I wasn’t expecting it. Wasn’t expecting the long fingers to wrap around my arm, or the black cloth to cover my face. Wasn’t expecting the awful smell of chloroform to fill my lungs and send me slipping into unconsciousness.
The room in which I awoke was a deceptively small, with translucent walls that did little more than cast shadows of the outside world.
There was a small device on my temple. I was wearing light blue scrubs and lay on a bed with sheets of the same color. The only other thing in the room was a heart rate monitor I was hooked up to.
The walls disappeared suddenly and standing there . . .
“Lena?” I sat up quickly, staring at her in disbelief.
“Jacquelyn,” Lena said as she strode to my side. “Glad to see you’re awake.”
“What am I doing here?”
“Lay down. You need to rest.” Lena gently pushed me back down. My hand reached up to touch whatever was on my temple, but Lena’s warm hand moved it away. “Don’t touch it. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“But what - Lena? What are you doing?”
She had grabbed a strab from the far side of the bed, bringing it over my shoulders and fastening it. I reached up to free myself, but Lena grabbed my wrist, pushing it down harshly. She held it in place as she fastened another strap over it.
“Don’t fight it.”
“Lena! Stop!”
She only proceeded to place straps over my other wrist, my
abdomen, knees, and ankles. I was stuck in place.
“Let me go Lena! Let me - let me go!” I was breathing hard in my
panic. In fact, I could hardly breathe at all.
Lena pulled something small and familiar from her pocket. My inhaler. “Exhale.” Though at the moment I was terrified, I listened. As soon as I had, the inhaler was in my mouth and I was able to take that life-saving Ventolin puff. Still, you glared at Lena. If you had a choice, you would have refused the inhaler, but you rather enjoyed breathing.
Lena stuck the inhaler on a nearby table, never taking her eyes off of you. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
“Says the woman who strapped me to a freaking table. What do you want with me, anyway?”
“Supergirl hurt me, Jacquelyn. I want her to feel that same pain she put me through.”
“She made a mistake. She’s only human.”
Lena raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, she’s an alien. But aliens make mistakes, too. She thought she was protecting you. She was scared. You can’t hold that against her. And you can’t hold me here because of it.”
“I can and I will. Supergirl will feel my pain.”
“They’ll know I’m gone. They’ll find me, and what’s left for you then? You’re making yourself a villain.”
“I am not a villain,” Lena snapped. “And your sisters would never suspect me of kidnapping you. Or did you forget? Supergirl still believes she is my best friend.”
I struggled against the binding, getting absolutely nowhere. “She’ll find me.”
“You’ll give yourself rope burn.”
A woman entered the room. She had wavy blond hair, blue eyes. And her name was Eve.
“What is she doing here?”
“Hope?” Lena smirked. “You’ll see.”
“Hope? That’s not -”
“It is now. I mapped her brain, created exactly the type of person I needed. A true friend, you could call it.”
“You got rid of her emotion.”
“Precisely. Now hope is perfectly capable of meeting my needs without the disgusting personal attachments.”
“You’re terrible,” I said, my voice shaking.
“Jacquelyn . . . You know that’s not true. I’m protecting myself.”
“Eve may not have been a good person, but you ruined her. You turned her into a robot and for what? Because she hurt your feelings? That’s what villains do, Lena. You’ve become like Lex. Cruel, heartless. You kidnapped two people. No good person does that. I never thought you would do that.”
“Well then maybe I’m not who you thought I was either.”