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karalovesallthegirls · 2 years

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time travel + I didn’t mean to turn you on

hello my love thank you for your request I wrote a bunch solely because I'm in love with you

Life is nothing if not consistent for Lena Luthor. She wakes at the same hour every single day, does an hour of stretches and exercise, eats the same egg white omelet. She’s the first to the office and the last to leave. Every moment is structured and accounted for, allowing Lena maximum control and regulation. Just the way she likes it.

And then, one day as she was stretching deep into a downward dog, her new life path came crashing down through her crystal glass coffee table.

One moment she’s thinking about the meeting she has in an hour and the next she’s flinching away from a spray of glass raining down overhead. She curls in on herself with a yelp, terrified and frozen at the sudden explosion beside her. After the clattering of glass had stopped, she’s left in dead silence. With a deep breath for confidence, she finally works up the nerve to look.

Collapsed over the metal frame of what had been her table lay some woman she had never seen before in her life, knocked out and bleeding all over her Persian rug.

Lena feels herself clicking into survival mode at the sight of her. She’s always been good at that – surviving. No one can keep a clearer head in a crisis than Lena. The initial fear now replaced with adrenaline and clarity, Lena jumps into action. Years of Pilates and daily weight-lifting aides her as she pulls the bloody woman off the twisted frame, dragging her over to her yoga mat. The woman is out cold.

She’s got glass stuck in all kinds of places, the worst of which seems to be a long, jagged piece stuck in her thigh. Lena knows better than to try and pull that one out, so she instead focuses on tying her sweatshirt around the woman’s thigh to try and stave the bleeding. It looks like it might be in a dangerous spot, possibly close to an artery, and the last thing Lena needs is some home invader dying on her living room floor. The press would have a field day with that.

While working to stabilize the rush of bleeding from her thigh, Lena shouted out, “HOPE, call emergency services.” HOPE, her omnipresent homemade helper, replied back from the speaker located just above. “Yes, Miss Luthor. Police, fire, or EMT?”

“EMT and pol-” she’s cut off by two hands on her at once: one covering her mouth forcefully and the other pressing a large glass chunk to her throat right at the jugular vein. She freezes.

Apparently, the unconscious intruder was more conscious than she thought. “Tell her to cancel it,” the woman says with a hoarse, pained voice. Lena watches her with a calculating eye, weighing her option. If she didn’t respond to HOPE in the next few moments, she knew her virtual assistant would call the police automatically. “It’ll take them, what, 5 minutes to get here? Maybe 10 with traffic. You’ll bleed out in seconds and I’ll be long gone before they even get close,” the woman says, “Nobody has to die today, okay? Cancel it.”

Her mind reels for alternatives, but the woman presses the glass harder against her throat, hard enough to cut, and her mind is made up. She nods, and hesitantly the other woman removes her hand from her mouth. “Cancel request, HOPE,” Lena says, voice surprisingly steady for someone in such a situation. “Request successfully cancelled,” HOPE chirped happily before shutting off.

The other woman sighs, the glass held to Lena’s neck slacking just a bit as she leans backwards. Lena can feel the way it pulls at her skin, how blood starts to trickle. She keeps her hands where they’ve been this entire time – pressing hard around the glass in the woman’s thigh. She’s bleeding a lot, even with the pressure Lena’s applying. “That was foolish,” Lena says, pulling away from the woman. “The EMT was for you. You’re bleeding too much too quickly, I think you nicked your femoral artery.” The woman laughs, laid back eyes closed like she’s not invading her house and threatening her life. “That’s right, you had medical training. I forgot about that,” the other woman says, pulling herself up into a half-sit and looking down at her injuries with a curious eye. “In my defense, they barely mention that in the history books.” “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” The woman just shakes her head.

“What day is it?” she asks. Lena is tired of this already. She’s supposed to be showering right now and preparing to leave for work, not negotiating with a half-dead possible hostage-taker. “Tuesday. March 13th.”

“What year?” “Is that a joke?” “Yeah,” the woman smiled, a hint of blood on her teeth. “Humor me.” “2018.”

The smile fades fast, replaced with a sudden alarm. As if the year were somehow worse than the giant piece of glass sticking from her thigh. “That’s way too early,” she says, hints of panic in her voice. “They dropped me way too far back. Crap.”

Her face looks pale and grows paler by the minute. Lena looks down to see the cloth she’d tied around her thigh fully saturated, the puddle beneath her growing. She’s losing too much blood. “Put the glass down and give me your hands,” Lena says, but the woman doesn’t move. Frustrated, Lena grabs her hands with her bloody ones and presses them just above the glass. “Hold here,” she says, and then gets up to leave.

Lena races to her bathroom, ignoring the woman’s shout of “Wait! Come back here!” and rifles around until she finds what she’s looking for. She comes back with a field medic kit and lays it on the ground. The other woman watches her wearily, hands still pressed to the wound. “You’re bleeding too fast,” Lena says, “and at this point you’ll be dead before the ambulance can arrive. We have to stop the bleeding.”

The woman doesn’t resist. At this point she might not have the strength to. Lena uses shears to cut up the seam of the the the woman’s pants, up and past the deep gash of the glass shard. “This is bad,” she says, and the woman doesn’t even look. “It’s too early,” the woman is saying, sounding weak, and Lena pulls supplies from her kit. She ties a tight tourniquet, earning a shocked groan of pain. “This is temporary, it can only be temporary. It should buy you a little time but it’s going to hurt like hell and if it’s on too long you could lose the leg.” “Fine, it’s fine,” the other woman says, almost delirious, and she grabs Lena’s shirt to pull her attention. “Listen to me,” she says, eyes wide and bloodshot, “Your brother is going to destroy the world, and you’re going to help him. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to help him, okay?” She’s practically incoherent. The blood has stopped but it’s still everywhere and Lena is covered in it. “They’re calling me,” the woman continues, shaking her head, “I’ll come back, or they’ll send someone else, but you have to stop him, Lena Luthor. Non Nocere-”

And then she vanishes.

One minute, Lena is wrapped around a delirious, halfway bled-out home invader, and the next she’s alone in her living room surrounded by glass and blood.

- She’s much more prepared the next time the stranger comes. To her credit, she’s had a few years by then to obsess and analyze and research. She’s watched the security footage of that day so many times and in such excruciating detail that she could tell you how many pieces of glass were shattered, how many gasps the intruder let out in pain. She could recite the entire five-minute experience from start to finish with perfect accuracy. Yet she could never explain it.

She can infer the basic gist of it, of course: at some point, time travel becomes a possibility, and the best possible use of that unbelievable advancement is to come back and stop her, because something she does – or rather, something she helps Lex do – is so catastrophically horrible it’s world ending.

She’s tried to find this woman, though of course if she’s a time traveler she may not even exist yet. There’s no way to know. Lena’s spent months studying the footage she has of her, noting the militaristic jumpsuit she wore, the strange patches for organizations that don’t seem to exist adorning the sleeve. She’s made note of the scars she can see – the long one that dances down her face, the smaller ones made visible when her pant leg was cut. The woman had clearly endured hell in life, and that hell had led her to Lena’s penthouse. She felt a sick nervousness just thinking about how they might link.

All of that to say, Lena is much more prepared when the woman returned, at least on an intellectual level. She’s not so prepared for the woman to show up as she’s sitting post-shower on her bed in nothing but a silk robe.

One minute she’s sitting alone, the next a woman is crashing on top of her. Their heads bonk together hard at the force of it, Lena reeling back against her pillow with a groan. At least she’s a softer landing than glass and metal.

“Ah crap,” the woman says, and there’s an instant spark of excitement in Lena at just the sound of her voice. She’d listened to that tape so many times it’s burned into her psyche but hearing it now in person after so long – absolutely thrilling.

“Thank you for not breaking any furniture this time,” Lena says, and her voice is a bit breathy from the rush of it. The other woman pulls up from where she’d collapsed against her and seems to finally realize where she is and just how little Lena actually has on. She practically flings herself off of her and on to the floor with a shout.

“Oh wow,” the woman says, mouth agape and face beet red. “I- I’m so sorry, there’s no way to know what you’ll be doing when I get here and I just, I didn’t realize you weren’t done getting dressed or… that wasn’t… I’ll just-”

“Wait in the hallway?” Lena asks, amused. This version of the stranger is such a funny leap from the way she was all those years before, yet exactly the same. It’s like she hadn’t aged much at all. “I was finishing my bedtime routine and I sleep naked. This is as dressed as I’ll be the rest of the night.”

Somehow, the woman’s face gets even redder. It reminds Lena of the blood from that day, how dark and covering it had been on her. That takes a bit of wind out of her sails.

“How’s the leg?” she asks, sitting back. She can feel her robe fall open slightly but left it be. It's amusing to see how nervously the other woman’s eyes dart around looking everywhere but her.

“Still sore,” the woman finally says, pulling herself up to sit on the end of Lena’s bed. She glances at her and then looks away. “It’s only been a few weeks for me, so it’s not close to healed yet, but I didn’t lose the leg or my life, thanks to you.” “Glad to hear it.” “Are you?”

“Mmhm. If you’d died that day, I wouldn’t have this chance now to ask you what the hell is going on.” The woman is watching her in a strange sort of way, and it seems to take her a moment to clear her throat and mind.

“Right, yes, that makes sense. I just-” she rubs her eyes, laughing in an embarrassed sort of way. “I’m sorry, you’re just a little distracting.” Her eyes stray along the line of Lena’s robe before jerking away. She stands up and moves away, hands ringing nervously. Lena notices the slight limp to her walk. “Crap, I’m sorry. Okay, focus, Kara, focus,” she coaches herself, and Lena latches on to that morsel of information with a fierce excitement. “Yes, Kara,” she drawls, and the woman’s eyes cut sharply to her. “Focus. Tell me who you are and what I can do to help.” Kara gulps noticeably at her tone, shifting on her legs, before saying, “I’m from the future. 40 years in the future, to be exact, and I was sent back in time to stop you and your brother from destroying the world.” Lena nods along. It’s not so unbelievable, the idea that Lex could destroy the world. That he could use her desperate yearning for connection to make her a willing accomplish. “Non Nocere,” she says, and the woman jolts in surprise. “What? That’s – have you already invented it?” “No, but you said that last time we met.”

Kara visibly deflates, sinking into a sigh as she leaned back against the wall.

“Thank Rao, okay. Yes. It shouldn’t exist yet, not for another year.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the tool your brother uses to destroy the world. You build it for him.”

Kara looks heartbroken as she says it, and Lena feels just the same hearing it. All she’s ever wanted to do is be a force for good despite her family, despite the life they’d set up for her, but here is this scarred, scared stranger come back to tell her how horribly she fails. How she destroys everything.

“Okay,” Lena says. “So how do we stop it?”

And that, at least, earns her a smile.

#i also wrote a lot because as previously discussed through text like twenty minutes ago i forgot to take my medicine today #and my brain has hyper fixated on this story rather than the notes and work I should be doing during my break #:D #mine #trope mashup #supercorp #I was tempted to go the time travelers wife route since we just hate-watched it but honestly my favorite time traveler concept #will always be terminator #so its more of that #anyway!!!!!!!!!! love ya

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