Kara’s eyelids were brutally heavy. She couldn’t force them open no matter how she tried, and everything sounded distant, as if she were listening from underwater. The loudest sound was the blood rushing in her own ears and the steady march of her pulse, like the distant rush of some animal moving across leaves.
“Whu?” she managed to choke out.
Kara finally managed to split them open, blinking away gummy eyelashes to take a blurred look around the room. She wasn’t sure where she was, only that they were underground. Her limbs felt leaden and her body ached. It was soon clear why.
The chunk of kryptonite in front of her glowed a paler green than normal. It was different somehow, hard to look at.
“I broadened my mind,” said Lex.
Kara managed to raise her head and look at him. He was stripped to the waist, a flabby early middle aged business executive, much softer than he would allow anyone to realize. He looked a little absurd, especially after all the effort he put into a public image of a physically fit, debonair, imposing man.”
“That is a very special type of kryptonite. You wouldn’t believe what I had to give up to get it. It’ll be worth it in the end.”
“Oh this place,” Lex said, glancing around the stone walls, lit by flicker torches and glowing Edison lamps. “A castle, in Scotland. It was incredibly expensive, I assure you. The grounds are quite lovely, though you’ll never have a chance to see them.”
“Of course I won’t,” Kara rasped. “Can you finish your monologue without the dramatic pauses? I’m on the clock.”
“This castle was built on a conduit of energy- a ley line. Actually several, and they converge beneath our feet. That and the peculiar construction -sandwiched within these walls are layers of copper, cold-hammered silver, and pure selenium- make it perfect for my purposes.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Oh no no no,” Lex laughed, “not everything is about you, Supergirl. This is about Lena.”
Kara heard a muffled cry and looked around frantically.
“She’ll join us shortly,” said “Lex. I wasn’t finished.”
“Oh indeed. You know, I’ve wondered what she sees in an alien freak like you. Why you’re so alluring to her. I’ve often wondered why you never made a move- I know you think about it. Fantasize about it.”
“I’ve been watching, you know. Did you think I’d let you out of my sight?”
Lex walked to a table and began toying with a long dagger with a thin, blue-black blade, drawing the edge over his thumb with a wince. He let a thin bloppy stream of his blood trickle into a silver chalice on the table before staunching the bleeding with a towel.
He turned to Kara sharply, holding the dagger.
“Your little secret? Or should I say, your big secret?”
He stopped and regarded her with a smile.
“I don’t mean your real name, Kara,” Lex chuckled. “I mean the other secret, you moron. The one that made you switch from the skirt to pants.”
“What? No, of course not…”
“I know what you want to do with her,” Lex said, kneeling to look Kara in the eye as the heavy chains weighed her down.
“Oh dear me no, I don’t play catcher. Anyway, as I was saying, I think I know what she sees in you. Turns out that rutting with inhuman monsters is in my half sister’s blood. On her mother’s side, obviously. Someone in the deep end of my dear sister’s gene pool interbred with one of the fair folk. The kindly ones. The fey.”
Lex lashed out with the knife and a hot red sting slashed Kara’s cheek. To her shock she felt blood running down her jawline and chin. Lex let it drop into the chalice, mingling with his own, then stood up.”
“Bring her!” he shouted. “Otis you oaf, bring her in.”
Kara’s attention snapped to the far end of the room. Otis Graves shoved Lena into the room. Kara knew it was her even with a black bag over her head. Lena was barefoot and bruised, her blazer and skirt torn from putting up a fight.
There was a thin chain of dark metal looped lazily around her neck.
“Once I learned about this, I did what I always do,” said Lex. “I decided to master my circumstances. I studied, I learned, I applied what I’d researched.”
He turned back to Kara, and as her vision cleared, she saw that Lex was drawn and haggard, thinner than she remembered.
“It took me almost two years to prepare this ritual. I have walked trails blazed by gods. I had to beg, borrow, and steal to piece together the forbidden lore I need. I even had to strike treaties with the pit.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Kara.
“Lex,” Lena panted through her mask. “Don’t do this. Let her go. Please.”
Lex barked out a sharp laugh. “Let her go? Come on, sis. That’s Kara’s line.”
Lena let out a sharp gasp, visibly tensing.
“Lee?” said Lex. “You hate that nickname.”
“Not from her,” Lena said softly.
“Lena, I don’t know what crazy nonsense he’s talking but I will get us out of this. He has some kind of-“
Kara was cut off as Lex kicked her hard in the belly, driving the toe of his shoe up under her ribs. The world exploded in pain and Kara doubled over, almost retching in agony.
“As much as I’d like to spend the rest of the day making you feel pain, we’re on the clock. I have power to acquire, a world to master, and a deal with a devil to weasel out of.”
“Lex,” said Lena. “You didn’t.”
“I did. Promised my immortal soul upon death, but alas, I’m never going to die. Otis, get her in place.
Kara strained at her chains as the big oaf wrenched Lena around and bound her hands behind her back with ancient looking iron manacles.
“The iron keeps her from trying any tricks,” Lex explained.
Kara was tired of his bullshit. The only thing that mattered was Lena’s shocked cry of agony when Otis forced her to her knees on the stone floor, followed by the whimper as he yanked the bag from her head. Her right eye was swollen almost shut and she had a split lip.
Incandescent rage boiled in Kara’s chest with the fury of a newborn star. If not for the strange kryptonite sapping her powers, Otis Graves would burn, screaming in agony in the terrible wrath of a Kryptonian’s gaze.
He hurt her. He hurt her Lena.
“You know how this is going to end, Lex.”
He was leafing through the pages of a heavy book on his work table.
Graves withdrew, smirking at Lena. She turned to Kara, eyes soft with emotion.
“Not often we get kidnapped together.”
“I’d rather have had a movie night.”
“Ugh, can you two please save the tearful love confession? I’m gagging.”
“Why didn’t you ever ask me out?” said Lena.
“I’m stupid,” Kara sighed. “I thought about it. I was scared. I thought… I don’t know.”
Lex rolled his eyes. “Danvers, are you really going to pretend you didn’t know that my sister is a rug muncher? It’s the worst kept secret in the Luthor family history. Throwing her into a girl’s boarding school was like throwing a pig in shit, but then Mother has always been a dolt.”
Kara ground her teeth. “Don’t talk about Lena like that.”
“Or?” said Lex. “Alright, look. I’d love to spend a bit longer taunting you, but I’m busy. The forms have been observed. I monologue, we taunt each other, I kill you.”
“No,” said Kara. “You try and fail and I drag you to jail.”
“Not this time,” said Lex.
“No, not this time,” said Kara. “This time I break my biggest rule.”
Lena stared at her across the room, eyes wide.
“I’m not going to let him hurt you anymore.”
“How noble,” Lex deadpanned. “Hold still, sis.”
He grabbed her by the chin, dabbing a thin paintbrush in the chalice, and began to paint lines and sworls on Lena’s face in their mingled blood. When Lena tried to turn, her let go and backhanded her across the face. Lena almost fell to the floor and let out a pained yelp.
Kara pulled hard at the chains but the held fast. She felt like she was weighed down by an invisible force, unseen hands digging spectral fingers into her arms and legs.
“It’s interesting,” said Lex. “Everyone assumes you have one weakness- Kryptonite. But you’re just as vulnerable to magic as anyone else.”
“What?” said Kara. “You’re insane.”
“I don’t think he is,” Lena said, wincing at her split lip. “When I was a girl, there were rumors that my mother was a witch, and she did some… some things I didn’t understand.”
He propped the book open on his forearm, making a final study of the markings he’d drawn on Lena’s face.
“You know the most annoying part?” said Lex. “It’s that you can’t just do magic. The power source, as it were, has to come from somewhere. The most common place to get it is from ancestor fucking a dragon or a god damned fairy or some other absurd thing. I don’t have the spark. But she does.”
He looked at Lena, a feral, hungry glint in his eye, and began to chant, reading from the book.
Kara flinched. The words sounded wrong, twisting and turning unnaturally as they fell from Lex’s mouth. The air grew heavy, as if a coat of soot and oil fell over everything, and a hideous stink of rotten eggs filled the room.
Lena cried out, eyes flying open in shock. She tried to say something but choked.
Kara lunged, desperate to free herself, to break the chains, to reach Lena and spirit her to safety the way she always did, but she was helpless. A terrible certainty of her own death fell over her like an ebon cloak, and she felt a distinct certainty of things, other presences in the room just out of sight.
“Lex,” Lena pleaded, “Stop. Please. You’re hurting me.”
Kara let out a sharp snarl, a ripping sound of threat from deep in her chest.
Lex briefly broke his chant. “Yes, the ritual will most likely kill you. No great loss. The world has enough degenerates and alien-fuckers as it is.”
He resumed his chanting, and Kara felt a sudden wave of agony through her body. She tried to scream but no sound came. It was as if a giant’s hands had shoved into her chest and begun crushing her lungs from the inside. She fell boneless to the floor, writhing in pain.
Lena lay on her side, tears streaming from her eyes, tears that tinged pink with blood as she jerked and convulsed, teeth clenched.
There was a soft crack and the rhythm of his chanting changed. He grew taller before Kara’s eyes. His arms swelled, corded with new muscle as his paunchy belly flattened and tightened into a washboard.
“That’s right,” he snarled. “Soon it all be mine. All your beautiful power mine. I will be powered by the sun! Lex Luthor will fly faster than a speeding bullet, bend steel in his bare hands! I will be a god, and when I am I will finally lead humanity into its glory! My glory! Lex Luthor, the Man of Tomorrow! Invincible! Immortal!”
Kara could feel herself fading, the world irising shut as death stalked her from below, a hungry predator always waiting just beyond the edges of her gaze. Her hands were pale, the flesh drawn so tight to the bone that they seemed barely more than skeletal. Her hands actually slipped free of her manacles, but she might as well be buried beneath a mountain for all the good it did. She had no strength to move.
“Lena,” Kara rasped out, “Lena!”
Lena forced her eyes open.
“I can’t,” said Lena, her face shattering into a mask of agony. “It hurts so much, and I’m too weak.”
“You are not weak!” Kara spat, with all her remaining strength. “You’re beautiful and powerful and… magical. You’re my Lena.”
“I love you, Lena. Please, I need you to know.”
“I know,” Lena choked out, pinching her eyes shut, tears of blood streaking her face as she clenched her jaw in tooth shattering pain. “Oh God I know, Kara. I love you too. I love you so much it hurts. I just wish we had more time. I…”
She went silent, and still. Kara stared at her for an awful endless moment of white hot pain as something ate her alive from the heart out, yet that pain paled next to the agony of watching Lena suffer. She was almost glad that death would take her first, but prayed to the god of a distant broken world that Lena wouldn’t have to see it. She felt a dim hope that somewhere past this, in fields beneath a crimson star there would be a place for them, that Rao would find a way to bring Lena home to Him, that He would not let her wander in the dark, forever lost.
Kara had fucking earned a little grace.
Then, Lena’s eyes shot open, ablaze with stunning, brilliant light. She wrenched from the floor with a sudden strength and arched her back, screaming.
Lex looked down at her as the iron manacles fell ruined from her wrists and she yanked the chain from her throat, her hands wreathed in otherworldly light as the links snapped.
Slowly she rose to her feet, eyes still blazing.
Lena screamed, a banshee wail that shook the walls around them, and her cry seemed to swallow Lex’s frantic chanting, opening vast shark-toothed jaws of music that gouged into his feeble warbling and bit down, devouring it.
He stumbled back, frantically turning pages in his book.
“Fuck you,” Lena snarled, and the words carried an intensity, a physical force just as Lex’s had, but where his sharp wrenching syllables turned the air somehow profane and tainted it with invisible filth, Lena’s burned, not as fire but as daylight burns, clear and bright to chase dark crawling things back into their hateful shadows.
With a soft cracking sound, the strange chunk of tainted kryptonite turned a dull gray.
Kara planted her palms and pushed up to kneel. She could feel, see the vitality coming back to her. Her frame expanded from skeletal and deathly thin to its normal self, slabs of lithe muscle bunching beneath her colors and crest as she stood and watched Lex shrinking.
Lena sagged, suddenly winded, grabbing the table for support.
Lex silent and stunned, wasted no opportunity. He snatched the dagger from where it lay and raised it high to slam down into Lena’s back.
It clattered to the floor instead as Kara effortlessly grabbed his wrist, feeling her thumb drive between the bones of his forearm.
“I,” Kara said, “am tired of you hurting us.”
Lex screamed in agony as Kara closed her hand, pulling every bone in his forearm. She reached out and seized his throat, savoring the hate and terror in his eyes as red sun fire blazed in her own, savage loathing kindling a blaze in her chest. This ended now.
A soft hand fell on her shoulder.
“Kara,” said Lena. “Don’t.”
“Not for him. For you. He made his own grave. Let him lie in it.”
Kara turned and looked at her. There was still blood on her face- the mingled painted lines smeared with her own. She looked so small and fragile and soft and the furnace that burned in Kara was doused, and suddenly nothing mattered but making her safe.
Kara let the sniveling coward go and brought Lena into her embrace, sheltering her with all her might.
“We have to go. Now. Trust me.”
“Yes,” Lex gasped, “time to leave, take me to jail now.”
Kara looked down. Lena’s eyes hardened.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Kara raised her foot and brought out down, snapping Lex’s ankle in a single sharp motion. He screamed and collapsed, crawling for the door.
Kara heaved Lena into a bridal carry and walked past him.
“Supergirl!” Lex bellowed, “you can’t leave me here! You don’t know what’s coming.”
“I don’t care,” said Kara.
She shoved the door open with her foot, then turned to close it the same way. Lena clung to her, arms around her neck.
Kara did more than that. A quick flicker of heat vision welded the heavy metal door closed. Lex screamed and pleaded from the other side.
Something was coming. Something ancient.
“Please. Get us out of here,” said Lena.
A crimson light blazed behind the door, bleeding through its edges. The stink of rotten eggs filled the corridor. Kara turned and carried Lena away.
“Wait!” Lex called. “Supergirl! You can’t leave me here!”
Kara ignored him and kept walking.
“No,” Lex was screaming, “no, wait, we can make another deal, a trade, there has to be something I can-“
“You tried to trick me,” something said in a voice like a hot knife dragged across a tombstone.
“What is that?” Kara whispered.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to,” said Lena. “Get us out of here. Take me home, Kara.”
Kara touched a soft kiss to her forehead, a promise of more and deeper to come. Once they were outside, Kara used the comm bead in her ear, and called Alex, told her what happened.
“Let’s go home, baby,” said Kara.
A year later, she flew back to the castle.
It was secluded, somehow forgotten, a tumbledown ruin. Heart thudding in her chest with uncharacteristic fear, she walked down the corridor into the underground and slammed the door open with her first.
No remains. No body. There was only one sign that Lex had been there at all. Scratches across the store floor, one with a fingernail still stuck in it.
As if he had been dragged.
Kara rocketed outside at supersonic speed, desperate to feel the sun and cleanse the oily, tainted feeling in that room. A cold, lingering dread welled inside her, twisting deep in her belly.
Part of her regretted what she did to the old ruin. It was history. Only part of her.
The rest of her flew fifth thousand feet up and came straight back down fast enough to destroy the stonework in massive shockwave that dug a crater where the building had stood seconds before. She then turned her heat vision on it, burning and melting. By the time she was done, by the time it no longer felt like she was being watched, as if she might be followed, there was nothing left but a smoldering, glassy crater. It looked like someone had dropped an atomic bomb.
It still felt like something slithered beneath, but whatever it was, it would not follow and that was all that mattered.
Kara flew. She had places to be. She’d already planned a date night with Lena.
Alex was watching their baby.
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