Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/13812231. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage Category: F/M, Multi Fandom: Supergirl_(TV_2015) Relationship: Kara_Danvers/Mon-El, Kara_Danvers/Original_Male_Character(s) Character: Kara_Danvers, Mon-El_(Supergirl_TV_2015), Original_Characters, Alex Danvers Additional Tags: Lots_of_Sex, This_is_a_sex_story, This_is_beyond_anything_I've_ever written, Turn_back_now_if_you're_squeamish_about_filthy_explicit_things, Specifically_included_but_not_limited_to, BDSM_(but_you_knew_that), Oral Sex, Anal_Sex, Vaginal_Sex, Rough_Sex, Public_Sex, Sex_Toys, such_as, Anal_Beads, Ankle_Cuffs, Collars, submissive_harnes, anal_hooking, Threesome_-_F/M/M, Cock_Rings, exploring_sexually_such_as, Cock_Worship, Vaginal_Fisting, Double_Penetration, Slut_worship, Extreme_Cum Sluttiness, Light_Choking, Large_Cock, Cock_&_Ball_Torture, That's_All_I Can_Think_Of, But_I'm_sure_there's_more, oh_and_graphic_mentions_of underage_sex_but_not_for_our_main_characters, It's_like_a_paragraph_of back_story, I_do_not_condone_nor_encourage, but_this_is_another_planet with_a_different_view_of_sex, but_I'm_marking_the_archive_warning_just_in case_it_offends, There's_plenty_of_oppurtunity_to_offend_here, forgot_to mention_the_following, Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, Spreader_Bars, Punishment, Daddy_Kink, Master/Slave, Dark_Mon-El, Recreational_Drug_Use, Predator/Prey, Outdoor_Sex Series: Part 5 of Hanging_On,_Letting_Go Stats: Published: 2018-02-27 Updated: 2018-03-16 Chapters: 3/? Words: 18122 ****** Into the Fray, Unflinching ****** by gldngrl7 Summary Unconscious following his meltdown, Mon-El is trapped inside his own mind. Kara must take extreme measures to reach him before he slips out of her reach and is lost forever. But does he even want to return to her? Notes I am breaking my personal rule, to begin posting a story I haven't finished writing yet. But I'm 20 chapters in and I'm near completion and you people are driving me crazy. LOL. So I give in. Don't expect daily updates though -- maybe once a week. I have read over the first chapter and I'm reasonably certain I won't feel the need to do any rewrites, so I'll post it. Please note that much of this story was planned before season 2B, so there's no Rhea or Lar Gand, but a story of my making. So this story, I think is officially AU, but...near-canon AU, not like "college AU" or "coffee-shop AU". PLEASE READ THE TAGS CAREFULLY, THEY ARE A WARNING TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!! The themes of this story are largely about sexual exploration, but THERE IS A PLOT HERE! There is also a lot of id happening here, so the gloves are now off, and you're entering a world of no holds barred erotica that takes place in a culture that lacks the boundaries we're accustomed to. I've chosen to take a lot of risks here, because I'm curious about the prospect of delving into a culture unfettered by the values most of us live under. I hope you can see it for the curious experiment that it is. If you don't like it, you know where the BACK button is. Rude comments haven't stopped me from writing yet. Also - hope you enjoy the moodboards I made for the story. RAL HAS A FACE! Hope you like him. You'll see it in later chapters.... On with the (peep)show.... ***** Chapter 1 ***** [Unflinching Mood]     Title: Into the Fray, Unflinching Author: gldngr7 Rating: Explicit Began: April 21, 2017 Chapters: ?   Feedback:  Encouragement is through comments is always welcome.  Flames are destroyed with my freeze breath.   Flags upon the floor And on this cold war Battle torn Soldiers fold Lay down your arms Losing all control And down this rabbit hole Lost souls letting go   --Banners -- “Back When We Had Nothing”   Chapter 1   “Nooooooo!” he screams, watching helplessly as a chunk of heavy stone caves in the skull of his best friend.  Mon-El stands beneath the cell’s reinforced doorframe leading to the stairs to the ground floor, in relative safety as the ground shakes beneath his feet.  His hands clench tightly, unable to tear his eyes from the crushed foot peeking out from the rubble, a stream of blood making its way out from beneath.   And then the room explodes, rumbling from another meteor strike, this one a direct hit to the building and not just the nearby grounds.  The stone ceiling gives way, dropping the remains of the room above into the cell, like a shower of death and destruction.  He narrowly misses getting caught in the downpour by diving through the doorway and into the stairwell, which shakes but remains relatively intact.   He needs to escape before the entire building caves in on them…him…or risk being buried under the rubble like Ral.  He loses his footing several times as he climbs the stairs.  At the top, he finds the ancient iron door, at first, unwilling to budge.  He angles his shoulder upwards and puts his entire body weight into the next shove, earning a few inches of opening for his efforts.  One more and he might be able to squeeze through.   The next shove brings success and after some heavy resistance the door yields as though it had only been teasing and wished to make amends.  Mon-El falls to the floor as he loses his balance, landing face first in the speared corpse of a prison guard.  People must have panicked when the mayhem began, crawling over each other to get out, killing anyone who got in their way.  From the looks of it…he was murdered by one of his own.   Scrambling to his feet, he makes his way out of the palace dungeons, where the king likes to keep his most prized prisoners.  Likes to hear their screams as they’re tortured.  If it’s quiet enough in the main hall, the screams drift up during the evening meal, providing a background music that brings a sickening smile to the king’s face.   In the main hall, so close to the exit, to freedom, he discovers the damage done there is catastrophic.  More than half of the walls have collapsed, revealing outside a red sky streaked with meteors while the floor of the main hall looks like war zone, littered with debris and bodies.  Perhaps people seeking refuge in the great hall hoping the palace would keep them safe from the wrath of the gods that visits them now.   He picks his way through the stone and flames, the smell of charred flesh stinging his nostrils and forcing him to breathe through his mouth, until he hears a weak voice calling out for help.  Mon-El looks around for the source of the sound but is unable to pinpoint its location.  Another tremble beneath his feet has him reaching for something to steady himself and he glances toward the nearest exit.  Another weak call draws his attention again.   He’s already been forced to leave someone to die, can he live with another on his conscience?   Mon-El climbs over two piles of broken stone and several bodies before finding the source of the cry for help, just a grasping arm, reaching out through the rubble.  Carefully, he moves aside a pile of debris, only to discover that it’s her he’s attempting to rescue.  She wears what was once her finest gown, as though fully expecting to meet her patronage at the end of the world.   “Why?” she asks, blood pouring down her face from the gash in her scalp.  The falling stone had not been as kind to her as it had been to Ral, leaving her instead to linger in death.   “I don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head.   “He…he left me here.  Left me here,” she says, as though she’s been repeating the thought over and over in her head, like a data-crystal with a glitch.  Her lips quiver with the flood of adrenaline her body releases as it attempts to keep her conscious and alive.  “Left me here.”  Then she looks up, her bloody face changing as she truly sees him for the first time.  She takes a deep breath, one of her last, and says, “I’m so sorry…I was too scared to say no.”   “I know,” he mumbles, though he still finds it hard to look at her.  “It’s all right.   I don’t blame you.”  He busies himself instead with trying to free her, looking for something to pry loose the larger stones under which she’s buried.   “Too late,” she says, her hand reaching to grab his arm.    “No,” he insists, even though he knows that’s stubborn denial speaking.   “This is my punishment.”   It is this statement that angers him, that turns the helpless feeling of emptiness in his gut into a burning, boiling rage that resembles the fury of the skies above his head.  And in this moment, he wants nothing more than to visit retribution on the man so good at getting his subjects to turn on themselves, even if just emotionally.  “Where is he?” he demands of her.  “Where has he gone?”   Her eyes widen, surprised by his fury.  She gasps for air, her lungs gurgling now with blood as it bubbles up in the back of her throat.  Too near death, the ability to speak now escapes her, leaving her only capable of pointing.  Mon-El follows the direction of her finger to see another body.  The deceased is unfamiliar to him, but the Kryptonian glyph on his uniform tells him everything he needs to know, as does the distinct weapons discharge burn on the man’s face.   Mon-El reaches for her hand, taking it in his just before it drops to the ground.  “I’m here,” he promises, even as her eyes glaze over.  Her lifeless grip held tightly in his strong one, he watches as the light fades entirely from her once-stunning eyes and her last breath gurgles out.  He waits for another gasping wheeze, a last bid for life, but none is forthcoming and so he crosses her hand over her chest and leaves her.   As he steps over the remains of the Kryptonian he notices something clutched in the man’s hand.  Bending down, he pries the stiffening fingers open to pull out a data-crystal.  Immediately, he recognizes its purpose and a tiny seed of hope sprouts in his chest.  If his instincts about the king are correct, and they always are, there may still be time.  Time to make him pay for Ral’s death.  Time to give Ral’s death some meaning.   Finding new resolve, Mon-El grips the crystal tightly in his hand, takes a weapon from the body of another dead guard and picks his way quickly out of the building until standing beneath a sky that’s on fire.  He’s never been in a war zone like they had in the dark times, before wars were fought amongst the stars, and until today, there’s been only the beautifully repurposed remains of the ancient palace to serve as reminder.  Mon-El imagines that that the dark times, the day that palace fell, must have looked something like this.  Green meteors, pieces of a dead planet, rain down striking Daxam unpredictably and without mercy.  He takes off at run, in the direction of the nearby Embassy where the Kryptonian Emissary would have been required by protocol to land and quarter his pod.  Likely, a larger ship, perhaps a dreadnought is in orbit somewhere, shadowed behind one of Daxam’s three moons.  It was just like Krypton to send an Emissary of peace, but provide military back-up; to offer one hand in truce, while keeping a proverbial knife stashed behind their backs.    They could never be trusted.   His feet fueled by rage, Mon-El ran.  Dodging rock and secondary explosions, he leapt over the bodies of those beyond help and blocked out the voices of those crying out for assistance.  There was nothing he could do for them.  He couldn’t help his own bond-brother, how could possibly help them?  So he ran, so fast it felt as though his feet hardly touched the burning ground.  So fast it was almost like flying.   Just as expected, Mon-El found the coward berating one of his guards for failing to gain entry to the hatch of the Kryptonian craft.  A circle of bodies surrounds the pod, a cadre of people desperate to escape, who gambled on their chance to reach the vehicle, and lost.   “Missing something, Your Majesty?” Mon-El shouted, the title more of a curse than an honorific.  He holds up the crystal he’d taken from the Kryptonian corpse, dangling it from the tip of his fingers like bait before a vexlar beast.   Even from this distance, Mon-El can see the mixture of hope and terror fill the king’s eyes.  The older man’s steel gray eyes, identical to his own, narrow to slits as he turns to the guard keeping watch.  “Get the crystal,” he demands.   Unquestioningly, the guard raises his weapon and points it Mon-El, who does the same, his hand shaking only a little.  “Give me the crystal,” the guard commands, a slight tremor in his voice.  He startles when another meteor strikes nearby with a deafening report, shaking the ground beneath them.   Mon-El shakes his head slowly.  “Daxam falls,” he tells the guard.  “Will you die for this man?  This tyrant?”  He can see the man’s eyes the moment, when the guard’s resolve waivers.  The weapon lowers and without a backwards glance the guard quits the field of battle, running as though towards something for which he is, in fact, willing to die.   A glance at the second guard, offering the same silent question, results in a similar desertion, but this time the guard drops his weapon at his feet before running away.  The king scrambles to pick up the gun, and brandishes it at Mon- El without a second thought.  Without his guards, his ministers of pain, he’s the coward Mon-El always imagined him to be.  The king is the coward Mon-El was always afraid he would become.   Mon-El grabs the barrel of the weapon, the king’s fearful eyes widening, but instead of taking the weapon, he placed the barrel against his own forehead.  “Yes,” he seethes.  “Kill me,” his voice shouts, a vision of Ral’s crushed skull flashing before his eyes.  “Kill me now.”  Then with a terrible laugh he reminds him, “Your ‘Last Hope’.”   Mon-El can see the hesitancy on the older man’s face.  His Majesty isn’t one for waste after all, not when it comes down to the ferrovanadium rivets.  And after all the currency and effort and lives he had poured into ensuring the continuance of his dynasty, he couldn’t just end it all right here without at least a second thought.  He couldn’t just pull the trigger and end more than 40 years of planning, not after all that he’d worked so hard to build.  Especially not since his plan has yet to come to fruition.   Fortunately, for Mon-El, there is no such reluctance on his part.  He isn’t afraid of death and hasn’t been for a long time.  There were times, when things were at their worst, he prayed to gods he didn’t believe in for his body to fail.  Prayed that there was some hidden time bomb within him, some internal traitor that would turn against him and put a premature end to the king’s plan.  It would serve the tyrant right.  But as always, time and time again, the tide turned in the king’s favor.   Until now.   Despite his reluctance, given enough time to consider the alternatives the king will eventually realize that only one of them will survive this catastrophe, and when his mind reaches that conclusion, he will not hesitate to pull the trigger.  But all it takes is that moment of indecision for Mon-El to make his move.   He knocks the weapon from the king’s hand, practically breaking the old man’s wrist in the process.  Doubling over in pain, he cradles the injured appendage in his other hand, whimpering like the coward he is.  A feeling of pleasure at seeing the old man in pain rises up within him and Mon-El shoves it back down into his deepest corners.  That darkness is something Mon-El refuses to give its lead.   He points his weapon at the king’s head, imagines pulling the trigger and watching his face melt off like the Kryptonian Emissary’s – that face he hates so much but can never escape.  Killing him now would bring meaning to Ral’s death, would make his brother’s suffering, the loss of his eyes, of his love and of the slow drain of his life, worth it.  But it would be over for the king in a second and it wouldn’t hit him where it hurts the most. Hardly an even trade, without the barest hint of justice.   “You’re not going anywhere,” he decides.  “You have a lot to answer for, and I’m here to make sure you do.”   “Who do you think you are?” the king spits, still bent over.  Around his neck dangles a chain with a delicate flat crystal attached.   “Exactly what you made me,” Mon-El replies, reaching forward and grabbing the chain and tearing it free.   “No!” the king cries.   “For your crimes against your people, I sentence you to live as one of them…in the paradise you created.  That is…if you can manage to survive the wrath of the gods.”  He punches the king square in the jaw, sending him sprawling to the ground, and Mon-El allows himself to feel that pleasure for a microsecond.  “That was for Ral,” he announces, as he slips the Royal Seal into his pants pocket.   Turning towards the Kryptonian pod, he swipes the first crystal against the outer panel of the pod, which chirps happily as though recognizing its passenger.  The hatch opens and grasping the external frame Mon-El uses it as leverage to leap into the cockpit.  As the hatch closes he tosses out the weapon and, through the clear canopy, surveys the ruins of the Capital City, a place he never learned to love, but is the only home he’s ever known.  He can’t stay here, not if he plans to fulfill the last promise he made to Ral.  He doesn’t know how, or even what his brother meant, but he knows he must live, for Ral’s sake, even if it means leaving so many others to die.    He glances down at the prostrate king, who scrambles for the weapon Mon-El discarded a moment before.  He won’t feel guilty about leaving him to his fate, not after all that he’s done.  It’s better than he deserves, and so much kinder than the ‘justice’ he’s extracted from others for crimes with far less impact.  The king fires the weapon at the canopy, but to no effect.  The pod, of course, is built to withstand the perils of outer space after all and is nearly indestructible by normal means.   He places his palm on the control panel and without plotting a course, he ignites the engines, the pod shaking in combination with the engines flaring to life and a meteor striking just a few yards away.  It’s a few breathless moments before he feels the pod lift-off.  Still another moment before inertia becomes momentum and he’s rocketing upwards at a steep angle, picking up speed in the ship’s determination to break through the atmosphere.   Perhaps the pod’s course will take him to the Kryptonian dreadnought no doubt hiding in the shadow of Daxam’s largest moon.  If he is silent, the dreadnought’s docking protocols will bring him aboard. No doubt they will throw him in the brig, if he’s lucky, but at least there’s a chance of survival, however miniscule.   As he clears atmosphere, the view from the canopy slides from a dusky red and gray to the black of outer space with a crackle, his ears adjusting from the onslaught of noise caused by friction and combustion, to the profound silence provided by a near vacuum.  That he made it offworld without being destroyed by meteors is a miracle to be sure, but one that has yet to fully play out, if the wall of meteors headed his way are any indication.   A computer voice breaks the silence, startling him out of the sudden terror washing over him.   “Loth-El, I am detecting multiple projectiles on a collision course with this pod.  Anything more than a glancing blow will have catastrophic results.  Shall I plot evasive maneuvers?”   So that was his name…the Kryptonian Emissary.  Apropos, it seems.  His father, the king would often laugh about naming him Mon-El, rather than bestowing upon him an official name from House Gand.  The Kryptonian House of El spoke loftily of hope and never giving up, and so his father had given him the name Mon-El, which translated to ‘last hope’.  It was a name bestowed with derision, and used with such intent from his earliest memories to his last.  It seems destined, somehow, that his only hope for rescue should come in the form of pod belonging to a member of the House of El.   “Yes!” he replies.  “Evasive maneuvers!”   A moment of silence without course-correction from the pod is followed by the computer’s voice speaking once more.  “You are not Loth-El,” the voice decides.  Mon-El rolls his eyes.  The computer’s voice is haughty and arrogant – so definitely Kryptonian.  “Where is Loth-El?”   “Loth-El is dead,” he replies honestly.  “Killed in the first wave of the meteor shower you have obviously detected,” he adds, not so honestly.   “State your identity.”   “My name is Mon-El.”   Immediately, as though hearing a magic word, the pod picks up speed, headed straight for the next wave of meteors.  Mon-El closes his eyes and waits for death, but is instead surprised when the ship begins to weave in and out of the wall of rock until it emerges from the other side without so much as a glancing blow from the projectiles.   “Well done!” he shouts, breathing a huge sigh of relief.   “My name is Benix, Mon of the House of El,” the pod replies.  “I have taken the liberty of laying in the next course as Loth-El requested upon his arrival on Daxam.”   “Excellent,” he answers.  “Where is the dreadnought hiding?”   “The last Kryptonian dreadnought was destroyed when Krypton exploded,” Benix informs him, her voice modulator shifting to a sad tone.  “Fourteen thousand, three hundred and thirty-six souls lost in the escape attempt, Mon-El.  Sixty- two percent of which were children under the age of sixteen.”   Mon-El feels a pang of sadness at the incomprehensible loss, wondering why Benix feels the needs to share that devastating data.  “But if there’s no dreadnought…then where are we headed?”   “To the Sol System,” she answers succinctly.  “The journey will take four Kryptonian years.  Deep space stasis will commence in five…four…three…two….”   “No, wait!” he has more questions.  What’s in this Sol System?  What can he expect to find there?  How will he survive?  Will there be others?   “One,” Benix intones, her voice followed by the hissing sound of the pod valves releasing the stasis gas.   He has no choice but to breathe in.  There’s nowhere to hide from the gas that will keep him in a sleep state until the counteragent is released upon landing and it’s time to awaken.  Darkness closes in around him like he’s being dragged under the surface of a lake kicking and screaming.   When his eyes open again, he’s back in Ral’s cell standing over the dying body of his brother-in-bond.  The brother he can’t save.  The brother he knows he’ll be forced to watch die.   Again.   ******   Three days.   Three days of sitting by his bedside and begging him to wake up and just…talk to her.  Three days of leaving the safety of National City in the hands of Martian Manhunter and…Guardian.  Three days of learning frustratingly little about Mon-El’s condition.   Kara sits on the toilet in the last stall of the bathroom, waiting for the next wave of tears to hit.  She’s been here for nearly an hour, maybe even two, it’s hard to tell time when every minute feels like an hour.  She’s managed to wrangle her emotions into submission, but the twisting, stabbing pain in her gut tells her that isn’t going to last long.   She came here because it was only the place she could get any privacy, escape the looks of pity, and remain close to him.  She could be by his side in a second, and even now she has one ear trained to the beeps and drips of the medical equipment attached to him.  Which is why Kara doesn’t hear her sister coming until the bathroom door opens.   Damn.  She forgot to lock the door.   “Kara?” Alex pokes her head in the room, her body language suggesting that some pushback is expected.  When none is forthcoming, she slips into the room and does what Kara forgot to do.  Locks the door.  “I know you’re in here.”   “No, I’m not,” Kara answers.  It is inside joke between them that began not long after Kara started junior high school after arrival on Earth.  More than once Kara hid out in bathroom stalls during her sixth-grade year.  More than once, eighth-grade Alex tracked her down to a bathroom stall to talk her into rejoining the world that still frightened her.  Alex had always been good at tracking her down, at which time she would call out, ‘I know you’re in there’, and Kara would reply, ‘no, I’m not.’  It usually put a glimmer of a smile on her face.   But not today.  Today it feels like she may never smile again.   “You’ve been in here for nearly three hours,” Alex informs her.  “I was starting to worry that you fell in.”   Three hours?  Her mind and emotions had distorted time worse than she thought.  Her emotions having been coming and going in waves like nausea.  Just when she thinks it might be okay to step out of the stall, the tears well up again.  Like now.  Kara tears another strip of toilet paper from the roll, and catches the tears before they can roll down her cheeks.   Alex slips into the next-door stall and sits down on the toilet.  She leans her ahead against the shared wall, and hearing the discreet thunk, Kara does the same.  “Want to talk about it?” Alex asks.   Kara shakes her head, knowing that even though Alex can’t see it, she will sense it.  “Is there anything new?” she asks, not sure if she wants to hear the answer.   “His brain has maintained a low Theta wave state of consciousness for three days now.”   “What does that mean?”   “People experience Theta wave consciousness when they’re in a dream state, but after a brief period in Theta we usually slip into Delta, or ‘slow wave’ sleep.  That’s where we enter a restful state, where our minds are able to rejuvenate.  That’s not happening with Mon-El.  Something’s going on in his brain.”   “What if I broke him?” she asks.  It’s the question that’s been percolating in the in the back of her mind for three days.  She hit him pretty hard after his powers had flared out, leaving him as vulnerable and as frail as any human.  “What if I…damaged his brain?”   “You broke his nose,” Alex says.  “And his jaw.  Both of which healed after we hooked the electrical leads to him.  He probably had a concussion, but there’s no reason to believe that wouldn’t have healed as well.  Scans show there’s no bleeding or swelling.  His brain is fine.”   “Then why won’t he wake up?”   “His brain is fine,” Alex reiterates.  “But…like most brains…his is still a mystery.  It’s clear that, so far, his autonomic reflexes remain intact.  He’s breathing on his own and reacting to pain stimuli, all promising things.”  Alex sighs a deep breath, putting a pause on the conversation.  “But I didn’t come in here to talk about Mon-El, I came in here to check on you.  You need to be taken care of too,” she says.   “I’m fine.”   “You haven’t slept in three days.  Barely eaten.  You must be running on nothing but rads by now.  First, you refused to leave his side at all, and now you’ve suddenly gone to hide in the bathroom for three hours.  Your guests have been asking about you, by the way.  Talk to me, Kara.  It’s just us, okay?  Is it about the things he said before the meltdown?”   That’s what they were calling it now.  The Meltdown, as if he were a nuclear plant that simply lost control of its cooling systems.  Kara grimaces, because in a way, that’s exactly what happened, and she is primarily responsible for the fallout.   “It’s not uncommon for people in the throes of a PTSD episode to enter what’s called a ‘dissociative fugue’,” Alex explains, filling the silence while simultaneously trying to reassure her sister.  “It’s likely that, when he wakes up, he might not remember anything that happened.”   “You mean he might not remember that I stabbed him in the back?”   “You did what you thought was best.”   “No, I did what you thought was best,” Kara corrects.  “I knew before I even talked to you that putting him in containment might be a possibility, but I stupidly assumed it would be a last resort and not the knee-jerk reaction.”   “Maybe you’re right,” Alex sighs.  “Maybe I could have been more delicate, and for that I’m sorry.”   “I’m not the one who deserves your apology.”  Kara wipes at another tear that rolls down her cheek and sighs.  “Some of the things he said, Alex,” she shakes her head.  “What happened back there?”   “Whatever it was…Kara…it doesn’t sound like his PTSD started with the destruction of Daxam.  It may go back farther than that.”   “He wanted me to kill him,” she says.    “Kara, he wasn’t in his right mind.  You don’t even know if he was lucid.”   “What could be so bad…that he’d want to die?”   “Whatever it was…he’s going to have to face it.  One way or another.  Or it won’t be last time he detonates like that.  I don’t know him as well as you do, Kara, but I like to think he wouldn’t want that to happen.”   “No,” she agrees.  “No, he wouldn’t.”   “So,” Alex drawls, “are you ready to tell me what drove you in here?  After three days of refusing to let him out of your sight?”   Damn.  Kara hoped that their conversation had been driven far enough off topic that it wouldn’t make its way back around to the starting line.  She isn’t going to let this go, and lying and telling her she just wanted privacy isn’t going to fly.  Not with Alex.  The lump of sadness—of grief she shouldn’t even be allowed to feel—rises again in her throat, choking off her voice.   “Kara?” Alex presses.   “Cramps,” she confesses with a sniffle, her voice like gravel and clearly thick with unexpected emotions.   “Cramps?” Alex echoes, her tone exhibiting surprise at this reply.  “You don’t usually—“   “I know!” Kara bemoans, tears gathering again.  “And it came a day early!”   “But you’re never early!  I could set a clock by—“   “I know.  I’m freaking Universal Mean Time, okay?  But this time I was early – like my body decided to add insult to injury.”   “Wait a minute,” Alex shakes her head in confusion.  “I’m lost here.  Did you think you might be—“   “Yes!”   “So you an Mon-El had unprotected—“   “It was an accident!” Kara defended.   “That pushes the boundaries of the definition of accident,” Alex quips.  “You promised me that—“   “It was just the once.  We got a little caught up.”   “So that’s why Mom asked me to—“   “Did you figure it out?”   “Who do you think you’re talking to here?” Alex questions, only slight offended.  “Of course, I figured it out.  But let’s take a step back.  I want to get this straight: you wanted to be—“   “Not at first, don’t be ridiculous.  But then…after we talked about it, I knew that everything might be okay if I was.  It’s not like I was keeping my fingers crossed for a positive result though.”   “So then why are you in here—“   “I don’t know, okay?  I just am.  I got my period and I started crying and now I can’t stop.  The thing is…I started to wonder, you know?  What it might be like.  Would we have a girl or a boy?  I imagined this little girl…”  She wants to go on, to tell Alex all the things she pictured about her imaginary daughter, but can’t bring herself to say more.  In her life on this planet, there have been few things Kara couldn’t share with Alex, and this is one of them.  It’s just somehow, too personal.   “You got attached to the idea,” Alex concludes.   “I let it become more than just an idea,” Kara explains, nodding.  “We talked about it…about starting a family.”  She crumbles and the tears begin in earnest as though they a starting for the first time…again.  “I just feel like everything’s falling apart!”   “I know,” Alex says.  “But it’s not, okay?  We’re all here for you…and for Mon- El.  J’onn is holding down the fort…with James.  I shouldn’t have been surprised by that,” Alex comments, referring to James’ coming out as Guardian, “but I was.”   “You and me both,” Kara snorts.   “Thanks to the device that gives you a direct line to parallel worlds, Dr. Snow is working with the rest of the medical team to figure out how to bring him out of this…whatever it is.  And Winn is working with Cisco to find a way to help him control his new, and more dangerous, abilities when he does wake up.  When…not if,” Alex stresses.  “And they’ve had some progress on that front.”   “They have?”   “It’s one of the reasons I came looking for you.  They seemed awfully excited.  They were even finishing each other’s sentences, which is ridiculously cute.”   “What did they find out?” Kara wonders, sniffing away the last of her tears.   “They could probably explain it better than I.  How about…you splash some water on your face, straighten yourself up and join the rest of the world again?”   “Alex…?”   “It’s just between us,” Alex answers Kara’s unasked question, standing up from her seat.  “When your period ends, you can start taking the pills.”   They exit their respective stalls at the same time, Alex taking Kara into her arms as soon as she’s close enough.  Kara sinks into her sister’s embrace as though it’s the balm for which she’s been searching.  Between the two of them, Kara has always been the strongest physically, but Alex is the stalwart – with the uncanny ability to put emotions into context and events into perspective.   “I miss him,” Kara whispers into her sister’s hair.   “I know.”  Alex strokes Kara’s hair, just as she did when they were teenagers and Kara had rough adjustment days.  “We’ll figure this out, Kara.  He’ll come back to you.  I’m certain of it.”   “How can you be so certain?”   “I’m taking a page out of your book, Kara.  I refuse to believe that God or Rao or the Universe or whatever, brought him all this way for you, just so you can lose him now.”    “What about not believing in that stuff?”   “I believe in what I can see and what I can measure.  I believe in cause and effect – actions and reactions.  And I can see it all now,” Alex announces, pulling Kara out of her embrace so that she can make eye contact.  “You are right, Kara…too many things had to happen in just the right order at just the right time to bring the two of you together.  A few too many coincidences to make the generally random nature of coincidences a plausible rationalization.”   “What are you saying?” Kara asks.   “The Blessed Path, remember?” Alex replies.  “Maybe it needs you to keep the faith.”   It made an odd sort of sense to Kara.  As if this were merely a test, an obstacle in their way that needed only to be hurdled.  When she thinks of it this way she can feel the determination bubble up inside of her.  He will find his way out whatever darkness has sucked him under – find his way back to her.  And she will be by his side, waiting, when he does.  This is just another obstacle.  And if there’s one thing Kara knows how to do, it is tear down things that get in her way.   With a new lease on her innate tenacity, Kara stalks to the sink and turns on the faucet.  She splashes cold water over her tear-stained cheeks while Alex hands her a few paper towels to dry off.   Examining herself in the mirror, she straightens her spine and tugs at the hem of her thoroughly wrinkled blouse in hopes of making it appear slightly more presentable.  “Let’s go see what Cisco and Winn have come up with,” she says.   Alex nods, succinctly.  “Atta girl.”   TBC ***** Chapter 2 ***** Chapter Notes I;ve been working on the first draft of chapter 21, which is deeply tied to chapter 2. I didn't want to post the new chapter because I was afraid I would need to do some rewrites to make sure the chapters aligned. Sure enough I needed to redraft parts of chapter 2. Thanks for your patience.   Title: Into the Fray, Unflinching Author: gldngr7 Rating: Explicit Began: April 21, 2017 Chapters: ?   Feedback:  Encouragement and constructive criticisms are always welcome.  Flames are destroyed with my freeze breath.   Chapter 2/?                                    I do what it takes to make this right                                           But, we got to stop before the regret                                                        After the war is won                                There's always the next one                                         I'll do what it takes to make this right                                                  --“Armor” by Landon Austin   Mon-El watches from behind as Morgon peeks around the corner then turns his head to make sure they are still alone in the corridor.  He’s antsy about being out in the open like this, so exposed to anyone who might walk around the corner or step out of any of the host of doors within his sightline.  Quickly losing patience with his bond-brother’s apparent indecisiveness he pokes Morgon on the shoulder.  “What do you see?” he asks, his whisper far too loud to be considered secretive.   “Are you trying to get us caught?” Morgon turns back with a hiss.  His frustration is the kind that only an older brother can truly feel, and though he feels it keenly, after four years this role still feels new to him.  His mother and Mon-El’s father celebrated the fourth commemoration of their latching just last month – though the word ‘celebrating’ implies a much more jovial event then the dour feast which actually transpired.  It is no secret that his mother regrets the match, despite the wealth and position it now affords her.  “Do you want to go back to the Rector Sem?” he asks his younger brother.   At the mention of their tutor’s name, Mon-El’s eyes widen and he shakes his head frantically.  They had narrowly escaped Rector Sem’s tutoring lesson for the day, and Mon-El is certain that if forced to return, the Rector would turn red in the face, and his eyes would squint and burn with righteous fire.  While Ral has a singular ability to laugh off Rector Sem’s bluster, Mon-El can do little but curse his quaking knees when in the man’s presence.   He envies his big brother’s courage and longs to be just like him, to stand up for what’s right and not back down, but though he tries his best, he always falls shy of the goal.  Instead he finds himself often standing in his elder bond-brother’s shadow, rather than stepping out into the sun’s rays.  Much to Father’s vocal displeasure.   “We’re almost there,” Morgon whispers.  “Just one more flight and two more hallways.  I heard some handmaidens talking about it the other day.  How come if there’s a treasure room, we’ve never heard about it?” Morgon wonders skeptically.   “Well, treasure rooms are supposed to be secret, aren’t they?” Mon-El shrugs, pragmatically.  He doesn’t really care that much about finding treasure, he’s here for the adventure with his big brother.   “If handmaidens know, then everyone knows.  That’s what Mother says,” Morgon replies with a slight roll of his eyes.    Mon-El nods sagely in agreement.  Even though they always grow suddenly quiet around him, he knows the servants are constantly whispering about one thing or another.  Telling secrets.  “The treasure’s probably all gone by now.”   “Coast is clear,” Morgon announces, and shoves Mon-El in front of him.  “Up the stairs.”   Mon-El races across the corridor and into the stairwell as fast as his short legs will carry him.  Father told him once that his legs would grow long and strong someday, just as his own once had, but Mon-El is quickly growing weary of waiting for that day to come.  He has a hard time keeping up with Morgon’s longer, quicker strides.   As if to prove the inferiority of Mon-El’s legs, Morgon joins his younger brother in the stairwell in three quick steps and then he leaps up the stairs themselves, taking them two at a time.  He tosses a glance over his shoulder at Mon-El.  “C’mon,” he says.  “Keep up.”   Mon-El struggles to do just that, his short, spindly legs unable to take the stairs more than one riser at a time or risk falling on his face, a move that could easily get them caught where they shouldn’t be.  “Wait for me,” he calls out, his voice raised only slightly above a whisper.   By the time he reaches the top of the stairs, Morgon is, once again, peering around the corner, on the lookout for unwanted witnesses.  He holds a hand back, signaling Mon-El to stop before moving like a flash, pressing them both against the stairwell wall.  Mon-El instinctively understands that silence at this time would be prudent, so of course his body responds with an ill-timed nervous hiccup.  He covers his mouth with both hands to mask the sound.  One of Morgan’s hands joins his to assist in the effort, just as a servant marches past the stairs carrying a stack of boxes.   Thankfully, the manservant is too busy and too laden to take notice of the shadowy presence just a few feet away.  Morgon breathes a sigh of relief when the servant is out of earshot.  Mon-El hiccups.   “Will you be quiet?” Morgon whispers.   “I can’t—“ hiccup –“help it!”  This always happens when he’s nervous, his diaphragm going into uncontrollable spasms.  Father despises it and sends him from the room, a disgusted scowl etched on his face, every time it happens.  Which is almost every time they’re in the same room together, except when Father ignores him.   “Hold your breath,” Morgon instructs.   “M’olding m’bref,” he mumbles around loosely sealed lips.  A roll of the eyes from Morgon has Mon-El gulping a deep breath of air and sealing his lips more tightly this time.  Still his hiccups continue, tearing painfully at his insides.  Before he can stop Morgon, his big brother disappears around the corner, where Mon-el is unable to follow lest his hiccups give away their position.  So, he has no choice but to wait.   And wait.   While waiting he takes three more deep breaths, holding each one until his vision turns grey around the edges and his lungs threaten to burst.  None of the breaths eradicate the stubborn hiccups though.  “Hic!” he hiccups, surrendering to his body’s own form of torture.   “Glaaaaaaarrrr!” screams Morgon, popping back around the corner, his face distorted and his hands raised to simulate the talons of a yellow-skinned glarbeast.  His lips pulled back into a snarl.   Startling, his heart set to racing in his chest, Mon-El lashes out at Morgon, punching him hard on the shoulder with all of his insignificant might, only somewhat mollified to see the self-satisfied smirk disappear from his brother’s deceptively angelic face.  “You’re going to get into trouble,” he whines.   Mon-El knows that, unfair or not, he wouldn’t get into trouble.  Not by anyone who might catch them, at any rate.  His punishment would be reserved for deliverance by Father, should the man decide to care.  Mon-El could never predict when the man would determine a punishment worth the trouble involved in administering it.  Should they be caught, it’s likely that Morgon would be hastened away to his mother, while Mon-El would merely be returned to the Rector’s classroom.   “There’s no one left up here,” Morgon explains with a careless shrug.  “I checked all around.  You can stop hiding.”  He reaches out his hand to clasp Mon-El’s, tugging him the rest of the way up the stairs.   Mon-El examines the deserted hallway searching for any signs that his brother is pranking him.  Such actions on his part, though good-natured, are not unheard of.  He’s never been to this part of the palace before, since it was closed off decades ago, after a tragedy of which people never speak in voices above a whisper.  It appears to be used for storage now, mostly, servants only visiting to retrieve items that were tucked away out of sight, and always with their eyes steadfastly averted away for the dark corridor in which he now entered.   “No one bothers to clean up here,” Morgon comments, running his finger over a tabletop thick with layers of dust.”   Ancient works of art, portraits on old-fashioned canvas line the corridor, each draped with a sheer, iridescent covering designed to protect it from dust and contaminants.  It does nothing, however, to protect the fine art from being forgotten.  Morgon peels back the covering to get an unimpeded look at the portrait.   “You shouldn’t do that!” Mon-El warns, his stomach twisting with anxiety.  “You might hurt it, and Father will get angry.”   Morgon sticks out his tongue, blowing a careless raspberry.  “The king won’t even notice,” he adds, with a shrug.  “If he cares so much for this stuff, why doesn’t he have it where people can see it?”   It is a point Mon-El finds difficult to argue, but still he grabs Morgon’s arm and pulls him away from the portrait, catching only the quickest glimpse of its ethereal subject in the process.  The metal plate beneath the portrait reads, ‘Her Royal Highness, Princess Gata.  Wife to Prince Trel, House Gand’.   A shiver races down his spine at the site of the woman’s face and her striking blue eyes, her hand resting on her slightly protruding belly.  Mon-El presses the protective cover back down over the portrait.  He can still see her face through the sheer, shimmering weave, except she appears even more ghostlike, her sparkling eyes now dimmed to sadness – an emptiness like grief – and a sense of foreboding fills him.   “What is it?” Morgon wonders, sensing his younger brother’s reticence.   “Nothing.”  He shakes his head, scratching the back of his neck in an attempt to relieve the sudden sensation of insects crawling beneath his skin.  “I think I know why no one ever comes to this place.”   “Why?”   “The Purge.”   “What’s The Purge?” Morgon asks, though he uses a ridiculously melodramatic voice.   It’s not every day that Mon-El knows something that Morgon doesn’t, which only means he wishes he had more information to flaunt than he actually does.  By virtue of his position, and the fact that he’s lived in the Palace six years longer than Morgon has, he’s heard most of the rumors, many of them contradicting and therefore of no use to him.  He doesn’t know enough about The Purge to provide an impressive display of knowledge.   “My great-grandfather’s brother – he was supposed to be king and not my great- grandfather – did something bad—“   “What did he do?”   “He killed his wife,” Mon-El nods at the covered painting, “and then himself.  They say he went insane and became some religious maniac.  And then his father the king, died just a few days later.  Heartbroken…they say.  After my great- grandfather became king, he said his brother was a traitor and had all memory of them wiped from the Daxcess.  Then he had these apartments closed off, declaring them Forbidden, and decreed that their belongings be destroyed.”   “Except the portrait…?” Morgon wonders.   “She was kind to him,” Mon-El explains.  “So he allowed it to remain, but he would not allow it to be placed in the portrait gallery.  It has to stay up here…covered…so no one can see it.”   “Her husband already killed her,” Morgon grimaces.  “What did she do to deserve more punishment?”   “She was…Kryptonian,” Mon-El informs his brother, the word tasting like bitter alm berries on his tongue.   “Oh,” Morgan nods.  “Maybe she was a spy.”   “Some people say he loved her.  How can you love a Kryptonian?” Mon-El asks.   Morgon regards the portrait once more, crossing his arms and rocking back on his heels as he has witnessed from the Royal Assayer.  “She was quite beautiful,” he points out, pragmatically.   Mon-El swallows the bitter taste in his mouth that always rises when Morgon starts talking about girls.  His older brother sees something in the frippery creatures that he cannot understand, no matter how hard he tries.  “It wouldn’t matter how beautiful she is, I would rather die than love a Kryptonian,” he declares, his tone one of absolute certainty, albeit a bit dramatic.   “Well, I wouldn’t care if she was a Lizarkon,” Morgon counters.    “Eww,” Mon-El pulls a face and tries not to laugh, but fails miserably.  “Disgusting.”   Morgon shrugs one shoulder, unoffended by his brother’s opinion.  “Mother says you can’t help who you love.  It just happens.  Sometimes slow and sometimes fast, but you can’t fight it.  You can try…but you’ll always lose.”  Morgon has never known his mother to be wrong, and therefore has no reason to doubt her word.   As a young boy, before his mother latched to the king, she would tell him stories of her love for his father, of their love for one another.  It was her way of keeping his father present – keeping him alive.  Like most Daxamite alliances, theirs had been arranged, but that had not stopped them from falling deeply in love, according to his mother.  His vague recollections of the happy times before his father was killed were of two people who danced in each other’s arms and smiled down at him as if he was their perfect Approval Day gift.  Reflic Ral’s grin, with his perfectly white teeth and carefree easiness, still clings to the outskirts of Morgon’s memory six years after the man’s tragic and unexplained death.  He wishes he could remember more of them in their happy times instead of mere glimpses, and his mother no longer speaks of him.   After a palace soiree celebrating something no one can even recall anymore, Reflic went missing for two days, before his body was found floating in the choppy, crimson waters of a nearby lake.  No signs of struggle or even foul play were present – and neither was internal evidence of drowning.  It is a mystery about which people in their social caste still whisper.   A light went out of his mother after that, Morgon recalls, and though she tried her best to keep up her spirits for him, her smile never quite travelled to her eyes any more.  One year after his father’s death, almost to the day, Daxam’s king approached her at an event and initiated a formal courtship.  Though many of Daxam’s elite are matched with partners at very young ages and some, in special cases, are designed for their latch mate by the agents of the Procreational Authority of Genetic Enforcement, decades of warfare with Krypton had left more than a few patriots without a spouse.   King Vir Gand had been latched no less than three times before initiating courtship with Tieran Ral, second daughter to House Is.  His first marriage ended one year before he ascended the throne, caused by a virulent illness in which she lingered painfully for months before finally succumbing.  Prince Vir married his second wife less than four months later, having not provided a timely heir during his first union.    Each subsequent wife lasted longer than the previous, the last – Her Royal Highness Princess Cienne – surviving six years and succumbing to illness just three weeks after Mon-El was deemed exceptional and released by PAGE.   After the death of three wives, inevitable rumors surfaced of course, but most went unheeded by the upper classes, or at least…unrepeated.  No one in a position of opulence cared to make an enemy of the sitting monarch, lest they be unceremoniously relieved of title, lands and position.   So, for reasons known only to the King, after six years without a wife, he pursued the widow Ral.  He viewed her growing son simultaneously as a minor inconvenience and a method by which he could keep his own progeny occupied and thus, out of his hair.  Fatherhood was nowhere on his priority list.   His mother had explained that marrying into House Gand would bring great advantages for his future, which was the only reason she agreed to the alliance in the first place.  She would never love again, not as she had loved his father, but she could make certain Morgon had the best start in life a widowed mother could provide.  No one knows better than Morgon, however, that his mother is unhappy in her marriage to the King of Daxam.  Her eyes are dull and lifeless now, dark circles beneath them like that never quite seem to go away.  And now and then, though she went to great lengths to hide it, Morgon would catch sight of bruises on her wrists and neck.   A noise from the stairwell tears Morgon from his woolgathering, focusing his attention in the direction of the sound.  Grabbing Mon-El, who stares unfocused at the approaching danger, he tugs his younger brother across the hall, his hands grappling at the oversized doorknob of the nearest room.   Locked.   Mon-El’s breath intensifies as he stares over his shoulder like a hunted fennick, Morgon tugging him to the next door in the long corridor, then the next, and then the next, until he finds one that gives way at his insistence. Morgon shoves his little brother into the room before spinning back to close the door, leaving it open just enough to peer out with one partially concealed eye.  As expected, the noise stems from a servant climbing the stairs, arms laden with items to return to storage.  The man disappears into a room at the end of the hall for a moment, before exiting, relieved of his burden.   “Morgon,” Mon-El’s voice says, tugging on his sleeve.   “Give me a minute,” he whispers, waiting for the servant to disappear down the stairs from whence he came.   “Morgon!”   “What?!” Morgon turns back, finally seeing the room that provided their escape.   “I think we found it,” Mon-El replies.   Found it indeed.    The bedroom of Daxam’s doomed first couple, as evidenced by the massive bed that fills much of its space, stands as though left abandoned a century ago.  The bed even appears to be unmade, as if the assigned servant never bothered to set it to rights after the sudden deaths of its owners.  A formal gown lay strewn across a chair waiting to be worn, matching slippers neatly placed nearby.   Except for the layers of dust, the room appears exactly as abandoned over a century ago now.  A nightdress lay in a puddle on the floor, waiting patiently for disposal by a servant that never arrives.   “This is just a bedroom,” Morgon denies, with a shrug.   “This was their bedroom,” Mon-El qualifies.  “Where else would you hide a treasure but in a room where no one will ever go looking for it?  Just look…no one’s even been in this room for a century.”   “You have a devious mind, brother.”   Mon-El preens at both the praise and Morgon’s use of the familial moniker.  Even from the beginning, Morgon gave him a sense of belonging he never felt in his own home—with Father.   “I thought you said the old king had all of their belongings destroyed,” Morgon says, confused.   “I thought so too,” Mon-El says, also confused by the contradiction of the story he was told and reality before his eyes.  “He must have only ordered their qubigital records destroyed.”   “So he had them wiped from the Daxcess—“   “And all historical record,” Mon-El finishes.   “And all of the historical record,” Morgon echoes, “but didn’t have their personal items destroyed?”   “Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to do it,” Mon-El suggests, a trace of sadness in his tone.  “Maybe the new king loved his brother, even if he was a traitor.”   Morgon thought about his father and the small chest of personal effects he kept beneath his bed.  Most if it was inconsequential and yet he couldn’t bear to share any of it, or be rid of the items, as they were all things his father had touched or owned.  He can’t imagine throwing it away, no matter what his father might have done.  “That makes sense, I guess.”   As if the long undisturbed room calls out to the insatiable curiosity within him, Morgon goes straight for a nearby chest of drawers like a pollinator towards its colony.  He hesitates for a brief second, waiting for Mon-El to stop him, just as he had done when he’d tried to get a better look at the portrait.  When no protest is immediately forthcoming, he passes his hand over the sensor that opens the drawer.  It slides open with a soft whoosh and not the whine he expects, as though the tracks hadn’t gone unused for a century.   Borrowing a bit of Morgon’s brash recklessness, Mon-El heads for the trunk in corner of the immense chamber, drawn by the crest of House Gand emblazoned on its lid.  Pressing his palm to the symbol, the lid splits in two, each portion folding back in half and then again in quarters until the contents of the trunk are revealed.  Sitting atop the pile of contents is a black gown, in its center a Kryptonian glyph stark against the black with its sparkling silver thread.  In the center of the pentagon, a serpentine symbol that reminds Mon-El of a trail of smoke rising from the wax candles the Priestess uses in the ritual to worship Lure.   “Kryptonian?” Mon-El startles, and turns his head to find Morgon standing over his shoulder.  “There wasn’t anything in there but ladies’ clothes,” Morgon adds.  “Boring.  Looks like you got more of the same.  How much clothing does a woman need anyway?”   Mon-El looks beyond Morgon to the chest to find every drawer left open with, predictably, the contents dangling out.  He shakes his head and turns back to the black gown in his hand.  “House of Ur,” he declares.   “How do you know that?”   “Father made Rector Sem teach all of them to me.  All of the ones that matter, anyway.  House of Ur led the High Council for three centuries.  Four years ago, a rogue scientist blew a crater in one of their own moons testing a weapon, and the scandal was so bad the House of Ur was forced to abdicate their seat.  House of Am is in charge now,” he explains.   “Blowing up a moon!” Morgon delights.  “That sounds exultant!”   “Five hundred Kryptonians were living on it at the time,” Mon-El adds, watching as the smile melts from Morgon’s face.  Mon-El has no love for Kryptonians, not even a handful of colonists, but there’s no honor in a death at the hands of your own kind.  And there’s certainly no honor in perpetrating such deaths.   “Oh.  Was the scientist put to death?” Morgon asks, a spark of hope lighting in his eyes.   “Oh, Krypton no longer puts murderers to death like on Daxam.  Now they sentence them to a fate worse than death.”   “What’s worse than death?”   “They call it ‘The Phantom Zone’.”  He’s heard adults whisper about it – about the barbarity of it – but knew little about the origins of the Kryptonian prison, other than its ominous name.   “I’ve heard Mother talking about it,” Morgon answers and then shrugs.  “It doesn’t seem so bad.”   “They say it’s like a living Nerg-Tyr,” he counters, evoking the Trinitarian Void where Almat judges the judgmental until they are sufficiently punished enough to earn rebirth.  “Except it goes on for eternity, but its residents are unaware because time doesn’t pass.  So, they have no way of knowing if, or when, their sentence will end.”   “You’re right, that doesn’t sound so good.”   Mon-El tosses the black ceremonial gown on the bed, a plume of dust rising in response.  Morgon coughs his eyes watering as he inhales the allergens now unavoidable in the air.  He waves his hands all around hoping to clear the air so that he can breathe again.  “Doesn’t that bother you?” he asks.   “I’m okay,” Mon-El replies, already digging through the rest of the chest, looking for something of interest.  He drags out more gowns and in the bottom blankets that appear to be more of sentimental value or ceremonial value than they are of any practical use.  Pulling out the last of the items, he stares at the empty chest, disappointed, before reaching his hands in and running them along the sides and the bottom.   “What are you doing?” Morgon asks, curious.   “Looking for a secret compartment, like a false bottom.  A place where a Kryptonian princess might hide something.”   “Isn’t a false bottom or secret compartment a little obvious?” Morgon points out.   “Father says they’re very crafty…Kryptonians…and are not to be underestimated, but also that they’re arrogant, which is always their downfall.  It’s just like a Kryptonian to think they’ll never be found out.”  He sighs, disappointed to have found nothing.  Placing his arm along the rim of the open chest he drops his head against his forearm in frustration, the chest tipping slightly to one side from the force.   “Did you hear that?” Morgon asks, his tone rising with excitement.   “Hear what?”   Morgan leans over Mon-El and presses on the rim of the chest and, sure enough, he hears a clunk.  “That.”   “The floor is uneven,” Mon-El shrugs, looking around at the floor beneath his knees but seeing no evidence of his assertion, “that’s all.”   “It sounds like a tile is loose.”  He’s heard and seen many a loose tile (maybe even created a few) in the palace, but they are immediately fixed by servants once reported.  It makes no sense that a loose tile would go uncorrected in the chambers of the Crown Prince and his bride, unless they were just sloppy back then.  Today, Father would not stand for such imperfection.  Morgon grabs for the chest and demands, “Help me move it.”   Mon-El complies, finding Morgon’s sudden excitement contagious.  He jumps to his feet and grasps the other side of the chest and together they shift it away from its century long location.  Morgon taps his foot along each visible stone tile until he finds the one that tilts up when he applies pressure.  A grin splits his deceptively angelic face, a lock of white blond curls falling over one sparkling green eye. “Found it.”   The tile lifts easily, along with a colony of cobwebs.  There’s no predicting what lurks in the dark hole revealed by removing the loose tile, but Morgon doesn’t hesitate before diving his arm into the potentially vermin or venom- infested darkness.   Mon-El thinks, as Morgon pulls back that tile, that his brother’s eyes could not get brighter nor his smile bigger, but he is proved wrong a few moments later when Morgon’s arm retreats from the hiding space with a lockbox in hand.  Mon-El slides the tile back into place at Morgon sets it gently on the bed examining it from corner to corner.   “And you said we wouldn’t find any treasure,” the older boy teases, passing his palm over the lid.  The proximity of warm flesh to the lock releases a mechanism with a churning sound.  “Val-Or’s Peaks,” he curses.   “What is it?” Mon-El asks, surprised by his brother’s expletive.   “It’s a Code Locked,” he replies.  Uncharacteristically disheartened, Morgon drops back onto his haunches.  Code locks have been in use on Daxam for nearly three centuries and have never grown out of fashion due to their ironclad, impossible to duplicate security.   “Code Locked?  Whatever’s in there must be very important.  Level 3, do you think?” Mon-El asks.   “How should I know?”   “If it’s a Level 1, I might be able to crack it.”   “Or…this could be the moment you find out you’re adopted….”   “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Mon-El snarks.  It’s just too much to hope.   “Be my guest,” Morgon offers, moving out of the way.   Mon-El places his thumb into a sliding a mechanism on the top of the box, flinching when he feels a pin prick on the sensitive tip of the digit.  Hardly taking a moment to analyze the offering, the pad reader turns green and a computerized voice demands, “Code phrase.”  Mon-El turns his head to meet Morgon’s suddenly reinvigorated green eyes.  His older brother chews on his bottom lip, the air of the room thickening with anticipation.   Code locks come in three levels.  Level 1, the easiest, requires only a blood sample with familial DNA allowing any member of the family to open the lock.  Assuming the lockbox once belonged to Mon-El’s ancestor, though distant, the familial match was still strong enough to allow for unlocking.  His theory confirmed by the pinprick, the box revealed a second layer to the Code Lock.  Level 2 adds an additional tier of protection, requiring a vocal code word or phrase to meet the unlock requisite.  Finally, Level 3 requires an exact DNA match in addition to identical voiceprint; only the person setting the lock can open it.   After a moment’s hesitation, Mon-El takes a wild guess and provides the motto for House Gand.  “Into the Fray, Unflinching,” he speaks into the locks panel.  Instantly, they hear a snapping sound and the lid releases.   “You did it!  Let’s see what’s inside.”   Carefully, Mon-El lifts the lid, peering into the box as though expecting a squirming, slimy orlin to leap out, its needle-sharp teeth bared for deadly purpose.  Even Morgon looks at him as though he’s crazy.  The lid doesn’t even creak as he slowly draws it back, and Mon-El feels a disappointment sink in when he realizes there are no sparkling jewels or ancient coins winking back at him as they capture the light.   “Papers,” he says, without even bothering to rifle through the contents.  “It’s just papers.”   “Real paper?” Morgon asks.  “When was the last time you saw real paper?”   “Father uses it for galactic treaties and trade agreements.  Not every government is paperless, you know.  And long ago, scouts would submit their reports in paper because it was more secure than entering them into the Daxcess.  I wonder if that’s what these are.” Mon-El breathes, his earlier disappointment transitioning to excitement.  “It makes sense.  They would need to be kept secure.  Things like troop movements, supply chain coordinates, even locations of ordnance factories; places the Protection Forces would send surge teams to.  For all we know…these could be old action reports from the Battles of Partek’s Moons.”   “Pretty sure these aren’t that old,” Morgon says, but fearless as usual he reaches into the box and grabs a handful of neatly folded papers.  Coat tailing his brother’s courage, Mon-El takes a few pages from the lockbox.  The parchment is thicker than he expected and less affected by the passage of time than one might assume after a century.  The lockbox must have been hermetically sealed to keep the papers in mint condition.   “You never know,” Mon-El ruminates, toying with the edges of the parchment, hesitant to end the anticipation, perhaps worried that the papers may contain information he’d rather not learn.   Morgon, not a reluctant bone in his body, has no such qualms.  Unfolding the letter, he scans the document, his alternately squinting and growing larger as they work their way down the page.’   “What is it?”   “Letters written by hand are hard to read.  I can only make out a few words,” Morgon complains.   Mon-El hold out his hand.  “Let me,” he suggests.  “Father makes me read handwritten documents all the time.  He says it’s important for me to be familiar with intergalactic treaties and trade agreements. He likes to test me on what I’ve learned; Rector Sem began teaching me the handwriting skill once I was old enough to hold a stylus.”   Happily, Morgon hands over the letter.  “You need the practice then anyway.”   The first letter is easy to read, it’s words looping neatly across the page and it doesn’t take long for Mon-El to decipher its contents.  “It’s a letter about….”   Morgon climbs on the bed and curls into a comfortable position, preparing to listen to his bond-brother read the letter aloud.  “About what?” he asks.   “Copulation,” Mon-El responds.  It isn’t what they came for, he knows.  A little disappointing, to be honest, since he’d been hoping for tales of adventure and not tales of personal entertainment.  Copulation is a dull subject, he feels, boring to hear about or to watch.  Father laughs when he makes his feelings known about it and promises him that he’ll have a much different view of the subject once he reaches the age of consent.  There’s always something dark and foreboding in Father’s promises and in his laughter.   “Go on then,” Morgon urges, and since his older brother doesn’t seem averse to hearing the letter’s contents, Mon-El gives in.   It’s not so bad, he realizes after finishing one letter and picking up another.  Trel’s missives are far more intense and graphic, perhaps owing to the differences in their cultures.  Gata’s communiques are sweet and heartfelt, only occasionally drifting into graphic prose.  Mon-El can’t deny that, if one were to judge by these letters alone, it would be easy to imagine that the prince and princess loved each other…deeply.  But this was only one side of the story, he reminds himself.  There’s no telling what secrets or lies the Kryptonian princess might have been hiding from her mate.   After the fourth love letter is complete.  Morgon hands him a large packet of folded pages.  “I found this at the bottom of the lock box.”   “This seems newer than the others,” Mon-El comments.  Unlike the love letters, which had clearly been lovingly read and reread, these pages resist a bit as he unfolds the packet, as if they’ve never been opened since first being folded and hidden away.    It isn’t as easy as he expects once he sees the scrawl on the parchment.  Though obviously written in some haste, the ink smudged in spots, Mon-El finds the handwriting to be oddly familiar, despite having seen only a few samples of the skill in his lifetime.  Still, despite the difficulty, the script on the page forms into legible words and then to a cohesive language.   “Well?” Morgon urges.   Haltingly, Mon-El reads.  “’I…haven’t much time to write these words.  Even now…traitors search the…palace grounds for me…for us.’”   “Traitors?” Morgon interrupts, suddenly perking up.  “Are you certain?”   “Yes,” Mon-El replies, holding up the parchment and showing him the word.   “Well the guy knew how to start a story, I’ll give him that.  Go on.  What happens next?”   “’Even now the traitors search the palace grounds for us.  A stasis jewel over her heart keeps my beloved Gata clinging to life…for the time being, but I have no doubt that their first priority is to finish what Seflan Mos started—to…murder…my wife and unborn son.’”  Mon-El’s head snaps up as the implication of the words in the letter sink in.   “What is it?” Morgon asks, in a near frantic state.  “What happens next?”   “Do you know what this means?” Mon-El enquires, excitedly.  When Morgon responds with a shake of his head, Mon-El rereads the opening portion of the letter once more, to make certain he read it correctly, before answering his own question.  “It means the stories are all lies,” he says, eyes widening.  “Crowned Prince Trel Gand, Regent of Daxam, was struck from public record because he killed his wife and then killed himself.  That’s what the Daxcess says.  The official story is that he killed her because he believed the child she carried wasn’t his.  That she was carrying a pure blood, and that this was Krypton’s attempt to get a Kryptonian on the throne of Daxam.”   “That’s a stupid plan,” Morgon points out.   Mon-El doesn’t disagree.  “This letter, written in his own hand and hidden in his own Code Locked box seems to point out that the official record is a lie.”   “I could come up with a better plan in my sleep,” Morgon says, still stuck on the holes in Krypton’s purported scheme.  “I have come up with better plans in my sleep!  Remember that time that we—“   “You’re the one who wanted to sneak up here, do you want to hear this or not?”   “Right!” Morgon replies, shaking his head.  “Continue.”   “He must have written this not long after this Seflan Mos attacked the princess.  A stasis jewel only has six hours of power in it when fully charged.”  Focusing his eyes back on the page, he continues to read. “’I cannot allow this to happen.  I must save them at any cost.  Even if it means doing the unthinkable.  There’s nothing I won’t sacrifice to keep them alive – even if it means giving up the throne, or giving up on the dreams we made together.  Let them have Daxam and do with it what they will.  I care not,’ he writes,” Mon-El recites, lifting his eyes to see Morgon’s reaction.  “’The Trinitarians are welcome to it, so long as my heart lives.  I must bequeath the charge of saving Daxam to someone else.  Time is quickly running out and the day has proved there is only one whom I can trust.  Even now, she prepares the way for us, directing the searching zealots away from our hiding place.  I must tell this story now before the time runs out, so that someday, someone might know the truth and understand.  I thought all was well, and convinced my wife of that, but I was a fool.  I didn’t see the knife that was pointed at my back.’”   Mon-El continues reading the letter, four long pages worth as Trel spills out his handwritten tale in hastily scribbled words, and practically unbelievable phrases.  He paints a picture of palace intrigue gone too-long unchecked and trusted advisors turning against their sworn liege, some of it legible and some of it not.  But between the lines, the letter’s pages reveal a desolate, broken heart, as well as a hasty, reckless plan to stay alive, even if it means sacrificing everything, except that which is most important to the prince.   Mon-El stumbles over poorly written words, and some he doesn’t even recognize as he nears the end of the letter.  Rapt with attention, Morgon nearly forgets to breathe, all the while knowing that this is story is certain to have an unsatisfying ending.   “’It is with a slim thread of hope I pray that someday, somehow, this letter falls into the hands of someone who will know what to do with it, so that the truth might eventually be known.  My brother is merely a puppet in their show and knows nothing of their plans.  He is young and naive but there’s no darkness in his heart – he trusts easily and will follow where led.  If you are reading this letter, I beg you…find a way to save Krypton.  In doing so…you may very well save the soul of Daxam in the process.  Signed, His Royal Highness Trel Gand, Prince Regent of Daxam.’ That’s it,” Mon-El announces, folding the letter back into its original configuration.    “What should we do now?” Morgon wonders.   “There’s nothing to do,” Mon-El answers.  “This letter was written a hundred years ago.  Krypton is fine…Daxam is fine, whatever he was afraid of…never happened.”   “I know that.  That’s not what I was talking about.”   “You mean about the other thing?” Mon-El asks, realizing some of the other more mysterious elements of the letter.  “I’m not even sure what he was writing about,” Mon-El confesses.   “We can find out,” Morgon suggests, his eyes already lighting with the beginnings of a plan.  “I feel like we should do something."   “Father will kill us,” Mon-El points out.   “Who says he has to know?’   “He knows,” Mon-El’s eyes light with a spark of fear. “He always knows.”   “We won’t always be kids,” Morgan promises, sagely.  “One day…the Royal Seal will be yours.”  Morgon takes the letter from Mon-El, placing it back into the lockbox, and closing the lid, listening for the barely audible whirring sound that precedes its re-locking process.  When the box is once more secure, he picks it by the handle.  “There’s much more to read and to learn.  We should take this with us…for safekeeping.”  Morgon is a boy of insatiable curiosity, and Mon-El knows that he’s claiming the box for more than simple safekeeping.  The determined look in his green eyes tells Mon-El his older brother plans to read every, last letter and journal in the there.   And Mon-El knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that whatever Morgon decides to do…he’s going to drag Mon-El along right beside him.   TBC   *****   ***** Chapter 3 ***** Chapter Notes Author's Note: So I'm no scientific genius but I try to write not one, but two, in this chapter. I can't promise it's scientifically accurate, but I can promise that I probably put more effort into researching (and understanding said research) than your average Supergirl writer. Feedback: Encouragement and constructive criticisms are always welcome. Flames are destroyed with my freeze breath. Title: Into the Fray, Unflinching Author: gldngr7 Rating: Explicit Began: April 21, 2017 Chapters: 3/?    Forget all we said that night No, it doesn't even matter 'Cause we both got split in two If you could spare an hour or so We'll go for lunch down by the river We can really talk it through And being here without you is like I'm waking up to Only half a blue sky Kinda there but not quite I'm walking around with just one shoe I'm half a heart without you   --“Half a Heart” –One Direction       Toiling tirelessly, a crew works to repair the damage done by Mon-El while in the throes of his meltdown.  Alex and Kara stop to watch the progress for a few moments on their way to the R&D lab.  Two work men use trowels to smooth the wet cement over the wall damaged when she and Mon-El flew into it.  Another pair carefully replace a glass panel on the balcony, destroyed by Mon-El’s unexpected heat vision.   “What made this happen?” she asks her sister.  “Winn tested him for abilities when he first woke up and there wasn’t a hint of flying or heat vision.”   “Our minds can do amazing things when it comes to protecting us from emotional trauma, Kara.  We can block out entire portions of our lives, as if they never existed.  But it’s more like surgery performed with a baseball bat than with a laser scalpel.  It’s crude and without finesse, and instead of only cutting away the unwanted memories it takes other parts with it as well.”   “What are you saying?”   “I’m saying that…he had these abilities all along.  I’m saying that his mind was repressing them.  And there’s every chance that he might continue to repress them.  That every moment he’s in his own mind, he may be convincing himself to disassociate from those trigger memories again.”   How easy it would be, Kara thinks, to go back to the way things were before it all fell apart.  To have another go at it, and this time to do it right.  But she knows, in the end, that would only serve her desires and not his needs.  She sighs with disappointment, her mind already predicting the answer to the question she’s about to ask.  “That wouldn’t be a good thing, would it?”   “If he has the chance to repress his memories again, there’s every likelihood he’ll bury them deep – so deep they could be lost forever.”   “Would that be so bad?”   “It depends,” Alex shrugs, her eyes filling with sadness.  “Which parts of him are you willing to lose?”   “I don’t understand,” Kara shakes her head.  She lies to herself, when deep down—way down—she senses the truth Alex regrets being forced to provide.   “Which parts can you live without?  His empathy?  His compassion?  His humor?  That part of him that looks at you so softly you want to curl up in his arms?”  When her sister shyly turns away from her, Alex places a hand on her Kara’s shoulder.  “Don’t think that I haven’t seen the looks that pass between you two.  A blind person could see the way you two feel about each other.  But Kara…people who disassociate are rarely the better for it.  The missing parts are usually the best parts.  The mind is funny that way.”   “I just don’t want him to relive his trauma?”   “Are you sure that’s it?” Alex asks.  “Or is it that a part of you is more comfortable believing that an egg-shaped pod gave birth to him at your feet?  That Mon-El didn’t exist until he came into your life?”   “That’s not…why would you say that?”   “Because three days ago you stood in the conference room and told us about Mon- El’s step-brother, and I could tell from the look on your face that you didn’t know any more about him than what you were telling us.”   “I just found out about him the night before?” Kara defends herself, her spine straightening, arms crossing at her chest.  She puffs up like a balloon filling with air.   “That’s precisely my point,” Alex nods.  “How long has he been here…how long have you been sleeping with him?  How many questions have you asked about his family?  About his life on Daxam?”   Kara opens her mouth to answer, but then chokes on the answer, her chest deflating in defeat.  Had she really never asked him those questions?  About his parents?  There had been brief moments, unintentional entrées he let slip, where she felt compelled to get more of his story.  But she never just…asked.  Like she didn’t want to know, didn’t want to challenge her own narrative of him.   She loves this man—loves his heart and his soul.  Loves the way his eyes soften when they meet hers, or the way he so openly gives her what she needs when they’re in each other’s arms.  But she doesn’t know his birthday, or the kinds of games he played as a child, his favorite subject in school, and how he managed to become a palace guard without any fight training.  She doesn’t know any of those things.   Because she never bothered to ask.   “I’m not saying these things to hurt you, Kara.  But to show you that…perhaps if you knew more about the man behind those soft eyes, about what made him who he is and what he’d been through, you might not be quite so prepared to bargain his memories away.  Traumatic or not.”   Kara tears up again, blindsided by the truth in sister’s words.  She can always count on Alex to tell her the truth, no matter how painful, no matter how much she wants to deny it when it’s offered.  And Alex wasn’t the only one to serve up truths on a silver platter recently.  A platter she’d tried to ignore.   “James was right,” she sighs, wiping at a rogue tear that escapes the well of her eye.  Kara leans forward, placing her forearms on the railing of the balcony, watching the workmen move back and forth below, like a goddess overseeing her inferiors as they toil away.  “I’m seeing it now more and more….” She drifts off thoughtfully as events replay in her mind like a montage of moments she wishes she could repeat, only better.  “Kryptonian arrogance,” she finishes.  “I didn’t want to think of Mon-El as a person who existed before landing on Earth.  I just wanted him to be the man that Rao made for me…sent to me… as if he had been formed from stardust and placed at my feet.”   Leaning on the balcony beside her sister, Alex bumps Kara’s shoulder with hers.  “Kara, I’m not saying that none of that is true…metaphorically speaking,” she cajoles, hoping to stop the faith from leaking out of her sister’s eyes along with those tears.  “I’m simply saying that maybe a few things happened between the stardust and Mon-El being placed at your feet.”   “Things that damaged him,” Kara concludes.   “So it would seem.”   Watching the workers for a few more minutes, Kara wonders if she’ll be able to put Mon-El back together as easily as the DEO is put back to rights.  What will she find in his eyes when he wakes at last?  Relief?  Distrust?  Disappointment?  Will he still be so emotionally giving, or will he hold himself back from her?   “They’re waiting for you in the lab,” Alex reminds her.   “Right,” Kara replies, absentmindedly, before shoving away from the balcony railing and heading towards the lab.   The moment she walks into the lab it’s like being swarmed by puppies who’ve been anxiously awaiting her return from a long vacation.  Winn Schott and Cisco Ramon could not possibly look different.  Winn, with his close-cropped, dirty- blonde hair with blue eyes, and the white skin of an Anglo who spends far too much of his days behind the screen of a computer and not nearly enough time outside catching rays.  In contrast, Cisco Ramon has the bronze skin and deep brown eyes that declare his Latino heritage, paired with messy, shoulder-length hair he’s constantly tucking behind one ear.   Despite their physical differences, their wide, toothy grins and the sparkling excitement in their eyes are so identical, they might as well be twins.   “Alex said you have something,” she says, offering them the conversation starter for which they are clearly waiting.  What follows is a mind-meld unlike anything Kara can claim to have seen.  Not even when she worked with Cisco and Felicity on Earth-1 during the Dominator invasion.   “We’ve made some discoveries,” Winn says, nearly coming out of his skin.   “Formed some theories,” Cisco adds.   “Start with what we know,” she insists, not sure she can handle to two of them postulating about theories.  Not without getting some solid ground under her feet first.   “Okay,” Cisco nods.  “His cells are generating an electrical field—“   “We knew that, he’s been siphoning—“   “No,” Cisco waves a finger, his eyes closed, a near-blissful smile on his face.  “Not from the siphoning.  His cells are generating the electrical field all on their own.”   “We all generate electrical fields,” Winn exposits.   “In small amounts, this electricity is what sends messages to and from our brains,” Cisco clarifies, his hands making inarticulate motions as though the short-hand sign language might help her understand.  It does not.   “Sparks our muscles to work,” Winn nods.   “Right,” Cisco’s head bobbles in a similar manner.  “But our boy is a whole different thing.  He’s a force of nature.”   “Literally,” Winn agrees.   “Literally,” his twin echoes, his eyebrows climbing almost to the top of his hairline.  “He’s a human capacitor, for lack of a better term, storing electricity and discharging in the form of superpowers.”   “Like I store yellow-sun radiation,” she assumes.   “Well yes and no,” Cisco shakes his head, tucking a long strip of his bangs that had fallen into his face, behind his ear.  “You don’t store yellow-sun radiation any more than a car stores gasoline.  If you did, you’d have a glut of it if you went too long without using your powers.”   “Your muscles would have gotten huge when you were kid, before you became Supergirl,” Winn provides her with imagery.   “Instead, your body simply takes what it needs to maintain an equilibrium.”   “Like you, Mon-El can absorb yellow-sun radiation and, like you, his body only takes what it needs to keep his body functioning at peak.  It strengthens and fuels his muscles – his strength and speed.  But the electrical field generated by his cells is what makes him different from you, Kara.”   “We come from the same solar system, what makes him so different?  Is it because Daxam was closer to the sun?”   Cisco and Winn share a look, already communicating non-verbally after only a few days of acquaintance.   In unison, they look back at her, their heads shaking as though on a synchronized swivel.  “The Well of Stars,” they answer.   “What about it?”   “He floated around in there for decades,” Winn supplies.   “Fermenting,” Cisco characterizes, his eyebrows a stark straight line across his forehead as the wheels inside his head turn.   “Fermenting?  Cisco?” she queries.   “Right!  So Mon-El was fermenting in The Well of Stars, floating in a soup of photons, hadrons, baryons and…we’re theorizing—“   “Gravitons,” Winn blurts, stealing Cisco’s thunder.   “—and too many other ‘ons’ to mention.  It sounds crazy, but I think when he flew he wasn’t actually flying.”   “He was flying, all right,” she insists, recalling with perfect clarity the shock she felt to see him hovering a foot above the ground.   Cisco shakes his head.  “He’s using the gravitons that now permeate his skin to generate an anti-gravitational field around his body.  If he can learn to control it, this ability should be virtually indistinguishable from flying.”   “Virtually,” she echoes, catching the one word that piqued her interest.   Winn grins.  “In theory, if he learns to expand that anti-gravitational field he could make others fly with him.  Guess who my new best friend is!”   “In theory,” Cisco reiterates.   “What about the rest of it?” she asks.  “The heat vision?”   “I just need to interrupt the electrical field around his eyes.”  Cisco scampers over to one of the metal-surfaced tables in the lab and retrieves a pair of glasses.  They are thicker and less fashionable than the ones she chose for Mon-El months ago.  “These glasses contain a micro electromagnetic pulse generator, which will dampen the electrical field whenever he’s wearing them.  It’s a sinewave pulse, so it shouldn’t affect any of his other abilities.  Easy-peasy.”  He hands the glasses to Kara, who accepts them gingerly as though they’re made of crystal.   “He says…like he didn’t just invent new science to make those,” Winn gushes, clearly enamored with his new friend.  “In less than a day.”   Examining the glasses carefully, both internally and externally, Kara notes that they are thicker than normal at the bridge of the nose and where the arms hover over the temples.  Inside, there are two tiny devices on either side, with wires threading though the upper frames to meet another device in the center.  “So when he wakes up, we can take him out of containment because he’ll have control over his heat vision?” she asks, allowing her excitement to peek through the waves of sadness that have engulfed her the last few days.   “Complete control,” Cisco confirms, “as long as he’s wearing those.”   Emotionally overwhelmed, Kara throws her arms around Cisco’s neck, hugging him with all of the gratitude and relief she feels inside.   “Okay,” Cisco chuckles at first, patting her back.  Over her shoulder he tosses a smile and a wink in Winn’s direction, but a second later, when her arms tighten like a vise around him, the novelty wears off.  “Too tight,” he wheezes, his entire body wincing.  “Don’t break the scientist.”    “Sorry, sorry!” she grimaces, jumping away from him as though he’s made of lava.   “It’s no problem,” he groans, before taking a long draught of air.  “Just happy to help.”   “Modest,” Winn claims, leading Kara to believe that she’s going to be in for days of gushing after Cisco returns to Earth-1.  Possibly weeks of moping to follow.   “Any ideas on why he’s not waking up?” she asks, hoping she’s not pressing her luck.   “That’s Caitlin’s area of expertise,” Cisco answers.  “Hers and your mom’s.  But last I spoke with her she seemed pretty frustrated with their lack of progress.  I’m sorry to say.”    “I’ve updated your mom and Dr. Snow on everything we learned and they’ve taken some steps to make sure there’s not a repeat performance of his Regan MacNeil impersonation--”   “Good movie,” Cisco injects, his head bobbing up and down as he reaches over to fist bump Winn.  “Classic.”   “Anyway, there will be no exploding of glass and diving for cover if…when…WHEN he wakes up,” Winn reassures.   “Thank you, Cisco,” Kara effuses, grabbing him by the hand, but careful not to crush it.  “For dropping everything to come here, you and Caitlin both.  For figuring out how to help him, once he wakes up.  You have no idea how much I appreciate everything that you’ve done, and I know that Mon-El will too.”   Suddenly overcome with shyness in the face of her profound gratitude, Cisco clears his throat and nods, but says nothing more.   “I should go check on him,” she decides, looking down at the glasses in her hands as though they are a symbol of newly bestowed hope.  “I’ve already been away from him for too long.   “Sure,” Winn nods.   She doesn’t even realize she’s turned on her super speed until she’s standing outside of his containment cell.  He looks different than the last time she was here a few hours ago.   “We’ve covered him in a blanket that’s lined with polypropylene,” her mother informs her.   “We’re hoping that the blanket will dampen the surplus electrical conductivity happening in his cells.   After the incident, Dr. Danvers attached him to electrical leads, allowing his body to absorb electricity to speed his healing process.  His skull was…severely damaged,” Caitlin winced, suddenly aware that her occasional struggles with bedside manner were coming to the fore.  Research medicine allowed her to keep a comfortable distance between the blunt force of her words and the patients that might be hurt by them.  “That sounded worse than it actually was,” she course-corrects.   “No,” Kara negates with a shake of her head, her fists clenching at her side.  “Everyone tries to downplay the damage I did, but I know my own strength.  I was hitting an invulnerable man hard enough to put his lights out, and then…all of the sudden…he wasn’t invulnerable anymore.  If he was human he’d be dead, and I would have killed him.”   “Honey,” Eliza Danvers says, placing a hand on her shoulder, “he isn’t human, and these are extraordinary circumstances.”   “Circumstances I caused.”   “It’s not that simple,” Eliza disagrees.  “One way or another this was going to happen.  The longer his psyche simmered the smaller the trigger would have needed to be to set him off, and the greater the resulting explosion.  If it hadn’t happened when it did…it could have been triggered by anything at any time afterwards, Kara. What if it had happened in the bar, or on the street?  What if you hadn’t been there to contain him?”   Her mother’s point of view made her feel marginally better, if only for the reason that her response to his meltdown saved untold people from injury or death, if it had occurred outside the insular bubble of the DEO.     “And there’s also the possibility that any damage caused by a public meltdown could have set your alien acceptance movement back by years, if not decades,” Caitlin adds.  “On Earth-1 we have enough trouble with people accepting the existence of meta-humans.”   “It wasn’t the most ideal circumstances, Honey, but it could have been far, far worse.”  Eliza’s skill at applying a silver lining to the darkest of dark clouds has not waned in the years since Kara has grown from pre-teen to adult.   “Can I sit with him for a while?” she asks, wondering if the presence of the polypropylene blanket will prevent her from taking up her earlier sentry position.   “Of course,” Eliza says.  “Talk to him.  We never know what might reach him.”   Kara nods as her mother opens the hermetically sealed door of the containment chamber.  Gazing at the deceptively peaceful looking form of her unconscious boyfriend, Kara hears the hiss-pop-suction of the door sealing her in.  Eliza presses another button, this one connected to a speaker.   “I’ll be right here,” Eliza informs her, her voice tinny and over-amplified by the speakers.  Kara can’t help but feel that her adoptive mother is talking about more than just her physical presence.   “I know,” she acknowledges over her shoulder.  This room, like the other cells, is constructed of materials impenetrable by Supergirl.  Tested and Certified.  Without her mother to release her, Kara is just as trapped inside the quarantine as Mon-El.  She tries not to let the door sealing behind her sound like the heavy clank of a slamming jail cell, but is unsuccessful.  Each time she enters this room it takes her a moment to adjust to the feeling of being trapped.   Her chair sits at his bedside, just as she left it a few hours earlier.  Slightly off-kilter with one rounded foot missing from its front leg, the chair appears disheartened somehow, as though it lost hope while waiting for her return.  Kara eases into the chair, finding the slight clank-clank of the empty-footed leg striking the ground comforting somehow, as the chair rocks back and forth beneath the force of her added weight.   Burrowing her hand beneath the blanket weighted heavily with polypropylene, she finds his hand and pulls it out from beneath the blanket, kissing the back of it.  Kara wraps her thumb around his, grasping at his hand as through preparing to drag him back from a precipice she can’t see, much less comprehend.   “I told you I’d be back,” she whispers.  With her free hand she strokes his cheek, careful not to disturb the wired leads attached to temple.  They took the opportunity while he was vulnerable to place an IV port in the crook of his elbow.  Her mother and Dr. Snow had taken copious blood samples at the time, and hope to retrieve more if…when…he wakes up, for comparison.  But even without the IV port, Kara is still amazed by the number of machines they could attach to him that don’t involve pricking his skin.   A pair of dark goggles covers his eyes, not to block any beams of super-heated light that might emerge from his eyes when they open, but rather to measure his eye movements.  In concert with tiny leads pressed to several locations on his skull, his brain waves are constantly monitored as Dr. Snow and her mother analyze its data output for the slightest change.  Kara slips the goggles from his face and sets them aside.   There’s a brief kerfuffle outside of the quarantine cell as Caitlin attempts to determine why Mon-El’s eye movements ceased without warning or a typical transition.  Through the transparent barrier, Kara makes eye contact with the scientist, silently informing her that she needs time with her boyfriend, sans the goggles that make him look like someone she doesn’t know.   Also different is the beard that has grown into a bushy scruff in his sleep.  For a moment Kara considers using her laser vision to give him a shave, but finds that she likes growth of hair on his chin and upper lip.  It makes him seem…regal…somehow – like a sleeping Prince Charming, awaiting only her kiss to awaken him from this cursed slumber.   “I’m sorry I was gone for so long,” she tells him, squeezing his hand tightly with hers, hoping he’ll somehow sense her presence.  “Something’s happened that…I just…I can’t tell you this while you’re unconscious,” she decides.  “Because I’ll just have to do it again when you wake up and I don’t think I can go through that twice.”   His eyes glide back and forth beneath closed eyelids and she wonders what he’s seeing in his own mind to make his Rapid Eye Movement so frenetic.  “I’m here, baby,” she whispers, leaning closer to his ear.  “Can you hear me at all in there?  Or have you shut me out completely?”  The thought of it sends fear slicing through her like a lightning strike.  “Are you angry at me in there?”  A tear she never felt building slips down her cheek.  “I wouldn’t blame you one bit…not for a second.  I wasn’t…I wasn’t what you needed,” she confesses.  “I see that now.  But I need you to come out of this so I can tell you how sorry I am.  So I can try to be what you need.”   He doesn’t move, but for his eyes he doesn’t so much as twitch.  Whatever is going on inside of him…it’s not making its way to an external expression of any kind.  Rather than finding it soothing, she is disturbed by his stillness, the outward tranquility she senses…knows…is hiding something far more chaotic.  If only she could be certain, he is safe in there and not reliving his personal hell over and over.  She’d give anything to look inside of his mind and get a glimpse of what is holding him there.   “Are you back there again?” she wonders idly, stroking his face.  “Is that why you won’t wake up?”  Kara sighs deeply, sinking against the backrest of her molded chair, trying to combat the despair threatening to overwhelm her.  “Just the other day you told me you wouldn’t go back if you could, and now I can’t get you to leave it. Are you happy in there?” she asks, afraid he’ll open his eyes and answer in the affirmative.   “I know how hard it is,” she confesses, “to leave your home, even when you know it’s a dream.   Even when there’s as much to come back to as you’re leaving behind.  It’s the hardest thing in the world, baby.  Hard enough to break you.  I just wish I could help you find your way back, to remember that you have a life here, even if it’s not perfect sometimes.  I wish I could be there with you,” she whispers longingly, prayerfully.   It takes a moment for those words to sink into her own mind, as if she’d put them into the universe without expectation of fulfillment, only to have the possibility of fruition suddenly present itself.  Had there been a lightbulb over her head, it would have lit up with blinding whiteness and then promptly exploded with the force of it.   “That’s it!” she exclaims.  In the space of her next heartbeat, she’s banging on the chamber door demanding exit.  Eliza ask what’s wrong before the door has a chance to slide open with hiss-pop.  “I have an idea,” she explains, “but I need Alex.”   “She mentioned something about meeting with J’onn,” Eliza supplies.   “Thanks, Mom.  I’ll be back.”    Less than minute later, she’s bursting into the conference room, where J’onn and Alex have their heads huddled at one end of the long table.  “Kara, did something happen?”   Alex jumps from the table, her eyes widening with concern.   “Black Mercy,” Kara replies.   “Come again?” J’onn demands, his hands finding his hips.   “The Virtual Reality helmet that Maxwell Lord retrofitted so that you could go into my Black Mercy dreams, do we still have it?”   “Of course,” Alex shrugs, “somewhere buried in storage.  But why would you…you want to go into his head!”  Taking less than a second to catch up with her sister.   “It will work, won’t it?” Kara interrogates.  “You said yourself, it’s like he’s still awake, but his body doesn’t know it.  That’s how it was with me when I was in the grip of the Black Mercy, right?”   “Your brain waves were slightly different,” Alex side-eyes J’onn as though seeking assistance.   “Are you sure this is a good idea?” J’onn wonders, rather more ineffectually than Alex might have preferred.   “Can you fix the device so that it will work?” Kara’s skin flushes with desperation.  She’s had it with sitting at his bedside and feeling helpless, she needs to do something.   Alex recognizes the desperation and frustration written across her sister’s face and makes the decision to do whatever it takes to help her, even if it’s dangerous.  Determining that perhaps…she needs to have a little faith, too.  “I’ll talk to Winn, maybe if we put our heads together—“   “Thank you, Alex,” Kara breathes, throwing her arms around her sister before she can even finish.  “And I’m sure Cisco can help too.  He and Winn are getting along like a house on fire.”   “I will do this on one condition,” Alex hedges, her brown eyes boring resolutely into Kara’s blue.   “Anything,” Kara agrees, a genuine smile crossing her face for the first time in days.   “Take a shower,” Alex says, “and get something to eat.  Maybe sit under the sun lamp for a while.”   “But—“   “You’re running on fumes, Kara.  Everyone can see it.  You have circles under your eyes and I have never seen that before!  If you used this device, you will need to be at full strength.  There’s no predicting how long you’ll be in there and you won’t be able to eat, and the radiation from the yellow sun lamp wreaks havoc on the helmet’s signal, so you won’t be able to refuel that way.”   “So I’ll need to top up,” Kara gathers with a nod.   “Exactly.”   “Fine,” she agrees.  “Get started on the helmet, and I’ll grab a few pizzas.  Tinkering always makes Winn hungry.”   “I’ll have the usual,” Alex replies, one side of her mouth lifting up in a half smile.   “Of course.”   An hour later Kara returns to the DEO with a dozen pizzas, three of which she eats while watching Winn and Cisco huddle over the device, one taking notes while the other makes calculations.   Somewhere in her mind, she imagined a few quick turns of a screwdriver, a handful of spliced wires and she’d be off on a new adventure in the Innerspace of Mon-El’s dreams but, as it turned out, it wasn’t quite that easy to retro- fit the already retro-fitted helmets.  Winn and Cisco labored and debated for days over the numbers and the dangers, and all the pitfalls that could come if they got it wrong.  Cisco was even forced to travel back to Earth-2 for a day to consult with someone called Harry, and then to Earth-1 for another day to build a specialized piece of equipment to merge with the helmet that would help translate her brainwaves to match Mon-El’s.   Finally, after four days of anxious waiting on Kara’s part, Winn makes the last adjustments to the helmet, a tiny screw driver in one hand, and a folded slice of Meat Lover’s in the other.  Cisco dexterously employs both hands to splice two new wires into the bright bundle of multi-colored spaghetti already there.  After twisted a bit of copper wiring together he looks up at Winn and nods, communicating his completion non-verbally.  Winn twists one last screw and echoes Cisco’s nod.   “Zatsabouit,” Winn garbles, half-chewed pizza pocketed into the side of his cheek like an underachieving chipmunk.   Kara polishes off another slice of Hawaiian while sitting atop a nearby lab table, her feet dangling two feet from the ground.  “Huh?’ she asks, her eyebrows crinkling in confusion.   Winn chews at his mouthful of pizza, Winn waves his tiny screwdriver in Kara’s direction.  But Cisco interrupts before Winn can swallow his food.  “He said…that’s about it.”   “It’s done?” she queries, lighting up with excitement as she hops down from the table.   “Well…the helmet is done,” Cisco shrugs with one shoulder.    “I still have to rewrite the software,” Winn finishes.   “What are you talking about?  What’s wrong with the software?”   “It’s lacking something important,” Alex supplies.  “Winn and I talked about it while you were sitting with Mon-El.  He wasn’t here the last time this was used.”   “Because I was kicked out!” he interjects, before explaining to Cisco in an aside, “I didn’t work here then.”   “He’s going to write software that includes a back door—“ Alex clarifies.   “It will be a door—“ Cisco nods.   “Literally,” Winn finishes.   “When I was in your head, Kara, there was no safety net.  It was either stay in there with you until you were convinced it was fake or be forcibly pulled out by J’onn, which could have had damaging consequences to my brain, since the helmet had been untested.  And this isn’t like Black Mercy, Kara, where you defeat its deceit and it detaches and crawls away.  You’ll be up against Mon- El’s mind and he might be harder to convince.  Worst case scenario, there’s also the possibility that he’s lucid in there and just doesn’t know how to wake up.  This way you’ll have a way out if you need it.  For both of you.”   “Shouldn’t take too long,” Cisco adds in a blasé manner, as though his confidence in Winn is a forgone conclusion.  Alex nods at him, as though thanking him for adding his reassurances.   “You’ll have enough time for a shower.”  Alex instructs, tossing a glance over her shoulder at the guys as she walks Kara from the room.  “You’ll need to wear a hospital gown so that we can attach leads to your body, so we can monitor your vitals.  I’ve left one in the locker room for you, along with your pills.”   “Pills?” Kara asks, and then, before Alex can explain, “Oh!”   “You should go ahead and start…assuming my calculations are correct.  No time like the present.”   Kara nods her head, confirming that her sister knows her clockwork-like cycle just as well as she does.  Her forehead crinkles with confusion, before asking, “But doesn’t it have to be taken every day?  What if I’m under longer than that?  Maybe I should wait until after....”   “Take the pill,” Alex urges, squeezing her sister’s bicep, “and call it a leap of faith.”   Kara licks her lips, her throat tightening as her eyes tears up.  She’s lost track of how many tears have been spilled since The Meltdown.  All she wants is the man she loves back in her arms, and as the days have passed, her faith has dwindled to the smallest of embers.  “I will,” she whispers.   “Then two hours under the sun lamp,” Alex demands.  “Or…you can always catch some rays above the stratosphere.  Your choice.”   She chooses the latter, to no one’s surprise.  Even at her worst, flying always improves her bleakest outlook, helps her think when she has particularly difficult problem or solve, or soothes her when she’s sad.  At the moment, though, Kara finds herself afflicted by all three.   It’s always been a solitary activity for her, flying above the clouds.  In the past, events have necessitated her flying with J’onn or with Kal in the service of her city of the planet.  Coming up here, however, where even the clouds are far below her, like white smudges on a blue and green canvas, is always a lonely, silent endeavor, where nothing disturbs her but the torturous intensity of her own thoughts.  Sometimes, it’s what she wants – the solitude – to take a break from the mantle of it all, if only for a few moments.  And sometimes she comes to listen for those cries in the night, the ever-present racing of frightened heartbeats, and desperate pleas for mercy – mercy she is often the only one to provide.   If Cisco is right, maybe she doesn’t have to be alone up here anymore.  Perhaps if…when…he learns to fly, Mon-El will join her here, and he can be her partner, her true mate, in yet another way.  But first, she must help him find the way out of whatever labyrinth he’s managed to build for himself in that unfathomably resilient mind of his.  Having had enough of floating, soaking up radiation, and feeling better than she has in three days, Kara shifts her direction back to the DEO, miles below, and switches on her speed.   “It’s time to get my boyfriend back,” she says aloud, though her sonic boom swallows the sound of it.     *****   Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!