That night, Selah slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the DEO. Kara was next to her- at least when she wasn't sleep-flying- and Alex was next to Kara. The girl was the first to wake up in the morning, when the sky that peeked through the windows was still dark. Lying on her back, she tried her best to fall back asleep, but her mind was too preoccupied. Strange dreams had haunted her all night, more than she had at Linda's. There, she had dreamt of surgical procedures, and being unable to move while she was cut open and operated on. Now they were much quieter and eerier, filled with Beta's voice whispering words that she couldn't quite make out.

Grumbling quietly, she punched her pillow into a more comfortable shape, but it was no use. Finally, she gave up on sleep and sat up in her sleeping bag, glancing over at Kara and Alex's sleeping forms next to her. Kara was snoring softly, curled up tightly in her sleeping bag, and Alex slept facing the door with a hand under her pillow, probably where her gun was stashed. She rubbed at her eyes blearily, taking a moment to look at her hands. Today was the day that Alex had said that she would do the procedure, so she was hoping that she would have thumbs again soon, but she had also said that she was making no promises. Running a finger along a particularly prominent vein in her wrist, she flexed her fingers. She still sometimes felt a phantom sensation of the cuffs on her wrists, firmly clamped around them.

She was tired.

The whole journey to get to where she was now had taken so long and was fraught with complications, and she had thought that once they were back home, she would finally feel peace.

But she just felt tired.

She laid back down in her sleeping bag, staring up at the ceiling as the sky began to turn pink, and Kara stirred next to her.

"Morning," she said quietly as the hero sat up. She groaned in response.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Around five, I think."

"What time did we go to bed last night?" Kara asked as she rubbed her eyes aggressively and swung her feet over the side of her cot.

"I fell asleep at about one, but you and Alex were still watching Ally McBeal, so I have no idea how long you were up for."

"Would you two shut up?" Alex snapped groggily, shoving her head underneath her pillow. "I'm the only one here without super-hearing and yet you are still loud enough to wake me up."

"You have to be up for work soon anyways," Kara pointed out, but her sister's only response was to hurl the pillow directly at her. "Rude."

"Can we get breakfast?" Selah asked.

"Please?" Kara whined. "I'm starving."

"Selah has to be back by ten," the agent grumbled, her eyes still closed. "Now please let me sleep, I don't have an alien circadian rhythm that lets me be awake at five am."

They left the room as quietly as they could, although Alex still threatened to shoot them when Kara dropped a shoe. The DEO was much less boisterous than usual, as the night shift workers made their way through the agency. The hero waved to a few of them as they walked over to the balcony.

"Noonan's is still closed, right?" she asked.

"Yeah, they open at seven," Selah replied.

"Want to go see if any of the food in my fridge is still good?"

"Yeah, that sounds exciting."

Kara couldn't help the smile that spread across her face as they flew across National City. This was her National City again, with her streets and her buildings. Her smile only widened as they entered through the window of her loft. It was no longer the alternate reality version of her loft that she didn't live in, where there were no knick knacks or colorful paintings, and all of the tea towels were grey.

Selah sat on the kitchen counter as she opened the fridge and began rummaging through it.

"Yeah, this milk is... chunky," she said, dropping it into the trash can. "There's probably not too much hope for any of my fruit either."

"I mean, technically speaking, eating expired food wouldn't hurt us, right?" the girl asked, swinging her feet. "I can't imagine that aliens can get food poisoning."

"We are not going to explore that avenue any further, Selah. Gross," she replied firmly, opening the freezer. "I have frozen waffles in here, that works." Selah began setting the table as she popped the waffles into the toaster.

"I missed your loft," she said, idly placing forks down. "Although I must say that it could use more pink. Maybe some accents of mauve?"

"Shut up."

"Just like, a lamp or something. You should really consider it."

"Do you want me to give you breakfast or not?" Kara demanded, pointing a knife at the girl, who smirked. "Are you excited to have thumbs again?" she asked, changing the subject.

"Yeah. I hope that the surgery works. Last night, Nia pointed out that I can't do finger guns anymore, all I can do is point."

"That's your biggest issue?" Selah began waving her two pointer fingers around aimlessly, and sighed.

"I look like I'm flagging down an airplane."

The toaster popped, and Kara brought the plates over to the table.

"Alright. Eat your waffles."

"Yes ma'am." Kara began pouring syrup over her waffle, carefully filling in each square.

"It is good to be back," she said.

"Yeah," the girl answered. "Guess who has no thumbs and is happy to be back home?" Kara glared over at her as she gestured vaguely at herself with two closed fists.

"I should have left you in the breach."

"That's rude."

.

Several hours later, they arrived back at the DEO. Together, they had managed to eat four boxes of waffles, and then they stopped at Selah's apartment so that she could put on fresh clothes that didn't belong to the government or alternate reality Kara. They made their way to Alex's lab, where the agent was getting materials ready for the procedure.

"Are you ready to cut me open?" she asked. Alex shook her head, smiling despite herself.

"Please don't refer to it that way," she said.

"Are you still mad at us for waking you up at five in the morning?" Kara asked.

"It was actually quarter to five, and yes. However, you are lucky that I have an incredible girlfriend who brought me enough coffee to put a horse into cardiac arrest."

"That doesn't sound very healthy."

"Yeah, well neither does me falling asleep while performing surgery and impaling myself on a scalpel." She turned to the counter and tossed a hospital gown to Selah, who caught it easily. "You okay?" she asked the girl, who was chewing her lip.

"Yeah," she replied. "Doesn't all that caffeine make your hands shake?" Alex raised an eyebrow and stretched out one of her hands, holding it in front of her.

"Steady as a rock," she stated proudly, pointing to it with the other hand. "Meet me in the surgical suite once you've gotten changed."

Selah nodded and left the room.

"I can come too, right?" Kara asked, walking beside her sister as they went over to the suite.

"Of course," Alex replied. The two walked in silence for a bit, before Kara noticed a small smile on her sister's face.

"What?" she demanded.

"I just missed you," the agent admitted.

"I missed you too. There was no Alex on the other Earth."

"That sounds pretty dull." The hero shoved her sister gently, and they entered the surgical suite, where Alex began setting up her tools and putting on a gown and gloves. Selah arrived a few minutes later, wearing the blue hospital gown.

"Hey," she said, running a hand through her hair nervously.

"You're all set?" Alex asked. She nodded. "You can hop up on the table, I'll be ready in a minute." The girl obliged, and Kara pulled up a chair next to the table.

"So uh," she said after a few moments of the girl fidgeting quietly. "Do you want to play twenty questions?" This managed to get a smile out of her.

"Not that again," she groaned.

"It's a good game!" Kara protested.

"Alex," the girl whined, turning to the agent. "Could you please sedate me now?"

.

Alex noticed the girl beginning to stir a few hours later, and she shut her laptop, moving to her bedside. The operation was completed, and they were back in the lab, with Selah lying on the cot.

"You're okay," she murmured as the girl sat up, trying to prop herself up on her elbows.

"What time is it?" she groaned back.

"Almost three." The girl glanced at Kara's empty chair, her forehead wrinkling. "There was a car crash. She just left."

"Okay."

"How are you feeling?" Selah sighed, looking at her bandaged hands.

"Foggy."

"The procedure went really well, I got the whole chip out. Now you just have to heal up, and we'll see if your thumbs come back."

"What do you think the odds are that they don't?"

"I really don't have the expertise in thumb regrowth to tell you that, Selah."

"Take a guess."

"I genuinely don't know," Alex said firmly, but she kept staring at her expectantly.

"One in ten," the agent said resignedly.

"Hey, that's pretty good," Selah replied.

"Yeah well, it's not backed up by any scientific evidence whatsoever, so maybe take it with a grain of salt."

"Okay."

Suddenly, Kara appeared in the doorway, quite out of breath.

"I'm back," she panted. "How's Sel- oh." Her face deflated slightly as she noticed that the girl was already awake.

"I'm good," Selah answered, her voice still a bit groggy, and higher than usual.

"I'm sorry that I wasn't here when you woke up," Kara said, sitting back down in her chair.

"S'okay. Did you stop the car chase?"

"It was a crash. And yes."

"Good job."

"Was she this out of it after the brain surgery?" Kara asked, turning to Alex. "She seems pretty loopy."

"No, Selah agreed to let me give her painkillers for the first time," her sister informed her. "I gave her an approximate dosage by Kryptonian standards, but I think that it might have been an overestimate."

"So-" Kara said slowly.

"She's... pretty high." The hero looked over at the girl again, who was staring at her bandaged left hand, seemingly mesmerized by it.

"Neat."

The painkillers gradually wore off over the next hour; after about twenty minutes Selah seemingly remembered that she had telekinetic powers and began periodically clicking all the ballpoint pens that were on Alex's desk, much to her annoyance, as she was trying to work.

"How are you feeling now?" Kara asked a bit later. The girl was sitting up in bed, her head cupped in her bandaged hands as she flipped through one of Alex's old medical journals.

"Better," she replied. "About forty minutes ago you guys were still just floating blobs of color, so-" she trailed off and turned a page.

"What are you reading about?"

"Pharmacology," she answered. "Clearly some of us need to brush up on drug dosage calculations."

"I apologized so many times, Selah," Alex groaned, putting her head down on her desk. The girl grinned and shut the journal. "Can I check your incisions?"

She turned to face the doctor, letting her legs dangle off the edge of the bed as Alex carefully unwrapped the bandages, revealing fully healed skin underneath.

"That looks good," Kara said, peering over her sister's shoulder.

"It does," she affirmed. "However, the only way to see if the bone is healed off again or not is with an x-ray, and I'd also like to do an MRI to check your neck where I took the chip out."

"Okay," Selah replied. "How long will it take?"

"Maybe an hour?"

"Okay," she repeated, standing up. Kara watched her sister and Selah leave the room, trying to ignore the sudden burst of worry in her mind. She felt her phone buzz in her pocket and pulled it out to see a text from Lena.

'Trying to analyze the chip that Alex sent me, but I could really use some x-ray vision.' It read. 'Help?' Kara smiled, returning her phone to her pocket as she made her way to Lena's research lab.

"Hey," she said casually as she entered.

"Kara, thank God," Lena replied. She was peering into a microscope, surrounded by pages full of scribbled writing. "I'm almost certain there's three layers to the structure of this, but I can't see past the first one on either side." Kara sat opposite her at the workstation, and the CEO un-clipped the microscope slide, handing it to her.

"Do you want me to break it open?" she asked, beginning to examine the tiny metal device.

"Only as a last resort," she replied, frowning at some of her notes. She pushed a piece of paper and a pen to Kara. "Could you make a sketch of what's inside?"

"I am known for my drawing skills," she said, beginning to draft a silhouette of the chip.

"As someone who has played Pictionary with you, I would argue with that," Lena countered. Kara snorted a laugh and kept drawing. "How have you been?" The CEO asked suddenly. Her pencil stopped for a second, before she began to move it again.

"Fine, I guess," she replied. Lena raised an eyebrow. "I am, it's just... hard not to worry about stuff. With the Agenda, and Selah-" she trailed off, focusing on the paper, and getting the shape of the inner wall of the device exactly right. "It was bad there. I don't even know how to put it into words, it was just really really bad."

"You don't have to worry about them anymore, Kara," Lena offered. "You're home again, you're safe. And now you have me and Alex and J'onn and everyone to help protect you again."

"I know," she said, wishing she could say more but still not knowing how to. "I guess that I'm still just adjusting to being back." She set down her pencil and shoved the paper back to Lena. "There." She began studying the drawing, her forehead wrinkling.

"Interesting," she muttered. "Thank you Kara, this helps immensely."

"Anytime," Kara replied, her smile not quite meeting her eyes.

.

"Kara?" Selah asked as she opened the door. "Hey, Alex has been looking for you," she trailed off as she saw the hero sitting alone in the sparring room. Kara's shoulders were slumped and trembling, and she hastily began wiping at her eyes, trying to hide the fact that she had been crying.

"Sorry," she muttered, straightening up. "What's going on?"

"Nothing important," Selah replied, walking over to sit next to Kara. "Are you okay?" The hero tried to answer but choked on her words, sobbing instead. "Hey, it's okay." Wrapping her arms around her, the girl began gently rubbing her shoulder. She leaned into the embrace, as shaky sobs wracked her body.

Selah had only seen Kara cry once before, in the middle of the night at the lab. The hero had woken up from a nightmare and thought that Selah was still asleep, and only then had she allowed herself to cry in frustration. The girl knew that if she made any indication to Kara that she was awake, or if she tried to comfort the hero that she would only shut down and get more frustrated, so she didn't move, instead trying to send out as many comforting thoughts as she could. She knew that Kara often cried when she was alone in the cell, after Selah had been taken away, and the hero had also spilled out a few tears when she cut Selah's thumbs off, but none of those compared to what she was now witnessing.

Tidal waves of emotion were washing off of her, frustration and fear and anxiety all mixed together. She was trembling, her hands clutching at the back of Selah's sweater, clenching up the material in her tightly balled fists. Her breath wheezed out in quick bursts between her erratic sobs, and her heart was beating much faster than usual. Tears streamed down her face, which was blotchy and red. Selah was used to feeling the runoff of emotions from people around her; if someone in close proximity to her was sad, she always felt a little bit of their sadness with them. It was something that was so normal to her that she usually didn't even notice it anymore. But the sheer weight of all of the feelings that were built up inside of Kara was almost enough to topple her. She felt her own throat tighten and breathing begin to falter with Kara.

"You're okay," Selah murmured, gently rubbing the hero's shoulders. "I'm here with you."

Eventually, Kara straightened, rubbing at her wet eyes with the sleeve of her shirt.

"Sorry," she muttered, her voice shaking.

"Don't apologize," Selah replied. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked carefully.

"We just-" Kara began. "We were working so hard for so long to get here, ever since we wound up in that cell. And now we're here, and-" her voice trailed off again as her eyes refilled with tears.

"It's not quite what you expected?" Selah finished. Kara shook her head.

"Even when I'm with Alex or Lena, I still can't stop all the fear inside of me, and I can't stop worrying about how they can be taken from me, or how you could be taken again, and with your surgery today, I just kept thinking about all of the times that you showed up in our cell with cuts and bruises and scars, and-" a hiccupy sob cut off her rambling, and she bent forwards again.

"Hey," Selah said. "Breathe."

"My parents made mistakes, Selah. A lot of them; big mistakes. And those mistakes resulted in the death of my whole world. There's all of this weight on my shoulders all the time for me to fix everything and to save the day, but-" she quietly sobbed again. "This feels bigger than anything I've ever faced before. What if I make a mistake like that? What if I lose all of this forever?"

"You won't."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you are the strongest person I know. C'mon," Selah put a hand on Kara's shoulder, and the hero sat up, still crying. "You saved my life, Kara. You gave me a life again, when I thought that mine was over. Compared to that, this is small potatoes, man. We'll get past it."

"How?"

"One step at a time, I guess." The girl squeezed Kara's shoulder gently. "We're still here. We can't waste that," she said, mirroring the hero's words from a few weeks ago back to her. Kara smiled weakly, rubbing her sleeve across her face.

"How, um." She cleared her throat and blinked heavily. "How did your tests go?"

"Good," Selah noted the abrupt change of topic, but knew that she probably needed to talk about something else. "Alex said that she's very confident that my thumbs will grow back, and my MRI was totally clear."

"That's good," Kara exhaled, and the girl felt some of the pressure lift off of the hero's shoulders. "That's really good."

"Nia mentioned that my aunt stocked up my apartment with a whole bunch of sticky buns," she offered carefully. "Do you want to get a snack?"

"Yes please."

"C'mon," she said, standing up and holding out a hand to help Kara up. "We can even pick up some potstickers along the way, if you want."

"Y'know, Kelly said that I should be careful about my tendency to turn to food whenever I'm upset, because it might become an unhealthy coping mechanism."

"Yeah well, what does she know?" Kara shot a look at the girl, and she smirked. "Besides enough to get a doctorate in Psychology."

"She also specializes in trauma," the hero stated. "It might not be a bad idea to get you an appointment to talk with her." Selah didn't reply. Kara wrinkled her forehead, turning to look at her, but the girl was standing very stiffly a few paces back, her face blank. "Selah?" she asked. The girl's only response was to fall limply to the floor.

.

.

.