Archive of Our Own

In the end, it wasn’t even a spectacular death.

Because even on her way out, Frances Mayfield would never be “spectacular.” And on top of her mediocrity, she’d always been horrendously unlucky.  

Take now, for instance.

One minute, Frankie was sprinting through the spring rain to make her train down a slick subway stairwell. Her hair was wet, sticking uncomfortably to the back of her neck and sweating forehead. She was late. Very, very late. Not that it mattered at this point. Who cared if they fired her? Not her. Nope. Her new manager was a goddamn creep. She was this close to quitting anyway.

Her earbuds were screaming the Bee Gees as loud as she could get them to drown out every other soul around her.

“I'm a dancin' man, and I just can't lose. You know, it's all right, it's okay~.”

The heel of her sneaker slid off the edge of a wet step.

“I'll live to see another day~.”

An involuntary gasp ripped from her chest.

“The New York Times' effect on man~ Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive~.”

She instinctively tried to raise her arms to break her fall. They were stuck in the pockets of her hoodie.

“Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'~ And you're stayin' alive, stayin' alive~”

Two distinct thoughts ran through her mind as she helplessly tumbled.

One: her mother was (like always) right about never going down the stairs with your hands in your pockets. Damn it!

“Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive, stayin' alive~.”

Two: If the fall didn’t kill her, the irony surely would.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive~.”

Her world went white.

Keep in mind, Frankie had never been particularly religious; neither had her parents. So realistically, she expected oblivion. To be one with the universe or some such shit. Or, at the very least, Morgan Freeman’s dulcet tones. Because if anyone was the voice of God, it was that man.  

Instead, Frankie didn’t wake so much as spring into consciousness. Gulping down lungfuls of air.

The first sensation that came to her was this spider-crawling-along-her-skin feeling that something was beyond just ‘not right’.

Her eyelids were too heavy. So she wiggled her toes in the hopes that the fall hadn't paralyzed her. They twitched and shifted underneath what must have been a hospital bed sheet. It was odd, though. She felt stretched out. Like her feet shouldn’t have been that far away from her head. Like the planes of her skin were more vast than they had been.

She forced one eye open. The effort stung. The edges of her lids were crusty with sleep sand. Her other eye followed sluggishly after.

She blinked.

Her brows furrowed.

She squinted.  

The ceiling had crown molding and a bowl-like light with a decorative tip at the center. – She’d always thought fixtures like that kinda looked like boobs. Juvenile, sure, but she couldn’t see them any other way. Frankie had never seen a hospital room with crown molding or boob lights.

A cold shiver ran down her spine, and most of the pain ebbed. She sat up in one swift, surprisingly easy movement for someone who was shit at doing crunches, like a vampire rising from its coffin. The springs creaked ominously beneath her. “Wha-”

She choked off the rest of her words and grabbed her throat. She coughed, trying to clear it. “What-” she took a shuddering breath. “Holy-.”  

Her voice was all kinds of wrong. Primarily, it was deeper, still feminine, but with a low, smooth timbre that didn’t belong in the mouth of a pitchy twenty-three-year-old barista who still sometimes got carded for Red Bull.

She looked down. "Jesus Christ!"

Those were not her hands.

Too tan. Too big, too graceful. The nails were unchipped and showed no signs of nervous biting. A habit she’d had since she was fourteen. The fingers were long compared to the stubby ones with the clubbed thumbs she was used to.

She hunched forward further, and thick, dark hair curled around her face and shoulders. Then there was also… well. On the subject of boobs, there were heavy, unfamiliar, not her comfortable B cups sitting on her chest.

She wrapped her strange arms around herself to hide them. A chill ran down her spine.  

No fucking way, I black out, and they give me a boob job, spray tan, and a hair transplant?

As wild as it sounded, it would have made more sense than the reality.

Frankie’s eyes snapped up from her bewildered ogling and inspected the room with such clear vision she could see the dust particles floating around in the dim light. She didn't even know people could have vision this good. She’d been 20/20 before, but now she felt like an owl.

She spotted a mirror hung over a short dresser. She flung herself off the bed and at it.

She apparently underestimated the power of her launch, because suddenly she was in front of the dresser. She tried to stop. To slow down, but couldn’t. Her thigh slammed into the furniture.

CRACK! SHHHEK- BANG!

No pain followed what would surely become a nasty black and blue bruise...

She looked down at the mess of wood splinters; half the wardrobe's right side was in pieces, and there was now a fracture running up the plaster from where it had slammed back into the wall.

She took this all in with mounting horror. “What. The. Actual. Fuck?” she murmured. Her heart was pounding.

She gripped her surprisingly well-muscled thigh, clad in unfamiliar blue sleep shorts, and poked around for an injury.

Nothing.

She was completely unharmed.

Hesitantly, she looked up from the carnage and into the mirror that had first caught her sight. She really shouldn’t have been too shocked at that point. She still choked on her spit.

The reflection looked like a woman out of a sports magazine: Tall, toned, tanned, defined cheekbones. A square jaw. Long, glossy black curls. And big, startled blue eyes.

“Oh fuck me…” She tried to keep her breathing steady. ”Who the hell are you?” She asked the reflection as she ran the stranger's fingers over the stranger's cheek.

She swallowed and looked around again. There, on the bedside table was a lanyard. She tiptoed over to it carefully. Trying not to do whatever the fuck she’d done the first time.

Beside the boho-style lamp was a press badge that read:

LARK KENT

METROPOLITAN GAZETTE

(Staff Writer)

…

Frankie laughed at the sheer absurdity of the situation.

What?

Lark Kent…

Lark…

Kent…

Fuckin’ A.

That sounded far too suspiciously like Clark Kent. She did not like where this was going.    

Frankie propped herself on the wall by one of the closed blinds. She closed the stranger's eyes and used the stranger's lungs (Lark’s lungs) to pull in deep, even breaths. Her brain was coming up with all sorts of ways to explain it all away. Coma dream was her working theory, but never in her life had Frankie had a dream this vivid. Most of her dreams felt more conceptual than visual. She’d always been shit with picturing things in her head.

She took another look around the room when she grasped a moment of calm.

The bed she’d launched herself out of looked so much more inviting than her bed back home. White sheets, a fluffy blue gingham duvet, and what looked like a hand-knit throw blanket. There were books stacked neatly on the other nightstand. Two Mark Twain books, a brightly colored (new by the looks of it) copy of Catch-22, which Frankie had actually been planning on reading. But Hemingway, above all, seemed to be Lark’s favorite. Her copy of The Sun Also Rises was dog-eared and spine cracked. Clearly well loved and reread.  

Frankie finished her snooping of the woman's meager library and looked elsewhere for clues on who exactly Lark Kent was.    

There were framed photos on the walls. One of an older woman sitting in a sunflower field, a floppy hat on her grey hair, and a big smile stretched across her face. There was one of a golden retriever too, perhaps a family pet. Then, a group photo at a press junket with more people she didn’t recognize.

Though…

A throbbing discomfort behind her eyes she’d been ignoring since she woke up began to turn into a sharper, more concentrated pain. Black spots danced in front of her eyes and made her head swim.

She clutched at her forehead, trying to keep her feet rooted in place and prevent her knees from buckling. The ID slipping out of her fingers didn’t even register.

With the pain came uneasy feelings that she was forgetting things. She grasped for the wispy thoughts, but like smoke they slipped through her fingers. Yet maybe a better analogy would be water. Because the harder she reached for these intangible thoughts, these… memories, the clearer they became. The untouchable mist turned tangible and trickled in through a crack.

They were still distant like they’d happened to someone else (which they had). But not someone unfamiliar. Almost like when your sibling is recalling a childhood memory you remember slightly differently or with missing details.  

Frankie's breath shuddered. Her eyes wide as an intense vision slotted itself into place.  

Lark’s strongest, happiest memory was a beautiful battering ram. The sun was bright and beaming. The cornfields were vast and disappearing beneath her in a blur of buttery yellow. The wind whipped her hair in a refreshing hurricane of dark curls.

Frankie remembered the day Lark Kent learned how to fly.  

It's a bird, it's a plane, no it's-

Her legs gave out. She dropped onto the edge of the nice bed. The furniture beneath her gave a long moaning-

CREEEEAK!

Holy fucking shit.

Superman…

She looked down the front of her shirt.

Er… Superwoman?

​

The panic attack preceding her revelation was one of her worst to date. It started with her own heartbeat she could hear beating through her chest, then she heard her neighbors, then everyone on the block, then it was like all of New York turned into a series of offbeat drums thumping out of time.

Her hands did little to block out the sounds, and just as she got a handle on it, the X-ray vision seemed to kick in.

Side note. Seeing through your own closed eyelids was spooky as fuck, and not being able to turn off the overstimulating vision of seeing the inside of everything was its own version of hell.    

Thankfully, the laser vision she was like 90% sure she now possessed never activated, and she was left with the more tame aspects of Lark's powers to wrangle. It was still quite possibly the worst night of Frankie's life.  

She had one singular moment where everything settled. Her vision blinked back to normal when she calmed her panic. Then her stomach rumbled. Frankie could only wince as it twisted uncomfortably.

Great. Super-speed, super-vision, super-hearing, and super-hungry. Lark didn’t seem to be the type of woman to do things by halves.

Her head fucking hurt.

With a steadying breath, she wandered out of Lark's room into the kitchen, rubbing her abused ears, and opened the fridge.

A whole shelf of labeled meal-prep containers stared her in the face. Each stacked with the rigid precision of someone who absolutely had their shit together.

She groaned indecently. “Oh, thank god, carbs.”

Fuck. Going by superhero logic, she was really gonna’ need to learn to cook properly now if she wanted to keep up with what her body burned.

She downed half a Tupperware of cold pasta in dread. She hated cooking.

So like any normal human being (which Lark Kent may or may not be), Franky cried. Not dainty crying either. With the pretty glistening tear running down the face. No. This was full-on, ugly-can’t-breathe snotty sobbing into a plastic container of penne arrabbiata.

Because what the fuck was she supposed to do if this was real? If she really was dead dead? And not just dead dead, but another person entirely.  

Her first order of business was figuring out what sort of place she’d found herself in. She searched around the spacious apartment for a laptop before she found it on the dining table between the living room and the kitchen.

She sat in front of it for a minute. Hesitating. Just breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Still trying to get used to the feeling of Lark's lungs. She got the impression the woman would be a great free diver.  

“Okay,” she muttered softly, “Alright. You can do this, Frances. Step one: don’t Hulk-smash any more furniture.”

She gulped and squeezed her eyes shut tight. “Step two: find out if this is a coma dream or if you really died and woke up as the kind of woman who fucking meal preps. Jesus.”

Frankie flipped the laptop open. The password was her birthday—well, Lark’s birthday. The date popped into her head before she even realized she was thinking about it. 02.29.91. February 29th. Pisces. That…annoyingly, seemed to fit. Franky was a Taurus, bullheaded through and through. Or at least that's what her mother used to say.  

The computer whirred to life. Chrome was already open, a few tabs bookmarked: Lark’s Gmail, LinkedIn, YouTube, and—bingo!—The New York Times.

She clicked on it.

It took her less than a minute of scrolling to realize that something else about this place was very, very wrong.

HOMLANDER SAVES INNOCENTS FROM BURNING BUILDING.

Franky wasn’t a massive comic book fan or anything, but she was pretty sure DC didn’t have a knock-off blond Superman flying around. Now that she thought about it, she started digging for more heroes she was familiar with. Batman, Wonder Woman… okay maybe just those two. Who the hell did Jason Momoa play again? Water man or something?

When her searches ran dry, she came back to Homelander. She squinted at her screen and zoomed in on the photo of him the article included. He was posed with his hands in his hips; his blue suit included some obviously fake muscles and his smile was icy.

Oh.

Dread pooled in her stomach. She knew that face.

She stopped watching a show entirely when he’d killed a kid in the first episode.

Franky let out a brittle laugh and covered her face. Great. Just fucking Great! I’ve been isekai’d into a fascist superhero satire with the powers of a god and a LinkedIn account. This was just what she needed. Because of course this day couldn’t get any worse than dying, right? Wrong! 

“Fuck fuck fuck.” she muttered low under her breath.

It would have been too easy if it was just some weird off-brand Marvel/DC thing. No, god forbid Franky actually had a chance to enjoy her afterlife.  

She leaned back in her chair, palms still over her eyes. “What the actual hell is happening to me?”

Okay, Frankie tried to focus. What did she know for sure?

She was in The Boys somehow. The show had been too gory for her. She’d only started it when her friend had told her Jensen Ackles was in it. But as far as she knew, he wasn’t in the first two seasons, and as much as she loved him, she wasn’t about to endure the gore for 2 seasons without him.

What else?

She had superpowers… was Lark a hero too?

A quick rummage through her apartment made her lean towards no. There was no super suit or spandex ensemble lying around. Just a whole lot of flannel and work clothing.

It could be worse. She told herself. She could have woken as actual Clark Kent. Dick and all. Eugh!

She shuddered at the thought and stood up, dragging her fingers through her– Lark’s– thick hair. Too many emotions crowded her head. Grief, confusion, a little bit of awe, dread all twisted into a big ball of goo in her stomach that threatened to bring the arrabbiata right back up.  

Frankie slumped her way back to Lark's room, forcing her perfect steel spine into a reluctant slouch out of spite.

She collapsed face-first onto the bed.

CRACK!

The whole bed frame snapped and buckled like a pile of sad toothpicks.

“Motherfucker!!” she shouted in surprise. Then she pouted, her eyes brimming with tears.

She shoved her face into the duvet, breathing in the unfamiliar scent. “I want a refund on reincarnation.”