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Kara is about half in love with Lena Luthor the moment she steps out of that perfectly appointed office, hot on Kal’s heels and high on the words “You could have fooled me.”
Because everyone, everyone is impressed with the speed and the strength and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but only a few people ever look at her - at Kara Danvers - and see potential.
So far, the list is Ms. Allen, her high school history teacher, Cat Grant, and now, Lena.
Okay, so she might also have a type.
But Lena is different, in that she’s the first really important girl friend Kara has had her own age - who isn’t her sister - and Kara knows herself well enough to expect that the tiny, minuscule really, crush she has will fade over time. She’s determined to have the kind of life-long friend American pop-culture is always idolizing. Lena might not be the hair-braiding type - more’s the pity, with the amount of time Kara spends guiltily fantasizing about running her hands through those dark tresses, fine and thick and soft, how she would smell, pressing light kisses to the line of her neck and Lena would giggle and push and…
No.
She really needs to get a handle on her thoughts.
Sleepovers, instead, she thinks. Movie nights. Lots and lots of food. Totally normal Earth things that she’s never really done and would like to experience.
There’s just one little flaw in her plan, which becomes apparent as they spend more and more time together.
The crush doesn’t fade.
Kara could live with that, maybe. Sure, it’s inconvenient, the way she sometimes gets drawn into Lena’s eyes, or loses her voice when the light hits her cheek just so, or accidentally breaks yet another pencil because Lena happened to smile at her in that way that means something, if only Kara could figure out what.
The problem is that when Lena goes from being unobtainable to an actual friend, Kara’s feelings keep growing, expanding, making her feel slightly drunk and out-of-control.
Because now she knows that Lena can do an expert french-braid.
That Lena will throw her pillow with absolute violence and terrifying accuracy if you wake her up before the coffee is ready.
That Lena likes old movies with men in suits and women in furs who flirt in non-stop snappy dialogue.
And she might have had a crush on Lena Luthor the prodigal CEO but oh, Lena with her hair still dripping wet from the shower, in Kara’s softest old t-shirt and pants, Lena who loves too deeply and feels too much and needs saving more than anyone Kara’s ever met.
Lena is so broken and so beautiful and Kara’s heart is so lost to her.
***
It takes longer, for Lena.
It’s not that she doesn’t love Kara; how could she not?
She can’t imagine anyone who could be around Kara and not fall a little bit in love with her. Judging by the number of suitors who always seem to school around the blonde, she’s not far wrong.
Being around Kara is like….the sun shining on your face. It starts slowly, when they meet for lunch, and by the time Kara’s on her second dessert and Lena her second mimosa the heat has radiated through her body and she feels warm and sleepy and safe. It’s a feeling she wants to curl up inside forever.
If she were a better person, less herself, perhaps that would be enough.
But the Luthor blood flows strong within her, and the sun cannot shine in one spot forever. It dies, seeps into the night, and it’s there that Lena feels most comfortable. The sun gives life but it also burns, threatening to bare all that she keeps carefully locked away. She can’t stand it, sometimes, looking into those clear blue eyes and thinking if Kara knew...if she understood...how Lena might use it for good, but the hunger for power is still there. How she wants, so much, things she can never have, and has to curl her nails into her palms to prevent herself from taking them. The helpless desire, slick and oily in her veins, to give everything she has, if only it will make a nameless, faceless rabble love her.
These are things Kara Danvers could never understand, and knowing that she can’t is almost worse than knowing that she doesn’t.
Supergirl almost always comes at night.
Lena’s not sure why. She’d been the one to initiate contact between them, asking her to help protect the gala, but it still doesn’t explain why Supergirl keeps coming back.
Maybe she enjoys the view.
Maybe she just needs someone to talk to.
But when Supergirl raises her face to the night sky, and talks about the death of a star whose light will still be finding Earth when both of them are long dead, Lena joins her.
If she feels a small twinge of guilt whenever she searches Kara’s eyes for Supergirl’s calm strength, or when the Girl of Steel’s grin widens into something almost light, well. She pushes those feelings down, hard, and expertly avoids dealing with them.
She is a Luthor, after all.
***
It doesn’t happen the way either of them would have wanted.
Kara never works up the courage to tell Lena herself, although she nearly makes herself sick over it.
Lena never puts the pieces together, and later she half-jokingly insists that they come up with a better story because she’s so embarrassed that a certified genius didn’t realize that her best friend and unobtainable crush were the same person.
Really, it was inevitable.
It’s simple, mundane. There’s a man, and a gun, and a grudge, and time that flows in fits and starts. Kara throws herself in front of Lena, cradling the projectile tight to her chest. Lena screams, following Kara to the floor. There are tears pooling in her green eyes and Kara reaches out, bullet still hot against her palm. She wants to apologize, for not being stronger, to beg forgiveness for not saving Lena from this pain. For breaking her promise.
Lena’s eyes distract her long enough for Lena’s fingers to tear frantically at her button-up shirt, ripping it open in search of a bullet wound. Instead her fingers meet smooth ballistic fiber, the slightly raised imprint of a familiar alien symbol. She stops, stutters, the pads of her fingers just brushing the rise and fall of Kara’s chest.
“Oh.” She says, the ‘o’ gasping from the back of her throat, lips curling around the ‘h’.
“It’s you.”