Rhu-El is…young. Small. Lena isn't quite sure how old he is, but Lena is sure of is that her mothers have adopted him. Somehow. Rhu-El also has another name that isn't so alien – her father is remarkably calm, actually, about interacting with them when it comes to this. Maybe it's because Kara is in the room, but Lionel isn't hostile. In fact, Lena would go as far as to say he's kind when he shows Rhu-El his 'special identity' to use in front of other humans.

"What are you thinking about?" Her lab-partner at her new school asks her one day, when she's distracted thinking about it all.

"My brother."

"Lex?"

"No," Lena shakes her head. "Noel. My mother's adopted him recently. It's…weird."

Jack pokes her on the arm. "How? What's he like? How old is he?"

"We don't know. Four? Three?" Lena mutters, frowning, looking down at her biology notes. "He cries a lot. He misses his biological family and he doesn't like the dark – his light has to be on all the time, but he can't sleep properly with it on. I can't sleep because of how he whines all the time." Distracted from her work, Lena stiffens as Jack puts a hand on her wrist.

"Hey, don't worry about it, yeah? He'll calm down eventually. What about a night-light? They come in cool colours, too."

"I don't know. I think they tried that last week," Lena sighs, rubbing her eyes and stifling a yawn. "And he doesn't like me."

"How could anyone dislike you?" Jack chuckles a little, Lena not having any energy to whack him on the arm. "It can't be that bad. He's having trouble adjusting. Maybe you could spend more time with him – I know that my sister doesn't like me in part because I don't spend time with her. Mother says she's given up on me."

"You have a sister?" Lena glances at Jack, who nods.

"Yes. Her name's Anaya. She's eleven."

"I've got three brothers, including Noel." Lena briefly thinks of Adam, wondering if he counts, but quickly discards the idea – he's Cat and Kara's son, not Lara's, not like Kal-El is. "Lex and Kal-El. Kal-El's only a year older than me."

Jack is a good friend. He walks around school with her, rolling his eyes as people snap pictures and cat-call her. He's a good friend and maybe he might have been a good boyfriend, too, had he not suddenly stopped dead upon seeing Adam, when he comes with Kal-El to pick Lena up in Cat's fancy Porsche, sitting on the head of the drivers seat.

"Who's your friend, Len?" Adam questions, not taking his eyes off of Jack.

"This is Jack…" Lena starts cautiously, handing over her satchel to Kal-El as he offers his hand, readjusting her grip on her biology project in its plastic box. "Jack, meet my brother, Kal-El and his step-brother, Adam."

"Adam, right, hi." Jack's voice is high and shaky and Lena eyes Jack carefully as he fumbles, stuttering. "Uh- yeah- you- we-"

"Do you see colour too?" Adam blurts out. That's when more things begin to make sense, Kal-El going ahh audibly in understanding as Lena raises her eyebrows sharply.

"Y-y-yes, yes I do," Jack replies, still stuttering.

"Come on, Lena, we'll let these two chat," Kal-El invites her into the Porsche, lifting her up over the side with ease into the back, tucking her bag in the small footspace in front of where Lena places her project. Lena sees the girls in her class ogling Kal-El from off the side, waving as they walk past. The happy-go-lucky boy that he is, Kal-El smiles cheerily, waving back, causing Lena to roll her eyes as the girls smirk.

Attention turning back to Jack and Adam, Lena feels a slight feeling of loss in her chest. I want to meet my soulmate, she thinks, swallowing. The boys exchange contact details, Jack not even saying goodbye to her as Adam slips down into the drivers seat, blindly buckling in before speeding off into the traffic.

"So, you met your soulmate," Kal-El prods. Adam nods, looking to be on autopilot, even as his eyes move back and forth like he's watching a ping-pong tournament. "And?"

"Everything's…so much weirder. Everything was grey before and I could see the difference in shade and tone, right, but this is completely different and-"

And then a car comes speeding into them, smashing off the side of their door and causing them to skid, slipping and sliding across the freeway, bashing into more and more cars before they finally start to go upside down. Lena screams, grabbing at the handle in the side of the open-top vehicle, seatbelt jerking and burning across her shoulder as they spin. As they bump against the side of the road, against a cement block, everything stops spinning and Lena dizzily sees Kal-El wrapped around Adam, holding onto the head-rest so tightly that it's bent out of shape.

He's the hazard in this wreck, Lena blearily thinks, he's the one that can't break. A look to the passenger's seat assures her that her biology project is royally screwed. Dammit.

In the hospital, afterwards, her family worries and surrounds her bed. Miraculously, she isn't injured other than a sprained wrist from holding on to the handle as they were thrown about, but her mothers still worry. The doctors say she's still in shock and Lena finds that easy to believe. Everything is distant…

Kal-El is perfectly fine, apparently – which is obvious, in hindsight – but Adam has broken both of his wrists badly enough he's had to go into surgery briefly, for them to be fixed. Jack sits beside Cat, Lena notices, watching them converse briefly before turning her attention to the sudden pressure on her stomach. Rhu-El is crying, she realises belatedly. He crawls closer to her, arms wrapping around her neck as he leans on her at an odd angle, causing Lena to lose her balance before she corrects herself, finally coming into focus.

"What's the matter with you?" She questions, arms hesitantly wrapping around her baby brother. Rhu-El sniffles into her school jumper, thin blue wool and the blouse underneath quickly becoming soaked. "Hey, don't worry about me, please, I'm okay…mom, help." She looks to her mother, who dabs her eyes, smiling happily.

"No."

Lena opens her mouth to protest, before Rhu-El sits up again, sniffing loudly before pressing a frankly disgustingly wet kiss to her cheek. Lena grimaces, free hand coming up to wipe it as Rhu-El starts hugging her again.

"You're hurting," he says, sounding far more morose than any three – four? – year old that Lena's ever met has, which…which to be fair, doesn't number much. "I don't want you to be hurt, Lena."

"Thanks," Lena says, not really able to come up with a reply for that. Rhu-El seems content to sit awkwardly in her lap, arms wrapped around her as Lena supports him oddly. "Mom?"

"Yes, Lena?" Lillian looks up from her conversation with Lionel…who Lena did not see until now. Heart pumping fast – and loud, the beeps of the heart monitor suddenly like sirens in her ears – she stares at him.

"…you really think that I'm not going to show up when you've been in an accident?" He questions her. Lena doesn't reply, swallowing uneasily. "Would you like me to go?"

"No," the word sticks in her throat, but it comes out as she suddenly feels a burning need to hug her father. She tamps it down though, even as her eyes itch. Looking down to Rhu-El, Lena busies herself with shuffling him one-handedly, a hopeless endeavour as Rhu-El does not want to move at all. Lara eventually helps, getting up to retrieve him, causing a familiar kind of tantrum, but one that baffles Lena as it's because Rhu-El is being taken away from her.

"I thought he hated me," she mutters, gaining a look from Kal-El and cousin Kara both. Looking away from the sight and awkwardly ignoring his crying for her, Lena looks around the rest of Accident and Emergency, anxiety rising in her as her thoughts stray to Adam. There are other patients here, some covered in blood and others that moan pitifully. A whole group of doctors are working behind a half-shut curtain, a victim of a car explosion going into cardiac arrest. Lena can see their skin, lighter greys meshed with darker greys and she has to look away sharply, feeling like she's going to throw up-

Something blooms from the centre of a person, the walls rippling into what looks like white but it's not, a kind of calming shade of something. The entire room begins to gain…colour. Colour, I'm seeing colour, Lena realises with a jolt, abruptly looking back to the person it bloomed from. Their hair is long and dark, as is their skin, but not the kind of dark like that of Lara, who Lena quickly compares them with before finding the comparison between the person- the girl and Jack much easier to see.

My soulmate is a girl, Lena's stomach flips. She's a woman. Lena didn't even know she liked women.

However, there's something to her that causes a different kind of nausea. Bandages are wrapped around her head and she sits under the covers of her bed, leaning into an older woman with the same kind of…tan? Lena glances at her own hand, seeing the bright pale of it before looking back to her soulmate. A colour leeches through her bandages. Red, Lena thinks, looking to the person behind the curtain who is covered in it, different shades and crusts of red.

Lena doesn't think she likes red.

Pushing back her covers, to her mothers' and father's immediate dislike, Lena gets out of bed, using Kal-El as a lever rather than letting him be a wall. The woman with the bandage looks over at the movement and she jolt as she sees Lena, single eye not covered by bandages widening dramatically. She sits up slightly, Lena trying and failing to get past Kal-El.

"Let me go," she demands her stepbrother, "step back, Kal-El, dammit, let me out- ow." She winces hard on purpose as Kal-El lightly touches her sprained wrist, overacting. It works, for definite. Kal-El immediately widens his eyes, moving out of the way hastily and letting Lena get out of the little corner he'd made, making for the other side of the room.

Her soulmate tries to get up too, but her companion stops her. "Maggie, no, the doctor said you shouldn't-"

Maggie.

"Hi," Lena says, smiling.

The other woman, Maggie's companion, looks to her, "She can't hear right now. She has a concussion and temporary hearing loss." Immediately, Lena's smile evaporates.

"Oh…does she have a cell-phone?"

"Yes," the woman says, glaring at Maggie sharply before leaning over to a handbag – Maggie immediately trying to stand up again. Lionel moves over to the other side of her bed, putting a hand on her shoulder and stopping Lena's soulmate from moving.

"Lena. Explanation. Now."

Lena glances at him before watching as the woman gives Maggie her cell-phone. She unlocks it before holding it out to Lena with a demanding expression, Lena receiving it gladly, taking a few seconds to figure out how to navigate the WTech cell before inputting her contact details, sending herself a text. Giving it back, Lena digs into her pocket, taking out her own phone and huffing at the lack of signal.

"Lena," Lionel glares.

Lena puts on a winning smile before proudly proclaiming: "She's my soulmate."

After the mini war that Lionel and Lena have, using hurried whispers and harsh hand-motions, Lionel leaves and Lena gets signal on her phone, back in her own bed. Rhu-El sits with her, watching her type out messages to Maggie as the girls each get to know each other. Her family slowly disperse, Cat, Kara, Kal-El and Jack disappearing to where Adam is inside the hospital. Rhu-El and Lena wave to Maggie and her aunt, Clarissa once Lena gets discharged, Lena promising to call as soon as Maggie gets her hearing back.

It turns out that Maggie is in the police academy and is five years older than her. It's an age-gap that doesn't bother her mothers, though her father is a little less appreciative – though, with how he treats homosexuals in the first place, it doesn't surprise Lena that he doesn't approve of Maggie, even without considering that Maggie is a Latina.

Learning colours is another matter entirely that Lena takes to with vigour, joining Jack in his excited quest to learning every shade, tone and chromatic scale of colour there is to know. Some evenings, they drive home with Adam and Kal-El to Kara's suburban home, spending evenings in the garage, or as Cat likes to call it, Kara's studio. Now Lena can see colour, she can appreciate her cousins artwork even more, staring in awe at how the colours blend and stick out. 'Alien landscapes' indeed – they're so different from everything she sees when she looks outside.

A couple of weeks after the crash, she gets a phone call. Answering it without looking at the caller ID, Lena hums.

"Lena Luthor-Elliot Lor-Van."

"Uh, long name there…" it's a girl and immediately Lena stops copying out her chemistry notes.

"Maggie?"

"No. Sorry."

Lena's shoulders drop and she looks to the caller ID. Unknown. "Who is this?"

"My name is Lois, Lois Lane – and I need your help."