song and steel
a Supergirl / Glee crossover event
chapter one
When Cat Grant's voice came crackling over the PA to demand her presence in her office NOW, Kara wondered what it was she had – or maybe hadn't – done to incur her boss' wrath this time. She was pretty sure she'd completed the usual early morning tasks flawlessly; she ran down the mental checklist and found nothing amiss. Scalding hot coffee? Check. Breakfast wrap? Check. Newspapers and downloads? Check, check. So what was it that could possibly have her boss' voice so laden with frost that the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped ten degrees?
She really didn't want to know, but stood up from her chair anyway, groaning as she did, and prepared herself mentally for the tongue-lashing she expected to get when she finally made it into the office. It wasn't far from her desk, but it might as well have been a million miles away.
"Good luck," Winn said from his desk across the aisle, none too sincerely. Kara frowned at the note of relief in his voice. Yeah – you're just glad it's me she called in there, and not you.
Sighing, Kara trudged into Cat Grant's office with all the eagerness of a death row inmate on his way to the electric chair.
"Kerri," her boss said as she entered, not looking up from the newspapers, tablet and layout sheets for the afternoon edition spread out across her continent-sized desk. "Please. Don't sit."
Kara resisted the impulse to roll her eyes at her boss' casual meanness; she had quickly learned that the woman had an almost preternatural awareness of everything that went on around her, and no detail was too small or insignificant for her to miss.
"Good morning, Ms. Grant. How can I assist you?" she ventured, hoping that her winning smile and cheerful disposition would help to melt the ice floes between herself and her boss.
The media magnate's head quirked up at that, a bemused smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "For one, you can never utter that phrase again," she said coolly. "This is CatCo, not the Starbucks on the corner. I would have thought you'd learned the difference by now."
Nope. Sunny and cheerful would not win the day here. Kara repressed the urge to sigh.
When Kara didn't respond, Cat continued on. "I have good news for you, Karla. You are about to get your first break here at CatCo. And no, I don't mean an extra fifteen minutes besides lunch. I mean a real, actual break. I'm giving you a story to cover."
Kara smiled widely and kept herself, somehow, from breaking into an awkward, yet endearingly high-spirited happy dance, but couldn't bite back the small squeal of delight that escaped her. "A real story? Really? Oh, thank you, Ms. Grant! Thank you!"
Cat waved her hand in the air beside her head, as though she was batting away a stray wave of happiness emanating from her assistant. They're so much like puppies at that age, she thought. I could have just given her a chew toy and she would have been equally thrilled.
"It's nothing, really. And by that, I mean it really is nothing. Apparently our esteemed Features and Local Interest reporter, Frank I-don't-care-enough-to-know-his-last-name, has come down with a case of the monkey flu or something, and he can't cover his weekend assignment for the Monday edition. It's a multi-media story for the paper and the Web site, so you'll need to take video in addition to writing the feature."
Kara felt herself nearly bursting with excitement at the thought of becoming a reporter, like a certain famous cousin of hers. She reminded herself of something he had once told her: there are no small stories – just small reporters. "Sounds great, Ms. Grant. What's the story?"
The room was silent as Cat made notes in red pen on a piece of copy for the afternoon's editorial page; she frowned momentarily before looking up again at her young assistant.
"There is apparently something called the United States High School Show Choir Championships taking place at the Grand Hotel in the heart of our beloved National City this weekend. You are going to cover it."
Kara made a confused face, her features scrunching up in bewilderment.
"Show choir?" she asked.
Cat let out an exasperated breath. Honestly, employees were so exhausting. She found herself looking forward to the day when it would just be her and a staff of automated constructs in the office.
"Frank explained this to me, but I didn't really care, so I wasn't exactly listening. The gist of it was that it's a competition in which groups of hormonally addled teenagers sing and dance in ridiculous costumes for a panel of incredibly bored judges and an audience of people too poor to buy tickets to see an actual musical performance. For some reason, high schools from all over the country send groups to compete for the most dubious national title I can imagine."
Kara thought for a moment, remembering how she'd loved to sing and dance as a kid. "It sounds like fun to me."
Cat barked a humorless laugh. "Of course it does." Rummaging about the pile of clutter on her desk, then looking down into a drawer, she found whatever it was for which she was searching and held it out for Kara to take. "Here. You'll need this."
It was a thick folder containing information about the competition, the groups involved, the history and rules of show choir, and even pictures of the most noteworthy performers. Kara used her super-vision and computer brain to scan and memorize all the information in seconds, all the while managing to look as though she was poring over it with great intensity.
"I want you to study every single detail in that folder tonight. Study and memorize it. Don't eat, don't sleep, don't do anything until you know the story and its subjects forwards, backwards and sideways. Especially the bit about the group our fair state is sending, as they're considered to be one of the favorites to win the whole silly affair: the New Directions."
The Queen of National City Media enunciated the last two words with special care, distastefully remembering the conversation with Frank, in which she had embarrassingly realized that the name sounded like Nude Erections if spoken too quickly. It was lucky for him that he'd gotten sick – otherwise she would have fired the man for that.
"New Directions," Kara repeated slowly. "Their star performer is Rachel Berry, and they're from William McKinley High School in Lima. Their coaches are William Schuester and Shelby Corcoran, and the rest of the group consists of Santana Lopez, Quinn Fabray, Brittany Pierce, Artie Abrams, Kurt Hummel, Finn Hudson, Noah Puckerman, Kitty Wilde, Sam Evans, Tina Cohen-Chang, Mike Chang (no relation), Blaine Anderson and Mercedes Jones."
Cat fixed her with an incredulous stare, her eyes narrowed in a look comprised of both astonishment and suspicion. "How – how did you - ?"
"Oh," Kara shrugged her shoulders as her face took on an embarrassed expression. "That? I'm – I'm just a really fast reader. Always have been."
"Your parents must have been delighted when you were in kindergarten."
"They totally were." Of course, that was on another planet, but still...
Cat arched an eyebrow. "Yes, well. Good for you, and them. Now – I have real work to do, for which I draw an eight-figure paycheck, and which enables me to pay you substantially less than that, yet still enough for you to afford an apartment that's not the size of a broom closet."
"Yes. Yes, of course. I'll just...I'll just go back to my desk and, um...start doing what I do."
"Excellent." Cat turned her large, plush office chair around to give her attention to one of the many television screens above and behind her desk, signaling Kara's dismissal. Then, as her assistant turned to leave, she raised her hand, one finger pointing skyward as the expensive bangles on her wrist clanked together indelicately.
Kara froze at the sound, knowing exactly what it meant.
"I need another coffee. And a lettuce wrap."
Right away, boss.
No one even noticed the blur she made as she grabbed her purse from her desk, zipped out the door and down nineteen flights of stairs to emerge from the front door of the CatCo Media Holdings, Inc. building less than two seconds later. She patted down the collar of her pale blue blouse and smoothed the front of her black pencil skirt while standing just outside the door, then adopted a decidedly more human pace as she headed down the long, wide city block to the deli, where Cat Grant's coffee and lettuce wrap waited to be purchased.
Disclaimer: "Supergirl" and "Glee" are owned by DC Comics and Ryan Murphy Productions, respectively. Characters used herein are merely borrowed for fun and entertainment, not for profit.