shattered souls won't mend themselves (supercorp au)

war against

coauthor: infinity_in_his_eyes

//Lena POV//

We all have our war stories to tell. Mine starts with my mother.

She never wanted me. It was only because of Lex that I was ever adopted. He begged my mom for a sibling. I think it was because he was lonely. Scratch that, I know it was because he was lonely. He told me when I was older and I snuck into his room so we could stay up late, huddled under the covers of his king-sized bed with flashlights. Oh, the things we confided in one another under those pristine sheets. But those don't make for a war story, not yet, not those confessions.

Since Lex was the one who insisted his parents adopt me (I was four at the time), my mom and dad didn't care for me that much. My dad was okay; he didn't care a lot, but at least he acknowledged my existence. My mother despised me. I'm sure she still does. She would have had me rot on the floor in the attic without a bed or food or clothes if she had her way. But Lex always was looking out for me. He begged our mother to give me one of the ten or so guest rooms (more specifically, the one next to his. Mother was happy to oblige, since she lived on the opposite side of the mansion.), pleaded that she pay for me to go to the same private school as he did. Lex was basically my guardian. A heavy burden for a nine year old.

Which is why I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when he started taking drugs his freshman year of high school. Of course, by then I was only eight, so I didn't understand the cause of his sudden withdrawal from the outside world. But I'm old enough now to know it was because of me. He never said it was, but it was obvious in the way he wouldn't let me in his room, how he wouldn't look me in the eyes on our drives home from school. He had found an outlet, a haven where he was safe from my burden. And whenever he tried to step out of the haven, he was hit face-first with the responsibilities that our mother and father never shouldered. So he would slip back in, taking more drugs, therefore becoming more and more depressed, and therefore taking more and more drugs. He was stuck.

I understand that addiction is hard, and that drugs can make you do terrible things. But when Lex came home one night with blood on his hands and clothes, I ran from him screaming. He just hung his head. I watched from the top of the stairs as the police came and took him away, our mother fighting tooth and nail, screaming at them to let her baby son go. Our father just stood there, watching the scene like me, but with a bored and inconvenienced look on his face. Once the police were gone, our mother turned to me, her face red.

"You did this!" she screamed, and started storming up the stairs. "You worthless piece of shit, you turned him into this! I was right, we never should have even looked at you!" I ran to Lex's room and locked myself in, burrowing in under the covers and crying silently into his pillow.

I wasn't allowed at the hearing, but I didn't need to be there. It's what happened after that actually mattered to me. My mother (with my father paying the expenses) hired a mercenary to kill the witnesses to Lex's murder. When he failed, my parents (if I could call them that anymore) were tried and sent to prison for a life sentence. Lex was placed in juvenile detention until he would join his parents in some far-off maximum security prison.

So that's how I ended up in a foster home just a week and a half before my ninth birthday. It's a run down house in the middle of Detroit with leaky windows, mildew-covered walls, and lumpy, creaky beds. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately, I still haven't decided), it's only about an hour's train ride to Metropolis. But I've never gone back, not once in the seven years I've been living in this hell-hole. But is it really living if there's nothing and no one to live for?