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“What are you planning on doing now that Lex is in jail?”
If it were any other day, Lena would have demurred. She would have pushed her way through the vultures surrounding her, all so eager to pick flesh off of such a recently dead corpse.
If she hadn’t just watched her brother get sentenced to thirty-one life sentences—if she hadn’t just seen her brother kill twelve innocent people—she might have had the mental fortitude to resist blurting out what she actually felt, come up with a convenient, lie, at least.
But it’s not any other day.
It is this day, the day on which her brother was sentenced, meeting her eyes coldly as twelve people died in front of her.
“Well, I’ll take what is rightfully mine.”
The group of reporters milling around her who had up until a few moments ago been mostly ignoring her suddenly erupt like the beehive they are. White lights flash in her eyes, voicex shout over themselves for her attention.
“And what do you mean by that, Ms. Luthor?” shouts a red-haired woman from her left, shoving a mic with a number 4 on it.
“Well, who do you think was running the company while my brother was out trying to kill Superman?” Lena answers even though she shouldn’t. “Our father left the company to us both”—not their mother, a sin her mother has never forgiven Lena for—“and I have already purchased the majority of Lex's shares—I will not squander them as he did.”
More shouting, more flashing.
Lena holds her smile with practice of a decade and a half of smiling through things and people she hates.
No one asks her any more questions, but she continues, regardless. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“We need a fresh start, a way to move past the stain my brother has forced upon us—and for that fresh start, I will be moving our company here, to National City”—Metropolis juries had been too biased, Lex’s lawyers successfully claimed—“and I will be renaming it L-Corp. We will no longer be a vanity project for a single billionaire and his family.”
She’s certain her mother is watching her now, listening to her now, and she swears she can feel the heat of her mother’s glare on the back of her neck, even though she knows her mother is still in Metropolis, taking control of her brother’s more… sinister enterprises.
“L-corp can change the world for the better, and I will see to it that we do,” she finishes.
The questions crash down over her once again—
“Are you ready for the responsibility—”
“Why haven’t the police seized your assets—”
One woman’s voice stands out from the rest, or well, really—one woman stands out from the rest. Blonde hair, glasses, and a distractingly cute face. She smiles at Lena and it scrunches up her whole face in a way that almost makes Lena miss her words.
“Kara Danvers, from Catco news,” she is saying. “Your company has announced plans for an alien detection—”
Between what feels like frames of the universe, she is before Lena, her shoulders an inch from Lena’s face (wider, broader than she expected from her soft, pastel sweater), looking very a) cute and b) much like she did not cross the intervening distance.
Her right arm is stretched out past Lena’s face, and Lena follows those shoulders down her arm, and then all the way out to her hand.
Pinched between her thumb and pointer finger is a bullet, still smoking, faintly deformed by this woman—Kara’s—fingers.
She’s twisted weirdly, because her mic had been in her left hand, and she had caught the bullet with her right by Lena’s right ear. Her back is to Lena, the full expanse of her shoulders directly before her, but her face is twisted towards her, even though she’s not actually looking at Lena.
She’s looking at her hand, and then at a window that is glinting just the wrong way in the light, three blocks away.
Lena sees a flicker of movement to her right, and Lena watches as Kara drops the first bullet as two more bullets seem to materialize between her fingers.
Once again, there are frames of the universe missing in between her movements—Lena feels like she is watching a stop-motion film with only ten frames a second.
She is holding the first bullet, then it is falling and she is holding a second, her hand five inches lower than it had been, the frame before, and then her hand has moved six inches, and there is a third bullet between her ring and pinkie finger.
She glances sideways at Lena, and from beneath her glasses, Lena can see her blue eyes shine in the sunlight. A thin ring, just inside of her light blue irises, glowing a faint gold. In the dark, Lena is sure they are unmistakable—in daylight, Lena is sure she can only see them because their faces are all but touching.
They are close enough that Lena can taste the faint hint of ozone on her breath.
They are close enough that when she opens her mouth to speak, Lena can see the tiny little tips of her second set of canines.
Fun fact: Kryptonians are physically indistinguishable from humans in all ways but four—
Their eyes, their teeth, their breath, and their skin.
This close, Lena can see see just a hint of skin that is not white but literally golden in the corners of Kara’s eyes and mouth.
It hits her then.
A little late, but hey, she just got shot at. She thinks she’d doing pretty good here.
This woman—Kara—is Supergirl.
Everyone else seems to make the same realization at the same time, silence breaking with a roar, and Supergirl opens her mouth—
“Fuck.”
The entire world goes insane.