Chapter Text
The monster was, by any reasonable standard, having a very bad day, and it had decided to share.
It stood roughly forty feet tall in the dry scrubland on the outskirts of National City, and it looked like someone had asked a committee to design a bear, a cathedral and a bad idea, and then given the committee no notes. It had six arms. It had too many teeth. It was currently using a ruined water tower as a club.
"Brainy!" shouted Alex, from behind an overturned truck. "Status!"
"It appears to be," said Brainy, from the next truck over, "extremely upset."
"I can see that!"
"I am merely providing context."
A bolt of green light from Nia's hands cracked across the monster's chest. J'onn, nine feet tall and the color of an angry jade statue, tore a boulder out of the ground and threw it with a shout. The monster batted it out of the air, roared, and swung the water tower in a long, whistling arc that sent the whole team diving for cover.
"We are not winning!" yelled Alex.
"It's a process!" yelled Kara, from somewhere overhead.
She came down out of the sky like a comet, red and blue and gold in the afternoon light, and hit the monster square in the back of the knees. It went down with a sound like a building being dropped from a great height. Dust rolled across the plain in a wave. Kara landed on top of it, planted both boots between its shoulder blades, and caught two of its arms before they could swing.
"Now, Lena!"
Lena Luthor was crouched behind the third truck, with her hair coming loose from its pins, a smear of dust on her cheek, and a case of high-density titanium in her hands.
She hated field work.
She did not say so, because Kara was currently holding down a forty-foot monster with two hands and one knee, and she'd have felt petty. But she hated it. She hated the dust, and the noise, and the way the ground shook, and most of all she hated that her heart, every single time Kara went into the sky, tried to climb out through her throat.
She flipped open the case.
Inside, gleaming against black foam, lay the handcuffs. They had taken her six weeks. They were, strictly speaking, not handcuffs at all, but a pair of resonance-dampening restraint bands, built from an alloy that didn't exist until she'd made it, and tuned to a frequency that would lock down any biological system in the known universe. They had cost four million dollars. They had a serial number. She'd privately named them Gertrude.
"Lena!" yelled Kara.
"I'm going!"
She ran.
It was not, she reflected, a graceful run. It was a sort of staggering sprint across loose gravel, in shoes entirely unsuited to the occasion, with a case under one arm and the very strong sense that she had made a number of mistakes in her life leading up to this moment. The monster's head swung. One huge, round, yellow eye rolled toward her. Kara said, in a quick, quiet, steady voice, "I've got him, I've got him, he's not going anywhere, just come on," and Lena, who had faced down boardrooms and bombs and her own mother, found that this was the one voice in the world she'd have crossed any distance for.
She slid in at the monster's wrist. She snapped the first band shut.
Click.
It hummed. A thread of silver light ran up its arm. The monster shuddered, and for a moment, a long, hopeful, shining moment, Lena thought, oh, it's working.
"One more!" said Kara. "One more, you're doing great,"
The monster, somewhere deep in its enormous, confused skull, took this personally.
It heaved.
The whole body bucked. Kara, still holding two arms, went up with it, and the monster whipped its free hand around and grabbed her by the cape. Lena had time to think, quite clearly, oh, no, not the cape, and then the creature flung Kara across the sky like a javelin. She went out of sight in a long, shrinking line of red.
"KARA!"
The back-swing of the same arm caught Lena across the middle. It wasn't a blow. It was more of a swat, the careless sort you'd give a fly. But it lifted her clean off the ground, and the world turned over. The sky. The dirt. The sky. A distant, tinny shout from Alex. The case left her hand and went spinning off into the dust. The ground tilted, rushed up, and she did the only thing she could think of, which was to put her arms over her face, shut her eyes, and brace for the impact of forty feet of falling Luthor.
It did not come.
She hit something instead.
Something hard, and cold, and ringing, like a bell. Something that clanked. But, and this was the strange part, something that had caught her gently, curled around her the way one might cup a bird, and swung her once through the air to bleed off all the speed, with a creak of old leather and a rattle of metal.
She opened her eyes.
It was Kara.
She had a moment of purest relief, a breath that went all the way down. Kara. Kara caught me. The cheekbones, the clear blue eyes, the stubborn tilt of the jaw. She'd have known that face anywhere.
And then she looked a little more.
The hair was longer. It was braided, thick and gold, down over one shoulder. The jaw had a thin pale scar along it that Lena had never seen. And the suit, the suit was wrong. The red and blue was gone. In its place, from throat to ankle, was a full suit of white plate armor: gleaming, polished, dented in four places, with a cloak of heavy white wool, and across the breastplate a sigil in silver. It was a sun, with a star in the middle of it.
It was a knight.
"Glad," said the knight, in a warm, ringing, rather breathless voice, "I found you, my lady."
Lena opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
"Fear not," said the knight. She set Lena gently on her feet, steadying her with one gauntleted hand until she was sure she could stand. She bowed her head. "It has been a long road, and a hard one, and I have been afeard these three days that I should be too late. But I am here now. Just let me take care of the monster."
"The, the what," said Lena.
"Stay behind me."
"Kara, what are you,"
But the knight had already turned. Twelve feet away, the monster had gotten to its feet, swinging its half-cuffed arm in a slow, thoughtful way, regarding the small, shining figure in front of it with a bemused expression. And the knight, with her braid swinging, and her cloak flowing, drew from her side a sword.
It was a very large sword.
It was nearly as long as she was tall. The blade was broad and bright, and as it came free of the scabbard it began to glow, white, then gold, then a hot, roaring orange at the very tip, like a poker pulled from a forge. The air around it shimmered. Lena, who had a doctorate and a healthy respect for the laws of thermodynamics, felt every hair on her arms stand on end.
"Hear me, foul beast," said the knight, and lifted the sword in both hands, high over her head.
"BURN IT ALL."
She swung.
"CALIBURN!"
A beam of light the width of a house tore out of the tip of the blade, pure and white and utterly silent, and when it hit the monster there was no explosion. There was no scream. There was just an absence. The monster stood in the path of the beam for the length of a single heartbeat, and then there was a fine, soft, glittering ash, drifting on the wind, and a long scar of glass through the desert behind it, and an enormous, ringing, unbelievable quiet.
Silence.
Somewhere, very far away, a bird started cautiously chirping again.
The knight lowered the sword. She slid it back into its sheath with a smooth, practiced shing, and stood a moment, breathing hard, her shoulders rising and falling under the plate. Then she bent, and picked up, from the scorched earth where the monster had been, a single gleaming silver band, its light fading.
"Hm," she said. "What manner of shackle is this?"
"That's mine," said Lena, faintly.
"Ah!" The knight turned, and her whole face lit with a pure, dazzling, uncomplicated smile. She came toward Lena at a trot, armor clanking, holding the cuff out in both hands like an offering. "My lady! Is it yours? Then I return it to you with honor. I would not have it said that Kara Zor-El kept a lady's treasure."
And then she stopped.
She stopped, quite suddenly, a few feet away, with the cuff still held out in her hands.
Because a woman had landed beside Lena.
She'd come down out of the sky in a rush of wind, red cape snapping, hair wild, with a long gash across one sleeve and a smudge of soot across her nose. She landed in a crouch, rose in a single motion, and stepped between the stranger and Lena, with her arms spread slightly, the way you'd stand between a child and a stray dog.
"Lena!" said Kara Danvers, who was, in no uncertain terms, the first Kara. "Lena, are you hurt? Are you okay? I got thrown about four miles, I came back as fast as I could, I didn't see what happened, I just saw a, a flash,"
She trailed off.
She looked at the knight.
The knight looked at her.
They stood about eleven feet apart, in the dust, in the sun, two women with the same face, the same eyes, and the same slightly dazed, slightly guilty tilt of the head. Behind them, the wind tugged lightly at a white wool cloak and a red silk one, and for a very long moment, nobody said a word.
"I," said the knight, slowly. She looked Kara over, from the boots to the S, from the cape to the cheekbones. Her smile faded, not into disappointment exactly, but into something quieter, and more careful. "I suppose," she said, "that you are not my lady."
"I'm," said Kara.
"But you look as fair as her," said the knight, gently, with a very small, very gallant bow. "Fair enough that I must beg your pardon, and that of your friend. I had thought, I had hoped. It seems I must keep looking."
She turned away.
"Wait," said Lena.
She had not meant to say it. It had simply come out, in the voice she used on boards and on bad news. The knight stopped.
"My lady?"
"You're," said Lena. She took a step forward, and Kara, still half in front of her, moved with her, a hand hovering at her elbow. "Who are you looking for?"
"My Princess," said the knight.
There was a very long pause.
"She is called Lena," said the knight, "and she is the finest, and the cleverest, and the bravest lady in all the realm. She is the whole of the Kingdom of Luthor's hope. She is" and for the first time her voice wavered, just a little "she was taken from the tower three days since. By what, I cannot say. I came upon the place and found a circle of burning light, and a book open on the floor, and the smell of lightning in the air. I followed, because what else could I do? I leapt through."
"Through what?" said Kara.
"The circle."
"A portal," said Lena.
"Is that what you call it? It spat me out in a field, in the middle of a great black beast, and I heard a woman cry out, and I thought," She stopped. She swallowed. "I thought it was her. It was your voice. It was very like hers. And I ran."
Lena stood very still.
It was a strange thing, to be looked at like that. Not with want, or with expectation, but with a kind of fierce, exhausted, impossible hope, by a woman who had the face of the person Lena was, at that very moment, trying very hard not to look at. The knight's eyes were red-rimmed. There was dust in her braid. Her gauntlets had cracked, and under the plate, she was shaking, ever so slightly, the way people do when they've been awake for three days.
She'd been looking for a Lena who wasn't there.
"Come here," said Lena.
"My lady?"
"Sit. Please. You've been on your feet for three days."
"I could not,"
"Kara," said Lena, in a voice she'd honed in a very large number of meetings, and then paused. Her own Kara, beside her, blinked. The knight blinked. Both of them said "Yes?" at the same moment, and then looked at each other, and in an extremely small and very surprised voice, the knight said, "Oh," and Kara said, "Oh," and Alex, who had come around the truck in time to see all of this, said a word that was not in the Danvers family vocabulary.
It took forty minutes to sort out.
Alex had brought a medical kit, a thermos, and a very large amount of suspicion. J'onn had scanned the knight twice, and found, to his visible discomfort, that she was, in every possible way, Kara Zor-El: the same DNA, the same cellular structure, the same blue-white glow in her bones. She was simply a Kara who had never been to Earth. She had grown up, she said, in the Kingdom of Argo, a high green country under a yellow sun, in a house of old stone, and she had been knighted at sixteen by a queen with her mother's eyes. Her sword was named for a legend she'd never been brave enough to say aloud. Her Princess was named Lena, and Lena had a laugh like a bell, and a book of stars, and a habit of climbing out of her window at midnight to sit on the roof.
"I swore," said the knight, with both hands wrapped around a thermos cup of tea she hadn't touched, "to be her sword. That's all. I never swore to be anything more."
"But you wanted to," said Kara, very quietly.
The knight looked at her.
"Aye," she said.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Lena, who had positioned herself on an overturned crate with a blanket around her shoulders, watched them. The two Karas sat side by side on the tailgate of Alex's truck, one in plate and one in spandex, and the sun hung low and orange over the glassy scar in the desert. She felt a strange, warm, unsettling thing pass through her chest. Aye. She wasn't certain what she'd done to deserve it, or who she was meant to be, or why the sight of Kara, her Kara, gazing at a stranger in armor with such deep, silent, understanding sympathy, made her want to cry.
"We'll help you," said Kara.
The knight looked up, sharply.
"We'll find her. I promise. I don't know how yet, but we've got a lab, and a team, and a very smart"
She glanced sideways, only a flick. Lena felt it like a hand on the back of her neck.
"a very smart friend," Kara finished, "who's really, really good at this kind of thing."
"Friend," repeated the knight, with an intent, curious look at the pair of them.
"Friend," said Kara, firmly.
"Hm," said the knight, in a tone that suggested she had not been born yesterday.
"We were just about to tell you," said Lena, "that you're welcome to"
FWOOM.
It was a noise like a furnace door opening.
All of them turned.
Forty feet behind the truck, in the open air above the dirt, a circle had torn itself in the sky. It was ragged and orange and wide, and it pulsed with a dull, angry, familiar light. The air around it rippled. A wind came out of it, smelling of woodsmoke and old gunpowder and, very faintly, beer.
And out of the circle, boots first, stepped a woman.
She was Kara. Of course she was Kara. But her hair was cropped short, ragged and sun-bleached, and she wore a battered leather duster over a faded flannel shirt, and her jeans were torn at the knee. She had a shotgun in her hands. She'd dropped, from her great height, into a perfect easy crouch, and she came up out of it with the long, bow-legged stride of someone who'd spent a lot of her life walking on very bad ground.
She scanned the circle of faces. She spat in the dirt.
"Okay," she said, in a flat, gravelly, Midwestern drawl. She hoisted the shotgun onto her shoulder. "Which one of you deepshits got my wife?"
Nobody moved.
"Come on," said the new Kara. "I don't have all day. I've been walking since Tuesday. Other than her, I love beer and kicking ass," She stopped, and thought about it, and her whole face fell. "And I'm already outta beer."
There was a very long, very wide silence.
"I'm sorry," said Alex, faintly. "Did you say, wife?"
"Yeah," said the new Kara. "Lena. Big green eyes, real pretty, scary smart, I'm talking really scary. Probably yelled at someone for tying her up wrong. Anyone seen her?" She looked around, and her squint settled on Lena, and she raised an eyebrow. "Hey. You look just like her."
"I'm not,"
"Huh. Real close." She took in the S on Kara's chest, and the plate on the knight's, and then, with a slow dawning expression, she looked from one to the other, and back at Lena, and back at Kara, and said, "Wait. Are you two married, or"
"No," said Kara and Lena together, with a degree of speed that startled even them.
"Huh," said the cowboy. "Weird."
Lena felt her ears go hot. Beside her, she could hear Kara's heartbeat go up about forty points.
"Do you want to explain that," said Alex, in a low voice, "or should I?"
"Not now, Alex."
"I'm just asking."
"Not now."
FWOOM.
They all turned again.
Another circle. This one was higher, and bluer, a clean, cold, electric blue, hanging in the air above the first. A figure stepped out of it, small, and ghostly, and wrapped in a thick purple scarf. She had a long black coat, and a satchel, and a tiny, determined chin, and she could not have been more than twelve years old. She had Kara's face. She had Kara's eyes. She was holding a very battered stuffed rabbit under one arm.
"Excuse me," said the little girl, politely. "Has anybody seen my mom?"
Lena made a sound that was not a word.
FWOOM.
A tall, stern-looking Kara in a sleek black uniform, with her hair in a tight bun and a glowing S on her chest. FWOOM. A woman in a lab coat, glasses pushed up on her head, holding a half-eaten donut. FWOOM. A woman in a long red scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a lute. FWOOM. A tall, blank-faced, silver-skinned Kara, with a faint blue glow in her eyes and a voice like polished glass, who stopped on the far side of the clearing, tilted her head, and said, precisely, "Query. Where is Lena."
Brainy made a small, strangled noise. "That one," he said, "is very advanced."
"It's so many," whispered Nia.
"I'm counting," said Alex, in a thin, reedy voice.
The sky was full of circles now. They opened one after the other, blue and orange and green and violet, like a field of enormous, awful, impossible flowers, and out of every one stepped another face, another armor, another uniform, another cape. They fell out of the air and walked out of the light and landed in the dust, a tall one and a short one, an old one and a young one, one in a spacesuit, one in a tuxedo. Each of them stopped, took one look at the others, and had the same expression of complete, confused, mounting horror.
And every single one of them said some version of the same four words.
"Where is my Lena?"
Lena sat on the crate in the middle of it all, with the blanket still around her shoulders, her hands knotted tight in her lap.
She was, she realized, shaking.
Not with fear. It was more complicated than that. She was shaking because somewhere in the last ten minutes the desert had filled up with Karas, a whole army of Karas, Karas in every shape and color, all of them frightened, all of them furious, and every single one was looking for someone she'd lost. Someone who looked like her. Someone who had been, to every one of them, a wife, or a friend, or a mother, or a world.
And beside her, one hand on the crate, close enough that their shoulders brushed, stood the only Kara who hadn't lost anyone.
"Lena," said Kara, softly.
"How many?" said Lena.
Kara didn't answer at once. Lena felt her breathe in, and felt her count.
"Twenty-two," said Kara. "Right now. And the circles are still opening."
"Twenty-two."
"Alex says maybe more."
"Alex," said Lena, and let out a short, unsteady breath that was not quite a laugh, "is going to need a bigger truck."
She lifted her head.
Above them, the sky was on fire with portals, in a hundred different shades. Beneath them, an army of lost Karas was shouting, weeping and arguing in a hundred different voices, and somewhere in the noise a shotgun went off by accident, and a little girl shrieked with laughter. The knight's white cloak flashed. The cowboy cursed. A robot said query again. It was, without any doubt, the strangest afternoon of Lena Luthor's life.
But under it all, quiet and steady, like the pulse of something deep and very old, Lena felt a thin silver thread of certainty pull tight inside her chest.
Someone did this.
Someone took them. All of them. Every Lena.
And she was going to find out who.