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Kara gets drunk one night on Zakarian ale and is in a sawyin kind of mood, so the dj puts on some obscure old Irish song and Kara can't help but dramatically strum along.
Meanwhile, Lena sits curled up in an armchair in a hotel room in National City, getting in some reading before an early night to bed so she can move into her new apartment in the morning. Suddenly, her Lowden 38 starts playing muffledly from inside its case and her heart nearly stops as her eyes snap to the closet across the room.
She looks back down at the book she's reading and her vision starts swimming like a visualizer, timed to the music that reverberates so beautifully throughout the small room that she can feel it in her soul.
Her brother had given it to her as a token of affection and a tribute to her mother for the first birthday she'd spent in the Luthor house. Their mother had resented it and supposedly thrown it away, but when Lex had been arrested and Lena had, in her most desperate hour, fallen victim to her hopeless, nostalgic urges and shown up at his house to sift through his things, she'd found it in the attic inside a tattered old shoe box marked with her name in the scratchy handwriting of a 14-year-old boy.
She hadn't been able to resist taking it with her in the move, and tonight she'd finally given into the urge to read it. An old Irish legend bound in leather - surely a choice by the publisher for the dramatics, Lena had thought when she'd rediscovered it. Though when she'd opened it, she'd gotten the distinct sense that this wasn't something that had been published.
It tells of a man who had dreamed of a melody as a young boy. Night after night, he chased this eerily beautiful tune through his dreams across sparkling lakes and snow-capped mountains and bright fields of the most beautiful flowers he'd ever seen.
And he'd always felt as if the music was leading him somewhere - a set destination that only this song could navigate the path to. One day, the dreams had stopped, and over time he'd forgotten the melody, but he'd never forgotten what its beauty had meant to him. One night, on the stage of a bar that no one knows the name of, he'd set his mandolin on its stand to give his voice a rest and take a swig from his glass of whiskey, and it had started playing.
The singer and the crowd of no more than a dozen people went simultaneously silent as the melody echoed off the faded wood, and none took a breath until the last note faded right into it. Tears streamed down his face as the notes clung to his soul, drawing him off his stool in a trance, out of the shoddy old tavern and across the street to Gartlan's pub.
He walked through the doors to find the smiling face of Gartlan himself greeting him from the stage. Where he stood holding a mandolin of his own. He'd asked the man to play the beginning of the melody he'd just finished once more, and the glass of whiskey that had never left his hand shattered on the floor not five notes in.
When Gartlan demanded an explanation, all the man could do was hold out his hand for the mandolin. Gartlan obliged and nearly dropped to his knees as the man before him picked the song up right where he'd left off and finished it with tears in his eyes and a soft smile on his face. The man had closed the distance, dropping a hand to cradle Gartlan's as he'd brought it up and gently pressed the neck of the guitar into it, wrapping his other fingers around to meet the warm, sweaty hand opposite them.
And as their lips had met without shame or hesitation - the crowds now gathered around the pub and at the door behind them where the tavern's patrons had found themselves drawn to the replaying melody too in awe of the magic in the air to be bothered by the stray from social norms - the man had known that this was exactly where the music had been leading him all along.
Now, as Lena blinks her own tears from her eyes, the cursive at the top of the page comes back into focus: Gartlan's song. She's never been more thankful for the music classes Lillian had demanded she take as a child than she is in this moment as she reads the notes in time with their ringing in her ears, and she feels a sense of inexplicable warmth take over her at the thought that she, too, might one day find her true love at the end of this melody.
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It had taken her a long time to admit to Kara that she could play guitar. Longer, still, before she'd agreed to play for her. But as Kara's hand suddenly shoots out to wrap around the neck of her guitar, stopping the notes in their tracks only seconds after they'd begun, Lena feels an old, familiar warmth rise in her chest and she knows it will have been worth the wait.
Because, without hesitation, she relaxes her grip and watches in awe as Kara brings the Brazilian rosewood to her lap and plays the melody flawlessly, Lena's eyes flitting all the while between the soft smile on the kryptonian's lips and the deft movements of her fingers.
As the last notes ring out, Kara's eyes finally rise to meet hers, and Lena is struck by the tears that brim them, her own giving way at the sight despite her best efforts to hold them back.
"I heard this once in the alien bar a few years ago, one of the first nights I got drunk. I felt it...take over me, and I started playing air guitar," she huffs a laugh, a blush creeping across her cheeks.
"I've never actually played a real guitar before today, but back then it didn't feel like it usually does when I mess around like that - like I'm just moving my fingers at random to get out the energy. This felt like...like my fingers knew what they were doing. Like the music was flowing through me and out of them, and I couldn't stop dreaming about that song for months.
I hadn't thought about since a little while after the dreams stopped, but I -" she cuts herself off, hesitation passing through her eyes before her voice drops to a whisper. "I felt it as soon as you started playing it. That it was the same song."
Lena is silent for a long moment, taking in Kara's words and trying to process them before her tongue remembers how to work again. "When was this?"
Kara's brow furrows in recollection. "I'm not sure, exactly, but not long before I met you. Maybe a couple of weeks?" Lena's heart skips a beat and she knows Kara hears it because her eyes drop instinctively to Lena's chest, and the younger woman can't help the way her breath hitches when Kara's pupils dilate slightly before cobalt orbs rise to meet emerald yet again.
"I -" Lena hesitates, knowing the words she wants to say are going to sound crazy, so instead she rises without another, quickly stalking to her room and throwing open her bedside drawer to grab the leather-bound journal within. She returns to the couch and presses the book into Kara's waiting hand.
She furrows her brow and chews her lip as she silently waits for Kara to finish reading, and as her best friend reaches the pages where the notes have been scrawled across slightly haphazard staffs, she looks up again with near-invisible tears streaming down her cheeks.
"This is it, isn't it?" Lena simply nods.
"When I got to National City, my apartment was still being cleaned and furnished, so I had to stay in a hotel for a couple of days. The last night I was there, I was reading this story when my guitar started playing the song out of nowhere. I could have sworn I'd hallucinated it, but deep down I knew it was real. I even felt it drawing me somewhere, but when I tried to follow it, the warmth faded before I could find its source. I got as far as some antique shop called Willa's."
Kara's eyes widen in recognition at the name, and Lena's heart starts to thunder in her chest as she feels that warmth grow until it surrounds them, the revelation of this last detail seemingly having sealed their fate.
"That's two blocks away from the Alien bar." The truth strikes Lena's heart like a long lost chord that only Kara is meant to play, and she can see in the pure love and adoration that floods Kara's eyes that her own chord has been struck, too.
So, as their lips finally meet without shame or hesitation, Lena smiles softly at the knowledge that this is exactly where the music had been leading them all along.