Title: Sunburst
Fandom: Supergirl
Rating: Gen
Length: 2000 words
Notes: Sequel to crane our necks for sunlight, a James/Kara AU where Kara gets to Earth long before Clark.

Kara couldn't sleep. She tossed and turned, flipped pillows this way and that, inched her way back and forth across every part of her side of the mattress, counted cracks in the ceiling and recited every snippet of Kryptonian poetry she could remember to herself. Nothing helped. She felt like the string of some oversized instrument, wound too tight and set to vibrate. The red digits on the alarm clock read 02:07 when James put his pillow over his face and said, muffled, "Honey, I love you, but I need more than three hours sleep a night to function."

"Sorry!" Kara whispered, crawling out of bed, "sorry, I'll just…"

She crept out to the kitchen and made herself a mug of peppermint tea—more to have something warm in her hands than to actually drink it—before curling up in one of the living room armchairs. Kara didn't need sleep the way most people did, but she couldn't remember not being able to before. It was a new and disorienting feeling, and part of her wondered if it was psychosomatic. After all, as far as every piece of ID she owned, plus Martha Kent, was concerned, Kara was going to turn forty in three days. The Daily Planet's "Women & Lifestyle" section was adamant that a woman's fortieth birthday was a time when she needed to focus on "Finding Myself" and "Honouring My Future", or at least to decorate her house with pieces of slate on which she'd scrawled the words Find Myself and Honour My Future in cursive chalk script.

Kara had never been what anyone could call artistic, but by the time the sun came up she was strongly considering scribbling in chalk on something, or at least repainting the bathroom. She'd already alphabetised every book they owned, watched an hour of cable news with the vague and slightly shamefaced hope that something would crop up that needed Supergirl's attention, and sent Perry five emails with pitches for various articles and some rather stream-of-consciousness observations about ideas they might want to borrow from the websites of the Planet's main competitors. She found herself twitching every time she tried to sit still.

"I need some coffee first," James said when he finally shuffled into the kitchen. He looked about as conscious as he always did at six in the morning, which was to say not very much. One cheek was still creased from his pillow; his shoulders were hunched beneath the faded cotton of an old Metropolis Monarchs t-shirt. "And when I've had coffee I can focus, and when I can focus you're going to tell me what's going on."

"I have no clue," Kara admitted, popping some bread into the toaster. She didn't feel any more hungry than she felt able to sleep, but she needed to be doing something. "I'm sorry, I just… I don't know, it's like I've got an itch but it's under my skin and I can't figure out how to get rid of it. It's probably just some sort of life stage crisis, I guess? It'll be my birthday, my mom will give me that really elaborate cake I'm not supposed to know she's planning to bake, it'll all blow over."

"Perry texted me," James said, holding his phone up to her for a second. There were a lot of messages listed on the lock screen; most of them seemed to be in all caps. James stuck his phone back in the pocket of his sweatpants, poured a mug of coffee, and dumped in what, even after two years of marriage, Kara still thought was a frightening amount of creamer. "Wanted to know why you were writing to him at four thirty on a Saturday morning with an idea for a hard-hitting series on the pygmy goats of the world."

"What, they're cute!" Kara protested. "They—oh god." Her hands were suddenly shaking so much that she couldn't hold the butter knife. It clattered to the counter top and that unsettled feeling surged through her again, redoubled: fight or flight, Kara's body couldn't figure it out and her breath caught in her throat.

"Kara! Kara, sweetheart, you're scaring me," James said. He set down his coffee and approached her carefully, one arm wrapping around her so that her trembling stilled itself against the solidity of his body. He pressed the back of his other hand against her forehead. "And you're burning up. Okay, we're going to contact J'onn, get—"

"No." Kara shook her head and pushed back from James. "No, we need to go right now. Now." This she knew as suddenly, as bone-deep and true, as she knew that Earth's sunlight gave her strength and that James loved her.

"What? Go where? Kara, if this is Kryptonite exposure again we don't have the time to—"

She grabbed James by the hand and tugged him towards the French doors in the living room. They'd gone over the asking price for the chance to have the penthouse apartment in a building that wasn't overlooked by anything—far less chance of Supergirl being spotted coming or going—but Kara scarcely had the time to be thankful for that as she wrapped her arms around James and took off.

Kara pushed east and south as fast as she could without hurting James, with no conscious awareness of their destination but feeling something like a lodestone beneath her breastbone, tugging her onwards. She was breathing hard by the time they set down, soft earth beneath her bare feet and the smell of sweet greenery in her nostrils.

James pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen for a few moments. "You mind telling me what we're doing in rural Polk County, Tennessee? No offence, but I don't think this part of the world is my number one choice for a couple's weekend getaway."

"Not here here," Kara said, frustration and anticipation tangling up in her so that she had to ball her fists together against the force of it. Now she understood. "Look up."

To her, it was obvious right away but it took James a few moments longer to pick it out of the bright, clear morning sky. "What is that, an asteroid?"

Kara shook her head. Her cheeks were wet.

It landed a couple of hundred yards from them. Kara felt the heat of its passage before it buried itself in the nearby undergrowth. She scrambled over to it, feeling branches snag against her pyjama pants and not giving a good goddamn because here was something precious she'd thought irretrievably lost and now it was found. James was close behind her, there to take her hand as she steeled herself to open the pod. The terror, when it struck, was entirely unexpected.

"What if it's not him?" she asked, her voice thick with tears. "Or, or if something happened to him? They told me to look out for him and I couldn't, James—"

He squeezed her hand, a warm and silent comfort, and Kara took a breath to steady herself.

"Okay, okay," she told herself, because waiting would only make it worse and because surely the DEO—or worse—had picked up on this by now and had dispatched someone to investigate. Then she reached out and ran her hands over the surface of the pod, trying to remember where—there, that was the spot, and she pressed her palm to it. Kara felt as much as heard the low hum of recognition that the pod gave out, and then with a pop and a hiss of depressurisation, the pod's canopy slid off.

«Kal, little one, where have you been?» she said, half sobbing and half laughing, because her cousin was alive and grinning up at her and looking not one bit different to how he had on Krypton's last day. He crowed and reached out to her with all of a toddler's imperiousness, and Kara took him in her arms and held him tight. Even his smell was the same, traces of soap and milk and the sweet powders her aunt had used at bath time.

"That's your cousin?" James asked. Somehow they'd ended up in a little heap on the ground: Kara with Kal on her lap, James with his arms wrapped around her. "But it's been years, how could he still be a little kid?"

"We were kept in stasis in the pods; even at top speed following the most direct route, it was always going to take years," Kara said. It was difficult to take her eyes off Kal. Part of her was afraid that this really was a fever dream and she'd blink awake soon to find that she was still Krypton's last child. "Those systems ran on a separate power supply, so if he got knocked off course by a solar storm or something happened with his nav computer, Kal would be safe until he got here or someone else picked him up."

"Until he could let you know you needed to come pick him up," James said. "That's pretty amazing."

"Yeah; yes, it is," Kara agreed. Kal grabbed a fistful of her hair and tugged on it. While she gently disentangled his fingers from her braid, she said, "This, um, this is going to change a whole lot of things."

"I know," James said.

"Because even if it was the smart thing to do, I couldn't walk away from him—"

"Honey, we—"

"I promised my mom I'd look out for him, and if I'm not there to talk to him, how's he going to know who he is or, or where he comes from or—but we're going to need a cover story for him, I mean, adoption is always the go-to and we can say we just didn't want to tell anyone until we were sure, but we'll need papers for him and they're more difficult to get than when I got here. Who do we know who can get us fake papers? I mean, Lois is the obvious answer but then we've got to tell Lois we're—"

"Kara. Hey. Breathe."

She took a shuddering breath and sagged back against James. "Am I being ridiculous?"

"No. You're being someone who cares about your family. C'mon." James stood, picking Kal up and settling him against his hip before taking Kara's hand and helping her to her feet. "You said yourself that there'll probably be people here soon. You take the pod and hide it, then come back for us and we can head home, okay?"

"If you're sure?" Kara said. "Yes, no, you're right, that's smart—I'll be right back." She kissed him quickly, then pressed a kiss to Kal's temple and, shifting to Kryptonian, said, «Behave well for James, little cousin. I will be right back, I promise.» She hadn't spoken her language in so long; the words felt rusty but right in her mouth.

Kal babbled at her and then started to chew his own first, which Kara took as a sign that he wouldn't feel abandoned if she left for a few minutes.

By the time she returned—the pod now safely secreted, at least for the moment, in a disused silo in rural Nebraska—James had moved to sit on a fallen tree trunk. He was dandling a grizzling Kal gingerly on one knee. "So we're going to need some diapers, plus an awful lot of baby wipes."

Kara sniffed and then coughed. "Oh jeez, that's—yeah." The flight home was going to be fun. And then the thought of home gave her pause again. "I know we—I know you said that you'd be okay with not having kids and this isn't what you were expecting when you woke up this morning and…" Her eyes already ached from crying, and the renewed tears weren't helping. She could only imagine the kind of figure she cut: standing in a clearing in the middle of nowhere, red-eyed and in her pyjamas, her hair half falling out of its braid. "You have to l-lie for me enough already. I'm not going to ask you to, to give up—"

"Hey, stop it, this isn't your fault." James stood, resettling Kal into the crook of one big arm. "We have some big stuff to talk about, and you're definitely going to be taking point on explaining to my mom why we just did a 180 on giving her a grandbaby—"

Kara went pale. Monique Olsen was a very successful lawyer for a reason.

"—but it's going to work out, okay? I'm not planning on leaving you, and I'm pretty sure you and this guy are a package deal. So we'll make it work."

"Ugh," Kara said, letting her head flop onto his shoulder. "Why are you so nice to me?"

"Because I love you," James said. "Also, you're on diaper duty for at least the next week."

Kal let out a shriek of evident approval.

"Fine, I love you too, jeez," Kara said, and wrapped her arms around her family, and took them home.