All This Time
Rating: 'M'
Characters (In Order of Appearance): Kara Danvers, David Singh, Quentin Lance, John Corben, Lena Luthor, Lionel Luthor, Lillian Luthor...?
Summary: Kara Zor-El, Legionnaire turned mercenary, is brought back to life on the planet Earth, the oldest of the civilised worlds. Forced into a contract under Lionel Luthor, Kara must solve a murder which the SCPD have ruled solved. The Kryptonian must wade through hordes of violent killers, in settings ranging from virtual paradises to seedy houses of prostitution, all the while trailed by the elusive Green Arrow.
Author's Note: Inspired by Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, this one is cyber-punk through and through guys. Gore, violence, swearing, sex, and death right from the beginning, most certainly not for the feint hearted.
Chapter 1
Coming back from the dead, to quote J'onn J'onzz, is a bitch. Every single time. The closest likeness to it that Kara could describe was the sensation of being dragged backwards through a bramble bush, underwater, while getting throat-fucked, and your lungs are filled with jello. In a word, it sucked.
In the Legion they taught people to let go before they were put into storage. To stick it in neutral and float. It was the first thing they would drill into the new recruits from day one, the hard-eyed J'onzz pacing in front of them in the induction space. 'Don't worry' he would tell them, Kara remembered his voice vividly, 'you'll be ready for it'. Failing that, the fear of death was carved from them with the words 'don't worry, kid. They'll store it'
Don't worry, they'll store it. It was a doubled-edged piece of wisdom. Both a bleak condemnation of the efficiency of the system the Legion had stood against, and a clue to the ever-elusive mental state required to navigate the harsh waters of re-sleeving. Whatever you are, whatever you feel, whatever you're thinking when they store you, that's what you'll be when you come out. So, the best thing to do is let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.
If they give you the time.
Kara came up thrashing. A violent cough forcing a glob of the amniotic storage fluid from her lungs, one hand plastered across her chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a weapon that was no longer there. A strong hand on her shoulder caused Kara to lash out, the hand that had been searching for wounds shooting to the throat of the person who had gripped her without thought. Rolling the rest of the way out of the floatation gel, Kara struck out, free hand striking her assailant in the nose and then the gut within but a second, and the man (so she assumed) dropped to the floor.
She stayed on him, sunk to the floor, crouched over him with her left hand still curled tightly around his throat. A fizzle and a jumble of voices sounded from behind her, snapping Kara back into reality a little. Raking her free hand through her hair to clear her view, Kara felt globs of the floatation gel run between her fingers, slicking back her hair like oil. Brining her hand back down, vision finally clear for the lack of hair and gel, Kara dimly registered her lack of clothing before turning to the rest of the room.
"Who the fuck is she?" One of the voices questioned, Kara couldn't tell which because of the surgical masks.
"I don't know!" Kara assumes it's the one holding the tablet who replies. "It's all fucking redacted!"
Beyond the two lab technicians still retreating away from her slowly, Kara noticed another figure, presumably security going from the cattle prod in his hand. Throwing him the most threatening glare she could muster, which required far more effort than she would have hoped for, Kara watched with a wicked grin as the security guard takes a few steps backwards. None of those three occupants of the room moved following that, and for half a minute Kara stayed in place, panting heavily, trying to adjust to her surroundings, and doing her best to figure out why it felt like she weighed so much.
"Miss Zor-El calm down." One of the technicians finally spoke.
That was when it clicked for her. Back on Krypton, Zor-El was a fairly common surname, her ancestors had been among the original settlers and so many had taken the same name as a mark of respect. Everyone knew how to pronounce it. That technician most certainly didn't, he spoke the same kind of Amanglic that was spoken on Krypton, but with none of the lilt or poetry, his voice was much harder, more drawl like. Still he had butchered the pronunciation, it had sounded more like 'Zo-Ral' from him.
Add to that she still felt too heavy.
Then the realisation crashed through her blurred perception like a brick through frosted glass.
Offworld.
Somewhere along the line they had taken Kara Zor-El (d.h.) and shipped her…somewhere. Krypton, to Kara's knowledge, was the only habitable planet in the Corvus star system, which meant a long range needlecast download to somewhere too far away from home.
Ignoring the words of the technician Kara looked around, beginning to process her situation, she needed to figure out where she was. The room looked to her exactly how old-world prisons had been described to her. Dull grey concrete walls, harsh neon lighting tubes overhead, and a large steel door was set into the wall on the far side. The re-sleeving facilities on Krypton were so much more glamorous, Kara had seen them more than a few times, pastel colours, pretty faces, rooms with thermostats set perfectly. After all, being re-sleeved meant that one had paid their debt to society, Kara reasoned, shouldn't they be sent off with a fresh start and a sunny disposition?
"How…" Kara tried, new vocal cords were always a challenge, and clearly the ones the belonged to her new sleeve hadn't been used for a while. "How long? How long have I been down?"
The technician with the tablet began scrolling through the files again before she looked back up to Kara. "A hundred and fifty years."
A hundred and fifty?
Kara vaguely registered the sound of choking, she was clearly applying too much pressure to the throat of the man she had pinned down, but she ignored it. The information was a little difficult to process, there had been no trial, no forewarning of how long she would be down for, a hundred and fifty was a little too long to process, even for her. With the weight of that revelation pressing upon her, Kara leaned back and took her hand from the throat of the man beneath her, moving slowly backwards until her back pressed against the base of the storage tank she had escaped from. Taking a shallow breath in, Kara reached up, blocked one nostril and blew tank fluid out through the other.
"Fucking hate getting shot." She mumbled to herself before looking up and addressing the technicians. "Wanna tell me where I am? Itemize my rights or something?"
"Right now, you don't have any rights."
Asshole.
It was the guard that had spoken, a grim smile stitched across his face. Kara briefly rolled her stiff neck and snorted the other nostril clean.
"Want to tell me where I am?"
The guard hesitated for a moment, glanced up at the roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before passing it on, then looked back to Kara. "Sure. Why not? Iron Heights Penitentiary, Starling City."
"What planet genius?" Kara spoke sharply, throwing him another glare.
"Earth."
XXX
A doctor finally took Kara away from the re-sleeving facility, leading her down a long white corridor, the floor covered in scuff marks from what Kara assumed were the rubber wheels of gurneys. The doctor was moving a quite the pace, and Kara struggled to keep up with her, wrapped as she was in a thin grey towel and still dripping with tank fluid. Everything about the doctor's manner was superficially bedside, Kara noted, though there stood a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of hardcopy documents under one arm and she was clearly in a rush. Kara didn't even want to consider how many re-sleevings she had to oversee in a single day.
"You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or two," She recited. "There might be minor aches and pains, tremors, visual or auditory hallucinations, it's all normal. Sleep should resolve any issues. If you have any recurring comp…"
"I know." Kara cut over her. "I've done this before."
Finally, the two came to a stop at a side door with the word shower stencilled into frosted glass. The doctor steered Kara inside and paused for a moment, as if to study her.
"I've used showers before too." Kara threw her a condescending smirk.
The doctor simply nodded. "When you're finished, there's an elevator at the end of the hall, discharge is on the next floor. Don't uh…leave in a hurry, the warden wants to see you."
To the best of her knowledge, Kara was sure the 'manual' said to avoid any string mental shocks to the newly re-sleeved. This doctor didn't seem to care much for that, though given the stack of papers under her arm, Kara deduced that she must have read her file, or at least, whatever was available, and assumed she could handle it. Kara did her best to do just that.
"What does he want?"
"He didn't choose to share that with me." Her words had an edge of frustration that she shouldn't have allowed to show. "Perhaps your reputation precedes you."
"Perhaps." Kara smirked. On an impulse, she flexed her new face into a warm, disarming smile. "Doctor, I've never been here before. To Earth. I've never dealt with your police, should I be worried?"
The doctor looked at Kara intently, and behind her eyes Kara could see both fear and curiosity, perhaps her reputation really did precede her.
"With a woman like you," She managed finally. "I would've thought they'd be the worried ones."
"Yeah, right."
With a smile and a curt nod, the doctor retreated, the frosted door sliding shut behind her. Quickly ditching the towel and stepping into the shower, Kara whistled away her disquiet tunefully, doing her best not to slip into a song from her home, just in case they were listening. With careful, almost surgical movements, Kara ran soap and hands along her new body, finally taking the time to get to know it. Her sleeve was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, Protectorate standard, with a fighter's build. She could feel a tugging at the edges of her senses, the sensation was, she reasoned, a military custom carved onto her nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, pretty advanced too, Kara quickly discovered. It had been the reason, she realised as she tested the muscle response under the wet heat of the shower, that she had been able to drop the technician without a problem but still had difficulty breathing. There was hardwired training in her new sleeve, not just the neurachem but combat conditioning and reflex aggression. Kara had attacked the technician because her sleeve remembered how to attack.
"Cool." Kara hummed out aloud.
Still, it paled in comparison to what she was used to, but that hardly came as a surprise. The Legion's neurachem was centuries beyond anything that existed on the open or black market, even CTAC R&D were lightyears behind. Then again, Kara supposed, she had been on the stack for almost two centuries, maybe things had changed.
Turning back to her new sleeve, Kara continued her evaluation. There was a tightness in her chest that signalled something deeper than adjustment issues, it felt like a nicotine addiction. Rolling her eyes, the Kryptonian huffed unceremoniously, she'd only just managed to kick the cigarettes before she'd hit the stack, having to do it again was a daunting prospect. There was also a considerable amount of scarring across her torso and forearms, and Kara took the time to run a finger along each and every one of them. Every sleeve has a history, she had learnt that early on, and if that kind of thing was an issue well…that's why synthetics were such a big market. Kara shuddered a little at that, she always had hated synthetic sleeves. Back in the day she had likened it to a draughty house, the nerve endings never seemed sensitive enough and everything tasted like curried sawdust.
Stepping from the shower into the changing cubicle, Kara found a neatly folded white blouse and grey pants that looked suited to summer, yet somewhat professional at the same time. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch and a pair of stud-like earrings. Taking a deep breath Kara turned to face the mirror.
It was always difficult, seeing a new face, looking into the glass and seeing a total stranger staring back. During her training, J'onn had likened it to pulling an image from the depths of a stereogram. Not that J'onn ever actually understood what they had to go through. Lucky bastard. Not even the Legionnaires, despite their frankly god-like training, were wholly used to it, the feeling that couldn't be shaken, that the face in the mirror wasn't your own but someone else through a window.
Kara stood before the mirror and idly towelled herself dry, getting used to the face. It was Caucasian, which was a comfortable lack of change, nothing drastic, and the overwhelming impression Kara got was that if there was ever a line of least resistance in life, her new face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features of her face managed to look weather-beaten. The hair was blonde too, though shorter than hers had been, and the eyes were a deep blue. All in all, Kara summarised, she still looked remarkably more like her birth sleeve than she had any right to given the mass jump in time and location.
Finally, suitably dry and as accustomed as she could hope to be with her new body after less than an hour out of the tank, Kara turned and got dressed. With a final glance at the mirror, she slipped in the earrings, strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the warden.
It was four-fifteen, local time.