Okay so I had a few thoughts-
Helena is just about no longer on the run with the astrolabe. But she can’t really bring herself to return to the Warehouse; for one thing, she resents that they sent her away (she’s been so lonely for so long, and they made it worse. “They”, by the way, are always the Regents, when Helena is in one of her darker moods.) (She’s been in a lot of those lately.) (She’s read about trauma and C-PTSD, but these articles and books tend to hit too close to home too quickly, and so she usually barely reads a paragraph before noping out and clicking back or closing the book and leaving it in a book swap.)
She tends to stick to glossy magazines, these days, mindless drivel for mindless evenings that don’t ask too much of her.
Until she sees a very familiar face on the front cover of CatCo magazine one day. It takes a surprisingly long time, and a full broadside of her charm, to get an appointment with this young, rich, powerful inventor-slash-CEO.
To her credit, the woman barely bats an eye when Helena walks into her office. Helena, who’s been trying very hard not to get her hopes up, who’s been looking very hard for the most minuscule micro expression, sees the double take, and knows that Lena Luthor was not born to that name. Was indeed not born in this century, or the one before it at that.
“How?” she asks, after the first few exasperating minutes in which “Lena” tried to stick to her story. “How are you here?”
“Lena” heaves a rough sigh and reaches for the decanter of whiskey on her office sideboard. She offers it to Helena with a wordless gesture; Helena nods equally wordlessly. She is rattled - not quite sure yet if she feels happy about this or horrified or frustrated. But rattled most definitely, and whiskey helps.
It is appropriately high quality for the world’s richest and most powerful woman under 30. Helena suppresses a laugh.
“Lena” takes a drink; long enough and deep enough to leave the glass half empty and Helena’s eyebrows high. “I tell you mine,” she says finally, voice rough, “you tell me yours.”
This is an easy demand to agree to; Helena wants to be known, here, now, by this impossible person. “Sure.”
“Lena” opens her mouth, then tuts at herself, rounds her desk, presses a button. “Soundproofing,” she explains. “This can’t leave this room. I’m sure you understand.”
“Lena” sits down again, on that pristine white leather couch. “I guess you could say I’m functionally immortal,” she says. The words come out flat, and she looks almost surprised by that. Then she pushes out a laugh. “Always wondered how it would feel to say that. Didn’t expect the answer to be ‘more curious about the story of the person I’m talking to rather than their reaction to mine’.”
“Functionally immortal,” Helena repeats, in a not-so-subtle demand for elaboration.
“I die, but then I… I guess reincarnate,” this woman says. “Bloody surprise when it happened the first time, let me tell you.”
“Lena” shrugs. “I suppose so. I’m enjoying it far too much to bring it to the Warehouse’s attention, though. I’m sure you understand.” Before Helena can say what she wants to say, “Lena” raises her hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, downside bla bla. Listen, you go through teething and potty training and learning to talk, again and again and again, all with periods in which you know exactly who you are, you just can’t talk about it yet because you’re still in kindergarten, and then you talk to me about downsides.” She tosses the rest of her whiskey down her throat. “And don’t talk to me about puberty,” she adds darkly.
Helena’s eyebrows are high again; she remembers “Lena’s” moodiness from when she knew her as Lucy - speaking of: “What’s your actual name then, anyway?”
“Lena” snorts indelicately. “Does it matter?” She looks away, out the window into the sunset sky, and her expression softens. “Once you find someone who says your name like that, it’s yours, isn’t it?”
Helena finds herself wondering if she falls into that category, with Lucy. She remembers the many ways she said, called out, breathed, moaned that name. Her cheeks warm; she takes a sip of her whiskey to hide them.
“That one was the second, by the way,” Lena adds. When Helena furrows her brow in question, Lena goes on, “The first time it happened; my second life, if you will, when we were lovers.” The equanimity with which she says the word douses cold water on Helena’s imagination; not ‘someone who says your name like that’, then. “So I hadn’t really clocked what was going on,” Lena continues, unaware of Helena’s… disappointment? Melancholy? But then, had they been that to another, perhaps things would be even more complicated now, so there is that. Helena refrains from wondering too closely what would be complicated by detecting or resurrecting an old flame back into flagrance. “I knew I had these snatches of memories,” Lena is saying; she focuses on that, “that couldn’t possibly be mine, but I had no idea why or where they came from. Figured it out on my third time around; that one was the longest one. Maybe the downside is not living past fifty, or always meeting a violent end, who the hell knows.”
Helena’s mouth sags open at the offhanded remark, and the pain and bitterness seeping through its cracks.
“Your turn,” Lena nods at her, and grabs the decanter off its tray.
Helena quickly sketches out her tale of woe - she and Lucy had parted ways long before Christina had come along. At the mention of the bronze, of being conscious while entombed, Lena’s jaw muscles twitch.
“Holy shit,” she breathes and refills Helena’s glass for the second time.
“Quite,” Helena murmurs; she’s the one staring out the window now, hand clenched around the tumbler till her knuckles are white. She doesn’t speak of the bronze much, tries not to think of it, even though she plugs a nightlight into the wall wherever she finds herself for the night - she’s got half a dozen of them in various purses, suitcases, coat pockets even.
“How long?” Lena asks, then shakes her head. “You don’t have to answer that. Too long is the only valid fucking answer to that, am I right?”
“I’ll drink to that,” Helena grates.
Their glasses clink softly against each other, and silence falls for a good long while.
She’s always enjoyed Lucy’s company. She enjoys Lena’s company too. So when Lena’s phone dings and reminds Lena that she needs to go to game night; when Lena looks up at Helena with eyes that don’t hold pity but an understanding that no one else, no one, could possibly ever afford her; when Lena invites her to come along: Helena agrees.
Lena isn’t Myka, for all that she and Helena shared back in London. But Lena knows, understands, how it feels to be alone. To know that everyone you knew in your past life, everyone, is dead and long gone. To understand the confusion of not finding a chamber pot under your bed when you’re only half awake, the vertigo moments of thinking the light odd for not flickering or hissing when you look up from the book you were immersed in for hours.
Lena understands that, intrinsically, like for like. Helena knows that Myka tried to understand it too, and feels that it’s doing Myka a disservice to dismiss her attempts as vicarious at best, but there is something that shared experiences will convey that a thousand words and the best intentions cannot. And perhaps in those shared experiences, even if they don’t talk about them, even if Helena soon finds out that the rest of Lena’s friends, welcoming as they are, close as they are (Kara, Helena knows immediately, is a ‘like that’ someone), don’t know about, perhaps in those shared experiences, Helena can find rest.
She doesn’t feel like running anymore, at any rate. Maybe that is Lena, maybe it’s her friends, with their game nights, pizza nights, movie nights, the easy camaraderie they extend to Helena. Maybe it’s working in L-Corp’s labs, researching and building in ways Helena only dreamed of before. Maybe it’s the fact that here she can figure out who she is, who she wants to be - with someone who knew her before, and with others who don’t know her at all.
She feels both free and grounded, and that she hasn’t felt since she first held a newborn little girl in her arms. And contrary to what she imagined, even feared, the feeling doesn’t scare her. Her feelings for Myka scared her - but she isn’t feeling that here. Lena isn’t Myka, obviously; besides, Lena has her Kara. But, Helena thinks, perhaps what she is building here is a base on which her feelings for Myka can be less scary. On which they can bloom and grow, a solid foundation, not the teetering shambles of a world rent apart thrice over.
