Villain Silver Banshee

Once upon a time, there was a girl who found something in her attic that she was never meant to touch.

Her name was Siobhan McDougal, and she had been a student at Midvale High School — the same school where Kara was slowly learning the mysteries of Earth homework and cafeteria lunch. Siobhan had long dark hair and a quick laugh and a habit of saying exactly what she thought, which her teachers found challenging and her classmates found very refreshing.

One afternoon, cleaning out the attic of her family's old house, Siobhan found a wooden box tucked behind a cracked mirror. Inside the box, wrapped in cloth that had gone brown with age, was a piece of carved stone in the shape of a crescent — pale as the moon and cold to the touch.

It was called the Caoránach Crest, though Siobhan did not know that yet. She only knew that it was old, and beautiful, and that when she touched it, something reached back.

The spirit that had been sleeping inside the Crest for a thousand years woke up all at once.

WHOOOMP.

Siobhan's hair turned white as fresh snow from root to tip. Her skin went the color of cold ash. And deep inside her chest, she felt a sound building — not a voice, exactly, but something older and sharper, pressing at the back of her throat like a storm looking for a way out.

She opened her mouth. And out it came.

SKREEEEE.

The windows in the attic shattered. The mirror cracked. The old house shuddered to its foundation.

Siobhan did not mean to cause any harm. But the spirit inside her was ancient and angry, and it did not understand things like choosing. She became Silver Banshee, whether she wanted to or not. And the scream became her only voice.

When she came to downtown Midvale three days later, looking for the Crest she had somehow lost in the chaos, everything went wrong. The scream came out when she was frightened, and it was so powerful that it knocked police cars sideways and sent people running.

Kara arrived within seconds.

She flew in from the east at full speed, cape streaming, and hit the wall of sound — SKREEEEE — and stopped dead in midair, gasping. Even with Kryptonian hearing, even with cells tougher than any metal, that scream was like running headfirst into a waterfall.

Kara hovered there for a moment, blinking, ears ringing.

Then she gritted her teeth and flew forward anyway.

She positioned herself between Silver Banshee and the crowd below — arms spread wide, feet planted in the air like she was standing on solid ground — and she became a wall of one. Every time the scream came, she took it. SKREEEEE. SKREEEEE. Each wave pushed her backward a little. She pushed forward again.

But even as she held her ground, her eyes were working. X-ray vision swept the streets below, scanning doorway by doorway, shop by shop. There — two blocks south, half-hidden by a fallen display stand — was a pale crescent shape lying on the cold concrete.

The Caoránach Crest.

Kara made a decision that surprised even herself. She stopped fighting. She lowered her arms. She looked directly at the white-haired figure hovering across from her, and she spoke.

"Siobhan," she said clearly, over the wind. "I know what happened to you."

Silver Banshee froze.

"I know you didn't want this," Kara continued. "I know you found something in your attic that you didn't understand. And I know where the Crest is. I can see it from here."

Something happened behind Siobhan's eyes — something shifting, like a light going on in a dark room.

No one had ever talked to her. Everyone had run.

Kara blew out a long, careful breath — FWOOOOSH — coating the swirling white energy around Silver Banshee in a thin shell of ice, cooling and calming the worst of the storm.

Then she pointed. "Two blocks south," she said quietly. "Shop doorway. You dropped it when all of this started."

Siobhan descended slowly to the street. She found the Crest in the doorway exactly where Kara said it would be. When her fingers closed around the cold stone, the spirit shifted — not gone, not yet, but quieter, like a kettle taken off the boil.

The white energy dissolved. Siobhan stood in the street in the sudden silence, looking at her own hands.

Kara landed beside her.

They sat down together on the curb of the wrecked street — the Kryptonian in her blue suit and the pale girl with white hair — and for a little while they were both just two people who had ended up somewhere they had never planned to be.

"Being a monster is mostly just exhausting," Siobhan said finally.

Kara nodded slowly. "I flew from another planet in a rocket and landed in a field. Earth was completely strange to me. I understand more than you might think."

Siobhan looked at her. Then she laughed — a small, tired laugh, but a real one.

S.T.A.R. Labs sent specialists the next morning to study the Caoránach Crest and help Siobhan manage the spirit bound to it. It was careful, slow work. But it was a beginning.

And every few weeks after that, Kara stopped by Siobhan's house, knocked on the door, and asked how she was doing.

Because she had learned something on that street in Midvale that she would never forget.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop and listen.

Sometimes that is the only thing that works.

And it had worked for Supergirl.

She intended to keep doing it.