Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s been some time since Kara has been to L-CORP.

There are many things that kept her from visiting; some of them circumstantial, because there would really be no reason for her to skip up to the CEO’s office when Lena is more easily accessed in the halls of CatCo, though now she spends her time split between her media empire and picking up the mess left behind in the disappearance of her CFO. When Lena is there, Kara leaves her alone. The reminder of the friendship they shared with Sam is too much for Lena (and Kara, if she’s honest) when Lena needs to spend that time rebuilding her legacy in an office haunted by the ghost of the person that should have been there instead.

Supergirl hasn’t visited, either, but for a very different reason.

It’s not that Kara doesn’t want to repair the broken bridge between Supergirl and Lena-- quite the opposite, in fact, but Lena had been excruciatingly clear with how she felt about Supergirl now. Kara had reeled from those words days after. They settled deep in her chest and crackle with pain every time she breathes. They are a grim reminder of what Kara had done, and what she continues to do. Mrs. Arias had been right; she could bury it deeper and deeper, but it would always come back to blow up in her face at triple the strength.

She’s caught between love and hate, and it’s a very odd position to be in.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that Kara-- Supergirl-- would find herself here now, watching the gleaming tower of L-CORP from afar, feeling the stroke of wind over her face and through her cape as she considered her options. There was really no true choice left. Kara had put herself here by her own doing, her own decisions, some of which were born out of necessity and others the boiling panic that she can never seem to get ahold of until after the fact. Even if she was justified in her fear, Kara could not escape the truth. The crumbling foundation of her relationship with Lena was her fault and would continue to be after the unsteady remains turned to dust.

But Lena deserved the truth, no matter how difficult it was now for Kara to expose it. No matter how much hurt it caused, it was the right thing to do. She admittedly didn’t have the best foresight for an alien with supernatural powers, but she had enough sense to recognize when something this monumental would be brought to light one way or another.

And if anything, the guilt was going to eat away at her until she said something anyway.

Kara takes in a deep breath. The air up here is cold and thin and it nips at her lungs like icy needles. Or maybe that’s just the pain of her fear spiking through her chest at the anticipation she feels.

Either way, it’s unpleasant.

At first, Alex had told her no. She knew what it would mean, what kind of disaster might follow Kara in the aftermath. It had nothing to do with the Luthor name, of course. Alex liked Lena. She didn’t want to see the remaining tether between her sister and the woman she’d grown fond of torn apart. She told Kara that this was something she could never come back from, something that would change everything-- forever.

Kara knew that already.

But she has to do it. Lena deserves the truth.

Alex still doesn’t agree, but she understands.

When Supergirl touches down on the L-CORP balcony, she can’t help but catch her breath unevenly when the pressure of her fear bears down on her chest like a thousand tons of lead. It’s almost suffocating, and her instincts are screaming at her to turn around, to pretend like she wasn’t just about to unload the baggage of her entire life on a woman scorned by Supergirl’s gatekeeping. Her heart is erratic, like a caged animal throwing itself against the bars of its prison with increasing panic.

Kara doesn’t like endings. She doesn’t like change, or uncertainty. Her life was already overflowing with things she couldn’t control, events and people and histories that refused to be corralled into something manageable. She would rather box up time and force it into a standstill to keep the future from leaking out. That would be better, she thinks, than the heartbreak looming just over her head. Than having to face the disaster on the horizon that spells out The End, Go Home, You Screwed Up For the Last Time.

For a moment, Supergirl assumes Lena doesn’t hear or notice her standing at the window. Lena’s back is to her, hunched slightly over the white resin desk, her peripheral shielded by her hand as she looks down at some report. She doesn’t move for a long moment, so Kara takes her time to memorize the curve of her shoulders and spine and the way her dark hair looks so lovely pinned in a loose bun. Her dress is pretty; simple and black, with little flowers in blues and purples scattered across the fabric. She must be working hard, for the desk is covered from edge to edge in stacks of papers and discarded pens.

Kara can pretend, just for that moment, that the stiffness in Lena isn’t caused by the caped hero lingering beyond the glass.

Then, finally, Lena sits up. It’s a slow maneuver, one that Kara recognizes as reluctant and wary. She stands and turns to the window, and Kara wants to run away from the look in her eyes.

Lena is many things. Unhappy, angry, annoyed. Hurt. Kara sees it in the draw of her thick eyebrows and the tight line of her mouth, an expression that very clearly reads, What do you want now and Please leave me alone. It’s not something Kara ever experienced from Lena until the past week, and even then, it was only when Kara wore her suit. Lena folds her arms, closed off. Kara wonders if she’s going to open the door.

But Lena is also polite, even in her anger. After a minute passes, Lena moves toward the window and eases it away on its track, despite that her tense body language echoes back at Kara that she really doesn’t want to.

“What can I do for you, Supergirl?” she asks, and her tone is cool, but not biting. Not quite the frigid greeting that Kara expected, but it’s unwelcoming just the same. Then, after tilting her head, jaw tight, she adds, “Come to check I haven’t been keeping a private stash of Kryptonite from you?”

Supergirl tries not to flinch and fails. She looks down at her hands and doesn’t know what to do with them, so she flexes her fingers and waits until the painful throb of her heart quiets enough for her to respond. “No,” she says, hoping that her voice doesn’t sound as meek as it does in her own head. It’s a barb she deserves, so she lets it sink in with the rest of the hurt clawing its way through her chest. She clears her throat and says, “You sent it back. Why?”

Lena’s eyes harden. “You were quite clear that you wanted to be in control of it all,” she answers, and though her voice is carefully controlled, Kara can hear the flush of anger just behind it.

The rejection is blatant. Supergirl had thought sending the kryptonite to Lena for safekeeping would have been the first step to mending the fracture between them, but she can feel that it wasn’t enough. Lena isn’t interested in mending it.

Words are fighting in her head to be let out, but somehow they get tangled on her tongue. Supergirl struggles to tramp them down into something understandable. “I didn’t mean it as an apology,” she tries, slowly, testing the words as if each one might come out the wrong way. Lena arches an eyebrow. “Honestly. I know I messed up, that I did something that can never be forgiven-- I don’t expect you to, Lena. But if I had to choose between you and the DEO keeping a supply of ‘super-charged’ Kryptonite, I’d rather it be you.”

Lena’s arms are crossed still, and the fingers resting against her upper arm lift in a subtle motion of impatience as her chin tilts upward. Her mouth purses and her stare is still riddled with suspicion. “And why is that?” 

Because I trust you, she wants to say, to scream. But she’s said it already, and it hadn’t made a damn difference then. It won’t now.

Supergirl lifts her head and looks up. She gazes into the office around Lena and feels its familiarity and old comfort as a sharp twinge in her chest. She looks away to the sky around the balcony corners. It’s late in the day, nearing sunset. It’s the time that reminds her the most of Krypton, the way the sky darkens into a bold rust and rose. “Because,” she starts, switching her gaze back to the stern face of the woman still barring the way into the office. “You made it. It’s yours. The DEO is a government sanctioned organization. Aliens have been targeted by them in the past, and may still be in the future. If someone decides later on that they’d rather not have me around, that I pose a threat to the country, they have all the tools they need to get rid of me.” She shakes her head slightly as a memory abruptly surfaces. “It’s why my cousin wouldn’t work with them in the first place.”

Lena doesn’t look convinced in the slightest, but Kara can tell the reasoning gives her a small amount of pause. “So, what, you’ll dump it back into the hands of a Luthor?” she drawls, and the way she says Luthor, like it's a bad taste in her mouth, only grips Kara with regret.

“Yes,” Supergirl says. She tries to ignore the implication that hangs heavy between them. Neither of them need the reminder of what Lex had done with Kryptonite, but Kara won’t let that drive the wedge deeper. Not again. “It’s safer with you. You know how to make it, so you know how to destabilize it, should--” should I need it , she wants to say, “--anything happen.”

Lena is silent for a while. Her eyes continue to glitter in thinly veiled distrust, but the hard press of her mouth has relaxed slightly. She’s searching Supergirl’s face for something-- a lie, an ulterior motive, perhaps-- and Kara’s heart hammers in the fear that Lena senses something of dishonesty to her, that she can feel the presence of a lie still lurking there.

A sigh leaves Lena’s mouth. Her shoulders fall, and though she doesn’t uncross her arms, she’s less tightly wound than when Supergirl had first arrived. “What is it that you want, Supergirl?” she asks, and her voice is tired.

Kara wants many things. She wants to make everything better, to comfort Lena, to help her understand, to forget what happened between them. She wants to start over.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says instead.

There’s some uncertainty to Lena at this, but she keeps her poise. With a wave of a hand, she stands aside and moves back to her desk, leaving Supergirl to decide if she wants to follow or not. Supergirl trails in at a slower pace and settles, with some hesitance, on the white couch that had once served as a place of comfort. Now, all she feels is stress weighing down her lungs like a ball and chain.

She’s not sure how to begin. Kara can feel Lena’s expectant gaze on her, but she keeps her eyes on the floor while she attempts to approach the words bubbling fiercely inside of her.

“I told you the other day what Kryptonite feels like,” Kara starts softly. The truth is, Kara doesn’t know if Kryptonite poisoning is comparable to the sensation of burning flesh or nails stabbing through her veins. She thinks it’s exponentially worse, but she has no guide of reference to base it off of. Not when the last time she fell ill was nearly forty years ago and she’d solar flared only twice since then. “When I’m near it… I--I can’t breathe. I can hardly think. I-- It’s-- it’s this unbearable agony, and every time I feel it I think...I think I’m going to die.” Supergirl shakes slightly at the thought, and then takes a deep breath to clear her head. Her hands are still trembling, so she closes them into fists to keep some sense of composure about herself. “It makes me want to crawl out of my own skin. It’s like my body is disintegrating and-- and tearing itself apart at the same time, like there’s acid in my blood and it’s turning me inside out, and all I can do is pray that somehow it stops so that I never have to feel anything ever again.”

Lena doesn’t say a word.

Supergirl continues, “I don’t think I’m a perfect person, Lena. I know you think I consider myself above everyone, that I have some big ego that makes me feel superior to other people, but I don’t. Mostly, I’m just...scared. I’m terrified. Kryptonite, it’s….it’s not a gun, just a weapon that can hurt me or kill me. It’s pure torture. And that’s all it’s ever been used for.” She sucks in another breath, this one shakier than the last, and exhales it in a short, loud puff. For a brief moment, she glances up at Lena, trying to gauge the impassive mask as she speaks. “The last time someone tried creating Kryptonite, it turned me into a monster. I hurt Alex. I could have killed someone. I almost did, actually.” Supergirl’s throat is tight, but now it’s from the memory that constricts around her neck, not the tension between her and Lena.

Lena is leaning against her desk, seated on the very lip of it while she listens. Everything about her is fiercely guarded. Her eyes narrow slightly as she clarifies, “You mean the Red Kryptonite incident.”

It was never public news what had caused Supergirl to go on a near-murderous rampage, but she wasn’t surprised to learn that Lena was well-versed with the event anyway.

Supergirl nods and lets her gaze fall back to her hands. “Yes.”

Lena stands abruptly from her desk. “I would never do something like that,” she says, and her tone is heated again, like it had been at the DEO. Defensive, frustrated. Kara feels her own rising up to meet it, ready to clash again like two bulls colliding in a battle of wills. “I would never endanger you--”

“I know that, Lena,” Kara cuts in, letting just the faintest edge of sharpness through. “I know you won’t hurt me. But you have to understand-- you have to know how terrified it makes me, just thinking of it. I was traumatized. It took me a long time to believe enough in myself so that I could protect people again.”

“I’m not Maxwell Lord,” Lena snaps. The Or my brother is silent and stifling.

She’s not listening. It’s infuriating, and Kara doesn’t know how many different ways she can explain it until Lena understands. She’s starting to think that coming here as Supergirl was a mistake; Lena would listen to Kara Danvers, at least, before her heart is broken into pieces.

Supergirl rubs at her eyes, begging herself not to lash out with the anger and the hurt that she’s desperately trying to hide. This was about making amends with Lena, not furthering the gap.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she finds herself saying, and instead of hot fury, there’s a wetness to her voice that she doesn’t recognize. A plea. “You can’t possibly imagine what it feels like not to have control over your own body. If you understand the physical danger of green Kryptonite, please, at least try to understand the fear and the pain of doing and saying things you would never do or say, and hurting those around you that you love and swore you would always protect.” Kara finds the words ironic as soon as they leave her mouth, because here she was, hurting someone she loved and had sworn to protect.

Maybe it’s the tears crowding suddenly in her eyes, or maybe the strained thickness to Supergirl’s voice, but Lena freezes and stares down at her. She’s visibly startled, as if she hadn’t believed the hero capable of such an outward display of distress. Kara muses it’s the most human she’s ever seen Supergirl beside the outburst they’d shared back in the DEO.

Supergirl takes a breath, ignoring the stickiness to it, and blinks away the blur to her vision. She stands from the couch as if the new position might infuse some of her fleeing resolve back into her spirit before it withers away completely. “You are brilliant beyond measure,” Kara says, but she shakes her head. “I know that. I’ve seen it. If anyone could make stable Kryptonite, of course it would be you. I’m glad it was you. But I-- I don’t handle fear… well. Or panic. Especially panic. And anything that has to do with Kryptonite, mostly when I’m not expecting it, just… it brings it all up to the surface, and I react poorly. I’m sorry.”

The muscles in Lena’s jaw are working just beneath the skin, and Kara can see the turmoil churning in her eyes as she struggles to find something to say in response. For a moment Lena looks away, contemplative, and then when she looks back, she’s gathered herself enough to tame the fire a bit. “I understand,” she says, and the heat is no longer there. “But that doesn’t make what you did excusable.”

Kara wasn't looking for an excuse-- hell, she wasn't even looking for forgiveness-- but the tone Lena uses, the underlying but wordless judgment she hears, strikes a chord within Kara. “You still think I have a God complex?” 

The stiff silence she receives in response is answer enough.

Supergirl has to hold back the scoff as it rises on her lips. A sharp energy is winding its way through her like a tide rising over her head and it bolts through her with astonishing speed. “Sure, if that’s what you want to call it, fine. I have a God complex. I have an issue with being mortal and vulnerable and fragile,” she bites out, and the fury from before is cascading out in full force. It’s frightening in its intensity, but she can’t seem to stop; it thunders out of her without restraint, verging on the cusp of desperation. “You think I don’t know what it feels like to be weak? To be useless?” Her fists are at her sides, and she’s shaking again. “What do you think I felt trying to fight Reign, and failing every time? How do you think I feel knowing I’m not strong enough? That I was beaten within an inch of my life? Does that sound like a God complex to you?” She twists away, heaving her breath, but the words keep tumbling freely out of her. This wasn’t what she had come here to say, but she can’t stop herself now. “I have to be invincible, Lena. I have to, because the people I love are human and mortal and breakable. I can’t lose anyone else in my life.” And like a gust of wind, the rage is swept away as she murmurs, “I can’t lose you.”

The air is still.

Kara’s breath is uneven, and she stares at the wall of Lena’s office, cemented in place by the dead silence ringing in her ears.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Lena’s voice is soft, but it’s dangerous, and when Kara finally turns back to look at her again, Lena’s eyes are wide, lips parted by the wild confusion written across her face. Kara doesn’t know how to explain this to her-- how does she, when Lena has no idea what kind of life Supergirl lives in private, when the only interactions they’ve had were purely professional? It makes her stomach constrict painfully. “What-- you-- you love me?”

The words are shrill in Kara’s ears. There’s an edge to them that she doesn’t recognize. Alarm, perhaps, colored by the disbelief staring back at her.

For some reason, Supergirl laughs. It’s a hard, single force of mirthless breath as she shakes her head. This is going so far downhill so fast, she doesn’t know how to keep up with the momentum that is spiraling farther and farther away by each passing second. Her own ability to process the chaotic churning of emotion has flown out the window, and she finds that the reluctance tied up in her chest about the reveal has unraveled and left her in a mess of wary acceptance.

She can’t answer that yet. Not when Lena still doesn’t know.

“Do you love Kara Danvers?” Supergirl asks gently. This, too, catches Lena by surprise, but this time her response is much different.

Lena strides toward Supergirl, an aggressive curl to her lip as she bears her teeth at Kara. “You leave her out of this,” Lena snarls, jabbing a finger at the House of El crest across her chest. She’s trembling with fury, and it takes all of Kara’s self restraint not to reach out and quiet it by folding her into an embrace. “Don’t you dare try to use Kara against me. Ever. Maybe I could forgive you for James, someday-- but Kara? Never.”

Supergirl tries to ignore that for now, because she has no choice. The words echo loudly in her head as a warning, like flashing neon signs pointing to the grand finale of everything between her and Lena Luthor. This was it; there was no going back, no start-overs, no redos. No forgiveness.

“That’s not an answer,” she says softly, and Lena recoils from her.

“Of course I do,” Lena says, watching her with sharp, furious eyes. Those eyes are piercing, and within them Kara sees darkness-- a darkness she'd glimpsed before, fueled by pain and betrayal. “She’s my best friend. She’s the only true family I will ever have. Of course I love her.”

Another time, those words would have lifted Kara to the heavens and flooded her with warmth and light. Now, they sit heavy in Kara’s lungs, ready to steal away the remaining scraps of her composure.

“Good,” she says, and the thickness is back in her voice, wobbling and fragmented. She nods and swallows back the heat welling up in her throat and cheeks. “That’s-- that’s good. She loves you very much, too.”

Lena appears cautious. When Supergirl looks at her, she can tell that Lena senses something-- something imminent, foreboding, and wholly unpleasant. The charge of the atmosphere is electric and frozen simultaneously, as if together they are watching the timer on a bomb tick down to the last few peaceful seconds before everything erupts in fire and ash. There’s a glimmer in her gaze that suggests the beginnings of comprehension are slowly starting to dawn. Kara can see the gears twisting and turning in her mind, and she knows that even if she said nothing more to Lena, the young Luthor would eventually figure it out by way of Supergirl’s remorseful behavior alone. 

“Lena,” she starts quietly.

“No.” The cogs are spinning faster. Her eyes are wide, but her eyebrows are drawn low, and it’s a picture of absolute, incredulous doubt that, as the seconds flash by, transforms into something darker. “No. No.” She staggers back a few paces, a hand outstretched to keep the superhero in place, even though Kara has not moved since uttering her name. Her eyes are suddenly red-rimmed, the skin of her cheeks and neck flushed pink.

Kara can do nothing but stand and wait as Lena’s denial slowly recedes, until all that stares back at her is pure, unfiltered shock.

Lena’s hand slips up to her mouth. She presses her fingers hard against her lips, covering the shake to her chin. Her eyes flutter shut for a moment and Kara can hear her ragged intake of breath as it rattles in her chest.

“Why?”

The question startles Kara, and she blinks over at Lena, whose unshed tears are still bright and shining along the edges of her eyes.

Why the deceit? Why the distrust over the Kryptonite? Why tell her the truth now? Kara doesn’t know which she’s asking, but she can’t request a clarification, because she realizes that it’s all of them-- it’s an overarching cry of betrayal, one that can’t be justified by excuses and stories and meaningless words. A challenge, a plea. 

“Because,” Kara tries, and she can feel the tightness of her own throat closing in, lifting the pitch of her voice into a high, tearful keen, “Because, I-- I… found you, and I liked you so much, and I didn’t want to give that up. I couldn’t. For-- for the first time in my life I found someone who didn’t want something from me and didn’t have to know this,”-- she gestures limply at the crest on her suit, the one that feels like a steel wall between them, “part. Y-you didn’t look at me like some savior, someone untouchable. I could be human and vulnerable and simple for once.  I didn’t have to be an alien.” It was an interesting thought, the idea that she’d found humanity in a Luthor. But it was true, because Lena had given her exactly that. J’onn might have reminded her of it, but Lena had gifted it to her with a smile.

And now, it was gone.

Lena stares at her for a moment more, as if trying to decide if Kara is being truthful.

Finally, she barks out a disbelieving, harsh laugh and shakes her head, though her eyes don’t leave Kara’s face. They’re blazing with pain and anger and heartbreak. “I don’t care if you’re an alien,” she says, “I don’t care if you have powers. You think you’re the only one with impossible baggage? I don’t care about any of that, Kara.” She knows Lena means it with venom, but all she hears is the strain of hurt and sorrow in her name. It lances through Kara as a visceral agony.

“Lena, I’m--”

“Let me see.”

Kara stops, confused for a moment.

Lena gestures to her with a dip of her hand. “Show me. Show me you’re really her.”

She looks down at her suit and the symbol that claims her for the House of El. She can’t just unbutton the front the way she would if she’d revealed this all to Lena as Kara Danvers, but she supposes there’s still an alternative. With a shaking hand, Kara locates the pair of thin-framed glasses she keeps tucked in the secret pocket Winn had made solely for that purpose. As soon as she pulls them into view, she hears Lena’s sharp catch of breath.

The seconds grow longer as Kara slips the frames over her face. They settle there with ease; it’s a perfect fit to her face, from the ends curled slightly around her ears and the little pads resting on the bridge of her nose. The glasses don’t shift when she reaches up to pull back her hair in one hand as a mock ponytail.

“It’s me,” she says, and the whisper feels like a shout in the silence of the office.

A stony acceptance etches over Lena’s face as she watches. She nods, slowly to herself at first, and then turns away from Kara to look down at something on her desk.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

Kara thinks that this is it; it was all coming to an end.

So before Lena can kick her out, Kara takes a few tentative steps forward, her hands pressed hard against her center to keep her own pain from falling apart. To keep herself together, at least for a few moments longer.

“I hurt you terribly,” Kara says, and somehow her voice is a little stronger now, a little less muddied by her tears. “I can’t ever come back from that, I know. I won’t ask it of you. I just… I need you to know: you are so important to me. I-- I know you don’t believe me now, and maybe you never will, but… I care about you so much. You are my best friend, my family, and I lo-”

“Don’t.” It’s soft, barely whispered, but stern enough that it cuts through Kara’s words with vivid strength. She nearly stumbles back a step from it, and only holds herself in place with a shuddering exhale.

Lena doesn’t look back at her. “I don’t care that you’re Supergirl. I don’t care that you kept this a secret,” she says, in the same muted tones, “Everyone has their secrets. I would have never asked you to give it up to me just because we were friends.”

The were hits Kara like a train.

“I don’t care that you lied,” Lena continues. She’s still turned away. “I lied, too. I kept the kryptonite from you, because I was scared. I didn’t know how Supergirl would react. If I had known it was you, maybe I wouldn’t have lied.” She shakes her head. “Or maybe I never would have told you. I don’t know. But you-- you--” her voice cracks, just slightly. Kara feels herself shrink. “--you, Kara, let me believe that I was more than a Luthor. That you believed in me and would always, always, be there for me, even when I wasn’t there for myself.”

Kara doesn’t want to breathe. The space between them is so fragile, even the smallest gust could shatter it.

“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of,” Lena admits, a little quieter. “And there are parts of me that are frightening, too. But I could deal with it all because you were there.” She takes a deep, steadying breath, and then twists back around to face Kara. There’s wetness on her cheeks tracking down to her jaw. “I can’t apologize for the Kryptonite. I won’t. I didn’t make it for you. I did it to help Sam, because she’s my friend, too. And you’re right-- I am human and breakable. I can’t face Reign and trade blows as an equal. But I can use the only thing that’s ever been a constant in my life: my ability to find a solution. I found one, and I used it. Because I will do anything to help the ones I love.”

Kara nods slowly. As would she.

“Kara, I-- I’m sorry I frightened you. I truly am. But I can’t forgive this,” Lena says. “I can’t pretend like the one person who saved me from myself didn’t suddenly turn around and act like I was Public Enemy Number One. That I was just another Luthor. You know how difficult it was for me to trust anyone, how much I depend on you. I confided in you--and only you-- how hard it is for me not to give in to the darker parts of myself, how hard I try to be better. And you went behind my back anyway. You doubted me, and that, by far, is the worst pain I’ll have to live with.” Lena swallows, and adds, “And now I can’t help but wonder how much you truly believed in me from the start.”

Kara’s vision blurs again. She had expected this the moment she stepped inside, but it hurts far worse than anything she could have prepared herself for. It’s gutting, like a knife of kryptonite is working jagged ends into her stomach. “I’ve made mistakes,” Kara says, struggling to keep herself together, “Many of them, and I still will. But when I met you, I-- I learned so much more about myself than I thought I would. You were the one that taught me what it meant to be human, to never give up even when it feels like the whole world is against you. I thought I was going to lose myself, that Kara Danvers was worthless and weak-- that being human meant I failed to be a hero.” She exhales; a strange calm drifts through her, a dull acceptance of her fate stretched out to quiet her emotions. “You proved me wrong. Being human is messy and complicated and full of stupid mistakes, but… it also means that no matter what, you don’t give up. You don’t give in. You , Lena, showed that to me, not the other way around.” She sighs, and tries to smile, though it’s watery and pained. “But you don’t need me. You’re strong enough to know yourself and what you believe in. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think there will ever be a time that I don’t consider you a hero or the reason I can get up every morning and try, over and over again, to be better." Kara hangs her head for a moment. Her chest is tight, and with the breath she takes she can feel the ache of her heartbeat as it pounds against her ribs. The words fall softly and unprompted as she adds, "You’re my heart, Lena.”

Lena no longer looks angry; the anguish has scrubbed the rage from the hardness of her eyes and the tightness of her posture. She just looks overwhelmingly broken.

“I don’t want to cause you any more pain that I already have,” Kara says, just above a whisper. She moves around the desk, along the far side that Lena isn’t currently by, just to give the other woman the space Kara knows she needs. “But if...if you ever...if you ever want to talk, I’ll always be there for you. I said I would always protect you, and I will, even though… even though I failed this time.”

Lena doesn’t respond. Kara doesn’t know if she wants her to.

There’s a sullen quiet, and it weighs down on them both for a length of time before Kara steps out onto the balcony. The sun has set; its dying light sinks lower and lower behind the black silhouette of the city, taking with it the warmth of the day. She watches the street lamps flicker on one by one until the streets below are glowing in gentle orange light.

The quiet follows her as she lifts from the balcony and into the sky, and doesn’t leave her until she finds her way back to her own apartment and breaks.

Chapter Text

If Kara thought that Lena’s blazing anger was the worst she had to endure, she was dead wrong.

There’s a different kind of pain with confrontation: it’s sharp, all at once, where the dread of anticipation comes to fruition in the shattered pieces of an unwanted reality. Telling Lena had hurt-- it hurt so bad, and the pain doesn’t recede, but stays curled up in Kara’s chest like an unwelcome parasite. Every time she breathes, it’s there to remind her of her mistakes and the things she can’t take back or return to. It’s a physical jolt whenever the memory of the betrayal in Lena’s eyes surges up through Kara’s thoughts and bolts through her heart with fresh, startling grief. It eats away at her strength, invades her dreams, and haunts the back of her mind in everything she does.

The worst of it, though, is not her guilt. It’s not the memory of Lena’s realization, of her rejection. It’s not the knowledge that Kara had ruined everything with the stupid decision borne out of her own fear of death and torture.

It’s the present. It’s the coldness around Lena whenever they share a room; it’s the unfamiliar steel of Lena’s voice, the unreadable guard of her stare, the way that Lena doesn’t look at her any longer than she does a passerby on the street. If they have to speak, it’s in short, clipped words, no more than necessary to deliver an update or reveal any new information. Supergirl is no more than an employee; not even that, sometimes, because Lena is warm and patient with her employees across L-CORP and CatCo. With Supergirl, Lena behaves no differently than if she were speaking to a machine.

And as Kara?

There’s nothing.

Lena hasn’t been to CatCo in some time. Her attention is entirely consumed in her drive to help Sam, which Kara can’t fault her for. Lena has left James in charge, and for a while, it’s almost like the time before CatCo was ever incorporated into the Luthor assets.  Sometimes Kara can even pretend that there is no connection. She can forget that Lena is still technically her boss, and that the reason she never sees her any more is from Lena’s intense desire to free Sam from the prison of her Worldkiller destiny. Which is true-- Lena has done nothing else but throw herself wholly to the cause.

But Kara knows there’s another reason she hasn’t seen Lena in several days beyond the minimal interaction they have whenever Kara wears her suit. It’s not even that Lena is avoiding her or going out of her way to prevent their paths from crossing; it’s complete, unabashed abandonment. She doesn’t call, or text, or so much as say her name. Kara Danvers has been forgotten, pushed aside, written off for good.

Not that Kara would expect anything more, really. But every time they happen to meet gazes, Kara feels that rejection bury lower and lower into her heart, drilling through her body and leaving gaping holes behind. It’s come to a point that Kara can no longer meet her gaze. As Supergirl, she can sweep into a room, get her briefing from J’onn or Winn or even Lena if she has an update, but Kara never lifts her stare higher than Lena’s shoulders, if she looks in her direction at all. If there are any occasional words between them, Kara nods stiffly and dismisses herself at the earliest opportunity. She tells herself it's to give Lena space; the other woman isn’t comfortable in the DEO, that much is obvious, and Kara is loathe to make the experience any worse. So she makes herself scarce if Supergirl absolutely has to be present, and then leaves as soon as possible.

Lena doesn’t try to talk to her, either. Nothing beyond the short exchange of data or to hand Supergirl a report. No bat of an eyelash at Supergirl’s appearance or consequent disappearance, no trip of her heartbeat when Kara stalks by, no acknowledgment that Kara even exists, even if they’re forced to share close quarters. There had been one time Kara tried to inquire into Lena’s activities, just to see what she was doing, but she’d been met with such bristling hostility that the encounter itself had prompted the investigation of Alex and a few other DEO employees.

We don’t have a friendship, Supergirl.
My friends would never scheme behind my back or lie to me.

The words are poison coursing through her blood, like somehow Lena has discovered a way to infect her with Kryptonite just by speech alone. It’s been several days since then, but they stay with Kara as if Lena is whispering them inside of her head on a constant echo that Kara can’t stop. She’d been stupid to think she could fix this, but common sense was not always one of her stronger traits.

Kara doesn’t go to L-CORP. She’s been there once to check in on Reign’s imprisonment, but otherwise leaves J’onn and the others to take care of the interference with Lena.

They aren’t any closer to figuring out how to save Sam, but every day the fissure between Kara and Lena widens farther. It’s cracking apart with the silence they share and the tension that fills the room every time they’re around each other.

And it isn’t just her failure with Lena that shoots needles under her skin and buries her resilience under layers of remorse and bitterness. Sam is trapped, probably still in that dark forest of Juru, and the last few times Supergirl had confronted Reign there had been no trace of Sam left. Kara’s terrified of what that means, but she can’t let go of the thought that Sam is in there, somewhere, waiting to be set free. Kara can’t think of the alternative, because that would mean it was all for naught, and then she would have lost the other dear friend that gave her the strength to carry forward. She would be alone. 

It wears on Kara with such power, there are days where leaving the room means finding a small, secluded space to pull herself together, because otherwise she finds herself amidst a panic attack. She hasn’t had those in a long time-- not since Psi-- but they creep back unnoticed until suddenly Kara is gasping for air and grabbing for a ledge to hold onto. Thankfully, Lena doesn’t see those; Kara can tell when they’re coming now, and every time so far she manages to secure an empty closet or facility to dissolve in before anyone notices.

Alex finds her like that sometimes. Huddled in a corner, holding herself as she struggles to breathe. Her sister stays with her and offers soft, quiet comforts until Supergirl is whole enough to be presentable again.
James tries to comfort her too, from time to time, but it only succeeds in making her feel worse. She doesn’t want him to be the mediator between her and Lena. She doesn’t want him to feel like he has to choose. And if he did, she would want him to choose Lena-- as much as it would hurt to lose another friend-- because Kara can’t take any more away from her than she already has. He’s Lena’s boyfriend, for Rao’s sake; Kara can’t come between that. So she sends James away with promises that they’ll talk later, later, later. Later never comes, but he doesn't mention it.

Winn is a small comfort, sometimes. But he’s enamored with Lena’s skill and ingenuity, and it never fails to come up in conversation, so whatever comfort Kara finds is short lived. Mon-El isn’t much better, either. He doesn’t speak of Lena, but of other things, other feelings, and with her heart already scattered across the cosmos by her own doing, Kara doesn’t have the endurance to suffer through that kind of talk. She can’t discuss feelings and emotions when the only ones she had to hold onto are a mangled mess inside the void where her heart should be. Besides, he has a wife. A wife that loves him, when Kara doesn’t even know what she wants anymore.

That’s not true-- she knows what she wants. She just can’t bear to name it.

Kara isn’t useless, of course. She’s not incapable of help or doing her job. Most days she puts on that same face that got her through the last fifteen years of her life and even manages a smile here or there. She knows it doesn’t reach her eyes, and so does most everyone else, but no one comments on it and Kara pretends there’s nothing under that smile but hope and unwavering faith.

Most days, it’s enough.

Today might not be one of those days.

Kara rubs at the space between her eyebrows, trying not to think as the elevator ascends higher. The gears and cables move with a low hum, and she appreciates the white noise instead of utter silence. She’s discovered lately that she can’t stand the quiet; it bombards her with memories of the Phantom Zone, with anguish and panic that she can’t tolerate when her mind is already scrambling to make do with the chaos she’s caught in. Between Sam, Reign, and Lena, Kara doesn’t have time to succumb to old fears. So whenever it gets too quiet, Kara hums, taps a foot, or plays music and videos on her phone to break the oppressive weight of nothingness.

She nearly jumps at the sudden din of the elevator, though, when it announces her arrival on the desired floor.

Kara has a bag of old movies slung on one arm. Favorites of hers from her childhood with Alex: The Last Unicorn, Spy Kids, a plethora of Disney and Pixar movies that she still adores today. All things she assumes Ruby will enjoy, instead of those old stuffy classics that Alex likes to torture her with.

She steadies herself with a small inhale and steps out onto the floor. Seeing Ruby will be a pleasant change. She might be Sam’s daughter, but she has the same infectious kind of joy that manages to seep through the holes in Kara’s heart and remind her of love and friendship that doesn’t hurt. Ruby will be a breath of fresh air for Kara, and she can’t wait to see her.

It only takes Ruby four seconds to open the door when Kara knocks. She looks older, somehow, and Kara can see the creases around her eyes and the lines in her face that signal the beginning marks of unshakeable worry and fright, but they’re masked under the bright shine that lights up Ruby’s face when she reveals Kara waiting on the other side. Alex had warned Kara that Ruby was struggling with her new reality, that the depression had hit her harder than anyone anticipated-- but seeing Ruby now, grinning at her, Kara thinks that something might have changed. Someone might have given her at least some of that spark back.

Kara can’t help but beam back at her. The wounds in her heart don’t smart as much, and she’s immediately thankful for the girl pulling her inside, nearly singing ‘Aunt Kara, Aunt Kara!’ as they enter the kitchen.

“Hey, Ruby,” she laughs, slinging an arm around the girl’s shoulders and bringing her close for a quick squeeze. Her glasses skew slightly on her face from the press of Ruby’s head against her cheek. The faint chemical smell of hair dye meets her nose, and she tries not to wrinkle it when the girl pulls away. “I missed you, kiddo. I brought some movies to tide you over between the snoozefests Alex makes you sit through. Also, your hair looks so cool.”

Ruby giggles. “Thanks. And hey, they’re not all bad,” she says, as Kara places the bag on the counter and lets a few of the DVDs spill out onto the marble. She pets a few end pieces of her blue hair and grins a little wider with pride.

“You’re right,” Kara says, nodding. “Some of them are absolutely terrible.”

That earns her a full laugh, and Kara thinks that Ruby is a life saver as the ache in her chest dulls into something bearable. Tonight she can forget her troubles for a little while. Hang them up at the door, so to speak. Ruby is here, and she needs all of the love and attention Kara has left to give.

“So, take your pick,” Kara instructs, dumping a few more of the movies onto the counter for Ruby’s attention. In the bag is also a box of movie-style popcorn, a package of red vines, an assortment of gummy candies (Kara truthfully cannot pick between Sour Patch Kids, peach rings, and gummy worms, so the logical progression was to buy them all), and a card game called Exploding Kittens that Alex had gotten her for Christmas last year.

In the background, Kara hears the flush of a toilet and muted hush of sink water. Alex has been dying to play the kittens game, so she figures her sister will be pleased with the goodies she’d looted from her apartment and the nearby liquor store. Ruby must be along the same wavelength, for the sight of the Exploding Kittens elicits an excited gasp of breath the moment she grabs it from the bag.

Kara takes the Sky High movie box from the pile and saunters through the living room toward the bathroom as Ruby dedicates her attention to the game’s rulebook. Alex had always hated this movie, but she just knows Ruby is going to love it if she hasn’t already seen it yet.

The door swings open, and Kara turns the hallway corner with the DVD lifted up as she says, “Hey, I brought your favorite movie, I thought it would--”

She stops immediately. It’s not Alex standing and staring at her from the bathroom doorway.

It’s Lena.

“Oh, yeah,” Ruby chimes from somewhere near Kara’s elbow. She’s still holding the Exploding Kittens game in her hands as she looks back and forth between the two women. “Aunt Lena came by to spend some time with me for a while. Alex went to go fix something with her new motorcycle.”

“Oh-- oh,” Kara hears herself say, but it’s distant, because her ears are ringing and the ache that had taken a backseat when she’d walked into Alex’s apartment is suddenly crashing back into her chest. It’s too late to toss her guard back up, to keep her emotions from jettisoning out of her as she scrambles to keep it together.

Keep it together.

Somehow, a smile cracks across her face, and it’s only born out of necessity because she certainly can’t let Ruby know how much this hurts, or why. Lena must feel the same since she offers a small smile in return, but Kara recognizes the way it doesn’t light in her eyes and how superficial it looks-- how it feels. Pressure heaves down on her lungs and it’s a wonder she doesn’t crumple inward at the force of it.

The insufferable silence that follows them is crawling through the apartment. Kara has to say something if Lena won’t, or else Ruby might start asking questions-- and those are questions Kara can’t explain, mostly because she has no answers to give.

Kara manages to swallow back the sharp lump in her throat for the moment and turns to Ruby. She can feel a manic energy winding up from her stomach, piercing through her chest, and she knows if she doesn’t get out of that apartment soon she was going to crack open like an egg and make a mess out of everything. And that would make an already awful situation even worse.

“H-hey, Ruby, why don’t you and Lena figure out a movie?” Kara suggests, moving back from the living room and into the kitchen, hoping that the jerkiness to her motion isn’t as obvious as it feels. Her voice is mostly controlled, and she prays that the wavering pitch of it isn’t too noticeable to human ears. She places Sky High on the counter with the others and grabs for the purse she’d abandoned on a chair table. She’s on autopilot, barely aware of what she’s doing.

“You’re not staying?” Ruby asks, frowning. The confusion is almost enough to mask the disappointment Kara hears, and she has to fight not to shake as she turns to face her again.

“I’m sorry, Ruby,” she says softly, cupping the girl’s face briefly with her palm in a short, affectionate gesture. “I just-- I just came by to drop this off for you.” The lie tumbles from her easily, despite the panic brewing just under her skin and threatening to burst into a full-fledged hurricane. She can’t look past Ruby’s shoulder to the woman who followed them toward the kitchen, but she can feel Lena’s eyes on them, watching, waiting. “I...I have a--a big article I need to finish tonight,” she finds herself saying with a half-grimace of apology, “You know, grown-up homework.”

Ruby doesn’t look any less crestfallen, but she nods. “That sucks,” she says, reaching out to squeeze her arms around Kara’s midsection. For a moment Kara wants to cling to her, but she lets go as soon as she feels Ruby pull away. “Good luck on your article. Is it about Supergirl?”

There’s a tremble starting up at her shoulders. She reaches for the door and smiles back at Ruby, though she can feel it’s a little too wide and a little too ecstatic to be natural. Ruby either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t let on that she recognizes the strangeness to Kara’s sudden behavior. “Yeah--yep--- about Supergirl. I’m going to meet her later tonight,” she says quickly. There’s a dampness on the back of her neck and her hands are clammy. Even though she doesn’t look at Lena, she can sense her there, and just the mention of Supergirl makes Kara feel like shriveling up into nothingness. They both know lie that Kara feeds to Ruby, and somehow that feels worse. It’s a shard lodged in her chest that spikes in pain with every movement.

“Oh, cool,” Ruby says, and there’s a glitter in her eyes that Kara identifies as awe.

She can’t stay any longer. She has to get out.

“Tell you what,” Kara says, pulling open the door with just a little too much force. Even if the shriek of her instincts is drowning out nearly every sound, focusing on Ruby gives her enough of a reprieve to formulate a few more proper thoughts, “If you want, I can-- I can ask her to come by sometime and see you. Would you like that?”

Ruby’s face lights up again. “Yeah,” she breathes, and Kara can take a half second to appreciate the life kindling in the girl’s face again. Ruby will be okay, at least. There was comfort in that alone.

“Great,” Kara says, and it’s a wonder that the quiver of her breath doesn’t translate into her voice, “Great. I’ll let her know. Bye, Ruby. Lena.”

“Good luck with the article,” Lena calls from inside the apartment, and just the sound of her voice, unmarred by the admonishment that usually graces her tone when addressing Kara, is enough to send panic and misery spiraling out of her control. Of course, Lena knows there isn’t any article. Of course there isn’t.

Kara departs with a sharp wave and hurries down the hallway. It feels like the walls are pressing in tighter, shrinking down into impossible constraints. Her vision swims, and dizziness spins through her head as each shallow breath she takes becomes faster, harder, and tinged with fear.

She wants to chastise herself for letting this happen. It’s just Lena, in Alex’s apartment. So what if Kara didn’t expect her to be there? So what if she had let her guard down, was ready to just let go for a while, only to have the one person she couldn’t stand to be around suddenly in the same room without warning or preamble? Kara was an adult, for Rao’s sake! She could handle a little bit of discomfort, couldn’t she?

Kara scrambles past the elevator. It’s too slow, too small, and she can’t fathom standing and waiting for it to reach Alex’s floor. Instead she bolts for the stairwell just at the end of the hall, unaware of the doors she nearly flies past in her desperation to get there. She slams into the push bar of the metal door, and it flings back against the cement stairwell wall with a cacophonous bang that echoes down several flights.

The stairwell is blessedly empty. No one comes to investigate the sudden noise, at least that Kara knows of-- she’s sinking into a far corner, clutching to the galvanized railing attached to the wall, numb to the world outside of the buzzing in her ears. The harsh pant of her breath is wild, but no matter how many breaths she takes, it’s never enough. The edges of her sight are dark and she can’t focus on anything but the fuzziness of the lights tilting above her head. She doesn’t register the railing crushed in her fist or the fact that she’d dropped her purse somewhere in her frenzy to reach the stairs. She registers nothing but the emptiness swallowing her whole from the inside.

Her body is fire and ice all at once, and it feels like it’s trying to eject her heart right out of her ribcage.

Get out, it snarls. Go away.

Kara doesn’t know how long she sits there, only that after some immeasurable length of time a shadow eclipses her blurred vision and it has bright, familiar eyes that stare down at her.

She prays this time it’s Alex.

“Kara,” a voice says, not unkindly, but without warmth.

It’s still not Alex.

Kara rasps for air. Some of her senses are returning; the lights don’t feel blinding, and the shape of the person standing over her sharpens into view. She’s not entirely surprised to see Lena-- it had been her voice, after all-- but the sight of her still embeds a deep pain in the center of her chest with thorns that throb through every inhale.

“I’m fine,” she manages, closing her eyes for just a moment to gather her bearings. The dizziness clears somewhat, and after a few moments more she’s stable enough to compose herself into something a little less chaotic. She wipes at her face with her sweater sleeve to rid the film of tears that had long settled there.

Lena doesn’t respond to that. It occurs to Kara that this is the third lie she’s said so far tonight, though she doesn’t know if Lena is keeping track. “You left your purse in the hallway,” Lena says evenly, stepping back as Kara slowly pulls herself to her feet.

She adjusts her glasses, thankfully still perched on her nose, and smooths back some of her blonde curls in disarray around her face. Lena is holding out Kara’s bag, and she takes with with a small, appreciative nod. There’s still erratic energy thrumming through her veins, but at least for now it’s kept at bay by a haze of dullness. The eye of the storm.

“Thanks,” she whispers.

There’s a pause. “Ruby was worried about you,” Lena comments, and when Kara looks up, she can see that Lena is having difficulty with something-- whatever it is, she hides it behind an indifferent mask, but there’s still a shine to her eyes and strain to her jaw and neck that can’t be hidden. It’s a startling contrast to the softness she exuded with Ruby, with her hair down in gentle waves against her shoulders instead of her usual polished appearance at the DEO.

Kara winces. She doesn’t want to worry Ruby; the kid had enough to worry about already. She didn’t need Kara’s mess on top of that.

Evidently, Lena thinks so too, because she follows up with, “I told her you were stressed about your deadline.”

Kara nods again and exhales a long, loud breath. “I’ll visit her soon,” she says, shouldering her purse. The twisting of her insides doesn’t stop, and she thinks she’s starting to get nauseous from the vertigo of her panic attack. Or maybe it’s just the continuous hammer of her heart in her stomach from the unexpected surprise of Lena Luthor. Speaking of who, is starting to turn, likely to resume her visit with Ruby--

Before she can help herself, Kara blurts, “What-- what about Reign?”

Lena stops. An eyebrow quirks upward, as if she senses a challenge in Kara’s question, like Kara is scolding her for leaving her post. Which Kara wasn’t trying to do, but she can’t help the edge to her own voice from the pits of emotion bubbling within her.

“Winn is still working on the synthesizer,” she answers with a layer of coldness this time. “Ruby asked to see me directly. I’m not about to tell the person most precious to Sam no.”

Kara shakes her head. “Of course not,” she says, “That’s-- that’s good, that you’re seeing Ruby. I’m sure she’s happy for it. She needs as much love as she can get.”

Lena watches her carefully for a moment, then, “Are you sure it’s a good idea for Supergirl to see her?”

The question catches Kara off guard. “She likes Supergirl,” Kara responds, and for some reason, the words force her to look away from Lena and break the gaze they’ve been sharing. It’s the longest either of them have managed to look at each other without snapping or bristling like cats for over a week.

Lena’s mouth purses ever so slightly. “Yes,” she says, “but the last time she saw Supergirl was back at my brother’s mansion, which is coincidentally the same time she last saw her mother and found out the truth about Reign. Don’t you think that might occur to her at some point? Alex told me she’s been getting better, little by little. You could disrupt that.”

This time, the anger that flares between them belongs to Kara, and she momentarily forgets that she’d just been curled up in the corner of a stairwell lost in a whirlwind of her own anxiety. Her teeth set hard and her eyes narrow as she locks onto Lena’s gaze once more.

“Ruby’s entire world was just upended,” Kara says, and even if she tried, she wouldn’t have been able to contain the frustration from leaking into her voice. It’s low, almost growled. Some amount of confidence snakes its way through her and she takes a small step toward Lena, though she doesn’t lose the light shake of her shoulders as she speaks. “Everything she knows has been stolen from her. Ruby needs hope, Lena. You might not think so, but Supergirl still stands for that-- I will always stand for that. If anyone knows what it means to lose everything they love all at once and to be uncertain and scared of what the future might mean, it’s Supergirl.” She exhales, loud and defiant, and pulls her arms in around herself like an anchor for the emotion still spinning out of her reach. Though her thoughts lay with Krypton, she can’t help but notice how it still applies to everything that had transpired between them. Some of the fire fades as she finishes, “Have you ever lost your entire world before, Lena?”

The woman in front of her is still, but there’s a flurry of something in the depth of her light eyes. Kara suddenly finds she doesn’t want to know what it is or what it means.

“I have to go,” she says abruptly, and she pushes past Lena without touching her for the descending staircase beyond.

Kara all but runs out of the building, chased by the trembling Yes she hears whispered from the stairwell of Alex’s floor.

There aren’t many ways for Kara to vent her anger and pain and sorrow all at once, but she finds some solace in pummeling two-ton blocks of concrete into dust in the DEO’s training facilities. Usually she’s alone; not many of the other agents want to be caught in the crossfire of Supergirl’s rampant emotions nor be responsible for when she inevitably crumbles into tears.

She’s grateful no one else disturbs her, because at this point it’s getting a little ridiculous.

But Kara can’t help it. She can’t stop the fear and the misery from rising up like bile in her throat, she can’t stop the bitterness and self-hatred from burning a hole in her chest. She can’t stop time from turning, from Sam turning into Reign, and she can’t stop the betrayal from radiating out of Lena every time she looks at Kara.

She can pound a few massive boulders into rubble, though.

This time, Mon-El stands beside her, striking at his own block with a little less fervor than Kara. He hadn’t asked, but she hadn’t turned him away when he had shown up at the door. They’re silent for a long time, lost in their own haze of thoughts and grunts of effort.

It’s not until Kara is through her third block that he finally speaks.

“What’s on your mind?” he ventures, gently enough that Kara can recognize the kind intentions of his questioning.

Kara pauses in her wind up for another hit and glances at him over her shoulder.

She’s still not sure she’ll ever get used to seeing him back here, wearing a suit that feels so alien and the scruff of a thick, dark beard across his jaw. Still, the warmth in him is familiar, even if it is one more thing she’ll lose at the end of all of this.

It takes her a moment to decide if she’ll answer or not. “Everything,” she ends up saying, sighing. It’s not a cop-out, though it sounds like one. It’s certainly not a lie, because anyone would have been able to guess as much from the storm she wears day in and day out.

He seems to understand anyway. “That’s a lot to think about,” he comments quietly.

“It’s a lot to feel,” she replies, and she looks back at the stone that now resembles more of a crater than it does a block. Though her hands are caked in dust, she tucks back some of the blonde locks that have swept into her face.

Mon-El moves beside her, and they stand shoulder to shoulder, staring at her decimated block.

“Do you remember when you found out about me,” he starts, and though they are the only two in the room, his voice is hushed. For a moment she’s worried he’ll bring up those feelings, those memories, of things she can’t think about on top of the maelstrom of her current situation. But instead he continues, “Do you remember how angry and betrayed you felt? How you said you could never forgive me?”

Kara does remember. It’s not a pleasant memory, but she’s glad to find that it doesn’t sting any longer. “Yes,” she answers.

She feels him turn slightly to glance at her. “Did you?”

Her initial reaction is to recoil, to insist that this wasn’t the time nor place to discuss their turbulent history, but when she meets his gaze she’s surprised to find a glimmer of sympathy there, and she suddenly understands where he’s going with all of this.

Kara takes a few moments to sift through the wilds of her thoughts. She doesn’t remember the exact moment when she’d forgiven him for his dishonesty, but it hadn’t been immediate; it had taken her time to accept his transgression for what it was and move past it in favor of a better, more honest future. But it had happened.

“At some point,” she says. “It took a while.”

He nods. “I don’t blame you. I can’t imagine what you might have felt then, how angry you must have been,” he says, “You trusted me with everything, including all that Daxam had done against your people, and I still wasn’t truthful.”

Kara closes her eyes and sighs. “It’s not the same, Mon-El,” she says tiredly, “Lena doesn’t care about who or what I am. It’s what I did despite of it all.” There was still the possibility that some of that still mattered to Lena, to some extent, but Kara had believed her back in the L-CORP office when Lena said otherwise. She’d kept her identity a secret for a variety of reasons, but now the truth of it seems trivial in the face of the decision she had willingly made behind Lena’s back. The decision-- and the doubt. Perhaps that meant she was simply too forgiving in comparison, too easily bent in the wind of heartbreak, whereas Lena was stone. Unbendable. More steel than the girl of steel when it came to being emotionally compromised and betrayed.

Mon-El is quiet for a while. She can’t read everything in his expression, but she thinks there’s a light, some sort of understanding, lurking beneath the sadness she sees there. She doesn’t know what it is and he doesn’t look as if he’s about to explain it to her. “Semantics,” he says finally, with a light shrug. “I kept a lie, you kept a lie. A mistake is a mistake, Kara.” She frowns at that, but then he adds gently, “She loves you-- I know from personal experience. There’s a lot for her to process, too. Give her some time to sort it out. I don’t think one mistake is going to ruin your bond forever.”

There’s an implication in that word, bond. Kara can’t read it, and it sits heavy on her shoulders like an unsteady burden. She crosses her arms and tries not to think of all the weight settled on her backside, bearing harder and harder with each passing day until it feels like her knees might finally buckle. Kara wonders how much more she can stand before she falls.

“Maybe not,” she concedes after a while, glancing to her block again. The fuel of her anger has diffused now, leaving her hollow and fatigued. “But it’s changed forever. I can’t go back.”

Mon-El tilts his head to the side slightly, as if considering some new thought. “No, but you can go forward,” he points out, and when Kara looks to him, there’s a faint smile beneath the rough beard curled across his mouth.

“The thirty-first century certainly did impart some wisdom on you,” she remarks. His words sit low in her chest, light enough not to hurt but not quite a relief from it.

He chuckles. “About seven years and one time jump too late, but I was going to get there eventually, right?”

Kara manages a short, small smile. “Don’t worry, you still have plenty ways to go,” she says, and he laughs a little harder this time. There’s still sadness in him and a pain that she had felt not too terribly long ago, but she’s grateful that it hasn’t reappeared amongst the ashes of the current fire still searing in her chest. There's no room for that kind of hurt and confusion when the space in her chest is already occupied and brimming full of it with Lena's name. He, too, seems to recognize this, because though Kara can see the desire in him to speak again, to pull up those old feelings and memories, he doesn’t.

Or at least, he doesn’t get the chance, because only a handful of seconds later the training doors slide open to reveal Lena holding a tablet on the other side.

“Supergirl,” she says, and the sharp tone of it holds a command.

Kara lifts an eyebrow and turns to face her fully. Beside her, Mon-El leans closer to whisper, “Forward"  before he strides out of the room, offering Lena a quick smile as he passes.

Lena’s eyes flicker between his retreating frame and Supergirl, who hasn’t moved from in front of her demolished concrete block.

“Yes?” Kara questions. Her gaze falls to the tablet in Lena's hands. Despite that near everyone else calls her by name, Lena never does; whenever Kara wears the suit, so she wears the name Supergirl, and Lena stubbornly insists on it. Or perhaps it’s simply another way to erase the memory of Kara Danvers from her life. As Kara looks to her now, still hidden behind walls she had once thought ruined, she thinks it’s the latter. Lena doesn’t even look at her with recognition most days.

“I need something from you,” Lena says, and her voice is a little tight, a little more guarded than usual. “Something that might help me figure out a way to fix Sam.”

“Of course,” Kara says immediately, stepping forward and ignoring the way Lena seems to tense at their close proximity. “Anything. What is it?”

Lena’s gaze drops to her tablet, and Kara gets the impression that she is bracing herself for something as her mouth presses into a thin line and her grip on the tablet whitens.

“Lena,” Kara prompts cautiously. A sliver of dread threads into her, needling through the carefully crafted persona of cool indifference she’s learned to wear in Lena’s presence.

“I-- I need a sample,” she professes, and it sounds like an admission of guilt in the way it falls hurried and strained from her lips.

Kara’s mouth runs dry. The persona she’d held onto threatens to break, but she manages to keep herself steady. It’s with slow mounting suspicion that she presses, “What kind of sample?”

The silence drifts in, saturated with anticipation.

“Blood,” Lena finally says, meeting her gaze. Though it’s piercing, full of warning and consequence, Kara sees in it some form of apology at the request. And fear, too. “Or tissue, but a blood sample should work, and it’s not as...invasive.”

Something bubbles up within Kara. At first it feels hot and peppery like anger, but a moment too late Kara recognizes it as the breathless squeeze in her lungs, come to steal the air away and plunge her into a spell of panic. She tries to take in a breath and it whistles out of her choppily and poorly concealed.

“Why?” she asks, and the moment it leaves her lips it transforms into a demand, sharp and accusatory. Her eyes pinch shut at the realization as soon as she sees the effect of it darken Lena’s expression.

“To save Sam!” Lena snaps, and Kara moves away from her, arms folded around herself as if it might contain some of the alarm clawing up through her stomach.

She shakes her head and exhales again, this time thankfully more forceful and less shaken. “No-- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Kara says, glaring down at the cement block as though it was at fault for failing to ground her. She digs her nails into the solid flesh of her bicep, and some of the panic dies away. “I just-- I mean, what is it for?”

Lena shifts. A beat passes before she answers, “Your DNA may be the only thing strong enough to counteract Reign’s. Considering you’re both Kryptonian-- Reign at least partly-- understanding yours could help me reverse engineer something to… eliminate those particular nucleotides out of Sam’s body.”

It takes Kara a minute, and then suddenly she snorts, “That almost sounds like a Kryptonian vaccine.”

When Kara faces her again, Lena shrugs. “Whatever works,” she says. “I need to try.”

Kara understands, but she can’t help the unease that fills her at the thought. Not just of herself getting stuck with a needle and siphoned of her blood, but for what kind of use the ability to vaccinate against alien DNA might have in the future. But then, this was also the woman that had set aside an alien detection device for good after one article from a fashion media magazine, and Kara doubted Lena would even go that far. This was about Sam, and only Sam. She repeats it to herself on several loops, hoping it would be enough to hold back the horror still attempting to pry its way into her consciousness.

Lena, too, looks uncertain. She drops Kara’s gaze again, sighs, and says, “And one other thing.”

Kara’s eyebrows lift high.

“Reign is adapting to the Kryptonite,” Lena explains quietly.

“She’s what?”

Lena shakes her head. “I thought I had more time,” she says, and this time the frustration in her voice isn’t directed at Kara. “But she’s adapting faster than I imagined. A few days more, if that, and she could walk out of here as powerful as she was without it. I… I want to see if introducing more Kryptonian DNA, or at least the parts that react to the kryptonite, will keep her manageable. At least until we figure out something more concrete.”

“You want to use my weakness of kryptonite to keep her subdued?” Kara asks, and though she doesn’t say it with malice, she imagines that the words alone are damning enough. This time, though, she has no desire to back pedal or excuse the tone of incredulity that slips through.

Lena runs the tip of her tongue over her teeth. Her stare is powerful, and to Kara it feels like daggers driving into her lungs, but she can still see the redness lining the edges of Lena’s eyes and a glimmer that follows. Kara isn’t the only one struggling to hold back tidal waves.

“I want to help Sam,” Lena says simply.

Kara nods, sharp and teetering on the edge of panic again. She grips herself tighter and twists away from Lena to stalk a few paces around the shattered block, hoping that the movement will quell the cyclone spinning up fiercely from her gut.

“How are you going to do it?” she forces out, coming to an abrupt halt and turning on Lena, still clutching herself.

Lena opens her mouth to respond automatically, but then there’s a pause, and she appears to realize the true question that Kara poses. She clears her throat and answers, “A red sun lamp.”

A breath whooshes from her and Kara closes her eyes a moment to gather herself.

“Your mother took blood from me once,” she says, and her voice is low, though it’s lost the growl of anger to it. “Threatened to kill Mon-El if I didn’t surrender.”

Lena stiffens again. “I’m aware,” she says. That darkness shows itself in her stare again, cold and angry. “But I would never ask you to blow your powers for this. I’m asking for a sample, not demanding.”

Kara looks up, but she doesn’t look at Lena. Her gaze is directed toward the corner of the facility, distant as memories flush her thoughts. “The last time I was under a red sun lamp,” she starts, “and someone wanted to take something from me, I was held captive by Nazis who wanted to cut out my heart and implant it into a Nazi-Supergirl who would have died without it.”

Surprise blossoms over Lena. It’s the first time Kara has managed to catch her off guard lately, and it shows in the speechlessness that settles over her.

Kara continues, “They didn’t give me a choice, of course. And the funny thing? I wanted to help her, still. She was dying and she needed something from me. She almost got it, too.” She takes a moment to gaze over at Lena, whose eyes are a little wider and her frown a little less prominent. The darkness recedes back until it's barely a shadow. When the silence starts to blanket them, Kara asks, “Do you know how many times I’ve come close to dying over the past few years?”

Lena manages to regain her composure. “A few, I suppose,” she says.

Kara’s mouth purses slightly. “An understatement,” she remarks, and she shakes her head. “And surprisingly frequent for someone who’s supposed to be invincible.”

“Then we have more in common than I thought,” Lena says, and though it’s without humor, it somehow prompts a small smile to Kara’s face. Fleeting, but she feels it nonetheless.

Kara holds herself a moment longer, waiting until the silence becomes unbearable again before taking in a breath. It’s not a choice she wants to make, but her desire to help, to do something worthwhile that might save Sam, overrules the fear festering deep within her. For now, at least. “I’ll be in the med bay,” she says quietly, suppressing a shiver.

Lena blinks, taken aback again, but then nods. She taps at the screen of her tablet a few times and moves for the doors of the training facility again, away from Kara. “I’ll have Alex do it,” she says as she reaches the doors. “I’m sure that would be more--”

“No,” Kara interrupts. When she meets Lena’s gaze again, she finds that her resolve has steeled under her skin, strengthening her voice and masking the shudder that attempts to ripple through her body. Lena pauses with an eyebrow lifted. Kara walks toward her, cape gusting slightly at her heels.

Lena doesn’t move from where she stands at the doors, though her expression is drawn tight again, as if anticipating another collision of fury and heat.

But Kara is not angry. Tense, yes, but when she strides up to the doors and beside Lena, it’s with astonishing firmness that she states, “If you want it, then you take it. No one else.”

She leaves Lena in the training facility staring after her.

It’s silly that she’s nervous.

Kara has been in this medical bay far too many times to be nervous. She gazes around, and notes that everything is the same, from the two beds and the sun lamps suspended over them to the monitors hooked by wires and cords nearby. So familiar it’s almost nostalgic in its own strange way.

Yet, sitting on the edge of the cot, she can’t help but be gripped by cold anticipation, hands clutching the edge until the metal frame beneath is bent into the perfect shape of her tightened fingers. She has one arm pulled free from the sleeve of her suit, exposing her right shoulder and the strap of the sports bra she wears underneath.

Alex had stopped by the med bay a short moment ago, voicing opinions and doubts that still swim unbidden through Kara’s thoughts. But this, Kara had argued, might help. It has to help. It’s something, because otherwise Kara has nothing but quickly dwindling time until something gives, and she doesn’t want to be the one who loses when it comes to her next encounter with Reign. Alex wasn’t as easily convinced; she was all restrained judgment and caution, and though nothing about her suggested she distrusted Lena’s intentions, she was forthright in her assessment that Kara’s decision is not just out of desire to help Sam, but as a show of good faith to Lena.

Kara sits by herself, aware that it was true.

When Lena enters, she doesn’t knock, but simply makes for Kara’s bed without a word or gesture of acknowledgement. She sets a case of medical supplies on the silver tray beside Kara and clicks it open to peruse the contents. Kara swallows back the sour fear building in her throat and reaches up with her bare arm to switch on the red sun lamp she’d pulled from the storage closet.

Scarlet light floods the bed and seeps down into Kara’s skin. It feels like being drenched in shadow after soaking in sunlight, stealing the warmth from her veins until she’s left just shy of a chill. It will take a few minutes for it to completely absorb the power from her bones, so Kara lies back against the pillows she has stockpiled on her bed and stares up at the ceiling.

It’s eerily similar to the last time she’d been in this position, only she’s not strapped down against her will or being threatened by genocidal maniacs in Nazi regalia. A vast improvement, but Kara still can’t shake the uneasiness that twitches through her like an animal prowling for an escape.

“It’ll be over with quickly,” Lena murmurs, and Kara blinks over at her in surprise.

Lena is holding a butterfly catheter in one hand and a blood vial in the other. The flood of emotion Kara noticed back in the training room is gone, replaced by the signature coolness that Lena typically harnessed. But there’s also something else, something bordering gentleness, that breaks through the facade as Lena watches her.

Kara is scared, but she’s too stubborn to say it. She swallows again and nods, ignoring the way her body flinches when Lena reaches out to touch the tender skin of her inner elbow crease.

Lena’s prodding is soft and kind. She stretches out Kara’s arm over her stomach and skims a fingertip over the skin, tracing the faint bulge of blue vein that rises at her probing. Warmth blazes under Kara’s skin at the contact, pleasant and tingling. She holds her breath and tries not to wonder at the flames flaring through her at Lena’s touch, or why, when Lena pulls away, the coldness feels more profound than just the loss of her yellow sunlight.

Though they are enclosed by glass windows, Kara finds that the quiet thickening between them stifles even the low babble of conversation and electronic alarms beyond the walls. It’s just her and Lena, brought close by the needle glinting in Lena’s hand and the vein throbbing in Kara’s arm.

This time, though, Kara doesn’t break the silence. She lets it fill her until the emptiness in her chest is brimming with it. She says nothing when, after a few minutes, Lena reaches close to tie a tourniquet around the top of Kara’s bicep. She says nothing when the floral scent of Lena’s shampoo wafts over her, nor when the heat of Lena’s body creeps through her suit as she leans close to test the vein again and wipe the skin with a cold alcohol pad. The smell of it is sharp and irritating as it burns in Kara's nose.

“Almost ready,” Lena says.

Kara nods.

There’s quiet again, but before it completely settles, Lena sighs and places her tools down for a brief moment. She glances up at Kara and holds her gaze. It’s the least dark look she’s given Kara in weeks, almost edging into something of gratitude.
“Thank you,” Lena says softly, and her gaze droops a little. “I know this is a lot to ask, especially after--”

Kara shakes her head, and Lena hesitates. “Sam is my friend, too,” Kara says. “I might be terrified of kryptonite and needles, but I would gladly give me life for her. Or you.”

Something flickers across Lena’s eyes. Kara takes it as remembrance, because a moment later Lena gives a small, barely perceptible nod. “I know,” she says quietly. Kara, too, thinks of the forest of Juru, of her plea to Reign to release Lena in favor of Supergirl’s life, or when she’d rescued Lena from the impending explosion of Metallo’s unstable kryptonite. When she'd forgone the change into her super suit when Lena had been poisoned, just for that extra fraction of a second to save her life. Of all the times she would have risked everything for Lena’s safety.

Kara turns back to the ceiling and closes her eyes. There are cracks in Lena that she can’t look at, a devastation bleeding through that worms its way into her heart that she simply can’t stand to endure. She has to stay strong, at least long enough to get through this. She prays to Rao that another panic attack doesn't find her there. 

It’s not for several more minutes that Lena speaks again. When she does, it’s the soft instruction to make a fist before Kara feels a small sting in the crook of her bare arm. She can’t help the hiss that leaves her at the sensation, but Lena is quick, and within moments there are three tubes of dark blood sitting in the case she had brought with her. Kara tries not to shake as Lena extracts the needle, stoppers the puncture with a small cotton swab pressed into her skin, and then secures it in place with a long strip of medical tape.

Lena switches the red lamp off and the two of them sit in a dark silence for a moment.

“Thank you again, Supergirl,” Lena says. Then she’s gone, and Kara sits alone in the med bay, more wounded over her own superhero name than the dull pinch in her arm.

After their conversation and Kara’s subsequent blood donation, Supergirl visits L-CORP more often and lingers in the lab longer than usual. Not to keep an eye on Lena-- though Kara thinks that’s likely what Lena believes, from the narrow glare she often receives from the youngest Luthor-- but because Lena’s admission of Reign’s evolving resistance had nestled a seed of worry deep in Kara’s heart. What if Lena couldn’t make a reversal agent in time? What if Reign outgrew her kryptonite restraints, and slaughtered all of L-CORP before Supergirl even got wind of her escape? It’s a thought that plagues Kara day and night, until she finds herself pacing the floor of Lena’s lab around Reign’s containment center without pause for days on end.

She doesn’t ask Lena about the progress, and Lena doesn’t offer any updates aside from the occasional, terse, “I’m still working on it” whenever Supergirl glances her way. Kara's grateful, at least, that she hasn't yet been banned from the lab. 

And since Lena won’t talk to her, Kara takes to speaking to Reign instead.

The worldkiller is lounging on the bed, one leg draped over the side and swinging with lazy patience. She’d long since broken the kryptonite-infused restraints on her bed, but the forcefield between her and the outside world is still mercifully intact.

For now, Reign likes to remind her.

Supergirl watches her from a few feet away, frowning whenever a smug smile curls at Reign’s mouth.

No-- Sam’s mouth.
Sam is in there.
She has to be.

“What’s the matter, Princess?” Reign asks, exaggerating an expression of faux sadness, pout and all. “Miss me, do you?”

Supergirl ignores the sneer to Reign’s voice. It’s a dance they’ve shared the past few days, but Kara remains diligent in her efforts to reach her friend through the cruel spirit that controls her.

“I miss Sam,” Kara corrects lightly. She steps slightly closer to the barrier. It still unnerves her, but Kara trusts that so long as she doesn’t touch it, the effects of the shield won’t bother her.

Reigns eyes her before huffing in annoyance.

Kara continues, “Ruby misses you too, Sam. She’s doing a little better in school now. Alex says she got a B plus on her latest chemistry exam, thanks to Lena’s tutoring.”

Reign does nothing, though she does appear a little more bored.

“She made you some cards,” Supergirl says, and she turns away for a moment to look through the bag she’d brought into Lena’s lab. In it are a handful of colorful papers, many of which have drawings of two people embracing or animals playing together marked across them. Many others are filled with words inked from Ruby’s hand, and others yet spotted with dried tears. Ruby has become a remarkable artist at her age, and Kara briefly imagines how proud Sam will be when she sees just how intricate the illustrations have become.

Kara pulls one out at random and opens it. It’s a pink paper with hearts and stars etched over a field of flowers. Little animals spring up from the blossoms, their faces surprisingly detailed; in the center of the field, a cat prances to the west, its tail up and expression friendly. The other page is covered top to bottom in a small essay that reads much like a diary entry. She holds it up to the shield for Reign to see, and begins to recite,
“Dear Mom: I miss you so much. I hope that you will come home soon. Today, a boy named Tony Jacobsen told me he liked my hair and drew me a picture of a cat. I think he is kinda weird but I like the drawing. I drew a cat for you since you are allergic--”

Reign growls from inside the chamber. The smugness is gone from her face, replaced now with the beginnings of a snarl.

“--so I thought this could be the next best thing. What do you think? Also, Aunt Alex is really bad at drawing, it’s really funny.”  Kara pauses, smiling slightly, then continues, “Did I tell you that I met a man from Mars? He is really nice. I think you would like him a lot. I taught him how to play Foosball at the Arcade and sometimes I get to have dinner with him and Aunt Alex. I really like learning about Mars, and I--”

“Enough,” Reign snaps. She sits up on the bed, glowering at Kara as if she could strike her down by glare alone. Which, Kara muses, she technically could, if the barrier wasn’t in the way or a kryptonite chip embedded into the skin of her chest.

Supergirl stops. “What’s the matter, Reign? Feeling a little homesick?”

The worldkiller rolls her eyes. “Your games are juvenile and pointless. Samantha is no more alive than the pathetic creature who raised her,” she says. The dark shadow of her make-up is unsettling to Kara, especially now that the mask is gone; it’s Sam’s face that looks out at her, it’s Sam’s smirk that twists at her mouth, and beneath the growl that accents her words, it’s still Sam’s voice that leaks out whenever she speaks.

“Ruby loves you, Sam. We all love you. We won’t ever stop fighting for you,” Supergirl says, pressing the pink card lightly to her chest, just above the crest of her suit. She takes something else from the bag beside her: a photo of Ruby, taken by James a few days ago. The blue of her hair tips is still vibrant, almost enough to draw attention away from the way her smile doesn’t quite reach the rest of her. Kara holds it closer to the barrier. Not enough to touch it, but it attracts Reign’s attention just the same.

A burst of red heat vision strikes the barrier in front of the picture and Reign roars obscenities. The barrier doesn’t give, but the screech of energy against the scattershield is piercing to Kara’s ears. She flinches back as Reign bellows, “--shred into pieces and flay the skin from your bones, bleed you over the bodies of your friends and--”

The shield hums and goes dark, cutting through Reign’s tirade.

“Please don’t antagonize the murderous alien,” says Lena from across the desk, where she’s been hunched over her laptop and microscope for the last ten hours. There are dark circles under her eyes, and the fatigue sags at her posture, but there’s nothing about the woman to suggest she intends to quit anytime soon. Her eyes don’t lift from her screen as she types other than to glance down into the eyepiece of her equipment or the device she’s been fiddling with for over two days.

“It’s starting to bother her more quickly, now,” Supergirl observes, frowning at the dark containment shield. “She usually doesn’t freak out until after I finish Ruby’s letter.”

Lena raises her head slightly at that. “Her patience could be wearing thin,” she says, but there’s a thoughtful press of her lips that Supergirl mimics as they consider the alternative.

“Do you think… Do you think Sam can hear me?” She looks down at the photo and the card in her hands. She won’t tell Ruby how Reign reacted, of course; as far as Sam’s daughter knows, it’s like reading a story to a comatose patient.

Her answer is delayed, and in the pause Kara can feel Lena’s uncertainty and fear.

“There’s no way to tell,” she says finally, looking back down at her experiment. “Reign hasn’t relinquished control since you fought all three worldkillers at once.”

It could mean several things, Kara knows-- but it’s the one outcome, the most likely one, that hangs heavy in the lab, unspoken but acknowledged in the silence.

She releases a breath and replaces the papers back into the bag. There’s not much else she can do in the meantime while Lena tries to manufacture a cure other than sit around and pry into Reign’s subconscious for whatever bit of Sam might be left. And when she doesn’t have that, Kara feels her uselessness crowd around her like shadows squeezing ever tighter. It makes her restless, much how she imagines Reign is trapped in that cell.

The only good thing to come of this, Kara thinks briefly, is that this was the most civil conversation she’s gotten out of Lena since the med bay.

A group of human-shaped silhouettes rippling with red energy drop down from the ceiling, but neither Kara nor Lena are startled by the sudden intrusion. Kara simply looks up at J’onn, Mon-El, and James as the three men step forward to inspect the lab. It hasn’t changed since their visit yesterday, except for perhaps a few more bags under both her and Lena’s eyes.

“Any luck?” J’onn asks, arms crossed.

Kara sighs. “Not on my end. She seems a little more agitated today, but same results.”

The creases of J’onn’s face relax slightly. “Maybe you’re getting through to her,” he says, and Kara wishes she could feel the soft spark of hope that escapes with his tone. “If Sam is responding to Ruby’s letters and pictures, Reign might notice and react more violently.”

Kara nods. “Or I could just be annoying her,” she says, still frowning.

J’onn shrugs. “Possibly. But we have to keep trying.”

She knows. She just wishes there was a reliable way to gauge the validity of their results.

“And Miss Luthor?” J’onn turns to Lena, who had returned to tweaking some sort of gadget on the table.

“I’m almost there,” she answers, and she continues with her screwdriver for another moment before sitting up straight. There’s a look of deep concentration that hides whatever else she might be feeling, but Kara can sense the lingering remnants of doubt still shrouding her thoughts. “Here. I have a prototype of the injection. The liquid kryptonite should act as a catalyst for the virus I wrote according to Supergirl’s DNA. If we can infect her with it, it might be able to neutralize Reign’s metamorphosis and force her back into human.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” Mon-El prompts. He looks pensive as he gazes toward the darkened shield.

Lena’s eyes narrow for a split moment. “Then I keep trying until it does. Even if it doesn’t work to rewrite her DNA and reverse the transformation, it might be able to keep her from adapting any more to the kryptonite and give me more time to refine the virus.”

All of them watch the shield for a moment.

“Wait,” James says. He steps closer to Lena before glancing between the others gathered around. When his attention settles back on his girlfriend, concern bleeds into his voice as he asks, “How are you going to give it to her?”

At this Lena sighs. “Now that she’s unrestrained, I can’t use the mechanisms inside the cell to deliver it properly,” she says. In one hand, she holds up the small tablet with the same program Kara has seen running on it since Reign’s containment, including the remote-controlled kryptonite level responsible for keeping Reign in manageable power limits. Lena gestures faintly at the container. “I need someone to enter it and deliver it personally.”

“Can you keep her subdued enough for someone to give it?” Mon-El asks, eyebrows drawn together.

The muscles along Lena’s jaw work, and it takes her a moment to finally admit, “I’m not sure. The longer we wait to give it, the more resistant she becomes. So it's not in our best interests to sit around and wonder about it.”

Mon-El doesn’t take this as a jab and nods. “I’ll give it,” he announces, offering out a palm.

Supergirl moves to protest, but Lena raises a hand to stop her.

“You can’t,” Lena says, staring at Kara. “This vial is full of kryptonite. If something were to happen inside that cell and it breaks, you’d be at risk.”

There’s a strange flutter in her chest at the idea that Lena is concerned for her safety. Supergirl gapes a moment, but charges stubbornly ahead to argue, “If she’s even remotely as strong with that Kryptonite infuser on her chest, she could overpower him easily. I’m the only one who can match her if it comes to that.” Kara huffs a breath and glares at the others, daring them to dispute it. “I’ll be okay if something happens to the vial. I’ve had worse kryptonite poisoning before.” Well, she probably hasn't, but at this point it was too small a matter to care about. Sam was their priority, and Rao be damned if she allowed the chances of success to dwindle for her own well being. 

Lena frowns, obviously not convinced.

Kara shakes her head before Lena can object again. “She’s my friend too, Lena,” Kara says, and the gravity of her words sit over them all, weighted by the sincerity thick in her voice. “I need to do this.”

There’s a reluctance to the young Luthor as she studies Kara. But then she places it into Kara’s open hand and sighs. “I’m not responsible for what happens to you, then,” she says, and though there’s a brief scowl that accompanies the statement, Kara thinks she hears the worry hiding behind it.

“This will work,” Kara says firmly, and she wills it into existence with every fiber of her being. It has to, because they have nothing else.

The others part to let Kara advance toward the scattershield.

“I’m going to give her a temporary burst of the kryptonite,” Lena explains as she taps on her tablet. “It won’t cause her irreversible harm, but even with her adaptations, it should be enough to take her down a few notches.”

Supergirl nods. She grips the syringe-gun in her hand, glad that Lena thought to construct it in a lead-based alloy so that the kryptonite encased within didn’t radiate through. It’s strangely heavy, as if the object is weighed down by all the baited hope and fears clogging the air of the lab. It’s a significant force enclosed in the space of her palm.

Which could, incidentally, also kill her.

She tries not to think about that.

“Okay,” Lena begins, just as the darkness of the shield fades back. “That should--”

She stops, and all of them stare into the cell.

Reign is on the floor, crouched in the far corner of her containment. The markings over her face are smudged like she’d dragged her hands down over her eyes and cheeks, and she grips her knees with pale, clenched fingers. She’s not unconscious like Kara was hoping she’d be, but the wild, unfocused look she shoots around the cell with wide, dark amber eyes is just as relieving.

“Sam,” Supergirl breathes. Triumph flares bright and hot in her chest, outshining everything else that lurked there.

The woman in the cell jerks to stare over at Kara. Though she wears Reign’s clothing, the frightened, dumbfounded expression that turns up at Kara is entirely Sam. She doesn’t move, but the clench of her shoulders falls slightly when she recognizes the red-and-blue symbol across Kara’s chest.

“S-Supergirl?” Sam whispers, and her gaze darts around again, filled with suspicion and doubt. She doesn’t move, and Kara wonders if she’s even breathing, or if the terror freezing her in place is too overwhelming to chance.

Supergirl whips around to look at Lena. “Let me in,” she demands, all but seconds from crashing through the shield herself.

Lena obliges with a shaking hand. The look on Lena’s face is pained, not relieved like what flows tentatively through Kara now; it’s cautious-- confused, even. Kara decides not to dwell on it as the shield ripples out of her way.

Supergirl hurries into the cell and around the end of the bed that separates her and Sam.

Before she reaches down to her friend, though, she glances briefly over her shoulder at Lena and the three men clustered around close by at the ready. “Put it back up,” she instructs calmly, “Just… just in case.”

This, too, Lena obeys, but her expression grows darker. The shield returns with a soft vibration as it falls back into place.

“What-- what’s going on?” Sam whispers, pulling away from her when Supergirl crouches low nearby. “Am I… is she… is it over?”

Kara desperately wants to reach out and close Sam in a tight embrace, to promise that everything was finished with, but she can’t. Not yet.

“Almost,” Supergirl answers gently, leaning closer when Sam doesn’t immediately recoil away. The syringe is still in her hand and slowly she brings it up to catch Sam’s attention. “Lena made this to help you. It should take care of her.”

Sam’s dark eyes focus on Kara’s face. They’re hazy, distant, like she’s only partly in this world. It’s strange to see it from a face that had spent the last few weeks taunting and snarling at Supergirl. The haunted look unnerves Kara, and for a moment she’s not sure Sam even hears her.

“Okay,” Sam murmurs. The word shakes as its spoken, much like the woman it comes from. But to her credit, she lies surprisingly still as Supergirl touches her arm with a tender reassurance. There’s no resistance as Supergirl gently tilts Sam's head aside to expose the flesh of muscle between her neck and shoulder. It’s pulled taut, either from the strength still lingering in her body or from the tension coiled tight by fear.

“This might pinch,” Supergirl says softly, pressing the mouth of the syringe to Sam’s skin. She cradles the side of Sam’s neck in the other, fingers curled around the base of her skull to support the limp weight of her head. Sam stares out at nothing.

Kara’s thumb depresses on the trigger.

Without warning, a hand flashes up and snatches Supergirl by the wrist. The strength of it is staggering, moreso than Kara would have expected; it feels like she could crush the bones in Supergirl’s forearm like dry kindling.

Her eyes are impossibly wide. Still brown, but swirling with horror.

“She knows,” Sam breathes, trembling.

Supergirl yanks back, but Sam’s grip is unbreakable.

It’s seamless: there’s only time for Kara to catch her breath as the shine of red melts through Sam’s terrified stare, and then it’s not Sam holding onto Supergirl’s wrist, but Reign, and a wicked smile is curving at her mouth. Her grip flexes tighter around Kara and something snaps, shooting daggers up Kara’s arm. The syringe gun clatters to the ground at their feet. She pulls Supergirl closer, their noses almost brushing.

“I can play games, too,” Reign whispers.

Someone screams as Reign pitches Supergirl backward. Kara smashes into the shield and spasms of searing pain ricochet through her spine and shoulders. She slumps to the ground on her stomach, face slamming into the slick surface of the floor.

Reign’s boots appear in Kara’s blurred vision. Before she can react, a hand closes around her throat, a thumb pressed hard into the soft flesh just beneath her jaw.

Supergirl sputters as Reign lifts her from the ground to dangle in midair.

She hears the shield disappear behind her, but Reign simply stands there, holding Supergirl aloft as if she weighed nothing. Laughter rings in her ears, echoing through the buzz of pain that disorients her.

“How predictable,” Reign says, turning to face the four other people waiting just beyond the cell door. “How gullible. You lot truly are a bunch of fools, aren’t you? Did you really think it would be so easy?”

“Let her go,” Mon-El demands, somewhere behind Kara. His voice sounds so far away to her, and she can’t concentrate on any of the other voices but Reign’s as the worldkiller laughs again. She thinks maybe she hears James shout something--maybe her name-- but no one moves under the threat of Reign’s fingers digging into Kara’s throat.

Supergirl wheezes and paws at the hand clenched around her neck. Her own wrist feels as though it’s on fire, and it throbs acid up through her arm and shoulder.

“Sure,” she hears Reign say, “Catch.”

Supergirl soars across the room and crashes into a soft body. Someone grunts under the force of the impact and the two of them sprawl back against the tables of the lab, scattering equipment and furniture in their wake. Glass shatters around them, loosing vials of chemicals in all directions. Something splashes across the bare skin of her neck and she hisses when it sizzles and burns.

Kara’s breath is ragged. She sucks as much air into her lungs as she can manage, coughing slightly at the effort, and glares up at the worldkiller smirking over at her.

There’s no time to think or strategize.

Laserfire jets out from Kara’s eyes, meeting the stream of blinding red that shoots from Reign. There’s power surging from the worldkiller that frightens Kara; the last time they’d had this standoff, she could feel the edge of advantage Reign had over her, but she’d kept her ground. This time, she’s rapidly losing it.

It only takes a handful of seconds for Reign’s heat vision to power through Supergirl’s. She’s knocked back again, crying out as the fire scorches through the crest of El across her chest. J’onn is cut down, too, hissing at the burn in his shoulder as he's flung back. James crouches low beside him with the shield on his arm hefted protectively over their heads.

Reign tsks her tongue. But when Kara looks up, it’s not Supergirl who Reign is focused on. She’s gazing over at Lena, whose nimble fingers are flying over the screen of the tablet in her hand.

“Oh, Lena,” Reign says, bottom lip pouted in mock pity. As she turns fully to face the distraught woman, Reign reaches up and pulls the kryptonite chips from the skin of her chest. Kara can see the pulse of green as it fades from beneath her flesh, and Reign is no worse for the wear of it. “Too little, too late.”

Lena backs away. The click of her heels on the linoleum is frantic, even though she’s impressively composed with the worldkiller stalking slowly toward her.

Supergirl struggles to stand up. Mon-El, too, lifts to his feet, but J’onn is still slouched down, gripping his bleeding shoulder. James stands abruptly in alarm as Reign advances.

“Leave her alone,” Supergirl growls. There’s fire building in her, different from the pain that stings at every inch of her body; its white-hot and furious, mounting higher and burning brighter at the threat looming close to Lena. It’s a blazing sun growing in her heart and roaring out an inferno of righteous light, and the power of it swells within her until it feels as though she might burst with celestial fire. Her fists curl at her sides and lift high. Mon-El stands close by, and without looking at him, she commands, “I’ll keep her busy. Get the syringe. James, make sure Lena and J’onn don’t get hurt.”

The second the words leave her mouth, Supergirl flashes through the air and collides with Reign. The worldkiller anticipates it and snatches her by the shoulders to fling her into a concrete wall. The momentum of her own speed nearly punches a hole completely through, and Supergirl has to crawl out of the crater of her own making before darting back into Reign’s reach.

She manages to strike Reign across the face and send her staggering a few steps backward, but there’s a savage grin that doesn’t leave when Reign looks back up. She’s amused by it and otherwise unaffected.

Kara pants. There’s no way she’ll be able to sustain this fight long enough to wear Reign out or somehow gain the upper hand.

“What’s the matter, Supergirl?” Reign calls. Her hands are splayed out and upward in challenge. “Was poor little Sam too much for you?”

Kara scoffs. “Sorry, was I supposed to be impressed?” she shoots back with bared teeth.

Reign’s eyes flare red again, shining like twin jewels of fire.

“Why would I want to impress you?” she laughs, and the sound of it sends ice prickling down Kara’s spine.

From across the lab, Lena shouts, “Supergirl, we’re running out of time!”

The claws on Reign’s outstretched hands sprout from each finger tip. Kara eyes them warily as the worldkiller takes a step forward, then another, until Reign is backing Supergirl toward the far wall.

“Running?” Reign echoes, and there’s a sick delight to her tone that curdles in Kara’s stomach. “You’re already out of time.”

She barely escapes the sonic shriek as the shockwaves ripple violently through the air, tearing through the linoleum of the floor and shredding some of the scattered lab equipment caught in its range. Kara ducks and narrowly avoids the crash of metal beams and warped frames that cascade down in the sparking aftermath.

Reign grunts suddenly, and Kara looks up to see Mon-El bearing down on her with as much strength as he can muster. He had an element of surprise, but in no time Reign tosses him away with all of the effort of a dog and her toy, lip curled with annoyance. The syringe flies out of Mon-El’s hand and across the lab.

Kara dives for it.

Something strikes her in the side; Supergirl sprawls over the ground, gasping for air, still reaching out for the syringe.

Reign stands over her again. She tilts her head, like a curious puppy, and smiles. It’s the same smile that makes Kara’s blood freeze and her heart stutter in her chest. There’s no Sam behind those eyes.

Still, she tries anyway.

“Sam,” Kara says. Her voice is hoarse, and she coughs lightly to clear it of the wetness threatening to strangle her words. “Sam, I know you’re in there. I won’t ever stop. I promise.”

Reign’s claws catch the fluorescent lights above them as she hooks her fingers toward Supergirl. “Oh believe me,” she says, “You’ll stop soon enough.”

Kara hears a muffled “Lena!” just as a a brilliant arc of light blasts out from behind Reign. The worldkiller pitches forward with a feral snarl, and Kara is surprised to see a smoking hole in the shoulder of Reign’s dark suit. The skin just beneath is scorched, and the smell of burnt flesh quickly meets her nose.

“Supergirl!” It’s Lena’s voice now, high pitched and panicked. When Kara whips around to find her, Lena is standing alone among the rubble holding what appears to be some kind of ray gun. The oddly-shaped barrel is smoking lightly, reminiscent of Reign’s new wound.

...Wound?

Reign regains her footing and whirls around to face Lena. A much darker and far more sinister expression contorts her face now, and it blazes with the red of her glare.

Kara’s breath seizes in her lungs.

Reign bolts forward, but Lena’s hand squeezes the gun just in time; another blast sends Reign onto her back, and this time Kara sees a large chunk of her suit burnt away from the space just beneath the worldkiller crest. Reign hisses and touches at the spot, and her fingers come away dark and wet.

Kara has no idea what that weapon is or how Lena suddenly came to possess it, but the sight of Reign down and bleeding invigorates the dying ember of hope in her own chest. They can do it-- they have a way to fight back, a way to win. A way to save Sam.

A way to move forward.

Mon-El steps closer to Lena. He meets Kara’s gaze and nods.

The syringe gun is only a few feet out of reach. Heart thundering, Kara lunges for it. A scream erupts behind her. The moment her hand curls around the handle of the syringe, Kara turns, and watches as Reign tears through the chest plate of James’s armor and brushes him aside for the woman standing behind him. Mon-El snaps his cape, snatching Reign’s wrist as she moves to strike Lena, and Kara takes the half-breath of time he affords her to launch herself at the snarling worldkiller.

Reign’s claws slice through the fabric of Mon-El’s cape just as Kara slams into her side, knocking them both away from Mon-El and Lena. A fist connects to the side of Kara's face and spots of light spring up into her vision. Another into her stomach steals the air from her lungs, and as she gasps, Reign smashes her forehead into Supergirl’s. Blinding pain explodes through her skull, and Kara collapses.

There are voices shouting, screaming even, but Kara can’t make out the words from the static churning through her head. Her face is wet, and her wrist has gone numb; yet somehow, when she turns to look at it, the syringe is still gripped tight in her fingers.

Reign is not beside her.

Another scream comes this time, and Kara vaguely recognizes the horrified cry that rips from James’s mouth as it forms Lena’s name. The sound of it is electric. Kara braces against the ground and heaves herself onto unsteady feet. She doesn't know which direction it came from, but she moves forward as the world tilts beneath her.

“Stop--Leave--” Kara tries, and her voice is cracked, raspy, and it feels like she’s been stabbed in the neck when the sound croaks out of her throat, “her--- her--”

Something metal snaps. It’s a sharp splintering sound that breaks through the warbling noise in Kara’s ears. She doesn’t know what it is, but something in the back of her mind alerts, though she can’t make out the warning flashing through her consciousness as if there are lights flickering out a message she can’t decode. Her sight swims, and it sounds as though the world around her has been plunged underwater; she can’t hear the other voices beside the one in her head that pleads for her to move faster as James’s cry echoes in her thoughts.

“Don’t worry, Supergirl,” says a voice, and it’s startling in its sudden proximity. Kara blinks and the shape of someone focuses into view. It looks like Sam-- it sounds like Sam. And for the span of a moment, Kara feels all of the hope and anguish and heartbreak and desperation clash in the space of her chest, bellowing and silent all at once. The void yawns wider, and for a brief second, she grasps something of clarity: this moment, here, was the end. There would be no other fight, no other battle between strangers from the same planet, no more war between worlds. This moment unfolding before Kara was the last of them, and whatever the outcome, there would be nothing to undo it. No second chances.

It reminds her of her visit to L-Corp and Lena, and all of that feeling that is unfamiliar and yet understood coils around her heart until she’s nearly choked by the intensity of it. She had wanted to run from those thoughts and feelings until they grew tired of the chase; she wanted to hide away behind her suit, pretend that the Kara Danvers and the Lena Luthor that sought comfort and companionship in each other were figments of the same imagination that gave her reprieve during the night. A dream, she’d wanted; no more real than the wistful visions of slumber, whisked away by the dawn and locked into distant memory until the next nightfall. But Lena wasn’t a dream-- Kara Danvers was no dream, but a nightmare, because Kara Zor-El was real, and she was alien, and she had gone behind her best friend’s back and tarnished the trust and love they’d built over the years.

And now Kara can’t run from Lena, or herself, or those feelings that eke into the quiet of the night and fill her with desire and wholesome joy. They’re loud and demanding, and as Kara stares into the blurred face of Reign, those feelings spring forward and declare freedom.

Oh.

She loves Lena.

Oh, how she loves Lena.

Kara blinks again. Reign’s face looms close, eyes glittering fierce and ruby. She realizes no time has passed at all, that Sam’s-- no, Reign’s-- voice is still echoing around her.

Reign continues, almost kindly, “You’re the first.”

Someone cries out.

Fire erupts in Kara’s stomach. It blazes and eats up through her with vengeance, tasting of ash and acid and lightning blistering through her veins. Her skin feels as though it's boiling away, and her bones are screaming as millions of red-hot daggers bury deeper and deeper into every inch of her body with savage, molten agony. It spreads up from her gut and out to her fingertips and drowns her in her own strangled gasp for air.

It's a sensation she knows well. Even if she didn’t look down at herself to see the large, pulsing green crystal protruding from just beneath her rib cage and through the tattered edges of her bloodied blue suit, Kara would know the feeling of kryptonite even in her dreams.

“Kara! Kara!”
It’s Lena’s raw, hysterical voice shrieking her name at a wrenching pitch that shatters the haze drifting over her. She struggles to move, to just lift her gaze, but all she can do is stare at Reign and watch the neon green light worming through every vessel under her skin, crawling up her chest and throat and jaw as it’s reflected in Reign’s triumphant eyes.

“KARA!” Maybe it’s Mon-El hollering her name now, or James, or perhaps J’onn. Their shouts blend together in frenzied, anguished cries.

What was that thought--? The end?

“KARA!”

Lena. Right, Lena.

There’s an inferno searing her skin, through the muscle that locks into place and seizes her with a choked wheeze.

Reign radiates victory as she holds Supergirl, but the more Lena screams her name, the more Kara begins to see something change in Reign’s face. It’s a flicker at first, barely perceptible, but then Kara watches in her pained daze as something overcomes the worldkiller with her hand still plunged through Supergirl’s abdomen around the kryptonite.

The red fades.

A soft, disbelieving, “Kara?” breaks through the noise surrounding them.

It’s a fight not to give into the dark clawing at the edges of her vision, but Kara manages a small smile.

“S-Sam,” she rasps, breath hitching, “I-- I told--” but she can't continue, and the words die on her tongue in an empty, suffocated inhale.

The brown eyes are wide in horror, reflective of how they’d been back in the cell. But they’re still Sam’s eyes, and Kara finds a sliver of comfort despite the agony splitting through her body at that.

“Kara,” Sam gasps, and tears are spilling onto her cheeks, “Kara-- I-- no--”

It takes all of her remaining strength to do it, but Kara presses the tip of the syringe gun into the exposed wound beneath the worldkiller crest. Sam shudders as the trigger clicks under Kara’s finger.

She will not fail another friend. She will not fail Sam.

Sam’s grip on Kara’s shoulder slackens. Green light flickers up against her skin and Sam flinches away, but then she takes the crystal from the soft flesh of Supergirl’s stomach with a gentleness Reign could never mimic, despite the light now trailing up the skin of Sam's own arm. Blood coats her hand, leaking down the front of Supergirl's suit and staining the red of her skirt darker.

Then, as Sam’s legs buckle, the two of them fall to the floor.

There are dark shapes above her. She can’t make out any features nor hear any words if they are spoken; her world is soundless, filled only by the serrated blades lacerating through every vein and the brand of pain as it sears her lungs with sickly fire. Her vision is dark and fading quickly, yet she can still see motion above her as something bends close: a person, maybe, a pair of shining green eyes, dark hair that cascades down to frame an open-mouthed face that says words Kara can’t hear or understand. And then a sudden motion and faintly, she thinks something might have stung her in the chest. Soft, wet warmth presses against her cheek by the corner of her mouth.

Ice blossoms under her skin and douses the flames licking against her bones until all that Kara feels is blessed nothingness.

When Kara opens her eyes, the light shining above her head is so blinding that for a moment, she wonders if she’d passed out on the beach. Her skin is warm, nearly hot, but she realizes that the plush beneath her is a cot and not the rolling sands of a sea shore. The low hush in her ears isn’t the lull of waves breaking, but the hum of machines that slowly come into focus.

After a few moments more, she realizes someone is sitting at the foot of her bed, gazing intently at her as her consciousness catches up.

“Hey,” says the person, and Kara blinks a few times to adjust to the light still glaring into her vision. “How are you feeling?”

Like my mouth is filled with sandy cotton balls, she wants to say, but the stiffness in her jaw and the throbbing spike of pain in her throat keep the words back. Kara wrinkles her nose slightly, and the person beside her nods.

“Don’t push yourself,” they say, and it’s with sudden clarity that Kara realizes it’s her sister smiling gently down at her. Alex’s face is gaunt and thin with dark bags hanging beneath her warm eyes.

“Alex,” Kara croaks, and her sister’s hand folds around hers. It fills Kara with security, and she clutches to Alex like a lifeline.

“Ssh,” Alex says, and she leans close to press her lips against Kara’s forehead. She pets back Kara’s hair and strokes the side of her face, and Kara wants to weep with the fierce relief that floods her at the touch. “You need to rest. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”

Kara swallows, and it’s painful, like trying to swallow down a handful of sharp rocks. “Sam,” she manages after a minute, struggling to fight the fatigue that attempts to drag her back under.

Alex pauses, then says, “Sam is okay, for now. She’s in a coma.”

Kara’s eyes widen slightly.

Her sister’s grip tightens a bit as she adds, “There’s been no sign of Reign since the injection. She responds physically to kryptonite, but there’s been no other indicator that Reign is still present. Brain function is normal, lab tests are normal. She’s just not waking up.”

Kara deflates against her pillows a little and sighs.

“You, on the other hand, have worried the shit out of everyone for three weeks,” Alex says, and though it’s not said with a reprimand, Kara can’t help the twinge of guilt at the thought. Still, her sister leans in close again, and this time Kara shakily lifts a hand to drape it over Alex’s backside.

Flashes of memory slip into her mind. Kara’s brow furrows as she thinks of the fight with Reign. It’s fragmented, and there are several chunks of memory that still elude her. She does, however, remember the kryptonite, and shuffles back slightly on her cot to touch a hand to the bandage wrapped around her midsection. There's a dull ache of pain just beneath it, but no ash, no brimstone, scorching her from the inside. 

 
Alex watches her reach upward, touching the skin of her chest and arms and face as if she doesn't quite believe the rest of her is still intact.

“How?” Kara demands, but yet, as the memory of green eyes and dark hair flickers to her attention, she has a feeling she already knows.

“Lena made a cure for kryptonite poisoning,” Alex explains softly. Her eyes are shining and wet, but there’s a small smile at her mouth. “An antidote for kryptonite, I guess. Mon-El says she gave it to you right before…you…” She ends with a sniffle and moves back to wipe at her nose.

An antidote for kryptonite. It seems impossible for it to exist, but she supposes ‘impossible’ was not a word that Lena tended to acknowledge.

It takes a considerable amount of effort, but Kara turns her head to the side, then to the other, sweeping the med bay for signs of anyone else. There’s a nurse attending another agent in the far corner, but Kara’s cot is sequestered off on its own, and no one else comes by to check in.

Alex must sense what Kara is about to ask, because before Kara can even open her mouth to pose another single-worded question she says, “Mon-El is helping with the city in your absence and J’onn is taking care of his father in the meantime. James was hurt, but he’s on bed rest at his own house after his discharge last week.”

Kara looks back at her sister.

There’s a few moments of quiet before Alex shakes her head.

“She’s not here,” she says. She glances back toward the rest of the med bay and the DEO facility beyond the glass walls, where everyone else continues on as normal. As if the world hadn't almost met an abrupt and horrifying end just weeks ago.

Kara frowns. “When?” she tries.

Alex clears her throat and looks down at her hands for a moment before meeting Kara’s gaze again. “She hasn’t been to the DEO since the incident,” she says, and the sadness Kara sees in her sister’s expression doesn’t seem to be for herself or even for Lena, but for Kara. “I’ve asked her. She won’t come back.”

The words sting in Kara’s chest. Alex must see the pain in her face, because her sister lightly pats her hand and murmurs something of an apology.

She doesn’t know why there are tears welling up in the corner of her eyes or why her chest constricts painfully around her lungs. She thinks, dimly, it might have something to do with the rage of emotion twisting in her stomach again, full of thoughts and realizations and understandings that she’d only fully acknowledged when faced with the potential of death at Reign’s hands. Things she wanted to lock away again and bury under a pretense of civility instead of bearing the crushing weight of it all as it grows heavier and heavier in her heart.

Alex stays with her for a while longer, answering the questions Kara gathers enough energy to ask. When she leaves, Kara curls into her cot, ignoring the protest of her wounds in favor of tending to the ache that lights in her chest and doesn’t leave, even when she drifts back off into a fitful sleep dreaming of green eyes and dark hair.

Chapter Text

It’s been a week since Kara regained consciousness, and she hasn’t seen Lena at all.

Supergirl floats far above the cloud layer of a dusk-tinged National City. Her cape billows out below her as she stretches onto her backside to stare up at the atmosphere unraveled beyond. With the sunlight withdrawing from the sky, she can see the twinkle of a few stars already popping into view, glittering and untouchable. She reaches out a hand and skims her fingers through the air where the stars wink and flicker in diamond-like clusters of cold, distant light, as if she might wipe them from the sky like cosmic dust off the surface of a cobalt glass dome.

The air is thin up here. It’s not much of an issue for a Kryptonian, who could survive the harshest of climates with ease so long as the yellow sunlight of this solar system continued to imbue power under her skin and strength in the depths of her bones. She’s been up this far many times-- farther, even. But she still feels the strain of the air in the bottom of her lungs, and though she takes long, even breaths, her chest still pinches slightly from the effort. The wound is almost unnoticeable now; all that remains is a pale, jagged scar beneath her sternum and the ghost of a twinge if she breathes too deep.

Kara doesn’t tell herself that the reason she’s up here, far above the city and away from the lives trudging on through it, is so that she doesn’t have to acknowledge the truth behind what’s really throbbing in her chest and the dull pain still oppressing every inhale.

Time was supposed to heal, wasn’t it? Granted, one week-- or, technically four, if she includes the three she’d spent bedridden in the med bay phasing in and out of consciousness-- isn’t a whole hell of a lot of time to sort through the feelings still lodged in her heart and throat. It had taken years for her to accept the fate of her planet and the deaths of her people, and months for her heartbreak over Mon-El to dispel and allow her a chance to continue on. This feels much like that time, Kara thinks sullenly, and it’s a thought that only digs deeper into her chest. She doesn’t want to go through that again. One time was more than enough.

The wind whips at her hair as she floats. It’s cold, and if she’d gone much further upward, there might have been frost gathering on her cape; it nips a flush onto her cheeks and the tip of her nose, but the rest of her is comfortably numb. Kara is thankful that up here, untethered from the earth, she can loosen the iron-grip she has on those thoughts and feelings anchored so deeply within herself, if just for a little while. Maybe if she’s lucky, they’ll float up higher and higher until they disappear into the heavens entirely. Or dissolve in the weightless silence that she’s suspended in, where the only sounds of the world far, far below are muffled through a sea of wind and in the veil of vast nothingness of light and endless sky.

Lena Luthor created a kryptonite antidote that saved her life. They were becoming creatures of habit, her and Lena, with this back and forth of saving each other. Kara wonders briefly if they should start a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. Or a tally, at the very least.  

Of course, Lena Luthor was also the person who created the kryptonite-powered laser pistol in the first place, the power source of which had led to Supergirl’s near-fatal wound when Reign took the gun from Lena and broke out its core crystal. But, on the other hand, without it Supergirl might never have had the chance to get close enough to Reign to administer the virus. Kara couldn’t necessarily blame Lena for using a last resort method that may as well have saved Supergirl’s life, too. Sam was alive because of it-- they were all alive because of it. As much as she hated to think it, the circumstances called for its use, and Lena recognized that before anyone else. It had taken time and a multitude of internal struggles to admit it, but Kara knows better now.

Still, Lena created the gun using the schematics from her brother’s old vault without notifying Supergirl or the DEO beforehand. It’s an uncomfortable situation, and it echoes the first confrontation they’d had over the subject of kryptonite. Only, now there are no more secrets, no more lies, and-- hopefully-- no more weapons of lethal capability hidden away.

Kara doesn’t really know how to feel about it all. What she’s supposed to feel. Up here, when her head is as light as the clouds drifting lazily beneath her, she can bear to rummage through the flares of anger and grief and utter confusion. She was angry about it, at first. When Alex explained the gun Kara had seen Lena use against Reign, it had flooded her with the same impassioned fury as when she’d discovered Lena was responsible for creating kryptonite in the first place. A fury filled with panic and blinding terror and memories of burning bones. It tasted of betrayal on the back of her tongue, that bitter, hard thing that was difficult to swallow, no matter how much she told herself Lena was right. The beam of that gun had come so dangerously close to Supergirl in that fight; Reign’s shoulder had been, what, four feet from her? What if Lena had missed? What if, in all the chaos, she’d hit Supergirl instead?

Though Kara knows Lena’s firearm skill is more than adequate, it still scalds her with old fear. Objectively, she knows where Lena’s loyalties lie, where her heart is set. She knows why Lena chose to do what she did, even if that old fear whispers doubts and accusations in the back of her mind. But still, the maybes, the whatifs, hammer down through her ribs and lungs until she’s swimming in panic again. Drowning in it.

Yet there’s a rational part of her brain, a small but noticeable voice, that pipes, What if she hadn’t?  Reign could have overpowered her again, could have left her for dead a second time, or finished what she’d started; and then Lena would have died, and Mon-El, and James, and J’onn, and eventually Alex and Ruby--

Kara pinches her eyes shut. No matter the howling of the storm in her breast, there’s a strange soothing in the acknowledgment that Lena had saved everyone yet again, despite Supergirl’s misgivings over the dangerous and overly risky method she chose to do so.

That is the Lena Luthor way, Kara supposes.

And if she’s brutally honest with herself, it wasn’t really the kryptonite gun that sent alarm bells ringing through her being and her insides twisting up with fright anyway.

It’s that even a month after Reign was vanquished and Sam returned from the dark dimension of Juru, Lena hasn’t said a word to Kara. Hadn’t visited her in the DEO while she recovered, or even so much as sent a message to ask if she was okay. It’s the same radio silence Kara received after Lena discovered the truth about Supergirl, only now Kara isn’t subject to being ignored or brushed off. It’s like she’s been forgotten entirely-- like Lena doesn't care . She had once thought she knew what it felt to be forgotten by Lena not so long ago. How naive she feels now, with the sensation of loss so significant it’s as if she never existed to Lena to begin with. That the history, the bond they shared, has gone up in flames and scorched from record. The absence has hewn something from the depths of Kara’s soul, and the tattered space left behind mourns it with every passing second.

At least when Lena ignored her before, there was that fire simmering just below it, the reminder that there had been something to burn to begin with.

Kara curls her arms around herself and grips tightly. She remembers most of the fight with Reign, now. The moments leading up to it, when Lena had spoken more than just a handful of short, indifferent comments to her. An actual conversation. They’d been teetering somewhere close to acquaintanceship again-- a potential, a maybe. She remembers the worry in Lena when Kara demanded to give Reign the vaccine herself. That deep-seeded dread in her stare that she couldn’t fully hide when Supergirl entered the cell.

Kara’s eyes open slowly, and she gazes unfocused through the dust of ice crystals gathered on her eyelashes. The air buffets against her cheek and through the waving curls of blonde hair trailing downward.

She remembers the raw, shattered scream of her name echoing through the lab as Lena was held back by James, forced to watch Supergirl be impaled by the shard of kryptonite that Lena herself had created. The mantra of Kara, Kara, Kara! that followed, as if the tearful shriek of her name might resuscitate her. Might stop the kryptonite from eating through every nerve in her body and devouring the life from within.

Perhaps there is irony in that, Kara thinks.

She exhales slightly. The ache is still there, ever present like a thumb pressing into a dark bruise deep in the cavity of her chest. Sunset is drawing to a close around the distant curve of the western hemisphere and the chill grows sharper, but Kara doesn’t mind much. It’s better, she thinks, to feel the sting of the air against her skin than the constant throb just below it.

There are more stars now. They remind her of Krypton, in a way, and a little bit of Midvale, too-- how she used to chart the stars with her father in Argo City, and then sit on the roof beside Alex to learn the new constellations hanging jeweled in the Earth’s unfamiliar sky. She remembers the jarring shift from her homeworld to Earth, how everything was different and frightening; the bold colors, the taste of the wind, the salt of the oceans and the feathered creatures drifting overhead, the blistering light of their sun in all of its golden brilliance. How the world itself felt strangely harsh and overwhelming and bright, but the people were warm and soft and full of a fierce love that soothed all of her other senses. Maybe, Kara thinks, that was why she gravitated toward Lena: she was shining, captivating, a force of nature whose only parallel could be found in the celestial bodies above. Human through and through, yet still somehow a reminder of home.

Her lungs squeeze, and Kara has to force those feelings back a little. They’re too much sometimes, even up here, suspended by nothing but shifting winds and stardust.

“--pergirl.”

Kara starts as her earpiece crackles with life. It’s Alex’s voice, hurried and hissed.

“Alex?” she questions, pressing a finger to the comm unit still set into the cup of her ear. The signal isn’t strong up here, and she was far enough away that the noise of the city receded to a soft hush under the distant roar of wind currents. Even then, she has to strain to hear anything of human life leagues upon leagues away. Winn must have boosted the signal, which meant an emergency--

“ --L-CORP, now ,” Alex demands, and the words bolt through Kara as electric fire.

She jerks upright, ignoring the protest of her joints that had become stiff while drifting motionless beneath the frigid ozone.

“What’s happening?” she demands, but she’s already kicking off from her space carved out of the sky and streaking down to the city glimmering in the low light of fading dusk. The earpiece squeals slightly in her ear, and seconds later she realizes it’s a disrupting frequency, not the DEO channel that Alex is reaching her through. An untraceable broadcast.

“Official --rders,” she hears Alex say through the static, “J’onn-- can’t--fer--DEO-- ” More static, and Kara shakes her head as the earpiece whines with sudden volume. “--Luthor-- weapons--egal-- ”

Her heart drops. She doesn’t need a full sentence to understand where Alex is going with this.

“I won’t let them,” she growls back to her sister, and the line goes dead before Alex can respond.

As soon as Kara hits the city limits, the noise rushes back into her skull like waves crashing violently onto a shoreline. She grits her teeth and sorts through the scattered sounds, through the chatter of civilians and the bleat of their car horns and alarms, through the wind whistling against her ears as she rockets between skyscrapers toward the tower branded L-CORP in the distance.

She hears J’onn’s voice before she hears Lena’s.

“--erstand, I don’t want to do this,” he says quietly, but there’s a grim resolution to his voice that steels in Kara’s stomach. It doesn’t sound right, doesn’t feel right, and for a handful of moments Kara can almost convince herself that it’s not him in the CEO office, surrounded by armed agents for a purpose that seemed more criminal than the reason he was there in the first place.

“Then don’t,” is Lena’s mild, unbothered response. It’s the first time Kara has heard her voice in weeks, and the realization of it presses hard on her heart.

The stretch of silence that follows sounds weighted, even though Kara is still miles from the building.

A sigh. “If it were my choice, I wouldn’t,” J’onn says. The characteristic roughness to his voice is faint, almost smooth. There’s still frustration there, but it’s masked by a weary acceptance. “But this goes farther above my head than I can see. If I don’t--”

“If you don’t,” Lena cuts in calmly, “someone else will. And let me guess-- they won’t be as gentle.”

There’s no response from J’onn, but there must have been one enough in his expression, because Kara hears Lena exhale softly.

“I don’t suppose a good lawyer can get me out of this one,” she remarks. It’s a dry, bitter statement that dredges up memories of Lena’s first arrest, when Maggie Sawyer had barged into her office and handcuffed her in front of Kara. That time Lena had been innocent; framed in her association with kryptonite by her name alone. By her own mother, no less. Kara remembers how adamant she’d been in Lena’s defense. How utterly faithful to Lena she was.

Is, she reminds herself fiercely.

It’s different this time, though. There’s no scheme to uncover, no innocence to prove. Lena Luthor had made the kryptonite, had created a high-powered weapon capable of felling a worldkiller, and kept the technology from the government-- the same government who was already primed with suspicion when it came to anti-alien exploits. Weaponry and highly restricted radioactive material were not great combinations for civilians to have in their possession, much less manufactured by them. And Lena was not the type of person to deny her involvement if it wasn’t the truth.

She had saved everyone from certain disaster in doing so, but the government never seemed too interested in that part. Not when the name Luthor is still attached to her and terrorist the thought that immediately follows.

Heat flows up from Kara’s gut and floods her system. Her teeth set harder, her jaw tightened, fists curled white-knuckled and stretched out in front of her as she shoots across the skyline. The tower is close now, and if she squints, her sight adjusts enough to glimpse the shadows of several agents in Lena’s office. The woman herself is in front of her desk, standing by herself.

“I’ve tried to postpone this as much as I could,” J’onn continues. “We may have had a rocky start, but I don’t doubt that you’ve done everything with the best of intentions.”

Lena snorts softly. “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that intentions mean nothing, J’onn,” she says, though it’s without the scorn Kara is sure she feels. “We are only judged by the choices we make, not what fuels them. Especially for those who bear my name.”

J’onn bows his head forward. “Then I will do my best in your defense.”

A small pause. Then, Lena shifts and sits back on her desk. “You do know they have no intention of throwing me in a cell to rot like my brother,” she mentions casually. Kara sees her hand sweep out in an empty gesture of calm indifference. “They’ll threaten me with it, of course. Or worse. But I know your kind. Those secret branches of government that the public believe exist only in spy movies and dystopian novels. They don’t want me in a cell, J’onn. They want to put me to good use for their own cause. If Lex didn't suffer from extreme psychosis, they'd have done the same to him.”

J’onn doesn’t have a response to that.

Kara, however, does.

The glass windows are shut, not even unlocked. But Kara doesn’t have the time, patience, or even the state of mind to care about something so trivial as a balcony door. Without so much as blinking, Supergirl dives through it; the entire frame of the window buckles in at the force of her speed, and shards of glass explode inward, like thousands of twinkling crystal bullets bursting toward the occupants within. Shouts cut through the confusion and several bodies duck in automatic response.  

On pure instinct alone, Kara whips the edge of her cape as she halts in front of a startled Lena, catching the spray of the glass in the material as it hails at them. The glass smashes harmlessly into Kara’s skin and suit. Her cape flares and scoops the remaining glass from the air as she lashes it in a downward arc, only to finish with a sharp twist to send the shards flying back at the feet of the armored agents still standing at Lena’s office door. The pieces thud into the carpet by their boots and against the plated armor of their shins.

It’s harmless, she knows, but she can’t help but feel a little triumphant at the alarmed expressions of the men that jump back at her entrance. She flicks back her cape and stands at full height, all bristling power and cosmic fury.

J’onn lifts his hands placatingly toward her. She catches a glimmer of guilt in his dark eyes as he exhales.

“Supergirl,” he says in way of a leery greeting, and she can tell her appearance has put more of a wrench into this plan than he anticipated. “Please, let us--”

“You should have told me,” she snaps at him, and she doesn’t hold back the savagery from her tone. It’s biting and verging on the edge of wild. Her fists clench again at her sides, and behind J’onn she hears the soft click of a gun safety. “You had no right to keep me in the dark about this!”

J’onn waves a brief gesture at the agent behind him. The guns lower.

“I know,” he says, “but this--” he nods at her stanced protectively in front of Lena, “--would have only happened sooner. I tried everything I could to stop it before it reached this point.”

“Then don’t do it,” Kara demands, echoing Lena’s earlier suggestion.

There’s pain in J’onn’s face as he looks at her. “You know I can’t."

It’s at this point that Kara realizes her eyes are aglow with blazing starlight. It’s reflected in the apprehension of the agents gathered behind J’onn, and for a split moment Kara wonders if these men would readily fight against her if J’onn gave the command. If being the operative word, considering she knew J’onn would not ask it of them. He wouldn’t risk his men, and he wouldn’t let Kara put herself into that position. These were men she’d fought alongside, men who admired her openly on the field and she admired them in return; could she fight them, if J’onn didn’t relent? What justification could she feed to herself then?

A new fear creeps up through her core, cold and uncertain.

In the back of her mind, she wonders if she’s only made this worse.

Lena is still quiet behind her. Kara can feel her there, tense, but unmoving and watchful.

“Supergirl,” J’onn repeats again. His arms cross, and she can feel that this decision of hers is going have consequences beyond her current state of comprehension. There would be backlash for this, she knows, perhaps not even just for herself-- Alex had risked herself by alerting Kara of the arrest when it was clear that J’onn had gone through lengths to keep it secret from her. Winn, too, if he had helped boost the unauthorized transmission to her comm unit.

Kara lifts her chin, eyes still shining. She won’t let them do this to Lena-- no matter what extremes it came to, though she prays it doesn’t go that far. “You can tell your supervisors they can go through me first if they want Lena Luthor,” she announces, teeth flashing around sharp words. She settles her fists on her hips and stares him down.

“There are laws and regulations I can’t simply ignore,” J’onn persists, and though he’s exasperated, the energy behind it is weak. He doesn’t want to do it any more than Kara wants him to. “If it’s not me, Supergirl, then it’ll be someone else-- someone worse. The government--”

“The government can thank Lena for once after all she’s done to save this city and this world time and time again!” Kara snarls, and one of the agents beside J’onn flinches. Another lowers his head, as if ashamed. “How many times is it now that the people of National City owe their lives to Lena Luthor for everything she’s gone through to keep them safe? How many times has she saved your life, J’onn, or mine? Too many times, and this is how your supers decide to treat her? This is how we thank her?” There are angry tears lining her eyes, burning like the heat that swells in her chest and just below her skin. It’s not fair, and she hates that she’s let it get this far-- hates that she never gave Lena the proper acknowledgement until it was too late.

J’onn closes his eyes and nods once. He’s silent for a long moment, and Kara stews in the tight, suffocating space between them.

“Is this your decision, Supergirl?” he asks finally, quietly. He doesn’t hide the regret to his voice. “Even when this concerns kryptonite?”

Lena moves ever so slightly behind her, but Kara doesn’t turn to look at her. Instead, she stretches out an arm to bar any space J’onn might have left to reach Lena. The starshine fades from her glare, though the resolution to it remains.

“I don’t think anyone needs access to it,” she responds tightly, “but Lena isn’t just anyone. She did what she had to do, and it worked. I can at least be grateful for that. Controlled substance or not, I’m one of two--three, now-- people on this entire planet that it can even remotely affect. She didn’t place the public in danger. She saved it.”

“Trust me, I know,” J’onn says, this time a little rougher than before. “If they weren’t forcing my hand, I’d be here under much happier circumstances. She saved my life, too.” He shakes his head. “If you do this, Supergirl, I can’t promise it won’t get uglier. I don’t have any influence on the higher-ups.”

Kara curls a fist. “Well, maybe I can convince them.”

“Supergirl.” It’s a gentle reprimand, not warm, but not angry, either. A hand ghosts at her outstretched arm, and slowly Kara pulls it back from in front of the woman she’s been shielding from view.

Kara turns to watch as Lena steps out from behind her.

“Lena, wait--” she starts, as panic tries to claw up her chest.

“It’s alright,” Lena says, giving a single shake of her head. Kara swallows back her protest when Lena briefly meets her gaze. There’s so much swirling around in her eyes, all of it an ache that clenches deep in Kara’s thudding heart and remains there, low and painful. “I can’t very well allow National City’s sweetheart to get swept up on criminal charges for interfering with a federal arrest.”

Kara scoffs. “You think I’m afraid of the federal government?” She glares back over at J’onn. “They can try me. We’ve had that discussion before. I’m sure Superman will have plenty to say about it, too.” The thought of recruiting Kal doesn’t even occur to her until she says it; part of her worries he wouldn’t take her side, after all, considering Lena’s family-- but then she thinks of the company her cousin occasionally keeps, and she knows that Superman would support her because it was the right thing to do. Prejudice be damned.

A small amount of hesitation surfaces on the faces of the men behind J’onn. “None of us want to make an enemy out of you or him,” J’onn comments, and just slightly, Kara thinks there might be a smile hinting at the edge of his mouth. “If this is what you choose, Supergirl, far be it from me to tell you otherwise. You’re our ally, not our employee. Perhaps the superiors can be convinced of Miss Luthor’s...pardon, should it threaten our alliance.”

“Then consider me her advocate,” Kara says, cool enough that J’onn purses his mouth and nods again.

“Very well. Miss Luthor-- my apologies. I hope next time we meet it will be on better terms,” he says, before lifting a hand to signal their departure. There’s murmuring from the small gathering of agents, but no one protests as J’onn leads them from the office. He pauses one moment to glance over his shoulder and add, “But I cannot promise anything, Supergirl. You’re taking a huge risk with this.” Then, he’s gone.

Jess peeks in, and upon seeing Supergirl still standing amongst a glittering sea of broken glass, hurriedly shuts the office doors behind the retreating men. Kara blinks away the wetness lingering in her eyelashes and sniffs back the blaze of emotion that had carried her through that conversation.

It’s not quite silent in the office. Wind rushes softly through the shattered window, stirring some of the papers on Lena’s desk. As they threaten to scatter off the desk entirely, Lena turns and treks back over to stack a few weights over them. Kara moves instinctively away-- a remnant of the awkward unease wrought between them over last couple months.

“I’m sorry about the window,” Kara says, locking her fingers together in a nervous motion. She’s sorry for a lot of things, but somehow all she can focus on is the damn window and the rash void of thought that had somehow made the idea seem appropriate at the time. Supergirl isn’t rash, she likes to think-- but maybe there were certain exceptions to that.

Lena pauses to look over at the gaping hole left behind in Supergirl’s hasty and rather dramatic entrance. An eyebrow lifts slightly as she regards it.

“I didn’t take you to be one for theatrics,” she says mildly.

A flush slips back up Kara’s neck and cheeks, only this time it isn’t from anger.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats, “I’ll pay for a replacement--”

“Kara, it’s fine,” Lena interrupts, and though the tone of her voice is tired, defeated  almost, Kara can’t help but feel a small thrill wind through her at the sound of her own name.

Still, she hangs her head. “At least let me help clean it up."

For a moment, Kara thinks Lena is considering her offer; the stretch of time that follows is a catch of hopeful breath, and she waits anxiously for Lena to say something-- anything-- before she breaks into as many pieces as the glass sprinkled around her boots.

Then, Lena shakes her head. It’s a slow, wry motion. “You’ve done enough, Supergirl,” she says, sighing softly. She slides into her seat at the desk and holds her head with both hands, elbows propped up on the resin surface.

Kara can’t tell in which way she means it. Was it meant in dismissal, or was it a rebuke, a scold for interfering where she has no place doing so? She’s suspended for a minute, uncertain, and then the hurt thuds its way into her chest. The sorrys spring up into her mouth, desperate and miserable, but she can tell by the hunch of Lena’s shoulders that her apologies are unwanted. Unneeded.

She stands there for a moment more, clinging at her own hands as if they might grant her a solution to the mess of hope and hurt strewn around her. It’s a helpless gesture, and it bothers her how childish it feels to be standing and wringing her hands in the presence of someone she’d once been effortlessly comfortable around. “I--” she starts, then cuts herself off with a short exhale and amends, “You shouldn’t-- you shouldn’t be punished for saving people. I won’t let them do that to you.”

Lena lifts slightly from where she’s curled over her desk, but she doesn’t look up at Kara.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Supergirl,” she says, and it’s that same tone, that tired, beaten numbness that now terrifies Kara more than her anger does. Her silver-green eyes are dull and heavy-lidded, no longer bright and steadfast against the danger of incarceration. It’s been a month since Kara has last seen Lena, and to see this-- to see Lena this haggard-- after four weeks is as jarring as being forcibly yanked out of a dreamstate.

Kara’s panic bubbles low in her stomach, threatening to boil over as the discomfort between them deepens. She wants to know what’s going through Lena’s head right then, what emotion is simmering under the blank look that she directs still at her desk. Is it fear? Is it disappointment? Does Lena care that Kara is standing before her now, well and able-bodied despite the near-death experience nearly caused by Lena’s doing, however indirectly? Is she upset that Supergirl staved off the first wave of what might be an endless attempt at legal backlash for acts borne out of necessity?

But Kara’s not a mind reader, however much she wishes she was right then.

Lena lets out another breath, this one long but quiet. Kara braces herself, because she can almost feel the words forming on her tongue, ready to sink claws into Kara’s lungs to join the others still pierced there.

“Thank you for trying to help,” she says, and for a brief second she raises her glance to meet Kara’s. There are tears there, unshed yet but shining along the rim of her reddened eyes, and the sight of them alone makes Kara’s throat close and tears of her own burn on her cheeks. “But I--" her voices wavers, "I can’t do this. I need you to leave.”

“Lena, I--”

“Kara,” Lena demands, sharper this time, and her eyes shut with visible effort. Kara doesn’t like the sound of her name like that; it arches violently through her, biting and unwelcome. She wants to crawl away from the echoes of it in her head. “Please. Just go .”

She’s rooted to the spot-- she can’t just leave, not when the DEO had just tried to arrest Lena for saving their lives, not when Lena looks like that and not when Kara feels like this -- but there’s a familiar thunderstorm growling inside her, flashing and ready to burst.

It’s with a whimper trapped in the back of her throat that Supergirl lifts off the glass-studded carpet and dashes out of the broken window, leaving behind the last remaining Luthor as she tucks her head onto her arms and cries.

“She doesn’t get it,” Kara says softly, and she brushes at the corners of her eyes with the sleeve of her supersuit. She’s barely speaking above a whisper, but to her it sounds like she’s hollering the words as they’re forced out of her chest. “I know-- I know I messed up. That I did something dumb. But you can’t just-- you shouldn’t just cut someone off entirely for one mistake, right? Or two, I guess. I mean, I’ve forgiven the people closest to me for worse.” She tries to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stays there, aching and hot. “I’ve tried so hard to make it right. To show her that I want to do better-- to move forward. But she just… she won’t listen to me.” The hiccup leaves her mouth as a sharp exhale, and she continues, “She barely even looks at me. How am I supposed to fix this if she doesn’t want to?”

Sam doesn’t answer.

Kara strokes the limp hand laid against the medical cot that Sam is resting on. Though the monitors in the background beep and chirp quietly, to Kara they’re bells and alarms, a music of Sam’s life that have become her only responses in Kara’s visits to the private room. Right now she has Sam all to herself, with Ruby in class and Alex trying to diffuse the uproar caused by Supergirl’s “insubordination,” despite that Kara is not legally tied to any entity and did not technically swear fealty to any sort of organization. For the past twenty minutes, Kara has ranted and raved to Sam’s unresponsive, silent face about the injustice of it all. She’s not sure if Sam can hear her, but she likes to think that Sam would have been just as vehement if it’d been her crashing through the window to stop Lena’s arrest instead.

Kara sucks in a breath to calm herself. It’s a little easier now, without the matter of Reign and the impending apocalypse to send her careening over the edge of self control. She settles herself until the tears die behind her eyes, and sighs.

“There’s so much I wish I could tell her,” Kara murmurs, resting her hand over Sam’s. The other woman is warm, but it’s the only sign of life beyond the electronic rhythm pulsing gently in the background. Even still, Kara finds comfort in Sam’s presence, however conscious it is. “I didn’t realize… I was so caught up in everything-- all of the shock with Mon-El, and his wife, and this… this nightmare from my own homeworld that I just didn’t… I didn’t know. About myself. About what I felt. There’s so--” she exhales again, closing her eyes to fend off the fresh wave of grief that tries to rear up in her chest and throat, “--There’s so much to feel, Sam. I don’t know how anyone does it.”

More beeping.

Kara shakes her head lightly, but it’s not directed at her comatose friend. “I don’t even know what to do about it. Do I tell her? I haven’t even told my own sister, and she... well, she probably knows what it feels like. Half the time I can’t even admit it to myself.” She blows out a noisy breath. “I don’t want to keep anything else from her, you know? I’ve done that so much already, and look where it got me. But what if-- what if that just hurts her more? What if that just makes everything worse? ”

The fear of it is almost as painful as her current predicament, and for a moment all Kara can do is hang her head against Sam’s blanketed thigh and breathe.

After a few minutes of thoughtful silence filled with the hum of medical chimes, Kara sits up again. “For all my super strength, I feel so helpless,” she says. She grips Sam’s hand one more time, and manages a small smile toward the unconscious woman. “You’re so strong, though. When you wake up, maybe you’ll have an idea how I’m supposed to get her to talk to me again. You do this human stuff better than I do.” She attempts a laugh, but it comes out as a puff of air instead.

There’s a shadow at the door across the room. Kara’s skin crawls before she even looks up, so when she sees Lena standing stiffly in the doorway staring in at her and Sam, she’s not surprised.

Still hurts, though.

“Sorry,” she says, rising to her feet. Kara’s still dressed in her suit and cape, which she figures Lena hadn’t expected; all the other times they’d ran into each other at the hospital Lena owns-- she had insisted on Sam’s transfer from the DEO nearly a week ago-- Kara had been dressed just as herself. But there’d been an apartment building on fire only an hour ago, and she hadn’t seen much reason to change. Not when these quiet moments she has with Sam are so few and far between, and the next call for Supergirl’s help is likely just minutes away.

Lena clears her throat and blinks back the residual flare of emotion from her expression. “Don’t be,” she answers, and it’s a civil tone, bordering lukewarm. She nods at Sam still stretched out motionlessly on the bed before Kara. “I got here early, anyway.”

Kara only nods in return. There’s not much to say, just like the last time they encountered each other here over Sam’s unconscious body. It’s odd, to say the least. As much as Kara tries to avoid the unpleasant rift between them, this was the fourth time she and Lena have found themselves in this exact position.

Fate is a fickle creature, Kara muses. That or just a supreme jerk.

She moves out from behind the bed and to the door that Lena still waits at. Kara doesn’t react when Lena steps out of her way, but the distance pulls tight on the leash of control she has on the misery still chained up inside her chest.

“Any difference?” Lena asks softly, and it’s so sudden that Kara freezes in place over the threshold of the door as comprehension catches up to her.

Kara blinks over at Lena. She is smooth and collected, as usual; her dark hair is wound in a neat bun, away from the sharp, elegant lines of her face. The illumination of sunlight from a nearby window only draws more attention to the cut of her jaw and the natural downturn of her mouth, and as Kara stares, she finds herself falling into the pale seaglass rimmed in sapphire of Lena’s eyes. An ocean storm.

“Uh, no,” Kara says, forcing herself to look toward their friend before she shatters under the weight of those intense eyes. The monitors beep enthusiastically, as if to contradict her. “Still the same.”

“I’m starting to have a bit of déjà vu,” Lena remarks, and it takes Kara a moment to recognize the intended humor lurking just beneath the politeness. It’s a dark, subtle sort of humor though, and the small smile she feels reaching for her mouth quickly vanishes. Lena’s not wrong. Sam being non-responsive and the two of them caught together in the waiting game is eerily familiar, only now time isn’t breathing down their necks for Reign’s eventual escape. At least Kara no longer has to worry about the woman on the cot choking the life out of everyone she loves because of a demon that chased her from the burning remains of their dead planet.

It’s a little more morbid than she likes to think, and her nose scrunches slightly at the thought.

“Yeah,” she agrees eventually, and when Lena glances at her over her shoulder, Kara doesn’t meet her gaze. She looks down instead at the bag in Lena’s hand. It’s a gift bag, but instead of a present she recognizes the letters from Ruby that Supergirl never had the chance to finish reading to Reign. This time the smile surfaces completely.

Sam would probably enjoy listening to those more than Kara blabbering on about her feelings.

Maybe it’s the surprise of Lena’s idle conversation that inspires something of courage to her-- or maybe hope, if she dares call it that-- when Kara takes in a quiet breath and pulls her lip between her teeth before asking, “Has… is everything going okay? Any more, um, unwanted visitors?”

Lena pauses by the foot of Sam’s bed. She places the bag over the blanket beside their friend’s ankles, and then carefully turns to face Kara again.

“No, thankfully,” she says, and the words are easy, stoic. “They’ve left me alone for now.”

There’s some relief to that, and it whooshes in her chest a little to give the tightness of her lungs some reprieve. She doesn’t hide the sigh when she responds, “Good. I hope it stays that way.”

“As do I.” Lena settles her with a look, and it’s impassive, though somehow softer than how she’s gazed at Kara over the past few weeks. But it’s a look that doesn’t recognize, one that doesn’t suggest she acknowledges the history between them.

The conversation wanes again, and in the silence Kara hears the whispers of her thoughts and memories itching for attention.

Lena is still looking at her. As the second tick by, Kara finds herself suddenly possessed with the urge to tell her everything: to spit out the elixir of love and anguish and rage that has slowly poisoned her insides. It wells up in her throat in response to the blankness watching her, still devoid of the comfort and affection that Lena had once looked to her with. Her chest pinches again, stolen of breath. Maybe, the small, vindictive voice in the back of her mind whispers, if she tells Lena-- if she breaks open that gate and floods the room with the sodden remains of her heart-- then that fire might spark back to life, those embers that mean Lena still feels something might smolder again.

“Supergirl?” Lena questions, softly, innocently, as if she has no idea of the dam cracking before her very eyes. As if she doesn’t see it in the glaze that overcomes the superhero still frozen at the door.

“My name is Kara,” is the response that bubbles out of her, quiet but somehow still resonating through Sam’s small room in a whisper that breaks halfway through. She doesn’t have time to be grateful that none of the nurses are nearby or that Sam’s quarters are blessedly free of video monitoring; she doesn’t even have time to utter a goodbye to her friend still unmoving on the cot, because Kara-- Supergirl, she reminds herself bitterly-- twists away from the door and races from the hospital wing with her cape snapping behind her like a flag.

The wine in Alex’s glass swirls in a languid circle as she stares off at the horizon. The sky is a shadowed canvas stretched above their heads from one edge of the world to the other, littered in thousands of glittering pinholes of faint starlight. The moon is hole-punched directly at the zenith, but it’s only half full like someone had cut it down the center with a butter knife. Kara reclines back against the pillows they’d taken from their apartments and sighs into the breeze that flutters across the rooftop. The soft sounds of the city float somewhere below them, swallowed by the wind and the hush of midnight. Moonlight glints off Alex’s glass where it sits suspended in her hand, still rotating in a small ellipse.

“So,” Alex starts, punctuating the word with a short sigh, as if still deciding on how to broach the subject Kara had dumped onto her fifteen minutes prior. They’ve gone through two bottles of red wine since then, and while Kara knows it’s not from awkwardness-- however surprised her sister was to discover that Kara, in fact, has sapphic desires-- she figures this particular development has thrown Alex for a loop that she’d been wholly unprepared for.

At least, she hopes that’s why her sister hasn’t said anything for an entire ten minutes.

“So,” Kara echoes back, watching the flicker of a signal tower on the hilltop far outside National City limits. It flicks on and off in a pattern she soon follows until it almost feels like a secret message is flashing to her from across the city.

“Lena,” Alex says slowly.

“Yes,” Kara answers.

“Luthor.”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“Lena Luthor? ”

Kara snorts and tilts up slightly to take a drink from her own glass. It’s nearly empty, and though human alcohol won’t ever affect her the way it does her sister, she likes to pretend, at least, that it’s loosening the ties on the secret lurking in her chest. Undoing some of the links of those chains coiled around her heart.

“Yes, Alex, Lena Luthor,” she says, a little dryly. Some of the pressure relents, and she can breathe a little easier. It’s strangely calming, telling Alex; though her fears and her worries still haunt the edges of her thoughts, she feels as though the presence of her big sister can ward them off. At least for now. “Are you really that surprised?”

Alex tips her head to the side. “No, I suppose not,” she admits, and Kara can tell by the lax of her voice and the small shrug of her shoulders that Alex really isn’t as taken aback as she seems. Maybe a little blindsided by the confession, but it must make some sort of sense considering the small nod of acceptance Alex follows with shortly after.

“I don’t know what to do about it,” Kara says, deflating against her pillows. The stars overhead wink around the half-moon hanging unfathomably high above them. Sometimes, she finds herself wondering if she could break through the atmosphere and to the moon orbiting just beyond it; could she survive an endeavor like that, walk the windless surface in Supergirl’s boots and revel in the utter silence that envelops her? She could carve El Mayarah onto its flaxen rocks as a reminder of Earth’s struggles and of a planet’s long gone, in a solar system far removed from this one. Of her own. She thinks, though, that the silence would be too heavy, too thick--too familiar-- to tolerate.

Alex shifts onto her elbow to look down at her sister. There’s sympathy there, the same as it was when Kara had emerged from her waffling unconsciousness after the fight with Reign. It doesn’t read as pity to Kara, but a recollection of pain and confusion similar in breed to her own. Only now Alex knows the truth of its depth, and the kinship between them only forges stronger.

“There might not be the perfect solution,” Alex says gently. She places her wine glass on her other side and leans into Kara’s arm. “The two of you have gone through a lot together, and there’s a lot of...history there to navigate around. And not just your history with her, but yours with everyone, and hers with her family.”

Kara frowns at the sky. “So, what, I keep tiptoeing around her until she decides she’s not mad at me anymore? That could take forever.”

“No,” Alex says, shaking her head. “I don’t think she’s the kind of person to give up a grudge.”

“Not sure it’s really a grudge,” Kara mumbles, “more like a blacklist.”

Alex shrugs. “Hey, she tried connecting with her mom again, didn’t she? Maybe you just need a little faith that she’ll come around.”

“I’m trying, Alex.” Kara sighs. “It’s not-- I’m not mad at her, anymore. I don’t really think I have a right to be at this point. I just… I don’t know. Every time we’re in a room together, I get all-- all freaked out and I leave. Or she tells me to leave, like the other week. If I can’t even talk to her about this, what do I do? Just sit around and let it--” she waves a hand with faint frustration, “rot inside me?”

“If there’s one thing I know,” Alex says, a light tease lining her tone, “it’s that you and repressed emotions are a terrible combination.”

Kara manages a short laugh at that, and then groans. She rests a hand over her eyes and exhales loudly from her nose. In a small voice, she says, “I can’t do that again.”

“I know.” Alex nudges her with an elbow, and Kara peeks out at her sister from under her palm. “Look, Kara, I understand what this feels like. Really, I do. Maggie and I might not have had the history you and Lena have, but I get what it is to be lost in your own feelings. It feels like you’re drowning in them, like-- like the shore is miles from sight and any minute you might sink to the bottom and never come back up for air.”

Kara gives a tiny nod.

Alex pats Kara’s other hand, the one by her hip, and leaves it there like a comforting weight. “It’s not easy,” she continues, “and it won’t be, for a while. I can’t give you a simple fix because I don’t think there is one. I can’t take away the hurt, Kara. I can’t tell you what to do and it’ll all come together like a storybook. I wish I could.”

“Me too.” Kara rubs at her eyes with the pads of her fingers. She’s not drunk, of course, but it still feels like the wine is slogging through her mind and giving her a headache.

“You have to be prepared for the worst, but you should hope for the best, too. Otherwise you might be stuck forever like this, and that’s not healthy. You’re the strongest person I know-- probably in the whole world, really-- but you don’t deserve that at all. You always worry about what’s best for everyone else, but you need to think about what’s best for you, too.”

There are plenty of things in her life that wouldn’t necessarily be considered healthy, but she knows-- if not at least from the seven months she spent mourning Mon-El and then watching Alex fall apart in the aftermath of her own broken engagement-- that there’s a level of damage here that could be avoided if she could just manage to not stick her foot in her mouth for once. Kara heaves a breath and asks, “Have… have you ever wanted to do the right thing for the wrong reasons?”

“Wrong reasons?” Alex repeats, blinking.

Kara curls upward into a sitting position and wraps her arms around the knees of her kitten pajamas as Alex shuffles back to give her some room. She rests her chin on her folded arms and gazes distantly at the light flickering from the outskirts of the city. “I’ve kept so much from her,” she says, closing her eyes briefly when Alex’s hand rests against her spine and rubs in small, gentle circles. “Who I am. What I did. I didn’t even tell her that I had asked James to go behind her back-- she found out through him, instead. She’s my best friend. I should be honest, right? I just… I wanted to be Kara Danvers for a while, you know. Not Supergirl, not Kara Zor-El. It was nice being just human with someone. Someone who didn’t have to be reminded that I’m not from this world every time they look at me.”

“I don’t think that,” Alex comments softly.

Kara shakes her head. “No-- it’s-- it’s different. When I told Winn about my powers, about myself, at first it felt… liberating. Like I could be my true self. And with him and James it was fun for a while. Exciting. But at the end of the day, they’ll never forget that I’m from Krypton. That I have powers and responsibilities because of it. You can’t, because you’re my sister and you’re Alex-- you’ll never forget that I’m an alien because the very fact of the matter puts me in danger, even if I wasn’t Supergirl to go along with it.”

Alex reluctantly nods, but purses her mouth instead of interrupting again.

“I just…” Kara looks upward at the moon above them again, wondering. Wishing. “There are these three parts of me that I keep separate for different reasons. They’re all me, but it’s like-- it’s like I can only play one at a time. I can’t be Kara Danvers and Supergirl and a Zor-El all at once.” The words ache as they leave her; it’s not something she spends much time thinking about, but it’s always there, lurking deep in the recesses of her being like a shadow. Like a stain. “And I’ve spent so much time lately worrying about how to be the best Supergirl and struggling to remember how to be Kara Zor-El that I neglected who I am as Kara Danvers. I didn’t want to be Kara Danvers, for a while. And to Lena-- to Lena, that’s who I was. That’s all who I was. And she loved that part, without even knowing the rest of who I am. Without having that little thought in the back of her head that her best friend isn’t human.”

Kara’s not really sure she managed to articulate the ideas whirlpooling around in her head-- it doesn’t feel as though it makes as much sense out loud as it did jumbled in her thoughts.

Alex rocks to the side and bumps gently against Kara’s shoulder. “Hey, I love that Kara Danvers part of you, too,” she says, but she doesn’t sound wounded by Kara’s attempt at clarity. Instead, she smiles. “But I think I understand. You have to divide yourself so much, compartmentalize every part of your life, that it’s easy to forget all of them are equally you. You juggle them so much, sometimes you want to put one down for a little while. I might not know what it feels like to be an alien, but I do know what it feels like to have a part of myself that can’t be easily shared or accepted.” Kara tips her head against Alex’s shoulder, and her sister continues, “She might not have known about the rest of you, but maybe that was a good thing at first. She got to know a really special part of you for you, not for your powers or where you came from. Kind of judgment-free, like a blank slate. I get it.”

“Yeah,” Kara murmurs.

“But.” Alex threads her fingers into Kara’s. They sit for a moment holding each other. “As much as she might have loved Kara Danvers, you’re more than just her. And Lena can’t truly love you--at least the way you want-- if she doesn’t know all of you, too.”

Kara nods against Alex’s shoulder. “I know.”

“So why would that be the ‘wrong reason’?”

She hesitates. The feeling is so vague and intangible that trying to tame it into a coherent explanation seems impossible. Still, she tries. “I should tell her, I know. Just like I should have told her about me to begin with, or at least when we started getting close,” Kara says quietly, staring down at her hand linked with her sister’s. It feels like an anchor, and she clutches to it as if she might float off into the ether without Alex to hold her down. “Keeping any other secret from her now seems incredibly stupid. I mean, you’re supposed to tell your friends this kind of thing, right? She has a right to know. I just-- I’m scared. These kind of feelings… when I had them before, for other people, it was easy. It was scary, sure. But I could muster up my courage and just do something about it. James was my friend too, but that-- it was like he was inevitable, like I knew in the very back of my mind that something would happen eventually. And I never even had to tell him about secrets like this-- he already knew me as Supergirl first. But with this… it’s so unexpected, and strong, and the cost is so high. And she doesn’t look at me like she knows me anymore-- like she doesn’t see Kara Danvers anymore. What if this only hurts her more, Alex? What if I’m only telling her to hurt her back for letting go of me? What if I only feel this way because I don’t want to lose her for good?”

“Ah,” Alex says softly, and she pulls Kara in tighter, her cheek pressed against a head of blonde hair. “Okay.”

They sit like that for a while.

Finally, Alex sits up a little, and Kara cranes her head back to look up at her.

“I think the first thing you need to realize, Kara,” she says, “is that it’s okay to feel this way. It’s okay to fall in love with your friends. It happens all the time, and you’re not a bad friend for feeling that way. It’s perfectly normal to have those feelings. Hell, I don’t blame you-- Lena is great.” She smiles slightly. “You’re right, I think keeping secrets at this point is only going to make things worse in the long run. Lena is a strong person-- I think she can handle anything you tell her now. There’s a lot going on between you two, so I get that it seems like too much-- like it’s only going to push you past the point of no return.”

“I’m pretty sure I already flew past that weeks ago,” Kara mutters.

Alex gives a noncommittal shrug. “If you think the relationship between you two is so far gone at this point, what do you have to lose by telling her? If anything, you need a peace of mind. She’s not the only one getting hurt here. And I really don’t think you’re the kind of person who would tell her something like this out of spite. It might feel like that, because you’re scared and you’re hurting, but just remember-- keeping a truth like this never did anyone any favors. Least of all you.”

“But--”

“Listen,” Alex cuts in, and Kara sags against her with a sigh. “It’s scary. I know. Rejection isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t fun, and when it comes from someone you care deeply about? It sucks. A lot. But, Kara, you can’t just keep pushing this away and hoping it’ll disappear. If you keep this a secret, it will eat you up inside and I don’t want to see you go through that again. I don’t want to see Kara Danvers be shut away again because it hurts too much to be her. It sits, and it festers, and it doesn’t go away, Kara. And, besides. I think with what happened between you two, Lena’s more likely to appreciate the honesty. She might just need more time to figure out how she feels about Kara Danvers right now.”

Kara bites at her lip. Even if she knows she should tell Lena, it’s like she’s a stone sinking through water unable to fight against the gravity of her fear as it pulls her deeper and deeper into the dark.

But Alex is also right. Lena would rather have the honest truth, even if it was one she didn’t necessarily want to hear. And Kara’s not sure she can carry this weight in her chest for the rest of her life, never knowing what Lena would say or do if she knew what Kara kept shackled in her heart. Maybe it was better to just set it free and see how the universe responded.

And, Rao forbid, what if Lena found out some other way?

Kara shakes her head to rid the thought. Alex looks down at her, an eyebrow raised slightly in question.

“You’re right,” Kara says, and with a little smile, she adds, "like usual.”

Alex brushes some of the hair out of Kara’s face and smiles back. It crinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and it’s a familiar expression that reminds Kara of home and comfort. “Of course I am. Big sisters always are.”

“Liar.”

“ Excuse you-- oof! ” The pillow wacks Alex squarely in the face, and Kara falls back in a peal of laughter that feels a little too sharp and a little too loud, but it still eases some of the pressure in her lungs.

It’s quickly followed by a shriek of surprise when Alex rounds on her with a pillow of her own and sends Kara’s glasses flying straight off her face. The two of them wrestle half-heartedly, and despite that Kara is Kryptonian and impervious to human assault, it somehow doesn’t stop her from being ticklish-- a weakness that her sister takes full advantage of when Kara is caught off guard.

They don’t stop until she accidentally flail-kicks an empty wine bottle clear off the edge of the rooftop, and they freeze just in time to listen to the faint twinkle of it smashing into the sidewalk below. Alex snorts, and Kara sputters a fit of laughter behind a palm pressed against her mouth.

Change is a terrifying prospect, and untempered feelings and emotions are the demons that plague it.

But with Alex as her support, Kara thinks she’ll manage.

Two days later, Kara finds herself standing at the bottom steps of Lena’s hotel entrance. She cranes her head back and searches for Lena’s window, but there are so many that it’s hard to tell exactly which one is hers, even if she’s been to the room countless times before. All of them are glossed in evening fire, reflected with amber and the glow of city light from adjacent buildings. Kara knows it’s one of the top floors-- Lena couldn’t be without her own penthouse, of course-- but she doesn’t search any further, because part of her feels that if she catches a glimpse of Lena before she’s ready to start confessing, she’ll just high-tail it out of there and pretend the whole admit-your-feelings-for-your-best-friend-who-probably-hates-you-right-now idea was a figment of a bad dream long forgotten.

She pulls at the hem of her cardigan sleeve as she enters the elevator and flashes a charming smile at the attendant waiting politely in the corner. He knows her by face alone and pushes the button for Lena’s floor as soon as the doors slide shut.

It’s thankfully a wordless journey up to the top, and she burns through the speech she’d clumsily prepared on her way over. It is a spur of the moment decision to come here after days of indecisive pacing and back-pedalling. She’s just going to do it and get it over with before she loses her damn mind.

Lena, I know you probably don’t want to see me, but there’s something I want to tell you. Something important. I don’t want to keep secrets from you, because I know-- Kara scrunches her nose and reforms the thought, -- because I want to be open and honest with you, and I think you deserve to know. I’m in-- She swallows the words back, ignoring the way the attendant side-glances her when she gives a faint shake of her head, --When I said I loved you, I meant it. And not in a friend way, or-- or a sister way-- The elevator rumbles to a halt, thankfully, though Kara has to hide the grimace that surfaces with the last line of speech. She’ll have to say something else, something hopefully less… pathetic.

Pull yourself together, Danvers, she scolds herself as the doors spread noiselessly apart. You’re a writer, for Rao’s sake. Say something coherent at least.

As she heads down the hallway, one foot after the other, she tries not to wonder why the voice in her head sounds like Snapper.

Lena’s door is on the far side of the hall. The hotel is large, and her penthouse takes half of the top floor with the best view of the city. The other half belongs to her neighbor, who Kara has never met but is now standing in front of his own door about to let himself inside. He pauses as Kara moves down the hall and casts her a strange look before entering his hotel apartment.

Kara blinks at him as he disappears, but continues for Lena’s door.

It’s silver in color with white trim. The keycard lock is sleek and black, and Kara suddenly remembers she has a keycard still buried somewhere in the bottom of her purse. She hasn’t used it in-- she takes a minute to think-- almost four months, if not longer. Probably longer; Lena usually came to Kara’s apartment instead of the other way around, and Kara had only used it two or three times altogether.

Her hand lifts for the door surface and hesitates inches away. She’s going to go in there, apologize for the intrusion, tell Lena how she feels, and then book it. No use in standing around to get her heart broken when she can already imagine the awkward silence and dismissal that seem to follow them around anyway. The semblance of a plan infuses her with a little courage, and she stands a little taller.

Kara’s cheeks puff out with the breath she releases. She’s not going to peek through the door-- Rao knows how difficult it was to not search for the meter of Lena’s heartbeat as soon as she reached the top floor-- because she’s going to do this as Kara Danvers, and only Kara Danvers. She’d made a mistake in confronting Lena about it all as Supergirl, and Lena doesn’t even know Kara Zor-El enough to make it the appropriate choice.

Kara wants to ease her into it, if Lena lets her.

Her knuckles rap softly against the metal door, and despite her pledge not to listen in, she can hear the sound of it echo hollowly through the apartment beyond. It’s otherwise quiet up here; the neighbor doesn’t make any noise, so all Kara is left with is the tick of seconds and the void of sound until she chances another timid knock.

She pulls at her lip with her teeth, worrying. Lena wasn’t the type to ignore a visitor, was she? Maybe she had a camera and saw Kara approaching, and won’t even bother to tell her to leave. The thought alone makes Kara wilt a little, but another thought worms its way in and then she finds herself rubbing at her forehead with a scowl.

Should’ve checked to see that she was even home, she thinks. It’s such an obvious course of action that she feels a bit stupid standing there outside of what was likely an empty apartment. She didn’t need to spy, but at least making sure the trip up wasn’t a wasted effort would have been the most basic attempt at common sense.  

She leaves her hand on the door for a moment. This is Lena’s space, her home outside of an office that always feels a little too sterile-- too serious. This was where Lena unwound, where the world wasn’t built of schematics and data and scientific inquiry. This was where Lena displayed her chess trophies, had a rack with old boy band CDs interspersed between classical cases, where well-worn books sat on shelves collecting just enough dust to prompt another read. It’s where Kara burnt a cauliflower-crust pizza (not on purpose, she still insists) and where Lena had tipped half a glass of red wine on her rug from the stitches of laughter brought on by Kara’s startlingly accurate imitation of Maxwell Lord. Even if it was technically a hotel room, Lena had made it a home; and besides her own, Kara thinks this one was the one she liked best, if only because it was truly and unapologetically Lena.

Kara knocks once more, just in case. It echoes again, loud and empty.

Something wakes in the back of her mind. It’s a small itch, like the shadow of a thought that doesn’t want to come to fruition but is nevertheless inching its way into the light. She frowns at the door, knuckles still pressed against it. Perhaps she should just check, at least make sure Lena really isn’t home-- if she was, and she was ignoring Kara, then at least she would know.

The lie is just convincing enough. She doesn’t have to acknowledge that yearning desire flushed beneath her skin and curled up in her soul, reaching for whatever glimpse of Lena the world could offer.

Kara tips her glasses down just enough to peer over the top of the frame. A second and a half of time allows her to adjust, and then the metal door fades away into the faint trace of an outline, and the rest of the room is mapped out in sudden clarity.

Kara stares.

She doesn’t know what she’s looking at. The thought won’t breach.

She keeps staring.

But the world doesn’t let her remain in the dark for long. Her chest constricts as the realization rears up and flashes out the words in her brain like an iron brand searing into her consciousness. The entire room is empty. No just of life, but of things-- Lena’s things. It’s fashioned back the way a hotel room would be, impersonal and bare. No trophies, no CDs, no books.

No Lena.

Kara staggers back, snatching her hand away from the door as if the image beyond had burned. Her breath comes harsh and thin, but there are no tears-- not yet. She’s teetering on the ledge, stubbornly refusing to plunge over by the strength of her denial alone.

She scrambles with her purse. Her hand shakes as she nearly rips into it, digging hurriedly through the contents for the keycard buried somewhere within. She jerks it out and fumbles to slide it through the keylock. The little light flickers red, and again, and again, and again.

The card snaps in her hand. Kara leaves the pieces on the carpet in front of the door and runs.

James’s door swings violently open. Kara doesn’t care that she’s broken the handle-- again-- because it seems so inconsequential compared to the crisis she’s having right this moment.

“How could you not tell me?” she demands, and it’s loud, echoing and raw.

James stands in his kitchen, startled. He has a plate in one hand aimed for the sink.

Kara halts in his entry. She’s still wearing the Danvers’ outfit of choice, but pieces of her blonde hair have come loose from her bun and stick to the sides of her face and neck. She’s breathing hard, ragged, and all of the fury contained within her seems to be held back by a very flimsy barrier.

James’s dark eyes soften. They’re warm, as usual, but despite her anger, Kara can read the sadness glimmering just below. The hurt. 

“She only told me this morning,” he explains, as if that was supposed to be an acceptable answer. There's something else, something he's not saying, but Kara doesn't have the capacity right then to care for his mourning. 

Kara glares. Seethes. “It’s almost eight at night,” she snaps, “That is more than enough time.”

He sighs. It’s long and deep and filled with weary sorrow. “She wanted to tell you herself,” he says, and at this Kara recoils. He shakes his head. “She asked me not to tell you first.”

It occurs to Kara how familiar this sounds and how utterly ironic it is. 

“Well, she didn’t,” she growls. “She’s already gone.”

There’s a flash of pain in his face, but Kara ignores it as she wheels around and darts out the door again.

There aren’t many lights on at L-CORP.

Some of them shine from random windows down the building, but there’s only a few, while the rest are dark and glitter only a reflection of the city lights glowing beneath. The sun has long set and night yawns above the tower as Kara flies close. She’s still in her civilian attire, as she was at James’s place, but she doesn’t care.

The window hasn’t been fixed yet. There’s still a gaping hole, though the fragments still stuck to the frame have been cleared. Now there’s simply no window there at all.

Kara drifts onto the balcony and steps into the office. The lights are low, but still on, and it’s a gentle, even illumination that exposes the clean surface of Lena’s desk and the empty shelves on the walls. The decor is still there, simple and aesthetically pleasing. But there’s no Lena.

She treads across the carpet for the white couch still centered in the room. The glass on the floor has also been cleaned, and though she doesn’t want to think of it, all she can picture is the last time she was in this office.

At least Lena was there, then.

Kara sinks onto the couch. It’s a little stiff, like it hasn’t been used in a while. She remembers the first time she sat here and looks to the spot where Lena had been reclined back, reading from the pages of CatCo. The space behind her eyes burn, but they don’t water. Instead it’s like a chasm has cracked open inside her chest, filling her with nothing.

Lena is leaving-- Lena left.

She left behind L-CORP and James and Jess and Sam and Ruby.

She left Kara.

It’s a choice that Kara was distantly aware of; she’d known it was a possibility, that with all of the darkness and vitriol surrounding L-CORP and its founding family, it would push Lena away. She was, after all, simply transplanted out of Metropolis, not a National City native. There had never truly been any promise that Lena would stay.

Kara just never imagined that she’d be the one to cause her to leave.

She takes one of the throw pillows from its place in the corner and stuffs it against her ribs, arms coiled around to crush it against herself. It smells like the office does: clean and crisp. But just underneath that, she can smell the residual fragrance of Lena’s lavender oil diffuser, and if she concentrates enough, Kara can convince herself that something of Lena’s scent still lingers, too.

Kara doesn’t realize she’s crying until the wetness of the pillow cloth rubs against her face as her shoulders and chin begin to shake.

About two hours pass. Kara stops crying halfway through, and by now the tears have long dried into a thin crust of salt on her cheeks. She takes her time walking around the office, remembering the several interviews she’d held with Lena here and wondering at herself back then. Had she felt that way then? Had she loved Lena since the very first time she’d stepped foot into the CEO’s office? It makes Kara smile faintly when she remembers the astonishment she felt at their introduction. The power Lena had exuded, and how comfortable she’d seemed wearing that strength like a cloak-- like a cape. She wonders if Lex had ever been that way, had ever embodied that smooth charisma before his mind was lost to his inner demons. Kara had never met Lex personally, but she’d heard stories, and to her it seems as though the Luthors were less pragmatic than egotistically smug. Until it came to Lena, of course.

Kara pauses at the far side of Lena’s office where the television is mounted on the wall. There are some flowers still in vases sitting on the console just beneath the TV, and she reaches out to lightly stroke a white petal with the tip of her finger. Plumerias, she remembers. Those had been the flowers in Lena’s vase when they talked for the first time on the office couch. They’d also been present in the tsunami of flowers Lena had somehow managed to stuff into Kara’s office.

The memory makes her smile a little more. Then she remembers the way Lena had smirked, all coy and pleased, and the heat that had blossomed in Kara’s chest at the sight. At those words Lena had spoken to her, the praise she’d given unbidden to Kara Danvers-- not Supergirl.

Her breath stings again, and Kara retracts her hand from the flowers.  

“Kara?”

She whips her head up, slightly startled. The hinges of the door hadn’t given even the slightest squeak when they’d been pushed open, and for a moment Kara feels a mote of panic slip out of reach at the thought that she’d been caught loitering in Lena’s abandoned office.

But it’s only Lena.

Wait-- only Lena?

Her mind feels a little off kilter, and it takes a moment of staring before Kara can adjust to the sudden intrusion.

Lena is dressed down in flowing satin pants and a blouse to match. Her hair is loose down her shoulders, slightly kinked where she must have had it tied back for a while. Her eyes are bright, and they glimmer in the low light of the office. She’s a lovely vision; for a moment Kara isn’t sure that she’s even real, that maybe her own grief was so powerful it had conjured some sort of illusion to quiet the heartache eating through her chest.

Kara wants to respond, to just say her name-- but the word won’t leave her mouth, and she finds that she really has nothing to say to Lena anymore. Nothing that would be worthwhile to say, not when this could be the last time she ever sees the youngest Luthor again.

Lena moves farther into the room and lets the door swing silently shut behind her. She takes a few tentative steps across the floor, toward Kara, and then halts at the couch.

“James says you found out,” she says, and her voice is quiet, gentle, and perhaps even a little morose. It throws Kara entirely off guard. It’s not anything like the coldness that usually greets Kara in their limited conversations-- it sounds like Lena, her Lena, and for whatever reason that hurts more.

She struggles to find an appropriate answer that doesn’t sound like an accusation. But anything that comes to mind, any words she manages to string together, sound too harsh-- too desperate. So she says nothing.

Lena stands watching her. When it becomes apparent that Kara has nothing to respond with, she says, “I wanted to tell you myself. Truly. I wasn’t going to just vanish without telling you.”

Kara turns fully to face Lena. There’s a buzzing beneath her skin, and it feels much like the time she’d been here before, telling Lena the truth about herself. About Supergirl. Like there’s a disaster waiting to strike, like the world outside of this moment is waiting to erupt in chaos. Like the end. 

How many of those was she going to have?

“What were you going to say to me?” she finds herself asking suddenly, in a tone that is not soft but not sharp, either. It’s somewhere in between, like steel with rounded corners. She swallows back the hardness to her throat and presses on, “What would you say to me, Lena, when you’ve barely spoken to me at all? Why would you, when we’re not even friends according to you?”

Lena shifts in place. Kara can see the effect of those words in the tightness that pulls at the tendon in her neck. “I have more respect for you that that,” she says, and her voice is a little quieter. “I’m not going to just walk away without telling you why.”

“Don’t bother.” Kara shakes her head. Her arms fold around herself, clutching at her elbows. There’s a numbness spreading through her veins stealing away the composure she thought she had. “I already know why. You’re running away, Lena. You’re running away from me.” If she was concerned about sounding accusatory before, she isn’t now; it bubbles up and out of her without restraint, as if all of the hurt has twisted into anger inside of her and is looking for something to latch its teeth into. She feels like a wounded animal, and suddenly all she wants to do is lash out and force this pain onto Lena for making her feel it in the first place. Take it back, her heart roars. Take it with you. I don't want it. 

“I’m not running away from you, Kara.”

Kara’s eyes narrow. “Then who, Lena?” she demands, “Why leave? Sam is still here, and so is Ruby, and James. The DEO isn’t going to stop harassing you for crossing a city line. I’m the only one you can’t stand to be around. You are running away, and I am the one you’re running away from.” She shakes her head and takes in a wet breath, and then steps from Lena toward the windows. That buzz has become a volatile energy, begging her to run before she explodes. She knows it’s her fault, that she’s the one who drove Lena away, but all she can think of how familiar this is. How she’s lost so many people she’s loved and how deeply this cuts into her from the knowledge that it was her own doing.

“This isn’t about Supergirl,” Lena says, and now her voice has taken an edge to it. She moves toward Kara, and that distance closes until Lena’s only a pace away. “This has nothing to do with Supergirl.”

And oh, if only Kara weren’t so damn stubborn. She glares at Lena through tears still clinging to her eyelashes and snaps, “It has everything to do with Supergirl. Look-- “ she grabs at the middle hem of her buttoned shirt and yanks it effortlessly apart. Buttons scatter across the carpet. The crest of the House of El stares back at Lena, and Kara bares it at her like a battle scar. “Look at it. I am Supergirl. You can’t ever forget that, Lena, and you have to accept it. You can’t keep-- keep looking at me like you don’t know, like you don’t know me, because I’m both. And I know you hate it, so you’re running away, and you’re-- you’re abandoning me because of it--”

Lena is suddenly close. Her hands curl over Kara’s to still the tremble that has taken fiercely over her, and Kara freezes in place.

“Kara,” she says, “stop.”

Kara shuts her eyes. She doesn’t want to look at Lena, to stare into Lena’s face and think of how much it’s killing her just to be this close. To hear her name from Lena’s mouth without a bite to it. To touch her.

“You don’t know,” she whispers, “you don’t know what it’s like, to lose everyone you’ve ever loved. Everyone always leaves.”

Lena holds fast to Kara. There's a deep silence broken only by the harsh intake of Kara's breath. “You love Alex, don’t you? She’s still here. And James, and Sam, and Ruby,” Lena says finally. “You’re not alone.”

“I don’t--” the words die in her mouth, and Kara shakes her head again. When she opens her eyes, she looks up and away from the sea green gaze awaiting her. I don’t love them the way I love you , is what she wants to say-- wants to scream it-- but Lena is so close, and she’s still touching Kara, and somehow the fury that had electrified her is ebbing into something calmer. Lena doesn’t say anything, and Kara can tell she’s waiting for her to continue.

When the moments lengthen, Lena lets go of Kara’s hands and shirt to give her some room.

Kara settles herself with a shaky breath and adjusts the frame of her glasses. Part of her doesn’t want to tell Lena, now; she doesn’t want to give that power to the woman who has decided to jump ship when the truth became too difficult of a pill to swallow. She wants to keep this secret tied up within herself and covet it as the only thing Lena can’t take from her.

Of course, when Kara finally glances up at the woman still standing before her, she knows it’s too late. Lena’s already taken everything down to the heart beating like a thunderstorm in her chest. She hadn’t even asked for it, yet Kara had given it all anyway.

“Why, then?” Kara asks softly.

Lena watches her for a moment longer. Kara doesn’t know the emotion currently shining in her eyes or why she works her jaw like she’s fighting back the wrong words. But finally, Lena swallows back whatever it was and collects herself into her usual poise again. “I need to focus,” she says at first, glancing down at the floor. “There’s so-- there’s too much here, and I… I just, I need some time to myself. Some space.” There’s a slight pause, and she adds, “To figure out what I really want.”

To figure out what she wants. To Kara, all it sounds like is a nice way of saying she wants to decide if Kara’s friendship is worth salvaging anymore. As if subjecting herself to sharing a city with an alien who’d once been her best friend wasn’t worth the trouble. Kara should have seen this coming from miles away-- it was ingrained in every motion, every word Lena had shared with her since Reign’s last fight-- but it still crashes into her with surprising intensity.

“I see,” Kara says, though she doesn’t. She looks down at her hands, then curls them into fists against herself and turns. She moves around the desk and sets herself onto the couch, arms folded around her middle.

Lena hesitates, then follows. When she takes her seat on the opposite end, Kara closes her eyes.

“I wish I hadn’t told you.” It’s an abrupt statement, and it hangs heavy in the air of the empty office space. Kara hadn’t really meant to say it, but she’s come to accept that where Lena is involved, she seems to have little self control over the rage of emotions that flare unpredictably out of her. She opens her eyes and stares out at the gaping window that whistles softly as the night air gusts by.

“I’d rather have the honesty and go through this than stay in the dark,” Lena says, and some of her gentleness hardens again somewhere into the territory of defensive. “I can make my own decisions. I don’t need protection.”

Kara looks at her. Full on, almost in challenge. “No, you don’t,” she says, and she’s mildly surprised at herself with how even it sounds. Very unlike the turmoil storming in her thoughts. “I didn’t do it to protect you.”

“James says you did.”

“Screw James.” Kara huffs a short breath and shakes her head slightly. “He doesn’t know a damn thing about why I did any of it.”

Lena raises an eyebrow. “You’re the one who told--”

“I know what I told him,” Kara interrupts, heat rising in her tone. A beat passes and she takes a breath to calm herself again. “I know what I said. You’re not the only one I’ve lied to, Lena.”

Lena is quiet and Kara knows that she’s waiting for the explanation. It’s one that Kara doesn’t want to give, because it skirts the edge of the truth still burning deep in her chest.

“I said it before,” Kara starts, quietly, like the words might break if she isn’t careful. “I didn’t have to be an alien with you. You saw me for Kara Danvers, not as an alien or a superhero. I don’t have anyone else in my life that treats me like that. It’s a selfish reason, I know. And yeah, maybe I did do it at first to protect you.” She sighs and shrugs. “That’s the reason I don’t tell just anyone. But it became more than that. You became more than that. Eventually I realized the only reason I stopped myself from telling you the truth is because I wanted you to myself-- to Kara Danvers. You didn’t need anything more than Kara Danvers. She was enough for you, and that… that gave me more peace than you could ever know.”

“I do know,” Lena says. “Kara Danvers was the only person who saw me for something more than a Luthor.”

“Me being Supergirl doesn’t change how I see you.”

Lena looks at her. It’s not with sadness, nor anger, but something akin to exhaustion. “Doesn’t it, though? I made kryptonite, Kara. If my last name wasn’t Luthor, would you have reacted the same?”

Kara’s instinctual response is to say Yes, but she pauses. Would it have made a difference? If Lena had been anyone else, would it had mattered as much as it had to her? Kara is silent as she considers it. Maybe she would have. Or, maybe not. If Lena had been anyone else, she wouldn’t have been Lena; as much as Kara knows the name Luthor hasn’t molded Lena into another Lex, there were still experiences attached to that name that made Lena who she is. That was one of the reasons Kara had adored Lena so much from the start. Lena had taken that name and ignored all of its attached judgments to make it her own. She had rose up in the face of adversary, laughed, and kept going.

“It wasn’t because you’re a Luthor,” Kara answers slowly. “It’s because you’re Lena Luthor. I know how I made it sound back in that forest, but I was panicked. It really has nothing to do with your last name.”

Lena’s mouth is pursed slightly. Kara can see some of that ire from their previous arguments just behind the mask, but it’s doused by the confusion that wells up in its place.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

The sigh that heaves out of Kara is quiet and deep. She wants to crumple inward, to fold into a tiny piece of herself until she’s a mere speck of existence. At this point, she can’t not tell Lena. She owes her the explanation, the truth, just like she had weeks ago.  

Kara takes her glasses from her face and rubs at her eyes with the fingers of her free hand. She’s getting a massive headache from this conversation, as if all of the emotions are swelling up within the confines of her skull and mounting pressure with every word they share. It’s a damn miracle they’ve managed to speak to each other this long without either one of them bursting out with anger, and for a brief moment she wonders why Lena was able to deescalate her when every other time Lena had only met her with the same ferocity. Why she’s suddenly being so….nice.

Perhaps it’s because Lena is leaving. She has an out, an escape. She’s not backed into a corner anymore. Lena is calm and collected because she never has to face this again.

Kara pulls at her lip. Alex’s words still echo faintly in her head, urging her to continue. And there’s something else-- it’s that little voice in the back of her thoughts, but this time it’s pleading, crying out bitter hope that this truth might somehow change Lena’s mind. So she takes in a breath and begins, “I went to your hotel room today.”

Lena nods slightly. “I was wondering how you found out,” she murmurs. “Why?”

“I had something to tell you.” Her hands are in her lap and her fingers twist together in absentminded motion. Almost nervous. She stares down at them to avoid the question burning in Lena’s gaze. “I-- I want to be honest with you, Lena. You should know the truth.”

“About what, Kara?” Lena questions, and Kara can hear uncertainty brace in the back of her voice despite how gentle she sounds. Like she’s anticipating something horrible, and for a moment Kara thinks Lena is assuming some other terrible, earth-shattering secret that might upend the rest of Lena’s grip on her reality.

Which it did to Kara. But she has no idea what Lena will think.

“About--” her voice cracks slightly, and she takes a moment to swallow before repeating, “About me. About how I feel.” About everything. Her knuckles fade white as she grips herself tighter. “I wasn’t upset about the kryptonite because you’re a Luthor, Lena. I was upset and-- and blindsided because--" her breath catches slightly, "--I’m in love with you, and it’s terrifying to know that you have this much power over me. That the person I love could--- could--” She brings her hands to her face and wipes at her eyes, if only to prevent herself from looking at whatever expression might be playing across Lena’s face. “You could kill me, Lena, even accidentally. I know you won’t. I know you’re the only person capable of actually controlling kryptonite. But this-- this is something I’ve never had to face before. I don’t know how to face it. All I know is that it’s not the kryptonite I’m scared of-- it’s you. Because you’re Lena, and I love you so, so much.”

There’s no answer. Nothing. Kara keeps her gaze trained on the glass coffee table in front of the couch and tries not to let the dread rise in the back of her throat.

Finally, Kara looks to her. Lena is staring, her eyes as red and wet as Kara’s own. She says nothing, but her gaze is shocked wide and it reminds Kara a bit of when Lena had discovered Supergirl’s true identity so many weeks ago. In fact, it’s almost a perfect mirror of Lena back then. For a moment Kara’s heart feels as though its going to bottom out of her rib cage and shatter on the ground.  

She manages to steady her breath. “You said you would rather have the honesty than be in the dark,” Kara says, and for once, she’s surprised to find that she’s not crying. Not anymore. Maybe she’s ran out of tears, or maybe the confession itself had whisked them all away. The breathing part isn’t as easy, but she pictures the sky and the stars she flies beneath, and the weight on her chest feels a little more familiar. “Your decision now, Lena.”

Lena blinks as Kara rises to her feet. It isn’t until Kara begins to move for the open window that she speaks again.

“Wait,” Lena says, and this time her voice isn’t smooth and controlled as it has been. It’s wobbly and thick, and a part of Kara aches at the splintered sound of it. “You can’t just-- you can’t just leave after that.”

Kara pauses by the window. The rush of the city is louder, and the wind pulls at the edge of her loose cardigan and the opened hem of her button-down. It almost feels like the sky is calling to her, coaxing her back home and away from the pain still radiating from the depths of her being. But she stays there a moment more and looks to the woman left sitting on the couch.

“Why not?” she asks, though she’s not really looking for an answer. “You are.”

Lena doesn’t say anything more, so Kara leaps from the balcony and disappears into the stars.

Chapter Text

Kara doesn’t know when she leaves, only that she must be gone; the city feels duller all of a sudden, like the spark that had kept it running is dim and flickering. The sky is the same shade of blue, but to Kara it’s only cold and barren, and even the stars at night don’t do much but seem to mock Kara for the solitude she keeps sequestered in while the heavens are ripe with glitter and light. Supergirl still does her job, of course, and she can’t never be genuinely happy to bring smiles to the faces of those she helps. But it doesn’t escape her that her cheer only lasts long enough to move on to the next daily task, and then it’s more of a chore to find her own smile again afterwards.

Sometimes she stymies the ache a bit by watching the sunset from the top of the hotel Lena used to live in. It’s not the same as watching it from the glass of the penthouse, but it’s close, and it’s always beautiful enough to keep her from thinking about the empty room below for a while. Occasionally she’ll even perch herself on the shoulder of her own statue and stare out at the shining bay, wondering about possibilities that will never come to pass.

Afterward, she usually finds her way back to her own apartment to curl up on her couch and pretend to watch Working Girl or Moana again. Tonight she’s opted for The Wizard of Oz instead, and she’s only half paying attention to Dorothy’s encounter with the Cowardly Lion when a sharp knock sounds at her door.

As she lifts herself off the couch, her phone buzzes on the side table and lights up with a new message from Alex.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” she mutters. She grabs the phone and maneuvers around the furniture toward the entry. Just as she reaches the door, Kara opens up the message from her sister-- fully expecting the familiar HEY UNLOCK THE DOOR in the text-- and glances down at her screen.

hey so Ruby needed some help studying for her bio quiz tomorrow, i’ll be late.

She blinks. And frowns.

Another knock, firmer this time, jolts her out of her confusion.

Kara doesn’t think about how she’s only in her kitten pajama bottoms and a tank top, hair mussed and glasses left on her kitchen counter-- she doesn’t think about anything. She opens the door and blinks again when she’s met with the sight of Lena Luthor standing at her threshold, knuckles still poised for another knock. She’s wearing the tan trenchcoat Kara remembers, and her hair is down and a little windswept.

She also looks incredibly angry.

Kara steps instinctively backward and Lena moves after her into the apartment. She’s all rippling power as she stalks into the dining space, heels marching over the wood and coat edges swinging around her as she turns on Kara when the door clicks shut again. Her eyes are red and her chin is trembling, but the tight draw of her eyebrows and the fierce bare of her teeth has Kara rooted in her spot.

“Lena--” she tries, but the bristling fury cuts her off.

“I do know,” Lena says, nearly hissing the words.

Kara has no idea what she means.

Lena doesn’t seem to notice her blank stare, or perhaps she doesn’t care, because she continues with the same, barely contained shake to her voice, “I do know what it’s like to lose everyone I’ve ever loved, Kara. I lost my mother when I was four, and my father, then my brother. Jack. Sam. More friends than I can count because of who I am. Don’t you dare try to tell me I don’t know what it feels like.”

Kara is wide-eyed and can’t quite comprehend the flurry of what’s happening right before her, but the memory clicks into place only a half second later when the vivid recollection of their last-- and presumably final-- encounter at L-CORP springs to mind. And a half second after that, she fully realizes that Lena Luthor is standing in her apartment without summons and apparently with a score to settle. Despite it, though, something deep within herself stirs, as if the inexpiable presence of Lena in her dining room has disturbed the deeper corners of her soul. It’s unsteady and shy, but it feels somehow like a wisp of hope. “I-- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--”

“I thought I lost you, Kara!” Lena cries, loudly, brokenly, and all at once. It pours out of her with such strength that the words are eviscerating, and it takes all Kara has to not fold Lena up in her arms and never let her go. But then Lena steps away from where she’s crowding in Kara’s space to collect herself. “I thought-- when I found out about… about Supergirl, it felt like you were gone. Like Kara Danvers had vanished forever, and I was never going to get her back.”

Kara swallows. She doesn’t really know what to make of this outburst, or why Lena is really here. Hadn’t she left? “I’m still me,” she says, a little timidly.

Lena’s eyes are hard and they shine like chips of glass in the light of Kara’s kitchen.

“Maybe,” Lena says flatly. There’s still a bit of aggression to her as she glares at Kara, and then suddenly she turns sharply on her heel to stare out at the rest of the apartment.

Kara’s not sure how to respond. Slowly, she steps toward Lena until she’s standing at her side and looking out at the living room where Lena’s gaze is distantly fixated. Kara can practically feel the emotion trembling inside of Lena, and she realizes it’s not rage-- not really-- but a geyser of overwhelming feeling that can’t be held back any longer.

“At the DEO,” Lena starts, and Kara glances at her from the side. She’s still staring at the apartment, and it takes Kara a moment to register that Lena’s attention has fallen to The Wizard of Oz still playing on the television. “After I found out, I could still pretend it wasn’t you. That you were just Supergirl and no one else. That somehow the two of you were separate people and I could go home knowing that I would still have Kara Danvers to myself. But,” Lena’s eyes flutter shut for a moment, “the way you looked at me was all her. All Kara. And every time I saw you, I saw less and less of Supergirl and more of Kara Danvers. And then I would remember what Supergirl had done, what you said to me, and all of a sudden I had no idea who Kara Danvers even was anymore.”

Kara feels herself shrink at the words. The wisp of hope growing within peters outs.

“I told myself for a long time that it was all a dream,” Lena continues. “Some fable I’d put too much faith in, only to be dragged into reality. I should have known better. All of the signs were there-- you leaving work all the time, you missing for days after the first fight with Reign. That was J’onn in your pajamas, wasn’t it?”

“Uh, they were technically his own,” Kara says, and though Lena lifts an eyebrow, she doesn’t question that further. The answer is enough to confirm her theory.

“That night on my balcony, when those CADMUS thugs chased me over the railing-- you heard that I was in trouble, and you came to me. Fed me some bullshit lie about coffee, but it was still you.” She shakes her head slightly, as if in disbelief. “And with Metallo. He could have killed you with that unstable kryptonite, but you were still there to save me. ‘Kara Danvers believes in you.’ I can’t believe I fell for that.”

Alarm creeps into Kara and she places a hand on Lena’s jacket sleeve to draw her attention. “Not everything was a lie, Lena,” she says, “I believed in you then, and I believe in you now. That hasn’t changed, and it isn’t any less real than it was back then.”

Lena is less heated now. She bobs her head slightly. “Perhaps.”

“If you still doubt everything, still doubt me, why are you--” Kara begins, but she stops when Lena turns to face her fully and locks her gaze into Kara’s. It’s a mesmerizing stare; there’s weight bearing down on her again, and the look in Lena’s eye is a match striking against the tinderbox inside Kara’s chest. Fire flares up hot and bright behind her ribs.

“You hurt me, Kara,” Lena says, in a low voice that pierces deep into Kara’s bones. “I couldn’t accept that, for a while. I couldn’t forgive you.”

She keeps Lena’s gaze, as if breaking it might wake her from some dream that may or may not become a nightmare. “Couldn’t?” she ventures quietly.

“Supergirl could have saved the children of National City by dropping me instead of risking polluting the water supply with Edge’s chemicals. But she didn’t-- you didn’t.” Carefully, Lena reaches up, and Kara catches her breath when she feels fingers curl a piece of hair behind her ear. Lena’s face is unreadable, but Kara thinks perhaps that’s a good thing now; the anger has diffused, and the tension building in the small space between them feels thick with something else-- something sweeter. “That really was you carrying me when I was poisoned, wasn’t it. Not Supergirl.”

It’s not a question, and Kara doesn’t need to deny it. She nods faintly. “I took you to the DEO as fast as I could,” she explains, and just the mention of the experience alone is enough to send a tingle of memory down the back of her neck of how utterly distraught the entire event had made her. "I wasn't going to waste any time to get you there."

Those silver-green eyes are bright. “You saved my life too many times to count, both as Supergirl and as Kara,” Lena says. “As angry and hurt as I was-- maybe still am-- I can’t ignore that. Supergirl didn’t just save me out of obligation. You did more than that without me asking, without it being expected of you. So many times you could have just left me in the hands of my mother, or Edge, or-- or myself. But you didn't. So, I believe you.”

“Believe me?” Kara repeats.

Lena tilts her head slightly to the side, and Kara feels a thumb skim gently over her cheekbone. Then Lena swallows, and suddenly there’s wetness rimming the red of her eyes. She does nothing to hide it. “That you love me,” Lena whispers. The words quiver as they’re spoken, like a confession long overdue.

“O-oh,” Kara breathes, and that fire in her chest roars white-hot until it's swelling up under every inch of skin. She can’t help but raise her own hands to cup around the arms of the woman in front of her, cautiously, as though she might crumble at the touch. “I promise, Lena, I do. I do.”

“I’m not…” Lena takes a small breath, then pulls at her lip. “I’m not good at-- at forgiveness. My ‘one strike, you’re out’ policy saved me more heartache in the long run before. But I never had someone like you before. And trying to move forward, to cut you out, it just...it just isn’t working. I don’t want to lose you, Kara.”

Kara shakes her head. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says gently.

Lena’s eyes shine. “And I’m sorry,” she murmurs. Her hand presses against Kara’s cheek again, and she marvels at the softness of the touch. “For scaring you. For pushing you away. For running away. You were right-- I left because I couldn’t stand to see you anymore. I couldn’t be here knowing that you were so close, but I couldn’t let you back in.”

Kara’s hand pulls away from Lena’s shoulder and slides over the back of the one settled on her cheek. She holds it there and wonders if Lena can feel the symphony echoing inside of her when those pale eyes only soften at the gesture. “It’s okay, Lena,” Kara says, leaning into her touch. “I understand.” And she does; if there's anything Kara knows intimately, it's that frantic need to escape, to run from the pressure and the pain lest it crushes her into dust. She would have done it herself if she hadn't been tethered to duty in the shape of a cape on her back and diamond on her chest. Ironically enough, it had been James that kept her grounded most during the absence of Lena. Had kept her from flying off. Perhaps he knew the truth behind Lena's departure-- sometimes Kara can see it in the way he watches her, and it reminds her of that light in Mon-El that acknowledged something unspoken. Either way, James hadn't fought it, hadn't protested their separation. He let Lena go the way Kara wishes she could have. 

Now she's immensely glad she hadn't.

There’s no one moment when the shift happens. The seconds are fluid, and Kara flows into them as Lena tilts closer. Her hand pulls Kara in, and then Lena’s mouth is pressed against Kara’s, moving and gentle and tender. Kara doesn’t care that there are tears slipping freely down her cheeks, and she gasps into Lena when the kiss presses deeper, harder, and it feels like there’s starshine streaming out from every pore of her body. That empty chasm is suddenly overflowing with brilliant light, and Kara shakes at the force of it as Lena softly rakes teeth across Kara’s bottom lip. She’s intimately aware of Lena’s hands now cupped around her neck, fingers buried into waves of golden hair.

A small noise escapes the back of Lena’s throat and Kara melts into it. She wants to pull Lena closer, but the two of them are already pressed flush together. Any degree of separation feels like too much-- a sentiment that Lena appears to agree with, as she leans fully into the support of Kara’s arms. It’s a reckless, unthinking kiss, and Kara can’t believe that passion this intense, this blinding, has escaped her for so long.

She doesn’t care about the world. She doesn’t even know it exists, because all that matters is Lena in her arms, panting and pushing hard against her mouth. And yet, as Kara takes in a ragged breath of air, the words spill out of her before Lena can kiss them away.

“Please,” Kara rasps, “please, stay.”

Lena doesn’t still, not completely, but she slows enough to pull back and meet Kara’s gaze. She brushes the tracks of tears from the side of Kara’s face and trails her thumb over the corner of Kara’s mouth. “I can’t lose you again,” she whispers, once her breath has evened out. “I’ll stay, Kara. I love you.” She tilts forward and Kara leans into her until their foreheads are touching. Her hand strokes over Kara’s cheek and ear, and all Kara wants to do in that moment is weep from the flood of reassurance that overcomes her.

Lena kisses her again. It’s soft and sweet and tastes like a promise, and Kara wants to chase this feeling for the rest of her life.

Of course, she doesn’t get the chance right then. Not a moment later her front door flies open, and Lena’s tongue is still in her mouth when she hears,

“Hey, Sam’s-- OH MY GOD.”

A few things happen all at once: Kara jolts, startled, and Lena jerks back with a hiss and reaches for her own lip while Kara whirls around to face her sister in the doorway as Alex slaps a hand over Ruby’s wide eyes.

“Well. Looks like you two have made out-- up. Made up,” Alex sputters, and Ruby takes advantage of Alex’s fluster to claw her way out from behind the protective hand.

“About time ,” Ruby chimes, and Kara blinks at her, stunned. A second too late she realizes her glasses are still abandoned on her kitchen counter just as Ruby’s smug grin transforms into a dropped-jaw gape of astonished disbelief. “Wait-- you-- you’re --!”

Alex swoops in again, only this time she’s got a hand clamped firmly over Ruby’s open mouth. “Alright, now’s really not the time,” she says, indicating the glasses with a hard tilt of her head as she stares down her little sister. “Like I was saying, we need to go. Sam’s doctor called. She’s waking up.”

Kara gasps, “Really?” just as Lena demands, “Why wasn’t I called?”

Alex’s expression flattens slightly, but Kara can see the playful nature of it as her sister replies, “Well, apparently they’ve been trying, but I guess you were a little busy.”

Lena’s cheeks somehow flush redder than they already were.

Kara snatches her glasses and shoves them onto her face. She’s got fireworks bursting in her chest, and if she doesn’t keep moving, she might actually die. When she turns to look at Lena she’s thrilled to see a shy little smile rise in response. But then she also notices the swell of Lena’s bottom lip and the small split darkened by a drop of blood. Immediately the fireworks cease, and she grabs for the woman who still looks slightly breathless from their kiss.

“Lena, are you alright? Did I hurt you?”

Lena blinks, then runs the tip of her tongue over the split. She considers the answer for a moment before responding, “No, but I suppose that’s bound to happen when trying to kiss the girl of steel.”

“Okay, seriously, paperwork, you guys--”

Kara laughs, cheeks flushed, at Alex’s exasperated gesture toward the girl still muffled behind her hand. Lena merely hums a note of amusement.

“We should go see Sam,” Kara says, lighting up again. “She should be with family when she wakes.”

Alex herds the teenager into the hall. “I’ve got Ruby on my motorcycle. Lena, do you have a car?”

“I--” she pauses, looks to Kara, then over at the purse that she’d tossed onto Kara’s dining table some time since she’d stormed into the apartment. “I can call my driver.”

“Or, I could…” Kara starts, then bites her lip. Lena raises an eyebrow just as Ruby manages to stick her head back into the doorway.

“I’ll go! Take me! I want to fl--mmmph!” Alex’s hand returns to the girl’s face, and Kara barely manages to suppress her own snort of laughter.

Lena settles a hand on Kara’s bare forearm. “Go, Alex,” she says, nodding toward the struggling child. “We’ve got it covered.”

Alex sends off a final look that is halfway between God FINALLY and HURRY UP before the two of them disappear down the hall in a mad scramble to get downstairs.

She waits until she can hear the rev of Alex's engine below. “Are you sure?” Kara asks, and with her sister and Ruby gone, the apartment feels strangely empty. Too quiet, too, as if the silence falling in place is waiting for something to go wrong. Waiting for something sinister to taint the light still blooming in her chest. “It’s not too soon?”

Lena smiles and traces up the curve of Kara’s bicep with her fingertip. It’s like her touch is made of sparklers, and it sends a zing of warmth blazing under Kara’s skin at the contact. She tries not to shiver from the sensation.

“Kara,” Lena says, “have you ever known me to take the easy road?”

Kara grins and grabs for the sweater draped over the back of a dining chair as she pipes, “Isn’t the invincible alien supposed to be the reckless one?” Lena rolls her eyes in return, and Kara snickers as she unlocks her side windows and pushes them open. Evening air rushes in to greet her, still warm and carrying sea salt in on the breeze.

When Kara offers her arms, Lena hesitates only briefly before stepping forward and says, “Well, I suppose with an invincible alien around, I don’t need to worry.”

“So long as you don’t routinely throw yourself from the top of buildings like Alex does,” Kara answers, just as she gently scoops Lena up from behind the knees and backside. Lena’s breath hitches faintly and she grabs for the taut muscle of Kara’s shoulder. Her grip doesn't relent, but Kara doesn't mind.

“Yeah, that-- that’s not going to be in my plans anytime soon,” Lena says, and Kara laughs.

The four of them reach the room at roughly the same time. The three adults hang back as Ruby darts to Sam’s cot, which has already been set on an incline by the physician standing beside the monitors.

“She came out of the coma just a little while ago,” he explains, glancing up from Ruby’s excited face and to the three women that enter just behind her. “She may still shift in and out of consciousness for a while as her brain adjusts, but she’s awake.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Alex says softly, and he dismisses himself with a nod.

Ruby leans into Sam’s side. The woman makes a sleepy noise, something like a small groan, and her dark eyes flutter open. There are still wires and tubes hooked up every which way to her, and the monitors beep and chime with renewed vigor in the background.

“Rubes?” she asks. Her groggy voice urges a bright smile across Kara’s face.

“Hey Mom,” Ruby says, and without warning she throws her arms around her mother’s midsection and buries into her side.

Sam rolls her head to the side and lifts an arm to pet the top of Ruby’s hair.  “Hey, kiddo.”

Alex moves around the bed until she’s behind Ruby where Sam can see her. “How are you feeling?” she asks, and Sam’s attention drags up from her daughter to the woman hovering close by.

It takes her a moment to focus, but Kara notices that with every passing second, the life strengthens in Sam’s eyes. She lifts her head and blinks a few times, then winces. “Well,” she starts, “like I was kicked in the head multiples times. Was I?”

Kara blanches when Sam’s attention turns to her. “I didn’t-- I mean, I don’t--”

Sam rolls her eyes and manages a short, breathless chuckle. “Relax. All I care about is that she’s gone,” she says, and her tone darkens slightly as she looks from Kara to the other two women. “She is gone, right?”

“As far as we can tell,” Lena answers, and Sam takes this with a nod.

“And these… powers?”

There’s a small bout of silence. Then, Lena clears her throat and explains, “You still respond to kryptonite radiation. There’s been no sign of Reign’s DNA re-emerging, but there may be some...residual effects from the vaccine created from Supergirl.”

Kara doesn’t miss how Sam’s gaze slides back over to her, but she’s glad to see no animosity at the news.

More silence. It’s heavy, and Ruby sends nervous glances between her mother and the three other women in the room.

Several moments later, Sam sighs. “Well, I hope that Supergirl will be willing to show me the ropes, then,” she finally says, and though it’s a tired statement, there’s a certain level of unmistakable resolution to it.

Kara smiles. “I think she’d be thrilled,” she says, and the corners of Sam’s eyes crinkle.

Sam pulls herself, with minor difficulty, to a proper sitting position and sighs as she begins, “Now that that’s settled--" She jabs the first two fingers from one hand in a ‘V’ shape toward Kara and Lena without warning. “--have you two gotten your shit together-- sorry, Ruby-- yet? If I have to listen to either one of you complain one more time about--”

“They were totally making out tonight,” Ruby interrupts, and for a moment Kara seriously considers fleeing through the window from the flood of mortification suddenly welling up through her center. “I saw them in Aunt Kara’s apartment.”

Sam must take the wide-eyed and red-faced expressions staring back at her as confirmation, because she bursts into laughter and doesn’t stop. “Oh, thank God,” Sam says, and despite the embarrassment that has Kara frozen in place, she can’t help but feel an immense, shining joy at the liveliness that’s taken hold of Sam. “I swear, I would have dragged myself out of this damn coma to tell you two to just do it already.”

“Ew, Mom,” Ruby protests, and this time it’s Sam’s turn to redden.

“No-- Ruby, that’s not what I meant--” but it’s too late, and all of them are joining the chorus of laughter and reaching out to touch Sam by the hand or the shoulder in gestures of gentle affection.

Later, when Lena slips her hand into the pocket of Kara’s sweater and curls their fingers together, Kara thinks change might not be so bad after all.

Chapter Text

He’s not the first one to arrive in Lena’s office uninvited over the past two months. Kara muses he won’t be the last, either, but the visits are becoming less frequent-- less pressured, more specifically. Before, after J’onn left empty-handed, there’d been a flurry of action on behalf of the government. Mostly just shouting matches between the D.E.O and whatever else secret department the feds were hiding, but, on occasion, a team would appear at L-CORP to announce some new contrived charges that Lena was guilty of. Kara doesn’t doubt there are probably a few dozen statutes the youngest Luthor has broken since setting up shop in National City, compounded only by her unorthodox assistance in saving said city-- and the world-- since then, but it matters little to her at this point.  

Of course, Kara’s morality doesn’t depend on federal laws. To hell with half of them, really. And it was truly fascinating to see just how many and how far those laws were able to bend when confronted by the House of El’s surviving ambassadors. Lena had been right: the government was willing to jump through endless hoops to get what they wanted.

Supergirl hovers protectively outside of Lena’s balcony window, off to the side of the building where the agent won’t see her. She can see him in perfect clarity through the steel and hear him as plain as day, though the new door to the balcony is shut (not locked, of course, considering the last time she’d been faced with a locked door while Lena was amidst a federal arrest). Kara can also see Lena standing at her desk, all slender and sleek angles in the form-fitting black dress she wears and her hair pulled up in a tight, smooth bun.

He’s a young man with an impassive face. His suit is tailored flawlessly to his figure, which is balanced between lithe and muscular, and his hair is short-cropped on the top of his head and buzzed shorter around the sides. He would look every bit the handsome businessman if the badge in his hand didn’t read Federal Bureau of Investigations across the top.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Luthor,” he says pleasantly, though to Kara it sounds superficial; practiced, even robotic if she had to make an comparison. It’s a tone that’s been taught and refined, not experienced. This was not a man who felt sincere in his greeting. “I’m glad to have finally have a chance to speak with you.”

Kara can’t see Lena’s face from this angle, but she can tell that Lena glances to the man’s badge with the faintest tilt of her chin.

“Perhaps you celebrate too soon, Agent Sabbatini,” she says, in a voice that leaves little room to interpret anything other than unamused impatience. She turns from him in a fluid motion for the papers on her desk, as if his presence had done little-- if anything-- to interrupt her task. “I do not see your name on my schedule, and I have a very tight schedule to keep.”

He doesn’t appear bothered by this, and even smiles. Kara immediately doesn’t like him.

“My apologies for dropping in unannounced,” he returns, stepping closer to Lena’s desk, where she’s still standing. He places a small attache case on the seat nearby and Kara can tell it’s meant as a subtle gesture of challenge. A defiance to her authority. “But I must insist, and I can assure you that this will take precedence over board meetings and CatCo interviews.”

Kara bristles outside, teeth bared. She stays out of sight only for the fact that Lena hasn’t yet indicated a need for Supergirl’s intervention. It was an agreement they arrived at about six weeks ago, after a handful of agents had tried-- time and time again-- to ambush Lena in her office while Supergirl was otherwise preoccupied. Her desire to protect Lena is strong and it hums within her like heavenly fire, but Kara’s respect for her is stronger; she will stay out of it so long as Lena wishes.

Lena pauses at this, long enough to place down the papers in her hands and send a look over at the man that Kara assumes must be filled with thinly veiled contempt. She can hear it in Lena’s voice when she says, “Let me stop you there, Agent Sabbatini, before you embarrass yourself. I have a multi-billion tech company to run during a time where this industry produces the most integral contributions to science that this country has ever seen . You are the grunt in a government division that doesn’t even exist. I don’t have time for people who don’t exist, Agent. Perhaps if you can find something substantial to present me with when I’m not busy doing the military’s job for them and someone better suited to understand the inner-workings of groundbreaking scientific advancement, we can talk.”

His eyes narrow. The expression that darkens his face is dangerous, and the fire in Kara surges brighter. He reminds her of a younger, less greasy version of Morgan Edge with a backbone-- and that makes her more nervous.

“Weaponizing illegal substances doesn’t make you a herald for ‘groundbreaking scientific advancement,’ as you put it,” he says in a low voice. The faux cheerfulness is gone, and in its place remains the threat of anger in the tone of a man challenged by an inferior. “It makes you dangerous and accessory to terrorist agendas.”

Lena snorts. “It only makes me dangerous and an accessory when it’s done independently of federal command,” she counters easily, and she doesn’t sound cowed by his tone whatsoever. In fact, Kara thinks she sounds a little bored. “Otherwise, I’d be an irreplaceable asset. Or is your pretend division not looking to seize my research and duplicate it for military use?”

The muscle in his jaw tightens, but unlike Morgan Edge, he remains composed. “What the government plans to do with unethical and highly illegal research is of no one’s concern but the government’s,” he answers.

There’s a small lapse in the conversation as Lena moves out from behind the desk and to the front of it, where she leans back and crosses her arms casually beneath her chest. They’re only a few feet apart now, and Kara watches as the agent’s chin slightly raises; this is Lena’s own challenge, an assertion of her confidence in the face of his attempt at dominance. Kara wonders if he, like Morgan Edge, takes this as an affront. “Of course not,” Lena says, just as evenly, “Just as I suppose it’s no concern of the public’s that their own government couldn’t protect them from an alien invasion-- twice-- without the help of the person who provided that research in the first place. Perhaps you ought to redefine “ethical” practices, Agent Sabbatini. It might save you from your own arrogance some day.”

He studies her. The tension is thick, suffocating even, and Kara can practically feel it radiating out of the office itself. The heat within her flares uncomfortably at the sudden thought that he might intend to harm Lena somehow-- that maybe he’d made it past security with an undetected weapon. The look in his eye certainly suggests he wants to. It’s a familiar stare, one she’d seen from too many men responsible for serving a force meant for good.

To Kara’s surprise, the agent suddenly smiles. The agitation in him is instantly gone, melted away somewhere that she can’t follow. It’s a startling transition and it leaves her with a pit of unease bubbling low in her stomach.

“You’re good,” he says, and the faint inflection of his voice sounds impressed. The rigidity of his shoulders becomes lax, and Kara notices how it seems to transfer into Lena’s: in the same half second, Lena’s posture stiffens just slightly at the shift in the atmosphere. The agent gives a small shake of his head and laughs . “You’re a natural at getting under peoples’ skin, aren’t you?”

Lena watches him warily. As far as Kara knows, this reaction is new. None of the other agents had made such an abrupt and inexplicable change of behavior. “Consider it a fundamental skill for my family,” she responds, and though it’s flippant and cool, Kara can sense the distrust coiling just beneath Lena’s carefully controlled tones.

The agent scratches at the near-invisible stubble over his chin. “You seem to share quite a bit with your family,” he comments, and now Kara can’t tell if the nonchalance he speaks with is genuine or not. He’s better at pretense than she originally thought. “Hard to believe you don’t share any similar goals.”

Lena’s head tilts slightly to the side. “Oh? Such as what, world domination? Alien genocide? An American coup d'état?”

“Your words, not mine.” He smiles again. It’s not a warm smile.

“Right,” Lena says, and Kara can imagine she rolls her eyes as she says it, “because my words have always carried so much weight before. Tell me, Agent, are my words to be taken as they are, or am I not to be trusted? It cannot be both. Or is consistency not a strong suit of your division?”

The conversation is carrying on longer than it has before. Kara is getting impatient floating beside the tower, and the longer Agent Sabbatini talks, the more unease winds its way under her skin until it roots there and tingles with the beginnings of anxiety. She wishes Lena would just throw him out like she has the others and let Supergirl in through the window already.

Instead of answering, the agent merely looks at Lena. Kara can’t read the expression with her radiographic vision, but it must bother Lena, because she shifts ever so slightly on the desk at the attention. “You can’t hide behind Supergirl forever,” he says, in the same low voice he had used earlier. Dark, verging on the cusp of a threat disguised as a mild remark. “You have more to answer for than even she can protect you from.”

Lena lifts her chin and spreads her arms out wide to gesture at the empty space around them. “Take a look, Agent,” she says, just as dark, “I’m not hiding behind anyone.”

Kara curls a fist and stifles the groan that rises within her. Please don’t challenge the government official when they want to throw you in prison , Kara internally berates, hoping that if she projects it outside of her own head with enough force, the woman inside will receive the message. It’s not the first time she’s found herself lamenting her lack of psychic power, but it’s this exact moment when she curses the yellow sun for not bestowing it upon her.

He doesn’t rise to the bait. He chuckles under his breath and shakes his head. “Such confidence,” he says, “I assume she’s close by. Maybe even watching.” His glance travels briefly around the room, and when it skims past the wall that Kara hovers behind, the hairs on the back of her neck stand in alarm. But he doesn’t see her, and refocuses back on Lena. “I can’t say why she’s so taken with you. Why she defends you so much. After the initial kryptonite fiasco, I assumed you’d be under lock and key the minute the Reign threat was neutralized.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Lena interjects, and it’s cold and cutting, like the edge of a blade against ice.

He shrugs and continues, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if she’s been compromised somehow. Say, didn’t your brother develop some kind of alien mind control device?”

Lena is silent. Kara finds that part of herself wants to know the answer, and it twitches deep in the corners of her consciousness beneath a wafer-thin shroud of doubt. But the moment passes, and Kara tosses the concern aside. She doesn’t care if Lex had created something to that effect. Not when Lena possesses all of his assets now and did with them what she felt best.

And Kara Danvers-- Supergirl-- trusts Lena’s judgment above all else.

“Whatever the reason, it won’t be enough to keep you from justice, Lena Luthor,” the agent says. Kara has to physically discipline herself from crashing through the wall by bracing her palms on the outer surface of the building. “Even if it means Supergirl has to be taken down a few notches to see reason.”

“If I didn’t know any better, Agent Sabbatini,” Lena starts, and Kara blinks at the sudden gravity that laces a dangerous edge to her voice. It’s deep and brimming with the force of an avalanche contained behind a cage of glass. It takes Kara a moment to realize that the agent has struck a chord, and the savage tone Lena uses is the first glimmer of true anger he’s managed to wrest out of her. “I’d say you were threatening Supergirl.”

Kara’s eyes widen. She hadn’t thought Lena would be so upset about that . Something akin to flattery-- maybe even giddiness-- flushes through her with golden warmth to the tips of her toes. She knows it’s completely inappropriate given the situation, but there’s a peculiar lightness  bursting in her chest at the idea that Lena takes personal offense to the endangerment of Supergirl’s safety. That she cares .  

He pauses and squints at her. “Interesting,” Kara hears him murmur. Then, he shakes his head again. “Well, Ms. Luthor, it doesn’t matter what you think it means. So long as Supergirl continues to work for the United States, she will answer to her superiors. Otherwise, if she insists on obstructing justice, we’ll have no choice but to take action.” Lena’s grip on her own arm tightens considerably, and he acknowledges it with a small lift of an eyebrow. “Her efforts to save the country are duly noted, but they do not exempt her from punishment nor do they give her a free pass for interfering in government sanctioned pursuits. Having superpowers doesn’t mean she gets to pick and choose what part of our law she wants to obey.”

The warning behind his words is clear enough to send prickles through her skin and down her spine. Kara knows he can’t see her, but she can feel his intention: he’d meant for her to hear that, not Lena.

“I’ll pass along the message,” Lena remarks, nearly growling, and whatever pretense of civility she’d been keeping has bottomed out from the exchange. She stands from her desk, and the power in her voice steels in her posture. It’s like watching a lioness get baited by a snake, and part of Kara wonders if he meant to invoke such a response in her. Lena wasn’t the only one skilled in getting under people’s skin, it seems.

He stands a moment more watching her. Then, he concedes with a smile and nods.

“See to it that you do,” he says as he tucks his badge into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. “And next time we meet, Ms. Luthor, I advise you keep your schedule clear.” He turns on his heel and exits the office, leaving Lena alone in front of her desk.

Kara can barely contain herself, but she waits the extra thirty seconds before she hears Lena sigh and call, “You can come in now.”

She doesn’t make much noise when she enters the room through the balcony door, though it does take measured patience to slide it back instead of wrenching it from the track like the agitation thrumming in her muscles encourages her to do. Instead, Kara pushes it aside and enters with the only sound of the hushing wind nipping at her cape to follow her inside.

Lena turns to her entirely unsurprised. There’s a level of exhaustion touching at the corner of her eyes, and Kara wonders just how much of a toll that encounter had taken.

“What an asshole,” Kara bites out, and she stares at the double doors of Lena’s office for a long minute as if she might chase him out of the building by the strength of her glare alone.

Lena steps close, but not too close; there is a certain amount of distance she keeps between herself and Supergirl versus herself and Kara Danvers. Over the last two months, the space has decreased, but Kara notices the way Lena hangs back, as if unable to resist some sort of barrier placed between them whenever Kara wears the suit. Perhaps it’s the crest of El or something else to do with Supergirl, but Kara knows she doesn’t mean it. It’s an instinctual space and Kara is patient enough to wait until whatever reluctance Lena has fades away.

It will in time, Kara knows. Two months ago when Lena had stormed into her apartment and kissed her, there’d been a weight of something permanent lifted from the strain of their relationship. It’s not something either of them will brush aside and forget, and it has certainly changed the atmosphere of their friendship forever. But that isn’t to say their relationship --whatever it is now-- has been patched up and given a new coat of paint. There are still chips and cracks to mend, rough patches to smooth over. There are emotions that Kara isn’t quite sure how to navigate, both her own and Lena’s, but in two months, Kara thinks they’re getting the hang of it.

At least at home. Lena’s hesitation around Supergirl is still an obstacle they need to work on, and it’s likely the culprit for why those declarations of love haven’t catapulted them into a fully fledged romance yet. As Kara Danvers, she can hold Lena, kiss her even-- but she can’t deny that there’s something preventing it from blossoming completely. It’s like a romantic limbo that she can’t do anything but endure until it passes.

She has a few ideas what it could be. Weeks ago, when this was new and fragile, Lena had confessed a few things to her. They’d been wrapped up together on Kara’s couch watching Sky High at Kara’s insistence. (It turns out, Lena hates it almost as much as Alex.) There had been no lead up, no symptom that something was wrong when Kara slung herself around Lena on the couch and curled in to enjoy the show.

“I thought I killed you,” Lena had uttered without warning. It had taken Kara a minute to register what she’d said, but she paused the movie and looked to Lena in quiet encouragement to continue. Lena’s breath was suddenly sticky with tears, but she inhaled and explained, “When Reign-- when she took the kryptonite from the pistol, I thought that was it. You were right. I could kill you, and I did. It was my fault that Supergirl was dead. That Kara Danvers was dead.”

“I didn’t die,” Kara had murmured back, settling a hand on Lena’s knee. “You made an antidote.”

Lena laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound, but self-deprecating and hollow. “I did,” she said, “months ago. I wasn’t going to screw around with kryptonite without knowing how to engineer a reversal agent. But it wasn’t-- I couldn’t…. Test it. Properly. I didn’t know if the antidote was going to work. Not in a living person.” She shook her head and lifted her hands to her face. Kara didn’t pry them away, but rubbed gentle circles into Lena’s thigh with her thumb and waited. “I watched you almost die, Kara. I panicked. And it worked-- thank god-- but I couldn’t-- I couldn’t let myself be glad. I couldn’t be relieved. I had almost killed you, and weeks later you came crashing into my office to save me as if you hadn’t almost died because of something I did. A choice I made. It doesn’t matter that I kept you from dying. I almost killed you in the first place, just like you were scared of.”

It took Kara a while to say anything. Then, “Is that why you wouldn’t talk to me?” she had asked, slowly, as if the answer was some big revelation she’d been resigned to stay ignorant of.

Lena hung her head. Kara could see the shame in her burn like a solemn light cast over every word and every thought still echoing within the cavern of Lena’s soul.

“Yes,” Lena admitted, hoarse. Thick with tears. “I couldn’t. I can never forgive myself for what I did, Kara. That’s why-- that’s why it took me so long to come here and face you again. To tell you the truth.” She shook her head and swallowed. “It took me that long just to realize I hadn’t endangered just Supergirl, but you, Kara, too. That’s...that’s what I was running away from.”

Kara softened. She pulled Lena in closer, one arm curled around the top of Lena’s shoulders and the other hand tucked over her hip. “Hey,” Kara said, and it was enough to coax Lena to peer up at her through tearful eyelashes, “I want you to know that I forgive you, Lena. I promise. I’d go through it all over again because it meant we got to save Sam.”

Lena trembled. Kara wasn’t sure she had ever seen her this small and vulnerable before; all of the resilience and strength Lena exuded had fled somewhere, leaving behind a shell that crumbled from the inside. “You shouldn’t--” she started, but Kara wouldn’t have it.

She kissed Lena gently just below the corner of her eye. It cut the sound right out of Lena’s mouth, and Kara felt the faint, startled brush of eyelashes against her own cheek.

“But I do,” Kara said, retreating just enough to catch her gaze again. She brushed a few strands of hair away from Lena’s face. “You’re a hero too, Lena. You protect this world and the people in it as much as I do. Sometimes that means taking risks.” Kara smiled. “If you hadn’t, we would have lost Sam. Maybe more. You are the reason we won.”

Lena didn’t answer, but she clung to Kara for a long time. It was the first time Lena had spoken as though she accepted Kara and Supergirl were one and the same-- previous conversations, however intentional, had always seemed to separate the two into their own entities. Kara couldn’t necessarily fault her for that. But piece by piece Lena was putting together the concept of Kara Danvers and Supergirl into one image, and the results of that impact, that acceptance, were seeped in her own struggle to forgive herself.

Kara thinks now, watching Lena hold herself a pace away in the middle of her office, that she sees some of that fear resurface. The old blame worms its way through the scars they had healed together and reopens the wounds, and it’s only a matter of time before Lena holds herself responsible for whatever consequence Supergirl will have to face in the coming days.

She wants to hold Lena like she had back then. To comfort her. But she also knows that Lena won’t take much comfort from Supergirl, considering the blatant reminder of the stress now rankling the edges of her composure.

“He’s right,” Lena says quietly, and Kara frowns. “I can’t hide behind you forever. You can’t protect me from everything.”

Kara reaches out and cups Lena’s jaw in her hand, and smiles when Lena presses into the touch. There’s still distance between them, a space that calls to Kara, but she doesn’t cross it. “I stand for justice, Lena. Not whatever warped sense of justice he has. I won’t-- I can’t sit by and let this happen to you.” She shakes her head. “I’m not going anywhere. You don’t need to do this alone.”

Lena’s gaze is downcast for a moment. It roams over Supergirl’s boots and up the length of the suit until it comes to a rest on El Mayarah . A slender hand reaches over and traces the vivid red and gold of the crest as if it were the first time she’s seen it. Silence drifts in through the office as Lena considers the symbol, and Kara wonders at the look of deep concentration that descends over her. Will she still insist that Supergirl stay on the sidelines, as she has the last few times they’ve had this conversation? Both of them know she won’t-- when has Supergirl been anywhere but the front line, especially where Lena was concerned-- yet the possibility of Lena’s request to stand aside dangles over Kara’s head, taunting and laden with guilt.

“Stronger together,” she finally murmurs, and Kara can’t help the thrill of surprise as it shoots through her.

She’d been prepared for resistance. An argument, even. Lena wasn’t the kind of woman to let other people decide her fate for her. Not that Kara intended to do so, but the control of it, the independence-- it was an integral part of Lena and how she coped with shitty situations. The ability to choose and act of her own volition was something she could never surrender, and some of that manifested in the need to do everything on her own without interference. That was how they’d come to the agreement of allowing Lena to take care of whoever showed up next in her office seeking to dismantle the leverage she had with Supergirl. And now that Kara understands the burden of responsibility Lena feels for Supergirl’s potential death and survival, it wouldn’t surprise her to learn that Lena would rather shut Kara out of any situation that put her in danger. Lena craved the security of her own power, and it astonishes Kara that she’s ready to relinquish it-- some of it-- into Supergirl’s hands.

Her breath catches slightly. There’s a pinch of emotion behind her ribs as she realizes that this isn’t Lena giving in, isn’t her caving to the assistance of someone else because she wasn’t strong enough to weather the storm on her own.

It’s Lena’s trust, her faith, placed solely in Supergirl that Kara recognizes.

Kara will treasure it closest to her heart for the rest of her life.

“Stronger together,” she repeats softly. “That means we’re a team, Lena. You and me.”

Lena smiles. Kara knows she’ll never tire of the brightness that blooms in her lungs at the sight of it. “Partners in crime,” Lena says, and when she tips back slightly to let out a gentle, twinkling laugh, Kara can’t stop the sunshine from flooding her system until it feels as though she’s glowing.

Their laughter is quiet, but Kara enjoys the sound of it mingled together. She smiles at Lena and shakes her head. “I hear you have a tight schedule to keep,” she says, and Lena’s expression falls faintly at the mention of it. As much as Kara absolutely doesn’t want to leave-- not when Lena looks so shaken after the agent’s visit-- she knows her presence will only serve as a further distraction, and Lena tended to carry too much on her shoulders as it was. “And I’m sure that only put you behind.” Kara tucks a lose strand from Lena’s bun behind her ear and hopes that Lena can read the warmth of love that fuels the gesture. “But I’ll be close by. If you need me, I’ll be here.”

Lena’s eyes flutter shut for a brief moment and she sighs. “Thank you,” she says, and when she looks to Kara again, it’s the unfettered gentleness that stirs the embers in Kara’s heart. They roll and spark under the pale gaze that enchants her, and Kara becomes hyper aware of the heat spiraling up from the bottom of her stomach. It’s not fair that Lena can look her at like that when she’s supposed to be leaving. “I might get home late, so I’ll text you if I don’t make it in time.”

Kara nods. Of course, Lena knows Supergirl will check up on her before then, visibly or not, but it’s the acknowledgment of this thing-- this relationship, built back up out of tears and ashes-- that nestles itself with confident warmth in Kara’s chest. “I’ll see you tonight,” she says, a little lower, just above a whisper, in the voice that belongs to Kara Danvers and not the Girl of Steel. It’s the most comfort she can offer when the crest of El keeps Lena from straying too close.

Lena’s smile is soft and small. She nods and steps aside from her place in front of the balcony to let Kara pass. Supergirl is mindful of the distance as she strides by, but in her peripheral can see Lena turn toward her as she makes for the window. Hardly a moment later a smooth hand catches at Kara’s wrist.

She stops. The hand moves up the fabric of her arm until fingers are threading into the hair at the back of Kara’s head, directing her back into Lena’s space. Kara doesn’t even have a chance to appreciate the proximity before Lena presses up into her and against her mouth with soft, warm lips.

If Kara thought she’d been overflowing with sunshine before, it’s nothing compared to the brilliant supernova gushing from her now.

Lena pulls her in harder, and Kara lets her. It’s not overheated like their first, but the passion is still there, still just as intense-- maybe more, if that was even possible-- and Lena’s kiss is languid and sweet as it fills Kara whole. She can taste the slight chalk of Lena’s lipstick and doesn’t care; everything is Lena, down to the heart blazing gold in Kara’s chest and the electric flashes that race down her spine and fingertips. She barely feels Lena’s hand bunch into the fabric of her cape at her shoulder, yet she’s somehow intimately aware of it, and all of her thoughts feel as though they’re attempting a fast-forward and rewind all at once when Lena’s other hand tugs harder at the locks of golden hair her fingers are deeply entwined into.

When Lena tilts back, panting lightly against Kara’s mouth, Kara nearly loses herself in the dark light smoldering in those eyes. Bold visions start spinning through her head, voiding whatever words she might have and replacing them all with an urgent fire unspooling deep in her core.

Lena thumbs over the corner of Kara’s mouth and chuckles. “I’ve got a wipe for that,” she says softly, and Kara’s thoughts are so far gone into their salacious fantasy that it takes her several slow eye blinks and heaves of breath before she realizes that Lena’s lipstick has completely disappeared.

Oh.

She doesn’t have to respond; the look on her face must be answer enough, because Lena laughs again, this time unrestrained and ringing with silvery delight. Kara thinks it might be the most beautiful sound she’s ever heard.

“Here--” Lena turns, breaking contact from Supergirl’s arms for a brief moment as she digs into a drawer at her desk. She pulls out a wet cloth and re-enters Kara’s space willingly, close and intimate in a way that makes Kara’s head spin again. She almost forgets she’s wearing the super suit until Lena reaches up and drags the towelette against her lips and says, “Can’t have Supergirl flying all over National City with a Luthor’s brand smeared across her mouth.”

Luthor’s brand. It takes her even longer this time to remember that Lena formulates her own cosmetics, and by the time the realization interrupts her wide-eyed surprise, Lena is laughing again.

“Oh, Kara,” she says, half between a sigh and breathy laughter.

Kara cherishes these moments. This one specifically, if she had to decide. There would always be room for firsts in the time to come, but this was one that could never be replaced or overshadowed. She doesn’t know what triggered it, if anything in particular did or if Lena had been building up to it over the last few months more consciously than Kara knew of.

Either way, Lena had taken that step-- had made that decision to move forward.

“Kara,” Lena says again, and Kara’s thoughts nearly give her whiplash as she refocuses on the gentle look she receives from the woman tucked against her chest. Lena tilts up onto her toes and presses a tender kiss to Kara’s mouth. “I love you so much.”

Kara can’t help the breath that stutters in her chest or the prickle of heat behind her eyes. “Do you?” she finds herself asking, despite the certainty she feels pooling in her chest. “Even as Supergirl?”

Lena’s eyes dart between Kara’s own for a moment, searching for something deeper, like a snag in the fabric of her faith and confidence. “Even as Supergirl,” she repeats once the quiet descends, and Kara’s entire being feels as though it will unravel when she adds, “As anything and anyone, Kara. Whoever you are, whatever suit you wear or name you go by, I will love you. I’m sorry it took me this long to say it.”

Kara feels wetness on her eyelashes and her throat is too tight to make any sort of coherent response. Instead, she leans forward and kisses Lena as firmly as she can manage without causing her any pain. She braces a hand against the smooth skin of Lena’s jaw, thumb rested over her throat and holds her tight, willing that every ounce of sunlight blazing within her insides will translate through the love she kisses desperately into the woman in her arms. Lena sighs and wraps fingers around the back of Kara’s neck, pulling herself flush against the crest of El. It no longer feels like a barrier, with Lena’s warmth seeping through the suit and the echo of El Mayarah in her voice through Kara’s head.

It feels like a potential, a promise.

A future.

The door opens.

Kara’s too disoriented by the fact that Lena Luthor is kissing Supergirl to fully realize that Lena Luthor is kissing Supergirl, and someone had just walked into the office.

But the sound of boots halting sharply on the carpet draws her instant attention, and Kara’s head whips up, eyes dark, at the intrusion as Lena turns to look. And it’s quite a sight: Lena Luthor in her tight black dress wrapped up in the arms of the Girl of Steel, her hands clutched into those flowing blonde locks and the daze of euphoria still gilded at the edges of her startled expression. There’s no more messy lipstick to worry about, but there is no doubt for anyone involved that the two of them had just broken from an intensely heartfelt lip-lock.

It’s silent for a solid moment. Kara’s head clears with astonishing speed as soon as the recognition of the person staring at them thunders into her awareness.

“So,” Agent Sabbatini says, and his tone is worryingly smooth, “This is why.”

Kara feels her entire body twitch at the sound of his voice. Every muscle and tendon strains, ready to launch herself at him if he so much as moves the toe of his polished boot in Lena’s direction. Or near her direction. Or in any direction, really.

But, miraculously, Kara stays in place, if only because Lena is frozen in her arms and Kara is not about to leave her there.

He must sense the animosity rolling off of Supergirl, because a second later he lifts his empty palms upward and states, “Just forgot to grab my case, Supergirl. Nothing else.”

Her gaze immediately drops to the chair a few feet away. The small black attache case is still there, and Kara has no idea how she missed it until that moment. She has half a mind to reduce it to ash before his very eyes, and only resists it-- barely-- at the thought that Lena would disapprove. When her stare snaps back to him, he’s smiling almost smugly.

Lena finally stirs. It’s not much, and Kara can’t tell if it’s a good thing that she doesn’t pull out of Supergirl’s hold or push her away. Lena stays close, only shifting enough to face the agent still standing and watching from the doors.

“Get out,” Lena says, and it’s low, dangerous, skirting the edge of feral despite how softly it’s spoken. The mere sound of it lifts goosebumps on the back of Kara’s neck. She can’t tell if Lena is bordering on panic, or if the threat lurking beneath the ice in her voice is merely fury at his interruption. Kara can feel her own panic sting in her chest; what kind of reaction would Lena have to this, once the agent left for good? Would she rescind the love she’d just given Supergirl after the truth of it was unwillingly exposed to an outsider? Would she spiral down in anxiety from it, and backtrack the progress they’d made together over the past few months-- or even just the last ten minutes? Kara’s heart drums against her ribs. Now that this Agent Sabbatini knows the truth, what would that mean for Lena? For Supergirl? How would those federal superiors use this information against them?

But then Lena’s hands move down from Supergirl’s hair and rest against El Mayarah , and she doesn’t make any attempt to free herself from the steel arms of Supergirl still circled around her. Kara doesn’t know if it’s an intentional gesture, but the warmth of Lena’s palms against her chest steadies whatever erratic agitation had begun to multiply until Supergirl no longer feels as though the future is ready to collapse at her feet.

“Of course,” Agent Sabbatini says with a small incline of his head. He’s still smiling, and Kara’s eyes narrow further at him. Now that she can see him with clarity in person, she thinks he looks exactly like a young Morgan Edge-- grease and all. Or maybe it’s because they both remind her of a weasel. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I get my case.” He takes a step, but the sole of his shoe is still suspended in the air when Supergirl blurs forward, snatches the case from the chair, and plunges it to the center of his chest before he touches back down to the floor.

Agent Sabbatini stumbles backward several feet with a sharply wheezed oof and clutches to the bag. There’s just enough time for him to inhale and look up at Supergirl before she slams the door in his face, inches from the end of his nose. Whatever protest he has is drowned in the deafening wham of the door, and he must think better of attempting to re-enter, because he only stands there long enough to gather his bearings after the rather forceful expulsion from the resident superhero.

Kara can hear the faint tick of the small analog clock Lena keeps in her desk through the tense silence that stifles the room. She waits just long enough to follow the sound of his footsteps through the lobby and to the elevator before turning to look at the woman still motionless behind her.

“He did that on purpose,” Kara says, and it comes out as a growl.

Lena appears a little less rigid now, but remains in place. “I don’t doubt it,” she agrees, shaking her head. “He knew you were here and wanted to catch you in the act.” There’s a pause, then she adds in a wry note, “Though I don’t believe he expected that particular act.”

Kara’s not certain that it’s an appropriate time to laugh, so she settles for an amused huff of breath. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice,” she says, sighing. She takes a few steps back toward Lena, but stops just beyond the bubble of personal space in case the agent’s appearance had shocked Lena right back behind the invisible barrier. “Such an amateur move, too.”

Lena nods. “Sometimes the most basic and obvious tricks are the ones least likely to be noticed. I should have known he was planning something when he showed up during Jess’s lunch break-- the day she decides to meet with a friend instead of having it at her desk.”

“No wonder he got up here so easily,” Kara mutters. “Flash that stupid badge and he can go wherever he wants.”

“Yes,” Lena says, “his type are becoming an increasingly prominent pain in my ass.”

Kara’s shoulders fall. The worry in her stomach recoils, and it tastes almost acidic as it spreads ice up through her center. “I’m sorry,” she says, lowering her gaze. “This is your office, I shouldn’t have--” the words catch in her mouth the moment Lena moves toward her, and whatever else she has to say fades away when gentle lips skim across the skin of her throat.

“What are you sorry for, Kara?” Lena asks, pulling back only to gaze up at her. “That we got caught?” Kara blinks, and Lena smiles. “I kissed you first. I’m a scientist, not a celebrity. I don’t hide when I find something beautiful in the world.” She cups Kara’s cheek, and then leans up to press an innocent kiss to the corner of Kara’s mouth. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

“But-- he--”

Lena laughs. “What? He’s going to run back to his superiors and tattle on us? These men have hardly moved past the point of acknowledging that women have saved their asses more often than the years they’ve been in office. It’ll take much more than one claim from some little cockroach that the two of us are romantically involved for any of them to believe it. They can’t do anything about it, anyway.”

Kara thinks she could listen to Lena disparage Agent Sabbatini-- or anyone, for that matter-- every minute of the day for the rest of her life. She likes the heat threaded through the tone of it and the way Lena’s oppressed accent leaks just enough to emphasize how utterly repugnant she finds him.

“Alright,” Kara concedes, ducking her head slightly when the flush on her cheeks feels too noticeable to ignore. It’s not embarrassment, but something warmer, thrilling even, despite the lingering nerves that still shadow the corners of her consciousness. “I just-- I don’t want you to be scared. Of me. Of… this.”

Lena considers it with a small tilt of her head. When Kara meets her gaze again, the affection radiating from those stormy-sea eyes sends more stars bursting in her chest. “Well,” Lena starts, in a kind, soft voice as she brushes Kara’s cheek with her knuckles, “I don’t admit it easily, but, I might be. A little. If anything, I’m scared of losing this. Like any little thing I might do could ruin it forever. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised I haven’t already.”

Kara shakes her head and exhales, though it’s tinged with mirth. “Nothing you’ve done since the day I met you has made me love you any less, Lena Luthor,” she says, and the brilliant smile that rises on Lena’s face in response rivals the sun with the warmth and light that rockets into Kara’s heart. She folds her arms around Lena again and sets a kiss to her forehead at the hairline. “I’m scared of losing you, too. For multiple reasons. You’re human, you own two multi-million companies, you’re related to multiple xenophobic, ah, activists-- ”

“You can say genocidal maniacs, Kara,” Lena interrupts, smiling slightly. “It’s okay.”

Kara flushes pinker, but clears her throat and swallows. “Right. Yeah. And that’s not even touching on the ways I could ruin this. I mean, I almost ruined our entire friendship, Lena. What’s not to say I won’t mess this up too?”

Lena huffs a breath. “Oh, please, Kara. You’re not the only one who made mistakes and kept secrets.” Her gaze falls downward, and though Lena doesn’t mention it, Kara can tell what she’s thinking of when her hands move to touch the space just beneath Supergirl’s sternum. The suit shows no sign of the tear-- Winn had done a phenomenal job with the patch up-- but the memory is still there, still visceral, and it shivers up from the old scar as a heavy reminder. “You and I both made a mess of it. That’s why we have to make it better,” Lena says, and she pauses to look back up at Kara. Her eyes are shining and vibrant, and Kara feels them pierce more than the ghost of the old wound. “Together.”

“Together,” Kara echoes, and when Lena kisses her again, not even all the stars combined could compete with the radiance that dazzles her soul.

“You are not making me watch that again,” Alex says, so deadpan that even Lena pauses to glance over at the woman stiffly perched on Kara’s couch, gripping her wine glass so tightly that her knuckles have gone pale.

Kara waves the movie case at her sister. “It’s a classic , Alex. You’re all about classics. Besides, Ruby loved it, and Sam hasn’t seen it yet.”

“That is not a real classic and you know it.”

Lena swirls her pinot for a moment and smiles against the rim of her glass. When Kara looks to her with an imploring pout, she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Kara, but I side with Alex on this one. It’s honestly terrible.”

“Thank you, Lena,” Alex says, shooting Kara a severe stare, “at least someone here has some modicum of sense.”

“Who has a modicum of sense?” Sam enters in from the kitchen, holding a tray of cheese assortments and other finger foods she’d prepared for the night. Kara snags a slice of cheddar off the tray as Sam leans over to set it on the coffee table. “Certainly none of you three. Who even uses the word ‘modicum’?”

Alex swats Sam’s knee with the back of her hand as Sam sits back onto the cushions and rolls her eyes.

“Sam, you’re the tiebreaker-- tell them we have to watch it!”

“Tie? Kara, it’s two against one!”

Kara wrinkles her nose at Alex. “I get two votes, both as someone who appreciates the fine arts of campy family fun, and as a literal superhero. Sam has to watch it! It’s like a right of passage.”

“You didn’t make Mon-El watch it,” Alex counters, but Kara simply grins, so she sighs and rubs her fingers over her eyelids. “Oh, that poor bastard.”

“This is the one that Ruby really liked, yeah?” Sam asks, and she tilts her head thoughtfully as she rolls the stem of her wine glass between long fingers. Alex settles her with a hard stare. There’s no missing the desperation contained within the look, but Sam pretends not to notice anyway. She does, however, appear to relish in a few extra seconds of silent anticipation before she gestures toward Kara standing in front of the television. “Let’s do it. I wanna see what the fuss is all about.”

Alex groans, and Lena lets out a long, exasperated sigh.

“Oh, stop it,” Sam says, “you two can complain after you’ve raised a kid on your own and had to suffer through the several Barney movies I had to take her to. In theater . I am literally immune at this point.”

“Supermom,” Lena says, and she clinks her glass against Sam’s in appreciation. “I didn’t know who Barney was until I was sixteen. Or what a Big Bird was. My parents didn’t see the appeal of kid shows like that. Said they were all mindless drivel.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. “Not even cartoons?”

“I once managed to watch a full episode of The Looney Tunes before my mother found out,” Lena drawls. “Should have seen the look on her face. It was like I’d let the devil in through the back door.”

Alex chokes slightly on the large swig of wine she’d just taken, and manages to cough it back into her throat. “That’s-- wow, you’re--” cough , “--lucky. Kara was a big fan of Wile Coyote and the Road Runner. Like, for literal years. She’d make me pretend to be the coyote and chase her while she ran around with super speed going, ‘ beep beep! ’”

“I had thirteen years of Earth childhood to make up for,” Kara chimes, just as the disc slides into the BLURAY player. It hums and shifts, and a moment later the screen lights up with the first copyright notice. “Sue me.”

Lena laughs into her wine. Kara turns and watches from over her shoulder, and the brief moment of amusement affords her just enough time to appreciate how soft Lena looks, tucked up against the couch while cross-legged on the floor. With her hair down in gentle, shining waves and all traces of the stern CEO makeup traded in for a natural glow, she looks content-- blissful, even. Her poncho sweater is a soft gray cashmere, and it’s probably the first time in Kara’s life she’s ever seen the woman wear a pair of leggings, but somehow, Lena manages to make the entire ensemble appear as though she had just walked off the page of a fashion magazine. It’s cozy and cute and stupidly attractive.

Well, she does own CatCo , Kara thinks to herself, and her smile widens when Lena glances up at her.

“Just play your dumb movie already,” Alex huffs, kicking a socked foot into Kara’s thigh.

Kara catches her by the heel and gives a tiny yank, but it’s enough to nearly pull Alex off the couch with a sharp yelp of surprise.

Her sister only narrowly manages to avoid spilling her wine everywhere, and scowls.

“Alright, enough, children,” Sam demands, and Kara quickly hurries to her spot on the ground beside Lena, where she’d dragged an armful of pillows for them to sit on. Not that there weren’t enough seats for the four of them on the sofa and chairs she owns, but, Kara figures this was more about the experience.

“Say, you think they called it Sky High because they were all blitzed out of their minds when they wrote this movie?” Alex asks, though her whisper is hardly quiet enough to constitute as one. Kara hears a small grunt soon after and peeks over to see Sam with her elbow in Alex’s ribs.

“You just don’t like it because you’d end up a sidekick,” Kara returns, and she’s glad that Sam is sandwiched between them to run interference, because the dark look Alex shoots her from over Sam’s shoulder is the stone cold promise of retribution.

Lena finds Kara’s hands and pulls them into her lap. Though it’s sweet, Kara suspects she means to keep Kara leashed in place and at attention-- and she’s not sure whether to be embarrassed or glad that it works.

“Hey, doesn’t the principal lady look like the President?” Sam says under her breath at one point, and Kara squints closer at the screen.

Huh.

“Maybe she moonlights as an actress in her free time,” Lena says, holding back a snicker as she empties the rest of the pinot into her glass. “Or even a superhero.”

“She’s certainly something ,” Kara hears Alex mutter, just as she takes a drink. Sam snorts, leaning into Alex’s arm, and Kara catches a small, pleased smile surface briefly over her sister’s face.

“I can’t believe Ruby actually likes that movie,” Sam says. The credits are rolling down the screen, but none of them move from their places strewn over the couch and floor to turn off the television. Kara’s lost track of how many bottles of wine they’ve gone through tonight, though it’s at least five or six by her estimate-- two between herself and Lena, and the rest left to the women sprawled over the couch behind them. And despite that Sam retains some Kryptonian powers, immunity to human alcohol is not one of them. “That was the corniest, most cheeseball movie I’ve had to suffer through in years .”

Kara exhales with feigned annoyance. “It’s not that bad--”

“Years, Kara. YEARS.”

“It’s literally the worst,” Alex interjects.

Beside her, Lena leans against the couch, her head tipped back on the cushion with her eyes closed. “Actually,” she says, “the second time around, it wasn’t so awful.”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Of course you’d like it,” she chides, “you’re the corniest person I know. You and anything cheesy are a match made in heaven-- case in point.”

Kara blinks as Sam gestures toward her with a near-empty wine glass, and is so flustered by the comment that she nearly misses Alex’s delighted bark of laughter. Then she feels a hand slide over her forearm and squeeze gently at her wrist.

“Yeah,” Lena says, unperturbed by the tease, “We are.”

Kara beams.

“Oh, Christ,” Alex groans. The laughter melts away into a hard sigh. “I take it back. You two are the worst. This is gross .”

“Seriously. And Ruby thinks I’m lame,” Sam says, and she throws back the rest of her drink in a single motion. Her eyes are a little red rimmed, a little foggy, but she holds it together well-- almost as well as Alex, whose only tell is that dumb little smile on her face Kara usually associates with her thoroughly drunk sister.

A sister that makes the psh sound and waves a hand toward Sam as she says, “What? No way. Ruby thinks you’re-- you’re awesome.”

Kara’s gaze narrows. Lena is silent, eyes still closed, and if it weren’t for the steady thrum of her heartbeat Kara would have assumed she’d fallen asleep.

Sam flops back against the couch. The empty glass is still in her hands, but she hardly seems to notice. “No, she thinks you are,” Sam shoots back, “you and your-- your motorcycle and guns and general,” she makes a vague hand gesture at nothing, “badassery.”

Alex grins. “My badassery, huh? Exact words?”

Sam slides a glare toward Alex from the corner of her eye. “Paraphrased.”

There’s a small snort of a laugh, but Kara doesn’t miss the slight sag of Alex’s shoulders or the faint, wistful touch to the corners of her eyes and smile. Kara watches as Alex reaches over to lightly pat Sam’s bent knee. “Well,” she says, and Kara wonders if she’s imagining the soft, almost sad note to her voice, “I hope whenever I get to be a mom, that kid likes me even half as much as Ruby does. You think she’d want to babysit?”

Glass shatters.

Lena startles to attention, and the four of them look down at Sam’s hands, where the jagged remains of her empty wine glass have burst in her lap.

“Sam-?” Alex starts, but Sam is busy fussing at the glass shards now scattered over the couch to answer. Either that, or she purposefully ignores Alex; Kara can’t quite tell.

“Shit, I’m sorry Kara,” Sam says, as Kara stands to help her scoop the larger pieces onto the empty snack tray. “It comes and goes, sometimes I don’t realize--”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Kara says, gently and with a smile that encourages Sam to return it half-heartedly. She brushes some of the shards off Sam’s pants into her palm. “I’ve broken more than my fair share of glass through the years. It happens, not a big deal. Are you okay?”

Sam shakes her hand over the tray and a few glittering splinters fall from her skin. She’s unscathed, but the pinch to her eyebrow suggests something else-- something beyond just the surprise of her variable super-strength ghosting through her thoughts. There’s more clarity to her now, as if the destruction of the wine glass had a sobering effect, but it’s not enough to rid the film of slight dissociation in Sam’s stare.  “Yeah,” she answers, sighing a bit, “I’m fine. I don’t know what happened.”

Alex is quiet. She watches Sam intently in the background, and Kara can’t read the expression she wears; it reminds Kara of when Alex used to do detective work, hyper-focused and determined, but it’s a little softer, a little more hesitant, even. Borderline timid. It doesn’t help that she’s also still a bit glazed over from the amount of wine shared with Sam, but there’s awareness shining through the haze that appears to grow stronger with every passing moment.

Kara straightens up to take the tray, but Sam immediately darts for it instead.

“I’ll take care of it,” she assures, and she’s already halfway to the kitchen before Kara can protest.

“I’ll help,” Alex says suddenly. She peels herself off the couch with surprising agility and follows Sam to the sink.

A hand suddenly grasps the hem of Kara’s sweater sleeve and yanks her down.

“We should leave,” Lena whispers, and it’s so urgent that for a split moment Kara thinks something is wrong-- but then Lena’s glance flickers to the two women in the kitchen, and the last piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

“Leave where?” she whispers back, “My apartment doesn’t exactly have multiple exits.”

“They need some space,” Lena insists, and Kara looks around in mild panic. There’s no extra room for them to hide away in or even a balcony to step out onto under the guise of fresh air; there’s only a sheet that separates her bedroom from the room they’re currently in, and the--

“Come on,” Kara commands, and she pulls Lena easily to her feet before dragging them both across the living room floor and to the open bathroom on the other side. She’s careful not to slam the door behind them, but it’s a cramped space (who needs a massive bathroom when they live alone?!) with two bodies jammed inside, so Kara ends up nearly thumping against the door anyway when Lena bends in, a little uncoordinated, to listen against the wood.

Not that she minds. Having Lena pressed up close is the exact opposite of a problem.

“Can you hear them?” Lena breathes, and Kara holds still to concentrate. It doesn’t matter that she uses her super-hearing, though, because a handful of seconds later Sam’s strong, almost biting voice rings loud and clear:

“I said, it doesn’t matter,” Sam says, and she sounds frustrated. “It was just an accident. I’m a little drunk and got carried away.”

“Carried away with what, Sam?” Alex asks, mirroring the volume. “What is there to get carried away with? Did I say something wrong?”

Kara’s vision adjusts through the wood of the door in time to see Sam bang a fist against the counter, but it’s controlled, and luckily doesn’t leave behind any fractured granite.

“Just drop it, okay?” She twists around to face Alex, and she’s halfway between anger and anguish at this point. The change in demeanor surprises Kara enough to lose focus, and she finds herself blinking at the bathroom door, Lena watching her expectantly.

Lena cants her head toward the door. What’s happening? she mouths, but Kara shakes her head.

“Sam,” Alex says softly. When Kara peers through again, her sister is in front of Sam, hands clasped around the slope of her shoulders. “Sam, talk to me. Please. Is this about Ruby?”

The silence from Sam is heavy, but she’s not unresponsive. Kara can tell that Sam is wrestling with the answer from the way her jaw works and how she opens and closes the fists at her sides. Then, in a voice cracked by emotion-- or wine, or some messy combination of both-- she answers, “Ruby loves you, Alex. Isn’t she-- aren't I-- aren’t we good enough?”

Alex stares. “Good enough?” she repeats slowly, and seconds later the words appear to take on a new meaning, and Kara sees a sudden, startling thought occur to her. “Wait-- you-- you want me to-- to be Ruby’s...mom?”

Sam pulls out of Alex’s grip and wipes at her face. “Forget it,” she says, hastily and with a sharp, unhappy exhale, “Forget I said anything. I’m drunk, obviously.”

“Bullshit you are,” Alex says, and it’s enough to draw Sam’s gaze again. “Tell me the truth, Sam.”

Beside Kara, Lena pushes her fingers against her mouth in rapt attention. Her gaze is slightly unfocused, and she leans heavily against the door, but she’s not drunk enough to be without some composure.

“I-- I thought--” a shuddering intake of breath, released in a long, defeated sigh, “You kept talking about-- about how much you wanted to be a mom, how important it was to you… and then you took care of my daughter, and you treated her like-- like she was your own kid.” Sam swallows and turns away again, closing her eyes. In a smaller voice she continues, “And you were so good to me. You cared so much, and you were so gentle with us both. I thought-- maybe-- you wanted something more, that you wanted Ruby, that you wanted--” her voice falters slightly, “me.”

Kara sits stunned on the bathroom mat. Lena’s eyes are watering, hand still pressed over her mouth to keep sound from leaking out.

Alex, too, is a vision of shock. Her lips are parted, eyes wide and glossed. She says nothing and does nothing until Sam turns back around to face her.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” she says, before Alex can formulate any kind of response, “I didn’t mean to-- to make a mess of this. I’m not good at this sort of thing and I don’t want to screw it up any more than I have. Please, just… forget it.”

Inside the bathroom, Lena grabs hold of Kara by the hands and clenches tightly. “Your sister better not--” she starts, eyes red and wet, but Kara’s attention snaps immediately back to the women in the kitchen when she hears Alex speak again.

“No,” comes the sharp answer, and Sam stiffens. “I’m not going to just forget it, Sam. Why would I-- how could I ever forget something like this?” Alex shakes her head and presses fingers against her eyelids for a moment, as if gathering herself. Then she sighs, deep and tired, and pushes the strands of hair out of her face. “Sam, I-- I was going to get married to someone I loved. And right before that was supposed to happen, I-- I discovered we had some, some fundamental incompatibilities. She didn’t want kids. And the more I was around Ruby, and you, the more I realized-- I did. I wanted kids so badly. I couldn’t just sacrifice one part of myself for someone else.”

Though Kara’s not drunk, the tears spring freely to the corners of her eyes.

Alex’s arms wrap around herself, and she stands there, looking less like a startled deer in headlights and more vulnerable, more fragile. She continues, “It broke me, Sam, to lose her. But I think it would have broken me more to stay and never know what it was like to have a kid of my own. To never be a mom, like you.” Alex steadies her breath, but Kara can hear the wetness to it, the slightly unhinged depth dragged into the light by Sam’s confession and the buzz of alcohol over them both. “And the more time I spent with you and Ruby, the more I realized that I had made the right choice. There was someone out there for me who loved kids as much as I did.”

Sam wipes at her face again. She doesn’t say anything, though Kara can see the lines of rejection in her crestfallen expression.

But Alex doesn’t stop. “And even with all of the horror that happened to you, I got a chance to see what it was like. To be a mom. And I-- Sam, you have to know,” her voice breaks, “I love being Ruby’s mom. I love her so much, Sam. And how perfect was it, having the two of you show up in my life when I’d just thrown my future out the window for the unknown?” Alex takes in a breath to steady herself. “It’s like-- it’s like the universe wrapped you and Ruby in a bow and put you on my doorstep, and said, ‘Here you go, I found a spot just for you.’”

Sam looks a little dumbstruck and stares at Alex for a long, quiet moment. Then, despite the tears still shining on her cheeks, she cracks a small smile and even a soft, timid chuckle as she says, “That was really corny.”

Lena pushes up against Kara and demands in a fierce whisper, “I have to see what’s going on!”

Kara slowly, almost painfully so, turns the doorknob and pushes it open just enough for a sliver of the kitchen to come into view. Lena presses her face into the door frame to peek out with one eye, and Kara hovers over her, mirroring the position.

Alex has a hesitant smile tilted at the corner of her mouth. “Yeah,” she says, “Guess it runs in the family.”

Sam nods and laughs again, this time a little louder. “So--” she fiddles slightly with her own hands, and sniffs. “So what… what does this mean, then?”

“It means--” Alex takes a step closer, and Sam blinks-- “that if I had known you'd wanted me to stay--” she reaches up to hold Sam’s face in her hands, and the intensity of the gaze they share makes Kara’s hair stand on end, “I never would have left.”

Below Kara, Lena gasps as Alex pulls Sam in and kisses her, hard and fierce and loving all at once. Sam crumbles against her, shaking and euphoric. Kara doesn’t even care that she and Lena are crouched in her bathroom and spying on her sister; she’s drunk on the emotion crashing up through her system at the sight of them, and is glad when Lena turns away from the door to wrap Kara in a tight embrace as a distraction from the tears burning in her own eyes.

“And for the record,” she hears Alex say, moments later, “I had no idea you even liked women.”

They’ve managed to stay quiet up until now: the strangled wheeze of a laugh erupts from Kara, and in Lena’s hurry to tramp a hand over her mouth, an elbow knocks the bathroom door wide open.

The two of them blink up at Sam and Alex.

“Whoops,” Kara says.

Sam dissolves into laughter and hangs her head against Alex’s shoulder. “This is so not how I imagined this going,” she says, a little breathless.

“Oh? How’d you imagine it?”

She looks up at Alex and smiles before tipping her head toward Kara and Lena still sitting on the bathroom mat. “Not with an audience, at least.”

“Hey, Alex and Ruby got to interrupt ours,” Lena says, lifting an eyebrow. “It’s only fair.”

Alex snorts. “Never remind me of that again. Ever.”

Sam and Lena laugh, loud and free and twinkling like bells. Kara merely looks to her sister and smiles; that sunshine she’d felt with Lena is now shining in Alex’s eyes, and Kara’s not sure she’s ever felt so whole-- so complete-- before now. It’s an iridescent feeling she can’t quite name, but it shimmers with light and warmth deep in her chest and expands beyond anything she’s ever felt before. She wants to chase it to the ends of the Earth and across the rivers of Time, though part of her knows that it will live within her for long as she has this little family to light the way-- together.