Lena Luthor

maybe i should have thought this one through. 

ana hadn’t disclosed that she wasn’t originally human to start with,  she had figured that she’d make a quick buck and be on her way but wound up stuck in the lab for testing longer than anticipated.  the timing had been off and the full moon hit just as it always had and she shifted,  staring the camera in the corner of her room while the familiar transformation took hold.  bones broke and realigned,  fur grew in its rightful places,  and she sat there quietly,  wondering if there’d be a soul brave enough to pop into her room.

a few hours passed and eventually lena’s scent began to waft on in,  the smell of her perfume  flitting through her nostrils.  she waits there for a moment,  baring her teeth in a large and toothy grin,  and takes in the woman’s response to her transformation.  no,  the harun-el didn’t do this.  she laughs,  her head shaking at the other woman’s disbelief before the fun in the situation quickly dissipates as she realizes that only another of her kind could recognize the sounds she’s made.

she paces back and forth for a moment before she lets out a grumble and braces herself for a shift,  her body rearranging itself into the form most fitting for the moment.  the older she managed to get,  the faster the transformation would become,  and a few minutes she’s standing in front of lena entirely nude and reaching for the clothes that she had recently shed.

“  so…  ”  she starts as she slips the bra and then the shirt she’d be given over her shoulders.  “  i’m still getting paid for this,  right?  ”

it isn’t the nudity or the sharp cracking of bones that makes watching ana go from wolf to human feel so violating, as though she’s been scooped out and spun around in the centrifuge before being placed back into her body all disoriented and wrong. it’s the way the law of the conversation of matter seems to shift around her, the way the human body accommodates an animal form in way that’s both grotesque and scientifically beautiful that leaves lena blinking at her test subject in wild awe, questions ready to fire from the tip of her tongue.

“of--- of course you’re getting paid,” lena says, confusion knitting itself into the crease between her brows. no matter the gray space that the harun-el experiments occupy, lena would never violate scientific ethics so much as to renege her subject’s compensation.

@entropystained​ said: [ text ] did you sleep together?

TEXT MESSAGE STARTERS

when sam opens the message she has to confront the afterglow still buzzing under her skin with the thrill of close connection, the culmination of a gravity that no amount of resistance could have allowed her to deny.  but seeing it outlined in plain text…  

GUILT plummets like an anchor down into black, frigid waters.  ice skitters, clammy, filtering out all the heat of bodies pressing together  &  the only thing sam feels is grim.  she can almost hear the question in lena’s voice  –  how she’d play it out sharp  &  lancing with mischief but the defeat  &  disappointment hugging the corners of her eyes   –  &  that dredges slick, acid regret in a way that her fingers can’t type back.  

lena would say this is inevitable, that sam  &  alex are meant to be, two pieces of a puzzle finally slipping into place.  

sam, stubborn, defiant of the idea that this should somehow throw lena of out her orbit, thumbs at lena’s contact until the trill of a telephone call bleats on repeat in the shell of her ear.  when the other line clicks, sam, with one hand shoved down into her coat pocket  &  her chin tucked down against her chest with her cheeks too tinted from the conflict warring within, simply asks.  “  can you come over so we can talk?  ” 

lena stares at the familiar home screen of her phone, nails clicking against each other as she waits for a notification to appear. a sigh passes her lips when the screen turns gray, samantha arias incoming call flashing up rather than the text she wanted.

“damn it, sam,” she mutters under her breath, foot tapping where it dangles off the edge of her bed. of course sam had to call. lena swipes her thumb across the green telephone symbol, lifting the phone to her ear as she tries to steady the rapid staccato of her heartbeat.

“sam.”

it’s a question that answers her own. anything other than a direct no is a yes, and she can’t control the swoop that hollows out her insides, leaves the room spinning even while she sits still on her bed. they slept together. they slept together, because they’re soulmates, and sam wants lena to come over so they can break up, make it official----

“isn’t it late?” she asks, voice catching. “isn’t ruby in bed?”

a feeble excuse even to her own ears, ruby being in bed all the better opportunity for them to talk uninterrupted. but lena isn’t sure she wants to talk to sam now, as though putting off the inevitable will make it hurt less when sam finally rips her heart in two.

@lunaersoul​ gets a starter!

lena’s heels click across the cement floor as she enters the lab, crossing the room with familiar efficiency. she scans over the tablet in her arm, pulling up the subject’s -- ana’s -- record with a quick series of inputs that brings her to relevant screens before she looks up.

“good afterno---” 

where she expects a woman of average height, a highly physically fit build with brown hair and brown eyes, now sits an exceptionally large... dog. wolf, she immediately corrects herself, taking in the long thin snout and the thick, dark fur. deep amber eyes stare back at her as the canine sits where she expects her patient to be, calm as could be and yet... entirely not human.

“...hope, what the hell is this?” she calls out, voice cracking as she asks her AI system for an explanation, heart hammering against the back of her sternum. (of all her brother’s stunts, her mother’s, the aliens they’ve fought.... nothing like this has ever just shown up...)

“that is ana romero,” the voice replies back politely. “playback of her arrival is available for you now.”

it takes lena a few series of blinks to drag her eyes away from the predator perched not ten feet in front of her, down to the video waiting to be played on her tablet. it’s quick -- the progression from familiar face, to the woman undressing, to this, and lena’s jaw works for a second before she’s able to force any words past her lips.

@ohsprock​ gets a starter for lillian! 

after more than two decades as a luthor, she ought to know better than to ask questions she doesn’t want the answer to. yet still, her heels clack down the hallway to the lab, long after jimmy falls asleep, stabilized and super-strong, to seek out her mother in her last hours of leave.

the sight of her mother in prison scrubs is becoming too uncomfortably familiar. unease still tumbles over and over in her belly, a writhing pile of serpents waiting to strike at her heart with one wrong word or disapproving glance.

but there’s a need in her bones that drives her forward, has her setting her purse on the bench and dropping her coat onto the back of the lab chair.

“i see you took the antidote,” she says, eyeing her mother before she crosses her arms, all too aware of the protective stance it gives her, but unable to force her arms out of their own hug.

“why?” she asks. “why couldn’t you say it before you had a truth-seeker latched on your arm?”

@entropystained​​ said: ∗ o9﹕ a  text  containing  a  confession .

𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑶𝑻𝑯𝑬𝑹 𝑳𝑰𝑵𝑬 .

to call what sam does when composing the message agonizing would be an understatement.  she types out different iterations all of the same design.  they turn out too romantic, too clinical, too goofy when she starts dotting in emojis somewhere between the beginning  &  the end of the text.  

there doesn’t seem to be enough space between the characters to encapsulate the way that she wants to press lena down between the couch cushions during movie night to kiss her breathless or that all the casual grazing touches mean something more now.  

things have changed.   a liminal space between friendship  &  lovers sets them in an in between that has her fumbling with how she feels, awkward for how to approach the dynamic between them that was always supposed to be a game for the press.  

[    sms    >    lena    ]    :  i had fun at the wedding. 

it’s as basic as cracking the door for the conversation, cautious enough to blanket the entirety of the evening without covering the intimacy they’d broached behind the latch of their hotel room. 

[    sms    >    lena    ]    :   i’ve been thinking about it a lot.  do you want to talk about it?  

where throwing herself into work has always been a welcome reprieve from her personal life, she now finds herself traversing a minefield where one wrong move will shatter the divide completely out of existence.

pretending to date her cfo was always a bad idea. perhaps a worse idea than pretending date one of her longest standing best friends. because now, when she’s harassed her lead scientists enough to be shooed out of the lab, and checked up on her prototypes and experiments until every update was documented in triplet, she needs to get back to budget reports and the DUA for their new partnership in japan, neither of which she can do without involving sam.

sam. 

the very reason she’s barely slept for the last four days, unable to find a box big enough in her mental storage unit to place the raw feelings that still haunt her. she’s yet to imagine a lock strong enough to keep the shiver out of her spine when she sees the faded, yellowing bruises as they disappear along her collarbones each morning. instead of counting sheep, she’s tried locking the memory of sam’s touch under complex combination, tried to will away the exact amount of rasp in sam’s voice as she moaned lena’s name into her ear, the sound still echoing in the cavern of her ears even now.

two fingers of scotch is hardly enough, so she pours freely, staring at sam’s text message just long enough that she knows she has to reply.

[ sms - samantha arias] So did I

it’s not a lie by any means, and to say anything else would do a disservice to both of their intelligences.

@amazonluthor​​ gets a semi-plotted starter!

the clanging ring of metal-on-metal sounds out as lena tugs against her cuffs, a discordant syncopation to the quick stutter of her heartbeat. but it’s no use; her arms are still bound to the same chair that the cadmus goons stuffed her in, coherent strings of consciousness still slipping away from her like bits of cotton candy plucked with wet fingers.

cadmus.

it’s a vile anchor as her mind struggles through the fog of drugs still coursing through her system, one that keeps her focused and sends dread pooling deep in her gut. she’s unsure how much time has passed, but she could recognize the familiar click of those steps anywhere. lifting her gaze, lena’s jaw clenches tight as she sees the face before her.

her mother.