"Go over the plan again for me, please?" Alex asked cooly. She was standing in her lab, leaning over onto a metal table as she tried to remind herself that she wasn't supposed to be interrogating Selah and Nia, she was trying to gain a better understanding of what they were proposing.

That morning, she had been enjoying a rare, uneventful break where she was drinking a black coffee and reading lab reports, but it was all interrupted by a frantic call from Nia, when Selah had a fifteen minute seizure. In the seven hours that had since passed, the girl had two more seizures, and they had made the decision to transfer her back to the DEO for monitoring. Alex and Kara had moved Selah in at the lab, Lena had come to work on recalibrating the cuffs and finding treatments for the seizures.

Alex, Lena, and Kara had been having a quick meeting to recap the day, debriefing on what had occurred and what the next steps should be, and for a brief moment, she had felt the slightest bit of control over the situation, up until they were interrupted again by Nia and Selah. Thankfully this time, there was no medical emergency, but Alex was getting a headache.

"I can open a dream portal for Selah to go into," Nia began, re-detailing it for the third time. "Just like the one I made for Kara and I when we went in to see her. Selah can use that to communicate with Beta in a safe environment that we can monitor, where we can even take her out of it again if things start to go wrong."

"How do we know that Selah will be able to go in and out safely?" Kara interjected, crossing her arms. "What will stop her from getting stuck again?"

"I can connect myself to Nia while I'm in there," Selah replied. "I'll be able to communicate with her, and she can reach me at any time too."

"And you're certain that will work? The bond won't be broken somehow?" Alex asked, pursing her lips as Selah and Nia exchanged a guilty glance. "You already tested it out, didn't you?" she asked tiredly.

"Not in the Beta mindscape," Nia offered.

"Where was it then?"

"Her regular dreamscape. We tried it three nights ago, and everything worked out the way it should. Introducing Beta into the environment shouldn't fundamentally change anything." Alex looked to Lena for confirmation, and the Luthor bit the inside of her cheek as she processed the idea.

"I can't think of any reasons why it wouldn't work," she admitted after a few moments.

"You said you'd be able to monitor the situation," Alex questioned. "What does that mean, you're just monitoring through the psychic connection?"

"I could also set up vitals tracking on this end," Lena supplied. "Heart-rate, brain activity, breathing. That would help us see any physical signs of changes occuring." The room was silent, as they all digested the plan.

"If things go wrong, you're certain that we can pull Selah back out?" Nia hesitated.

"I know that I can get out." Selah replied. "But we need a failsafe. Nia and I set up a sort of psychic code, so that if Beta overpowers me, we can shut down the mindscape and trap her inside."

"What would happen to you?"

"As long as we stop it fast enough, I'll be able to get out of the mindscape, and I'll be sent into the dream realm until we can re-address the situation."

"I don't like that," Alex said immediately.

"It's not going to happen," Selah insisted. "And even if it does, I'll still be alive, and we'll be able to figure out our next move. That's more than we have right now." The director frowned, but didn't push further.

"So?" Nia asked carefully, after a few long moments.

"I want to talk to J'onn," Alex replied. "And Kal, and Brainy, and Lea, and anyone else who can offer us some perspective into what this might entail. We're not doing this without getting as much information as we can."

"Agreed," Lena added. "I'm going to try to run as many simulations with Brainy as possible."

"Okay," Nia said, turning back to smile confidently at Selah. The girl met it cautiously, glancing at Kara, who was still sitting quietly in the back corner of the room, staring stonily at the floor with her arms crossed.

"Kara?" she asked.

"Now you want my opinion?" The hero asked, trying to keep the indignance out of her voice.

"Of course I do," Selah replied, taken aback by the woman's tone. Kara finally sat up in her chair, keeping her arms firmly crossed over her chest.

"This whole idea is insane. We shouldn't even be entertaining it as a possibility."

"What else can we do? Nia asked.

"Wait until we have another solution figured out, preferably one that won't theoretically end with Selah permanently stuck in a coma?"

"We can't wait anymore, Kara," the girl protested. "Things are only getting worse."

"How do we know that you and Nia trying all these experiments aren't exacerbating all the problems? It might not be a coincidence that you start having seizures again right after messing around with your powers."

"We don't have time." Selah said evenly, jutting out her chin. "I can't sleep anymore. And Lena's already put the power dampeners to the max but I can still hear Beta in my head. Every second that we wait and we decide to keep looking into other options, that's just more time for her to get stronger. Waiting isn't an option anymore." She stared evenly at the hero, who stubbornly returned her gaze, her jaw set.

"You seem to already have your mind made up, so clearly nothing I say will make you see things differently," Kara replied. "This is ultimately your decision, so you can choose whatever you want. Just don't expect me to tell you that I agree with you or that this is a rational idea when it's very clearly not." She glanced to Alex, who wouldn't look back at her, and then to Lena, who was chewing on her nails, her expression guarded. "Okay," she muttered, standing up and striding out of the lab.

.

It didn't take long for Selah to find Kara, only a little under an hour. Initially, the hero had made herself relatively unreachable, first shutting off her phone and her comms and flying to the Fortress. Usually the ice towers and gadgets there were enough to distract her from any problem, but today the cold felt jarring on her skin, even though she didn't really feel it. The clouds that puffed out into the air with her breaths were irritating, and Kelex kept asking her if there was anything he could assist with, despite Kara telling him three times that she didn't need anything.

After leaving the Fortress and Kelex, she flew up as high into the atmosphere as she could, to the point where she started feeling the oxygen thin. It made her lungs feel tight and her throat tense, and that helped a little bit. But up there, it was too far away for her to hear much of anything, and the heavy silence made her more frustrated. She found herself wishing there would be a car crash, or a fire, or an elderly woman who needed help getting across an intersection, anything that could distract her from reality, and make her feel useful again.

Once she descended back to Earth, she thought about going to her apartment, or on a walk, or to a sparring room, but somehow all of those options felt wrong and unhelpful. And that's how she found herself in the tiny kitchen of the DEO, on a mission to make something feel organized and manageable. The DEO kitchens were rarely used, and cleaning the dust and grime off of the tables and cupboards, and sorting through the non-perishable food items made her feel like she was accomplishing something.

Midway through her power clean, she heard Selah come down the hall and hover in the doorway, but she kept herself focused on scrubbing the grout around the sink, doing her best to mask her thoughts. She wasn't sure if the girl could even hear them anymore, with the power dampeners turned up so high, but she wasn't taking any chances.

"Hey," Selah said quietly. Kara barely glanced at her. "You're um... kind of eroding the counter." The hero looked down at the countertop to see she had made a sizable dent around the sink, where she had worn it down from her scouring. She pulled off her rubber gloves and tossed them into the sink with the remains of the sponge, sitting down at the table instead. "Do you need space still?" the girl asked.

"No." Kara admitted. "I'm not very good at being distant."

"I know." Selah took a few hesitant steps into the kitchen, and leaned against the wall. "It's pretty clean in here," she said awkwardly.

"Thanks," the hero said curtly, and the girl sighed, walking over to the table and sitting next to Kara.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I should have included you more in this whole process, and I should have let you know what was going on, I just didn't want to make you worry-"

"Don't apologize," Kara said, cutting the girl off. "I should be apologizing to you." It was quiet again, as she tried to sort out what she wanted to say.

"Is that your whole apology?" the girl asked hesitantly. "Because I get that you're a little emotionally volatile right now, but that's a pretty bad apology."

"Shut up," Kara grumbled, trying her best to not be amused. "I'm trying to organize my thoughts."

"You do seem to be pretty keen on organization," Selah muttered, looking at the rows of canned soup behind Kara's head. They had been sorted alphabetically, each one with its label facing directly forwards.

"Would you stop making dumb jokes and let me apologize properly?"

"Sorry. Kelly says humor is my coping mechanism for situations where I feel uncomfortable."

"I'm sure she does. Look, I'm sorry, okay?" Kara's words were still more aggressive than she intended them to be and she winced. "I'm sorry," she repeated, more softly this time. "I've been really used to you being around all the time, and it being the two of us against the Agenda, and Beta, and the forces of the multiverse. As much as all of that was awful and I wouldn't want to do it again, it was nice that I wasn't going through it alone. It was nice having you there with me. And I knew that coming back to our Earth and our team wasn't going to be a super easy transition, I knew there would be a sort of whiplash again, I just didn't anticipate that it would hit me so hard. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to be back, but I can't pretend like things feel normal again."

"A wise old monk once told me that trying to fit yourself into what's considered 'normal' will only limit yourself and your potential," Selah said.

"I told you that," Kara corrected.

"Yeah, and?"

"What did I just say about dumb jokes?"

"Sorry."

"Selah, you're my family. That's never going to change, and I keep trying to remind myself of that. I can't lose you, not after everything we've been through."

"You're not going to lose me."

"This plan is reckless."

"It's much more reckless to keep pretending like everything is fine and that there isn't a much larger issue at hand!" Selah squeezed her eyes shut, trying to regulate her emotions. "Kara, I know you're afraid of losing me, and you're trying to protect me. I get that you're not opposed to this plan as much as you are opposed to me being in danger. But if we keep waiting, you're going to lose me faster. I can't hold Beta off for much longer."

"What are you saying?"

"I've told you so many times that she's getting stronger. I'm not in control of this anymore, the only thing keeping her out is the cuffs, and even those are starting to get weaker. I know you want for there to be another solution, but we don't have time for one. I don't have time." Kara felt the impact of the girl's words hit her, and she clenched her jaw. "It's like you said, I know what I have to do, and this is ultimately my decision. Please don't make me make it without you being there with me."

Kara didn't answer right away, her breath catching in her throat as she looked up at the girl. Selah looked tired. Her eyes were shadowed, her face was pale and tight, and her arms looked weak and feeble, dwarfed by the bulky cuffs around her wrists. The last time that Kara had seen her looking so fragile and small was when she was still in the mindscape, and she wanted nothing more than to be able to fix it all somehow, but she couldn't. Clearing her throat, she took a deep breath and nodded.

"I'll be there," she said hoarsely.

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