"You're sure this will work?" Kara asked dubiously, holding the psychic crown in her hand. She was sitting in Alex's lab next to Selah, who was still comatose. Nia sat beside her, and Alex was working in the far corner with Lena, occasionally muttering back and forth about test results and scans.

"Ninety eight point four percent sure," Brainy replied matter-of-factly, standing stoically next to her. "Empath Andromedans communicate on a very specific frequency that makes them able to connect with almost all alien races, whilst it is incredibly difficult for anyone else to connect to them if they do not wish them to. However, when we utilize my abilities and couple them with Nia's dreaming powers, we can create a strong enough psychic bridge that will put us onto the correct frequency."

"And we both will be able to go into her mind?" Kara said, looking at Nia.

"I am certain that Nia will be able to enter. I will remain grounded in reality, and once she is in, I can bridge you in with her. As long as our connection is stable, you should be able to stay as long as you need."

"This won't be damaging to Selah at all, will it?" Alex questioned, glancing over the top of her laptop at Brainy. "I can't imagine she's used to people entering into her psyche."

"Technically we are just entering into her dream realm. I don't imagine they will be able to go deeper. But they will be able to talk with Selah and have her understand them."

"Are you ready?" Nia asked, looking at Kara solidly. Kara nodded silently and attached the crown to her forehead. Grasping Nia's hand in her own, she shut her eyes.

"Entering in three, two, one," Brainy counted. Kara expected to feel something after one, but nothing happened. Waiting a few moments more, she opened her eyes, assuming she was still in Alex's lab and was about to ask Brainy why it didn't work. However, she found that she was not in the lab, and was instead standing in an empty white room. Nia was standing next to her, and they made eye contact cautiously.

"I guess we're in," she said.

"I guess so," Kara replied.

"Are you in?" Brainy's amplified voice boomed into the room, making both women flinch.

"Can he not hear us?" Nia asked. "Can you not hear us, Brainy?"

"I can't hear you, are you in?" he repeated. "I'm just going to assume that you are. I'll stop talking now."

Nia rolled her eyes and looked around the room.

"This is pretty... empty," she said. "Is that a bad sign?"

"Not sure," Kara answered. The room was small, maybe six feet by twelve feet, windowless, and completely white. "Where's Selah?"

She glanced over her shoulder and spotted a door in one of the far walls. She was certain that it wasn't there before, and hesitantly approached it. It opened smoothly with a turn of the handle, revealing another room. This one was much larger, and was entirely grey. There were windows across on the far wall, but they didn't look out to anything, instead showing only the same dull grey tone.

"Not gonna lie, this isn't what I was expecting," Nia stated.

"Me neither."

"What was it like when Brainy went into your mind?"

"I was in my loft. Nothing was really out of place, except that I couldn't get out. And my cat showed up a few times."

"So why is Selah's mind so empty?"

A sudden memory came to Kara of what Brainy had said when he first entered her mind. He told her she was in a coma, and she had replied that they were in her loft. "Loft?" he had said. "Oh, you mean the physical manifestation of the place in which your subconscious feels most comfortable. That loft?"

Looking around at the grey and white nothingness, Kara found it difficult to breathe. There was absolutely nothing here. Not a single item from the girl's entire life as a form of comfort. Just empty white walls and barren floors.

"Maybe it just has something to do with how we're connected in," she ventured, hoping that was the case. "With her being an Empath and all."

Nia nodded, seemingly satisfied with this answer, but Kara took another long look at the white room, trying to ignore the hard pit in her stomach as she walked into the grey room.

They walked through another five or six rooms, all in slightly different shades of white, black and grey. Sometimes the doors in between were large, while others were barely big enough for Kara and Nia to squeeze through. Some of them seemed to have the tiniest beginnings of decoration, like the vague outline of a poster on a wall, or a hint of color in one of the windows, but nothing was fully developed or solid. Kara had to swallow down a lump in her throat when she saw the faded pattern of her rug on the floor of one room.

Finally they entered a room that had no door leading elsewhere in it. It was long and thin, almost like a hallway, but there was nothing in it at all.

"What happens now?" Nia asked, looking to Kara uncertainly. They waited a few moments for a door to appear, but nothing came.

"I don't know," she poked her head back into the room that they had come from, but saw nothing out of sorts in it. When she turned back, however, she gasped as she saw Selah seated against the wall at the very end of the room.

"What?" Nia demanded, looking around.

"It's her," Kara replied, furrowing her brow. The younger woman looked to where Kara was pointing, but her face remained blank.

"I don't see anything," she said.

"She's right there," Kara insisted. "Why can't you see her?" Nia shrugged.

"I don't know, I've never done this before."

"Okay, well. Stand guard at the door, I'll let you know if anything changes." Nia nodded as Kara carefully began making her way over to Selah, trying to walk softly.

The girl was sitting against a wall with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, which were tucked into her chest. As Kara approached, she looked up but her eyes were misty and white, just like they had been after Beta blinded her in the cell.

"Selah?" Kara asked gently. Selah flinched at the sound, cowering more firmly into herself. "It's me."

"Get away from me," the girl hissed through gritted teeth.

"What?" Selah's eyes began glowing blue, and Kara barely darted away in time from a blast of heat vision that was sent her way. She didn't know if she could get hurt in the girl's mindscape, but she certainly wasn't taking any chances. Taking a few steps back, Kara tried again.

"Selah, it's Kara. Nia's here too, but I'm not sure if you can see her."

"No." The girl's head twitched sharply, and Kara noticed that Selah's fingernails were digging into her skin as she clutched her arms together.

"Hey, what's wrong? It's me."

Selah finally lifted her head and stared squarely at Kara. Her lip was split open and there were deep hollows under her eyes. Her face was gaunt and pale, with tear tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

"This isn't real," she said flatly.

"It is," Kara insisted.

"No."

"Selah, I'm really here. I came to get you home."

The girl didn't respond, instead shaking her head and dropping it back down. Kara noticed blood beginning to run down one of Selah's arms, where her fingernails had broken the skin. She put a hand on the bleeding arm, resting it over the girl's tightly clenched hand, feeling her muscles reflexively tense up at Kara's touch.

"Selah," she said gently. Selah continued shaking her head back and forth, her eyes squeezed shut. Kara felt the ground underneath her shift slightly, and she instinctively reached out to steady the girl. As soon as she touched Selah, the shaking got worse.

"What's happening?" Kara pressed, turning to look at Nia. The younger woman had her arms stretched out and her eyes shut, straining against the waves of disruption.

"Our connection is becoming unstable," Nia replied through gritted teeth. "We have to go."

"Not without Selah."

"Nia? Kara?" Brainy's too-loud voice echoed through the room again, and Kara saw Selah flinch at the noise, putting her hands over her ears. "You need to get out. The connection is breaking up."

"Selah is rejecting the psychic bridge," Nia said. "She's the one pushing us out."

"If you don't leave, there's a chance that you could get stuck in the connection. You need to leave now." Brainy said, reiterating Nia's stance.

"We can't just leave her here!" Kara objected.

"Kara, I don't want to either, but we don't really have a choice." Nia grimaced, crumpling under the force against her and falling to one knee. Kara desperately turned to Selah again, and put a hand on her leg.

"I'll come back for you," she promised. The girl twitched at the contact but didn't pull away.

"Kara!" Nia yelled, and Kara pulled herself away from Selah. Nia placed a hand on her shoulder, but she didn't tear her eyes off of Selah as the connection ended. Suddenly, they were back in the lab, Nia slumped forwards in her chair and breathed heavily.

"What happened?" Alex urged, looking at Selah's comatose form expectantly, waiting for the girl to begin to stir, to wake up.

"It didn't work," Nia replied quietly, studying the floor.

"Why not?"

"She pushed us out. She didn't recognize us, or didn't believe that we were really there."

Kara looked around the room, seeing the worried lines across Alex's forehead and Nia's shoulders still heaving as she caught her breath, and she stood up abruptly.

"I need some air," she said, her words short.

She willed away the tears pricking at the backs of her eyes as she walked past Nia, who was still slouched over as she recovered. Leaving Alex's lab, she made her way to an empty training room and shut the door. The metal wall was cold on her back as she leaned against it, rubbing a hand across her face and trying her best not to cry. Every time she closed her eyes, all that she saw was Selah cowering in a corner, trembling, with her hands clasped over her ears. It was like the image was burned into her retinas, and try as she could, Kara couldn't make it go away.

It wasn't supposed to end like this.

She and Selah had made it home, they had beat Beta. They had won. It was supposed to be over now, and they were supposed to be able to take a break. It didn't seem possible that just that morning Selah had been at her apartment, dripping syrup across the table as she laughed at a stupid joke Kara had made while they ate freezer burned waffles. She had been so happy and so normal, and now she was in a coma.

'We're still here,' Selah's voice echoed in her mind, repeating the words that she had told Kara just before passing out. 'We can't waste that.'

"Yeah, well," Kara whispered back, her voice breaking. "You're not here anymore, Selah."

The door opened, and she turned to see Alex standing hesitantly in the doorway.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," Kara replied, not bothering to wipe away the tears that began spilling out of her eyes as she slid to sit down on the floor.

"She's stable," Alex said as she came to sit next to her. "There were no adverse effects of you going into her mind."

"Except that she doesn't recognize me." Alex put an arm around her sister.

"Brainy and I think that it's safe for you to keep going in, and to try to make her realize that it really is you. This isn't the end." Kara nodded, chewing on a fingernail.

"This isn't the first time she was unconscious for a while," she said softly. "After we beat Beta. There was an explosion, and I blacked out. When I woke up, there was just rubble all around me, the whole building was gone. And in the middle of it," she paused, putting a hand over her mouth as she remembered. "Selah was lying there, limp, like a ragdoll. I thought she was dead. But I went to her, and she still had a pulse, and she was still breathing, even though she was burned all over, and her whole body was bruised and cut up. I didn't have my powers, so I just picked her up and started walking into the woods. I didn't know where I was going, I just knew that I had to get her somewhere safe. I had to keep her safe. For four days, I kept moving her and watching over while she slept. I'd give her water and made sure she was comfortable. But every day, I'd look at her and think, 'Is it now? Is this it for her?'"

Alex gently rubbed Kara's arm with her thumb, watching her little sister's face twist with pain as she continued.

"There were a few times where I thought she died. She stopped moving and she was so still and quiet. But she always had a pulse, and she was always breathing, even if it was shallow. She never died. She never let go. And all of that was for this? For her to get home for a day and then go into a coma?"

"Shh," Alex whispered as Kara began to cry.

"It's not fair," she whimpered.

"No, it's not. But Selah is a fighter. If she can get through all of that, she'll get through this. Don't give up on her yet."

"I'm not giving up." Kara rubbed at her eyes weakly. "I just... I see a lot of people die. And I get that comes with the job, and I'm at peace with it. I think that it's an honor to be with someone in their final moments. But it doesn't get any easier, no matter how many times it happens. It's hard, watching people die around you all the time and wondering if you could have done things differently to be able to save them. I don't want to watch that happen to Selah. I have to be able to save her."

"You will."

"How do you know?"

"You are so strong, Kara. You'll find a way."

"People keep telling me I'm strong lately," Kara said emptily, staring blankly at the wall in front of her. "I don't really feel it."

"I know. But that doesn't make it any less true."

Kara rested her head onto her sister's shoulder, and they sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Alex stood.

"I'm going to go check on her again," she said, squeezing Kara's shoulder even though she knew that her sister was too strong to really feel the pressure. "I'll keep you updated."

"Okay."

.

"Well, fancy meeting you here," Beta said, her cruel eyes glinting as she walked up to Selah, who had been huddled in the corner of the grey room, trying to sleep.

"What do you want with me," Selah asked lowly. "You were just here, wasn't that enough to fulfill your sadistic desires?" Confusion flickered across Beta's face for an instant before she masterfully hid it again.

"We both are still here," she replied. "I won't have had enough until you are gone." She stood above the girl, her hands on her hips as she took in the sight of Selah's bruised body. A coy smile turned one corner of her mouth upwards. "Although I suspect it won't take much longer. Now," she began strolling back and forth in front of Selah, her form shifting from Alex's to Lea's to Kal-El's. "Whose face should I take on for today?" She filtered through a few more before landing on Kara's.

"Not terribly creative," Selah pointed out. "You've been her for the last three times."

"Yes well, I'm not in the business of changing what's working oh-so well for me." Selah was about to retort, but was cut off by not-Kara's fist crashing into her jaw. "After all, you have to hit where it hurts."

Selah felt a warm coppery taste fill her mouth as her lip began bleeding, but she swallowed it down, refusing to spit out the blood in front of Beta.

"I never asked before," she said, trying to redirect the conversation. "How come you can shape shift now? That's not an Andromedan power. Did you steal it from someone else?"

"If I told you then that would ruin all the fun," not-Kara quipped. "Haven't you heard of something called dramatic irony?" She aimed a kick at Selah's head, but the girl rolled away, narrowly avoiding her foot.

"The audience knowing something that the character's don't," she recited. "So I'm just a character in your play?"

"Now you're catching on."

"You're not going to win this," Selah stated, staring evenly at not-Kara, who paused in her attack to stare back.

"What do you mean?" she replied casually. The coldness of Beta's eyes shone through not-Kara's as she gazed intensely at the girl. "I already am."

Selah fell onto her side as the blows kept raining down onto her. She curled into a ball and squeezed her eyes shut, desperately wishing for any kind of escape from the torture.

.

.

.