#LBitR

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 25)

Previously, on LBitR...

She missed.

She missed?!

Lena can’t quite believe her eyes—she’s stunned stupid when the suit’s target tracking system beeps and chimes as it tries to locate and lock onto the little blue dot that is now flying somewhere a few hundred feet below her.

Her arms—and, more importantly, the Kryptonite blasters—are pointed slightly upward at an angle slanted just high enough to have missed Kara, had she stayed put.

Which she hadn’t, thankfully.

Lena hears the crackle of static inside her helmet, followed by a low groan of frustration Lex was too slow to mask.

She has very little time to bask in that small victory. Lena’s first instinct it to fly away, as far from Kara as she can possibly manage; however, as if it picks up on Lex’s anger, the implant at her temple sends what feels like an electric shock sparking right into her skull.

It catches Lena off-guard, so much so that she releases a yelp of pain as she tries to reach blindly for her temple in a reflexive action.

The loud thunk of metal on metal—more especially, her gauntlet making unimpeded contact to the suit helmet—stops her short, and with a start, Lena realizes that despite the connection Lex has established with the implant, she was able to complete the movement.

Wherever he’s holed up, Lex seems to have arrived at the same conclusion; Lena hears an angry yelp resonate within her helmet, and then the pain at the side of her head flares white hot, hotter and brighter than ever.

It disorients her for a moment, but more than that; it makes Lena clench her teeth because, for once, it’s not all she’s feeling.

She hears the thrusters of the Lexosuit. She hears the whirr and hum of the blasters as they recharge. She feels her broken hand, encased and stifled by a cast and the Lexosuit gauntlet, throbbing in pain with all the action. She feels the tender, bitten spot of her tongue and tastes the coppery tang of blood in her mouth.

It’s like the connection grows more tenuous by the second.

Unthinkably, as she hovers in the air cataloguing everything she feels and hears besides the implant in her temple, Lena releases a bark of laughter. She can’t remember the last time she had so many boxes to work with, so to speak.

Maybe the laughter came a bit too early, because Lex seems to realize his grasp on her mind is growing weaker and weaker.

“Trust me, Lena, this is far from over.”

The trigger words do what Lex designed them to do, of course. Lena feels the pulse, but this time, she is expecting it—she boxes the flash of pain before it can swell into something unbearable and is almost proud of her momentary triumph.

What she doesn’t expect, however, is for the Lexosuit to suddenly shut down entirely.

She’s falling, then, plummeting toward the pavement at a sickening speed, and her limbs are flailing as she tries to repower her suit, but there’s just so much happening in her head at once and oh god, Lena is going to puke in this goddamned suit…

“Lena!”

Lena doesn’t even need to look—she knows it’s Kara, knows she’s zipping through the air to come and break her fall before it’s too late.

Kara’s almost there, too, when the suit comes to life again at the very last second and Lena realizes, belatedly, what Lex is trying to do.

“Kara, get away!”

The blasters shoot just as the thrusters re-engage abruptly, shooting Lena upwards in a burst of green light, and Kara—

Kara’s sent careening through the air, crashing through the walls of the main branch of National City Bank.

“No!” Lena shouts, drowning out the sound of Lex’s laughter in her ears.

“Come on, Lena,” he prods gleefully. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

She feels his control returning, and it’s so much, so many things at once for her brain to fight, she finds herself slipping.

The target-tracking systems of the suit beep again; Kara’s little blue dot is moving—slower, but moving nonetheless.

Lena doesn’t have the time to be relieved, because the Lexosuit’s already taking off after Supergirl, and Lena feels her brother’s control returning, and it’s so much, so many things at once for her brain to fight, she finds herself slipping, unable to redirect it.

She bursts through the wall, and Kara scrambles away, looking slightly worse for the wear.

“Lena!” she shouts, and damn her, she still looks relieved, despite the faint, glowing green veins beginning to crawl over her skin.

Lena manages to move her arm away again at the last second, through monumental effort, just as Kara ducks away from another Kryptonite blast that blows a hole with scorching green edges on the wall behind her.

“Kara, get away!” Lena cries. She can feel Lex doing something to regain full control, like he is stitching together threads to tether her to his whims again. Her mind’s beginning to go foggy, and Lena’s tired, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can hold her own against him through willpower alone.

“Kara, go!”

“No!” Kara shouts back—she’s smiling, why the fuck is she smiling? “Lena, it’s OK! I trust you!”

Lena wants to scream at the Kryptonian that it’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of keeping away from a Kryptonite-powered war suit Lena has no control over.

Lena can’t even hear how giddy Lex sounds anymore. All she hears is the sound of the blasters at her arms charging to fire again, the sirens at the city below, the crackle of energy that seems to surround them entirely, and Kara…

Kara’s voice.

“Lena,” she’s speaking calmly, arms in Lena’s direction as if Lena is not the most dangerous thing to a Kryptonian in this planet at the minute.

“Lena,” Kara continues, stepping closer, so close the suit’s targeting system locks right onto her face, and Lena can see the green of Kryptonite getting stronger on her features with every step that she takes.

“No—”.

“Lena,” Kara cuts her off, still smiling like an idiot like everything’s going to be alright. “It’s OK. You can do it, Lena. You’re already doing it.”

“Kara, get away—”

Strong hands grab at the arms of the Lexosuit and Lena finds herself trembling. Lex will fire at any second now; Kara’s already close, too close, and all it takes is the push of a button and then she’ll be gone.

“It’s OK,” Kara says softly, so close now that she might as well be whispering in her ear. The ominous hum of the fully charged blasters almost drowns her out. “You’re doing so well, Lena. Trust me, it’s OK.”

Several things happen at once. One, Lex releases a howl of pure, unadulterated fury that reverberates inside the helmet like the angry clash of a gong. Two, Lena thinks her brain has actually begun to melt with the sudden intensity of the pain emanating from her temple. But then…

It vanishes within a split second. Lex regains control and fires; however, he’s already too late—Lena’s already shooting up through the ceiling and into the sky out of her own volition, sending the jets of green far into the horizon, away from Kara.

Lex is fuming.

“It seems I underestimated both of you, especially our little Kryptonian friend,” his voice comes through once more, and holy shit he sounds absolutely livid. “But trust me, Lena—”

Lena laughs again. Lex’s trigger words still ache and resonate in her brain; but they are no longer the debilitating blinding flashes he meant them to be. They’re twinges; pinpricks, really, and much more easily dealt with.

Easily boxed up.

“You tried, Lex,” Lena hisses, feeling a little high, a little light-headed at this sudden, inexplicable turn of the tables. “And you failed.”

“I haven’t failed yet, Lena,” he retorts, clearly angry beyond belief, but with a sudden calmness that sends a chill down Lena’s spine.

“I wanted you alive to witness the grand-finale, Lena, but make no mistake,” he continues, voice cold and vengeful in a way Lena hasn’t heard since he turned the sun red, a lifetime ago. “I have no qualms over collateral damage. We all must make sacrifices, after all.”

Lena realizes too late. She’s high above the clouds when her suit visor goes dark—the words OVERRIDE flash before her eyes, and a ten-second counter begins, flashing in ominous green right below. The blasters retract, but the hum of the Kryptonite charge doesn’t go away; if anything it intensifies, becomes so deafening Lena is scarcely even aware she’s falling again.

She doesn’t need to see Kara speeding after her. She can only take the few seconds she has left to scream for her to get away, far, far away, or she’ll die with Lena. She’ll die, because Lex’s last move was to make his own sister into a Kryptonite bomb. 

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[mssirey]

about little bumps on the road, i think Lena is schizophrenic (maybe) and she actualy killed kara and this kara is in her head, but idk its just a late night thought. <3333

Oh fuck that would be WILD! And cruel. @naralanis you wouldn’t do that to me, would you?? 🤨🤨🤨

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 19)

Previously, on LBitR...

Like her cell before this, the room Lena now occupied has no windows, only the bright fluorescent lights that emit a soft hum just loud enough for Lena to hear—something that would ordinarily drive her crazy with annoyance, but now just gives her something else to focus on.

There are no clocks, either, at least not that she could see, not even on the many monitors attached to her via an array of wires. Though, to be fair, her visibility is somewhat compromised by the limited range of movement the handcuffs afford her.

No one has come in to check in on her so far, not even a nurse doing their rounds or some hapless DEO agent—because she is very much not in a hospital, as much as it looks like she might be. Lena would guess she’s being held at the DEO, but she doesn’t particularly like guessing. She likes knowing. And what she knows is that she’s been here for what feels like forever and she’s starting to get antsy.

Not that Lena has much idea of how much time has passed; she tried counting the minutes in her head, but couldn’t concentrate long enough on the task to keep it up for more than twenty counts to sixty, which in her book, is long enough.

She half-expected Lex to come in at some point, even if just to gloat, but he hasn’t shown so far, and Lena figures he doesn’t need to. He’s already got his pieces in place—he controls both Lena and the Director of the DEO; he can just sit back, kick up his feet, and relax while he waits for the game to start up again.

For Kara to come flying into his trap.

Fucker, Lena thinks bitterly. She feels a little high—probably whatever pain medication she was given.

Her stomach growls, sudden and loud, and Lena realizes she has no idea when she had eaten last. But more than telling she’s hungry, the unpleasant sound tells her she’s been sitting here twiddling her thumbs (figuratively speaking, of course) for a few hours at least.

Tired of being laid up and useless, and entirely not in the mood to wait for Alex or whoever else to come in, Lena tries to shuffle down the bed, as much as the handcuffs will allow, to try to get to the bandages stuck to the side of her head.

There’s some incredibly awkward shuffling down the thin mattress and further into the cheap, staticky sheets, and the angle is far from comfortable, but eventually Lena manages to lean down just enough so her fingertips graze the edge of some gauze, right at her temple. She pinches it between her index and middle fingers—the only ones that actually reach—and slowly begins to tear it away from her skin.

It’s at this moment that Lena becomes exceedingly thankful for the invention of morphine—or whatever else it is they have her on, here—because after some poking around, she’s definitely reopened her wound. Her fingers come away bloody, and the whole spot feels raw and hot to the touch, but fortunately, she feels little more than pressure.

She’s very well aware that, as far as good ideas go, this one probably nears the bottom of the list (or perhaps isn’t in it at all), but her options are limited, after all. And to be quite fair, even if she doesn’t succeed, she’s already in this pseudo-hospital room—it’s quite unlikely her captor will let her just. Die.

The angle is mightily uncomfortable, which makes it less than ideal when it comes to actually digging into a head wound, and so far she’s felt nothing that resembles the minuscule implant in her skin, but Lena is nothing if not tenacious, not to mention stubborn as hell. Kind of like Kara.

“If you would like, I could provide you with the schematics to Lex Luthor’s mind-control implant without the need of aggravating your wounds.”

Lena jumps—as much as one can jump when they’re handcuffed to a bed—at the voice; she’d been so concentrated on her slightly insane task she didn’t hear anyone come in. Her bloodied hand snaps away from the wound on her temple in shock and hits the rail with force, enough to send her now-empty ice-chip cup flying to the other side of the room.

“Brainy!”

Lena cannot quantify the sheer relief she feels when she sees the stoic figure at her door, ramrod straight with his arms crossed at his back. His lips are tugging into a little smile, like he’s so clearly happy to see her, and for some reason that makes her want to cry.

She does cry a little, and it’s so pathetic, because her hands are still handcuffed so she can’t even reach out to wipe at them. But it’s the first time in weeks, maybe months, that someone other than Kara actually looks happy to see Lena, and she finds she’s wholly unprepared to deal with it.

“What are you doing here?”

He steps in, squinting at her and tutting under his breath as he sees her bloodied hand, head, and bandages. “Do you need me to tell you how exactly much you’re increasing your risk of infection by interfering with your bandages?”

Lena lets out a wet, choky laugh. “No, thank you. I’ll be good.”

He nods, lips tugging ever-so-slightly wider. It’s the closest to a beaming grin as Brainy can get, and Lena can’t help but laugh. Maybe she’s hallucinating. But she’s so, so very happy to see me.

“Good,” he says, looking a bit awkward just standing by her bed with perfect posture. Lena wouldn’t have it any other way. “I will call someone shortly to redress your wounds. Trying to remove this type of subdermal implant with a piece of glass only had a 9.7% chance of success, in case you were not aware.”

Lena lets out a little snort. “I figured the odds weren’t great,” she quips. Brainy’s now just close enough she can touch his elbow with her casted hand—the other one is erm, bloody. It’s a little awkward—Brainy, like Lena, was never the extremely touchy type—but he accepts it with a little laugh. “Brainy, Alex—she also has an implant; she doesn’t remember—”

“I am aware of the Director’s implant. I was working to disable it, but it seems you managed to trigger the return of some of her memories.” He raises his brow, and Lena can tell he is mightily impressed. “Well done.”

“Who else has them? Who else has Lex gotten to?”

“Only the Director, as far as we know. Lex hasn’t made many of them, but we are working on disabling the entire system.” He frowns. “I need your help,” he admits as if it both pains and delights him to need Lena’s assistance. “I found the schematics of the implant itself, but the system…”

“Works on the basis of a program I designed,” Lena groans.

Brainy nods solemnly, thankfully not saying anything further on the subject. Instead, he pulls a small tablet from his pocket, and taps at it until it flashes blue. He turns the screen for Lena to see, and her eyes have a bit of a hard time focusing on the diagrams slowly spinning in place.

“The implant cannot be removed without triggering an alarm,” Brainy begins, and Lena is glad to finally have someone who can get straight down to business. “As well as several countermeasures Lex put in place. Had you successfully removed it, it would have. Erm. Liquefied your brain. In essence.”

Lena lets out a low whistle through her teeth. “Talk about overkill. So I guess we can’t remove Alex’s either.”

Brainy shakes his head. “No. The only hope is by disabling the entire system, which unfortunately cannot be accessed remotely,” he sighs. “I’ve tried 346 times and haven’t gotten close.”

“Well, if we can’t access remotely, then the only other option would be to—”

“LENA! ARE YOU BLEEDING??!”

Brainy jumps back a full three feet, bumping into the monitors with a loud clatter, hugging the tablet to his chest like a kid caught stealing from the cookie jar. Lena yelps, startled by a blue-clad figure at the door to her room, mask off but scowl very, very much in place.

“Nia,” Lena breathes, but she doesn’t have the chance to say anything else before the young woman marches to her bed, looking exasperated.

“What the hell were you thinking—girl you made a whole-ass hole in your head, this is not the time to start poking around in there, if this scars I swear to god I am going to kill you before Kara kills me before Lex kills us all are you kidding me right now—”

“Nia,” Lena tries again, and she can’t even be bothered with the way Nia’s fussing over her torn bandages and slowly clotting wound, because she just wants to thank her, she wants to hug her, but most of all, Lena just wants to cry. “Nia—”

“Oh my god, are you crying!?” Nia yelps, her previous fury vanishing within a second as it turns to worry as she eyes Brainy, who looks completely out of his depth at Lena’s sudden sobbing. “Why are you crying??”

Lena wants to raise her arms to hug the young woman, but the stupid handcuffs won’t let her, so she just. Sobs. Like a little baby—it’s a little pathetic, but she can’t help it, because Nia’s here, Nia’s the one who took her to Kara. Their mad run across the country, the resentment that melted into companionship again, the laughs they shared along the way—it was all because of Nia.

Nia seems to understand, on a surface level, because she lets out a sigh, dropping the gauze she’d been unsuccessfully trying to stick back on Lena’s head, and just wraps her arms around her, tight and present.

“Thank you,” Lena sobs wetly against the crook of her neck. “Thank you.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 3)

Parts 1 , 2

“are you taking it or not?”

the question isn’t even loud--it’s a murmur nearly lost to the noise of the ancient metal fan running full power in the small store, blowing the garments on the racks with a pitiful little breeze, but it’s enough to kick the gears into lena’s brain into grinding again.

she stares at the flannel shirt she’s been holding for too long--it’s a faded plaid of green-and-black, a men’s size that has probably shrunk in an unfortunate tumble in someone else’s dryer before ending up at this thrift store in the four-lane town they’ve stopped at.

lena blinks, feeling the fabric under her fingertips. it’s much softer than it looks, feels almost familiar in a strange way she doesn’t care to analyze. “what sort of weather am I even supposed to be packing for, anyway?”

kara gives her a look, but doesn’t answer her question. her eyes waver from lena to the shirt and back again a few times before she finally sighs. “take it. it goes with your eyes.”

lena assumes they’re not going anywhere too cold, since kara doesn’t buy them anything warmer than light jackets with the money she dug out from the road a few hours back. she hasn’t told lena where it came from or how she knew it was there, and lena hasn’t asked. talking, if there ever is any, has been done in short bursts and mostly out of necessity-- a ‘we’re stopping here’ or an ‘I need to pee.’ they certainly don’t discuss anything important, and given their situation, a mysterious briefcase full of money seems somewhat important.

they leave the store laden with paper bags full of clothing lena would probably never wear under normal circumstances, but that’s kind of the point, so she’s not about to complain. she knows better by now.

instead of going directly back to the car, kara leads them to a pay-phone down the street, and lena follows silently, waiting with the bags outside as kara produces a roll of quarters from her pocket and gets to work.

lena tries not to zone out as she hears the clicking of the phone, the mashing of buttons, and the clinking of coins. inside the booth, kara seems frustrated--she huffs in what lena knows is exasperation, but continues with whatever it is she’s trying to do without a word.

she doesn’t know how exactly, but she feels it, can’t really explain how she just knows, but it’s like someone dumped a bucketful of ice over her head; just like that, lena’s eyes snap open and she feels the hairs at the back of her neck standing at attention and she knows they’re being watched.

her heart is hammering in her chest in dull, rapid thumps that would definitely alert kara something is off if she still has her super-hearing (lena isn’t sure yet what the verdict is on that). lena tries, as discreetly as she can in her state of sheer panic, to look around, faking a stretch to crane her neck until she sees it.

there;s a man standing at the corner on the other side of their street. he’s leaning against a boarded storefront and trying to light a cigarette. it’s all completely innocuous, dare she say it, but their eyes meet across the street for a fleeting second and that sends a chill down lena’s spine.

an old, rumbling bus hisses and creaks down the street between them, and once it’s gone, so is the man.

it’s probably nothing. but a wanted criminal and the person she supposedly killed can’t exactly take any chances.

“kara,” lena calls out softly as she taps on the booth’s dirtied glass, trying to sound natural and failing horrible if the way her own voice squeaks out of her is any indication. she also realizes with a start this is the first time she’s spoken kara’s name since.. well. it hits her like a truck and this probably isn’t the time to dwell on it.

“kara,” she hisses again, opening the cabin. the blonde shoots her an incredulous glare that wilts into worry as soon as she registers lena’s panic. “kara, someone’s watching us.”

the phone clangs back into its hook loudly, and kara curses under her breath--lena has never heard kara curse before. she grabs her bags on one hand and takes lena by the wrist with the other, leading her back to the car at a near sprint.

“who? where?” she asks as they walk, her grip so tight around lena’s grip she would have broken the bone into dust were she at her full power.

“a man, at the street corner just now,” lena gasps, struggling to keep up.

“where did he go?”

“i don’t--I don’t know--kara, you’re hurting me!”

kara stops so quickly lena almost slams straight into her back, but the blonde’s grip relaxes immediately and she moves to entwine their fingers together instead, resuming her walk at a more sedated pace.

“sorry,” she whispers, so low lena strains to hear. “did you happen to see where he went?”

lena can only shake her head, afraid a moment of uncertainty may have unnecessarily led to more stress and fear. “no,” she finally says, trailing off with shame. “i’m not even sure if he was actually watching us. i just... i just had a feeling.”

to her surprise, kara nods and squeezes her hand in reassurance as they reach the jeep. “always trust your gut.”

their newest purchases are tossed in the back without ceremony, and in a matter of seconds kara’s peeling away from the empty car park, tires screeching as she speeds onto the road.

the silence is tense, this time. not that it hasn’t been tense in the last few days, but the sheer adrenaline running through lena’s veins and the worry kara fails to conceal work together to add another heavy layer of tension like the icing on top of a particularly disgusting cake. lena can’t take it anymore.

“where are we going, kara?” 

it feels weird to use her name now--like lena is undeserving. kara’s only answer is a grimace she fails to hide in time.

“where did that money come from, and how did you know it was there?” lena pushes, watching the needle of the speedometer climb up from the corner of her eye. “who were you trying to call? why are you even running with me?”

“stop,” kara grits out, muscles straining at her neck and jaw. her grip on the steering wheel tightens as the speedometer climbs, and lena knows, she knows she should stop, but it’s been days and days and days with no answers and she’s had enough.

“no!” she practically shouts. “you’ve been dragging me up and down the country--is there a plan here? if so, what is it? why are we running together?? how can you even stand being near me? how come,” and then she chokes, realizing she’s crying far too late to do anything about it. “how come you didn’t actually die?”

“i did!” kara shouts, hitting the breaks and swerving into the shoulder so suddenly it gives lena whiplash. they come to an abrupt stop in the thankfully deserted road, and kara is panting, shaking so hard the entire car trembles with her.

“what?”

“i did die,”she says, softer this time, voice trembling almost as much as her shoulders. “i was unresponsive for five whole minutes. alex brought me back.”

lena wants to say something, anything, but her brain is completely stuck on the fact that supergirl did die. words don’t make it past her throat; all that rises is bile, and she narrowly makes it out of the door and onto her knees on the pavement as she vomits.

It plays in her head on a loop, supergirl falling out of the sky, riddled with green, kara--kara, her kara, lying dead for however long in a crater on the pavement.

and it was all lena’s fault.

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 10)

Previously on LBitR...

“Calm down,” Lena whispers, even though she’s having trouble doing exactly that at the sight of the empty bench where she had left Kara waiting not even an hour ago.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Alex hisses; the muzzle of her gun dis rather painfully on her back, and Lena would really like to step away from it, but the agent has her arm locked in a vice grip. “Where the hell is she, Lena? She was here when I followed you in!”

“Walk with me,” Lena says, quickly scanning the area--they’re standing in a stiff, unnatural way, and the last thing she wants is to draw any attention, especially when they’re both wearing stolen LuthorCorp lab coats right outside the building. She takes one tentative step away, hooking her arm around Alex’s as if they were just friends walking down the street arm-in-arm.

Thankfully, Alex understands Lena’s not-so-subtle hint faster than Kara ever could; her image-induced expression relaxes into a smile that barely looks forced, and her grip of Lena’s arm, though still tight and borderline painful, shifts so that it appears more casual.

“Is there any way you could have been followed?” Lena asks, subtly looking around them, noting that Alex is doing the same.

“That’s always a possibility,” Alex admits, sounding both panicked and defeated at once. “But I was very careful.”

“OK, let’s not panic yet,” Lena tells both Alex and herself. “Kara and I made plans to rendezvous back at the motel if I was gone too long or if anything happened.”

Alex gives her a look--it’s weird to have a patented Alex-Danvers-look-of-disapproval coming from a stranger’s face. “You weren’t gone for long, though.” She doesn’t voice the alternative.

Unthinkably, Lena reaches out and gently pats the hand on her arm. She means for it to be reassuring--it’s the kind of thing she would do for Kara--the kind of thing she has been doing for Kara over the last couple of weeks, but Alex looks just as puzzled by the action as Lena is.

She removes her hand and clears her throat. “Still, our best bet is the motel. Did you drive here?”

Alex nods. “Great,” Lena continues, mind already working a mile a minute. “Kara probably took the bus back--we didn’t want the car to be seen downtown,” she explains, and Alex lets out an undignified snort.

“That’s remarkably sensible of you,” she quips sarcastically. Lena ignores her.

“What I’m saying is, if you drove here and we take your vehicle, we may beat Kara to the motel, or get there shortly after her. It’s one hour from LuthorCorp to the motel by bus--she’ll switch routes at least twice on the way.”

Alex looks impressed despite herself. “And if she doesn’t show, what then, genius?” she challenges, lips pursed.

Lena breathes out steadily, calmly. “She will,” she says with as much conviction as she can possibly muster in her tone, because the alternative is simply unthinkable.

Alex smacks her lips, slowing her walk as she considers their limited options. “Fine,” she finally concedes, dragging Lena down an alleyway.

They dispose of their lab coats in a trashcan in that same alley, and Alex practically hauls Lena towards a secluded spot behind down another alley a few blocks away.

“You better hold on,” she says, removing a few strategically placed cardboard boxes to reveal a sleek black motorcycle, discreetly parked behind a dumpster. “I did not bring an extra helmet.”

Lena does hold on, mainly because Alex weaves and cuts through traffic like an absolute manic as she follows the directions Lena has to practically shout in her ear as they go. She knows Alex is desperate to find Kara and make sure she’s OK, but Lena also wishes she would ease off the gas a little; she’s got enough to be afraid of at the moment.

She feels like her heart is about to burst out of her chest when they finally reach the hotel; they’re nowhere close to the room she and Kara had checked into, but she’s already fumbling in her purse for her key card. with Alex hot on her heels.

They stumble into the room together, and Lena has to stop, has to take a second to try to stop the cold dread she immediately feels at finding it empty, exactly as they had left it this morning.

Alex begins pacing like a caged tiger immediately. “She’s not here,” she gasps, tapping at the image inducer at her temple, and then it’s Alex, really Alex, looking worried and panicked and slightly disheveled in this empty room, and now Lena is belatedly realizing it’s up to her, Supergirl’s would-be killer, to try and comfort the hero’s sister while they wait.

As if she is not on the verge of a panic attack herself.

“We knew she wouldn’t be,” she tries to reason, keeping her voice as even as she can, though she can’t stop tugging at her fingers out of sheer nervousness.

She’s doing the math in her head, thinking of the bus schedules, of which one Kara probably had gotten on and when; she’s mapping out the routes in her mind, considering the usual trip times, factoring in the average Metropolis traffic at two in the afternoon on a Thursday.

Alex takes one look at Lena’s fidgeting hands and immediately sighs, sinking into one of the beds. “Take that stupid wig off,” she barks. “Blonde you is freaking me out.”

That lets out a little chuckle, but it feels like some kind of hysteria. She takes a seat on the opposite bed, and Alex regards her quizzically.

“Kara said something similar yesterday,” she explains, carefully removing the wig and setting it on the nightstand. “That’s too bad; I really thought I was pulling it off.”

The attempt at humour falls completely flat--Lena can see it plainly in Alex’s wooden expression. “You definitely weren’t,” she deadpans. Her knee is bouncing up and down, up and down, up and down, boot tapping dully on the carpet.

It’s driving Lena insane.

“Kara will be here soon,” Lena says, still tugging at her fingers. Alex doesn’t look convinced. 

“And if she doesn’t?”

Lena has no answers to that, refuses to consider the possibility.

“She will,” she says again, in an almost silent whisper, for her own comfort. “She will, she will, she will.”

Alex says nothing, only continues with her bouncing knee, keeps her gaze locked onto Lena. And Lena, Lena tries not to squirm under the agent’s scrutiny; she fidgets, she stares at the blinking red numbers of the alarm clock, steals glances at the door--she looks at anything and anywhere to avoid Alex’s gaze.

When Alex does speak again, her voice is low, but it still startles Lena enough for her to jump a little in surprise.

“What do you remember about that day, Lena?”

When Lena turns to face her, Alex’s eyes are as hard as stone. Her scowl has returned, and the way her brows are furrowed is far more telling than the cold tone of her voice. It says, plain and simple, I don’t trust you.

It takes Lena a long time to come up with an answer Alex may find even remotely satisfactory--she knows that ‘I don’t know’ that is on the tip of her tongue simply won’t cut it, even if it is the honest answer. Her memories, the few that she does have from that day, are murky and sparse, and don’t feel altogether hers.

She struggles to recall any details, searches the blurred images interred somewhere in her subconscious and tries to make sense of the tangled mess she has been left with. “Flashes,” she tries, settling for as much truth as she can muster at the moment. She swallows. “I remember... I remember Kara falling--I remember seeing her from the top floor at LuthorCorp.”

Alex raises a brow like she doesn’t fully believe her. “The top floor?” she asks, voice oddly neutral. “Not from the basement labs? You didn’t watch it from the screens?”

Lena furrows her brows, tries to poke at whatever remnants of memory she has latched on to. “No, I don’t...” she closes her eyes, sees Kara falling, riddled with green, her body limp falling past her windows as fast as a bullet. “I-I don’t think so, I was... I think I was at the top floor.”

“You were apprehended in the basement, Lena,” Alex says brusquely.

“N-no, that can’t be right,” Lena chokes out, but all she sees behind her lids is Kara’s body falling, and her mind provides the most horrifying sound effect as it hits the pavement. “That can’t be, I watched her fall, I w-watched from my window.”

Alex shakes her head. “What do you remember before the rockets?”

Lena rattles her brain with difficulty; her lungs can’t quite return to their normal rhythm with the images her mind is supplying. “Before?” she gasps, keeping her eyes shut so she doesn’t have to see, doesn’t have to wither under Alex’s unyielding disappointment and doubt.

“M-myriad, the, um, the Fortress, ah... I was there with K-kara, and--”

She’s close to hyperventilating; she can’t get the image of Kara’s body--her bloody, broken body falling, falling--out of her mind.

“The Fortress? Lena that was two weeks befo--Lena? Lena, are you OK?”

Lena can’t respond--she can’t speak, she can’t even breathe. her brain is giving her the most terrifying flashes of memories, memories that don’t feel like her own, and she’s scrambling to fill that gaps at the same time as the images come, unbidden, to her mind. Her mental boxes are teetering, swaying in their little organized, compartmentalized stacks, unbalanced, and she can’t, she can’t breathe.

“Shit,” she vaguely hears Alex say, marginally registers the agent rushing to her side, but then someone is touching her and there is another flash--it is white hot and painful in her brain, like an electric shock, and she feels someone grabbing at her shoulders, pushing her down hard, pulling, and dragging, and, and--

Lena yelps and recoils, bats away at the hands reaching for her shoulders in uncontrollable, all-consuming panic.

“HEY!”

It’s another voice, worried, coming from someone bursting through the door with force, nearly slamming it off its hinges. Lena’s only somewhat aware of Alex yelling--she sounds happy, surprised, worried, and a whole gamut of other things Lena cannot focus on, because suddenly, there’s just warmth all around her.

She’s being held, tight, tight, tight, but it isn’t restrictive--it’s the opposite, warm and comforting and it envelops her almost entirely, like a heavy blanket, muting the sounds of her own frantic heartbeat.

“Sh, Lena, it’s just me. You’re OK. I’m here, I’m here.”

It’s Kara’s voice--low in a soothing murmur, rumbling in her chest as she whispers right at Lena’s ear, and the vibrations are soft, reassuring, and tranquil, almost enough to ease Lena’s trembling.

She’s wrapped tight in Kara’s arms as her awareness returns, slowly and fuzzy. Kara’s hand rubs circles on her back, and Lena instinctively tucks her head under Kara’s chin, seeking more of her warmth. Kara is taking deep, deliberate breaths, and Lena finds herself subconsciously trying to match them at every inhale and exhale, using the pressure of the rise and fall of Kara’s chest against hers as guidance.

When the flashes cease, she dares open her eyes again. Over Kara’s shoulder, her gaze locks with Alex, who’s awkwardly standing to the side, watching them closely.

“OK,” the agent says, gaping a little. “What the fuck?”

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

<< Previous || Next >>

[naralanis]

Hey all! I said it would happen over the next few days, but I have so much to work on in April, I just decided to bang it out this weekend before I shift my focus to other projects.

Thank you so much for reading--the response has been incredible, and I have to admit, y’all have been absolutely killing me with your tags. Seriously, y’all have made my day several days in a row. Sorry not sorry for the cliffhangers along the way, but I hope they were worth it!

The full story is now up on AO3 (with a little epilogue! hooray!). Cheers!

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road

lena becomes aware of her brain beginning to zone out almost immediately; she just doesn’t have the wherewithal at the minute to pull herself back to attention.

instead, her focus wanders towards the noise.

there’s the incessant sputtering and whirring of a coffeemaker that looks positively ancient--there’s also something clanking inside the machine, and she can hear it from where she’s sitting. the engineer in her knows it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes kaput just by listening.

there’s the occasional ding of a bell, the splattering of hot oil, bubbling in a pan somewhere in the kitchen, the squeak of a door swinging open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.

there’s the abominable sound of cutlery scraping against plates--it irks her to the point of silent fury, the way the metal scratches and clinks and screams against the cheap china. but then, to make everything worse, there’s the chewing.

loud, rapid, moist, and utterly revolting, not to mention obnoxious chewing. lena levels a withering glare from under her baseball cap -- lillian would be proud, of the glare, not the cap-- and sneers with all her might.

“could you not,” she hisses, fists clenching when the slurping of orange juice through a straw joins the maddening cacophony, “could you please not eat like a complete troglodyte?”

the slurping ceases, mercifully, but the chewing resumes, almost as a direct challenge, after an indifferent shrug of broad shoulders.

“i haven’t eaten in three days. i’m hungry.”

the voice sounds equally tired and annoyed, and lena has regretfully become very well acquainted with that particular tone over the last few days. she ignores the way blue eyes look solely at the humongous (truly, the massive, inhuman quantity) stack of pancakes that is currently being decimated.

“be that as it may,” lena continues, gritting her teeth at another scrape of the knife that seems to screech louder than before, “maybe you could eat a little more slowly? or at the very least,” she scowls, “with your mouth closed?”

there’s a deep exhale from across the table--an exasperated, getting-real-tired-of-your-shit kind of sigh, and it comes with an exhausted hand running through hair that has been cropped short, now only a few inches long and tucked into a baseball cap almost as ratty as lena’s. it’s a gesture that lena recognizes from a time when that hair fell in long, blonde curls, cascading freely over blue-draped shoulders and she hates the way the memory comes unbidden to her mind.

“do you have any idea of what my usual caloric intake has to be?”

lena blinks, because no, she doesn’t, and she’s automatically trying to do the math in her head before she stops herself and remembers to scowl again.

the cutlery resumes its scraping--a bit more forcefully, frustrated, even. “a whole damn lot,” comes a muttered addendum.

lena’s rolling her eyes before she can think better of it. “one would think you wouldn’t need to meet your usual caloric intake under these... circumstances,” she begins, but trails off into silence once she’s the one on the receiving end of an icy glare.

she doesn’t learn, though, does she, because lena continues against her better judgement, lowering her voice to a whisper and glancing around them, just in case. “it’s not like you have anything... super messing with your metabolism right now. it’s not like you need the extra energy.”

the slurp is obnoxious and furiously deliberate this time, drawn out long enough until there’s no orange juice left in the cup--just the endless sound of air bubbles and melted ice blubbering and sputtering as they’re sucked through the straw.

“that’s exactly why i need more energy. i’m still recovering, so i need all that i can get.”

“but what about the sun?” lena can’t help but ask, can’t help but push, shifting in her seat and leaning over their table, letting her curiosity get the better of her for a mere moment. “i mean, i always thought that supergirl...”

“nuh-uh,” comes the categorical denial and a fork, pointed accusingly at lena. ‘there is no supergirl,” the blonde says, and her fork moves to point at the TV above the bar of this middle-of-nowhere diner they stopped at after nearly three days of nonstop driving. it’s still reporting on the chaos of three days ago.

“supergirl is dead.” kara says through a scowl that rivals lena’s. “you killed her.”

Next >>

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 5)

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4

there’s a change after lena’s little breakdown back in kansas--a paradigm shift that upends their entire dynamic seemingly overnight in ways that lena cannot even begin to comprehend.

but she can categorize them.

at the beginning of this road trip of insanity, when someone had taken a bag off her head and shoved her in a jeep with kara--kara, alive, with cropped hair and new glasses and alive--they had merely existed in the same space, because... well, lena was furious, kara was furious, and so they sat together, stewing in their anger in a confined space for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

so it had been... silence, and a whole lot of ignoring one another, when they weren’t sniping, fighting, bickering. willful, stubborn, heavy and deliberate silence. but now? now that silence is often interrupted -- not always by words, but by looks.

there’s glances, all from kara, and they say things more clearly than words ever could, and they come when lena is least prepared. it’s a look that asks her whether she’s alright--the answer to that is almost always a categorical no-- while kara is driving, or through the glass of a phone booth while she attempts yet another of her mysterious calls as lena waits outside. it’s a poorly concealed glance at a rest stop that asks whether or not she’s hungry, a side-eyed gaze that asks the silent question of what’s on your mind?

lena doesn’t know how to deal with any of it, has simply no idea how. but glances are only part of this altered dynamic, of this unexpected shift, because now there is also talking.

they talk. or well, kara talks--to lena, for lena, sometimes for no reason at all. they’re not exactly having conversations--not yet, because that still requires more than what lena’s prepared to contribute--but at least they’re not arguing, either, and that feels like a considerable step forward.

kara will talk about everything and nothing; little comments on the weather, passing observations on the scenery, but that’s not all. she’ll tell lena things--not important things, because they’re not there yet, and sometimes lena wonders if they’ll ever be-- but things nonetheless, like where they’ll be stopping next, or an interest factoid about the state they’re in (like, the location of the nation’s largest inflatable donut or something equally ridiculous).

but the most worrying of all, the thing that really throws lena off her game, that unbalances completely, is the touching.

the first time lena registers kara’s casual touches, she feels like she almost has an honest-to-god aneurysm, because the last two times that kara’s touched her happened to be when lena was in the middle of a panic attack, and it’s like her body remembers those particular circumstances. she nearly jumps out of her skin the next time she feels kara’s hand on her shoulder.

it turns out to just be kara asking whether she’s done with the sink (at a motel in nebraska, this time), and lena’s heart is still hammering in her ribcage as kara gives her one of those are you ok? looks.

over the course of a few days, lena grows used to it all--kind of, but not really, but as much as she can under the circumstances, she accepts these new little facets of her current reality.

she’s lost track of time--maybe they’ve been on the run for weeks, maybe it’s been months, who’s to say? but at every rest-stop, at every shitty motel or random attraction, kara’s there, looking, talking, and touching, and lena doesn’t feel so horribly untethered any more. she’s still terrified, confused, and generally listless, but... it’s easier to breathe, somehow.

they’re approaching the state-line between missouri and tennessee when lena dares (she hasn’t tried since... texas, maybe) to ask a question.

she’s been dotting the places they’ve passed through on a roadmap she picked up a few towns ago--some are so small they’re not even on the map--trying to make sense of the route kara has been seemingly making up as they go.

she stabs through the paper with her pencil at caruthersville, missouri, knowing they’ll cross the mississippi sooner or later.

“are we going all the way to the east coast?” she asks, mostly just voicing her thoughts aloud, not really expecting kara to give her an answer. to her surprise, kara does, barking out a little laugh.

“i mean, if we have to, sure.”

lena almost drops the pencil and the map, she turns to kara so quickly.

“why would we have to?”

kara shoots her a look, but it’s got... mirth, something that has been missing from that blue gaze since... since they had decided to be enemies. give or take.

“we’re kind of on the run, lena. in these situations, it’s imperative that we keep on running.” she quips sarcastically.

lena blinks. are they talking-talking now?

“are we running anywhere in particular?”

kara’s lips press into a thin line, and she doesn’t answer for so long lena thinks that well has run dry. but, once again, kara surprises her.

“just... away.” her eyes are glued to the road ahead. “there’s no plan, if that’s what you’re asking. at least not yet.”

“not yet?”

kara shakes her head, sighs deeply. “not until i get in touch with some friends, at least.”

there are many follow-up questions to that, but lena settles on what is probably the worst possible choice imaginable.

“are we having a conversation right now?”

she can see kara tense a little, hears the sharper intake of her breath and regrets her words immediately; however, kara sighs once more, relaxing into her seat by degrees.

“sure. if you want to.”

lena swallows dryly, her throat tight all of a sudden. there are so many things she wants to say, so many questions, worries, so, so much to get off her chest.

“uuh,” she starts off, hoping to find the words along the way, and kara laughs a little. “what... what friends are you trying to get in touch with?”

“the usual,” kara says, looking a little wistful, and lena can tell she’s trying to keep her smile up for her sake. “mostly, i need to reach alex somehow.”

“is... is alex the one you’ve been trying to call? from the pay-phones?”

kara nods the affirmative. “we have a few codes; a system in place if we ever need to contact one another if we’re ever in trouble. she hasn’t been answering, which is a little worrying, but i’m sure she’s just waiting for the right moment.”

if we’re ever in trouble...

“did, uh... did the briefcase come from alex, too?”

“yeah. she made me memorize several coordinates across the country--said they would be useful if the fortress was ever compromised.”

which it was, lena thinks immediately. because of her.

“anyway,” kara continues, oblivious to lena’s thoughts, hands running over the steering wheel a little nervously. “i’m sure she’ll answer soon. she’s probably got too many eyes on her right now.”

lena perks up at that, brow quirked in question.

“too many eyes on her? why?”

kara seems to shrink in her seat.

“well...” she says, eyes darting like they’re looking for answers and finding none. “alex doesn’t... she doesn’t exactly know... that uh... she doesn’t know you’re with me.”

lena blinks, opens her mouth, closes it again. kara looks sheepish.

“she may be leading the manhunt for you.”

“she what?!”

<< Previous || Next >>

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 16)

Previously, on LBitR

Lena takes a moment to examine her surroundings after she takes stock of her body—besides her throbbing hand now encased in a professionally-made cast and the headache pounding at her temples, she’s physically fine. She does her best to ignore the very smug Lex Luthor at the foot of her bed.

It’s a cell, there’s no doubt about it—albeit is one nice enough to be mistaken for a mid-range hotel suite if someone didn’t know any better.

Lena knows better.

“How are you feeling, sis?” Lex quips jovially, stepping to a cart with a pitcher of water and pouring a hearty glass. Lena grimaces as she sits up, rolling her eyes at his playful tone—playful Lex never meant anything good, but what else is new?

“Nasty break you got on your hand there—the doctors told me you have multiple fractures. How did that happen?”

His expensive loafers squeak slightly on the floor, and he stops right next to Lena. His grin is cheerful and utterly insufferable—the same smile he’d sport he taught her a lesson, even when they were children, the same he’d flash at her whenever he explained—in excruciating, condescending detail—exactly how she’d lost their latest chess game.

Lena would very much like to punch it off his face, even if doing so would accomplish nothing beyond giving her some fleeting satisfaction.

Sadly, her hand is out of commission.

She takes the glass he offers and downs it in practically one gulp, relaxing despite herself with the cool water running down her dry, tight throat. Lex raises a brow, amused.

“You trust me not to poison your water? Impressive.”

Lena rolls her eyes, slow and deliberate. “Nope,” she says, smacking her chapped lips. “But if you wanted me dead, you would have done it already. Plus,” she hands him back the glass, cocking her head towards the pitcher. “Poison was never really your style. It’s not dramatic enough.”

Lex chuckles, looking impressed despite himself. “Touché,” he concedes, taking the glass back and refilling it. “I do enjoy a good drama. Now,” he hands her the glass again, waits until Lena has taken a more sedated sip. “Want to tell me what happened to your hand? I am so very curious.”

Lena meets his gaze head on once she’s done drinking, remaining silent for long moments—just until she sees the slight twitch of his lips when he gets impatient. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she drawls, feigning disinterested as strongly as she is able, “but I punched a cement wall. Wouldn’t recommend it, it’s rather painful.”

Lex chuckles again, and his eyes glimmer with a giddy anticipation, like a child about to be let loose onto a pile of Christmas presents, unable to hide his excitement. “Cement, huh? I would have guessed steel, myself.”

Lena can’t help herself—she flinches, just a little but enough to be noticeable, and she knows—she can see the satisfaction in his eyes when Lex does notice how her shoulders suddenly tense.

“A haircut and new glasses, and she’s a whole new person,” he laughs. “Though, let’s admit it—despite fooling you, a supposed genius… she never was a master of disguise, was she?”

“How’d you find me?” Lena interjects, trying to do so calmly, though she’s moments from snapping. Something about hearing Lex refer to Kara in any way makes her skin crawl. “How have you been tracking me?”

She says me, not us. Because, if her hunch is correct—and Lena hopes to god that it is—Lex should have no way of tracking Kara now that she’s alone.

His grin widens, predatory and gleeful all at once.

“Is that really what you want to ask, Lena? How I found you? Don’t you have better questions—for example, why I haven’t turned you in to the authorities yet?” He pulls a chair and sinks into it—comfortable, settling in like one would at the cinema. He crosses his legs and steeples his fingers over his lap, looking so much like Lionel like that it makes Lena nauseated. “You are, after all, America’s most-wanted criminal,” he chuckles. “That’s quite a distinction, even for a Luthor, don’t you think?”

Lena shrugs. “You own the authorities in this reality, Lex.” She points out, and Lex nods once, as if he is conceding the point. “Plus, you have a tendency to monologue like any cliché cartoon villain. I’m sure you’ll clue me in on your grand plan sooner or later.”

She can tell he’s bothered by the cliché jab—that nearly imperceptible twitch returns momentarily to the corner of his mouth, but really, Lena just can’t help herself. As quickly as it appeared, the twitch is gone, and Lex’s lips tug into an even wider smile, like a shark showing off its teeth. He leans back on his chair, and his gaze is both cold and cheerful in a mixture that makes a shiver run down Lena’s spine in the worst way possible.

“Have any headaches lately, Lena?”

Lena swallows, thinking of those disjointed memories, those blinding flashes that rattled her brain. “No more than usual,” she lies, clearly not convincingly if Lex’s responding scoff is any indication. She’s thought about this, ran the probabilities in her head—she’s just not sure she wanted to believe her brother would stoop that low.

Even if, deep down, she knows better.

“Funny,” Lex quips, tapping a silly little rhythm onto the arm of his chair with his manicured nails. “They are a common side effect. Along with…” his eyes narrow and his grin widens impossibly further, from ear to ear, like this is his moment of triumph. “Memory loss.”

Lena sucks in a breath—her heart feels loud, like it echoes from her chest and bounces off the walls of this tidy cell. She doesn’t dare say a word, and immediately, Lex seems bored with her lack of response.

“You know what your problem is, Lena?” he asks, brushing off some nonexistent lint from the sleeves of his suit. “You always fail to consider the big picture. You never think of the greater possibilities.”

“You used Non Nocere,” Lena grits out through her clenched teeth. Her jaw is so tense the pain radiates all the way down her neck, and her good hand is fisted in the sheets, knuckles white with the strength of her grip.

“I improved on it,” Lex quips happily. “You had a good base, but no follow-through—it’s your biggest flaw. But your little project with the Q-waves… it had potential. I just took it further than you would ever be able to take it.”

“You—” Lena chokes on her words, bites her tongue. She’s trying, she’s trying so hard to be brave, to maintain her composure, but those flashes return full-force, blinding—those tangled memories are flashing again, like Lex’s mere mention of the Q-waves is a trigger—and she is suddenly reeling, trying to push them down. “You mind-controlled me. You sick fuck!” She hisses. “You made me try to kill Ka—you made me try to kill Supergirl!”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Oh, Lena, who’s being dramatic now? You said it yourself; you wanted to hurt her. I just gave you a little nudge.”

“Not like this!” Lena gasps—her strength is waning; she can feel it draining from her limbs, she feels the last tendrils of her resistance evaporating into thin air, vanishing from her mind. “Never like this!”

Lex ignores her completely, continuing on as if he was giving her a chess lesson. “I have to say, the implant worked much better than the contacts; it is far less error-prone. Tracking you was just a bonus—though I have to admit I really enjoyed seeing you two run around the country like you ever had a chance.”

Lena can’t talk; it takes all of her energy to just stop the rattling inside her skull, to wait with cold dread for the moment—because it’s coming, she can feel it coming—when Lex just takes control again.

“It was smart to go your separate ways, but I wouldn’t worry too much,” he continues, voice low and dangerous. “She’ll be back for you. Despite everything, she always comes back, doesn’t she? Even if it’s just to die by your hand, all over again.”

“No,” she grits out, trembling. “N-never.” She couldn’t, she wouldn’t, not again—she couldn’t see Kara falling again, she couldn’t kill her again.

Lex leans towards her, puts a hand on her covered knee and gives it a little squeeze—the kind of gesture a parent would use to reassure a child, but this? This is a taunt. Lex doesn’t just own the authorities in this reality—he owns Lena’s mind.

“Did you like it, when I took you to the top floor?” He drawls. “I figured you would appreciate seeing her face-to-face when you pressed the button. Maybe we’ll have you on the ground this time, huh? To see her hit the pavement? To see her really die?” he chuckles, patting her knee and standing.

“I won’t hurt her.”

His laugh echoes in the room, louder than her heartbeat, her short gasps for air. Lex walks leisurely to the door before turning back to face her once he activates a biometric lock, ready to leave Lena alone with her terror.

“Oh, Lena—but you will. Trust me.”

 << Previous || Next >>>

[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 18)

Previously, on LBitR...

When Lena wakes up, this time, it’s to a scenario completely different from anything she might have expected.

For starters, she’s in handcuffs. That becomes quite apparent when she reaches over to touch the sore spot at her temple; or rather, when she tries. Her hand stops with the distinctive metallic rattle she’s unfortunately familiar with barely inches into the movement—even the one now kitted out with a much bulkier cast. She’s essentially chained to a hospital bed—not the cell she was in before, it looks alike—if the familiar, faint humming and beeping of monitors is any indication.

The other thing she absolutely was not expecting was to be face-to-face with one visibly furious Alex Danvers barely seconds after her eyes readjust to the harsh lights above her.

Lena tries to speak, but her throat is excruciatingly dry, and that makes the words sting like needles when she tries to push them out. She manages a pitiful little groan before the sensation alone sends her into a miserably painful coughing fit.

There’s no sympathy in Alex’s eyes, none whatsoever as she begrudgingly hands Lena a little paper cup full of ice-chips.

“Thought you could take the easy way out, Luthor? There are easier ways than stabbing yourself in the head. Just saying.”

Lena crunches the ice with her teeth, sucking the water as it melts away greedily and gratefully. She ignores the comment and the angry tone for the time being—who knows when she’ll have an opportunity to speak with Alex.

“Alex,” she coughs, throat still hoarse.

“It’s Director Danvers to you, Ms. Luthor,” the redhead says coldly. Lena has to control the impulse to roll her eyes—Lex obviously messed with Alex’s head, too, and thus Lena has a rather limited window to try and tip the scales here. She tries to sit up, shuffling awkwardly upwards as much as the handcuffs would allow.

“I wouldn’t get too comfortable,” Alex quips cruelly, looking at a clipboard with feigned disinterest. “As soon as you’re discharged, you will be transferred to a DEO holding facility. I assure you, a little bleeding won’t get you out of our custody so easily.”

“I didn’t stab my own head,” Lena drawls hoarsely. “I was trying to take out an implant.”

“The tracking chip your brother put in, I know. How do you think he found you?”

Lena takes the opportunity to roll her eyes then, since Alex seems to focused on whatever is on that stupid clipboard. “Alex,” she tries again. “You have to, you have to get in touch with Kara—she’ll be trying to call you, you can’t let her come—”

“Kara is dead, Lena!” the Director hisses, and Lena’s heart shatters at the anguish in her eyes, at the sorrow so visible and raw it tells Lena Alex believes that wholeheartedly.

“Alex,” she chokes out, eyes stinging with tears at the mere thought of Alex not remembering how she had pulled her sister back from the brink of death, not knowing that Kara is alive and (relatively) well, that she’s probably flying to National City to her actual death as they speak.

Thinking that Lena had murdered her sister in cold blood and then tried to run.

Fuck you, Lex.

“Alex, listen to me,” Lena tries through clenched teeth. “Kara—”

“—is dead, Lena! You killed her—I arrested you myself! We have evidence, Lena, and I am going to make sure you rot in a cell for the rest of your pathetic life for it, you piece of sh—”

“Alex! She’s alive! Kara’s alive, I swear!”

Alex’s fists clench at her sides; her whole body goes rigid with fury and grief. “Stop it, Lena, stop this right now,” she says under her breath, her cold tone as much of a warning as her posture.

Lena ignores it all, stares directly into Alex’s flinty gaze. “No,” she grits out. Her head throbs, and so does her broken hand, and her throat still hurts, but Lena pushes through. “You saved her, Alex—we have been on the run together ever since—”

“Lena, shut up, shut up right n—”

“She dug a briefcase full of money in Texas!” Lena shouts. “From you! You have a series of caches through the country, plans in place for both of you if you’re ever in trouble! She called you from different pay-phones in every state—she tried to reach you every single day, and—”

“Lena!”

“Two rings! ‘Hello, yes,’ means ‘go ahead,’ ‘yes, hello’, means you can’t talk! Anything else, it’s not you on the phone!”

“Stop!”

It’s a deafening, agonizing yelp, and it comes with a clipboard thrown clear across the room and a flinch Lena can’t quite contain in time. Alex is shaking with sheer fury and grief; her eyes, engulfed by dark circles, are glittering with tears, and her lower lip trembles as she tries to speak again.

“Please, stop,” she murmurs weakly, sounding utterly broken. “Stop. How do you—” she has to stop to try and stifle a sob, and is not successful in the slightest. “How do you know those things?”

Lena swallows, having shouted herself hoarse. “Kara told me. Or rather, she showed me. You told me about the code yourself.”

“I-I never—she’d, she’d ne—no, I wouldn’t—” Alex stammers, her face flitting through a multitude of expressions that bleed into one another, before settling into clear and intense confusion.

Lena tries to touch her temple again, momentarily forgetting she’s in handcuffs. She groans once her movement is stopped short, and points to where she feels a rather thick bandage on the side of her head. “I didn’t ‘stab my head’ for no reason,” she tries to explain as calmly as she can. “I was trying to remove a mind-control device my brother dearest implanted. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had one too.”

She can tell that she’s losing Alex by the second—the agent looks increasingly confounded. But something that Lena has said might just have jostled a memory or two in her brain—Lena can practically hear the gears turning as Alex tentatively reaches for her own temple.

“It’s how Lex tracked us,” Lena continues, noting how Alex’s eyes seemed to widen by a fraction. “I couldn’t let him find Kara, too, so I sent her away.”

Alex changes her movement, makes it look like she was merely running her fingers through the hair cropped short at her temples. But Lena can tell—even if she isn’t thoroughly convinced, she is rattled, and at this point Lena will take any victory she can.

Alex straightens her shoulders, looks Lena down with an anger that, at least, isn’t as intense as it was mere minutes ago. “You’re lying,” she declares emphatically, despite the doubt in her eyes. “I don’t know how, but you’re—you’re lying. A mind-control implant is just too damn convenient, Lena.”

“I’m not lying,” Lena whispers, suppressing a sigh of frustration. “She’s alive, and she’ll fly right into a trap if you don’t stop her.”

Alex stops trying to hold her composure; Lena’s words are affecting her, and Lena feels terrible. “Enlighten me,” Alex murmurs, low and dangerous. “What would that trap entail, exactly?”

The sigh Lena releases this time is pure defeat. “Me. Unleashing Kryptonite hell.”

Alex smirks, looking at once defeated and confused. “Ahh, but see, you’ve already done that, Lena. You’ve already killed her,” she says through tears.

“I didn’t!” Lena hisses. “Alex, I did send Kryptonite rockets at her, but she’s alive and coming here to die all over again and you have to help me stop it! I know there’s part of you that believes me, Alex—just feel the goddamned implant at your own temple!”

“I don’t believe sh—”

“Where is her body!?” Lena yells, and then, she can see the puzzle pieces starting to click together in Alex’s head. She wonders if it’ll be as painful as it was for her, or if Lex is just especially sadistic to her because Lena is his sister. “Where is she buried, Alex?”

Alex scoffs, but her eyes dart around the room like she’d find the answers anywhere but her own mind. “She’s… she’s buried at… Midva—no, at…” she stutters, hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

“You can’t remember, Alex, because that memory doesn’t exist.”

“Of course I can, just—just give me a second, just…”

Alex continues moving her mouth, but words come out in unintelligible whispers, and she begins to pace the room like a caged animal, muttering to herself and shaking her head like a lunatic.

Lena can relate.

“Alex, listen to me,” she tries once more, and her heart sinks at the mixture of grief and confusion she sees in the agent’s eyes. “I know you don’t believe me, but you need…”

Lena sighs, closes her eyes. This is it; the only chance they have. “You need to get Nia.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 2)

 Part 1

lena wakes up with a start when her head starts smacking against the window of the (stolen? given? borrowed?) jeep once they turn onto a bumpy dirt road in what looks to be... approximately the middle of fucking nowhere, though that’s hardly surprising. ‘nowhere’ is precisely where they’ve been for the past four days.

lena massages the side of her head that hit the glass with a displeased harrumph--she can already feel a raised bump at the point of impact. her eyes are heavy and dry, lids stubbornly sticking together as she blearily looks around.

kara is staring straight ahead, both hands clenched around the wheel in a way that would have ordinarily mangled the thing as easily as one breaks a matchstick. but her knuckles have gone white with the force of her grip, and the steering wheel is no worse for the wear, and all lena wants to do is point it out.

“where are we?” she asks instead, seeing nothing but dust and bright blue skies. the road they’re on is practically indistinguishable from the landscape--a strip of lighter, packed-in dirt that disappears into the horizon.

“texas,” kara answers, eyes still on the road. it’s so bumpy the entire car is shaking; lena is practically bouncing in her seat, so much so she feels her teeth clatter in her mouth and has to clench her jaw to make it stop. the radio is completely silent--has been that way since some news station said the words lex luthor, so the only sound is the bumping and shaking of the vehicle. lena wants to say something about kara’s driving, maybe tell her to slow down, but she thinks about their exchange at the diner one more time and tries to, again, reign. it. in.

“it took us almost three days of driving to get to texas?” lena asks, making sure to put in the us instead of you in her question even though kara has been the one driving. in truth, she hasn’t really kept track of where they’ve been--hasn’t been able to, with all the zig-zagging across cornfields and deserts and ghost towns and dingy motels... scratch that, maybe it isn’t so surprising it’s taken them that long.

kara just grunts and nods, offering no further explanation. lena continues staring at her white-knuckled grip on the wheel, wondering when--of even if--the thing will just break in two.

it doesn’t break. instead, kara turns abruptly into an even smaller dirt road, leading to more nowhere, and then she suddenly stops.

“why are we stopping?”

lena receives no response; kara just turns off the engine and undoes her seat-belt, stepping off the car to rummage in the back for something. she comes out with a small shovel, which makes lena raise a brow in confusion, but the blonde offers no explanation as she walks a few metres away from the jeep and starts digging.

she hasn’t been asked to help, so lena stays inside the car for as long as she can muster without the air-conditioning running, watching kara’s plaid shirt darkening with sweat at her back as the blonde grunts through the effort of digging through dry, hard earth. 

kara’s still digging by the time lena steps out of the car once she feels a trickle of sweat running down her back. the heat is stifling; her head feels hot and humid under her cap, and her hair is stuck at her temples. lena approaches cautiously, taking a water bottle from the passenger cup-holder--kara looks up momentarily once she hears the passenger door slam closed, but otherwise keeps to her task.

lena eyes the blonde curiously--she’s grunting, panting, and sweating profusely with the effort, and the picture she paints is so... weird. lena has never seen kara sweat.

“why is it taking so long for your powers to come back?”

that gets kara’s attention. lena’s standing right by the hole kara’s made in the ground, one hand tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, the other extending the water bottle like a peace offering. lena’s gazing at the hole with ill-concealed ineterest, but says nothing further, waiting.

kara sighs, taking the offered bottle without looking at lena and running a hand through her hair. the short strands are drenched in sweat, and looking more brown than blonde at the moment.

lena waits, transfixed with a water droplet that escapes from the corner of kara’s mouth as she drinks in large gulps; she follows the droplet run down her jaw, then down her bobbing throat to disappear somewhere between her collarbones.

“i don’t know,” kara says, handing the empty bottle back. her voice is jarring enough to remind lena she had asked her a question, so she nods dumbly as she takes the bottle back and fiddles with the cap. “i think there’s still some kryptonite in my system.”

lena opens her mouth in surprise, but struggles to form the words. kara’s gone back to her digging, and before long hits something hard beneath the earth. she discards the shovel, opting instead to kneel in the dirt and continue unearthing whatever she’s looking for with her hands.

“still?” lena finally whispers, so low she doesn’t think kara heard her, isn’t sure if she still has her super-hearing or not.

kara grunts, tossing a metal briefcase at lena’s feet. she clicks it open, and lena just sees the green of dollar bills in neat little rows.

“well,” kara mutters, still kneeling in the dirt. “it was a lot of kryptonite.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 20)

PART TWENTY OH MY GOD YOU GUYS WE’RE NEARING THE END

Ahem. Previously on LBitR...

The next time Lena wakes, it’s to the weirdly familiar yet inconceivable exasperating sound of loud, obnoxious slurping.

Before she can even begin to blink the bleariness out of her eyes, the sound assaults her ears again—it is so visceral it disconnects her from the space she’s occupying (namely, the bed on a DEO medbay somewhere) and transports her somewhere else, far, far away, to a diner in the middle of nowhere. With Kara.

The slurping resumes and she sits up like a shot, fast enough to make herself dizzy. She’s still in handcuffs, and her sudden movement makes them rattle noisily against the railing of her bed, cutting her movement short abruptly and making her bounce back into her pillows.

“Kara?”

The name leaves her lips before her brain can fully catch up with the improbability of that logic, though it arrives at that conclusion moments later, when Lena’s eyes adjust and see Nia’s quirked eyebrow eyeing her back curiously as she sips from a plastic to-go cup.

“Nope,” Nia quips after another unnecessarily loud slurp. “Just little ol’ me. Here,” she extends a hand to Lena, who takes the second to-go cup the young woman offers without even thinking. “It’s kale. Your favourite—for reasons unknown to mankind.”

Lena takes a tentative sip—she has to lean forward, a little clumsily and awkwardly, since the handcuffs don’t allow her to bring the cup closer to her face.

Nia pulls a face at Lena’s second, much less tentative sip. The smoothie tastes amazing, and it makes her release a happy little hum before she can catch herself, and Nia’s offended grimace reminds her so much of Kara. It’s weird, but a happy kind of weird, and Lena knows it’s probably the last reprieve they’ll get before shit well and truly hits the fan. So, she’ll take it—the reprieve and the smoothie.

Nia watches her down half of her cup in a matter of seconds with an expression close to abject horror. “Gross,” she mutters, then slurps again at her own smoothie, a purple concoction that admittedly looks quite good.

“Don’t judge me,” Lena says, amused and smacking her lips with delight. “I’ve been eating nothing but fast food for weeks. I can’t remember the last time I even saw a vegetable.”

Nia laughs. “No judgement, I have nothing against vegetables. I love salad. I just don’t blend it.”

“Well, thank you for my blended salad,” Lena drawls with a waggle of her brows. “I—and my arteries—deeply appreciate it.”

“You and your arteries are welcome,” Nia says, pulling out the rickety metal chair by Lena’s bedside and plopping down rather ungracefully. “I thought I’d keep you company for a little while, if you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Lena begins, but there’s something off about Nia’s tone—a slight warble of worry that Lena only spots because the young superhero won’t meet her eyes.

“Not that I don’t appreciate your lovely company,” she starts again, fiddling with the straw of her drink. “But… there’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

“There’s a ton of stuff I’m not telling you,” Nia replies easily, though her eyes are darting around everywhere in the room, except to Lena, in clear discomfort. “I’m a woman of mystery.”

Lena taps her nails against the plastic of her cup, squeezes it slightly, jostling the ice and making the plastic bend and creak as she scrutinizes Nia’s face. The young woman’s playfulness has all but vanished, and there’s a tension in the air that wasn’t there before, and it worries Lena.

“You’re here to keep an eye on me…” she starts with the obvious, watching for the most minute changes in Nia’s expression to indicate whether she was in the right path. “… because of Lex—no, that’s too easy; everything is because of Lex.”

There’s a slight sag to Nia’s shoulder’s, a microscopic shift to her brows, and they tell Lena what she wants to hear without words. “Because of Kara,” she breathes, and the way Nia chokes on her smoothie all but confirms it, and Lena immediately snaps into panic mode.

“Oh my god,” she gasps. “You heard something—you know something,” she says, free hand clenching around the flimsy sheets of her bed. It’s not a question, and Lena doesn’t phrase it as one, but the guilty look on Nia’s face answers it perfectly either way. “Is she here? Is she on her way?! Nia, you can’t let her come, we have to stop her! It’s a trap! She cannot come!”

“I know, I know, Lena,” Nia says, forcing a bit of calm that is not naturally occurring in her tone at the moment. “Please calm down; Kara is not in National City,” she grimaces. “At least not yet.”

“Then where is she?” Lena asks, voice wavering in a way she doesn’t even attempt to control. “She absolutely cannot come here.”

“I know,” Nia sighs. “We know. She was spotted by one of Lex’s satellites in Mexico.”

“Mexico…” Lena murmurs, mostly to herself. “For some sun, probably. Is she alright?”

“I would assume so; she was a literal blip on the radar, almost too fast to be picked up at all.”

Lena breathes a deep sigh of relief, sinking into the miserable pile of crappy pillows at her back. “Good,” she says, closing her eyes, already trying to map out the next steps from here. “Good, that means we still have some time.”

Nia quirks a brow in question. “Time? Time for what?”

Lena looks at the young woman like she’s gone insane. “Time to foil whatever Lex is planning to do next,” she explains as if Nia is missing something painfully obvious, because isn’t it? Painfully obvious? Does Nia just expect her to sit tight, handcuffed to this bed, while Lex continues with whatever lunacy he has in store for Kara?

“Brainy said the implant can’t be removed or disabled from a distance, but I was the one who created the system they run on. If I could somehow sneak into the mainframe, maybe I could—”

“Woah, woah, woah, let me stop you right there, Lena,” Nia interrupts, looking panicked. “Hold your damn horses—you are not going anywhere except another, more secure facility. You’re not stepping foot in LuthorCorp—no way.”

“Nia,” Lena hisses, vaguely aware she’s close to sounding like a petulant child, but not even remotely close to caring. “I have to—I’m the only one besides Lex himself who stands a chance in hell of disabling those systems.”

“No way, Lena. No. It’s too risky.” Nia says with an air of finality.

Of course it’s risky. Lena’s not blind to that simple fact—never has been. But the other simple fact is that any world with Lex Luthor in it presents more risk than anyone would be willing to accept.

“What’s the alternative, then? Keep me here, handcuffed, while Kara swoops in for a rigged death match against my brother??”

Nia flinches, and that tells Lena everything she doesn’t want to hear.

“Oh my god, you are,” she practically yelps, watching Nia shrink into herself at her outburst. “You can’t just keep me here! I could help, I could—I have to help—”

“I can, and I will!” Nia suddenly shouts, standing up so abruptly she sends her chair screeching backwards across the floor. “Don’t you understand, Lena? Lex wants to use you and Kara against each other. Every time I close my eyes, I see my friends—my friends, Lena, which includes you, you asshat! I see you two killing one another, over and over again! It’s already happened once, and I cannot let it happen again!”

Nia’s shoulders are shaking—her smoothie dropped and now leaking all over the floor. Lena can see the tears threatening to spill from her eyes; her fists are clenched and trembling at her sides, and all Lena wants to do is reach out and hold the young woman’s hands in her own, to tell her everything will be OK.

But can’t make those assurances; they both know it.

Nia releases a breath—it comes out as a sad little laugh. “You won’t be… you know, you won’t be handcuffed,” she says, as if the restraints were the whole point. “You’ll be at another facility, out of Lex’s reach until this is all over.”

Lena shakes her head, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell Nia that it’s useless. There’s no place Lex can’t reach. “What about Alex?” she asks instead. “She’s got an implant too.”

“Alex will go to the secure facility with you. She volunteered—she doesn’t want Lex to use her to hurt Kara either.” Nia sighs, finally looking Lena in the eye, though she looks defeated. “Lena, I know this isn’t ideal. But we’re running out of time, and we’re running out of options. It’s the best we can do.”

Lena doesn’t voice her disagreement—her gaze makes it clear enough that Nia sighs again, sinking back into her chair with a frown.

The silence is tense; Nia is not looking at her. Lena runs through all the possible arguments she thinks of in her head, before deciding they are all moot. The decision has clearly been made.

But Lena is stubborn. To a fault, really.

“Nia,” she whispers, waiting for the young woman to raise her head to look her way. “Why did you take me to Kara? When she was on the run?”

Nia shrugs. “I had a vision of you two—Kara was wearing her suit, but she had short hair.”

“And what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Nia admits, biting at her lip nervously. “I’m still trying to decipher it. But I knew—with or without the vision, I just knew you wouldn’t… kill her. I knew you two had to be together for any of this to work.”

Lena takes a deep, deep breath—she’ll analyse whatever Nia’s trying to convey later, but now she has to grasp at the only out she has.

“Together you said,” she repeats, voice breaking. “Then you’ve got to let me help her.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 8)

Previously on LBitR

“For the record, I still say Disney World would have been far safer than this insanity.”

Lena does her best to ignore Kara’s muttering. While this may be one of the more insane schemes she has ever concocted in her life, the truth of the matter is that she would have never, ever suggested it if she didn’t honestly think they could pull it off.

“Maybe,” she concedes, squinting at the drugstore compact sitting on the nightstand as she readjusts the wig. “But it certainly wouldn’t be as productive.”

She turns to Kara, who’s still frowning, and fluffs the strawberry blonde locks cascading from her own head. Maybe she should just bleach her hair and be done with it.

“So, what do you think?”

Kara’s frown deepens considerably. “You still look like you, Lena. I’m not sure about this.”

“Wait, hold on; I’m missing a crucial piece,” Lena retorts, reaching for a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses sitting on the nightstand. “Ta-da,” she says flatly, pulling them on. “Unrecognizable, I’m basically a different person.”

Kara pulls a face, and Lena mentally kicks herself, rushing to pull the frames off.

“Kara, I didn’t mean...”

The blonde raises a hand, stopping her in her tracks. “I know,” she says, though she does so through clenched teeth. “I still think this is a monumentally bad idea. Explain to me why I can’t go with you.”

Lena sighs. “Because you’re supposed to be dead, Kara--it’s far less risky if I go in alone. Even if I get caught, you remain a secret. Plus-- I know the building. I used to own it, once upon a different Earth, remember?”

Kara crosses her arms over her chest, looking entirely unconvinced. “I still think we should wait for Alex. She’s going to respond soon, Lena, I know it.”

“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Call her again tomorrow,” she says, as evenly as she can. “But I’m doing this, Kara. I can’t just stand by while you go without powers for another day--who knows when Alex will actually be able to help? I need to do this.”

Kara stares, pensively and worriedly, not saying a word for a long time. She looks at the wig Lena’s wearing, at the outfit they bought a few towns over to make her look like some intern--button-down, dark jeans, oxfords, at the medical supplies they’ll use to take a sample of her blood and transport it to LuthorCorp tomorrow. Her gaze lingers on the glasses Lena’s still holding, and she releases a sigh, sounding more than defeated--she sounds afraid.

“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” she waves a hand over the considerable space between them, seemingly at a loss. “There’s nothing to... atone for, or whatever.”

Lena smiles, knowing it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree there.”

Kara looks anguished, seems to be grinding the gears in her head, like she knows that at this point she’s just grasping at straws.

“Is it too late to find a vet lab somewhere?” she tries, with no conviction behind her tone.

“No, but LuthorCorp will have the equipment for much faster, and more accurate results. I can do this, Kara. I promise.”

Kara visibly deflates, and Lena knows the matter will be dropped, just like that. “Fine. I concede. I’m never talking you out of this, am I?”

Lena feels her smile twitch a little, but she reaches over the gulf between them, putting the glasses back on the nightstand.

“No, darling, I’m afraid not.”

Kara’s responding sigh seems to echo in the motel room; it lingers in the air, heavy with a fear Lena knows she’ll try to brush off.

“Alright, fine. Now please take off that wig--you as a blonde is freaking me out.”

Breaking into LuthorCorp is quite simple, in a manner of speaking: all one needs to make it through the main doors is a swipe card. If she had the necessary materials, Lena could easily clone one with her eyes closed, but as it is, she needs to acquire one from an actual employee.

That is easily accomplished; Kara, decked out as tourist (complete with a neon-orange fanny-pack of her choosing), distracts a low-level minion having his lunch break on the public plaza right across the street from the main building, and Lena just walks right past them, disguise in place. His entry card and lab-coat are in her hands in less than a second, and in the other, she’s already crossing the street.

With any luck, Lena will be in and out of the building before the card is ever reported missing.

The problem, however, lies in getting into a laboratory. Any of the more equipped labs, those working on secretive (and likely illegal) projects, would lie behind layers and layers of security Lena has neither the time nor the tools at present to even try to break.

To their luck, Lena doesn’t actually need to try to sneak into any high-clearance labs--all she needs is a solid thirty minutes with a mass spectrometer of her own design; a handy not-so-little piece of machinery that had become standard in all L-Corp labs in their previous Earth, and, because Lex cannot resist stealing a good idea, LuthorCorp.

Still, even to access a simple, run-of-the-mill lab at LuthorCorp, Lena needs to go through biometric sensors--retina scanners, to be precise.

And maybe, just maybe, Lena had neglected to mention that little detail to Kara when they discussed the plan for the umpteenth time that morning while she methodically took a sample of Kara’s blood, but that’s neither here nor there.

Once she’s through the main doors-- Kryptonian blood sample packed into a Thermos full of ice in her purse (I am amazed and disturbed at how easily you were able to get medical supplies like these, Lena, seriously), it’s easy enough to make her way through the  elevators, carrying a stack of papers to look the part of an intern--no one even bats an eye.

The cameras on the third floor are exactly where Lena had expected them to be, so she walks down the corridor to where she knows is a supply closet, and swipes in with no problem. The layout of the building really had not changed at all since she last worked there, even if that had happened on a literal other reality.

Once she’s in, Lena only has to wait. She counts the seconds in her head in French, both to keep track of time, but also to calm her racing heartbeat, because this--this is the biggest gamble of her plan.

Since she obviously does not have a way to bypass the biometric scanners, Lena’s only option is to get someone to do it for her.

She lies in wait in the supply closet for about two and a half minutes, and then she hears it: the sound of footsteps, two sets of them, and idle conversation, coming down the corridor directly her way. Lena takes a deep breath, counts the steps as they approach--she only has one chance to do this right.

When the steps are right in front of the closet, she swings open the door with force.

“Ow!”

The hit is a good one--whoever’s on the other side blocks her from opening the door all the way with dull impact, and her papers go scattering all over the place.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry! Are--are you OK, did the door hit you?”

Lena’s holding a hand over her right eye, moaning and doubled-over in mock pain as two young men--both looking to be interns-- look her over with concern. One of them is already on the floor, gathering her papers.

“Ow, no, it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have opened the door like that--oww” she cries, maybe a little too dramatically. One of the interns, tall and lanky, steadies her as she fake-wobbles on her feet.

“Ouch, did you hit your head? Let me take a look at your eye, take your hand---yikes!”

Lena removes her palm, previously dusted with the finest blush powder she could find at the drugstore yesterday, and makes a big show of blinking away her tears. The make-up gives her an instant shiner, and the fine powder has the added benefit of irritating the shit out of her eye--so the swelling and the tears are 100% real.

“I’m fine, really, thank you,” she says, waving them off and taking the sheets the other intern dutifully picked up. “I’m so sorry, I was in such a hurry--are you guys OK?”

“Better than you,” the first one, laughs, though he still looks concerned. “Are you sure you’re OK? Your eye looks pretty bad, do you want to go to the infirmary or something?”

“No, no, it’s fine -- I just got to run some stuff, then I’ll get some ice. I’m fine, really,” Lena waves them off politely, touching the skin around her supposedly injured eye.

The two men exchanged a worried glance, but the first shrugs his shoulders. “OK then, take care. Sorry again.”

“No worries,” she laughs, a little too high, but she’s so close, so so close... “I’m just a klutz--my fault, totally.”

She’s already walking away towards a lab, one she had checked during her walk from the elevator to the supply closet. The interns linger by the closet door for a moment, before slowly making their way to the elevator, still sending worried glances her way.

Lena swipes the stolen card, and immediately the panel by the side opens up, revealing the retina scanner and prompting her to scan her credentials. She leans towards the scanner, and the red light makes her blink; the machine buzzes and flashes red, and a robotic voice filters through the side-speakers.

Unable to scan. Please try again.

Lena huffs, audibly--she hears the interns’ steps pause someway down the corridor. She stomps her foot, and leans over the scanner again. It buzzes.

Unable to scan. Please try again.

“Shoot! You’ve gotta be kidding me right now!”

The steps grow closer, and for a moment Lena’s a bit worried she may be overselling her frustration, but before she can try scanning her retinas again, the tall and lanky intern is by her side.

“Did you try your left eye? Seems to be in better condition,” he jokes--his smile is genuine and friendly, but Lena puts on an impressive grimace of alarm.

“I never registered it,” she bemoans, feigning panic. “God, I meant to, but then it was just one of those things--oh my god, my boss is going to kill me--”

“Hey, relax,” he quips, raising a hand to stop what was going to be a rather dramatic tirade. He smiles, and swipes his card at the door, leaning over the panel and scanning his own eye.

Scan complete. The voice drones. Access granted; Montgomery, Jason.

The panel lights up in green, and the door unlocks with an audible hiss. Lena lets out a little squeak of delight that is barely faked--she can’t believe it worked.

“Oh my god, thank you, you’re a saint!”

She pushes the door open, but is barely a foot inside when an arm blocks her entry--she almost screams, body frozen in sheer terror as she turns to look at the intern the door panel just identified as Jason.

He’s smiling broadly. “Say, I’m sorry about your eye. Can I make it up to you over some coffee, later?”

Lena can barely contain her sigh of relief, but she puts on her sweetest smile and bats her eyelashes (though she’s not sure how good the effect is with the eye that is actually stinging quite painfully--what the hell was in that powder??). “I think you just did, Jason.”

His blush would have been cute, if Lena had not been on a very tight schedule. “Oh, I insist. When does your shift end...?”

It takes Lena a second to register he’s waiting for her name; she slowly maneuvers under his arm, dragging her fingers over the sleeve of his labcoat--she can practically feel the poor guy’s shiver as she leans in closer.

“Liz,” she whispers, close to his year. “And my shift ends at seven. The café across the street alright with you?”

He visibly swallows. “Yes, ma’am. See you there, Liz.”

Lena gives him a wink--with her good eye-- as he steps away. As soon as the door clicks shut again, she exhales with relief, leaning against it so she doesn’t just fall to the floor. Her knees are trembling.

She knew she could pull it off, but she also cannot believe she did.

With no time to waste, Lena practically bolts to the nearest spectrometer, quickly uncapping the Thermos with Kara’s blood sample and getting to work. It’s almost refreshing to be in a lab again, even under these circumstances, after weeks on the road. There is an innate sense of calm that falls over her when she’s working like this, like this is her element.

Like this is where she is meant to be.

The spectrometer whirs to life with Kara’s sample--Lena only needs twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes with it. She is tempted to stay for as long as she possibly can--there is so much equipment here that would be helpful... if only she brought a bigger purse, maybe she could have stolen some without detection, since there are no cameras in the labs.

The screen begins to break down the analysis, and Lena’s barely seeing it; she’s copying everything by hand onto a notebook--once the machine is done, she will make its history unrecoverable, and she doesn’t want to print anything through LuthorCorp printers.

Lena works quickly, annotating in her shorthand and trying to work as fast as the machine gives her results. She is barely processing what she sees; there will be time to read and figure everything out later, but now, she needs all the information she can cram into this little notebook.

She can feel her own eyes widening at some of the results, has to check them twice before writing them down--her pen furiously scratches across the paper, but her brain is already elsewhere, trying to reverse engineer the method of synthesizing what she’s seeing in Kara’s blood, trying to figure out ways to get it out of her system, trying to...

The spectrometer slows down and stops--the bar on the screen reads analysis complete. Lena releases a sigh of relief, hand cramping as she writes.

And then there’s the click of a gun right behind her.

“Fancy seeing you here, Lena.”

Lena shuts her eyes--the right one still throbbing, and raises her hands, still clutching the notebook as she slowly and deliberately turns around. She never even heard the door hissing open. She opens her eyes to meet a flinty, furious glare.

“Hello, Alex.”

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 15)

Previously, on LBitR

Kara says no.

Lena is not surprised. They may have grown apart, yes, and she may have claimed otherwise when she was hurt and heartbroken, but the truth of the matter is, she knows Kara—stubborn, hard-headed, resolute, and so optimistically brave. Of course Kara thinks they can do this.

But Lena also knows herself. She is also stubborn, hard-headed, and resolute. It’s partially what made them—her and Kara—so volatile to one another when everything came crashing down.

Lena also likes to think she has even a modicum of Kara’s bravery, when the occasion calls for it. She’d like to think that what she’s about to do counts as that, instead of complete stupidity.

“Listen to me,” she says, mind still reeling after their explosive argument at the side of the road, about fifty miles back. The last time they had shouted so much at each other had been back at the Fortress, and when that memory returns—fuzzy, faded—Lena resolutely tamps it down like she would an oozing wound. “Kara, listen—"

“No.”

Kara’s gritting her teeth so hard Lena almost thinks she can hear them grinding. She figures Kara needs to let some of her strength go somewhere other than the steering wheel already marked with the deep imprints of her fingers.

“Kara.”

“No.”

“Kara. It’s the only way.”

For the second time that day, Kara guides the vehicle to a stop at the shoulder of the road. Her shoulders sag with the heaviness of the sigh she releases, and Lena can see the fading sunlight in the glimmer of the tear tracks on her cheeks. “There has to be another way. I refuse to accept this.”

Lena reaches her good hand over, pats Kara’s arm, which is rigid and tense like the rest of her, coiled so tight it practically trembles. “Whether you accept it or not, we’re out of options.”

“Don’t think—” Kara chokes on her own words, and her whole body clenches even tighter. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing—what you’re planning on doing, Lena. It’s suicide.”

“It’s the only way,” Lena says demurely. She’s thought about this for the past hour—she’s been running all possibilities in her head, speed running through them like a competitive chess game.

Lena suddenly remembers playing with Lex, as a young girl. She remembers his gloating whenever he won, disguised as brotherly advice, and she remembers beating him—how he’d stiffly and coldly congratulate her, hiding a silent fury in his eyes. The way Lex won any game—chess or otherwise, high-stakes or no—was by rattling his opponent, with an aggressive opening that left them scrambling from the get-go, second-guessing their every move.

He’s got them scrambling alright, has had them scrambling since the beginning, Lena realizes, perhaps a little belatedly. He’s gotten into their heads—he’s certainly gotten into Lena’s head—and that’s gotten them on the backfoot all along.

They have limited moves; they’re cornered in the board, and the only way out is through drastic action. Lena cannot second-guess herself in this.

“If he’s got Alex, then this is the only way.” Her voice brokers no argument—the kind of tone she used to employ against moody board-members once upon a lifetime ago—yet she knows Kara will argue. Kara will not back down on this, and Lena wouldn’t expect anything less.

“We’re not sure he’s got her,” Kara interjects, though she doesn’t seem to believe herself. “You don’t have to—you don’t have to, Lena.”

Lena wishes it were true. She wishes they had more moves, more pieces to make another play, any other play except the one she has to make. “I do, Kara.”

It takes another two hours of talking—and talking is putting it mildly. There’s talking, and then there’s more shouting, and then there’s crying. Mostly from Kara’s part, her despair mounting as she comes to the inevitable realization that her hands are tied, that they are out of options, and that Lena is right. Lena refuses to shed a single tear, though her heart breaks over and over at every sob Kara fails to stifle.

But in the end, Lena breaks her—she breaks down every defense, every argument Kara has, until she’s basically cornered Kara into a checkmate she never signed up for. It hurts, to do it like this—to be as impassive and unyielding, as cold as she is. But the strategy pays off, and Kara acquiesces when she’s got no tears left to try.

They part ways in the early morning light, somewhere up in the mountains of Virginia. They’re both exhausted, with red-rimmed eyes and hoarse voices, and there’s so much… resentment in the air it practically sizzles, almost like it was when they were at her worst.

Kara does as well at being pushed into a corner as Lena.

She shoots off into the cover of the trees with a barely-concealed sniffle and a terse goodbye, and Lena feels like her heart flies away with her. She wants to shout for Kara to come back to her, she wants to apologise over and over and over again, for everything. But the play is in motion.

Lena climbs back into the RV with a tired sigh and a wince—the painkillers have long worn off, and her broken hand hurts considerably. She tries to focus on the pain radiating through her bones as opposed to the increased shallowness of her breaths, or her irregular heartbeat.

She can do this, she has to do this.

Lena takes a few minutes to try and calm herself as best as she can, with minimal success, but it is enough—enough to stomach through the pain in her hand, the gaping void she feels in her chest now that Kara is not next to her, the painful flashes of half-memories that still crowd her brain… enough to turn the RV around, broken hand be damned, and floor it down the road heading west. To National City—to Lex.

It doesn’t take long for Lex—or rather, whatever goons he hired for the job— to find her, though admittedly it’s longer than Lena had anticipated. She did make it relatively easy for them, taking a major cross-country highway right off the bat and driving almost twelve straight hours uninterrupted to a rather large, crowded, and definitely CCTV-surveilled rest stop. She takes her sweet time, too—it’s almost like she’s saying I’m here, come get me.

Which they do. Eventually.

Lena has been at the rest-stop for almost two hours, effectively a sitting duck, when she finally feels the prick of a needle at the back of her neck as she exits the restroom. It’s weird, all things considered, that the sensation feels familiar. She’s barely conscious when someone catches her before she falls face-first on the cheap linoleum, has just enough focus to see the dark van, but when darkness overtakes her vision and she can’t feel her limbs anymore, she almost welcomes the respite.

Finally, some rest.

When she wakes, it is to a blessedly darkened room and a pounding headache. It really says something about the life she’s lead, the fact that Lena is familiar with the process of regaining consciousness from a drug-induced slumber.

She takes stock of her body, first—blinks her eyes to gain focus, runs her tongue over her lips. Then she takes a slow, deep breath, fully expanding her lungs, pleased that there are no twinges of pain at her ribs or her back. She stretches, feeling softness underneath her, and realizes she’s on a bed.

Lena feels clean, oddly, like she’s taken a shower recently. Her hair still feels a little damp, and by extension do does her pillow.  She’s not fully covered, but the sheets up to her waist are very soft, and her clothes are comfortable, almost like pajamas.

She could so easily convince herself it was all a dream. Lena almost wants to, wishes to hold onto that little nugget of comfortable lunacy for as long as possible.

But she feels the cast on her broken hand, and hears shuffling by the foot of the bed. Lex sounds thoroughly amused when she opens her eyes and finally meets his gaze.

“Hello, Lena.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 4)

Parts 1, 2, 3

they’re in kansas now, and for the first time since this madness began, lena is completely and utterly alone.

they’ve stopped at the dingiest motel lena has ever seen in her life--which, given the places they’ve frequented recently, is really saying something--the kind of place that is maybe definitely run by a serial killer or someone nearly equally unsavoury.

and lena? lena is not coping well.

“i’ll be gone twenty, thirty minutes, tops,” kara had said exactly twenty-four minutes ago. “keep the blinds shut, and don’t open the door no matter what--no matter what, lena.

and so lena has been sitting here, waiting, staring at the worn wood of a door that maybe had once been painted red, not moving a muscle. she’s sitting cross-legged on the miserably thin mattress and scratchy bedding, hugging a floppy threadbare pillow tightly to her chest because she’s afraid the panic will simply burst out of her if she doesn’t hold on to anything at all.

lena tries to calm herself, she does--has been trying for the past twenty-four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. she tries to distance herself from her thundering heartbeat and shallow breaths, tries to remove herself from her own fear. she closes her eyes, measures and calibrates the movement of her lungs, thinks of a metronome in her head to help her keep a smooth, steady rhythm that isn’t so frantic as it is now.

she focuses on the pilled, rough fabric of the pillowcase, lets her nails (she’d like to clip them, would like to stop digging crescents into her palms when she clenches her hands into fists with nervousness) drag across the fabric and catch onto the rough stitching of the seams, counts every little rip, every little torn seam.

then she focuses on the smells--there’s that odd, lingering odor of old plastic that comes from the phone and the tv; there’s the dust that irritates her nose a little, makes her eyes water some. and then there’s mothballs, which this room is sure to have an abundance of, which smell oddly comforting for some reason, like an old house with old cabinets.

she’s almost back in control, can feel her lungs expanding further now, with more ease, when the hum of the staticky television set--it was almost on mute, the volume is so low--breaks her concentration, shatters it like hot glass doused with ice.

“...and it’s... it hurts, really, that i was not able to see the madness; it pains me that my own sister was capable of such atrocity...

lena jumps, fumbles for the remote and raises the volume until it is deafening, so loud and deafening it’s like her brother is yelling at her--but he isn’t, he’s speaking calmly to some reporter, a grief-stricken expression plastered on his face, with tears--actual tears--pooling at his eyes.

“i blame myself,” lex’s voice booms from the old tinny speakers, distorted and haunted, rattling the glass from the windows as much as lena’s bones, echoing in lena’s brain like a well-crafted taunt.

“i should have seen it. i should have done something to stop her--i should have saved supergirl.”

lena wants to scream, but she can’t even breathe, she can’t do anything but tremble and she hates, hates the sound of his voice in her ears, hates, hates and hates herself for falling for his tricks over and over and over again.

“hey! turn it down, lena, are you crazy??”

kara materializes out of nowhere--lena didn’t even notice her stepping through the door. the blonde yanks the remote and shuts the tv off , and lena doesn’t register her worried gaze,  doesn’t feel the arms rubbing at her shoulders. she can’t hear the concern in kara’s voice as she repeatedly asks her what’s wrong.

“i can’t do this,” lena finally chokes, words caught in a sob--her shoulders are trembling, her throat is tight, and her eyes are burning with tears, and she can’t, can’t, can’t do this. “i can’t do it, kara, i just can’t.”

“what are you talking about?” kara asks, brow crinkled in that way that is so, so familiar, from a whole lifetime, a whole world ago and it only serves to untheter lena further, disconnects her from this reality, makes her want to wake up from this nightmare.

“i can’t do this with you. i’m” she’s gasping now, words stuck and hurt in her throat, hurting and breaking her from the inside out, but lena has to say it, has to speak it into truth. “kara, i’m crazy.”

kara shakes her head vigorously, but lena doesn’t let her speak.

“i’m-- i’m insane; i’m the luthor who tried--oh my god, i’m, i’m the luthor who did kill a super!”

“stop it,” kara hisses, and lena finally registers the force of the grip on her shoulders as the blonde practically shakes her. “stop that nonsense right now, lena -- you’re not crazy, i’m not dead, i’m right here--”

“but you were!” lena practically shrieks, because can’t kara see? “you were dead, kara, i killed you.”

kara’s hands tighten--lena will definitely have bruises on her arms later--but what stops her is the intensity of that blue gaze.

“lena,” kara says, biting out the words like they hurt. “this was all lex’s fault. don’t let him get in your head, not again.”

“he’s always in my head,” lena cries, because isn’t that the truth? ever since they were children? “he’s always--he’s always there, and he’s, he’s taunting me, kara! i didn’t see his madness before, and now in this world, i’m the crazy luthor who’s killed a super!”

“and yet, here I am,” kara points out, gently, but with a fear in her eyes she simply can’t conceal. “right here, in front of you, in a motel in Kansas, because we are running from your brother. because he is the crazy one. not you. we’re gonna take him down, you hear me?”

lena’s madness has gone into hysteria, that’s the only explanation for the incredulous laughter that bubbles out of her, choking out her sobs momentarily. “take him down? maybe you’re the crazy one. how the fuck are we going to take him down, kara? he’s the good luthor in this earth.”

kara’s brows furrow, but it’s a crinkle of determination, this time. lena is shocked to recognize it, shocked she understands the sheer force of will behind kara’s voice.

“together. we take him down together.”

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[naralanis]

little bumps in the road (pt. 24)

OK everyone, we’re going to finish in 26, maaaybe 27 parts if I decide to go ahead with an epilogue! Enjoy, the ride is almost over!

Previously on LBitR...

For one interminable moment, it goes exactly how Lena remembers it would. The pain—white hot and blinding, cresting in waves that crash against her very psyche in what feels like a sonic boom right between her temples. She feels it bubble up under her skin, searing the insides of her skull, like her brain is boiling.

It makes her feel… suspended, somehow. Untethered from herself—she’s not exactly an observer watching over her own body and mind succumb to the whims of another; she’s still very much there, feeling the flashes and the searing pain that come with whatever reshuffling of memories and actions that took place in her mind as viscerally as if it were all real.

Wait.

No, no, they are real. The pain is real. Lex wouldn’t have it any other way; he would always want to inflict maximum, tailor-made suffering…

Would imaginary pain so visceral it feels real be his version of tailor-made suffering for Lena?

His trigger words are still swimming in her mind, bouncing around, bumping and rattling in there like her psyche is a pinball machine, but there’s something else, too. It’s not poignant, not so invasive in her mind, but it’s there, like a mantra Lena didn’t come up with, a little obstacle everything else that has been forcefully injected into her mind has been plonking against.

You know, Lena. That means you are prepared.

Lena feels blood in her mouth as she tries to make sense of the mayhem in her head, as she ponders what the hell she’s supposed to do, detached and bound to the searing flashes all at once. It’s exhausting.

Her tongue swells a little where at the spot on the side she had apparently bit raw; she worries it against her teeth, feeling and tasting the tender muscle in something she can recognize as a conscious, deliberate action.

Oh.

That means something, Lena’s sure of it. She just needs to unscramble what’s left of her mind enough to analyse it, somehow.

“Lena, Lena, Lena,” Lex’s voice comes through the intervals between flashes, haunting and childlike, crystal clear though almost robotic as it is filtered through speakers. “Open your eyes, Lena! I don’t want you to miss the show!”

Lena wants to retort that her eyes are open, otherwise, where the hell is all the light coming from? But as she clenches her jaw, the fresh cut on her tongue throbs, and she remembers she’s in a Lexosuit.

Her lids snap open and she is immediately greeted by the orange hue of the suit’s visor as it filters the skyline of National City in a crystal clear image and rows of data. It’s a bit much for her brain—she goes from dizzying white flashes to the overwhelming displays in the Lexosuit, and it takes her several long moments to adjust.

And so, Lena blinks into a state of half-awareness. She’s flying, zipping through the air above National City, but she has no recollection of how she got there; another gift from the little implant in her temple. The way her body moves is… unnatural—she’s not controlling the way her limbs adjust so that her current flight pattern is uninterrupted by the wind, and in the part of her mind that is only partly aware of that fact wonders how exactly Lex is controlling everything, whether he’s doing it via the implant or via the suit itself.

“Hey, Lena, I’ve got an idea,” Lex says in her ear, and the Lexosuit stops in midair. It does so roughly and abruptly, enough to give Lena some hope that maybe, just maybe, Lex is not controlling her actual physical movements.

But knowing her luck as of late, he’s probably doing both.

“Let’s play a game, sis,” Lex says jovially. “Let’s play ‘Find the Blue Dot… Then Kill It’.” His laugh echoes in the confined space of the helmet. “What do you think?”

Lena tries to answer this time, but all she manages for several moments is a pitiful series of angry grunts—it amuses Lex to no end, she can tell even in her altered state as his barely contained chuckles reach her ears—until she finally muddles through a gritted jumble of words.

“Ff-u—fuck-k you…”

He tuts loudly. “Now, now, Lena, that’s no way to start a game. You have to pay attention—look, there’s a little dot coming your way right now!”

Lena feels the agonizing slowness of her reaction time; it’s like her limbs are made of lead, and she hasn’t even really tried to move them yet. Her eyes seem to move slowly too—she wonders if her pupils are contracting and dilating again with no control, because it takes her an excruciatingly long time to focus on the little blue dot that beeps on the suit’s radar, indeed careening Lena’s way at breakneck speed.

“Nngh” she grunts again, like she’s chewing out the words. “K-kar—Kara—”

“Let’s give the Girl of Steel a warm welcome, shall we?”

Everything happens in slow-motion then—or at least, the part of Lena’s brain that she’s compartmentalized away for herself perceives it that way.

She sees that little blue dot zoom through her visor once, twice, before entering her actual field of vision. Kara’s blue suit is a weird shade of green through the orange of her visor, her cape an odd brown hue as it flutters in the wind, though the movement seems so slow to Lena’s perception she might as well be in water.

With her hair cropped short and the different colours of her suit, it’s like Lena’s brain has to play catch-up for a moment; it’s like she cannot recognize Kara for a second that stretches into infinity as the Kryptonian comes closer and closer.

Lena feels something at her back—a mechanical whirr, hydraulic hisses—and then, against her will, her arms are outstretched towards a rapidly approaching Supergirl, and Lena’s brain has finally caught up, just as the blasters at the suit’s forearms click into place and begin to glow green.

An image of Supergirl, of Kara—long hair, red and blue suit, face riddled with green—flashes before her eyes, and she’s falling, falling lifeless from the skies. For a moment, Lena thinks she’s seeing the future, but at with another painstakingly slow blink she’s back in the present, where Kara’s currently barreling towards fully loaded Kryptonite blasters.

“Kara, no!”

There’s an explosion of green, and the impact is enough to send the Lexosuit reeling backwards—Lex’s laughing in her ears, and Lena has to fight to get her bearings. Kara’s blue dot still darts in Lena’s visor—the radar puts her somewhere behind the Kryptonite-powered suit.

She’s alright.

“What a miraculous save from Supergirl,” Lex’s voice cackles. “Very last minute, though; a little less graceful than we’d like, but we’re used to her brawn, aren’t we, Lena?”

“S-stop it,” Lena hisses, and she’s not sure she’s talking to Lex or to herself, but the thrusters on the suit don’t heed her choked plea.

She’s zipping after Kara in what probably looks like a frenzied, disorienting game of tag over National City’s tallest skyscrapers. Kara dodges, dives, curls around buildings only to shoot upwards again, and Lena tries her hardest to follow the Kryptonian’s movement with her eyes as her body blindly follows.

She needs to stop this—she can already feel the blasters powering up again, and the suit has locked onto Kara once more, preparing to fire; Lena can even tell when Lex will take the opportunity—as soon as Kara weaves back from the CatCo building and into open skies—

“Lena!”

It’s Kara’s voice, coming from quite a distance, but Lena can still hear it, clear as day. For someone who needs to fly away from a Kryptonite-powered war-suit, Kara sounds relieved. She’s stopped zipping through the air, now merely hovering above the CatCo helipad, a sitting duck for the blasters Lena wields unwillingly.

“K-kara, stay away!” Lena shouts, the panic easing the passage of her words through her throat, even if her entire body rebels against the action.

“She never learns, does she?” Lex drawls from within, sounding absolutely giddy. The green light emanating from the blasters seems to illuminate Lena’s full field of vision; it gives everything a sickly glow.

“Kara, go!”

“You can stop it, Lena—I know you can!”

Lena feels like she’s shaking her head, but it’s hard to tell—the Lexosuit is suffocating, her mind is a jumble of thoughts, past and present, some of them not even hers. She can practically feel the implant pulsating in her temple.

“Lena! Look at me! You can stop this; Lena, just—look at me!”

Lena is, she’s looking straight at Kara, who has her arms raised above her head as if she’s surrendering despite the crackle of green in the air, as if she can’t see the blasters powering up or hear the beeping of the suit’s targeting system, and no, no, no, no—

The whole world explodes in green.

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