Note: Oh man, you guys. This is it! The Big Talk! The Explanations scene! It'll probably be another massive expositional dialogue dump (Squealing sounds)! In all seriousness, this IS the bit where Brainiac will finally explain just what on earth (and so, so, so many other planets if we're really counting) he's doing and why.

I do not own Young Justice. Please review, comment, or criticize constructively. Most of all, enjoy.

The Last Daughter

Chapter 11

Explanations

Kara had to take a moment to just stare and marvel at her surroundings. Dozens of screens streaming what looked to be terrabytes of information in symbols she couldn't understand. Power cables running every which way, but never in a way that they were actually tangled or messy, nor that they might impede movement or maintainence. Metals of swirling silver, green, purple formed almost artistic patterns through the shifting plates of the floor and walls.

"Come." Brainiac's voice sounded, and she shook off the shock of actually seeing the inner workings of his technology, and numbly followed him through a series of doors and hallways, each as eye-catching as the initial room. They finally exited into a massive, domed room, giant cables running into a great chair set into the center of the chamber. Brainiac sat himself down in the chair, cables and plugs extending out of its frame to attach to him as his plates shifted, making space. He leaned back and his eyes closed; the cables and chair and massive network of technology she didn't even have a frame of reference for beneath them glowed. Kara could almost see the data pouring in both directions, like water flowing through a network of springs. She briefly remembered the images one of her mother's sisters had shown her, of springs and lakes that the rising temperatures on Krypton had destroyed in the early days of the core's destabilization. Before the problem had become intractable, and flight from the world the only course of salvation. She snapped out of her memories as Brainiac leaned forward, his eyes opening again.

"I believe it would best serve us both for you to begin, Kara Zor-El." Brainiac said, waving a hand out to her. "Rest assured, all operations by my forces on the planet Earth have been suspended, and will remain so until we are finished." Kara took a deep breath. She had no reason to trust him, but… a part of it made sense. If he thought he didn't know everything about what he did, why shouldn't he put his work on hold until he was sure?

"The key root of the problem was an over-use of resources." Kara began. This, she was intimately familiar with. Both sides of her large extended families had spent hours, sometimes days, debating and talking and comparing notes as they grew more and more aware of the slow death of their world, conversations she often couldn't help but overhear. And which she eventually forced her way into, despite the objections of many adults. "We exhausted most of what Krypton and the few colonies we had established had to offer when my parents were still growing up, and the decision to gradually harvest from the planet's core to offset the losses of energy and materials was the beginning of the end. My Aunt and Uncle were the ones who really put it all together decisively, though a few others had similar ideas they couldn't prove yet before then."

She sighed, and dragged a hand across her face, her mind going back to the discussions, the late nights, the occasional shouting matches between so many people she knew and cared for. Who to tell, how much to tell them, if they were even right.

"Once they proved to themselves what was happening, that the core was destabilizing and would eventually break down, destroying the planet, they tried to figure out what they could do about it." Those had unquestionably been the worst days, Kara thought. When everyone had desperately been trying to find some way to save a world already past the point of salvation. "It took almost two years before they realized that trying to repair the core wouldn't work. It would be the shortest of short-term solutions; continual injections of resources we didn't even have would be needed to keep offsetting destabilization. Eventually my Uncle had another idea. Instead of trying to save Krypton, they should try and save Kryptonians."

She smiled at that. Uncle Jor's plan, like so many other things he'd done, impossibly simple and complex at the same time. "He proposed a total restructuring of society dedicated to one goal; getting as many people off Krypton as possible, starting with the youngest citizens. Setting every aspect of the world to building and fueling ships, plotting out courses, sending probes to chart the way well in advance. It took them months to even get enough data for preliminary estimates. But everyone who knew believed in it, wanted it to be airtight and above reproach when they finally took it to the High Council." Her father had practically collapsed into her arms in relief that day after the initial audience. When even then it seemed like they were in. As though the Council understood the gravity of the situation, and needed only to convince a few skeptics to have the majority needed to put the plan into action.

"Then your scouts intercepted one of our probes, and clashed with border patrols on the moon." She scowled up at him. "Then the rest of your forces came, barely two months later. And your scouts were all anyone was focused on before then. They'd torn through the garrison on the lunar base, and all attention shifted to the question of 'Are there more, and will they come for us?'"

She could see he wanted to interject, but held himself back from doing so. He wanted to hear everything she had to say. It honestly surprised her.

"Your attack didn't take us by surprise in the usual way. We were on alert ever since the battle with your scouts. But we were surprised at how you just rolled over us. How nothing we did seemed to matter to you." She scoffed to herself as the memory hit her. "You know, we actually tried contacting you, when your ship first appeared? You never responded, and the next thing we knew, an army of robots was raining down on us."

Kara glared at him again, her fury building as she remembered. But she kept it in control. She wasn't there to fight. Not yet at least. She was there to talk. To explain her side of things, and to hear his explanations.

"I don't know how many died then. I wasn't even technically part of the military yet; my results from the entrance examination hadn't come in before your main force arrived. But I fought anyways, and I know what I saw your creations do. Vivisecting and butchering people and animals in the streets, disintegrating prisoners…" She had to stop, take several deep breaths. Calm herself. "Our entire defensive line planetside was on the verge of collapsing when my father called the military commander, said he had a weapon that would stop you cold, and he needed my help to finish it."

She turned away then. She didn't want him to see her as she recounted this. "He didn't. He was lying. He'd stolen resources set aside in the early planning phases of the evacuation plan, and built a ship that would take me away from the planet. He knew you were up to something bigger, and he didn't want me there when it happened. But I was still close enough to see it," She turned back him, eyes literally burning in anger as she felt heat vision build up behind her eyeballs. "To see you wipe our capital city, Kandor, off the face of the planet. And you did a lot more than just destroy the planetary capital. You plunged the whole world into chaos. Most of the council was destroyed with the city, along with some of our best scientists and our largest stocks of resources. No-one left could maintain order, and everything started breaking down. The military commander, Zod, tried to force the remnants of the government to follow through with the plan my family devised. To try and evacuate as many Kryptonians as they could. But support had waned in light of the losses, and because of what my father did. And when they refused, Zod went to war with them. A war that squandered the last of our resources, the last of the time everyone still had. My Aunt and Uncle built a small ship of their own, and sent their son away in it after the war ended, barely hours before the planet collapsed on itself."

She heard a pattering, tiny objects hitting metal. She numbly realized tears were tracking down her face, falling onto the half-shattered chestplate of her warsuit.

"You tore our attention away from working to save ourselves, and you left nothing behind but chaos, so we never had a chance to recover like we needed to. Because of what you did, my people couldn't save themselves." Kara finally finished, glaring through her tears at Brainiac. She couldn't read his face. She knew he could form expressions, though whether he actually felt anything was up in the air for her, but his face was utterly inscrutable.

She watched him lean back and streams of data flow again, before he recovered his seat and fixed his eyes on her.

"As context," he said, sounding almost… tepid. "Was necessary to understand your half of this conundrum, so too will it be necessary to understand mine." He held his hand out, and a series of holograms formed above his palm. He cast them down, the light forming into fascimiles of planets she'd never seen before, small screens opening above each one, filled with footage. She saw rolling fields of silver grass, titanic waves that crashed upon shores of crystal, grand temples of stone and jade rising higher than the great mountains behind them.

"Most of my people are content to simply exist on the homeworld, living as part of a great collective, rarely interacting with the galaxy at large. I was not. I desired to explore, to see all the vastness of the universe had to offer. But my wandering was aimless, little more than sightseeing. It was in this system, near the edge of the galaxy, that I discovered true direction. True purpose."

Brainiac… sighed. Or at least, gave his approximation of a sigh. "I observed and archived minor specimens and footage from the worlds before you over a galactic standard year, until something happened I did not anticipate." The sun in the center of the holographic solar system suddenly heaved, and burst outward. In seconds, every world was swallowed by the explosion. The footage shifted as the silver fields burned; the seas boiled over the crystal that melted in the heat; the temples were annihilated as winds and heat beyond comprehension swept them away with the mountains they surpassed, the surface of the world itself crumbling beneath the onslaught.

"Ironically, as with your world's core, the sun, in a almost unprecedented manner, rapidly destabilized and went supernova, destroying the entire system. I myself barely escaped the blast, and could only watch as billions of years of evolution and change and beauty were wiped out in a matter of minutes. My cursory observations the only proof of them ever having existed at all." Kara watched his right hand curl into a fist and realized, with a start, that he sounded mournful.

"I knew then what I had to attempt," Brainiac continued after a few seconds of thought. "As unlikely as this event had been, it could not be the only such case. Nor could statistically unlikely supernovas be the only source of sudden destruction of worlds and life. The universe is harsh, uncaring, and relentless. Whether a world has newly formed, or hosts a trillion forms of life that have evolved over billions of years, all can be lost," He snapped his fingers. "In an instant. Merely because a world seems safe over an infantismal amount of time, there is no assurance it will remain so. So I resolved to stand against such demands of existence. Life would not be so easily snuffed out again. But I realized early on I could not achieve such tasks as single-handedly preserving every planet in the galaxy. I would need to scale back in scope, and prioritize my efforts to planets that would be threatened with annihilation in the relatively near future. I also need a way to analyze the life of a world in greater depth, to understand what I need to create to help preserve it."

He looked almost… bashful. "I must admit, my eventual solution is apparently… unrefined in practice. I had not fully considered the reactions of sufficiently developed life forms to my efforts of analysis. Rest assured that I will, regardless of the outcome of our efforts here, endeavor to redesign my workforce to reach a less… harmful state."

Kara honestly couldn't believe what she was hearing. "I must also debate you on a major point, Kara Zor-El. My goal is to preserve endangered life, endangered worlds. What would I gain by destroying the subjects of my efforts at an sub-atomic level?" He shook his head, and finally rose from the chair. "It may perhaps be easier for you to accept the explanation of my efforts should you also see their fruit." He waved as hand as the cables and plugs disconnected and his plates slid back into place. Another burning doorway opened at the foot of the stairs leading to his chair.

Brainiac went through first, and Kara could only numbly follow. He'd led her into a viewing booth, above a massive complex of shelves and containment modules. She could see wires running into the bottoms of thousands upon thousands of modules. She briefly wondered how all this fit into the ship; it certainly didn't seem big enough. But Brainiac tapped at a holographic display, and the modules shifted, one rising out of the mass and floating towards the booth, the metal casing sliding backwards.

"I did not destroy your city, Kara," Brainiac said as the module reached the glass. "Nor did I destroy all of those you claim I have. I preserved them."

Kara couldn't believe her eyes. In the center of the module, down to the badlands she remembered from Zod's training sessions, was a miniaturized replica of Kandor, maybe the size of a small plate. It took her minutes of simply gaping before her mind finally accepted what Brainiac was trying to tell her. That what was in the module wasn't a replica of Kandor. It was Kandor.

BAM! BOTTLED CITY, EVERYBODY! WHOOO!

Okay, so yeah. Like I said, I tried to imply where I could that because no-one could fully understand anything about Brainiac's technology, no-one really understood what was actually happening whenever he was involved. Remember all the times people and Kandor seemed to be vaporized by lazers? More to the point, anyone remember the episode of YJ where they pulled a double-twist and made us think that vaporized heroes were simply hit with transporter beams, and everyone just assumed they were deadly lazers because why wouldn't they?

Yeah, that's basically what's been going on this entire time with Brainiac (only without the double-twist of the lazers being just actual deadly lazers). Everyone's always assumed he's just some superintelligent asshole violently butchering people with his robot army, and then blowing up a chunk of their planet for kicks. He's actually more like an early-years conservation scientist; we've just been hearing about his actions from the perspective of all the animals he's forcibly stolen specimens from.

I mean, think about the crap that scientists do so they can study animals, or get them into conservatories. Animals are probably scared shitless of these weird people in coats with metal boxes that can outrun them, shooting them with things that make them really tired, stabbing tags into their ears, taking them to unfamiliar places and sometimes never letting them leave at all (even if some of those places are actually pretty nice and there are other animals around).

I got that idea of perspective in my head very early on to think of this version of Brainiac: he's a conservationist who doesn't know how fucking terrifying he is to all the animals he's dedicated his life to saving. Though I knew he'd need to concede that his drones actually are kinda quite inhumane from any perspective that isn't his, and that's something he's gonna have to work on for everyone's sake (including his own). He's a man (or mandroid) blinded by science and his fairly noble purpose of saving chunks of species and worlds he determines are in or will be in apocalyptic danger.

Personal disclosure, that opening bit of Brainiac's with the system of awesome planets destroyed by a supernova; so happy I could finally write that bit of hardcore-af-pathos for a seemingly maniacal killer mandroid. I asked myself early on how I could have Brainiac justify what he was ultimately inflicting on worlds in the name of saving them, and that idea of worlds of beauty and splendor and life just wiped out in minutes, and all he can do is watch… knew I had it down right then and there.

There's also a reason Kara kept reminiscing about how kinda-awful it was growing up in a large family of scientific geniuses who figured out that their planet was straight-up doomed. Keep that in mind going forward. Her experiences then might be important later.