Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Clark Kent was less than a block from L-Corp’s new headquarters when he was yanked into an alley. “You’re on your way to interview Lena Luthor, right?” A blonde woman asked him, a bright grin on her face. Her hair was up in a ponytail, thick glasses were perched on her nose, and the pastel pink cardigan she was wearing completed the harmless look.

Clark felt himself relax. “Yeah. I’m Clark Kent, with the Daily Planet,” he said, holding his hand out in a polite greeting. The woman cheerfully ignored it.

“And I’m Kara, your old family friend who you decided to let tag along with you to the interview.” Kara gave him a wide smile, but Clark frowned, letting his hand fall back to his side as unease settled over him.

“I don’t know you. Why would I let you come along?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Cat Grant that Clark Kent is Superman,” Kara said sweetly.

“E-excuse me?” Clark sputtered, his eyes comically wide and his hands rising, palms out, as if to placate the woman (or surrender).

“We really should be going, Clark. We don’t want to keep Miss Luthor waiting!” Kara chirped. She linked one of her arms with his and dragged him out of the alley and towards L-Corp.

Clark was too shocked at being manhandled by a relatively tiny blonde woman to protest.

///

“Ah, Mr. Kent, right on time,” Lena said as Clark Kent entered her office. A blonde woman followed a step behind him, and Lena arched an eyebrow. “And you are?”

“Hello, Miss Luthor! I’m Kara, an old family friend of Clark’s. I’m with CatCo, kinda.” Kara gave Lena a wide smile. “He offered to let me tag along for this interview since he isn’t in town that much. I’d honestly thought he’d forgotten I wanted to be a reporter, but it looks like he remembered after all!”

“Well, that’s very kind of him,” Lena commented. Clark looked distinctly uncomfortable. Usually when he’d interviewed Lena he’d barely looked away from her, as if hoping his piercing gaze would get her to spill all her secrets, but his eyes were trained on Kara, and he had a slight frown on his face. Odd. “Shall we begin then?”

“Erm, yes, of course, Miss Luthor,” Clark stammered, finally ripping his gaze away from the bubbly blonde at his side. He hurried over and sat in the chair in front of Lena’s desk, and Kara followed suit, though she sort of ambled over, her eyes flitting around the office with undisguised interest.

The interview went about as well as Lena had thought it would, Clark repeatedly asking about her intentions in National City, going so far as to suggest she’d moved her company’s headquarters there to get out from under Superman’s watchful eye so she could enact some dastardly plan. When someone snorted at that, Lena feared for a moment it was her before following Clark’s reproachful gaze to an unapologetic Kara.

“What? That’s ridiculous. If she really wanted to become some evil overlord she’s definitely smart enough to do it right under Superman’s nose,” Kara said, rolling her eyes.

“What exactly makes you think I would succeed where my brother failed?” Lena asked, curiosity piqued. Clark shot her a look, but she ignored him. He was going to write a hack job on her either way, so she may as well have some fun with this shitshow of an interview.

“I’ve seen your designs, and you’re way smarter than Lex,” Kara replied, shrugging. “If you were gonna try to take over or whatever, you’d succeed. Luckily for Superman, you’re one of the good guys. Good gals? You get it.” She waved a hand dismissively and gave Clark an expectant look. When he remained silent, however, his mouth slightly agape as he stared at her in shock, Kara rolled her eyes. “Am I the interviewer now then?”

Lena looked from Clark, who had his eyes glued to Kara, back to Kara, who was watching her with an amused grin, and lifted one shoulder in a small shrug. “You can be if you’d like. Mr. Kent doesn’t seem up to the job at the moment.”

Kara’s grin widened at that and she bounced a little in her chair. “Awesome! So, Miss Luthor, what are your plans for the image inducer you currently have in R&D?” Lena’s eyes widened in shock but Kara continued as if she hadn’t just asked the scientist about a project that was not yet public knowledge. “I mean, I’m sure you could be intending it for some every day, human-esque purposes, but it could also be used to help aliens who can’t pass for human. Are you pro-alien, Miss Luthor?” She didn’t say it like it was a bad thing, or like she was looking for some scandalous scoop. More like she was asking for the time, or commenting on the weather.

“I don’t believe I got your last name,” Lena said, her voice tight. She very carefully did not fidget in discomfort. It took a lot of effort.

“I don’t believe I gave it,” Kara replied, a smirky smile on her face and her voice still as bubbly as ever. “I asked you a question, Miss Luthor. Well, two questions, actually.”

Lena tilted her head, eyes narrowed as she assessed the woman perched so casually on her office chair as she asked questions about top-secret L-Corp projects. She didn’t seem nervous at all. So, Lena took a gamble: “I’ll answer your questions, both of them, if you answer mine. Though since you asked two, I should get to as well; it’s only fair.” (At this point she had completely forgotten about the actual reporter in the room, who was now looking from Kara to Lena and back, his pen poised above his notepad.)

“Deal. You have to go first since I asked you first, though. It’s only fair.” Kara’s smile got less smile-y and more smirky even as she batted her eyes innocently.

Lena wondered how much trouble she’d be in if she tossed her stapler at this woman’s face. As it was, all the urge manifested in the real world was a slight eye twitch. “Fine. The answer to your first question is that yes, I do intend for L-Corp’s image inducer to help aliens who can’t pass as human integrate into our society. As for whether or not I’m pro-alien, I can’t exactly say I enjoy not knowing who among us can kill me with nary an effort, but that doesn’t mean I want them to be hunted down based on potential danger alone. If an alien truly wants to live peacefully on Earth, we should let them.” Lena leaned back and crossed her arms. “Your turn.”

“My last name depends on who you ask,” Kara said easily, leaning forward and resting her elbows on Lena’s desk. Lena arched one of her eyebrows at the non-answer, and Kara grinned. “But I’ve decided that I like you. I’ve never liked anyone I’ve been- well, I suppose that should wait til you ask your next question. The name is Danvers. Kara Danvers.” Kara gave a cheeky wink. “You won’t find me when you look that name up later though, so I wouldn’t bother if I were you.” Kara suddenly pushed away from the desk and leaned back in her chair, a bitter smile on her face. “If you ask the government I don’t exist, after all. Why give a ghost a last name?”

Lena swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat and asked her next question, which Kara had clearly already seen coming. “How did you know about the image inducer?”

Kara bit her lip, and for a moment it seemed she’d stay silent. The uncertain look turned to a cocky one in a moment, however, and Lena got her answer. It was not a good one.

“Someone really wants you dead, Miss Luthor. I’m not sure who it is, but they managed to send me, so it’s someone with serious connections.” Kara hopped up to her feet, giving Lena a bright smile when the CEO subtly pressed the panic button under her desk. “I like you, Lena. I’ve never actually liked someone I was sent to kill. So I’ll give you a warning and be on my way.” Kara appeared beside Lena on the other side of the desk before the other woman could blink, reaching out with a warm, tan hand and grasping her throat loosely. “You need better security. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. Even with Superman interviewing you.” She squeezed lightly as if to emphasize her point before vanishing completely, leaving a rattled Luthor and a sputtering Super in her wake.

///

Kara launched herself off Lena’s balcony at super speed and flew a few buildings over, plopping down lightly on the edge of a roof a few stories shorter than L-Corp’s and using her super vision to watch as a small security team burst into the CEO’s office, only to be waved off and told to cut their arrival time in half. Once they were gone, grumbling to themselves and exchanging confused looks, Lena stood from her desk and walked around it until she was directly in front of Clark. She grabbed his notepad and dropped it unceremoniously into the trash, pen and all, and Kara very nearly burst out laughing at the look on her baby cousin’s face.

“Why the hell would you bring an assassin to your interview, hmm, Superman?” Lena asked, looking down on Clark like he was a bug on the ground and not the revered Man of Steel.

“Gosh,” Kara whispered to herself, “I like her even more now. How is that possible?” She started swinging her legs and leaned forward, enthralled with the chaos she’d caused. Sure, she’d have to pay for it later, but she could handle them. Probably.

“I- I’m not Superman, Miss Luthor. I brought that woman here because she threatened me, that’s all,” Clark said nervously, not-so-subtly leaning away from the furious Luthor.

“The second half of that is true, I’m sure,” Lena drawled. “Man of Steel indeed.” She somehow made the moniker sound like an insult and Kara was maybe in love. “If you don’t have any information for me I suggest you leave. And you can forget about using any of our interview for your little article.” She walked back around her desk and sat primly in the chair, already turning her focus to her laptop as she continued. “I’m a Luthor, Superman. Surely you of all people know we have a veritable army of overpaid lawyers chomping at the bit for some action. Now get out.”

Clark stood but didn’t move, looking at Lena with a crinkle between his eyebrows, which Kara kind of wanted to punch away because how dare her baby cousin steal her crinkle, genetics be darned!

“Don’t worry, Mr. Kent. The only thing I have to gain by revealing your identity is having you as an all-out enemy instead of a reluctant acquaintance, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?” Lena glanced up at Clark for half a second before turning her gaze back to her laptop. “Now, I suggest you leave before I call my security back in here to drag you out, and you’re faced with the monumental decision of letting a group of humans manhandle a Super or resisting to try to prove something to me and inevitably arousing their suspicion.”

And Clark Kent turned and left without a word. Kara was tempted to go congratulate Lena but figured that probably wouldn’t be welcome after what she’d just revealed. Also the hand around her throat might have been a bit much, but Lena needed to understand just how outmatched she was so she’d take this threat on her life seriously.

Because Kara might assassinate the targets they gave her, but she did her own background checks first, and never killed anyone she thought didn’t deserve it. So far they’d been lucky and had sent her after some truly scummy people, but they’d messed up when they sent her after Lena. They’d actually royally messed up because Kara had averted a few assassination attempts from other sources that Lena hadn’t been taking seriously while she followed the woman to find out her true character.

Kara had been planning on leaving when the show was over, off to tell her handler she was refusing the case, but she found herself flying closer to L-Corp instead, taking up a perch on a building within sight of Lena’s office and watching as the CEO continued her day as if nothing had happened. As if her life hadn’t been threated, wasn’t still being threatened, as if she hadn’t just found out Superman’s secret identity or had a run in with an overpowered assassin. It was impressive, Kara supposed, but also very, very sad.

Kara knew she should go, especially when Lena finally left her office at the absolutely horrifying hour of 3am, but she followed her instead, muttering to herself the entire time that she’d just fallen from the lofty title of “assassin” to the much grosser title of “creep”.

Lena had her driver take her to a fancy bar, and while Kara didn’t follow her in, she did touch down on a roof across the street from the secret rich person establishment to continue listening and watching, the glasses that helped tamp down her visual powers long since tucked away in the pocket of her soft pink cardigan.

Lena appeared to be a regular, based on her brief conversation with the bartender, and a disturbing amount of expensive alcohol later Lena was slumped on her stool, muttering under her breath about stupid not-assassins and even stupider Super reporters (Kara was a bit amazed at how happy it made her that Clark apparently ranked below her by Lena’s estimation). She waved down the bartender for another drink and the woman shook her head and slid a tall glass of water Lena’s way, and, much to Kara’s surprise, Lena began sipping at it after scowling at her (the bartender was completely unruffled and just grinned in response before going back to wiping down the rest of the otherwise-empty bar).

Kara told herself once again that she was going to leave, and she even started to hover (just a few millimeters, but it was a start to climbing the ranks back to “assassin” from “creep” okay) when she spotted a familiar person approaching Lena at the bar. “Oh Rao, no.”

And before she was even thinking of the consequences Kara had used her super speed to burst into the bar, stopping beside Lena in a blast of wind and placing herself between her and Leslie.

“Aw, c’mon,” Livewire groaned. “You took too long again and they sent me after your scraps? Get it together, Kara.” Livewire ran a hand, already crackling with electricity, through her wild white hair and jutted her hip to the side, giving Kara what she probably meant to be a reprimanding look but that actually came off as more of a pout. “Look, I don’t care which of us takes out the target, but I have a life, so let’s get this over with, okay?”

Kara, however, took a step closer to Lena just as the heavily intoxicated woman noticed them. “You ‘gaaain?” Lena whined. “Kll meurdon’, jus dooit alre’y,” she slurred.

Livewire tilted her head. “Did she just say ‘kill me or don’t, just do it already’?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously and electricity crackled around her. “Don’t tell me you finally found someone you refuse to kill and they’re a Luthor of all people?” Then she shook her head with a laugh. “Nah, that can’t be it. Jesus, that would be stupid. What’s going on though, Kara, seriously?”

Kara glanced between the irate Leslie and the flushed, glaring Lena and made a decision. It was probably a stupid decision, but oh well. Her first big decision she made solely for herself since landing on this darn planet may as well be, what would the humans say, a wrecked train?

So Kara locked eyes with Leslie and adopted her usual loose fighting stance. “She’s mine, Leslie.”

Livewire just raised her eyebrows. “Okay first, don’t use my real name. I mean I know I used yours but that’s just cuz you never chose a cool codename like I did. And second, if she’s yours just kill her already, idiot. I already said I don’t care which of us does it.”

“Ohhhhgraaate,” Lena slurred. “’nother ‘ssassin. Phooey.”

It took every bit of Kara’s willpower (sadly not super like her others) to not turn to Lena incredulously and double check that she’d just said ‘phooey’. But she unfortunately had a point to make, so she just narrowed her eyes at Leslie. “Mine to protect.”

Leslie froze, her lightning fizzling out as she processed what Kara had said. Then, “You sure you wanna do this, Supes?”

“I won’t like it if she dies,” Kara admitted, her nose scrunched up as she tried to figure out why exactly she felt the need to protect her, “so this is the only option.” She gestured from herself to Leslie. “Obviously they really really really want her dead.”

“Your sis ain’t gonna like this.”

“Sssster? Thersssah ‘nother one?” Lena groaned and tried to slam her head on the bar, but Kara turned at lightning speed and placed her palm against the drunk scientist’s forehead before she managed to gain any momentum.

“No. Bad human. Protect your brain,” Kara scolded.

“I can dooo wha’ever I wan’, ‘m drunk,” Lena mumbled, and promptly went boneless. She would have fallen to the floor if Kara hadn’t stepped closer and wrapped her other arm around her waist, pulling the human snugly against her and holding on as tightly as she dared, the hand resting on Lena’s forehead sliding to the side to cradle her head.

“Why? Why do humans insist on drinking?” Kara bemoaned to no one in particular. “It’s poison and it makes them illogical. I don’t get it.”

“Ask your sis when she comes to kick your ass,” Leslie helpfully suggested, grinning at the frustrated Kryptonian, whose only response was to shoot her a pout.

“Yer warm,” Lena mumbled, abandoning her boneless schtick to turn and cuddle against Kara. “Gon’ tryta mel’ me tadeath?” [Translation: “Gonna try to melt me to death?”]

Kara sighed and scooped the surprisingly-willing-considering-she-knew-Kara-was-an-assassin-sent-to-kill-her woman into a bridal hold. “I am taking Lena home. Will you be standing in my way, Leslie?” Hard blue eyes turned to Livewire, who immediately raised her hands up in surrender and stepped so far to the side she was wedged between two stools.

“I don’t have a death wish, thanks for asking.”

Kara nodded and turned to the bartender, who had been watching the entire thing and was staring between them all with a disturbingly calm expression on her face. Her heartbeat was different than a human’s though, Kara could tell. “I will not harm Lena Luthor, Martian. May I leave with her without any trouble?”

The woman’s eyebrows climbed nearly to her hairline at that before her expression settled into a grin. “Despite all the death talk I think you’re trustworthy enough. Be my guest.”

And with a nod of thanks Kara walked out of the bar, Lena already fast asleep in her arms.

It was a good thing Lena had worked so late that she was the only patron in the bar at the time, or the whole confrontation would probably already be going viral.

Chapter Text

Lena woke up with a hangover, which she had honestly expected after going to the bar for the express purpose of getting blackout drunk (even knowing M’gann would never let her). She had also expected to wake up in her work clothes, maybe even sprawled across the top of the bedcovers or even just her couch, face crusty with yesterday’s makeup. So yeah, Lena had expected to wake up cold and grumpy and in pain.

She had not expected to wake up warm, wearing her softest pajamas, face clean of makeup and hair in a loose braid, sandwiched between the heavy blanket on her bed and the solid, warm body she had apparently decided to cling to instead of, say, a pillow.

The natural response to waking up sprawled across some random person was probably to scramble off them and get a good look at their face to see if she at least knew the person (she wasn’t sure if knowing them would be better or worse though). Lena, however, did not do this. Oh no. Later, she would claim she was still a little drunk, that the stress of the day before had exhausted her more than usual, that she was too sleep-deprived to think logically.

Because instead of distancing herself and figuring out who her bedmate was, she snuggled closer and fell asleep again.

///

The second time Lena woke up it was to her pillow moving, which was honestly just very rude of it. Then she registered that it was moving to turn her blaring alarm off and she decided to forgive its transgression just this once as her eyelids drooped and she started to fall back asleep.

Then her brain decided to bring up the fact that her pillow shouldn’t be moving at all, much less radiating this much warmth and turning off her alarm for her.

Lena was wide awake then, only now recalling her earlier realization that there was a stranger (maybe, hopefully?) in her bed.

Once again, Lena did not do the logical thing and scramble off and away from them, instead just shifting so she was propping herself up enough to see the face of the person whose chest she had decided to use as a pillow. “Motherfucker.”

Kara blinked at her, disturbingly awake for the early hour, and offered a grin. “Sorry, Miss Luthor, but last I checked I was not, in fact, your father.”

“I hate you,” Lena blurted automatically for lack of an actual comeback, and Kara immediately pouted. “No no no, you do not get to pout at me. You made my day hell yesterday. It was at least 40% more hellish than usual.”

Kara tilted her head, still resting on Lena’s actual pillow, bringing Lena’s attention to the way her golden hair was fanned out around her, magazine-picture worthy (which was just unfair and made Lena glad her own, bed-head-prone hair, was in a braid, which… wait a minute had her not-assassin braided her hair???). “I find that statement incredibly disturbing. We need to work on your work-life balance.”

Lena arched an eyebrow and decided to pretend she was in her fanciest suit and sitting regally in her office chair and not wearing kitten-patterned pajamas and literally on top of the person she was trying to intimidate. “We?”

“Yup! I kind of gave up being an assassin to protect you so I may as well protect you from yourself too while I’m at it.” Kara looked so earnest with her wide blue eyes and pretty pink lips and Lena…

“I hate you,” Lena repeated again, for an entirely different reason this time. How fucking dare her not-assassin be so pretty.

“You keep saying that,” Kara commented, and Lena jolted a bit in surprise when she felt the tie being slipped from her braid and a large, warm hand beginning to comb her hair out. “But I think if you actually hated me you wouldn’t still be laying on me more than on your ridiculously comfy bed.”

Which. Kara made a good point. And normally Lena was quite good at arguments (ask literally anyone she knew), but post drinking binge and pre coffee she was most certainly not. So she just groaned and stopped propping herself up at all, lying down fully on Kara once again and grumbling about stupid pretty blondes.

Kara started giggling a few minutes into Lena’s sleepy, barely-audible-to-herself rant. “I should probably tell you that I have extremely sharp hearing before you say anything less insulting than ‘stupid pretty not-assassin with stupid muscles and how dare you be so soft and warm darn you’.”

Lena pouted and turned her head, burying her face in Kara’s chest as she mumbled, “I said damn.”

“I don’t cuss.”

Lena raised her head and arched her eyebrow at Kara, who didn’t seem to see the irony. “You’re against cussing but not killing? Really?”

Kara gave a small shrug, jostling Lena a bit. “Everyone and everything dies eventually. I just speed the process along for some of the exceptionally scummy folks. As for cussing, I was told it was rude, and I do try to be polite.”

“Mhm, the gentlewoman assassin,” Lena mumbled, causing Kara to pout-frown at her. “The gentlewoman not-assassin, my apologies.”

“Well this not-assassin would like to know why the heck your alarm went off at 7:15AM on a Saturday.”

Lena groaned and thunked her head down on Kara’s chest. “Work. Right. Fuck.”

“Language,” Kara chastised. “Also, you have had less than three hours of sleep, which means I have also had less than three hours of sleep, though admittedly I don’t need nearly as much sleep as humans. Plus it’s the weekend. So I vote we sleep til noon.”

“Your vote doesn’t count,” Lena grumbled, beginning to roll off of Kara so she could get her day started. A moment later she grunted out a quiet oof as a warm, solid weight rolled on top of her and pinned her to the bed.

“If my vote doesn’t count this is a dictatorship and I am now the dictator,” Kara mumbled, eyes drooping as she nuzzled into Lena’s neck. “G’night.”

Lena squirmed into a more comfortable position and began tapping Kara’s shoulder insistently. “C’mon, get up. You were wide awake just a few minutes ago.”

“Loud ‘larm. ‘Mergency mode. Sleep now. Nighty night.” Kara’s lips brushed against Lena’s neck as she mumbled her barely comprehensible answers and Lena felt her face flush in response. “Nooo why’s yer heart pounding all o’ sudden. Shhhh.” Kara moved her head down and whispered another shhh right above Lena’s heart. “You gotta be quiet so Lena can sleep more, heart. Humans are delicate, y’know. Gotta sleep ta be healthy.”

“You’re the worst assassin ever.” Lena stopped squirming and tapping at Kara and sagged into her mattress, accepting her fate as a pillow for the time being. Kara was freaking immovable.

“’m fine with that.” And with that Kara fell asleep lying on top of her and Lena, much to her annoyance, followed soon after.

///

When Lena woke again she was quite confused. First of all, why was she so warm? And second, why were her eyes willingly staying open even when her body felt like lead? Then she noticed the blond hair splayed across her chest and realized the heaviness wasn’t in her limbs but on them.

“Kara.”

“Mm, no more training,” Kara mumbled, still asleep. She shifted on top of Lena and burrowed into her more. “Don’ like hurtin’ people.”

Lena sucked in a sharp breath at that. What kind of assassin didn’t like hurting people? Kara had seemed pretty nonchalant about her job earlier. Her mind buzzing with what felt like some kind of secret she definitely shouldn’t be privy to, Lena automatically glanced at the clock and all thoughts of Kara’s past fled her mind as she cursed, loudly.

“Mmph what, ‘m up!” Kara yelped and jolted to a, well it wasn’t really a sitting position. She was, however, kneeling and straddling Lena’s waist as the brunette lay in bed, shivering at the sudden loss of warmth.

“Great, now I’m late and cold,” Lena grumbled.

Kara looked down at her and blinked rapidly. “Lena? I mean, Miss Luthor? Wait what time is it?” She glanced at the clock before giving Lena a sheepish smile. “Oops. Guess we slept a little past noon. Sorry about that.”

“It’s 3PM,” Lena groused. “I’d say that’s more than a little past. Now please get off of me so I can get ready for work.”

Kara’s brow crinkled as she frowned down at her, and a moment later she did the exact opposite of what Lena had told her to, flopping down (gently) on top of her again. “First tell me why you need to go into work on the weekend when you already stayed there til 3AM last night.”

Lena stared at her for a solid minute before, “Stalker.”

A cheeky grin was Kara’s only response.

“I don’t see how my work habits are any of your business,” Lena tried, averting her eyes when Kara’s startlingly blue ones seemed to stare into her very soul (if Luthors even have souls, she thought bitterly to herself).

“I had a very lucrative career as an assassin, Miss Luth- okay you know what seeing as how we’ve officially slept together now I’m going to call you Lena,” Kara decided, plowing on and completely ignoring Lena’s reddening face and indignant squeaks, “so Lena, what I’m trying to say is that I had a very good job. I may not have chosen it, or really wanted it, but I was very good at it. And I have given up that job to protect you. So since I have assigned myself this new job of keeping you alive, it would really suck if you up and died on me because you weren’t sleeping enough.” Here Kara paused and Lena yelped when she felt warm fingers slip under her shirt and skim along her ribcage. “Or eating enough. So from now on I’m going to make sure you get sleep and food. Got it?”

Lena couldn’t help it: she started pouting. She puffed her cheeks out and turned her face to the side, trying to hide in her pillow as she grumbled a petulant, “I didn’t ask you to quit your job you know.”

“If I hadn’t you’d be dead,” Kara said, eyes hard and voice subdued. Lena faced her again, eyes wide with surprise. “I stopped three attempts on your life when I was deciding whether or not to kill you myself, and last night if I hadn’t been playing ‘stalker’ Leslie would have killed you for sure, even with your Martian friend there.”

That was a lot to process. Like, a lot a lot. “Okay, nope, you don’t get to drop all that on me until I’ve had coffee,” Lena declared. “I don’t care how much sleep I’ve gotten, I need caffeine!” She squirmed valiantly until Kara finally let her up with an amused roll of her eyes. Lena made a beeline for the bathroom but stopped in the doorway and turned, pointing menacingly at her uninvited guest. “Don’t you dare come in here, Kara Danvers, or else.” And with that she slammed the door, doing her best not to linger on how prettily Kara’s eyes had sparkled when she’d laughed at Lena’s vague threat.

Lena didn’t emerge from the bathroom until a full half hour later, feeling quite refreshed after her shower and her teeth no longer having that gross fuzzy feeling (yet strangely she hadn’t had the stale aftertaste of alcohol on her tongue, so she was going to assume she had somehow brushed her teeth last night… and also there was no way she was asking Kara about it, or her pajamas and braided hair for that matter).

Kara was stretched out across the bed like a starfish and when Lena opened the door she didn’t even glance at her, which Lena was thankful for since she hadn’t had the foresight to bring a change of clothes in with her and was currently wrapped in a towel.

“I didn’t come in, just so you know,” Kara commented as Lena rifled through her closet.

“Yes, I noticed.”

“I also didn’t peek,” Kara added, a strange tinge of pride in her voice. “Even when I heard you slip and almost fall. I’m glad you grabbed onto something tangible and didn’t try to grab the water like Alex did once.”

Lena stopped thumbing through the suits in her closet and turned to Kara, her hand going to clutch the towel even tighter around herself. “You… heard all of that?”

“Yup. I did tell you I have really good hearing, right?” Kara looked over at her then and squeaked before going back to staring at the ceiling, her face flushing. “Oh Rao I forgot you hadn’t gotten dressed yet, sorry.”

“H- how good is your hearing, exactly?”

“Cat Grant is currently yelling at one of her reporters because there were three spelling errors in the article they submitted.” Kara’s tone was bored but Lena’s mind was reeling. CatCo was across the city. How the everloving fuck-

“What did you mean when you said you didn’t peek?” Lena’s voice was quiet, faint, but what did that matter when Kara apparently had hearing that rivalled Superman’s?

“I can see through walls.”

“You can see through walls,” Lena repeated. “Of course you can. Anything else I should be aware of?”

Kara disappeared, just like she had in Lena’s office the day before. Only this time she reappeared in a matter of seconds and offered Lena a steaming cup of coffee with a large grin. “You did say you needed caffeine!”

Silently, doing her best not to freak out, Lena took the cup and sipped the brew. She moaned quietly at the taste and noted how Kara’s eyes darkened in response. “I am quite partial to Noonan’s coffee. Though I suppose my stalker would know that.”

Kara’s bottom lip pushed out in a pout that Lena hated herself for finding adorable. “I’m not a stalker! I was an assassin doing a background check is all. And now I’m, uh,” the pout was driven away by the cocky grin spreading across Kara’s face, “I’m your better security.”

“And what exactly makes you think I’m going to hire you?” Lena arched an eyebrow at Kara, who only seemed to get cockier.

“Well for starters I’ve already saved your life five times.”

Lena’s other eyebrow joined her first. “Oh really? As I recall you claimed to have stopped three attempts on my life, along with what happened at the bar. None of my doctorates are in math, but I’m fairly certain that adds up to four.”

“Five,” Kara corrected. “I stopped you from being killed during your interview with Superman.”

“The only one trying to kill me then was you.”

“Yes, and I stopped myself. So five.” Kara’s grin was so wide it made her cheeks bunch up and get rosy.

Normally Lena would argue this point, but either the caffeine wasn’t kicking in yet or the part of her brain that enjoyed debating things was currently occupied with tallying up all of her not-assassin’s adorable traits. She was pretty sure it was the latter, unfortunately. Lena heaved a sigh. “Okay, fine. You saved my life five times. So what? That doesn’t mean I’ll hire you, you know. You haven’t even given me a resume.”

Kara’s eyebrows nearly hit her hairline. “Wow, you’re a tough person to get to work for. Okay, well a resume is just past job experience and skills, right? You know my past job experience- best assassin ever. As for my skills-”

“No references?” Lena interrupted, smirking. “How about the length of time you held the job? So I know if you’re reliable and alll.”

Bright blue eyes narrowed at her and Kara put her hands on her hips. “My references, as you call them, are the ones who sent me to kill you, so I really don’t think you should be contacting them. Ever. And I was an assassin for thirty years.”

Lena nearly choked on her sip of coffee. “There’s no fucking way you were an assassin for three decades! You can’t be more than 26 years old!”

“Yeah, I kinda stopped aging around then? Or at least slowed way down. Or maybe I age twice as slow as humans?” Kara mused. “I’m not actually sure. I just know I’ve been on this planet for thirty of your Earth years, and the people who found me started training me as an assassin right away.” Kara shrugged. “So, on to my skills, then. Aside from the obvious, assassinating, I’m a great proof-reader.”

Lena knew Kara had moved on to her skills to distract her from exactly who had found a recently landed alien and turned them into an assassin, not to mention how old she was at the time, but she snorted anyway, deciding to let her off just this once. “Yes, a proof-reader who can see through walls and get me coffee from across the city in less than a minute.”

“Oh that’s for the abilities section.” Kara winked. “With the proper tech I can type an entire novel in five minutes. Not really sure how many words that would be cuz it depends on what I’m writing.” The blonde shrugged before adopting a somber expression. “Seriously though, you really should consider hiring me, Lena. As you already know, I’m fast, have sharp hearing, and can see through walls. I’m also quite strong, and indestructible, basically the perfect inhuman shield with the added feature of danger detection.”

Lena tilted her head at that, eyes narrowing. “So if there’s a sniper…”

“I’ll catch the bullet.” Kara’s gaze was open and earnest, and for the life of her Lena believed she was telling the truth. And yet-

“The only one who can do that is Superman.”

Kara gave her a rueful smile. “Yeah, I guess my baby cousin has learned a few tricks over the years, even if I learned them first.”

Lena’s eyes widened and her grip on her towel tightened enough that she could feel the blood pulsing in her fingers. “That doesn’t make sense. How did he grow up to be a hero when…?”

“When I’m an assassin?” Kara finished for her. She closed her eyes and stepped backwards, floating up and gently flopping onto the bed, back in her starfish pose. “Two super assassins are certainly better than one, but why raise a squalling infant and deal with a rebellious teen when you can use the baby as incentive to make his thirteen-year-old cousin do what you want? Kal got to stay with the human family I tried to hide him with as long as I did what they said. My job was to protect him, and I did.”

“Fuck,” Lena whispered.

“I second that,” Kara said dully. A beat passed. Then Kara blurred into a cross-legged position on the bed, sitting and staring at Lena eagerly. “So, Lena, whaddaya say, am I hired?” She wriggled her eyebrows playfully and Lena couldn’t help but laugh.

“Fine, you’re hired. Feel free to use the bathroom if you need to, just don’t come out til I’m done getting dressed. And no peeking,” Lena added when Kara’s eyebrow wriggles got decidedly less playful.

Kara pouted. “Boo, boss lady, you’re no fun.”

“Boss lady? What happened to calling me Lena since we’d ‘officially slept together’?” Lena purred, smirking when Kara’s face reddened.

“Lena! How could you say something like that?” The Kryptonian’s tone was absolutely scandalized and Lena’s smirk grew.

“You said it first, darling.”

“When did I- oh Rao I didn’t mean like that!” Kara disappeared into the bathroom in a blur and slammed the door as Lena cackled with the realization that Kara wasn’t confident and smooth at all- she was actually easily embarrassed and delightfully dense. This might be fun after all.

Chapter Text

On a normal Saturday Lena made it to her office by 8AM at the latest. Today she didn’t get in until nearly 5:30PM, because a certain not-assassin had apparently forgotten to list ‘voracious appetite’ in the abilities section of her resume and they ended up spending an entire hour at Noonan’s, Lena watching in awe as Kara ate her weight in sticky buns and other sweets. At some point Lena definitely heard one of the baristas talking with her manager about the ‘coffee ghost’ and had to suppress an actual giggle at Kara’s glaze-and-crumb-covered smirk, though she did tip extra on the way out since her gentlewoman not-assassin apparently didn’t classify paying for things as being polite.

L-Corp was fairly empty on Saturday evenings, so no one except the occasional custodian or workaholic scientist saw the blonde woman following their mysterious CEO everywhere she went like an excitable puppy.

And Kara was quite excitable. Lena didn’t actually have much paperwork to finish up, so she and her self-appointed bodyguard ended up in the labs by the time the sun had set, and Kara spent the first few minutes blurring from machine to machine, talking entirely too fast for Lena to understand.

Lena let her explore in peace until she realized Kara was fiddling with one of the projects on her workbench. “Hey, no, you’re supposed to be my ‘better security’, not one of my R&D scientists!” Lena rushed over, her ponytail and crisp white lab coat fluttering behind her as she ran, and she was grateful she’d taken the time to change into her more casual (and safe) lab clothes before coming down to the main R&D lab to see if there were any projects she could come up with helpful notes for (and to work on a few of her own if she had the time).

Kara hummed distractedly in response and continued fiddling with one of the device’s components, barely glancing up at her when Lena came to a halt and stared in shock. The device was actually one of her more idealistic projects, one she figured she wouldn’t be able to finish for a few years what with how little time she was able to devote to actually working on it. Only, now that Kara had fiddled with it at super speed for less than a minute it almost looked… done?

“What on Earth?” Lena murmured, her eyes roving over all the new pieces Kara had added and noting that the woman had also replaced a few she’d put on earlier.

“More like what on Krypton,” Kara corrected cheerfully, surveying her work one last time before reaching down and keying in a command.

A soft whirring sound filled the lab and the small, intricate pieces of the machine began dancing around each other, a blue light crackling into existence between them and glowing brighter and brighter before dimming and taking the shape of a small cat.

“Streaky!” Kara happily plucked the cat off of the small platform and placed it in her palm, where it began wandering around and pawing curiously at her hand. “Isn’t she adorable?”

“You just made a cat out of solid light,” Lena mumbled. “And all you can say is that it’s adorable?”

Kara nodded, eyes still trained on her tiny new friend. “I found a stray cat on one of my first jobs, or, uh, more like I made it a stray cat.” Kara’s nose scrunched up in a grimace. “Anyway I couldn’t just leave her there, so I took her with me and named her Streaky!” She used her pinky to gently pet the tiny cat, no larger than an apple, and Lena was pretty sure it started vibrating with purrs. “That was awhile ago though and I had to leave her with Eliza when she got older. But now I have a tiny Streaky who won’t age!”

“Did you make… programmable solid light?”

Curious blue eyes shot to hers and Kara’s brow crinkled. “Isn’t that what you were going for with that design?”

“Not exactly,” Lena admitted, her voice strangled. “Why the hell wasn’t this the first thing you listed out for your resume? I would have hired you sooner.”

Kara pursed her lips and shrugged, depositing the tiny cat on her shoulder and crossing her arms. “I dunno. My planet’s tech was way more advanced than this planet’s, so my tech skills aren’t usually something I think of as, well, marketable skills. This kind of stuff was common on Krypton.”

Lena blew out a heavy breath through her nose. “Have I mentioned I hate you?”

“A few times, yeah. Wanna pet Streaky?” Kara extended her arm straight out toward Lena and turned her hand so her palm was facing up, and Lena watched in shock as the little cat pranced along Kara’s arm and stopped in the center of her palm, tilting its head at Lena and swishing its tail. When Lena didn’t move the cat made the decision for her and ran to the tips of Kara’s fingers before leaping off of them and soaring straight at Lena, a determined look on its tiny face.

Her startled yelp made Kara laugh even as she barely managed to catch the little cat. Lena raised it up to eye level and cautiously pet it as Kara had, smoothing her pinky down its head and along its back, all the while taking detailed mental notes of how realistic its fur felt and memorizing its strange appearance- it glowed a soft blue, slightly darker blue light outlining its features. Streaky looked like some kind of video game cat that had just up and walked out of the screen and into reality.

“How did you even do this?” Lena breathed quietly, gaze still fixed on the now-purring cat made of solid light.

“You had the basic design right, I just added some things to make the photons work. Oh and I cobbled something together so the light was integrated with an AI of sorts.” Kara glanced away and Lena looked at her just in time to catch the somewhat guilty look on her face.

Lena’s eyebrow arched. “Explain.”

“Streaky is kind of, ah, sentient?” Kara winced. Lena nearly dropped the poor cat.

“You made a sentient cat out of solid light? And you didn’t even ask first? Kara!” Lena wanted to be mad. She really did. But she was holding a tiny miracle in her palm and it was still purring happily and, well. “I’ve never gotten to have a pet. How the heck do I even take care of something like this?”

Kara perked up. “You wanna keep her?”

Lena narrowed her eyes at Kara and brought Streaky closer to her, holding the mini cat up by her shoulder and somewhat shielding it from Kara. “Mine.”

Kara punched the air with joy. “Yes! We have a pet!”

“I believe I said mine, not ours.”

“But I made her. I’m her mama,” Kara pouted. “Streaky, come back to Mama!” She reached out and made grabby hands at the little cat, pout only growing.

Streaky ignored her so-called mama and hopped up onto Lena’s shoulder, curling up under the collar of her lab coat and dozing off. Kara’s jaw dropped and Lena just smirked.

“Mine.”

“Hhmph, meanie,” Kara mumbled sulkily. “I can’t believe you claimed my pu-”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Lena interrupted, barely believing her ears. She knew Kara was a bit dense, but c’mon!

“What’s wrong with saying p- oh Rao.” Kara covered her face with hands. “Why do humans have to have so many words for- for- agh.”

What little of Kara’s face Lena could see was bright red and Lena’s shoulders began shaking with silent laughter at the poor blonde, which caused Streaky to wake up from her nap and jump up onto Lena’s head instead with an indignant little meow.

“Wait she can make noise, too?” Lena asked, her surprise only growing when a little paw bopped her on the forehead as if in warning. Streaky apparently had a bit of an attitude. Well, so did Lena, so they’d get along just fine.

“Course she can.” Kara’s brow crinkled and she tilted her head to the side as if listening to something. “Hey, did we leave the balcony door open? Cuz there’re wind noises coming from your office.”

“Shit!” Lena walked as fast as she could to the elevator (running would upset Streaky, and god why did Kara have to name her that?), Kara close behind. The ride up was tense, Kara squinting up for some reason- oh right, x-ray vision. Cuz being a gorgeous muscley alien who could eat all the sugar she wanted wasn’t enough. “I hate you.”

Kara looked at her then, startled. “What impressive thing did I do this time?”

Lena really regretted not throwing her stapler at Kara’s face when they first met. It wasn’t like it could’ve hurt her anyway.

They arrived on the top floor and the elevator doors slid open, saving Lena from having to answer as she speed walked to her office. When she reached for the door handle, however, a warm hand grabbed her own and stopped her. Her annoyed glare turned to a worried frown when Kara held her index finger up to her own lips and glanced meaningfully toward the doors.

Someone was inside her office. And they’d apparently come in through the balcony. Fucking wonderful. Time to see how good her not-assassin was at saving a life for a change, it seemed.

Kara stepped in front of Lena and eased the doors open, her back and shoulders tense. Lena peered around her, noting that the lights were on and the balcony doors were, in fact, wide open, but luckily whoever her uninvited guest was had apparently decided letting her stacks of papers scatter across the room was rude(r than trying to kill her???) and had put her paperweights on them to hold them in place.

The sigh of relief had barely made it past her lips when Kara’s hand was in front of her face, a cold metal bullet held almost casually between her thumb and index finger. “What is the point of having an indestructible shield when you don’t stay behind it?” Kara asked, irritation lacing her voice.

“Ah, um.” Lena gulped, her gaze stuck on the bullet that had been expertly aimed right between her eyes and that Kara had caught mere inches from her face. “Fucking hell.”

“Not gonna comment on her cursing?” An amused voice asked, and Lena finally looked past the bullet and saw the woman who had fired it, a large silencer on her sleek back gun and her short red hair gleaming in the fluorescent light. A cocky grin stretched across her face and despite seeing someone catch the bullet she’d just fired she seemed relaxed and confident.

“Who the fuck-” Lena began, but Kara interrupted.

“I mean she did just get shot at, so I think it’s excusable. Lena,” Kara said, turning her head back to look at Lena, “meet Alex. Alex,” Kara faced forward again and gestured at Lena with the hand still holding the bullet, “this is Lena.”

“Oh, I know who she is, Kar,” this Alex person said, gun still trained on Lena. “The question is, why do you feel the need to introduce me to a dead woman?”

“Because she’s mine.”

At that Alex finally dragged her gaze from Lena to Kara, an angry furrow to her brow and her lips already turning down in a frown. “Excuse me? I only came to kill her cuz they said you were taking too long. Again. Don’t they usually send Leslie when this happens?”

Lena, meanwhile, began to wonder if she could sic Streaky on Kara. “Why do you have to keep saying it like that?” she demanded.

“They did send Leslie, but I scared her off.” Then Kara turned to Lena, her head tilting and a pout already forming on her face. “Saying it like what? And how do you even remember that when you’d had so much alcohol?”

“M’gann doesn’t let me get blackout drunk after the incident,” Lena muttered, continuing before Kara could ask for details, “and I am not yours, so quit saying that.”

Now Kara was full on pouting. “You’re mine to protect! I even got you to hire me to do it! Though so far all I’ve gotten out of it is a free meal and sleeping with you.”

Suddenly Kara’s hand was in front of Lena’s face again, and Lena barely registered the soft plink of the first bullet falling to the ground, her eyes focusing in on the second bullet Alex had just shot at her.

Kara turned to Alex. “Would you please quit shooting at Lena? I am trying to keep her alive, and you are complicating things.”

“You seduced my little sister?” Alex growled, completely ignoring the blonde. “This was just business, but now it’s personal!” She pulled a second gun from behind her back and started firing at the two women with both firearms, one after the other.

Kara caught all the bullets easily, dropping each one to the ground just in time to catch the next, and Lena was honestly just glad that both guns had silencers so no one in the building would hear gunshots and call the police to report yet another attempt on her life. It was getting a bit embarrassing at this point.

“Dammit, Kara!” Alex reholstered the empty guns and started pulling knives from who-knows-where, hurling them at Lena with an aim and focus that was actually quite impressive.

“Rao, Alex! Stop sounding like an assassin from a cheesy movie and quit trying to kill Lena!” Kara dropped yet another knife to the ground, and Lena looked down to see the floor around them littered with crumpled blades and squished bullets.

“You’re just wasting your ammunition at this point,” Lena observed coolly, smirking when Alex’s face began to redden.

“Lena, provoking her will only make this worse-”

“No, she’s right. Let’s try this then!” And with that Alex hurled a fucking grenade at them before running out of the room and leaping off the balcony, spreading her arms and legs and gliding off in a flying suit. What the actual hell.

Kara turned to Lena, the grenade, pin long gone, held in her hand. “Any ideas?” At Lena’s petrified look she sighed. “Fine, these things taste gross though. I’mma need some potstickers after.” And then she fucking swallowed it.

“What the fuck! Kara!” Lena wasn’t sure if she wanted to go to her or run for cover, but in the end Kara just turned her head to the side and gave a monstrous burp, smoke curling out of her nostrils like some kind of dragon.

“So nasty.” Kara shuddered. “I need to go grab Alex cuz she always forgets that she sucks at landing- I’ll be right back.” Kara disappeared.

Lena, still trying to wrap her head around Kara eating a live grenade, carefully picked her way through the puddle of deadly ammo on the floor and sat down numbly on her couch. She wasn’t sure how long she just stared blankly at the still-open balcony doors before a soft mew and an even softer weight landing on her lap made her look down to see Streaky sitting on her thigh, looking up at her and giving a tiny little yawn, light blue ears twitching attentively.

“How are you not the strangest thing that just happened?” Lena murmured, once again petting the small cat. “Who knew all it takes to turn your world upside down is one insistent alien?”

“I could’ve told you that,” a voice groused, and Lena jerked her head up to see Kara flying in through the balcony doors, a pouting Alex held out beside her like an angry cat, Kara’s hand fisted in the back of her flying suit. “Not that you should even still be alive, seductress.”

“Ugh, Alex, I didn’t mean it like that!” Kara scowled at the woman. “I just took her home after I got Leslie to leave and she was drunk, so I made sure she got to bed alright and she ended up grabbing hold of my clothes, is all. I didn’t wanna risk hurting her so I just slept in the same bed.”

Alex scoffed. “Uh huh. Sure.”

Lena blinked at them both several times before a tiny, fluffy head butting against her pinky drew her attention back to Streaky and she resumed petting her, her eyes not leaving the frustrated women in her office. “You called Kara your sister.”

“So what if I did, seductress?”

Lena’s eye twitched. “Call me that again and I’ll sic Streaky on you.” Lena gave a pointed look to her lap and saw Alex’s eyes widen in shock. “Now, how exactly are you two related if you require a flying suit?”

Alex gaped before turning to her sister, who was still hovering above the floor and holding her aloft, with a fierce glare. “Kara Zor-El Danvers! How much does she know?”

“Um, everything, I guess?” Kara’s free hand reached up and fiddled with her glasses. “I liked her, Alex, what was I supposed to do?”

“I knew it! Seductress!” Alex exclaimed.

Lena stopped petting Streaky and used her hand to point at Alex instead. “Get her, Streaky.”

Kara’s brow crinkled and she flew back a bit, grip still firm on Alex. “I didn’t- agh!” Whatever she was going to say was cut off when the tiny cat turned to them both with a glare and became a streak of light that zoomed across the office and resolidified on top of Alex’s head, meowing angrily and bopping the woman’s forehead repeatedly with its tiny paws.

“What the hell?” Alex yelled as Kara landed with a jolt, dropping her and backing away. She raised her hands and tried to grab the cat, but it turned incorporeal each time, still smacking her with its paws in between her attempts at grabbing it. “Kara, get this damn cat off me!”

“You know,” Lena mused, “Streaky might actually be an accurate name, considering.”

“When did you teach my sweet little Streaky to attack people?” Kara pouted.

Lena just shrugged. “I didn’t. Must be instinctive.”

When Alex started swiping at Streaky with a short sword (seriously, where was she getting all these weapons???), Kara finally intervened, and Streaky let herself be scooped up before, well, streaking back to Lena and sitting primly on her lap, waiting for head pats, which Lena happily gave.

Kara’s pout turned thoughtful as she watched Lena and Streaky, and then she smacked the palm of her hand with her fist. “I got it! Lena, you should hire Alex too!”

“And what do I need two bodyguards for?” Lena asked, already sizing up the redhead, who was now staring incredulously at her sister.

“I know she doesn’t seem it, what with how easily I’ve been beating her,” Kara started, and didn’t even flinch when Alex swiped at her with the short sword and only succeeded in shattering the blade, “but she is highly skilled. She’d be a good coordinator strategist person for your security team!”

“I already have a job!” Alex exclaimed, pouting at her broken sword.

“Okay, but I decided to protect Lena, and I even got her to hire me to do it, so if your job is to kill her then we have to fight. And we decided not to ever seriously fight when we decided we’d be sisters, remember?” Kara whipped out a super mega pout that even Lena hadn’t yet been subjected to. Was pouting one of her superpowers or something?

Predictably, Alex caved almost immediately when the pout came into play. “Ugh, fine. Looks like I’m your new head of security,” Alex grumbled, turning to Lena with a scowl. “Congratulations, Luthor.”

“I suppose that’s mildly better than seductress,” Lena mused. “I never said I’d hire you though.”

Kara still had her super mega pout on, so all she had to do was turn to face Lena, bottom lip wobbling and eyes tearing up. Fuck.

“Fine. God,” Lena muttered, looking away. “At this rate I’ll end up hiring all the assassins they send after me.”

“Nah,” Kara chirped, no sign of the pout left on her grinning visage, “There’s really only one more I have in mind.”

Lena turned to her and arched an eyebrow. “Streaky, get her.”

“No, Streaky, I’m your mama- ack!”

Watching Streaky angrily bop Kara on the forehead actually did improve Lena’s mood.

Chapter Text

Since Lena now had two new hires instead of one, and both were perched on the couch in her office talking quietly to one another (all Lena really heard of the conversation was Kara vehemently denying being the ‘missile-like projectile’ that had destroyed some building or other), she set to work putting them both into the employee database.

“Do either of you even have social security numbers?” Lena asked mildly, fingers still tapping away as she filled out the other fields on the digital form.

Kara and Alex turned to her, both wearing matching expressions, eyes narrowed slightly and lips ticked up in mischievous glee.

“Depends,” Alex commented, lazily reclining further on the sofa.

“Streaky,” Lena began calmly, and the little cat perked up from its perch on her shoulder, shooting Alex a warning glare and letting out a small, angry meow.

Alex straightened up in her seat and bit back a scowl. “Kara doesn’t have one, and mine isn’t really active anymore. We each have some you can use that will pass though.”

Lena finally turned her attention from the screen in front of her to regard Alex, both eyebrows nearing her hairline. “The only way for your social security card to not be ‘active’, as you put it, is if you’re legally dead.”

Alex just averted her eyes and gave a stiff shrug. “If you’re willing to take lives you have to be willing to give up your own.”

Streaky gave a soft, sympathetic mew at that, and all eyes shot to the little cat, who just twitched her ears and nuzzled against Lena’s neck, a purr rumbling through her small body.

“I think you made that cat too smart,” Alex muttered to Kara.

“Maybe you just underestimate cats’ intelligence,” Kara countered stubbornly.

“I’d bet ten to one that you made that cat smarter than you thought humans were when I first met you.”

“I’d bet twenty to one that Streaky is smarter than at least one member of humanity in this room, and not the one whose shoulder she’s perched on.”

“You take that back!” Alex hissed, lunging across the sofa at Kara and actually growling when the blonde dodged by flying up up and away, reclining midair somewhere between the couch and Lena’s desk.

“Catch me if ya can, human.” Kara stuck her tongue out at Alex and Lena had the odd experience of watching what was clearly a highly trained woman swerving and leaping around her office in an effort to catch a smirky blonde who was almost lazily flying backwards at superspeed. It was essentially a very unevenly matched game of tag.

Lena didn’t even bother trying to refocus on the task at hand or trying to get either woman’s attention. She just watched, both highly amused at their antics and quite interested in how they moved, as a new boss in the case of Alex and as a scientist in the case of Kara (though when Kara’s shirt rode up and Lena caught sight of her abs she gulped in a very unscientific way).

Eventually Alex tackled Kara, or rather the place Kara had been half a second before, and ended up being caught by the startled Kryptonian right before she barrelled headfirst over the balcony railing. Alex yelped as Kara held her suspended for a moment, having caught her purely on instinct, and both in a bit of shock at the dangerous turn their game had taken.

“Whoopsie,” Kara said quietly, carrying her sister inside and setting her down far, far away from the balcony. “No more balcony time for you.”

“You were the one who went over there in the first place, idiot,” Alex muttered, shooting a glance to the balcony before giving her sister a softer look. “Thanks.”

“Always.” Kara grinned. “And even if you had fallen, I can fly, so it would have been okay. I’m glad you didn’t fall though.”

“Me too.” Alex gave Kara a lopsided grin, and startled when Streaky appeared on her head long enough to bop her forehead twice with her little paws before streaking over to Kara and doing the same repeatedly, letting out little mewls of outrage.

Lena rolled her eyes. “Blood relatives or not you’re definitely sisters.”

“Heck yeah,” Kara agreed, wincing as Streaky continued to attack her. “Lena, could you pretty please call Streaky off?”

“Hm, I don’t know,” Lena mused. “I’d say you quite deserve it for nearly sending your sister sprawling off a balcony over forty stories up.”

Alex gulped and Kara looked ashamed.

“I woulda caught her,” Kara mumbled. “And it was an accident, I wasn’t paying attention.”

Lena arched her eyebrow at that. “Not paying attention? Fine quality for my bodyguard to have.”

Wide blue eyes met hers and before Lena could tell her she was (mostly) teasing Kara suddenly shook herself.

“You’re right. I’ll pay more a- oh Rao you’ve gotta be kidding me.” Kara was suddenly beside Lena, reaching down and scooping the startled CEO out of her office chair and into her strong arms before zooming further into the room, away from the windows, Streaky clinging to her hair for dear life at the use of superspeed. “Be right back,” Kara murmured, settling Lena on the couch and depositing a shaking Streaky on her lap before disappearing completely.

Lena blinked in shock a few times before reaching up with one hand to smooth her hair, her other hand going to comfort Streaky. “Any idea what all that was about?” Her voice was deceptively calm considering her shaken manner.

Alex didn’t turn to her, body rigid as she faced the windows. “She got you out of sight of the windows, so it’s safe to assume she heard a threat.” Dark eyes flitted across the room as the redhead did what seemed to be a visual security check. “Might be a sniper, or some kind of incoming projectile. We’ll know when she gets back. On a related note, Miss Luthor, do you have a panic room?”

“Not here, no,” Lena answered after taking a deep breath. She continued to pet Streaky as the small cat huddled against her stomach, still recovering from moving so quickly while in solid form. “And you can just call me Lena, Alex. Or would you prefer I call you ‘Miss Danvers’?”

Narrowed eyes zeroed in on Lena’s small smirk before Alex sighed and relaxed, the ghost of a grin on her face. “Fine then, Lena it is.”

A solid thud drew both women’s attention to the balcony, where an astonished Kara had just landed, mouth agape and eyes wide as she looked at Lena. “Lena, who in the name of Rao did you piss off?”

“Excuse me?” Lena asked incredulously as Alex did not at all try to hide her own snort. Streaky gave a small mew and probably would have gone over to bop Kara on the head some more if Lena hadn’t still been holding her close to comfort her.

“There was a missile,” Kara said bluntly, not even blinking. “An actual, honest-to-Rao, missile headed towards this building. And before that whoever they are managed to send me to kill you, and even Leslie and Alex. That’s impressive, sure. But a missile? In the middle of a city? C’mon! Who has this much power and disregard for others’ lives?” Kara groaned and in the blink of an eye she was sprawled across the couch, which was not at all long enough for someone to lay separately from someone sitting, and as such she had plopped her head on top of Lena’s thighs, nose to fluff with a startled Streaky, who very nearly bopped her in the eyeball as a result. “Calm down, Streaky, I’m discovering my inner theater kid here,” Kara mumbled, sulking.

Lena and Alex were both staring at Kara with their mouths slightly agape, and Lena had a blush reddening her cheeks.

“Missile aside for the moment,” Lena began haltingly, “would you mind telling me why exactly you’re in my lap?”

A soft, disgruntled sound was her only reply until she reached down and lightly flicked Kara’s ear. “Ow! I mean, that didn’t actually hurt, but it’s the principle of the thing,” Kara whined, turning big blue eyes up to meet Lena’s. “I just saved you and your company from a missile, y’know!”

“Be that as it may, it still doesn’t explain your current position,” Lena drawled. Streaky headbutted Kara in agreement, actually causing the Kryptonian to wince in discomfort, though she didn’t budge. “Good girl,” Lena cooed quietly, and the little cat gave a pleased little mew before streaking up to curl on her shoulder, away from the intruding Kara’s pouting visage.

“I wasn’t gonna sprawl dramatically across the floor, Lena, and you’re the one who chose to sit on the only couch in the room!”

“Actually you sat her there,” Alex commented mildly, arms crossed and a grin on her face, missile worries seemingly forgotten in the wake of her sister’s antics.

“Shut up. You’re my little sister you don’t get to correct me.”

“Ah ah ah, I may have been your little sister before but I’m older now. Look at these wrinkles,” Alex said happily, pointing to the faint beginnings of crows’ feet by her eyes. “So by your logic, as the big sister, you don’t get to correct me.”

“That’s not how aging works,” Kara whined, pout now directed at Alex, whose only reply was to stick her tongue out.

Lena cleared her throat and did her best to not accidentally start petting Kara as she had been Streaky. “I have more enemies than friends, and many are quite powerful, so I’m not sure who managed to hire you two or send the missile, or even if those attempts on my life were done by the same person. So for now, how about Kara gets off my lap and I get back to putting you both in the system so you’ll actually be paid for your efforts?”

“But you’re comfy,” Kara mumbled, causing Lena’s blush to darken.

“Kara, quit being gay and let the lady up so we can get our money,” Alex quipped. Kara just sniffed and turned away. “I’m stealing the last potsticker for the next week if you don’t get up in three, two, and there she goes.”

Kara had given an outraged yelp before scrambling off Lena’s lap and arranging herself in the corner of the couch, knees drawn to her chest as she anger-pouted at Alex. “I can’t believe you would even threaten that, Alex.”

“No money no potstickers, idiot.” Alex waltzed over and plopped down beside Kara as Lena stood, straightening her clothes (and being careful not to jostle Streaky too much) as she headed back to her desk.

Kara was distracted from her sulking when she noticed Lena hesitate, glancing from the couch to her desk chair and back. “You can come sit over here if you wanna,” Kara offered, perking up slightly and abandoning her sulky pose. “I promise I won’t lay on you again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I… alright.” Lena grabbed her laptop and came back over, giving both Danvers a surprised look when Alex scooted out of the middle seat so Lena could have it, sandwiched between her two protectors. “Thank you,” she murmured as she sat down, Streaky already rubbing herself against Lena’s neck in comfort.

“’Course,” Alex said with a small grin, her sister’s smile already in the megawatt range.

Lena tried to tell herself she was only sitting between them to speed up the process of putting them in the system, what with them both peering at the screen and giving her whatever info she needed, but she knew she just wanted to feel safe after a fucking missile being shot at her office. Sure, she hadn’t seen it thanks to Kara’s quick action, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying of a fact.

She shivered occasionally, distracted by the thought, and after a few minutes of this was surprised when Kara rifled through her satchel before scooping Streaky up long enough to drape an odd, red fabric around Lena’s shoulders and setting the cat carefully back down. Streaky pawed curiously at the fabric before giving Kara an approving little meow and settling down, curled up against Lena’s neck as she fell asleep.

Lena paused in her typing to feel the hem of the red fabric, giving Kara a questioning look.

“It was my baby blanket, back on Krypton,” Kara explained quietly. “My parents sent it with me as a memento, a reminder of my childhood and of Rao’s red light, and I’ve managed to hang on to it. It’s actually quite useful,” Kara mused, “both insulating and bullet proof to degrees not replicated on this planet.” She paused, a distant haze over her eyes, before snapping to attention. “Oh, you can probably just put ‘personal security’ as my last job.” Kara nodded at the screen and Lena turned back, startled, but realized Kara didn’t need her to respond to any of that at the moment (she did make a mental note to study the fabric if she ever got the chance though… with Kara’s permission, of course).

“Yes, I’m not sure HR would approve of my hiring assassins, now would they?” Lena mused, earning a snort from Alex and a small grin from Kara. “And thank you,” she murmured quietly, taking advantage of the Kryptonian’s superhearing. She saw Kara give a miniscule nod in her peripheral.

They continued filling out the forms, both Kara’s and Alex’s pulled up on a split screen since many of the answers were the same for both, but they all paused when they got to the ‘references’ part, the only sound the soft snores of Streaky (yes, Kara had programmed her cat to snore because she correctly thought it would be adorable).

“Clark Kent,” Kara finally said, causing Alex to choke on her own spit.

“Your- why?” Alex finally gasped, leaning forward to look across Lena at Kara, eyes wide. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

“Oh, I don’t. But he is technically the one who introduced me to Lena.” Kara gave her sister a happy grin. “And it’s not like he could actually tell anyone the truth if they called him up for a reference.”

“Kara Zor-El Danvers, what did you do?”

Lena raised her hand, index finger held high, between them. “Pause please. Alex, how do you spell ‘Zor-El’?”

Wide eyes turned to Lena and Alex’s brow furrowed. “You really wanna put her alien surname in the employee database?”

“Of course not. I just have an easier time pronouncing things when I’ve not only heard them but also know how to spell them, and based on the very little amount of time I’ve known her I’m going to need to full-name Kara at least three times a day.”

Kara could have sworn Streaky laughed in her sleep. Traitorous cat!

“Z-O-R-E-L,” Alex said, smirking. “There’s a hyphen between the R and the E.”

“Thank you. Please continue.” Lena lowered her hand and smirked over at Kara, who gave her a not-at-all terrifying glare. “Darling, your glare would be exponentially more effective if you weren’t pouting as well.”

Streaky, still asleep, somehow managed to tap Lena’s shoulder lightly with her paw in reprimand just as Alex repeated, sounding strangled, “Darling? I thought you said you didn’t sedu-”

“Kara blackmailed Clark Kent into bringing her to our interview by threatening to out his Super identity, which she then did anyway, to me,” Lena blurted, hoping to distract both Danvers, one of whom was dangerously close to needing Streaky sicced on her and the other looking at her with sparkling eyes and a disturbingly large smile.

“You WHAT?” Alex yelled, immediately pointing to Kara when Streaky awoke with a glare, back arched and fur looking distinctly porcupine-y. “Oh hell no, I’m not getting attacked for this! Get her, she’s the idiot!”

Streaky paused, letting out a questioning little mew and looking to Lena, who nodded toward Kara. Streaky’s glare turned to the blonde, who was already covering her head.

“Streaky, no, bad kitty! I’m your mama, you can’t- darn it.” Kara cut herself off with a resigned sigh when Streaky blurred over to the top of her head and landed in light form, permeating her arms and making only her little paws solid so she could bop Kara on the forehead for waking her up.

“Good girl, Streaky,” Alex said approvingly before turning to Kara with a fierce glare that even scared Lena a little. “Explain, now.”

“Okay, fine. So I’d been checking up on Lena for awhile-”

“Stalking,” Lena and Alex chorused, exchanging an amused look at Kara’s huff of annoyance.

“Whatever. Anyway, I’d already decided I liked her, and I wanted to meet her, and maybe even warn her about, well, me, but it’s kind of hard to just walk up to an infamous CEO with her own personal security team. And I knew Clark was gonna vilify her in his article, and I didn’t want him to do that, plus I know his biggest secret and all, so I figured, well, why not?” Kara shrugged.

Alex dropped her head into her palm. “Idiot.”

“What if he comes after you?” Lena asked, only now realizing that Superman coming after the woman who had so flippantly revealed his civilian identity to a Luthor was a very real possibility, especially when he didn’t know said woman was his cousin.

Kara snorted so hard she would have hurt herself if she weren’t invincible. “Please, he’d have to actually look for me to come after me.”

Alex raised her head at that and gave her sister an impossibly soft look. “Kar-”

“Forget it,” Kara interrupted, turning her head away, bottom lip pinched between her teeth and eyes shining with unshed tears.

Alex sighed and rubbed a hand through her hair, and Lena looked between both sisters with a small frown, surprised when she saw that Streaky was no longer attacking Kara and had, in fact, fallen asleep on top of her head.

“I’ll put myself as your reference, both of you, if that’s alright?” Lena asked, adding herself to both boxes when Alex and Kara nodded, though Kara remained staring out the window, body stiff and muscles straining.

The tense silence continued for a long while, Alex’s eyes tight with frustration and sorrow and Kara’s face turned away as Lena continued typing.

Lena yawned and blinked rapidly to try to wake herself up, but apparently her body had gotten a bit greedy after actually getting enough sleep for once and it wanted to do it again. She found herself leaning against Kara and mumbling about stupid immovable blondes even as she wrote each Danvers woman a brief letter of recommendation, making up a story about hiring them temporarily during her last business trip and deciding to fly them back and make them full-time employees due to their skill.

It wasn’t until she had finally finished all the documentation for her new security hires and she’d closed the laptop, eyes already aching, that she realized she had, at some point, curled up against Kara’s side, knees bent and feet tucked under herself on the couch, shoes long abandoned on the floor, and Kara had wrapped her arm around Lena’s shoulders and was holding her close, bright red blanket and all, her own eyes closed even as she kept her head stiffly upright so as not to disturb Streaky’s slumber. She looked remarkably more relaxed than she had earlier. Lena looked over at Alex with wide eyes and saw the redhead watching them both with a smirk. She looked away when Alex mouthed ‘seductress’ at her.

“I suppose we can go back to my apartment now,” Lena said quietly, all the while wondering when she’d gotten on board Kara’s whole ‘get Lena to sleep enough that she won’t just keel over from exhaustion’ plan.

One of Kara’s eyes peeked open and pink lips curled up in a smile. “Oh really?” Kara murmured. “And you wouldn’t be planning on actually sleeping, would you?”

Lena blew out a frustrated breath when she saw Alex’s raised eyebrows. “Yes, apparently one night of getting enough sleep was addicting. And Alex, get your head out of the gutter this instant.”

Alex rolled her eyes and stood, stretching her arms above her head and letting out a monstrous yawn before bothering to reply. “Whatever, Luthor. Meet here same time tomorrow?” She was already heading for the balcony.

“You’re in the system now, you can take the elevator,” Lena drawled. “Especially since you aren’t all that skilled at landing in your flying suit.” She smirked when Alex whipped around with a glare. “And yes, we’ll meet here at the same time tomorrow. Preferably with a certain new hire coming in through the front doors and not trying to shoot me, impale me with blades, or blow me up.”

“Yeah yeah,” Alex waved her hand over her shoulder as she headed towards the office doors, this time. Right before she slipped out she shot Lena a smirk. “Treat my little sister right, Luthor.” And with a wink she was gone.

“Did I really have to hire her?” Lena asked, eye twitching.

Kara just chuckled and scooped Streaky, still sound asleep, off her head, cradling the small cat in one hand. “She’ll be an asset, trust me. Surprising as it is, her abilities in the field far outweigh her abilities to annoy.” Kara smiled at Lena, and it was a soft, sleepy sort of smile that made Lena want to kiss her (wait… what???). “Now, will we be driving home or flying?”

Lena bit her lip, face reddening (either from her impulse to kiss Kara- whom she had barely known for more than a day and who had legit been sent to kill her, what the everloving fuck- or from Kara’s sleepy smile-turned-smirk, she didn’t know). “Flying,” Lena’s traitorous mouth blurted.

Kara’s smirk widened and after carefully transferring Streaky to Lena’s hands, she had all of their things ready to go in an instant, slinging the CEO’s bag over her shoulder along with her own satchel. Kara scooped Lena up, holding her tightly to her chest, semi-swaddled in the blanket now to ward off the chill of high altitude night flying.

As Kara lifted off from the balcony and began the short flight to Lena’s apartment, she voiced the question Lena had been dreading. “So, do you have a guest room, or…?”

Chapter Text

Lena did not, in fact, have a guest room. Guest rooms were for people who were expecting guests, after all, and the only people likely to try to stay with Lena were certain family members trying to hide from the authorities. The last thing L-Corp needed was a press release about its CEO allowing her brother or mother to use her apartment as their evil lair.

Lena did consider, briefly, trying to have Kara stay on the couch. But as Kara was taller than Lena even when the brunette was in her highest heels, that probably wouldn’t be polite seeing as she had a normal-sized couch that her not-normal-sized not-assassin couldn’t comfortably lay on.

Even as Kara took them the scenic route through the night sky, Lena’s mind was whirring with thoughts of how to accommodate the alien, so much so that she couldn’t even register her fear of heights (or rather, her fear of falling from heights), much less appreciate the view Kara kept ooh-ing and ah-ing over.

The only viable option Lena could come up with was for her to have Kara stay at a hotel, but given the frankly ridiculous number of attempts on her life in the past few hours alone that seemed like a fairly horrible idea.

Streaky had awoken mid-flight, and after taking a precarious glance down had huddled against Lena the rest of the way, giving a quiet mew of distress every time a gust of wind caused the Kryptonian carrying them to sway midair. Lena’s own fretting over the sleeping situation only seemed to add to the small cat’s unease, and when Kara finally touched down on the balcony of Lena’s penthouse apartment Streaky turned incorporeal and began streaking around the place, exploring her new, less terrifying, environment.

As for Lena, being closer to the problem at hand (both spatially and time-wise), filled her with a sort of doomed resolve, and once her feet were firmly on the balcony she turned, Kara’s arms still encircling her, and poked her finger aggressively into the center of Kara’s collarbone.

“I don’t have a guest room because I’m a Luthor, and that’s all the explanation you’re getting.” Lena was hyperventilating a bit and she could physically feel the concern of the blue eyes looking down at her (the audacity of her not-assassin to be both kind and tall how dare).

“O~kay,” Kara said quietly. She tightened her arms around Lena so that she was holding her in a loose hug. “My sleeping arrangements aside for the moment, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Lena said, huffing out an indignant harrumph. She could see the disbelief of her truly being fine in the downturn of Kara’s lips, which she supposed made sense since I’m fine is best known for meaning the opposite. She dropped her hand to her side and took a deep breath. “I don’t have a guest room. And you’re too tall to sleep on the couch. And there’s no way I’m going to sleep on the couch since my living room is made of windows. And by that same logic I can’t just send you to a hotel for the night. So, your sleeping arrangement will be the same as last night.”

“We get to sleep together again?” Kara asked excitedly, her gleeful grin not fading in the least at Lena’s glower.

“Yes. But if you word it like that in front of Alex, I’ll have Streaky bop you both in the eyes instead of just on the foreheads. Got it?”

Kara actually saluted her, which at least meant Lena was freed from the hug-like position and was able to go inside.

“You can have the bathroom when I’m done,” Lena called tiredly over her shoulder as she rifled through her dresser drawer to get her pajamas.

“Do you want me to braid your hair again?”

Instead of answering, Lena slammed the bathroom door as Kara snickered gleefully from the other room.

///

The next morning Lena’s alarm went off at 11am, which was absurd for a Sunday in both her and Kara’s opinions, though for her it was absurdly late and for Kara it was quite the opposite.

Kara groaned and buried her head in her pillow. “Didn’t we agree to meet Alex at L-Corp way later than this?”

“Yes, but we have some things to do first.” Despite falling asleep with a solid foot of space between them, she had somehow ended up in the center of the bed with Kara’s arms around her and her back flush against Kara’s front. Streaky was napping on the pillow above their heads. She tried to wriggle away but Kara only pulled her closer. Lena sighed. “If we get ready now we can get to Noonan’s before they stop serving breakfast.”

The warmth at her back vanished and in less than a minute Kara was standing by the door to the bedroom, freshly showered and hair already dry, though she was of course still in the same clothes as the day before. “Get up already, sleepyhead!” Kara sing-songed. “Sticky buns, sticky buns, sticky buns~!” Streaky was perched on the blonde’s head now and was stomping her tiny front paws in rhythm with Kara’s singing.

Lena groaned at the improvised tune and rolled out of bed. She had a feeling most mornings were going to end up like this now, though perhaps she should start getting ready first since it apparently took Kara less than 60 seconds. Cheater.

Her usual morning routine done, Lena stepped out of the bathroom and rolled her eyes- Kara was sprawled on the bed asleep. Even Streaky was back to napping, just a ball of blue fluff curled up on Kara’s stomach and snoring away.

“Kara. Sticky buns.” Lena expected that to awaken the always-hungry Kryptonian right away, but she didn’t even twitch. “Streaky?” The little cat didn’t move either, just continued snoring away.

Lena nearly tripped in her hurry to get to the bed. She grabbed Kara’s shoulder and shook her, but the blonde didn’t awaken, nor did Streaky, who was jostled from her position by the shaking and ended up sprawled on the covers beside Kara.

“Kara? Streaky? Kara! KARA!”

“You’re Lena Luthor, correct?”

Lena looked up at the unfamiliar voice and froze, Kara’s name dying in her throat. A young woman with long, chestnut hair was leaning against the door frame of Lena’s bedroom, her arms crossed over her chest. She was dressed casually in a light blue blouse and dark blue slacks. The only odd thing about her- aside from her illegal presence in Lena’s home- the shiny blue domino mask she was wearing (a/n: it’s legit called a domino mask fight me).

“Who the fuck are you?” Lena asked, the cool composure she usually had when she was being threatened completely gone now that Kara and Streaky were also in danger. Her voice shook from anger, not fear, and her hands were clenched into fists. “What did you do to them?”

The brunette tilted her head, a grin spreading across her face. “I can see why she likes you.”

Lena walked around the bed and placed herself between the intruder and her friends. “If you’re here for me then just kill me and leave them out of it.”

The other woman pushed herself off the wall and sauntered forward, stopping a few feet from Lena and staring her down. “Would your self-appointed bodyguard consent to that?”

“Of course not.” Lena rolled her eyes. “Kara’s too noble for her own good. And definitely too noble to be an assassin. So just kill me and let her go.” A pleading lilt had entered her voice and Lena couldn’t even regret it, despite her years of training in the Luthor household to never let a foe know her weakness. “Please.”

The woman tapped her chin with her index finger as if in consideration. “How about a deal, Lena Luthor? I’m sure that genius brain of yours has already surmised that I’m from the Danvers sisters’ former organization. Meaning that when the human sister of our pet Kryptonian failed to rein her in, they sent me to get the job done.”

Lena had to physically bite her tongue to stop herself from cursing the woman out for calling Kara a ‘pet’.

The woman smirked as if she could read Lena’s mind. “I’ll tell you a little secret, since you’re so eager to die.” She leaned forward and whispered, her breath hot against Lena’s ear, “I’m not human.” The woman pulled away in an instant and gave a feral grin. “In case that wasn’t obvious.”

Lena closed her eyes and took a deep breath in, and then a slow breath out. “Just tell me what the deal is.”

A giggle was her only response. When Lena opened her eyes, brown eyes met hers with obvious excitement. “I’m a poison master. Kara and the… cat-like creature… inhaled a special poison I concocted just for today.” She smiled sweetly. “The fur ball isn’t actually alive so it should be fine once the poison wears off, but the Kryptonian…” She trailed off and pursed her lips, eyes slanting to rest on Kara’s prone form.

“What. Is. The. Deal?” Lena asked through gritted teeth. However much she’d wanted to throw a stapler at Kara upon meeting her, she wanted to punch this woman in her smug face about a million times more.

“It’s quite simple, really!” The perky woman pulled what looked like a tube of lip gloss out of her pocket and held it up. “Every good poison master carries an antidote to her poison. If you give this to Kara, she’ll survive. The catch is,” the woman lowered the tube and narrowed her eyes, “it’s poisonous to those who haven’t been poisoned.” She smirked.

Lena sighed. “Let me guess. You won’t give me the tube, but you’ll put the poisonous cure on my lips?”

The smirk widened. “Pucker up, buttercup.”

Lena stepped forward, but paused. “Streaky will be fine, though?” Something in the woman’s face changed- it almost looked like she wanted to laugh? 

“Of course she named it Streaky,” the woman mumbled, rolling her eyes… affectionately?

Lena’s brow furrowed. Sure, this so-called poison master was from the same organization as Kara, but why would someone who seemed to look down on her know about the cat she’d taken in years ago? And why would that same someone seem affectionate towards the person she’d supposedly poisoned?

Before Lena could think about it more, warm fingers had grabbed her chin and tilted her face up. Her stomach twisted as she met the assassin’s cold brown eyes, but she steadied herself and puckered her lips. The assassin just smirked and applied the lip gloss, not affected in the least by Lena’s murderous glare inches from her face. When she was done, she capped the lip gloss and stepped back, surveying her work for a moment.

“That should be enough. I’d suggest you give your girl true love’s kiss to wake her up before you pass out, Miss Luthor.”

Lena didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but she did as the assassin bid and knelt on the bed. She hesitated only a moment before leaning down and pressing her lips to Kara’s.

She was kind of expecting to be dead, or at least unconscious, by the time Kara awoke (if Kara awoke), but Kara’s eyes flew open six seconds into Lena kissing her. Lena pulled away in shock and looked up at the assassin, who was… doubled over in laughter? Lena stared helplessly between the dumbfounded Kara and the cackling assassin for a solid minute, and was only startled out of it by Streaky hopping up onto her shoulder.

“Wh… what the hell is going on?” Lena asked quietly.

“You… kissed me?” Kara asked at exactly the same time.

Startled blue eyes met confused green eyes and Lena pointed defensively at the still-cackling assassin (or was it another not-assassin???). “I- she said she poisoned you! And you weren’t waking up, so I had to give you the antidote and… it’s her fault!”

Kara propped herself up on her elbows then and stared at the assassin. “Nia? What are you doing here?”

Nia, of course was too busy laughing to answer, and Kara’s brow crinkled as she looked around the room, like she was getting her bearings. Suddenly her brow smoothed and she gave a Lena a sheepish look.

“Do you remember when I said there was another assassin I wanted you to hire?”

Lena stared at Kara, then looked at Nia. “No. Kara, no. Not her. Please not her.”

“Her name is Nia Nal. She’s half-human, half-Naltorian, born and raised on Earth. She joined the organization to get revenge on the ones who caused her mother’s death,” Kara paused and Nia finally stopped laughing at that, though she kept her face hidden, “uh, anyway, she tends to test people before deciding if she’ll trust them. And she doesn’t know anything about poison?” She aimed the question at Nia and the woman finally straightened.

Nia gave them an eye-crinkling grin, one hand behind her back and the other up, her hand making a peace sign. “Yeah, all that stuff about me being a poison master was complete bullshit.”

Lena dropped her head into her hands. “I hate you.” She lifted her head a moment later and glared at Kara. “Why did you fake being asleep? And how did you get Streaky to betray me as well?”

Streaky gave an indignant meow at that and Kara looked confused.

“Oh no, that’s on me,” Nia volunteered, giving a little wave. “I may not know shit about poisons, but my code name is Dreamer for a reason. I get it from my Naltorian side.”

Lena hurled a pillow at her and Nia manifested a blue energy beam from her palm and easily deflected it. “I have some other powers too, of course.” She smiled sweetly.

“When Nia was just learning her powers she accidentally manifested one of the Phantom Zone creatures from a nightmare I was having,” Kara added, shivering. “That was not a fun time.”

Nia blanched. “I figured out how to get rid of it after awhile!”

Lena heaved a long-suffering sigh. “And why should I hire her, exactly? I already have you for a bodyguard and Alex for head of security. What role is she supposed to fill, sleep therapist?”

“I was thinking something along the lines of ‘future strategist’, but whatever works,” Kara mused.

Lena narrowed her eyes. “Explain.”

Nia raised her hand, acting more like a timid student than a half-alien assassin. “I can sorta, uhm, dream the future?”

“Of fucking course you can.”

Lena got off the bed and walked on unsteady legs back into the bathroom, but she didn’t close the door. She focused on her reflection as she wiped the not-poison lip gloss off her lips and applied a dark swath of matte lipstick instead. Her eyes were still a bit red from the tears she’d held back when she thought Kara was in danger, and now she wasn’t sure which was stronger- her relief that it had been a test or her anger about it. So many ridiculous things had happened at this point that she didn’t know quite how to cope, so she supposed she might as well just keep moving forward. Besides, life with Kara in it might be more exhausting than life without Kara in it, but she couldn’t help but feel that it was worth it. Kara and all the warmth she’d managed to bring into Lena’s life in just the past few days was worth it. It had been such a short amount of time, and yet Lena didn’t ever want to go back to a life without Kara’s sunny warmth (brought from both the kindness and caring she’d shown Lena and the antics of her and her friends that produced a warmth Lena couldn’t help but bask in). Kara was worth it. Which meant Kara’s friends were worth it too (even when they were annoying).

 “We’re all going to Noonan’s for breakfast, or rather lunch at this point.” She ignored Kara’s pout and Nia’s wince when Kara glare-pouted at her. “After that we’re going to get some person items for all of you, and then meeting with Troublemaker Number Two at L-Corp. Any questions, Troublemaker Number Three?” She turned to Nia with an expectant look and Nia shook her head sheepishly. “Good. Now, do you have a place to stay or will you be camping out on my couch for the foreseeable future?”

Nia gulped. “I, uh, wait. If your couch is open why is Alex sleeping on the roof?”

Lena actually face-palmed. “Do none of you not-assassins have a place to stay?”

“We’re transient by occupation,” Kara (Troublemaker Number One) drawled. “I already had three targets lined up after you, all on different continents. And Alex was supposed to be taking out some organized crime bosses on the other side of this country. I dunno what Nia is supposed to be doing.” She slanted her eyes over to Nia, who grinned.

“Oh, I just took out a major target- three months in the making- so I’m actually on vacay right now.” Then she pouted. “Or at least I was until our top two assassins went MIA. Rude.”

“If you didn’t see it coming perhaps your job title should be ‘sleep therapist’,” Lena quipped.

Nia just shrugged and started playing with Streaky. “It doesn’t really matter to me, Miss Luthor.”

“Call me Lena or I’ll sic Streaky on you,” Lena said coolly, dropping her keys and wallet into her purse. “Kara, grab your sister and meet us downstairs.”

Kara saluted and zoomed off, and a few minutes later a very cranky Danvers had joined their group.

“Alex,” Lena said calmly, when halfway through the ride to Noonan's the redhead still hadn’t stopped her complaining, “you’re only cranky because you didn’t sleep well, and you didn’t sleep well because you chose to camp out on a concrete roof instead of just telling me you didn’t have a place to stay yet. Am I incorrect?”

Alex didn’t complain anymore after that.

And so Lena, Streaky, and all three Troublemakers claimed a booth (away from the windows) at Noonan's. After Kara had exhausted their pastry supply and Nia their caffeine supply, they hit up several reputable stores (read: “Lena shopped at the stores often and the others gaped at the outrageous prices”) and all three Troublemakers ended up laden with bags of clothes and other necessities. Even Streaky had some bags of items, though it was determined that Kara, as Streaky’s self-proclaimed “mama”, had to carry them.

When they arrived back at Lena’s apartment, everyone was puzzled by Lena selecting the button for the floor below her penthouse.

Alex elbowed Nia. “That was just normal lip gloss, right?” (She had been regaled with the tale at Noonan's by a giggling Nia while Lena blushed and did something on her phone and Kara obliviously chowed down.)

“I thought so???” Nia whispered.

The elevator pinged its arrival and Lena strode out, the Troublemakers hot on her heels. As it turned out, the floor beneath the penthouse apartment was another apartment, nearly as nice. And not just any apartment, but the super fancy kind where the elevator opened straight into it because it took up the entire floor, just like the penthouse (and possibly all the apartments in that building).

Lena pointed to the left. “Nia, your room is over there.” She pointed to the corner opposite. “And Alex, you can stay in that room.”

“Lena,” Kara said, her voice faint, “I thought you said you didn’t have any guest rooms?”

“I don’t.”

“A guest apartment counts,” Alex drawled.

“Well, when Kara needed a place to stay last night I didn’t have a guest apartment either.” Lena crossed her arms and looked away from the three pairs of eyes staring at her. Streaky rubbed up against her neck affectionately.

Surprisingly, it was Nia who broke the silence. “Could you maybe elaborate on that? Please?”

Lena sighed but continued staring at the wall. “I texted Jess, my secretary, while we were at Noonan's to see about finding a place for you to stay. As it turns out, most of the apartments in this building are empty- something about high prices.” She waved a hand lazily. “I figured since transient not-assassins keep finding their way into my employ, I might as well be prepared, so I bought the building.”

All of the bags Alex had been precariously holding dropped to the floor. “You… bought the building? Just like that? This entire building???”

“How rich are you?” Nia whispered.

“Rich enough.” Lena still wouldn’t look at them, and her cheeks were tinged pink with embarrassment. Even Streaky, curled up and purring against her neck, wasn’t helping to relax her.

Kara could hear the rapid pace of Lena’s heart, and as someone who had grown up as one of the ruling houses on her original planet she could understand why Lena was feeling anxious- her intention was to do something nice, but it had gone a bit overboard and was freaking out her newfound friends. So, Kara set her (and Streaky’s) bags on the floor and engulfed Lena (and consequently Streaky) in a warm hug.

“Thank you,” Kara said, then whispered into Lena’s hair, “I knew you were a total sweet heart.”

Lena’s blush deepened and she hid her face in Kara’s shoulder, once again grumbling about her stupid not-assassin.

Behind them, Alex and Nia finally snapped out of it and chorused their own thanks as well.

Eventually Kara pulled back and grinned at Lena, whose blush had thankfully faded. “So, where’s my room?”

Lena pursed her lips and looked down for a moment, before looking up and meeting Kara’s eyes, one of her hands fisting in the hem of Kara’s shirt. “No new room for you, you’re stuck with me.” Her eyes flitted back to the ground. “If, um, if that’s alright?”

“That’s perfect,” Kara said happily, and pressed a kiss to Lena’s forehead without thinking.