Supercat Frankenstein AU – anon.
a/n: I have a feeling this will not be very fluffy. At all.
Your dream was always to create life. Oh, not in that sad, normal way – pregnancy was overrated, and you had no intention of letting anyone have even the slimmest chance of taking them from you, like Adam had been.
(You ignore how you gave Adam up.)
You wanted to create life. You didn't want to create a child, despite how your many first attempts until you managed it, were in fact, children. Carter is your assistant, a clever, quiet boy made of fresh, young, stolen parts that occasionally need replacing. You put him on ice for a few weeks after his surgeries, to keep him from feeling pain, pumping a hot, blistering serum through him to promote growth and life – he's not technically alive, in all sense, after all. Keep him on ice too long and his paltry system wouldn't be able to keep up, his organs would fail and die, and his brain would stop transmitting between neurons and all that. Electricity would pump his heart for him for the rest of time, but that didn't do anything when nothing worked.
That didn't change even when you started experimenting with alien biology.
Of course, you still have a life outside your lab. You have to. Money comes from having a job, and while you might have an empire, it's not – quite – self-sustaining. Misogynist white men with ambition and stupidity ingrained in their blood try to take over your company many times. For a while, you're even in that precarious situation that is handing your company over to them, and potentially revealing Adam to the world. But Kara saves you, like she always has. She's Supergirl, yet her devotion to you is uncanny.
It's probably why you saved her, took her away before anyone could find her – before the government organisations could take her body and do whatever Kara had wanted for her herself after she died.
It takes you an agonisingly long time to revive her, but there's so much damage done that you- you can't. You can't save everything. And it's both a curse and a blessing when enough time in the dark undo's her healing, because it means you can finally get in under her skin, literally. The curse of it though, is that she can't heal anymore, and you're not quite sure – except you are, because you are Doctor Catherine Grant and you are the best in your field, and you know that those cells that used to react under certain lights have shrivelled up and lost whatever potency and ability to take in sunlight that they used to have.
Like Carter, her vocal chords are minimal by the time you wake her, but unlike Carter, you have no doubt that she will not be able to speak, and you cry over that fact. You cry over many things as you bring her back because you have to bring her back. You have to. You can't-
"I can't just leave her."
And so she comes back, and she's so confused, so very, very confused, and she cries and curls up and tries to scratch at her plastic stitches. She won't let you near her, and you're so grateful that she lets Carter, because Carter knows what he's doing – he might be twelve, but he's also fifteen, and eighteen, and twenty-four and three. He's an amalgam of parts, and he knows it and feels it, and different hormones – an inadequate amount of the right ones, but what are the right ones when the right ones promote change that his body can't handle?
"Should have let her go," he says when she sleeps, eyes shutting as he curls up beside her on the couch. "Should have let her die."
"No," is all you say, before you go back into your lab, turning off your cell and taking out the SIM card, in case Kara's sister tries to track you again – you've already had to move between labs twice now. You'd had to contact Winn, your favourite IT Hobbit, to understand the basics of tracking using GPS, using the excuse of Carter's father wanting full custody despite his new restraining order.
The next few months are cold. Kara stays away from you, except when she pulls you away from your lab to eat and sleep and avoid being burned to a crisp by the fires that spring from time to time. When that happens, you meet eyes for a time, and you wonder when she'll forgive you.
(You both know she'll never forgive you, but you love her and you couldn't just leave her, and that is something you both know too, and she loves you enough to let it go unsaid.)