Despite Lex’s untimely demise, or timely depending on who you asked, bringing Luthor-Corp back under Lena’s control was a quick and easy process. That was mostly due to Kara, who had insisted that Lena build connections between the board members and employees when Lex essentially abandoned the company in his crusade against the Supers. Even gone, Kara was still saving Lena. Lena thought that it was high time she returned the favor.
Lena retreated to her personal lab two days after returning to National City and wasted no time. This wasn’t something that Lena could run multiple trials on before deeming it successful. She would only have one attempt to get this right, which meant she had to get all of her calculations exactly right on the first try. There were far too many variables to consider.
The first step, Lena figured, in travelling through time was to figure out the equation for the speed at which time passed. She quickly ran into a roadblock and reached out to the only person who might have been able to help. She was lucky that the Legends had yet to return to the temporal zone when Lena reached out to contact Gideon. She suspected that such an occurrence was more planned than it was a coincidence due to the fact that Gideon gave up the missing variable Lena needed without any fuss. A message from Sara and Ava followed, advising Lena to be careful messing with time and wishing her good luck on her mission. There was a post script from Sara telling her to say hi to Kara, when she saw her again. It seemed that Lena’s plans were more obvious than she thought, but Lena wasn’t too concerned about it. As long as no one tried to stop her, and Lena didn’t think they would, she honestly didn’t care if they knew what she was doing.
With the equation issue solved, Lena set out to answer the second and most important questions on her list: how far back should she go?
The simplest solution would be to go back to the day before that final battle, but there was no guarantee that Lena could stop Lex’s attack in time. There was still too much risk.
The second option Lena considered was going back to just after Crisis, before Lena started to wage her own personal war against Supergirl. She could keep Lex from getting too powerful, patch things over with Kara and they could take him down together. Lena shot that idea down as well. She had no idea how many contingency plans Lex already had in place at that time and no way of knowing how much damage he could do.
Lena quickly decided that the only way to keep Kara from dying at Lex’s hand was to keep Lex from ever rising to power again in the first place. But what about Kara? Lena needed to be in a time where Kara trusted her, otherwise they would never be able to work together. If this was going to work at all, they couldn’t build their friendship or anything more than that on lies.
The only way Lena could think of fixing all of this was to start all over. She needed to go back to the very beginning of her friendship with Kara.
With a date in mind, Lena began working on the final component of her trip.
Because Lena was only sending her consciousness back in time rather than physically travelling there herself, it was simple enough to build the headgear and attach it to the computer that would run the program Lena had designed for the task. Lena had the sense to leave a note addressed to Alex that explained everything that Lena was doing, just in case. She hoped that Alex would never read the note but Lena was too much of a pessimist for that. The fact that she wanted this to work so bad was probably a sign that it wouldn’t work at all.
Nevertheless, Lena resolved to try. Kara deserved that at the very least.
After checking the equations for the tenth time, Lena set the date she wanted to travel into the computer and started the algorithm. She settled on the exam table with the headpiece in place. There was no time like the present, after all, and Lena had wasted more than enough time with Kara. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
With her mind focused only on Kara and all the wasted time between them, Lena let her eyes fall closed and the work she had done washed through her being.
Lena awoke with a splitting headache and groaned into her pillow before her surroundings registered in her mind. Once she realized that was laying on a much more comfortable bed than the examination table in her lab, Lena sat upright in bed. She was in her bedroom, in her apartment in National City, but everything was just slightly off. It was like her apartment hadn’t been lived in yet.
With a gasp, Lena bolted from her bed, her headache forgotten as she scrambled for her phone to check the date. The model of the phone was enough to let Lena know that she had successfully made it to the past, but she needed to know the date to be sure. Lena could have cried in relief when she finally got her phone on and unlocked but she held the tears in until she was standing in her living room and had turned the television on. There, wearing a sunny smile and her original suit, was Kara. The coverage showed Supergirl stopping a collision between a school bus and semi-truck.
Lena covered her mouth as a sob escaped her throat. Kara was here, Kara was alive. Lena could save her. Lena did save her. Kara was alive, even if she had no idea who Lena was, she was alive. They had a second chance and this time Lena wasn’t going to waste a moment.
Making her way to her home office, dimly aware of the way her home seemed so unlived in with the absence of the last five years worth of memorabilia, Lena searched through her desk until she found a simple notebook bound in black leather. The notebook was small enough that Lena would be able to carry it on her person easily, which was good because that was the only way that Lena could be sure the information she put in the notebook was safe. A list of important events that would be happening in the next five years was not something that would be safe as a digital file. Even L-Corp’s servers could, and would, be hacked. Armed with a mechanical pencil and determined not to lose Kara again, Lena began writing.
The first list was much simpler than the second one that Lena wrote down. First, Lena created a to-do list for herself. Staring with what Lena considered the most important, she wrote:
befriend Kara again
befriend Supergirl
It seemed silly to list both halves of Kara’s identity as separate entities but Lena had to acknowledge the fact that she was essentially starting from scratch with both Kara and Supergirl. She would need to build a relationship with both versions of the woman she loved separately before she could be let in on Kara’s secret. Selfishly, Lena hoped it wouldn’t take her near as long to prove herself trustworthy again. Leaving complicated thoughts of time travel and relationships to be pondered over later, Lena continued with her list.
make anti-kryptonite suit
upgrade supersuit
put Lillian away
Deal With Lex
Again, Lena paused for a moment before moving on to other matters. She would have to deal with her equally complicated feelings about her family later.
build Watchtower
keep Kara alive
The last item was underlined three times.
Turning a page in her notebook, Lena began her second list. This one was more of a timeline than a list, a timeline of all the important events that would happen in the near future, from the Daxamite invasion, to Reign’s attack (Lena made a note to bring Sam to National City as soon as possible), to Red Daughter and everything that happened with Lex, to Crisis and Leviathan and finally, to the battle that had resulted in Kara’s death.
From the rules of time travel that Barry and the Legends followed, Lena knows that there will be some events that she simply cannot change. There will be things that she can’t stop from happening no matter how hard she tries, but she was okay with that. As long as Lena can minimize the damage of those events with her advanced knowledge and, most importantly, as long as she can keep Kara safe, Lena could cope with all the rest. Kara’s death would be the one thing that Lena would change, no matter if the universe wanted her to or not.
Before she could make any changes though, Lena needed to get to work. After all, it wasn’t every day that a woman got to meet the love of her life for the second time.
