Current Day

National City is quiet.

Or what passes for quiet in such a bustling metropolis. The engine growls and angry horns of rush hour fade with the sun, and twilight ushers in an uneasy stillness, a precarious segue between the hustle and bustle of the day and the onset of the city's more nocturnal affairs. As dusk descends, the downtown corridors and alleys fill with elongated shadows, sink into fledgling darkness while the skyscrapers, the city's sentinels of glass and steel, stand silent among the burgeoning stars.

Light spills from the executive office on top of the L Corp building in the heart of downtown, not an uncommon sight in the evening hours by any stretch.

Because Lena Luthor is working late. Again.

Or trying to. Her focus isn't exactly what she'd hoped it would be. On the screen in front of her is the latest status report from the research and development lab. Just like it's been for the past hour. Progress has been...slow, the words long ago losing their form, blurring into one another in a whirl of black and white and gray. An exercise in futility.

A siren sounds in the distance, but that's commonplace. It will soon be swallowed whole by the descending darkness, disappear into the city's complex tapestry of brick and stone and steel and concrete. But for now, the noise rises, floats to her through the door of her balcony, the one she's taken to leaving open in the past weeks.

For Supergirl.

Her visits have been more frequent as of late, dropping out of the evening sky onto her balcony like a falling star, always some business to discuss. Although lately Lena finds the meetings more personally enjoyable than she would have previously thought possible, a friendship slowly being carved out between the two, a Luthor and a Super. Who would have thought?

But National City is...tense, lately, and the Girl of Steel is being kept busy, to put it lightly. With the mayoral elections ramping up, the inflammatory rhetoric of Councilman Drummond is emboldening the city's anti-alien factions, and they're flexing their muscles with increasing regularity, a growing list of violence and destruction to their names. She can't remember the last time a day went by without news of an incident of some sort.

The icing on the cake, at least as far as Lena's concerned, is today's breaking news item - Lillian Luthor's trial is set to start next week after another plea deal broke down this afternoon. Of course, her own role in the events leading to Cadmus' downfall hasn't been widely publicized. But it's expected to be. Icy fingers crawl up her spine when she considers the very real possibility that she'll once again find herself in the crosshairs.

It's like the wind is blowing from all directions, each one mixing and sliding over the other, spinning into the perfect storm.

So she does what she's always done when the world around her spins out of orbit. She works.

Work is a constant. Throughout her life, she's found it to be cathartic, a way to exert a modicum of control over her life, however illusory. Growing up, when things at home would-, when her mother would-

Her jaw clenches unconsciously. Even now she finds she can't linger on the memories, the pain aching dully in her veins, the pins and needles of an old injury flaring up with a change in the weather. Suffice to say, she was particularly studious as a child. When she finished school, she graduated at the top of her class, unsurprisingly. Just as unsurprising, she graduated with few friends. The habit is a hard one to break, it seems. Another bad news day, another late night at L Corp, working feverishly, grasping for control when her world continues to spin.

With each new headline, each new article on Cadmus or the trial, yet another Luthor tied up in murder and crime, it chips away at her. At what she's trying to do, who she's trying to become. It feels like she's splintering, burning up like a meteor on her way to earth.

Damage control is hard work. Made doubly hard when her name is plastered all over the news for all the wrong reasons.

With a last look at the jumble of words on her screen, betrayal writ large across her features, she leans back in her chair and closes her eyes, a heavy sigh escaping her lips like an admission of defeat.

After a moment she stands and rounds the desk, grabbing her phone from its place near the edge. As she walks toward the balcony, she pulls up her texts, clicks open the message thread with Kara with an easy familiarity.

When the new contact photo for Kara appears on her screen, though, she pauses, a soft smile pulling uncontrollably at the corners of her mouth. The shot is a candid one, Kara eyeing a fresh-out-of-the-oven pizza at Vino's the other night, her face a captivating study in unabashed joy. Something loosens in her chest at the sight.

The text she sends is to the point: "I'm wrapping up work. Care for some take-out?"

She's not the only one who has been working extra hard as of late. With the contentious election, her mother's trial, and the increasing number of anti-alien attacks, the budding journalist has been working overtime on articles for CatCo, her name appearing on bylines more and more frequently as the months have progressed. The whole city seems to be burning the candle at both ends these days, as if all of them are stuck in the same vicious holding pattern, their eyes on the sky waiting for the storm to break.

Another siren sounds. And another. A veritable symphony of emergency vehicles, their shrillness ricocheting off the steel and glass of downtown like a giant echo chamber.

With one last look at Kara's photo, Lena clicks off the screen, her brow creased in concern and her arm falling slack by her side as she steps across the threshold and approaches the railing, intent on surveying the city in the dying light.

But she never reaches it.

On the western horizon where the pinks of sunset give way to the lavenders and purples of twilight, an object falls from the heavens, ringed by a crown of fire and trailing a veil of smoke in its wake.

She squints, trying to get a better view of the comet or whatever it is, but it's too fast, too far to see much. As it falls, though, the speed works against the flame, beats it back, strips it of its power, and she has enough time to see a blur of blue and red before she loses sight of it behind the silent towers of downtown.

Lena's heart stops.

She doesn't see the impact; she's spared that much. But the collision is audible, the dull thud reaches her ears, echoes off the buildings downtown. It's the most sickening sound she's ever heard, and bile rises in her throat.

The phone slips from her hand, skitters unnoticed along the floor.

She's not sure how long she stands there on the balcony high above National City, unblinking, unbreathing, utterly unable to move. The sirens continue their song, building to a deafening crescendo. But she doesn't hear it.

Time stands still.

Eventually, she finds herself back at her desk, although she can't remember walking, can't remember moving. Whole minutes of her life are gone.

She can't remember anything other than the sound of impact.

With practiced hands, she brings up the local news on her computer, frantically searching for breaking news.

Although the wait feels interminable, a lifetime spent with bated breath, she doesn't have to wait long.

The video starts with a wide shot, someone videoing their kids playing in the park, their squeals and laughter pure, innocent. But they quickly fall quiet as the camera pans upward, zooms in, trying desperately to keep the emerging object in frame as it plummets through the crepuscular sky. It's when the flames abate that the news channel pauses the video, zooms in impossibly further.

The results of grainy and pixelated, but even still, there's little room for debate about what she sees.

Supergirl.

Lena's hand clamps tightly over her mouth as if she could somehow stop the horror with the gesture. Her jaw trembles, and her eyes widen impossibly.

No.

They continue the video, this time in slow motion, tracking Supergirl's fall to earth in dogged detail. Her body is slack, a streak of blond and blue and red falling through the sky over National City, the bruised evening sky a hauntingly beautiful backdrop.

And then the impact...she can't...

It shakes Lena at her foundation. With each replay, the sickening crash sends shockwaves through the ground directly to her feet, and she falls to her knees, the hand over her mouth muffling her screams.

The news crew cuts back to a studio scene, the anchors talking in clipped tones, speculating on the events and promising to return when any new information is available.

Lena, on her knees on the floor of her executive office, a tear tracking down her cheek, hears none of it.

No no no...

Later, much later when she thinks about this moment, the bile rising in her throat, it occurs to her how much the intensity of her reaction shouldn't have surprised her. After all, what she's seen, what she's experienced over the last few months have been support enough for her suspicions, for a crazy theory that she didn't want to believe.

But her reaction? Well, it tells her that she believed it, knew it to be true whether she wanted to or not.

The tear drops to the floor unnoticed. Another follows in short measure.

Because she knows about Supergirl. She knows.

And yet she said nothing.