Chapter 48: Teenage Alien Smallville Supers

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

Smallville, Present Day

"I have no idea how we're going to make this work," Kara said, throwing up her hands in frustration. On the kitchen table in front of her was a deceptively normal-looking laptop computer, but one that was enhanced with Kryptonian tech. Despite the advancements in computer technology during the last 15 years, Kara could still easily create a false identity that would hold up to any but the closest scrutiny. The problem was, though, that she had no idea what to enter.

"Well," Jonathan said, "obviously we can't have Kona be the daughter of Karen Kent officially. She appears only 2 years or so younger than Clark and you were already here in Smallville by that time. People would have noticed you getting pregnant."

"True," Martha agreed, "but a lot of people here remember Karen as a teenager and they will notice that Kona looks almost exactly like she did back then. They will have to be closely related in some way."

"Well, we can't make them siblings, either," Jonathan mused. "Not even half-siblings, seeing as both of Karen's official parents died years before Kona would have been born."

"I thought about asking J'Onn if we could make Kona the daughter of 'Cousin John'," Kara added, "but he has been visiting us here in Smallville for two years now. Someone would ask why he's only bringing his daughter here now. And why she ends up staying with us instead of him."

"Still, that's probably our best route," Martha said. "J'Onn basically duplicated your appearance, just male, for his Cousin John disguise, so we've established that your looks hail mostly from the Jones side of the family. And you did tell people that you found John because you were looking for more members of your mother's family. So we'll say you found Kona the same way, another cousin in need of a new home."

Jonathan brushed his hand through his thinning hair, leaning back into the couch. "Don't you think that's pushing believability a bit? Another teenage girl from the Jones family orphaned?"

"People will buy it," Martha waved his concern away. "It's exactly the kind of tragic story the gossip mongers of Smallville will enjoy. They'll be talking about the Jones family curse before long."

"I hate those gossiping hags," Kara muttered.

Smallville, 14 years ago

"That's the girl the Kents took in, Jonathan's niece."

"The one who got pregnant at 12?"

"Yeah, that's the child, right there in the stroller."

"I heard she got pregnant while staying in an orphanage. Do you think she was…?"

"Apparently she isn't telling anyone who the father is."

"Probably some juvenile delinquent or other."

"Martha and Jonathan will have their work cut out for them."

"They're not sending her to school, either. She's being home schooled."

"Well, given her history, I'd keep close watch on her, too. No telling what she might get up to."

Kara did her best to tune out the voices around her, but it was hard. She'd been here the better part of a year now, but keeping a firm grasp on her enhanced senses was still difficult. Thankfully, she had the smells mostly under control, but tuning out the voices was proving harder. Especially when she was fully aware that so many people were talking about her and Kal.

"How are you holding up?" Martha asked, walking beside her. It was their first real outing into town as a family. Kara had been here with Martha or Jonathan before, but never with Kal and always just for short visits. Earth – which so far consisted of Smallville and its surrounding farms for her – was still a strange place for her and it was only now that she felt somewhat confident enough to actually socialize with people other than Martha and Jonathan. Well, confident was pushing it, maybe. She was more or less certain, at least, that she would not accidentally kill someone with her powers or immediately out herself as an alien.

"Is this normal among humans?" she asked.

"What's normal, honey?"

"The way all these people are... are talking about me, like... like…"

Martha nodded, understanding. "Like you are the newest exhibit in a museum? Yeah, we call that gossip on Earth. And sadly, it's quite common. Remember, most people don't have your degree of hearing, so these people think you can't hear them while they're running their mouths."

"So they think that, just because no one can hear them, it's okay to say these... things?"

"It's not okay," Martha assured her, squeezing her shoulder. "But I fear it's something you have to get used to, at least for a while. As far as these people know, you are a girl who became a mother at 13, which is highly unusual. After a while the novelty of it will fade and they'll gossip about something else."

Kara shook her head, wondering if you would ever understand humans. They were so extremely confusing. On the one hand, there were humans like Marthan and Jonathan, who were kind and friendly above and beyond what she could ever have hoped for. She didn't know what she would have done without them. On the other hand, though, there were humans like the ones she could hear all over town. Gossiping, running their mouths, judging. And this was but a small town in the country. She didn't want to imagine what things might be like in the bigger cities she had heard about.

Rao, she missed home so much.

"No such thing as gossip back home?" Martha asked. "No one talked about the latest scandal or anything?"

"Not like this," Kara answered. "I mean, sure, people talked and shared news, but I can't remember anyone ever... what did you call it? Running their mouths like this."

Martha smiled. "Maybe Krypton was better than Earth in that regard. Or you were simply too young to notice the behavior of adults back then. No super hearing, either, right?"

Kara had to concede the point, though she couldn't really imagine her mother Alura gossiping with her sister about how young the new chief arbitrator's wife was.

"Just ignore them as best as you can," Martha told her. "Sooner or later they'll get tired of talking about you and Clark or something else will come along to hold their attention."

Kara snorted. "Maybe another alien kid will just drop out of the sky."

Smallville, Present Day

Kona gracefully landed on the grass in front of the Kent house, touching down as gently as a feather. She did a little bow to the audience, which consisted of her brother Clark. And how weird was that? She had a brother. A brother who was Superboy. She would not get used to that anytime soon.

"You're doing really great," Clark told her, applauding a bit. "You look like you've been flying for years."

"It... well, it comes naturally, doesn't it?" she asked. "I was floating in the cage they kept me in almost from the get-go and when I got out, it was one of the first things I practiced."

"Well," Clark said, "you seem to have had an easier time than I. Took me months to figure it out. I kept losing my concentration, which inevitably led to me tumbling down and landing on my butt"

Kona couldn't help but chuckle at the image. "Maybe I'm just better at the whole super powers thing than you."

Where had that come from? She had said it teasingly, sure, but why would she antagonize the people who had only just taken her in? Clark frowned at her words. Had she messed up? Would they send her away?

Then he grinned, tough. "Oh yeah? Then how come you can't do this?"

His eyes glowed red and Kona jumped up with a yelp as the ground underneath her began to smolder.

"Stupid laser vision," she complained, making sure her shoes weren't burning. "Why is that so hard?"

Clark shrugged, his eyes returning to normal. "Well, you are part human. Maybe that ability was in the, what, 30% DNA they couldn't decrypt?"

"You think so?" she looked at him. "Damn, that would suck!"

"Or maybe you just haven't found the right trigger yet," Clark said. "Mom says that she used to accidentally set things on fire when she got angry."

She raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. "So you say I need to get pissed at whatever I want to set on fire?"

He shrugged. "It's worth a try, isn't it?"

Kona huffed, but then turned to look at a small wooden box standing beside the barn. She narrowed her eyes, doing her best to be angry at that stupid box. She tried to picture it burning. She imagined getting a splinter from it (which was kind of hard, given that she was pretty much invulnerable). She did everything she could think of to get angry at that stupid, stupid box. The fact that it stubbornly refused to burn actually did make her quite angry, but nothing happened.

Groaning in frustration, she walked over and picked the box up.

"Stupid thing," she muttered, looking at it from up close. "Why don't you just BURN?"

The box suddenly exploded in her hand and she stumbled back with a yelp, tripping over her own feet and ending up on her butt on the ground. Wooden splinters rained down around her, all that was left of the box.

Clark was beside her a moment later. "Are you okay? What happened?"

Kona looked at the wood chips surrounding her. None of them looked signed or burned, just... smashed. "Well, the stupid box didn't burn, but... something happened."

Smallville, 12 years ago

"Okay, what happened?" Martha asked, giving her 16-year old niece/daughter a stern glance.

Karen just muttered something under her breath, refusing to meet her eyes.

"What was that?" Martha asked again, refusing to let Karen off the hook.

The sullen teenager finally met her eyes and Martha saw the mix of anger and embarrassment in those blue orbs.

"They tried to hurt Clark," Karen grumbled.

Martha sighed; she had worried that something like that might happen sooner or later.

"A little more detail, please?"

Karen threw herself into the couch, sullenly crossing her arms over her chest. "I was on my way to collect Clark from this kindergarten place you insisted he should go to."

Martha nodded. That had been a very long, very hard discussion. Leaving Clark in the hands of strangers had rated somewhere just below personally feeding him to wild dogs in Karen's mind.

"When I arrived, he was playing with a little girl he had just made friends with. The daughter of the Langs. They were having fun."

Martha nodded. She had met Lana before, a sweet little girl.

"Then an older boy arrived. Stevie Douglas. Was supposed to collect his little brother, I think. Apparently, they thought it a fun idea to steal Lana's rucksack from her and make fun of the unicorn on it. Clark went to take the rucksack back from them and Stevie raised his arm to punch him."

Martha rubbed her eyes. She rather doubted the Douglas boy would really have punched a three-year old kid. He would probably just have shoved him down or something. All Karen would have seen, though, was someone raising their hand against her cousin/son.

"I assume he never got the chance to do it?"

"I caught his wrist and threw him to the ground," she replied, not sounding sorry at all.

"And…?" Martha asked.

"I... well, I might have… fractured his wrist in the process. Accidentally, of course."

"Of course," Martha sighed. "How bad?"

"How should I know? I'm not a doctor!"

Martha sat down beside her. "We talked about this, Karen. You need to be more careful!"

"I AM careful," Karen growled. "I am ALWAYS careful! If I hadn't been, I'd have taken off his entire arm instead of just cracking a few bones."

"And what happens the next time Clark is hurt?" Martha asked. "He's a young boy, he WILL get hurt in some way, shape, or form while he grows up."

The very notion of Clark getting hurt made Karen visible tense up, but then she closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and relaxed again.

"I know that. It's just... I promised to protect him."

"And you do," Martha told her, putting her hand on Karen's tense shoulder. "Just try not to overdo it, okay? The last thing we want is for someone to find out how... special the two of you are."

Karen nodded. She already knew all this, of course. She was highly intelligent, resilient, one of the strongest people Martha had ever known and that was not referring to the fact that she could bench press tons. But she was also still a teenager with a temper. A teenager whose number one priority in life was to protect the child entrusted to her care even as her world died. Martha knew that, were someone to ever seriously hurt Clark, the world would not be a big enough place to hide from Karen's retribution.

"Let's try and protect Clark without causing bodily harm in others, okay?"

Karen sighed, but nodded. It was probably going to be the best she was going to get from her today.

"On the plus side," Martha said, "Clark has made a friend. That will do him good, I think."

One day later, outside the Kent house, Clark Kent was playing with Lana Lang, his best friend in the entire world. Okay, granted, they had only met yesterday, but still. From now on, they would be best friends forever and ever.

"Your mom is so cool," Lana chirped. Karen Kent had become her own personal hero the moment she had taken down that idiot Douglas boy in no time flat. She had badgered her parents until they agreed to bring her over to the Kent farm to play.

"I know," Clark replied, grinning proudly. "She's super!"

Smallville, Present Day

"What about the super side?" Jonathan asked.

"The super side?" Kara looked at him, frowning. "What's the super side?"

"I mean what are you going to tell people when Supergirl goes public? You called yourself the last daughter of Krypton numerous times in the press. If you introduce Supergirl as your daughter, people will think you lied to them."

Kara groaned. To be honest, she hadn't even thought of that one yet.

"We'll figure something out, but we're not going to let Supergirl go public anytime soon. Clark was 14 when I allowed him to become Superboy. If I let Kona go public any sooner than that, I'll never hear the end of it from him."

"So another 13 years then?" Martha asked, grinning.

Kara chuckled. Right, strictly speaking Kona was only about a year old. It was hard to remember, given that she looked and acted like your average 13-year old. Her vision powers easily found her two children – and wasn't that just the weirdest thing ever? She had two children now. Thankfully Clark had gotten over his initial resentment and seemed to be doing his best to make her feel welcome now.

She frowned, though, when the box simply exploded in Kona's hands.

"Okay, that's weird."

Smallville, 4 years ago

"I feel weird doing this," Kara muttered.

She was aware, of course, that this was quite a normal thing. Schools all over the country – possibly all over the world – had such events where selected parents of students came into school to talk about their careers. Having never been to school here on Earth, though, she had never personally experienced it as a student. The fact that she might one day be asked to participate as a parent had never entered her thoughts.

She was standing with a few other parents and listened as Sheriff Cole, the father of one of Clark's fellow students, spoke about his work. It wasn't terribly exciting, of course, as Smallville wasn't exactly a hotbed of criminal activity. Sometimes a few guys drank too much and caused a disturbance, occasionally there were thieves, possibly a domestic dispute here and there, that was pretty much it. Which Kara was thankful for, to be honest. She really didn't want to risk Superwoman being seen stopping crime in Smallville, Kansas.

All too soon, though, it was her turn to step in front of Clark's class. She had thought long and hard about what to say, given that most people in Smallville only knew that she was working from home and had money to spare. She finally settled on being a software developer – which actually was one of the things she did at K-Solutions, of course. Winking at her son, she gave a pretty boring spiel about creating new software from her computer at the Kent farm, making sure to include enough technical terms to confuse any non-techie. She really didn't need to have more people interested in what she did for a living.

"Any questions?" she asked a few minutes later, having finished her brief presentation.

One of the girls raised her hand. "Yes?"

"What was it like becoming a mother at 13?"

Kara froze. How had she not seen this coming? She was standing in front of a class where half the students were girls, all of them between 11 and 12. Only a year or two younger than Karen Kent had supposedly been when she got pregnant with Clark. Clark, who was doing his best to disappear behind his books right now.

"I... eh, what?"

"Ms. Kent is here to answer questions about her job," the teacher stated. The side-glance she gave Kara was not a happy one. "Not about her… personal life."

"But surely becoming a mother at 13 influenced her working life, too?" a different girl interjected. Kara got the distinct impression that some of the girls had prepared this beforehand. Well, it wasn't like this was the first time she had been asked this. Maybe not by young girls, but still.

"You are right, of course," Kara finally said, earning another stink eye from the teacher. "The fact that I was so young when I became a mother made me look for a job I could do from home, but also one that paid enough so I could provide for my family. Thankfully my marks were good enough to get such a job."

"Do you regret it?" yet another girl asked. Kara was fully aware that the question was not in regards to her supposed job.

"Ms. Johnson," the teacher began, looking like she was about to have a coronary.

"I have never and will never regret Clark being my son," Kara spoke over her, smiling. "That said, I wouldn't have minded if things had gone a bit different in regards to the timing. Being a teenager in Smallville is hard enough all by itself." Never mind an alien teenager, she added internally.

Looking at the angry teacher beside her, she quickly decided to get out while the getting was good. "And I do love my job, it's great. That's it then, be studious, listen to your teachers. Bye!"

End Chapter 48

Author's Note: I looked up the minimum age for kindergarten in Kansas, which is apparently 5. Now I already wrote about Kara leaving Clark at the church kindergarten when she was 16 (meaning he was 3) in an earlier chapter, so maybe we can just agree that Smallville doesn't quite adhere to standard rules. Either that or Kara simply got daycare and kindergarten confused.

Mostly using this chapter to show some more scenes of Kara's early years in Smallville, I admit. The final flashback is somewhat inspired by an episode of Gilmore Girls, where Lorelai is in Rory's school to talk about her career as a hotel manager, but every single question is about how she got her daughter at 16.