Chapter Four
Thor's hand was warm on her shoulder—steady, grounding—as he guided her through the corridors of the strange flying vessel. Kara kept her eyes forward, her face still burning with the heat of a thousand suns. She had dented the ceiling. With her head. In front of everyone.
She wanted to disappear into the Phantom Zone.
Thor said nothing as he led her into a small chamber. The door slid open with a soft hiss, revealing a space with peculiar, padded furniture in muted colors—blues and grays that reminded her of storm clouds. He guided her to one of the seats, his touch gentle but insistent, and sat her down with the care one might use with a frightened animal.
Kara sat.
Thor stepped back, surveying her with that same thoughtful expression he'd worn when he'd first called her "sister." Then he turned, scanning the room with the focus of a warrior assessing a battlefield. His eyes landed on a rectangular cushion resting on another seat. He retrieved it, returned to her, and placed it carefully in her lap.
Then—and Kara's mind stuttered at this—he took her hands and folded them atop the cushion. Positioned them just so. Patted them once.
He nodded, satisfied.
Kara stared at her own hands. At the pillow. At Thor.
He took two steps toward the door.
Paused.
His brow furrowed in consideration, and he turned back around.
"No," he murmured to himself, as though solving some great tactical problem. "No, that will not suffice."
He retrieved a second cushion.
Before Kara could process what was happening, Thor had gently pressed her shoulder, guiding her to lie back on the padded furniture. He tucked the second cushion beneath her head with the tenderness of a mother settling an infant for sleep. Then he took the first pillow—the one that had been in her lap—and repositioned it atop her chest. He laid her hands on top of it again, arranging them with meticulous care.
He stepped back. Nodded once more. "There. Rest well, little sister."
And then he left.
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
It was made of glass.
Kara turned her eyes—just slightly, because moving felt like admitting this was real—and saw them. Dozens of faces pressed close to the transparent barrier. Technicians. Soldiers. People in uniforms she didn't recognize. All of them staring. Gawking. Some with their mouths hanging open. Others whispering to one another, gesturing at her prone form.
At the girl who'd been tucked in like a child.
Her mind kicked into overdrive.
It was instantaneous—the way her consciousness fractured and multiplied, spinning out into thousands of parallel processing threads. Her brain was a quantum supercomputer running on liquid nitrogen and pure solar radiation, overclocked beyond any mortal comprehension. She ran simulations. Permutations. Analyzed every social cue, every cultural variable she'd observed since arriving on Midgard.
Hundreds of scenarios bloomed in her mind's eye.
Then thousands.
She broke her own awareness into fragments—each one examining a different angle, a different possibility. Was this a Midgardian custom? A warrior's ritual? Some form of psychological warfare? A test? An insult? A kindness?
Billions of calculations cascaded through her neural pathways.
Trillions.
More.
The numbers became meaningless. The processing power she wielded could have calculated the trajectory of every atom in this vessel, predicted the weather patterns of this entire continent for the next decade, reverse-engineered the technology holding this ship aloft—
And yet.
And yet.
Every single simulation, every permutation, every possible explanation led her back to the same conclusion.
The same question that had been burning in her mind since the moment Thor had sat her down, then laid her down, then arranged her like a doll:
What the Rao just fucking happened?
Kara lay there, hands folded on the pillow atop her chest, staring at the ceiling she had not dented in this particular room.
Having an older brother, she decided, was the most traumatizing form of torture ever devised.
She closed her eyes. Took a breath. The embarrassment would fade. Eventually. In perhaps a century or two.
For now, she could at least gather information.
Kara focused her hearing—let it expand outward like ripples in water. The voices of the ship's crew faded into background noise: heartbeats, footsteps, the hum of machinery. She pushed past it all, searching for the voices she recognized.
There.
The conference room. She could hear them clearly now.
"...the Tesseract is the key," the man called Fury was saying. His voice was hard, controlled. "Loki's going to use it to open a portal. Bring his army through."
"I doth know my brother's mind," Thor replied, and Kara's heart clenched at the pain in his voice. "He desires a throne, aye, but this—this is madness beyond his usual mischief."
"Madness or not, he's got the Tesseract," another voice cut in—the one called Stark, she thought. His tone was sharp, almost mocking. "And unless someone's got a better plan than 'wait and see what the psycho does,' we're playing catch-up."
"We need to find it," said a woman's voice. Calm. Deadly. "Track the signature. Loki will make a move."
"New Mexico," Fury said. "That's where this started. That's where we lost the Tesseract in the first place."
Kara frowned. Tesseract. New Mexico. Army.
None of it made sense.
She knew what a tesseract was in the mathematical sense—a four-dimensional analogue of a cube—but they spoke of it as though it were an object. A weapon. And this "New Mexico"... was that a region? A city-state? And what army could possibly threaten beings such as these?
She listened harder, parsing the tactical discussion, the talk of energy signatures and gamma radiation and—
"What about the girl?"
Kara's eyes snapped open.
"The Kryptonian," Fury continued. "Thor, you want to explain what the hell she's doing here? Because from where I'm standing, we've got enough problems without adding a superpowered teenager who can't walk through a room without demolishing it."
Silence.
Then Thor's voice, steady and firm: "Kara Zor-El is no threat to thee or thy world, Director Fury. She is lost, far from her home, and hath suffered more than any soul should bear. I have claimed her as kin. She is under my protection."
"That's sweet," Stark said, and Kara could hear the smirk in his voice. "Really. Touching. But 'protection' doesn't mean much if she accidentally sneezes and puts a hole through the hull."
"She is learning," Thor said, and there was an edge to his words now. "As I once did. As all of us have."
"Thor's right." That was the other man—Rogers. His voice was quieter, but it carried weight. "She's a kid. Scared. Alone. We've all been there."
"Speak for yourself, Cap," Stark muttered.
Kara stopped listening.
Her chest felt tight. They were talking about her like she was a problem to be solved. A variable in an equation. She understood—truly, she did. She was dangerous. She had proven that within moments of arriving. But hearing it spoken aloud, hearing the doubt in their voices...
It hurt.
She let her hearing collapse back to normal range. The muffled voices beyond the glass door faded. The hum of the ship's engines became soothing, rhythmic.
Kara lay there, hands still folded on the pillow, and stared at the ceiling.
She had flown across the stars. Survived the destruction of her world. Crashed through a storm and accidentally incapacitated two gods.
And now she was being tucked in for a nap.
Her eyes grew heavy.
Perhaps, she thought, that was not such a terrible thing.
She had endured enough excitement for one day. One lifetime, truly. The conversations could wait. The questions could wait. The universe and its problems could wait.
For now, Kara Zor-El—last daughter of Krypton, bearer of the House of El, survivor of the end of all things—decided she needed a good nap.
Her eyes drifted closed.
And despite everything—despite the stares, the embarrassment, the uncertainty of this strange new world—she felt safe.
Because Thor had called her sister.
And that, somehow, was enough.