Chapter Text
Exodus
National City, Earth.
"You can do this!"
Kara strained, pushing back with all her strength. Alex watched her with glistening eyes and heavy breathing, looking at her with so much hope, even as the air around her started to thin, even when all her powers couldn't stop the Ark from rising into the atmosphere, her sister still believed in her. She yelled, channeling all her energy in that single point in her hand where it met metal, knowing that she couldn't fail, that Alex was in that ship, that she wouldn't ever see her sister again if she wasn't strong enough.
"You got this!"
She couldn't hear her, not really. The spaceship was soundproofed, the sound of thrusters too loud for her to listen to words, but whenever she opened her eyes, desperately gasping for breath, she could see Alex's lips moving, imagine her voice full of love like she did whenever they had a sister's night.
Kara met her eyes again, feeling her tears freeze in her cheeks, and shook her head. She felt so weak . She would take a thousand knives made of Kryptonite to this feeling of failure. That she was losing Alex, her world all over again, and this time, it was all her fault. Because she wasn't strong enough. Wasn't good enough. She choked, unable to cry without air, and shivered.
"Winn, record me. I need- I need to leave a message. Kara! Kara, listen to me, " Alex's mouth moved, and Kara couldn’t stop herself from watching, even if she couldn’t understand a word. Kara didn’t hear it until later, but there was an echo in the recording as if Winn had just been holding the phone over his comms.
" Kara, I love you ."
She understood that, she watched her sister form those words time and time again that the way her lips moved was all but engraved in her mind, and Kara's heart broke.
" I- Kara, listen to me. I love you. You're the best sister in the world, and I'm so happy to have you in my life, but- But we both know I'm-" Alex started sobbing too, putting her hand where Kara's rested against the glass. " I'm going to be fine, Kara. I- I promise I'll find a way back to you, you know I always do, but I- I need you to make a promise to me too, okay? Can you do that? "
She wasn't even flying anymore, she realized. She was using all her strength to hold on to the Ark, and she felt cold, so cold like she never felt before, like… like how she remembered feeling whenever she looked outside the window of her pod. Kara didn't want to, and she hated herself for nodding, for focusing on the way her sister looked at her, desperation, worry, resignation, and the way Alex's short hair fell over her cheeks because this felt like Krypton all over again.
Kara looked at her, paying attention to her face, to the way she frowned, because she didn't want to forget, not like she did Aunt Lara or her friends from the Guild. She didn't want Alex to be just another blurred shape in her memory, so close to her yet so far away.
"Alex..." The word escaped her lips. She felt so distant from Alex, even as their hands tried to meet each other through the thick glass.
"Kara, I- I need you to take care of Dad for me, okay? Just- Just until I get back. And I need you to look after Maggie, she's… I love her, Kara, I love her so much." Kara pursed her lips, watching silently. "And I know I gave you so much shit about it, Kara, but- But I want you to talk to Lena. I- I know how much she means to you, and I need to know that there'll be someone there to take care of you, so, promise me that when this is all over, when I- I'm gone, you won't push her away, not because of me, okay? I- I don't want you to be alone again."
"Please, Alex. I love you!" Kara begged, feeling that familiar ache of loss in her heart turn into a black hole. She didn't need to hear what her sister was trying to say, she understood Alex’s expressions, she knew what was going through her head.
Alex frowned, looking at her with pity, and shook her head.
" I love you, Kara, but I need you to let go, okay? "
Kara shook her head, vision darkening.
"I- I’m not leaving-" She tried to say, managing to read her lips, and flexed her muscles with all her strength. This time, the Ark didn't even budge.
" Kara, you're solar flaring. Let. Go!”
“No!” She tried harder, and something within her snapped. She fell back against the metal, her fingers too cold to keep a tight grip, and she found herself unable to breathe.
“Kara. Let . Me. GO!” Alex screamed in desperate worry.
Kara Danvers lost another piece of her world that night when she allowed herself to fall off the ship, dragged by the invisible weight of gravity and grief. Her world imploded, crumbled inside her as she fell, unable to stop herself from watching her sister blast into oblivion once the spaceship left the atmosphere. And when the rescue team fished her out of the ocean, when she rose from the waters with a tattered cape and the symbol of the House of El half burned off, the only thing that Kara could think of was that Alex, her sister, the woman who learned Kryptonian just to be closer to her, who learned the rituals of adoption just because she knew how much it meant to the little girl that lost her world, that had just lost her world, was now experiencing that same heartbreaking pain that Kara went through when she left Krypton.
All because she was too weak to help when it mattered.
Maggie was there when they docked, tear-stricken, and covering her mouth as if she could somehow stop the sobs from coming out. On the other hand, she held her cellphone, with Winn’s recording playing over and over again. Kara approached her hesitantly, holding one arm against her belly and with a pronounced limp in her left leg, but she relaxed when Maggie dragged her into a hug.
They stood there for an infinity, crying on each other's shoulders.
"I- I'm so sorry," Kara murmured, feeling Maggie's hands caressing her hair. She felt rather than saw Maggie's shrug, the way she tried to evade by making light of it. As if it wasn't such a loss.
"It wasn't your fault, Kara." Maggie murmured.
"She- She told me she loved you," Kara added, feeling like she had to pass on the message, like she couldn't fail her sister again. Maggie nodded against her shoulder.
"I know. Winn called me, when- I heard it." Kara nodded, too tired to care. Winn did the same for her, played the recording the moment Kara got her hands on a phone after the boat that rescued her.
Most of her powers were gone but she could still hear J'onn landing behind her, watching the scene with what she knew would be worry and empathy, but he didn't interrupt. No one did.
"It… It feels like I'm back in the pod," Kara confided. "Like Krypton blowing up all over again and I just stood there, watching, too powerless to do anything about it. Only- only this time, it blew up because of me."
"It wasn't your fault," Maggie stated, certain. She wouldn't mention anything until a few weeks later, but Kara wasn’t the one the cop blamed for what happened. Maggie knew she was the one who let Alex go off on her own. Because it was much easier to be cool and try to impress her girlfriend by saying stupid stuff like ‘Ride or Die’ when she didn’t understand the cost of a statement like that. Didn't really acknowledge that the risks were all too real.
It was her fault really, and as bitter as that realization felt, Maggie couldn't find it in herself to deny the truth.
When the Ark entered lightspeed, Alex fell back into the leather chair. She didn't feel like crying or yelling, she mainly just felt empty, hollow. It was like things just lost their meaning, like it suddenly didn't matter where she was going or if she would even get to her destination.
She wondered if this was how Kara felt when Alura put her in her pod.
And as she watched the stars stretch around the window almost like a Star Wars movie, she asked herself why the hell would Lilian Luthor care enough to put leather chairs in an alien spaceship? Wouldn't anything alien-related coming from a Luthor look more like a space fridge than a five-star cruiser?
Alex slumped in the chair, allowing her mind to wander between meaningless thoughts so she could avoid the memories of Maggie, or the expression in her sister's face right before she fell and everything else Alex left behind. She knew she wanted to go back to Earth, she would return, she was sure of it. But the first step now felt like lead, and she couldn't muster enough courage to take it.
It wasn't fair! She raged, she just found her father only to lose him all over again, to lose everyone. She was alive, and she knew it wasn't like Kara. Earth was alive, they were still there, but what guarantees did Alex have that she would even find a way back? Or worse, that everyone would still be there waiting for her when she returned? Alex suddenly felt intimately aware of her own mortality and the urge to break down hit her walls like a tidal wave.
A beeping noise caught her attention, a notification in the alien keyboard. a hesitant touch on the alien hieroglyph led to a camera of the cells, a hundred aliens, no, a hundred refugees cowering in fear, and Alex remembered Lyra was one of the people in those cells.
She just wanted to go back, to hug Kara and 'kiss the girl she wanted to kiss', but…
These people also had lives in National City too, didn't they? Family, friends… Alex knew most of them wouldn't make it. They were too scared, too untrained to know how to look for a way back, to chase a solution until it led them to their objectives. It wasn't her responsibility, she just had to focus on herself. On getting back. Eyes on the ball.
The weight of her decision felt heavy on her conscience.
With a sigh, Alex began to mess with the controls of the ship. The computer interface was all written in a strange language, but Alex didn't take long to stumble into the language settings, with options to translate it into other more alien-friendly languages.
She only managed to recognize it because the screen filled itself with different written languages, and one in the corner was clearly Kryptonian glyphs.
The whole thing looked like a patch job, but it made Alex curious about the fact they even bothered. It wasn't hard to use, and thanks to Winn's babblings she could see they left big holes in the codes of the software. The Ark was locked onto a specific destination, she couldn't do anything about that, but hacking the interface and setting herself as Administrator and the Captain of the ship was so easy it seemed almost intentional.
She couldn't change the course, but the moment it dropped out of (Alex snorted, unable to resist the comparison) Hyperspace , the Ark would be hers. Assuming she could figure out how to pilot it, of course.
The computer warned there was only enough fuel for another trip, but ship-wide energy was solar-powered, so hanging around a sun for a few hours would be enough to keep life-support and other priority systems online. There was enough food for… she stopped, running the numbers in her mind… roughly six days if everyone rationed, which was longer than the Life Support systems could handle.
So, priorities. Alex had to figure out how to fly this ship. The moment they jumped out of light speed the Ark would return to manual controls, and if she didn't learn fast enough she risked crash landing
...Or worse.
She didn't even know what was Talkron Garos, or whatever the place Lillian dumped them was called. She needed to find Lyra, see if she knew anything that could help. (Alex remembered suddenly that she smuggled herself to Earth once, right? Lyra would know how to get back.) Figure out a way back home and find a place to land and fix this ship if it took longer than a week to get back.
Great.
She allowed herself five seconds to recompose before forcing her fingers to open the ship-wide comms. There was a crackle on the radio, then silence. Alex faltered, not knowing how to start, how to give hope to people when she couldn't muster enough for herself. But she gripped Maggie's gun tightly with the other hand and reminded herself of Kara's smile and that somehow gave her the will to take that first step.
"This is Alex Danvers." She said, somewhat weakly. They deserve to know . "We're currently aboard a ship thousands of light-years away from Earth, and there's no way of turning back." Her line was dry. The tone she learned by heart from years working at the DEO, but suddenly it felt… lacking.
She already felt awful, sad, angry, guilty . She couldn't just leave them like that, without closure. Without… without hope.
"I know you must be feeling lost and angry, I am too. We were forced to leave family, friends, our entire lives behind because we're different. It's not fair , I know , and I'm so sorry we're in this situation. But as much as we might want to break down and cry, or lash out at those we blame for these circumstances, we can't allow ourselves to lose hope. We'll find a way out of this." She stopped for a second, let her words hang in the air. She needed them to trust her. She needed them to believe in Alex as they did in Kara.
"If we put our minds together, if we cooperate, and trust in the people beside you, we can find our way home." She paused, taking deep breaths through the nose. "To do that, we need to put aside our differences, our opinions, our hatred. I'm not saying this will be easy, but in the words of Supergirl , El Mayarah , We are ‘Stronger Together’ ...
...And together, we can accomplish anything."