Chapter Text
Hook. Newsworthiness. Angle. Call to action.
Kara fidgets with the corner of a page of her notebook. The one with the pitch she’d workshopped all afternoon yesterday, perfectly structured to not exceed the maximum one minute of Andrea Rojas’ attention span.
“Danvers,” Andrea sighs, like it pains her.
A parting appears in the small crowd of Kara’s coworkers to allow her a direct line of sight to her editor, who’s leaned back in a perch on the edge of her desk, one heeled foot crossed over the other. Kara draws a deep breath, ready to reel off, but in the hair of a second it takes her, she realises Andrea is still talking.
“I heard Lena Luthor is trying to make some sort of a comeback.” Andrea shrugs with a waft of the papers in her hand. “I want an interview.”
Kara blinks. Lena Luthor. Well, she knows the name, of course, but this is hardly her wheelhouse. She’s not on the—well, she doesn’t even know which beat she should be on, for that story. Fashion?
She glances at Nia, trying to submit the question to her telepathically. Nia just peers back at her with a quirk to her brow that tells Kara that she should probably be responding.
Her fingers skim over the indents of her writing on the paper of her notepad.
“Actually, Ms Rojas—”
“If you’re about to tell me that you don’t know what Lena Luthor is even famous for—save it,” Andrea says. “Whatever angle you need to feel like it’s not too beneath you, be my guest. Consider yourself granted creative license. Just get me Lena Luthor, on the record.”
Kara bristles. She hadn’t been about to say that. Not in so many words.
She does know some things Lena Luthor is famous for.
*
Item A: The show, obviously.
Not that Kara has ever really seen it. Eliza had never approved of reality TV, so no episodes of Living it Up with the Luthors survived a full play-through in their Midvale home. Nonetheless, the youngest Luthor, having had her tumultuous teenage years televised, was the source of some on-screen tantrums so cataclysmic that their meme-worthy status even managed to filter through to Kara and her sister’s screen-time limited childhoods.
When Kara was fourteen, Alex had somehow got her hands on an enormous stack of cut-outs of Lena Luthor’s sobbing face—God knew where from—and had spent months deploying them like landmines. One on the inside of Kara’s locker. One pasted to the lid of her laptop. One waiting, stuck at the bottom of Kara’s sock drawer, awaiting a slow and painstaking reveal as laundry day crept closer.
She’s pretty sure that last one is still there, buried beneath Eliza’s years-neglected clay modelling supplies.
*
Item B: “Her tits,” she imagines Alex would mention, snickering into the dregs of her nightly red wine while image-searching Lena’s “break the internet” photoshoot—Lena, aged eighteen, posed with a champagne bottle popping suggestively between her legs, dress falling around her shoulders, bosom teetering precariously at the low plunge of its neckline, and skin smoothed out into an uncanny alien sheen.
But instead what her sister actually says is, “Famous for being a closet case.” (Kara is right about the red wine, at least.)
“What? No, she isn’t,” Kara says, waving a hand while Alex looks amused. “But she’s so pr—”
Alex raises an eyebrow.
Kara forfeits with a humph. “You think everyone is gay.”
“That’s because they are.” Alex shrugs, and pats around on the couch for her phone. “Sara showed me this a while ago, when I told her who you work for these days, actually,” she says, tapping something into the screen. A second later, she hands it over.
Kara squints at the screen. It’s a Tumblr search that reads, “lendrea”.
And, wait, hold on is that—?
She scrolls. And, yes, there’s image after image of Lena Luthor and Andrea Rojas: arm-in-arm at events, heads tucked inside matching hoodies, laughing too loud after brunch.
She glances up at Alex, and meets an intensely watchful gaze.
Does Andrea assigning her the story have something to do with this… friendship? She’s about to wonder aloud, but Alex is already saying, “Keep scrolling.”
So, Kara does.
In amongst more of the same kind of photograph, there’s pure hysteria. One post is a photograph of an iceberg segmented horizontally, smothered in a frenetic word cloud of text: “Lena releases bisexual eyeshadow palette” and “matching medallion necklaces” above the waterline, and then, beneath it, “synchronised Instagram ocean photos”, “kissgate”, and “both talking about trust in interviews in the same month”.
In another post, there’s a screenshot of one of Andrea’s tweets from 2009. Alongside a heart eyes emoji, she has shared an image of herself wrapped up in Lena’s arms gazing out at a sunset, replete with the awkward neck angles and glazed over eyes of an amateur Photoshop job. Tumblr user @lendr3a mourns, “i’M CRYIGG THIS WAS 8 YEARS AGO TODAY”.
“Okay, they seem close.”
Then, a set of gifs of distant, fuzzy woman shapes, plausibly Lena and Andrea, on the mezzanine in a dark arena. The shapes are clinging and close to one another in the first, and then in the second facing one another, the taller one clutching the other’s face and pulling her near. Their faces are close behind the blurry spread of hands.
Kara looks up again.
Alex’s eyes twinkle. “Sure, just some gals being pals,” she says in that tone that is supposed to tell Kara something is going over her head. “Just inseparable pals that abruptly stopped associating with each other after ten months joined at the hip.” She chuckles. “Going theory is that back when the show was airing Lena’s mom-ager didn’t think the only Luthor daughter being a dyke would sell as much lip gloss, and you know—” Alex lowers her voice “ —these days she's dodging any and all attention because of Lex.”
Lex. Lex Luthor. Darn.
There’s a pause, where Kara feels her face fall and Alex softens.
“Maybe you should call Clark.”
*
Item C: The biggest meme of them all.
Kara’s pretty sure even Eliza has seen it.
A clip of Lena, from the final season of Living it Up with the Luthors, bolt upright in the leather backseats of a chauffeur-driven car, a phone held aloft.
Lilian Luthor sits over from her, snarling through a tight-mouthed expression. “Lena, can you please stop taking pictures of yourself? Your brother’s going to jail.”
*
It’s Lois who answers Kara’s call, her voice all warmth and light, brimful with excitement about some story she’s getting her teeth into, until, “Sorry, Kara, I haven’t let you get a word in. How are you?”
Kara just blurts the story she’s been assigned. She doesn’t even get as far as asking for Clark, before Lois signs off with an, “Oh, honey.”
Clark doesn’t manage a hello: “Kara, did you say Lena Luthor?”
The words spill out of Kara in one breath: “She’s moved to National City and Andrea wants me to secure an exclusive. And she hasn’t done any press since—well, you know. So I called you because… I don’t know. Maybe for advice?”
Clark hesitates. “Well, I’d suggest you don’t tell her who you are, K,” he concludes.
Kara squirms.
“You mean who you are.”
*
The angry part of the crowd isn’t large, but it sure is loud. It could be louder still, if they’d managed to coordinate their chants better. A hoarse-voiced woman on a megaphone cuts across the top in a tinny shriek, but it’s still pretty much unintelligible.
Kara hasn’t attended many corporate rebrand launches, but she figures that the set of barricades and handful of bored-looking NCPD officers looking onto a corralled protest across the plaza aren’t typical.
She’s penned into an area near the front that’s been marked off for press, standing room only. They’ve been there a while now, the mid-morning National City sun radiating off the flagstones, and the other journalists are starting to grumble. There’s some sort of delay to proceedings—Kara’s Twitter feed suggests security concerns.
A falling hush, followed quickly by a rev of renewed fervour from the protesters is the first thing that tells her that Lena Luthor has arrived. When Kara spots her, coming on to the platform from stage left, she’s flagged by private security and another woman in a suit who is holding a comically large pair of scissors.
Lena steps up to the lectern and sets her hands firmly either side. She seems much smaller in real life, but physically bolder all the same, ripped as she is out of a fuzzy-at-the-edges 2000s digital resolution and into the glaring sunlit HD of real life. The softness of her early-twenties puppy fat has turned sharp at the edges of that signature bone structure. The teen scrawny alt-girl look has long been scrubbed clean off, replaced with a bold lip and the finely tailored curve of a suit jacket and pencil skirt.
It’s hard to remember that this is the same woman that had once thrown a salad at her brother’s head on national television.
But she still carries that striking something that keeps her recognisable. Those wild almost manic green eyes, and then, when she opens her mouth to speak to greet the crowd, that same lilting thrum of a voice. Kara’s almost so captivated by its cadence that she has to remind herself to listen to what it’s actually saying.
“I won’t mince my words,” Lena is saying as Kara tunes in. “For too long this company’s name has been associated with scandal, tawdry sensationalism—”
“The Luthor family stole our futures!”
A voice, young and shrill bursts out as if to underscore Lena’s point. There’s a ripple of half-gasps and camera clicks. Kara’s eyes glance over the crowd, and for a moment it’s unclear where it came from.
A jostling ripple of movement is visible near the front of the unbarricaded crowd. Security converges in a flash of dark suits. There’s the blur of a flailing arm, and the crowd instinctively surges back. A GBC camera swivels towards the chaos. A second later, a staffer blocks the shot with a clipboard.
A placard—‘LUTHOR SCUM’ emblazoned in slashing red—flumps onto the flagstones as a girl is grabbed, too hard, by the elbow.
Kara instinctively shifts forward, mouth halfway open to object, but the girl is already being marched away, a mask pulled down below her chin now and still snarling. She’s a teenager.
“Say his name, Lena!” she shouts, writhing against the grip on her arms. “Say what he did!”
A hush has fallen over everything—not silence, but a charged quiet that even affects the protesters whose noises have settled down to a simmer.
Lena Luthor does not look over. She waits a beat, then two. When she speaks again, her voice is steady. “I can’t control where this company has been, where it has come from. Only where we choose to go next.”
And she goes on, almost as if nothing has happened, with the crowd still half-holding its breath. The GBC camera is angled back towards her.
“While LuthorCorp has been a pioneer in storytelling formats that defined an age of television and captivated audiences, times are changing. Our talented staff will now be channelling their creativity into groundbreaking approaches into content that deepens understanding, and challenges ideas. As part of this direction, we’re proud to announce the opening of our National City offices, which will serve as the company headquarters, home, and heart.”
Lena gestures behind her to the domineering tower. Only days before had the last construction workers left it behind.
“With this, we have an opportunity to engage more closely with a vibrant community and fresh perspectives, whilst evolving alongside our roots in Metropolis. We’re pivoting to content that educates, inspires and engages audiences. And with a new direction, a new name. L-Corp.”
Lena draws the crowd’s attention now to the plinth just in front of the stage—the centre of the plaza on a normal day. It’s covered in a slightly creased off-white fabric that looks like it’s been snatched from a wedding reception, bound with a complicated arrangement of ribbon.
The woman with the absurdly large scissors hands them over to Lena, and shuffles down to hold the ribbon taut. Lena follows, and with a flourish of scissors and a snap the fabric falls away to reveal a new logo, all chrome and sharp edges.
Lena Luthor peers at it, then glances up and across the crowd, and Kara spies something in it, a flash of trepidation in a quick release of breath, and then—with the other woman pressing a handheld mic into her grip—it’s gone.
*
There’s five minutes for questions, they are told gruffly by the scissors woman, before invited guests (amongst whom Kara does not number) will be welcomed inside for the reception. “Questions about Mr Lex Luthor’s past conduct, as a matter of ongoing legal proceedings, won’t be answered today,” she adds.
This sends a murmur rippling through the press pack. “Like hell they won’t,” grumbles a man in a Tribune lanyard.
Kara misses the rush of hands darting up around her. Lena invites a question from someone several bodies over from Kara.
“Vicki Vale, GBC News. Lena, you’ve spoken about the pivot for L-Corp to more serious storytelling. Does this mean we’ll see fewer projects in the unscripted space?”
Lena nods, a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth for a more welcome question than might have been expected. “We’re still developing unscripted content, but with a new bar for quality and intention. We’re certainly moving away from more… exploitative formats.”
Hands shoot up again, and this time Kara is quicker off the draw.
Someone doesn’t wait to be called. “The Citizen, Ms Luthor. Has L-Corp instituted new financial oversight policies in the wake of your brother’s mismanagement?”
Ms Scissors cuts in smoothly. “As previously stated,” she says, sounding bored. “Matters relating to Mr Luthor are outside of the scope of what we’re able to answer today.”
There’s a tight pause and a few pencils stop mid-scribble, briefly—then Lena raises a hand gently, palm angled towards her publicist.
“As far as L-Corp’s practice goes, we’ve conducted a thorough internal review resulting in a new leadership structure, and there will be no tolerance for misconduct. An Independent Ethics Advisory Panel will oversee funding transparency as well as our editorial practice.”
The next reporter is waved in by the publicist. “Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” comes in a familiar voice, and Kara’s jaw drops as she leans back and catches sight of a brown ponytail. She hadn’t clocked her in the scrum. Foolish, really, if there was one thing guaranteed to drag her cousin-in-law across state lanes, it was a Luthor trying to change the narrative.
Lena straightens. Kara can’t see her face at this angle to read her expression.
“There are communities still dealing with the consquences of decisions made under your family's leadership. How will your new logo help address that?”
Lena doesn’t flinch. “I can’t discuss matters that pertain to an ongoing legal case,” she says. “But I am committing this company to outreach and redress. We’re engaging with National City non-profits to establish an accountability council.”
She’s barely finished before Lois cuts in. “With respect, Ms Luthor,” she says, drawing out the name, “the families impacted are still in Metropolis. Hundreds of workers whose jobs are now at risk, who are unlikely to ever see their pensions.” She gestures, and Lena’s eyes follow the route towards the barricade. “Some of them are still trying to be heard. I count at least one teenager who got shoved into a squad car during your opening monologue, and now you’re planting a fresh name in National Ci—”
“In the interests of time it will be one question per publication today,” the publicist says hastily, and nods to someone else. “Patty O'Day, is it? Your question?”
“Thanks so much, yes, NC Style Weekly. Lena, your wardrobe today is much more structured than your last press appearance. Is that a visual metaphor for L-Corp’s new direction?”
Lena looks more bemused than relieved by the shift in tone. Kara can hear Lois bristle and curse.
“I’ll leave the metaphor work to our creative team,” Lena says. “But I appreciate your eye for detail.”
Less distracted by Lois as Lena bats away the softball, Kara’s reactions live up better to the moment, and as soon as her hand is raised she sees Lena’s eyes shift towards her and nod.
And it’s so strange, to be acknowledged for the first time by someone she has spent the last week furiously Googling, that Kara finds herself hesitating in the headlights of Lena’s gaze.
“Yes, in the glasses?” Lena prompts.
As if drawn to notice them, Kara pushes the frames up her nose. “Thank you,” she says. “Kara Danvers, Teen CatCo.” A titter breaks across the press pack as she names her publication. “Um. With LCorp pivoting away, potentially, from reality formats, what kind of stores do you think deserve more space on your roster?”
Lena tilts her head slightly. “Ones that inform. That empower,” she says. “There’s enough spectacle in the world.”
Before Kara can press, Scissors steps in with seamless efficiency. “That’s all we have time for.”
Another moment passes before Lena breaks their eye contact.
*
Kara’s still scribbling down Lena’s phrasing when she hears Lois’s voice again.
“Kara! Thanks for the tip.” Lois is striding over with a wink and an unapologetic grin. “Not trying to scoop you, kid. Just figured I wouldn’t let a Luthor sneak out of Metropolis without at least one good jab.”
Kara huffs a laugh. “You call that a jab?”
“Please, I was being polite.” Lois tucks her notepad under one arm and glances towards the dispersing crowd. “Anyway, what did you think? All those advisory panels she’s got stacking up… You think there’s an L-Corp Subcommittee on Removing Sticks from Executive Asses? Because I’ve gotta say, I liked her better back when she locked herself in the wine cellar for ‘privacy’ and got stuck for twelve hours.”
Kara blinks, and Lois reads her obliviousness on her face, raising two of her own amused eyebrows.
“You didn’t see that one? Oh, honey. Whole thing had the dramatic pacing of a Shakespeare tragedy, if Hamlet plugged his new fragrance mid-soliloquy.”
“Seems like I have some catching up to do,” Kara says.
Lois’ laughter is cut off as her eye is drawn somewhere over Kara’s shoulder, and she shifts her stance as if using Kara as a body block. “Shit. Don’t let that Freeman woman catch us conspiring. She’s already iced me out. If she catches you chatting with the Planet’s finest she’ll lock Lena down like Fort Knox.”
Kara glances to the cluster of security hovering around the stage. Lena presumably still swallowed somewhere within it. Scissors—Freeman, Lois had called her—is peering furiously at the protesters.
“So, what, you’re not trying to get up close and personal?” Kara asks.
Lois points her pen at her. “Like I said, I’m not trying to scoop you. Even if I was tempted, a gal’s gotta pick her battles and if Lena Luthor has a tell-all in her, it sure as hell won’t be to the Daily Planet. She might be willing to take her brother down through the courts but I’m not sure she’s likely to twist the knife in our pages. But you Kara. Nice question, back there. Flattering Lena’s ambitions but not patronising her. Soft enough to slide under her defences, sharp enough to get noticed. She’ll think you’re benign.”
Kara’s not sure that that’s a compliment, but she smiles back at Lois. “Are you giving me tips now?”
“Please. Claiming credit early.” Lois squeezes Kara’s arm. “Dinner tonight. I’m flying home in the morning and I plan to do it still drunk. You, me, Alex. Cheap beer.”
“Deal,” Kara agrees. “But I’m picking the place.”
Lois is shaking her head. “I want a total dive, only.” She’s stepping backwards, flashing another wink. “And if you land that interview, sweetie.” She frames her face with a flat hand, almost vogueing. “My face, in the acknowledgements.”
Kara laughs, and lingers a moment longer as Lois swaggers away, notebook tucked to her chest.
Just ahead, the swarm of suits is moving. There’s a glimpse of Lena now, flanked on all sides, a few steps away from the glass-fronted building, head dipping in acknowledgement as someone murmurs something in her ear.
Benign. Lois’s word choice chimes in Kara’s ear. She doesn’t think, then, just moves.
“Ms Luthor!” she calls, hurrying forward, shouldering her way past the last few stragglers in the thinning audience. “A follow up, please. Are you hoping for a different perception of L-Corp, or yourself?”
Lena’s steps hesitate, just slightly. A half-turn of her head, just enough that their eyes catch for the second time, for half a beat. It’s an acknowledgement, though it’s completely unclear if it’s tinged with interest or irritation.
Then Kara’s line of sight is cut off.
“Thanks for coming,” Freeman says, coming into focus in front of her. “Any further media queries can be directed here.”
She drops a business card on top of Kara’s notepad, crisp black ink lines in the shape of an L against white cardstock, and a generic PR email address.
*
Kara sends the email just before four, after spending far too long crafting the subject line.
She hits send, instantly regrets at least three things, goes to her ‘Sent’ folder and obsessively re-reads it for the next hour until Nia’s movement beside her packing up her laptop breaks her focus.
*
By seven, she’s crammed in a booth opposite Alex and Lois.
The server, with a wonky name badge that reads ‘Gayle’, is gruff in a way that delights Alex. (“What? It’s camp.”) She barely looks at them as they order, and slams their beers down so contemptuously they fizz over.
Kara raises an eyebrow. “I live five minutes from a taco truck that could have changed your life,” she tells Lois, and feels her stomach rumble.
“But then we would have missed out on our delightful repartee with Gayle,” Alex observes, and her face lights up as Gayle shoots her a deathly glare. “We’re tipping her double,” she whispers to Lois.
Kara hums vaguely in agreement and lets the chatter blur around her. Her phone’s in her lap, her screen dimmed, but muscle memory has her checking it anyway. And checking again.
Eventually, when they’ve eaten and Kara has demolished everyone's leftovers, the quarter Alex had slapped on the pool table earlier gets called in and Lois, tired of waiting for Gayle to deign to return heads directly to the bar. Kara, alone, opens Instagram.
L-Corp’s official account has been updated with the rebrand. It’s a mix of soft-launch brand teasers and stills from earlier that day. There’s some drone footage of the ribbon cutting with the protesters conveniently out of frame, some shots of the new building and stylised but non-specific TV studios. Kara scrolls, and finds everything from before today has been scrubbed, then taps back up.
One post from the reception catches her eye. It’s Lena Luthor, mid-conversation with a handful of people whose backs are to the lens and out of focus. A drink is untouched on the table beside her. Her head is tilted in a way that could be listening or barely contained contempt.
Kara feels a pull to those eyes, still a fierce contrast even in the wash-out of a desaturated filter, trained on her anonymous guests, and almost wills them to fix on the camera lens.
Then her email pings, the banner across the top of her screen pulling her focus.
(She saves the Instagram post almost automatically. For the article. If she gets it.)
From: Julia Freeman
To: Kara Danvers
Subject: Teen CatCo - Feature Proposal: Real stories, starting with LCorp’s new CEO?
Kara,
Lena is available for a short meeting 3pm Thursday at HQ. Liaise with Jess (cc’d) to confirm details.
This is not an interview, and is completely off the record. But she is open to hearing your pitch.
-JF
Kara stares at the email for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiles.
She doesn’t notice Lois sliding back into the booth until her drink’s halfway to the table. “Oh, don’t tell me that’s your ‘I’m about to win a Pulitzer’ face.”
“Just a meeting,” Kara says.
“With Luthor?” Lois narrows her eyes. “Look at you. Giddy. You gonna pitch her hard-hitting journalism or just bat your eyelashes.”
Kara pockets her phone. “Neither,” she says primly. “I’m going to prepare.”
Lois’ head lolls back and she lets out a mock snore. “God, you really are related to Smallville,” she says. “But let me know when the Luthor leaks start. I want a front-row seat.”
*
Kara is led through a hushed corridor of off-white, high-gloss surfaces with vague organic wall fixtures that have a kind of curvy textureless design that makes it feel like she’s walking through the inside of a very expensive sex toy.
(That’s Alex, in her head. Alex, who'd lost it when Kara had described the rebrand at dinner, collapsed back in the booth, wheezing, managing only through tears forming at the corners of her eyes to say, “L-Core? Is that not already Lena Luthor’s line of luxury vibrators?”)
Julia Freeman walks a precise step ahead.
“Lena has ten minutes,” she says, briskly, swiping a keycard and then pausing with a hand pressed against a door. “Do not ask for more.”
Kara steps into Lena Luthor’s office and slows instinctively, like her presence might throw something off balance.
The space is unnecessarily large, with a huge expanse of floor still between her and the desk, covered with a plush rug that anyone in heels must be forced to wobble across. Everything in the room matches, from the slate toned shelves with their non-specific ornamentation, almost minimalist, to the plain couch and coffee table at the near end.
At the other end, there’s floor to ceiling glass that brings the National City skyline in. A swooshing desk is small against the skyline backdrop, and Lena Luthor, tucked behind it in a large office chair, is even smaller but unmissable. She’s a dark contrast against the neutrals of the backdrop, almost like it’s part of a curated design: dark hair, dark suit, bright red lip popping against the colourless wash. No matter where your gaze might fall, it’s as if everything pulls it back to this singular point in the room, so hard as it is to look at anything else.
There’s a neat stack of papers at Lena’s hand, a stylus in the other, and she’s otherwise working off a propped up tablet. It doesn’t seem very ergonomic, and with the glare that must be streaming in from the city directly behind, Kara can only assume Lena doesn’t intend to spend very much time in here.
Kara walks forward, closely followed by Julia.
Lena doesn’t rise.
“You’re early,” she says, not looking up.
“Habit,” Kara says. “At the bullpen, if you’re not early, you’re invisible.” She’s trying to sound bright, but it’s coming off nervous.
Lena hums as if vaguely amused, gestures towards one of the two low guest chairs on the other side of the desk. “You’re still only getting ten minutes. This is mostly for our internal media targets.”
She speaks with the weary tone of a parent explaining their superhero costume at the school fundraiser.
Kara sits. “Understood.”
Freeman hovers somewhere at the edge of the desk and doesn’t take the other chair. Her arms stay vaguely crossed, allowing enough room for her tablet to still be held like a shield.
Kara takes out her notebook, but doesn’t open it.
“So,” Lena says, finally glancing up. That red mouth is twisted into a near smile. Her eyes twinkle with something like amusement. “Teen CatCo. Do you normally lead with softballs, or are we getting straight to high-waisted jeans—yes or no?”
“Actually, I was going to ask about operating in National City’s policy environment,” Kara says, keeping her voice steady. “But I can pivot to fashion if that’s what we’re doing.”
Kara can absolutely not pivot to fashion. Not across from someone dressed in… Well. Kara has no idea what, which is the problem. But it looks very, very expensive.
Lena’s eyes flicker, just for a second. Kara chooses to believe that it’s not in a scathing glance down her own outfit. It’s something else. Interest. Recognition. Still, that edge that maybe Lena thinks that this is quietly funny.
Lena sets her stylus down. “Policy environment,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” Kara says, flipping open her notebook. “National City’s climate tax incentives. It’s interesting that L-Corp is claiming them whilst still positioning itself as a production company. So I guess I’m wondering where it relates to your new angle on storytelling.”
Lena folds her arms. Leans back.
Kara can practically hear Freeman’s spine stiffen.
“This was supposed to be lifestyle coverage,” Freeman says flatly.
“It’s just a question,” Kara says, without moving her eyes from Lena.
“You’re pitching, not interviewing.”
Lena, still leant back, lifts one hand slightly. “It’s fine.”
She’s watching Kara now, with the kind of focus that feels like sunlight through a magnifying glass.
“This isn’t the angle I’d have expected from Teen CatCo,” she says slowly.
“And are you what our readers should expect from the titles that you’ve been attached to?”
Lena’s eyes shimmer.
Freeman clears her throat. “If we’re done—”
“We’re not,” Lena interrupts, gaze still on Kara. Then, to Freeman: “It’s fine. We’re good here, Julia.”
There’s a moment where Freeman hesitates, but then there’s a slow shuffle of her making her way back across the office without comment. The door takes an agonisingly slow hiss shut behind her.
The air has changed now that Lena’s stage manager has left, and Lena fixes her with a gaze that’s as intense as ever.
“I assume Andrea Rojas is keeping a close eye on your copy,” Lena says, after a moment. There’s a bored affectation to her voice, but her fingertips twitch against the stylus where it rests on the desk.
“She’s aware that I’m meeting you.”
(Kara had briefed Andrea that morning, so to speak.
“Luthor said yes?” Andrea hadn’t looked up, but Kara had seen a fractional freeze around her shoulders.
“Not exactly. I have a pitch meeting.”
Andrea had hummed and started typing again. “Well, good. Don’t blow it.”)
“She’s always had a thing for stories that look innocent upfront,” Lena adds, with a look that’s carefully steady.
“You know my editor well then?” Kara can't resist. She’s egged on by something. The thought of Alex’s beaming, gossip-loving face, perhaps.
“Not so much,” Lena says, and a light frost seems to settle on the furniture. “It’s been a while.”
Kara chooses not to push her luck, but instead lets a little silence pass by.
It’s Lena, again, who breaks it. Kara notices something there, in how Lena sits with a silence. Or doesn’t.
“You asked me something the other day,” Lena starts, but then hesitates. “About what kind of stories should get told.”
Kara nods. “You gave me a very broad answer,” she teases.
“I don’t usually get questions like that,” Lena says. “Especially not from outlets whose audience ages out at prom.” Her tone is dry, but her fingers tap lightly against the armrest.
“Well, I think other people's storytelling has defined a whole lot of your life,” Kara says. “What if I want to help you tell your own story?”
The tapping stops. Lena’s gaze is steady.
“Then let’s see what kind of story you think I'm worth.” Lena makes a big gesture of looking at her watch, then folds her hands in her lap. “You have five more minutes.”
*
From: Julia Freeman
To: Kara Danvers
Subject: RE: Teen CatCo - Feature Proposal: Real stories, starting with LCorp’s new CEO?
Kara,
Lena proposes a limited shadowing arrangement for your feature, to include scheduled visits, travel, time on site at L-Corp, and a handful of scheduled sitdowns.
Draft terms are attached for you to share with your legal team. Jess will be in touch to handle your security clearance. Topic restrictions and proposed schedule to follow.
-JF
*
Kara reads the email so intently and so repeatedly that her screen times out, leaving her face reflected back at her, grinning giddily.
This is far more access than she had pitched, even if Freeman clearly intends to funnel it into a few tightly choreographed five-minute interactions.
Kara’s pulse ticks faster. She pictures Lena, still in that same spot behind her desk. Smiling and yet still somehow unreadable. But saying yes.