Chapter Text
“Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.”
- Zen Cho, from “The Four Generations of Chang E”
The hospitals were more overwhelming than she had expected them to be.
Towards the end, when the matter of coming home became a when, she’d known in that shadowy-vague way that coming back was going to be a lot. She’d briefly envision cameras flashing, paparazzi shouting, strangers staring, but, inevitably, her thoughts eventually shifted to what she was returning to. Cat, Evelyn, Alex. (If they’d have her.)
The list.
Winn.
Mike.
The list.
She’d thought of coming back the way drowning men think of air, as if it’s something holy, and always seem to forget about the specifics of it. The press of the water. The burn of the sun. The ache in the lungs that refuse to fade. Going from drowning to breathing was a process, one that was always forgotten. Nobody wants to think about the spluttering, the coughing, the ragged gasps. The transition from dying to very, very much alive.
Anyways. The hospitals. They were overwhelming in that everyone’s talking everyone’s looking everyone’s touching type of way. It was white rooms, and doctors that did not speak English and she had to pretend she did not understand them, pretend that they were the first people she’s seen in years, pretend like there isn’t dried blood under her fingernails. They brought in a translator, and then it was what is your name? how long were you there? all by yourself?
How long, again?
Are you sure?
And then it was the plane ride back to National City, with an aid sitting right next to her the whole time, the rumble of the engines and the rattle of the turbulence, and she smiles at the flight attendant who brings her water and pretends like panic isn’t swirling in her gut, like each little bump of the plane isn’t making her think what if what if what if
And then, then, then, it was National City hospital. Driven from the airport through the city so fast she couldn’t even stare at the streets. More exams. More X-rays and blood tests and MRI’s and white rooms with no windows and that paper that covers the exam table, the loud, crinkly type that sticks to your skin.
It’s all so much in a way she wasn’t expecting, and that makes her feel off-balance. If she hadn’t predicted this, what else did she miss? She’s been back in the city for less than a full day and already it feels like the foundation beneath her feet is cracked, like everything is so far away but so, so close. Like she’s in a cotton padded room, and the whole world is tapping on the glass.
(Can she even be sure any of it happened at all?)
And then they move her to the final room, one with gray accents and floor length windows and all the panic vanishes in an instant. Somewhere, between the airport and X-ray Number Three, the sun has set, leaving the city outside steeped in darkness. Oil black and filthy, only broken by the golden lights shining from the thousands of windows. Like flames, like bonfires, an entire city lit up from the bottom with rage.
Kara breathes in.
Something inside her chest burns, and she knows it is not her lungs. She wants her bow. She wants her arrows.
She wants to find Adam Hunt.
Her first trip back to National City, the one that ended with a drug dealer pitched face-first into the concrete from two floors up, she stepped onto a soggy magazine bearing his face. She’d shaken it from her boot, and recognized the name from the list, and in an instant his portrait, too wide and pale, was seared into her mind. She’d hurried on, rushed towards her mission and future, but she hadn’t forgotten that magazine. His smile. The way it settled beneath her skin.
Later, listening to Akio’s snores, and flipping through the list’s pages, she stumbled across Hunt’s name again, scrawled in that messy hand. She ran her finger over it, and then snagged a pen from the bedside table and underlined it. Her very first alteration to the book, and it felt final, felt absolute. The moment in which that if became a when.
When she got back. When. He would come first. She would wipe that smile off the face of the Earth with as much ease as she did shaking the trash from her shoe. When she got back, she’d reach her hands into that rotting face and the pain would come out shining.
But but but.
But first.
First she must face Cat and Evelyn and Alex and Winn, and then get reacquainted with the city, and then set up the base.
One, two, three. She drums her fingers against the window’s glass, and watches the lights burn. One, two, three.
City, base, Hunt.
The door swings open, slow and scared.
But first.
She lifts her fingers off the glass and turns away from the bonfires. Cat is hovering in the doorway, hand resting on the knob like she’s a beat away from leaving, and she’s looking at Kara with a face that’s raw and afraid. Kara swallows down the lump in her throat. Does not move from her spot near the window. She will not cry. She allowed herself a few tears on the fishermen’s boat, allowed herself to cry into the phone held shakily to her ear. But she will not cry now.
A voice inside her head that sounds exactly like Astra’s murmurs something about weakness, and Kara says, “Mom.”
Cat breaks. Pushes off and out of the doorway, crosses the room and wraps her arms tightly around Kara, squeezing the way one would a lost child. The way one would a ghost.
“Kara,” Cat breathes, face burned in her hair, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
Hug her back, she thinks harshly, a snap thought that makes her blink, and tentatively she loops one arm around Cat’s waist, unsure of how much she’s allowed to hold. They stand there for what feels like forever, Cat crying softly and Kara blinking against the onslaught of her perfume. The exact brand she remembers and somehow this is so much more overwhelming then all those damn medical exams.
Eventually, Cat pulls back, and Kara lets her arm swing back down to her side.
“Kara,” Cat says again, and then stops, face wet and eyes red-rimmed, uncertain of what to say. She reaches up and cups her cheek, and despite the hiss in her head, Kara leans into the touch. Cat exhales shakily, and when the scent of old coffee hits her face she does not flinch. “Let’s go home, okay?”
Kara nods. Blinks again. “Okay.”
She decided during the second year that she was going to call Cat mom when she got back. She even tried it out a couple times, rolling it around in her mouth right next to an image of Cat’s face held carefully in her head. Perfect makeup, perfect earrings, haircut more expensive than most people’s rent, that angry set to her mouth that always seemed to be aimed at her. It never felt right. The syllables were too lumpy to ever stick to the concept of Cat in her thoughts.
Her father’s second wife? Yes. Alex and Evelyn’s biological mother? Yes. Frustrating as hell, overbearing and just a replacement for her real mother, now dead and buried since she was thirteen? Maybe.
She listens to the wind pull through the leaves above her, Astra muttering something about knife training next to her, and thinks that maybe she is not a good person. Maybe she never was. Maybe Cat was only ever frustrating because it was aimed at her, and she deserved nothing less.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. She opens her mouth. Tries to say mom again, but this time nothing comes out. Maybe it’s not Cat. Maybe it’s her. Try again. Do better. Be better.
Mom. Cat.
Maybe.
The hospital releases her in the morning, and after forcing her to eat a shitty bagel and some fruit, they leave. Cat does not drive home. Of course not. Cat has a driver and she sits in the backseat with Kara and it feels weird, because of course Cat has a driver, she’s always had a driver, but still. Kara doesn’t know what she was expecting.
Cat’s hands flutter from her lap to her hair to her collar, and that too is unexpected. Cat Grant, nervous. The world must be ending. Eventually, Kara gives up watching her and turns her attention to the scenery passing by outside. Watches the building. Watches the people.
“Kara?” Cat says finally, when they’re stopped at a red light and the car behind them will not stop honking. That’s all Cat’s managed to get out so far today. Just her name. Kara does not tell her that it no longer feels like hers. She does not tell her about the hiss in her head that keeps getting louder with each honk of that damn horn.
“Yeah?” she says instead, watching Cat watch her.
“Some things—” Cat starts. Stops. Starts again. “Some things are different from—from before.” Cat says it hesitantly, watching Kara like she’s waiting for her to shatter into a million pieces. Or maybe just disappear again.
“Okay,” Kara says.
“We—we packed up your things,” Cat admits, guilt flashing across her face. “I’m so sorry. We didn’t throw anything away! But—Alex is unpacking things right now—but.”
Cat looks like she just admitted to committing some grave sin, a murder—
(Kara stops short. Would she look like that? If she confessed? Does she even feel guilty anymore?)
Cat misreads her lack of response and rushes to fill the silence, but Kara cuts her off. “It’s okay. I don’t want much of that stuff anyways.”
Cat blanches, and that—that was the wrong response. Okay. Okay. Recover. Lie better. Be better.
“I just mean, it’s been five years. I was dead.”
Cat still seems unsure, and even a little shocked at Kara’s use of the word dead, and Kara isn’t even certain of what the fuck she’s trying to say her, so she closes her mouth. Resists the urge to look out the window again.
A moment of silence, Cat steels herself, and Kara wishes she would just say what she wants to.
“And there’s one more thing. It’s important.” Cat explains, carefully, that she does not have a younger sister. That Evelyn is not Evelyn but Carter, a brother, and it’s new and he’s very self-conscious about it, you see, and so anxious. So. Please?
(Guilt swirls in Kara’s stomach. She doesn’t care if Evelyn is Carter. She doesn’t care, she just wants him happy, wants him safe, so why is Cat looking at her like she’s going to have a meltdown in the back of this damn car?
Inhale. Exhale. Astra murmurs something about arrows, and the hissing gets louder. Be better.)
“Okay,” Kara says.
They’re silent for the rest of the drive.
The penthouse is exactly as Kara remembers it. Fourteen floors up, decorated with that white, minimalistic bullshit that she always hated as a kid but Cat insisted upon.
(“Why white?” Kara had bitched. “What about stains?”
Her father had hushed her. “Be polite.”)
Her trunk is held tightly in her hand, despite the driver’s best efforts, and Cat has been eyeing it ever since Kara pulled it out of the boot. She’ll have to be careful, have to hide it to make sure Cat doesn’t go through it.
(Okay. Okay. Family, trunk, city, base.
Hunt.)
Alex is standing in the foyer when they come in. Her hair is shorter, shaved on one side and sharply angled on the other. Her shoulders are broader and skin is a bit paler, with the faint beginnings of wrinkles forming at the corner of her mouth.
How odd. Wrinkles.
Kara sets her trunk down by the door, memorizes the exact way it’s sitting so she’ll know if someone touches it, and then allows herself to smile.
“Hi, Alex.”
Alex’s jaw shakes, and whatever stoic expression she was aiming for slides right off her face like oil. “God, Kara.” Her voice cracks, shakes, and for the second time in just as many days Kara gets squeezed so tightly it’s difficult to breathe. Alex pulls away first, sniffling, and then runs her hand through Kara’s hair.
(It’s just barely grown out from Russia. Just hardly reaching her mouth. If Anatoly saw her now, he’d hand her a razor.)
“I always said you’d look good with short hair,” Alex says, and the tension snaps like a rubber band.
Kara steps back, smiling. “You can talk! You’ve gone all rebellious on me!”
Alex snorts, rubs the back of her neck self-consciously. Cat hovers, just a few feet away, and Kara can feel the awkwardness start to set in again, the weight of everything she needs to tell them and everything she can’t tell them pressing down on her.
(The hissing has moved down to her spine now. A snake swallowing her vertebrae whole, tongue flicking out to trace her skull.)
Alex shifts her weight from foot to foot, and just as she’s about to open her mouth to attempt to say something, the door to the foyer flies open with a loud bang. Cat jumps out of her skin, Alex flinches, and, in the doorway, Carter beams.
His hair is brown now, having faded from the dirty-blond of his childhood, and far shorter, too. Curly and boyish, and Kara thinks Carter Carter Carter. His grin is infectious, bouncing up and down on the heels of his feet, and Kara can’t help but reciprocate.
“Hey, bro.”
Carter slams into her, hard enough to make her step back slightly to regain her balance and make Cat wince. She’s just a couple inches taller than him now, and a pang of grief hits her square in the chest.
“I knew you were alive!” Carter crows. “I knew it!”
Kara buries her face in Carter’s hair, breathes in the smell of a shampoo that she does not recognize. “You were with me the whole time.”
It’s easier after that. Carter drags her throughout the whole penthouse, talking a mile a minute as if he’s trying to fit in everything she missed in one go. Cat and Alex trail behind them, silent, exchanging glances and Kara pretends she doesn’t notice. She mm-hmm ’s in just the right places and tries hard to pay attention to what Carter is saying.
It’s when they’re standing in front of the mantle and Carter is explaining exactly how they’ve moved each of the framed photographs over the last five years that Cat breaks.
“Carter, sweetheart, why don’t we give Kara some space? Let her get changed?”
Kara glances down at herself, and sharply realizes that she’s still, in fact, wearing the sweats that the first hospital in China gave her. Everyone looks at her. She flounders, just for a second, and then regains her footing. “That’d be nice. Pretty sure these are starting to smell.”
(Good. Funny. Break the tension. Everything is okay. She is okay. Everything is going to be fine. )
Carter snickers next to her, and then they all accompany her back to the foyer where she snags her trunk (they all stare), and then up the stairs and into her bedroom. It’s like a big procession, like a damn funeral march. Everyone’s hovering and looking and then the door closes behind her and for the first time in over a week she is alone.
(Untrue. She can see Cat’s shadow blocking the light underneath the door. Always hovering.)
It’s alone enough.
Cat was telling the truth, about them packing everything up. Cardboard boxes are shoved haphazardly into the corner of the room, the items spilling out onto the ground, like someone had frantically tried to unpack it all in a rather short time span. She snorts quietly to herself, imagining the panic on Alex’s face.
It’s all rather messy, and she needs to go through it, needs to organize it all, needs to purge out the useless crap. She feels the urge to just start throwing away boxes entirely without even looking through them, get rid of all the stuff until she’s just left with the necessities, exactly the way she did in Russia. Exactly the way Astra taught her. But she can’t do that. Or, at least, she can’t do that without freaking out Cat. She already looks positively wigged out by this entire situation, and Kara thinks that she might actually lose it if she opened the dumpster and found untouched boxes.
Okay. Okay, so. She’s crossed off Cat and Carter and Alex, and that just leaves Winn, who’s coming over for dinner. (She overheard Cat and Alex discussing it in hushed tones during Carter’s very engaging description of the movements of the fridge magnets.) She can hide the trunk now, and then she’ll unpack tonight, city tomorrow and possibly the day after, and then the base. The base will take the longest to set up, and she knows she has to give herself time to get it right, to get the arrows, the computers, to get it at least functional.
She needs to be smart about this, to be careful, clinical. It can’t be like Coast City. She’s been building up to this for the past five years, and she will not screw it up. She can’t. She won’t.
She pushes the trunk onto the top shelf of her closet, and then piles boxes around it, adjusting until it can’t be seen. A bad hiding spot, but it’ll do for now. It’ll be enough to deter them. (Hopefully. When has Cat Grant ever been deterred?)
She circles her room, once, twice, looks at the color of the walls (a light blue), and the bedframe and the view out the window. Gets acclimated with its corners and shadows and the way the sun shines in from outside. She won’t be able to sleep in here, she realizes. It’s too open. The bed is in the middle of the damn room, only the headboard pushed against the wall, leaving her exposed on almost all sides. The windows are too big, the door at a bad angle.
Later. She fights back the frustration bubbling in her chest. She can deal with that later.
She kneels, making sure the windows and the door are in her eyeline at all times, and pulls open the cardboard box closest to her. Old sports trophies. She picks one up, weighs it in her hand, reads the label 2001 NCHS Basketball Championship, and decides to keep it. It could make for a good weapon. She pushes that box aside and moves onto the next one (shoes) and then the next one (old stuffed animals), and just as she’s deciding to give up and just ask Alex which damn box her clothes are, she pulls open the next one, and gets hit with the smell of her father’s cologne.
She had been so nauseous, on the lifeboat. The sea swaying sickeningly beneath her, storm clouds rolling angrily on the horizon. So nauseous and more tired than she’d ever been in her life, a bone-deep exhaustion that only seemed to get worse with each passing minute. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep, but Zach kept reaching over and shaking her awake, brushing the hair out of her face, telling her that it was all going to be okay.
It was all going to be okay.
They’ve got half a water bottle left, and he pushes it into her hand, and when her eyes flutter he reaches out and snags her face.
“Kara,” he said, and he tells her that he failed their city. That she needs to get back, to right his wrongs. She tells him to preserve his energy, and then he pushes the list into her hand.
When he pulls the trigger, killing that crew member, he does not hesitate and the gunshot rings out across the sea for miles. He holds the gun to his head, and a scream builds up in Kara’s throat, and he pauses here, just for a second.
She’s going to remember that look in his eyes for the rest of her damn life. That rage. That conviction.
He looks at her, and he says, “Survive,” and when he kills himself he pitches backward, half hanging out the raft, staining the water red.
She flinches back hard, shaking off the remnants of the flashback, and inhales sharply on instinct, resulting in another sharp whiff of her father’s cologne. It’s a box of his things, his clothes and a couple knick-knacks, placed here in her bedroom most likely by accident. She reaches in hesitantly, and pulls out the first item her fingers brush across: a ratty old leather jacket that she vaguely remembers him wearing from time to time. It’s worn out in the shoulders and elbows, and one of the pockets is torn.
She finds the rest of her clothes quickly after that, moving through the boxes until she gets what she wants. A pair of old jeans, loose-fitting, a tight sports bra that’s going to make her shoulders sore, and a gray cotton t-shirt. She does not look at herself when she changes, carefully avoids her scars, and then finally pulls on the leather jacket. It doesn’t fit quite right, a bit too long in the arms, and the smell of the dust and cologne is a bit overwhelming, but.
But she wants it.
(In the back of her head, Astra’s jaw tightens.)
(Well, she wants it, and also the rest of her clothes are composed entirely of pink and yellow dresses and stupid polka-dot button downs. God, she really was a fucking idiot back then, wasn’t she?)
Cat eyes the jacket when she leaves her room, but she doesn’t say anything. Winn comes for dinner, hugs her briefly, tightly, and then insists on making plans on going out tomorrow, to see the city again. Cat disapproves, clearly, but doesn’t say anything. Winn brings up Mike, and Cat glares at him so hard Kara is a little surprised he doesn’t burst into flames. Carter asks about the island, and the table goes deathly silent, and she tells him that it was cold, and when she excuses herself, Cat still doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t sleep at all, but pretends for each of the five times Cat comes in and hovers. Alex checks twice, once just peering through the door, and the second she shuffles over and holds her hand in front of Kara’s mouth, like she’s making sure she’s actually still breathing.
It’s about as good as she could have hoped for.
“Your funeral sucked,” Winn says. His fingers drum against the steering wheel, eyes focused on the stoplight in front of them. Kara glances over to him, lips twitching. She’s wearing the leather jacket again, and fiddles with the worn out cuffs.
“How bad?”
“Awful. Everyone was all clingy and huggy—”
Kara groans, and Winn starts laughing. His movements loosen up a bit, and he watches her out of the corner of his eye. It’s almost like before. Almost. The light turns green, and Winn eases on the gas. His car is shit, complete with rust stains and brakes that squeal. Kara sort of loves it a little.
“—and Margaret was there, too!”
“Margaret B?”
“No, Margaret T.”
Kara does a double take. “Margaret T was there?”
“Right! She was so two-faced about it too! Like,” Winn clears his throat, affects a high-pitched voice, “She was my best friend! We were sooo close.” He drops the voice, glances at Kara, makes sure she’s smiling. “And I’m like oh fuck off, you were an absolute a-hole.”
Kara laughs then, a light little chuckle. The conversation fizzles out, and silence settles back in the car. Winn keeps looking at her, and Kara abruptly realizes that she’s stopped smiling. It’s so much harder than she expected. To keep smiling. But now the silence has dragged on for a bit too long, and if she starts smiling again she’s going to look weird, and—
It marvels her. How easily this part of life came to her before. How easily she could just smile.
The car slows again to another red light, and Kara turns to look out the window. Winn drums his fingers along the steering wheel again, shoulders tight, and finally they turn onto the only road that Kara actually wanted to see.
Outside, behind a six-foot tall, rusted chain link fence, looming in the distance, is the factory. Something inside Kara’s chest tugs, and for a second the hissing is overwhelming, deafening.
“—your dad sold his factory just in time,” Winn is saying, and Kara nods along automatically, focusing.
The factory is smack in the center of the city, equal distance from the rich and poor neighborhoods, from the train tracks and the docks. It’s got three floors and two subfloors, alongside a host of hidden nooks and crannies. And, most importantly, it’s abandoned, and trapped behind enough padlocks that there won’t be any squatters.
No security cameras.
No people.
It’s perfect.
“Why did you want to come to this neighborhood, anyways?” Winn asks, and his tapping increases. Kara realizes sharply that he’s stopped the car, loitering by the curb and allowing her time to stare at the factory.
She leans back in her seat. “No particular reason.”
Winn’s jaw works, and then he nods, bobbing his head in a way that sharply reminds her of highschool, when he always seemed to be frustrated with her, but would trail after her no matter what.
The car starts moving again, and Winn makes a random left turn. He hesitates, uncertain if he should say whatever he’s thinking. Kara watches as his spine straightens, and then he blurts out, “Mike’s married now.”
Kara blinks, and then, startled, laughs. “Married? To who?”
Winn exhales, relieved. “Okay, oh my god. Ms. Grant didn’t want me to tell you, because, like, she was worried or something. But I was like, you guys dated, at the end! You should probably know! But she was scared you were going to freak out—” He freezes abruptly, eyes wide, watching her. “You’re not going to freak out, are you?”
She snorts, and frustration swirls in her gut. She knows she has to be patient. She knows everyone is going to be walking on eggshells around her for a while. She was alone for five years, she reminds herself. She was alone.
“No, Winn. I’m fine. Who’s he married to?”
He hesitates again, and Kara resists the urge to scream. “Imra Ardeen. The, um. The—”
“The girl he cheated on me with?” Kara fills in dryly.
“Yup,” Winn’s voice is tight. A brief silence lapses in the car, and then Winn looks at her, lips twitched upwards into a hesitant smile. “For the record, the wedding was even worse than your funeral.”
The conversation flows just a tad bit easier after that. Winn keeps up a steady stream of word vomit, filling her in on everything she’s missed in the past five years. It reminds her of Carter, and being dragged around the penthouse, except this time it’s Winn, and he’s driving aimlessly throughout the city. He tells her that he’s working IT at Catco now, under Cat, who is literally the most terrifying boss ever, like oh my god, and it’s sort of okay. Kind of boring, if he’s being honest. He’s dated on and off, nothing too serious. He gets coffee with Alex every couple of weeks, and there’s this new guy in the Art Department, James, that he’s sort of becoming friends with.
She knows that she should tune him out. She knows that she should be focusing on the layout of the streets, that that is literally the whole point of being out here today. She knows that the mission comes first. She knows that she needs to find Adam Hunt.
But.
Winn’s pulled over, tucked into an alleyway that he probably should not be parked in, talking about literally the best Chinese food you’ve ever had, seriously Kara, it’s amazing, when she speaks for the first time since the awkward Mike conversation.
“Winn.”
It’s the way she says his name, maybe, that makes him stop talking immediately. Or maybe it’s the way she’s looking at him, focused, determined. His eyes widen, eggshells, and he starts to open his mouth again, probably to ask if she’s okay, but she cuts him off again.
“I’m sorry.”
Winn blinks, flabbergasted and confused. “What for?”
She is ten years old and she meets Winn for the first time on the playground at school. She trips him and laughs when he cries.
She is eleven, and tells the entire class that his father was arrested, even though he told her in confidence, even though he asked her not to tell anyone.
She is thirteen years old, and standing in front of her mother’s grave, and when Winn places a hand on her shoulder, she tells him to fuck off.
She’s fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and he’s always there, a best friend in so many ways, and yet she treats him like shit. Rips him apart at a moment’s notice, just because she wanted to.
They both go to National City University, and he helps her whenever she begins to fall behind in a class, and she calls him an idiot. He holds back her hair when she vomits into the toilet, so hungover she can hardly see straight, and she ignores him for three weeks straight. He brings her soup when she’s sick, and when she cries she gets mascara on his favorite sweatshirt.
She is climbing onto the yacht, and Winn is waving to her from the docks, and she does not look back over her shoulder, preferring instead to complain to her father about Winn’s clinginess.
She is half asleep on the island, listening to the waves crash on the shore, and she does not think she is a good person.
“Winn.” She says it gently, tentatively. She’s thought about this exact conversation from the second she landed on that rocky beach, and for the first time since she’s been home she knows exactly what to say. “I was horrible to you. You deserved to be treated so much better. I was a shit friend, and I’m sorry.” She speaks carefully, clinically, never taking her eyes from Winn’s face.
She doesn’t want forgiveness. She wants Winn to leave her. She wants Winn to realize that he deserves so much better than her.
“You weren’t,” Winn fumbles, eyes wide and a little glassy. “You weren’t that bad.”
“Winn.”
“Okay,” he sniffles and looks away from her all at once, his shoulders caving in. “I forgive you.”
“Don’t.”
He huffs, and all at once he’s angry. Fingers tap-tap-tapping on the wheel. Rapidly, with jerky motions, he undoes his seatbelt and climbs out of the car. Kara dutifully follows. The alleyway is dark and a little damp, and alarm bells go off in Kara’s head but she shoves them down in favor of Winn. He’s pacing now, a quick back and force, and then all at once he stops, and the weight of his glare pins Kara to the concrete.
“I’m so angry at you,” he admits, hands trembling slightly. “I mean, you were dead. You died. And then you rise from the grave and everything—” His voice cracks, and he scrubs at his face roughly. “Things sucked after you left. It was all so bad, and it’s just started getting better again, and I can’t—”
His glare fades away into despair. “Kara, I can’t do that again.”
She nods her head, hands in her pockets. She needs him to leave her. She needs him to leave her. “Okay.”
Winn drags a hand down his face and swallows hard. “God, Kara. I missed you so much.”
She nods again, and this time can’t keep her eyes on his face. She opens her mouth. Astra snarls. “I missed you, too,” she admits. The snake drags the tip of its tongue right across the underside of her brain, and she swears she can see a magazine bearing Adam Hunt’s face shoved up against the alleyway wall.
Flick, flick, flick, and the snake hisses MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER
Winn reaches out and gently places a hand on her shoulder. “And we’re going to get through this, okay? Together?”
Lit up from the bottom with rage. The mission comes first.
She needs him to leave her, but she knows, by now, that Winslow Schott isn’t going anywhere.
“Yeah.” She swallows down the lump in her throat. “Okay.”
A brief shift of the wind, a flash of color, and just as her instincts twitch, head raising to assess the threat, a dart hits her square in the neck. The snake swallows another vertebrae, and just before things go dark, it murmurs I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
The drug leaves her system slowly, sluggishly, and just as she opens her eyes a taser is pressed into her ribs. A startled gasp leaves her lips as her body spasms, and then it's pulled away again, held in front of her face to crackle.
She’s awake now.
They’re all wearing matching masks. Stupid red horror masks that they probably got from a Halloween store, black hoods pulled up. They’re trying to intimidate her. She fights the urge to laugh. The warehouse is dark, shafts of light barely piercing the heavy layers of dust. Three exit points in front of her, and a potential fourth, if the breeze tickling the back of her neck is to be trusted.
“Ms. Grant,” the man waves the taser in front of her face. Three combatants, including the man in front of her, but only one, hovering towards the back, actually has a gun. The final kidnapper is off towards her left, hands empty. The chair she’s in is old, creaky, and it’s only her wrists that are bound, zip tied to the back of the chair.
Idiots. They aren’t even wearing gloves.
“Ms. Grant,” Man Number One says again, and this time he presses the taser into her stomach. A cry rips its way from her mouth, legs lifting off the ground and towards her chest as she curls in on herself. Her teeth clench down, saliva dripping from her mouth, and then he pulls away again.
“Did your father make it to the island? Did he tell you anything?”
Winn lies sprawled behind them, thrown haphazardly on the ground, and she cannot tell if he’s breathing or not. She inhales, slow and steadily, letting the last of the drug leave her system.
Her heart begins to thrum. “It’s Zorel,” she says. “Not Grant.”
He holds the taser to her chest, and this time she does not cry out. The man pulls back, startled, and glances at his compatriot with the gun. When he turns back to her, she meets his eye easily.
“Ms. Zorel,” he sneers. “Did your father tell you anything?”
The snake flick flick flicks against her skull. “Yes he did.”
The man huffs, and leans in closer, getting in her face. “And what, exactly, did he say?”
She exhales, watching her breath fog in front of her and the ziptie snaps. She raises her chin, and the hissing falls silent. “He told me I’m going to kill you.”
The first man dies easily, simply, sweeping the chair out from underneath her, letting it shatter into pieces when she rams it against his head, and then burying the leg into his chest. A simple death. Fast.
The second man, the unarmed man, is even faster, lunging at her just as the man with the gun open fires, and she uses him as a shield, bullets piercing his thin skin and his life shatters like glass. There’s blood on her face now, and her heart is beating fast in her chest. She wants to rip him apart. She wants it to be slow.
But he’s not on the list.
And so, when she catches up to the third man, she breaks his spine and he dies in less than a second. She allows herself this, this moment of rage, and her head is completely silent.
It’s become so simple, to kill.
Sirens wail in the distance, and she forces it all back down, adopts a look of fear, and treks back to Winn.
“A man in a hood? A green hood?” Detective Sawyer raises an eyebrow, incredulous, and Kara doesn’t blink.
“Yes.”
Behind her, Cat is clenching her jaw so tightly a vein throbs in her forehead.
“Why would he save you?” Sawyer asks, and Alex, sitting on the couch across from Kara and Winn, shoots a glare at Sawyer that feels a bit too personal for the occasion. Kara makes a mental note to ask how they know each other.
“I don’t know,” Kara says. “Why don’t you find him and ask?”
The snake sits coiled low in her back, lazily lapping at her nerves. Satiated. Something in Kara’s chest burns, and she thinks of the sound of that man’s spine snapping. She thinks of how good it felt, ringing in her ears.
I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
“A man in a green hood,” Sawyer huffs, and Kara fights back the urge to smile.
The kidnapping makes everything worse. All that awful walking-on-eggshells, waiting-for-her-to-shatter act gets dialed up to a hundred, and she has to actively prevent herself from bashing her head into the wall. Alex asks her if she’s okay no less than thirteen times a day, and Cat hovers, always within arms reach. Even Carter, who Kara had hoped would be a bit better about this than everyone else, sticks to her side like glue, chattering a million miles an hour.
(She feels a bit bad, being annoyed by this. She waited five years to get back to them. Five years to see them again, and now that she’s actually here she just wants them to go away again? She needs to try harder. Smile bigger. Be better.)
Kara brings up going back out into the city the day after the kidnapping, and Cat nearly has a stroke at the mere thought, so she lets the matter slide. She’s still able to get some work done, late at night on an old burner phone she had stashed in her trunk. She orders arrows and gear and computers from the same manufacturer the Bratva uses, with a bank account she knows can’t be traced to her. She gets it all sent to a PO Box set up under a fake name, and counts down the hours until everything arrives.
And in the minutes in between, she researches Adam Hunt. The CEO of Hunt Multinational, forty-eight years old, and currently under investigation for fraud. He’s stolen millions of dollars, all of it from the poor, the underprivileged, and he’s successfully bribed and killed anyone who’s gotten in his way. He’s ruined hundreds of lives, stolen homes and life-savings, and the stain of his existence sits like a bad rash under her skin.
She looks at his photo shining up at her from the phone, and plans.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
Kara smiles through her teeth, and forces an easy-going expression onto her face. She wraps her fingers loosely around the coffee mug Alex shoved into her hands, and leans back in the kitchen table chair. “Mom. You’ve been gone from Catco for over a week now. I think if you wait any longer the stock market will plummet.”
Carter, sitting across from her and frowning at his homework, snorts. “She’s right. I don’t think you’ve ever taken this much time off.”
Cat frowns. “My daughter rose from the grave. Of course I’m going to take some time off.”
Cat only referred to Kara as her daughter twice before the boat trip. The first time was exactly five months since her mother’s death and three months since Cat and Zach were married. She had dropped it easily, over breakfast, something along the lines of I can’t believe I have a daughter who doesn’t know how to match blacks and Kara had lost it.
It was their first bad fight, the first of many to come, all culminating with Kara telling Cat that she’d rather die than be her daughter. It was all rather dramatic, especially considering the silent treatment Kara gave her for four solid weeks afterwards, and looking back on it something twists in her stomach.
She should have been better. She should have been better.
(The second time was just two days before the boat trip. Cat said that she was embarrassed to have a daughter like Kara, and Kara told her to go fuck herself. They didn’t talk afterwards, and then.
Well. And then.)
It gives her some whiplash, is all. Sitting in the kitchen and listening to Cat call her her daughter, something which just five years ago would have resulted in a fight. Cat still glances at her nervously when she says it. They should probably talk about it. Kara drinks some more coffee instead.
“I’ll be fine, Mom.” It’s the first time she’s being left alone since the hospital. Carter will be at school, and both Cat and Alex at work. She’ll have the entire penthouse to herself. How exciting.
Cat drums her fingers against the marble countertop, still uncertain. “If you insist. But, promise me you won’t leave the apartment. And if you need anything you’ll call.”
Kara grins, holds up three fingers. “Scout’s honor!”
She leaves the apartment. Carefully going out the same side entry she used to sneak out a million times as a teenager, avoiding the security cameras in the back alley, and then she’s gone. Sweatshirt hood pulled down low over her head, coupled with a baseball hat and some ratty jeans. All in all, it’s giving celebrity-goes-incognito, but it works.
Nobody looks at her.
Her trunk is held tightly in her left hand, this being the first chance she has to get it out of her closet and the apartment. She knows that Cat hasn’t had the chance to go through it yet, even though she has looked for it (three days after she came home, at around 3:42 in the morning. Cat had glanced briefly in the closet, moved a box, but when Kara shifted in her bed a bit too loudly, she had left it alone, and hasn’t tried since.)
The base is a solid forty-five minute walk from the apartment, and she sticks to side streets and narrow alleyways the whole time. Getting a feel for it. Readjusting to the concrete beneath her feet.
In all the places she’s been, she hasn’t been able to find one that feels like National City. The buildings have this weight to them, like the air itself is putrid, like gravity is just a tad bit stronger on these city blocks. The pressure of the smog, the clog of the traffic, and the people, spilling out of their homes and stores and onto the sidewalks. A whole body that aches and bleeds and knits together to form the collective, to form the whole.
And what does that make her, then? Is she part of this city, burning and breathing with it? Or is she an outsider looking in? Will the city ever be her home?
Kara shifts her trunk to the other hand, and decides that it doesn’t matter. Whether she is the city or she’s outside of it, the city is hers, and she’s going to scrub it clean. She’s going to reach into the wounds and scrape out the infections with her own filthy fingers, even if it kills her.
She drops her trunk onto the concrete ground of the factory. Breathes in the smell of the dust, the grime. The corners are soaked in shadows, and mildewy puddles sit scattered across the floor.
She strips off her sweatshirt, lets it fall to the ground as well. Feels the air on her arms, her scars.
The factory will be perfect.
Kara is sitting in the living room, flicking through a trashy magazine when Carter gets home from school. Hair still damp from the shower she took to wash off the sweat from her workout. She can no longer smell the grime of the factory on her skin. Carter grins, plops down onto the couch next to her, and Kara asks about his day.
Yao Fei pushed the birdcage into her hands.
That rage. That conviction.
The guilt fades the second she raises the meat to her lips.
“I don’t need a babysitter, Mom.”
Cat sighs, and based off of the tightness of her jaw, they are veering dangerously into Fight Territory. “Kara, you were kidnapped. They still haven’t caught who was responsible. Please.”
J’onn J’onzz looms behind Cat. Six feet tall and biceps about the size of Kara’s face. She’s seen men like him before, knows how to take them down, how to use their weight against them, and, barring all else, how to be stronger than them. Hell, in Russia, she was that man. She’s not intimidated, even though he scans the room, back straight with a focus that screams military. She’s not intimidated, but she is fucking annoyed.
She’d expected that it was going to be hard to get her work done all while fending off any of Cat’s suspicions. Now, she’ll also have to dodge a damn bodyguard.
The look on Cat’s face is nothing short of imploring.
For fuck’s sake.
“So,” Kara rests her elbows on her knees, leaning forward in the backseat of the car. No seatbelt, doors unlocked. Maybe this will be easier than she thought. “What do I call you?”
J’onzz glances at her in the rearview mirror. “J’onn is good.”
“John?”
“J’onn. It’s French.”
Kara hums in that annoying, rich-bitch way and watches J’onn’s temple twitch. “You’re ex-military?”
“Yes, ma’am. 105th airborne out of Kandahar, retired.” He falls silent, providing no further information.
Curious, Kara thinks. He’s closed off, all stoic expressions and frowns. He’s hiding something, Kara knows. Briefly, she wonders if he’s ARGUS, sent here to keep an eye on her, but immediately she shoots that idea down. Haley would know better.
So, if he’s not ARGUS, and he is certainly not Bratva, then whatever he’s hiding has nothing to do with her. Something personal. She leans back in her seat. She can do personal.
“How long have you been in the bodyguard business?” she asks, nonchalantly. There’s a red light up ahead.
“About five years.” J’onn pauses here, and she can practically see the build up of a speech. “I don’t want there to be any confusion, Ms. Grant. My ability to keep you from harm will outweigh your comfort.”
Kara rests her hand on the door handle. “Zorel.”
He glances at her again in the rearview mirror. “What?”
“It’s Zorel, not Grant.” The car rolls to a stop, and she’s gone in half a second, darting out into the traffic, onto the sidewalk, and down an alley. She slows to a walk, glances over her shoulder, grins to herself.
This will be fun.
All of the gear arrives right on time, carefully hidden in several duct-taped closed cardboard boxes. It takes three trips to cart everything to the base, and two more to ensure she has all the items she needs. Spare arrowheads and shafts, extra fletching, and several whetstones of varying grits. Three separate computers, two generators, and an assortment of knives and first aid supplies.
It takes several hours to get everything into the base, and even longer to make sure it’s all organized accordingly. It’s not perfect, and she’s still missing some items that will take a bit longer to get her hands on (such as a motorcycle), but it’ll do for now.
She’s sharpening the arrowheads, bent carefully over the whetstone when Alex texts her.
(Cat got her a phone the day she was left alone for the first time, and Carter spent all morning before school teaching her how to use it. When they left, she carefully pried off the back and disabled all of the tracking features.)
Alex G (2:42): Do you want to go get some coffee?
Kara places the arrowhead down, straightening it so it’s in line with the others, and contemplates. Aside from that first day, she’s hardly seen Alex at all, a fact that Alex has apologized profusely for. She weighs her options. If she says no, well. Kara sighs. She can’t exactly say no without Alex getting worried. She texts back a quick yeah, sure, where? and dutifully puts the cafe Alex responds with into GPS.
She straightens up from where she’s hunched in her chair, rolls out her neck. Tonight, she promises herself. Hunt will be tonight.
Nooch’s is a cute little coffee-shop, tucked away off the main road and two blocks from Catco. A smooth wooden counter and red brick walls, and colored panes on the windows that throw squares of shaded light onto the ground. The bell attached to the door jingles when Kara walks in, and Alex, already sitting at a table, gives a hesitant wave in greeting. Kara was half-expecting Alex to choose a table smack in the middle of the store, one that left them open and exposed on all sides, but is relieved to see that she’s instead nestled into a corner, and left the seat with a view of all the windows and doors for Kara.
Kara slides into her seat, and smiles at Alex, who offers her a wobbly one in return. Alex has already ordered for them, and Kara’s coffee sits in front of her, slowly going cold. She takes a sip out of it just to be nice, and fights back a wince. Disgustingly sweet.
“It’s a, uh, latte. With caramel syrup. You loved them—” Alex breaks off, drums her fingers on the table.
Kara forces down another sip. “It’s perfect. Thanks.”
“Where’s your bodyguard?”
Kara swipes her thumb along the rim of her cup, gathering some stray caramel syrup. “Outside,” she lies. “Surveying the perimeter or something.”
It’s awkward, with Alex squirming in her seat and Kara’s thoughts still half on Hunt. Before the boat ride, they had been—
Close isn’t the right word, because Kara had bitten the head off of anyone who tried to get close. (See: Winn.) They were close in that forced-to-be-around-each-other-constantly way, in that I-sort-of-hate-you-but-not way. Alex was the only person that Kara let accompany her to her mother’s grave, but also Kara used every opportunity to annoy her. Kara was the first person that Alex told she was gay, but when Alex went away to college she didn’t call for three months.
Whatever the relationship was, it worked for them, and whatever arguments they had always tended to be forgotten about come morning. At least until the end.
That last argument, the one the night before the boat ride. Kara had tried to tell her about what had happened, what she found out the night prior in her college dorm’s bathroom at three in the morning. Kara tried to say, Alex, I don’t know what to do. Kara wanted to say, Alex, I’m really, really scared.
What Kara did say was, Alex, I fucked up and maybe it was because she caught Alex in a bad mood that day, or maybe Alex was just tired of always being forced to fix Kara’s mistakes, because Alex responded with figure it out yourself and leave me the fuck alone. So Kara climbed onto that boat desperately searching for something to take her mind off her mess up, at least for a couple days, and then she did not come back.
Coast City was always warm. Always humid and sticky, and she sort of hates it a little. She could go back. She could go back.
Leave me the fuck alone.
She tightens her grip on her bow, and searches for someone to hit.
“So.” Kara breaks the silence, allows a silly smile to cross her face. “How was med school, Doctor Danvers?”
Some of the tension eases out of Alex’s form. She groans, and accepts the conversation starter eagerly. “God it sucked. Like, in the moment I didn’t quite realize how bad it was, but looking back on it I’m like holy shit.”
Kara thinks of the drug dealer. Of the way his blood made the concrete shine.
“That’s kinda sucky,” she says, and sips her awful coffee. “You were looking forward to it.”
Alex pushes her hair out of her face. “I mean, it wasn’t all bad. The material was super interesting, and I love being a doctor, and I had Maggie! It was just. Hard.” Alex raises her eyes from the table and looks at her, like she’s trying to convey a very important message, and abruptly Kara thinks that maybe she’s missing something.
“Maggie?” she asks instead.
“The detective you met a couple days ago. Maggie Sawyer.”
“Are you guys still dating?” Kara decides that drinking half of her coffee is enough, and she doesn’t have to subject herself to the torture any further. No point in being a sadist.
“Ah, no. We broke up a year or so ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Alex says, looking distinctly like it is not okay. “It was a mutual thing.”
The conversation meanders on from there, all of it focused on Alex. She just entered her second year of residency, as an emergency medicine doc, and is working at Obsidian North. No other relationships, aside from Maggie. She gets coffee every few weeks with Winn, and Kara smiles and says that he said the same thing.
It’s on Alex’s second cup of black coffee, right when they’ve just about milked all the small talk starters they can, when Alex gets brave enough to ask about Kara.
“So,” Alex reaches and snags a sugar packet, just to have something to fiddle with. “How are you doing? With…everything?”
Kara runs her finger across the rim of her cup again. “Fine!” It comes out too cheery, and she tries again. “I mean, it’s been hard. But I’m okay.” Hissing. Always the damn hissing.
“Uh-huh,” Alex says, and Kara knows that she does not believe her for a second. “Has it been overwhelming?”
“Mmm,” she responds. Alex frowns and raises her eyebrow in the exact same way she always did when Kara didn’t give her the answer she wanted. And here’s the problem: Kara can’t tell the truth. She can’t say I’ve got a snake that lives in my spine. She can’t say I’ve killed so many people and I’m terrified that I might be starting to enjoy it. She can’t say I need to find Adam Hunt.
“Kara.” Alex is pushing now, and it is simultaneously aggravating and relieving. At least Alex is getting a bit better at the eggshells. “Kara, you were alone for five years. People have trouble being alone like that for just a couple of weeks. And then the day you come back you were kidnapped.”
“Alex.” Kara meets her eye carefully. Smiles, keeps her hands still, and the snake laughs. “I’m okay. I promise.”
She catches him in a parking garage, walking to his car with two armed guards, the only light being provided by the rusty fluorescents above. He’s wearing a nice suit and tie, and his face is exactly as she remembers it, all those years ago. She thinks of the magazine, she thinks of the way it stuck to her boot. She thinks of that look in her father’s eyes.
She raises her bow and she thinks of Shado.
The lights die just as easily as the two bodyguards. Three arrows loosed, and the snake has never been quieter.
Hunt’s hiding in the back of his car, eyes wide and breath coming in short huffs when she drags him out onto the pavement. The hood hangs low over her head, and she grabs the front of his shirt to bring him up to eye level.
“You are going to transfer forty million dollars into National City bank account 1141 by 10:00 pm tomorrow night.”
(Her voice is rough, deeper. Modulated by the device that sits just beneath her clavicle. Another lovely gift from the Bratva.)
Hunt is a millionaire, a CEO, and he’s made his living by grinding everyone else to dust beneath his heel. He raises his chin. “Or what?”
He cannot see her eyes, smeared behind the greasepaint, but he can see her mouth, and she smiles. “Or I’m going to take it.” She lets the words hover in the air, and then, like a ghost, she vanishes.
So maybe she’s not a good person. Maybe she is not the city, but maybe she is also not outside of it. Maybe she’s looking at everything through a pane of glass but maybe she is the pane of glass.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. What does it matter? A ghost is a ghost is a ghost, and all of it is dead. The boat goes down and any chance she had to be someone else vanishes beneath the waves, leaches out into the water in time with her father’s blood.
She sits in the life raft, watching as her father slowly begins to smell, and when she turns her head the island sits on the horizon.
It’s funny, she’ll think later. How she looked at those shores and thought she was saved.
Time passes slowly, the minutes trudging along as she waits. Like sand passing through her numbed out fingers. Thick as jelly and all Kara wants to do is shake the jar.
(Impatient, Astra had snapped at her.)
She glances at the clock on the mantle, reads 9:29, and fights the urge to check the balance in the bank account. It won’t have changed, she knows. She’s going to have to take it. Starting out wasn’t going to be easy, she knows. None of them would know who she was, what she represented. She would have to teach them fear.
She’s sitting in the living room, watching Carter do his homework. Cat’s working late, and Alex is sitting in the armchair, flicking through files and looking half dead on her feet. Carter’s chewing on the end of his pencil, and Kara flips the page of the magazine that’s been placed on her lap. The words fly up at her, all glossy and incoherent. It’s impossible to focus, especially on something as trivial as Kim Kardashian’s love life. She steals another glance at the clock, 9:31, and scrubs at her eyes.
The doorbell rings.
Carter glances up from his math problems, looks at Alex and then at Kara, and then back to Alex. It rings again, and with an annoyed sigh Alex stands and walks to the front door.
They aren’t expecting anyone. Or, at least Kara doesn’t think they are, but then again she distinctly remembers the vertitable parade of Cat’s guests that trekked throughout this apartment at odd hours of the day. Truly, waking up and finding Martha Stewart in her kitchen was a formative experience.
Alex opens the front door, and then immediately closes it with a hard, “No.”
Kara drops the magazine onto the coffee table and stands. “Who is it?”
“No one.” Alex locks the door. “Sit back down.”
The doorbell rings again, and then a loud and incessant knocking begins, coupled with a very familiar, very plaintive voice. Kara exhales slowly, and crosses over to the door.
“You don’t have to do this now.” Alex stands in front of her, and looks rather desperate. She extends one hand, and carefully places it on Kara’s shoulder, squeezes lightly.
Kara smiles. Shakes off Alex’s hand. “It’s fine, Alex.” And she opens the door to Mike’s face.
She met Mike her freshman year of college. He was tall and funny and made bad jokes, and she liked him, maybe, in the beginning. She liked hanging out with him, and she liked the parties he took her to, and she liked the fact that he never took anything seriously. It was refreshing, she told herself. To find someone who appreciated the humor in life.
He made fun of Cat with her, and gave her drugs, and mocked Winn when he dared to express a little concern at just how much they were messing around. They started dating two months after meeting, and he cheated on her one month after that, at a party in which he got black out drunk. He tells her it didn’t count because he couldn’t remember it all that well, and she lets it slide because, if she’s being honest, she doesn’t quite care what he does, as long as he doesn’t leave her.
She doesn’t tell him that, of course not, but rather cheats on him a week later as payback, and when he finds out he doesn’t talk to her for three weeks.
Alex didn’t think it was healthy, and Cat called him every version of the word pretentious asshole she knew, and Kara told them all to fuck off.
So maybe the relationship wasn’t the best. And maybe, at the end, it got bad enough that Alex started asking if he was hurting her, you know, like that. Kara didn’t deign the questions with an answer, because she knows that each time Mike hurt her, she hurt him back with something just as worse.
It was a relationship built upon the mutual exchange of pain. They’d become each other’s punching bags, that type of person that you take everything out on.
She says Alex, I fucked up, because she knows it’s Mike’s, and she isn’t sure how he’s going to take it, and she’s half convinced that this is what he’s going to leave her over, so she leaves first. She gets on that boat and she does not come back.
She decides, exactly nine months into the first year, when Astra’s arms are painted with blood and she can feel infection slowly start to seep in, that no matter what, she is not going to tell Mike.
They go for a walk. Partially to escape the weight of Alex’s glares and partially because the apartment feels so goddamn suffocating. They escape before Alex can think about calling J’onn, and by the time she probably realizes they’re already out the building. Flick flick flick, and the hissing gets louder with each minute she spends out here with him. They’re about halfway down the block, the night sky looming overhead, silence oppressive between them.
He breaks first, hands shoved in his pockets and eyes focused on the ground in front of them. “I’m sorry it took me so long to visit. I sorta thought it wasn’t true.”
She pulls her fists up so they’re half hidden by the leather jacket’s arms and rubs her fingers along the cuff. It no longer smells like her father’s cologne, but has rather adopted the stench of the grime that coats the base. Flick, flick, flick, and she wants to check what time it is.
“It’s okay. I could’ve called.”
Mike sneaks a glance at her. “So, it’s all true then? The—the island and everything?”
“Yup.” She kicks at a rock and sends it skidding along the pavement. I AM COMING
“Jesus, Kara.”
Mike stops walking abruptly, dead in his tracks and he turns and finally looks at her. His eyes are wide and shaky and Kara has been wondering what about him is different, until she sharply realizes that he no longer has that glazed-over look he always got when he was high. He opens his mouth, and Kara can feel where this conversation is heading, a full nosedive towards the past, so she cuts him off.
“Winn says you’re married now. To Imra?”
He fumbles slightly, and then holds up his hand, showing her the thin silver band that wraps around his ring finger. “Yeah.” He drops his hand. “Yeah.”
Kara thinks about the look on Astra’s face, thinks about the way the infection made the entire world seem like it was spinning. She thinks about how pale his skin was, how it shone in the sunlight, and she thinks about how she buried him right next to her father. How she never even gave him a name. AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
“I’m happy for you,” Kara says, and she isn’t sure if that’s true or not. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, signaling that it’s ten o’clock. She nods, steps back. “Really, Mike.”
“Wait—wait,” he steps towards her, closing that little space of distance she gained. “If you need anything—”
She smiles. “I’ll ask.”
She does not kill Hunt. She leaves him alive because she wants him to witness what it is like for everything to be ripped away. To lose everything in the blink of an eye.
She takes exactly forty million dollars, and carefully deposits it in hundreds of bank accounts, and it’s only when every cent successfully transfers that she crosses off his name.
(That rage. That conviction.)
She tilts her head back, and the weight of the city pressing down upon her shoulders feels just a tad bit lighter.