"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 that you probably don't really want to talk right now. And that's okay, I'm just going to sit with you, alright?"

Selah didn't reply.

She 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 just as hard as she remembered. Selah didn't seem bothered by the emptiness, as she sat in the corner opposite the hero, 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; she could see scratches and cuts along her arms, as well as fingerprint-shaped bruises from where she gripped her forearms too tightly. Something about her still seemed... missing, and Kara felt uneasy as she looked at her.

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

This was probably the tenth time that she had re-entered the void since her initial visit. She was beginning to lose count; all of the time that 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 she was pushed out, as she had been the first time, but there had been a few times where the girl had 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 Kara entered alone. Each time, she would spend a few hours sitting with Selah, usually in silence.

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

"I am real," she replied.

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

"Selah, I'm not Beta." She snorted, rolling her eyes as she stared at the wall opposite Kara. Desperation sat heavily in her 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 arrived 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 at it, there was nothing there, but with her peripheral vision she could see a disturbance in the air as it seemed to vibrate and twist. It reminded her of when she looked 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 them, the light 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, and she 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, she 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 her, and she quickly turned away again. "I'm really here."

"I don't believe you."

"If I wasn't real, then 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," she 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 the girl cautiously examined her face before ducking her head back down onto her arms.

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

"A little while longer." Selah nodded minutely, and she gingerly slid a little bit closer to her 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'll be honest, I did not think that they could pull it off, entering into your subconscious like this. I guess that I underestimated their determination. And you do have a Coluan on your side." She shrugged, pursing her lips. "No matter. Nothing that they can do will stop the plans that 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 the truth, she is 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 does not matter to me much."

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

"How is your conjuring going?" Beta replied in lieu of an answer. "Have you managed to make anything yet?"

"How do you know about that?"

"When will you finally accept that I know everything? That is an Empath power, is it not? 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 them 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. She didn't seem to mind, though. She had begun to hum as she shut the door, and there was a rustling sound as she opened up a bag that she was carrying. Selah couldn't hold back her curiosity, and she had 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 her.

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 the tags on it- with all of the prices carefully torn off. She had gently set the blanket down on the end of Selah's bed, trying her best not to disturb the girl, and then she 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 her 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 while she slept, 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 the mindscape. 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 out. She felt fatigue wash over her from the exertion of her powers, and she 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 comfortably," 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. She felt her stomach twist, and couldn't bring herself to look at 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 she 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 she 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 exactly 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 the director would impersonate was extensive. And whenever she 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 that 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 that 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 that it's all in my head. I know that Beta is in here too, so technically I guess that she isn't real either, if she doesn't exist in the physical world. Prove to me that you are real."

"That blanket," the hero replied. She 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 because it reminded me of sunlight. I thought that you might need some of that. And when I brought it into 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 now."

She 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," she 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 that we have together."

"Okay. Well, 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 then yesterday, I snuck into your mother's holding cell and I 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. I would have to take you at your word. Nothing that you say can definitively tell me if you are really here and if 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 this, 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 them 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 he dreams that he is 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 and 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 to me."

"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."

"This is a 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 that you have 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." Selah frowned.

"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?" she inquired. "Those seem like equally bad options."

"No, dummy. 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 are going to 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 philosophy course."

"I'm just saying. If we follow along with your thought experiment, I'm choosing to delay my own demise at the hands of the wild beasts. Sure, it would be quite an unpleasant death, but at least it would be fast. Instead, I put myself into another situation that will almost certainly result in my death, but it's also going to take much longer, and it'll 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 then 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 to 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. Kara was asleep in one of the chairs next to the cot, but Nia was awake in the other one, and she seemed to sense Selah's presence. She 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 Brainy and Kal-El. She could tell that they had all been at the DEO recently, that they had visited her room and sat by her bed, in the very chairs that Kara and Nia were currently seated in.

The vision disappeared as abruptly as it came, leaving her 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 firmly.

.

.

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