Work Text:
“Kara?”
Silence. Then a whimper.
Lena finds her tucked inside her closet, hands over her ears, eyes squeezed shut, head pressed against her knees.
Kara is somehow deadly still but shaking at the same time. A compressed ball of distressed energy vibrating on the spot. She knows Lena’s there. Even locked away from the world as best she can she hears everything.
It’s embarrassing and frustrating and it makes this anger bubble up inside her chest because screw this! Screw all this sound! Why is there so much? Why is it so loud?!
She can hear everything.
Children screech as they play in the park.
The car across the street clicking and stuttering to life boxes at her ears
The wind on the glass of the window, scratching and scraping and howling in her face
The glass of soda abandoned on the kitchen counter fizzes like it’s right inside her ear, the texture grating her skin like it’s soft cheese
The constant zzzzZZZZZZzzzz of electricity running through her apartment building and through her skull, filling it with barbed wire and taking over the space where her thoughts should be.
Lena shifts from side to side, and the ruffle of her clothes is like drums.
She hears everything and Rao, she wishes she didn’t but she does and it hurts!It hurts so much!
There’s no harmony to it, the sounds of Earth are chaos and discord. No beautiful magic that strings each sound together into a symphony, into nature's perfect balance of all.
No because Earth’s choir sings with the texture of chewed, dry and crumbling leather run through a shredder then slapped across her face.
It eats at her brain. Little gremlins with rakes stabbing and dragging them across her brain. A few bounce around whispering in gargled tones, “it’s too bright in here too”
And into the closet she went.
Dark peace. A tiny relief from the light and some sound at least, even as it battles with the claustrophobia.
Trapped in the pod.
No end. No sound but now there’s too much.
No light. Too much light.
She’s trying to keep it contained. Keep it in keep it in. It’ll pass. Maybe. Hopefully. But it’s so loud and if that soda doesn’t stop bubbling and hitting the glass in that violent shrill tinkling-
The tears are just another thing to make her brain scream. The way they roll down her cheeks like something overwhelmingly slimy, and her eyes aching like they’re made of dry sand. She wants to peel her skin off, curl into a ball that just pops out of existence until it’s passed. If it passes, she thinks, always panicking that it won’t, that this is life now and she cries harder, hoping someone would be kind enough to shoot her into space and leave her to Rao.
The noise. The noise. The fucking Noise!
Make it stop!
Please!
She reaches out, grabbing Lena’s jacket, gripping it like she’s dangling from a cliff and it’s her only lifeline and then she lets go of it. A cliff drop is better than feeling every single fibre of Lena’s jacket like rusted metal dragging along her skin.
She holds her head again, forearms pressed tight up against her ears.
“‘S too loud,” she says, spit and sobs catching on her words.
Lena for her part remains calm even if her heart is breaking seeing the person she loves distressed. She knew Kara suffered from sensory overload but knowing it and seeing it are two very different things.
Here was her hero, the Girl of Steel, bulletproof and braver than anyone she had ever known brought to her knees by her own senses. Her mind struggles with the juxtaposition but it isn’t important. Kara is.
Lena packs her own upset into a little box and places it aside. She falls into problem solving mode and in the softest voice she can manage she tells Kara,”It’s okay. I’m going to get up now and get some things to help, okay?”
She wants to reach out, hold Kara’s hand tight and comfort her but she knows better than to add to the overload. She quietly removes her heels and with quiet footsteps she retrieves Kara’s DEO devised ear defenders.She picks up the tinted version of Kara’s glasses, just in case.
She crouches down, explains everything she’s doing as she places the ear defenders on Kara, cautious of Kara’s comfort. She offers the glasses next, placing them next to Kara to wear when she feels ready to leave the self made darkness. And then she just sits with her.
It’s finally quiet. No overlapping noise. Super hearing means even DEO designed ear defenders can’t block everything but they block enough that all Kara can hear now is her and Lena’s breathing.
She doesn’t know how long it takes but eventually her body comes down from panic mode. The frustration and anger dissolved and re-absorbed into something more useful. When she no longer feels like a live wire, she reaches for the glasses, swapping them with her regular ones. She wipes the mess from her face with her sleeve before finally looking up at Lena.
Wonderful, perfect, patient Lena Luthor. Saving a super from a meltdown. Her hero.
“Thank you”