Wonder Woman picked up the globe as they heard a soft moan from the dias. Kal-El sat up, and spun his feet over the side, a sad, haunted look on his face.
Kara went over to help him down. She looked at him, her hand going to his cheek. "Are you alright? What happened?"
"I-I'll tell you later, Kara...It looks like Rao has something to say."
Rao hesitated and continued. "You will now see what you were brought here for." Rao walked in front of the group and began to explain... "Most of you have been afflicted with visions or nightmares lately... of what seems to be impossibilities or outright lies, most seeming to concern this young lady here."
One of the walls becomes a screen. Space. "Before the Crisis, there were infinite dimensions and infinite earths, not just the one you remember now..."
The 'camera' focuses in on a large world circling a red star. Zooms thru the cloud layer, revealing the rolling green countrysides and futuristic buildings. It goes into one, into a lab of a scientist, clad in green & red. He turns around. Kal's face wrinkled in puzzlement. "It's Jor-El! Why..." Nara shook her head. "This is not the Phantom Zone Krypton, Kal." "This is on the TRUE Krypton...before Crisis and the changes. The universe was greatly different then."
Rao's hand waved...now they were back in space. Krypton is roiling with pre-shocks. The screen splits. In one half, a spot appears, growing into an oddly-colored small ship. Its' Hyperdrive activates and it disappears in a flash. On the other side, Jor-El and Lara clutch each other tearfully, watching the ship disappear into the roiling green skies, praying for their child's safe journey, moments before their home collapses in on them. The screen unites, and the planet explodes, pulverizing the nearby moons. Kara heard a faint sniff, and looked at Kal, staring at the screen with great pain and loss etched in to his face, his eyes tearing. He saw her looking at him and he smiled weakly.
One piece of the world, swathed with atmosphere, hurtles away. The scene changed. The meteor strike. The father frantically assembling a rocket. The mother looking for a suitable home. Sewing a supersuit for their only daughter... The rocket speeding free of the glowing white chunk. Kara stood stunned. "My dream...I-It HAPPENED? That was real?!"
The rocket crashed to earth…and was found by the Last Son. "My dream..." Clark breathed …
And in that breath, A young girl matured under earth's yellow sun, and became a young woman.
The skies becoming red. Kara, in her twenties, in the mid 80's, talking with Batgirl on the roof of a building. "My dream..." Babs breathed.
And then they heard a man scream.
Kara turned as white as a ghost as the doors in her mind creaked open further. "Oh...Great Rao...I remember this..." she whispered in shock.
They watched as a blue, yellow, and red fury burst through a rock wall in an antimatter universe. Powered by fear and rage, she attacked the Anti-Monitor, protecting the prone form of the Man of Tomorrow... She turned to Dr. Light. "Get Kal OUT of here!" she screamed. Pummeling the villian she hears...
"...He is killing her! I have to help you!"
Kara whipped her head around. "No! GO...GO NOW!"
Just what he was waiting for... Everyone watching felt the dread envelop them.
The Anti-Monitor's hand practically enveloped Supergirl's head.
She heard the sneering Kraayn-voice, amused, as it was in her dream.
She recalled the panic she felt as she heard...
"You turn in battle, girl? That is a fatal mistake!"
"Oh, no..."
Dr. Light paled in shock, at the memories of what was now rising to the surface: the reality of Crisis. Her alternate Crisis memories were fading like a formerly comforting dream
No. This…CAN'T be right. This HAS to be some trick, Kimiko thought, staring at the wall. But it was not so easy to deny. She weighed her old memories with the new ones…and the old ones felt more and more ephemeral. The sadness and dread in her heart, while watching herself on the screen clinched it. While growing up in Japan, her mother was fond of saying, 'Even when the mind is confused, the heart KNOWS." Her heart ached as she watched herself distract the Girl of Steel...Feeling the truth of it hit her between the eyes.
She.knew it was true.
"Oh…God...No! I distracted..." She whispered to herself.
Kara sat on her legs on the floor, hugging herself. She closed her eyes but listened to the gut-rending blast, tears running down her face, her revived mind recalling the pain of the attack.
The scream. "KARA!"
Lois held Superman as he crumpled to his knees. Tears streamed down his face. "Oh my god, Lois...I remember! My God, this happened!...How...How could I forget?!" He whispered.
Kara forced herself to open her eyes and heard:
"C'mon, Kara...Don't give up. You'll make it. Pl...Please stay with us."
"I...I can't..."
Kal, followed by Lois, walked over, knelt and held Kara... and they watched and listened as the Grim Reaper came for her in another place and time...
The wounded Supergirl moaned slightly and spoke to a tearful Kal, who was cradling her dying form. "B...But it's okay...I knew what I was doing... I wanted...wanted YOU to be safe... You mean so much to me...so much to the world."
He finally managed to clear his tight throat. "Y-You succeeded in destroying the machines."
"Thank heaven...the worlds...have a chance to live..." She spit up a bit of blood from her rattling lungs and focused, with effort, on him. "Y-You're crying...please don't. You taught me to be brave...and I was..."
A bloody hand gently, lovingly, caressed his cheek, leaving red streaks behind. She smiled slightly, at great cost. "I...I love you so much for what you are. For how...good you are..."
The hand dropped. The heart stopped. A final, shaky rattle... and all was silence.
A pause. The Man of Steel clutched her still form to his chest, shoulders heaving silently. Then, all watching heard the scream of fear and fury that rattled two universes.
They all watched as Kal staggered to his feet, tears streaming down his face... He opened his eyes, and everyone watching took an involuntary step back.
Never, in all the time that Bruce, Diana, and John Henry had known Superman, had the ever seen him CLOSE to the state they were watching him in now. Dangerously close to homicidal... rage, grief, guilt and murder were written large on his enraged face and volcanically glowing eyes... "WHERE IS HE?! THE ANTI-MONITOR? I...I WANT TO KILL HIM FOR THIS!" Bruce started as he felt chill race up his spine.
Rao looked silently around the room. Enough of the heroes' memories had revived, so that almost ALL were in some pain over this.
Rao waved his hand. The visual continued, the focus shifted to a black-haired Lois Lane, sorrow etched across her face, holding a microphone.
"Lana...Batgirl will now give the eulogy."
There was a switch to Babs, as Batgirl, leaning on the podium before the assembled heroes, masking her grief as much as she could... Barbara whispered in time with the visual, "...Kara is a hero...she will be never be forgotten." As Babs watched, she felt her face warm with tears as her memories rose to the surface. She realized then that what she experienced that night in Holy Martyr's was only a small portion of what REALLY happened.
She was interrupted out of her reverie as the scene shifted again... the Man of Tomorrow, in front of his artic fortress, praying with fingers steepled over a prone figure carefully wrapped in a scarlet cape, with a S-shield over its' chest.
The group watched in sorrow and empathy as he slowly staggered to his feet, lovingly picked up his bundle, and flew it off to its' final destiny...
Rao sadly, waved his hand again. The 'screen' shut off. He paused, looking at the two last survivors of a doomed world, crying their eyes out in each other's arms, in joy and pain. There was a slight mechanical series of squeaks as Barbara rolled over to the two tearful Kryptonians. Kara reached out to her former best friend... Accepted, they all quietly cried together, united in their common past losses, and their relief in reunion.
(Crisis dialogue by Marv Wolfman, "Crisis on Infinite Earths" #7 (of 12),
'Beyond The Silent Night' pp.38-40)