Chapter 2: Morning After
The dawn did not bring warmth. It brought a pale, watery light that seeped through the shattered atrium and painted the destruction in shades of gunmetal grey. Professor Amelia Stone’s keys jangled in the unnatural silence, the sound too bright, too ordinary for the scene that greeted her.
She stood frozen in the wreckage of her museum. Glass crunched under her sensible flats. The air stank of ozone, cracked stone, and something else—something coppery and foul that caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes, trained to observe minute details in lunar basalt, took in the catastrophe: the ruined skylight, the cracked marble, the scattered display cases.
And the duffel bag, abandoned near the entrance to the Planetary Geology wing. Empty.
“No,” she whispered, her scholarly composure cracking. She rushed forward, her heart a frantic bird against her ribs. The lead-lined case was smashed open, vacant. The other rocks were there, dull and mundane. The special one, the one with the strange isotopic signature, the one that had arrived in a black-ops courier pod with no paperwork, was gone.
A sound.
Not glass shifting. Not the building settling. A hitching, ragged intake of breath. Muffled, wet.
It came from her office.
Her glass-walled office, where the blinds were drawn. A sliver of shadow at the foot of the door.
Amelia approached, each step careful. The metallic, salty smell grew stronger. She pushed the door open.
The sight was a physical blow.
Curled into the smallest possible ball beneath her wide mahogany desk was a figure. Blue and red fabric, torn to shreds, was wrapped around pale, shaking hands. A cape. A symbol. Golden hair matted with dust and something dark. The body was naked from the waist up, the remains of a blue top hanging in tatters. The skin of her back and shoulders was marbled with bruises already blooming a deep, violent purple. Her legs were splayed awkwardly, modestly attempting to cover herself, but failing.
The marble floor beneath her thighs was smeared with two distinct substances: drying blood, and the opaque, sticky spill of semen.
Amelia’s hand flew to her mouth. Her brain, so adept at categorizing, at analyzing, short-circuited. This was not data. This was a car crash of the sacred and the profane.
“Oh, my god.” The words leaked out, airless.
The figure flinched at the sound, curling tighter. A low, animal whimper escaped her.
“Supergirl?” Amelia breathed, kneeling slowly, keeping her distance. The title felt absurd, a cruel joke. The woman—because she was just a woman here, now—buried her face deeper into the shreds of cape. Her shoulders shook with silent, shuddering sobs.
“It’s alright,” Amelia said, the curator in her taking over, using the voice reserved for fragile artifacts and startled interns. “I’m Professor Stone. I work here. You’re in my office. Can you look at me?”
Nothing. Just the shaking.
Amelia’s eyes swept the room. On the edge of the desk, atop a holographic display of the Martian Valles Marineris, lay a jagged, pea-sized fragment of green stone. It was dark now, inert, but she recognized the morphology. A piece of the main sample. Chipped off. It must have been under her, cutting into her skin as he…
Amelia swallowed the bile rising in her throat. She focused on the practical. The human, not the symbol.
“You’re hurt. I need to help you. May I come closer?”
A minute, jerking nod.
Amelia crept forward on her knees. Up close, the damage was catastrophic. The bruises were horrific. Finger-shaped marks stood out livid on her hips, her upper arms. The delicate skin at her neck was raw and abraded. But it was her eyes, when she finally, slowly, turned her head, that broke Amelia’s heart. The famous blue was shattered, glassy with shock, rimmed in a swollen, painful red. They held a vacancy, a hollowed-out horror that spoke of a violation far deeper than the physical.
“He took it,” Kara whispered, her voice scraped raw, alien to her own ears. “The green rock. He had it… and I… I couldn’t…”
“Shhh,” Amelia soothed, reaching out slowly to brush a strand of filthy hair from her forehead. The skin was cold, clammy. “Don’t try to talk. We need to get you cleaned up. We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Kara murmured, the words flat, absolute. Her gaze drifted to the green chip on the desk. A full-body tremor wracked her. “It… it ate me. From the inside. My bones were melting. My blood was on fire. And he… he just…” She trailed off, her breath catching in a wet sob. “He kept saying my name. Not Supergirl. He said ‘Kara.’ How did he know my name?”
The question hung in the cold air, more terrifying than any physical threat.
Amelia had no answer. She stood, her knees popping, and grabbed the wool blanket she kept for late nights. She shook it out and knelt again. “I’m going to cover you, okay? Then we’re going to stand up.”
Kara nodded, listless. As Amelia draped the blanket around her, trying to avoid touching the worst of the bruises, Kara’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. The strength in it, a fading echo of what it should be, was still enough to make Amelia gasp.
“It made me weak,” Kara said, her eyes burning with a desperate, confused agony. “But it didn’t make me not feel. I felt everything. I felt his hands. I felt his… his weight. I felt him… tearing me open.” Her voice dropped to a ragged whisper. “I felt him come inside me. I felt it… leaking out of me. I can still feel it.”
Amelia held her gaze, refusing to look away from the pain. “I know. I’m so sorry. But you have to let go of me so I can help you.”
The grip loosened. Amelia carefully, slowly, helped her to stand. Kara wobbled, her legs unsteady. The blanket slipped, and Amelia saw it all again—the brutal evidence of the violation. The blood. The streaks of dried white on her inner thighs. The angry, swollen flesh between her legs.
Kara followed her gaze. A violent, full-body shudder convulsed through her. She bent over, retching, but nothing came up. Just dry, wrenching heaves that seemed to tear something loose in her chest.
When she straightened, her face was ashen. “I need to shower,” she said, the words mechanical. “I need to burn my skin off.”
“My apartment is two blocks away,” Amelia said firmly, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, feeling the tremors that never ceased. “We’ll go there. No one will see.”
They moved through the ravaged museum like ghosts. Kara limped, each step a small agony. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor, away from the spot near the Moon Rock exhibit where the marble was darkest.
Amelia’s apartment was a cluttered nest of books, sample boxes, and astrophysics journals. She led Kara directly to the bathroom, a small, tiled space. She started the shower, steam beginning to fog the mirror.
Kara stood motionless, the blanket held around her like a shield.
“I have to…” Kara began, then stopped. She let the blanket fall.
In the bright, unforgiving fluorescent light, the extent of the damage was even more clear. The bruises were a monstrous map of violence. Amelia saw the faint, ghostly outline of a handprint on her stomach. She saw the bite mark on her shoulder.
Kara stepped into the shower. The water hit her, and she screamed. A short, sharp sound of pure anguish. She sank to the tiles, curling up as the water sluiced over her, her arms wrapped around her knees, her head bowed.
Amelia watched, helpless, as the water at Kara’s feet swirled with pink, then rust-brown, carrying away the physical proof. But she knew, looking at the raw, broken figure weeping under the spray, that some stains wouldn’t wash out.
She left her there, giving her privacy, and went to make tea she knew wouldn’t be drunk. She picked up her phone, stared at it. Who did you call for this? The DEO? The police? For a Kryptonian who had been brought low not by a monster, but by a man with a rock?
From the bathroom, over the sound of the shower, she heard the crying change. It became quieter, more hopeless. It was the sound of someone who had just realized that the world was not what they believed, that their own body was now a crime scene, and that the power they had relied on was a fairy tale that had ended at midnight in a museum.
Amelia Stone put the phone down. The recovery of the specimen was now inextricably linked to this horror. The geological mystery had become a blood-soaked secret. And the woman in her shower, scrubbing her skin raw, was no longer just a hero.
She was a witness. And she was broken.