Work Text:
The sparring room on the Watchtower had been reinforced four times. The first three times were because of Clark. The fourth time was because Barda had thrown Diana through the floor during a "light session" and Steel had rebuilt it with promethium-laced plating and a resigned expression.
The room had no windows. No cameras. No monitoring equipment. This had been Diana's requirement, non-negotiable, stated once: "Warriors do not train under observation. Observation changes the body. The body must be free to fail." Bruce had argued. Diana had looked at him. Bruce had stopped arguing.
Barda was already warm when Kara arrived. Not from the stretching (Apokoliptians didn't stretch; Granny Goodness had considered flexibility training a luxury and luxuries were for New Genesis, which was an insult on Apokolips, where it was the worst thing you could say about a warrior: she trains like she has time). Barda was warm because she'd been hitting the promethium-laced heavy bag for twenty minutes and the bag was losing.
Kara walked in. Sports bra, compression shorts, bare feet. No suit. No cape. No crest.
Barda noticed this the way she noticed everything: completely, immediately, and with the total-field awareness that Granny Goodness had beaten into her (literally, with a neural lash, at age six, in a room not unlike this one except that room had an audience and the audience was encouraged to learn from the beating).
She noticed and she set it aside. There was a place for noticing. The place was later. The place was Scott, and their bed, and the particular way Scott listened when Barda told him things, which was with his whole body, because Scott Free listened the way he escaped: by giving himself entirely to the mechanism until the mechanism gave him what he needed.
Later.
Now was for hitting.
"Rules?" Kara asked.
"No heat vision. No mega-rod. Hand to hand. First to three submissions or first to break the floor."
"The floor's rated for ..."
"I know what the floor's rated for. I helped rate it." Barda rolled her shoulders. The left one popped. It had been popping since an engagement on Apokolips approximately ninety years ago when Lashina had dislocated it during a training exercise that Granny had called "bonding" and which had actually been a dominance calibration designed to establish hierarchy within the Furies through controlled injury. The shoulder worked fine. It just remembered.
Bodies remember. That was the first thing you learned on Apokolips, before you learned to fight, before you learned to kill, before you learned that pain was just information with a delivery problem. Bodies remember what was done to them and they tell you about it at inconvenient times and you either listen or you break.
Barda listened. She'd been listening to her body for a hundred and fifty years. She knew every sound it made.
"Ready," Kara said.
Barda moved first.
She always moved first. Not because she was faster (she wasn't; Kara's reaction time under yellow-sun radiation was approximately eight percent better than Barda's, a margin Barda had calculated over six previous sparring sessions and filed in the part of her tactical mind that never stopped running). She moved first because initiative was a choice, and on Apokolips the one who chose to move first was the one who'd decided the terms, and deciding the terms was the only freedom you had in a fight where the outcome might not be yours to control.
Her right cross came in at about sixty percent. Testing. You always tested first. Even with someone you knew, even with someone you'd fought beside, because bodies changed and what was true last month might not be true today and assumptions in combat were how you lost teeth.
Kara slipped it. Clean. Head movement, not a block. She didn't even bring her hands up. Just moved her skull two inches to the left and let the fist go past.
Barda felt the air displacement and knew immediately: Kara was running hot today. The slip was faster than last time. More efficient. Less thought. When Kara was thinking, her defense was good but structured, predictable, the way Kal's fighting was predictable because they'd both learned from the same people and the same people fought like they were protecting something. When Kara stopped thinking, her defense became something else. Reactive. Animal. The Kryptonian combat genome expressing itself without the Terran filter.
Kara stopped thinking when she was angry, or tired, or when she'd had a bad week and needed to move.
Today she was not thinking.
Good. Barda could work with not-thinking.
She pressed. Jab, cross, hook to the body. Kara parried the jab, absorbed the cross on her forearm (and Barda felt the impact travel up through her own wrist and into her shoulder and the shoulder said hello, I remember impacts, do you want to hear about Lashina again and Barda told the shoulder to shut up), and caught the hook.
Caught it. Kara's hand closed around Barda's fist, mid-arc, and held it.
Their eyes met.
This was the moment. The fulcrum. In a fight between two people who could shatter planets, the moment when one of them catches the other's fist is not a defensive maneuver. It's a conversation. It says: I see your speed. I'll show you mine.
Kara's grip on her fist was firm. Not crushing. Not proving anything. Just: I have you. What now?
What now was: Barda grinned, got her hips under her, and threw Kara across the room.
Kara hit the far wall. The promethium plating buckled (Steel was going to sigh). She was off the wall and back in range before the buckle finished deforming, which was fast, which was very fast, which was the kind of fast that made Barda's hindbrain light up in a way she was going to think about later and not right now.
Not right now.
(Later. Scott. The bed. The telling.)
Kara came back in with a combination that was pure Kryptonian (no Earth martial art moved like that, the angles were wrong for human joint architecture, these were strikes designed for bodies that could rotate through ranges of motion that human shoulders and hips couldn't access) and Barda had to actually work.
Work meant: her body stopped being a thing she was directing and became a thing she was riding. Apokoliptian combat training didn't teach technique. Technique was for people who had time between stimulus and response. Granny Goodness taught reaction. She taught the body to know what to do before the mind finished processing what was happening. This was done through pain, through repetition, through years in the fire pits where you either developed the reflex or you developed injuries, and the injuries were also a teaching tool because Granny wasted nothing.
Barda's body caught Kara's elbow strike on a forearm block, redirected a knee with a hip check, ate a palm strike to the sternum that moved her back about a meter (and she felt that one, actually felt it, the compression of her ribcage under an impact that would have liquefied a human torso, and her body said oh, this is real, and Barda agreed, yes, this is real), and countered with a sweep that Kara jumped over because of course she jumped over it, Kara could fly, sweeps were a theoretical exercise against someone who could simply stop touching the ground.
"Sweeps don't work on me," Kara said, and she was almost smiling.
"Everything works on everyone. You just have to adjust the timing."
"That sounds like something Granny Goodness would say."
"It is something Granny Goodness would say. She was a monster. She was also occasionally correct. These things coexist."
Kara's almost-smile became an actual smile, and then the actual smile became a feint, because Kara had learned (from Diana, probably, or possibly from Bruce, who fought like a man who'd figured out that the most dangerous thing in a fight wasn't force but timing) that expressions were weapons if you let your opponent read them.
The feint worked. Barda committed to defending the right side and Kara came in from the left and got an arm around Barda's neck and squeezed.
Here is what the chokehold felt like, from inside, reported honestly:
Kara's forearm was across Barda's throat. The pressure was real. Not performative, not pulled, not the careful modulation that Kara used when she sparred with anyone who could break. Full pressure. Barda's trachea compressed. Her carotid blood flow reduced. Her vision didn't narrow (Apokoliptian physiology didn't respond to oxygen deprivation the way human physiology did; she'd been choked, drowned, asphyxiated, and spaced, and her body's response to all of these was approximately: this is inconvenient, please resolve it at your earliest opportunity) but she registered the restriction.
What she also registered, in the same total-field awareness that she was not going to think about right now and was absolutely going to think about later:
Kara's body against her back.
The density. Barda had known, intellectually, that Kryptonians were denser than they appeared. She'd read the files. She'd sparred with Clark (different experience entirely; Clark sparred like he was apologizing for being strong, every strike accompanied by a micro-hesitation that said I could hurt you and I'm sorry about that and Barda had wanted to tell him that she didn't need his apology, she needed his commitment, but she hadn't because it wasn't her place and because Clark's restraint was load-bearing for his identity and you didn't kick out someone's load-bearing wall just because it made for a less interesting fight).
Kara did not spar like she was apologizing.
Kara sparred like she was finally doing the thing her body was built to do, and the doing was a relief, and the relief was in every point of contact.
The forearm across Barda's throat: dense, warm, generating heat from solar metabolization that Barda could feel through her own skin, which was not easy because Apokoliptian skin was engineered to be thermally resistant. Kara was running hot enough that Barda could feel her. That was significant. Barda filed it.
The chest against Barda's back: Kara was pressed against her, leverage for the choke, and the pressure was even and continuous and it was like leaning against a wall that was also warm and also alive. The sports bra was a thin layer of human textile between Kara's body and Barda's back, and it was doing approximately nothing, and Barda could feel through it the same way she could feel through most things, which was completely, because Apokoliptian tactile sensitivity was a combat adaptation (you fought in the fire pits where visibility was zero and you learned to read your opponent through contact or you lost).
She could feel Kara's heartbeat. Through the contact. Through their skin. It was elevated (combat, exertion, the particular adrenal state that good sparring produced in people whose adrenal systems were built for planet-scale threats) and it was strong in a way that Barda was going to describe to Scott tonight with the specific Apokoliptian word that meant a machine that does not know it can stop.
The thighs. Kara had jumped onto Barda's back for the choke (practical, efficient, the correct approach when your opponent was taller and you needed height for the arm placement) and her thighs were locked around Barda's waist. The grip was extraordinary. Barda had been gripped by many things (Granny's neural lash, Lashina's bands, the crushing apparatus in the Terrorium that was designed to calibrate pain tolerance, Scott's arms when he held her and the holding was the one touch in her life that had never been about control). Kara's thigh grip was in a different category. It was the grip of someone who did not need to think about how hard to squeeze because the squeezing was not effortful. It was default. This was what her body did when it locked on. The strength wasn't being applied. It was being permitted.
Barda knew the difference. On Apokolips, strength was always applied. Forced. Demanded. You performed your power because your power was your value and your value was your survival. Everything was effortful because everything was observed and observation meant assessment and assessment meant ranking and ranking meant life or death.
Kara's strength was not performed. It was ambient. It existed the way gravity existed: as a condition of the environment. She was holding on to Barda's back and the holding was effortless and the effortlessness was—
Later. Later. Later.
Barda broke the hold. She did it the Apokoliptian way: not by pulling Kara's arm off (which would have been a contest of arm strength and Barda wasn't certain she'd win that contest and uncertainty in combat was either a problem or a gift depending on your relationship to fear) but by dropping her center of gravity, rolling forward, and using the angular momentum to throw Kara over her shoulder and onto the floor.
Kara hit the floor. The floor held. (Steel would be relieved.)
Kara was on her back. Barda was on top of her, one hand on Kara's sternum, pinning. A submission position if Kara accepted it. Not a submission position if Kara didn't, because a pinned Kryptonian was only pinned until they decided not to be.
One second.
Two seconds.
Kara's eyes. Blue. Not the blue of Earth's sky (Barda had spent enough time on Earth to have opinions about its sky, which was: it was too pale, too thin, a sky that didn't know what it wanted to be, neither the red of Apokolips nor the gold of New Genesis nor anything with commitment). Kara's eyes were the blue of a star that was still working. Still burning. Still producing the thing it was made to produce.
On Apokolips, eye contact during a pin was a sexual overture or a death threat. Often both. The Furies had not made a distinction. Barda had learned this at thirteen, pinned by Stompa after a training bout, Stompa's hand on her chest in exactly the position Barda's hand was on Kara's chest right now, and Stompa had looked at her and the look had been the first time Barda understood that desire and violence lived in the same room on Apokolips and the room had no doors.
She'd learned, later, that the room could have doors. Scott had built them. Scott had shown her that desire could exist in a room with exits, that you could want someone and also be free to leave, and the freedom to leave was what made the wanting worth having.
Barda's hand on Kara's sternum. She could feel the heartbeat under her palm. Elevated. Strong. The engine that did not know it could stop.
Three seconds.
"Submission?" Barda asked.
Kara's eyes held hers. Then: "Point."
She tapped the floor. Barda released her. Stood. Offered a hand. Kara took it. Their grips matched (this was not something Barda experienced often; on Earth, offering a hand meant calibrating, always calibrating, making sure you didn't crush what you were helping up) and for about half a second, standing, connected by grip, they were two bodies in equilibrium. Equal force. Neither pulling, neither yielding.
Barda released.
"One to zero," Barda said.
"Your sweep still doesn't work."
"I'll adjust the timing."
They reset. Barda rolled her shoulder. The shoulder remembered Lashina. Barda told it to remember something else. The shoulder was not good at following orders. (Neither was Barda. This was, Scott had told her once, her single best quality.)
Round two.
Kara came in first this time. She'd adjusted. The Kryptonian combinations from round one were gone; now she was mixing, Earth martial arts layered over Kryptonian joint architecture, and the result was unpredictable in a way that made Barda's hindbrain produce a sound that was approximately oh.
Oh was not a combat assessment. Oh was the Apokoliptian hindbrain's response to encountering something that registered as both threat and opportunity, a dual classification that on Apokolips was how you identified a worthy opponent and also (because the Furies made no distinction and Barda had not fully unlearned the Furies' categories despite a century of trying) how you identified a worthy partner.
Granny Goodness had designed the Furies' training to conflate combat and desire. This was deliberate. Warriors who could not separate fighting from wanting were warriors who fought harder, longer, more completely. The conflation was a weapon. It had been used on Barda. It had been used on all of them. Lashina, Stompa, Mad Harriet, Bernadeth. They'd all learned to fight with their whole bodies, and their whole bodies included the parts that wanted, and the wanting was not separated from the violence because Granny had welded them together in the fire pits when they were too young to understand what was being done to them.
Barda had spent a long time unwelding.
Scott had helped. Not by being gentle (gentleness alone couldn't undo what Granny had done; gentleness without structure was just another form of formlessness, and formlessness was what Barda feared more than pain because pain at least had architecture). Scott had helped by being specific. By touching her in ways that were precise and intentional and clearly, obviously, unmistakably not combat. By building a physical vocabulary between them that had no Apokoliptian translations. By being the first person who'd ever touched her in a way that her body couldn't file under training exercise.
She was unwelded now. Mostly. Ninety percent. The remaining ten percent activated in moments like this: when a fight was good enough and an opponent was strong enough and the hindbrain couldn't tell the difference between I want to beat her and I want
Kara's knee came up. Barda checked it with her hip. The impact was dense (that word again, the density, the weight-that-didn't-match-the-visual, the lie of the body) and Barda's hip absorbed it and her body said more and she was not going to unpack that right now.
She was going to tell Scott.
This was their arrangement. Not a rule. Not a protocol. An understanding, arrived at over decades, that Barda's interior life was large and strange and contained rooms that had been decorated by someone else (by Granny, by the Furies, by Apokolips itself) and that the best way to keep those rooms from becoming traps was to open the doors regularly and let someone she trusted look inside.
Scott never flinched. That was the thing. That was the mechanism. Barda could tell him I was sparring with Kara today and my body couldn't tell the difference between fighting and wanting and Scott would listen and his face would do the thing where he processed information (still, focused, the same face he made when he was working out an escape, because listening to Barda was the same skill as escaping a trap: you had to be completely present and completely free at the same time).
And then he'd say something. Something that made the room smaller. That took the thing that felt enormous and Apokoliptian and terrifying and showed her the dimensions of it, the edges, the places where it started and stopped. He'd say something like: "Was it a good fight?" And she'd say yes. And he'd say: "Then it's working."
Because Scott understood (because Scott had been raised by Granny too, because Scott had his own rooms, his own welded seams, his own body that remembered things it shouldn't have to remember) that desire showing up in a fight wasn't the problem Granny had designed it to be. It was just information. It was a body remembering that it was alive and that alive included everything, and the everything was not a weapon unless you let someone else aim it.
Scott never aimed it. Scott just held the door open and let Barda walk through the room and out the other side.
She was going to tell him about Kara's thighs. About the grip. About the heartbeat under her palm. About the blue eyes during the pin and the half-second of equilibrium when they were standing and connected and equal.
He'd listen.
He might ask questions. (Scott's questions were precise. Surgical. He asked questions the way he picked locks: minimum tools, maximum result. "What did it feel like?" Not what did she look like, because Scott knew that Barda's experience of desire was haptic before it was visual. She felt first. She saw second. The Furies had been trained in darkness. They'd learned bodies through contact. The visual was a luxury Barda had only learned to trust on Earth.)
She'd tell him: it felt like fighting someone who was built to the same tolerances.
She'd tell him: her body didn't know how to classify it because the classification system was broken, had always been broken, had been broken by design before she was old enough to know what classification meant.
She'd tell him: I am not confused about what I want. I want you. That is settled. That was settled before I left Apokolips and it has never unsettled. But my body has a parallel process running that I didn't install and can't fully uninstall and today it activated because Kara Zor-El fights like she's forgotten to be afraid of what she is and my hindbrain interpreted that as...
Scott would nod. He'd know. He always knew.
He'd probably say: "The fact that you can tell me about it means Granny lost."
And he'd be right. Because on Apokolips, the desire-in-combat response was a secret. You didn't talk about it. You didn't name it. You just let it fuel you and the fuel was Granny's to direct because anything you couldn't name was hers to use. Granny's entire system ran on shame and silence. The Furies wanted each other and fought each other and the wanting and the fighting were one thing and the one thing was never spoken and the not-speaking was the collar.
Barda spoke. That was the escape. Not from the desire (you couldn't escape your own neurology, and trying was just another form of the suppression Granny had used). From the silence. You escaped the silence by talking, by telling the one person who had the key to every room in you, by saying here is what my body did today and hearing him say yes, and you're still free, and the freedom is in the telling.
Round two ended when Kara got behind her again. Not a choke this time. A bear hug. Arms around Barda's torso, locked at the wrists, and Kara squeezed.
Barda's ribs compressed.
She registered this with professional interest and also with the other thing, the thing she was not going to think about until later, which was that Kara's arms around her from behind and the full-body contact and the pressure of the squeeze was a sensation she had experienced before in other contexts and her body was doing the mapping, the overlay, matching this pressure profile against stored profiles and finding correspondences that were not appropriate for a sparring match and she was going to file them where they went and deal with them when they were meant to be dealt with which was later, in the bed, with Scott, with the doors open.
She broke the hold by expanding. Simple physics. Barda's musculature could generate enough outward force to overcome Kara's grip if she engaged everything at once, which she did, and Kara's wrists separated, and Barda spun and got a hand on Kara's throat and pushed her against the wall.
Not hard. (Not soft either. Exactly the amount of force that said: I am serious and you should be too.)
Kara's back against the wall. Barda's hand on her throat. The reverse of the pin from round one. Kara's pulse under Barda's fingers now instead of her palm. Faster. The fight was working on her. The engine was running higher.
Kara could have broken this hold instantly. They both knew it. The wall behind her was promethium-laced plating and she could have gone through it like water. She didn't. She stood in the hold and looked at Barda and the look was not Apokoliptian (there was no death threat in it, no sexual overture, no conflation) and it was not human (there was no fear, no submission, no performance of vulnerability). It was Kryptonian. It said: I am permitting this. The permission is the point. I am strong enough to leave and I am choosing to stay and the choosing is what makes this a conversation instead of a fight.
"Point," Kara said.
Barda released. Stepped back. The distance between them was about half a meter, which was a specific distance that meant something on Apokolips (combat range, intimate range, the range at which you could either strike or kiss and the ambiguity was the point) and meant nothing on Earth and Barda was on Earth and the distance meant nothing and she was going to tell Scott about the distance and what her body did with it.
"One to one," Barda said.
Kara rolled her shoulders. No pop. No memory in the joint. Kryptonian bodies didn't carry their history in their connective tissue. Barda's shoulder remembered Lashina. Kara's shoulders remembered nothing.
(Barda envied this. She would never say so. Envy of a body that didn't remember was too close to wishing her own body would forget, and she didn't wish that, because the remembering was also how she knew where she'd been, and knowing where she'd been was how she knew she'd escaped.)
"Your grip is different today," Kara said.
"Different how."
"Firmer. You're usually more technical. Today you're just... holding on."
Barda said nothing. Because Kara was right, and the reason Kara was right was not something Barda was going to explain in this room, in this context, in this conversation. The reason was that her body had shifted from sparring mode to something older and deeper and less civilized and the shift expressed itself in grip before it expressed itself in anything else because grip was the first language the Furies learned.
"I'll adjust," Barda said.
"I didn't say it was a problem."
Barda looked at her.
Kara looked back. Neutral. Open. The same face she wore at press conferences and Justice League briefings except without the press conference layer, the thin glaze of I am approachable and safe. Just: a woman in a sparring room, observing something about her partner's grip, reporting it without judgment.
She didn't know what it meant. Barda was almost certain of this. Kara read bodies well (all Kryptonians did, the sensory suite was extraordinary, Clark could hear a heartbeat from orbit) but she read them in the Kryptonian register, which was data. Input. Measurable phenomena. She'd noticed the grip change the way she'd notice a shift in air pressure: accurately, immediately, and without the interpretive layer that would tell her why.
On Krypton, desire hadn't been read through the body. Kara had mentioned this once, in passing, at one of Kory's gatherings (Kory's gatherings were dangerous because Kory poured Tamaranean wine and Tamaranean wine lowered inhibitions across species in ways that were legally ambiguous in several systems). Kara had said that on Krypton, bonding was a cognitive decision. Genetic compatibility. House alignment. Courtship protocols. The body was involved the way a vehicle is involved in a commute: it got you there, but it wasn't the reason for the trip.
So Kara felt the grip change and didn't read it. Didn't know to read it. Kryptonian literacy didn't include this dialect.
Which meant Barda was safe. Which meant the room had doors. Which meant she could stand here, half a meter from Kara Zor-El, in the aftermath of contact that her body was still cataloguing, and the cataloguing was private, and the privacy was not enforced by shame (as it would have been on Apokolips) but by the simple fact that the woman in front of her spoke a different body language and the mistranslation was, in this specific case, a kindness.
"Round three?" Kara said.
"Round three."
They fought for another forty minutes. Barda won the third round (arm bar, applied with the kind of technical precision that she fell back on when she needed her forebrain to override her hindbrain, because technique required thought and thought occupied the processing power that would otherwise be used for the other thing). Kara won the fourth (a takedown so clean that Barda's professional assessment was perfect and her other assessment was filed, deep, for later). The tiebreaker went to Barda by half a second, a submission hold that Kara could have escaped but chose not to, and the choosing was the thing, the thing Barda was going to carry home.
They sat on the floor afterward. Backs against the wall. The promethium plating was cool against Barda's skin, which was hot from exertion, which was real exertion, which was rare, which was why she did this.
"Same time next week?" Kara asked.
"Yes."
"Your shoulder pops."
"It's old."
"I can hear it. From the inside. The cartilage is slightly degraded on the anterior aspect."
"I know. It's been like that for ninety years."
Kara was quiet for a moment. "Do you want me to..."
"No."
The no was faster than Barda intended. Harder. Because the offer (she knew what Kara was going to offer: heat vision, precisely applied, the Kryptonian equivalent of physical therapy, a thing Kara did for Clark's injuries when Clark had injuries, which was almost never but not actually never) was generous and practical and completely correct and Barda did not want it.
She did not want it because the shoulder was hers. The pop was hers. The memory of Lashina was hers. The degraded cartilage was the record of a thing that had been done to her and she had survived it and the surviving was written in the joint and she was not going to let anyone edit the text.
"Okay," Kara said. No push. No Kal-tone. Just: okay.
Barda looked at her. Kara was sitting with her legs extended, arms loose, head back against the wall. She was sweating now (so Kryptonians did sweat, under enough exertion, a data point Barda filed in the professional column and absolutely nowhere else). Her hair was damp at the temples. The sports bra had a tear at the left shoulder strap where Barda had gripped during round four.
She looked like a person who had been in a fight with someone who was actually trying.
She looked like she'd enjoyed it.
(On Apokolips, the post-combat state was called kratha. It didn't translate to English. The closest approximation was the clarity after effort, but that missed the connotation, which was that kratha was specifically the state in which the body was most honest. All performance burned away by exertion. All pretense metabolized. What was left was what was real. The Furies had used kratha for everything: for debriefing, for bonding, for sex, for the kind of honesty that only happens when the body is too tired to maintain its lies.)
(Kara, in kratha, was ...)
(Later.)
"Thank you," Kara said. "For not pulling your hits."
"I don't pull hits."
"Clark does. Diana does, a little. Even Kory moderates." She looked at the ceiling. "You're the only one who actually tries to beat me."
"Do you want to be beaten?"
"I want to be fought. There's a difference."
Barda understood this so completely that for a moment the understanding was a physical sensation, a pressure in her chest that had nothing to do with the sparring and everything to do with a hundred and fifty years of being the strongest person in the room and what that meant, which was: no one fought you for real. They fought your reputation. They fought the idea of you. They performed combat in your vicinity and hoped you'd grade them on effort.
Kara wanted to be fought. Not beaten, not tested, not trained, not assessed. Fought. By someone who was genuinely trying to win because the trying was the respect.
"Next week," Barda said. "I'll adjust the sweep."
"The sweep doesn't work on me."
"Everything works on everyone."
Kara smiled. The real one. Not the press conference. Not the hall monitor. The one that showed up when someone treated her like a person who could take a hit instead of a symbol who had to stay clean.
Barda stood. Offered her hand. Kara took it. The grip. The equilibrium. The half-second of equal force.
Barda let go.
She walked to the door. Opened it. Paused.
"Kara."
"Yeah."
"Your combinations in round two. The Kryptonian angles layered over the Earth technique. That was good. That was genuinely good."
"Thanks."
"Don't tell Clark I said so. He'll want me to compliment his technique and his technique is apologetic and I don't have the patience."
Kara laughed. It was the real one.
Barda left.
She showered (the Watchtower showers were too cold, always too cold, everything on this station was calibrated for people who couldn't survive the temperatures Barda found comfortable, and she'd stopped complaining about it because complaining was a performance and she was done performing for the day). She dressed. She took the Boom Tube home.
Scott was on the couch. Reading. (Scott read constantly. Escape manuals, engineering specifications, poetry, cookbooks. He consumed information the way he consumed everything: with the focused joy of a person who had spent his childhood in a place where information was controlled and rationed and used as a weapon, and who now, free, could not get enough of it.)
He looked up. Read her face.
"Good sparring day?"
Barda sat next to him. Close. Their shoulders touched. His shoulder didn't pop. His body had its own memories but they lived in different places.
"I need to tell you about something."
He put the book down. Turned to her. Full attention. Full presence. The escape-artist listening face, the one that meant: I am here and I am free and the freedom is for you.
"Tell me," he said.
She told him.
All of it. The grip. The density. The heartbeat under her palm. The pin and the eyes and the half-second of equilibrium. The hindbrain's inability to distinguish fighting from wanting. The chokehold and the thighs and the way Kara's strength was ambient rather than performed and what that did to a body that had been trained on Apokolips to read strength as both threat and invitation.
She told him about the shoulder. About Kara's offer to fix it and Barda's refusal and why.
She told him about kratha. About Kara sitting against the wall, sweating, honest, post-combat, the performance burned away, and what was left, and what what-was-left looked like, and how her body had responded to it.
Scott listened. He didn't flinch. He didn't stiffen. He didn't perform security.
When she was done, he was quiet for a moment. Then:
"Was it a good fight?"
"Yes."
"Then it's working."
She leaned into him. His arm went around her. The hold was not strong (Scott was not strong, not by the standards of the people Barda fought and trained with, he was a man whose power was in his mind and his freedom and his absolute refusal to stay in any cage), and the not-strongness was the point, because the not-strongness meant the hold was a choice made without leverage, without force, without any of the mechanisms that Apokolips had used to teach her what holding meant.
He held her because he wanted to. She let him because she wanted to. The wanting was simple and it was theirs and it had no Apokoliptian translations.
"Next week," she said.
"Mm."
"I'm going to adjust the sweep."
"She flies. Sweeps don't work on people who fly."
"Everything works on everyone. You just have to adjust the timing."
Scott kissed the side of her head. "You sound like Granny."
"Granny was a monster."
"Yes."
"She was occasionally correct."
"Also yes." He paused. "Do you want to talk more about it?"
"No. I want to sit here."
"Okay."
They sat. Scott picked his book back up. Barda stayed against his shoulder. Her body was cooling from the sparring. Her shoulder popped once, quietly. Lashina, saying hello. Barda said hello back. Not with forgiveness. Just with acknowledgment. The memory existed. The shoulder worked. She was here and she was free and the freedom was in the telling and the telling was done.
Next week she'd fight Kara again.
Her body would do the thing again.
She'd tell Scott again.
He'd listen again.
The room would have doors.
That was the escape. Not from the feeling. From the silence.
Big Barda had escaped everything Apokolips had ever built to hold her. The fire pits. The Terrorium. Granny's love, which was the worst cage of all because it was designed to feel like shelter.
She'd escaped all of it.
She could handle a sparring match.
(The sparring match was very good.)
(She was going to adjust the sweep.)
(Everything works on everyone.)