Chapter 8
Now that the excitement of her future self traveling back in time and defeating her first supervillain had died down, time seemed to pass painfully slow for Kara. James’ ex-girlfriend Lucy Lane, little sister to the famous Lois Lane, had arrived in the city, hoping to patch things up with him, and basically putting the final nail in the coffin of her burgeoning crush on the photojournalist.
Luckily, her newfound friendship with Lena Luthor was more than enough to keep her occupied. Having a friend as Supergirl rather than Kara Danvers was an interesting experience, as she could be much more open about various aspects of her life, particularly regarding her non-human nature. El encouraged her to embrace her roots, joining her on some mornings to pray in front of the rising sun, and being able to share that side of herself with someone other than Alex was a breath of fresh air.
“So,” Lena’s slightly accented voice drawled through her earpiece the morning before Thanksgiving. El had offered to cover the transfer of an alien prisoner they had captured earlier that week, and Alex had taken over her apartment in preparation of Eliza’s arrival, so Kara was free to float about the city, doing odd jobs around the city and posing for the occasional selfie while she and Lena spoke over the phone. “Does Supergirl celebrate Thanksgiving? Or are you joining us sad loners working over the holiday?”
“My adoptive mother is coming to town,” Kara replied, floating upside down outside the window of a particular bored-looking little boy and making faces at him while his mother prepared dinner. “I’m excited, but my sister has been in a near panic for the past week.”
“It’s kind of reassuring to know that you have family drama like the rest of us,” Lena observed. “Well, most of us. My family drama usually involves an assassination attempt.”
“Yeah, well, I’m bringing my future self as a guest to dinner, so I think we’re tied,” Kara countered. She did a quick loop de loop before a sudden thermal nearly knocked her off course above a nearby park and frowned. “It’s too bad I couldn’t invite you, too. Nobody should be alone for the holidays.”
Lena chuckled and Kara grinned. “I’m fairly sure that would require me to know some classified information, Bright Eyes.”
This time Kara was the one who laughed. Lena had made a sort of game of trying to assign her the cheesiest nicknames she could think of in lieu of calling her Supergirl. Each one she came up with sounded like it came straight from a bad pulp novel, but Kara couldn’t help but appreciate the effort. “I could bring you leftovers later this weekend? We could have our own little celebration, just the two of us.”
“I’d like that,” Lena said softly. A beep on her earpiece told Kara Alex was trying to reach her and she sighed, knowing it was time to return home.
“I’ve gotta go, Lena. Try not to work too late.”
“No promises,” Lena replied. “Good luck with your family.”
Tapping her earpiece, she hung up on both Lena and Alex, choosing to zip home, rather than answer, she dropped through her window while Alex paced and El sipped on a glass of some sort of glowing liquid that she likely procured from Al’s.
“Finally!” Alex exclaimed.
“Nice to see you too,” Kara quipped, she turned to El. “Did everything go alright with the prisoner transfer?”
El lifted her glass in greeting. “She broke through her restraints, but I calmed her down pretty quick.”
“And by calming her down, you mean…”
“Knocked her out.”
“Can we focus please?” Alex asked. “I’m freaking out here, and you two are not helping.”
“Alex, you regularly take down aliens ten times stronger than you with nothing but a gun,” Kara reassured her. “This is going to be fine.”
“Last year, she was mad at me for you not dating enough. I can’t even imagine what she’s gonna do to me for you coming out as Supergirl.”
“She seemed fine on the phone,” Kara offered. Alex stared at her flatly. “At least she’s making pie.”
“Yeah,” Alex scoffed. “And I’m sure it’ll be your favourite.”
“Chocolate pecan pie is the best desert in the galaxy,” Kara said. “And as someone who’s been to twelve different planets, I mean that literally.”
“She’s right,” El chimed in, placing her glass on the coffee table and standing up to join them. “I’ve been to well over two hundred and still haven’t found anything better.”
A knock on the door interrupted them, and Kara turned to answer it.
“Oh, God,” Alex muttered. “Wait, Kara, you need to change -”
Kara waved her away. “It’s fine.” She reached out and opened the door, cheering when she saw the grinning face of her adoptive mother. “Eliza!”
Eliza cheered, dragging her suitcase inside before turning to wrap Kara in a hug. “Oh, my best, favourite, wonderful girls!” She released Kara and turned to her sister, opening her arms. “Alex, come here!”
Alex stepped forward to quickly hug her mother, stepping away as Eliza looked between the two of them. “You both look so great!” She paused as she seemed to finally notice El standing quietly near the kitchen counter, her arms crossed as she fiddled with something underneath her jacket. “And who is this?”
“Eliza,” Kara said, pulling her forward by the wrist. “This is El. She’s a version of me from the future.”
“Is that so?” Eliza asked, looking El up and down.
“It’s good to see you, Eliza,” El said, her voice hoarse.
“Well,” Eliza declared. “If you’re my daughter from the future, then come here.” She held her arms open, and Kara and Alex watched as El hesitantly stepped forward. She didn’t raise her arms to reciprocate, but what Kara could see from her eyes told her that this meant a lot to her future counterpart, and she couldn’t help but wonder morbidly how long El had gone without a hug from their mother.
The two of them separated, and Eliza turned back to Kara while El escaped back to her drink. “So, Eliza,” she asked. “How was your flight?”
“Oh, it was fine,” Eliza remarked, catching on to the need to change the subject. “A little bumpy.”
“Oh, I hate when that happens,” Kara agreed. “I hit some crazy air pockets when I was flying around the city today.”
“You’re doing great, Kara,” Eliza said.
“You really think so, Mom?” Alex asked.
Eliza smiled. “Of course.”
“Well,” Kara declared. “I’m going to go change, and then we can start getting ready to prepare the food.”
“That sounds good to me,” Eliza replied. “Though, I must admit, I wish I had been warned ahead of time I’d be feeding two Kryptonians. I’d have brought more pie.”
Kara zipped into her room, changed, and was back in the space of thirty seconds, and yet that was still enough time for Eliza to begin questioning El.
“So… El, that’s an interesting choice in name.”
El’s lip twitched as she helped Alex carry Eliza’s bags further inside. “Well, both Kara Danvers and Kara Zor-El were already taken when I got here,” she explained. “I had to go with something else.”
“I take it that means there aren’t two Supergirls flying around National City?” Eliza concluded.
“El goes by Flamebird,” Kara explained. “She’s one of Rao’s first children. She was tasked with destroying the creations of Vohc the Builder in order to inspire him to create greater and greater works.”
“Is that so?” Eliza asked slowly. “And what inspired you to take up such a… storied mantle, El?”
El smiled sardonically. “Partly for the irony. As you can probably tell, I don’t have Kara’s singing voice anymore. There are several myths that reference Flamebird’s singing. Sometimes, her voice is what inspires Vohc to build again, sometimes her song is what carries the destruction that starts the cycle over again, and it is her lover, Nightwing, who then consoles her with his own singing when she despairs at what she has wrought.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Alex said hesitantly. “What… happened to your throat?”
“I was curious as well,” Kara added.
“It’s not a nice story,” El warned them. “I’d hate to ruin the mood more than I already am.”
Eliza reached out and grabbed her wrist. “If you don’t want to tell us, that’s fine, Sweetie. But, we are your family. We’ll listen if you feel like sharing.”
El looked between the three of them for several seconds before sighing. She reached up and undid the zipper of her jacket, revealing the jagged patch of scar tissue covering her throat. “One of Darkseid’s Furies ripped out my throat. Kryptonians have remarkable healing abilities, but even they have their limits. My vocal chords regrew, but they were thicker and made almost entirely of scar tissue. If it weren’t for the fact that my diaphragm is so much stronger than a human’s, I probably wouldn’t be able to make much noise at all.”
“Holy shit,” Alex cursed.
“What kind of creature would do something like that?” Eliza asked, her face having gone pale.
El shrunk in on herself and reached up to fiddle with what Kara could now tell was a necklace underneath her shirt. Her voice was flat as she described what happened to her. “That’s what Darkseid does with those he doesn’t kill. If he thinks he can get even the slightest use out of someone, he’ll rip them apart and hollow out any bit of kindness, mercy or compassion they have before putting them back together stronger and crueler than they ever were before. That particular fury had once been an ally and knew how much I liked to sing, so she took that away from me just to watch me suffer.”
“And you came back to help stop this… Darkseid?” Eliza asked.
El nodded. “He takes everything from you. Bit by bit. You might win a battle here or there, but never without sacrificing whatever you cherish most. Even if we beat him in the future, there’s nothing left there to save.”
The four of them were silent before Kara rushed forward and wrapped her arms around El. “We’ll beat him,” she whispered. “I swear, I’ll train as hard as I can, every day so that, when the time comes, I’ll be right by your side.”
El smiled and returned the hug. “Thanks, but you just need to focus on being the best hero you can be right now. There are certain things that need to happen or be taken care of before we can even begin preparing for Darkseid.”
At that moment, Kara’s phone rang and she groaned, recognising her work ringtone. “Speaking of killing the mood.”
“Everything alright, Sweetie?” Eliza asked.
“Yeah,” Kara sighed, reading the summons from Miss Grant before pocketing her phone. “It’s just work stuff.”
“It probably has to do with Leslie Willis,” El explained.
“The shock jockey?” Alex asked.
El nodded. “In my time, she tore into Supergirl live on air. Cat was unimpressed.”
.”I hate to leave right after you got here,” Kara said, turning to Eliza.
“It’s alright, sweetie,” Eliza said. “I knew you girls would be working when I got here.”
“I’ll stay with her for a bit,” El offered. “I have some time to kill before I have to leave.”
“That’s right,” Eliza agreed. “You go on, Kara. It will give me some time to get to know El.”
*(OoO)*
El watched Kara and Alex leave and took a deep breath. Seeing Eliza again was proving to be much harder than she anticipated, and while she would like nothing more than to flee, she knew that there were several secrets she needed to divulge while Kara and Alex weren’t there.
“This must be pretty strange to you,” Eliza observed. “Living with another version of yourself.”
El let out a short bark of laughter as she grabbed Eliza’s bags and carried them to Kara’s guest room. “Kara doesn’t get paid nearly enough to feed the two of us,” she replied. “For the most part, I stay at the barracks in the DEO.”
Eliza froze, her eyes wide while El put the bags down and turned back to her. “You know about the DEO?”
“I do,” El said softly. “I actually needed to talk to you about them, but I couldn’t really do it in front of Alex and Kara.”
“Do they not know about it?” Eliza asked.
“They both actually work with them,” El explained, gently leading them both to Kara’s couch where they sat down together. She had tried not to reveal too much about people since coming to the past. Not only was it a breach of trust that this version of the people she knew hadn’t even given her, but she had heard enough horror stories from Barry to know that it was incredibly easy to accidentally sabotage a relationship when trying to prematurely improve things. She’d call it human nature, but given the amount of non-humans she was dealing with - especially one particularly stubborn Martian - the propensity for drama clearly wasn’t endemic to Earth. This time, however, she would make an exception. J’onn might still be taking his time in coming out to Kara and Alex, but El could at least make things easier by nipping their suspicion of him killing Jeremiah in the bud.
“The Hank Henshaw who runs the DEO isn’t the same man who blackmailed you and Jeremiah,” El explained.
Eliza frowned. “What do you mean he’s not the same man? Did he have some sort of… crisis of conscience?”
El chuckled and shook her head. “No, I mean it literally isn’t the same man. When Henshaw dragged Jeremiah to Peru to hunt down a Martian by the name of J’onn J’onzz. Martians are shapeshifters, and live incredibly long lives compared to humans. J’onn came here centuries ago after a war on his planet wiped out his people. He spent most of his time in hiding before the DEO decided to hunt him down. Jeremiah ended up finding him only took one conversation for him to realise J’onn wasn’t a threat, but a refugee. Unfortunately, Henshaw was obsessed and refused to call off the mission. Henshaw managed to trap J’onn, but Jeremiah stopped him. The two of them fought and ended up going over a cliff, though, and J’onn, inspired by Jeremiah, took Henshaw’s form so that he could change the DEO into a force for good.” Eliza was crying at this point and El sighed. This was going to be the hardest part. She reached over and grasped Eliza’s hand. “Eliza, I need you to promise not to tell Kara and Alex about this.”
“You want me to keep this all a secret?” Eliza asked, her grief turning to indignation.
“J’onn deserves the chance to reveal himself to them on his own,” El replied. “I can’t force him to trust them.”
“Fair enough,” Eliza conceded. “But why tell me?”
“Alex might reveal that she and Kara are working for the DEO while you’re here,” El said. “If she does, I didn’t want you to accidentally make them suspicious of J’onn, thinking he was the man responsible for taking your husband away.”
Eliza was quiet for a long time, thinking about what she had said before looking El over.
“How much older are you than Kara?” She asked quietly.
Confused at the sudden change of subject, El answered hesitantly. “Fifteen years, give or take. Once we had to abandon Earth, it became harder to keep track of time, though, so I could be wrong.”
“Fifteen years,” Eliza replied quietly. “You don’t look much older than Kara.”
“Kryptonian biology,” El replied. “Even under Rao’s light, our natural lifespan is roughly three times that of a human.”
“And what about under the yellow sun?” Eliza asked.
El shrugged. “No idea.”
“That’s a long time to be alone,” Eliza said quietly. “Did you ever… find someone?”
“I did,” El replied. “She was the most amazing woman I had ever met.”
“A woman?” Eliza asked. “That’s… unexpected.”
El chuckled. “You said something similar in my timeline.”
The two of them shared a quiet laugh before Eliza sobered. “If you need me to, El, I’ll keep this from the girls for you. But you should really think about being honest with them, they might surprise you.”
El smiled sadly. “I’ll think about it.”
*(OoO)*
Diana was floating high above National City, basking in the peace that came from being so far removed from anything when El joined her. She had spent the last week thinking about the strange, otherworldly woman. She had indeed heard about Clark’s cousin making her debut in National City and even swore that she would offer whatever assistance she could were she in the area, if for no other reason than to alleviate the worries of some of her more… paranoid colleagues. Luckily, Supergirl seemed to be as devoted to truth and justice as her cousin, and had seemed to be quickly learning how to control her powers so as not to do more harm than good when she helped people. Every time Diana saw her on the news, she was always grinning brightly, seemingly happy to simply be of service.
El, however, was very different. From the moment Diana first laid eyes on her outside that warehouse in Gateway City, she knew that she was dealing with a fellow warrior. One who had descended into the pits of Tartarus and clawed her way out. She fought with the efficiency of one who was used to being outnumbered - constantly scanning her surroundings as she quickly took down one enemy before moving on to the next. Even had she not freely confessed to her flight from a wartorn future, Diana would have believed her based solely on the way she carried herself.
“You seem troubled,” she observed as the other woman joined her in the sky. Her lips were set in a frown and the skin between her eyebrows crinkled as she looked around them.
“I’m fine,” El replied. “Did you learn anything at the pier?”
“I did not,” Diana admitted. “I kept watch for several days, but nothing seemed amiss, and without access to the shipping records, I had no way of knowing if anything was being smuggled or not. Did you manage to find anything on David Cheng?”
“A little bit. He has an address listed in National City, but when I flew over it, there was next to nothing inside.”
Diana frowned. “A safehouse, perhaps?”
“Could be,” El said. “I’ll keep an eye on it and see if anyone drops by. There was something else, though.”
“Go on.”
“It has to do with Maxwell Lord. He was attending the same party as Kara the night of the attempted robbery. She told me that he never left, even when Reactron attacked, he hung around until well after the police arrived on the scene.”
Diana considered what El was saying. A man as connected as Maxwell Lord would know the moment an attempt was made to steal from him, especially because she and El had made a point not to hurt the security team. It was entirely possible he was simply playing it close to the chest so as not to draw any negative publicity, but… “You think he was unconcerned because he already knew the robbery would happen?”
El shrugged. “It’s a long shot,” she said, her raspy voice sending shivers down Diana’s spine. “But I wouldn’t put it past him to rob himself to hide the fact that he was stealing from his competitors.”
“If he were doing so, why steal outdated technology, though?” Diana countered. “Great though my distaste for the man may be, there is no denying that he is rather intelligent. If his goals were corporate espionage, there are better targets.”
“That’s true,” El conceded.
“Did he do anything of this sort in your time?” Diana asked.
“I don’t know about planning heists,” El said. “He did try to clone me by kidnapping coma patients and experimenting on them.”
“That filth!” Diana snarled. “Is there no line he will not cross?”
“He’s not the first megalomaniac hiding behind a saviour complex I’ve dealt with,” El said. “Unfortunately, we don’t know enough. Lord might not even be behind it in the first place.”
“Perhaps if we kept watch over that apartment you found, someone might come by that could provide us with more answers,” Diana suggested.
El shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” At that moment the rumble of thunder shook the air around them and she tensed momentarily before sighing.
“Not a fan of lightning?” Diana asked.
“It’s not that,” El said quietly. “Kara just got struck by lightning is all.”
Diana’s eyes widened. “Is she okay? Should we go help her?”
“She’s fine,” El explained. “Electricity hurts us, but it would take a concentrated blast from Zeus himself to actually put us down. The lightning passed through her into a woman she was trying to save, though.”
“And you knew this would happen?” Diana asked carefully, her eyes narrowed.
El nodded, her gaze fixed on the distance. “The high voltage passing through Kara’s unique biology will activate the woman’s meta gene, and she’s going to be a rival of Kara’s for a while before becoming a potential ally in the future.”
“So you decided to manipulate events so that she might gain her powers once again?”
“I’m not a god,” El snapped. “If I try to change fate at every turn, then things will change in ways I can’t possibly predict, and I risk failing a second time.”
Diana sighed, reading the pain in El’s eyes. “It’s true that the Fates do not like it when their designs are meddled with,” she conceded. “You have taken on quite the burden, El.”
El shrugged. “Someone has to,” she muttered. “If we’re going to be staking out Cheng’s apartment, do you have somewhere to stay?”
Diana smiled, accepting the change in subject. “I am currently staying at the Marriott, though I appreciate your concern.”
El flushed slightly and Diana smirked. “It’s not like I have a place to offer myself,” she mumbled. “Don’t know why I asked.”
Diana chuckled. “Why don’t you go help Kara and we’ll meet back up tonight to start watching the apartment.” El nodded and was about to take off when Diana stopped her. “And El? Thank you. I appreciate you helping me with this.”
El glanced away awkwardly and nodded before darting away, making Diana laugh once more.