There had been no reason for what she had done, none that she could actively point to and hold onto as her unrelenting truth. Her actions had not been driven by logic and reason. Everything that she had done sprang from an unrelenting fountain of emotional chaos. She had been raised to be a princess of granite and diamonds-all hard edges and cool to the touch. Every other part of her was to be locked up in a prison guarded by a savage beast with sharp claws and piercing teeth.

So when she looked back at the betrayals that she had so deeply felt, she knew that she had just mistakenly thought her pain was emotion and not the beast let loose. She had thought that she could turn everyone inside out and take out the pieces of them that were undesirable and messy. She had deluded herself into thinking that everyone should be given a cage to imprison the pieces that create weakness and leave the strongest amongst them vulnerable.

And, she had come close to accomplishing it. She had the skill and resources. She had the chance to perfect the variables on Earth that took away the common sense of a unified world. She could have created hallowed ground on the one Earth that was left. It had all been within her reach...but the circumstances as they were disrupted her necessary sacrifices. She had entered into a partnership thinking that she was too righteous and too smart to be derailed by the machinations of Lex Luthor.

Lena had been playing too many hands and, in the middle of it all, forgotten what game she had been playing and the reasons that she had been playing it. But, most of all, she had forgotten about the beast that lived inside of her. She had started to believe in all the comfortingly nice things that Kara Danvers said about her. She had allowed herself to see herself through the rose colored glasses that her best friend freely and happily offered to her.

"You're beautiful," Kara had said. "You're a good person...Not like your mother...Not like Lex…".

Kara had fed Lena a beautiful lie surrounded by white picket fences and ballads about love and hope. Like a fool, Lena had believed it all because Kara had believed. She put aside her own origin story and drank from the well of damnable kindness that Kara gave to her.

It wasn't that Kara had secrets and lied to her about being Supergirl that had awoken Lena's beast. That would have been too...easy and mundane a reason for so desperately trying to fix the world. It hadn't been much about Kara's lies at all.

It was about how she felt in that moment when she held a gun to Lex and he had revealed such an obvious truth about Kara being Supergirl. it was in that moment, that she felt the power in crossing the line that she had only flirted with before. She shot an unarmed man in the name of love and justice...and it broke the piece of her that so carefully had been locked away and guarded by the Luthors' lies and deceit.

It left her vulnerable.

Lex had fallen from the bullet and Lena had been left alone with his corpse. She looked down at her deceased brother until she could no longer stand the consequences of being a hero. So when she turned from him, she knew that just walking away would be foolish and naive. She took the opportunity to explore Lex's bunker and found yet another of the Luthor secrets that had been kept from her.

It had looked so innocuous when she found it-just a simple amulet, Kryptonian in origin. Probably another thing discovered in Lex's obsession to know all things and possess all things that could harm a Super. She had reached for it intent on destroying anything that could further harm Supergirl, because in this version of the story, she protected the world by protecting Kara. She had been and always would do the things that Supergirl could not. She would be Kara's Dark Knight.

But that had all fallen apart the moment her fingers touched the cold stone. Everything changed. Everything. Because she remembered thousands of years of humanities sins and the part that she played in it. She remembered her last life and how there was no saving a broken world.