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owl-with-a-pen · 2 years

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After tonight, everything was going to change.

As Nia sat with the rest of her friends in Kara’s apartment, playing games and passing around snacks, Supergirl’s interview was out there right now being broadcast to every television screen – every household - worldwide.

By tomorrow morning, everyone would know exactly who Kara Danvers really was.

It was a big step, a terrifying step, but for the most part Kara appeared to be taking it in her stride. She didn’t care about tuning in to see her exclusive with Cat Grant like the rest of the world. Inside these four walls, the Super Friends might as well have been in a bubble of their own. One that already shared the knowledge of Kara’s true identity, that offered safety and peace of mind far away from what was transpiring outside.

Soon, not even CatCo would be quite the haven it had used to be.

For right now, though, Nia wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. She didn’t care about the tantrums rival news stations would throw in the wake of CatCo’s exclusive, or that the colleagues she’d only ever exchanged morning greetings with would no doubt be calling her aside for one-on-one ‘off the record’ Q&A’s the second she stepped through the elevator doors.

Instead, Nia was more than happy to sit here in the moment, coddling a chilled wine glass whilst curled up in one of Kara’s lounge chairs, her foot brushing affectionately against her boyfriend’s shoulder where he’d pulled up a stool nearest to the coffee table.

The bowl of popcorn in Brainy’s lap was already close-to demolished and, aside from the few handfuls that Nia had managed to steal from behind his back, Brainy had definitely been the sole perpetrator.

Not that she could blame him. After all, an impulsive appetite for junk food wasn’t just reserved for Brainy’s negative moods.

For tonight, though, indulging in those impulses was more than okay. If anything, it was encouraged. This was meant to be a night for celebration.

Brainy’s eyes were bright with enthusiasm, his laugher so loud and genuine that Nia found she couldn’t help but grin along with him, even when she wasn’t party to the conversation at hand.

The longer she’d had to let it all sink in, the more she felt that a shared burden had been lifted from the both of them. The invisible weight that had presented itself in the form of a ticking clock had finally been reset, and the fear of losing each other to their respective times was over once and for all.

Nia felt lighter than ever before, a near constant tickle in her chest that only seemed to make the grin on her face grow wider.

They weren’t just celebrating Kara’s secret tonight. It was also a welcome home party, a chance to recognise that their family was finally whole again.

When the game portion of game night rounded off and everyone began to settle down with their drinks, Brainy rose from his seat to get more popcorn from the kitchen. Nia didn’t miss the way his hand casually brushed over hers as he passed her by, a soft smile aimed in her direction.

It still felt so unreal to feel him like that outside of the dreams that had been plaguing her every night for three weeks - to have him back in her life, to know that this was permanent. When he’d been gone, Nia had found that she’d berated herself over and over again for taking every moment they’d had together for granted, wishing that they’d had the chance to do all the stuff regular couples got to do without the interruption of a superhero alert or crazy misadventure.

Dinner and a movie, walks in the park, road trips, vacations. In the end, it wasn’t about what they did together, only that she’d wished they’d had the time for it.

And, maybe – just maybe - once the world had shrugged off yet another superhero to pull down their proverbial cowl, they’d be granted that time in spades.

Fading away from the conversation at hand, Nia found herself searching Brainy out, glancing over towards the kitchen. It looked like he’d since refilled his popcorn bowl, although he showed no interest in returning to his seat just yet.

Instead, he simply leant forward against the counter, staring amiably out as his friends as they chatted easily amongst themselves. Sharing food, laughter and stories, all the while ignoring the action movie Alex and Kelly had picked out after meticulously scrolling through Netflix’s selection for the last half hour.

He was so absorbed that he didn’t even notice when Nia stood from her own chair, joining him behind the kitchen counter.

Certain that Brainy had yet to feel her presence, Nia pursed her lips, slipping her hands around Brainy’s chest, folding her arms around his front. She leant into his back, moulding into the curve of his spine.

Brainy stirred at the contact, relaxing into her touch with a soft sigh. He lifted his hand, running his thumb gently along Nia’s knuckles.

Nia grinned, resting her chin against her boyfriend’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, tucking her face into the warm crook of his throat, nuzzling her nose into his jaw. “Whatcha thinkin’?”

Brainy smiled, rubbing idle circles across Nia’s hand. “Just… that I am so happy to be here,” he admitted. He took in a deep, cleansing breath, letting it out slowly. “With you, my family, feeling this way… this profound sense of belonging, I-I suppose it’s difficult to think about how close I came to losing it all.”

“But you didn’t,” Nia murmured, squeezing her arms tighter around him.

“You’re right,” Brainy said, curling his fingers against the counter’s surface, easing them both a little closer towards it. “And knowing now that the future is ours – all of ours – to make into whatever we want, that is most freeing.”

He turned then, prompting Nia to lift her head from his shoulder. She kept a hold of the rest of him though, letting her arms drape loosely around his lower back.

Brainy’s eyes shone brightly as they flickered across her face, marvelling every aspect of her. Nia never got tired of that look, the fondness and adoration she saw in Brainy’s expression, like he was the luckiest person in the world to be with her in that moment.

It was a look she was pretty sure she was reflecting wholeheartedly right about now.

She was so enraptured by it that she almost didn’t notice Brainy’s hand draw away from the counter, reaching up to take her cheek, cradling her face against his palm. His hand buzzed with familiar warmth, the tips of his fingers nearly electric against her skin.

“And my future is entwined with yours, Nia Nal,” Brainy said softly, tipping her chin towards him. “I know that for certain.”

“Good,” Nia said breathlessly. It was all she could think to say, the rest of her brain was far too focused on how close their faces suddenly were to one another.

Even with a dozen thought tracks at his disposal, she knew Brainy felt similarly, especially when his gaze trailed down towards her mouth, a thrill of anticipation catching in his smile.

Tired of the preamble, Nia leant into Brainy’s guiding touch, brushing her lips playfully against his.

The moment Brainy’s lips parted against hers, a needy and sharp exhale meeting her tongue, Nia grinned, sinking herself fully into the kiss. Brainy matched her fervently, his hand slipping from her cheek so that he could balance her weight against him.

She could feel the desperation slowly work its way out of Brainy’s kiss, levelling out into contentment as he began to relax into the motions. There was no need to rush a single second of this. There were no emergencies to fight, no great obstacles in their way.

Now, they had all the time in the world.

Impulsively, Nia slid her hands beneath Brainy’s shirt, skirting her fingers across the warmth of his green skin. An unmodulated groan rumbled deep inside Brainy’s chest, sounding every bit like a mechanical purr as he let Nia’s fingers continue to explore the small of his back, digging her nails into the muscle closest to his spine. She smiled against his mouth when a pleasant shudder wracked him, feeling the lingering touch of Brainy’s hands as they trailed upwards again, grabbing her waist, drawing her towards the roaring fire of his life projectors.

Nia laxed into that welcoming heat, allowing Kara’s kitchen to fade far into the background. Instead, they drifted together in that unbroken moment, way out of reach from the rest of the world, perfectly content in the bubble they had created in each other’s shared proximity.

“It’s impressive, they haven’t even broken for breath.”

That was, until, their friends’ unapologetic commentary managed to pierce right on through it.

It had been Lena who had spoken, although Nia made a fierce point of ignoring her. Instead, she wriggled her hand out from Brainy’s shirt so that she could wind it around the back of his neck, rewarded with a soft gasp as he reacted to the coolness of her fingers.

Annoyingly, this did nothing to deter their friends.

“When’s the polite time to say something?” Alex wondered out loud.

“No, no!” Kara hissed. “No snapping them out of it! Let them have this!”

Nia almost laughed at that, unable to keep from reacting any longer.

“Hey, lovebirds!” Alex called out, ignoring her sister’s pleas entirely. “Is that popcorn for everyone?”

That, it seemed, was enough to even catch Brainy’s attention. His lashes fluttered as he stilled against Nia’s mouth, blinking open his eyes. Nia sighed, reluctantly parting from the kiss, although she couldn’t help but notice that Brainy’s hands remained on her hips, not yet willing to pull away from her completely. Nia smiled, stroking a loose strand of blond hair that had caught across Brainy’s lips, tugging it from his mouth. The urge to kiss him again, just to spite her friends, was pretty strong. Although, one urge was a little stronger.

She turned to Alex distastefully, fixing a hand to her hip. She swirled a finger down towards the popcorn bowl, raising a brow. “Oh, you mean this popcorn?” she asked, smiling wickedly. “Not anymore it isn’t.”

“I told you you shouldn’t have said anything!” Kara moaned, tipping her head back into the sofa.

“Hey, Lena started it!” Alex argued, turning towards her girlfriend. “Kelly, help me out here.”

Kelly laughed, raising her hands in surrender. “I’m staying out of this.”

“And do not drag me into this,” Lena scoffed, lifting her wine glass to her lips. “I wasn’t the one that addressed them directly.”

“Alright, alright, let’s calm down, it was no one’s fault,” J’onn said placatingly.

“Thank you.”

“Except for yours, Alex.”

“Hey!”

Nia only rolled her eyes, turning her attention back to Brainy. She tugged his hand.

“C’mon,” she said, scooping the popcorn bowl into her arms, winking playfully. “More for us.”

Brainy’s smile was just as bright as any one before it, his cheeks still tinged with a healthy blush. He let Nia pull him away from the kitchen and, together, they returned to the living room. This time, they opted to share the lounge chair if only to drive their point home that no one was touching their popcorn.

Not that Nia minded. She much preferred to be curled up on Brainy’s lap than with a glass of wine.

When their friends’ whining eventually died down and Kara had dramatically sped over to the kitchen to laser-vision another bag of kernels, everyone was finally settled down enough to watch the movie.

With her face pressed comfortably into the fabric of Brainy’s shirt, the warm pulse of his projector grazing her cheek, Nia allowed herself to drift, confident that when she opened her eyes, Brainy would still be right there with her.

She breathed in the scent of him, lashes fluttering shut as Brainy wound his arm around her, pressing his thumb idly into her back.

In all honesty, Nia wouldn’t have wanted to celebrate today any other way.

#supergirl #supergirl fanfiction #brainia #nia nal #brainiac 5 #kara zor el #lena luthor #alex danvers #kelly olsen #j'onn j'onzz #dansen #don't mind me just writing more scenes i wanted to see in 6x20...#my writing

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dameronology · 3 years

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asystole {obi-wan kenobi x reader}

summary: ‘the trouble is the way you stick, to any part of me that remains in tact/but if i pull the plug, it isn’t only me i’m holding back’ - asystole, hayley williams (a.k.a ‘the one where you’re the bane of obi-wan’s life, even as a force ghost’)

warnings: mentions of death, swearing, angst, and me not having a single fucking clue how force ghosts work

this was originally based on a random idea i had and also encouragement from kara/@hellotherekenobi who requested a prompt that i completely forgot to include but...we move. also, i would highly highly recommend listening to the above song just because it’s a real tear jerker and i lOVE it

enjoy

- jazz

Loss, for Obi-Wan, was not a stranger. It was an old acquaintance, constantly lingering beside him -- not quite there, but not gone either. He could always feel its presence, a constant and painful reminder of everyone he’d lost. He could probably count them all one hand but that didn’t make it any better. Loss was loss, whether it were two people or ten. Even if his grief had stopped and started with the passing of his master all those years ago, it was still something he felt in its wholeness and in its entirety. Because that’s all Obi-Wan could do: feel. It was everything or nothing. Zero percent or one hundred.

And with you, he wished it were nothing. He wished that your sudden absence from his life was something he didn’t have to feel in every fibre of his being. It was hard enough to acknowledge and even more painful to comprehend. You were the one person he’d always just assumed would be there forever. How foolish it now seemed, he was very much aware. Everybody died -- Qui-Gon Jinn was a testament to that; as was Satine Kryze and quite literally every other person in the galaxy who’d had the pleasure of being reminded of their mortality. It was just that this was...it was you. You weren’t immortal by any means but maker, you had acted like it. The way you went about life with an air of recklessness and discontent for the rules, making even the hardest of missions into an adventure. His life had been a thousand times better since you’d come running - nay, stumbling - into it. You’d blown his entire world to bits and pieced it back together with tiny, intricate bits of yours. Filled it with chaos and laughter and a light he hadn’t felt since the days of his youth.

Perhaps most importantly, you’d looked after one another. He would stay by your side 24/7 to make sure you kept your head screwed on your shoulders, and you would pester him to drink water and remember to eat. He would remind you when you had important missions and meetings, and in return, you’d proof-read his paper work. He remembered the first time he’d fallen asleep beside you, to wake up with a blanket wrapped around him and his boots pulled off. It was so clear in his head because it was the first time someone had ever done anything for him without asking. It became something you did often, and though he never said it, it was something he kept so close to his heart.

Obi-Wan wasn’t a fool. He knew you weren’t going to be around forever - he just didn’t realise that not forever was going to be a whole lot sooner that he’d anticipated. He used to make jokes about how your recklessness would one day lead to your demise. The idea of it made him feel sick now. He’d been right the entire time. He didn’t want it to be real.

None of it felt real. The whole conversation he’d had with Mace Windu about you not making it felt like a distant nightmare, something he’d tried so hard to wake up from, only to find that he was wide awake the entire fucking time. Night terrors were bad, but reality was arguably worse.

It didn’t feel right at first, to see your chambers still filled with your stuff and your lightsaber still resting on your nightstand. Obi had been the one to put it there when you’d been taken to the infirmary, thinking you would have asked for it when you woke up - but you didn’t. It went hand-in-hand with the robes he’d hung up on your door and the get well soon, moron card he’d brought you.

Then, they emptied your room. Took your clothes and your books and every other worldly possession you had. Your name was removed from the door to your quarters and added to the list of Jedi who had died in combat on the stone in the Temple gardens. Aside from that, any sign that you had ever walked the halls or burst into council meetings at the last minute was gone. You lived on only in his memories, your lopsided smile ingrained into his mind and contagious laugh echoing constantly in his brain.

Throwing himself into work was the only option for Obi-Wan. He already took on a thousand things at once, but without you to help bare the weight, it became a million. If he was busy, he didn’t have time to think -- about you, or how fucking fragile everything was, or about all the ways he could have saved you. You’d slipped through his fingers, even when he’d be holding on so tightly. It wasn’t his fault. It was just...life.

A few weeks passed, and Obi-Wan continued to push himself. Everybody noticed it -- how suddenly busy he was, how quiet he’d become, how tired he looks. Blue eyes had grown exhausted with grief and regret, strawberry blonde hair becoming longer and unrulier than was characteristic for him. When you’d died, you’d taken a tiny piece of him with you. An important part. Maybe that part had been you.

It was on a cold Tuesday evening that he heard the four words. Sat out on the balcony of his quarters, watching Coruscant and life pass by in a blur ahead of him, a tangle of traffic and noise and a million sounds that he couldn’t quite decipher. The sky was a navy blue, cast with the tiny little glints and dots of distant planets. All worlds that you’d once promised to explore

‘You look like shit.’

He thought he’d imagined it at first. In fact, it wouldn’t have been the first time in the last few weeks that the sound of your voice in his head had felt clear enough to be real. Imagining things - hallucinations and echoes of the long gone - was simply part of the grieving process. A process he’d gone through countless times before.

The sudden appearance of you in the corner of his eye jolted him like an electric shock. Perhaps not that far off of the emotional equivalent of being hit by a bus. Or a light freighter. Or...all of those things at once.

You were ethereal. When he’d last seen you, you’d been...tired. Now, you were smiling and radiating some sort of energy that could only be described as quintessentially you. There was not a chance in hell that a grief-induced hallucination could be so life-like, so crystal clear. Plus, why would he have imagined you like this, slightly transparent and with a blue glow surrounding you? A fitting colour for your final form, he figured.

‘Shocked to see me?’ Your drawl continued. ‘Because if you think you’re shocked, let me tell you. One second I was napping and the next I was a fucking Force ghost. Could you imagine?’

Obi-Wan smiled softly. ‘I don’t think I could.’

‘I can float through walls, though.’ You grinned. ‘How cool is that?’

‘It’s...that’s very cool.’ He replied. ‘I don’t suppose you can hug Force ghosts?’

Obi-Wan reached his palm out towards you - slowly but surely, as though he were scared you were going to fade away all over again if he touched you. You mimicked his actions, faded blue fingertips just moments away from his. When they finally touched, they didn’t. You felt nothing. He felt a rush of cold, as though somebody had poured a bucket of cold water over him.

He didn’t fully understand the concept of Force ghosts. Studied them, sure. Understood them? Not quite. There weren’t enough Jedi texts in the galaxy to fully capture the complexity of what made somebody come back. Often, they were linked to acts of heroism, or stemming from action taken when the person was still alive. That didn’t seem like you though. You weren’t the sort of person to try to fiddle with jinxes and hijinkery that would allow you to come back once you were dead - at least not purposefully. There was certainly every chance you did it accidentally.

‘Guess not.’ You murmured. ‘Sorry ‘bout that.’

The icy feeling only grew closer as you took a seat beside him. It was funny, because he thought that if he’d had the chance to reunite with you, that it would have been more emotional than this. Something filled with more feeling and grandeur. Instead, you’d just appeared, and acted as though you’d never been gone in the first place. Obi-Wan preferred it that way.

‘I’ve missed you.’ He continued to stare blankly ahead.

When you died, there were a thousand things he’d come up with that he’d wished he’d said. They ranged from comments about the weather to grand declarations of...how much you meant to him. All things he would never dare say to your face, and that’s probably why he came up with them. Because he would never get the chance to say them. And now, here you were, right beside him, and he had a second opportunity to get that closure -- but the words didn’t quite come. They stayed on the tip of his tongue, there, but not quite there. Even if this wasn’t quite the version of you that he imagined himself telling them to, it was still undeniably you.

‘I should hope so.’ You tried to nudge him with your elbow, but it was just another icy jab. ‘I would say that I missed you too, but I don’t know where I’ve been.’

‘What happened between then and now?’ Obi asked. ‘Between that and this?’

‘Okay, first of all - you can say my death. Coming up with a thousand other words for it won’t undo it.’ You said. ‘And...I don’t know. I just remember blaster fire, then some darkness, and then I was here.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘Well it didn’t tickle.’ You replied ‘It was quick, if that’s any comfort.’

‘I suppose it is.’ He murmured.

‘You’re being uncharacteristically quiet.’ You observed. ‘I can go away if you want. I’m not sure how this whole thing works but if you want me to leave, I can go and scare Dex-’

‘- that’s the last thing I want.’ He cut you off. ‘I just..I’ve spent the last few weeks trying not to acknowledge that you’re truly gone and it’s a little hard to do that when you’re quite literally a ghost.’

‘I’m not really gone though, am I?’ You said. ‘I’m still here. Not as I’d like to be, but I’m here.’

‘So as long as you’re around to irritate me and make snide comments, you’re here.’ He smiled. ‘Whether that’s in the flesh or...in the blue.’

‘I’m sorry it happened.’ You gently sighed. ‘Not sorry that I died for the greater good but sorry it was so..sudden.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ He wanted to reach across, to take your hand in his or run it down your arm - but he couldn’t. He couldn’t deal with another rush of cold in place of what used to be warm flesh. ‘It was still undeniably your most half-witted decision to date but you saved a lot of people, so I won’t hold it against you.’

‘Oh, how kind.’ You snorted. ‘I bet you’ve secretly enjoyed the peace and quiet, Kenobi.’

‘I miss it already.’

Obi-Wan woke up the next morning, still on the balcony. The air was cold -- as evidenced by his violent shivers -- and the sky had changed from navy, to a turquoise-tainted pink. The city below was moderately quiet, signalling that it was still pretty early. The only sounds were coming from traffic in the distance and the occasional whoosh of a passing jet in the sky above. He stayed like that for a moment, azure eyes clouded with some kind of apprehension as he watched the clouds slowly pass, not a care in the world for the fact it was fucking freezing.

Last night had been real, even if there was no sign of your presence. Actually, that wasn’t quite true -- the robes he’d discarded before your appearance had been thrown over him like a blanket. They did little to protect him from the cold air, but it was a confirmation that you had been there. He wasn’t sure when you’d left - or how - but he was the only one on the balcony.

There were a lot of questions floating about in his head. Why were you only turning up now after weeks? Why had you materialised by him? Why were you here at all? You were finally free, free to do literally whatever you wanted, and you’d wound up by his side. There were millions and millions of places in the galaxy and somehow, his balcony was the one where you’d wanted to be.

After showering and shaving, Obi-Wan found himself heading towards the classroom of the best Jedi he knew: Yoda. If anyone was going to know anything about Force ghosts, it was him. He’d have to make sure not to let slip exactly what he was talking about - your relationship with him was far more attached than the code allowed, after all - in a more general sense, he must have had something to offer. It wasn’t the kind of thing they taught in Jedi training. If anything, it was the opposite. The lesson was don’t become attached enough to someone so that they haunt you! - and it was one at which he’d failed quite miserably.

‘Master Kenobi.’ Yoda sat in the middle of the classroom, meditating. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know who it was. ‘Of assistance, may I be?’

‘Good morning.’ Obi-Wan greeted him with a bow. ‘I have some questions, and I was hoping you might be able to help me.’

‘Do go on. Help, I might be able to.’

‘Right.’ He cleared his throat, awkwardly taking a seat beside him. ‘What do you know about Force ghosts?’

‘Lots. Specific, you must be.’

‘Say you had a dear friend, and they died.’ He began. ‘Then they came back a little while as a Force ghost.’

‘Come back, they don’t.’ Yoda opened one eye, glancing over at him. ‘Never gone, they were. The Force takes time to manifest.’

‘So...the ghost version of them is still them?’

‘Very much so.’ He said. ‘Why, there are many reasons. Many Jedi study for a long time to materialise as ghosts after passing.’

‘What if they didn’t?’

‘Then unfinished business, they have.’ He replied. ‘When a Jedi dies, their Force connections do too. If they are left unbroken, exist as a ghost they will.’

Well, that explained it.

‘Right.’ He murmured. ‘Last question, I promise - how long does that connection usually last?’

‘Months to years, it may be.’ He explained. ‘On their unfinished business, the connection depends.’

‘That makes sense.’ Obi-Wan nodded. ‘Thank you, Master Yoda.’

The little green creature simply nodded in response, turning his attention back to his meditation. He didn’t ask questions -- what was the point? He’d been around hundreds of years, and dealt with hundreds of similar things in that time. Truth be told, he didn’t have all the answers. He was just good at acting like it.

Obi-Wan pondered on the conversation for the rest of the day.

There were a lot of things that could have constituted your unfinished business. The list was endless, especially given how suddenly you’d passed. Nobody knew you better than Obi-Wan, but even he struggled to decipher it. You weren’t the sort of person who would hang around for no good reason. It had to be something important -- something so pressing that you quite literally couldn’t pass away in its entirety without dealing with it. Part of him was worried that he didn’t know at all; you were always sneaking about, always doing something that you shouldn’t have been. That left a long list of possibilities.

But Yoda had directly mentioned Force connections, right? Maybe he’d meant it in a general way, but Obi would have been a complete dumb-ass to think that the Jedi didn’t know what was going on. If the situation didn’t tell him, his seeming ability to know everything about everyone certainly would have. You were the only person he could have possibly been talking about.

It was something he knew he had to bring up, and so he made the mental promise to himself. The best time would have been that night, when he saw you again. If he saw you again. He trusted you to return. You knew better now than to disappear forever without saying goodbye.

And he’d been right. That evening, after he’d exchanged goodbyes with Anakin, Obi-Wan found himself wandering out to the balcony. Sure enough, you were leant against the railings, back turned to him as you peered down at the city below. The air was cold again -- maybe because it was Winter, but also maybe because of you -- and the harsh winds blew back your hair. He wanted to reach out and feel it, to feel you, but he couldn’t. A man whose love language was physical touch was sure to suffer when the person he wanted most was a fucking entity.

‘You’re late.’ You glanced over your shoulder at him. ‘Don’t your meetings normally end at six?’

‘Anakin wanted to talk about something.’ He replied. ‘So is this your life now? Waiting for me to come home?’

You snorted. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been at the diner all day moving stuff around to confuse Dex.’

‘That’s mean.’

‘And what would you do if you were a Force ghost?’

Wait for you. Follow you.

‘Explore.’ He lied, leaning against the balcony beside you. ‘I spoke to Yoda today about...this.’

‘Mmm?’

‘He said that people who usually come back either purposefully prepared for it when they were still alive.’

‘Or?’

‘How do you know there’s an or?’

‘Because I sometimes struggled to turn on my lightsaber. You think I’m skilled enough to do this shit on purpose, Kenobi?’

‘You’re…’ brilliantly intelligent, easily the smartest person I know, ‘...clever. Don’t put yourself down.’

‘Just cut to the point.’

‘Right.’ Obi-Wan cleared his throat. ‘He said that, or that they had unfinished business. Force connections still strong enough to keep them here.’

‘So, you and me?’

‘What?’

‘Our Force connection.’ You said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘You do know what we have one, right?’

‘I...I figured we were always just...close.’

‘No, you dipshit.’ You shook your head with a laugh. ‘They can develop between best friends. It’s a little rare, but we’re both so strong with the Force that it just happens naturally.’

‘That makes sense.’ he turned to look out at the city. ‘I didn’t really have a best friend before you.’

You looked over at him, a smile playing on your lips. ‘Yeah, me neither.’

Obi-Wan quickly fell into a routine, post-you. Not post-you completely, because he still saw you every evening, but that had helped push him towards the transition. He adjusted to only seeing you after work - not in the mornings or during the day or every waking second like it used to be. Nothing was how it used to be. Not even close. You were no longer beside him during meets or climbing into bed next to him when you had nightmares. There were no more missions with you or late nights filled with paperwork and laughter.

That was the problem.

You were here, but you weren’t really. The ghost he saw every night had your eyes and your laugh and your personality, but it wasn’t really you. Obi-Wan couldn’t touch you; he couldn’t feel you in the same way he used to. It was like having a conversation with a figment of his imagination -- conversations of false hope and plans that would never come to fruition. Because you could banter and you could laugh and you act like things weren’t completely fucking different, but they were. You were a ghost. A ghost of yourself, a ghost of the past, a ghost of what used to be.

It had helped the pain at first. Eased the dread of knowing that you weren’t ever going to be back, not properly. Obi-Wan had appreciated that. It made grieving a lot easier when you were technically still there to tease and jester him through the process. Knowing that his friendship was the reason you couldn’t fully let go of existing had both made it better and worse. Better, because it meant you cared for him as deeply as he did for you. Worse, because it was so open-ended. At what point would you be satisfied enough to finally let go? Would he get to say goodbye, or would you just be here forever?

That was the problem, Obi-Wan had come to find.

He was hopelessly in love with you - though that much was obvious - and he couldn’t deal with only having some of you. He wanted all of you, or he wanted none of you. Only being able to talk to a blue apparition of you just wasn’t enough. It was just a constant reminder that the person he loved most in the universe was gone, and that he’d never fully have you. He was kicking himself for that one. What if he’d said something to you when you were still alive? Declared his love for when he could still physically reach out to you?

That was the thought plaguing his mind every night. With you beside him, a cold aura radiating towards him as you sat with your legs hugged to your chest. It had been a few weeks since your first appearance, and your nights together ranged from deep conversations to comfortable silence. The latter was always worse, because Obi-Wan constantly found himself teetering on the edge of saying something. It was hard, because despite everything, he found you to be more enchanting and peaceful than ever. More entrancing.

‘Can I tell you something?’ He asked.

‘Sure thing.’ You peered over at him. ‘You look worried. Is it serious?’

He paused for a moment. ‘Depends how you take it, I suppose.’

‘Try me.’

‘There are…’ he faltered again. ‘There are some things I regret not telling you when you were still here.’

‘I am here.’ You reminded him.

‘No, I know that.’ He found himself unable to look at you. ‘I mean when you were here here.’

‘What’s the difference, Obi?’

‘Remember when you used to come to my bedroom at 2AM because you’d had a bad dream?’ He asked. ‘Or when you’d throw yourself into my arms after we’d been separated on long missions?’

‘Yeah.’

He absent-mindedly reached a hand out towards you; it went straight through you, a rush of cold shooting down his arm. ‘I can’t do that anymore.’

‘You can still talk to me.’ You urged. ‘You can still be with me-’

‘- not in the way I want.’ Not in the way I need.

‘What do you mean?’ You gently pushed.

‘You don’t need me to explain it.’ He finally looked at you, blue eyes shrouded with an emotion you couldn’t quite decipher.

‘Obi-Wan, what do you think has been keeping me here?’ You asked.

You knew. Of course you fucking knew. Try as he might to be mysterious and suave, but you could read him like a book -- and it was a shock to you that he hadn’t seen your feelings either. They were clear as day to both of you, and yet it had been easier to ignore them for the sake of your friendship, and for the sake of the code. You both always figured that you could deal with them at a later date, because that’s when you’d had a later.

‘Just say it.’ You murmured. ‘Say that you love me too and I’ll go-’

‘- I don’t want you to go.’ He cut you off. ‘Because then you’re gone forever.’

‘And then you can move on.’ You smiled. Neither of you knew that ghosts could cry until now.

This was the closest he would ever get to having you now. He could have just sucked it up and dealt with it, and kept you by his side in your ominous form - but would that have been fair on you? To keep you around, just because he was so full of regret over things unsaid and so full of fear over grieving? None of this was fair, on him or on you.

‘I can’t say it.’ Obi-Wan murmured. ‘Not yet.’

‘It’s okay.’ You gave him a watery smile. ‘I know.’

Neither of you said anything else - maybe you didn’t want to, or maybe you were scared to. The fact you’d finally acknowledged the bantha in the room after years, finally admitting that love had been the driving force behind what made your friendship so good, for so long. The irony was that when you’d died, he’d wanted nothing more than for you to come back in some form. Now, he realised that it was holding him back from moving on -- and he couldn’t do that until he’d let you go. But he couldn’t do that either.

Unbeknownst to Obi-Wan, his words had been a confession. Albeit a thinly veiled one, but a confession nonetheless. It had confirmed to you the only thing you’d wanted to know before you’d passed: that he loved you back. That was all you needed. It was all you’d ever needed.

Eventually, the Jedi beside you grew sleepy. That’s how it usually went every night -- you’d talk, he’d fall asleep beside you, and you’d cover him with a blanket and slip out to wherever it was that Force ghosts went at night. He never asked, for fear of it ruining the mystery. Obi-Wan knew that he wasn’t the only person you saw, but it was a nice thought, and one he didn’t want to taint. At least you took more mercy on him than you did with Dex, who slowly thought he was going insane at all the random objects suddenly being moved around.

When you heard him gently snoring, you stood up. Obi-Wan looked peaceful, as though he’d finally gotten something of his chest - even though he hadn’t realised he’d done it. He hadn’t realised that it had been enough.

You leant down beside him, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. For the first time since you’d appeared, you could finally feel his skin against yours - no cold jolts, no body parts suddenly disappearing through the other. Just your lips against his; warm and...human.

‘Good night, Obi-Wan.’ You ran a hand through his hair, before standing up and stepping back. ‘I love you. I’ll always love you.’

He felt it. He was asleep, but he felt your lips on his and your hand in his hair, and he’d secretly smiled to himself, not entirely realising what was going on. He’d thought it was a dream, or that he was simply imagining that you could finally touch him as though you were a human, and no longer a cold, blue ghost.

Because you weren’t. You were no longer a ghost.

Obi-Wan didn’t realise till he rose the next morning, a blanket tossed over him and the feeling of your lips still lingering on his, even hours later. He even dared to smile for a moment, before the knowledge of what he’d done hit him. He’d given you what you wanted - an unintentional confession of love. The thing you needed to finally cut off your Force connection. The only thing still tethering you to this world.

You were gone, but at least he’d finally gotten what he wanted. You. Even if it was only for a few moments.

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mandareeboo · 3 years

Note

Drabble Prompt: Okay so yeah. There’s a superhero team up of at least Supergirl, Aqualad and technically Superman but he’s not really paying that much attention to Kara and Garth. But then during a calmer moment, Clark checks back on those two and sees them being sibs.

Clark didn't enjoy working with most heroes, and he especially didn't like working with Kara's friends (they always gave him these... looks. Like he was the one in the wrong when Kara was destroying buildings on live TV), but one perk was that heroes never tended to ask questions, in or out of mask. Clark can walk up to Kara and the small child that was clearly Aqualad in the fight against a giant squid half an hour earlier and not be afraid of being outed.

Kara looked up, scoffed, and halfheartedly swatted the kid's shoulder. "Garth, this is Clark. My cousin."

Clark gave the kid a smile. "Car got blown away in the fight," he lied. "Got room for one more at the bus stop?"

(Bus stops are so dang lame. He'd rather fly, honestly. But if Kara of all people was waiting for a bus, he could only assume she had hit a rough patch, and it was his duty as her little cousin to rub that in.)

Garth blinked at him. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

"Uh," said Clark, intelligently, feeling his well-planned soliloquy flying out the metaphorical window.

"He writes nerd stories for the nerd paper," Kara said.

"That's it!" Garth cried, snapping his fingers. "Are you here to write a story about the squid?"

Clark looked at Garth, his eyes glowing with earnest excitement, then Kara. He raised an eyebrow. Is he really this clueless? Kara raised hers back. What do you think, smart guy? He clapped him on the shoulder. “Sure am, buddy! It’s not every day Superman gets to destroy an evil space squid. It’s more like a... once a month thing.”

“He usually saves the seafood for Supergirl,” Kara said, quite pointedly.

“Oh, come now, cuz,” Clark replied, enunciating for irritation, “it’s not Superman’s fault they always seem to land in Supergirl’s part of town. She’s the one who made such a big fuss about separating Metropolis for patrols, isn’t she?”

“Maybe if Superman didn’t hog all the front lines-”

Garth grabbed her elbow and Kara stopped, but only because he was pointing. “The bus is here!”

She squinted at the large object as if it deeply offended her and tossed a disgusted look at him over her shoulder. “Either join us or don’t, Clark. I’m not covering your fare.” Garth went to pat his pockets but she stopped him, slightly shaking her head. The boy looked relieved.

Clark frowned. Something unfamiliar gurgled up inside him as he watched the blonde help Garth up the step into the bus and paid his fee for him.

It was stupid of him to feel jealous. Immature. But Kara always managed to turn him back into that snotty brat he used to be. She was the iceberg of his childhood- never changing, stuck in the age he’d last seen her in thanks to that glitch in space stasis.

But here this kid was, confidently crawling up on the seat next to Kara. Shoving his phone in her face. Showing her a video of some weird toy robots. And here Kara was- not only allowing it, but encouraging it, nodding along and bumping their shoulders together. Eventually the kid hunkered down and fell asleep, snoring into her shoulder, and Kara still showed none of her usual irritation, throwing an arm around his back.

The same way she’d treated him, back in the day.

Maybe he’d just assumed that those days on Krypton- before the resentment, and the superheroing, and the constant noise of Metropolis threatened to overwhelm Kara’s ears- had been special to both of them.

It dawned on him with the same, slow creeping sensation one got sinking into a bathtub. He leaned over Garth’s head and murmured in her ear. “Are you taking the bus for him?”

Kara rolled her eyes, then shrugged. “He’s get motion sick when we fly.”

As if this was common sense.

As if Kara had ever listened to or abided by common sense.

“Bit clingy, isn’t he?” Clark said, with some distaste.

“He’s got one of those velcro-grip control moms,” she explained. “Hanging with me is a lot less pressure.”

“Ah, yes.” Clark rubbed the back of his head, more lost than ever before. “I hear that’s a problem that the youth are facing. Moms. Being velcro.”

Kara didn’t seem too put off by his attempt at humor. “Wouldn’t know.”

“Kara-”

“Don’t give that lecture, Clark. The Danvers’ and I cohabitate just fine, but I’m not like you. The Kents made your their son before you were old enough to get a pimple.”

“Jeez, relax. I wasn’t gonna go there,” Clark said, having absolutely intending to originally go there. “It’s just... surprising. Seeing you like this again. It’s been awhile since you were so... thoughtful.”

Kara scrubbed a hand through Garth’s hair. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t hard enough to stir him, either. “Yeah, well,” she answered, staring out the window. “It’s been awhile since someone needed me, I guess.”

#Ask #Question Mandar #randox-talore #Drabble Prompts #Drabble Prompts Monday #DC Superhero Girls 2019 #Kara Danvers #Clark Kent #Garth Bernstein #Have I mentioned I just. Really love how Kara says Clark.#There is SO much snark in it #Beautiful #10/10 #Also I wanna say Garth is definitely more aware than he lets on here #Like he doesn't get that Clark = Superman #But he DID pick up on Clark defending Superman #And how much Kara was frustrated by that #And was tryna distract her from that

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pterodactylschreech · 3 years

Text

Entangled

(One-shot based on this post)

Lena looks beautiful tonight.

She's all Kara can think about, despite being surrounded by everyone she loves. Her eyes track back every few seconds no matter where she treks in the apartment or how much her family and friends vie for her attention. It's their first game night post-Phantom Zone and post-The Break, as Kara thinks of it. The first time everyone is back together, smiling and laughing and happy, in over a year. And they all want Kara's attention, her presence the glue for the family after her absence.

But all she can think about is Lena.

Lena sitting close on the couch while they play games. Lena passing her the last pot sticker on her plate without thought. Lena standing in the kitchen refilling her wine glass and mingling with Kelly and Brainy, at home among their friends. Kara focuses on her, intent to memorize every single detail of the other women as if she may never see her again. The crinkles by her piercing eyes when she squints in laughter at one of Nia's corny puns. The play of light on her features accentuating the sharp angle of her jaw and the soft curve of her lips. The gentle, bright look she shares with Kara when she catches her looking, a hard won relief radiating out from the woman after months of fighting one another. Kara could practically taste the joy on the air, surrounded by her little family.

Kara hopes that look means everything that her matching expression means: I love you. I'm home again, and I missed you. Hopes beyond all reason that Lena understands and is sending the same message back.

It's been a week since she returned to find Lena unemployed and living at the Tower out of a hastily packed suitcase. A week since she refused to let Lena remain in the cold and impersonal lair and convinced Lena to unofficially move in with her. She wouldn't admit it, not even to Alex, but one of the reasons Kara insisted so strongly was because she couldn't bear to sleep alone. The memories of her nightmares from her childhood after landing on Earth were enough to drench her in fear of the coming nights, the darkness and isolation that pulled her under the waves of terror. It turned out to be the best decision for both of the women as they both suffered and only found peace and reprieve when sleeping next to one another.

And it's been two days since Kara bared her soul to Alex, finally admitting the depth of her feelings for Lena after her sister told her about the decision they had been forced to make: Kara or National City. Her feelings that lay dormant for years due to her fear but surfaced to crush her under their weight during the year spent away from Lena, that grew like ivy through her heart until they covered every inch of her life. Kara sobbed into Alex's shoulder, for time lost and hope and comfort from her one constant through everything. Alex, for her part, seemed decidedly less surprised by Kara's outburst than she had expected. She let Kara expend her tears, then quietly told her it was time for Kara to choose her own happiness first. To put herself before the world and her past and her decades of fear. To tell Lena and let them be happy, together.

So now, Kara sits on her couch, surrounded by family and basking in the warmth of their love and closeness, nervous and fidgeting while she anxiously replays her prepared speech over and over in her head. For one terrifying moment, the whole situation felt excruciatingly familiar and terror spikes through her. Alex lays a hand on her bouncing knee, a distraction and reassurance that all would end well if Kara just trusted herself and Lena.

The night wore on in pleasant company until the group thinned out, pair by pair. Only Alex and Kelly remain on their way out of the apartment. Alex lingers in the doorway to give Kara an extended hug and whisper encouragement in her ear. "Good luck, Kar. Love you." She and Kelly say their last goodbye to Lena, and Kara quietly closes the door for the evening.

After taking a deep, steadying breath, Kara turns back to find Lena tossing empty take-out boxes into the recycling bin and setting their empty glasses in the sink. With her hair in a haphazard bun, Kara's NCU sweatshirt, and her cheeks pink tinged, Lena leaves Kara breathless in the entryway. The domesticity and familiarity of Lena in her clothes, in her home and cleaning up; in her glasses, forgotten after a particularly spot on impersonation during charades and still perched on the bridge of her nose, have Kara dreaming of their possible future. Of games nights and family dinners and quiet nights in that begin and end with Lena by her side.

Kara's tongue darts out to wet her lips and her hands twist together as she moves closer to Lena who has rinsed the glasses and is drying her hands on one of Kara's novelty printed dish towels. When she turns and spots Kara, hovering nearby but without fully approaching, she watches the simple movements of Kara's hands with rapt attention and smiles the same gentle grin from throughout the night. The corners of her mouth turn down slightly when she notices the focused crinkle between Kara's eyes, the unfailing sign she was deep in thought or struggling to vocalize something she found important.

Kara hardly registers the soft padding of Lena's socked feet across the floor until she reaches up to smooth the offending crinkle away with her fingertips. Kara's eyes drop closed at the gentle press, and she exhales a long held breath, focusing entirely on the point of contact and warmth to ground herself in the moment and chase any final doubts away. "Lena," Kara's voice puffs out into the quiet of their closeness. Lena's hand drifts to brush a stray curl behind Kara's ear before answering, matching her reverent tone. "What is it, darling?" Kara's eyes slide open to take in the gaze fixed on her: Lena promising safety and trust trust with nothing but the vulnerability in her eyes and the press of her hand to Kara's chest, just over where her crest materializes. It's enough to set Kara's heart beating wildly in anticipation.

"I need to tell you something. We promised each other, no more secrets. And there's one more thing I need you to know before we try this again. Our friendship, or you know, us."

Kara can see Lena's response to her words and hesitated. Lena's shoulders immediately tensing and her mouth drawing into a tight line, fighting trembling lips. She places her hand over Lena's on her chest to keep her from pulling away preemptively and to draw the strength she needs for what may come next. "Kara, what-?" "Wait, please. It's not bad, well, I don't think so, it's just, um-" Kara stops to regroup her frantic thoughts.

"Just, um, let me say what I need to say. And, if you don't, you know, feel the same or want anything to change, then none of this will matter."

Lena relaxes minutely, squinting at Kara's phrasing in suspicion and confusion. She lets Kara hold her hand in place. Once she feels Lena's tension release enough to prove she's listening, Kara plunges into her speech.

"Lena, you are my best friend. One of the two most important people to me. When we were fighting," Kara sucks in a deep breath at the lingering pain of their separation. "that was one of the hardest years of my life. All this terrible stuff was happening, and my person, the one I go to when everything feels like its falling apart, was gone. You were gone. I could still hear you and see you, but I couldn't have you. You were gone, and it was all my fault."

Hot tears spill free from Kara's eyes. When Lena reaches up to wipe them away, Kara leans heavily into her warm palm.

"Kara, darling, it's okay. We've forgiven each other. You don't need to apologize again."

A soft laugh escapes Kara's lips before she turns her head to press a kiss to Lena's palm. She speaks into Lena's hand, too nervous to see what Lena's reaction will be to her next words.

"I'm not. I'm just being honest. I lied to you for years. Willfully. Cruelly. Because I was selfish and stupid and scared. Rao, I was so scared to lose you. So, I rationalized lying day after day because I knew you'd leave when I told you. I knew the moment I said the words, it was over. No matter what I did or said, I would lose you."

The apartment was silent but for Kara's sniffles and her overflowing words.

"I did lose you." The whisper carries a year's worth of pain and longing.

"But, me being Supergirl isn't the biggest thing I haven't told you."

Lena's sharp inhale draws a fresh panicked round of tears from Kara who holds tighter to Lena's hand on her chest and forges onward quickly.

"You have to understand why I haven't said anything. It's not that I haven't wanted to; it's all I can think about sometimes. Most days now. But I couldn't. How could I- it would've been-" Kara stops and looks at Lena again, to read the expectation and shock flaring behind her green eyes. "I had to be honest about who I am before I could be honest about how I feel."

Lena joins Kara now with the first of her own tears breaking free to run down her cheeks. Kara can hear the quickening pace of her heart and focuses on the sound.

"Lena, I met you, and my whole world changed. You didn't know me during my first year as Supergirl, didn't see the rage that I could barely control or the reckless way I threw myself at every enemy. I struggled. A lot. But you showed me that we aren't bound by our family's sins. That I could hope and change and-" Kara feels the weight of the word on the tip of her tongue, rolls it around in her head another second and tastes the letters as they spill out for Lena to catch or watch shatter on the ground. "love. I met you, and I realized how deeply and fully I can love. I've lost so much, so many people, and I tend to be very protective of the love I share. But, I've learned that, despite what I've lost, the pain and the loneliness, I can love with my entire self. With all of who I am. With my heart, my body, and my soul. All that I am; all that I've experienced and will experience, everything. I can love through it and find strength in those who love me."

It was now Kara's turn to gently brush the fallen tears from Lena's cheek, one hand still holding firmly to Lena's hand on her chest.

"I've been drawn to you from the first day we met and every day after. I've never been able to fight it. Never wanted to, even when we were on opposites sides. I could never quite see through my love for you. Alex used to find it extremely frustrating, but I think she's finally come around."

Their watery laughs mingle together.

"You asked me once if I knew anything about quantum entanglement. I may know more about it than I admitted. And since that day, I haven't been able to think of you in any other way. I love you, but it isn't just that I love you. I am tethered to you, pulled across the universe to orbit you. The true source of my strength. I am entwined with you on a molecular level and in my soul. My parents sent me here to save me and to protect Kal, but something more, something bigger, maybe Rao himself, brought me to you."

Kara carefully absorbs Lena's body language, her stillness and continued silence. She seems to barely be breathing in the wake of the confession. The only sign Kara has that Lena is still listening is the furious pounding of her heartbeat reverberating through Kara's ears. Normally, even moments ago, the steady rhythm calms Kara, so much that she would take to flying over L-Corp during the past year just to hear the familiar sound. But now it leaves her uncertain and nervous. She fills the empty charged air with rambling, too anxious to wait for Lena to resume her normal functioning.

"I understand you might not feel the same, and after everything, I don't blame you. I mean, I did lie and then call you a villain and treat you pretty bad, so yeah." Kara trails off, cringing at the less than stellar stream of words her mouth chose. "So, um, if you don't want anything to change, then it doesn't have to. It won't. We can keep being friends and having game nights and movie nights. And you can obviously stay here as long as you need. I just, um, needed you to know how I feel."

The tide was open, and Kara couldn't find the ability to lock the flood gates on her mouth. Tears begin a fresh descent in the wake of her expelled anxiety.

"And I feel that I love you. That I am in love with you. I am in love with you, Lena."

Salt brines her lips, and her tongue tastes the clinging mineral as it slides out to wet them. Lena remains stoically still in her position pressed to Kara and swimming in her own trickle of tears. Kara notes the slowing of them, the crystalline droplets that drip from her jaw to the floor. She watches Lena's lips part and the quick flicker of her green eyes over Kara's face, landing first on her own blue eyes, then her nose, her cheeks, the scar above her eyebrow, before settling lower on her trembling lips.

She can't stand the limbo, the electric deja vu and mixture of fear and hope.

"Lena, please say something."

In reflection, Kara knows the moment, the span of seconds between her plead and Lena's reaction, only lasted the length of a heartbeat. But in the beat between her words and Lena's movement, Kara felt the weight of every loss she's suffered, every end. And every beginning. Every beautiful Earth sunrise and blossoming friendship. Anticipation swelled painfully behind her ribcage, her heart preparing to drop or soar.

In that moment, Lena held more power over Kara than any amount of Kryptonite ever could. With one second she could either crush Kara beneath one more disappointment and loss, or she could fuel Kara more powerfully than the yellow sun.

Kara's throat tenses with choking tears as she opens her mouth to withdraw every word to ever steal its way past her lips, but Lena blocks any hasty retreat half-formed with her own lips pressing firmly against Kara's. She pushes forward, bumping their noses and pressing her body impossibly closer, their hands still trapped between the mingling beats of their hearts.

Locked and entwined. Entangled over an invisible crest.

When her lips meet Kara's, soft but sure and insistent, Kara's mind blissfully silences but for the rapid fire pleasure of feeling and Lena. The burning desire in her chest spreading through her limbs and begging for more. More skin, more lips, more pressure. More Lena. All around her, flooding her senses until there's nothing left but the two of them.

It's everything and more than she imagined. Her nose fills with nothing but the sweet perfume Lena wears daily, and the lavender undertones of her own conditioner in Lena's hair. For once, the world quiets in Kara's hypersensitive ears, condensed to the sighs escaping Lena's mouth as she leans further into their kiss. And it's the taste that leaves Kara dazed and desperate for the next kiss. The fruity wine clinging to Lena's tongue and the underlying taste that is distinctly Lena. Unlike anything Kara has ever tasted and addictive from the first touch of Lena's tongue to her own.

They remain in their embrace, erasing any space that crept between them during their fighting and time apart. Even after breaking for air and resting their foreheads together, reveling in one another, they stay close. Kara can't fight the broad smile stretching across her face, and she hears Lena's matching grin in her words, reverently whispered in their shared breaths.

"And I love you, Kara. All of you. Always."

AO3 link

#supergirl #supercorp #supercorp fic #kara danvers #lena luthor

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thornedrose44 · 3 years

Text

Ends of the Earth

(Read it on AO3)

The world ended.

Well, that's not technically accurate… humanity's time on earth ended, a lot sooner than to be expected which is where the tragedy of it all lies, if Lena were to guess.

Not that Lena's own time on earth had ended. She was still here, pottering on, miles underground, fiddling with forgotten experiments and watching endless hours of television that she never had time for before…

She wondered if this was what retirement was like…

Admittedly, Lena had always imagined it involving more travelling, maybe some gardening and it had never been lonely. She refused to acknowledge that when she thought of getting older it was with crinkly blue eyes and silver streaked blonde hair at her side which always helped soothe the ache in her chest that such morbid thoughts produced. Now, even that fantasy was well and truly gone.

She would only ever get to watch herself grow old now, at least she didn't have to worry about the paparazzi's comments about her receding good looks.

It wasn’t a bad life, not really. She had enough food to see her through old age or until the tempting call of the void summoned her. If Lena was being honest, which she kind of had to be when the only person she had left to lie to was herself… She knew it would be the latter that would take her in the end.

See the thing is… Lena hears… things.

They’re not real, or they are but they are merely the sounds that an empty building creates to keep itself company. The groan of a pipe. The squeak of a beam. The hiss of a fridge. The knock of a mechanised system keeping the air breathable and the water on hand.

Lena still had enough of her sanity to convince herself that the sounds were a natural part of her safe haven (‘prison’ more like). But there were mutters at the back of her mind that said other things. That squeak was a mouse still alive on the outside. That groan was a ghost, trapped forever alongside Lena. That hiss, the blast-proof doors whistling open and irreparably bursting Lena’s protective bubble. That knock…

The knock was the worst.

The knock was the call of the void that allowed Lena to fantasise. To dream.

That knock meant she was no longer alone.

That knock… that knock could be everything she ever wanted…

That knock could be Kara…

And that…

Lena knew that it would be the void that got her before old age. It would be that knock, her loneliness and the hope of seeing blue eyes just one more time… just one more time…. That would do her in.

***

The first six months hadn’t been too bad. Lena had kept herself busy making the repairs she needed to keep her safe haven ‘safe’ for as long as possible. The Children of Earth’s final attack, that had prompted humanity’s departure two months ahead of schedule and Lena staying behind to ensure their escape, had wrought significant damage to the structure of the bunker.

The work was dull. But it was good. It kept her hands busy. Her mind distracted. And it meant she could fall into bed, utterly exhausted and free of thoughts of what ifs and almosts and not yets and soons and new beginnings…

The majority of the work required for Lena’s home to be brought to tip-top shape was done after six months. The next six months were about optimisation. Trying to make her home… more homey… An already difficult task when there was little in the way of colour to decorate the concrete bunker, but a nigh on impossible task when Lena’s home had never been four walls but blue eyes, golden hair, a bright smile and a warmth that made even the darkest moments survivable.

It was the second year that broke something in Lena that she would never get back again.

It made the light in her chest steadily dim and extinguish.

A candle that had remained alight with the childish possibility that Lena would get her miracle, her last second save and a happy ending.

She knew it was impossible. Knew that the surface of the Earth was not accessible to another living being. That the transmat portal could not be repaired, the necessary materials completely depleted - even if Lena had the materials to repair it, she wouldn’t have been able to generate a high enough voltage to power it. That the survivors were now countless lightyears away and a ship travelling to her would arrive long after she had turned to little more than dust in this mausoleum.

To survive the breaking (more specifically the ‘breakdown’ that had Lena spending pretty much the entirety of a month drunk off her ass), Lena found a routine. She found a routine and stuck to it.

A routine that kept her busy, mentally and physically occupied because if she stopped… if she let her thoughts wander… Well, that knock started to sound rather enticing.

Lena performed regimented checks of her safe haven and its equipment.

Lena had time for reading. For television.

Time for fun science experiments she never had time to progress when the scientist part of her was told to give way to the business woman part.

Time for exercise; soft curves hardening to muscles as she threw around equipment and worked tirelessly and rigorously.

Set meals.

Set bedtime.

Set wake-up.

Day after day passed by in this fashion. Weeks. Months.

Two years in her concrete bunker became three, became five… and before Lena really knew it… she was rapidly approaching a decade in this prison of monotony.

***

It had started with an innocuous ‘beep’.

A fucking beep foretold the destruction of Earth - Lena prayed that humanity, when they re-told the story of the fall of their first home, would ignore that particular aspect of the tale.

It had all started out as a minor reading on a random L-Corp machine tucked away at the back of Lena's lab. (It had been the beginning of yet another half-formed experiment by an idealistic Lena when she thought that being in charge meant she could spend time on her own projects. How utterly naive she had been.)

Lena had taken it over to the DEO where she and Brainy looked over it together for a weekend - mostly because Lena had nothing better to do, what with her friendships being more or less non-existent since her near defection back to the Luthors and despite her subsequent assistance in bringing down Lex.

Lena assumed it was an atypical reading, a presumption that had been reinforced by Brainy with knowledge of the future. Because if this erroneous result was in fact true and accurate then… the Sun clearly had it in for the Earth.

It was heating and expanding at a ridiculous rate. A rate which would make the Earth uninhabitable in a mere handful of years, the heat and radioactivity increasing to such a level that it would be like living in an overpowered microwave.

So, the result had to be wrong because as far as Brainy was aware the Earth was very much still standing a thousand years down the line.

It took a month, with nearly all of L-Corp's resources working on it to find out that, as it turns out, the future can change.

Which was great news for those strongly in favour of free will and heavily against predetermination. Less great news for those that had recently got a mortgage for a new house…

It was full go then.

The next two years were some of the worst and best of Lena's life.

The sun's sudden failure was a parting gift from the Daxamites, who were big believers in ‘if I can't have it, you can't have it either’. Lena assumed Lex would appreciate the pettiness of the action.

The first six months had been filled with hope and a fervour to fix it. Solve the problem like the Superfriends had so many others before. Kara was their guiding light, tirelessly chasing down every lead, ready to get whatever Lena, Brainy and the whole cohort of scientists required at a moment's notice.

Lena, however, wasn't hopeful. She wasn't an optimist. Not anymore at least. Maybe once, when she was young and her mother was there to chase away the monsters under the bed and lift her into the air when the sun was at its warmest.

She had been hurt, though. Lied to and betrayed far too much to have faith in some intangible and, as of yet, unknown success. She was a Luthor. Raised to be resourceful, stubborn and with a tendency to doubt.

So, whilst her team of great minds slept, Lena would stay awake an extra couple of hours and plan and prepare for the worst. Because you never know when 'just in case' would be the only option left.

Lena and Kara's friendship over that six months steadily rebuilt.

It rebuilt over peace offering coffees brought to Lena's side by fidgeting fingers, “You look like you need it.”

“You didn’t have to.” Lena would always remind, not wanting there to be an obligation, not wanting Kara to be there unless she wanted to be.

“I know… I wanted to…” Would always be murmured back, soft and sincere, a rope cast out in the darkness.

It was rebuilt by softly spoken encouragement when either flagged.

“What use am I? It’s not like I can punch the sun better.” Kara huffed on days when she was left to pace without direction waiting for the next task, the next lead, the next… whatever...

“No, but I know that you would if you could.” Lena would reply, earning her a small upwards tick to Kara’s lips that made Lena’s heart flutter with something other than a constant state of anxiety. “You are more than just your powers, Kara. Far more.” Lena would whisper earnestly, and Kara would simply rest her head on Lena’s shoulder.

It was rebuilt by fingers gently interlacing to offer comfort, “We’ll find something.”

“Together?”

“How else? A Super and Luthor are unstoppable, didn’t you know?”

It was rebuilt by Kara sharing her fears of losing yet another home and Lena listening, “I don’t know if I can take another loss like this.”

“I know, I can’t even begin to understand what you must be going through, but it's not going to be the same as last time, you know?” Lena would murmur, soft and hesitant, afraid of stepping wrong, afraid of treading on Kara’s open wounds that she had never known were there before. “If it does happen…” Lena would tack on (always if, never when) in those first few months. “You won’t lose everything. I won’t let you. Everyone that can be saved, will be.”

“Is it bad that I don’t… I can live with a few losses… I can, but there are some… Some that matter more...” Kara confessed haltingly, blue eyes wide and scared as if she was revealing something she wasn’t sure Lena was ready to hear yet.

“No, there’s nothing bad about that. At least,” Lena murmured, ducking her head as she curled her fingers tighter around Kara’s, her thumb rubbing back and forth over knuckles, “I don’t think of myself as a bad person for it.”

“You’re not.” Kara would insist, finally covering over the hurt of ‘villain’ once and for all.

It was rebuilt in Kara carrying Lena to her cot in the backroom of the labs whenever she found her slumped over her keyboard in the early hours of the morning.

“Hmm…” Lena would sleepily hum as she felt herself being cradled in Kara’s arms who never used super-speed when she was carrying her anymore, something Lena was grateful for as it gave her precious extra seconds of being safely ensconced by everything Kara.

“Sleep, Lena, just sleep.” Kara would mutter tenderly, lowering her onto the blankets and pressing an almost imperceptible kiss to Lena’s forehead which guaranteed Lena pleasant dreams.

It was rebuilt on tragedy and hope. It was rebuilt on optimism and pessimism. It was rebuilt by two people who just wanted to save each other in whatever way they could.

***

After six months, it was known. It was known that there was no Hail Mary that could undo what had happened.

Now, it was just about survival… and, for some unfathomable reason, everyone was looking at Lena to ensure that.

“Me! Kara, they’re looking at me to… to… save them!” Lena yelled incredulously once she had returned to the sanctuary of her lab and it was just the two of them (as it often was now).

“Yeah… they are…” Kara replied with a shrug like it was obvious and understandable.

“Me! A Luthor!”

“No. Not a Luthor.” Kara declared firmly, lifting her chin in that way that always made Lena’s knees just that little bit weak. “Lena. The woman that has saved this planet and its people time and time again. A woman who has proven herself selfless and a hero in every way possible. The person that I…” Kara swallowed thickly and in that moment, Lena couldn’t breath, couldn’t move, couldn’t even think. Kara stepped towards her, strong and confident, reaching out to take Lena’s hands in her own, squeezing them tightly as earnest blue eyes stared deep into lost green. “Lena Luthor, you are my hero and I am always looking to you to save me.”

Lena finally inhaled a shuddering breath, nodded her head once and got to work.

The first step was the underground bunkers that would provide shelter for humanity whilst a more long term solution was achieved. The bunkers were not designed to be aesthetically pleasing or even remotely homely. They were functional, quick to put in place and hopefully temporary (which they would be for all but one).

Whilst the bunkers were built, Lena and her team were given two momentous undertakings that were critical for humanity’s continued existence:

Find a suitable new planet to call home.

Figure out how to get the entire population of Earth there as quickly as possible.

Lena hated the second six months of those two years. Kara was barely around, constantly buried under miles of earth, supporting the construction teams in their work, her help was crucial as having someone who could manoeuvre large weights delicately removed the overheads of large pieces of equipment and the time they would take to get in position and slowly carry out the task. When Kara ever did manage to poke her head above sea level, she was off to far flung places trying to minimise the impact of whatever natural disaster was occurring due to the Sun’s interest in making Earth a holiday destination for lava monsters in the near future.

Kara only ever made it back to National City for the occasional weekend once a month. A weekend that she mostly spent sleeping after having pushed herself past the point of exhaustion.

Kara had taken to sleeping in Lena's cot whenever she was back, holding Lena close instinctively whenever the former CEO managed to collapse beside her after her own ridiculously long days.

“You know, you have a far more comfortable bed at home? With proper sheets and pillows and blankets and all those really good things that are conducive to sleep…” Lena drawled as she slipped off her heels and sat on the edge of the cot that was already filled with a dozing superhero.

“I could say the same thing to you.” Kara yawned in return, shuffling to the edge of the single-person cot to leave a reasonable gap for Lena.

“Yeah, but…” Lena began to argue, biting her lip; Kara was out there everyday pushing her body beyond its limits in places with little sun, little hope and little in the way of comfort. And when she was granted a few hours of reprieve, just a few measly hours to rest before she was pulled back under, she spent it in a darkened back-room of a laboratory.

“No buts.” Kara cut in, tugging at Lena’s sleeve to pull her down into the empty space and open arms. “I’m here because…” Kara murmured, nuzzling her nose against Lena’s forehead whilst kindly ignoring Lena’s pounding heart, “Because I want to be here.”

“I want you here too.” Lena would eventually reply once her heart had returned to a normal beat and she was sure Kara had fallen into a deep slumber.

(The Superfriends talked about Kara never returning home and choosing to be wherever Lena was amongst themselves, but they never brought it up with either woman, presumably out of respect or simply being too busy with the impending end of the world).

During that time, Lena was under more stress than she had ever been in her entire life. A whole planet on her shoulders and she was being crushed under the weight of it all.

On the plus side, it was the longest anyone had ever gone without spitting her last name out with disgust. It was difficult to damn the person working tirelessly to save you. Not that there weren't some that tried to call her saviour and devil in the same breath, but the Superfriends, who had become her friends again, would put a stop to it before they ever got to the second part of their sentence.

Lena knew that Kara had asked them to look after her whilst she was away. And she appreciated the thought more than she appreciated the actual looking after. Alex had taken to looming over her shoulder like a bodyguard and frog marching her to the canteen at set times to eat three meals a day. Nia, meanwhile, insisted that Lena walk up and down the white-washed corridors of the laboratory at least twice a day to ensure she exercised.

She grew to love them all: Brainy who was constantly by her side, Alex who was holding her up when she nearly collapsed from exhaustion and Nia who always managed to remind her of the small things she was fighting to save when she got lost in the big picture. She loved them but every time they pulled her away from her work, Lena would hear a voice in her head whispering an ominous countdown.

***

One year post-world-ending-beep, and humanity was tucked away in its new home - the bunkers underground.

Lena and Brainy had finally found a promising planet that they could call home, code-named Goldilocks until an actual name was selected when they finally stepped foot on it (it felt weird officially naming something that they had never seen or experienced). Now, they just had to get everyone there and Lena doubted that there was an intergalactic moving service - maybe that could be her new business venture after her secondment as humanity’s supposed saviour was complete.

Their best option was the transmat portals (mark two) that she somehow needed to make so that they didn’t require a corresponding portal on the other side. Their idea was more of a wormhole or slingshot, that flung them across the galaxy. They had transports that they could load people up in, they now just needed to create the ‘road’ or ‘shortcut’.

Lena spent day after endless day with Brainy in contact with Earth’s greatest physicists trying to solve problems and reconcile theories that would probably have taken centuries to solve, but mother was the necessity of invention. And dear god, did they need this invention.

The pressure was destroying Lena and more importantly it was creating a gulf between her and Kara that they had so pain-stakingly worked to remove over the last year.

“Lena, you need to eat.” Kara pleaded, her fingers making only fleeting contact with Lena’s elbow, the last time she had made contact Lena had flinched which had hurt Kara in a way that no physical attack ever could.

“I’ll eat later.” Lena replied sharply, her eyes remaining fixed on the board in front of her.

“Come on, Lena. Everyone else has taken a break.” Kara murmured, gesturing to the empty room and the blank computer screens.

“I’m not like everyone else.” Lena responded absent-mindedly.

“I know, I know…” Kara soothed, fingers twitching with the obvious desire to pull Lena into her arms.

It had been weeks since Lena had been in Kara’s arms but Lena knew… knew that if she sunk into Kara’s embrace, she would crack open and she didn’t know if she would be strong enough to put herself back together again.

“Just, I’m here… for you… always.” Kara promised with a sad and lost tone of voice that made Lena’s throat tight and scratchy.

***

The Children of Earth were the single most irritating thing about the end of the world, and Lena knew that was saying something.

They were also the people that saw Lena’s near year long record without an assassination attempt as a challenge.

They were a fanatical group that believed if the Earth was ending, the human race should too. That was pretty much it. Considering the rather bleak sales pitch, Lena was impressed by how many people they convinced to eagerly join up.

Unsurprisingly, Lena was the number one target on their (s)hit list - what with being the main person working on getting them all off planet. Kara, took to being by her side almost constantly, an ever present shadow to the youngest Luthor; dark, steely blue eyes and a harsh frown on the world’s celebrated heroine made even the most committed of assassins think twice.

Kara’s shift to bodyguard came after the very first attempt on Lena’s life.

Lena was at her desk in her laboratory, making changes to an algorithm in the dead of night, the rest of her team retreating to their beds for a few hours whilst they could. It was Lena’s shaky hands that saved her life (exhaustion, stress and a near constant caffeine overdose had produced tremors in Lena’s long fingers that Kara couldn’t bear to look at anymore), Shaky hands reaching for a mug of cold coffee. Shaky hands so tired they couldn’t summon up the strength to hold it steady. The porcelain slipping through her fingers and rushing downwards to smash onto the floor.

Lena instinctively scrambled after it, pitching herself awkwardly downwards and to the side,

It was this that saved her.

Ensured the bullet aimed for the centre of her back actually hit her shoulder.

It was the sharp inhale of pain and whisper of Kara’s name as she fell off her stool that saved her.

Because Kara was always listening out for her. On hand and ready the second Lena needed her.

Lena didn’t hit the floor. Didn’t smash into the ground like her coffee mug.

Warm arms were around her before she even got close.

“You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.” Was whispered endlessly on repeat as she was carefully transported to the medbay where Alex and Eliza (quickly roused from sleep by a terrified superhero) got to work. Lena didn’t ask about the assassin, she knew she was safe with Kara watching over her and the Danvers so tenderly cleaning out her wound and that was all that really mattered. She didn’t have any space left in her mind to think of anything else, so overwhelmed with all the problems she had been asked to solve. There was no processing power left to confront other unknown questions.

Kara didn’t leave her side from then on. Not that Lena would let her. Not that night.

Their hands were clasped tightly together and would stay that way even when it inconvenienced the two doctors, who were wise enough not to raise it as an issue.

Lena’s wound was dressed efficiently and in such a way as to minimise scarring, Eliza and Alex returned to bed as they moved away from early morning, and the leaders of the survivors underground were made aware of the threat against their chief scientist. If Kara, as Supergirl, hadn’t insisted on serving personally as Lena’s protector, Lena was pretty sure the leaders would have demanded it, having grown equally fond of and dependent on the youngest Luthor.

When it was just them… just Kara and Lena… that’s when Lena let the tears fall and the sobs wrack her body. She was cradled carefully in Kara’s arms in an instant and everything she had been holding back burst out of her in an unending stream.

It was cathartic, letting it all out whilst Kara just held her and listened and whispered words of reassurance and affection.

The gulf that had formed, disappeared in an instant as Lena buried her head into the crook of Kara’s neck murmuring apology after apology for keeping her out, for putting distance between them, for not being good enough, for not saving Kara’s second home.

Kara listened, rejecting every single apology with a firm voice and understanding blue eyes.

“Don’t push me away again.” Was all Kara asked for.

“Never. Never again.” Lena promised, not knowing at the time how she would be forced to break that promise less than a year from now.

***

The looks and hints and flirts and teases started in earnest then - they had always been there but boyfriends, secrets, distrust, confusion and hurt had blanketed it and kept it from growing. Now, it was just them and the end of the world.

Their days were spent together, Lena trying to save the world and Kara just trying to save Lena.

“You know I was a prodigy back on Krypton…” Kara revealed her past quietly as she was oft to do when the lab was empty and the bunker was blessedly quiet.

“In writing?” Lena asked, abandoning her work to give Kara her full attention - Kara was the only thing, especially when she was like this (soft, vulnerable and eyes aching with the loss of one home) that could make Lena turn away from the screaming voices inside her head.

“No…” Kara laughed lightly, “I was to be the youngest to join the science guild.”

“Really?” Lena murmured in disbelief.

“Hmm…” Kara hummed, her mouth quirking up at the edges; Lena’s eyes dipped down to stare at the movement as they had begun to do with increasing frequency.

“Then why…” Lena began curiously wondering why Kara would turn away from something she had been preparing for and so obviously excelling at.

“Because, on Krypton…” Kara reached out with tentative fingers and pushed a dark lock of hair behind Lena’s ear. “We didn’t have people like you. People who worked on the ‘just in case’. People who spoke up. People who… thought everyone should be trusted with the truth. People who thought everyone deserved to be saved, not just the select few.”

Lena grabbed Kara’s hand and brought it to her lips, pressing a comforting kiss to its palm as Kara revealed her scars to her.

“I didn’t see science the same.” Kara confessed, her gaze turning far-away and distant as she took in the scribbles on the white-board like she recognised the odd syllable of a language she hadn’t spoken in years. “Science was elitist. Science led to hubris. Science failed to save us. But it was the lies that damned us in the first place. So… when I had the chance to start again…” She trailed off, expression melancholic and wistful.

“Thank you for telling me that.” Lena whispered sincerely, once it was clear Kara had nothing left to say.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Kara chuckled dark and pained in a way that made Lena’s heart crack across the surface.

“What is?” Lena prompted, squeezing Kara’s hand tightly in the hopes of grounding her.

“If I had been a journalist on Krypton, I could have made a difference. And if I was a scientist here, I could have made a difference.” Kara said, her smile a dark and broken thing that looked just wrong on her face.

“You make a difference, Kara. Every day. Just by being you.” Lena declared, green eyes sharp and jaw clenched determinedly.

The twisted smile receded back to something soft and adoring. “Maybe for the next one I’ll switch back to science, I mean how long do you think it would take me to get upto speed?” Kara questioned teasingly jerking a thumb at the board covered in excessive equations.

Lena let go of the heavy moment, though she wanted to reinforce to Kara that she was perfect just the way she was. But there would be other moments, other conversations, other secrets shared, other wounds tended…

“Depends on your teacher. With me there to help, I could make you an expert within a decade.” Lena asserted with a confident wink.

Kara’s gaze narrowed, a smouldering smirk slowly appearing as the kryptonian leaned into Lena’s space, “Is that so? Professor?”

Lena gulped.

***

It was a known yet unspoken thing between them.

They spoke around it, danced right up to it, fogged up the glass with eager breaths and pressed against the membrane with curious fingers. Lena knew Kara felt it, in the same way Kara knew Lena felt it. Though, both were too fearful to define it, to say how deep it ran, how much it meant to either of them.

It was ambiguous in its immensity, not in its existence.

Whenever they brushed up against it, and came close to breaking that barely visible wall between them, they were pulled back with murmurs of ‘soon’ and ‘almost’...

They were both too dutiful, too dedicated to the task at hand to leave room for much else. And they both didn’t want to start when they couldn’t commit all of themselves to each other. Wanted their chance to have the highest probability for success that it could. Because that's what they both deserved.

“The first sunset.” Kara murmured when they were cuddled up together on Lena’s cot in the small room put aside for the chief scientist at the back of the lab in the bunker. “Me, you and a picnic under the very first sunset.”

“Sounds romantic.” Lena teased, rubbing her cold nose against Kara’s clavicle.

“I’ve got it all planned.” Kara admitted honestly. “Every last detail.”

“You’ve really thought about this…” Lena said in awe, pulling back to look down into soft blue eyes.

“It’s all I think about…” Kara replied, her fingers stroking up and down Lena’s back - Lena wished those clever, clever fingers would sneak under her sleep shirt and run along her bare skin.

“Soon.” Lena exhaled their now common commitment.

“Soon.” Kara echoed.

***

The transmat portals were nearly done. Ahead of schedule which was probably a first for any project, yet alone one on such a large scale.

The only problem was the energy source. It was… rather unstable and the amount of energy required to power all the portals at the same time was substantial. To ensure the tentative peace between all leaders and those involved, an agreement was made that all the portals would activate at the same time and humanity would pass through in one go to ensure that there was no group given an advantage.

Lena understood the political reasoning but it was an engineering nightmare.

They were working on putting power stabilisers on the portals to limit the impact of unwanted surges, when the Children of Earth made their play.

Coordinated explosions that threatened the sanctity of the bunkers moved the scheduled departure date up and prompted a mass evacuation. Kara didn’t want to leave Lena’s side but the people needed their Supergirl and it wasn’t fair for Kara to stay by Lena’s side when she was far from the fighting and others needed her to be their shield. Kara left her side with a promise of, “Soon, we’ll get our sunset.”

Lena had prepped the transmat portals from the command centre, monitoring the power levels with a wary eye as the bunker shook with the ferocity of the fighting. Lena watched over transport after transport, making changes as required to keep the power stable. As the numbers of those left to go through began to dwindle, Lena sent her team of loyal scientists led by Brainy (who she had to order to leave) on their way, leaving one transport for her and the soldiers holding off the Children of Earth.

Lena struggled, as time ticked ever onwards, to keep the power surges under control and the transmat portal open. With the energy already expended, Lena knew if it closed… it wouldn’t be possible to open it ever again.

The soldiers led by Alex and Nia appeared following a large explosion that completely caved in an entire section of the (thankfully, now empty) civilian barracks. Held up by Alex and Nia was Kara, bloodied and bruised, skin a sickly green as her eyes fluttered weakly and her mouth moved trying to form words, fighting desperately to remain conscious. A battle she lost a second after catching a glimpse of Lena hurrying towards them.

They made their way as a group (Lena and those that had taken the pivotal last stand) to the transport when the evacuation alarm was joined by a clinically detached voice calling out, “Power Level Critical.”

The transmat portal flickered before brightening and then dimming almost immediately. The power surges threatening the very integrity of the portal.

“Lena, we have to go now!” Alex shouted, jerking her head towards the last transport that her group of soldiers were already piling into when she saw Lena freeze mid-step.

Lena doesn’t remember making the decision. It was just instinct. She could work out the variables, could see the solution and just… acted. It didn’t require actual thought.

There was the portal that wasn’t safe for a transport to go through unless someone was making the necessary adjustments to the power in the command centre.

There was Kara, hurt and beaten but still so alive and so beautiful and without a doubt the love of Lena’s life.

It was never a choice, so how could Lena have made a decision.

“No, you have to go. I need to keep the power levels under control. You won’t make it, otherwise.” Lena said, her voice eerily calm and collected for what she was about to do.

The looks of absolute, sheer horror that appeared on Alex and Nia’s faces as understanding dawned would stay with Lena forever. It was the moment she realised she was making a sacrifice and not just carrying out a simply logical action.

“No, Lena…” Alex gasped, her brown eyes turning watery as she hefted Kara higher as if.. As if she was trying to shake Kara awake so that she could bear witness to what was happening.

“There’s no other way.” Lena declared, striding forward to cup Kara’s perfect face in her hands before leaning down to press a soft, farewell kiss to Kara’s cheek. “I was really looking forward to that sunset.” Lena whispered quietly.

Lena took one second to memorise that light vanilla scent that she would always associate with Kara before letting go of the kryptonian and looking to the distraught sister, “Keep her safe.” Lena requested simply, “And…” Lena swallowed thickly, “Tell her to be happy. Just happy.”

And with those final words, Lena sprinted back to the command centre, yelling for Alex to “Go!”

It was a close thing in the end. The power surges were seconds away from blowing the portal, and the bunker along with it, to smithereens when the transport finally zoomed safely through to humanity’s new home. Lena cut off the power just in time to limit the extent of the explosion that followed. The portal blasted apart but it didn’t have enough oomph to rip through the bunker.

It did knock out the lights, though, leaving Lena in absolute darkness for the first week of her new existence as the last human on Earth.

***

Okay, so Lena needed to admit to something… just a small thing… it was just, she knew it made her sound… you know… not really all there…

She had a dog.

A… uh… robot dog… that she had built for herself for company…

And, you know, Tom Hanks had a volleyball so, in comparison to that Milo seemed far more… sane…

(Don’t worry she had resisted the urge to call it K-9 and she had made it far more mobile and life-like than the rather square Doctor Who companion).

His name was Milo, after the main character from Atlantis, one of Kara’s favourite films. He was sleek, more grey-hound shaped than terrier, but moved rather clunkily. He had a tendency to trip when going up or down staircase B5-1 since that particular set of stairs were a little steeper than the others in the bunker and Lena had forgotten to factor that in when she created him. Now, she found the little stumble he made on those steps gave him character, made him seem even more alive than the adaptive AI that operated him so she never bothered to fix it.

Lena resisted the urge to give Milo a voice, since a robotic voice coming from her robo-canine companion kind of ruined the image that she had of Milo being a real dog but she couldn’t stand the silence anymore, couldn’t stand only hearing her own voice.

That was the other thing… after a year she’d started narrating for lack of a better word. Commenting on her work, speaking her thoughts aloud rather than keeping them inside her head. Partly to add some sound to her quiet life and partly (but mostly) to remind herself she was still here, still had a voice.

If a tree fell in the forest would it still make a sound?

Did Lena still exist if no one was around to see or hear her?

In year four of her solitary existence, the narration became full-on conversations with herself which eventually prompted her to create Milo after she realised that she had gone to bed two consecutive nights in a row angry at something she had said to herself.

Milo spoke to her in song.

“You’ll always be here to keep me company, right Milo?” Lena would ask after crying over The Notebook.

“I’m never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.” Milo would blast at her through the speaker in his mouth alongside a friendly wag of his tail.

Lena was working on a beam with a crack in it, bending her head down to check on Milo who was looking up at her through green LED lights. “Did I get it all?” She called down.

“Higher, higher and higher. I said your love…” Milo directed, his LED eyes emitting a beam of light to point out a spot above Lena’s head.

He was a good dog overall, though he definitely had a preference for 80s classics much to Lena’s equal amusement and chagrin.

***

She tried not to think of Kara. But it happened.

The longest she had gone, not including sleep (though most of her dreams involved her blonde best friend so it wouldn’t have helped her average anyway), was three and half hours. An event which occurred during her drunken month in year two; she had grown irrationally angry at the transmat portal and had taken a crow-bar and smashed up the remains of the structure whilst listening to screaming death metal music.

She knew Kara would mourn her, miss her at least for the first year. But Lena knew she would keep herself busy. That there would be near endless tasks to occupy her mind and distract her heart and that whenever there was a lull or a break, the Superfriends led by Alex would be there to soothe whatever pain may surface.

Hopefully, by the second year Kara would be able to think of her and it be a joyful experience rather than one of pain. She knew Kara would still think of her often even one year removed from their separation (loss). Knew she had been significant enough to Kara to leave a wake behind.

By the third year, Kara would be ready - Lena didn’t doubt - to open her heart to another, to find someone else to fill the spaces Lena fleetingly occupied. There would be plenty ready and waiting, many probably far more deserving than Lena.

Kara would find someone else to share that sunset with.

Years four to six, Lena hoped Kara would be rediscovering her passions, that her new home would be stable enough that Kara could get back to the things that made her happy. Lena hoped Kara was still writing, still turning her hand to paper and creating wonderful prose.

Years six onwards… Lena imagined Kara with a family of her own. The image would shift and change but there were always two children underfoot that Kara adored and both of which had inherited Kara’s blue eyes and pure heart. The other person in the picture was blank-faced, their features undetermined. Male or female, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was they put the brightest smile on Kara’s face possible.

“Just be happy.” Lena would whisper her plea out to the universe last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Because, if she said it enough, willed it enough then there was a chance she could make it true. Make the picture in her head of Kara real just by wishing it hard enough.

***

It was the start of her ninth year - Lena kept track by way of scratching into the walls a tally since it pleased her to think she was leaving some indelible mark on this place even if no one else would ever see it - and the knock was starting to become just that little bit more enticing. Lena had started to find herself walking up to the large blast doors and just… staring at them for hours on end.

It was only Milo that was keeping her going by this stage, blasting out, “Don’t you forget about me”, and “Oh, won’t you stay with me? ‘Cause you’re all I need”, whenever Lena’s fingers so much as twitched towards the manual override button.

Lena didn’t think too deeply about how her only reason for carrying on was the potential guilt that came with breaking the heart of a robot dog.

“Spread it like peanut butter jelly...”

“Whilst I appreciate that you found the perfect song for my current actions”, Lena chuckled, casting an amused glance over her shoulder at her companion, whilst she spread the peanut butter over the plastic-like bread that had been made to last decades, “I don’t think you realise what that song is really about…”

Milo’s head tilted to the side at the words - Lena had designed him so that when he was processing new information or analysing anything he would tilt his head to the side like a real dog.

“Oops!... I did it again…” Milo proclaimed, dropping to the ground with an embarrassed shake of his metal head.

“You’re still my best boy, don’t worry.” Lena reassured, finishing off preparing her lunch and making her way to the little living space she had made herself, a rather ratty red sofa and television screen had been added to the small room behind her lab that she had made her own. She had just sat down and was about to take a bite of her sandwich when-

Bzzzztttt…

That was new.

The buzzing sound was so loud and clear that it felt like the entire bunker was vibrating with it. Lena was on her feet in an instant, Milo by her side, as she grabbed her tablet and went towards the source of the sound. As soon as the sound had begun, though, it decreased in volume to a mere hum. Outside Lena’s lab, in the long corridor covered in tally marks was a bright purple circle with blue streaks of light hovering below the ceiling. Beneath the light in a crumpled mass was a figure dressed in dark blue and crimson red with a silver cable connected to their centre which disappeared back up into the portal.

“Okay, I got the angle slightly wrong… Yep, face planted…”, The intruder groaned as they pushed themselves up to reveal a mess of hair. “I know, I can fly but I wasn’t thinking about flying and didn’t react in time… and-” The figure struggled to their knees and shifted round, finally catching sight of Lena who was simply standing there, mouth agape, leaning on Milo to keep her upright.

Kara.

It was in that moment that Lena saw a shade of blue she had been deprived of for over nine years. Kara’s eye colour, though, was possibly the only thing about her that hadn’t changed.

Familiar golden curls had been cut away to be replaced by slightly darker blonde with the odd streaks of silver that only just grazed a jawline Lena’s fingers had traced countless times. Also gone was Kara’s defined and overly muscular body, she looked thinner… almost gaunt. Her cheeks hollower than they had ever been before. The crinkles around her eyes were nowhere near as deep as Lena had imagined them to be whenever she thought of Kara with her family. There were instead, however, lines around her mouth that implied she frowned more than smiled and that… that cracked whatever fragile grasp of reality Lena had left completely apart.

Because of this - Lena no longer trusting her eyes, unable to accept an existence where Kara hadn’t been happy, as Lena had begged the universe to make happen everyday - she didn’t truly see the expression on Kara’s face.

She didn’t see the sheer joy, the tears of elation, the broken smile that couldn’t smile as wide as it wanted due to being so out of practice.

“You’re here… You’re really here…” Kara breathed out, her blue eyes drinking in the sight of Lena shifting shyly from foot to foot as she stroked the smooth metal surface of Milo for comfort.

“Kara.” Lena murmured, testing the word out in her mouth, trying to see if she still knew how to say it after all these years.

“Lena, you’re here…” Kara whispered totally awestruck, getting to her feet and taking slow, careful steps towards Lena, her fingers reaching out for the raven-haired woman.

“I don’t under-... this isn’t real… you’re not real… you can’t be real…” Lena stammered, shuffling backwards away from the ghost in front of her, unaware of the gasp of pain that it caused. “Did I answer the knock? Is this a dream? Milo analyse the surroundings and conditions.” Lena ordered, dropping her gaze to her tablet as she tapped frantically against the screen, mumbling her every thought out loud as she had become prone to do over the years. “Hallucination, most likely… potential causes… sleep deprivation? Unlikely, I have a set sleep schedule. Radioactivity has finally penetrated the bunker and has caused a multitude of health problems. Possible, though I take regular readings of-”

“Lena! Please, stop…” Kara cried, collapsing to her knees in front of Lena, tears streaming down her face. “I’m here, okay? I’m really here!”

“No! No!” Lena shouted in return, “This isn’t real! Because… because…” Lena’s breaths came out sharp and panicky as she was overwhelmed by a tempest of emotions she had worked so, so, so hard to deaden herself to over the last nine years. “You’re meant to be married! You’re meant to be happy! You’re not meant to be here…”

Fingers curled delicately around Lena’s biceps; she wasn’t even aware that she had fallen to her knees as well, that she had brought her hands up to cover her face.

The touch and its sheer gentleness almost made Lena jerk away but the barely there scent of vanilla instinctively made her lean forward instead, her head moving to rest as it always used to do on Kara’s reliable shoulder.

“Lena, how could I be happy without you?” Kara whispered, her fingers moving ever so carefully from Lena’s biceps, round to her back… so tenderly wrapping Lena up in her arms. “Let me take you home, please, please Lena… let me take you away from here, please…” Kara begged, pressing featherlight lips against Lena’s forehead. “Let’s go see that sunset, yeah?”

Lena pulled away so that her hands could move to cup Kara’s beautiful, anguished face, thumbs wiping away the endless tears, “You still want to? Even after all this time?”

“It’s all I’ve thought about.” Kara confessed, a breathtaking smile overtaking her face… and that… that one smile made it all worth it… made nine years in darkness… nine years alone all worth it.

Lena loved how that smile stretched under her palms and she wondered how it would feel under her lips; the thought barely even crossed her mind before she started to lean forward to find out, Kara inhaling sharply as she realised what Lena intended, when-

“Sha-la-la-la-la-la, music play, do what the music say, you wanna kiss the girl.” Milo sang out for them, his metal tail thumping happily against the concrete floor, his green LED lights looking between his best friend and this blonde newcomer excitedly.

“Thanks, Milo.” Lena chuckled wetly, glancing over at her robo-dog before looking back to find Kara’s blue eyes sparkling with joy at her. “I have a robot dog, now.” Lena explained needlessly, cheeks turning an embarrassed pink.

“I can see that.” Kara replied with a laugh, her hand reaching out to brush through Lena’s dark hair, as she asked her voice brimming with hope, “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am…” Lena admitted with a fervent nod of her head before pressing a delicate kiss to Kara’s cheek. “I want to see that sunset.”

#supercorp #lena luthor #end of the world AU #happy ending (I promise)#I cried writing this but adored it (what does that say about me?)#Would people be interested in Kara's POV?#Or another part following their time post-saving?

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lena-in-a-red-dress · 3 years

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Metallo!Lena AU Pt 26

"You can't stay with her, Kara," Alex sighs, hours later. "Not this time."

"Why not?"

It's been her role, ever since Lena was first rescued. Lena healed, and Kara waited, and eventually, Lena always woke up. What will happen, then, if this one time Kara can't sit with her?

"Her system didn't respond to her usual green kryptonite," Alex explains, patient despite her exhaustion. "The only way we could keep her going was to hook her up to the supercharged cystals she developed while testing her suit."

"But the lead shielding--"

"Isn't sufficient. Not for this."

"Then I'll sit with her as long as I can..."

Alex gives her a hard stare. "Is that really what Lena would want?" Kara doesn't have an answer. "We've got her in her lab, which is the only reason you're even able to remain in the building right now."

Lena would have shielded her lab from top to bottom before experimenting with her kryptonite. She had been so meticulous about protecting Kara, it would be an insult to her memory to expose herself now.

No, not her memory-- Lena isn't dead yet.

Kara still has hope.

"So what do we do now?"

Alex shrugs. "You keep being Supergirl, and I start reading up on Lena's research. If there's anyway to wean her back down to the usual kryptonite, it'll be there."

Kara nods. She doesn't like the idea of leaving Lena alone, but she's needed more as Supergirl. There's a lot of scared people in National City following Vengeance's appearance at the food bank re-opening. Part of her is grateful for the distraction: unable to wait with Lena, Kara would go out of her mind just sitting on her hands doing nothing.

"What about the mole?" she asks, quietly.

Alex's gaze hardens. "We're still working on it."

"Alex--"

"I'll keep her safe," her sister vows. "I promise."

There's nothing Kara can do. Just nearing the corridor to Lena's lab makes her nauseous, and makes her skin heat. But she can't settle, not until Alex sets her up in a spare office with a video feed of Lena's lab.

Looking at her, Kara almost feels like she's been transported back in time. It's like she's looking at Lena just after her first rescue, her body slack under the thin hospital sheets. But it isn't the same: Kara forces herself to take note of the muscles on Lena's frame, the fullness of her pale cheeks.

Lena's no longer the skeletal figure she used to be. She's not weak, or frail. She's strong. Lex may have stolen Lena, but he hasn't killed her. She can still fight.

And she will.

---

Days crawl by, and Kara exists in a lasting purgatory, drifting between Catco, her Supergirl duties and her surveillance of Lena. Through the lens of the video camera, she can see for herself how Lena's lifesigns grow stronger and more stable. But Lena doesn't wake up.

After a week, Alex warns her they'll be trying to wean Lena to a weaker kryptonite.

"Are you sure it's safe?" Kara asks.

Alex's expression doesn't impart any kind of certainty. "Honestly, I'd prefer to do it with her conscious. But if we wait too long her body may grow accustomed to the increased output, and make it more difficult to downgrade later."

If not outright impossible.

Kara knows what Lena's decision would be, were she awake. The one constant since Lena's rescue has been Lena's refusal to harm anyone, especially Kara. If Lena could choose, she'd make the same decision Alex has.

"Okay," Kara says. "Let's do it."

---

The transition proceeds smoothly, each stage of the stepdown process punctuated by long periods of observation to confirm that Lena's condition doesn't worsen.

With each reduction of the kryotonite's output, Kara creeps ever closer to Lena's lab. By the time Alex completes the downgrade with the insertion of Lena's standard manufactured kryptonite, Kara is waiting anxiously in the lab across the hall.

As soon as the old kryptonite is shut away in it's lead lined box, Kara is so nervous she could speed to the moon and back, but she steps into Lena's lab and makeshift medbay with deliberate care.

Alex notices her hesitation, and offers a smile of encouragement. "It's okay," she says, beckoning for Kara to come closer. "She's okay."

"But..."

"Her vitals are strong," Alex informs her. "She's handled the stepdown like a champ. She's o-kay."

Kara nods. Alex motions to an agent, who delivers a chair without a word. "One chair, as promised." Alex gives Kara a hug. "I'll bring you dinner in a bit."

When she leaves, Kara finds herself alone at Lena's bedside. Ignoring the chair for now, Kara steps towards the bed. With trembling fingers she reaches out and slips her hand into Lena's. Her breath catches when their fingers touch, even though Lena's remain limp against hers. It feels as though something inside Kara slots back into place to have Lena solid and tangible in her hands.

Kara takes a deep breath. With tears burning behind her eyes, she leans down and presses a kiss to Lena's brow, before touching their foreheads together.

"I love you too, Lena," she whispers, voice hoarse. "Please, come back to me."

previous / next

#metallo lena au #supercorp #sorry for the delay on this #realized five days ago i still had to knit a gift #finished it so now i can get back to this goodness

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fictorium · 4 years

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i literally cried when i saw the picture. 😭 please can i have number 8 “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

Kara can’t remember why she was ever worried about bringing Cat to Argo. Something about alien cultures being too alien, or whether Cat would still find Kara impressive without her powers. Maybe it was simple fear of how her mother would react to their relationship.

Not that Alura’s reaction was ever going to derail much, now that Cat and Kara were living together. And with the very reason they’d come to Argo in the first place, for Kara to give birth safely and without any kind of red solar or green kryptonite interventions, it would take more than disapproval to break them up.

Still, even through the pain Kara knows she doesn’t have to worry about Cat here in this strange place. Cat, as always, is the queen of whatever room she walks into. The medical staff defer to her, and Kara feels that all the exhaustion and agony is worth it every time Cat looks at her. This baby might not have been planned, a quirk of Earth’s effects on Kryptonian physiology that neither of them expected, but Kara knows they’re both ready to raise their child together.

If the damn baby ever exits her body, that is. Thirty-six hours would be long enough even on Earth where Kara wouldn’t be able to feel any of the pain. Here, it’s a feat of endurance that she isn’t sure she’s going to make it through. But every time she wants to give up, to protest that it’s just too much, Cat is there to hold her hand or provide ice chips, and there’s energy enough for another contraction.

Then the pushing begins in earnest, and there aren’t enough ice chips to make that any better. Cat offers constant encouragement, strokes Kara’s damp hair, and despite her own obvious tiredness, is the best cheerleader Kara could hope for.

And, okay there’s one point where the midwife causes an unnecessary panic, and Cat curses so vividly and fluently that there’s no need to translate any of it into Kryptonian.

“It’s okay,” Kara says, trying to restore the peace. She takes Cat’s hand, revelling in being able to squeeze it without unconsciously moderating her strength. “We’re almost there.”

And something in that simple truth hurries their baby up. Three pushes and what seems like seconds later, a tremulous little wail echoes off every wall in the birthing chamber.

Every fiber of Kara’s being wants to slump back against the pillows, have some rest at last. But she forces herself to stay up, watches every move as their child is cleaned and wrapped and handed to Cat, who receives the squalling bundle like it’s a bomb about to go off. Only once she shifts position does Kara see how utterly natural it is for Cat, how used she is to cradling a child.

“Hello sweetheart,” Cat says, moving towards the bed so Kara can meet their newest addition. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you. So has your other mommy.”

“Oh wow,” Kara says, fighting her tears and losing the battle fast. “I thought I was ready for that word but wow. And you two... I just...”

“Here.” Cat passes the baby over, and Kara can’t believe there’s strength left in her arms to hold anything, but it feels as easy as breathing in the end. “Meet our daughter.”

A girl. A baby girl.

Kara feels Cat press a kiss to her temple, and they both gaze down at the red-faced daughter they’ve been waiting nine long months to meet. She’s so perfect Kara thinks her heart might burst; it feels like it could beat right out of her chest.

“As wonderful as this moment is, darling, I think we should probably let your mother in now. She’s about to break through the wall, even without powers.”

“Yeah, okay. Mom?” Kara calls out, and the door opens barely a second later. “We’ve got a granddaughter here for anyone who wants to claim her.”

The tears fall harder as Alura approaches. Kara spent much of her life thinking this was lost to her, that even in the rare chance of starting her own family, her mother was supposed to be lost for most of that time. To get this back, to have this chance when it seemed impossible, is more than Kara knows how to handle. She hands off their daughter to her doting grandmother, already captivated.

“Come on,” Cat says, urging Kara to lay back against the pillows at last. “Rest up, new mama. There’s plenty of exhaustion and crying still to come, I’m sorry to tell you. But we’ve got this.”

“Thank you,” Kara says, hoping the words will be enough to convey everything she’s grateful for. “And don’t let my mom hog the baby.”

“We’ll need a name.” Cat moves around the bed, returns with their daughter back in her arms. “But you should sleep a little first. I don’t want her named after a Spice Girl because you’re sleep-deprived.”

“Don’t let little Ginger hear you saying that,” Kara teases. “But sleep sounds pretty good.”

Cat says something more, something that comes with a kiss and comfort and peace, but Kara is too tired to do anything but close her eyes and let the world fade out.

#supercat #cat grant #kara danvers #s1 nostalgia meme #babyfic #pregnancy and birth stuff #Anonymous

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hobbitkiller · 4 years

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She-Ra, Supergirl, and Tangled: A Tale of Three Female Relationships: Part 2

*SPOILER WARNING FOR SHE-RA, SUPERGIRL, AND TANGLED: THE SERIES*

For those of you just tuning in, I’m taking a deep dive into 3 female relationships in 3 of my favorite tv shows that all turned into toxic messes at some point. The point of this series of posts is to exam these relationships, where things went wrong, whether there’s a chance for redemption, and what conclusions, if any, we can draw from these relationships about media’s representation of female characters and female relationships.

Oh, and shipping, ‘cause this is tumblr after all...

So, in Part 1 I gave a summary of the female relationships in question in these three shows (Adora and Catra, Kara and Lena, Rapunzel and Cassandra). I also summarized how these relationships began and when they started to go wrong. If you already know that stuff because you love these shows too, you don’t necessarily have to go back and read it, but doing so is always encouraged.

In this installment, I will be exploring 3 themes related to the festering resentment within these relationships: Mother Knows Best, Chosen Ones, and Itty Bitty Boxes. Follow the jump to get started!

PART III: MOTHER KNOWS BEST

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I’ve heard a few people claim that Mother Gothel is not a top tier Disney villain. She doesn’t have the following that characters like Scar or Maleficent have. However, at the same time, I’ve heard many people saying something along the lines of “This is my mother.” There’s something uncomfortably familiar about Mother Gothel in Tangled. I recognized the same putdowns and microaggressions that I used to get from my stepmom in Gothel’s targeted jabs at Rapunzel’s confidence throughout the movie...all done with a smile and “It’s for your own good” attitude.

A lot of media focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons. Mothers in Disney have historically been silent or dead. (Except Perdita. That bitch was awesome).

This, of course, makes it interesting that 5/6 of these characters have verbally (and in some cases physically) abusive, manipulative mother figures. And for Adora and Catra and Rapunzel and Cassandra, that mother figure is the same.

Here are our three abusive mothers:

Shadow Weaver who raised Adora and Catra:

Lillian Luthor who is Lena Luthor’s adoptive mother (and played by the absolute joy to watch that is Brenda Strong):

And, of course, Mother Gothel who kidnapped and raised Rapunzel for most of her life and is the SPOILER biological mother of Cassandra:

There are, of course, good mothers sprinkled in. Rapunzel’s biological mother, Queen Arianna is great once she actually gets lines in the TV show. Lena’s birth mother was also, by all accounts, a very kind and loving person. Kara has two moms, and while both have flaws, both are inherently good people (particularly Eliza Danvers, her adoptive mother).

However, in spite of the presence of some positive examples of motherhood, the relationships between all three of these pairs is heavily influenced by the three narcissistic women above.

All three of these women are dishonest, withhold affection only to give it away as a special treat, and actively manipulate their children. Yet, at the same time, the children can’t help but seek approval. Adora and Catra both feared and desperately sought approval and affection from Shadow Weaver. Lena tries to cut ties with her family, but keeps being drawn back in when Lillian admits pride at her accomplishments or that she does, in fact, care about her. Rapunzel sought affection from Gothel growing up because she was her one human contact, and, when Cassandra learned the truth of who her mother was, Cassandra desperately wanted some validation that the mother who abandoned her loved her on some level.

These mother/daughter relationships scarred 5/6 of our characters (Kara has her own hangups about her mother, but not on the deeply psychologically scarred level as the other five.)

Adora is mockingly called paranoid by Shadow Weaver for understandably thinking the woman who lied to and manipulated her her entire life was up to something. Catra pushes everyone in her life away emotionally for fear of being hurt (only to create a self-fulfilling prophecy when they leave due to her behavior). Lena is constantly scared of being “betrayed” and manipulated. When she’s hurt by Supergirl asking Lena’s boyfriend to snoop on her, she says it was “something my mother would do.” When she and Kara first became friends, Lena was reluctant to do so because of the trust issues from her family (Lex Luthor is obviously also a manipulative, abusive jerk). Even Rapunzel, the embodiment of sunshine, has lingering trust issues. In the Season Three episode “Beginnings” she explains to Eugene that one of the reasons she likes Cassandra is because Rapunzel spent 18 years with someone who lied to her, whereas Cassandra was forthright and said what she was thinking.

Cassandra’s mother issues are a little more complicated. When she was four, Gothel abandoned her in order to kidnap Rapunzel and Cass was adopted by the captain of the guard. Cassandra has deeply repressed this memory by the time we meet her when she’s 22/23. Then, she’s given a glimpse of what life was like with Gothel:

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Early in the series, Cass talks about how her father instilled in her the value of “earning my keep.” It’s clear here, though, that love as a transactional relationship had been instilled in Cassandra early in life: “And when it (love/affection) came, it came with strings.”

This transactional view of relationships is something shared by all 5 members of our “bad moms” squad on at least some level. Adora constantly feels the need to fix things and be useful to her friends. Catra thinks if she just wins enough or is good enough, maybe Shadow Weaver will finally love her. Lena’s approach to relationships largely revolves around buying things for them and trying to unilaterally solve their problems for them without their input. Rapunzel has to go through an entire episode to learn that you can’t buy friendship through doing nice things, and that she doesn’t have to. Cass ties her self-worth deeply to her usefulness to others. They all struggle to find internal validation at times.

The other way mothers play a part in the downfalls of these relationships is the element of competitiveness. This is an issue with Adora and Catra and Rapunzel and Cassandra. As previously stated, both of these couples share a mother figure. And, in both of these couples, there is a deep resentment on the part of the non-golden haired child toward the other. Shadow Weaver did not hide that Adora was her favorite. She frequently praised Adora while berating and abusing Catra even when both had done equally well. Even when Adora abandoned Shadow Weaver and Catra for the rebellion, SW was more concerned with getting Adora back than appreciating the loyalty and accomplishments of Catra.

Mother Gothel literally gave up Cassandra to take Rapunzel.

Both Catra and Cassandra feel completely overshadowed by the blonde in their lives, and part of them can’t help but think that, if only Adora or Rapunzel were out of the way, or had never existed, maybe they would have been chosen as the favored one.

This, of course, brings us to our next topic:

PART IV: CHOSEN ONES

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I’ve never been a big fan of Ron Weasley. I didn’t read the Harry Potter books until I was in my twenties (yes, compared to many of my readers, I’m old), and I think this lead to me being less charmed by his humor or bullying of Hermione than I otherwise might have been. I found his temper aggravating and he is just...the worst...in the sixth book. Like, he purposely starts dating someone to punish Hermione who had already asked him to Slughorn’s party because Ginny pointed out that Hermione had probably kissed the guy she was dating TWO YEARS AGO. No, seriously, read that book again. That’s what happened. Then the seventh book happens and it turns out Dumbledore KNEW Ron was going to ditch the team at some point...

That being said, as I sat down to write this novel-length meta, I found myself thinking about what it’s like to be the support team for the “chosen one.” In the seventh book, Ron could have stayed at home with his pureblood family. He would still be in some danger due to their involvement with the Order of the Phoenix, but it would have been a lot safer than traveling around with “Undesirable No 1.″ Yet, because he loves Harry, he chooses to go on this mission.

In the three pieces of media we’re discussing, 2/3 have literal chosen ones--characters with specific destinies of supernatural origin: Adora and Rapunzel. Kara also largely fits into the trope as someone sent to earth from afar to “save us.” As I somewhat jokingly said in the first part, all three of these pieces of media feature a blond super-powered person who needs to save the world.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be the best friend or “sister” of the person who’s “burdened with glorious purpose”?

On the one hand, it’s constant fear over that person’s safety and wellbeing. On the other, there’s a bit that can’t help but feel resentful. Imagine having a friend that overshadows every accomplishment you’ve ever had seemingly by virtue of just who they are.

Now, of course we know that it’s no easy road being a chosen one. There’s a lot you have to sacrifice, and it usually involves injury, near death, and a boatload of trauma. And the support teams know this. For some, it’s never an issue. But for others...

In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Adora, to Catra, always had the presence in her life of a chosen one, even before she got the sword and became She-Ra. Shadow Weaver had sensed something powerful about Adora when she was a baby, and thus treated her as the “Golden Child” to Catra’s “Scapegoat.”

This idea of the “Golden Child (GC)” versus the “Scapegoat (SG)” rolls a bit into this issue with “chosen ones.” In toxic, narcissistic families, parents often hold up one child as the great one while the other is the one to blame for their problems. Think Olga and Helga in Hey Arnold! (Is that reference too dated for some of you guys? Man, I’m old. Also, I remember finally being old enough to realize Helga’s mom was an alcoholic and it blew my mind.) This also usually entails encouraging a level of competitiveness between the siblings.

In some ways, it’s like a “chosen one” is the whole world’s golden child. Anyone who researches this dynamic knows it’s abusive to both the GC and the SG, which is clearly displayed in She-Ra when Adora is stressed by the pressure of expectations and the knowledge that her mistakes will most likely be taken out on Catra. That doesn’t change the fact that Catra resents the positive attention (the adoration if you will) Adora gets--that, no matter what Catra achieves, it will be nothing compared to Adora. This resentment is a big part of what fuels the escalation of their personal conflict leading to one of the saddest pieces of animation since Fry’s dog died sad and alone on Futurama. In the Season 1 episode “Promise.” (This is, by far, the best episode of the series), Catra airs all of her feelings she’d been repressing about what it felt like living in Adora’s shadow--how it made her feel like a “side kick,” something Adora never consciously tried to do and is shocked to discover.

Cassandra on Tangled:The Series has similar feelings about her role in Rapunzel’s life. Not only is her best friend the one with the magic hair and great destiny, but she is also her boss and monarch. Aside from the two songs I included in my last post, “Waiting in the Wings” and “Crossing the Line,” this conflict is best demonstrated early in Season One in the episode “Challenge of the Brave.”

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Cass didn’t suffer abuse in quite the same way Catra did (though Gothel was the worst mom for her first 4 years), but she does feel disrespected and overshadowed by Rapunzel even before learning about Gothel. In “Crossing the Line”--a song many likened to “Let it Go” when they first heard it, Cassandra lays out these feelings further:

There’s a line between the winners and the losers.

There’s a line between the chosen and the rest.

And I’ve done the best I could,

but i’ve always known just where we stood.

Me here with the luckless.

You there with the blessed.

Now, when this song first came out, there were negative reactions from some fans. How could Cassandra call someone who had been kidnapped and locked in a tower with the neglectful and verbally abusive Gothel for 18 years “blessed”? But, from Cassandra’s perspective, Rapunzel still gets everything, power, respect, etc., purely because she was born a princess while Cass has worked incredibly hard her entire life to achieve one goal, becoming a guard, and is constantly denied.

With Lena and Kara in Supergirl, the resentment, again, is mostly between Lena and Supergirl for most of their relationship. Multiple times during the show’s run, Lena has expressed concern about human’s relative helplessness in the face of aliens like Supergirl who have power. This is why Lena sees some of her shadier actions such as making Kryptonite or trying to give humans super powers as justified. She doesn’t go to the extreme levels of hatred that her brother Lex does, but that distrust in those who are naturally more powerful runs throughout the family as does the resentment that aliens have seemingly usurped the leadership role among humanity that should have belonged to the Luthors.

What makes this interesting is that, in most of her relationships, Lena, as a billionaire, is the more privileged and powerful one. This is really best demonstrated in her relationship with James Olsen, whom she orders around as his boss while buying him expensive gifts and going behind his back to fix his legal problems. And for much of their relationship, this is how Lena sees her relationship with Kara. It’s not a manipulative or cruel thing. Lena just sees Kara as her adorkable reporter friend who is hapless in the face of danger.

Then, all of these preconceived notions come crashing down when Lena learns that Kara is Supergirl. Suddenly, she learns that her hapless friend was actually playing her the whole time--that she was stringing Lena along and pretending to be only human.

Lena’s resentment may not be as explicit in this case as Catra’s or Cassandra’s, but it is layered within all of the emotions Lena Luthor is pretending not to have.

This, of course, leads us to our final subject for today.

PART V: “ITTY BITTY BOXES”

I’ve mentioned a few times throughout this novel-length meta the word “repressed.” Catra, Lena, and Cassandra are not good at expressing their emotions in a healthy manner. Much of this can be blamed on the aforementioned mother figures and the trust and intimacy issues that having narcissistic, abusive parents can lead to.

Narcissistic parents often place the burden of maintaining the emotional wellbeing of the family on the children. It is your job as the child to make sure they don’t get upset. It is you who has to keep the cool head and maintain the facade of positivity. Parents like Shadow Weaver, Lillian Luther, and Mother Gothel do not see it as their responsibility to help their children regulate emotion or address it. To them, “negative emotions” are character flaws.

Of course, anyone who’s watched Inside Out knows that emotions aren’t inherently good or bad and feeling, addressing, and understanding them are vital to good mental health.

Too bad Inside Out wasn’t there for Catra, Lena, or Cassandra growing up.

Instead, each of these characters has learned to bottle up and hide emotions like sadness, fear, hurt, and true, deep anger. Lena even outlines her approach to such feelings when helping Brainy, an alien who is basically like an organic computer, solve a problem:

youtube

I was not the only person that was reminded of this gem after that scene:

Putting emotions away in an imaginary box is a real technique for keeping yourself from becoming overwhelmed in a situation where you need to focus. However, “forgetting the box existed” is not the appropriate use of the boxes. They need to be opened, and the feelings addressed.

Catra is interesting, because in some ways she’s very vocal about her frustration and anger. Yet, that surface level frustration manifests in yelling at her friends and subordinates over their job performance or just being a general jerk. It’s not an expression of her true, deep feelings. Catra doesn’t let anyone see the deep levels of hurt she feels when Shadow Weaver manipulates her to join Adora. Instead, she just almost destroys the world...as you do. Season 4 in particular features a Catra who is more mean to her friends than ever before, yet she is still repressing so much of her true feelings to the point of mental and emotional collapse.

Cassandra also struggles to express her feelings, particularly to Rapunzel. Part of it might be because Rapunzel is her princess, and it’s not Cassandra’s place, but it’s also something she struggles with in general:

The above line occurs in an episode where Rapunzel knows Cassandra is mad at her and keeps pushing her to share her feelings. As we can see, Cass is not a big fan of that. Even though they talk at the end of the episode, it’s clear that there are still some hurt feelings on Cassandra’s side that she doesn’t express until she has electric blue hair and is singing a rock ballad about “Crossing the Line.” This is also fascinating because, as previously stated, one of the reasons Rapunzel likes Cassandra is her honesty. But, like with Catra, Cassandra can be honest about surface level annoyances, but intensely represses anything deeper.

All three of these characters let their emotions fester until they become deadly infections that poison their relationships, not just with their best friends, but with everyone. Many of these relationships could have been diverted from their dark paths if there had been more honest and open communication both between the characters and internally. If Lena acknowledged the real reasons why she was hurt when learning Kara was Supergirl, if Catra had been honest about feeling overshadowed and pitied by Adora, if Cassandra had expressed the pain she was feeling in her relationship with Rapunzel, things could have been different. Instead, those feelings have turned toxic.

NEXT TIME IN THE NEVER-ENDING ANALYSIS:

Blond Bulldozers

I Don’t Care (I ship it)

Just going to do 2, because 3 subjects were a bit much.

Hope to see you there.

#she ra #spop #adora #catradora #catra #shadow weaver #supergirl #supercorp #kara danvers #lena luthor #lillian luthor #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #rapunzel #tts cassandra #cassunzel

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lunelantern · 4 years

Text

~~~~🌙Uchiha Sasuke 🌙- - the light of the darkness🌙~~~

[~~Escaping the matrix / Infinite TSUKUYOMI dreamland~~]

{***💗💝💝💖Sakura's pure love and their unbreakable bond ***}

To put it bluntly, Sasuke's character shouts the following message: DO NOT BE A SLEEPY SHEEPLE PRAYING TO THE LIFE SCRIPT!🐑🐑🐑

BE YOURSELF!💡💖

I've always had this hunch that there's much more about Sasuke's character than the eye can see and how after minutely rewinding the manga and the philosophy behind his character, I've come to realize that his construction is a wending breadcrumb trail for the secret educational message of the manga: question everything, do not take anything for granted, think with an open mind, ward off manipulation, walk away from the clever manipulators who try to crush your free Will and whirlwind you back into the flock of obedient sleepy sheeple🐑🐑🐑

Uzumaki Naruto as the hero and the promoter of the status quo fits into the pattern of the cookie-cutter hero that flatters the vast majority; he's the Serpent 🐍🐍🐍 disguised as the guiding lighthouse through the storm in the "Happy-ever-after" fable. Naruto keeps the Life Script narrative a-flame under the guise of morally and politically righteousness.

Funny thing is that the allegory of the manga illustrates this warped, reverse herd mentality that's meant to crush the free Will and freedom of speech. The real Serpent of the manga isn't Orochimaru who quests the ylem of our existence as presented and struggles to free himself from the "Infinite dream", but Naruto himself who tries to lure and "guide" us back to the cattle of loopholed slaves in the prison-like cage of so called democracy and status quo. When in reality, he shoves the Life Script under our noses served on a silver plate with the false promise of accessing to spirit elevation, freedom, love and peaceful cohabitation and happiness.

Which contradicts the sequel of the manga as per Orochimaru's statement in Sasuke's Novel: there is always upcoming conflict bubbling and waiting to erupt. Which is reiterated in Boruto Manga's narration.

Obito Uchiha too makes us alert not to fall for this clever web when he mocks Naruto's vehement lifetime goal to whip Sasuke's ass back on what he calls the "real track", stating that without considering and acknowledging Sasuke's worldview is yet another form of manipulation. 🧟‍♀️🧟‍♂️🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️🧠🤪

Sasuke is presented as the tragic anti-hero who lost his path, the fallen angel who needs to be guided from the Purgatory and led to heaven. When in reality, he warns against manipulation, indoctrination under the false pretense of righteousness and politically correct. 💡

Sasuke is the character who seeks constant enlightment🧠🧠🧠. He doesn't take anything for granted. He questions everything he hears and he won't stop until he unearthed the truth. He encourages us not to fall for the sugary coated words of the society who'd do anything to whoosh us back into the chain of slavery🔗🔗🐑 and punishing us for trying to be our own true selves.

Sasuke is correct in brazenly throwing the truth into the flabbergasted faces of the Rookie Nine🐑🐑🐑 upon joining the war: "I don't care what you think about me."👏👏👏 Meaning that he won't alter his own true way to fit into the Life Script. He won't forgo his true self in lieu of having their acceptance.👌💡💯

In this case, being accepted and acknowledged by the masses is yet another false validation of self served as politically and morally correct. The shinobi world won't accept Uchiha Sasuke for what he is (only Sakura does 😉), unless he follows the predetermined scenario of Life. 😍💖💗💝💋

Haku himself admitted to having fallen for the Life Script willfully because he lacked inner power and self-identity🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️; he accepted the Life Script, he mirthfully accepted to be a mindless obedient voiceless and kitless sheep 🐑 in the hands of a criminal, in lack of a life purpose.

The ones with a different onset of life principles with always be shunned and rejected and antagonized by the masses. Because they poses as a real threat to the self-identities of the masses of obedient Life Script devotees (which perfectly explains racial and gender discrimination).

People have a natural instinct to reject what's different and Naruto is a prime exemple of this survival instinct. He never accepted anyone who does not share his worldview and always fought to curb everyone back into the Life Script.

Sasuke's rejection by the society only proves it that breakthrough ideas, inovative and creative people who think differently will always struggle in a tug - of - war with the Life Script consisting of obedient sheeple.

Don't be inovative, don't think differently, don't behave differently, be like us and follow wordlessly and mindlessly is the message that Uzumaki Naruto spreads through the Manga 🧟‍♀️🧟‍♀️🧟‍♂️ under the pretense of acquiring universal peace. Which proved to be a sublime faux pas because naruto's installment as Hokage proved not to solve anything; there's still a lot of conflict undergoing (see the clownish grotesque circus of the Manga's Las Vegas aka the "reformed" Hidden Mist 🎠🎡🎢🎪💈 village the shambolic motherboard of crimes and conspiracies as the drain pools is ready to flood), there's still pain and remorse bubbling hot and there's still a deep state with an abscound agenda (Boruto - Kara and Otsutsuki aliens 👽👽👽) unfolding right under the flimsy veil of peace.

Not coincidentally, Sasuke is the only one who tapped his real conscience that's hidden deep into the soul and awakened true enlightment, through the spiritual journey of his inner dialogue with the Creator of Ninshu, the Sage of Six Paths as the prophet of the manga: the ultimate visual Doujutsu which raises the veil of deceit off the eyes, the key to unlock the ultimate truth - - the Rinnegan (aka the Third Eye of eternal knowledge in Buddhism).

Sasuke is the only living in the universe who is immune to the dreamland cast by Infinite TSUKUYOMI. Sasuke is the only one who can break free from the matrix and ward off any deceit and manipulation.

Even having knowledge of his true intentions and his peculiar vision of a Hokage, the Sage of Six Paths imparts half of his chakra with Sasuke.

There are interesting theories about consciousness and reincarnation which profer that, upon death, our souls are presented with two choices: either go back to earth and reincarnate as a recycled soul with erased memories or ward off the light and walk into the void of darkness to reunite with your true form (remember, Naruto is the deceiving "light" 💡🌞 and Sasuke is the blissful "darkness" 🌑🌙).

Without sounding like a far-fetched conspirationist who went too far into the rabbit hole, there are challenging theories which go as far as to assert that our recycled souls are lured and trapped by mishiveous entities which would use an entire repertoire of manipulations into trick us back into reincarnation and rebirth, in order to feed from our souls and energies, which makes it impossible for us to break the matrix of Earth and reunite with our true selves in the afterlife. Which is exactly what the Otuatuski Clan of unearthly entities do in the Manga: use the earth shinobi as chakra vessels to feed from 🤔👀

Sasuke Uchiha shares a very strong, soul-enriching message: never trust what you see, never take it for granted what the other say, break free from the mind-benumbing spirit-crushing Life Script scenario, never blindly follow the herd without using your own mind, always think, always ask questions, always seek for answers, always make sure to see things for what they are, always look behind the veil, always trust your gut, trust your instinct, open your mind and let them atune to your senses and trust only your own self. Sasuke teaches us that the truth and the real source of light must be sought only inside our own hearts and pure, selfless and love is the answer.

Sasuke teaches us how to break free from IT😉😎 and not to be scared to do so.

Sasuke tells us to not be scared to be us, to think differently and to seek our own answers (he's the only one who didn't take anything for granted, who didn't blindly join the Shinobi War without digging for the truth - - he resurrected the former Shinobi who created the village to seek for the truth and filter it through his own mind).

"I am not a child nor I am pure", his answer to Hashirama's remark means that he isn't an obedient sheep into the flock who accepts the Life Script obediently. "impure" in this context means that Sasuke is not corruptible or brainwashed. Sai was wrong when he stated that Sasuke "is a blank canvas ready to be painted in colors", namely he's a naive idiot ignoramus to the manipulation going afloat who's bend to every puppet master's commands. That's Sai, he unconsciously perfectly depicted himself.

Sasuke incites us to find the light withing ourselves and find the answers inside us because that's the only source of truth.

If you'd like a movie analogy, Naruto Manga suggest that we're living in a matrix, a simulated dreamworld and you're presented with the two pills - the red pill or the blue pill, with Naruto and Sasuke as the avatars of the two pills (Naruto will trap you into the matrix and Sasuke is your ticket to break free from it).

🌅⛩️⛩️⛩️⛩️⛩️⛩️⛩️⛲🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌

➡️ Now for what true love means...

... Sakura.

She's the whirlpool from where pure love stems. She is the only manga character who loves Sasuke for what he really is. She's the only one who'd follow him unconditionally without abandoning her own true self.

Sakura surrendered to Sasuke unconditionally. She gave herself to him so intimately with abandonment and unadulterated heart. She offered her heart selflessly without asking him for anything in return. And that's why her love is benediction; she remains an angel who only wants to shower Sasuke with her love.

And that's why sasuke is the sole keeper of her heart. The only man who can love her. Because sasuke is the only man who reached spiritual enlightment. He's the only one who can see her love for what it is - sacrosanct, noble and pure.

Sakura would have followed him when he joined Orochimaru only because she wanted him to feel loved, to give him her love.

Sakura knew something that only Kakashi, Obito and Zetsu knew because they were witnesses, namely that a clash between Sasuke and Naruto would inevitably result in both dying. And that's why she pleaded with him one last time before being silenced with a RINNEGAN genjutsu by sasuke who desperately tried to break from the matrix. 🔗🔗🔗. She simply wanted to give him love, selflessly, with nothing in return.

Even Itachi tried to place sasuke under a matrix by fabricating a credible past for him and possibly channeling his future back into the Life Script - - Itachi knew that the less he knew, the less he'd suffer. Which obviously didn't work out well and in the end, Itachi admitted his fault for trying to change his little brother and manipulate him.

Sakura's love is transcendental, is pure and unbiased. She's the only legitimate source of love in the manga, the paramount of it. Because one who loves forgives and accepts unconditionally.

The one who loves you genuinely will never try to manipulate change you.

Sakura love the real Sasuke. She loves him for everything he represents, his soul, his mind, his heart, his history, his body.

Naruto selfishly suggests that they'd finally get along in death when he'd not be a kyuubi vessel anymore snd he won't bear the curse of knowledge the Uchiha on his shoulders, which is a romanticized brainwashing way of stating that Naruto attempts to erase Sasuke's hystory, roots and ancestry by cutting the ropes with the Uchiha. Ultimately, Naruto suggests that Sasuke gives up with his true self and join the cattle.

Sakura doesn't do this. She accepts Sasuke's true self and loves him unconditionally and that's what true love means, one that glows, heals, accepts and surrenders unconditionally, with no prior ado or conditions. 💖💝💗

#Sasuke #Sakura #Sasusaku #Naruto Manga analysis #Naruto Manga pairs #Naruto Manga symbols #Infinite TSUKUYOMI #Reincarnation #Matrix #Consciousness #Naruto Manga philosophy #Uchiha Sasuke analysis #Sasusaku pair explained #Sasusaku love #Sakura love #Naruto Manga theories

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stephen-narain · 3 years

Text

The Work of Art in the Age of Virtual Reproduction

By Stephen Narain

This essay received the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing.

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

—Jay-Z, Decoded

I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

—T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Cut” by Kara Walker (1998)

1. The Disintegrating Sugar Sphinx

This essay is about not seeing the physical exhibit of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety.” This essay is about seeing hundreds of its virtual reproductions online.

I first encountered Walker’s work in 2007 at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. At the time, I was an undergraduate preparing to tell my parents—Guyanese immigrants to the United States—that, no, I would not be applying to law school. I wanted to become a writer. Still, my family’s pragmatism shaped the vision of the writer I wished to become. Socially conscious. Committed to a community’s particular experiences. Unafraid of upsetting that community’s standards if necessary. I had big ideas about the novel and about what the novel could do. Yet, I was also aware that the bridge between aesthetics and politics was a difficult one to build. Add to this the sophomore’s struggle with interpretation. A discerning professor during a course on the American counterculture of the 1960s encouraged me to constantly examine the assumptions guiding my claims about the political uses of art. Such proclamations might best be made after a more nuanced study, she suggested more than once in red ink on my C- papers. My response in the months to follow was to run in the opposite direction of grandeur: to read so minutely that I could never be charged of falling prey to the affective fallacy. The ideal criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote in 1949, “will not talk of tears, prickles, or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects and emotion.” I might as well have tattooed that quotation on my arm. I don’t think I laughed or cried my entire senior year.

Viewing Walker’s exhibit, which included silhouettes of slaves superimposed on lithographic renderings of Civil War battle scenes, I tried to remain as “objective” as possible. But a slave’s decapitated head was floating in a cloudy sky. Blobs that could either be blood or feces were nestled in a valley. Entire appendages were flung into the lithograph’s white borders, beyond the image entirely. I tried to be subtle when what I felt was disgust. What was the nature of this disgust?, I wondered. And how do I ensure my response to it became neither parade nor parody? How do I neither scream the near-platitudes of Amiri Baraka nor dwell in the ignorance of those people privileged enough to proclaim “art for art’s sake?”

Writing on her visceral response to E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, Zadie Smith suggests: “We are aware that there is an emotive response for which the novel explicitly applies that is not properly requested by an atom or a rock formation or a chemical compound. Sensing the anomalous nature of this emotive quality within the university, we have resolved not to speak of it much.” My gut emotive response upon seeing Walker’s modified lithographs was a sense that they were gesturing toward the stories that remained hidden within my family, within my country, within the region I choose to call home. Walker’s pieces were the most brilliant evocations of historical revisionism I had ever encountered. The vital differences between American and Caribbean slavery aside, I wondered how my particular experiences as a West Indian person related to those “objective” criticisms I was tasked to make in the classroom. Was I supposed to suppress these experiences? Channel them in some measured, productive—and ultimately palatable—way? What, in the name of “nuance,” might I elide? And those basic facts of biography—a Bahamian childhood, a father who grew up on a Corentyne farm, Indian ancestors who crossed the kala pani many generations ago—what became of them?

Seven years later, I still have not answered these questions. (I might spend a lifetime as a writer trying to do so.) I follow Walker chiefly because her work encourages me to not only examine my assumptions about the political uses of art as Sullivan instructed—but to constantly examine the professor’s assumptions as well. I was sad when I arrived in New York a week too late to see Walker’s thirty-five-foot-tall sugar sphinx, but I was grateful that I could experience her work the way most young people living in the world experience things these days. I scrolled through hundreds of photographs posted on the Instagram and Twitter and Facebook pages of people I did not know. Things got complicated, however, whenever I clicked the hashtag #karawalkerdomino. Disturbing images loaded on my screen—the skinny boy sitting next to me at the coffeehouse might have assumed I was interested in some strange pornography. “Sowapowa” angles her camera to make it look as if she were squeezing the sphinx’s impressive areolas. “Bulzeye”—in an unfortunate accident of nomenclature—inserts his tongue into the sphinx’s vagina. “Nealmaffei” smirks beneath the sphinx’s derrière.

The virtual fourth wall demolished, I wonder how Wimsatt and Beardsley might react to the Brechtian theater that art-viewing has become on social media. I wonder what they might make of the constant bombardment of images we encounter where individuals have inserted themselves into the text. I wonder what they might make of Kara Walker.

This essay poses—and refuses to answer—questions about the nature, production, and consumption of art in this current age of virtual reproduction. It is written by a Guyanese-Bahamian-American person three days after he faced the Domino Sugar Factory for the first time, holding a fancy camera his great-grandfather could never afford, preoccupied not by the onus of history, but by all the aggressive facial hair to be found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A photograph is stored in his imagination. In it, a forty-year-old hipster with a handlebar moustache stands in front of an artisanal cheese shop. A young orthodox Jew—hat black, locks brushing against his ears—holds his son’s hand.

They are all waiting for the light to turn green.

2. Good Selfies/Bad Selfies

“The photograph,” Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” With each social media post, we experience the ghosts of our previous selves. For a Caribbean community that has had its identity reduced for centuries, this layering of character can provide a powerful tool for cultural change. Frequently, the region’s social evolution has been framed in postcolonial language, and I wonder if changes in media consumption might serve as a viable alternative—or complement—to these critical constructions.

In his 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, Samuel Selvon paints a portrait of a balkanized metropolis. “It have people living in London,” Selvon writes in the inimitable voice of Moses Aloetta, “who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening to the other ones except what you read in the papers.” Newspapers, in the past quarter century, however, have radically evolved in their platform: when was the last time you sat down with a hardcopy of The New York Times or the Trinidad Guardian or the Stabroek News? Moses’ nostalgia in Londoners is fed by his physical distance from Port of Spain—but in a visual sense, his nostalgia is fed by his distance from real images of the city. If nostalgia is built from a triangular interaction between memory, desire, and sensation, the Internet has radically transformed how we remember, want, and feel.

The post-independence generation of artists emerging from the Caribbean and its diaspora are hyperaware in narrative effect—if not in poetic intent—of this cultural tide change. Christian Campbell, in his poem “Lightskinned Id,” takes a joy in the simultaneity of his skin’s multiple shades—and in what effect such a coexistence might have on the evolution of his perceptions. In “Disappearing Houses,” a collaborative project published in the Summer 2013 issue of Wasafiri, Andre Bagoo and Vahni Capildeo employ photometric techniques to disrupt our often vision of Trinidad’s economic progress. They create otherworldly images of working-class detritus in tension with the vision of glass and steel development promoted by tourist boards and self-fulfilling prophecies. The works of Shivanee Ramlochan, a journalist, poet, and editor, and Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, a painter and poet, are preoccupied with the spiritual shape-shifting we might trace back to Hindu mythology.

Boodoo-Fortuné, influenced by Frida Kahlo, works in watercolor and ink. Her exhibit “Criatura”—Spanish for “creature”—ran last summer at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago. The forty-four pieces, the artist writes, were intended to “prompt reflections on the alchemy that governs a mixing of selves, straddling life and death, their natures fed by forces of both fruition and decay.” The title piece portrays a woman, part human, part tree. Wildflowers grow from her hair. Her elongated neck is composed of skin and bark. Her eyes are exaggerated like an anime temptress, yet sadness resides behind seduction. This balance of boldness and vulnerability marks Boodoo-Fortuné’s representations of the feminine spirit. Each of the painting’s women can be interpreted as conversing with one another. But this observer wonders if the piece “Separate and Same” provides a key to understanding the exhibit as a whole. Might all the women in Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection reside in a single body, the way Parvati and Durga and Kali belong to one entity? Is Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection a yoga of sorts? And if so, is a walk through the gallery akin to clicking through a friend’s Facebook album—that peculiarly twenty-first-century mythopoesis—titled “2013 was a great year!”? Image one: a kiss on a mountaintop. Followed by a stare behind a glass of Cabernet. Wisps of hear behind a commencement cap. A contemplative look into nowhere. Then a click. A true nowhere. A white space. Until we choose to close the page, to log off, and to get on with our ordinary lives.

3. A Brief Note on Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr Page

The title of Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page, “Wings & Fire,” further signals the artist’s fascination with flight and destruction, with hubris and humility, with Icarus and Daedalus. My interpretation of Boodoo-Fortuné’s work fundamentally changes because I follow her on Tumblr. Below one of “Criatura’s” paintings, “Mother of the Hummingbirds,” is a quote by Sandra Cisneros: “I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin (via radicalheart82), 16,625 notes.” On June 20, Boodoo-Fortuné posted an animation of a turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. The caption: “Don’t knock my shell. It hurts a lot.” Two weeks prior, Boodoo-Fortuné posts a picture of puppy prints in her studio floor. A week before, a statue of a lady grasping wilted flowers. The same day: what looks like mortar and pestle and ferns on a woodblock. That same day again: a GIF of a woman like a 1960s Elizabeth Taylor with a halo over her crown, an image of the sun eclipsing the moon, and moving constellations, dippers—big and small—Orion, Hercules, all these stars I cannot name.

4. Anatomizing Self Construction

If Boodoo-Fortuné’s gallery exhibition represents an endpoint—and epiphany—her Tumblr page provides a glimpse into the rough work behind the artist’s elegant proofs. This is a very modernist sensibility, something I can only now articulate in this manner, in this moment because of the discerning professor allergic to bullshit. A scholar of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, the professor helped me realize that the works—The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ulysses—I romanticized as spontaneous acts of genius experienced passionate revisions by their respective their editors. These works were not created in isolation. They were the product of many hands.

“What happens when a new work of art is created,” Eliot writes in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” In our current age of virtual reproduction, Caribbean artists frequently—and subconsciously—shuffle inherited sequences. The texture of old ideals is constantly impacted by the Caribbean artist’s engagement with, or negation of, those ideals and by her reifications of historically marginalized forms, be they of griot storytelling traditions or of the aesthetics of creolization or of the Walcottian mythology-mixing created within the region’s social web.

Through Tumblr’s interface—consisting of patterned visual displays, a dated archive, and a dynamic social network—we can glimpse, in unprecedented ways, the versions of the Caribbean artist’s self she wishes to represent to the world. Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page reveals a deep interest in gender roles, in spirituality, in the factors that facilitate—and hinder—empathy with fellow human beings and with nature. We see the influences she wishes us to see. Insodoing, we also see the content of each influence differently. We see Cisneros in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see bruised turtles in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see the stars in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Humingbirds.” And somewhere along the way, our perceptions are altered, our foci shift. The life of a hummingbird’s mother becomes foregrounded in our minds. What might that life entail? And I think back to Walker’s Civil War lithographs. I think of Toni Morrison’s Sethe.

“Every negro walk in a circle,” Marlon James writes in The Book of Night Women. “Take that and make of it what you will.”

5. Bridging the Uncanny Valley

Right eyebrow arched against social media, Smith writes in her essay “Generation Why?”: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” Yet, the impulse to acquire multivalent information is precisely what drives many Caribbean users to social media in the first place. It’s difficult to deny that Facebook inspires narcissism (it’s called “Facebook”) or Instagram, idiocy (young man licking the vulva of a sugar sphinx). But this generation’s online capacity to curate their visual representation—individuals actively insert themselves into dominant images, if they wish—facilitates a freedom denied to many individuals in the colonized Caribbean.

I won’t risk grandeur by arguing that Facebook feeds political independence, but I wonder how the Arab Spring might have turned out if millions of people took Smith’s skeptical route. She is correct on this point, however: the Internet user loses himself in the social network’s vast garden of forking paths. The pornography addict, the terrorist recruiter, the pro-democracy activist: all of them transcend their physical selves online, becoming the “set of data” points they wish to project to the world.

Two of the most promising voices in Bahamian culture—the novelist A.L. Major and the academic Angelique Nixon—both engage with the ways in which the expectations of the tourism industry have impacted, for good and for ill, the prism through which Bahamian people view their history and themselves. “When colonialists discovered the islands,” Major writes in a Michigan Quarterly Review blog post “Going to Watch Junkanoo,” “they found a way to instantly categorize those areas, a way to describe and recognize the islands easily. Tropical birds, exotic fruits become the recognizable features of a tropical landscape, and not, for example, poorly maintained roads or overburdened garbage collection sites. It’s this brochure self-knowledge, an ability to see the world as tourists might, that stifles creativity.”

Uncovering the garbage, for Major and for other post-independence Caribbean thinkers becomes a call to action, even as—for the sake of propriety and tourism advertisements—many Bahamian citizens might want to keep these images concealed. Yet one can’t help but feel that figures such as Major and Nixon take an end-justifies-the-means approach to criticism: in their ethical cost/benefit analysis, their people’s self-understanding far outweighs a Norwegian tourist’s ability to enjoy her suntan.

If Major uses a literary magazine’s blog to interrogate the images coming in and out of the region, the Barbadian photographer Risée Chaderton uses a TED talk to interrogate how such images, in real ways, impact the Caribbean body politic. In “Shaping Who We Are,” Chaderton discusses the rise of eating disorders amongst Caribbean men and women. She studies the “uncanny valley”—a perceptual space where non-human images appear to be human. Near the cusp of this valley might be robots or Disney characters—as well as many of the models on the covers of style magazines that make their way into Caribbean dental offices and public libraries and teenage bedrooms. Chaderton’s photographs, committed to celebrating healthy Caribbean body images, necessarily oppose the images that fall within the uncanny valley, just as Major’s blog opens a space for Bahamians—and non-Bahamians—to interrogate the assumptions guiding the country’s history-writing.

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What artists like Chaderton—and Walker and Boodoo-Fortuné—encourage is a radical reconception of the Caribbean female body, a site that has been abused, distorted, and commodified for much of the region’s history. Understandably, these artists’ work is in constant battle with the sheer force of incoming images from international media. However, the intimacy of these artists’ visions allows us to anatomize self-construction—physically and spiritually—in the tradition of Janine Antoni, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid, three of the most innovative Caribbean artists of the twentieth century. As Walker’s giant sugar sphinx appears lower and lower on the public’s collective Instagram feed, I wonder how these artists’ work will evolve in the years to come. I wonder what their art (and their tweets) might teach us about who they are individually becoming—and about what the Caribbean, as both a region and a sensibility, seeks to represent down all its plural avenues.

#Alice Yard #Caribbean #Art

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saiilorstars · 4 years

Text

Dare To Forget Me

Ch. 18: Secrets Behind

// Previous Chapters //

Fandom: Law & Order SVU

Pairing: Rafael Barba x Original female character

Warnings: Due to the nature of the series’ plots, I do have to rate this as ‘mature’ for constant mentions of rape.

~ 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ` 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ~

Chapter Summary: Olivia pushes Montserrat to come forwards, but the detective refuses...so Olivia does the next best thing. Meanwhile, Rafael unintentionally discovers what Montserrat plans to do in regards to her position at SVU.

"Soo...someone found out," Montserrat cut straight to the point once her therapy session started.

Dr. Weslin was surprised at first until she realized Montserrat hadn't chosen to disclose. "What happened?"

"I tried being supportive but it backfired on account of my weakness and my incredibly intelligent sergeant," Montserrat drew in a deep breath which she exhaled in the very next second. "I mean, really, did I think I would be able to hide it from Olivia Benson? A cop who's worked for more than 10 years as a Special Victims detective? Ha!"

Montserrat leaned against the leather couch and looked to the side. Her mind raced with the memory of Olivia's confrontation. It wasn't so much a confrontation than it was a questionnaire. As it was Olivia's nature, she wanted to find out what happened and how to make things good.

"When did it happen?"

"Last year. I was on the job, undercover, and he caught me off guard," Montserrat couldn't find it in her to face Olivia. Her eyes kept darting to the side each time she attempted to meet Olivia's gaze.

"Did you tell anyone?" Even without looking at her, Montserrat knew Olivia wasn't staring in a pitiful manner, she was trying to help as was her nature.

Montserrat shifted on her couch. "Only a few. Just...just the necessary people. My Lieutenant, my doctor's...and Casey."

The last bit made Olivia pause for a second. "Casey? And she didn't encourage you to come forwards?"

"I told her no," Montserrat clarified before Olivia got any ideas. "I talked with my Lieutenant and...we both agreed that the undercover mission was too important to ruin."

"Ruin?" repeated Olivia with wide-eyes. "Is this the same Detective Novak I'm talking to? Did you both agree to that or did your lieutenant make you agree?"

Montserrat bit her lower lip as if it were chewing gum. "My Lieutenant reminded me it had been a 3 year operation. My accusation would abruptly end it and we wouldn't have caught Hallie D'Amico."

The name was a well known one considering D'Amico was famous for her drug empire.

"Did he at least come down with a drug charge?" Olivia asked, hoping there was at least some retribution for what that man did.

But Montserrat shook her head. "Most of the operation was based on Hallie, and a lot of her men went down with her...but he didn't. I don't know how he did it, but he escaped. We don't know where he is now. He hasn't resurfaced since last year."

"Montserrat…"

"Please don't," Montserrat shook her head, gaze falling again. "I don't want to keep talking."

It was at that moment that Montserrat realized she wasn't ready for an anonymous group. She didn't feel capable of sharing that horrible moment with anyone else. "That was last week and so far Olivia's still insisting I press charges against him."

"And, if given the opportunity, would you consider it?" Dr. Weslin asked.

Montserrat wanted to think about it, but the more she did the ickier she felt. It may have been ridiculous, or maybe not, but it was just the way her body reacted. "Any thought about...him...makes it hard. If I press charges then everyone will know, and everyone will ask questions...I'll have to relive everything again. And it might be for nothing since no one knows where he is."

"Would things be different if his location were known? Or if he was already in custody for the drug charges?"

Montserrat scrunched her face, bringing her hands to cover herself. "I don't know," she answered tiredly. "I just don't know."

~ 0 ~

"...I've got it set up, trust me…"

As Montserrat neared the bullpen, she could hear Kara's voice carrying out. It was rare of Kara to make a visit at work, so when Montserrat walked in and found Kara at Sonny's desk the world made sense again. She'd come for Sonny, not Montserrat.

In retrospect, Montserrat thought she should've seen it coming. They were basically dating, as annoying it was.

"Montserrat!" Kara jumped from the edge of Sonny's desk, looking far too startled for her.

"Hey, what's going on?" Montserrat pulled her jacket off and draped it over the back of her desk chair.

"Nothing!" Kara said too quick.

Dammit. Montserrat believed she knew why Kara had dropped by in the middle of the day.

"I should go," Kara said, swiping her purse off Sonny's desk. "See you later," she said to the two detectives before making a quick-paced exit.

Montserrat dropped into her chair with a weary sigh. "Sonny, for the love of God, make her stop all of her birthday party plans."

"What?" Sonny raised his eyebrows, clearly surprised she knew of their plans. "How did you-"

"-don't insult my intelligence, Carisi," Montserrat warned. "Just tell her I don't want it. I thank her for it but I don't want to celebrate anything this year."

"Oh c'mon, you're turning 30 and I know that might not sound appealing but-"

"-it's not the age," Montserrat stopped him. She sighed again. No one understood why she didn't want anything to do with her birthday this year, and she couldn't tell them why. "I just don't want it. So please, make her stop."

"Why don't you just tell her yourself?" Sonny offered the only alternative that wouldn't end with his own head.

"Because she won't listen to me!"

"I'm-"

"Novak," Olivia called as soon as she walked into the bullpen, "My office." She went straight for her office without glancing back at any of her detectives.

Montserrat fiddled with a pen on her desk for a few seconds while the others kept staring at her. Eventually, she let the pen drop and looked up. "What? Is this high school now?"

"You better gooo," Nick's teasing voice helped no one.

Montserrat got up from her chair and walked towards Olivia's office. She promptly shut the door and turned to face her Sergeant.

"Have you given any thought of what we talked about?" Olivia went straight for the point.

Montserrat sighed and gave a shake of her head. "My answer is still no. It's buried and there's no point in bringing it back."

"But there is still something we can do," Olivia persisted. She got up from her seat and moved around the desk. "You did everything right, meaning you can still press charges."

"And do what?" Montserrat raised an eyebrow. "You're not listening, Olivia, he's not here anymore. He could be off in Brazil for all I know. I'm not putting myself through that."

"I understand that, but I just want to help you-"

"-if you want to help me, then stop that damn birthday party from happening!" Montserrat gestured to the bullpen as of Olivia would know. "Otherwise, just leave it. I'm tormented enough."

"Montse-" Olivia called but the detective was already out the door. Olivia walked towards her open door and closed it again. She turned to her desk and remained still while she thought of some things. Eventually, she got an idea. Whether or not it was a good one, she wouldn't know until she did it.

~0~

It was late at night when SVU got a call. Nearly 3 am saw Olivia and reporter Jimmy MacArthur arrive at the scene. Police sirens flashed in the night, reflecting off the bright yellow tape sealing the street off.

"Couple of tourists walking along said they heard moaning from the other side of that wall around 2:00 A.M," Fin walked Olivia down the park, stopping by a cemented wall. "The vic is Heba Salim, 24, clothes muddy and torn, scratches on her face, bruising on her body."

"You get a statement?"

"Novak and Amaro are doing it right now," Amanda walked towards them. "But she seems pretty out of it. She told the two responding unis that she had been raped by two male whites."

"Okay, we set up a grid search?" Olivia asked though she knew her detectives were of course already on it.

"From the park entrance, and we've got Carisi leading a canvassing endeavor for hotel doormen on Central Park South. So far, no witnesses," Fin said, spotting Jimmy nearing Montserrat and Nick. "What's that guy doing down here?"

Olivia glanced back and saw Jimmy, frowning. "Don't even start. One PP gave him full access. Nothing we can do."

Unfortunately, Montserrat and Nick would be the first ones to meet Jimmy that night, since he was practically breathing over their shoulders while they attempted to keep up with their victim's gourmet. Heba was semi-conscious but the fact the two ERs rushing her towards the ambulance were louder than Montserrat and Nick made it difficult for both detectives to get a good, clear statements.

"Could you do us a favor and back off?" Nick nearly exploded on the reporter after Heba's ambulance drove away. "We were trying to get a statement!"

"Sorry, but I have full access," Jimmy was proud to announce, much to the annoyance of Nick.

"Who are you?" Montserrat scrunched her face, partially from confusion and the other part from genuine cold. She felt the tip of her nose freezing.

"Jimmy MacArthur. You know me," the man said with such assurance it almost made Montserrat doubt herself. "I hope you guys know by now that we're looking at a hate crime."

Montserrat was both stunned and confused on how he'd gotten that when both she and Nick hadn't even gotten a proper retell from the victim. "How did you-"

"-you better not publish any of that yet," Nick warned, already scowling but all Jimmy did was smile and go on his way.

~ 0 ~

The next morning had SVU busy with Heba's family, more so them than actually her.

"I don't think this is the way to get to our vic," Sonny told the other detectives around him while they watched Olivia and Rafael go back and forth with Reverend Curtis, who was acting on behalf of Heba's family.

Olivia's office was filled with the detectives, Heba's family and the Reverend. It was a loud commotion and the only person who nattered wasn't even in the room. She was in the interview room, trying to wish it all away.

"Reverend Curtis, Heba is in good hands here," Olivia followed the Reverend around her office. "I hope that we can stay focused on this case."

"As do I," Reverend Curtis raised his hand, showing them he was on their side but with more important endeavors. "This is just her family. Her brother Fareed is on his way."

Rafael barely contained the urge to roll his eyes right there. This was a complete waste of time. "Have we even interviewed her yet?" he spoke up just to stop Olivia from following the Reverend.

"Sort of," Montserrat muttered, crossing her arms as she remembered the interruptions from last night.

Amanda cleared her throat and gave her co-worker a glance to warn her to keep quiet. They didn't want Heba's family to know about Jimmy Mac. "Yeah, she was completely out of it at the scene. She was freezing. She spent all night in the E.R. I mean, this is the first chance we've had to talk to her."

"And we can't talk to her in front of her parents or you, reverend Curtis," Olivia put her hands together in exhaustion. They were making their case so much more difficult.

"This is more than just a rape. She was singled out because she wore a hijab," the Reverend spoke slowly as if none of the group were competent to understand his point.

"We're exploring that possibility-"

"Possibility? She was called a 'Muslim bitch.' Am I misinterpreting that?"

"Nobody is saying that you are-"

"-good. Even so, this community doesn't trust the NYPD-"

"-oh, but they trust you?" Rafael scoffed.

The Reverend shot him a look. "That's right. They reached out to me to be their advocate."

"Advocate? Any chance you told them that's exactly what the D.A.'S office is?"

"Heba's parents are concerned with her honor and the family's reputation."

"Go ahead." Olivia had enough of the nonsense. Every second they wasted arguing with the Reverend was another second Heba spent in torment. She went back to her detectives, pushing Amanda and Nick towards the interview room. "We understand that. So how about my detectives go in there with Heba - please get everybody else out of there…" She closed the interview door after Amanda and Nick then turned back and walked Rafael and the Reverend out of her office, "While you two work together in reassuring the family?"

Rafael's expression indicated no chance of that. The Reverend was working his last nerve and it wasn't even noon.

~ 0 ~

"So what are we looking?" Olivia asked the group once they were at a decent peace in the bullpen. They'd been able to get a proper statement from Heba, but it'd been quite the challenge to get them all out of the precinct without losing it.

"The rape kit exam confirms vaginal tears and the presence of semen from two different men. And remnants of torn hymen tissue," Amanda read off the results their M.E had sent them so far.

"And where are we on the hate crime aspect?"

"Well, they ripped off her head scarf and they taunted her with racial slurs," Montserrat said what Heba's statement had been. "That's pretty much the definition, isn't it?"

"Well, it's according to her," Nick leaned back on his chair. "We still haven't found any witnesses."

"Oh, come on. That time of night? Right by the park?" Sonny raised an eyebrow, smiling just to be obvious. "Somebody should have seen or heard something."

Olivia seemed to agree with his thoughts. "Okay, well, then go back up there, re-interview everybody. Doormen, street people." Sonny nodded and looked at Montserrat to see if she was ready to go.

"I hope it's not a chase," the ginger got up from her chair.

"And where are we with the security footage?" Olivia looked at the remainder of her detectives.

"We have the D.O.T. Traffic cam, but we're still checking into a couple other things," Fin promptly answered.

"Let me stop you all before you divide and conquer," Rafael stopped the entire group in time. "The family says Jimmy Mac called them. He had details from the case."

"Not such a surprise since he was at the crime scene," Olivia sighed.

"They think someone from SVU is talking to the press," Rafael's eyes flickered from one detective to the next. "Be aware of what you are saying."

"We got it, councilor," Sonny ushered Montserrat towards the hallway, but the ginger stopped just to make one remark.

"What is this, high school? We know how to keep our mouths shut," she rolled her eyes and went on out.

~ 0 ~

Following Olivia's instructions, Montserrat and Sonny talked to as many people that could've been at the scene last night, but it seemed they weren't going to have luck because everyone told them the same thing. There were no screams. There was no girl. They'd gone home earlier.

"I was working late last night," one construction worker was in the middle of saying, missing Montserrat practically ball her fists on her sides.

Sonny was more professional at the moment. He just kept the questions coming. "How late?"

"1:30. I'm trying to log in as many hours before De Blasio phases us out."

"And you were here, right by Central Park?"

"Yeah."

"You or any of your friends hear screams or see two guys take this woman down?" Sonny showed the man a picture of Heba on his phone.

The worker shook his head. "I heard about it this morning. Must have happened after I left."

"Okay, thanks," Sonny turned to Montserrat with the same disappointed expression she had.

"That's like the 20th person we speak to who has no idea of what happened," Montserrat groaned. "My feet hurt. And my mind."

"Yeah, well the mind thing isn't from this case, is it?" Sonny meant the birthday plans and just the mere reminder made Montserrat groan.

Luckily for her, or unluckily judging who was thinking, they were interrupted by Jimmy Mac.

"Are you kidding me?" Montserrat glared at the man she was losing respect for even when she hadn't even properly met him yet.

As soon as Jimmy saw them, he walked over (while stuffing the last bit of his hot dog into his mouth). "Detectives Carisi and Novak. So how's your vic?"

Montserrat had to bite her tongue so that she wouldn't respond with a curt 'none of your business'.

"You find that head scarf yet?"

"You think we're gonna talk to you about an open investigation?" Sonny derailed the answer cleverly, but Jimmy saw it as a mediocre attempt to cover the truth.

"So you got nothing. That's okay. There may be nothing to get!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Montserrat raised an eyebrow at the reporter. "Maybe you have something you want to share?"

Jimmy laughed in a condescending manner. "Jimmy Mac didn't become famous by sharing his sources with the cops. You can read about it like everybody else in the city in tomorrow's paper."

"Don't count on it," mumbled Montserrat when he left. "Who the hell does he think he is? He doesn't know anything." She would've said more had it not been for Sonny becoming focused with his phone all of a sudden. "What's up?"

"Uuh…" Sonny's look become concerned, bringing Montserrat to peer over to his phone and see the image causing problems.

"That's Heba on the street…"

"And look at the time stamp," Sonny pointed to the corner of the picture.

"It's 1:54 am and...she's walking toward the park. Clothes torn, no head scarf," Montserrat pursed her lips as they both knew that was quite a big contradiction to Heba's statement.

~0~

With further confirmation that Heba's statement was not quite true, the detectives took it straight to Heba herself for clarification. However, it turned out to be a waste of time because it only ended with Heba reaffirming her initial story and getting her family to throw the detectives out.

"How'd it go?" Olivia asked Montserrat and Sonny as soon as they walked into the bullpen.

"We are no longer welcome at that house," Sonny plopped down at his desk, more or less irritated.

Olivia motioned with a finger for Montserrat to follow her into the office. Montserrat dutifully followed but was already wear of where their conversation would end up at.

"Amanda and Finn went to Warner yesterday for further analysis and it's pretty much coinciding with the time stamp," Montserrat started first, thinking it would give her an advantage to lead the conversation towards her favor. "She said something about red and gold fibers being found under Heba's nails."

" So the benefit ended at midnight, and the security footage shows her walking towards the crime scene at what time?" Olivia rubbed her temples as she moved to her desk.

"It's 1:54," Montserrat paused for a second. The images of the distraught Heba was something hard to process. "Heba got defensive saying we didn't believe her but the truth is right there. We do believe something happened to her - the video proves it, but...not where she says or when she says."

"No chance of talking to her today," Olivia presumed after what Montserrat said.

"Not unless we want to be thrown out twice in two days," Montserrat crossed her arms and walked up to Olivia's desk. "She's too defensive, meaning she's lying. And if she's lying, then she doesn't want our help that much."

"Montse," Olivia brought her hands to the desk, looking disapproving. "It means she's hiding something because she's scared."

"Or mine, or yours…" Montserrat decided to leave it at that.

Olivia stayed pensive for a while before laying eyes on Montserrat. "Is this why you debate about pressing charges, then?" Montserrat visibly stiffened in her spot. "Because of the back and forth thing?"

"I don't want to do this right now, Olivia," sighed the ginger.

"I...I just don't understand," Olivia admitted. "You work for SVU. You of all people know how this works, the benefits of going forwards...the freedom you have afterwards."

"You say that because you knew exactly where your tormentor was. He's been in prison waiting trial, but I have no idea where the hell he is," Montserrat fervently shook her head. "I'm not opening myself to that type of trauma if I know there's not going to be any closure. Not happening."

"Hey Sarge?" Sonny poked his head into the office, essentially ending that conversation without knowing it. "We got a problem."

Olivia exchanged a look with Montserrat, both wondering what it could be now. "And what is it?"

Before Sonny could answer, Rafael pushed way into the office. He looked angry as hell as he raised a newspaper in his hand. "Who the hell has been talking to Jimmy Mac?" Because the newspaper's headline was all about the hoax that Heba's case was thought to be.

Perhaps it was the effect of the repeated conversation, or the fact she just felt plain offended, but Montserrat responded with a decent dripping sarcasm, "Oh yeah, all of us. We took turns."

That was all it took to infuriate Rafael. If Montserrat hadn't been in her own mood, she would've been amused by the way his face scrunched in utter anger. She'd come to learn some of his mannerisms since she was so good at irritating him. When he scrunched his entire face just for a blip of a second, it meant he was frustrated and a good amount of angry.

"Hang on," Olivia rose from her chair, making a motion with her hands for them to calm down. "None of us are talking to Jimmy-"

Rafael let the newspaper drop on the desk. "Then where the hell is he getting it from?"

"I wish I knew, but we don't." Olivia picked up the newspaper and reread the headline at least twice before forcing herself to skim the article. "But I'm going to talk to him."

"And do what?" Rafael scoffed, snatching the newspaper from her hands. "There's no point. Someone is talking."

"I will fix it," Olivia reassured then looked at Montserrat and Sonny. "Leave us, please. Montserrat, we'll talk later."

Montserrat did a double-take before outright saying, "No we're done. I made my decision." She gave Olivia no room to argue by leaving with Sonny.

"Can I ask what the hell is going on?" Rafael wished he could get at least one question answered that day.

"...she just doesn't like her birthday," Olivia found herself answering within the second.

Rafael rolled his eyes. "I have never met someone who put that much hatred into their birthday. You all need to focus."

"We will," Olivia's reassurance meant nothing to him at the moment.

"You better because I will be coming back tonight to see your progress."

Olivia leveled his intense look with her own, studious one. "How hard is the D.A. breathing on you right now?"

The question only made Rafael slightly shift. He kept his cool facade as best as he could. "My concern only."

It was then Olivia's turn to scoff. "Okay."

Rafael pointed a warning finger her way as he started to leave. "I'll be back later."

Olivia nodded him off and picked up the newspaper again. She would mark Jimmy's office as the second place she would be heading to today.

~ 0 ~

"Captain Carroll?" a tall, dark haired man stepped into a woman's office.

The woman in question was an older woman, probably fifty or so. Her grayish hair was tied into a tight bun and her blue eyes, though bright, were dimmed by the stack of papers on her desk. "Yes, Sanders?"

"You have a visitor," Detective Sanders said.

"Do I?" the Captain thought for a second before shaking her head. "Can't be. I don't have anything scheduled."

Before Detective Sanders could say anything, Olivia pushed the office door open and strode inside. "You'll have to make time then because I'm not leaving until we talk."

Captain Carroll raised an eyebrow at the woman, clearly taken aback by Olivia's bluntness. Being an older woman, Carroll was used to a different type of lifestyle. "Excuse me?"

Olivia ignored Carroll and glanced at the detective with them. "Leave us."

Detective Sanders briefly looked to his captain, wondering what he should do. He hadn't been very open to Olivia's sudden visit to their precinct, but as a detective there wasn't much he could do.

"Leave us, Sanders," the Captain ultimately said, making a motion for the man to leave.

Olivia waited till they were alone before speaking, and even when she did she was careful to speak in a quiet manner. "I'm Sergeant Olivia Benson, acting commander of Manhattan's SVU squad."

"Yes, I've heard about you several times," Captain Carroll rose from her desk and straightened up her blouse. "To what do I owe this visit? It's not everyday we get a Manhattan SVU Sergeant in Queens' Homicide."

"I'm here unofficially," Olivia walked slowly towards the desk. "I was the one who received one of your detective's transfer papers. You remember Detective Novak, right?" Olivia scrutinized the Captain for every expression she gave, and it was quite easy to see that the mere mention of Montserrat's name made Carroll stiffen.

Carroll cleared her throat and once again patted her blouse down as if it'd gotten crinkled in the one minute since the last time. "Detective Novak? Of course I remember her. She's the reason many of our drug missions were successful. You know Hallie D'Amico, right?"

"I do," Olivia gave a slight nod of her head. "And I think we both know at what cost D'Amico went down...right?"

Once again, Carroll's forehead creased at the middle. "I...don't know what you mean."

"Let me put it to you this way, just so that we don't waste time," Olivia pressed her hands onto the desk and leaned forwards, "I know what happened during your undercover mission for Hallie D'Amico. I know what happened to Detective Novak and I know that you did nothing about it. You, Captain-" Olivia spat the title like venom, "-are a true disgrace in this department."

Carroll's eyebrows knitted together as anger flourished through her. "How dare you-"

"-no, how dare you call yourself Captain while you let your detectives go through hell?" Olivia pushed herself off the desk, thinking it was better to put some distance between her and the Captain.

"I have no idea what you are talking about," Carroll attempted to say, but Olivia was heated.

"Quit playing! I know about everything! Montserrat told me!"

Carroll was stunned. "She did what-"

"-and don't you dare-" Olivia pointed a sharp finger in Carroll's way, "-have the audacity to be angry about that! How could you - how you could trade in your detective's well being, her entire self, for one measly operation?"

"Measly operation?" Carroll's eyes nearly bulged from her eyes. "That was an undercover mission of 3 years!"

"I don't care!" snapped Olivia. "Because no mission is worth any detectives' lives!"

"Now wait a minute!" Carroll raised her hands, hoping to slow things down for her benefit. "I don't know why Montserrat would ever choose to disclose to anyone, but I'll have you know I never forced her to keep quiet."

"No," Olivia agreed, tilting her head, "But you sure did remind her that the mission was important. It'd been years' work and it would be a shame if her pressing charges about a rape would cut the mission short. Hallie D'Amico couldn't get away, right?"

"And she didn't."

"At Montserrat's expense!" Olivia practically yelled in the woman's face. She didn't even notice how far she'd gone over the desk. "You know she goes to therapy because of what happened to her? It's the only place she can talk freely because she doesn't want to press charges. You manipulated her into keeping quiet just so you could get your name on the headlines."

"I did no such thing," Carroll said, but Olivia swore it sounded like the woman was trying to convince herself of her own statement. "Now get out of my office, and don't you ever come back. If Montserrat would like to argue, then by all means she's welcome to return."

Olivia shook her head. "You're cynical. That's why Montserrat left Queens, and your precinct in the first place. She couldn't stand living here, working in a place where no one cared for her."

"I tried to ease her pain the best I could-" Carroll attempted to argue but Olivia quickly walked up to her to cut her off.

"All lies!" she spat and straightened herself up. "When push came to shove, you threw Montserrat under the bus. You decided she was not important enough-"

"-that's not true-" Carroll's face fell, but Olivia felt no sympathy for her.

"-it is. The only thing I'm glad about is the fact that Montserrat is with us now. Because in my squad, we care about each other and we always look out for each other. Sadly, yours doesn't share the same sentiment," Olivia gave Carroll one look-over before storming out of the office.

Detective Sanders watched Olivia leave their precinct and had the curiosity to see his Captain. However, when he attempted to speak with Carroll, she basically threw him out.

~ 0 ~

You work for SVU.

Montserrat fervently scrolled down her computer screen, switching tabs every now and then. No matter how hard she tried, she kept hearing Olivia's words from their most recent disagreement. Despite her failed endeavors, Olivia just wouldn't give up on pressing charges. Montserrat was getting weary, and yet even through that she had never really thought about her work at SVU as she was now.

What Olivia said was true. Montserrat worked at SVU, the place where it was encouraged to come forwards about rape. And yet there she was, doing the exact opposite. How could she continue working there when she herself wouldn't come out and say what happened to her?

"Are those...transfer applications?"

Montserrat nearly jumped out of her chair. Of course when it hit her that she was no longer alone, she quickly closed all the tabs at once. But it was too late.

Rafael moved around her desk slowly, eyes flickering between her computer and her. "Are you thinking of transferring out of SVU?"

Montserrat cleared her throat while racking her head for a plausible explanation. She hadn't even concluded on her own if that's what she wanted to do. She'd just...perused. But boy was it going to cost her. "I...I was...I was just looking," came out of her mouth a few seconds later.

Rafael took the seat beside her desk. "Really? Just looking? Why?"

Montserrat's mouth opened several times but in the end a small laugh slipped through. "It doesn't matter. I was just looking. And why do you care? If I were to transfer, wouldn't that just be a relief for you?"

For a second it looked like Rafael would smile out of amusement, but he kept it well hidden. "Well, contrary to the popular belief, your big mouth is actually helpful sometimes. And...you do good work around here."

Montserrat looked at him for a second before smiling herself. "Are you trying to say you'd miss me if I were gone?"

"Stop," Rafael warned, though he did shift in his seat like he'd been outed.

Montserrat still smiled ever so proudly. "It's okay, councilor, I know it's hard to admit it--"

"Seriously, stop. Where are the others? I came back to see Olivia," he looked around at the empty bullpen, making it harder for Montserrat to keep from laughing.

"Olivia's been gone all afternoon. Nick and Finn went to talk to Heba's family again, and Amanda and Sonny went for some take out."

"Oh, so you waited for everyone to be gone to go through transfer papers," Rafael noted. "You're serious about this."

Montserrat brought a hand to her hair, nervous fingers looping around one curl. "I'm not. I'm just...considering."

"That's the same thing. I transferred as well, so I know the process very well. What is going on?" Rafael was beginning to get tired of asking the same question with no answer available.

"Nothing. And I would appreciate if you didn't say anything about this to anyone else," Montserrat sighed. If this was the reaction she got from someone who rarely showed any emotions, she didn't want to know what the others would do.

"Fine," Rafael said after concluding that despite her assurances it was a serious matter. For some reason, things weren't fine. It bothered him.

"Hey!" Amanda's voice drew their attention, though one more than the other. "We got the food!"

"Great! Sonny hand me mine and don't touch it!" Montserrat's demeanor changed drastically, but of course in Rafael's mind it was all for show. He knew exactly what she was doing. Faking it. And she was doing a pretty good damn job at it too. No one could know what she was doing on the side.

But he did.

#svu #rafael barba #ocappreciation #ocapp #svu fics #rafael barba fics #rafael barba imagines #svu imagines #oc: Montserrat Novak #fic: dare to forget me

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dimensiontripperhibiki · 4 years

Text

The End is Where We Begin (2/?)

Thanks so much for all of the likes/comments/reblogs etc. They really mean a lot and definitely encourage me to keep writing. I couldn’t wait to get started on this chapter. Hope you guys enjoy!

“Kara, can you check on the pizza?!” “Sure!” Kara jumped up from the couch and jogged into the kitchen to check the pizza. She opened the oven, narrowing her eyes at the gently browning pizza. “Seems okay!” She shut the oven door and began to walk back to the couch, intending to continue to flick through the channels. She paused though, at the sound of a knock at the door. She walked toward it and opened it. Her stomach did a peculiar flip when she found Lena standing there. “Lena. Um...hi.” “Kara,” Lena replied in greeting as she glanced briefly past Kara. Kara swallowed convulsively as she stepped out of the way to let Lena pass her. “Come in. I-I didn’t expect to see you.” “Why would you?” Lena replied. She stopped a few feet into the apartment, sniffing the air. “You’re cooking? Since when can you cook?” Kara gave a nervous laugh and shut the door. “Hey, I can cook just fine!” Lena smirked at the response. “I don’t recall any of your culinary ventures ever being successful.”

“Well I-I…” Kara spluttered for a moment before she reluctantly admitted defeat. “That’s fair. But why cook when you can just order takeout? It’s so much faster.” “I could give you an entire list of reasons. Not that you would listen.” Kara smiled warmly at Lena, forgetting to reply for a moment. She had missed this. Just being able to talk to Lena like this. “Kara, the pizza!” “Huh?” Kara’s attention was drawn away at the sound of Alex’s voice and she watched her sister hurry from the bedroom to the kitchen. “Oh no. It was fine five minutes ago!” She grimaced, watching as Alex opened the oven and frantically fanned the smoke away with a towel. “Guess we’re ordering takeout?” Lena pressed a hand to her mouth, disguising a laugh as a cough. Unfortunately, that cough was enough to draw Alex’s attention toward her. “Oh. I didn’t know we had company.” Alex straightened up, fumbling behind her back to turn the oven off. She was clearly as surprised to see Lena as Kara was, albeit more suspicious at the same time. “Is everything okay?” “Everything is fine,” Lena answered, turning her attention back to Kara. “I actually wanted to ask you some questions about our discussion the other day. About the antimatter. I have some ideas but I need to…” “Ah!” Kara threw her arms up, effectively shocking Lena into silence. Her gaze flicked to Alex and she noticed her sister’s brow furrowing. “That? That was nothing.” Lena frowned. “It sounded like something when you barged into my office.�� “That was just…reporter stuff, you know? Nothing at all to worry about. Come on, Lena. I’ll show you out.” Kara took hold of Lena’s elbow and escorted her to the door, trying to ignore the way Alex was staring at her. “I’ll be right back, Alex!” Lena pulled away from Kara’s grip as soon as they were outside of the apartment. “What the hell?” “I’m sorry!” Kara whisper yelled. She glanced at the door, worried that Alex might be listening. “Come with me. Please.” She walked past Lena and walked down the hallway, only stopping when she was a safe distance away from the door. She breathed a sigh of relief when she turned to see that Lena had followed her. “Kara, what’s going on?” “Alex doesn’t know anything about what I asked you.” Kara’s gaze kept flicking over to the door, checking to make sure they were still alone. “And I want to keep it that way right now. I want to keep this between the two of us.” Lena stared at Kara for a long moment before she let out a soft, bitter laugh. “A secret between the two of us? That’s a foreign concept.” “Lena, please.” Kara pleaded, her voice audibly trembling. “She can’t know anything about this yet. It’s complicated. But I really do need you to keep it a secret.” “And if I give you my word that I won’t tell anyone you’re just going to believe me?” Lena raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You trust me with this...secret?” “Of course I trust you,” Kara answered sincerely. She stepped closer to Lena, almost reaching out before she thought better of it. She let her hand drop to her side. “I’m not going to lie to you. You know I’m not telling you everything about what’s happening. But I promise I will. When it’s time.” Lena let out a breath, her gaze flicking to the side. “Come to my office tomorrow. I need to speak with you and clearly now isn’t a good time.” “Right. I will.” Kara tried to quell the hope that bloomed in her chest, to no avail. “Thank you, Lena.” “I haven’t done anything yet.” Lena pointed out, her lips turning up slightly before she walked past Kara, toward the door. “Don’t be late!” “I won’t!” Kara called after Lena. She watched Lena leave before she headed back inside, her elation at the invitation to Lena’s office causing her to completely forget about what had happened a few minutes ago in the apartment. Upon entering her apartment she found Alex waiting for her, her arms crossed in front of her chest. Kara’s smile slipped away. “Okay, you’re mad.” “I’m definitely confused,” Alex admitted, staring hard at her sister. “What was all that about?” “Uh…” Kara hesitated at the question. She’d never been very good at lying to Alex. “Just something I wanted to work on with Lena. I figured maybe if she helps me look into this...thing for CatCo, maybe it would give us a chance to bond again and maybe she would see I really didn’t mean to hurt her.” Alex’s brow furrowed and for a moment Kara thought that her sister wasn’t going to believe her. Finally, Alex’s posture relaxed. “Just be careful, okay? I don’t want her to take advantage of you again.” She quickly continued, seeing Kara open her mouth to protest. “I know! I know she has every right to be angry with you but I can still be pissed at her for hurting you. You’re my sister. I’d be furious with anyone for hurting you.” Kara breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed that Alex had believed her at least. She wasn’t exactly lying. She did want to rebuild the closeness she’d once had with Lena, she just wasn’t being completely honest with her sister. “I know. Thanks, Alex.” “The pizza is a lost cause by the way,” Alex commented as she turned and made her way back to the kitchen. “We’re going to have to order takeout again. I’ll set the movie up while you do that because you’re definitely paying this time. And I’m demanding a hunger games marathon tonight.” Kara pouted at the demand that she pay for the food but she was quickly distracted by Alex’s last sentence. “Wait, marathon? Aren’t you meant to have a date with Kelly tonight?” “Uh…” Alex paused briefly on her way to the couch. She sat down, grabbing the remote. “No.” “Alex.” Alex flicked through the list of movies on the screen, refusing to look at Kara. “Fine, I canceled.” “What?” Forgetting about ordering the food, Kara walked over to the couch and stood directly between Alex and the TV, forcing Alex to look at her. “Alex.” “Stop saying my name like that,” Alex grumbled, reluctantly setting the remote down. “I’m worried about you, okay?” Kara bristled, recalling Nia’s constant pleading with her to say something to Alex. “Why? Did someone say something to you?” “No. But you’ve been distracted lately.” Alex took note of the relief that washed over Kara’s face. “You’re not focused on the job. It’s like your mind is somewhere else entirely.” “I am not distracted!” “You flew into a building yesterday, Kara!” Kara grimaced. “I’m...well...that was...fine! I was distracted then but I’m not distracted now! I was just thinking about…” “Lena?” Alex interjected knowingly. “Kara, I know you miss her but…” “I don’t want to talk about this.” Kara quickly interrupted. She didn’t want to get into her thoughts about Lena and she didn’t want to lie to Alex more than she already was. “I’ll try to focus, I promise. Now can we go back to talking about why you ditched your date to hang out with me?” “I already told you. I was worried.” Alex patted the seat next to her and Kara plopped down at her side. “Kelly understands.” “You could have at least invited her over for movie night.” “You’d be okay with that?” Alex turned more toward Kara, resting her arm along the back of the couch. “Me inviting her to our sister nights sometimes?” Kara shrugged her shoulders. “Sure. You two are serious, aren’t you? She’s practically family to me too now. The more the merrier!” Alex smiled warmly at the response and leaned forward to hug her sister. “Thanks, Kara. I know that would mean a lot to her.” ---- “Come in,” Lena called at the sound of a gentle knock at her office door. She distractedly straightened the already neat stack of papers in front of her and looked up when Kara entered the room, her hands and arms full. “It’s too much, right?” Kara grimaced at the shocked look on Lena’s face. “I didn’t know if you would have eaten lunch yet so I brought sushi and then I figured maybe you would want something sweet so I brought cronuts and cupcakes. I didn’t know if you would want hot coffee or iced so I brought both.” Lena leaned back in her seat, reluctantly amused by Kara’s rambling. “I’m not especially hungry but I never say no to coffee.” Kara brightened at the comment and she walked toward Lena’s desk, unceremoniously setting everything down. She sat down opposite Lena, shuffling the chair as close as possible to the desk. “So you wanted to talk?” Lena sipped at the coffee Kara had brought for her, noticing it was still piping hot. “I do need to ask you some things. But before we get into that, I was wondering if you’ll tell me why you’re keeping secrets from your sister? It seemed that the two of you told each other everything.” “I...you’re right. We do, usually.” Kara took her bright pink milkshake from the cup holder on the desk, mostly for something to do with her hands. “But if I tell her about this she’s only going to worry. It’s dangerous.” “I would have thought she’d be used to that by now,” Lena commented, folding her arms atop her desk. “Being the sister of Supergirl and all.” Kara shrugged her shoulders in response. “I just don’t want to worry her until I have to this time.” “But my question is, why is this time different to all of the other times?” “I’m...um…” Lena watched Kara nervously fidget. “So that’s the part you’re not telling me.” “It’s not for the reason you think!” Kara said quickly, not wanting Lena to get the wrong idea. “It’s just that I don’t want to tell anyone until I’m sure. I’m still kind of processing it myself. Trying to anyway. But I will tell you. When I’m sure.” “It sounds important. Is it bad?” Kara nodded grimly. “You could say that.” As Kara drank an unhealthy amount of her milkshake in one sip, Lena decided to stop pressing the issue. “I’ve been looking into the antimatter you asked me about. Or trying to, at least. As I said when you asked me, it’s really only a theory.” Kara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Do you know if there’s any way to stop it?” “Not yet.” Lena reluctantly answered, trying not to show how much it irked her that she was having trouble figuring it out. “I’ve been looking into it but up until now I only have more questions.” “Okay. Can I help?” Lena thought about that for a moment, hesitant to open herself up to working with Kara again. This was how it started. She knew that. Kara would worm her way back in with her goodness and sincerity and Lena’s resolve to be angry would crumble. “Lena?” Lena shook her head, breaking herself from her thoughts. “There’s far more matter than antimatter in the universe compared to say...moments after the Big Bang when matter and antimatter would have been at war with one another. Of course, matter won out in the end which is why now there’s very little antimatter left in the universe today.” Kara nodded in response. “Yeah?” “But we still encounter a small amount of antimatter every day.” Lena continued, cupping her hands around her still warm coffee. “But that only accounts for single particles colliding which is why we never notice when they do collide.” She paused, taking a sip from her coffee as she gathered her thoughts. “The only answer I have for you right now is that the scale of destruction that would be caused is entirely dependant upon the amount of antimatter in question. Which leads me to my question...how much antimatter are you talking about?” “A lot.” Kara sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Larger than a city?” “Bigger than the earth,” Kara answered, shaking her head. She shuddered, recalling the wave which had consumed everything. Including herself. “Do you know if there’s a way to stop it?” “I’ll keep looking,” Lena replied, watching Kara closely. There was something off about her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. “Thank you,” Kara said gratefully. “Anything you find out could help. This really means a lot to me.” Lena bit back a harsh retort. It was instinct for her to want to lash out at Kara. The wound of betrayal was still fresh. So fresh that Lena wasn’t sure it would ever heal. “Lena, I’m...I think I’m…” Kara hesitated, taking a shuddering breath. “In this crisis, I’m supposed to…” Lena watched with a furrowed brow as Kara struggled to speak. “Supposed to what?” “Just…” Kara was cut off by the sound of her phone ringing and she jumped at the sound, scrambling to take her phone from her pocket. “Sorry, it’s Alex. I have to take this.” Lena motioned for Kara to go ahead and leaned back in her seat. “Hello? Yeah, it’s fine...I’ll be right there.” “Duty calls?” Lena asked as Kara quickly tucked her phone away and stood up. “Sorry. Can we talk more tomorrow?” Kara asked hopefully as she whipped her glasses off. Lena nodded as she watched Kara’s suit appear. “That’s fine. Stop by my office around the same time.” “Thanks, Lena. I have to go, I’m sorry…” Kara bit her lip, looking at Lena. “What?” Lena looked down at herself, wondering what Kara was looking at. “Nothing.” Kara blushed. She could hardly tell Lena that instead of rushing off to a burning building she was busy thinking about how much she missed hugging Lena goodbye. “I’ll see you later.” Before Lena could say anything Kara had fled the room, shooting up into the sky from the balcony. Sighing, Lena looked at the untouched food Kara had left on her desk. She supposed her employees would be happy, at least. TBC.

#Supercorp #Supergirl #Kara Danvers #Lena Luthor

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