Chapter Text
Lena’s apartment greets her with silence.
The door closes softly behind her, the sound too final for the night to still feel unfinished. She stands there for a moment longer than necessary, keys still in her hand, mind moving too fast to settle on any one thought.
Kara Danvers is Supergirl.
The truth keeps circling, not crashing, not exploding—just orbiting, relentless.
She sets her keys down. Slips out of her jacket. Kicks off her heels without caring where they land. Everything is familiar, immaculate, exactly as she left it. And yet it all feels subtly wrong, like the world has shifted a few degrees off-center and no one warned her.
Lena walks to the kitchen on autopilot.
She pours herself a scotch. Doesn’t sip it yet. Just watches the amber liquid settle in the glass as her reflection stares back at her, composed and unreadable.
Anger starts to rise then. Not all at once—small, sharp sparks.
The interrogation room.
The glass walls.
Kara standing there, arms crossed, saying procedure like it meant anything at all.
Kara hadn’t looked at her. Not really.
Lena closes her eyes and exhales slowly.
She isn’t angry that Kara is Supergirl.
That truth, surprisingly, sits quietly inside her. It explains things. It fills in gaps she hadn’t even realized she’d been skirting around. The late nights. The injuries brushed off with too-easy smiles. The way Kara always seemed to know when something was wrong before Lena ever said it out loud.
No. That part makes sense.
What hurts is what Kara chose to do with it.
What hurts is being dragged into the DEO like a liability. Being contained. Being handled.
Anger curls tighter in her chest.
She takes a sip of the scotch. Lets it burn.
Her thoughts slide backward, unbidden, rearranging memories with brutal efficiency.
The Daxamite invasion.
Lena remembers the fear, the urgency, the way she threw herself into helping because that’s what she does—because if she can fix something, she will. She remembers designing the lead dispersal device, calculating outcomes, trusting that saving the many mattered more than the cost.
She hadn’t known Mon-El then. Not really.
Mike, he’d said, smiling like it was nothing.
She remembers the ship. Rhea’s cold authority. The suffocating sense of being trapped. Trying to escape alongside him, heart pounding, every instinct screaming that they weren’t going to make it.
And then—
Supergirl.
Swooping in like a promise kept.
Lena had thought, foolishly, that the relief she’d seen on Supergirl’s face was for her. That maybe, somehow, she mattered even then.
Now the memory shifts.
Now she sees it clearly.
Supergirl wasn’t happy to see Lena Luthor.
She was happy to see Mon-El.
The realization lands harder than the scotch.
Lena sets the glass down on the counter, fingers tightening around its rim until the cool crystal presses into her skin.
And then her mind turns, inevitably, to Kara.
Not Supergirl.
Kara Danvers.
The woman who burst into her life all sunshine and awkward charm. The woman who asked questions like she genuinely cared about the answers. Who showed up, over and over again, unguarded and warm, wearing optimism like it was armor.
Lena hadn’t wanted that.
She remembers telling herself to be careful. To keep walls intact. She’d spent years building them for a reason.
Kara hadn’t listened.
Kara had smiled and stayed anyway.
Slowly, infuriatingly, she’d made Lena believe she mattered—not as a Luthor, not as an asset, but as a person. As a friend.
Lena closes her eyes.
I let you in.
The truth settles with a quiet, devastating certainty.
She loves Kara Danvers.
Not the symbol. Not the hero.
Kara.
And that—that—is why tonight hurts so badly.
Not because Kara kept a secret. Not even because she found out the way she did.
But because when it mattered, Kara chose fear over trust.
She chose control.
She chose to treat Lena like a villain instead of the person who had stood beside her again and again.
Lena opens her eyes and takes another sip of scotch, finishing it this time. She sets the empty glass down with deliberate care, the sound soft but resolute.
She thinks of reaching for her phone.
Of texting Kara. Calling her. Demanding answers.
She doesn’t.
Instead, Lena straightens, shoulders squaring as something inside her finally stills.
She’s done chasing. Done explaining her worth. Done bleeding quietly for someone who hasn’t yet earned the right.
If Kara wants her in her life—really wants her—then Kara can come to her.
Let Kara do the crawling.
Lena Luthor has already given enough.
The apartment remains silent as she turns off the lights, resolve settling in alongside the hurt—sharp, clean, and unyielding.