Chapter Text
As far as the world knew, Lena Luthor was both a scientific genius, and preternaturally good at the business side of the equation too. Under her steady stewardship, L Corp had been growing, and she seemed to have a nose for a good deal. She understood people, knew when someone was trying to deal with her dishonestly, could tell when someone was attracted enough to her that she could leverage it to her advantage, and knew when to steer clear of that one particular Starbucks because she was wearing white and the barista was in a bad mood.
Lena Luthor had a gift, they said. Made to do business.
They were half right.
Lena checked the mirror as her driver eased down the packed boulevard, half glad of the traffic since she was heading to a meeting that she wasn’t looking forward to. The gentlemen of the board at Hamatsu Electronics did not like dealing with her, distrusted her because of her family name, and usually were trying to screw her over every chance they could get. She had to gird up for meetings like these. She drew her deep red lipstick across her lips, smacked them together once, fiddled with a bit at the corner of her mouth. She bared her teeth to make sure they were clean.
Her phone rang. She almost ignored it, because she frankly needed the peace of the car ride to get herself into the proper frame of mind to meet with these men, but she took it out of her Kate Spade bag and glanced at it. It was the one person who she would nearly always take a call from: Kara Danvers.
She tapped her wireless earbud. “Hey Kara!” she said cheerfully. She was always glad to hear Kara’s voice.
“Hey Lena,” Kara answered just as cheerfully. “I wanted to see if you were busy Saturday night.”
“Hm,” Lena said, and flipped open her calendar. Three scheduled items competed for her attention, none of which she particularly wanted to participate in. “Sort of, but what did you have in mind?”
“Oh, nothing,” Kara sighed, “it’s just that James is having a showing of some of his stuff at a gallery downtown and Saturday night is the opening, and I was kind of hoping I could waylay you into coming with me.”
“Wine and cheese, eh?” Lena said. She looked again at her calendar. She moved one item two hours earlier and deleted the other two. She knew Jess, her secretary, would get the notifications but nevertheless, as she spoke to Kara, she tapped out a quick text message to her. Please see my changes for Saturday’s schedule and make calls accordingly.
I’m being a capricious wench, she thought with amusement. But spending the evening at an art opening in some nouveau-bohemian art gallery with Kara Danvers was too appealing to pass up.
Kara Danvers had been her first friend in National City. She’d been the only one from day one who judged Lena on her merits and believed in her when nobody else did. Unlike most of the rest of the world, Kara didn’t believe that being a Luthor automatically made Lena evil, and that was worth a lot. That was one of two reasons why, though it had been nearly two years now, Lena hadn’t tried to date her: a friendship like that, that presumed nothing about her and asked nothing of her, was worth the world. She had no desire to risk it for a romance that might or might not work.
The other reason why Lena hadn’t tried to date her, of course, was that she didn’t really think it would work. Kara, though she had never said so, was hung up on someone else.
“OK, great! I can’t wait! It’s going to be so much fun!”
They said their goodbyes and Lena resumed brooding into crosstown traffic. Her driver, Frederick, was her favorite, not because he was an especially good driver (although he was competent enough), but because he was mercifully, graciously free of extraneous thought. She didn’t have the constant whispers of his musings about life, his worries, his fight with his wife last night, constantly drifting back and knocking her on the side of the head, the way she had with other drivers. Most did, and it could really be damned distracting.
But Frederick’s head was mostly empty, and that was a merciful relief.
****
She’d been fourteen when she’d been caught in the accident in Lex’s basement lab. She didn’t know what in the hell he was up to with those Tesla coils and he wasn’t about to tell her, but the damn thing had exploded in a flash of white light, blinding her and knocking her unconscious. When she woke, she felt… different. She thought there was something wrong with her, because she was overrun with emotions that she couldn’t understand, swore she was hearing voices that she shouldn’t be.
It had taken her some time, longer than her physical recovery, to really begin to process what had happened to her, what the little (large) knock on the head had given her. When the feelings flooded in, the ones that didn’t make sense to her, she came to understand that it was because they weren’t her own. When the voices began whispering, familiar voices, she came to understand that they were thoughts she was hearing, other people’s thoughts.
When she did understand it, she rejected it at first. It felt weird and invasive in a way she didn’t like. But it became a means of self preservation in a family where she could trust nobody, especially her mother. God, even after she knew what she was feeling and hearing, Lillian’s feelings were so difficult to untangle, a barely intelligible cocktail of cold rage, iron determination, despair, unfocused longing. She was fourteen and suddenly bearing the weight of her mother’s madness in too deeply intimate a way.
She did what anyone would do. She put up walls. She learned to control it. She only took in a little at a time. It was harder when she was tired. And keeping the walls up in itself was tiring. It was a dialectic of sorts.
That was part of why she craved Kara’s company so much. Because Kara’s heart, even when she was sad, was filled with goodness, with love, with empathy. She didn’t need to keep her walls up with Kara, because the emotions that rolled off of her in waves were a benevolent tide.
Lena wouldn’t say she loved Kara, but if pressed, she wasn’t sure she’d say she didn’t either.
But you couldn’t carry on a thing with someone who wished they were with someone else, could you. Lena didn’t know who it was, but it didn’t matter. The mythology of the one that got away was always bigger than the person. You couldn’t compete with it.
But at least she had Saturday.