Disclaimer: Supergirl ain't mine.
A/N: I feel like nobody gives Kara enough Kryptonian love, even though she clearly craves it. So I set out to resolve that, to have each of her precious people bring her homeworld alive again. Also, this exists in some delightful near-future where there's zero drama amongst the fam, and no ship wars, either (but I am a Supercorp shipper, so that might have colored things a bit, but I tried to rein it in as much as I could, lol). If you enjoy, please review!
not only blood bonds us all
Kara loves sunset best, and not for the overly excited reasons that most people admire the splash of colors across the sky. No, Kara loves the sunset because then, sometimes, the flare of light resembles her red star back home.
James realizes this after a while, after he's found Kara hard to reach on clear evenings when darkness is settling in, and a while after that, he figures out why. Quietly, he begins taking pictures, preserving every crimson and scarlet dusk that descends over National City. And he invests in a top-of-the-line camera and enlists Kal-El's help to fly him to the remotest regions; there, he takes long, slow exposures of the stars, where the long arm of the Milky Way arches overhead and other galaxies hold candlelight vigils incomprehensible distances away.
He doesn't know where Krypton's system is, but he knows its sun is still there. He makes sure to capture every angle, just to be sure.
It's on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon that James presents Kara with this careful compilation. Kara cries for a long time, and when he's at her loft next, his photographs are arrayed all over the walls (the nightscapes are strewn across the ceiling), and Kara never seems to stop smiling.
When Alex was young, when Kara first came to this planet and intruded upon a once orderly life, she was annoyed by her new sister's lack of understanding, especially when the holidays come around. She'd bristle at Kara's curiosity—it always felt like an attack, somehow, to have Halloween and Thanksgiving questioned—and it'd irritate her when rituals were upset, when Kara doesn't understand the sanctity of Christmas morning ("You're not supposed to x-ray them, you're supposed to rip the paper off!").
But while Kara fumbles, Kara tries, and in a year or two, Alex gets to have her earthly customs respected without a hitch. It's only later—a decade later, and she winces—that she realizes she has no idea about Kryptonian holidays, and she only even realizes her ignorance when she overhears Kara saying something to Mon-El about solstice festivities.
And she pauses, and ponders, and comprehends in a rush that Kara has not celebrated her sacred days once in fourteen years. Half her lifetime, without Christmas, without the hope and the wonder and sheer shared joy of that.
So Alex holes up with Alura's AI for several hours straight (which causes Maggie to freak out, however briefly, when she's incommunicado) and learns all about the Nova Cycle and its tenants of birth and rebirth, of sunrise and new days and light. She plans for months after that, with J'onn and James and Lena and Eliza and Winn, and when the summer solstice rolls around, she invites Kara and Kal-El out for a day trip.
It takes Kal-El a moment to realize what's going on when they arrive, but Kara understands instantly, and before Alex can finish saying, "May Rao's light shine upon you," Kara has bulled into her in such a fierce embrace that Alex can barely breathe.
"Little tight there, sis," she teases, but it's not a complaint, and Kara doesn't loosen her hold.
Winn learned Kryptonese as an exercise, as a challenge to his intellect and a way to pass the time, and to contribute to his skills as an asset at the DEO. But once the tension over Guardian has faded, Winn realizes that there's a much more practical use for his newfound knowledge.
Kara is surprised the first time he greets her in her native tongue, but then she grins and replies. He holds his own gamely as pleasantries are exchanged, but learning a dead language is tricky, even for a genius, and Kara's using colloquial slang and has a bit of an Argo City accent, and he falters.
But Kara just smiles sunshine-bright and helps him along, immediately and laughingly deciding to immerse him in the language (she refuses to speak to him in English for weeks, and he'd be disgruntled if he'd never taken that knowledge for granted). Soon, he's conversational, and after the end of a few months, he's fluent enough to argue during game night with her.
Oddly, they're a much better team at Catchphrase when they're speaking Kryptonese (Alex and James still insist it's cheating, and Winn just clucks while Kara steals the last potsticker).
Mon-El is still clueless about Earth (and largely clueless about women, and Kara sighs and shakes her head and thinks, That was an interesting mistake), but there's something endearing about his ignorance. It reminds Kara of herself when she arrived, but even more, it makes her think of how Kal-El would've been, if only everything hadn't gone wrong and she could've been there for him.
(But he had the Kents, and they were good people. And Mon-El has her, and she's good people, too.)
But Mon-El also remembers the stars the way Kara does, as tangible stepping stones instead of far-flung pinpricks of light. They laugh about other worlds and strange suns, reminiscing over exotic getaways on the cusp of black holes and the time-paralyzing beauty of the Well of Stars and the way the rings of Aldron-4 look during the twin sunrise.
He reintroduces her to earth and space, to the memories she's half-forgotten and the ones she's made since. And he knows what it means to sleep, to fall into dreams for decades and wake to the nightmare that is another universe. They don't ever really talk about that, but they share the bond, anyway—quietly, somewhere beneath the surface.
And they're friends where their peoples were only enemies, and Kara likes to think she's righted some cosmic wrong, erased a little of her parents' more damning legacy, and Mon-El still isn't certain how to be a hero, but he tries, and the gap is bridged.
For all the bonds and reminisces Kara shares with Mon-El, she feels she shares even more with Lena. There's something deep here, some profound kind of empathy wrought of the striking mirror of their parallels, of their losses and doubts and their desires to prove useful, to prove good.
And Lena believes the same, but she finds herself frustrated at a certain point, once she's told Kara every last secret and let that sunlight into the final darkened corner. Kara's helped her immensely—she even flew Lena back to the Luthor mansion in Smallville so demons could be faced and ultimately put to rest—and it wounds Lena that she cannot possibly return the favor.
She cannot return Kara to Krypton, even though she knows where its star hangs in the sky. There's nothing to go back to there, just an asteroid belt in an orbit that used to house a planet.
But Kara takes her to the Fortress of Solitude once, when Cadmus is executing a nefarious plot and the hero and the Luthor need both sanctuary and answers. And despite the direness of their situation, Lena marvels at the crystalline cavern, is reverently quiet when Kara consults the ghosts of her parents. After their research is concluded, they sit together on the snowy floor and Lena dares to ask about their unique surroundings, about the facets and the ice, and Kara enthusiastically embarks on a nostalgic exposition of Krypton's silicate surface, speaking of massive fractal mountains and fields of shattered gems and deserts with diamond sand.
She misses it. Lena can see it in her eyes, the way the blue dulls.
"Earth is so…organic, and messy," Kara relates with a tempered chuckle. "Krypton was so clean, but not like this, not cold like this," she adds with a wave at their arctic environment. "It was always warm in Argo City, and the view was always breathtaking, what with all those crystals catching the sun-fire."
Lena's heard of crystal caves before, but now—after they've thwarted Cadmus's latest plot—she researches it. She has time and resources, and perhaps most importantly, she has a friend who can fly. Kara's a little taken back when Lena suggests a round-the-world trip, just the two of them, but she takes it all in unquestioning stride.
"What're we going to do?" Kara asks, and, "Spelunking," Lena replies. (To which the hero fixes her with an odd look and ventures, "You mean, like, cave…diving?")
But when they descend into the subterranean depths in Mexico (and in Bermuda, and China, and Australia after that), Kara is no longer bemused or skeptical. She's hushed in awe, and she gazes at these quartz and limestone formations with tears in her eyes and no breath on her lips.
"I know it's not exactly like Krypton—" Lena whispers in apology, because she's used to apologizing, to not being enough, but Kara catches onto her hand and shakes her head and dismisses that with,
"No, it's better. It's here. And maybe home's not so far away, after all."
Upon arriving back in National City, Kara finds one final surprise awaiting her in her loft: on the coffee table, glittering violet, is a flawless amethyst geode. She smiles, shaky, and holds the geode up to the slanting evening light.
The crystals burn like sun-fire.
After M'gann leaves for her brave vocation on her home planet, Kara can't help but notice how morose J'onn is. He tries to hide it beneath his typical gruff exterior, but when he's not barking orders or doting on Alex when he thinks nobody's looking, he stares off into the middle distance with a faint furrow in his brow.
Kara doesn't have to be psychic to know what he's thinking, and she frowns as well and tries to imagine a way to help. They've always bonded over their shared refugee status, but somehow she doesn't feel like empathy and anecdotes are going to cut it this time.
She asks Kal-El, for she's aware that Superman and Martian Manhunter, while not being friends, certainly knew each other for quite some time. Her cousin contemplates their shared comrade for a while and ventures at length that he was surprised to discover that J'onn speaks Kryptonese—"Or, at least," Kal adds, laughing, "he read my mind at the time."
And Kara remembers how she felt when Winn learned her language (and later, when Lena learned it, too), and how it feels to speak with her cousin, to keep a dead language living.
"Do you know Martian?" she wonders, and Kal-El winces and replies, "Nope, not a word."
But Kara's resolve is not so easily crushed, and she hedges a bet on the Kryptonian thirst for knowledge and consults the AI of her mother. Alura's ghost informs her that she possesses a complete understanding of the Martian tongue, and would she like to learn it?
Kara looks at her mother's face, stoic and unblinking, and it's not the same, but she likes the illusion that she can still learn something from her—that there is still some parent-child transfer of wisdom possible. So she spends free hours in the special room at the DEO, listening to pronunciations and consulting conjugation tables and practicing, practicing, practicing.
Martian's a guttural, tonal language, and it's hard to get a grasp on. Kara labors onwards, broadening her vocabulary and sharpening her grammar and inching closer, day by day and syllable by syllable, to her goal.
When she's ready, she strides straight up to J'onn, who fixes her with only mildly curious eyes. She hesitates for a second—Rao, what if she botches the delivery—but clears her throat and offers, in harshly musical Martian, It's good to see you, friend.
J'onn blinks, and his arms fall from their cross on his chest, and he blinks again. Slowly, like the turning of the seasons, his lips curve in a smile. It's a rare sight, possibly as rare as the sound of his native tongue in his ears.
Thank you, friend, he answers, then shakes his head and corrects, Thank you, child.
In both English and Kryptonese, that translation is patchy at best, but Kara knows what he means—knows what that means in Martian, to be called child. To be included as family. To disregard blood and stars and hold tight to tethers of the heart.
Because to Alex, she is sister. To J'onn, she is child. To Lena and James and Winn and Mon-El, she is friend.
And two thousand light years away from where she started, Kara Zor-El is home.