Work Text:
Sharing clothes was new to Lena. She had never done it before Kara, and didn’t do it after. Over time Lena had acquired various items of Kara’s clothing, all a bit too long and a tad too narrow. Their proportions different enough that the clothes never fit quite right. After they cut ties, Lena began to question, was it weird to sleep in your ex friends college sweatshirt? Kara had lent it to her about a year ago, then never asked for it back. Lena didn’t want to give it back.
The jumper was soft in her arms, warm from the heater that she kept in the back of her wardrobe. If she closed her eyes and held it up to her face she could almost smell Kara on it, that strange ever present mix of vanilla icing and the cheap perfume she always insisted on wearing.
Pulling it over her head, she walked to the living room. Rainbow cushions weren’t in the style of her apartment, but then again, they weren’t her cushions. They were Kara’s, like the oddly shaped picture frames adorning the far wall, and the unopened packet of cookies in the cupboard. A packet of cookies that Lena would never eat. Little pieces of Kara left in the cracks of every room.
Kara had somehow manage to fill all of those spaces. The ones left by Lillian, by Lex, by Jack. It was only after she left that Lena realised the extent to which Kara had repaired her. All of those spaces had suddenly fallen empty again, leaving a gaping hole in the centre of her chest. Maybe this was what it felt like to be in withdrawal. A constant, borderline overwhelming urge to return to that comforting thing, or in Lena’s case, that comforting person.
Years ago, Lena’s apartment was blank. A canvas yet to be painted on, however Lena wasn’t an artist. Not in any sense of the word. So it stayed blank, that was until Kara came in. With a paintbrush in her cheeky lopsided smile and a pencil in her love for colour. The canvas was quickly filled with candid photographs in bright frames, the strange cushions on her couch. Filling every crevice with colour.
Lena had half-hoped that by this point she would have had the courage to take down the photos and erase all of Kara’s additions. Strip the entire place back to its monotonous beginnings. Monotony would be easier than seeing Kara around every corner of her own home.
If they’d been together this would be the point where they meet in a supermarket car park, exchanged cardboard boxes of broken memories, interlaced with minimal muttered words and unspoken apologies, but they hadn’t been together.
It felt like a break up. The tears didn’t smudge her mascara any less, she didn’t lose any less sleep. There was still a drawer of Kara’s clothes in Lena’s wardrobe. One she hadn’t dared to open. Maybe if she had she would have noticed that there was a sweatshirt missing, not one of Kara’s, but one of her own. Maybe if she had opened it then she would realise that on the other side of National City, in a considerably smaller apartment, there was an equally heartbroken girl wrapped in a too short MIT sweatshirt, but she didn’t open it. She didn’t realise.
The room felt empty, the entire apartment felt empty. Lena never knew quite how accustomed she had become to Kara’s beaming presence until it was gone. Silence stretched through the room, an echo of Kara’s laugh bounced off the walls of Lena’s mind. The sweatshirt offered a poor substitute for Kara’s hugs, trying to fill a space Lena knew it never could.
She lay back on the couch. The evidence of Kara’s lies strewn about the room. A set of mismatched cushions, a sweatshirt for a college she never attended, and a broken heart.