Chapter Text
I once likened it to my skin peeling off my bones. Nails running through my veins. I had been angry. Betrayed. Terrified. A dear friend of mine harboring the one substance that had the power to not only kill me, but drag me through agonizing torture along the way. It was nearly impossible to think rationally at the time, and I’m sure Lena knew that.
But now, as I drip blood on the reinforced concrete floor, I could almost laugh. I’m living the exact circumstance I tried so hard to prevent. My fear didn’t save me, nor did my sharp words. Nor did my open offense or the pathetic puppy dog eyes I thought might sway Lena’s decision to keep synthetic Kryptonite. She meant well, I know this still. She didn’t have plans to use it on me, although only once she did. Still, she knew that keeping that formula written down meant it could end up in the wrong hands.
I do laugh this time at the absurdity of whose hands that deadly information found its way into, shivering violently from the exertion. Wheezing into a cough from the way the humorless laugh squeezes my burning lungs. Grips my splintered ribs. It’s been…maybe…twelve days? At least…I think it has been…at least twelve. Surely nearing two weeks since I fell into the trap that landed me here. I try to swallow, but my tongue is so dry, it sticks to the roof of my mouth. Every single muscle in my body is alight with a fierce drilling ache. It reminds me of those times after solar flaring when I’ve—okay, maybe not my smartest move—pulled muscles, overestimating my strength while “human.” Except this time the stiff swelling feeling—the one that leads to pain with small movements—it doesn’t go away with sleep. The glowing green lights beat down from every direction of my dark concrete cell, swamping my system in poison.
Lex has provided about as little sustenance as my physiology can survive on, and exactly nothing more. Numbly, deliriously, I think, the nausea from the Kryptonite probably wouldn’t allow me to keep food down if he decided to be a more generous host anyway. Even the thought of potstickers right now makes my stomach churn. I press my forehead against the cool concrete, hoping the soothing temperature might sap the pointed, knotting headache from my skull.
It doesn’t.
I press my head harder against the floor, hoping the pressure might release somehow, but I know deep down it’s in vain.
I feel the warmth of tears making my vision swim as I mumble an incoherent prayer to Rao. Please, don’t let him come back. It gets worse every time he comes back. And I know…
I know sooner or later he’s going to kill me.
Once he gets whatever sick revenge he thinks he’s getting on Superman by doing this to me—or maybe revenge on Lena too—he’ll dispose of me somehow. My chest burns with humiliation at the thought of what I must look like right now. Bloody and pathetic and quaking like a victim. Not like National City’s hero. I’m not supposed to bend. I’m not supposed to break. I’m supposed to be the one unshakable thing people can count on in a dangerous and unpredictable world. And right now, since breathing is just about all I can focus on, I don’t feel like much of a hero at all. I know deep down in the pit of my stomach that I have failed all of National City. Countless horrors could be hammering down on innocent people right now, and I’m grinding my forehead into concrete with grit teeth like the creature Lex surely thinks I am.
I can’t begin to imagine what about this gives him…any kind of pleasure. I’ve had too much time to follow that thought spiral down to the darkest crevices of my mind between experiments. Punishments. Whatever it is he’s doing with me. Half the time I don’t fully even understand what’s happening until I’m being dragged back to this empty cell, trying to figure out which pieces of me still work. Which pieces of myself even fit together anymore.
As my mind ties itself in knots and slices their frayed ends back open again, only one motive makes any sense at all. The most obvious one.
Power.
It’s not shocking. It’s not new. It’s as old as civilization itself. The desire to conquer, to overcome. The desire to impose one’s will upon the world. Upon the people in it. Bloodlust and the lust for power walk a thin line, unable to be disentangled from one another. It’s born of fear, really. It has to be. Fear of being vulnerable and helpless. Being controlled. The fear of being on the receiving end of that imposition of power.
That’s why it’s so especially heinous, I think, as I’m shivering here in a gripping thorny hurt I can’t even put words to. I can see this for what it is. Lex has done something uniquely and personally cruel. He’s gone down the sinister path of imposing his own worst fears…on me. Reducing me to the trapped, tortured, powerless thing he runs around claiming Kryptonians will turn the people of earth into. By “taking over” and “subjecting humanity to our rule.” He’s punishing me for a crime I never even committed. For a crime he predicted and projected upon me in his own mind. One that would never—no, will never—come to fruition. He wants me to be the scared animal he thinks humans could become. The scared animal I believe he feels like every, single, day, behind those cold soulless eyes.
And I have to keep catching myself from empathizing. From aching at the thought of how exhausting it must be to spend every. waking. moment. in a frantic grasp for existence. Reaching for some meager semblance of importance when there are people out there so much more powerful than you. Reminding you how little control you have. It tugs at my heart.
And then I think about how human men harass and dominate and impose their will on other human women. Doing the exact same thing they seem so frightened of supers doing. It’s hypocritical.
I experience it as Kara Danvers much more often than I experience it as Supergirl. But even when I’m in costume, there’s this bizarre thing men do. Using their words or their hands or their weapons to try and find a way to reassert their power over me. And when they know they can’t physically overpower me, it finds its way to me in disgusting words. In online posts where I have to find unnervingly fetishized photos of myself in battle. Reading comments under articles about actual good I’ve done, only to find the conversation centered around my body. And suddenly in those moments, even though I could crush a skull between my palms, I feel completely stripped of any might at all. Because I can punch through walls. I can carry a falling plane. But I can’t keep these specific sorts of people from doing to me what they do to every other woman in their own minds. Reducing me to an object of pleasure, and nothing else. Strangely enough, even powerful villains make me feel…safer. At least then my personhood doesn’t feel under any kind of threat or question.
That’s it, I think.
Personhood.
Lex isn’t like those creeps hiding in comments sections. But he’s made it clear I am not a person to him. He has turned me into exactly what I am to him. Maybe that’s why in every scenario that keeps running through my head of how this ends, I can’t consider rescue as an option. Maybe in the beginning. The first few days. But not now. Because there’s this shame I can’t seem to fully comprehend makes that impossible to imagine. It weighs on my bones like melted tar. Drags so low in the pit of my stomach I feel I could plummet right through this disgusting crusty floor. I don’t want any of the people I love to see me like this.
I wouldn’t survive it if they did. I wouldn’t be able to meet their eyes ever again. That’s why death is the only option left. Now I just have to find a way to speed it along. Make the pain finally go away.
The only problem is when I stop eating, stop cooperating in any way, he threatens my family. Alex. Eliza. Kelly. J’onn. Brainy. Nia. Lena. It’s too much. Far worse than any physical pain I’m in is imagining him hurting any one of the people I love. So…
So I just have to endure. See this thing through to the end. Follow instructions and let myself be entirely taken apart so that maybe, if Rao has mercy, my loved ones will live another day. So just maybe Lex’s need to keep his own word—for the sake of arrogant credibility alone—will keep my family alive as a byproduct.
I hear footsteps down what I know to be a long concrete hallway as bare as my cell, and all of my muscles tense involuntarily as the sound stops just outside my door. I blink swollen lids repeatedly to fight back the tears of genuine fear that pool in my eyes. My chapped lower lip wobbles against my best efforts. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I want to go home.
I want someone to hold me one last time. Even just for a few seconds, I want to feel safe again. I’m rewarded no such luck when the heavy bolts on the door shift, and then the nth metal door is open. And soon he’s in front of me. His perfectly polished shoes, anyway. I don’t look up. I don’t try to bolt for the open doorway. I’m too weak to push myself from the floor, let alone to my feet or to the hall. Instead, I swallow my sandpaper tongue and clench my teeth, shoulders lifting instinctually.
“Not so brave now, are we, ‘Girl of Steel?’” he mocks me, voice light. Playful. Almost unaffected.
I don’t say anything in response. I don’t move from my braced position.
“Now,” he muses dryly, “don’t go and tell me you’ve lost your will to live. That would be tremendously disappointing.”
I barely contain a scoff at that. “I thought you wanted me dead,” I rasp out just as humorlessly.
“Oh, believe me, I do. But not yet. Not until I’ve discovered every fatal flaw and weakness your invasive species has. As much as I’d love to believe I won’t have to deal with any more self-righteous Kryptonians, parading their brazen sense of—frankly unfounded—superiority on my home planet; I’m not one to base my actions on hopes alone. That’s much more your thing, isn’t it? Hope?”
I’m silent. Not because I have nothing to say. Truth be told, the word hope burns in my chest and swirls up a deep tragic longing in the epicenter of my soul. But I know today will not be the day that I die, and I don’t want to make whatever sick plan Lex has for me worse. So I bite my tongue. I won’t let him get a rise out of me. The less I say the better. I learned that one quickly.
A heavy sigh echoes in the cavernous room, and my sluggish attention is drawn back to its source. “This won’t do. You’re far too weak for my electrical experiments. You need to eat,” there’s a pause, and then I hear a garbled sound catch in my own throat as a heavy boot nudges an open wound on my left side. It leaves fire in its wake. “You need sun lamps,” he tells me. Like a clinical assessment, “Then we can carry on. I want to know how much electricity it takes to bring down a healthy Kryptonian. This just—” he clicks his tongue, “—won’t cut it.”
I groan.
“Oh, forgive me. Cuts indeed are part of the problem here. Pardon the word play. Though, you heroes like that sort of thing, don’t you? Kitchy sayings? What was that contrived saccharine phrase you used to say all the time? ‘Hope, help, and compassion for all?’”
My entire face burns with shame having the words thrown back at me in this state. Who could I possibly help like this? I hear the click of a button, and at once the low green light gives way to darkness. Instantly, the nausea lifts. My stomach drops when the pain doesn’t waver quite enough. Everywhere I’m compromised continues to thrum and sear unbearably. Fire still tears across my side. I’ve never been exposed to Kryptonite for so long, and there’s a part of me that wonders if Lex realizes my body is slowly shutting itself down. If he realizes he could accidentally kill me without even meaning to. I let out a breath of relief anyhow at the absence of the churning in my stomach. At the lifting of the ever-present burning, slicing ill feeling I associate with my greatest weakness. At least now the wounds alone are what hold my focus.
I sag against the floor. The coiling in my muscles releases, because it no longer takes every bit of strength I have to breathe. Unhealed wounds on my back make themselves more apparent without the everywhere distraction of the Kryptonite. Wounds on my stomach. On my thighs and arms. My chest. My mind clears enough to realize I’m smearing blood on the concrete where I lay. If death weren’t so imminent, I’d be worried about infection.
Does he enjoy this, I wonder? He doesn’t talk like the serial killers in movies. He doesn’t move from where he stands. Instead I can hear his metal suit materializing around him, and then a cold jointed artificial hand is grasping my left ankle.
And then I’m being dragged. Out of the room. I curl around myself and duck my head into my arms, palms gripping into my hair and elbows pressed together guarding my middle, to keep my worst wounds from catching against the floor. It’s better to have my shoulder brush the ground than the softer broken parts of me. The ones framed by ripped fabric, soaked through with deep red around the frays.
I keep my eyes shut as I’m thrown against corners around hallways. I don’t try to memorize the maze he leads me through. I did that the first week, when there was still a fire in my heart. A certainty that someone was coming to get me. Back when I thought maybe I’d even be able to outsmart a Luthor and break out myself. Now my goal is to make it from one moment to the next. There is no future. Only right now.
I must black out somewhere in the hall, because the next time I open my eyes I’m strapped down to a steel sunbed. Hollow eyes stare at me with precision. Like a math equation that doesn’t make sense. I blink hazily, nearly high on the instant relief of yellow sunlight on my skin. Tingling with warmth around every wounded part of me.
But something is wrong, I realize, when Lex’s frown deepens to something I’ve come to recognize as a sign of imminent danger. My breath catches involuntarily, and the flinch I fall victim to goes unaddressed as the only visage I’ve seen in nearly two weeks lowers closer to my face. He’s no longer in his metal suit. Just a man now. And his startlingly human hands frame my cheeks, not out of affection. They’re shifting my head this way and that as his piercing gaze zeroes in on a cut on the outer edge of my left eyebrow. His thumbs prod at it, and I squint under the bright light of the lamps.
“You’re not healing,” he grumbles quietly. As though it were an annoyance. As though it were an incredible inconvenience he now had to address. Not the fate of my entire life.
He looks perplexed, but a faint smile pulls on my lips. My first real smile since I was taken, I realize. “I’m dying,” I surprise even myself with the words. And the shift in his pallor draws out a bizarre congested chuckle from my stuttering chest. It’s not my usual light warm timbre. It’s something caught and jagged. Something that tips precariously over the edge of my busted lip and tumbles into oblivion. Treading the thin line of insanity. A sound I don’t think even my family would recognize. I can hardly call it my own voice.
It doesn’t matter though. It sets off a chain reaction in Lex Luthor that spins a deep thread of sun-warmed satisfaction in my bones. His eyes widen almost imperceptibly. His hands stiffen where they clutch at my face. His jaw tightens. His shoulders go rigid.
He’s actually scared.
His hubris has failed him.
I’m dying.
I’m dying, and he can’t fix me this time.
The ceaseless cycle of torture and sunbed resuscitation is finally going to end.
I’m dying.
I shouldn’t luxuriate in this. It’s sick. I shouldn’t feel an almost heady bubbling of joy in my chest. It shouldn’t flush warmth across my entire being. But it does. Because all of a sudden, I’m staring at a man who has finally realized his power has an end.
He doesn’t get to choose when I die. It is this final rebellion that settles something that has been rattling around frantically inside of me since the moment I woke up in his capture. This idea that I’d failed. That I’d failed my family. My dead planet. Everyone on this planet who has come to count on me for hope and protection.
But I know now that I haven’t failed. Not completely. I am denying Lex one final satisfaction. Smiling in the sunlight near indulgently, eyelids heavy and swollen, I hold them open to grip his gaze, unafraid. Because no threat to my family will work this time. I did everything he demanded. Endured every bit of vile torment with the ferocity of one so deeply loved. I let that love carry me through it. I’ve reached the finish line. “El…Mayara,” I breathe out, consciously relaxing my hands where they’ve been balled into fists at my side. My eyes flutter shut, and I decide to try and enjoy what little time I have left under these lamps.
He throws a tantrum anyway. Begins muttering words my brain is too tired to put any recognition to. But the panicked angry cadence of his voice confirms that he hasn’t planned for this. He smacks my face lightly with his palm, growling at me to stay awake. I blink and see a glint of sharp silver in his hand. I choose to watch as he cuts back wide swaths from my suit to look at the smatterings of injuries he’s inflicted—welts, cuts, burns, bruises, glowing green blood vessels branching noticeably through translucent skin. Hideous. The depraved workings of a sociopath. But the weak smile never leaves my lips. He knows he can’t fix it.
Look, my mind clamors for justice, Look at what you’ve done.
And, oh, he does. And the panic in his eyes is enough.
I close my eyes for the last time, I’ve decided, and practically melt into the table. I sink like one of those soft gooey brownies Lena and I loved to bake for game nights. As the sun lamps are turned up brighter, an actual sigh of pleasure falls from my lips. I begin to realize my end might genuinely be a peaceful one. Rao’s mercy. A hum of quiet energy moves through me with such a gentle healing touch, I barely even register the way the rest of me is jostled along with Lex’s prodding.
“No…no no no no NO,” he speaks through grit teeth, as though the words are physically hurting him.
I grow increasingly lightheaded and pleasantly dizzy as the voice grows more distant with mumbling and curses. My body feels less like my own and more like a numb weight I’m attached to.
Thank you Rao, for Alex. For Lena. For J’onn. Nia and Brainy. Eliza. James and Kelly. Winn, and every person in this unfamiliar world who decided I was worth loving. Who fought for me. Who protected me. Thank you for every hug and potsticker and slice of pizza. For every game night my cheeks ached from laughter. For every group karaoke night that taught me my lovability went further than just Supergirl. Further than my powers. Yes, Kara was the one they adored. The most embarrassing and messy and imperfect parts of myself are the ones my chosen family carried with the most tenderness. Thank you for allowing me to experience real selfless love. Even if it was only temporary. I will carry that love in my soul to the endless beyond. When I am reunited with your great light, and love eternal. Please protect them, oh Rao. Care for them in my absence. Send your favor and strength and mercy to this Earth that held your last daughter so gently. So devotedly. I release any tether to my mortal being. I relinquish my strength. I am ready now, great Rao. I’m ready to go home.
And rest comes swiftly. I’m bathed in light. I’m bathed in breath and heat and power. I’m rocked to sleep in a yellow sun bath. My last strings of consciousness are snipped gently one by one, and I welcome the endless buzz as the light slips into warm darkness.
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The darkness doesn’t last.
It never does.