Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

2260 lightyears. That’s how far Earth is from Krypton.

Jeremiah tells you this one night as he’s setting up a telescope on the back porch. You’ve been living with the Danvers for about a month and Alex’s birthday is coming up. The telescope is for her; she’d wanted one since long before you’d arrived.

(Alex hasn’t been talking about space much lately. You only know she used to because you’d overheard Jeremiah asking her about it; she’d simply said that she’d grown out of her astronomy phase and wanted to study biology instead. You don’t want to think too much about why.)

(You don’t talk about space much either.)

You stand stiffly as you watch him slot the eyepiece into place, your back practically pressed against the side of the house like your spine wants to melt into the wood. Alex is away on an overnight trip with her class and her father wants to surprise her with an early present when she gets back. He says that he’s hoping to rekindle her love for the stars, the love that they’d bonded over all through Alex’s childhood. Even as he talks about her, though, you count the number of times he glances back over his shoulder at you with that look plastered across his face.

He looks at you like your impervious flesh is brittle and he’s waiting for you to break, like the alien girl who flew two thousand lightyears and plummeted to the ground in a metal cocoon needs to be wrapped in a new one of cotton and sympathy or she might shatter into pieces like the planet she left behind.

The wood beneath your fingertips splinters slightly as you flatten your palms against the paneling.

You don’t want sink into that gaze, don’t want to let the softness envelop you. It would be so easy, and you’re so so tired, but your mother didn’t send you two thousand lightyears to be soft. You don’t want him to look at you like you’re fragile—or maybe what you really don’t want is for him to be right.

You weren’t supposed to be like this, not here under Earth’s yellow sun. Great powers, your mother had said. Extraordinary things.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

You don’t want to be taken care of, don’t want to let these people take care of you. But your eyes close for a second, and you think you might let them anyways.

Jeremiah straightens from where he’s been kneeling to appraise what he’s built. He glances up at the sky briefly before sidling over to you and sinking back down into a crouch so he’s looking up at you instead. His voice is gentle, seeping through your locked vertebrae and lacing its tendrils around your spine, as he begins to tell you what Earth’s scientists know about the planet that used to be Krypton.

The human astronomers don’t know its name. They haven’t made the connection between the story of Superman’s home planet and a red dwarf star system, one of billions, trillions, half a galaxy away. Krypton is a secret kept between Kal-El and the Danvers and a select few others. To everyone else, it is simply a number slapped on a data point, filed away into some NASA database for potentially habitable exoplanets, and Superman’s lost home remains an idea, a concept, woven into the mythos of an extinct race and a planet’s Last Son.

Jeremiah tells you about Krypton as if a piece of the home you’d lost would be a comfort to you (as if those pieces of your planet, you learn later, aren’t the only things on this one that are actually capable of breaking you).

“2260 lightyears,” he says to the sky, unable to hide the wonder that colors the edges of his voice.

You say nothing.

You don’t tell him that you already knew the distance you’d traveled, that your aunt had shown you Earth years ago when she told you stories about the universe. You don’t tell him that, during the years when you were stuck, frozen, in the Phantom Zone, you’d repeated that number to yourself (in its Kryptonian equivalent) so many times, so deep in whatever small part of your mind still remembered enough to want out of the nothingness, that it almost lost all meaning.

It’s the number that separates the before and after in your life. You’d once thought it was all that separated you from your purpose, your duty. Your destiny. 2260 lightyears between you and your reason for existing. You don’t tell him that this number, your number, is inscribed into your very bones.

(It turns out you were wrong, though. You’d reached zero, finally, finally, but then you looked up and there was Kal-El, standing over your pod and extending his hand to you, and your number began to expand again, only this time it stretched out so far you couldn’t even see the end.)

Jeremiah looks through the scope, aims it to the heavens, and he beams.

“It’s still up there,” he whispers with the hint of a smile. He explains what a lightyear is, as if you hadn’t been the one who’d just traveled over two thousand of them, and tells you that 2260 lightyears means that Krypton isn’t gone, not really. He lays a hand gently on your arm, eyes warm, and says that Krypton will be up there for centuries to come.

You nod and you try to smile, but it doesn’t reach your eyes. You want to say thank you, because you know he’s only trying to help, but the words get caught behind your teeth.

He’s doing this for you, you think, as you try to meet his gaze (you can’t; your eyes lock somewhere to the left). You know this, but despite the warmth you can feel radiating off this kind man who is doing all he knows how to, you shiver. The hair stands up on your arms and you’ve been here long enough to know that the nighttime chill on this planet is not the cause.

You don’t tell him that you don’t want him to show you where Krypton is in the sky. You don’t tell him that you’d barely been on Earth two days when you’d found it on your own.

You don’t need a telescope or starcharts or coordinates of ascension and declination—it speaks to you, as if Rao’s gravitational pull is stretching through space and tugging at your Kryptonian cells, calling you home. Calling you back to the void from which you’d barely escaped, back to that yawning fissure in the fabric of your universe. It reached for you as soon as the yellow sun set on your first night on Earth and the stars blinked awake in the purpling sky.

You wish it didn’t. You wish you could scrub away whatever evolutionary memory of it is embedded in your alien DNA; you wish you could look at the sky and not remember. Because despite what the sky says, Krypton is not still up there. Orbiting around Rao is empty space where a planet used to be, and you are the only person in this entire universe who knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt, the only person left alive who was there when the world ended. Everyone else is still waiting to hear the news, waiting two thousand years for confirmation as the obituary for your world travels through space in packets of light.

You don’t want to see the ghost of your dead planet as it existed two millennia ago, back when it was young and whole and strong, back when things still could have turned out differently. Back when it still could have been saved. But Jeremiah is crouching beside you and smiling softly as he adjusts the telescope to your height.

You don’t tell him the things you know. You don’t tell him the things he doesn’t.

You step up to the scope, leaning forward with your hands folded behind your back, fingers clasped together so tightly your bones grind. You look through the eyepiece.

* * *

Each of the lights in the sky is a planet or a star with a story and a life, another Krypton or another Earth. You remember this and it warms you, but then you remember that Krypton is still up there, too, sparkling away.

You wonder how many more of those planets had a story and a life and a people like yours. How many had an ending like yours as well. You wonder how many parents raced their own apocalypses to try to send their children off, hugging tearful goodbyes as the ground beneath their feet fissured and collapsed. You wonder how many more of you are out there in the universe—girls who are the last of their kind, who carry the ghosts of entire worlds on their backs.

You look at the stars until each one of them makes you wonder—

Maybe they’re all dead and you just haven’t heard about it yet.

(You think there should be a gaping void in the stars where Krypton was and not this lie that haunts you, taunts you, every night. That tiny bright dot should have been ripped from the sky in an instant just like you were ripped from it, like it was ripped from you. There should be something, anything, to mark the death of a planet, of a whole world. Your whole world. Something so that every person looking up would know what happened there. So that someone, anyone, might at least begin to understand what was lost.)

Sometimes the sky starts to feel more like a graveyard than anything else, full of ghosts trapped up there with no one to mourn them. No one but you. Sometimes you start to feel like one of them. Like you’re a ghost, too, and no one truly knows your story; no one else who remembers is left, no one who is left knows enough to grieve.

Alex always seems to know. She knows enough. On nights like those, she herds you inside at night and distracts you with a movie or some inane story about a boy in her class who may or may not want to ask her out. You know she makes these stories up for you (she doesn’t even like boys; you’ve known for ages despite the fact that she’s never told you) and you’re grateful for that.

But still, some nights you find yourself lying on the roof, haunted but unable to look away. Trapped, almost. You sneak up there, just a short burst of flight that easily goes unnoticed, because you think lying beneath the expanse of sky will help—the house is too small, the walls too close, the air and lights too warm, like the space is encroaching inward, like it might collapse at any moment. You always think coming out here will help, but you realize as soon as your eyes lock onto Rao, at its place of honor in the constellation that you and Alex constructed around it, how very wrong you are.

You feel like you’re back in your pod again, frozen in space and time, looking out through the walls of your glass coffin. Even the tiniest sounds overwhelm you, the lull of waves and crickets that blankets Midvale as it sleeps, and your mind can’t handle filtering your senses anymore so it shuts them down entirely. And suddenly your head is stuck in a vacuum, everything is muffled, and you think this might be worse than the noise. You work your jaw and shake your head to try to clear it. The ringing you hear now is coming from inside your own head.

Rao sits at the eye of a flying bird, the bird you and Alex drew in the stars. You’d decided on a swallow because they were Alex’s favorite, but sometimes as you look up at it you can feel its beak reaching inside your ribcage and closing around what it finds there. It spreads its wings across the sky, a migratory bird with no home to return to, so it burrows into your hollow chest to roost.

Something inside you wakes up and your every instinct screams for you to return to a home that no longer exists. The longer you’re here, the more distance (in time-years not light-) that stretches between you and that home, the less you remember the instinct that calls you to it. But whenever you step back and realize again what you’ve forgotten, you feel the absence in your body like a physical loss. Home is a phantom limb that throbs and aches and takes root in your thoughts until you’re so consumed that you find yourself unable to pry yourself from where you’ve rooted yourself beneath the stars.

You couldn’t fly back down if you’d wanted to, still too stuck in your own head to use your powers. You try, though, willing yourself to go back inside the house, to get back in bed before anyone notices, until you’re finally able to roll your locked-up body off the roof.

You leave a crater in the yard that Alex has to help you fill back in before Eliza and Jeremiah wake up the next morning.

(Sometimes you think the bird might be an albatross instead.)

Alex looks out the window of your bedroom and sees you curled up in a ball in the dirt. You used to think that she was just a light sleeper, but you figured out that she always stays awake until she hears you float in through the window and fold yourself back into the bed that sits across from hers. She never lets herself fall asleep until she’s sure you have first.

So she’s awake when she hears the light thud of your body hitting the ground and a minute later she’s climbing out through your window, shimmying down the drainpipe from the second floor with two shovels tucked under one arm. She doesn’t say a word, just hands one of them and starts digging. It’s just the two of you, standing outside in your pajamas at 3am, silently shoveling the soil your body had displaced back where it belongs.

After this, on bad nights Alex climbs up to join you instead.

After you come to live with the Danvers, you discover very quickly that your sister can climb anything. (To you, it seems she can do just about anything.) If she finds a place that she doesn’t know how to reach, that her human body shouldn’t be able to reach, she figures out a way through sheer force of will because like hell she’s gonna let you go somewhere she can’t follow. She says it’s because she’s competitive, because she’s always had something to prove, even more so now that she has a sister who is superhuman. (She says.)

She sprawls out beside you and starts pointing out constellations, drawing your eyes away from the bright spots of the stars and to the spaces and shapes between them, telling you stories of the heroes and gods that humans saw in the stars thousands of years ago. Sometimes she runs out of myths so she makes up her own and thinks you don’t know the difference.

Sometimes the two of you find man’s myths inadequate—you are two girls from Midvale and yet together your lives span the universe, bigger than anything this Earth alone could produce—so you decide to write your own together. You write across the heavens the story of an orphaned star that fell to Earth and the human girl who saved her, who gave her a home and a reason to stay.

You tell each other the story of the little core of molten iron, formless, lost, the piece of sky that fell and didn’t know what it was or what it wanted to be. Until it saw her mythic hero, just a girl like herself—only she wasn’t a girl, was she? She was a star; she was light itself. A changeling, not a human. But when she met the girl with iron in her eyes and light in her heart, she recognized herself and she knew that’s what she wanted to be. And so she cast herself (molded herself, tempered herself) into a form that mirrored the one before her and she, too, was a girl.

You draw lines between the stars and rewrite the thousands of lightyears that separate them into the connective tissue that holds together your stories’ bones. Alex helps you exorcise the ghosts, and the two of you construct living things in their place; she grounds the cold, infinite chaos of the universe in the two of you lying on a roof, in the feeling of the gentle slope at your back and Alex’s arm solid and warm against your own.

* * *

At night, the sky above Midvale is inky black and sparkling. You come to love it, once the good nights start to outnumber the bad. Before you arrived on Earth, you’d never seen a sky so clear and dark (the sky on Krypton hadn’t looked like this since long before you were born). The expanse of it is so wide, endless, that, on those good nights, looking up is almost like flying through space again.

Sometimes, in those moments when your mind is blissfully, fleetingly quiet, you find yourself floating a few inches above the rooftop, just so your back no longer grazes the shingles. You just hover there, the night air wrapping around you, safe in the way that sunlight, for all the power it gives you, is not.

It’s strange, you think, that a being who gets her strength from the sun would spend so much of her life in the dark.

But then you remember that the only reason your Kryptonian body has superpowers on this planet is because your cells were made for a darker world, one that orbited a red dwarf star. Your body only loves the light of the yellow sun, your cells ignited beneath its rays, because it knows the difference. The light only exists because it has darkness to set it apart.

The sunrise is always a welcome thing; you wouldn’t go so far as to say you prefer the night. But

You come to appreciate it—the night, the sky, the darkness.

The silence.

There’s no sound in space. Over two thousand lightyears of silence, two thousand lightyears that should have passed in an instant with your pod’s FTL capabilities but that instead stretched into the decades you spent frozen in an interstellar limbo with nothing but your own thoughts.

What does it sound like when a planet dies?

Nothing.

It doesn’t sound like anything at all.

Except that’s not right.

There shouldn’t be sound in space, it’s a vacuum, there is no air through which sound waves can travel. And there was silence, so so much of it, between Krypton and Earth. There’d been so much silence that you've almost forgotten the moment itself—

They say the Big Bang created the universe, but the only bang you remember is the one that ended yours.

You remember it, maybe not an actual sound, but the feeling, the percussive blast that quaked your bones, that you sometimes still feel echoes of in your marrow, a gravitational tempest strong enough to wreck your ship on the shores of purgatory.

What does it sound like when a planet dies?

It sounds like I love you, I won’t fail you. It sounds like a thirteen-year-old girl unable to cry because the force of it knocks the sobs back into her chest.

It sounds like the loudest thing you’ve ever heard, every sound you’ve ever encountered on Krypton and on Earth brought together in your mind and plated over the memory of that moment. You remember a vast cosmic howl, like the planet itself was groaning, wailing, voicing everything your body couldn’t. Because when a planet dies, you think, someone should cry for it.

* * *

When you’re a little older, Alex starts asking you more about what you remember from before, bits of curiosity feeling for cracks in her restraint, threatening to break through the first rule of alien foster sister club (you don’t ask about alien foster sister’s dead alien planet).

Now that you’ve been on Earth for a while, the loss feels a little less raw where it sits in your heart. You don’t know when exactly home begins to mean the Danvers’ instead of the hole in the universe two thousand lightyears away and the ache you once thought you’d never stop feeling. It happens in moments so small you’re not even conscious of it. You say, “I’m going home,” after school each afternoon, following a script you’d pieced together in your first weeks on this planet, but one day you realize that it’s stopped feeling like a lie. When Eliza takes you with her to a bioengineering conference in Berlin, you think, “I miss home,” and you realize you’re not talking about Krypton anymore.

(You’re not talking about the house in Midvale either; the summer after Alex graduates from college, the two of you go on a two-month trek in Nepal and not once does the thought of missing home cross your mind.)

You know Alex has always wanted to ask you about home, your Krypton-home, and one day you realize that you don’t mind if she does. You wouldn’t mind talking about it with her (you might even want to, need to, though you don’t think you’re quite ready to tell anyone that yet), and you know she wants to ask even before she’s allowed herself to consciously realize it.

Because you know how Alex’s mind works. She’s a Danvers, through and through, always trying to look inside things, to take them apart and see how they work. Sometimes you wonder what she would do if she had your vision, if she could see into anything and everything and deconstruct it all in her mind. You think she could probably take over the world.

Alex with her human eyes but vision greater than you think yours could ever be—she wants to take the whole universe apart, to break the infinite into comprehensible fragments, and you realize there is nothing you want more than to help her.

So you don’t wait for her to ask. You tell her about the Phantom Zone and Kryptonian technology and spacecrafts built to travel thousands of lightyears. You tell her what you remember about the ecological destruction that spelled the end, piecing together snippets of memories that you didn’t even realize you had—overheard arguments between your mother and your aunt when they thought you weren’t paying attention, conversations in hushed tones that cut off abruptly as soon as you entered the room.

You tell her these things that only you know. You try to fill in the gaps of all the things she doesn’t.

But as you tell her all of this, there is one single question that Alex does ask.

She asks if you remember how it happened.

She asks if you remember the moment Krypton died.

(You’re the only one in this universe who possibly could, after all.)

You do remember it, and you’re sure Alex has woken you from enough nightmares that she knows exactly how clearly you remember it.

You don’t take the out she gives you, because you’re ready. You’ve never talked about it, not with anyone, but you think maybe you’re tired of carrying this with you. You’ve waited years—you waited too long to tell Jeremiah—and you think maybe don’t want to wait anymore.

You tell her what it sounds like when a planet dies. You tell her how the ground shuddered and groaned, how tectonic plates yawned apart and revealed the gaping maw underneath.

You tell her about the light, the blast, the outward surge of the dust of your planet and its crest breaking against the hull of your pod.

And Alex—well, Alex tells you that planets shouldn’t be able to explode. She doesn’t want to, but you can always tell when there’s something Alex isn’t saying. She just sits in silence long after you finish you story, so you nudge her.

(Later you learn you aren’t as perceptive as you’d thought, but sitting across from Alex in this moment, the eulogy for your planet hanging heavy between you, you’re right.)

“Planets are fundamentally stable,” she says, and what you hear is that the way Krypton died defies all logic and science and reason. As if there could ever be logic behind something like that.

You don’t know what to make of this, so you wait. Alex doesn’t know what to make of it, either. So you wait.

Her eyes aren’t focused on you anymore; you recognize this look, the one she gets when she’s focused on something inside her own head. She’s seeing it happen, or trying to see it, trying to reconstruct the moment in her mind so she can pull it apart.

“It shouldn’t have happened.” She shakes her head gently. “The gravitational binding energy that holds a planet together is– that would have required– ”

She cuts herself off, running through it in her mind again.

The energy that holds a planet together should be greater than the energy any internal mechanism could possibly put out against it. Krypton was a lot of things, but apparently what it should have been was not one of them.

(After this conversation with Alex, there are moments when you fear that you, your Kryptonian body, might also one day simply decide not to be. You think that the energy that binds you together underneath your skin might suddenly decide to stop following the rules that govern it, and all these pieces of you that you feel vibrating against your edges might finally break free.)

Alex’s eyes finally snap into focus again, and she just stares at you.

“It never should have happened,” she whispers.

You don’t know what to say.

“But it did.”

“It did.”

She slides over to you and pulls you in. And suddenly, you do know.

This is what you make of all of this.

“And now I’m here.”

“And now you’re here.”

Chapter Text

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future…

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

— Voyager Spacecraft Statement by President Jimmy Carter. July 29, 1977.

The first time you die, you’re thirteen years old. You’re lost and alone, sealed in your pod, falling and falling and falling. Your mind shuts down and your frantic body stills, and there in your chrysalis you spend twenty four years, just waiting to become.

Inside a cocoon, a caterpillar doesn’t just become a butterfly (not that you think you are a butterfly; you just think about cocoons a lot). The creature must first cease to exist. Metamorphosis implies death—of a sort, at least. Death of the thing that came before.

The before breaks down into a genetic soup, digests itself until, like a planet razed, nothing remains but dust and water, yet somehow it retains the memory of the after that it’s meant to become. The proteins rearrange themselves, form eyes and legs and wings, and what emerges bears no resemblance to the thing that went in, the thing that was lost.

Conservation of mass, you always tell yourself. When you find yourself looking up again, lost again, trapped among the stars—conservation. Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, so nothing is lost. Everything that Krypton once was still exists, or so physics says. It’s just scattered across light years and galaxies and any of the myriad dimensions and universes you know must exist.

But the memory of Krypton? The stories and the voices and the lives that vanished when the mass of the planet was sown across the galaxy? Those memories live inside your matter alone.

You are the Voyager probe, a golden record launched into space to tell the story of your people long after they are gone. Your memories are infallible, gilded by the light of Earth’s yellow sun until they are as permanent as etchings on cold metal.

A golden record, a cosmic message in a bottle. A baby floated downriver in a basket of chrome, sent across the Milky Way with a wish and a prayer to guide you.

* * *

The second time you die, you’re twenty five. You feel the echoes of your first death, the same trappings around the edges, only this time it doesn’t feel like losing.

“I’ll join my mother,” you say to J’onn. “We’ll be together in Rao’s light.” And you find yourself believing it.

You aren’t lying when you say you’re at peace with it. You aren’t simply telling J’onn what he wants to hear so he’ll let you go (though you’re so used to doing that by now that sometimes you have a hard time distinguishing between what you want and what they need).

A calm settles over you that is more powerful than anything you’ve ever experienced. You register absently how cold the vacuum of space is—it must be cold, there are crystals of ice frosting your lips in a way that even your freeze breath does not back on Earth—but all you feel is warm.

You’re falling, you notice. You shouldn’t be, not when you’ve flown this high, when the Earth’s gravity can no longer reach you, when there’s nothing left to pull you home again—you should be floating, orbiting forever, trapped again like you were in the Phantom Zone. But there you are, falling again.

You’re falling again, your bones too heavy for your leaden muscles, only this time you remember what it felt like to fly. This doesn’t feel so different, as it turns out.

You remember how far you had to fall before the first time you flew, through light years of space onto the surface of a planet with a yellow sun, before you ever knew you even could.

* * *

It’s Alex, in the end.

(It’s always Alex).

You flew too high for the Earth to pull you back, but not too high for her. She’s your gravity, your beacon, the North Star that guides you home.

* * *

Afterward, you think about that moment a lot—those few minutes (or seconds, or hours, you’re not quite sure exactly how long it was) before Alex was able to reach you, those moments you spent floating between the Earth and the yellow sun, adrift once more in the vacuum of space. You think you must have felt weightless then, more so even than when you fly above the Earth.

Because in that moment, you were done. No more crosses to bear, no more capes or lives or worlds, living or dead, sitting on your shoulders. Nothing left but you and the darkness of space and the warmth of Rao’s light.

Those spaces are where you’ve always existed. The in-betweens—the dark gaps between the stars, the silences between words. The empty spaces inside you that once housed all the people you loved. You are made of those spaces, defined by the things you lack instead of the things you are, like a constellation—more void than stars, more loss than person.

Sometimes you wonder if Earth is more of an in-between than the Phantom Zone ever was, only a detour before you can finally find your way home.

Because here’s the thing: you didn’t die. Not at thirteen, not at twenty five. You lived.

You wonder when the two words began to mean the same thing.

You stop keeping track, stop counting the number of times you should have died but you didn’t, because this—this life—is the gift that you were cursed to bear.

You were never meant to be just a girl, someone who is born and lives and dies. You are a gilded symbol of hope, a vessel tasked to carry something greater than one person, and you realize that will outlive everyone on this planet.

It’s okay, you tell yourself. You’ve done this before. Loss is written into your DNA. You are built for this. Like flying, like falling—losing is something your body remembers how to do.