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It’s never a secret. For the first time in Kara’s thirteen years on Earth, there’s no great revelation. There isn’t anything to reveal.
This weight that she’s carried with her into every relationship outside the Danvers that she’s ever tried to build since she landed—it suddenly becomes inconsequential, when they’re together. The fact that Kara is Kryptonian, that she is Supergirl. The distinction between Kara Danvers and Kara Zor-El and National City’s resident hero. The deception; the disguise.
There’s no pretense between them, no pretending, no parts to play. They meet in the ring as Supergirl and Miss Martian, and then a few days later Kara Danvers shows up at the alien bar—and M’gann knows. It’s not something she needs to deduce or figure out after they’ve known each other a while. She just looks at Kara and she knows—it’s just a simple unconscious observation, as clear to see as the gold of Kara’s hair or the blue of her eyes.
M’gann slides Kara an Aldebaran rum and Kara doesn’t even realize that she’s still wearing her glasses.
-
J’onn tells M’gann how lucky he is to have his friends in his life, this new family he’s found on Earth, because it makes being here on this planet a little less lonely. M’gann tells him that working at the bar does that for her.
What she says but he doesn’t quite hear: in all the time she’s lived here, she’s never really had a friend.
(Lonely and alone are two different things.)
What she doesn’t say: she’s been on Earth for three hundred years and for three hundred years she’s been alone.
-
She likes working at the bar because it’s loud.
She’s constantly surrounded by people who talk a little too loudly, whose thoughts are even louder than their voices. And it’s one of the most peaceful places she’s been able to find on Earth in three hundred years.
When she first arrived on Earth, she avoided any place with humans. She was afraid to touch them, afraid to be seen, lest the blood on her hands stain their skin. Lest they see her for what she was.
She sought out the greenest forests and jungles, mountains topped with pure white snow. Anywhere that wasn’t red or rocky.
But it was too quiet there, hidden so far from the rest of the world. And M’gann was weak, or so she thought, and couldn’t bear the punishment she deserved. She couldn’t bear the quiet, the solitude, trapped alone with herself and her own memories and guilt, feeling them slowly expand to fill every corner of her mind until that was all she could ever think about.
It was too loud, alone in the quiet.
So now she lives in downtown National City, where she’s integrated herself into human society just enough to find the noise. To find that constant low rumbling of strangers’ thoughts that might, for a moment, drown out her own.
And still, despite her days at work where she drifts through a sea of minds that can only partially blunt the memories that plague her, she spends her nights restless and hungry—looking for a fight, looking for something, something more, to distract her. To make her feel, to make her forget.
She remembers every single time she witnessed one of her people laying a hand on a Green. Remembers every time she herself did as well, before she found the strength to refuse. She replays these moments in her mind on a constant loop, preserved in painfully incorruptible detail by the psychic power of her Martian memory, and she counts.
Roulette’s fight club was by no means the first—every time she steps into a ring or into a dark alley at night or in front of a drunken stranger’s fist, she keeps counting.
Three hundred years of fighting, of counting the blows and the bruises on her skin night after night, and it doesn’t even come close.
Three hundred years is a long time to stay alive out of pure guilt.
-
“When was the last time you flew?”
They’re standing on the balcony of the DEO, Kara’s cape somehow fluttering even despite the utter stillness of the air, as if gravity bends around her even when her boots are planted fully on the ground.
M’gann just stares at her, like she doesn’t understand the question.
“I know you can, M’gann. Why don’t you?”
Yes, I can fly. I can do a lot of things.
(I’ve done too many things.)
“No, I can’t. It’s not- it’s complicated.”
It’s simpler this way. To just be human during the day, to almost convince herself that’s all she is. To occasionally be a Green Martian at night, but only within the confines of a steel cage—of a match with a designated opponent, with a beginning and an end.
Flying has no beginning, no end, nothing to hold her in or hold her back. Nothing to stop her from going too far. Flying is dangerous. Flying is terrifying.
Kara watches her as she turns to look back out over the ledge, and she slowly nods.
“Okay.”
-
M’gann does fly again, eventually.
The first time, it happens by accident. A mission goes south and Kara calls for backup. Alex rushes to Kara’s side, Kara is all she can see. But M’gann—all she sees is the child Kara was trying to protect, still exposed and vulnerable and paralyzed with fear.
“Take him,” Kara yells. “Run, M’gann. They’ll kill him if they find him here.”
And all the doubt and self-loathing that M’gann has been harboring for over three centuries falls away.
She grabs the kid and runs. She doesn’t even realize she’s transformed, not until she notices that the child has latched himself onto her, burrowing into her cape.
She wraps him up as tightly as she can, and leaps.
-
After that, they go flying together sometimes, more and more frequently as M’gann starts to let herself fall in love with the sky.
She shows Kara the places she used to hide out, back when she first landed on Earth. Places that she uncovered over decades of wandering the planet, where Kara can go when everything gets too loud, where there aren’t any humans for hundreds of miles. The deepest, richest forests and the clearest oceans and brightest skies.
She’s watched these places dwindle over the centuries, heart silently breaking as the sheer richness of the life on Earth that once set it so apart from Mars slowly began draining away. As dry, cracked soil tinged red (like rust, like blood) seemed to creep inward, encroaching at the edges of her world. Following her, almost. A curse on this new planet.
But there are still a few pockets of light left on this planet that they find together—the last daughters of a cursed red planet and a dying red star, bathed in green and blue and gold. The world shines so vibrantly in those places that the two of them wonder if the humans can possibly see all the colors that they can with their alien eyes—because if they did, how could they bear to keep bleeding it dry?
-
Kara takes M’gann up to the Fortress of Solitude. Tells her she’s welcome anytime.
M’gann flies up there during the summers sometimes, when the sun never sets in the arctic and the sky glows white. When there are no stars in the sky for days at a time.
It’s too bright around the Fortress to see Mars from there. A reprieve, however temporary. It’s enough to block out that constant reminder, that tiny spot of light that had always taunted her from the blackness of the sky each night.
M’gann camps out on top of a pristine white glacier, staring up the way she otherwise never allows herself to, into the clean brightness of the summer sky. A blank slate above and a blank slate below.
-
It’s a profound relief for both of them, to be around each other.
Kara can’t accidentally hurt M’gann, doesn’t need to constantly regulate herself the way she does in every interaction with the rest of the world. M’gann can’t accidentally read Kara’s mind (or read it at all).
It’s peaceful and freeing and quiet. It’s just easy.
Sometimes they don’t speak. Sometimes Kara knows that no matter how desperate M’gann is to drown out her demons, she can’t bear the weight of so many minds all the time. So they simply sit together, just the two of them, far from anyone else.
It should seem strange to M’gann, that she’s found peace here, with one of the only people on this planet whose mind is closed off to her. It should be terrifying, the feeling of not knowing. But this girl whose mind is effectively as impervious as her skin—she’s turned out to be the one person M’gann can read just as easily simply by looking at her as she could with her Martian powers.
They both know what it is to be physically unable to forget, their memories etched permanently in their minds, whether through telepathic abilities or neuronal connections made invulnerable, gilded by the yellow sun. They both carry the shame and burden of the mistakes, the unthinkable acts, committed by their people.
They both know what it means to lose everyone you’ve ever loved, and what it is to wake up every day knowing that eventually you will, again, inevitably outlive everyone you ever will love.
They keep no secrets from each other. They share dreams, emotions, memories—not because of a psychic bond, but because they’ve both experienced those same dreams (those same nightmares). They understand each other’s emotions and memories implicitly, because they’ve felt them too.
There’s no pretense between them, no pretending, no parts to play.
They just look at each other and they know—a simple unconscious observation, as clear as the blue of the ocean or the stars in the blackness of the sky.