My apologies, and thank you, to those of you who brought up my mistake in the last chapter—I feel terrible but I somehow overlooked that Kara's glasses are lined with lead! Shame on me as a fan. That being said, I will not expand on that dream sequence any farther (I did have a possible plan for it, but I don't want to leave such an obvious error in this particular story, and it wouldn't be fair to you guys if I edited the previous chapter, so live and let live).
KARA'S APARTMENT—Present time
Kara opened her eyes to the sound of harsh, teethy whispers.
"She's in too much pain—"
"Alex is right, Mr. Olson. She can't wait much longer."
"Okay, there's still the issue of moving her. James is right in that she's in a lot of pain—and rightfully so. She shouldn't be moved without a proper med evac."
"What if you bring the equipment here?"
"Wel—that's actually not the worst idea you've had. It might take a small while, I do not have Supergirl's speed."
Kara made an unsuccessful move to turn her head to find the disembodied voices, "Gah!"
"Kara?" Alex inquired, appearing from the darkness. The space was only lit by the candles now, the manual crank-powered lantern set on the edge of the coffee table. Alex crouched beside Kara, who was trying to catch her breath, "Hey, shh, you're okay." Alex tenderly placed one hand on the side of Kara's face. "Here, follow my finger."
Kara's half-opened eyes lazily traced the path Alex made with her index finger in front of her face. "What's going on?" She mouthed, thick strands of saliva adhering her lips together. She repeated herself, not above a whisper.
At that, the familiar face of Hank Henshaw appeared above her. To her surprise, he smiled a little, but his eyebrows remained in their perpetually raised position, "Supergirl."
"J'onn, there's some sort of invisible monster thingy." Kara rushed.
Hank gave a definitive nod, "Mr. Olson has already informed me of that much. As far as my knowledge goes, there was no such beast on Fort Rozz, but without computer access to the database, I can't be sure." He had already explained to Agent Danvers and James Olson that the generators that the base was running on right now were actually their secondary set. The EMP killed the first, which were capable of keeping all systems running; the secondary only kept essential systems—namely the locks on the doors—on. "DEO's working with National City Power and Light to turn things back on, until then it's radio silence. I took a trip around the city, but I didn't see anything."
"You have your powers?" Kara's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Even though that much was obvious, he was standing here, in front, of her as Hank Henshaw.
"My abilities aren't based on electromagnetic energy. I'm just me, I'm afraid."
"You—" but her words where choked off in a sudden intake of breath as the pain caught up to her concussion-muddled mind.
Alex frantically pet her sister's hair, "Shh, Kara, just breathe," she looked up at J'onn and James. "Alright, we need to get to work. J'onn, take James with you, and pick up Winn Schott. I'll make a list of what we'll need." It was doubtful that Winn would believe that Hank Henshaw was getting him up at three in the morning to try and save National City from the power-outage from hell, so maybe James would make it a little more convincing. "Can you fly with two people?"
"No problem."
Alex snatched a Post-it pad and a pencil from the end table beside the television, and began scribbling down her obtuse 'DEO shopping' list. After well-over a minute of writing, Alex crammed several of the Post-its into his hand, "Please hurry, sir."
He nodded and started for the door.
James gave Kara's hand a final squeeze, "Be right back." Kara had seen him standing over her from his place behind the sofa, but she had not noticed his hand around hers. Hers dropped down beside her as he followed J'onn out the front door.
James voice carried as the door closed behind them, "I don't, like, have to hold your hand, do I?" while Hank gave him a sideways, yet award-winning, look of supreme annoyance.
And they were gone.
Kara found herself looking up at Alex, who was still kneeling dutifully beside her. They stared back at each other for several long, silent, serious seconds, then Kara moved to adjust her busted arm and released how heavy it felt. Raising the broken limb a little, she inspected it in the soft light of the candles. Along both the front and the back of her arm ran a long piece of …metal?...duct taped from palm to elbow. Kara gave Alex a confused look, who bit her lip and then said stoically, "You need new salad tongs…"
After a beat of silence both burst into laughter—well, Alex did; Kara scrunched up her nose and grinned manically.
"How dare you, those were my prized salad tongs," Kara wheezed and Alex fell backwards onto the floor in a hysterical fit of laughter, and then tried to recall the last time she even saw Kara eat a salad.
"Okay, okay," Alex said catching her breath and waving her hand like it was the white flag of surrender, "You need to rest."
Kara rolled her eyes—Fantastic, back to Dr. Alex. "What I really need is to figure what happened, and what I need to do to fix it."
Alex's face returned to is serious resting-state, "No, Kara, what you need to do is focus on you. Look, I can't imagine what it's like to have the whole world resting between your shoulder blades, to have history have its eyes on you—but I know what it is to have to give up the tiny sliver of control you have in life, to trust someone else—but that's what you have to do. You have to trust me. And J'onn and James and Winn, and the rest of the world, to take care of ourselves once in a while. And to take care of you."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Flashback (from How Does She Do It?)—Supergirl saves the city from the Lord Technologies bomb by flying it, literally, up up and away from National City, as Hank Henshaw urges her to throw it over her communication headset.
Kara honestly did not think she was in danger. Then again, she did not not think she was in danger, either.
Kara rarely felt invincible, even before she was taking on escaped alien prisoners and metahumans and downed airplanes; Kara was well aware that she was not unbreakable. If fact, she felt terribly fragile a lot of the time, like when she had to take Ms. Grant's verbal abuse with a smile, all while being called the wrong name. Kara had lost everything, her parents, her culture, her lifestyle, her planet—to a big extent, her identity—except for her name. So on the days that Cat Grant barked and sneered, insulted her intelligence and fashion sense, without even pronouncing her name correctly, Kara felt fragile.
Or like when she would catch Alex, in her rare moments of softness, looking at a picture of Jeramiah Danvers she kept hidden deep within the pockets of her wallet, when she thought she was alone. It had only happened two or three times in a dozen years, and Alex had yet to realize she'd been caught, Kara had walked in on Alex with her wallet on the table or desk in front of her, not touching it. Staring at the soft-worn photograph with a look that Kara had never been able to place with one single emotion. How could she look so helpless and so singular at one time. Kara wondered if she had had a photo of her own father, would she be able to look at it so?
Or the first, and, hell, every time she saw James Olson, someone she shouldn't—couldn't—have, Kara felt fragile.
But when she took the bomb, she was not worried. Mainly because she wasn't thinking about her.
As she rocketed upward into the sky, the timer of the bomb ticking away just inches from her face, Hank bellowing in her ear, she thought about her mother, take care of Kal. And she thought of Eliza, take care of your sister. And she thought of Ms. Grant, take care of my son. So as the bomb detonated, that's all she thought, Take care.
She was unconscious hundreds of meters before she hit the water, so why could she remember what it felt like on impact? How come she knew what it felt like to drown?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
KARA'S APARTMENT—Present time
Kara gasped, suddenly, her trunk raising off the couch several inches before she flopped back down, squirming and groping for air.
Alex heard a strangled, desperate noise. She was staring out the window at the time—she'd just gotten up to stretch her legs—less than sixty seconds away, and she scrambled towards the sofa.
"-Lex!" Kara gasped hoarsely.
Alex skidded to a halt, clumsily, on her knees, "Kara, Kara, Kara!" Alex was pressing her ear to Kara's chest as she tried to calm her small thrashing, "Easy, easy, Kara, hang on. Hey, shhh."
Alex was up and sprinting, Kara watched her with pleading eyes from where she was suffocating loudly on the couch. Alex was opening and slamming kitchen drawers, then tearing through the living room to the desk beside the bed, and then she was back beside her sister.
Alex's fear of a collapsed lung was brought into light. In her head she visualized the leaking arteries beneath Kara's broken ribs, steadily filling the space between her lung and her chest wall, the hemothorax now suffocating her.
Alex grabbed Kara by the upper arm and turned her onto her side as best she could, all while Kara reenacted a fish out of water. Alex cranked the lantern like her—no, Kara's—life depended on it, and powered in on.
Alex was talking as she was acting, lifting Kara's arm up over her head and pinning it down with a sofa cushion, "Kara, you have blood in your chest, it's collapsing your lung." She spoke morbidly calmly as she moved the bandages aside from Kara's ribcage, and doused her side with rubbing alcohol, "I'm going to remove it, but it's going to hurt. Stay calm."
Somewhere in Kara's panicked, dying thoughts, she wondered if Alex planned on removing the blood or the lung, but judging on the small hole Alex began carving in her side, it probably wasn't the lung.
Kara felt a scream contract deep within her, but couldn't manage to let it out. Alex still spoke soothing words as she worked, "It's going to be okay, shh, Kara, you're going to be fine, just hang on." Alex was duct-taping a handful of crazy-shaped drinking straws together, half-hoping Kara didn't notice she was defacing one of her prized possessions. One of Kara's greatest first accomplishments when she first arrived on earth was collecting all eight of her favorite cereal's Krazy Drinking Straws prizes from the cereal box. She never used them now, but could never bring herself to throw them away—despite Alex's attempts during 'spring cleaning'. And now here they were, every color of the rainbow and neon pink, bundled together with silver tape and drenched in isopropyl alcohol.
Alex gave Kara one last apologetic look before she forced her McGuyvered chest tube between her sister's ribs. Kara managed to scream then.
Alex applied the last piece to her contraption—a Zipblock Freezer bag—to the protruding 'Krazy' ends and taping the bag around the end of the "tube" as the blood began to evacuate Kara's chest. Alex soothed, "It's over, it's over, just breathe. It's okay."
Kara stopped sobbing long enough to inhale sweetly.
"Just breathe." Alex repeated several times; to her sister or to herself she was not sure.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alex couldn't remember the last time she bit her nails.
God, it had to have been fifteen years ago, before she realized how unsanitary and kid-ish it was. But, alas, here she was, not ten minutes after having to effectively stab her little sister, and she had already mowed down her left hand completely, and had begun chewing on her right.
She had cleaned up, both Kara and herself, scrubbed the blood off her hands until they were red and raw (Kara's couch would probably not be so lucky), draped Kara in her Supergirl cape, and then the afghan blanket from earlier, and now sat on the floor, wedged between the coffee table and her (yet again) unconscious sister.
Alex had her left hand just barely resting on Kara's splinted hand, with her right hand at her face, biting her nails. She watched Kara anxiously.
Kara looked…unfamiliar. She was a strange color, grey and dim—maybe it was the candlelight. And she was covered in a sheen on sweat, her hair stuck to her neck and face in sickly ringlets. Her jaw was clenched, her teeth grinding a little in her sleep, the strain evident in her temples.
Alex thought about the time Kara had been fished out of the ocean after the Lord Technologies bomb incident. She remembered the bile returning to her stomach from her throat as she heard over the comms We have her, sir. The recon team was informing Director Henshaw that they had extracted Supergirl's body from the water. Alex had been beside her from the moment the helicopter landed. The look of her body was awkwardly misplaced—Supergirl strapped to a backboard. It was surreal.
Alex realized she had stupidly began to cry. Looking at Kara now…this was too real. Kara Danvers wasn't zooming through the skies this time, and she still bled red. Her little sister, the one she never wanted, almost died tonight.
Alex was tired, tired of pretending she was okay. Tired of pretending she was incorrigible, tired of pretending watching Kara take on foe after foe was okay for her.
"Hey." A breathy whispered brought her back to reality.
"Hey," Alex responded, leaning in closer to Kara, whose eyes were squinting as if facing harsh light.
"Crying?"
Alex vigorously wiped the tears from her face and shook her head. With a sniff, "No, no, I was just…how do you feel?"
"Hurts." Kara forced a swallow, "Alive. Thank you."
Alex smiled, still trying to staunch the tears, "Yeah. Just stay that way, okay?"
"Deal." Kara searched her sister's eyes, "Why…crying?"
Alex scoffed, "You scared me, Kara. You—you can't…you know what?" Alex leaned back a little, her expression softening, "You don't have to be Supergirl." Kara began an exhausted protest, but Alex continued, "No, listen to me. The world already had Superman. You just had to be 'Kara'. The universe owed you that. It kills me that you're not bitter, or angry, or a little bit selfish; that you're willing to give everything, even before you put this on," Alex held up a corner of the cape that was draped over Kara, "I had—we all had—taken these huge strides to make sure you got a chance to just be Kara Danvers, but you ended up Supergirl all the same. I realize now, that those two people are indistinguishable.
"I just want you to be my sister, Kara. And I want you to be my sister for a long, long time. Maybe it's a human trait, to be grossly selfish. But I don't want to lose you, Kara."
Alex had eased herself over Kara, and was not technically hugging her, but it was close enough.
Kara was about to wheeze a response, but here was a frantic banging on the door—so surprising that Alex jumped a little.
"Alex, it's me!" It was James, for the second time that night.
Alex reluctantly left Kara's side to unlock the door.
James stumbled inside like he had just crossed the finish line of a marathon, tossing a duffle bag full of Alex's demanded supplies on the floor.
"What happened?" Alex asked.
"That 'invisible monster thingy'," he huffed to catch his breath, "Hank found it. Well, it found us."
His words were emphasized by the sound of a crash outside—like a sedan being hurled from a rooftop…
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alright everyone, hope you enjoy this installment! Things are progressing a tad slower than anticipated, but I had a couple reviews wanting a little more from Alex, so I hope this satiated that. It will be a few days before the next update, but as always, thank you for reading and feel free to comment.
Regards : )