Rao, Make my Journey Bright

by Wonderful_Crystal

Summary:

Like every beginning for the past seventy years, it begins with a dying planet. It begins with Kara Zor-El awakening in a crash site.

That crash site was not on Earth, or anywhere near it.

Notes:

Ditching all my bitch ass mcyt fics for the new, shiny, badass blorbo

I’m trying to go for hobo Joan of Arc meets citizen sleeper meets woman of tomorrow meets specifically the soundtrack for the gunk with this fic tell me if I succeed

Chapter 1: Like All Other Beginnings

For most people, the story of their lives starts with their birth. Or, perhaps their conception, maybe the first contact between their parents.

Kara Zor-El has never been that lucky. Her story starts - and has always started - in an escape pod. There is no other version of this story.

Her mother, whose final kiss on her cheek continues to burn, is dust. Her father, her city, her world. everyone she’s ever known or was ever going to meet. It’s all gone. Rendered back into the atoms whence they came.
New nebulae form from the parts that made up an entire people with an entire unique existence. The force of it propels her onward. Onward.

The impossible heat of a planet exploding collides with the insane gravitational forces tugging on her as she hurtles into space. The roar of engines and burning flame consumes the air. Sobs, screams, and prayers fight for space within her throat. She can’t imagine how Kal must be fairing.

She doesn’t dare to imagine if he’s not faring well. If he’s even faring at all. Kara damn near hallucinates the sound of a baby’s cry.

A strange string of undoing cut through Krypton with startling ease.
The Science Guild was berated for complaining about a global decline in biodiversity instead of just fixing it. The Council funded strange new projects to experiment with solar energy while also pissing off a terrorist named Brainiac. Civil war brewed between continents struggling for domain over their own natural resources. Teenagers developed a new style of dance that was blamed for societal decline more heavily than any other problem listed.

So now the planet is gone, as if that was an easy thing to do. As if the sudden, fiery erasure of a whole history is an easy sentence to formulate.

Kara pukes into the tube shoved into her mouth for that exact purpose. The extremes of low gravity takes more blame than the psychological trauma.
The bone dust of all her ancestors wizzes by. Kara’s internal organs join the mosh pit of it all. There’s an AI screaming at her to adjust her trajectory, although she physically cannot.

This is how her story began. This is her very own, century long, unbroken chain of exploded planets and the burdensome grief of an entire species rendered extinct.
Like all other beginnings, Kara Zor-El awakes in a crash site.

Conscious comes in tandem with pain. Kara notices the heat before she notices she’s still alive.

Somewhere along the line, the landing mechanisms malfunctioned and shot her through the shattered window and face first into the desert sand. Her mouth is full of the stuff, her head swimming in disoriented agony.
The feeling of cooking alive paired with the severe dehydration leads to the safe assumption that she has been out for a while, laying in the smoldering ruins of the last piece of technology her civilization ever made.

One of the last, Kara reminds herself. Somewhere out in this vast universe is her baby cousin. She is not alone. She is not alone.

Her mantra falls short when she fails to open her eyes. The sand, the agony, it’s too much. She twitches helplessly.

Two hours or ten seconds pass, she has genuinely no idea, before there is a hand roughly yanking her face forward into the harsh daylight.
Kara screams but it’s just a puff of blood clotted sand. A calloused appendage rubs the sand from her eyes.

She cracks open her sight like a newborn baby developing vision for the first time. The star above is a bright gold.

Kara’s seen pictures of planets with other colors of stars. Still, looking up to a yellow sun and not a red one confuses her. Reminds her of how far away from home she has gone, how alien the strange color of light flooding this world is.

Kara grimaces when a shadow steps between her and the sunlight. The person connected to the hand forcefully holding her upright.
Still out of it, she turns from the stranger to a stinging pain laced against her entire body. Her shotty space suit leaks bright blood from wounds that look like a more serious form of carpet burn.

The stranger yanks her hair, harsh and swift. Kara’s eyes feel like they’re about to burn out of her sockets.

A thick being, stocky and wide, makes eye contact with all four of their four bright compound eyes. Off white, flowing robes cloak them like a cloud. With a decisive chitter, a language Kara’s only heard in movies, they release her hair while pushing her back through the shattered windshield of her pod.

Kara is able to wiggle so the glass shards in her seat don’t poke her that badly, so that’s a plus. With her fuzzy thoughts in shambles, she fumbles her head toward the mission. The sacred mission, held above all others.
Kara goes over her stock as the pod jolts forward through the sand. She can imagine it’s being pulled by some sort of vehicle, or beast of burden.

What does she have again? Oh, right.

Food, the last that will taste like her mother’s cooking. Water, from lakes and streams that don’t exist anymore. A change of clothes, of which is made with a unique fabric fiber that cannot be grown anywhere else. A knife. A sizable stash of information crystals. A tablet encoded with a Kryptonian dictionary, history book, cook book, map, and other keepsakes.

And the tracker that will lead to Kal, the most precious item of all. It gleams Argo City blue.

The golden sun makes the back of her eyelids almost orange. Kara struggles to keep awake.

He’s just a baby, Kal. If her pod malfunctioned, he’d stand no chance if his did as well. The idea of his tiny body contorted and crooked sends a cold shiver up her spine.

She’ll hope this person is dragging her away to help her recover. Then, she’ll set off in whatever direction the tracker points.

Her magnetic north is set, hurtling through the darkness in search of refuge. Kara prays for safe passage in the same second that sends her back to black, thoughtless darkness.

Chapter 2: Prayer for the Dead

Notes:

If you can’t tell I really fuck with fantasy religions

Between consciousness and sleep, Kara is on the race track of the school she’ll never get to graduate from.

She pumps her legs. Demanding more from her body than it could ever possibly give, pleading with her lungs to just hold on. Somewhere in her chest her heart beats just shy of exploding. Her head swirls.

Then, with all this effort, Kara is not fast enough.

Every last person she’s ever met jolts past her. They roughly knock her shoulder, they trip her feet with theirs, no one turns around to look her way.
There they go. Everyone, family, friends, classmates, teachers, reoccurring strangers. They all run past her without any effort.
She just can’t keep up. All of Krypton sprints further and faster than she could ever hope to go.

It’s a fitting metaphor, she thinks with the strange second brain that exists only in dreams. My literature teacher would be proud.

The back of Kara’s eyelids are orange again. She must be awake now, but somewhere much cooler than the desert. There’s the faint whir of air conditioning.
Then, there is the pain. Dull and throbbing. The only sensation tugging for her attention is the IV buried in her arm. They must not have IVs for children, or their children are much larger than her, because the needle in her vein feels huge.

Kara must’ve made a groan, or something, because a hand of similar size and texture comes to forcefully grip her chin. They turn her toward them, compact eyes both narrowed and unfocused.

When Kara mumbles, the stranger chitters contently. Almost gleefully.
They release their grip, letting her head flop down onto her collarbone, and move out of sight.

From her vantage point in a strange medical bay Kara can blearily examine wherever the fuck she managed to land.

Sheltered from the scorching yellow sun is a bustling building of those tall, wide, white clad people. They go about their business throughout a series of platforms, not walls or floors as she knows them.
Each platform is thick, but hollowed out in an arch for lower passage, with its flat top filled with furniture for its unique purposes.
The medbay must be on a really high platform, because Kara can see down on all the little compact houses, and shops, and rectangular farms. A total open air society, but still sheltered from the cruel wind outside.

It’s pretty. It reminds her of looking down the inner balcony of that office building mom worked in all the time.

Kara spends seventeen years in that bed with the same attendant grabbing her face and tending to her needs. (On this planet, a full orbit around the sun takes two days).
She cries enough to need constant access to water. She learns how to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in this strange, frittering language. She reads then rereads the historical text crystals that got shipped off alongside her. She stares at the tracker intensely.

Kara got sent so far, so fast, she escaped the bounds of her home solar system. The pod would’ve gone further should she have not crashed.

How much further could Kal have gone? Is he even in this solar system? Is he even alive?

Rough hands come to examine her again, and Kara zones out. She’s used to the roughness of their touch by now.
They brush her hair with an almost mean intensity, but she knows this is how they show kindness. A rough bone comb tears through her curls.

They dressed her in those pretty white robes that flow around her body like a river. Her wounds have scabbed over, her bruises a lighter shade of horrific. She cries maybe once every few hours now.

Kara looks and feels like a child that just lost everything. She’s fallen short of her daily prayers, a good habit her father instilled in her.

She zones back in when the hairbrush smacks her shoulder.

The person with the comb attempts to introduce themselves, as they've done a couple times, but Kara has no idea which part of that sentence was their name.
Upward Note, she decides to nickname them, makes a gesturing motion toward themselves.

“Yes?” Kara chirps.

“Yes!” Upward Note says.

Upward Note grabs Kara’s hands with the same force of all touch on this planet, and coaxes her off the bed.

Kara’s knees still hurt from being thrown out the pod. Her walking is wobbly, but Upward Note extends careful patience.
Together the two walk and limp out of the medbay. Upward Note leading the way through a twisting maze of platforms and ramps leading to other platforms.

They move through houses. Kara watches a baby roll over for the first time, dinners being cooked, arguments being had.
Their food is a scent she’s never even thought possible before, like if burnt vinegar smelled good. Their language akin to the chiming chorus of nighttime insects, thrumming and building on top of itself.

Upward Note comes to a stop, and Kara is jolted out of her people watching.

At the center of this building, this mini-universe, is a rounded dias lit by a small pinhole of a sunroof.
The light reflects rainbows off the mirror on the ground, candles and coins litter the rim. This is a shrine.

Upward Note brought her to the center of their world to pray. Or, that’s how she’s taking this gesture of good will.

She rubs her eyes, already swelling with tears, and copies Upward Note as they sink into a position of prayer. Sat on the floor, knees brought to shoulders, palms stretched out on the ground.

Upward Note sings. She can tell by the change in pitch from their already delicate language.
Kara is glad she landed somewhere beautiful.

“You have been the sun of my life,” Kara begins.

She remembers her father teaching her this prayer. Grandma had just passed, and it was Kara’s first funeral. She’s never seen people cry so much.
It’s now up to her to host the funeral for her whole world. She fears her hands are too small for the job.

“My prayers will be the sun that lights your way on the journey home,” her voice cracks, the tears stain her cheeks.

Zor-El believed that anything was possible under the light of Rao. He believed that he could fix everything, spare Krypton its upcoming fate.
This star above her is not Rao. Perhaps, Kara will never bask in the light of her God again. She feels exiled, ejected from the solar system like a rotten tooth pulled from a mouth.

This mass expanse of universe feels like a wasteland without home being within it. The rest of existence continues on, unresponsive to the apocalypse that has shattered Kara’s life.

“I will remember you in every dawn, and await the night I will join you in the sky,” she promises.

The melody of Upward Note’s song is harmoniously lifted further by other voices joining in. This must be a popular folk song, or prayer, or something.

“Rao's will be done,” Kara swears.

She sits in the light of a distant God and weeps.

Chapter 3: Glass-Maker

Kara has been nursing a headache slowly building in misery like a mold colony for the past nine years. (Eighteen days). It reminds her of her mother’s Petri dishes.

Her mouth feels like the cold vacuum of space has taken up residence within her tongue. The back of her eyes flood with a nauseating heat, not unlike a migraine. All her muscles feel on the cusp of fraying into thin fibers, her skin raw and thick.

Worse still, Kara can’t find this as an excuse to take a break. Not that she has learned there is a trade to be made.
There is absolutely no excuse to not get to Kal as fast as possible. There is an unknowable amount of distance to cross, and there are few bridges to be found among the stars. To earn the various currencies and objects that can win Kara a place on one of the few spaceships capable of intergalactic flight, she has to sell goods or labor.

Odd jobs are aplenty in WhirrWhirrWhur, which is how she thinks this planet’s name is pronounced. That might be the name of the city? Whatever. All she needs to know is that there is a spaceport in a nearby city and currency that will give her access to it.

She doesn’t think they’ll have a problem with unaccompanied minors in space, but lying is always an option. Technically she’s aged twenty six years since crash landing here.
Wow, Kara thinks. I could always say I’m thirty eight.
The thought comforts her. Mildly. The headache is still wracking through her skull on a warpath.

Upward Note suggested letting her work to the person who dragged her out of the desert, who Kara has nicknamed Whistle.
Whistle doesn’t treat Kara any different for her age nor her refugee status. Her labor is just as back breaking as everyone else’s.
(She’s also noticed that all her coworkers are not the same species as Upward Note and Whistle. Whether this offloading of heavy labor onto outsiders has malicious undercuttings is yet to be seen).

The first day of work was rough. The spiky, rough plants these people harvest clothing fibers from stuck bristles into her hands. The unrelenting desert sun cooked Kara alive. The tools were heavy, the barrels of raw material heavier.
Now?
Kara throws down the barrel with a force. Her robe is stained grey in sweat, the star above harsh and growing harsher as the year drags on. It is much lighter now.

She knows theoretically there is a strange interaction between muscles of biological organisms and planets with different gravities. The weight of objects becomes relative. Objects such as your blood and bones are included.
It’s lighter now. Even the grief, too consuming to even weep over, has dulled into the backdrop of all things.

Kara is much more focused on the worry. Between the worry, she is focused on the amount of tiny, uniform pebbles Whistle hands her at the end of the day.
She doesn’t fully know the currency exchange rates on this planet. She doesn’t know if these people, with their two sets of compact eyes like sparkling fractals and flowing robes, are the only intelligent beings on this planet.
Worse, she doesn’t know if they are alone in their galaxy, which will greatly increase the cost of getting anywhere due to lack of available ports. She assumes that there’s no way that all of the hundred or so workers laboring next to her in the desert crash landed from separate solar systems, but you’d be surprised.

Her friend Celen once joked that people take the complicated nature of space flight as a dare. Celen-Zir is probably right.

She is definitely dead.

Kara lifts four barrels of floral material. Two on each shoulder, each lighter than the other.
Someone exclaims something in yet another language Kara doesn’t know. They should surprised.

She gets back to work without thinking about it. The lack of work it takes.

-

That night, curled into a hammock hanging in a barn filled with foreign livestock, Kara feels sicker than she’s ever felt.

Mom and dad ensured she had all the vaccines available in Argo. They showed her all the scary movies about alien viruses and how different chemicals in the atmospheres of other planets could be harmful to off-worlders.
So, after one mass extinction event, this is how Krypton dies? Kara getting an alien disease and having no one to wish her off to Rao?

It’s a sad thought. If she wasn’t already crying due to the pain, she’d cry out of self pity.

Kara gently climbs out of the hammock on trembling legs. The day is just beginning to break over the horizon, and it is quite the beautiful blur past all her tears and blinding pain.
She doubles over once she escapes the barn and meets the sand. She tries to purge silently, she really does.

But it feels like absolute zero has decided to stop being a mere concept and expel itself, as violently as possible, out of Kara’s throat in the form of heavy icy shards.

It’s like puking glass. Kara is not surprised by the amount of red gunk staining the transparent blue when she comes up for air.
Then she promptly starts piling again.

With her arms trembling too heavily to hold back her hair, and nobody else awake or wanting to get close enough to do that for her, the ice gets clumped within it and weighs her head down. Eventually she is forced to fall forward into the cold sand.
The heat behind her eyes that has been building for years violently begins to burst. Her face contorts into a messy heat map of impossibly cold and dangerously hot.

Kara’s ears ring. Below the ringing, she hears a crack. That’s when she realizes she’s shoved her face forward onto hot glass. Still warm from the fire.

Where on Rao’s bright world did glass come from? Real glass, not a metaphor for ice. Real actual glass that has just slid its way into her forehead.

Wearily leaning back between violent upheaval of ice to examine the source of her new scar slicing next to her eyebrow, Kara’s heart skips a beat.
It’s all red. The whole world is red. Red and bleeding and blazing and holy Rao protect her.

Beyond the ringing clattering in her skull are screams. Real, petrified screams. Screams in chirps and whistles and guttural cries and sing-song voices.
Apparently she woke everybody up with her glass puking act.

Shakily, she uses her hands to crack through the molten glass and rapidly melting ice to free her hair and face from its clasp. Everything hurts, but everything above her shoulders hurts worse.

Kara wants her mom. She wants her mom and she wants her now.

When her vision clears from the suffocating red, Kara realizes she is roughly ten feet off the ground.
Her back to a foreign sun, Kara looks towards the people staring up at her from her shadow. All her limbs tremble, a movement mirrored by those below that point up and gasp.

She has risen with the star above and she is beyond petrified. Again.

Notes:

Totally gave my Kara Melissa Benoist’s lil eyebrow scar bc it’s cool and she deserves it

Chapter 4: Planetary Mass

Kryptonian history is marked by the shift of Rao, the sun, from a yellow dwarf to a red giant. It is a natural part of the life cycles of stellar bodies, but one her ancestors did not expect.
History and religious myth alike tell of the falling age. The mighty Kryptonians falling into the soil one by one, losing the ability to fly in an event ascribed to the anger of the gods. The sky rattled. Their eyes cooled, mouths warmed, and their bodies filled with weakness previously unknown. The divine scorned them, and cast them into the ground like seeds. Civilization spouted at the cost of might.

Kara is now living the distant history of her ancestors, before they had any need of buildings or science or anything they couldn’t gather with their own two hands. Krypton is gone, and Kryptonians can fly again.
Her eyes are filled with flame, mouth sharp with ice, muscles stronger than any alloy ever smithed.

And she is just a little girl, awarded divinity for surviving the apocalypse. Hovering above a mass of scared strangers on a distant planet.

Kara wants to cry but her tears sizzle and evaporate. A foreign yellow star creeps across the new half of a new year.

Without any decorum Kara summons the will within herself to fall into the ground. What once would’ve been a lot of pain has lessened into merely a bruise.
If legend stands correctly, she will never bruise again.

Oh Rao, is this a punishment for surviving? Is this meant to be a gift?

Kara curls into a fetal position in the sand, wrapping her head in her arms and shutting away all light.

She can hear every grain of sand shift against its neighbor. She can hear the heartbeats of thousands of organisms all at once. Kara shuts her eyes tight enough to hurt and can still see through her skin to her own bones.

“Though we go forth alone,” she croaks between sobs, “Our soul unites us under Rao's gladsome rays,”

The prayer she has counted on since the earliest years of childhood fall thin. The words fray. The meanings splinter into nothingness. There is nothingness.
There is so much ‘thing’ that everything is too small a word. Kara’s tiny body is cracking under its power and will crack for one final time. Then, comes invincibility. Then comes an unknown scarier than anything she could’ve possibly concocted in any nightmare.

“We are never lost, never afraid. For we shrink not under the sun of righteousness,”

Her voice cracks, the sound waves sharp and cruel. Her skin prickles with energy like a stuttering engine.
Everything hurts. This is the last pain.

“Rao binds us to those we love,” she weeps, the sentence hitting harder in her loneliness, “He gives us strength when we have none. And in the darkest places, he guides us,”

The pain comes to a striking crescendo. Her brain contorts within her skull, her muscles writhe like worms. She can see her atoms.
Kara wants to rip them all apart.

“For Rao sees all, feels all, his love eternal,”

The downward slope begins. The pain takes a silent spike upward when she accidentally yanks out a fistful of hair.

Kara begs, “Rao, protect us so that we might protect others,”

She shivers now. Trembling like a gong throttled.

“And we shall rise, a fire in His hearth, burning and free,”

Gently, a hand touches her shoulder. The softness unexpected but most certainly accepted.
Kara blearily raises her head, sizzling tears leaking down her face and frost coating her mouth. Sitting in the sand beside her is Upward Note.

They use their gentle hands to help Kara upright. A large Kryptonian bag sits beside them. She instantly knows what Upward Note was sent to do.

“Thank you,” she sings in their language.

Upward Note makes a sound of dismay, and brings Kara into a hug. White ribs wrap around them both in the wind. The churning inside of Kara finally resides.
She feels safe for the first time in a long time. Twenty six of Upward Note’s years, to be exact.

Pressed against her friend’s side, Kara double checks everything is in the bag. The crystals, the tracker, all her supplies and mementos and artifacts.
Within the jumble of stuff is a new crystal. A smaller, tinier thing. A crystal from this planet. A gift.

Tears well up in Kara’s eyes again.

“Thank you,” she repeats, “Thank you,”

She adds another thanks in Kryptonian for good measure. Upward Note looks devastated and elated all at once.
They help her stand. Wobbly, unsure. Kara is scared to take the next step. She didn’t think she’d ever have to do it this way.

Kara hugs Upward Note one final time. Tight as she can without harming them, filled with as much appreciation and preemptive grief as she can muster within her touch.

Then, Kara slings the bag over her shoulders. She turns her head upward, gazing into that alien sky that sheltered her for this period of time.

Then Kara jumps.

There is a sensation akin to breaking the surface pressure of water when Kara finally breaches the intangible line of atmosphere and void. Low gravity becomes complete weightlessness. Flying becomes floating, then becomes trajectory.

She is a comet. One with a calculable mass and speed. One that can be observed moving unpredictably swift in the night sky. One that is the reincarnation of her ancestors oldest stories.

She is one. She is alone. She is a comet, ejected planetary mass sent whirling away in flames.

The world containing WhirWhirWhur is far below her now. There is nowhere to go but, well, whatever direction translates to forward.

The simple blue line that is the compass connecting her and Kal leads her onward. She traverses the space between planets and crosses into the space between stars.

There is an epic feeling to it Kara cannot undersell. There is a beauty to this, a Rao given beauty. She wishes she earned it any other way.

Chapter 5: Lantern Light

Notes:

I gave up at the end but WHO CARES 🎉

The sensation of interstellar flight, all alone with nothing but her tiny body in the vast blackness, is something Kara really needed. It washes her with a cold meant to explode flesh.

Her interia propels her forward as her muscle-powered flight keeps her as straight ahead as she can reasonably stay. The tracker's needle point her only compass.

Trillions of photons dance around her in glorious, uncoordinated tempo. Their movement is really the only evidence that she is moving. The distant stars surrounding her don't seem to get any less distant.
(This really is a cluttered void. Kara's astromony teacher would flick her on the head for just learning this now.)

The emptiness around her equals out the emptiness inside her, resulting in nothing short of nirvana. The meditative quality of literal nothingness. The medicial quality of being entirely alone.

Kara stretches every muscle fiber toward her pinprick of light leading the way. The promise of not being alone, of finding the other last one, it's all she has. That tiny promise of tomorrow.
The displacement of thin gas roars in her ears as her speed increases with all the drama worthy of the moment.

One of the small dots in the infinity begins to glow green. The shift is slow, but noticeable.

Whatever viridian object it is, it's coming toward her on a collision course. Matching her speed in every impossible stride.
When Kara swerves, it corrects its path to meet her. When she dives, it follows suit.

Kara tilts her head curiously, unsure of if curiousity merits a speeding up or a slowing down.

Eventually, the green object takes the shape of a woman. The woman is clearly Alstairian with her yellow skin and the mass of tail like appendages on her head.
The logo on her chest, as well as the green ball of light on her finger, signifies her as a green lantern.

Kara hesitates, having been told to be wary of this outside militant force. This army of aliens that try and tell Kryptonians what is right and wrong.

Being telepathic, and having eyes, the lantern notices this hesitation.

"My name is Belara. I'm the green lantern of this sector," she says, directly into Kara's mind.

She wants to buck against the telepathic intrusion, but would also like to communicate. Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, so Kara must make do.

"I assume you're the girl I've heard so much about?" Belara asks.

Kara grips tight to the strap of her bag, thinking hard, "I am on a mission, please let me go,"

"You can't do that mission on an empty stomach," Belara extends her hand.

Kara's stomach lurches at the recognition of its pain, reminding her that she has been too long without food. Or rest.
How long was Kara flying for?

With the same studied hesitation, she gingerly accepts the outstretched hand.

--

Entering an atmosphere feels hotter than leaving it, she thinks.

Kara lands a little two hard outside a docking depot on some cold, isolated moon that has just enough gravity to serve as a glorified gas station.
Spaceships of various sizes dot the atmosphere and the flattened rock of the planet below. People of all kinds move cargo, people, and themselves to and fro. It sounds like metal and conversation, and smells of the horrible mixture of far too many cuisines.

She scrunches her face in discomfort at the overwhelming sensory input. Going from the soundless void to countless whirring machines, bickering arguments, explanations and phone calls to parents.
Kara can hear all of it. It's nauseating.

Belara leads Kara into a building with big windows and large seating areas. The sickening mixture of smells lessens to a very strong scent of, something. It smells like brine and heat.

Belara says something to an employee in a silly uniform, and beckons Kara to sit at one of the many tables. It's sticky and uncomfortable, so Kara hovers slightly over it.

Before long, something resembling food is placed before her.
It is a warm brown liquid, filled with tiny chunks of miscellaneous meat from animals Kara could not recognize if shown images of. She shoots it like a shot.

Once she isn't literally starving, Kara is the first to open conversation.

"You said you've heard about me,"

Belara spoons some of her own food into her mouth, thinking of a response.

"Despite how old the universe this, we forget that it is still very young. While species have come and gone, planets too, its only happened a handful of times since space travel has become common,"

She tries not to space out during the exposition. It is very difficult.

"Kara, no one knows what to do with you. You're more than stateless, you're peopleless,"

She turns her nose to the words like they physically defile her.

"I have my cousin," Kara says like a prayer, "I'm not alone,"

Belara's expression shifts, "There is another survivor?"

Kara nods, licking her lips free of remaining soup residue.

"That's I don't want to die," Kara says flatly, "Because then Kal is the last one left,"

"I won't let you die," Belara gets the words out slowly, carefully.

She appreciates the gesture, "You don't need to do anything. I just need the stars,"

Belara's expression grows somehow more soft, further melting into this heartache beyond sympathy.

"Nobody can survive on stars alone," she places a reassuring hand on Kara's wrist.

Well, nobody has been her before.

There was an ancient time where the Kryptonians did subsist on Rao alone, grandes powers that trumped the need for proper civilization. Those were the last people like her.
But now, Kara doesn't have a flock to fly with. She does, however, have a mission.

"Rao will feed me. He'll take me home," she responds eventually.

Belara does not dare raise the question of where home is now.

"The corps want you to live with one of our own," she phrases the words cautiously, "We can give you a foster family. You won't have to be alone,"

"I have a mission," she dismisses.

Belara's fingers tighten around Kara's wrist. There is no physical sensation, so she only knows that by sight alone.

"It's best to leave that to the adults. We can find Kal,"

"I have," Kara repeats forcefully, "A mission. And no one is going to stop me,"

In the blink of an eye, Kara is once again weightless. The bowl in her hands shatters into pieces, its contents freezing through instantaneously.
Whatever. She'll get more food at the next planet.

Kara has to get distance from the one who promises to stop her.

Chapter 6: Weight-Barer

Notes:

If I could ever get off my ass I would tell this story the way it’s supposed to be told: as an audio drama with a team of linguists creating dozens of unique conlangs complete with dialects

To use energy derived from Rao for non-religious purposes was sacrilege. Astronomical instruments such as satellites and probes that needed solar power had to be sanctioned and blessed by the temple.

So, Krypton leaned into geothermal energy once the age of charcoal and manure was over. Once the era of science begun.

The drills sunk deep past the crust and into the molten mantle below. Siphoning energy by the trillions of Jo-El's. Nobody really paid attention when the relationship between Kryptonians and Krypton became parasitic. They only started paying attention once the host began to buck off the leech.

So, imagine Kara's surprise upon stumbling into a city where everything is powered by a brilliant, ruby red star.

She lands in a rolling field of hovels, still alight from atmospheric reentry. Her skin a level of warm she never expected to experience before.

The sound of screams pierces her skull like a barrage of polearms. Painful beyond pain.
Sure, she gets it. Kara probably shouldn't of descended from the sky in a blazing comet in the middle of a civilization. She should've landed in a lake, or something.

Rearing away from the shear volume of terror, Kara flings her body westward at the speed of sound.
She quickly crosses the line between out-of-district shanty towns and into the marvelous city. Airway traffic splits to accommodate skyscrapers that expand upwards into the edge of the atmosphere, and the foot traffic below splits for no one and nothing.

Kara loses momentum and recoups in a shadowy nook. The speed in which she- well, lost speed- startling her.

It's the star, isn't it? Red and glinting, high in a midafternoon sky.

Kara chews on that thought as she trudges out of the alleyway and through the crowd of billions. A tripedal race seems to be the predominant demographic, but she sees people from all over the known universe. All heights, all sizes, all languages. The shear noise of it makes her head fuzzy.

Fuzzy, not explosively-painful.

Her footfalls come more easily upon the ground, which is a whole host of conflicting emotions. It's good to feel normal. It's terrible to feel trapped. It's even worse to feel powerless.
Kara has grown a bitter distaste for powerlessness in the short timespan in which she has tasted total and complete power. Any girl her age would, honestly. Ascension is hard to turn away from.

It takes her about a mile of walking aimlessly down this one, seemingly endless, stretch of street before realizing the sole of her left shoe has completely eroded away. The right one isn't far behind.
Mumbling to herself, Kara kicks them off and continues to nowhere without them.

By mile two of this aimlessness she has discovered that her feet are starting to ache. It is a dull, almost imperceptible sensation distantly related to pain.
Kara's heart twists, marveling at how quickly pain can become foreign.

Her sense of smell has calmed down enough to locate a building on the ground (possibly not actually ground level) floor that smells good. It's a 50/50 bet on that equaling food.

Turning through a complex machine seemingly mimicking a revolving door, Kara smiles at her luck. She guessed correctly about this being a restaurant.

Now, she has no idea what is on anyone's plates. Nor does she know if she has any method of intergalactically accepted payment, as the coins she earned on the whistling world could be unique.
All Kara knows is that she's hungry.

The process of actually obtaining food is simple enough. She stands in a line behind half a dozen of those tripeds, shuffling her feet forward until she blindly points to something on a screen that is probably a menu. A robot accepts this request and doesn't seem to have any qualm with the currency nor the amount of currency Kara places onto the counter. Score!

At the end of the line, Kara is presented with a plate of what appears to be noodles between two thick slices of some breadstuff. The flesh of something is included.
She simply accepts her plate and moves to sit by a window.

Restaurant goers around her do take notice of the shoeless, guardianless, dirty child huffing down a meal meant for two. One even goes so far as to strike up a conversation with her.

Kara has no fucking clue what this nicely dressed triped is saying. The language is curly, dipped in ink and hard to swallow.

"No thank you?" she responds blindly.

The stranger doesn't know Kryptonian. They frown before accepting the loss, returning to their own meal.

The food is filled with a warmth that floods her bones and flavors she doesn't have tastebuds for. Parts are rich and savory, other parts bland where her biology cannot compute the information provided. Kara eats it like an animal.

Kara absently wonders if some sort of child protection service is on its way right now to collect her homeless, worldless self. She wonders if it matters any.

Then a sound cracks her skull in two.

It's a sound larger than life, a rumbling and cricketing crack that shatters the atmosphere above and city below.
She covers her ears with her hands to no avail. The sound continues to crush her brain from the inside as her eyes well up with firey hot tears.

Her agony is giving more healthy heapings as the folk in the restaurant begin to scream. They point out the window, shouting nonsense in a language Kara cant isolate from the rest of the painful noise.

Through red tears, Kara peaks out one eye to see one of those impossibly tall skyscrapers beginning to crumble.

Dust flows from the rectanglular structure like water, flowing elegantly on the wind. The sound continues to jackhammer into her brain with a vengeance as more screams continue to ring out.

She doesn't think twice. Really, she doesn't think at all. Kara flies.

In an instant, she catches the building with her bare hands. The unsightly material trying and failing to scrap her palms.
The structure isn't crystalline. It's crumbly, fragmenting in unpredictable patterns and spurting huge plumes of dust.

Her hands gouge two massive scars in the already thoroughly gouged material. Every tendon, muscle, and ligament in Kara's whole body strains with the impossible effort of holding this building upright.
Her arms tremble. Sweat slicks her skin and icy cold panic floods her throat.

One omniscient thought leaks up from her shaking arms and into her brain; she has no idea how many people will die when her strength finally gives out.
She has no idea how many people are in the building, or how many have already been injured or killed by falling debris. She knows nothing other than she can lift or only so long.

Kara's vision blurs, refocusing in a dizzying display of fleeing people. All of her senses hone in, counting heartbeats and ragged voices.
Ten thousand is the number she gets up to before she doesn't bother going any higher. Ten thousand people are in this skyscraper.

Kara presses her forehead against the strange rock-like material in an effort to strain even harder to correct the building's lean.

Her elbows lock, then involuntarily fall limp.

She lurches forward, entire body pressed flat against the shattering structure. Her arms shake in defeat as her strength finally wanes.

The building beneath her skin continues to crack. A impossibly huge sound, flooding everything in its radius.
Kara cannot let these people die. She can't. She can't. Kara can't die. If she dies-.

Every spare particle in her dust covered, tear-blurred vision suddenly glows bright green. The immense pressure on her arms softens, the weight taken from her hands and into another.
Kara blinks hard as she witnesses the entire skyscraper be enveloped in green. Magically, miraculously, fixing its posture as its clouds of dust sparkle down.

"There you are," a voice in her head rings loud.

Oh, it's that green lantern that bought her lunch. Belara, wasn't it?

Kara shoots herself off into wild open space as fast as her failing body will allow.