Kara might be nearly invulnerable -- skin, and muscles, and bones stronger than steel under a brilliant yellow sun -- but anyone who knows her well knows that her heart has none of those things around it more than physically. Maybe it more than the rest of her was tireless, even without any protection, tissue paper soft no matter the load it was given to carry, never learning how not to care, never wanting to for long, or ever truly at all.
Those words register with a pain in her heart, that reflects lightning fast to her face and her bright eyes. There's no world in which she could ever see that kind of pain or even fear reflected those so familiar eyes and familiar face and not feel it to the tiptoes and top of her heart. How wrong. How he shouldn't be afraid or hurting, or that it shouldn't look like this under all that distance and annoyed bluster. He's not Barry -- and he is, and he's not -- but it's all tangled up together. And her heart with it, when the answer is faster than a bullet, too.
"You don't have to be. You won't be." These words almost entirely tumble and trip over themselves, trying to get out fast enough, certain enough, and sure enough. It's a movement almost too fast, uncertain in its own right, at the very same second, whether to place her hand on his, and in the end, she ends up with her palm up for his hand. "I'm here. And I'll be here, as long as I am. I promise."
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Kara might be nearly invulnerable -- skin, and muscles, and bones stronger than steel under a brilliant yellow sun -- but anyone who knows her well knows that her heart has none of those things around it more than physically. Maybe it more than the rest of her was tireless, even without any protection, tissue paper soft no matter the load it was given to carry, never learning how not to care, never wanting to for long, or ever truly at all.
Those words register with a pain in her heart, that reflects lightning fast to her face and her bright eyes. There's no world in which she could ever see that kind of pain or even fear reflected those so familiar eyes and familiar face and not feel it to the tiptoes and top of her heart. How wrong. How he shouldn't be afraid or hurting, or that it shouldn't look like this under all that distance and annoyed bluster. He's not Barry -- and he is, and he's not -- but it's all tangled up together. And her heart with it, when the answer is faster than a bullet, too.
"You don't have to be. You won't be." These words almost entirely tumble and trip over themselves, trying to get out fast enough, certain enough, and sure enough. It's a movement almost too fast, uncertain in its own right, at the very same second, whether to place her hand on his, and in the end, she ends up with her palm up for his hand. "I'm here. And I'll be here, as long as I am. I promise."