NO FREEDOM IS FREE.

(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.)

“i can help if you want to check it out.”

     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. 

“ what if you’re just superior & that’s it? ” i looked down, and noticed i had more coffee in my cup as i imagined, which turned out to be the only good news that say so far. “ you spent all your life looking like a twig, they put some juice on you and you did not turn out half bad—— you could have been evil. ” what’s the definition of ‘evil’? i have seen it all in my life, i have been through the whole spectrum & back, this man had to have something special written all over his blood. “ but you’re a good man. ”

heroheart​:

“uhhhh…. yeah. super.” a thin strand of blonde is blown up and away from tickling her forehead, and kara gently eases the steel frame from above her head and discards it to the side with a practiced finesse. the impact on the concrete is minimal, but boot-shaped grooves plant themselves beneath her feet from where she caught it.

rubble coughs up a heavy cloud of dust, and she listens. (a few dull thud-thud, thud-thuds from too far away to be implicated in the wreckage.) she dusts off a shoulder with the flick of her wrist and offers her other hand out for him to take.

“— supergirl.”

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.

    “ so -- when you say super -- “

i got made. phil's in the process of burning me as we speak. there is a wince barely held back, his jaw tight, the frown cutting clean into the lines of his forehead. another ally on the out, another person in danger; it is a body ache bruise to know that it is her this time caught in the crossfire. outside he can hear the street getting busy - a car horn, a yelp as someone nearly gets side swiped, loud street sellers hawking wares. all in a language he doesn't know, in a place he has never been before. the signal crackles and looks down at the burner phone in his hand as sharon's face freezes while the signal struggles to catch up.

(mumbai is the busiest place he's ever seen, busier than new york or washington. tomorrow he has to get a train that will take him to another train that will get him to the coast. and after that, waiting for natasha and sam.)