Okay, this is, frankly, rough. I wrote this based on a challenge from a friend, and it is very far indeed from a perfect piece of writing, even on a technical level. But WTH, I might as well post it 
The story starts with a small ship, racing away from a doomed planet. As it flies, radioactive debris from the destruction clusters around it, cocooning it - but this was foreseen, and the ship is well-shielded to protect its two small occupants, held in suspended animation.
For far, far longer than a human lifespan, the cocooned ship flies uncontrolled through space - passengers unaging, held in a state nearer death than sleep - until finally it drifts into the Sol system. There, as it passes Jupiter, triumph and disaster strike simultaneously - the tides of gravity mean the glowing green cocoon is ripped from the ship, finally waking the navigational systems from protective hibernation. But also, the two parts of the ship are torn apart. They were designed to operate independently, but not to be separated like this - damaged, they drift onto different paths. They shall not land as one.
One part is less damaged than the other, its self-repairs concluded within a human year. It fails to reconnect with its sister ship, but detects a possible M-Class planet in the star system. It is less than five years before it lands on Earth, on a farm near Smallville, Kansas, USA. Shortly afterward, an unseasonal snowstorm closes the farm where it landed off for some time, and when it lifts, the farm owners announce they have had a baby boy. A few think this unannounced pregancy to be odd, but in general nothing particularly exceptional is thought of it, and the ship is kept secret in the farmers' barn.
_______
Eighteen years later, the boy has become a man in the eyes of the law, and Clark Kent goes to Metropolis University. A year later, he is shocked when a flying woman appears in New York City, saving children from a crashing car... but Powerwoman doesn't shock him for the same reason as everyone else.
They're shocked a person can fly.
He's shocked that *someone else* can.
The Kents always warned him to keep what he could do a secret. Help people, yes, and many people have had reason to thank a mysterious blur or a convienient flash of red. But no flights, nothing to call attention to himself.
Of course, he sees some of why soon enough. Powerwoman becomes a spectacle - and to some, an object of ridicule. In one of the few interviews she gives, she claims the hole on the chest of her white costume is a symbol of how she's loyal to nothing except justice...but he hears so many lewd comments about it, and that's the least of what the news media has to say.
He wants to ask so many things, but soon enough, he feels like he's missed his chance to talk to her. She doesn't stop helping, but she stops talking, refusing to engage. The polite media call her "unapproachable". The rest call her a bitch.
Thoughts swirling through his head, he makes decisions based on her experience. Of course, he has the head start of being a man in what's still a "man's world", and he has no illusions about that. But he wonders how many others are out there, together with the realisation that with Powerwoman's travails as their only example, they could be driven further into hiding, rather than helping.
His first decision is to change his major to journalism. His second is to start wearing a pair of glasses. "Controlling the narrative" was something he'd always associated with people doing the *wrong* things, but it's now becoming increasingly clear to him that you needed to do it for the *right* reasons too.
_______
He's in someone's arms.
The realisation is odd, but he's struggling to think why. He can't open his eyes... his head's... foggy? Something else's... can't Δº his º⍜▵o¬...? What's Øꝍ on...?
Whoever's holding him notices his squirming, starts shushing him gently. He's too unclear to do much else, and settles down to whatever they have planned.
Getting wherever they're going, they place him into some sort of chair, and switch something on. It buzzes lightly, and gradually his head clears.
"Come on Kal. Cute as the trip down memory lane was, it's time to wake up."
Groggily, he forces his eyes open. He needs to blink several times to focus on the figure, given the number of lights pointed directly at his head, but he zooms in eventually. As soon as he does, he recognises Powerwoman, but a second name for her sits at the tip of his tongue for a moment before it resolves. "Kara?"
"About time!" For a moment, she looks as though she's going to slap him, but then settles for striking a pose instead. "I was beginning to wonder if you hit a different planet!"
"Planet?"
She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "...is this because that circus act scrambled your brain, or are you really as ignorant as you seem? When I heard you shout 'øØô·Δ',...". Another sigh. A beat. "Tell you what, if you promise not to break anything, I'm going to head out for a few minutes t-- and let you clear your head. Promise?"
Clark nods back. Slightly gormlessly, in all honesty.
As Powerwoman - Kara? - turns to go, she pauses for a moment and adds that he can turn off the sun lamps if he wants, she just finds them relaxing. And then she's gone.
He slumps back in the chair and closes his eyes against the light. She's right about the lamps, he thinks - the glow on his skin buzzes pleasantly - but only if he keeps his eyes shut. His head is clearing enough to think somewhat after Fine's assault, but still feels slow and hard to focus.
As he tries to relax, his mind drifts idly back through the previous year. His graduation from university, being taken on as an intern at the Planet Media Group's once-jewel, the Daily Planet. Finding himself almost immediately writing stories in the understaffed newsroom. And how his long-planned debut, following in Powerwoman's footsteps, was almost unravelled when one of his fellow interns managed to scoop his own story.
Fortunately, the resulting story was... all right. She'd dubbed him "Superman", partly after the S-like symbol on his chest which had been on his ship, partly because it was adjacent enough to "Powerwoman" to fit. He hadn't modelled his costume after hers much, in style or symbol, partly because he didn't want to step on her figurative toes... but mostly because if he had, he would have been taking on her PR problems in full.
And now, less than a month later, his first meeting with her consisted of her rushing in to rescue him from some, as she put it, "circus act" after the guy melted his brain enough that he started thinking in tongues. And apparently speaking them.
Levering himself out the chair, he tries to clear his head by futily shaking it some more. Who was she? Why did the name "Kara" come to mind when he saw her, and why did she call him "Kal"? And "planet" - meaning not the PMG, but an actual world?
Summoning, with more effort than it should take, his pass-through vision, he looks around. Some sort of bunker, well below the surface. No obvious recent activity beyond the room he's in and the nearest way out, but enough facilities - including beds - that it was clearly designed to be lived in, and may have been at some point. Before he can scan the whole place though, the effort becomes too much, and he falls back into the chair, his head spinning.
He's still there when Powerwoman returns - even if the dizziness has mostly receded, he's not so willing to push his luck a second time quite so soon.
There's an awkward moment when they look at each other. He feels he should know her, Kara, more than he does. There's something... familiar, comforting maybe, about her that crept in with the name "Kara", but only in the vaguest of ways.
Still, the awkwardness certainly isn't just on his side. She's standing there, clearly embarrassed if he's any judge of character at all, looking like she also has things to say and no idea how to say them. It's strange, and not from a vague feeling - he's followed her career, and she's never shown (never allowed herself to show?) anything like this in public.
Eventually, she's the first to speak, almost mumbling that she took care of Fine.
"Who are you?" With the silence broken, the words are out of his mouth almost before he realises what he's saying, but he doesn't walk them back.
She doesn't answer straight away. Instead, she turns away, clasps her hands behind her head and studies a cobweb on the ceiling. Only briefly, but with superspeed potentially involved, he doesn't know how much considering she does before she speaks - and even then not to answer, but to apologise.
"What for?"
Now, she turns to face him again, once again resolute. "My birth name is Kara-El. I was born in Arjonca, Lurvan on the planet Krypton. My parents were Zor-El and Allura-Ze. And I'm pretty certain you're my cousin, Kal-El."
He wants to deny it, say it's ridiculous. But the words trigger more half-memories - nothing solid, but thoughts of lots of crystal, and the sensation of being put down somewhere, two faces above him which aren't clear in his mind, but certainly aren't the Ma and Pa he knows.
"Can you recall anything? What about your parents' names? Your father was Jor-El, my father's brother, and your mother was..."
"Lora?"
A nod, "Lora-Van." She pauses, seeming to wait for anything else to come from him.
He wants to deny the whole thing, say it's a trick of Fine's. He wants to embrace it, remember more, hug his cousin. He actually sits there, leaning forward now, head spinning again.
She walks over to him, and places a hand on his shoulder gently. "I pushed you too hard, didn't I? I thought you were Kal when you appeared last month. When you shouted in Lurvian when Fine attacked you, I finally knew you were Kal-El. I didn't think about the fact that you were an infant when we were sent away, that you really wouldn't remember much. I just..." a pause, "I've been worried about you for years. I only went public like this because I hoped you would come and find me. I was meant to look after you,..."
Seeing her trying so hard not to cry triggered something in him. He wept. And then so did she.
Once the tears had tailed off, he had more questions, and she told him what she knew. There had been some kind of great threat to Krypton, but the rulers had argued about what to do, many even denying the seriousness of it, others admitting it needed to be dealt with, but constantly extending the timeframe to deal with it, making it tomorrow's problem. Their parents had despaired of anything happening officially, and managed to gather funding to design suspended animation ships. Then something had been spotted, and they had given up on a full-size ship and sunk everything they had - every penny, every moment of their time - into making one small pair of capsules, and a slot for them on a commercial Flamebird V rocket that could get out of Krypton's gravity well.
Kara herself had been a young teenager, and often babysat Kal while their parents worked. She didn't realise exactly what the project was until the day before, when Zor and Allura had taken her aside. She didn't remember everything they told her - it had all been too much. She had screamed, shouted and cried. Until that moment, she said, she'd fancied herself practically an adult, and that told her exactly how wrong she was. She just remembered them telling her that Krypton was about to die, that they were sending them away to try and save them, and that she should look after Kal. And pictures of some giant, dark mass that had something to do with it. There was no plan, no target. Just the hope they might survive.
The next day, after a sleepless, tearful night for both her and her parents, came being loaded into the pods. Jor and Lora had looked just as bad when they showed with baby Kal. The final goodbyes were said, the pods were sealed, and the next thing she knew, the pod was opening in a field near the bunker where they were now. Only when she pulled herself out and went to check his pod, to decide whether she needed to take him out now or could leave him until she'd found shelter, there was no other pod.
She'd panicked, of course. Going effectively straight from the farewell to finding out even Kal was gone was too much. She'd run around - no powers yet, she belatedly added. They'd not had powers on Krypton - as if his pod was probably just nearby. Eventually, she literally passed out in a ditch.
The next morning, she'd been a little bit stronger, and a little calmer. She'd searched around, less haphazardly, and happened upon the bunker they were in now. It had become her "fortress" for several years, living off the supplies she'd found there. A refuge where she could hide while her powers emerged - between searches for Kal, gradually learning the local language and the rest of what she had to know about where she'd ended up.
Ultimately, she got a US citizenship as "Karen Starr" - although she was noticeably reticent as to the "how" - and moved to NYC. There, she managed to "ride a tech boom" to a small fortune. That achieved, the Powerwoman idea came to her as a potential way of drawing Kal out - if he was alive and aware on Earth, he probably had the same powers as her. Surely he couldn't fail to notice someone with the same powers as him, and realise who it was? She hadn't, as she already admitted, considered that he was too young to have remembered her. Nor the realities of dealing with the media, such as the disastrous interview where she "explained" her costume and the hole in the front - in reality, she had just liked the design, and refused to change it just to appease some "misogynist s***ts" after it became a target of mockery. The interview had been an attempt to subvert that, and after it backfired, she just quit dealing with the media.
Nonetheless, while she'd saved a lot more cats from trees than she'd foiled major crimes, the actual experience had been oddly satisfying to her. Hence why she'd kept doing it, even with the media problems and Kal "not showing up" (said with a half-glare, half-grin).
In turn, he told her about his life growing up, in Smallville with Ma & Pa Kent and his friends there; then on to Metropolis University, where he'd seen her for the first time, and resolved to do the same thing - but only after he'd graduated and felt, as he put it, "adult enough". (He elided past "the need to learn enough to avoid her mistakes", especially since she'd already admitted to them.)
"One thing I have to ask - why wear the symbol on your chest?"
He shrugged, "I wore it because it was there. I thought it might be some family crest I should continue."
"Nothing so grand. It's Old Kryptonese, not Lurvian, but it was definitely widely known. Try looking at it again, see if you can think what it means."
"...hope?"
"Yeah, that's it's literal meaning. More specifically, it's there as a prayer, asking for hope for the hopeless. They knew the chances of us making it to somewhere habitable were tiny, so they added it from an old tradition, a plea to whatever forces were out there to give us a chance."
"And they did?"
"And they did."
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