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Cat’s been back for three months - three whirlwind months in which Kara’s entire life has been lifted up and shaken like a snowglobe, and the pieces are only just now starting to settle into a new landscape - before Kara breaks down and asks the question that’s been waiting, heavy and tight, in her throat since the day her sister got married.
“How long have you known?”
Cat pauses, her pen stilling on the printout of a newspaper clipping she’d been marking up. “How long have I known what?” She looks at Kara over the rims of her glasses, the slight breeze from the open balcony door rustling her hair with soft fingers. “If you mean Marissa and Rani down in legal, I know that they think they’re being subtle but I give it two weeks until they disclose, Nia took my bet back in May -”
“No, I - wait, really?” Kara frowns, thinking back - and oh, yeah, she can see it. But - “No one told me about the betting pool!”
“You’re the boss now, dear,” Cat reminds her with a tiny smirk, uncrossing and crossing her legs back the other way and looking back at her notes. “And you have an unfair advantage, don’t forget.”
Kara sighs, that now-familiar melancholy creeping its way up her chest. It’s true that things have been different since she came out, again, to the world - the promotion, of course, had already changed her dynamics with her colleagues, but the first day she’d come back to the office after her interview the floor had been dead silent. All of these people that she’d worked with for years - her friends - had stared at her with a breathless kind of reverence at best, blatant mistrust at worst, and even now conversations die sudden deaths each time she enters a room or turns a corner. Her new office, where she and Cat are settled now, has solid walls and large windows that she can turn opaque with the press of a button, and more often than not she keeps them frosted these days. It’s lonely, yes, but it makes her coworkers - her employees, she reminds herself - more comfortable. It’s not that she can’t still hear them, or even see them if she wants to - she knows that and they know that too - but it’s an illusion that makes life feel a little more normal, if not for her than for the people she works with, and she’ll do whatever she can to make this transition easier for them. Even her new hires, the ones who never knew her as Kara Danvers, cower a little in her presence.
Nia and Cat, they’re the only ones who don’t treat her any differently, and Kara loves them all the more for it even if it means that Cat still calls her Kiera, sometimes, when they’re alone. It makes her feel - she doesn’t know, exactly. It just makes her feel, feel something good and warm that she can’t put a name to.
Cat’s had that effect on her for a long time, and those feelings are finally overflowing.
“That’s not what I meant,” Kara says now, shifting a little in her armchair across from Cat. “I meant about me.” She lets the words land, watches how Cat stiffens but doesn’t look back up. “How long have you known who I am?”
Cat slowly pulls her glasses from her face, folding them and setting them on the coffee table between them. “Kara,” she says carefully, angling to face her and lifting her gaze to look somewhere just to the right of Kara’s own, “you weren’t -” She pauses, and it’s heavy. Kara can hear the click of saliva in her throat as she tries not to swallow, can see the way her fingers tighten ever so slightly around the pen she still holds. She couldn’t break it, Kara thinks, not unless she really tried. Kara, though - she folds her own hands in her lap, making sure there’s no fabric that could get caught in her fingers and torn to shreds by mistake.
There are two heartbeats pounding in her ears, and she can barely tell which one is her own.
Cat looks her in the eye, then, a look of resignation on her face. She’s been waiting for this conversation, Kara realizes, but she’s not going to make it easy. “How long do you think?”
Kara nearly smiles, a tight, anxious thing. Always the journalist, she thinks, rolling her eyes just slightly. “I’m asking you,” she says resolutely. Her pulse is throbbing in her neck and her throat still feels tight but empty now, too, now that this question - and the much bigger questions that live inside it - has broken free at last. Even now, still waiting for an answer, she can breathe a little easier.
Cat’s eyes flash, anxious and annoyed but a little proud, too, Kara thinks, as she tilts her head, conceding. “Since the balcony,” she admits, her lips twitching, and Kara barely has time to let out a breath before Cat’s heart rate triples and she hurries to add, “The first time. When I asked you - when you took off your glasses.”
Kara nods, the movement as rapid and jerky as Cat’s uncharacteristically fumbling words. She brings a hand to her face automatically before remembering she doesn’t wear those glasses anymore, and her hand hovers uselessly until she runs it through her own hair. “That’s kind of what I figured,” she says, and her voice comes out raspy.
Cat nods, too, much more gracefully. “I never asked, but I figured - was it J’onn, when both of you came to see me?” Her words are light but there’s an edge to them, and Kara’s cheeks flush with the memory - how determined she’d been to fool Cat, how naive she’d been to think that the worst consequence of someone learning her secret would be getting fired.
“Yes,” she says. “I was - I told you how much the job meant to me. Back then, it was the one part of my life that felt normal. That felt like mine.”
“I can understand that,” Cat murmurs, finally dropping the pen and standing. Kara watches her, the sharp, tense lines of her body as she smoothes down her rumpled skirt and passes Kara to stand at the balcony door. She doesn’t step outside, though, just stares out at the city skyline until at last she says, “I’m sorry that I didn’t at the time. I handled that whole situation poorly.”
Kara swallows, the words healing something inside her that she didn’t realize was still sore. She nods, though Cat can’t see her. “Thanks,” she says quietly, her heart still thundering in her chest. She relaxes her fists, only to see red marks where her nails had dug into her palms.
She could let it go now, could tell Cat good night and go home to her new house that still feels empty and unlived in. She hosted her first game night last week and it was wonderful having her family there, to hear her niece’s giddy shrieks echoing across the newly-painted walls, but she misses her apartment. It’s been weeks now but when she flies past there are still reporters lingering there more often than not. Her new house is nearly impossible to access, built into a hillside and surrounded by huge trees and invisible barriers, and Kara gets it, she does. She just doesn’t like it.
I do not do well with change, she remembers telling Cat years ago, just before everything changed. Before Cat left for the first time, and Kara kissed her on her balcony when they said goodbye.
“So you knew,” she says now, the words hovering, hollow, in the air. Kara herself feels hollow and distant, like she’s watching this conversation happen from somewhere else. “That night on the balcony. The night you left.”
Kara can’t see Cat’s face, but she sees the way her body shudders, the shiver that rushes up her back. “Kara,” she says, sounding tired - she waves a helpless hand out to her side, her fingers twitching like she wants to be holding something. A drink, maybe. Kara doesn’t have a bar cart in her office but it’s where they hold most of their evening meetings, and this is why, Kara thinks. This office - this balcony that Cat is standing on the edge of - is neutral territory in a way that Cat’s, a few floors below, isn’t. Not on nights like this, when the city is bright beneath and the building quiet around them.
Kara stands too, now, her legs weak beneath her. She walks towards Cat and then past her, stepping outside into the cool autumn air. A fog hangs in the sky and she lifts her face to it.
It had been a night much like this.
Cat had been glowing, and her breath had been sweet with a hint of scotch. The flushed cheeks, the way she’d run her finger along Kara’s arm - that wasn’t the drink but the anticipation, the exhilaration of stepping off a ledge into something new and unknown. Kara knows the feeling, now. She’d felt like that when she’d sat waiting in the green room three months ago, Alex hovering anxiously and Cat squeezing her shoulder with steady strength. “Are you ready?” she’d asked, and Kara was.
But she hadn’t been, that night - not for Cat to leave, not on top of her new job and her new boss and the hopes she’d pinned on James Olsen crumbling to dust for reasons that she still can't fully explain. And Cat had been bold, flirty, even, and her confidence had been contagious. She’d turned to face Kara fully, running her thumb along the crisp sleeve of her suit, and for just a moment Kara couldn’t help it - her gaze landed on Cat’s mouth, and lingered there.
A slight, shaky inhale and Cat’s pulse racing beneath her fingers as Kara turned her arm to gently catch Cat’s wrist -
Years later, she still doesn’t know who started it. They were just kissing, the air they shared growing warm between them in the chill of the evening breeze. It wasn’t until Cat’s hand ventured from Kara’s hair to settle along her jaw that Kara had remembered - it was the way she’d touched her the day before, just a few feet from where they were, when she’d sat heavily on the couch as Cat told her that she was leaving CatCo. It was the way she’d touched Kara Danvers, her former assistant, and that - that wasn’t who she was kissing, whose mouth she was chasing even as Kara let go of her and stepped backwards, clenching her shaky hands at her side.
Kara doesn’t know who started it, but she’s the one who finished it. She's the one who left Cat alone on the balcony with stammering apologies and a tight, manic smile; the one who left so fast that she heard the glass balcony doors rattle in her wake.
“I thought I’d taken advantage of you,” Kara says now into the empty night sky. The balcony railing is cool beneath her palms, and she tries not to crush it beneath her fingers. “I thought - if you knew who I was, you’d have never -”
From behind her, Kara hears a soft, wordless sound; before she can turn to look, Cat is beside her, arms folded across the balcony railing. Just like that night, and Cat knows it too. It’s written all over her face.
“That’s not what happened,” she says, and lets out a mirthless little laugh. She shakes her head disbelievingly. “It was a mistake, but not because of that.”
“I don’t understand,” Kara tells her then, shifting to face Cat entirely and resting her hip along the balcony rail. “If you knew, why did you -”
“Because I knew,” Cat interrupts her, steel in her voice, now, and in her eyes. “Supergirl wasn’t the one that I was trying to let go of. You - you, Kara Danvers - you were the one that I didn’t know how to say goodbye to.” She presses her lips tightly together in a heartbreaking smile, blinking back tears, and Kara wants to reach for her, wants - oh, she wants.
“I didn’t know how to say goodbye to you either,” she whispers. “I -” she pauses, raising a shaky hand to her face and pushing her hair back behind her ear, trying not to look away from Cat. “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you knew. I thought you’d hate me.” Her voice breaks at last, and for the first time, Cat’s the one to move forward and wrap her arms around Kara. They stand there together, Cat’s hands clasped tightly together behind Kara’s back and Kara’s face buried in Cat’s shoulder, for a long, silent minute.
“If I was capable of hating you,” Cat says at last, pulling back just enough to rest her hands on Kara’s shoulders and look her in the eye, “we’d have crossed that bridge a long time ago.” Images flash through Kara’s mind - herself, yelling at Cat in her office; Carter, lost and alone in a train station; Adam, walking out of Cat’s office for the last time; Cat, screaming as she plummeted through forty floors worth of air - and Cat must see them, too, because she shakes her head and goes for levity. “And you know what I do to people who try to kiss me when I don’t want them to.”
Kara does know. She had copies of the restraining orders filed neatly away for years; she’d remembered them each time she wondered how that night might have gone if she’d just told Cat the truth, up until four months ago when Cat had casually thrown her memory of that night into chaos and left her fearful and wanting all at the same time.
“Then why was it a mistake?” she asks quietly, her stomach twisting with that same fear, that same dangerous desire, that’s been building and threatening to swallow her from the moment Cat stepped off the plane months before.
Cat drops her hands, then, and takes a step back from Kara. “Because I was leaving,” she says resignedly. “Because I needed to leave, and that was hard enough even before...” She leaves the words hanging, gesturing helplessly between them. “And because nothing could have happened," she continues. "You were -” She cuts herself off again, huffing out a frustrated sigh. She turns her gaze briefly briefly towards the sky like it might have the words she’s looking for and then down, seemingly annoyed, when they don't magically appear. Kara's never seen her quite like this. Not Cat Grant, all cutting wit and snappy comebacks and, when it matters, exactly what Kara needs to hear. She doesn't know what it means, now, that even Cat doesn't have an answer for this. That she barely has words at all. “You weren’t ready for me to know," Cat finishes eventually. "And even if you were - even if you knew I did - nothing could have happened." She looks up at Kara then, her expression half hidden by shadow. "You know that.”
“I don’t know that,” Kara says stubbornly, remembering - she’d cried herself to sleep that night, and more nights than she cares to admit in the following months. Missing Cat, to be sure, and wracked with guilt, but even as she'd adjusted to life without her there had been moments when she’d needed her more than ever, and she wasn’t there. She’d been adrift, isolated - she’d been fired, and she still doesn’t know if Cat knows that, but she knows that if Cat had been there in the first place, she’d have looked before she leapt into nothingness. She wouldn’t have been flying blind.
Cat sighs, this time with a familiar annoyance that makes this conversation feel a little less surreal. “Of course you do,” she says impatiently; she presses her lips together again, this time in frustration. “You were my employee, and god knows how much younger, and until then - you have to know, Kara, I had no idea that you might -” She blows out a harsh breath, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. “I had no idea,” she repeats. “And before I could begin to - you were gone.” She drops her hand and catches Kara in a piercing gaze. “You told me you were sorry, that you'd made a mistake, and then you just flew away. What was I supposed to think?”
“So all this time,” Kara says unsteadily, not answering Cat’s question, ““you didn’t say anything.” Cat’s eyes flash and she looks like she wants to cut in, but Kara doesn’t let her. “Why now?” she asks, trying to not to let her voice shake, terror and something else, something she’s too afraid to put a name to, aching in her chest.
Cat doesn’t blink. “Well, things have changed, haven’t they?” she muses. “I was ready to come home, and CatCo was a mess. I wanted the best team possible to help me rebuild it. To make it better. You were always going to be the first name on that list.” Her voice turns sharp. “But then I learned that you’d quit, and why, and - it was so clear to me, Kara. You needed a push, but you were ready, too. You just didn’t know it.”
Kara can barely breathe. “Ready for what?” she whispers, and it’s like the city has fallen silent. She sees the gentle wind rustling Cat’s hair, sees the windows surrounding them lit up and the dark figures of people going about their lives on a normal Tuesday evening, but the background she’s used to - the clack of keyboards, the quiet pop of a wine bottle being opened, the shrill hum of video games and the rumble of car engines and the buzz of conversation and laughter - has all faded to nothing, nothing except Cat’s heart racing in her chest and the blood rushing in her veins and the near-silent sound of the careful, steadying breath she takes before speaking.
“For everything,” Cat says at last. “To have it all.”
Kara had told William about that conversation, the one they’d had years ago. You can have everything. Just not all at once, and not right away. She thinks that she might have missed the point that Cat had been making, or maybe just been too afraid to believe it.
But she does have it all, now, or something close to it. She has her family, the one she built for herself and the one she’d thought gone forever. She has her sister’s happiness, a warm flame in her heart where the fear and guilt over what she’d cost Alex had lived for so long. She has the job of her dreams, one where she can make every bit as much of a difference as she can as Supergirl. She has a place in the world, even if she’s still finding her footing after taking another leap of faith. She knows who she is. It’s going to be the best version of herself yet, and she knows that because of the people who have helped shape her, who have walked and fought and loved and lost beside her. Because of the woman who called when she needed her, put her faith in her once again, and then sat across from her and let her share this version of herself with the world.
The two of them - they have everything they could need and more, but what Kara wants, right now, more than anything, is to reach for Cat. It’s what she’s wanted for a long time, and Cat is looking at her like maybe she wants that too. Like maybe she’s also ready, and just waiting for a push.
“So you knew I was Supergirl,” Kara says eventually, feeling her lips relax into a small, hesitant smile, “but you didn’t know how I felt about you. Seriously?”
Cat smacks her arm, then, and Kara lets out a relieved, breathless laugh. The air is changing around them, the world shifting under her feet again, but she puts her hand over Cat’s on the balcony railing and Cat turns hers until their fingers are laced together. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cat admits. “So much was changing, and I knew you...cared ...for me, but you care for everyone. It's what makes you -" She cuts herself off again, blinking hard, and Kara can see the way her eyelashes stick together, hear the slight hitch in her voice as she admits, “But until that night, I never considered it might be anything more than that.”
“It was,” Kara breathes. “It was, I just - you’re right, I wasn’t ready.” She swallows, looking down at their joined hands. “There were moments when I thought you had to know, just - little things -” very obvious things, she’s realized in retrospect; Cat is many things and she’s apparently pushed her patience to the limit, waiting for Kara, but she’s certainly never beensubtle - “but I couldn’t let myself believe it. I just kept thinking that if you knew, if you’d even suspected, you never would have let me kiss you.”
Cat’s eyes soften. Her whole face is soft, open and beautiful and inches from Kara’s. “Well,” she says quietly, drawing out the word like honey, but Kara barely hears it, too focused on how it looks leaving her lips. “Now you know.”
It’s dark and quiet and Cat’s waiting, her hand warm and flexing with nerves beneath Kara’s, but she’s frozen for a moment - a moment she knows well. It’s the moment she looked up and saw Alex’s plane falling out of the sky, it's the moment she kissed J'onn's forehead and left the DEO, not expecting to come back, and it’s the moment at the end of Working Girl. It’s the moment she watched Air Force One explode, and the President plummeting alongside Cat; the moment she looked down at the lead bomb detonator in her hand, out of options; the moment she pulled Lena aside at the award ceremony, her heart in her throat alongside her worst fears, before she knew that the true cost would be much, much worse than her wildest nightmares. It’s the beat of silence before she called Eliza “Mom” for the first time, the warmth of Alex’s hand in her own before J’onn removed Kara from her memories, and the fierce, frantic excitement of hearing the little footsteps of her niece before seeing her face for the first time. It’s setting her glasses down on a table and leaving them behind as she walked into the sunlight.
It’s the balcony a few floors below them - the heartbeat between taking off her glasses and meeting Cat’s stricken gaze, the breath between Cat nervously licking her lips and Kara catching them with her own.
It’s the moment between making the leap and hitting the water, not knowing if you’ll sink or swim, and Kara lingers in it, basking in the freefall -
Until Cat makes an impatient little noise, finally stepping into Kara until there’s no space between them at all, and this time, together, they soar.