Chapter Text
Lena walks half the length of the train before she finds an empty carriage. She supposes she ought to look for other first years to sit with, but her last name hangs over her like a curse, and she’s long since become allergic to the whispers. The second that Luthor is breathed into the air, all anyone can talk about is dark magic and betrayal, and Lena suffocates under the irreparable contamination of her brother.
So when she finally comes across a vacant booth, she quickly slips inside, resigning herself to a few dull hours of alternating between staring blankly out the window and just as blankly at the pages of her textbooks. She gazes down at the small ball of sooty black fluff that is curled in her lap, far more content than Lena herself. A few weeks ago, her mother had gifted the kitten to her, on the condition he be called Cadmus, after the Muggle legend of the monster-slaying Greek hero. The implication in this requirement makes Lena vaguely sick, and she had shortened it to Caddy the minute her mother was out of sight.
She’s got her eyes closed and is listening to the soft humming of Caddy’s purrs when a tentative knock startles her. A small blonde girl with bright blue eyes is smiling gently at her, carefully sliding the compartment door open.
“Hi,” she grins, and Lena’s vocabulary seems to be unable to unearth a suitable reply. Years of etiquette training and it falls out of her brain with a single syllable from this girl. “I’m Kara. Is this seat taken?” She gestures to the one across from Lena, who mutely shakes her head. Kara appears unperturbed by Lena’s silence, perhaps mistaking her shock for shyness, and happily chatters on. “I was going to sit with my sister – her name’s Alex, she’s in third year – but then I thought it might be a good idea to go find some other kids in my grade, you know? And I couldn’t tell, but you looked like you might be new, as well.”
“I am,” Lena manages finally. “But, um, I don’t think you want to sit here with me.” The words taste bitter in her mouth, but she owes it to Kara, who is too happy and excited to be tainted by her so early on.
“Am I bothering you?” Kara looks horrified at the thought.
Lena can’t help but smile a little, a brief upturn of the lips. It feels a little foreign, but she loves it. “No, of course not. It’s just, um. I’m – a Luthor.” She waits for the inevitable recoil, the disgust, for the quick gathering of belongings and hurried exit.
“Cool. I’m a Danvers.” Kara offers back.
“You don’t understand. My older brother, he – he did some bad stuff. Really bad.” Like killing Muggles with magic, Lena finishes in her head, but she doesn’t need to voice it, because even the Muggleborns will have heard about Lex by now.
“But did you do bad stuff?” her unexpected companion enquires politely.
“Um, no. I’m eleven,” Lena clarifies. “And I don’t want to be like him.”
“Great.” Kara grins at her so genuinely that about a thousand pounds fall off Lena’s shoulders, and her spine straightens for what must surely be the first time in five years. No one has ever looked at her like that before, like she’s innocent. “So do you know what time the food lady comes by? Because I’m really hungry. I’m always hungry. I think Alex might’ve hexed me when I was adopted.”
Lena laughs softly. “You’re adopted, too?”
“Yep. I used to live in one of those remote magic colonies. You know the ones that experiment with new brands of magic? But it got destroyed in the last wizarding war. I would tell you all about it, but, um, it still makes me sad.” Kara’s light dampens for a moment, like a candle flickering.
“What kind of new brands?” Lena asks, wondering if this is overstepping. She’s not really sure how to hold a conversation with someone her own age – she’s never had a lot of opportunities – but questions are probably the right sort of thing.
“Raw magic, mostly, like the kinds kids do before they know they’re wizards. Stuff without wands. I learned some of it, before it…” she trails off, and if anyone can understand how hard it is to talk about your past, it’s Lena, so she executes a quick subject change.
“What house is your sister in?”
Kara beams at the thought of her sibling (and idol, Lena suspects), and this sets her off on a rant about Gryffindor and how Alex is a chaser for the Quidditch team and Kara’s sure she’s going to be captain someday.
“Do you think you’ll be in Gryffindor, too?” Lena asks, and she can imagine it, what with Kara being courageous enough to talk to a Luthor and all.
But the other girl shakes her head. “I reckon I’ll be Hufflepuff. Everyone thinks you sort of fall into that house, like if you’re not smart or brave or ambitious, but I think you can choose Hufflepuff, too. Plus, Alex says the common room is near the kitchen.”
When after some coaxing, Lena admits she’s terrified to end up in Slytherin, Kara demands to know why. “I don’t want to be another Luthor.”
“Slytherin is for people with ambition, Lena. You can have ambition to do good things, not just bad.”
The rock in the pit of her stomach starts to dissolve after that, and she fills the space it leaves with pumpkin juice and chocolate frogs once the food trolley comes around. Kara buys one of everything, but once she realises Lena has a kitten, promptly ignores most of the sweets in favour of petting Caddy until he falls asleep.
When the train stops, Lena thinks about how nice it was to have a friend, even if it was only for a few hours. This idea is quickly overridden when Kara shoves the remaining candy hastily into her pockets, takes the cat in one hand and grabs Lena’s with the other, practically dragging her out of the compartment.
“Come on, Lena, it’s going to be amazing,” she squeaks, and somehow, Lena finds it within herself to agree.
///
The Sorting Hat just barely glances off Kara’s head before it’s shouting Hufflepuff, and cheers erupt from the yellow-clad table (along with a few very loud whoops from some of the Gryffindors, which Lena can only assume is the gleeful heckling of Kara’s sister and her friends). She shoots Lena a winning smile before disappearing into the sea of students.
It seems like eons before it’s “Luthor, Lena”, and despite Kara’s earlier words, her nerves are building again. The hat is silent so long once it slips over her eyes that she’s starting to worry it’ll refuse to acknowledge her, when it whispers in a gravelly tone. “You’re smart. There’s nothing in any of our libraries you’ll find exceeds your grasp. And brave, too. If it comes to it, you will sacrifice all things to be who you have to be. There’s kindness in you, Luthor, even if it hides. And of course, ambition. I saw it in your brother, too.” She nearly cries. “But it doesn’t worry me in you, little Luthor. Because you have all the rest as well. Slytherin!”
///
She has three classes with Kara – Potions, Herbology, and Defence Against the Dark Arts. At first, she worries Kara will ignore her, with her green and silver tie and the rumours that tag along in her wake. Instead, the dungeon door barely has time to close behind the tiny blonde girl before she’s throwing herself into the seat next to Lena and jabbering away about her new common room and the ticklish pear painting.
Somehow, on that train ride, Kara had decided that Lena was a worthy friend, and though she can't really understand it, Lena is going to do everything she can to hang onto this thing between them with both hands.
///
Lena discovers Kara is truly terrible at potions. Almost impossibly bad. She strongly suspects that even if Kara were to follow the instructions precisely to the letter (which she never actually manages to do), the liquid would still find a way to explode or solidify or dissipate into vapour. When she accidentally spills a watery concoction on Lena halfway through the first week, the class falls silent, waiting for the debut of the famous Luthor rage. Kara just laughs, scrubs the potion off Lena’s arm with the edge of her robe, and asks if she’s okay. Lena feels odd for a moment before she manages to tie the realisation down: Kara is not afraid of her. Not even a little bit.
///
What Kara lacks in Potions, she more than makes up for in Herbology. The horrible plant with red venomous spikes curls into her magic touch, and the Professor even gets her to hold a Mandrake to keep it quiet after class, even though that’s technically second year stuff. Living things always seem to want to be closer to Kara, and yeah, Lena can understand that.
///
Their first Defence Against the Dark Arts class, Professor Henshaw pulls her aside.
“I knew your brother,” he tells her, in that deep and serious voice that keeps even over-excitable eleven year olds (re: Kara) completely still and silent.
“I used to think I did, too,” she says. He nods, just once, and after giving her a smile (which is really too small to be an actual smile, but is somehow impossibly reassuring anyway), he never brings up Lex again.
Even though there’s at least a dozen other girls and boys clamouring to be Kara’s partner when they practice spells, she always chooses Lena.
///
Kara drags her to the first Quidditch game of the season (Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw), and screams herself hoarse, cheering loudly for Alex even when the quaffle isn’t actually near her. Lena doesn’t think she’s ever seen anybody be so passionate about anything (her family is full of apathy; towards society, towards the poor, towards Lena herself), and it warms her to know that people like Kara exist to make even things like weekend inter-house sport seem like the event of the century.
It doesn’t take long for her to start cheering, too. At first, she feels stupid, showing she cares about something, but Kara grins at her, and after that it doesn’t seem silly anymore.
///
“You’re just a Mudblood the Luthors adopted to cover up Lex going completely psycho,” the boy spits at her, getting up in her space. She’d trod on his foot by accident while walking back from dinner, and he’s been yelling at her for at least a minute now. She takes it silently, knowing that if she gives even half as good as she gets, the word that she’s turning out to be just as violent as Lex will have circulated before breakfast tomorrow, and this second year will be painted as the victim of an unprovoked attack.
“Hey! Why are you being mean?” The boy is at least a foot taller than Kara, but he still recoils at the sound of her scolding. Tiny Hufflepuff Kara, the little sister of the star of the Gryffindor team (and to a significant extent, the unofficial little sister of Hogwarts), who no-one has ever seen even the slightest bit cross even though they’re well into the term by now. “Don’t be rude to her, she didn’t do anything wrong.”
She grabs a surprised Lena’s hand and tugs her away from the gaping offender, into the dark recesses of a nearby corridor. “Why didn’t you stand up to him?” Kara demands. Lena worries for a moment that she’s mad at her, too, but one glance at her friend’s face and she realises Kara is upset.
“It’s not worth it.” She hopes Kara hears that it’s not worth the backlash, the rumours, the jeers in the halls. But as if she’s got some sort of special power, Kara listens through all the other implications, and knows what she really means.
“Yes,” Kara says, with a million tons of certainty. “You are.”
Then she takes Lena up to the Astronomy Tower and points out constellations to her, fingers still tightly knotted with Lena’s, until everything seems peaceful again (or maybe peaceful for the first time ever).
///
One day, Kara grabs the back of Lena’s robes and pulls her into an abandoned classroom. “Look at this,” she squeaks. “Remember that raw magic I told you about? That my colony used to do? I tried some of it. I’m not very good yet, but – watch.” Kara screws up her face in concentration, and slowly, she begins to hover, feet lifting off the ground.
Lena gapes, speechless. “That’s amazing, Kara. Most grown wizards can’t do magic like that.”
“But you can’t tell anyone,” Kara makes her promise. “Otherwise I might get in trouble.”
Lena nods gravely. It’s the first time she’s ever been entrusted with a secret.
///
Lena mostly hangs out alone on Halloween. She’s starting to make a few tentative friends in her house, but it’s hard – most people either hate or love Lex too much, and digging herself out from under his name is exactly as hard as she expected. But she thinks of Kara and her unquestioning trust and she finds it within herself to try. She will not be the girl who looks for empty compartments anymore.
///
“Where are you going for Christmas?” Kara nudges her gently.
They’re sitting in the kitchen surrounded by a gaggle of House Elves. They all adore Kara (much like everyone Lena’s ever met), and keep offering her small treats. She brings them tiny trinkets, often – nothing that could be misconstrued as clothes if they don’t want them to be, but innocent little silvery charms Kara makes herself from various household objects. The elves treasure these, pinning them to their pillowcases and draping them about their necks. They’ve learned not to thank her too many times – eventually, she just goes red and stammers a lot under the weight of their gratitude (which Lena finds equally adorable and amusing) – and instead ply her with a Muggle food she seems particularly fond of.
“How are your sticking pots?” Lena asks, by way of diversion.
“They’re great,” Kara smiles. “But you’re changing the subject.”
Lena sighs. “I’m staying here. It’ll be the best Christmas I’ve ever had,” she admits, and means it. Finally, a holiday without her mother bemoaning the injustice of Lex’s residency in Azkaban, listing Lena’s many shortcomings, and becoming more and more explicit with her pure-blood bigotry with every sip of Fire Whiskey.
Kara immediately looks horrified. “You can’t stay here all alone. Not on Christmas.” She announces this as if it is some kind of grand and unbreakable rule that Lena is a fool not to know.
“I won’t go home,” Lena tells her, and she keeps her voice as soft as she always does with Kara, but the sentence has a backbone of steel, of surety.
“Then I’ll stay,” Kara responds happily, going back to the little dumplings she loves so much without another word, her problem-solving done for the day.
“What? You can’t stay. You’ve got a family. I won’t be the reason you miss a normal Christmas,” Lena argues, suddenly feeling dreadful.
Kara shrugs. “Alex will stay with me. That’s all I need for a normal Christmas.”
The next day, Lena is proudly informed by the youngest Danvers that all it took was a little pouting for Alex to cave. The effort was apparently helped along by the fact that Alex’s Muggleborn friend Sawyer is staying behind as well.
///
Lena puts off meeting Alex for as long as she can. It’s a remarkable feat that she’s made it till now, given that Kara spends at least sixty percent of her time either with Alex, or talking about her. She learned early on that Alex is a very protective sister, and Lena cannot imagine she would take kindly to her little sibling befriending a Luthor.
Kara introduces them with a “be nice, Alex”. The three of them are in the Hufflepuff common room, which is neutral ground, and it’s Christmas Eve. The cheery reindeer ears adorning Kara’s head are doing nothing to ease Lena’s apprehension under Alex’s appraising gaze. The eldest Danvers is tall for a third year, and her eyes and hair are both impossibly dark, and Lena thinks she might as well be wearing a sweater with hurt my sister and I’ll kill you embroidered on the front. They stand in awkward and frosty silence for a moment until Alex catches sight of the textbook peeking out from Lena’s bag, The Combination & Integration of Ancient Magical Arts with Modern Non-Magical Sciences. Then Alex is off on a tangent about how useful spell-work can be in forensics and how Aurors don’t know what they’re missing by ignoring Muggle advances. Kara watches their debate interestedly, with no idea what’s being said, but intrigued by it all the same.
When Sawyer arrives (who Lena quickly realises is also the Maggie that Kara mentions occasionally), she drags Alex into a game of catch-the-snitch-in-the-common-room, which mostly seems to involve jumping off a lot of arm chairs and laughing. Kara tugs gently at the edge of Lena’s robe, and whispers, “She likes you.”
It means more than Lena expects it to.
///
In the second term, a fifth year boy from Gryffindor sets a bludger on Lena with a hex, and she’s waiting to go into her History of Magic class when the solid ball of iron slams into the side of her head. Her skull aches and her tongue feels too big for her mouth and everything turns static and fuzzy, then black.
As soon as she wakes up, she wishes she hadn’t. Everything hurts and it’s another one of those times when the desire to surgically remove her last name hits her like a ton of bricks. When she finally cracks an eyelid, she can make out at least three, very blurry, Karas sitting next to her bed. There’s a small pile of chocolate frogs in her lap, but she hasn’t touched them, her hands instead tangling worriedly in her blonde hair.
“Hey,” Lena croaks, and it feels like it’s ripping her larynx apart, but it’s worth it, because the clouds part and the sun comes out behind Kara’s eyes.
“Lena! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you’re all right!” She dashes forward and wraps Lena in a purposefully delicate hug. Lena nearly cries, not out of pain, but because she can’t conjure up a memory of the last time someone held her like this.
“Alex is gonna jinx that Lord guy really bad,” Kara murmurs.
///
Even though she saw who hexed the bludger, Lena refuses to tell any of the teachers. This wins her a reputation for not being a snitch and being tougher than she looks, and earns her the beginnings of grudging respect. For the first time, she feels like she’s taken a step forward without twelve steps back.
Lena’s Head of House, Professor Grant, tells her on the record that she’s a fool for covering up for the boy, but off the record that she understands Lena will have to work ten times as hard as anyone else just to be normal, and she respects her for that.
///
Eventually, she works up the courage to stop resisting when Kara invites her to hang out with the rest of her friends. She meets Winn, the tiny Ravenclaw from her History of Magic class (and, she later learns, the one who had told Kara as soon as she was hit by the bludger), and James, the tallest boy in their year who is dying to be the Keeper for Gryffindor. At first, they are a little wary of her, but she’s used to that. It’s only reasonable that they worry any description of her they’ve received from Kara has been starched by her rose-tinted glasses. But after a while, a loaned Quidditch almanac and a heated debate on magical machinery, she becomes more Lena than Luthor to them.
///
The year seems to gain an absurd amount of momentum around early March, the weeks rocketing by, perhaps egged on by the fact that things appear to be finally falling into place for Lena, or the dread of spending three months at home. The idea of the Luthor household is all the more terrible for the newfound knowledge that things like respect and hugs and friends are not pipedreams, but luxuries that even she can be allowed.
All of a sudden, it’s Easter, then time trips over itself again, and exams are looming on the horizon. They drag themselves to the library early and late, often in the company of a rather stressed Alex and her own collection of third year friends, all armed with index cards, textbooks, and frowns.
Lena personally loves studying, and while Kara has a similar appreciation for learning, Lena’s discovered that she’s very tactile, and only engages through experience, making the piles of reading a chore for her. She tries to make it more interesting, enchanting little models of the stars to float above Kara’s head to help her remember the constellations, using candy to practice transfiguration, and drawing diagrams in colour-changing ink.
It all probably slows Lena down, but when they stumble out of their last exam, Kara wraps her arms tight around Lena and sighs out, “Thank god. I could not have done that without you.” She’s about to say of course you could’ve, but holds her tongue, instead offering herself a brief moment in which to feel needed by someone for something other than appearances.
///
In their post-exam euphoria, they all head down to the lake. Kara refuses to celebrate properly until Alex is also free (which won’t happen until that afternoon), so they settle for quietly revelling in the sensation of all their knowledge pouring out their ears as they happily discard a year’s worth of learning. James is levitating bigger and bigger rocks from the shore into the lake, each of which hovers precariously mid-air while they heckle at him gleefully, all desperately hoping this will prompt a visit from the giant squid.
Lena and Winn sit on the grass, talking about Muggle technology, and all the ways they could improve it with magic. In a brief but comfortable silence, Winn stumbles out, “My dad. He was… He did bad magic, too. Cursed things, and sold them to Muggles. Usually toys. Nobody knows about it, though. I can’t imagine if everyone knew, like with -”
“Like with Lex,” Lena finishes. She is struck by the odd sensation of tangible connections forming with people, little parts of her life that overlap with others’ like a Venn Diagram: adopted like Kara, a terrible family like Winn, hopeful like James.
“I wanted to tell you that you’re brave for standing up under it all, and that I know neither of us will end up like them,” he says.
“How?” she whispers, because in a lot of ways, she’s still terrified. Because she’s so young, and Lex wasn’t all bad at eleven, and how can you know who you’ll grow up to be?
“Cos we’re so afraid,” he tells her. “If we were like them, we wouldn’t care that we could be that way, you know? We don’t want to be, so we can’t be. Do you see?”
Their conversation is interrupted before she can reply, by Kara throwing herself down next to her and resting her head in Lena’s lap, and by James wondering loudly if the squid would eat him if he went for a swim. “Squids aren’t typically dangerous to humans,” she tells him, and hesitantly cards her fingers through Kara’s hair. When the other girl hums happily, she does it again. James whoops and shucks his cloak, dragging Winn with him down to the lakeside.
“She said typically,” Winn reminds him nervously. He looks up and catches Lena’s eye, squinting a little in the sun. He nods once, and she nods back, and it’s as if they’re confirming it to each other: no, we don’t want to be like them.
///
Caddy curls up between them on the train home, and Lena is bursting with the knowledge that she didn’t have to go looking for an empty compartment but was instead hastily yanked into a full one by a handful of other kids already well on their way to a sugar high. Kara runs one hand through Caddy’s soft black fur and with the other passes every-flavour beans to Lena, who is reading aloud a Muggle manual for a dishwasher, much to the amusement of James and Kara, who have never so much as heard of one before. For Winn and herself, who are slightly more acquainted with the Muggle world (Lena having lived as one until her adoption, and never quite forgetting; Winn being a half-blood), entertainment is derived from the others’ reactions to the concepts of electricity and buttons.
After Winn and James leave to try and track down the food trolley again, Kara’s head drops onto Lena’s shoulder, her eyes fluttering shut. “Hey Lena,” she mutters, voice cloudy with sleep, “I’m really glad I sat with you that first day. Really glad.”
“Not as glad as I am,” Lena whispers back, but takes so long to find the words to reply that Kara is asleep by then.
///
Kara hugs her fiercely in farewell on the platform. Over her shoulder, Lena catches sight of one of her parents’ staff, here to take her to the Luthor mansion (she refuses to think of it as home anymore). She’s glad and unsurprised no one from her family bothered to come.
“Kara, we’ll still be friends next year, won’t we?” she asks hurriedly, aware that the underling has seen her and is cutting through the crowds towards them.
“Of course,” Kara swears, looking confused, pulling away slightly to make eye contact, but still holding tightly to her.
“Even if I can’t write to you?” Lena presses. “Because my mother won’t let me -”
“Ms Luthor, we have a schedule to keep,” the staff member grabs her trolley with his right hand and her upper arm with his left, and begins to lever her away from Kara, who is finally forced to let go.
“Why wouldn’t you be able to -” she hears Kara start to ask, but she’s being pulled away, and people are filling the space between them.
She worries that it’s just a time-lapse version of what the summer will do to them anyway.