Chapter Text
On the day before Lena’s wedding, she thinks about running away.
"You’re too young, you know,” Kara says, voice so soft and faraway that Lena isn’t even sure she’s supposed to hear it. The older girl is laying her back down onto the earth only a foot away, her fingers threading through tall blades of wild grass, blonde hair a wild mane around her face. The late afternoon sun washes all over Kara, painting her golden.
Lena sets her hands down by her sides, wincing a little when her palm rests against the veneer of mildew coating the old oak bench she’s seated on. It’s a small price to pay for loitering through Midvale’s nearest park, one only ever occupied by the two best friends. “Too young for what?”
“For marriage,” Kara sits up, trying to smooth out her mussed hair even if she doesn’t have to—she’s still beautiful, always so beautiful. “I hear that in the city, you usually wait until you’re at least in your mid-twenties, sometimes even later.”
“Maybe Midvale’s special for considering 20 an age ripe enough for marriage.”
“And probably behind with the times,” Kara points out. “I mean, it’s nearly the 21st century.”
“We’re not that behind,” Lena shrugs. “Mother’s getting the Luthor household a computer soon.”
“Well then, a fancy girl like you shouldn’t have to sit on a gross old bench. Come on, sit with me,” Kara beckons, patting on the ground next to her. Lena wipes the dampness from her hands on the hem of her floral-patterned dress. She laments the impossibility of sinking to the soil without ruining the delicate fabric of her clothes, wishing she owned a sturdy pair of denim jeans and an oil-stained t-shirt meant for getting a little dirty just like Kara did. She moves to sit by Kara’s side, and she lays her head on the taller woman’s shoulder, taking a deep breath in.
“Jack’s not right for you,” Kara says. “He’s not right for you. Just please, think about what we’ve talked about. You don’t even-” She pauses then, lips pressing into a thin line. Her eyebrows furrow, and she seems to cherry-pick her next words, careful not to break her friend, gentle not to deepen the fissures forming in Lena’s heart. “You didn’t even have a part in arranging your own wedding.”
“Hey, I picked out my dress,” Lena tries to cut through the tension, though her attempt at humor comes out weak, laced loose with doubt. “And you know how my parents are, how his parents are. Control freaks, really.”
“You didn’t even choose the date.”
“It was the day we first got together,” Lena says. “Tenth grade at Jon’s café. It’s romantic.”
“Lena, you don’t even love him.”
The laugh Lena coughs out is thick and watery with an emotion she couldn’t quite place. “Of course I do,” she insists. “He’s my fiancé.”
Lena knows Kara doesn’t believe her. Her best friend is someone who’d wax lyrical about anything at all, from the mundane nothings of her day (like making coffee, watering her plants, staring straight at the sun) to her encounters with odd customers at Alex’s auto repair shop (stories that have no right to be as interesting as they were, really). However, when it comes to anything about Jack, her voice would fall flat—tone dropping to a disinterested lull. She never admits it outright, never says anything explicitly mean about him, but everyone, from Alex to Nia to Brainy to Cat, knows how utterly pedestrian Kara finds Jack, how disappointed she is with her constant acquiescence to his eager advances.
“Remember the promise?” she presses on.
It was a silly little thing—a dreamy proposition to pack your bags and just run away from town. As kids, they’d gather two rucksacks, one for Lena, one for Kara, and stuff them tight with clothes and ziplock bags of sandwiches and peanuts, with each one’s teddy bears and pouches of too-sugary fruit juice. Over time, this idea of escape solidified further into certainty—it turned to talks of actually attending college, much to the dismissal of both their families and musings on what odd jobs to take up in the city. They’d ramble on about Kara fixing up an old car, and learning how to drive, saving up every penny from the tips she’d receive. Both had once agreed that this town was no home, had made a promise that one day, they’d both go on their way together. One day, Kara and Lena would leave and never look back.
“I don’t know if I can do that.” Lena sighs, lifting her head from the other woman’s shoulder and moving to sit across her, to look right into clear blue eyes.
“Do you love him?” Kara asks.
“Kara, I already said I did.”
“Lena, do you love him?” she repeats, hands reaching out to meet Lena’s own. When Kara intertwines her right with Lena’s left, she flinches ever so slightly at the contact, fingers grazing over the silver band that now burns around her ring finger as though it hurts just to touch. Kara keeps holding on, anyway.
The few beats of quiet that follow settle heavy between the two friends. There’s an answer here, somewhere—in this silence, stillness, space between sparsely spoken words of dense truth. Lena doesn’t dare touch it.
But Kara does.
“Run away with me,” she says.
The sun descends lower on the horizon before the two young women—a lurid amber hemisphere, swollen and seeping with a blazing, syrupy radiance that drips from the scant scudding of clouds in the sky. Dusk is approaching. The dread of the next day to come now looms closer than ever.
“Okay.”