Work Text:
Lena grunted in annoyance. The head chef was shouting at the kitchen crew again. She was tempted to throw her popcorn at the television but stopped when she realised it bordered on bratty behaviour. Her scowl deepened as she mentally drafted a scalding letter to the show’s production team. In her opinion, this was far from entertaining. The chef’s insults were crude and unoriginal, and no real food has been made for the past five minutes. Even Lex’s worst tirade was more enjoyable than this. Lena itched to change the channel.
Kara hummed from Lena’s shoulder, where she rested her head. Her eyes were closed but there was movement underneath her eyelids. Lena was unsure if she was awake or if she was dreaming about chasing puppies again.
In between the annoyed shouts coming from the tv, Lena heard a light snore. Asleep then.
Oh yeah, this adorable Kryptonian was why she was watching this channel in the first place.
Kara insisted on watching this culinary show, convinced that by some form of osmosis, she would learn how to differentiate sugar from salt. Lena, unable to resist her pout, resigned to an evening of cataloguing dishes that made her girlfriend salivate. She was not ambitious enough to try replicating them and she had a very capable personal chef hired to do the job for her.
Kara had lasted a whole twelve minutes before succumbing to her food coma. Looking fondly at her, Lena saw that she had started drooling. A strand of saliva made its way steadily to Lena’s sleeve. It should be disgusting, but Lena found it endlessly endearing. Kara was probably dreaming about food. It was always that, or animals. Fondly, Lena watched her sleep.
A particularly loud shout made her jump, and Kara’s head fell off her shoulder.
“Hm? What?” Kara blinked. “Foie gras is unethical Lena, we have to save them ducks.”
So she was dreaming about both food and animals. Lena congratulated herself for knowing her girlfriend so well.
Looking at the screen, Lena saw the chefs preparing Chinese dishes, not French. Raising an eyebrow, Lena contemplated, “You know what, that’s not a bad idea. We really need to work on ethical consumer food consumption. I’m sure that it’s not just ducks that need saving. The whole food industry is due for a revamp, it’s not sustainable, we know that for sure.”
“Huh?” Kara was not fully awake. There were too many words said but too few active brain cells to understand them. She had already forgotten about what she said herself.
Lena grinned at the hero and brushed blonde hair out of her face. Smiling back, Kara rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Stretching her arms out, a sliver of skin showed through the bottom of her tank top. Abs, delicious abs, tensed. Lena wanted to press her face against it, but she did not want to seem too desperate.
“Do you want to go to bed?” Lena suggested, levelling her best smoulder at her. She took the small glass of water from the table and poured its contents on her cleavage. She bit her lips and raised an eyebrow in what she hoped was an attractive manner. She was sure that her subtle teasing was just the right amount of desperate. She was not some hormonal teenager after all, despite her girlfriend’s attractive looks and lovable personality.
Kara shook her head, the short nap rejuvenating her. Oblivious to the brunette’s seduction ritual, she sped to the kitchen and with a blur, came back with a few tissues. “Klutz.”
Maybe later then. Lena tried to hide her disappointment.
On the television screen, the chefs were now angrily shouting at one another. Pots and pans were thrown around and ingredients spilled onto the floor. One of them spat on the ground. It was really unsanitary, and Lena continued devising ways to shut down the programme. Kara would understand. Lena could use the Foundation to fund another healthier show, where verbal abuse would be banned. It would be a plus if she could introduce kale or some other vegetables every episode. Kara would be so annoyed and would do the huff and puff dance that lasted minutes and somehow always ended into a heated make-out session.
Lena would inevitably concede to Kara’s request to remove vegetables from her line of sight. The beefcake that triumphed all greens.
Kara frowned at the scene on the tv, most likely more bothered about the waste of food than the screaming men. “I don’t want to watch this anymore.”
“Okay then, do you want to watch something else?”
Nodding, Kara took the remote and scrolled through the channels. She settled on a rerun of Harry Potter.
Lena cringed. This rendition of the magical world was all about wands and oppression, but real magic was hand movements and freedom. Still, thank god it was not Sabrina the teenage witch. After watching a few episodes, Kara kept trying to plant random black cats on her, determined to “complete her look”, whatever that meant.
Nia encouraged it, finding suitable candidates on the street. Alex just laughed, that traitor. Kelly was somewhat on her side, but only because she was allergic to fur and would like to spend game night sneeze-free. Lena suspected that the guardian would not oppose if they brought a hairless sphynx next.
In the end, Lena had taken to running way from Kara every time she held anything remotely black and furry. It went against her modus operando of always running towards Kara. She hated it. She wondered if she could somehow turn all black cats into any other colour on the colour spectrum. But then again, everyone might take it as a Luthor’s latest plan to destroy the world, albeit in small, pet-centric ways.
She needed a more feasible plan.
“LENA!” Kara gasped. Lena looked around, startled.
“Hm, darling? What’s up?”
Lena sounded like a 90s teenage jock, and she blamed it on her girlfriend.
“Can you make me an invisibility cloak!” The sentence did not have the proper tone and inflection of a question.
Lena furrowed her brows. Her need to satisfy her girlfriend’s wants knew no bounds. “I can make you invisible, but I’m not sure if I can enchant an object to be invisible. It would have to reflect light or have some technology that mimics its surroundings. And maybe some adaptive AI so it did not look out of place. This requires no magic, I can easily engineer something like that.”
Lena decided to start a project on cloaking technology tomorrow.
Kara deflated, “There’s no fun in that!”
Another idea popping in her head, Kara turned to her again, “How about Hagrid’s bike! Enchanting something to fly would be easier than the light refraction thing, right? I always wanted to ride something like that!”
“Kara, you can fly.”
“But it’s different, I will be flying on something,” Kara continued, ignoring the totally legitimate point that Lena made. “Also, I think I’ll look really cool. I can even borrow Alex’s leather jacket! Can you imagine, Lena?”
Lena had nothing to say to that. Kara would indeed look very cool in leather. Any thoughts in her mind came to a blissful halt.
Taking her silence as a rejection, Kara pouted and crossed her arms. Frowning, another idea crossed her mind and her eyes lit up.
“What if you enchant me to float instead?” Kara grinned again.
Sometimes, when Kara used her brains too much, she would go into the territory of nonsensical ideas. It was something Lena always dreaded. With Kara’s talent in convincing Lena to do silly things and Lena’s inability to grow a backbone, things exploded. Lena would have to deal with Alex’s disappointed face while Kara hid away.
If National City found out that its resident hero was a cowardly rat, they would rescind her key to the city and give it to Dreamer instead. The Lena Luthor foundation would approve. Its founder could just pretend that she had no sway on the organisation’s opinion. Supergirl would believe her, she was pretty easy to trick these days.
“Kara, you can fly,” Lena enunciated. The four words were simple enough for the flying hero, who could fly on her own without aid, to comprehend right?
“Yeah, so?” Kara shrugged.
Lena looked at her, trying to see if she was fibbing. Kara looked deadly serious, crinkle prominent on her forehead. The last time she looked like this, Kara spent three days trying to win a bet with Alex that she could sustain on potstickers for a week. The toilet in their shared home smelled so bad Lena took to using the one in her office.
“If you cast a spell on me to levitate, I can have twice the floatiness!”
Kara mentioned that Kryptonians are an intelligent species.
Maybe Kara spent too much time on Earth and her brain underwent atrophy with not enough simulation? That would surely dampen someone’s logical thinking.
Lena should investigate this. To do that, she had to invent a MRI that was not shaped like a pod. Either that, or she could also stick stickers all over its surface. That ought to trick Kara. She loved those that puff out and felt like cotton.
The easily distracted hero, for once, did not look like her attention would easily scatter.
“Um,” Lena said ineloquently, racking her brain for a solution. She found one and it was rather simple.
“What if I magic you to feel a tug upwards,” Lena suggested. She saw Harry do something like that to an aunt or something. “Something like an anti-gravity spell I guess, but since you can fly you will probably just feel a funny sensation.”
Nothing could go wrong. Lena tried to reassure herself. Afterall, Kara was virtually indestructible.
A voice that sounded like Alex reminded her of Kara’s few weaknesses, which just happened to include magic. Lena wisely chose to ignore it.
Kara bounced in her seat, visibly excited. The sofa groaned in its displeasure. The hero looked like she was told that Christmas came early, or that dessert was a three-hundred-pound chocolate cake.
She looked so adorable Lena could eat her.
“Oh…oh.. You have to say winguardiam leviosa!” Kara shouted, flapping a hand at her. “You have to!”
Lena sighed inwardly. Kara was a nerd, and it was inconveniently rubbing off on her. Two days ago, she tried to replicate the ‘Expecto Patronum’ spell, thinking that it would help the patients in the Luthor hospital’s children ward. She had witnessed first-hand the effect Kara had every time she visited. The children were always happier afterwards. It inspired her to create something that would have a similar effect. She wished every child could have their own personal hero.
For the children, Lena would do anything.
She managed to conjure an animal-like figure, but her memories of the experiment were blurry. Seconds after the spell, the animal acted like a very strong psychoactive substance and the rest of the afternoon was spent in a haze. Lena smiled at the memory. Magic always made things fun.
“Let’s go outside, I’m not sure the roof will remain intact if you bump against it.”
Too enthusiastic to wait any longer, Kara swept Lena into her arms and swiftly closed the door behind them. Before she could blink, Lena was in front of a vibrating Kara under the night sky. Whipping her head around, the brunette suspected that they were in DEO’s old desert base.
“Not bad,” Lena approved.
Wagging her non-existent tail, Kara-the-dog-and-Kryptonian-hero panted at the praise. She bounded around, leaping into the air a few feet with every few steps.
Lena’s heart burst at the seams in affection.
“Okay, okay,” Lena waved her hand to catch the blonde’s attention. “You have to stand still for it to work.”
Kara obeyed her.
Okay, Lena. Destination, determination, and deliberation. Wait no, that’s Harry Potter. Damn it.
Closing her eyes, she concentrated. When she opened her eyes again, it glowed a beautiful gold.
Under her breath, she muttered, “Alta volare!”
Releasing her magic, Lena quickly shouted with an eyeroll, “Winguardiam Leviosa!”
Kara chortled heartily.
“Woah, look, Lena! I’m defying gravity!” Kara giggled as she began to inch upwards at a snail’s pace. Her spirits were not dampened by the lack of speed. Lena tried not to snigger as her girlfriend fell mid-air into a horizontal position.
Kara gasped, “What if I do the superman pose!”
Determined, she began to move her limbs into place. Looking like she was swimming underwater, it was a rather cute picture. Arranging her arms, she pushed her right one forward and clenched her hand into a fist.
“Zoooooom,” Kara shouted from where she floated, a terrifying six feet away from the ground. She was also moving upwards, and not forward.
“You know Supergirl has a similar pose right?” Lena jested.
Kara gasped earnestly, “Really?!”
Lena chuckled. Peering at her girlfriend, she narrowed her eyes. Was it the eight slices of pizza earlier that made Kara expand? Her face was puffy and with each inch she went up, it became even more bloated.
Lena’s eyes widened. She recalled a similar scene playing out in the third instalment of that damned series.
“No, no, no, Kara, come back!” She screeched. Reaching out a hand, she jumped and held on to Kara’s right foot. Kara guffawed at her antics.
With her other hand, Lena slipped her phone out of her pocket and her fingers mechanically dialled familiar numbers.
“ALEX, HELP!” Lena screamed as she tightened her hold on the superhero’s boot. “KARA’S FLOATING AWAY!”