Nobody Does It Better

What He Said

He'd gone around to Kara's, found that he'd interrupted sister night, and then tried his very best to leave before Kara and Alex... well, Alex, really, made him tell them what happened.

He was not successful.

He had tried to explain that it wasn't Lyra's fault, she wasn't in control of herself when she was like this, but Alex was having none of it, and stormed out. He'd tried to follow her, but Kara stopped him. He didn't know what he was going to do about Lyra, but he knew that he didn't want her to get hurt.

Kara quickly made him some ice cream - which is a neat trick, if you've got some liquid nitrogen, or a friend with Freeze Breath - and then put on a movie, which they both ignored; he talked about Lyra, and she talked about Mon-El, and they'd both cried and hugged. That night, he slept on Kara's couch; and, after stopping at the rescue centre to adopt a grey cat with spots down the side - either as a gesture of defiance or as a piece offering, Winn was ashamed to say he didn't know which - he returned to his apartment to find Lyra, and all of her things, had gone. She'd clearly left in a hurry; there were drawers still open, the bedroom was a terrible mess. Winn had been relieved that there wasn't any blood.

Then he saw she'd left without her night-light. That really bothered him. He'd bought that for her. He'd searched all over for a little blue bird night-light. When he'd found it, he'd explained to Lyra that it was a canary, and why that was important, and then they'd danced around the kitchen to the They Might Be Giants song.

She wouldn't be able to sleep without her night-light.

He'd tried to call her - so he could give it back to her, you understand - but there was no answer; Winn had even gone to where her brother lived, but he'd gone too - in even more of a hurry than she had, apparently. So Winn carried the night-light around, in his bag, just in case he ran into her in the street, or at the bar. But there was no sign of her.

He'd named the cat Jadzia.

Life had carried on, as it always had before. There were still game nights to be played and won, laddered tights to be mended, Guardians to be... Winn didn't know what the verb was for whatever it was he did in the van, but it needed doing, all the same. J'onn had seemed impressed with the rate at which the L-Corp project was being completed, which was good. And, after rumours of rogue Kryptonians operating again, Winn had gotten the go-ahead to try using red-sun radiation as a defence instead of Kryptonite; he hadn't gotten it to work yet, but he was getting there. Professionally, at least, everything was going just fine.

Until about... nine or ten hours ago.

He'd been at L-Corp, explaining to Lena, in extensive detail, the process for opening a wormhole without there being a portal on the other side, and that he'd done it himself, and when she'd followed up to discern when he'd had the opportunity to use a transmatter portal, he'd said-

"We have one at the DEO."

Yeah. That was where he went wrong.

"You... have a transmatter portal? At the DEO?" Lena said.

"Yes. Yes, we do, Ms. Luthor," he said, speaking way too quickly.

"We're still doing this?" she said. Lena had told him on several occasions that he could use her first name, but Winn had felt it was important to maintain her authority on the project, especially in front of her employees.

"I'm on DEO business, Ms. Luthor," he said.

She sighed, as she often had when he was being officious, and asked, with a hint of incredulousness, "Where is it?"

"In the lab. It's not very big, about the size of a big garage door," he replied. "It's pretty much the size most of them are, you now, it's not like..." he trailed off, adding a wavy hand gesture intended to convey, without using the actual words, that building a prototype large enough to allow an armada to pass through was, even from a simple practicality standpoint, kind of insane.