Work Text:
Thermal Equilibrium
The sauna was Kory's idea. Not the sauna itself (the Watchtower had three, built to human specifications, which meant they topped out at about 90°C and were, to Kory, room temperature). Her idea was the modification.
She'd asked Steel to recalibrate Sauna C. He'd looked at the specifications she'd written on a napkin and said, "That will kill anyone who walks in there."
"Yes. That is the point."
He'd blinked at her.
"Not to kill them. The point is that no one who can be killed by it will walk in."
Steel had thought about this for four seconds and then nodded and done the work, because Steel understood structural requirements and because Kory had asked him nicely and because Kory asking nicely was a force that bent better men than John Henry Irons, though he'd bent less than most.
The readout on the door said 140°C. The small printed notice below it (Kory had written it herself, in very neat handwriting, in four languages) read:
THIS SAUNA WILL KILL YOU.
If you are not certain that it will not kill you, it will kill you.
This is not a challenge. This is thermodynamics.
She'd added a fifth line after Barry had tried the door:
Barry, no.
140°C. Fifty degrees above the point where human proteins began to denature. A human being who opened that door would lose consciousness in about ninety seconds and be dead in four minutes. The air inside would sear the mucosal lining of their lungs on the first breath. It was not an environment that permitted ambiguity about what you were.
Kory loved it.
She was sitting on the upper bench (cedar, replaced monthly, because even Tamaranean-rated cedar charred eventually), her back against the wall, her hair unbound and floating in the thermal convection currents like something alive. Which it was, technically. Tamaranean hair was photoconductive. It moved toward energy sources the way roots move toward water, and in 140°C air it billowed and drifted and caught the light from the heating elements and threw it around the room in amber refractions. She didn't control it. She'd stopped trying to control it about two centuries before she'd been born, genetically speaking. The Tamaranean genome had made a decision about hair several thousand years ago and the decision was final.
She was naked. Obviously. The sauna was 140°C. Clothing was a philosophical error at this temperature.
The door opened.
Kara walked in, paused one step inside to let the heat settle against her skin (an involuntary response, Kory had noticed; Kryptonians registered temperature shifts even when the shifts couldn't harm them, a sensory system calibrated for a world that no longer existed), and then closed the door behind her.
She was wearing a towel.
Kory looked at the towel.
"That will be on fire in approximately forty seconds."
Kara looked down at the towel. "It's the principle."
"The principle of what?"
"Of..." Kara gestured vaguely. "Modesty?"
"You are in a room that would kill every modest person on this station. Modesty is not a principle that survived the door."
Kara considered this. The towel began to smoke at the edges.
"Fair point."
She removed the towel (which she dropped on the lower bench, where it would smolder for a while and then give up) and sat on the upper bench across from Kory, pulling her knees up, back against the wall.
The knees-up thing. Kory had seen this posture in other contexts and catalogued it. Kara pulled her knees up when she was not yet settled. When the transition between who she'd been five minutes ago and who she was going to be in this room was still in progress. It was a protective geometry. Compact. The minimum surface area exposed to the environment.
She'd unfold. She always unfolded. It just took a few minutes.
Kory waited. She was good at waiting. Tamaraneans didn't have a cultural anxiety about silence the way humans did, and she'd learned (through Dick, mostly, and then through the painful process of unlearning what Dick had taught her about emotional availability, which had been mostly correct and partly a projection of his own need to be needed) that some people arrived at comfort through stillness rather than conversation.
The heat worked on Kara like sunlight worked on Kory. Not the same mechanism. But the same category of effect. The tension in her shoulders released in stages, starting at the trapezius insertion points and moving outward, and Kory watched this happen because Kory watched bodies the way Kryptonians watched mathematics: as a primary language.
This is what Kory saw.
She saw Kara's skin flush.
Not the way humans flushed. Human flushing was vascular, capillary dilation, blood rushing to the surface to radiate excess heat. Kara's skin didn't need to thermoregulate. What it did, in 141°C air, was something else. The heat activated something in the deep layers. The same cells that processed solar radiation responded to thermal energy as a secondary input, and the response was visible as a shift in the quality of her skin rather than its color. She didn't turn red. She turned clearer. More present. As if the heat were cleaning a window from the inside.
Kory recognized this because Tamaranean skin did a version of the same thing. Starfire metabolism was fundamentally thermal. Her people had evolved around a star that produced enormous infrared output, and their skin was an organ designed to absorb and convert ambient energy. In high heat, Kory's skin didn't flush either. It brightened. The melanin analogue in Tamaranean epidermis was photoreactive, and heat made it more efficient, and the efficiency was visible as a deepening of her natural color (which humans called "orange" and which was not orange, which was the specific amber-gold of late afternoon light through the canopy forests of Tamaran, a color that didn't have a name in English because English had never needed one).
Two women in a killing-temperature room, and neither of them was being killed. They were being fed.
That was the thing Kory had wanted, when she'd asked Steel to build this room. Not the heat itself. The equality of it. A space where the thing that made them different from everyone on the station was the same thing, and the same thing was: they ate energy, and energy felt good, and there was no human word for what it felt like because humans died from it.
Kara unfolded.
Kory watched.
On Tamaran, the assessment of another person's body was not sexual by default. It could become sexual, and frequently did (Tamaraneans were not, as Dick had once put it with a mixture of admiration and alarm, "restrained" about the intersection of aesthetic and erotic appreciation). But the primary register was structural. You looked at a body the way you looked at a weapon or a ship or a landscape: what is this built for, and how well is it built, and what does the build tell me about the history of the builder.
Kory had been a warrior since she was fourteen. She'd been a slave before that. Both experiences had given her a vocabulary for bodies that was precise, unsentimental, and utterly without the discomfort that Earth cultures attached to looking. On Tamaran, refusing to look at someone was the insult. It meant they weren't worth assessing.
She looked at Kara.
Shoulders first. Always shoulders first. On Tamaran the shoulders told you what someone had carried, and how, and whether they'd chosen to carry it or been made to. Kara's shoulders were wrong for her frame in a way that Kory had been puzzling over since they'd first met. They were broader than Kara presented them (the suit hid this, Kory had always known the suit hid this, because Kory's professional eye couldn't be fooled by fabric and she'd spent years wondering why a woman built like a siege engine chose to dress like a hall monitor). But the breadth wasn't the interesting part.
The interesting part was the tension.
Even here, in killing heat, with the door closed and no one to perform for, Kara's shoulders carried a residual elevation. Two, maybe three millimeters above their natural resting position. Not visible to a human eye. Visible to Kory, who had spent her adolescence in a slave pit on the Citadel where reading the posture of the person next to you was the difference between anticipating a beating and not anticipating a beating.
Kara's shoulders said: I am resting but I have not forgotten that I might need to not be resting.
Kory's shoulders said the same thing, and she knew it, and she suspected Kara knew it about her, and neither of them had ever discussed it because some knowledge was structural. It didn't need to be spoken. It lived in the body.
The collarbones. Kory noted them the way she noted the crossbeams in a ship's hull. Load-bearing. Heavier than they looked. The hollow between them collected a small amount of moisture (condensation from the steam generator, not sweat; Kryptonians didn't sweat at this temperature, or possibly at any temperature, Kory had never confirmed this and was not going to ask because the question would require context she was not prepared to provide).
Kara's arms. These were where Kory's assessment shifted from structural to something closer to professional respect.
On Tamaran, warriors' arms were displayed. Bare arms were a status declaration. It meant: these have been used, and I am not ashamed of how. The Citadel had understood this (the Citadel had understood everything about Tamaranean culture that could be turned into a weapon against it) and had forced their slaves to wear full-length coverings. Hiding a warrior's arms was a way of erasing their history.
Kara hid her arms. Every day. The suit covered them to the wrist. On Earth this was normal. Humans covered their arms for warmth, modesty, fashion, a hundred cultural reasons that had nothing to do with shame. But Kory looked at Kara's bare arms in the sauna light and thought: these should not be hidden.
Not because they were beautiful (they were; that was not the point). Because they were legible. The musculature was Kryptonian, which meant it didn't separate into the distinct bundles that human or Tamaranean muscle displayed. It moved in continuous sheets, each group integrated into the next without visible boundary, and the effect was of a body that had no weak points. No gaps between the armor plates. A continuous surface.
Kory's own arms were different. Tamaranean musculature was visible, striated, the individual fiber groups apparent under the skin because Tamaranean combat physiology prioritized explosive force (short bursts of enormous power, the starbolts, the flight acceleration) over sustained output. Kory's arms looked like what they were: weapons platforms with obvious moving parts. You could see the mechanism.
Kara's arms hid the mechanism. The strength was there (greater than Kory's under a yellow sun, and Kory was honest enough with herself to state this flatly, without jealousy, because jealousy of someone's genome was as productive as jealousy of a mountain's height) but it was submerged. Invisible until the moment it was needed. An ambush predator's architecture. Still water that could become a flood without warning.
This was not, Kory thought, an accident. Krypton had engineered this. A species that put its power on display would be challenged. A species that concealed its power would be underestimated. Krypton had chosen to be underestimated, and had died anyway, and the irony of that was something Kory was not going to mention to Kara because Kara lived inside that irony every day.
Kara's hands were resting on her knees. Kory looked at them.
Hands were personal. On Tamaran, you didn't assess someone's hands unless you were close to them, because hands were where the truth of a person's life collected. A warrior's hands told you more than their rank or their scars or their ceremonial armor. Hands told you what they did when no one was looking.
Kara's hands were uncalloused (Kryptonian skin didn't callus under yellow-sun radiation; Kory had confirmed this by asking, directly, because Tamaraneans asked directly, because life was short even when you could fly, and Kara had said "no" and then looked faintly surprised, as if she'd never thought about it, which Kory doubted). They were proportionate. The fingers were not long, not short. They were exactly what they needed to be to do what Kara did with them, which was everything from holding a coffee cup to holding up a collapsing building, and the range of that spectrum was visible in nothing. The hands held no evidence. They were exquisitely, almost aggressively neutral.
This bothered Kory.
It bothered her because her own hands were not neutral. Her own hands were burned. Not scarred (Tamaranean skin healed, eventually, from almost everything) but textured. The pads of her fingers carried a faint roughness from two decades of starbolt generation, the repeated thermal cycling of channeling stellar energy through her hands leaving a cumulative effect that no amount of regeneration completely erased. Her palms had a quality that Dick had once described as "warm sandpaper" (he'd said it fondly; she'd filed it in the category of human compliments that were also insults and also true).
Her hands told the truth about her life. Kara's hands told nothing.
And that was, Kory thought (watching the steam curl in the air between them, which was 141°C and would have killed everyone she'd loved on Earth), the most Kryptonian thing about her. The blankness. The refusal to let the body record what the body had done. A civilization that had mastered genetics so completely that it could erase the evidence of living from its own skin.
On Tamaran, they would have called this a tragedy. On Krypton, they'd probably called it elegance.
Kara's torso. Kory assessed it in the way she'd been trained, which was from the top down, the way you read a ship's schematics: start with the frame and work inward.
The frame was deceptive. (Everything about Kara's body was deceptive. This was Kory's running conclusion and she was increasingly certain it was deliberate on the part of the Kryptonian genome, if not on the part of Kara herself.) Under the suit, the silhouette suggested "fit human woman, athletic build, approximately Clark's height ratio." In the sauna, with nothing between Kara's body and the air, the suggestion evaporated.
She was denser than she looked. The proportions were human-approximate but the mass distribution was not. Kory could see this because Kory had held her (in combat, pulling her out of debris after the Daxamite thing; in greeting, because Kory hugged and Kara accepted hugs with the careful reciprocity of someone who was always monitoring her own grip strength). Kara weighed more than a human woman her size. Not dramatically more. Maybe fifteen, twenty kilograms over what the visual would suggest. But the extra mass was distributed so evenly that it was invisible to the eye and only apparent to the touch. Her body was a lie about its own density, and the lie was so well-constructed that Kory suspected most humans who'd touched her (and Kory did not know who had touched her, and was not going to ask, because asking would require a conversation she was not sure Kara was prepared to have with anyone) hadn't noticed.
Kory had noticed. Kory noticed everything about bodies. It was the one skill the Citadel had given her that she'd kept.
The density meant that in the sauna, in the heat, Kara's body didn't move the way a human body of similar appearance would move. When she shifted position (she was unfolding now, one leg extending, then the other, the transition from compact to at-rest happening in the slow, deliberate way that meant she was becoming comfortable), the movement had a weight to it that was subtly wrong for her visual mass. Like watching a dancer made of stone. The grace was there. The lightness was not, and the absence of lightness was the tell, and Kory saw it, and she thought about what it meant to walk around on a planet where everyone assumed you weighed what you looked like you weighed.
She thought about what it meant to hug someone and calibrate your arms in real time so that they wouldn't feel the difference.
She thought about how exhausting that calibration must be.
The heat shimmered between them. 140°C. The cedar bench beneath Kory was beginning to darken at the edges where her thighs rested. Her body ran hotter than the room when she was at rest, which meant she was slowly charring the bench with her baseline metabolic output. She'd mention it to Steel. He'd sigh. He'd replace the bench. This was their arrangement.
"The bench is charring," Kara said.
"It always chars."
"I know. I can smell it." A pause. "It's nice, actually. The cedar. It smells like something real."
Kory understood this completely. The Watchtower smelled like recycled air and polymer and the particular ozone note of energy systems running at capacity. The sauna smelled like wood being slowly destroyed by two women who were too hot for furniture. It was, in its way, the most honest room on the station.
Kara stretched. The motion was unselfconscious in a way that Kory had rarely seen from her. The extension of the arms overhead, the arch of the spine, the release of the breath she didn't need to hold. In the suit, this motion would have been invisible. The suit's nanoweave managed the silhouette, maintained the approved geometry, kept everything within the parameters of "approachable, nonthreatening, Clark's cousin."
Here, the stretch was visible for what it was: a body uncoiling from a posture of restraint. The ribcage expanded fully (Kory could see it expand, could see the intercostal spaces widen, could see the volume of the thoracic cavity increase by what she estimated was about thirty percent beyond what Kara usually allowed in public). The shoulders dropped those two millimeters. The spine articulated through its full range.
She looked, for about three seconds, like what she actually was.
What she actually was, in Kory's professional assessment, was this:
She was the most efficiently constructed humanoid Kory had ever seen who wasn't a direct product of divine manufacture (and Kory included Diana in this comparison, though Diana's construction followed different principles: Diana was built for beauty as a weapon, intentionally, with aesthetic impact as a design parameter, which made her a sculpture; Kara was built for survival, with beauty as an unintended byproduct of structural optimization, which made her an engine).
Kory had known engines. On Tamaran, the engineers built ships whose beauty was incidental to their function, and the incidental beauty was always more affecting than the deliberate kind, because it meant the math was so clean that elegance fell out of it naturally. Kara's body had that quality. Nothing was decorative. Everything was structural. And because everything was structural, and because the engineering was very, very good, the result was beautiful in the way a bridge is beautiful, or a raptor's wing, or a river that has carved the only possible path through stone.
Kory felt something about this. She was going to identify the feeling, because Tamaraneans identified their feelings, because suppressing feelings was what the Citadel had demanded and Kory had spent her adult life refusing to do what the Citadel had demanded.
The feeling was: recognition.
Not of Kara specifically. Of the category. Of being a body that was more than its context could accommodate. Kory walked through human spaces every day in a body that was calibrated for a different star, a different gravity, a different set of assumptions about what a person could be. She'd learned to navigate the mismatch (clothes that fit the culture, postures that didn't alarm, the particular care of making sure her starbolts didn't activate during emotional moments, which had been a problem in her twenties and was now merely a constant background process). She'd learned to be a Tamaranean woman in a human context, and the learning had cost her things she didn't inventory because the inventory would be too long.
Kara had learned the same lesson from a different direction. Kryptonian instead of Tamaranean. Kansas instead of Tamaran. But the fundamental operation was identical: be less, visibly, so that the people around you can be comfortable.
They were not going to discuss this.
But the sauna was 140°C and they were both sitting in it and alive and the heat was feeding them and the bench was charring and the door said THIS SAUNA WILL KILL YOU, and Kory thought:
This is enough. The sharing of the room is enough. The mutual recognition that we are both engines pretending to be furniture is enough. We don't have to name it.
Kara closed her eyes. Tipped her head back against the wall. Let the heat do whatever the heat did to Kryptonian biochemistry. Her face, unguarded for once, was doing something Kory had seen exactly twice before: nothing. No expression. No performance. No "approachable" or "determined" or "compassionate" or any of the other settings Kara cycled through in public like stations on a radio. Just a face at rest. Turned off. The screen dark.
It was the most beautiful Kory had ever seen her, and Kory had seen her in battle (where she was magnificent, objectively, the way a detonation is magnificent) and in grief (where she was terrible, which was also a kind of beauty, the kind that broke things) and in the quiet moments at Tuesday dinners with Kal where she was gentle and precise and correcting his vowels.
She was most beautiful switched off. Because "switched off" meant the machinery was visible. The resting architecture. The structure underneath the performance. And the structure was what Kory had been looking at this entire time, through the assessment of shoulders and arms and collarbones and density, and the structure said:
I was built to survive. Everything else is what I chose to do with the survival, and I am tired of choosing, and in this room I don't have to choose, and the not-choosing is the closest I get to being what I was built to be without hurting anyone.
Kory understood.
(On Tamaran, the warrior caste had steam rooms. Not for cleaning. For the specific purpose of sitting in a space that was too hostile for civilians, where the hostility of the environment was the privacy. You couldn't spy on someone in a room that killed you for entering. The steam rooms were where warriors went to stop being warriors for an hour. To let the architecture show. To sit with other people who'd seen your architecture and were not impressed by it because theirs was just as load-bearing.)
(This sauna was that room.)
(Kory had built it for herself. She hadn't expected Kara to start using it. But Kara had walked in three months ago, survived the heat, sat on the lower bench for forty minutes without speaking, and then left. She'd come back the next week. And the next. And Kory had never invited her and Kara had never asked permission and neither of them had acknowledged that a pattern was forming because acknowledging it would make it a thing and things, on Earth, had to be managed.)
(Tamaraneans didn't manage things. They had them or they didn't.)
(Kory had this.)
"Kory."
"Mm."
"What temperature does Tamaranean skin actually start to feel warm?"
"About 200°C. Why?"
"We should upgrade the sauna."
Kory smiled. It was not the smile she used on Earth (carefully calibrated for warmth without threat, for beauty without intimidation, for I'm the friendly alien, the one who dates humans, the one you're allowed to think is pretty without it meaning anything). It was the other smile. The one that showed teeth. On Tamaran, showing teeth while smiling meant: I am happy and I am not moderating the happiness for your safety.
"I'll talk to Steel."
"He's going to need a new sign."
"I'll write a new sign."
They sat in the heat. The bench charred. The air shimmered. Two engines pretending to be furniture, in the one room on the station where the furniture couldn't survive them.
Kory closed her eyes.
She thought about the sign she'd write:
THIS SAUNA WILL REALLY KILL YOU.
She thought about adding a sixth line.
You know who you are.
She thought about the fact that, for the first time since she'd left Tamaran, she was sharing a steam room with someone who understood what the steam room was for, and the understanding required no translation, and the lack of translation was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a long time.
She didn't say any of this.
The heat said it for her.
140°C.
Alive.