#brain doing brain things

….

She developed disciplines.

Soft focus.

The way you can look at a person's face without looking at their eyes. She trained herself to receive everything as background rather than text.

It worked, mostly.

It failed when she was tired. When she was frightened. When the sun had been weak for days.

And it failed always, without exception— when Lena walks into a room.

….

“You're not looking at me."

"I am."

"No. You look around me. Through me. Never at me."

The accusation hangs between them, and Kara wants to explain. I see too much of you already.

The looking-away is the kindest thing she can offer her.

She says nothing. She presses her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, small and hard, watches the brief white dent it leaves, and says, "I'm sorry. I'm listening." Which is true. Which is not the same thing.

….

Months. The white shifts by degrees so incremental that Kara cannot track the change in real time, only in retrospect, the way you cannot watch a plant grow but you notice one morning that the stem has reached the window.

Slowly the hum of Lena's heartbeat gets louder, the wavelengths vibrating closer and closer. A sound faint and then less faint. A color white and then — not white. 

One afternoon, for maybe a second, something red at the end of her. One evening, a blue that is not the same as Kal's blue, not anyone's blue yet. Each pulling in opposite directions.

Neither resolving into the other.

….

There is a moment, in the early stages of learning a language, where the speaker realizes that the new vocabulary is not going to be additive. It is not more words for the same world. It is a different world.

She is not thinking about Lena.

She is thinking about yellow.

She is standing in the grocery store staring at the lemon in her hand.

Kryptonian had words for yellow. Has words for the fruit in front of her.

She puts the lemon back.

She buys one later anyway, from a different bin. She doesn't know why.

She brings it home and sets it on the counter.

She calls Lena.

The lemon sits until it is no longer yellow.

….

She looked it up once.

Color theory. The electromagnetic spectrum. The full range of wavelengths the human eye could theoretically detect. She found words for some of it. For most of it she found nothing. She started a list, privately, in a notebook she keeps in the back of a drawer and tries not to think about.

She did not show it to anyone.

She wrote the descriptions because she had nothing else.

She adds the color at the edge of Lena, which she has no name for and is not purple but is closer to purple than to anything else.

She does not show anyone.

….

She mentioned it offhandedly once.

"You see them?" Kal asked.

"You don't?"

The silence that followed tasted like loneliness.

Kal's heart was strong, steady, primary blue like Earth's sky. But it was just sound to him. Just rhythm. He couldn't see the way it darkened when he thought of their dead world, couldn't see the guilty yellow that moved through his chest when he looked at her.

….

The worst part is how beautiful it can be.

She has never been able to say this to anyone. It feels like a confession of something, like an appetite she should not have.

But it is true.

Pain, at its most acute, produces colors that have no reason to be there.

A deep, impossible green.

A blue that occurs at the far edge of the spectrum.

She could look away. That is the thing. She has the capacity. She has spent years developing it, the deliberate compression of input into something survivable.

She cannot look away.

….

Purple is not in the spectral band. Lay out the rainbow — violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red — and purple is not there. 

The red-sensitive cones fire. The blue-sensitive cones fire. The green cones go silent. 

The brain receives two contradictory signals and rather than fail, rather than produce an error, it invents something else.

….

Lena’s right hand rises to her collarbone. Rests there. Fingers loose, palm curved slightly inward.

Kara can hear the pulse under her fingers.

She has not turned the overhead light on yet, which means she does not know how much time has passed, which means she has been sitting there long enough to lose track of it.

Late afternoon. The light warming the papers on her desk, warming the edge of her sleeve. Red wavelengths falling away, the world tilting toward its cooler self, the eye adjusting.

Lena's fingers press up into the muscles of her neck, head turning, jaw not tightening so much as settling. The pulse steady beneath them. Always steady — her body cooperating with its own concealment.

But the violet bleeds through anyway. Arriving from both ends at once.

Kara has seen purple in other people. In strangers. In her own reflection once, briefly, under fluorescent light she did not trust.

Lena's hand lowers. The violet stays.

Lena looks up.

"You're doing it again."

….

“Sometimes", Kara said, "I wish I could see less."

"Of the world?"

"Of people."

….

Kara does not know what color her own heartbeat is.

She would like to think it is a forgotten shade of red. The one she tricks herself into seeing through the thin skin of closed eyelids and the light of an imposter star.

She thinks this may be a kindnesses the universe arranged for her, though she is not certain it is a kindness, and on some nights she is certain it is not.

….

Red.

Crimson, scarlet, vermillion, carmine, ruby, cherry, rust, copper, cardinal, maroon. None of these words existed in Kryptonian.

But Krypton doesn't exist anymore either.

"Why red?" Alex asked once.

Kara picked up one end of the fabric between them.

Folded it in half. Folded it in half again.

Superman's cape is red. He chose it first. But he was a baby when he left. He doesn't remember the sun that made us.

She's jealous of that sometimes. Of his uncomplicated heroism.

His cape is just a cape.

He doesn't know what it feels like to drape yourself in your own ending and call it a beginning.

Kara didn't tell her any of that though.

….

Human blood is red because of iron. Kryptonian blood is red for the same reason.

She thinks about this more than she should.

….

It is after nine. The overhead lights are off; only the lamp, the city behind her through the window, and the green glow of the monitor she turned away from an hour ago and has not turned back toward.

"You didn't have to come."

"I know."

"I said I was fine."

"I know."

Kara sets the bag down on the edge of the desk. Thai, the place Lena likes, the one that stays open late. Lena looks at the bag.

"I'm not hungry."

"Okay."

"I'm not hungry. I ate the apple Jess gave me."

The apple is on a napkin at the edge of the desk. Well, half of it.

"I can see."

Lena takes a bite.

"How did you know I was still here."

"Lucky guess."

"You are a terrible liar."

"I know."

Lena smiles, almost. She pulls the bag toward herself. She does not open it.

Kara can see violet peaking out at the edges of her. She makes herself not look at it. She makes herself look at Lena's face, the small tired creases at the corner of her mouth, the place on her jaw where she has been pressing her fingers.

"I heard you."

Which means something different from what Lena thinks it means still.

The smell of lemongrass and basil and the sweet salt of the peanut sauce lifts into the room and Kara watches Lena's shoulders drop by a quarter of an inch. Lena takes out the container. Takes out the chopsticks. Takes out the second container, and the second pair of chopsticks, and raises her eyebrow as she looks up.

"I thought you might want company."

"I said I was fine."

"You did say that."

"Just eat your noodles."

Lena smiles and the violet deepens half a shade.

An unexpected bitterness hits Kara’s tongue before the food ever touches it.

No one talks about it. The feeling of loving someone for so long and so badly and so inadequately.

….

A lens does not produce light. A lens takes light that is already traveling, indifferent, and bends it into something that can be received.

The cornea is a lens. The lens behind it is a lens. Both of them refract. The vitreous humor between the lens and the retina is a third medium. By the time the light arrives at the back of the eye the reds have focused slightly behind the greens and the blues have focused slightly in front.

As far as they know, Aziraphale disappeared. Without warning. Without any word of goodbye. How does this affect the people around them?

How does it affect Maggie, who was suddenly left without her landlord (and all his other tenants)? The People of Soho who know Aziraphale as a well-meaning cryptid? The Bookshop that was a Soho Safe Space that the MAFIA has been trying to get for years? The restaurants that were always miraculously restocked and small diners that were kept in service because they were Aziraphale's favorites and he never let them lose business? Their friends?

And the only side they have as an explanation is Crowley's. And Crowley would probably drunken rant, and they would pity him, of course they would. And over time, it would be the only side they could hear. Without knowing Aziraphale's side, who would they believe in more? (Don't get me started on their reaction when Crowley starts spouting how 'this was not the first time Angel rejected me', or how Crowley would try so hard to stop ranting about Aziraphale, which would only make him seem guiltier).

Look back at the fandom's immediate initial reaction to the Last 15 Minutes. How instinctively people sided with poor Crowley. That is what's happening here, except without The Narrative to give us a meta commentary.

So when Aziraphale comes back to thwart the Second Coming, Crowley sighs and goes along because he gets it. He knows Aziraphale. He knows that Heaven is toxic, and Aziraphale is a victim. He's sad, but he gets it.

The humans don't.

Cancel culture is prevalent and does not care for your backstory.

And resentment brews deep in those who were abandoned.

And poor Muriel is trying so hard to explain what's going on, but we've seen how Heaven keeps its angels in the dark under the guise of Order. They won't have the clearance to provide any meaningful information and evidence to defend Aziraphale. If they could even contact him.

Instead, they're left on a Fully Populated Earth, overwhelmed. They're accompanied by a Sad Demon that she learns is the kindest demon ever. They're dealing with Angry Humans who are facing the consequences of Aziraphale's sudden disappearance.

They're dealing with the Mafia that is taking Aziraphale's absence as an opportunity to take that piece of land away. They're dealing with the HMRC (I believe this is the IRS in the UK) breathing down her neck and she never learned to do taxes (and they have always been suspicious of Aziraphale so it's worse now that he's disappeared).

(FYI these two things are canon in the Good Omens novel)

And so, as they acclimatizes to earth, they can't help but feel tired and resentful. They try so hard to smile at Aziraphale when he sees them, but it's dimmed with anger. Why did you leave me alone? Why do I have to deal with this? Are they right in what they say about you? Do you know how hard it is to smile when I can't defend you?

And then I talk about how All of Humanity is now the Second Coming.

Crowley asked questions, and fell.

Jesus asked "why, father, have you abandoned me?" and was left unanswered.

Now, it's the humans that ask. Why did you leave us? Why did you leave Crowley? Why should we forgive you?

Good Omens talks about sides. Heaven, Hell, and what Crowley and Aziraphale once referred to as Their Side. Humanity.

Ultimately, Aziraphale chose Heaven. He needs humanity's forgiveness, for abandoning their side.

Aziraphale twice now told Crowley "I forgive you." And it was never in a good context.

Crowley forgives. He doesn't say it outright, but he does.

But now, Aziraphale needs Crowley's forgiveness, he needs Crowley to say those dreadful words, for the sake of humanity.