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Esme doesn’t sleep. Not when her new parents aren’t there. And they aren’t — they aren’t home. That is the second thing Esme thinks when she’s pulled from a nightmare, the one where flames lick at her throat as they pour out of her. She feels like screaming — that’s the first thing she thinks about between waves of terror, heart thundering in her ears. The sound comes out as a whimper instead. That’s because her tongue is wedged down firmly between her teeth until she tastes salt. To be good. Press down. Don’t make a sound. Esme’s fingernails lance at her scalp, palms press against the lingering images that flutter behind her eyelids. Her feet kick furiously at tangled sheets, further swallowing and embedding themselves around one of her ankles. There’s a coolness at her wrist that for just a moment dulls down every overwhelming sensation when she focuses on it. The metal slides subtly down her arm and allows her to think a bit.
She’s not completely filled in darkness, she realizes. Between her fingertips she can see hollow light peek through. It’s from her Supergirl nightlight. She’s trying not to rock, trying to stay still, because it’s causing the bed to slightly creak. But her body isn't listening. Her wet fingers move from her face to dig into the flesh at her sides as she continues careening back and forth.
There’s a light tapping sound at the door.
“Esme?” The voice is familiar. “It’s Kara. Can I — can I come in? Please?”
She can’t speak, she wants to but right now only little whimpers and sobs are working their way out of her jaw’s vice grip, not words.
Another voice murmurs something softly.
All Esme wants to do is stop. Not to stop to go back to sleep, because that’s where scary things — real and true things — loom. Just to stop crying, to stop feeling so much. Her parents will be home soon. They said so.
“Esme,” comes Kara’s voice again. “You had a nightmare.” Esme’s breaths sputter loudly over the reassurances. “You’re safe.”
Safe?
“You’re home.”
The drumming of Esme’s heart slows slightly at that. She struggles around the frog in her throat for a long time, finally forces out a “Kara?” and then the door creaks open.
Esme continues to rock forward and her eyes are still screwed shut, but she can feel someone’s presence, her Aunt Kara, kneeling down at the foot of her bed.
Kara has been speaking this whole time, cooing the same refrain. “You’re safe, Esme. You’re home.” And Esme wants to reach out, realizes she already has before she can think better of it.
Kara’s hands feel soft and soothing and warm when they drape around Esme’s smaller one like a blanket straight from the dryer. But just as soon as Esme feels a moment of relief, her body recoils on instinct. Touch. Her aunt is an alien too. Don’t touch.
Kara lets her wrench her fingers away, but as if she can read her thoughts, says, “It’s okay if you want to hold my hand, Esme. You’re wearing the bracelet we talked about, do you remember?”
Esme doesn’t. She remembers the flames, and the darkness, and her parents — no. Her parents will be home soon. “The what?” she says finally.
“The bracelet your Aunt Lena made.” There’s the sound of metallic tapping. “It stops your powers from mimicking mine.”
Esme vaguely recalls her new family sitting down with Alex and Kelly to discuss the jewelry they all wear. Later, when her thoughts are clearer she’ll play back over the matching set of bracelets Nia and Brainy had slipped on, almost identical to Esme’s own. Except Esme’s has zebras etched in. J’onn and Kara had chosen rings, though while J’onn wore one on his pinky, Kara placed one on each finger. Just in case one of them falls off, she had said. “So if you want to touch me, you can,” Kara says now reassuringly.
Esme doesn’t respond. The seconds of silence unfold like kirigami snowflakes, one onto another and then another, in seemingly endless symmetry. Her eyes are still closed, still shrouded in blackness.
“I’m going to turn on the light, okay?” Esme doesn’t fully comprehend the words this time. Only the silence answers, but when her vision is bathed in the soft pink of her eyelids, some part of her must have braced for the shift in light because it’s more soothing than it is startling.
After a few moments, everything becomes sharper at the edges. She inhales noisily, opens her eyes and dives into Kara’s arms at the first sight of her, hooking her nose into her aunt’s collar bone a little painfully. Her aunt’s chest is a furnace, her heart thrums steadily; she smells like mint, and citrus, and lo mein noodles. Kara moves to the bed and strokes Esme’s back, starting at the shoulder blades, down her spine and back up as she whispers the same reassurances again and again. With her other hand, Kara combs through Esme’s hair and she sighs at the feel of cool metal brushing her scalp. The visions slowly fade. A few minutes in, Esme actually hears the change in Kara’s refrain — Kara is asking her something.
“…Do you want me to call your moms?” Kara asks again. Esme shakes her head vigorously before the sentence is fully out. “Okay, okay,” Kara says softly.
It has been 47 days since Kelly and Alex had first tucked Esme in and declared her family. This is their first night away. Not away, Esme silently corrects herself, as she wipes at her eyes and unlatches her ankle from stubborn sheets. They would be back. Soon. She isn’t going to ruin their date, they were so excited. Several more minutes pass by in repetition. Esme feels her body settle: her shoulders relax, her toes uncurl, her jaw unclamps, causing a jolt of electric pain to shoot up and to settle behind her eye.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Kara asks.
Esme shifts and mumbles into Kara’s shoulder. “It’s not real.” But it was.
“It was a dream.” Kara says carefully, neither agreeing or disagreeing. Esme feels the tilt of Kara’s chin turn upward, toward a shadow in the doorway.
“Sometimes I get nightmares too,” Kara says. Her voice is steady and inviting and Esme knows a bit about the nightmares that make up her aunt’s world. Her family gone, every other person gone, a planet consumed in fire. The need to adjust to powers, and people, and expectations that were so different but no less absolutely necessary to keep her new family safe. It’s all very familiar to Esme. But though her aunt Kara is trying to bond…or be the adult, as adults do, Esme doesn’t much feel like either.
“Yeah.” Esme pushes off of Kara’s shoulder and wipes at her eyes. A hazy calmness has settled over her and she blinks back against the sleep threatening to take her. She isn’t ready to go back.
“Do you want some water—?”
“I killed them.”
Their sentences clash over the top of each other. Esme’s looking down at her Powergirl bedsheets, not daring to meet Kara’s gaze.
“You killed who?” Kara’s voice is gentle. Not a hint of anger or fear in it.
“My parents.”
“In your dream?” Esme nods. “Did you accidentally kill your moms with your powers?” Kara offers her hand out again but Esme turns away from her and her green fuzzy cardigan.
“No. My Mommy and Daddy. But it’s real. I did it.”
“Why do you think that, Esme?” It isn’t Kara’s fault but Esme feels anger bubbling in her stomach in response. She must know. Kelly and Alex must have told her about the night when Agent Liberty and his men lined them up in rows, children on one side, parents on the other. Her mom and dad had told her to be brave, to not make a sound.
Her teeth latch down again hard, capturing both her tongue and a sob in one go. “They went through the portal and I didn’t say anything!” The traitorous sobs escape her this time. She can’t stop them. She looks up at Kara square in her blue eyes. “They’re dead. I k-killed them.”
“Do you know what death is?”
She does, she recites what Mama Kelly had said about it. “It’s when a body stops working.”
They talk about it. Esme eventually holds her hand again while Kara explains things Esme has heard a hundred times from Kelly, about Agent Lib — no, Benjamin Lockwood’s plans, and how alien children were kept behind to power the portal and other devices, tearing at the moments down to their barest parts, like stripping flesh from bone. As though if it were reasoned through and dissected often enough all emotional memory could be cut away entirely. Esme was one of those children, her powers were siphoned and used where she did not have any say.
“Ben Lockwood had so much anger,” says Kara. “He let his fear of aliens — of us,” Kara squeezes Esme’s hand, “ turn into hatred. That’s why he made the portal. He made that choice. Esme, your parents loved you.”
Esme wants to say something, but she doesn’t have the words. She had been one of eight children powering the portal her parents went through. Her father walked by after a touch to her forehead and a finger to his lips, as he was pulled through. Into the fire.
If she were older she might’ve been able to articulate that it wasn’t fair to ask for her inaction. That if they loved her they would have tried harder, or would have let her try to keep them together and safe. Or just together. That her parents left her alone and afraid: of Lockwood’s men, of other humans who might use or hunt her. Afraid of herself. And her only constant, the companion that never left, was the guilt — an emotion that she couldn’t begin to understand or explain, but one which must be true. But she doesn’t have those words so she jerks away from Kara, hangs her head back in her hands and screams “Stop. Stop it!” again and again.
She doesn’t notice at first when someone else enters the room.
“I don’t know what to do,” Kara says a little frantically. “Should we call Alex?” There’s whispering back and forth.
Esme’s body has worked itself up again into painful sobs that rack her small chest. There don’t seem to be any tears left to fall.
“Esme,” comes a voice that’s so soft and gentle, Esme doesn’t hear it at first. “Esme,” the voice says again, no less kind but much louder. “It’s Lena.”
Esme wrenches apart her hands that are struggling to contain the sobs at her stomach, and reaches out at the sound. “Auntie?”
Lena takes both hands immediately into one of her own. “Yeah,” she says, joining Esme and Kara on the other side of the bed. “I have some water. I want you to hold onto it, okay?” Lena brushes the chilled glass against Esme’s fingertips.
It takes a few seconds for Esme to hear Lena, really hear her, and a few seconds more to get her hands to work properly, but then they’re spread around the frosty glass and a tiny part of her feels almost triumphant. Her sobs are further in between now, though no less violent when they do come. “Very good. Just focus on the glass.” Esme tries. She leans back into Kara’s stomach and her aunt pulls her to her chest.
Lena eventually asks her a series of questions. How does it feel? Is it heavy? What color is it? And for that last one Esme reluctantly opens her eyes.
The glass — or rather a Winnie the Pooh jam jar — is purple and yellow. Esme cups the jar at the base with her palms, letting the cold ground her.
“Can you tell me what it tastes like?” Esme looks up at Lena: her hair is in a loose bun, she’s wearing a dark blue turtleneck, and her green eyes crinkle at the corners where she smiles.
Does water have a taste? She doesn’t remember it tasting like anything, she didn’t much care to drink the offered water before. Now she’s curious to double check.
“Probably tastes like rain,” Esme decides and that earns her a chuckle into the base of her scalp which releases a bit more confidence. Her thumbs swirl at the condensation along the glass when she sips. Dollops of red pour thick like honey from her mouth into the jar. Blood.
Esme glances at Kara and Lena, readying herself for critical words and hard stares. “I’m sorry,” she says, turning quickly to Kara whose eyebrows are knitted in concern, but she shakes her head immediately and resumes stroking Esme’s shoulder.
“I’m not angry,” Kara says with such conviction that Esme has no choice but to believe her.
Other than a slight twitch in the muscle of her cheek, Lena’s face remains almost impassive, She refashions her features immediately back into a smile, not as wide this time but at least it still reaches her eyes. “No one’s angry.” She clasps Esme’s elbow and says gently, “Esme, can I see in your mouth?” Esme opens it, baring her teeth like a vampire and Lena’s smile widens until dimples pop out. “And stick out your tongue for me —“
“— like you’re at the Doctor’s.” Kara adds and Esme does, and the circles at her back increase in tempo. “Okay,” Lena says lightly. “I’ll be right back.” She pushes off the bed, and strides out and back before Esme can think to ask Kara about the disappearance.
Lena is leaning down in front of her with a real glass of water this time in one hand, and an empty blue bowl in the other. “Do you use mouthwash?” Lena asks. Esme nods. “This has salt in it. It’s going to hurt a little. I want you to swish it around in your mouth like mouthwash and then spit it into the bowl.
Lena is confusing sometimes. “Spit it?” Esme asks.
Lena nods.
Esme tips the water back and immediately regrets it. It feels like fire and for a minute she begins to panic. Forgets to swish the liquid around.
“You’re okay.” Lena says calmly.”The salt in the water is cleaning the wound.”
Esme swishes twice and spits. She vaguely hears Lena ask her to open her mouth, but she feels betrayed. “Water isn’t supposed to burn,” she informs Lena. She moves away from the glass now in Lena’s outstretched hand, toward her aunt Kara instead. She glares at the glass. Water in fact being able to burn is possibly the greatest betrayal of her young life. She pushes one last time against the glass until Lena sets it on the side table. Esme shakes away the nightmare — and the memory of breathing fire.
Lena sits beside her again, intertwining her fingers with Kara’s and explains that while it feels like burning, what Esme is experiencing is her skin drying as the salt takes the bacteria out of her mouth.
“That sounds like burning,” Esme says a little petulantly.
“I suppose it does.” Lena says with a short huff of a laugh. Lena moves to face Esme again, crouching down on her elbows. “Can I see in your mouth again? I won’t touch anything.”
When Lena frowns at whatever is in Esme’s mouth, Kara whips past from behind Esme’s back and returns with some cloth pads which she is tasked with pressing down into her tongue.
Lena stares at her as Esme snuggles back under the blankets with Kara. “What is it?” asks Esme. Lena’s eyes widen a bit and Esme says, “That’s your lying eyes when your heart speeds up.”
“That’s not…is it?,” Lena looks to Kara who just shrugs. They have some sort of adult conversation with their eyes, until Lena quirks a small smile. “Oh.”
“Just say it,” Esme mumbles while she fluffs her pillow and settles in, her breaths starting to even out. She turns to Kara, “Auntie, will you stay with me?”
“Of course,” says Kara.
“I, uh, I was adopted too,” answers Lena finally.
That is news to Esme. She’s way more settled now. Kara plucks the cotton from her mouth, and Esme’s eyes feel heavy.
“You were alone?”
Lena’s voice sounds far away. “I used to be. But I’m not anymore.”
Esme reaches out to Lena with her spare arm without thinking. “C’mere,” she says. Lena and Kara sandwich her from either side, their fingers woven around Esme’s middle. Even as Esme is falling asleep, she knows there’s something about this moment, something important that she shouldn’t forget. “If we’re alone together, then we aren’t alone?” she asks no one in particular.
“That’s right,” Kara says. And it’s there under the cover of warm cotton sheets and softly thudding heartbeats that Esme drifts off to sleep.
Two weeks later, after many talks with Mama Kelly and Mama Alex and her new therapist Gwen, after three coloring books are penciled through and almost two dozen pictures are made, Esme and Lena walk hand in hand. They’re strolling barefoot along the shore of a beach — near San Diego, Aunt Kara had said when she flew them. The cool water tickles at her heels every now and again and clumps into a wonderful, thick mess of wet, grainy sand.
“I don’t hate water anymore,” she tells Lena. “It was the salt anyway.”
Lena chuckles. Esme glances up at her, sees how the soft rays from under silver clouds pierce her pale skin. It’s why Lena is carrying a spotted umbrella in her other hand. “That’s good. I was a little worried,” says Lena. Esme thinks that’s an understatement. If she had Kara’s powers of hearing right now, Esme would almost be sure Lena’s words are so understated that they’d be considered lies.
“Why?” asks Esme. When Lena doesn’t immediately answer, Esme plops down and scoots into the water until it rushes and laps up at her knees. Kara is at her side in an instant, with her hand at the small of Esme’s back.
Lena studies her carefully, then turns to the ocean. There’s that look again, that far off one. After a moment Lena shakes her head and joins Esme and Kara on the ground. “I used to be scared of water when I was your age. My bro— new family tried to help. Started small with glasses of water, and when I wouldn’t shower or take a bath they bought soap that would turn it purple.”
“Why purple?”
Lena shrugs. Kara weaves her arm from behind Esme’s back and around Lena’s waist and Lena leans into the touch. “I think it was a safe color. “If I had to guess his logic, my brother tried to anticipate how I may react based on what the liquid looked like. Blue is like…well water,” Lena’s dimples pop out again and Esme laughs. “Yellow is, I suppose like urine…”
Esme crumples her nose and thinks for a moment. “Red like blood?”
“Mhm,” Lena agrees, fiddling with a woven red and blue bracelet at her wrist. “And green reminded me of a lake…”
Esme knows what a lake is well enough. It’s like the ocean sort of except much tinier. Esme begins to open her mouth again in question but then Lena says, quick and clipped, “Like the lake my mother drowned in when I was four.”
“Oh,” says Esme. She stares at the water for a while, the ripples her feet make, the stones underfoot, and the soft waves of the tide. How the ocean sparkles under the sun, just like her Aunt Kara. Where seagulls land and people swim, and fish — allegedly — live. Esme tries to reconcile how a place of life could also become one of death. “Do you still hate water?”
“I don’t think I ever did. I was afraid of it.” Esme puzzles the words together, finally settles on the idea that fear must be a more vast emotion than hate. Like a lake to an ocean. Years later she’ll reconcile Ben Lockwood’s anger as the lake, his fear as the expansive ocean, and his actions as the winding, rushing river that raged back to its final point of entry, where he had chosen to harm others.
“Are you still afraid?” Esme cups some water in her hand and holds it out to Lena. She is somewhat vexed when her empty hand stretches out now uselessly to Lena, where the ocean has escaped through. She flits her thumb along the zebra grooves of her bracelet absentmindedly.
“Sometimes,” Lena admits softly. “I pretended like I wasn’t for a long time. The ‘why’ doesn’t matter. It’s not the point —“ Lena says to Esme, who’s opened her mouth again. “Another day. I promise.”
Esme looks down guiltily at her still wet hand and sets it back into the ocean. Lena nudges her hip with her knee. “But when I stopped pretending, when I stopped running and just let myself be afraid without trying to rationalize the fear, it got easier. Every day.”
And now Lena’s here. Esme doesn’t so much think about it, but feels it.
“You can ask me other things,” Lena says after a while, when Esme is silent for quite some time, taking to cupping the liquid and trying to bury it beneath the sand — quite unsuccessfully.
“It wasn’t water,” Esme says instead, her mind on a completely different track than Lena’s.
Lena inhales sharply.
“What do you mean, Esme?” asks Kara, breaking the silence on Esme’s right side for the first time.
Esme turns to Kara. “It’s fire. I don’t like fire.” And she feels guilty for saying this but, “Water stops fire.” It’s why she had been so confused that night, but Alex had talked it through with her each day until Esme learned with certainty that fire wouldn’t hide in water.
“That’s usually true, Esme,” says Kara. “ Though not grease fi—“
Lena shakes her head and Kara clicks her mouth shut. “Do you know why you’re afraid?” Lena asks. Esme nods. “You don’t have to tell us. But if you want to —“
Esme karate chops her hand into the body of water, cutting off Lena’s sentence with it. “On the other side of the portal I saw walls of fire. And they all burned. I saw it.” She heard it and smelt it too. She saw it happen to the rows of people before her parents, and all the rows that came after. “They didn’t know, they didn’t see. But I knew.”
Esme’s eyes are locked firmly on her lap, and Lena chases her eyes with her own until Esme looks up. “That’s why you think you killed them?”
Esme is starting to feel that upset again, a churning in her stomach, but she isn’t sure why. She doesn’t know that it’s because of how the question is being framed. So she doesn’t respond at all.
“I thought I killed my mother too for…a very long time.” says Lena.
A part of Esme wants to ask why, another wants Lena to stop talking, but the biggest chunk of all wants to just soak up the cool waves that wind in a soothing rhythm up her legs. So that’s what she focuses on, eyes never leaving Lena’s.
“I was there when she drowned, and I didn’t scream. I didn’t go to her. I didn’t do anything.”
“Why?”
Lena’s face wilts a little at that but no tears fall. “I don’t know. And I probably never will.”
“Never?”
“Because she was so young,” Kara says to Esme. “Memories grow further away the older you get. And they can change from what you think they are.”
Esme thinks about her moms. How they remember their first date completely differently from each other. Thinks too about how Brainy says, “Memories are fallible. Aside from my own, that is.” Whatever fallible means.
Esme takes in Lena’s features. How, while she isn’t crying, her nose is pinched, her dark eyebrows are furrowed, and her lip is trembling oh-so-slightly. How she’s in pain, still, after all this time. How Esme wants to fix it, though she probably can’t. Then she thinks about something else Kelly had told her recently, just before the beach. It was a warning in fact. “Mama Kelly says that when people are drowning, it doesn’t look like it —“
“Esme —“ Kara tries to interject, rubbing circles on her shoulder. Lena’s face changes immediately from pained to an expression that is imperceptible, at least to Esme.
“Even adults can’t tell a lot of the time,” Esme feels heady and almost euphoric now for being able to provide Lena some comfort. “So…so you probably didn’t know. You didn’t have all the information and you’re a scientist. No wait — “ Esme says before Kara can cut her off again. “And if memories change, maybe afterward you thought that something was wrong because it already happened.”
“And maybe none of those things happened that way,” Kara says.
“But you were four!” Esme is shouting now. She launches herself into a standing position. “That’s small. You couldn’t do anything and it wasn’t your job, it — it…”
Lena cranes her head up and nods. “It wasn’t my fault. I know.” The kindness of her voice offsets her otherwise severe expression. “I do know that.”
There Lena goes being confusing again. “Then why did you tell me?”
“So now you know too.”
“But I didn’t think it was your fault.” She looks at the swell of the ocean and back down to Lena. “I just found out,” Esme points out.
Kara and Lena exchange another furtive glance, and it’s annoying when adults do that. She plays back through the conversation and before she knows it Esme’s palm is on Lena’s shoulder to steady herself from the onslaught of anguish. Lena’s hand moves to rest over hers but —
“It’s not the same. And that’s not fair!” Esme flinches at her own voice, and marches away. When she feels Kara and Lena stand, she dashes toward the pine trees up on the hill. They weren’t there. They didn’t have powers when their parents were in trouble. And while Lena couldn’t remember why, Esme did.
Out of habit she bites down on her tongue again, though she had promised Alex she wouldn’t. She feels the wind whip past her face and the panic swim up her belly. It crawls to her throat until she finally releases a piercing scream. It goes on and on.
“Leave me alone!” Esme says in warning, stopped short by Kara kneeling down in front of her.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. We don’t have to talk anymore but I have to know where you are.” Esme plucks Kara’s glasses from off her nose and chucks them, well, not as far as she had hoped. It is instinctual and she regrets it instantly.
Kara’s eyes remain fixed on her.
Esme can feel Lena’s eyes on her too, scooping up the glasses and handing them to Kara after wiping them down. Lena stands behind Kara, her hand trails over the nape of her neck. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Esme,” Lena says.
Esme looks from Kara to Lena. Kara’s face reads concerned and caring, as she inches the glasses back up her nose. Tight lips and furrowed brow. Why was Lena’s so hard to read? “That isn’t an ‘I’m sorry,’” Esme says with a stomp of her foot.
“No, it’s not,” Lena agrees evenly.
“What are you feeling now, Esme?” Kara asks before Esme can argue back. “In your body?”
Overwhelmed, upset, scared. “Like I hate you.” Esme says. Her chest is heaving.
“Okay,” Kara’s face doesn’t move a muscle. “What else?”
Esme firmly presses on her tongue again and shakes her head. Already her anger is starting to dull and recede. Already guilt is beginning to coil slowly into the foreground.
“It’s okay to feel things. To let them out. As long as you’re not hurting anyone.” Lena kneels down beside Kara. “You can scream, you can say whatever you’re feeling. Or nothing at all.” Lena’s eyes are shiny, and it is that ounce of feeling that Esme can suss out, one of pain and broken understanding, which wrenches Esme’s jaw back open.
“It shouldn’t have happened!” And Esme means all of it: the lake, the red sun bearing down, the portals of fire. Hot tears trail down her cheeks and she wipes them away before she can taste the salt.
“I know,” says Kara, as if she hears all of the words that Esme doesn’t know how to say. When Kara reaches a hand slowly out in offering, Esme folds herself into her aunt's chest. She sobs softly into her bobbing throat.
Esme digs into Kara’s T-shirt and just lets herself be held for however long, until her breaths even back out. When she feels a hand hover over her, she releases one of Kara’s shoulders and tugs it roughly closer until all three of them are tangled in a heaping hug, one that’s a little sweaty and difficult to breathe in, but no less comforting.
Esme isn’t ready to accept here in the sand on the afternoon of an abnormally warm autumn day, that she isn’t to blame. She’ll find out a decade from now that Lena and Kara blamed themselves well into their twenties. That even decades later, sometimes during the most unexpected of moments, they still do — during a picnic, or a favored noir film, in times of bliss or glee, because not all of the people they want to share those moments with are there.
But after 61 days, staring into green and blue eyes that are nothing like her own, she knows, really understands for the first that she isn’t alone in feeling alone. That it isn’t just her parents who adopted her, that all family can be found. While Kara, and Lena, and Esme too had lost their homes, they could find homes again in each other.
“Are you ready to go?” asks Kara, rising and stretching out a hand to Esme.
Esme thinks of her mothers, probably on the couch watching TV, and feels a swelling of affection. “Yeah, let’s go home.”