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She sees it all through the Fortress screen – the field, the abomination that she now knows wore her cousin's cherubic face, warped as if melted by flames, kissed by radiation burns, the woman, now slag near the Earth's core.
Flooding.
Clawing.
Fighting so hard for so long because it takes so long and she can't look away. She thinks that he'll stop, over and over again, but it keeps going through every thrash, his features obliterated as if by an unending tide of tar. Irrationally, she hopes in her heart that someone will save him.
The heave.
The slow twitches.
The last spasm of the Last Son of Krypton.
Nothing.
The laughter.
Photos. Gleeful, smiling faces clustering around on the rent battlefield.
She vomits. Usually, that makes her feel better.
The body is splayed open, dissected, a desecrated husk when she finds it in one of the thousand laboratories secreted around the paltry little world that the Kryptonian Empire or its last son could have incinerated.
Luthor told her of each one.
Kal wouldn't want this. Would try to stop her. Would make her want to stop herself.
She doesn't care.
She kills everything that she finds there.
Humans. Animals. Things.
Gestating blasphemies, a litany of insults, born for no other reason.
Luthor does not die.
Luthor will not die.
He's in the Fortress, and he will never leave, and he will not die.
Bloodless and methodical and exacting, precise where she is anything but because she knows the pains and weaknesses even of Kryptonian flesh, the reprogrammed robots will make sure of it.
But there is no feeling in this. Just motion, more inexorable than the gravity that she can dismiss on a whim, floating through corridors and cavernous rooms. Some, she doesn't even have to enter. A few quick gouts of plasma are enough.
When she's finished, she gathers what's left and what she finds of Krypto and places it in the pod that brought him here, to a world of backwards savage ants.
A burial in the sun, flares and eruptions of nuclear fire from its surface reaching out like a mother's arms, ready to be handed a mewling infant, his lungs strong, by the midwife.
She watches, bathed in the unadulterated, unfiltered radiation, her skin tingling and pulsing with the luminescence that even now is flooding her hypercharged cells.
When he had found her, that beatific and naïve smile on his face conjuring memories of the baby she had cradled in her arms, her precious Kal-El, she had remembered the ancient vow, the first and oldest duty of family.
A strange thing, to fail a duty while fulfilling it.
Now, she remembers the sun haloing her cousin, almost washing out his features, as he stood there above her crashed pod. The kiss of it on her skin. The faint palpitations of his heart in his throat. The rise and fall of lungs. The steady murmur of a voice laced with wonder at meeting The Last Daughter of Krypton.
Somehow, bone structure alien, mature, jaw refined, arches in place of the chubby baby fat that pinched with his pre-verbal giggles as, under the light of a red sun, Kara Zor-El lifted her preciously small cousin still smelling faintly sweet, warm, and milky, from his creche as he lifted her from her pod, she knew him.
Something in the eyes. The smile. The breathless, nervous giggle.
The same blood that coursed through them both.
And then the lie she encouraged him to believe because the fragile, infant heart that shone like the sun around him had to be clutched tight. Adamantine bones and and skin of steel weren't enough to protect it.
She turns back to the world. His world. Even within its own solar system, a paltry little ball of water and dust that she can crush between her thumb and index.
But, of course, everything is small at that distance.
Even Kal and the rocketship from a dead planet that winks out of existence in a yellow corona.
She lazes back towards his world, moving at a mere half light-speed. Now that the precious moments have been squandered, there is an infinite span of time
She is the Last Child of Krypton.
(it is not Clark's Krypton)
And that is what she will be.