Soulmates: Chapter XVI
(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
No more than two steps down and Kara instantly regretted it.
The city didn’t care. The street was empty and devoid of life yet the sound of a busy world carrying on despite her sat in the air, spilled over from the closeness of the city, as though carrying with the black evening clouds and settling on top of the entire street.
The strangeness of it wasn't all that strange. There had been this big, angry and colourful argument. A dramatic escape. A slammed door and pounding, rushing feet. A push-pulling chest. A mind compounding itself. Then two steps into the street and returned to the world, Kara finally looked up and took stock.
She looked at the empty stationary cars parked adjacent, then the stillness of the streetlamps with nothing making shadows, almost a photograph, all of it without movement or motion. The street was too calm, too still, and Kara instantly felt how little the universe cared about her troubles despite somehow caring enough to create them in the first place.
But there was still all that noise. The proximity of the lower-side district fell on the doorstep. The city always eating away at everything, devouring and consuming any silence. The residential townhouses were central and expensive, tightly packed, sitting beneath it all, and yet the nothingness of the street seemed to compound and echo the thumping constant of a city, as if the world was peering around the curtain—sneaking glimpses and then ducking out of sight—laughing at the state of Kara's life.
For a few minutes Kara simply listened to the noise, gathering herself, standing there and taking it in, rooting herself in something outside her thought processes.
In the distance there were alarms, traffic, laughter and conversation. Then the distinct sound of helicopters choppering through the air, maybe a news helicopter or police surveillance.
Kara sighed, then sighed again. She stood straighter, unsure of which direction to start walking. She had always felt at odds with the universe but right now she mostly felt at odds with herself. One problem at a time; she figured out her feet, got them walking, slow but steady, and that allowed her brain to work again.
The guilt compounded. She regretted every horrible, nasty word that had tumbled over her lips. The ones she could remember. The ones she couldn’t remember. Kara didn’t even want to try. In the moment it had felt beyond anger, something she knew, while hissing hateful things, was little more than cruelty for the sake of cruelty, because how else could she make Catherine Grant understand the effect she had on others?
There it was, Kara thought.
Her carefully curated life online—pretence, filter, pleasantly out of context and glowing—was gone in the blink of an eye. For her, at least. Kara felt confronted with the truth in a way that couldn't be unrealised.
All that effort to seem less dowdy in photographs, less boring through the lens of a curated life, less ordinary, less woefully Kara Danvers; she realised on the turn of the street corner that it was more for herself than it ever was for a soulmate researching her online.
Just too feel that she was actually interesting.
Someone that she herself might admire and want to know more about.
Then Cat had lifted her blouse and showed her the scar; the permanence on her body that Kara...
Wasn't interesting enough.
Not beautiful, worthwhile or valuable.
Kara Danvers, who had moved here to National City above all other reasons because something in her gut said this was where she would find the one. Just, not that one.
It wasn't supposed to be Cat.
There were emotional justifications to her rage and anguish, of course there were emotional justifications; she had a soulmate who was inconveniently—someway, somehow—not her girlfriend Lena.
“Can I come over?” Kara texted her.
“Of course.” The text from Lena popped up, then another followed immediately. “My flight lands in two hours. Your thumbprint will let you in the front door so make yourself at home. I won’t wake you if you are asleep.”
“I won’t be asleep. Thanks, I love you. I’ll see you when you get home.” Kara replied and put her phone in her pocket, looked both ways, then got her feet going again.
Lena felt, more than anything, to be her person. It felt right with Lena in this settled, certain way in her heart—right the way other people talked about soulmates. It was quiet and correct, solidified and assured, despite a lack of time under their belt, which felt romantic if anything, fated maybe.
More than that, Kara felt like there was this safety that ran parallel to the romance, the sex, the push-pull of wanting to touch her all the time, and how nerve wracking that was. Kara didn’t worry about it, not once, because in Lena there was the safety that came with having a best friend too. This person who was looking at her, really looking; not just seeing the outside, noticing the zit, the sweatpants, but grinning and looking and seeing right past that stuff.
Kissing would slip into giggles, then long conversations about silly things, as though Kara could do that, all night, all week, all her life, sitting on Lena’s hips; nose to nose and consumed with conversations about stuff that wasn’t important.
It wasn’t just happy with Lena.
It was happy like it would progress into some prolonged, always state of happiness. A shared life that would look and feel no different to anybody else’s perfect happy-ending story with their soulmates.
But Lena wasn’t her soulmate; the universe had said so. Kara couldn’t make sense of it, not just because she was head over heels in love with Lena, but because her actual soulmate wasn’t going to be around for the long-haul, and like salt into the wound, Cat made it clear whatever time there was left to be spent—it was not time she wanted to spend with Kara.
In some tiny way, that had been an instant relief, almost like Kara had been spared because Cat refused to even try and love her. Kara didn’t want her too, not as she was thinking about it, pounding the pavement, collecting the events of the day into something that made sense. Kara didn’t want her purpose, her life, her nudge from the universe to point towards making herself a vestibule for teaching Cat Grant how to be a decent person.
Which was silly, Kara knew that too, because she didn’t exactly feel like a good person after the things she had said. She just didn’t know how to make the accounting in her brain square it all away because soulmates were…
An inescapably concrete, arranged certainty that people simply did not avoid and ignore. A soulmate wasn’t just a partner—they were a fixed point. A tomorrow that was coming, because tomorrow always came, and that could only mean one thing despite Kara’s conflictions.
One foot in front of the other down the street, without determined direction, because the truth was that she didn’t know how to be a good person, not tonight; she just knew how to walk and breathe, and there was little else she felt capable of trying to do, so she just did those two things.
Past the first towering office building that sprouted up and welcomed her back, Kara realised there was one other thing she knew how to do; think in prolonged and expansive trails, losing herself, consuming and simultaneously consumed by an overactive mind. It was fine on vast farmland and wheat fields, helpful even, but not smart near busy traffic and tram lines.
Kara lost herself anyway.
Cat felt to be this complex creature who was neither malevolent or benevolent, yet exuded both of these energies abundantly, in a way that felt strange and unimaginable for a shared life—a loving partnership.
Kara walked towards Lena’s home, hands dug in her pockets, crying quietly, unsure of how to process these things. At least, not with heckling conversations back and forthing across streets from neighbours. The raring, clattering sounds of the city colluding and sticking with righteous imposition in her disordered mind. The smells, the traffic, the noise, the unforgiving totality of it was overwhelming.
It pushed her further into her thoughts; into her steps, trudging into internal questions and conflicts, because she could not imagine Cat in any other light or gaze, yet there had to be other lights, other gazes, other moments to be shared with her, all of which would inevitably make sense because right there on her hip…
Kara walked, and walked, and found herself a mile later right in the centre of towering concrete, into the billow of a restless city sprouting around itself. A real city, one that never slept, never ate, never lived or breathed, but just took up all the good views and good air in a way Kara began to realise that she hated and wanted no part of.
She couldn’t stop walking.
She couldn’t stop the inertia of a dense, unimpressive, greyish city.
She couldn’t stop wandering through ideas that felt tentative and uncertain; to imagine what a life with Cat would look like, certain it was a life she did not want.
The main junction was tailed with traffic in every direction. Kara dipped her head; walked through the slow, non-existent movement of traffic, around a stalled hood, then slipped around the trunk of the opposite pushing car, saving no time at all, yet simply feeling as though she should not stop walking.
It was the thought of Cat in a kitchen, at dawn, making coffee and eating toast. It broke her brain eleven different ways. The way that thought did not—could not—sit in her mind long enough to even fathom a picture. It was too impossible and absurd. A flash, a vague idea of comfortable domestic quietude, with an exhausted woman eating toast, naked, some little smile in her bite when she looked Kara’s way and saw Kara looking back at her, but then Kara realised it was someone else’s smile etching in her mind, someone else’s penchant for avocado toast with two eggs and a sprinkle of pepper.
It was at best, on the sixth attempt, a very Lena-esque rendition of Cat, there in her head for just a second, then quickly morphing into jet black hair and a radiant dimpled smile, making crumbs on the kitchen floor in her brain, and Kara did not want to sweep them away, not for a second.
Kara kept trying to picture it, to put Cat in some domestic scene. It was as though Cat Grant, for such a small woman, had made herself too big to fit inside a warm, homely kitchen. Time and life had taken her somewhere else—somewhere too far gone for Kara to meet her there.
There it was, Kara realised on the corner between fourth and fifth, perhaps the only thing Catherine Grant could not afford to buy in any meaningful way. A chipped, used breakfast table with two chairs, a newspaper on top, and a wife sitting opposite to share a crossword with. It was sad. It was heart-breaking and morose; to have all that success, all those fancy things, and yet own nothing quite as important as a burgundy spilled wine stain on the kitchen table from too much laughter shared with someone worth laughing with.
Beyond the mundane, ordinary things that people shared, breakfast in the kitchen, moments of domestic quiet; Kara found herself at other losses. Big and small. She swung her stride into the turn of the pavement, squeezing to the side as the foot traffic grew thicker, somehow three or so miles further than where she started her walk.
Cat was beautiful but she was also greyish, asexual almost, in the same way a teacher feels to be asexual. Kara couldn’t imagine it—her—doing anything of the kind. Cat was…too pristine. Too difficult to imagine as a woman with kinks, and turn-ons, and preferences, and so they didn’t exist because they could not be imagined.
Kara skipped faster when she saw the tram pulled into the spot, it was heading northbound, and she instantly gave up on the idea of walking anymore. It was getting her nowhere fast—literally and metaphorically. She hopped on the back.
There was a little railing and platform just before the door of the cart. Kara stood beneath the shelter of the roof, half-inside, half-outside, cold pricking air on her cheeks. She patted her pockets and didn’t find her card, her purse was quickly rummaged through, but it was late and the attendant at the front didn’t glance her way, so she stopped, strangely, as though an engine had stalled.
No movement, no thoughts, just that cold pricking air needling her skin, reminding her of her body.
The day had brought so much stress, her body needed to be without her overactive processing for a minute, just for a pause to get her lungs working the way they were supposed to. It came to her. She remembered how to breathe again, properly this time, and that felt like a battle won.
Slowly, the cart pulled and ricketed along the line which jump-started her brain into movement. Kara stepped into the car, sitting down on the first empty row of seats. She hunched over, all unladylike and almost folded over her lap, rubbing her headache with a hard sigh.
It wasn’t that Cat was totally impossible to imagine in her future, Kara thought around that a little more.
Cat was the boss Kara felt she would tell her children about one day. Twenty-one or two-ish, somewhere between college and real adulthood, convinced they are the first and only person, in the city, in the world, to have an asshole boss who inflicted misery in gleefully proficient ways. Almost tucked away, that was where Cat had been living inside Kara’s imagination of the future.
A story to be told to the kids, everyone sitting altogether on the back porch, with rolling eyes and laughter, because who could ever believe someone once made their mother ensure all the bubbles in the bubble wrap were no more than a millimetre to one another. There Kara had indeed found herself, with a ruler, because the gifted vase being sent to the other side of the coast had the thinnest lacquer of hand-stroked gold that needed careful transport. A wedding gift for some vapid, tenured reality show cast-member.
A story worthy, prize winning, blue-ribbon bitch of a boss.
Maybe not to the gift’s recipient.
That vapid and self-absorbed reality star, whom Kara found out weeks afterward was actually a former subsidiary employee. A junior weather girl on a local station that Cat had bought-out some long years ago. They had met only a few times, talked to each other just the once or twice, all of it too many years ago for anyone to really remember but Kara had seen the photographs in the archive, the two younger women chatting politely to one another, and she knew that Cat must have remembered it all quite perfectly.
Sometime after the nice young weather girl left, though years before she became famous for other things, Cat had heard about what the charming news anchor at the same station had been saying and doing behind closed doors. Handsy, but certainly charming and successful enough that it would never stand up under investigation—not on the complaint of a young, unimportant, unremarkable weather girl.
Kara couldn’t be certain of the facts because there were no official documents or complaints, but maybe just like that junior weather girl who had curiously left the station quickly and quietly, despite gushing to Cat, wide-eyed and optimistic, in the archive footage Kara saw online, how she had wanted to be a weather reporter since she was in second grade, how amazing and exciting it felt to be living her dreams.
Cat fired him the same afternoon she heard the allegations.
And some years later, she sent the vase as a gift for that unremarkable, unimportant weather girl’s wedding day; made sure on the most explicit terms possible to her temping assistant that the bubble wrap was to be checked, twice over, just to make sure it was proper for such a nice vase, and that it should be wrapped neatly in gorgeous paper, a handwritten card with no words—just her signature—tucked neatly into the crease.
Cat Grant was many things, forgetful didn’t seem to be one of them. She sent Kara the navy-blue dress after all, despite knowing what Kara did not know at the time. Cat must have felt some sense of wrongness in her soul, small as a seed, it had to have taken root somewhere, yet she sent the navy-blue dress and gala invitation.
She waved her wand, sent Kara to the ball, and if Lena didn’t want to go then that was too bad—she told Kara to go ahead and take her anyway, because Kara was young, in love, and the dress was very beautiful, one had to make haste of such things.
The cart came to a slow stop to take on passengers, and Kara continued to wonder on the reasons; why Cat would care enough to send the dress, but not enough to tell Kara the state of things, because there had to be reasons, and Kara hoped for lovely ones.
It made Kara feel less terrible, less confused, entirely less awful. Until she remembered the things she said—shouted—while glaring Cat down in the hallway and bitterly wishing her well on a lonely, sad voyage into the end.
“Smile.” Kara jerked up and met eyes with the old woman sitting across. “Whatever he did…he is either not the one you’re supposed to cry about, or he’s the one who is going to make those tears worth it in the end.” She winked.
“Thanks.” Kara sighed and took the backs of her hands across her cheeks.
“Soulmates aren’t easy.” She lifted her sleeve and pulled it up to show a mark on her wrist—a name that was blurred and old like an aged tattoo. “Harry was difficult. It took work…men always do. Would you believe there was a Harold before him? I had a Harold before Harry, for three years, and those were good years—the best years.” The woman’s eyes went calm with a certain light. “Love is very difficult, and it’s a younger woman’s game, I remember that.”
Kara pushed a small smile and nodded, “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“What always happens, dear. I met Harry.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Tall, plain, not terribly handsome or exciting. Till, one day, I see this mark under his shirt collar. It was summertime and he had unbuttoned the top of his shirt and I had seen it before but never…” Her expression became furrowed. “It was my birth name, from before I was adopted, that the nuns had gave to me when I was a baby. It’s still so strange but until that moment, seeing it there on his neck, I had never thought about my birth name. I never told a soul about it.”
“What happened after that?” Kara asked curiously.
“Three children, plenty of arguments, thirty years of marriage, a life that went how life always goes.” The woman smiled.
“But the first Harry?” Kara blinked. “You just…” She wanted to say left, abandoned, deserted him as though he had never existed, because those were her own feelings from the day, but she said nothing and let it hang.
The stranger sat there with her expression calm and paused.
“Well.” Her coat buttons were fiddled with. “The heart wants to believe what it knows, what it feels is right. Harry—the first Harry—he had this birthmark on his bicep with my name. It was my name, the name he knew, but not the name I was born with. It looked…different to other people’s marks. I always used to tease him about that.” Her eyes shone a little, then she sniffed and gave nothing else away. “A tattoo, not a birthmark. He had it put there. To trick me. To…try and stop the natural order of things.” She exasperated as though it were understandably deranged.
“Mhm.” She nodded, surly. “He had noticed me before I ever noticed him. He saw my birthmark and introduced himself by his middle name, Harry, not his Christian name, Edward.” Kara was enthralled and conflicted by each detail. “He said it was love at first sight, but love is so far above us, it’s the universe’s business, and you do not need to trick or lie for it.”
The last part made sense; Kara felt inclined to agree.
The car slowed toward Kara’s stop, a ten-minute walk from Lena’s apartment. She got up, gathering her coat and purse.
“Did your husband, the second Harry, the right Harold.” Kara looked back over her shoulder to the older woman, inhaling and working herself up to it. “Did he love you like he was trying to always get better at it, to keep you for always, or like you were something he had a right to? Like, he didn’t need to try because the marks said so?”
The older woman didn’t verbally respond, she didn’t need to, her expression gave her and the truth away with little more than silence. It was as though she flinched slightly at the unexpected question, her eyes flickering as she thought about it, and the fact she had to think about it told Kara everything she needed to know.
“I think if somebody adored me that much, looked at me and felt things so deeply that they tattooed my name, figured what the hell, they would just love me like they were playing for keeps, because I was more than enough for them—” Kara imagined that first Harry, some idealistic young man, stood on a street corner with his heart thump-thumping wildly in his chest, so desperate and certain of himself that he had just locked eyes with the woman he wanted to grow old with. “Well. I…I think I would have made a different decision. I think I preferred your first love story better.” Kara turned back and got off the tram.
Maybe a soulmate wasn’t what her life had been lacking, Kara thought.
