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A snowflake descends upon her hair, melting into the blonde. One after another until a flurry swarms around Kara Zor-el. She lets the cold stain her hair dirty, lets it fade from sunlight to the quiet glow of twilight.
The city streets keep moving. She watches, perched from her vigil on the Daily Planet’s revolving world. In her red skirt, Kara should be shivering, but the expanse of her cape covers her from the elements. The sigil of her family’s house rests between her shoulder blades. She wears no mask. Supergirl is a supernova, too large for Kara Danvers to be mistaken for.
Kal meets her there, late as always. His back is straight, but he’s forgotten the pointless glasses that Clark Kent wears across his nose.
She huffs a tired laugh. She moves to his side and swipes the piece of Kal’s mundanity—of Kal’s humanity—off his face.
“Oh, silly cousin,” she says in Kryptonian.
Kal goes a little cross eyed as he watches her hand lower. Then, he smiles that toothy smile and answers in English, “Kara, it’s good to see you.”
She tries not to let the change bother her. Her voice is stiff, an accent not quite from Earth following each syllable as she meets her cousin halfway.
“It’s great to see you, too,” she says in Kal’s mother tongue. But she adds at the end, “it’s been too long,” in the tongue of her mother.
Kal hears it for what it is and acquiesces. His smile does not falter; he only extends his hand in invitation.
“Shall we go?” His Kryptonian is stilted but textbook perfect. He learned the language from a supercomputer, of course.
She grabs his hand, and they launch across the world.
The arctic seems warmer than Metropolis with none of the falling snow, and the stillness of the edge of the Earth never fails to make Kara shudder. She knows it brings Kal a measure of peace, but she can never see this Fortress of Solitude as anything more than a crypt trapping the motion of her childhood in sterile crystal. A memorial to the world she watched explode from the glass of her escape pod.
She allows Kal to lead her inside. They are greeted by the booming voice of her uncle. The projection of Jor-el speaks with command, his inflection almost perfect. But Kara had known the real thing. To her, this seems hollow and lifeless. This technology can never capture the soul.
“Welcome back, my son,” Jor-el addresses and after a beat, he says, “Welcome, Kara Zor-el.”
At the look of longing in her cousin’s eyes, Kara can only feel sympathy and a thick sort of pity. Kal never got to know the real thing. To him, this is his father. This technology is the only piece of Krypton he has ever known.
The flesh and blood that stands in front of him is forgotten for the sake of cold, impartial cybernetics. Kara can’t find it in herself to blame him.
“Hello, father,” Kal speaks in his perfect Kryptonian. “Can you bring out what we found last time?”
Jor-el does not answer. Instead, his form dissipates and reappears in the adjoining chamber. Kal finally turns to look at Kara. He smiles again, but a sad bit of loneliness peeks out at the edges.
He motions her forward, “I’ve been meaning to show this to you for a while.” They walk towards Jor-el’s holographic shape, and Kal continues to explain.
“I found it a few weeks ago. I’ve been coming here for years, so I don’t know why it took me so long to find it.” He has a sheepish arch to his eyebrows now, “Sorry it took me so long.”
Kara doesn’t forgive him in a brush-off of words. That is a truly human thing to do. She just lets him take her to his discovery in silence.
They descend a short set of stairs into a room filled with furniture. Kal’s best attempt at recreating a Kryptonian sitting space. She smiles at the familiarity despite the creeping sting of nostalgia in her chest. She aches always for a time she can never get back.
Kal waves for her to sit in one of the small chairs as he walks over to the other side of the room. He stands tall in front of his father as the hologram commands a portion of the crystal wall to slide away. Kal reaches into the newly formed crevice. He turns back at her with mischief and mirth in his eyes. It lightens something that had coiled tight within Kara, smooths the edges of her hostility for this uncanny enviornment.
“Close your eyes, Kara,” Superman tells her, so she listens.
She can hear him remove whatever object had been behind that panel in the wall. She can hear the tap of his footsteps as he makes his way to where she’s sitting. It’s obvious he is holding something out for her to see when he says, “Go ahead and open your eyes.”
She’s not quite sure why she hesitates but she does, and Kal notices. His voice softens, and his Kryptonian seems more fluid somehow, more like the quiet words her mother would speak to her in the early hours of the morning before either of them had the chance to fully wake up.
“This belongs to you just as much as it belongs to me. If not, more so,” and he places the gift in her hand. “It’s okay to miss this, Kara.”
She doesn’t quite know why he said those last words, but she opens her eyes nonetheless. In her palm sits a small photo.
Her aunt and uncle stand on the left, arms full of a bundled baby. One of Kal’s small hands reaches up to Lara, and she smiles down at him in the same toothy way of her son. Jor-el stares ahead, a proud and sure look on his face.
Kara’s parents stand on the right, her father’s strong arms bracing both Lara and Alura. Zor-el grins broadly as if the photo had just captured the tail end of his laughter. She can almost hear the echoes of it ricochet around this hollow room. Her mother’s face is halfway turned as she looks down at the young girl beside her. There is love and beauty in the softness of her features. Her arm winds tightly around a fifteen-year-old with curls of gold. The smile on Kara’s face seems foreign to her now.
She can’t speak for several minutes. There are no words in any language to describe the overwhelming weight of her grief and missed opportunities.
Kal sits next to her after a while, waits for Kara to memorize every inch of this photo.
“I remember when this was taken,” is all she can say. And because Kal does not remember the day this photo was taken, she feels she must continue.
“You had just celebrated your first birthday. It had rained for weeks, and this was the first real day of sunshine. My father insisted on celebrating. I think it was an excuse for him to see his nephew. My mother and your mother talked about the flowers, and I remember the light making your mother’s hair shine almost red. I adored them. I adored all of them.”
The first tear escapes, and Kara does not wipe it away. She doesn’t stop any of the ones that follow. She needs to scream, to claw at the walls of this crystalline tomb until the pain in her hands matches the pain in her heart.
Instead, she sobs and allows Kal-el to hold her hands. They tremble around the picture, the sharp edges digging into her flesh.
Kal leans in close, voice so understanding, and it’s the first time Kara thinks he might actually understand her.
“It’s okay to miss this, Kara,” he repeats with a tightening of his hands around hers. He pauses only for a second, “But it’s also okay for you to make a life for yourself here. They would have wanted that.”
She only cries harder and lets the grief spill out in crooked English, “How can I just move on?”
Kal replies in Kryptonian, “You don’t move on, you move past. Move through your pain and know it’s okay to come out on the other side of it.”
“But what do I do with all this grief, with all this loneliness?” She cries. When Kal doesn’t answer immediately, she looks up at him. She sees the humanness of Clark Kent staring back at her.
He smiles, “You can start by letting yourself love again. You don’t have to keep carrying the weight of Krypton on your shoulders. You can share it with the ones you love. You deserve to love, Kara.”
She looks down at her mother’s face, knowing that after this photo was taken, it would only be a few short months before she’d never see it again. But the love was there; it never left.
It’s a gift almost as precious as the picture.
Kara laughs, wet with melancholy. Yet, she feels, for the first time since coming to this planet, the meaning behind the crest they wear. The meaning of every crest emblazoned on every crystal in this room.
Hope.