"Selah." Kara did her absolute best to keep her voice hushed and calm, but the girl still shrunk back into the corner, refusing to open her eyes. "I know you probably don't want to talk right now. And that's okay, I'm just going to sit with you, alright?"

Selah didn't reply.

Kara chose a spot on the floor a few yards away from the girl, not wanting to make her uncomfortable by sitting too close. As she sat, she took the opportunity to look around her again. Not much had changed in the mindscape, if anything. The walls were still blank and dingy white, and the floor was as hard as Kara remembered. Selah didn't seem bothered by the emptiness, as she sat in the corner opposite Kara, her arms tightly wrapped around her legs and her head tucked down. It didn't seem like she had been healing up the way that she normally would; Kara could see scratches and cuts along her arms, as well as fingerprint-shaped bruises from where she gripped her forearms too tightly.

"I'm just going to sit here with you," Kara repeated, mostly for herself. Selah shifted her weight nervously.

This was probably the tenth time that Kara had re-entered the void since her initial visit. She was beginning to lose count; all the time she spent there blended together in her mind. Alex had advised them to space these entries out a bit, to avoid Selah becoming overwhelmed, and it always killed Kara to leave the girl alone there. Sometimes Selah pushed her out, as she had done the first time, but there had been a few times where she let her stay until Kara had to go. They had also decided that having two people entering Selah's mind at once was too much, so Brainy and Nia had re-configured the crowns to allow Nia to stay grounded in reality while just Kara entered. Now Kara went in alone every time, and would spend a few hours sitting with Selah, usually in silence.

"You're not real," Selah said suddenly, staring straight ahead.

"I am real," Kara replied.

"You're not. What do you want, Beta?"

"Selah, I'm not Beta." The girl snorted, rolling her eyes as she stared at the wall opposite Kara. Desperation sat heavily in Kara's stomach, the familiar feeling she had felt when she cut off Selah's fingers, when she had watched as Reign killed all of her friends, when she had arrived just seconds before Alex drowned, not knowing if she had come too late, and all the way back to when she was a child and she watched her planet explode.

"I don't want to lose you," she whispered quietly. Selah didn't react, but something in the middle of the room caught Kara's eye. When she looked directly, there was nothing there, but in her peripheral vision, she could see a disturbance in the air as it seemed to vibrate and twist. It reminded Kara of looking up at the night sky through the light pollution in the city. Sometimes it seemed like she could see the stars, but when she looked directly at the light it would disappear.

The thing in the center of the room appeared to be getting stronger, however. Something was beginning to take shape, flickering and shaking violently, but Kara could make out a vague outline. It was a dark rectangular object, long and thin, still quivering with the energy that pulsated through the room.

Perplexed, Kara turned to look at Selah, to see if the girl saw it too, but her eyes were squeezed shut, her jaw clenched. Her face was tense and forced, as she tried to control herself. Glancing back at the vibrating thing, Kara saw that it was beginning to slowly fade and disappear. Once it was finally gone, Selah cleared her throat quietly, relaxing the tension in her neck ever so slightly.

"None of this is real," she repeated hollowly.

"Selah, I'm here. I'm sitting with you." The girl shot a wary glance at Kara, and quickly turned away again. "I'm really here."

"I don't believe you."

"If I wasn't real, why would I keep coming back?"

"I don't know, I don't really want to understand the Machiavellian mind of a sociopath but maybe that's just me."

The room began shaking slightly again, but this time instead of the strange disturbance that had appeared before, the walls themselves were trembling. Kara recognized the feeling from all the times before when Selah forced her out of the void.

"Hey," Kara said, reaching a hand out closer to the girl. "Please don't push me out."

Selah didn't reply, but the shaking did subside a bit.

"Why do you keep coming back?" she asked quietly.

"Because I care about you," Kara replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'm not going to leave you here, I'm going to get you home." The rumbling that shook the void stuttered to a stop, and Selah cautiously examined Kara's face before ducking her head back down onto her arms.

"How long can you stay?" she asked in a voice that was so quiet, the hero wasn't sure she would have been able to hear it without her enhanced powers.

"A little while longer." Selah nodded minutely, and Kara gingerly slid a little bit closer to the girl's corner.

.

"Your friends are persistent," Beta said, appearing immediately after Kara left, and staring in fascination at the place where she had disappeared into. "That's the- hmm," she furrowed her brow. "Fourth time she's come to visit you this week?"

"What do you mean?" Selah asked.

"I didn't think that they could pull it off, entering into your subconscious like this. I guess I underestimated their determination. And you do have a Coluan on your side." She shrugged, pursing her lips. "No matter. Nothing they can do will stop the plans I have here." Selah didn't answer, chewing her lip as she tried to make sense of the mind game.

"That Kara isn't real," she stated carefully.

"Oh, she is very real," Beta insisted. "You know it's true, she's far softer to you than I ever am. Ah well."

"I don't believe you. It's just another one of your tricks."

"Believe me or not, it doesn't matter much."

"Why do you have to be so cryptic all the time?" Selah asked, flexing the muscles in her wrist, feeling irritated.

"How's your conjuring going?" Beta replied in lieu of an answer. "Make anything yet?"

"How do you know about that?"

"When will you finally accept that I know everything? That's an Empath power, isn't it? I seem to remember coming across one of your memories where your mother..." she let her sentence fall away, clicking her tongue. Selah offered no response, and glared coldly at the woman who raised her eyebrows cockily before turning and disappearing into the nothingness.

Selah waited for a few moments, gnawing at her lip as she made sure that Beta was actually gone. Once she decided it was safe, she shut her eyes and carefully began letting go of all the tension behind her eyes that she had been holding in. She held her hands out straight in front of her and focused on a memory from soon after she arrived at the DEO.

She had been lying on her cot, trying to make the world around her make sense, when she had heard Kara coming. As the hero entered the room, she had faked being asleep, not wanting to have to talk to her, or to offer up any kind of vulnerability. Kara didn't seem to mind, though, she had begun humming as she shut the door, and there was a rustling sound as she opened up the bag she was carrying. Selah couldn't stop her curiosity and allowed herself to see through Kara's thoughts what the woman was doing. She remembered feeling overwhelmed by a sense of calm that radiated off of the hero.

Inside of Kara's bag was a yellow blanket, the kind that were sold in fancy bookstores. It was neatly folded up and tied with a blue ribbon, and it still had tags on- with the price carefully torn off. Kara had gently set the blanket down on the end of Selah's bed, trying her best not to disturb the girl, and sat down on the stool in the corner. She had taken out a notebook and began to jot notes down about a case she was working on, but all the while her thoughts were caring and protective, watching over Selah as she slept.

Selah hadn't felt cared for like that in a long time, possibly ever. She'd never had someone sit with her like that, making sure that the world kept spinning and allowing her to rest.

It terrified her a little bit.

She allowed the memory to fade again, wiggling her fingers as she brought herself back to reality. When she opened her eyes, the yellow blanket was spread out in her outstretched arms. It took her a moment or two to recognize that it was really there, that she had actually managed to bring it into reality. She felt fatigue wash over her from the exertion of her powers, and had to blink spots out of her vision. But the blanket remained, a comfortable weight in her hands. She pulled it closer to her chest, hugging it tightly as she rested her cheek against the soft fabric.

'At least when I die in here, I can die comfortable," she thought morbidly to herself. The fatigue kept growing inside of her as she bit back a yawn and curled up on the floor, underneath her blanket.

.

Kara returned again soon after that. Selah had no grasp of time whatsoever, but it felt sooner than normal. She never saw Kara arrive, she always just sort of appeared in the middle of the room, and it took the girl aback to suddenly see her standing at the other end of the room.

"Hi," Kara (or not-Kara) said softly, walking a few steps forwards. Selah felt her stomach twist, and couldn't bring herself to look the woman in the eye. "I'm just going to sit with you, okay? Just like before."

Selah watched through the corner of her eye as Kara settled herself in against the wall, sitting cross legged. She wasn't in her suit, she was instead wearing a DEO sweat suit, with the black and white logo emblazoned across her chest.

Usually Selah was able to compartmentalize her feelings whenever Kara (or not-Kara) appeared, but this time her mind didn't seem to be able to shut off. She couldn't stop thinking about what Beta had told her.

'You can't take the things she says at face value', she reminded herself. 'With Beta it's safe to assume that everything is some form of manipulation.'

Yet something kept nagging at the back of her mind. It felt important, but she couldn't put a finger on what it was. Something in Beta's words felt true somehow, it felt real. The Kara that came and sat with her felt real, much more so than Beta had ever been able to replicate. One of the Director's favorite pastimes seemed to be taking on Kara's form and beating up Selah, or telling her all of the girl's deepest insecurities that she managed to unearth. In fact, the list of people that Beta would impersonate was extensive. And whenever Beta took over these peoples' forms, it was always followed up by an attack. But when this Kara came, she was soft and gentle and careful not to push too far.

'It could just be a trick from her. Getting you to trust some iteration of her must give her power or more control. All of this could be a trap.' As much as she knew the words could very well be true, something about them was wrong, or missing somehow. The first time that Kara and Nia had appeared in the void, Selah knew that something about them felt different. She had chalked it up to Beta growing stronger and learning new abilities, but she didn't believe that anymore. Something in Kara was real. Something was alive.

"Beta says you're real," she said quietly. Kara started slightly at her words, obviously surprised.

"I've been telling you that I am," she replied, a sad smile spreading on her lips.

"I know that this," Selah gestured vaguely to the nothingness around them, "isn't real. I know it's all in my head. I know that Beta is in here too, so technically I guess she isn't real either, if she doesn't exist in the physical world. Prove to me that you are real."

"That blanket," Kara replied. Selah followed her line of vision and looked behind her to the yellow blanket, crumpled in the corner. "I gave it to you two days after I met you. I bought it from the fancy overpriced bookstore down the block from Noonan's, because it reminded me of sunlight. I thought you might need some of that. And when I brought it in to the DEO, you pretended to be asleep as soon as you heard me coming, but I didn't let on that I knew. I sat with you until you fell asleep for real, just like I'm sitting with you here."

Selah examined the woman's face for any trace of deception or manipulation, but Kara seemed open and honest, her blue eyes earnest as she looked back at the girl.

"Not good enough," Selah stated firmly. "Beta can read my thoughts and access all of my memories. As soon as I conjured this blanket, she could have learned all of that. She can regurgitate information from any memory we have together."

"Okay. The night after your brain surgery I sat with you for hours while you were still unconscious, and I held your hand. I didn't want you to be alone. And yesterday, I snuck into your mother's holding cell and yelled at her for a good fifteen minutes before Alex caught me and made me leave."

"Yeah but you can't prove to me that any of that actually happened. It's just me taking you at your word. Nothing you say can definitively tell me if you are really here and that this is really happening. You could be some figment of my traumatized mind trying to make sense of my impending death." She ran a hand through her tangled curls in frustration as she grew more agitated. "All of it, everything that's happened since I came to the DEO could be a hallucination from some drug that the doctors injected me with. I could have been floating in one of their giant water tanks this whole time. Or... I could be dead. I could have died and none of this is real."

"Selah," Kara said, her voice hushed.

"I like science, right?" the girl answered, her hands tugging at the collar of her shirt as she spoke, trying to keep the emotion in her voice at bay. "I like science and math because they make sense. And there's always an answer there that you can prove. One plus one is always going to equal two, no matter how much mind control you're under. None of this makes sense, there's no clear path here. You can't quantify feelings and put it into an equation that will give you an answer. There are no right answers, there are no consistents. Nothing is-" her voice broke as she crumpled back down to the floor, gnawing on one of her fingernails, which was already chewed down to the quick. "Consistent."

"What are you feeling right now? What parts of it don't make sense?"

"I am living a distorted hellscape of the butterfly parable," Selah said slowly. Kara raised an eyebrow, squinting. "Okay, that's a point for the 'you're not the real Kara' team, you absolutely should know what that is. You were an English major, dude."

"Remind me?"

"Zhangzi's dream," she recited bitterly. "He falls asleep, and dreams that he's a butterfly. All he feels are butterfly feelings, all he thinks are butterfly thoughts, he is completely and fully a butterfly. But then he wakes up. And he doesn't know anymore, if he is a man who had a dream where he was a butterfly, or if he actually is the butterfly, and now he's having a dream where he's become a man."

"So this is your butterfly dream," Kara said.

"Or maybe escaping the lab, getting back home, maybe all of that was my butterfly dream. I don't know what is actually real. I don't know if any of it really happened."

"Okay, well, can I offer you an insightful allegory?" The woman sat up a little bit, shifting herself up straighter against the wall. Selah glanced over at her uncertainly before shrugging. "You have gone through so much in the past few months. Or the last six years. Really your whole life. It's been a lot."

"Very encouraging start," the girl muttered.

"Shut up and let me finish. For real though. You have experienced so much, and overcome even more. Your entire life has been focused on survival and constantly fighting for safety and security. Right now, you are at a precipice. All of those bad things you've fought and escaped from are hunting you, like wild animals. And they have pushed you to a cliff's edge, and there's nowhere else to turn. You can't face all of them at once on your own, there's no safe way down from this cliff that you can see. All there is in front of you is fog and uncertainty. You have two choices, you stay and let all of those things catch up with you, let them swallow you up and eat you alive," Kara leaned forwards, smiling slightly. "Or you jump."

"So instead of accepting that a bunch of ravenous beasts are going to maul me to death, I choose to jump off a cliff and fall to my death?" Selah inquired. "Those seem like equally bad options."

"No, you're choosing hope. You're placing your faith on a chance, on the chance that I am real, that I am here, and that I can get you home, because a chance is better than nothing. And by your logic, even if you do fall, you're allowing yourself to hope that there's a chance for survival. When we get to the end of difficult situations, sometimes all that's left is hope. Like Pandora's box. All the monsters have escaped, and now all that we have is the hope that things will get better."

"You know, Nietzsche said that giving Pandora hope was giving her the worst monster of all, because it just prolongs torment."

"I regret encouraging you to take that psychology course."

"I'm just saying. If we follow along your thought experiment, I'm choosing to delay my own demise at the hands of the wild beasts, which would be an unpleasant death, but fast. Instead I put myself into another situation that will almost certainly result in death, and also it will take much longer and be more painful in the end. Instead of letting myself get eaten, I hurl myself off of a cliff, realize that there's no ground below me like some Looney Toons character, and the rest of my life is just falling and waiting until I hit the ground."

"You're forgetting something," Kara said, biting back a smile.

"What?"

"You can fly." Selah couldn't find a retort to this, and instead crossed her arms, flopping back against the wall. The room was silent as she picked at the hem of her shirt.

"I'm scared," she admitted.

"I know. I can't make this decision for you, Selah. You have make this choice for yourself. But if you do choose it, just know that there are a whole lot of people back home who really want you back. I-" Kara closed her eyes, swallowing back tears. "I want you back."

The hero shut her eyes and a vision rushed over Selah of Alex's lab back in the DEO. Nia and Kara were asleep in the chairs directly next to her cot, and Brainy was standing behind them. He seemed to sense Selah's presence, and he grinned, waving excitedly to her. Alex was in the corner, pretending to write a mission debriefing while she really kept an eye on Kara, her protective nature showing. Lena and J'onn weren't in the room, but Selah could feel them nearby, as well as her aunt and Kal-El. She could tell that they had all been at the DEO recently, had visited her room and sat by her bed, in the very chairs were Kara and Nia were currently seated.

The vision disappeared as abruptly as it came, leaving Selah staring at nothing. Kara was watching her with a perplexed frown, clearly unaware of what she had just seen. The emptiness in the room seemed all the more obvious to the girl as she looked around herself. She put a hand on the blanket, feeling the softness against her skin again, and breathed a long, deep breath.

"I want out," she said solidly.