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

That morning, she had been enjoying a rare, uneventful break while she drank a black coffee and read some 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. She and Kara had moved Selah in at the lab, and Lena had come to work on recalibrating the cuffs and finding treatments for the seizures.

Only a few minutes ago, the three of them had been having a quick meeting to recap the day. They were debriefing together 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. However, that had only lasted 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 that I made for Kara and I when we went into Selah's mindscape. We can use that to communicate with Beta in a safe environment that we can monitor, and 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. That will keep me fully aware and lucid, Beta won't be able to trap me."

"And you're certain that it 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?"

"In her regular dreamscape. We tried it three nights ago, and everything worked out the way we were expecting it to. Introducing Beta into the equation 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," the agent questioned. "What does that mean, is it only going to be monitored psychically?"

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

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

"I can get out." Selah replied. "But just in case I'm not me, we need to have 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 what our next move is. 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 first 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. She was staring stonily at the floor with her arms crossed.

"Kara?" she asked.

"Now you want my opinion?" she said, 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. I thought that we were going to approach it as a last case scenario, not a: 'let's immediately jump into making plans.' We shouldn't even be entertaining it as a possibility."

"What else can we do? Nia asked.

"We could 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 of 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 turned the power dampeners up 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, we're only giving her more time to get stronger. Waiting isn't an option anymore." She stared evenly at the hero, who stubbornly returned her gaze, her jaw set.

"Well, you seem to already have your mind made up, so clearly nothing that 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 at 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 again, only a little under an hour. Initially, the hero had made herself relatively unreachable, first shutting off her phone and then her comms, and flying to the Fortress. Usually the ice towers and gadgets there were enough to distract her from any problems, 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 Kel-ex kept asking her if there was anything that he could assist with, despite her telling him three times that she didn't need any help, and that she wanted to be alone.

After leaving the Fortress and Kel-ex, she flew up as high into the atmosphere as she could, to the point where she started to feel 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 only made her more frustrated. She found herself wishing that 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 down to Earth, she thought about going to her apartment, or out on a walk, or to a sparring room, but somehow all of those options felt wrong and unhelpful. And then somehow, 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 at least 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," she said quietly. Kara barely glanced at her. "You're um... kind of eroding the counter, there." The hero looked down at the countertop to see she had made a sizable dent around the sink, where she had worn down the grout with her scouring. She pulled off her rubber gloves and tossed them onto the counter with the remains of the sponge, sitting down at the table instead. "Do you still need space?" the girl asked.

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

"I know." Selah took a few hesitant steps into the room, and she 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 her.

"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?" she 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 of late," Selah muttered, looking at the rows of canned soup behind Kara's head. They had been sorted by color, each one with its label facing directly forwards.

"Would you stop making dumb jokes and let me properly say that I'm sorry?"

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

"I'm sure that 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 gotten really used to you being around all the time. For a while it felt like it was just 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 was going to 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 into a mold of what's considered 'normal' will only limit you and your potential," Selah said.

"I told you that," she corrected.

"Yeah, and?" The hero sighed, laying her head down on the table.

"What did I just say about dumb jokes?" she asked wearily.

"Sorry." After a moment, Kara straightened again, taking a deep breath.

"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 that 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 that you're afraid of losing me, and that 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 put into danger. But if we keep waiting, you are 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 don't know if I'm even in control of my own mind anymore, the only thing that's keeping her at bay is the cuffs, and even those are starting to get weaker. I know that you want for there to be another solution, but we don't have time to find 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 force me to 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 that wrapped 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 knew that she couldn't. Clearing her throat, she took a deep breath and nodded.

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

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