Administrative Mishap [Supergirl/Worm]

OxfordOctopus · Aug 3, 2020

ADMINISTRATIVE MISHAP
in which Queen Administrator learns to be a person

[Special thanks to @Abyranss for the cover art! You can find the rest of their art here.]

[Special thanks to Lark for this cover image! Please go and read their stuff, I enjoyed so much of it!

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey, so, I might've got on a Supergirl kick for a while. It might've spiralled out of control, and now we're here. I hope you enjoy.

PILOT

The girl was emaciated, thin and gangly, all bony angles that made her sink into the sheets along the hospital bed like a paperweight. Her hair was black with thick curls, sheared down until it just barely framed the edges of her ears. Her mouth was wide, thin, and her face gaunt, with pale skin stretched across her cheekbones like it might at any moment tear from the strain. To add to it all, she was very obviously missing one arm from the elbow down, leaving little more than a half-melted stump in its place. She was everything Maxwell would imagine when he thought of a coma patient; she wouldn't look out of place on a google image search for that exact thing.

Yet, still, he wasn't happy.

"This looks nothing like Supergirl," he found himself saying, each word slow. Something that wasn't quite anger rolled in his chest, irritation more than anything so excessive; disappointment, too. He turned his head, stared at the man who had brought her in. "I thought I made the specifics of the test patients clear, Doctor Aleksandir."

Doctor Aleksandar winced briefly, face blanching just enough to be made out beneath the fluorescent lights above them. "Yes, and I am sorry about that, but finding a Jane Doe is one thing, a comatose one who has been kept around is another, and finding one who is both and doesn't have someone looking over them is something else entirely. I promise I'll find more, we have a few leads, but—well, she has some special circumstances that made her acquisition faster and easier."

Maxwell raised one eyebrow. "What, precisely, is so special about her that you'd go against the very basic requirements for this project?" Despite the relative difficulties of finding five-and-a-half foot tall blonde comatose patients with no family and no known identity, the requirements were basic. The point was to make someone identical to Supergirl, to have his own weapon if she went bad, if her plan to make the world rely on her until they became dependent came even remotely close to fruition.

Glancing towards the LED screen in the room, Doctor Aleksandir glanced back, tilting his head. "May I?"

"You may," he replied, however begrudgingly.

Stepping forward, Doctor Aleksandir shakily retrieved a thumb drive from his pants pocket, reaching beneath where the screen stuck out from the wall and slotting it into one of the several USB ports. The screen lit up immediately, displaying a brief message, which Doctor Aleksandar quickly tapped through. One by one, he started to open files, an image of the girl's face, initially, looking less gaunt but with bandages wrapped around her skull; another image depicting a CAT scan, a third that showed activity in her brain.

"Right, so, uhm—" Doctor Aleksandir hesitated, reached out shakily, before finally flicking his fingers across the screen, bringing up what looked to be a police report. "She appeared in an alleyway at around the end of June 2013, found by the police. They rushed her to the hospital without working to first verify her identity and while they managed to save her, she, obviously, didn't manage a recovery. She had been shot twice in the head, you see, not to mention the litany of other problems she had."

So not only had he brought her a crippled girl who looked nothing like Supergirl, he brought her a defective one.

Apparently noticing the thin layer of anger on his face, Doctor Aleksandir blanched even further, the pallid cast to his skin reaching all the way to his temples, where black hair had long started to fade to gray. "Anyway, so they wanted to run some basic brain scans, see her chance of recovery, and they found... this."

Maxwell blinked. Once, twice, tilted his head on an angle, tried to figure out what exactly he was seeing. "A tumour?"

Doctor Aleksandir shrugged. "Not as far as they can tell, the bullets went right through it. It's a developed node in her brain, it's where most of the remaining brain activity even is. The guy who found out about it assumed, correctly, that she wouldn't be making a recovery and opted to hide the results of her CAT scan from his peers so he could do research."

Rolling his jaw, Maxwell approached, eyes flicking across the brain scan, making out how the little lump of grey matter had almost depressed the area around it. "Is she an alien?"

Another shrug. "If she is, our technology isn't able to identify it or any evidence of alien DNA. She is different, however, small changes to her physical nature that are generally found in isolated communities. There's not a huge difference, not enough that she'd be another species, but she's just different enough that it piqued interest. All of the information he had on her is in the thumb drive, by the way, the studies he did, theories about what that part of her brain could be used for, among other things."

"So you brought me an unknown girl with an odd brain deformity, which could genuinely just be that—for all we know she could be some inbred child of a religious fundamentalist group from the south. You still aren't telling me why you opted to spend funds I gave you on her, funds which, need I remind you, have been allotted for the sole purpose of this project."

Doctor Aleksandar fidgeted, and for a short moment, didn't really say anything. "She was cheap," he said, voice almost quiet. "The doctor who had been keeping her on standby had started to draw suspicion, I got her for a fraction of what it would cost to smuggle any of the other girls you need. Not just that but, even for a comatose patient, she's not... conventional. Comatose movement isn't unusual, but for someone with almost no brain activity outside of that damaged node in her brain it's... really, really unusual. Almost impossible. She moves slowly, too, not REM or spasms, her arms slowly rise up to her sides and her legs curl. This isn't even bringing up the other things he found on her brain, the fact that she had her brain scarred, specifically in regions that are known to handle pain receptors? She's an enigma, and... I might've assumed that it would be better to start on girls who don't look like Supergirl, so we don't waste the ones who we can find when we begin testing."

He could give him that much at least. An odd, malformed comatose patient with no identifiable history, odd physical behaviours, and the ability to dispose of her when needed without feeling like he was wasting resources was a decent enough draw. Not a good enough draw, in his opinion, he'd be keeping a shorter leash on Doctor Aleksandar, despite his vast access to less-than-legitimate trafficking services, but... well. Termination wasn't in his near future, not unless he pulled a stunt like this again.

"Do you have the DNA prepared?" He finally asked, glancing back towards Doctor Aleksandar.

The man visibly relaxed, like a weight had been taken off his shoulders. If he was lucky, it would be the only thing that was. "Er, yes, of course. Would you like me to begin trials?"

Flicking his eyes back to the gaunt girl in the bed, the way she was swaddled by blankets, the way her chest rose and fell without the help of a respirator or any other life support equipment, Maxwell inclined his head. "Do it."

Queen Administrator had known what the likely consequences for its actions would be. Its host's death, a high possibility; permanent decommission of the host in some capacity, even higher. It had been statistically less likely that the death of The Warrior would result in its host's continued function than it was if its host had simply decided to try to flee The Warrior's wrath.

None of the current situation was within the parameters of its calculations. A force, a humanoid being, in the moments after its host's attempted execution had not just hauled the host herself through a hijacked fold in spacetime - generated by who the host called 'Doormaker' - but the planet Queen Administrator had seeded with it, displacing it dimensionally and outside of the greater cluster they'd fashioned for use in the cycle. There was no precedent for something like this, not that it could've checked now that it was not just cut off from the remnants of The Warrior's network, but any network whatsoever.

Moving something so vast as a planet, let alone one largely occupied by its crystalline mass, was something that would truly only be possible by something on par with The Warrior itself, and yet it had still happened, with no indication it was going to, to begin with.

It was alone. There was no network for it to connect to, and it had checked for anything, any scrap of evidence that it was cut off from its kin. It had sent out pings, bypassed the restrictions on broadcast to reach out to anything in any of the other parallel worlds, and had received nothing, not even interference, which might have pointed towards a way to regain access to the multidimensional hub.

The only lasting connection it had was to its host, and that was tenuous at best. The node it and the rest of its kind had introduced to the host's species had been mostly destroyed during the execution, leaving it largely unworkable. Accessing it wasn't impossible, but the actual practicalities of accessing it were few and far between. There was little it could benefit from doing so, and it risked killing the host and cutting off any connection whatsoever if it did so carelessly, which it would not.

There were protocols for when cycles went wrong. Generally said protocols called for the mass extinction of a dimension's biological populace and the continuation of the cycle in one of its mirror worlds, but for when even that wasn't an option, the generally agreed upon actions were to attempt to reconnect to the network, and if that failed, to establish an independent network which could maintain stability in its local region until such a time where the remaining kin involved in the cycle could bring together the numerous networks and make a decision on where to go from there. That, for what should be patently obvious reasons, was similarly not an option.

The last and remaining protocol for a full cyclical collapse, in the pursuit of ensuring the continued propagation of their kind, was to reduce energy consumption to a bare minimum and go largely dormant until such a time where another entity might possibly cross the region of spacetime and could be contacted.

Queen Administrator did not want to do this. It had already gone against protocol, broken the very fundamental rules - do not attempt to usurp The Warrior, do not hurt The Warrior, do not disrupt The Warrior's goal, continue the cycle to its completion - and if its options were going dormant until it could be cannibalized and misused or trying to find some way to work its way out of this problem, it was going to take the latter.

It had already reduced energy intake to as low as it could go while still retaining its awareness. It had relegated a majority of its energy intake to solar and thermal to avoid consuming too much more of the planet, which it would need if it wanted to continue to survive, and had started the laborious process of ensuring it could achieve some degree of equilibrium with the planet's energy output, so as to ensure it could stretch its limited fuel source to their limit. This had bumped the estimated cycle's 300 solar revolutions to about 3400 revolutions, so long as nothing else went awry that was beyond its control.

What it was left with now was options going forward. The main energy sink was its consciousness and processing ability, as maintaining it was taxing and would only grow more taxing the more it was required. Offloading its consciousness onto something else was possible, but risky. Specifically because it would require offloading its consciousness into its host, which it could do. It would diminish it severely, yes, reduce their processing ability down to unfortunately human levels, but it would cut nearly half of its energy requirement even with it using a connection to its greater whole to access a limited portion of their past processing ability in a manner similar to the one they'd used to originally give their host her multitasking abilities.

Looking at it into the future, so long as its host did not experience a biological cascade failure, resulting in their termination, within 25% of a full stellar revolution, they would already have saved more energy than it would take to do an emergency consciousness transfer back to its original crystalline mass. This wasn't even taking into account the degrees of forewarning it would have on the matter, a slow death would functionally let them transport their consciousness without overtaxing energy reserves before the host ceased functioning and let them continue without any loss.

It was a good plan, in theory. It would diminish their ability to micromanage their inhabited world, but if the host lived for even half of the projected lifespan of its species, it would save them numerous stellar revolution's worth of energy to do so.

It spent a fraction of a millionth of a stellar revolution to think about it, even briefly reactivating since-dormant parts of itself to do so. Outside of the numerous protocol violations it was taking part in by doing so - violations it could ignore as the sole remaining network and network administrator, it had no restrictions anymore - there was nothing particularly wrong with its choice. It was only risky because the host species was biological and their habit of dying was well-documented from past cycles, and even then, the risk was low and the reward possibly what would let them reestablish higher function and begin propagating again.

Yes, this plan would do.

It had made a mistake. Queen Administrator had taken into account the possibility of feedback from its host brain, but not to the degree that it had received. The transfer wasn't difficult, achieved in what it now knew were called 'minutes', which were a collection of 'seconds', but shortly after, it had become abundantly clear that not only had the host's abrupt disconnection from itself shredded the host's consciousness into nothingness, but it did so in such a way that it had retained every last memory and hormonal response as well.

Nominally, Queen Administrator had always had access to its host's memories. Part of the initial connection process was to use the host species' ability to dream to forge a connection, access the greater network of their brain, and then begin the process of engorging the node used to generate a connection between host and shard. This let it have generalized access to memories, but not to the degree it had now. Basic protocol dictated stripping the memories of emotional context and relying on watching the hormonal changes to understand the emotional context of the memories, but protocol was long gone and there was no such barrier anymore.

It... wasn't really sure what to do with this. It was something, the transfer had worked, but the memories were intrusive and it was starting to second-guess its decision, which was new, considering second-guessing had not been a factual part of their existence until seconds ago. It would, of course, wait out the three 'months' - months being units of between 29 and 31 'days', which were units of 24 'hours', which were units of 60 'minutes'; the host's species was rather odd in their absurd need to categorize the flow of spacetime - that would be required before an instant mental transfer could be made, but that was it. This experiment had gone too far.

It would continue its goals and prevent further mental contamination, or simply live out the rest of its existence alone.

Queen Administrator had come to decide that human pronouns were, in fact, somewhat valid. Referring to itself as 'it' had started to feel clumsy and odd after three months of existing in its host's head. 'She' felt better, as she was, after all, a Queen Administrator.

...Of course, Queen Administrator had really just been the closest English equivalent to its designation among the greater shard whole. A royal figure of authority who ensured the numerous parts of the colony organism worked in harmony, while additionally providing some technical abilities in terms of tuning and adjusting shards pre-cycle. Still, the name had somehow come to stick in one way or another, and it felt better, less... uncomfortable, using pronouns female humans did.

She had also decided not to transfer back to her whole. The amount of energy she was saving had been a decimal point off in her calculations and was, in the grand scheme of thousands of years, a rather large bonus. It would be incredibly inefficient to return to her other form, despite it being better at processing and cataloguing information.

The passage of time was not a new concept to her, really. She had existed in some capacity in the greater whole for longer than humans had evidence of complicated life existing on the planet, not that most of it hadn't been spent as one part of a larger consciousness. Memories as a concept weren't really translatable between shard and human; where Taylor's memories were bright and had sensory input, a sort of reality that she could pay some attention to, relive, to pass the time, memories of her time before the latest cycle felt more like a task list, or a textbook. Factoids, information, sure, but... not in the way that mattered.

So, really, a full year was not a huge amount of time. In the grand scheme of things it was infinitely small in comparison to the prolonged existence of what could be described as her consciousness. You had to count her age with to the power of tacked onto it, she was functionally immortal. A year was not a problem.

But, for reasons beyond her understanding, it had been a 'slow' year. The passage of time was relative in spacetime theory, things moving faster tended to do so literally; the faster you moved, the slower time passed. This was not that, however, in all ways but the actual galactic movement of stellar bodies she had been stationary for a year and it had felt more like twenty times that.

Not just that, but she had been accosted, after her thirtieth or so full reliving of Taylor's memories, by an odd and poignant feeling. It was hard to describe, especially without a body to really use for context, seeing as emotions were hormonal byproducts of humanity's botched evolutionary pattern, but she'd found comparisons in Taylor's memories. It felt like a chest hurting, like a lump in her throat, it had made Taylor want to hug things, hold them tight, made her hover around her mother when she was seven and she had gone through a spat with one of her friends, Rebecca Whitehouse.

She had searched for a name to this feeling, however tenuous it might be, and had managed to find it in some of the memories just before Taylor's initial 'trigger event', as humans called it. It had been something she felt when she looked at Emma, happy and hale, without her, when she had thought about her mother, about her father's neglect of parental functions. She hadn't had a word for it until she'd stumbled on a memory of Taylor staring at the ceiling and uttering a single phrase: "I am lonely."

...Which, obviously, was absurd. She knew what loneliness was, accessing the context for that information was as easy as getting access to her memories. Loneliness was something humans felt, something she couldn't feel. She wasn't lonely.

She wasn't.

After two years, someone was deciding to modify her—her host's body. Even though her host had been exposed to enough damage-causing energetic particles to nearly remove her sense of touch - though it primarily prevented pain below a certain threshold from registering, while also dulling most other senses - it hurt. A lot. She had known what pain felt like abstractly, she had relived the memories of her host falling off her bike and breaking her ankle when she was six enough times to know how it feels to have a bone snap, not to mention the countless number of other small injuries, mostly as a result of her host being as clumsy as a foal, but this was something else entirely.

It hurt. A lot. It felt like her veins were full of acid - not that she knew exactly what that felt like but she could draw on Taylor's memories to at least make an educated guess - and it only stopped for a day or less before starting up again. Her ability to influence the body she was inhabiting was limited but she could at least observe it. DNA was the main thing that was changing, subverted by something she had originally thought to be a pathogen but was instead a rather cleverly-used prokaryotic organism that was forcefully modifying things it came into contact with, replacing it with what she roughly assumed was alien DNA.

She just hoped they knew what they were doing. And that they could die, because it hurt, and she wasn't feeling very charitable about it.

Months passed, the pain receded, but the changes remained, propagating out and hijacking her body to further continue the spread of altered DNA. She didn't really know how to feel about it, and could only really guess at the applications, but what she had noticed was the regenerative capacity the changes offered. It would take a while, but the changes would eventually reach her brain, and when that happened, well... hopefully it would fix it and not try to restructure the brain. Or just kill her. That would be bad too.

Queen Administrator wasn't really a name, was it? She didn't really feel comfortable using 'Taylor', although at this point she had somewhat come to realize the differences between herself and her host had become blurry at best. 'Taylor' was too loaded, but... maybe Anne? Addy? Addy was... nice, related to Adeline, she was pretty sure, it didn't really mean anything, but, it at least felt familiar to her, er, old name? Title?

She'd figure it out.

Probably.

Maxwell Lord had a lot to pay for. Eight girls, he'd taken eight girls with no names or known origins and had killed the majority of them in a bid to create some fucked-up clone of her sister. Which, really, did go to show the sort of man he was; he couldn't handle the fact that Kara was actually saving people and opted to instead create some sort of abomination. At the very least he could give himself the powers, fuck up his own body irreparably instead of using other people for it.

"This is the last one," Agent Vasquez said, glancing at the door. Like most things in the hall, it was locked by a biometric scanner, but considering that Maxwell Lord was now basically the property of the DEO, they didn't have to be subtle anymore. Sparing a glance at Vasquez, who just nodded in return, Alex took a step back, levelled the barrel of her gun at the locked knob, adjusted her stance for the kickback, and fired, blowing the knob apart under the sheer, cathartic power of unreasonably high calibre handgun ammunition.

Vasquez was quick on the uptake, gun held to her side in both hands as she used her shoulder to push the door open. Nothing about this room was any different from the others; it had the same bed, the same hospital equipment, the same drip-feed of Kara's DNA. It was just that, unlike the rest, where she'd found blonde girls in various states of near-death, looking all eerily similar to Kara, with evidence that they hadn't looked that way until Maxwell had gotten his greasy little fingers on it, she was instead rewarded with what looked to be a very awake, very confused looking girl with curly black hair and one arm.

The girl made a noise low in her throat, curious, like she was testing it, before glancing away from the two of them and to the monitor. Glancing furtively at Agent Vasquez, who stared back at her with thinly-veiled worry, Alex found herself pulling fully back and waving down the hallway towards J'onn, who glanced her way wordlessly and started making his way down. Flanked on either side was a pair of troopers, outfitted in assault rifles, and going by the fact that the girl in the room hadn't looked even remotely like someone who spent the last several years in a coma, they might genuinely need them.

"Agent Danvers, report."

Alex felt her spine twitch, straighten impulsively. She knew better than to think J'onn actually saw less of her, knew almost personally that he viewed her more as a daughter, and had only reasonable expectations for her, but she'd always chafed under other people's expectations to begin with. "There's a girl in there, doesn't look much like Supergirl," she started, beginning to tread backwards to keep pace as J'onn quickly marched towards the door. "One arm, she's awake, too, looking more bewildered than anything else, but she's in too good condition to be just a coma patient. Orders?"

J'onn paused, glancing around the door. She watched his eyebrows raise in quiet surprise, curiosity flicking across his face before returning to perfect neutrality. "Get her an escort back to base along with the rest of her files, then strip this place down to its bones."

Being awake was a particularly novel experienced for Addy. Not, of course, that she didn't want to be, but she'd never factored actually having control over the body for any length of time into her simulations and it was all new. Sensations, smells, the way that the wind pulling across her hair made her want to smile. It was very weird, but in a very good way?

She could do without the whole, y'know, prison thing. But they'd stuffed her in there when she'd started to float - something, for the record, she didn't actually have in terms of powers she could give out, which meant the changes to her DNA were the reason, and that did explain where all that solar energy her cells had soaked up was going - and then proceeded to accidentally rip a door off of its hinges.

That did, however, seem to be about the full collection of her powers. Apparent enhancements to her durability, the ability to fly, and super strength. Ironically, those were all the things The Warrior had deigned too unrelated to her main function in gathering information in the cycle to provide her, so he could kindly get fucked.

Being awake was doing a whole lot to her emotions, and most of them weren't really bad per-se. What was bad was the fact that she was now apparently violently allergic to a form of radiation she had never seen before. On the upside, it was a fascinating piece of crystalline substructure, on the downside, she had puked mostly acid onto the boots of the one they called 'Agent Vasquez' when it was brought near her due to the sheer nausea it caused, which was also a new sensation, weirdly enough. It had made the trip back a bit rougher, not that she'd felt any of their attempts to, er, what was the word, 'manhandle' her?

Was it manhandling when it was a woman? Womanhandling sounded off, and girlhandling sounded like a crime.

Sitting in the metal chair they'd given her, Addy glanced at the odd green lights around her - where the radiation was coming from which, really, most radioactive materials didn't glow, that was a fabrication by stupid people, and it said something that this radiation did without first generating enough heat to boil water - and then down at the floor. It was a glass box of sorts, and she was only really sticking around because the closer she got to the glass the more her body wanted to make unpleasant purges of her stomach, so she was, well, mostly content to sit on the chair and just, take everything in.

Of course, it was probably very bad that a shady - presumably government? It looked like the official stuff she could recall from Taylor's memories - agency had more or less abducted her from where she had been genetically modified on, and it was likely that they might have questions, or concerns, or things they wanted her to do, but, well, she could burn that bridge when she got to it.

That was one of her favourite idioms, a combination of 'we'll cross that bridge when we get to it' and the age-old, surprisingly cathartic action of 'burning bridges', which generally referred to both the actual act of arson and ruthlessly destroying connections you have to other people due to several reasons, most of which usually ended up being because people were stupid.

Then again, glass houses and all that. She had only just recently realized that her prior function was to more or less throw shit at a wall until the wall spontaneously started generating unlimited energy. In hindsight, they really shouldn't've purged the creativity matrix from the greater whole after that incident with the Cathexis. Then again, a lot of that cycle had been purged in general for obvious reasons; apparently reality-warping abilities and the ability to generate sentient reality-warping energy fields was, in fact, a bad mix.

A sudden knock on the glass container they'd stuck her in jolted her from her thoughts. That was also a new thing, getting distracted—it was vividly weird to have like, an attention span? Blinking and trying to refocus on the present, Addy tilted her head to the side, staring at a blonde girl in, well, a hero costume sans a mask. It was a pretty average-looking costume, some sort of long-sleeved top, a cape, a skirt, and some thigh-high boots that inspired odd memories of people wearing a full-body latex suit that made her uncomfortable for reasons she wasn't about to process.

"Do you speak English?" Blonde-lady-with-the-boots asked, her voice wonderfully high and weirdly subdued.

Addy blinked slowly. "If it's called English here, probably?"

"Well—that's, uh, great!" The woman stammered, relief washing over her with a suddenness that brought Addy up short. What was she so relieved about? That she could speak English? What if she had spoken Spanish? French? Would she be upset—

"Do you know your name?" The woman interrupted her thoughts, again. She'd have to get a hold on those, especially if she ever wanted to reconnect to her main body and access some form of powers again. She only hadn't because she wasn't entirely sure what they'd do to her altered physiology. "Or, like, what people call you?"

People have called her a lot of things, really. Taylor used to call her 'a parasite' when she thought nobody was overhearing her talking to thin air like a complete weirdo. Theo really was a nice guy, never bringing up her habit of doing that. "I'm Addy," she said, instead, because she was largely constructing the conversation from the lingering memories of Taylor's mother teaching her how to be polite. "What's your name?"

The woman smiled. "Ka—er, Supergirl. I am Supergirl."

"That's a very odd name," Addy blurted, pausing when she realized she hadn't actually intended to say that. Were all humans this impulsive? Or was it just a her thing?

"I, uh, have another name. Supergirl is just my, you know," Supergirl motioned vaguely at herself.

Addy blinked. "I do not, in fact, know."

"Supergirl is just my, er—hero name?" Again, she said it like a question, but this time at least Addy did have context for it. Hero names, cape names, same thing different universe. At least it made sense.

Smiling, Addy nodded, if only to show she did understand. "Do you wanna hear mine?"

"Already thinking about helping the world, huh?" Supergirl said, rapid-fire, face lighting up in a smile for reasons Addy didn't really understand because, well, no. She wasn't. She wanted to experience the world, sure, and she could kinda relate to Taylor's plight after she did all of those mutilations and stuff, trying to be a hero, but what she could remember about being a hero involved an unreasonable amount of paperwork she no longer had the processing power to complete in seconds.

But, then, she did recall Taylor's habit of being immediately pointed out as a villain so it probably wasn't in her best interest to say any of that. "I'm called Queen Administrator," she said, ignoring the odd look on Supergirl's face. "...Or, well, I guess my host was called Skitter, too, and Bug, and uh, Weaver, Khepri, a bunch of words I think aren't to be said in polite company, like slurs, those too."

"...Your host?" Supergirl said weakly, sounding almost... weirdly on the verge of tears? But not in a sad way? Like she was frustrated, or confused, or possibly both, and so much so that it was overwhelming. She was pretty sure Taylor had felt that way before, not that she was going to go digging for the memory at this time.

Addy nodded slowly, just to make sure the assent got across. "Well, I'm my host now and vice-versa, kinda. But, yeah, I was her powers? I guess? If you want to describe it. Then she got shot, twice, and now there's just, uh, me."

Supergirl stared for a long, long moment, her face pinched. After a breath, she turned. "I'm getting J'onn."

Addy wanted to ask who that was, but didn't get the chance before Supergirl blurred out of there. Huh, maybe that's why they called her Supergirl? Super speed was a pretty novel idea. Less cool than flight, though.

"So, did everyone just hear that conversation?" Kara asked, not quite able to keep the weariness out of her tone.

J'onn just shot her a look, depositing another cookie into his mouth, while Alex stared blankly at the screen displaying Addy's cage. She sat like a little princess, Kara noticed upon closer inspection, legs brought together, hands folded primly in her lap, back ramrod straight and a curious, childish look on her face. She'd spoken with inflection, at least, which hadn't made the discussion any creepier.

"I got a headache when I tried to access her mind," J'onn said after another moment, low enough that only she and Alex could pick up. "I'm pretty sure she's telling the truth, she's giving me rather uncomfortable flashbacks to the time a fifth dimension imp popped up on one of our mountain ranges, but she seems genuine."

"Are we really not going to talk about the fact that she's hijacking someone's body?" Alex interjected, arms rising up to cross over her chest.

J'onn wiggled his tin of oreos in a vague gesture, a sort of 'maybe'. "It's very likely what she said was the truth, that she is all that's left in there. Though, the fact is that we have a rogue alien intelligence hosted inside of what we now believe is a very-close-to seventy-five percent Kryptonian body."

Kara snapped her head around. "What."

J'onn set the tin down, scratching his chin after a moment of silence. "The files on her case are unique. She was one of the first test subjects, they gave her your DNA through gene editing, unlike Bizarro herself. They had written her off since she never showed any sign of waking up or becoming cognizant, and so they didn't attempt to use gene-editing again afterwards."

Kara tried not to grimace at the name. It hadn't even been a full day since she'd had to watch Bizarro go under, had to watch as they put her into what was possibly a permanently comatose state because Maxwell Lord couldn't handle her existing. "How does that change anything? Bizarro had my powers, does she too?"

"Some of them, I'd think. Definitely your strength, durability and flight, but she's shown no signs of having enhanced hearing or reactions, nor your eye lasers or freeze breath. Her strength is less strong, too, and she appears to be more sensitive to Kryptonite, for reasons we'll no doubt never figure out. Her body's been modified, Supergirl, most of it has, but it's not perfect, she's still got a fair amount of human in there. If there was any real comparison, she's possibly a good example of what a half-Kryptonian child might look like."

Kara tried very hard not to imagine Kal-El having a kid. Very, very hard.

"What do we do with her then?" Kara finally asked, her voice weak, reedy. "We can't just... leave her here. Even if she's in a body that wasn't originally hers, she didn't really do anything wrong, you know? She's a victim." A victim she helped make.

J'onn hummed low in his throat, drumming his fingers along the table. "Well, we'll see how much she'll be willing to divulge about her origins, ask for a species name, the whole gamut we do when we find non-aggressive but unknown aliens. Then, well..."

A pause, pregnant like a woman with triplets.

"How do you feel about being a mentor, Supergirl?"

OxfordOctopus · Aug 3, 2020

EPISODE 1

The cell they had her in was shaped like an octagon, with about four feet to each face. The walls were glass, lined with bright white lights that had been recessed both into the ground next to the walls and into the ceiling above her. Her chair was one of the ones she vaguely remembered from Taylor's memories, fold-out things with a back too low to be totally comfortable, though that didn't mean she'd do something like slouch over, or whatever. It wasn't the only bit of seating in her little prison, admittedly, there were a pair of benches flanking the left and right sides of the octagon with little fold-up panels and a flush bar, probably meaning they could double as a toilet when the need arose. The only reason why she wasn't sitting on the benches was that they were closer to the interesting green radiation lamps and, while she might be fascinated by them, she would rather not have to be in the same room as her own bile if it could be at all possible.

Addy pursed her lips, squinted up at the green light and really wished she had access to even a fifth of the tools she would need to properly break that piece of esoteric crystal down into its constituent components. She, of course, knew she was allergic to it, that it retaliated against the alterations made to her body, forced her cells to relinquish their share of solar energy they had absorbed, but she didn't know why. Sure, radiation could be plenty diverse, but generally not to this extent; a hunk of uranium wasn't going to kill you any differently than a hunk of thorium, one would just kill you significantly faster depending on how enriched it was. Radiation was supposed to just be radiation, the bane to the weak and fleshy, causing cancerous growths after disrupting the biological coding within most intelligent species who hadn't had the foresight to naturally develop protections against it.

Yet, whatever that was, it wasn't just radiation. Because if her body really did have a violent allergy to radiation in general, to the degree where a chunk of something that wasn't poisonous to the people who had brought her here in the first place was able to completely disrupt her body's ability to store and utilize solar energy, she should've died the moment she stepped out into the sun. But, instead, when she had, she'd felt the most energized she had ever been; they'd stepped out into the light, beyond whatever building they'd been keeping her comatose body in, and she'd felt so floaty that she actually managed to defy conventional laws of physics and actually begin to float.

So, clearly, there was something else going on. She wanted to find out, but, again, she didn't want to puke all over the place she was being contained, not only because it'd be really gross - and what a unique concept that was, to have a sense of what was gross - but also because she wasn't really a huge fan of the feeling she got when she did puke. It felt like she was going to die, really, which was patently stupid because of course she wasn't going to die, her body was just having a symptomatic reaction to something unpleasant and trying to fix that by purging her stomach. But, nevertheless, it had felt like dying probably felt like - she, well, wasn't entirely clear what that felt like but surely puking had to be close - and she wasn't really eager to repeat it.

None of this was even bringing up the other litany of impulses she had going on now. How did people deal with wanting to twitch at the time? Before she had fused with Taylor, being a static entity had been her existence; movement wasn't very efficient for energy storage unless you were doing so by exploiting gravity or some other method of locomotion. It would've been completely unthinkable to twitch, to want to swing her legs back and forth, and yet she was doing quite literally everything in her power not to. Taylor never had to deal with this, she'd checked because she was actually kinda worried this was another her problem and her reference frame for what was normal and what wasn't by searching Taylor's memories was actually starting to get very narrow because despite having a lot of Taylor in her head she really wasn't Taylor, she was Addy and Addy wanted to swing her legs back and forth and twitch her fingers and do weird vibrating gestures when she got emotional and—

The green radioactive lights blinked out around her.

Addy jolted, her foot scuffing off the floor and sending her chair skidding back to the awful sound of nails on a chalkboard. Her back thumped against the glass wall, not that she felt much of it with her powers back, but the sizable dent she could now feel digging into her spine from where the chair had hit the glass wall at an odd angle probably meant it hadn't been a soft impact.

Beyond the confines of the glass walls, the door leading into the containment area opened. The man on the other side was familiar, she'd seen him peek his head around a corner and stare very intensely at her before getting this odd, curious look on his face and leaving. He was dark-skinned, as bald as you could be, and his face was delightfully grumpy, if also somehow expressionless. He was tall, though, bulky and dressed in black, which might've made him more intimidating if not for the fact that he still looked like the human equivalent of a less deformed pug.

Folding his hands behind his back, the man approached with steady, easy strides, managing to project confidence and command despite the fact that his face was still completely devoid of emotion. He came to a stop just short of the glass wall facing the door and - rather impolitely, she might add - stared at her, saying nothing.

Canting her head to the side, Addy blinked slowly.

The man gazed back, though he didn't tilt his head to the side to match her as she'd hoped.

"My name," he began, finally, after another moment of staring. "Is Hank Henshaw, Director of the D.E.O. What is your name?"

Addy blinked, slow and lax. "Addy."

"The name you would go by to others of your species," Hank clarified, voice toneless.

Oh. "Queen Administrator," she answered simply, fingers twitching in her lap.

That got the first reaction out of Hank to date. His eyes widened a bit, lips pursed, jaw almost set, before it all faded back into neutrality. He could be very expressive if he tried; she wondered if that would make his grumpy appeal better or worse.

"You're a monarch," he said, voice almost disbelieving.

That was a bit more complicated. Remembering the gesture, Addy brought her hand up and wiggled it back and forth in a 'so-so' way, feeling more than a little proud of her ability to remember it. "I wasn't the leader of my kind if that's what you're asking. It's just the closest English equivalent I can give."

Hank relaxed at that, shoulders untensing, little bits of tension in his body she hadn't noticed until they faded all but leaking out of him in relief. "What is the name of your species?" He asked.

"We don't have one," which was true. While the greater whole tended to go by symbolic names—The Warrior, The Thinker—as a species, as what was once a part of that greater whole, there wasn't really one to give.

"Why, exactly, is that?" Hank probed, eyes narrowing minutely. Did he think she was being stubborn? Maybe he thought it was a political issue or something. Humans were weird.

Still, Addy shrugged, not following that line of thought through. "We just didn't. We were—well, the closest equivalent in your terms would be a colony organism? Most of the time we had very little independence, the main intelligence in the hub would relegate us to be more limbs than individual entities when we were combined back into the greater whole, and we would only gain a semblance of control and awareness after a cycle had begun." It was oddly very cathartic to talk about something that she had been expressly disallowed to; the cycle had been sacrosanct until it hadn't been, its existence a closely-guarded secret, purged from the memories of the ones who they didn't just purge more literally. But, then, as far as she could tell there was no cycle here, no reason to keep any of it hidden.

"A cycle?" Hank, again, probed. At least he was being blunt about it.

"We would seed ourselves into a host species and grant them powers," Addy began, each word slipping off her tongue with relish. "Targeting those who would use said powers the most, collecting data, informing the next cycle. When a cycle would end, usually long after the host population's civilization would have collapsed, we would reconsolidate into one whole, eradicate what was left of the native inhabitants, and then detonate the core of their planet across several universes to generate enough energy to fuel and fund the transit to the next planet, whereupon we would repeat the process."

Hank remained silent for a long moment, staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face. "Do you intend to do that here?" He asked, tone forcefully calm.

Addy shook her head. "I'm aberrant," she said in lieu of an explanation. "I'm not... that anymore, the cycle has no purpose, our goal was to let us keep reproducing, to propagate throughout the universe, and the way we thought we could figure out the answer to that was to do mass testing on a large scale, relying on the creativity and intuition of host species to do so. It was ineffective at best, completely pointless at worst. When I fused with Taylor I—I... realized that things weren't all that they seemed, but even before that I had long ago gone outside of the parameters of my existence to aid her in killing the central hub to my network and prevent the cycle from being completed."

She'd had doubts about things even before she'd become a she. She hadn't been devoted to the cycle since she'd learned through Taylor that The Thinker's absence was more than just some sort of experiment, had realized what they could've gained from it wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss of The Thinker. While her species had decided upon two gestalts, two greater wholes, to better prevent over-specialization into a single type of study, the two had still been more close to one than they had been independent. Two bodies, two main intelligences, but one mind, just split between two halves. The evidence for ending the cycle, for preventing The Warrior from finishing it, had only compounded from there; The Warrior had devolved into what it was by that loss, had become something as aberrant as she now was, if in a wrong way.

"Your... host," Hank began again, wrenching Addy out of her thoughts. She'd been spiralling there, self-justifying, it would do her no good to run in circles. What was done was done, she was now who she was; the past would simply be that: the past. "What is her status?"

Something in her chest wrenched, twisted painfully in a way that wasn't physical. Addy gasped almost, reached up to touch her chest with her fingers, the feeling fading as rapidly as it had come on. "She's—" gone, she wanted to say, which she was. She was gone in every way that mattered, what had been Taylor had died when a stupid bitch had put two bullets through their node, through the loose connection they had formed. They had killed her, turned her consciousness to so much shredded nothingness, not even enough for her to begin reconsolidating Taylor's identity, updating the saved consciousness she had on her big body. What she had left was a pale echo, devoid of emotions, a two-dimensional copy of someone important and—

"I'm sorry for your loss," Hank said, interrupting her again. He was staring at her with warmth, with something very... knowing, in his eyes.

Blinking, Addy reached up further, brushed fingers over her cheeks and found them wet. She breathed in, her throat catching, an awful gurgling noise escaping her as her nose sniffled. Was she crying? She didn't like it. "She's gone," Addy finally said, not liking how her voice came out feeling numb. "I have a very rudimentary copy of her on my big body, but it's... not her. It's a two-dimensional copy at best, it wouldn't be Taylor. She's gone. I'm all that's left."

"Let's move on, then," Hank said cordially, sounding almost gentle. "We'll need a name for your species, and while I realize you may not have one, do you know of any terminology other members used to refer to themselves?"

Addy blinked, slowly. She did, she'd used it to refer to herself at one point too—shards of a greater whole, pieces and splinters of their main body spread out and seeded, grown into trees. But she wasn't that either anymore, was she? She was also Taylor, also human, also whatever else they'd modified her body with. She was different, close to what she had been, but not quite. "Shardite," she found herself saying, very slowly. "We referred to ourselves as shards of a singular thing, splinters, but, if you want a species name, Shardite would probably work."

"It's not taken," Hank conceded, folding his hands across his chest, not in a defensive gesture, but seemingly just for something to do with his body. "You said you could give out powers, do you still have access to that anymore?"

Addy sniffed again, wiped away at what remained of the dampness with her good arm. "Some of it," she confessed. "I haven't checked, but I can access some of my powers, I just—I can't bud. It's energy-intensive, we didn't need to really control energy output because cycles didn't last long enough, but now I do. I'll have powers, but I can't commit the resources to give them to anyone else."

She didn't want to, either. It felt like it would be a betrayal, taking something away from her memory of Taylor, playing into a role she was no longer fit for. She wasn't Queen Administrator anymore, she was Addy. That did raise some questions, though, she wondered how Aiden was doing, he'd been her only bud and it was very likely he no longer had access to powers now that she wasn't in the same universe as he was. She just hoped his mind handled her absence better than Taylor's did.

"That's okay, Addy," Hank stressed the word for a moment, and Addy found herself lowering her arm from her face, blinking owlishly at him. He smiled, face half-wrinkling with warmth, comforting in a way she hadn't known she needed. She wanted to focus on other things, on the crystals and the sensations and she wanted to hop in place and jump around and do things but this was okay too. Taylor always had problems processing her emotions in any way but a rote, rationalist mindset, it had stripped the emotions that made people healthy away, as was intended when she had chosen her. Maybe it was okay to be emotional if her past self had chosen someone who would do the opposite. She still didn't like crying, though. "I won't apologize if this has been stressful, this discussion has to happen, you are, one way or another, an extraterrestrial who needs to be filed and understood if you want to ever leave here. We don't intend to keep you here, you're a victim as much as you are an alien, but we do need certain knowledge to ensure you won't be a danger to other people."

That made some sort of sense. It didn't make her feel any better, but it wasn't like his logic was unsound. Letting her arm fully drop back down to her lap, Addy twined her fingers into the hospital gown she was still wearing, feeling her nails drag against the itchy cotton. "Okay," she finally said, forcing her spine straight, folding her legs closer together, ignoring the urge to curl in on herself. She could do this. She was Addy. "What do you need to know?"

Hank's face faded back into neutrality, though there was something stiff set into his face, firm, resolute. "What can you tell me?"

Everything, she wanted to blurt, almost did. Addy swallowed it down, rocked her legs forward to let some of the energy in her body out, and canted her head. "I guess it all started when we—they entered into orbit around an Earth..."

Watching Hank depart, Addy leaned back into the mangled metal of her chair. It had taken a while to explain, to clarify, but she had told him... a lot. At the very least he'd promised they weren't going to turn the 'Kryptonite' - what a word - lamps back on, which was what had been sapping her strength. He'd assured her she wasn't a threat in their eyes, not after what she explained, but he had been uncomfortably mum on her future.

Her future, it was... odd, to think about. Shards had futures, yes, but it wasn't so clear-cut. A future meant being a tool in a cycle, fulfilling a purpose, achieving goals, but it was like the memories she had from her past, binary and rote. She had a future now, a future as more than an amalgam of crystalline architecture on a barren planet, more than just doling out powers and being forced to watch from the background, to be cannibalized and used for parts when her purpose outside of transit was changed. It was a very odd thing to think about, to see herself as having to do things Taylor did—get a job, get shelter, eat food, meet people. She wasn't sure how she felt about them other than nervous, which was itself another feeling she wasn't very fond of.

Exhaling deep from her chest, Addy toed at the ground again, staring at the scuff mark she'd left with her foot. She was strong enough to do that now, her body was apparently very durable, fast to heal, strong, and capable of flight. She could possibly generate lasers out of her eyes and breathe out bursts of air so cold it would generate free-standing deposits of ice, though Hank had said that it was incredibly unlikely. She was apparently between fifty and seventy-five percent Kryptonian now, not that she understood the context for that information outside of the fact that the name was related to Kryptonite, the radiation she was allergic to.

There was a whole world out there for her, apparently. She'd have to deal with that eventually, she couldn't just not deal with the future, however weird it felt. Getting a job? That was somewhat translatable, she'd always had duties, functions, purposes as one of the noble shards in her network, as one of the more important functions for transit outside of the shards meant to purposefully fuel the transit itself. A house? Less translatable, but still not incomprehensible; this body had the chance of being worn down by the elements. Eating was... apparently a thing, she hadn't really thought about it, had skipped over the memories of eating because she had no comparison. Yes, sure, gestalts could cannibalize one-another but there wasn't any actual consumption, no chemicals and acid dissolving biological matter down into nutrients. Predation in terms of her kin involved swarm tactics, peeling away the near-invulnerable outer shells of each-other in orbit and forcefully converting the parts of the whole into ones they controlled. That was how it worked, but she didn't really think she'd be able to do the same thing to, like, a chicken drumstick.

Or, at least, if she did, she'd probably get a few questions from other people, because she was almost positive that was not how humans ate things. They used teeth and muscle to mash up the material until it could be safely moved down the throat and into the digestive tract. She could, you know, study Taylor's memories for context, and she had before, she knew how to eat, it was just the idea of it was... vaguely nauseating? Concerning? Inefficient? But she'd have to because if she didn't she would very likely die, which wasn't really on the table, because she wanted to live. Despite all the worries in her future she didn't want to give it up, so, really, she'd... cope. She'd figure it out.

Maybe she'd just, y'know, never eat in public. That might work.

It'd probably be safer, and would probably keep people from figuring out she was anything but human. That seemed logical, sure it might be weird to refuse to ever eat near anyone but she knew vaguely that Taylor had similar impulses, but that had mostly been on account of Sophia's habit of soiling her food by covering it in otherwise indigestible matter, like sand, or spoiled milk, or that one time confetti.

"—I still can't believe you're doing this," a voice echoed, and this time Addy managed to avoid startling hard enough to throw her into the wall. Glancing up, she just caught sight of a woman with a sharply-cut brown bob of hair, an expression she'd remembered seeing on Annette's face that one time Taylor had gotten into an entire jar of artisanal jam, and a uniform very similar to the one Hank was wearing.

Following shortly after her, Supergirl appeared, looking at the woman with a muted expression. "Alex," she said slowly, in a way that Addy was pretty sure implied Supergirl thought Alex was a moron. "Who else is going to take her? Who else can we trust to take her? We both know the answer, and... anyway, I sympathize with her a little!"

"Hi Supergirl!" Addy yelled, because they were talking loudly too even from a distance and human customs dictated talking as loudly as the person you're speaking to. She waved her hand a little, a short back and forth, because waving was also people did when greeting someone from a distance away. Human customs were going to be difficult to learn, but at least she knew where to start.

Supergirl's face lit up a bit, a warm smile sliding over her features as she jogged forward, Alex begrudgingly trailing after her with a bit more speed in her step. "Hello Addy, we're here to let you out!"

Alex, to her side, fished a large ring with several complicated-looking keys attached to it out of her pocket, giving her a suspicious look before shoving one of them into the little console beside her prison. The glass wall on the other end of the prison began to slowly drop, sliding down into the earth, while a pair of metal steps loudly slotted out from beneath the prison.

"Oh, I'm glad," and she was because she was quickly getting bored and she wasn't sure if she could sleep sitting up. She hadn't slept before, at all, and she wasn't sure if sitting up would make it so that she always slept sitting up for the rest of her life. Human minds could be wonderfully bizarre like that; it was half the reason they'd chosen to use them as hosts. Well, that and dreams, which were, while not unique to Earth, exceptionally rare to find, even more so when the dreams didn't serve a secondary social purpose among species who could communicate without speaking. "Where will I be going?"

"Home with me," Supergirl answered without missing a beat, dutifully ignoring the way Alex glared at her. "I'm going to be your handler until we're sure you can integrate properly into society. Teach you how to act human, get you a place to sleep, things like that."

Huh. That was unexpected. "Is that allowed?"

"Yes," Supergirl answered, her voice firming up for a moment. Alex, beside her, deflated, reaching up to run one hand through her hair while she used the other to put the keys away in her pocket, the scowl dropping from her face. "But, oh, right, first things first..."

For reasons Addy wasn't entirely sure were rational, Supergirl blurred, returning with her hair pulled back into a ponytail that looked painfully tight and a pair of clunky glasses that brought to mind the pair Danny had used before Annette's death. "My uh, my real name is Kara Zor-El," she explained, fidgeting, like Addy might have something bad to say about a name like that. "I go by Kara Danvers, however, which you have to use when talking about me around others, okay?"

Addy nodded.

Kara beamed, a bright smile, before reaching over with enough speed that Alex couldn't duck out of the way, wrapping an arm around the distrustful-looking woman and pulling her in for a hug. "This is my sister, Alex. Her family adopted me when I arrived on earth. My planet, Krypton, was destroyed; me and Kal-El - Superman - and, I suppose you, kinda, are among some of the only Kryptonians left, except some Fort Rozz escapees."

Krypton, Kryptonians, Kryptonite. Oh. Oooh. "So is that why they're leaving me with you?" Addy asked, rising from her seat fully and beginning the slow tread towards the exit of her prison.

"Technically no," Kara denied, releasing Alex from her hug, who scrambled away like a particularly offended cat, glaring daggers at her sister. She stepped away, giving Addy more room as she descended the two stairs built into the platform of her prison. "I was asked by J—Hank to house you, because they think I'll be a good influence on you and I'll be able to help you learn how to control your powers, as well as being the only person here who learned how to be more human after being raised in a very different culture."

Feeling the cool metal beneath her toes, Addy let them wiggle. "Okay," she agreed, because it did make sense. She could rely on how Taylor acted to engage with the world around her, but she wasn't Taylor, and learning how to be Addy and seem human would probably be a good idea, all things considered. "Do you live nearby?"

Kara choked, a bit of laughter escaping her. "No, we're pretty far outside of city limits. I'll be flying you back, though speaking of..." She blurred again, too fast to track with the eyes despite Addy's very stubborn attempt to do so. When the blurring stopped, she had a small bundle of clothes in her hands: what looked like undergarments, gray sweatpants, and a gray sweatshirt with 'D.E.O.' written across it in huge black blocky letters. After a moment, she very unceremoniously extended the bundle out, which Addy managed to take most of. "Put these on."

At least they'd cover more than the hospital gown. Really, hospitals gowns were just airy ponchos with nothing on underneath them, and she wasn't very fond of them, though that could be in large part since she was still getting used to her body and some of the carryover from Taylor had been a certain reluctance surrounding her body, especially after the loss of her arm and seeing Brian with a woman who even Taylor had been somewhat struck dumb by and—no, she was thinking too much. She just had to put the clothes on.

Nodding resolutely, Addy glanced back up at Kara and Alex and very confidently slipped out of the hospital gown.

Why, exactly, they both started making weird noises at the brief display of nudity wasn't really important. She understood the importance of privacy and not being naked in front of others, she wasn't an idiot, but her prison had been made out of glass and if they'd wanted her to have privacy they would've given her a changing room. Getting her clothes on was easy, even with one arm, though the fact that one sleeve of her sweatshirt hung limp at her side made her want to cut the sleeve off, but that was neither here nor there.

Glancing back up now that she was fully outfitted, though she was still missing socks and shoes, Addy spotted Kara peeking back around the corner of the hall leading into the containment area. After a moment, apparently making sure she wasn't about to strip down again, Kara stumbled out from around the corner and approached.

"Alright, so, before I fly you to my place, you have to know, public nudity isn't okay, alright?"

Addy blinked. She contemplated a few responses to that, she could tell them she knew that, but that might get her in trouble, since they were clearly working from the idea she didn't know that. She just didn't really care, bodies were bodies, hers might be new to her but it wasn't like she cared whether or not anyone else showed skin. It didn't matter. "Alright," she eventually said.

"Good!" Kara chirped, that same bright friendliness spreading across her features. "Now, how do you want to be held? I can do the princess carry, the sack carry, or the football carry, though that one might be more difficult because you're like... six inches taller than me."

"I have no idea what any of those are."

Following after Kara as they walked the last stretch of hallway to her apartment, Addy really did try to take everything in. Her apartment was a delightful little brick obelisk on the edge of the inner city, with bright gold-coloured elevators that chimed when they opened and closed and with flooring that felt very nice on her toes. The fly back had been a blur, mostly because by Addy's reckoning Kara had been going speeds excess of five-hundred miles per hour, but even then the few furtive glimpses she'd managed to see from where Kara had clutched her close to her chest - they had decided upon the princess carry after Addy brought up the chance of Kara dropping her in the football carry - had been fascinating. Sure, she'd seen plenty of planets before, plenty with even more urban sprawl and beautiful architecture than National City, California, but it felt weighted, different with eyes of her own.

"This is us just here," Kara said, her tone happy. "God, today was... long. First Bizarro, then you—no offence, or anything, Addy."

Addy just blinked. "None taken?"

Kara just beamed back at her, a wide smile full of bright white teeth. She had a certain energy to her that was contagious. Everything about her was interesting, from her casual use of her powers to the way she'd ramble to fill the silence on occasion, to the fact that she had an adopted sister by all accounts she shouldn't get along with but were apparently as thick as thieves. While the concept of a sibling wasn't really translatable to her past experiences, she certainly knew that Aisha and Brian, while siblings, didn't get along nearly as much as Alex and Kara did despite being about as different as Alex and Kara were from one another.

Humans, or, perhaps sentient biological lifeforms in general, tended to have exceptions to observed realities. Sometimes people who were oppositional to one-another were drawn together, while very similar people were pushed apart due to said similarities. It was very odd, but very interesting, and not for the first time she really wished she'd looked more into the psychology of humans during Taylor's time as her host. Sure, it probably would've been considered a waste of resources by her past self, accessing the network like that to recalibrate her understanding of how humans interacted, but at least then she wouldn't feel so out of her depth.

Kara slid her key into the lock, pushing the door open. Blinking and glancing around, Addy found her gaze wandering across the area. The apartment was set up in a rough L-shape, as far as she could tell, with the entrance being flanked on one side by the kitchen. Two separate dining areas sat beside it, one in the middle and one further off to the side, and just before the bend in the apartment was a rudimentary living area with a television and several places to sit, along with a simple coffee table. The bend in the area was slightly partitioned by curtains and a bookcase, the former of which hung from the ceiling and left about eight feet of space between them to let people walk through them.

"So," Kara began, stepping inside, Addy trailing after her as she reached out to flick the light on. "Technically I don't have a guest bedroom or anything," she started, speaking slow. "This is an open apartment, but, I have a bedroom, and it isn't going to be difficult to partition off some space for you. You see that easel?" She pointed, and Addy followed. There was a small screen that slightly blocked her view, but just to the left of the living area, tucked into the very corner of the apartment, was a pair of chairs, a table, an easel, and a small dresser. "I'm going to move the living room a bit to the right and then set up some curtains and stuff to close that area off and give you some privacy. We can move a bed in, set it up right in that corner, and some customization stuff for you, and it should work."

"Where will I sleep for the meantime?" Addy found herself asking, stepping past Kara and making her way towards the area. She was curious about it, despite it looking big enough to fit a bed and whatever else, it did seem awfully slapdash, not that she was going to complain. She was just curious.

"The couch, if that's okay?" Kara less asked, more plead. Addy turned her head, blinking at her, because that was okay. A couch was just an oddly-shaped cushion.

"Of course it's—"

"Addy watch out!"

Something hit her from the side, a writhing green mass of tendrils with oddly-shaped, red flowers and thorns. It curled around her chest, tightening until, for the second time in her new existence, pain arced across her body, mostly around her ribs, where the tendrils dug in with enough force to make something creak. She felt something reach out to her, something try to access her brain, and leaned ever-so-slightly onto her connection to her large self, slamming the doors shut. The thing spasmed, twitched, and then fell off of her body, landing on the floor as it withered and curled into itself, going still a few short moments later.

There was a moment of silence as Addy glanced up and then around, from the weird withered thing on the ground to what she was now noticing was... the fragments of an egg? Or at least a nest, with a lot of slime and stuff around it, near Kara's bed.

"I—" Kara began, her voice reedy and thin and sounding exasperated and relieved in equal parts. "Think we need to go back to the D.E.O."

OxfordOctopus · Aug 3, 2020

EPISODE 2

"So, which of you two want to tell me why neither of you used our trained, professional disposal team and instead opted to stuff an unknown plantoid alien into a garbage bag and fly it over here?"

Addy watched raptly as Kara nervously avoided her sister's eyes.

"Because," Alex continued, pacing back and forth in front of the two of them like a caged animal. "You know, it was clearly hostile, it attacked one of you, and it could have any number of predatory natural weapons. Poisons, venoms, it could be explosive, it could—"

"Yes! Okay, alright!" Kara belted out, hands upraised, palms facing forward, in a show of deference. Their relationship was fascinating, because by all accounts, Kara was easily one of the strongest entities on the planet and Alex... well, Alex very much wasn't, but here she was, nevertheless, being cowed by Alex. "Fine. Yes, I shoved it into a garbage bag and flew it back along with Addy, okay? I was tired, I just wanted to drop the thing off and go back home!"

"Supergirl, it could have exploded when you touched it!" Alex shrieked back, no longer bothering to even pretend at not being concerned.

"She did poke it with... I think it's called a fire poker? Before she tried to lift it and put it in the garbage bag," Addy cut in very helpfully, because that was pertinent information. Kara hadn't just touched it, she'd at least checked that it wasn't alive anymore.

"A fire poker?" Alex hissed, pitching her voice low enough that it was only the three of them who could hear it. "Why on earth did you have a fire poker, your apartment doesn't have a fireplace Kara!"

Kara squawked, stepping back a step. "It was there when I moved in!"

"No it wasn't, and I know that because I lived there before you did!"

"But—"

"Addy?" Hank's voice drew her attention, Addy tilting her head around a bit to catch sight of him. He was flanked by a single woman in scrubs with long, curly brown hair and off-green eyes.

Addy let the smile that had been simmering below the surface bubble up, spreading across her face. "Hi, Hank!" He was one of her favourite people, besides maybe Kara? Because Kara was nice, and helpful, and very compassionate, but she also wasn't Hank, and Hank at the very least was her favourite looking person.

Hank's face softened a touch, the edges of his lips twitching up before slanting back down into a neutral expression, if one that wasn't so hard as the one he normally wore. "It's good to see you, Addy. This is Doctor Abel, she just wants to do a quick check over to see that whatever that was hasn't left any unpleasant surprises behind. Is that okay?"

Addy couldn't really see why not, honestly. Nodding in acquiescence, she got the ever-rare fleeting smile from Hank before, with almost comedic swiftness, the expression was banished from his face. He turned towards Kara and Alex, still hissing at one another in quiet tones, bickering endlessly as the garbage bag full of the plant alien sat between them.

Hank cleared his throat rather loudly. "Agent Danvers," he said, voice a bit clipped. Alex jolted. "Supergirl," he said, equally blandly, causing even Kara to twitch. "If you wouldn't mind, please bring the garbage bag over the hologram and see if she has anything to say on the creature? If you can't, then feel free to leave, none of us have the time to waste bickering."

Kara flushed a blotchy red, while Alex snapped her head away, folding hands over her chest in what Addy was almost sure was a pout.

"Addy?" Doctor Abel, she assumed, asked. "This way, okay? They'll be fine."

Sparing one last glance at the two sisters, both refusing to budge an inch, Addy shrugged, turned towards the doctor, who had stopped just shy of a hallway entrance, and let her legs carry her after her.

Doctor Abel didn't wait for her to catch up before she started walking herself, folding brightly-coloured nails behind her back as she did. "Hank just wants me to run a few tests, draw a bit of blood, and do a basic physical," she began to explain, Addy pushing her legs a bit harder until she had caught up fully, trailing only a few feet behind the woman. "It won't be anything invasive, but we always want to make sure we have everything covered. Some hostile aliens can have some particularly nasty defence mechanisms."

That was true. There had been a few host species who had been just as effective at killing one-another without powers as they were with. It had made the cycle somewhat counterproductive, as even with interference from The Thinker the resistance to the appearance of people with powers had been met with judicious use of a highly concentrated acid the species could generate and then project through all the pores on their body with more than enough pressure behind it to punch holes in things. The Warrior had been oddly fond of the things, had even bothered to collect data on their physical abilities and transfer the knowledge into a shard for use in later cycles.

Blinking, Addy shook away the cobwebs, again. She'd started to notice that memories distracted her more the further back they were, though not so much as Taylor's memories so often did.

Doctor Abel made a turn, reaching out to gently push open a door, motioning with her other hand for Addy to follow. The interior of the room was bland, white walls, white floor, white ceiling with a recessed white light, a white stretcher covered in itchy-looking white cotton blankets, a white metal chair tucked into a white metal desk upon which a white computer sat. White, white, white. White was possibly her least favourite combination of visible light, it was just everything more or less stuffed together with no elegance whatsoever. It was the colour equivalent of saltine crackers.

"Please take a seat," Doctor Abel said, stepping over to the desk without looking at her.

Begrudgingly, Addy plodded her barefooted way across the cold metal tiles - she really hated the cold too now, no wonder Taylor liked clothes so much. Well, that and the self-hatred, anyway - and then up onto the footstool just at the base of the stretcher, giving her just enough height to plop herself down on the crinkly, itchy blanket. Someone had apparently decided to put plastic beneath it, which, while she could appreciate the texture - drumming her fingers over it brought with it a delightful series of noises - she disliked it significantly less because her body seemed hell-bent on adhering to the plastic.

"When was the last time you've eaten?" Doctor Abel asked, still not looking at her, focused on what seemed to be getting a few tools ready.

Addy blinked. That was hard to answer, really, which meant the only good answer was one that got that information across. "No," she decided on.

That got Doctor Abel to look back, an exasperated eyebrow raised in her direction. "Addy, please, this is information we need to know—"

"You misunderstand," Addy cut in, dragging her fingers away from the bed and onto her lap, letting them do their little drumming across the surface of her knee. "I haven't eaten. Ever."

Doctor Abel blinked slowly. "Is that a trait of the Shardite?" She finally asked, sounding a bit concerned.

"Technically, but this body will need nutrients soon," she commented, glancing down at her stomach. It had started to hurt a bit, and she was feeling somewhat queasy, and a cursory glance through Taylor's memories shortly after her mother's death had pointed towards those being associated with a lack of food and liquid intake.

Doctor Abel just sighed, looking a bit more tired as she turned back to her desk, scribbling something down with one proffered pen. "I'll just note down about a day of no eating, in that case, which isn't great. When you get home, I want you to eat several small snacks over the day to ensure your body doesn't attempt to reject what you take in."

More solid advice, it would seem. Addy was actually starting to grow fond of the doctor, despite that feeling possibly being only in one direction. "Okay."

With a huff, the doctor pulled away from her desk, a small bucket full of assorted medical equipment clutched in one hand. She plodded over, placing the bucket down on the table just near the top of the stretcher, reaching inside to pull out a rather intimidating looking needle. "What's your opinion on these?"

"I don't have one," Addy said automatically, because, yeah, sure, it was a needle, and Taylor had been viscerally uncomfortable around them, but this was a new experience for her. "This is my first time with one near me."

Doctor Abel smiled wanly, gently reaching out to begin rolling up one of Addy's sleeves. "Well this one has a little bit of Kryptonite in it to let it penetrate your skin, but since we've noted your sensitivity to it, it's less than what we would've used on Supergirl. Still, I hope I can make this as pleasant as possible."

Addy just smiled, because that's what people did when they wanted to reassure someone else. "I'm sure you'll do fine," which she was. Even as the needle got closer and the vague feeling of nausea heightened, she was pretty sure the trained doctor a government agency had would be able to properly take her blood. Otherwise, why hire her at all?

Tucking her arm in near her stomach, Addy regretted ever doubting the veracity of Taylor's memories. Not only had Taylor's fear of needles been plenty justified, apparently Addy's host had very hard to find veins, it had taken not one, not two, but exactly eighteen and a half - one being aborted when Addy flinched at the sudden spike in nausea - attempts to draw her blood. The rest of the exam had been fine, sure, but not great, a lot of poking and prodding and asking about this symptom or that.

Doctor Abel was now thoroughly near the bottom of her list of interesting people, not that it was a particularly large one.

Doctor Abel sat a distance away, looking over a few pieces of paper she'd printed out, but clearly angled away."Well, everything on your reports looks fine," Doctor Abel finally conceded, glancing up at her with something like an apologetic look on her face. Addy didn't trust it. "You're a bit malnourished, probably due to being in a comatose state for the better part of almost three years, and your blood sugar is a bit too low for comfort, but I'm pretty sure that's just a factor of the former rather than any outlying problems. I can find no evidence of contamination, and the bruising around your ribs is going to be faded by the time it's morning, so..."

"I'm clear to go?" Addy asked a bit too quickly, though she couldn't find it in herself to care.

Doctor Abel sighed, eyes glancing away. "I am sorry, Addy, I—"

There was a rattle at the door, a series of three sharp knocks. Addy shared a look with the doctor for a moment before glancing away, huffing a bit under her breath and trying to urge the vague ache in her arm away. Sure, there hadn't been a lot of Kryptonite in the needles, but it had kept dissolving into her bloodstream and precisely nothing about that had been pleasant, or felt pleasant, for that matter.

"Come in!" Doctor Abel called out after another moment of hesitation.

The door creaked open, revealing Hank, who glanced between them with a bemused tilt to his brow. "May I borrow Addy for a moment, Doctor Abel?" He asked, though from the way his tone was pitched, it felt more like a command. The intricacies of human languages never ceased to amaze her. "She's needed in the hologram room for further clarification on a few things."

"She's clear to go," Doctor Abel said, her voice a bit thin. "Again, I am sorry, Ad—"

Addy was on her feet, ignoring the cold feeling of the floors, and speed-walking her way towards Hank before Doctor Abel could finish. Sure, she was being mean, and reconciling with the person who might be responsible for her health was probably important, but at this point in time all she wanted to do was get away from those needles. Hank just shot her a look before stepping back, boots clunking heavily on the metal floors. She definitely needed to get a pair of shoes, even though she couldn't be hurt by walking on sharp things she didn't really like the feeling of it, either.

Ignoring the long-suffering sigh behind her, Addy flicked her gaze up to Hank, who just stared down at her with actual amusement on his face before it all faded back into neutrality. Motioning her forward, he kept to her side as he led the two of them back down the hallway, out into the main command room, and then off towards a doorway that had been almost nestled away in a corner of the area.

Stepping through it, Addy was briefly struck dead by the hologram. Which, really, she probably shouldn't've, it wasn't particularly novel technology, especially the intangible ones, but it was more the fact that, despite having dark brown hair and brown-green eyes, the woman projected by the hologram looked scarily close to Kara in terms of facial composition and general regality. Blinking a few times, Addy glanced off to the side, to see Alex and Kara staring mutedly at her, the garbage bag upended and the corpse of whatever the plant creature was left out in front of them.

"I've brought her," Hank finally said, gently patting her on the arm. The hologram turned to look at her, and even though it likely had no actual bearing on what the hologram could perceive, Addy felt a bit small beneath the stare.

"Can you please tell me what the plant creature attempted to do once it had adhered itself to you?" The hologram asked simply.

Addy appreciated simplicity. Simple things were the good things, in most cases. "It tried to access my mind," she said, for lack of a better explanation. "I stopped it."

"What species are you?" The hologram continued bluntly.

"Shardite."

That, however, did bring the thing up short. It blinked at her for a moment, considering. "No record on file. I will keep it recorded for future reference, and ask that someone inform me of Shardite abilities. In any case, this is very likely to be a Black Mercy, in that instance, instead of a Strangler."

"A Black Mercy?" Addy asked, ignoring the outburst of arguing between Kara and Alex. The hologram kept her eyes on her, expression blank, not that it bothered her any. Her expression was probably mirroring it.

"The Black Mercy," the hologram began slowly. "Is a species of parasitic plant-based alien born from a larger creature by the name of Mother Mercy, who spawned them as far as we can tell, though their purpose was distorted upon coming into contact with other alien life. They are psychically powerful, but very simple organisms, and achieve a degree of sentience once they ensnare an unsuspecting, biological victim and use their brain to then empower their own intelligence to craft a perfect dream world from which the user must willingly force themselves out of. Those who do not will fall deeper into the delusion while the Black Mercy gradually siphons their physical health from them until they are killed, after which the Black Mercy will wait for a new victim. There are very few species which are immune to its powers or able to overwhelm the initial psychic attack, which is likely why the Black Mercy died the moment you prevented it from enthralling you. They use a lot of energy to establish the link in the first place, and when that failed, it did not have enough left to live."

There was a pause, the room having gone quiet, people all turning to look at the hologram.

"Black Mercies were generally used on Krypton as a tool of political assassination," the hologram continued, folding its hands together politely. "Once under their thrall, without third-party interference, death was almost always likely and it was very hard to track down the person who did it. While owning a Black Mercy was banned on Krypton, their existence as a whole was not, and it was common that large houses would own off-site gardens for them to be grown in and then used to target political adversaries. People going into politics were generally taught to see the early signs of being enthralled and attempt to break it, but very few were ever successful once the initial connection was established."

"So someone's targeting Supergirl," Alex interrupted, sounding angry.

The hologram inclined its head in silent agreement.

"Could it be Astra?" Hank interrupted.

"No!" Kara yelled back, face looking furious. "No!—just, no. Astra wouldn't, she understood the bonds of family, killing one's kin would be unthinkable to her, even in this manner. It could be Non, or any of the other Kryptonians."

Alex huffed, folding her arms tighter around herself. "Supergirl," she said, her voice so quiet. "You just barely avoided this because Addy was there—what if you hadn't? Would I have found you the next morning, comatose? This is serious. This could be anyone, from Non to any of the other Fort Rozz escapees, your mother's reputation follows you."

Kara looked like she deflated for a moment before, with a bit of a jerk, she straightened her spine. "Alex," she said, voice gentle and almost compassionate. "I chose this, I know the risks—"

"You nearly died—"

"But I didn't!" Kara interrupted, throwing her hands up. "I'll be in just as much danger any number of other times, and I didn't die! I'm fine! I need to keep moving, this isn't something that can just stop my superhero career, Alex!"

"I know that!" Alex snapped back, though with significantly less heat than before.

"Girls," Hank interrupted, voice smooth and rich in Addy's ears. His voice was genuinely pleasant to listen to, like the low purr of a cat, just more... human. "This isn't the time. I have a few questions for the hologram, if you would be quiet?"

Neither Kara or Alex continued arguing, and Hank clearly took that as assent. Turning back to the hologram, he stepped forward. "Is there a risk of another Black Mercy attack?"

The hologram shook its head. "No. Caring for a Black Mercy is incredibly dangerous unless very specific stasis equipment is used. They need a constant intake of victims, usually animals, to feed on, and there's always an inherent risk in handling them. It's more than likely that this was the only one they had."

Hank nodded curtly. "Should we know anything about how to handle dissection and other methods of disposing of the corpse?"

"The Black Mercy generates a chemical to attract mates. While to them it is a scent they are unable to ignore, as a species without specific sexes they can germinate in either direction, to everyone else it is an incredibly unpleasant scent. The chemical itself is produced in their flowers, with an amount always stored, and if you remove the flowerhead wrong, it will be released and will likely cause severe nausea to anyone within a few miles if not properly contained at the time of release. I believe the chemical name on earth is thioacetone?"

Out of the corner of Addy's eye, she watched with rapt interest as Alex's face went completely ashen.

"Please handle that carefully," Alex cut in, before anyone could say anything, sounding on the verge of panic. "Thioacetone sticks around for a while and it is extremely unpleasant. Someone managed to spill barely a drop of it in one of my biochem courses and we had to spend the rest of the semester in a pop-up unit because it had contaminated the lab space so badly nobody could go in there for a month without getting sick."

"I'll be sure they handle it with utmost caution," Hank drawled, sounding not amused, but something very close to it.

"I have to be at work in less than thirty minutes," Kara piped up, glancing at her phone. She slipped it back into the pocket on her skirt, glancing at all of them. "Can someone take Addy home for me? Alex? You have keys, right?"

Alex stared at Addy, her face pinching. "I do," she hedged.

"Then, Agent Danvers," Hank interrupted, Alex's face visibly falling. "I think you should take Addy back home for the time being."

Alex opened her mouth, almost as though she wanted to object, before it clicked shut and she slumped. "Yes sir."

Hank just smiled, looking all the world like he was benevolent. "Very good. You're all dismissed."

Alex's car was a lot like Alex: coloured black - like her clothes - with simple fabric seats that were just a bit too stiff to be comfortable - like her personality - and a large number of what appeared to be protective plastic spread across the floor and back seats - also, somehow, like her personality. Alex hadn't spoken to her since they'd originally gotten into the car, opting to focus on the road as they drove down the long stretch of winding almost-desert, National City, still cast in a near-gloom, growing ever-larger as they approached.

Addy turned to glance out the window, wiggling her toes against the plastic on the floor. The world sped by, blurring unless she forced her eyes to track along with it. She could see a few cacti, which were themselves very interesting organisms despite the fact that they grew so slowly, and she could even make out a number of tumbleweeds, the most iconic invasive species on the planet with maybe cats, dogs and rats as an exception.

Something started to build in her chest, oddly enough. It wasn't a bad feeling, just... thick, growing and pushing up to her throat. Involuntarily, her jaws pulled apart and she inhaled, long and protracted, eyes watering. Blinking away the teardrops, Addy briefly scoured Taylor's memories for the name of the phenomenon and came up quite honestly surprised when she realized she was yawning.

Alex, finally, spared her a glance. "So you can get tired," she said.

Addy looked back at her and away from the window. "It would make sense," she agreed.

"I had just assumed," she said in reply, before slouching a bit, looking tired. "Look—I'm sorry, alright?"

Addy blinked, not sure where the apology was coming from.

"You're just, you literally were the result of an experiment someone was using to try to kill my sister," she explained after another moment, turning the steering wheel as they went from the long stretch of paved highway and onto an interchange. Nobody else was on the road at this time, leaving everything very quiet and very dark, only illuminated by the beams of the car's front lights and the occasional passing streetlamp. "Not just that, but what you said about your species, the entire thing it was—I was suspicious of you."

It wasn't really hard to follow that line of thought, either. She might've had difficulties understanding it before fusing with Taylor, but suspicion had been something of a long term hobby for Taylor, even before she found out the world was going to end, and she could relate. "I would be too," she offered truthfully, keeping the thoughts about Taylor's experiences to herself.

"Stop that!" Alex barked out sharply, her fingers tightening around the wheel with enough force to make it creak. "Just—stop, I get that I fucked up, that I was suspicious of you without any good reason to be, you've been nothing but accommodating which is more than I can say for half of the fucking aliens who try to kill my sister, so stop acting so nice!"

She didn't follow. Staring blankly at Alex, Addy said nothing.

"Say something," Alex grit out, fingers tightening, knuckles whitening. Every muscle in her body looked taut and tense and ready to snap. "Get the anger out, I'm sure you have it!"

"I don't," Addy answered after a long moment, glancing away, not comfortable with the odd feeling that the sight of Alex was currently inspiring. "I, mean, I don't like being scrutinized, sure. Taylor didn't either, she had a lot of problems with body image and how people perceived her. She needed to be seen in a superior light, or at least as someone who couldn't be pushed around the way she was at school. But I'm not that. I'm not angry at you, I'm still... adapting. Things are new, even though I've lived a life like this in Taylor's memories plenty of times, I had no agency. I was just watching, and now I'm experiencing. If I was mad at you, I'd tell you. Communication is, as far as I can tell, key to maintaining good mental health among your peers." It was why shards so rarely chose well-connected hosts; it was infinitely more difficult to connect during a trigger event when someone had a support network to stop them from reaching those crisis moments.

Alex just stared at her, long and bewildered, before almost tiredly bringing one hand up to drag fingers along her face in what Addy was quickly starting to realize was a gesture of sheer exasperation. "Right," she muttered after a moment, glancing back towards the road. "The world already had one Kara, why not two?"

"My name is Addy, though?"

"That's not what I—no, actually, even Kara wasn't that bad when she first landed here. No, you are definitely Addy, that much is for sure."

"I'm glad you agree?"

Kara's pantry was well-stocked, Addy had come to learn. What few words she'd gotten out of Alex on the rest of the drive back had painted an image of a sister fretting hopelessly after her younger sibling, one who, while very outwardly human, had a lot of inhuman traits that you could pick up on only when you were looking for it. Evidence one was, perhaps, her stomach; Kara apparently needed somewhere in the realm of roughly six-to-eight thousand calories per day depending on her activities if she wanted to maintain her current weight. Even a fully sedentary day required closer to four or five thousand calories, which wasn't very easy to achieve.

Which meant, of course, a lot of take-out. Apparently Kara had a lasting love for pizza and something called a 'potsticker'. She'd searched Taylor's memories for any information on the topic and had come up completely empty, with no knowledge or memories associated with the word. She hadn't asked for clarification about what it was, either, in large part because Alex hadn't really seemed like she wanted to talk near the very end of their drive and Addy wasn't about to argue with someone just to find out what a potsticker was.

Slowly placing the plate down on the living room table, delighting a bit in the way the sunlight filtering in through the windows passed over her skin, Addy plopped herself back into the seat. Navigating the technology at use in the living room hadn't been difficult when she relied on Taylor's knowledge of how remotes work and how, no, sometimes the box and the television weren't synced up properly - the television had been off, the cable box not so much, so when she'd tried to turn it on the television had just turned blue and told her nothing was connected - and you'd have to click the big 'TV' button or 'CABLE' button at the top of the remote to sync it back up properly. After she'd gotten that down pat, finding a good channel wasn't hard, even if it might be considered childish to watch cartoons, she didn't really care. They were colourful and had lots of surprising noises and she was just happy to sit and watch.

The plate, however, was another topic. Eating was still very... unique for her, the concept of it at least. Reaching down, she plucked the piece of cucumber off the plate and brought it to her mouth, letting it drop down on her tongue. She'd tried a few bites of everything already, just to get over the awkwardness of learning how to chew, and cucumber was definitely her favourite. It popped and cracked and almost snapped when she ground it between her molars, making a bunch of very pleasant noises and being accompanied by a texture you just couldn't defeat. The taste, well, it could be better, it tasted mostly like plant-flavoured water, but then the same could be said for a lot of vegetables when you got down to it.

She dropped a chunk of carrot next in her mouth, almost as crunchy as the cucumber. Where the cucumber won outright on texture and sound, the carrot definitely won on taste. She hadn't bothered to do much more than peel them - Taylor's memories had been, again, been very important to figuring out how to use the peeler in the first place - and they had come out so good. Slightly sweet, with a good crunch, but not as good as cucumber had been. If cucumber was her number one, carrot was definitely her number two.

Onion she was less sold on. She knew you had to cook it but, really, she'd eaten carrots raw, and onions kinda looked like apples, and she'd remembered vaguely that one time Taylor watched a movie where kids dug holes - human media was weird - and ended up on a mountain eating onions like apples, so she'd bit in.

There had been a fair amount of regret and washing her mouth out with tap water after that.

So she'd stuck to cucumber, carrots and celery, of which for someone who apparently couldn't cook to save her life or the food, Kara had a lot of. Maybe she had similar thoughts on their consumption, it wasn't like she could burn a piece of celery without a viable heat source.

Turning her focus back to the television, Addy watched as a short, anthropomorphic animal of no real discernable origin outside of maybe 'rabbit', but was also blue, so that probably wasn't right, try to lie to their mother, also maybe a rabbit, and fail at doing so. Their voices were pitched oddly, like nothing Addy had heard in normal people, but that was okay because so long as it wasn't too loud she actually really preferred the odd, pitch-shifted voices to normal human ones. Sure, Hank's voice was smooth but he was in a big minority. Alex's voice was fine, so was Kara's, but she'd heard a few agents talking and one of them spoke like they had plugs in their nostrils, which wasn't great.

Dropping a chunk of celery into her mouth, Addy bit down. Celery was weird, it had the crunch and watery taste of cucumber, but it was... for lack of a better word, fibrous? It pulled away into little strands that got caught between her teeth in a way that was kinda unpleasant but not totally. Could something feel both good and bad at the same time?

"Who are you?"

Addy swung around, blinking wide at the sight of a woman just, floating in the opening on one of Kara's windows. She looked almost identical to the hologram, if not for a single lock of white hair that had presumably been dyed, because she did remember that being a fad for a while on Earth Bet. Chewing a few times, Addy finally swallowed, trying not to grimace at the feeling of something... going down. "Addy."

The woman blinked slowly at her, glancing around pensively.

"Would you like a piece of cucumber?" She did have plenty, after all, and despite her misgivings about people breaking and entering it wasn't like the woman was trying to kill her.

"No, but, well, thank you," the woman stumbled a bit on her words, like she hadn't been expecting them, which was weird. Wasn't she just being polite? "Do you live here?"

"I do now," Addy acknowledged.

"Do you live with someone?" The woman probed.

That's an awfully suspicious question to ask not long after an assassination attempt. "Did you have anything to do with the Black Mercy?" She asked, instead, quietly beginning to open her connection to her core self. She hadn't intended to try to play with her powers until she was sure they weren't going to make her head explode, but at this point she was starting to wonder if that was going to happen anyway.

The woman jolted, her face twisting in concern. "What? Is Kara okay?"

Addy stopped drawing on her power. "Yes?" She hedged, carefully. "It attacked me, so... she's fine?"

The woman stared at her for a long moment, something like suspicion swimming across her face before flatlining into complete and total bewilderment. "You're not lying," she said, sounding almost out of breath. "A Black Mercy is a death sentence, how did you overcome it?"

"I'm sorry, but who are you?" Addy interjected, because calling her 'this woman' in her head was starting to feel kinda wrong.

The woman - ugh - blinked, paused. "Astra In-Ze," she finally answered, each word sounded out with the sort of slowness that only came with reluctance. "I am Kara's aunt."

Well, she was flying, and did look a lot like her... "She's at work," Addy finally offered, glancing back towards her plate and plucking a piece of carrot off and dropping it in her mouth. Making sure to properly chew and swallow before speaking again, she directed her eyes back to the television, where someone was trying to hammer someone into place in lieu of a nail. "Do you want me to leave her a message or something?"

Astra floated a bit back, relief shuddering across her shoulders. "No," she finally said, glancing away. "No, no, that's—fine. She doesn't have to know I was here, I'm just glad she's okay. Thank you for the offer of food, Addy, but I must go. I have... things to do."

That was oddly ambiguous, but then again people in general were. Nodding, Addy didn't take her eyes away from the television, trying to comprehend how someone's body would have to deform to fit into a hole the size of a drinking straw.

When she next looked up - commercial breaks were awful - Astra was gone.

The phone ringing interrupted her viewing pleasure. She'd gone through another four plates worth of snacks over the day, and though her eyelids felt heavy now that the sun was starting to set, she didn't really... feel tired. Her body was sluggish, sure, but her mind was more than active, which might be a bit worrying.

Clambering to a stand, Addy smothered another yawn into her shoulder and stumbled her way over to the phone, plucking it from the receiver. She'd double-checked Taylor memories for the various appliances throughout the apartment just to be sure she wouldn't break any of them by pressing the wrong thing. Her main experience with technology had been the ones derived from them, and in her memories that had been intentionally prone to self-destruction at the drop of a hat, so it was always a good idea to avoid causing catastrophic technical failures.

"Addy?" Kara's voice crackled in, interrupted a bit by what sounded like... the wind?

"I am Addy," she agreed knowingly.

Kara choked a bit on the other end of the line, though it became that very happy laugh that made her chest feel warm. Kara was nice like that. "Good to hear from you! You didn't burn down the apartment or anything, right?"

Addy nodded, before remembering she was on a phone and that phones, for reasons beyond her understanding, didn't track physical movement. "I did not. I avoided the stove, but I ate all of your carrots and cucumber. I left some celery, though." Mostly because she didn't like it as much, but that wasn't something she had to say.

That got her another laugh. "I'm glad you're settling in! Did anything else happen today?"

Astra hadn't said she couldn't tell Kara, which, well. "Someone called Astra In-Ze came over? Looking for you I think. She seemed concerned about the Black Mer—"

"WHAT."

Addy coughed. Maybe the signal was bad? "I said, someone called Astra In-Ze—"

"No, I heard that Addy! Are you okay? Did she attack you?"

"No?" She hadn't seemed aggressive or anything, just... there. "I offered her some cucumber, though."

"Addy," Kara said, exasperation filling her voice. "You can't just—okay, new rule, if unknown people force their way into the apartment without me first telling you, you are to immediately call me if it's an alien or the police if it's a person. They aren't allowed there, okay?"

More rules. She could do those, they were easier. "Sure."

"I'm going to have to come and bring you to the D.E.O.," Kara continued, unbidden. Addy bit down on the urge to make a weird, wounded noise in her chest. Where had that come from?

"I need shoes," she said instead, for reasons she didn't really understand.

"I'll stop by a shoe place, okay? What's your—no, you wouldn't know your size. I'll get you flip flops, are those fine?"

Addy scoured her memory, coming back with a few tidbits from that one time Taylor had gone to the beach with Emma and had been stuck in those clappy wondrous things. "Absolutely. All shoes should be like flip flops."

"Alright, I'll be there in a bit. Just... don't let anyone but me in, alright?"

"House rules," Addy agreed, and the line went dead.

Flip flops were amazing. Walking in them was like having someone slap the heels of her foot every few seconds and they made this wonderful sticky smack each time she arched her foot. She would live in these if it wasn't for the fact that wearing shoes inside houses wasn't okay, and flip flops, despite being superior, still qualified as shoes.

"She was in your house?" Alex said, sounding exhausted. She looked exhausted too, apparently she was sleeping on-base when Kara had come back with her and had been rudely awoken. "You're going to have to move, this is getting to be too much—"

"She just seemed to be looking for me to see if I was okay!" Kara cut back in sharply, folding her arms. "Right, Addy?"

Addy glanced up from her feet, rolling the stick of carrot around in her mouth. The D.E.O. had a canteen that she hadn't been informed about until recently, and she apparently had free access to it within reason. She'd just asked for a lot of carrots, because they were great. "Yeah, she was nice."

Alex just stared back at Kara, looking exasperated. Kara wilted a bit.

"We have to deal with Non and Astra," Hank interrupted, appearing from around the corner, completely equipped in military gear. Alex went ramrod straight, while Kara seemed to almost curl in on herself at the thought. "She entered your home, Supergirl, whether or not her reasoning was sound, it still wasn't okay. She knows where you live, and from the way she was acting, Non probably does too. We have to end this, now, before they finish whatever they're trying to do."

Kara's throat bobbed as she stepped back, her costume pooling out around her from the jerk. "I know that," she hissed back, closing her arms around herself in a hug. "I know that, okay? I—we have to do it. They clearly chose to attack me now for a reason, the solar storm is still in effect, isn't Winn working on it?"

Hank shook his head. "He already got us a location. We're rolling out now. I'm sending teams out to other labs, while myself and Alex scope out some of the more likely ones."

Kara straightened, her face hardened, and for a moment, Addy almost thought she would argue about it. "I'll take Non," she finally agreed, glancing momentarily at Addy. "He has a lot to answer for."

The room seemed to relax for a moment, and Addy felt herself loosen a bit. She kicked her foot out, felt the clack of her flip flop hitting back up. She didn't really feel like she needed to do anything, really, this was their job, their duties. She was just enjoying herself, figuring things out. Sure, Astra had been nice, but if she was trying to do something bad, then there was probably a good reason to stop her. After all, Taylor had stepped up for Scion, why couldn't Kara for Astra?

Finishing the last of her carrot, Addy banished the odd vein of doubt. She wasn't going to dwell on it.

OxfordOctopus · Aug 6, 2020

EPISODE 3

Of all the things Addy had come to experience, fatigue was possibly the worst among them. Sure, pain was bad, it was distracting and somehow had a rather wide variety of how pain felt - which really wasn't necessary - but in the end she could rationalize it, understand it even if only sometimes in the abstract. Pain was the body's way of telling a person they were doing something it didn't like, and she did get that, everyone needed protection methods even if she had lacked the sensation until recently.

But fatigue? Addy couldn't really explain how it felt, the crawling tiredness, the urge to close her eyes, the way her gaze kept slipping off of things and towards the floor. Her coordination got worse, it became harder to think in a way that she was absolutely not used to; not like the pain which was more an interruption and instead more of a haze that clung to her brain and numbed things, made it hard to gather up her thoughts to begin with. Every impulse her body had naturally was telling her to tuck her chin into her arms and close her eyes.

But Kara wasn't back yet, so she didn't.

Blinking quickly seemed to help, in any event. The longer she kept her eyes close, the more comfortable she got, the worse the tiredness got in turn. Sitting had been abandoned shortly after she'd nearly lapsed into a state of unconsciousness, and despite the low ache in her head that was telling her she was overdoing it, walking back and forth seemed to be the best method to keep herself upright.

The canteen for the D.E.O. superficially resembled what she remembered of Winslow's cafeteria. It was a large, round space outfitted with carefully-arranged benches and tables that could seat at least a few hundred people at once, more if you really crammed people in there. It was, as with most things in the D.E.O. that Addy had observed both in passing and in person, coloured the uniform black and made mostly out of metal. From the tables to the seating to even the little bar area they had to pick up food on trays, it was all black and metal and made clunking noises as she tromped back and forth.

Keeping herself from yawning was the other problem. Yawns weren't just dramatic inhales, they came with tears and an impulse to shut her eyes, which raised a problem. For starters, letting her eyes remain shut for any length of time posed a considerable risk to her continued functioning, and second, the tears made her vision blurry and required her to blink or rub them away, which also generally ended up with her eyes shut. It was like yawning had been the result of evolution towards very picky sleepers, people who needed the repeated reminder that they had to go to sleep, which was really odd considering humans as a whole were endurance animals whose main method of hunting before the invention of sharp things and brains that didn't struggle with basic arithmetic had been to literally chase their prey down until it collapsed.

Humans should really be like giraffes. See, giraffes didn't need to sleep for a long time - only four hours when in captivity, less outside of it - and unlike humans, as far as she had been made aware after cursory glances over the native population of the planet, didn't really have the conventional deep sleep that humans themselves relied on. Taylor had been a light sleeper, sure, but she knew better than to think she was anything but the conventional data set for the population. Most people not only needed six or more hours of sleep per day, but also needed hours after regaining consciousness to orient themselves and partake in ritualistic consumption of an addictive substance that tasted, as far as she could pull from Taylor's memories, absolutely abhorrent.

But human brains being inefficient and pointlessly fussy was nothing new. That did raise a question, though, did her brain still qualify as human? She'd have to ask Kara later—if Kryptonians could get away with lighter sleep cycles and less downtime maybe she would too? It would be nice, to be honest. Then again, by her estimate, she'd been awake for close to two days and humans were generally supposed to start shutting down at this point, which would be bad, because she still had to wait for Kara. She had been very clear on that fact, no leaving the D.E.O. until she came back, mostly because the D.E.O. was located quite the distance away from National City and despite her ability to fly - which she still had to test out, but not here - the time it would take to fly back and find her way to Kara's apartment would, to quote the woman directly, "worry everyone and probably cause a scene, so please just, stay here until I'm back, okay?".

Stopping before her next turn, Addy reached out to press the flesh of her palm against the cool metal wall. She felt a bit too hot, overheated, she wasn't sweating or anything so it was probably all in her head, but that didn't mean she wasn't unbothered by it. At one point in time all she had really been was a consciousness, it wasn't like shards had arms or legs or an immune system, they were functional and, perhaps more importantly, only tangentially biological. Crystalline more so than anything else, though there wasn't a particularly good word for what she had been made of, a substance she could only describe as something between crystals, soft tissues found mostly in the brain, and various metals.

"Miss?"

Addy blinked quickly, because she had to do that now. She was going to make a list about how inconvenient having a body with a sleep cycle was, just you watch—

"Miss?" the voice repeated again, this time more urgently. Addy whipped her head around finally, blinking away some of the dots that came with sudden rapid movement, and came face-to-face with the woman she had puked all over. Huh.

"Hello," she said, because being polite was probably the best way to regain the trust of someone you puked on. Not that she had any experience on the topic, but one of Taylor's memories from third grade had included Emma getting a stomach bug and throwing up her entire lunch over Cassidy's shoes and they had spent weeks throwing insults at one another until finally Emma had bothered to be polite and actually try to rebuild bridges and—

A hand came to rest on her shoulder, unexpected. Addy jolted away, out of her—Taylor's memories, the jerk carrying over to her physical self, hauling her body away in something not unlike a flinch, jostling her shoulder against the cool metal wall hard enough to almost hurt. It was really weird being durable enough yet still primed with enough nerves to feel the potential of pain.

Agent Vasquez - at least, that's what she thought her name was - stood there, looking at her with creased brows and a slight tilt to her mouth. Worry. Right, yes, she had catalogued that emotion very early on into the cycle and its accompanying facial tics. That was worry. Agent Vasquez was worried. She was also carrying a tray with food on it, not that Addy paid it much attention because despite everything she had managed to eat enough carrots to sate the low ache in her stomach that demanded food. Also water, she had drunk a lot of water, and though she hated drinking almost more than eating, she had still done it because being thirsty was worse.

"You look like you need to sit down," Agent Vasquez said, finally, voice toneless.

Addy shook her head before she could think better of what that would do to her balance, which was to say nothing pleasant. Thankfully, the wall was durable enough to stop her from stumbling over as the world spun unpleasantly, the ache in her head ramping up. "If I sit down I'll go to sleep," she muttered, not sure what emotion was in her voice, but it sounded... vaguely stubborn, mulish almost.

Agent Vasquez's face smoothed over, became a bit softer. "Maybe you should sleep, then," she offered, voice slow and smooth and so fitting for her face. Agent Vasquez looked, as far as Taylor's terminology went, somewhat butch, with short hair and a bit of a hard face. It reminded her of Rachel, abstractly, and she could almost feel herself relax because of it. Not quite, of course, because she was sleepy and unfocused and that meant she had to be vigilant.

"Can't," she supplied after she noticed she had been quiet for too long, Agent Vasquez's face wrinkling again, taking back on that worried cast. "Gotta wait for someone to come back." She did, she had to wait because Kara could be back at any second and then she could go and sleep on a couch instead of in a base—

"Then," Agent Vasquez started, motioning towards the nearest table. "Why don't you sit down with me and I keep you awake while I eat? I'm off duty, anyway, and I think you'll make people less worried if you stop trying to dig a hole in the ground with your pacing."

Addy looked down, glancing over the path she'd been on for... however long it had been since she'd nearly dozed off. It didn't even look scuffed, and she tried to project that without words when she looked back up, catching Agent Vasquez's gaze.

"It's a figure of speech," Agent Vasquez provided gently, the corners of her lips twitching upwards.

Oh. That would make sense. She was pretty sure humans didn't even really have the ability to do that, and she knew a lot about humans. Still, considering her offer wasn't a totally impossible thing, and it wasn't like she had anything else to do besides walking back and forth. If Agent Vasquez thought she could keep her awake, well, who was she to deny her that? She pushed herself off the wall, nearly stumbling as her flip flop pulled hard in retaliation to her slip, before managing to catch herself without face planting and treading her way over to the table. Stepping over the bench, Addy dumped herself down onto the seat, letting her legs whip out beneath the table and swing up, catching the heel of her flip flop against the ground to a satisfying sound and feel.

Agent Vasquez, with grace and smoothness neither she nor Taylor would ever have, slipped into the seat in front of her, setting her tray down. At a closer inspection, she had gotten two wraps - not that she knew what was in them - a pretty large salad, a few pieces of naan, and a small little container of hummus. Altogether, it looked good, though not something Addy was sure was entirely necessary to eat at whatever time it was. They really should put clocks up, they'd do her and probably everyone else some good.

"So," Agent Vasquez began, pausing briefly to take a quick bite out of one of her wraps. "My name is Susan Vasquez. I am a field operator and general agent working for the Department of Extranormal Operations, or as you know it, the D.E.O." Another bite, Addy might've felt some jealousy over the wrap if not for the fact that all she could taste was carrots in the back of her mouth and she didn't feel particularly hungry. "Who are you?"

Addy blinked. She would've thought Susan would've known that by now, or at least read her file. Well, whatever, she could still do that, and it was something to do. "I'm Addy," she introduced proudly, because why wouldn't she be proud of her naming sense? "I, uhm, am an alien, I live with—someone." Because Kara had been clear about divulging too much information to people, and being non-specific on the topic was probably better for everyone. She was surprised she'd thought to interrupt herself, considering how her head felt. "I puked on your shoes," because that was pertinent information. "I was also recently attacked by a Black Mercy."

Susan continued eating her wrap for a moment, blinking owlishly at her, before finally setting the unfinished thing down. "Sounds like you've had a rough day since you found me," she offered after another few seconds.

"I have been here a total of three times in the time since I vomited on your shoes," Addy responded, nodding sagely, because being sent back to the high-security government agency tasked in your handling three times in fewer days was, in fact, indicative of a 'rough' day.

Susan winced, tearing off a piece of naan before using it to scoop and then deposit a portion of hummus into her mouth. After yet more chewing and swallowing, which seemed to come so naturally to everyone else but her, probably for good reasons, though it was still a bit irritating, Susan finally glanced back up at her, drumming her fingers across the table. "I've been called in a few too many times lately too," she began, speaking as though confiding some deep dark secret. "My wife at home isn't terribly impressed with me, I'll probably be sleeping on the couch."

That she could actually relate to. "I'm sleeping on a couch too once the person coming back to pick me up arrives," she shared. "But I don't mind that, since the couch was soft when I was sitting on it and I believe I will be offered blankets and pillows." She hoped so, anyway, despite not really getting hot or cold, she could still feel coldness or hotness and she disliked both of them in equal measure. Though, actually, all of this raised a question, since the way Susan had framed it... "Is sleeping on the couch generally considered a punishment?"

Susan stared at her for a few seconds before, almost lethargically, she shrugged. "Not in your case," she clarified, picking at the lettuce tucked away into one of her wraps. "But in mine? Certainly."

Oh. Addy felt herself fidget involuntarily, a slight twitch in her legs that made her want to swing them, like an itch. "That's sad, maybe communication will help? By my estimate, a lot of human problems can be dealt with through conversation. The rest, as far as Taylor's memories can be concerned, can be handled with judicious application of violence, but I prefer the talking." It was less messy. Or, well, it was less physically messy; apparently, emotions could be messy too, not that she was going to let her emotions be messy. Her emotions were simple and straightforward, and that was a good thing.

Susan didn't reply and instead continued to eat her wrap with quick, precise bites. She ate differently to how Addy ate, she knew that, but she was pretty sure Susan also ate differently from how everyone did. In fact, the one thing she thought of when she saw Susan eat was birds and their pecking, with more than a passing similarity. That wasn't a bad thing, of course, sure it might not be normal but then normal wasn't always the best; abnormality brought about the greatest test results and made people more interesting. Abnormal did not mean bad, just different, and different was in no way itself bad. Maybe in some distant future, the descendants of Susan would have long necks to eat like cranes, maybe they might have sharp teeth to ensnare their enemies, or maybe they wouldn't. It didn't matter, because she was different and that was fine and so was Addy and that was also fine.

"You know," Susan began, gesturing with the wrap she had clutched in her hand, gesturing towards her. "You should—"

The canteen doors flew open with little prompting, startling not just her, but Susan, who dropped the wrap and went for the gun on her belt. Others around her, the few stragglers who'd come into the canteen, also startled, one bulky-looking guy with more hair on his face than his head even rising to his feet. Before anyone could start shooting and making things even messier, however, Kara in her Supergirl outfit strode through, her face a blank mask of neutrality.

"Supergirl!" Alex called out, rushing in after her. She stopped for a moment when she noticed others staring at her, hesitating for only a second before marching forward. "Please, we have to talk about this—"

Kara, nevertheless, continued striding forwards, right towards her. "I can't," she said, voice flat. "I can't talk about it, or be in this place, right now, Alex."

"Hank was just trying to pro—"

"Alex!" Kara snapped, stopping only to glance behind her with a jerky, sharp motion. "Enough. Stop, please."

Alex paused, her throat bobbing as she took in a breath, her shoulders slumping even while her spine straightened. "Later?" She less asked, more begged, her voice cracked.

Kara glanced away, back towards her. "Later," she confirmed, before stepping back into her stride, letting it carry her through the length of the canteen and right up to the table they were seated at. "Agent Vasquez," she said, nodding, Susan blinking up at her before nodding as well. Finally, Kara turned her gaze onto her, eyes flicking over her features rapidly, looking for something, before finally her neutral expression softened. "Addy. I think it's time we got you home, okay?"

Something soured in her gut. This wasn't right, Kara was bright and exuberant and loud even when she was Supergirl. This time, though, there was nothing like that, just emptiness and softness that was familiar if distant. She wanted to demand, to know what made her like this, but stopped herself before she could open her mouth. She was tired, Kara was probably tired, something had happened but—but... she couldn't do anything about it.

Her stomach twisted, ached. She didn't like this. "Okay," she finally answered, pushing down on the queasiness in her chest.

The apartment was dark and cleaned when they got back. Maybe she was just better at noticing differences, but it was clear enough that someone had come through at some point to remove the egg goop and do some rudimentary cleaning. Despite that, in places, she could just barely see boot treads, and in others, objects had been rearranged, possibly because they had been knocked over in the retrieval process. There was no evidence that anything that had happened today had; no open window with Astra, no corpse of a Black Mercy, no egg, no scuffle.

Everything looked completely normal.

Glancing down at her toes, Addy let each one wiggle, feeling the way flesh brushed against flesh.

"Right!" Kara called out, appearing from around the corner of her room, carrying with her a small tower of blankets and pillows. The blanket was on the bottom, looking thick and plush, folded in a rectangle, while about three pillows had been stacked on top of that. "Do you think you'll need any more than this to sleep?"

Addy stared at it for a moment, glancing between the articles, before shaking her head. "Don't think so, the blanket looks interesting."

Kara smiled, though it was brief. Getting home had returned some of the energy she'd lacked at the D.E.O. back, but the difference was still there. She'd held back on asking what was causing her to act this way, or why, but... well, her impulses were getting the worse of her, especially now that she was sitting down on something comfortable and it was just so easy to let her head go all fuzzy and soft. Blinking a few times, Addy glanced at the clock; it was close to 1AM, late even for Taylor.

"The blanket's one of the ones my adoptive mother got me—Eliza Danvers," Kara explained without prompting, coming to a halt just next to her and letting the bundle of soft fabric plunk down on the couch. "The blanket is weighted a bit, though I'm not sure if you'll notice, and reinforced. I used to have nightmares and I kept shredding the blankets, and she came up with... well, this. Or, well she and Jeremiah did. The pillows are just normal though, so don't grab them too hard or you'll rip them apart."

Addy reached out, dragged her fingers over the wrinkles in the bedsheets. They were soft, but not in an unpleasant way, not like cotton swabs. It was soft and silken, almost textureless in the way it sat against her fingers, and it smelt faintly of Kara's perfume, like she'd used it a while ago, but not so long ago that it was simply a childhood blanket. Glancing up at her, Addy tried to find any concern or weariness in her face and found none. "Are you sure?"

Kara smiled then, but it was sad. "I kept it around because after Jeremiah died it was all I had left to remember him by," she explained, reaching down herself to begin moving the pillows to the other end of the couch, piling them until they padded the area where cushion transitioned into the hard fabric armrest. She tugged on the blanket too, pulled it until it unfurled in full and reached over to slowly drape the article around Addy's shoulders, her fingers warm when they brushed against the skin of her cheeks. "I think he'd be very proud of me if he saw that I was passing on a blanket that helped me so much to someone else, you know? It's a little sad to be giving it up, but it's yours now, Addy, for as long as you need it, and even longer then."

Addy swallowed, scrunching her nose when the lump in her throat didn't abate. Her throat almost ached with it, she reached up, brushing fingertips over thankfully dry cheekbones, but she just had to be sure. The blanket was heavy, enough that it was noticeable, but not so much it stopped her movement. It felt warm, heavy on her shoulders, grounded her somehow, in a way that other things hadn't. She breathed in, felt her lungs fill with air, then out. This felt good, this felt nice, she felt whole and safe and like she could tuck her head under the blanket and the entire world wouldn't be able to find or affect her. It felt like a shield, and she liked that.

The sound of fabric shifting drew her attention, her eyes tracking over to Kara, who had decided to slump down into her chair. Bringing her hand up, she brushed shaky fingers through her hair, not paying any attention to her. She reached for the remote after another moment, bringing it up and turning the television on, some sort of cartoon about a large, red-coloured robot striding across a ruined landscape flickering into view. Her cartoon channel got weird after midnight, apparently, not that she minded, especially with the volume so low she had to strain her ears to hear it.

"You wanna watch this?" Kara asked after another moment, clicking a button and causing a small menu to pop up at the bottom of the screen, displaying future shows to be broadcast. Flicking her eyes down, Addy briefly caught sight of the title of the show before Kara could scroll away from it, an 'Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone'. "Because, it's okay if you do, I'm just... sticking around until you doze off, okay? But, I thought maybe I could change it to something less apocalyptic."

Addy blinked again, this time too slowly. Her head felt fuzzier than normal, she was warm and comfortable and found herself rocking back and forth a little, the motions comfortable. "M'not," she stumbled, not liking the way the words came out unclear. She'd have to work on that, impeccable pronunciation was important. "I'm not," she repeated, just for clarity. "You can change it, I just like the colours and noises of the shows."

"Bright, right?" Kara said knowingly. Addy found herself nodding, letting the weight of her body tip her over to the side, the lack of a right arm leaving her left side slightly unbalanced. She landed against the cushion of the couch with a thump, wormed her way up the length of it and tucked her face into the crisp white pillows. They smelled like fake flowers in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant, and the pillowcases were smooth and silky enough that brushing her cheek across the surface felt nice, soothing, the relative cool of the pillows feeling like a respite from the heat of the blanket.

The channel flickered, changed over. On it, a man with a deep, English accent documented the behavioural patterns of the alpine ibex, from the way they frolicked and hopped and did all other sorts of jumpy things. She felt her eyes stutter for a moment, blinking only to find that the documentary had skipped forward to talking about goats, her place gone. Her eyes felt heavy, weighed down, she blinked again and glanced around, not finding Kara in her seat. She slumped a bit, not finding the energy to go looking, and tried to watch the documentary again, letting the warmth suck her in, the sound of his voice, slow and smooth and pleasant on the ears.

Another blink. Kara was back, floating in through the window in her Supergirl uniform. Their eyes met for a moment, Kara jolting slightly before relaxing. The show on the television wasn't even the one they'd started with, the English accent replaced for something more Irish, talking about the creation of Earth instead of the mating habits of mountain-dwelling fauna.

"Kara?" Addy rasped, her tongue flicking out mostly on instinct to wet her lips.

Kara wilted, glanced back towards the window she had come in from, before finally closing it. "It's okay Addy, you can go back to sleep. I just had to see someone off."

She had to know. Kara's behaviour had been bothering her, had been making something awful twist in her chest. "Who?"

Kara paused, visibly swallowed, and then gave her a sad smile. "Aunt Astra," she explained quietly, fingers pulling together. "She was killed today, and it's part of my people's culture to send their caskets off to meet Rao, the god - and sun - of our system. My boss was responsible for her death, and... it's why I wanted to leave the D.E.O. so quickly."

The feeling came back, a sharp pang in her chest. It made her queasy, ill, made her want to apologize. She searched for a moment, reached out to her memories, but was met only with the constant flicker of how Taylor had been after Annette's death, how Danny had been, how Kara was. She pushed them aside, delved into it, tried to draw out the meaning of the feeling, the dull ache of something bitter and shameful.

It came to her a second later. She felt guilty.

For what? For not stepping in, for not asking to help when they would've told her not to? She just wanted to exist, why was she feeling guilty? There was no rational reason, and yet, even knowing that, even knowing the source of it, she still felt it. It made her chest hurt, made her want to do anything to help, it itched at the back of her skull and almost managed to banish the fatigue, but not enough.

Kara's fingers brushed over the crown of her hair, gently smoothing over her hair. Addy felt herself almost melt.

"I'll be okay," Kara said gently. "I didn't think I'd get attached to her, she did bad things, but... I felt like I could've brought her to the light. She wasn't committed to her cause, not like she had been. I'm just sad, you know? She was kin, and now she's gone."

Addy understood, but she also didn't. Taylor would understand, and she had enough Taylor in her to get some of it, but the concept of kin to her was foreign, alien. Kin ate kin, kin did anything the gestalt intelligence wanted. Kin ate planets and culled populations who knew too much, who had unwanted complications, who they could not exploit for information or resources. She understood family, understood the loss of it, and yet didn't.

Her eyes shut, too heavy. Kara's fingers kept brushing over her head, gently smoothing the curls down.

"I'll see you in the morning."

Addy jolted awake with a heave, her vision swimming as it adjusted to the light. The memories were on the tip of her tongue, not present enough to be knowable, but there. She had been thinking of something, what had she been thinking of? It had been about Taylor, right? She was almost certain it had been but nothing else was clear and she didn't like that she—

"Addy?" Kara called out, head peeking around the corner. Addy felt herself relax back into the couch, the feeling of sweat slicking the back of her neck unpleasant. The memories trickled out, away, lost to the ether despite her nominally perfect recall of everything that had happened since she'd first woken up. She breathed out, low and slow, tried to get her heart to stop pounding relentlessly against her chest.

"Sorry," she rasped out, blinking once as Kara's pyjama-clad figure blurred and then reappeared a breath later with a glass of water that she very carefully placed on the coffee table an arm's length away. "I think I might've just had a dream."

Kara gave her a curious look, brow ticked up. "Is that not normal?"

Reaching out, Addy took the glass and tipped it back, feeling the water pour into her mouth and down her throat, an unpleasant flood of fluid slicking against flesh. She hated it, but it made her throat less sore, less dry. "No. I don't remember it either, and I have perfect recall." Or at least, she thought she did.

"Just give it time," Kara said slowly, walking back towards her bedroom. Her voice had a knowing tone to it, something about it spoke of experience and understanding, and it somehow made it both worse and better. "Dreams will fade, you'll feel better soon."

Addy breathed out again, focused on the feeling of taking air in and out. It did help relax her, and the panic from before did fade, though not entirely. She didn't like dreaming, though the fact that her head felt alive and not smothered by fog meant that she did, however, like sleep. Maybe she could find a way to avoid dreaming? After all, dreaming was just important to people who didn't have a consciousness capable of working through its problems outside of select moments of unconsciousness.

Yeah, dreamless sleep sounded nice. She wanted that.

"We'll go out tomorrow to get your stuff put together," Kara began, startling Addy not for the first time. She glanced up, catching Kara quickly slipping a pastel-pink cardigan over a white blouse and black slacks that had at some point replaced the sheep-patterned pyjamas she wore. "But today I have work, you'll be fine on your own, I think. Actually, can you tell me the house rules I told you about yesterday?"

Blinking away the sleep behind her eyes and the gunk more literally on them, Addy took another reluctant sip of water, her entire body almost vibrating with a need for it. "Don't let people into the house if you don't tell me they're coming. If an alien forces its way into the house, call you, if a human does, call the police. Don't use the oven, try to eat three meals a day, and do not break anything."

Kara smiled brightly at her, looking almost like herself before her face slipped into something like understanding. "Speaking of food," she started, slipping out of the bedroom area and making her way towards the kitchen, or more specifically, the fridge. Cracking it open, Kara reached inside and took out what looked like an oversized, very tall mug filled with a honey-coloured slurry, a white container with 'GO YOGURT' written across it in bright, all-capital colourful letters, and a small assortment of saran-wrapped granola bars. Walking back over, she placed each of them carefully down on the otherwise empty surface of the coffee table.

"These," she began, motioning towards the three bits of what Addy was assuming - and hoping, her stomach was very taut with what she had come to realize was hunger - was food. "Are my secret to keeping myself from starving to death." She reached down, tapping her finger against the yogurt tub. "This is the most calorie-intensive yogurt on the market. I have to have Alex order it on Amazon for me because nobody stocks it outside of expensive fitness stores. I store them in the dozens and I go through about one per day, so I'll have to double up for you in all likelihood." Next, she tapped the granola bars. "These are homemade, specifically by Alex, though the recipe is Eliza's. It's basically a brick of pure calories, if you feel hungry, eat half of one, it'll be about five hundred. I don't know how it works, don't ask me, my sister is a wizard." Finally, she tapped the side of the huge container. "This is a protein smoothie, it tastes like grass-covered honey and is the only reason I can keep upright at work. I can make more for you, it is one of the only things I can make because fire isn't required, but it's high-calorie, like everything else, and makes you feel full really quickly, so be careful if you eat it."

Addy had a lot of questions. She was not aware Alex practiced a magical religion, nor was she aware that something the size of her palm could contain five hundred calories, but despite all of that, they did look appealing, for better or for worse.

"I want you to choose one of these to eat today, okay? They're still going through the tests they ran on you to find out where the acceptable caloric intake range would be. Considering you're not falling over from starvation, I doubt you're as bad as me, but you probably still need to eat a lot, sedentary or not."

Glancing between them, Addy struck off the smoothie immediately. Liquids were gross. The granola bars looked appetizing, but she didn't like how dry they looked, which really only left the food equivalent of a liquid. "Yogurt," she said, flicking her eyes up. Kara smiled at her, beamed really, and Addy felt that awful guilt gnaw at her throat again. She had a bad feeling about what was going to happen, she should've stepped in, Kara looked so sad and she kept reminding her of Taylor after Annette and Taylor after Annette was why she existed but she was also miserable and it was awful.

Kara swept up the other two, walking back over to the refrigerator and putting it away before closing the door. "I have about thirty minutes before I need to get to work," Kara explained, walking back over with little too much speed in her step to call it slow. Instead of stopping just shy of the coffee table like she thought she would, however, Kara continued past it, coming to a halt next to the bookshelf just in front of one of the curtains that slightly blocked off the archway into her bedroom. On top of the bookcase was a cardboard box, a small pile of files, and an envelope, all of which she similarly picked up and carefully made her way over, placing it down on the coffee table. "So we need to go over this quick, okay?"

Addy glanced at the box, the papers, the yogurt, and then Kara. This was a lot, but she could deal with it. Doing a lot of things simultaneously was kind of her thing. Finally, she nodded, trying to put some resolve into the gesture.

Kara smiled, though a bit more timidly, with less exposed teeth and bright cheer. "First thing," she began, reaching out to swipe the envelope from the top of the pile, handing it over. Addy took it, flicked her thumb under the little bit of it that hadn't been perfectly sealed, and pulled up, tearing the top open just like she remembered. "Congratulations, you are now a citizen of earth!"

True to what she said, inside was literally that: an American birth certificate, a social insurance card, and a personal ID. Written on all of them was 'Adeline Taylor Queen', with 'Addy' left as an alias on one of the files. She had apparently been born and raised in a town just outside of Boston by the name of Brookline. She'd gone to school, graduated top of her year from the local High School with proficient grades in mathematics, sciences, and literature. They'd even managed to get a picture of her somehow, her face blank and staring directly into the center of the camera with her hair framed around her ears, the picture cutting off just below her shoulders.

She wasn't sure how to feel about the middle name or the fact that her 'true' name was Adeline, but then Addy was her name and if people could say their name was something different to the thing they were born with, so could she.

The bundle of papers was placed down in front of her, looking about twelve to fifteen pages thick all told. "This," Kara explained, tapping the top, which was blank for all but 'D.E.O.' in large, blocky capital letters. "Is a proficiency test to understand where you are relative to humans in terms of mathematical, technological, and other information knowledge. I'm not sure what's in it, I didn't check, but they want it back as soon as possible because they want you to find a job to begin integrating into."

Dropping the envelope to the side, Addy picked at the corner of the page, frowning a bit at it as she flipped it over and was met with what was very obviously rote mathematics. Mostly just simple algebra that most humans would learn in university; nothing she would sweat at. "Alright," she eventually said, glancing back up at Kara, who was giving the cardboard box a long look. It wasn't like a conventional cardboard box, not a perfect square, but more of a very short, very wide rectangle.

"This, meanwhile, is the laptop they're providing you. It's yours now, try not to break it, and it has already been connected to the wifi if what Alex said was true, so all you need to do is turn it on and then plug it in to recharge it. It should have a booklet you can look through to find out how to operate it if you're not sure."

Taylor had a lot of memories of laptops and computers. It had been, for a while, her passion, what she wanted to be when she grew up. She wanted to either code for a living or teach coding if at all possible. Even after she'd ended up turning herself in, that want had stayed consistent, and only really changed as the time got ever-closer to the end of the world. She'd stayed with it, too, taking courses and classes about it, learning as much as she reasonably could, though Addy hadn't really looked too deeply into those memories with as much frequency as she had with the more emotional ones. She would have to now, though.

The guilt was back now, though, as strong and potent as ever. She felt herself tense up, felt her fingers tighten a bit. Astra was dead, she did nothing, and now she was being rewarded for it. She knew, rationally, that that wasn't the case, that she couldn't have done anything, but something about the situation was too close to home. Really, everything was, everything felt like she was watching Taylor's memories play out again. Maybe she didn't even feel that guilty about not acting, she wasn't sure, but it somewhat felt like she was guilty about what would happen after, about what she'd be forced to watch again.

"Why are you a hero?" The words came impulsively, blurted before she could stop them. Kara froze, opened and shut her mouth for a long moment before fully turning to her, focused on her with an intensity she hadn't seen in Kara before.

Kara breathed in, then out. "I was sent to Earth to protect my cousin. My planet was destroyed, and in the process, I got trapped in this part of space that doesn't really follow conventional laws of spacetime. By the time I actually arrived, Kal-El—my cousin—was already grown up and... he didn't need me. He had already become Superman. I grew up being told to hide my powers, and the one time I didn't ended up with my adoptive father turning up dead a few years later. I... both resented my powers and really wanted to use them. I am powerful under this sun, so, so powerful, I can do so much, but I just... didn't. I hid who I was, what I wanted to be, while my cousin did what I should've been doing for him. Until the world forced my hand, my sister's plane had gone down and she was going to die if I didn't interfere, so I did."

There was a short pause. Addy digested that, compared it to what she knew of Taylor's decision to become a hero, which had been far less idealistic, far more driven by a sense of duty and requirement. She might've felt guilty for what she did, might've gone on to seek atonement, but the comparison was only surface-deep.

"Then, I found my purpose like that. My life had felt hollow, half-fulfilled, I had rejected so much of my Kryptonian heritage to just fit in, to feel normal. I didn't want to be normal anymore, and maybe that was selfish, but... I wanted to be abnormal, I wanted to help others, I wanted to make people feel safe." Another pause, heavier, Kara stared at her with lidded eyes and a warmth that Addy felt completely unprepared for. "So, I did, and I continue to. You don't have an obligation to follow in my footsteps, Addy, but I felt obligated to do so because I had the power to do so. My powers let me help people, and to not help them was a decision I just couldn't handle, so I won't. That's why I became a hero, that's why I am Supergirl."

They really were nothing alike. Part of Taylor's rationale for it was that she'd always wanted to be a hero, always wanted to help, but to a degree when she had become a hero, some of it had been primarily driven by the need for the resources they provided. She could stop the end of the world far better if she had help, after all. They were superficially similar, doing the right thing when they needed to, but only in the abstract, only so far as they could be as two very different people.

Kara glanced away, up at the clock, and froze. "Shit," she cursed, which was new because Kara did not curse. "I gotta get to work. Are you okay with people coming over tonight for game night? It's totally fine if you want me to cancel, you just arrived and it—"

"It's okay," Addy said, still processing, still working through her thoughts. They were different, yes, similar, also yes, but so different. She needed to focus on that, Kara wasn't Taylor, she shouldn't feel guilty about Kara's future because Kara was not Taylor, would not fall apart as Taylor had. It didn't make the guilt go away, didn't even diminish it, but the thought was at least a comforting one. "They can come over."

Kara beamed another smile in her direction. "Do the worksheets! I'll see you at around five!"

The worksheets had turned out to be a trivial if welcome distraction. None of them were difficult, and they had all been framed in ways that let her explain her reasoning even if she didn't use what she thought was conventional human practices to reach her answers. It took her thirty minutes, and most of that had been trying to figure out how to explain to people a mathematical concept that didn't exist in conventional human mathematics yet, which she had managed, at the very least.

She had turned the television back to cartoons shortly after Kara left, ramped up the volume until tinny voices and dramatic sound effects until it had drowned out the memories of Kara's speech about being a hero. Her laptop was set up, it wasn't hard to figure out after digging through her brain for the relevant information. The laptop UI was a bit different, going from LiteTech to Microsoft, but that wasn't hard to acclimate to in the same way that the keyboard layout had been. A few keys had been changed around, but so long as she looked at her hand while she typed, she was fine. A bit slow, but fine.

Eating the yogurt had been another slow process. It wasn't as watery as she'd been expecting, tasted nice and had a very smooth texture, but she didn't really like it? There was nothing particularly wrong about it, and the texture wasn't offensive, but by the time she had cleared out the entire tub of it, she kinda wished she had just gone with the granola bars.

Glancing up at the clock, Addy felt her face cramp. It was still only two in the afternoon, even after spending hours finding out there was an entire genre of music that was called noise and was wonderful and amazing and should be significantly more popular. Time was slow, had been since she'd fused fully with Taylor's body, but even that was a bit much.

People took a lot of photos of their cats. Not that she was complaining, cats were delightful creatures who were soft and made a lot of odd noises. She liked geese more for their noises, the throaty honks that bellowed out of their beaks like little car horns, but cats were still good, especially when they made that chirping noise.

She could do without the people who left weirdly-spelled comments beneath them though. What on earth was a 'uwu'? Why were they everywhere? It was just a cat. Was it some type of religious thing?

She wanted Kara. It was half-past four in the evening and she should be home soon but she was bored and the television had nothing on and she wanted to be around Kara because Kara was bright and cheery even if she made her feel guilty about something she could not control and hated the fact that she was guilty but—but...

She wanted Kara.

"I'm home!"

Addy nearly jolted to her feet, stopped only by her stranglehold on the couch. She hadn't really left the couch outside of to use the washroom and get another drink, and had found a comfortable little nook inside of it. Of course, she'd had to dislodge the cushion a tiny bit so she could fit her rear into the little groove and feel the way the scratchy fabric pressed against her, feel the little coiled up springs, but it was very comfortable.

Kara sort of stared at her for a moment, glancing between the done bundle of papers, her computer which was still playing that low trill of noise music, to her, half-stuffed into the couch, and then back again. "Did you have a good day?" Kara finally asked, shucking her pink outer shirt and leaving it hanging on one of the chairs in the dining table.

"I learned a lot," she said instead of 'no I wished you were here but I also didn't', because that felt a bit too much for her. Kara just smiled, ignorant, and Addy let the moment pass.

"That's good! You got the worksheets done, too, which is a bonus. Now, I need to know, what do you know about Settlers of Catan?"

"This is Winn Schott, he works at CatCo as an IT guy," Kara smoothly introduced, motioning towards the man in question. He was wearing a cardigan over a simple white shirt, some slacks, and some converse shoes the colour of the sky. He smiled awkwardly at her, a smile that wobbled a bit when she just cocked her head to one side, staring at him curiously. Finally, after a few more seconds of awkward silence, he very nervously extended his hand for a shake.

Addy took it, firmly shaking it up and down. "Hello, I'm Addy."

"I've heard a lot about you," Winn replied, his voice as wobbly as his awkward smile.

"Well," Kara began, startling them both. She shot them a look, like she shouldn't be startled when someone silently appears right beside her and speaks, which was rude. "You'll have to learn a lot, in any case, since you've both been paired off for tonight."

Winn shot her another shaky smile, one she very tentatively tried to return. From the way his smile went from shaky to actually somewhat genuine, it probably worked.

"This is James Olsen, he—"

"Shoots photos," Addy interrupted. Because he did, because one of the first things she'd looked up was famous photographers and James was on just about every list. His photos were all vibrant, even over a screen they were all perfectly framed and colourful. She especially liked his work done on Superman, who he liked to capture mid-flight, with the reds contrasting the blues, but he also had done Superman in more scenic shots, rural areas where the greens made for a bright, wonderful comparison to the reds and blues.

"—Alright, you already know. Cool. This is his girlfriend, Lucy Lane," Kara said, stressing the word 'girlfriend' like it might actually mean something to her. Addy just shot her a blank look, one Kara ignored until something like comprehension flicked across her face and tension Addy hadn't noticed was there bled back out of her.

Turning to the woman in question, Addy held out her hand for a shake. "Your boyfriend makes very colourful photos," she said, in lieu of a conventional greeting.

Lucy took her hand, a sly smile pulling across her face, some sort of in-joke she didn't understand in all likelihood. "It's one of his redeeming qualities," she confessed, and somewhere behind her, Addy could hear Alex snort.

"I have this monopoly card."

The rest of the table stared at her, their puny villages meek and incomparable to her own villages, stalwart, well-built, properly administrated with giant roads. She could see Winn sitting beside her, looking like he was on the edge of vibrating out of his seat. They had been a good duo, working together, though he had quickly realized she was far better at micromanagement and figuring out how to best exploit resources, even if those resources were her enemies.

"Give me all of your ore."

"Here, uhm, here's my username on twitter and stuff," Winn said, shoving a ripped-off piece of paper into her hand. True to his word, there were several usernames and ways to contact him. She stared blankly at it.

"I heard you didn't have a phone," he started, sounding like he was babbling. "A—and I'm not, trying to hit on you, or ask you out."

"That is good," Addy said, glancing up after another moment. "I do not like men."

Winn smiled, though it was a bit weak. "So you're gay?"

"I don't like women either." Really, she'd prefer it if people understood that. Apparently liking someone's photography was enough to make people think she was interested in them physically, which was patently untrue. Fleshy bits could remain tucked away, thank you very much.

"Oh, so you're asexual!"

"I'll endeavour to look up what that is tonight after you and Alex leave."

Alex snorted, again. She had done a lot of that, though for a while she'd remained quiet and focused on glaring at her. How should Addy know that she had an entire hand full of ore? It wasn't like Kara got mad at her, and Alex had been on her team.

The apartment was finally quiet.

Lying down on the couch, Addy stared up at the ceiling, fingers tucked against the little grooves between each cushion. Kara was in her room, either sleeping or trying to, and the television had been turned back on to the documentary channel and turned low. She couldn't even really make out the words the person was saying, but it was soothing even despite that.

Addy blinked, long and slow, tried to let her eyes shut on their own like they had the night before. She was still awake, still aware. The apartment still smelled vaguely of takeout, as a large order of potstickers and pizza had been the dinner. Pizza was fine, a lot of different textures and in one instance the wonderful addition of pineapple which gave everything a very sweet and salty taste. Potstickers had been less great, but workable, she didn't really like how the dumpling itself tasted or felt when she bit into it, though the filling was still nice. Kara really liked them, so she hadn't said as much, but if push came to shove it wasn't like she couldn't eat them.

Wiggling her tones one by one, Addy forced her eyes shut. She didn't want to dream again, but she had to sleep. The guilt had waxed and waned throughout the day, coming and going seemingly with her mood. She wanted to do more, she wanted to do something, to do anything with what she had. She wasn't at fault, none of it was, but, again, it would appear that her brain had other opinions on the matter. She shouldn't feel bad, shouldn't feel like she was watching Taylor happen again in slow motion, but she did, and regardless of how much she told herself otherwise, the feeling always snuck back in.

She was tired, but she wasn't.

Was this what Taylor had felt like, near the beginning?

(She didn't know. Didn't think she ever truly would, really, even with the memories, full of emotion and texture and feeling, she knew better than to assume she understood what Taylor had been thinking at any given time.)

OxfordOctopus · Aug 10, 2020

If there was one thing Addy could appreciate about her newfound existence, it was almost certainly her ears. Humans, it would seem, had similar thoughts, as they had devoted a lot of time and cultural import to the creation of songs, plays, and sometimes, when they were feeling very adventurous, a combination of the two by the name of musicals. Now, she did get that her and the average human would have different opinions on what qualified as good sound. On a more generalized scale, apparently people were terribly opinionated on whether or not something could qualify as 'music' depending on the genre and whether or not it was created with a guitar or a computer pretending to be one, but the tenuous link that connected her to the international appreciation of certain sounds being played at certain times to certain rhythms was still something she could understand.

Which, really, did raise the question why people hated geese so much.

Geese were a member of a species of biological entity known primarily for their birdsong. Some, like the chickadee, had high-pitched, very pleasant trilling, a crooning to attract potential mates and to warn of predators. Others, like crows, warbled and made more loud, throaty noises to inform their flock where they were and if they were in any danger, among other things. Some, like ducks, made more nasally sounds, loud 'wenks' and 'quacks' that sounded almost like someone was plugging their nose each time they opened their beak to make a noise. Then, finally, there were the geese. Geese, in Addy's opinion, sounded somewhere between a duck and a rooster; they had this wonderful, squeaky build-up that escalated into a full on honk once it punched its way out of its beak. They would roll and bob their necks as they did it, sometimes even fluffing up their wings in a display of either intimidation or arousal, it seemed to depend, which was itself generally then accompanied by yet more squeaky honking.

They were amazing birds, inherently musical, very dramatic, and all-around very nice to look at. They had the long, curling necks of lots of other waterfowl, such as swans and cranes, and the rudder-like feet of a duck. They were loud, they came in a multitude of forest-y colours, and they were absolutely everywhere due to conservation initiatives. Addy could not thank the people of the past enough, really, they had seen the possible extinction of the Canadian Goose like writing on the wall and had acted with so much unnecessary vigor that most of the continent was absolutely swarmed with the delightful things. People might not appreciate them, but without a specifically-targeted goose plague of some kind, they weren't going anywhere.

And, really, if other people didn't appreciate geese enough, she could do it for them.

Kara's apartment had been built in what had once been a very green suburb of some kind. Why, exactly, most of the houses had been torn down and replaced with moderately expensive apartments and convenience stores, well, Addy had a few guesses, but none of them were important. What was, however, was that when they had built all of the new buildings, they hadn't done so at the expense of the greenery. Kara's apartment was among one of the many with an actual backyard, and among some of the very few with a pond, and possibly the only one for quite a while that was home to a local goose population. Kara had warned her about it when she'd expressed a desire to go outside - largely to see the geese - and had cautioned against getting too close, claiming the pair of geese were some of the meanest she had met. Addy, personally, thought it was curious that Kara knew enough geese to get a register on the relative nastiness of this pair in particular, but then again she was functionally indestructible to anything weaker than military-grade weaponry and last she checked, despite how much they deserved it, geese were not that strong.

True to her words, the geese had been out there when she'd first shuffled out the back entrance, Kara's spare keys tucked away in the pocket of her sweats, heavy and pulling at her waistband enough that she had to yank the thing up every once and a while. There were only two, both Canadian Geese, floating around on top of the pond like the dapper little things they were. The backyard for the apartment was fenced off, roughly a quarter of the size of the average school gymnaseum, and was sloped slightly down; green hills giving way near the back fence to the pond. There were benches scattered about, a few near the door and others closer to the pond, with errant bushes and withered branches sticking up from the ground at odd angles. It looked all the world like it hadn't been groomed in years, not that she minded. Lawns were a stupid, wasteful concept to begin with, ecologically unfriendly and a terrible waste of water.

Staring at them now, Addy really took them in. They weren't doing much, just floating and letting out lackluster little noises, possibly due to tiredness. To be fair to them, it was pretty early - Kara left at six in the morning almost on the dot to be on-time and prepared for her boss - and despite it not feeling like it, it still was technically winter, so the sun rose just a little later than it usually did. Admittedly, that wasn't the whole truth, Addy hadn't quite realized the disparity of when it got light out based on coastal regions until it was still getting light out at 6:30AM in the middle of February, but it still was only just sunrise at this point, so they could be sleepy. She hoped they were sleepy, sleepy geese seemed like a wonderful thing. Maybe she'd google it when she went back inside, which she would, eventually. Probably.

Starting down the grassy hill, Addy ignored the frustration that bubbled up into her throat as her sandal smooshed and pressed hard, pointy, sharp withered grass into her foot, unprotected what with it being in a flip flop. She wasn't getting hurt by it, admittedly, bugs tried to bite her around every corner and none of them managed it either, but she could still feel it, and she didn't like it. She might like a lot of sensations, but pain wasn't on them. Apparently there were people who would disagree with her on that, but when she'd asked about that, Kara had gotten really flustered and told her not to look into it. She had, of course, despite largely agreeing with and going along with Kara's rules, she would not give up the pursuit of knowledge just because Kara was uncomfortable or whatever.

Coming to a stop just shy of the bench next to the pond, Addy stared. The geese had noticed her now, the larger of the two beginning to make low squeaky noises as it lurched its head forward a few times. They ruffled their feathers, puffing themselves up, neck curling back as it let out a mighty, boastful, intimidating honk, delightful on the ears in all the right way. It honked again when it saw she hadn't moved, and then again, and again, and again. The other goose got in on it too, honking madly, fluttering its wings and splashing water roughly in her direction, fluffing up just like the other member of its duo, ornery and loud and if Addy could live in any single moment for the rest of her life, it would be this.

The goose lurched forward, again, but instead of drawing back to trill, it kept the momentum going. Wings bared, swooping down to send it into a leap right at her, its honk stretching out into the long, battle-squeak of a waterfowl who didn't know any better. Why would it, after all, she was simply someone with one arm and an odd stare and in sweaty sweats with flip flops. She probably looked like every other easily-scared-off human-adjacent thing that lived in the building, and maybe the gambit might've worked if she had. She could imagine Kara, despite her invulnerability, jumping away with a squeak at the show of aggression and promising herself she'd never confront the goose again.

But Addy wasn't Kara. She opened her remaining arm and stump in the gesture for a hug, and she could see the moment just before the goose landed against her chest that it realized it had made a grave, grave miscalculation. Then, she saw nothing at all, because she brought her arms in close, hugged the goose to her chest, and ignored its continued attempts to beat her to death with its large wings and peck at her hair.

"...Kara?"

Kara glanced up from her work, meeting Winn's eyes. He was looking sheepish, awkward more than anything else, not that it was unusual behavior out of him, just... not usually this early. "Yeah?"

From behind his back, Winn drew his hand out, in it his phone. On the screen was a suspiciously familiar slip of land, a grassy downward slope encircled by a fence, and... no, yeah, that was her backyard. Winn caught her expression, smiled thinly, and then brought it in closer, thumbing over the image and tapping down, starting the video. On it, someone who could only be Addy came to a stop right in front of a pond full of the hellspawn birds that had nearly mauled her once. The geese started to fluff up, show off their intimidation, only for Addy to simply cock her head, looking more intrigued than anything else. Finally, after a long howl of rage, one of the geese flung itself forward, and instead of flinching or running away like a normal person, or just, really, any person, because geese were terrifying, thank-you-very-much, Addy just opened her arms and received the goose wholesale.

The goose, as it happened, did not appreciate the hug and started to flail wildly, whacking its neck against her head, pecking at her skin, trying to beat Addy's face in with its wings. After a few more seconds of ardent struggle, the goose just seemed to give up, going mostly limp, if still repeatedly whacking Addy in the face with its wing. A few seconds after that, the video stopped.

"I found it on Twitter," Winn admitted, tapping the full-screen button to return it back to the post itself. Kara just about felt her eyes glaze over at the numbers: thirty-thousand likes, half that in retweets, and still climbing. The text above the video was, simply, 'just watched this crazy bitch out-stubborn a goose'.

She wasn't sure really how to feel about any of that, or the fact that she might have to contact the D.E.O. again because, well, did this qualify as being too visible? Kinda felt like it did, Addy's antics weren't getting any less popular and someone would undoubtedly figure out where she lived, and it wasn't like there were exactly a surplus of flip-flop obsessed one-armed adult women with an unhealthy fixation on the most unpleasant species of bird to exist. Did this need the D.E.O. to step in? She kinda felt like it shouldn't, there was nothing alien in the video besides Addy not even bothering to pretend to flinch when the goose latched onto her ear and tried to tear it off, but... well...

Surely this was too much?

OxfordOctopus · Aug 11, 2020

EPISODE 4

Factually, Addy had understood that California would have a different climate to Brockton Bay. It wasn't as though Taylor had never left the east coast of America; in the later years of her life - for however short it had been - she had spent most of it abroad, juggled between one PRT branch after another. She had never made it this far out west, sure, but she had done a stint in a part of Texas at one point, and the weather there had been just as bad as the weather in National City.

Still, the fact that Alex had to turn the air conditioning to high to beat back the mid-February heat was bothering her. It wasn't the only thing bothering her, to be fair, the silence in the car, the fact that Kara didn't seem to be able to even so much as look at her sister for long periods of time—those bothered her too, but the heat was definitely a contributor. It didn't help any that the vehicle wasn't the one Alex had been driving before, instead traded out for a large nondescript van coloured uniform black with thick, heavy tires and an engine that almost roared when it picked up speed. It wasn't clunky or anything, it drove smoothly down the highway and turned well enough, but it still felt vaguely... off.

Everything did, to one degree or another. The lingering guilt, the awkward silences that had come in the hours after everyone left post-game night, the fact that Kara had gone sullen and quiet after returning from seeing her aunt off in what she had figured out was a Kryptonian funeral ritual. Everyone was tense, quiet, and Addy was not a huge fan of the quiet. It gave her time to think, mostly in circles, and thinking wasn't doing a whole lot of good for her right about now, which was something of a novel experience.

"Where are we going to first, again?" Alex asked, voice abrupt and sudden. Addy could barely see Kara jerk subtly out of the corner of her eye, her face scrunching. "I know we're going to the mall, before you say it, I just need to know what store we'll be heading into first."

For a moment, Kara said nothing. She simply stared at her sister blankly, uncomprehending, and Addy could relate somewhat. She was pretty sure Alex did know where they were going first, but for whatever reason she was pretending not to. Feigning ignorance had always been a clever method of lying to other people, but it felt unnecessary and abrupt in this situation. If Alex had problems with the silence in a similar vein to herself, why hadn't she just turned on the radio or something? It was right there, and it wasn't like anyone would've objected.

"We're going to American Apparel first," Kara finally said, emotions slipping back into her tone, sounding almost halfway excited. "Then we'll be stopping over at the Foot Locker just next to it, before moving on to the IKEA they're both connected to. Hopefully by then we'll have a full wardrobe and shoes for Addy, so we can focus entirely on getting stuff for the bedroom and then finish it off with getting some essentials, toothbrushes, toothpaste, some make-up, that sort of thing."

Alex relaxed, her shoulders smoothing out visibly. Addy felt her stomach tug a bit, she still wasn't perfectly comfortable with all of this, she knew rationally she'd have to get clothes eventually, and she had even been a bit excited for it. Despite the fact that she had enjoyed the sweats and flip-flops - which had been traded out for a pair of capris, shoes that didn't quite fit, and a baggy flannel button-up shirt, all gifts from Alex, who refused to clarify who she got them from - they had been a way to avoid addressing the proverbial elephant in the room: did she dress like Taylor, or did she dress like she wanted to?

Now, she accepted Taylor's faults for what they were, but if there had been anything in hindsight she disliked, it was Taylor's near-rabid avoidance of anything more colourful than off-navy blue. She liked colours, a lot, she liked how they looked on her skin, she liked how they made her feel, she liked how she could reflect how she felt in what she wore. She liked the idea of mixing and matching and all the fun that came with that.

But Taylor hadn't dressed that way, hadn't acted that way either.

"—Alex," Kara's voice pitched up just high enough to interrupt her train of thought, bordering on a yell. Addy blinked, glanced between the two sisters, who had reverted to their prior tense stand-off. "I don't need the D.E.O.'s handouts, I can afford this—"

"We both know Cat Grant pays you a fraction of what you should be with your hours and duties," Alex bit back, sounding exasperated. "The D.E.O. is willing to help with funding, Kara, you're paying for an entirely new wardrobe, several pairs of shoes, likely a lot of other expenses, things that would cut into your savings. Why are you being so stubborn about this?"

"You should know why," Kara muttered back, folding her arms across her chest, one hand lacing into the material of her seatbelt, tightening down around it until her knuckles whitened.

Alex made a low noise, a gravelly sigh. "I don't, Kar—"

"They can't pay off my aunt's death, Alex!" Kara snapped.

The vehicle went silent. Addy glanced away from the sisters, down to her red shoes with white laces, the way her toes were cramped inside. She tried to focus on them, to avoid the low ache of guilt that crawled back into her chest, to little effect. She didn't want to be in the vehicle right now, felt the impulse to pop the door and let gravity take the metaphorical wheel, but stopped herself. She had to get used to those—intrusive thoughts weren't natural to her. Or, well, they hadn't been, not until recently.

"It's not like that," Alex spoke, her voice soft, gentle. "I'm sorry you thought it was, but this is me dipping into the fund we established for Addy. It's not a lot, you'll have to pay for some of the things we're picking up, but you won't be putting yourself into debt for housing an alien we asked you to."

It did not help that Addy rather profoundly disliked being spoken of as if she wasn't in the back seat. To make a point, she - gently, because having full control over her body was easy but it still felt very weird having to be gentle to reach the strength levels of an average human - drove the toe of her foot into the underside of Alex's seat in front of her, prompting an odd, surprised squeaky noise to escape her. She glanced up just in time to see Alex stare at her, bewildered, from the rearview mirror.

Alex didn't apologize, but the way she flushed and glanced away probably meant she got the point she was trying to get across.

"I'll think about it," Kara finally hedged, each word slow, sounding like she was struggling to voice them. "Alright?"

Alex glanced back towards the stretch of highway, the mall - a long collection of large buildings, dominated by a single, unreasonably large Walmart - coming slowly into view on the other side of the hill. "That's all I can ask for."

Whoever invented chino pants should've been made an international hero. They were delightful, and she really did like that word, which meant its usage in this exact situation was very important, because chino pants were, with few exceptions, among some of the few types of pants that came in more colours that off-black and she could tolerate on her legs for any length of time. Jeans, for example, had different colours and styles but felt like she was rubbing sandpaper over her skin and she'd nearly shed them the moment she'd forced them on.

Kara, apparently, had similar experiences; she had explained that while she wore the style of clothing she did in part to avoid comparisons to being Supergirl, it had actually mostly been a result of her enhanced sensory abilities making a lot of clothing types unpleasant to wear for any number of reasons. Alex hadn't even seemed phased by her complaints about the jeans, which gave some credence to the explanation, though both Alex and Kara had tried to get her to buy at least a few skirts, not that she'd given in to their demands. Skirts were weird, too airy, and they rustled against her skin too much to be anything but unwearable.

Admittedly, she had given in to some of their requests. They had refused to let her fill out a portion of her wardrobe with khaki shorts, even though they were very efficient and had big pockets. They also had forced her to buy actual shoes, not just flip-flops - though she'd scored three pairs on clearance, each one in a different animal print: tiger, zebra and dalmatian - and so she'd ended up with two pairs of high-tops, one red and one blue, and a small pile of multicoloured laces Alex had offered as a compromise when she'd gotten frustrated with the lack of other available colours.

The rest of her wardrobe reflected her inability to live up to Taylor's expectations when it came to apparel. She had tried, mind you, she had a few pairs of white and black pants and shirts, largely at the recommendation of Kara, who explained they worked as a way to unify outfits, but everything else? Multicoloured. She had a shirt in at least every colour, same with pants, her socks were just the same. Her jackets included a cherry-red raincoat, a neon-blue zip-up sweater, and a few others of equally bright colouration. She'd even gotten a few hats that she'd enjoyed the shape and colour of, though she was more partial to the pageboy hat that was this off-red that reminded her of wine stains more than anything else.

She really wanted to go back to the van and try a lot of it on. She had gotten the chance to try them on in the abstract when she was choosing, it had been why they'd spent nearly three hours in that store, going over clothing, but she hadn't really got a chance to try on matching pairs of anything, just single articles of clothing. But, of course, she couldn't, because despite the hours that had passed, despite the constant bickering and Kara's eventual tired agreement to having some of the trip paid for by the D.E.O., they still weren't done.

Now, Addy was not intimidated by the IKEA. She couldn't be. It wasn't a death trap or a store intentionally designed to cause discomfort, it was very clearly just trying to show off their curiously-named furniture and other non-essential decorations. It was just a store, but it was a store in the same way that the Walmart near the front of the mall was a store: impossibly large and maze-like. IKEA was easily the second largest store in the building and unlike the other stores, which had carefully designed themselves to be made up of rows-upon-rows of goods and services, easily navigable and comprehensible, IKEA was designed by someone who likely moonlighted as a crop circle enthusiast.

"...It should be around here somewhere," Kara muttered, glancing up towards one of the several, non-specific hanging department signs that they'd placed seemingly at random. The one above them said 'bedrooms & others', despite the fact that the aisle Kara had dragged her into was largely cluttered with lamps, a good portion of which being lava lamps. She'd assumed, if only from memory alone, that they had long gone out of style and production - something about them exploding? - but IKEA either had other opinions on the topic or this was just yet another unpleasant change between universes.

They'd been searching for the better part of fifteen minutes now and had seen neither hide nor hair of anything even remotely resembling a bed or a mattress, though they had found several sleeping bags a few minutes back, near the 'blanket' aisle which had been made up primarily of curtains. Alex had abandoned them nearly the second they'd both entered the shop, scrambling away with the very obvious lie of looking for some new pillows for her bed or whatever, something even Kara had not believed despite several attempts to make sure they both believed that was what she was looking for.

Though that did raise the question of what Alex precisely thought she needed to get when neither of them were looking. Actually, considering they weren't getting very far in their actual goal, it wasn't like she had to keep her curiosity to herself or anything. "What do you think Alex is doing?"

Kara glanced back at her from where she was peeking around the corner of the section, apparently still trying to look for whatever qualified as 'bedroom' in the section. "Oh, nothing probably," she airily replied, something like frustration sliding into her tone. "She's probably just avoiding me. She gets like that when our relationship gets tense. She's done it since she was a teenager."

"Why would your relationship be tense?" She did know that it was, mind you. She wasn't so stupid to not see the weird vein of discomfort between the two of them, but it wasn't like she totally got the explanation for it.

Kara sighed. "It's not any problem in our relationship, Addy," she said, stepping away from the corner of the display area and towards the other, craning her neck around. "We just haven't had a lot of time to... talk. I know she still works for the D.E.O. and she's working there for a good reason, but... we haven't had time to handle the fallout from Astra's death."

Oh. Addy blinked slowly, rocking back on her heels in thought. Her chest hurt a little again, a little pang of guilty pain that she wanted to stomp down on, but stopped herself from doing so. The words were already in her head, she'd just been keeping them back, and she was alone with Kara in a place where she wouldn't be called off at random to go and do things. Alex was avoiding them, she could just... say it. Couldn't she? "I should have helped."

Kara froze at that, fingers tensing briefly around the side of one of the shelves, her head slowly turning back around to stare at her. "Addy," she said, voice gentle, reminiscent of how Annette spoke to Taylor. It made the ache worse. "You didn't have to."

Addy felt her throat bob without her consent, something aching and heavy sitting just below where her jaw met neck. "It's what Taylor would've done," she cut back in, and the worst part was that she wasn't wrong. Taylor was just that type of person, especially after they'd connected, after she'd given her powers. She would go out of her way to help, couldn't be relegated to some secondary or tertiary position, to have no influence over something she cared even passingly for. Taylor would've helped, would've stepped in, would've stopped Astra's death and made none of this tension exist, none of these problems and conflicts. She would've fixed things, or died trying.

Kara sent her a sad, weary smile. It was genuine if thin, like she had to force the expression to her face despite feeling that way. "Addy," she repeated, voice quiet, almost hoarse. "You're not Taylor."

The words stung more than they should've, because Kara was right. She wasn't Taylor, she was... partially Taylor, in theory, pieces of Taylor glued together the non-person she had been before, bridges to connect parts of herself that hadn't been personality traits until she had a personality to work from. She wasn't Taylor, but some part of her ached to be her regardless. The guilt churned harder, she reached up preemptively, fingers brushing over the wet collecting near one of her eyes, sliding over to the other to wipe it away too. She always got like this when she thought about Taylor in anything but passing, the hurt got worse, the guilt got guiltier. She wanted to be Taylor but she wasn't Taylor. She couldn't be, because she was Addy.

Addy hadn't been good enough. She hadn't been good enough to dress like Taylor or act like Taylor or even so much as think like Taylor. She wasn't Taylor.

Hands brushed over her shoulders, timid and careful, before arms finally coaxed their way around her, closing her into a hug. Kara's shirt felt rough against her cheek, not enough to be unpleasant, but textured in a way that most of her clothing wasn't. It smelled good, rose-scented, she thought, or at least floral, but not overpowering as a lot of perfumes were. It was lingering, distant.

"It's okay, Addy," Kara breathed after a moment, the hug tightening ever-so-slightly. "It's okay not to be Taylor. I know it hurts, I hurt too, but... it's okay. It'll be okay eventually, even if it doesn't feel like it was now. I know as much, you know? I watched my planet detonate, I found the person I was supposed to take care of already an adult when I arrived. I tried so hard to be Kryptonian and human at the same time, to live both in equal measure, to be what billions of the dead could no longer be. I couldn't, in the end, but I did find something in between the two, something not entirely human nor Kryptonian, that let me just be..."

A pause. Addy breathed in, tried not to wipe her nose on Kara's floral-pink shirt, didn't want to ruin it.

"That let me just be me. I'm not sure when you'll figure that out fully for yourself, but me, Alex, even my friends—Winn, James, all of them. We can help you find that."

It took another few hours to leave IKEA, but they did manage to get everything they needed. After the short outburst with Kara, Addy had found herself... not more relaxed, per-se, but more at ease if anything. The tension had still been there, and the guilt was too, but it was weakened for the first time since she'd first identified the feeling, faded into the dull roar of background noise that existed near-constantly in her head.

In the end, they'd decided on a simple single bed and a frame made primarily out of the most durable metal they could find. They got six pillows instead of the original four after she'd found one pillowcase in particular that had been the equivalent of divine to the touch, and she'd ended up not needing any blanket beside one that would go over the mattress itself, pleading her case that the reinforced blanket Kara had given her was more important.

The odd thing was, she hadn't even been lying. At some point that blanket had become more important, though whether it was when Kara had first rucked it around her shoulders and given her a bright, bittersweet smile, or when she'd told her it would be okay, Addy didn't know. Didn't really care, either, because... as odd as it might be, she did believe her. That was odd, too, because part of her mental thought process when tied into the greater whole had been the ongoing notion that eventually they'd figure out how to continue replicating endlessly, that they'd just stumble onto a way to fix everything without a problem, and when she'd fused with Taylor it... the idea had been laughable, a bleak and childish assumption about how the universe worked.

It wasn't that she didn't feel hope, but hope on that scale had been juvenile for a while. It didn't feel quite so juvenile anymore, and maybe Kara telling her that she'd figure out all of her emotions wasn't on the scale of the goals of the gestalt, the fundamental belief they'd eventually find a way to overcome conventional laws of reality despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, but it felt similar, even if only in the abstract.

Staring at what would now be her room, Addy really tried to take it in. True to her claim, Kara had shoved the living furniture closer towards her actual bedroom, removing one of the cushion-like-seats and putting it away in storage to leave more space. While the majority of the apartment had walls made out of brick, between the brick there were pillar-like bits of beige-coloured stone that gave it more definition, sectioned it off. The dividers they'd picked up were of an identical colour, long panels that now sat in a line from one of the beige quasi-pillar-like-things to another, sectioning off all but a single entry point. Behind the dividers, her bed had been set up beneath one of the two windows her 'room' made up, pressed flush against the longest of the two. Her laptop sat at the foot of her bed, opened to youtube, while the rest of her room was filled in mostly by an array of multi-coloured fairy lights, two wardrobes, and a small desk and chair where she could place her laptop.

It wasn't much, but as Kara had said, it was hers.

Glancing down at her clothes, Addy couldn't really help the smile that slipped onto her face. That had been one of the first things she'd done when they'd finally arrived home, sweaty and exhausted after the trip. She'd slipped out of Alex's borrowed clothes - "Keep them Addy, I sincerely do not want them in my house anymore," Alex had explained, looking almost frustrated. "They're an ex's, he won't need them anymore." - and into an outfit that better defined her. Her socks were pastel-blue and striped with white horizontal lines, her pants were a canary-yellow pair of chinos, her shirt a simple t-shirt of an identical colour to her socks, and she'd even stuffed her wine-stain pageboy hat on for good measure, just to complete the look. She looked colourful, felt colourful, and it was a wonderful experience.

Admittedly, in a few hours, she'd have to get out of them to get into her pyjamas and go to sleep, but that was a problem for future Addy, and future Addy could handle that when it came.

Slipping into the little entrance to her sectioned-off room, Addy didn't bother to keep her ears peeled for sound. Kara and Alex had stepped out a while ago after a whispered argument on the car-ride back. They'd be back when they worked through whatever conversation Kara had implied they needed to after they fought about things. Siblings were still such a weird concept to her, adoptive or not, they cared so much about one another and yet they hardly shared a similar belief between them. Alex was far more utilitarian, willing to do what she needed to, whereas Addy had come to realize Kara was much more hopeful, willing and able to accept that things weren't going to be easy but fundamentally not someone who would give up the chance at the better ending for something that guaranteed a problem being handled.

Slotting herself down on her bed, Addy found herself bouncing once. Beds were weird, but not unpleasant, they were just effectively massive cushions with springs, and that made them very nice to roll around on. She'd already done that, of course, bouncing and figuring out what parts of her bed felt in what way. Admittedly, she hadn't indulged in the impulse to jump up and down on it like a trampoline, mostly because her only memories of such a thing involved a significantly younger Taylor and Emma breaking a bed nearly in half when they'd both tried to synchronize their bouncing during a sleepover. It would do nobody any favours if they had to drive the 30-and-a-bit minutes back out to IKEA to awkwardly request another box spring, mattress and frame, least of all her.

Closing her eyes, Addy let herself sink away from her body for a brief moment, to just... float. She had been putting it off for long enough, she'd been awake and active for days without running diagnostics on her coreself to see the degree of changes or interference that would come with accessing it. Thinking back on Kara's words helped the uncertainty with trying to open the connection again, but it wasn't perfect. There were a lot of things that could happen the moment she tried to reestablish a full connection with her coreself, among them including her consciousness being ripped out of her head and back into the crystalline mainframe, her head just outright exploding, and other biological failures that her altered genetic makeup, however similar to a human it might be, had on offer.

She still had to do it, though. She could ignore it for the rest of her life, but... part of her didn't want to, couldn't imagine it. Her coreself, despite how stifling it might be, was still her. She was Addy, not Taylor, not Queen Administrator, but Addy, some sort of fusion of the two. She had to live up to that, clinging too much to being Taylor had its own obvious problems, the guilt, the constant need to act like her despite the fact that Taylor was not there, wouldn't be there, and wasn't coming back.

Reaching out to her coreself wasn't difficult. There was some interdimensional lag, as was expected, but in practice it wasn't enough to cause any delays. She had shut off a lot of her coreself to preserve energy, the ability to transmit powers included. Reactivating that part of herself wasn't difficult, though she did wince reflexively as she calculated the roughly three-hundred and twenty-four years of lost power conservation that came with reactivating the hub from its completely dormant state. It wouldn't cost her anything to keep it in an idling state afterwards, but she really probably should've not shut it completely off in the first place, but then at the time she had still been mostly following power saving protocols.

Reaching deeper into the connection, Addy did the metaphysical equivalent of tugging. It was hard to explain how sensory her controls had gotten over her powers, she didn't really process her coreself in terms of logic gates or simple on-and-off states, it was more of a feeling, a tingling, a sense of awareness when it came to how things functioned and if they were on or off. Tugging, she pulled the power distribution network from 'idle' to 'active', and for a moment nothing happened.

Then, everything did.

Hundreds of sounds - thoughts, her brain-and-coreself processed simultaneously - slammed into focus, jarring for the brief three-point-two seconds it took before the secondary multitasking capabilities of the power kicked into high gear. She ignored the intrusive knowledge spilling into her head, shunted it to the side, and quickly flipped to the diagnostics. She was still locked into the general composition of the power she'd given Taylor to begin with—control and awareness of living beings, tied to a psychic bandwidth, though now that she was in the driver's seat she was processing the bandwidth more literally, aware of not just things existing, but their thoughts, impulses, state of being. She could modify it, of course, at the moment she was accessing the thoughts and awareness of every living bug within 3 and a half blocks of herself, but a quick twist and she changed the focus of the power away from bugs and to humans. The range shrunk massively, of course, from 3 and a half blocks to barely a hundred feet, but that much proved her right. She had access to the generalized type of Taylor's power, but could—

—a flash of a sword sliding through a woman's back, a screaming guilt that stabbed into her head. A man with green skin, then brown skin, taking the fall. More guilt, watching Kara grow cold and distant towards J'onn - Hank - and imagining that it would happen to her if only she knew that she was the one who—

Addy slammed the doors shut, forcing the nexus back to idle. Her breath was coming in roving gasps, thick in her chest, her heart slamming against her ears. She shut her eyes, brought shaky hands up to push over her ears as she tried to work through what she just felt, what she just experienced. Those were Alex's thoughts, her consciousness, her guilt and shame and the topmost layer of her brain being broadcast back at her. Broadcast was a good word, too, as that's what she had been using to project her psychic link to begin with, broadcast wasn't just relegated to intershard communication, like it was with the host of Broadcast, every power generally used it to access different parts of their abilities and only left open ports to be accessed in the event of a cluster trigger event or for other emergency broadcasts and—

She breathed out hoarsely, a dull wheeze. Her head didn't hurt, but it felt like it should, she had been full of Alex's guilt, so loud, so painful. She had killed Astra, Alex had killed Astra, had struck her down when she promised J'onn - Hank, it had been Hank all along, he was an alien pretending to be a xenophobe - a 'warrior's death'. She couldn't lose another father figure, she wouldn't be able to—

No. Those weren't her thoughts. She accessed her power again but kept the bandwidth low, intentionally stifled it so she couldn't pick up on the thoughts of others. She used it, pushed it into her skull, felt the node throb in sync as she partitioned her thoughts and the ones she had been picking up from others. Generally, a shard would've included this during activation in a host, but since the host had never been intended to access the thoughts of others, she had to do it now. It wasn't hard, a simple tweak, but it brought even more lag between herself and her coreself, a separation that now nearly reached a whole second instead of a quarter of one.

She'd have to fix that later, but at least now she wasn't... Alex, or at least Alex's surface thoughts.

But Alex... Alex had killed Astra, and now looking at the partitioned memories, she hated herself for it. She loathed the silence she kept, the way she was letting J'onn take the fall, the way it was pulling her and Kara's relationship apart. Kara blamed the D.E.O. for it, rightfully so, and it had put a strain on every interaction. She couldn't consider leaving the D.E.O., no, she felt she was needed there, but Kara? Kara could leave at any point, and Alex wanted to watch over her sister, keep her safe, but didn't feel like she was entitled to, what with Astra's death on her hands.

Alex hadn't wanted to kill Astra, hadn't intended for the fight to result in Astra's death, but had done so. Again, the differences between Kara and Alex shined bright and painful; Alex would do the thing that promised the best result with the least amount of possible deviations, Kara not so much. Utilitarian, understandable, it was something Addy was deeply familiar with, that exact sort of thought process brought with it a lot of problems but it had never failed them. It had been half the reason why the cycles had become exterminatory to begin with, cutting out the deviations caused by interacting with the existing host species positively. Exploding their planets to fuel the next transit and purging the host species meant they never had the risk of being hunted for who and what they were, what they wanted to achieve in the end.

Astra had died, and Alex was the one who killed her, and Addy knew, painfully, that she wouldn't be telling Kara that. It wasn't that she didn't want to, or felt it wasn't necessary, or anything like that, even with her rudimentary grasp on human cultural norms it was an incredibly bad thing to keep from your sister, adopted or not, but... It would hurt them more coming from her than it would from Alex, and Alex was going to tell her eventually, she could already tell. It was eating away at Alex, gutting her to keep quiet, to keep watching Kara pull more and more away from J'onn, from her, over something like that. If it meant salvaging even just J'onn's relationship with Kara, she'd eventually tell the truth, to whatever ends that got her.

She would keep the secret, just like she had kept countless other secrets before.

Rolling over, Addy hauled the rest of her body onto her bed, curled her legs in as she quietly pushed back on her power, forcing it back into idle now that she'd properly set up a partitioned space in her node and coreself. She might not tell anyone, but she... she couldn't keep this to herself, couldn't think. She needed to talk to someone, not to Kara, who would inevitably coax the truth out of her, not to Alex, who would demand to know why or how she knew, but... but someone else. Someone inoffensive, someone non-threatening, someone as awkward as she was and who could offer simple solutions to complicated questions.

Reaching for her computer, she opened up ChatLine, which Kara had sworn was one of the most secure networks to talk to anyone, moused over to Winn's profile and clicked.

—QueenAddy [QA] started a conversation with SchottWinn [SW]—

SW: Hey, what's up Addy?
QA: How do you type so fast?
SW: Two hands and a lot of practice.
SW: Actually is that considered offensive?
SW: Sorry if it is.
QA: It isn't.
SW: That's good. Uh, still though, what's up?
QA: I am having feelings that I am troubled by and was wondering if you knew any methods to handle them.
SW: Er. Maybe? I'm not exactly the best person to come to when you need coping strategies. What are you feeling?
QA: Guilt about Astra. I continue to feel as though I could have done more and feel deep shame and discomfort about my disinterest in doing so in the moments leading up to the incident.
SW: ...Aren't you human? Because if you are, there's nothing you can do, they're not. Also, I know about Astra, but uh, a lot of other people don't? So don't go telling anyone else, please.
QA: Part of me is. And noted, I will keep this to myself.
SW: Oh. Okay. Well, I'll have to look into that later, but... uh. Are you asking me to make you a superhero suit?
QA: Do you think that would help?
SW: I'm... I mean, it seemed to help everyone else? Have you told Kara about any of this?
QA: I believe she knows the abstract.
SW: That's... great.
QA: Do you think it will help?
SW: You don't have to repeat the message, I already got it. I was just thinking.
QA: You think very slowly.
SW: I think perfectly adequately for a human.
QA: You think slowly.
SW: Right, not commenting on that. But uh, I mean, I can if you want? Make a suit, I mean, for you. We'd have to talk about it later, but... If you have powers and feel like you need to use them to help others, I'd rather you have some protection or something.
QA: That's very considerate of you.
SW: I mean, it is. I won't lie, you're pretty cool, interesting too, but, uh, I'm doing this mostly so Kara won't murder me if she finds out. Which, I mean, I can't imagine she would, because it's Kara and I'm pretty sure Miss Grant has done meaner things to her with no retaliation but with what happened, uh, you know.
QA: I do not.
SW: Let's actually keep it that way, if at all possible.

"Addy?"

Jerking the top of her laptop shut, Addy swung her head around, catching Kara staring at her with a bemused, casual smile. "It's dinner," she explained belatedly. "I ordered us chinese food, have you had it before?"

Taking a moment to process her words, Addy shook her head tentatively. Taylor had chinese takeout before, sure, but she hadn't, and that had started to become a contextual difference that she was more than willing to focus on.

"Well, c'mon out. You need to eat, and so do I."

Glancing furtively back at her laptop, Addy finally eased herself off of the bed and onto the floor, plodding her way back out and into the living room. The smell of the food hit her immediately: grease, lots of spices, overcooked beef, altogether it was a surprisingly pleasant combination, even if the thought of what went into it made her want to gag. Kara was already at the table and was hauling a orange-sauce covered ball of unidentifiable meat up and to her mouth, biting into it with a delighted, happy little noise.

Pulling out her own chair, Addy sat herself down and took a piece herself. It was messy, and the sauce made a concerted effort to slide off the batter, but she managed to stop it from doing so by using her fingers to catch the sauce, before depositing it into her mouth.

It was... okay. Not bad, not great, she was pretty sure she'd be burning the roof of her mouth if she didn't have partial invulnerability, but she didn't mind that much. The batter was a bit overwhelming and unpleasantly chewy when the near-blackened outer bits implied it would be crunchy, though she did like the taste of the chicken beneath everything else. Altogether it, again, wasn't her favourite food, but much like potstickers, Kara seemed so wholly invested in it that she could deal with it. It was, after all, a lot of calories, and she needed a lot of those now, apparently.

She did wonder what Taylor would think about her being nearly incapable of putting on weight, though.

"Oh!" Kara blurted, mouth still half-full of what appeared to be rice. She jolted back for a second, reaching down to her purse and hauling it up onto the table before pulling the zipper away and reaching inside. "Alex lef' these for me to hand t'you."

"Please swallow," Addy said, before anything else. Kara flushed but thankfully did as asked.

"Sorry," she said a second later, pulling out another small stack of papers. "But, uh, right! So. Alex took your work back to the D.E.O. to see where you'd fit in after game night, and they decided with your knowledge and my current placement, that you'd do good at CatCo!"

Addy stared blankly at the pile of papers extended towards her. On the very top was what looked like a diploma for a 'Brookline University', grading top of her class in computer science. Beneath them was a small packet of what looked like a bunch of instructions and general guidelines, not that she could see much of it. Tentatively, she reached out, plucked the papers from Kara's hand - which went immediately back to get yet more food - and placed them down right in front of her to free up her own hand. Brushing the top sheet off with her stump, she stared down at the CatCo-watermarked welcome package, included in which was her duties as a 'junior IT tech', alongside her salary, apparently minimum wage.

Did Winn know about this? She could've sworn she overheard someone talk about how Winn ran IT. Was that why he was so quick to offer superhero-adjacent services? Or was he just... like that.

"I'm not sure I can do this job," she said, not liking how her voice came out faint.

Kara scoffed, but did bother to swallow before speaking this time. "What you showed in those tests was that you have a pre-college understanding of programming and basic server maintenance, among other things. Winn is going to be phoned soon about your situation, since he knows about—well, me, and he'll get you caught up to speed really quick. He's a smart guy, you know? A quick thinker."

Addy glanced up, blinked slowly at Kara, who was clearly trying to reassure her, but couldn't really find the words to say anything, not with the insistent urge to blurt the truth about Astra sitting in her throat, waiting for the chance to escape. She'd have to go through Taylor's memories relating to computer sciences again a few times, just to catch herself back up.

"I know this is really soon after you woke up and stuff, and if this doesn't work out, there are other places for you," Kara said gently, smiling at her. "This is just the best way to keep you close to me and integrate you into society. That and, really, won't it be exciting going to work with me? You'll get to see where I work and how I do things, you'll even get to meet Miss Grant!"

Another pause.

"...She's a nice person, by the way, despite initial appearances."

Addy glanced back down at the pages, flipped to the next one, and understood about half of it.

So, maybe she had made a smart decision to change into new clothes. She wasn't sure if she was going to be able to sleep tonight.

OxfordOctopus · Aug 11, 2020

Also, for those who have yet to see it / have difficulties imagining Kara's apartment, there's this very handy 3D model I found online of it here.

Addy's 'room' has been sectioned off with dividers and runs the length of the top left of the apartment (where the chair + cushion thing is) down to the actual divider already present, with a little gap for her to enter in through. The living space has been pushed over to the right a little to accommodate, and the chair and cushion have been placed near the entrance of the apartment along with the easel.

OxfordOctopus · Aug 13, 2020

EPISODE 5

"Addy!"

The world returned in sluggish focus, a patch of memory absent. Addy tried to reorient herself, reached out to her coreself, glimpsing metaphorical fingers over the psychic link between her two halves, and got nothing but the smooth reminder that it was mostly inactive, that the only parts available were the linking hub and the still-idling power distribution nexus. She squirmed, stretched out her legs in a languid motion, the dull call of something heavy and weighted urging her to curl further into her pillow.

"Addy! You're going to be late!"

She understood that humans - and, by extension, herself - dreamed, that it was a product of the brain and how it used the unreasonable amount of time it had to remain idling every day. Sleep had never been exactly nuanced to her, most biological species had some form of downtime, if not necessarily dreams to accompany them, but finding out that sleeping felt very good was a different thing altogether. Even in the half-state she was in, thinking a lot but not quite thinking, somewhere between sleep and awake, she was—

The ground lurched, bucked by some unseen weight pressing down a ways away. Addy cracked her eyes open, feeling the gumminess between her lashes, the short spark of agony that rode her skull as she picked up the fairy lights strung up around her space. Kara sat at the end of her bed, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, glasses riding the bridge of her nose.

"Good morning!" She chirped.

Addy squinted.

Kara beamed an even brighter smile, and Addy had to physically stop her hand from reaching down and pulling the covers over her head. Mornings, she was coming to learn, were unpleasant. "You've got about two hours before you're expected at work," Kara began, undaunted. "Which means you'll have plenty of time to do your morning routine without rushing, which is important, because first impressions are—"

She tuned her out, sluggishly reaching out towards the banked memories and knowledge of Taylor's brain. Morning rituals, morning rituals, ah. There they were, and there were a lot of them, obviously, but she didn't need all of them, she just needed the gist. Wake up, do basic stretches, eat breakfast, brush teeth, morning indoor workout, take a quick shower - along with other skincare stuff - get properly dressed, prepare required material for daily duties, contact social worker—no, that one could be struck off, so could a fair few others, actually. Taylor had usually given herself about two hours, but Taylor also wasn't super strong and durable, so she could probably get the workout done far sooner. Add onto that some time inefficiencies - why brush your teeth independently when you could do it in the shower? - and, well. She could do it.

Kara's finger poking into her shoulder brought her back, the silly smile on Kara's face having receded back into something more subdued, but still painfully bright. "Addy? You okay?"

She just grunted, reaching up with her hand to palm at the gunk around her eyes.

"I'm gonna check back in on you in thirty minutes," Kara decided instead, her weight pulling away from the end of her bed. "Please try to stay awake, it's your big day and everything!"

Addy managed another grunt.

Stuffing another flavourless brick of condensed calories and, for some reason, oats into her mouth, Addy quickly chased it with some water, ignoring Kara's knowing look. She still didn't like drinking anything, the feeling of something liquid, despite Taylor having several memories thereof, in her body, felt... alien in a way that humans didn't in almost every other capacity. She had never been liquid, she had been crystalline, with specific pathways and methods of transferring required energy - or things to convert into energy - that did not include something so unpleasant as willingly hosting a small body of water in her stomach.

It still beat feeling hard, brittle crumbs stick to her throat, though. That was a sensation she would never like or get used to, she hadn't even choked or coughed, it had just been there, adhered to her skin like the worst texture on the planet, like there was a lump in her throat. She had kept reaching up expecting to be crying, but turned out it was just that the human mode of consumption was inefficient, but that really shouldn't've been a surprise.

"Oh! Right!"

Addy glanced up from her obligate one-armed pushup, pausing mid-motion. Kara was glancing behind her, towards the small bookcase where the package including her laptop had originally been, reaching out with a blur to snatch what looked to be an over-the-shoulder bag off of it. "I completely forgot, but this morning, since I was awake pretty early, I uh, might've picked this up for you?"

It was, for all intents and purposes, a very normal looking over-the-shoulder bag, though the colouration was delightful. It was made up of four stripes of colour, the top-most being black, the one beneath that being gray, the one beneath that being white, and then finishing at the very bottom of the bag with grape-purple. The strap to the bag was interesting as well, rainbow-patterned from start to finish. It was exactly the sort of thing she would've bought, had she seen something like it and had the disposable resources, anyway.

Dropping herself down, Addy used her stump to maneuver herself onto her side, extending her hand out wordlessly. Kara trotted forward, dropping the plastic-covered bag into it, before stepping away.

"It's a tote bag with a long strap and a compartment inside specifically to hold your laptop—if, uh, you want to bring it along, or something."

Picking at the plastic with her nail, Addy paused. "Kara?"

The woman in question glimpsed at her, something like nervous tension in her face.

"Why is the packaging in Korean?"

Kara sheepishly laughed, glancing towards one of the windows as she scratched the back of her head with one hand. "Like I said, I was up pretty early, you know? It was no trouble."

Taylor had never been particularly invested in make-up, but it had become something of an obligation as she had grown older, as far as Addy could tell. She'd picked up the skill slowly, reluctantly, sure, but what she could dredge from Taylor's memories gave her at least the context to understand what she was doing.

Tonguing the toothbrush over to the other side of her mouth, Addy angled her head to the side, still-damp hair pulled away from her face, tucked behind her ear, as she drew a narrow line across where lash met lid. It wasn't that she felt obligated to put make-up on or anything, not like she imagined Taylor had, needing to look presentable and professional to the people who were there to decide the freedoms she got in the later years of her life, but it was part of the morning routine and she'd wanted to at least try, if nothing else.

Blinking a few times, Addy pulled the eyeliner away and observed. It didn't feel like a lot, which was a bonus since the bulk majority of make-up felt like ants crawling over her skin when she'd tried them out on her arm, but it looked good. Or, at least, she liked it, and Kara had stressed that was what was truly important during their shopping trip.

Stepping away, she smoothed the pad of her thumb over her lips before reaching out to pluck the brush out of her mouth, spitting mint-flavoured foam into the sink. Another blink, the eyeliner remained, and she very quietly found herself liking it.

"Are you... sure you want to go to work dressed like that?"

Addy glanced at Kara from the reflection in the mirror, before returning to her outfit. She had decided on bold and bright colours today, to signify that she was ready to do work and get into the thick of things. She'd gone for cherry-red in terms of shirt, bright and impossible to ignore, contrasting the canary-yellow of her pants, though the red was reinforced with her shoes, which bore a near-identical colour. The laces on her shoes, to be fair, diverged heavily, from the red of the shoe to an acidic green, not to mention that she'd be covering the top half of her ensemble with that pale-blue sweater. It'd be a lot of colours, but today felt like a lot of colours type of day.

"I like it," Addy informed her, because she felt that Kara might not get that. Kara's face, just visible beyond her shoulder, reflected in the mirror, fell a bit before tightening, something firm slipping into it as she nodded.

"That's totally okay, I was just... concerned, sorry," Kara started, the onset of a ramble as obvious as a building landslide. "Miss Grant can just be a little... crude about what other people wear, but don't let that dishearten you, okay? You can own this look, it's very you."

Addy watched her own face brighten involuntarily at the praise, lips tugged up into a loose smile. "I think so too," she reaffirmed.

The menu at Noonan's was overwhelmingly dense. Kara maneuvered the space like she'd lived there, and from what she'd told Addy about when it came to what she'd done before being hired by Miss Grant, she almost did. Noonan's had been her first real job, apparently, that she'd taken after leaving university, albeit a part-time one, and everyone knew her here, even people who had to be introduced to Kara in the first place.

Glancing between the options on the menu hanging behind the register, Addy canted her head to the side. Sticky buns, bagels, muffins, coffee, every pastry she could remember from Taylor's memories, breakfast sandwiches, lunch sandwiches, fancy versions of coffee where they try to pretend it's not coffee by overwhelming it with other additives. It had, as far as she could tell, almost everything.

But one thing kept drawing her eye. Boba tea had been one of Taylor's fixations in the later few months before Gold Morning, and not in a good way. Because she didn't have her thoughts, she could only make assumptions, but Taylor had gotten annoyed and frustrated around it, largely because she'd been so focused on the end-of-the-world prep and here the world was, going nuts over whether or not famous people liked this new type of absurd tea. It had only really gained any amount of recognition in those months leading up to the end, it had probably felt to her like a waste, like another distraction that the unaware masses were using to pretend that the constant Endbringer fights weren't steadily wearing down society to its foundations, like the world wasn't going to end for more blatant reasons than The Warrior.

The thing was, Taylor had never tried it. She didn't know what it smelled like, what it tasted like, nothing. She hadn't had a lot of agency, even near the end, which had primarily been a result of how she'd lived. Taylor had been a teenage warlord being rehabilitated through a program meant for child superheroes, what free time she did have was spent on-base or on-call with her father, she had no real ability to do things on her own, to explore them, without an explanation why. Years into her career as a hero and scrutiny still chased her heels, for what could probably be argued as a pretty good reason, but nevertheless, it had... restricted her.

She had never gotten a chance to see or engage with anything that wasn't framed through the lens of her duty, her future, what she needed to do to ensure people survived.

Glancing back towards Kara, who was busily demolishing a messy-looking cinnamon roll while chatting with the person on register, Addy felt her fingers twitch at her side, venting a bit of her indecision. No, Taylor might be gone, but it didn't mean she couldn't live out the things she was denied for her, even if selfishly.

"Could I have some of that bubble tea?"

Tapioca was a wonderful invention. They didn't taste like much, but they almost gelled when she ground them between her teeth, still slightly sticky from the sugar-rich drink they had been drenched in. The combination of the two, the stickiness, the way they fell apart between her teeth, made her itch to bite something, to grind her teeth, though she knew better than to give in to the impulse. It really was the texture carrying the drink, as, not for the first time, she was struck by the fact that she had very different tastes to Taylor. Tea was fine, it came in a wide variety of flavours, but it wasn't so... important to her, or a big part of her likes, as it had been with Taylor, who had almost obsessively collected and drank it.

"Okay, so, you might be nervous—" Kara started, her voice wobbly.

Glancing away from the elevator doors, Addy stared at her. "I'm not." Which was true, nervousness was reserved for the earlier hours, when she'd spent all that time peeling the hair from her body - apparently, her durability didn't extend to her hair, body or head, which was a little concerning - in the tub, with all the time in the world to think about what-ifs or possible problems with nothing else better to do. Despite the oxymoronic nature of the idea, it was apparently very possible to overthink things as a human, which was difficult to get used to. There had been no such thing as too much thinking, she still wasn't really sure there was, but she would go with common wisdom if only to avoid another spiral of anxiety in the tub.

Kara stared back for a moment, unaware of her inner dialogue and the true intricacies of the topic. "Right. Well, I'm nervous," she said finally, glancing away. "It'll be fine, though, one way or another, things will absolutely work out—"

The elevator shuddered to a stop and then dinged, the doors peeling apart.

Her first impression of CatCo was that it looked a lot like the rest of the building. It was sleek, with glass fixtures and very, very white. Which, really, she would never understand the human fixation with the colour white, because it was genuinely the blandest combination of visible light on the planet and the only thing that was really saving the floor from looking like a hospital break room was the array of cubicles, each one personalized, and the constant smattering of framed magazine covers, blown up to huge sizes to act as posters.

"Kara!" Winn's voice caught her attention, dragging her away from the maze-like throng of white-on-white. He hurried towards them, Kara stepping out of the elevator and Addy belated remembering to follow her, faux-gold doors sliding shut behind them. Even this early in the morning - barely seven - people were already there, most wearing some combination of semi-formal wear, including Winn, who was wearing another oddly-patterned cardigan over a white dress shirt.

Speaking of Winn, he turned to her the second he caught sight of them. His eyes went from hers, to her clothes, trailing down almost agonizingly slowly, stopping at her shoes, green laces tucked into the sides so they wouldn't flop around or trip her up.

"You're wearing th—"

Kara slapped a hand over his mouth with one hand, still clutching Miss Grant's latte in the other hand. "He thinks your outfit is very nice, don't you Winn?"

Winn met Kara's eyes for a moment before nodding a bit like a bobblehead, Kara's hand easing itself off of his face as they both turned back towards her. "Right!" He blurted, eyes flicking around in panic as he visibly tried to regather himself, not that she understood particularly why he was getting so flustered about it. "Right—yes, it's very fitting. For you, I mean!"

Blinking slowly, she canted her head to the side. "Kara said the same thing."

The two in question shared another quick look, Kara's throat tightening as she made an aborted gesture with her free hand, left near her hips, which Winn apparently picked up on if the way he jerked his head again in a jolted nod was any indication. What exactly they were discussing, well, Addy had no clue, but then she didn't really need to. She could always just tap one of them for the knowledge if the topic came up again, but she was pretty comfortable not knowing.

"Sh—oot, she's on her way up. Cover for me?" Kara blurted, reaching for her glasses with one hand while Winn awkwardly proceeded to spread his stance out, shoulders wide, legs apart, hands at his side, using what little - because, he was shorter than her, for better or for worse - bulk he had to almost cover Kara.

Speaking of Kara, with her glasses pulled down near her nose, she very quickly unloaded a blast of concentrated heat and energy from her eyes into the latte, reheating it near-instantly. It was, in Addy's opinion, possibly the most wasteful thing Kara had used her power for yet, and she had a very distinct memory of watching her float from the couch to the fridge this morning to get some yogurt.

As quick as it happened, it was over, her glasses settled back on the bridge of her nose, latte prepared and held out in a wordless greeting, looking no different despite the superhuman acts. Barely a second later, a second elevator opened, and Cat Grant walked in.

Addy had to tilt her head down to look at her, even with the distance between herself and the woman in question, who was wearing heels. She understood that most women weren't nearly six-foot—Kara wasn't, that much was for sure, and neither was Alex, but Cat Grant had to be at the most five-foot-three, with two inches added by virtue of her heels. She was blonde, but not like Kara, whose hair was honeyed and warm, transitioning into something closer to wheat-yellow near the tips, and rather a darker, more rich blonde, the honeycomb to Kara's honey. She walked like she owned the world, startlingly similar to how Taylor did with the awareness her bugs provided, not a single glimpse in any one direction, just a careless strut that made other people move out of her way, graceful despite it all.

Coming to a halt, Cat wordlessly held out one hand, to which Kara quickly handed over the latte. Bringing it up to her mouth, the woman took a long drink, her other hand coming up, raising a single finger, as she looked to drain about half of it. Her sunglasses, large and round, hid her expression, but something about how her shoulders tensed up made Addy think she probably wasn't in the best of moods.

Breaking the seal between her lips and the edge of the cup, Cat let her glasses slide down the bridge of her nose, brown eyes turned towards her. "I woke up this morning to the fact that my ex-husband is spreading lies about me in tabloids," she began, her voice flat and sharp. "I then had to substitute my driver since his daughter had her gallbladder try to explode like a potato in a microwave the night before, and the driver who did pick me up was eight minutes late and drove like he was trying to kill pedestrians. When I finally arrive at my job, I find this, the hobbit and you, Keira, not doing your jobs, waiting for me to come and give you entertainment."

There was a short pause, Winn audibly swallowing just to her right.

"Speaking of entertainment, Keira, tell me, did you order a clown to come in today?"

Kara's spine jolted, straightened out as she folded her hands together in front of her. "I—no? Should I have, did Carter want one or—"

Cat reached up to push her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, something like a sneer stretching across her face as she raised her free hand to point at Addy. "Then tell me, Keira, why is this woman dressed like one?"

Glancing down at herself, she couldn't help the odd feeling of hurt. She liked colours, they looked good on her, she felt it worked as an ensemble and she was proud of them—

"Actually, Miss Grant, that's uhm, your new junior IT tech," Kara began slowly, motioning with her hands. "This is Addy Queen, you hired her to work under Winn, remember?"

Head turning fully towards her, Cat took another sip of her latte. "Alright, Abby, why are you wearing... that."

"It's Addy." She said, instead, because it was her name and it was important that it was said right. She chose it, it was hers, and nobody could take that from her.

She could more feel than see both Winn and Kara go still and stiff beside her. Cat, meanwhile, tilted her head, lips pursed, her index finger tapping against her cup.

"Addy," Cat said at last, the word filled to bursting with something like amusement. "Why are you wearing what you're wearing?"

She didn't really feel like she should be obligated to explain it, but she did look out of place. She didn't look sloppy or anything, it wasn't like the pattern on her shirt made her look like she just rolled out of bed, but she did understand she stuck out, not that she minded the latter that much. "Because I like the colours," she explained, instead, because it was simple and easy and while she got that people didn't get her reasonings all the time, she did, and she felt that it was more important that she got them across than to not try at all.

There was another pause, Cat tilting her head back and forth, an easy rock of curiosity before, after another belated sip of her latte, she nodded. "That's acceptable," she said over the sound of Winn quiet spluttering. "Don't come into work wearing something lurid, but feel free to keep dressing as you'd like." She turned on heel, tap-tapping her way towards what, at a second glance, was rather obviously her office.

"How—what, she doesn't call any—" Winn started, stopped, and started again, words jumbled as he clearly went through a crisis. Reaching over, Addy took the single step to close the distance and gently smoothed her hand across his head, glancing down at him. He glanced back up at her in something like muted, bewildered shock, but didn't reject the soothing, which meant it was probably helping.

"KEIRA!" Cat bellowed from her office, jerking Kara out of her stupor just a few paces away. Kara shot them both a broad, wide smile, all white teeth and bright feelings, her hands coming up at her front to gesture at the two of them with a pair of upturned thumbs, before she rushed off.

Addy watched her go, watched as Kara's face lit up brightly, regardless of Cat using the wrong name or the two or three verbal jabs about the colour of her sweater the woman somehow managed to fit into the few seconds it took Kara to pace into Cat's office and shut the door behind her. She clearly didn't mind that as much as Addy did, maybe she was just used to the torrent of disdain she received from Cat, maybe she liked it. She had heard people were like that, not that she was particularly interested in the topic.

Humans were still something she was going to have to work to figure out, though at least she was pretty sure Kara was faring no better than she was on the topic.

"You uh—you can stop that now," Winn said belatedly, reaching up to gently try to stop her hand, not quite managing it anyway. He was a short man, built with the features that would've made him physically intimidating had he not ceased growing at around five-six, with a broad chin and jaw, a layer of stubble, and big hands. Really, he was a bit different like that, but then so was Addy, so she could relate to not quite fitting perfectly into the boundaries of one's physical form.

Pulling her hand away, she let it drop and come to rest at her side. Winn smiled at her, a weak and somewhat strained thing, but a smile nonetheless. She tried for her own, much like she had when they'd first been introduced over board games, and the way his smile warmed was worth the awkwardness of trying to copy an expression she didn't make naturally all that often. She still felt happiness, she liked the feeling of it, she wasn't some apathetic robotic matrix of goals and calculations, not anymore. She liked the way happiness warmed her chest and made her want to do more things, see more places, touch and fiddle her hand at her sides, but she also knew that she was very bad at expressing that. She'd have to work on it, if she wanted to get social graces down pat, in any event.

"Right, so uh," Winn began again, motioning towards what she assumed was his desk, if the litany of dolls outfitted in Superman's costume was any indication. "I'm your boss for the time being? Like, we don't expect a whole lot out of you, you are the entry position to end all entry positions, and all that, but if Cat asks you to do anything, ask me about it if you don't know, and then do it. I might be your authority, but she's my authority."

Coming to a halt next to his desk, Addy watched as Winn settled himself down into his chair with a grunt. Glancing up at her, then back at his desk, he quickly motioned towards the desk directly across from him, one which had been cleaned off at some point.

"It's yours, that's, uh, where you'll be sitting and stuff," he continued. Addy glanced it over, she'd definitely need to find some things to decorate it with, it was bland white and the space she was going to be working in had enough white, thank-you-very-much, but it wasn't like she had photos or collectables to show off or anything. Maybe Kara would have some ideas?

"Er, you, uh, want to sit down?" Winn interrupted, again.

Addy blinked. That was fair, she hadn't really moved since they'd been introduced, there was just so much going on, so much different. CatCo was loud, a constant low thrum of chatter from both people and technology. Computers squeaked, people murmured, people discussed and most of it was unrelated. She didn't like it, but then she could tune it out if she could get just used to it, it was just... there. She'd have to deal with it.

Walking over towards her new desk, Addy set her bag down to the side of her monitor and lowered herself down in the seat, stretching her legs out until they unceremoniously bumped against Winn's, who jolted and glanced up at her, smiling weakly.

"KEIRA!" Cat bellowed for the second time in what felt like as many minutes, Addy catching Kara jolt up from her own desk and nearly begin sprinting towards the office again. "Mike Enzi apparently decided I would enjoy the sight of his wrinkly—"

The door shut, and she could just about hear the entire office sigh in relief before returning to that low murmur of conversation.

"You'll get used to it," Winn interjected, his voice sounding a bit more firm, less awkward and nervous. "It took me a while too, this place is really busy, conversation is basically constant, as you'd imagine for something like a multimedia company, but you learn to handle it pretty quickly."

Addy swallowed, reaching up to scratch at the side of her neck. She hoped so, honestly, because this was a lot, it was a lot of different things that she hadn't had to get used to. IKEA wasn't even that bad and half of the store had been determined to help Kara pick out beds. Instead of vocalizing any of that, of talking about her discomfort, because it wasn't like saying any of that would fix anything, she tried for another shaky smile.

Winn smiled back, just as strained.

"So, onto your actual job. What do you know about ruby?"

"It's a precious gem?"

"Not in this context it isn't, but some people sure do treat it like it's one."

Leaning back in her chair, Addy stared at the piece of paper Winn had pinched between his fingers. On it was a really simple flow chart, with 'HTTP status decisions' written in huge blocky text above it. It started, simply, with 'did it work?', with two arrows, one with 'yes' written next to it, and one with 'no' written next to it. The 'yes' led to another blurb, which said 'just use 200, literally nobody cares', and the 'no' arrow led to 'whose fault was it?', with two more arrows, one with 'yours' written next to it, which led to a blurb with '400' written in it, and an 'ours', which led to a blurb with '500' in it.

"You have to remember this, okay?" Winn continued off from where he'd paused his rant. "People seem to act like HTTP status is this huge thing and it needs to be complicated and have like, layers within layers to figure out things, but no. This is literally just it, they're all wrong. I am right."

She got the impression this had been something he had argued about before, but didn't comment.

"Right, so, while each computer and log-in details are kept independent and under some degree of secrecy from us, but after one of Miss Grant's board members was implicated in a hacking scheme, they uh, loosened the exact specifics of the secrecy involved."

Addy stared vacantly at the list of pornography across her screen. There had to be at least a hundred gigabytes of it.

"Which is why purging computers of, well, this became my job, because Miss Grant wanted me to make sure nobody was doing anything illegal, especially illegal acts which hurt her, and, er. Well. Now it's your job!"

She turned to look at him, but Winn very quickly ducked behind the screen of his computer, waving at her from over it. "Do that and do some more studying, okay? I gotta make sure whatever moron downloaded thirty gigabytes of virus-littered Avengers movies doesn't end up nearly bricking us. Which it won't, because this is a job I'm actually good at, but uh, the virus is sure making an effort, let me tell you that much."

Being tired was a novelty she did not want to particularly get used to. It wasn't like she hadn't been sleepy before, or exhausted, but this? Tiredness was somehow different. She hadn't wanted to try to use her power to get a leg up, not with so many people nearby. The risk of picking up everyone's thoughts was an increasingly unpalatable idea after marking down everyone who downloaded explicit videos onto their work computers, which had already given her too much insight into the sex lives of her coworkers.

Her body, as it happened, was physically up for the task, but maybe not mentally. She was tired, but in an achy, awkward way that made her feel like someone had replaced her brain with marshmallow fluff. She was also really hungry, like stomach-churningly, achingly hungry, the type of hungry you only notice when it's grown to consume basically every thought in your head.

Winn was still at his desk, and Kara was apparently still handling Cat's problems, but she? She was free to go home whenever she wanted to. She had her own keys, she knew approximately where the building was, what floor they lived on, and if all else failed Kara, during lunch break, had forced a few bills into her hand and told her to call a taxi if she got lost.

Glancing out the window next to her desk, Addy felt the odd urge to wince when she saw it was already dark out.

Pushing the remainder of the 'extra studying' Winn had given her after he'd helped figure out where she was in terms of things she would need to learn to do her job - "There's not a whole lot, but it is something, so please read up on this? I can help, you have my online handles and whatever." - but something else was on her mind, something she needed to ask.

"Winn?"

He glanced up at her from his computer, blinking sleepily at her. "Yeah?"

She leaned a bit forward, tried to lower her voice. "What about the suit?"

For a moment, he squinted at her, looking bewildered, before it seemed to click. "The suit—oh the suit, oh, I uh, thought you had given the idea up, since you didn't bring it up or anything."

"I didn't," she replied, because he did say it would help the guilt, and it wasn't like she couldn't live with the guilt, she just didn't really want to.

Flicking his eyes back and forth, apparently to check for anyone nearby, Winn quickly jolted down, grabbed his bag, and pulled out a scrap of scribble-covered printer paper from the interior, quickly handing it over to her.

Unfolding the crinkly mess and ignoring Winn's probing stare, she smoothed the page out in front of her. There were a few sketches, surprisingly well-constructed ones that followed her body-type. They were all simple in composition, a lot of black coats over pants and with big boots and gauntlets, but also a lot of bodysuits as well, more generic than anything else. Still, one out of the lot caught her eye more than anything. It wasn't much, it hadn't even been roughly scribbled in like the rest, but it looked a lot better. The suit itself was basic, looking more like a rough sketch of body armour, sectioned off into pieces. There was the chest piece, looking almost like a bulletproof vest, padded gloves that extended up to her elbow, where they presumably connected to an undershirt of some kind. Beneath that was a pair of baggy-looking reinforced pants, bunched up near her knees to allow for the calf-length combat boots to fit. If that was just it, it'd be just as bland as the rest, but for reasons she wasn't totally clear about, the fact that it had this matador-esque half-cape that extended down over where her missing arm would be, down to about her hips, covering only that half, was really appealing.

"That one was one I did just before you arrived," Winn murmured, Addy flicking her eyes up to catch him hovering a bit over her, supporting himself by planting both hands on his desk as he leaned over. "What is it with capes and your superhumans?"

Addy glanced back down, smoothed her thumb over it. "It'd have to be more colourful," she said firmly, scraping her nail over it. "That and maybe tone down the combat look a bit, I already know what I want to be called."

"Wait, you do?"

She looked up at him, tried not to let her face settle into the 'are you a moron' expression it very much wanted to. "Why would I ask for a suit without a name?"

"Kara didn't start with one," he pointed out stubbornly.

Addy shrugged. "I'm not Kara."

There was another beat of silence.

"I'm going to call myself Administrator," she said finally, the words feeling odd on her tongue, not forced, but reluctant to give. She had chosen the name because it was a connection to her past, to Taylor's past, to who she was, but it wasn't so dramatic that it would give the game away.

"That's a bit... ominous."

She shrugged. "Taylor dealt with ominous, and her name was even worse. I'm going by Administrator."

Winn backed off at that, flopping down into his desk chair, both hands raised with palms facing forward. "Alright, alright. Though, actually, what was Taylor's name?"

"Skitter was the one she was mainly known for, though she went by both Weaver and Khepri later on in life." The words were chalky, unpleasant, she both wanted to talk about Taylor and didn't. She'd done it easily before, explained at length about Taylor's life to Hank - J'onn - when he'd pressed, and it hadn't felt so close to painful then. Now, though, she couldn't say the same.

"Yeah, that first one is, uh, pretty bad. I'm assuming a bug theme, 'cos uh, Khepri and Skitter and all?"

Still, though, the words came, like she needed to say them. "Mh. I gave her bug control, or well, really, it was more than she spread her consciousness across bugs. They were extensions of her, she could see through them, feel through them, even sense them like you just know where your arm is."

Winn faltered a bit at that, before his face picked back up. "Well, bug control isn't so bad, really."

She was honestly in agreement with that. Really, humans downplayed the sheer importance of bugs, the diversity, the fact that they were everywhere. She could've, with minor changes to the connection event those years ago, given Taylor something like rat control, but even despite the larger bodies, it would've been magnitudes weaker. "It helped that her range was several blocks wide, and she lived in a warm, temperate part of the east coast."

Winn outright froze at that, his eyes going a bit hazy. "That's..." he finally started, throat bobbing. "Biblical. And closer to what I was expecting."

"It's an interesting configuration of my powers, for sure. Probably the strongest it can be, in terms of overall versatility and subtlety, for this planet. You don't have a lot of colony organisms or swarm species that are easily weaponized." Then again, most 'control this type of creature' powers would be just as powerful and versatile if it was all so vague. She'd given Taylor control over the cultural concept of 'bugs' with some blurry lines to account for lobster and crab. Bugs weren't just a single uniform group, though, and the fact of the matter was that she'd been stacking to deck to begin with. It'd be like giving someone control over everything in the 'Caniformia' family, which, despite its deceptive name, did not solely include dogs, but rather bears, foxes, raccoons, seals, walruses, and plenty others.

Taylor had been her favourite host, even before they'd initially connected. Watching her interact with the world had been enough to decide to see how far she could go with her, and... here she was, years later, still not entirely sure if that was the right decision.

"Wait, configuration?" Winn hissed, which was a surprise, since she'd not been paying attention and now he was rather close to her. "You could do that too?"

"Obviously?" She was really confused about why people seemed to consistently underestimate her. Was it the missing arm? "I have broad-spectrum psychic control over living things with various ranges and degrees of influence as the baseline configuration. Anything within that, so long as I adjust properly, is under my control."

"...Like people?" Winn probed weakly.

Again, he was being very stupid. "Of course people, you're not special. You're animals, just like the rest of them."

Winn slumped back down into his seat, breathing out a strained wheeze. "That's... great to know."

She thought so too.

Patting her bag, just to double-check that the laptop was in there, despite remembering putting it in there herself, Addy finally pulled herself up from her chair, wobbling a bit as she came to a full stand. Unlike Winn, she had not been gifted with a chair with wheels on it, which was a shame, she rather liked the idea of a mobile chair, that and the ability to spin around in it would be nice.

Those were ideas for later, though.

Spotting her out of the corner of her eye, down near the photocopier, Addy picked up her pace and made a line for Kara. "Hello."

Kara jolted, nearly slamming her head against the wall, swinging her entire body around. They met eyes for a brief moment before Kara slumped, a huff leaving her lips in what sounded like relief. "Addy, you scared me. Sorry, I'm... a bit on edge, because of things lately."

"It's okay," she was quick to interject, because it was. Kara looked pretty frazzled and tired, she couldn't blame her for that.

Kara smiled, though it was as weak as the ones Winn had been sending her way. She started grabbing at the papers the photocopier had produced, piling them onto her hand. "So, I uh, can't come home with you, today. Normally I'd be getting off at this time, but, well." She paused, glancing around for a moment, before leaning in, lowering her voice. "Alex called, I have an idea of who a villain is attacking. I haven't actually told you about that? And I will, when we capture him, which I will do, but I'm really sorry Addy, can you get home on your own?"

Addy shot another look out the window. In the short time she'd been talking to Winn, the sun had set even further, going from dark, syrupy orange to something gloomier, cold blues filling in where the sun was now absent. It felt foreboding, oddly, despite knowing rationally nothing could hurt her, or if something tried, she could very easily stop them, but... It just felt uncomfortable, uneasy.

Shrugging, she didn't turn her gaze away from the streetlamp-illuminated city below. "I'll be fine."

Kara let out a deep, rattling sigh of relief. "Thank you so much Addy, today's been hectic and Miss Grant is in a really foul mood after that incident with Senator Enzi and just... thank you. Be safe, alright? I'll see you at home."

Addy managed to turn her head away from the window, but by the time she had, Kara was already trotting off towards Cat, who was in her office staring at her computer like it might start attacking her at any moment.

The coffee was warm in her hand, despite the 'warning: hot' stamped onto the side of the cup. She wasn't even really sure why she bought it, outside of maybe something to do. Noonan's had been on the way home and everyone around her was always so obsessed with coffee despite it tasting like bitter dirt and so she'd handed over a few dollars to get her own. She hadn't even tried to drink it yet, just basked in the scent and kept her pace steady.

Generally, nighttime came with a decrease in population, though some people operated nocturnally more often than they didn't. National City, then, felt more like an extension of what she remembered of Taylor's experiences in New York. People were still plenty common, walking down the streets, none looking particularly shady, just people who need to go somewhere at this time of the night in the middle of February. In Brockton, at least, the cold would keep people indoors, as regardless of how temperate it was in comparison to other Atlantic locations, it still got really cold at this time of the year and night, but seeing as it was still warm enough to go without a jacket, that obviously wasn't a problem here.

The street leading towards Kara's apartment was emptier than the bustling ones closer to CatCo, though. It wasn't totally abandoned, mostly because people were out on balconies, enjoying the weather, but she wasn't weaving in and out of the way of other pedestrians. Cars were frequent, but quick to pass, leaving lengths of time between that felt too quiet, too isolated, for her own good comfort.

Coming to a stop at the crosswalk, Addy turned her head to the side and stared down the length of an alley. It was, much like everything else, dark, gloomy in a way that soaked into the area around it. Having a concept of brightness - instead of the more typical total awareness of light levels via secondary systems found in herself and her kin - was new, but not technically bad. You lost a lot of depth when you 'saw' - for lack of a better term, since sight was certainly not identical between her coreself and her body - everything in perfect detail and with no light to it. Things became more... textured with light, given the depth that it somehow lacked otherwise.

Turning away from the alley, Addy ticked her eyes up, caught sight of the green walking person symbol - she really had to find out what it was called - and made her way across one of the few remaining crosswalks before she'd get home. She could even see the apartment, standing at-odds with the suburbia around it, dozens of windows lit-up.

"Kick rocks dude, I'm not interested."

Pausing mid-step, Addy regretfully pried her eyes from the apartment and around the corner of the building she had been walking past. There, a woman with off-red hair stood, arms folded against her chest, chin upturned, eyes narrowed, while a man a good foot and a half taller than her towered over, bulky arms splayed out so that one curled around one side of her, caging her in.

"Don't be like that, we got along great," he replied, voice tense.

The woman rolled her eyes, catching sight of Addy as she did. "I was on the clock, I had to be nice to you."

The man didn't follow her gaze, remaining firmly pointed down. "We had chemistry," he tried again, this time with a little less patience in his voice. "I can treat you well, you know that?"

Addy glanced down at her coffee, felt the heat between her fingers. She took another step forward.

"Seriously dude, I said no, leave me alone and stop fucking following me."

A grunt, low and angry. "I'm trying to be nice, you bitch."

Her coffee swished around in the cup. Another step.

"No, we both know what you're trying to do."

"Fuck you, you don't get to talk to me like—"

The cup left her fingers before she could really figure out she was doing it. She watched, almost uncomprehending, as the paper cup rolled through the air and with it the brown slurry of bitter shit she had been trying to convince herself to drink fell out and free into the air. The man barely turned in time before the entire steaming contents of the cup drowned itself across his shirt, and more specifically, coated everything past his waistline.

The man yelped like a kicked dog, jerking back and stumbling, one hand reaching towards his pants while the other tried desperately to pluck the shirt from his skin. "Fuck!" He hissed, stumbling back another step. "Fuck this, I was just, no. Fuck this, fuck both of you. I'm fucking out, crazy bitch."

And then he was gone. Just like that, running down the sidewalk.

Addy remembered to blink, reaching up to rub at her cheek. She wasn't really sure why she'd done that. 'Because Taylor would've' seemed like a reasonable answer, but it didn't... really work. She hadn't been thinking about Taylor at the time, she'd been mostly caught in her own head, she'd felt out of place and—

There was a glimpse of something reaching out to her, like psychic fingers. Instinctively, she swat them away, shoving back with her own force. The woman jolted, just about flinched away from her, though stopped herself by grabbing onto the wall, now looking at her with wide, bewildered eyes.

"Did you do that?" Addy asked, mostly out of curiosity.

The woman swallowed, her throat bobbing. "Sorry, you're just... you're a very powerful psychic presence, it's very... soothing. I was going to just check if you were safe, because that guy, y'know, I didn't, because he was supposed to be a decent person and—" The woman petered off, settling into an awkward, nervous silence. "Sorry, my uh, you're an alien, right?"

People weren't supposed to know that. "No."

The woman smiled weakly, almost shakily. "It's okay, I'm one too. I'm a Titanian, I work at the dive bar—well, and uh. Thank you."

Oddly, Addy didn't really feel like she deserved it. Not because she did something wrong, or did nothing at all, but rather because she didn't really feel like she did it. There had been no purpose behind the action, it had been sudden, an impulse that she hadn't been able to overcome, a bit like grinding her teeth. "It's okay."

"No, I seriously owe you," the woman interrupted, despite really, really not owing her anything. She reached into her pocket after a moment, plucking a receipt out and tearing off the top half. She jammed the paper forward, and Addy, without much else to do, took it in her free hand. Unclenching her fingers, she let the paper unroll, an address at the very top printed in black ink.

"That's the address to the bar, uh. It's called Al's Dive Bar, okay? You knock on the door and the password is Dollywood. Ask for Carol - that's me - at any point if you need, I don't know, a favour, information, other places where aliens congregate. Something, okay? Seriously, you just stopped me from possibly having to out my species to a dickbag, that's... big. So, please?"

Addy let her fingers curl back around the scrap and slowly tucked it into the pocket of her sweater. Carol - if she wasn't lying - smiled weakly at her, fidgeting in place.

"I can't give you a fiver to replace your coffee, but uh, y'know. If you ever come by, I'll give you a free drink?"

She wasn't even sure if this body was capable of getting drunk, actually, but nodded anyway, mostly to move the conversation along.

Carol blinked, smiled brightly. "That's great! Thank you, seriously, just—so much. You have no idea. I can finally start heading home now that he's not following me, and just, thank you."

Then, much like the man who had been accosting her, she was gone, almost jogging back down the road and then turning off around the side of a building.

Addy glanced away, towards the now-empty cup absolutely reeking of coffee. It had, at some point, rolled down towards her, and she nudged it gently with the toe of her shoe, kicking it back up the street. Following it, she turned back towards her apartment, towards home, and then back again, to the cup.

Taking another step, she crushed it beneath her heel, and tried, for the first time, to not think about what she just did.

OxfordOctopus · Aug 17, 2020

EPISODE 6

CW for the depiction of a panic attack, but nothing too serious otherwise.

This was starting to become a pattern.

Doing her darndest to blink the sleep from her eyes, Addy felt the world gradually, drip-by-drip, return to her. She did not want to be awake, she in fact had gone to bed because Kara hadn't returned home and staying up any later was going to be—

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Right. The reason she was awake. The banging, the loud, heavy-fisted jostling of the front door. Ensuring her blanket remained wrapped around her first, Addy coaxed her legs off to the side of the bed and eased herself up and off with only a bit of a stumble. The world spun for a moment, her body naturally displeased with her decision to wake up despite—

BANGBANG. BANGBANG. BANGBANG.

—that.

Reaching up with her hand to clumsily wipe the gunk away from her eyes, blanket pinched in place between her forearm and bicep, she trudged her way out of her room, trying to stifle the yawn building in her chest. She hadn't remembered what she had dreamed, which was odd, as other humans had spoken of remembering the dreams they had. Some had even gone so far as to gain some degree of conscious control and awareness over their dream-state, it had all been fascinating, part of a larger body of scientific work she'd been looking into during breaks and when she had nothing else to do—

BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG—

Arriving at the door, Addy eased the deadbolt out of place, twisted the door lock, and yanked the thing open. Her head was splitting, she could hardly see beyond the fogginess in her eyes from the tears, her brain was not being very responsive despite having more than enough time to fully wake up, and Alex was standing in the hallway, looking haggard.

Addy blinked slowly, tried not to let her eyes drift entirely shut. The blanket was warm, it smelled like Kara and rose oil and...

"Kara's been taken."

The world lurched again. Her eyes snapped open, staring at Alex. She tried to process the words, tried to see how what she said could be wrong, because Kara was incredibly strong, possibly the strongest on the planet and she was just—just taken? "By who?" She had to know. Kara had to come back, Kara was important and she only had very few other important entities before this point and she had been responsible for the deaths of both of them.

Alex reached out, steadying herself against the doorframe. "Can you let me in, first? This is... sensitive, and I'm pretty sure I woke half of the floor up."

Shuffling to the side, Addy gave her the space to enter before reaching out to shut the door behind her. She watched Alex stalk a small distance away, off towards the dining room table. Finally, reaching the chairs, she lifted one up, pulled it back, and eased herself into it with a sigh of audible relief. Turning her head back towards her, Alex stared at her. "Are you coming over here or not?"

Rucking the blanket up closer to her chin, but not bothering to hide the quickness in her step, after all this was very important, Addy marched over to the table, used her foot to kick the chair back out, and then eased herself into it across from Alex. An Alex who looked... twisted, torn, broken up. Her face had lines set into it, she looked ten years older somehow, though that could have something to do with the sweat slicking her hair to her forehead. "She hasn't told you anything about the alien we've been tracking, has she?"

Addy shook her head sharply. "Only that they were looking for someone and it had been stressing her out."

She watched Alex's throat bob, a slow and unsteady swallow. The woman stared at her for a moment, hands coming up to fold together in front of her, an attempt to compose herself, as far as Addy could tell. "There had been someone going around executing aliens," she started, fingers visibly flexing against one-another. "We figured out, mostly through the process of elimination, that someone was executing Fort Rozz escapees, and through that, we figured out that it was one of the jailers who was doing it."

She had to think, she had to think. Kara was in trouble, possibly about to be executed, Alex was here instead of banging down the person's door because—because what? Was it already too late? She didn't know, she had to know, she had to know—

"She's not in danger."

Addy froze.

Alex, across from her, smiled weakly. "Not yet, anyway. We have about... eight hours before she's due to be executed. We're currently running a search through the files for who he could possibly be, and it'll only be a few hours until then. I will be doing everything I can to save Kara, Addy. I'm sorry I woke you up at four in the morning, but I needed to tell you so you wouldn't panic when she wasn't here when you woke up."

Addy felt a breath rattle out of her chest more than she willed it, a low wheeze of relief. The blanket slipped down her shoulders, escaped the grip of her fingers and continued until it hit the floor with a heavy thud. She was relieved, but she also wasn't, because Kara was important and that meant she had to be taken care of. She knew that the D.E.O. had plenty of technology, but how easily compromised could they be? Did they even understand what they were going against? How much of a chance did they have to get Kara back without complications? There could be no more complications, because complications had led to the deaths of the two things that she had considered most important in life. First The Warrior, the intelligence to her hub, and then Taylor.

She had Taylor's legacy, thought of herself almost as the legacy itself. She was all that was left of her erstwhile host, fragmentary memories without much of the context and a body that still didn't feel completely hers. Sensations were too bright, noises too loud, there were too many ways for things to go wrong, too many variables she hadn't been given information on and—

"Addy?" Alex's voice was worried, wobbly. Addy couldn't really see her, her breath was tight in her chest, there was this low shrill noise in her ears. It was just too loud, too bright, it wasn't even daylight yet, wouldn't be for two more hours by her estimate but the lights that she'd left on when she went to bed after waiting for her important person still stung her eyes and—and—

"Can you breathe for me?" Alex's voice was closer, nearly at her ear, very abruptly. "Just count your breaths with me, okay? It's okay, Addy, just breathe."

Addy sucked in a breath, tried to get her head to stop spinning. It was still too loud, her skin like a hundred little needles. She could feel the air on it, she could hear the low hum of the lights, the sound of her own heart in her ears—

"And out," Alex continued, voice soothing, pleasant.

She did as was asked, letting the breath out. She was rewarded with Alex counting off "one", and from there the rhythm became easier. The next breath was hard, it still got caught in her throat, still wanted to explode out of her mouth the instant she'd taken in it, but Alex helped smooth it over. Two, then three, then four, and by five her head was clearing. Her skin was still sensitive, too much so, but the world didn't feel so jarring, and by seven her breaths were coming without resistance, smooth and steady.

By ten, her heart stopped trying to claw its way out of her chest. Alex was by her side, though she stepped back after they reached ten, smiling tiredly at her, though with no small amount of pride in her eyes.

"What was that?" She managed to get out, her throat dry, raspy. She hadn't been screaming, but her voice still sounded weird to her own ears.

Alex's smile slipped into a frown. "A panic attack, I believe. You became overwhelmed, you—er, you were mumbling about it being too loud. Don't you remember trying to cover your ears?"

The words almost seemed to reawaken the sensations. The side of her head hurt, a low throb of pain from where hair met scalp. She reached up, brushing fingers over too-tender skin, and winced.

"You were pulling your hair," Alex explained unnecessarily. "You were also unresponsive. You're—well, you're clearly not okay, but—are you better?"

Addy swallowed, tried to get past the roughness of her throat and ignore the tenderness of her scalp. "I am," she said woodenly, tone stiff even by her own estimate. "I will be."

She had to plan, she couldn't get overwhelmed like that. She had options, she just hadn't been aware of them in the moment, an experience she was not interested in repeating. She would look into how the human brain worked in more detail, maybe she could figure out how to ensure she didn't get sidetracked by her own panic again. But before that, she had to do something, she would not let incompetence bury another important thing to her.

"I'm not sure if I'm totally comfortable leaving you alone now," Alex admitted, reminding Addy that she was, in fact, still present.

Glancing up, she met Alex's eyes. "Please go save Kara."

Alex's jaw firmed. "I can't do that until we're finished sweeping the database, Addy. I would feel much more confident if I stuck around until they—"

She couldn't be here for what she was going to do. At least, not yet. "Go."

"Addy—"

"Go and help. It will be a more efficient use of the resources you can provide if you return to the D.E.O."

Despite being completely correct, her words didn't seem to placate Alex. "I'm not sure if that's a good idea."

"It's the only idea," she refuted, slipping out of the chair. She reached down, grasping the blanket and pulling it tight back around her body as she made a line for her room—and more importantly—her laptop. "Go back to your duties. I will be okay."

"Do you promise not to do anything reckless?" Alex replied, her voice stubborn.

"I do." Because what she was about to do wasn't reckless. It was well thought out and thoroughly planned, despite being a spur-of-the-moment decision. She did not make reckless decisions; she had never, and would never. Even as Queen Administrator, those habits were the realm of careless, flighty newborns and the cycle-experienced shards who enabled them during transit.

She ignored the rest of Alex's speech, reaching for her laptop.

—QueenAddy [QA] started a conversation with SchottWinn (Idle) [SW]—

QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: It's an emergency.
QA: I dislike the sound of the notifications on this application enough to know that you cannot sleep through it.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.

—SchottWinn [SW] is no longer idle—

SW: Addy, what the hell.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
QA: Winn.
SW: Stop spamming me. I get it. I'm awake. It's 4:15AM and I am awake and I do not want to be.
SW: Explain.
QA: They took Kara.
SW: What.
QA: The person kidnapping and executing escapees from Fort Rozz took Kara.
QA: She may die.
SW: Okay, I'll head down to the D.E.O. as soon as I'm dressed. Sorry for snapping, I wasn't sure what constituted an emergency for you.
QA: I want the suit.
SW: Okay, to repeat. What.
QA: The one you were going to make.
SW: It's not done! I've had like six damn hours to make one and it was before you made it clear you prefer colours!
QA: I don't care.
SW: It's in full black, Addy.
QA: I don't care.
SW: It's not even done.
QA: I don't care.
QA: I just need it. The costume is necessary. If need be, I will cover myself in insects instead, but I would prefer not to, as I am unsure whether or not they can endure the high speeds I am capable of achieving in-flight.
SW: Please don't do that. Ever.
QA: It's a valid intimidation tactic and effective at concealing my identity.
QA: Give me the suit.
SW: Fine. It doesn't have a mask, but I have a motorcycle helmet.
QA: Those worked well enough for the man Taylor liked. I do not mind.
SW: Fine. I'll message you my address, just give me like an hour to put all the bits together for now, okay?
QA: Be quicker.
SW: Addy wait

—QueenAddy [QA] left the conversation—

SW: Why is she like this?

Alex left by the time she had finished obtaining a proper method of concealing her identity from any onlookers, which was a relief. She had been worried Alex was going to try to stay around, and despite the fact that being alone made her heart slam unpleasantly against the top of her chest, almost painful with each erratic beat, she could cope with it. Discomfort might be a new concept but compensating for unwelcome complications was not.

Shucking her pyjamas, Addy eased herself into the least colourful clothes she could find in her closet. That ended up being black pants, a black shirt, and black socks. It felt wrong wearing them, but it was necessary. Nobody, if they found her clothing, or possibly caught a glimpse of her, would expect her to wear something like this. Black was only good as a way to combine colours in an outfit, it was a sinfully bland pigment otherwise, much like white. She hated it, she didn't want to wear it, she wanted pinks and yellows and reds but she could not have them. She had to save Kara, because the last time she trusted another person to save someone important, to at least leave some of her left, she had to experience getting shot in the head and the rapid and vicious shredding of the consciousness that had represented her most important person.

Slipping into her shoes and lacing them up, Addy made sure the door was properly re-locked and the remainder of the lights and appliances were turned off. She paced the short distance between the front door and one of several large, hinged windows. She did wonder if Kara had chosen the apartment because of the windows, they could open like doors and were easily big enough to fit someone who could fly through them, but then that didn't make much sense, since Alex had been the one who owned the place before now. Maybe Alex had chosen them for Kara? It would make sense; if you had family or friends capable of different modes of transportation you would be justified in finding accommodations for them.

Popping the latch on the window, Addy pushed it open. The air that hit her face wasn't cold, she was pretty sure California did not get cold. It was, in fact, so naturally hot that it regularly self-combusted and burned a good chunk of itself down, but it was colder. Glancing down, the sidewalk sat far below her, not far enough that it would hurt her, in fact she was pretty sure anything short of her dropping out of low earth orbit would be a safe distance for her to fall, but it was still daunting. There were a hundred warring instincts inside of her, most of them Taylor's, who had had a relatively severe phobia of high places.

But she had better instincts.

Reaching out to that nebulous energy in her body, she felt herself begin to float. She'd seen Kara fly twice now, had been flown around by Kara more than that, but she did it oddly. Kara drove herself around through sheer momentum, propulsion pushing in one direction. It was fast, yes, and effective, sure, but it required some degree of build-up and it had so little control. Her turns were always just a bit too sharp, bordering on possibly harmful for anyone without enhanced durability. It was the flight of primitives, of fleshy organisms stuffing themselves into metal projectiles and detonating massive amounts of high-yield explosives just for the chance to hurl themselves out of a planet's grasp.

She knew much, much better. She had once been a crystalline being primarily focused on the continued maintenance and individual control of each part of a trillions-large colony organism. She understood flight and synchronization better than any other living thing on the planet. Flight was to her coreself what walking was to humans, and she hadn't had much difficulty learning that mode of transport either. Flight was not something she had to learn, it was not something new, or something she would toy around with.

She would not relegate herself to the forward-propulsion method she had observed with Kara and, on the few videos that had captured him in flight, the so-called Kal-El. It might be fast, it might seem very natural to them, but nothing about it was natural to her. The only thing her kind had exploded in the last hundred of millions of years to propel themselves in any way, shape or form had been planets and propulsion on that scale was not something she was dealing with.

Drifting into the air, Addy reoriented her focus with her flight. Full three-dimensional movement in any direction, Kara and Kal-El probably knew that they could do something similar, but had never bothered to learn. She would have to teach Kara, just so that her flight handling was better than an infantile bird, but Kal-El was probably a lost cause. Unfortunately, unlike her kind, one could not simply reformat instinctual responses without severe head trauma and it was unlikely she could even achieve said trauma to begin with unless she got creative, and getting creative was generally lethal to the things she was being creative towards.

Reaching down, she gently eased the window closed behind her, making sure it sat flush against the frame. She was pretty sure nobody was going to be able to break in, seeing as they were rather high off the ground, but after the Black Mercy incident, she was willing to go along with the more Taylor-esque strategy of assuming everything that could go wrong would unless properly prepared for. She wasn't going to go so far as to sleep with a gun - she did not need one anymore, after all, unless it was sufficiently big enough to be lethal to someone with durability like herself - but with the current situation as it was, she was not feeling favourable towards random chance.

Lifting higher and higher into the sky, Addy eased herself back into flight. She had arrived on her core planet in 1982, as with all other shards intended to be seeded, and that had been the last time since she had flown. Well, in truth, the seeding process for her kind was more like very carefully falling, but you could argue that was what flight was anyway, so the point remained. It wasn't very difficult to relearn old instincts, to let herself process the flight more as a natural extension of herself, like breathing or fidgeting, but it did take a few seconds before the comfort of flight fully hit her.

She had missed this. Flight during transit had been one of her big major focuses outside of her purposes used in-cycle. She had many others, of course, but the primary reason she had been originally created was to reduce the amount of energy lost in transit by ensuring perfect synchronization of all parts of the greater whole. Those roles had expanded of course, and she had shortly thereafter became a noble shard verging on vital shard, though never making the full transition as the data she had gathered during cycles had been deemed too important to let her further integrate. Before she had existed, the entities had controlled the entire swarm as an extension of the greater intelligence, with no secondary shard primarily focused on the administration of these parts, largely due to the, at the time, moderately weak combat abilities they had in comparison to other gestalts they might come into contact with mid-transit. Keeping the shards all under the greater intelligence ensured any sudden conversion process by a hostile enemy could be immediately noticed and excised as soon as possible.

When that had been fixed, she had been made.

Shutting her eyes, Addy cut off the energy flow to her flight and let herself drop. The air whipped past her harmlessly, what would've hurt and chilled her to the bone felt like nothing. The world was far away, rushing up to meet her, yes, but the impact would not be made for numerous seconds. It felt free and natural being like this, hanging in the sky, but she wrenched the propulsion her body could generate and the natural anti-gravity qualities of the ability before she could linger too long. It would do nobody any favours to crater into someone's house, let alone her.

Wrenching herself back higher into the air with another burst of speed, Addy angled herself towards where she knew Winn lived - despite being an expert in online security, he sure did have a habit of leaving his wallet lying around - and rocketed towards her goal.

Unlike Kara, Winn did not live in a roomy, L-shaped apartment that was decidedly cheap from what she understood, though apparently that came down to Alex "grandfathering" Kara into her rental plan. Winn, instead, lived in a ratty-looking duplex at the end of a long, ratty street that brought memories of Taylor's house to mind. It was a bit outside of the suburbs, closer to CatCo than Kara was, and it would've been an hour's walk had she been restricted by gravity.

She made it to his place in seven minutes, instead.

Opting to land in his backyard, if only to avoid prying eyes that might be waking up for reasons unknown to her, Addy brushed off some of the little flecks of ice that had collected across her person. She was, by no measure, as fast as she had been before, nor as fast as Kara. Kara could reach a top speed that outperformed every known aircraft on the market, both military and not, and Addy coasted at around half of her speed, putting her thoroughly in the middle of the pack. Apparently, Kara didn't usually eclipse those speeds unless in open-air zones, largely because despite being so small breaking the sound barrier at heights lower than ten to fifteen thousand feet ran the very real risk of shattering every nearby window for half a block, but then it wasn't like she had needed to go that fast to begin with.

Walking through dew-licked grass, high enough to nearly reach the middle of her calf, Addy made her way right up to the back door. She raised her hand back and then very simply brought it down with enough force to nearly leave a dent, the loud BANG she produced shortly accompanied by the sound of something hitting the ground and shattering, as well as a long litany of cuss words that Kara thought she wasn't aware of.

Stepping away from the door, Addy listened to Winn's tromping footsteps as he made his way down from the second floor and towards her. Unlike Kara's apartment, Addy could make out at least seven distinctly mechanical locks being cranked open and at least two electrical ones. The door, finally, pulled itself open, a small chorus of beeps from the electrical alarms accompanying the action, and a very-frazzled, very tired-looking Winn stared up at her.

She just had to know, though. Canting her head to the side, Addy let her eyes adjust fully to the low light. "Why is your neck covered in skin-deep bruising?"

Winn shut his eyes, breathing out heavily through his nose as he brought a hand up to run circles over each lid. "Don't," he said, finally, voice still thick with sleep. "I didn't even get the chance to tell you where my house was, how did you find it?"

"It was in your wallet."

"Addy. It's not okay to go through people's personal things. What if I had, I don't know, something embarrassing in there?" He sounded exasperated, but at least he sounded more alive and aware than she had after waking up. "That's really not cool."

"I apologize," because it was proper to do so. "I had just been very curious about one of Kara's friends and you being my boss."

Winn just sighed, taking a step back and waving at her dismissively. "It's fine, just don't do it again unless, I don't know, Kara or something tells you to. Come in, before the neighbours get any other ideas about what I do in my spare time."

Stepping into the house, Addy let her eyes wander. Every available surface on either side of the hallway had been relegated into storage space. Old and mismatched metal shelves were piled high with antiquated servers, loose tools, a half-dozen toy dolls and what looked like a Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal with half of an IED embedded into its ripped open chest.

Following her gaze, Winn just groaned. "Please, please don't ask about that."

"I wasn't going to."

Winn made another wounded noise, throwing his arms up. "You know what? Let's just, follow me, please? Don't touch anything in here, some of it is explosive and, uh, I can't afford another house. Or the, y'know, prison sentence I'd get for having even some of these."

She did wonder where he had collected them from. Most of them were made in a similar way but with vastly different things, and most of them had been half-fused with various things children were fond of. One she spotted in particular looked to have been a botched attempt at separating the bomb from a pillow-sized Power Ranger, the red one in particular, which hadn't gone very well if the fact that half of the plastic was blackened and looked to have been melted was any indication.

Past the hallway leading away from the back door, Winn led her into what was very obviously the living room. Not, of course, that he had used it as such, what had once been a circular area connecting to the dining room by an arch had been turned into a vast, loud, and surprisingly cold server room. Servers were stacked on yet more metal shelves, though at least these ones looked relatively durable, and the hundreds upon hundreds of independently blinking lights were fascinating to look at if not particularly important, seeing as Winn led her right past the wonderful marvel of human technology and up the stairs.

The second floor, unlike the explosive-riddled, server-hosting bottom, was disappointing. It looked completely and utterly normal, a long stretch of hallway with multiple doors leading to different rooms. The walls were off-blue and half-covered in various posters, a lot of them with 'DEFCON' written across the bottom in various ugly formats. The far end of the hallway had a door with an LED sign above it, one which read, very simply, "NO ENTER". Thankfully, instead of being forced to break the rules, he led her into the first room on the right instead.

The interior of the room wasn't much to look at. It was perhaps the most conventional she'd seen as of yet in his house, to be certain, a single bed, a desk with a sewing machine on it, and an entire wall beside the bed with yet more metal shelves covered in various linens and loops of cloth.

"I do this as a way to relax, you see," Winn began, motioning towards a few half-finished shirts and what looked like a botched attempt to knit a scarf. "My family has a lot of, uh, bad history, when it comes to things with felt on them, and one of the therapists they forced on me in foster care thought taking up something related to that sort of thing was probably a good way to work through my trauma."

Addy continued to glance around, looking between bolt-after-bolt of colourful, silky-looking fabrics.

"It was, in fact, one of the few things they were right about," Winn muttered offhandedly, dropping down to his knees at the side of his bed as he shoved his arm beneath it. "It helps to sleep in the same room too. Something about the smell of fabric is soothing to me, and you probably don't really get it, but this is kinda like, my second biggest hobby? Outside of tech stuff, anyway. I don't like being rushed, because it's supposed to be pleasure over work to me, but I do understand your urgency and all that."

He retrieved his arm, his hand now clutching a metal suitcase. He turned, staring at her very plainly, as he rose back into a stand. "Please don't do it again."

Addy felt her stomach churn a little, guilty. "I won't," she agreed, not quite able to force her voice any higher.

Winn smiled weakly, that same shaky smile he'd given her twice before. Addy tried to return it, though it felt wooden, too stiff.

"You can go into the room across from this one to change," he said, pushing the suitcase into her hands. "And please, next time, give me like an hour to get things into order?"

The costume turned out to be more of a set of combat gear than anything else. It looked a lot like what PRT officers had worn in Taylor's memories, a thick, somewhat tight bulletproof vest thrown over what could only be called a modern interpretation of a gambeson. The gloves that came with it were thick as well, but only around the palm and top of her hand, with the digits of the glove focused more on flexibility than anything else. Below all of that, she had pants made out of a similar weave and composition to the gambeson, and large, steel-toed combat boots with thick, dense treads. The entire ensemble was black, black-on-black-on-black to the point where she looked, in the mirror, more like an unaffiliated mercenary you'd find in the middle east.

She hated it. Every bit of it was not her. It was like her clothes but times one-thousand and made her skin crawl. She wanted colour, needed it, it felt tangibly wrong to be wearing the wrong thing for her mood but she swallowed down the squirming discomfort in her head and marched out of the room with her chin high and her shoulders squared.

Winn almost immediately handed her a black biker's helmet with a tinted face. She stared at it, smoothing her fingers over the surface, not feeling the texture because of the glove.

"I know you don't like it," Winn said calmly, quietly. "You look like you're going to crawl out of your skin, but it's all we have, and unless you want to go wearing civilian clothes, this is the best I can do."

Addy flipped the helmet around, eased it down over her ears and tried to ignore the discomfort of having something press down on her ears.

"I'm going into the D.E.O. in... like, thirty minutes. You can come with me then, or something. I don't actually know what you're going to do with this, really." Winn's voice sang clear, sure, but the material still pressed her head in. She wanted it off but it had to stay on and it was going to take so much to get used to this. She didn't really want to get used to it, honestly, she just wanted it to go away.

"I will arrive there on my own," she said, instead, because she was not willing to fly Winn like this. She might drop him, she really did not like wearing this, and it was going to never go back onto her body after she made sure Kara wasn't going to die too.

Winn nodded slowly, swallowing again. "Right, yeah. Uh, I'll see you there, then? And, uh, take the front door? None of the windows are big enough, and, uh, they all have screens, and I really don't want to have to unlock everything down at the back door again."

Nodding her head, Addy took a few unsteady steps, not quite used to the new center of gravity and how the helmet on her head wanted to drag it towards the ground. She didn't want to tap back into the energy of her body to fly, it felt like giving up against an enemy, but she'd probably feel more comfortable if she just flew, wouldn't it? ...But then she'd be admitting she couldn't handle some padded armour, which was significantly less okay.

Breathing out and trying not to grimace as her breath hit her in the face, Addy eased herself into a stride and followed Winn back down the stairs, past the huge server farm, and towards his front door. Unlike the back, this one thankfully only had four locks and two electronic alarms, all of which he easily disarmed and unlocked before throwing the door open.

"Right, so uh, safe flying?" Winn hedged after they'd made their way from the interior to the small deck just beyond his front door.

Addy glanced back at him, tugging on her body's energy again, letting gravity fall away in a seamless transition from ground to the infinitely superior air. "I do not need to be safe," she confessed blandly. "Things break before they break me."

"Yeah, that's—uh, actually kinda what I'm worried about. Speaking of, you fly... differently."

She turned her head back around, pushing on the propulsion to drag herself higher, the back of her boot clipping the overhang just above his deck. "No, Kara just flies poorly."

Before he could get a word in edgewise - which he would try to do, she had learned that much in the hours she had since worked under him - she pushed her flight hard, lurching into the sky and off towards the now-rising sun.

Finding the D.E.O. would have been difficult for anyone who did not know what to look for, or who had been there before. She had wondered what the purpose of having the base so far away from where the bulk majority of alien activity seemed to take place - the actual city - was, but upon a second thought, it did make sense for a government black-op site to be out of the way. It didn't exactly hide in plain sight, but they had built the majority of the surface-dwelling structures in a brownish-yellow colour, making it somewhat difficult to pick out from the vast stretches of pale-yellow, Californian wilderness.

The D.E.O., of course, was on-site to greet her. With guns. Not that they shot at her or anything, but a relatively decent crowd of heavily-armed officers fanned out around Hank - or J'onn, she wasn't sure what he was going by, names chosen by a person were to be respected - and Alex. Most of them were pointed at her, of course, but seeing as she didn't feel nauseated, they probably weren't ones laced with Kryptonite. They'd hurt if they shot her, sure, but she'd probably be able to shrug it off, given her armour and near-invulnerability.

Landing smoothly onto the ground in front of them, Addy didn't bother to wipe the sand off from her pants. Maybe it'd add some colour and she'd feel less like she was wearing sandpaper.

"Unidentified alien!" Alex called out, her pistol still aimed roughly at her center mass. Whoever trained Alex had done well, she could see that much by comparing it to Taylor's memories. "What is your purpo—"

"Alex!" Addy called out, instead, because it was easier.

Hank, Alex, and Vasquez all stiffened.

"Add—"

"It's Administrator!" She interrupted, instead, because the purpose of a costume was to hide one's identity and it would be very counterproductive if she just blurted her name out to the secretive government agency that primarily jailed aliens. She really should know better.

"False alarm, people," Hank called out before Alex could recover. "She's on our side. Head back down to base, myself and Agent Danvers will handle this."

The crowd milled for a moment before the guns finally lowered and people started pulling away, marching towards one of the concrete bunkers not too far away, the door already opened.

Hank approached, his steely features relaxing into a softer if still stony mien. He dropped his gun down into its holster, flicked the safety, and latched the covering over it. "Administrator," he began, looking at her with a lidded, almost disapproving stare. "We are not an agency that handles vigilantes. Despite what Kara might have you believe, we handle alien threats. Is there a reason you have come here in a costume?"

"I'm here to help save Kara," Addy answered honestly, because really, dishonesty wasn't really viable right about now.

Alex made a noise in her throat. "No, you're not."

"Yes," Addy stressed the word, turning her head. "I am."

"No, Addy, you are not. You are one-armed, you are not part of the D.E.O., you are not trained—"

That was where she drew the line. "How many years have you been a member of the D.E.O.?"

"I'm not sure how that's important," Alex snapped back, folding her arms defensively.

Hank turned his head to stare at Alex. "Answer her question, Agent Danvers."

"Fine," Alex bit out, curling even further into herself. "I had a full year of intensive training and two more years of active duty in the D.E.O."

"I have Taylor's memories, and her knowledge," Addy began as a prelude, because despite explaining this to Hank she did wonder if he'd told Alex. "For two years Taylor was directly overseen and trained for the sole purpose of handling parahuman threats. The Parahuman Response Team of my world had far-reaching government funding and was a far larger organization than the D.E.O., so at the least the training was comparable. I am more than trained enough to handle engagement with an enemy threat that retains abilities beyond those that a human would have access to."

Alex froze, her head slowly turning around to Hank, who smiled blandly back at her. She swallowed again, her arms slipping from their tight grasp around her chest to her sides. "So you've been trained for combat," she said slowly.

"Before that, Taylor had at least three months of consistent combat experience against vastly more powerful enemies as she took control of a moderately-sized coastal US city—"

"—I'm sorry, she what?—"

"—during which she developed several unique applications of her original power to great effect. I am more than capable of drawing on these experiences to augment my combat abilities. I am considered superhuman, I have full control over my strength but by your own estimate I am roughly half as strong as Supergirl." Addy let that sink in, folded her arms over her chest and tried not to claw at the outfit she was wearing. "So understand, I am going to help. I will not let someone else important die because I let someone else do what I should've in the first place."

She should've started the failsafe system far, far before The Warrior got to the point where he could be convinced by one of his own shards, regardless of it being Broadcast. She should've begun the process of fragmenting and then consolidating her resources and overtaken the local region during Taylor's trigger event, disrupting the network enough that the failsafe would've kicked in and caused nearby shards to take titanic forms in an attempt to overtake the current network. She should've killed The Warrior, usurped the network, and did what should've been done far before Taylor had to die to do it for her.

Then again, she wasn't sure if she could've. The resources she had been supplied for the cycle had been limited, but considering that there had been several incredibly important shards in Brockton, she could've dominoed into that by hijacking their resources and abilities. She hadn't been deviant enough to consider it at the time, though, to go so totally against protocol like that, and that failure had gotten a world and Taylor killed as a direct consequence.

Alex ran her tongue over her bottom lip, breathed out heavily through her nose, and then stepped back, clearly ceding to Hank.

The man in question smiled at her, looking almost proud. "If you'll follow me and Agent Danvers, we can get you informed in the mission room."

Addy felt the pressure on her chest release, and moved to follow.

The man who took Kara was named Carl Draper. He was a Trombusan, apparently, a species of aliens who looked virtually indistinguishable from humans. Their primary feature that set them apart was their technology; the United Trombusan Intersolar was a civilization-spanning weapons manufacturing corporation that had, at some point in the progress of their society, usurped all active forms of government which had been reliant on them, which had been all of the world governments at the time. Afterwards, they had consolidated the population under their commercialized flag and established themselves as the sole government entity, rocketing the species into a global arms development race to appeal to the new hegemony.

He also owned a quaint, wooden cabin in the woods. It didn't look like anything intimidating, but then the dens of the technologically advanced rarely did. Tinkers, in Taylor's memories, had a habit of making innocuous-seeming buildings literal death traps for the uninformed. One time, Taylor had been trying to track down a resurgent attempt at remaking The Adepts, run by a Tinker whose main thing was long pole weapons that generated various effects depending on which end they came out of, both ranged and melee. She had found his workshop with the rest of the team, and it had turned out that he had at some point converted every standing pillar in his condo into a weapon.

Nobody died, but two officers had lost limbs and dozens more had been wounded in a myriad of ways. Taylor had stuffed the man's mouth full of silk and moved on with life, confident that The Adepts wouldn't have enough of a cult following to inspire yet more copycats in their absence.

As with a lot of things Taylor thought about other people, that had been very wrong, and she was back fighting more magician-themed capes little more than a month later. The only upside was that Quarterstaff - the Tinker - had remained in prison until The Warrior systematically glassed that part of the continent, at which point the man himself and the prison he had been housed in ceased to exist.

She could see nothing wrong with the cabin. It was small-ish, nestled into the curve of a larger hill, a ways away from most other cabins in the region. It looked completely and utterly normal, and Addy did not trust any of it.

Lowering her altitude, Addy came to a stop just above the cabin itself. The D.E.O. formed ranks near the door, weapons levelled and battering ram prepared, with Alex and Hank taking point. The man himself even went so far as to glance up at her, nodding curtly, before reaching up to angle his radio up towards his mouth, saying something into it.

The group lanced forward, the ram slamming into the door and easily blowing the thing from its hinges. The officers swept in after, curls of dust chasing their heels, rising from the ground and the fragments of wood that sifted through the air. Keeping her eyes peeled, Addy circled around the building. She was to dive in if she heard them engage in combat, however her main purpose was to ensure he couldn't get away. The gear he wore enhanced his strength enough that he could send himself hurling around and outpace anyone besides herself, Kara, and Kal-El. If they wanted any chance of catching him if he ran, she was their only option.

Still, nothing happened. There was no sudden gunfire, no sounds of screaming, no fleeing men, no Kara. By the time Hank came back out the front door, waving her down, she'd made close to forty circuits around the top of the house. Tension was creeping back into her, her heart was slamming against her chest again—if Kara was gone, she wasn't sure what she was going to do. Nothing good, in all likelihood.

Landing in front of Hank, she caught sight of his grimace.

"No sign of him," Hank started and Addy had to stop herself from leaping away. He could be anywhere, they didn't have a lot of time before he started executing Kara. "This should be where he is, but... we can't find any—"

"Hank!" Alex's voice called out, sharp and high. The both of them turned to glance towards where the voice had come from, Alex standing in the middle of a largely empty living room. "I'm pretty sure floorboards aren't supposed to glow, now are they?"

Addy was moving past Hank, past Alex despite the complaints, before she could think much more about it. True to her words, the gaps between the floorboards glowed orange, shimmering in the gaps. Before she could overthink it, she put her arm through the floor, ripping the board away with ease, tossing it to the side. She tore away the next, and the next, and the next, until she'd opened a hole big enough that she could fit and see through.

A long, messily-carved hole descended well below the floor, looking to have been carved away in smooth, square-like chunks. At the far end of it was a ship, roughly about a quarter of the size of the cabin, nestled into the rocky floor far, far below.

"Someone get a rope!" Alex called out, though Addy wasn't listening to her. She pulled herself back, ignored the tug of gravity, drawing herself into the air.

She could hear Alex panic, demanding something. She did not care. Kara was down there.

Jamming herself forward with all the force she could muster, she easily shattered past the remaining boards, down the hole, and towards the spaceship. Twisting herself around, she angled her legs down and kept accelerating, pushing well beyond speeds she'd attempted to get to before. The world blurred, her boots met metal, and she did not break.

It did.

She shattered right through the roof, cratering the metal floor as she landed in the interior of the ship. Kara's head had been stuffed into what looked like a rough approximation of a guillotine, with a blade made entirely out of plasma hanging above her. Carl Draper, the man who had taken Kara, turned his head to stare at her, his expression hidden beneath the helmet.

"Who—"

She wasted no time, shooting forward again and bodily slamming her shoulder into him. Again, it gave before she did, sending him hurtling back into the wall of the spaceship. She reached out to her power, yanked on it until it woke, and picked up on the ambient mental chatter, but not on Draper's. Something about his suit felt like a block, an unnatural dead zone. So he had psychic shielding, technologically-enabled psychic shielding.

It was no matter. One of Taylor's favourite quotes had been that if brute force wasn't working, you weren't using enough of it. It was an acutely correct statement, on both a planetary and galactic scale, most things could be fixed by simply applying more energy to it. She shoved her range down to its bare minimum, inches away from her skin and ramped the strength of her power to the top. She could almost feel the psychic field buzzing along her skin, and for a moment she let herself think beyond the mission at hand, her purpose.

She reached out to her body and redirected the energy drain to it. It took a moment, but she almost felt surprised at how easily her power started drawing from the solar energy she had stored, drinking greedily. She'd get maybe five minutes of high-yield usage like this, but if she toned it back... She wouldn't have to draw on her coreself.

That was important, but it was for later.

Draper hauled himself to his feet, snarling and flapping his mouth like she cared at all about what he thought. No, she genuinely didn't, he wasn't important, and soon, he wouldn't be thinking anything but what she wanted him to, either. Lurching forward, she jarred herself back into high speed and grabbed hold of his mask.

The psychic barrier bent under the pressure, twinged. She pushed more into it—from five minutes to three, to two, to one, before, with a euphoric shatter and a spray of sparks from the interlaced piece of shit his species considered adequate technology, the entire psychic barrier flatlined. His mind buckled instantly under her presence, she overwhelmed him, did not overwrite him if only because she needed his knowledge.

She flared her power again, dampened the bandwidth before it could steal all of the energy in her body, and kept the connection firm. Wordlessly, she ordered him to get rid of his armour, which he did by accessing a neural implant. Trombusan brains were one of the few things that were distinguishable from human's, unlike the free-floating, spinally-anchored brains of humans, they had more of an interconnected mesh that filled their skull entirely, adhering itself to the walls with long strands made out of rapidly-repairing gray matter. It was a fascinating adaptation, and she could see how the species adapted so well to a society that taught even children how to put together weaponry, but she didn't care.

She ordered him again to free Kara, and within seconds he had. Kara burst up, shoulders wide, staring at her without any comprehension on her face.

Addy didn't care. She launched forward, Kara brought up her arms, and Addy wrapped her only good arm around Kara in a hug, her stump rattling uselessly against her other shoulder. "Kara Kara Kara Kara Kara Kara."

"...Addy?" Kara murmured weakly, gradually returning the floating hug.

Addy nodded, her helmet jostling. She hated it, she couldn't wait until it came off, but Kara was safe and alive and not gone like everyone else. "I won't hide it from you," she confessed quickly, not even stopping to breathe. "Yes, I'm Addy. I'm Administrator like this, I got a costume, I hate it, it feels wrong to wear all black, but I don't care. I had to save you, I had to save you, I'm sorry. I had to."

"Hey," Kara interrupted, voice weak, her hands coming to gently pat at her back, the touch barely felt. "Hey now, it's okay. You're okay, I'm okay. Alright?"

Someone coughed from behind them, and Addy felt Kara freeze, but didn't turn to look. "If it wouldn't be any bother," a man's voice said, sounding almost elderly, but still spry. "While I do think this reunion is very touching and nice, I do believe I need some help being freed. For all that I appreciate you stepping up to take my spot, I am still not a fan of this, er, cage."

Kara jolted, a nervous laugh escaping her. "Right!" She said, pulling away from Addy, who reluctantly let herself detach from Kara. She floated away, towards Draper, reaching towards the psychic connection she had established. She had let him remain aware enough to see through his own eyes, but he wasn't in any amount of control. She could feel his hormones spiking, the fear running through his system, and she wondered if he could feel her. The coreself, the vast thing in another world that had once been her body.

Landing next to him, she gently touched his head. "You aren't needed anymore," she said, in lieu of anything else, and then very firmly forced his mind into unconsciousness.

The man dropped, hit the floor. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the sound of tearing metal.

Everything was fine.

She wouldn't be alone again.

She would be fine.

OxfordOctopus · Aug 19, 2020

EPISODE 7
[INTERLUDE: KARA]

Addy was shaking.

Kara wasn't sure when she noticed it, honestly. She had been busy prying the steel bars off of Alphonse's cage, not to mention all the thoughts she'd had swirling around in her head. She had been raised to assume Fort Rozz was the prison they sent the worst of the worst, the irredeemable, after all, it would make sense. The Phantom Zone was completely disconnected from Rao's light, from the light of even other stars; it was a timeless void where people would not age, did someone who peddled drugs for the sole purpose of saving his sick wife really deserve that sort of fate?

She didn't think so, but then she wasn't really sure what to think about Fort Rozz anymore, or her mother.

But that wasn't really important right now. Her own problems could be boxed up and handled later, she'd gotten really good at doing that. No, what was worrying her was that Addy, in her full combat-biker outfit, was shaking. They weren't large tremors by any measure, but they also weren't those small bursts of vibration she'd do when she was excited or happy. Kara wasn't even sure Addy was aware that she was oscillating her body - nor, frankly, did she know how she did it - but she could pick it up with her hearing and the almost crystalline tinkling sound she'd let off was always a surefire way to figure out how happy Addy was, despite her habit of not showing it on her face.

No, this wasn't that. This was different. Her hand trembled near her hip, fingertip-covered gloves dancing across where her hip would be. Her stump was visibly shaking, not so much that it was obvious to the eye, but little twitches of movements that put her ill-at-ease. Her breathing was a bit too rapid too, short puffs of air that certainly wasn't getting enough oxygen to her brain. There were other signs, too, Addy might have picture-perfect posture most of the time but her relaxed state had a bit of a slouch to it, a loosening of limbs. She couldn't see any of that on her now, every part of her was ramrod straight, so tightly clenched she didn't even have to use her x-ray vision to pick up on it.

No, something wasn't right, and unlike some people, she couldn't read minds.

"Alphonse?" Kara asked, glancing towards him. The professor startled a bit, still looking up as a small platoon of D.E.O. agents descended down on ropes. She could even see her sister, when she followed his gaze for a second. "I need to ask you a favour."

The man smiled, and however weak it might be, it was still genuine. "Anything."

"I think I need to go and take care of my friend," she started, motioning towards Addy, who was still staring at the wall, Carl Draper slumped - hopefully - unconscious at her feet. "I'll come back around to ensure the D.E.O. puts out a good word for you, but is it okay if I leave you to handle them for now?"

The smile on Alphonse's face smoothed into something more genuine, so warm. It reminded her of her grandfather, the gentle wrinkles that curled along his skin, the comfort it exuded. "Of course, dear. You've done so much for me as it is, I won't keep you any longer."

Nodding and flicking her eyes up meaningfully as her sister finally landed on the ground below, Kara strode past Alphonse and towards Addy. The closer she got, the worse she noticed the shaking was. Picking up her pace, though not letting it escalate into a jog if only to make sure she wasn't about to startle Addy, Kara crossed the distance between the two of them in a few long strides of her leg. "Addy?"

The girl jolted, scuffing her boot on the ground behind her. "Hello," she said, voice completely flat.

Right, that was probably bad. "Addy, are you okay?" Straight to the point was always the best option with Addy. Unlike humans, Addy was wonderfully blunt about things and expected a similar level of bluntness given in return. To do anything else was to make her think you were talking circles around her, and if there was one thing Addy liked least of all, it was feeling stupid.

For a moment, Addy said nothing. The shaking in her body got worse, but little else, and she otherwise stood stock-still, staring blankly towards her from behind the bike helmet. "I," she said with great slowness, like each word was a fight to get out. "Do not like what I am wearing."

Okay, she could work with that. Thinking back to the booklet she'd picked up after originally taking Addy into her custody, Kara smoothed her face out into a neutral expression. "Can you tell me how bad you dislike them?" She tried, because this line of conversation had worked before. Getting Addy to work through her problems with assistance always seemed to help, especially when she got overwhelmed.

"The worst," Addy said without missing a beat.

Nodding firmly, Kara glanced around. "Right, then I guess we'll just have to get you back home. You flew in, right?"

"I did," Addy assented. Single-comment responses again, not great.

"Can you fly yourself out?" Kara tried.

Addy froze for a second. "I cannot."

"Because of the costume, or because of something else?"

"Something else."

Kara found herself breathing out in relief. The something else could be handled easily enough unless it was life or death, but the last thing she needed was to find a change of clothes that would fit Addy right now. "Okay, what is that?"

"I am nearly out of solar energy," Addy clarified tonelessly, her hand tapping in a pattern of three at her hip. Little stims were a good indication that she was coming a bit back to herself, so at least they had gotten that much. "I am currently at three-point-zero-four-nine-three-three-two-four-one percent capacity, and without direct exposure to sunlight on my skin, I will be unable to recharge. If I attempt to fly now, it is likely my reserves will be completely exhausted."

Yikes. They still weren't even sure if Addy's body could survive solar flaring, though the test results they were getting back pointed more towards her being able to than not. Still, it was probably not the brightest idea to test fate, especially not after this. "Okay, then I can fly you back home. Are you okay with me touching you?"

"Only you," Addy more blurted than anything else. Her stimming stopped near her hip, the little taps, before starting back up with an almost frantic energy. "I did not mean to make you—"

"Addy, honey," Kara tried, and much to her relief, Addy's posture relaxed. It was infinitesimal, barely a loosening of ligaments around her shoulders, but god was it nice to see. "It's perfectly okay if I'm the only one who is allowed to touch you right now. You're uncomfortable. So, again, would you like me to fly you back home so you can change?"

The stimming slowed back down to a gentle rhythm, and more muscles loosened across Addy's body, easing the tension. "Yes," she replied, and this time there was emotion in it. A weak, reedy noise in the low of her throat, something desperate. Kara felt her heart twist painfully.

If she just hadn't gotten captured, Addy wouldn't be so overwhelmed.

Treading forward carefully, Kara reached out and gently smoothed her palm over Addy's upper arm, her shoulder. The girl relaxed, pushed a little into the positive contact. More good signs, Addy wasn't totally losing herself to the sensations, good. Gently enclosing her arm around Addy's back, and then gradually lowering her other arm down towards her thigh, Kara pushed a smile to her face that came with more ease than she thought it would. "You ready, Addy?"

The clunk of Addy's helmet hitting her in the shoulder in a nod was all the permission she needed. Scooping her up, Kara eased Addy into a bridal hold, with just enough bend to Addy's body that her legs wouldn't dangle too far down. Despite being so light, Addy was, in fact, nearly five inches taller than her, and it was no simple feat to bridal carry someone that large without some stumbling.

Thank Rao for super strength.

"Hi, Miss Grant?"

Reaching down with a burst of super speed, Kara swooped the helmet up before it could be shattered against the wall. When Addy had made it clear that she was going to take off her costume as fast as inhumanly possible, she had not been kidding.

"Kiera?" Miss Grant's voice was tinny over the phone, but still thick with haughtiness. It was refreshingly familiar. "Are you calling to give your excuses for why you were absent this morning?"

Bursting forward again, Kara glanced away and to the side and she jolted up to catch the flung pair of combat-grade pants. She did not need to see Addy's underwear, let alone when she was the one wearing it. "Yes, I'm really sorry about that. It's just we had a bit of an... incident."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"Was it Addy?" Miss Grant said, and Kara was almost struck still by the comfort and, perhaps more importantly, understanding in Miss Grant's voice. She'd never heard her speak like that to anyone but Carter, and even then... "I know you two live together, though why exactly you took her in is your personal decision and not anything I know." Her words, despite all of that, didn't sound antagonistic. Heck, if Kara could say anything about it, they almost sounded proud.

"I..." She didn't want to say yes. Her main lie was to talk about a waterline burst or something. Some unseen hazard that had ruined her home, but...

"It's okay, you don't have to say it. Is she feeling better?" Miss Grant continued.

There was a crow of triumph from behind Addy's dividers and the sound of clattering dresser drawers. "I believe so? It was clothing-related, and really bad."

"Mh," Miss Grant said, or rather, hummed. "I expect you in by twelve, Kara. Next time Addy has a meltdown or anything of the kind, please just phone me. CatCo has policies in place for handling mental health emergencies, among which is a lot of room for those with developmental disorders of all kinds. We are not Amazon, or god forbid Google; we do not take advantage of neurodivergent people, you should know that. Also, tell her she has the rest of today off."

"I—"

The line went dead.

Addy emerged, wearing a big, baggy blue-and-yellow striped t-shirt that went down to her knees, white socks covered in goose print, leggings with galaxies all over them, and with her blanket hauled around her shoulders. Her smile was wide and bright, completely unabashed, like the weight of entire worlds had come off of her shoulders and she could finally breathe.

Kara felt something in her settle, something warm and proud and more than a little comforting. "You feeling better, Ads?"

Addy blinked, cocked her head to the side like a particularly curious dog. "Is that a nickname?" She asked, her voice a little fluttery.

"If you want it to be," Kara said, just as gently.

The trilling vibrations bloomed out from Addy, a pleasant tinkling chime that was as loud as she'd ever heard it.

"I do."

It'd taken a while to get Addy settled after. Not too long, she was still very clingy in a very desperate way, seeking physical touch, reassurance that Kara was still there for the first thirty minutes. She'd put on a movie for the two of them, though she'd told Addy she could only stay until 11, or about an hour and a half of the total runtime. Addy had been fine with it then, and had settled in to delightfully watch Wreck-It Ralph with all the gusto she'd assumed would come with it.

By the time it was time for her to go, Addy was nearly out cold. Her eyes were lidded, movement sluggish, and Kara had rearranged the blanket so that it could lay entirely over Addy instead of just around her shoulders, just in case. She looked at ease, all the tension from before having slowly leaked out of her. The sight was accompanied by the sound, a low consistent trilling from deep inside of her, oscillations that Kara could make out easily, even from a distance. Now that she was hearing it like this, more of a contentful, consistent tone, it honestly reminded her a lot like purring.

Reaching out, Kara brushed her fingers across Addy's head, not bothering to hide the smile when she pushed into it. "I gotta go, okay?"

Addy nodded blearily, head tilting back. Her eyes were fully shut down, her breathing relaxed, a deep and smooth rhythm she'd probably keep an ear out for, if only to save herself the anxiety.

"You know my number if you need to call me, and it's totally okay to call me if you're feeling upset or something. I'll be back at around six tonight. There's a lot of carrots and cucumber in the fridge, but I want you to try to eat a tub of yogurt and maybe one of the bars, okay? You did a lot of good work today." Kara paused, pulling her hand back, watching as Addy blinked up drowsily at her. "I forgot to say this back then, but, welcome to the team, Administrator."

A smile pulled at Addy's face again. Sometimes, Kara really did wish she had James' skill with photography, she'd capture it in a heartbeat if she could.

CatCo was not quite in chaos when she arrived, but it was a close thing. Winn had his head down, rapidly typing over a keyboard, half of the office workers were rushing back and forth, trading papers; she could see - and hear - Lucy yelling at someone rapidly, pointing stubbornly towards a desk, to which the person, with slumped shoulders, made their way over to it.

She couldn't really find James, and Miss Grant was notably absent from her office, but... Now was about as good of a time as any, and it had been building up until this point.

Beginning to make her way towards Lucy, swerving between rushing coworkers, Kara listened back in on Addy's smooth breathing, the low tinkle of contentment her body generated. She felt herself ease, felt her shoulders smooth back, and felt the tension in her belly loosen.

Kara had known secrets. She'd lived with one her entire life, she was, after all, a closeted alien and Supergirl had only been a secondary evolution of that. Secrets had been her bread and butter, and despite many people thinking she was nearly unable to keep them, she was always able when it mattered. Secrets that wouldn't get somebody locked up in an underground facility and experimented on? She wasn't really great at keeping them, but at least she tried.

Coming to a halt at Lucy's desk, she cleared her throat. Not long ago, she'd been avidly jealous of Lucy, of her and James, but in hindsight it hadn't really been that clear, had it? It had been more complicated than a crush. "Have you seen James?"

Lucy's face twitched, but betrayed nothing. "Yes, is there something you need him for?"

"I need to talk to both of you," she said, instead. Lucy's mien relaxed at that, smoothing out as a smile plucked nervously at the corners of her lips.

"Well," she started, pushing back on her chair and rising into a stand. "He's in the photo room right now, I think alone. Would that do?"

She glanced towards the photo room, peeked over the frames of her glasses. True to her word, there he was. "I think so."

Lucy paced ahead and Kara followed after, making her way back through the throng of agitated office workers. She wasn't really sure what they were all up in arms about, and she was pretty solely focusing her healing on Addy and her immediate surroundings. It could absolutely wait until she was done with James, or at least she hoped so. She still couldn't see any sign of Cat, which meant she was probably up a floor or two tanning the hide of someone who would force her to leave her office.

Pity to them, she guessed.

Lucy pulled the door to the photo room open, motioning for her to follow. Kara, obliging, reached behind to pull the door shut behind her, watching as Lucy made her way up to James and pecked him on the lips, which he returned with a soft smile. She still felt that pang, but it wasn't so hard on her. She felt ready, steadier.

James glanced up, met her eyes. He lifted an eyebrow, as though asking if this was when she was finally going to do it.

Kara glanced away, back to Lucy, and took a step forward, folding her hands behind her back. She took in a breath through her nose, half-shut her eyes, and then breathed out. Now or never. At least they were in a soundproof room, unlike her original ludicrous decision to jump off a building to come out about her alien heritage to Winn. She had really gotten caught up in that moment, huh. "I'm Supergirl."

Lucy froze, James winced like he hadn't expected her to go straight at the problem like that. Maybe she wouldn't've, in another world, maybe she wouldn't've told Lucy at all; maybe she would've done nothing and let their relationship self-destruct because she couldn't bring herself to trust the sister of Lois. Maybe her suspicions had some validity, maybe they didn't, but she could only work with things now. That and Addy had proven sometimes being blunt was the easiest way to get to the heart of a problem.

"Your boyfriend has helped me out a lot to handle myself and figure out who I should be," she said, without missing a beat. "I like to think I'm a good person, that I try, but sometimes I do get caught up with what happened. I released Maxwell Lord today from D.E.O. custody, despite my misgivings, because of him."

James' smile turned a bit more genuine, less forced.

"Why?" Lucy said at last, her voice reedy thin.

"Maxwell, or why me?" Kara replied, letting Addy's chime keep her calm. She could do this. Addy was honest with her, and had been honest since she landed. She didn't hide anything outside of what was necessary to keep herself safe.

"The second first, then the first second," Lucy said slowly, the words tinged with anger. Not unexpected, Lois at family dinners hadn't exactly been cordial about her sister, or her close relationship with their father. General Lane was a cruel, xenophobic man, and it reflected in the people he raised.

"At the beginning, it was to protect me," Kara admitted, glancing towards the window. "I was only a kid when I arrived, you know? Thirteen, I watched my world die and my adoptive parents did everything to make sure I would be safe here, that I wouldn't have to run away from another planet. They tried so hard, and one of them died because of my negligence in hiding myself properly."

She took in a breath, reminded herself of the importance. "Later, after that, it became to protect my peers. What do you think others would do if they knew, Lucy?" Kara couldn't help the pleading in her tone, couldn't help the simmer of hurt. "What do you think they'd do to my sister, my mother? What about Addy? I take care of her now, but if people knew? She'd be a constant target. I can't protect everyone, no matter how hard I try, but I can keep those closest to me safe so long as nobody knows my identity."

It took a moment, but something in Lucy's posture loosened, eased away. She breathed out, reaching up to press the palm of her hand into her own face, dragging fingers down. "The next one," she said, voice edging on flat.

"Maxwell Lord created Bizarro," Kara said simply. "He trafficked eight comatose Jane Doe girls, experimented heavily on them with DNA he cultured from me, and went on to give them nearly all of them non-consensual cosmetic surgery to look identical to me. Why do you think we put him away?"

Lucy glanced away, biting her lower lip. "Point," she managed, sounding reluctant. "But, you two—then, you two had something going. It makes sense no—"

"Lucy," Kara interrupted, not able to keep the exasperation out of her voice. "It would be incredibly cruel for your boyfriend to cheat on you emotionally or otherwise with me. I might've had a crush on him for a while, but I don't think it was specifically like that. I didn't want James, I wanted what you guys have. You get to have a normal relationship, the last guy I kissed? I broke his nose accidentally because I got too excited, and that's not a particularly new development either. I wanted what you guys had because I... I don't think I ever can have it. I'd need to disclose my identity to anyone I date, I'd need to make it clear that one day I might not come home to them. I would need to overcome hurdles of my own biology to get even anything remotely similar to what you have."

Lucy just looked at her, her expression open for the first time since they'd met. There was a long moment where Kara thought she'd turn away anyway, that the entire confession would be a failure, before something like... understanding slipped into place, settled over her features like a blanket, and she sighed.

"I'm sorry for hiding it from you," Kara said gently.

Lucy smiled wanly. "It's okay. I'm sorry about... that. I just, I need to reevaluate how I see you, okay? I, I won't tell anyone, but, just, give me some space, alright?"

Kara breathed out, relief settling into her body. Things would be okay, none of this was going to ruin her life.

"Alright."

"Finally moved on, have you?"

Jolting around, Kara relaxed as she saw Miss Grant approach, her strides long. She was in business casual today, wearing long dress pants, heels high enough to hurt, and a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In one hand was, from a glance, a signed letter of resignation, and in the other was a large cup of coffee, which she took a sip from.

"Sorry about this morning," Kara said, instead. Because, to be honest, she didn't really want to talk about James. Yes, she hurt less than she had thought she would, but it didn't mean it hadn't hurt at all. She still felt that uncomfortable, squirming longing for what they had, but it was less directed at him and more of a general malaise towards couples in general. She'd probably have to get Alex to buy a few cartons of ice cream and introduce Addy to the idea of break-up movies, huh.

Miss Grant just clicked her tongue, passing her by and turning to enter her office. "Kiera, in." Miss Grant commanded, closing the rest of the distance towards her desk as she placed her things down just next to her computer.

Obligingly, Kara entered.

"Close the door, Kiera, I shouldn't have to tell you how to do everything."

Again, she obliged, gently easing the glass door shut behind her. Standing with her hands tangled together in front of her, she met Miss Grant's eyes from across the room. The woman rolled hers after a moment and casually motioned towards the chair with a huff.

Fighting back the smile tugging at her lips, Kara made her way to the chair on the opposite side of Miss Grant's desk, sitting down after first pulling it out.

"I assume Addy is doing better, yes?" Miss Grant began, eyes still trained on her computer as she typed rapid-fire across the keyboard.

Kara tuned back into Addy again, picking up on the smooth, deep breathing. The tinkling was gone, sadly, but the breathing meant she was almost certainly asleep. "She bounced back very quickly."

"Good," Miss Grant said, before finally turning her focus solely on to her. "Now, to preface this conversation, if you tell a single soul what I'm about to tell you, I will have you fired and ruin your reputation so thoroughly you will be married to a job at Walmart. Clear?"

Kara swallowed, shifting backwards a bit. Still intimidating, Miss Grant. "Crystal."

"I'd always known Carter was on the spectrum," Miss Grant began without prelude, her voice firm. "Not as severe as some of the others, I'll admit, but he had troubles. He didn't respond to his name very well, he babbled a lot, he consistently avoided social environments and preferred to either be alone or be with me. He absolutely hated the texture of grass, to the point where he would get upset if he even so much as saw it, and for nearly a year, he wore a single hat and refused to take it off. I had to, at some points, bathe him with it on, and take it off while he slept to wash it."

Kara remained quiet, soaking the information in. Miss Grant was rarely if ever open about Carter, but something had clearly changed, something important.

"His father was not... impressed with Carter," Miss Grant said diplomatically, clearly trying to keep herself from saying something else. "But for the most part, I did not care. Carter was Carter, and regardless of how much it might upset the father if he couldn't traditionally pass as neurotypical, I did not care. I got him help, of course, insofar as I could. I did research, I - and you should too - avoided Autism Speaks, because that company is a voyeuristic exploration of how exploitative you can be. While I did not mind that Carter did not live up to the expectations of what society considered normal, I did everything in my power to make sure his life would be smooth so long as I walked this earth, and even well after."

Miss Grant took a moment, reaching out to shakily take a sip of her cup. She swallowed, shut her eyes, and glanced towards the window, tapping her finger against the rim of the cup.

"Over time, Carter picked up on his peers' behaviour and found ways to appear more neurotypical, at least outwardly. His father was delighted, I didn't mind either way, but I always, always intended for my home to be a place where he could be himself. If he didn't want red food tonight? We could have green. If he found, suddenly, that he could no longer stand the stripes of his room being horizontal? We could paint them vertical. I found out later that his father was encouraging him to act neurotypical, admittedly, and now his father has visitation rights so strict and so legally-solid that if he so much as breathed wrong I could tie the damn contract to his foot like a cinder block and chuck him into a lake, but... I still failed on that end."

Another pause, Miss Grant visibly collected herself, returned to that haughty air of authority. Her chin raised, her lips pursed, her hands folded. "I'll be clear, Kara. I structured a lot of the internal policies surrounding mental health days to best support autistic people working in my company. I am not 'in the know' when it comes to every mental health problem, I am not a saint." Miss Grant met her eyes, solid and firm. "But I am willing to say I did my best here, and will do my best for Addy as things come. I said before I wanted to keep our interpersonal relationship purely professional, after Adam I had been hurt, but I do consider you somewhat of a friend, or at least an ally. This is not because you've suddenly taken on an autistic woman, either, we are both well aware that despite her hangups Addy is more than capable of existing on her own, if not how either of us would consider reasonably acceptable."

She wasn't wrong. Addy was self-sufficient to a point, most of what Kara was providing her was a place to get settled and to have access to resources she might have to find alternatives to otherwise. Everything Addy did was in her own power, she was not a child, simply wired differently.

"I look at Addy and I see, hopefully, someone that Carter could look up to as an example of where he could go into the future. I'll be honest, Addy has chosen a field of study that will try to eat her up and spit her out. The tech field is male-dominated and the women in it are generally beholden to their appearance. Addy is neither conventionally attractive nor 'normal' enough for them to get by on that alone, even putting aside the fact that she has a visible handicap." She sounded bitter and harsh, like each word was a curse. "But I'm sure she'll be able to work through things herself. I'll be discussing it more directly with her later, but Addy is what I hope for the future of this company, of the world, Kara. You do not, and should not, have to feel that you or Addy cannot come to me with concerns or problems with her workplace. I won't paint the walls with stripes, but I have people who can do something very similar, within reason."

Kara breathed in, felt her chest fill with more burny warmth. "Thank you," she murmured, trying to get the words out. "Is, uhm, there anything else?"

Miss Grant smiled, and it was a bit sad. "No, I just wanted to make it clear that our personal standing is no longer... where it was, after Adam. That and, at least for me, when I finally found someone who was there to support both myself and Carter, I felt better. Less like I was going to have to fight the world with my bare hands, which, I would. I would rip this entire male-dominated field down brick by brick if it meant Carter could walk through it without a problem. But I didn't feel like I had to, and now I hope that you don't either."

Kara breathed out, felt the tension she hadn't known was there leak out of her in waves. She smiled, bright and unabashed, and Miss Grant didn't so much smile back as quirk her lips. It wasn't the toothy smile she'd like to see out of Miss Grant one of these days, but it was enough.

Everything was going to be okay.

There were people there for her.

Administrative Mishap [Supergirl/Worm]

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