#does it count as drama if its just me being unwilling to die on any other hill. i have to defend wauce *runs into oncoming traffic* | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lena-in-a-red-dress · 5 years ago

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Hey :) Can I request a Lex vs Lena showdown with some drama and hurt/comfort? Also supercorp and if possible some big sister !Alex and Kelly thrown in the mix. Sorry if it's too vague!

Her plan never fully comes to fruition. It never does, Lena acknowledges. Not when her brother is involved. But with a gunshot wound in her side steadily oozing blood and her hand wrapped around a deadman’s switch, it looks like at least this will be the last of him.

The last of both of them.

“Don’t pretend you’re going to let go of that detonator,” Lex sneers from where he lays. He has his own pool of blood spreading around him, thanks to the fight that had ended with Lena’s rapier in his gut. “We both know you’re too weak.”

“Last time you doubted me, you ended up with a bullet in your chest.”

Her brother coughs wetly. “Proudest day of my life. My baby sister finally growing a spine.” When he laughs, bloody spittle spatters against the tile floor. “Shame it didn’t stick.”

Lena knows he means her resolve, but her brain jumps to his death. She’d killed and the bastard had somehow crawled his way back not only to life, but to the same pedestal he’d fallen from years before.

“This time, I’ll make sure it does.”

“And take yourself out with me? Kamikaze isn’t your style. Never was. Too much good left to do, right? Always.”

Lena shakes her head, and moans when it sets the world to spinning. She slumps against the wall behind her, exhausted. She’s done. She knows it. She can feel it in the warmth of her own blood coating her chilling skin, in the empty room around her.

She gazes at the detonator in her grip, and feels her fingers start to relax.

“Not this time.”

Dying without anyone to mourn had always been a possibility for her future. She just never imagined it would feel this lonely.

“Lena, stop!”

The sharp shout snaps her back into focus-- her grip reflexively firms on the detonator, ensuring her death would last just a little bit longer.

She looks up to find Alex Danvers sprinting towards her with James’ sister on her heels. Kelly. A sob claws its way up Lena’s throat. They aren’t the faces Lena wants to see, but the sight of them still spreads a bloom of warmth in her empty chest.

Alex slides to her knees in front of her, only stopping when Lena finally has the presence of mind to pull away.

“Don’t come any closer,” she rasps, lifting the detonator in warning. “Don’t try and stop this Alex.”

“What are you even doing?” Alex beseeches. “Why didn’t you wait?”

“Wait for what? For him to get away? Or for the goons to come for me too?”

A shadow of doubt flickers behind the agent’s eyes. “Face it, Alex. If I’m arrested, I’ll be the only Luthor who stays in prison. We both know it. This is the only way to stop him.”

Alex shakes her head. “No. No it isn’t. You’re not a murderer.”

Lex laughs, low at first, then tumbling into a gasping guffaw. Alex ignores him.

“Lena, listen to me.”

A warm hand touches her knee.

“I know things have been rough. I can only imagine what it must feel like, to have your entire world turned upside down again and again. First your brother, and then Kara, and now Lex again--”

“You too. You lied too.”

“I did. And I’m sorry for that.”

Lena isn’t expecting the admission or the apology. They sit, heavy and sour, waiting for a response that Lena can’t provide. Her thoughts feel slow, and she knows it won’t be long until she doesn’t have a choice. None of them would.

“Go,” she croaks. “Only Luthors need to die today.”

“Bullshit.” Alex’s pleading sharpens into anger. “That is such bullshit. This isn’t some grand attempt to rid the world of your poison, or curse, or whatever the hell you’re calling it! You’re giving up!”

Huffing a laugh, Lena nods weakly. “Late to the party as ever.”

“I will not let you--”

“What else is there?”

“Everything! Jesus, Lena!”

Everything.

The idea forms bittersweet in Lena’s mind. She used to have it all. Everything she ever thought she wanted. Now… now she has no friends, no company, and no reputation, good or bad. She’s just… a name. A shell. No one in this reality knows her. No one cares to.

Mind wandering, Lena calmly observes that her entire life ended the day she shot Lex. She lost Kara. She put Lex in a position to reset reality. This… this would just be a formality.

“You have L-Corp, Lena. With Lex gone you’ll have full control-- you can rebuild everything--!”

“Just to lose it all again? No, thank you.”

Doesn’t she realize how hard it was to rebuild L-Corp the first time? To claw every success from the jaws of defeat, only to be knocked down again on the next pass? While she had found enough happiness in it at the time, it had been a neverending struggle. The idea of accepting that struggle again when true peace was so close at hand… It fills every inch of her, and she knows the darkness at the edges of her vision will soon swallow her completely.

She’s ready.

But Alex isn’t done.

“I lost my father,” Alex confesses. The urgency of before is gone, and suddenly it feels as though they are the only two in the room. “More times than I can count. I’ve grieved my sister’s death. I looked down the barrel of reality unraveling itself, and I still can’t imagine how you must feel right now. But I know... I know how inviting it is to just… let go.”

Lena struggles to lift her head, until a callused hand cups her cheek and helps tip her chin up to regard Alex gazing steadily back at her. Unwavering.

“All I’m asking is for you to let us help you let go,” that kind face says, “and keep going.”

The words don’t process in a way that makes sense to Lena’s dimming mind. All she knows is that the agent settles on the ground like she’s in for the long haul, and Kelly hovers unwilling to leave Alex. They’ll both die with her.

However willing she is to die, Lena knows she can’t bring the both of them with her.

She summons the final dregs of her energy to nod. When fingers reach for the detonator, it’s not to take it from her, but to wrap securely around Lena’s failing grip. Though it’s just her hand, the touch feels like an embrace, and when Lena blinks fat tears squeeze from her eyes to splash on numbed cheeks.

Behind Alex, Lex cackles roughly, lifting a detonator of his own.

“Like I said. Weak.”

He presses the button.

“ALEX!”

Kelly darts forward, Guardian’s shield expanding on her arm. Alex hunches over Lena’s fist, squeezing with all her might. Lena’s last thought as her vision fills with Kelly shielding all three of them under a shimmering blue forcefield is that she really should upgrade James’ gear.

---

Lena wakes to nothingness.

Ow.

Oh. Maybe not quite.

She pries open her eyes and squints at the medbay around her, registering the glass panes separating them from the rest of the building and the sleeping figure slumped in a visitor’s chair at the side of her bed.

Kara.

“For fuck’s sake.”

Supergirl bolts awake, eyes blinking blearily before focusing on Lena. “Lena--”

“Don’t.”

There’s a surprising bite to her tone, contrary to scrape it takes to get her voice to leave her throat. It stops Kara in her tracks, and she sits back as though Lena had smacked her hands away from reaching.

Huh. Looks like she might have a superpower of her own.

Guilt trips.

Lillian would be thrilled.

“I’m just… too tired to do this again.”

Kara’s gaze falls briefly, before returning to Lena’s gaze. “Do what?”

“This. All of it. I don’t-- I don’t want it.”

Oh, sure. Now her voice decides to wimp out.

She switches tacks, reaching for the first thing that came to mind. “Alex?”

Kara nods. “She’s fine. So’s Kelly. They were both discharged days ago. You would be too, except for the bullet in your side.”

So the gunshot wound is what kept her here in Kara’s reach. Great. She’d have to thank Lex for…

Alarm twinges in Lena’s chest.

“And Lex?”

A pause precedes Kara’s response, and in that interminable moment Lena’s mind races towards the worst.

“Dead. As far as we can tell. His remains were identified through his dental records, and DNA is pending, but…”

“Death doesn’t seem to stick, does it?”

“Only for those who deserve it least.”

Lena can hear the weight of lives in Kara’s words: lives lost, lives she still answered for, lives she would never forgive herself for losing. She’s sure Alex is one of them. Maybe even Kelly. Lena’s not so sure she does, anymore.

“Lena?”

Turning her head, Lena meets Kara’s tear-filled gaze.

“Alex, um… she mentioned some of what you said, in the bunker, and-- I just…”

Lena rolls her eyes back towards the ceiling. “Don’t flatter yourself, Supergirl. It’s been a long time coming.”

Silence follows, long and deep. Lena can almost imagine she’s alone, and then-- “That’s not what I meant.”

Oh, god. The tears are audible in Kara’s voice, and a lump rises to Lena’s own throat unbidden.

“I only meant to say-- I’m sorry you had to struggle with that alone.”

Shit.

“And that I’m here, whenever you want to talk.”

Lena wants to huff in derision, or roll her eyes again, but she doesn’t trust herself not to break down into tears. She’s spent so long being so angry that she stopped feeling anything altogether. And now all she can feel is sad-- for herself, for being unable to reciprocate any of the emotion Kara is exuding with every syllable. The tears in her eyes are sympathetic reflex, nothing more, but there’s no way in hell she’s going to give Supergirl the satisfaction--

“I’m not going anywhere.”

All Lena can do is let her fingers curl around the palm that settles in hers.

For now, it’s enough.

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declassroomedteach-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

The Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View features a poignant scene following a street fight that ends in murder. Lucy (Helen Bonham Carter) comments that you witness something memorable and think you’ll never be the same, but then you forget and return to your old self. I hope to do a better job holding onto my jailhouse conversion, from skeptical to convinced about the existence of God.

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

Thanks to my former employer and its bad actors, an institution I’ll call Land of Motown Community College, where I served as an English teacher, I’ve seen the best and the worst of pure Michigan humanity. If God created humans, God sure must have a sense of humor.

Even a smattering of details from my story sound like a rollercoaster Lifetime movie no one wants to watch. Since 2012, I’ve been sexist witch-hunted through an ongoing living nightmare that has included hack shrinks, illegal and involuntary lock up in a Catholic mental health ward and now incarceration for thirty-four days in a mid-Michigan county jail for a crime I did not commit. College administrators, union teachers, dirty cops, dirty doctors, dirty nuns and dirty priests, plus the state’s top most government officials, have participated in the protection of white collar criminals and encouraged my simultaneous downfall. All this for me, so one man can prove his power over unions near union ground zero.

The U.S. Constitution’s first amendment makes clear that government is not to establish any official religion, not protect any particular religion from existing laws. Perhaps the founding fathers could foresee the distant future. Nearly two hundred fifty years later, a female citizen has found cause to invert the phrase “God bless you” with blasphemy, attempting to redress grievances.

I’ve never met the emergency room doctor who signed me into a Catholic looney bin for a week. To my horror, I was held in a Catholic Siberia, it turns out, on campus with my all girl Catholic high school. I was raised and violated by the same church, which now pretends it’s never met me. Thirty five years ago, for Halloween, classmates mimicked the Robert Redford movie Brubaker to stage a failed, backboneless prison break. These classmates, who have also turned away from my plight, dressed not in hospital gowns or orange as the new black, but plaid skirts and knee socks adorned temporarily with stripes. (Good girls, we stopped mock rioting when the nuns glared.)

Unfortunately, there is no law or principle governing the intersection of religion and families. In my time of need, even my immediate and extended family has turned away, exponentially multiplying my distress. My extended Catholic family has not advocated for me, though it would cost nothing except some skin. The anger caused by this and so many betrayals envelops like nuclear explosion.

However, I realized something on day thirty-three of my lock up in the big house. Because the ties between families and religion tend to act like strangleholds, my estranged Catholic mother is incapable of doing the one thing I want and need her most to do: to demand that Livonia Catholics honestly investigate me claims. Because of my new found belief, I forgive my aging mother. She’s only human and doing the best she can. (Unfortunately, the damage done feels irreparable. Forgiveness does not mean I can tolerate her presence.)

Through five solid years of loss, I have been cornered mentally and financially into a nearly impossible position. But the kindest of strangers have helped me to survive. Downstate, nice generous neighbors responded to my cries for help by giving. Up north, the same. People have given money, food, house wares, helpful supplies such as wood, shoes, warm clothes, plus their time and honest well wishes. I wish I would have kept better track of the names and faces of the many regular people who have been so kind, forming a lifeline, keeping me alive.

My fighting spirit has kept better track of my transgressors, including Fox News Detroit, which ran a sexist hack piece in 2015 cutting together footage I asked them not to shoot in order to make me look looser than loopy. In search of more positive and helpful press, my creative and liberal mind encouraged me to tag my own, downstate old-ring suburban home with a metaphoric phrase that offended and confused. “A religious figure criminally violated me!” Only my version was Twitter-short. Basic sentence: subject, verb, object.

Passersby assumed I was nutz. I’m not. Unfortunately, the human resources’ labor attorney and architect of my nightmare is smart enough to know that once a crone-aged female is labeled crazy dangerous, most people won’t bother to parse the facts. Just ask Hillary. Voters elected a man without ethics, unwilling to practice stability, a sexual harasser, eager to “lock her up!”

I recreated my civil rights protest up north at a lake named after the largest city in New Brunswick. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, after numerous rereadings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. In middle age, without an income, I’ve been forced to gather wood and water for two years, for two winters, with a third approaching, in order to survive in my dead husband’s summer cabin, which is facing tax forfeiture, and soon. In both iterations, I repainted my eye-catching sacrilegious phrase with “Act Peace.” I’m not a bad person, or dangerous, or interested in spreading evil. But Fox News Detroit has been not interested in my actual story.

While I was incarcerated, nasty locals ran down my mailbox to which my sign “Act Peace” was nailed, and then took the sign. Two paintings espousing the Statue of Liberty have been stolen. My sign about the connection between the dirty cop who put me in jail and Land of Motown Community College was stolen, I’d guess by the dirty cop. My cries for “help!” with needed justice have been ignored. Instead, community officials at this private lake community have bent the law with the help of dirty local county officials, who may try to re-arrest me over the care of my feces. Yes, you read correctly. My troubles continue. Danger surrounds. This is not a pretty story.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

Something wicked this way came, and stayed, but I pray to harness goodness and finally slay the beast on my back. I’ve been falsely accused of being suicidal and a danger to society within a country that has grown accustomed to men mass murdering and sexual harassing. I know the pain of mental illness in the form of mental torture, so I feel very sympathetic to those, especially military veterans, who suffer from PTSD. Mental pain is real. And can be excruciating. I realize no matter my idiosyncratic tendencies, finally winning a measure of justice will require the help of other people, and, well, by any name, I guess God. I know that God may not intercede with my legal and financial problems but belief in a higher power does help with gratefulness and tranquility.

In jail, every day is a good day to die. However, the smallest graces save a tattered soul and help a person carry on to the next long minute. I want to thank the two women who ran Bible study every Tuesday. Yes, you read correctly. Unbeknownst to them, they gave me gold for a writer without means: a composition notebook, on my 54th birthday, which was an otherwise desolate milestone. Moreover, these women of God showed me a respectable and inspirational version of Christianity.

On cable tv, my cellmates preferred back-to-back episodes of Cops, shows about zombies, the shallow high jinks of Jerry Springer, endless sci-fi. (I prefer comedy and drama.) The day I was eventually sprung from the slammer, my legal troubles abated but not erased, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on St. Pio, an Italian priest who was said to develop stigmata and miraculously heal. Angered, under stress, I admit I acted out loudly like an ass (even by jail standards): “I hope they roast his nuts!”

Many jail birds claim to accept Jesus as their savior, though none gave up their bottom bunk for the pregnant woman in our ranks. Critically, I recognized around me the kind of souls who would have rejected Mary and Joseph. But I was forced to realize this was not a television segment that was going to uncover more Catholic dirt. Although St. Pio may have self-inflicted his wounds, trapped in a county cell block, I dropped my bad attitude and truly felt in my body an undeniable wave of love.

No surprise, in the short time since my release on PR bond, my nascent jailhouse conversion has been tested and wavered, fallen apart, and needing rebuilding. Im not a saint. My days are terrifying and unresolved. But. If I breathe calmly and deeply, and repeat my affirmations, what some call prayers, I recognize a connection between hope and light.

House of Hope in Hersey, Michigan, offered me a composition notebook. Any additional help readers may offer with legal defense, plumbing, back taxes, transportation, work or grace are appreciated. Thank you.

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