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i.
Lena wields her bruises like a weapon.
The hurt is aimed outward, like she dares the universe to take even more from her, to try her even harder, just so she can grit her teeth and grin it down and prove that she is better than everyone thinks she is. Adversity seems to spike straight into her dopamine production, and all the self-deprecation and secret fear that she’s just like her family is shoved to the side when she has something she can do in the face of it.
The alien detection device is, in a way, an early aberration. Like a moment of weakness overtook Lena and told her to do what Lex would do, to monetize something awful rather than try to make it better.
They barely knew each other when Lena, about sixty percent CEO and forty percent giddy researcher, showed her the object that looked like a mouse and could ruin countless lives, and Kara, science-oblivious reporter with a conscience, fried the ever living crap out of its software chip. And Kara stands by the article she wrote: the Lena Luthor who would throw her weight behind that invention is someone who needs to be exposed and stopped before greed did yet another thing to send this planet on a path to its own destruction.
But that’s not the real Lena. That was Lena completely out of her depth, facing a mission that eclipsed her entire life, and it’s over a series of lunches and interviews that Kara gets to learn about the real Lena. The Lena who never wanted any of this. Who has accepted that she’s destined to become an intensely scrutinized public figure almost like a burden she deserves to bear because of what her family has done. Whose head aches during endless meetings with investors and her hostile board, and who works too many late nights to ensure that the tiniest bits of progress she is making in trying to establish LuthorCorp (or L-Corp, now) as a force for good in the world don’t get obliterated by the many, many people who are trying to bring her down.
She never says it, of course, but Kara knows more about burdens than most people, and Lena’s shoulders, late at night, are as good a tell as any.
And all Kara Danvers, CatCo junior reporter, can really do to help Lena Luthor is distract her. The lunches are opportunities to get Lena out of her head--the business one and the science one--and to make her remember that she’s a person outside of L-Corp. That she has interests that aren’t her work, like--and this was akin to pulling teeth would be for a person without Kryptonian strength coursing through them--her unabiding love for Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, and the fact that she went through a My Chemical Romance phase for a whole month in college, until someone sent a picture of her dressed as a scene kid to Lillian and she was reminded that Luthors didn’t do such things.
Kara’s lunchtime Lena gamely fakes an interest in boybands and does research on them, enough to make jokes about Justin and Britney and about Aaron Carter’s hair when Kara prompts those, and honestly, the only reason Kara knows that she’d done homework for lunch is because she sometimes flies by Lena’s office on her patrols and had caught sight of six tabs on Wikipedia on her huge monitor a few nights ago.
Their lunches together are tentative, and they explore a few of these innocuous topics because Kara knows how to ramble and Lena seems perfectly fine to let her, with a small blush and growing smile, and that’s all great--but sometimes, work does get in the way. And sometimes, Lena is stuck on a project and it’s distracting her, and Kara Danvers can offer to listen to it, but Lena just laughs and waves her off.
I don’t want to bore you with science.
It’s painful. Being Kara Danvers isn’t difficult anymore, after all these years, but part of getting to that level of comfort with her human … alias? Disguise? Identity? None of the terms seem to fit, but they all apply.
Part of being comfortable with being Kara Danvers is avoiding things that remind too heavily of Kara Zor-El. Those were choices she made a long time ago, started making at age 13, and continued making as she grew up. It was, in a way, easier to mimic who Kal-El had decided to become than it was to try to be her old self. High school science had been a form of advanced torture, where it actually took an effort for her to do average on any tests, and Eliza had spent more than one evening talking to her about human advancement and what might happen if she pushed it along too fast.
She gets it, obviously. She’s seen a planet eat itself with its ambition. Science without wisdom is a poison; Albert Einstein apparently said something like that once, and it’s completely right. If her mother were still alive, she’d be saying the same thing.
All of it means that she buried science as quickly as she could, and became someone different. A new world, a new Kara. Kara the journalism graduate, who loves human pop culture a totally normal amount, and who has to blink and laugh when her best friend, a legitimate scientific prodigy, asks her over lunch what she knows about quantum entanglement.
More than you do, is what Kara Danvers can never say, and Lena smiles at her and looks like she might want to pat her hand and go, “you’re adorable”, which…
She would normally like something like that, maybe. She would… Lena reaching out for her fondly is a good thing. This burgeoning friendship isn’t like any of her other ones, and they seem to be able to give each other something that comes from their separate but similar losses: a kind of comfort and unspoken understanding, a place to be quiet together.
But of course, that’s all in Kara’s head, because Kara Danvers loves Disney movies and eating more food than the human body can handle and talking to Lena about how it’s great to just wander around a park on a beautiful spring day and Lena should make some time to do that, clear her head.
Kara Danvers has lost her parents. But it’s not Kara Danvers who recognizes Lena Luthor’s loss, and it’s not Kara Danvers who can help Lena with inventing, Lena's preferred coping method that isn't alcohol.
Kara Danvers is the invention.
And so, when Lena tilts her head and gives her that soft smile that makes her feel all sorts of weather-inappropriate warm inside and nudges with, “Polyatomic anions?”, Kara makes a baffled face, a grimace, even, and a part of her feels like she just buried Kara Zor-El all over again.
“Well, when you see what we’re doing with them, it’ll blow you away,” Lena says, looking proud and relaxed and like someone that she’s destined to be: someone who creates, someone who gives, and not someone who just picks up the pieces she’s inherited because she feels she has to.
It’s easy to be Kara Danvers for that Lena, even if a part of her wants to scream that she’d be a better sounding board than whoever this collaborator is; that she probably knows more, and that she’d love to give more, and that she’s not from here and that having Lena pick her brain will probably advance human development by a hundred years over the span of a month.
Yeah. It’s easy to be what this Lena needs, and to forget that there is so much more Lena should be getting from her in the face of that delight and ease .
Even leaving aside the DEO’s doubts… adding to Lena’s burdens by admitting a lie meant to protect her after the year she’s had would just be cruel, wouldn’t it?
She can almost persuade herself that it’s concern, and not a profoundly selfish form of cowardice, that has her smiling and saying, “I can’t wait.”
---
ii.
When Jack dies, his work doesn’t.
It’s unspoken, the fact that Lena, face frozen in a mask of grief, went to the consoles in his temporary lab and downloaded a lot of his designs onto a thumb drive before the police arrived to take Beth away.
It’s not what Lena talks about the next day, when she admits to fearing what yet another loss might do to her.
But the research is there, and Kara watches as over the course of several months, Lena starts working with it again in her home lab. The one that isn’t lead-lined, because Lena isn’t Lex and isn’t hiding what she’s doing; at least, not at home. L-Corp has plenty of lead-lined laboratories, and safes, and…
They don’t talk about things like that. If they started, as Lena and Supergirl, what is currently still at a low level of discomfort with each other’s working methods would supernova into something much uglier. And they both feel the responsibility of not letting that happen. That’s the legacy they inherited. Supergirl and Lena might not agree on much, but they agree on not becoming a second act in a story that is about their male family members.
What Lena works on in the privacy of her own home isn’t Kara’s business, of course, but it’s potentially Supergirl’s, and…
She’s an awful person, in this one specific, horrible way. She knows it about herself, and it motivates her to do so much more good in every other way, but there isn’t any other way to balance the fact that Alex and J’onn don’t trust her best friend, and she can’t persuade them to not monitor her even more closely unless she just… monitors her herself.
It’s not like waiting for the other shoe to fall. Kara trusts Lena with her life. It’s just that… Supergirl isn’t allowed to trust her with her identity, and that leads to her watching from afar as Lena tries to pick up the Biomax research and get it to work.
She’d mentioned it to Kara, over a late dinner in Kara’s studio apartment; the lasagne had been a little burned and the salad a little too soggy, but Lena had just laughed and said it was the first home-cooked meal she’d had in as long as she could remember, and Kara had tried not to ache at that idea. She’d succeeded, until Lena had looked at her and wryly smiled, with a, “I mean--I don’t suppose dinners prepared by the family chef count in the same way, huh?”
Whoever Kara is at heart, now--this odd mixture of Kara Danvers and Supergirl and also the phantom that lives on between them somewhere--that person wants to cook Lena more and better lasagne, and convince her to have some Karamel Sutra afterwards, even if Lena is just going to tease her and then say ridiculous thing about needing to watch her weight. The heart of Kara wants to sit with Lena on her ratty couch and show her the parts of pop culture she now admits to having missed out on what with her seventeen gazillion degrees, gosh, Lena, and will happily drink red wine with her even if the taste isn’t great and it does nothing for her.
Why Alex and J’onn can’t see Lena the way she does, she’ll never understand, but she’ll fight for it. Because it’s something special, Lena curling up into a smaller and smaller ball next to her, heels dropped under the coffee table, wrapped up in a blanket, and talking quietly about what she would be doing with her life if she had more choices. About the research she and Jack had done when she’d been the ugly stepchild, in the figurative sense, and Lillian had left her well enough alone. About the dreams they’d had of changing the world for the better. About how she can’t really remember a time when she didn’t already want to undo the Luthor part of her.
“I came here because of Supergirl, you know,” Lena muses in the near-dark of her living room, as Harry meets Sally on the TV. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Now that I look back on it.”
“Is it?” Kara says, taking a deep breath at the prospect of spending yet another evening ping-ponging between her various selves.
“Yeah. I was so… desperate to prove that I could live in a city with a Super, and not be at war with them, that I picked up my whole life and just…” She gestures in a way that indicates she’s a little more than tipsy. It’s a rare sign of her letting go, and Kara’s hand creeps along the back of her own couch, like she’s Kenny and they’re at the movies and she’s about to bust a move.
But it’s just for comfort, because thinking back to anything to do with her brother is a lot for Lena, and the slight embrace Kara pulls her into is one that’s for comfort and encouragement. An I’m listening, with arms.
“Mission accomplished, so far,” Kara murmurs, and Lena laughs quietly.
“I barely see her. And when I do, it’s usually because she’s there to tell me that she’s sure I didn’t do anything wrong, but other people aren’t so much--or, you know, she flits in, saves my life, and goes off again.” Lena swirls her glass of wine and stares at it absently, brain running a mile a minute. “I don’t know what I was imagining. Maybe… some sort of partnership, after I got things settled here. But I’ll never really get things settled, and…”
The laugh is wry this time; self-deprecating, and Kara shifts without meaning to, wanting to defend herself a little, but also… make an offer that she can’t make?
She’s going to have to talk to Alex. This can’t … continue, like this.
“Have you ever asked her? To work together?”
Lena tips her head back and looks at her, and Kara immediately shoves her glasses back up; the glasses that say I’m not her!!!! in bright neon letters, apparently. “It’s a bit much to just throw out there, isn’t it? Thank you, Supergirl, for taking some bullets to me. By the way, I have a business case to present to you-- ”
It comes out in a highly exaggerated voice that sounds a little like Lillian Luthor, and Kara guffaws without meaning to, jolting Lena and her wine glass until they’re both just looking at each other and grinning in a way that feels silly and whole.
“You could give it to me? Your business case, I mean. And I could--you know. Do the thing I do to get her attention.”
Lena’s eyebrows raise slowly. “The thing you do to get her attention?”
“I didn’t mean for that to sound so weird, I meant, I’ll--um, call her,” Kara says, and Lena’s eyes crinkle in the corners and her lips are a little red and she’s just… so lovely, like this.
If Alex ever had a mildly drunk Lena Luthor joking with her on the couch like this, she would never wonder if Lena was working with her mother. Maybe this is something she should try to engineer at a game night--except that would mean not playing with Lena.
“Don’t,” Lena says, stretching slowly and pulling away a little again, clearly composing herself after… a small reveal. “It’s just… a silly ideal. We come at things so differently that I’m not even sure how we’d work together, and she seems to do just fine without me.”
I don’t, Kara almost says, but an alarm going off in the distance somewhere reminds her of who she is, even when she’s off duty, even when she gets to have Lena to herself.
“I’ll just have to keep… trying to build things that make the world better, and maybe, one day, I’ll come up with something that will help her,” Lena says, finishing the glass of wine and putting it on the table before settling back in her own corner of the couch.
Kara watches her and swallows fifteen thousand different confessions and thinks about the nanobots and how, if she had an hour and a half with the design, she’s fairly sure she could crack the thing that Jack and Lena had been stuck on for so long.
But unless Lena asked, that wouldn’t be right--and Lena couldn’t ask, because…
She had to talk to Alex.
---
iii.
Even afterwards, a part of her recognizes that the device is nothing short of a feat of genius.
Lex’s original design is clever enough, but the speed with which Lena made the alterations, and the subtle other improvements in terms of dispersion rate and spread…
In a different world, Lena Luthor would win a Nobel Prize someday.
But in this one, she created a device that not only saved the planet, but did so in compliance with a moral code that Kara sometimes wondered if she actually shared.
It was one of the pinch points between Supergirl and Lena. Supergirl would not kill. Lena…
It wasn’t killing, what she’d done to Jack, not really, and Kara can talk herself out of that one--but Lena had very easily shot someone earlier in the year to save Alex’s life, almost as if life and death, they’re just pieces to be moved around a board…
None of it matters anymore. Not now. In the after, the one thing that matters is that Lena crafted a device that would save the planet, and left it for Supergirl to pull the trigger.
And now, Lena wants so very hard to apologize to and comfort Kara Danvers, whose sort-of boyfriend was the only real casualty of the decision Supergirl had taken with Lena’s device.
It is too much.
The two parts of her conflate into a single atom of loss, and Lena didn’t do anything wrong but isn’t in a position to understand that the person she’s trying to condemn and the person she’s trying to heal are one and the same.
Of course none of that is Lena’s fault, but all Kara can think of when she declines a lunch, declines a dinner, declines a movie, and doesn’t answer the door is that Mon-El is the consequence of her not having told Lena who she was and what she could do.
If Lena trusted Supergirl, or knew that Kara’s scientific knowledge and aptitude matched if not exceeded her own, she might have… she might have tried to talk to her about the device, might have given her a chance to adjust it before she’d had no choice but to set it off.
And so it isn’t just the guilt of having sent Mon-El away that she bears, but also the guilt of having forced her best friend into a series of steps that she’ll hate herself for.
If Kara ever started wielding her losses like weapons, the world would burn.
And so she sends a text, a simple I’m getting better, that doesn’t feel like it even remotely resembles the truth.
But then, the truth is never something that she’s given Lena. And she hates herself for it.
---
iv.
She didn’t think she’d ever get to a point where Alex could have legitimately said something like I told you so, but in all of her glorious insight into Lena Luthor, she’d never really anticipated that her best friend would kidnap their other best friend and carry out unauthorized and not entirely consensual scientific experiments on her.
Her head feels like it’s going to explode. She needs to punch something, strangle it, just-- anything. What the … what the fuck is she meant to do with this?
Lena obviously knows that Supergirl would never stand for it, this whole vigilante science justice spiel that she’d come to the DEO to grudgingly defend only when Reign escaped her captivity and she was left with no alternatives. Lena gets that, and chose to do it anyway, which is the point at which Kara gets to stop feeling guilty about the ways in which she’s keeping things from Lena for at least a few minutes.
But it’s not the same. Because Lena, earlier fantasies about the partnership of the century aside, doesn’t owe Supergirl anything. Supergirl doesn’t really involve Lena Luthor in anything she does. Supergirl, at best, tolerates Lena Luthor’s existence and activities when they don’t cross any lines. And for all the words about trust, about you’re not like them, at the end of the day, she’s obviously never convinced Lena that there was anything more than that tolerance between them.
Because Lena doesn’t know that the woman she’s lifting her chin against and calling out on her own secrets and dishonesty is… her best friend of two years.
Kara knows she’s lucky hypocrisy isn’t laced with Kryptonite. But it doesn’t really help, at all.
The worst part of it is when she takes a few deep breaths and corners Lena after the fact and says what she’s really thinking: “I know why you didn’t tell the DEO what you were doing. I know. But why didn’t you--”
“Why didn’t I what?” Lena asks, in a voice so cold that it makes Kara feel like she’s shrinking. It’s not even professional or clinical. It’s just… nothing. It’s a burned bridge, collapsing between them. “Tell you ?”
She grits her teeth together and forces herself not to snap anything in response because this is all her fault. All of it. And Lena isn’t really wrong, even if the Kryptonite reveal is... almost more than she knows how to deal with. She clenches her fists and exhales slowly and says, “I’m sorry. I know that’s also unfair. I just--this hasn’t really ever come up between us, but where I’m from, I was a scientific prodigy, and it’s… I just, I would have liked to try to help. If I could have.”
Lena blinks at her coolly, without a hint of surprise on her always, always beautiful features, and tilts her head slightly. “Why doesn’t the DEO make use of your scientific genius?”
“Because--” she starts to say, and gives up almost immediately. There is no answer to that. Her other abilities are the ones that aren’t replicable. Science on Earth is different enough for it to still count as work for her, on some level, and they have other scientists. And she’s hidden this part of her for so long that she’s never even asked.
It’s never felt like it mattered. But it does, here, with Lena.
Lena’s expression relaxes minutely, until she sighs and looks away. “I don’t really know what to say to this, Supergirl. You no longer trust me, and I have little reason to think that you’ll come to my lab for a pleasant conversation about whatever it is that I’m working on instead of a sanctimonious lecture about how in the wrong hands I could be threatening all of existence. Or you.”
There is no explaining to Lena why this answer, which is the logical and expected one, brings tears to Supergirl’s eyes. Tears that come out of nowhere, and tears that feel like they’ve been buried inside of her for so long that she doesn’t have anywhere for them to go, now.
She almost starts apologizing again, but Lena looks at her tiredly--and it’s Kara’s Lena, this, the soft one that other people don’t get to have, and that is when the tears spring free--and says, “We’ve spent a long time fighting against our legacies. But maybe, they are what they are for a reason.”
“I don’t accept that,” she blurts out, voice thick with something that feels a lot like grief for everything she’s already lost.
And Lena’s smile is so wry and so Lena that the words out of her mouth don’t register until much later. “We can’t all spend our lives tilting against windmills, Supergirl. Some of us don’t have lives long enough to try.”
It’s in watching Lena walk away with that closely-contained swing to her hips and those shoulders tight with all the burdens in the world that Kara feels her heart shatter.
---
v.
“Can you just-- stop hiding your research from me?”
Lena laughs a little, but in that sardonic way that Supergirl evokes. “I don’t know. Can you just… accept that my intentions are never to create weaponry that will be used against you? Without us having this same argument over and over again?”
Kara sighs and leans against a console that creaks behind her. The DEO should really invest in some upgrades. “I said I was--”
“I know. And we worked together well. Our visible skillsets are complementary.”
It’s a small allusion to the conversation they had over a year ago, and Kara looks down at the ground, crossing her arms over her chest. “I miss it, you know.”
Lena takes a few tentative steps over towards her, keeping the center console between them, and Kara thinks for a hard moment that she looks like she belongs there: in the DEO’s nerve center, using that ridiculously powerful brain to help them stay on the right side of history. Lena and Brainy would get along famously. Lena and Supergirl would get along even better than that if Lena would…
No. It was never up to Lena to fix things between them, and Kara can’t pretend otherwise.
“The Girl of Steel can’t negotiate some lab time for herself?”
Supergirl’s Lena is funny in a different way from Kara’s Lena. Steel, rather than something soft and real. They’re so achingly similar, and Kara can’t look at Lena with eyes that suggest anything like Supergirl’s neutrality anymore. How she hasn’t seen through it yet--
“I mean, I could, but--every minute I don’t spend out there… It’s hard enough to… not be Supergirl all the time. Adding another hobby…” She shrugs. “I didn’t… take up this job because I thought I could do a little bit of good on the side. I knew what it would mean. Anything this important, you lose bits of yourself over, don’t you.”
Lena assesses her in a way that makes her hold her breath on instinct, but it isn’t what some part of her hopes it means. It’s not realization. It’s discovery.
“My best friend likes to tell me that I can only save the world if I take enough care of myself to stay alive.”
And Kara laughs, in a way she can’t explain, at having her own words quoted back at her. “I’m not sure that works on me. I can’t really--well. Kryptonite aside.”
“Do you age, at all?” Lena asks, almost as an aside, but her eyes burn in that way that tell Kara they’ve touched on a secret interest of some kind; like a star spotted in the distance, and Lena’s winding up her telescope almost automatically.
“Oh, yeah. I mean, when I first came here, I was twelve. So--I got the joys of superhero puberty, and… well, my rate of decay is decelerated by the photosynthetic qualities that my skin exhibits in this solar system, but…” She shrugs, letting her arms fall to her side. “It’s… a little morbid? To try to find out?”
Lena’s smile is genuine. “Well, morbid, or a path to finding out if there’s anything in your biology that might have medical uses here on Earth, different molecular composition and all.”
Kara licks her lips for a second and laughs when Lena raises a single eyebrow in invitation. “Geez, Ms Luthor, do you use those lines to get all the girls to agree to be experimented on like this, or is it just me?”
And maybe they are starting over, because Lena stiffens initially--like she hears the words as the accusation they could be--but relaxes at the tone, and shakes her head with a small laugh. “Nevermind. I can’t even imagine the paperwork involved on running tests on the DEO’s most prized property--”
“ Hey. The property has feelings,” she says, before she can stop herself, and Lena’s eyes shine at her and Kara feels like it’s the start of something new and beautiful, because Supergirl has earned the full, toothy grin that makes Lena look her age but also reckless, just a little bit bold.
It gets awkward after a moment, the grinning, because it’s new, and even Kara’s feeling of sheer relief at Lena maybe not hating half of her anymore isn’t enough to cut through years of just feeling each other out very tentatively, volleying accusations and mistrust back and forth more often than not.
But Lena ducks her head and says, “Anyway. I have megalomaniacal capitalist impulses to satisfy, so... “
“Thank you. For your help,” Kara says, as Lena starts backing away, and she thinks of Alex defending Lena’s research and how everything might finally be where she needs it to be for the truth to come first.
---
vi.
It’s her Earth birthday, and she spends it how she wants to: a late brunch with Alex, who has an evening shift at the DEO to pick up, and an evening with Lena, who cleared her entire schedule so they could have a sleepover simply because Kara asked her to.
She’s wearing fuzzy slippers, pajama bottoms with at least one hole in them, and they’re watching Up! and Lena is crying silently between glaring at her and pouring more wine--the standard Disney recipe, that--and it’s the loveliest of normal evenings with her favorite person, and it’s time.
It’s so far past time that it makes her want to launch herself straight into the Earth’s magma, actually. But if there is anything that watching Krypton explode in her rear view has taught her, it’s that better late than never is the rare idiom that is entirely true.
The credits roll, and Lena sniffles and glares at her and says, “These fucking movies, Kara, why do you torture us both?” and she smiles and pushes her glasses up her nose and looks out the window at the sky.
“This one.. I chose it for tonight for a reason.”
Her tone must immediately make it clear that this isn’t going to be a light conversation, and Lena dabs at her eyes with the sleeve on Kara’s National University hoody that’s somehow become part of her wardrobe on all movie nights but looks at her carefully. Never pushing for more; never prompting. Just there.
It’s ridiculous that, with all of her ability to think in 17 dimensions and basically predict the future and invent outlandish things like teleportation portals, that Lena cannot see something that is so, so very obvious in every minute Kara spends with her, and that Kara isn’t even really trying to hide anymore.
The fact that she loves Lena isn’t the problem, after all.
“Alex… cried a lot at this movie. And the idea of a second adventure, as being something that people want. When we first saw it, I think she was thinking about Eliza moving on, and… well, we didn’t know what had happened to Jeremiah, so I guess to her it would have felt a bit like cheating? But more than that, it would have felt like giving up.”
Lena pulls a knee up to her chest and rests her chin on it. “Yeah. I can understand that.”
Kara smiles at that, and rubs at the hole in her pajama pants, right on her right thigh. “It’s a very human reaction, that. The fear of… moving on to something new.”
It’s quiet for a few very dense moments, until Lena exhales slowly and says, “You’re about to tell me, aren’t you. Finally.”
The air freezes in Kara’s lungs and she stares, feeling her glasses dip down her nose and without any capacity to shove them back up again.
Lena looks over and it’s still with kind eyes, which she doesn’t really understand; not when--not when she’s been lying for so long, and, no. She doesn’t have the right to start crying about this; she doesn’t , but of course if her hands are digging into her pants this hard she just--
The sound of the fabric tearing has Lena blinking, looking down, and shaking her head before looking out the window. “God. Did you really think I didn’t know?”
Somehow, yes doesn’t seem like the right answer. It feels borderline offensive. Like Lena’s a dupe; a giant idiot who didn’t see through the world’s sloppiest disguise when anyone with even a third of her intellect should have been able to.
But if she knew all this time--
“I understand why you didn’t tell me at first. Secret government agency obligations, justifiable fear of my family name…” Lena shrugs, and her shoulders are so, so very small, for how much she’s carried all these years.
Kara swallows her own emotions because this cannot be yet another thing that’s all about her. It just can’t. “It wasn’t that for long. It wasn’t, I promise.”
“I know,” Lena says, turning to look at her again with eyes that are knowing and sad. “Whatever differences I might have with your alter ego, they were always abstract. You never worried that I would use anything I was working on against you. Just that someone else might. And...” She smiles, but it feels a little like death. “You turned out to be right, more often than not.”
“That doesn’t--” Kara starts to say, but stops when Lena lowers her leg and reaches to pour herself some more wine.
“No, it’s not an excuse. But… sometimes, something just is. And you were a good friend to me as Kara, always. And we all have… roles to play. There were times when I thought I honestly couldn’t handle it anymore--when I was going to have to slap those glasses right off your face as you pranced in with a lunch a whole three days after yelling at me as Supergirl that I was potentially arming alien terrorists on accident--but they were few and far between. You… to you, they almost are different people, aren’t they?”
She can’t even imagine the look on her face, but it’s almost pitying, the look Lena directs back at her.
“Do you ever get to be your whole self?”
And she thinks of a planet exploding in the rear view mirror, of twenty-four years of silence and darkness and shadowy thoughts of losing everything she’s ever loved the only things wrapping around her, and knows that tears are streaming down her face because this is so much more than she deserves.
“I don’t even really know who she is, anymore.”
The words come out wet and broken, and Lena’s own eyes well up with tears as well, but she swallows them away. And Lena gives her a moment to wipe at her eyes with a blanket, to sniff up a remainder of the tears, and to clear her throat until she can taste a thousand apologies.
“Why today, Kara?”
She swallows hard. “It’s my Earth birthday. The day I landed on Earth, after… a twenty four year detour through something called the Phantom Zone. It’s the day I… try to do all the remembering of Krypton that I can, all at once, so it doesn’t… so I don’t have to carry it every single day. So I can just… be Kara, or Supergirl, all the other days. And I normally do this with Alex, but--”
Lena’s eyes are so beautifully soft, even now, even when they should be hardening with anger, but there is nothing there but understanding and--something that she’s been hoping to see for a long time now, but couldn’t ever look at too closely. Not without this conversation, first.
“I… Alex is no longer the most important person in my life. I mean, she’ll always be one of them, but--when I think about…”
The words are almost impossible, millions of drafts of them having flitted around her mind ever since Lena turned to her with a quiet, “And who are you exactly?” almost three years ago now, and they’re a giant jumble. All she can do is force through the mess with the most important truth.
“I told you that I miss it, sometimes. And I do. But I don’t think I’d miss it at all if it wasn’t for you being in my life, being at the very heart of it all, and thinking about what we could do together. About… how you would have loved Krypton, all of its flaws and all. About how my parents would have thought of you as a perfect match, because you would have been. And how I want to explain what all of these things mean to you, and talk to you about the nanobots and how I have at least two theories on how you could limit cellular mutation if the RNA structures on humans are what I suspect they are--”
She knows she’s rambling, but it’s impossible to stop, impossible to not look down at her own lap and the pajama pants she’s basically ripped off her self, her hands still clenching there because nothing about her molecular make-up makes her less susceptible to anxiety than humans are and this is the biggest conversation she’ll ever have, isn’t it? It’s what everything depends on.
And as she stares at her own lap and continues to ramble on about different questions she’s had about Lena’s work over the last few years, two hands appear in her line of vision and slowly cover her own and squeeze there.
“Breathe,” Lena says, and she does, cramming words back inside of herself; it’s easy, really, when she’s been doing it for this long.
But Lena’s thumb strokes the back of her hand, and squeezes her hands together more tightly, until one of her hands lifts and tips Kara’s chin up slightly.
“I wish you would have told me sooner. But I think I understand why. There are parts of me that I have a hard time sharing with anyone, even you. It’s not as if… you saw me volunteering my work with Eve to Kara, and I could claim all I want that it was for IP confidentiality reasons, but… I am working on not lying to myself as much as I used to.”
Kara feels the fingertips move to her cheek, holding it there and she can’t help but sigh and stare at Lena’s lovely, loving eyes. “It’s not the same. It’s… you’re being way too kind to me, because it’s not the same and we both know it.”
“All I mean,” Lena says, and her thumb strokes right by Kara’s mouth and comes away wet, before she sits back on her knees and pulls her hands back onto her own lap, “is that the world around us makes it very hard for us to ever really be ourselves. With anyone.”
It’s not quite an offer; maybe it’s taken all of Lena’s reserves to simply let this conversation happen to her, to not give into the feelings of betrayal and disappointment and hurt that have to be in the mix somewhere. But it’s an opportunity, and after twenty-seven years, Kara finds that more than anything, she wants to find out who she really is.
With Lena.
“My name is Kara Zor-El. Potstickers are my favorite food, and we didn’t have musicals or most wildlife on Krypton anymore, and those are some of the things that make it easier to be here. But sometimes it’s really hard, even with all the good things, and on those days, I tend to call you and invite you over because just being near you makes it possible for me to believe that… maybe, there was a reason for… my life being what it has been.”
And slowly, like a sunrise, Lena smiles, beautiful and open. "Well. That sounds… incredibly relatable, Kara Zor-El.”
Hearing her name in Lena’s voice makes her feel like she’s under a red sun and capable of flight anyway, and she feels something old and bruised inside of her settle at the sound of it; like she's finally arriving in a place where all of her belongs.