. (afrit) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-02 00:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: dc comics, sam winchester, supergirl |
Who: Kara and Sammy Winchester
What: A visit
Where: Smallville
When: Before Gotham went nutty
Warnings/Rating: Nope!
Kara had been hiding in Sanctuary for days.
Days and days of quiet, white walls and stillness. It was pristine, and it reminded her so much of home, and she both hated and loved it for that. But Stephanie had been right about one thing; she wasn't made for isolation. She studied what data was still accessible from her father's sunstone. She played with Krypto. She slept. She ate. And then she couldn't stand it anymore. She ventured out early in the morning, when the sun was barely up, and she went to Kansas. Smallville felt safe, like it had before. There was nothing but wheat fields for miles, and she could hear the birds in the trees and nothing else, if she concentrated really hard. It was far away from any city bustle, and she brought Krypto back with her the following morning. Maybe there weren't people there for her to talk to (she didn't venture near any of the inhabited farms), but there was blue sky and sunshine, and she was starting to realize she felt better there than she did under the ocean.
She hadn't forgotten that Sam was supposed to come, and she kept the door propped, but she wasn't counting on company. It had just become habit now, propping the door before she took Krypto and made her way to the largest, longest field of grain that Smallville had to offer. It was spring, and the fields were tall and uncared for here, overgrown, and she stayed near the abandoned workshed near the edge of the field, in case Sam did show up. She had no idea what to expect from him, but March said he was nice, and Kara wanted to believe that there were nice people in this strange place.
In the distance, an abandoned farmhouse stood, shutters teetering sideways and the porch door slamming harmlessly as it swung on old hinges. She flopped back onto the ground, between tall stalks of wheat that waved in the early morning breeze. Krypto ran in circles, looking like nothing more than a white labrador that was glad to be free, and the girl in the jeans and the bright blue hoodie laughed, an incorporeal and happy sound from amid the grains.
Sam wasn’t sure what to do to prepare for a world-crossing experience. So he put on what he put on most mornings: drab and unexciting cloth in browns and blues, a gun in a clip at the small of his back (not an easy draw but at least not as obvious while still being there), and a backpack with a standard two day supply in case he got stuck somewhere with no food or water. Sam knew very well that Dean would have put on a gun, strapped on a knife and walked through the door; he also knew that Dean would be pissed he was doing something like this without telling him--but Sam wasn’t as much of a boy scout as Dean liked to think sometimes. He was lying his pants off these days, and he would keep doing it if he thought it was right.
Ford thought Sam was being paranoid, but he was willing to yield to the older man’s experience, especially since he felt guilty for giving Sam a cold. Sam sneezed a few times, but the cough wasn’t anything to keep him down. Smiling at Ford’s good-natured but faintly irritated teasing at Sam’s lack of suffering, Sam stepped a few paces away from the door and looked around. A creaking porch door smacked on old wood behind him, and a warm midwest breeze swept over his face. A waving sea of amazing grace spread out on the flat landscape, and Sam automatically shifted his eyes over, looking for a road, road markers, or a mailbox, things that would give him his location.
Some of the tension of the unknown drained from his shoulders as he stepped down onto solid gravel and followed a worn path away from the farmhouse, which he quickly realized was abandoned. He heard a dog barking and smiled despite himself. Dogs made Sam happy. “Hello!” he called out into the gold sea under the blue sky.
Krypto came running immediately, all big-dog bark and a tail that wouldn't quit wagging. He liked Kara, but he was Kal's dog, and he missed his owner. The man coming down the warm path was big and masculine, and he was closer to what Krypto missed. The dog whined a little when he came closer, realizing his long-lost owner hadn't come to collect him, but the whining only lasted a second before he began a careful approach, wary, and watching the newcomer for something. Whatever the something was, the dog must have found it. He began running forward again, less excitedly, less wag, but still with a happy-dog grin on his face. He fell into step beside Sam with a bark, leading from Sam's side, toward the center of the nearest field.
Kara sat up in the tall wheat a few second into the dog's scrutiny, but she didn't interrupt. She knew what Sam looked like, thanks to March, but it was the same as reading a description in a book. Her imagination had needed to fill in things, and it wasn't the same as a hologram, and definitely not the same as seeing someone in person. He was younger than she expected, she realized, and less formal. He was big like Kal, though, and it made Kara a little lonely to watch him lumber toward her. She stood a second later, because there wasn't any point sitting there and sulking. She'd been doing nothing but sulk since her recent conversation on the sunstone.
"ëoS :bEm" she called out, the words unthinkingly Kryptonian. And then she stood, blonde run through with golden wheat, a tangled tumbled mess to her waist. Her hands went into the pockets of her blue hoodie, and she picked up the backpack she carried everywhere, the one with her suit in it. She approached him on perfectly earthly sneakers, looking like any other eighteen-year old girl on the planet. "Hello. You are Sam?" she asked, her voice heavily laced with a Kryptonian accent, something formal, British meeting Bosnian and coming out sounding young somehow.
Sam waited on the dog while it decided whether or not it felt friendly. He knew exactly how that dog felt, and he thought about it as he decided to crouch down and hold a hand out. This was not the safest way to welcome a dog that might prefer to chomp fingers than allow his ears to be scratched, but it was a risk Sam was accustomed to taking. With people, too. Sam let a smile spread over his face as the dog did what all happy, well-treated dogs do, and then he straightened up to find the girl in the wheat.
He’d done a little bit of research before he’d arrived, but not really as much as he could have. Dean might have been more focused on finding kryptonite than Sam was, even knowing who the girl was and where she came from. Sam had grown up with a comic here or there, taken from convenience store displays, reading stories out of order and trying to decide whether he liked Superman or Batman better. He’d always chosen Superman because the colors in Superman’s books were brighter, but in the end awful things had happened to the son of Krypton, and Sam had stopped reading them in favor of short detective novels featuring Encyclopedia Brown and the like.
Sam stopped at the edge of a field, balancing on a heap of dirt that marked the edge of a plow, the tips of his worn in running sneakers bobbing in the clean dirt and the fresh air ruffling his hair. “That’s me.” He put out a hand in her direction, automatically stepping forward a little bit a smiling a perfectly thoughtless smile that was naturally pleased to meet her. “You must be Kara.” He pronounced the first “a” in her name incorrectly.
Krypto cheerfully bound around them in circles, quickly getting over his melancholy and flopped ears about Sam being the wrong person. Kara watched the dog, laughing at the slightly manic circles of white. Krypto was a perfectly normal dog; she envied him sometimes. "Kara," she corrected, soft A, and she shoved her hands deeper into the hoodie pockets. "I know it is the custom here to shake hands, but it is not a very good idea," she said, sounding sheepish and guilty and young. Her face was made for smiles, and the somberness didn't sit well on her sun-kissed features. In the absence of a handshake, she got a tip of her head, a nod toward the abandoned house. "Do you like to explore?" she asked him.
March had told her some things about him, but they didn't all make sense to her. She knew he chased things, and she knew he killed things, but that he did it to help. She was learning, quickly, that even the good people in this place were violent; it made her yearn for home. For quiet and peace. She still didn't think to question what the cost of that peace had been; it was long before she was born, and it was only touched upon in her schooling as a positive, in the way that only things that hadn't been experienced could be.
She fell into step toward the house, and she nodded toward it once more. "Where I am from, old places like this do not exist. We do not keep things from the past that are not useful," she explained. Once, she would have viewed the old farmhouse in the same way. Now, she would give anything to go back to Argo, even to a destroyed and abandoned Argo.
Sam smiled sheepishly when she pointed out that gripping a new Kryptonian’s hand would probably result in pulp and pain. Duh. “Oh, right. Of course. Sorry.” He picked his hand up out of the air and rubbed the back of his head in a distinctly teenage movement that was much younger than his physical appearance. Sam’s capability for violence was well controlled and hid under the surface, where it didn’t poison anything he did. With age and experience came wisdom. “I like getting to know the neighborhood,” he replied in agreement, dropping his hands and putting both into the front pockets of his canvas jacket in an obviously practiced movement.
He turned as one with her and moved back to the farmhouse, at ease in such a broad space and comfortable in the waving grass. He kept grinning at the dog as it frolicked by and sniffed out invisible trails along the side of the road. Looking up, Sam followed her gaze to the farmhouse, which looked quaint and kind on the sunny landscape. “Who’s to say it won’t be useful again?” he asked, smiling a softer smile now and giving her a look meant to be cheerful.
Sam bent down to retrieve an old branch in one long movement of limbs and height, and, straightening, chucked it in the air along the road for the dog.
"Where I am from, there are no places with land like this," she said, motioning as the wheat field as they moved. "Our nutrients come from balanced meal replacements," she explained. "Some people like the old ways, and they have hydroponic bays in their home, but they are few in number, and even they only use what they grow to supplement their balanced meal replacements." She looked sheepish for a moment. "Were. There is so much waste here," she explained, motioning with her hand, ever the budding scientist who could think of so many ways to improve the yield of the wheat field, even while retaining this archaic system of agriculture. But then she laughed when the dog chased after its own tail, and her expression faded to something more appropriate to her age, bright and young and unserious. It was a flittering thing, quick as the wings of a butterfly, the change in expressions. "People do not like that I criticize," she added, a question in the statement. Should she be honest, or should she pretend? Her parents would tell her to be honest, at all costs, but she was not certain that rule was the same here.
She watched him throw the branch, and she laughed as Krypto barked and jumped in the air, trying to catch it mid-road. She ran a little forward then, and she looked over her shoulder to see if Sam would follow. Maybe he was a runner, despite being so very tall; she couldn't tell.
Sam just smiled at her comments about farming. “People are sentimental. Nothing wrong with that. It’s one of the nice things about them.” And one of the things that made them cling to life when they should really move on, turn to poltergeists, murder people in ugly ways, and then get hunters called down on their asses. But he kept that to himself. “And sometimes hard work tastes better because you’re hungry.”
If you pushed aside the recurring problems with death (and Death), the Devil, and various murderous supernatural beings of varying kinds, Sam was pretty much the perfect man. Extremely tall, relatively dark, sometimes blindingly smart, honest, empathetic... and in the best shape anyone could ever ask for given his size and occupation. Sam could run several miles at a stretch on any given day, the number varying with altitude. He could sprint from evil and toward it depending on the situation, and when he wasn’t trying to save the world or kill things that deserved killing, he was doing pull ups and lifting things just to put them down again.
Sam took off after the dog. He wasn’t really chasing to catch it, just like he wasn’t really racing a Kryptonian anywhere. (Sam had taken the whole two-people-one-body-one-door thing in his stride.) The backpack staying in place along with the gun (the Winchesters spent a lot of time running), Sam made a grab for the dog and the dog’s stick, which caused a flurry of tail wagging and darting around in the dust.
Kara gave him a second to catch up, and then she sped ahead, her feet landing on the abandoned from porch in a second, her movement not even visible to the human eye. She leaned against the faded sideboard, the cracking white paint flaking onto her hoodie and leaving traces of itself in her blonde hair. She smiled, too many teeth and cheeks brightly red, and she looked almost like the carefree girl she'd been at home, the one who was more worried about being genematched with a boy and having her first kiss, than she'd been about her future in the science caste.
"We are sentimental," Kara explained when he neared, no indignation in her young voice, and only curiosity that he shouldn't think she was. "But we do not leave old things behind. We capture memories on sunstones," she explained, fishing one of Kal's sunstones from her backpack, a hint of red cape visible as she reached for what she sought. Her own sunstone was too damaged to offer many memories, and it hadn't been created to store any kind of long term data, but Kal's had, and it was only one of many in the Fortress. She palmed it, the tiny blue crystal long enough to fit in her palm and pointed at both ends. "You will see?" she asked, selecting the wrong word for look, and then bringing the crystal to life. The hologram that rose above the stone was the size of a television screen, but that's where the similarities ended.
The people in the hologram looked real and close enough to touch. Kara's expression went sad for a second, and it was a sign of youth, the fact that she couldn't hide her reaction to seeing the family on the screen; Kal, just a baby, and his parents, alive and happy and well. But she hadn't selected this memory for the family alone; the setting was one of Argo's parks, and it was bright and clean. The grass was almost unbelievably green, and the sky just as brilliantly blue. In the distance, tall buildings could be seen, sleek windows and pale, bright structures. There was no smog or pollution, even from the vehicles that flew overhead, while the family chatted and laughed below them. The sounds were crystal clear, chattering in Kryptonian, and Kara swiped her fingers along the stone abruptly, making the sunstone quiet and insignificant again.
Sam jogged up a little while later. He had been running full out for a while but he wasn’t out of breath. The exercise wasn’t effortless, especially with his weight, but at the same time, it would take a lot more to get him to break a sweat. He sat down on the edge of the porch so the dog could run up for ear scratches and tussles for the stick. Sam looked up as Kara spoke, but his expression (Sam’s expressions were transparent 98% of the time) said that when he said “sentimental” he didn’t quite mean the same thing. He didn’t argue it, though.
Sam leaned forward with curiosity to look at the crystal. He grinned. “From the Fortress,” he said, and he just barely managed to bite off the addition of Cool! Putting a palm nearly the size of a dinner plate down on the old sun-weathered wood, Sam leaned forward over one hip and thigh so he could watch the hologram. He glanced up at her only once, just to see her reaction with an awareness of others most men didn’t have.
After the image went dark, Sam said, “It looks like a nice place.” His tone was sympathetic. The dog came up to pull on his sleeve.
"You know the Fortress?" she asked. Why should he know, when the people in her own world didn't even know who she was. And she had the feeling that the ones who did think they knew didn't agree with each other. She was supposed to be Helena's Kara, but nothing Helena said was familiar. She was supposed to be Stephanie's and Damian's Kara too, and Jason didn't have a Kara. For a girl who had just landed here, it was confusing. "How do you know, when no one at home can agree?" she asked. "Does Dean tell you that you are the wrong you?" she asked, March providing his brother's name.
"It was," she said of the place being nice, her hand lowering without thinking to pet Krypto's head, fingertips rubbing at his ears in a way that was gentle enough not to hurt him. Unthinking, and she couldn't hear a thousand voices out here. Out here, the screams and crying were quiet, distant, and she wondered if she would have to stay away from populated places forever, in order to have that silence in her head.
She turned her face up to look at him after that, freckles along the bridge of her nose. "They want me to help in Gotham, but I am worried," she admitted. Her new friends were there, but what if she killed someone else? She still couldn't control her strength when stressed or overwhelmed, and she could control it even less when she was frightened. And despite all the power in this world, she was still scared with frightening regularity.
“I know... of the Fortress,” Sam corrected, seeing no purpose in lying. The Winchesters could be exceptionally good at lying, when they chose to be, but Sam had always preferred telling the truth, which made him worse at it than either his brother or his father had been. Unless circumstances dictated otherwise, Sam went for truth. “I read about it. But I don’t really know anything much about you or your people in detail. I kind of read... this encyclopedia entry. I don’t think it really helps me that much, since, like you said, we’re all different versions. But the encyclopedia is in another door, which is probably what made that work.” Sam shut his mouth and devoutly hoped that there were no encyclopedia entries on him in this world. Right then and there he decided not to look.
Sam dropped his chin to watch the dog. “Dean doesn’t say it, but he’s thinking it. But to me, he and Cas-- I mean, he’s the one that’s behind. A few years. He doesn’t understand what’s happened, and I really don’t want to explain it to him in detail.” Sam lifted a hand and rubbed it across the thigh of his jeans, where it had gone wet and clammy. “It’s too awful.”
Sam set his weight on his knees with his elbows. He was better at talking about her problems than his. “I don’t blame you. But... fear doesn’t go away when you ignore it,” Sam sighed.
She gave him the blankest of looks when he explained the encyclopedia entry. The words sounded like gibberish to her, not translating into anything that existed on Krypton. She tried to memorize the combination of consonants and vowels, intending to find the word herself later. Her access to things was limited in Sanctuary, her own sunstones not being filled with Earth historical data, but she was already planning a trip to the Fortress, and she could try to find the information there. If everything else failed, she could ask March. He never gave her trouble about anything. Their link wasn't persistent, but it was easy enough to activate by calling him in her mind; he would help, if she couldn't find it herself. But she was stubborn, and she'd try to do it on her own first.
She tried to imagine what was too awful to explain in detail. "It is like when I do not want to explain what it is like to know everyone is dead," she finally said, the words costing her emotionally. But Sam was willing to help her, and he deserved the sacrifice, if it helped him to say what he was feeling. She watched him set his weight on his knees, and she looked out into the field after. "Does loneliness go away when you ignore it?" she asked, watching the wheat wave, the sight so foreign that, in that moment, she wanted to be anywhere but this place.
Sam thought about that for a little while. The dog grew bored waiting for him to be entertaining and flopped somewhere just out of the way, but not too far in case he changed his mind. “Sometimes it does. You start working on something... a project with your hands, or something that makes you focus on something else, either one. Then you forget for a while. Focus on something that’s not you, you know?” He shrugged huge shoulders, somehow managing to look like an overgrown puppy while he did it. “At least, that’s what works for me. And then you help people and, on the way, you tend to make friends.”
Sam moved one sneaker and piled dirt into a fortified ridge of dust, protected from the breeze. “You lose people. That’s how it goes sometimes. You just have to keep going.”
Her youth was evident in the look she gave him once he was done. He made it sound so easy, and so doable. But she wasn't very sure. Maybe it was different for him, since he'd had his brother around? She knew that from March, and she wasn't sure how to make him understand that she'd lost everyone, her entire family, and her entire planet. She didn't feel like she belonged on this planet, because she was - as Damian called her - alien. No matter how many friends she made along the way, or how distracted she was, she was still different than everyone else. She hated it, and she hated it in that very young way that only a teenager could hate something. She hadn't been raised with hardships, and she hadn't been raised to expect anything from life but a good partner and a successful career in science. This was almost too different.
It was, in short, not fair.
She was quiet for a few long seconds, and then she huffed a soft breath and glanced out to the field. "Can we work on something? Throwing? Catching? Running at normal speed?" she asked hopefully. He'd said distractions were good, and she really wanted one right then.
She didn't give hm a chance to say no. She picked an old, cracked baseball up from the high grass near the porch, and then she set off for the wheat field, Krypto and Sam in pursuit.