Chapter 1: Crash Landing and a Fevered Touch
The world ended in a scream of tearing metal and a bloom of orange fire against the lavender sky.
Barbara’s head cracked against the viewport. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of warning lights and the shriek of stressed alloys. Then, impact. A grinding, bone-deep shudder that tossed her against her restraints like a rag doll. Silence fell, heavy and immediate, broken only by the ping of cooling metal and her own ragged gasps.
Smoke. Acrid and chemical, but underneath it, something else. Something sweet and cloying, like crushed orchids and lightning.
“Kara?” Her voice was a croak. She fumbled for the harness release, her gloves slick with something that wasn’t blood. “Kara, talk to me.”
A groan from the pilot’s seat. “I’m here. I’m—ow. Everything’s… fuzzy.”
Barbara stumbled free, boots crunching on shattered console glass. The shuttle was a carcass, split open along its belly, vomiting wires and insulation into the clearing. The air that poured in was warm, thick, humming with a low-grade energy that made her teeth ache. She pushed past a dangling panel, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs.
Kara was pulling herself upright, one hand pressed to her temple. A trickle of gold-flecked Kryptonian blood traced a path to her jaw. In the eerie, pulsing light of the bioluminescent vines that hung like arteries from the towering trees, she looked unnervingly pale. Her usual aura of invincibility was gone, sanded away by the crash and this place.
“Are you hurt? Your powers?”
“I don’t know.” Kara flexed her hand, staring at it. “Everything feels… heavy. Dampened. That energy field we flew through, it’s like it’s still in my cells.” She looked up, her blue eyes wide. “Barbs, where are we?”
Barbara followed her gaze. The sky was a rippling canvas of impossible colors, lavender bleeding into deep violet, with no sun, no stars, just that constant, shifting glow. The jungle around them was a symphony of quiet, alien life. Vines pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light. Fronds the size of cars dripped moisture that sizzled softly when it hit the strange, moss-covered ground. The silence was profound, a living thing pressing in on them.
“Somewhere the League hasn’t charted,” Barbara said, her training kicking in, pushing back the rising tide of panic. “Communications are fried. Transponder’s dead. We’re off the grid.”
“Great.” Kara stood, wobbled, and braced herself against the shattered cockpit frame. “So. Standard protocol. Assess, shelter, signal.”
“Right.” Barbara forced a breath, the sweet, electric air filling her lungs. It was doing something to her. She felt jittery, hyper-aware. The scrape of her glove against her thigh was amplified. The sound of Kara’s breathing was a tide she could map. “Shelter first. This wreck won’t hold. And something might come to investigate the fireworks.”
They worked in a tense, wordless rhythm born of a hundred battles. Kara, even weakened, bent the less-damaged hull plates into a rudimentary lean-to against a massive, smooth-barked tree. Barbara scavenged the emergency kit: a water purifier, protein packs, a thermal blanket that seemed absurdly flimsy in the face of this alien humidity. Every movement felt charged. Every accidental brush of shoulders sent a current up Barbara’s spine.
Hours bled together, marked only by the slow pulse of the vines.
They tried to talk, to strategize, but the words felt small, swallowed by the immense, watchful quiet. The planet’s energy was a pervasive whisper in their blood. Barbara found herself staring, tracking the line of sweat down Kara’s neck as she tried futilely to spark a fire with broken wiring.
“It’s no use,” Kara sighed, tossing the wires down. She leaned back, closing her eyes. The golden light played over the strong lines of her face, the curve of her lips. “It’s like the air here absorbs heat differently. My heat vision just… fizzles.”
“We’ll manage,” Barbara said, but her own voice sounded strange to her—softer, lower.
“Will we?” Kara’s eyes opened, fixed on the swirling sky. “A year, Barbara. The sensor log confirmed it before it died. Time dilation field. A year here is… what, days back home? They’ll think we’re dead. We will be dead if we can’t…” Her voice hitched, a rare crack in the Supergirl armor. “I can’t even lift a rock the size of this shuttle right now.”
The admission hung between them, raw and terrifying. Kara, vulnerable. It was a concept as alien as the jungle around them. Barbara’s carefully maintained walls, the ones that kept her professionalism, her analysis, her distance, began to soften at the edges, eroded by fear and that incessant, sweet hum in the air.
“Hey,” Barbara said. She moved before she could think, crossing the small space to sit beside her. Their thighs touched. The contact was electric. “We’re alive. We’re together. We’ve gotten out of worse with less.”
“Have we?” Kara turned her head. Their faces were inches apart. Barbara could see the faint flecks of silver in her blue eyes, the tremble in her lower lip. The scent of her—sunlight and ozone, now undercut with that alien pollen—was dizzying.
All the unsaid things, the glances held a beat too long during Watchtower debriefs, the casual touches that weren’t casual at all, came roaring to the surface. The planet’s energy stripped away the pretense, the fear, the logic. It left only a raw, trembling truth.
Barbara’s gloved hand came up, almost of its own volition. She traced the curve of Kara’s jaw, wiping away the dried trace of gold blood with her thumb. The leather was a rough contrast to the impossible softness of Kara’s skin. Kara’s breath hitched, her eyes darkening.
“Barbara…” It was a whisper, a plea, a warning.
“I’m tired of not saying it,” Barbara heard herself say, the words spilling out like a confession dragged from the depths. “I’m tired of pretending I don’t think about this every time you fly away. I’m tired of being Batgirl when I’m with you. I just want to be me. And I want you.”
The last thread of restraint snapped.
She closed the distance, capturing Kara’s lips with her own. It wasn’t gentle. It was months, years, of pent-up longing unleashed—desperate, hungry, and soaked in the relief of being alive. Kara froze for a half-second, a stunned statue, then melted. A sound, half-sob, half-sigh, vibrated against Barbara’s mouth as Kara kissed her back with equal fervor.
Her hands came up, one tangling in Barbara’s long red hair, the other splaying against her back, pulling her closer until there was no space left between them. The cool metal of Kara’s suit under Barbara’s seeking hands, the heat of her mouth, the taste of her—it was overwhelming. The alien air hummed around them, through them, a catalyst for something inevitable.
They broke apart, gasping, foreheads pressed together.
“Okay,” Kara breathed, her voice ragged. “Okay. That just happened.”
“Yeah,” Barbara managed, her own heart trying to punch its way out of her chest. “It really did.”
Then Kara kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, pouring a century of loneliness and a desperate, present hope into it. The outside world—the wreck, the jungle, the lost year—ceased to exist. There was only the shared heat of their bodies, the slick slide of fabric being pushed aside, the exploration of hands on skin that knew every strength but had never learned these specific curves.
Later, tangled in the thermal blanket under their makeshift shelter, Barbara traced idle patterns on Kara’s bare shoulder. The planet’s eerie light painted their skin in otherworldly hues. The urgency had mellowed into a sated, awe-filled stillness, but the hum in the air, in their blood, remained.
“I don’t know what that was,” Kara murmured, her nose buried in Barbara’s hair. “But it wasn’t just us.”
“The planet,” Barbara agreed, her analytical mind struggling to re-engage and failing utterly. “It’s in the air. It… lowers inhibitions. Amplifies emotions.”
“It felt like more than that.” Kara’s voice was hesitant. She looked down at her own hands, turning them over. “For me, it was… physical. Cellular. Like my whole biology was lit up. I’ve never felt anything like it.” She met Barbara’s eyes, a shadow of her old, anxious vulnerability flashing through. “Did I… hurt you?”
“God, no,” Barbara said, pulling her closer. “The opposite. It was…” She lacked the vocabulary. It had been transcendent, a confluence of need and emotion and something stranger, something that had crackled between them like a completed circuit.
Kara nodded, but a faint, troubled frown lingered on her face. She pressed her hand lightly against her own lower abdomen, a gesture so fleeting Barbara almost missed it. A tiny, almost imperceptible shimmer of gold light flickered beneath her skin where her hand had been, then faded.
Outside their shelter, the jungle breathed its luminous, electric breath. The long, alien night stretched ahead, full of unknowns. But for now, wrapped around each other, they had found a new, terrifying, and exhilarating kind of gravity. The mission to survive had just become infinitely more complicated.