Kara had wished the news of the baby would help to alleviate the rage that had been building inside her, but it only made it worse. She thought of her own life, she thought of the baby she would never have with James Olsen, and how all they got was a single kiss.
"You should shower," Lois told her. Kara had been staring out the penthouse window to the city below, her hands closed into fists. It took her another moment to realize something had been said.
"Oh, yeah, I will... do you know where--" she began but Lois already knew what she was going to ask.
"I've been keeping it clean for you." Lois walked, Kara followed her to the walk-in closet in the bedroom. Lois pulled or pushed something Kara couldn't see. The back wall slid to the side, revealing her Supergirl suit. Kara's own reaction surprised her. It seemed so much brighter than she remembered. It seemed foreign. She moved quietly to it and lay a hand on the symbol at the center, the symbol of her house. She remembered her mother wearing that same coat of arms when she went to work everyday.
"It doesn't feel like it's mine anymore. I don't know that I can wear it, after what I did..." Kara said, surprised at how easy it felt to speak the truth to Lois. She so badly wanted to be a part of a family that she had already begun to treat Lois as a sister.
"Kara, listen to me." Lois said, turning the girl's face towards her own. Kara's eyes were already swelling with tears. "The things that have happened to you, the mistakes you made aren't your identity, they're a part of you but they're not who you are, this is," Lois told her, touching the symbol on the suit. "You are the last daughter of the Red Sun of Krypton, you are Supergirl."
Kara hugged her without warning. Lois wrapped her arms around the girl. Maybe, Kara thought, maybe she would be okay after all.
"Oh..." Clark said as she walked in and saw them. Kara pulled back and wiped her face. "Everything alright?" he asked. Kara nodded.
"Is it time?" she asked.
"It is," he told her.
Lois took Clark's hand. "Let's give her some privacy," she said, leading him out of the room. Kara turned back to the suit. Her suit. She smiled.
A few minutes after sundown, Kara and Clark flew side by side over the city, Bruce's Batwing just below them. Bruce had explained how they found Waller's apartment but Kara hadn't been listening, she wasn't interested in the how, only the where. She watched the city below, each light a life, all them of afraid of her and her cousin. She was eager to find Amanda Waller and root out the plot which had made her an enemy of the people she cared for most. She had to remind herself to stay focused or she ran the risk of letting all her frustrations out on the first person who upset her, and with her that could be deadly.
"Here," Clark said, lowering his altitude. She followed his lead.
When the door opened and Amanda Waller threw her keys on the table in the hall, they were already there, waiting for her. Batman had turned the alarm off before they even arrived on the premises, now they crowded the dark living room in silence. Waller flipped on the lights and looked up, surprise barely registering. Kara could hear her heartbeat, it remained steady.
"You're not scared..." Kara said, unsettled.
"Should I be?
"No," Superman told her. "We just need information. If you cooperate this will--"
"Save it," Waller said. "You're not the first people to break into my home and you won't be the last, skip to the chase, I don't have time for exposition."
"You'll just... tell us?" Kara asked.
"Depends. What do you want know?"
"Enchantress," Batman said. "She worked for you. Task Force X. We need to find her."
"Legally I can't confirm such a program exists or ever existed, but you already know it did so I'll just say, she's no longer a part of it," Waller said.
"Why?" Kara asked.
"In simple terms? She's pure evil. She killed people without cause and that made classified missions much harder to keep quiet." Waller moved to a painting on the wall and took it down, behind it was a safe. As she began putting in the combination, Batman looked to Superman who shook his head no, as if to say there were no weapons in the safe. Waller pulled out a file and handed it to Superman. "That's where she's been hiding out for the past few years. It's a small island about a few hundred miles from the Gotham coast."
"Quarantine Island," Kara said as she read it, remembering something from her history class.
Waller nodded and added, "That's what they used to call it during the Typhoid outbreak of the twenties. Now it's June's home."
"June?"
"Enchantress isn't a person, she's an entity and she lives inside June Moone, a quiet and lovely artist who's never done harm to anyone. Please, if you go there, don't hurt her."
"Thank you, that's all we came for," Superman said, moving toward the open window.
"Thank you," Kara said. And she finally heard Waller's heart skip a beat.
#
The brick building ahead stood monstrous on the shore of the small island. It felt unpleasantly familiar to Kara. As they landed and moved to the broken doors, she felt that the soil beneath her had the same heavy feel as the soil surrounding the grounds of Arkham Asylum, the same feeling came over her as they walked on, as if gravity pulled harder here.
She didn't know the suffering that took place here all those years ago, but if it was anything like Arkham, it was something the walls wouldn't soon forget. Since her stay there, she had thought herself far too easily fooled by dark rooms and quiet halls, easily able to believe the noises were sinister, the shadows malevolent. But she had the comfort of not knowing for sure if anything truly did live just outside her plane of vision. But Enchantress was the answer to the question of are there things in the shadows.
Bruce's eyes glowed a pale blue as he used his suit's x-ray vision to search the building. "There's something upstairs. Can't make out what," he said, said looking down the long hallway ahead. Kara found what he meant and focused her vision. Through the wall she saw a woman hanging by the wrists. The body moved.
They made their way to the second floor. Kara pulls open the metal doors. The woman was bound to the wall, her arms over her head, her hair hanging down in frizzy ropes, covering her face. She was pale, weak, as if she had been here for days. She looked up to them, her eyes glowing green. She smiled.
"Hello again," she said, looking at Kara. Fear was replaced with rage. She saw her mother getting into the car, the fire, her body burning... Supergirl darted across the room, taking the woman by the neck and pushing her hard against the tiled wall.
Superman shot across the room, pushing Kara back, she fell to the floor. "She killed my mother! She made me kill someone!" Kara shouted.
"It's not just her," Superman reminded her.
"That's right... June's in here too," said Enchantress. "You wouldn't want to be responsible for another innocent life now... or would you?"
"You made me kill him," Kara hissed.
"Oh no... he was alive when I left him. And you know it."
Batman reached down for Kara, she stood on her own. Batman turned to the woman on the wall. "Who did this to you?" he asked. "Was it Joker?"
Superman stepped ahead of Batman and looked her in the eye. "Why are you working with him? What do you want?"
"I want many things, none of which have to do with the Joker."
"Then who?"
"Lex Luthor," she laughed.
"What?" Superman's calm exterior was beginning to break.
"No," Kara said joining them again. "What you did to me was personal, I saw your eyes. You weren't just doing a job. You wanted to make me suffer."
"I didn't say I worked for him, I work with him."
"Not anymore," Kara said, moving to the door. The others had Enchantress, there was nothing she could, or wanted to do here anymore. If Luthor was truly behind the attacks at her mother's and Arkham, she had nothing more to wait for. Before she was able to cross the threshold, Superman stepped in her way. "You can't go," he said.
"He did this to me. To us, I have to bring him in."
"She'll kill him," Enchantress sang.
"I'll go," Superman told her. Kara knew he was right. She wanted nothing more than to hurt whoever was responsible. She stood down, Superman left.
"Why?" Kara asked Enchantress. Her voice almost breaking. "Why did you do this to me? My friends... my family... you took everything."
"Balance," she began. "You all come from the sky, reaching down like gods, saving people marked for death. There's a natural balance to the world and you upset it every time you save someone who was meant to die. Death must have what it's owed."
"Your never answered the question. Who put you here? Why are you restrained?"
Enchantress laughed. "You're all so upset, letting your emotions get the better of you, you didn't even notice."
"You said you worked with Luthor," Kara said. "He must have done it, trying to get rid of loose ends."
"Only someone who knows me very well would know to use iron chains..." she said. Kara looked at her restraints. They were old, black iron.
"Waller?" she asked.
"It was easy wasn't it," Enchantress said, turning to Bruce. "...finding me? I'm sure she made you work for it, but a little hacking here, a little there... and boom, you got your clues... and it led you right here, to me. I let Amanda use me to destroy you."
"You said it was Luthor," Kara said, her heart starting to drum in her chest.
"And who do you think introduced us?"
"Bait..." Batman said. Kara looked at him, she could hear a faint rumbling growing louder and louder through the walls. Behind it, a whirring, something electrical in the room... a camera sat in the corner, looking down at them.
"She set us up..." Kara warned.
The walls exploded in a mess of dust and debris, a bullet tearing into Kara's shoulder-- Bruce tackled her to the floor when he realized what they were shooting with. She screamed in agony as she fell. He looked down. The bullet had shattered, green liquid oozed making her nerves turn black. More bullets smashed and dug all around them, each sending more liquid Kryptonite in all directions. The body of June Moone hung bloody on the wall, torn to shreds by the barrage of gunfire.
Kara looked to the broken wall, two helicopters skated by across the clear blue.
Batman pulled an explosive-gel gun from his belt and sprayed the floor. He covered himself and Kara and detonated.
The floor shook and gave with a boom, they collapsed to the floor below. Kara screamed as she hit the floor, pain running down her arm like fire.
Bruce pulled tweezers from his belt and put his knee on her arm to keep her still. He reached into her shoulder and pulled out the bullet fragments but the liquid Kryptonite had done its job. Her veins throbbed, her arm lost its color. She could still move it but only just.
"That's not a Kryptonite bullet, what is that?" she asked of the bullet.
"It's a Kryptonite tip with liquid Kryptonite inside but the liquid isn't as potent as the solid, it only affects what it touches--"
"How do you know that?"
"I've made something similar. In case I needed it..." he said. She looked away, realizing now that the fear the people of her city felt about her was beyond what she had imagined. She pushed it away. "Kara, he began, "Clark doesn't know they have this tech. Other than me, Luthor's the only one who can make something like this. He must have given it to Waller... you have to warn him. Can you fly?" She shook her head, "You have to get it out," she said of the liquid."
"It's already soaked into your muscles."
"So cut them out," she said.
He hesitated, then, all at once, he reached for a knife and told her to look away. Batman dug his blade into her skin. She could feel everything he did but couldn't bring herself to look at it. The burning pain of his blade and the kryptonite were so much that she thought she may lose consciousness. As soon as he was done, relief came, her strength, which she soaked from a ray of sunshine which showered from the bullet riddled walls as dawn came, was all she needed. Kara stood.
"And you?" she asked.
"I got the Batwing. Go."
She struggled to stand, her arm burning beneath her. Kara closed her fists, the gravity around her shifting, she flew-- bursting through upper floors-- through the ceiling. The three helicopters spotted her but she was too fast for them.
Behind her she could see the batwing taking off and flying the opposite way. Batman was safe. Now it was up to her to save her cousin. She focused all her energy on flying as fast as possible. The island was a dot behind her, the ocean spread vast and wide below.
Something glinted silver in the sky, a tiny pinpoint a thousand feet ahead. A drone. It had already fired its missile. All the air pushed from her lungs as the impact crushed down on top of her. Green fire burned across her body. Debris cut into her. That same familiar nausea churned her stomach. She lost her focus. All was now only flashes of blue sky above and ocean below. Her eyes rolled back. For the second time in her life, Kara Zor-El fell from the sky in a hail of fire.