Chapter Text
The portal opened in the middle of Lena's office with a soft silver shimmer and the faint smell of ozone.
Kara and Lena had been in the middle of their usual lunch: sandwiches, shared fries, and the careful six inches of couch cushion they always left between them, as if it meant something. It was a perfectly platonic lunch. They had both said so, several times, to several people.
A black-haired woman stepped through the shimmer, talking rapidly to the holographic interface glowing on her forearm.
"...calculations are right. After the reveal, pre-confession, so everything stays PG and no trauma. Groovy."
Kara was on her feet before the sentence ended, one arm flung out, sliding herself between the stranger and Lena in a single smooth motion. A fry flew off her plate and landed on the rug. Nobody noticed.
She waited for the instinct that said threat.
It didn't come.
What came instead was something warm and strange and very hard to name, a pull behind her ribs like a song she'd half forgotten. The woman had dark, glossy hair pulled into a hurried ponytail and a jacket that was slightly too big in the shoulders. She tapped at her wrist hologram with the quick, distracted flick of someone who had been doing it all her life.
She looked up, took them in, and beamed, like she'd been expecting exactly this.
"Okay, ladies. I need you both to put these on." She tossed two small metallic discs through the air without looking. Kara caught them out of reflex, one in each hand. "Back of the neck. It's an hour and thirty minutes, there and back, and then you're home. Easy."
"Who are you?" said Lena, from behind Kara's shoulder. Her voice was very even. It was the voice she used for hostile board members. "And how did you get into this building?"
"Technically? I didn't. I'm not in this building yet, I'm just in this part of it." The woman waved a hand. "Look, I know how this sounds. I'll explain what I can. I just need you to trust me for ninety minutes."
"Why should we?"
The woman turned toward the shimmering portal, her back to them, and said, almost casually:
"El Mayarah Teaghlach."
Kara felt it hit her like a quiet shock down her spine.
It was Kryptonian, and it was not. El Mayarah was the old motto of the House of El, stronger together, a phrase she hadn't heard spoken aloud in years. But the second word wasn't Kryptonian at all. It was Irish. Soft, old, lilting. Teaghlach.
Household. Family.
Lena had drawn a sharp breath behind her. Kara glanced back and found her staring at the woman's back, green eyes wide, one hand pressed flat against her sternum as if something there had skipped a beat.
Neither of them said anything.
"Please," said the stranger, not turning around. "They're just disguises. I can't have you looking like yourselves where we're going."
That did it. It was the "please" more than the password. It had a catch in it, small and genuine, the sound of someone asking for something that mattered more than she was letting on.
Kara looked at Lena. Lena looked at Kara.
Then Kara pressed the disc to the back of her neck.
It felt like a cold coin sliding under her skin. Her vision swam, and the room tilted, and when she blinked it settled again, a little wrong.
Lena's eyes widened. "Your hair."
Kara touched it. It had shortened into a soft, practical bob that brushed her jaw. When she caught her reflection in the dark glass of the office window, there was a faint pale scar above her left eyebrow that hadn't been there a moment ago, and her face had settled into a gentler, lined version of itself. She looked, Kara thought, like someone who had spent a lot of years laughing.
"You look good," Lena said, faintly.
"You haven't put yours on."
Lena did. She winced as the disc settled. When it was done, the changes were small, and somehow worse: fine lines at the corners of her eyes, a few silver threads in her dark hair, a soft look of someone who had learned to stop holding herself so tightly.
Then Kara glanced down, and saw her hands.
They were older. Not frail, but weathered, with the softness of age settling over the knuckles. And on her left ring finger sat a thin gold band, worn smooth at the edges from decades of wear.
Her breath stopped.
She looked up and found Lena staring at her own hand with the exact same expression. Lena's band was gold too, set with a single small stone that caught the light, a green so deep it looked like the color of Lena's own eyes.
They looked at each other.
Neither of them said a word.
"Right!" said the black-haired woman briskly, turning back around. "That's the hard part done. I'm Lor— I'm a friend. Hold my wrists."
She took them both, one in each hand, and walked them through the portal before either of them could think of a reason to say no.
They stepped out into a janitor's closet that smelled like bleach and construction paper.
"Okay. Rules." The woman held up three fingers. "One: no questions. I know, I know, but we don't have time. Two: no wandering. And three..." She pointed at Kara. "Especially you. Glasses stay on. The whole time."
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were absolutely going to."
She was right. Kara pushed her glasses further up her nose with a resigned sigh.
"Your only mission," the woman continued, hand on the door, "is to sit in the third row and say two things. 'Woohoo.' And 'Yes, Chloe, we love you.' That's it." Her voice wobbled, just slightly. "The people who should be here can't make it. I just really needed somebody in that row. At least I have it on video."
Kara's heart did something complicated.
"Who is Chloe?" said Lena, very quietly.
"No questions!"
She pushed the door open.
The school gym had been turned into an improvised theatre. Paper snowflakes hung from the basketball hoops. A small stage made of folding risers stood at the front, trimmed with cotton batting and tinsel. Hundreds of parents were packed into rows of metal chairs, holding phones and programs and sleeping toddlers, and the air was warm with whispering.
The woman steered them into the third row, shoulder to shoulder with a man holding a camcorder and a woman fanning herself with a flyer. She dropped into the seat on Kara's other side and clasped her hands in her lap. They were trembling.
The lights went down.
A little spotlight flickered on. A cheerful, off-key piano began to plunk out a Christmas tune. And a line of five-year-olds in paper crowns and tinsel scarves shuffled onto the stage, squinting into the glare, scanning the audience with eyes wide and anxious and hopeful.
Lena wasn't watching the children.
Lena was watching the woman next to Kara.
She had gone completely still. Her face, in the dim light, had softened and brightened like a window opening. She was biting her lower lip, with the exact gesture, Kara noticed, that Lena used when she was trying not to cry in a board meeting.
Strange, thought Kara. That's very strange.
She didn't have time to wonder why. The line of children shuffled forward, and one little girl stepped out of the row: dark hair, a paper crown slightly askew, and eyes so bright and green that Kara felt her stomach drop. The girl squinted into the spotlight, scanned the third row, and found them.
Her whole face lit up.
"That's her," the woman beside Kara whispered, so softly it was barely a breath.
The play was, by all accounts, a triumph.
There was a snowman who forgot his lines, and a reindeer who bowed so low his antlers fell off, and a very small star whose job was to hold a flashlight and who took it extremely seriously. And in the center of it all, belting out her solo with the full-throated confidence of a child who had never once been told she couldn't, stood Chloe.
"Woohoo!" said Kara, a half-second late and much too loud. Heads turned. She sank a little lower in her chair. "Sorry."
The woman beside her made a tiny choked noise. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob.
"Yes, Chloe," she whispered, to no one. "We love you."
Kara swallowed. Something in her chest was pulling tight and warm, and before she could stop herself, she leaned closer and said very softly:
"You have a beautiful daughter."
The woman did not look away from the stage.
"I know," she said.
Kara nodded slowly. Then, because her heart was too full to keep it all in, she turned to Lena, who was frowning at the stage with her whole brain, trying to work out the plot of a Christmas pageant as if it were an engineering problem.
"And you have one too," Kara whispered, gently. "A beautiful one."
Lena glanced at her, distracted, still half watching the snowman. She nodded absently, the way people do when they haven't heard a word.
Kara pressed her lips together and bit back a smile. She had no idea why she'd said it. She had no idea why her eyes were stinging.
The final song ended in a flurry of tinsel. The children shuffled to the front of the stage and waved to the audience with both hands, and every parent in the gym stood up at once in a thunder of applause.
The woman jumped to her feet too, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.
"Okay," she said, voice shaking. "Okay. That was perfect. You were perfect. I'm going to go distract Chloe with some excuse, and you two head back to the closet, and I'll send you—"
She never finished.
There was a sudden gust.
It rushed through the gym like a gentle wind, and rattled the paper snowflakes, and ruffled Lena's hair. And then two very small, very strong arms wrapped tight around Kara's legs.
Kara looked down.
A little girl in a paper crown was grinning up at her, cheeks flushed, eyes sparkling, absolutely beside herself.
"GRANMAS!"
Kara's hand found the little girl's hair before she'd decided to move it.
It was soft and dark and slightly sticky with glitter. Chloe tipped her head back against Kara's palm, beaming up at her with a gap in her front teeth that hadn't been there in the stage lights, and Kara felt something in her chest give way entirely, like a dam she hadn't known she'd built.
"You came," Chloe said again, in a satisfied voice, as if she'd bet someone five dollars on it.
"We did," said Kara, hoarsely.
Granmas.
The word settled over her like a warm blanket, and it took a full second for the rest of it to catch up. Grandmas. The woman at her side, with her green eyes and her dimple and her finger-tapping, wasn't just someone's mother. She was...
Kara's gaze drifted, very slowly, to the woman's face.
The woman was looking back at her. She was wearing the expression of a person who had been caught red-handed, and had decided, on the whole, not to mind.
Oh, thought Kara, again. Oh.
Chloe was already twisting in her grip. "Granma Lena!" she squealed, throwing out her arms, and Lena, who had been blinking at the two of them in growing confusion, made a small, strangled sound as the word finally landed.
Kara watched it travel across her face: confusion, then disbelief, then a slow, dawning wonder that turned her green eyes impossibly wide. Lena looked at the little girl. Then at the woman. Then, very carefully, at the ring on her own aged hand.
Then at Kara.
Kara gave the smallest nod she'd ever given in her life.
Lena's mouth opened. Closed again.
"Chloe," said the woman sharply, catching her daughter by the shoulder before she could launch herself at Lena's knees. "What did I tell you about doing that?"
Chloe froze. "...Doing what?"
"You were on the other side of the room a second ago."
"But Mommy, I took all the precautions!" Chloe's voice rose to an indignant squeak. "I went outside and ran all the way around the back where nobody could see, and I only did it really, really fast, and—"
"Baby, that's still wrong."
"But—"
"There are too many people. There are cameras." The woman crouched down, bringing herself level with her daughter, and her voice dropped into something firm and tender at once. "I know you're excited. I'm excited too. But we talked about this. We are going to be having a very long conversation when we get home."
Chloe's lower lip trembled. Then, with the supreme resilience of a five-year-old, it stopped.
The woman ruffled her hair, soft even in the scolding. "Go say goodbye to your friends. We're getting ice cream on the way back."
"YAY ICE CREAM!" cheered Chloe, and, a half-second later, so did Kara.
"Yay ice cream," said Kara, a little breathless, a little delighted, a little in shock.
The woman straightened up and gave her a flat look. "Not you. You're going back to space. Remember?"
Kara blinked.
"Ooooh," she said. "Right. Space." Her face fell, only a little. She'd been picturing a waffle cone.
Lena's hand found hers, warm and a bit unsteady, and squeezed.
"We'll get some when we get back," Lena said quietly.
Kara glanced down at their joined hands, at two gold bands that matched. She felt her face go warm all the way up to her ears.
"Yay," she whispered, a little brighter.
Chloe, who had been watching this with the sharp, interested eyes of a child who notices everything, grinned a gap-toothed grin and said, in a very loud whisper:
"You're being kissy again, Granmas."
"We are not," said Kara.
"We are absolutely not," said Lena, at exactly the same moment, and both of them turned a deep and identical shade of red.
The woman put a hand over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.
The Closet
They made it back to the janitor's closet before anyone noticed two strangers were missing.
The portal opened on the far wall, shimmering silver, smelling faintly of ozone. The woman stepped in front of it, finally turning to face them, and in the dim light of the supply shelves she looked about thirty, tired, flushed, and radiant.
"Thank you," she said. "I mean it. You have no idea."
"I think we have a little idea," said Lena, dryly.
The woman laughed, wet and startled. "I suppose you do."
"The actual grandparents," Kara said slowly. "The ones stuck in space."
"Traveling back from a space delay. A very annoying one. A rogue comet and some paperwork." The woman scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "They wouldn't have made it in time. And Chloe's been practicing her solo for six weeks, and she'd have noticed. She notices everything. So I did what I always do when I have a problem." She spread her hands. "I borrowed a time machine."
"Does your uncle know?" said Lena.
"Uncle Barry? Oh, he definitely doesn't know," said the woman, with a flicker of a smile. "He owns the time agents. The whole time-travel police, all the badges, all the paperwork. If he finds out, I'm filing my own incident report. He'd say I was breaking rule one."
"Barry runs the time police?" said Kara.
"Eventually." The woman winced. "Forget I said that."
"What's rule one?" asked Lena.
"Don't touch anything." She sighed, and shook her head. "Which is rich, because he's the worst offender in the family."
Kara and Lena exchanged a very quiet look.
"At least," the woman added, brightening, "I have the whole thing on video. They'll be able to see it. And I'm sorry about the cover story. I know it's a lot." She hesitated. "You don't have to tell each other anything. You don't have to do anything. You both just..."
She stopped. She pressed her lips together, and shook her head.
"Never mind. I've already said too much. I should go. Uncle Barry's time-enforcement idiots are going to catch up with me any minute."
"Wait," said Kara.
The woman paused.
"Is she..." Kara's voice caught. "Is Chloe going to be okay?"
The woman's whole face softened.
"She's going to be loud," she said. "And fast. And she's going to ask a lot of questions, and cry when she loses at board games, and be absolutely, completely loved. Every single day." She smiled. It was Kara's smile exactly. "Don't worry. I've got her."
Kara nodded, throat tight.
"Thanks for the help," the woman said again, quieter. "Truly. Bye-bye."
She raised one hand in a little wave.
Then the portal sealed, with a soft pop, and the closet was gone.
The Office
They stood in the middle of Lena's office, next to the couch, with half a sandwich and a scattering of fries still sitting where they'd left them.
Nothing had moved. The clock on the wall read exactly eight minutes since they'd left. Outside the window, National City carried on as if nothing had happened.
The little metal discs popped off the backs of their necks with a soft click and dissolved into silver dust.
Kara looked down at her hands.
They were her own again: young and strong, no gold band, no silver at the knuckles. Her hair brushed her shoulders. She flexed her fingers once, and felt a strange hollow ache where the ring had been.
Across from her, Lena was staring at her own bare hand.
Neither of them spoke for a very long time.
"Well," said Kara eventually, her voice small and rough. "We have a cute kid."
Lena laughed. It cracked in the middle.
"We do." She wiped her eyes, and tried again. "At least we were there. Even if the timing was a little... sideways."
"Sideways," Kara agreed.
They stood there. The air between them felt very full, and very fragile, like a soap bubble that neither of them wanted to be the first to touch.
Pre-confession, thought Kara, remembering the woman's muttering in the office, and understood it at last.
"Kara," said Lena, softly.
"Yeah?"
"Do you think..." Lena stopped. She looked at the six inches of couch cushion they'd left between them at lunch, and a tiny, rueful smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Never mind. Someday, maybe. Not today."
Kara's heart gave a slow, heavy thump.
"Someday," she repeated. "Okay."
"Okay."
"Today," Lena said, brisker now, brushing at her skirt, "there is a promise of ice cream."
Kara's face lit up. "Ice cream."
"I did say."
"You did say."
Lena held out her arm. After a moment, Kara looped hers through it, close enough that their shoulders brushed, and a very small, very hopeful part of her wondered how many more times she'd get to do this.
They walked out of L-Corp together.
In another time
Lorelei stepped out of the same janitor's closet at a school in another year, and found two very familiar women waiting for her.
One of them had her arms crossed. The other was holding a half-eaten bag of fries and trying very hard not to look guilty.
"Lorelei Daniel Luthor-Danvers," said Lena, in the voice she had once used on a boardroom and had now perfected on a daughter. Her green eyes were warm. They were also dangerously bright. "What did your Uncle Barry from the other Earth teach you about messing with time?"
Lorelei winced. "Moms."
"Rule one," said Kara, around a fry.
"I know."
"Don't touch anything."
"I know."
"You touched everything."
"I'm sorry!" Lorelei's voice wobbled. "I'm sorry. It's just that you were stuck, and Chloe was so excited, and I knew it'd be the first time you didn't make it, and I..." She trailed off, and looked at her shoes. "You know you had to be there for Chloe's first play."
Kara's smile was already giving her away.
"We know," she said. "We would have hated to miss her first showtime."
"And we didn't," said Lena, uncrossing her arms. "Not really. Even with all the warning in the world, we were going to be late. So, no, we're not actually mad." She raised an eyebrow. "But you're still grounded for the weekend."
Lorelei blinked. "Mom. I'm thirty-two."
"And you're grounded."
"I have a mortgage."
"You have a mortgage, and a time machine you borrowed without asking," said Lena, serenely. "Grounded."
"She's very good at it," Kara whispered, in a stage whisper. "Don't fight it. I've been grounded for forty years."
"That's fair," Lorelei sighed.
"Anyway, kiddo." Kara opened her arms, fries and all. "Give your moms a hug."
Lorelei was across the closet in half a second.
They held on tight, the three of them, in the cramped, dusty dark between a mop bucket and a stack of folding chairs. Lena's arm was around Lorelei's shoulders. Kara's chin was on top of her head. Nobody said anything for a while, and the muffled sound of a gymnasium full of laughing children drifted through the closet door.
"Tomorrow," said Kara, finally, into her daughter's hair. "We'll see you and Chloe for breakfast."
"Pancakes," Lorelei mumbled.
"Obviously pancakes."
When they finally pulled apart, Lena glanced at the clock on the wall and raised one dark, elegant eyebrow.
"Well, honey," she said. "In this time, exactly five minutes ago, you promised me ice cream."
Kara grinned. It was bright and unguarded and a little lopsided, the grin of a woman who had loved the same person for more than half her life and still couldn't quite believe her luck.
"You dummy," she said, softly. "Let's go."
She looped her arm through Lena's, the same way she had in another office, in another year, and together they walked out of the closet, and through the school, and into the warm bright evening.
Behind them, a little girl's laughter was still echoing across the gym.
It was right on time for showtime.
Fin?