-Kara-
"Yes Kal, I made sure that the pillar was load-bearing." Kara Zor-El hovered in front of her cousin, fighting the desire to roll her eyes.
The young blonde woman gestured at the skyscraper they had just rescued from a bomber. "It's still standing up isn't it?"
-He's such a grumpy fusspot in the cape,- Kara thought.
Superman, the perfect emblem of all that a superhero should be, never thought other people could do anything right. Including, unfortunately, Supergirl.
Sometimes she just wished he would be more like family.
"It is," Kal said brusquely sweeping his X-ray vision over the building, he dove toward it. Kara paused scanning the building with a frown. Her stomach dropped seeing it, and she bolted to follow in his wake.
Punching through a window, the experienced hero swooped in an arch picking up a woman sheltering under a table.
Exiting the roll in an impeccably neat tuck and still moving through the air, he braced the woman against his body, arm carefully cradling her neck and his back shattered through the opposite side window.
Kara grimaced, a tug of guilt gnawing at her.
She really thought that everyone had evacuated. She had been doing this for a year and missed something so crucial. Kal always made her feel like this when he came to town.
Lost in thought, and too distracted to control her senses, the young hero's ears absently picked up on a chopper taking off a half mile across town and an anxious woman's voice.
Perking up at the thought someone might need a rescue, she focused her hearing to the area and picked up a rapid stream of clipped sentences, "I really don't want -to do this. It's nonsensical really. I hate flying. I know they say it's the safest way t-to travel, but that's just because more -idiots are allowed to drive than fly. Lex was crazy. There's no reason for me to follow through on -umph."
Figuring the anxiety was from someone's flight jitters, Kara was about to turn her attention back to her cousin before she caught the sound of a chambered bullet click.
She blasted toward it.
This time she felt Kal behind her making an urgent sound her mind was too busy speeding forward to process.
She reached the drone just as its first bullet smacked into the tail of the helicopter. The next several dozen bounced off her chest.
Her mind plotted out her next step while the bad guy monologued his bad guy plans at her.
-Blah blah, always hit my target. Blah blah you'll never stop me.- she thought annoyed.
She sized up the situation and shot down the drone in front of her with heat vision, yelling at Kal to get the drones Disembodied-Voice Man had mentioned across the city.
Seeing him follow her command she thought with satisfaction, -I would have totally been a good mentor. Stupid phantom zone.-
That frantic heartbeat pulled her focus back.
The helicopter was now awkwardly flailing in the air next to the young hero. -The helipad's still close,- she eyed the rooftop uncertainly. -Eh it'll be fine.-
She managed a smooth-ish landing, bracing the copter from underneath. The cement was almost intact this time. She bent the metal landing gear back in place and winced hearing a bolt fly off somewhere.
-Still, not bad.- Dusting off her hands with a satisfied smile Kara checked in on the passengers. An unconscious middle-aged pilot.
And a beautiful raven-haired woman with vibrant green eyes and bold red lipstick, stark against alabaster skin.
The dark-haired woman's hands trembled as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her blue dress. She closed her eyes for a moment before fumbling for the door.
Speeding over, Kara opened the door and lifted her out. The woman gave her a quavering smile of gratitude.
-Golly.- Her mind went blank noticing flecks of gold in the green.
She shook her head when she realized she was staring and opened her mouth to speak. Kal cleared his throat behind her. Kara placed the woman on her feet looking down to hide her blush.
"Welcome to National City Ms Luthor," her cousin said in an icy tone that Kara didn't think was particularly welcoming. "I hope your intentions here are -different."
-Luthor. -She frowned. -Well, he does have that whole nemesis thing with Lex I guess. But this woman didn't look much like a terrorist war criminal.-
This Luthor had such a sweet smile and Kara had seen her checking on the pilot even though she was so scared.
-Also, she has hair,- she thought keeping her giggle on the inside so she could keep up her Supergirl face.
The dark haired woman straightened and turned toward the Man of Steel.
Face unreadable she replied gracefully, "Your efforts are appreciated as always. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to assist in finding the most recent addition to the line of people trying to murder me."
Turning toward the blonde hero she added a much quieter, more sincere, "Thank you."
"Anytime!" Kara responded. More excitedly than she should have judging by the tightening of Kal's expression.
She tried to course correct.
Hands on her hips, she deepened her Supergirl voice. "You know, -National City's resident hero and everything. So -eh since your here."
Lena Luthor looked back at her confused, but gave her another of those smiles Kara liked before turning away.
The shaken woman took out her phone and robotically detailed the situation to the person on the other end. Her feet wobbled on high stiletto heels, but her back was straight as she made her way to the elevator.
Floating up to him, Kara made a face at her cousin. "What the heck was that, Superman? You're lucky I'm so much nicer than you are."
"She's up to something." Kal replied with an obnoxiously knowing tone. "Luthors-" he ground out, "always are Kara."
Under her breath, fully aware Kal could hear her, Kara muttered, "She seemed nice enough to me if you weren't such a jerk-face all the time," as she rocketing off toward the sound of a stranded kitten in severe distress.
-Lena-
Someone spat in Lena Luthor's face this morning.
After her assassination attempt yesterday her secretary Jess had fussed over Lena for hours, trying to get the beleaguered CEO to go home.
The idea brought to mind the image of herself sitting alone in her ostentatious empty penthouse, sifting through the dozens of contacts on her phone. Acquaintances, exes, her adoptive mother. All people who wouldn't bother pissing on Lena if she were on fire.
That sounded like considerably worse torture than a few policy meetings, even if she did feel a little off her game. Given how today was going she considered whether or not she should just set a bed up in her lab downstairs. Cut out the cumbersome need to venture out under the open sky.
The Luthor looked out at the city from her office window. The outline of a man flying through the air interrupted her contemplation.
Eyes narrowing, she turned away and tapped a button on the side of her desk. White shades closed her away from the world.
The young Luthor had no idea why Superman chose this week to leave his sentry duty in Metropolis to dog her steps. She assumed her brother had a tracer in the Man of Steel at some point, but she doubted the boyscout in blue would sink low enough to tag Luthors for sport. Sanctimonious epitome of virtue that he was.
-The woman though.- she thought. -She seemed..- Lena put the thought away remembering the girl posing next to her super counterpart. -Heroes are all the same.-
Lena had come to National City hoping to distance herself from the Luthor-Super war in Metropolis. After Lex went to jail, the streets around LuthorCorp headquarters were never without a legion of angry protesters.
Metropolis's would-be heroes. She supposed they hoped to put an end to Luthor corruption by putting the end of some bit of metal through the last Luthor standing. Her security team had amassed an impressive collection of knives and guns taken off the rabble who had tried their luck.
She felt like a naive idiot for thinking it would be different here.
Walking into her office building for the first time, she had been hit in the eye by a wet wad of phlegm.
It was from a man with blue skin and a ridge going up his forehead. Held back by her security team, he yelled into her face about deaths in the Venture explosion. His daughter. Every response she prepared for the press felt meaningless, so she stood silently in the marble lobby under the watchful gaze of her new employees.
Everyone was certain any Luthor would unravel with the slightest provocation, she could understand why her scientists that didn't specialize in engineering murder robots or skull-shaped volcanic architecture might feel a little less than secure in their position with a Luthor at the helm.
It's not like they didn't have a point. If Lex could go insane, who's to say her own villainous origin story wasn't forth coming.
Her heels clicked as she walked across the office and folded her legs to sit in front of her favorite Luthor family heirloom.
~It's hard to believe he was the same person.~ She thought flooded with memories.
Lex had spent an entire summer with his adopted baby sister. They had played chess for hours on end capturing data to get the right logical algorithm. He was bold even then, risking their mother's wrath to sneak the thing out of the family library. They had finished fitting it with robotic components in August. All so a sad friendless twelve year old girl could play a game of chess against her older brother after she was shipped back to her boarding school exile.
Lena watched as black responded to her opener with a Sicilian defense and sighed.
That could have been a mistake. A not so small part of Lena always felt like she was playing this game of life against her brother. She went back to this board again and again like it could teach her something about life she had been missing.
What she had to do now was focus on reality, on the budget proposal she'd spent the week crafting. Being the freshly minted LuthorCorp CEO meant that every move she made had to be strategic.
Her appearance was evidence of that. A black blazer over a form fitting white designer dress, carefully accented with silver. Flat ironed long black hair. Meticulous make up, covering any freckles on her smooth pale face. All sharply contrasted with bright red lipstick. Her presence evoked decisiveness. Power, without sacrificing femininity.
But being a real player wasn't about aesthetics. It was about sacrificing what she needed to in order to keep her real goals in sight.
Playing the long game, she plotted out dismantling the LuthorCorp weapons development departments then siphoning those funds into R & D departments for medical technology and energy renewal. But if she wanted to do any of that she had to maintain their equity turnover for the quarter and that would be impossible without regaining the trust of the public to convince their shareholders of the company's stability.
-Might as well block in world peace and saving the whales while I'm at it.- Lena thought dryly. Her largely dominant cynical side doubted much more than damage control could be effectively accomplished whilst captaining this sinking ship.
She grimaced pushing her hand through her hair in frustration.
Before the Super nightmare, running this organization had never been a goal. She had imagined herself the pioneering bioengineer.
She longed to go back to her cramped lab space and watch neoplasm cell replication under a microscope until her eyes blurred. Her heart ached remembering the sense of purpose and pride she had the last few years. ~I was so god damn close to curing cancer. That would have been something real.~
Now she was stuck spending her hours teaching self-important men in tacky three piece suits the definition of the word 'no' was unchanged even when it came from a woman.
It left a bitter taste in her mouth, but it was the kind of politics she was groomed for.
Considering the layout of that chessboard was far more complex. Lena didn't know who the pieces were or on which side they belonged.
Every move she made now rippled out to effect thousands. She was a Luthor. She didn't even think her brother knew the whole truth of that. And Luthors were not taught to play chess. As in life, they learned to study and conquer a board.
Part of her did enjoy the challenge. And she never doubted that she was good at the game. What worried her was that her brother had learned the same lessons.
He had been the golden child, the heir to the empire.
Trusting him like no one else in her life, Lena had ignored so many things she couldn't forgive herself for. Under her brother, LuthorCorp had slowly transformed from the multidimensional corporate entity their father had groomed them to maintain, into an indiscriminate global arms-dealer providing the means for bioterrorism and drone armies to the highest bidder.
Every step he took down that path pushed Lena to stubbornly throw herself into her work. She felt removed from that idealistic part of herself now, but she had really believed that if a Luthor brought the world the next great panacea in medicine, history wouldn't remember the name for anything else.
Now, she needed to undo what her brother had done to the world.
The terror, the evil he had inflicted in the name of championing humanity had to have a counterbalance to oppose it and she trusted herself more than any cape. ~Just have to survive long enough.~
She shuddered imagining the thousands of lives LuthorCorp had been responsible for taking. How many would have read her name on the side of a vial of some bioterrorist's virus, or a bomb, or the casing of the bullet.
Behind all of that she saw the fevered look of obsessive mania in her brother's eyes. His descent had been a decade's long slide. The half-truths and all-out lies had kept her complacent until the end.
Until those eyes woke her up.
And that man she barely recognized forced Lena to hate the only person she had ever loved.
Shakily she stood to make her way to the decanter. She poured just enough to let her force the image away from her into a deep corner of her mind.
She felt trapped in this business, trapped in her own name.
She wondered if moving her life to this city was a mistake. It didn't matter where she was, the entire world knew who the Luthors were. She hadn't met anyone yet who had been able to convincingly look past that, even before the Luthor brand became synonymous with evil incarnate.
Lena looked down at the budget proposal on her desk with a sigh. -I should probably get familiar with the take-out options nearby. I doubt there's going to be any reason for me to leave this office for the next decade.-
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Notes:
Little did she know...Lolz.
It's hard to get the first chapter to represent what you're getting for the rest of the fic.
I promise all of the other chapters have way more dialog.
Kara chapters tend to be more fun and fluffy. Lena chapters tend to be more deep and sarcastic. They both speak to different bits of my heart and I'm not actually sure which ones readers are liking more. Let me know if you have an opinion.
I really enjoy the Kara/Lena time and there is a lot of it, but there are some really fun side characters that pop up in the next few chapters to give it a little spice and intrigue.
The Lena section here in the first chapter is lonely like that for thematic reasons. Make it to somewhere around the middle and you'll see why :D
Side bar-I think part of me really feels intensely about SuperCorp for all the tasty potential mellow drama. You know Luthor-Super/ Montague-Capulet. Who doesn't want star-crossed lovers who actually cross through the stars, families at war, secret identities, lost civilizations. So much awesome to play with. I've been trying to find a book with the same premise and legits cannot. Let me know if you've found anything close to a supercorp vibe (like with heroes, not basketball).
I'm tempted to lose some money self-publishing one just so it will exist in the world.
If anyone is giving this a reread, when I started writing I was still sweeping out the cobwebs, so I'm going through and taking another pass. It's something of an active work in progress. It's always good to hear any jokes or aww moments that you liked so I know to keep those in.