Conquered by the Overlord

The soldering iron hissed against the circuit board, a thin ribbon of smoke curling up toward the fluorescent lights of the workshop. Skye held her breath, tweezers pinched around a resistor no bigger than a grain of rice. The motherboard was a custom job, some rich asshole's home automation system that cost more than her first car. He wanted his lights to dim in sync with his heartbeat. She wanted to finish before noon so she could spend the afternoon ignoring her phone.

The bell above the shop door jingled.

"We're closed," she said without looking up.

The footsteps didn't stop. Heavy. Deliberate. The kind of walk that expected floors to get out of the way.

"I said we're closed." She set the tweezers down, pulled her magnifying visor up, and turned around.

The woman standing in her doorway wore a black suit cut so sharp it could've drawn blood. Blonde hair pulled back tight enough to stretch the skin at her temples. Blue eyes that caught the light like something frozen. She looked exactly the same as she had seven years ago, which was impossible, because nobody looked exactly the same after seven years. Except her. Except the woman who'd once called herself Kara Zor-El, last daughter of Krypton, and who now wore the face of every nightmare Skye had spent half a decade trying to forget.

"No," Skye said. "No way. I'm not getting involved with you again, Zor-El."

The woman smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who'd heard "no" before and found it adorable.

"You look good, Skye." Her voice was honey over gravel, that same impossible accent that wasn't quite human. "Retirement suits you."

"Retirement suits everyone. That's the point of it." Skye turned back to her workbench, picked up the soldering iron, and pretended her hands weren't shaking. "Door's behind you. Use it."

"I need your help."

"Don't care."

"Lena Luthor is missing."

Skye's hand jerked. The soldering iron slipped, scorching a black line across the motherboard. She stared at the damage for a long moment, then set the iron down and turned around again.

"Lena Luthor," she repeated. "Your general. The woman who tried to turn Earth into a Kryptonian colony. That Lena Luthor."

"She's been gone for three weeks. No trace. No communication. Her last known location was a research facility in the Nevada desert, and when my people arrived, the place was empty. Files wiped. Equipment gone. Bodies." Kara's jaw tightened. "Three of my best soldiers, dead. Not killed in a fight. Executed."

"Sounds like a you problem."

"It's a you problem too, if she's building what I think she's building."

Skye laughed. It came out bitter, the sound of someone who'd heard too many apocalyptic warnings to take any of them seriously anymore. "There it is. The end of the world speech. You know, I've heard that one before. From you, actually. Right before you decided Earth wasn't worth saving and flew off to conquer a dozen other planets instead."

"I didn't conquer them. I liberated them."

"Right. Liberation. That's what they're calling it now." Skye pulled her visor off and tossed it onto the bench. "Let me save you some time. Whatever Lena's doing, whatever crisis you think is coming, I don't care. I'm out. I hung up my gauntlets. I bought a shop. I fix computers for rich assholes and I go home to an empty apartment and I sleep through the night. Most nights." She met Kara's eyes. "I'm not Quake anymore. I'm not Daisy Johnson. I'm not even Skye, most days. I'm just the woman who fixes your laptop. And that's how I like it."

Kara stepped closer. The air around her seemed to shift, pressure dropping like a storm was coming. Skye felt it in her teeth, that familiar hum of power that Kara couldn't quite contain no matter how controlled she looked.

"You can lie to yourself," Kara said. "You've gotten very good at it. But you can't lie to me. I know you, Skye. I know the way you breathe when you're scared. I know the way your pulse jumps when you're lying. And I know you've been waiting for something to pull you back in since the day you walked away."

"You don't know anything about me anymore."

"I know you still wear the necklace."

Skye's hand went to her throat before she could stop it. The chain was thin, the pendant small, a chunk of Kryptonian crystal that Kara had given her a lifetime ago. She'd meant to throw it away a hundred times. She'd never managed it.

"That's not..." She dropped her hand. "That's nostalgia. That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it?"

The bell above the door jingled again. Both women turned.

The man who walked in was tall, dark-skinned, with the kind of face that had seen too much and smiled anyway. He wore a leather jacket that had seen better decades and carried a duffel bag over one shoulder. He stopped when he saw Kara, and his expression did something complicated.

"Skye," he said slowly. "You didn't tell me you had company."

"Trip, this isn't what it looks like."

"It looks like the Kryptonian Overlord is standing in your shop."

"That's exactly what it looks like." Skye sighed. "Trip, this is Kara Zor-El. Kara, this is Trip. He's my..." She paused. "He's my friend."

"Friend," Trip repeated. "Is that what we're calling it?"

"Don't start."

Kara looked between them, and something flickered in her eyes. Something cold. "You've been busy."

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes. I have a life now. A real one. With people who don't try to take over the world."

"I never tried to take over the world. I tried to save it. There's a difference."

"Tell that to the millions of people who died when you decided to save it."

The temperature in the room dropped. Trip shifted his weight, hand moving toward his jacket, and Skye held up a hand to stop him.

"Don't," she said. "She's not here to fight. Are you, Kara?"

Kara's eyes were still fixed on Trip. "That depends."

"On what?"

"On whether you're going to hear me out."

Skye looked at Trip. Trip looked back, his expression saying everything his mouth didn't. They'd had this conversation before, in a dozen different ways, usually at three in the morning when the nightmares got bad. He knew about Kara. He knew about the years Skye had spent as her lover, her soldier, her partner in everything but name. He knew about the way it had ended, the betrayal, the blood, the long slow fall from grace that had left Skye broken in ways she was still learning to name.

He also knew she'd never really gotten over it.

"Five minutes," Skye said. "You get five minutes. Then you leave, and you don't come back."

Kara nodded. "Five minutes."

Trip didn't look happy, but he stepped back, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Skye gestured to the chair in the corner of the workshop, the one she kept for clients who wanted to watch her work.

"Talk."

Kara didn't sit. She paced instead, her footsteps silent on the concrete floor. "Lena was working on something. A weapon. Something that could neutralize Kryptonian powers on a planetary scale."

"Good for her. Sounds like a smart investment."

"It wouldn't just affect Kryptonians. It would affect anyone with metahuman abilities. Inhumans. Mutants. Anyone with powers beyond the human baseline."

Skye's stomach dropped. "You're saying she built a power suppressor."

"I'm saying she was building one. And she's missing. Along with the prototype and all her research."

"And you think she's going to use it."

"I think she's going to sell it. To the highest bidder. And I think whoever buys it is going to use it to start a war."

Skye was quiet for a long moment. She thought about the surgery, the months of recovery, the way Fitz had looked at her when he'd told her the suppressor was out, that she was free, that she could finally be herself again. She thought about the first time she'd used her powers after that, the way the vibrations had sung through her bones, the way she'd felt whole for the first time in years.

She thought about what it would mean to lose that again.

"Why me?" she asked. "You have an army. You have resources. You have an entire planet's worth of technology at your disposal. Why come to me?"

Kara stopped pacing. She turned, and for the first time, Skye saw something in her eyes that wasn't cold. Something that looked almost like pain.

"Because you're the only one who can find her."

"I'm a computer technician."

"You're Quake. You can sense vibrations across continents. You can feel the heartbeat of the planet. If Lena is out there, if she's hiding, you're the only one who can find her."

"I told you. I'm not Quake anymore."

"You'll always be Quake. It's not a job. It's not a title. It's who you are." Kara stepped closer, close enough that Skye could smell her, that same impossible scent of ozone and something floral, something alien. "You can pretend you've changed. You can pretend you've moved on. But I know you, Skye. I know the way you come alive when you're using your powers. I know the way you feel when you're connected to everything, when you can feel the whole world breathing around you. You can't tell me you don't miss it."

"You don't get to do this."

"Do what?"

"Act like you know me. Act like you care. You left, Kara. You left me. You chose your empire over me, over us, over everything we had. And now you show up in my shop like nothing's changed and expect me to just fall in line?"

"I never left you."

"You flew away. You didn't come back. For seven years, you didn't come back."

"I was building something. Something that would last. Something that would keep us safe."

"Us?" Skye laughed, and it hurt, the sound tearing out of her throat. "There was no us. There was you and your grand vision and your army and your wars. I was just... I was just a soldier. A tool. Something you used until you didn't need me anymore."

"That's not true."

"Then why didn't you come back?"

The question hung in the air between them. Kara's expression shifted, the mask slipping for just a moment, and Skye saw it. The guilt. The regret. The thing Kara had been carrying for seven years, the thing she'd never been able to put into words.

"Because I was afraid," Kara said quietly. "I was afraid you wouldn't want me anymore. I was afraid you'd moved on. I was afraid that if I came back and you turned me away, I wouldn't survive it."

"So you just... didn't try?"

"I thought about it. Every day. Every single day for seven years, I thought about coming back. But I convinced myself you were better off without me. That you'd found a life, a real life, and that I'd only ruin it."

"You were right."

"I know."

"So why are you here now?"

Kara met her eyes. "Because I need you. And because I think, somewhere underneath all that anger and all that pain, you still need me too."

Skye wanted to argue. She wanted to scream, to throw something, to tell Kara to get the hell out of her shop and never come back. But the words wouldn't come. Because Kara was right. She hated it, hated the way her heart was pounding, hated the way her body was responding to Kara's presence, hated the way she could feel the pull between them like gravity.

"I can't do this," she said. "I can't just... I can't just pick up where we left off. Too much has happened. Too much has changed."

"I'm not asking you to pick up where we left off. I'm asking you to help me find Lena. That's all."

"And after?"

Kara was quiet for a moment. "After, we can figure out the rest."

Trip cleared his throat. "Skye, can I talk to you for a second?"

She nodded, grateful for the interruption. They stepped into the back room, leaving Kara alone in the workshop. Trip closed the door behind them and turned to face her, his expression serious.

"You're not actually considering this."

"I don't know what I'm considering."

"Skye, this is Kara Zor-El. The woman who conquered half the galaxy. The woman who broke your heart. The woman who's been the villain in every nightmare you've had for the past seven years."

"I know who she is."

"Then why are you even entertaining this?"

"Because she's right." Skye leaned against the wall, suddenly exhausted. "Lena Luthor is out there, and she's building something that could hurt a lot of people. And I'm the only one who can find her."

"That's not your problem anymore."

"It's always going to be my problem. That's the thing about being who we are. We don't get to just... stop. We don't get to retire and pretend the world isn't burning down around us."

"So what? You're just going to go back to her? After everything?"

"I'm not going back to her. I'm going to find Lena. That's it."

"And you expect me to believe that?"

Skye looked at him. Trip had been there for her when she'd first come to this city, when she'd been broken and lost and trying to figure out who she was without the powers, without the team, without the woman she'd loved. He'd helped her build this shop. He'd helped her build this life. He'd been patient and kind and he'd never asked for anything she wasn't ready to give.

He deserved better than this.

"I don't know what's going to happen," she said honestly. "But I know I can't just let this go. If Lena's out there, if she's really building something that could hurt people, I have to try to stop her."

"Even if it means working with Kara?"

"Even if it means working with Kara."

Trip was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed, ran a hand over his face, and nodded.

"Fine. But I'm coming with you."

"Trip..."

"I'm not letting you do this alone. Not with her. Not after everything."

Skye wanted to argue, but she knew it was pointless. Trip was stubborn in the way that only people who'd survived impossible things could be stubborn. He'd made up his mind.

"Okay," she said. "But you have to let me handle Kara."

"Handle her how?"

"I don't know yet." She pushed off the wall and headed back toward the workshop. "But I'll figure it out."

Kara was standing by the workbench when they returned, examining the damaged motherboard with what looked like genuine interest. She looked up when they entered, her expression unreadable.

"Well?"

"We'll help you find Lena," Skye said. "But there are conditions."

"Name them."

"One: This is a temporary arrangement. Once we find Lena, we go our separate ways. Two: You don't use your powers on me or anyone else without permission. Three: You tell me everything. No secrets, no lies, no half-truths. If I'm going to do this, I need to know what I'm walking into."

Kara nodded slowly. "Agreed."

"And one more thing."

"What?"

Skye stepped closer, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off Kara's body, close enough that she could see the way Kara's pupils dilated, the way her breath caught in her throat.

"I'm not your submissive anymore," Skye said quietly. "I'm not your soldier. I'm not your anything. If we're going to work together, it's as equals. Understand?"

Kara's eyes darkened. "You were never just my submissive."

"Don't."

"I'm serious. What we had... it wasn't just about power. It was about trust. About surrender. About giving yourself to someone completely and knowing they'd take care of you."

"I know what it was about."

"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you've spent seven years trying to forget."

Skye's jaw tightened. "I said don't."

"Fine." Kara held up her hands. "Equals. I can work with that."

"Good." Skye turned away, grabbing her jacket off the back of her chair. "We leave in an hour. Trip, can you close up the shop?"

"Already on it."

Skye headed for the door, but Kara's voice stopped her.

"Skye."

She paused, hand on the doorknob. "What?"

"I missed you."

The words hung in the air, simple and devastating. Skye didn't turn around. She couldn't. If she turned around, if she looked at Kara's face, she'd lose whatever composure she had left.

"I know," she said. "That's what scares me."

She walked out into the afternoon sun, leaving Kara standing alone in the shop.

---

The car was a piece of shit. Skye had bought it three years ago from a guy who swore it had never been in an accident, which was technically true if you didn't count the time it had been used as a getaway vehicle in a bank robbery. The engine made a sound like a dying cat, the air conditioning worked only when it felt like it, and the passenger seat had a spring that poked you in the ass if you sat down too hard.

Kara sat in that seat now, her posture perfect, her expression serene. She looked like a queen slumming it, and Skye hated how much she still found that attractive.

"The desert facility is about four hours from here," Kara said, consulting a tablet that looked like it was made of glass and light. "I've got satellite imagery from the day before Lena disappeared. Thermal signatures indicate there were at least thirty people on site. When my team arrived, there were none."

"Thirty people don't just disappear."

"No. They don't."

Skye merged onto the highway, keeping her eyes on the road. Trip was in the back seat, headphones on, pretending to sleep. She knew he was listening to every word.

"What else?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You said Lena was working on a power suppressor. That's not her style. She's a geneticist, not an engineer. She builds things that change people, not things that take away their abilities."

Kara was quiet for a moment. "She changed. After I left Earth. Something happened to her, something I don't fully understand. She became... harder. More willing to do whatever it took to achieve her goals."

"And her goal was?"

"To protect humanity. From me. From anyone like me."

"She thought you were a threat."

"She thought I was the biggest threat. And she wasn't entirely wrong."

Skye glanced at her. "You're admitting that?"

"I've had a lot of time to think. About what I did. About the choices I made. I'm not the same person I was seven years ago."

"Neither am I."

"I know."

They drove in silence for a while, the desert stretching out around them, endless and empty. Skye kept her hands on the wheel and her mind on the road, trying not to think about the last time she'd been in a car with Kara, the last time they'd driven through the desert together.

That trip had ended differently.

"Can I ask you something?" Kara said eventually.

"You can ask."

"Why did you stay? After I left. Why did you stay on Earth instead of coming with me?"

Skye considered the question. It was one she'd asked herself a hundred times, usually in the dark hours of the night when sleep wouldn't come.

"Because Earth is my home," she said finally. "Because I'm human, or close enough. Because I didn't want to be a stranger on a world where everyone was stronger than me, faster than me, better than me in every way that mattered."

"You were never less than anyone."

"I was less than you. I was always less than you."

Kara reached out, her hand hovering over Skye's arm, not quite touching. "That's not true."

"It is true. And you know it. You're a Kryptonian. You're practically a god. And I'm just... I'm just a girl who can shake things. A girl who was experimented on, cut open, put back together. A girl who was never supposed to have powers in the first place."

"That's not how I saw you."

"How did you see me?"

"As the strongest person I'd ever met. As someone who'd been through hell and come out the other side still fighting. As someone who made me want to be better."

Skye's throat tightened. "You have a funny way of showing it."

"I know. I'm sorry."

The apology caught her off guard. Kara didn't apologize. Kara was many things, but contrite wasn't one of them. She was proud, stubborn, certain of her own rightness in a way that had always infuriated Skye and drawn her in equal measure.

"Don't," Skye said. "Don't apologize. Not now. Not when we're just starting."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know if I can forgive you yet. And I don't want to make promises I can't keep."

Kara nodded slowly. "I understand."

They drove on, the sun sinking toward the horizon, painting the desert in shades of gold and red. Skye watched the road and tried not to think about the woman beside her, the woman who'd been her lover, her commander, her everything. The woman who'd broken her heart and left her to pick up the pieces.

She'd spent seven years building walls. Seven years convincing herself she was over it, over Kara, over the life she'd left behind.

Seven years of lying to herself.

And now Kara was back, and the walls were crumbling, and Skye didn't know if she had the strength to rebuild them.

---

The facility was a hole in the ground.

Literally. A concrete bunker half-buried in the desert, surrounded by chain-link fence and warning signs that had been bleached white by the sun. The gate was open, the lock cut, and the tire tracks leading in and out were fresh.

"Someone's been here recently," Trip said, crouching to examine the tracks. "Within the last few days."

"Lena's people?" Skye asked.

"Or someone else. Hard to tell."

Kara stood at the gate, her eyes scanning the facility. "I don't sense anyone. No heartbeats. No movement."

"Could be a trap."

"Could be."

Skye stepped through the gate, her boots crunching on the gravel. The bunker entrance was a heavy steel door, slightly ajar, darkness visible beyond. She reached out with her powers, sending a pulse of vibration through the ground, feeling for anything that shouldn't be there.

The building was empty. But there was something underneath.

"There's a sublevel," she said. "At least three floors down. Something big."

"How big?"

"Big enough to power a small city."

Kara's expression tightened. "Let's go."

They descended into the bunker, flashlights cutting through the darkness. The walls were concrete, the floors metal, the air thick with dust and the faint chemical smell of something Skye couldn't identify. The first level was empty, stripped bare, not even a chair left behind.

The second level was worse. Labs, empty. Equipment, gone. Files, erased. Someone had cleaned this place out with surgical precision.

"The third level," Kara said. "That's where she was working."

They found the stairs and descended, the air growing colder with each step. The third level was different. The lights still worked, humming overhead, illuminating a vast open space filled with machinery.

And in the center of it all, a machine.

It was massive, easily thirty feet tall, a tangle of wires and conduits and glowing blue energy. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie, something that shouldn't exist in the real world.

"What the hell is that?" Trip breathed.

Kara walked toward it, her footsteps echoing in the silence. "It's a power dampener. A big one. Big enough to cover the entire planet."

"Lena built this?"

"She started it. But she didn't finish." Kara pointed to a console near the base of the machine. "The core is missing. Without it, the machine is useless."

"So she took it with her."

"Or someone took it from her."

Skye moved to the console, brushing dust off the keyboard. The screen flickered to life, displaying lines of code in a language she didn't recognize.

"Can you read this?" she asked.

Kara leaned over her shoulder, close enough that Skye could feel her breath on her neck. "It's Kryptonian. Old Kryptonian. The kind used by the science guild."

"What does it say?"

"It's a log. Lena was documenting her progress. The last entry is from three weeks ago." Kara's voice tightened. "She says she was expecting a visitor. Someone who wanted to buy the machine."

"Who?"

"She doesn't say. But she was afraid. She says if something happened to her, the core needed to be destroyed. That it couldn't fall into the wrong hands."

"Looks like she didn't get the chance."

Kara straightened, her expression hard. "We need to find that core. Before whoever took it figures out how to use it."

Skye nodded, but she didn't move. She was staring at the screen, at the last line of Lena's log, a single sentence in English at the bottom of the Kryptonian text.

If you're reading this, Kara, I'm sorry.

"Skye?"

She looked up. Kara was watching her, her expression unreadable.

"We'll find her," Skye said. "And we'll stop whoever's behind this."

"I know."

They stood there for a moment, surrounded by the bones of Lena's machine, and Skye felt something shift inside her. Something she'd been trying to bury for seven years.

Hope. And fear. And the terrible, undeniable knowledge that she was in way over her head.

But she was in it now. For better or worse.

And she had a feeling it was going to be worse.