leverage – Question of Smoke

randomthingsthatilike123:

Was talking with @tomas-abe about this–have you ever thought
of a supergirl leverage au?

Honestly, I’ve talked so much about how Kara isn’t a
horrible liar—she’s a phenomenal liar. She makes everyone
think she’s a bumbling, harmless, ordinary, average human—her kindness isn’t a
lie, but as we’ve seen with RedK—it is a choice. And we’ve seen her with
Clark— “you really have the clumsy thing down.” But for Clark that was real. For
Kara, it’s an act. She’s the heir to a house renowned throughout the galaxy for
its scientists—and she was about to become the youngest person in Krypton’s
history to enter the science guild. But she was told over and over and over to
be ordinary, average, unremarkable—to hide herself, hide anything that marks
her as alien. She’s a genius in a room full of preschoolers who are just now
learning concepts that she’s understood since before she could walk—of course
she’s bored with earth science.

Supergirl isn’t a
lie, but it’s not quite the truth either—and neither is Kara Danvers. Both are
part of her, but at the same time they’re both personas that she embodies and
can step into almost at the drop of a hat—they are constructed and built. And
yes, when outright confronted, she is a horrible bluff—she can’t do it. But
almost everyone forgets or glosses over how much pain Kara must always be in,
the anger she carries inside of her of being the very last, of being sent away,
of being alone. They forget that she is not simply a human with powers but
forever and always Kryptonian with powers—like how everyone thinks of Clark, like
we’ve seen in Myriad how even Clark
thinks of himself, Kara never thinks of herself as human. She has a different
language and values and culture and religion and she fools everyone into
thinking that she’s just like them(for more about this,
here’s the post I made that’s a lot more comprehensive). That isn’t Kara’s
stage. This kind of complicated and woven falsehood is her stage. Sound like
anyone?

Kara would totally
be a grifter. Especially a Kara who wasn’t found by Clark, who wasn’t found by
the Danvers—this is Kara without a purpose, who sees her cousin flying over
Metropolis with the house of El’s Crest on his chest and doesn’t need her. She has nothing to live for—so she wanders, constantly
pretending to be someone else and she gets good
at it. She has a soft spot for swindling people who violate environmental laws
because it’s easier—and never goes
after anyone who doesn’t deserve it. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily legal. She’s also got a soft spot for
art—it’s marvelous, in a way even Krypton never was. And grifting is something
that makes her feel alive, covering up for just a little bit the gaping hole in
her heart where Krypton used to be. And really, she doesn’t have very many
ties, or attachments—she travels light, easily able to switch identities and
leave at the drop of a hat. There’s this undercurrent of sadness in all of her
identities, even with the happiest of her personas—which just makes her a
mystery and all the more magnetic to the people she’s trying to con—she’s able
to seem so damn genuine and sincere it’s addicting.

Not to mention someone who can easily see everyone’s
tells because of advance senses, hear their heartbeat and see infinitesimal
twitches and expressions that pass in a millisecond—she didn’t visibly use her powers as Cat’s
assistant, but she still kept the job for 2 years before using super speed or
strength—and that was because of how well she could read Cat, who went
through probably hundreds of assistants before finding Kara. That would be essential for a grifter. Plus, we know
that she learned English in less than a week.
An entire language in just a handful of days—being able to learn regional
dialect and adopt accents and

She goes by so many aliases, trying to run away from the
memory of krypton. But her current alias? Kiera. Kiera Deveraux.

Kara woke up alone on Earth and saw her no longer baby
cousin with their family crest on his chest doing perfectly fine—he’s grown, he
doesn’t need her. How would he even know about Kara in the first place, or any
of it? Kara’s been doing this since she was 13, and now she’s probably 30
something, maybe 32. We’ve had Clark even say—Kryptonians age very slowly. She
still looks like she’s in her early 20’s. She doesn’t seem to age maybe that makes
her even more legendary but she likes to use make up to make her look older
because that truly fucks with people,
although she never goes after bad
people.

One thing that is truly different from Krypton, and not in a
bad
way, or a lesser way, is the way humans create art—she loves art. And it’s something that she bonds over with their thief.

As for who’s Nate, the alcoholic whose young son died
because of corporate greed, the mastermind who thinks of every contingency and
almost obsessively observes and
analyzes? Why, that’s none other than Cat Grant. Cat Grant

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