Chapter Text
“It's better to burn out
than to have to
keep living.
[My candle burns
at both ends,
it will not last the night.
Thank god.]”
—a softer world: 1214
‘Black Canary and Red Arrow are at it again in Central City. The Starling Duo are taking a break from their home city to lend Central City a hand against the growing metahuman threat as we all ask one simple question:
‘Where is the Flash?
‘—As some of you might not remember. The Flash is Central City’s resident superhero, a metahuman who sides with justice and law instead of using his powers for criminal activity. Only he vanished without a trace a month ago, leaving his beloved city to fend for himself.
‘The general consensus is that he did not leave on his own free will. If that is the case, then we have one more question for you: who is powerful enough to make the Flash disappear?
‘We are with David Singh, Captain of the Central City Police Department, who has taken the time to finally give a statement on this issue. Captain, what are—’
“Ugh, please, Winn, turn it off.”
She can practically hear (oh, wait, not practically) the amusement in his voice as he asks, “Soo, how was training?”
“I will throw this pillow at you and I will enjoy it,” Kara warns, not even bothering to pick up the pillow as a threat. She’s suppose to be indestructible, why does she hurt so much? She squeezes her eyes shut tighter and throws an arm over her face to block the afternoon sun streaming through her windows. “I am not liable for any damaged caused with fluffy projectiles.”
“That’s cruel,” he mutters, pouting, before switching off the television completely.
Kara groans and reluctantly pulls herself into a sitting position. “No, it’s called ‘Hank is ridiculous and I’m sore.’ I hope there’s no more training sessions for at least a week.”
Winn snaps his fingers. “Now you’ve just jinxed yourself. Good job.” His phone chimes. “Hey, so James is on his way with the pizza, there was an accident on Waid—no one got hurt,” he says quickly. Which is good, because as soon as she heard ‘accident’ she was ready to fly out of here. “But since we have some time: any news on the Flash’s disappearance?”
Kara shrugs. “I don’t know. Hank tells me more things now, but that’s something he won’t talk about.” She grabs a beer from the fridge, tossing one to Winn. He fumbles for it but ultimately catches with with a triumphant cheer. “He just wants me to focus on National City’s problems. Which, okay, yeah, I get that, but this is the Flash we’re talking about. He was the second bonafide superhero to show up after my cousin. I’d watch the news reels about him even if it weren’t for Cat making me do it. It feels weird not trying to do anything to figure out where he went.”
“You know, I could always do my,” he mimes typing, “I could do my thing and search DEO records for any information they have.”
That would be…the wrong thing to do, but still she has to actively resist the idea. She met the Flash once. Only in passing. She was headed to Keystone on an errand for Cat with a self-indulgent pit-stop in Central City and the Flash raced by, nearly knocking her over at the suddenness. He stopped for a moment, kept her from eating sidewalk, caught some wayward papers, and asked her if she was okay and that he was ‘so, so sorry.’
He seemed nice, distracted, but still nice, he caught all of her papers and made sure she was okay before rushing away.
Not so much a dramatic, world-shaking meeting. Definitely not something to go in the history books.
The thought of him missing and her not doing anything about it…
Kara shakes her head. “Let’s give it another day,” she says, plopping down next to him. “And then I’ll ask Hank again. If he tells me no, then you can do your thing. For all we know the Flash could just be on another planet or dimension. He could just randomly show back up and wonder why we were all worried.”
She so hopes that the case.
She hears James in the hallway and jumps up to answer the door before he has to fumble for the knob. He smiles wide, holding the pizzas high over his head.
“I come bearing food!”
“My hero,” Winn swoons, making grabby hands at the three boxes.
Kara will fully admit she has a healthy-ish obsession with leftover cold pizza, she is so down for shoving a full box into her fridge for tomorrow morning before work. And James knows her very well is seems because he puts two boxes on her dining table and carefully, Tetris-like, puts the other box between a jug of milk and another bottle of orange juice, over a Tupperware of pasta but under a loaf bread. Hey, her fridge isn’t that big thankyouverymuch.
Winn reaches over for a slice, but James pulls it away.
“What’s the magic word?” he teases.
“Uh, Supergirl is better than Superman?” Winn tries. “Please don’t ever tell your cousin I said that...even though it’s true.”
James laughs out loud. “It was actually ‘James Olsen is the best photographer,’ but I’ll take that.” She slides the box over to Winn and grabs his own slice. “Kara, here.”
She grabs the slice he’s offering, one from the other box. Extra cheese, pepperoni, olives, and jalapenos. The perfect pizza…even if no one else thought so. Oh well, more for her then. Kara grabs the particularly gooey slice and takes a bite, it’s almost too hot, but it’s still delicious. She goes for another bite when Winn’s computer beeps with a warning and Kara’s phone rings the Ghostbusters theme.
“Noooo.”
Winn dives for his computer, pizza hanging out of his mouth. He nearly drops it trying to hold onto it and at the same time say, “There’s someone attacking the City National Art Museum in downtown.”
Kara doesn’t even both answering her phone, just pops in a comm. unit and changes in the few seconds it takes for it to connect her to Alex. “I heard,” she says when the other line finally filters through. She salutes James and Winn (they both huddle around Winn’s computer as he connects them to CCTV) “I’m on my way. Do you guys know who it is?”
“Not yet,” Hank says. “Just that they’re fast.”
She groans. “Please not another Speed Demon.”
“Jason Brassell is still serving two life sentences and all of his speedster experiments have been destroyed. 01 through 20. We made sure.,” Alex reminds her gently.
Kara winces. Oh, right. She really, really hates that they couldn’t find another way to deal with the twenty Speed Demons that were the result of a delusional, disillusioned scientist. Most of them weren’t fully formed even by the time the DEO got wind of what Dr. Brassell was doing and the rest either killed themselves or begged for it.
No, no, don’t think about it.
Those are bad and very sad thoughts. No.
City National is an absolute mess when she finally makes it there. Of the eight columns holding up the façade of outcropping design in the front, three of them are shattered. The statue in the small park in front is in pieces and people are screaming as a yellow storm of lightning whirls around from the steps to the park and back again. Several cracks splinter on a fourth column, chunks of it crumbling to the floor.
She drops down, bracing herself for whatever is about to be thrown at her, and takes a deep breath to yell a sharp, “Hey!”
The whirlwind stops, the sudden stillness is a shock to the system, and Kara has to blink a few times to get use to it. What stands in replace of the lightning is a black-clad figure shaped like a man. The uniform looks almost military in style and he wears a mask that covers everything but his eyes, his black, black eyes.
“What do you want?” she demands. “Leave these people alone.”
She blinks once and he’s gone.
Ugh, speedsters.
Kara barely has time to react before he’s throwing himself at her with a war cry, swinging out with a punch she can easily dodge. But she misses the knee coming up to nail her in the solar plexus. She throws herself back on her heels, taking only about half-damage (it’s enough to be honest), and grapples for him, hooking a hand under his arm and tossing him over his head.
He goes skittering like a stone on the water until a tree stops him from going further.
Then he’s back at her again in a blink of yellow lightning, throwing punches and kicks she blocks and dodges a third of the time. He gets her face in a back hand when she’s distracted by a creak in her chest, but she manages to sweep his legs from under him in return.
“Something’s wrong,” Kara gasps, rubbing her throbbing chest. “He’s got no style.”
Alex snorts. “You have no style either, it’s not unusual.”
“And he hasn’t said a word. Alex, something’s wro—.”
The black clad figure comes at her again, barely slow, barely fast; screeching something unintelligible. She crosses her arms in a block, her bones shaking in the aftershocks when the man lands a solid, power-filled punch. He doesn’t even flinch at hitting a wall, just continues on to crash right into her, sending them both to the ground.
After that it’s just a flurry of fists and kicks. Even if the guy isn’t trained, he’s fast and a heavy-hitter. Kara’s not use to struggling against no-names. (Not that she usually fights against no-name to be honest. There’s usually one of two people behind it: Aunt Astra or Maxwell Lord.)
There’s something different about the fight now. Something…wrong—wrong, wrong, it’s all wrong.
She lets him pin her to the ground, not missing the flicker of surprise at the corners of his pure black eyes. He seems to hesitate at her weakness, even as his hand vibrates, hovering over her face.
Kara takes a deep breath, her teeth chilling, her lungs frosting over, and blows.
He jerks back, screaming. It’s guttural, animalistic. He claws at his face where the worst of the shallow frost bite is, writhing on the ground. His movements are slow, sluggish, and Kara feels no pride.
“I got him,” she says. “I’m bringing him in.”
“Be careful,” Alex says softly.
Kara gazes down at the whimpering man, the one who still stares up at her with hate clear on his face even through the crippling pain.
“Why didn’t you stop?”
Thud!
Without the mask on he has fluffy brown hair and a hollow face, gaunt, splattered with freckles and moles. He’s tall and thin—Kara would be willing to call him lanky, but with how skeleton his face looks she can’t be that generous.
Thud!
He hits the glass wall again, ramming his shoulder against it hard enough he’s going to break something eventually, snarling hatefully at them—No, just her, his black, void eyes never leaving her. Something gross crawls up her spine and she shudders.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asks.
Thud!
Hank raises an eyebrow at her. “What makes you so sure something’s wrong with him, Miss. Danvers?” he asks. “He could be like any other criminal we’ve met.”
It feels like he’s testing her. God, she hates it when he does that.
“Look at him.” She gestures at the snarling man. Lightning streaks behind him, but he doesn’t seem to have much control over his speed. She’s seen speedsters do amazing things, up close and personal and on the news, but he doesn’t seem to able to do any of it. “He’s acting more like an animal than a person. Even some of the worst from the Phantom Zone has more thought process than this.”
Thud!
He nods, satisfied. “I can look into his mind, see what’s going on, what made him want to attack our resident Supergirl.”
Thud! Thud! Pop! Crack!
The man’s shoulder visibly dislocates. He swings out with his left hand, shrieking, only to punch glass, his hand breaking is audible and Kara’s stomach rolls. A small hairline fracture appears in the prison they’ve set him in—the one that’s a reinforced glass cylinder in the middle of the room, made to withstand Kryptonians even without the use of Kryptonite, for a few minutes at most. But they're a lot stronger than a speedster...
So how the hell?
Hank frowns—no, this is J’onn right now, there’s always slight differences. “Kara, leave.”
“What? No!” she protests. “Whatever you do to him you can do in front of me.” She swallows thickly. “Unless…No, J’onn, you can’t hurt him. He can’t be in his right mind.”
Thud!
Oh God, even injured he’s still throwing himself at her. Blood smears against the glass, a mockery of a horrible painting.
“Leave,” J’onn snarls. “Alex, get her out of here.”
Kara feels Alex grab her arm, lets herself be taken from the room, but all of her focus is on how the man in black howls in rage, scrabbling at the glass like he could claw his way through to get to her.
“There’s no way that guy is human,” she says when they’re standing in front of the monitors. The largest one has the prison room's feed set up. “But, Alex…he is human, isn’t he?”
Her sister shrugs. “We won’t know until we get the bloodwork back, and that won’t happen until we can get blood work actually filed.” She grabs Kara’s hand, squeezing comfortingly. “J’onn won’t hurt him. At least, not on purpose. It’s going to be okay.”
The screen shows J’onn still standing in the same place, but now the black-clad man paces angrily in his prison. The camera is good enough she can see his lips moving as he mutters to himself, the microphones not good enough to pick up the sound, though.
“Can you hear what he’s saying?” Kara asks.
Alex shakes her head. “He’s mumbling, not forming clear words with his lips. It’s pointless.”
Kara sighs in frustration. Her life had been so much simpler before she was Supergirl—she’d never trade it for anything else to be honest, even when faced with awful situations like this. But some times...
J’onn’s moment of silence is over when he speaks one word clearly: “Supergirl.”
The man’s head snaps toward J’onn, his eyes narrowing, shoulders curling to his ears as he rocks back on his heels.
He dares to say it one more time. “Supergirl.”
Thud!
And the man is throwing himself at the walls again, no mind to his injuries and pain.
“Trigger,” Alex breathes, eyes wide. “He’s got triggers implanted in his brain. He’s been brainwashed.” She presses a button. “Director, you can get rid of them, right?”
“So there is something wrong with him?” Kara asks almost desperately, just wanting one word of confirmation. She knew it.
J’onn takes a few steps closer to the blood smeared portion of the prison. She can only see his back, but she imagines his eyes are red, fixated on the man in black. The speedster presses close, sneering at the Martian, blood drips down his hands, his shoulder is twisted, ugly. His lips are stained crimson, his lips too dark. There’s still dark patches of frost bite on his face, around his eyes, unhealed, flaking.
One. Two. Three.
The speedster chokes, gasps, his hands curling into fists despite the broken state of them. His shoulders shake, his knees tremble. And then he’s collapsing to the ground, dragging down against the glass. J’onn goes with him, kneeling carefully at his level.
He curls into a ball, banging his fists against his head, whimpering. J’onn places his hand on the glass, palm down, fingers splayed wide.
Alex cuts the feed just as the speedster starts screaming hysterically in pain.