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On the random, sporadic, and brief instances that Kara drops in on Clark—be it at the fortress or his apartment or on a video call—she usually looks like shit. He’s come to expect this, as sad as it is, and is only grateful she’s in one piece and not passed out in some red-sun bar where she’s lost all her senses. He’s seen her drunk, hungover, beat-up, you name it. Kara doesn’t let him see much of her true self, but he’s seen many versions of her at what one might consider her low points.
But he’s never seen her like this. As Kara stumbles into his apartment and slumps onto the couch across from him, he’s caught off guard by the exhaustion in her eyes, in the tilt of her narrow but strong shoulders. It’s not just a lack of sleep; her very being is tired, frayed at the edges. She fumbles for words as she watches him, as he tries not to pry but is overcome with concern that she’s not at all her usual bubbly, biting self. As she asks mechanically how he’s doing and he tries not to stare at how pale she is, how disheveled, how he swears there is a tinge of green in the corner of her bloodshot eyes.
“Kara,” Clark interrupts quietly, frowning. “What happened?”
She hesitates. He sees her deliberate, sees the battle occur in her mind over how much to tell him. He usually doesn’t want to know the details of her off-planet escapades—not because he doesn’t care but because they’re often the same, and it merely stresses him out to know how much she’s drinking. It only ends in arguments, or her leaving, or her hanging up the call.
It never ends well. But this time he can’t let it go.
Krypto stops destroying Clark’s kitchen for a second, like he senses Kara’s distress, and flies into the living room. He rests his head on her lap, whining softly. She runs her hand through his fur, brow furrowed, and he understands something has occurred, something big. In this gesture he sees this, and he also sees his cousin with the only thing she has left from her childhood on a planet that no longer exists, from a people who are all but extinct. He sees in her haunted eyes the ghosts of a million Kryptonians, destroyed or sickened, dying slowly.
He hadn’t realized it wasn’t all immediate. It wasn’t until Kara could speak better English that she told him the bitter details, usually thrown out in moments of frustration or anger. Pieces of his history provided when she could muster up the guts to speak about it. Her mother and father, wasting away before her eyes. Everyone she knew and loved, gone.
You don’t understand, Kara screamed at him three years ago, so loud that it shattered one of the vials at the Fortress. He doesn’t remember what triggered it, but it could have been anything. For someone who gets along with just about everyone else in his life, Clark can never quite manage to say the right thing around Kara. He’s always screwing it up.
You don’t understand, Kal-El, you weren’t there. You didn’t see it. You don’t know what it was like. A crack in her voice despite the anger in her words. A quick swipe across her eyes to hide the tears she didn’t want him to see.
He’s never argued about watching the dog since. How can he deny her this one thing, to safeguard the only piece of her past she still has? He knows by now that she hardly counts him as a link to Krypton. He’s too Earth-adapted, too normal. He doesn’t get it, can barely speak Kryptonian as is. He mourns for his lost planet, but not like her. He’s privileged, in a way, to not remember it.
She resents him for it, for not remembering. He doesn’t blame her. He wishes he could shoulder some of her grief, her burden. They are the last of their kind, but the weight of it is so much heavier on her. It’s taken him a while to realize how alone she feels despite his best efforts.
“We had quite the adventure, didn’t we, buddy?” Kara asks the dog, her playful tone falling flat. The dog whines again like he doesn’t quite agree. Finally, his cousin looks him in the eye, finds the right words. “He was poisoned by Brigands. Had to go on an interstellar shitshow of a quest to get the antidote.”
“Brigands?” Clark asks, alarmed. They’re the scum of the galaxy, traffickers who leave planets devastated. How the hell did Kara get tangled up with them?
The story unwinds from her, detail by detail, and by the end Clark is mostly just glad she is alive. He also suspects she left out a few details. Nearly losing her dog explains why she’s reluctant to let Krypto out of sight, but not why her hands are trembling ever so slightly.
“Don’t worry about me, Clark,” Kara says, using the name he prefers, the one she’s gradually switched to over time. It’s a nice gesture, one he appreciates. For a while, she refused to use it, refused to speak anything other than Kryptonian. “Turned out alright.”
“I’m proud of you,” he says genuinely, reflecting on the young girl she helped and the depth of her reflections over revenge. She has a good heart, buried beneath all that grief and angst and fury. She’s kind, his cousin, though she doesn’t think so. “I really am, Kara.”
She mulls over his words, not immediately rebuking them as overbearing or cheesy. She nods, offering a half-hearted smile. “Thanks. It’s…I’m glad to be back. To see you.”
He doesn’t know if she’s ever said this to him. “Me too.” Then, because he doesn’t want her to grow uncomfortable under the sincerity of the conversation, he asks, “You hungry?”
Kara nods, standing up to follow him to the kitchen. Before she gets far, she sways, legs unsteady. Is she getting more pale?
“You good?” Clark asks, pausing.
She tries to shrug it off. “Just tired.”
But she stumbles, her knees going out from under her with a grunt of confusion. Clark lunges forward to grab her before she falls, alarm spiking as he takes in her fluttering eyelids, her rapid pulse.
“Kara?” he asks urgently, depositing her on the couch and pressing the back of his palm to her forehead. She’s burning up. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
She tries to slap his hand away. “M fine.”
“No, you are definitely not,” he retorts, unsure how the yellow sun hasn’t cleared up any lingering injuries from her fights with the Brigands. “This isn’t normal, you should be fine by now.” It’s been a few days since her ordeal, judging by her mention of partying with Ruthye (was the girl even old enough to drink?), and the added benefits of Earth’s sun should have fixed anything leftover.
“It’s…ow,” Kara winces, curling up into a ball. She presses her face into the couch, eyes scrunched shut. “Don’t know. Maybe the green sun.”
“What?” Clark bursts out. “You didn’t mention that.”
“Oops,” she says thinly. “I got stuck on a planet with one. It switches off with the yellow sun, but it was…a long time.”
“Anything else you forgot to share?” he admonishes.
“Um.” Kara cracks open an eye and looks at him guiltily. “There was also the…Kryptonite arrows. Krem shot me. Like, five times.”
His stomach flips. How close had he come to losing his only family? Her “adventure” had nearly killed her, and she managed to gloss over it.
“Okay, we’re going to the Fortress,” Clark decides, not wanting to wait any longer to get her the help she so obviously needs. What was she going to do if he weren’t here? It’s hard to imagine her asking him for help, and that pains something in his chest just to think about. She’s distant, but maybe he just hasn’t tried hard enough, hasn’t tried the right methods. Has he been patient enough?
She mutters a few insults as he scoops her up but lets him do so, which is concerning. It’s weird to fly his own cousin to their fortress when she always brings herself, either flying or via her ship (which he’s glad is not destroyed, but he doesn’t know how to drive it and flying her is faster. But she doesn’t put up much of an argument, which (again) worries him, and she’s nearly unconscious by the time they arrive, her eyes unfocused and fluttering as he carries her in, calling out commands to the robots.
He deposits Kara on the med table and lets them do their thing, scanning and prodding her as she mumbles in fevered pain. The scans light up green, much to his alarm, and the robots set to work.
“How is it still in her system?” Clark asks Gary, thinking with pained sympathy of his last run-in with kryponite in Lex’s hellscape of a pocket dimension. Kara’s much smaller than him, but he figures yellow sun works proportionally the same to heal them.
“It seems the prolonged exposure of the green sun reduced her ability to fight the kryponite arrows, which left some of the substance in her bloodstream,” Gary notes. “It was dormant for a few days, maybe the yellow sun keeping it benign. But she is tired, and her body couldn’t keep up forever.”
“It will take some extra work to fully remove it,” says another robot. “It will be painful. But she will make a full recovery.”
Kara emits another gasp of pain, her body convulsing, and the robots set to work. Clark has never felt more helpless as she writhes and bites back a cry at the injections and magnified yellow sun. It’s hard to watch; he realizes it’s probably why Lois hates to be here when he’s healing, hates to see him like this even though she wants to be near. Watching someone he loves in pain is a particularly torturing gut punch for Clark, and the fact that it’s Kara is almost worse. He wonders again if he’s failed her.
“She needs to rest,” Gary says calmly, after the worst of the treatment is over. “She will return to normal after a full sleep cycle. For now, she’ll need to be observed so she does not hurt herself. She may be confused.”
“I’ve got it,” Clark says, figuring the robots will not help Kara relax. They roll out of the room, leaving the last Kryptonians alone, trying to make sense of the distance between the other.
He fixes blankets over her and allows himself, for a moment, to fuss over her state, to feel the full extent of his worry. He’s always worried about her, always concerned something like this would happen—that she would be pushed to the brink, that her partying finally goes too far. Because sometimes he doesn’t think she cares what happens to her or not, doesn’t care that it keeps him up at night.
Despite his worry, he’s proud of her and a little ashamed he’s expected at first it was her drinking that caused this.
Kara shifts, muttering incoherently with a shiver.
“It’s gone,” she murmurs, staring with glassy eyes at him as she speaks Kryptonian. He doesn’t catch it all, beats himself up again for not being fully fluent. “Krypton…gone. It’s all gone.”
“I know,” Clark says gently. “It’s okay, Kara. You’re safe.”
“Father,” Kara nearly whimpers, the word splitting his heart in two. In her delirium she thinks it’s him, thinks she’s stuck in the worst day of her life. One of many. She uses the deep familiar Kryptonian father, laced with longing and grief that cracks her dehydrated voice. “Don’t send me away. Please. Don’t let me go. I can’t—I failed you.”
She tries to writhe off the table, to fight against some invisible force. Clark catches her before she can do any damage, glad he stayed. He’s not sure the robots could contain her without making things worse. He switches to Kryptonian, hoping his accent and probably poor grammar are sufficient.
“Rest now, Kara. You did well. You’re safe.” Clark holds her until he’s sure she won’t try and bolt away, hurting her still-healing form, and settles her back in the bed. She exhales softly, her brow creasing in pain as she closes her eyes again.
Kara’s never really wanted him close, but now…she needs someone. He thinks about how Ma would tend to him when he was tired or sick, how she would brush his hair back from his forehead and reassure him.
On Earth, at least, Kara’s never had anyone to soothe her when she’s tired or sick. Clark combs some of Kara’s tangled hair out of her face, touches her forehead to check that her fever’s going down. He wishes he could take away her pain, take away the grief that’s robbed her of so much joy, of her family, her home. He wishes it hadn’t been so unfair.
Why did fate, the gods, whatever—give him a home and family, spare him the memory of his dying planet? Why did he get so much while she got this lot, bitter and pain-filled, the narrow road? He’s sure she thinks it sometimes, that he got it all and she got sorrow instead. It’s not been easy for him, but it has been in some ways. Much easier. He got everything she had taken away, everything she wanted. And Kara doesn’t treat him with contempt and cruelty, with obvious jealousy, but the pain’s burrowed into her, and rightfully so. Ma and Pa raised him well, but he can’t say he would act any better if he were in her position.
Clark stays at her bedside until Kara wakes, hours later, groaning weakly and scrubbing her eyes. Krypto yips and zooms to her side, surprisingly gentle like he understands what she’s gone through.
Kara blinks at him in the yellow sunlight, like it’s all crashing back over her. He sees the phantom pain from the kryptonite shudder through her worn frame like an exodus, sees her brow knit with an emotion he’s not sure how to read. Embarrassment or shame, maybe? She’s probably feeling weak, like she shouldn’t have shown him this side, allowed him to take care of her—
Clark freezes at the sudden sheen of tears in his cousin’s eyes, at the heave of her shoulders. He hasn’t seen her cry in years, since the early days of her time on Earth, when she was still in mourning, and even then she tried to hide it from him, never accepting any comfort. So this floors him, this open flow of tears that crumples her face and happens so quickly.
He swallows back his expectation of rejection, the respectful walls of physical distance he maintains because he knows she hates being touched, has never let him close. Does it remind her too much of her family, the way they would kiss or hug her? Is it too painful for anyone to wrap her in her arms, too achingly close to what she lost?
Clark ignores these just for today, taking a risk because he can’t sit here and do nothing while his cousin cries, having narrowly avoided losing her dog and her own life in the last week. He ignores the past times he’s tried and tries again: he scoots closer and opens his arms, and is deeply surprised when Kara leans forward and burrows her face into his chest, releasing a strangled sob as she puts her arms around his middle.
“Hey, you’re okay,” Clark says, hugging her tightly. “You did great, Kara. It’s all fine now.”
“I’m sorry, Clark,” Kara chokes out. “I never answer your calls and I’m not honest with you, I’m not okay, you know? And all this shit with the Brigands brought up so much, almost losing Krypto, Ruthye losing her parents…” Her confession winds out of her as her sobs slow down, sniffling, still clutching him like a lifeline.
“I know,” Clark responds gently, patting her back. “I’m not angry at you. I just want you to be safe.” I just want you to stop hurting.
“Yeah,” she sniffs, pulling back and wiping at her eyes. “You’re overbearing as hell.” But her tone is light, somewhat endearing.
“I meant what I said earlier,” Clark tells her. “I’m proud of you. I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything, but I’m here for you.”
Kara pulls Krypto close and hugs him, too. “I know. I think I’ve taken that for granted.”
Clark shrugs. “You weren’t—aren’t—ready. And I get that. I’m sorry I pushed.”
She shakes her head. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”
“If you want to stay on Earth for a while, you know who to call,” Clark says hesitantly, preparing for another rejection. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. But after all this, you should probably take it easy.”
“Oh yeah?” Kara raises her eyebrows teasingly. “Become a reporter like you? Live a boring normal life?”
“Whatever you want,” he says readily. “Stay for a bit. And maybe you can meet Lois, too. She’s heard a lot about you.”
Kara rolls her eyes. “Your embarrassing party girl of a cousin? I’m sure she has.”
“My family,” Clark corrects softly, and Kara glances at him in surprise. “She knows all about my family. Has met Ma and Pa but not you, yet.”
“Well, then.” She smiles, a glimpse of her usual Kara spunk returning. “I think I’m ready to try.”