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"I'm sure we'll meet in the spring
And catch up on everything
I'll say I'm proud of all that you've done
You taught me the ropes, and you taught me to love"
-The Good Side, Troye Sivan.
There’s a stain of coffee on the armchair, the white armchair.
It’s not really big. It’s not dark either; the coffee was already smudged enough for it to not be dark brown. Yet it is the only thing she can think about.
There’s many, and better, things to focus on, she knows. But thinking about the dirty spot on the right side of the cushion of the armchair is much better than thinking about the nightmares she experienced in the Phantom Zone. Much better than thinking about how Nia still has shaky hands from the trip. Much better than Brainy’s almost-relapse of turning on his inhibitors.
The coffee stain is a much better thing to think about instead of Kara’s empty eyes.
When they found Kara, alone and thin in the Phantom Zone, there wasn’t much time to do anything except pick her up and carry her out of there. There wasn’t much time to check on her eyes when the phantoms were showing them their greatest fears. Lena didn’t have time to do anything but cry over the hallucination of Kara dying in her arms - even if she was trying so hard to save the one that was real.
When Kara was back in the tower, bloody and unconscious, it was better to focus on the gashes all over her skin, the sunlight levels on her cells, the metabolic consumption of her body, rather than the fact that Kara wasn’t waking up.
When Kara woke up, it was slowly and painfully - Alex didn’t even have to ask Lena for the meds before she was already inserting them in the IV. Kara passed out, but not before weakly reaching for her neck and letting out a broken, “Where is it?”
Both her and Alex brush it off, thinking it was just Kara’s confused mind looking for something that wasn’t important. Alex didn’t make any connections - Lena thinks she wouldn’t have been able to even if she wanted.
So, she doesn’t mention it. Neither does Alex. Neither does Kara.
She doesn’t point out how the blonde’s hands keep reaching for her neck, trying to find something that isn’t there.
She doesn’t mention how every time she walks into Kara’s apartment she finds her looking around boxes, under the bed, behind the cupboard, looking for something she never seems to find.
She doesn’t discuss it with anyone when she hears the last words of a Danvers sisters’ argument and doesn’t question how important it is.
She knows she told Brainy they shouldn’t put their feelings into boxes anymore, but maybe Kara is the one box she never opened in the first place and she can still add a few more things into it anyway.
Kara never explains. Lena never asks. Their friendship is back to firm ground but it’s still not solid enough for Kara to tell her what the fuss is all about.
Lena never asks. Kara never explains.
So, looking at the stain on the couch it is. Much better than looking at Kara awkwardly sitting in front of her, both of them in silence as they wait for Nia and Alex to come back with the food.
And Kara’s hand is on her neck, almost as if she's waiting for something to show up there.
The thing never shows up and the action just leaves Lena looking at Kara’s hands. The strong hands and delicate fingers with nails always cut short. It’s always amazing to Lena how those hands that could literally tear the world apart are the same ones Kara uses to softly pet a dog and give Lena a double tap on her back when they’re hugging.
The blonde’s hands never show a sign of aging, nor a sign of all the battles she’s been in and hard work she does- and they never will- but Kara moves her hands knowing how much power they hold, how much destruction they are capable of doing. She knows she can clap her hands and create a sonic boom. She knows she could crush a man’s skull with her hands. And every time, Kara chooses to be gentle and kind with hers.
“It’s my necklace.”
Kara’s voice startles Lena away from her hands and she meets her eyes. The blonde is curiously watching her, her bottom lip between her teeth, almost worried about what she just said.
“What?”
“The thing I keep reaching for,” she explains, “it's my necklace.”
Lena frowns, thinks back to her memories with Kara and focuses on her neck, “I’ve never seen you wear a necklace.”
“I still had it when we met, I- I don’t have it anymore,” she says, her eyes going down to her lap, where her fingers fidget with each other, “it was my mother’s.”
Half of her wishes that Nia and Alex would show up already, because Kara looks sadder and sadder, closer to tears. And not only is Lena terrible at dealing with emotions, much less sadness, but she had also never seen sad Kara. She had dealt with angry Kara. And annoyed Kara. And aloof and closed off Kara. But sad Kara just feels like a shot in the heart and she hates that she knows there’s nothing she can do.
“Did you- did you lose it in the phantom zone?” she asks, unsure if that’s the right question.
She knows it’s not when Kara’s eyes fill with more tears. “No… I- I- I gave it up.” The tears fall when she looks up to Lena, eyes filled with pain and sorrow, “Why did I give it up?”
Without thinking, Lena is running the meters to Kara’s couch, quickly wrapping her arms around the blonde- just as fast, Kara rests her head on her shoulder and allows the tears to fall. Every broken sob that leaves from Kara’s mouth feels like a stab in the heart and Lena thinks now she knows what Kara meant when she described kryptonite.
“Hey,” she tries to quiet her, her hand running softly through blonde locks as she tries to make her voice sound as hopeful as possible, “hey, it's okay, maybe we can get it back.”
“We can’t. It's gone,” her hands tighten in Lena’s blouse and she hears the soft ripping sound when Kara’s fingers pull, “the last piece I had of Krypton is gone.”
“Maybe we can get a new one? Argo is still around,” she tries again. And it isn’t lost on her how Kara being hopeless makes her force out the hope she always buried deep inside herself.
Kara shakes her head, breathing in and out a couple of times to calm her shaky voice. “It was a family heirloom. My mom gave it to me, her mother gave it to her and so on. They don’t make them on Argo anymore.”
“I’m really sorry, Kara.”
She almost does it, but she fights every part of her instead and forces her head not to move, not to lean in closer to Kara’s forehead and give her a kiss. She just holds on tighter and doesn’t mention it when Kara’s arms are leaving a small ache, she just holds the blonde and lets her cry.
“It’s not even about having it anymore, you know? I just- I miss it. For so long, it was my one comfort on this planet, the last piece of home,” Kara scoffs, “now it’s who knows where.”
When Lena prods Kara into leaving the crook of her neck to look her in the eyes, the tear stained shirt clings to her shoulder but she doesn’t care because the only tears she’s worried about wiping away are the ones on Kara’s face. So she does- and she has to control her crazy heartbeat when Kara leans into the touch.
“Hey, you said Alex is home, right?” Kara nods at that. “Well, you’ll always have Alex.”
“What happens when Alex is gone?” she whispers, so small so quietly. Lena barely believes the words came from the same woman that inspires hope on everyone with a single phrase and a blinding smile.
“You’ll still have her,” she says, wills her voice to not break at the unannounced mention that they’ll all die. That they will all leave Kara alone on earth. Kara’s semi-immortality has always been a touch and go subject - or maybe not even a touch, just a go. Just ignore it. Just pretend it’s not there. W e will cross that bridge when we get to it kind of thing.
She pushes the thought down as she moves away from Kara, ignoring the small whimper that leaves the blonde’s mouth. She only whispers a small one second to her before walking the couple of steps to her bag and grabbing one of her most precious possessions.
When she comes back to Kara, she’s expected with open arms- Kara’s need for physical touch after an emotional moment has always been a given but Lena has never been the receiver of it, she has only watched as Kara held onto her sister’s arm or hand just to know she’s there.
She holds the yellowish polaroid in her hands, she unfolds the little wrinkled corner, and breathes out before showing it to Kara. “That’s my mom.”
It’s a simple picture. Just a small square where in the middle of four yellowish lines, there’s a small picture of a woman holding a child. The woman is smiling at the camera, wild red locks in her face as her hands grab the waist of a child, Lena, who looks way too distracted by the fairy lights above her to look at the camera.
“She’s beautiful,” is all Kara says.
“I don’t remember much. I think not remembering sometimes hurts more?” She looks away from Kara’s understanding eyes and tangles their hands together, the picture of her mother safely held by the blonde’s finger. “Because what is this empty feeling I have in my chest if I don’t even recall what I'm mourning? It took me a while to realize it’s love. It’s not emptiness, it’s just love. All the love I have for her, that I didn’t have time to show her,” she looks up, softly wipes away the new tears on her friend’s cheeks, “You’ll have time to show everyone how much you love them, Kara.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
The intense yet soft knocks on her door pull her away from the book in her lap. She debates whether she should open or not- knowing it's a losing battle since Kara can tell that she's inside.
She softly gets up from the couch and wraps the blanket tighter around herself as the chill of the night hits her legs.
“I can just break the door, you know!” The muffled voice from outside says when she stops a couple of feet away from the door.
She sighs. She opens the door to find a glassesless and messy haired Kara - the pajamas with little pandas eating pizza Nia had gifted her months ago way too thin for a night like this one, but it wasn’t like she could even feel it.
No. Kara probably wasn’t even trying to pretend it’s cold tonight. She’s just looking at Lena with a mix almost between desperation and love. Lena bites her lip, wishing she had been wrong for once and Kara would decide to not show up.
But the small necklace hangs from Kara’s hand. The silver chain tangled in her hands and the small black rock hanging from it.
“Was it that bad?”
Kara opens and closes her mouth a couple of times. “Lena-”
“Holograms aren’t really my expertise,” she interrupts, “but I think it looks pretty enough?”
“Lena-”
“And neither are crystals but I saw the one you left and-”
Two strong hands find the side of her arms, the action making her stop her rambling. “Lena. It’s amazing. You’re amazing. It- it looks like it was made on Krypton.”
It hadn’t really taken that much time. Seeing a broken and disconsolate Kara over the necklace she had lost was enough incentive to work tirelessly for a week until she found a way to replicate a kryptonian hologram in a shape small enough for a necklace. And it wasn’t hard to convince Alex to push for a game night in her and Kelly’s apartment so Nia could take a selfie “for no reason”.
She thinks the logistics of it would probably bore Kara. She had, after all, uploaded pictures to a crystal as if it was an iPhone long before any of them were born. So, she doesn’t say or explain any of that.
“I’m glad you think so,” she says instead.
“Thank you.”
Kara’s voice is just above a whisper, probably just her way to make sure her voice doesn’t break. The tears in her eyes haven’t fallen yet but the water in them makes the blue a million times more hypnotic. And Lena can’t move away, not even when Kara leans in closer and rests her forehead against hers. And she won’t move away when Kara starts talking.
“I know I’ll lose a lot. I know those days will come and I don’t really want to think about it,” she shakes her head softly, as if willing her own thoughts to go away, when she looks back into Lena’s eyes, there’s so much feeling in them that her heart starts to beat uncontrollably, “but you, this gift, you gave me a way to keep all of you with me. Thank you. I’m going to meet a lot of people but I’ll carry all of you with me, I will carry you with me.”
“I guess that makes me immortal,” she says, for lack of better words.
“I guess it does,” Kara whispers before leaning in and finding Lena’s lips with her own for the first time.
It wasn’t unusual, really. Kara retreating into herself, wanting some space and time to think.
It had been a thing, ever since those first few weeks of dating when Kara had shyly told her that sometimes everything was too much. The noises everyone made, even unaware of them, would be too much.
Like the pumping of blood, valves opening and closing- “It’s like my ears are a stethoscope and I can’t exactly turn it off,” she had said, “sometimes it’s comforting, knowing you’re still here, but sometimes it feels like it’s punching my ears over and over.”
Like something as simple as everyone around her breathing in and out and having to hear exactly the way everyone’s lungs expand and contract. Or the way teeth hit each other over and over as someone ate and water passed down someone’s throat.
Kara had said, a tad sadder, that after so many months alone in the Phantom Zone, having to constantly be with people was exhausting too. Like all energy was drained of her after a couple of hours at Catco or talking with firefighters, when before, she could spend hours at it.
Lena had said nothing. She had only held her and left small kisses on her forehead and the crown of her head in understanding as the blonde talked. So, they had developed a system. If Kara didn’t tell her before, when she was starting to tire out of the world, she would leave a little plumeria on her balcony, either in her apartment or her office, and Lena would know that Kara wanted to be alone for a little while.
And Kara would come back, every time. She’d come back with recharged energy and soft kisses ready for Lena as if she was starting to get withdrawals the same way Lena was.
It was never an issue, Lena would lie if sometimes she didn’t need those quiet moments too. And she never asked what Kara did. And Kara never explained either. But knowing that staying away from time to time helped Kara was enough to quiet down the confusion and sometimes pain of needing to keep Lena, and all of them, away.
Normally, she wouldn’t disturb Kara. She’d let her do her thing until she came back. Because loving Kara is like loving the stars, she watches them- her- when it’s their time to be around, and waits for them to come back to her again. But after ten days, along with ten worried calls from Alex who was unable to go check on her sister herself, the absence pushes Lena to softly knock on Kara’s door on day eleven.
“Oh, Lena,” Kara’s neighbor, Gerald, says as she catches sight of her. He’s got his dog’s leash on one hand and Lena kneels slightly to pet the dog, who’s almost as old as his owner, smell her hand, “It’s good to see you. Is Kara alright? Haven’t seen her lately.”
The genuine concern in his voice makes Lena’s heart ache and she’s only able to smile and nod weakly at him before turning around and reaching for the spare key of Kara’s apartment- “your key, Lena," the blonde would say.
When she walks into the apartment, she can tell something is different right away. Because everything, everything , is covered in candles. Candles resting on the tables, the kitchen island, the chairs, the top of the fridge, the couch and the floor. She breathes out in relief when she notices that none of them are burning, or have been burning.
But her breath catches in her throat when she sees Kara. The blonde is in the middle of the room, her couch moved to the side as she sits cross legged on the carpet.
By the steady rise and fall of Kara’s chest, the closed eyes and neutral look on her face, she can tell the blonde is meditating. She’s only seen Kara meditating a handful of times, so she doesn’t know exactly what it entails- she’s never been the most religious person- and Kara has never brought it up, so she doesn’t want her to be forced into sharing anything she doesn’t want to.
Lena bites her bottom lip, unsure if one is able to talk to someone when they’re meditating or if that’s disrespectful. But the pile of take out bags, a pile that should be bigger for the consumption of a kryptonian, worries her.
“Kara?” she whispers, still a couple of feet away from her. Blue eyes don’t open, “Hey, love. I know you want your space but Alex and I were worried. Do you- Have you been eating okay? Can I buy you some chinese food?”
Kara doesn’t move, not even at the mention of her favorite food. The action only makes her worry even more and her heart beats faster. She kneels in front of her, stopping her hand before it reaches Kara’s leg- unsure if her touch is welcome.
“Baby?” she tries again, “Can I do anything?”
She looks down to the floor and notices them. The pages. Pages and pages with kryptonese on them, all around Kara. She doesn’t pick one up, no matter how much she wants to, but her average knowledge of the language is enough to let her know it’s a list of names. Her heart aches at the possibility of what they could mean.
She sighs softly and whispers just as quietly, “I’ll go, alright? I’ll come back in a few hours to leave you some food.”
She waters the plants before leaving, a task she knows Kara forgets on her good days and will certainly forget now. Then she goes to the kitchen, picks up the bag of trash and walks to the door before a low voice stops her.
"I can't remember their names," Kara's eyes are open now, but she doesn't look up. Blue eyes stay firm on the floor in front of her, on the pages filled with black and blue ink. "I wanted to say a prayer for them, but I can't remember all their names".
Lena walks over to the blonde, trash bag forgotten beside the door, and mirrors her position. As soon as she does, Kara's hands move and find hers- a sigh of relief leaving both of them.
But Kara's hands are shaky, and so is her breathing. She grabs Lena’s hands tightly and yet the brunette knows she’s still holding herself down- having to constantly check and control her strength, even in the middle of a breakdown. Lena moves one of her hands away and starts to run it up and down the blonde’s arm- an action she knew calmed her down.
"I saw my father," she whispers, shaking her head, eyes trained on Lena’s hand as she traces small circles with hers, "in the Phantom Zone. He wasn't much more than a hallucination, obviously."
The blonde scoffs, almost as if she's annoyed at what her own mind conjured. It was always an uneasy subject, the Phantom Zone. No one really wanted to talk about it so no one ever did. Not even Kelly, with her renounced policy of an open communication between the team, ever pushed anyone into talking about that- knowing that the simple balance everyone in the tower has created is extremely fragile.
"It was-" she stops, breathes out, "It made me realize I never mourned him. Not really. So I- I brought what I needed for a kryptonian farewell but then- I remembered I also never mourned my uncle or my aunt. And I brought the things to say goodbye to them too."
The tears burn Lena's eyes and they fall freely from Kara's, she tries to remain strong- as strong as she can. Trying to pass down her strength to her hands so they can move over to Kara, whose sobs she tries to hold down as she keeps talking.
"But then I realized… none of them got a proper goodbye. So I- I made a list. But I don't- I don't remember all of them. I can't-"
"Shh," she reaches for the back of Kara's neck, pulls the blonde to her, when another sob breaks out and leaves her unable to speak, "come here."
She knows words of comfort wouldn’t work right now. That holding Kara closer to her until the blonde is ready to talk is the best way to be there for her when she has nothing useful to offer.
"I know I had fifteen classmates," she whispers, after a while of silence, "but I only remember ten. I always sat in the front and Tul-Med was always on my right and Neva Val-Re on my left. The line behind us was Wen-Tox and the Tav-Ja twins. Then there was Kem-Jad, Meri Ath-Jo, Sara-Mil… and Eva Qe-Zim and Wes Ke were the ones in the back that talked really loudly." Kara leaves the crook of Lena’s neck to look her in the eyes, the tears like an unstoppable waterfall falling from them and Lena knew there was nothing she could do to stop her, "But who were the other five?"
"I can't remember their names, Lena," she repeats, her voice breaking. "My school teacher, she- her name was Kyt but I can't remember her last name. And my dad's best friend. Or the woman that sold the candles with the pretty smell my mother liked. Or even my neighbor, I always liked his house because you could see the big painting he had brought in a space market through the window- I remember that but not his name. I should remember his name."
“It’ll be okay,” Lena whispers, her hand rubbing Kara’s back as the blonde leans her head on her chest again, “maybe-”
“No,” Kara interrupts, breaking away from her arms and standing up. Leaving Lena sitting down on the floor and looking up at her as the blonde walks around the apartment and starts to pick up the candles, “This was stupid. I shouldn’t have done this.”
“Kara-”
The blonde stops her sudden movements when Lena’s hand reaches her back. She doesn’t turn around, not even at Lena’s soft prodding to do so. After minutes of quiet- with Kara just standing there, trying to remain strong as she holds a blank page in her hands, and Lena watching the back of her head with worry- Kara’s back arches when another sob leaves her mouth and Lena’s arms are quickly around her, holding the blonde up as she cries and cries. Her front pressed to Kara’s back, she holds her tightly for hours.
Lena’s heartbeat had been beating rapidly long before Kara had walked through the door.
It beated rapidly as she told Alex her idea, wondering if it was actually okay. It beated rapidly as she asked Brainy for help. It beated rapidly as she worked on her new project. It beated rapidly as she spoke with Alura. It beated rapidly as she simply thought of it all, only forcing herself to calm down and slow it down when Kara was around- knowing a constantly quick heartbeat would alert her something was wrong, or would have Kara drag her to the doctor to be checked for hypertension.
Kara had come back, slowly but surely, back to her daily activities after the long overdue and painful realization of the actual amount of people she lost when Krypton was destroyed. Days were spent with the blonde meditating on the balcony while Lena watched quietly from afar, never leaving at the blonde’s new request, and nights were spent holding her as more and more nightmares catched up to Kara.
It left both of them exhausted. Lena’s human body is too weak to perfectly take on sometimes a couple hours of sleep at night and Kara’s heavy and traumatized mind not strong enough to go through the days without looking like a “walking dead” as Snapper had so eloquently put it.
But, as usual, Kara seemed to bounce back into her happy and bubbly self - as she completely ignores the issue, her trauma, and expects it to go away. But Lena knew, they all knew, that she wasn’t okay. Kara sometimes would go quiet, right in the middle of a game night, even though she kept playing and smiling and kissing Lena’s cheek from time to time, but her loud laughs and jokes would suddenly dissipate from the room.
Sometimes Kara would just drift off and her eyes would stay trained on the floor or the walls and it’d take her a couple of minutes to realize someone is talking to her. Sometimes they could hear her talking to herself, trying out random name combinations, hoping it’ll make her remember the ones she forgot.
That’s how Kara walks into the room, her head looking down at her fingers, moving them as if she’s counting something and muttering words in kryptonese Lena is too far away to catch. It’s when Kara leaves her bag on the table and accidently knocks over the candles there, that she finally looks up- frowns when she sees the candles everywhere and Lena sitting in one of the armchairs.
“I promise the candles are not a ploy to seduce you,” she says instead of hello.
Kara chuckles, even if the confusion is still on her face, and walks over to Lena- kissing her forehead softly and kneeling in front of her, “Good. It’s not like you need them to do that.” Lena smiles and leans in to kiss her, “What are they for though?” she asks when they separate, “the candles.”
“Tiz-Gar, Lara Hill-Em, Klar-Di, Tesa Ty-Lel and Kai Om-Re,” she says, Kara tensing under her hands, “those were the names of your classmates.”
“What- How-” Kara’s mouth opens and closes, before recognition falls into her eyes and they water.
“I called your mom,” she says when Kara is unable to ask the question. The blonde frowns.
“There’s no way to contact Argo.”
“Brainy helped me make a strong enough antenna to reach Argo so I could ask your mom.”
Kara looks at her disbelieving for a couple of seconds, “You made an antenna strong enough to reach the other side of the galaxy?”
“Brainy helped-”
“Lena,” she stops her, kissing her like every time she kisses her when she does something Kara considers incredible, “you’re- you’re amazing.”
She leans in, kisses Kara on the tip of her nose before softly rubbing hers with the blonde’s- winning a soft smile from her. Kara’s eyes follow her closely and curiously as she reaches out to grab the pages from the coffee table.
“I- I asked your mom for the names. Your teacher’s and your neighbor,” the tint of sadness comes back to Kara’s eyes and she hates she brought it up again. But Kara had to do this. She had to. “She knew you’d probably have more people in mind, so there’s a transcript of Argo’s archive on the table too.”
“I do,” Kara whispers shakily, “I- I just- They deserve to be remembered.”
“They do. And I love you for wanting to do that but darling... It’s not on you to do that. Argo is still out there,” she says, nudges her head so blue eyes find greens, “your culture. Your home. It’s not all on you, it’s not just your burden to carry. You can get someone to carry it with you.”
“But it’s so heavy ," Kara says, her voice breaking in the end, “I don’t want anyone else to be crushed under it.”
“Carrying it alone means you will be the one under the rubble eventually,” she wipes Kara’s tears away, “I will carry it with you. I want to- if you’ll let me.”
“Really?”
She bites her lip before nodding, trying to keep her tears at bay at Kara’s expression of love, “But if you don't want to do this, I cooked some muffins. We can forget about this and eat them.”
Kara laughs softly. She reaches forward and wraps her arms around Lena’s waist, letting her head hide on her belly and her nose brush against her thigh. The brunette just runs her hand up and down Kara’s back and lets the silence fill the entire room, knowing the action always calms her down.
“I’ll teach you the prayer,” she whispers, turning her head to look up to Lena, “then we can eat the muffins. Is that okay?”
“That sounds perfect.”
They move to the couch, Kara lying on it with Lena on top of her - their legs tangled and the blonde’s arms around her waist while the brunette’s hands and fingers trace patterns on her arms.
Kara would say the words in kryptonese, stopping after each sentence and translating it in english. She’d let Lena take the time to repeat them, get used to them before moving onto the next- always giving her a kiss on her head or raising Lena’s hand to her mouth after she got another one right.
“You have been the sun of our lives.” Kara says in her language.
“You have been the sun of our lives,” Lena repeats, once in english, once in broken and slow kryptonese. Without knowing that they’ll spend hours on hours after this, lighting candle after candle. Saying prayer after prayer, until Kara’s heart didn’t feel as heavy as it does now.
“Our prayers will be the sun that lights your way on the journey home.”
“Our prayers will be the sun that lights your way on the journey home.”
“We will remember you in every dawn. And await the night we join you in the sky.”
“We will remember you in every dawn. And await the night we join you in the sky.”
“Rao’s will be done.”
“Rao’s will be done.”
“ Khap :zhao rrip ,” Kara whispers in her ear. Lena turns around and chuckles at Kara’s soft expression.
“What does that one mean?”
“I love you.”
It wasn’t Kara who saved her from the goons and got her out of the warehouse, obviously. She knew it wasn’t going to be Kara.
It was Alex instead. Who came in, guns blazing with a team behind her as they took them all down. It was Alex, the one who got down on her knees in front of Lena to untie the ropes on her legs and take out the gag from her mouth.
It was Alex and Nia, Lena leaning most of her weight on both of them, who dragged her out- instead of one strong kryptonian.
She knew it wasn’t going to be Kara, for the exact same reason she was even in the warehouse. The same reason Kara wasn’t able to stop them when they showed up in front of them while they were walking back to her apartment after date night- Supergirl was powerless.
Supergirl had been powerless for a week, still seen around National City thanks to J’onn’s and M’gann’s help - much to the man’s dislike and the woman’s amusement. And no matter how many adrenaline rushes Kara tried to induce on herself and how many hours under the sun lamps she spent, she couldn’t get her powers back.
“Your cells are still weak from so much time in the Phantom Zone,” Alex had explained.
“They should recharge themselves after a while,” Lena had added, trying to lift up Kara’s sour face. It hadn’t worked.
Kara’s spirits had only started to raise after three ice creams and some of Lena’s promises that left the blonde breathless and blushed - until the van had showed up in front of them, two men quickly grabbing Lena and throwing her into the vehicle while the other hit Kara on the side of her head, strong enough to leave her disoriented and confused.
The first thing she notices when she wakes up is the IV uncomfortably pressing on her arm and the perfume of the way-too-soft pillow of the tower’s med bay. She frowns before opening her eyes- the lack of another hand pressing against her own is a heavy presence. Every other time she had woken up here, whether for a small or big injury, she had always woken up with Kara’s hands holding her own.
When she opens her eyes, Kara is there. Lena doesn’t know what would have been worse, Kara not being here when she woke up or Kara being here and purposely not touching her.
There’s a bandage on Kara’s head, a dead give away that her powers still haven’t come back, and she’s got her face turned, eyes lost somewhere in the empty tower. Anxiety rises to Lena’s heart because she can tell, with just one simple look at Kara, that something is wrong.
“Kara?” she asks, making her consciousness known before the machine connected to her heart would.
Kara looks up and there’s that something in her eyes Lena was always so scared to see. The blonde reaches out but the relief in Lena’ heart disappears as soon as Kara’s hand seems to change direction, grabbing the sheets on Lena’s bed instead of her hand.
“Hey,” she moves her hand forward, only making Kara sit straighter in the chair and moving her own hands to her lap, “it’s okay. I’m okay.”
Kara clenches her jaw, “Not thanks to me.”
“You know you don’t have your powers, it’s okay you sat this one out. I wouldn’t have wanted you in danger.”
“But that’s the thing!” she exclaims, voice loud and angry, before breathing in and out- calming down before continuing in a softer, sad, voice, “I don’t know if my powers will come back. What if they don’t come back?”
“Kara-”
“How am I supposed to help if I don’t have my powers? The stupid articles I’m forced to write certainly aren’t making a difference,” the crinkle shows up in Kara’s forehead and Lena hates that she can’t brush it away like she always does, the blonde's need for space perfectly clear in the way she sits further away from her than she normally would, “I couldn’t even help in saving the woman I love,” Kara trails off, the tears gathering in her eyes but she blinks them away, “helping people is such a fundamental part of me, what am I if I can’t help?”
“You’re Kara.”
The answer is automatic, fast- the truth. Kara’s self doubt and fear of failure always a heavy companion Lena has just started to unwrap - that Kara had just started to share. But now, realizing that it’s starting to squeeze the confidence out of Kara, the self love out of the hero- she knows there’s little she can do, except reassure her one last time of the truth.
“Lena-”
“-You’ll always be Kara. Superpowers or not. Cape or not.”
“Lena. I think- I-”
“You’re going to be okay, Kara.”
“Lena,” she presses on, cutting her off completely, “I’m trying to break up with you.”
“What?” she asks, the words falling over her like a bucket of cold water.
She thought that in the moment Kara would break up with her, she’d be able to look away. She didn’t look Jack in the eye when she told him she was leaving. She didn’t look James in the eye when she told him to leave. But here, right now, Kara’s eyes are magnetic and she can’t look away.
They’re filled with sorrow and tears - she knows hers probably look the same. But she can’t, she won’t, look away. This could be the last time she is able to look into Kara’s eyes for a long long time, or maybe forever. Kara’s eyes had always been her favorite place to get lost in, it was only fitting she’d get lost in them as she loses Kara too.
“Lena-”
“Are you serious?” she whispers, begging her voice not to crack - from anger or from pain, she doesn’t know. Begging herself not to cry, knowing her tears would only add more pain and guilt in the blonde’s mind. But she’s mad, she’s so mad- even if her own mind begs her to calm down because she knows where Kara is coming from. But was it all for nothing? She does everything she can, she helps in any way she can, putting Kara first, putting everyone Kara loves first, before herself even- and she gets dumped the second something goes wrong?
She sits up in her bed and grabs Kara’s hand in hers, squeezing, begging, for her to say something else, take it back, “Talk to me.”
“I- I can’t-”
“-Kara, please.”
"I'm sorry. I can't do this. You can’t do this either,” Kara shakes her head, “I can’t just have you do everything for me when I can't do anything for you."
“We can figure it out, okay? Don’t shut me out.”
But Kara has already shut her out. It’s clear by the scoff she lets out, the way she untangles her hands from Lena’s and her eyes suddenly go hard- like they do when she’s trying to remain strong, when she’s trying to ignore something that’s obviously hurting her. It’s the last thing she sees clearly before her eyes fill with tears that she’s not able to blink out and everything turns blurry.
No matter how many broken sobs she lets out, the tears don’t stop coming and she lets out a broken “But I’m here,” begging Kara to stay, begging her to work it out with her.
“But how long?” Kara answers, her voice soft and pained, “I’m sorry but this is over.”
Saying I love you it’s her last try, her last attempt at getting her back. But Kara’s “"I love you too but that still doesn't mean this is good for the both of us.” leaves her speechless, pain and anger bubbling up inside her heart. The silence hurts just as much as the talking, so after a minute or so of Kara looking unsure if hugging her would be okay or not, she sighs.
"I- I think I'd like to be alone now,” finally looking down from Kara’s blurry form and into her lap, slowly playing with the corner of her sheet- the tears falling into it.
"Lena-"
"Please," she whispers before the blonde gets a chance to tell her she shouldn’t be alone, that she’s never good to herself when she’s alone. But maybe Kara also wants to be alone, also needs that moment to herself to cry on her own.
So, Kara nods and gets up from her chair. She only looks back to Lena once before leaving down the hallway.
It’s only when she hears the sound of the door closing that she allows herself to break down. Her own arms are cold and not strong enough when she hugs herself, wishing they were Kara’s instead. But she can’t call for her - you can’t really call your ex to get over the break up with said ex.
The word feels wrong. Incorrect. Inaccurate. Like a bad taste joke. Like saying 2 plus 2 equals 5 or that the equation for gravity isn’t GM/r2.
Her heart feels too much like when that woman dragged her away from the beach. Like when a police officer came to tell her her mommy was gone. Like when Lillian introduced herself to her for the first time. Like when she found out about Andrea’s betrayal. Like when she found out who Lex truly was. Like when Kara broke her heart.
Except this time it feels worse. So much worse. Because now she knows what it’s like. What it’s like to have everything she ever wanted- kissing Kara, sleeping with her, game nights curled up together, movie nights that get ignored as they make out, entire nights talking and pillow talks after sex and everything in between- but it was all taken away again.
So maybe that's why, when Nia walks in to see how she’s doing and sees her crying, she lies and says the goons shook her up more than she thought. She lies and says Kara was called to Catco for something. She lies and says yeah with a chuckle when Nia teases her about her girlfriend making it up to her later.
Except maybe she shouldn't have. Because Kara seems to be in as much of a mood as her after their break up. She knows that, it’s not like her and Kara to suddenly stop talking.
They don’t hang out as much. Their conversations are a little more stilled and their touches have been below zero. They’re still friends. They said they would still be friends. Just no longer girlfriends.
But everyone else did not seem to get the memo- or Kara just conveniently forgot to tell them- because they keep talking to Lena as if she’s still her girlfriend.
It’s just a couple of jokes at first and random mentions. Just Nia teasing her about Kara’s love eyes and Kelly telling her she shouldn’t buy so much food to woo Kara some more. She guesses it’s like reflex to them already, all the months joking about them- it’s hard to give up, she gets it. She’s laughing along with most of them before she remembers she shouldn’t anymore.
It’s just a couple of requests that while, yes, a significant other should do it, it’s not like Lena is against it. She can go to Kara’s apartment to grab Nia’s notebook because the woman forgot it there- Kara's apartment is just a small detour plus she’s going to Catco for lunch anyway and she has a key. She has a key. She should probably give it back, she should. But doing that would make it too permanent, she’s not ready for permanent yet.
It’s just simple things. Simple questions. She knows why they ask, she gets it. She is, probably, right after Alex, the perfect person to ask stuff when it comes to Kara.
It starts with Kara’s new intern- Joe? Jonny?- calling her on a random wednesday, breathing heavily and apologizing half a million times for asking Nia for her number. “I’m so so sorry to bother you Miss Luthor but Miss Danvers asked me to get five docens of meat, cheese and bacon potstickers and not to come back without them but I swear I’ve gone to every single chinese restaurant and they don’t make those.”
There is a small pause in her steps at how it sounds like Kara was demanding the potstickers but she brushes it off as the new intern’s nerves and the desperation of not finding them so she chuckles lightly and explains to him how to get to Miss Lui’s house, an old woman who Kara had befriended and had become her “personal taster” for new recipes- it hadn’t worked, since Kara liked everything. But the woman had told her to come by to ask for any of the new recipes any time.
Lena hangs up and moves on with her day.
Two days later it’s Nia, calling her in hushed tones and a worried voice, telling her that Kara had been fidgeting a lot since that morning and she was moments away from breaking the floor. “What do I do?”
“She needs a distraction,” Lena explains, biting her lip and stopping herself from running to Kara and helping her herself, “show her a couple of puppy videos until she stops putting her index and thumb together, that means she’s not as anxious anymore. Then take her to get ice cream or something.”
“Thanks,” Nia breathes out. Lena can hear the smirk before the woman speaks again, “Sure you don’t want to come over here? I’m sure some kisses will cure everything.”
“Just do that, Nia,” she snaps, ending the call when Nia starts making kissing noises on the other side of the phone.
Then it’s Kelly, a week later, sneaking up on her at the tower before she leaves. “Hey, Kara has been around the apartment a lot lately, not that I mind, of course,” she says quickly, raising her hands and then biting her bottom lip, “but… I bought this new toy and-”
“Oh my God,” Lena cuts her off, not wanting to think about the women’s sex life, “nope, no. Goodbye Kelly.”
“But you’ll keep her entertained right? Just tonight! Or maybe a couple of days!” the woman exclaims, receiving the sound of the door closing as a response.
Once it’s J’onn, asking her to see if there’s a way to get Kara to stop eating all the snacks at the tower. And Andrea asking her how she can make Kara “go back to rainbows and sunshines because the attitude is even worse”. And even Alex showing up to ask her if she has any ideas on how to tell Kara that no, she can’t go to missions if she still doesn’t have her powers because all of the ways she's tried have ended up in an argument.
And Lena gets it, she really does. She does wish there was a book easy enough to read to know exactly what Kara needs at any moment but there isn’t and she isn’t a book. And she’s happy to help, she is. But she’s not the person they should be going to, she isn’t Kara’s listening ear anymore, or the one she goes to for comfort- she’s not even sure the blonde even wants her around.
Maybe that’s why she feels a headache coming as soon as she walks into the tower and everyone there already starts to throw requests and questions her way.
“Hey Lena!” Alex greets her from the couch, “Kara keeps asking for Chinese again, sway her for some Italian today, yeah? We ate chinese last time.”
“Hello, Lena,” Brainy says, looking up from his tablet, “Kara keeps challenging me to arm wrestling matches because she believes she can beat me even without her powers, can you tell her to stop?”
“Lena,” Nia’s long pronunciation of her name sounds from above the stairs, “Kara keeps asking me to put her in dream bubbles and take her flying, is there any-”
“-I don’t fucking know okay?!” she cuts them off, they all stop in their tracks and look up, surprised at the anger in her voice, “I’m not Kara’s fucking therapist! I’m not even her girlfriend!”
Her last words are accompanied by heavy silence and the metal doors of the elevator closing. When she turns around she finds Kara, take out bags on her hands and hanging from her arms, looking at her with the saddest expression she had worn since that day in the med bay.
And Lena can’t do this. She can’t. She shakes her head and blinks away the tears from her eyes before walking past the blonde, muttering a soft sorry to her, and walking into the elevator.
The doors close in front of her and the elevator starts to go down when she hears the various screams of “What! ” and “Why!” and “Kara!” from her friends.
Like Alex and her had said, Kara got her powers a week after that day in the tower. There wasn’t an adrenaline rush and it didn’t take more hours under sun lamps or throwing Kara into the sun, as Nia had jokingly suggested (the blonde was willing to try). Kara had just...woken up one day and all her super senses were back- like if a phone had run out of battery and she had to leave it changing for a while before she could even turn it on.
So, Supergirl is everywhere. Literally everywhere.
Supergirl is saving cats from trees. Supergirl is helping to find lost dogs. Supergirl is helping construction workers by lifting heavy metals. Supergirl is stopping robberies and accompanying drunk women back home to make sure they’re safe.
Supergirl spends a day in an apple farm helping the men carry even more so they’d get more money. Supergirl goes to the atlantic to save an oil shipment from contaminating the sea. Supergirl. Supergirl. Supergirl.
And because Supergirl is everywhere, it means Kara Danvers is not around as much. She keeps the appearances good enough, doing the long saves on days she doesn’t have to work, making sure her excuses to leave Catco are always backed up by Nia. But even if her life at Catco is fine- or there , not fine, not great, just… there- the rest has been more and more ignored by the blonde.
She misses a game night- it’s not a big deal, it’s not. Everyone still had fun, even if both Lena and Alex kept looking at the news, waiting for the other shoe to drop, the shoe being Supergirl being hurt. But she wasn’t hurt, she was just helping a lost kid in an entertainment park in Italy find her parents.
She misses the monthly tower meeting- it’s not a big deal, it’s not. She was putting down a forest fire in South America. It’s okay. They get it.
They all get it. Except Nia gets annoyed when Supergirl was helping an old lady cross the street when she had asked her to help her pick an outfit for her date with Brainy.
They all get it. Except that Brainy is hurt when Kara doesn’t show up to the Star Trek exhibition they said they’d go to together.
They all get it. Except that Kelly is surprised when Kara turns down her invitation to a new restaurant to have one on one time with her future sister in law.
They all get it. Except that Alex is pissed when Kara doesn’t show up to sisters’ night because she was flying to Tokyo, on a plane , because one of the kids aboard was too scared to fly.
They all get it. Except Lena is scared, so scared right now, and the last Supergirl related news she saw was the blonde saving a small town in Iceland from getting covered in lava. And normally, she wouldn’t be scared- she wouldn’t. But there’s a bomb strapped to her desk, the windows and door of her office are locked, her phone is nowhere to be found and her purse empty of any useful objects- it makes her a little anxious. A little desperate. Really scared. Because she can’t find a way to fix it.
She would have called, she really would have called for help. It had taken her months to get used to- knowing she had people to rely on, people that wanted her safe- but after Kara, Nia, Kelly, Alex and Brainy showed up to her hospital bed to tell her to stop inviting death by being stupid and instead ask for help, only then did she slowly and painfully start to let them in.
Like talking with Nia and telling her she wasn’t sure about the motives of a business partner, only for the reporter to do some digging and help Lena expose him- Nia got a great article, Lena had one less white man to worry about.
Like telling Kelly and Alex about Lillian’s latest plan and how they could stop her- instead of trying to stop her mother on her own- only for Guardian and Sentinel to start discussing the tactical side of her plan and suggesting new, and better, ideas.
Like shyly asking J’onn if he’d go with her to a conference because she knew Mr. Hammer would once again make inappropriate comments, only for J’onn to accept right away and look like the most intimidating bodyguard Lena had ever had.
Like asking Brainy if he’d be willing to do one of her personal projects with her, one that she knows she’ll be able to do on her own but somehow still wanting the man’s company, only for him to quickly say yes with a little excited glint in his eyes.
So, she knew. She knew they’d show up if she called. Dreamer would show up to save her if Supergirl was unavailable. Or Sentinel. Or Guardian. Or even J’onn or Brainy. But there’s no phone, no working computers, no nothing for her to be able to call out for anyone outside of her office- is it even her office now? She hasn’t even been here since she quit. But somehow the blank walls and the expensive chair, and every little detail in it, still feels hers .
She’s not even sure she’s trying to find a way to get out now, knowing it might be for nothing. Her door doesn’t move, no matter how much strength she uses. She can’t even break the windows, no matter how many times she throws her chair into it. She can’t get her computer to turn on and it takes her longer than it should to realize any wire coming in and out of her office had been fried. So, she does nothing. She just breathes out and appreciates that it’s two AM, there’s no one on the building except the security guards, who are on the first floor and would hear the explosion and be able to save themselves before the whole building collapses. But not her.
She starts crying when the countdown hits two minutes because she realizes, even after the too-many-to-count assassination attempts, this time, right here, right now, at this point in her life… she doesn’t want to die.
She doesn’t want to die because she wants to go to Kelly’s and Alex’s wedding. She doesn’t want to die because she wants to see the look of happiness on Alex’s face when Kelly tells her she was able to push the adoption forward. She doesn’t want to die because she and Brainy are halfway through a breakthrough and she wants to hug him for the first time whenever they make it work. She doesn’t want to die because gossip and braiding sessions with Nia and wine every Wednesday is the most relaxed night of every week. She doesn’t want to die because Nia is two nights away from convincing her to get a cat and she’s fond of naming one after a scientist.
She doesn’t want to die because she hasn’t seen Kara in days and she hasn’t kissed her in months. She doesn’t want to die because she never got to move in with her, fall asleep and wake up every day beside her. She doesn’t want to die because she wanted to argue about Kara not being careful enough and Lena not eating enough and which pets they were gonna have and Kara hogging all the blankets even though she doesn’t feel cold. She doesn’t want to die not being Kara’s girlfriend. She wouldn’t even want to die being her girlfriend.
She thought when death came knocking on her door, she’d let him in happily- knowing death would be her only relief, the only way she’d get a break. But now, as the timer goes from 1:00 to 0:59 to 0:58 she wants to scream and cry and everything in between because there’s so much she still wants to do. So much she wants to see. She doesn’t want to die just when she has found her family.
The timer gets to 0:10… 0:09… 0:08… 0:07… 0:06… but she doesn’t see it get to 0:05. The shatter of glass is too loud after the hours (has it been hours?) she spent alone in her office. Arms desperately grab her, one on the back of her knees and the other softly grabbing her back, before she’s covered by a heavy cape as they fly away. She doesn’t get to see, but she hears it, she hears it, when the timer goes off and the structure of her building starts to crash.
Kara softly lands on the roof of one of the buildings around the block and she gets to see, first hand, how it all collapses to nothing- not even Kara’s arms around her are enough to calm her racing heart, her worry for whoever was in the building and her sadness about how it’s all gone- officially, all she worked for was gone.
Her legs give out when Kara lets her get away from her grip- her knees don’t touch the floor, the blonde is already there to hold her up and take her into a not-literally bone crushing hug. She’s too confused to even answer Kara’s pleas of Lena, Lena, are you okay? . They feel far away, too out of reach even if Kara is right here- and she doesn’t want to think how it takes her almost dying to finally touch her again.
“I’m fine, I’m fine, thanks,” she says, after Kara asks her softly for the fifth time.
“Thanks? You know you don’t have to thank me, ever-” The hint of anger and disbelief in her words are stopped halfway when Kara’s hand finds Lena’s wrist and she feels nothing around it. “Lena, where’s your watch?”
She doesn’t look into Kara’s eyes when she says it, part of her ashamed- knowing that if she had the watch maybe this could have been solved faster and maybe even without Kara. “Uh… I- I took it off.”
“What? Why?”
She almost reaches out, her hand almost holds onto Kara’s arm to bring her back down to sit on the floor with her when the blonde stands up. But she can’t do that, she can’t do that anymore- it’s not her place.
“I- I gave you that for a reason! It’s supposed to help! Let us know when you need us, me , to save you!” She sighs when Kara’s voice rises after each word. She’s not wrong but how does she explain to Kara that the watch keeps reminding her that she’s no longer Kara’s?
She had understood every time Kara had blown up, she had. She’d keep her head as calm and cold as she could when they’d argue, when Kara’s feelings got the best of her, when Alex and Kara had an argument and she and Kelly had to take the role of peacemakers. But right now she can’t, right now her hands are still shaking and the smell of dust is on her nose and she was almost blown to pieces- so she can’t fucking take the high road right now. So when the words leave her mouth, those words that have been in the back of her mind for a long time, it makes Kara’s pacing stop, and she almost regrets it.
It’s probably half her trust issues saying that one day Kara would stop, and it’s probably the rest of her issues begging her to give up but- “Maybe I don’t want you to save me all the time!”
“What? But- But that’s what I do, I help.” Kara says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and it is. But Lena is too tired to pretend one of Kara’s issues doesn’t start and begin in helping to be careful about what she asks next.
“What would happen if you didn’t? What would happen if you stopped?”
“I’ll- I’m not gonna stop.” Kara looks away from her, looking up to the sky, and scoffing at the mere idea.
“You were powerless for months, you were a mess, what would have happened if you didn’t get them back?”
Kara opens and closes her mouth before shaking her head, her breathing quickening with every word, her hands opening and closing into fists over and over, “I- I- That’s not the point, the point is that you should have called for backup. You need to let me help! If I can’t help you then you won’t need me and if you don’t need me then, then-”
“Kara-” she tries, standing up when she notices the beginning signs of a panic attack on her.
“-No, you- you have to need me, I-”
“Hey, hey look at me, breathe okay? Follow me,” she says, getting closer to the blonde, her hands softly touching her arms to make Kara look at her. But her breathing doesn’t calm down, the pressure of Lena’s fingers is not enough- even if it was the thing that used to calm Kara most of the time. “Okay, listen,” she says, taking Kara’s hand in her own and resting it on top of her heart. Kara’s hand is shaky and Lena can tell she’s holding down to not wrap her in a hug again by the way her other hand keeps reaching for her hip and then moving away from it.
So she hugs her first. She rests her head on Kara’s chest as the blonde’s chin comes to rest on the top of her head. One hand still on top of her heart and the other one running up and down Lena’s back- willing herself to calm down. But after minutes and minutes of being wrapped in each other, Lena’s not sure who needed the hug the most.
“No, hold on,” Kara whispers and pulls her into her again when Lena tries to step away. The blonde rearranges the hand on top of her heart and moves it to her back, pulling Lena closer and closer and closer. And Lena wants to forget this is not before , she wants to pretend it’s those days they were dating and Kara would hug her this long just because.
They pull away eventually and Lena already feels the adrenaline leave her body and the exhaustion starting to creep into her. She sits down on the side of the building, the wall holding up her back as she motions for Kara to sit down next to her.
The superhero starts to ramble about the team being down there keeping things under control and how she was in Canada when she heard Lena’s heart beating way too fast, faster than normal, so she came to help and-
And it’s that word that makes her ask. Because it’s always help, help, help. Kara helps everyone but when does Kara help herself.
“Tell me,” she says, cutting her off on her story about getting a not-so-kind bear out of a freezing lake, “how do you feel when you help someone?”
Kara seems caught off by the question, in part she probably was. She stays quiet looking at Lena as if expecting her to ask something else or to explain the reason why she asked. She just looks back and waits. She waits when Kara looks away and up to the sky because she knows that Kara doesn’t lie, not anymore, and that’s why she usually takes so long to answer.
“Um... like I'm here for a reason.”
“So how do you feel when you don't?” she pushes, the crinkle forming on Kara’s forehead, “Everyone at Catco heard about the time that you gave your shoes to a homeless woman. Well, imagine that you just walked by her. How would you have felt?”
“Like a bad person. And I would've been,” she nods at herself, “She needed shoes. That's what you do.”
“Well, a lot of people walked by her. Are they all bad people?”
“What? No. Not at all,” Kara’s answer is instant and forceful even if Lena’s question was soft and slow.
“Then why are you?” Kara bites her lip. Lena tries again, hoping this doesn’t end up coming out the wrong way, “Can you try and list three good things about yourself that have nothing to do with helping? Three things that would be great about yourself if you had never gotten your powers back, or you hadn’t checked in on my heartbeat.”
Kara says nothing. Instead she looks away from Lena’s eyes, no matter how much the brunette tries to make eye contact with her. “Okay, how about one thing?”
The silence breaks her heart and part of her hates what she asks next but the other part knows it’s necessary- she and Kelly had discussed it too much, Alex had even joined in on their shared worry about Kara. So while she doesn’t hate it exactly, she’s… worried. “Kara... what do you think would happen if you stopped helping people?”
“They'd see…”
“What would they see?”
“They would see…” she tries again, her eyes watering, “what a complete loser I am. Just… sad, useless, broken, worthless, nothing.”
“Baby…”
“No,” she raises her hand, stopping Lena, “I... I know it's not healthy, and I have this voice in my head, and it's a really loud one. And it's saying… that one of these days, you're gonna realize… That you can do so much better than me,” she looks up to her and Lena can’t do anything but reach for her and wrap her hands in hers, “My ability to help people… that's all I have. That's the- that's the only thing I even like about myself. Without that, I just can't think of a reason why you would keep me around. I can't.”
“I'm gonna say something now, and it would be great if you could just sit and listen. Is that okay?”
One of Lena’s hands goes up and wipes away the tears that fell from Kara’s eyes, the blonde leans into her hand and kisses softly the inside of her wrist. She knows there’s not much she can say, Kara’s feelings won’t go away, no matter how many amazing things she can say about her but she knows those words might relieve the pain in her heart anyway.
“Yeah, okay.”
“I’m going to say three things that I think are good about you,” she rests her forehead against Kara’s and makes sure to find blue eyes before whispering. “You're kind. You are a wonderful friend. And you are beautiful. You're hilarious. You're patient. You're smart. You make friends everywhere you go because they see what I see. You shine. You're amazing. You're the love of my life. And my life is so much better than I ever thought it was gonna be because of you, Kara.”
“I love you.” Kara whispers, her voice rough and small from holding down the tears.
And when Lena says I love you back she knows what’s going to happen before it does. Because Kara looks down to her lips and her eyes close before she slightly moves forward so Kara kisses her. And Lena kisses back. And she lets herself be consumed by it for a minute, just one last time, before she pulls away and smiles sadly at Kara.
She doesn’t have to explain- of course she doesn’t, it’s Kara. But when Kara also smiles her sad smile and nods, it feels like a break up all over again. Right person, wrong moment and all that shit they say in the movies sometimes do apply.
So when the staircase door is opened and they hear the rushed steps of Nia and Kelly looking for Lena, Kara clears her throat, helps Lena to her feet and with another sharp nod- she flies away.
She should have known- after all, she’s lived through plenty of explosions- that this one wouldn’t come without consequences.
It takes a week for the first board member to call her. She hangs up. She never liked his subtly sexist comment and way-too-strong cologne.
But she picks up when, a couple days later, Mrs Railly calls her. She politely listens to the issues on top of issues that Lex’s demise and Lena’s resignation had piled up onto the company. She hates the small weight inside her chest, but the company used to be, after all, her greatest accomplishment, back in the day.
She hates the shimmer of satisfaction in her heart when the woman tells her she was the best CEO Luthor-Corp ever had. And she hates, especifically, that it's the same feeling Lex would have had at hearing the same words.
She declines, as kindly as she can. But it’s not even an hour after that she hears the ping of a new email on her inbox. A detailed count of how many people would lose their jobs and how many projects would stop without giving anything back to the world, if Luthor-Corp closes.
There was a reason why Mrs. Railly was always her favorite. She knew how to get what she wanted, Lena had never doubted that.
It doesn’t even take a month before she’s back in her chair, high above National City. This time, on the other side of the city- Luthor-Corp’s second division.
She does the changes she did in the other world, that world that feels so far away it almost feels like a dream. She gets Sam back as her CEO. She changes the name to L-Corp. She fires the people that need to be fired and hires the ones that need to be hired. And that part is simple. Easy. Almost automatic.
It’s not that what starts to pile up on her. It’s the little comments, at first.
It’s when Mr Griffin tells her “the company always thrives with a Luthor at the head,” that the first questions roam in her mind. Why should that be a good thing? She’s not like the other Luthors, is she? Luthor-Corp thrived with Lex at the head too. But does that mean they have the same business methods or does it mean she’s just like him? But it's a small thing, a one time thing- she can ignore it, so she does.
Then it’s the people at the labs, that when she quickly solves an issue for them, they cheer and tell her stories about the times Lex had done the same. She’s not like the other Luthors, is she? They’re both just really smart. But does that mean they have the same knowledge methods or does it mean she’s just like him?
And then it’s the news, questioning what her big plan is. Debating whether her alliance with Supergirl and her friends is a farce. Calling her thing after thing after thing - and there it is, the moment she feels like she’s back on that old Earth again.
But she’s used to it. She can handle it.
Except this time she doesn’t have that feeling of fulfilment when the company moves forward, it feels good but it’s more of a deja vu than a new feeling. And this time, the terrible hideous time, she doesn’t have Kara.
There’s no Kara bringing her donuts and telling her she’s good and kind and amazing.
There’s no hugs after a long night or movie nights after a stressful week. And it hurts and hurts and hurts until her heart beats out of her chest and her head aches after crying.
It keeps happening. The feelings keep catching her off guard, more often, stronger. The methods that used to help her barely do now- and her fingers keep hovering over the business card Kelly had given her months ago.
And it’s like that, red eyes and ragged breath, that Brainy finds her- curled up on herself after a panic attack caught her off guard as she tried to finish a code on the tower.
He’s kind and quiet as he sits beside her on the floor, softly patting his shoulder for Lena to lean on. It brings another sob out of her, this time out that’s not so sad and more happy and relieved. She takes in his warmth, even if his shoulder feels a little bony on her cheek, and breathes out.
“I think,” he whispers, almost as if trying not to scare her off, “your boxes are broken, comrade.”
“I know,” she sighs, wipes the remaining of her tears away, “I think it might be time to clean them out.”
She backed out the first time- cancelled the appointment three days before she was supposed to go.
She backed out the second time too- she didn’t cancel. But once she got into her car, she picked up her phone and called to let them know she wasn’t coming, a lie about work that she had been thinking about more than she should have.
She tried to back out the third time. Key word: try. Except that before she could make up a work emergency or any other reason why she wouldn’t be available, Kelly and Nia were waiting for her, leaning into her car with a cup of coffee on their hands.
“There you are,” Nia said when she saw her, expending a coffee and leaning closer to her before whispering, “it’s a little spiked but for legal reasons, it wasn’t me.”
Lena chuckled softly before tasting the slightly bitter and strong whiskey in the coffee. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We are taking you to therapy,” she said, “we’re not letting you chicken out this time.”
“I had a work emergency,” she tried to defend herself again, sighing when Kelly looked at her unimpressed, “I was literally on my way.”
“You were going to fake a headache this time,” Nia points a finger at her when she opens her mouth, “I saw it. You can’t lie.”
“Should you be dreaming about a future robbery or the next apocalypse?” Lena rolled her eyes.
“Nope. Apparently my powers deemed getting you to therapy way more important,” she said, opening the passengers door and throwing herself into it. Kelly doing the same thing with the back door, both of them looking expectantly at Lena from the windows before she sighed and walked to the driver’s seat.
“This really isn’t necessary,” she tried again, “I’m not a kid who needs to be taken to school or something.”
“We know you’re not a kid, Lena,” Kelly said, “consider this support, okay?”
“Yeah,” Nia backed her up, “that’s what friends are for.”
Lena let out a bitter laugh- if only they knew when she’d hear that before - before driving.
The psychologists clinic is an old building, so old that as Lena walks through it for the first time, the first thing she thinks about is the first line of that horror show she watched with Nia. Novamente Clinic has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Novamente Clinic; and we who walk here, walk alone.
Except she wished she had been alone, because Miss Green- “Jules, darling, call me Jules” - decided to accompany her to Doctor Simmons’ office and she kept and kept talking. She told her about how many doctors work here, the many research studies that have been done here in the past and she even talked about the damn floor tiles before their reached her doctor’s door- she’s not sure if it was just Jules being herself, if she was suddenly in a tour about the clinic or if they needed her to donate some money to them.
She’s saved from having to answer a question about why she was coming to therapy, which is a normal question to ask for an assistant apparently, by Doctor Simmons smiling kindly at her and telling her to come in.
The first session is nice enough, easy enough. She tells Doctor Simmons, Esme, about simple stuff, superficial stuff. She talks about her friends for a bit and tries to joke about Nia and Kelly dragging her to therapy before squirming under Esme’s gaze when she asks why Lena had to be dragged here. But they easily move on and the fact that an hour passed quicker than she thought it would makes Lena come back for a second session and a third and a fourth and so on once a week.
“You’re from Ireland then, what do you remember of it? Just in simple words.”
“It was… green and bright, it felt like magic. And then it was Christmas carols. And then- then it was sorrow and pain.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mum died... when it was green and bright.”
“I saw Kara yesterday at the boulevard. She looked healthy, happy. Like she used to be before me.”
“Kara? Who’s that?”
Her eyes bore through the therapist’s. “A significant part of this whole charade, but I’m not ready to… I just wanted to let you know I saw her.”
“You said Lex took you in after they adopted you. Tell me about him.”
“He’s a murderer. Why should I talk about Lex?”
“Don’t tell me about the present. Tell me about him, from before. What was he like?”
She stays silent for a while, her finger going over the patterns in the arm of the couch. She barely remembers what he was like- the old Lex.
“He… he liked The Beatles a lot. And Queen. Collected as many signed things he could get his hands on. Made me like them too, even dared me to try and play all of Bohemian Rhapsody in front of Lillian without her noticing and thinking it was a classic piece,” she chuckles, remembering how her mother had praised her on it and Lex and her had laughed behind her back like two little kids. Her lips turned back down again, “I… I’d forgotten about that.”
“You said your mother-”
“No, not her. I don’t want to talk about my mum.”
“Lex was my fault. I should have seen that.”
“I always thought I was a little bit in love with her, honestly. She was my first friend. My first confident. I thought it was what love was supposed to be about…”
“And then?”
“She broke my heart. Betrayed me. She didn’t even tell me the truth, she could have just done that . I could have understood.”
“You said you don’t do well with lies. Is she the reason why?”
Lena chuckles, “No, no. Honestly, the way Andrea broke my heart feels funny now. I thought I loved her and I did, in the way you always love your first friend but… when I think of love mixed with betrayal, I’ll always think of Kara.”
“What did Kara do?” Dr Simmons asks, only getting Lena to clench her jaw, no words leaving her mouth. “Okay, maybe that’s it for today then.”
“He just- he just used me,” she breathes out, her voice breaking, “tied me to a chair like I wasn’t his little sister and shouted so loud. And it was all so red - why- why did he do that?”
“If Kara loved me then why did she leave me?” Lena cries into her trembling hands, sobs wracking her upper body with such violence that she digs her nails into the cushions to make sure the lack of oxygen is only mental. “It was supposed to be us against the world, not against each other.”
“I killed him,” she sobs, “I loved him and I killed him. I loved Jack. And if I loved him and I was still capable of doing that to him, who says I won’t do it again?”
She looks up into her therapist's eyes, begging for an answer. She finds a sympathetic and kind look, but no words to fix her guilt.
“My mom drowned. That's why I never learned to swim.”
“I tried so hard to be what she needed and yet, here I am. Sad and utterly alone. Maybe Kara is better off without me, I am just a pile of issues- you’d know that better than most.”
“You have been working hard to be what you need to be.” Dr Simmons tilts her head, appraising Lena with an understanding brow. “Kara must be working on her own issues. But… do you think you’re better off now that she isn’t around?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“Then why would the other way around be true?”
“Well… She’s Kara. She’s– she’s like... like daylight, like touching the sun with bare hands and not fading to ashes.”
“According to that, what would it make you?”
She lets out a bitter chuckle, devoid of happiness. “A nimbus cloud, perhaps, obscuring the sunlight.”
“She lied to me. For years. Over and over again. Making a fool out of me.”
“And yet you made the conscious decision to date after that.”
“We just… we let bygones be bygones and… no matter how much I try not to, I love her. I’ll always love her. And I want, more than anything, to have her back.”
“Why are you here, Lena?”
Her jaw goes slack, surprised by the sudden change of course in the questions. “It’s therapy,” she stutters out, “do I need a reason?”
“Most people have an idea of what they want to gain with it. What is yours?”
“I... I-”
“Just think about it, okay? We will discuss this next week.”
“There’s still twenty minutes left.”
“It’s been enough for today.”
“It took all of my willpower to not drive off a cliff on my way here.”
“What stopped you?”
“I can’t give my mother the satisfaction.” Lena looks down. “And I like coming here.”
“Last night was the first time I went to game night without Kara. It was… really nice.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she breathes out, actually happy at her words, “Kelly is amazing to play poker with and Nia is the funniest drunk.”
“I visited Jack’s grave yesterday. Talked to him for a bit. I know- I know it doesn’t mean anything but… it was nice. I talked to a piece of marble for two hours about the latest L-Corp advance,” she chuckles, “and uh- it made me realize he’d have liked it so, I made some adjustments and it’ll be named after him once it comes out. I don’t think it’ll make up what I did but… it’s something, right?”
She doesn’t finish sitting down on the couch before she’s rolling her eyes, “Andrea and I had another fight on Sunday. We were doing so well, honestly. But she just had to do one of her ‘subtle’ questions that aren’t really fucking subtle, I can tell when she’s fishing for a story. And we’re back to square one.”
“And what did you do?”
“I left,” she scoffs.
“I’m tired today. Just… tired. I don’t really have a reason why but… I am.”
“I started therapy because I wanted to get better, for Kara”
“Better how?”
“I thought.. maybe if I fixed what was wrong with me, all my issues, then- then I’d be stronger and she’d take me back but…”
“But?”
“But that’s not even the reason why Kara broke up with me, no matter how much I tried to blame it on me and now… I see there are a lot more things to focus on than Kara. And this helps, here, you. It really does.”
Dr Simmons smiles. “I’m glad to hear you say that.”
Lena should’ve known better. She knows better on most occasions. Being earthbound means, for her, being three steps ahead of the natural course of predictability. But she’s always been a step behind luck.
She should’ve known better when she, blearily and reeking of single malt, typed in an email for the practice’s secretary, making a sharp point on why she wouldn’t make it on time for Monday’s round of support group, asking if he could reschedule and find her a spot for the closest event she could be squeezed in before her absence became noticeable to certain patrons.
Slumped on the cold leather of her chair, she sighed as her earbud pinned with a notification.
Friendly Counseling Bureau.
Thursday the 21st of October, 2021. 5:30pm.
Novamente Clinic, counseling firm. 7167 Hyrax St. National City.
Lena should have known beforehand. Even if it was impossible to make the slightest hint of a wild guess.
She hates Thursdays, hates how they’re trapped in the middle of a war between being part of the early or late portion of the week. Hates how unpredictable they are, how they are the hardest days for her to wake up - knowing she’s so close to her recently patented three-days-weekend, but still having to fight the shackles of the mishaps of the day before coming home to an empty penthouse.
She hates that it takes her driver calling in sick, no available parking spots near the building, forgetting her coat and having to fight the bite of October’s breeze, and crashing into someone’s sturdy back when she yanks open the door of the hall with her still sight glued to the screen of her phone to confirm that Thursdays, fate and luck hate her back.
“Lena?” a familiar voice calls from above her. Long, tan fingers cradle her hand where she’s rubbing her shoulder, a bitter grimace and some foul choices of speech itching in the tip of her tongue. To her regret, her traitorous eyes flit upwards, only to find a haunting, concerned shade of blue hovering. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you coming in. Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
The only figurative similitude she shares with Thursdays, fate and luck is that she hates herself, too. Not in the same pernicious, hostile way she used to wish her bones would become liquid acid and rot her from inside out - she wouldn’t be stuck in this godforsaken event if she didn’t think therapy wasn’t helping her. But, there’s an unhealthy quantity of self-resentment simmering in the lowest ring of her ribs as her gaze gets caught up in Kara’s worried curl of lips, then in the handprint branding her hip.
Today, out of most days, she hates that the woman she’s woefully in love with is looking back at her with that same amount of love, and yet she can’t climb to her tiptoes and wrap Kara in a warm hug, can’t kiss her and give her the key to the secrets of her heart so Kara knows how beautiful she is under the septic white light of the room.
However, she can breathe in and out, stand upright and stutter her way into a conversation.
“Kara,” she pants, tongue bone dry. “Hey– hi, what are you–… this was the last place where I expected to find you.”
It’s a rhetorical question. Lately, most of her Kara-related inquiries don’t hold much sense.
However, she needs the metaphorical tether to bind her to gravity. If Lena can navigate tamed waters, ask for the obvious while ignoring finger-shaped indentations in the can of Canada Dry Kara is gripping or the flashy Alexander the Great scribbled on the name tag fixed to the collar of her jacket, she sure will be steering that wheel with as much subtlety she can scrape from the knot of intrusive thoughts in her mind.
"I wasn't expecting to find you here either," Kara says, hiding her face behind her hair as she looks down and covers her awkwardness with a chuckle. "Have you- it’s been long… how are you doing?"
There is a moment of stillness in Lena's mind when she hears the question. It's been a while since anyone asked- she'd kindly requested Dr. Simmons to stop doing it and she had become too in tune with Nia, Kelly and Sam for all of them to know when one was not okay.
But the moment of stillness doesn't come because she hasn't heard the question in a while. It's because, when she thinks of the answer, she actually knows the answer is good. And it’s an honest verdict.
"Better," she mumbles instead, because good might be too much of an overstatement to how many setbacks she has from time to time, "you?"
Kara hisses. "Better, too. More calm, I think."
“That’s great.” Her smile feels like a stranger in her face, stiff and unfamiliar when it used to be the most natural occurrence whenever her ex-girlfriend orbited around her.
Clearing her throat, Lena cranes her neck down and catches the nervous scuffing of Kara’s shoes against the tiles. She bites her tongue, allows the metallic taste to coat the walls of her cheeks so it stops her from blurting out pathetic lines like please, love me again or I’m still in love with you or even worse–
“I miss you.”
“Kara, you can’t–” It’s not fair. Lena loves her so much. It’s not fair that Kara is looking at her as if Lena wasn’t the shrapnel-impaled victim of the explosives her fears triggered. It’s not fair that she’s standing in front of that innocent, blue-eyed smile and feels everything other than the miracle of having her heart stitched back to her body. “Why didn’t you tell me you started therapy?”
The sound of the can crumbling takes Lena’s eyes off Kara. She hugs herself and waits for an answer that, hopefully, won’t leave an acrid taste on its path.
“Nobody knows,” Kara rushes to disclose, “other than Alex, that is. Um. Besides, we– we haven’t talked in a long while.”
Ah.
A few agonizing weeks of Lena being axed from the spine up and down at the mere mention of her ex’s whereabouts. Nothing overzealous. Just her limbs chilling with her unruly heart’s attempt at trying to shatter past the sorrow and run to the caped star outlined high in every sunset’s skyline.
Last time she had seen Kara, it had been on a Thursday.
The murmur of her surroundings snatch her attention back to the present. The subtle slouch of Kara retreating into herself, the burning blush mantling her cheeks, it’s summary enough for Lena to know what Kara is feeling.
Shame is a crux she carried over the first weeks of her rounds around the practice.
“You know my number by heart, you could’ve dialled. That we’re no longer together doesn’t mean I won’t be there when you need me.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Kara exhales. “I know that, it’s just…”
Lena steps forward to cup the edge of a warm jaw, holds the weight as if she were cradling ancient relics and swallows yet another love confession after the blonde sucks in a shuddering breath and falls prisoner to her touch, closing her eyes and crushing her cheek to the hand caressing it.
It’s hard that it is so easy with her.
“For the first few weeks, it fucking sucks. You feel like nothing the person holding the notepad says will nip the issue in the bud, that there are no words in our language that could help you heal,” Lena says, stroking the pad of her thumb across a sharp cheekbone. “But it gets better, and this is something that could do you good, Kara. There’s no place for shame after you realise what a total bitch it is.”
“It’s weird when you’re the half-full glass kind of person,” Kara teases her, light lashes fluttering on the skin of her inner wrist, right where her watch lies sound in place.
“Say the word and I’ll inject a cocktail of cynicism to the missing half of the glass.”
Kara laughs, that typical low huff sound she makes the times Lena utters words she doesn’t fully agree with and, unconsciously, her hands clasp around the fabric of Lena’s dress, clutching tight after she realises what she’s doing, in the hopes of grasping a fleeting moment of mercy before she has to let go.
Lena doesn’t want Kara to let go. Never again.
It can be easy, she could make it work. For Kara, she can find a way to make it easy.
At this point she fears sounding like a broken record, but once again, she’s on luck’s black list.
Lena doesn’t realise how close their breaths blend until Kara stumbles out of their bubble as if struck by lightning, flushed and offering apologetic smiles as a hand on her shoulder deliberately steers her across the crowded hall, disappearing past the back door, foregoing the tents set for the evening’s appointment.
There’s a reason why they are there, after all. And as unbelievable as it sounds, for Lena, this isn’t all about Kara.
Rather quickly for her stunned brain, a nice woman with salt and pepper speckling her roots walks to Lena and makes her familiar with the inner workings of the schedule, shoving into her hands a name tag Lena doesn’t get to read before she’s being pulled into the tents.
It’s an odd kind of speed-blind-dating with the hilarious twist of seeking to bond with faceless people, people she doesn’t have to contact or identify unless she feels comfortable to do so. They were paired in historic pairs, Lena had been told, to find them was her own decision.
The only purpose is to offer anonymous, unbiased support in exchange for the same quantity of unanimity.
As if.
“I would rather trust my brother with world peace than let someone else in,” Lena complains, eyes rolling skull-high. Washed all by herself in the golden, dim light of the room she was thrown into mere seconds ago.
Unfortunately, at least for her, she’s proven wrong in the next sixty ticks of the clock hung in the wall to her left. Sinking into the cushions, ready to sulk for how much time these shenanigans will take, Lena shuts her eyes and lets her head hang on the back of the sofa.
“Um– hello? Is anyone– can someone hear me?”
The voice coming from the speakers is grave, nowhere natural, crossing the borders of modified. And that, along the mirror making up the wall she’s facing, makes a great combo to instill some confidence in Lena, to feel like she still has control granted by the privacy.
She stares back at her reflection, picks apart her posture the way her mother used to do at breakfasts in the manor. Her shoulders are tense, sitting taut to hold the weight of her heavy mind. Ramrod straight, her spine feels like it could snap at any time given, but Lena overlooks it to focus on her hands, inwardly chastising herself when she realises she’s fiddling.
She’s nervous. That she can’t deny.
“Is this as uncomfortable to you as it is for me?” Lena has to ask, not knowing which line could break the ice in one of these situations.
Although strange, the deep chortle that greets her back adds its penny to put Lena at ease. Blood rushes to her head, and she sucks in a long breath, waiting for a more articulate answer.
“Not really, no,” her partner for the evening says, slow, robotic and endearingly nervous, too. “The fact that I can’t see you helps a lot, don’t think I would feel this confident if I knew what your face looks like. Not that I think you don’t have a nice face– you probably do. What– what I mean is… ugh.”
Knowing she won’t be seen, Lena covers her face with her hands and allows a smile to overtake her stiff features. It’s unfathomable how swiftly awkward people can charm her.
“Take your time,” she offers, granting the small mercy the person on the other side must be begging for.
“Sorry, I’m usually way more eloquent than this. Uh… nice to meet you, by the way, I’m– I’m not supposed to tell you that.”
Lena tsks, glancing at the stupid smile on her face in the mirror. “That’s what they said.”
“It's my first time attending one of these meetings, I might be a bit rusty. But I asked a friend and he told me the easiest way to kickstart the conversation was to lean on light topics,” the person says, “so, how’s family? How's your love life doing?”
The first concrete conclusion Lena makes is that she and her friendly counsellor have extremely opposite definitions of what light topics entail.
Not even putting her family and her love life on a balance could tell Lena which court is trying harder to get rid of the liability that she represents.
If this stranger had asked about her recently dusted passion for avoidance, she would’ve poured her heart out to them as if they were Dr. Simmons. But alas, there are a couple of variables she doesn’t have the guts to bring up to the metaphorical mirror-wall yet.
“Given my family has a clandestine reward for my head, and I was dumped not so long ago… I’m not sure those make for simple topics.”
“Shoot, sorry to hear that. I have a great family, and sometimes I assume everyone else does too, which is stupid–”
“–it’s not. I mean, yeah, you shouldn’t assume. But the fact that you believe all people to be kindhearted is… refreshing,” Lena says, plucking at the edge of her skirt. “Now that we’re past my fucked up family and your decent one, how’s that other variable going for you?”
“The love life?”
“Yup.”
“It’s not going at all. My girlfriend and I just broke up, too.”
Lena purses her lips. Relatable. “Want to talk about it?”
“Have you ever felt like the world constantly conspires against your happiness? We loved each other too much… it felt like that amount of love was doing more harm than good.”
Lena hears a crack in their voice. Maybe it is a choked sigh, maybe it is the speaker. Her heart aches all the same, an empathetic retort to the pain she does hear in the following take of breath.
It’s funny that, no matter how distant her life is from the stranger on the other side, they’re sitting right now separated by a thin wall made of glass and letting their lives revolve around each other. If only for a couple of minutes, or at least until one of them gives up on the pressure.
It’s funny that she gets them. Not because she’s obligated to, but because her own heart is experiencing the same type of ache.
“Isn’t love supposed to fix everything?”
“Apparently, no. At some point, loving each other also started to mean needing each other. Growing a sense of dependency on your partner isn’t healthy.”
Lena bites her knuckle, rubs it across the faded crimson of her lips. There’s a strong point to their argument.
“You should be able to need them, and yet know how to live without them,” Lena adds, “it takes emotional range to bring someone into your life, trust them with your heart and expect them to not stomp on it.”
“Wise words.”
“Thanks, I borrowed them from my therapist.”
“But do you believe them?”
The clock interrupts her thoughts, the telltale of tick-tock already drilled into her ears.
It’s been seventeen minutes since she sat down on the sofa and started scraping the lid of her Pandora box to a complete, bravely faceless stranger.
Would it be prudent to pour her heart out, too? Should she keep some of her dignity deep in the bottom?
“I’m sorry if I hit a sore topic,” a small apology flows to her, and the decision is made for her.
“I’m still learning how to believe that,” she confesses, “I have a black or white personality. There’s no space in my life for grey zones, unless we’re talking about morality.”
The stranger laughs, and with the way her heart goes rampant in the dark cavity of her chest, Lena is afraid it will take control and fist its way to the other world behind the mirror wall.
She hasn’t experienced such a powerful connection ever since...
“If I love someone and they love me back, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be together, right? And if we aren’t, then there’s no real love in the equation.”
“Uh–”
“–no, wait. Before you think I’m a total witch, that’s what I used to think,” Lena defends herself to the mirror, foregoing her heels and tugging her legs underneath herself. “My ex and I broke up because they were going through a rough patch, and I tried to reason with them, but there are some occasions where you cannot keep glueing pieces together. You have to let it break before you can start rebuilding it, otherwise it’s going to break you.”
“Love isn’t enough,” the stranger croaks, “I found the hard way. I would give my life away for her in the blink of an eye, but the stuff that exists between life and death scares me. So I acted out of fear, but I wasn’t protecting her, I was just hurting her. Once again.”
“Protect her? Are you some type of vigilante? A knight of night?” Lena jokes, if only to alleviate the tension building in her skull. She doesn’t expect the nervous spluttering in return.
“No! No– ha, ha. Wouldn’t that be fun?” they say, “my mind sometimes is plagued with thoughts I don’t like. And I’m not a fan of people too close to that.”
“We’re all works in progress. It’s okay to find yourself in a dark place from time to time, what matters is the tools you use to get out of there.”
Lena knows today isn’t about her own healing, but how polished is her skill to help others heal. She knows. But as she catches her reflection in the mirror, the healthy blush and the shiny screen in her veneered eyes, she believes she’s doing pretty good so far.
“Bingo, you’ve found my Achilles’ heel. I’ve been abandoned so many times that now it’s Pavlovian for me to run away when things get hard. ”
“And were they? With your girlfriend?”
“Ra– God, no. It was so easy, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.”
“But then…”
“I’m a coward. I love her with my whole heart, but I lost her because I don’t know how to handle that much love.” Lena hears the squeak of sneakers against the tiles, figures her partner is shifting and finding safe territory in their own land. “She was doing too much for me. She became my healer, and the kind of baggage I carry with me? I mean– I don’t wanna brag, but it’s exhausting.”
“That’s what you do for the people you love, you help when they can’t help themselves.”
“Yeah, but not at the expense of their own well-being. It broke me to see her light dimming whenever she found out something about me.”
There’s a lot of pain and guilt in their voice, that much she can decipher. Could they be as broken as Lena once was?
“Were you purposely hiding them from her? If there was a way to stop the things you’ve done and hurt her then–”
“–no, we don’t have secrets between us. Not anymore. And… remember what I said when we started? About the world being against me? Most things that happen to me aren’t even my fault.”
Lena frowns, tuning to the pounding of her own pulse under the strap of her watch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing… I just– life’s not fair, that’s it.”
“But you love her?”
“Mhmm, she’s the best thing to ever happen to me. There are days it feels like I don’t deserve good things, but she was always there to remind me that maybe I do–” a laugh comes next, the joy drained out of it– “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We’ve barely talked about you.”
She shakes her head, unsuspecting. “You don’t have to worry about that, truly. I was expecting to come here and have someone prodding for information I don’t fancy sharing. But you have been nothing but attentive and desperately honest, so I’m thankful.”
“Still…”
“Giving you advice is ten times better than poking my guts out for you to study, believe me. I’m the scientist, not the volunteer,” Lena says, drags her sweaty hands across fabric. “Hearing you worked wonders to make a verdict.”
“Oh, no.” Lena giggles, she actually giggles. “What is it?”
“I’m a firm believer that love, as beautiful as it is, is the hardest sentiment to get caught up in.”
And it is. It is for her. Maybe it is for Kara, too. But she understands that the root of their weaknesses isn’t entirely wedged in the foundation, but the cracked bricks they chose to pile without noticing.
She loves Kara, and Kara loves her too. That’s enough fuel to keep working.
“Look, love isn’t about the fifty-fifty balance. Love is, essentially, about offering your eighty when your partner is twenty. And accepting the seventy when you’re feeling as low as thirty.”
“That’s quite the clinical outlook.”
“Well, I can be quite calculating.”
“I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.”
Strangely, Lena does too. “Then, what are you going to do next?”
“Keep working on myself, so I can be with her. What about you?”
She pulls her eyes off the mirror, glances at the clock and realises they hit the forty minute mark. “Might as well do the same.”
“Thank you, friendly…”
Picking the name tag she didn’t have time to stick to her clothes, she reads the name and pales. She remembers being paired in duos, remembers the name of her counterpart being jotted down in Kara’s tag. It doesn’t take a genius to realise Lena was talking about her ex to her ex this whole time.
She fucking hates that it takes historical lovers to realise she hates her luck, too.
How didn’t the possibility cross her mind?
“Hephaestion.”
“Oh, I’ve got Alexander the Great!” Kara says, and–
“Figures.”
And just like that, like any other Ancient Greek, Lena readies herself for war.
She shoots out of the sofa and bolts out the clinic’s door in the following minute, never taking a glance back in fear that Kara figured out who she was venting to.
Letting the motions handle her, Lena switches her autopilot on and wanders through the next few days working by inertia, RSVP-ing positives to random invitations waiting on her mail, including the Halloween party one of her acquaintances at the clinic had made her guest of.
She busies herself, dumps random activities in her schedule to quieten the wandering thoughts starring a certain angel-faced blonde.
To avoid thinking of Kara and her defeated words.
Kara and her fears involving Lena.
The night of the party comes, and the mixed odor of alcohol, sweat and mud are the bloody battlefield. Dark clothes, dark makeup and the bright red cup brimming with vodka in her hand her body armor.
Ringing more loudly than civilian-appropriate, the hardwood floors of Tristan’s lakehouse boom under her feet. People pass by her, more than one dragging their eyes and unabashedly checking her out. She has yet to recognise a familiar face, wonders why she would be invited to a private party by someone she has interacted with less than two times in her life.
She subtly picks up her phone, an universal signal of leave me alone- and pretends for the longest minute of her life that the only messages there aren’t Nia’s and Kelly’s, telling her to leave her phone and have fun .
She’s anxiety-ridden. She can’t leave her phone and have fun. That’s not how it works.
Being a party goer was never much of her thing. If anything, she would be arm wrestled by her friends into stepping foot on university fraternity territory. She was rather used to playing the porcelain doll, hanging from her father’s arm at balls and wearing a smile that dissipated underneath the lewd compliments handed in silver plates.
This crippling lake house is far from Metropolis’ hippodromes.
However, Lena’s selflessness wasn’t completely genuine when she pulled the green light in the invitation and, even if she had been trying to not think of her, catching a glimpse of Kara out of stiff interactions at the tower was a wide percentage of the reason why she said yes in the first place.
She just has to expect her lack of mundane social skills to not betray her before she bumps into her target. Which doesn’t take long, thanks to years of visual training floating to the surface.
That, and the fact that Kara chose godforsaken Waldo as her costume in a Halloween adult party bordering on quasi-nudity and broad depictions of danger.
Warmth washes over her the way it always does whenever her eyes get locked up in Kara, charmed by the red pompom of her hat and the dorky glasses. And Lena downs the last sip of cheap vodka before discarding her cup into a bin full of fake skulls and blood, taking post under a hovering skeleton to hide from stray eyes. But to her universally acknowledged bad luck, a metaphorical ice bucket is dumped down her back as she takes bottles of beer one after the other, straightening her spine as she swallows her tongue and stares at her favourite person from afar.
There’s a woman all over Kara, holding her elbow and throwing her head back laughing at whatever joke her ex is picking from her arsenal.
It doesn’t take long for Lena to start running hot, the blood coursing through her veins pumping acid that travels up to the mouth of her stomach, nauseating her.
The stranger keeps touching Kara, hands inching closer to the sacred territory of her arms, fingers wrapped around the stripped fabric covering skin that used to belong to her. To skin she used to be wrapped in the cold nights, that she used to bite at when Kara was inches deep inside Lena, vowing into her ear how much she loved her.
She tries her hardest to keep the alcohol in her system.
It’s not like they owe each other anything. They haven’t been together for a long time now, but entertaining the idea that Kara could be moving on without her drives Lena to insanity lane. Like her flesh is rotting off her bones from the searing heat of her pain.
It’s far from fair, but Kara isn’t responsible for what she feels. Even if there was the underlying understanding that they were waiting for each other, that they were taking time to heal before coming back stronger.
The stab of betrayal prickles too sharp in her tongue to wash down with beer, so she accepts the flask a shirtless Elvis is holding out for her and gulps down a big swig, coughing as it drips like gasoline down her throat.
She’s about to turn around and leave to have her own pity party at home when the song finishes, and that window of time is silent enough for Kara to tune in the heavy beats of her heart, neck whipping at light-speed in the direction of the doorway, a bright smile splitting her face in half as she catches a glimpse of Lena standing there.
Hook, line and sinker.
“Lena!” Kara shouts above the music, gracelessly rushing to her side with eager steps. She’s embarrassed to acknowledge the surge of victory when she sees the dissatisfaction in the woman’s face after she’s abandoned without a second thought. “You came! I didn’t believe it when Tristan told me you would be here tonight.”
“Why? Because life has made me bitter?” she snaps. Just because Kara left her conversation behind to run to her doesn’t mean she’s off the hook… not at all.
“You hate parties, duh.” Her bitterness seems to fly over Kara’s big, pretty head. “Who are you tonight?” she asks and her eyes narrow, studying Lena’s festive attire.
Lena smiles, displaying the fangs she had found last minute in a closing corner shop. Kara’s eyes grow a dark ring that glows under the moonlight, and she leans on the feeling for a few pauses. That tidbit of information does wonders to her bruised ego.
“Count Dracula, I guess,” she says, licking her lips, watching Kara be enthralled with the motions of her tongue. “And you chose Waldo? I had the time of my life trying to find you.”
She blushes, laughs that nervous laugh Lena adores. After Lena tugs at the strap of her messenger bag, the blonde lights up and jerkily steps back, if only to rummage through its depths.
“I saved these for you,” Kara says, handing her a bag of witch-themed Kit-Kats. “Trick or treating was slow this year, I got stood up by Alex. Something about Kelly and some Garter person.”
Lightheaded, Lena hums a dry laugh and plucks the candy from Kara, making sure to pull her close from the leverage she has on her hand. She’s tipsy, tiptoeing around and hanging from the tail of a drunken devil; she couldn’t build the courage to do what she does next if it wasn’t for the liquid fuel.
“You want some?” she asks, the face of faux innocence, looking up at Kara through thick lashes.
“I mean– I kept them for you but, um. Yeah, don’t see why not.”
The Elvis impersonator from before lifts the flask behind Kara’s back, silently asking Lena if she’s up for more, and she grips the cold metal before bending her elbow, ignoring concerned eyes glaring at the long-gone guy as Lena grants back the bottle. Kara stands taller, creating a barrier between her and the other poisoned partygoers, but her eyes are so soft when she glimpses at Lena, they almost seem liquid.
Tearing up the Kit-Kat package, she picks a single bar and bites the corner, holding the rest between her teeth for Kara to bend down and take. Blue eyes widen, and she places a hand across the length of Kara’s spine, feeling muscles shift as her ex leans in under the pressure her palm applies to her back.
Polite as the gentlewoman she is, Kara doesn’t take the bait right away, but latches onto the curve of her hips and breathes hard as she bites into the chocolate, a hair’s length away from kissing away the smirk on her face.
Lena stumbles, weak at the knees. The sharp bouquet of Kara’s cologne fills her nostrils when she hides in the crook of her neck, the waft doing more to placate her haywire senses than weeks of overpriced meditation sessions downtown ever did.
“You’re cruel, did you know that?” Kara asks, jaw hooked to the crown of Lena’s head.
“Who was that girl you were talking to before?”
“Uh?” she leans back, barely taking her eyes away from Lena’s mouth, debating something with herself. “Ah. That was Aurora, Tristan’s sister. They own this lake house. Why? Did you… do you want me to introduce you?” Kara frowns, averting her eyes from her. A twinge of jealousy coating her own words.
“Nope. Not really, thank you,” she slurs.
And, honestly, Lena can’t remember why she was so angry at someone else touching her Kara. Not when she’s the perfect face of innocence and obliviousness, not when blue eyes keep looking at Lena as if she was the sun herself.
She shivers, vibrating with the love that threatens to spill out of her.
“Are you cold?” Kara wonders, hands already travelling to the hem of her striped sweater. “You always refuse to wear thick layers in autumn, that’s reckless,” she whispers and caresses the length of Lena’s arms, waking a path of goosebumps on her trail.
The idiot of an ex-girlfriend she’s stuck with doesn’t have any right to know details about her, nor nail that nerdy gorgeousness while reciting them if she isn’t doing anything about it. Like kissing Lena, or pinning her against a tree log to have her way with her.
Having scurried from her modesty, left parked in the doorway of Tristan’s and Aurora’s lakehouse, Lena drags her hands under the white and red sweater Kara is donning, rejoicing in the whimper puffed against her mouth after she plants her palms in the ridges of her abs and scratches, feeling the muscle flex beneath her ministrations.
“I miss you.”
Kara sighs, lids twitching. “Lena, you’re wasted.”
“So what?” she lets out a sour chuckle, “it’s not like I don’t miss you when–”
“–I know, and I miss you too, you know that, but–”
“–you look so pretty tonight–”
“–I don’t want you to say things you wouldn’t want me to hear if you were sober.”
The pressure around her wrists doesn’t register until she clenches her fists only to grab at cold breeze, branches whistling above them and suffocating Lena in the dome of humiliation she built herself.
“Then why do you let–” a loud, anguished shriek tears her string of speech apart.
Through her double vision, Lena manages to distinguish an ocean of guests running to the shore of the lake, a spectrum of emotions raging in their faces.
Her blood freezes when she sees a pale hand holding a flask high in the air, right before it blurries away underneath the ripple of moonlit water. She doesn’t move, can’t move. The blood in her vessels had been heated up with the liquor offered by the same guy struggling to fight his watery grave, and Lena wishes she could get close and offer a straw for him to clutch - but her blood is crystal, and if she takes a false step, the adrenaline could shatter her.
“Stay right here, okay? Don’t move until I come back,” Kara barks the order, forcing eye contact so Lena gets the gravity of her words.
And Lena, for all of her fearlessness, doesn’t find the voice to halt Kara from jumping into heroics, watches with a tremble injected in her jaw as her ex runs away from her, discarding her messenger bag and the hat as she shouts for people to move out of her way and submerges into the black pit with a clean dive.
The reel replays in her head in the most sickening of ways, taking Lena away from the moment and throwing her into an entry painted with a vignette effect, almost twenty-four years ago, on the other side of the globe.
Realistically, her cerebrum can reason and aim a shot through the fog, making Lena understand that Kara will be okay, that she has faced several threats worse than a dip in a lake in the middle of the night. But life, Irish mountains and a couple of paramedics discussing in hushed tones to come up with a way to tell a four years old that she would be motherless for the rest of her life screwed up her control of emotions from a young age.
Now it is convincing her that she is going to lose the love of her life in the same tragic predicament. She’s not coming up. She’s not coming up. She’s not coming up.
She’s paralysed with panic from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, a wave of nausea blocking her airway.
Nothing helps bring her down from her catatonic stupor, not even watching Kara break through the surface with a limp body hanging from her arms after what feels like a lifetime. Not even watching her hands press down on his sternum, performing CPR on the guy as the crowd stares with fear etched on their faces. Lena allows minimum reliefs to barge in when she hears him choke, before he turns to his side and coughs out an alarming amount of water.
Quickly, Kara discards his clothes and helps him lay in a blanket, wrapping him in dry layers to get his thermoregulation to work, warming him up as much as possible before the ambulance arrives.
Kara doesn’t part from his side for a moment, touching his shoulder and making sure she’s there for him as he goes from shock to realisation, his skin going from a shade of purple to ashen white.
And Lena just watches, because that’s all she can do. Watches until her eyes blurry with tears and the ground starts to swallow her, devoid of energy to keep pushing the night’s terror away.
She had been that person once. She had been the one with a small, weighted blanket resting on her shoulders, hyper focused in the blaring lights of the ambulance burning her retinas.
Her most precious tether was taken away from good. And, back then, Lena had just watched, too.
“Lena? Lena? Baby, please. You’re scaring me.”
Blinking, she becomes aware of the veneer of dryness clouding her eyes, stares into the void as she acclimates to the present, Kara’s face coming back to clear-cut definition.
She can’t stop the force of the sobs that overwhelm her next, can’t feel the sting of the prints of her nails into her palms, right where she was clutching Kara’s hat to her chest - she doesn’t even know where she got it from.
“How could you– I… Kara, you can’t–” she stutters out, a surge of tears clogging her airways.
“I’m okay. I’m all good, see?” Kara says, grabs Lena with cold hands and smooths her palm above her beating heart. “It’s over, and I’m here with you.”
Lena shakes her head. “It was– I thought I was going to lose–”
A sob breaks through her aching lungs, and Lena launches herself into Kara’s arms, hugging her with all the strength her muscles can conjure. She doesn’t care that Kara is still drenched, disregards how the icy water seeps into her blouse as she tugs her closer and cries into her shoulder. Finding peace in the strength of Kara’s arms around her, in the hand stroking up and down her spine.
“I’m here, I’m not going anywhere,” Kara promises in low tones, never letting go of her hand as they wander through the now vacated house, following her up close as they climb the stairs and walk into an empty room.
Lena seats quietly on her hands and bites the inside of her cheeks, eyes tracking Kara’s steps around the room. She watches her materialise dry clothes out of thin air, stripping down to her underwear without shame. And.
Apart from the residual fear, the numbness has dissipated to a tingling sensation in her limbs, defrosting from the grip the lure of death had on her neck. Left in its wake simmers an acute urgency to have her close, to make sure Kara is real and not a sick hallucination her mind raised to shield her from the other alternative.
Nostalgia dawns upon her and with the demolishing desire to have her hands reconnect with Kara, Lena scrambles to her feet and tears the distance between them. Pushing Kara to the wall as she finishes tying the knot of her sweatpants, panting even before she meets her focal point.
There’s a fleeting moment where, after she cups her jaw and crashes her lips to hers, Lena thinks that the wait is over, that this close-call has been enough of a tribulation to step away from the brake wedged into their relationship. But she climbs to her toes and moulds her chest into Kara, siphoning the warmth from her bare torso, whimpering into her mouth and yet getting nothing but apprehension.
“You’re drunk,” Kara says, turning her face away. “We can’t, not like this.”
“I’m not drunk anymore, not after that fucking show,” she growls, “Kara.”
“No. I want to, Rao, I have been dying to. But I’m doing this for you, for us.” She squeezes her hands before she goes to pick a black hoodie. “Let me fly you home?”
At last, Lena steps away from her and draws a meridian between them to save herself from the sting of rejection, sulking in her own hemisphere. Grimace firm in place, she grants her dignity some self-respect and shoves her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, shaking her head.
“I drove here.”
“Well, you know I can’t let you behind the wheel until it’s all out of your system. So it’s either asking my sister to come pick you up, or letting me drive you home,” she puts voice to the lifebuoy, as if Lena could choose anything else than sharing space with her. Lena nods, looking up at Kara after she grabs her forearm to stop her from exiting the room. “I’m not saying no, or rejecting you. I’m just– this is me giving a window of time for you to think it through.”
Lena sniffs, eyes glistening. “I’m sure of what I want.”
“Then let’s go home.”
A little past two in the morning, Lena is sitting in one of the chairs lining her kitchen’s countertop, a warm cup of tea cradled in her hands as she stares at the five lightbulbs hovering above her. She’s grasping all of her senses again, the colour coming back to her cheeks after having traded the jeans and heels for a pair of sleep shorts and a frayed t-shirt, one that has Kara’s eyes widening from where she leans against the kitchen sink as she recognises the garment to be hers.
The speech she had composed on their way home evaporated from her mind the second Kara opened the door for her. Jitters course through her, have her swallowing scorching mouthfuls of Barry’s Gold Blend to occupy her with something other than blatantly staring or blurting out nonsense to pierce the silence.
And yet, there’s a question lingering in her mind that won’t let her sleep if she doesn’t ask it in the following second.
“Have your feelings for me changed?” she asks, shoulders curling inwards.
“What? No! I mean– yes, but in a good way.” Kara scatters to regain her composure, the question coming out of the blue. “If anything, they have only grown stronger.”
“Then when you broke up with me…”
“It wasn’t a matter of how I felt about you,” she shudders out, “I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t, and it hurt a lot when I realised what I had done.”
Dejected, she clicks her tongue. “It was pretty stupid.”
“Oh, yeah, of course. I know that.” The ring of Kara’s laughter brings some more life into her. “But, at the same time, it was something I needed to do. If I had kept pushing through my guilt, then it all would have gone downhill and I would’ve lost you forever.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“Lena, love isn’t enough. I had to find a perfectly fluctuating balance, to learn how to give and receive without taking advantage of your willingness to be there for me.”
A smile threatens to pull her lips upwards, and to let it take over her face borders the limits of being cathartic. “Something about accepting the seventy when you’re feeling like a thirty?”
Kara’s eyes shoot up. “I knew it was you! I spent nights on end wondering whose patient’s family would have a reward for them.”
“Well, you brought light topics to the table.”
“Amateur’s mistake, I’m afraid. I told Tristan the name you gave me but he wouldn’t let me see the charts, I’m guessing he didn’t want me to freak out after realising who you were.” She purses her lips. Lena has an intrusive thought where she presses hers to Kara’s. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You just said it yourself, I didn’t want you to freak out. I backtracked, and it was selfish, but I didn’t want to slow down your process. Worst case scenario, you would have stopped attending therapy, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
Crossing her legs at the ankles, Kara’s shirt rides up and Lena’s drawn out abstinence has her ogling the sliver of golden skin that peeks through before Kara clears her throat.
“So, what you said…”
“It’s true, all of it. Dr. Simmons was one of the best life choices I made this year,” Lena says, and traces the rim of her cup. “And that thing about me being the best that’s ever happened to you?”
“Okay, okay. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“But…” she needs to know if she meant everything else.
Kara abandons her own cup to the sink. She clenches her jaw, finding green eyes across the room with ease.
“You loved me at my worst, and I didn’t know how you could love me at my worst when I can’t love myself when I’m like that. But I know… I know that if the day comes and you feel the way I did back then, I would do the same for you,” she whispers, a distraught expression in her face. The tip of her nose has turned red, and the intervals of time between each flutter of her lashes are growing closer. “I don’t want to deprive myself of your love when it’s one of the very best things in this small corner of the universe.
And this is new, for both of us. And yet– Lena, we have been through so much worse. I know we can’t let our love, which is supposed to be the greatest thing to come out of this mutual suffering, be over before we even start living it the way it’s meant to.”
That’s what it takes for Lena to find her breath again, to make a deeper meaning out of the compass of her words.
Despite the hours of therapy and support, a sign with a giant question mark was still hanging from the flagpole of Lena’s mental sanctuary. She needed this kind of final piece to see the whole picture; riveted between having to move on her own, or begin again with the love of her life.
She’s glad her favoured option won in the end.
“What does this mean? For us, that is.”
“That I’m game if you are. I want to live it all with you, Lena.”
Lena tries her hardest to stop the pitter patter of her heart, but it flares back again with ten times its original strength. Kara lowers off the sink and walks round the countertop, turning the chair around so Lena goes putty in front of eyes broadcasting the fervour of the sun.
Her finger joints crack, she’s enthralled and sated with the muscles of Kara’s forearm tightening as she holds her weight with it, her free hand travelling to hook Lena’s chin between her fingers and push her face upward in a demonstration of strength that pulverises her spine.
She glances up and her eyes flutter close as Kara starts leaning in, giving her time so Lena can pull away if she wants to. But that’s the last thing she needs right now. So, taking matters into her own hands, Lena gathers a fist in the collar of her shirt and hauls her closer, yanks her in for the honour of her patience and her lips are crashing against hers. She feels whole again.
Kara tastes the same way she did all those months ago, lets out the same needy whines as Lena charts the bow of her lips with her tongue and licks into her. Stumbling when the forearm holding her up weakens after Lena’s tongue curls around hers and tugs, both moaning at the heightened stimulation.
Her mouth is heavenly, inviting Lena to make a home of it and stay there for as long as she’s allowed to. But she yearns for more, and even with her hands wandering and touching all the patches of skin she can reach, it isn’t enough. She’s dying to feel the pressure of Kara’s weight pinning her against a solid surface, to feel the gentle strength and devotion as Kara coaxes love vows from her and spreads her apart to worship the most sensitive inches of her body with her mouth.
Lena leans away with a short kiss, giggles when Kara chases her. Desperate and attentive.
“I love you, with my whole heart,” Kara confesses between gasps against her mouth, her thumbnail tracing lazy patterns in the length of Lena’s thigh cinched around her waist.
She presses her forehead to hers. “I love you too, darling.”
The weight of Kara’s arm around her is normal now, has been normal for a while. Usual. Daily. Constant.
A common occurrence that Lena has learnt to catalogue as the most precious of phenomena, especially the times it happens after a long day spent together doing nothing. Hours on end wasted on decompressing, on breathing in the euphoria of vibrating in the same wavelength as Kara. Something that she never believed she would have the chance of living- much less relive, be given a second chance- but it’s now as easy as breathing after almost a year since they gave dating a second shot.
But, for all the love and joy encaged in the corners of their apartment, both Lena and Kara have to remind themselves of the routes they’ve taken to be standing where they are, metaphorically speaking. She has to grant credit where it’s due, because she knows now that love isn’t enough when it’s not paired with the willforce of wanting to grow stronger together.
So, if there are nights where the peaks and highs of their happiness can’t be stifled, there are also the midnight moments where they let go of their strength to fall asleep in each other’s arms. And thus, leave a slat open for their fears to grab them by their crossed ankles.
Like right now, where Lena shifts on her side of the bed and unscrews her eyes only to find her girlfriend staring at the ceiling with blown wide, petrified eyes. The only sounds in the room are the small, almost begging, whimpers that leave Kara’s mouth and the ruffling of sheets as Lena presses her hand on the blonde’s chest, right above her heart- she feels it drumming like a wild thunderstorm and hopes her hushes are enough to relax the blonde.
“Oh, you haven't had one of these in a while,” she whispers, placing her hand on Kara’s cheek when she closes her eyes to get her to look into her eyes. Blue orbs move desperately from side to side, unlike her stiff arms, stiff legs and stiff fingers. “You got this. Remember the plan. All right?”
It pains Lena, tears away at heart whenever it happens. It’s far from being the first time, but the pressure burning behind her eyes is new, a presence she hates when it stops her from aiding Kara.
The night terrors began little less than two months after they started dating the second time, Kara confessing to a frightened Lena that she used to experience them often during her first year on Earth and from time to time after coming back from the Phantom Zone, usually manageable but always terrifying when she’s alone.
Lena didn’t know what to do that first night, no amount of psychological first aid training could have prepared for the feeling of her ribs pressing down hard on her lungs as she watched Kara struggle with herself, not being able to find her voice nor control of her limbs.
But, after long minutes of whispering reassurances and making sure her girlfriend felt her touch, Lena and Kara had managed to win the battle. And, fearful of going back to sleep, she had held Kara tight against her chest, silently letting tears stream down her face while listening to the woman she loved talk about how the pale faces of her dead parents was the first forecast that warned she was about to have another episode.
She hovers over Kara, making her presence known, just like the blonde needed, but staying far away enough not to overwhelm her.
“Control your breath,” Lena says, not letting the watery intonation of her voice affect her. She breathes in, breathes out and begs to a myriad of deities that this isn’t one of the times Kara is left so traumatised that she loses sleep for the following week. “Clench your fist.” Moving a small muscle has proven to be an efficient tool so far, so she makes sure to encourage Kara to engage in any form of motion she’s able to, all in the hopes of snapping her out of the paralysis.
“Uh-huh.” Kara’s whimper is broken, but it fills Lena with sense, and she caresses the protruding bone of her fist, employing the steps she has on arsenal without pushing Kara too close to the edge.
“I'll get the light,” Lena murmurs and stretches her arm back as much as she can, trying her best to reach the night light without breaking apart from Kara. Proximity in the following minutes is as crucial for her as it is for her girlfriend. Their bedroom is quickly washed in a golden light that spills and casts shadows above the blonde’s face, highlighting her bloodshot eyes and the subtle tremble of her lips, signs that she’s fighting hard to move past this. “Okay? I’m right here.”
A couple beats of time pass by and Kara barrels through the mental barrier, finally gets to clench her first then unfurl her fingers after she realises she’s got a grasp of reality.
“Uh-huh.”
“There you go,” Lena coos, strokes her arm. “Clench your fist.”
Following the sound of her voice, Kara wraps her thumb around her fingers and squeezes, regaining control of her body. She sits up, heaving and sucking in mouthfuls of air.
“You did it. Good.” Sweaty strands of honey hair stick to her temples, the silk of her shirt permeated with the fear experienced by the pair, but Kara’s weak smile lights up the room like an imploding star, soft at first but breaking into an amount of energy that could blind. However, Lena pays no attention to the photonic menace and leans in to kiss her forehead, running a hand through her curls. “I’m so proud of you.”
Kara’s hand moves up, finds itself tangling in Lena’s hair, just like it had done every other time. The blonde slowly relaxes more and more in the silence of their room, letting Lena’s touch and smell bring her back to reality. It’s after a couple of minutes that she speaks again, softly although worried.
“You were already awake, weren’t you? You noticed it faster than other times.” Lena only sighs, hides her face in the crook of Kara’s neck in answer, “You should have woken me up, too. Love is balance, remember?”
“You know I think it’s a waste to make both of us lose sleep,” she bites her bottom lip, knows the crinkle that it’s forming on Kara’s forehead- already knowing the dance of this conversation far too well- she kisses her girlfriend’s neck, a silent request to let her continue. “Besides, the dream wasn’t too bad this time and seeing you snore was enough to calm me down.”
“I, I don’t-” Kara scoffs, a little laughter in her voice, “I don’t snore.”
"Tell that to my ears," Lena says and then lets out a shriek when Kara flips them around and pins her to the bed.
“Don’t you dare tarnish my reputation, Lena Luthor!” Kara gasps through an overjoyed smile, bending down to kiss the tip of her nose. Drawing a trail to the scar on her eyebrow and the bags under her eyes, going down to fasten her mellow lips in the edge of her jawline, finally, blessedly, moving to worship her mouth. “Thank you,” she whispers, “I can't thank you enough for everything you do for me.”
It’s not like she’s forced to. Most of the things she does are, in one way or another, payback for all the times Kara’s kindness has saved her life. These small acts of service are born from what she’s learnt from her girlfriend’s own love language, born from the love she holds for her.
When she met Kara, her heart was withering to the whips of an unforgiving society, but the blonde with a crooked smile and the blue eyes and a compassion Lena had never experienced before was the first person to make her feel human in a long time.
She could never forget how Kara polished the dents in her heart without wanting anything in return.
“Love is a balance, right?” Lena shoots back, uses their shared mantra to placate the heavy discomfort still pooling Kara’s gaze.
“I saw Kai Om-Re tonight. He always sat in the front circle at class, the first one to greet me as I walked in. His entire family was part of the Artisan Guild, but he defied generational order and became an early intern for the Science Guild. We were supposed to start around the same age,” Kara retells what she saw in her paralysis, using the vocal catalyst to help her cope, right as she was taught. Same way it is Lena’s.
“My nightmare was Lex, again,” she sighs, sharing her own thoughts, just like they’d both promised to do. We talk, we share. You burden me and I’ll burden you because we’re a team. “We were in the tree house again but this time he was the one pointing a gun at me and…”
She tries off, knowing Kara understands her mind enough to fill in the gaps herself. She nods, peeks her lips in a thank you for telling me- knowing there’s nothing she could say to make Lena’s nightmares go away, the same way there’s nothing Lena can say to scare off Kara’s.
“Rao’s will be done.”
“Rao’s will be done.” Fastening her arms around Kara’s neck, Lena brings her down and kisses her, laughing after Kara lets out a faux squeal. “I love you.”
Kara hums. “I love you.”
And those words, however overused in their relationship, have never been worn off their meaning. To hear her girlfriend mutter them against her shoulder the mornings they woke up tangled together, to spell them across the back of Kara’s hand when they were out and the atmosphere was overwhelming.
There’s a mutual understanding, they have become each other’s anchor in the trek for purpose.
“Come on,” Lena says, pushing her hand against the woman’s shoulder to get her off of her, but Kara only melts into her even more, “I want to get some morning sunlight.”
“But you’re right here.”
Rolling her eyes, she helps her girlfriend up, strolling with lethargic steps to the balcony. “Don’t be so sappy or I might have to fall in love with you.”
“Uh, scary,” Kara jokes, kissing her cheek before launching her weight into the sofa, patting her lap to beckon Lena, rearranging the bodies so Kara is the one soaking in the sunlight and she’s hidden under the shadow. “Pretty girl on my lap? Sitting in the sun? I feel pretty fulfilled at the moment.”
“What–”
“–some potstickers would make my dream life come true, don’t you think?”
“It’s six in the morning, Kara Zor-El. Let your body fully wake up before you start fueling up with over fried oil.”
Dramatic as she’s been for a long time, her girlfriend throws her head back with a low groan, stretches her legs on the coffee table, right next to the resin sculpture where Lena had preserved all the dried plumerias Kara had once left in her balcony.
She leans in, drops a wet kiss to her cheek. Kara’s cute, she’s really cute.
“You’re no fun.”
“I’m trying to preserve your health so there’s someone to annoy me when I need the vibe check,” Lena states, like it’s obvious she wants to spend the rest of her living days with Kara.
It’s rather impressive how quickly the blonde sobers up, straightening up to pierce deep into Lena’s soul with her blue eyes. Kara wraps an arm around her waist, picks her hand and plants her lips to the faded scars speckling her fingertips.
“Rao’s will was done when I met you, you are the sun that lights the way on my journey home.”
And for Lena, the promise of everlasting devotion is crystal clear in her words.
For all the happiness she was feeling before, Lena is surprised to know there’s even more space in her for joy. Thanks to Kara, who’s always finding ways to make her realise what a Lena Luthor in love looks like.
Her girlfriend had been bugging her for weeks, reminding her once more as they’re wrapped around each other in the morning light, to keep her schedule free for October 10th, 2022. Something about remembrance, she had said, about commemorating the years they had known each other.
So Lena did, because she’s in love and there’s nothing that fills her with more peace than date nights with the love of her life.
But when the night finally arrives, it isn’t that surprising when a rushed message lets her know Kara was stuck in the tower, far too used to the coming and going emergencies of being Supergirl’s girlfriend.
The only thing that takes her by surprise about the whole ordeal is that she was not asked to come in to help. That, and the fact that Kara has been radio silent even a couple of hours after the threat was detained. But Lena doesn’t fuss over it, already used to the frantic dynamic of having to take some time to decompress and fill out the official statement for the authorities.
However, she rushes to pick up her keys and her watch, teletransporting to the tower the seconds preceding the text she gets from Kelly, telling her Kara needed her. Yet, as she walks into an almost dark room expecting to find her girlfriend hurt or in any sort of tragic predicament, none of the blinding and strong white lights of the ceiling are on - she’s only able to walk through the room thanks to the red and blue LED lights lining the floor, and the muscle memory of having walked through the area multiple times before.
“Kara?” Lena calls out, heart leaping in her throat as she catches sight of her girlfriend standing alone in the balcony, having replaced the suit with dark jeans and a white button up. “Is everything okay?”
“Hey! You came.” She’s taken aback with the surprise in Kara’s voice, not believing she hadn’t heard her coming from miles back. Lena doesn’t mention it, staring flabbergasted at the bouquet of plumerias Kara extends towards her. “Today marks six years since you walked into my life and changed it, for the better. Of– of course.”
Lena looks at her surprised, even as her hand moves on its own to take the flowers and her lips curl up on its own- she’s usually the one to remember the random and small dates. None of them forget the big ones but it's Lena the one that loves to hold the silly anniversaries close to her chest.
The first time Kara brought her lunch. The first time Kara brought her a present. The first time they hugged. They’ve never talked about whether or not the other kept track of those things, and it warms Lena’s heart to know the blonde does too.
As she watches Kara fiddle with the top button of her shirt, she steps closer but her brows reach her hairline after her girlfriend takes a step back and shakes her head with a shy, hopeful grin.
“I’ve got reservations at a restaurant in half an hour, but I wanted to ask you something first… You- you can say no, obviously. And if- we can just ignore I ever asked and just- just go have dinner.
“What is it?”
Then, in that precious second Lena is sure she will never forget, Kara bends to one knee. And, after all the years she spent wondering how she would swallow the fear of having someone pop the question for her, she finally gets her answer.
With Kara? It’s overwhelming, yet the most gleeful she’s ever felt in her entire life.
“I’m not sure about many things, but I’m sure about you,” Kara starts, her speech injected with nerves that not even the bright light in her eyes halts. “I know this is the place where I broke your heart, once. But this is also the place where we truly became a team, and I'm hoping… that you'd want to be a team with me for the rest of our lives.
“From the moment I met you, I knew you would be someone important to me. I just didn’t realise how much. But– Lena, falling in love with you was that one heads up I never expected, and yet made more sense than anything else. Love is a balance, and we learn that together everyday, because we decided we were worth fighting for.” She straightens, undoes the clasp of the blue box and reveals a bracelet, shaky hands hoisting it up for Lena to see. “This planet has seen us break apart and heal, has heard us pronounce our love millions of times. But, there’s a deep feeling in my heart that makes me believe I came all the way from another galaxy just to kneel in front and ask you if you would like to share your life with me. So, Lena Luthor, will you marry me?”
Yes. Yes. Ten thousand of times yes.
But as she bounces off all extremes of the human emotion spectrum, Lena stays quiet, mouth agape with the shock of the love of her life asking her to be her wife.
Kara, loving and caring and her favourite person, blinks twice per second, watching with an expectant expression while Lena covers her mouth and big tears spring to her eyes.
"I got you a ring, too,” Kara says, revealing a smaller box in which a ring sits- it’s simple, a silver band surrounding a stone that shines a soft blue when light reflects on it, matching perfectly with the ones in the bracelet. It’s perfect. “Because no one else would know what the bracelet means. And I want people to know that you said yes. If- if- you say yes, that is."
And… there’s no version of herself in the traceable universe that could ever say no to Kara.
Lena nods, her head moving up and down in a motion that would give her whiplash if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s already feeling lightheaded.
“Yes,” she blurts out, falls to her knees in front of Kara and cups her face in the cradle of her hands, staring right into the blue eyes of her future wife. “Yes. Oh my– I'd never say anything but yes.”
“Really?” Kara breathes hard, more tears gathering in the corner of her eyes even as Lena does her most to wipe them.
“You’re my dream come true, it would be an honour to call you my wife, too. You- you’re magic, Kara.”
“Here,” her fiancée says, discarding both boxes before clasping the bracelet around her wrist and sliding the ring on her finger, pressing her lips to the blue stones that rest with a reverence that has her heart reeling. Kara looks up, the starlight shining in her smile easily overtaking the dimmed lights of the tower, and she stands up to wrap her arms around Lena, the curl of her mouth never waning.
“God. I love you, I love you.” They laugh, a little bit watery but substantial amounts of content. Lena kisses her, once for having met her, twice for having saved each other, three times for finding love where she never expected it to be. All the times she had the words in the tip of her tongue but couldn’t say them because fate wasn’t ready to see them together, she cashes out her payback, and kisses the love of her life as many times as she wants. Because she can, because this is the start of the rest of their lives together. “I love you so much, Kara.”
“I love you, too. Thank you for making me happy,” she whispers, propping her forehead against Lena’s. “Now I have forever to make you happy, too.”
“Forever sounds good.”
Kara hums, “Do you know what else makes me happy?”
“What?” She closes her eyes when Kara leans forward, resting her forehead against hers and taking in the moment of calmness between her and her fiancée.
“Potstickers,” she says, breaking the moment, making Lena laugh in disbelief, “We should get some.”