Chapter 4
The Avengers – or should she say what’s left of them – try to right it somehow. She’s not privy to the specifics, the information’s so classified even Haley’s in the dark. But they’ve clearly been building towards something.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t work.
How does she know? She knows because she’s not blind: the disappeared stay disappeared. Kara doesn’t come home.
Something shifts after that and not only within the DEO. She could swear that people too, on the street, at the bar, sense it somehow: it’s as if they all collectively give up. Thor retreats to New Asgard, never to be heard from again. Bruce Banner escapes to his man cave in Mexico (officially to study Gamma radiation, unofficially to lick his wounds). And Captain Marvel – because yes, apparently there’s a female captain superhero now (and where the fuck was she when Thanos attacked?) – leaves Earth altogether.
She spends two full weeks in tedious debriefings with top DEO brass: when did she do this, when did she decide that, why this, why that. It’s protocol, yet she can’t help but feel on the defensive and is disturbed to realise how much is starting to blur, how much is jumbled.
It’s around that time that the funerals start.
Now that the chaos has more or less settled, families wish to honour their disappeared. Except there’s a shortage of everything: of funeral homes, of slots for church and funeral services, of coffins, of burial sites. There’s even a shortage of florists and flowers. Some families stick to traditional rites, others adapt to the circumstances. Cremation becomes the default. She goes to every single ceremony for members of the DEO National City branch, as well as for NCPD officers they lost in the Snap’s aftermath. Sometimes that means attending several in a single day, one after the other. She always introduces herself to the closest family members, before melting into the background. Thankfully, she’s never asked to speak.
She used to like the colour black. Now, she’s rather over it.
She remains discreet at James’ funeral too – to which National City, particularly African-Americans, turns up en masse. The Summer sun bears down on them, relentless, unyielding. Her short exchange with Kelly is stilted and leaves her with a fleeting sense of missed opportunities. She thinks of the Tracksuit Mafia, of the pattern behind their attacks, of the Governor‘s latest request. She spots Lena in the crowd, effortlessly standing out, a few discrete bodyguards close by. She feels eyes on her at one point, but can’t say for sure: Lena’s sunglasses obscure her eyes and there’re no outward signs of recognition. She’s suddenly petrified at the idea of having to speak to her and slinks back.
She doesn’t organise anything for her mother or Kara.
And things, somehow, start to go back to normal.
(Ha! Now that’s a word that’s lost all meaning: normal.)
Drinks with Vasquez become a regular thing. They usually go to a Fed’s haunt. Sometimes, when the memory of Maggie doesn’t threaten to become too overpowering, they end up at Al’s Dive Bar. It feels important to continue to support the business in the current atmosphere of widespread anti-Alien sentiment. She beats Vasquez and whoever is foolish enough to take them on at pool, and gets her ass handed to her at Jenga. She has a couple of drinks, the buzz necessary to get her to relax somewhat, enough to enjoy herself. There’s something freeing in Vasquez knowing what she’s lost, in not needing to explain and rehash and whenever conversation strays too close to personal topics, she shuts it down, Vasquez and the others too polite enough to point it out.
The bank wants to know what she’d like to do with Kara’s and her mother’s various bank accounts. She puts it off for as long as she can get away with, then contacts a few charities, including the most high profile ones in responding to the snap, but in the enduring chaos even they are slow to respond. So she has the bank accounts closed and the money transferred to hers. She’ll decide what to do with it later.
The Tracksuit Mafia scale up their attacks on supply convoys into the city. Their tactics stay the same, except they up the ante in terms of fire power. Their earlier objective of capturing precious cargo to then sell on the black market for ten times its price, seems to have morphed into suffocating all businesses – be they private or public – that refuse to pay a tribute to them for protection, plain and simple. It’s not about preserving the goods anymore: destroying them is just as fair game now. It’s a type of scorched earth strategy law enforcement has a hard time to adjust to.
She texts Maggie. A call is a little bit too… Anyway. Maggie comes through: she replies immediately and sends her a wealth of documents (notes on past investigations, leads on bases and warehouses, a spider web of connections to legitimate businesses). It all circles back to the mafia boss Kingpin Alex vaguely remembers her muttering about on multiple occasions. Maggie ends her email with: “Be careful with the Tracksuit vampires. They may seem like harmless goons at first glance, but they can be unpredictable, dangerously so. I’m glad you’re alive, Alex. Really glad. And I’m so sorry about Kara. Stay safe.”
She replies, ends her email with: “I’m really glad you’re alive too.” Deletes the sentence. Puts it back in. Deletes the draft altogether and rewrites it. She leaves that sentence in and hits the send button before she can change her mind. (Because at the end of the day, she is: so fucking glad.)
National City builds a memorial to its disappeared. With Kara’s name on it. With J’onn’s – his real Alien name, so at least they got that one right. With Brainy’s and Nia’s. With James’. And so many more.
From what she’s seen – for she’s been quite unable to avoid the press surrounding it – it’s a lifelike sculpture of Kara in her Supergirl uniform, standing among a couple of other figures: one representing the volunteers who were instrumental in the clean-up, another first line responders, too many of whom lost their own lives.
She doesn’t understand the need. Pouring concrete and carving it all in stone feels so definite when there’s still so much they don’t know. When there’s still the possibility that… And don’t these projects usually take years, between developing a winning concept, choosing an appropriate and symbolic location, assembling it? The Mayor has his reasons for rushing this, but it’s too fast, unnecessarily so.
She ignores both Haley’s order and the Governor’s personal request and doesn’t attend the inauguration ceremony. She gets blackout drunk at home instead. She wakes up around midnight in a puddle of her own drool on her kitchen floor. She ignores the miss calls from Vasquez, drags herself to bed and passes out.
The memorial is desecrated that same night: they deface it with hateful graffiti and scratch out all recognisable Alien names. The Children of Rao stage a mass suicide at its feet the following day. News agencies speak of 42 recovered bodies.
What a waste.
They kill Vasquez on a Friday morning.
In broad daylight.
The fucking bastards.
She thought the convoy’d be safe. Who’d want to attack hospitals’ supply of proton therapy equipment to treat childhood cancer? Turns out: the Tracksuit Mafia would. Because of fucking course they do.
She’s not part of the protection detail, which means she’s not the one who holds her, while she draws her final breaths; she’s not the one who returns to the DEO soaked in her blood. But she followed the planning of the mission and ultimately, whatever well-meaning colleagues tell her, she’s responsible. This is on her.
It's Kara all over again.
No, it runs even deeper: all the way to their father’s first disappearance. Yet another instance where she failed to protect someone she’s close to. Proof that she truly is incapable of keeping the ones she cares about safe.
They go through the protocol: she informs Vasquez’ parents. It’s the second child they lose in so many weeks. (She wonders why Vasquez didn’t tell her about her brother. Or whether she did and Alex’s just been so in her head she didn’t register it.) The call is short, awkward, heartbreaking. Vasquez’ mother starts sobbing and passes the phone to her husband. The lost in translation of it all, her Spanish rusty, their English tentative, doesn’t help. Neither does the fact that she can’t reveal much about Vasquez’ work – Susana, her mother weeps – or the circumstances surrounding her death. Alex promises to send them her personal effects from work and warns them HR will need some time before they’ll get in touch, considering the backlog they’re facing with vanished employees.
In normal times, they’d organise a DEO-wide minute of silence; they’d put in place emotional debriefing group sessions for Vasquez’ team and those who participated in the mission. In normal times, she’d make herself available for affected colleagues. But there’s nothing normal about their current times. Vasquez’s just one more number on a long list of fallen DEO men and women, a list grown exponential in the past months.
She’s handed Vasquez’s bulletproof vest, still damp with blood and stares at the gaping hole in its front. A new kind of shotgun she’s told, more powerful, deadlier. Whatever the state of the world, one can trust the arms industry to continue to innovate. How reassuring.
It’s not really a fully formed intention. By the time she realises what she’s about to do, she’s already there. The sprawling warehouse on the outskirts of town isn’t their HQ, but it featured prominently in the paperwork Maggie sent over and their last weeks of surveillance have confirmed it as an important hub. And what exactly is she about to do, anyway? She’s dressed all in black, shock baton at her side. She came here for a fight, for sure. She wants to get bloody, wants to shed blood too.
An eye for an eye.
She thinks of Vasquez, conceding defeat at a game of pool, with that shy and good natured grin of hers. Hears her mother‘s voice dissolving into sobs over the phone. This is for her.
They don’t expect her.
The element of surprise goes a long way, but it can’t work miracles either. As much as her shock baton can hold its own against bats, when they start drawing their guns – and fuck, where did all these machine guns suddenly come from? – things start getting dicey, real fast. She uses one guy’s momentum against him, holds his arm away as he fires, shooting someone else instead. When another takes aim at her, she uses the first as a shield. He takes three, four, five hits, before she drops him to the ground. She body checks a fourth goon and slides out of sight behind a steel shelf. She’ll take care of him later. One moment she’s incapacitating number five, the next he’s suddenly taking a swing at her with a knife she hadn’t seen. When the ratatatat starts, she leaves him choking on his own blade, lodged deep in his throat and jumps for cover.
Three dead and it would appear she’s cornered. Nevermind. This, the adrenaline, the narrowed sharpness, the single minded focus, yes: this is what she came for. She spots the oil puddle on the ground, hears the echo of approaching boots, ever closer. She counts at least six of them, with distant voices to the right. It’s all reflex: she turns her baton on and lights the place up.
The explosion blasts her back with a deafening boom.
She comes to, maybe seconds, maybe minutes later. She crawls up onto her knees with some difficulty, coughing. The air’s suffocating. She takes stock of her body: she feels each one of her arms and legs and seems able to move them. She covers her mouth and nose with her top, tries to regulate her breathing and squints through the blaze. She can’t make out much beside the flames. There’s a body to the side, another lies unmoving trapped under a collapsed steel structure, a third, fourth and fifth over there. Her ribs – scratch that: her entire body hurts. The ringing in her ears dims. There’s… she’s not sure, but it sounds like sirens in the distance.
Shit. She can’t be here.
She struggles up. Her left leg gives way when she puts weight on it. Her head’s spinning. She gets back up again with difficulty and stumbles out of the building. The night air’s refreshingly cool. She cradles her ribs, leans against the wall and waits until the coughing’s under control.
She limps away, as fast as possible, without a second look for the destruction she‘s leaving behind.
This was for Vasquez.
They didn’t deserve anything else.