FIC: "Alone and Far from Home" (1/1, SV, spoilers for 7.01)
I mentioned yesterday that I was writing a "What if I wrote 7.02". Well, I haven't got the time to finish it, so I finished up what I did have, creating a coda (for 7.01)/character-study (for the character revealed in the final moments of 7.01) type of fic.
Alone and Far from Home
by LJ
Kara only met her Uncle Jor-El a few times, and she’d never understood why he and her father disagreed and never spoke. Her mother and Aunt Lara had tried to make the two reconciliate now and again throughout her childhood, but distance made things difficult. Argo City and Kryptonopolis were hardly neighboring city-states.
She wonders what Uncle Jor-El would have thought of her following Kal-El to Earth. She’d never actually met her cousin, only seen pictures Aunt Lara had sent to her mother: a baby like any other, dark-haired, and by all accounts promising.
Things are foggy and confusing at first: the roar of water and the silence of being submerged. A call for help, and the vague memory of responding, of knowing she could help and doing so, and seeing the man she’d rescued on the banks of a river whose waters reflect blue and gold, not red. She’s not sure what she did next, only that she wakes up again on top of a building, clutching an assortment of native clothing. She puts them on, ignoring her natural modesty, her mind clearer now and focusing on the tasks at hand: first, hide her ship - Earth is not ready for the universe - and second, find Kal-El.
She takes a moment, staring out into the strange new world she’s found herself in, and mourns: her mother and father, her friends, everyone she ever knew is dead and gone. But she’s an adult now, her father had said, old enough to take care of herself and to watch over her little cousin. All the years of her adolescence she’d wanted to be considered a grown-up, like everyone else her age, like every other teenager, and now that the time has come for her to embrace those responsibilities she finds that the adults were right: the wanting was better than the having.
But there’s no one else to teach Kal-El about where he came from, she reminds herself, no one else from their lost home in all the universe, and without him she’ll be alone. From what she’s seen of Earth, the natives look just like Kryptonians, so there’s no question of eventually blending in…but they’ll still be different. But you’ll be different together, she tells herself.
She takes a breath and reaches over to the pile of her old clothes and picks up her bracelet: a coming-of-age gift from the grandmother she shares with Kal-El, a gift received only days before the destruction of Krypton. The moment I put it back on, she tells herself, the mourning and complaining and heartache is over. The moment I put it on, I’m Kara Zor-El, and I’m not a child anymore, and Kal-El is my ward.
She slips it on.
She takes a breath and then stands up.
Remembering where her ship likely came to shore, she flies. First, my ship, she reminds herself, and then Kal-El.
[END]
Alone and Far from Home
by LJ
Kara only met her Uncle Jor-El a few times, and she’d never understood why he and her father disagreed and never spoke. Her mother and Aunt Lara had tried to make the two reconciliate now and again throughout her childhood, but distance made things difficult. Argo City and Kryptonopolis were hardly neighboring city-states.
She wonders what Uncle Jor-El would have thought of her following Kal-El to Earth. She’d never actually met her cousin, only seen pictures Aunt Lara had sent to her mother: a baby like any other, dark-haired, and by all accounts promising.
Things are foggy and confusing at first: the roar of water and the silence of being submerged. A call for help, and the vague memory of responding, of knowing she could help and doing so, and seeing the man she’d rescued on the banks of a river whose waters reflect blue and gold, not red. She’s not sure what she did next, only that she wakes up again on top of a building, clutching an assortment of native clothing. She puts them on, ignoring her natural modesty, her mind clearer now and focusing on the tasks at hand: first, hide her ship - Earth is not ready for the universe - and second, find Kal-El.
She takes a moment, staring out into the strange new world she’s found herself in, and mourns: her mother and father, her friends, everyone she ever knew is dead and gone. But she’s an adult now, her father had said, old enough to take care of herself and to watch over her little cousin. All the years of her adolescence she’d wanted to be considered a grown-up, like everyone else her age, like every other teenager, and now that the time has come for her to embrace those responsibilities she finds that the adults were right: the wanting was better than the having.
But there’s no one else to teach Kal-El about where he came from, she reminds herself, no one else from their lost home in all the universe, and without him she’ll be alone. From what she’s seen of Earth, the natives look just like Kryptonians, so there’s no question of eventually blending in…but they’ll still be different. But you’ll be different together, she tells herself.
She takes a breath and reaches over to the pile of her old clothes and picks up her bracelet: a coming-of-age gift from the grandmother she shares with Kal-El, a gift received only days before the destruction of Krypton. The moment I put it back on, she tells herself, the mourning and complaining and heartache is over. The moment I put it on, I’m Kara Zor-El, and I’m not a child anymore, and Kal-El is my ward.
She slips it on.
She takes a breath and then stands up.
Remembering where her ship likely came to shore, she flies. First, my ship, she reminds herself, and then Kal-El.
[END]