little bumps in the road
lena becomes aware of her brain beginning to zone out almost immediately; she just doesn’t have the wherewithal at the minute to pull herself back to attention.
instead, her focus wanders towards the noise.
there’s the incessant sputtering and whirring of a coffeemaker that looks positively ancient--there’s also something clanking inside the machine, and she can hear it from where she’s sitting. the engineer in her knows it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes kaput just by listening.
there’s the occasional ding of a bell, the splattering of hot oil, bubbling in a pan somewhere in the kitchen, the squeak of a door swinging open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
there’s the abominable sound of cutlery scraping against plates--it irks her to the point of silent fury, the way the metal scratches and clinks and screams against the cheap china. but then, to make everything worse, there’s the chewing.
loud, rapid, moist, and utterly revolting, not to mention obnoxious chewing. lena levels a withering glare from under her baseball cap -- lillian would be proud, of the glare, not the cap-- and sneers with all her might.
“could you not,” she hisses, fists clenching when the slurping of orange juice through a straw joins the maddening cacophony, “could you please not eat like a complete troglodyte?”
the slurping ceases, mercifully, but the chewing resumes, almost as a direct challenge, after an indifferent shrug of broad shoulders.
“i haven’t eaten in three days. i’m hungry.”
the voice sounds equally tired and annoyed, and lena has regretfully become very well acquainted with that particular tone over the last few days. she ignores the way blue eyes look solely at the humongous (truly, the massive, inhuman quantity) stack of pancakes that is currently being decimated.
“be that as it may,” lena continues, gritting her teeth at another scrape of the knife that seems to screech louder than before, “maybe you could eat a little more slowly? or at the very least,” she scowls, “with your mouth closed?”
there’s a deep exhale from across the table--an exasperated, getting-real-tired-of-your-shit kind of sigh, and it comes with an exhausted hand running through hair that has been cropped short, now only a few inches long and tucked into a baseball cap almost as ratty as lena’s. it’s a gesture that lena recognizes from a time when that hair fell in long, blonde curls, cascading freely over blue-draped shoulders and she hates the way the memory comes unbidden to her mind.
“do you have any idea of what my usual caloric intake has to be?”
lena blinks, because no, she doesn’t, and she’s automatically trying to do the math in her head before she stops herself and remembers to scowl again.
the cutlery resumes its scraping--a bit more forcefully, frustrated, even. “a whole damn lot,” comes a muttered addendum.
lena’s rolling her eyes before she can think better of it. “one would think you wouldn’t need to meet your usual caloric intake under these... circumstances,” she begins, but trails off into silence once she’s the one on the receiving end of an icy glare.
she doesn’t learn, though, does she, because lena continues against her better judgement, lowering her voice to a whisper and glancing around them, just in case. “it’s not like you have anything... super messing with your metabolism right now. it’s not like you need the extra energy.”
the slurp is obnoxious and furiously deliberate this time, drawn out long enough until there’s no orange juice left in the cup--just the endless sound of air bubbles and melted ice blubbering and sputtering as they’re sucked through the straw.
“that’s exactly why i need more energy. i’m still recovering, so i need all that i can get.”
“but what about the sun?” lena can’t help but ask, can’t help but push, shifting in her seat and leaning over their table, letting her curiosity get the better of her for a mere moment. “i mean, i always thought that supergirl...”
“nuh-uh,” comes the categorical denial and a fork, pointed accusingly at lena. ‘there is no supergirl,” the blonde says, and her fork moves to point at the TV above the bar of this middle-of-nowhere diner they stopped at after nearly three days of nonstop driving. it’s still reporting on the chaos of three days ago.
“supergirl is dead.” kara says through a scowl that rivals lena’s. “you killed her.”
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