Chapter Text
Lisa didn’t really know when it started, not exactly. However, she did know how it started.
Back in the early days of the Undersiders, before they were Warlords, before the gang wars, even before either of them had so much as a stub on the PHO wiki.
It started in quiet rooms, with two damaged girls planning minor crimes. Two Thinkers bouncing off of each other, Lisa gathering information that Emma turned into visions of the future that gave Lisa more information.
It started in utter darkness and near silence, with two damaged girls trying to sleep off skull cracking migraines. Together, because only one room in the loft could get that quiet or that dark, not without Brian constantly smothering them in his power.
Lisa watched as a scared Emma Barnes on the run from the law, with freshly acquired powers, moved from committing crimes just to try to keep herself safe to becoming the Oracle of the Underside that could, and would, ruin your life with a smile on her face if you crossed her.
But it was in those quiet, private spaces that changed everything between the two Thinkers. How they continued to hold each other through their shared agony when they pushed their powers too far, long after living space ceased to be a concern. How, when they moved out of the loft, Lisa invited Emma to live with her without a second thought.
And then their whole apartment was those private, quiet spaces. And Lisa realized something else.
Emma’s power never really turned off, in the same way her own did not. Lisa had learned months ago that Emma’s power messed with her own in ways that would infuriate her, if they weren’t partners in crime. Lisa’s power showed her things about the futures Emma saw, but not about Emma herself. The things Lisa learned about everyone else she got close to, she was never told about Emma Barnes.
And that fact would be the final straw. The last in a long string of reasons that, when Emma kissed her one night, Lisa kissed her back. It was a gentle, soft thing, but full of both care and promise.
It changed everything between them, even though nothing changed. By the kind of unspoken agreement only possible between the two strongest Thinkers in the city, Emma quietly moved into Lisa’s room. They stopped being partners in crime, and merely became partners. Planning sessions and quiet, uneventful evenings both became interspersed with kisses, which only rarely broke away from soft, sweet, and gentle.
And obviously, neither of them said a word to anyone, even the other Undersiders or the Thinkers’ chief lieutenants. Their relationship was just as private and quiet as the events that lead to it, and concerned no one but them.
Even as they spent more and more time in costume as Tattletale and Oracle, as Warlords that controlled a city, with all the crime and cruelty that came part and parcel with those titles, they continued to make time to just be Lisa and Emma, to be two girls that were in over their heads and falling in love while they fell.
Neither of them were good people. Now, certainly, but not for a long time since, realistically. Good people don’t bankrupt their parents before running away from home. Good people don’t accidentally murder their childhood friend. Good people definitely don’t work together to start a gang for safety from their previous moral failings.
Lisa feathered a kiss to Emma’s forehead, and smiled when it made her squirm slightly in her sleep.
They were, objectively, terrible people.
But lying here, in their bed, enjoying the still novel sensations of this much skin to skin contact as the setting sun bathed the room in orange and gold, Lisa wouldn’t have it any other way.