HEART OF A HERO.

     steve shrugs, waves off the concern, a little out of breath from how fast he’d hauled himself across the block – there’s been a collapse of the street under the apartment renovations, the scaffolding creaking with every passing second. supergirl seems to have assuaged the worst of it by catching half the crumpled beams, but there’s still work to be done. 

       “ let’s go to work. if there’s people down there, we should find them – and i could always use a little extra muscle. “

she hops, avoiding the rubble that’d split through the street below them, and starts digging through rock and ash. half of it splits between her fingers, leaving a thin layer of grit speckling her boots, but she continues, leaving a trail of odd-shaped rocks and cracked-through concrete slabs in her wake as she leaves a space big enough to slip through into the resident parking lot below.

“it — sounds like a busted gas line.” (change clinking in a pocket from a few miles out. a whistling kettle from the warehouse district. quiet hisssssss from beneath the ground. thud-thud. thud-thud. could she — is she wrong? this world is so loud, it makes her blink a couple times with her own uncertainty.)

“ How do you mean? ”  Held under the quizzical furrow of her brow, the bulk of Alex’s prying gaze softened immediately into concern.

The prevalence of strange dreams weren’t such an outlandish occurrence.  Considering the years Kara had spent in suspended animation — and then not — in the frigid, boundless expanse of space, in the fire and brimstone propelled by the decimation of her home planet, it’d been no wonder the first years she’d spent on earth had been rife with nightmares.  Fitful dreams.  Fragments of reminders of all that she’d lost, while Krypton’s deceptive wraithlike glow still inhabited some distant pinprick of the night sky.  But that had been years ago, when the trauma was still as fresh as the pizza crust still sitting in the grease - dappled box on Kara’s coffee table.  Years ago, when even the rolling bellow of thunder and the clamor of the popcorn maker were enough to shake the girl of steel into sleepless nights.  “   ——  Like how you used to dream about Krypton? ”  

she dreams of home. the once-was. she dreams of soot and blood, chaos and — reckoning. she dreams of alura, zor-el, kal when he’s nothing more than a tuft of hair and a bundle of diapers, but it turns to ash in her mouth and wakes her with a start. faces creep in — alex, lena, sam, winn — and melt between the gaps in her fingers. she dreams more vividly than she has in years, but it’s more than just — that. torquasm rao keeps her grounded, and wades her through the terror before her alarm drags her from a fitful rest. 

“kind of. i can’t — i don’t know how to explain it. it’s like... i can feel something coming. something bad. and i just — don’t know how to stop it.” she’s never been prophetic. she thinks that would’ve helped when she was younger — stopped jeremiah from working with the DEO, stopped astra from falling on alex’s sword — but — it gnaws away at her. something small, black, that begins to take root and bloom into the pit of her stomach and fills her with an acute kind of nausea that she’s not used to.

now he’s seen an awful lot of crazy things, but he’s never seen somebody practically catch a building before – the world is a strange new place and he’s never felt so out of time; what happened to the wright brothers being the ones with the big ideas? steve gets to his feet, dusts off his hands to shake hers.

“ steve rogers, ma'am. i thought i heard somebody trapped down here, but – well. i guess not. ”

(she can hear the way the building wanes before it happens — an inconceivable shift in the metal that hisses low before the foundations give out from beneath them. clark says she needs to spend less time focusing on what could happen, and take a deep breath and focus on what’s directly in front of her. focus on kara, not the flash of red billowing out behind her. but the point is moot when metal groans when bent, and she zips across the city without much of a second thought. there’s a hot tea still brewing in the break room at catco.)

“sorry, uh. about the dust. i’m trying to be neater.” a gentle squeeze envelopes his hand. another pause. (another quiet, searching moment. thud-thud. thud-thud.)

she doesn't intimidate the way the bat does. mostly, she thinks, because it'd be more difficult to etch the sigil onto a standing-lamp, but ultimately because the blue and red cuts through the smog like its own lantern. one swift promise, and she spends her off-days circling the city and listening. her time is split between nationaI city and gotham, and it reminds her vaguely of the last time kal went off-world. beignets in france. vodka in kaznia. pastries in portugal. the world envelopes her as the last daughter of krypton, and it feels... right. gotham? yeah, it's not so... forthright in its gratitude.

"that's not why i'm here." heavy boots press down into the concrete, and hands lay flat on her hips. two promises. look after gotham. keep catwoman out of trouble. (she's more of a dog person.) and... well, she does a pretty good job of manifesting trouble, even on a quiet night. (she's grown to understand that quiet is a curse. gee, it sure is quiet today leads to the unfurling of an underground crime ring, or an explosion on main street, or the next catastrophe that halts her in her tracks and tars the knitted stitches of the suit with ash and dirt.)

"i know you can take care of yourself." bruce spelt that out pretty clearly. gotham should be afraid of her, if anything. or... something along those lines. (there's the faint running of a tap from across the street, the hurried timid clip-clip-clip of heeled footsteps three blocks away, the tinny screech of an old jukebox from even further —)