Work Text:
She doesn’t remember where or when it was, she just remembers.
Her mother is a giant in her memory, towering above her. In a photo that is currently in storage with the rest of her Metropolis apartment, the woman is small, with sharp eyes and dark hair just like Lena's— the source of Lena's— but in her memory the woman is the whole world.
Her arms enveloped, and held Lena in her lap so tight that Lena had squealed to be let free even as she burrowed and clung, closer and closer though her arms were too small to reach back.
If it was cold that day, Lena can’t remember. The whole world was within those arms, and when she left them the world was gone.
…
She manages to forget.
Paris is beautiful, but it could be the ugliest city on this and any other planet and still she would love it. In Paris, she is the American girl with the bad French accent and a name that means nothing.
In Paris, she has an apartment to herself and a boulangerie across the street that sells her croissants, and every morning she walks to class, a trail of flaky pastry crumbs in her wake. She learns how to solder a circuit board in the morning and what Baudelaire was writing about in the afternoon.
In Paris she has friends.
They meet between classes at a cafe near the park, and they laugh at Lena’s terrible French accent but they don’t switch to English for her and they don’t make her feel bad when she can’t keep up. They don’t care what her name is, and so she manages to forget what it is.
She is the funny American girl, and when they leave for their afternoon classes, they say au revoir like they mean it, they kiss her cheeks like they aren’t afraid of her, they hug her, each and every one of them, like they don’t want anything from her.
And she forgets. For a while.
…
She isn’t allowed to speak.
There are important people who must speak, and there is Lex, there is Lillian, and at her own father’s funeral, Lena is not permitted to speak.
(The day before, the will was read. Half to Lex, half to Lena, and all of Lillian’s fury to Lena, also. She would thank him, if he weren’t dead.)
(She would sit in his chair until he found her in his office, as always. “What are you doing in here?” he would always ask, kiss her hair instead of waiting for an answer. “I wanted to thank you,” she would say, “for the gift of Mom’s eternal rage.”
It wouldn’t matter when this fantastic conversation took place. At seven or at twenty-seven, along with everything else Lionel had given her, that is what he had gifted her, too.)
The grave is still open, the casket inside doing nothing but sitting there, and everyone is gone. If she didn’t have her own driver, she wonders how she might have made her way home, but then there are footsteps on the dry grass.
“Come on,” Lex says. “Lolly, let’s go home.”
And at that, she breaks. She doesn’t have a home to go to, not in Metropolis, not— the list is too long, and she feels untethered from the planet, and cries harder for it, and more still when Lex wraps his arms around her.
He holds her, tighter and tighter until it hurts and until she can feel herself again.
“You’re going to be fine,” he says, and she doesn’t mention who he’s leaving out of that statement.
…
She set the sky on fire.
Alone in her lab like a thief, she mixed one wrong enzyme and now everybody lives. Alone in her office after the sky stops burning, she wonders how long she has left before she is excluded from that reprieve.
While expecting the arrival of someone to kill her, Supergirl lands on her terrace.
It’s not the same thing, she tells herself. It’s not.
(It’s not.
Aliens are no more of a threat to humans than humans are to themselves. Which is to say: everyone is dangerous, just different kinds of dangerous. But still, the voice in her ear says this is danger and she reminds herself that the only person who’s ever actually tried to kill her is Lex.
The voice in her ear belongs to her would-be killer.)
“You stopped her,” Supergirl, Kara, Supergirl says. “Lena—”
And she’s close, so close, and the air is warmed by her, and then she’s too, too close, gripping her in an embrace that is too, too strong, or maybe just strong enough.
She’s never been touched by an alien before. Not that she knows of, and she doesn’t know what to do, but the voice in her head doesn’t whisper danger, danger, danger anymore. The voice is silent, gone, the sound of Kara— Supergirl’s breathing the only thing left.
…
She finds Kara waiting in her office.
It’s been days since Lena last saw her, and at the sight of her something aches, as it always does now, in a space where Lena cannot find the edges.
At the sound of her, feet clattering to a silence, Kara looks up, and that endless, amorphous space solidifies. She looks tired, more than tired, and Lena remembers she doesn’t know why Kara has been absent for days, missing from Lena’s life.
She could guess, but Lena doesn’t dabble is speculation.
“I’m sorry I— I would have come sooner if I could.”
The problem with Kara Danvers is that the knowledge Lena’s being lied to doesn’t stop her from believing Kara, and that aching, crystallized thing won’t let her keep the distance.
“It’s okay,” she says instead of the many things she wishes to say instead.
But Kara doesn’t look like it’s okay, doesn’t look like she believes Lena, bowed and broken on Lena’s couch, and that distance wittles right down until it’s gone, Lena curling her arms around Kara’s shoulders.
And it’s such a different sensation, to hug instead of to be hugged, and her arms feel awkward, muscles uncertain about how to bend her limbs correctly. Different, but— Kara’s arms settle around her, fingers curling into the wool of Lena’s sweater and knuckles pressed against her back, and Lena soaks in the warmth of the body in her arms, feels the flex of that strength it possesses, and it lets her believe.
“It will be,” she says, more truthfully, not quite to the woman in her arms.