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The Coffee
Kara burst into the CatCo bullpen holding two cups like she'd just discovered fire.
"Guys. Guys. Lena made coffee this morning. With her own hands. And it was perfect. The temperature, the ratio, the little foam leaf. She freehanded the leaf. Who freehands a leaf at 6:47 in the morning? She's brilliant."
James glanced up from his desk. "Kara. Millions of people make coffee every day."
"Not like that."
Winn rolled his chair over, chin in his hand. "You're doing the voice again."
"What voice?"
"The 'Lena breathed and it was a scientific breakthrough' voice."
"I'm just stating facts."
"You know," said James, carefully, in the tone of a man stepping onto thin ice, "people usually only get that excited about a barista when they're, uh... really into the person who made it."
Kara lit up. "I know! She's so good at it! She could open a café. She'd put every café out of business! I'd be so proud."
James opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Winn.
"She sounds like the president of a fan club," said Winn.
"Thank you!" said Kara, delighted, and took a long, reverent sip of her coffee.
The foam leaf stayed intact until the very last drop. She didn't think that was a coincidence.
----
The Email
Alex found her sister in the DEO kitchen, staring at her phone with her whole face glowing.
"She answered my email in under four minutes," Kara whispered. "Four. And she cc'd all the right people without me asking. And she used a semicolon correctly, Alex. A semicolon."
Alex took a slow sip of her own coffee and looked at the ceiling for strength.
"You know normal competent adults exist, right?"
"Not like her."
"Kara." Alex set the mug down. "Are you sure you're not just... I don't know. A little bit fond of her?"
"Of course I'm fond of her." Kara frowned, bewildered. "She's my best friend. I'm fond of lots of people."
"Do you get all pink when you're fond of Winn?"
"Winn doesn't use semicolons."
"Okay, but do you think about Winn when—"
"Winn," said Kara, with great dignity, "once sent me a text that said 'k.' No punctuation. Not even a period. It was very upsetting."
Alex put her face in her hands.
"I'm going to need a minute," she said.
"You can have it," said Kara kindly, and went back to her phone, where the semicolon was still glowing.
----
The Toast
Lena's penthouse smelled faintly of smoke.
"Do not say anything," said Lena.
Kara was standing in the kitchen doorway, a bag of potstickers in one hand and a look of enormous, reverent delight on her face. In front of her, on the counter, sat two slices of toast so thoroughly carbonized they looked like a pair of tiny black bricks.
"They're brilliant," said Kara.
"They're charcoal."
"They're a bold reinterpretation of carbon!" Kara picked one up and tapped it with a fingernail. It rang like a bell. "And you did it at exactly the temperature where it didn't set off the smoke alarm. That's engineering."
"I disabled the smoke alarm," Lena admitted. "In the first thirty seconds."
"That's innovation."
Lena started to laugh. It came out of her helplessly, one of those rare, startled laughs that she never planned and could never quite stop. She leaned against the counter with one hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking, and Kara watched her with the soft, stunned expression of someone seeing the sun come up.
"You're ridiculous," Lena managed.
"I'm supportive."
"You're ridiculous." But her eyes were bright, and her cheeks were pink, and she did not move away when Kara bumped her shoulder gently against hers.
For a moment the kitchen was very quiet.
"You say that to everyone," Lena said, softer. "'Brilliant.' I've heard you say it to the doorman."
"He opened the door very well."
"That's what I mean."
"No," said Kara, after a pause, with a small furrow between her eyebrows, as if she were working out a very strange equation. "I don't think I say it the same way to the doorman."
Lena went very still.
Kara blinked. The furrow deepened for half a second, and then, because she had no idea what she'd just said, it smoothed out again. "Anyway! Potstickers!"
She held up the bag with a triumphant smile.
Lena looked at her for a long moment, hand still pressed to her chest. Then she took the bag.
"Potstickers," she agreed, in a voice that wasn't quite steady.
-----
The Sticky Note
Sam cornered Kara in the L-Corp lobby, arms crossed, an eyebrow raised.
"She left me a sticky note," Kara said, holding it up like evidence in a murder trial. "It says, 'Don't forget to eat.' With a tiny smiley face. Sam. She drew the smiley face with the pen she uses for patent filings. That's multitasking. That's genius-level time management."
"Kara." Sam pinched the bridge of her nose. "That is basic human caretaking."
"Brilliant basic human caretaking."
"When someone is this gone over someone's caretaking..."
"Oh, she's a natural nurturer," Kara said, nodding earnestly. "She'd be an amazing mom. I mean! Not that I... I meant to a houseplant. She'd be an amazing plant mom."
Sam's eyebrow climbed. "A plant mom."
"She has fourteen," said Kara. "She names them after scientists. There's a Marie, and a Rosalind, and a very ambitious fern called Ada."
"Which one's your favorite?"
"Marie."
"Is that the one you water when she's in meetings?"
Kara went rigid. "...I might have watered Marie."
"Uh huh."
"A couple times."
"And has Lena ever mentioned that?"
"She said, 'Marie's looking particularly well lately,'" said Kara, with some pride, "'I can't imagine why.'"
Sam let her head fall back and stared at the lobby ceiling for a long moment.
"I'm going to get a coffee," she said, "and when I get back, I'd like us both to pretend this conversation was more productive."
"I'll pretend," said Kara kindly.
----
The Meeting
Nia sat through an entire board meeting while Kara, in the seat next to her, took notes exclusively on what Lena Luthor's blazer was doing.
10:14 — adjusted left cuff. 10:21 — crossed legs. Room listens harder?? (Frequency?) 10:26 — sipped water. Very decisive.
In the elevator afterward, Nia could stand it no longer.
"Kara," she said, "do you notice anything about how you react when she walks into a room?"
"Yes!" Kara's face brightened. "I get so focused. It's like a superpower. Like heat vision for my attention. Everything else goes kind of blurry and she's just... sharp." She held up a finger. "I think it might be a Kryptonian thing. I should ask J'onn."
"Heat vision," said Nia, faintly. "Right."
"You know what's weird?" Kara leaned against the elevator wall, frowning. "I've been getting these dreams lately. Weird ones. Like, comfy ones. Last night there was a really long hug, and some cake, and I think a tuxedo. Do you think it means anything?"
Nia very carefully did not say, Kara, I'm a dreamer. I know exactly what it means. I had the same dream last Tuesday.
"I think," said Nia, "it might mean you're going to a wedding."
Kara's face lit up. "Ooooh. Maybe Alex and Kelly!"
"Sure," said Nia, and pressed the button for the lobby very gently with one finger. "Maybe."
----
The Phone Call
"Oh sweetheart," said Eliza, over the phone, in the warm, patient voice of a woman who had once successfully raised two teenagers, "you sound so happy."
"I am!" Kara was sitting cross-legged on her couch with a pillow in her lap. "Lena helped me with my taxes. She found a deduction nobody's found in thirty years. She was so good at it, Mom, you should have seen her face when she found it, she did this little... this little thing with her eyebrow..."
"Mm-hm."
"And her handwriting is so neat."
"Kara."
"And she remembered that I don't like pickles on my burgers, and she didn't ask, she just knew, and..."
"Sweetheart." Eliza's voice was soft. "You sound exactly the way your father used to sound when he talked about me."
A pause.
"Aw," said Kara. "That's so sweet! He must have thought you were really good at... astronomy?"
There was a very long, very loving silence on the other end of the line.
"Yes, honey," said Eliza. "I'm sure that's what it was."
----
The Parking Spot
It began, as most disasters do, as an experiment.
"I'm going to test a theory," Kara announced, to nobody in particular, from the passenger seat of James's car. "I think I've been overestimating the impressiveness of ordinary skills."
James squinted at her. "Okay..."
"Like parallel parking." She gestured at a tight space between two parked trucks. "Do it. I'll watch."
James shrugged, put the car in reverse, and slid neatly into the spot with a single clean maneuver.
Kara watched with an expression of calm, scientific focus.
"Nice," she said, finally.
"Thanks?"
"I feel nothing."
"...Great."
"Interesting. Very interesting." She made a note in her phone. "Let's try another one."
An hour later, at CatCo, Lena Luthor pulled up to the curb in her sleek black car, took one look at the impossible gap between a delivery van and a fire hydrant, and tucked herself into it with all the grace of a ballerina folding her arms.
Kara, standing on the sidewalk with her phone out, made a sound like a kettle.
James, beside her, stared.
"Okay," said Kara, in a small, strangled voice. "That's... fine. That's a data point."
"Kara."
"I just think maybe I have a very specific, uh, a very specific kind of..."
"Kara."
"...I need to talk to Brainy," said Kara, and walked straight into a lamppost.
----
The Intervention
It took a group effort.
They sat Kara down on the couch in the DEO lounge, with the lights turned up and a plate of potstickers on the table as an emotional bribe. Alex, James, Winn, Sam, Nia, and, standing at the front of the room with a projector remote, Brainy, who had prepared a slide deck titled Statistical Probability That Kara Danvers Is Experiencing Romantic Attachment Rather Than Pure Intellectual Admiration.
"I didn't know it was an intervention," said Kara, looking around nervously.
"You asked me to run an analysis," said Brainy.
"I asked you to look into my parking anomaly."
"Yes. I looked." Brainy clicked the remote. The first slide appeared: a bar chart, entirely one color. "You have called Lena Luthor 'brilliant' forty-seven times in the last month for the following actions: tying her shoe, parallel parking, remembering your middle name, sighing, existing in soft lighting, and once for blinking in a particularly symmetrical fashion."
"That was a very symmetrical blink!"
Alex held up a hand. "Let him finish."
"You have watered her houseplants on a minimum of nine occasions. You have taken nineteen pages of notes on her blazer. You have, on three separate occasions, walked into a lamppost while watching her walk." Another click. "You have described her 'little eyebrow thing' to your mother. You told a doorman he was 'not as good as Lena at opening doors.'"
"That's true," said Kara, weakly.
"The correlation between these behaviors and the presence of Ms. Luthor is 0.98. The p-value is approximately zero." Brainy lowered the remote. "Correlation is not causation. But in this case, I would like to formally propose a causal mechanism."
"Brainy," said Kara. "Please."
"You are in love with her."
Silence.
A very long silence. Alex had her fist pressed against her mouth. Winn was visibly vibrating. Sam had closed her eyes with the serene expression of a woman at long last receiving justice.
"The brilliance is real," Brainy went on, gently. "She is a genius. She is also, as you have noted, extremely good at toast. But the reason everything she does feels extraordinary is also real, and it has nothing to do with her IQ. Both things are true. You have simply been refusing to look at the second one."
Kara stared at the floor.
She stared at it for a very long time.
Then, very quietly, she said:
"...Oh."
"There it is," breathed Winn.
"Oh," said Kara, again, a little louder, and her whole face went slowly, spectacularly pink. "Wait. Is that why my stomach does the thing?"
"Yes," said six people at once.
"The thing," said Kara, in rising horror. "The thing where I see her and it feels like I swallowed a bird? I thought that was hunger!"
Alex slid to the floor, laughing so hard she wheezed. Sam covered her face. Winn handed a crumpled twenty-dollar bill to James without a word, and James accepted it with great solemnity.
"You had a bet?" said Kara.
"Not a bet," said James. "A pool."
"For how long?"
"I had Christmas," said Nia.
"I had Valentine's Day," said Sam.
"I had last year," said Alex, from the floor.
"Oh my god," said Kara, and slid very slowly down the couch until only her glasses and the top of her head were visible. "Oh my god."
Brainy clicked to the final slide. It read, in large, friendly letters:
CONGRATULATIONS.
----
The Door
Lena opened her apartment door that evening to find Kara standing in the hallway with a paper bag of potstickers and an expression Lena had never seen before: soft, a little dazed, and completely unguarded.
"Hi," said Kara.
"Hi." Lena tilted her head. "You look like someone just told you the sky is blue."
"Something like that."
"Something happened."
"Several somethings." Kara stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and for once didn't fill the space with words. She stood in the soft glow of the entryway and simply looked at Lena, the way she always had, like she was the most remarkable thing in any room. This time, she let herself understand why.
Lena's breath caught.
"I think," said Kara, carefully, "I've been calling you brilliant for a lot of reasons. And only some of them have to do with your brain."
The potstickers hung forgotten in her hand.
"I told the doorman," Kara added, a little faintly. "About the thing with your eyebrow. And Marie. I've been watering Marie. I should probably confess that."
"Kara."
"Yes?"
"I know about Marie." Lena's voice shook on the edge of a laugh. "I've known about Marie for months."
"Oh."
"And Jess keeps a spreadsheet."
"Oh no."
"Of every time you've called me brilliant. In my presence, or reported to me by third parties." Lena took a small step closer. Her eyes were bright, and very green, and very soft. "She had to start a second tab."
Kara laughed, helpless, and then stopped, because Lena had put one hand against her chest, right over her heart.
"I was waiting," said Lena, quietly, "for you to catch up."
"I'm so slow."
"You're not slow." A small, tender smile. "You're just thorough."
Kara set the potstickers down on the table, very carefully, as if they were made of glass. Then she took Lena's face in both hands, so gently it made Lena's heart skip, and kissed her.
It was soft at first. Warm, and a little shy, with the careful wonder of someone opening a door she'd walked past for years. And then Lena's hand curled into the front of her sweater, and the kiss deepened, slow and sweet and certain, until the world went quiet and bright and the only sound was two people breathing in the same small space.
When they finally broke apart, Kara's voice was wrecked and wondering.
"Okay," she whispered. "Yeah. You're brilliant at that too."
Lena laughed against her mouth, low and bright and delighted.
"Only that?"
Kara's smile turned shy and warm at once.
"I'm willing to collect more data."
"Then I'll clear my calendar," said Lena, and pulled her in again.
----
Epilogue: The Group Chat
Six phones lit up at 9:47 p.m.
There was a single message from Kara, with no punctuation and no context:
you were right
The group chat exploded.
ALEX: I'M CRYING
WINN: WHO HAD TONIGHT
NIA: ME, ACTUALLY. I HAD A FEELING.
JAMES: I'M NOT PAYING OUT UNTIL I SEE A RING
SAM: Congratulations. I need a drink.
BRAINY: I would like it noted that I predicted this at a 97.4% confidence interval.
ALEX: BRAINY. NO ONE ASKED.
BRAINY: I will be adding it to the deck.
Across the city, in a quiet apartment with a bag of potstickers cooling on the table, a woman who had once told the entire elevator that her best friend was "a genius for how she folded a napkin" lay curled against another woman's shoulder and didn't pick up her phone.
She didn't need to tell anyone.
She already knew.
(By Monday, of course, she'd told the doorman.)
Fin.