![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Duality
Fandom: Superman Returns and Batman Begins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,941
Characters/Pairings: Clark Kent, Chloe Sullivan, Kara Kent, Martha Kent
Acknowledgments: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damo_in_japan for betaing this.
Previous Part: Chapter 6
Next Part: Chapter 8
Summary: Kara discovers what a Kryptonian is meant to be when there is no Krypton.
Her knees complained with each step up the creaking stairs, and the plate of cookies demanded that a hand be taken off the railing and added to its support, but in the end, Martha Kent climbed her Everest. She rarely came up to the second floor of the Kent house, but Clark’s old room was there and Kara had insisted on sleeping in it. She rose her hand to knock, but a clear voice said “Enter.”
She did.
Kara was floating over the mattress horizontally, arms crossed and as stiff as a mummified pharaoh. The bedclothes that hung off her gave a skeletal look to her body.
“I could have heard your bones creaking a mile away. More than a mile.”
Martha set her jaw and ignored the insult. “I know you’ve been in a funk lately. Maybe some fresh-baked cookies will snap you out of it.”
“My world is gone. You really think some cookies are going to make me feel better?”
“If the past is weighting you down, focus on the future.”
Kara floated higher, spinning so that she was facing Martha. She nearly bumped into the ceiling. Martha had to crane her neck to face her.
“My future is an eternity on this barbaric rock, with yellow light that stings my eyes and clothes that won’t stop itching!”
“I can take you to the store to buy new clothes,” Martha said magnanimously.
Snide: “Oh, would you?”
Martha set the plate down on Clark’s dresser, pushing aside a Little League trophy. She crossed her arms severely. “You can make this easy or you can make this difficult. It won’t change what happened, but it will change how people see you. And from here, you are not looking very good.”
Kara’s blue eyes flashed as she considered it. Then she floated down onto the bed.
“Thank you for the cookies, Mrs. Kent.”
“You’ve very welcome. Now get dressed, we’re going to town.”
Martha turned to give Kara her privacy, but on her way out the door Kara stopped her.
“How old was he when he found out?” Kara asked, looking at the red star on the ceiling, alone among all the green.
“He started getting his powers at age twelve, but it wasn’t until he was in high school that we told him he was… one of you.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Pretty well, considering… I think he felt that it explained a lot.”
“Did he ever…” Kara reached up to touch the red star, blotting it out with the tip of her finger. “Did he ever wish that Krypton hadn’t exploded and he’d grown up with his real parents?”
“His birth parents, you mean?” Martha said stiffly. “Yes. He did. But if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets in the sea.”
***
As soon as she stepped out of the elevator and onto the floor of her apartment building, Chloe was dialing her editor. Vicki’s voice was muddy over the cell-phone link, that wonderful Gotham gremlin that seemed to possess every communications device from time to time. Still, Chloe was so keyed up she could hear Vicki’s voice crystal clear. She didn’t even bother fumbling with her keys, just stood outside her locked door and let her hands rub together excitedly.
“Bump the Batarang from the superhero page, I’ve got a new headline.”
“Bigger than Superman coming back?” Vicki sounded amused, as she usually did when talking to Chloe. “If it were anyone else…”
“Superman talking with Batman. A little grainy, but that helps it look realer.”
Vicki groaned at the reminder of their fledgling tabloid status. “Legit?”
“I saw it with my own two eyes. They talked a little, seemed to have a bit of an argument, then Big Blue flew off.”
“You’re too late for evening edition.”
“I’ve already got it up on my blog.”
“And people who aren’t in your legion of newsboys will read about it tomorrow morning. Follow up on it, Sullivan. I wanna know what they were talking about.”
“Vicki, as of now, Batman and Superman are my only story.”
She flipped her cell-phone shut and tossed it into her tote bag, bumped into a big yellow shield. She looked up into sapphire eyes. Damnit.
“Clark,” she said.
“It’s still Superman when I’m in costume,” he said, a bit gruffer than she was used to. “Obviously, you haven’t told anyone.”
She shrugged. “Who would believe me?”
He seemed unsure whether to hug or shake hands, so he settled for clapping her on the shoulder manfully. “So, how’ve you been?”
“Single, occasionally twenty pounds overweight, and now a blogger.”
“A what?”
“Look it up on Wikipedia.”
“On where?”
She rolled her eyes. “Just forget it. You’re more charming when you’re naïve.”
Then, it was to business. Seemed like it always was, whenever she saw Clark those days. Maybe it was too much to ask for that when he had come back, he'd left behind the stick up his ass. Because she’d wanted him to leave behind the stick which had been up his ass since he’s gotten his powers. That is, she didn't mind his ass being back, since it was a nice ass, she just wished the stick, which was up his ass, wasn't there.
For both the obvious reason and because she was still tripped up by ‘nice ass’, Chloe didn’t look him in the eye. It just made it that much more difficult for him. Maybe he even deserved it a little. Chloe didn’t feel great about making him squirm, but he owed her for five years of not being there.
“I want you to pull the pictures from your website,” he said at last, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t bubbling over with happiness to see him.
“No can do.”
“You know how much fear and mistrust we’re greeted with. And now people are going to think we’re in league!”
Chloe walked around him. It was pitiful how fast they fell back into old roles. For her, at least; she was the secretary. But even if he didn’t need her help, she still wanted him to have it. “Maybe people wouldn’t fear you as much if you were more open.”
“No matter what I do, people will fear me.” Clark almost explained to her about the possibility of artificial Kryptonite being out there, somewhere. But, no, he couldn't trust her not to turn it into a scoop. Five years ago he could’ve, but if there was anything coming home had taught him, it was that time made all the difference.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t try to change their minds.”
He looked at her with eyes that were cold as Arctic ice. “Why should I? How many times should I have to prove myself? How many times…” Superman reached out and took her hand. She flinched. “How many times must I hold someone before they trust that I won’t crush them?”
Unbidden, a tear crawled down Chloe’s cheek. She didn’t bother wiping it away. Damnit, Sullivan!. Goddamnit! “I never blamed you for what happened. Not ever.”
“That’s alright. I did it for you.”
Her heart quickened. Superman heard and knew what was going to happen next. She stepped forward and laid her head against his broad chest, ear against the S-shield. As securely as his cape protected him, Clark sheltered her within his arms. She wore a new perfume, but under it was the same Chloe smell. Trustworthiness and reliability and… love. He could admit that. That there was love between them, even if they’d buried it long ago. Even if her pulse hadn’t quickened when she’d seen him again, because she was so blasé and cosmopolitan now. A good reporter. Her dream had come true and he’d missed it.
His heart was beating like a blacksmith was using it as an anvil. She must’ve heard it.
“You could put Lex behind bars if you wanted to. They say he got out because you didn’t testify against him. You were the prosecution’s star witness and…”
“I never knew there was going to be a retrial. I thought his conviction was airtight.”
She sniffled. “There’s no statute of limitations on what he did. Put him away, Clark. He deserves it, and worse. They all do.”
“No.”
His voice wasn’t as heroically deep as it had once been, but it wasn’t the high falsetto of Clark Kent either. It was Clark, straight-edge farmboy going to Smallville High, who spoke to her in dulcet, soothing tones when no one else would give her or her conspiracy theories the time of day. The Clark Kent who’d told her about his gifts because he knew she wouldn’t be afraid. The one who’d given her the first kiss of her life.
“I have to believe,” he said, stumbling over his words as if he were that trembling schoolboy once more instead of the world’s greatest hero. “I have to believe that he’s capable of redemption. Even Lex deserves a second chance.”
“That’s more than he gave his victims.”
“And that’s why we’re better than him.”
“You, maybe,” she spat. “But I’m human. And I want him dead.”
“Our desires don’t make us human. Actions alone determine that.”
“Actions.” Chloe shouldered her purse. “Well, Clark, I’m off to get stinking drunk, alone, in my overpriced apartment. You do whatever. But the story still runs.”
And for the first time in her life, Chloe shut her door on Superman.
***
The day in Smallville turned out to be long, but uneventful. Martha Kent made her rounds, trading gossip and well-wishes with everyone she met on her weekly routine, while Kara tried to discover an invisibility superpower. Watching Mrs. Kent’s mawkish interaction with the Earthling Ben Hubbard made Kara wish there was an Emoti-Enforcer around, like in the early days of Krypton’s consolidation. But no, the wanton sentimentality went unpunished. Not that Kara supported the authoritarian “displeasure” with emotions, but she could definitely hear the Elders’ words in a new light when presented with such saccharine mush.
At last, after a dozen painful attempts to be drawn into piddling conversations of no intellectual stimulation, Kara was allowed to return home. Thankfully, Kal-El’s caretaker showed a modicum of tact and allowed Kara to eat her supper in her room, where she wouldn’t have to be put through the so-called “humorous” blather that was projected by radio signal onto a much-accessorized cathode ray tube. Martha said she found it relaxing. It made Kara’s brain hurt with its insipid predictability.
Alone at last, she reached under the mattress of her bed and found the long, cold length of her black crystal. It was a cylinder, rounded at the ends, and as thick as the space between her thumb and forefinger. As soon as she touched it, the crystal warmed and lit up a dark pink for her. From it, warmth flowed through her body. She set it aside, still throbbing, as she needed to prepare for bed. But it felt comforting just to have it on, that low machine hum filling the air instead of the Earth sounds or Earth silence.
The shower was an inefficient way to get clean, but not unpleasant. With hot, hot water she scrubbed herself, replacing the scent of the outside with the comparatively clean one of the soap. At the very least, she had not changed. The Earthlings used improper diet and exercise as a matter of course, while she had developed a fit instrument of a body. Her flesh was taut, ripe, smooth… pleasing physical attributes on Krypton, although from the media she’d seen Earth placed a much stronger emphasis on such arbitrary factors. Her body was whipcord-thin and bronzed as any tanner’s, her buttocks firm and high, her midriff flat, her breasts small but firm. As long as she was being judged on physical factors, she felt better that she was being judged on those things than the overall cherubic nature of her face, the smile that came too easily and too “adorably” for her to be taken seriously when they went to town, the hair that went everywhere the moment she moved faster than a dull walk.
Coming out of the shower dripping wet, she examined herself in the mirror. She was strong, but it wasn’t obvious. The “cornfed hunks” of Smallville were all broad, beefy specimens… a little like Clark. She was decidedly more compact than even the husky girls who hung off those muscular boys. She had already encountered a word to describe her physicality, which was “petite”. Her body was petite and unremarkable so long as she did not make an effort to make it remarkable, in which case her sexuality could be an asset.
Turning to view her reflection from different angles, Kara noted the way her waist tapered slightly and how her nipples puckered irritatingly in the cold. They were pink and, outside the personalized climate control of Krypton, had a tendency to engorge at inopportune times. This resulted in Martha Kent insisting on Kara wearing thicker shirts and more layers of clothing. She accepted Martha Kent’s advice, although it seemed likely that this would result in less attention from the male population of Smallville, which would seem to unnecessarily complicate mating attempts. For a primitive world, Earth was shockingly roundabout about the simplest things.
She ran a hand lightly down the silken skin of her stomach, stopping to dip a finger experimentally into the thimble cup of her belly button. It tickled. She slapped her belly and felt pure muscle, proof of her discipline’s victory over Earth “cuisine” and sedentary traditions. With pride, she ran her hands up until they were tangled in her hair. She quickly gathered it up into a simple ponytail, then dressed in some of the clothes she’d bought with Martha.
The crystal was waiting for her, so black it seemed to suck light into it. Dimming the lights, Kara sat on the bed. She crossed her legs and held the crystal on her lap, the better to commune with it. Her breath entered a self-hypnotic state, focused to intensity yet loose enough for meditative purposes. The crystal’s systems opened up to her, filled her. Her breasts rose and fell, and her mouth opened with the deepening of her breath. There was so much knowledge stored within, enough to satisfy even her insatiable curiosity. And as she’d suspected, some of it was about her. Her father must’ve known about his brother’s plans for Kal-El; he wouldn’t have allowed for his nephew to be spared just to neglect his only daughter. So what was her purpose? What had she survived for? She went deeper to seek her answers. Her eyelids lowered, and she began to sway from side to side, smiling dumbly at the satisfaction of answers entering her mind.
The knowledge was forbidden, but she was experienced in petty rebellion and bypassed the security lock-outs. And they thought Kryptonian encryption was so secure. That kind of information inside the crystal felt different within her mental interface, like nothing she’d ever felt before… but good, in its own strange way. She wanted more. Grunting with exertion, she forced her way deeper inside the crystal’s database. So much knowledge she couldn’t absorb it all consciously, but gluttonously she pulled it to the forefront of her communal interface. The crystal seemed to grow hotter, even shake a little. It felt good. The House of El was prominent within the files she sought, her name cross-indexed inside. She would learn more about herself.
The information she was taking stretched the inside of her mind, almost painfully so. This was no mere collection of data, not any type of data she’d ever encountered in her vast studies. An AI? They were prohibitively resource-intensive, to the point where only the Science Council members were allowed to work with one. Despite the pain of its entry, she kept going. She needed all of it.
Compilation of the data was a certainty. She could feel it approaching, her whole body quivering, her mind dead to everything but the fragments of code coming together like amino acids in a primordial soup. Kara churned, increasing her tempo. She rocked back and forth, bucking and biting her lower lip until a spasm rocked her. A second and third followed rapidly. More. A spasm a second. Each seeming more powerful than the last.
Kara began to tense and tighten. Sweat bathed her body, tickling her as it dripped off her flesh. Her eyes, no longer glazed, fixed heatedly on the black crystal as it seemed to swell. With a bright flash of light, she felt it empty its knowledge into her, then shrink as if it had actually lost physical mass. The crystal had reached its peak. Her white-knuckle grip on it went loose and she let the crystal drop to the mattress. It was now a milky white.
The contractions within Kara’s mind began slowly to diminish in intensity, and a minute later she was gasping in the stunned aftermath, sated and unmoving, whimpering softly.
“Yes… yes,” she said, now seeing the data for what it was. Like a solved puzzle, she fed the perfectly geometrical shape mind-representation back into the waiting, willing crystal. She understood now. This was phase one of her mission, her holy mission to Earth, and she’d completed it.
“You have done well, my daughter,” her father said, for who else but Kara Zor-El, last daughter of Krypton, could’ve resolved the seemingly random mass of algorithms into a virtual consciousness. “Now, your true test begins.
“The House of El lives on, Kara. And you shall be its truest scion.”
Fandom: Superman Returns and Batman Begins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,941
Characters/Pairings: Clark Kent, Chloe Sullivan, Kara Kent, Martha Kent
Acknowledgments: Thanks to
damo_in_japan for betaing this.Previous Part: Chapter 6
Next Part: Chapter 8
Summary: Kara discovers what a Kryptonian is meant to be when there is no Krypton.
Her knees complained with each step up the creaking stairs, and the plate of cookies demanded that a hand be taken off the railing and added to its support, but in the end, Martha Kent climbed her Everest. She rarely came up to the second floor of the Kent house, but Clark’s old room was there and Kara had insisted on sleeping in it. She rose her hand to knock, but a clear voice said “Enter.”
She did.
Kara was floating over the mattress horizontally, arms crossed and as stiff as a mummified pharaoh. The bedclothes that hung off her gave a skeletal look to her body.
“I could have heard your bones creaking a mile away. More than a mile.”
Martha set her jaw and ignored the insult. “I know you’ve been in a funk lately. Maybe some fresh-baked cookies will snap you out of it.”
“My world is gone. You really think some cookies are going to make me feel better?”
“If the past is weighting you down, focus on the future.”
Kara floated higher, spinning so that she was facing Martha. She nearly bumped into the ceiling. Martha had to crane her neck to face her.
“My future is an eternity on this barbaric rock, with yellow light that stings my eyes and clothes that won’t stop itching!”
“I can take you to the store to buy new clothes,” Martha said magnanimously.
Snide: “Oh, would you?”
Martha set the plate down on Clark’s dresser, pushing aside a Little League trophy. She crossed her arms severely. “You can make this easy or you can make this difficult. It won’t change what happened, but it will change how people see you. And from here, you are not looking very good.”
Kara’s blue eyes flashed as she considered it. Then she floated down onto the bed.
“Thank you for the cookies, Mrs. Kent.”
“You’ve very welcome. Now get dressed, we’re going to town.”
Martha turned to give Kara her privacy, but on her way out the door Kara stopped her.
“How old was he when he found out?” Kara asked, looking at the red star on the ceiling, alone among all the green.
“He started getting his powers at age twelve, but it wasn’t until he was in high school that we told him he was… one of you.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Pretty well, considering… I think he felt that it explained a lot.”
“Did he ever…” Kara reached up to touch the red star, blotting it out with the tip of her finger. “Did he ever wish that Krypton hadn’t exploded and he’d grown up with his real parents?”
“His birth parents, you mean?” Martha said stiffly. “Yes. He did. But if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets in the sea.”
***
As soon as she stepped out of the elevator and onto the floor of her apartment building, Chloe was dialing her editor. Vicki’s voice was muddy over the cell-phone link, that wonderful Gotham gremlin that seemed to possess every communications device from time to time. Still, Chloe was so keyed up she could hear Vicki’s voice crystal clear. She didn’t even bother fumbling with her keys, just stood outside her locked door and let her hands rub together excitedly.
“Bump the Batarang from the superhero page, I’ve got a new headline.”
“Bigger than Superman coming back?” Vicki sounded amused, as she usually did when talking to Chloe. “If it were anyone else…”
“Superman talking with Batman. A little grainy, but that helps it look realer.”
Vicki groaned at the reminder of their fledgling tabloid status. “Legit?”
“I saw it with my own two eyes. They talked a little, seemed to have a bit of an argument, then Big Blue flew off.”
“You’re too late for evening edition.”
“I’ve already got it up on my blog.”
“And people who aren’t in your legion of newsboys will read about it tomorrow morning. Follow up on it, Sullivan. I wanna know what they were talking about.”
“Vicki, as of now, Batman and Superman are my only story.”
She flipped her cell-phone shut and tossed it into her tote bag, bumped into a big yellow shield. She looked up into sapphire eyes. Damnit.
“Clark,” she said.
“It’s still Superman when I’m in costume,” he said, a bit gruffer than she was used to. “Obviously, you haven’t told anyone.”
She shrugged. “Who would believe me?”
He seemed unsure whether to hug or shake hands, so he settled for clapping her on the shoulder manfully. “So, how’ve you been?”
“Single, occasionally twenty pounds overweight, and now a blogger.”
“A what?”
“Look it up on Wikipedia.”
“On where?”
She rolled her eyes. “Just forget it. You’re more charming when you’re naïve.”
Then, it was to business. Seemed like it always was, whenever she saw Clark those days. Maybe it was too much to ask for that when he had come back, he'd left behind the stick up his ass. Because she’d wanted him to leave behind the stick which had been up his ass since he’s gotten his powers. That is, she didn't mind his ass being back, since it was a nice ass, she just wished the stick, which was up his ass, wasn't there.
For both the obvious reason and because she was still tripped up by ‘nice ass’, Chloe didn’t look him in the eye. It just made it that much more difficult for him. Maybe he even deserved it a little. Chloe didn’t feel great about making him squirm, but he owed her for five years of not being there.
“I want you to pull the pictures from your website,” he said at last, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t bubbling over with happiness to see him.
“No can do.”
“You know how much fear and mistrust we’re greeted with. And now people are going to think we’re in league!”
Chloe walked around him. It was pitiful how fast they fell back into old roles. For her, at least; she was the secretary. But even if he didn’t need her help, she still wanted him to have it. “Maybe people wouldn’t fear you as much if you were more open.”
“No matter what I do, people will fear me.” Clark almost explained to her about the possibility of artificial Kryptonite being out there, somewhere. But, no, he couldn't trust her not to turn it into a scoop. Five years ago he could’ve, but if there was anything coming home had taught him, it was that time made all the difference.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t try to change their minds.”
He looked at her with eyes that were cold as Arctic ice. “Why should I? How many times should I have to prove myself? How many times…” Superman reached out and took her hand. She flinched. “How many times must I hold someone before they trust that I won’t crush them?”
Unbidden, a tear crawled down Chloe’s cheek. She didn’t bother wiping it away. Damnit, Sullivan!. Goddamnit! “I never blamed you for what happened. Not ever.”
“That’s alright. I did it for you.”
Her heart quickened. Superman heard and knew what was going to happen next. She stepped forward and laid her head against his broad chest, ear against the S-shield. As securely as his cape protected him, Clark sheltered her within his arms. She wore a new perfume, but under it was the same Chloe smell. Trustworthiness and reliability and… love. He could admit that. That there was love between them, even if they’d buried it long ago. Even if her pulse hadn’t quickened when she’d seen him again, because she was so blasé and cosmopolitan now. A good reporter. Her dream had come true and he’d missed it.
His heart was beating like a blacksmith was using it as an anvil. She must’ve heard it.
“You could put Lex behind bars if you wanted to. They say he got out because you didn’t testify against him. You were the prosecution’s star witness and…”
“I never knew there was going to be a retrial. I thought his conviction was airtight.”
She sniffled. “There’s no statute of limitations on what he did. Put him away, Clark. He deserves it, and worse. They all do.”
“No.”
His voice wasn’t as heroically deep as it had once been, but it wasn’t the high falsetto of Clark Kent either. It was Clark, straight-edge farmboy going to Smallville High, who spoke to her in dulcet, soothing tones when no one else would give her or her conspiracy theories the time of day. The Clark Kent who’d told her about his gifts because he knew she wouldn’t be afraid. The one who’d given her the first kiss of her life.
“I have to believe,” he said, stumbling over his words as if he were that trembling schoolboy once more instead of the world’s greatest hero. “I have to believe that he’s capable of redemption. Even Lex deserves a second chance.”
“That’s more than he gave his victims.”
“And that’s why we’re better than him.”
“You, maybe,” she spat. “But I’m human. And I want him dead.”
“Our desires don’t make us human. Actions alone determine that.”
“Actions.” Chloe shouldered her purse. “Well, Clark, I’m off to get stinking drunk, alone, in my overpriced apartment. You do whatever. But the story still runs.”
And for the first time in her life, Chloe shut her door on Superman.
***
The day in Smallville turned out to be long, but uneventful. Martha Kent made her rounds, trading gossip and well-wishes with everyone she met on her weekly routine, while Kara tried to discover an invisibility superpower. Watching Mrs. Kent’s mawkish interaction with the Earthling Ben Hubbard made Kara wish there was an Emoti-Enforcer around, like in the early days of Krypton’s consolidation. But no, the wanton sentimentality went unpunished. Not that Kara supported the authoritarian “displeasure” with emotions, but she could definitely hear the Elders’ words in a new light when presented with such saccharine mush.
At last, after a dozen painful attempts to be drawn into piddling conversations of no intellectual stimulation, Kara was allowed to return home. Thankfully, Kal-El’s caretaker showed a modicum of tact and allowed Kara to eat her supper in her room, where she wouldn’t have to be put through the so-called “humorous” blather that was projected by radio signal onto a much-accessorized cathode ray tube. Martha said she found it relaxing. It made Kara’s brain hurt with its insipid predictability.
Alone at last, she reached under the mattress of her bed and found the long, cold length of her black crystal. It was a cylinder, rounded at the ends, and as thick as the space between her thumb and forefinger. As soon as she touched it, the crystal warmed and lit up a dark pink for her. From it, warmth flowed through her body. She set it aside, still throbbing, as she needed to prepare for bed. But it felt comforting just to have it on, that low machine hum filling the air instead of the Earth sounds or Earth silence.
The shower was an inefficient way to get clean, but not unpleasant. With hot, hot water she scrubbed herself, replacing the scent of the outside with the comparatively clean one of the soap. At the very least, she had not changed. The Earthlings used improper diet and exercise as a matter of course, while she had developed a fit instrument of a body. Her flesh was taut, ripe, smooth… pleasing physical attributes on Krypton, although from the media she’d seen Earth placed a much stronger emphasis on such arbitrary factors. Her body was whipcord-thin and bronzed as any tanner’s, her buttocks firm and high, her midriff flat, her breasts small but firm. As long as she was being judged on physical factors, she felt better that she was being judged on those things than the overall cherubic nature of her face, the smile that came too easily and too “adorably” for her to be taken seriously when they went to town, the hair that went everywhere the moment she moved faster than a dull walk.
Coming out of the shower dripping wet, she examined herself in the mirror. She was strong, but it wasn’t obvious. The “cornfed hunks” of Smallville were all broad, beefy specimens… a little like Clark. She was decidedly more compact than even the husky girls who hung off those muscular boys. She had already encountered a word to describe her physicality, which was “petite”. Her body was petite and unremarkable so long as she did not make an effort to make it remarkable, in which case her sexuality could be an asset.
Turning to view her reflection from different angles, Kara noted the way her waist tapered slightly and how her nipples puckered irritatingly in the cold. They were pink and, outside the personalized climate control of Krypton, had a tendency to engorge at inopportune times. This resulted in Martha Kent insisting on Kara wearing thicker shirts and more layers of clothing. She accepted Martha Kent’s advice, although it seemed likely that this would result in less attention from the male population of Smallville, which would seem to unnecessarily complicate mating attempts. For a primitive world, Earth was shockingly roundabout about the simplest things.
She ran a hand lightly down the silken skin of her stomach, stopping to dip a finger experimentally into the thimble cup of her belly button. It tickled. She slapped her belly and felt pure muscle, proof of her discipline’s victory over Earth “cuisine” and sedentary traditions. With pride, she ran her hands up until they were tangled in her hair. She quickly gathered it up into a simple ponytail, then dressed in some of the clothes she’d bought with Martha.
The crystal was waiting for her, so black it seemed to suck light into it. Dimming the lights, Kara sat on the bed. She crossed her legs and held the crystal on her lap, the better to commune with it. Her breath entered a self-hypnotic state, focused to intensity yet loose enough for meditative purposes. The crystal’s systems opened up to her, filled her. Her breasts rose and fell, and her mouth opened with the deepening of her breath. There was so much knowledge stored within, enough to satisfy even her insatiable curiosity. And as she’d suspected, some of it was about her. Her father must’ve known about his brother’s plans for Kal-El; he wouldn’t have allowed for his nephew to be spared just to neglect his only daughter. So what was her purpose? What had she survived for? She went deeper to seek her answers. Her eyelids lowered, and she began to sway from side to side, smiling dumbly at the satisfaction of answers entering her mind.
The knowledge was forbidden, but she was experienced in petty rebellion and bypassed the security lock-outs. And they thought Kryptonian encryption was so secure. That kind of information inside the crystal felt different within her mental interface, like nothing she’d ever felt before… but good, in its own strange way. She wanted more. Grunting with exertion, she forced her way deeper inside the crystal’s database. So much knowledge she couldn’t absorb it all consciously, but gluttonously she pulled it to the forefront of her communal interface. The crystal seemed to grow hotter, even shake a little. It felt good. The House of El was prominent within the files she sought, her name cross-indexed inside. She would learn more about herself.
The information she was taking stretched the inside of her mind, almost painfully so. This was no mere collection of data, not any type of data she’d ever encountered in her vast studies. An AI? They were prohibitively resource-intensive, to the point where only the Science Council members were allowed to work with one. Despite the pain of its entry, she kept going. She needed all of it.
Compilation of the data was a certainty. She could feel it approaching, her whole body quivering, her mind dead to everything but the fragments of code coming together like amino acids in a primordial soup. Kara churned, increasing her tempo. She rocked back and forth, bucking and biting her lower lip until a spasm rocked her. A second and third followed rapidly. More. A spasm a second. Each seeming more powerful than the last.
Kara began to tense and tighten. Sweat bathed her body, tickling her as it dripped off her flesh. Her eyes, no longer glazed, fixed heatedly on the black crystal as it seemed to swell. With a bright flash of light, she felt it empty its knowledge into her, then shrink as if it had actually lost physical mass. The crystal had reached its peak. Her white-knuckle grip on it went loose and she let the crystal drop to the mattress. It was now a milky white.
The contractions within Kara’s mind began slowly to diminish in intensity, and a minute later she was gasping in the stunned aftermath, sated and unmoving, whimpering softly.
“Yes… yes,” she said, now seeing the data for what it was. Like a solved puzzle, she fed the perfectly geometrical shape mind-representation back into the waiting, willing crystal. She understood now. This was phase one of her mission, her holy mission to Earth, and she’d completed it.
“You have done well, my daughter,” her father said, for who else but Kara Zor-El, last daughter of Krypton, could’ve resolved the seemingly random mass of algorithms into a virtual consciousness. “Now, your true test begins.
“The House of El lives on, Kara. And you shall be its truest scion.”
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 04:41 am (UTC)And mentions of Kara's otherworldly characteristics and her observations continue to fascinate me. Hadn't thought of regular clothes being itchy, or Martha's interaction with Ben Hubbard could be considered 'wanton sentimentality'. Awesome work!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 08:10 pm (UTC)I feel a certain amount of trepidation about that black crystal. I'm kind of reminded of that dark Captain Marvel villain... Eclipse? Something? But my money's on Brainiac being behind the crystal.