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Chapter Text

2015, Sevastapol

Yelena Luchenko breathed out, her lithe, muscular body covered in sweat as she hung upside down from the rafters of the dilapidated Soviet-era warehouse, her jet-black hair tied in a tight bun to avoid entanglement. Beneath her lay her objective: a small metal box on a table, surrounded by a hilarious number of alarms, trip-wires, and sensors. With practiced grace, she eased up on her descender until her black-clad body hovered just above the table and carefully placed four steel mirrors at the edges, reflecting the lasers neatly around the box.

She breathed in. No sounds of alarm yet, no rushing of boots or klaxons. From her belt pack, she took out a 1 kilogram lead weight and deftly swapped the metal box on the table with the weight, depressing the plate it rested on so that the sensor never registered a change. It had taken her 33 tries in practice to master this move, and she permitted herself a small smile in success.

Her partner, Sofia Azarova, gave her a thumbs up as she pulled Lena’s rope up, holding out her hand to take the metal box. Yelena handed it up, then turned her body so that Sofia could pull her the rest of the way back into the rafters.

… except nothing happened. She was suspended in mid-air, five meters above the ground, and wasn’t moving. Yelena pivoted her body around to see what had happened and saw… nothing. Sofia was gone, abandoning Yelena to be caught or killed. She swore to herself, wrapped the rope around her leg, and pulled herself back up while trying not to make enough noise to set off the auditory sensors in the room.

Once she was safely back in the rafters, she checked her exit route. The window at the top of the warehouse was still propped open, so she raced across the rafters and outside into the pitch black night. Just as she was about to round the corner, something triggered her sixth sense and she came to a stop, pulling out her Grach MP-443 service pistol. Dropping to her belly, she inched her way forward until she was able to see around the corner. Sure enough, Sofia was laying in wait, a pistol aimed in her direction at chest height. Had Yelena simply run around the corner, she would have been shot dead by her compatriot.

She and Sofia weren’t supposed to be enemies; in fact, throughout most of their Unit 29155 training, they’d been secret lovers. Comforting each other after intense training sessions, sneaking to quiet corners wherever they could, they sheltered in each others’s embrace in the harsh Russian GRU special forces academy. She recalled one of the worst sessions they’d experienced together; her instructor had tied them both naked to metal chairs in a warehouse not unlike the one they were in, in the middle of February in Moscow. Over the span of twelve hours, she’d had water thrown on her every fifteen minutes to induce severe hypothermia while she was beaten with rubber garden hoses in a simulated interrogation. Both were certain they wouldn’t have passed that lesson without each other for support, even if they’d barely spoken, and both lay in each other’s arms the following night.

“Sofia… what are you doing?” she whispered around the corner, taking care not to alert the guards that patrolled the warehouse’s perimeter far below.

A shallow laugh came in the darkness. “Yelena, you know as well as I do that only one of us graduates tonight. Liliya was quite clear about that before we set out. Whoever brings the box back graduates from the program.”

“And we agreed we would do it together! She wouldn’t dare lose the two best agents she’s ever had,” Yelena hissed. “Now let’s stop this ridiculousness and go back and confront her together. Isn’t that what we always said these last 3 years? Stronger together?”

She listened carefully and heard only a tired sigh in response.

“One of us graduates, Yelena. The other one dies. You know that’s the way. That has always been the way. And that cannot be me. I am sorry, Yelena.”

What made Yelena such a promising candidate in Unit 29155 wasn’t her marksmanship, which was excellent nonetheless. It wasn’t her stunning beauty, her mostly flawless skin or her emerald green eyes. It wasn’t even her mastery of language or her photographic memory. What made Yelena a rising star was her ability to understand people deeply and know what they were going to do, even before they knew it themselves.

Blinking away the tears that had welled in her eyes, she sat cross-legged at the corner of the building. True to her habits, Sofia rounded the corner with her arm fully extended, another Grach pistol her in hand. Yelena kicked her legs straight out, catching Sofia’s knee with one foot and hooking her calf with the other, causing her partner to stumble and drop her pistol to catch her balance.

Yelena reached up, grabbed the metal box as it fell out of Sofia’s other hand, then tucked her knees into her stomach before kicking straight up.

Sofia flew over her, over the edge of the roof, and plummeted to the broken concrete far below.

Amidst the confusion and the chaos of guards shouting, Yelena rappelled down the back of the warehouse, the metal box in hand, and disappeared into the night.

“I knew you had it in you to succeed, Yelena. Well done,” Liliya Luchenko nodded with approval, her pursed lips curling ever so slightly into a smile.

Yelena stared icily at the woman, her eyes almost unblinking. Ten heartbeats passed before she spoke, every word spat. “You made me kill my best friend. For what? Why did Sofia have to die?”

Liliya scoffed, toying with the metal box Yelena had recovered from the warehouse. “You have no friends, rybochka. You only have victims. This is your lot in life.” She stood up from behind the massive wooden desk in her Moscow office, the room decorated in dull walnut paneling and cigarette stains, its bright red rug long ago discolored to rust. “You have been honed to the perfect weapon, one which we will unleash upon the world. Now, it is time for you to graduate.” She opened the box, pouring out its contents - one single brass key with a tiny red ribbon tied to it.

“That’s it? That’s what Sofia had to die for? A key? What is it even for?”

Liliya gestured to a bureau on the side of the room before rolling up the wooden lid. On the desk sat an iron lockbox.

Yelena took the key and strode over to the desk, eyeing Liliya the entire time. She carefully inspected the box first, looking for traps and tricks. Finding none, she turned the key and opened the heavy metal lid with a loud creak. Inside lay two small stacks of documents bound together with binder clips - four or five passports of varying nations including the European Union and America, some other identification, a large bundle of currency, and a stack of airplane tickets in each pile. She lifted up the various documents to find a single small piece of newsprint at the bottom.

“What is all this?”

“Your graduation, rybochka. Today, Yelena Luchenko is dead. Today, Yelena Luchenko fades into history.”

Yelena lifted up the newsprint and gasped.

Елена Лученко, 22 года, погибла ночью в результате дорожно-транспортного происшествия недалеко от Севастополя. Ее “Лада” столкнулась с другим легковым автомобилем, которым управляла 21-летняя София Азарова. Ни у одного из водителей не было родственников, и местные власти признали это несчастным случаем.

Yelena Luchenko, age 22, died overnight in a vehicle accident near Sevastapol. Her Lada collided with another passenger car driven by Sofia Azarova, age 21. Neither driver had family, and local authorities have ruled it an unfortunate accident.

She put down the newsprint and opened up the first passport in the pile, a blue leather passport that could only be for the United States of America. Inside, she saw her face and information.

Name/Surname: LUTHOR
Given Name: LENA KIERAN
Nationality: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Date of Birth: 24 OCT 1993
Place of Birth: METROPOLIS

“Congratulations, Yelena. You have learned the final lesson, that to succeed you must be able to kill even when you love. You are now Lena Luthor. Now the real work begins,” Liliya smiled thinly before walking out of the room. “Your flight leaves in two hours. A change of clothing is in the bathroom. Take nothing else besides the contents of the box. If all goes well, if you do your job well, you will never see me again.”

The door to the office slammed shut, sounding like a grenade exploding. Out of curiosity, Lena looked at the other stack of documents and pulled out the top passport.

Name/Surname: ARIAS
Given Name: SAMANTHA RUBY
Nationality: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Date of Birth: 29 JANUARY 1994
Place of Birth: METROPOLIS

Lena struggled to hold in the sob threatening to burst from her chest. Liliya had planned to allow Sofia to live, to let them both graduate - but had told Sofia otherwise. “I’m going to kill her,” she muttered to herself, “if I ever see her again, I’m going to kill Liliya.”

Two days later, Lena listened to the dull thud of the US Customs and Border Patrol agent stamp her passport with a cheerless, “Welcome home, Miss Luthor” at the international terminal in National City. She exhaled, breathing in the warm California air, and headed to the arrivals area for a taxi.

Author’s Notes

Unit 29155 exists. It’s a known Russian assassination outfit responsible for some real world assassinations. The Russian text I translated using DeepL, so apologies for any grammatical mistakes it made.

This fic originally started out as a comedy prompt in the Supercorp 2.0 Discord. The original prompt was from Jay, "Lena trying to kill Kara? and failing over and over again? ". However, things happened and this is not comedy.

Join The Party

Enjoyed this story? Want to meet fellow readers and discuss? Join the SuperCorp 2.0 community on Discord today and enjoy the company of 900+ SuperCorp fans!

As always, please review, kudos, comment, like, follow, all that good stuff. I appreciate it.

Chapter Text

National City, 2022

“Well, Kiera, what do you have to say for yourself after this rather sloppy story pitch?” Cat Grant sat behind her desk, staring intently into the sky blue eyes of her senior business reporter as she held aloft a single sheet of paper covered in red ink.

Kara Danvers shook her head. “I need more time, Miss Grant. Some of the sources are taking longer than I thought it would to interview, and I can’t draw any rational conclusions about the deals LuthorCorp is involved in until I do. And they spook really easily.” She shuffled through some papers in her folio before withdrawing one. “Like this one here, Maximum Imports. They supposedly manufacture toothpaste but they barely sell any on the market, yet they have huge numbers of cargo containers arriving at Long Beach every day.”

Cat Grant, owner and editor in chief of CatCo Magazine sighed, nibbling on the earpiece of her glasses. “Tell me what you think is going on, proof or not.”

Kara withdrew another document, this time a grainy black and white photo. “This was taken by a private investigator in Anapa, in Krasnodar. Mikhail Davidov, a known Bratva captain, is supervising these Maximum Imports cargo containers being loaded aboard a LuthorCorp ship. And there isn’t a toothpaste factory in 500 miles of this port.”

“And what exactly do you think they’re smuggling?”

“Drugs,” Kara replied without hesitation. “The Bratva have been connected with the opium trade and own a huge number of farms in Turkmenistan. My sources say they’re shipping from the Black Sea because no one dares inspect ships originating from there due to the invasion of Ukraine.”

Cat scoffed as she put down the photo. “And you think LuthorCorp, which has always been as slippery as a greased eel and has never once slipped up on anything major enough to bring in law enforcement has gotten into the drug trade with the Bratva? That’s hard to believe, Kiera. They wouldn’t risk that much reputation damage doing business with the Russian mafia. They don’t need the money and they certainly don’t need police inspecting their cargo.”

Kara shrugged. “Sometimes people do stupid things for greed. Remember that dustup a few years ago when Oliver Queen was in bed with the Bratva in Starling City? Either way, I know there’s a story here, Miss Grant. I can practically smell it. I just need more time to gather proof.”

“One week,” Cat snapped, ignoring the beaming smile on the reporter’s face. “And I still expect you to cover whatever batshit crazy thing Lord Industries is debuting next week, too.” She almost managed to suppress her smile at the veteran reporter she’d found years ago as an assistant. Under her guidance, Kara was well on her way to a Pulitzer one day. Eager, courageous, and dogged, Cat saw much of herself in the young woman.

Ever since her arrival in National City, Kara had struggled to find her place in the world. Orphaned at 13, she’d been taken in by her adoptive family, the Danvers, and grew to love them despite her losses and trauma. When her older sister Alex left home to join the FBI, Kara was bereft without her presence. Once Alex had graduated from the FBI Academy and been assigned to the field office in National City, Kara followed suit.

While law enforcement wasn’t something she had any aptitude or interest in, investigating and telling stories was. She’d suffered through a year as Cat Grant’s assistant, managing to keep the job longer than anyone else ever had through sheer determination. After that year, Cat decided Kara might be more useful to the company as a staff writer rather than a coffee gopher, and that started her career as a reporter. Seven years after she’d set foot in CatCo’s offices with nothing except a CV and a yellow sundress, she’d earned her position on CatCo’s business beat.

And it was the business beat that, to her, showed the seedy underbelly of National City more than any other beat, even the crime beat. Ultra-rich moguls - oligarchs, really - like the CEO of LuthorCorp, Lex Luthor, or Maxwell Lord gave to National City with one hand and took with the other - and always took more than they gave.

Kara bolted out of Cat Grant’s office with a grin and newfound motivation. Her first item of business was to get some gear. Two doors down from Cat Grant’s office, she popped into the photography office. “Jimmy!” she cheered to the Art Director, James Olsen. A former superstar with the Daily Planet in Metropolis, Olsen decided to switch things up a few years back and make his mark in a different city.

“Hey Kar, what’s up?” the photographer asked, not looking up from the layout he was working on, hunched over the light table.

“I need some gear. What have we got with a really good zoom lens?”

That got Olsen to look up. “What for, Kara?” he sighed.

The blonde fidgeted, wrapping her fingers together. “Uh… to take some pictures? From really far away?” she smiled.

James ran his palm down his forehead, over his face. “Yeah, that’s what zoom lenses usually do. What are you getting yourself into now?”

“I need to take some photos down at the docks to see what’s being offloaded from a ship, that’s all! Nothing too dangerous.”

“Right. Nothing too dangerous. Kara, no offense, but you’re about as subtle and as quiet as a bull in a china shop. I tell you what, let me put this layout to bed and I’ll come with you, okay?”

Kara pursed her lips. James was one of her closest friends, and putting him in danger was the last thing she ever wanted to do. That said, taking photos down at the docks shouldn’t be took risky, especially from where she was thinking. If they walked up to the roof deck of the Customs House, a local restaurant on the 14th floor of an old clock tower, they could see most of the docks very clearly from hundreds of feet away. “Okay, deal. Half an hour?”

“You got it.”

Two hours later, they both stood atop the observation deck at Customs House, each holding a glass of iced tea from the restaurant’s bar. James had set up a monopod at their table right on the edge of the building and had his Nikon with his favorite Sigma 600mm lens carefully resting against the stone wall.

“So, what exactly are we looking for?” he asked, staring through the viewfinder at the pilot house on the LuthorCorp cargo ship, the Venture.

“Well, LuthorCorp mostly manufactures high-tech stuff, so anything that isn’t obviously tech stuff.”

A few minutes later, James clicked the shutter several times in rapid succession. “I think I’ve got something. Do you know how to read Russian? I see some containers with Russian writing on them but I’m not sure what they say.” He swung out the display screen on the camera and thumbed over to the photos he’d just taken.

Kara squinted at the picture on the tiny three-inch screen. On one of the containers, yellow Cyrillic had been spray painted: райо́н Со́лнцево. “Rajón Sólncevo,” she sounded out the lettering. “That’s… that’s a part of Moscow, but… oh shit. Jimmy, is there any chance they could see us from here?”

James shook his head. “Not at this distance. We’re easily a quarter mile away. Even if they were out with binoculars, you’d have to really work to see us since the building’s parapets are in the way.”

“Okay,” Kara sighed in relief as she realized the meaning of the words. Sólncevo was a district in Moscow that was noted for being the home of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, one of the largest criminal organizations in Russia. “I think we’ve gotten enough for one day. Let’s not tempt fate.” She motioned for the waiter to bring over the check; a few minutes later, the young man tending the area handed her the bill. She whistled. “$7 for an iced tea… must be nice,” she laughed, placing her CatCo company card on the plastic tray.

“Good thing Cat has a petty cash fund,” James chuckled as he put his camera gear away in its hard shell case.

Kara handed the bill back to the server and noted the small tattoo on the back of his hand. “That says… mir, right? For world peace? That’s a very nice tattoo. My sister has some similar to that.”

The server smiled. “I’m sure it’s very common. Thank you for the generous tip, Miss Danvers. Have a good day.”

Kara linked arms with James as they walked to the elevators. “I can’t wait to see the photos full-size. There’s no reason for crates like that to be aboard a LuthorCorp ship.”

James gave a thin smile. “Just be careful, Kar. Depending on what LuthorCorp is mixed up in, this could get ugly, you know?”

“It could, but we’ve been chasing after LuthorCorp for years now, Jimmy. We’ve never once gotten anything solid on them. This- this could be a big break!”

The photographer gave the reporter’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. “Well, I look forward to my Pulitzer for the photography, then,” he grinned.

“Авторитет, у нас может возникнуть проблема,” the young man whispered into his phone. “There were two reporters snooping around today, taking photos of the docks.”

“Tell me everything, shestyorka.”

Author’s Notes

Unit 29155 exists. It’s a known Russian assassination outfit responsible for some real world assassinations. The Russian text I translated using DeepL, so apologies for any grammatical mistakes it made.

This fic originally started out as a comedy prompt in the Supercorp 2.0 Discord. The original prompt was from Jay, “Lena trying to kill Kara? and failing over and over again?”. However, things happened and this is not comedy.

Join The Party

Enjoyed this story? Want to meet fellow readers and discuss? Join the SuperCorp 2.0 community on Discord today and enjoy the company of 900+ SuperCorp fans!

As always, please review, kudos, comment, like, follow, all that good stuff. I appreciate it.

Chapter Text

Moscow

“Misha,” Aleksandr Luchenko stood up from his enormous mahogany desk with his arms open wide, a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. “How are you?”

Mikhail Davidov, one of the Bratva’s most prominent pakhan, or mafia bosses, and a scion of Russia’s third most infamous crime family, strolled leisurely into the LuthorCorp offices. “Sasha,” he greeted, kissing the man on both cheeks. “You’re looking well, except for, you know,” the dark haired man gestured at the top of his own head, the thick, dark hair and five o’clock shadow adding to his greasy persona.

“Ah, I’m going by Lex now, Lex Luthor. Trying to be more international and reputable and all that,” Aleksandr said, gesturing at his Armani suit and goatee. “And yes, I know. I’ll probably just shave it all off and be done with it. Now, I’m sure you didn’t come all the way here from Anapa to make fun of my receding hairline. What can I do for you?”

“Lex Luthor?” Davidov mocked, sitting down in one of the overstuffed leather chairs. He took a moment to admire the view; out Lex’s windows, one could see the entirety of the Metropolis skyline, from the docks to the mountains in the East. “Please, Sasha. That sounds ridiculous. You may as well call me, I don’t know, Mike Matthews or something equally absurd.”

“That’s not too bad, Misha. If you ever set up shop full time in America, you should remember that one. Now, what brings you here?”

“Ever the businessman, ‘Lex’,” Davidov smirked. “Can’t even spare time for a proper vodka. Very well. I have a problem that you and your family might be able to help me solve. As you enjoy saying, a uniquely American problem.”

Lex took a bottle of Iordanov vodka and two shot glasses out of the freezer in his office wall as he motioned for the mafia boss to continue his tale of woe.

“There is a reporter - well, two reporters - up in National City who were sticking their noses where they didn’t belong yesterday.”

“Reporters do that, Misha. Especially in America. They’re always sticking their noses into other people’s businesses, like dogs off the leash.”

At the mention of America, Mikhail spit on the floor.

“Do you mind, Misha? I just had these cleaned,” Lex frowned.

“Fine, Lex. Anyway, these two reporters… I need them to stop sticking their nose in our business. We’re about to bring more product into America than ever before, and we can’t risk the wrong people finding out. If this goes off without a hitch, we’ll be poised to take National City and the entire West Coast away from CJNG.” Mikhail recounted what his spy had told him; two reporters from CatCo were taking photos of LuthorCorp ships at the National City docks at the moment several large crates of heroin were being offloaded.

“And what would you like me to do about this, Misha? You know we can’t officially get involved in drugs. Looks bad for the business. We’re taking a big enough risk as it is just shipping your crates around, pretending they’re toothpaste or whatever we’re calling it this week.” He took a small jar of pickles from the refrigerator and grabbed a silver serving fork, then poured two shots of the ice cold vodka. “Budem zdorovy!,” he toasted before downing a shot and chewing on the pickles, the other man mirroring his actions.

Mikhail gave Lex one of his trademark smarmy grins, accentuated by his greasy, slicked-back hair. “Ordinarily, I would just send a few boyeviks to solve the problem, break a few knees. But this time, there’s a complication. One of the reporters has a sister in the American FBI, and we don’t want anything that can be easily traced back to us. I’ve heard rumors that you and your mother have some former Spetsnaz assets that can be… brought to bear on the problem. People who can send a message quickly, perhaps discouraging any retribution or investigation?” The mob boss asked hopefully.

Lex scoffed. “Officially, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am just a businessman, after all.” He poured another shot for each of them. “That said, a special forces team of the Russian government is entirely the wrong way to handle that sort of problem, Misha.”

Davidov arched an eyebrow. “Oh? And how would you solve it, greatest criminal mastermind of our time? Za nashu druzhbu!” he toasted, drinking the shot.

Lex drank his shot and bit down on a pickle. “Even within the Spetsnaz, there were certain… special individuals. People who had unique skills, who could take care of problems without leaving any footprints. I could certainly have a discussion with one of them about your little problem.”

Davidov grinned the smile of a predator, all teeth. “Ah, Sasha - forgive me, Lex - you always were an artist. Can you make it happen?”

“For a price,” Lex grinned, pouring a third shot. “Poyekhali!”

Mikhail downed his shot. “How much?”

Lex pretended to think, tapping his fingers against his lips. “Seven million US.”

“That little? I can buy a bottle of vodka that costs more. Are you quite sure you’re all right, Lex? Usually we have to haggle for a little bit,” Davidov smirked.

Lex’s features darkened. “I have a bit of an ax to grind with the Americans. Last year, their FBI shut down one of my shell companies. Cost me nearly a billion dollars after all was said and done, so I feel like punishing them a little. Killing the sister of an FBI agent just feels like a good way to send that message.”

“Ah, revenge. A good motivation, my friend. Well, your vengeance is my good fortune. I will send the money over today.” Mikhail stood up, hugged and kissed Lex, and took his leave.

After the mobster left his office, Lex picked up his phone and dialed. A few rings later, the call connected to Moscow.

“Mother.”

“Lex.” Even through the phone line, he could hear the impatience and the judgement in his mother’s voice. He’d grown up hearing that all his life, from his very youngest days to his grooming for becoming a GRU director eventually, making it all the way to Colonel. Everything had been on track until a few years prior, when his entire family had fallen out of political favor with the administration. Rather than risk fighting the powers that be, the family had chosen retirement and building the infrastructure for organized crime families to do business around the world instead. While it might not have been as influential as heading up a GRU directorate, Lex had to admit the private sector was far more lucrative.

“I need a favor. I need an asset. Someone from 29155.”

“Do you now. Whatever for?”

Lex grinned. “A couple of American reporters in National City are getting too nosy about our little project with Davidov, and one of them is the sister of an FBI agent.”

Liliya Luchenko made a disgusted sound. “Mikhail and his drugs. So unimaginative. Very well, what’s he want?”

“Them gone. Make it look like anything that can’t be traced back to him,” he smiled, taking a sip of vodka. “He’ll pay 7 million, usual arrangement.”

“Easy enough. I’ve got just the asset in mind, dear. In fact, she’s been in country for many years now, up in National City. She runs the branch office there, though you’ve never met her, on purpose. Tell him it’ll be done in a week or two and his precious heroin will keep flowing,” Liliya scoffed. “So uncultured. If we didn’t need his money, I’d have him taken care of as well.”

“Thank you, Mother.” Lex finished his shot, turned the glass upside down, and reclined in his chair, a smile growing on his face. He knew exactly which asset Liliya would send. The targets wouldn’t stand a chance.

Author’s Notes

You likely remember a character from the TV show named Mike Matthews. That’s who I had in mind for a greasy gangster.

With this, the pieces are in place.

Join The Party

Enjoyed this story? Want to meet fellow readers and discuss? Join the SuperCorp 2.0 community on Discord today and enjoy the company of 900+ SuperCorp fans!

As always, please review, kudos, comment, like, follow, all that good stuff. I appreciate it.

Chapter Text

Lena sat at her desk, overlooking the National City skyline. She’d taken over this branch of LuthorCorp at the direction of her handler; though she’d never seen Liliya again since her graduation, she received missives from her and the other members of their organized crime family frequently, giving her instructions about what needed to happen. It wasn’t so different than her GRU days, except the money was better.

She was ideally placed for her missions. As the CEO of a branch of a major corporation, she could easily attend functions with high-ranking officials and other notable personalities while not raising any eyebrows, gathering information.

Sighing at the latest missive, she cracked open a bottle of Bushmills Black Label from her cabinet. Ever since arriving, she’d leaned into the constructed identity she was given, that of an Irish girl adopted by a German business family. She’d even managed to work in the gentlest hints of a Gaelic lilt to her speech, just enough to start conversation if needed. Lena grimaced as the shot burned its way down her throat. She’d still not managed to acquire a taste for Irish whiskey and longed for the days when she and Sofia could drink bottom shelf vodka at the Spetsnaz commissary instead. But that wouldn’t do for keeping up appearances, so she forbade any vodka from her liquor cabinet lest she be tempted to display habits she shouldn’t have.

Lena looked at the innocuous message in her inbox, a simple Fedex shipping notice. Special delivery, it said, urgent. No refrigeration needed, signature on delivery. Invoice 29155. She finished the finger of whiskey she’d poured herself just as her assistant knocked on her door. “Come in, Jess,” she called out.

“Good afternoon, Miss Luthor. This just arrived from Fedex,” the young Asian woman indicated, holding out the immediately recognizable label.

“Thank you, Jess. I may need to move some things around on my calendar. I’ll let you know.”

Once the woman departed, Lena tore open the envelope. Inside was an issue of CatCo magazine with two pages dog-eared. One was a critical article about stock buybacks, by a reporter named Kara Danvers. The other was a photo essay on National City’s homeless and at risk youth, taken by James Olsen. She looked inside the envelope and found the shipping notice.

INVOICE 29155

PURCHASE ORDER 127323-4

TWO ITEMS ACCIDENTALLY SHIPPED

LUTHORCORP NATIONAL CITY DOCKS

PLEASE CANCEL IMMEDIATELY

She straightened out the magazine and put it on the coffee table of her office, burying it with the other fashion and business periodicals littering the glass surface. Satisfied that it looked completely ordinary, she put the shipping notice in the sensitive recycling bin to be shredded, then sat back down at her desk and opened up a Tor browser and her VPN.

Thirty minutes later, she had all the information she needed about James Olsen and Kara Danvers. Where they lived, what they did for work, their commute; it was astonishingly easy to locate everything solely with public records. She smiled that her two targets were media professionals; their lives were far more public than the average citizen. Arranging accidents for both of them should pose little challenge for her.

James would be the easiest to take care of first; she’d noted that Kara had a sister in the FBI, which would mean much more careful planning to make everything look accidental and above board. She reviewed a week’s worth of CCTV footage of every aspect of the man’s commute, thanks to LuthorCorp’s contract with the city for traffic cameras - the bus he took, the time, the route it traveled, and with a thin smile, she had her plan.

Lena made one final stop in her digital travels, to a small bank in the Cayman Islands. She typed in the purchase order number and found what she’d been waiting for: a disbursement of funds to one of her offshore shell accounts for $1 million. More than enough to procure the materials she’d need for the assignment and a decent amount to pocket for her troubles.

Two days later, at a dingy, neon-lit local bar one block away from the city’s vehicle maintenance yard, Lena sat on a barstool nursing a pint of Rolling Rock as her target sat down next to her. Affecting her best SoCal accent, she turned to the maintenance worker who’d just gotten off shift.

“Hey Kelly,” the young man greeted her, clapping her on the shoulder as he snuffed out the cigarette he’d walked in with. “Not sure what you had me doing today, but I’m not gonna say no. Could definitely use the extra thousand,” he smiled.

“Well Bobbyyy,” she pretended to slur her speech just slightly, “it’s just something that my bosses wanted done, ya know?” She idly tossed the blonde locks that she’d donned for the occasion. “They don’t tell me nothing.”

“So when do I get paid?”

Lena smiled and withdrew an envelope from her purse. “Here ya go, big boy. And I got you a beer too,” she grinned, pushing a pint of Rolling Rock towards the man who gratefully accepted it.

Bobby took a hefty swig of the drink, wiped the foam from his beard, then turned back to her, looking her up and down, his eyes trailing across her more prominent features. “Thanks, Kelly. You’re a real life saver. Say… uh, you wouldn’t maybe want to get a bite to eat someplace, uh, sometime, you know?”

“We could do that,” Lena started to trace a small line down the man’s muscular forearm, noting the grease stains on his wrist and hand, “or if you want, maybe we could go back to my place and have another drink there?” She ducked her chin, offering a soft smile.

“Really?” he asked, wide-eyed. At her nod, he chugged the rest of the beer and stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls. “Sure! I mean, yeah, that sounds nice.”

A block later, the two walked arm into arm through a nondescript service alley near the bar. The streets around municipal buildings in National City were ironically poorly lit; what residential buildings were nearby tended to be low income and thus not a priority for the city to maintain well. Bobby stumbled over the darkened curb.

“Hey… Kelly, I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, but…” he slurred, then clutched his stomach. “I’m not feeling so well. I think I… I think I wanna just head home, ok?” he managed.

“Of course, Bobby. Why don’t you just sit down for a moment and rest, all right?” she cooed, easing the man down onto the grimy sidewalk.

“Yeah… that sounds good. M’tired. Long day,” he smiled, then giggled for no reason. “Can’t believe…” his breathing became more labored and inconsistent, “paid me a G just… just to… just to cut a couple of…”

Lena watched carefully as the man’s body went into shock, seized up, and expired. The poison she’d administered into his beer was a GRU speciality, a combination of nicotine and a difficult to trace nerve agent that together mimicked a natural heart attack almost perfectly. Even more important, the drug metabolized quickly in the presence of alcohol, leaving little for a medical examiner to find except the nicotine and blood alcohol. Ordinarily in the field, she’d have to synthesize parts of it, a substantial risk for even trained biochemists. Thankfully, the labs at LuthorCorp made the work easy and safe for her, a blessed convenience compared to her normal operations.

She rifled through the man’s pockets, removing the envelope she’d given him and taking the cash from his wallet as well. For good measure, she lifted his credit cards which she’d melt down later, leaving just his identification and other pocket lint. He’d be found a few days later behind the dumpster, just another nameless victim of National City’s meaner streets.

Like clockwork, James Olsen took the #56 bus from Coal Harbor - a moderately affluent suburb of National City - into Downtown Crossing at 7:38 AM every weekday, rain or shine. He looked out the window, seeing the National City harborfront in the distance as the sun rose over the skyline, and shot a few frames on his ever-present Nikon.

Just as the bus reached the middle of the bridge, it came to a halt and the driver tabbed the intercom. “Uh, sorry folks, looks like there’s some construction ahead in the bus lane. We might be here for a few minutes… no, wait, the police ahead are waving us forward. Never mind, looks like we’ll be on time after all,” the man announced jovially.

As the bus merged out of the bus lane into regular traffic, a dump truck that had just pulled out of the work zone found itself without working brakes. The driver panicked, sending the massive steel truck careening into the side of the bus. Partially crushed like someone’s hand squeezing a beer can from the sides, the #56 bus hit the guardrail of the bridge and slid along it, sparks flying behind it.

Until it reached the construction zone, where the guardrail had been taken down to fix the road surface.

The bus and the truck careened off the bridge, plummeting hundreds of feet into the waters of the National River below.

“Kara.” Cat snapped across the bullpen at CatCo half an hour later. The reporter came trotting across the office and came to a screeching halt in front of the dizzying array of screens Cat kept on her walls, tuned to every major news channel.

“Is that-” Kara started, looking at the TV closest to Cat with her mouth agape.

“I’m afraid so. James was on the #56,” Cat sighed, turning to look at the TV screen to give the reporter the privacy she needed to process the news. Police helicopters and news drones hovered around the Coal Harbor bridge as the crushed remains of the bus and dump truck were dredged up by crane from the water below.

“What… what happened…” Kara muttered before grabbing one of the remotes off Cat’s desk and turning the volume up.

“Investigators have indicated based on reports from the Department of Transportation and footage from CCTV cameras that one of the CalDOT trucks lost control and crashed into the bus, knocking it into where the guardrail should have been. Police and rescue crews said due to the severity of the impact and the height of the fall, they do not expect any survivors. CalDOT says they’re beginning an internal review to ascertain how to avoid such accidents in the future. For KPJT-TV, this is Leyna Nguyen. Back to you, Rick.”

Cat clicked off the TV. “Before you ask, yes, I’m fairly certain he was on it. That’s the bus he always takes, and his phone isn’t answering at all. You know James. He’ll answer his phone in the middle of the night in two rings,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I know he was special to you.” She punched a button on her phone. “Siobhan, I want an interoffice meeting in 15 minutes. We have some bad news.”

Kara sat on her couch under a throw blanket, nursing a bowl of hot cocoa and staring listlessly at a bound album of photos on her coffee table. Early on in their friendship, Jimmy had given her a copy of some of his favorite photos to enjoy. From time to time, she’d leaf through it, even the photos of them as a couple when they’d first met.

She turned her head at the sound of knocking on her door, followed by the turning of the lock.

“Hey,” her adoptive sister Alex offered quietly, carrying a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine. “I came over as soon as I could get off work.”

Kara nodded, sniffling, unable to put words together to acknowledge anything. Alex pulled out a gallon tub of chocolate ice cream, grabbed another blanket off the armrest of the couch, and handed Kara a spoon. “I’m so sorry, Kara. I know he was… well, I know you two were good friends, even after.” Her eyes darted down to the album on the table, confirming where she thought Kara’s mind might have been.

Kara blew her nose. “It’s not fair, Alex. All I ever do is lose people close to me. My family, my home, now my ex… why does this keep happening to me?” She took a large bite of ice cream, barely tasting the frozen concoction. “Do you think… could it have been intentional?”

Alex shook her head. “Everything all the authorities have found so far points to it just being… well, just being a terrible accident, a bunch of things going wrong all at once. I’m sorry, Kara. I know it would be easier in some way if there was a reason for it, if there was something to investigate,” she gently patted the blonde’s knee, “but it’s looking more and more like it was just… well, bad luck, to be honest. Why, are you working on something that might make you think that?”

She recounted the photo shoot she and Jimmy had done a few days ago down at the docks. After the retelling, Alex shook her head. “You’re lucky no one saw you, Kara. The Bratva are no petty street thugs. We’ve been trying to investigate some of their operations in Gotham, and it’s not been pretty. That said, this,” she gestured towards the open photo album, “is very decidedly not their style. They like to make big, flashy, flamboyant shows of everything, advertising it was them as a means of intimidation. This… this is just a horrible accident, and I’m so sorry.”

Kara put her ice cream down and curled up, her head resting on her sister’s shoulder. “Thank you, Alex. You’re always looking after me.”

To: Prokhorov Bank

From: LuthorCorp Logistics

Subject: Shipping Issue

Message: We apologize for the shipping issue with purchase order 127323-4. One of the two items has been canceled, and we should be able to cancel the other item in your shipment within the next two weeks due to logistics issues. Please contact your account manager for any additional questions.

Lena pressed send on the message and sat back in her chair, taking another sip of whiskey in the darkness of her office. Once the message sent, she closed the browser tab and switched to the next one, a grainy photo of Kara Danvers standing in front of an apartment building on the other side of the city.

Author’s Notes

And now we are underway. For those wondering, yes, Mr. Olsen is really and truly gone and not coming back.

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Chapter Text

Lena studied her target carefully. Commute times, restaurants she frequented, potential relationships, workplace… anywhere she could get cameras or drones, she did. The most obvious conclusion she reached after a week of near constant observation was that Kara Danvers was an exceptionally boring person. Work, home, and takeout food seemed to be all that defined her life, with no deviations in her schedule except when her sister came to visit every other day or so. Unlike her late colleague, she lived in the poorer section of town; a quick look at CatCo’s payroll (a LuthorCorp subsidiary) showed the woman made substantially less than Olsen had.

She’d make her move today. The fact that her target had nearly every meal delivered would make terminating her child’s play; she just needed her lab to finish culturing an especially vicious strain of type E clostridium botulinum, the deadly bacteria that caused botulism poisoning. By mid afternoon, the extract would be ready and all she would need to do would be to wait for Kara to order her nightly batch of potstickers from Shanghai Dumpling King and see to it that the batch was contaminated with the toxin extracted from the bacteria.

Her intercom beeped gently. “Yes?”

“Miss Luthor, I have an unscheduled guest here to see you, a Miss Kara Danvers from CatCo Magazine?” her assistant Jess said.

Lena quickly closed all the tabs on her browser, wondering what in the world her target was doing at her offices. There would be no reason for such an occurrence whatsoever; she’d been careful eliminating the Olsen man, so much so that authorities didn’t even connect the dead maintenance man with the accident. She straightened her jacket and smoothed out her pencil skirt before taking a deep breath. “Please show her in.”

Lena watched very carefully as Kara stepped into the office, the blonde looking around and taking in the vast, mostly white surroundings. She hadn’t chosen the decor; she’d just inherited it from the previous agent that her handlers had assigned to National City. As the blonde approached the oddly-shaped white desk (it always reminded Lena of an uncomfortable shoe), she stood up and extended her hand.

“Miss Danvers, it was? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Kara took Lena’s hand and shook it firmly. “Yes, that’s correct, Miss Luthor. I’m investigating a matter that might impact your company, specifically some shipments aboard one of your cargo ships, the Venture?”

Lena sat down, studying every detail of the blonde. She wore a conservative skirt and a plain white shirt, a pale pink sweater, and a brown leather purse that was entirely wrong with the whole ensemble. Slim, athletic, but her movements betrayed no indication that the blonde had any kind of self-defense training. Oddly, she seemed nervous, slightly fidgety, gripping her notebook almost as though it were a lifevest.

“I see. I must confess, I’m not especially well versed with what happens in our fleet. I’m not responsible for that part of the company - that’s headquarters. Could you be a bit more specific?”

Kara held up her notebook, leafing through the first few pages. “Yes, there were crates on the Venture from Russia that shouldn’t have been there, as it hadn’t been to any European ports in weeks.”

“There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why those crates were aboard the Venture, Miss Danvers,” Lena turned in her chair and smiled, pressing the remote on her desk to turn on the office TV. “I’m pushing LuthorCorp to be much more environmentally sustainable, and that means reusing packaging and shipping materials as much as possible. We even purchase and rehabilitate used containers from other companies - at quite a discount, I might add - so that we’re doing our part to avoid more waste.” Canned footage of all the green initiatives LuthorCorp was undertaking passed by in a bland montage as Lena spoke.

“I… see. That’s not something one expects a Luthor to say, Miss… uh, Miss Luthor.” Kara’s cheeks tinged slightly pink as she mentally scolded herself for stumbling over her words. She’d seen photos of Lena Luthor before in all the trade publications, but they did her no justice at all. Kara marveled at the woman’s flawless complexion, perfect jawline and cheekbones, and… one eye was blue and the other was green?

Lena’s voice shook Kara from her reverie. “You seem to be very invested in what LuthorCorp is doing, Miss Danvers. Who are you exactly?”

Kara adjusted her glasses out of habit. “Um, I’m Kara Danvers. I’m with CatCo magazine.”

Lena arched an eyebrow at the woman. “That’s a publication not known for its hard-hitting journalism. More like, ‘High-waisted jeans, yes or no’. No offense to you personally, Miss Danvers.”

“None taken, Miss Luthor. I’m on the business beat, which isn’t exactly the most read part of our publication.”

“Right. Can we just speed this interview along? Just ask me what you want to ask, Miss Danvers.”

“Are you smuggling for the Russian mafia?”

“You wouldn’t be asking me if my last name was Smith.”

Kara shook her head the tiniest amount. “Ah, but it’s not.”

Lena sighed, reclining back in her chair. “To the best of my knowledge, no, Miss Danvers. I’m trying to make this company a force for good. I’m just a woman trying to make a name for herself. Can you understand that?”

Kara swallowed audibly as she watched Lena defending her name, those brilliant green eyes flashing. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have the answers you wanted. Good luck in your investigation, Miss Danvers.”

Kara stood and shook Lena’s hand, noting it was very calloused. The woman had had immaculate manicures to tend to her nails and smooth the skin, but the callouses were still quite noticeable. “Thank you. Good day, Miss Luthor.”

“Good day,” Lena nodded. Part of her mind rebelled against her assignment; Kara had a very, very firm and shapely behind that caught the brunette’s eye. She’d taken no serious lovers outside of assignments since Sofia at the academy, but she still appreciated the fairer sex. Lena thought it almost a pity that the woman would die tonight.

—-

Kara bit into her fifth potsticker of the carton, her brow wrinkled. Something tastes a little off in these,” she thought to herself, dipping them in a little extra sauce to make up for it.

Her phone beeped as she finished the last dumpling; it was Alex. “Hey sis, what’s up?”

“Oh, just checking in on my favorite reporter. How’re you doing?”

Kara smiled faintly as she recounted her day. “Did you know Lena Luthor was as beautiful as she was, Alex? I mean… she belongs in the regular section of CatCo Magazine, not the business section.”

Alex chuckled. “Don’t tell me you’re nursing another crush and trying to drown it in potstickers, Kara.”

“I totally did not eat a carton of Shanghai Dumpling King, Alex. I swear.”

“That’s because you ate two of them, Kara. You can’t fool me.”

Kara giggled. “You caught me, Miss FBI Agent.”

“But seriously, I’m glad you’re sounding better. I know it’s only been a couple of weeks, but you’re pretty amazing, you know that?”

“Thanks, Alex,” Kara sighed, tucking her feet underneath her. “It’s been tough but… I feel almost like, working on this story is a way to get some closure, you know? Jimmy would have wanted that, for his work to see the light of day no matter what. I printed his photos and they’re going to be part of the story somehow.”

“I can’t wait to read the expose. We’ve never been able to pin anything on LuthorCorp, so if you’re able to get something to stick, the FBI Director herself might give you an award,” she laughed, “anyway, get some rest. Lunch tomorrow at Noonan’s?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Kara grinned as she hung up the phone. She gathered up the empty dumpling containers on the kitchen counter; she’d put out the trash in the morning.

The next morning, Kara woke up, went to the kitchen to make her morning coffee, and screamed.

On the counter there were two rats who had snuck in overnight and had been nibbling on the remains of the dumpling cartons. Both were clearly dead. She looked at the poor creatures; whatever had killed them clearly had acted quickly. Feeling badly for them, she gave each one a gentle hug before scooping them and the Chinese containers into the trash. Afterwards, she considered the sanitary implications, took an extra long shower, then got ready for the day and headed to work.

No sooner than she’d walked into the office than Cat Grant shouted for her across the bullpen. “Kiera! Get in here!”

Kara scampered across the crowded office quickly as Cat stood with her back to the doors, staring at the TV screens. “Can you believe it? Police are saying it was accidental, but this just doesn’t happen in National City, Keira. Fifteen dead like this?”

Across the TVs, the news tickers all scrolled similar variations of headlines.

FOOD POISONING CLAIMS 15 LIVES

CONTAMINATED CHINESE FOOD HAS CITY ON EDGE

NATIONAL CITY HEALTH INSPECTOR SAYS NO CAUSE FOR PANIC

Kara grabbed a remote and clicked on the sound as she covered her mouth with her hand. “No word from authorities yet whether this was purely accidental or something else. National City’s Health Inspector has asked anyone who has consumed food from Shanghai Dumpling King in the last 24 hours to contact them immediately, and bring any remaining food in a sealed container to the NCPD.”

“I want you down there right now, Kiera. Find out what’s really going on. If there’s a food contamination crisis, I want to know. And if there’s any possibility this was intentional, I want the scoop.” Without any additional details, she shooed Kara out of her office.

Before Kara had even a moment to catch her breath, her phone started buzzing incessantly. She opened up the messages app.

ALEX: CALL ME

ALEX: CALL ME RIGHT NOW

ALEX: ARE YOU OK

Kara immediately hit the phone icon. Her sister answered even before the first ring had completed. “Kara, thank god, I was afraid you were one of the fifteen,” Alex gasped.

“I’m fine, I promise. One of the cartons last night did taste a little funny but I’m fine. Do you know what happened? Are you investigating it?” Kara asked as she walked to her office to gather up her gear.

“No, it’s still being handled at the local level. We can’t intervene unless it becomes a federal issue of some kind. Right now it looks like just a really bad case of food poisoning.”

Kara stuffed her digital recorder and notepad in her messenger bag as she talked. “I’m going to go down there and look around. This could shut down Auntie Zhang’s business, Alex! There’s got to be some other explanation.”

“I’ll come with you, if you like. Something is bothering me about this. I’m sure my director won’t mind, it’s been quiet lately.”

An hour later, Kara stood in the kitchen of Shanghai Dumpling King, the restaurant dead silent. The National City Board of Health had ordered it closed pending investigation and none of the staff were doing their morning work.

“I don’t know what happened, Miss Kara! We have never had any problems like this in all my years,” the elderly Chinese woman cried as Kara gently hugged her. “The police, they say I poisoned people! I don’t poison people! I cook for them only good food. They say we a dirty Chinese restaurant, no surprise we make people sick.”

Alex looked around the food prep area, noting that it was as clean a kitchen as could be. All the meat and perishables were stored in the walk-in refrigerator, the floors clean, and the thermometers all indicating 1 Celsius, the correct temperature to store food at. She turned to Auntie Zhang. “Did they say what it was?”

Auntie held out a sheet of paper. “They say botulism. Can you believe that? Everything here is cooked to perfection!”

Alex looked at the report, her background as a medical student brought to bear. Botulism was relatively rare; nationally, only about a thousand cases occurred in a year and more than a handful was inherently suspicious. Most cases were from people improperly canning vegetables and fruits. “All fifteen cases had pork dumplings. How many pork dumplings did you sell last night?”

Auntie pulled out her phone and looked at the point of sale data. “Easily 200 orders. They are one of our most popular, as Kara well knows,” she smiled faintly, patting the blonde on the shoulder. “And as if I would ever serve bad food to my family!”

“That’s so sweet of you to say,” Kara offered, hugging the woman again as she resumed crying.

“No, I mean it! My- my niece was one of the people… one of…” Auntie stuttered, unable to finish the sentence.

Kara looked at her in horror. “No! Not Lian! But she was fine last night! She was so happy when she dropped off my order!”

“Wait, your niece was one of the victims? And she was the delivery girl?” Alex looked up in alarm. “Why would she have eaten an order of dumplings?”

Kara sat down in a plastic chair near the dishwashing station. “Oh no. No, no, no!” she cried, holding her head in her hands. “I offered her some of mine! She said she hadn’t had time for dinner. Alex, oh my god, did I kill her?”

“What? No, Kara. Besides, yours were fine. Believe me, from what I read on that toxicology report, if you’d even eaten one of the bad ones, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Something… something doesn’t add up here. Would Lian have eaten some when she got back from delivery?”

Auntie nodded. “We served the staff snacks before closing. Everyone had some of the leftover dumplings. We do that every night to thank the workers for their hard work.”

“And Lian was the only one who got sick?”

“Yes, she… she… I can’t believe she’s gone!” Auntie cried, sitting down in a chair next to Kara.

Alex paced around the kitchen. “This just doesn’t make sense. People got sick from dumplings but botulism mostly occurs in improperly cooked and stored foods. Did any of the diners who ate in the restaurant get sick?” At the elderly woman’s wordless shake of her head, Alex frowned more. “That makes no sense at all. If it was the food, people should have gotten sick regardless of how they got the food. So only delivery customers got sick, and the one person we would want to ask about deliveries conveniently got sick too. I don’t suppose Lian? Lian had a car with a DashCam?”

Kara shook her head. “Lian rode a little electric scooter. It’s a lot easier for her to get around in traffic. I used to joke with her that it looked like a little banana, it was so bright yellow.”

“Something smells bad about this, Kara. The timing is all wrong. Botulism usually takes a full day or even several days to really take effect, not hours. We aren’t officially on the case since it looks like NCPD is calling it an accident, but there’s just some weirdness here I can’t put my finger on. I’ll ask my director if we’ve ever had a domestic terrorism case like this.”

Kara stood up to hug her sister. “Thank you, Alex. You’re the best. I’m sure there’s some other explanation - Auntie would have to close up shop permanently otherwise.”

—-

Lena sighed as she reviewed the security camera footage from Kara’s apartment building, sipping the last of a glass of merlot. Somehow, she’d screwed up, a rarity for her. The woman was still alive and apparently unharmed; the death of the delivery person indicated that somehow, the employee must have eaten the dumplings intended for Kara.

So much for subtlety, Lena thought. She’d have to go for something a bit more direct. She closed her laptop and retreated to her bedroom.

Author’s Notes

My browser history indicates one of two things: either I am a writer, or I am a serial killer, a phenomenon many writers are familiar with.

Some folks pointed out that Lena was especially cold in wiping out a busload of people in the last chapter. Here, she’s done it again. That’s the safest way to do this sort of thing, when you think about it. One death looks suspicious, but a bunch of them, less so.

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Chapter Text

Lena mulled through her options as she ran on the treadmill in the LuthorCorp company gym, sweat pouring off her body and soaking the technical fabric shirt and compression shorts she wore. As she passed kilometer 11, she considered her options.

Doesn’t go out much, except for work. The takeout route was the easiest, but I can’t try that approach with poison again. Too suspicious. Workplace shooting? It’d be effective but probably too high profile and none of her coworkers are a good enough fit to make it plausible. She’s healthy and young, so that rules out heart attack and other natural illnesses. Maybe a stroke, but that’s a stretch. Airplane accident? If she actually flew somewhere. Traffic accident? No, she takes public transit and I already used that with Olsen. Maybe someone to push her into traffic?

Lena grimaced. All the options she’d come up with so far weren’t great. She briefly glanced around at the other employees working out and caught one employee’s Netflix show on their treadmill as a masked robber attempted to steal a woman’s purse. She mulled over the possibility; the woman lived in the lower income part of the city. Muggings were common; a stabbing would be ideal, as guns were too easy to trace. She began nodding to herself as she finished her 14 kilometers and started her cooldown. One of the other deep cover agents in her area, Veronica Sinclair, had substantial underworld connections. With the right amount of money, any one of National City’s gangs could provide the muscle needed for an easy stabbing, made to look like a robbery gone bad.

An hour later and freshly showered, she pushed the Do Not Disturb button on her desk and picked up the phone, dialing a secure number from memory. “Nika Yasno,” the familiar voice said on the other end. “Yelena Luchenko,” she answered.

“It’s a lovely day for a picnic.”

Lena remembered the passcode series perfectly, drilled into her under duress during her training. “I’m glad. I didn’t remember an umbrella.”

“What do you want, Yelena?” Veronica - Nika as she was known in Unit 29155 - snapped.

Lena sighed. Veronica had been in a cohort of agents one year ahead of her; at the GRU academy, each year’s graduates helped condition the following students, to make sure they were worthy of continuing in the program. She idly ran the pads of her fingers over her lower back, feeling the tiny, almost invisible scars from where Veronica had repeatedly touched a blade to her skin during her mock interrogation. “I need a hit. Needs to look like a robbery gone bad,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

“$25,000. Text me the details and when you need it by.”

“I will. Tonight if possible.”

“$30,000.”

“Done.” The line clicked, the call dropped. A few moments later, Lena texted the required details - Kara’s address, her work schedule, and her apartment building. A reporter’s salary didn’t go far in National City, so a robbery wouldn’t look at all out of place.

—-

Kara finished organizing her notes, looking over the different toxicology reports that she’d gathered from the National City Police Department. During her afternoon meetings, Alex had texted her a few tests she’d run quietly on some of the food at Auntie Zhang’s restaurant. All the tests came out clean; there wasn’t a hint of botulism anywhere, nor the bacteria that caused it.

She looked at the timeline she’d laid out on the whiteboard in her office. At some point the other evening, Lian had left the restaurant with fifteen orders of dumplings. Based on Alex’s assessment, those dumplings should have been perfectly fine to consume. Lian dropped them off at the various customers; Kara’s was the final order and she’d shared a couple of dumplings with Lian. The young delivery woman had made it back to the restaurant to help out and consume a light snack with her coworkers before making it to her apartment, falling ill and succumbing to the poisonous food.

The NCPD Medical Examiner confirmed that the victims had perished in exactly the order of the delivery; 90 minutes after consuming one of the tainted dumplings, neural paralysis set in. Thirty minutes after that, death followed.

Kara spun her pen around in her hand. How did dumplings go from perfectly fine to toxic in just a few minutes? She needed an expert opinion; her sister was too busy with whatever investigations the FBI was working on. There was no one at NCPD she trusted; the department already had it in for Auntie Zhang, wanting to bury the matter entirely and just blame the Chinese immigrant’s food and be done with it. Something tickled her mind and she dug through the other folder she’d started on LuthorCorp.

Lena Luthor, graduated magna cum laude from The Metropolis Institute of Technology, dual degrees in biochemistry and engineering with a minor in business administration for undergraduate, electrical engineering for her master’s, and held a doctorate in applied mathematics from the same university. Biochemistry, Kara thought. She might be able to help. Kara packed up her notebooks and headed out to catch the bus.

“Excuse me! Wait! You can’t just go in there!” Jessica Lee shouted as she chased after Kara, who managed to elude her. Kara opened the double doors to Lena’s office, taking the young executive by surprise.

“I’m sorry, Miss Luthor,” Jess glared at Kara. “She was just too fast.”

Lena laughed. “It’s all right, Jess. I was just finishing up my lunch. Now, Miss Danvers, what can I do for you?” She appraised the blonde carefully, looking for any signs or hints of muscle paralysis, facial asymmetry - anything that would indicate the poison had reached her at all. Finding none, Lena mentally concluded that somehow she must have screwed up badly.

“Miss Luthor, I’m sorry for barging in-”

“Please, call me Lena,” she smiled.

“Uh, okay. Lena - I’m sorry for barging in. I just needed to talk to someone about this, and I’d read you had extensive knowledge of a bunch of scientific fields,” Kara rushed her words out as she dug a notebook out of her bag.

Lena canted her head. “To what specifically are you referring?”

“Yesterday, fifteen people in National City died under mysterious circumstances, involving a relatively rare toxin, botulism.”

“I see. I’m afraid toxicology was never one of my specialties, Miss Danvers.” She gestured for the blonde to take a seat across from her at the desk.

Kara smiled in return. “If I have to call you Lena, you have to call me Kara.”

“Very well, Kara,” Lena slightly overemphasized, “I’m afraid it’s been years since I took organic chemistry and the associated courses.” In fact, her handlers had ensured expertly forged documents for everything about Lena Luthor’s life, though she certainly had the academic knowledge behind her purported credentials - more than enough to hold solid conversations with other subject matter experts.

“Well, it’s not the chemistry specifically, Lena. It’s- I just need someone to bounce some ideas off of, if that’s okay?” At the brunette’s nod, Kara opened up her notebooks and walked through her discoveries and the timeline of events.

Lena nodded along, following Kara’s narrative even though her mind was racing. This reporter was getting uncomfortably close to the truth; had the delivery girl not also died, there might have been enough evidence to eventually connect all the events back to her. Her right hand twitched ever so slightly as she mentally inventoried the various weapons she had concealed in her desk.

“So that’s where I’m stuck. How did fifteen orders of dumplings go from perfectly fine to lethal in less than half an hour? There’s no way any bacteria multiplies that quickly, especially after being cooked properly?” Kara huffed, tossing her bangs with a breath.

“Is it possible that the toxin was misdiagnosed? There are a number of different toxins that can all cause neurological paralysis and damage,” Lena asked, wracking her brain for alternatives to throw the reporter off the scent.

“No, according to both NCPD and the FBI, it’s definitely botulinum toxin,” Kara replied, missing Lena’s sudden glance at the mention of the federal agency.

Lena tapped her index finger on her lips, catching Kara’s eye. She subconsciously licked her own lips as she watched Lena’s finger press gently against those plump, full, vibrant lips. She’d come out shortly after Alex had in their late teenage years, and to the extent that she had a type, Lena was it. Smart, beautiful, well-spoken, clever… Kara drank in the woman’s presence.

“Have you ruled out the delivery girl? Is it possible she somehow contaminated them, accidentally perhaps?”

Kara sighed. “There’s no way to tell because she was one of the victims, unfortunately. What I don’t get is… well, botulism usually takes a really, really long time to set in. Hours, sometimes days depending on the concentration of the bacteria itself. These people all fell victim to it as though they had consumed a massive amount of the poison, more than enough that someone would have noticed.”

“Well, that depends, though. Clostridium botulinium has multiple different strains and not all of them produce tastes or smells that would be obvious as spoiled food,” Lena added.

The two women traded places; Kara tapped on her lips with her fingers as Lena watched, mesmerized by the blonde. Just as Lena felt herself about to lick her own lips, she cleared her throat to recenter herself. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Is it possible for the botulism toxin to occur without the bacteria?”

Lena shifted subtly, trying to mask her discomfort at the line of questioning that was hitting ever closer to home. “Of course. That’s how therapeutics like Botox are made. It’s a diluted botulinum toxin injected directly into your face.”

Kara made a gagging expression at the revelation before giggling. “Seriously, who thinks that’s a good idea anyway? Here’s this POISON so let’s shove it into our faces.” She paused for a moment. “How hard is it to extract the poison? Does it require anything special?”

“Honestly, a high school student could do it. You’d create a culture of the bacteria, wash it with an acid, buffer it, then use a protease inhibitor and then another acid to precipitate it out. There’s absolutely nothing special about the process and as long as you’re wearing gloves and maybe a face shield, you could even do it at home,” Lena recited the process she used in the labs, common knowledge available online. Because the bacteria that created botulinum toxin was present everywhere in daily life, cultivating it was fairly straightforward- another advantage of it as a poison as it left no paper trail.

“Huh,” Kara mused. “So it’s possible the food wasn’t spoiled, but that someone - literally anyone with a high school education - could have intentionally poisoned it?”

Lena relaxed internally, seeing the direction the conversation was going. “Well, yes. That’s entirely possible.”

“The more I learn about this, the more I think this was intentional, an intentional poisoning,” Kara muttered, her brow furrowed as she looked over her new notes.

Lena crossed her legs. “How so?”

Kara held up the NCPD reports, shaking them vigorously. “Look how quickly the NCPD closed the case on it, Lena. They were so quick to judge that Shanghai Dumpling King just made bad food, so quick to point the finger at the minority instead of doing their due diligence. This could have been done by a competitor, or, or, it might even be a hate crime. Because you know everyone’s calling for the restaurant to be closed, and look where it is. It’s right near Westwood Highlands, the really nice part of town. I’d bet you… something… that the neighbors have been trying to get rid of the restaurant and gentrify it, Lena. I’d bet that there’s some other hidden motivation we can’t see yet, but I’m going to find it and help keep my friend’s restaurant open.”

“While I can’t say for certain, your ideas certainly aren’t unreasonable, Kara. I think you might be onto something,” Lena agreed as she turned her attention briefly to her laptop. “Unfortunately, I have another meeting coming up-”

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to talk your ear off! I- yeah, I’m really sorry,” Kara scrambled to pack up her notes into her messenger bag. “Let me repay you sometime for all your help. Maybe we could go out for a drink or something? I don’t make quite the salary you do, I’m sure, but the least I can do is buy you a beer.”

Lena stood up to usher Kara out. “Make it a syrah and you’ve got a date,” she smiled as she walked Kara to the door.

“A d-date? I, uh, um, sure! Yes! I’d love a wine. A date! A date with wine! Please stop me from talking,” she pleaded with wide eyes as Lena chuckled.

“Good day, Kara. Talk to Jess on the way out and let’s set something up, all right?”

As the sunny blonde walked out, Lena reclined in her chair, exhaling from the close call. Fortunately, Kara hadn’t shown any suspicion or even interest in Lena’s possible involvement in the case, and had practically misled herself with no effort from Lena about where to probe next.

—-

“Hey lady, gimme five dollars,” the drunk slurred as he stumbled out of the dark alley towards Kara. Disheveled, the large man still cut an imposing figure, his meaty hands holding a hunting knife in front of him.

Kara’s eyes widened as she saw the lumbering brute stagger towards him, raising her own hands to ward him off. “Leave me alone!” she shouted, looking around the nearly empty street two blocks from the CatCo offices and wondering where everyone was. At two in the afternoon, surely there must still be some people around, yet as far as she could see, the streets of National City were empty of their usual hustle and bustle.

“I said, gimme five bucks, you stuck up bitch!” the man roared as he closed the distance, swinging the knife back and forth.

Kara took a deep breath and calmed herself. She watched the man’s actions, feeling the rhythm of his knife swings as he approached. Time felt like it had slowed to a crawl as his arm lazily swung the blade at her throat. Just as he began another swing, she lifted both her arms up, catching the soft flesh of his forearm on the bony point of her elbow.

The knife slipped from his grasp, bit into the sleeve of her jacket, and then clattered to the ground as she kicked her heel into the side of his knee with a muffled wet sound, the joint shattering. As the man fell to his knees, Kara clapped her hands over his ears, the concussive blow knocking him unconscious.

As she ran back to CatCo, she speed-dialed Alex, detailing what had just happened and missing the tiny drone overhead that flew away.

—-

“Miserable failure. That was the best you have, Nika? That was shameful,” Lena scolded, turning off the footage from a nearby CCTV camera as Nika’s drone flew back to her.

“I didn’t think it would take more than a simple boyevik to kill an unarmed single woman,” Veronica spat, snarling at the camera in their Zoom call. “But rest assured I will not miss again. This time I will leave nothing to chance.”

“Honor demands no less, sestra.”

“For your own safety, do not be anywhere near her apartment, Yelena.” The call disconnected and Lena turned off her phone, swearing silently to herself as she stared out the floor to ceiling windows of her office. How could one woman be so much trouble and yet so appealing?

Author’s Notes

A wine date sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

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Chapter Text

“And you’re sure you’re okay?” Alex asked, tousling her little sister’s hair as they slowly walked back from the little cafe a block away from Kara’s apartment. Unlike earlier in the day when the streets were quiet and the mugger had accosted Kara, the streets were lively with National City’s citizens out for the evening.

“I’m fine, Alex, I promise,” Kara smiled, sipping her bubble tea as they strolled down the street, the LED street lamps turning on with the sunset. “It’s so funny that the guy was where I left him when I ran to find you. I guess I made life easier for the NCPD today, huh?”

Alex smiled thinly, the movement not reaching her eyes. The NCPD had indeed found Kara’s assailant, still unconscious on the ground. She didn’t mention to her sister that he was in National City General in a coma, his eardrums totally ruptured and with a severe concussion. “Yeah, definitely easier. Well… here we are,” she said, standing in front of the four story brick building on Hope Street. “Do you want me to come up?”

Kara opened her arms wide to hug her sister. “Alex, I really am fine. Thank you for always looking out for me,” she grinned, hugging her sister tightly. “I’m just going to go to bed and pretend this whole crazy day never happened.” Idly, she glanced down at her jacket sleeve, the fabric still ripped where the assailant’s knife had caught it. “And then tomorrow I guess I’ll go down to the mall and hope they have this on sale again.”

“All right, Kar. Sleep well, and call me if you need anything, anything at all, okay? Love you,” Alex replied, releasing the hug. She idled on the corner as her sister entered the building; once she was safely inside, Alex turned to head back to her own apartment.

That’s when the windows of Kara’s apartment - and half the floor - exploded in a massive fireball.

“KARA!” Alex screamed as she ran back towards the building, speed dialing on her phone. “This is Agent Danvers, requesting immediate backup and medical services, 16 Hope Street at the intersection of Hope and Argo. Explosion and fire in progress!” she managed to get out as she ran.

Up the three flights of stairs Alex charged until she opened the fire stairwell’s door to the fourth floor and saw… just wreckage. Most of the wall to Kara’s apartment was just shattered brick piled up in the hallway; the door to her loft lay askew across the hall, the iron bent in spots. Alex peered inside, fearing the worst. Small fires burned around the apartment, but for the most part, it was just a ruin. The windows had been blown out, and nearly everything was shattered.

“Kara… Kara! Where are you?” she cried, looking around frantically. A loud creak spun her around and she saw a pair of feet sticking out from behind the ruined door panel. Alex scrambled over and heaved the iron door away, revealing her sister laying in the rubble. She leaned down and felt both a pulse and gentle puffs of air, thanking the heavens Kara was still alive. She inspected her sister’s unconscious form, noting that her skin was blackened and her clothes torn and even melted.

Alex’s phone chimed with a new text message from her boss, Hank Henshaw.

EOD ON THE WAY

MED TEAM 2 ON THE WAY

SECURE THE SCENE

NCPD ON THE WAY

She exhaled, her shoulders slumping. The cavalry was on the way.

Kara’s head rang with the echoes of the explosion. She tentatively opened her eyes, finding herself greeted by bright lamps and the beeping of equipment. “hhhh,” she managed, her mouth parched. “Hello? Where am I?”

She slowly sat up. She knew she was in a hospital bed of some kind and all her clothes were gone. Instead, she found herself in a green surgical robe of some kind.

“Miss Danvers, please don’t try to sit up too quickly. You had quite the concussion from the incident,” a young blonde nurse urged as she eased Kara back down onto the pillows.

Kara shook her head as her vision cleared. “Where am I again?”

A familiar voice immediately quashed her nerves. “I brought you to our medical field office,” Alex replied. “It was closer and faster to get you here than NC General.”

Kara looked down at her body, seeing all the electrode leads from the diagnostic equipment on her. “How… how bad is it? How bad did I get hurt?”

“As far as we can tell, it looks like mostly head injury plus the usual scuffs and scrapes. You got super lucky, sis.” Alex grabbed a tablet from the bedside table. “We got this from the security camera feeds.”

She pressed play, showing Kara opening the door to her loft and a massive fireball propelling the entire door backwards, sweeping Kara into the opposite wall before the door fell on her. “Had your loft’s door been made of anything except iron, I don’t know that we’d be talking right now. It managed to shield you from most of the blast.”

Kara shuffled herself back to a sitting position on the bed. “How- what happened? I didn’t leave the oven on or anything.”

“I’m not sure. It looks at first glance like a gas leak and that’s what NCPD will probably come up with, but…” Alex trailed off, looking around the room as she took a seat on the edge of Kara’s bed. “You’re not that unlucky. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out something’s up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kara, think about it. Your colleague dies in a vehicle accident one day and then a short while later a bunch of people on the same delivery run as you all get sick and die of food poisoning. Then a guy accosts you with a knife and tries to stab you. And now your apartment explodes. That’s a hell of a lot of coincidences, and it’ll fool NCPD but it’s just too much in too short a time,” Alex relayed the thoughts that had been running through her mind about her sister.

“Was there anything else on the security feed?” Kara asked, looking down at the tablet.

Alex nodded. “Swipe back about two hours on the slider.”

Kara looked at the feed, seeing two of the building’s maintenance men working in the corridor. Nothing overly suspicious happened; they appeared to be cleaning out the heating ducts in the hallway. She looked up at her sister. “What am I missing?”

“Exactly. There’s a big chunk of time that is missing. About 20 minutes. The building superintendent said that there was a short power outage in the office, and that’s why the security camera feed is missing. These were the last two people we caught on the feed.”

Kara pinched her fingers apart, looking at the two men in careful detail. Her breath caught as she expanded the picture to as large as it would go. “Is there any way to make this more clear?” she asked as she handed the tablet to Alex.

“Maybe,” Alex muttered, taking out her phone and texting her office. The tablet screen flashed and a small status box blinked on it. AI UPSCALING COMPLETE, the little green light indicated. “What is it? What do you see?”

Kara pointed at the back oof one of the handymen’s hands. “I recognize that tattoo.”

Alex squinted at it. “MNP? What does that mean?” She wracked her brain trying to remember what organization that could be.

“It’s not English. мир is Russian for mir. It means peace. A week ago, I was at a restaurant with Jimmy investigating potential Russian mafia connections. We were taking photos of unusual cargo off a LuthorCorp cargo ship, the Vantage, and the waiter at the restaurant had the exact same tattoo. I remember asking him about it, since it means peace and you have that dove tattooed on your shoulder.” Kara sighed aloud. “It means that LuthorCorp is somehow involved with these ‘accidents’… and maybe they actually did kill Jimmy.”

Alex stood up. “I’ll get facial recognition on these two going right away. If the Russian mafia is involved, this just became a matter for the Bureau. Meanwhile, you should rest. You took quite a hit today.”

“Fine,” Kara sighed. “Please tell me at least this field hospital has a good cable package?” she muttered as she grabbed the remote and clicked on the news.

“The best, sis,” Alex smiled as she exited the room.

Kara chuckled as the door closed and her attention fell to the flat screen TV on the wall. “*Fire department officials are still investigating the cause of the explosion on Hope and Argo streets today after what appears to have been a gas leak destroyed the top floor of a residential building. According to National City Police, there doesn’t appear to be any concern about arson or other suspicious causes. Authorities are still unsure if anyone was harmed in the blast. In sports news…”

She clicked off the TV, mulling over her sister’s words. The number of coincidences was odd until she’d seen the tattoo. The tattoo - and the connection to the Russian mafia - was too much of a coincidence.

“It is done,” Nika’s voice snapped over the phone. “No witnesses, no survivors, and no proof. Gas leak.”

“It took you long enough. Very well. Thank you, Nika.” Lena tapped the red button on her phone, disconnecting the call. She exhaled, finally allowing herself to relax, and finished off the red wine she’d poured for herself. It’d been a shame to have needed to kill Kara, but orders were orders. She’d send the coded message in the morning back to her handlers.

Lena shed her silk robe and crawled into bed, luxuriating in the feeling of the satin sheets against her skin. Ever since this assignment had begun, she’d been sleeping poorly. Perhaps now she’d be able to get a good night’s sleep.

“Alexi Ivankov,” Alex said over the Facetime call. “That’s the name of the one guy we were able to ID. Just like you suspected, Kara, according to Interpol records - he’s Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Russian mob.”

Kara paced around the little hospital room. “And is he employed by LuthorCorp or something?”

“Not that we can tell. We’ve had him tied to a local gambling establishment and an illegal fight club headed up by a woman named Veronica Sinclair. He’s part of her muscle.”

“Can we get into that club somehow? Maybe I could sneak in, see what I could find out?”

Alex dragged her palm down her face. “Kara… you just got almost blown up by the Russian mob, and you want to go interview them? That’s… not the best idea you’ve had. Besides, you can’t just walk into those kinds of places. They’re usually invitation-only, for high rollers and big names. The only people they’d be less happy to see than a reporter would be the cops.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll… just think about other ways to figure this out.”

She mulled over who she might know that would be able to get an invitation to something like a high roller underground fight club after she’d hung up with her sister. Slowly, a broad smile spread over her face. She knew exactly who to ask the next day.

“I’m worried.”

“About?”

“All these attacks on her. It’s going to break the block.” She watched the video feed of Kara pacing around the hospital room.

“It’s holding on just fine. Our diagnostic equipment shows no issues at all.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“We just need to keep her out of danger. Keep a closer eye on her, okay? Keep the danger away from her.”

“I will.”

Henshaw clapped Alex on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work, Agent.”

Author’s Notes

I’m not sure who’s more unlucky at this point, Lena or Kara. Either way, things aren’t going well for either of them, and things are about to get a lot more complicated. Buckle up.

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Chapter Text

“Not again,” Jess Lee sighed as the blonde woman raced past her desk and through the doors to Lena’s office. “Excuse me, you can’t go in there! Stop!”

Lena was in the middle of typing up her report as she looked up in shock to see Kara Danvers standing in front of her desk, holding a paper bag of what smelled like doughnuts. Her mouth opened and closed several times before she finally managed to get her shock under control. Veronica had assured her the job was done, yet here was clear evidence in the flesh that she had failed yet again.

“I swear I just blinked and she got right past me,” Jess huffed, glaring at the blonde.

Lena looked over the reporter, who barged in wearing a brown jacket, blue shirt, and black slacks.

“Lena, I’m so sorry, this is my fault. I just need to talk to you,” Kara urged, clutching her hands together.

“Jess, will you make a note downstairs that Kara Danvers is to be shown in right away whenever possible?”

“Yes, Ms. Luthor,” the assistant grumbled as she withdrew from the office, closing the double doors behind her.

“Really?” Kara asked, a hint of a smile crossing her features. “Thank you.”

“Now,” Lena said, sitting down to hide any possible indications of nervousness, “how can I help?”

“I… I think I might have gotten involved in something shady,” Kara said, wringing her hands tighter.

“You did?”

“Do you know of a woman named Veronica Sinclair? She caters to people in your, um, your circles.” Kara asked, blushing slightly as she realized the implications of just how different she and Lena were.

“Tight dresses, tattoos like Lisbeth Salander? Yeah, I know Roulette. We went to boarding school together. I never liked her,” Lena snarked, reciting the cover story from memory that she’d had drilled into her as she struggled to eliminate the quaver in her voice.

“I need to find her. Her and one of the men that attends their fight clubs.”

Lena sighed. “Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Her little fight clubs stay mobile.” This conversation had suddenly taken an even more uncomfortable turn. If Kara had managed to sniff out one of Nika’s assassins, it would be quick work for her to decipher that Lena had ordered the hit… a hit that yet again had apparently not gone well.

“But do you know where she’s holding the next fight? I wouldn’t ask if I had any other option,” Kara begged, her eyes wide.

“I’m a Luthor, of course I’m invited to her little pop-up. Not that I’m interested in her type of entertainment.” Lena leaned over and opened the drawer to her desk. She closed her eyes for a moment, her jaw clenched.

The mission. Following orders. Doing what was asked of her no matter what. Even if it would compromise her position, her cover, she had to complete the mission at any cost. Her handler would be able to make any consequences go away; the deputy chief of police her handlers had planted in National City had already managed to derail any serious investigations into the attempted killing of Kara. This would just be chalked up as gang violence, and Kara’s body would be dumped in an alley later in the day.

She pulled out a Glock 19 she’d kept in the desk drawer, the compact firearm always loaded and ready to go. It was her favorite, the grip fitting in her palms perfectly, snug with no space between the firearm and her fingers. 10 millimeter hollowpoint bullets to cause maximum trauma and not hit anyone except the intended target. She’d have to get the rug cleaned, but at least there wouldn’t be any danger of hitting Jess or anyone else.

Lena took one last breath as sadness tugged at her heart, her chest tight. This woman was exactly her type, and she’d even considered delaying just to take her out on that wine date. Beautiful, athletic, and seemingly pure as the wind-driven snow - Lena lamented her task. Forcing her feelings back inside the lockbox of her heart, she exhaled.

In one smooth, practiced movement that was practically second nature, Lena stood up, took a modified Weaver stance, aimed squarely at Kara’s face, and pulled the trigger.

As though time had become mired in molasses, Lena swore she could see the bullet fly out of the barrel past the muzzle flash and the smoke, sail across the office, and hit Kara between the eyes as her face slowly changed to one of shock. The black glasses she wore shattered as the bullet struck them squarely in the middle, flying from her head.

And the bullet… just flattened and fell to the floor.

“Wh-what?” Lena gasped, pulling the trigger again.

The second slug pancaked and fell to the floor with the same dull thud.

“L-Lena! You- you shot me! What- WHY DID YOU SHOOT ME?” Kara screamed, not realizing she’d incurred no injury at all.

“What are you? What the fuck are you?” Lena shouted in reply, discharging three more rounds at Kara’s face before aiming lower and emptying the remaining six rounds into Kara’s chest. Holes tore open in the woman’s blouse, but no blood came forth and the sound of lead slugs falling to the floor was the only sound in the room. The woman hadn’t even been moved by the impacts.

Kara stepped forward and grabbed the gun out of Lena’s hands, snapping it cleanly in two. “Why would you do that to me? I thought you were my friend!” She gave Lena a hard shove, sending the woman flying over her desk and into her chair before falling to the floor unconscious.

Kara looked down at her torn shirt, then fell to her knees as memories flooded over her, drowning her consciousness.

Across the city, Director Henshaw’s monitoring equipment all flared red, alarms ringing across their systems. The monitoring systems built into Kara’s glasses had shattered with the rest of the frames.

“Oh, shit.”

Zor-El pushed a final sequence of keys on the crystal console, the silver pod in front of him glowing. “Your pod’s coordinates are set for a nearby yellow star.”

“I’m not afraid, Father,” the 13-year old girl, the youngest ever inducted into Krypton’s Science Guild, affirmed as she climbed into the pod.

Since she was a young girl, Kara had always looked to the stars for answers, often standing on the white crystal balcony in her family’s spire. She knew, as did many of the noble houses, that Krypton was dying. They’d used technology and science to mine the core of their world, providing energy to fuel their civilization as Rao, the red star they orbited, slowly diminished.

Her mother Alura stroked Kara’s forehead as she lay back in the pod. “The trip is long, but you’ll sleep most of the way, and we’ll be with you in your dreams. Because of the Earth’s yellow sun, you’ll have great powers on this planet. You will do extraordinary things,” she choked, a tear running down her cheek.

An explosion sounded in the distance as the room shook. “Kara, you have to go now. I love you.” He keyed in the final sequence as Alura hugged her daughter, then the pod door sealed over her. In moments, a cool blue gas flooded the pod as Kara felt the force of the pod racing down the launch tube… and then she remembered nothing else.

“Hank, good to see you,” Jeremiah Danvers said, stretching out his hand to shake with the government agent as the agent’s aide parked a black Bronco in the Midvale home’s driveway. “What brings you out this way?”

“Let’s go inside and talk.”

Once inside the kitchen, Henshaw pulled out a small device and activated it, a high-pitched whine briefly noticeable before it faded away. “There, now we can talk freely. Jeremiah, I know you’ve done some contracting work with the department before, but we need your help with a more… pressing matter.” The dark-skinned agent pulled out a manila folder.

Jeremiah took a sip from his coffee mug as he leafed through the photos. The first few shots showed some kind of craft, looking almost like a metallic fish. The next few shots showed federal agents opening the craft to find a young girl dressed in all-white robes sitting in the pilot’s seat, unconscious. “What is this? A new kind of extraterrestrial?”

Henshaw shook his head. “We’ve seen this kind once before - an infant that landed near Smallville, Kansas. This one’s much more mature, probably our equivalent of a teenager.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“They can be. Exposed to the radiation in this solar system, they become… well, the best word is, they become gods. Immortal. Invincible. Our scans show that they’ll have powers beyond our reckoning - the ability to fly, to shoot beams of energy from their bodies, to see through things with x-ray vision,” he cataloged. “And those are what we speculate based on their biology. There might be more.”

Jeremiah nearly spit out his coffee. “My god, that’s terrifying. Did you put it down?”

Henshaw sighed. “We can’t. We haven’t found any way of causing them serious physical harm; our scientists theorize their bodies change the moment they enter our solar system, something to do with dark matter. But what we did find is that they’re highly resistant but not impervious to some mind control technology we were able to salvage from a different species. With the infant it was easy - we just kept the baby under watch, and as he matured, we used the neural suppression technology to put artificial blocks in his mind. He’s so conditioned, he’ll probably never break free. For this one, because she is already mature, we had to do substantially more work. As long as she isn’t exposed to serious trauma or things that would make her question her nature, she won’t know she has powers to use.”

Jeremiah looked around, double-checking that Eliza and Alex were still out at the store. “So what do you need my help with?”

“This girl is going to need a home, and I was thinking we could hide her here. She’ll be thoroughly subdued, no chance of her powers manifesting under normal conditions. Just give her a nice, quiet adolescence and we’ll take it from there once she’s of age. In return, we’ll obviously help pay for everything, Eliza will get a prominent posting in a national laboratory of her choice the moment she finishes her doctorate, and Alex will find that she qualifies for a full ride at any university in the country that takes federal student aid.” Henshaw handed over a clipboard with a series of forms.

“And that’s it? Just keep her hidden? What if things go wrong?”

“You’ll have one-button access to a high speed team that will evacuate you and your family at the first sign of trouble, and I’ll be making routine visits very frequently to ensure the neural suppression is holding strong.”

“All right. Deal,” Jeremiah said with a smile, signing off on the pages of forms. “Alex probably won’t be thrilled, but Eliza and I would welcome another kid in our home regardless.”

“Miss Danvers, congratulations!” Henshaw said as Alex stepped off the stage at National City University, her dual diploma in hand. She’d managed to get through the MD/PhD program in nearly record time, despite a few rough patches along the way.

“Uncle Hank! Thank you so much,” Alex replied, returning the handshake. “It’s been a long road to get here, but I finally made it - and no small thanks to you and the department helping out my family from time to time.”

Henshaw smiled as walked next to the woman, resplendent in her robes. “I have something for you that would be mutually beneficial, Alex,” he said, handing her a file folder. “A division of my agency is looking for fresh talent, and you fit the bill perfectly. Let’s take a walk.”

A few minutes later along one of the campus’ forested walkways, Alex riffled through the folder quickly. “Specialist in xenobiology… xenobiology? What in the world is that?”

Hank chuckled. “That’s the rub. It’s not of this world; specifically, we need a strong scientific mind with medical experience to study lifeforms that are not of this world.”

“Not of this… what are you saying, Uncle Hank?” She leafed through another few pages, her eyes widening. “Holy shit… is this… this is real, Uncle Hank? There really are aliens on Earth?” At his solemn nod, she kept reading. “And you want me to help you study them? I didn’t even know the FBI got involved with that sort of thing.”

“We do. There’s a subdivision of it called the Department of Extranormal Operations, or DEO. We’re tasked with dealing with all the paranormal stuff that the regular part of the Bureau finds in the normal course of operations. Once you sign off on the paperwork, I can give you more details.”

Two days later in the FBI’s Department of Extranormal Operations division, the scales fell from Alex’s eyes.

“My adopted sister is an ALIEN, and you’re just telling me this now?” she shouted at Henshaw. “What kind of alien is she? Is she dangerous? Was our family in danger the whole time I was growing up?”

“Of course not, Alex. We were watching the whole time, making sure you were safe. Kara herself doesn’t know she’s an alien.” He went on to explain the neural suppression techniques used to essentially implant the Kryptonian with false memories and mask her ability to access any of her powers.

“So… what, you want me to study her?”

“No, you’ll have your hands full with other alien data in your work here at the Bureau. However, one part of your assignment from now on will be taking over the surveillance role for Kara. You’ll be keeping an eye on her, ensuring that the memory blocks are all still in good working order, letting us know if anything comes up that could potentially unseat them,” Henshaw explained, handing Alex some briefing documents on how the technology worked.

As she leafed through them, she read parts aloud. “Traumatic events can break a memory block… severe cognitive dissonance… involvement in situations where her powers would be the only logical explanation. This… I knew it, Uncle Hank. I knew there was something up. Kara never, ever got sick when we were kids. She never broke a bone or sprained an ankle, never had an accident or got seriously hurt… or hurt at all, now that I think about it.”

“That’s her alien nature. As you can see from the briefing documents, she’s basically invincible. Nothing short of flinging her directly into the sun would probably cause her harm, and even then I’m not entirely sure the sun would do the job,” he sighed. “Keeping aliens like her under control and out of harm’s way is one of our most important jobs - and it keeps her safe, too.”

“Mom and Dad always told me to keep my little sister safe,” she sighed. “I guess some of that was unnecessary. Still… I don’t mind this assignment. I love her, I really do. Adopted or not, she’s the best little sister I could have asked for, so keeping an eye on her is absolutely no hardship at all.”

Memories. Overheard conversations. Recordings. Experiences. Kara’s conscious memory might have been blocked by the DEO, but her body and her subconscious had taken everything in for years and years, storing it, waiting for her to remember it. Freed of her mental shackles, the organic supercomputer that was her mind processed it all and swept away the remains of the DEO’s neural blocks as she knelt on the floor of Lena’s office.

“I remember…” she whispered, tears pooling in her eyes.

She clenched her fists, every muscle in her body becoming taut. Power flowed through her body; she felt lighter, stronger. Whole. “Liars. Every one of them is a liar. Uncle Hank. Mom. Dad. Alex.” She looked over at Lena’s unconscious form. “You,” she spat.

Kara snarled in fury at what had been done to her. She stood up, straightening her back as small items around her began to levitate and the floor began to vibrate. Kara tossed Lena’s body over her shoulder, shattered the floor-to-ceiling glass window by walking through it, and shot into the sky.

Author’s Notes

Apologies to the many folks who’d asked in the comments up to this point whether Kara had powers or not. Now you know, and I hope it was worth the wait.

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Chapter Text

“Where am I?” Lena mumbled as she awoke, her vision foggy and her head feeling as though she were underwater. Slowly, she got her bearings and looked around. This was definitely not her office, the last place she remembered being.

Ice. Ice and rock everywhere around her. She was in some kind of cave or cavern; the dim lighting made it difficult to tell. She slowly pulled herself to a seated position. The air was cold but stale, the ground freezing. Luckily she’d worn a pantsuit with a jacket to work that day; her office always tended to be a bit colder than comfortable.

Her office. Memories flooded back. She’d shot at Kara. No, she shot Kara. She’d shot her ten times and all ten shots had done nothing, not even broken the skin. In fact, she’d shot the blonde literally between the eyes, shattering her glasses but otherwise not harming the woman. In all her training, in all her years as an operative, Lena had never seen anything like that. Body armor stopped bullets of all kinds, sure, but no one had ever been shot point blank in the face without even a scratch to show for it.

“I suppose I should have changed into flats before I tried to kill Kara”, she mused to herself.

She pulled herself off the freezing ground to get a better look at… wherever this was. The walls of the cavern appeared as giant hexagonal ice crystals, almost like pillars in an ancient temple. She brushed off her maroon peacoat, noticing the edges were charred.

“I was wondering when you would wake up. I didn’t hit you that hard,” Kara’s voice echoed through the chamber. Gone was the light, cheerful, chipper blonde personality; her voice was heavy, firm, monotonal… unyielding. Lena swiveled around, looking for where the woman was.

The ground shook beneath her feet as Kara landed behind her, small crystals of ice spraying everywhere. Lena shrieked in surprise. “Kara! What- where am I? What’s going on?” She looked at the blonde who had shed the bullet-ridden clothes she was wearing, instead wearing a plain white hooded robe. A tiny raised glyph was embroidered onto the breast, looking like the letter S in a pentagon.

“What’s going on is that you tried to kill me, Lena. You tried to kill me, and instead you freed me, so I suppose I have to thank you for that. You freed me from the lies that had been heaped on me for years and years.” Kara began to slowly pace around the brunette, looking her up and down. “Not that they’ll do you any good, but don’t bother pulling out the knife I see strapped to your calf or the small handgun under your left arm. You’ll just get hurt and there isn’t a hospital for hundreds of kilometers.”

Lena struggled to maintain a calm voice. “What- what are you going to do to me?”

“That all depends on you and how truthful you are. Let’s start with the basics. Who are you?”

“My name is Lena Luthor. You know that, Kara. I’m…” she stammered, trying to decide how much of her cover to maintain. “I’m the CEO of LuthorCorp National City, I’m from Metropolis, I-”

“Liar.”

“What? No, Kara, it’s-”

Kara crossed her arms, her lips pressed together thin. “I can hear your heartbeat accelerating. I can see the blood vessels in your eyes dilating. I can smell the changes in your skin chemistry as you start to sweat. I can literally see your body’s reaction when you’re lying, no matter how good you think you are at it. Try again.”

“Kara, I- it’s me, it’s Lena.” She held her breath as the blonde reached out and tore open her shirt, buttons flying everywhere. “Wh-what are you doing?”

Kara reached into the brunette’s shirt and withdrew the tiny PSS Vul pistol nestled in a holster against her ribcage. “Let me show you what you’re dealing with,” she snapped. Holding the pistol at eye level, Kara clasped it with both hands and slowly crumpled the metal as though it were nothing more than cheap tinfoil. In seconds, the firearm was little more than a ball of blackened metal, unrecognizable. “I am done with the lies, Lena. This lovely little pistol takes about 53,700 PSI to mold into putty as I’ve just done. Do you know how much force it takes to do that to a human skull? Only about 1,700. I could crush every bone in your body below your waist and then let you try to crawl back to civilization before you died of exposure. The truth, Lena. All of it, now.”

Lena swallowed, her eyes wide at the astonishing display and the overt threat. She’d been expert at reading people at the academy, and the person in front of her was completely different than the woman in her office not long ago. “M-my name is Yelena Luchenko. I was rescued by the Russian GRU when I was four years old and grew up near Moscow.”

“And why did you try to kill me?”

“I was ordered to by my superiors. You were getting too close to discovering the connections between LuthorCorp and the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Russian Mafia. You stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, and I was ordered to kill you.” She paused, looking the blonde up and down. “You… you should have been dead four times over, but I suppose I see why all my attempts had failed.” Her eyes darted to the metal sphere on the floor.

Kara stared intently at her; Lena swore that her eyes seemed to glow blue faintly. “Did you kill Jimmy Olsen?”

Lena looked away. “Yes,” she murmured.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t tear you apart limb from limb, Lena. Why I shouldn’t pull your head off and leave your body here where no one will find it for decades. I could rip your spine out through your throat with the same effort it takes you to open a bottle of water,” Kara growled, the glow in her eyes increasing.

“I can’t.”

Kara blinked, not expecting that level of candor from the woman. The glow in her eyes dwindled.

“All I ask is whatever you do, just get it over with. I deserve at least that much,” Lena said, dropping to her knees and bowing her head. Relief that she didn’t have to hide any more let the tension bleed from her body. She chuckled to herself.

“What’s so funny?”

Lena looked up, the corners of her mouth tugging with her mirth. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking that if I have to die, at least I’m going out at the hands of a beautiful goddess. There are far, far worse ways to go.”

Kara grabbed Lena by the lapels and lifted her in the air. “I’m not going to kill you just yet, Lena. You still have to answer quite a few more questions first.”

“Where are we, exactly?” Lena asked as Kara dropped her on her feet.

Kara rolled her eyes, turning to walk away from her former friend. “Which part of YOU are going to have to answer questions implies that I will be answering your questions?”

“I can’t help it. I’m naturally curious. It’s what makes me a good spy,” she snarked as she followed the alien down one of the icy corridors.

“About 80 kilometers north of Qaanaaq. While you were unconscious, we flew around for a little while until I found a place that seemed nice and quiet. This place reminded me of home a little.” Kara walked out of the smaller passageway into a grand chamber that could have been a cathedral for its size.

Lena looked around in awe, the ice crystals refracting the sunlight in blue and white sparkles. “It’s… beautiful here. But… how does this remind you of your apartment?”

“What? No, not my apartment. My home, Lena. In case shooting me in the face with no injury at all wasn’t obvious, I’m not from here. You know, this planet.” She pointed at a long black stone on the ground, indicating for the spy to have a seat. After a moment, she sat across from Lena on another chunk of ice. “Are you involved with the DEO?”

“The… so it does exist. I had my suspicions,” Lena exclaimed. “For years we’ve heard tall tales about places like Area 51 in Nevada, or Hangar 18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, but those were largely American disinformation. But the Department of Extranormal Operations… I thought it might actually exist. My superiors disagreed, calling it yet another fairy tale.”

“So you don’t know them?” She squinted slightly, looking at Lena’s vital signs. No sign of deception.

“I don’t… but now that I know they exist, I’ll be on the lookout for them. They must have a bounty of technology we could use.”

Kara scoffed. “What makes you think you’re ever leaving here alive, Lena? You murdered 36 people, one of whom was a dear friend.”

“Because I’m fairly good at reading people, and that’s not you, Kara Danvers,” Lena gave her most winning smile, only to look at the icy blue eyes across from her at the near total stranger across from her.

“I’m not Kara Danvers, Lena. Kara Danvers was a fiction that was forced on me by your people,” Kara said coldly.

“My people? We had nothing to do with that-”

“Humanity, Lena. Your species. Not your pointless bickering subdivisions, your prideful boasts about which pile of dirt your father’s grandfather pissed on first,” Kara looked up at the vaulted ice ceiling. “I’m from out there. My homeworld, Krypton, 27 light-years away. I arrived here as a 13 year old girl after watching my planet die.” She whirled around on the brunette. “Do you know what your people did to me? The moment my pod opened - and I wasn’t fully conscious - they tried to erase me. They tried to make me forget who I really am, what I’m capable of. They made my life a lie, convincing me that my parents had died in a house fire and that I was just an orphan in need of a home.”

Lena sat perfectly upright, her hands in her lap as she quietly pressed a thumb into her palm to soothe her anxiety. “I’m… sorry to hear that.”

“There is no Kara Danvers, Lena. Not any more. There never was.”

Lena couldn’t help herself, her curiosity getting the better of her. “So… who are you, then, if you’re not Kara Danvers?”

Kara stood tall as she gazed as the diffuse sunlight. “My name is Kara Zor-El, of the House of El,” she stated, holding her chin high. “I am… I think I am the last of my people. But enough about me. I still want to know why you thought it was okay to just kill me.”

“I don’t think, Kara. I do as I’m told. I follow the orders given to me, or else I’m the next to be tortured and killed by my… organization.” Lena reflected on several of the kill orders she’d been given over the years and the horrors she had to inflict on her fellow operatives.

“Tortured?”

Lena pulled up her shirt, her skin breaking into goose flesh in the chilly air. She turned around so that Kara could see the intricate network of scars on her back. “This was what was done to me just in our training.”

Kara squinted, seeing the honeycomb of scar tissue and her vision tunneled into the x-ray spectrum. After the momentary surprise, she looked over Lena’s bones. “What… what happened to you?” she murmured. “Every bone in your left hand has been fractured at some point.”

“That…” the spy sighed, “that was for an assignment that didn’t go well. I spent a week being tortured by my people for failing. And I was lucky. My handler at the time said if I failed a second time, they would just cut it off before executing me.”

Kara grimaced sourly. “This is what I mean, Lena. Your people… they’re monsters. Your entire race is a bunch of monstrous barbarians, uncivilized savages barely more than the primates you evolved from.” She picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground. “This… this is what my world was, Lena. A barren rock, devoid of almost all life. My world was ancient, orbiting a dying sun, Rao. The light of Rao was life, and Rao withdrew his favor until one day… he was no more, and neither was my world.”

Lena watched the blonde intently, looking for any sign of weakness, any way she could escape the situation. If the person in front of her had been the Kara Danvers she knew, she could have thought of a dozen different ways to manipulate the blonde. But this… alien was a blank slate for her. Even the littlest things like body language, poise, and breathing patterns had changed. Lena squinted briefly. Was the woman even breathing at all?

“My parents sent me here, the closest planet with a hospitable, young sun. A new sun, a new world. Do you know, Lena, this world is a garden paradise compared to my home?” She whirled on the human. “It’s a world you don’t deserve! Your kind treats this paradise like a toilet. You’re all vermin, a plague this planet could do without.” She reached down and clasped Lena’s left hand, holding it up. “Look what they did to you! Animals don’t even do this to each other, Lena. Your species is worse than the most primitive animals!”

Lena felt a distinct sense of unease about the alien’s words. They were so reminiscent of her own people’s authoritarian leaders. Stalin. Khrushchev. Brezhnev. Putin. “And what would you propose? Ruling over us instead? Playing god to a planet of lower life forms than yourself?”

Kara scoffed. “Ruling you would be about as satisfying as administering an ant colony. No, all I have to do is wait, Lena. Your people are on a rapid path of self destruction. Nothing in this world can harm me. Not storms, not heat, not cold, not any of the ridiculous weapons your species has devised. All I need to do is wait for the next hundred years as your species ends itself, and then I will have some peace and quiet on this planet. It will heal, and heal rapidly once you are gone.”

“You’re… not wrong. But what about your friends? Your family?”

“I have no family, Lena.”

“But Alex-”

Kara’s eyes blazed alight, a beam of intense blue heat lancing out from her into the ice a few meters from Lena. Even at that distance, the human felt as though she were sitting near an iron forge; the steam mixed with rock that had started to melt under her burning gaze.

“Alex is a liar! She lied to me for years! She pretended to be my sister, but she was working for the DEO to keep me contained. Alex! Eliza! Jeremiah! They’re all liars, just like you, Lena!” She knelt down and slammed her fist into the rock, pulverizing a hole in it as long as her arm.

Lena froze in place as the alien expended her rage on the rocks around them, not daring to move for fear it would be the last thing she did. As terrifying as Kara’s power was, she sympathized with her friend’s pain. The GRU had stolen everything away from her, made her take on so many different identities that she couldn’t really remember who she was any more.

Kara bent over, her head in her hands as quiet, muffled sobs shook her shoulders. “I have nothing, Lena. I have nothing and no one, and it hurts so much. Yesterday I had friends, I had a family, I had a good life, and then someone I thought might have been a friend - YOU - you woke me up from that dream.”

“A dream that was a prison,” Lena murmured, carefully touching Kara’s shoulder and rubbing it slowly when the blonde didn’t pull away.

“Which is worse, Lena? A pleasant prison or a crushing, empty freedom? I could have lived a long time with that dream,” she cried.

“My… my life is also a prison, Kara. But not like yours. Your prison was pleasant. Comfortable. Easy. All you had to do was not wake up. Mine…” she held up her left hand. “You have seen the conditions of my prison. Every day in here-” she tapped her temple, “is a day when I wonder if I will die in this prison. And there is no escape for me. No waking moment. No freedom from the pain and death that surrounds me, that-” her voice hitched, “that I must cause to stay one step ahead of my own pain, the inevitable death at my heels.”

She stared at her hand, flashbacks of the GRU agent who had strapped her arm to an anvil and wielded the ball peen hammer with terrifying, agonizing precision. “For what it little it is worth, I am sorry I woke you from your dream. I would give it back to you if I could.”

“I will grant you the time you need to think on your sins, Lena. When I return, I will have more questions for you.” Kara stood up and faced towards the vaulted ceiling, then shot into the sky through a small opening.

Author’s Notes

Some folks had asked in the comments who Kara is. Now that the mind control has broken, we’re starting to see who she really is versus what the DEO and Cadmus programmed into her. That’s always been one of the things I thought the CW show did poorly - they dramatically underplayed Kara’s Kryptonian heritage. We’ll explore a little bit more of that next.

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Chapter Text

Kara hovered far above the North Pole, her eyes closed as she embraced the blissful silence of space. Miles above the Earth, no sound traveled to her hypersensitive ears with no air to convey it. She tilted her head back, the blonde locks drifting aimlessly around her in the lack of gravity, the yellow sun’s radiation bathing her in light. She’d always enjoyed being outside in the sun, far more than any of her family did. Any time there was a hint of sunlight, even as a teenager she’d flocked to it. Now, in the direct light of the sun, unobstructed by the atmosphere, she knew why. She felt alive, truly alive for the first time in forever.

Far beneath her, barely more than the size of her toe from her perspective, was Greenland and the ice cave she’d sequestered Lena in. She glanced at it for a long moment as her mind filled with images and memories. Lena was the ultimate paradox. Seemingly kind, absolutely beautiful, elegant, intelligent… and a mass murderer. Lena had killed James along with dozens of others on the bus, and 16 people in her poisonous takeout food scheme.

Yet Lena did so under duress. Kara had seen the damage the GRU and the Bratva had done to the woman. Broken bones, fractured teeth, a network of nearly invisible scars across her flesh like the etchings of a madman in blood on a stone wall. And those were the scars she could see. She had no doubt there were other scars, scars of the mind and the heart that left no trace on flesh.

Had Lena been Kryptonian, she would not have been held accountable for her sins; her head of House would ultimately have borne any punishment for her transgressions. Certainly, the head of her House would have had rights to punish Lena, just as Jor-El had once had the right to do so to any member of the House of El if they’d brought dishonor to it, but such matters were for a House to decide internally.

She thought back to her last memories before her parents exiled Kara to save her life. General Dru-Zod had been fomenting unrest, called the Great Council blind to the disaster that had been about to befall their world. In that, he and Jor-El shared a common perspective. But where Jor-El led with science and a cool head, Zod led with might. His attempt to overthrow the council had him and his closest associates banished to the Phantom Zone for eternity. Kryptonian law had no need for a death penalty when exile was arguably more torturous.

The thought brought a faint smile to her lips. Even though she’d been inducted into the Science Guild as its youngest member ever, she’d grown up at her mother’s side. Alura was a judicator of a Great House, and Kara had heard endless conversations between her mother and father as they debated case law over the years. More than one family dinner had been interrupted by rapid—fire interrogation of their Kelex unit by Zor-El or Alura, hunting down some obscure provision of Kryptonian law. In Kara’s mind, she was not only charged with the preservation of Krypton in her genetics, but also its culture and laws.

Idly, she turned her eyes to the west, to the visible brownish-green splotch in the mighty Pacific Ocean. What was it their species called that? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch? The Kryptonian pursed her lips together in disdain for the people of the world beneath her. Certainly, people like James mattered. She’d even thought Alex had mattered until Alex’s betrayal became clear. But the rest of the species? She’d meant it when she told Lena that the human race wasn’t even worth the space it took up. That Lena had killed dozens of them didn’t mean much to the alien, save the ones that were her friends. Preserving Krypton’s scientific heritage would prove difficult on such a primitive world, but she would do her best to honor her people.

With that calculus in her thoughts, she made up her mind. Lena wouldn’t join her victims in death’s embrace. Easy though it would be for Kara to do, Kara had to live up to the ideals of Kryptonian law. The last scion of Krypton itself, and now that she no longer had to pretend to be human, pretend to fit in with the human’s views and laws, she looked at Lena in a new light. Whoever had coerced Lena into committing the crimes she’d done would pay, not just for corrupting Lena, but for the lives that were forfeit as a result of that manipulation. Kryptonian law would brook no other possible outcome, and Kara would administer the justice she’d grown up with and knew in her heart to be superior to anything the humans had devised.

No Phantom Zone existed on Earth, and Earth’s prisons were little more than graduate schools for criminals to become better criminals, so Kara committed herself to removing the criminals in the only way she could. She would hunt down the people responsible for corrupting Lena, the people whose hands were covered in the blood of Lena’s victim, and she would exile them to the farthest reaches of the world for as long as she could until she could find a way to access the Phantom Zone again.

With a firmly set jaw, she nudged herself into the planet’s gravity well and began her descent to set things right.

Author’s Notes

A short interlude but an important one to set what happens next in a context that makes sense.

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Chapter Text

National City

Alex shook her head as she looked from monitor to monitor, thousands of little green dots indicating various authorized civilian or military aircraft on radar. “I can’t find any trace of her. Once she exited American airspace, our satellites were too slow to track her. The only thing I have is a general vector - north east from the coast of Maine.”

“And nothing from our NATO satellites? No fast-moving unidentified objects?” Henshaw asked as he paced around the control room of the DEO.

“Nothing, sir. It’s like she just vanished,” another agent replied.

“None of the trackers on her are responding?” he snapped.

“They’re all still in her apartment, Hank,” Alex pointed at the screen. “She must have somehow changed clothing quickly. We had a trace on her at the LuthorCorp offices, then briefly to her apartment, and then… gone.”

Henshaw had had a feeling this day would come. He’d advocated to his director at the time that an adult Kryptonian should be put down immediately; they were still mortal for a few days after their first arrival to the solar system. Once their bodies had adapted to the yellow sun’s radiation, ending them would be all but impossible. He wasn’t even sure the neural suppression could be reinstated; though he’d checked on Kara over the years, he had never tried to amplify her initial conditioning, lest he accidentally break it.

“Sir… she’ll be back.”

“How do you know, Alex?”

Alex smiled faintly at the memory. “When she first arrived, we had a few fights - mostly about her hogging the bathroom. She would always run out into the yard and up someplace high. There was this one tree where you could see the ocean. She said she needed the quiet to think, and after she was done, she’d come back.”

Henshaw grunted. “Vasquez, go down to the armory and get crate A17. I think we’re going to need it.”

“A17, Hank? What’s that?” Alex asked, tilting her head. There were tons of crates in the DEO facility, more than a lifetime’s worth of alien artifacts, but she’d never heard of whatever the director was asking for.

“When the first Kryptonian arrived on this planet, he came in a pod, just like your sister’s pod. There was some type of radiation surrounding it; we were able to get a read on it before it decayed and faded away. Your sister’s pod had the same kind of radiation. Two of our xeno-engineers surmised that the radiation somehow dampened the alien’s powers briefly. We spent the better part of a decade trying to reverse engineer it and what’s in A17 is our best guess.” He thought back to the green crystals that had clung to the pods; when they arrived, they glowed like Christmas lights, but after just a week, they had faded to a milky white color.

Vasquez wheeled a hand truck with a heavy steel ammunition box on it, locked with a handprint scanner. Hank placed his palm on it, triggering the electronic release. Inside were hundreds of rounds of 5.56mm and 9mm ammunition glowing a dull green. “Listen up people. This is experimental ammunition. We don’t know for sure it’ll work, but we know nothing conventional will. Load up, 2 rifle magazines and 1 pistol magazine per agent.”

“I hope we don’t have to use this, Hank,” Alex muttered as she filled two magazines for her rifle.

“So do I, for a variety of reasons.”

“Agent Danvers, we have a high speed unidentified inbound at… Mach 7. It might be the target,” reported another agent. Alex looked at the monitor. The scanner showed it coming to an abrupt halt… at her apartment.

It had to be Kara.

Sure enough, a moment later, her phone chimed, a text from her sister.

WE NEED TO TALK.

Henshaw looked over her shoulder. “Showtime. Your call, Alex. How do you want to handle it?”

“You’re sure the neural suppression broke?”

“Without a doubt,” he replied instantly.

“What am I walking into? Is she still my sister?” Alex asked, unsettled by Henshaw’s inability to look her in the eye.

He fiddled with a pencil on the desk for a moment. “I… don’t know. I’m not sure what she does and doesn’t remember. In theory, she should still have all her memories after we applied the suppressant technology, but… no one’s ever broken free of it before.”

“Okay,” Alex sighed, “I’ll go there and meet up with her. Hartmann, Vasquez, I want two squads, one on the roof, one on the ground. Do not fire unless you’re fired upon, do not engage unless I explicitly order you to. Let’s roll.” She picked up her phone and texted Kara back.

ON MY WAY.

Fifteen minutes later, she walked into her darkened apartment to see Kara sitting on the couch, dressed in all-white robes.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you wear something like that, Kara,” Alex offered tentatively, taking a seat on the teal chair across from her.

“How long, Alex?” Kara asked, her voice low and flat as her blue eyes bored into her sister.

“How long what, Kara?”

“How long have you known what I was? Since the day I moved into your room?”

Alex regarded her sister carefully. The glasses she’d worn were gone; her hair was down instead of in its usual ponytail. More than anything, she could feel her sister’s anger, simmering just beneath the surface. “Ten years ago. The day I graduated from National City University and Uncle Hank recruited me. Once I signed on… he told me everything.”

Kara narrowed her eyes, looking at Alex’s vitals. Seeing no signs of deception, she pressed on. “So for the last 10 years, you’ve pretended that everything is normal, even though you knew I was an alien?”

“I- yes. I was sworn to secrecy about it. Believe me, Kara, I was shocked to find out the truth. Other than never getting sick or injured, you were just my little sister all through growing up and high school,” Alex confessed.

“And you never thought to tell me?”

“I was under orders not to, Kara. Whatever… whatever you actually were, you showed no signs of being anything other than an ordinary person like the rest of us. I swear, I didn’t treat you any different or think any differently of you. You’ve always been my little sister.”

Kara stood up and faced the wall before walking over to the fireplace and picking up one of the fire irons. “You made me ordinary, Alex. Your organization, your people, your superiors. Uncle Hank and the DEO forced me to be someone I wasn’t. Stole my identity, my family, my memory.” She began to twist the fire iron into a spiral with the same ease that a regular person might twist a thin paperclip, the metal beginnings to glow a dull red under the tension. “What gave you that right?”

Alex looked down at her hands. “If I had known, I would never have made that choice for you, Kara.”

“LIAR! You did know, Alex. You made that choice every day for ten years. Every time you looked at me, every time you spoke to me, every time we hugged or ate ice cream on my couch, you made that choice for me! EVERY. DAY. You could have told me the day you found out, Alex. Remember how we used to pinky swear our secrets? Remember how we promised there would never be anything between us after Kenny died? You have lied to me every day for the last ten years, and worse, you helped me lie to myself!” She slammed the iron down on the marble mantle, shattering it and causing her sister to jump in fright.

“Alex?” Hank’s voice squawked in her earpiece, “Are you all right? Do you need backup?”

Kara turned her head, looking out the small window of the apartment, then looking at the floor and ceiling. “Are you kidding me, Alex? You have a DEO team on the roof and in the lobby? What did you and Hank think was going to happen?”

“I don’t know, Kara! I don’t know what’s going on any more, I- I don’t know who you are! Hank told me he suppressed your memories, made you think you were someone else. I- are you my sister, still? Or was all the time we had together erased when whatever happened, happened? He doesn’t know!” Alex cried, leaning back in the chair as though she could put more distance between herself and the alien that had been her sister.

Kara levitated over to the chair as Alex watched, slack-jawed. “I’ll tell you what happened. Lena Luthor tried to kill me, Alex. She shot me right between the eyes with a gun. My glasses broke… and that was it. The bullet bounced off me and landed on the floor, and at that moment… I remembered everything.”

“What… what does everything mean?” Alex asked, biting her lip. “I… the DEO doesn’t really know anything about who you actually are. The moment you landed, they did… you know.”

Kara rolled her eyes. “Of course they did. I hate your species, Alex. Not you personally, but your race as a whole is… anyway. My real, true name is Kara Zor-El. I am from the planet Krypton, 27 light years from here, in a star system on your charts known as LHS 2020, though we called it Rao. We were an ancient civilization, traveling among the stars millennia ago. A few years prior to my departure, our scientists noticed our sun becoming more and more unstable. One day, my mother and father put me in an escape pod and sent me to this world to escape the fate that befell my people.”

Alex stared in rapt fascination at her foster sister. “Who… who were you on Krypton? I mean, how old were you? God, I have so many questions.”

“And questions that we could have talked about all those nights laying awake in our beds in Midvale, if your organization hadn’t stolen that from me,” Kara smiled bitterly. “Instead of living the lie that was forced upon me. I was the equivalent of 13 years old when I was evacuated from Krypton. I was the youngest member ever inducted into the Science Guild, one of our people’s most prestigious organizations. And I have spent the last 14 years locked away from my own mind, imprisoned in it.” She stood up, walking over to the pieces of broken marble.

“Did you know, Alex, that my mind is probably more complex and more dense than all of your people’s computing power on this planet combined? We were genetically engineered to be perfect, to be paragons of our people, to contribute to our society in ways that could only be dreamed of here. Had the DEO left me alone, left me to be myself, I probably could have cured most of the diseases in this world by now. Instead, you condemned me to a prison of mediocrity, fetching coffee for Cat Grant and writing mindless dreck in CatCo Magazine to sate your people’s endless hunger for irrelevant minutiae.” Kara crushed the marble into a fine powder between her fingers as she spoke. “Imagine the good we could have done together. Imagine the world as it could have been, had you not chained me up. Imagine the end of cancer instead of articles about high-waisted jeans.”

In the blink of an eye, Kara sped over to Alex and deftly plucked the concealed earpiece from her right ear, speaking into it. “But your people chose instead to assault me, to rob me, to blind me to my own power. Especially you, Uncle Hank. You could have ushered in a golden age for your species, for your entire world with the knowledge in my head, but you put me in a cage as soon as you possibly could.” She squeezed, and the earpiece collapsed into a flat disc of metal and plastic.

“To answer your question, Alex, I am both the girl you grew up with and a woman of power beyond your imagination. I remember everything. I love you for the friend you were to me growing up and I hate you for what you did to me and the lies you forced on me. And now I am free, free to be myself, free to be all that I truly am.” She stepped to the balcony and slid the door open.

“Kara, please, wait- we, we can talk about this-”

Kara looked over her shoulder. “There’s nothing to talk about, Alex.” With that, she floated from the balcony into the air. “Goodbye for now, Alex. Thank you for finally telling me the truth.”

“Kara, no, please- please don’t go-” Alex cried, tears pooling in her eyes as she reached out.

“We can’t let her go!” Hank’s voice shouted in her remaining earpiece. “She’s too dangerous out of our control! Team 2, if you have a shot, take it!”

“Hank, no!” Alex shouted as the roof squad opened fire on Kara.

The Kryptonian glided to the roof, easily dodging the bullets as they flew by like leaves slowly dancing in the wind as time slowed to a crawl. Kara felt a dull, mild ache as one bullet passed near her; she raced the rest of the way and in less than a breath, scooped every gun from the hands of the five DEO agents and rocketed across the sky with them.

Lena had spent the better part of the day exploring the network of caverns and nooks in the ice. Her phone was useless, far out of reach of any cell tower and it only had the most basic satellite communications capabilities. All she’d found in that day was that Kara had told her the truth. The moment she’d stepped outside, it was like being on another planet; rock and ice stretched in almost every direction. Her stomach rumbled from the lack of anything to eat at all.

Across the evening sky, green wisps of the aurora borealis danced, a silent symphony of lights. “Kara wouldn’t just leave me here to die, would she?” the brunette wondered to herself. “Well, I did try to kill her, so there’s that. And apparently she’s more than just the reporter I knew. Was she a killer in her life before she came here? What kind of alien is she, anyway?”

A few moments later, the ground near the cavern’s entrance shattered as Kara slammed down out of the sky, holding some kind of assault rifle. Lena instantly recognized it as an American M4A1 rifle, the kind that nearly every branch of the military carried. She also had a massive black canvas sack of some kind over her shoulder, lugging it with ease into the caverns. Lena followed the Kryptonian inside, curious at what she was up to with a weapon she clearly had no need for.

Within minutes, Kara had unpacked a half dozen scientific instruments and laid them out on one of the rock slabs, plugged into a portable battery of some kind. Lena recognized some of the equipment, like a mass spectrometry machine, but was befuddled by the rest. Kara briefly turned to frown at her before going back to work, removing the ammunition from the rifle and scraping a tiny bit of metal from one of the rounds before putting it into the machine.

“What… what are you doing, Kara?” Lena asked as she tentatively sidled up to the blonde.

Kara looked at her wordlessly before examining the results on the tiny display with a barely audible grunt. She took another scraping of the metal and this time her eyes glowed blue-white as a tiny beam of heat energy hit the metal. The display once again showed a few small numbers and some kind of energy waveform Lena didn’t recognize.

“You’re- are you looking for some kind of radiological signature? That almost looks like the signature of kharitonchiki,” she commented, pointing at two large peaks in the spectral analysis of the metal.

“What’s kharitonchiki?” Kara asked, breaking her silence as she tapped on a display.

“It’s a vitreous fused sand found near Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan. The former Soviet Union conducted hundreds of nuclear weapon tests there, and that was formed out of the sands and rocks nearby - highly radioactive rocks.” Lena looked down at the makeshift workbench. “Why… why would bullets have any kind of radiological signature?”

She looked at the blonde who remained mute on the topic, and a small smile crept on her lips. “Ah… you’re studying to see if it will hurt you.”

Kara turned to look over her shoulder, examining Lena carefully. “Perhaps. If it is what I think it is. How did you come to that conclusion?”

Lena smirked. “You brought back a rifle from somewhere America operates its military. We already established in graphic fashion that bullets cause you absolutely no harm whatsoever, so the only reason you would have done that is if there were something special about it. And you’re dissecting a bullet, which means there’s nothing special about the rifle itself. It’s not exactly a giant logical leap.”

“Fine,” Kara huffed. “Yes, they were shooting it at me. They knew I was coming, and they brought out whatever these weapons are. I’m trying to see what they came up with.” She turned a small dial on the spectroscope and smirked. The humans had attempted to replicate the substance her pod was made of, aiming to generate the epsilon radiation that was native to Krypton. They’d gotten the basics down, enough that their synthetic metal could possibly break her skin with enough time and effort, but humanity didn’t yet understand phased radiation across multiple subspace domains, and probably wouldn’t for centuries. Kara wondered if they’d survive long enough as a species to evolve their understanding to that point.

“Americans,” Lena scoffed at the rifle. “Always trying to make a better gun.”

“Says the woman who had more guns and weapons on her than she did pieces of clothing,” Kara snarked right back. “Anyway, there’s nothing useful here. They tried and failed.” She took the gun and heated it with her vision into glowing orange slag, then wrapped the ammunition in it like a molten steel burrito. Once sealed, she tossed it into some snow, the modified lead bullets encased and utterly unable to cause even mild discomfort to her.

“Hot.”

Kara raised an eyebrow. “Well, yes. Steel needs to be about 1,000C to turn orange and be malleable, so it’s quite hot.”

“I meant you, Kara. Seeing how… how strong and capable you are. It’s… it’s quite hot,” Lena said, licking her lips.

“Was flirting with your captors something you were taught in your assassin’s school as well?”

Lena nodded, her thirst for the blonde abating with the harsh memories of her training. “Flirting. Seducing. Fucking. Whatever it took to get the job done, we were taught how to do. Men, women, anyone at all. Finish the job at any cost,” she muttered, thinking back to the brutality she’d been subjected to.

“And did they remove your uterus as well?” The blonde asked, her eyes briefly dropping to Lena’s waistline, seeing through her anatomy with ease.

“They did. We can’t afford to get pregnant in our assignments so they just… removed that capability entirely.” She’d been blackout drunk for that operation because the GRU refused to spend money or resources on Western drugs, and Russian drugs - at least the medical kind - were in too high demand to be spared on operatives who were worth nothing to the state.

“Again, savages.”

A quiet pall settled over the room as Kara cleaned up the remainder of the scientific equipment before Lena’s stomach broke the silence with a loud rumble. The Kryptonian regarded her captive for a long moment. “I suppose I should feed you, shouldn’t I?”

“Aren’t you hungry? Or did you stop to get some food while you were disarming American soldiers? Usually you’re the one bringing various foods…”

The question brought Kara to a stop. Normally, she’d be ravenous at any time of day, eating everything in sight. Alex used to make fun of just how much she could eat. But ever since Lena had shot her, unlocking her powers, she’d felt… nothing. No thirst, no hunger, no fatigue. It was as if she were running on pure energy, every time she stepped outside into the sun.

She sighed, another realization piling onto the truths that Lena had unlocked with a bullet. “I haven’t eaten, no. I’m honestly not sure I need to since… since you woke my powers up. But I’ll see about getting you something to eat and drink.” She contemplated just what level of effort to make on behalf of her captive. On the one hand, Lena had tried to kill her multiple times as well as murdering dozens of people including one of her friends. Kryptonian law was quite clear about the level of culpability Lena had - almost none - but Kara was still coming down from the emotions of the events. On the other hand, before everything that had happened, Lena had exhibited real potential to be a friend - and her work at LuthorCorp had seemed earnest in its efforts to improve the backwater planet.

Justice demanded that Kara treat her prisoner with dignity, but kindness demanded that she treat Lena as the person - the friend — she might have been.

Without another word, she took off into the sky, leaving a cloud of ice and snow in her wake on the brunette.

-—-

Half an hour later, the alien flew back into the room with a heavy cardboard box that smoldered at the edges. She silently laid out carton after carton of food - beef and Guinness casserole, smoked salmon, loaves of soda bread, ham, chicken, and seafood chowder.

“What- where did all this come from?” Lena asked, her stomach rumbling ever more loudly, her eyes wide and nostrils flaring. “It smells… familiar somehow.”

“Well,” Kara’s mouth inched upwards ever so slightly, “Qaanaaq is a remote town with only one grocery store that gets resupplied like, twice a year. It hardly seemed fair to take any food from them, so I just kept going until I landed near a place that was open, some place called Mary’s Cottage Kitchen in Ballycastle.” She dug into a bowl of chowder with a crust of bread.

“Ballycastle… Ireland? You managed to fly to Ireland and back in… 30 minutes?” Lena expressed her amazement as she grabbed a bamboo fork and the casserole, filing away a mental note about just how fast this alien was as she dug into the beef.

“I could have flown faster, but the friction was starting to light the cardboard on fire. Figured dinner didn’t need to be quite that well cook-” Kara stopped mid-sentence as she stared at Lena.

The brunette had her head bowed, fork on her cardboard takeaway container, as tears slowly dripped onto her blouse. She sniffled, reaching for a napkin to dab at her eyes.

“Lena?”

“I- I didn’t think… I’m sorry, I didn’t think I’d remember, Kara.” She blew her nose, finally managing to look up at the blonde, her eyes red. “I… remember now, myself. This tastes… this tastes just like my mother used to make. They tried to beat it out of me, to make me forget, but… this is it, Kara.”

Kara shook her head. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I told you that the GRU rescued me when I was four years old. I was in an orphanage… I think I was in an orphanage somewhere in Europe. I’m not totally sure, but that’s what they told me growing up. But… but I was born in Ireland. I was born to a woman… I can almost remember her name. She died when I was four. She… she drowned in a lake, and I couldn’t save her.” Lena took another few bites, then nibbled on a crust of the soda bread. “This all tastes so much like what we used to eat. We weren’t rich, I don’t think, but she… she would cook these meals that were amazing.”

“How did they make you forget? The same way they did to me?” Kara asked, squinting at Lena, looking for signs that this was an act to engender sympathy.

The brunette sniffled, then looked up, holding her chin high. “Nothing so sophisticated. Look carefully at my jaw with your super powers.”

Kara did, looking past the soft flesh and seeing bone, teeth, and… three? Four metal posts embedded in the bone. “What… what is that? Why are there metal posts and synthetic teeth on one side of your mouth?”

“When I was a teenager, I started getting nosy about my background. I knew that I hadn’t always been in Moscow, so I started asking questions. One of my handlers beat me so bloody that he fractured my jaw and four of my teeth. To make sure I could still operate in the field and look the parts they wanted me to…” she shuddered at the memory, “they replaced the teeth with false ones, dental implants. And to reinforce that I shouldn’t ever try to remember who I was… they did the entire procedure without any anesthesia.”

Kara scoffed, her lips upturned in disgust. “Your people are no better than the Americans, Lena. All of you, I swear. You’re just reiterating why your entire species is a plague of primitive animals unfit to live,” she fumed.

“I don’t disagree with you…” Lena sighed, finishing the box of beef casserole. “In a way, we’re not so different, you and me. Our respective factions decided we were too dangerous as we were, and decided to reshape us to what they wanted us to be.”

Kara finished her own box of casserole and moved onto her smoked salmon and more bread. “Then maybe it’s time we show them all just how dangerous we can be,” she murmured, her eyes narrowed.

Lena tilted her head. “What do you mean, Kara?”

The Kryptonian put down her fork. “I mean, I refuse to be imprisoned again, which is exactly what the DEO is going to try. They want to put the genie back in the bottle, and I have no doubt they will make every effort to threaten and coerce me into being their mindless drone once more, pretending to be a weak human. And your handlers aren’t going to be thrilled that you’ll never, ever complete your mission because you can’t possibly kill me.”

“Not to mention they’ll likely think I’m compromised now,” Lena sighed.

“Why?”

“Because of… never mind, it’s not important. So what are our next steps, then?”

Kara squinted at Lena. “No, say what you were going to say. I hate it when people withhold information from me, now more than ever. They’ll think you’re compromised because?”

Lena gave a shallow, short laugh. “Because of my proclivities, Kara. It’s well known in my unit that I prefer women to men, and blonde women in particular. You just happen to be… well, exactly the sort of woman I’d be interested in. So when it’s reported that we vanished together, the natural assumption will be that I am indulging in my deviance.”

“What deviance is that?”

“Russia isn’t much different than the former Soviet Union, at least when it comes to social attitudes. Being a lesbian is still considered immoral in much of my country, and it’s gotten worse ever since 2006. In fact, I’d say we’re perilously close to being declared criminals again, just like we were under Stalin.”

Kara shook her head. “Yet another aspect of how primitive your species is.”

“Oh, and things were better on your planet?” Lena snapped.

“Considerably better. Sexual relations was permitted among any individuals capable of consent. We eliminated sexually transmitted diseases generations ago, and all our reproduction was handled by advanced computers that found ideal genetic matches and birthed the children for us,” she said, recalling how orderly Krypton had been before the end.

In a society where every resource was valuable and scarce, only carefully planned reproduction was possible, to ensure that the number of mouths to feed never exceeded what the society was capable of producing. With no reproductive or disease outcomes, Kryptonians could freely associate and be intimate with each other in any pairing or combination they saw fit, which Kara summed up for the human.

“That must have been nice,” Lena muttered. “My… proclivities… have only been seen as a weapon that could be used against others. For blackmail, for seduction, for… well, anything that was useful to my superiors.”

“I will refrain from restating the obvious,” Kara replied in kind, packaging up her empty boxes. “I intend to stop the DEO from manipulating me any further. And I intend to stop your government from causing me or my loved ones any more harm. If you were in my place, how would you do that?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Lena smiled, “Kill me. Now. Immediately. With me dead, my agency will see the mission as an utter failure.”

Kara shook her head. “What kind of fool do you take me to be, Lena? I know you had accomplices for the other attempted hits, and for the murder of James Olsen. Those accomplices are still out there, and they must be brought to account as well.”

“They are, but with me gone, my handlers won’t see investing any more assets as a good use of time or people. Unless you do something to directly threaten the Bratva again, they’ll forget about the whole thing. Stay away from LuthorCorp and the Bratva, and everyone you know will be safe once I’m gone.” Putting aside her empty casserole box, she knelt down on the icy floor, her fingers clasped behind her head. “Make it quick with those laser vision eyes of yours, please. That’s all I ask. You fed me my last meal, and it was delicious, so… just… erase me.”

The Kryptonian stood up, her eyes glowing a dull blue light before reverting back to normal. “No. That is not justice under Kryptonian law, Lena, and in this backwater planet of yours, it’s the only sane law there is. Do I emotionally blame you for taking away friends and killing others? Yes. But my people’s law states clearly that you were manipulated into your actions and thus you cannot be held accountable for them. Also, I don’t believe you, not about erasing you. Clandestine agencies like yours and the DEO never leave well enough alone. If you vanished, they’d keep looking. No, the only answer is to stop them both.”

Lena turned her head, looking over her shoulder. “Stop them? How? You can’t stop them, Kara. They will never give up.”

Kara turned her chin towards the icy roof and the dark sky beyond. “They will when I wipe them from the very face of this world.” In another gust of wind, she rocketed into the night sky, Lena staring after her as the takeout cartons scattered across the rocky floor.

Author’s Notes

Only a few more chapters to go, as we kick things into high gear and our two ladies start to settle matters.

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Chapter Text

National City

Kara swept the skyline of National City, listening for her sister’s voice as she stood atop the LuthorCorp building. Tuning out the din of a million voices to hone in on just the one she wanted was mentally challenging, but she smiled to herself as she did. “I’ll be free soon enough to leave all this noise behind”, she thought to herself. Except for Lena’s rambling, the ice caves in Greenland were perfectly quiet, free of the cacophony of humanity.

There. She caught the briefest echo of Alex’s voice and mentally chased it down. Into the air she shot, hovering high over a squat grey warehouse block in the industrial section of the city as her anger from the previous day resurged, thinking of all the lies Alex had told her over the years. The sound was muffled, barely intelligible, so she focused a pinhole beam of heat vision to cut through the building’s exterior, drilling down until the words became more clear.

“The bullets didn’t do a damn thing, Alex!” she heard Hank Henshaw’s voice grumbling.

“That’s because they’re too slow, Hank. Did you know she could move that fast? What else haven’t you even told me about my own sister?” Alex shouted back.

Kara looked down through the building, her vision penetrating layers of steel and concrete to see the two people she’d once loved, her sister and a close family friend, standing at odds with each other in some kind of control room. This was a surprise; she’d thought Alex was an eager participant in her imprisonment.

“Frankly, there’s a lot we don’t know about Kryptonians. We only have limited information that we were able to extract from one of our Daxamite prisoners before he… stopped cooperating,” the director grumbled. “Who knew they were allergic to lead?”

“Shooting him in the leg was a war crime even before we found out that lead was lethal to them, Hank, and you know it. God, how could I have been so stupid to have believed everything you told me about Kara?”

Hank crossed his arms. “You can’t commit war crimes against someone who isn’t human! Now you need to get back to work on building some weapons that can actually take a Kryptonian down.”

Kara zoomed her vision in to better see her sister’s face, recognizing the contortions of her brow, her jaw open. “Hank… are you saying you want to kill Kara? My sister? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Henshaw slammed his hand on the glass table next to them. “She’s too dangerous to be left alive, Alex! Now that she has her powers, there’s no way we can mentally suppress her any more. She’ll be immune to our technology. That radiation from her spacecraft is our only hope of stopping her from dominating this world and enslaving us!”

Alex threw her arms up. “What- are you fucking kidding me? Hank, this is Kara! Kara! You’ve known her for over a decade. She’s not going to enslave us. She’s not going to enslave anything. She won’t even put a leash around a dog’s neck for fear of hurting it. What the hell has gotten into you?”

“Agent Danvers, you are getting perilously close to insubordination,” Henshaw growled. “Carry out your orders and get me my weapon against the alien threat.”

“I won’t, Hank. I won’t help you kill my sister. It’s bad enough that she hates me already for spying on her for a decade, but I won’t help you hurt her. She’s done nothing to deserve what you - what we’ve done to her.”

Henshaw gestured across the room, four agents coming up behind Alex with their weapons drawn. “You leave me no choice then, Alexandra Danvers. You’re under arrest for sympathizing with an uncontained alien threat and for aiding and abetting the enemy. We’ll figure out how to locate Kara and capture her without you. Take her down to the containment units for now.”

Kara clenched her jaw as she spread her arms wide, bathing in the bright yellow sun. She felt herself practically glowing, soaking up the energy like a sponge dropped in a bucket of water. Clenching her fists, she felt her knuckles crack, and she smiled.

Then she dove.

Through the roof of the building.

Through 8 floors of increasingly thick steel and concrete.

Through the ceiling of the DEO control room.

She landed, a spiderweb of cracks appearing in the floor under her feet as portions of the ceiling fell around her, and stood with her hands on her hips. “Let me save you some time, Uncle Hank,” she spat. “You betrayed me. And you betrayed Alex. Let her go.”

Henshaw glared at the alien in her white robes before shouting for his agents to open fire.

Kara turned her head around, looking at the room. Ten agents had M4A1 assault rifles all pointed at her as time stopped. Faster than the blink of an eye, she picked up each agent and arranged them in a circle around each other, each soldier’s rifle pointed at the next soldier’s knee. In another second, all ten agents were laying on the floor, clutching their bloodied limbs.

She looked for her sister who was halfway down a corridor being dragged by four more agents and with a smirk, she raced to them, removed the restraints from Alex, and chained all the agents together, one agent’s hand to the next agent’s ankle. All four cried out in pain, their joints dislocating from the weight and falling atop each other.

Kara returned to Henshaw, who had pulled out his handgun and had already fired two of the dull green bullets at her. She scoffed, plucked them out of the air, and carefully placed them over the arches of his feet. In another beat, he lay on the floor screaming as blood gushed from the soles of his boots.

“Who told you to do this to me, Hank? Who told you to imprison me, to force Alex to lie to me?”

“Go… to… hell…” he snapped through gritted teeth.

Kara rolled her eyes, grabbed Henshaw by the lapels, and flew straight through the armored window at the end of the room before lifting him straight up, far above the city skyline. “Let’s try that again, Hank. Who told you to do this to me?”

Henshaw looked down, blood drops from his feet falling away from him, the city streets far beneath them both. “I… I can’t tell you! They’ll kill me!”

“Oh really,” Kara said, “and I won’t? I’m not the ‘niece’ you remember, Uncle Hank.”

She let go.

He fell a thousand meters. Two thousand meters. And then came to a halt just over the radio antenna mounted on top of CatCo’s building.

“One last chance, Hank, and then I impale you on this piece of steel. Because I’m not the Kara Danvers you created. I’m not the girl you forced into a human mind, making me forget my powers, my people, my planet. I’m not the prisoner you guarded with members of my own family. I am Kara Zor-El, the head of the House of El. I am of the last ruling family of Krypton, and I am running out of patience. Who ordered you to brainwash me?”

“CADMUS! Project Cadmus! They- we- our mission is to keep Earth safe from aliens like you!”

“And they made you control me?”

“You, the others, the DEO… it’s all part of the plan to keep you from ruling us!”

Kara rolled her eyes. “You humans all think alike, I swear. I have no interest in ruling you any more than you have interest in ruling over the mice in the city streets, Hank. I just want to be left alone and left to be myself. Why is that so hard for your species to understand?”

“No one with powers like you could resist using them!” he gasped. “You would subjugate us all.”

“You’re irrational, Hank. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to rule your pathetic species. I certainly don’t. Now, where do I find this Project Cadmus, so I can have a little chat with whoever is running it?”

“I won’t talk! They’ll kill me!”

Kara huffed and spun Henshaw around. With a mischievous smirk on her lips, she looked at the skyscraper below them, the metal radio antenna piercing the sky like a giant needle. As the grin on her face grew, she reached down to Henshaw’s waistline, grabbed his underwear and nylon webbing belt… and suspended him from the antenna by his pants.

Kara levitated in front of the struggling man as he hung in the sky, limbs flailing helplessly. “I could have killed you with no more effort than swatting a fly, Hank. I could have impaled your skull on that antenna with the same ease as I’d put a toothpick into a banana. So don’t tell me that I want to rule and dominate you all. I truly could not care any less about your species. This ends now. If you should happen to talk with Cadmus before I do, tell them that surrender is their only option if they want to live.” With that pronouncement, she rocketed off into the clouds.

A few moments later, Kara found Alex exactly where she expected: Al’s Dive Bar. The grungy little watering hole was a favorite for the neighborhood where her sister lived and featured the best parts of any dive bar: cheap drinks and confidentiality.

For her part, Alex sat at the rustic, rough-hewn wooden counter, nursing a third glass of scotch as she tried not to look at her own reflection in the mirror behind the bar lest she see the guilt and shame burned into her brown eyes.

She turned the tumbler at an angle, watching the light reflect off the edges of the glass, wondering what was left of her life. Her career was over, her sister was gone - everything she’d known and thought to be true had shattered like glass in just a few moments. With a scoff, she tossed back the remains of the glass, realizing that Hank’s betrayal was nothing compared to what Kara must be going through.

“Tough day at the office, huh sis?” Kara joked as she pulled up a stool next to her sister.

“Kara!” Alex’s hands shook, forcing her to put her glass on the bar. She suppressed the instinct to reach for her gun, for all the good it would have done her. “I- I honestly never expected to see you again. I thought you’d be furious at me.”

Kara signaled the bartender for a glass of seltzer and a refill of whatever Alex was drinking. “I was. I was furious at you, furious at the deception you foisted on me. I said as much yesterday.”

Alex looked down into the brown liquid at the bottom of her glass as the bartender poured another two fingers. “I… I know. And you were right. There’s no exc-”

“Then you defended me today.”

The brunette’s eyes snapped up to her sister’s face. “How could you know that?”

Kara grinned as she took a sip of her drink, savoring the fresh lime in the bubbles. Since alcohol had no impact on her even before she regained memory of her powers, she’d grown up just drinking non-alcoholic beverages to save money. Her favorite by far was anything carbonated, a type of drink unique to Earth. “I watched you argue with Hank before I came in.” She took another sip of her drink, smacking her lips. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still mad. But… you showed your true colors today. Despite everything, you still care about me.”

Alex’s eyes began to tear up. “Of course I do, Kara! You’re my little sister. You’ve always been my little sister to me, long before any of this craziness. That hasn’t changed. That… that never changed, even after I found out the truth.” She tentatively reached for Kara, hesitating, until the blonde closed the distance. Alex cried in relief, tears falling on Kara’s shoulder.

“I know where you stand now. And I know where the DEO stands. I’m going to put a stop to this, Alex, to all of it. Please do me a favor?” Kara asked, clasping her sister’s shoulders.

“Wh-what kind of favor?”

Kara stood up. “Don’t go into work until it’s all over.”

Alex tilted her head. “What do you mean? How- when will I know it’s over?”

Her sister looked over her shoulder with a solemn expression, her eyes cool. “There won’t be a DEO any more. You probably should update your LinkedIn profile,” she laughed. “Love you, sis.”

With that, Kara vanished from the bar as Alex sagged in her seat.

“Wait, you can see through buildings?” Alex realized with a gasp, minutes later.

“Cadmus,” Lena said as she sat back against icy formations of the glacier they were standing on, a heavy coat that Kara had brought her keeping her warm from the biting winds of the Arctic Circle. “The first hero, the greatest slayer of monsters before Heracles. That’s not at all arrogant or presumptuous,” she scoffed, before her frown eased and her eyes drifted far away along the icy horizon.

Kara finished recounting everything in Hank’s confession to her prisoner in the hopes the assassin could shed some light on whatever Cadmus was. “Does any of that make sense to you?”

Lena picked up a small, flat stone and tossed it across the flat ice in front of them, watching it ricochet off the frozen surface. “I thought not at first, but I have heard whispers and rumors of Кадмус - Kadmus - here and there. Nothing concrete, nothing solid. Just something that several colleagues in another directorate were tasked with.”

“Go on,” Kara said, crossing her arms.

“Our organization was broken into directorates. I was part of Directorate 12, which focused on assassinations and other… destabilizing activities. But there was another directorate, a thirteenth directorate that focused on everything and anything related to outer space. I vaguely recall some colleagues speaking of it before the great purge.”

“What great purge?”

“Don’t you get cold?” Lena shivered, forcing her hands deeper into the coat’s pockets.

“No. Cold doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, I’m happy for you, Elsa. Meanwhile, I’m freezing. Can we please go inside to continue this conversation?”

Kara smirked, memories of watching Disney movies with Alex bubbling to the surface of her mind. “I am one with the wind and sky, but sure.” She turned and walked into the crystalline hallways of the glacier, the sound of the wind fading. A few minutes later, she sat Lena back down on one of the natural stone benches in what Lena was calling the great hall. “Now, about this space directorate…”

“God, I need a drink. All right, so the thirteenth directorate was responsible for trying to find and harness any alien technology that might fall into our hands one way or another. Supposedly they had agents scouring the world for evidence of aliens and trying to obtain artifacts. Frankly, I think it was just a way for senior officers to waste more money on frivolous pursuits and inter office affairs. I never saw any evidence that we’d discovered something.”

“And the connection to Cadmus?”

Lena ran her hand over her head, brushing her fingers down her hair. “Like I said, nothing concrete. I recall a memo or two, but it was all interoffice bullshit from what I can remember. People talking about preventing aliens from ruling over us, that sort of thing.”

Kara huffed. “Why does everyone think I want to rule over you? Don’t you realize how stupid that is?”

“How could we not, Kara? With the powers you have… you could dominate everyone on our world. Take anything you wanted, command us to grovel at your feet, you- you could make us do anything,” she said, licking her lips.

Kara threw up her hands. “But WHY? Why do you think that, Lena? I grew up as the daughter of a scientist and a judge. Every lesson I’ve ever learned has been about respecting truth, respecting the order of things.” She regarded the human in front of her, watching the microscopic reactions to her words. “Oh. Oh, I get it now. You’re afraid of what I might do because you know what YOU would do with my powers. You WOULD subjugate this world. Empress Lena has a nice ring to it?”

“I- no, Kara! I would-“

“Built-in lie detector, Lena,” Kara tapped the side of her face next to her eyes. “That is exactly what you’d do. That’s what any of you would do. You’re like rats fighting for dominance in a burrow. All you want is conquest, your entire species. More for you, less for someone else. That’s not how most of the galaxy works, Lena. We figured that out millennia ago.” She thought back to her early childhood visits to nearby planets, and the disastrous interplanetary wars with Daxam that they’d endured for centuries before both sides grudgingly agreed to a cease-fire.

Lena started pacing around the icy cavern. “It’s because… well, it’s because we don’t like how things are, Kara. And if we had the power to change them… we would. Make things better. Make things easier.”

“You’ve had that power all along, Lena. Look at what you’ve done to your world with it,” she said, her voice losing its acerbic bite.

“I… I know, Kara. We’re sort of stupid, I guess,” she sighed. “So anyway, that’s what I know about Cadmus,” she looked Kara up and down, tugging her lower lip between her teeth. “They’d have loved to have gotten their hands on you, that’s for sure.”

She thought back to her visits to the GRU’s headquarters near Moscow, rare as they were. There were plenty of rooms and even entire floors she wasn’t permitted to visit, but she’d never seen anything obviously alien in the halls. Then again, she’d considered Kara perfectly human until she shot her in the face, so her alien radar perhaps wasn’t the best to begin with.

“Must be an organizational trait,” Kara quipped, the slightest hint of a smile on her lips.

“Why Kara Danvers - sorry, Kara Zor-El, was that you flirting with me? Are you implying you’d like my hands on you?” Lena snarked.

Kara laughed, the first real laugh Lena had heard from the Kryptonian since before shooting her. “That wasn’t what I was thinking, but then, I suppose you do still owe me that wine date.”

“I’m afraid I’m out of wine at this very moment,” Lena chuckled as she gestured around the icy cavern. “Perhaps you can take a rain check?”

“Perhaps. Though knowing the truth about you now, perhaps that should be a vodka date instead,” Kara smirked before turning more serious. “I want to go after Cadmus, wherever it is. This thirteenth directorate, where is it located?”

Lena tilted her head. “Well, I mean… all the directorate heads are located at the GRU headquarters in Moscow. But-“

Kara turned her chin towards the roof of the cavern. “Great. Then that’s where we’ll head to start getting some answers.”

“Kara, you can’t just… walk into GRU headquarters. It’s not a Big Belly Burger, they’re not going to greet you and ask you what you’d like as a side with your top secret documents.”

A corner of the blonde’s mouth turned up. “I know. That’s why you’re coming with me.”

“Kara, I can’t-“ she started before feeling her feet leave the ground and then a second later, the harsh cold of the Arctic air against her face as they rocketed across the Arctic Circle towards Russia.

Author’s Notes

Kara’s observations about humanity accurately reflect how someone with a meta-genius IQ would look at Earth, in the same way we’d look at a mouse colony. Ruling it would have no point - all responsibility, no reward. But we get at the heart of the matter, thanks to Kara and Lena.

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Chapter Text

Moscow, Russian Federation

Less than 15 minutes later, Kara hovered over Grizodubova Street in the northwestern suburbs of Moscow as she held Lena in a bridal carry, the most convenient way to carry the human. “Where should we start?”

“Unit 29155’s headquarters is that rather ugly looking brown building, the one next to the shiny domed roofs and the circular front,” Lena commented, her stomach unsettled both from the rapid flight and potentially facing her former comrades in arms. “Directorate 13 isn’t necessarily going to be there, but if there are any records tying it to Cadmus, chances are we’ll find them in the facility somehow.” She wondered briefly if her handler, Liliya, would be in the building. She’d visited it only sparingly between assignments and Liliya had remained true to her word at Lena’s graduation; the agent had never laid eyes on her since.

“And you’re sure we can’t just walk in?”

Lena scoffed. “Well, you could probably walk in. Their weapons clearly wouldn’t do anything to you. Me… I’m probably not wonderfully welcome and much more easy to perforate than you are. Plus, we don’t want them doing something typical like destroying all their data and machinery before we get a look at it, so… no, no walking in. We’ll have to play it subtle. Damn, I wish you spoke Russian,” she mused, thinking of different scenarios in which she could infiltrate the building with deception.

“Why?”

“Because it’d be a lot easier to get into the building if we didn’t have to charge in, guns blazing. If you weren’t a threat, if you were disguised somehow, we might stand a better chance. But the moment you opened your mouth, the game would be up,” she sighed.

“Кто сказал, что я не могу говорить по-русски?” Kara asked in a perfect Central dialect. “Who said I can’t speak Russian?“

Lena’s eyes widened. “But- how? You never said-“

Kara offered a lopsided grin. “You never asked. I can speak and understand about 50 of this planet’s most common languages.”

“That’s astonishing. How?”

“Lena- I, I explained this to you already. I’m not human. I’m an alien. When my people sent me to this world, they prepared me for it. Inside the spacecraft I was brought here in, computers trained my mind to learn languages, culture, everything I needed to know to survive on this world.”

“Still, that’s… a lot of languages. How do you keep them all straight?”

Kara quickly descended a few blocks away in Berezovaya Park, through some dense trees to avoid being seen. “Lena, my brain is basically a supercomputer. I am probably the most intelligent life-form on this backwater planet. Human languages are easy, comparatively speaking. My people’s language closely resembles some of your more difficult languages all put together. Learning and speaking yours is no mental challenge.”

“That’s still… wow. I wish I had that level of skill. I only speak about half a dozen, and I have to be careful or I start mixing things up.”

Kara looked in the direction of the squat building ahead. “So, how do you want to play this?”

“Okay, since you clearly speak fluent Russian… delivery person is too obvious. Cleaning crew… no, we vet the cleaners very carefully because they might be exposed to sensitive documents. Journalist…”

Kara looked at the assassin, confused. “Do you… uh, get a lot of journalists showing up to your top secret spy headquarters?”

Lena smirked. “More often than you’d think. The bigwigs always want to show off their latest gadgets or clever ideas to impress Dear Leader, and what better way to do that than to have the media covering their bluster? Let’s see…” she muttered to herself, ticking off items on her fingers. “Vedomosti’s too international. Rossiskaka Gazeta is all government employees, too easy to check. You covered the business beat for CatCo reasonably well… so maybe Izvestia.”

She looked at the all-white outfit Kara was wearing. “And you’re definitely going to need a change of clothes. Something professional. Remember that Russians aren’t nearly as into what you normally wear to CatCo. We don’t really do bright, cheerful colors.”

In a flash, Kara blinked away from the park before returning with a black pencil skirt, white blouse, notepad, and a copy of Izvestia, the garish black logo easy for anyone to see. She thumbed through it quickly until she found a photo of one of the reporters. “Look, Lena… she even looks a little like me,” the blonde pointed at the black and white photo of Lidiya Lysenko, one of the junior business reporters.

“That’s perfect. Junior reporter, no one’s going to recognize you, and you can say you were sent over for a quote about… about one of the never-ending conflicts in Chechnya. Once we’re inside, you can do your thing while I try to find an access terminal that’s open and see what they have on Cadmus.” She smirked at the blonde’s outfit. “Dare I ask where that came from?”

“What, did I forget to remove the tags?” she laughed. “How long will we have?”

“Probably 15 minutes - a half hour at the most before my credentials get revoked and people start asking questions they shouldn’t. I wish you hadn’t crumpled my pistol into a ball,” she snarked.

Kara rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll be fine… and if you’re not, just steal one.”

The two women emerged from the park with Lena positioned behind Kara as though she were escorting the blonde under guard, her heavy coat over her hand. Passersby paid them no attention whatsoever as they walked down Grizodubovoy Avenue, huge hulking white apartment complexes surrounding the thoroughfare like the walls of a canyon. Turning onto a small side street, Khoroshevskoe Street, they found themselves in front of a beige, non-descript office building. Lena nudged Kara up to the doorway where a simple call box slid aside with the right passcode, revealing another tiny console and a thumbprint scanner. Lena pressed her thumb against the black glass, and the aged metal door buzzed open.

In the tiny, cramped, dusty foyer, two guards in all black tactical gear stood at the ready, their AKS-74U rifles resting against their chest armor. As soon as the door close, Lena spoke up. “I have a reporter from Izvestia here to speak with Colonel Sokolov.” Without a word, the guards opened a set of double doors, gesturing for Kara to go through. “Spasibo bol’shoye”, the blonde nodded with a smile as she walked towards the colonel’s office.

Once Kara had vanished into the belly of the building, Lena took the stairs up to the third floor, where most of the analysts worked. It wasn’t uncommon for field agents to use analyst workstations for research, especially of sensitive materials that the GRU wouldn’t want accessed outside of the building’s computer networks. Checking carefully to make sure she wasn’t being overly supervised, she started her search inside the agency’s labyrinthine computer system while the other analysts in the room typed away furiously.

Kara scribbled notes furiously and nodded as Sokolov, a stout, puffy middle-aged man with iron gray hair and a dour face, droned on about the GRU’s latest accomplishments in supporting Russian business initiatives around the world. He’d managed to hit every bland talking point Rossiya 1 had parroted for months now about the various special military operations around the world, extending Russia’s sphere of influence.

“Thank you for your time, Colonel,” Kara smiled as she closed up her notepad. “I will make sure our editorial piece reflects the good work you and your team are doing.”

Solokov laughed, a braying sound reminiscent of a donkey. “That’s completely unnecessary, Ms. Lysenko. Our leaders will know the good work we do here based on the results we bring. And I happen to bring,” he paused for a moment before drawing his Yarygin PYa pistol, “very good results, especially when it comes to catching spies.” He stood up from behind his massive oak desk, the pistol trained on Kara’s face.

Kara sighed. “How did you know?” she asked, not bothering to maintain her blown cover as the colonel made a slow circle over to Kara’s chair.

“The real Lidiya Lysenko was here not a month ago and was bragging about her new Lenovo tablet.” The colonel leaned down, his lips close to her ear. “The tablet that I managed to acquire for her despite the sanctions, in return for the favor she repaid me right in this very chair,” he bragged. Kara shuddered at the implications of the man’s words. “Now, what should I do with you, little bird? Shall I have my men simply shoot you? Shall I remand you to one of our prison camps? An attractive woman like you would be quite the comfort for the guards. Or perhaps you would like to trade a favor in this chair as well, hmm? I did have it washed after we were done.”

“You know, I think I’m just going to go,” Kara said, standing up and putting her notepad in her bag, not even acknowledging the matte black pistol the soldier had trained on her.

Sokolov brayed again. “You have spirit, I will give you that, little bird. It is a shame you’ve chosen what you have. I would have been lenient with you, but now you must know that you will never leave this room alive.”

Kara turned around and looked at the man holding the gun on her. She observed his position, his distance to her, his distance away from the desk, and her mind ran a million different scenarios and calculations all at once. “Before you shoot me, would you- can I have a sip of your tea?” She asked, nodding her head towards the gold and crystal teacup on the desk.

The colonel tilted his head, confused, before shrugging and handing the cup the blonde. “Who am I to deny a pretty woman a last request?”

In a split second, Kara splashed the tea all over the floor, dropped the mug at a forty five degree angle away from them, and kicked Sokolov’s feet out from under him. As he lost his balance, his feet skidded across the wet floor and his neck impacted the corner of the desk at just the right angle to snap it. His limp body hit the ground as Kara tilted her glasses down, staring through his flesh to confirm that the bones of his neck were indeed broken. She holstered his pistol before taking a step back and shrieking loudly. “HELP! SOMEONE HELP! PLEASE!”

Guards came barging through the door to see the colonel laid out on the floor, his head at an odd angle. Kara made a show of whimpering and falling to her knees. “He… he… he was so nice, and then he came over to me and… and he slipped, he slipped on the tea he spilled… please, someone do something!” As more guards and soldiers ran into the room, shouting at each other, she carefully slipped past them back into the main hall, looking for Lena.

Lena tapped her fingers nervously as the ancient computers - rigged to use Russia’s Astra Linux operating system - finished copying the corpus of files to a thumb drive. Just as the assassin pulled the drive out, the screen flashed bright red.

ВНИМАНИЕ

НЕСАНКЦИОНИРОВАННЫЙ ДОСТУП

The unauthorized access warning also meant internal security had been notified. She quickly left the workstation and headed for the fire stairwell; elevators were too easy to stop. Fortunately, this particular GRU building was a holdover from its Soviet days and while the offices of the bigwigs had been modernized, the rest of the building was still stuck in 1974 - which meant confining her to an area would be difficult.

Just as she passed the second floor door, alarms sounded loudly. Lena set her jaw, wishing she’d taken Kara’s advice and stolen a gun along the way, but at the time that seemed riskier if she’d been noticed.

“Medical emergency! Emergency teams to Colonel Sokolov’s office immediately!”

Fuck, Lena thought to herself. Something’s happened with Kara. She raced down the last flight of stairs, pushing open the door to the foyer where dozens of Spetsnaz soldiers and medics were scrambling to organize and determine what to do. Across the hallway, she spotted Kara hugging the wall, making her way to the door. For a brief moment, Lena thought the blonde would get clear until one of the guards spotted her.

“You there! No one leaves until the situation is clear!” he ordered, drawing his pistol.

Time stopped once again. Kara’s head turned to face the three security cameras in the room - one of them so well hidden that even Lena hadn’t known it was there - before instantly frying them with her heat vision. Once the recording devices were out of commission, Kara simply… vanished.

Lena blinked twice. One moment, the blonde was standing less than three meters from her. The next minute, the blonde had vanished into thin air, the guard looking around frantically. He charged out the front door, rifle held at chest level, but found no sign of the mysterious woman.

The assassin repressed a smile at her unwilling partner’s skills on display again as she made her way to a side utility door and out of the facility while everyone was still occupied with Colonel Sokolov’s unfortunate fate. On the ground not half a meter from the door was the pencil skirt and blouse Kara had borrowed from a nearby department store.

The moment she was out of the line of sight, Lena found herself a thousand meters above Moscow. “A little warning would have been nice, Kara!” She half-joked, clutching her bag to her chest.

“Sorry, I didn’t feel like answering any questions,” the blonde smiled as they tore across the sky, the bitter wind chilling Lena’s cheeks. “I had enough of those from that disgusting colonel.” As they made their way back to Greenland, Kara attempted to recount what had happened with the colonel, but the wind noise from traveling so fast made it impossible for Lena to gather more than a few words.

Once they’d landed and retreated inside Kara’s ice fortress, Lena fished the USB drive out of her bra. At Kara’s quizzical look, the assassin smirked. “At the speeds we were traveling? The only place that would have been safer would have been in a body cavity and believe it or not, these things are still sensitive to moisture.”

Neither woman was able to keep a straight face for more than a few seconds; once their laughter died down, Lena composed herself. “Now, here’s the catch. All these GRU drives are programmed to call home. The moment you put it into a computer, it immediately pings a central server, so we won’t have too terribly long once we access the information on it.”

“Lena,” Kara placed her hands on her hips and looked at the ceiling. “Do you see a lot of cell towers or wifi here? How’s it going to call home when there’s no Internet of any kind?”

Lena blinked twice. “Well, yes, I know that. But there aren’t exactly a lot of computers around here either, Kara. I assumed we’d need to travel somewhere to pick one up.”

Kara grinned as she opened up the backpack she’d tucked under her robes. “You mean like this one?” She smirked, tossing a stolen GRU laptop onto the obsidian stone Lena had started thinking of as her desk.

“Kara… if you had told me you could move that fast, and steal an entire computer without being seen, why did we go through the entire exercise of sneaking into the GRU?”

The blonde gritted her teeth as she shrugged. “I… I didn’t know I could move that fast, honestly. I’m still getting used to-“ she gestured up and down her body with her hands, Lena’s eyes following every movement, “this. You know, having superpowers. I’ve never had them before.”

As Lena opened the laptop, she nodded. “Because the DEO suppressed your memories as soon as you landed here, yes? So you weren’t like this on your world?”

“No. Krypton was a very different world. A lot more harsh, unforgiving. Our sun, Rao, was dying, so we didn’t have the energy that your sun has.”

Lena watched the Linux bootloader scroll across the screen, spitting up various startup codes and sounding little warnings that it was unable to contact its GRU servers. The laptops the GRU used still functioned just fine in offline mode, in case their spies needed access to information or software in inaccessible places. “Hopefully this will have the information we need to know what exactly Cadmus is,” Lena muttered as she loaded the contents of the flash drive to the stolen laptop.

Within a minute, she’d opened the cache of files and gasped. “I knew it. I fucking knew it. Lillian’s behind this. She’s behind Cadmus.” Kara leaned over, looking at a grainy photo of an organizational chart. Along with other names Lena had mentioned, she spotted two prominently near the top - Liliya Luchenko and Alexander Luchenko.

“Luchenko - that’s your name. Are these your family?” Kara asked, tapping the screen.

Lena scoffed. “They wish. I was given that name, but that wasn’t who I started out as in life. And neither of them treated me as anything other than cannon fodder.” She exhaled sharply, thinking back to the last time she saw Lillian, when Lillian forced her to kill Sofia to graduate. “God, this is going to take forever,” she muttered, staring at the stacks of files in the flash drive.

“Let me try,” Kara asked, pulling the laptop into her lap as she sat next to the brunette on the obsidian bench. Her eyes darted around the interface, making note of the navigation, then she began to leaf through the documents. Image after image flashed on the screen for less than the blink of an eye as the Kryptonian ingested and memorized all the information.

Lena watched the blonde carefully, the alien’s eyes taking on a more sapphire hue as she drank every bit of information from the flash drive, then proceeded into the contents of the purloined laptop. Her eyes moved so far that they appeared to simply glow blue.

In another few minutes, Kara closed her eyes and exhaled. “Your handler, Lillian, isn’t just behind Cadmus. She IS Cadmus. According to these documents and all the various bits connected to it, she built Cadmus right under the nose of the GRU. She’s been diverting funds and personnel for years now. Facilities in Yakutsk, secret operational cells in major capitals, surveillance everywhere… she’s been monitoring for any credible scrap of information about aliens on this world.”

Kara rubbed her forehead as she closed her eyes again. “That includes compromising the DEO as well. They compromised Henshaw five years ago when he began to have unauthorized sexual contact with an alien. Since then, Cadmus - Lillian - has called the shots there.”

“Kara?”

“Yes?” she responded, her eyes still closed.

“Why… why are you crying?” Lena regarded the Kryptonian carefully. Silent tears slowly rolled down her cheeks.

Kara opened her eyes and turned her head to look at Lena, and in that moment Lena felt like she’d fallen from a cliff. The ice cavern slipped away and all she saw was the brilliant topaz of Kara’s eyes, like staring into a too-bright light.

“Your mother… I’m so sorry, Lena”, her voice cracking and sounding like Kara Danvers for the first time since Lena had shot her, anguish written across her face. “Your mother didn’t drown.”

Author’s Notes

The scene with Sokolov is unapologetically cribbed from The Hunt for Red October, when Ramius kills his political officer, Putin.

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Chapter Text

Ireland, 1997

“Mama, spin me!” Lena giggled as her mother twirled her across the field of foxglove flowers, their purple cones dancing in the breeze and afternoon sunshine. Elizabeth Walsh held her four year old daughter by the forearms as they spun through the flowers, warm and safe.

“Let’s sit down for a bite, Lena,” the raven-haired mother smiled, pulling her precocious daughter into her lap. They sat down on a plain red linen blanket with a picnic basket straight out of the 1950s atop it. Little Lena clapped as her mother pulled out some of her favorite foods, especially soda bread and sliced cheese.

“Yuck!” Lena pouted, putting aside her slice of bread and cheese. “I want grapes!”

Elizabeth chuckled, rooting around the basket as she snuck a few bites of her own bread and cheese. “I’m not sure we have grapes, my little pixie, but we do have…” she dramatically dug around, “Some chocolate!” She announced as she pulled out a couple of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars.

Lena squealed with delight and mimed groping for the candy as her mother unwrapped one of the bars. “We’ll keep the other bar in the basket for now. It’s too warm a day to leave it out,” Elizabeth said as she broke the bar into little squares and gave Lena one.

After they’d finished their picnic lunch, Elizabeth put away the basket, tucking it under a nearby tree to keep it out of the direct July sunshine. She unzipped teh back of her yellow sundress as she called for Lena to walk down to the lake. “Come on, pixie, let’s have ourselves a swim before we go!”

“Mama, my tummy doesn’t feel good,” Lena grumbled, her palms over her midsection.

“Some nice cool water will help with that, pixie,” Elizabeth smiled as she kicked off her sandals and stepped into the clear, cool pond. “Come on, the water’s lovely!” she called out, stumbling on the stones underwater.

Lena clutched her stomach a little more and sank to her knees. The four year old lacked the vocabulary to explain how she was feeling; had she had the words, she would have told her mother that her stomach was doing somersaults and her legs felt curiously numb, like she’d been sitting too long. With every breath, the numbness spread more, her fingertips beginning to tingle.

Her gaze was torn from her fingers to the sounds of splashing in the water. Lena looked up, expecting to see her mother coming to get her, but instead was horrified to see her mother thrashing around in the water. She tried to call out to Elizabeth, but couldn’t make a sound; she felt as though someone had an invisible hand over her mouth.

Elizabeth’s splashing became more erratic, less coordinated, but just as silent. Neither mother nor child spoke a word, and all Lena could do was shed silent tears, frozen inside her own body, as she watched her mother sink beneath the water’s surface.

Across the shore of the lake, Liliya Luchenko watched her target expire. The moment Elizabeth slipped beneath the gentle waves of the lake, she started a timer on her watch. Once fifteen minutes had passed, she crossed off the assignment in her head. While as a mere foot soldier she wasn’t paid or encouraged to think, Liliya had ambitions to fulfill - and ambitions are fueled by careful observations.

This seemingly low value target was commanded by her superiors at the GRU, and while it was unclear what the target had done to earn this fate, Liliya didn’t particularly care. All she knew was that she’d gotten the job done flawlessly. The target was dead and the only witness was a four year-old child. She had intended to cross off the child as well, but her poison of choice had acted too quickly, and the neurotoxin paralyzed the child in place on land instead of in the water.

Just then, she realized that if the authorities were to recover the body and run a toxicology test on both the mother and the child, they might stumble upon the truth. Liliya grimaced and packed up her gear, then headed for the vehicle she’d parked away from the lakeside. The poison would keep the child immobilized for another 30 minutes easily, more than enough time for her to drive to the other side of the lake and retrieve the little girl before she could escape or get help.

She looked at the target dossier one last time before lighting the paper on fire. Elizabeth Walsh, target designated by the GRU for liquidation. Enemy of the state. No details as to why. Liliya weighed her choices. Should she liquidate the child as well, and dump the body elsewhere? Certainly it would have to be far from the little hamlet she’d made her base of operations. Which would be more complicated to deal with, a murder and a kidnapping, or a double murder? The GRU could easily exfiltrate the both of them, and no one would be the wiser.

Her mind set, she started the tiny car and drove towards the opposite shore.

Greenland, 2023

Lena collapsed, sagging against Kara before she threw her arms around the blonde and tucked her face into the alien’s neck, bursting into heaving sobs.

Kara wrapped her arms around the brunette, cradling her head against her. “I- I’m sorry, Lena. I didn’t know just… just how evil Lillian was until I read through all that. She… she’s the one who made you into a killer. She’s the one who must be held responsible.” Her mind finished processing the enormous amount of information they’d purloined from the GRU and she had as complete a picture of Lena’s life as anyone could possibly have - even more so than Lena herself.

She thought back to her meditation a few days prior, sorting out how she would have handled the entire situation on Krypton. With conclusive proof that Lillian was responsible not only for giving the orders that got Kara’s friend killed but also shaping Lena as a weapon from early childhood, Kara was able to absolve Lena of any wrongdoing. In her eyes, in the eyes of the law of Krypton, Lena was just as much a victim as James, as Auntie Zhang, as the trail of sorrow that Cadmus had left. The various tortures Lillian had ordered Lena subjected to alone would have been enough to absolve Lena on Krypton.

“We will obtain justice for you, Lena, and for your mother as well, I promise you,” Kara murmured as she held onto the frail human clutching her. Getting no response from her, Kara lowered her voice, pulling the brunette closer.

“Justice is a familiar concept to me, Lena. On Krypton, my mother was a Judicator. I suppose the closest thing here on Earth would be a judge, but instead of trial by jury, Judicators were the arbiters of the law. They alone decided the outcomes of the cases brought before them.” She thought back to how resplendent Alura looked in her white robes, slowly pacing around one of the many domes at the top of Krypton’s tallest government buildings.

Kara began to idly card her fingers through Lena’s hair as the brunette’s sobs slowed to whimpers. “It was clear from early on that I would not follow in my mother’s footsteps. The genetics of the House of El took greater prominence in my genetic makeup than the House of In-Ze, and I was created to become a scientist like my father and my uncle. But my mother couldn’t help but teach me what she knew of our laws and ways when I wasn’t studying the sciences.”

“It turned out that the Matricomp - the artificial intelligence which programmed our young and raised us until birth - had underestimated just how strong our two Houses’ genetics were. I was the youngest person ever admitted to the Science Guild, just months before my world exploded,” she sighed, feeling the gentle sensation of Lena’s fingertips against her back as Lena’s breathing calmed. “Even though I grew up as a scientist, I never forgot all the lessons about justice and order that she told me growing up.”

Kara gently took Lena’s face into her warm, smooth palms. “You have done horrible things, but you are not at fault for those things. You must understand that, Lena. Kryptonian justice would see no other way, and so…” she exhaled, closing her eyes for a moment, “…and so I absolve you of guilt for Jimmy’s death, for Lian’s death, for the people you killed on the bus and in the delivery of food. Your world’s primitive legal systems will not see it that way, but my world’s justice does. And as the wronged party here, my people’s laws take precedence. All that you have done must fall at Lillian’s feet, and she will be brought to account.”

Lena shuddered, hugging Kara ever tighter. “Th-thank you, Kara. I… I’m sorry. I’m still sorry, so sorry-“ she pleaded, continuing to dampen the Kryptonian’s robes.

“Shh. We will make this right, Lena. We will make this right for everyone.” She looked to the ceiling of the icy cave as though she could hear Lillian out in the world somewhere.

She looked down to feel the brunette’s breathing slow down and even out, clear signs that she’d finally fallen asleep after all the emotional turmoil. Kara gave more thought to all she’d read in the GRU files about Lena. Beyond absolution, she’d learned of nearly innumerable horrors foisted on the woman since childhood. Assaults of every kind, torture, cruelty beyond measure, even being forced to kill the only friend she’d had just to graduate her training, only to find out it had all been a ruse.

A small spark blossomed inside Kara’s chest as she considered all that had happened. Flirtatious though she was, Kara recognized Lena’s flirting as part evaluation tool and part defense mechanism. Yet the human had shown clear interest in a date, in sharing a glass of wine and getting to know the Kryptonian more. Granted, at the time Lena hadn’t known that Kara was an alien, but in fairness, neither had Kara known either. Perhaps after they vanquished Cadmus and removed the threats from their lives, they could pick that thread up. Objectively, Lena was certainly attractive.

Kara thought back to Krypton and her twelfth birthday. It was common among the Great Houses to start matchmaking at the onset of puberty so that the Matricomp had ample time to conduct as many genetic simulations as needed to ensure the ideal offspring. Alura had said that they’d looked as far as House Hu-Ul for a potential match for Kara, given how strong she was in the sciences. House Hu-Ul had been one of the most prestigious military houses until General Dru-Zod had attempted his overthrew of the government, and their eldest child, Faora, had been a promising match for Kara.

She reconciled the memories of meeting Faora at a formal convocation of the Houses; the young girl was just a year older than Kara and had short, jet black hair and a razor sharp jawline. Kara smiled to herself fairly as her fingers continued to weave through Lena’s hair; Faora and Lena bore a strong resemblance to each other, from the GRU photos of Lena at the same age. Idly, she wondered if Faora and Lena would have looked similar in adulthood.

A few hours later, Lena woke from her emotional turmoil, clutching Kara’s waist briefly as she stirred awake. “Wh- Kara?” She managed to cough out as she sat back up, her back aching from falling asleep in such a contorted way. The blonde, sitting as still as a marble statue on the obsidian bench, turned her eyes down towards Lena.

“How are you feeling?” She asked, her voice soft.

Lena grimaced as she pulled herself to sitting, working the kinks from her neck and jaw. “I’ve… been better. But thank you for… for sitting with me. I-”

Kara tilted her head as she regarded the brunette, silently waiting for her to continue.

“You likely know more about who I am than I do so… when this is all over, when we have stopped Lillian and Cadmus, if… if you’d be open to it, I’d like to learn what you know?” She dropped her eyes, unable to meet the blonde’s intense gaze.

“Of course, Lena. You are owed that as recompense at the very least. For now, we should start to prepare for our final campaign against Cadmus.” She gave the brunette one final squeeze as she stood up, then with her eyes carved a large slab out of the icy walls, catching it and laying it flat. In a few more sweeps of her heat vision, she cut a map into the ice. “From what we learned, this is the facility that houses the Thirteenth Directorate.”

Lena walked around the icy table a few times. “I… I don’t recognize where this is. The facility itself I’m sure is standard Russian GRU construction, but I don’t know the location.”

“Does the name Нижнея́нск mean anything to you? Nizhneyansk shows up several times in a few different purchase order documents, but they appear to be shipments of… not much,” Kara recalled.

“Nizhneyansk… that’s far, far up north. It’s in Siberia, in the Sakha Republic. There… there isn’t much there, as far as I can remember. Maybe an airfield and a small port, but that’s close to the Arctic Circle.”

Kara walked around the icy slab. “That makes sense. Cadmus would want some place where they could control the entire battlefield, be able to see anyone and anything in the area. A little fishing village would be predictable and easy for them to monitor.”

Lena tapped her lips with her index finger. “What’s the game plan?”

“Game plan?” The blonde tilted her head. “You mean, our objectives?” At the brunette’s silent nod, Kara rested her hands on her hips. “Endgame. Cadmus is at the heart of everything, so we cut the heart out. We wipe out Cadmus and everything about it, Lena. That frees you, frees me, frees Alex from doing the will of Cadmus through the DEO.”

“I… don’t remember what freedom feels like, Kara.”

Kara set her jaw firm. “You will.”

Author’s Notes

It always struck me that Lillian would absolutely do something to take out Elizabeth as revenge for Lionel’s affair in canon. This was my interpretation of that idea.

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Chapter Text

Nizhneyansk, Sakha Republic, Russian Federation

“Wouldn’t it be safer for you to simply wait behind until I’ve finished, Lena?”

Lena scoffed as she checked the magazine in her pistol, pulling back the slide halfway to ensure a round was loaded. “And miss my chance to have the last word with Lilit’s? How little you know me, Kara. She owes me, and before you put her down, I’m finally going to have a chance to say my piece.”

Kara nodded as she looked across the vast, featureless tundra at the small fishing town in the distance, her white robes fluttering in the breeze and masking her from sight against the cloudy skies. “I understand that. It was common in trials on Krypton for the victim to address their perpetrator and remind them of the path of true justice. I will not deny you that satisfaction.”

Moments later, Kara flew above the small town, looking for the features to map it to the schematics she’d memorized from the GRU laptop. With a small smile, she recognized one of the stone-covered hills just a few kilometers outside the town and flew over it. Whoever had designed the facility had made a noble effort to conceal it, but Kara’s enhanced hearing easily picked up the sounds of automatic gunfire deep underground. “I’ve found it, Lena,” she tapped her ear, activating the communications link they’d set up.

“What do you see?”

Kara described the hills, the muffled reverberation of gunfire, various patches of dirt peeking through the permafrost that could only be from the heat plumes of an underground building. “There’s a little hut in the center of a field. That seems like a logical candidate for the entrance to the facility. It appears to be mostly underground, though.”

“All right. I suppose the easiest thing for you to do would be to simply… walk in the front door,” Lena chuckled, remembering how lackadaisical the guards in Moscow had been. “Good luck. Remember that there may be alien technology here, so there are potentially weapons that could cause you actual harm.”

With a grim smile, Kara landed at the little hut, barely more than a field building. Looking around, she saw nothing that indicated a heavy security system, and pulled on the corrugated steel door. With a groan, the lock holding it closed gave way, and she peeled the door from its frame like opening a can of sardines.

Inside the hut was little more than a few desks and some dim lights; across the desks was strewn the usual detritus of soldiers barely paying attention - empty bottles of beer, playing cards, and cigarette stubs. She inspected everything carefully, looking for traps or a way to locate the way into the underground portion of the building.

Several traps had been laid out, but none appeared to be connected to a monitoring system, the largest of which was an antiquated bear trap, designed to maul an intruder’s leg. With a sly grin, Kara simply slapped the mechanism with her hand. The rusty steel jaws clamped around her forearm, bent out of shape. Once attached, she ripped it from the floor and folded it in two, putting it aside so Lena wouldn’t run into it later.

After a minute of wandering around, she heard it: one part of the floor had a slightly different sound when she walked over it. Kara pulled back the threadbare rug to find a steel hatch. Opening it revealed a ladder into the depths of the building, along with poison darts that lodged into her robes. She gathered them up and crumpled them into a ball, tossing it aside before she made her way down the ladder, finding herself in a maze of dimly lit metal corridors.

“Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!” a poorly dressed guard shouted, scrambling to raise his AK-12 sub machine gun. Kara rolled her eyes and with a burst of speed, simply grabbed the gun out of the soldier’s hands, tied the steel in a knot, and then smacked him in the jaw with it, knocking him unconscious. The commotion was enough to raise the alarm, however, and dozens of Spetsnaz soldiers came pouring out of the narrow corridors.

Automatic gunfire began to pepper the hallway, sparks flying from the walls as a veritable hailstorm of bullets landed on Kara. The floor pattered with the sound of deformed lead slugs hitting Kara’s body and simply bouncing off. As each moment passed, more soldiers fell to the floor injured or killed by ricochets and friendly fire. Kara simply stood at the end of the hall, her arms crossed, until the soldiers ran out of ammunition. Klaxons and red flashing lights activated as those soldiers who were uninjured ran away.

A few braver souls attacked her with crowbars, hammers, and knives once they’d expended their ammunition. With hardly a second thought, she simply shoved them into the walls, knocking them unconscious. By the time she made it to an unmarked elevator at the end of one corridor, the halls were strewn with the broken bodies of nearly a hundred Spetsnaz shock troops.

Kara stepped into the elevator and pressed the only button on the panel. Though she had little need to breathe as often as humans did, she did so out of tension, opening her senses to what she might encounter once the elevator reached its destination.

When the doors opened, she was greeted by a horrifying sight: a room of giant glass, liquid-filled tubes with different aliens held suspended in them. A few were obviously deceased, but most had some kind of life support equipment inserted into their chambers. She looked carefully at them, recognizing a few from her early education on Krypton. There was a Daxamite, deceased, based on the lack of life support equipment and the bullet holes in his leg. A green-skinned Coluan with black hair floated in another tank, a mask over his nose and mouth with small bubbles emerging from it. Further down the room, she saw an emaciated green, almost reptilian alien hooked up to an enormous amount of wiring and computers.

“What… what in the world is all this?” Kara breathed, looking over the vast rows of containers. Cyrillic labels marked each tank as to what the humans - presumably Cadmus - thought each alien was.

“This is keeping humanity safe from the likes of you,” a disembodied female voice filled the room. “All these intruders, all these conquerors, thought to arrive on our world and use their abilities to conquer us, to enslave us, to oppress humanity. All of them failed, and we keep them here to study them, to learn their weaknesses, to exploit their abilities and bend them to our will, to our cause.”

Kara whirled around, looking for the source of the voice but saw nothing. She spotted a series of cameras dotting the vaulted ceiling, and burned each out with her heat vision. The sparks and shards of equipment fell, sounding almost like small bells pealing as they bounced off the glass cages.

“Clever girl,” the voice snarled. “You think to blind me, to prevent me from acting against you? How naive. Now, let’s see just how resilient you really are.” White mist began to flood the room, a dense fog crawling across the floor. Kara took a deep breath and held it as the mist obscured her vision. The inside of her nose tickled from the gas, but she felt little else from it.

With a small smile, Kara squinted, focusing her eyes into the upper band of the electromagnetic spectrum where microwaves, x-rays, and gamma rays passed through the Earth. The fog nullified, she began to search along the edges of the room for doors or other means of escape. Her ears picked up the sounds of boots along the metallic corridors; she even began to catch snippets of conversation.

“Boss says the gas should have knocked her out like it did with the Daxamite. Once she ventilates the room, we have three minutes before the gas wears off. Sergey, Dmitry, get the alien off the floor. Andrey, prep chamber 43 for our new guest.”

Kara smirked. These humans clearly had no idea how Kryptonians worked. Daxamites were similar to Kryptonians, but not nearly as strong and with far more vulnerabilities due to the radiation exposure in their home system. They’d fled Krypton eons ago, long before Kryptonians had started genetic engineering in earnest to make living on their world easier. She made her way to the walls of the room and waited for the soldiers to enter through a hidden door that she’d missed in her sweep of the room.

As the two soldiers in the lead - Dmitry and Sergei, she assumed - walked into the room, she simply stepped behind them and ripped their gas masks from their faces. In just two coughs, each fell to the floor unconscious. Fan noise picked up around them as the unseen commander ventilated the room, revealing the third soldier holding a syringe and manacles. “What-” he spluttered before Kara plucked the syringe from him and shoved him into the wall, knocking him out cold.

Kara examined the wall where the soldiers had emerged, finding the nearly invisible seam for the door. With an easy punch, she crumpled the metal before pulling it apart as though she were simply tearing through a sheet of foil. After a short walk down the barely-lit corridor, she found herself inside a control room, dozens of screens showing scenes from around the world. Facing away from the door was a woman dressed in a charcoal grey suit, staring at the monitors. “Is the alien ready, Andrey?” she inquired, staring at footage from one of the hallway screens.

“Oh, she’s ready,” Kara snapped, putting her hands on her hips. “You must be Liliya, I presume?”

“She is,” Kara heard a voice behind her, turning to see an out-of-breath Lena standing in the ruined doorway, an AK-12 in her hands. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, Liliya. I’ve dreamt about this day for eight years.”

The woman turned around, revealing her face. Stern, austere, no hint of warmth or kindness was visible in the frown lines etched into her flesh as though they were carved there. Her shoulders square, her jaw set - this woman was every bit the adversary that Kara had expected. “Have you, Yelena? And why is that? Petty revenge? A deluded sense of justice?”

“The bill always comes due, Liliya. You made me kill Sofia. You’ve made me kill dozens, maybe even hundreds of people over the last decade. You have to pay for what you made me do,” Lena hissed as her eyes darted down to the gun’s safety switch, ensuring the safety was off.

Liliya’s lips curled into a smile. “Then take your revenge, as befits you.” She held her arms out wide, her laboratory coat draped out wide.

Lena pulled the trigger, sending a three-round burst dead center into Liliya’s chest.

And Liliya laughed. “Did you really think I wouldn’t be prepared for such a… juvenile outburst, Yelena? I know you. I know how you think. I taught you everything you know, every trick in your book. I knew you couldn’t resist coming back, and it was only a matter of time before you found this place.” She stepped forward briskly and tore the rifle out of Lena’s hands. “Pity. I was hoping to get a few more years out of you before we had to retire you.”

Kara leapt into action, grabbing the rifle. She expected to simply yank it from Liliya’s hands and her eyes widened as she felt actual resistance.

“Aren’t you the interesting specimen?” Liliya mused before spinning the rifle around and smashing it over Kara’s head. The rifle itself shattered into pieces as Liliya followed up the strike with a solid punch to Kara’s jaw.

For her part, this was the first time Kara had felt any serious pain since before coming to Earth. Sure, she’d done things like stub her toe and other minor inconveniences, but for the first time under a yellow sun, she hurt. Massaging her jaw, she looked at Liliya with a furrowed brow. “What- what are you?”

Liliya sneered at the Kryptonian. “What every human will have to be to deal with threats like you, alien. I know who you are. I’ve been watching you over the years through the DEO, just waiting for this day. We’ve had to concoct some… interesting remedies to resist the threat you pose.” She kicked Kara square in the stomach, shoving the Kryptonian backwards against one of the desks in the room. “You have the Daxamites to thank for my abilities. Something they called Harun-El. Just a sliver of it injected into a human body is enough to help us reach parity with species like you,” she snarled.

Kara remained hunched over, waiting for Liliya to approach. As the enhanced human got within reach, she launched into a series of punches that defied the eye’s ability to see them, catapulting the woman across the room. The Kryptonian noted that even though Liliya recoiled from the impacts, she was incurring no perceivable injury from the hundreds of impacts against her.

The Russian recovered from the blows, turning away as many as she received until the wall they fought next to gave way, disintegrating into rubble. No longer surprised or caught off guard, Kara noticed that as hard as Liliya hit, she was substantially slower than the Kryptonian. Faster than a normal human, to be sure, but not nearly as fast as she was. She dodged a right cross and punched into the back of Liliya’s arm.

Liliya reacted, pulling her punch and for just a brief moment, cradling her elbow. That told Kara that whatever Harun-El was - she’d never heard it mentioned by her father or anyone in the Science Guild - it clearly gave humans greater abilities, but it had finite, diminishing effects. She mounted another series of attacks against Liliya, repeatedly kicking her in the thighs and midsection, driving the woman through wall after wall like a children’s cartoon brought to life. Bruises flared to life on her skin, fading away seconds later, but Kara confirmed her hypothesis. Each bruise took slightly longer to heal.

After the fifth or sixth wall, Liliya spun around, feinted at Kara and as the alien dodged the attack, Liliya sprinted past her to reach Lena. Before Kara could intercept, Liliya grabbed Lena’s arm, wrenching it behind her back as she wrapped her forearm across Lena’s throat. “Not a step closer, you filthy alien, or I’ll snap her in half like a twig.”

Kara arched an eyebrow. “And? You expect that threat to have meaning? You ordered her to kill me. You ordered her to kill my friends, kill dozens of people. Do you think I hold some kind of affection for her? For you? For any of your species? All I ever wanted was to be left alone, to mourn the loss of my world, and all you have ever done is hurt me. You stole my memories. You stole what childhood I still had left when I came here. You stole my abilities, my intellect, everything that made me who I am. Kill her, for all I care. Once she’s out of the way, I’ll finish you.” She heard Lena’s heart rate accelerate and the first tiny droplets of sweat break out on the brunette’s forehead as her eyes widened. Kara could almost hear Lena protesting in her mind, wondering what their nascent friendship had meant.

“What-“ Liliya spluttered, “You!” She turned her gaze to Lena, tightening her grip and readjusting. “You were supposed to seduce her, you pathetic deviant. You were supposed to win her heart so that we had leverage over her, so that we could emotionally blackmail her. What good are you otherwise, you useless homosexual?”

Harun-El may have made Liliya stronger, but it didn’t change her fundamental physiology. Kara could still see her body’s reactions, the muscle fibers twitching, the blood flowing, the nerves firing. As though time had slowed to a crawl, she could see the chain reaction of impulses that told her Liliya’s next movement was to kill Lena. She squinted, summoning the energy stored inside her body to aim a beam of intense heat vision squarely at Liliya’s forehead.

Nothing happened in the first few milliseconds, but then the skin began to redden, then char slightly. Liliya leapt back, recoiling from the pain as she let go of Lena involuntarily, who fell limp to the floor. Once Lena was out of the line of fire, Kara widened her gaze, the beam engulfing all of Liliya’s head. The rank odor of charring flesh and burned hair filled the room as Kara’s heat vision pressed Liliya back against a wall, her hands over her face as they muffled her screams.

Kara picked up the severely burned woman, the Harun-El all but exhausted from her body’s attempts to heal from the Kryptonian onslaught. “All your fancy tricks. All your evil. All your abuse and torture of people like me, and you’re still weaker than any of us, Liliya.” She slammed the woman to the floor. “Your fate will be that of the worst criminals on my world. You will be exiled from the rest of your people to live out your days, tormented by your failures. Cadmus ends here and now.”

“Kara-“ Lena gasped as she began to pick herself off the floor, her body screaming in pain from the injuries Liliya had dealt her. Her shoulder and elbow were dislocated, and her back aches like she’d slept on it wrong for a week. She struggled to her knees, then reached out to the blonde.

And in that moment, from a crouch two meters away, Liliya sprang forward, driving a piece of the metal wall into Lena’s back. The jagged tip ruptured her shirt just at her abdomen, staining it red with her blood. Lena spun as she fell to the floor, grabbing Liliya’s arm and pulling her down. Liliya gasped and clutched her side, finding the handle of a stiletto against her ribs, the blade already deep in her chest.

Lena pulled herself up to Liliya’s ear as the light in the elder woman’s eyes dimmed. “I told you… if I ever saw you again… I would… kill… you,” she whispered, droplets of blood flecking the burned woman’s flesh. “This… is for… me… and… Sofia,” she managed before losing consciousness.

Author’s Notes

Throughout the various fandom wikis, Harun-El is kind of this murky substance, so I just went with it at a surface level. Logically, it would have a half life, as would any kind of administered medication - just enough to pose an actual challenge to Kara.

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Chapter Text

Lena woke slowly, disoriented. She’d expected to not wake at all, to simply fade away. A small part of her had hoped to awake at the side of a pond again, this time able to swim with her mother. As her faculties returned, she could sense her body once again, feeling returning to her extremities. Her surroundings came into focus. A hospital, or something very much like it, though the room was lit with LEDs in the ceiling - and no windows at all. She was laying in the hospital bed, a blue gown covering her as nearby sensors beeped. Lena turned to look at the display; her heart rate was a normal 55 beats per minute, her blood oxygen levels good. She’d been in enough hospitals around the world to easily know what her condition was.

The last thing the assassin remembered before the world faded away was watching Liliya die atop her, even as the weight of her handler’s body made her wound scream. She’d won, gotten revenge for all the torment and pain the spymaster had inflicted over the years, and was content to die.

Lena’s hands unconsciously moved to her stomach, remembering the flash of pain and the jagged metal protruding from her abdomen. She closed her eyes for a moment, bracing herself to see just how bad the injuries were. Alive though she might be, Lena knew her days in the field were over - and possibly the days of eating solid food or digesting it normally were over as well. She half expected to see part of her body missing. Sighing, she hiked up the blue gown slowly, then gasped.

There was nothing. No injuries. No scars. No evidence that she’d even been injured, much less mortally wounded. “I don’t- what the hell…” she muttered aloud, gritting her teeth…

… and gasping again. She had feeling in her teeth on the left side of her jaw, the part that her mother’s interrogator had broken in torture. The dental implants that they’d crudely installed were gone, and in their place were… her teeth, her natural teeth. Lena searched the tiny hospital room, sweeping her eyes over every detail she could manage as her breath quickened. She spotted the call button on the side of the gurney and slowly rolled to her right side to reach it, expecting pain but not receiving it. Gingerly, she pushed the red button which lit up as brightly as a traffic light.

A woman walked in wearing a lab coat and carrying a table computer. Lena looked her over - tall, hair somewhere between brown and red. Serious, stern. No identification tags, which boded ill. “Простите? Где я, медсестра?” she asked. If this were a GRU installation, whatever had been done to restore her to health was likely to be undone shortly.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” the redhead said quietly, not unkindly. “I don’t speak that language.”

“Oh, I was asking, um, where am I, nurse?” Lena corrected, switching to her Californian accent to match the nurse.

“Well, I’m a doctor, not a nurse, and you’re in a private medical facility, Miss Luthor,” the doctor said.

Lena resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I see. Thank you, doctor. Could you… where exactly is this facility? I mean, what part of the world am I in?”

“Ah. You’re back in National City.”

“How long was I out?”

The doctor checked her watch before offering a small smile. “A couple of days. You were brought in under some… unusual circumstances, and your body needed to finish healing.”

Lena brushed the back of her teeth with her tongue, wondering just what kind of healing had been done to her. “Finish healing, you said? I’m afraid I don’t remember what happened to me.”

“What’s the last thing you remember, Miss Luthor?”

“I was in a great deal of pain from… from an abdominal wound,” she hedged, not trusting the doctor’s intentions. She was at a disadvantage; the doctor knew who she was, but she had no idea who the doctor was, no indication whether she was a civilian doctor or something else. “Could you tell me how I got here? I’m afraid I don’t remember very much.”

The small smile on the doctor’s face grew. “Ah. You’ll probably be wanting to talk to my sister about that. She’s the one that brought you in.”

“Your sister?” Lena tilted her head as she started to piece together the puzzle. “You must be… Dr. Danvers, I presume?”

“Dr. Alex Danvers, and yes,” Alex smiled, extending her hand. “Pleased to meet you. My sister should be along momentarily; I let her know you’d awakened.”

No sooner had she finished the sentence than the curtains around the room were knocked aside by a gust of wind as Kara sped into the room. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Lena,” Kara said, her hands clasped behind her back as her white robes settled around her.

“Thank you. I assume it was you who saved me and brought me to… wherever here is?”

Kara nodded. “Here is National City, in the former Department of Extranormal Operations, or DEO. After Cadmus fell, things have been a little disorganized here, but we’re getting them on the right track. They had the right medical facilities to treat you after what happened at Cadmus.”

“What DID happen, Kara? The last thing I remember was being impaled by Liliya and stabbing her.”

Kara smirked. “Well…”

—-

Kara watched as the two Luchenko women fought it out. Should she intervene? Lena was so adamant that this was her fight, this was her bid for revenge, even though she was badly injured. Kara had no need for revenge - as long as Liliya was neutralized and couldn’t cause any more harm, that would have been good enough.

She watched as the light in Liliya’s eyes vanished, courtesy of the stiletto that Lena had perforated the elder woman’s ribs with and the jagged piece of metal they’d both been injured by. With her enhanced vision, Kara could see that Lena would soon follow suit; the damage to her internal organs was mortally wounding.

The Kryptonian sighed. Should she attempt to save Lena? She was a friend, of sorts. She’d also committed dozens of murders. Perhaps this was the justice she had earned, the final reckoning. Kara shook her head. She was no arbiter, no adjudicator. It wasn’t her place to pass judgement, and life came first. Life always came first, even if it was human life on a world teeming with it. To do any less would be to forsake her Kryptonian heritage.

Something tickled the back of her mind as she computed the best way to save Lena’s life. Virtually every scenario had less than a 3% chance of the human surviving. Then her eye landed on the debris of one of the workbenches. There was a shattered glass vial on the floor with shards of what almost looked like obsidian. On closer examination, it had almost a violet glow to it, and Kara could feel its latent energy stinging her skin.

This must be Liliya’s Harun-El,” she thought as she bent down to pick up the black stones. Immediately, her fingertips began to burn, the flesh reddening. She dropped it, grabbed another piece of shattered steel nearby, and bent it into makeshift tongs to grab the alien rocks. Liliya had said just a sliver was enough to give her powers that were nearly Kryptonian in nature.

Kara closed her eyes and recalled all the research she’d read from the GRU computers. Within Cadmus, all their medical and scientific data was available to her mind, an open book. She recalled their research on the Harun-El; in addition to its power-granting capabilities, it was also capable of healing even the most traumatic wounds in ordinary humans and many other species that weren’t sensitive to epsilon radiation. The substance had to simply be introduced into the subject’s bloodstream.

The Kryptonian quickly scanned the environment; amidst all the damage to the lab benches, there was still one bench in the far corner undamaged. She sped over to it, tongs in hand, and rifled through the drawers until she found an undamaged syringe. With as much care as she could muster, Kara took the Harun-El and placed it on the workbench surface, grabbed a nearby mortar and pestle, and ground the stones into a fine powder. Once pulverized, she took a small spoon and tapped a few milligrams of the powder into a syringe, then filled it the rest of the way with water.

Wasting no time, she injected it straight into Lena’s heart. Within moments, the human’s body began to convulse. Kara saw the wound attempting to seal around the jagged metal, so she ripped it free to allow Lena’s abdomen to close up. In another few breaths, her pallid color began to flush, her skin pinkening as the flesh began to knit together. She looked through the brunette with her enhanced vision, seeing the damaged organs restoring themselves; the Harun-El itself in her bloodstream glowed like violet fireflies throughout her body, some winking out as their power was consumed by the healing process.

Kara smiled in satisfaction; though they’d not been friends per se, she felt a kinship to the human, especially after all the trauma bonding they did over the death of Lena’s true mother. Lena’s breathing evened out as the stress and strain of the injuries began to fade, and Kara held her close.

Until the floor began to rumble. In the distance, a klaxon sounded, along with a heavily garbled announcement in Russian. Warning, dead drop switch activated the bloodless voice announced. At the automated warning, Kara looked at Liliya’s corpse, seeing the dead woman’s wristwatch glowing bright red. Self-destruct sequence initiated. 60 seconds to facility liquidation, the voice announced, then began counting.

Kara’s eyes widened as she realized what Liliya had done posthumously. With no time to spare, she grabbed the Harun-El powder, stuffed the rest of it in the syringe, then carefully picked up Lena and raced out of the underground bunker. In moments, she was kilometers away, outside an abandoned seasonal hunting cabin. She opened the unlocked door to find a temporary resting place for Lena, then raced back to the facility to free as many of the captive aliens still held there. Those who were most ill or injured, she injected with a small dose of the Harun-El as she evacuated them.

After all was said and done, she’d managed to free almost two dozen fellow aliens before the timer counted to zero and the facility exploded, creating a massive sinkhole that the buildings were swallowed by.

—-

“That is… incredible,” Lena sighed as she reclined in the hospital bed. “So what happened to the aliens you rescued?”

Kara smiled broadly as she sat down on the far corner of the bed. “They’ve been resettled for the most part. Hidden away, disguised so that no one can find them if they choose not to reveal themselves. Your world is clearly not ready to deal with any kind of extra normal life, so it’s best if we keep quiet and out of the way.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the DEO coming after you again?”

“Not any more. Cadmus had the previous director killed after he failed them and confessed their existence to me,” Kara sighed, looking at the door to the room. “But one of the aliens I rescued is a shapeshifter, so they’re covering for the old director’s absence. It works out nicely - one of my kind covertly in charge of the organization that’s been hunting them down for years now.”

Lena pressed the button on the side of the bed to bring her slightly more to a sitting position. “And why tell me?”

“Because you made the right choices, in the end. You could have turned on me at any point, let Liliya know I was coming, ambushed me… you had opportunities to betray me to your own benefit, and you chose not to. Despite the actions you took under duress, you are not my enemy, Lena. And it was by your hand that our mutual enemy was slain. So I figured,” the blonde shrugged, “what the hell.”

“What the hell indeed,” Lena smiled. “That stuff is… well, damn near miraculous. All the old injuries I had, all the scars… it’s gone, Kara. The pain is gone, the scars are gone,” she murmured, “… only the memories remain.”

Kara nodded in agreement. “I know what that feels like, to have the legacy of those memories burdening you. But it sure beats having them and the scars, doesn’t it?”

Lena tilted her head back, sighing. “I suppose so. The question is… now what? Cadmus has been terminated, but I’m sure the GRU won’t necessarily appreciate us blowing up their facility. Do I just go back to work at LuthorCorp, pretend none of this happened, and hope no one picks up the loose threads? We did leave a bit of a paper trail in Moscow.”

“We did,” Kara laughed, remembering the shocked faces of the soldiers as she super-sped past them. “How do you think they’ll handle it?”

“Knowing them, there will be a lot of finger pointing and probably a few people will get one-way vacations in Siberia to cover up the embarrassment. That’s usually the way it goes, and as long as nothing’s obviously wrong, it’ll just get swept under the carpet.”

Kara stood up. “Then it sounds like the problem’s more or less solved, no?”

“And what about you, Kara? What will you do now… now that you’re no longer your former self?”

The blonde made her way to the hospital room door. “I- I’m not really sure just yet. I’m not sure who I am now, and whether I could force myself to… to go back to that life.” She thought about the life Kara Danvers had been forced to lead, as an assistant and then a journalist, her true nature suppressed by the DEO. “When I figure it out… maybe I’ll let you know.”

”Well, I can suggest at least one thing that could help with that,” Lena smiled.

“Oh?”

“I do still owe you that wine date.”

—-

National City, 1 week later

“I’m not sure I belong here, Lena. Look at this place!” Kara muttered as she brushed imaginary lint from her beige jacket and skirt, examining the surroundings of the wine bar. The entire room was paneled in cherry wood mounted on exposed black brick. Bottles of every sort lined the walls, some with labels so old, the paper had yellowed slightly. Across the bar, a glass-enclosed room held stacks of bottles as though it were a library as impeccably dressed staff circulated, carrying glasses and bottles to patrons nestled in cozy booths. A faint sound caught her attention and she squinted, her enhanced vision revealing not one but two cellars below the bar filled with wines.

Lena chuckled as she guided them towards a booth in the corner of the room. “It’ll be fine, Kara. I come here all the time, the staff knows me and will take care of you,” she smiled, shrugging off her jacket and handing the blonde one of the menus.

Kara’s stomach felt like it was going to leap out of her throat. “L-Lena, the prices… does this menu really say that a single glass of wine from Chateau Canadel in Provence is $110? And the bottle is $480?”

“Well yes, that’s pretty typical pricing here. The wines are very good, though, and many are difficult to get. That’s why I come here usually.”

“I think you’re getting ripped off. Next time I fly… uh, fly to France, I’m going to see what they really charge for a bottle,” Kara grumbled, perusing the rest of the list. “Despite my, uh, abilities, I can’t actually afford anything here. The cheapest glass of wine is like $50.”

Before Lena could say anything, the sommelier arrived at the table. “Ah, good afternoon Ms. Luthor. A pleasure to see you again as always. The usual for you, and what can I get your companion?”

“Thank you, Renato. For my date, how about the Mas de Daumas Rose Frizant?”

“Very good, Ms. Luthor. I’ll be back momentarily.” The sommelier practically vanished.

Kara watched the man leave before turning her attention back to Lena. “Just how often do you come here? Also, your date?”

“I did promise you a wine date, didn’t I?” She grinned. True to his word, the sommelier reappeared as though from thin air, placed two glasses of wine in front of them, and vanished again. Lena raised her glass to Kara’s, the blood red wine a stark contrast to the pale rose sparkling wine. “To… well, I’m honestly not sure what.”

“To a second chance. For us both, literally. You nearly died, and the fiction that was Kara Danvers did die by your hand, however inadvertently,” Kara intoned, holding Lena’s eyes with her steady gaze as she took a sip of her rose.

As Lena sipped her own wine, a question popped into her mind. “I don’t suppose… can you get drunk?”

“Why, trying to get me drunk and have your wicked ways with me,” Kara joked. “No, alcohol has literally no effect on me. It never has, even before… before I got my memories back. Whatever the DEO and Cadmus had done to dampen my powers didn’t change my physiology, so no, alcohol has no impact at all. But I do like anything carbonated, so good choice on your part.”

Another server brought some small dishes of mixed nuts and a charcuterie board for the women to chew on. Kara dug in tentatively, to Lena’s amusement. The Kryptonian was still clearly trying to integrate who she had been and who she was in the present. “So, were you able to successfully resume the life and times of Kara Danvers?” Lena asked, enjoying a slice of aged Gouda.

Kara finished chewing her bite of prosciutto on a small toast. “I- no, not really. I resigned from CatCo. There’s just no way I can… I can be that person any more. I’m not her, I never was her. Now that I’m myself again, I can’t go back to writing ridiculous articles about high-waisted jeans and celebrity hookups.”

“I can understand that. Certainly not something I’d be able to do if I had your powers.”

“I haven’t changed my mind about humanity. You’re still a plague on this world, but… but I feel like there are still enough parts of the world that I have ties to. Alex, Eliza…” she paused before looking straight into the assassin’s eyes, “…you. Whatever I end up doing… if it means interacting with this world, with your species, I want it to mean something. Krypton is gone, my people are gone, but what we stood for - what we stand for still lives in me. I want my people’s memory to be a blessing wherever I go in the galaxy.”

Lena raised her glass to the blonde. “I’ll certainly drink to that.” After a long moment, she tapped her index finger against her lips. “What you said, when we were hovering over Moscow…”

Kara tilted her head. “Which part?”

“Where you said… your brain is basically a supercomputer. I was thinking…” she started before finishing off the remainder of her glass, “what if… what if you came to work for me, for LuthorCorp?”

“And join the organization that indirectly helped to finance Cadmus and the DEO and all the different anti-alien groups?” Kara nearly hissed, her eyes narrowed.

“We stopped… we killed the driving force behind that. With Liliya dead, there’s no Cadmus. You took care of the DEO. All these secret cabals have no sway over either of us any more. Think of it, Kara! You could do… do like you said. You could use that brain of yours to change this world, to make it better,” Lena gushed.

“And make you even richer?” The blonde scoffed.

“Fine, I’ll- I’ll make you a partner. A senior partner in LuthorCorp, subordinate only to me. Access to everything, and- and-” the brunette struggled, mentally scavenging through her company’s assets to find something that would appeal to the Kryptonian. Money beyond a certainly point didn’t motivate Kara. Power meant nothing to the alien; she knew that offering it would be pointless next to Kara’s actual powers. What would power mean to a super-powered individual who could rule the world in the blink of an eye?

Then she realized. She knew what Kara would want, what Kara would have wanted from the start.

Lena swallowed hard, as Kara leveled her steady gaze at the human.

“I’ll give you power over… over me. Over what projects we pursue and don’t pursue. Veto power, if you see something you don’t approve of.”

Kara slowly nodded. “To prevent another Cadmus. But I don’t need to join LuthorCorp to do that, Lena. You know I can stop you wherever, whenever.”

“That’s true, but… what if it didn’t have to come to that? You could nip things long before they became real problems, before government agencies and others really took notice of you. And… what if it’s not just humans, Kara? What if we get new visitors from other worlds? We saw plenty of evidence of that at Cadmus. They were obviously friendly, or at least not serious threats to us. What if there are those who aren’t so friendly?”

“What are you implying, Lena?”

Lena chanced reaching out and taking one of Kara’s hands in her own, marveling at how perfect the skin was. Smooth, soft, flawless, yet no weapons she had or knew of could cause any lasting harm. “What if we’re better together, Kara?”

At that turn of phrase, Kara’s eyes snapped away from their joined hands to look Lena dead on. “That- how did you know, Lena?”

“Know what?”

Kara sat back, exhaling. “That… stronger together. El mayarah, in my people’s language. It means stronger together, the creed of my family and my House on my world. That is our highest ideal in the House of El.” She turned away, watching waitstaff shuttling more bottles to patrons in what could have been mistaken as an elaborate dance. She squeezed her eyes closed, remembering the home she’d lost as suppressed memories washed over her. Alura, brushing Kara’s blonde hair as Rao crested over the horizon in the mornings. The deep rumble as the council chambers dome opened to the night sky when the High Council was in session. Jor-El and Lara bringing their newborn son, Kal-El, to his name day ceremony.

The Kryptonian opened her eyes. “With you. Not for you.”

“I’m sorry?”

Kara set her jaw. “I’ll work with you at LuthorCorp, but not for you. Because you’re right. We are stronger together.”

Lena beamed at the thought as she squeezed Kara’s hands. “I- thank you, Kara. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am. This puts my mind at ease in so many ways.”

“Does it?”

“Well, yes,” Lena smiled, baring her teeth like an apex predator. “LuthorCorp has some fairly strict fraternization rules, you see. And you working for me would definitely mean we couldn’t… well, pursue anything.”

The corner of Kara’s mouth tugged up. “Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to infringe on any of your human-made rules, no matter how silly they seem to me, would we?” She paused for a moment, looking over Lena’s vitals. Slight flushed cheeks, faster heart rate, more shallow breathing, dilated pupils. “What exactly were you thinking of pursuing?”

“Umm… well, I- ever since the day you set foot in my office, I’ve been wondering…” she tapered off, suddenly nervous. Lena’s mind flashed back to that day, seemingly lifetimes ago but only a week past. Kara, standing in her office, clutching her notebook in her very plain pencil skirt and blouse. The barest hints of what she’d thought were athleticism peeking through her questionable fashion choices that she now knew were alien biology. Arms that could punch through steel walls. Legs that could move faster than the eye could see.

Kara eyed the brunette, her mind taking in every detail and analyzing it carefully. Freed of her constraints, of her shackles, she recalled everything she’d ever learned about human physiology in the blink of an eye. “Your heart rate just went up another ten percent and I can clearly smell… oh. OH. Oh, that’s what you were thinking of pursuing, Lena?”

Lena knocked over her glass. “What? How- you- can you- Kara!”

“I wasn’t joking about my, uh, abilities, Lena. Literal supercomputer,” she smirked, tapping her temple. She tracked Lena’s sight lines, the brunette’s dusky eyes tracking quickly over her face, settling on her lips. “I bet…” Kara mused, “I bet you’re wondering what it would be like to kiss an alien, aren’t you?”

Lena stared, open-mouthed at the Kryptonian before finding her voice. “… yes.“

“There’s only one way for you to find out,” the blonde smiled sweetly as she leaned in.

The world faded away for Lena as their lips brushed against each other, tentative and soft. Kara was everything she expected and yet nothing like what she expected. Kara’s lips were soft, yet they hinted at something immeasurably strong, like velvet over iron. And the warmth… Lena had never felt such satisfying warmth in her life. Not the intensity of a sauna, but not the normal body heat either.

After what could have been seconds or hours, Lena pulled away, only then noticing Kara’s hands resting on her shoulders. “That was…” Lena began, barely speaking above a whisper.

Kara’s smile broadened as she arched an eyebrow. “Out of this world?”

Emotions raced across Lena’s face before she finally burst out laughing. “Kara! That was TERRIBLE!”

“Oh. I’m sorry it was so bad. I guess you’ll have to do it again.”

“What? No, not the kiss, the jok-“ Lena started, before feeling Kara’s hands gently cupping the back of her head and the alien’s warmth against her lips devouring the words on them.

Author’s Notes

Just the epilogue left now, friends!

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Chapter Text

One Year Later

“Thanks to the leadership of LuthorCorp’s cutting edge research teams, we’re proud to announce today our very first experimental cold fusion reactor,” Lena nearly shouted, her arms outstretched as images of the giant reactor filled the screens behind her. “This reactor promises nearly limitless, clean power using muon-catalyzed fusion. In fact, the electricity you’ve been using here today has been generated by our first prototype.” The CEO surveyed the room happily, idly brushing her hands down her black slacks.

The reporters in the crowd snapped photos and scribbled notes on their devices as quickly as they could. The LuthorCorp press secretary announced the opening of the questions period, and a raven-haired woman’s hand shot up immediately. “Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” the moderator acknowledged.

”Miss Luthor, this is a very impressive announcement, but cold fusion is a myth and has been for decades. How have you overcome the obstacles that stymied past researchers?”

Lena nodded at the reporter, noting her intense stare. “Indeed, there have been a number of serious obstacles along the way; without getting too technical, the biggest problem with past attempts has been the net energy loss. Our researchers discovered a way to generate the muon particles in a way that’s net energy positive. I’m afraid I can’t go into any more detail about that part, however.”

The reporter continued. “What’s your response to the energy companies that claim your reactors are dangerous?”

“They absolutely are dangerous… to their profits,” Lena snarked, a wry grin on her face. “Ever since we made our first announcements, they’ve been fear-mongering because they know this technology will put an end to perhaps 80% of their business. But if governments adopt these, we’ll cut carbon emissions by as much as 20% in the next 3 years.”

After nearly 15 minutes of a withering barrage of questions, Lena exited the stage to thunderous applause. Backstage, once the sound technicians had removed her microphone, she grabbed a lime seltzer from a waiting staffer as she headed to the company car. With a sigh of relief, she cracked open the soda water as the door to the car closed.

“So, how’d it go?” Kara asked, sipping her own seltzer.

“Really well. The fact that we’ve gotten these reactors online with no incidents and no leaks has been nothing short of amazing.”

Kara grinned at the pronouncement; in the last year, she’d shared some of Krypton’s most elementary technology with humanity through Lena. The much touted muon fusion reactor was derived from a children’s toy on her world, the equivalent of the primitive chemical batteries humans used. Once Lena grasped the concept of subspace domains and an electromagnetic spectrum that had multiple dimensions, progress went quickly. Muon-based power systems had been several hundred years old by the time Krypton met its demise; they had progressed to harvesting subspace energy directly, what humanity had only recently discovered as dark energy. Kara had simply implemented systems from the earliest century of fusion power for Lena.

“And we did it all without any outside funding or resources,” Kara said, reminding Lena of the earliest days of the project. Inquiries from a dozen of the world’s militaries had come in, even a few credible attempts at spying and recruiting LuthorCorp employees to decode and weaponize the secrets of LuthorCorp’s fusion successes. Kara had ensured that even had the secrets become known, they’d be nearly impossible to use in weapons system; there was no practical way to build particle accelerators in a compact format as far as humanity knew, and her designs were intentionally massive in scale. Until humans discovered ways to compact the space inside atoms, they’d never be able to turn Krypton’s technology into weapons.

“We did, a fact for which I am deeply grateful,” Lena murmured as she shuffled closer to the blonde. “I certainly didn’t relish the idea of being beholden to anyone else again in my life.” Brief memories of her constant struggles against the GRU and her handlers threatened to disrupt the nearly omnipresent sense of warmth she felt any time she was around her favorite alien.

Lena leaned over and gave her girlfriend a quick peck on the lips as their limousine pulled into the private executive parking lot at LuthorCorp’s new headquarters. She’d moved the headquarters from Metropolis fully once they’d ended Liliya and the threat of Cadmus; her private investigators had determined that the GRU considered all of Cadmus and the Thirteenth Directorate a massive failure that necessitated a coverup, so leaving Metropolis behind was essential.

The two women walked through the expansive lobby, decorated with the latest scientific achievements from around the company. Nearly lunchtime, the lobby’s enormous glass walls had rotated open, allowing fresh air into the building and open air dining at the ground floor employee cafe. Lena’s stride skipped a step as a notification pinged on her smartwatch. She held it up, glanced at it quickly, then took Kara’s hand and squeezed it three times.

Kara nodded silently as they made their way to the elevator bank. Once the doors closed, Lena swiped her ID against the scanner and the elevator began its descent into the basement levels of LuthorCorp.

“What do you think it is this time?” Kara mused as they glanced at the monitors in the elevator sharing the day’s news headlines.

“No idea,” Lena said with a touch of mirth in her voice. “But knowing how things have been lately, I’m sure it will be entertaining.”

After passing by all the numbered sub-basements, they finally arrived at LL22, far below National City. The doors slid open to reveal another set of metal doors, which Lena badged through. The couple stepped inside a cozy office, complete with a couple of desks, equipment lockers on most of the walls, several messy lab tables, and a wall-sized screen. As soon as Lena walked to the wall, it lit up with LuthorCorp’s logo and a short chime.

“Voice authorization Lena Luthor, passcode KLDZL-E-38,” she announced, additional quiet chimes indicating she’d given the correct codes. The screen flared to life once more, this time displaying the DEO logo. Alex’s face filled the monitors, breaking into a smile at seeing her sister with the brunette.

“Director Danvers, to what do we owe the pleasure?” Lena asked, opening a can of tonic water for herself and Kara.

Alex’s smile broadened. “Agent Zor-El, Agent Luthor, good to see you. We’ve had reports of anti-alien activity near the Kasnian border, and we suspect that it may involve our old friends the Bratva.” The screen split to display a map and some grainy surveillance photos.

“Seriously, Alex?” Kara barked. “I helped you upgrade all your satellites six months ago and this is the best photo you’ve got?”

Lena covered her mouth, stifling a laugh, as Kara ranted for another two minutes about subspace relays and imaging arrays. Finally, once the two sisters slowed to muttering, she spoke up. “Kelex, please enhance the image using the LuthorCorp neural imaging models,” she asked the omni-present AI that Kara had deployed a few months ago.

“Image upscaling is complete. Review results and provide feedback,” the neutral voice called out.

Kara stood next to Lena as they examined the photo that Alex had sent over. “One of these days you’re going to have to show me how to do that,” Alex muttered over the line as they inspected the results.

“Trade secret from Krypton, Alex,” Kara smiled. “Now… I recognize that one,” she pointed to the photo of two men standing outside a coffee shop talking. “That is almost certainly Alexander Luchenko,” she pointed out, recalling his image from the Cadmus files she’d memorized. “Not sure about the other one.”

Lena sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The other one is Mikhail Davidov. He’s a pakhan - a Bratva captain. What is it they’re into, Director?”

Alex’s smile faltered. “You’re not going to like this part, Kara. These two have been kidnapping aliens - like Cadmus was - but instead of experimenting on them, they’re just torturing and killing them. We’ve found a half dozen bodies in Kasnia in the last two weeks, and they’re aliens from faraway countries.”

Kara’s jaw hardened. “They’re preying on my kind because they know they can,” she fumed.

Alex nodded in assent. “That’s exactly what’s happening, unfortunately. Fortunately, we’re in a position to do something about it.” The auburn-haired woman smiled grimly. After the fall of the old DEO, the Martian shapeshifter they’d replaced Hank Henshaw with had “retired” a couple months later, naming Alex as the new director. Since then, Alex quickly pivoted the organization’s purpose from hunting down aliens to protecting them as much as possible.

“Orders?” Lena asked, her eyes darting to the various equipment cabinets in the room filled with her inventions. Once she’d freed herself from Liliya’s machinations, she’d had enough free time even as CEO of LuthorCorp’s National City division to return to the labs and start constructing new technology - especially with Kara’s help.

“Take care of the problem, Agent Luthor. No collateral damage, no attention, but this… I know this happens to fit in your skillset especially well. Make sure Luchenko and Davidov don’t have any more victims. And make it clean. The last thing we need is the Bratva poking around the DEO.”

“Understood,” Lena gave a thin smile as she opened up one of the lockers, the wall-sized screen going black. She pulled out case after case from the locker onto a workbench, fishing out sniper rifles, submachine guns, night vision goggles, rip-stop uniforms - all the tools of the trade for the assassin she still was at her core.

For her part, Kara tapped a gold necklace she wore, and tiny black metallic particles flowed out of it, pouring down her body until she was in a skin-tight, scale armored body suit, her family’s crest embossed in it.

“I have got to get me one of those,” Lena murmured as she changed into her battle fatigues.

“Maybe for your birthday,” Kara smiled sweetly as she loaded up the cases onto a rolling cart that one of her robots immediately took up a cargo elevator.

Lena swiped open her smartphone, connecting with her assistant. “Jess? Can you move my calls and meetings for the next…” she glanced at Kara, who smiled back, “three days? I’ve just had an urgent matter come up near our Kasnian facility.” After a few minutes of back and forth with her assistant, she ended the call. “The jet will be ready in about 15 minutes. Shall we?” She asked, holding out her arm.

“We shall,” Kara grinned, looping her arm through Lena’s. “It’s a shame you don’t just want me to fly you places more often.”

“The wifi is better on my jet. The food is better on my jet.”

Kara rolled her eyes. “But it takes so long to go places!”

“Need I remind you, Kara, that the bed is also far more comfortable on my jet?” Lena grinned.

“Oh. Yes, yes it is. Come to think of it, the jet is a better option after all,” she smiled. “I really like that bed.”

“I really like you in that bed,” Lena quipped back. “And the sooner we get to the airfield, the sooner we can enjoy that bed together.”

Kara smirked as she pressed the button in the elevator to the private garage. “Sure you don’t want me to fly us to the airfield? We could get to the bed- I mean, the jet faster.”

Lena licked her lips. “As a matter of fact…”

the end

Author’s Notes

And that’s that for Assassin’s Credibility. Thank you for sticking with the story, and I hope you enjoyed ot.

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