In the first few moments, Allana didn’t recognize the man who had been thrown into the cage with her and she pressed herself back, deeper into the shadows, and observed his struggle with his captors warily. It had taken her a few days, but she’d learned to feel vulnerability, learned a consciousness of exactly how weak she was like this, how incapable of taking this man on if he didn’t turn out to be friendly. She’d called out while he was still outside the cage, not knowing that they intended to actually shove him in here with her, but once she was cornered enough of her bravado faded that she wasn’t sure whether that had been the best idea.
Then he straightened up, stepped into the light a bit, and spoke with a familiar, if heavily strained, voice and Allana gave up her pretense at hiding, half-stumbling out of the shadows and into a faint bit of light from between the slats of train car. “Clark?” she asked, her voice somewhere between shocked and concerned at seeing someone who was usually as close as you could come to invulnerable looking about as beat up as…well as she felt. “It’s Allana,” she said, realizing that he probably had no idea who the eight-year-old calling his name actually was, unless her family had figured out what had happened and had told the others that the girl posting on the boards (the one post she’d managed before they’d taken her phone) was her.
She stepped forward further and tilted her head back to look up (and up and up) at Clark, tilting her head to the side so that she was considering him out of the eye that wasn’t bruised so that her vision still blurred and the skin still twinged when she tried to squint it against the blurring. “Kriff,” she said quietly, “How bad is it? Do you need…I’d heal you but I can’t…the Force is going. I can still feel it I guess. I just can’t…” she trailed off and shook her head slightly. She almost apologized, but bit it back at the last second, realizing that her voice would have come out choked and shaky. She’d forgotten that it was harder to hold on to your emotions when you were younger, even if it was only physically younger, when your body got tired faster and hurt more and you didn’t feel entirely in control of your own limbs. When she’d actually been eight, she’d been a solemn, self-possessed child, but she wasn’t that girl right now, was her older self trapped in a useless, vulnerable prison and it wasn’t helping the fear of the carnival that was like something alive and skittering, clawing at her from the inside.
After a couple deep breaths she pulled the furry jacket of her costume tighter around her. She’d find out from Clark in a moment if Kon was at the carnival, if he’d seen Ariel, if her family was all right, if her father had started to push too far against his delicate hold on the light side. For now, however, she needed a second to regroup, to process any information she might get. She tried out a small smile and tugged slightly on the furry jacket they’d wrapped her in, raising an eyebrow tentatively at Clark, “Do you think this is karma for making fun of your costume?” she asked, proud of keeping her voice steady, “because if so, I’m really sorry.”