Pieces of You
-Lena-
"Well my dear. I may be put out with you, but you played our game fairly well, I think." Lillian made a dismissive tisking sound with her tongue. "Supergirl expected to rescue you from your own family?"
She smiled smugly at Lena. "Maybe you are a Luthor after all. To make it up to me, I am going to leave you with Lex's journals which went over details of the technology he created that you decided to destroy. Always so jealous. Couldn't stand the idea of your brother outshining you once again Lena?" Her mother asked mockingly.
"Here, while you work." Lillian said placing a comms device on the table beside her. "I wouldn't want you to miss out on the progress made on the other experiments. Given the intriguing results your brother obtained from her counterpart, I have a feeling that this research may be groundbreaking."
Her mother baited Lena even when she was pleased. Lena had played the long game, not knowing what to expect. Her mother had been furious after Lena opened Lex's vault for her and found it emptied.
Lena had fed her mother some story about L-Corp not standing in the shadow of Lex's accomplishments. Like she had destroyed it all in a jealous temper-tantrum. Lillian was always ready to accept any narrative that involved Lena's petty inferiority complex with Lex.
To gain her trust, she had given the woman the DEO's private radio frequency.
Lena had been trying to use her mother's plan, which seemed idiotic and juvenile, to fashion her own escape. She had not anticipated that the hero would get captured and stripped of her powers so neatly. And there no evidence of DEO backup in sight, yet.
Lena remembered the early Luthor lesson. Non immerito ipsam significandam.
[translation: Never foreshadow without reason]
Luthors may revel in their own genius once the king had surrendered, but they were never supposed telegraph a move before it was played. And, blood, or no, there was no doubt that Lillian was a Luthor.
Lena had no idea where the lumbering Kryptonian-powered boy that she used to trap Kara had come from and she was having difficulty guessing what other surprises her mother may have held back from her.
So now her mother, dear caretaker that she had always been, was moving onto the second phase of her plan. Obviously hedging her bets to ensure the effective psychological torture of her daughter.
With this masterful move, Lillian had ensured the salt she was rubbing on Lena would reach some wound.
First, by forcing her to listen to whatever she was doing to her would-be rescuer in case Lena was lying about her Luthor devotions.
And second, by cutting at her pride. Making Lena her brother's lab assistant. Forcing her to use his notes to recreate those disgusting weapons. With the intention of having Lena present them to him when he was broken out of prison, she was sure. A plan she suspected her mother would not have mentioned unless it was already in motion.
Lena touched the bruise on her arm lightly. Lillian had made no secret of taking blood from her while she was unconscious. She shuddered to think what it might be for.
~That is tomorrow's problem. Today...~Looking over at the comms device, she grimaced.
Lena had no doubt that this was open both ways, so her mother could listen to every move she made, every reaction she had to whatever her mother chose to broadcast. That, coupled with the multiple cameras placed around the room. Lena thought bitterly, ~Not even Luthors trust a Luthor.~
She sat down and pretended to actually read Lex's journals, careful to remember to turn pages every few minutes, while she considered her next move.
Taking into consideration the psychotic alien muscle-man her mother had found, Lena needed an advantage. Without Supergirl -Kara.
~No don't think about that right now.~ She crammed the lid down on that box so hard she gave herself a headache. Safe in her sad little jail cell, Lena could afford to wallow in self-loathing an betrayal. This was not a place for weakness.
As she was currently a wanted fugitive, her L-Corp team could not use resources to look for her. And without a Kryptonian to count on for a rescue, that meant that Lena had to figure out her own firepower.
She smiled, ~What better way to achieve that than one of Lex's moon-shattering death-rays?~
Flipping back several pages Lena started to read the journal in earnest, looking for anything that might give her an edge, allow her to take out muscles long enough to get her -them out of here.
~Urgh,~ Lena thought, ~No wonder all of Lex's plans to foil or murder Superman had failed for decades.~
The genius engineer couldn't find anything in this journal that would realistically get her out of here. Lex's designs were powerful but not versatile or reliable enough to use and her mother kept checking referenced the notes to make sure she didn't make any changes to Lex's precious toys.
At this point she just wanted to get it over with and surrender to insanity. She had already listened to two days of torture sessions, kindly pipped in to Lena's work area by her considerate mother.
She got to listen to her mother clinically log notes. She would occasionally make comments to her daughter, probably just to let the hero know Lena was listening and didn't care.
Her jaw tightened every time, but she could not allow any more reaction than that. The girl's grunts of pain sounded strangled, like she was trying to hold back.
The woman felt nauseous knowing in her gut that it was for her. That the only best friend Lena Luthor ever had was doubled over in pain, choking down screams to spare Lena the discomfort of hearing it.
She hated herself.
The cruel part of her mind forced her to acknowledge again and again, that Kara's current situation was an ironic granting of her grief-stricken wish; the girl was certainly paying for getting to know Lena.
The young Luthor buried her head in her hands feeling the throbbing headache return.
She had started tinkering with the basic circuitry of Lex's design to distract from it, hoping her mother didn't notice the alterations.
Then the speaker crackled back to life.
She was braced to endure more unintelligible sounds between her mother's observations. But instead it was Kara's voice, more hoarse than she'd ever heard before, but undoubtedly the same voice that had answered her mid-night phone calls, the same soft sweet voice, that sang little songs when she skipped around Lena's penthouse, that comforted her after another of her brother's appeals.
That lied to her hundreds of times…
Lena let go of her thoughts before they brought on tears her mother could misinterpret.
Shaking her head, she focused on the voice, silently hoping this wasn't going to be the last time she heard it.
"It's funny, I would have thought our time together would have at least given me some new nightmares Dr. Luthor. But they're always the same. A flash of green, a planet exploding, imagining a thousand of those shards of green ripping apart my parents and then remembering them chasing me through space in a thousand separate moments of pain."
Supergirl had never talked with Lena about that before. She loved talking about Krypton. But is was always nostalgic. Never her pain.
"You know I get why there are so many aliens that go bad and why you would hate them. The ones that don't respect Earth, that think they're better than the people here." Kara's hoarse voice filled with sincerity, "But I've always loved Earth. The people here look at things differently. I'm not always good at understanding emotional things, but I want to and I love them. I love this planet."
"For me, Earth was freedom. I've been here for eight years and I'm still grateful every day. It rescued me and gave me something to live for. And I have always wanted to deserve to be here." Lena heard her mother mumble something into her clinical log, obviously paying no attention to the girl.
"I really tried you know. I thought being human all the time was the answer. I went to school and gave up my powers for years. I just wanted to be normal. It felt selfish not to use my powers, but I was looking for a place to fit. I wanted to be a mom more than anything." She paused. "Being Supergirl I have to be different. I don't really know who I am now and I can't imagine there would be anyone who might be able to accept all the pieces of me."
Lena's heart broke thinking Kara was trying to appeal to the humanity in Lillian Luthor. Humanity she had not seen evidence of in twenty years of being her daughter. It wouldn't work.
She had an awful confirmation of this in the form of another grunt of pain followed by hoarse gasping breath from the young Kryptonian.
"I guess you've figured out Kryptonians bleed and there's not much I can do to get out of this. But that doesn't matter." Kara panted. "I've just have never told anyone before and I want to be honest with someone about who I am."
Kara told Lena it wasn't her mother she was talking to when she started humming her favorite N'Sync song. Lena made the mistake of outing her 90s boyband obsession and Kara dragged her on stage for Karaoke night. Her bright bubbly voice played in her head. ~It's Kara-oke, Lena. Obviously I get to make all the decisions.~
The Luthor moved to hide in a camera blind spot as she failed to stop the tears running down her face.
~Stupid ridiculous amazing idiot. Stop confessing things to me. I am getting you out of here god damn it.~ The woman wiped her eyes. She hardened her mask into stone and dove into her work with a vengeance.
The young Luthor woke still sitting at her table; a steel washer had left an imprint on her face and she had a fuzzy feeling in her mouth. She had slept for a few hours, more than she had intended but the weapon was almost done.
It wasn't enough, but she almost didn't care. Lena had made this thing with her hands and if she was ever going to go down in a blaze of heroic glory she was ready for it to be now. The fate of every idealistic loner.
She stood for the first time in half a day and something ground against the sole of her shoe. She reached down and found the necklace that her mother's alien muscle had pulled off of Kara days ago.
She held it in her palm, the crystal reflecting in the light and thought about that day.
~People are more important than powers.~ Something clicked.
Lena didn't know if this is what she had meant. But Lena knew everything about two people, Kara and Supergirl.
She knew about Alex, about Maggie, the DEO, her cousin.
Kara had showed her a journal she'd written in code to keep it from Alex and Alex told her she cracked it when they were 16 and still read Kara's journal sometimes to try and figure out what kind of hairbrained things her sister was getting up to.
Supergirl had been so excited to explain the special resonance that keyed only into Kryptonian superhearing. She'd given her a watch currently sitting in some police evidence locker.
Supergirl had told her every, frankly insufficient, feature in her supersuit and she had certainly felt her way through the thing enough that one night to know where things where.
Lena might not have anyone else to count on, but Kara's life was bursting at the seams with people who would be desperately looking for her. She would have been one of them.
To mask her movements on the monitors, she started to casually organize her workspace, straightened files, gathered together materials. She took out a broom and dustbin and swept the area, careful to get into the corners and ~yes!~ she found the tracker he had pulled out of her suit that day.
Lena was doing her programming work on a closed network. She had wasted considerable energy trying to find a wormhole to get a message through.
But if you could get a Kryptonian frequency into the air, it couldn't be stopped. The fact that her mother had bred her own Kryptonian would have complicated things, but she could use this transmitter to send out a coded signal. One she was sure would make absolutely no sense to anyone but her favorite government agent.
She was careful to follow the same morning routine as always, and when she settled back down to work, she hid her repair project under the guise of fine tuning her already completed weapon's design.
A wash of relief flooded her when there was tiny hum of the circuitry coming back to life. Lena keyed in the frequency and her coded coordinates and felt certain about something for the first time.
.
.
.
Notes: Hey guys. End to the angst will be forth coming.
Let me know if you can think of something Kara really should have told Lena in that little message.