Carter's words were slow to come. "I… don't think so?"

Raina huffed out a laugh, and swiped at her eyes to find her tears gone. The area around the mini park was empty, as it usually was. It was far enough away from anything important that Raina and Carter were the only visitors. "There's a reason for that."

"There usually is," Carter said, and then winced so hard it looked painful. "Oh god. Sorry."

"It's fine." Raina told him, and then for the first time, she told someone her truths. Being pulled into a rental van, blindfolded, gagged. The days she spent in her own basement, shaking with fevers and arm aching from the IV full of god knows what. Even after she'd been rescued, they'd never been able to identify what the substance was. It had been drugs, and a little biological something or other.

To be honest, Raina didn't even want to know what it had been. It didn't have any lasting effects, at least.

"They put out an Amber alert for me," Raina said morosely, staring at her hands. They looked like they always did — her wrists knobbly from when she tried to yank her hands from the padded cuffs. "To deflect suspicion. They participated in search parties, even."

"Um," Carter said. "That's. That's messed up."

Raina shrugged, and subtly checked her eyes again. No more tears. That was relieving at least. "I'm amazed they even found me, to be totally honest. They had all they needed to keep me down there until they hit the wrong strain and I couldn't do it anymore." She swallowed, her sore throat mixing with the memory until she could practically see it through her old, delirium filtered eyes. The police breaking down the door, George helping her off the table. She hadn't been able to stand unaided for a week. "I'd managed to… I don't even know. Maybe it was a noise. Maybe it was a splatter of blood that got stuck in Mom's hair. They found some evidence that they were lying, and they got a warrant. And then they found me." A last shrug, more to burrow into her jacket than anything else. The warmth was far from her memories of that basement. "The end."

"Actually," Carter said. "Not to you know, be rude but… That sounds more like a beginning." He chuckled, nervous, but finally trying to catch her eyes. "Raina, you survived that! That's like an origin story, like you're a superhero!" Carefully, slowly, he laid a hand on her shoulder, When Raina didn't flinch away, he gripped it hard enough that she had to look at him. He looked earnest, and very, very Carter, like he'd been distilled down to his best parts. "You aren't the same person you were back then, right? I don't know to what extent, or even if it's just how you do your hair but Raina, for the hand you've been dealt you've managed to lay down the law.

"Honestly, I'm in awe, and I was ages before this. You're so smart, honestly you are." He snorted. "Look, even my mom things you're awesome, and it takes a lot. You're coherent about your thoughts, and you've got a lot of them. You know what you want, and you're blazing a path for it. You can't tell me that your parents were the end of your story."

Raina hugged him again. It was more awkward than the first one, mostly because they were both sitting on an unyielding park bench.

Still buried in the coat Raina had never seen Carter wear before today, Raina said, nearly rhetorically. "You know the way to my heart?" Raina said, almost rhetorically.

"Your stomach?" Carter said, because he thought it was a joke. Raina squished him tighter, and he coughed. "Um, sorry. No."

"It's why I like Supergirl," Raian told him, and let go. She could feel the box closing back in over her awful memories as she spoke, her reporter surfacing instead of her wounded child. "It's why you should probably become a therapist. Stories."

"Stories?"

"Stories," Raina said again, and smiled. "That's what Supergirl is. She's stories — endless possibilities of stories. She could have been from a thousand universes and she chose this one. I like Supergirl because of her story — the fact that she saves people, the fact that she's an alien and in no way dented to us and yet she saves us, for nothing more than a thousand fractured stories across news platforms that don't know her. That's why it's her." Raina stopped for a breath, ignored the way Carter was staring at her like she just admitted she'd written Harry Potter. "That's why I love working at CatCo, too. Your mother recognizes that we need to have truth in our stories. She knows that we need to acknowledge what's happening in the world. Everything is a story, even our lives."

"I think you should probably write Hallmark cards," Carter told her. "Ditch this reporter gig. You'll make millions."

"But then I'd be lying, and I just can't have that."

"True."

Raina laughed, and so did Carter. Her throat ached, and it was cold, and the tree was the saddest thing she'd seen in a very, very long time, but that didn't matter. Friends were almost as awesome as stories were, and Raina was grateful for everything.