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Alex paddled uselessly, desperately, with her arms, trying to remember to exhale in a slow, steady stream, trying to ignore the uncomfortable feeling of bubbling and stretching under her skin.
She knew she only had maybe thirty seconds, really. Not long at all.
Kara’s Kryptonian biology - solid, rather than sixty percent water like Alex’s, and synthesising sunlight, rather than moving and holding seven or eight litres of air like Alex’s heart and lungs - was much more suited to the vacuum of space. She was suspended ahead; she was motionless, dreamlike, and for a moment, Alex forgot her mission and simply stared at her.
She looked ethereally beautiful. She was a vision. She glowed, unearthly, angelic, so much closer to the sun than normal, floating on the black backdrop of stars she’d dropped from so many years ago.
Alex could barely believe she was real.
The pod behind her bleeped her ten-second warning and Alex cursed, her words falling flatly into the dead space around her, as she reached for Kara, her fingers closing around the Kryptonian’s wrists, their skin feeling wrong up here - false, rubbery, barely-there, even though Alex was certain she was squeezing hard enough to bruise a human.
The line around her waist began to wind her back in, through - not air, but… emptiness - and Kara blinked in slow motion, hardly conscious, as they both drifted silently back towards her pod, who knew how quickly or how slowly, for time seemed not to exist here - but Alex’s long exhale was running out and just as she thought that this was it, the residual volume in her lungs and heart that she physically couldn’t push out was going to expand and explode and she’d be an internally pulverised mess of flesh and tissue and myocardial muscle and valves -
She was in the Kryptonian pod that had originally crashed Kara to earth, so many years after she’d set off, and the glass-like synthetic was appearing over her head, and Kara was watching it, abject horror on her features as the spacecraft repressurised, Alex gulping air and Kara simply staring out at the stars.
She reached up and rested her hand flat on the seal, then squeezed her eyes closed and cried.
“Alright, Agent Danvers. You’ll do. You can go home before you start nagging this time, if you feel well enough.”
Alex glanced up at the DEO doctor and across at the screen showing all her vitals.
She’d been cleared of decompression sickness; the pod had kept her and Kara locked inside, filling with pure oxygen and gradually reintroducing the other atmospheric gases, for more than twelve hours on their return to the earth’s surface.
Despite escaping the dangers of bubbles forming within her, Alex wondered if the bends might have been a better result than Kara’s periods of listless staring, interspersed with panicky, illogical states of violence as she banged ineffectively on the clear cover above, indestructible, immovable, imprisoning them both for Alex’s safety.
The MRI and CT scans showed that all her tissues and organs had returned to their normal size. There should be no lasting damage.
Her core temperature, which had lowered dangerously despite the sunburn, was once again within normal parameters. She was back to full health, none the worse for her unprotected jaunt into the vacuum of space.
Alex wasn’t sure she’d ever feel warm again.
After her discharge, she went straight to the sun room. It wasn’t like Kara needed the sun, having floated closer to it than ever before, but the time in the pod had exhausted her. Alex had asked it, after the third bout of panic, followed by the third time the Kryptonian’s eyes had glazed over, to sedate her - to put her to sleep, so she could rest peacefully until they were home.
Alex stood by the table, relishing the feel of solid ground beneath her feet, the resistance of the air as she bounced onto her toes, the pull of gravity rocking her back down. The depth of the breaths she could pull in.
She still felt cold. Numb. She remembered the pain, indescribable pain in her head as the Myriad wave increased in intensity - she remembered the pain in her chest that had far outweighed it, when Kara had calmly and clearly said goodbye.
She rolled the necklace around between her fingers. She should have known, really. Kara had never, ever taken it off - not when her sport teacher had spotted the chain and yelled at her in her second week of school and she’d had to put her hands over her ears and hunch down to stay in control of herself, not when one of the creepy guys who’d taken a shine to her flawless skin had tugged her closer by the pendant, and not for a single day of work at CatCo or as Supergirl.
It was lucky the metal was as indestructible as Kara was, and that the chain was so long, so she could hide it in almost any outfit.
But to leave it behind? Alex had heard conversations being stopped short around her all day, conversations between agents and friends, that she’d assumed were about J’onn and his incarceration. She’d assumed that Max Lord being nice to her was as a result of their shared experience of fixing the mind control the first wave of Myriad caused.
Now she knew better.
Kara had faced almost certain death, and they’d all known. They’d all let her go.
She’d set out on a suicide mission, she’d said goodbye to everyone, and she’d left Alex with a necklace.
The pieces hadn’t fallen together - Alex wanted to blame Myriad’s mind fog, or Kara’s permanently sunny, optimistic disposition finally wearing off on her realism, or something, but she knew it was pure blinkered stupidity on her part, her belief that Kara was indestructible - until Vasquez had handed her the earpiece. And then she knew, she knew, that Kara wasn’t coming back.
She just refused to believe it.
She should have seen it in the seriousness of her sister’s set jaw and steely glint all day, J’onn’s quiet determination, Max’s out-of-character sensitivity. Lucy’s worry flowing off her in waves, the flurry of calls between CatCo and the DEO.
Kara wasn’t sunny, the day she flew into space. She wasn’t optimistic or hopeful or full of naive belief. She was calm, and accepting, and serious, as she hefted a million tonnes of otherworldly metal onto her shoulders, and the weight of an entire species; an entire world.
Alex worried about Kara’s safety every day. She knew she wasn’t indestructible, she knew her sister was vulnerable no matter what powers she had, but she still somehow failed to imagine that Kara could ever be gone.
And she’d known. Kara hadn’t gone into a battle that had gone awry, or been taken by surprise. She’d prepared.
Alex bounced faster beside her.
Was she not worth a goodbye?
Was her sister so ready to die for a planet that wasn’t even hers?
They were both allowed home so quickly, and Alex thought it seemed too soon, too soon after floating in the emptiness of space, to just go back to how it was before.
The world was saved. She’d watched the Myriad wave decrease in intensity, watched as her colleagues became less and less impaired, knowing it was because her sister was flying further and further away from her and from the atmosphere that kept her alive - or, not alive, in Kara’s case, but grounded.
In the panic of Kara flying away, of leaving her, Alex forgot that Kara didn’t need to breathe, she forgot that space wouldn’t kill he - just imprison her eternally.
As everyone around her recovered, Alex remembered Kara’s silent panic attacks from when they were children, her hushed tones as she tried to explain the horror of the Phantom Zone, and wondered whether space not killing her might be worse.
She’d counted the minutes it took, the minutes that Kara would be suspended in nothingness, blinking in slow motion, thinking sluggishly, failing to produce any movement with nothing to push against. Alex had counted it all as her trembling hands activated and programmed the pod, talking hurriedly to it in broken English and Kryptonian, explaining to its artificial intelligence system what she needed and how urgently.
Eight minutes and fourteen seconds before the pod was operational. Another six minutes and fourty-seven seconds before Alex was strapped in and travelling. Two minutes and two seconds from crossing that invisible divide into space until she spotted Kara, hair in disarray, cape aloft in an uncanny imitation of flying.
Long enough for anyone else to have suffocated, or for their insides to have liquidised, or to have died of exposure - from the heat of the sun or the cold of the vacuum, either way.
And then Alex had just stared, just stared at Kara’s beauty, wasted time simply looking at her, distracted by the vastness of the universe and the realisation that this, here, this was where Kara had come from, and that little planet below them - all Alex had ever known, the only place she’d ever been - was so tiny and so insignificant, and how could Kara be so willing to give up her life for it?
All of that was yesterday.
One day - less than twenty-four hours ago. Alex had said goodbye to her sister, flown into space, floated through a vacuum, and pulled her back down. She’d faced the destruction of the entirety of humanity and then sat for hours in a futuristic spacecraft from a non-existent planet to decompress.
She wasn’t sure she could ever decompress.
Kara had watched her planet explode. Literally explode. She’d watched everything she knew disintegrate into the enormity of space, and spent twenty-four years decompressing and watching time pass her by entirely. She still hadn’t gotten past it.
Alex stared around at her stark apartment, and squeezed her eyes closed.
Here was everything she owned, and a few photographs of the four most important people in her world. One was dead, or missing, or whatever he was now. One was her mother, and their relationship was complicated. And the other two weren’t from this planet.
Even as a percentage of the city, the square footage of her apartment and those few people were almost insignificant. (As people, they were incredible; but as part of a whole, purely number-crunching, they were nearly nothing. Two of them didn’t even belong here; they were refugees. As a percentage of the country, and the world… and then the world’s percentage of the vastness of space…
Alex felt lost in the enormity of where she’d been and what she’d seen. She felt more lost than she had before Hank had fished her from the police cell and given her a place and a meaning again. She felt more lost now than when her father had died or Kara had dropped from the skies.
Her sister was from the stars.
Where did that leave her?