686. Chapter 686

It’s one of the reasons she started studying medicine to begin with.

She wanted to change the world; but her world, too, was her sister.

So before she became a soldier to fight for Kara on battlefields large and small, she became a doctor.

To make sure her sister didn’t suffer like she did.

Because all that time she spends in the lab isn’t strictly required for her multiple degrees.

She spends the extra time – and bribes some of the TAs to turn their backs on the extra equipment and strange chemical requisitions she makes – trying to make anti-depressants that will work on a Kryptonian.

Because Kara’s outwardly cheerful disposition has a devastating toll. Her nightly difficulty falling asleep – her utter terror of silence, of darkness, of thunderstorms, because they all feel like her pod, drifting, drifting, alone, trapped, alone – and that drag she constantly has on her heart, even when she’s doing her best to literally punch through it – don’t escape Alex’s notice.

How could they?

She experiences such similar things herself.

So she spends years, trying.

Year, explaining away Kara’s sudden bouts of intense nausea and shaky hands as modified versions of Clark’s solar flares, because if Eliza knew, she’d want someone with more expertise than Alex, more experience, to take over the project.

But Alex is the only one who can do it.

Who can take proper care of Kara. Who can shield her from the worst of the moments when she winds up splayed out on the bedroom floor, unable to move and unable to do anything but, perhaps occasionally, blink.

The number of hours Alex has spent, laying on the floor next to Kara – building a blanket fort around her little sister – is astronomical.

Almost as astronomical as the amount of time she spends in the lab, trying to make her medicine that will take the edge off the pervasive clouds of depression that always seem moments away from taking over Kara’s entire sky.

Hell, and her own.

But she’s human. She has access to… things.

Kara’s entire planet is gone. All her people.

Alex is her only hope.

She doesn’t succeed until J’onn picks her up from containment and trains her to use a gun, trains her to use her bodyweight against creatures much stronger, much larger, than her; trains her to kill.

Because he also gives her access to some of the most advanced medical resources in the world; and so he lets her continue training to heal.

The weeks the newest medicine take to course through Kara’s system before making any kind of tangible impact on her day-to-day life are agonizing for Alex, like they’ve been for every attempt in the past.

And this time – with the resources of the DEO at her fingertips – this time, it works.

She finds the right chemicals, the right dosages, the right combinations.

It doesn’t make everything better. Far from it.

But it lets Kara smile easier, and sleep easier, and laugh louder. It helps her spend less energy on just surviving, freeing up her emotional capacity for developing coping strategies, discovering ways of living that work for her, better than they’ve been able to before.

And when Alex meets Maggie, she has an idea.

She invites aliens of various species, from various sectors, who only have access to paltry human medicine, to let her do for them what she did for Kara. With them. With Kara.

It makes Maggie beam with pride and it makes Kara’s heart swell, and it makes the mental health of National City’s alien populations that much better.

All starting with her sister, a college chem lab, and a lot of blanket forts.