Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is a softness in her eyes.

Somehow Kara has learned this in half an hour while the world has waited years to peer past the hills and blindspots of its own ignorance, to glance across corridors, to reach past ten-foot poles and take her hand.

(The line about the ten-foot poles does not make it into the article. Kara can’t figure out how to make it charming enough.)

Kara tries to write something kind about Lena, the woman she has only just met. She begins with Lena’s curriculum vitae, but it sounds dry. Biomechanics and proteomics, the subjects of Lena’s two degrees, are fascinating to very few. To most, they are nonessential. Worse, pretentious. Kara would need to break their syllables down into bitesize pieces for the readers of CatCo to digest.

Kara writes about National City very briefly 一 Lena, after all, has only just arrived 一 and then she spends an… undisclosed amount of time venturing across Ireland on Google Maps. And then it’s TripAdvisor. And then she’s checking out an Airbnb hosted by a woman named Siobhan with red hair and three dogs at her feet, one practically large enough to knock her over-

And Kara is gone.

Geography, Kara knows, gives you tunnel vision. Look closer at a drop of water and you’ll find a whole world of moss and organisms and sparse particulate matter. Look into Ireland and you might never want to spend time anywhere else.

She’s had this Word document open for two hours and she’s written twenty-seven words. Half about National City, half about Belfast.

She doesn’t know why she does this, but Kara rings Lena up.

“I have some questions for this article I’m writing about you. Could I come back for another interview?”

Chapter Text

Lena leads Kara through the waltz.

“I didn’t know there’d be dancing,” Kara murmurs. She’d hardly thought newscasters and politicians would make the Pulitzers this glamorous. In the nights before, she’d given the invitation a cursory look on the refrigerator door. Heels or flats? Should she go all out and wear a gown, or perhaps just a cocktail dress?

Alex rolled her eyes. “The dress code’s right there.” If it weren’t for her trip to Midvale soon, she’d be coming to the gala as well.

But Alex had always been a better dancer. She made fine company and knew how to toe the line between chatty and quiet wherever she went. She’d known how to pronounce hors d’oeuvre without a Youtube video and a dialect coach.

Sometimes Kara envied that natural ability to fit in.

“I’m a spy!” Alex would protest. “Duh!”

Kara would laugh, and then Alex would do that obnoxious older-sister ‘you know that I know this is something I will never be able to understand’ thing with a raise of her eyebrows.

Did they teach that in spy school or was Alex just that good at her job?

Kara invited Lena to the ceremony. Lena, who was good at small talk like Alex. Lena who would probably wear a three-piece suit that’d keep Kara’s eyes on her all night. Lena, who said yes. Lena, who helped Kara choose a silvery-blue dress for the evening after all.

“You don’t think it’s too formal?”

“Not at all.” Lena shook her head and continued pinning Kara’s hair up with small clasps. “I hope you don’t mind that they’re black.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, you can’t see! I meant the hairpins.” Lena held one out so Kara could see it in the mirror. “Mine are black so they blend with my hair. ‘M afraid I didn’t have the foresight to order yours in brown.”

“Is this what rich people actually worry about?”

“Unfortunately.”

Kara’s hair is pinned up gently now, staying in place even as she spins on the dancefloor.

“I’m sorry you didn’t win.” Lena doesn't know how else to mention the obvious. She’d rather take the first leap than let her friend ponder on it a second longer.

“I didn’t think I would.” It’s not really true, and Kara’d already cleared off a spot on her bookshelf for the award, and yeah maybe she’d spent the whole hour dusting the mantel and, with a bottle of hand sanitizer, pretending to hold up the award and thank Alex and Eliza and Nia and of course Lena, Lena in the audience wearing the three-piece suit-

They keep spinning.

“I thought I might win, though.”

The song changes and most of the dancers switch partners, but Kara keeps Lena close.

“I thought my article was good.”

With anyone else Kara would be dizzy by now. Instead she just feels like she’s floating. Untouchable.

“It was excellent,” Lena says. She isn’t sure if Americans would just call that ‘kissing up.’

Lena lets her eyes fall on Kara’s lips.

They’re dancing. Lena doesn’t know if she’s leading. Perhaps they are each taking a turn.

Lena doesn’t know if she’s leading Kara on.

Not until the next morning, at least, when Kara kisses her over breakfast, when Kara confesses feelings over coffee, when Kara picks up the hand sanitizer bottle with a grin and unfolds the acceptance letter left in her clutch, when Kara links her arm in Lena’s and walks her home despite being able to fly, when Kara wishes Lena goodnight, when Kara says she shall see Lena the next day and the next and maybe Lena ought to keep that three-piece suit because there’ll surely be other Pulitzer awards and she’ll win one of these days.

That’s when Lena knows.

But for now, they are dancing. The orchestra plays another song, and Lena manages another spin around the floor. A black hairpin slips and falls out of Kara’s complicated updo. No one hears a thing.

Chapter Text

There’s a pretty girl at the airport bar drinking an eight-dollar glass of wine.

Kara knows because she bought it; it was the least she could do after spilling the last one. There are still silvery glass powder-shards scattering the floor. Hopefully those don't puncture anything soon.

“I’m sorry, you didn’t even ask for that. I’m just some stranger talking about puncture marks in those airport carts’ tires. Guess I’ve been rambling.” Her voice dims. Kara spins her ring around and around her finger. It’s too shiny, and it could use some nicks and cuts. “I get worried about, uh, accidentally hurting people.”

The girl’s staring. She blinks twice.

“I - I am -” Kara keeps fiddling with the ring. “I am sorry to intrude. I’ll leave you be.”

“You don’t have to.” The girl shrugs. “I’m Lena. Thanks for the wine. Most people wouldn’t have done that.”

“Most people wouldn’t have talked about glass powder-shards either, would they?”

“Maybe you’re peculiar.” The pretty girl 一 Lena, Kara corrects 一 leans in. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Kara doesn’t know quite how to say ‘you could, but I think every wine tastes like grapes, and I don’t want to seem uncultured in front of you.’ She’s noticed the crispness in the collar of Lena’s suit, and the sleek pair of glasses perched on her head. Next to her, Kara might as well have shown up in patchwork overalls and a pair of hand-me-down Crocs.

But Kara grins, her heart willing to take this leap. “Would a cup of tea be alright? Would it seem weird to drink tea at a bar?”

“Not any weirder than rambling about broken glass at a bar.” Lena sits back in her chair, legs crossed, and waits for Kara to order.

Lena, Kara learns, is on her way to Geneva for a biotech convention. First class, naturally. The elites’ lounge is closed at the moment for cleaning; that’s the reason she isn’t sitting in a massage chair there with a glossy magazine and a half-finished caramel macchiato.

Kara wrinkles her nose. “You like massage chairs?”

“I mean, more tolerate than ‘like.’ But I spend a lot of time in airports. You learn to take their flaws in stride. It’s like renting a gigantic, moving hotel room for a night 一 a room with a photography collection from the 19th century downstairs, no less!”

“A room with sushi and decorative lanterns,” Kara counters, taking a glance over Lena’s shoulder. The neon sign is practically calling her name.

“A room with Irish whiskey! Red wine!”

“Plus, when that room happens to come prepared with toy stores-”

“And bookstores. Don’t forget the books.” Lena swirls her glass in a circle before tipping back the last of her wine. “Heavens, I could go anywhere as long as you gave me something to read.” Lena gives Kara a real grin, her eyes young and crinkled at the edges. Her lips are stained pink before she reaches in vain for a cheap napkin at the bar. They’re two feet over to her right, tucked all the way by the wall.

“I can get that for you. Think it’s the least I could do.” Kara shifts out of her seat and across the room.

They exchange boarding passes. Kara’s flight doesn’t leave for six hours; Lena’s for ten.

“What are you, the most punctual person in the world?”

“Try the unluckiest.” Lena crosses her legs. The temptation to kick off her heels does rise to the surface, admittedly, but she is in public and the shoes ought to stay on. “My flight was pushed.”

“How long ago?”

“Try… a few hours ago? And were also delayed a few hours before that.”

“So you’re, like, never leaving. That’s what I’m gathering.”

“Hey!” Lena swats Kara across the bar. “How on earth am I supposed to have any faith that I’ll get to Geneva if you don’t have faith either?”

“I wouldn’t mind if you stuck around a little longer, though.”

Beneath the table, Lena rolls the napkin Kara gave her into a scroll. It’s nice to do something with her hands.

They leave Lena’s wine glasses, one shattered and the other empty, and brave a busy airport terminal to explore the bookstore.

They traipse past book covers plastered with smiling white women and calendars of blue sunsets. Kara kisses Lena after the fifth sunset calendar. The cashier had gone next door for a cup of coffee anyways.

“What was that for?”

“I just wanted to know what it’d be like.” Kara pulls back an inch. “Was that alright? Should I not have-?”

Lena shakes her head. “Don’t worry. You should have.”

Kara looks behind her; still no cashier, and with the rush of flights at three o’clock no one else is in the store. “So would you mind if I did that again?”

“I’d be upset if you didn’t.” Lena leans in and tastes the strawberry on her tongue.

Lena leaves for Geneva after three hours in the bookstore. Kara had her arms draped over her shoulders all the while.

Kara flies off to Athens for her vacation with Alex soon after.

Kara never really asked where Lena was from. Maybe she’d just assumed they were both from Chicago 一 Chicago where Kara had spilled the wine, Chicago where they’d booked individual Ubers and Lyfts to the airport 一 and maybe she’d been too timid to broach the question. But she’d been correct all the same.

“I’ll miss you,” Lena’d said before she handed her passport over at the checking counter.

“You don’t need to miss me for long, though.”

After Geneva, after Athens (when Alex spent the entire first night asking Kara about the cute Irish girl at the bar), they meet again where they began.

Kara brings Lena to a Barnes & Noble for their first date, and Lena suggests cocktails afterward. “Just as long as you don’t shatter any more glasses?”

“Uncalled for!”

Lena laughs. “The night’s still young.”

Chapter Text

But it hurts, Lena laments.

Like a scythe, thin and crooked, the loneliness wants to be recognized as such.

Bathroom tile feels good on her skin, at the very least. If her brother were to see this he’d call her what she is 一 weak 一 and Lena winces (only on the inside; if he were here, he wouldn’t be able to see it on her face.) This thought, this consolation prize, keeps her one step away from broken.

Lena burns. That’s why she’s here on the floor tonight. Like a letter with the edges eaten away by flames, the deadly contagion pleading for just a little more to swallow, to chew, to have-

“Honey,” Kara whispers, and Lena winces. Outwardly this time. “You know you oughta be in bed.”

“But I’ve been there all week,” Lena protests.

“Three more days?” Kara asks. “The meds’ll have kicked in by then?”

Three days feels like a lifetime when you’re ill.

“No.”

“For me?”

Lena doesn’t waste the energy in moving. Moving was something for Lena of two weeks ago, the Lena that weaved from room to room like a pencil performing the connect-the-dots dance. It’s difficult to shake those memories.

“Maybe,” Lena supplies. But the bathroom floor is cool, a salve to her skin. Sure, it’s probably crawling with invisible bacteria but at least it’s quiet (or, it was before Kara walked in.)

Kara touches Lena’s forehead with the back of her hand. “You need fluids.”

“There’s a… sink in here? I can drink from it. I think.”

It hurts. Worse than the root canal or the time she had to run the entrepreneurship conference while she had walking pneumonia because, uh, she hadn’t had time to go and get diagnosed with Said Walking Pneumonia in the days leading up.

The pain, that scythe slicing through her, dodges and weaves. It’s an excellent sparring partner, and Lena is losing every match.

Oh, make it stop.

Lena remembers nothing of this, but Kara somehow drags her half-numb body off the cool tile and back into bed. Kara presses a glass to her lips. Lena wrinkles her nose at the lukewarm water. “Ugh, really?”

“You can’t keep much down. Take it.”

Lena shivers as she downs it.

“Fuck, mononucleosis is a bitch.”

Kara doesn’t know what to say, but she at least cooks soup for Lena an hour later.

“Thank you,” Lena murmurs, cupping the bowl in two fragile hands. She leans in to smell it. “I love you.”

“I assume that’s about the chicken noodle and not about me?”

“Eh.” Lena shrugs. Feels nice. It’s probably been three days since she cracked a joke.

Her head still aches, and the metaphorical scythe is cutting through her, but she at least has Kara.

(And the bathroom floor. An excellent companion to drunk sorority girls and sick businesswomen alike.)

Chapter Text

January 28th

To-go order. Thank you for coming! Please return to Lao Sichuan when you can!

[Today’s order:]
Pork and vegetable dumplings (12) -- $13.95
Diet soda -- $1.95

There was a dark-haired girl, Angela knew, who always bought dumplings twelve at a time.

Well, to be technical about it, there was this dark-haired billionaire who tipped twenty-four percent whenever she showed up at the doors of Lao Sichuan. Once, the sunglasses slipped down her nose and she just made a shhh motion with her finger at her lips.

“Mum’s the word?” Lena asked that day.

Angela nodded gently. “See you soon, stranger?”

“Hopefully.”

There was something about that voice of hers. Angela didn’t know if it was the influence of Lena’s boarding-school background (okay, sue her, she read the Lena Luthor biography cover to cover) or maybe her Irish upbringing (it warranted a whole chapter in the biography! Of course Angela paid attention!) but that lilting tone made her turn every time.

Lena Luthor felt like a girl plucked out of the airwaves of a true crime podcast. Or maybe one of those old-timey radio dramas where they’d pop balloons to make the gunshot effect.

Lena, ever a good tipper, with her long coats and those sleek black sunglasses 一 the frames seemed to change styles each time, Angela thought. Was she just seeing things? Women like Ms. Luthor probably had an entire Sunglass Hut’s worth of glasses sitting on a glass rack in some magical walk-in closet.

Closets, plural, Angela thought. She shivered. It felt surreal to think of having two separate rooms in which to house her clothes. Wait, did Ms. Luthor have three closets?

Eh. Eat the rich, she thought. Angela checked her watch and, noticing that she had just an hour left before the day’s end, felt a second wind coming on. She retied the apron around her back to keep the knot from slipping.

Almost there.

February 29th

To-go order. Thank you for coming! Please return to Lao Sichuan when you can!

[Today’s order:]
Pork and vegetable dumplings (24) -- $19.99
Congee (2) -- $5.95
Green onion pancake (3) -- $7.95

“I’ll be home soon, darling,” Lena murmured into her cell phone.

At the register, Angela really wanted to be just a cashier/waitress/parttime-cook-sometimes-when-Kenny-gets-sick-and-the-boss-allows-it. A kind, gracious cashier/waitress/parttime-cook.

Unfortunately, she was eavesdropping against her will.

(Okay, maybe she liked it a little. Just a tad.)

Lena grinned. “I don’t know when soon is. I’ll be there!”

Angela had been waiting two minutes for Lena to produce her credit card from her purse. Two minutes of watching Lena Luthor, misunderstood genius and tech CEO, flirt over the phone feels a lot longer than you might think.

“No, you don’t need to fly-” Lena swallowed her singular word back, “to rush down here. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Lena grabbed at a stack of bills and tried to uncrumple them for Angela to see. “Good?” She mouthed.

Angela unfolded and counted them. I’m holding Lena Luthor’s fifty-dollar bill, she thought, and tried not to get excited. Famous people are just people. It was a fact of life. But it was still something Lena had owned, and that made it oddly special for a piece of paper.

“Kara, you’re only a little bit ridiculous,” Lena said into the phone.

Beneath the sunglasses, she was smiling.

Angela stuffed an extra fortune cookie into the plastic bag before Lena left. It felt like a job done well.

“You shall gain a new skill,” Lena read aloud.

From her own fortune cookie, Kara frowned. “You will lose an athletic game. Don’t get too upset. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lena laughed. “Guess you’re a little upset, huh?”

“As if you wouldn’t be, either! You’re the sorest loser I know.”

“Whatever.”

“Oh my gosh, you’re being a sore loser right now. And you haven’t even lost anything yet.”

“Yet?”

Kara kissed Lena then. It was a colliding sort of embrace, needy and satisfied, waiting and expected. There’s no other way to kiss somebody when you’re tangled under a blanket and on top of each other, sitting on the couch, your arms holding up a makeshift fort of lonely pillows and a quilt you bought at IKEA until you let go to kiss your girlfriend and then the pillows fell. The quilt, too, but more slowly.

Lena grinned and nudged a few square inches of quilt out of her eyes. “I might be a sore loser. But that’s only because I win so often.”

“We get it, you’re smart.” Kara kicked Lena softly. It was honestly a surprise that she could find Lena’s shin among the mess of blankets.

“So, this isn’t a very good blanket fort,” Kara admitted. “No structural integrity. And don’t even get me started on the lack of windows in here - that means no natural light.”

“You wanna fix it?”

“Okay.”

Lena kissed Kara then, softer this time. She wouldn’t want to wreck the mess of blankets with another spontaneous gesture.

“I like fixing things with you,” Lena said at the end. Their fort might not have windows, but it was plenty good.

There was this blonde girl, Stephen knew, who buys two cups of coffee from him ‘round the clock. One black with milk and sugar, the other decked out with fancy syrups and sprinkles of nutmeg on top and - and once she brought a bendy straw? Were those even something that adults owned, unless they were hosting kindergarteners’ birthday parties and or maybe school gift exchanges?

“Have a good day,” he told her. He knew her name was Kara 一 he wrote it on the cups often enough 一 but customers didn’t like it when you remembered their names that way.

“Thanks!” Opening her fist, she let a rainstorm of coins fall into the tip jar. Stephen faintly wondered if Kara was one of those ladies that wandered the city with a metal detector in her spare time.

She tried to rush out the door, as usual, and then held herself back so she didn’t spill the hot coffee. Not that it’d even be that bad if she did; she’d run into somebody a few weeks ago, spilling a hot drink down her shirt, and she hadn’t even flinched. Was she made of steel or something?

“I’ll be right there, Lena!” Kara yelled, on her way out of the door.

Stephen wondered where she was even hearing this Lena woman. What, was Kara a CIA agent with a hidden earpiece? He was pretty sure CIA agents didn’t make a habit of bringing bendy straws to coffeeshops.

His customers were strange.

But, hey, at least he was grateful for the twenty-four percent tip.

“You alright?” Kara whispered. There’d been some sort of emergency at L-Corp. The alarms had gone off; not just the regular ones but the second-line alarms beneath her desk, and even the third line of defense. Those wires were woven into the walls, designed to detect that which security guards could not.

“I’m-” Lena bit her lip. “Yes.” She felt sort of silly, here in her girlfriend’s arms. Kara’d rescued her from the rooftop and here, in the air, Kara had not let go.

The wind was surely making a mess of her hair. What would the shareholders think? Lena doubted anyone could capture a clear photograph of this, but she worried about it nonetheless.

“You made me spill my coffee,” Kara whispered, “on my way to you.” She hadn’t lifted her voice for a while. She’d shouted instructions at the scene, yet had let her tone fall once they’d left.

“Sorry.” Lena thought about offering to pay Kara back, but that seemed… risky. Like she might be flaunting her wealth.

“I’m sorry too. I - I wish you didn’t have to do this every time,” Kara said.

“What?”

“Every time the alarms go off. I wish you didn’t need to panic.”

“It’s alright. You get used to it. Or, I dunno, I suppose my therapist would say that you adapt.” Lena squeezed Kara’s hand. “You wanna get Lao Sichuan tonight? It’s classic comfort food.”

“Sure. You want me to go?”

“Nah, I want to see my favorite waitress. She always has something nice to say. And she compliments my sunglasses.”

Kara laughed. “Well, of course, you’re practically a collector. There isn’t a pair you haven’t heard of. Like that time we went to New York Fashion Week-”

“It was a coincidence that I had the same pair as Anna Wintour!”

“Suuuure.”

Chapter Text

Loving Kara feels like this:

headlights hit the back of her head and she is glowing, out of reach, caught in the halo that the taxicabs have accidentally given her; she’s trying not to play with a fraying thread on the edge of the carpet in Lena’s office (no can do; she can’t not tug at it, and she won’t change for the life of her); she remembers Esme’s substitute teacher’s name and helps Esme writes her a thank-you card with one too many heart stickers on the envelope; she whispers Lena’s name over breakfast, over chess games, over voicemails; she spins in her socks on hardwood floors and tries not to fall; she tells stories of slipping down banisters back home on Krypton, back when her mother would play along with her; she calls her mother zuiai, beloved.

She calls Lena that, too.

Sometimes in the middle of the night Kara will wake up and search for Lena’s familiar frame. She presses a kiss into the palm of Lena’s hand. They talk about the festering wound of loving somebody who has died, or even worse 一 of loving somebody who is alive but is dead to you. So strange, that present-tense ‘is.’ Once somebody is dead they will never be anything but.

When Lena tries to swallow her grief Kara offers to take some of it on her behalf. “Give me your pain,” she says, “and I will shoulder it as best I can.”

“But it’s mine.” Lena cannot rid her eyes of tears. Once more she gives thanks to darkness, this time for hiding her face.

“Not forever. I cannot hold it forever. I will just carry it a mile and make that one little distance easier to bear.”

“I can’t-”

“Try? For me?” Kara is crying too. Lena can hear her sniffling.

“I - maybe.” Lena shakes her head. “Half a mile, alright?”

Loving Kara feels like this:

you are in the back of a taxicab and you can’t stop looking at a pretty girl; she can’t pry her eyes away from the window, where the pixellated lights of the city, of skyscrapers and domes, shine down. perhaps ‘shine up’ is a better term. this girl knows where each of your tattoos are, and she has cheekily suggested that your next one ought to be a picture of a teacup piglet ー you lost a bet to her years ago, something about her sister and maggie, and this is your consequence.

this girl has left lipstick kisses on your coffee mugs and, right now, the inside of your wrist. you are grateful for darkness’ kind shadow at this moment, in this yellow taxicab. you pass underneath a bridge and, caught under the incandescent flicker of light shaking in and out of the car windows, you remember once more that you love her. you have too many reasons to count, so you leave them out and tell her regardless.

you do not tell her that your next tattoo, your fifth, is probably going to be the letter ‘k.’ it’s a surprise. kara only thinks you’re bad at surprises because you hide all your best ones from her 一 like, this one time, you gave esme the idea to write a letter to her substitute teacher with kara, and kara did a happy-dance all around her apartment because ‘esme’ had the perfect heart stickers for the envelope, and she looked too ecstatic to pop her bubble and mention that they were yours.

you got them in the mail. it was a fundraising effort from some hospital, seeking funds for their new cardiothoracic surgery wing.

(you don’t remember much about this, except that the neurosurgeon on the brochure 一 lexie something? 一 was pretty. and very young to be a doctor. what, did she skip a grade?)

all you remember is the stickers, and esme’s sticky fingers, and crayons spilling all over the coffee table.

you are in a taxicab with the love of your life, and she falls asleep with her head pressed against the window. you reach out to grasp her hand even if she can’t feel it.

somehow she will know.

Chapter Text

Lena dreams sometimes.

She knows enough about her own insomnia to be grateful for the dreams, for the vacant moments she can spend in another place. Untethered in her emotions, she can drift away. Knowledge is a funny thing in a dream, present but separated. In dreams she knows her mother is cruel but not why, and she remembers Kara’s pearl necklace but forgets her powers.

Her doctor gives her sleeping pills. When she takes them, she counts down the minutes until they take effect. Or maybe that’s the dream talking to her, too. They’re little blue trapezoids. She takes them with cups of water. Never coffee, the doctor said. The nurse smirked and said, “eh, won’t kill you, will it?” when Lena asked about that at the next visit.

In dreams, Kara doesn’t wear glasses either. Lena quite enjoys getting lost in this, her own imagination.

Nia knows enough about dreaming for a lifetime. She, unfortunately, reaffirms the doctor’s statement that drinking coffee with a sleeping pill is probably a bad idea. But she also flips through her mother’s books and poems when Lena tells her about all of this.

“I can’t really interpret much,” Nia cautions. “I don’t have as much training as… other Naltorians.”

Lena knows enough to keep Maeve’s name out of this conversation.

Nia knows, as she always has, to avoid any mention of Lex as well.

“Close your eyes?” Nia asks. Lena feels a little like she’s praying as she does. She hasn’t done that since she was ten years old.

“Do you feel this?” Nia brushes the back of her hand over Lena’s forehead. Just barely. Enough to lift a few dreams out of Lena’s subconscious.

Nia closes her eyes too. “Hmm, your dreams feel funny. Ooh, and Kara’s there.”

Lena already knew the second thing, so she asks, “Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?”

“They feel sort of blue, if that makes sense. Like, if they had a color, it’d be blue. Not morose. Soothing. Like the tickle of wind across your face.” Nia smiles, feeling swept away. She likes being able to do this for her friends. Last week Alex had dreamt that Kelly opened a 24-hour Waffle House and had desperately needed to know if this was some secret plan of her wife’s. (It was not, by the way. Just chaos brimming under the surface. Chaos leaks into dreams like dust into water.)

“As if everything is smooth and gentle and kind in this, the nice blue place,” Nia goes on. “You’re, y’know, on an overnight train with Kara. Or you’re dancing and you switch partners with somebody and now she’s there, in all her clumsy, tall glory.”

“I don’t remember the one about the train,” Lena muses. She keeps fiddling with the strap of her watch, unable to find anything else in the dark. “Can I open my eyes now?” Technically the dark is all in her mind, so perhaps it’s more like her dark. It belongs to no other.

“Shh, not yet, grasshopper,” Nia answers in a falsely deep voice. Lena laughs at that. “Your dreams feel like everything is in place.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

“Why thank me? You’re the one with the balanced psyche.”

Lena knows Nia half-believes this and half-doesn’t, so she keeps herself from poking fun at the woo-woo, hippy-dippy-ness of these terms.

Lena stands up to leave and kisses Nia’s forehead. “See you again next week?”

“Alex, Alex, there is no way your daughter has convinced Kelly to sink your life’s savings into a Waffle House-” Kara blurts.

“We’ve been there, like, five times this month. How do you explain that?”

“Maybe she likes the food!”

“Nia,” Lena announces to her girlfriend later, “thinks I have peaceful dreams.”

“Oh, really?” Kara asks. They’re lying on the couch they just purchased. The saleswoman at IKEA hadn’t let Kara do a ‘test drive’ so she’s retroactively insisting upon testing it out. (Lena doesn’t understand it either, but she’s going with the swing of things.) Kara tosses a cushion out of the way so it doesn’t dig into her back. “What are your dreams like?”

“I don’t remember too many of them. Nia can draw them out, though, like some sort of… magic. She says they involve you.”

“Oh.”

Lena tosses the cushion back at Kara. “She says I dream of you fondly.”

“Is that true?” Across the canvas of fabric Kara leans in. They’re three inches apart now.

“I do dream of you fondly. Much more so than anything else.” Lena traverses the soft distance to kiss Kara on the forehead, leaving a dark pink mark. “Anything, anything,” Lena hums, shutting her eyes. Kara was right; this couch was a good idea. So long as they don’t spill wine on it, hopefully. It’s bright yellow and any little stain will show up in an instant.

“Nerd,” Kara says. Another kiss. “I like you too, Luthor.” She feels like a schoolgirl, wrapped up in Lena’s arms, feeling the lingering just-got-out-of-the-factory scent of the couch 一 the candles have only just been lit, and haven’t covered it up yet 一 and Lena is smiling, staring ahead at the candles on the counter, so close and yet so far. Kara knows Lena well enough. They won’t be getting up anytime soon.

The couch was a good idea, Lena thinks. Here, cradled in cushions and the trace of Kara’s touch, she could fall asleep and really dream.

Nia’s getting better at interpreting dreams. She offers to do so for free, for practice, for her friends (“that’s a lot of ‘for’s, Winn had added. “If you ever make a flyer or something, you oughta have a better slogan than that.”) Nia had elbowed him in the stomach, and he’d stuck his tongue out at her, and Kara whispered something in Lena’s ear about candlelight, and Kelly texted her wife that no, they were not sinking thousands of dollars into the enfranchisement of a Waffle House™. It was just an idea of Esme’s, for heaven’s sake!

They do go out for waffles, all… eight of them? Alex and Esme and Winn and James and Kelly and Kara and Lena and Nia and Brainy and J’onn gets there late but he’s pulling up a chair… no, that’s ten. A table for ten.

Esme said she hadn’t gotten to make waffles for forever (which really means ‘not since last week’) and she delights in the syrupy goodness of maraschino cherries. She pours half a jar onto her stack of waffles but offers Auntie Lena the first one.

“Really?”

Esme nods. “The first one’s gonna taste the best. You should have it.”

Lena grins, unable to convey all of you are precious and I want to give you the entire world in the crook of her smile, and eats the cherry. It dyes her tongue red.

She’s been dreaming of seasides lately. Maybe she ought to take her niece out to Coast City, where they can have pineapple ice cream and look for shells on the beach. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Kara takes her hand at the table for ten and Lena remembers yet again that this life is good.

Her dreams may be lovely, but her life is far more so.

Chapter Text

Close your eyes.

Just for a moment, Lena says. Kara does it without thinking. She never did put much faith in prayers, but she would sooner die than forsake Lena. Lena, whose word can be trusted; Lena, the lonely daughter with the tarnished name and polished silverware.

“You’re a good listener,” Lena whispers.

Kara leans her head back against the wall. Eyes shut, she can hone in on everything: the shuffle of the newspapers at the stall on fifty-ninth street, the tinny ring of the bell at Kowalski’s diner, the clack of high heels on pavement and the sidestep of dancing girls, the rustle of cellophane as candy wrappers open, the jostle of leaves, the cooing of pigeons, the shift and shudder of a roommate moving her boxes down from a U-Haul, and unmistakably Lena, Lena’s gentle sigh, Lena with a gentle hand cradling Kara’s face and Lena asking ‘is this alright?’ and Kara thinks she might cry before she nods, eyes still closed, now screwing her eyes shut because this is Lena, Lena with the good heart, Lena with the V-necks in the mornings, Lena who has antique salt and pepper shakers, Lena who lets you drink her coffee because it’s peppermint and you miss the taste, Lena the good, Lena the gracious, Lena the fragile and unforgetful, and this is Lena kissing her now.

Kara doesn’t open her eyes.

Lena is smiling. She bites her lip to keep herself from laughing; this silence is golden. It shouldn’t be tarnished.

In four years, when they’re married and have adopted not one but two cats, Kara will describe this as her best kiss with Lena, and Lena’ll elbow her on the couch because “what about the one in Chicago? Hello? Were you even paying attention?”

Yet for now, Kara preserves the comfortable silence. She leans into Lena’s embrace again and finally opens her eyes. “I didn’t think you were going to do that,” she admits. “I mean, I’d hoped. I’d hoped for, y’know, a while.”

“But?”

“I didn’t want to push anything.” Oh, this is embarrassing. Is she seriously going to cry?

Lena laughs and hands Kara a tissue. “Here.”

“Thank you.” Kara kisses her again. “I think I could get used to doing that.”

In eight years, right after Esme wins the spelling bee and everyone goes out to dinner at Kowalski’s (they have great pierogi!), Lena will admit her internal monologue right before The Kiss™ went something like wait fuck she can sense heartbeats! do some deep breathing or else she’ll figure it out! like the thing dr. ford said: in for four, out for six, hold for four. wait, was it in for six and out for four? and then segued smoothly into oh no it’s been too long since i kissed anyone 一 what if my tongue has, like, atrophied and forgotten how to do this???

Kara will laugh and squeeze Lena’s arm. “You’re wonderful, you know that?”

Lena smirks. “I do.”

They order extra pierogi and carry them home in a styrofoam container labeled ‘there are twelve in here and I will KNOW if you sneak in and eat some in the middle of the night, Kara Danvers.’ (“Subtle,” Kara huffs.)

“Close your eyes,” Kara says in the car, and Lena does, and before they leave the parking Kara kisses her again.

“You taste salty,” Lena murmurs.

“As if you don’t?”

Chapter Text

There’s this girl Colleen.

She can’t fully pronounce the word ‘refrigerator’ so she calls it a fraida. Like my favorite Kahlo, Lena will murmur. And Kara brushes her arm, or perhaps elbows her, each time.

There’s this girl Colleen, six years old and orphaned until she wheels her unicorn suitcase into the front door of Kara and Lena’s house. Esme, Alex says, can’t wait to meet her this weekend.

Colleen buries her hands into the scruff at the base of the cat’s neck. His name is Toasted Bagel for reasons unknown; Toasted Bagel is grey with black spots, which is a classic sign that trouble is in the air 一 if a server ever hands you a bagel that looks remotely like Toasted Bagel, Lena insists, you ought to throw it away.

(“One-percenters,” Kara will scoff, and before she laughs she’ll stroke her hands over Toasted Bagel’s head until he reaches up and presses his wet nose into her hand.)

Colleen walks to school on wayward paths. She tries to skip stones on greenery, the way she used to on the planet Clayro, and frowns when pebbles just plop down onto Kentucky bluegrass. Colleen has no clue what ‘blue’ looks like because bluegrass is green. She tries to eat popsicles by exhaling onto them until they melt at the picnic table, leaving orange patchworks all over the wood. Colleen spins and doesn’t know why her head gets dizzy, but Kara takes her hand and shows her. She and Kara fly sometimes. Because Lena can’t, Colleen and Lena take a spin on the little bumblebee helicopter with silvery wings outside. The remote control usually works. When it glitches, Bee drags in the air, but the remote usually works just fine.

There’s this girl Colleen, seven years old, and she has blue hair. She wears tank tops in the middle of winter because her blood vessels don’t work like humans’ do; she doesn’t have any capillaries and her blood pressure’s 240/60, which nearly made their pediatrician call the ER on their last visit. Colleen has crooked teeth and falls asleep with Toasted Bagel in her big-girl bed. Colleen prefers orange juice to apple, croissants to muffins, and England to France.

There is this girl, this precious soft soul, and Kara cannot wait to open the fraida again tonight and cook dinner for her family.

Chapter Text

“You’re a nerd,” is the first thing Lena says when she wakes up. The next sentence out of her mouth is “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to do any grand gestures!”

Kara shrugs, her cheeks pink with bashful humor. “Sorry for trying to one-up you? Happy anniversary. Breakfast in bed.”

“Apology not accepted,” Lena pretends to protest, and then digs into her plate of Kara’s famous, homemade, one-of-a-kind banana pancakes with whipped cream and raspberries on the side (yes, Kara insists that Lena state this honorific, in this order, every time. It’s the most in-character thing she’s done since she rescued a few ducks out of a storm drain last week and presented them to the animal shelter with nametags that read ‘hi! I’m huey!’ and ‘dewey!’ and ‘louie!’)

The sun glows against their windows. Kara keeps her ears to the metaphorical curb but, thankfully, Nia is taking over superhero duty this morning 一 just until ten-thirty, they agreed last week, and then Nia gets to put her purple starry pajamas back on and sleep for another hour. Lena makes a mental note to thank Nia later for taking the hero shift.

But right now, there are pancakes (“famous, homemade, one-of-a-kind pancakes!” Kara reminds her with ease) and Bell, their foster dog, is climbing into the bed. No surprise there; he smelled the famous, homemade pancakes. Bear, their cat, isn’t far behind.

(Kara is unable, as far as Lena can tell, to stop adopting animals from the shelter on Bleecker Street.)

Lena wouldn’t want things any other way.

Chapter Text

A bundle of daisies sits on Lena’s desk. Lena steps into the office after her lunch break, frowning at the bouquet that’d shown up out of the blue. It looks so out-of-place in this glass and chrome environment.

“Miss Luthor?” her assistant Jess asks.

“Yes?”

“There was some, uh,” Jess fumbles with a calendar in her arms to verify that the flowers were delivered today and not some other time, “kerfuffle at the balcony. Around eleven o’clock. You were at the McCallan meeting at that time.”

Lena raises an eyebrow. “Sorry, how is this relevant?”

“Supergirl tried to send you, um, a hundred and fifty daisies. At eleven.” Jess coughs. “I said no.”

Lena lets the barest hint of a smile show. She definitely should’ve seen this coming. These past few days, she and Kara have been working in their garden, elbows deep in mulch. “Did she now?”

“She offered to fly them up in individual parcels-”

Of course she did.

“And then she wanted to bring you lilies because she knows they remind you of home-”

Lena laughs. Her wife's such a dork.

“But I thought that, well, several dozen daisies might trigger some people’s allergies around the office, or shed too much debris as they slowly lose life,” Jess says, “so I… insisted she only bring in a dozen.”

“Uh, my wife can be a little bit… clingy?” Lena explains. “You’re doing excellent work, Jess.”

There’s a bouquet of lilies on the kitchen counter. Peonies on the little table in the hallway, which normally has pictures from Alex and Kelly’s wedding on it. Lena finds black-eyed susans decorating the corners of the dining room, Queen Anne’s lace on her dressers, sprigs of pink foxglove sitting perched in a cup on the closet shelf. She grins and takes a photo of the foxglove blossoms to send to the groupchat. Perhaps Kara thought the coat rack looked lonely.

“Kara?” Lena calls. She hasn’t seen her anywhere, even as Lena’s been touring their house on a scavenger hunt. “You home?”

There’s a faint noise to her right, close to the door, and Lena knows Kara’s in the garden. Again. If their rosebushes get any more attention, they might win an award for Most Symmetrical Display of Thorns from Good Housekeeping.

“Hi!” Kara says, her grin bright as day. Lena would kiss her if her cheeks weren’t spotted with dirt from weeding and planting a few more rows of carrot seeds. Kara’s wearing her favorite navy-blue overalls 一 Nia helped her embroider little trails of ivy leaves all over the denim 一 and she wipes sweat away from her brow before taking off her worn gloves and running to hug Lena.

Well, who cares about dirt on her cheeks anyways? Lena kisses her softly. It feels like an early-morning embrace even if it’s the middle of the afternoon. “You’re a huge nerd.”

“Just the way you like me?”

“Unfortunately.” Lena smirks. “We don’t even have black-eyed susans in our garden!”

“But you like them a lot - they remind you of that book you used to like as a kid, right? So I swung by that flowershop-”

“Daisied and Confused?”

“No, the one on 45th street. The Willow and Thatch.”

“You’re too nice,” Lena murmurs, “and my assistant feels bad for turning away your offer of daisies.”

Kara shrugs. “That’s alright. I filled the halls of the DEO with them instead.”

“You can’t do that! They’re a spy organization!”

“And who says that secret agents don’t want to see fresh-cut flowers sometimes? I mean, Lee, that’s terribly reductive of you. Just ‘cause their job involves security work, you automatically assume that they’re all doom-and-gloom, super-practical all the time?”

Lena laughs. “Okay, okay.” She scans the garden to see if Kara’s starting or finishing up. “You wanna come in? We can have pink lemonade and watch Gilmore Girls.”

“No, I wanna see X-Files!”

“Alright, then.”

Kara shuffles into the house through the back door, leaving her gloves and tools in the dusty shed. The garden’ll still be there tomorrow. She presses another kiss to Lena’s cheek as Lena settles in by the television, a plate of cookies in hand. After Lena drops off the snacks, she doubles back to grab the pitcher.

“Leeeeena, you said lemonade!” Kara says. “This is limeade.”

“I misspoke…?”

“I feel absolutely betrayed. That’s it, then. No more daisies for you.”

Lena frowns. “Oh, but what about the employees of L-Corp? Don’t they want to see fresh-cut flowers sometimes? Kara, that’s so presumptuous - just ‘cause their job involves office work, you assume they’re not worthy of your beautiful daisies?”

Kara hits her with a pillow. “I freakin’ hate you.”

“Oh, yes, your multiple bouquets of flowers made that very apparent.”

Chapter Text

In a vast and distant place, there will be room for you and I.

You and me. Kara points to the typo on the screen. The room is for me, not for I.

Lena swats her away with a brush of the hand. “Hush now. I’m waxing poetic.” She contorts her back and lowers her head to write again. “You too.” Marzipan the cat sits on a chair and licks his paw, stalling as he pretends like he hasn’t been trying to steal her pen for the last half-hour.

“Don’t be mean to the baby.” Kara edges the chair away from the desk gently. She wraps Marzipan up in her arms, resigned to the fate of never not finding white fur on her shirtsleeves. “Lena’s meannnnn.”

“Just trying to brainstorm!”

“Her storms are mean to little kitty cats.” Kara swaddles, then bounces Marzipan in her arms. He’s heavy, solid-gentle-warm like a weighted blanket. She recalls an exercise they made her do in high-school, carrying bags of flour for a week to prepare everyone for parenthood. It was bigger and heavier than an egg, and therefore more baby-like. The more your paper bag ripped, the worse your grade. This is far more preferable.

“Mom’s brainstorms are weiiiird,” Kara whispers into Marzipan’s ear, “throwin’ bits of gray matter all over the place. Ick.”

“Do you want me to write a short story about brains dashed on the ground instead?”

Kara wrinkles her nose. “Nah. That’s a little too Walking Dead, even for me.”

Lena groans and pushes her laptop out of the way so she can slump, forehead-first, on the table. “Why did I ever decide to take a creative writing class.”

“Do you need me to go get your three-page pro-and-con list?”

“No one’s gonna like my story.”

“Yeah, especially if it’s…” Kara scans the screen of Lena’s computer, “less than half a page long.”

“Hey!” Lena scoots her chair out quickly and takes the cat from Kara’s arms, nuzzling his nose with her own. “Marzi, save me. Kara’s meannnn. Even crueler than I am.” He meows and bats at a ball of lint on her sleeve. “She’s a menace.”

Marzipan yawns, nestled in her warmth.

“A public threat, practically.”

He itches at his nose with his left paw.

“Your mother is a danger to us all!”

Kara leans in to kiss his forehead. “Oh, no, what shall I become with my reputation in tatters? How can I ever move on?”

“First, you should recognize that you’re a dangerous woman. I mean,” Lena rubs at the cat’s ears and whispers, “Marz, you should know she has plans for world domination!”

His mom is really weird. Moms, technically, but up until today Marzipan thought the one with yellow hair was sillier. She spends many mornings dancing with another version of herself in that unnecessarily large glass thing in the bathroom. Yellow-hair-mother (she calls herself Mama?) is usually the frenetic one. She forgets her glasses and sprints through the door like her life depends on it; she refuses to use blue Expo markers because she prefers green; the list could go on.

But it’s Mom being weird today. Mom is the one with black hair and all the fancy suits. He’s confused why she doesn’t run out of them. Technically, he’s confused why Mom needs to change at all; couldn’t she just settle with one standard look, the way his birth mother had orange stripes?

Mom is very frown-y today. She spends a great deal of time muttering down at her hands. Again, weird. She definitely has something going on. Thank goodness Marzipan came to live with both of them. Their lives would probably fall apart if he weren’t around to hold the pieces together.

‘We could be ourselves if we were elsewhere,’ Lena tries again, instead of ‘in a vast and distant place, there will be room for you and I.’ She bites the skin at the edge of her thumb, a habit adopted from sixth-grade classmates. Her eyes remain fixed on the laptop. ’‘But this is Agloe. People aren’t fond of trauma here,’ June says. She’s the main character of the story.

Marzipan curls against her left forearm next to the laptop. Lena smiles and blows him a kiss.

June knows. The people of this dying city have disregarded enough grief to tolerate yours by now. They brush trauma off as mood swings, momentary stress, the ache of the news cycle. So you keep your pain closer than even your enemies. You line up your problems like dominoes. Maybe, with an eagle’s eye and one good shot, you could knock them down.

‘You wish you could be vulnerable,’ June says to Henry. In the story he’s her friend at school, one of her only. She moved there a semester after he did. New kids stick together. But there’s no use emoting in a wax museum. The spectators would whisper about you for months. You cannot open up about the scars beneath your clothing. It would be a sin to stick out; instead…

“All good?” Kara calls from the next room over.

“Yes! Finally writing!” Lena replies. Marzipan is falling asleep on the table next to her, and June and Henry are unpacking their emotional baggage.

Instead you twist your back into a knot attempting to conform. Your parents’ molds ought to fit your body, you think. Weren’t you made in their image? They laced up your bootstrap and sent you on the road they paved. Lena is rambling at this point, but her plan is to go back and edit later. Right now she merely needs to put ideas on paper. (Even if it’s digital paper.)

They cleared the path ー why are you still this aimless? They lit the lanterns ー why can’t you sustain the fire?

’Someday,’ June says, ‘I might figure this out. I’ll find a home, right? I hope? The parasite of loneliness will relent? I wish it’d choose a new host. Someday, after the storm cloud lifts, I could actually work on my career. Get an apartment bigger than five hundred and fifty square feet. I know it’s just a pipe dream, but… I don’t want to be awoken. It would be nice to stay here for a while. Just let me fantasize about living in an 80s movie where bees are still around and the tar-black roads don’t claw their way into the wooded trails near my house.'

'I miss the old versions of those trails. It’s dumb, I know. I’ve only lived in Agloe for six months, but I still wonder. What did they look like before they were forced to change?'

'Do you ever wonder that too?'

It’s been a long day. Lena ought to go cook dinner, so she closes her laptop and nudges Marzipan. “You hungry?”

He yawns.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Lena remembers her hometown, too. Holling was a ghost town. Holling shone on the outside and rotted in the middle; no amount of cultivated red rosebushes could change that. Lena used to spend hours clipping sunsets and houses with yellow-brimmed porches out of magazines.

Maybe she might find her version of someday, she’d think. A home without a steel gate. Or a night watchman. Or a second night watchman on the other end of the community, posted in his own booth, ready to flick on the alarms and neon lights at any moment.

“And then I moved away, went to college. Skip past all the stuff with my, uh, biological family. I got to meet your mama,” Lena tells the cat, “and her friends, and her wonderful sister. Alex is super cool. She’s the one who brought you the stuffed mouse.” Never mind the fact that Lena didn’t give him her soliloquy about the place where she was raised. Perhaps he’s a mind reader.

(Lena stares at Marzipan and thinks ‘you have very pretty brown eyes’ at him, very intensely, for sixty seconds. He blinks and hops off of the table. Probably not a mind reader.)

“And then I met your mama,” Lena repeats, holding a third of a cup of kibble. “And I got to leave stupid Holling behind. I mean, I bought a gift for Ernie because the rest of the residents did not believe in tipping the watchmen. He was really happy about the mini-muffins.” She scratches between his ears. “Have you ever had a muffin, Marzipan?”

He ignores her and keeps eating.

“I bet you’d like it. You seem like a banana-nut muffin kind of guy. Now, me, I’m staunchly in favor of lemon poppyseed.”