Chapter Text
Sam always hated flowers.
They’d always reminded her of funerals. An irony that wasn’t entirely lost on Lena when she’d stated in no uncertain terms that there were to be no flowers laid on the coffin.
Because her wife hated flowers.
Flowers didn’t mean death to Lena, though. Flowers meant life. Flowers meant hope and love and growth. Another reason that they had no place on her grave. Still, it was strange to show up to visit without bringing something. Something that said to strangers walking past, attending their own people, that this person, this dead person in the ground, someone still loves.
Maybe actually having someone visiting would be a good sign of that instead, because it had been precisely five-hundred and ten days, thirteen hours and six minutes since she’d last been here. The day that they put Sam in the ground.
The day she’d buried her wife.
It was a nice spot, not where Lena would have picked ordinarily, but the luxury of narrowing down the date of her death meant that Sam had been the one to make most of the arrangements herself. The one thing Lena wasn’t allowed to micromanage. There were too many other people for Lena’s liking. She would have put Sam on a hilltop someplace private, overlooking the ocean, not in the National City cemetery surrounded by strangers and only a tree and bench underneath it by way of a view.
At least Sam keeping her own last name meant the chances of her headstone being defaced were limited.
Lena wasn’t quite sure what she’d been expecting by coming today. She wasn’t even sure why she had come today. A combination of the move back to National City, the fact that Ruby had told her this morning that she didn’t want Lena to go to her hockey games anymore and the fact that today was the perfect weather for staying indoors, meant that Lena found her way to National City Cemetery. She didn’t really know what she planned to do once she got there. Dramatically stare at her headstone in silence for two minutes? Try not to freeze to death, even though the winter chill set her teeth on edge? Maybe she just wanted to sit down on the bench that Sam had been so determined to be in front of, under the tree and try to find a way to be less sad.
What she didn’t expect was someone else sitting on the bench, talking to a headstone about two metres from Sam’s.
“…of course, you wouldn’t believe the trouble I managed to get myself in. Winn practically had a fit in the restaurant. He’s been a mood ever since… Well…”
Lena eyed the blonde woman as she walked up, hesitating in front of Sam’s headstone, unsure of her footing until the woman noticed presence and her words trailed off. Lena felt slightly guilty for interrupting.
“Oh,” she breathed, looking askance at Lena with a wry smile. “I’m going mad.”
She looked sad, tired too. Lena glanced over towards the headstone the woman had been speaking to. Warm colour, simple, not inexpensive, but not gaudy. And new. Of course, that only meant that it hadn’t been there five hundred and ten days ago.
Lena didn’t hold to well with conversation these days, but it felt awkward to just stand silently.
“You’re only mad if they start answering back,” Lena said, shoving her hands deep in her pockets, a ghost of a smile crossing her face. She was the last one to draw conclusions on the appropriate way to grieve.
“She does answer back.”
Lena surveyed the woman again. She had a kind face. The kind of face that made you want to smile and laugh, even if you didn’t want to. With her blonde curls and glasses and a buttoned-up, patterned shirt. She looked young too, like she had no business being in a graveyard having conversations with a headstone, more at home in a coffee shop or at least somewhere warm.
A nudge, something at the back of her mind pushed her.
“What’s she say?”
The blonde woman shrugged, a soft smile gracing her face and lighting her eyes.
“Depends on what I ask her.”
It was easier to pretend that things were normal if she kept busy. Not that she hadn’t been busy lately anyway. Moving an entire company to the west coast tended to do that, on top of relearning how to talk to a teenage stepdaughter.
Lena looked back at Sam’s headstone, taking it in for the first time and tracing the letters of her name with her eyes. Sam had designed it too. She wanted something simple, just her name.
“Your mom?”
The question drew Lena’s attention back to the blonde woman, who was looking to Sam’s headstone with a quirked eyebrow.
She didn’t know what to feel at the question. It wasn’t like she had to answer, or even if she did, she could lie. Lena felt the urge to do so for a brief second, because often it was easier to pretend like she wasn’t what she was at the age of twenty-seven. But the truth of the matter was, Lena didn’t even know where her mother was buried, Lillian had never told her. And lying about who Sam was to her, even to a total stranger… well, that was just against the very fibre of her being.
“My wife.”
There it was, that look that always passed across people’s faces when they hear that her wife was dead. It should make her angry, it used to make her furious, but now it just made her feel tired.
And broken.
“Oh, sorry,” the woman replied softly, shifting a bit on her bench and looking back toward the headstone she’d been talking to. “Alex was my sister. I’m Kara.”
For some reason that made Lex’s face flash in her mind. She imagined him, sitting in a cell, mad and screaming at the world. Thinking it was unfair.
As if life was unfair for him .
“I’m Lena,” she answered, feeling tight and twisted inside.
Kara, which was a nice enough name, smiled at her introduction and a few seconds lingered in silence when they both looked back to their own family’s headstones. Lena let herself sit in the silence of the cold air for a few more quiet seconds, wondering if she’d visited long enough now not to come back for at least a year when Kara’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“She seems nice, doesn’t she?”
Lena blinked, looking over and realised that Kara was once again talking to her sister’s headstone.
About her.
Unsure what to do, or if she was interrupting again, Lena spoke.
“Does she agree with you?” Gesturing towards the headstone with a wave.
Kara laughed, empty enough to be fake. An echo that Lena could recognise anywhere now.
“It’s a toss-up,” Kara replied. “Alex liked to disagree with most of the stuff I thought and did. We argued about everything all the time.”
Without warning, Kara burst into tears, alarming Lena enough to make her regret coming today and feel guilty for feeling that way all at once. Lena was terrible with tears at the best of times. Unlike Sam, who burst into tears every time so much as a sad movie trailer played on the TV, Lena wasn’t a crier. She hadn’t cried in… so long she couldn’t really remember. She hadn’t cried at the funeral.
She couldn’t.
Lena didn’t really know what to do, so she just stood locked in place, staring at a stranger and feel feeble. Kara seemed to pick up on her burning desire to flee and hastily mopped her eyes on her sleeve.
“Crying, again,” she sniffed. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologise for crying,” Lena said weakly. “Please.”
Kara nodded jerkily at her words.
“Sorry.”
“There you go again,” Lena inched forward warily. “Apologising.”
“My sister used to get on my case about it too,” Kara said with a watery smile. “She’d probably punch me if she saw me now.”
Lena took a step toward the other woman, hovering between a desire to give comfort and her innate inability to do so successfully.
“Well, that’s what this is all for apparently,” she said instead, giving honesty to her thoughts and gesturing across the cemetery, a sea of headstones. “Grieving and all that. Closure.”
Lena hated that word. As far as she was concerned, closure wasn’t really in the cards for her. It never had been. Not when her mother died. Not when her father did. Not when Lillian rejected her. Not when her brother went mad and especially not now that her wife was dead too. Still, it was supposed to inspire comfort. At least that’s what Sam told her before she died.
“Tuesday lunchtimes were our thing,” Kara began, rather hoarsely, her face wracked with so much raw grief, Lena felt it mingle with her own. “Every week, no matter what.”
Lena took a solider step forward now, indicating the space on the bench next to Kara.
“You mind if I?” She questioned.
Kara’s eyes widened, seemingly stunned that anybody would voluntarily want to sit next to someone in her state, but she scooted even further along the bench regardless, making more space.
“No, not at all. Please. Stops me rambling and all that.”
Lena settled beside her, bundling herself a bit tighter in her thick coat and let out a sigh.
“You’re not rambling,” she breathed out. “You’re talking.”
Kara choked on her next breath, her eyes puffy and red.
“And crying.”
Lena stared at her for a brief beat, before reaching towards and rummaging through her purse.
“Here,” she said, handing her a packet of tissues which Kara grabbed eagerly.
“At least you remembered to bring tissues to the cemetery.”
At the loud, unabashedly disgusting sound of Kara blowing her nose and cleaning her face finished, Lena gave her a reserved smile.
“Well, that’s less grieving 101 and more of a parenting staple,” she explained once Kara handed the now half-empty packet back. “I also have a first aid kit, wipes and Advil if you need them.”
“You’ve got a kid?” Kara said, surprise evident in her voice. Another thing that Lena was used to now when people found out about Ruby.
She still wondered how Sam had done it all those years before they met.
“Yeah,” Lena continued, her smile a little easier now. “A daughter. She just turned fifteen.”
That had been a fun birthday, or rather lack of. Lena had done her best, but she wasn’t Sam. Sam had been the one who made the cake and picked the spot they’d go on the day trip to. She was the one who’d somehow known the perfect gift to get and knew all the fun stories because she had been there for every minute of Ruby’s life.
This year, Ruby decided she wanted the same thing Lena always wanted on her birthday.
To do absolutely nothing.
Lena wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing or not by going along with it.
“Wow,” Kara replied with wide eyes. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you really don’t look old enough to have a teenage daughter. I mean that in the best way! Foot in mouth disease.”
There was no judgement in Kara’s eyes or voice, so it was clear enough that she wasn’t harbouring shitty opinions about teenage motherhood, though the flush that crept up her neck and cheeks clearly meant she was embarrassed by what she had said. Lena opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated.
“She’s… adopted.”
Technically correct, but not the whole truth.
Kara didn’t seem to pick up on her hesitation, another smile gracing her face.
“Oh, that’s cool,” she answered. “I’m adopted too. Late. Just turned thirteen when it happened. Couldn’t have asked for a better family then the Danvers though.”
Her voice seemed to crunch once more.
“Or a better sister.”
Kara trailed off after that, her eyes zoning out as she stared at her sister’s headstone once more. Lena looked to Sam’s name too, trying to find some of the comfort she was supposedly supposed to feel sitting here, but all she had in her heart was numb and weighted. It wasn’t like her wife was really here, just lying in a box in the cold ground. All this place was to her was a headstone and a tree and a bench.
At least on a cliff at the ocean, it would have been a beautiful view.
“I lost my wife early last year,” Lena suddenly said, breaking the silence first. “Still not over it, but there’s nothing special about that.”
When they’d first found out, Lena didn’t believe it. All she could do was sit next to Sam, clutching her hand as the doctor droned at them. Later that night, her breath had come in searing gasps, still not believing it. Because if out of the two of them, Sam wasn’t the one that cancer was supposed to happen to. Out of the two of them, Sam wasn’t the one who was supposed to leave first.
“People you love die, life goes on,” she said flatly. “It’s not as good though, but there you go.”
There was a burn in the back of her throat, her own words felt like acid on her tongue.
“I’m not the best at comfort.”
Kara shrugged beside her.
“I think you’re ok,” she said in a quiet voice, gentle and sympathetic in a way that set Lena’s teeth on edge. “Other people are… Well. You seem like a nice person.”
At that, Lena grinned, rolling her head towards Kara and arching an eyebrow.
“Because I carry tissues?”
Kara made a funny sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh.
“Well, I didn’t want to say it was the first-aid kit.”
Lena’s centre shifted for what felt like the first time in years, suddenly feeling more solid. More real. Relaxing as much as she could on the cold bench, Lena recrossed her arms briskly against the chill.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted your conversation before.”
Kara seemed to ease in herself too, scratching the back of her neck and not looking at all frozen enough for Lena’s petty liking.
“No, you just saved me recounting a truly awful dinner I had on the weekend with my friends.”
Friends. Lena can’t remember the last time she had one friend, let alone the plural.
“Bad food?”
“No,” Kara shook her head. “But one of my friends has a lot of food sensitivities. I don’t know why he thought Ethiopian was a good choice, but I guess he thought since I’d never been before it might tempt me out of my apartment. All my friends think I’m starting to become a hermit. It’s not that I don’t want to see them, I just…”
Lena understood that. Because even though she’d never had well-meaning friends that tried to drag her out of her grief, she could certainly appreciate the desire to be left alone in it.
“Don’t particularly want to see them,” Lena finished for her.
Kara seemed to disappear inside her own mind for a minute, eyes drawing away from Lena and back to the grave.
“They loved her too,” she finally said. “I know that. And they love me. But it’s just… different. I don’t feel ready for it. Going out. It’s not like things can go back to the way they were anyway.”
Depression sucked, Lena couldn’t deny that. The person you loved being dead sucked more.
“It’s good, though,” Lena replied softly. “To have people who care about you. Who wants to be there for you. But it’s also a pain in the ass.”
“It’s a total pain in the ass,” Kara exhaled, her voice strung with unexplored tension. “I mean, can’t I just be let alone to self-implode?”
“Personally, I loved my self-imploding phase,” Lena answered dryly. “Really went down well with a bottle of cabernet.”
Kara threw her head backed and laughed. Shattering the air with the sound and for half a second, something warm swelled in Lena’s chest at the sound. Kara’s laughter turned into more of a strangled groan quickly though, leaning forward, she braced her head in her hands, and Lena saw that tears were once again crawling down her cheeks.
“I’d kill for a glass of wine right now,” she whispered. “Me, Alex, on my couch with a glass of wine talking about everything. Well, when I say talking, I was doing most of the talking. She was doing the listening. If you don’t mind me asking-“
“Cancer,” Lena said automatically, deadly, like a bullet between the eyes.
“Oh… no…” Kara stuttered out, looking slightly horrified. “I wasn’t going to…”
Lena felt like shit for assuming, shittier for making this kind stranger squirm with the knowledge of it.
“Sorry,” Lena said quickly. “It’s just, everyone I know… knows, and you’re the first person I’ve talked to for longer than five minutes I’ve met the doesn’t and I just… Wanted to say it.”
Silence and stillness weren’t unbearable anymore, old friends instead, but actually talking to an adult out loud about Sam was… disconcerting.
“What did you want to ask?”
Kara’s mouth gapped like a fish for a second, before another flush filled her cheeks.
“I just wondered if you’d like to get a drink sometime,” she replied, her eyes immediately filling with more horror.
“Not like that!” She half-shouted. “I mean, just that everyone I know is… You’re… You seem to be… Sorry.”
Lena took in the strange rambling mess before her with sympathy. She usually didn’t hold much with people that couldn’t say what they mean and wanted and say it directly, but she could appreciate what Kara was trying to do. Reach out through the loneliness for a lifeline. A connection with someone, for something that she obviously wasn’t getting from her friends. But while Lena could appreciate that, she couldn’t be that anyone right now. She even struggled to be that for Ruby.
But something in the way Kara was looking after her, that hint of deep sweetness in her blue eyes that reminded Lena of Sam, stopped her for cutting off the friendship offer at the knees entirely.
“Coping mechanisms?” Lena demanded more than asked.
Kara blinked at her.
“Sorry?”
“Coping mechanisms,” Lena repeated. “You got any?”
Kara tensed in her seat, a strange look passing across her face before she answered in a rush.
“Sleeping, self-isolation, obsessively staring at photos of my sister and crying, apologising for myself constantly, being angry with the world,” she listed. “You?”
“Baking, oddly enough. Trying to micromanage my daughter’s life without ruining it. And yes, drinking. Nothing quite hits the spot as drinking wine in bed.”
Apart from the red wine stained ring on her bedside table that was.
“Sounds undeniably healthy,” Kara said with a grin, full of morbid humour.
“Absolutely,” Lena continued. “Making ourselves sick with it all.”
“We could be peculiar friends,” Kara grinned wider. “Joined by self-pity, bitterness and vomit.”
Lena shrugged, but a smile played on her lips too.
“Beats grief counselling.”
“Ha!” Kara exclaimed. “I’ll be sure to tell my shrink that. He’s trying to get me to be more zen.”
Lena’s face pinched and gave Kara a look a mock-disgust at the word.
“Zen?” She questioned. “I don’t think I’d know how to be zen. Don’t think I’d want to be.”
“No, it’s great,” Kara rushed, her hand touching Lena’s elbow lightly in her excitement. “You just get to be all ‘inner-peace’ like and when you hit like, level ten zen, you get to lecture everyone around you about yoga.”
Lena’s couldn’t reply, she couldn’t even breathe, all she could do was stare at the fingers still touching her arm, even through the thickness of her clothes feeling the heat. A flood of memories threatened to burst through her mind like a damn, alongside a rush of weird and complicated guilt.
But then, Kara’s fingers weren’t on her arm anymore. And she could breathe.
“Well,” she managed, clearing her throat. “Who wouldn’t want that?”
Looking back up into Kara’s eyes, she saw a stir of something that was more than sympathy in her eyes.
Understanding.
“Who indeed.”
They didn’t exchange numbers.
Lena found herself drawn back to the cemetery. Back to Sam. She’d didn’t plan for it to be a Tuesday, nor for it to be lunchtime when she did, but it was, and there she was. Walking towards that same tree and bench and feeling something strange when she saw the back of a blonde head on it.
Kara was reading today, no scintillating conversations, and she didn’t look as tired, and when she heard the sound of Lena walking towards her, she looked up with a smile that had Lena’s feet moving slightly faster to get there.
Without pause, as if it hadn’t just been two weeks, and they still weren’t perfect strangers, Kara dived into the conversation before Lena had even had a chance to sit.
“So, me being zen didn’t completely work out.”
“No?” Lena settled on the bench.
“I went along to this meditation thing with my friend,” Kara explained, closing her book but leaving her finger in place between the folded pages. “But the instructor was so annoying! I ended up shouting at him and storming out.”
Lena had a hard time picturing the wavy-haired blonde next to her, wearing pink polka-dot pants, shouting but looks could be deceiving. She’d certainly been prone to shouting on occasion.
“How was he annoying?”
Kara let out a heavy sigh.
“In every way,” she groaned, gesturing animatedly. “Just slurping tea and sniffing. And doing that thing with his nose when he didn’t want to blow it. Snorting it back up.”
“What did you shout?” Lena questioned appreciatively.
Kara looked slightly guilty, but a hint of mischief in her eyes battled with it.
“I think I called him a snort-curdler. Yeah.”
“Oh dear,” Lena snorted rather unflatteringly, covering her mouth immediately at the sound, but unable to contain her amusement. To her credit, Kara didn’t seem dissuaded, her grin actually widened.
“Then I went home, got drunk and watched videos of Alex on her last birthday.”
Lena thought back to her apathetic phases, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling for hours in silence. She’d systematically removed every photo of Sam from their bedroom, between the move to Metropolis and then the move back most of the pictures in the apartment had been designated to areas Ruby frequented full stop. Lena doubted she’d have the courage to watch old videos.
“Well,” Lena breathed, glancing at Sam’s name in stone. “That’s not too terrible.”
“Except I never get drunk,” Kara explained. “So now I’ve got a hangover, and I’ve probably got all my friends on ‘Kara; Code Red’.”
Lena looked over at Kara disbelievingly.
“Do I even want to know?”
“It involves a pineapple, a trip to the zoo and bad hair dye.”
Lena blinked, unable to even fathom the ridiculousness that story hinted at.
“Logically, how could it not involve a pineapple,” she answered breezily after a pause.
Kara eyed her suspiciously before waving away the comment.
“My point is, they already think I’ve lost my marbles and this hasn’t helped,” she continued, her fingers flexing on her knee. “Total personality shift. Before I’d have been the first one ready to try out meditation. Alex was always the one with the hair-trigger temper about this stuff, but God love her if she didn’t do it for me.”
Lena supposed it must be some long-standing tradition amongst the bereaved to fluctuate wildly between moods when talking about the dead. Kara’s face had immediately shifted from a grin to shattered.
“It’s like I’m just morphing into a shittier version of my sister’s personality,” Kara continued in a dark tone. “Like Alex’s bad moods mixed with my hair-braininess, wearing a trench coat in a dark alley.”
Lena inclined her head at the description.
“That was… oddly specific,” she muttered, taking a breath and bracing herself to dole out advice. “Though I really wouldn’t worry about it too much. After Sam died, I started doing things that were just so not me. Like I was possessed by her spirit to make me do the dishes myself.”
So many memories and nagging, lingering arguments about unimportant things that were so easily solved. Why did she never do the dishes before? Probably because she was crap at domesticity, never having to hold a broom before in her life before she met Sam.
“Dishes are a bit different to treating your friends like crap.”
Yanked from her own spiralling thoughts abruptly by Kara’s words, Lena looked over the other woman’s now slumped figure.
So despondent.
“Hey,” she tried softly, hesitantly. “We grieve. People grieve.”
Kara let out a shuddered breath, taking a few minutes of silence before she looked to Lena with red-rimmed eyes.
“How’d you do it?” Her voice grated out of her throat like it had been run over by gravel. “You seem so… together.”
Lena resisted the urge to laugh at the suggestion, but truthfully she wasn’t surprised. The Luthor family training kicked in, dropping cold and blank facades as if their very lives depended on it. Except for `Lex, of course. Passive-Aggressiveness kicked to the curb in favour of insanity and plans for world domination.
“I’m a better actor then you maybe,” Lena replied finally, feeling brittle.
Kara watched her intently, her eyes intense.
“Seriously.”
Lena would like to smile and make no answer. It was her usual response if someone asked how she was. Most people didn’t really care anyway, they just wanted to ask out of obligation, or worse, curiosity. Most worse, most honestly of all, just to see if the youngest and newest Luthor CEO was ready to crack. Vultures prepared to sweep in and pick at the bones. But Kara wasn’t looking at her the way most people did when they asked, and a sweeping desire filled Lena’s heart, to be honest.
“When Sam died, I wanted to kill myself,” she rattled out gruffly. “And when I couldn’t, didn’t, I thought if I’m going to do this carrying on living thing, it’s going to be on my terms. I’m going to do what I want, when I want, and I’ve always got suicide to fall back on.”
The lid of her own particular brand of crazy now, Lena waited for some sort of response from Kara. A look of horror, maybe. Running away screaming, definitely. She didn’t except Kara’s reply.
“Good to have a backup.”
Lena softened, smiling to herself for a second.
“At first I thought it was amazing,” she explained. “I can do anything, who cares? What’s the worse that can happen, nothing too bad because I can always kill myself, you know? But then I realised you can’t not care about things you actually do care about. You can’t fool yourself, and even though I’m in pain, it’s worth sticking around to try and make my corner of the universe better. For Ruby, you know.”
Even if she was floundering on that front.
“It’s not all about me,” Lena whispered, looking at Kara with a shrug. “That’s all there is. Happiness is so amazing, it doesn’t really matter if it’s mine or not.”
It was such a lovely day. Cold, but at least the sun was out, crisp through the chill. Lena always wondered about everything, she had her whole life, but the desire deep in herself to be warm was inbuilt.
Warm, again. Sam had been so warm.
“Good people,” Kara’s voice cut through lightly. “Do good things for other people. And I think you’re good, Lena. Smart, funny, kind.”
Kara’s eyes were kind, soft and most importantly, to Lena, honest. Honest enough that Lena knew that she believed what she was saying. Lena stared at her for a while, lost in the idea of warmth before that nudge in her mind nudged as it was want to do, along with guilt. Breaking the exchanged stare, Lena rolled her eyes and shook off the words.
“You forgot, unbelievably sexy.”
It was a throwaway line. Ridiculous. Something she would have said to Sam, but still, it made Kara grin.
“Nah,” she answered with a thoroughly serene expression on her face. “I just didn’t want to be too obvious.”
“I feel.. panicked,” Kara rattled, on the verge of tears. “All the time. Like I’m going to do the wrong thing. So… I don’t do anything. And that’s why I think I’m going to blow it with Cat tomorrow, but..”
Her words trailed off, and she took a sip of her coffee.
Lena watched her with concern, worried for all the things Kara had told her during their less and less infrequent meetings on Tuesdays on their bench. Like that when her sister had died, Kara hadn’t been able to leave her apartment for three weeks. The fact that she’d lost her dream job and had been told by her more mentor then boss that she was only allowed to reapply when she got her shit together. The fact that `Kara had to accept a job at a community newspaper and after four months had finally had enough and was interviewing again tomorrow.
“Concentrate on getting better,” Lena finally said simply. “Everything else can wait.”
It’s something that Sam would have said, because Sam would have been so much better at comfort then she was. Still, she thought she was doing ok for never having a proper friend before. At least, Kara always seemed to be happy if she turned up on a Tuesday.
Especially if she brought coffee.
“I’m not sure I’m worth waiting for,” Kara admitted. “I’m embarrassed…that I’m acting the way that I am.”
Like the public meltdowns, screaming at her friends, throwing the microwave in the garbage chute when it didn’t heat fast enough. Personally, Lena thought those were pretty minor incidents considering the last time she felt close to falling to pieces she scrapped her plan to merge with Lord Tech when Maxwell asked her to dinner.
Kara’s apparent overreactions were less expensive.
“Whatever gets you better.”
Kara chuckled weakly at Lena’s reply.
“Yeah, I’m not better, but I’m not going to stick my head in the oven.”
“I doubt you know where the oven is.”
Kara laughed, but Lena had heard the stories about Kara’s attempts at cooking.
“Good one!”
Lena was relieved to hear her say that. Though if the past few months had taught her anything, it was that Kara’s sense of humour was as black as her own.
“You’re in pain,” Lena answered gently.
Not an excuse, an explanation.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m embarrassed about really.” Something twisted on Kara’s face. “Dying of cancer, that’s being in pain. Actual pain. I felt sorry for myself. I still do. But I’ve realised that death will come soon enough and there’s nothing to fear about it. No feelings to worry about, not mine anyway. Just peace and quiet.”
Lena thought about Sam. All the nights in the hospital when she could barely even breathe. She wondered if Sam would rather her time over faster to skip that hell.
"I am trying to work out if there’s a way I can still carry on annoying people, after I die, but I haven’t cracked it yet,” Kara grinned through the tears in her eyes. “But I’ll just have to make the most of that one while I’m alive.”
Lena’s mind jerked back again, watching Kara watch her.
“It’s a hobby.”
“Yeah,” Kara nodded. “Just to asses, though. I’m trying to be nice to the people who were nice to me at least. I’ve realised, remembered, that everyone’s struggling and I feel that I should help the people, who helped me. My friends.”
Kara’s voice petered out at that, her eyes sliding back to her sister’s headstone the way they always did when she had a few seconds of no distraction. Lena knew it was because Kara wished she could understand what Alex thought about whatever she just said. What her opinion was, what she’d think, how she’d react. Without her sister, Kara felt like she was walking through life without a limb.
“That’s good. It’s good to be good. It’s good to help.
Lena was a poor replacement, but still, Kara smiled.
“How are you?”
Kara shrugged, leaning into Lena’s space more then she really wanted. But when someone’s in pieces beside you, invasion of your physical and emotional space falls down the list of things you didn’t want today.
“Yeah, you know.”
Lena made a face.
“What’s that mean?”
Kara sighed, running a hand down her face, pinching the bridge of her nose, before letting it fall on her lap.
“I was trying to be all suave and not, you know, burden you with my troubles.”
Lena looked upwards, the slight rustling of leaves disturbing her attention. The first of the spring leaves had returned to the tree. Green shoots sprouting, delicate and wavering in the light wind. Surprising, she hadn’t noticed it before.
“Well, us suave people love to gossip,” Lena answered breezily. “So spill the beans.”
Kara leaned back on the bench, straightening her spine and turning even more into Lena's space. So close her knee brushed Lena’s briefly.
“I’m the same really,” Kara huffed exhaustively. “I’m still a bit crazy, trying hard to care about stuff. And then today, we find out that the owner of the paper is selling up and we’ll all lose our jobs.”
So she hadn’t gotten her old job back. Lena should have asked.
“Not the bad bit though, I was fine with that,” Kara waved off. “Then my friend starts crying cause it’s the only job she’s ever liked and so I’ve got to try and save it, for her sake."
Letting out a mirthless laugh, Kara then groaned as if even contemplating the effort that would take more out of her then it was worth. Lena immediately resolved the make a call tonight and buy the paper herself.
“Just think,” Kara’s strained. “If you’d killed yourself, you’d have missed all this. Sorry, an absolutely awful joke to make.”
Lena couldn’t help but laugh, despite Kara’s mortified expression.
“Not at all,” she assured. “You made me smile. Morbid humour does that.”
A horrible week. One of the worst she’d had in a while. Between a parent-teacher conference which revealed Ruby was in a play she hadn’t told Lena about, the disruption in her production line for her new alien image inducer devices and Lillian calling to lecture her on how she was a stain to the family name, Lena definitely wasn’t feeling like she had much to offer anyone at the moment.
“I am, and always will be, useless without her.”
The breath caught in her lungs and a burning grew behind her eyes, she couldn’t even react appropriately when she felt the soft touch of Kara’s fingers on the back of her clenched fist, tracing over the skin until she released the tension and allowed Kara to thread her fingers with her’s.
Kara squeezed her hand.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “You’re not useless.”
Lena tried to stop herself from shaking, trying to focus on their clenched hands as some sort of lifeline. A way to ground herself to reality and stop herself from completely falling to pieces.
“It’s not that I couldn’t do anything without her,” Lena said emptily. “It’s just that I didn’t want to. It was no fun. I’d come home, she’d be in the kitchen, cooking, chopping stuff, helping Ruby with her homework, asking me about my day, giving me advice on stuff. And if she went, ‘oh pass the salt’, I’d go, ‘fuck me, do I have to do everything around here’.”
Lena tried to smile at the memories, but it came out wobbly instead. Her voice cracking over the words and the pain they inspired. So many things she tried not to think about anymore, so much that she had lost.
“I miss her so much,” she admitted with a shudder, feeling relieved and revolted with herself for saying it out loud.
Closing her eyes, she tried to re-inflate her insides with something other than loneliness.
“Have you ever thought about having a relationship?” She questioned, eyes opening. “Boyfriend, girlfriend?”
Kara didn’t answer quickly, Lena could feel her intense stare, knowing that she wasn’t fooling her trying to change the subject to something new. Still, Kara must have decided it was best to let it go, even if she didn’t let go of Lena’s hand.
“You know, I want what you had,” she answered tentatively. “Marriage, kids. I had a boyfriend for a minute there. He wasn’t…. well, Alex never liked him. He left, then he came back married, and it all got bizarre. Ended up liking his wife more than him, and it turned out Alex was right. Not actually straight after all.”
She didn’t sound too happy about it, but Lena chalked that up to having more to do with the absence of her sister. Lena managed to gather herself enough to look at Kara now, taking in her confusion, tenseness and grief that Lena knew too well.
This time, it was Lena that squeezed their joined hands.
“There is this one girl that I kind of know through work,” Kara continued with a thin smile. “She’s pretty cute.”
She didn’t sound that enthusiastic, but Lena wasn’t going to mention it.
“Feeling like testing the waters?”
Kara shrugged, sighed and pulled her hand out of Lena’s and back towards herself.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Lena felt a tendril of sympathy, mixed with an increased sense of guilt and something else. Something greedy.
She flexed her fingers, folding them back into her own lap.
“Well, whatever you do… It’ll be ok.”
Kara ate disgustingly, but Lena wasn’t afraid to admit that it captured her attention in a sort of mesmerising way. For some insane reason, the three cheeseburgers that she had shoved into her mouth managed to fit, leaving Lena wondering about her own understanding of the laws of physics. Still, Kara managed to swallow it all with a grimace that had less to do with the amount she’d eaten and more to do with what she had just told Lena before she shoved half a cow in her mouth.
“Why would you be embarrassed about being honest and saying something nice?” Lena said, daintily and pointedly picking at her own salad with her fork. “She should be flattered.”
Kara gave the Big Belly Burger bag a shake, the lack of loose fries evidentially of great disappointment to her judging by her mournful expression.
“I think she was scared,” she sighed distractedly. “I’m obviously not her type.”
Lena eyed Kara briefly, wondering if the extra-large thick shake she’d just drunk had caused temporary brain damage. Kara wasn’t the type to fish for compliments, or reassurances, but in the time that Lena had known her, she had given off the distinct impression that she was astoundingly unaware of her own beauty.
Lena’s mind drifted for a brief second, eyes tracing the slope of Kara’s cheek and her sharp jawline, before the thoughts dropped and twisted in her gut.
“Someone just got there first, but you didn’t do anything wrong,” Lena murmured, looking away. “You showed your feelings. That’s good. I wished I’d shown my feelings more, with Sam.”
There she went again, the way she always did. Thoughts back to Sam like a lightning rod.
“Sometimes I’d be embarrassed to hold hands in public,” she admitted, the way she admitted everything she remembered to Kara. “Or if we were on the phone and there were people around, she’d always say ‘bye, love you!’ I’d always say, ‘me too!’ She’d laugh, cause she’d know.”
Lena was embarrassed to be in love for so long. Shamed. Not because she was gay, but because she was her and she was a Luthor and Luthor’s don’t love. Not unabashedly, not openly. Certainly not the way Sam had.
“Sometimes, if I was working late, the phone would ring, and I’d think ‘oh God, what’s happened’, and then I’d answer and ask what was wrong and she’d say ‘nothing, I just love you.’”
Lena's voice caught, on the cusp of something again. All that untapped and suppressed emotion that thinking about just brought up images of her wife in her mind. Every memory pressed and folded like dried flowers in a book. Seeing her for the first time, harried and rushed with a stack of overdue library books spilling out of her hands and falling on the ground. The first thing Sam had done was shout at her, and Lena had known she was a goner.
“One day you’ll meet someone, and it’ll be… Life will be brilliant,” Lena managed, trying to calm her nerves that felt tattered and frayed. “Nothing to feel sad about. Not yet.”
A sniff drew her attention. Looking back to Kara, Lena was dismayed to see tears glittering in the sunlight as they fell down Kara’s cheeks, somehow making her seem even more beautiful. Lena berated herself silently, resisting the urge to catch the loose ones clinging to Kara’s eyelashes.
Before she could even whisper an apology, Kara caught out ahead. Wiping the tears away with a practised swipe.
“How is it you managed to make me feel better even when you make me cry?” Kara stifled, the edge of humour in her voice clearly for Lena’s benefit.
“Because talking about my dead wife’s just a natural crowd-pleaser,” Lena answered, the swell of feeling in her chest fit to burst now, but unable to look away again. “ ’Go to’ party conversation if there ever was one.”
Everything about them, everything that they said to each other, toed the line between depressed and worrisome, but it was always what they both seemed to need. Lena had been comfortable sitting in a place where she could speak allowed the way she thought, for she certainly couldn’t do so anywhere else. But the way that Kara looked at her sometimes when she said something, made Lena’s heart clench. It wasn’t worry so much as it was… something else. Something more.
Kara always did something small when they met, some action that was so wildly unexpected in Lena’s mind that it between an addictive game for her to come back again and again, to chase for another unexpected thing.
Lena hated that she made Kara cry.
“I like that you talk about her,” Kara whispered, sounding almost guilty for admitting it. “I love that you love your wife and I can’t wait for someone to love me as much as you loved your wife, but you can still be happy. You’re so brilliant. So great, but you’re breaking my heart.”
There was so much they didn’t know about each other, but Lena couldn’t bring herself to label their relationship as one of convenience. Maybe it was born of that, Lena certainly wasn’t insipid enough to call it fate, but it certainly had evolved to be something more. The dark things that had passed between them while the people they mourned lay cold in the ground so close by, dead spectators to their heartfelt confessions.
Lena missed so much about Sam, it would take a lifetime to list it all down, but that easy intimacy and honesty was easily the thing she missed the most. Never afraid to tell Lena all the things she was doing wrong as well as everything she was doing right.
The light shifted, filtering through the trees, hitting Kara’s face differently and Lena found herself lost and hit all at once, her words finding new meaning. One of the final conversations with Sam came to mind in the worst way, the words playing out in her mind over and over again.
Lena fought the urge to reach out and take Kara’s hand, the bile of self-disgust in her stomach doing it for her.
“Don’t worry about me,” she finally said. “I’ll be ok. Things are ok. I’ve got Ruby, my work. You’ll be ok too. We both will.”
She doubted Kara believed her.
It wasn’t a Tuesday.
It was undoubtedly the worst day.
The week leading up to it was the worst week.
She’d been cleaved in two, and she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move, she was so numb with it. Sitting here, in front of it even though by now she’d visited so many times, was different then it had been on all the other days. She didn’t know how Kara did it, every week she could talk to her and tell her things, unplug all the that was inside and let out the pressure. But she couldn’t do that. She wasn’t sure she can’t get words out past the block in her throat, and even then she wasn’t quite sure she trusts the words her brain would pick to say anyway.
It wasn’t like she could hear her.
But it Sam was here, really here, Lena would tell her she loved her. She’d tell her she missed her. She’d tell her she was sorry. Again and again and again, all the things she was feeling.
Today was the worst day.
Lena heard her before she saw her, but then again she couldn’t see anything but her wife’s name engraved on stone.
“Hey… I just…”
Kara’s stalled words trailed off, awkward, clearly wary if she was wanted. They hadn’t talked about this day beyond one conversation months before when Kara had asked why the date hadn’t been on the headstone. Lena had told her what it was, that Sam had been the one to make that choice.
“You wanted to check on me,” Lena finished, wondering suddenly why it wasn’t raining.
Surely it should be pouring down with cold, cruel rain.
Kara sat beside her, Lena could hear the rustle of her clothes. Silently for a long minute.
“Where’s your daughter?”
Lena closed her eyes. Another reminder of everything she was doing wrong. The biggest reminder of them all.
“Ruby wanted to go to school today,” she answered grittily, angry with herself for expecting…. wanting more then she was getting. Wondering if there was more she should be doing. “I wasn’t going to tell her what she had to do on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Today, she could tell me she needed to go skydiving, and I’d let her.”
When they had found out that Sam was dying, Lena had floundered. Floundered between reality and nonacceptance. But Sam had moved forward with a determination that Lena had never seen before. Everything had changed, but her overall goal had remained the same. Happiness.
She and Ruby had attended a joint counselling session every week from the time she’d been given the results, to the week that she’d died, and Ruby had been in therapy ever since. Sam had known what Ruby needed, she always knew what she needed. It wasn’t as if Ruby was failing in school, or didn’t have a social life, or had started displaying erratic behaviour. It wasn’t as if she had suddenly become Lena. But still, Lena worried. It gnawed at her, the distance between them that had never existed before. Because the piece, the person that had linked them together with love as a family wasn’t their anymore, and nothing Lena could do would ever be able to bridge that gap.
“I’m not good like this.”
Lena blinked, wondering who had said that out loud for a brief second before realising it was her. The burning in her eyes returned, like acid bubbling against the retinas, but for once, she allowed herself to feel the sadness of it all.
People weren’t supposed to be widows at twenty-seven. Children weren’t supposed to be without their mothers, but death and tragedy followed her like she was cursed. Everything she touched came undone with rot and even though she wasn’t superstitious, she didn’t believe in fate and the idea of an omnipotent being ruling over all reminded her too much of Lex’s rantings, Lena wondered how many things she’d ruin before she finally understood that she wasn’t meant to be happy.
If Sam was here…
“I was never the… parent that…” She struggled with the words, things she wanted to say to her wife but could only say out loud now that someone was alive beside her.
“Ruby was eight when I came into the picture with fun and the gifts and the good times,” she began, easing her way into the memories. “I was trying to be everything that my parents weren’t, I guess. Also, because I was only twenty myself. I met her in college, you know. Sam. We were both studying in Boston. MIT for me, Harvard for her.”
It had been more straightforward back then for Lena. More comfortable. She existed in a state of rebellion for most of her life, but the genius of her last name meant she’d coasted quickly through two degrees before she could think two hard about them. Her love life had been easier too, a mindless run of girls that she’d see once and sometimes call twice until she met Sam. In many ways, she’d been so ahead for her age, but the emotional crater in her heart was far from mature.
“Of course, she’d scrapped and strived and was a single mother being everything that I wasn’t,” Lena continued aloud. “Total focus on her goals and for some insane, crazy, asinine reason she thought that I was worth her time. That I was worthy of her daughter’s time.”
It hadn’t been easy, not at all. Sam was older than her, in more than just years. But she’d opened Lena’s eyes to a world beyond her own, a deeper world. Lena never believed in love at first sight, and it certainly wasn’t that way with Sam, but the instant she’d met Ruby, all bright smiles and gap-toothed and funny, Lena knew that’d she’d never be able to move on.
“When Sam and I got married, I didn’t adopt Ruby. We talked about it, Sam and I, but I was ok just being Lena to her.” Lena pulled at her own words, drawing them out even though vinegar filled her mouth. “Ruby had a mom, she didn’t need me to be… that. But then, Sam got sick. And then it was all hospitals and tests and doctors and waiting and then time ran out on that being something I could skate by on, just being Lena.”
Lena wished she could remember things without feeling sad. Wished the words could leave her without plummeting disaster in her heart.
“Fun doesn’t really cut it when your wife is asking you to be totally responsible for her daughter when she dies soon…”
Sam had been so sure. She’d been sure the instant she’d asked Lena to marry her.
“Honestly, I don’t know what she was thinking,” Lena continued faintly. “Every decision I’ve made since then regarding Ruby has been bordering on a disaster.”
Kara’s fingers were on her shoulder then, ghosting with comfort.
“Lena-“
She stood, abrupt and ramrod. Half from the contact, half from revulsion to other’s empathy.
It boiled behind her eyes, Lena clenched her fists and glared at the carved name.
“I mean, I moved her to Metropolis for a fresh start, but all that did was take her away from all her friends and any sense of stability she had,” her words felt stuffy and wet, but she couldn’t allow herself to let it out. “Then I moved her back thinking that maybe that would help, but all that did seemed to do was make her even sadder.”
The broken parts inside of her shifted, making her feel vacant. Relieved that she’d finally said it. Mortified. Lena wished for a way to shutdown the nonessential functions of her brain. A way not to feel.
"Or maybe it’s just me who’s the sad one. Maybe she’s fine, and she doesn’t need therapy, and I’m just spiralling,” Lena closed her eyes. Barricaded them, hoping that the barrier would be enough. “Or maybe I just really, really miss my wife.”
She breathed in, and out.
In again.
“Sam was my greatest achievement.” It was all wrong, all so wrong and messed up. “I got Ruby through her too. I’ve never done anything else, really. Not of worth. Nothing else to be proud of. Just that. I won at life.”
Despite the fact that Ruby had slipped a pamphlet about grief under her bedroom door. Despite the fact that she was clinging to control of her company by her fingernails. Despite the fact that Lillian kept calling to shout at her. Despite the fact that her brother still managed to send her death threats in the mail.
She had won. But now she’d lost.
“You did.”
Then Kara was next to her. Tall, strong and grieving too, but a beacon of something intangible and wanton. Lena should want to beat a hasty retreat, but the pillar that was Kara folded around her like gravity, pulling Lena into her orbit.
And suddenly, Lena was pressed against her, tight and hugged with a one-armed sling. Lena stiffened, as if her whole body wasn’t sure what to do before some instinct inside her clicked.
This is what it felt like to be held.
Lena folded like a reed into the unnatural warmth that Kara radiated, until she found herself completely encircled and pressed into Kara’s front, her face bent and hidden in the crook of Kara’s neck.
“I’m not as good as her,” Lena admitted mutedly into Kara’s skin. “And I’m proud of that.”
Lena had never realised before just how quite so broad Kara was. Strong muscles and hard curves that had been hidden beneath a small-town charm and a grieving sister. But there was steel beneath all that Wheaties girl facade. Soft though too. Holding Lena as if she was the most important and precious thing in the world.
“You’re just different.” The whispered words rippled, so close to Lena’s ear.
But Kara hadn’t known Sam. She’d only known her impression through Lena. But Lena knew that Sam would have loved Kara. Would have loved everything about her.
“I’m angry, I’m petty, I’m sad,” Lena rattled. “I’m jealous of anyone who’s still got someone.”
Kara hummed, the vibrations of it making Lena shiver.
“How did you get Sam if you were so bad?”
It was said with easy amusement. A casual edge to it, tied like a flung rope to pull Lena out of the swamp she was rolling around in. Familiar.
“I’m not sure,” Lena answered. “I was just nice to her, I think.”
Lena could feel Kara’s grin, a breath away from pressing against her hair.
“You should try that again.”
Lena sucked in a breath and held it. For a feverish second she imagined that of all the configurations of atoms in the universe, she got to be standing here and now in Kara’s arms. She wished she could hold all the things she wanted and all the things she’d lost in her lungs, like a breath she’d never let out.
Something happened then, something that hadn’t happened for so long, the starburst image in her mind was of a little girl, clutching her bear and sitting on the edge of a bed while a strange man in a suit told her he was her father.
The tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down her face. She felt the muscles of her chin tremble like a small child. There was static in her head once more, the side effect of the constant fear, constant stress Lena lived with. She heard her own sounds, clawing though her chest, raw from the inside. It took something out of her; she didn't know she had left to give. That was the way it is when people were hard. It was like a theft of the spirit, an injury no other person could see. All the acid and vinegar and self-loathing pouring out and carrying all the much until it finally ran clear and she allowed herself to feel again.
“I miss her so much,” Her voice sounded flinty and desperate even to her own ears, the tears soaking Kara’s front as she said them. “I feel sad all the time. I’m not the person I was. Sam dying was like… I lost most of me, and all the good stuff all the happiness… any joy in anything… I feel like I’m nothing.”
Lena wondered if Kara had been waiting for this moment. The moment of collapse and conclave where she came undone. But Kara wasn’t that cruel. If anything, she was far too kind.
“That’s not true.”
Kind enough to say things like that and mean them with deep conviction.
“People think that I’m sort of ok, you know, like I’m moving forward,” Lena narrated, her voice catching with each fresh roll of salt from her eyes. “I’m snarky now and again, and that this is the lapse, but it’s not. This is me all the time now. Everything else is the front, you know?”
Lena scrunched her face, wondering for a brief jarring second if it could be possible to be consumed by someone’s warmth. But Kara didn’t speak, or move to let her go. She just let her be in the place she needed to be.
“I’m not well, but I remember what it was like to be normal, so I do an impression of that,” Lena continued in a staggering voice. “But this is what I really am. And I want to be normal again, but I’m weak. When Sam was dying I tried to be brave for her, you know, face on for her and for Ruby, to be positive, and even then I’d break down sometimes, and she’d… have to comfort me.”
She could see her in her mind. Shaven head and thin, layered under blankets on the couch and still the strongest thing Lena had ever experienced.
“I couldn’t even give her that when she was dying,” Lena sobbed, pity for herself and her failures as a wife and a mother and as a goddamn human being.
“She was still on duty. Looking after me.”
Time-lapsed. Seconds of it, nothing more, but in that time Kara pulled away without pulling away. Just enough so she could move her hands, clasping Lena’s face gently and brush away the tear. Close enough to speak with no distance.
“She’d have loved that,” Kara was emphatic. “Because I’m like that too, and it’s better to be needed.”
It shouldn’t be the way it was, but it was too easy not to do so. The parallels, the comparisons, the places they were filling for each other. Kara was kind and good and sweet and funny and all the things that Sam had been, but there was an air of optimism about her that Sam didn’t have. Sam had cut through the world with a desire to see the best in it, but she was realistic about it. She carved her own path.
But Kara parted waves with her presence.
Where Sam had dark corners and shadows in her, a fire that churned out a woman hellbent on conquering the tasks she put her mind to, Kara was light and gentle and soothed. Sam was active and outspoken and fought for a future that could be all the way until the end. Kara was sensitive and steadfast and flowed like water.
It was all muted and jumbled and confusing. The lines more blurry and the rules more complicated, separating what was real and what is not real in the mess of grief and loss and quiet moments on a bench under a tree in the in-between world Kara and Lena both seemed to function in now.
What was she doing? What was she thinking?
Lena pulled away, retreating in more than just one way. She could see in Kara’s eyes that she understood. That Lena was drawing a line in the shifting sand between them.
“Don’t you be like me,” Lena demanded, angry and filled. “Don’t wallow. You get addicted to it. I am, I think. The grief I mean. I sort of know where I stand with it. I just… when something goes well, or I see a glimpse of hope, I get confused.”
A symphony of emotions filled her, a different mirror of ones played across Kara’s face at her words.
”And then when it all turns to shit I go ‘oh, there it is. Now I can get drunk and wait for death’.”
So morbid. So depressing. So honest.
Lena took another step back.
“When you do find someone, dance with them whenever they want,” she husked. “I wish I’d danced with Sam every time she’d asked. It was because I was embarrassed sometimes, or busy. What I’d give for just five minutes with her now. Holding her, just moving around.”
Somewhere, in all this, she’d look away from Kara’s face and back to the headstone. The longing filling her voice real and genuine along with the tears still tracking down her face. But then, she heard that telltale sniff, and she looked back up because Kara was crying now too. Enough to make the corners of Lena’s mouth tilt upwards in a fond, wet way.
“See? Back to normal, both crying. Good work.”
Kara snorted, garbled, as she swiped away at the salty trails on her cheeks with the back of her sleeves. A gesture so familiar now to Lena that it made feel something bordering on fond.
“You’ll be fine,” Lena finished. "I’ll be fine.”
Kara laughed, and the sound made Lena feel light. Light and airy and lost.
“Of course we will.”
Kara sitting on their bench was as familiar sight as to her now as Ruby, bleary-eyed in the morning and half slumped into a bowl of cereal. Things this past month had been, well she didn’t want to say easier but definitely eased. Maybe it was just a strange month all round, but something inside her seemed to have shifted into lightness. Ruby no longer seemed to avoid her in their own home, even going so far as to graciously hand over the remote last week when Lena asked if she wanted to watch something together on Netflix. Three hours of binge-watching a car restoration show, Ruby had gone to bed with a smile, and a mumbled ‘goodnight’, and Lena wondered if this is what it felt like in the early stages of establishing a new normal.
It left a good taste in her mouth and a spring in her step, which halted just as quickly and sharply as if brakes had been slammed when she realised that Kara was sitting on the bench, so much as she was hunched with a half-drunk bottle between her knees, looking like she’d been dragged through the washing machine too many times and as a consequence had lost all her colour. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and exhaustion and Lena scrambled her brain wondering if there was something significant about this day that Kara had told her and she had forgotten.
So caught up in her own bullshit that she couldn’t even remember-
There she went again.
Maybe because, even after all this time, even when she’d seen Kara cry and bitter and lonely and grief-stricken, she’d never seen her so stretched. Like thin elastic pulled to the point of breaking. Kara had always been so emotive with everything before, she felt things to an extreme level that should be something Lena would hate, but instead made her endearing. She wasn’t an empty shell, she wasn’t drained of life. All hollow eyes that landed on Lena and stared at her unblinking, pleading for something intangible.
Lena was afraid. Afraid to touch the issue, afraid to even step forward under the weight of that stare that felt like an iron grip on her skin. Her good mood vanished under it, suffocation settling over her like a thick blanket. So natural in the way Kara didn’t even move, twitch or blink, but sat like a cold, dead thing.
It frightened her, before Kara finally spoke, sounding frail and delicate and paper-thin.
“Bad day, I’m afraid.”
Lena’s heart lurched, and she moved forward with ease as if she hadn’t just been on the verge of running away. Sitting beside Kara was easy now, even if she wasn’t sure of her place there today, plucking the bottle from her grip was easier.
“You shouldn’t drink alone,” Lena chastised, before taking a swig and resisting the urge to immediately vomit.
God, she could handle her liquor, but this tasted like paint thinner.
On the plus side, Kara’s dead-eyed stare shifted into an alarmed look as she hastily grabbed the bottle back, eyeing her with enough concern for Lena to wonder if she’d actually turned as green as she felt. Managing to keep it down, feeling it go straight to her head, Lena tried to regain some composure and wondered to herself how in the hell Kara managed to stomach it if it was her drink of choice.
Then, something cousin to acid reflux ran up her throat, and she clutched the fabric at Kara’s shoulder to brace herself before she let out an involuntary, highly unladylike, burp that definitely would have had Lillian clutching her pearls.
As disgusting as her mouth felt, a blush crawled up her neck and filled out her cheeks and ears. Though, upon reflection, it could be blamed on the booze.
None of it really mattered though, because it made Kara laugh. And that was worth any level of mortification.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Kara said with a lopsided grin, finger the bottle and taking a long slow pull from it, eyeing Lena all the while with a challenge written on her face.
Daring Lena to ask.
But Lena didn’t rise to the bait, she just added the clue the basket of all the other oddities Kara had displayed since they had met. A plethora of puzzle pieces that made up the woman that was Kara Danvers, all hinting at something big, something momentous, something that Kara almost seemed to want Lena to guess at, but she just continued to ignore. It wasn’t her business to hammer at the foundations of the only person she considered a friend, after all, but Lena would have to be in a coma not to have formed her own conclusions about the secret Kara had that they danced around.
“You ok?” Lena asked instead, sincere beyond doubt. Wanting to know suddenly with an urgency that shocked her a little. She’d known she’d been treading dangerous ground when it came to their graveyard meetings, but in an instant, Lena could feel herself going to a place she’d been terrified to go to again.
Kara sighed, fingering her bottle.
“Yeah. Still covering stories that nobody cares about, upsetting people I like, trying to keep my job and not kill anyone. You?” As if planned, despite the rushed sentence which seemed more akin to word vomit then actual words, Kara took a deep breath, and let all the tension drop from her shoulders in a long breath.
Maybe she shouldn’t have, even though it had rapidly become both their thing to do so whenever the other was un-ironically cynical and unwholesome, but Lena laughed. Threw her head back, chuckled deeply, kind of laugh that she felt down to her bones because it was so undeniably delightful for her to know someone who thought the way she did and said it aloud. The only other person that ever seemed to exist on that wavelength had been Lex. Still, his oafish charm had long since vanished under the weight of cruel malice, and Lena thanked whatever atoms had combined correctly that that particular combination hadn’t born fruit in Kara.
“It’s nice to hear you moan about work and relationships,” Lena enamoured with a smile once her laughter died. “Just like a normal person.”
Kara gave her another one of those knowing looks, before she stretched slightly, making as if to crack her knuckles.
“I suppose this is progress,” she answered dryly. “I should pay you for these chats. All that money I've wasted on a shrink, this is much better.” Kara said it with a cheery grin, the colour returned to her face in a rush like a sun in the sky, placing a supposedly placating hand on Lena’s upper arm as her eyes shone with mirth.
Lena could feel it. The chance to get caught up and run away with the tiding ocean that was Kara Danvers, but the urge to say something real landed far more strongly.
Placing a hand over the hand on her skin, Lena stared at Kara intently.
“Your friendship means more to me than money.”
A charged moment passed, full of potential and hope and optimism, before it all came crashing back to earth and Lena looked away. Both their hands dropping as if they’d planned it beforehand and their eyes turned back to the headstones of the people they were supposed to be here to see and to miss and grieve.
A minute, then two, passed before Kara spoke with none of her previous humour.
“Are you lonely?”
It was the perfect start, the ideal question with an incredibly complicated to answer. Because in truth, Lena had been lonely her entire life. Reckless, wild and chasing visions of a reality she’d never quite gotten before.… Before all her feelings really were dead and gone.
“I only miss one person.”
She did. In every crevice of her life that Sam had left empty and troubled, she missed her.
“Yeah,” Kara breathed out, her eyes glued on her sister’s name. "Me too.”
Lena felt like her insides were on fire, that she was the worst of the worst for feeling longing right now when she knew she shouldn’t. Why had everything become so complicated when she wasn’t looking.
“Do you want to go to that game night thing I told you about tonight?”
Lena wondered if she’d misheard, if her brain had skipped on her the way it sometimes did these days when she got lost in thought. But no, she hadn’t, because Kara was now looking at her with those piercing blue eyes, conviction back along with her colour as well as her life, begging an answer to her question with her mind.
“Oh no,” Lena balked, swallowing the lump of terror in her throat. “I don’t get out much these days.”
Kara reached out, catching her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s hardly out,” she retorted with a playful eye-roll. “It’s at my place, so it’s less out than this. It’s still just sitting down, looking at something. It’ll be fun. Come on.”
Kara said it with far more gravitas than Lena put into her words and suddenly everything felt so weighted, the words between them, her hand still holding Lena’s, the fabric of their jeans softly scratching against one another. Lena wonders how they got here, wonders what the ghosting smile on Kara’s face meant, wonders how it was that Kara seemed to view her and how it was somehow so different to everyone else in the world.
Anyone living anyway.
She should say no. It’s what she wanted to say, but when she opened her mouth say it, Kara had her pinned with some kind of indecipherable look. Suddenly it felt like something could be happening after all and Lena found herself breathing out a different answer.
“Ok. I’ll come. Ruby’s been wanting to go out with some friends for a while anyway.”
That was partly true, at least she thought it was since Ruby seemed to have a standing appointment to out at least once a week with somebody she knew. At first, Lena had wondered if it was yet another way that her daughter wanted to avoid her, but more then that it seemed that Ruby was truly the social butterfly to Lena’s hermit.
“Or you could bring her if you like,” Kara’s eyes sparked with the suggestion, her grin widening. “Why not, hey? She might enjoy it too.”
The thought, the idea of Ruby being introduced to Kara. To those two worlds colliding into one spelled disaster in Lena’s mind. How she was to go about explaining just how they’d met when Lena had never mentioned her. How she was supposed to explain what Kara was, what she meant or what would never happen. Would Ruby understand any of that? Especially when the relationship between them was hanging by a thread.
“I’ll ask her.”
She wouldn’t. But the look on Kara’s face was delightful, Lena didn’t have the heart to do anything but lie.
“We could definitely do with someone who cares about success, cause we are the biggest bunch of losers you will ever meet. But it’s a good bunch.”
The joke didn’t seem to land right in the air between them, and Kara levelled her with a severe look after her grin died. Lena with the sudden, heat stopping realisation that she hadn’t just agreed to board games, but to an introduction to Kara’s friends. The horror of it must have shown on her face because Kara reached for her hand once more.
Lena reached for sincerity instead.
“You’re welcome then because I kick ass at Monopoly.”
Kara smiled, linking their hands further, creating a mess of fingers that Lena didn’t even want to attempt to untangle. Just as suddenly as the tension built, it had broken again,
Lena was late.
She was never late for things, but in all fairness, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to go to this ‘game night’ Well, it was sort of like visiting wonderland, falling down a rabbit hole into a place she’d never expected to be. She’d mulled it over inside her own closet like she was going on a first date, tossing aside clothes for not pleasing her and spending an inordinate amount of time wondering what the right bottle of wine to bring would be. Drilled into her was a mountain of etiquette lessons, the primary rule flashing that it was the epitome of impoliteness to turn up empty-handed after being invited somewhere.
Still, no amount of fussing over wine choices could quell the burning in her stomach once she finally stood in front of Kara’s apartment door, the address the blonde had scribbled on her hand with a grin slightly smudged now from clammy sweat. She rocked nervously on her feet for a minute before she raised her hand to knock.
Lena barely had a chance to smile a hello when the door was thrown open. Basically, arm-wrestled into Kara’s tight hug of greeting, Lena went stiff as a board pressed up into the other woman. Partially because she was never good at overt friendliness, but mostly because of the four sets of eyes that were staring at her from over Kara’s shoulder.
Lena didn’t have too much time to rethink her choice to stay though, being yanked inside immediately once she was realised from Kara’s enthusiastic embrace. Only able to garble out a returned hello as she thrust the two bottles she’d brought into Kara’s hands, as the other woman thanked her profusely with a wild grin and waved her further in so she could shut the door.
Kara’s apartment looked exactly like she imagined it, and yet nothing like it at all. It was cozy, filled to the bursting with knick-knacks and clutter, clearly laid out in a sort of functional disorganisation. Hastily cleaned, with a pile of shoes near the door and a bundle of coats layered on the chair nearest the kitchen. What caught Lena’s attention the most about it were the photos. Photos absolutely everywhere, in every empty space, most of them of Kara’s smiling face pressed up against a red-haired woman that could only be her sister. Lena would recognise the exasperated eyes of a long-suffering sibling anywhere, even if her’s had turned out homicidal.
Alex looked different than Lena expected, but then Lena hadn’t really known all thought all too much about it. Until this moment, Alex had just been a faceless name tied to all the memories Kara had shared, in the same way, that Lena assumed Sam was to Kara. Lena’s curiosity was deepened though by the explosion of images, and she wondered if they’d always been there, or if this was the way Kara coped. Where Lena had determined to erase all visual clues of her previous life out of pain, Kara chose the relive every moment for the same reason Lena wondered. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just a way to not move in any direction at all.
Lena didn’t have time to muse too much further before she was led over to the living area and sat swiftly on one end of a squashy love seat. At the same time, Kara took the other end, handing a poured glass of something that was definitely not what Lena’d brought, before she shifted in her seat, uncomfortable to be surrounded by strangers who shared. Kara was the first to break the ice, shoving chips and salsa in her mouth with one hand while the other waved introduction to each person sitting around the coffee table piled with board games.
Nia, the woman on Lena’s other side an ex-colleague of Kara’s and settled in an armchair seemed nice enough. Offering Lena a kind smile to Lena’s curt nod. Her boyfriend, introduced as Brainy, seemed more intense, studying her face with strange scrutiny for a brief few seconds, before getting distracted by the offer of the Top Hat on the Monopoly board. The oldest man in the group, the one with the look of a soldier called J’onn, who cut Kara off before she could say his occupation, offered her his hand to shake. A strange look in his eye while he did it, something that shifted once she’d let go as if her taking it had been a test of some sort.
The fourth and final member of the group she unfortunately already knew, although not in person, though he certainly recognised who she was if his fierce glare was anything to go by alongside the sound her made when he practically spat out her name.
“Lena Luthor.”
Heads swivelled to face her, including Kara’s who looked quite ridiculous with half a chip dangling from her mouth. Lena sighed internally, wondering if it had been too much to hope for that this night could go cordially if not well. Or course she had to be recognised, and by a person so personally intimate with the crimes her brother had committed no less.
Truthfully, oddly, it had never actually occurred to Lena to tell Kara her last name. It hadn’t occurred to her to tell her a lot of things really. Like what she did for a living. She was notoriously camera-shy for a reason and had already been estranged from her family for a long time before she had been all but forced to take the reins at the company. Kara’s and her quasi-friendship was strange at the best of times, it didn’t translate well to game nights and introductions, especially not when Kara had probably assumed that her last name was the same as her wife’s and that she hadn’t just invited the sister of the world’s most dangerous egomaniac for dip and chips.
“James Olsen,” Lena managed neutrally, half perched for flight on the edge of her seat and unable to met Kara’s bug-eyed gaze. “This is quite a coincidence.”
James’ expression darkened under her words, and he looked ready to shout, something she braced herself for. It had been a long time since she’s had to defend herself as a Luthor. Not if you counted the amount of hate mail that still flooded into L-Corp, but it had definitely been a long time since she’d associated that part of herself with all the shit she’d been handling with Kara. Or anything associated with Kara. But, then again, she supposed at some point their strange little co-dependent bubble was going to have to burst.
Ready to be stormed out of the apartment, Lena nearly jumped from her skin when she felt the warm touch of Kara’s fingers on her knee, drawing her attention immediately to the owner of said finger’s face. Kara looking at her with that same, crooked grin that she always seemed to wear when she thought Lena had said something particularly strange and funny.
“Well, now at least I know you can afford to ante up for poker night!” She happily said, before passing a meaningful look toward Nia who flushed all the way down to her roots.
And just like that, the bubble burst. The comment seemed to settle it for everyone else in the room. J’onn chuckling at Nia’s indignant expression while he dealt out the Monopoly money, Brainy was still studying his Top Hat piece intently as if it were about to reveal the secrets of the universe to him. Even though James’ eyes shifted between casting Kara incredulous looks and Lena dirty one’s, Lena still found herself relaxing in her seat under the weight of Kara’s smile and the still warm touch on her knee.
It was more relaxed after that, even if Lena still felt like the odd man out. As she had predicted, Lena won Monopoly easily, resisting the urge to smirk at the look of awe Kara gave her as everyone declared bankruptcy and she raked in the rent. Next up was charades, Kara claiming Lena as her partner, earning her another glare from James. Charades, (not Lena’s strong suit), devolved into Pictionary, (definitely not Lena’s strong suit), before finally, people started to stand and help clean up.
“Did you have fun?” Kara asked her, pouring Lena another glass of whatever she’d been drinking all night. “Admittedly, my skills are a little rusty, but not bad altogether.”
“It’s been a while for me too,” Lena admitted with a small smile, feeling relaxed and warmed by all she’d been drinking.
“Didn’t think there’d be much room for Pictionary in the Luthor household,” James interjected darkly as he stuffed the boardgames back into their spot in on an overflowing bookshelf.
“James!” Kara shouted, indignant, a furious expression on her face as she glared at the tall man with furrowed brows.
The soft hush of the other conversation died suddenly. Stopping where they stood mid-clean-up, glances darting back and forth between James and Kara, who was glaring so hotly Lena was surprised James hadn’t burst into flames.
“What? We’re all just supposed to sit here and not comment?”
Kara reached to grip Lena’s hand, still glaring as if she was afraid Lena was going to run away.
“There’s nothing to comment on,” Kara snarled, her hold on Lena’s hand tightening even as Lena’s face remained set in stone.
“No?” James bit out. “Not even about the fact that we haven’t seen you in person in months, only to be called up out of the blue this afternoon for an ‘emergency game night’. I’m sure you can appreciate that we might be concerned, especially since you failed to mention, and apparently didn’t even know that your new friend is a Luthor .”
The implications of that rant, if not the disgusted way in which he’d said her last name, sat uneasily in Lena’s chest. Emergency game night? That could only mean that Kara had organised this entire event for Lena’s benefit. She could spend a month stewing on the why’s, and the wherefores of what that meant, but the embarrassed splash of scarlet covering Kara’s cheeks answered the question more than her brooding ever would.
“James-“
“I’m not my brother, Mr Olsen,” Lena cut through Kara’s words quietly, her face steady when the man’s glare turned to her, glancing quickly and furiously down their joined hands, before turning to her eyes.
“No?” He sneered. “Then you won’t mind answering some questions.”
Lena didn’t want to seem nitpicky, but at that moment she wondered at Kara’s taste in friends. Certainly, this experience had reinforced more than ever how correct her choice not to have friends was, because quite honestly, James was coming off right now as a bit of an asshole. An asshole with a clear vested in interest in protecting Kara from her, a motive Lena could only applaud, but an asshole none the less. None of the others seemed too keen to step in on this particular mess either. Clearly, there was a lot at play here, beyond just her name. This argument was layered with a lot of things that Lena hadn’t been privy too. Frustration, regret, grief. Kara may have lost her sister, but Alex was something to these people too.
Family. The people that Kara had pushed away. That had to hurt.
Lena’s thoughts flashed to Ruby and new guilt twisted in her gut.
“She didn’t come here to be interrogated!” Kara half-shouted with a clear storm in her eyes. Lena preened at the deeper compliment that lay beneath the words.
“I want to know why she came here at all!” James snapped sharply. “How exactly is it that you two met?”
Kara’s mouth twisted, but her immediate action was to turn to Lena with a reassuring look.
“You don’t have to answer that,” she said gently. “Or any other of his stupid questions.”
Lena’s heart melted at the concern.
“What?” James continued oblivious. “Is it a state secret?”
There was a long pause, heavy with the question, and even though it had been James’, Lena knew that Kara’s other friends wanted answers too. Answers less about her probably, and more about Kara. How this strange relationship came to be, in all the time Kara had been missing from their lives. What Kara had been doing in all that time. But to explain even an inch of that, Lena would have to reveal a great deal about herself. Talk about things that had only ever existed between her and Kara. Lena didn’t know Kara’s friends, she didn’t know if they deserved answers from her in any way at all, but a greater part of her wanted to talk. Wanted to tell. If only because Kara had been her guiding light through hell, and these people were obviously desperate to understand that they hadn’t lost Kara alongside her sister so many months ago.
She could read it easily on Kara’s face that she didn’t expect her to say anything at all, but Lena just smiled and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, before she began to answer through a steadying breath.
“Kara’s just trying to be kind. We met at the cemetery.”
The implications of what she said read instantly on James’ face. His glare died, the sneer dropped from his mouth, replaced by a sorrowful expression and an immediate slide of the eyes towards Kara then back again.
Lena’s expression didn’t change though, nor did her gaze move from James’ face. She may understand some of the reason, emotion really, behind James’ attitude, but it still made her heart throb painfully for what she’d have now to explain.
There was only one reason that they could have met at a cemetery. Because Kara wasn’t the only one who had buried someone.
“Loss does strange things to my family,” Lena continued, trying not to let the bitterness mix with the sorrow. “And I’ve lost a lot of people. You don’t like me, because of my name, but that’s ok because I get it. My brother did horrible things.”
She knows that too well, and not just from the news snippets she’d listened to in the middle of the night after Sam had finished vomiting in the toilet bowl, only to find the restless sleep Lena never could. Lena knows about what Lex did to James personally, because of his connection to Superman, she’d heard about the scars that would never fully heal. And she was a big enough of a coward to resent deeply the circumstances that had put her and James in a position where they’d ever have to meet, even if she wouldn’t change them at fear of never meeting Kara. But all around, more then anything, she hated being compared to the thing that was her brother.
"Maybe I should have seen it, maybe I should have stopped it and known. But I was living my life with my wife,” Lena crunched out, feeling like she’d swallowed gravel. “Waking up with her, every day feeling truly happy and vulnerable and safe. Living in her laughter and the safety of her arms. Maybe I should have been there with Lex, maybe I could have stopped it, but I made a promise to my wife to be there for her, forever. Through everything.”
Her marriage to Sam hadn’t exactly hit the front papers, mostly because she was the banished, the black sheep of the family when it happened, and all the media focus had been on the golden child Lex. Sam’s illness and death she had paid a small fortune to keep from being plastered across the news, amid the shit-storm that was Lex’s fall from heaven when any story about any Luthor was lapped up like warm milk.
So she could tell from the dawning apprehension on James’ face that while he hadn’t been aware of her situation before, he definitely knew where she was heading with her words now.
“Sleeping in the hospital room by her side, loving her more then I’ve ever loved anything, especially myself. I lost her last year. And it broke me. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of killing myself.”
What do you say when somebody, a stranger, drops that bomb on your lap? Not that Lena had said it to shock, just to be honest. It seemed to hit James though, his face turning grey with it. Her heart was beating so loud in her ears now, Lena almost missed the gasp from Nia and the way Kara’s hand tightened infinitesimally around hers in comfort.
“But I didn’t, because I’ve got my daughter,” Lena continued, steel lining her words even though her eyes started to prickle. “I didn’t stay alive for anything else, not for a really long time. Not for my company, not to be better than my family, not to be anything but alive and there for her.”
Ruby, her sole reason for existence. Until…
Well, that was a thought that should remain unfinished.
“You don’t know my situation, that’s ok,” Lena continued with a wry, mirthless smile. “You see me and see a Luthor, that’s ok too. You don’t need to know anything else about me. I don’t need to explain myself to you. Because all that matters is that I had the best marriage imaginable. Magical. When my wife died, I was suicidal, and depressed and broken, but now I’m not so much anymore.”
Lena felt hollowed by the time she’d finished speaking, her final words met with silence around the room. James stared at her like she’d just sprouted an extra head, his mouth lax and eyes unblinking. Kara’s other friends, all still standing frozen, seemed even more rooted to their spots with conflicted looks on their faces. Half ready to flee, half prepared to cry. Lena certainly hadn’t intended on that response, and she definitely didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her. A single, burning instinct filled her.
A need to leave, right now.
She barely had time to formulate it into a thought though, before Kara’s next words blasted out of her chest in a rush.
“I’m Supergirl.”
The room’s tension, awkward before, felt like fractured glass now. Everyone in it seemed to have stopped breathing, wide-eyed and switching between staring at Kara and Lena, waiting for something to happen. Maybe for Lena to let out an evil cackle, throw a hidden kryptonite bomb she’d smuggled in her pants. Maybe they were wondering what on earth Kara was doing, if her mind had utterly snapped in a bare moment of insanity, revealing to a Luthor who she really was.
It explained everything, of course. Why there’d been more tension then air at the idea of Luthor in their midst. It explained the fact that Kara was able to drink that godawful alcohol (probably alien) this afternoon without throwing up her liver. It explained how she never needed a jacket, even in the height of winter. It explained her voracious appetite and how, when the sunlight caught her cheeks in just the right way, she seemed almost ethereal. God-like.
Kara just watched her, glasses in hand after she removed them, with the same lopsided grin she always wore as if she hadn’t just dropped Lena in the middle something huge, and at that moment, Lena’s only instinct was an unbridled delight.
“Can I get your autograph for Ruby?” She questioned excitedly. “You’re her hero.”
J’onn snorted, Nia laughed, Brainy stared at her with a strange mix of vacancy and happiness, James still watched her warily, but Kara’s eyes sparkled as she reached for a pen, as if knowing that would be Lena’s reaction all along.