Chapter Text
It took her several months to notice it.
In her defense, until very recently, Alex had had no desire to be near her, so never mind the x-ray vision and all the other stuff that she just couldn't turn off however much she wanted to. None of that was going to help when what she should have spotted was just a small set of lines, hidden in the divot of Alex’s elbow, and not even really visible to the naked eye outside of a really bright sky or a flashlight pointed directly at it.
When she discovered it, they were on the beach together at dawn, after another one of Kara’s nightmares had both of them shooting upright and Alex, now by rote, had stumbled over to her bed and curled around her. It wasn't really hugging, what Alex did. It was more like a laying down version of … whatever that thing you do to stop people from choking was called on Earth. She’d have to ask. (She had to ask after everything.)
Alex just sort of squeezed her with all of her bodily strength--and that was a joke as well, it couldn't be strength when it was so insignificant--and held her down. Like Kara would just… float away, otherwise.
Evaporate into tiny particles like her entire--
It was stopping these kinds of thoughts that had her focusing on the small things. Eliza had suggested it; when she panics, she should look to center herself by bringing everything down to the almost-atomic level. Be in the now, the here. And so there were individual grains of sands on her fingertips that she could feel, and one of her socks was starting to fold over just a little bit under the sole of her foot, and the air smelled like some sort of fish she couldn't name and like cold, which she couldn't really explain to Alex but made complete sense to her.
She said these things, slowly, out loud, and Alex sat next to her, a foot or so away now, and nodded at her observations. She didn't add any of her own; when Kara had asked why, once, she’d just said, “You experience it all so much more. It just feels… silly.”
Kara hadn’t wanted to point out that it was going to be a real struggle for her to try to be normal like Alex if she didn’t have those kinds of reference points: a concrete human benchmark for what being alive, on Earth, was like. She should, someday. But today wasn't that day.
And she’d made it through the sand, the sound of a seagull in the distance--far enough away where Alex couldn't hear it at all, but without her glasses on, it might as well have been squawking right into her ear--and the sky. She searched, focused on something else that she could tune into. Something else that could chase away the darkness and the feeling of being trapped. The beach helped, and the exercise did as well. She never thought it would, but Eliza had asked her to try and her entire life’s purpose had been boiled down to... trying to do what was best for the people around her.
Not Kal.
Not anymore.
But the Danvers... she could try for them.
Her eyes scanned the horizon, the stretch of sand made wet by the ocean, the scattering of seashells and weeds and detritus there. And then they scanned Alex, who had gotten used to being part of this ritual, and had stopped shifting away at being looked at. Kara counted eyelashes, freckles, small marks of distress on Alex’s face--by her eyes, lines by her mouth, things that said concern in every language she spoke--flecks of dust and grime on her pyjamas.
And then, she saw it.
“What’s that?” she asked, before she could think about whether asking was okay, or if it was a bad idea to interrupt their process. Her breathing had evened out, she was "snapping out of it", as Alex said. She could feel the sun’s slow rise in the distance--but it's important to finish things, her mother used to always say, even if they already feel done, and she'd had twenty four years to think about what that meant coming from a woman who put her in a pod and sent her away before the planet actually died.
She blinked. Hard.
Alex looked over at her with that small, cranky look of surprise--the one that said, Kara’s about to do or say something weird--but she masked it fast. “What’s what?”
Kara pointed at her elbow, the skin there thin enough for her to see nerves and veins and muscles without x-ray vision, and specifically, at the small array of lines at the end of her forearm.
Alex followed her finger and said, “Oh. Oh, right. Oh, shit.” She stared at her own arm for a few seconds, until she tentatively reached out. “Um. Can I see--can you show me your left arm?”
It had been months of being manhandled--in the gentlest, feeblest way possible--just to get her body to move in a way that was Earth-appropriate, and Kara extended her arm without any real hesitation. Her own skin was a mystery to her. She’d come out of the pod pale as a ghost, anemic and without any muscle tone to hold her up, but the second Kal had exposed her to the sun, it had burst inside of her and made every part of her swell. She was tanned, now. Like she could absorb the sun forever and it wouldn't touch any part of her except pigmentation.
Alex was pale next to her, a white hand tracing a line up her forearm--and she felt it simultaneously like a thousand little needles, tattooing her all over, and like nothing at all --and staring at a part of the body that Kara didn't know the formal name for, here, either.
“Your cubital,” Alex said, softly, because Alex wanted to become a doctor and knew things like this, and was also starting to understand when Kara was missing context or language or knowledge. And she was becoming giving about it. It made breathing a little easier, most days. “It’s called your cubital.”
“The--those lines?” Kara tried, and Alex shook her head.
“No. This area of the arm. Forearm, cubital, or inner elbow. … I guess teenage boys might call it an elbow pit, sometimes,” Alex said, her nose crinkling in displeasure. “But it’s called a cubital. And it’s where…”
She paused there, looked up at Kara almost apologetically.
“It’s where we get our marks.”
“Marks,” Kara echoed, looking at Alex until she stretched her arm back out. The lines were only visible at certain angles, but now that she knew what to look for, they were clear. They were… not on top of the skin so much as a part of it, subdermal. They looked almost like scars, but folding inwards, not discolored. It was almost as if they were waiting: like empty trenches, prepared for something to fill them, but what that could be was beyond Kara.
“Yeah. They’re…” Alex exhaled in mild frustration and shifted away a little, pulling her hair over her shoulder and fixing it in a ponytail as she thought. Kara had learned these habits and recognized them now. Alex was searching for the right words, and wouldn't speak until she had them, unless it was to swear about how hard it was to find them.
(It was one of the things she really liked about Alex. It wasn't about her , about how Kara had ruined her life in so many ways. It was just Alex, and it felt natural, and she liked seeing it happen.)
“Most people call them… soul marks.” And already Alex frowned, unhappy with the explanation. “Because… okay. So, we’re born with these, and they change as we grow up and experience things and meet people who are important to us. In different ways. They… they change colors. And brighten. They work as… sort of a warning system? But also a sign that… Well, they eventually settle, if you find…”
This was probably the worst explanation of anything Alex had given her since she'd started willingly trying to explain everything to Kara, and it was enough to almost make Kara smile. Except… she also really did want to know, and Alex's rambling wasn't helping.
“What’s a soul?” she asked, quietly, as Alex mashed her lips together in search for more words.
Alex looked over at her at that, and something about her expression changed so fully that Kara felt it like a small blow. Inside of her, obviously. Nothing touched her on the outside on this planet. And as Alex’s eyes locked onto hers and softened in a way that she didn't really understand, there was movement from the corner of her eye and--
Alex’s marks brightened with a soft yellow, something close to gold. It was like the lines filled, and they radiated outward for a long moment, until they dimmed and disappeared again.
“I think,” Alex said, not looking at her arm at all, her voice a little thick and unreadable, “that we should go and wake up Mom, and… I think she might be able to explain, better than I can.”
Kara nodded. Eliza was very good at making her understand things in a way that made her feel less stupid and clumsy; like she was from a foreign country, not a dead world. She was kind, and whatever she was missing now--whatever souls were--Eliza would probably be able to make sense of it.
Alex clambered up to her bare feet, pyjama pants almost falling off her hips, and held out a hand for Kara to take. When she did, Alex pulled hard, and… oh.
This was a hug. Kal had tried to give her one, but that had gone... bad, and Eliza sometimes looked like she might want to try, but this was one, her first in twenty four years, and it felt... it felt good, it felt right.
She didn't really know why it was happening, but Alex breathed shakily into her neck and said, “C’mon. Let’s go home”, and it felt like the nightmares might just be a little further away, later.
Kara breathed deeply and thought about Alex, thought about home.
---
Her arm was starting to ache.
It shouldn't, anymore. She'd had it splayed out like this on more medical tables than she could even remember. It was one of her first memories of Lillian, who would never be her mother, whatever she was made to call her. She must have been all of five years old, and the hand on her wrist should have been holding her hand, maybe, but instead it was pressing her down to the sterilized table, trapping her there.
"We'll fix this," Lillian had said, in a tone of voice that made it clear that the alternative was plain impossible.
But here they were, a good decade later, and it hadn't been fixed. The latest consultant on the case, as Lillian had started calling Lena's mark, had been flown in on the Luthor jet from some experimental genetics facility in Switzerland. He'd been given carte blanche; whatever was wrong with Lena, whatever flaw had resulted in a soulmark that was blurred, leaky, and unresponsive, if it could be fixed it had to be.
Before someone would notice. Before Lena couldn't escape the public eye anymore, before it would become a source of tabloid speculation. Before it would be yet another thing about Lena that embarrassed the family that had so graciously, so kindly, adopted her.
Sometimes, she wondered if Lillian would rather have her dead and buried with a functional soulmark than like this. It was a thought she couldn't dwell on; if it was true, as she feared it might be, she would have to flee, except how could she?
All her money was Luthor money. And their ties ran deep. Deeper than blood, though in her case, it seemed, also as deep as blood.
"Excuse me?" Lilian said, voice cold enough to burn.
A syringe with something purple was being prepared in the background, but Lena's focus was on the doctor: a man with unkempt gray hair, inhuman eyes, a beak-like nose and a discovery that would change everything for her.
"Her genetic profile reveals nothing, beyond the fact that she is biologically related to Lex Luthor, whose genetic profile also reveals nothing." The doctor made a sour face. "Your children are blood relatives, Mrs. Luthor. As for why one has a functional mark and one has-- this…"
She should be used to it now, the pointing at her elbow, the way people responded to it like it was something dirty, but it always, always struck home. Of course she didn't want to be an aberration; and no, she couldn't accept that there wasn't an explanation for it, that there was something happening here, on her own body, that she couldn't solve.
Her new family couldn't either. It was possibly the only thing they had in common: a complete inability to take no for an answer, no matter what reality told them.
To Lex, and to Lillian, the marks were about status. They indicated who belonged. They flared at passion and brilliance. They didn't determine life paths, but the marks were brightest on exceptional people, triggered by the environments they operated in. And a mark that didn't work… simply had to be fixed.
Lillian hadn't said anything meaningful in the last few minutes and the purple syringe was moving closer. It wouldn't do anything except hurt, probably. But Lena was, at this point, fine with it. It would be more data. She wouldn't say no to more data.
She'd been gathering her own ever since she'd copied Lex's keys for his private lab. Sure, he'd put a biometric scanner on the lock when he'd gone back to college last week, but… and she almost laughed, arm tied to a table, as her mother denied, in increasingly frantic tones, that she could possibly be related to Lex.
Apparently, a biometric scanner wouldn't be all that much of a problem.
Her own blood was a substance she was almost as familiar with as water, and it had shown her nothing. This meeting, with this latest supposed genius, merely confirmed she wasn't missing anything obvious.
It wasn't genetics, which Lillian had been so sure it was. It wasn't a disease any of the dozens of doctors she'd seen over the years had recognised. It wasn't an injury that just hadn't healed; the mark wasn't scarred, it was just… vague. Like a watercolor painting that was bleeding. Like it was incomplete, somehow; left half-finished.
The thing Lillian had refused to ever consider was that it wasn't that there was anything wrong with Lena. To her, any mark was all Lena, all Lex, all her. But... there were theories that they didn't reflect the strength of one soul, but rather the power of two souls meeting. Some thought that marks responded to meaningful connections between souls, and that the mark's final pattern, final color, was a reflection of a perfect bond.
And if those theories were right, what if…
What if it wasn't that she was broken, but some part of the primary connection that supported her mark wasn't okay?
"Lena," her mother snapped, jarring her from her thoughts. The purple liquid was spreading through a forearm vein, burning there, and she fought the urge to clench a fist or bite her lip. "We're done here. To the car, now, please."
"Sorry, mother," she said, automatically, shaking out her deadened arm and murmuring a thank you for your work to the doctor, who was still looking at her like she was something unbelievably small and insignificant.
The purple faded, as did the pain, and that left her ignoring her mother in the back of a car, fingertips touching a mark that she wanted so, so very badly to understand.
Her mother's jaw worked furiously, audibly, and she finally said, "I hope you aren't foolish enough to think this changes anything about your place in this family. Or that it's something that… anyone else should know about."
She'd been a Luthor long enough now to recognize when a threat was just poorly masked panic, and fought a hard-earned smile. "Of course, mother."
Another moment of heavy silence filled the car, until Lillian crossed her legs and said, "You'll be going to Saint Elias as of September. I expect you to excel there, as Lex did. Do not disappoint me."
It was a shock--but it wasn't. Lex had been the reason that the Luthor mansion felt anything like a home, and without him…
It was a blessing to be leaving a house that reminded her of nothing but loss and death, and even if this faint freedom came with strings attached, she could handle those.
It felt like one of those moments she'd read about and witnessed on Lex's arm, her friend Jack's arm, even Lillian's, once or twice. Of course, what passed for her own mark didn't react, but not for the first time since that first investigation of all of her shortcomings, Lena felt nothing but relief at its stasis.
Whatever her soul had to say, it clearly didn't want to say it to Lillian Luthor, and in what world could that be a bad thing?
---
"It's… on Krypton, we had… you would call it a computer," she said, when Eliza had shown her two videos and given her three articles to read on "soul science". They hadn't added much to Eliza’s initial explanation, but it had given her some time to think about what she’d learned.
Soulmarks. Marks that revealed moments, interactions, experiences, and people that left an imprint on the soul. The word that came closest was shesur, but shesur was something internal, not something shared. This… this was about connections, the way Eliza told it. And that made it feel more like the system that her uncle had destroyed out of love. Or arrogance, as her own father had said.
Alex had talked her mother into making coffee for all of them. It was one of the bitterest things she’d ever tasted, as far as she could remember, and she kind of hated it, but it also kept her focused. Eliza and Alex seemed to like it, which was just one more way in which they were so very different. But… they were looking at her openly, waiting for her to share, which she’d never really done before. It was… there was so much that was just...
She shook her head. “It was… designed to ensure that genetically and otherwise, relationships were good matches. And would produce good offspring, enhance the positives in all bloodlines and… repopulate the Guilds in a way that ensured Krypton’s prosperity.”
Alex’s eyebrows did a thing and she mumbled fascist much? , causing Eliza to snap, “ Alexandra ” in that tone of voice that Alex always listened to, even if it was some more muttered protest.
Eliza turned back to her when Alex backed down. "How did you access the computer? Was it something that parents did for you, or…”
It was weird, to be nostalgic over something that had ceased to exist before she was born, and she hadn’t been old enough to miss before it had become an impossibility. Still. This world was full of emotions, and it seemed intent on her experiencing all of them as quickly as possible. She stared into the coffee and shook her head. “My uncle… dismantled the whole system. He didn’t even use the Matrix to have Kal, which was… well, they were… radicals. But even when Matricomp was legally binding--”
“Oh my God, ” Alex breathed, and as Eliza got ready to tell her off again, she just stared at her and said, “Mom, come on, that’s--”
“Kara, ignore your sister, please. She’s clearly forgetting everything she knows about cultural relativism,” Eliza said, archly. Alex grumbled again but shook her head and went back to her coffee. “You were saying?”
They weren’t family. But they were… familiar, and something about how even when they were learning about Krypton, they were acting the same way as they did when Alex ate a slice of pizza really grossly and Eliza got annoyed made all of this easier. It made it easier to pretend that… she was teaching, not reliving.
“You wouldn’t go to Matricomp unless you were in a serious relationship. You would… date, I think you call it?” And at Eliza’s nod, she shrugged. “And if you were serious, you would ask Matricomp to assess compatibility and…”
“What if it said no?” Alex asked, looking at her intently. “Like--say you were in love with someone and this computer told you that it was a bad match. Could you ignore it?”
She thought of her uncle, his pride, his ambition, his determination and his brilliance, and smiled wryly. “No. Not by law.”
Eliza looked out the window for a moment before folding her hands around her mug and saying, “Soulmarks aren’t like that, Kara. They… they can give you an indication that something that matters to your soul is happening. And when you find what some people call a soulmate, your pattern settles. But… it is still just an outward sign. You can… ignore your soulmate’s existence. And you can--” She stopped talking there, swallowing abruptly before pulling up her shirt sleeve and extending her left arm, where a pattern of blue and green lines looked like it was fading; like the top layer of it had been skimmed off. “You can lose a soulmate, and still… live a full life. A very full life.”
Alex leaned into her mother’s side and wrapped an arm around her, also staring at the pattern, and Kara couldn’t help but look back at her own blank elbow. “So it… it makes a suggestion. It tells you that someone is important. But it’s not the law, and you can have relationships with people who do not make your mark… do that.”
Both of the Danvers looked at her in a way that suggested she was missing the point, somehow, but eventually Eliza nodded. “I think that’s as close as we can get to a common ground, yes.”
“And… if you don’t have one,” Kara said, looking back at her own arm. “That also… that’s also okay, right?”
Eliza smiled at her so kindly that it felt like a hug. “Of course it is, Kara.”
--
It would be a few years until she realized that there simply wasn’t anyone else who didn’t have a mark. That no matter how many people she met, from however many planets or cultures or walks of life, they all had something to show on their left arms to show that they had a soul capable of connection.
When she figured as much out, when it felt like a fact even though she couldn't possibly check every arm on the planet, it was easy enough to file it away. It was just one more thing that made her a daughter of a dynasty that no longer existed, and… that was who she was. It always would be. But other things were getting better. She was in college, she had friends, and she had learned how to act like she was just the same as them. Alex was one of her best friends, she loved Eliza and Midvale, and National City felt like a place where she was just about hidden enough to not worry so much about how to be .
A soulmark would have been nice, maybe. But in the grand scheme of things, there were so many things for her to miss forever, so many absences that felt like black holes dotting all of her insides, that it felt absurd to pine for something she’d never had at all.