“There are only two or three human stories,
and they go on repeating themselves
as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
They’re in a bare white room. A blonde girl with sunken blue eyes sits opposite of another woman, this one having dark brown hair and glasses perched over her eyes. The only thing that separates the two is a plain brown table.
The blonde begins to speak.
It started off slow, Kara says, retelling the story as if she was still living it. And supposedly, she was. The story never really ends, it’s told over and over through the hearts of the little girls who had to grow up too fast. The kids who learned about the gravity of pain, before they could learn the weightlessness of love. The story keeps being told, everyone thinking- hoping - that maybe this time it will end differently. It never does.
She eats smaller, sleeps even less. Every smile is a little more fake. But in the beginning, she doesn’t think she’s depressed. Even at night when she sits on the windstill, staring at the stars, as if suddenly Krypton will pop back into existence and this will all be some messed up dream, she still doesn’t realize that she's been behaving self- destructively lately.
And it’s not like she needs another reason to be different, only someone like her can see that far into the sky, can see the stars being born and the ones slowly fizzing out. Yet when she looks all she can see is her planet exploding rather ironically, in a beautiful array of colors, and she’s reminded that there aren't very many people like her left at all.
There was Aunt Astra, who always told her to follow her heart, but then she was gone and what was left of Kara’s heart shattered into pieces and she wasn’t sure which part to follow.
There was Kal- El (He went by Clark now and whatever part of Krypton she thought she had in him simply vanished) who was a hero to the entire world, but who couldn’t bother to be a hero to her.
It isn’t until she starts wondering if it would be easier to join the rest of her people in Rao’s light, that she thinks something might be wrong with her. When Kara really thinks about it, she can pinpoint the exact moment it started.
Her parents ship her off, and she still doesn’t fully understand what’s happening , only that people are dying and why does her mother sound like she’s saying goodbye? It’s all very sudden but she went inside the pod anyways and she turns around to see if her parents are following but all she sees is fire and all she hears are screams. But she’s meant to be a scientist and she knows, knows, that sound can’t travel through space, yet it takes her a full minute to realize the screaming is coming from her throat and the fire is in her heart. By the time she stops screaming, she begins feeling drowsy and she doesn’t want to fall asleep but as she does she prays that when she emerges Astra will be there, singing her awake and she’ll tell her about this awful, awful, dream.
And Kara tells her that she knows that's the moment, when her consciousness begins to leave, that everything went wrong.
Sometimes Alex will catch her with that empty look in her eyes and she’ll ask, Are you okay? And Kara will lift up the corners of her mouth and force some joy into her eyes and try to make them look less lifeless . Because while eyes may be the window to the soul, her’s was left behind long ago, within the crumbs of a place she used to call home. So she says, I’m okay. And Alex smiles back and they keep shopping or eating or watching a movie or whatever it is they still do together these days.
It wasn’t always so fake. Kara remembers long phone calls and endless pot stickers. She remembers game nights and warm hugs. She also remembers Lena, and how every moment was like torture but she was okay with the pain.
She knows now that abandonment issues are a thing, and sometimes you get it when everyone you’ve ever known simply ceases to exist (She knows it wasn’t that simple, but she doesn’t want to think about how they all died screaming). She remembers how she never wanted her to leave, but didn’t get why Lena even stayed.
But now all she knows is tasteless food and game nights that aren’t fun and hugs that no longer make her feel safe. And Kara knows that she shouldn’t feel this way, yet she doesn’t feel like she deserves to not.
And she knows that she loved her. But unlike she said before, love is not weightless. Love is the joy of summer days and staying when it rains. But the thought makes her sad. Because Lena wasn’t okay with getting wet.
There was a time when she hadn’t been so poetic. She was thirteen and she didn’t quite comprehend why people wrote hard-to-understand stories with rhyming lines. But that was before it happened, so Kara can’t really be blamed.
The woman on the other side of the table asks her to explain, and she doesn’t really want to. Not because it was a specifically painful memory (it was), but because she knows thinking about it will just send her spiraling deeper into the back of her mind, and she really isn’t sure if by the end of it she’ll want to come out.
But she tells her anyway, because she looks at Kara with a knowing glint in her eyes and she knows that not many people can say they’ve been through the things she has endured in her life, but the dark haired woman sitting across from her looks like she just might understand what she’s feeling. Kara can see the hidden message and she knows that if she recedes into herself, someone will be there to pull her out.
She remembers telling Lena and the look on her face. She remembers crying and feeling pathetic because what gave her the right to cry after what she’s done?
She also remembers Lena pretending to forgive her, and that must have been the hardest part. She understood the yelling and the sorrow and the pain (both physical and mental) that Lena put her through. She remembers the feeling of kryptonite spreading through her blood stream, making her weak, (No one really gets just how much it hurts to have poison infused with your blood, killing you slowly but never actually letting you die) and she still forgave her because she understands wanting to make somebody feel the same pain you went through, she understands.
But it’s Lena pretending to still love her, that brings her to this room, talking about her emotions.
And Kara really isn’t sure if it ever was love. Before her, the only thing Kara knew about love was in crappy tv shows, and watching Alex go through it. To this day she doesn’t know if that was it, only that around Lena she wanted to smile and cry because she was so beautiful and how can anyone be so beautiful? But the first time she asked her Lena smiled and said it’s love, darling . And they kissed and she can still remember the way Lena’s lipstick smudged her mouth and the overwhelming warmth and fear threatening to swallow her whole.
So Kara guessed it was love but it was also pain because why should she get to love again while everyone she had left in the remains of her planet didn’t?
The question was answered when Lena betrayed her, and sure Kara betrayed her first, but the feelings were never, ever, faked. She wonders if any of it was even real, because if it was that easy for Lena to stop loving her, what makes her think she ever really did?
She comes to the conclusion that she shouldn’t get to love anymore than them.
And Kara still had nightmares of explosions and the fire in her heart and the emptiness in her soul, and Lena happened and in came nightmares of bright green pain traveling through her. But she still forgave her, still loved her. And that was probably what hurt the most.
Then Kelly looks at her in a way that she can’t decipher and it makes her feel like she’d done something wrong. She tells her something that sounds a little like Lena scolding her for being self depreciating, but Kara is only half listening. The other half is hearing the screams of the people across town, trapped in a fire (and she’s ignoring how similar it sounds to the screams of her people, trapped in a crumbling planet) and Kara sends Kelly a look that the older woman immediately understands, and Supergirl is gone.
And if Kara stands a little longer in the flames, because maybe today she’ll finally burn, she’s sorely disappointed. The next day Kelly looks at her like she knows what she tried to do and asks her Are you okay?
And Kara can’t help but think that’s a really stupid question and that’s what she tells her and Kelly just nods and says, I know. But their eyes are locked when she says it and Kara feels like she knows a lot more than she wants her to, and the tears pool up before she even realizes she was going to cry.
Kelly hands her a tissue but Kara knows there aren't enough tissues in the world to cry out all the agony she holds in her heart.