Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It takes a moment for my logical mind to figure out what exactly…

even…

happened…

 I’m not completely clueless.  I’m still here.  I’m still in my room.  The midday light is still warm, though I struggle to feel the full breadth of that warmth.  Nothing has moved from its place, but time feels stilted and indefinite.  I know that Alex and Lena are with me.  Touching me, holding me, with careful hands framing my arms.  I realize belatedly that it’s because I’m swaying where I’m sitting.  The comforter gets closer to my face and then distances again.  Yeah, I’m swaying.  But…the last I remember my cheek was pressed against Lena’s sweatshirt. Now, she’s pulled away.  Holding me upright along with Alex.  I guess I was folding over.

How is it even possible that I can’t fully even feel their hands?

Well—

Okay, I guess…I feel the weight of them.  The shape even.  But there’s a definite numbness there.  Almost like they’re holding someone else up, and not me.  Like I’m hovering outside my body, watching them interact with it.  An observer, not a participant.  Their faces are lined with grief, lips parted, speaking softly back and forth, I can tell that much for certain.  And I get the sense that maybe I’ve–

I’ve made a—

This is a mistake.

This wasn’t supposed to happen after coming back home.

I’ve experienced this before.  The disconnect.  The numb distance.  Back in that hell I was trapped in, but that was…well—at the time I thought it was a good thing.  It was one of the only ways I got any relief at all from the pain I was in.  I even tried by sheer force of will to make it happen more often than it did naturally.   Not that it ever worked.  This plexiglass hiding spot was never quite in my control.  Almost like…a safety switch only someone else could flip.

Now I want it off.  Lena is looking at me, oh Rao.  Those glassy green eyes.  She’s cradling my cheek.  I can’t feel it.  I want to feel it.  Why was this too much?  Being held by someone I—

Someone I love.

Why is my system trying to shut out good sensations?  Safe hands?  Healing touches?  It sends a blistering rush of despondent anger through my chest—crawling up my neck—and that’s the clearest sensation I can access.

Alex’s voice is soft.  I hear it.

“Kara? Deep breaths, okay?  Did we hurt you?”

I don’t think so?

“Did any sutures pop again?”

Again?  When did they pop the first time?

Then Lena. “Darling, are you able to speak to us?”  Her voice is so fragile, it’s hard to believe it’s Lena it’s coming from.  

Whatever I’m doing right now…whatever it looks like from their view must be stressful.  But the last thing I want is to give them more stress.

Lena continues, tones endlessly soothing, “Can you tell us what you need?”

What would I even say?

She clearly sees my answer isn’t coming, because she goes back to gentle platitudes that don’t have any expectation attached to them, “You’re going to be alright, darling, I promise.  We’re here now.  You’re safe, sweetheart.”

But I want to scream.  What used to be a safe haven now feels like a prison with this  thick plexiglass wall between me and the people I love.  One I can’t seem to shatter.  My voice feels like gravel as I try to tell them, “I can’t feel—can’t feel anything.  Can’t feel you.”

I hate how wobbly and distressed it sounds.  That’s not right.  Not like a hero.

“You can’t feel anything?” Alex repeats, and she sounds so far away.  Muffled.

You’re not gonna cry again, are you? The unwanted voice nearly makes me jump out of my own skin.  Dry.  Sardonic. His voice. 

No. I’m not going to cry again.

I lift my hands to my cheeks and drag them along the surface.  Numb.  I lower my hands down and stare at the wetness beading my fingertips.

I thought I wasn’t crying anymore…

Why can’t I even feel the tears?  Am I breathing?

Near frantically I find myself dragging my fingertips across my face again.  Nothing.  Nothing.  I can’t—

Feel anything.

I drag them down.  Or I try.  My throat.  I know there’s bruising there.  I dig my fingernails in and drag down my throat.  Down my chest.  My nails catch over bandaging.  More muffling of sensation.  It sets my soul ablaze with addled frustration so I—

I dig harder.

Harder, and I feel just the slightest whisperings of pain.  Bizarrely, it loosens the tightness winding around my ribcage like a boa constrictor.  Real.  Something feels real.

This foggy safety switch…I’ve lived it before so maybe if—if I think back to the first time it happened…if I—

If I can walk back through and—and maybe try to understand.

If I can hammer down exactly how it started, maybe I can turn it off.  

They’re still talking.  More and more words.  And the more words they speak, the more I can’t decipher what is being said to me.  And that is wrong.  So wrong.  I’m supposed to be able to hear better than everyone else, and now I can’t even—what are they saying????

Feeling frustration riling in my chest, squeezing at my throat, I close my eyes and think.  The first disconnect was…

I drill into my mind…into dangerous shapes and harsh dark colors—greys and silvers, shadowed blacks and deep stony blues that shift behind my vision.  Bits of clarity surface.

It happened…somewhere around my first escape attempt.  But the moment I’m looking for was either at the end of my first day as prisoner, or somewhere in the second day. I still don’t know how long any of that was—but, not the point—

It’s hard to think.  It’s hard to think when Alex and Lena are right at my side, waiting for me to come back to them, and I can’t.  It’s hard to think when I know every moment that passes further illustrates that I’m…different now.  That I’m—

Do you feel ruined yet, Supergirl?

No—

No no…no.  I can remember! I just need to think—

But poring through my mind feels like shaking locked door knobs as I wander through the endless fog. Disorienting and indistinct.

Okay.  Maybe I can’t find the exact moment.  But maybe I can find my way there.  Walk through it until I find it.  Yeah.  That has to work.  

Now, what was the first thing I can remember?

The first—

….

…

..

…

I was desperate.  Of course, I had to be.  To try to escape without a good plan.

When I first woke up…I was confused.

Restrained, shadowed in darkness, breath knocked out of my lungs.

My senses begin to fill in the memory blanks, information rushing in like a blast of wind to my face.

Yes.  That is the first thing I remember.  I was barely coherent enough to realize that I was dangling in the center of a huge cavelike room by my wrists.  Swinging slowly in a craggy giant dome with eerie yellow spotlights shining down.  Blinding my sensitive eyes.  I remember being so—oh Rao—so physically sick.  Nauseous to the point of vertigo.  Like my brain was boiling and eating through my skull—like my blood vessels were being incised from the inside out with fishhooks.  Seared alive through muscle and bone by what felt like thousands of invisible carnivorous pinching insects.

Deliriously, I seriously considered that the tenderized remains of my insides might be beginning to glob and pool into every empty intestinal hollow.

I felt like a carcass hanging in a butcher shop.

Kryptonite.

And when my eyes could peel open longer than a few seconds, I could see Lex standing in front of me, just below where I was swinging.

Well, he tilted his head with an air of authority.  Good morning, sunshine.  His voice echoed in the too large space.  

Chills.  I ripple with them, carding through the memory with more urgency…

There are gaps…I can’t remember everything.

But I was strapped to a wheeling table.  I’m sure of that much, because once I was no longer dangling, everything was moving in a blur.  There was a needle in my neck.  Something that made my muscles burn, and then made them stop…responding altogether.

That was the first moment the fear blared louder than the pain.  It was impossible to move.  That singular terror is all I can pull up in my memory of that moment.  Trying to even shift my head to one side and failing.  Every instinct screaming to fight.  But only my fingers twitching in response.

It was with that blaring pit of dread that I just watched—all I could do was watch—as he clicked a button and my nanotech suit was deactivated and—

And then I—

I was horrified to blink down at bare skin. My skin. In undergarments that were not my own.  Instead of my civilian clothes I’d been wearing before—what should have been beneath the suit.  

Beyond that it’s hard to piece the next part together.  I try to reach into the wind tunnel of my mind to find what I’m missing, but—

Nothing.  I can’t.  And I won’t push for more.

I just have this abstract knowledge that I was put through some kind of bizarre invasive physical.  Something that reminded me more of an amoeba in a test tube or a livestock appraisal than anything meant for a person.  My mind was entirely present, but my body didn’t—I couldn’t get it to respond—even though I—

No, I don’t think I want to walk through this.

I don’t need to.  I don’t want to.

Fast forward. Fast forward. I need to turn this brain fog off.  This isn’t why I’m looking.  This isn’t going to help me get back out of this sensory mind prison...sanctuary…thing.

Okay, where was I?

I woke up. The table. The injection. The physical I can’t remember. And—

No, 

Wait?

Yes, okay.  I don’t have to linger.  Just track through it.  Right.

After that…for the rest of my waking hours I was groggily dragged through a series of dehumanizing medical tests.  Evaluations.  I remember him scrawling in black pen.  The hasty sounds of the ballpoint dragging over a clipboard.

I try, I really—

I am trying.  To remember.  But with all that happened after I couldn’t move…even as I press for details, I can’t remember much more than still images.  What I was looking at.  The jagged rocky edges of the shadowed stone ceilings.  His face.  His sardonic laugh—an almost pained grimace of condescension.  Sneering in vitriolic cruelty at me.

Supergirl, or Kara—may I call you that?  I think I will, only in this particular regard.  Kara, you self identify as a writer.  Enlighten me.  At what part of the hero’s journey would you consider yourself to be in at this moment?

I scoffed at him in response.

Is this High School English class? My planet exploded. I’ve been trapped in the Phantom Zone twice. You’re not a part of my hero’s journey.

It was an honest dig at the time.  When your entire world splits to pieces in the cosmos, not much can compare to it.  Still, the insult seems entirely idiotic now.  My pride still mattered to me at that point.  That had to be it.  It was always always easy to be proud as Supergirl.  Maybe to a fault.

Because then—electricity.

Everywhere.  

A high powered metal electric baton was slammed across my stomach—like the ones Lena and I found at his base in Kaznia—and my world arced with lightning.  The acrid taste of ozone filled my senses.  My teeth sank into my tongue, drawing blood.

I think you’ll find where you’re at right now is only the ‘Approach to the Innermost Cave.’  He’d smiled self-satisfied and gestured to the cratered, cavelike base.  In this particular hero’s journey, if you were to survive, you’d call our time together, ‘The Ordeal.’  The proper climax of the story, in which the hero faces death—usually symbolically.  Sometimes literally.  Often reborn in the latter portion of the story through the facing of their greatest darkness.

He was pacing.  He was pacing and I couldn’t stop seizing. The table I was on was so cold.  He just kept talking—

You, however, will not get to experience this metaphorical rebirth.  You, my celestial parasite, will die permanently.  Your journey ends here.  So make of it what you will—just spare me the formulaic hope speech when that time comes.  Deal?

I tried to speak, but the baton came down again.

The baton became a recurring character during my time in the darkness.

When I bit his hand, since my jaw was the only thing I could control?

Baton.

And later.  When control of my limbs actually started to return sooner than he expected? 

Baton.

I’d broken free of the restraints almost unexpectedly.  One moment begging my muscles to work, and the next tumbling from the table as my wish was granted. I’d tripped on ice cold uncoordinated limbs, booking it for the door.

But before I could even reach the handle the end of the baton clipped my right side.  And then I was jolting on the sterile white tile, breath ripped clean away.  Hideously ashamed.

The electric punishment was so cruel.  So frequent.  A neural nightmare.  I wonder if my memory is such a tangle of confusion for that specific reason.  Could electricity have to do with this mental disconnect?  I just…it wasn’t quite then that the switch was flipped.  So what…what else?

That was all the first day.  Or…the first things I remember after being captured, so I have to be getting close.

I was thrown into a dark cell for the first time at the end of that day—I think it was a day?—or maybe just an uncertain number of hours.  My supersuit was reactivated, thank Rao, and I was dragged into that windowless concrete cell.  The one that glowed green both day and night, and…and I was so thoroughly heavy with shock I just laid there for a moment. Taking stock of myself.  The loudest voice in my mind was that of the little girl inside me who watched her planet explode.  The girl who was shot off into the vast empty darkness with nothing left of her world.  Her family.  Her hopes for the future.  That fear—almost childlike in its form—pressed itself to the surface of my being.  And it made one thing terribly clear.

I couldn’t just sit around and hope someone would find me.  There was this flashing red light inside of me—a siren—that warned I needed to put my mind to escaping.  Immediately.  If things hurt now, it would hurt worse later.  There was no time to waste.  I remember thinking, I have to be out of here before the forty-eight hour mark.

They always say the chances of recovering a missing person decrease drastically after the first forty-eight hours.  Which has more to do with the fact that most captors are doing irreversible damage within those first forty-eight.  For this reason, I told myself over and over that I could process everything once I was home.  If I could just get home.  There was no time to let the fear consume me.  No time to dwell on any of it.  And—

Oh.

An anchor-firm stiffness blankets my psyche.  Because this is it.  I’ve found it.  This is the first escape attempt.  In the present, the numbness in my body doesn’t cease, though flickers of warning signals tell me I’m walking a dangerous line.  My pulse skyrockets.  My jaw wires tight.  Tread lightly.

Lena’s voice echoes softly in such a clouded way that I can’t hear her words.  Just the sincerity in her tone.  And my heart swells with courage.  I will walk into the darkness.  I will walk into it and I will come back to her.

With renewed ferocity, I face the memory again.

I was curled in a heap on the floor of my cell.  Cold.  Shivering.  Hurt and drained, veins pulsing green through translucent skin.   I remember I had to wait a while for my muscles to stop twitching from the electricity, and I spent that time patching together my plan.  And…what I did next—it wasn’t representative of who I am as a hero.  Or even as a problem solver in the ordinary.  I can only blame the thundering urgency that was closing in on me for how ill advised it was.

I had been able to wiggle my limbs and carefully work out some of the cramping in my muscles enough to stand by the next time I heard footsteps coming down the hall.  And so I stood.  Waiting.  The cape settling over my shoulders making me feel like a kid in a costume as the heavy metal door slid away to reveal Lex, standing there arrogantly.  Not even looking my way.  Typing on some screen in one hand.  In the process of calling himself a generous host as he held a paper plate with stale dinner rolls in the other hand.

Continuing in the distant, scientific tone he’d addressed me with from the start.  He wasn’t paying attention.

Because I was supposed to be subdued and so—

And so—

And so I took my chance.

I grit my teeth.  I reeled against the weakness dragging my bones low, and I shot forward.  Lightning in a single swift movement.  I’m Supergirl.  Woman of steel.  Hero of National City.  I will not back down.  I threw my cuffs over his head and yanked the chain tight.  His throat made a hideous noise.  Hope and clarity surged through my veins.  Suddenly his head was drooping and my knee was in his gut.  Dinner rolls went flying to the scuffed concrete.  Even as sluggish as I was, I slammed him into the hard edges of the door.  He dropped, gagging.  Human.  I ran.

My boots slammed against the concrete halls and my mind became a map.

I had worked hard earlier as I was wheeled or dragged through the halls to memorize the layout.  An endless maze of cavernous dark paths and metal doors.  Not unlike the Kaznia base, entirely.  Except this place had craggy cavelike walls and ceilings.  Sometimes there was visible metal piping along the walls.  Some of the piping was rusted.  Some were shiny and new.  I tried to note the differences to help me remember my path.

It was a mistake.

It was too rushed.

And my meticulous layout memorization wouldn’t have mattered.

I didn’t make it far.  There was an alarm.  Too loud.  Like the horn of a train at the pitch of a dog whistle.  The dull lighting in the halls shifted from an eerie flickering yellow to a deep red.  And I knew the instant the burning in my bones deepened, he had triggered some sort of Kryptonite release system.  In seconds, I imagined numerous ways it could’ve happened.  If it was strategically placed Kryptonite in the halls with receding lead casing, or if he’d somehow found a way to aerosolize it…whatever it was…I knew.

Because I only made it down three hallways before I couldn’t move another inch.  Before the agony won.  Before I was dragging blunt nails along the ground.  Through my hair.  Digging my fists into my skull.  Shouting for him to turn it off.  To make it stop.

Please, make it stop.

But that wasn’t when the safety switch flicked in my head, was it?

No.  That doesn’t feel like it’s it.

Why won’t my mind show me the things I’m looking for?  Why can’t I just remember in whole pieces?  It’s like there are these entire gaps.  Parts of it are just so incoherent I don’t know if it happened or I dreamed it.  Every time I think I’m getting close to understanding, I feel the blank spaces in my head stretch wider.

Why am I doing this? Why am I hunting through my mind when all that’s here is rubble?  Why am I even putting myself through—-- - - - -Like a flood, I remember.

Like a buzzing jolt, it hits me.

The switch.  The—the safety switch. It wasn’t during the escape attempt.

Rao, I was looking for the escape attempt, but it was after.

It was the punishment for the escape attempt that did that.  How could I forget that?

That part strangely doesn’t come back to me in any amount of vivid detail.  It’s much more clinical, like pulling out a file from a cabinet that only contains a bullet pointed list of events.  As far as any actual recall goes…it’s more of a smear of color with little clarity.

The punishment involved being strung from a ceiling.  Dangling again.  A whip. It glowed green.  Devices on a metal table.  Torture table.  I called it that.  Out loud I think.  Mirrors.  A room of mirrors.  The walls were mirrors.  I had to watch.

The colors in my mind sharpen, and the air that I’m breathing starts to thicken.

His expression—it—

It was impassive.

Blood. My own. 

I’d never seen so much of my own blood before in my life.

Time seemed to drone on

and on 

and on.

It didn’t stop.

I think that’s when.

  It…just…switched off.

I switched off.

.... . .-.. .--. / -- .

That was it.  The same feeling—the disconnected half-present feeling.  Like I was watching him slice someone open from the third person.  Barricading myself in a closet of bulletproof glass.  Feeling but not feeling.  It didn’t stay like that the whole time, but the moments it did were spent in phrases.  Breathe.  Breathe.  Keep breathing.  We’re going home soon.  They’re going to find us.  Alex will find us.  J’onn.  Lena.  Breathe.

That.

I guess–

So that’s my answer.  That’s what caused it.  The right combination of…unpleasant events right after another.  The right amount of pain sustained over a period of time.  The right sequence of emotional firebombs and then…boom.  Safety button.

I’m thankful for the numbness now.  Thankful that I’m getting to wear it as an insulated coat—a shield between myself and what happened.  Even if it disgusts me how cowardly I feel.  To need a shield from my own memories.

Only, it doesn’t explain how the safety button was flipped now.

Alex and Lena aren’t hurting me.  They’re holding me.  They’re trying to help.  This is what I dreamed about—what I wanted.  Why can’t I feel it?  I want to feel this.  Why can’t I–?

“Kara, breathe, you can’t scratch yourself, okay?  I’m not trying to trap you, I promise, but I can’t let you scratch open your stitches.”  Alex.

Oh no.  My gut roils with sludge.

They’ve still been talking to me.  This whole time?  How long have they been talking to me?

“Alex, I think we should help her lay down and—and give her some space.”

And they do.  Because I’m now staring at the ceiling of my bedroom.  Coughing.  They must have moved me.

There’s more talking.  I wish I could understand it.  I feel like I’m slamming my fists against that plexiglass wall.

And then there’s cold.  Cold in my hands.  I squeeze the cold with everything I’ve got.  I grip onto it and focus.  

Then there is cinnamon.  Cinnamon wafting through my nostrils and it is so sharp against the numbness.  The cold starts growing in its clarity against my palms.

I breathe.  I breathe in cinnamon and I squeeze the freezing cold.  Until all I’m doing is sensing.  Feeling what is real.  Until I’m also hearing again.  My own breathing—shallow and congested.  The rustling of my comforter.  And that sound makes me realize I’m trembling again.  Beyond my own control.  Maybe I never stopped.  So I squeeze the cold harder, grinding my teeth, nails biting into my palms. It stings.  Real.

And slowly, like the dripping of a faucet, my awareness drizzles back in.  The numb heavy feeling lifts and leaves a sharp sting in its wake.  Seeping in.  Taking up space.  Real.

And at some point I realize—I can feel again.  I can feel the damage the sun lamps couldn’t heal.  I can feel new scratch marks along my neck.  From my own hands.  A fire pulsing beneath the bandages on my chest.  A fire where I’m sure I scraped myself open for the sake of breaking that stupid plexiglass wall.  And regret replaces that disconnected numbness, splashing heavy in my stomach like a cinder block in a well.

  My eyes start to focus, and—

  There they are.

  Alex and Lena.

  The lights are—well—they’re lower?

Panting softly, I ask, “Why is it dark?” My eyes flit over to the curtains.  Drawn closed to cover my bedroom off from the rest of the loft.

A hesitant hand settles on my forehead, and hair is gently brushed away from my face.  Alex.  “You told us it was too bright,” her voice tells me carefully.  Like she’s afraid one wrong word might send me billowing away into the wind.

“I did?” I waver.  The thought then occurs to me that not only could Alex and Lena have been talking to me that whole time.  I could have also been responding.  I don’t remember telling them it was too bright.

Lena’s voice is quick to soothe my confusion.  “Don’t worry about it, darling.  It’s okay,” she meets my eyes with a warm sincerity, dark hair tumbling over her shoulders so beautifully.  And then my eyes drift down to her hands.  Her hands, which are cradled over my hands.  My stomach flutters in an all too familiar way.  She’s holding my hands.  My hands that are—

Wet?

My brows lift hesitantly, and I have to ask, “Am I…holding ice right now?”

My eyes flick back to Alex as she chuckles weakly, and I watch her set a small red candle down on my nightstand.  “Yup.  It was Lena’s idea actually, so you can blame her if your blankets get wet.”

And then Lena actually guffaws, lightly smacking Alex on the shoulder.  I can feel my brows drawing together.  When did they get so…buddy buddy?

I don’t get to ask, because Lena decides to defend herself, “We just needed you to have some anchors to the present,” she speaks softly, letting go of my hands and moving her own fingers to peel mine back from the ice.  “When you started scratching yourself, I figured it was for the sensory input.  We both know you wouldn’t be trying to hurt yourself.  You just…needed something to ground you, and that’s—it’s perfectly understandable.  So I grabbed some ice and then Alex remembered that cinnamon candle you own.”

“I still have no idea how you like it,” Alex adds, shifting closer on the edge of the bed.  “Way too strong for me.  But it did the trick, yeah?  It helped you come back down?”

I swallow dryly, and nod.  And all of a sudden I don’t have words at all.  Because whatever just happened, whatever part they saw, I can’t even remember all of it.  And when I was hunting in my own memories to understand what was happening, I couldn’t remember all of those either.  And it’s starting to feel like the only place that should make any sense to me—my mind—isn’t even my own anymore.

“It’s a good candle,” I try to smile at Alex.  “And a good idea,” I shift my appreciation  toward Lena, who is plucking the ice from my hands and setting it in a glass off to the side.  I smile gratefully at her as she wipes my hands off with a soft towel, but I worry that it doesn’t reach my eyes.  Because flickers of the memories I tried to card through in that glass closet keep snapping to the front of my mind and then disappearing.  Paralleling.  Lena’s hands moving my wrists.  Lex’s hands strapping them down against a table.  Alex’s thumb brushing across my forehead.  Lex’s thumb jabbing at the cut on my brow.  And I’m exhausted.

It seems like Lena notices, because a flood of sympathy washes over her expression, drawing the corners of her beautiful lips downward.  She pulls her hands away, and my heart twinges.

I let Alex continue to play with my hair, because I can see how anxious she is, even in the lower lighting with the curtains drawn closed.  She sits to the left of me on the bed, propped up on her right arm on her side.  I notice I’m laid near the center of the bed, and Lena is seated to my right side, near hip level.  Both right up next to me.  Hovering.  Hesitant.  Their constant attention elicits a pang of self conscious worry.

“You guys act like I’m dying,” I laugh weakly, “Don’t worry about me.  I just like to…ya know…make an entrance.”

I expect a chuckle or even a smile, but their worried expressions only seem to deepen, and I don’t miss the way they eye each other.

“Kara…you were missing for twelve days,” my sister’s voice sinks past my attempted levity, and whatever lighthearted expression I was attempting fractures.

“Twelve?”  I was right.

Lena nods her agreement, now fiddling with her own fingers rather than touching my hands.  I wish she’d hold my hands again.  “How…” she gently clears her throat, “how much do you remember?”

The room is silent, and I can’t for the life of me summon an answer.  “Some of it,” falls lamely from my lips, and they exchange a look again.

“Enough of it,” I clarify, uncomfortable.  And I’m slowly realizing that this is nothing like I imagined my reunion with either of them would be.  Whatever words come out of me, they all seem to be the wrong answers.  Conversation has never felt like a test I should have studied for.  Even when I was still learning English as a refugee.  But now, I’ve done it again.  I’ve said the wrong thing.  Because neither one of them jumps to respond.

  At their clear hesitation to speak, two opposing waves crash inside of me.  The first tidal wave being the deep thrall of pressure curdling in my lower belly.  The need to tell someone. To open my lips and let the pieces I do remember of that nightmare spill out.

  Twelve days.  It all happened in twelve days.

  That first wave of emotion is low and insistent and churning.  It knows these fragments inside me are sharp.  They can’t stay inside me forever.

  But stronger than that is the second wave, foaming and roaring and arching up as a trilling panic in my chest.  It branches like fingers up my throat.   This wave swallows the other whole.  It thunders, If I open that door—if I open my mouth to talk about it, they’ll ask me questions. If they ask me questions I’ll have to answer them. If I answer them they’ll know.  They’ll see all those horrible things in their heads.  They’ll picture me that way.  They’ll picture with clarity what my own mind can’t even hold in one piece.  They’ll never stop unseeing it.

  The damage.

  The damage.

  The damage.

  If I turn it to words…that will make it real.  That will make it permanent.  It will no longer exist only in my experience.  Only in my memory.  Lex is dead.  I carry it alone.  And talking to them.  It would be suddenly out of my control.  Alex could tell Kelly could tell J’onn could tell Brainy could tell Nia could tell everyone.  It won’t be mine anymore.

  The roiling in my gut wants me to share the burden. The hissing in my chest knows that I can’t.  That those jagged pieces will cut on their way out.

  “—’s spacing out again,” I catch the tail end of Alex’s mumbled words, and clench my jaw.  My heart squeezes in genuine devastation.  I missed more conversation.  I keep missing pieces.  Inside is pieces and now outside is pieces too.  I can’t fit anything whole together.  This isn’t right.  I don’t feel right.

  “Alex,” my voice grinds insistently.

  The attention of both of them immediately flicks to me.  Silent.  Patient.  “Yeah, Kar?”

  My next words slowly link themselves together in my mind before I’m brave enough to utter them aloud.  But still, I do.   “I keep…missing things. Things you guys are saying. Did you check me for, uhm…” brain damage?  “Is my head–?”

  Thankfully I don’t have to say it.  She catches on, “Yeah—no, no you—all of your brain scans came out normal,” she continues to brush my hair aside, though her words halt for a moment. “It’s expected to have some brain fog after the ordeal you just went through.”

  The Ordeal.

  His voice sounds almost real. Gritty and loud.

  Red. So much red.

  “I think—I think I need to sleep.  I–I need to…” I just close my eyes and nod.  Once.  Then several times as I keep swallowing.  This dryness never goes away.  I just keep nodding as if that will finish my sentence for me.

“What?  But you just woke up,” Alex’s voice betrays her disappointment, but Lena cuts in fast.

“Of course, Kara.  We’ll—give you some space.  We’ll both just be here in the other room.  We made you some food whenever you’re feeling up to it, but don’t rush yourself,” I feel her hands gently squeeze mine again, and some tension drains from my shoulders.  “Call for one of us if you need anything at all, alright?”

I open my eyes to hold Lena’s gaze, nodding again.  Hoping my grateful expression retains some shred of dignity.

Alex’s hand smooths in my hair one last time, and she looks at Lena, then back down at me.  I can see the wheels turning.  Can see the moment of understanding, the moment her encouraging facade goes back up.  A comforting smile I’m so familiar with.  “Right…yes.  We—we’ll just be in the other room,” and she looks physically pained as she pulls herself away from me.  I wish I could have it in me to feel guilty about it, but the space clears out some of the noise in my head as they carefully pull away.

And before I know it, two of my favorite people in all of my known universe have retreated back out of my room with reassuring glances my way, pulling the curtain closed.

And I’m alone again.

Only I can hear them whispering softly again from the kitchen.

And I don’t miss the hitch of a quiet sob.  One clearly muffled in the arm of a sweater.

I don’t sleep.

And when the light from the living room goes dark as the sun slips away in the sky, and the shuffling around in my apartment goes quiet, I lay awake still.  I lay awake as Alex and Lena discuss who is taking the ‘night shift.’  I lay awake as they decide who is sleeping on the couch, and who’s curling up in the recliner.  I lay awake even as Lena worries if they should wake me up to take my medicine.

Alex says no.  That I should sleep if I can.

I think about saying something, asking for food or medicine or both, but the exhaustion outweighs my desire for pain relief.  And I don’t have anything left in me to muster up a performance.  To appease their fears.  So as their conversation peters off into nothing, and darkness falls on all of us like a blanket, I stare at the ceiling.  I stare at the ceiling until my eyes drift shut, and then I watch patterns and colors dance behind my eyelids.  And I breathe.  It’s all I know how to do anymore.  I breathe as my mind replays everything I’ve ever done wrong.  Everything that’s led to this point in time.  Every moment that could have played out differently.  I drown in every why I can think of, and let the patchwork of patterns behind my eyes consume my world.  I know I can’t avoid this forever.  I know there is a world waiting for me on the other side of this curtain.

But tonight, I hide.

Tonight, I breathe.

I breathe until the sun comes up.