Note: So, this is gonna be a big exposition dump, courtesy of the SuperParents, though honestly Jor-El's gonna be doing most of the heavy lifting. It's not gonna be completely exposition. Just mostly. Fair warning.

I do not own Young Justice, nor any characters therein. Please review, comment, or criticize construsctively. Most of all, enjoy.

The Last Daughter

Chapter 3

History and Keepsakes

"The beginning of the end started with the loss of Kandor," Jor-El began, gesturing for Kara to sit down on one of the steps. "There were adverse affects on the geophysical scale, for one. A large portion of the planet, down to the core itself, had simply disappeared. Krypton had lost a great deal of structural integrity, and the destabilization of the core accelerated as a result. We were barely able to launch Kal's pod in time, our own estimates were so out of date." The hologram cast a sorry look towards Superman. He'd never gone into these details with him. Even as a facsimile of the man they'd happened to, it was still a deep wound for him and Lara.

"So there's even more to blame him for." Kara said, anger seeping into her voice.

"Some blame falls to him, yes," Jor admitted. "But not all." He sighed, and ran his hand over his face. It was strange how advanced his systems were. That even though he knew what he was, he couldn't break the habits he'd had when he was truly alive.

"What none of us truly realized early on," Lara cut in, giving Jor some breathing room. "Was what the loss of Kandor meant. The majority of the High Council; industrial centers, civic centers; major stocks of our last resources; some of the brightest minds on the planet. We were thrown into disarray, and what was left of the Council couldn't maintain order, couldn't decide on proper courses of action."

"But… You all had a plan," Kara insisted. "You two, and Dad and Mom. Mass evacuation before the core completely destabilized. Half the council was on-board…" She stopped as realized what she'd just said, in light of what she'd just been told.

"Support for the plan waned in light of the losses, and Zor's hijacking of project resources to save you didn't sit well with those who survived." Lara reached down, like Jor forgetting in the moment what she was. Her hand passed through Kara's shoulder, breaking into disjointed hololgrams. "Debate as to the proper course dragged on for months, until…" She didn't go on. Jor understood why. What was next was going to be even harder for Kara to hear.

"Until what?" Kara asked.

"Until Zod." Jor admitted. "He drew what remained of the military to him, and attempted to lead a coup against the remnants of the Council. The resulting civil war consumed or destroyed what few resources we had left, as well as any time needed to build and fuel ships. Even if the Councilors who survived had agreed to support us, evacuation on any major scale had become an impossibility." Kara drew her knees up and curled her arms around them. Jor had to resist the urge to reach out to her again.

"What happened to Zod?" Kara asked after several seconds of tense silence.

"He and his surviving sub-commanders were sentenced to the Phantom Zone." Kara sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. "I'm sor-"

Kara strode up from her seat, walking right through Lara to the nearest wall, and drove her fist against it. The room shook.

"I can't believe he would've done something so…" Kara sucked in a shaky breath as tears started flowing. "What am I saying? Of course I can believe he'd do exactly that."

"Why did it take me so long?" She asked. "I was sent away months, at least, before Kal was. And he's been here long enough to, what, grow up and start a family?" She didn't notice Superman raise his eyebrows, nor the questioning looks Jor and Lara directed his way briefly.

"I've honestly been wondering on that topic since Kal informed us," Jor admitted. "By rights, you should've have been here long before now. But now that your ship has finally arrived, I can see if I was right in what I assumed happened." His projection rose, and reached into open space, beams of light coalescing before his fingers.

"What are-" Kara began to ask.

"Pulling your ship's flight logs. It wasn't hard to locate remotely, there are only three places in the solar system now with Kryptonian technology."

"You can access those systems remotely? Her ship is being stored in the most secure facility on the planet." Superman asked, partly astonished, partly concerned.

"Kal, we'd surpassed that level of technology centuries before I was even born. Humans weren't even evolved to the point where they knew to live in caves." Jor explained as though it were the most obvious fact. He reached with his other arm, and a similar wave of light began forming. He tossed both waves up, and they shifted, transforming into rough models of the galaxy, lines mapping paths through star systems. "Now this," Jor pointed to the model on his left, "Is Kal's flight path." A fairly straight shot, with some curving allowances for what were marked as nearing-supernova-stage stars, black holes, or planets with excessive gravity. "The other is Kara's." A less direct pattern, that seemed to curve around or stretch out in various areas. "Did your father program your flight path?" Jor asked.

"Of course he did. He based it off of the data you all had, but he coded it in himself." Kara replied, obviously wondering where this was going.

"That explains it." Jor said, a wistful look passing over his face. "All due respect to Zor, but he never quite grasped interstellar travel and astrophysics the way I did. He even admitted as much to me once, during one of our late-night sessions checking data from our deep space probes." Jor waved a hand, and Kara's map fractured and zoomed in to multiple areas. "These are areas I intentionally tried to keep Kal's ship clear of. Supermassive black holes, large planets with intense gravitational fields. Objects with enough power to throw off a person's relativistic timeline in regards to the rest of the galaxy."

"You're going to have to explain that one a bit more, Uncle Jor." Kara said, smiling. She'd hadn't realized until then how much she missed these sorts of talks, even if she couldn't always fully grasp what her uncle and father tried to explain to her.

"Gravity distorts space, and it distorts time. By passing along objects with high gravity, your own passage of time was slowed compared to that of everything else around you. An half hour here, for instance," Jor pointed to a indicator for a black hole, "Would be at least a year or three beyond its range of distortion." Kara held her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. For a moment, Jor was worried that this, of all things, had somehow broken her completely.

Then her hand fell, and he could see the smile on her face, hear the laughter coming from her.

"I'm sorry," She said, "It's just… He was actually terrible at something. And for it to be this, what we were literally all counting on… and he got it so wrong I was late by a couple decades."

"He's not, exactly, my son, y'know." Kal said as they flew back into the airlock. The fortress had zeta tubes, but Kara admitted she enjoyed the flight. So Kal indulged her.

"What do you mean, 'not exactly?'" Kara asked.

"It's not really my place to say. If he wants to tell you, he will." Kara mused on that bit of information. What else could that young boy who looked so much like him be?

"So you're not…?" She questioned, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Well, I mean, I'm not saying that… Uh…" Kal's expression grew suspicious at the smirk growing on her face. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Oh, immensely." Kara admitted.

A loud sound of shifting metal, followed by an even louder banging and ringing, hit her ears, coming from the direction of the labs. Where her ship was being stored.

"Bart!" She heard a voice she wasn't familiar with yell. She could tone down her hearing, but not enough that she couldn't not hear far more than most probably assumed she could.

"Hey, I didn't do it!" She heard a younger voice, the fast one, she thought she recalled, exclaim. "I mean, not on purpose."

"If you broke it-"There was intense warning in the woman's tone.

"Let me just…" The boy's voice trailed off. "Oh man. Now THAT is crash."

Kara decided to take the initiative, and flew with all speed to the labs. She came through the doors to see the boy and a young woman, around her age, with blonde hair and an orange armored jumpsuit, gathered around a panel that had slid out of the back of her ship.

"What did you…" Kara couldn't keep speaking as she came around the ship and saw what he'd released.

Resting on a large sheet of metal was a suit of armor. A deep blue metal formed most of the suit, with red outlines and contours along many edges. Kara could just make out the more basic battle-fabric suit contained within, and the ceremonial cape already affixed to the latches. The symbol of the House of El, in the traditional colors, stood proud, carved into the center of the chest-piece.

She couldn't believe it. She reached out, hesitant to touch it, as if it would disappear the second she made contact. Her fingers grazed the center of the House symbol. She took an unsteady breath, as the horrible reality she'd learned that day clashed with everything the suit represented, what it's very existence still meant. She felt tears begin to build in her eyes, but even she didn't know if they were of sorrow or joy.

"Kara," Of course Kal had followed. "What's wrong?" he asked, clearly another question coming in his head that he felt he maybe shouldn't ask as he reached her and saw the suit.

"It's a," Kara had to pause, taking in a shaky breath. "It's a warsuit. A traditional gift to Kyrptonians who've passed the examinations and been accepted into the military." Her hands, unbidden, traced down the armor, feeling every inch they could. "I'd just finished the examinations, with… with Zod as my advisor and instructor." She had to stop again at that, remembering what he'd done for her, trying to reconcile the man who'd seemed every inch the perfect, honorable warrior, with the man who'd single-handedly doomed Krypton with a pointless civil war, and was now locked in a literal half-life dimension forever. "It took at least a month for results to be calculated, and I'd had to leave before they came in. But Dad, he was so certain I'd made it, so proud of me regardless of what could happen, he… he told me that same night that he'd already had the suit commissioned, before I'd even taken the examination. I didn't know he'd… loaded it in… I didn't think it was even ready." This was good, she finally decided. It was wonderful. She'd seen already, with the fortress and the projections of her aunt and uncle, that Krypton wasn't completely gone. Its history, technology, culture; these had all, by some miracle, managed to outlast the planet itself. And the people had, too. Not many. But there was more of everything now than anyone had suspected, she realized. Now that she was here. With the ship and suit her father had made for her.

So yeah, taking some major liberties with Krypton's history, and probably a bit of its culture too. For those in the know about what Kandor means, it's going to come up again. Not quite in the most classic sense of the usage initially, but it's coming up again.

As far as the changes here, this is mostly me projecting over a lot of problems I've really always had with the Superman/SuperEverybody origin. If Jor-El and his brother were smart enough to know the planet was going to explode, and they were smart enough to be able to build ships to get their kids out of dodge, why the hell wouldn't they try and do that for, y'know, as many other people on the planet as they could? Answer: they absolutely would, and that's what they were always going to do. Monkeywrenches just railroaded their way into their plans for mass evacuation, from the loss of a big chunk of planet speeding up the destruction of the planet, to ineffectual politicians to a civil war. Kara's origin on travelling to Earth is also something I tweaked a bit.

My knowledge of the original story is minute, I admit, but my understanding is that it's either: Zor-El was so stupid when it came to space navigation he planned a route that took decades longer to complete from roughly the same starting point as Superman, or Kryptonite messed with the ship and made it late. Because it's always fucking Kryptonite. Thus, my poor-man's-astrophysics explanation; Zor-El's not-quite-as-good-but-not-unbelievably-stupid route sent Kara past a bunch of space-things with high enough gravity to disrupt her relative time (anyone see Interstellar? It's basically that same thing as with the water planet, where they get stuck down there for a couple hours, but almost 27 years have passed everywhere else because relativity is a right bitch like that). So, because she hit a bunch of relativistic roadblocks/speed bumps on her flight, she arrives on Earth decades after Superman, despite actually being sent away earlier.

Zod being not always totally evil and fascist, and a personal instructor to Kara, is going to be mentioned again, as will her suit and her technical background in Krypton's military as a soldier-in-training-almost. It's both a way of distinguishing her and her actual Kryptonian tech and experience from Superman's Earth ways/stuff (barring the Fortress of Solitude, that is) and Ma-and-Pa-Kent-made suit . And because it's just badass.