her for a little while, and in the newfound quiet, the distant bustling of the city grew on Kara’s nerves. Luckily, even after pondering, she could always count on Ruthye to bounce back for a second, third, seventieth round of questioning.

“What about animals? What animals are nearby us?”

“Birds,” Kara said. “Fox. Squirrels. Deer. Dog. Cute dog,” she added. Ruthye gave her an unamused look and she bit back a grin. “What? I can hear it.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she said dryly. Up ahead, Krypto’s head perked up and he scrambled back from the rock he’d been sniffing with a startled huff.

Ruthye wasn’t familiar with some of Earth’s animals. Kara did her best to describe deer and bears as they walked, although descriptions, in English especially, had never been her strong suit. Ruthye told her about some of her own planet’s animals, from elephant-like mounts with weird tentacles on their faces to a marine animal with eight fins, a squashed-in face, and no eyes. At the hour and a half mark, Kara stopped them to drink and have a snack when Ruthye’s breathing grew rougher.

When it evened out again, they set off once more, bouncing stories of pets between them. Kara had a lifetime’s worth of things to say about Krypto, and Ruthye told a tale about a young wild rat she’d hidden from her parents for a month when she was ten.

“It was going well until I returned from home one day and found him missing,” she said. “That night he made his reappearance at dinner, where he bit my brother’s foot and was crushed by a pot lid.”

“Oh, my God,” Kara said.

“I know. I cried for days, although in my mother’s defense she had no idea I’d been harboring the thing and had no reason to hesitate before killing it.”

With no shortage of things to talk about, the walk flew by in a breeze. They reached their destination close to noon. Kara stopped them as the trees thinned out around a grassy bluff, which sloped steeply down, a waterfall of rocks and tilted trees, into the dense forest below. The forest stretched out into the horizon and disappeared where the green met soft, cloudy blue. Kara set the backpack down beside a cluster of rocks and sat, beckoning Ruthye to join her.

“Worth it?” she asked, amused, as Ruthye gaped at the view. Krypto bounded past her with an excited bark and leapt off the edge to fly loops in the sky above the trees. “I know. Now imagine if we’d woken earlier and saw the sunrise.”

“We must stay until the sun sets,” Ruthye demanded, settling on the rock to Kara’s left.

“Yeah, don’t think we brought enough food for that. Maybe another time we can fly up, though, when we aren’t staying for long.” She dug through the backpack and held up a sandwich in a baggie temptingly. “Unless you want to ration…?”

She did not want to ration, which was good. Kara didn’t really feel like hiking back down in the dark. So the two of them ate on the rocks facing the bluff and watched Krypto dart among the clouds. While the view was undeniably beautiful, Ruthye seemed especially mesmerized by the pure quantity of trees. She explained that, born in a more mountainous region, she had never seen so many trees in one place before.

“On our way to Earth I believed half your seas to be green,” she admitted. “Now I understand what I was seeing were your forests.”

Your. The word settled uncomfortably in Kara’s gut every time she said it. Was it hers? Earth, with its sea of green and blue, its open farmland, its cities, its constellations? Was it right for her to claim it as her own? What about Krypton, with its star-speckled leaves, city rivers, and spiraling gold buildings? Whatever inkling of belonging she felt for Earth was shackled tight in a chain, a chain made of a crumbling Krypton, keeping Earth yanked tautly away from her grasp. Don’t forget me, it screamed as it fell. Don’t leave me behind.

Kara sighed and glanced over at Ruthye, who leaned over the edge of the bluff to peer into the trees below. She frowned. “Be careful, you’re going to fall.”

“If I were to fall, you would catch me,” Ruthye dismissed. She leaned forward and Kara’s blood pressure spiked.

“Yeah, let’s not rely on that.” She shot up from the rocks and pulled Ruthye back by the arm, who turned to look at her irritably. “What? Don’t make that face at me.”

Ruthye opened her mouth to snipe something back, but in the trees below, the bushes ruffled, and Kara shushed her. She leaned over the bluff and Ruthye—Kara’s hand still on her arm—followed suit. Under the green leaves below them, through a small gap in the canopy, the back of a bear lumbered into view, chuffing as it walked.

Ruthye gasped. “What is that?”

“A bear. What, you couldn’t tell from my description?”

“Your description sucked,” she breathed. “Can we have a closer look?”

“What? No.”

Ruthye turned to her, expression flat.

A minute later Kara silently lowered them through the canopy, Ruthye in her arms, Krypto blissfully unaware as he played among the clouds. She landed them behind the thick trunk of a tree and placed Ruthye gently on her feet, putting her finger up to her lips to silence her. Together, they peered around the trunk and watched the bear snuff around. It stayed a fair distance away, although Kara made sure to keep one eye on the animal and one eye on Ruthye, who watched it with wonder in her eyes. A real animal lover, that girl. Although Kara was hardly one to talk.

Of course, keeping Krypto away was an impossible task, since he was hardwired to stick close to Kara’s side, and thus stick close to mischief. When he barreled through the trees with an excited bark, Kara grabbed Ruthye and shot back up toward the bluff before the bear could so much as turn and try to maul them.

Ruthye gushed as Kara cleaned their empty sandwich baggies and soda cans and Krypto got his final few barks in at the bear from the air. “That was remarkable. What a powerful creature. I wish to see every animal on this planet.”

Kara swung the hiking bag over her shoulder. “Maybe our next trip can be down to the zoo.” She meant it as a light-hearted comment, but of course Ruthye lit up, and Kara hadn’t seen her more passionate about anything since her murder revenge plot. Guess I’m taking her to the zoo.

On the hike back down, Kara made do with what she had. She pointed out the birds perched on the branches, the squirrels darting from bush to bush, the butterflies on the tree trunks, and a small salamander hiding under a mossy log fallen along the side of their path. Ruthye loved each one and excitedly pointed out a distant rabbit herself around the midway mark before pleading with Kara to describe common zoo animals.

After a few hours and a horrendous attempt at describing a giraffe (yellow horse with a long spotty neck, like, really long, top of the trees long, however long you’re thinking, it’s longer, I swear), they made it back to their campsite. Luckily, no wild animals had wrecked the place, and they both slumped into their chairs.

Ruthye denied feeling tired and refused to take a nap; thirty minutes later Kara slipped a baseball cap onto her head to block the sun from her face, which tipped downward as she dozed. In her absence, the woods murmured, its voice breathing through the branches and whistling through the leaves. It followed her as she unpacked the hiking bag and refroze the cooler, trailing after her alongside Krypto, who shoved his nose next to her face to sniff at whatever she had in her hands whenever she crouched. Their water bottles, their snack wrappers, the cooler, the sleeping bags. A snuffling nose. A persistent whisper.

Eventually, she sat in the camping chair next to Ruthye with her arms folded, her feet crossed and tapping. Krypto settled in the dirt by her feet and closed his eyes. Just her and the wind. Her and the songbirds. Her and the distant laughing of the cabin family. Her and the thud of a falling acorn. The forest had lungs, and she if closed her eyes she could feel its breath on her neck.

Might as well let it bite. What point was there in pointless looming?

She wiped the corner of her eyes an hour later and splashed her face with water from a nearby creek. The rippling water smoothed to reveal her eyes just as red as they’d been before, so she paced around the trees kicking acorns until the color faded and she could breathe without a hiccup in her chest. Maybe it was the water, or the tears, or the fact the trees no longer murmured, but she felt refreshed as she re-entered the campsite and shook Ruthye awake for dinner.

“I have another age-old camping tradition for you,” she said once their paper plates were scraped dry. The horizon bled peachy orange through the trunks and leaves of the trees, spilling into their clearing, across their faces, and into their crackling fire. “Do we still have those roasting sticks?”

They did. Ruthye burned the motherfuckers again, as Kara had eloquently put it the first time, while Kara dug through their food bin and fished out supplies for s’mores. Ruthye eyed her as she broke open the top of a bag of marshmallows and tossed one her way.

“Is this another item to impale?” she asked critically.

“You betcha. We’re camping, Ruthye, impaling’s half the fun.”

Ruthye speared the marshmallow through and listened carefully as Kara explained the various levels of roasting.

“Now, if you’re a little wuss, you want it golden brown. If you’re a true warrior, you want it charred black.” She dipped her marshmallow into the heart of the fire and watched it ignite.

Ruthye, rotating hers carefully over a small flame, eyed her judgmentally. “I think I’ll take wuss,” she said as Kara lifted hers from the depths of the campfire to reveal a blackened outer layer.

“Your loss.” She smushed the thing between two graham crackers and slipped in a piece of chocolate, then held it up for Ruthye to see. “You gotta sit in it for a second. Let the chocolate melt.”

She wolfed hers down in a single bite while Ruthye made her own and took and smaller, more tentative half-bite into it.

“So?” Kara licked the chocolate from her fingers. “What do you think?”

“Very sugary,” Ruthye admitted. “Borderline nauseating.” She ate her other half and added, “I like it.”

They made s’mores until the sky melted into a dark blue dusted with small white stars. Clark had never been a big fan of telling scary stories over a campfire—unsurprisingly, he wasn’t a fan of intentionally unsettling people—but when Kara pitched the idea to Ruthye, she demanded she tell one, so she assumed the younger girl didn’t share his concerns.

She told her an old one from Krypton, one of the few she remembered, a story older siblings would pass down to the younger ones to freak them out. Kara hadn’t had any older siblings, but she’d had plenty of friends who had, so such stories had made its way to her anyway in the back of school classrooms and in the halls between units. Ruthye listened with rapt attention as she told it; a story of a man who woke to one of his pets dead every morning with their paws chopped off. The ridiculous story didn’t unsettle her as much as it had when she was young now that she’d witnessed the entire extinction of her people, but Ruthye seemed to like it—didn’t even seem scared, just enthralled at the twist—and insisted she tell her own.

Turned out Holzherr had a knack for creepy stories. After about three that left Kara’s head reeling with alarm, she waved Ruthye off and muttered something about going to sleep.

“Are you frightened?” Ruthye ducked her head with a mischievous grin see Kara’s face as she stood.

She rolled her eyes. “It takes a lot more than that to scare me.” She extinguished their campfire in a single puff of air and added, “I’m appalled, more like.”

It only seemed to embolden her. “My people are creative, too,” she said as she folded up her chair.

Kara huffed out a laugh. “Well, I know that now.” She took both chairs over her shoulders. “Kids on Earth wouldn’t last a minute with those stories.” Kids on Krypton, too, she thought, but was proud enough not to say.

That night the crickets’ song blew in past the zipper on their tent and enveloped Kara in memories; she drifted in and out of a tentative unconsciousness, dreaming of her mother’s hands in her hair, of a soft lullaby she remembered only in fragments. What had its tune been? She shifted restlessly, trying to recall the lilt of her mother’s hum, a lyric here and there she couldn’t place. All her shifting disturbed Krypto, who rolled off of her legs with a hefty sigh and dozed off on the bare floor of the tent. She stilled and opened her eyes to stare at the tent ceiling.

“Kara.”

Ruthye’s voice startled her. She twisted in her sleeping bag to look over at her where she laid on her side with bright, wakeful eyes. Why wasn’t she sleeping? It had to have been at least an hour or two since they’d laid down. Sure, she tossed and turned like Kara did, but never for this long. “What?”

“You aren’t sleeping.”

Kara squinted at her. “So what?” It struck her for the first time that, while she could consume whatever she wanted without fear of illness, Ruthye didn’t have the same privilege. Should she have cut her off after the fifth marshmallow or something? Fuck, her brother is going to kill me if I bring her home sick. “Why aren’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

Oh. “Okay.” Thank Rao. The silence sank in for a moment as she exhaled. Begrudgingly—because she knew Ruthye was only telling her thanks to something weighing on her mind—she asked, “About what?”

“Home.” Ah, shit. There it was. A rough one, too. Ruthye rolled onto her back and sighed. “I cannot sleep because of it.”

Kara turned toward the ceiling, too. “Yeah, me neither.”

Obviously, that being all she said didn’t satisfy Ruthye. “Well, why can’t you sleep?” she prodded.

Kara poked at a pebble trapped under the tent floor a few inches away. I guess this is going to be a full deep conversation. “I have a song stuck in my head.”

“What song?”

“That’s the thing. I can’t remember.” She dug her nail into the pebble. “Some lullaby.”

The crickets rose in a mournful chorus. Ruthye said, “Kara?”

“What?”

“Just tonight—could I sleep closer to you?”

Kara raised her eyebrows, not because of the request itself but because of the uncharacteristic uncertainty in her voice. What did she think she was going to say? No? It was an unexpected ask, but what was she supposed to say to a sad little girl? “Sure.”

Ruthye’s sleeping bag rustled as she dragged it across the floor to Kara’s side. Close to Kara’s side—sleeping bags pressed together close, move-her-hand-away-from-the-pebble-to-make-room-for-her close. Her arm hovered awkwardly in the air as Ruthye laid down beside her. That was until Krypto perked up from the floor and wormed his way onto Kara’s other side with his tail wagging, much closer than Ruthye, his paw on her chest and tongue lapping at her cheek.

She leaned away with a laugh. “Rao, what is this, a slumber party?” Her arm fell across Ruthye’s shoulder, which relaxed instantly under her touch. In fact, her whole body seemed to exhale at the contact. “Thinking of home” must have been an understatement. Sure enough—

“I’m worried about forgetting something, too.” She shifted to lean her cheek against Kara’s forearm and sighed. “My family used to have fires in the yard and tell stories like we just did. My brother—he had a goal to tell one creepy enough to unsettle me. He would make them up himself sometimes. Now…I am the only one left who remembers them. What if I forget?”

That hit home. She exhaled all the breath from her lungs. “Yeah, I know what you mean. My first few years on Earth, I tried to document everything I remembered about Krypton. It’s kind of impossible. And exhausting.”

“I’m going to write them down,” Ruthye said. “All the ones I know.”

“Alright.” Her eyes drooped. “Don’t beat yourself up about it if you can’t remember. Sometimes every detail doesn’t matter. Sometimes the feeling you get when you think about it is what’s important.”

Ruthye mulled over the idea. In Kara’s head, the lullaby started again, breaking off, looping, fading and restarting. What were the words of the chorus? She closed her eyes and furrowed her brows, her head beginning to ache.

“Can you sing it?” Ruthye mumbled.

“Hm?”

“The song,” she yawned. “Do you remember enough? I’m curious to hear.”

“I’m not really a singer, Ruthye.”

She didn’t press it. Her cheek snug against Kara’s forearm, breaths coming out in increasingly softer puffs, she was clearly now losing her battle with sleep. Phantom fingers ran through Kara’s hair. Her mother hummed. Her voice, soft and gentle, sang the first line of the lullaby…

Without much thought, she hummed it back. Broken and half-remembered, from the mouth of a girl much the same, yet despite it all, it still sounded nice. Like her mother’s hands in her hair, the red morning sun beaming in through the windows, the laughter of children outside. The crickets’ night chorus filled in the tune’s wavering gaps. She hummed until a tear rolled down her cheek and her voice broke, until the woods inhaled it—a piece of her mother breathed into the trees.

A song weaved from Krypton and Earth.

Their last day flew by in the blink of an eye. A few minutes from their campsite stood a relatively large lake, where they spent the first half of the day splashing around making a ruckus, and the second half of the day messing around with a small collection of board games Kara had stolen from Clark’s apartment. That night they made up their own constellations in the sky, shooting dumb stories back and forth between them. Inside the tent, it took only a matter of minutes before Ruthye dozed tucked against her side again, almost more sudden than Kara could process it.

I guess this is how I sleep now, she thought wryly as Krypto snored in her ear and Ruthye used her right arm as a makeshift pillow. She could excuse it, though. She understood the woods had a way of creeping in at night.

The final morning, she let them both sleep in.

They had to meet up with Clark by midday, but Kara could easily do most of the packing herself. It was the least she could do to let her get some sleep after three days of rising early, and she found she didn’t mind being by herself in the silence of the woods as much as she had in years past.

Ruthye only woke once the sun had nearly reached its peak in the sky. She and Krypto had somehow made their way toward each other in Kara’s absence, and Krypto now laid with his back halfway draped across Ruthye’s chest and his paws in the air like he’d been hit by a truck. With her arm tossed over him, they were both pinning her sleeping bag down pretty solidly, so she dawdled around with packing up the rest of the tent’s items before her patience reached its limit and she whipped it out from underneath them—literally.

She did it swiftly enough that they barely jostled, but Ruthye still jolted to attention. She glanced to her left, saw Kara missing, and twisted around in a slight panic until she spotted her rolling up her sleeping bag across the tent. On top of her, Krypto perked up and looked around. She rubbed her eyes with a yawn. “What time is it?”

“Time to take down this tent. Roll your sleeping bag up for me, we’ve gotta get out of here soon before Clark’s head explodes from anxiety or something.”

She wormed out from underneath Krypto. “Is it noon?”

“It’s not. We’re definitely not going to make it on time if we walk, though.”

Ruthye’s head snapped up, her eyes wide. “Why did you not wake me? We could have left sooner!”

Kara threw out a hand dismissively. “I don’t like having to rush.”

“Well, now we will definitely be rushing,” she hissed.

“Jeez, lay off. I said we wouldn’t get there if we walked.” She unzipped the tent and ducked out into the light, stretching her arms, and a few moments later Ruthye hurried after her with her sleeping bag rolled up under one arm. “Lucky for us, I know how to fly.”

So, yes, superstrength had its ups and downs. Kara could lift anything from a sleeping bag to five hundred pounds of camping gear, not to mention the entire thirteen-year-old girl that came with it. That meant (good news!) they could clear out their campsite and turn a thirty minute walk into a handful of minutes.

The downsides…well, she had to admit there weren’t many. Maybe the expectations, although, with time, she found she didn’t mind them too much. Maybe the expectations that came with it weren’t even a fault of her powers—maybe it was a fault of her own self. After all, offering to piggyback Ruthye and their camping supplies to fly down had been her idea. Maybe superstrength didn’t come with any downsides. Maybe it simply came with a reason to do good.

Either way, they made it to Clark’s truck by noon as promised, and his shoulders only visibly loosened a little bit when they landed.

“You’re not supposed to be flying,” he said as he dropped the tailgate and she crouched to let Ruthye hop off.

Kara shoved half of the gear into his arms and said, “Cut me some slack, there’s nobody around.” Luckily, the road by the woods were bare. She’d been counting on it. Gambling on it, really, but she had good intuition—good hearing, too.

He let her off the hook with only a small shake of his head and helped them load the truck bed.

“So, how was it?” he asked once they’d all piled in and the truck rumbled off the roadside. “Have fun?”

Kara slid her window down and dangled her arm out with an exhale. “Total blast. Right, Ruthye?”

Ruthye leaned in from the backseat, nodding, and a moment later Krypto’s head popped up beside hers. “Absolutely,” she said, then launched into telling him about how she’d learned Earth camping traditions and how Kara had allowed her to see a bear up close (and, later on in the same day, picked a snake up with her bare hands so Ruthye could see it clearer). A little bit of the tension returned in Clark’s shoulders, and Kara turned her head away to hide her grin.

To his credit, he tried to keep his voice light. “Sounds…kind of dangerous.”

“I had it under control,” Kara dismissed.

“She has promised to take me to an Earth zoo next,” Ruthye added.

Clark perked up. “Oh, a zoo! That’s fun.”

Great, now she had a witness. She would really have to take her to a zoo now. An ethical one, at that. Were there any ethical zoos? How far away is the nearest animal sanctuary?

She couldn’t find it in herself to be too upset, though. Or upset at all. She slipped on a pair of sunglasses from the glove box and leaned back. “Hell yeah. I’ll find a good one. Maybe one where they’ll let you hold a snake, too.”

This delighted Ruthye. It didn’t delight Clark, who grimaced slightly but didn’t say anything. With a laugh, she leaned back against the door to breathe in the air, but the tension that usually seized her inside of cars clung a bit looser under the dappled light of the trees. The woods whipped by the window in a blur, the wind howling her name as she passed. She raised a hand to it in thanks and tipped her head toward the sun.

The weather today, both inside of her and out, felt beautiful.