Hi guys. I know I've been mostly absent from the internet for a number of months now, and I can't make any promises about returning. At this point in my life, real life is more pressing than internet community, although I love you all dearly. (I will reply to reviews as soon as I can, I promise).
I'm not sure the direction I'll be taking from now on, but for about a year and a half now I've been completely and utterly absorbed into Marvel and DC. Marvel much more completely - comics, cartoons, movies, etc - but the CW Arrowverse tided me through the worst depressive episode I've ever experienced and in many ways I owe its heroes my current emotional health and happiness.
This story is a Kara-centric introspective of 2.11, "The Martian Chronicles." I felt like Kara was completely justified in her hurt and pain, even if she and Alex did make questionable decisions when communicating with each other during this episode. I also feel like everyone just skipped over how upset Kara was and made it about Mon-El. I mean, I am 1000% Team Mon-El, but this was not about him. It's about Kara and Alex, the relationship that defines everything else.
There's supposed to be a difference between friends and family.
Friends can be there for you – should be there for you – but they can be flaky and have their own wants and concert tickets. Family is always there.
(Earth Birthday is supposed to be a celebration of her new family, but today all Kara feels is absolutely alone.)
Her family is dead, and Alex is going out with her girlfriend and she's excited and bubbly and making excuses like a friend, and Kara has no way of knowing the day when Krypton died (Krypton's cycles are – were – different than Earth's, she spent so long in the Phantom Zone, and the trip to Earth was long despite that) along with everyone she'd ever known, and can never have the closure of a date to mourn on. She woke up when her pod fell, and it felt like minutes had passed. Earth Birthday is a way of making good from bad.
Kara encourages Alex to go, because that's what you do when a friend acts like this. You have to go along with it, otherwise they get mad and resentful, and Kara cannot handle that on top of her other emotions today.
Even the distraction of Mon-El and his club sodas can't drag Kara from her grief as she stares into her own glass at the bar, trying to contain the pounding pressure and heat behind her eyes. (Crying and heat vision are a lot alike, and she's not sure whether tears are going to come rolling down her cheeks or whether the bar in front of her will burst into flames.)
Normally Kara knows she is so lucky, so lucky, to have Earth and all the wonderful things that come with it – James and Winn and J'onn, Cat, potstickers, an alive and healthy Kal – no, Clark, it's Clark, why can't she ever remember that? – and Alex, the most important thing, the star in her sky.
Today her grief bleeds into an anger that could consume the world she stands on, and she remembers screaming at the hologram of her mother, crying insensibly, because they could've done something to save the world and no one did –
She picks up on J'onn's voice outside, which is fine, she knows he comes to visit M'gann and even if he's doing it in secret she's sure he has his reasons, but when she hears inhuman growling, the sounds of smashing cars, lights, and punching, she changes instantly and follows M'gann out into the alley.
Her eyes explode: it was heat vision, not tears. Instead of reducing the White Martian to ash, she just spooks it, and motivated equally by responsibility and rage she punches through the air after it. (An enemy to really whale on couldn't have come at a better time.) But after it flings her into a rooftop she loses it.
She wants to scream until her breath runs out, but she returns to the DEO, where she just can't contain snippy, mean comments to Winn under the guise of being worried about him and James and their new vigilante enterprise. (Which she is, she is, she really is, but today she cannot worry kindly.)
Earth Birthday is not a birthday, it's just a name for the Danvers family's turning the nightmare of Kara's life into something good. Family are allowed to bail on birthdays in special circumstances. But not this.
.
Kal has his Fortress for solitude.
Kara flies up to the top of Earth's atmosphere, where the sun reaches into her so powerfully but her flight begins to wane, and erupts, heat vision lasering at nothing, sobs coming out in ice crystals, tears vaporizing in violent blue steam.
(Irrationally, she has the tiniest desire to be with Mon-El right now. Mon-El would understand. He watched his planet burn as Krypton's shattered corpse scraped it free of life. But then, maybe he wouldn't, because Mon-El is glad to be on Earth and last year Kara almost died because she didn't want to leave a fantasy world that mimicked her life on Krypton so exactly.)
Finally she hovers still, holding her breath (she doesn't quite need to breathe on Earth anyway, but it still feels weird not to), her cape hanging listless against her back, and stares out at the stars.
My aunt used to teach me the stars…
Last year she almost had her Aunt Astra back. And Alex took her away from Kara forever. She forgives her, she does, but she can't help feeling bitter, especially the way Alex is behaving today. Kara understands choosing Maggie. Choosing Maggie most days, even. (That's good for Alex.) But sometimes Alex forgets that she is what tethers Kara to this planet, and it rips Kara apart that she is choosing Maggie today, the day that Kara needs her the most.
She dreamed for twenty-four years in stasis, both in the Phantom Zone and rocketing her way across the universe, but she sometimes feels as though she remembers flying through space, the stars and planets glowing comfortingly all around her. (She wishes she could fly in space. Up here at the top of the atmosphere, though, is the closest thing.)
She closes her eyes, remembering the feeling of the stars passing her in every direction, and the wonder her sleeping self felt.
When the tears leak out, they freeze on her face.
.
One of the smaller good things about these powers on Earth is that it never looks like Kara's been crying. Her eyes don't get bloodshot, her cheeks don't swell. She returns to National City and zips through the DEO too fast for people to see much more than the red streak of her cape.
In the locker room attached to the room Kara trains Mon-El in, the one where she exclusively is allowed to break cinderblock and let off some steam (not nearly as much as she did earlier), Kara rubs the frozen tears off her cheeks and out of her lashes, and they crumble into the sink. Her hair has curled more than usual from the overexposure to her heat vision, striking something in her. She stares at her face in the mirror, and recognizes nothing of the girl she was when she left Krypton. She looks like her mother and her aunt Astra.
What does her crest even mean if she has no one to be strong or together with?
Alex catches her. And Kara lies to her face: that she was "overexcited," that she made the plans this morning, and that her pain at Alex leaving her tonight was immature. That she isn't mad – that lava is not smoldering inside her, waiting to devour.
That is what you do when a friend comes to you because they're afraid you're mad. You lie and reassure them, because if you lose control and solar energy explodes from you like fireworks, they will never come back.
The only thing that finally snaps her out herself and her raging pain is protecting M'gann and then the lockdown nightmare that comes next.
(This miserable lack of trusting anyone is just a mirror to what she feels inside.)
.
J'onn pairs her with Alex, because the Danvers sisters are an unbeatable team and they trust each other beyond belief, and Kara wants to kick her feet and punch the floor so hard the stone will shatter like glass. But it never occurs to her that Alex couldn't be anything but Alex. (Not being herself, but still Alex.)
In the freaky darkness of the DEO lower levels (it makes Kara nervous when she can't see through the walls), Kara feels compelled to come clean. In whispers she confesses she was mad, her feelings were hurt, and Alex has the gall to say that she doesn't want to feel bad for spending time with Maggie, so Kara retaliates with the final truth: even though her parents saved her life, they set her adrift in the stars, alone and asleep, with a necklace for company, and she will never see them again. And Alex going along with plans on the one day of the year Alex is supposed to be there for her and tide her through this pain – feels a lot the same way. When she was thirteen, confused and helpless and didn't even speak human language, Alex became everything she lost: mother, father, aunts, uncle, cousin, best friend: her whole world.
Alex promises never to abandon her, but she…doesn't she understand that she already did? An apology won't mend the pain she felt earlier, the remains of which swirl and shudder within her now, like a tsunami, or a planet-quake.
.
She's ashamed of the relief that courses through her at Alex not being Alex. Maybe that's why Alex has been acting wrong all day.
(It's also shameful how much Kara wants to hit this alien wearing her sister's face, speaking in her sister's voice, mocking her silly little feelings.)
(And yet she means it with every single solar-powered cell in her body when she growls her threats of what she'll do to this filthy alien if it's hurt her sister.)
She thinks it'll all go back to normal, that everything will be better, after the real Alex shows up, after they terminate the lockdown. Then Alex remembers the concert she was suspended from the ceiling during in a cradle of White-Martian-goo and rushes off to call her girlfriend.
(The sympathetic, normal part of Kara understands; Maggie has probably been really worried. But the abandoned thirteen-year-old girl inside her rebels that her big sister won't comfort her and apologize to her first.)
Something about having real Winn back after that convincing impersonator drains Kara of her anger towards him and James, and she lets him go. (She could stop him, everyone knows she could stop them both, but maybe they need a chance to help, too. Someone should do something good with today.)
She has no energy left today, and she does not deserve the joy that flight gives her, and so after she changes she walks back to her apartment, trying to soak in the light and sound of the city, remind herself that there is so much good here, and so much to protect.
She ends up watching sitcoms with her knees to her chest, all cried out.
And then Alex actually comes to her with a cupcake, with a lighted candle and a K that Alex got for her, and all her relief rushes back up, and everything is so normal when Alex has to remind her not to blow the cupcake into smithereens by accident.
But Alex remembers the White Martian's conversation with her. And Kara knows painfully that Alex made her own choices today, at least until she met up with her in the DEO.
Alex reassures her that she won't go anywhere. Kara believes her, and lets Alex shift the subject to romance, because that's what sisters do. (But Alex is wrong, all the pain is not about her feelings for Mon-El, it's about Krypton and Earth and everything that comes with it. Last year, she exploded in a mess of anger that she realized was about never getting to have a normal life, Kryptonian or human. Now, she realizes her anger is pain and fear over the possibility that she will never have anyone to love her again.) (She misses Cat.)
And then her sister goes home to her girlfriend and Kara lies curled on her bed, more tears seeping out of her. She already grieved explosively (it's a miracle she didn't solar flare), and now she cries in her apartment, a lost little Kryptonian girl.