SUPERGIRL: S3EP19 - Avarice (March 2019)

Hal had torn through the Darkstars like tissue paper. Entire corridors full of the walking corpses, decomposing back to dust. Fortunately, they left a clear path for Kara, John and Alex to follow. They were attacked only three times, and though Kara had to be careful to avoid any direct hits from the Darkstar weapons, they dealt with the drones with relative ease.

For Alex, the most exciting part of their adventure through Citadel was the technology on display. The Ancients had really known their stuff. Everything was automated, lights turning on as they neared then disabling when they exited. Despite being some thousands of years old, the structural integrity of the city was still intact. Perfectly so. No rusty doors, no collapsed hallways. It was a testament to engineering on a level Alex had never believed possible.

In fact, Alex was starting to think this would turn out to be easy. She should have known better.

"Ground team, this is Koriand'r on the Starfire. Be advised we have detected two inbound Xanshin ships. They'll be here within the hour."

"Damn it," Kara whispered.

They advanced deeper into the city, and Alex began to grow nervous. The number of Darkstar bodies had started to lessen, and… yes, there was blood on the floor now. John saw it too, though Kara seemed too absorbed in her own thoughts. Hal had been wounded.

"Ring," John muttered, hesitant to disturb the silence, "Where are we heading?"

"Analysis of Lantern Jordan's trajectory suggests a termination point in the city's engine room."

Sure enough, after a further few minutes of walking, they arrived in a large open room dominated by an enormous transparent spherical reactor. The roof towered at least ten levels above them, tiered with gangway after gangway. The sphere was full of pulsing orange Light, just like the Darkstars outside.

Three smaller reactors, shaped like cylinders and towering up from the ground level, were visible on either side. Each tank contained a different type of Light, which appeared to be helping contain the reactor core.

The closest to where the trio had entered was a reflective white, power untempered and pure, like a thin mist. It gave off a sound too. A rhythm Alex couldn't quite understand but knew to be shifting, weaving and ever-evolving. The second contained a sluggish black smoke, giving off a music of utter stillness. A sharp and persistent rhythm that didn't once alter its pitch or tone. The third tank, the furthest away, appeared empty at first glance, but if she stared at it long enough, she could just perceive a warping to the space within. Something was there, she just couldn't see it. The rhythm of this invisible Light was charged, volatile. It peaked then plummeted through the registers she recognised so rapidly it made her ears ring—a tune of… destruction, of turmoil, and of rebirth.

Kara stumbled backwards, performing a warding gesture with her hands in the direction of the reactor and the tanks around it. Okay, there was something Alex was definitely not understanding about Kara's fear of Light.

"Heads up!" John yelled, and a dozen Darkstars descended from the roof, falling towards them with savage shrieks.

"Look!" Alex had spotted a small glass cube that she'd missed before. Hal was locked inside, strung up by his wrists and ankles.

"Go! I've got this." John thrust his ring upwards, traping the approaching Darkstars in a sphere of green. Alex, cursing under her breath, grabbed Kara by the arm and dragged her towards the cube.

"Kara, I get you don't like this stuff, but snap out of it!"

Kara blinked, then started running under her own will. A vent in the roof was pumping orange Light into the cube where Hal was suspended. He was wearing ordinary clothes - a collared shirt and jeans under his flight jacket. His ring was nowhere to be found.

Kara slammed her fist into the cube, and the walls shattered like glass, raining down around them in tiny fragments. Alex ran inside as the last piece hit the ground, and cursing again, grabbed the clamps holding the unconscious Jordan in place.

She unlocked his feet, then reached for his arms. The second she touched his skin, orange light flared around her fingertips, and the engine room vanished.

Alex screamed, stumbling backwards, but all her senses were instantly overwhelmed. She was floating in a sea of orange. Not red, or rich gold, but stark and painful orange light. It swirled around her, convulsing, writhing… and then it touched her.

'I could be yours. Feel my power. Isn't it glorious?'

It… it was glorious. Phenomenal in its intensity and beauty and magnificence. Infinite power. It could destroy the Worldkillers with a single gesture. Finally, Alex could stop being the one who always needed saving. Have real power. Protect the Earth! Protect the universe! Yes, it could be hers. It was hers. She wanted it. Needed it. Desperately, furiously, with everything she had.

The Light swirled around her, eager and inviting, pulsing, attuning to Alex's heart, feeding on her desire, her need to…

She'd been here before, hadn't she?

Craving, desperate and addicted.

Twin flashes tore through her mind. A bottle, hurled in bitter hate and anger at her own sister. Crashing her car, a second chance.

What was it Kara and John had said? Light… Investiture was magic with Intent. The orange Light rippled across her skin, beckoning, soothing, burrowing…

And in a split second, Alex knew this Light for what it was. She had fought a war against this power for years and years. Contained its craving deep within the recesses of her mind and heart.

It was Avarice.

"Alex!"

Alex sank to the floor of the cube, the haze of Light shattering around her and dumping her back into the real world. She threw up, violently, all over the floor.

"Oh fucking hell," she hissed, edging away from the greedy Light, which was still falling from the vent, trying to lick at Alex's fingers.

"Sucks doesn't it?" Hal croaked. He'd woken up, and was hanging limply from the one remaining shackle. His face was shallow, gaunt. When had he last ate or drank? How long had he…

Days. He'd been exposed to that hungering, desperate Light for days.

Alex had never liked Hal Jordan. Never understood him or why he acted the way he did. But that… he'd survived Alex's worst nightmare for days on end and hadn't broken. Alex's respect for him shot through the roof.

Kara landed by her side, dropping half a Darkstar to the ground and ripping Hal's last shackle free. Then she grabbed Alex by the shoulders.

"What happened? Are you alright?"

"Yeah… Yeah, I'm okay." She wasn't. Not really. She didn't think she would be for quite a while. But she'd been strong enough to reject that thing. To throw away infinite power. She could be proud of that.

The Avaricelight actually retreated from Kara's presence, trying to curl up and hide. Alex would have laughed if her head wasn't ringing.

John landed on the ground outside the cube, panting, blood dripping down the side of his face.

"That… really… sucked…"

A dull thud echoed through the engine room, and all four of them looked up towards the reactor above. The Light had taken the shape of an enormous, writhing snake, glistening orange, with beady black eyes that seemed to suck in everything around them. Alex resisted the urge to puke again.

"Now do you see why I hate Light!" Kara snapped. Then, for the first time in Alex's entire life, she watched as Kara lifted her hand towards the snake and displayed her middle finger at it.

"YOU DO NOT MATTER! I WILL HAVE A VESSEL SOON ENOUGH! THIS WAR ONLY FEEDS ME! MY LIGHT WILL BE THE GREATER; MY PRISON DESTROYED!"

"Oh shut up, Ophidian!" Hal growled, rolling his eyes despite being unable to stand up.

"Ophidian?" John asked. He looked very uncomfortable, ring pointed at the reactor cage as the snake slammed against it once more.

"Yeah. Found the data in one of the computers before the buggers got me from behind. The Ancients trapped this thing here. Ophidian: the entity of Greed and Avarice. It's a massive chunk of living Light. John…" He still looked deathly weak, but his gaze held within it an anger Alex didn't like.

"The Guardians lied to us."

"I don't understand."

"They've been saying for years that Will was the only emotional Light. That never sat with me. We've seen Lights form around other Intents before. The universe is full of them. When Sinestro created his fear ring, I started to question. I wondered if there were other Lights or entities that the Guardians were deliberately suppressing. Lights more powerful than ours. This thing is one of them, and I think its the reason why the races of Vega are always at war."

Ophidian slammed against the reactor again.

"THE GUARDIANS ARE PATHETIC! FULL OF LIES AND FEAR! YOU WILL SEE HAL JORDAN. THE PEOPLE'S OF VEGA HAVE BEEN MY TOYS FOR GENERATIONS. MY POWER MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN ENOUGH TO TEMPT YOU, BUT THE OTHERS ARE JUST AS DANGEROUS. WHAT WILL YOU DO AGAINST THEM? WHEN I AM FREE, I WILL TELL THEM ALL ABOUT YOU, LANTERN. WE WILL SEE HOW FORMIDDABLE YOUR GREEN-LIGHT IS THEN!"

John swallowed. "I'm sure they had a good reason, Hal. The Guardians have protected the universe for thousands of years."

"And not once has a Lantern been sent to Roshar or Scadrial. Both planets are off-limits to Lanterns. Both planets with foreign Light." He grit his teeth.

"I need to go to Roshar. Learn what I can about Light, and about these entities. Honour should at least listen to me. Reports say he's the most reasonable of the three."

"I THINK YOU SHOULD WORRY MORE ABOUT YOURSELF, HAL JORDAN. WHEN I AM FREE, MY FIRST STOP WILL BE EARTH. SUCH BEAUTIFUL SELFISHNESS THERE…"

"You aren't going anywhere," Kara huffed. "You're locked up like a fish in a bowl."

Ophidian shied away from Kara's voice slightly, and Alex filed that away for future reference. Kara didn't have a selfish bone in her body. It was no wonder a being of pure greed and indulgence wouldn't like her. But Kara was not perfect. Not by a long shot. She had a lot of anger repressed, and if there were beings like Greed or Will or Honour, an entity of Anger wasn't much of a leap. Alex's sister would have a hard time fighting that.

"WE WILL SEE."

Alex and John snapped alert at once, warning bells ringing in their brains. Pushing back the aversion in her throat and stilling her shaking fists, Alex forced herself to watch the snake's face. It caught her eye and seemed to smile slightly, then it collapsed back into convulsing orange Light.

This creature wasn't acting like something defeated. In fact, it barely seemed to care that they'd stopped it from taking over Hal's body, or that Alex had rejected it.

It had another plan, and they needed to figure out what it was. Fast.

With Ophidian locked back into its cell, it wasn't hard for Alex to gain control of the Darkstars and disable the remaining units.

Unfortunately, that also confirmed Alex's fear. The creature was sure it would escape. Why? Because it had already set a plan in motion.

"The Darkstar heading to Tamaran was ordered to kill the King," Alex said as she sat at a console in Citadel's control room, pouring over the holographic data screen in front of her. Citadel, it turned out, wasn't just a city, but a space-ship as well.

"It was meant to cause a panic on Tamaran, one big enough that, when a second Darkstar attacked Xanshi, they would blame each other and launch a full-scale war. To the winner goes the spoils, and an entity of greed would have all the power it needed to escape its prison."

The Citadel control room was an enormous structure staggered over three levels at the very top of the central tower. This level, the highest, had dozens of consoles scattered around, each displaying one of the city's different systems - power, life-support, shields, etc. To the right of the control room was a giant staircase leading down to the floor below, which was dominated by a Stargate. On the other side of the stairs was another room, with a single throne-like chair sitting dormant on a hexagonal platform. Weird. The walls were all a coppery red, with silver metal pylons forming each intersection, and the keyboards were all constructed from glass. They'd changed from a language she didn't know - presumably whatever the Ancients spoke - to English. It was a beautiful space. The Ancients had been brilliant at interior decorating.

"I don't understand this though," Kara said, tracing a line of code on Alex's screen denoting the instructions given to each Darkstar. Alex had been unable to contact the other machine, which, according to its built-in GPS, was on Xanshi right now.

"It's nowhere near any cities. What's it doing in the middle of nowhere? Shouldn't it be trying to kill the Xanshin president?"

Alex shrugged. It wasn't near any of the population centres, but Xanshin was much larger than Tamaran, about the size of Mars.

"Let me see?" Hal said. He was sitting on a chair behind them, wounds bound in bandages Alex had recovered from a medical wing a few floors down. They'd found his ring - locked in a suspension matrix - but it had been out of power, and he'd left his lantern on Earth. John had spent at least five minutes berating him. Then, when he'd tried to summon his lantern, he'd been unable to, which had elicited a great deal of laughter from Hal. Apparently, the city-shield was preventing him from accessing the pocket dimension where it resided. And with two Xanshin ships one minute out, dropping the shield was a big no.

Hal pushed himself over to the screen and scrutinised it.

"Xanshi is mostly a forest world, I don't…" He froze, eyes going wide. "Oh shit. Xanshi's soil is extremely nutrient-rich thanks to the magma chambers in the planet's crust. If one of the Darkstars self-destructs down there, it could set off a massive chain reaction on the surface. Millions would die."

John, who'd been standing a short distance away, bolted towards the staircase as Hal started rapidly dialling the Stargate from a nearby console. Alex stepped back, heart rate jumping. Kara left to her feet as well, racing after the Green Lantern.

"Kara wait!"

Kara ignored her. The Stargate surged to life, a blue portal settling into the ring-shaped device, and John and Kara both shot through.

The gate shut down, and not a second later, Alex's screen chimed.

The Xanshin ships had arrived.

Kara shot through the Stargate, skidding to a halt on marble. The Stargate on Xanshi was in the middle of a city square it seemed, for dozens of people had stopped to gawk at her and John as they exited. There were also at least twenty guards around the perimeter, all pointing weapons at them.

John had been right, the Xanshin looked much more human than their Tamaraenean counterparts. They were the same size as humans and had similar muscular structures. Their skin was pitch black, their hair equally dark in colour, though highlights appeared to be a popular fashion choice. The significant difference, she supposed, was the exaggerated nature of their figures. Every man she could see looked like an Olympic swimmer, and every single woman had a perfect hourglass figure and breasts at least twice the size of Kara's own.

She was not jealous.

"Stop! Who dares step foot on Xanshi without…"

"Your planet is about to explode!" John snapped. Then he shot into the sky, leaving a trail of green light behind him.

The guards all turned to Kara with stunned expressions.

"You heard him! Move!"

She followed John into the sky, leaving a slightly unnecessary crater in the exquisite marble of the Stargate platform. Arching over the capital - a sprawling metropolis that reminded her of National City - she followed John away from the city and across a veritable sea of green. Hal hadn't been kidding. Forest planet did not do that massive jungle beneath her justice. It stretched across the whole horizon, punctuated only by the occasional bluff or clearing. Pillars of woodsmoke rose into the night across the forest, punctuated by tiny lights beneath the canopy of trees.

It was gorgeous. Like nothing she'd ever seen before.

John's ring, which was now literally ringing alarm bells, led them to a meteor crater after a half an hour flight. They swooped down towards the opening, and Kara's stomach started flipping. What if they were too late?

Someone had opened a fissure in the dirt-covered crater, digging down into the earth below. John, a look of steeled determination etched into every facet of his face, shot into the cave. Kara followed him, being careful not to let her gravity shift the rock of the opening and collapse the entrance. The fissure opened up after a few metres… and Kara fell out of the sky.

"Eeeep!"

Her powers cut out, no pain, no warning. She simply dropped like a sack of potatoes and face planted into the stone. Thankfully, Cisco's suit absorbed most of the impact, but the audible 'crack!' and the subsequent stab of pain in her face definitely signalled a broken nose.

"Excewent," she groaned, sitting up and rubbing her aching nose, blood dripping down into her mouth.

"Rao wat' urts. How does Owiver do wis all de time?" She slurred. John landed beside her, pulling up a screen with his ring and running a diagnostic.

"Are you alright?"

"My nose is bwoken! What do you thwink!?"

As she was berating him, she looked up at the ceiling, realising what she'd missed before. A layer of barely visible steam covered the roof of the cavern—a mist with a distant effervescent crimson tint to it.

"Fucking Light," she muttered. John's ring confirmed it a moment later.

"Sensors indicate a high concentration of X'Light in the caverns beyond. Alert the Guardians immediately; proceed with caution."

"Wonderful," John muttered, turning away from Kara and looking to a tunnel where the Darkstar must have gone.

"Go. I will be fwine," she said. John swallowed, then raced down the tunnel beyond. Kara fixed her gaze on the opening in the ceiling. No way she was getting up there without her powers. She'd have to wait.

The deeper John flew into the caverns, the more his ring yelled at him.

"Warning! Approaching dangerous levels of foreign Light exposure. Return to the surface immediately. Emergency communication with Oa failed. Return to the surface immediately. Geothermal pressures exceeding safe levels. Return to the surface immediately!"

But John wasn't in the mood to trust the Guardians right now. He had a job to do. Save the planet. He wouldn't let it die. He could do this. Prove to the Guardians, to Hal, to the Justice League, that he deserved this. The ring hadn't made a mistake.

Finally, just as he was beginning to feel the heat and pressure even within his aura, he emerged into a massive cavern filled with liquid magma. Bubbles of plasma burst from the molten ground, the very air threatening to burst alight. Everything reeked of brimstone and sulphate.

Where was… There!

Floating just above the lava was the figure of a Darkstar, Avaricelight flaring around its metal form.

In a second, he'd formed a rocket launcher and fired at the walking corpse. The Darkstar saw him but utterly ignored its oncoming death. The rocket crashed into it… and did nothing. The construct shattered around the creature's armour.

John growled, flying down towards the Darkstar, forming an enormous sledgehammer in his hands. He brought it down on the creature's head, confident of a killing blow, but again his construct shattered. Then Light infused steel stabbed straight through his shields, piercing his gut.

And John realised what he'd missed. The creature's orange glow had hidden the fact that its armour was yellow. The one thing a Green Lantern's Light couldn't touch.

The Darkstar punched him in the face, pulling out the blade, and John was sent careening backwards. Gut burning, blood pooling from the wound, he barely managed to keep himself from hitting the lava. His ring was screaming at him.

He turned around, ready to try again - grab a hand full of lava and melt the thing - when the unthinkable happened.

It detonated.

A catastrophic "BOOM!" tore through the cavern, John was flattened against the rock walls, then lava was all around him, and his awareness blinked away.

For Kara, who'd been pacing her cavern near the surface, the explosion started as a dull rumbling in the earth that began growing louder, louder, until the truth of it couldn't be denied. John had failed.

She had to get out of here before she was incinerated.

The air around her began to heat. The earth cracking and shattering to a fine mist of stone and dirt as it cascaded from the fissure above. She tried to jump into the sky, willing her powers to return, but she couldn't get more than a few inches from the ground.

"Come on, come on, come on…"

The stone at her feet began to crack and splinter, vibrations running through the planet itself.

Kara's gaze fixed on the gaseous X'Light clinging to the ground and roof. Watching as it pulsed to the vibrations, as it swirled around her feet. Could she use that somehow? Krypton had no natural magic, that was why she and Clark were so vulnerable to it. The stones began to glow with heat.

But she wasn't on Krypton anymore.

There was energy, power, in those mists, and Kara's body could absorb solar radiation.

Did she dare touch that which she hated so much?

In the end, the decision was made for her. The ground of the cavern collapsed as lava burst forth in fountains of liquid rock, and Kara had no choice but to fall and reach for the Light as she did so. She sucked in a deep breath, as much as her Kryptonian lungs - built for picking apart oxygen from carbon-dioxide - could hold.

A surge of strength flooded her body and mind both, a euphoric, burning sensation that urged her to move, to fly.

And fly she did.

Her nose healed in a split second, and Kara shot up into the air trailing effervescent crimson light as magma flared around her. The Light rolled off her entire body as she flew higher and higher to escape the explosions of fire and death and ash. Only once she reached the atmosphere did she dare look down.

Rivers of lava were ripping apart the beautiful forests, and wildfires were scorching the earth. Settlements across the woods were alight or falling into enormous caverns as they opened up at their feet.

And the screaming. Her enhanced ears heard each and everyone—the wails and cries of the dead and dying.

Tears streaking down her face, Kara Zor-El did the only thing she could.

She descended like a burning angel from heaven and saved as many people as she could.

Alex, Hal and Kori watched in horror as Citadel's deep space sensors recorded the devastation of Xanshi. Life signs blinking out across the planet by the thousands. The entire Western Hemisphere was now aflame, enormous ash clouds clogging the sky. And it had only been ten minutes since it started.

"Kori, you have to help them," Alex said, voice trembling.

Kori looked like she'd be sick any second. The flames in her hair had died entirely, and her green eyes were closed as she muttered a prayer to X'Hal under her breath.

"They are our enemies," she whispered. "This doesn't change that."

"They're still your neighbours, you've lived here for thousands of years Koriand'r," Hal said. "Now you have a chance to put aside enmity and do the right thing. Be bold. Be courageous. Millions will die if you don't do something."

Kori swallowed.

The console beside Alex started beeping, and she accepted the call with shaking hands.

"What have you done?!"

A Xanshin man was staring murder at Kori and Alex, eyes ringed red with tears.

"Captain, the Xanshin ships are locking weapons on us. What do we do?" Came the voice of Kori's first officer on another screen.

Kori took a deep breath, then stood up straight-backed, fire returning to her hair.

"Colonel Aernfar," she said, speaking to the Xanshin ships. "I'm ordering all available Tamaranean ships to Xanshin immediately. We'll help you as much as we can."

"How do we know you weren't behind this!"

"The thing that did this is locked up in Citadel, Aernfar," Hal said, pushing his chair so he was in front of the screen. "I've already sent a distress beacon to the Green Lantern Corps. You'll have all the help we can give you."

Aernfar stared at them for a few moments, before nodding and closing the link.

Kori turned to her commander.

"Set a course of Xanshin immediately, and send out an alert to our fleet. Every ship is to help with evacuation and medical attention." The commander nodded, then he too vanished.

"I'll gate back to Tamaran from here, tell my sister and the King what's happened. At least, with the Darkstars gone, we can use Citadel as a… as a refugee camp." She paused.

"I'm sorry about your sister."

Then she dialled the Stargate and left, the three ships in orbit doing the same.

"Ophidian is still locked up, and if the Tamaraneans and Xanshin can work together, he should stay that way," Hal said, standing up and wincing. "I'm going to Oa. I'll report to the Guardians and get myself healed up."

Alex nodded dejectedly. Kara would be okay; she could survive flying lava and ash storms. But if Kara had been underground when the explosions went off… No. Don't think about that. And what about John?

"What then?" She asked him.

Hal grit his teeth.

"I'm going to Roshar. Fuck the Guardians and their rules. I'm going to learn about Light, all the Lights. They can strip me of my ring if they want."

Alex held out a hand to him, and he took it. They still weren't friends, but they'd buried the hatchet between them for now in mutual respect.

Just as Hal was about to leave, a blip appeared on the long-range sensors.

"What now?" Alex muttered.

An asteroid had appeared at the furthest edge of the sensors - some fifty light-years away. But, not just an asteroid. More like a small moon. And it wasn't orbiting anything. What was that?

"City, run an analysis," Hal said, looking as confused as Alex felt.

'Processing…

'Analysis complete. Mineral composition indicates large quantities of Kryptonite and Naquadah. Speculation based on stellar path and trajectory: apparent debris from the planet Krypton. One settlement detected - population approximately 200,000 life-signs.'

Alex fell off her chair.

The Present Day…

Kara understood why Clark hadn't wanted her to come here now. It was, for lack of a better word, hell.

Ally, Kara's second daughter, had run her into a swirling vortex of white energy. Like a breach, but she knew it was something very different. That corridor had dropped them here. At the edge of forever.

Kara and Ally stood atop a rock outcrop, staring down at a storm. A storm of destruction, of ruin and transformation eternal. A surging refractive mass, punctuated by explosions of red, black and white energy instead of lightning or thunder. It was like the ocean amid a hurricane. Spreading as far as Kara could see, undulating and crashing in on itself eternally. The air around them was damp, heavy not with rain but with the power of transformation itself.

The sky above was pitch black. It wasn't truly black, that was just how Kara's brain created the image. What she was really seeing was a pool of cosmic power - the Nether Force - the prison bars, the roof on this place of nightmares. But there were stars dotting its surface. Not real stars, though they looked like it from where she was standing. No, the pin-pricks of light she could see were universes held in their death throws, forced to relive their last agonising moments over, and over, and over, and over.

"How are we going to get through that?" Kara whispered, holding her daughter's hand.

"The Destroyer keeps the Dark Force reservoir here, a last-ditch protection against interlopers seeking the Forge of Worlds. But I was born on the other side of the storm. My Light is the mingling of Life, Death and Dark. Of Cultivation, Preservation and Ruin. That storm is a part of me, as I'm forever bound to it."

Kara didn't understand a word of that, but she watched, transfixed, as Ally walked them towards the edge of the storm. With every step she took, white light, like soft mist or smoke, began to rise from her body. The storm started to ebb, calming under her touch. Then it parted altogether, revealing a path down beyond, leading to… It was a lake—a pool of molten metal pulsing with music that was at once calming, strengthening and overpowering.

Ally led her to the very shore of the Forge, then knelt down before the metallic waters.

"This is the Forge of Worlds—the very font of creation. I can use the waters to restore your memories if you want. My mother's life, aligned to yours. You can remember both lives, or just hers if you want."

Kara swallowed, listening to the harmony of creation as it reverberated around her. What did she want? She wanted the life this other her had lived. A life with a man who loved her. With daughters of her own.

That was what Oliver had sacrificed himself to give her. The final step, the final choice, had to be hers.

Did she truly want to give up her other life? Her original life. Everything that made her who she was. Ally could wipe it clean. What about the hidden pains of this world? Did she want to put those on her shoulders? She knew there were things she'd yet to learn. They could be horrible.

Oliver had built this world. Had brought them into this new multiverse. He would never give them a clean, unburdened life. He understood doing that would destroy who they were. And Oliver's own nightmares and memories had undoubtedly followed the Paragons to Earth-Prime. But he had built this world, so she had to believe it had a happy ending.

She glanced into her daughters kind, welcoming, gorgeous face, and knew that for truth.

"Bring her back. Leave her my memories, not prominent, just there for when she needs them. But bring back your mother. Let me sleep."

Ally smiled softly, then cupped her hands in the waters. She lifted them up, and the liquid metal shimmered with expectant energy.

Kara Danvers, Kara Zor-El, bowed her head, eyes closed.

"Thank you."

Ally let the power fall atop her head, and Kara Allen was reborn.

Barry is back next chapter :D