But as wonderful as that little chat with Ruby had been, the high of it all faded away eventually and that somber sadness returned to the atmosphere surrounding the two women. Sam continued just to hold Lena close and stroke her hair while Lena continued to focus on Sam's heartbeat. Heaven knew she didn't care about her own anymore. But once again, she couldn't help but ask the question that Sam had tried to brush off earlier before they called Ruby.
"What am I going to do?" she sighed, sounding more hopeless than afraid now. But just like before, Sam had no answer for that.
"I can't tell you," she sighed ruefully. "This is a hard question and I have no answer."
"But don't you at least have a little advice? Or any suggestion at all?" Lena pressed hollowly.
"Unfortunately, I do, but you aren't going to like any of them," Sam replied.
"Ah. You're going to tell me I should forgive and forget," Lena muttered, forehead wrinkling as she frowned.
"No, no," Sam corrected. "I'm going to tell you that you need to confront this issue head on. You're going to need to talk to Kara ASAP and tell her everything you know. It may feel natural to you to want to start keeping your own secrets in retaliation, but that's going to get you nowhere in this fight, except even deeper into trouble than you already are," she said.
"What?" Lena recoiled and, for the first time that night, vengeance and anger crept into her voice. She sat up out of Sam's arms defiantly.
"You may feel like this is unfair, and that Kara should come to you and not the other way around, and I do agree with that," Sam continued calmly, letting Lena sit up, but refusing to let her go off just yet. "You have every right to be mad and hurt, but I'm asking you for your own sake that you do not become vengeful over this. Just go in there and address it. You can't wait around anymore in the hopes that Kara might tell you. If she hasn't told you yet, she never will, so the best way to deal with it now is for you to take the lead and make the first move, as unfair as that is," Sam continued to advise. "If you want to get anywhere at all, you need to start moving forward right now. Don't wait around anymore. It's not going to be easy or fun or pleasant or happy, but at least it'll get you somewhere."
"But I don't want to take the initiative!" Lena almost whined. "Why should I have to answer for her mistakes?"
"You shouldn't," Sam replied, still calm. "But at the rate things are going, if you want to get anywhere, you're going to have to."
Lena heaved an angry, frustrated sigh, slouching and running tired fingers through frazzled hair.
"I know it can't be easy," Sam consoled. "But we both know it's the only way anything will change or come to some sort of conclusion, no matter how unsavory that conclusion may be."
"I know, I know," Lena promised with a defeated sigh. "I just don't think I'm ready..."
"Well, don't push yourself before you're ready," Sam replied. "I just mean that you can't wait forever. Take as much time as you need, but the moment you feel ready, go for it."
"But what should I say? What should I do?" Lena pleaded.
"Everything that Kara didn't," Sam replied again. "Be honest, direct and determined. Don't be forceful, aggressive, pushy or vengeful. But do be assertive and get a little angry. Not enough to make the rift between you any bigger, but enough to fuel some fire to your argument."
Lena paused for a moment, although Sam's ideas were still very unsavory to her, to hear Sam suggesting that she actually actively get angry before, during and after her confrontation with Kara caught her interest. It was something she had never been recommended before.
"It's because you have a right to get angry," Sam explained in response to Lena's surprised and confused expression. "You have a right to be mad and hurt. You have a right to feel like something unfair and unjust has happened to you, because it has! You have a right to feel your emotions. You don't have to keep hiding them away or trying to suppress them. You deserve to feel every single negative thought and emotion to its fullest."
"Can't say that's advice normally give to a Luthor," Lena snarked.
"It's not advice normally give to a Wordkiller either," Sam replied, and this made Lena pause again. Sam only gave her another pained smile before continuing. "I cannot speak for Kara or her upbringing or her conflicting identities, but I can speak for myself and my own life. Much like you, and her, I was a very lonely and isolated child growing up. I was always the weird one, even though none of my Kryptonian powers had manifested yet. At least as far as I knew. But either way, that sort of environment left its marks on me. It made me bitter and resentful, but then I was made to feel ashamed of that anger. So I bottled it up and it festered like an untreated sore. It really was only after I became pregnant with Ruby that I finally took a stand for and to myself, admitting that I deserved a good life and I deserved all of my pain and anger. I didn't hold back anymore. It set me free, and gave me the best gift I could've ever gotten..."
Sam paused to smile tenderly as she thought about Ruby. Meanwhile, Lena stared at her, enchanted and entranced with the story and lesson that Sam was telling to her. It was definitely a new one.
"But I do admit that maybe I could've handled my anger better," Sam continued, a flash of bitterness marring her warm and fond smile. "I don't deny my anger, nor do I regret or defy it. I just wish that I hadn't been so accusatory and vengeful. When I finally lashed out, it all came crashing down upon my mother's head. I think, even now, to some extent, we both knew that she deserved at least some of it, but I was just so hateful by then that I didn't even stop to think and try to find a better way to communicate with her. That lead to our estrangement..."
Once again, Sam trailed off, a dark look in her eyes. Lena had almost forgotten that Sam came from a broken home too, and that Sam had also suffered the pains of not fitting into a family before being coldly kicked to the curb after a disagreement went too far. And like Lena's own mother, Sam had been abandoned by the man who got her pregnant. Lena briefly wondered if Sam realized how much she resembled Lena's birthmother, not just in story, but in personality, wisdom and compassion.
"I was so angry that I didn't harness my rage for good or for improvement. I didn't work with it, I let it control me, and that's the one thing I do regret about all of that," she confessed, finishing her story. "So please, Lena, do get angry. Do feel all of your resentment. And bring it all forward to Kara. That anger will only serve you and help you get across how deeply this affected you. But please, please, please don't let it control you. I'm not telling you this because you are a Luthor, I am telling you this because you are a human. Be angry, but be aware. Be forward and assertive, but be willing and open. Be ready to talk and fight, but be ready to surrender and compromise. Stand your ground, hold your position, make your feelings known, but don't do it to an excess. Stay humble."
As Sam continued to offer up these suggestions, Lena finally began to let it all sink in. She was still incredibly mad at Kara and incredibly stung by this secret and its subsequent dramatic reveal (she had a shattered photo of them sitting in her office's trashcan to prove that) but Sam's lesson about the good, helpful and necessary side to anger really resonated with her. It was a good idea. And it just might work...
She still had no idea how or when she was going to confront Kara, but with Sam's words echoing around her head, she simply knew that she would get to it eventually (since Kara didn't seem to plan on confronting it any time soon) and she would not hold back. She would not sink to petty vengeance, but there would be no mercy from her this time. Like Sam said, she deserved to be angry. She deserved to rip into Kara at least a little, and she would... eventually.
"And if you think about it, Reign kind of helped me figure all of this out too," Sam continued. "I know she was a monster and I know she was an enemy and I know all of us wanted nothing more than to get rid of her and all her little vicious friends, but being stuck inside my own mind with only her for company did leave me with a lot to think about. If you really think about it, what is Reign other than a twisted sense of justice?"
"What?" Lena scoffed despite herself, but Sam only kept on talking, unbothered by Lena's harsh dismissal of her point.
"She showed me how easily good traits can twist into something negative. Similarly, that revealed to me that the inverse is also true: bad traits can be used for good," she said. "Think of it this way, Reign wanted nothing more than to serve, protect and do good. Sure, she had a terrible, no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners mentality, but she wasn't going on rampages just for fun or for power."
This gave Lena yet another pause. Sam did have a point. As Reign herself had said, she had not come for power or control, just justice. A vigilante justice, but justice nonetheless. The only people she killed were bad people, or people who stood in her way (which she had equated to being bad because to stand against her was to stand against justice and to stand against justice was to stand beside evil). Reign, violent as she had been, had only wanted to do good.
"I think some of that might apply to Kara," Sam mused. Lena bristled a little when she heard Sam try and defend Kara, but she allowed Sam to explain. "Maybe what Kara did was not malicious, but a twisted sort of love. After all, everything that can think ahs made at least one misjudgment before," she said. "Maybe Kara did what she thought was best, even though it clearly wasn't."
"That doesn't make up for anything!" Lena shot back coldly.
"I know that," Sam promised calmly. "I'm just trying to figure out where she's coming from. You need to know you opponent before you can engage properly with them. And I can't speak for Kara at all, but I can theorize..."
"Fair enough," Lena replied, crossing her arms and grunting. Although she hated to admit it, Sam had a point.
It was clear that she, personally, didn't to hear any justification for Kara's actions, no matter how valid they were, and Sam understood this because she agreed that Kara had a lot to answer for, but perhaps because Sam also knew what it felt like to be half human and half alien, she could still sympathize with Kara. She agreed that Kara's actions had been wrong, but she pitied Kara instead of growing angry. The way she saw it, maybe Kara had only chosen to hide out of fear. It wasn't easy to be a hybrid. Even if Kara embraced her alien side (unlike Sam), Sam was certain that Kara's Kryptonian nature had still caused her at least a bit of trauma and trouble in the past. Sam could understand that, and she could understand why Kara might keep her identity a secret. Sam, herself, had been none too pleased to learn about her own alien alter ego, although to be fair, hers had been a whack-job vigilante. At least Kara was good.
"All three of us know what it feels like to not fit in," Sam murmured. "All of us are, or have been, stuck between two worlds."
"True," Lena relented, but only just a little. She held more sympathy for Sam than Kara even though the two had relatively similar stories. But Sam was right, all three of them had been misfits in their own homes, outcast and lonely, scared of who they were and what the world would think if they ever found out. Lena could see Sam's point on that. Maybe Kara's actions had been driven by fear and love instead of mistrust and cruelty. Maybe Sam had a point that good emotions could become bad and vice versa. Maybe Kara was no happier than Sam was with Reign. Maybe Lena could start to understand and start moving forward... Maybe... But not just yet.
By the end of the night, however, all thoughts and words had been exhausted. There was still a lot left to say and a lot left to do, but Sam instinctive knew that it could not be rushed and that everything that could've been said tonight had been said. Lena was no longer crying, she had the reassurance and validation that she was never alone, Sam had been able to explain her own take on the story and theorize on what was going on in Kara's head and they had made a small plan for moving forward. There was nothing else left to do for that particular discussion. The rest had to wait for another day. There was something unsatisfactory about realizing that the conversation was over for the night, but it still had managed to get so much done that both Sam and Lena felt a little bit better than they had a couple hours ago.
"Thank you again, Sam, so much. I don't think I can ever repay you or properly express how grateful I am that you did this for me," Lena sighed, nothing but sincerity and humility in her voice now. She lowered her eyes and bowed her head.
"Well, you could always turn over L-Corp to me or let me retire early," Sam said with a laugh. This earned a small chuckle from Lena, which in Sam's mind, was the biggest achievement of the night.
"We'll see," the Luthor replied. "I might just insist that we trade posts. You work here in National City and I'll go back to Metropolis. We can switch apartments and everything!" she snickered despite herself.
"I'll keep that as an option," Sam replied with a smile and a nod, but then she grew serious once again. "In all honesty, though, you don't have to pay me back for anything. Consider this my payment to you for helping me with Reign."
"Friends don't keep tabs like that!" Lena shook her head with a gentle smile.
"Good. Then you understand why I won't accept any payment for this," Sam replied, gesturing between the two of them. Lena's smile grew.
"You really are a blessing to have and to know, Sam," she muttered.
"As are you, believe me," Sam promised, reaching out to squeeze Lena's arm fondly. Lena narrowed her eyes slightly, still not quite sure if she trusted Sam, or what she had just said, but she knew enough to let it be for tonight and just take the compliment without complaint, even if she didn't quite believe in it herself.
After much arguing, Sam slept on the couch while Lena took the bed. Lena had wanted to repay Sam by allowing her the bedroom over the couch, but Sam continually insisted that she was fine with the couch and unless Lena was willing to pick her up and drag her into the bedroom, she wasn't going to budge. Lena had halfway considered it, but she finally decided not to, instead pretending to accuse Sam of being stubborn and hardheaded before they parted ways for the night, one remaining in the living room and one headed for the bedroom.