Alex was antsy. She was huddled into herself on the far side of the couch, ignoring the movie, phone clutched in hand. Maggie had watched her get more and more restless as the evening progressed.
Instead of the cheesy rom com in front of her Alex's thoughts were on the day's events. Kara's dishevelled appearance. Kara brushing off their plans for tonight. Kara shouting at Winn.
She shook her head in a bid to try to clear her thoughts but her mind continued to replay her day.
Supergirl being thrown through the walls of an old warehouse causing the building to crumble and collapse on top of her. Alex's own bloody hands moving rubble, trying to unearth her sister. The image of Supergirl emerging from the debris, uniform shredded, one arm clutching her stomach, the other arm was hanging limply at her side, her shoulder clearly dislocated.
"Just go over there and see her." Maggie said softly, taking Alex's phone away from her, if only to save the case that she had been picking at for the last half an hour. Alex flinched at the fleeting contact.
"She doesn't want to see me. And anyway, its late." Alex sighed. She had thought that things between her and Kara had been getting back to normal but in the last few weeks they had barely seen each other, let alone spoken to each other. Kara was not taking her calls and any texts she got a reply to did not invite conversation.
"Alex please. Just go and see her, put your mind at rest." Maggie pulled a reluctant Alex in for a hug.
Alex let Maggie play with her hair as she relaxed into Maggie's arms.
"I'll drive you over there."
"No. It's okay. You've got work in the morning."
"Kara?" Alex threw her fist against the door again, growing more and more inpatient with every knock.
"I'm going to let myself in." She warned before pulling her copy of the key out of her pocket and letting herself into Kara's apartment.
"Kara?" Alex called again as she struggled to find the light switch.
"I just wanted to make sure you were okay." She continued before her fingers fumbled over the correct part of the wall and she turned the light on.
The apartment was empty. Not only was Kara not there, none of her belongings were either. The apartment was bare. Stripped back to its basic shell.
Alex searched the apartment calling Kara's name, desperate to find some trace of her little sister.
"Kara!"
It was getting louder.
"Kara!"
Kara was huddled on her bed trying to block out the noise of the city. Her fight that afternoon had sapped all her energy and she just needed some sleep. Her stomach still ached and there was a burning pain all along her arm where J'onn had helped her push her arm back into place. Alex was right, she should have spent some time under the sun lamps.
She groaned as she was assaulted by another blast of super hearing. She could hear the baby crying in the apartment building across the street. The angry drunk shouting at his young son as a bottle shattered a couple of blocks away. Through it all she could hear her sister shouting her name desperately. She had to shut them all up.
Controlling her powers had always been hard, but recently any control she once had was slipping away. The super hearing was the worst. Every little creak and drip in her new apartment was amplified. The ancient heating system groaned as if in pain and the whole building shivered in the wind. Sleeping here was impossible. Her old tricks for blocking everything out just didn't work anymore and the stress was making her other powers worse. There were the random bursts of x-ray vision when she wasn't wearing her glasses, bursts of super strength when she was just trying to pick up a glass or shut a door and yesterday, when she was rescuing a child from a car wreck, some petrol fumes had caught in her throat and the resulting cough had sent her freeze breath all over him. The poor kid had turned blue with the cold.
Across the city, she could hear Alex again.
"She's not here Maggie. It looks like she moved out a while ago judging by the dust."
She could just about make out Maggie's reassurance from the end of the phone and Maggie begging a worried Alex to come home so they could figure out what to do together.
Before she knew it, Kara was flying high above National City, the wind in her ears blocking out most of the unwanted sounds from the city below.
She broke the sound barrier about ten miles outside of the city, high above a quiet neighbourhood. The resulting sonic boom pierced her ears, the noise reverberating through her bones. She suddenly felt her strength leave her body and she began to tumble out of the sky, disorientated and completely out of control. She hit the dry dirt of the field below hard, sending a dust cloud up into the air and began to cough heavily as a result.
Angry tears began to drench her cheeks as she struggled to pull herself out of the crater her crash landing had caused. She could still hear the noise of the city and she could still hear Alex. Somewhere through the chaos of National City, Alex was with Maggie.
Kara tried to block out everything and just focus on Alex but it was all too much and she was losing control. First, she could see the skeletons of the occupants of the only house within sight of where she had landed, they were up against the windows, peering out in search of the cause of the loud bang. Then her heat vision kicked in, scorching a patch of dry grass a couple of feet away from her. She screwed her eyes up to try to stop any further outburst but this only gave her a headache, her whole body started to shake from the pain and built up energy.
Without even thinking of the consequences she focused the massive beams of solar energy from her eyes to the ground draining her anger as well as her power. The resulting explosion sent her stumbling backwards to the ground again.