Lost in translation (Lena)

Kara's jacket slips off Lena's shoulder. She lets it slide almost all the way down, catching it loosely in her fingers before it can hit the ground. She's cold. At least she thinks she is. She must be because she's shivering so much that she can't fathom another reason why. Kara is no longer at her side, instead, she's kneeling next to her sister, whispering in her ear and gathering her in her arms, sweeping her off the ground and opening the door in one shaky motion. Dread takes hold of Lena and she knows, she just knows that something terrible must have happened, but her brain refuses to catch up with her to point to the only evident reason. Intimately aware that she should do something, she stays rooted to her spot, watching as Kara and Alex disappear into the apartment as one.

Where Kara's hands were tracing fire not an hour ago, are now trails of doom and emptiness.

One of said hands appears at the door, and it jerkily motions for her to come in ; like a puppet, Lena follows its string.

Kara is on the couch, holding her sister, her face contorted in fear but with a hint of something in her eyes that screams she's about to tear the world down. "There's a green can in the cupboard right over the sink," she say, "instant herbal tea. Can you make some ? Please ?"

Lena nods then realises that words would probably be welcomed in this situation. "Yes," she says, "yes I can."

She retrieves cups, glosses over the fact that she knows where they're stored, puts water on the stove, and sets to making tea. It's grounding, it's something she knows how to do ; she breathes a little easier. She puts the same amount of granules in each cups, stirring exactly seven times because if she doesn't something bad is going to happen. Kara takes her cup gratefully, Alex limply, and she holds it close to her chest, like she's trying to fill the hollowness there. At once Lena knows what happened. "Do you think she saw Sam ?" she mouths to Kara.

"And Ruby," Kara mouths back, a flash of anger tearing her face for a split second.

"They weren't due until tomorrow," Lena whispers to herself. "Can I do anything ?" she asks, louder.

"Stay with her ?" Kara asks hesitantly. "I'm going to call Kelly but I don't want to leave her alone." Abandoning her cup, she rises from the couch and kisses Lena's forehead in a way that makes her ache everywhere. She takes two steps before freezing and turning around with an unreadable expression. "I'm sorry," she says. "You can go home if you want. I'd understand if it's a situation you don't want to be in."

"Do you want me here ? Would it help ?"

Kara's arm shakes almost imperceptibly, and in the silence of the room, Lena swears she can hear her phone's screen crack. "Yes. Yes it would help."

"Then I'm staying."

Kara disappears in her bedroom and, after hovering hesitantly, Lena goes to sit on the couch next to Alex. Like Kara has done several times with her, she wraps a blanket over her shoulders, trying to offer whatever comfort she can as a stranger. She feels uneasy, rightfully so, caught in a terrible situation and carrying a lie that isn't her to diffuse.

With a strange jerky brutality, Alex slouch forward and puts her cup on the table, hot liquid slouching over and dripping down to form an expending circle. "I haven't seen her in ten fucking years," she says, barely over a whisper. "My kid. My little girl. I mean, I guess she was never properly, technically, mine. But it sure as hell felt like it. What am I talking about ? You don't care about that shit."

"I do," Lena says as softly as she can. "You can talk to me. Sometimes talking to a stranger helps."

"Her name's Ruby."

Lena is aware of this. Damn is she aware of this.

"We chose it together," Alex says, making a weird gesture with her hands. "Her name. It suits her. She was so tiny. She's big now." She makes the same movement again and Lena realises she's indicating Ruby's size in a drunken motion. She catches something silvery in her palm. "Your phone's ringing," Alex says, extending her arm towards Kara's jacket. "Nice ringtone."

Lena staggers to the abandoned jacket, retrieving her phone from the inside pocket with slightly shaky hands. All the while, she tries to keep Alex in her sightline ; she's starring into the distance now, tears rolling down her face, and it's frightening. She averts her eyes for fifteen seconds, looking down at six missed calls from Sam and a single text, Is she ok ? When she looks up Alex is gazing at her with the creepiest of smile. Her hands are resting on her knees, palms up, empty of the shimmering thing she thinks she saw.

From then on, things happen fast. So fast actually, that Lena feels like she's caught in slow motion as the world rushes past her. Kara barges out of the bedroom, still on the phone, but she knows, it's clear that she knows, that something just happened, that the situation just got ten, twenty times worse. She crouches next to Alex, firing questions after questions at Lena, tears pooling in her eyes like Alex is as good as dead. She moves fast, talks even faster on another phone that came out of nowhere and less than two minutes later, a literal Martian phases through the door. Lena doesn't have it in her to be surprised. He gathers Alex in his arms and turns to her, his eyes glowing red. Something pulls at her mind, and she feels the room slipping away. Kara is blurry, the air is too thin to breathe, she's light, untethered, ready to float away. "Don't," a voice says, maybe Kara's, before the room comes back in focus, slamming in Lena like a running train. They're gone, all three of them and Lena is left wondering if she just hallucinated the whole thing, struggling to wrap her head around what just happened, if it did happen. There's a crumpled piece of paper in her hand, a promise from Kara to come back and explain ; she smooths it against her knee over, and over, and over.

It takes Lena a full hour to move again and consider regaining her own home. She knows it because in the semi darkness of the room, the microwave clock is nearly blinding. When she does move, it's not because she's finally regained full consciousness of herself, or because she's worried out of her mind and needs to do something, but because her dress is starting to feel uncomfortable, dirty, clinging to her body in all the wrong places. She goes to fish her key out of Kara's jacket, and on second thoughts, takes the jacket with her. Sue her, it smells nice, and if the world is running at full speed toward disaster, she should get to enjoy at least one final thing.

During her scorching shower, she forces her mind to empty, washing her hair twice and scraping her skin thrice until she is clean, smells clean and feels clean. Once the water stops rushing, her mind starts running again. She busies herself with laundry, then cleans her bathroom, disregarding the fact that it was clean to begin with, washes the single cup she's taken to leaving on the counter, turns her phone on and off five times, moving around the apartment in a quest for better signal in case Kara is trying to reach her.

Her stupid brain still won't fucking shut up, and most of all, it refuses to settle on one thing long enough for her to actually grasps what's happening. It keeps switching from Kara kissing her on the beach, to Alex smiling like a creepy children's cartoon, to the the tall green man, back to Kara kissing her, via Sam crying herself to sleep, to Alex smiling… She knows there must be a good and rational reason why Kara has a Martian on speed dial, and there must be a rational, if not good, reason for what happened to Alex ; but right now, she doesn't understand any of it. And the more she tries to make sense of it, the more it feels like her neurons were used to make scrambles eggs ; she's powerless. Without meaning too, she's reminded of the time Lillian left her on the side of the road when she was seven ; she feels as small, as confused, but this time, Lex isn't here to pick her up.

In a last desperate attempt to calm her brain, she turns on the television with the firm intention of finding a rerun of something ; it might be her worse idea to date, because if her mind is chaos, the outside world is Armageddon.

At first sight, the heat vision cutting through the night makes it looks like it's Superman, but then again, Superman probably wouldn't set fire to entire neighbourhoods. He probably also wouldn't beat anyone to death on live television, even if they're drug lords and overall terrible human beings. The footage is terrible, and puzzling. In the hour Lena spends glued to her TV, she sees it no less than ten times, a building bursting into flames, a dark figure, cape billowing behind them, throwing bodies left and right, pummelling them into the ground with never seen before strength, then the exact same figure rescuing kids from the fire.

What really throws Lena off, is that at the very end of the footage, before it circles back again, three black SUV pull up just as the figure disappears, and she swears Kara is amongst the agents in tactical gear circling the wreckage. When they stop showing the footage, she rewinds it several times, zooming in as much as she can and paying no mind to the reporters musing about violent vigilantes and wondering if this is the same Blur they were praising for helping grandmas. She catches a wisp of blond hair before a blue man pulls a hood over it, and the suit peaking from under the tactical vest is too similar to the one Kara was wearing tonight for this to not be her. She rewinds it again, and again, until even when she closes her eyes, all she can see is Kara not getting out of a SUV, but simply blinking into existence between the blue man and the hero known as Dreamer. There must be a perfectly reasonable and rational explanation for this, but for the life of her, Lena can't figure it out.

Well into the night, Sam shows up with a black eye and a split lips, and really, the explanation is right in front of her, because not many people are angry enough at Sam to beat her up, and not many things can truly hurt her, but she doesn't ask, if Kara as something to tell her, she will do so on her own terms. And if she can't, or doesn't want to, because if she's a government agent part of an alien threat strike team with enough gun power to injure her friend, there's a chance she can't share it, Lena can make her peace with it. With few words, they fall asleep on the couch together, Lena draped in Kara's jacket and Sam with an ice pack on her face. Sam's body, usually so warm, is freezing, and Lena wonders how her broken heart is still beating.

Lena wakes up alone, approximately ten seconds before a soft knock reaches her ears. Call it instinct, call it acute awareness of her body and mind to Kara's own, but she knows who's behind the door without having to open it. She's wide awake, terribly so, before she has the time to decide if she wants to be or not. The sun is barely rising, plunging the room in pre-dawn greyness and a muted feeling that puts her slightly on edge. She doesn't know what to tell Kara, what to ask. What she can ask. She doesn't want to greet her with an onslaught of questions, are you a secret agent ? is your sister okay ? are you okay ? but she also doesn't know if she can hold back her running interrogations. The sight of Kara when she opens the door does the job for her.

Her face is covered in soot, her eyes are red, her right hand is buzzing with the remains of an ache and the beginning of a bruise. She's standing ramrod straight, shoulders tensed back, trying to make herself tall when truth be told, she's never appeared so small to Lena. All she can do is drag her inside and engulf her in a hug, feeling like she's breathing right for the first time in hours.

"I need to tell you something," Kara mumbles in the crook of her neck.

"Go shower," Lena says, forcing herself out of the embrace. "Take some time to breathe, think it other, then we can talk. You don't own me an explanation, I just want to know if you're okay."

Kara disappears to the bathroom, and while the water runs, Lena prepares a change of clothes for her, then sets to making some tea. Tea always bring comfort, tea is something she understands and can cling to in the face of whatever mess is threatening to tumble over her, over them, like a goddamn tsunami.

For fuck sakes, she was happy for five minutes.

Kara emerges from the bathroom in too short sweatpants and a too tight sweater but she looks better. In the steam, she looks eerily otherworldly, but with her wet hair falling in her eyes, she also looks painfully human. She comes behind Lena, weaving her arms around her waist and holding tight for a breath, two, before she kisses her on the side of the head and steps back.

"How is Alex ?" Lena asks carefully.

"Awake."

Lena takes in the non answer, giving time to Kara to elaborate before she herself goes on.

Kara fidgets with her glasses for a moment, pushing them up on her nose, running her fingers on the branch. "I'm an alien."