Title: Over the Waterfall
Summary: Before Flight 237 to Geneva took off, the DEO agents were under observation. So is their savior.
This is the first part of my series of attempts to add as much Astra as I can. You can find it in actual series form (with useful links) over on Ao3, same username. In this case, canon divergence is from the end of episode one.
Kara swoops in a smooth arc, spinning high through the air before dropping down low, to trace a course with her figertips two floors below the top of the nearest skyscrapers. Skyscrapers. The name humans gave the construct still seems pretentious to her – the buildings are, at most, a few hundred stories high, if that - but it is impressive enough an achievement for a civilization without any form of countergrav.
She's headed towards a fire, three blocks away and closing rapidly. Soon, she will have to stop her musing and focus on her target. It's big, far bigger than the kitchen and campfires she's had to practice on. Not sure if her freeze breath can put it out – Kal-El has managed, over the span of his career, but she hasn't practiced the ability in literal years, not like her heat vision, which is useful on an almost daily basis. She switches her sight to x-ray as she approaches, to check for anyone trapped before she - wait. Something ...
To say Supergirl gets shot down by the DEO may be in and around the area of an overstatement, with tendencies towards hyperbole and exaggeration of the material facts. The events, as they transpire, are more a series of stop motions, each half a second delayed where they should be continuous than anything terrestrial in origin.
They shoot. She pauses midflight to take in the dart that's appeared in her shoulder. It's a small thing, barely bigger than a wasp, but it hurts. It shouldn't. Nothing hurts her. Nothing can hurt her. But this hurts. They continue shooting. She flips on her axis and begins to fall.
They move in to pick up her body almost as soon as it hits the ground, four black-clad figures hurrying forward, another two keeping an eye on the perimeter of the silent street while the last contacts their transport. The snipers on the rooftop are already packing up their equipment, job done for the evening, when they get taken out. Silently, the lookouts first. The muffled thumps of their bodies collapsing disappears into the background noise of the city.
National City, like any large urban area, is never quiet even in the earliest hours of the morning. Distant traffic, wind, the muffled sound of a house party in flagrant disregard of noise restrictions. There's a short scream from four blocks away that stands out enough to draw attention. Clubber kicked out by bouncer, they decide by mutual consensus.
Point team goes down just as easily as their overwatch, even with their closer and overlapping lines of sight. They register nothing more than a blur, too fast to react, before their vision cuts out.
Astra returns to the ground gently and approaches her unmoving niece. She doesn't bother checking on the combatants once they're down and unarmed. If they live, they live and have an object lesson in why not attacking her niece is in their best interest. If they don't, it's no mites on her own hexacampa. Their affront has been dealt with.
"Little One …"
She taps at the kryptonite darts inquisitively, then hisses at the burn they spread across her skin. It has been years since last she experienced such sharp sensation.
"Now what do we have here?"
Alex has been freaking out, more or less quietly, all day since the decision to bring Kara in was finalised. She locks herself in the lab to work it off, if only because the gym has windows and she has a reputation to maintain. She flits from one project to the next, until the force of her stress makes a breakthrough with a problem that has been bugging her for months, and she loses track of time completely. Only finding out that the capture team is MIA second hand, hours after the fact, does nothing for her blood pressure, or for workplace safety.
In a stroke of luck, they have a new batch of rookies, nearly at the point where they've finished introductory training. Danvers on the warpath is an element they need to be prepared for and have heretofore not been exposed to, so Hank feels absolutely no guilt when he locks her in the gym with them.
He makes a mental note to give them time off when things have cooled down.
Vasquez has found some anomalous kryptonite emissions leaving the city, dated to time of probably intercept
Extrapolated, using all available data and enough processing power to, the flight path has only one logical destination. (There are, in fact a multitude of places it could lead to, any number of warehouses, abandoned summer homes, caves and under-hangs, but only one location that makes sense.)
Just because all the facts line up in neat sucession doesn't mean he has to like it. Fort Rozz was not quite as abandoned as the military thought. And now it holds one of the people he considers part of his extended family.