[National City, M'gann's Alien Bar — December 2016, 11:52 PM]
The attack came without warning.
One moment, the bar was filled with its usual evening crowd—aliens from a dozen worlds, sharing drinks and stories and the small comfort of community. The next, the windows shattered inward, and silver canisters rolled across the floor.
I was behind the bar when it happened. Still working my regular shift despite the crisis—Kara had insisted on maintaining normal patterns while the team tracked Cadmus's location. "They might be watching," she'd said. "We can't let them know we're onto them."
So I'd been mixing drinks and collecting glasses when the world exploded.
The canisters hissed. Green gas erupted from them—thick, choking, spreading across the bar in seconds. The patrons closest to the windows were the first to fall, their bodies convulsing as the virus took hold.
Screaming. Chaos. Tables overturning as aliens scrambled for exits that were too far away.
I didn't hesitate.
The gas hit me like fire. Every breath burned. My cells screamed warnings that I forced myself to ignore. I grabbed the nearest fallen patron—the Thorian who always ordered extra sweetener—and dragged him toward the back exit.
"Mon-El!" M'gann's voice cut through the chaos. She was standing behind the bar, seemingly unaffected by the gas. Green Martian physiology, I remembered. Different vulnerabilities.
"Get them out!" I shouted. "Anyone who can move, get them out!"
I deposited the Thorian outside, where the air was clear. He was breathing—barely—but breathing. I turned and plunged back into the green cloud.
The pain was already building. Stage 4 levels, maybe higher. My hands shook as I grabbed the next victim—an elderly Saturnian, the poet, his body limp in my arms. The TK field extended around him instinctively, protecting him from further exposure as I carried him to safety.
Two down. Dozens more inside.
Back into the gas. The old Roltikkon couple, collapsed near their usual booth. I extended my field to cover both of them, felt the strain of maintaining protection over multiple bodies while my own cells were dying.
Four more outside. Eight. Twelve.
My vision was blurring. The lead component was doing its work, attacking my system from within while the viral load accumulated in my bloodstream. Every trip into the cloud pushed me closer to collapse.
"Mon-El!" Kara's voice—somewhere above, outside the contamination zone. "Mon-El, get out of there!"
I couldn't answer. Couldn't spare the breath. Another victim—a young alien I didn't recognize, probably new to the city, probably came here looking for community among her own kind.
Fifteen. Eighteen.
I fell the first time near the bar itself. My legs simply stopped working, neural signals disrupted by the lead poisoning. I forced myself up, used the bar for support, kept moving.
Twenty victims evacuated. Twenty-three. Twenty-five.
The bar was nearly empty now. Just scattered bodies near the windows—the ones who'd taken the initial blast, whose exposure was too severe for survival. I checked each one anyway, looking for signs of life.
Found one. A child—someone had brought their child to the bar, probably thought it was safe, probably never imagined—
I scooped her up, cradled her against my chest, and staggered toward the exit.
The last steps were the hardest. My body was failing in ways I couldn't quantify. Organs shutting down. Blood turning to poison. Cells dying faster than they could regenerate.
But I kept moving. One foot in front of the other. The child in my arms, still breathing, still alive.
I made it outside.
Kara was there, her face a mask of horror and determination. Emergency response teams were already working on the evacuated aliens, medical equipment deployed, containment protocols in effect.
"Mon-El—" she started.
I handed her the child. "Last one. I think that's—that's everyone who was—"
My legs gave out.
The concrete rose up to meet me. Or I fell to meet it. Hard to tell the difference when your nervous system was dissolving.
"NO!" Kara caught me before I hit the ground, her arms wrapping around me with desperate strength. "Stay with me. Stay with me!"
"Got them out," I managed. "The ones I could reach. Saved—"
"Don't talk. Just hold on." She was shouting orders to someone—Alex, maybe, or the medical teams. "We need a portable sun lamp! Full spectrum, maximum intensity! NOW!"
My vision was tunneling. The world reduced to Kara's face, framed by stars and smoke, her eyes bright with tears she refused to shed.
"I chose this," I told her. My voice sounded distant, like someone else was speaking. "Wanted you to know. Not an accident. A choice."
"You don't get to choose to leave me." Her grip tightened. "You hear me? You don't get to—"
The darkness crept in from the edges. Cold. Endless. Final.
At least I chose how to die. Saving people. Not running.
The thought was clear, crystalline, the last coherent thing before the abyss swallowed me whole.
---
Darkness.
But not emptiness.
Somewhere in the void, my cells were fighting. The adaptation that had been building for months, stressed beyond any controlled test parameters, pushed to its absolute limit—it didn't give up. It accelerated.
Lead was being processed, filtered, neutralized. Not fast enough to stop the damage, but fast enough to slow it. The viral load was meeting resistance—Daxamite physiology similar enough to Kryptonian that the Medusa pathogen struggled to find purchase.
I couldn't feel any of this. I was unconscious, maybe dying, probably dying. But my body knew what to do. Had been trained through weeks of exposure, pushed through stages of resistance, forged in the fire of controlled poisoning.
It fought.
---
Light. Heat. The familiar warmth of solar energy, but more intense than anything I'd experienced.
I opened my eyes.
The DEO medical bay. Sun lamps blazing at full intensity, arranged in a circle around my bed like some kind of technological ritual. Kara sat beside me, her hand gripping mine, her expression caught somewhere between hope and devastation.
"Hey," I managed. My voice was rough, barely a whisper.
"Hey." She laughed—a broken sound, more sob than humor. "You absolute idiot. You complete, total, suicidal—"
"How long?"
"Thirty-seven hours." She wiped her eyes with her free hand. "You were dead for two minutes. Your heart stopped. We had to—" Her voice cracked. "Don't ever do that to me again."
"The aliens. From the bar. Did they—"
"Most of them survived. Thanks to you." Alex appeared in my peripheral vision, looking exhausted but controlled. "You got twenty-eight people out of that cloud. Three died from initial exposure, but the rest are stable."
Twenty-eight people. Living because I'd chosen to burn.
"And Medusa?"
"Contained." Alex moved closer. "The attack on the bar was a test deployment. They were planning a larger strike on the harbor—maximum concentration of alien shipping traffic. We stopped them before they could launch."
"Cadmus?"
"Scattered. Lillian Luthor escaped, but we captured most of her operation." Alex's expression hardened. "She'll be back. But not for a while."
I processed this information. Medusa stopped. Cadmus disrupted. Twenty-eight people saved.
And I was alive.
"How?" I asked. "The lead concentration—I should have—"
"Your adaptation accelerated." Winn appeared behind Alex, tablet in hand, looking like he hadn't slept in days. "The stress triggered some kind of breakthrough. Your cells developed new resistance mechanisms in response to the exposure—emergency evolution, basically. Your lead tolerance jumped from sixty-five percent to over ninety."
"Ninety?"
"Ninety-three, to be precise. The highest natural lead resistance we've ever documented in any species." He shook his head in amazement. "You should have died. The mathematics said you would die. Instead, your body decided to rewrite the rules."
Kara's grip on my hand tightened. "You got lucky."
"I got prepared." I met her eyes. "Months of adaptation training. Pushing my limits. All of it leading to this moment. It wasn't luck—it was groundwork."
"It was reckless."
"It was necessary." I tried to sit up, failed, settled for turning my head to face her fully. "If I'd stayed outside the cloud, if I'd waited for someone else to do what I could do—people would have died, Kara. More than the three we lost. The Thorian. The poet. That child. All of them."
"You could have died saving them."
"Yes. And it would have been worth it."
The words hung in the air. Kara's expression shifted—frustration giving way to something more complex. Understanding, maybe. Or acceptance.
"This is who you are," she said quietly. "The person who runs into the fire."
"I learned from someone." I managed a weak smile. "A woman in a cape who never hesitates to put herself between danger and the innocent."
"I'm invulnerable."
"Not to everything." I thought about Kryptonite. About red sunlight. About the psychological wounds that powers couldn't protect against. "You take risks too. Every day. The difference is scale, not principle."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned down and kissed me—gentle, careful of my weakened state, but unmistakably fierce underneath.
"If you ever scare me like that again," she whispered against my lips, "I will find a way to kill you myself."
"Understood."
"Good." She pulled back, wiping her eyes again. "Now rest. Doctor's orders. You've got about a week of recovery ahead of you, and I'm not letting you out of my sight."
"Kara—"
"Not. Letting. You." She settled back into her chair, hand still gripping mine. "Deal with it."
I closed my eyes, letting the sun lamps pour energy into my battered cells. Twenty-eight people saved. Medusa contained. A relationship that had survived my near-death.
And my lead resistance, apparently, was now at ninety-three percent.
The adaptation had worked. Not the way I'd planned, not through controlled exposure and careful preparation—but through crisis. Through the desperate mathematics of survival.
One crisis at a time.
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