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I.
They first meet in Greece, during a glorious new era of civilization—one that rose from almost nothing but changed everything.
Olympus stands tall and proud, its peak hidden by the clouds, and normally Kara would have felt awed that she’s standing so near the home of the gods.
Yet that is not to be so, for her attention is instead riveted to the girl resting at the foot of the mountain, beneath the shade of a handsome cypress tree. The girl’s head is tipped back against the tree’s trunk, exposing the slender column of her neck. Her eyes are closed, her expression peaceful. Hair as black as Tartarus itself frames an ethereal face, and Kara swears the girl must have been a goddess of some sort—she is too exquisite to be human, too lovely to have anything other than ichor in her veins.
And Kara, against her better judgment, ambles nearer, heedless of the echoes in her mind, of the tales wherein gods punished mortals because they got too close. Her heart begins pounding madly in her chest—perhaps warning her and telling her to turn around before it’s too late, perhaps a different matter altogether—but she ignores it and presses on, and Kara is sure that this is how Icarus felt when he flew too close to the sun.
But if this is how she’s going to burn, then so be it. She will risk a thousand hells, and then some, if only for the chance to stand before the divine.
The greenest eyes she’s ever seen meet her gaze, and Kara knows that the risk has been worth it.
“Are you . . . a god?” Kara asks, her voice hesitant but her stare unwavering.
Those green eyes crinkle at the corner in confusion, before understanding dawns. The girl smiles, heart-stopping in her beauty, and responds with a question of her own. “Are you?”
“My name is Kara.”
“Mine is Lena.”
“Run away with me.”
Kara smiles, takes Lena’s hands in hers. “I will follow you anywhere,” she says, and steals with her lips Lena’s delighted laughter.
This is the first life they spend together: in a young earth, a young nation, surrounded by endless possibilities.
This will not be the last.
II.
They spend another life in Pompeii. Kara is a senator’s daughter, pretty and clever and kind, beloved by all. She is betrothed to a warrior, a hero, and she falls in love the second they meet.
Except, it is with his sister instead.
“The gods will judge us,” Lena breathes, pants against Kara’s neck, their skin slick with sweat.
Kara grins, teeth flashing in the dark, and she looks feral, but still her eyes adore. “Let them,” she says, as daring as a mountain lion, and Lena can’t offer any more words after that, as Kara devours her whole.
Exactly a week later, Vesuvius wakes up from its slumber and destroys everything in a storm of sulfur and fire.
III.
Their life in France is full of blood-red memories and hymns left unsung.
Kara’s father is a duke and her mother a countess, and they do everything in their considerable power to ensure that their daughter wants for nothing. Kara grows up with every want indulged, every wish fulfilled. She’s sophisticated, and she’s also well-read, which is why she knows what’s happening behind closed doors when her father meets with the king and his henchmen.
She’s as sweet as a rose, but sometimes her smiles are edged with something darker, something harsher, because roses do have thorns.
She likes whites and blues and reds in her dresses, “Just like the flag,” she says.
What she doesn’t say is she’s helping the revolution.
Lena is the illegitimate child of a wealthy man, and despite his wife’s efforts to the contrary, Lena becomes heiress to a vast fortune. Her greatest treasure, however, is her brain.
It is the weapon she uses to undermine everything her family stands for, and she does so with a steady gaze and an even steadier heartbeat.
Kara sees Lena in a meeting of revolutionists, the youth of France, congregating in a rundown hotel that reeks of mead and piss.
When they touch, the world seems to stop spinning on its axis, and a thread, a consciousness, replaces the force of gravity, pulling them towards each other rather than towards the earth.
They both die at the barricade, blood mingling, blonde strands tangled with raven locks, fingers entwined.
IV.
Kara lives another life in Chicago. She is an art school graduate who works at a coffee shop while waiting for her big break. (And she has to believe that it will come because—well. There’s no other choice.)
Lena is the annoying customer who is always talking on her stupid phone and always ordering with a stupid scowl and Kara just really wants to dump her pretentious coffee order over her stupid face.
(It is a pretty face, but that is not relevant.)
“My name is Lena,” Lena says, speaking slowly, as if Kara is a moron.
Kara blinks at her, tilts her head, the picture of innocence. “Did I write it wrong?”
Lena rolls her eyes. She turns the cup so that Kara can see the writing: Llama. “I’ve been coming here for months, honestly,” she grumbles.
It takes all of Kara’s willpower not to laugh, because Lena looks so darn offended and it is really funny, if Kara does say so herself. (She mentally pats herself in the back for good measure.) “Well,” Kara drawls, “it’s not like you’re the only customer buying here. We do have quite a lot of patrons, Miss Lema.”
The glare Lena sends her then is so intense, Kara wouldn’t have been surprised if lasers shoot out of her eyes.
That goes on for several more weeks: Kara purposely writing Lena’s name wrong and Lena increasingly getting agitated.
It stops on a Thursday, when Lena slaps down a napkin on the counter, glaring straight into Kara’s wide eyes.
“Get it right,” she instructs tersely, before turning around and leaving the shop.
Kara picks up the napkin gingerly, as if it might suddenly come alive and wrap her and choke the life out of her.
What she sees make her huff, though it comes out more of a chuckle.
Tomorrow, 7:00 p.m. I’ll pick you up. Wear something blue and nice.
— LENA (xxx-xxx-xxx)
It turns out to be the best and last first date of this life.
V.
There’s an old life where Kara meets Lena back in Greece, this time as comrades in the battlefield. Kara is an Athenian girl who escapes her home instead of going through a marriage her father arranged, and she flees to Sparta, where women are not merely accessories to men.
She learns to fight from an older Spartan named Aleksandra, who treats her as her own sister, and Kara learns how to be truly happy.
She fights, she spills blood, and she basks in Ares’s glory.
She sees a woman by the central hearth, cloaked in shimmering green robes.
“Who goes there?” Kara asks, a hand on the hilt of her sword.
The figure turns, pale fingers dropping the hood.
Hair as dark as night seems to catch fire, and Kara is mesmerized by the woman’s eyes.
Lena knows how to read the stars, and she guides Kara into many more victories.
But one time, the stars fail her and choose to doom them both.
This is the first life where Lena will not understand how to forgive herself.
Kara dies in the battlefield, an arrow buried in her heart, Lena’s name on her lips.
Lena looks for her body. She sits beside her, presses a kiss on Kara’s forehead.
Lena dies in the battlefield, her lover’s knife buried in her heart.
VI.
Kara spends many lives across the universe, amongst the stars that once robbed her of life, as if that’s not punishment enough.
She lives, she loves.
She searches for something that can’t be found.
VII.
Krypton explodes, and Kara gets lost—even more than before.
Life on earth is not kind.
It has never been.
Lightyears away haven’t changed that, and Kara doubts anything ever will.
Kara learns of loss all over again, when her baby cousin—no, not a baby anymore, but a grown man, who has Jor-El’s eyes and jaw and Lara’s smile, and who proudly wears their family’s crest—leaves her without a purpose, without a goal, and only with the instruction to be normal.
Kara has recollections of her other lives on this planet—bits and pieces, really, rather than whole memories, but they bring her comfort still.
They are the only tether Kara has—to the world, to the universe.
(Perhaps even to herself.)
She trails after Kal-El, nervous but at the same time giddy, because being with him is different. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to explain why, how, he makes her feel, but it’s more solid, as if assuring her that despite every unspoken thing between them, the call of their blood is still strong—that even though they have spent planets away, the House of El still lingers within their bones. They are its legacy, the last children of Krypton.
Meeting Lena Luthor, Kara thinks, will have her reevaluate everything she has ever known about herself.
But at the same time, it makes her feel warm, like Rao’s light; weightless, like cloud atop a mountain.
Lena lives in the epicenter of an earthquake, in the eye of a storm. Every tremor comes from within her lungs, every gust of wind is her breath. Her eyes are oceans and galaxies, her skin the canvas of infinity.
And loving her, Kara thinks, is coming home.