Chapter 1: IMPACT
[National City — September 2016, 11:47 PM]
The darkness split open and poured me through.
Not darkness—nothingness. The absolute zero between heartbeats. One moment I was dying—car wreck, blood in my mouth, the streetlight spinning above me like a broken halo—and then nothing.
Now this.
My body slammed against metal walls as the world shook itself apart. Alarms screamed in a language I shouldn't understand but somehow did. Emergency lighting bathed everything red. The pod—because that's what this was, some kind of escape pod—was tumbling through atmosphere, and every impact of turbulence drove the breath from lungs that weren't mine.
Pod breach imminent. Structural failure in T-minus forty-three seconds.
The words scrolled across a display panel in angular script. Kryptonian. I knew that because I'd watched six seasons of a television show called Supergirl, back when I was a twenty-eight-year-old accountant in Denver with a Netflix subscription and a boring life that ended on a rain-slicked highway.
Back when I was human.
The pod hit something solid—atmosphere, maybe, or debris—and I crashed sideways, my shoulder punching a dent into the wall. The impact should have shattered bone. Instead, the wall buckled.
What the hell—
My hands. Wrong hands. Too large, too pale, fingers longer than they should be. I flexed them and felt strength coiled beneath the skin like compressed springs. The muscles responded with terrifying precision, foreign and powerful and absolutely not mine.
I tried to remember my name. My real name. Nothing came. Just static and the fading image of headlights racing toward me.
Pod breach in T-minus twenty-eight seconds.
The display showed the exterior view—a city sprawling beneath us, lights glittering like scattered diamonds against black velvet. National City. I recognized the skyline from establishing shots. The CatCo building. The waterfront. The alien bar where I'd watched Mon-El get drunk in episode after episode.
Mon-El.
Oh god.
I looked down at my body—his body—and understood with sickening clarity what had happened. The chiseled physique beneath torn Daxamite clothing. The height. The impossible strength I could feel singing through my nervous system.
I was Mon-El. Prince of Daxam. Future love interest of Kara Zor-El.
And I was about to crash into her city in approximately—
T-minus twelve seconds.
The ground filled the viewport. I grabbed the restraints instinctively, pulling them tight across my chest. The webbing groaned under my grip. Too strong. I was crushing the material without meaning to.
T-minus five.
I closed my eyes. Thought about the life I'd lost. The parents I'd never see again. The cat who'd probably miss me for about a week before finding someone else to feed her.
Impact imminent.
The world became noise.
[Crash Site — Moments Later]
I came back to myself in pieces.
First: the smell. Burning metal and ozone and something sweeter underneath—flowers, maybe, from whatever garden the pod had destroyed on its way down. Then: sensation. My whole body hummed like a struck bell. Every nerve ending fired at once, screaming data at a brain struggling to process input it had never been designed to handle.
Then: sound.
Everything was sound. Sirens wailing three blocks away. Car alarms shrieking. Someone's dog barking from inside a house—two heartbeats in there, one fast and scared, one slower, sleeping. Water rushing through pipes beneath the street. The electrical buzz of a transformer on the corner.
I pressed my hands against my ears but it didn't help. The sound came from inside my skull.
The pod's hatch had torn off during impact. I could see the night sky through the opening—stars, clouds, the silhouette of buildings. I tried to stand and my legs didn't cooperate. Too strong, too fast, responding to commands with a half-second delay while my nervous system struggled to translate human intention into Daxamite action.
I crawled instead.
The pod's shell had carved a trench through someone's backyard, plowing through a fence and coming to rest against what used to be a garden shed. Vegetables scattered everywhere—tomatoes, squash, something leafy that might have been lettuce. The mundane details helped. Grounded me.
Cool air hit my face as I dragged myself through the opening. Clean air. Earth air. My lungs—his lungs—expanded to take it in, and the sensation was so vivid I nearly choked. Every molecule registered. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Trace pollutants. A hint of rain on the wind.
I'd never tasted air so clearly in my life.
Sirens grew closer. Red and blue lights flickered between houses. Voices called out instructions I couldn't parse over the roar in my ears.
Then new sounds. Not mechanical.
A heartbeat approaching at impossible speed. Wind displacement. The soft whump of boots touching ground.
She landed ten feet away.
Kara Zor-El wore her Supergirl suit—the original one, from the first season. Blue and red. The S-shield blazing against her chest. She stood in a combat stance, fists raised, eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Behind her, black vehicles screeched to a halt. Agents in tactical gear poured out, weapons trained on me.
I tried to speak. To say something—anything—that might make them understand I wasn't a threat. But this throat didn't work the way mine used to. The sounds came out wrong. Guttural. Alien.
Kara's eyes widened slightly. She said something to the agents. I caught fragments: Kryptonian pod... unknown... alive...
My vision swam. Too much input. The lights burned even through closed lids. The sounds hammered my skull. Every cell in my body screamed for something I couldn't name—energy, I realized. Solar energy. This body had been sleeping for years, and it was hungry.
I raised my hands. The universal gesture of surrender. My fingers trembled.
"Please," I managed. The word came out mangled but recognizable.
Kara stepped closer. Her blue eyes bore into mine, searching. I saw the moment she decided I wasn't an immediate threat—her shoulders loosened a fraction, her fists uncurled.
Then the exhaustion hit.
Days in the pod. The crash. The sensory overload. The trauma of whatever cosmic force had shoved my soul into this body. It all caught up at once.
The last thing I saw before darkness claimed me was her face. Suspicious. Beautiful. Real.
She was real.
I hit the grass and didn't feel the impact.
[DEO Transport Vehicle — Unknown Time]
Consciousness returned in fragments. The rumble of an engine. The chemical smell of medical equipment. Voices arguing in hushed tones.
"—can't just leave him in restraints forever—"
"Until we know what he is, standard protocol applies."
"The pod was Kryptonian design. That makes him—"
"That makes him unknown. Kryptonians are extinct. So who is this?"
I kept my eyes closed. Listened. The Daxamite ears were still overwhelming, but I was starting to adapt. Learning to filter. Push the distant sounds to the background. Focus on what mattered.
Two heartbeats nearby. Female voices. One sharp and military—Alex Danvers, I guessed. The other softer but no less intense. Kara.
"He spoke. English."
"One word isn't conversation. Could be a telepathic mimic. A Thovian echo. Anything."
"Or he could be scared and confused and we're treating him like a weapon."
"Better safe than sorry, Supergirl. You know the protocols."
A pause. When Kara spoke again, her voice had hardened.
"I know the protocols. I also know what it's like to wake up on a strange planet with no idea what's happening."
Footsteps. Someone leaving. The vehicle continued its journey.
I risked opening my eyes a crack.
Sterile white ceiling. Medical equipment I didn't recognize. Restraints around my wrists—heavy, industrial, probably designed for hostile aliens. Smart. Even half-conscious, I could feel the strength coiled in my muscles. These restraints wouldn't hold me if I didn't want them to.
But I wanted them to. Right now, being contained was the only thing keeping me from screaming.
I was in the Supergirl universe. In Mon-El's body. With his powers slowly coming online and his memories conspicuously absent.
The show had covered his arrival. Crash in the season finale. Awakening in the premiere. But the details were fuzzy—I'd binged it years ago, half-distracted, never imagining any of it would matter.
What did I know for certain?
Mon-El was Daxamite. Prince of a dead world. His people and Kara's people had hated each other for centuries. He'd hidden his royal identity at first, claiming to be a palace guard.
He'd fallen in love with Kara. She'd fallen in love with him. They'd lost each other at the end of season two when lead—poisonous to Daxamites—flooded the atmosphere.
Lead. Right. That was a problem.
The vehicle stopped. Doors opened. Agents swarmed around the gurney I was strapped to, wheeling me through corridors I couldn't see from my prone position.
I caught glimpses. High-tech facility. Reinforced walls. Security checkpoints. The DEO—Department of Extranormal Operations. Government black site for alien threats.
They parked me in a cell. Glass walls. Observation equipment. The restraints transferred from gurney to a chair bolted to the floor.
Alex Danvers stood on the other side of the glass. Her arms crossed. Expression locked in professional neutrality.
"Welcome to Earth," she said flatly. "Let's talk about who you are and why you're here."
I opened my mouth. Tried to find words that wouldn't make this worse.
And realized I had absolutely no idea what to say.
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