Chapter Text
Blue Star Rendezvous
The message was three words, same as always. No encryption needed because no one in their right mind monitored the Czarnian bounce-relay frequency. The infrastructure was literally built for an audience of one.
ROCK. BLUE. NOW.
Kara landed on the fourth-largest asteroid in the accretion belt of Sigma Orionis Bb, a blue supergiant that bathed everything in that hard, short-wavelength light that made her skin hum. Present. A different frequency of alive. She sat on the ridge where the nickel-iron deposit made a natural bench, cape pooled around her like a discarded argument, and she breathed vacuum.
That was the point. No atmosphere meant no sound. No sound meant no voices. No voices meant no one needing anything.
She'd been sitting for eleven minutes (she always counted, couldn't help it) when the rumble hit through the rock. Sublight approach, sloppy deceleration. The SpazFrag touched down two hundred meters away with the aerodynamic grace of a thrown refrigerator, its landing struts punching divots into the regolith.
Lobo swung off the bike and mag-locked his boots. He was carrying, absurdly, a steel keg under one arm.
He walked over. No hurry. That was the thing about Lobo that no one would believe (which was fine, because no one would ever be told): he could read a room. Even a room with no walls, no air, and one Kryptonian sitting in the dark.
He dropped the keg, sat on it, and waited.
Kara held up a hand. Not yet.
He shrugged. Pulled a cigar from somewhere in that vest (she'd never figured out the pocket topology and had stopped trying) and lit it. The ember was the only warm-spectrum light for about six AU in any direction. The smoke froze instantly into a tiny expanding crystal lattice that caught the blue starlight and scattered it into something almost pretty before sublimating.
She watched three cigars worth of frozen smoke sculptures before she spoke. Sound carried through the rock if you pressed your palm flat. Their version of a tin-can telephone.
"Jimmy almost died today."
Vibration through nickel-iron. His response came back the same way, rumbling up through her fingers. She felt him lean forward on the keg.
"Almost only counts in horseshoes and fragmentation grenades."
"I caught the building. But I caught it late. Because I was dealing with Lex's public testimony about metahuman registration and Kal wanted me to be diplomatic about it. To represent well. And I had my back turned for four seconds."
Lobo said nothing. Another cigar.
"Four seconds, and the whole parking structure folded. Because some contractor cut rebar costs. Not a supervillain. Just a guy who wanted a boat."
She felt his laugh through the asteroid. It was not a kind laugh, but it was an honest one.
"Yer mad at the wrong thing, Blondie."
"I know."
"Yer not mad about the building. Yer mad because Boy Scout gave ya the tone. The 'we have a responsibility to be better than this' tone. After you already saved everyone."
She pulled her knees up. The blue light made the House of El crest look almost black.
"He does that."
"Yeah. That's why I don't do teams." He crushed the cigar out on his own forearm. Not for effect (there was no audience). Just because that's where his arm was. "Here's the thing, Little Red. Yer cousin's got one speed. It works for him. Capital-G Good all the time, no cheat days. That ain't a system that's got room for somebody havin' a bad afternoon."
"It's not a bad afternoon. It's a bad year. The registration hearings, the Phantom Zone breach in March, the thing with the Daximites. And everybody wants me to care about it the right way. The correct amount. With the appropriate affect."
"Fraggin' exhausting."
"Yes."
He stood up. Walked over. Stood in front of her, close enough that she had to look up. In the blue light he looked like a bas-relief carved out of the asteroid itself. White skin, red eyes, the whole Czarnian nightmare-sculpture aesthetic.
He held out his hand.
She took it.
She was still sitting on the ridge, knees pulled up, cape pooled around her, running hot behind her eyes in that way that meant she was either going to scream into vacuum or punch something into a new orbit. Neither would help. She'd done both before.
Lobo walked over. Stood in front of her. Close enough that the blue light split around him and she was in his shadow for the first time since she'd landed. He looked down at her the way he looked at everything (like he was deciding how hard it would be to break and whether it was worth the effort) and then his expression did that thing.
That thing no one would ever believe.
He actually looked at her.
"Stop doin' that," he said. Through the rock, through her palms.
"Doing what."
"The face. Yer doin' the face where ya think yer about to be ugly."
She didn't answer. Which was an answer.
Here was Kara's private architecture, the part she would die before admitting on any world with an atmosphere: she was vain. Not Earth-vain, not Instagram-vain. Kryptonian vain. She came from a civilization that had literally engineered aesthetics into its genome. She knew (with the quiet factual certainty of someone who'd been raised in a culture that quantified everything) that she was, by virtually any humanoid standard in the known galaxy, staggeringly beautiful. And she liked it. She maintained it. She thought about it more than a girl who could benchpress a tectonic plate probably should.
And the part that made her throat tight right now, sitting on a nickel-iron asteroid in hard vacuum with mascara she didn't need and couldn't cry off: she felt ugly. Not physically. Worse. She felt like the beauty was a costume over something tired and fraying and not enough, and everyone could see through it, and the only reason they didn't say so was because you don't tell Supergirl she looks like she's coming apart at the seams.
Lobo had no such inhibitions.
"Yer a mess," he said.
She flinched.
"Yer hair's wrecked. Ya got concrete dust in it from whatever building ya caught. There's a rebar scratch on yer left shoulder that's already healed but ya didn't clean the rust out of yer suit, so now ya look like ya lost a fight with a parking garage." He ticked these off without cruelty, without gentleness. Inventory. "Yer eyes are doin' that pink thing which means ya been heat-visioning something or tryin' not to cry, and since there's nothin' slagged in the area I'm goin' with option two."
"Are you done?"
"No." He crouched. Eye level. Red eyes to blue, and at this distance in this light his face was all geography, every scar a canyon system. "Here's the thing, Blondie. I've seen every species worth seein' in this galaxy and about forty percent of the ones in the next one over. I've seen Tamaranean courtesans who could stop a fleet engagement by walkin' into the room. I've seen Zamaron queens who weaponized beauty so hard it bent spacetime."
He paused. Not for effect (Lobo didn't do rhetoric). He was just making sure he had the words in the right order, because he was going to say this once.
"You are the most physically perfect thing I have ever personally encountered in approximately three hundred years of active consciousness. And I include a couple sunsets on Czarnia before I blew it up, which were, frankly, spectacular. Yer face could end religions. Yer stupid little cape catches light like ya hired someone to choreograph the physics. On a bad day, and this is clearly a bad day, you are still so far past beautiful that the word doesn't apply. It's like callin' a supernova 'warm.' Technically accurate. Completely useless."
She stared at him.
"That ain't flattery. I don't do flattery. Flattery's a tool for people who want somethin'. I want what I always want and I'd want it if you had three heads and a skin condition." He stood back up. "What I'm tellin' ya is that the ugly yer feelin' right now ain't on yer face. It's in yer head. And it got put there by people who need ya to feel just bad enough to keep performing for 'em."
The blue star pulsed. (They do that. People forget that blue supergiants are variable stars. The light shifts. Everything shifts.)
"So stop doin' the face."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"You just called me more beautiful than a sunset on your dead planet."
"I called ya more beautiful than several sunsets on my dead planet. Don't undersell it."
"And then you said it doesn't matter."
"I said what yer feelin' ain't about what ya look like. Different sentence. Keep up."
She laughed. It came out weird and broken and she clamped down on it because laughing in vacuum when you're channeling sound through rock vibration is deeply, deeply undignified, and the vibration hit her own palms and she heard herself and she laughed harder.
He watched her laugh the way someone might watch an unexpected detonation. Interested. Not worried. Lobo didn't worry. That was (she'd realized about three hookups in) the entire mechanism of this thing they didn't talk about. The total absence of worry. He couldn't die. She couldn't hurt him. He had no expectations, no developmental arc for her, no concern.
He just showed up, said exactly what was true, and didn't flinch from any of it.
She stood. Wiped the concrete dust off her shoulder (he'd been right about the rust, which was annoying). Pushed her hair back and felt the grit in it and decided she didn't care.
"You know," she said through the rock under their feet, "on Krypton, telling a woman of the House of El that she was beautiful was a formal legal declaration. It had contractual implications."
"Good thing Krypton blew up then."
"Good thing."
She reached for him.
He was, as previously noted, not gentle. But that was also the point. You can't break the Main Man. And the Main Man can't break a Kryptonian. Which meant (and this was the secret under the secret, the thing beneath the thing they never talked about) that for a few hours on a rock in a blue star system, Kara Zor-El didn't have to be careful.
Not with her hands. Not with her strength. Not with the part of her that wanted, sometimes, to just not modulate.
That was the real vanity, if she was being honest. Not the face. The power. Knowing what she was and never, ever getting to be all of it.
Except here. Except with him. Except on a rock that nobody owned in light that nobody needed, with someone who would regenerate from anything she accidentally did and then probably compliment her on the crater.
She reached for him, and she did not hold back, and the asteroid's rotation shifted by about 0.003 degrees, and neither of them noticed or would have cared if they did.
The blue star watched.
Stars don't judge. That's theology's job.
She was sitting on the ridge, waiting for the engine vibration, and she thought about her mother.
Not a long thought. She didn't indulge these. But it came anyway, the way it always came in the eleven minutes before he arrived (she always counted, couldn't help it, Kryptonian brains don't stop counting just because the heart is doing something the brain doesn't approve of):
What would Alura think.
Alura In-Ze, adjudicator of the high court of Argo City, who had selected Zor-El as a bonding partner through a process that involved genetic compatibility indexing, house alignment review, and a courtship period governed by fourteen separate protocols. Alura, who had engineered Kara's genome with the same care she applied to legal briefs. Who had looked at her daughter and seen not a child but a continuation (of the house, of the line, of standards that predated spaceflight on Krypton).
Alura would not have been horrified. Horrified was a human word for a human scale of disapproval. Alura would have been structurally offended. At a molecular level. The way a crystal is offended by a fracture.
Her father would have been quieter about it. Zor-El would have done the thing he always did when Kara disappointed him (she remembered this with a clarity that the yellow sun made merciless, because Kryptonian memory under solar radiation doesn't soften, doesn't blur, doesn't grant the mercy of forgetting): he would have gone still. Not angry. Recalculating. Revising his model of his daughter to accommodate new data he hadn't anticipated and didn't want.
Her grandparents. She thought about them less often but they were there in the chain, because House El kept records and records kept expectations and expectations kept ghosts. Five generations of genetic optimization. Careful, deliberate, curated bloodlines designed to produce exactly what she was. And what she was doing with what they'd produced was waiting on a rock for a Czarnian who'd committed genocide and rode a motorcycle that smelled like burning ozone and old blood.
Jor-El and Lara. Uncle and aunt she'd barely known but whose legacy she wore on her chest every day. They'd sent their son to Earth to be a symbol. They'd died believing the El crest meant something that would survive the death of a planet. It had survived. It meant hope. It was currently folded in a cape on a nickel-iron ridge while their niece waited for a booty call.
Kal.
Kal would be the worst. Not because he'd judge her (he would, but he'd never say so, and the not-saying-so would be worse than the judging). Because he'd be confused. He'd tilt his head the way he did when something didn't fit his model, and he'd ask her if she was okay, and he'd mean it, and the sincerity would be the most violent thing anyone had ever done to her because she'd have to stand there in the full blast of Superman's genuine concern and know that she couldn't explain it in any language he'd understand.
She couldn't say: he's the only one who doesn't need me to be anything.
She couldn't say: I'm tired of being a symbol and he's the only person who's never seen the symbol.
She couldn't say: your parents died so the crest would survive and I take it off on a rock for a man who killed his entire species and I don't feel guilty about it and the not-feeling-guilty is the most honest thing I've done since I landed on this planet.
Five generations of House El. Genetic optimization, courtship protocols, the crest, the legacy, hope as a heritable trait.
And part of why she sent the three words on the Czarnian bounce-relay (not all of why, but the part she'd never say, the part that lived in her own version of the place where things were true and unexamined) was this. Exactly this. The knowledge that every person who'd ever had a claim on her (by blood, by crest, by legacy, by love) would be appalled. And the appalling was the point. Not because she wanted to hurt them. Because the weight of their expectations was killing her and this was the one thing she did that existed entirely outside the architecture they'd built around her.
The hookup wasn't rebellion. Rebellion is a performance aimed at the authority you're defying.
This was absence. A place where the house had no jurisdiction. Where the crest was fabric on a rock and the genome was just a body and the legacy was just a word in a dead language on a dead planet and she was just a woman waiting for a man who didn't care about any of it.
The engine rumbled through the rock. Ten seconds out.
She thought about Alura one more time.
Sorry, Mother. Not sorry. Both at once. File it in the place.
She'd learned that from him, she realized. The filing. The place where things that are true exist alongside things you won't do anything about.
Kryptonians are fast learners.
After
She was pulling the suit back on (it self-repaired, Kryptonian nanoweave, which was fortunate given the evening's structural demands on the material) when he did it.
The whistle.
Low, long, appreciative in the way a mechanic whistles at an engine that shouldn't exist. Not performative. Lobo didn't catcall. Catcalling was for people who wanted a reaction from a stranger. This was closer to an involuntary audit.
She had her back to him. The suit was halfway up, the cape still on the ground, and she was reaching back to seal the dorsal seam when the sound vibrated through the rock under her boots.
She stopped. Didn't turn around.
"Really?"
"I'm just sayin'." He was sitting on the remains of the keg (which had not survived the evening intact, though not from drinking). "I finally get why ya wear the Boy Scout's pajamas."
Now she turned. One eyebrow. The Kryptonian eyebrow. The one that had made four Green Lanterns and a New God uncomfortable at various points.
"Excuse me?"
"The suit. Big cape, high neckline, full coverage, boots up to here." He gestured vaguely. "It's camouflage. Yer hiding."
"I'm not hiding. It's a family crest. It has cultural signi—"
"Yer hiding a felony under that thing."
She blinked.
"Blondie, I have personally been to Apokolips. I've seen the Female Furies in full combat kit, and those women were specifically engineered by an actual god to be distracting in a fight. You would stop Barda in her tracks and she'd be mad about it for a century." He lit a cigar (the last one, she noted; she'd crushed two of the others at some point and neither of them had discussed how). "The suit makes ya look like a hall monitor. Which I figure is the point."
"It is not the—"
"It is absolutely the point. Because if ya wore anything that actually fit, nobody would hear a word ya said ever again. Every press conference, every Justice League briefing, every time ya pulled someone out of a car wreck, they'd just be standin' there with their jaws on the floor. Ya'd never get taken seriously again. Not by the humans, anyway."
She sealed the dorsal seam. Slowly.
"You're saying I dress frumpy on purpose."
"I'm sayin' yer so put together that ya had to strategically un-put-together yerself just to function in polite society. That ain't frumpy. That's tactical."
She picked up the cape. Held it. Looked at it like she was seeing it for the first time.
(Here's what she would never say, to him or anyone: he was right. He was exactly right. She'd figured it out within her first year on Earth. The suit Kal wore was designed by Martha Kent, a woman who loved her son and wanted him to look heroic and trustworthy. Kara had adopted a version of it because it was easy and because it sent the signal she needed: I'm like him. I'm safe. I'm the family-friendly one. And somewhere in there, consciously or not, she'd made sure the silhouette was wrong. The cape too long. The skirt (when she'd had the skirt) breaking the line at exactly the point that made her look cute instead of what she actually was. Because what she actually was, in the body Krypton's genetic legacy had given her under a yellow sun, was unsettling in its precision. Not cute. Not hot. Not any of the words humans used. Something closer to what a mathematician means when they call an equation elegant. Inevitable. Exactly and only what it must be.)
"You think about this a lot?" she asked, clipping the cape.
"Just figured it out." He stood, cracked his neck (the sound propagated through the asteroid like a small seismic event). "Took me about four of these meetups. I'm slow but I get there."
"You're telling me it took the Main Man, the scourge of the galaxy, four hookups to notice my body."
"Nah. Took me one hookup to notice yer body. Took me four to figure out why ya hide it." He swung onto the SpazFrag. The bike's engine turned over with a sound like a planet clearing its throat. "Big difference."
She stood there, fully suited, cape catching the blue starlight in that way it always did (and yes, she knew the physics of it, and yes, she'd calculated the drape, and no, she would never admit that to a living soul). She looked like Supergirl. The whole approved package.
"Lobo."
He looked back.
"If you ever tell anyone any of what you just said, I will throw you into that star."
"Wouldn't kill me."
"I know. But it'd be a very long swim back."
He grinned. The full grin, the one that had made entire civilizations reconsider their military budgets.
"Yer secret's safe, Blondie. Both of 'em."
He didn't mean the hookup.
She knew he didn't mean the hookup.
He peeled off into the dark, cigar trailing a helix of frozen smoke crystals, and she watched him go and thought about armor. The real kind. The kind you build out of a slightly wrong silhouette and a smile that's calibrated to be pretty instead of devastating and a family crest that tells everyone don't look too hard, I'm just his cousin, I'm the approachable one.
She flew home. Put the coffee on. Checked her phone. Kal had texted.
You okay?
Fine. Just needed some air.
She caught her reflection in the kitchen window. Full suit, cape, boots, the whole thing. Hall monitor chic. She smiled (the real one, not the press conference one) and thought about what it would be like to just once walk into the Watchtower wearing something that actually fit.
She wouldn't. Obviously. The strategy was sound.
But it was nice to know that someone, somewhere, on a rock no one would ever find, had noticed what was underneath it.
She poured the coffee.
Tuesday with Kal. Registration hearings on Thursday. Metropolis needed her in the morning.
The cape was good armor.
She'd keep wearing it.
Blue Star (Interior)
The bounce-relay pinged. Three words.
Again.
He was in the Vega system, finishing a contract. (Finishing meant the target was in several pieces across two moons, but the client had specified "decisive" and Lobo was a man of precise professional standards.) The ping came through on the Czarnian frequency, which no one used because no one could use because there was one Czarnian and he was currently wiping someone off his boot chain.
He looked at the three words.
He didn't feel anything. That was important to establish. The Main Man didn't feel things about a ping on a relay. What he did was math. He was three jumps from Sigma Orionis. The contract was done. He had a keg of Khundian battery acid he'd been hauling since the Thanagar job. No prior engagements.
Math.
He kicked over the SpazFrag and aimed for blue.
The approach. Sloppy on purpose. (Everything that looked sloppy was on purpose. Things that were actually sloppy, people didn't survive to have opinions about.) He came in loud because she could hear the vibration through the rock and he'd figured out around the second time that the advance warning mattered to her. Not because she was scared. Because she was always on guard and the ten seconds between hearing the engine and seeing the bike was the only transition she got between Supergirl, who must be ready and Kara, who is sitting on a rock in the dark because she's at the end of something.
He'd never tell her he'd figured that out. Telling her would make it a thing. Things required maintenance. This was not a thing.
This was math.
He walked over. Mag-boots. Keg under one arm.
She was doing the posture. Knees up, cape everywhere, face aimed at the blue star like it owed her money. He'd seen this version three times now (or four, he didn't count, counting would make it a thing). The knees-up version meant it was bad. There was also a feet-dangling version (medium), a standing-with-arms-crossed version (she wanted to fight something and couldn't find a worthy target), and once, exactly once, a lying-flat-on-her-back version that had scared him.
Not scared. Noted. He'd noted it. Because the lying-flat version meant she'd given up on something, and a Kryptonian who'd given up was a problem on a scale he respected.
Tonight was knees-up. He could work with knees-up.
He sat on the keg and waited.
She held up a hand. Not yet.
Right.
He pulled a cigar. Here was the thing about the cigars (and he would eviscerate anyone who suggested this, so it would never be discussed): the cigars were a clock. She needed to not-talk for a while before she could talk. He'd tried just sitting there the first time and it had been wrong. The silence was too empty. Too much like the vacuum it actually was. The cigar gave the silence a rhythm. Light, smoke, freeze, sublimate. Light, smoke, freeze, sublimate. A pulse. Something her eyes could track that wasn't the star and wasn't him and wasn't whatever was eating her.
He'd figured this out on the second visit. He was slow. He'd said that to her once and meant it. Three hundred years of existence and most of what he knew about people he'd learned from studying how they died. How they lived was a different dataset. Smaller sample size. Less professional relevance.
Three cigars tonight. Worse than average.
She talked. Building collapse. Rebar. Jimmy. Kal's tone.
He listened.
(Listening was not a Core Lobo Competency, as any of his former associates would attest, mostly via seance because most of his former associates were dead. But listening in vacuum through rock vibration was a different kind of listening. It was physical. Her words came up through the asteroid and into his boots and through his skeleton and he received them the way a seismograph receives data. Without opinion. Without processing. Just: here is what is happening in the ground right now.)
She was mad about the building. She said she was mad about the building.
She was not mad about the building.
She was mad because Kal had given her the tone after she'd saved everyone. The Main Man had never personally met Superman for longer than it took to exchange punches (four occasions, two draws, one loss he didn't acknowledge, one win Kal didn't acknowledge) but he knew the tone. He'd heard it from every authority figure in every system who thought being powerful meant being right. The we must be better tone. The this is bigger than us tone. The tone that actually meant: your feelings are a liability and I need you to manage them so I can be comfortable.
He'd genocided his entire species, so he had a certain clarity about authority figures.
He told her she was mad at the wrong thing. She said she knew. She did know. That was the worst part, and he saw it clearly: she knew exactly what Kal was doing and she couldn't say so because saying so would break something she needed. The family. The crest. The last two Kryptonians thing that she wore like a second cape, heavier than the first.
She couldn't tell Kal to shut up because Kal was all she had left of home. And Kal couldn't stop doing it because Kal didn't know he was doing it. Big Blue wasn't cruel. He was just a guy from Kansas who'd been told his whole life that his way was the right way and had gotten enough evidence to believe it.
Lobo understood Kansas in the abstract. Everywhere produced guys like that. Czarnia had too, before he'd solved the problem.
(That was a joke. He made jokes about the genocide because the alternative was the other thing, and the other thing had no place on this rock.)
She said the word. Exhausting.
Yeah.
He stood up. Walked to her. Stood in front of her.
Here's what was happening inside the Main Man at this particular moment, rendered honestly because no one was asking and no one ever would:
He was looking at her face and running calculations.
Not those calculations. Structural calculations. He'd been alive for three centuries and he'd learned to read load-bearing stress in everything (buildings, bridges, spines, civilizations). Kara Zor-El was a load-bearing structure that was taking more weight than her design specs intended. The face she was making (he'd called it "the face," kept it simple) was a stress fracture. Not failure. Not yet. But the kind of micro-expression that, in a building, meant you had six months before something shifted.
She didn't need someone to fix it. Couldn't be fixed from outside anyway. She needed someone to stand next to the crack and not panic about it.
That he could do. He was good at not panicking. He was good at standing next to broken things. He was, if he was being honest (and the Main Man was always honest, it was the one virtue he'd kept when he'd thrown out the rest), the ideal structural companion for someone who was afraid of their own weight. Because he literally could not be crushed.
She could drop everything she was carrying. All of it. Every expectation, every performance, every carefully modulated smile. She could drop it on him. And he would not buckle. Would not break. Would not even notice, really, except in the academic sense of huh, that was a lot.
He held out his hand.
Not tenderly. He didn't do tender. He held it out the way you'd offer a handhold to someone on a ledge. Structural.
She took it.
What happened next.
(He was not going to narrate the sex. He had standards. But he would note, privately, in the space inside his head that no one would ever access, that there was something in it that he hadn't found anywhere else in three hundred years, and it wasn't the physical part, though the physical part was exceptional on a technical level because she didn't hold back and not holding back with a Kryptonian was a seismic event.)
(What it was, the thing he hadn't found: she wasn't afraid of him.)
(Everyone was afraid of him. Everyone. The people who hired him, the people he hunted, the people who fought him, the people who arrested him, the people who drank with him. Fear was the medium he moved through. It was so constant he'd stopped noticing it the way a fish stops noticing water.)
(She wasn't afraid. Not because she was naive. Because she could actually, genuinely hurt him, and he could actually, genuinely hurt her, and they both knew it, and they both didn't care, and the mutuality of that was something he didn't have a word for in Czarnian or Interlac or any of the forty-seven languages he spoke well enough to insult someone's mother in.)
(He would never tell her this. Telling her would make it a thing.)
After. The keg. The cigars (fewer now, because she'd crushed some, which he noted and did not mention because mentioning it would mean acknowledging that she'd been grabbing for things during and the things she'd grabbed included his cigar case and also a portion of the asteroid that was now a different shape).
She was getting dressed. The suit did its Kryptonian nanoweave thing, stitching itself back together like it was embarrassed about what it had seen.
He watched her.
Now he was going to think about how she looked. Because he'd been running the calculation for four visits and it had finally resolved.
The whistle wasn't planned. It just came out. Three hundred years old and a woman putting on a cape made him whistle like a dock worker. Embarrassing. He committed to it.
The thing he'd figured out: the suit was wrong. Not broken, not ugly. Strategically wrong. The lines were off. The cape was too long. The whole silhouette was designed to make her look less than she was. He'd been looking at it for four meetups trying to figure out why a woman who clearly knew what she looked like (she knew, he could tell by the way she moved, the way she held angles, the unconscious physics of someone who understood their own geometry) would deliberately choose to present below spec.
And then tonight, watching her seal the back of the suit with that particular expression (the one that meant she was putting the costume back on, and not just the fabric), it clicked.
She was hiding.
Not from enemies. From allies. From the humans who needed her to be approachable. From the cameras that needed her to be wholesome. From Kal, who needed her to be the kid cousin, the mentee, the one who was still learning. If she walked into the Watchtower looking like what she actually looked like, every dynamic she'd carefully built would collapse. They'd stop seeing Supergirl and start seeing a Kryptonian woman in the full expression of what that meant, and they would not know what to do with it, and she would be alone in a different way.
So. The pajamas. The hall monitor look. The cape that caught light beautifully (she'd calculated the drape, he was almost certain, because Kryptonians calculated everything) but always drew the eye to the symbol on her chest instead of to her.
Brilliant, actually.
Sad, actually.
Same thing, sometimes.
He told her. All of it. Because the Main Man didn't have a filter and if he'd figured something out he said it, that was the deal, that was the only deal. He told her she was hiding a felony under the suit. He told her she'd stop Barda cold. He told her the suit was camouflage.
She got defensive. That was fine. Defensive meant he was right and she knew it.
He told her the rest. The part about it being strategic. Smart. A choice, not an accident. Because giving her credit for the intelligence of the deception was more respectful than pretending the deception wasn't there.
She said the thing about throwing him into the star.
"Wouldn't kill me."
"I know. But it'd be a very long swim back."
He grinned.
(Inside the grin: something he was not going to examine. Something that had to do with the fact that she'd just threatened him with a star and he'd found it charming, and finding things charming was not in his operational parameters and hadn't been for about two hundred and ninety years, and he was going to file this away in the same place he filed the genocide jokes, which was the place where things that were true lived alongside things he wasn't going to do anything about.)
"Yer secret's safe, Blondie. Both of 'em."
He meant the second one. The hiding. The deliberate dimming. The choice to be less so that everyone around her could be comfortable. That was the bigger secret. The hookups were just logistics. The hiding was architecture.
He knew about architecture. He'd torn down enough of it.
He rode out. Cigar in his teeth. The SpazFrag's engine was running rough (she'd dented the exhaust manifold at some point, probably with her knee, he'd fix it later, he'd fixed it after every visit, he never mentioned it, mentioning it would make it a thing).
The blue star behind him.
In approximately three to nine weeks, the bounce-relay would ping again. Three words. He would do the math. The math would work out. He'd buy another keg, because she liked the taste of terrible things (noted, never mentioned). He'd bring cigars (she liked watching them freeze, noted, never mentioned). He'd land loud. Sit on the keg. Wait.
Not because he cared.
Caring was a thing, and this was not a thing.
This was math.
The math just always worked out.
(On Czarnia, before he'd killed everyone, there had been a word. Yr'kleth. It didn't translate to Interlac. The closest approximation was "the structural necessity of a specific person," but that lost the connotation, which was architectural. Yr'kleth was the one stone you couldn't remove from an arch without the whole thing coming down. The keystone, but with volition. The stone that chose to bear the weight.)
(He hadn't thought about that word in two hundred years.)
(He thought about it on the ride home and then he filed it in the place and he didn't think about it again until the next ping.)
(This was not a thing.)
(The math worked out.)