Current Day
"Inconceivable!"
The word rings in Kara's cozy apartment, and it takes Lena a moment to realize she's hearing the line from two different directions, like an echo. Of course, there's Vizzini's grating voice coming from the TV in front of her, his outbursts increasingly frustrated as he watches the man in black repeatedly overcome the roadblocks thrown in his way.
But there's a second source above her: Kara's muted imitation. Her voice is far gentler, the word almost whispered, like it escaped without permission. Like she just can't quite keep herself from quoting along with the film.
A smile pulls at the corners of Lena's mouth, and she presses herself further into the pillow beneath her cheek, curling closer into Kara's lap. Her fingers resume tracing slow circles on Kara's knee, the skin delightfully warm to the touch, her movements languid, idle. She turns her attention back to the TV.
"The Princess Bride" continues, the screen flickering in the darkened apartment, the greens and browns and blues of the idyllic landscape spilling into the room, wrapping around the soft cocoon they've woven for themselves on the couch, the stillness broken occasionally by another echoed line from her girlfriend. When warm fingers trace their way along her scalp, playing with the strands of hair framing her face, Lena's eyes flutter closed in unabashed contentment. She revels in it, this foreign feeling. Memorizes the weight of it. The shape of it.
On screen, Vizzini loses the battle of the wits, and Buttercup finally comes face to face with her rescuer, arguing defiantly when he needles her. But she doesn't recognize him, doesn't see beneath the facade, beneath the simple costume.
All she sees is the disguise.
All she sees is the trick.
There was a point in time where Lena thought the premise of this scene was utterly ridiculous. How could she not know it was him all along? How can you love someone and not recognize them standing right in front of you?
Apparently, it's not always that simple.
Rolling her shoulders, Lena shifts against Kara's leg, tilting her head up to look at Kara, who's watching the TV raptly, a dopey grin sliding across her face the moment that Buttercup, at last, realizes her mistake and flings herself down the hill after Westley.
God, it had taken her an embarrassingly long time to make that leap herself.
"You're staring. I can feel it." Although Kara's eyes never leave the screen, her smile sharpens, turns playful, and her fingers untangle themselves from Lena's hair, moving instead to trace the shell of her ear, to raise goosebumps along her jawline and draw a smile from her lips. When the fingers stray too close, Lena purses her lips, steals a kiss, her cheeks pulling into a Cheshire grin.
"Can't help it," Lena sighs. "You're distracting."
"Hmm" is all the response she gets, but Kara vibrates with it, and it seeps under Lena's skin, settles around her like a warm blanket. Turning away, back to face the screen once more is a herculean effort, but eventually, Lena manages it. Kara's hand returns to tangle softly in her hair.
The movie continues, and the minutes pass. The heroes find themselves traversing the dreaded Fire Swamp with its three-fold dangers. "Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist," Westley stupidly proclaims.
Lena waits for the surround sound quote, but Kara is silent above her. There is no echo.
Reaching blindly, Lena grabs hold of the hand resting heavily against her hair, pulling it forward and placing a kiss against the cool palm while her eyes slip closed.
Her lips taste smoke, and she breathes in fire.
She blinks, uncomprehending, staring with disbelief at the singed blue sleeve inches from her face, the cloth marbled with shades of deep red.
Slowly, her movements dulled, sluggish, her muscles uncooperative, Lena shifts, her head swiveling upwards, seeking out Kara's face above her.
"Lena?" Kara says, her voice rising in panic, her blue eyes widening as she reaches up to run a bloodied, blackened hand along her own cheek.
But her cheeks are broken, studded with green, and her veins glow beneath her skin, incandescent in the darkened apartment.
A knock, hard, insistent, sounds at the door across the room, and Kara's eyes shift towards the noise, but her eyes are unfocused, unseeing. Her hand trembles in the flickering light.
Lena leverages herself up, swinging her legs off the couch and turning away from the TV. Her office door comes into view.
"Come in," she says off-handedly, leaning forward in her chair to finish up her response to R&D about their latest request. The afternoon sun traces warm fingers along her exposed neck, casts oblong rectangles and lines along the edges of her desk.
"Hello dear," her mother purrs, gliding gracefully through the doors in her designer heels, looking flawless, everything in its place. Passing the coffee table, her purse swings wide, barely missing the flower vase sitting near the table's edge. The lilies shiver in her wake, their tall stalks bending and bowing as she processes by.
"You…," Lena starts, her spine straightening, her fingers turning white where she grips the arm of her chair. "You're not supposed to be here." Her voice is calm and even, betraying nothing of the panic bubbling in her throat.
As she approaches, Lillian inclines her head indulgently, blinking languidly in the bright office, and when she stops a few feet away, her face unchanged, the patronizing tone is unmistakable. After all, Lena's heard it most of her life.
"Darling, I just wanted to make sure you didn't miss your surprise, that's all." Leaning down, her mother takes her by the elbow, gently guides her up.
It's like she's eight years old again, under her mother's commanding thumb, escorted away like a misbehaving child. It's a lesson she learned young. Learned hard.
And Lena yields. Like she always did.
Together they turn, firm hands pointing her to the bank of windows along the wall and the view beyond, where the sky has darkened to a haunting purple, no man's land between day and night. One step. Another. Lena pulls forward on her own, drifting to the balcony railing, her mother's fingers sliding slowly away.
The city is beautiful tonight, the skyline twinkling to life beneath her, its yellows and whites and greens and reds like an abstract painting - National City by Jackson Pollock. Overhead, a sprinkling of stars have punctured the dawning night sky, but their lights are strangely flat. Off.
Closing her eyes, Lena wraps her fingers around the metal railing and listens to the city.
But it doesn't sing to her, not tonight. The streets are uncannily quiet. There are no engine growls, no angry horns, no hum of electricity coursing through the grid, the symphony of downtown completely silenced.
A line forms in her forehead. And then another. Everything is...wrong, like her world is just a few degrees off kilter. Close, but not quite.
Tightening her grasp on the railing, Lena opens her eyes and looks across the skyline. Watching. Waiting.
Supergirl falls to Earth in the distance.
The thud is visceral. She feels it in the pit of her stomach, in the way every nerve ending in her body rages.
But still it's silent, and Lena stares in muted, open-mouthed horror. Her screams die on her lips, acrid and sharp and bloody.
And then the world around her shatters with a thundering boom as the sound barrier collapses, sending a tidal wave of sound careening across the city. All of it - the shrill scream of sirens, the incessant growl of traffic, the cracking of bones, the crash of atoms. It's the sound of death.
She stands unblinking in the deluge, drowning in the waves, salt staining her lips.
Clank. Clank.
The sound at her back is quiet but persistent, the kind of thing that weaves itself into the background, ever-present but infinitesimal. It's hard to say how long it is before Lena notices, before she turns to seek its source.
Lillian stands tall behind her, the drab gray jumpsuit hanging poorly on her frame, her neck ringed in pearls, her hair immaculate.
Clank. Clank.
As her mother shifts, the handcuffs dangling from her wrists like bracelets of steel jangle, the short chain between them protesting noisily at the attempt at movement.
"Well," she starts, her voice calm, commanding, "now that's settled, we can get back to-"
Lillian's brows furrow in confusion. "Darling, wh-" Her mother's face cracks, a flaw in her perfect appearance, and her eyes widen in shock.
Lena doesn't hear the rest. She stumbles backward, away, have to get away - but there's no rail at her back, no safety to be found. As her feet find nothing but night sky beneath them, her mother's face twists into familiar disappointment.
And then she's falling.
The wind whips her hair around her face, and the force pushes her arms and legs upward as she falls. She doesn't scream. Or at least if she does, she can't hear it.
Instead, she watches the strange, untwinkling stars above her, flat against the bruised sky, and she wonders at them, curling the fingers of her outstretched hands as if she could pluck them out, gather them up.
The impact brings darkness, total and absolute, and for a moment there's nothing. No sound, no feeling. Just darkness.
But it doesn't last. The pain creeps in, sharp and hot in her neck. A beeping begins, electronic, steady, and it reminds her of -
Lena wakes with a start, her eyes darting around the room in panic, but as she takes in her surroundings, the room regains its familiarity, and little by little her heartbeat begins to calm in her chest, the wild careening beginning to slow. She takes a deep breath, and her lungs burn with the effort.
Apparently, she'd dozed off in a chair next to Kara's bed, her legs tucked into her chest, her head bent at an awkward angle against the arm. Lifting her head, a sleep line mars her cheek. Movement hurts, she finds very quickly. As the vestiges of her dreams begin to fade away, she rubs at her neck where it aches, pins and needles and fire along the topmost portion of her spine. J'onn had offered her the use of the DEO barracks, given her the grand tour himself, but they're too far away.
Everywhere is too far away.
Gingerly unfolding her limbs, Lena scoots closer to the bed until her chair is within the ring of lamps and she feels the warmth on her neck, in her hair, until it suffuses her lungs. Reaching out with tentative movements, she lays a hand across Kara's wrist, and she holds her breath until she feels it against her fingertips, the thready heartbeat beneath the surface. It calms her, brings her own racing heart into line.
Lena sits, her head leaned back, her arm outstretched. She no longer tastes blood on her tongue or smoke on her lips, no longer feels screams clawing at her throat. There are just the heartbeat and the sun.
And try as she might to stay awake, to focus, soon her eyelids droop, the sun is lost, and as she leans back in her chair, her face retreating into the shadows beyond Kara's lamps, she falls into nightmares again.
Time is fluid. It comes and it goes, it starts and stops and rewinds, unconstrained by natural laws. Lena sleeps in minutes. She sleeps in hours. And upon waking, Kara is the same, always the same.
During the course of the night, the cramped medical suite saw a steady stream of visitors. J'onn, whose visits were brief, silent affairs. Winn, who talked a lot, words tumbling out of his mouth in a flood; Winn who said nothing at all.
And, of course, there was Alex.
They had sat together for a little while early last night, she and Alex and Maggie. But then Maggie's phone had chirped to life, the NCPD demanding her return in clipped tones, and the two had excused themselves. When Alex returned a few minutes later, her eyes were freshly red, her hands trembling as she ran her fingers through her hair.
They sat quietly, their silence comfortable. She was there when Lena dozed off, a steady presence nearby, her eyes always trained on Kara.
But when Lena wakes from her nightmare in the middle of the night, dull, flat stars still floating behind her eyes, the chair next to hers is empty. Alex is gone.
Alone, save for Kara, Lena blinks repeatedly, willing the sleep away while stretching the cramped fingers of her hand where it had been curled beneath her arm while she slept. Squinting against the bright light overhead, she checks the time on the slender watch sitting slack against her wrist: 3:47 a.m. Christ.
Slowly - so slowly - she unfolds from the chair next to Kara's bed, her legs shaky from disuse, her brain muddled. A couple hours of broken sleep, and she's gained nothing but nightmares from its inky depths, shadows that are slow to recede even in the overwhelming glare of the lamps circling the bed.
Kara lies still beneath them, maddeningly unchanged. Lena blinks, a voice whispering that maybe this is another nightmare, maybe this isn't real. But the lamps are warm on the exposed skin at her neck, and Kara's skin is still broken and raw beneath her fingertips.
She steps away.
The path to the barracks' bathroom is circuitous, but not intentionally. Turn after turn leads to one identical corridor after another, leading Lena back and forth in the military-industrial maze, and with the specters of her nightmares lurking in the shadows at her back, whispering insidious nothings in the shell of her ear, her steps grow hurried, confused. Her heels rain staccato bullets on the steel floor, and they ricochet off the walls all around her.
The fluorescent lights in the restroom are disorientingly bright when she finally manages to find her way, but the splash of cold water on her face is bracing. Rivulets cut across her ashen cheeks and cascade to the basin below, circling and disappearing into nothingness in the drain. Leaning heavily on her hands, she eyes her reflection warily, noting the circles beginning to form beneath her eyes, threatening to swallow them whole.
"Tsk tsk," clucks a voice in her head. It's her mother's tone, patronizing and sharp, deriding the naked exhaustion and emotion etched into Lena's face for all to see, her mask long since crumbled to dust.
Any sign of weakness, any outward crack or imperfection is strictly forbidden, a lesson learned in agonizing clarity in her youth.
Her fingers curl painfully into the stainless steel sides of the sink, her knuckles paling.
She remembers well her mother's stoic face and flawless make-up under the lights of the cameras after Lex was arrested, how Lillian faced the paparazzi and police interrogations alike as immovable as granite, not a hair out of place. But when the door closed at the family estate, when the cameras darkened and the public eye turned away, Lena remembers the breaking glass, the snarled teeth hidden beneath the polished facade. She remembers, too, the deluge of tears, the barely concealed sobs, as if her mother could somehow cry enough to fill the void left by Lex.
Clenching her jaw, she plunges her hands beneath the icy water and cups them to her face, again and again, until her skin is raw and her hands are numb.
Until the voice is silent.
When her limbs feel a little less heavy, when her body resigns itself to being awake, Lena steps away from the haunted girl in the mirror and out into the hall to begin the meandering walk back toward Kara's room, her route the one J'onn had shown her the night before, the turns more familiar now that she has her bearings. Nearing the control room, she hears them before she sees them, raised voices echoing along the empty corridors. And when she enters, the voices falter and quiet, leaving her feeling like an unintended intruder. Although Alex slides a guilty look her way, J'onn merely nods in greeting before continuing to speak, albeit at a more reserved volume.
"It's covered. Ramirez, Cole, and Strauss have been covering the courthouse, and Vasquez has a team reviewing tape and running analysis. I pulled Agent Schott to work on reconstructing the explosive device."
The roles are laid out with military precision, each to their station, and Lena feels her uselessness in electric neon, stinging along her arms, flashing across her face for all to see. It itches and rankles in a way she's unaccustomed.
"Catch a few hours, Agent Danvers," J'onn continues, and Alex visibly bristles at the order, her chest rising quickly as she draws breath to ready a response. He shuts her down before she can get a word out, his eyebrows rising in emphasis. "I need you fully here," he continues. When Alex opens her mouth to protest again, his voice softens.
"Alex."
It's a question, a request, an order wrapped in the tone of a concerned father. Alex doesn't deflate, doesn't loosen the tension in her jaw, but she turns quietly, all the same, moving in clipped strides toward the hall that leads to Kara's room.
J'onn exhales quietly. "I wish…" he starts, but he doesn't complete the sentence. There's no need. She knows what he'd wish. She knows the sadness lurking in his eyes when they slide to meet her own. Knows, too, the way his expression closes off, corrects. Offering him an understanding nod, Lena excuses herself and follows the path Agent Danvers took from the room moments before.
She finds Alex standing over Kara's bed, all bloody knuckles and clenched teeth. Clouds darken her brow, and she vibrates with the barely restrained intensity of a thunderhead, electricity crackling in the air around her.
Lena hesitates in the doorway a moment, waits until she sees Alex take a deep, bracing breath before she moves to stand by her side.
"What's happened?" Lena asks. The question may seem...indelicate, perhaps. Blunt, most definitely. But she needs news. Needs something.
"Visited Lillian Luthor in jail," Alex mutters, her eyes never leaving Kara's prone form in the hospital bed beneath them. It's a critical gaze, like she's cataloging, eyes scanning inch by inch in search of a change in her condition. Any change.
When Alex's shoulders sag, Lena knows that she's come to the same inevitable conclusion: nothing's changed. It's the same routine she's seen from everyone who has walked through the door since last night, like the haunting chorus of a sad song, the same melancholy notes played on a loop. Lena's eyes drop to Alex's fists again, where the skin is red and broken.
Only then does it seem to hit Alex, what she's said, who she's talking to, and her head swivels, eyes widening.
"It's not-", she starts, turning her hands over, looking at them with fresh eyes. "I didn't-," her words cut off, and she sighs heavily. Starting again, she says, "Your mom...is something else." By her side her hands flex and then reform into fists, leaving the agent grimacing at the ache.
A laugh bubbles in Lena's throat, but it's a dark thing, mirthless and resigned. "Yeah…"
"She was cagey. And smug," Alex ventures, pausing a moment gauge Lena's reaction. "All too happy to rattle her chains in my face, remind me she's been under lock and key for weeks now."
Frowning, Alex eyes her hands again before turning to Lena, her cheeks a light red, "I, uh, I hit the wall outside the holding cell a few times."
"Wall still standing?" Lena mutters, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. Not for her mother - there's no protectiveness there, no ache of sympathy. Instead, there's just a disconnect, a hollowness, noticeable only where the emptiness bleeds into the frayed periphery.
No, there's no concern for her mother. But for Alex Danvers? Lena shifts and steps toward the small sink set against the wall, her limbs grateful for the movement. When she returns with a cool, damp rag, Alex tries to wave her off like there's a penance in letting the injury sting, like it reinforces the connection to hurt alongside her sister.
"Sit." It's her CEO voice, the one she uses to bring the boardroom to heel. Confused, Alex complies, shuffling to sit in the chair by the bed that Lena had slept in last night. There's a twinge in her neck just looking at it now. "Did you get anything useful?" she asks, crouching next to the chair, setting to work by dabbing gently at the blood around Alex's knuckles and clearing the grit and debris from the broken skin.
"I know she's lying," Alex responds, shaking her head. "God, she wasn't even really trying to convince m-" Her words cut off abruptly when Lena touches a particularly raw spot on her hand, and her fingers splay automatically.
"Sorry…" Lena whispers, her face twisting in apology before continuing her work.
Alex watches the progress a moment, the dried blood all but gone, but the skin beneath blooms red and purple and black, a bouquet of bruises to carry in remembrance. When she continues her thought, her tone is quiet, but there's an edge to it, the promise of the storm charging the air. "I got nothing. All that...and I got nothing." Nostrils flared, she stretches the fingers of her hand again while Lena stands, moving to the sink to rinse out the rag.
"Thanks," Alex offers, her eyes flitting to Lena's before falling, finding her sister.
Returning, Lena stands next to the bed, and together they stare at the girl beneath them, battered and broken, her condition unchanged. Wires snake from her scalp, cocoon her arms, stretch out from her fingertips and connect her to a panel of machines beside the bed. The effect is unsettling. It's a weird dichotomy, for while Lena Luthor, CEO of L-Corp, is familiar with the technology, knows the purpose of each machine, their effect on the whole is disquieting, and it's more like standing in a post-modern Frankenstein's laboratory than in a hospital room.
They stare in silence, words unnecessary, but the room is full of noise all the same. The machines beep and blurt and screech in rhythm, and beneath it all is a constant electric hum, the sound visceral and all-encompassing. It sinks under Lena's skin, sets her nerves alight, makes her teeth hurt with the sharp pain of something too cold, too fast.
She hates it. Every second, every sound. She hates the way the smell of smoke lingers in the room long after Kara's body has been cleaned, long after her charred, tattered suit has been removed.
The itch in her arms and the tingle in her nerves transforms into movement. She's had her moment to break down - the jolt of adrenaline that propelled her across town last night and led her here, and the subsequent crash that left her whimpering in the chair next to Kara's bed. But now? She splays her fingers, curls them again, savoring the stretch. Now it's time to work.
"What can I do?" she asks, turning to face the woman at her side, the question suddenly sharp.
Alex is motionless, a specter, her eyes fixed on the bed, giving no outward sign that she's heard the words, heard the need in them, heard the hope hidden in their shapes. So Lena repeats herself.
"What can I do?" she says again, pausing a moment before deciding to elaborate. "I heard earlier in the control room…"
Alex blinks, and Lena falls silent, watching the woman shift, watching how her eyes blink once more, purposefully, before reluctantly dragging away from Kara. Watches, too, how they seem to shift, to focus with a definitive click, as if only now being able to see the room beyond the hospital bed. And when Alex blinks a third time, she's Agent Danvers. With a slight movement, her shoulders pull back and her spine straightens, as if moved by muscle memory alone, a soldier ready to report, adjusting to the phantom body armor settled heavily over her frame. God, she knows the feeling, and seeing it so clearly in Alex chases the remaining shadows from Lena's own mind, like the sun burning away the last vestiges of a morning fog.
Purpose, Lena decides, is the root cause. Having a purpose, working towards a mission, is wholly transformative - it's a universal human truth. But the thought falters as her eyes briefly flit to the bed at her side, her fingers reaching out to graze the corners of the bedsheet, and it slides cool against her fingertips. It's a universal truth, full stop, she corrects. Humanity is hardly a prerequisite.
When Alex begins to speak, her voice carries the undercurrent of authority, and Lena's thoughts focus once more. "Agents are covering all aspects of the bombing, looking for suspect ID," she begins, repeating the facts as if reading a dispatch, "delineating motive circling Supergirl, Cadmus, and the National City political scene, with particular focus on the recent upheaval therein, and analyzing a million pieces of evidence from two different sites." A pause, a breath, and then...nothing. The moment stretches, the seconds dragging by while the words hang heavily in the space between them. In a rush, Alex releases the breath she'd held burning in her lungs. And says no more. Her gaze falls back to Kara, returning to its familiar path of cataloging and analyzing injuries, looking for improvement. Looking for hope.
It's the words left unsaid that trouble them both.
A shadow crosses Alex's eyes and takes up residence between them, a solid thing, cold and undeniable, and her strong shoulders bow fractionally inward under the pressure. Could be doubt. Could be fear. Of course, Lena considers, it might merely be a reflection of what's written all over her own face.
With a shiver, Lena shifts and allows her gaze to move away from Alex to a bare stretch of wall behind the woman. The space and color are neutral, utterly unnoteworthy, but it reminds her of a fresh canvas, blank and so full of possibility, ready and waiting for a new story to be told across its breadth. The rhythmic beeping of the medical machinery seeps into her veins and stirs her blood, again and again, until its summons reaches every limb and her fingertips resonate with the frequency. Until it resounds in her head like a call to arms.
For all outward appearances, she zones out, the way her eyes slide out of focus, the way she absentmindedly chews on the inside of her mouth. Inwardly, however, the bell toll has awoken something elemental. With a whirr of motors and a steady hum of electricity, her mind jolts to life like a Leviathan lumbering out of the depths. Taking all of Alex's information, she shuffles through it, pulls a piece out, turns it first one way and then another, evaluating every facet before placing it back amongst the group and picking up the next. Words flit behind her eyes like images across a giant whiteboard, and lists begin to form in the margins, data distilled into stark bullet points and rudimentary timelines, their order constantly rearranging while she processes, making room for new puzzle pieces and discarding the irrelevant. Everything is cross-referenced and sourced, and mental images accompany her notes like file attachments in an email.
It's always been this way for her, her brain processing the world around her in bulleted lists and cataloged images, numbers and letters each in their place. Growing up, it didn't take long to realize it was unconventional, this process, but it's always gotten the job done for her. God knows it was useful in college and is damn near indispensable in keeping L-Corp at the forefront of its field.
When her eyes flash open, she finds Alex watching her, but her features are guarded, closed off. Lena wastes no time, not anymore. Her brain is screaming at her, the circuitry alight, and it hums in her nerves right down to her toes. It's the buzz of discovery. Of possibility.
Of hope.
"The Kryptonite. Where is it?"
Alex's eyebrows furrow, and suspicion obscures her gaze like smoke. There's a hesitation - one, two, three beats - before the agent carefully responds.
"Secure storage. It's been logged and will be analyzed with the evidence from the scene, explosives, etc."
"I need it." Alex's eyes widen in barely concealed alarm, and Lena cringes visibly at the tactless statement.
Not exactly her most eloquent request.
"It's secure, Lena. Only J'onn and I have access." Feeling the need to further explain, Alex continues. "Look, the DEO doesn't exactly have a great history with this stuff, and-"
"And I'm a Luthor." It's a statement rather than a question, and the room suddenly feels too hot, the overhead lamps too close for comfort. She can feel the blood rising in her cheeks.
When Alex inhales, ready with a rebuttal, Lena cuts her off. "Look, Agent Danvers, I know you have fine technicians here at the DEO, and Winn...Winn would be welcome in my lab any day of the week, but-" Her words halt, and her traitorous eyes find their way to Kara, to the angry welts and broken skin, the soot-blackened hair, the wires and tubes anchoring her to the bed. She looks small, a description Lena has never once associated with the woman, or her counterpart, and there's a sting in her eyes that feels like betrayal. Sucking in an unsteady breath, she smells the acrid note of smoke on the air. It burns in her nose, in her lungs. Swallowing, she wills the words to come without choking, reaches out in search of steel to strengthen her spine.
"But you don't have anyone like me."
Across the way, Alex narrows her eyes and chews her lip in concentration, the steady beep of one of Kara's machines ticking off the seconds of silence between them.
"I will get you something, but I need a sample. I need to work," Lena pleads.
Alex's eyes have dropped to Kara again.
When the final words come, they're barely above a whisper, more a prayer than a conscious statement, a wish sent into the universe to be decided by a higher power. "I need to help her, Alex." And that's it, really, the entirety of her request distilled down to five meager words. She feels the truth of it vibrate in every cell of her body, a fine-tuned instrument with only one note. So much for armor and steel, Lena thinks, swallowing harshly and blinking away the sting in her eyes. She's laid herself bare beneath the bright lights, stripped to bone and blood and heart.
Alex reaches out to her sister, her fingers hovering delicately over Kara's cheek, but they don't land. They can't. There's no spot, no inch unmarred by last night's attack. Instead, the outstretched fingers curl painfully in upon themselves, and the arm retracts tightly to Alex's chest. Lena's heart clenches in her chest, and her breath rattles in lungs.
Without turning, eyes locked on Kara's still face, unnaturally sallow despite the glow of the lamps, Alex swallows and speaks, her voice surprisingly strong. Sure. It claps like thunder in the small room.
"How much do you need?"