Chapter Text
Cat Grant apologized for nothing, or so the common wisdom went.
In fact, Cat Grant spent much of her childhood desperately trying to make up for things outside of her control, only to be rebuffed time and again.
As a teenager, she resolved never again to make amends for problems she hadn’t caused.
If, perhaps, that tendency became a bit…calcified over the years, well, she’d earned herself a bit of peace and absolution.
Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. After all, Cat Grant’s story started over fifty years ago on a planet far, far away…
“The time to leave is now,” Catharine ordered, watching as her husband dallied by the windows, looking out at Argo City, the place he had called home all his life.
“Perhaps they were misguided,” Wil-Van hedged, turning back to Catharine, robes fluttering behind him. “We all know how Astra can be… There is a reason society has not allowed twins for centuries.”
“Impulsive, perhaps, but not irrational, Wil-Van.”
“And yet nothing has changed. Look around us. Were it not for Astra’s outlandish claims, you would never have contemplated such a plan. Earth is…barbarous. Millenia behind us.”
“All the easier to blend in, Wil-Van. I will leave with or without you.”
And that had settled it. A marriage of love it was not, but Wil-Van had sworn to unite their houses, and he would not separate them now.
With many years still to come before Krypton’s imminent destruction, pods were not yet hard to come by, and Catharine’s standing on the Council gave her all the leeway she needed to authorize an off-planet trip for her family under the guise of cultural outreach.
They arrived late at night, pod sliding across the sandy shores of a vast body of water. (For the first time, though not the last, Catharine had regrets.)
“By Rao,” Wil-Van exhaled, staring out at the inky abyss lapping at their feet. Slowly but surely, a smile spread across his lips as he lifted his face to the skies, where a yellow sun would soon warm their skin and grant them powers of the sort they had only heard described in records from Krypton’s interplanetary soldiers and travelers.
And such began their acclimation to life on Earth. Wil-Van—now William—marveled at all he found. A scientist to his core, nothing was too minor for his notice.
Catharine noticed just as much—perhaps more, she would say, capable as she was of lifting her head from the grains of sand to see the beach as a whole. But marvel she did not. Until she found books. Those repositories of knowledge and culture, stored in neatly lined, carefully bound pages, had earned her respect, unlike the inhabitants of this uncultured planet.
William, known now as Professor Grant, found himself a position at a local university in Metropolis. A “savant,” they declared him after he inadvertently revealed a discovery in the field of quantum mechanics still decades in the making. A “refugee” from some far-off country they deemed him, welcoming him to their ranks as Catharine languished at home, sinking into herself in a world not her own until she joined William at a “faculty party” and made the acquaintance of the first of many authors she would sweep into her orbit.
Of course, it was just as Catharine was beginning to carve out a place for herself that everything went horribly, horribly wrong.
“Illness,” William declared it.
“Weight gain,” Catharine feared, having read of the rigorous regimes undertaken to correct such imperfections on this planet. Perhaps, she reasoned, there was some greater gravitational pull at work. Some imbalance in the elements.
“A baby!” cooed the insipid wife of one of William’s colleagues.
Catharine blanched.
“Oh, I know what that means.” She’d given Catharine a knowing look, as if she had even the slightest clue. “Let me get you to the ladies’ room. We’ll let the men be.”
Catharine had excused herself early, stopped by a bookstore and picked up every text they had on pregnancy—that utterly barbaric ritual Krypton had long since abandoned.
“Congratulations!” the cashier had said, smiling too broadly at her, as if such a level of informality were warranted. Such breeches in decorum… Catharine shook her head and hurried home, sweeping through the door in mere seconds—slowed already by this unexpected burden.
And her burden it became.
A baby—a helpless infant squalling in her arms after hours and hours of torturous labor undertaken at home, lest doctors wonder at Catharine’s impervious skin. The first in the family to have real, documented proof of existence on this planet—Catherine Jane Grant, they called her, following the earthly naming conventions, choosing “Jane” at random from the pages of some infernal list of names that came with no histories, no legacies, no significance whatsoever.
Mothers here, it turned out, stayed at home with their children, or so William’s colleagues insisted. And so Catharine did, losing years and years of connections to this whisp of a girl—all blonde hair and loose limbs and more promise than Catharine could ever imagine for herself on this planet. But that promise had to be reigned in and tempered. Powers locked away in the face of a society that did not take well to outsiders and aliens. Reserves of self-control marshaled to keep them all safe, unendangered by this surprise of a child who would do nothing but fight her mother on it until she had forced her way into the public eye.
The “Queen of All Media” they called her now. Catharine scoffed. She had let herself become a plaything for these mortals, sucked into a world she should have stood above. Just like her father, who let himself be charmed by these humans and swept up in their world. Let himself forget that distance was safety until it was too late, abandoning her one last time.