I wanted to apologize for how long it took me to upload it, the false hope and all that, my life has been...messy, hectic would be an understatement, with the pressure to present results from my research, meeting with my comitee (I was chewed alive thank you very much), and all the paperwork, I've been drowning in things to do. But hey, here we finally are, you can read the chapter whole in AO3.
Read in AO3
He rocks on his heels, hopeful, as if waiting for a sudden miracle to change her mind and decide that letting him meet Lori is a good idea. Hell no. The younger woman can see J’onn stiffening behind her, probably from her own tumultuous thoughts, but she sends him a small smile in reassurance, she can handle this.
“I don’t want you to meet her”, her voice is steady and cold, it doesn’t waver with the trembles that are wrecking her body, and there isn’t really much more for her to say. She barely waits for him to give a meek nod before turning away, turning her back on that chapter of her life, finally closing that lid of pain, her mind single-focused on the babbling toddler on Kelly’s arms, waiting for her as she’s escorted by J’onn to one of the DEO’s vans.
Maybe one day her heart won’t break or shudder when her mind thinks of Mon-El – despite it being a less and less common occurrence – maybe one day she might be able to stop feeling so much anger and shame, dulling the pain, maybe she could even forgive him, as unthinkable as it is now. One day, maybe. But that day isn’t today.
It's a bittersweet taste, knowing that the girl she loves the most, cradled in her arms while sucking on her thumb, came from a situation of so much pain. A part of her story tainted with blood and splattered in tears, towering insecurities and pain. There had been so much pain she still womders more often than not how she managed to survive, to come to the other side and live to tell it, even is she had adamantly refused to do so. Not until that moment in that creepy glass cell when the words simply became too heavy to keep inside her, too tarnished and real to pretend they weren’t there.
A violent shudder pull her out from her spiraling thoughts. With a sigh, trembling and hollow, she remembers that it isn’t that tragic. Not even being on the other side of the room from the woman she loves. There really isn’t much to complain about, she knows is for her own wellbeing and because it allows her to be close to the love of her life, in spite of it all, it is still a bothersome that she has to be feed vitamins and supplements through a tube half of the time – her body refusing solid food after such long period of time basically starving herself – and that, albeit they’re in the same room, they’re not allowed to be together, when all she wants is to caress the Kryptonian’s blonde tresses and kiss her lips, even if she’ll never say that out loud. However, said alien is extremely injured and needs the sunlamps, that are absolutely harmful for her very human skin, and it isn’t like she can stan upright much, her own muscles being weak and slightly atrophied.
Being apart after such trauma isn’t easy, particularly after they managed to survive precisely because they were together.
The nightmares hunt them, more often than not being real enough to make them wary of the world and people surrounding them. They don’t talk about it.
----
The Kryptonian pads into her kitchen with her fluffy rainbows socks, still limping slightly, creaking like an old house with every step, her joints are still tender and ache sometimes, but she’s almost entirely recovered from that endeavor, hopefully she can go back to work soon. Though washing the dishes has never been her favorite chore, it is soothing in its way, allowing her mind to drift the way she knew it would, while she meticulously scrubs the dishes clean, hands soapy and the front of her sweater slightly damp. A slender hand on her shoulder pulls her from her musings, tenderly pulling at her wrist until she has dried her hands and starts following the raven-haired woman.
Lena navigates them – the blonde’s hand securely held in one of hers – with familiarity through the apartment, turning lights off as they go, before passing through the partition that leads to Kara’s bedroom, pulling the blonde along, who follows sheepishly with slightly furrowed brows. Nevertheless, as soon as the alien registers where she is being taken to, she stops lightly eyes widening, staring questioningly into green eyes that always seem to hold all the answers. The fact is that she truly wants Lena to mean what she’s implying, but she also knows the woman might just be offering to sleep there alone, in a show of care for her wellbeing.
As predicted, the younger woman reads right through her-
“I won’t let you sleep on the couch”, Lena is clearly not asking permission. However, she can read Lena just as much as she can read her, with narrowed eyes, eyebrows scrunched, she pulls up some of her Supergirl persona, even if her back has a hard time handling such pull. Not even giving the other woman the time to say anything, because she’s pretty sure this is one of those selfless acts she frequently pulls off – and that are something she loves about the raven-haired woman, but right now she just wants them to share – and that has no place right now, not when she has to look after her, human fragility and all that aside, she made a silent vow to always care for the younger woman, months ago, and she will spend her life fulfilling it if she’s allowed.
“I won’t let you sleep on the couch”
“Thank you”, despite the effort behind the word, it comes out raspy and fragile. Brittle like porcelain but equally gorgeous, clearing her throat, the thought, half-formed, that had been bouncing in her brain finally comes out, “I know you’ll be an amazing mother”, a lone, pearly tear slides from a blue eye as her lips form a surprised ‘o’, once the words register. The next moment, warm, plushy pink lips are pressed to her own, Kara pressing into her and trying to commit her feelings into the kiss.
And Lena gets it, she does, pushing back just as strongly and tangling a hand in golden hair. They kiss like the other is water in a dessert, their kisses moisturized with spit and tears. When they part, foreheads touching and breathing ragged, Lena can clearly see her future painted beside this woman.
Pressing a tender peck to Lena’s lips, “You are an amazing mother already”, Kara murmurs against her lips, breathing ghosting her face. Lena simply clings to her and let’s those (definitely) happy tears, roll down her face freely.
They fall asleep tangled into each other, limbs tightly wrapped around them and faint smiles on their faces, finally taking a step forward with their own hapiness.
----
It isn’t easy being in a relationship again.
That’s a thought that she had been terrified to allow into her mind, worrying that it might mean she’s not sure about Kara, about them. But now, striding confidently across the polished floors to her new office, she realizes that it’s nothing but reasonable, to feel out of her depth being in a relationship, sharing with another person her life and the intricacies of her mind. It doesn’t mean that she isn’t happy, she is, but after the trauma she went through, part of her is just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
She had been naïve enough to believe that being with Kara sunshine Danvers would be more than enough to soothe all her insecurities that – despite therapy and all – still pop up whenever she feels too vulnerable with someone else. The crippling fear that she’s being manipulated, pushed around and controlled, decisions taken out from her hands, beliefs and ideals dismissed. Lena thought that with Kara those things wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen, considering Kara would never treat her that way – even though she had avoided relationships like the plague since Mon-El. After all, it felt very logic to believe so, she already knew Kara, before her heart had been shattered and her self-confidence thrown out the window, because the blonde alien is her person, will always be, and she knows her heart, hence, she always wanted to believe that those fears wouldn’t have a place in their relationship.
How wrong was she.
----
To say that Kara is feeling jittery would be the ultimate understatement, she’s buzzing with excitenment to the point where Lena had to pass Lori into her arms in an attempt to keep her from drilling the entire building down, her entire being vibrating with excitement. She can’t be blamed for it though, today is the day when Lori will officially become her daughter.
She and Lena have already signed the papers and had Lena’s very fancy lawyers look at them, but finally turning them over, finally taking the final step into becoming a legally-bound family, has her filled to the brim with love for the girl in her arms, babbling happily at her mothers’ attention. This part of the procedure could’ve been done through their lawyers as well, only handling over the signed papers from both parents (Rao does she love how that sounds) in order to them to proceed before the law, but she insisted they do it personally, insisting that it was the whole experience.
Doing this as humanly possible, having a family under circumstances she never imagined, and loving them in a way that she never though her wounded heart would be able to – after Krypton dying, the pain that it caused her, she feared that there was no longer space in her heart for love, filled with the never-ending fear of being left alone again, surviving. But that is certainly not the case.
Lena has changed her and her life.
When she looks to her right, where the aforementioned is going through several blueprints that she can barely get the gist of – emerald eyes scanning in a breath the entirety of it, before proceeding to make annotations – she is dressed in her full attire business after months of staying on the sidelines – with her maternity leave and all that happened afterwards – and Kara can’t help but fall a little bit more in love with her. With the way she slowly chews her lip while concentrated making calculations, or how her neat, intricate, bun gets messier the longer she struggles with fixing an issue, poking at it with her pencil and hands, heels abandoned on the floor haphazardly.
Your life could mean so much, and yet you fly around in a cheerleader skirt. How did they do it? What did they say to make you believe? Look out the window and you will see fear, racism, strife. This country is a fatted heifer. I am here to cut its throat.
She’s going to die very soon and she’s going to do it right here on the road to god-knows-where, Colorado, her hands still clutching the wheel of this foul-smelling rental car, buried under five feet of snow for the remainder of the season until some fortunate family of possums digs her up in spring, probably. (Do they have possums in the mountains?)
But before she dies, she’s going to kill Sam Arias.
-
In which Lena Luthor hates the winter holidays, until her best friend lures her to her cabin in the mountains where she's promptly held hostage by a very well-timed snowstorm and the irresistible charm of unexpected guest Kara Danvers. (But Lena will literally kill a man before admitting to that last part.)
oh i’ve been waiting ages to be able to post this—
@supercorpzine gave me an incredible opportunity to participate in their project again this year, and i’m unbelievably grateful. it’s been a brilliant experience, they’ve done so much incredible work, and i’m really honoured to be able to share this one with you x
(if you read the zine, you’ve seen the shortened version of this, but here it is in it’s entirety!)
thirteen birthdays
It’s nearly Lena’s birthday. She knows it’s coming, because she’s been watching the days creep forward on her calendar at work for weeks, but she still doesn’t know what to expect. Lena had always been largely content to ignore her own birthday. She’d buy the slightly higher shelf whiskey for herself, maybe, or book tickets to a particularly extravagant show in town, but that was the extent of it. Kara, on the other hand, had a history of placing heavy importance on birthdays.
She had first witnessed it with Alex; Kara spent two weeks planning the most intricately planned surprise party Lena had ever seen, complete with the participation of almost the entire DEO, a cake flown in directly from Alex’s favorite Midvale bakery, and some kind of heartstoppingly expensive, as-yet-unavailable-on-the-market, limited quantity body armour that Kelly had promised she’d love. And it was cute, Lena had to admit, the excess that Kara was willing to go to in pursuit of being sure that the people she cared about felt celebrated, but it also seemed like it was probably a little bit exhausting to be on the receiving end of all of that attention.
I am going to need about 12 billion fix it / reunion fic now because Netflix is terrible and didn’t renew Warrior Nun, which was dirt cheap to make AND somehow still managed to pull the numbers it did with zero promotion.
And I am trying really hard not to side eye all the cancellations of diverse shows between HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, but there is a pattern emerging that cannot be ignored — they’re all the racially diverse or LGBTQ+ shows getting the axe. Paper Girls, First Kill, the entire DCTV block, Batgirl, Tom Swift, Westworld, the Nevers, I’m Not Okay, Minx.
Warrior Nun S2 is just the latest one. It was set up to fail. They didn’t set up interviews for the cast, send it to reviewers, they put it between the Crown and Manifest S4, they didn’t promote it at Tudum. Simon Barry even said that they had zero promotion budget, and you could tell because we never got a release date, just “winter 2022.”
The fact that it did as well as it did, cracked the Global Top 10, and received high fan engagement and articles writing about it was a miscalculation on their part, and honestly I think an embarrassment to them. Because it shows how little they care about diverse shows that 1) don’t feature straight white male or 2) aren’t part of an existing IP/franchise. They were caught flatfooted when they realized how popular it could have been with just an ounce of support.
How do you kill things so prematurely, when you know there is an audience there? Even if they are renewed, shows aren’t safe, because they are reversing the season renewal. And in the case of HBO Max, they are making decisions that make zero sense - who kills shows that are mid-production or nearing the end of their production (Minx).
And why is it always us who gets cut first? It is never the straight white dude show. If something gets saved, it is the (maybe) gay white dude show. Like you can’t be 2 or more. You can only be one (1) and also that one show is all you get for representation.
And the fact that the decision makers are all conservative white dudes (Bezos, David Zaslav, and Reed Hastings) who love Trump and Elon Musk just makes me wonder if that is the goal in the first place.
Not to make money because they have enough. They just want to kill us by taking away all our representation in these shows, just to destroy our culture on purpose because they can take the damn hits to their belts.
I hate this. The promise of streaming as the safe haven for diversity was always a bit of a sham, but somehow this is worse, knowing the creative community wants to make these shows but studios don’t want to platform it. They’ll give us one or two seasons and then force the creators to abandon it with “you can’t shop it anywhere else for 3 years” clauses.
How the fuck are we supposed to see ourselves reflected in art if they keep taking our shows away from us? If not streaming, where the fuck do we go now?
The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
It's actually called The Style Invitational, and my mom runs it. Ran it. They canceled it last week with no warning after almost 30 years. Feel free to write the Post and tell them Bezos is shit!
idk if this is a young fan thing or new fandom culture but some of yall think fics are abandoned way too quickly. a few months or a year or two is not unusual to go without a fic update. sometimes fics take longer to write, other times writers have rl events, or maybe there's multiple fics and one gets more priority. there are tons of reasons for fics not to be updated every week or every month. it also isn't uncommon for people to come back and update fics after a number of years—ive read updates that took five, or ten years. people's lives change, but they still want to tell their stories. personally, i never consider a fic abandoned unless the author has said so; though if it's been a few years i manage my expectations. but a last update being a year ago is... generally not a sign that a writer has abandoned their fic
Original fic usually goes through this same process before being commercially published. Readers just don't know that bc they aren't receiving it in bite-size chunks online. Large periods of stagnant writing are historically just another Monday for most writers.
Very very true!! I typically take about a year or two to finish my original works, and that’s with chunks of time worked in there (I’m talking weeks or months) where I just didn’t work on it at-fucking-all
Fanfics for me are much faster paced because there is this demand to write them, which means I might have a little more motivation, but not always. The compliments/comments help because talking about the story does bring more ideas to mind, but sometimes I just don’t have the time and/or energy to put those ideas to paper
Plus, sometimes writers just need breaks from their works (original or fanfic). Breaks are healthy! Breaks are normal! Breaks are essential to writing!
Please please please try to keep that in mind before you send a “When’s the next update?” message, when it’s only been a week since the last one
