Nine
At four o'clock in the morning on the fifth day, Kate awoke, sweating and shaking and half-screaming. This was her fifth time waking up since she'd tried to go to bed at nine the night before, exhausted as she was. At least this time, she knew almost immediately that she'd been dreaming. The last time had been a full-on flashback instead of a nightmare, and it had taken an hour for her to calm down enough to attempt to sleep again. She put her face in her hands and whispered, "I can't keep doing this. I'm so fucking tired."
"You'll get through it," J'onn said, coming to sit down on the edge of her bed. "It doesn't seem like it now, but you will. I know. I've lived it."
"I don't have a thousand years to learn to work through this," she said, frustrated.
"It didn't take me a thousand years," he said gently. "And it won't for you either."
She sighed heavily. "I don't know if I'm up for gentle sympathy right now." Her blood was still boiling from the dream, her muscles tense in expectation of pain or… whatever.
"Fine. Do something for me."
She looked up, trying to see his face more clearly in the dark of the bedroom. There was enough ambient light from her window through the blinds that she could see the general shape of him, but that was all.
"Take a slow, deep breath, in through your nose, down into your belly. I'll do it with you." And he did. She heard his slow inhalation in the quiet of the room, an intimate sound, as if he were breathing deeply in his sleep, lying next to her in the bed. It made her want to kiss him.
She pushed that thought aside as quickly as she could, scrubbed it from her brain, shoved it in a box and locked it behind a door in a shadow of her mind. Face hot with embarrassment, she tried to take a deep breath with him. She failed, her breathing now even more unsteady than it had been.
"It's all right," J'onn murmured, deep voice soothing. "Try again. In slowly, through your nose. Put a hand on your belly to feel it expand." He breathed in slowly.
She did too, doing as he'd instructed and placing a hand on her stomach.
"Now hold it for four seconds and exhale through your mouth, like you're pushing air through a straw." He exhaled a moment later, the four seconds having passed as he spoke, and she felt his breath on her face as he released it slowly through pursed lips.
She exhaled with him, her breath forced to release slowly this way.
"Good," he said. "Again."
The two of them went through the process again, then for a third time.
"How do you feel now?" he asked when they were done.
"Better," she said. "Calmer."
"Good. Do you want to try and get some more sleep? I think it's too early for most humans to be up."
"Yeah." Kate lay down in the bed again and looked up at J'onn.
He placed a hand on her cheek, then immediately removed it. "Sorry. That was automatic."
She reached for his hand and placed it back on her cheek, closing her eyes and enjoying the warmth of it against her skin. "I wish I could read your thoughts," she whispered.
"I'm… just thinking of home."
"Tell me more about it," she requested, releasing his hand and rolling onto her side facing him.
He did. He told her about growing up, about meeting M'yri'ah. He told her about his daughters. He told her about Martian politics, culture, architecture, until she fell asleep.
She slept for four hours straight with no more nightmares interrupting her.
###
On the seventh day, Kate and J'onn went grocery shopping. It was an ordeal. The press of so many bodies inside the store made Kate's skin crawl. J'onn shapeshifted into a fully human form to avoid being stared at, but Kate ended up staring at him more than anyone in the store probably would have otherwise.
"Why do you keep looking at me?" he murmured, as they walked down an aisle.
"You look weird," she replied, thankful that this aisle was empty. She'd gone down it even though she didn't need anything here because she was tired of the people going past. The longer she'd been in the store, the tenser she'd gotten, until she felt about ready to snap in half.
"Have I gotten something wrong?" he asked, glancing down at himself in his t-shirt and jeans and sneakers, dark skin and buzzed hair.
She smiled a little. "No. I meant you look weird as a human."
"This form displeases you?"
She blushed. "I wouldn't say that. I just… like you how you actually are."
He fell silent for a minute or two, long enough for her to forget about the interaction. Then he said, "You know the superhero form I've taken is not what I truly look like."
"Yes," she replied. "And you don't have to keep that form around me, either. I saw your real body when I came to rescue you. It didn't scare me."
J'onn stared at her for a moment, surprised, then fell silent once more.
When they were finally back at her apartment, Kate breathed a heavy sigh of relief, some of the tension easing from her shoulders. She dropped the grocery bags onto the kitchen counter with a huff and began to put things away.
J'onn came to stand nearby and said, "I would help but I… don't know where anything goes."
"Just take everything out of the bags then," she replied, her back to him. She heard plastic rustling as he did as she'd said.
When she turned back around, he looked like himself again: green skin, blue cape, orange eyes. He'd stopped pulling things from bags and was now standing there, staring at his hands.
She stopped too, watching him. After a moment, she said, "You can change back if you want. You know, into a Martian."
He looked at her.
As she watched, his body elongated, his skull becoming tall and pointed, nose disappearing. His clothes went away, his hands lost their pinkies and his feet became those strange, three-toed things with what looked like hooves at the heels. His eyes retained their orange color, but became almost hexagonal in shape.
She took him in, noting the ridges along his body that she'd seen before, the night she'd rescued him. She noted the Ken doll-like appearance of his crotch, devoid of anything resembling genitals. Her gaze moved back to his face, studying his eyes. "Hello," she said.
"Hello," he replied, and his voice sounded just slightly different, a tiny warble in his throat.
She studied him some more, then said, "Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Why is your head so… you know, long and pointy?"
He tilted his head. "I do not know. Many Martian scholars believed it was some kind of evolutionary hold-over from when we were sea creatures."
Her eyes trailed up the length of his skull. "So, it was like a fin?"
"Yes, most likely."
"Interesting."
He blinked.
She blushed. "It just occurred to me you might find these questions objectifying."
"I do not. Other humans would only be afraid of me. Your curiosity is… refreshing."
Kate remembered that other humans had locked him up in a military base for two years because they were afraid of him. She grimaced. "If you ever… want to talk about what happened to you in that place, after you came to Earth, you can."
"Mostly, I was just lonely," he said, "but I'd had plenty of practice being that for so many years…" He tilted his head again, as if in replacement of a shrug.
"They kept you locked in that machine," she countered, hot anger coursing through her at the memory. She remembered healing his muscles, the constant ache in his shoulders from having his arms forced out at his sides like that for so long.
"That was the worst that they did to me," he said. "No more."
"They—" Her mouth snapped shut with an audible click from her teeth.
"Kate," he said, and reached out a hand to touch her.
She flinched automatically.
He dropped his hand.
"No," she said. "You can touch me. I have to get used to it, remember?"
His eyes softened—those strange, beautiful eyes—and he reached out once more and put a hand on her shoulder.
She grit her teeth, thinking of tentacles, but allowed his hand to remain. His fingers were so much longer in this form that they felt odd. "Can I see your hand?" she asked.
He removed it from her shoulder and let her hold it between both of hers.
She studied the bones of his fingers, the texture of his skin, which was harder than a human's. Harder, and almost shiny. In that moment, she wished so much that she still had her empathetic powers, the ability to reach inside the body and sense things. Her curiosity as a nurse and healer was burning her up inside. "Do you breathe?" she asked, looking up.
"Yes, through my pores. I also smell through them."
"Ah." That explained the lack of a nose, though she also wondered at the lack of a nasally-sounding voice without a nose through which to breathe or release some amount of sound. Perhaps if one didn't have a nose, then one's voice wouldn't sound nasally at all. It wasn't as though anything was being blocked, like it was if one plugged their nose and spoke that way. In J'onn's case, there was nothing to block.
"Can you hum?" she asked, knowing that humans could not hum if they plugged their nose.
Instead of a yes or no answer, J'onn demonstrated by humming one note for several seconds. The sound seemed to emanate from his entire body instead of his mouth.
Kate stared at him, leaning forward to see if she could discern what was happening. As he continued to hum, she slowly reached for him, watching him with her eyes. He nodded. She placed a hand on his chest. His whole body was just slightly vibrating, and there seemed to be a pocket of air around it. It reminded her of placing her hand on top of an active air hockey table. "Whoa," she said quietly, and laughed.
He stopped humming.
Kate, whose hand was still pressed to his chest, pressed a little harder. "Do you… have a heart?" she asked, not feeling a heartbeat under her palm. She moved it closer to where his heart would be were he human, but still felt nothing. She looked up into his face in confusion.
He smiled, seemingly amused, and took her hand, moving down his body until it rested against his abdomen. Boom, boom, boom, boom… His heartbeat could be easily felt now against her hand, and it was very fast. "Is it supposed to be this fast?" she asked, concerned.
"This is a normal heart rate for a Martian," he explained calmly. "Our hearts beat much faster than yours."
She looked up at him, embarrassed again. "You're sure all these questions don't make you feel like a bug under a microscope?"
"I'm sure," he said. "It's been so long since I've spoken to anyone who didn't believe me to be here for nefarious purposes. I'd talk about anything you wanted as long as I could talk."
She remembered being connected to his mind, remembered his sense of crushing loneliness. It made her unbearably sad. "Here," she said, turning away. "I got you something." Along with a whole bunch of fruits to try, she'd also grabbed a large handful of candy bars at the checkout aisle. She picked up one of them now. "You said you're not allergic to anything, right?"
"Correct," he said, tilting his head and staring down at the candy bar she'd placed in his hand.
"Do you know what chocolate is?"
"No."
She grinned. "Oh man. Have fun eating that, then. You'll thank me."
Curiously, he broke open the wrapper and took a small nibble. He went very still almost immediately, then stared at Kate.
She blanched, afraid that his Martian tastebuds were different, and maybe he thought it was disgusting. Perhaps processed foods wouldn't taste good to him?
He took a much bigger bite, then closed his eyes and groaned in pleasure, tipping his head back.
Kate flushed from her hairline down her toes and turned away at the sound and visual, an ache building between her legs. No, no, no! she admonished herself. Stop it!
"Are you all right?" he asked her, his mouth clearly full.
She laughed at the sound of him talking through a mouthful of chocolate and grabbed one of the candy bars, opening it. "Yes," she said, willing her heartbeat to slow. She bit into the bar, trying to remember what it had been like the first time she'd ever eaten chocolate, but she'd been so young that she couldn't. She turned back to J'onn.
His candy bar was gone and he was looking not so subtly around her body to the pile of them on the counter.
She laughed and stepped away, gesturing at them. "I got them for you." When he did not immediately lunge for one, she studied his face.
He'd gone soft and was smiling at her gently.
"What?" she asked.
"No one had gotten me a gift in a long time."
"It-It's just chocolate."
"It isn't just anything," he said, and opened another candy bar.