to want and to have and to hold - Chapter 1 - EQT_95 (2024)

Chapter Text

A hangover. It had to be. There was no other earthly reason for the throbbing head, her impulsive hatred for existence, and the wave of nausea that demanded Big Belly Burger stat.

There was just one problem.

This wasn't her couch. Hell, this wasn’t even… her fingers brushed the ground and met… dirt? Why was there dirt? Why was it so hot? And why - she squinted, blinking and flinching until her eyes adjusted to the brightness - why did this look like a desert?

Lena groaned. It came out like the croak of a sad frog.

Cotton-mouthed, head pounding, and feebly hoping this was a bad VR trip, she curled to sit up. Vertigo would be better than whatever this was. She pressed a sympathetic hand to the bridge of her nose and noticed the maze of red sand lines against the deep burgundy fabric of her three-piece suit. The suit she was wearing the night before. The power -suit she had chosen to increase her confidence for when…

A shiver crawled across her skin. It was as welcome as it was unsettling, though before Lena could think much about that, it was sapped by the sun baking down on her. She closed her eyes though that wasn’t particularly useful at shutting the world out.

“End simulation.”

A beat.

Nothing.

Two beats.

Nothing.

Lena’s remaining flicker of hope extinguished.

It was a feeble, desperate, aspirational attempt anyway.

She swallowed, feeling an entirely different wave of nausea strike.

Eyes flicked open and scanned the horizon. Face already contorted in a scowl, it quickly deepened.

It was a vast sea of nothing. So much nothing. Not a single cloud interrupted the blanket of sky. Not a single hue contrasted the monochrome palette of reds and orange. Not even the hiss of a reptile rippled across dry, cracked earth. The most interesting thing was the dots of rocks sprinkled across the ground like decorations on the world's driest cupcake. The horizon was cloaked in haze and, if the glistening line of sweat on Lena’s own brow was any indication, it wasn’t the wet kind that brought cleansing rainfall.

Well done, Luthor.

Shaky knees were forced into action, though standing was no more enlightening than sitting. It took a staggering second before she found her balance. For added helplessness, she spun uselessly in a circle to discover everything looked exactly the same in every direction.

The sun hung overhead. Odd how it felt larger in a desert. Lena half-wondered why vultures weren’t also in the sky, circling their next meal.

A meal. She’d give up half her L-Corp shares for a burger. Better yet, she’d give up half her shares for a genie to grant three wishes: a burger, aspirin, and sunglasses. She wasn’t asking for much - just a few simple comforts while she shriveled into nothing.

Hand cupped over her eyes she scowled toward the sky, half-hoping one might suddenly descend from it. And for all her luck, there was something floating. It was a speck, a shadow of something, a rendering error. And it was getting bigger. She hoped it wasn’t something designed to kill her.

It was.

It wasn’t.

“Of course it’s you,” Lena sighed. It was a sigh meant to express her general disgruntlement for her situation, for Supergirl, for life in general. It did its job well. Her arm dropped in defeat.

“Were you expecting someone else?”

The cape. The flowing blonde hair. The hubris.

“Oh I don’t know,” Lena answered sardonically. “The DEO, an unseen bullet from a sniper rifle two miles away, Alex Danvers herself? Couldn’t wait to come and gloat yourself though could you?” she continued. “Lena Luthor trapped in the desert. Care to shed some light on which one it is?”

“Beats me. The Sahara? Gobi?” Kara rattled off. Her feet found the ground and hands found her hips. The whole pose was infuriating. “Does it matter?”

“Did you bump your head?” Lena asked.

“What?”

“Did you sleep-fly?” Lena asked dryly. She looked out to her left, waiting for a miracle in the form of an incoming helicopter or portal or carrier pigeon with a cheat code to zap her out of this conversation.

“I didn’t fly .”

“What?” Now it was Lena’s turn to balk, and she hated balking. “So you-”

“Followed you through the portal? Yea,” Kara huffed. “Took till now to even find you.”

“Find me?”

“And to think I was about to offer you a ride home.”

“You want to take me for a ride?” Lena asked, unable to keep her eyebrows grounded. “You’re a few months too late for that one, Supergirl.”

The flushed expression made it worth it.

“Fine, I don’t care,” Kara scoffed. “There are more important things to deal with-”

“Like using Myriad for your little schemes?”

“Just use the portal watch again. I’ll fly on my own.”

Lex’s watch. Of course. Later she’d blame her lapse on the sweltering heat.

Lena patted down her pockets. Her very small, very empty pockets. She didn’t get a chance to voice this little confusing discovery, because a strangled cry off in the horizon broke her train of thought. It didn’t sound great.

“Hang on,” Kara interrupted to state the obvious. A broad shoulder bumped past Lena and squared up toward the horizon. A horizon that was quickly accumulating a growing cloud of dust. “Is that-?”

Lena looked up to find another tiny spec floating in the sky. She sighed, one hero was already enough. She didn't need another one.

Though perspective was a funny thing: that tiny shadow floated faster and faster and closer and closer until it was no longer a tiny little harmless spec. That was because it wasn’t a tiny spec at all: it was a giant boulder the size of a semi-truck hurtling toward them. Her head tilted, a useless interrogation tactic but one that occurred subconsciously while, consciously, Lena felt her stomach plummet.

“Are you f*cking seriou-”

The next thing she felt was Kara’s hands settling firmly at her waist. The next thing she saw was a blur of reds and oranges blending from a burst of superspeed. The next thing she heard was the whir of air as they swept skyward away from a herd of incoming-

“What are those?” Lena shrieked. Whether her shriek was from the impossible size of the creatures sweeping across the desert or because of the nonconsensual way Supergirl had flung her skyward, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t much care to interrogate it when three more large rocks became airborne, aimed directly at them.

Kara easily flew to avoid them which meant little to Lena’s flinching stomach.

“Put me down,” Lena demanded. It was a harried and wildly dumb thing to say.

Another dip turned her flutter of nausea into a code brown situation.

“Put you… put you down?” Kara replied, reasonably dumbfounded and swooping left to avoid a bone-shattering red rock catapulting past them. “In the middle of that?”

A gust sent her flyaways in further disarray - something that might have been a problem in a boardroom but didn’t crack this situation’s top 100.

Lena glanced down at the fourteen forms clambering around below them. Their three-wheeled transportation rigs sat abandoned which, for a moment, seemed like a decent exit strategy. That was until she realized the learning curve to operate them might be a tad unrealistic given the circ*mstances. More unrealistic was knowing the ‘where’ she would drive it.

Another boulder whizzed past them.

But that wasn’t what made Lena gulp. What made her gulp was the size of them: they were huge, and not just in an all-muscled-out kind of way. No, they were giants in every sense of the word. And there were six appendages. On each . And a mucus-covered ochre-yellow skin clad with turtle shells. And foot-long claws for fingers. And howls that sounded like battle cries.

They were so impossibly large that boulders were being pried from the ground like a farmer plucking onions from a garden. Lena hated onions.

So yea, Lena gulped and then, like any irrational CEO with a grudge, she doubled-down:

“You heard me,” Lena answered because vulnerability be damned.

Vulnerability which was poorly concealed in her shallow breathing, and racing heart, and ghostly, translucent skin. Lucky for Lena, Kara wasn’t completely dense and gave a quick nod.

Her face felt a briefly comforting blast of wind before the dry, stale air returned, and Lena opened her eyes to find they were now surrounded by a constellation of more rocks poking out of the ground. They poked in a way that suggested coverage. Had Lena felt remotely normal, she might have sighed with relief.

“Right, so, this definitely isn’t Earth,” Kara said.

“You think?” Lena hissed as she peeled away from Kara and staggered on two shaky feet. She found support against a particularly jagged boulder and waited until the urge to vomit passed.

“No need for hostility. I’m just saying-”

An explosion over Lena’s left shoulder sent part of the boulder crumbling down onto them. Coverage was blown. Relief was ruptured. The nausea resurfaced. Everything was a disaster.

“Why are we still being attacked?” Lena shouted, ducking a shower of tiny rocks and scurrying to find safety near a protruding boulder. It protruded with the effectiveness of a hole-covered awning during a National City downpour which was to say the protrusion was useless.

Kara sputtered. “Y-you’re the one who wanted put down!”

Another cascade of rock shrapnel followed. Then another.

“Not in the line of fire you dolt!” Lena shouted over another explosive crumble. She wouldn't get sick. She was not going to puke. She was going to regain control of her coiling innards and swallow down her queasiness. It was an odd mantra to have while cowering for her life.

“How was I supposed to know the rocks were sentient?”

“The rocks are ‘sentient’?” Lena gaped, and her nausea climbed into the backseat. The existence of incompetence was, for once, welcome. “The rocks are - Is that what you think is happening? And not the same creatures that attacked us two seconds ago?”

“It’s a foreign planet,” Kara argued, “they could be anything.”

“You are startlingly dense. How have you ever saved anyone -”

“Look,” Kara huffed, intercepting a head-sized rock before it could pancake Lena, “if you want to get out alive I need to fly us.”

“Not a chance in hell-”

“I get it: you hate me -”

“Understatement of the century,” Lena remarked in between shallow, centering breaths. Because ‘mantra’.

“And I’m not so fond of you at the moment-”

“You called me a villain.”

“So you’d rather get sandwiched by a giant rock than accept my help?” Kara gawked before obliterating a cow-sized rock flying toward them with a quick punch.

So maybe her logic wasn’t entirely sound. And sure, her irrationality was punctuated by pride. And yea, in retrospect it might actually be a bit funny to see Kara deal with a puke-covered cape for a while.

“ Fine ,” Lena sighed then flinched in anticipation of another flattening that never came, “but only until we’re clear of… this.”

‘This’ took ten minutes of flying in the direction of more vast emptiness. Not that there seemed to be any other option.

Lena clambored away from Kara the minute she landed and wretched up a stomach of nothing. More emptiness. She couldn't remember the last time she ate, which hadn’t been a problem when she thought the nearest diner was a quick portal away.

“You’re breathing heavily.”

“Maybe - because I was just attacked - by giant - f*cking monsters - on an alien planet - and my only option - was trusting a buffoon who thought the rocks were alive ,” Lena replied between breaths. A particularly ragged one failed to calm her nerves, stomach, and general temperament which was pleading to claw at the Kryptonian until she felt better about her predicament.

“And your pulse has been elevated-”

“So?” Lena huffed. “What do you care?”

A beat of silence followed and Lena became aware of the howls echoing in the distance. They sounded like a wolf cry being passed through a synthesizer to mimic a drone. It might have been a hit at Burning Man, but did very little to improve the current vibes.

Meanwhile, Kara stood resolute and annoyingly close.

“I don’t like this anymore than you do, but we aren’t going to get home if we can’t work together.”

“Speak for yourself. Just because you can fly doesn’t mean you’d last a week on this planet.”

“Oh right, I forgot: how many foreign galaxies have you traveled to?” Kara asked, scuffing up a cloud of dirt with her dumb boot.

“Just because you’ve driven a car doesn’t mean you know how to build it,” Lena retorted. “Intergalactic trips aside, I am far more equipped to find a way back to Earth than you, y-you pompous brawn.”

Admittedly not her best insult. Kara’s scrunched brow agreed.

“And how do you plan on doing that from the middle of a desert? With Goobs larger than trees?” Kara asked, turning to stand in the sun’s path, forcing Lena's eyes to narrow further.

“Goobs? That’s what those things are?”

“They seem Goob-ish,” Kara shrugged.

Useless. Absolutely useless.

“I’ll scout ahead,” Kara said, already hovering off the ground with a burst of vanity.

“And leave me? Alone?”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

A lie and a truth.

Kara was gone before Lena could muster up an argument. She left a wake of dust in her path which Lena determined was intentional.

The first few minutes were passed by unsuccessfully spitting the cloud of sand from her mouth and futilely patting tiny puffs of it from her clothes. After that she paced. Then she sat. Then she cursed this lifetime and the next for her predicament.

Through it all the sun continued beating down, practically unmoving which only added to the twilight zone quality of the day. The only silver lining was that her stomach finally settled. That was quickly tarnished by her growing parchedness. She licked her chapped lips to feel the first evidence of dehydration. More than shelter, they would need to find water and soon. Lena eyed the cracks and fissures in the ground warily. Did this planet even have water?

There were many ways Lena expected to die: an assassination attempt from Lillian, a plane accident, an assassination attempt from Lex, a lab experiment gone awry, an assassination attempt from a corporate competitor. The list was endless. Mostly assassinations but who was counting.

What wasn’t on that list? Death by dehydration on an alien planet.

She wiped her brow and dreamed for a moment of seltzer with lime. Hell, at this point she’d happily slurp on a lemon wedge dipped in hot sauce.

These were the swirling thoughts Lena swam in when she spotted Supergirl dart across the sky and hover like a valiant dog returning with its fetched stick.

“I found a place.”

“Great,” Lena said dryly, climbing to her feet and dusting off. A useless endeavor.

“It’s maybe four miles-”

“Piece of cake,” she continued, setting off in the direction Kara had returned from.

“Once we pass through that bluff up ahead,” Kara finished.

Lena froze then fumed then took another deep, calming breath. She tried her hardest to ignore Kara’s co*cksure grin and started walking again.

“Really?” Kara asked. Lena didn’t need to turn around to hear the scoff of disbelief.

“Are you coming?” she replied instead.

Stubbornness had gotten her through plenty: board meetings, confrontations with Lillian, an especially misogynistic professor at MIT. She had no doubt it would get her through the small obstacle of trekking across a literal desert in blistering heat without an ounce of water and with the worst wardrobe choice imaginable.

“You’ll never make it with those on,” Kara said the way all superheroes did with their dumb superiority complex.

“Try me.”

And yea, maybe the sharp pointed pain of blisters were starting to form and tiny granules of sand were rubbing all the wrong crevices, but these variables only cranked Lena’s stubbornness up to eleven.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re on an alien planet wearing cashmere and silk-”

“First of all,” Lena huffed, turning on heel to send a threatening index finger toward the floating Kryptonian, “it’s chiffon and chantilly lace, you uncultured brute. And second,” Lena continued, pausing to yank off her heels, “you don’t know a thing about me.”

“Oh, but I do,” Kara shot back. Lena turned away, ignoring Kara’s mocking smile. She hissed at the soft pads of her feet landing on lego-sized stones. Things were not going swimmingly. “I know you only do cardio at the crack of dawn because Lillian made sly comments to you growing up, and I also know you schedule 7 am meetings with Metropolis to get out of spin class which means you, Lena Luthor, are sorely unprepared to hike, boulder, or scale anything that isn’t the walk you take from your office to your lab-”

Lena, affronted, balked: “How the f*ck dare you-”

“Plus I think the air might be thinner on this planet.”

“Oh wow. Are you a scientist or just blessed with stating the obvious?” Lena said all breathy and annoyed.

“Which is why we’re doing it my way.”

So this was what it meant to have a nemesis.

And maybe Lena might have squawked like an unhinged swan for the way Kara swooped down and grabbed Lena’s waist and flung her over Kara’s shoulder like she was a kitchen towel.

And maybe Lena might have beat her fists and heels against the brick wall of muscle that made up Kara’s back.

And maybe Kara might have laughed like she was taking far too much pleasure out of the childish way Lena’s legs kicked angrily in the air.

It was the worst flight of Lena’s life which was saying a lot. Like, a lot , a lot. She wasn’t interested in the rolling nothingness of desert or the landscape’s eventual plummet when they soared over the bluff or the efficiency of flying. She was focused instead on the erupting swell of anger she had for the woman she once called her best friend manhandling her like she was a bag of potatoes.

It was made worse when Lena was unceremoniously dumped onto the ground. Kara dusted her hands off and stepped over Lena’s further-dustied form. A snarl dwelled in Lena’s throat which became a grumble when the ostentatious flicker of a red flowing cape gave her a face-full of the fabric. She swatted it. She missed.

Angrily she climbed to her feet, taking stock of the broad shoulders pointing toward the only architecturally unique thing within sight. She waited for the punchline and panicked when none came.

“This? This is it?” she asked when she finally realized the shambles of metal sheets tethered together by rusting rivets and exposed steel frame was the ‘place’. “This is what you call ‘shelter’?”

It looked like the brutalist home of a Bond villain if the Bond villain was severely cost-conscious with zero interest in longevity. Bunkers were made of higher quality materials. Sheds were made of higher quality material. The dome-like structure looked more like an accident made from four walls that collapsed in on eachother. From a distance it could have been overlooked as a dump. Even from where Lena was currently standing, it looked like a dump.

“How about ‘thank you’?” Kara called.

“You want a ‘thank you’ for finding a junk pile in a wasteland?”

“It looks better on the inside,” Kara answered defensively. Lena didn’t miss the stubbornly crossed arms and ‘hero’ scowl.

“And where exactly does ‘inside’ start?” Lena asked. A quick survey of the shingled, mangled dome of metal didn’t offer any sign of hinges or ventilation or windows for that matter.

“Uh… about that-”

👾

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lena complained a short ten minute walk later. Her heels rattled from her left hand. Her right hand was permanently fused into a fist.

“It’s safer.”

“How did you find this hellhole? How did you-”

“Are you coming or not?”

Lena genuinely wasn’t sure. She took a look at her surroundings: at the bluff they’d flown over, at the vast wasteland of dust, at the nothingness everywhere else. Then she looked down at Kara who was hovering over a manhole the size of a redwood’s trunk.

“Well?”

Lena’s shoulders slumped in resignation.

And so they had shelter. A boiling hot shelter.

Lena looked around as she peeled off her jacket. The air was suffocating and still. She noted a handful of windowed slits in the facade that, upon interrogating, were concealed from outside view by metal overhangs and were completely inoperable.

All of the decor was alien, to say the least: a primary structure that looked like a rung out rag molded from metal and bolted together to span overhead; a floor made up of sedan-sized red tiles smoothed by wear patterns; rusting walls painted in thick black charcoal markings.

Besides this, it looked abandoned, and in a hurry too. Lena couldn’t decipher what the station was used for, but whoever occupied it sure didn’t stick around to clean up the piles of scrolls, clunky gadgets, or unexplainable array of vessels lined against the walls.

“Any idea what lived here?” Lena asked, stepping deeper into the dingy space.

“Goobs? Maybe?” Kara answered. “Not sure why they’d abandon it though.”

“Shouldn’t we be worried?”

“There isn’t a Goob within three miles, and this place looks like it hasn’t been occupied in a decade.”

“Three miles? Awfully precise.”

“Oh, uh,” Kara fumbled, awkwardly tugging at her ear lobe.

“Right.”

They split up after that.

To Lena, the space was impressive. It also seemed to be one bad gust away from collapsing in on them. Naturally, every piece of furniture was oversized. It might have been comedic if not for the growing pit of dread replacing the nausea in Lena's stomach.

While dingy was the word that came to mind, that was selling it short: the space was expansive, though Lena supposed it had to be given the ‘Goobs’’ sizes. Furniture was oversized to fit them: tables were three feet taller, chairs were two feet wider, and the consoles of buttons were the size of Lena’s palm.

The space consisted of a main room large enough to put most five-star ballrooms to shame. It was zoned into three sections: the middle looked like a rec space. To one side of that were rows and rows of shelves holding any number of gadgets and supplies. To the other side was a wall of what Lena determined to be the closest things to computers. The system was a series of stacked components bolted floor-to-ceiling like a tetris board. Lena made note of the various access panels for later though her optimism waned when she saw the cobwebs of cables pouring out of the topmost row of modules. Worse were the piles of sand she saw spilling out of, well, everything.

Three doorways connected the main space to everything else: one led to the tunnel that brought them from the outside, opposite that was another doorway linked to the living quarters. The third was opposite the gadget zone and overflowed with rolls and rolls of scrolls.

The living quarters were nothing special except for the fact each room was massive.

“Anything?” Lena asked when Kara returned from checking them out.

“Just bedrooms the size of gymnasiums. You’ll never guess what we’re stuck with though.”

“If you say ‘one bed’ I swear to god-”

“Hardly. There are plenty of rooms to sequester yourself away and plot all of your brainwashing schemes,” Kara said haughtily. “But there’s no science lab. Guess you’ll have to make your kryptonite the old fashioned way.”

“By blowing up a planet?”

Kara froze. Her expression fell and gaze dropped.

Lena felt a tug of remorse. She cleared her throat. The remorse passed.

“I hardly need a lab to get us home,” Lena said.

Kara responded by retreating toward the shelves of gadgets.

“What we need though is food,” Kara said after an unspoken amount of time. It was caked in fake light-heartedness.

“And I sorely need a drink,” Lena replied dryly.

“I’m betting one whiff of whatever they drink here would knock you out for a week,” Kara called from within a bin filled with jumpsuits seven times too wide for either of them. She tugged the fabric to show its full width. “It might need a belt.”

“I’ll do with my own clothes, thanks,” Lena scowled into a bin two rows away. It was filled with what Lena could only describe as ‘alien tools’: wrench-like objects, something with a weird spring, another that looked like a z-shaped corkscrew.

“Just saying, a change into something more comfortable might not be the worst idea.”

“Comfortable? You want me to wear a parachute,” Lena shot back. “I will walk myself home before I get stuck long enough to need a change of clothes.”

More time passed. They’d segregated themselves to opposite ends of the alien ballroom, sorting through their new temporary outpost for anything that might get them off the planet faster. Lena was quickly discovering the rudimentary limitations they’d be dealing with; this planet was not advanced in ways of technology.

Worse was that the icons, symbols, and markers lining the scrolls, walls, and keyboards were definitely not Germanic. If there was any chance of using anything in the main room, Lena was going to need a crash course in cryptography unless the miracle of a rosetta stone appeared alongside the genie.

Unwilling to put her faith in the fictitious, she gravitated toward the room of scrolls. She unrolled the first and read. Though ‘reading’ was putting it generously. The characters were like reading French if French was put through a blender, reconstituted into an alphabet of unlimited characters then married Hangul and had twins who couldn’t agree on anything.

“Hey,” Kara said, poking her head into the room, “did you ever find the transmatter portal?”

Lena’s head shot up before her hands dropped the scroll and dug feebly through her empty pockets, again. She jumped to her feet and grabbed the jacket she’d left on an oversized footstool to repeat the actions.

Nothing.

“It must be where I landed,” she guessed. A lame guess filled with reckless hope.

“Well that’s not great news.”

“You can literally fly. It will take you, what, a minute?”

“Obviously,” Kara scoffed. “I’m just saying there was a whole herd of Goobs trampling that area. Unless Lex made it out of Supermanium then I don’t see how-”

“Supermanium?”

“You know; the hardest substance in existence?” Kara asked like Lena had just asked what a cloud was. “Brainy named it after… well, he named it after Superman but I’ve beaten Kal so-”

“Your arrogance really has no limit.” If disdain could drip, then Lena’s words were drowning in it.

“I’m just saying,” Kara said, hand waving ambiguously, “don’t blame me when I find it shattered into a thousand pieces because Lex couldn’t be bothered paying for quality materials-”

“Are you going to go look or would you rather lecture me about things I have literally no control over?” Lena snapped.

👾

And so the watch was broken.

Shattered. It might as well have been ground up and turned into the same sand that piled uselessly around them.

“I told you,” Kara said. “Cheap, value-engineered-”

“Will you shut up?”

👾

“Not even crackers?” Kara mumbled, opening and closing the same cupboard doors for the fifth time.

“What, Supergirl, never go to bed hungry?” Lena muttered.

“Says the one who grew up in a mansion with kitchen staff. How am I supposed to keep up my energy to scout for supplies if I don’t have any food?” Kara moped.

Lena dropped her head against the oversized footstool her back rested against and brought a hand to her brow. “I can’t believe I’m stuck on an alien planet with you.”

“At least there’s oxygen,” Kara offered, hopping onto the table that towered over Lena’s scroll studies.

“Great, stave off death until starvation kicks in. Prolong the suffering.”

“What if we built a portal?”

“Across the universe,” Lena deadpanned.

“I love that movie,” Kara sighed. “Now I want to watch it.”

“Do you know how risky that is?” Lena continued with zero interest in a derailment. “We don’t even know where we are, and even if we did, the timing, the coordinates, the energy required would be astronomical. There would be no room for error, and this prehistoric equipment does not stir confidence that it would help us get there.”

“Are you saying you can’t do it?” Kara asked. It came out as a childish challenge.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Lena replied with a matter of factness that wiped the haughty smirk from Kara’s face.

“Oh.”

Without another word Lena rose, leaving the piles of uncracked scrolls behind, and retired to ‘her’ bedroom. She wasn’t even that tired, but any distance between her and Kara was welcomed.

She chose the furthest room from Kara’s which was still one planet too close. Worse were the nonexistent doors on any of them, so she made her best attempt to hang one of the oversized suits from a few DIY-ed hooks and a frayed cable. She pretended there wasn’t a stench to it. That illusion lasted less than twenty minutes before she tore it down and threw it back into the bin.

With the sun still beating down on the outpost, and stomachs rumbling with hunger, Lena laid prone on the mattress made of itchy fabric and what she could only assume was sand and styrofoam. If the princess thought a pea was bad, this was in an entirely different league of discomfort.

Lena didn’t take loss well. She’d been a Luthor long enough to take on challenges by staring down the barrel of failure and glaring it into submission. That didn’t seem so easy now: she didn’t have her lab, a grasp of the world’s technology or its language, and she was stranded with Kara Danvers.

Brooding about it did no one any good, so Lena refused to complain about any of it. Instead she rolled onto her side, pretended the faint stench wasn’t coming from the mattress and vowed to make tomorrow a better day.

👾

“You didn’t find any food, did you?” Kara asked in greeting the next morning.

“Bit of a late start isn’t it?”

Lena had broken her vow the moment she realized there wasn’t any coffee on this planet.

“Like you can tell: has the sun even moved?” Kara asked, peaking through one of the slits. “So?”

“No. Food wasn’t a priority.”

Coffee was. And since that wasn’t happening anytime soon, food might as well take a backseat.

“Wasn’t a-? Food should be the highest priority,” Kara whine “We could starve to death or-”

“If we find a way home before lunch we’ll be just fine.”

“Well I hate to be the bearer of, like, reality, but unless you have a second, better-designed transmatter portal in that jacket lining, we won’t be getting out of this place before lunch next month . This packaging is so weird,” she continued, sniffing a canister of purple powder. “Think this could be food?”

“By all means, give it a try,” Lena grumbled from behind the growing pile of scrolls. She’d set up shop at a too-tall table in a too-big chair. Her chin sat dangerously close to the tabletop. “I could learn a lot about how the Kryptonian anatomy responds to consuming powdered jet fuel. You know, for science,” Lena smirked.

Kara scowled then flew up to glare at Lena’s eye-level.

“Well what’re you doing, Miss I’m-a-big-jerk-who-woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed?”

“I thought I’d twiddle my thumbs until the sky magically plucked me out of this hellhole and plopped me back into my penthouse.”

Kara’s face puckered with skepticism.

“I’m trying to translate this language,” Lena conceded. “But the alphabet is… it’s irrational at best.”

She tried for ‘nonchalant’ to hide the fact that she had no idea what she was doing. The execution was mid.

“Irrational? Lena Luthor can’t crack the language nut?” Kara said. With the help of super speed and flight, Kara sent half the table of scrolls flying and peered her nosy face over Lena’s shoulder.

“Seriously?” Lena glared while her arms flailed over the table. Three uncontained scrolls floated freely to the ground. They might have contained the answers to life. They might also have been recipes for biscuits. It was anyone's guess.

“Probably because it isn’t a true alphabet.”

“What?” Lena asked through gritted teeth.

“My guess? They’re hieroglyphs.” Kara continued. She glanced between the scrolls then back at the canister of powder in her hand again. “Yea look, these are similar to one of Phalon’s historic languages. It was common with a lot of worlds in Andromeda.”

“How do you know this?”

Kara shrugged. “I’m a genius.”

Lena stared with the amusem*nt of a cat.

“My father traveled a lot. Sometimes he would bring me along. You learn a lot spending a month bouncing between planets.”

“And you accused me of being privileged,” Lena quipped.

“Yea look,” Kara surged ahead, “I bet these are numbers. See how the stones are collected in a tray in this one? That tray appears stacked here which probably means-”

“They’re sets,” Lena finished, realization dawning.

“Bingo,” Kara said. “I could help if you wanted-”

“Don’t you have scouting to do?”

Kara hovered away from the table with a ‘hmph’ and something that sounded very close to “wonder if I’ll find food.”

👾

“What’s that smell? Is that food? You found food?” Kara asked the moment she zoomed through the tunnel. “Are you eating?”

Lena, still unfed, was standing over a steaming pot of… goop.

“Eww,” Kara said with a scrunched nose. “Why is it so tacky? And… gray?”

“I was hoping it would thin out once the heat dispersed,” Lena said with her own scrunched expression.

“You found heat?”

“No. It just sort of… comes this way,” Lena clarified.

“Is it even edible?”

“Should be. Might stave off our need for water, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Says so on the packaging,” Lena answered, pointing toward the empty foil wrapping. It came from one of four bins filled with the packaging.

“The… you mean you figured out the language? In a day?”

“It’s a rudimentary understanding. Here, keep an eye on this,” Lena said. She thrust a ladle-like utensil in Kara’s hand and retreated to the other side of the space.

It was a shot in the dark, but Lena had a hunch this cabinet of conduits, tabs, and cable-like ropes was some sort of mainframe. At least, that’s what the glyphs implied.

“Why me?”

“Because you are useless at anything else around here,” Lena called from the depths of the cabinet she’d crawled into.

“I helped with the language thing this morning, didn’t I?”

“What’d you find? Water? Energy source? Intel?”

“Desert mostly,” Kara hummed. “When can we eat it?” Kara called from the goop station.

“Beats me,” Lena answered, flipping a switch she hoped wouldn’t set the place on fire.

“I’m gonna try it.”

“Whatever.”

“Do you want some?”

“No.”

“That’s not what your stomach says,” Kara called. “Besides,” she continued, a burst of air in the cabinet indicating she was now standing next to Lena, “hunger leads to memory loss and malfunctioning critical thinking.”

“Malfunctioning critical thinking,” Lena parroted dryly. And yea, maybe her stomach chose that opportunity to grumble its displeasure.

“Food first. Then you can play house,” Kara insisted, holding a vessel of murky gray goop under Lena’s nose.

It tasted like a cellar.

And so they had food. Flavorless, sludgy food.

👾

“Need any help?”

“No.”

“You sure?” Kara asked half a day later between bites of cobweb-flavored goop. “Looks a bit tricky.”

“I said ‘no’,” Lena said through clenched teeth.

Lena stretched half an inch more, extending herself to her absolute limits and seething about it. Why? Because the outlet she was struggling to access was still three measly inches out of reach.

“Alrighty,” Kara hummed, floating with the annoyance of a mosquito directly next to said outlet.

Lena had been grinding her teeth for so long that another headache crept from her temples down her neck, and Kara’s cheeky grin was doing the opposite of helping.

“Maybe if you grow wings-”

“Shut. Up,” Lena grumbled, feeling the precariousness of her less than OSHA-approved stack of furniture, boxes, and a mattress from one of the spare rooms.

“Glaring at it won’t bring it any closer,” Kara continued, arms crossed, eyes twinkling with superiority, and cape billowing even though there wasn’t so much as a breeze in the oven they called a shelter.

“Will you please just leave ?”

“And miss watching you plummet to your death? Not a chance.”

“There are faster ways to kill me,” Lena hissed, leaning back then forward to intentionally rock her land-locked boat.

“That doesn’t look like a good idea.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

“That’s ‘Supergirl’ to you- hey, hey, woa ,” Kara yelped, dropping a few unexpected inches under the added weight of Lena’s grip on her cape. “You’re cheating!”

“I’m a Luthor,” Lena huffed once the plug was in place and she’d pushed off Kara to reposition herself onto the tower of garbage. “I don’t play by the rules.”

Whatever offended response Kara had on the tip of her tongue was drowned out by the hum of a hard drive clicking and grinding awake.

“Perfect,” Lena said with a nod.

And so they had a computer.

It wasn’t the 21st century speeds Lena was used to, but she was determined to make it work. Two days stranded and already making progress.

Somewhere between Kara’s unsuccessful scouting and complaining about the flavorless goop, Lena managed to link up the heavily pixelated monitors that had the resolution of an 8-bit arcade game. A few short test-runs later, and she discovered how the keys and knobs worked.

“Great, now all we need is an antennae.”

Kara’s head popped up from behind the oversized plank they called a couch. “Huh?”

“If I can link up with an antennae, I should be able to send a radio message to Earth.”

“Really?” Kara asked. She climbed over the back holding three scrolls in her hands.

“It’ll take hours of calculations, and we’ll need to scrap for material, but I don’t see why not. An ultra high frequency antenna is already what NASA uses for the Mars Rovers, and J’onn’s ship carries the same technology.”

“Huh.”

“Once sent, I’m sure Lex or Brainy could figure out how to portal us back in an afternoon.”

“I thought you said we couldn’t use a portal,” Kara replied.

“Not from where we are with our technology, but if we can message someone on Earth-”

“Sounds like a literal shot in the dark,” Kara scowled. “How will we even know if they get it? The message?”

“We’d have to build a transmitter here to wait for them to ping back. From there we could coordinate and-”

“Won’t they have to time it to hit our antennae at the exact right moment?”

“That’s hardly going to be a problem,” Lena said.

Kara’s uncertainty didn’t fade. “How long could that take?”

“Depends where in the universe we are. That’ll be the first step.”

“Uh-huh. And uh, how exactly would you-”

“I’m sorry, do you have a better idea?”

Lena’s shoulders stiffened and head tipped to the side in suspicion. Kara at least had the decency to flush and reach clumsily for a pair of glasses that weren’t there.

“No, I just… well, kinda: do you know how warp speed works?” Kara asked. The scrolls in her hands crinkled.

“Of course I know how warp speed works, but knowing how it works isn’t enough. If you think an antennae is involved, that’s nothing on space travel. We would need extensive information about the path between here and Earth, and the fuel required, and-and-”

“And a ship?” Kara offered, flipping one of the scrolls around to show off a set of highly detailed blueprints.

Lena took half a glance at them and sneered. “We can’t build a spaceship from scratch. It would take years.”

“Maybe we don’t need to. Maybe they built it.”

“That’s the basket you want to put your eggs in?”

“Beats sending echoes out into the universe.”

“Those echoes are the same calculations we’d need to route a path for the ship,” Lena replied, her patience cracking.

“Which you already plan to figure out, right?” Kara asked.

“It’d take time,” Lena continued, eyes flitting across the page of glyphs and characters. “All of this will take time.”

She fell back into her chair and sighed.

“Great, well, while you do that I can look for the ship.”

👾

Kara found a ship the next day, much to Lena’s dismay. It was tiny, nonfunctioning, and did not match the blueprints Kara had found, but it was a ship. And like the useless golden retriever she was, Kara reacted with far too much enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Lena was left to be the adult in the room.

“How does it run?” she asked, surveying the tiny metal coffin warrily.

“Not sure yet. But look, it’s got these cool turbo-looking things and-”

“And who exactly did you steal it from? Do we need to be worried they’ll track it down?”

“Well definitely not a Goob. Can you imagine a Goob trying to fit inside this?”

“I can barely imagine a child fitting inside it, much less two grown adults.”

“It’s more spacious inside than you think,” Kara waved off. “Here, I’ll show you-”

“No. Thanks,” Lena said, though her words were almost certainly drowned out by the murderous creak of a rusting hinge from the ship’s tiny door swinging open.

“But it’s really really- woa ,” Kara continued, head poking through the threshold.

“Just get the materials I asked for.”

👾

It took another day to realize this planet was weirder than they thought. It also meant Lena was not getting her materials anytime soon.

“We need to revise our strategy,” Lena said by way of hello the next morning.

“Did you finally come around to my spaceship idea?” Kara asked, walking into the ‘kitchen’ sans cape. She ripped open a pouch of gray sludge and smelled it with cautious uncertainty. “It is far superior-”

“Our timeline didn’t consider a binary star system,” Lena interrupted, swiveling around to face Kara’s scrunched up face.

“A.. wait, a binary star-? You mean like Kepler-47?” Kara asked, tipping the steaming pouch of gray goop toward her yawning mouth.

Lena looked away. “Yes.”

“Double star means double power though,” Kara replied. A trail of goop slid down her chin. “Means I can find fuel extra fast.”

“Except it’s red.”

“Red?”

“The second sun.”

Kara clambered over to the slit Lena held open and squinted out before her eyes widened.

“It’s red,” Kara whispered, a hint of nostalgia in her voice. “It’s… Rao, look at the size of it.”

“Yes, well that giant red sun is currently hiding the second sun.”

“Oh,” Kara huffed, “so sorry I was focused on finding a ship to get us home-”

“A ship that doesn’t run and has enough interior space to lodge three hamsters and a marble. Meanwhile you haven’t scrapped even one item on my list to make an antenna.”

“So, guess this means we’re stuck while I don’t have powers.”

Lena pressed her eyes closed and let out a slow, calming breath. She was going to get so good at breathing. “It would appear so.”

👾

“Ow,” Kara cried then hissed then sucked on her thumb like a toddler. “What the heck?”

“You’ve probably exhausted your powers,” Lena said without looking up.

“But it’s only been a few hours,” Kara scowled. She clutched her thumb to her chest like it would sooth the pain. “It was only a small flight. I should still have reserves.”

“Not every yellow sun produces the same output.”

“But it’ll come back, right?”

“Your powers? Yes, obviously.”

“No, I meant the sun. The yellow one.”

Lena scowled, more perplexed by the inane set of questions. “Yes, it’s… do you not understand how gravitational force works-?”

“Obviously, duh,” Kara grumbled, turning toward the window slit.

“We’re probably on the other side of it now.”

“When will it come back?”

Lena glanced up at Kara who was glancing worriedly out the tiny slit again. A moment passed before Kara looked toward Lena expectantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry: did I give the impression I vacation here regularly?”

“No, no I just meant-”

“That what? That I’d have the rotation cycles of a solar planet with two suns to hand for you? That I had absolutely nothing else on my mind but to spend my morning blue-skying through all of the hair-brained questions Supergirl might ask?”

“You could just say you don’t know. You don’t have to be so mean about it.”

A pout followed that Lena ignored until it turned into heavy sighs by mid morning then dramatic falls onto the couch after lunch then incessant pre-dinner foot tapping that made Lena want to shred Kara’s boots.

“I think we should call it the ‘command center’,” Kara said at one point absolutely out of nowhere.

“Enough,” Lena said. She slammed her hands on the desk for good measure. “Why don’t you go make yourself useful and see if there’s anything in the ship you can learn.”

“But the door is stuck,” Kara grumped from an oversized swivel chair she’d taken to kicking across the room. Lena wanted to melt the wheels. “And I have stupid human powers. And it’s really hot and my suit is itchy and-”

“I. Do not. Care. Go put something else on and find another way in.”

And for a beautiful string of uninterrupted moments that became minutes that became hours (though no watch could prove it), Lena was able to focus.

That was until Kara started lugging stuff into the ‘command center’.

It wasn’t the stuff or the noise or the frequency of the trips that ripped Lena’s focus away. No, it was the attire Kara was doing it in: super suit hanging from Kara’s hips, revealing a black sports bra and an upper body of impossibly toned, rippling muscle glistening cruelly with a layer of sweat.

And Lena tried, she really did. She was fueled by hatred, animosity, and a stubborn disposition that would have the toughest board members on their knees begging for mercy.

And yea, maybe the thought of Kara begging on her knees wasn’t helping things.

“So I was thinking-” Kara began seemingly out of nowhere holding some chunk of metal and standing impossibly close in a way that made the heat and sweat and flexing muscle radiate into Lena’s personal space and sent an unexplainable chill down Lena’s spine and her tolerance for beefcakes somewhere near negative five, “there’s this access panel-”

“Will you please put something on?”

“But I’m hot, and you said-”

“I don’t care; it’s distracting,” Lena said.

Did Kara lose her grip on the random hunk of metal? Definitely.

Did Lena stare at the way Kara’s biceps and forearms shifted and stretched and tightened to accommodate the near-drop? Unfortunately.

👾

“This manifold is an absolute labyrinthe,” Lena remarked a short while later because it was easier to focus on something when doing so meant Kara would behave. Which was why she was now neck-deep inside the spaceship.

“What if we simplified it?” Kara offered, now wearing some less attractive combination of a sack cinched together with rag ties that unfortunately still exposed her finer assets which included but was not limited to her forearms, biceps, shoulders, and the intermittent gaps that exposed her torso. It was basically as ineffective as wearing nothing at all. “It must be impacting the efficiency.”

Why Kara felt the need to stand so close and lean so casually and cross her arms with an unexplainable easiness was beyond Lena. So she kept her eyes fixed on the entanglement of pipes and not on the fingers that traced over the metal with a dexterity that was being sorely underutilized.

“It would be worth the calculation,” Lena said with a small cough. She searched for a rag to wipe her hands and well-worn rage to distract her thoughts. “It seems unusual they’d build inefficiency like this without reason. I’ll look at it after I finalize the spatial calculations.”

“I could do it.”

“You?” Lena asked, an eyebrow lifted in surprise with a shadow of skepticism. Her eyes mistakenly fell onto the flex of arms as Kara hung lazily from an overhead metal rod.

“I’ve got nothing else going on.”

“ You .”

“What? I can do math.”

Lena had zero faith in that statement, but she shrugged nevertheless, tossed the rag onto the ground, and muttered something about the antenna being a better basket anyway.

👾

“Six.”

“Six?” Kara asked past the spoon and mouthful of goop she’d just shoved into it.

“By my calculations,” Lena said, dropping the notepad onto the table and dragging a bowl of goop toward her. “It revolves around the red sun. And we revolve around both. Fortunately the yellow sun orbits around the sun faster than anything in our solar system. My math shows a ten-day orbit. We’ve got four days with and six days without.”

“That’s sort of good news, right?”

“Why stop at ‘sort of good’? Our standards have plummeted to eagerly eating gray goop for dinner and forgoing all forms of hygiene and garments,” Lena said, gesturing to the rag-sac half-covering Kara’s torso. “At this point, I think it is categorically ‘questionably great’ news, don’t you think?”

Kara grunted and slid Lena’s math toward her.

“What about nighttime?” Kara asked after a moment. “Or is it like Iceland in the summer? Maybe we’ll never see nighttime.”

They absolutely would.

👾

If Lena thought the endless days sitting in a breezeless time capsule were unbearable, the sunset that faded into darkness two days later took the cake. The ‘command center’ as Kara now took to calling their shelter like it was a fun summer camp was still just a barebones collection of scavenged metal sheets bound by rusting fasteners. This didn’t pair well with bone-chilling nights that introduced a new element: wind.

When a particularly ornery gust of wind swept through, the metal groaned and whined against the point fixings - at least, the ones that were still fully intact. On these occasions, small gaps revealed themselves, sending more sand descending onto them. It answered the longstanding question Lena had about the origins of sand mounds. Though how the sand hadn’t found its way into every nook and electrical cranny was a miracle and the only reason Lena felt a glimmer of hope that she’d leave this godforsaken ring of hell.

But that wasn’t what Lena was thinking about at the moment. She couldn’t think much at all with her teeth chattering louder than a chainsaw. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and tried to curl into a compact ball. She again silently cursed her life. Nothing creative; she’d run out of creative ways to describe her predicament by the second red sun day.

It had been an unproductive night day followed by a sleepless night, and there was absolutely nothing Lena could do about it. When another gust sent the shelter creaking and whipping another breeze of cold through Lena’s room, she gave up and found her way back to the main computer. Perhaps the humming exhaust of the computers would make the longest night bearable.

Because it truly would be the longest night. Four days worth, to be exact.

And that meant another wrench: The cycle would eventually interrupt the yellow sun orbit. It meant longer spans without Supergirl. It meant more days of being sequestered with Kara.

Between teeth-chattering cold, Lena found herself mulling over her current state: marooned on a foreign planet in a (still) unknown location with the last person on earth (and now the universe) that she’d want to be stranded with for company. Worse yet, said ‘last person’ would be without powers for anywhere from ⅓ to ⅔ of their time. Not to mention, freezing chills, and now an even longer sentence. Worst of all was that they still had no plan to get home.

Things could not be more dire if she tried.

Which was why she settled into her oversized chair that smelled faintly of sour milk and tried to get some work done, because that was the only thing she had control over.

“Morning,” Kara said with the chipper tone of someone who managed to sleep. Lena glared at the red cape tucked warmly over Kara’s shoulders and burrowed a little deeper into the smelly chair she now resided in. “Woa. You look, uh…”

“If you say one word about my appearance, I will personally tie you up by your feet and dangle you as bait to the Goobs.”

“I wasn’t - uh, that wasn’t…” Kara stammered, face reddening by the second. “I just meant: you look like you could use some… help?”

“Unless you can magically dig up some wood and lighter fluid, then no Supergirl, I don’t need any help from you.”

Lena had never been so lucky to have a single sentence cryptically ban Kara from a room for the entire day. Lunch was the exception: Kara lurked just long enough to grab a bowl of goop and raid the ship’s scrap pile before creeping off. To where, Lena didn’t ask. She didn’t care. She just gratefully took the silence and stewed in her terrible mood.

Kara returned again only when Lena stopped working to eat for the first time all day. It was dinner - Kara’s third favorite meal and one she never missed. Except she didn’t reappear to take the offered bowl of ambiguous goop. Instead, she sheepishly asked to borrow the soldering iron.

“The soldering iron?” Lena repeated. A catalog of questions appeared in her mind.

“Normally I’d just use my, uhm,” Kara replied, pointing toward her eyes before adjusting glasses that hadn’t donned her face since they’d arrived.

Begrudgingly Lena handed it over. It wasn’t a real soldering iron - at least, not in the sense of how one on earth worked, but she’d discovered it a few days earlier and felt delighted at working with such a familiar tool in a world of unfamiliar.

It was a harmless request. It wasn’t like she was even using it, but there was the small placebo effect that came with having a warming device so near. In minutes she swore the place was getting even colder.

More sleepless hours passed, and exhaustion vied for priority in the fight between warmth and sleep. Case in point was that her head dipped for the third time in as many minutes. It was a sign: a sign she was too tired to continue, but her entire body shook with cold. She was practically an icicle. A hyperbolic icicle. She glanced toward the closet of bodysuits and sighed. It was better than nothing.

Because she had tried ‘nothing’ and that got her nowhere.

When she finally trudged toward her room, laden with three crusty, awful smelling fabric carcasses, she didn’t feel any more at peace with the situation. The fabric crinkled from dried sweat, disuse, and the chill of cold that blanketed the entire ‘command center’. Santa Claus himself wouldn’t have survived these conditions.

Which was why, perhaps in a fit of delirium, she felt an unexpected waft of warmth. She had enough wherewithal to question its authenticity. She didn’t have enough to not challenge them. If anything, letting her imagination believe it was warm might let her finally get some sleep. Except the waft of warmth also came with incessant buzzing, like an outdoor lamp used to kill mosquitoes.

Great. With a sigh she yanked the trailing suits through the threshold and startled to a stop. There was a silhouette. She wasn’t alone.

It was Kara. Huddled beside her bed.

“What are you-”

Anger was betrayed by confusion because the room was warmer. Kara offered a look of guilty surprise. It clarified nothing until -

“Is that a heater?” Lena asked, almost rhetorically of the device because there it was, producing heat. Radiating glorious morsels of warmth.

“I can't get the buzzing to stop,” Kara said apologetically.

“You made a heater?” Lena repeated, unable to totally process the small gift of comfort.

“I think it's coming from a loose coil I didn't tighten enough,” Kara continued, a small scowl fixed on the tiny metal box. “I’ll fix it tomorrow-”

“You made me a heater,” Lena said now, a hint more forcefully. It was forceful enough to make Kara's gaze flicker up to Lena.

“Hopefully it doesn't explode,” Kara offered lightly. “I mean - I wouldn't have. It isn't… it's not a bomb or anything - anything like that.”

Lena's head tilted inquisitively between the heater and Kara who stood with sloped shoulders and an un-hero-like posture.

“Right, well, goodnight, Lena.”

Lena continued to stare - in shock or disbelief she didn't know, as Kara retreated from the room.

She'd made her a heater.

👾

“So, what do you think?” Kara asked, standing proudly next to her careful calculations. “Pretty impressive, huh?”

Admittedly they were. And they were done in a fraction of the time Lena expected, which was good and bad: good because it meant Kara might not be completely useless; bad because it meant Kara had zero distraction and would be reverting back to her ‘bored toddler’ state of annoyance.

“Perhaps if we were traveling on-planet,” Lena said dismissively.

“This redesign would be a 20x improvement on the system’s efficiency.”

“With a fuel source that we still don’t have,” Lena pointed out.

“Well we know it runs on something . Otherwise it wouldn’t exist. That counts.”

“Groundbreaking conclusions, really.”

“Thank you-”

“Except you’ve failed, again , to see the forest, Supergirl.”

Yes, the heater was a lifestyle improvement. Yes, she was begrudgingly thankful for it. That hardly meant her mood was blossoming with sunshine. There was still the predicament of being stranded on an alien planet that kept her staring into the void long after Supergirl was snoozing four rooms away. It was taxing even for someone who spent her life managing sleepless weeks and a workload well beyond her years.

“Even with the most efficient engine, the ‘fuel’ needed will be too heavy to hull across the universe, and that hunk of metal doesn’t look like it can carry you and me much less two tonnes of fuel.”

“What’s the problem? Even J’onn’s tiny ship can take on warp speed.”

“J’onn’s tiny ship would tear itself apart if it had to travel more than four lightyears. We are 27.6 lightyears from Earth.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“Hardly; we should be working to the thousandths at minimum when considering warp speed travel. And unless you’ve got six small modular reactors the size of thimbles in your back pocket you’ve been holding out on showing me, we’ve got a problem with your little ship idea.”

👾

“Hey Lena?”

Lena closed her eyes, scrounging for a morsel of patience.

“What.”

“How did you know where we are?”

Lena’s hand paused mid-scrawl. A lone gust of wind whistled through the sheet metal to fill the silence. The space heater buzzed. Kara was staring into her bowl of goop like it might hold all of life’s answers. It was dinner time.

“The constellations,” Lena confessed. She held her breath, expecting a follow-up that didn’t come. She wasn’t interested in revealing why she was familiar with the network of constellations surrounding Krypton. That was a conversation meant for a friend.

“How are we so close? How isn’t there any damage?”

A scrunch appeared over her nose. It scrunched at the goop.

“The size of Krypton would only require a distance of 0.23 lightyears to avoid any damage to human life. I assume the same applies for Goobs and life on this planet. We’re-”

“0.5 away. At least.”

“Enough to have witnessed it, but not enough to cause any significant damage to the planet.”

Kara nodded like she heard, but her gaze was glossy and distant. “Good. That’s… it’s good no one was hurt.”

“Kara-”

Kara looked up and Lena faltered. What was there to say? She felt a tug of compassion; of remorse for the hero she once called friend. She just didn’t have any words to voice it.

The moment passed and Kara retreated to her bedroom, her forgotten bowl of goop untouched.

👾

“What if we jumped planets?”

Lena wanted silence. She needed silence, but powerless Kryptonians were like illiterate puppies: they couldn’t read a room.

They’d survived the first night cycle, but just as Lena had predicted, the solar cycles weren’t aligned with the planet's revolution. That meant Lena only had one day of yellow-sun reprieve before plunging back into a twelve-day combination of red sun and night.

It meant Lena’s depleted patience had eleven days to go. Apparently she’d uncovered a tenth circle of hell.

“Then we wouldn’t need to solve this fuel or battery problem,” Kara continued. She paced with the excitement of someone suffering a severe case of cabin fever. Or maybe that was Lena.

“Right,” Lena responded, her eyes fixed on the two scrolls she was transcribing. The right-to-left and bottom-to-top microscopic glyphs were already difficult enough to follow. Add to that the rudimentary slab of charcoal she used to scrawl with and it left no room for a bored superhero.

“Really? You think it could work?”

Kara bounced.

“No.”

She wondered if this was why Lionel barricaded himself in his office so often.

“Then why-”

The brittle charcoal cracked and sent a smudge across the parchment. It also snapped Lena’s singular thread of patience in two.

“Because I need you to shut up.”

“That’s not very nice. I’m just trying to help, and this seems like a good idea.”

Lena captured her forehead with smudged fingers and sighed. “It’s a terrible idea.”

“But what if-”

“Not only does it fail to consider where we would source our fuel from, it assumes the planets between here and Earth are producing exactly what we need, or were you suggesting we build a new power supply on each planet?” Lena interrupted, face shooting up to glare daggers at Kara’s frozen form.

“Obviously I hadn’t gotten that far,” Kara mumbled. “I was just spitballing-”

“-useless suggestions? Yes, you’re quite good at that, so let me add an ounce of critical thinking: given the current capacity, we would make it less than three lightyears before requiring our first intergalactic pit-stop. Assuming we find a planet that isn’t hostile to our genetic make-ups or hostile in the violent way, it would mean a minimum of ten separate stops, ten separate engine builds, and ten chances of failing. I, for one, am not interested in spending a second longer with you than strictly necessary let alone the sixty years it could take us to get home with that absolutely asinine ‘spitball’.”

Kara pouted then huffed then collapsed onto the giant chair she’d been pacing around. A minute of glorious silence passed before: “Well it’s better than nothing which is exactly what you’ve produced in the last two weeks.”

“Says the one who hasn’t managed to figure out how anything on this planet is powered,” Lena shot back. “You have flight, strength, and x-ray vision and have nothing but the shell of a ship to show for it. Kryptonite isn’t your weakness, it’s incompetence.”

So yea, Lena was starting to lose her patience.

👾

“Do you hear that?” Lena asked when another rumble echoed across the sky. They’d taken a risk staying outside without Kara’s powers. Progress couldn’t wait for a yellow sun. If there was any chance the ship could be scrapped to make an antennae, that was Lena’s prerogative. That meant folding to Kara’s unyielding puppy-dog eyes and ripping off access panels to take a closer look at the ship’s motherboard and circuitry under a blood red sun.

“It’s probably the Goobs,” Kara replied from the depths of the metal void she’d crawled into. A wrench-like crank was the only other competing sound. “I don’t understand much about their culture, but they really like hitting each other.”

“Wow if only we had a mechanism to banish harmful intentions,” Lena offered dryly from above, her own hands busy sifting through a tangle of wires.

The cranking wrench-like sound paused.

“It’s like you’re intentionally perverse,” Kara’s voice echoed from the undercarriage.

“Just because you use deception to your advantage doesn’t mean it’s morally correct.”

There was a brief sound of shuffling before Kara’s head popped into view. “You actually believed in it? That the Q-waves would have worked?” Kara asked. She twisted a dirty rag between her hands. “Eradicating desire to do harm wouldn’t eliminate harm. I don’t think people plan to harm. It just… happens.”

“Is that what you tell yourself at night to justify your actions?”

Kara looked down at the knotted rag. “My actions were well-intentioned.”

“To you . I, on the other hand, find your intentions the exact thing worth making obsolete. At least then people like you couldn’t string people like me along for years-”

“Lena, I did it to protect you-”

“Is that the excuse today?” Lena asked with a hollow laugh.

Two glassy, ocean blue eyes lifted to stare at Lena and a bottom lip trembled indecisively. “Just forget it.”

And it was forgotten. Sort of.

Kara sulked off leaving Lena behind to finish drawing out the wiring. It took less than ten minutes though before Kara’s abandonment became a loitering, pouting Kryptonian watching from the edges of Lena’s periphery.

Meanwhile, Lena fumed, and the howls of brawling Goobs continued.

By the time Lena was finished, the red sun hung two degrees higher in the sky. It could have meant anything and nothing. She packed up the tool box and lugged it unspeaking past Kara who sat just as silently with her cape draped over her shoulders.

Silence continued as Lena trekked down the ladder and into the triple-height tunnel that fed into the temporary cave they called a residence. She stripped out of her jacket and listened to grains of sand bounce around her. Kara occupied herself in the kitchen.

Silence continued, and still, Lena fumed.

She fumed over the weeks and years of deception. She fumed over the ease with which Kara designated her a villain. She fumed over the way her heroic disposition rolled over when things got hard.

The fuming didn’t let up when she returned to the common space and found a bowl of gray gloop waiting for her. Her nose scrunched at the steaming substance and every bit of frustration, anger, and self-pity erupted to send the primitive bowl crashing into the far wall.

Kara, fittingly, looked between the bowl and Lena with raised eyebrows and a spoon hung frozen in front of an open mouth.

And Lena might have just stormed off. On Earth she might have composed herself better and kept her mouth shut and maintained her rehearsed facade.

But she wasn’t on Earth.

“So when you walked into my office after the Crisis, you were trying to protect me?” Lena asked. For once she was towering over Kara. It felt empowering.

“That? That was… that was different.”

“Lie.”

The spoon in Kara’s hand was abandoned into her bowl. Gloop dripped forgotten on the wall.

“It was,” Kara rushed. “I was worried about you, and yea, I was under the impression you didn’t have your memories, but-”

“Memories that everyone else kept. You and Alex? Brainy?”

“Lena-”

“Nia? Kelly?” Lena pressed.

Kara’s face soured.

“Just admit it was never about protecting me. It was about protecting you and your interests.”

“That’s not true-”

“Lie. You may have National City fooled, but that’s only because they don’t see the real you. But I see you for what you are. You hide behind this facade of heroism, but you are a fraud. You preach and preach loyalty and honesty and virtue, but Supergirl hasn’t practiced that a day in her life. I know Kara Danvers hasn’t.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t look good on you,” Kara bristled. “Sure, maybe sometimes I mess up. Everyone does but you know the difference between you and me? I own up to my mistakes.”

“Another lie,” Lena spat. “‘Maybe sometimes?’ You have post-rationalized your bullsh*t left and right since the day I met you. Even now you don’t hear yourself doing it. Supergirl doesn’t apologize, she justifies her hypocrisy, or have you already forgotten your use of Myriad?”

“I was using it to save lives-”

“And as long as you have that to fall back on, you’ll always feel vindicated saying those words. Except that’s exactly what makes your legacy nothing more than a house of cards. One tiny tip of the scale and someday everything you know and love will all come tumbling down.”

“Is that a threat?” Kara asked, climbing to her feet. Shoulders stiffened.

“Worse: it’s the truth. You’re so blinded after beating the same drum day after day that you think it can control the outcome of everything. That’s how you explain away every intentionally harmful choice you make.”

“I make the choices others can’t and sometimes it doesn’t work, but at least it’s better than standing by and watching lives get destroyed-”

“So we agree then: my Q-wave research is just as righteous as your own actions.”

“That isn’t the same-”

“Why? Because you decided it wasn’t? You aren’t a god, Supergirl. You’re an alien from a destroyed planet trying so desperately to cling to some semblance of significance that you will feign relationships to stay ahead. You use people and hurt them and then accuse them of disloyalty when they deign to fight back,” Lena rushed ahead, because what was the point of holding it inside anymore. “You don’t deserve the status the world holds you to because deep down you aren’t doing genuine good. You’re doing only what you think is right when you think it’s right and that is a dangerous power to have when you wield it so carelessly.”

“Excuse me if I take a second to swallow all of that rich insite coming from a Luthor-”

“Sure, bring my name into it. It’s not like you haven’t before.”

“And maybe I was right about it all along. You’re partnered with Lex now, aren’t you? Is that what you want? Should I just let the Lex Luthor’s of the world take over? Xenophobia and discrimination running rampant in the streets because one man is allowed to wrangle power from others? Or does he get a pass because in this hypothetical your moral superiority forgives his betrayal but not mine?”

“At least Lex hasn’t spent the last five years blatantly lying-”

“Oh, so if my lies weren’t so blatant I’d get a pass? Lex is our standard-bearer for what is wildly deluded but acceptable behavior now? Rao, Lena do you even hear yourself? You put that man in jail,” Kara shouted. “You shot him, and now you’re defending him. You know what I think it is?”

“I couldn’t care less what you think-”

“I think you’re afraid to realize just how deep you’ve gotten with Lex; with all of this. You’re so blinded by the fear of being vulnerable that you’d rather work with a man you know will betray you than the unknown of anyone else.”

“If you’re suggesting you are that someone else, I hate to break it to you but that ship has sailed.”

“And so instead you’d stand here defending a man who has killed hundreds and actively plies you and everyone around him to his will. I know you, Lena. I know you aren’t that easily manipulated, so what is it if not that? Are you so afraid to admit you’re wrong?”

“Me? Wrong?” Lena laughed. “Gaslighting from National City’s hero is not something I expected.”

“You are wrong,” Kara responded, cheeks flustered red. “And I’m not gaslighting. If anything, you’re gaslighting yourself into thinking Lex can be trusted. He held my secret as a pawn until it would manipulate you the most. He is a maniacal -”

“You knew?”

A moment. A realization.

“What?”

Lena stared, an unwanted sting pricking her eyes. “You knew he knew.”

Kara looked back in abject horror.

“Tell me again it was for my protection. The years and years of lies when you knew he knew-”

“Lena-”

“Who else?” Her voice cracked. She swallowed down the growing knot. “Who else knew your secret?”

Kara's mouth opened and closed with an uncertainty that made Lena see red.

“Who else knew, Kara?” she shouted.

“Lillian.”

It was barely a whisper, but the confession might as well have been projected on loudspeaker.

Lena felt herself nodding because of course; of course Lillian would know. Of course Lex would know. Of course she was the only Luthor who could be controlled enough to stay in the dark.

“I see.”

Kara looked close to tears. Her fingers twitched at her side but she stayed put. She stayed frozen even as Lena left.

And inside there was silence.

Outside the howls of brawling Goobs continued, edging louder and closer.

👾

The next day started like any other: Lena stared blankly up at a ceiling she expected to come crashing down at any moment. She shuffled out to the main space, longing for coffee. She picked up her forgotten jacket and slipped it on. The wall had been cleaned of goop.

Feelings weren’t things Lena knew how to identify. Growing up a Luthor, suppression was the lesson and distinguishing between anger and sadness was just as foreign as knowing even those could have flavors. Flavors like a sense of betrayal, disrespect, or isolation. Like heartache.

So when Lena woke up filled with something that twisted her heart and weighed on her chest, she misidentified it as ‘restlessness’. And when she felt a memory sting at her eyes and knot her throat, she mislabeled it as ‘exhaustion’.

She was always a bit more stubborn when restless. She was always a bit more reckless when exhausted.

It was this mindset that she set her sights on the tunnel to the surface.

She didn’t need Supergirl’s permission to continue her searching, and she certainly wasn’t going to let her get in the way of taking what she needed to get off this planet and back home.

“What are you doing?” Kara asked.

The voice jolted Lena out of her trance.

“Going out,” she replied stiffly, adjusting her bag and checking that her makeshift scarf was tucked securely into her neckline.

“No you aren’t,” Kara said flatly. It put Lena’s teeth on edge.

“Then get out of my way,” Lena said darkly.

“I wouldn’t expect someone so good at holding grudges to be so forgetful.”

“I'm fully functioning in that department, thanks.”

“Oh, so then you remember those howls outside are Goobs. Towering Goobs who wouldn’t think twice about tracking a fleshy human down and tearing you limb to limb.”

“Hardly. Now please-”

“Do you hear how close they are? We should wait until the next cycle. Until I can go out-”

“That’s another nine days away, and in case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t exactly a utopian paradise worth sticking around for.”

“Then I’ll go" Kara said, all cheeto-puffed out chest and heroic vibrato. " Solo .”

Lena scowled. “You are incompetent and powerless.”

“Not if you write down the instructions.”

“How do you expect me to instruct you to do something I’m still interrogating?”

“I’ll… I can describe it to you.”

“You may have won a Pulitzer, but don’t be so misguided to think it had anything to do with your vivid imagery, Supergirl.”

Kara flinched, her chest deflated, and Lena felt emboldened.

“I’ll take my chances,” Lena said, pushing past Kara. “I’m not risking another setback.”

“Lena-”

“What?” Lena snarled, fingers gripping tightly around a blank scroll. The crinkle of it was interrupted by a Goob howl.

“Let me.”

“Why?” Lena asked, swinging to face Kara.

“B-because,” Kara stammered.

“Because? That’s why?” Lena scoffed haughtily. “Because, because, because ,” she continued, a mocking tone, “Ambiguity is no different than deceit, Supergirl. What is it this time, hm? Still can’t trust a Luthor? Can’t risk me sabotaging your heroic return? Can’t-

“Because I can’t fix you!” Kara shouted.

Lena blinked, her corporate demeanor shaken by the seething anger coming from the powerless Kryptonian.

She lasted exactly fourteen steps outside before she heard the giant metal manhole creak open. She huffed a small sigh when Kara’s pace quickened to catch up.

Lena rolled her eyes and glanced around the nearest corner for any signs of life. There was nothing but the howl of wind and a cloud of dust in every direction which, given the alternative, was a relief.

The relief lasted until Lena had located copper wiring. The joy of its discovery turned sour by the proximity of howls. Lena wasn’t particularly athletic, but even she felt confident a rock could be thrown further than where Goobs were battling it out.

“Can we go in now?” Kara asked, head floating in the doorway.

“Why? Is Supergirl scared?”

“No, but we’re being reckless, and I don’t like the look of those clouds on the horizon.”

“You’re welcome to go inside-”

“I’m not going without you.”

Lena felt her pulse quicken. She knew better than the lean into another fight, but her temper was at a constant simmer these days.

“Why do you care?”

“You know why. And look, you’ve got what you need, right? Don’t be careless.”

“Will you please just… go stare at the sun or something. I’ll be in when I’m done.”

Kara stared unblinking. She exhaled heavily through her nose. Lena didn’t find it remotely threatening.

“Look, I’m just trying to be supportive. And I can’t be that if we’re standing in the wide open like fish bait. Let’s go inside and we can bounce ideas off of each other. I helped with the manifold problem, didn't I?”

“A pointless exercise when we have no method of fueling it,” Lena shot back, sinking into the satisfaction of watching Kara fidget.

“Well I can’t do anything about that now, can I?” Kara said with a nod toward the red sky. “So we might as well work together.”

“What part of being stuck on this godforsaken planet with you gave the impression I’ve had a lobotomy?”

“I just thought-” Kara began, her voice wavering in confidence. “I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”

Kara’s feet crunched against the ground as she jumped down. Lena almost let her go, but Lena was also feeling petty.

“I wish I could,” Lena replied dryly.

“You know,” Kara began, frozen at the manhole hatch. “You know you aren’t totally innocent in this either.”

“Oh?” Lena asked, her voice the personification of ice. Her fingers tightened their grip around the alien-equivalent of an allen wrench. A clap thundered across the sky and Goobs droned in… something. Lena assumed in celebration.

“Yea,” Kara said, turning back toward Lena. “You sided with Lex. You followed his every whim.”

“Right, because Supergirl has never been persuaded by others. You say you wanted to be upfront; to be honest, but how many times did you let others ‘convince you’ to keep your secret? How many reasons did you make up along the way to excuse their persuasions?”

“But when have they ever tried to hurt innocent people?”

Lena wanted to scream. She wanted to strike Kara and yell all the ways she lived in hypocrisy.

“You want to know why I’m defending Lex?”

“Yes,” Kara exhaled impatiently. “Please explain how he deserves your forgiveness but I don’t.”

“Because he chose me,” Lena spat.

“What?”

“Or is it so easy for you to forget I was one of the 3 billion who died? That you would have let my memories die with me that day?”

Kara fishmouthed, her eyes revealing her own dawning realization, “Lena, I-”

“You know who cared enough to intervene? Lex. Lex did while everyone else lied to my face over and over. For years how many laughs were at my expense? How deep did the deception go, Supergirl ?” Lena said, voice even and deadly quiet. “So forgive me for making the very flawed, very human choice of picking someone who chose me. Because who else did I have? I knew no one, I had no one.”

“You had me,” Kara offered. It landed like a limp tuna.

Lena couldn't help the laugh that came out. “I’ve never had you. I’ve had the version you controlled - the cordoned off version that puppeteered her way into my life.”

“You were my friend, Lena. We were friends-”

“Friends don't manipulate friends-”

“Says you,” Kara snapped back. “How many lies did you tell between finding out and now? Is that what friends do?”

“We were never friends, and don’t blame me for playing the same game you devised. You started this on day one; when you came to me and lied to my face; lied to me after how many chances? You knew what honesty meant to me-”

“Yes, Lena, you made that very clear.”

“Which furthers my point: if this was really a friendship; if you truly cared about me-”

“Because you made it crystal clear there was no recovering from that. Over and over you told me as Kara and as Supergirl: you couldn't - wouldn’t - be friends with someone who had breached your trust. So what was I supposed to do with that kind of ultimatum? Either I keep up the lie or lose you.”

“So you chose cowardice.”

“I chose the thing that would keep around one of the most important people in my life. If that brands me a coward, fine. But don’t pretend you’re something better. I may have been a coward, but your motivations were vindictive and cruel.”

“Because I was hurt!”

“So you threw out every principle and gave up everything to go back to Lex?”

“I gave up ev-? What was there to give up? I never had anything,” Lena answered, voice quivering with anger. “I had nothing but lies and a two-faced best friend and her friends who kept up the ruse-”

“Because Lex is so innocent in this? We’re talking about the same person right? The same Lex you shot? The same Lex who, time and again, has caused nothing but pain and suffering for you? For the world?” Kara pleaded. “The Lena I know wouldn't be so gullible to forget that side of Lex, so forgive me for doubting your allegiance-”

“My allegiance? Is that what you've kept me around for? To keep my allegiance in check?” Lena scoffed.

“That came out wrong-”

“You want forgiveness because there’s someone worse out there? You think that is enough to absolve you of your own lies,” Lena said, her voice finally breaking. “But you still don’t get it. You still stand here and claim it was well-intentioned; that you had my best interests in mind; that you were trying to,” Lena broke off with a sad laugh, “to protect me?”

“ Yes .” It came out exasperated and tired. It came out with the shuddering exhalation of someone begging to be heard. “Why do you think I’m here?”

Lena felt her mouth fall open, her next words caught in her throat.

“What?” was all she could manage.

“You think I’m here because I wanted a nice holiday of gray goop and giant Goobs? Of being powerless and stranded?”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” Lena asked, head shaking in confusion.

“Why do you think we’re here? How do you think we got here?”

“The portal - the signal was muddied, it was… it was miscalibrated because you were using Myriad-”

“Oh come on, Lena. You’re smarter than this. Myriad can’t influence a transmatter portal, and it definitely can’t implement breach technology-”

“Then it was Brainy and Alex-”

“Do you actually-? You think they sabotaged Lex’s watch? You think we designed this whole thing to, what? Banish you to another planet? Lex got what he wanted; he wanted Non Noncere, and you were a designed casualty.”

“You’re lying. You’re… prove it.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Kara asked, hands spreading at her sides. “What motive do I have to be here?”

“You got caught in the crosshairs,” Lena forced, feeling her confidence drain. “You wanted-”

“Lena, please ,” Kara continued, taking a cautious step forward.

It sent Lena back three. A head shook in denial; disbelief; confusion. “He wouldn’t-”

He would.

And the Goobs howled closer.