Chapter Text
Alex Danvers | National City | Carlson Reservoir Pump Station 14 | May 3rd, 2018 @ 05:30pm
Alex blows out a long breath and rolls her left shoulder. Rama Khan's final moments were spent on three things. He snapped Eve Tessmacher's neck like a twig. He staggered under a two-fisted blow from Kara. He shoved Alex to the ground.
Then he was gone and so was Kara. She's alive, at least they think she is. Her tracker pinged her leaving the fight and going orbital to knock out the Obsidian Tech satellites before the simulation could go global. It's sitting in a reservoir outside of National City right now, judging by the alarm on the displays in front of her screaming about 'imminent failure'.
Lex never made it to the fight, which is something she'll have to dig into.
"Fuck me," Alex grumbles.
"Not at work, dear," Sam teases in her ear.
"Anything?"
"Well, she's not in the lake."
"We knew that."
"You guessed that, Al. Slight difference. She dumped her tracker, is all. You know how she is...."
How she's been since Day One, Alex thinks. Like a tornado. There and gone I've got no idea what happened.
"Think she knows they're expensive?" Alex asks no one in particular.
Brainy looks up from his station.
"The Continuity Protocol does not prevent me from speaking in this case. So I can tell you that yes, she does. In the Temple of the Just on New Earth, there are a collection of her trackers on display which were recovered by the Founder herself. Three hundred fourteen, to be precise."
Alex looks down at her tablet.
The one in the lake is number 313. Interesting flex, Brainy.
"Come on back, Ghost. Nothing's going to find her unless she wants to be found. Keep the dopplers spinning, Agent Dox. I want to know if so much as a fat pigeon is flying around this city."
"Understood."
She calls up the intercom on her tablet.
"This is the director. All hostiles are KIA and we are standing down from Red to Orange. All agents are to report to the nearest armory for armor inspection, recharged rifle and sidearm, and a shield projector. Active defense crews switch with fresh crews every four hours. Interceptors on the rails and engines hot at all times. Central out."
Her watch beeps at her.
"Shift ended ten minutes ago," she realizes.
Dox spins in his chair, a bit too precisely to keep up his 'human' act.
"Have a nice evening boss. Ruby should score many home runs."
Alex snorts.
"That's Tuesdays."
"Ah. Yes. In that case, she should do whatever sport today is and do it well," he replies.
Alex makes her way through a hallway full of salutes as she goes towards the balcony. The quartermaster strides up, takes the rifle off her armor's rear clip, and replaces it with a fresh one. She trades him her pistols for fully charged ones. He presses four shield units into her palm. The new ones with the omegahedron power cores. These won't drop to 99% percent battery during a single human lifespan. Regulations and basic economics say she gets one over the course of her entire career.
"Thanks, MacAllister."
He smiles and answers in his warm, rolling brogue.
"Just a feeling, ma'am. Take care of your wee one, won't you?"
She stares out at the sinking sun. Her stomach thinks she's still in combat. It's trembling and clenched.
"Yeah. I'll give them a hug for you."
Kara making herself scarce after a fight is normal. She stays home, binges donuts, and plays video games, her sisterly check-ins are brief but she sometimes calls Eliza to chat. Kara disappearing from a crater with six bloody bodies in it, one of them a civilian? That is not normal.
Sam flutters down beside Alex. Her cape is silver-trimmed and her snow-white armor still wears the coal-black, screaming skull design of the Worldkiller she once was. It's been reinforced with Nth Metal and polished mirror bright. The paint makes bright light bounce off it, increasing its contrast. Criminals react appropriately to a giantess walking towards them in armor pure as driven snow except for that warning sizzling on the front.
Before Sam's feet hit the deck, she presses a kiss to the top of Alex's head.
"Hey, you."
Alex bumps her hips against Sam and they lean out over the railing together.
"Hey. Grabbed your helmet from the garage. I need to go through a car wash or something..." Sam complains, shaking green-gray glop off her hands. Two hours ago, that was a lunatic Kryptonian that had hidden in the Earth's crust for eons. The bitch actually had the temerity to say she was invincible, a B-Movie villain mistake.
Karma was instant and it came by way of Sam's fist.
"We got the plasma bath back online, babe."
"Ooh! Great!"
Sam's face lights up. Alex is doomed. Alex has been doomed since the moment she herded Ruby back to her mom that day on the waterfront.
Ruby flops onto the cushion beside Alex. She ate her salad without nagging, which is weird. That's either her fourth or her sixth slice of pizza, depending on how fast she ate while Alex set up the blanket and pillow fort. That's less weird. Sam's in denial about the possibility of Ruby having powers, but Alex only ever saw one teenager eat like that. Kara.
"Hi. What're we watching? Not Grey's Anatomy, by the way. She looks too much like you."
"Well, now I'm out of ideas, kid."
The Nature Channel's loop of the Sahara at sunrise is replaced by the civil defense logo.
"What the fuck?" Alex whispers, leaning forward.
"Swear jar."
She winces.
"What's that?" Ruby asks.
"Right. I guess it's kinda before your time. That's a system they made to interrupt television in case of an emergency. Like a nuclear attack. They used to do tests."
"This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been a real emergency, instructions would follow," Alex intones, waving her arms like a robot.
"Oh. So it's like, rather than school shootings, you had the Cold War when you were in high school?"
Alex pulls her baby girl in and just squeezes Ruby tight. What else can she do?
The civil defense logo disappears.
In its place is a darkened studio with a high-shine floor of jet black wood. Spotlights come on, one at a time.
The first one illuminates a robed female figure, kneeling next to a crimson-toned leather chair. The focus is tight so all that can be seen is black silk, a wisp of blonde hair, and the leather of the armest. Another light comes on, illuminating another figure next to the right armrest. The hair hanging out from under the hood is black and wavy.
Six lights come on, one after the other.
A grand piano.
A set of looking leather couches.
A mahogany dining room set.
A few rows of bookcases, staggered in an elegantly haphazard arrangement across the room.
A glass table with a laptop, a glass of champagne, and a pair of chunky framed glasses with a scrunchy waddled up beside them. A drop of blood sparkles in the spotlight and drips from the side of the glasses. The sight of the scrunchy makes Alex's stomach flip. She knows that scrunchy and this is very, very, very much not Kara's loft. She didn't come back before someone took her hostage, that's why. She throws the blankets off and scrabbles for her phone.
"Mom, look!" Ruby exclaims, tugging at her shirt.
Last, the spotlight falls on Kara. Her big frame is wrapped in blue satin and her crossed legs are bare below her knee-length dress but for gladiator sandals of black patent leather. She is gripping the armests as each of the women shuffles forward and presses a kiss to Kara's knuckles. She lifts her palms and they nuzzle in like nursing kittens, turning their cheeks and foreheads to catch her every caress. Heats pours into Kara's palms, lines of green and blue energy and Alex thinks it looks like heat vision except Kara's and Sam's is red and so is Kal's.
"So," Ruby mumbles. "Kara's gay?"
Alex gulps.
"Yeah. She is, sweetie."
"She could've told me."
"I don't think she really thinks she has to. Like, in Kara's head, you might as well ask if she's straight and she'll say 'no'."
Ruby hums.
"So to her, saying 'mom, dad, I'm coming out as straight' is her idea of normal. Neat."
Alex chuckles.
"Yeah. Let's see what she says."
Alex hits 'max volume' without thinking.
"Hey!" Sam hollers from the kitchen. "Innocent ears out here!"
The static from air flowing over the mic must sound like a trash compactor to her.
"Subtitles, please," Sam groans when she shuffles into the room with popcorn and wine. "I might have a headache tonight otherwise."
Ruby laughs so hard her straw bubbles her root beer almost over the top of the glass.
"Ruby..." Alex warns.
"Oh, totally," Ruby deadpans. "She meant a headache headache."
Sam settles down beside Alex, two stems of California white in her big hand. Alex takes one, stealing a tickle along Sam's palm as she does.
"What's up with 'greetings Mister Bond' over there?" Sam wonders, gesturing to the TV.
"No idea, Sammy."
"Closed captions?" Ruby suggests, winding the last of the cheese around her finger and shoving it in her mouth.
"How ladylike," Sam scolds.
"Ladylike is just a heteronormative tool used to police female behavior from a young age. It implies that some feminity is acceptable and some is not."
Sam sighs.
"Alex, please move the rest of your college textbooks into the storage unit before she finds The Bell Jar or something."
"Read it twice," Ruby butts in. "She needed a hug."
Alex turns on the captions just before Kara speaks.
People of National City, I have a message for you.
I will no longer be the hero you wish. I will not stop bank robberies or looting or drug deals. Banks are insured against theft. Broken glass leaves behind no greiving children. Drug dealers are not the root of the problem. Despair is.
I will act only in the preservation of living things. I did not cross stars for some imitation of virtue. I was sent with a glorious, ancient purpose coursing in my veins.
Why, you ask?
Why, your leaders shriek? Why can we no longer control her? Why will the maiden no longer act as our whore?
You may know that Superman carries the name of Kal-El. El is our family name but as a male, he was not stamped with his father's name. Zor-El was the surname I was given at birth, because my mothers' line carried no name with it.
None of names are the names of mothers.
But I carried the glory and the terror and the wonderment of being her daughter. So I am no longer Kara Zor-El. I claim the name Kara Alura Vakatiliyn, out of Alura, by a line of mothers beyond counting. I will not be the hero you want. I will not come when called with a shrill whistle. I will not fall to heel behind your sodliers like a tamed bitch.
You may take comfort that I will come when needed and I will be the savior humanity requires.
Good night.
At her end, Kara picks up a remote and points it at the camera.
At Alex's end, the civil defense logo replaces an apparently batshit insane sister.
"Cheese dripping onto your pants, babe."
"I think that broke Alex, mom."
"Ruby, can you get my laptop, please?" Alex gulps.
Before Ruby can complain, Sam snaps her fingers and points at the dining room.
"Penny for your thoughts, gorgeous?"
Sam kisses Alex's temple.
"That word, I've heard it somewhere before. Something in the oral histories, I think."
Ruby plops Alex's government laptop in front of her and types in the password.
"Really, kid?"
"Really. What? I wanted to see if I could buy a fighter jet!"
Alex scrolls through the files they pulled of Kal's pod and its data core. This would be a lot easier if Kara had surrendered her pod.
"There. Ruby, want to practice your Kryptonian?"
Ruby sounds it out, moving her lips, then reads it aloud.
"And when the war was over, the boys were spared. But none of the great mother's names survived, only their fruit. As new nations arose, the sons were free to ask mothers for wives just as the mothers were free to refuse their daughters. Any woman who neither knew males nor wanted them was given a new and precious name in honor of endless mothers before her. She would be called Vakatiliyn for and her name was a holy name, the name of a thousand queens who knew no kings but themselves. Upon our wombs and their fruit, we built Krypton."
Sam looks at Alex, her face scrunched in confusion around those lovely hazel eyes. If her brain was working, Alex would be kissing those cute little wrinkles.
"So she just started a cult?" Sam asks.
Alex swallows, dragging her tongue along her paper-dry mouth.
"No. Worse. You know how Muhammad Ali said Cassius Clay was a 'slave name'? Ruby, you probably heard about it in school, right?"
"Yeah, why?"
Alex points at the screen.
"It was a slave name so he refused it and picked a new one. Like Kara did just now."
"Problem is the name itself. Vakatilyn. Because that word is one of fewer than a dozen surviving words of a language from Krypton's earliest period. Rocks and spears, after making fire but before making animal skin clothes. The language had a word for men but the word for their goddess was Vaka and it was used to indicate women too. They didn't see women and goddesses as two different ideas. And in modern Kryptonian 'ti' is an honorific used for something that was well made or powerful and 'liyn' was a suffix indicating royalty, status, and so on. That root word, Vaka, came down through almost a million years of recorded history untouched in fifty languages. That doesn't just happen for no reason."
"What do I call Aunt Kara now?" Ruby asks, cuddling in against Alex's side.
"When she picks you up from school, Kara. Translated? Kara, child of Alura, Goddess Who is Powerful and Majestic. That would be close."
"Well that's a bit much," Ruby jokes.
"Yeah," Alex agrees. "The future is female. If anyone can do that it's her. But what scares me is the look. I know that look. That's her mad face."
"It's not," Ruby scoffs. "I saw her mad face at game night That was like, blank. No smile or frown or anything. Just kinda there."
"Kid, you saw her 'don't eat my ice cream face', not her mad face. This isn't anger like game night. That was..."
Alex sighs. "There's a sort of anger I have to find to go on missions. I have to work at it and build it up until it's like I've got a brick on my chest," Alex explains, tapping her breastbone.
"Holding me down. Keeping me steady. So that if I have to kill someone to make it back to you, I can do it without freaking out. That's what Kara looks like when she's thinking like that."
"Oh," Ruby murmurs.
"Yeah. Rama Khan saw her mad face today. Then he swung at her with his weapon. She dodged and then just tore him in half. One move. He didn't have time to blink. That anti-Kryptonite suit she has is something else. Wish I knew who made it. I think that video is a message to us and a threat to someone else. "
"Well," Sam mumbles. "A manifesto and a veiled death threat to persons unknown. That's a lot to unpack."
Alex pitches forward and puts her head in her hands.
"And she didn't trust me with any of it. Rather than unpack, I think she's just going to dump that box on top of their head."
"Who were the sex dolls?" Ruby asks, slurping her root beer.
"Ruby!" Sam scolds, playfully slapping her thigh.
Alex grabs the remote and rewinds to the moment the women's faces were clearest. They're more than half hidden by hoods and the rest is in shadow. Kara's little pet Stacy is sure as hell not platinum blonde and green eyes or no, that woman has probably seven inches on Lena Luthor. Lena's more the type to be sprawled across Kara's lap with a too-tight shirt that reads 'my wife is super' or something.
"No idea."
Once upon a time, Kara would tell Alex about a new crush each month. The incurable romantic, always off to a new fancy. She can't remember the last time Kara gushed about the guy at the bookstore or the FedEx guy or the bike messenger. Kara would take new lovers like she'd try new ice creams and then it stopped. That just dropped out of their chats few years ago. Some point after she became an assistant at CatCo. Whoever those women at Kara's feet are they have powers and they're someone so precious to Kara that they haven't come up in any of their daily chats. They touch base every day, once after breakfast and once before dinner.
Hell of a secret to keep, sis.