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The first thing she sees on Earth is color. Green, to be specific. It's everywhere, the world is awash in this gorgeous, gorgeous green.
Krypton had nothing like it. Krypton was grey and dying, but Earth is green, green, green.
Alex checks to make sure she blinks every now and then those first few weeks. “That's the color of your soulmate’s eyes. There really wasn't any green on Krypton?”
She doesn't know. She shouldn't have been color blind; she came out of a machine and no one else in her family ever was. Except for Kal, but she didn't know that then.
No one did, and no one from Krypton ever would.
She couldn’t find the right paint color. The greens got vaguely close, like a shadow out of the corner of her eyes. She swore she’d seen it, that flash of color that stole her breath, but it’d fade to grey whenever she turned.
Eliza bought every green she could get her hands on. She picked up a palette, ten brushes, and the largest paper pad she saw. Kara smiled more that day than the whole week before.
Even Alex wouldn’t complain about the splotches on the deck floor.
Mixing paint was messy but helped her regulate her strength. She mixed and mixed, it took days, but eventually, she watched that elusive green slip over her palette.
She painted trees and landscapes, buildings and people, all out of minuscule changes in that green. She mastered varying the color until her palettes showed a rainbow of the most vibrant green to the muted greys her eyes couldn't color for her.
High school is boring. She knows everything here but the language, the history. She can't stand converting from Kryptonian units to English ones. She's told it will get easier, but Rao, she just wants the science guild she was promised.
Human history is… frightening. It's so similar to Krypton’s early stories. So rife with corruption, subterfuge, warfare… she tells Alex that humanity can't continue this way.
Alex has no answers for her.
Eliza flips through channels until the Cat Grant show pops onto the TV. It's gossipy and Eliza likes to complain at it. But for fifteen minutes she says not a thing.
The Unmasked is a special, every day, where corrupt officials, specialists, politicians, and more are held accountable for their actions. She strips these people of hiding places and wrenches them into the light.
Kara is hooked. It doesn't hurt that Cat Grant's eyes are a gorgeous, gorgeous green.
She's attracted to CatCo for all the right reasons. She loves journalism, shining lights where stories need telling, and CatCo is a great place to work for women. There are no downsides.
She knows the color of the CEO’s eyes too, but that's more morbid curiosity than anything else. She's met other people with that green in their eyes, nothing happened… what could the chances really be?
College races by in a flash. She works through three majors but doesn't hit the top of her class. She's been warned about standing out. But a triple in History, English, and Journalism doesn't seem overly outrageous in a family of doctors.
Only Alex knows that Kara spends every moment with a dictionary pulled up on her phone, with three world history books from around the world, with every newspaper from the brand new CatCo.
There are some green eyes on her campus, but nothing clicks. There's no flash of color. She gets less and less interested in love.
Alex wishes her luck, knee deep in exams, she can't make it to lunch on Kara's first day. It's okay. Maybe she'll make a friend to go to lunch with instead?
“Where is my 10:15?”
Someone should probably do something about the crying woman, but apparently, that's not going to be her. She walks into a fishbowl office and this woman, legend, Queen is already dismissing her.
“Tell me why you're special.”
There's a tightness in her chest, this was probably a bad idea. But years of blending in comes to her rescue. “I'm not special.”
Cat Grant meets her eyes-
And the world blooms in color. The tanned white of her face, blonde hair, turquoise necklace, black dress, blue pen, and the red of fire on a TV screen.
She gasps a breath and Cat Grant says, “Bullshit.”