One of the best memories that I had of my mother was at 14 years old. She had just gotten back from a 12-hour shift at the airport. As I heard the door unlock, I hopped out of the bed, racing over to the door. Turning the knob before she could.
I opened the door and saw the haggard, tired form of my beautiful mother. I smiled at her saying, "Hi, mom!”, giving her a hug and a smile to brighten up her day. “Hello, sweetie.” my smile widened at her words.
“William James Abbot!” I flinched at the full name call. What did I do? “Look at your pants!” she exclaimed.
I looked down at my gray, cotton gym pants and saw a visible hole on the pants at knee-level. I grimaced and looked at her apologetically. “I’m sorry, mom.”
I turned to walk into my room to take off the pants, while my mother sat her things down, when my mother sighed and said, “Leave your pants in my room, Willy.” She spent the next hour and a half sewing up the hole in my ripped pants.
That is the kind of woman my mother was. Always willing to lend a helping hand, even when she was dead tired. She was an amazing woman. It took me years to get over the fact that I would never see her again. A lot of teary nights in the orphanage were spent agonizing over something that I could not change.
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The ding of the elevator brought me out of that delightful trip down memory lane. I blinked as the elevator doors opened and the head of a sparring dummy crashed into the back wall of the elevator, right next to my head. Kara stood there, her fist out and a decapitated sparring dummy in her path.
She looked at me, breathing heavily, an expression of anger and frustration on her face, anger being the most prevalent. That look changed into one of surprise.
“Crap, Winn!” She flew over to me, hovering in front of me as she looked me over. “Are you okay? Did I hit you with the dummy?”
For a moment, I thought about faking pain to gain some sympathy from her, before ultimately deciding that that was a shitty move to do. “Kara, I’m fine. The head didn’t hit me at all but aren’t you worried about the dummy’s family?” I asked her, pointing at the field of dummies behind her hovering form, “They might want to sue.”
Instead of laughing at the joke like I thought she would, she seemed to curl into her floating self. Was my joke that bad? It was like a cloud had appeared above her head. I attempted to put my hand on her shoulder, managing to only put my hand on her back. “Are you okay, Kara?” She groaned and put her head into her arms. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you can keep sparring with the dummies, although I don’t think that they can take much more.”
I winced at the look of the sparring dummies. They were all either dented or in pieces. I internally groaned at the money that I would need to spend to buy metals capable of dealing with a Kryptonian’s strength.
She pulled her head away from her arms and rolled her eyes at my corny joke, a smile appearing on her face.
She floated over to a bench on the side of the room, lowering herself to it and sitting down. I sat down next to her and asked, “So, why the dummy head in the elevator?”
“I just found out that my sister is part of the DEO. She’s been lying to my face for years. She knew how dangerous Kryptonite was to me. It could kill me! But she still let them use it on me! She betrayed me! And now I’m finding out that I brung a prison full of possibly hostile, criminal aliens to Earth?” She looked me in the eyes, “She told me ‘Don’t use your powers and you’ll be safe’ but that just made me weak. If those people hurt anyone on this planet, I–that is my fault!” She yelled, tears flowing down her face, her face, red with anguish.
I scoffed, “Did you intentionally bring that prison to Earth? Did you tell those prisoners to harm anyone? You can’t control their actions. You can only control what you do. From where I am standing, you are net positive.” I pulled her into a hug, saying into her ear “What they do is not your fault. You are a good person, don’t take the blame for the decision of someone else.”
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It had been a few hours since Kara had left. She had gotten my point, but I could feel that she was still feeling guilty. Benefits of being a part empath, I guess. I was now out, having gotten a message from one of my alien informants.
I walked into the abandoned sewage treatment plant, an odor blocking mask on my face. “Revex, are you in here?” I heard a growl coming from in front of me and walked towards it.
Revex, a Brairian, a bear humanoid that came from the planet Brair. He was captured by the Kryptonians after he stopped on their planet for fuel. They locked him up because they were isolationist elitists and they violently disliked other races on their planet. Elitists to the extreme. I’m happy that Kara did not retain that part of her culture.
I found Revex behind a line of pipes, sleeping. Revex was a big man. Large in both stature and weight. He looked more like an ogre than the bear humanoid that he was. He laid there, snoring on the ground. Each breath he took, a growl.
I groaned in annoyance at Revex. Almost every time that we met, he was sleeping right here. It was a little tiring to do this almost every time. He was almost always in hibernation mode.
I grabbed his shoulder, shaking him rapidly and violently. “Waaah?!” Revex exclaimed in confusion. It always took him a minute to wake up from his naps.
“Winn!” He wrapped his arms around me, hugging me tight. Over the last two years, Revex and I had become more than informer and receiver, we became friends. I hugged Revex back. When we separated, I asked, “So you said that you had information for me?”
He smiled at me, “Yeah, I was at that alien bar, and I heard this Valeronian bragging how he was going to kill the Kryptonian girl that was on the news, saving the plane. I’m not sure why he thought she was Kryptonian but I thought that you would want to know about a Kryptonian sighting.”
I took a deep breath at Revex’s words, slightly afraid at the possibility of a Valeronian, a species as strong as a Kryptonian, fighting Kara. She did not have enough skill to fight the warrior species that was the Valeronian’s.
“Thanks a lot, Revex. That info’s really helpful.” I pulled out my wallet and passed him 7-hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll see you soon, Revex. We have that bowling tournament next week.”
Revex smiled and said, “See you then, Winn.” He waved me off as I left.
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