Chapter 31: Close to Home (Out of Time – Part 4)

Disclaimer: All things Supergirl/Superman and Hawkman belong to DC. No infringement is intended.


When Kara slowly became aware again, she found herself in an unknown place. She was in some kind of spacious tent, animal hides adorning the wall, and a stone-circled fire was crackling in the center. The bed she was resting on was little more than a cot. The entrance flap of the tent was slightly open and bright sunlight streamed in from outside.

Sitting up, she could not quite stifle a groan. Her head hurt like crazy.

"I am glad to see you awake, Miss," a voice said in accented English.

She looked up, seeing a man enter through the tent flap. He was tall and muscular, clearly of Native American descent, probably in his early thirties. He had dark, piercing eyes and carried a rifle in his hand.

"How long was I out?" she asked, rubbing her head.

"Almost two days, Miss. Though given that I saw you fall from the sky, burning like a comet, I would say that you recovered rather quickly."

She swung her legs over the side of the cot and stood up, feeling kind of wobbly. The stranger was by her side a moment later, steadying her.

"Take it easy, Miss! Those legs haven't moved in a while, give them time to wake up, too."

"Thank you, Mister...?" she began.

"Johnson. Katar Johnson! And your name, Miss?"

Feeling confident in her balance again, she took a few steps forward. Looking around, she was quite certain that she was a lot closer to her own time than before. But how close?

"My name is Kara, Mr. Johnson. Kara-El. And this might be a strange question, but... could you tell me today's date?"

He chuckled. "I assume you are asking for the date according to the white man's calendar, Miss El? Well, by that reckoning it would be June 17."

He looked at her, cocking his head to the side. "Something tells me, though, that this does not quite answer your question, does it?"

It seemed that this man was entirely too perceptive, she figured. Well, he had apparently seen her fall from the sky and remain unhurt. Playing the harmless human damsel was not in the cards. He already knew she was not quite normal. Besides, some instinct told her that he, too, did not exactly fall under the "normal" category. Something about those eyes... they looked too old.

"No, it doesn't," she finally said. "I... I was actually asking about the year."

He kept looking at her for a long moment, then nodded. "Well, that would be the year 1870, I believe." He paused, looking at her face. "You do not seem very satisfied with that answer."

"It is a better answer than I feared, but not the one I was hoping for," she told him. She wasn't really surprised. Given that she had been unable to calculate the exact number of years she had been displaced, she had "aimed low" in her calculations, figuring she would rather arrive too early than overshoot. It simply meant she would have to do another jaunt through time, a much shorter one in this instance. Which meant more calculations.

Speaking of calculations...

"I had something with me when I... arrived," she said, her eyes scanning the room. "A small metal box that I had clipped to my hip. You wouldn't have found it, too, would you?"

"Ah, yes, the Mother Box!"

She blinked. "How do you...?"

He knelt down and retrieved the alien computer from under a second cot, holding it out to her. The Mother Box was humming audibly, the familiar tic-tic-tic showing that it was active.

"A truly amazing piece of machinery, Miss El. When I picked it up, it... spoke to me, though it did not use words doing so."

"I know the feeling," she said, gratefully taking the Mother Box back. She didn't know whether she could do the calculations without it. "And what did it tell you?"

"It merely... confirmed some things for me, personal things. Answered some questions I had about my own past, so to speak."

His eyes travelled to the far corner of the tent and Kara followed his gaze. Sitting against the wall of the tent was something she had mistaken for a Native American headdress during her first cursory sweep of the room. It was not, though. It was a chest harness, she now realized, with two large hawk-like wings attached to it. Lying next to it was a helmet, made to look like the head of a hawk, including a beak that would cover the nose of the wearer.

To the casual observer the whole get-up might look vaguely Native American. To Kara, though, who had studied alien species in school, it looked like something else entirely. Something that was entirely out of place here in this time.

"I see recognition in your eyes, Miss El," Johnson said. "Tell me, does the name 'Thanagar' mean anything to you?"

"I have heard it before, yes," she said. "It sounds like we both have interesting stories."


Later that same day Kara was floating through a canyon, Katar Johnson flying by her side with his winged harness and hawk mask. It was actually just the second time he had taken to the skies, or so he said, but he flew like someone born to it.

Kara had learned about the Thanagarian Hawkmen in school, how they used the mysterious Nth Metal – found only on their world and nowhere else in the entire universe – to negate gravity and enhance their weapons. To find traces of this very particular alien technology in the American Old West was strange enough, but the actual story behind it was apparently stranger still.

"The reincarnation of an Egyptian Prince?" she said, not even trying to keep the skepticism from her voice. "Really?"

"You say you are a time traveler from another planet," Johnson countered. "What makes my story less believable than yours?"

"Well, you did see me fall out of the sky," she replied.

"And you see me with a metal not native to this world, made into a harness resembling the dress of alien warriors I have never met."

"Okay, point taken."

From what Johnson had told her, he had always experienced vivid dreams that showed him living in foreign lands, wearing different faces. In all those dreams, though, he had worn the wings and the hawk mask, always fashioned from a mysterious metal that he always ended up finding again and again. Upon touching the Mother Box, though, the sentient computer had apparently enabled him to make sense of these images, recognizing them as memories of previous lives. Including memories of his first live as an Egyptian prince called Khufu, who had found a crashed Thanagarian space ship in the desert.

"I am in your debt, Miss El," Johnson said, gliding beside her. "Without your wondrous machine, I might well have floundered the rest of my life, trying to make sense of these images in my mind."

"If I can stay at your place for a day or two until I regain my strength to continue my journey, I will consider us even."

"I gladly offer you my humble hospitality."

She smiled at him. "And someone to enjoy flying with, too?"

He smiled back. "There are few things in life better than flying, aren't there?"


It was the third day of her stay with Katar Johnson in the Old West. Well, the third day she was conscious anyway. The Mother Box was still calculating the exact details of her next time jaunt and she was still soaking up solar energy to be at optimum power levels for the flight. They spent much of their time talking. She told him what little she remembered about the Thanagarians from her school days and the tales Adam Strange had told of them, while he would regale her with tales of his life on the Cheyenne reservation and his previous lives. He did try to needle some details about the future from her, but she steadfastly refused.

Katar also talked at length about a woman he had encountered many times throughout his many lives. She had originally been Princess Chay-Ara, his wife, and it seemed that she, too, was fated to be reborn again and again. More often than not they found each other, but so far in this life she had eluded him.

"If it is fated, then I shall meet her again," he simply said, a forlorn look on his face. "It makes little sense to long for lives that are past, worlds that are now forever lost."

It was with this innocuous comment that the thought suddenly popped into her mind. Or rather, it exploded into her mind with the force of a nuclear warhead. She was in the past. Well, obviously she had been in the past for a while now. Seven months spent 3,000 years in the past. But that had been too distant, too far away, to really grasp the reality of her situation. Now, though, with a mere century and change away from her own present day, the thought suddenly took form in her mind.

She was in the past. A past where Krypton had not yet died.

She gasped, almost as if hit by a physical blow. Her planet, her home, it still existed in this time. It was whole, not a graveyard of radioactive debris. Her people were still alive. Her parents... well, her parents hadn't been born yet, but unless she was mistaken grandpa Seyg-El should be a young man right now. Or if not him, then great-grandpa Ter-El at the very least should be around. The House of El had been prominent on Krypton for centuries.

She fell to her knees, the possibilities swirling around her mind. Dimly she noticed that Katar was coming to her side, inquiring what was wrong, but she paid him no heed. Krypton was alive. Over a century away from that fateful day when the core collapsed and billions died screaming.

"I can stop it," she whispered, the mere utterance of the words seemingly shaking the world around her, rocking the foundations of her life. If she could go to Krypton now and convince them to stop mining the core for energy, then maybe it would be enough to avert that fatal catastrophe. Krypton could live!

"Stop what?" Katar inquired, worry on his face.

Looking up at him, her eyes shimmering with tears, she couldn't help but grin like a loon. "I can stop it! I can save them! They're still alive in this time and I can save them all!"

He narrowed his eyes and looked troubled.

"Now, Miss Kara, I don't pretend to know much about these things, but should not mere common sense say that it's dangerous business for time travelers to muck about with the past?"

She didn't hear him, though. She stumbled back to her feet and quickly ran into the tent. A moment later she found the Mother Box, still sitting on the makeshift cot, recharging or whatever it was it did when it wasn't in use. Her fingers closed around the metal casing and it became warm in her hands, the soft tic-tic-tic telling her that it was powered up and ready.

"I need you to create one of those boom tubes," she told it. "Like the one that took Steppenwolf away. I need one that takes me to the planet Krypton!"

The tic-tic-tic stopped and for a moment Kara almost believed that the Mother Box would refuse her commands. The telepathic link clearly communicated a feeling of unease and hesitation. Could a computer feel unease? Even a living one? After a moment, though, she felt the Mother Box beginning to calculate and knew that it would do as she asked.

She didn't have any belongings to gather. Her cape had gotten lost somewhere along the way and she hadn't taken off her super suit since she got here. She clipped the Mother Box onto her hip and walked back outside.

"Thank you for your hospitality, Katar," she said. "I'll be off now."

"I hope you know what you're doing, Miss Kara," he simply said, nodding to her. "Safe journey! Make sure that you do not lose track of your destination!"

"I'll do my best," she says, smiling at him in farewell. "I hope you will find your Chay-Ara, Katar!"

With a loud boom the tube opened up in front of her, air swirling around it, energy crackling. She saw Katar take a step back in surprise, but paid it no heed. Gathering all her resolve around her, ignoring the sinking feeling of making some sort of cataclysmic mistake, she stepped forward into the space warp.


As she stepped out of the tube, she stumbled. Gravity much higher than she had gotten used to made her body feel heavy. Then she saw the red glint to the sky, the giant red sun shining overhead. Everything around her was tinged slightly red by the sun, great Rao, and the plain before her was made of reddish earth. In the distance, she saw the crystal towers of a Kryptonian city, which one she couldn't tell. But it didn't matter, really. The towers glistened in the red light, the air smelled familiar. Despite the fact that it had been 14 years since she had set foot on this world, her body remembered it. Her every cell remembered it.

"Krypton," she whispered, the slightly different atmosphere carrying the words in different ways. Without even thinking about it, she slipped into her native tongue and the words floated on the air like music. "I am home! Great Rao be praised, I am home!"

For several minutes she just stood there, simply letting the feeling of home wash over her. The higher gravity made her feel heavy and grounded in a way Earth never did. The red light slowly began to sap the strength from her limbs, but she didn't care. This was home. The planet she had lost, the world she had thought she would never, ever see again. If she could never fly again, that would be a price she would gladly pay.

Kara fell to her knees, her fingers digging into the soft Earth even as tears were running down her cheeks. From deep within her, sealed away for years, grief and anger poured forth and she sobbed, letting her sorrow for her home's destruction run free and splatter onto its soil.

Somewhere deep below, she knew, Kryptonian machines were mining energy from the planet's molten core, a process that would eventually bring the world to ruin, shatter its continents, burn its cities, and boil its oceans. But she had a century to put a stop to it. A century to make the short-sighted rulers of Krypton understand the consequences of their actions. She would not allow Krypton to die again. She was not a helpless little girl this time, born into a world already in its death throes. She could change things! She would have her family back! Clark would get to grow up with his parents!

Steeling her resolve, she stood up again and prepared to take off and fly towards the nearest city. Suddenly, though, another boom tube opened up directly in front of her, forcing her to take a step back. A shape appeared before her. A man dressed in blue, sitting in a floating chair.

"I fear I must ask you to go no further, Kara-El," the newcomer said. He spoke perfect Kryptonian, she realized, but without any sort of accent or dialect. In an uncomfortable way it reminded her of Brainiac's manner of speech. Utterly flat, emotionless, cold.

"Who are you?" she asked, body tensing in preparation for a confrontation. "How do you know my name?"

"I am Metron of New Genesis," he simply said. "And as for how I know your name and your intentions, Kara-El, you carry one of our Mother Boxes with you." He gestured towards the metal box on her hip, which seemed to hum in response.

Kara took a step back, her fists clenching. "You are one of Steppenwolf's people then? I stopped your kind once, I will do it again!"

"I am not allied with Steppenwolf nor with his master," Metron said, infuriatingly calm in the face of her anger. "There are factions involved you know nothing about, not yet. It is of no matter at this point in time anyway. I know why you are here and I cannot allow you to proceed."

"Allow?" she growled, her anger boiling over. She was here, she was home, and she could prevent the death of her people. No stranger on a fancy flying chair would get in her way. "No one 'allows' me to do anything, Metron! You better stay out of my affairs!"

She took off, her power of flight still working off the stored solar energy in her cells. She would have to be careful, as Rao's red light would not replenish her energy levels, but for now she had power to spare. Leaving the stranger behind, she rocketed towards the Kryptonian city in the distance. She just needed to warn them, to tell them, then everything would be all right.

Her flight path was suddenly obstructed, the stranger in his chair appearing right in front of her. She swerved to avoid him, but he was right there again. No matter how she maneuvered, he kept appearing between her and her target.

"Out of my way!" she warned him, her eyes filling with red fire.

"I cannot," he replied, still calm. "If you were to proceed, Kara-El, the damage done to the space/time continuum would be tremendous."

"I don't care," she yelled. "I can save my people! Billions of lives will be saved!"

"And trillions more will be lost," Metron countered, arguing like a professor correcting a headstrong pupil. "You cannot fathom the impact your deeds would have on things to come, Kara-El. As much as it saddens me to say so, Krypton's fate must remain unchanged."

Kara had heard enough and her eyes spewed fire. Searing beams of heat struck the floating chair as she intended to simply blow Metron's mode of transport out from under him. The beams simply flickered and died, though, absorbed by a force field surrounding it. Even angrier than before, Kara darted forward and smashed her fists against the barrier around Metron. The barrier shook, the flying chair wobbled slightly, but that was all the effect it had.

"Your powers are impressive, Kara-El," Metron said, not looking concerned. "If we were not under a red sun, you might even eventually pose a danger to me. As things stand, though, you have no hope of doing any damage to me or my Mobius Chair!"

Kara growled again and prepared to simply dash past Metron at super speed, but suddenly she found herself gripped by some sort of tractor beam hailing from the chair. She fought against the energy holding her captive, strained with all her remaining strength, but the beam didn't even flicker.

"We must be away," Metron said. "Your very presence here in this time and place is already causing minor tremors throughout space/time. I will deliver you back to your proper time zone."

"You won't stop me," she snarled at him, continuing to fight. "Even if you take me back, I now know time travel is possible. I know I will eventually meet a time traveler. I will do it under my own power if I have to, but I will get back! I will save Krypton!"

This caused Metron to pause and he looked at her in something resembling concern. "Hmm, I believe you are right. You are certainly stubborn enough." He looked down, manipulating some controls built into the arms of his chair. "Probabilities are converging around you. I cannot remove you from the time stream for the same reason that I cannot allow you to interfere with Krypton's fate. That leaves me but one alternative, I fear."

The Mobius Chair began to move again, dragging Kara with her. "What are you doing?" she yelled at him.

"The only thing I can do to preserve the sanctity of the time stream," he said. "I will show you that I am right and you are wrong."

With a loud boom another tube opened up and the Mobius Chair, along with its two passengers, vanished from Krypton. When Brainiac sent out two drones to investigate some strange readings it had gotten, there was nothing there to find. Only some faint traces of fallen tears, slowly soaking into the ground.


End Chapter 31

Author's Note: There were numerous comics during the Bronze Age where Superman attempted to use his well-established ability to time travel to go back and save Krypton, but it never worked. To coin a Doctor Who reference, the destruction of Krypton is a fixed point in time. Given the impact the survivor(s) of Krypton have on the rest of the universe, averting the planet's destruction would certainly cause a MAJOR rewriting of history. Still, given that Kara has a far deeper connection to her lost home world than Kal-El ever had, I couldn't see her not attempting to save her world if given the chance.

As for Hawkman, I am going with the Goyer/Johns version of the character, meaning he is the reincarnation of the Egyptian Prince Khufu, who gains his abilities from the mysterious Nth Metal, recovered from a Thanagarian space ship that crashed in ancient Egypt. Katar Johnson was an Elseworlds version of the character from the 1997 Justice Riders one-shot, but I think he fits neatly into the whole resurrection scheme of the character. So as you can probably guess, Hawk-people will soon turn up in Kara's present day, too.