Chapter Text
The penthouse door flew open, crashing into the wall to reveal Kara and Alex standing in the doorway, each with their arms piled high with bags and containers. "Lena, we know you probably wanted to be alone tonight, but- Winn, what are you doing here?"
"Hey, Alex, Hey, Kar." He lifted one of his hands slightly to wave at the sisters without removing his arms from around the CEO's torso, seated between his legs. "I'm providing cuddles."
"He broke in." Lena deadpanned.
"To provide cuddles!"
"Cool." Alex shrugged, shouldering past the stunned Kryptonian who reluctantly followed. The bottles in the bags she had been carrying rattled as Alex deposited them on the kitchen island with less care than one should treat glass. "I brought booze, and she brought food, so scooch over," Alex explained, grabbing a bottle of wine and four glasses before using her foot to repeatedly shove Winn until he moved away from Lena to sit between them.
Lena rolled her eyes at their antics. "Have I told you guys that you don't follow instructions very well?"
"Admit it; you're happy we don't." Alex wheedled.
"I plead the fifth." Lena took a sip of her accepted drink from the elder Danvers as a noticeably grumpy Kara dropped to the floor in front of the coffee table with the food. "Kara, what's the matter?"
"You said that I give the best cuddles," Kara grumbles angrily, scowling at Winn as she tears into a container of potstickers.
"You do, but you're also prone to falling asleep during cuddle time, but you always insist on being the big spoon, and it feels like we're being crushed to death," Winn explained.
Lena nodded in agreement. "Exactly, and I don't want to die."
"Since when!?" Alex shouted in mock confusion earning a shove from the CEO that had her bumping into Winn and sending him off the couch onto the floor.
Kara smiled slightly as her cuddle competition tumbled down but quickly returned to pouting as he reclaimed his seat. "But I'm Captain Cuddle."
Alex rolled her eyes, shoving Kara in the face with her foot. "Stop being such a baby and hand me a container I'm starting!"
Kara batted her foot away but handed her a container nonetheless. "I hate this planet."
"No, you don't." The couch trio refuted.
"No, I don't," Kara admitted with an exaggerated sigh, passing Lena and Winn their food. The group continued their playful banter as they ate and drank. Kara especially seemed to make it a point to keep the conversations light. Alex was in the middle of a story about how J'onn once found her and Winn arguing over who's fault it was the printer was on fire when for the second time that evening, the door collided with the wall, causing them to jump and Lena to think about how it was a good thing she was wealthy enough to afford her friends continued abuse of the poor wall.
"Lena Luthor! Despite your request for privacy, my calculations suggest a 98.86% chance that the presence of your dearest friends and most trusted comrades would be the best solution to lifting your spirits after your encounter with your family." Brainy announced, striding confidently into the center of the room.
"Encounter with your family being code for how your brother almost killed you today. Also, I told him I was coming over." Nia teased, giving Lena's shoulder an affectionate squeeze as she and J'onn entered the apartment.
"Precisely!" The Coluan agreed earnestly, dropping to the floor to sit beside Kara, completely missing his girlfriend's sarcasm.
Lena didn't have the heart to burst his bubble. Instead, she leaned forward, gave his knee a gentle pat, and turned her attention to J'onn, who cringed as he moved to the door slightly to look at the wall. "And what about you, J'onn?"
"I was planning to stop by when Nia called and said she and Brainy were on their way over if I wanted a ride." J'onn shrugged, moving to close the door only to burst open again.
"Oh, come on," Lena grumbled until she realized who it was that once again attacked the drywall.
"Lena!"
"Sam, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Metropolis. And where's Ruby?" Lena moved to stand from the couch until the former Worldkiller shoved her back down, taking the unoccupied seat beside her as she started looking her over in a fashion similar to how Lena had witnessed her treat an, at the time, mortified Ruby after she tripped running downfield in the middle of a soccer match.
"First of all, Ruby is fine. Jess volunteered to watch her; she told me to tell you hi and take care of yourself. Secondly, I was in Metropolis until I heard the news." Sam explained, giving Lena a pointed look when she tried to move out of the single mother's reach.
"And what, you booked a flight the moment you heard about it?"
"Of course not, don't be ridiculous." Sam scoffed. "I took the company jet the moment I found out."
"Sam!"
"And third of all," Sam continued, ignoring Lena's cry of reproach. "We're not supposed to be anywhere other than with our family when they need help."
"But I already told you that I was fine when you called. You didn't need to pull Ruby out of school and fly out here, Sam." Lena huffed, thinking Sam's instinctual reaction to race herself and her child across the country at the drop of a hat was rather extreme, despite being touched by her insistence that she and Ruby both saw her as family.
"Are you serious? Ruby is the one who called me and told me to turn on the news. The first thing she said after I did was, 'I'll ask my teachers to send you my assignments; I'll be waiting in the office.' The only reason she isn't here now is that you have this nasty habit of severely underselling the facts when you're hurt, both physically and emotionally, and I wanted to make sure that your 'I'm okay.' didn't actually mean 'I refused medical treatment and amputated my own leg without anesthetic and now I'm drinking.'"
Lena rolled her eyes at Sam's less-than-flattering description of her self-care habits. "I'm not that bad."
At Lena's rebuttal, scoffs, noises, statements, and even a harsh laugh of disagreement filled the apartment. Lena looked at her friends in disbelief. Did they all think so little of her ability to care for herself? Off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single instance where she valued her well-being less than adequately.
Kara, almost as if she could hear what Lena was thinking, instantly brought up a, in her opinion, minor incident from a little over a year ago. "Lena, you once got stabbed on your way to game night, didn't say anything about it when you got there, and when I asked if something was wrong, you told me that you pulled a muscle."
"It wasn't that bad." Lena refuted. "It was more of a paper cut than anything."
"You nearly died!" Kara shouted at Lena's indifference to her injury, gesturing towards her side. "They had to take a piece of your liver!"
Lena waved her hand in a light dismal of her friend's reaction. Lena was convinced that Kara had taken the incident worse than she had. For months after the surgery, Lena would catch the hero staring intensely through the material of her shirt with her X-Ray vision nearly every time they were together to check how the wound was healing despite both Lena and Alex's assurances.
Apparently, this story had turned into a group project because Nia decided to chime in with, "You complained more about the fact that you wouldn't be able to drink and had to miss work for a while than you did about the pain."
"I had a lot of really important meetings I needed to be there for, and I wasn't that upset about not being able to drink." Lena defended, trying her hardest to keep her face neutral even though Nia was absolutely correct.
Alex nearly spat out her drink at that statement before turning towards the CEO to pin her with a skeptical look. "You asked me to replace your I.V. with scotch. When I told you no, you said, 'you're right, we should do vodka because no one would be able to tell."
"I was kidding." Lena could feel her face heating up under her friend's scrutiny as she fidgeted with the hem of her sweatshirt.
"You cried when I gave you a glass of water." Alex deadpanned.
"I was committed to the Bit," Lena responded lamely in a final desperate attempt to dig herself out of the hole she found herself in. It clearly did not work because Nia, Sam, and Winn each reached out to place a comforting hand on her person before responding with "Ma'am," "Sis," and "Oh, honey." respectively. Thankfully Sam decided to take pity on their friend by returning to their original conversation before anyone else could come up with other examples.
"The point is I had to make sure that you were okay, and as luck would have it, the people who would be most likely to have that information and honestly tell me are here in this room," Sam said, giving Lena's knee a gentle squeeze before leaning forward to meet Alex's eyes on Lena's opposite side. "So, Ms. Doctor Agent Director Danvers, give me the rundown."
Alex rolled her eyes playfully and huffed a laugh at the ridiculous title. "Honestly, she's actually pretty good this time. Nothing life-threatening, just a few bumps, bruises, and scrapes. Honestly, her hands are what had me worried the most."
"Yeah, I noticed they were wrapped," Sam responded, cradling one of Lena's bandaged hands between hers.
Alex downed the remains of her drink before using the now empty glass to gesture at Lena. "Yeah, Ivan Drago over here managed to get out of her restraints and just started swinging."
"Rocky IV, a cinematic masterpiece!" Brainy interjected proudly at picking up on Alex's reference. Kara patted him on the shoulder; Nia kissed his cheek and whispered, 'good job,' and Lena nodded in approval at his classification of the film and gave him a wink and thumbs.
"She broke four noses, one jaw, ruptured two separate guys' eye sockets, and knocked out a total of eighteen teeth. And that was before she put her fist through the window; thankfully, we got all the glass out." Alex continued completely ignoring the outburst.
Sam turned to her friend with wide eyes. "Geeze, Lee."
"What? I was mad." Lena shrugged.
"Yeah, I can tell!" Sam knew for a fact and had seen firsthand on several occasions, including one tragically timed prank that had left her on the receiving end, that Lena Luthor could throw one hell of a punch but hearing how much damage her usually well-mannered and level-headed friend had caused was a bit of a surprise.
"Gotta give that one guy props though he was the only one smart enough to duck." Winn said only partially joking.
"Well, hopefully, this will be a lesson to whoever is stupid enough to try something like that again." J'onn said, sending a wave of comfort towards Lena when they made eye contact.
"A girl can dream." She sighed.
"Hey, that's my job." Nia teased.
"I mean, honestly, you'd think Lex would know better by now." Kara huffed, frustrated that Lex Luthor always found a way to cause problems for the people she cared about, especially his sister.
Lena let out a humorless chuckle. "One would think, but Luthors have this insatiable urge to have complete control of every little thing in their life, and if they can't, they make it their goal to destroy it, which goes double when it's applied to family."
Nia stared up at her friend in sympathy. "That's awful, Lee."
"Yep, it's one of the flagship traits of the Luthor family along with having I.Q. levels in the two hundreds, alcoholism, and mental illness." Lena shrugged, taking a sip of her drink before voicing what everyone else had to be thinking at that point. "My family sucks."
Or apparently not, as Kara, Sam, and Alex responded with, "Hey!" "Rude!" "That's uncalled for.", respectively, as Nia and Winn held their hands to their chest and shot her matching looks of betrayal as if they had been attacked. J'onn and Brainy gave no noticeable reaction but became just a bit quieter. Lena couldn't understand what she had said to cause that sort of reaction for the life of her. At this point, it was an unwritten rule amongst the group that all non-Lena-specific things related to the Luthors, especially their familial practices, should be disparaged whenever an opportunity presented itself. Thankfully Alex somehow picked up on Lena's confusion and slung her arm around her shoulders as she launched into a slightly slurred explanation.
"Listen here, Luthor, just because you share genetics and the same last name as those pricks don't make them family."
Lena scrunched her nose at the stale smell of alcohol on Alex's breath. "I'm almost positive that is the literal definition of family."
"Shut up." Alex said, pulling the CEO closer so their foreheads were touching. Lena resisted the urge to laugh as Alex went cross-eyed for a moment when she tried to look her in the eyes. "Family is the people who love you, want to make sure nothing bad ever happens to you, and do stupid stuff for you without thinking."
"Like flying across the country with zero notice." Sam added leaning into Lena's side to rest her head on her shoulder and wrap her arms around her waist.
"Or scaling up the side of the building to skirt past security to be a cuddle buddy." Winn winked, leaning over to rest a comforting hand on the small of their back.
"Committing corporate espionage to bankrupt your competitors." Brainy clapped his hand around her ankle and held it like one would someone's hand.
"Threatening your kin folk in the guise of your superhero alter-ego." Nina sighed, rapping her arm around Lena's leg and laying her head on her knee.
"Using your martian abilities to make sure you have good dreams." J'onn remained in his seat across from the couch but sent a telepathic wave towards the CEO, making it feel like he had wrapped her in a hug.
Kara, jealous cuddle fiend that she is, sprawled herself across Alex and Winn's legs as she gently rested her head in Lena's lap and stared up at her. "Or, you know, making sure any article that even eludes to you is courteous and respectful of you and your company and preventing the ones that aren't from ever seeing the light of day."
"Yeah, stuff like that. That's what makes people family, and we-" Alex emphasized, gesturing to everyone in the room. "We is your family."
At that moment, in her apartment surrounded by people who love her, worry about her, and apparently regularly commit crimes for her, she finally understood. These crazy people are her family in every way that matters. Lena couldn't find the smile that spread across her face, the tears that welled in her eyes, and the warmth that settled in her chest and spread throughout her body.
"Yeah, you are." She said around the lump in her throat. "You're my family."
And it's a pretty great one.