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“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”
The Kryptonians invade on a Thursday. Cat remembers this day because the downtown traffic was horrendous and she was afraid she was going to be late for her weekly facial. In the end, the traffic saved her life. The spa was situated in the direct path of the first hit. Everything in a 7 mile radius was destroyed. Everyone in the spa was instantly killed.
It’s been eighteen months since Cat has had a facial. She wonders if it shows.
They had tried for peace initially. Supergirl, hero of National City, leading negotiations. It seemed to go well in the beginning, but most things do, and by the end it was clear that the Kryptonians, saved from Krypton’s doom by escaping on a prison ship, had no interest in sharing the planet.
It’s been one year, six months and two weeks since she left. Since then, the children have come back and the city is being restored. The barricades have been taken down, the graffiti washed off walls, the statue of Supergirl is slowly being rebuilt. She fell from the stars to raise us up. Cat’s new apartment overlooks the park. It’s one of the first places that the air cleared.
One of the few safe places for a Kryptonian, one of the first places they might attack if they ever came back. But they won’t come back. The city’s been assured of that. Supergirl’s sacrifice meant they were safe. Cat wants to tell them that it wasn’t just Supergirl who made the sacrifice.
Cat sees Alex on a Tuesday. It happens because Cat is on a park bench. A year before, she would have died before exposing her designer clothing to the horde of bacteria swarming over the public bench, but then she almost did die and suddenly the thought of sitting in the same spot as hundreds of other strangers, in the breathable air and sunlight, doesn’t seem so bad. Besides, at this point her designer clothing has seen worse.
She is on this park bench, attempting to read Amal Alamuddin’s autobiography and distract herself from the general apocalyptic dystopia of it all, when Alex Danvers sits down beside her.
“Hey,” Alex says, as if this is an entirely normal occurrence. As if they had been in contact with each other since that terrible day when Max Lord’s prophecy finally came to pass, and the government deemed it necessary to release a chemical explosion over the city. The children had been evacuated by then, along with most of National City’s residents, in a mass exodus that caused more havoc in two days than the Kryptonians managed in a month.
And then they released the weapon. A bomb. A bomb which set off a Kryptonite mushroom cloud that rained radioactive particles down over the city. Three-hundred Kryptonians exiled into space. Some of them fell to the ground before they exited the atmosphere. Images of bodies dropping like flies played on the newsreel for days. Cat remembers the feeling of nausea every time one of those bodies was blonde.
Supergirl never fell. But she also never returned. The day she flew through the clouds, holding up a radioactive bomb that would effectively destroy the last of her people, the day she chose humanity over the Kryptonians, was the last day Cat had seen Alex.
“Are you here to tell me you found her?” Cat doesn’t beat around the bush. Time is precious. She knows that better than anyone.
Alex looks off into the distance. There’s a pond up ahead. Two swans circle each other lazily. Cat remembers reading somewhere that they were both female. The thought made her smile at the time. Alex watches them with a distracted expression before turning her attention back to Cat.
“She asked me to look out for you.” Alex says. “Before she… the night before she left. She said you’d be mad for a long time, and then you’d just be sad. I guess I was waiting for the latter.”
Cat exhales a humourless laugh. “She said all of that, hmm?”
Alex’s lips press together in a wry sort of smile. “In her way.”
Cat doesn’t say anything, but closes her book and brushes her fingers over the cover.
“Anyway,” Alex fumbles on, as if she isn’t sure where this is going either. “Are you? Okay?”
Cat inclines her head. “I’m alive.”
“Yeah,” Alex sighs.
After that, there’s not much more to say.
Cat goes home to an empty apartment. She lives alone for the first time in almost twenty years. Carter is fifteen and starting his second year of high school in Metropolis. It’s safer in a city with Superman. Though Cat isn’t sure how she’d react to seeing the Man of Steel and Spinelessness, who was nowhere to be found when the city burned. Lois Lane was at the memorial, held under a Kryptonite-tinged sky.
Clark was sorry he couldn’t make it, she had said, and her voice quivered. Cat didn’t want tears. She wanted Supergirl back.
“It should have been him,” she managed to say. “It should have been Clark instead of Kara. He owed her that.”
Lois had turned pale, and for a moment it was almost satisfying.
Cat’s empty apartment is not as nice as the penthouse. She opens the windows to air out her grief, but it clings to the walls and they yellow with loneliness. She drinks less and writes more. A number of books have surfaced since the invasion, but none which tell the full story, none which tell her story. Cat sits in front of her little desk, adjusts her glasses, and writes about Kara.
She has pages and pages. Most of them she knows will never be published. She writes not to immortalise, but to remember. The subtle glow of Kara’s skin after she’d spent hours in the sun, the little scar on her eyebrow, the sound of her laughter—these are the things Cat can’t bear to forget.
Cat wishes she was still angry. It was easier when she was angry. It distracted her, kept her focused on something other than the gaping hole in her chest that seemed to appear the second Kara broke through the stratosphere. Kara’s last two words rattle around in her head like bones. “I’m sorry.”
Cat doesn’t know if it was a response to her own plea of “Don’t do this!” or if it was an apology for the general catastrophe that Kara’s existence had inadvertently brought on the city. Cat does know that one moment Kara was in front of her, on the roof of CatCo, her cape billowing, her hair whipping around her face, her face smeared with ash and streaked with tear marks. She had looked so brave and so doomed. The next moment, she was a streak in the sky, holding up a bomb like a suicide note. And then, there was just nothing.
It snows in National City.
Meteorologists hypothesise that the radiation in the mushroom cloud affected the city’s weather patterns. They use words like climate disturbance and freak temperature reactions. It reminds Cat of winters in Metropolis. Winters of her childhood. The city adjusts quickly. Traffic is a nightmare, and locals seem uncertain how to function in this cold, but in general, they embrace it.
The tree in the main plaza is lit up, and every store blasts Jingle Bells. It feels almost normal, and Cat can’t quite understand. Nothing is normal.
Carter spends the holidays with his father. He calls Cat almost every day. He misses her, he says, but she knows he’s worried. He asks her to come to Metropolis for the New Year and she says she’ll think about it.
Alex shows up at her door on Christmas Eve. Cat blinks at her, brandy swirling through her bloodstream and pulling at her eyelids. Christmas Eve brandy tart was a long-held Grant tradition.
This year, Cat decided to skip the tart.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Alex says. She’s breathless. Her eyes are wide and frantic.
Cat’s gaze drifts from Alex’s face to the body in her arms—Kara’s body.
She steps back, stumbles really, and Alex takes that as as invitation to enter.
She groans as she makes it across the floor of Cat’s living room and deposits the body on Cat’s sofa. “This area has the safest air-quality. With the DEO building still in ruins and the agents scattered, I didn’t have much of a choice. I couldn’t risk anyone… I mean, I can’t even believe that…” Alex finally turns to Cat, her wide eyes now glossy with tears. “She’s back.”
Cat’s world seems to blur. It trembles and quakes and she asks, in a voice so tentative she hardly recognises it, “Is she alive?”
“Her body’s in a regenerative coma. Her cells are rebuilding themselves. Most of the work was done off-planet, I think. Coming through our atmosphere must have thrown her into regression.” Alex sighs and glances over her shoulder. “But I think she’ll make it.” And then, in a quieter tone. “She has to.”
Cat doesn’t sleep. Neither does Alex, who accepts a glass of brandy and sinks into a chair after Kara’s frail alien body is deposited in Cat’s bed. Skin and bones and stardust in her hair. Cat’s fingers had hovered above Kara’s cheek, afraid to touch her, lest she disintegrate like she always did in Cat’s dreams.
“What happened?” Cat finally asks, while her trembling world begins to settle.
“She, uh,” Alex shrugs. “She showed up at my door.”
Cat’s eyes narrow. “She showed up. At your door?”
Alex chugs back the last of the brandy in her glass and nods. “She was freezing and pale.”
“Did she say anything?”
Alex emits a humourless laugh. “She said ‘Merry Christmas’ and passed out at my feet.”
Cat refills her glass and drinks it all in one go. Merry fucking Christmas indeed.
At some point, between the silence and the fear and the relief, Cat asks Alex where she went to college. Alex graces her with a story involving Kara’s strange college roommate. Cat tells Alex about Kara’s first day at CatCo, and how, in retrospect, she’s almost certain that Kara destroyed a photocopier. Alex laughs. Cat smiles. They finish the bottle of brandy.
At 4am, Cat closes her eyes for just a moment, and then the sun is out, and Alex’s hand is on her shoulder and Cat’s eyes feel scratchy and her throat feels raw and her heart is still lost somewhere in that dark space inside her.
“She’s awake,” Alex says. She’s been crying.
Cat stands. She smoothes down her shirt and runs a hand through her hair. She wonders if Kara will be able to tell how many new wrinkles she’s acquired since they’d last seen each other.
She taps her knuckles gently against her bedroom door before pushing it open. She’s nervous. Her stomach turns, not just from the brandy in her bloodstream.
Cat approaches the bed slowly. Caution and distrust are new traits she’s discovered since the invasion. She resents them, but finds them necessary to her survival. This time is no exception.
Kara. Beautiful, immortal, broken Kara lies on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Cat wonders if she’s staring at the sky. She turns her head at the intrusion and her face shifts instantly from something still and sad to a canvas of nervousness, happiness, fear, joy.
“Hi.”
Cat swallows. She’d reconciled herself to never hearing that voice again. She’d moved through all of the stupid, stereotypical stages of grief. Anger was a good one—denial, not so much. She decides on the former.
“How could you?” Her voice is a whisper. Raw, honest.
Kara’s face remains in a state of constant, changing emotions.
“How did you know?” Kara had once asked Cat, who had kissed her cheek lightly and fleetingly.
“You’ve never been good at hiding how you feel,” was Cat’s answer. She remembers feeling smug, awed, excited. She loved beginnings.
The invasion hit the next morning and everything ended.
Kara swallow nows. She’s less pale than the previous night. Cold, bright sunlight streams through the bedroom’s open curtains, filling out the hollows of her cheeks.
“I didn’t think I would ever…” Kara sits up with a wince, and Cat fights the urge to help her. “I thought it might be my last chance to say it.”
“And that made it better?”
“It made it the truth.” Her voice is a whisper. Raw, honest.
That gaping chasm that has lived inside Cat for the longest time seems suddenly too small, too shallow to hold the weight of her heart. It closes up, sews itself together, each stitch a letter of Kara’s name.
She moves to the bed and sits at the edge, still afraid to touch or wake up. “You confess your undying love and then launch yourself into the sky on a suicide mission.” It’s surreal, saying everything she’s been wanting to say for months, having the conversation she’s played over and over in her head.
“Did it work?” The lightness in Kara’s voice belies the shadows in her eyes.
“We’re still here, aren’t we?”
“Alex told me…” She clears her throat, chasing away tears. “She said some of them died.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Cat’s response is immediate and resolute. How, even now, can Kara’s compassion extend so far? It overwhelms her.
“There was no one else holding that bomb.” Kara’s voice trembles and Cat reaches out, closing a hand over Kara’s knee. Warm skin under a thick duvet. She’s solid and real.
“You made a choice,” Cat’s eyes find Kara’s and wait for them to settle, for Kara to come back from whatever far off place her guilt takes her. “ A choice that saved so many lives.”
Kara bites down on her lips, and shakes her head. “I made a selfish choice.” Cat wants to wipe the tear that falls down Kara’s cheek, but she can’t seem to take her hand off that knee. “I wanted to save Alex.” She says it like a confession. “You.”
Cat forces her herself to shrug. “Well. Mission accomplished.”
Tentatively, Kara reaches out. Her hand finds Cat’s and she links their fingers. She flexes slightly, experimentally, as if she’s worried Cat might not be real either. Cat doesn’t look at Kara, but watches their joined hands.
An hour goes by. It could be a minute.
Kara says, “You moved.”
It’s an absurd non-sequitur that almost makes Cat smile. “I see the coma hasn’t stripped you of your keen powers of observation.”
“I mean… Why?”
Cat looks around the room. “I needed a change.” Cat turns back to find Kara watching her searchingly.
The expression causes Cat’s heart to jump up to her throat as Kara says, “Why didn’t anything ever happen with us?”
Cat wants to roll her eyes. She would have done so months ago. It would have been easy to play it off and say, “You were my employee,” or “You’re too young,”.
Instead, she goes with honesty. It’s her favourite currency these days. “I thought we had more time.”
Kara nods slowly and exhales. “Yeah. Me too.”
They’re quiet then. Cat wishes for a moment that she had super hearing. She wants to press her ear to Kara’s heart, as if it were a conch shell.
Instead she asks, “Have you thought about what happens next?”
“Next?”
“The city’s saviour has returned. Will you put the cape back on?”
Kara looks away. Her gaze settles on the window. “I don’t know.”
“No-one blames you, Kara.” It’s an obvious statement, but Cat thinks that perhaps it needs saying.
“No-one?” When Kara looks back at Cat, her gaze is skeptical. “Really?”
“It was… difficult.” Cat chooses her words the way a knife-thrower would choose his daggers. “When you had… when you were away. I was angry.”
“I didn’t mean to be gone so long.” Kara pouts and swishes her mouth to the side, and Cat wants to kiss her so badly that her chest hurts. “I was just so tired. I closed my eyes and then I was just floating.”
Cat gently detangles their fingers and pats Kara’s hand as if they were just friends. “You didn’t miss much.”
“I missed you.”
Cat’s heart races, making up for months of abuse and neglect. “Kara—”
“I meant what I said.” She speaks to Cat now with such certainty. There are galaxies in her voice, as if she’d seen all of space and time and came back to say this one thing. “I meant it when the world was ending and I mean it now.”
Cat says nothing. What can she say? She’s stopped expecting to wake up from this dream.
Kara looks back to the window and squints. “Is it… snowing?” She smiles. A real, impossible smile. “I thought I made that up.”
“It’s snowing,” Cat confirms.
“My wish came true.” Kara’s smile widens and, as if on cue, white flakes begin to fall in earnest.
Cat watches her face. “You wished for snow?”
“No.” Kara shakes her head and sighs. She lets go of the universe tangled around her finger. She turns to Cat. “I wished for home.”
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