Chapter Text
It’s not that Kara meant to run into her—it just kind of, well, happened.
She was flipping through a stack of papers that accumulated on her desk that morning, shuffling through the busy hallways of National City University and smiling her way past groups of college kids. It was the first day of the new school year, AKA Hell Week: Professor Edition. Kara had so many things to do—she had to print out her attendance sheets, make copies of the syllabus within the next ten minutes because class starts in twenty, and there just wasn’t enough time.
But then one second she’s flying down the long hallways, nose deep in her packet of papers, and the next she’s frantically reaching a hand out to try to prevent the woman she just barreled into from falling to the ground… which, of course, doesn’t work out too well, because Kara’s on her knees straddling a stranger in the middle of a busy hallway.
“I—oh gosh, I’m—I am so sorry!” Kara scrambled to get up, holding her hands out for the woman to take, and she let out a relieved sigh when the woman took her hands and let herself be pulled up by Kara. The woman took a moment to wipe any dirt that may have gotten on her skirt off, then met Kara’s eyes with a sympathetic smile. Kara actually stopped breathing. Her eyes are gorgeous.
“Don’t worry about it.” Even her voice was gorgeous. Wow, but her eyes—Kara couldn’t tear her own away from them, they were so vibrant and so green, and Kara wanted to ask the woman if she had some kind of cosmetic eye surgery or something because human eyes can’t possibly be that pretty.
It wasn’t until the woman shifted a little and cleared her throat that Kara realized she was staring. “Oh—are you okay?” She tore her eyes from the woman’s and looked her over, searching for any kind of wound or sign that Kara hurt her.
“I’m perfectly okay… are you?” she raised a single eyebrow in question, and Kara swore this woman was sculpted by Michelangelo himself.
“Yeah,” Kara felt her phone buzz incessantly in her pocket and she pulled it out, frowning when she discovered what time it was, “Oh, gosh. I have to go, I’m—” She didn’t finish her sentence because she was sprinting down the hallway to her classroom. She had six minutes. Hopefully her students were competent enough to access their emails because forget making copies.
She walked into her classroom, writing a plethora of assignments on the board because this is college, students don’t get a ‘free/go over syllabi’ day. Luckily this was a class full of people who knew the whole rodeo. Everyone taking Romance Languages and Literature was someone who was genuinely interested in the subject. It was a junior level class that students prayed to get into because it was always full every single year during the four years Kara’s been teaching it.
It was always a really good feeling when she saw the spark in her student’s eyes as she started talking about Miquel Hernández, speaking passionately about passages from his poems, grinning widely when students raised their hands and asked question after question, drilling Kara as hard as they could, earning a wonderfully detailed answer from their professor. It was fun. It was invigorating. It was Kara’s passion.
“…veo un bosque de ojos nunca enjutos, okay, which means “I see a forest of eyes never dry.” I mean, come on! How beautiful is that?” She didn’t wait for a response, just spun around her desk and to her board. Kara gleamed as she drew a ton of black scribbles on the board that came out to look like a ton of open eyes, blue streaks thrown in to indicate tears, stepping aside to showcase the artwork, “eyes never drying—so they’re…”
“Crying.”
Kara pointed at the student with gusto, “Correct! But why? Why is this village of people crying?” She stepped back to lean against her desk, looking around the auditorium.
One girl in the back of the class raised her hand, and Kara nodded in her direction to allow her to answer. “Because of the poet. He died, and so everyone in the village that was able to see his creations was affected by his death.”
“Why?”
“Well… because his work impacted them.” Kara pushed for a reference from the text, “”A poet dies and creation feels the hurt and the dying inside.” So that’s telling us that the poet's creations have resonated with so many people that they are able to actually feel devastated when he dies… maybe because they know that what they have now is all they will ever get.”
Kara hummed in acknowledgment, but not necessarily in agreement. She chose certain snippets of the poem specifically so her students would gather from the text exactly what they were. “Your inference was really good! But I want you guys to go home tonight and read The Elegy for Federico García Lorca from El Viento del Pueblo. Tomorrow we’re going to be discussing the big picture of the text. Cool?”
She earned a series of nods from her students, and Kara let them go.
Day one was a success.
So was every day for the next week.
Every day was fine up until she was walking down the hallway, her daily outline for her class in hand, and a flash of familiar jet black hair appeared in front of her, and Kara reached out for a hand and felt herself being pulled to the ground. It was by sheer luck that she stepped forward with one foot and grounded herself, pulling the woman close to her instead of falling on top of her… again.
“We really need to stop meeting like this.” She smiled, her forest green eyes squinting slightly, and Kara found a similar one adorning her own features.
She let the woman’s hand go, taking a step back when she realized she was flush with her front, shyly wringing the back of her neck. “I’m sorry—for last time and this time. And maybe even the next one.”
“You could at least ask me to dinner first.”
The joke flew over Kara’s head. Completely. “Dinner?”
The dumb expression on Kara’s face made that fact very clear to the woman, and she furrowed her brow, “no, I don’t mean that literally.” She chuckled quietly at Kara’s little “oooh,” ducking her head slightly. They stood idly for a moment, just watching each other, waiting for someone to say something. “I’m Lena.”
Lena. Even her name is beautiful. Kara’s smiled widened, almost glowing as she raised her right hand to the woman, “oh, Kara.” Gosh, her hair is so black... and super long. It must get really hot this time of year, Kara silently admired the woman.
Lena took Kara’s hand and gave her warm hands a good shake, her fingertips lingering a second too long, drawing a faint blush from the blonde standing in front of her, “Kara…” her cherry red lips wrapped experimentally around the word, “I like it.” Her eyes flitted down to the folders in Kara’s hands, then to the badge hanging from her lanyard, “oh, you’re a professor. What classes do you teach?”
“Oh, uh, Literature—Romance Languages and Literature, actually.” It was then that Kara saw Lena’s badge clipped to the hem of her tight pencil skirt, and Kara looked quizzically at the name on the badge. Lena Luthor… that has a nice ring to i—wait, “You’re Lena Luthor?” She almost missed the flinch that came with her asking that particular question, almost. But Kara doesn’t mean it the way she figures Lena must have taken it. She knows all about the Luthor family, sure, but she also knows that Lena Luthor, founder of L-Corp, two Ph.D.’s, and a vast knowledge of European history that just so happens to overlap with Kara’s own knowledge of European novelists, is a new professor that she has been very excited to meet for the longest time.
So Kara gushes to Lena, actually starts to ramble on and on about her love for various European novelists, particularly Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, which just so happens to be a source that Lena used in a paper she wrote years ago on the value of women throughout history—a paper that Kara didn’t mean to find but somehow did when she was doing some futile digging for her old boss when she was still a reporter way back when. Kara was in the middle of rambling about how she didn’t mean to be snooping through Lena’s old social media accounts when the same incessant buzzing that tore her away from the woman a week before appeared in her pants pocket.
“I’m sorry—I have to get to my class.” She looked back into Lena’s eyes from her phone, freezing up at the awestruck stare Lena was giving her, mistaking it for horror and disbelief, “I—was that weird? I’m really sorry, I got too excited, oh gosh,”
Lena quickly shook her head, her lips slowly turning up into a smile, “no, no… I just—no one’s ever said… all of that before. I didn’t know how to respond.” She folded her arms over her chest and smiled at Kara.
“Oh. Well, good. I really have to go, I’m sorry.” There was a rushed goodbye, and Kara was zooming down the long hallways, dodging groups of students, saying hello to familiar faces. She burst through her classroom door. Kara Danvers, always the teacher to cause some kind of scene. “Hey guys!” nonetheless, there was a bright smile on her face as she taught about the beauty of Spanish literature.
A few students wanted book recommendations after class, so she stayed after to spew off some great titles for them to read—after they read the plethora of books that was already required for the class, of course. She was thinking of at least one more for the last boy in the group when a familiar voice stepped in, “Elective Affinities by Wolfgang von Geothe. It’s brilliant.” Lena mistook Kara’s awed expression at the fact that she, Lena Luthor, was in her classroom for unfamiliarity. “You haven’t read it?”
Kara shook her head, then grimaced and nodded, “I—yes. I have, it’s one of my favorites. Add that to your list.” She smiled at the group of kids, waving them off before turning to the woman standing before her, jawline especially sharp from the low angle Kara was at. “Lena, hi. What can I do for ya?” she was all smiles on the outside, but on the inside, everything was running a million miles a second. Keep your cool, Kara. Why am I so nervous anyway? She’s just Lena Luthor, no big deal.
Lena moved around Kara’s desk to the extra chair to its side, raising her eyebrows in question. She sat when Kara nodded, crossing her legs at the knees. “You never got to finish your rambles, so I thought I’d catch you after your class and let you finish.” Her eyes flitted down at her hands, nervously fiddling with her fingernails, “if you’re not in a hurry to be somewhere else, of course.”
Kara flushed slightly, adjusting her glasses, “right, sorry. I ramble when I’m… well, always.” She looked at Lena and could see the hesitation in her eyes. Her nervousness was apparent in the way she pushed stray hairs behind her ear. Kara realized that Lena probably didn’t have any friends here, considering she was in a new city and people didn’t particularly see Luthor’s in a positive light. So, she started talking. Kara was determined to make Lena realize there was someone in this world that could see past her last name, because someone who’s favorite book is something so cliché as Pride & Prejudice (a fact Kara learned during her time fruitlessly digging for dirt on Lena for that ridiculous article she didn’t even want to write) absolutely cannot be evil. She just wished that other people could see that.
Kara had read so many of Lena’s papers; papers on novels that Kara knew all too well, on European history, on mechanical engineering, on progressive science, on social issues—everything. Kara was the queen of analyzing a writer’s work, and she analyzed Lena to the last comma. She knew a good deal of information about Lena from her writing, but the creator themselves are far better than any string of words they could piece together and slap on a piece of paper. And Lena was someone to discover, that much Kara knew.
“I’m sorry for rambling… anyways.” She chuckled softly and watched Lena’s lips spread into the widest smile she’d ever seen from anyone, including herself. God, it was amazing.
Lena covered her lips with a hand and laughed, “No one’s ever read into my papers that much, thank you.”
“Well, when I love someone’s work I put my all into it.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” Lena leaned back in her chair, her hands clenching at her sides to prevent her from nervously picking at her fingernails again. “Listen, to be honest, I don’t have many friends in National City and you’re the only one who didn’t run away once learning my last name, so…” she couldn’t quite finish her thought before Kara’s smile, the one that would surely give Lena a cataract at some point, interrupted her train of thought. “I hope we run into each other again—figuratively.”
Kara agreed with a sheepish smile. She definitely couldn’t wait for that encounter.