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Lena stood in front of her open wardrobe. She knew she was being silly, it didn’t really matter what she wore, she had been married to Kara for heaven’s sake. Technically she still was. Not that Kara would exactly be there to care what she was wearing anyway. She sighed and ran a hand through her hair, still caught in indecision anyway, before settling on a dark suit with a crisp white shirt she felt comfortable in. And it didn’t hurt that she knew she looked good in it too, all of Kara’s half-finished sentences and obvious checking her out the first time she had worn it, confirmed that much. She half smiled at the thought, before continuing getting ready; it was almost time again.
~~~~~~~
Alex greeted her with a smile at the entrance to the DEO and they walked through the lobby together, catching up a little before they reached one particular door, and the elephant in the room could not be ignored any longer. As Alex reached for the door handle, Lena made a small sound and Alex paused.
“Before we go in, how is she?”
Alex considered her answer for a moment, “she hasn’t changed much. Still threatening everyone, still angry and aggressive and not anything like herself.” Alex’s voice caught in her throat. “And she still needs to be sedated most of the time to avoid it using her powers and getting out of control.” Even after a year, it was still difficult to look at someone you love and know that it wasn’t actually them looking back.
Lena gave a sharp nod. She had been mentally preparing herself for this since her visit last month. But it was still going to hurt; it always did. She took a breath and opened the door confidently, holding it open for Alex behind her before walking up to the gurney. Lena looked at Kara, lying strapped to the table with a perpetual snarl on her face. It still looked wrong, for the love of her life to be wearing the Supergirl suit and yet to be the farthest thing imaginable from her Kara Danvers.
Kara saw who had entered. “Oh, it’s you again. Haven’t they told you to fuck off yet? Get a life and stop-” her face slacked suddenly and Lena looked up in surprise to notice Alex pressing a now empty syringe to Kara’s upper arm. Except it wasn’t Kara, Lena took a moment to remind herself.
Alex looked almost apologetic as she taped a piece of cotton over the needle mark, though she had nothing to apologise for; the powerful alien parasite who had taken hold and corrupted Kara from the inside was the one to blame. And Lena did blame it, for taking Kara away from her and Lori, for keeping her sedated almost 24/7 because it would use Kara’s powers to hurt people, for taking Supergirl away from a city and a world that desperately needed her almost as much as Lena needed her. It had a lot to answer for. Other superheroes could save the city, but no one else could replace Kara to Lena.
~~~~~~~
By the time Lena arrived home, she was exhausted. Mentally and emotionally, these visits always drained her, but it was better than the alternative of not seeing her wife. She kicked off her shoes and flopped back on the couch, relaxing into it with an arm over her eyes to block out the sunlight. She lay like this for a while, allowing herself to recover a bit before she had to start functioning like a person again and get on with her day.
Lena was just thinking about whether to order food in, when there was a double knock at her door. She sighed, before composing her mask again and padding over to the door. She peered through the peephole, and was slightly taken aback. Smoothing her expression, she unlocked the door and swung it open.
“Hi, I hope I’m not interrupting.” Ray Palmer stood there, with his trademark adorkable smile.
“Not at all, Ray, please,” Lena stepped aside and gestured for him to come in. She hadn’t seen him since they had pooled their resources to try and develop a new technology to save the city a few years back. It had worked and that had been the end of it.
He walked into the open living room, fidgeting with something in his suit jacket pocket slightly awkwardly. “You’re a hard person to figure out,” he said light-heartedly.
Lena raised an eyebrow, “I’m not sure what you mean?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean you, as in Lena Luthor. I meant, you as in, Supergirl’s wife.”
Lena kept her expression carefully neutral, allowing a confused smile to grace her lips. He had been an ally in the past, but Supergirl’s secret wasn’t hers to tell. “I’m not sure what you-“
Ray held up a hand. “Lena, I know.” He grinned, “I’m kinda in a supergang too. Gang? Team? I don’t know exactly, we haven’t really discussed it… But we’re something like that.”
There was a moment of awkward silence as Lena’s mind worked overtime trying to figure out why Ray was really here. She had been in too many seemingly-innocuous-actually-dangerous situations in her life to really trust someone’s intentions as they stated them.
“So uh, anyway, my point, is that you don’t need to worry about me knowing, I can keep a secret. And I know you can too.” He said the last bit pointedly. “I know Supergirl’s alive, and I know she’s being held at the DEO.” Lena’s heart rate spiked. “And I want to help.”
He brought a small vial out of his jacket pocket and held it out to Lena.
“This is a new and improved version of my nano-tech.” He didn’t mention that he hadn’t designed this one. Somehow, he didn’t think it would help the situation.
“I read about this,” Lena took the vial and examined the contents, gently swishing the liquid from side to side, “you used it to remove a brain tumour years ago.”
Ray grinned, “I knew getting it published in a journal was a good idea, even thought Felicity said it was dangerous.” He caught Lena’s amused gaze and cleared his throat. “But anyway, back to the task at hand. So, I think I’ve found way to make the tech target living parasites instead and… remove them.”
“You… think?” Lena’s gaze flicked to him sharply. “It’s an alien parasite in an alien host. That’s quite the risk considering no one’s been able to figure out how the thing works, let alone how to get rid of it.”
He looked at her in all seriousness, “but you can.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Unless-“
Lena closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose, “unless we used Kryptonite to weaken Kara first.”
“Not enough to cause permanent damage, just enough to stop the parasite using her powers and, you know, destroying everything in sight.”
“Unless Kara’s powers are the only thing keeping the parasite relatively at bay, and we go and weaken her to the point where the thing takes her over completely.”
Ray’s forehead creased. “That is… another possible outcome… Albeit a very unlikely one.” He interlocked his hands and gestured to Lena, “the way I see it, the parasite could be doing all kinds damage anyway. At least this way, you have a good shot at getting rid of it.”
Lena set the vial of nano-tech down on the table close to Ray and folded her arms. “I really do appreciate the thought, Ray, it was a kind gesture.” She gave him half a smile; it was as much as she could manage right now. “But don’t be offended if I don’t take you up on the ‘it might work, it might make it worse’ vial of liquid nano-tech.”
Ray held his hands up, “that’s absolutely fine. It’s your decision. But please, keep the vial. Just, in case you change your mind.”
He looked at her consideringly for a moment, then took a step back towards the door. “Anyway, I should be off; worlds to save, things to invent.” He paused with his hand on the door handle and turned back to Lena, “it was good to see you. Take care of yourself.”
She nodded and wished him well in return with another half smile, before the door closed and she was alone again. Today was turning out to be a lot more than she had planned for.
On the other side of the door, Ray walked down the corridor before glancing over his shoulder to make sure Lena’s apartment door was closed, before tapping his smart wearable and calling the first number on his speed dial. It rang once before a woman’s voice echoed down the hallway, “did it work?”
“I think it did, she didn’t suspect anything. But that’s how this works, right? This is what’s supposed to happen...”
Sara Lance took a sharp breath, “I guess we’ll find out.”
Back on board the Timeship, Sara Lance looked at another Lena Luthor.
“You’re sure this is how it’s supposed to be?” Something seemed off to Sara, but it also made sense.
Future-Lena nodded, “one hundred percent.” Which was true, in part; after all, Sara had asked her what was supposed to be, not what had actually happened in her own timeline. And she knew Kara was supposed to live, just like she knew Supergirl was supposed to be around for many years to come, not still stuck to a table because of an unrelenting parasite. If there was anything good about being a Luthor, it was being able to convincingly tell half truths without anyone realising they didn’t know the full story until it was too late to change anything.
It had taken her almost ten years of focusing on little else, sleepless nights and attempting to raise Lori as a single mum, to develop a cure for the parasite which had taken up residence in Kara’s body. Except the resulting cure wouldn’t work on the parasite in her own time, because it had had too much time to latch on and grow, slowly succeeding in it’s efforts to trying to take over it’s host. If she was ever going to turn into a supervillain, that would have been the final straw. She could have burned the city down when she had found out. But now, by a sheer stroke of luck she had run into Ray with the rest of Legends, and she had a chance to get the cure to a time when it would work and she would get back all but one of those ten years for her past self. She closed her eyes and allowed herself a moment of relief. She had faith that her past self would use the cure and save Kara, that it would work, and that this crappy reality she had been subjected to living for the past decade would be gone soon, paradox’d out of existence. But the cure would still exist; that was all that mattered. This would all be over soon.
~~~~~~~~
Present day Lena sat in her apartment, looking anywhere but at the vial of nano-tech Ray had dropped off. It was a full two minutes before she rose decisively out of her seat and walked to her small home lab to find a pipette and put some of this liquid tech under a microscope.
Examining the contents in the dip of the glass slide much like a child examines a new favourite rock on the beach, Lena mentally worked through the potential ways this could react differently to alien DNA, compared to the human DNA Ray had no doubt tested it on. Finding no obvious flaw, she fetched a vial containing Kara’s blood, which she had been using to try and study the parasite’s impact and remove it, and carefully took some into a pipette. She was about to add it to the nano-tech slide, when she paused, thought better of it, and put on safety goggles.
Feeling slightly more prepared for the unlikely event of an explosion, she hovered the pipette of Kara’s blood over the slide under the microscope, peered down the lens, and squeezed a single drop onto the slide. The effect was slow, but there was definitely something happening. Within a few minutes, Kara’s blood cells looked different. When no further changes appeared to be taking place, Lena paused, before going over to one of the temperature-controlled cupboards on the opposite wall and taking out a vial of Kara’s blood from before she had been infected with the parasite. Not even aware she was holding her breath as she did so, Lena put a single drop of pre-parasite Kara’s blood on a clean slide and put it under the microscope. She flicked between the pre-parasite blood and the nano-tech blood rapidly, looking for any differences between them. She didn’t find any. The nano-tech had effectively removed all traces of the parasite in Kara’s blood.
~~~~~~~
Lena burst into Alex’s office at the DEO.
“I’ve already tested it on several samples, and I know we should test it more extensively but we don’t exactly have a lot of potential bodies to pilot this on nor do we have enough of this to waste and it’s not like we could test it on her actual organs – she’s using them. But I’ve run several simulations in Hope on what could happen and they’ve all been successful-“
Lena caught Alex looking at her in total bewilderment and stopped, realising some context might be useful here.
“I’ve got… something. Something which might get rid of the parasite in Kara.”
If Alex had been holding anything, she would have dropped it.
“Here, I’ll show you,” Lena led her to the lab next door and carefully took the securely wrapped glass slides out of her bag and opened the wrapping, checking the cover slips were clear of any stray fluff and placing them under the microscope for Alex to see.
Alex walked over hesitantly, not quite ready to allow herself to get caught up in the hope emanating from Lena’s very presence in the room. Looking down the lens, she paused, “they’re the same.”
Lena practically vibrated with energy, “I know! That’s the thing, one is post-parasite blood mixed with nano-tech and the other was from before Kara got the parasite.”
This is what’s going to save Kara. The unspoken inference hung in the air.
Alex stopped for a minute to process all of this, before going back to her lab and picking up the sandwich she had been eating before Lena and burst into her office. “Okay, so how exactly does it work?”
Lena explained it in detail and showed Alex Hope’s simulation results, and Alex managed to keep up just fine, remembering more than she thought she would from her pre-DEO Bioengineering days.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Alex shrugged, “I trust you’ve worked this out and it all seems to make sense. According to the simulation, it won’t harm Kara. The worst that could happen is nothing. Let’s do it.”
~~~~~~~
After making sure Kara was safely sedated, Alex rechecked all the straps were set tight and securing her safely to the gurney just in case. The Kryptonite in the walls was already set to 17%. Meanwhile, Lena took a syringe and filled it with every last drop of the nano-tech liquid from the vial. When they were both ready, Alex nodded and Lena sterilised Kara’s upper arm with a wipe before injecting her with the nano-tech. They both knew it would take longer for the tech to act on all the complicated parts of a whole body than it had done in a drop of blood in Lena’s lab, but they waited with bated breath nonetheless.
After two hours with no change, it was getting harder to stay hopeful but they stayed. After five hours, Lena had taken up intermittently pacing and leaning on the table. Lena’s grip on the edge of the table tightened as her stare bore a hole in the top of it. Alex thought about saying something, but nothing seemed right. Hope could be incredibly cruel when it flickered out, perhaps it would have been better to stay in the darkness of the unknown, rather than allow a spark to raise their spirits before blinking out of existence, and making the darkness seem darker than before. After two days, Lena went home to sleep in her own bed. After four, she had stopped waiting for the phone to ring with news about Kara. She just didn’t understand why it had worked in Hope’s simulations, when it reality it hadn’t; she didn’t understand what had gone wrong, and she was trying really hard not to blame herself.
Eight days later, life was pretty much back to normal – as normal as it had before Ray’s since and since Kara had essentially been taken hostage in her own body, that is. Lori had an inset day from school and was obsessed with Frozen, so Lena was working from home in her study as Lori sat surrounded by bits of paper with Olaf on, wearing a variety of different outfits as she was inspired by RuPaul’s drag race on tv.
Lena didn’t flinch when she heard the door unlock, assuming it was probably Alex, coming over to see her niece, as she liked to do when she could. But Lena bolted out of her seat at the sound of Lori’s surprised squeal.
“Mama!”
Kara paused in the open doorway, beaming at the sight of Lori, sitting on the floor surrounded by paper and colouring pencils and looking at her with surprised delight.
Without hesitation Lori ran towards her and Kara scooped her up into her arms and held her tightly, “Oh, I’ve missed you so much.”
Kara allowed herself to relax a little and release the tension she hadn’t realised she’d been holding in her shoulders as Lori clung to her. Kara knew how long she had been away. She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of her daughter safely in her arms, praying to Ra that she would never again have to be apart from her like that. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Lena standing in her study doorway across the room, completely frozen; but only for a moment. In the next, she was wrapping her arms around Kara with Lori sandwiched in the middle, and allowing herself to get lost in the moment.
“Hey you,” Kara whispered, smiling at Lena like she was the sun, moon and stars.
Lena couldn’t help the grin that broke across her lips in response, feeling the first happy tears in a long time fall down her cheeks, “hey yourself.”
“Um hi, I’m getting squished in here,” came a small, muffled voice from between them. “I don’t want to be a pancake.”
Kara giggled, “sorry, Munchkin.” She set Lori down, and let her skip back to her drawing. But the little girl paused halfway and turned back to Kara hesistantly, “you’re not going to leave again, are you?”
Kara’s gaze flicked between Lori and Lena.
“Sometimes, I might have to leave for a little bit. But I will always do whatever I can to come back to you as soon as possible.” Lori seemed to contemplate this answer for a moment before deciding it was good enough and plonking back down on the floor with her ten million Olaf sketches.
Lena turned from watching Lori go back to her colouring as if this was an everyday occurrence, to see Kara looking at her in a way that made her heart ache.
“I love you.”
Lena knew she would forever be caught off guard by Kara’s open affection and she was contentedly resigned to how much those three little words from Kara would affect her. For the first time in over a year, she held her wife close and kissed her softly.
“I love you, too.”