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Kara and Lena
It started, as most things did with them, without either of them noticing.
In the beginning, it was always full names, careful and polite.
"Thank you, Lena." "Of course, Kara."
Even after the late nights, and the shared takeout, and the way Kara's shoulder had begun to fit perfectly under Lena's chin on the couch, they stayed formal. As though the names themselves were a last thin piece of professional distance, and neither of them was quite ready to drop it.
Jess noticed first.
She noticed because she was the sort of person who noticed. She had a spreadsheet, a very small and discreet one, in a locked folder labeled Q3 Contingency, and one of its columns was titled Forms of Address. Under it, in neat gray text, was a single entry that had not changed in fourteen months.
Kara. Lena. Kara. Lena.
She added a note beside it, in the margin, in a very small font.
Watch this space.
Kar and Lee
It happened on a Tuesday, in the passenger seat of Lena's car, at a red light on Fifth and Main.
Kara was half asleep. It had been a very long day. She had a smudge of ink on her thumb and a paper bag of potstickers in her lap, and she was slumped sideways against the window with her glasses crooked and her eyes closed, and the sound of the engine was a slow, warm hum.
"Night, Lee," she mumbled.
She did not realize the syllable had left her mouth until it was already gone.
Lena went very still at the wheel.
The light turned green.
Nobody honked. It was a very quiet street. Lena sat with both hands on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield at the empty road, and for four whole seconds she did not move at all.
Then, softly, she drove on.
Neither of them said a word for the rest of the trip.
The next morning, she handed Kara a coffee across the desk, with the exact amount of foam and the little cinnamon sprinkle that Kara liked. She did not look up. She was very busy with a stack of papers.
"Morning, Kar," she said, soft as a secret.
Kara's hand stopped halfway to the cup.
"Morning," she said, a little too quickly.
Neither of them mentioned it.
They also never went back to the full names when it was just the two of them.
In a locked folder labeled Q3 Contingency, an entry changed.
Kar. Lee.
Jess looked at it for a long time. She did not smile. She took a very small sip of tea, and her eyes were suspiciously bright, and she pressed the Save key with great ceremony.
Honey
Months later, the pet names arrived the way spring does in National City: suddenly, and all at once.
Kara started it.
She was standing in the doorway of Lena's office, with her coat over one arm, watching a hostile board member being dismantled over video call with surgical precision and absolute calm. It took eleven minutes. By the end, the man on the screen had gone gray and was gripping his own desk, and Lena was reclining in her chair with her hands folded, looking like a very elegant cat who had eaten a very large canary.
The screen went dark.
"You're terrifying," said Kara, almost reverently. "Honey."
Lena looked up.
There was a long pause.
Something warm and startled moved behind her eyes, a flicker of light like a candle catching. She opened her mouth. She closed it again. Her fingers tightened on the arm of the chair, and a faint pink flush crept up the side of her neck.
"Thank you," she said, in a very small, very careful voice.
Kara went the color of a tomato, and fled.
At the CatCo front desk, in the elevator, and in the break room, Cat Grant's assistant would later insist that the sound she heard was absolutely not a squeak.
It took Cat Grant about nine hours.
She heard it at the end of an afternoon editorial meeting, when Kara, rushing out, called over her shoulder to Lena, who was waiting in the lobby: "Be right there, honey!"
Cat did not look up from her papers.
"Danvers," she said.
Kara froze in the doorway. "Ms. Grant."
"Is that a new pet name?"
"It's, uh. It's just a, I say it to, to lots of people..."
"Do you." Cat turned a page. "Do you say it to the mailroom?"
"...No."
"To Mr. Olsen?"
"No."
"Then I suspect," said Cat, serenely, "that it's not the sort of thing you say to lots of people." She finally looked up, and her expression was very kind, and very sharp. "I would just like it noted, Kiera, that in this building I am the only one who gets to call people 'honey.' I find it works well for intimidation."
"Yes, Ms. Grant."
"You may keep yours. It suits."
Kara bolted.
Cat waited until the door had clicked shut. Then she picked up her pen, and for just a moment, a small, private, entirely unprofessional smile crossed her face.
Darling
Darling came a week later, and it was Lena's.
She did not say it by accident. She never did anything by accident. She was a woman who had spent her entire life weighing words, and this one she had been holding back for months, turning it over in her mind, choosing the moment.
It was a Thursday night.
Kara was at the door of the penthouse, half in and half out, with her cape bundled under one arm. There had been a fire in the east end of the city, and a collapsed warehouse, and a very long evening of hauling people out of the rubble. She had a smear of soot across one cheekbone. She was swaying a little on her feet.
"I'm going back," she said. "There are still, they think there might be two more..."
Lena caught her wrist.
It was a light touch. She had not moved quickly. She simply stepped forward, and wrapped her fingers around the soft inside of Kara's arm, and held on.
"Come back to me," she said, in a voice so gentle that Kara almost didn't hear it. "In one piece, darling."
Kara stood very still.
She looked at Lena's hand. She looked at Lena's face. The evening light from the window lay across her cheekbone, soft and amber, and her eyes were enormous, and very green, and a little bit afraid.
"I will," said Kara.
She flew home faster that night than she ever had before.
After that, it was constant.
Honey when Lena was soft. Darling when Kara was reckless. Sometimes both in the same breath, tangled together like they had always belonged that way, in the kitchen, in the car, in the dark.
Honey, did you take your vitamins?
Darling, those are not shoes for a rescue.
Honey, I love you, but you cannot eat that.
Darling, please put me down. I am in the middle of a meeting.
Brainy, who was monitoring a routine communications channel, logged a seventy percent increase in the use of confectionery-adjacent endearments. He did not report it. He was a being of great discretion. He simply wrote it in his private notes, under a heading that read Humans: Curious Rituals, and drew a small, hopeful heart.
Lillian Luthor caught it at dinner.
She had been invited for her usual monthly meal. She sat at the head of the table in a gray silk suit, cutting a piece of fish with surgical precision, and listened to her daughter say: "Darling, would you pass the salt?" across the table to the blonde reporter at her left.
Lillian set down her fork.
She looked at Lena. She looked at Kara. She looked, for several seconds, at the salt.
"Darling," she said, in a very dry voice.
Lena froze, with the salt shaker halfway across the table.
"I do believe," said Lillian, "that's mine."
"Mother..."
"I used it on you for twenty years. It was meant as a warning. I did not realize it was transferable." She picked up her wine, and sipped, and her mouth curved, very slightly. "Do carry on. I find the evolution fascinating."
Kara slid so low in her chair that only her eyes were visible over the edge of the table.
Sugartits
It had begun, as all very bad ideas do, at two o'clock in the morning.
It was a night in early spring. They had been up late, watching a terrible movie about an alien invasion, in which the aliens were clearly several men in rubber suits. Lena had come in from the bathroom in a silk robe, a deep green one, which fell to her knees and made her look like an extremely expensive painting. She had stopped in the doorway, with her hair loose and her face soft with sleep, and said, "Are you still watching this?"
And Kara, who was lying on the couch under four blankets, with a bowl of ice cream balanced on her stomach and her brain at the lowest point of its entire circadian cycle, had looked up at her, and said, in a voice that she would regret for the rest of her natural life:
"You look like sugar."
Lena had blinked.
"Sugar."
"A sugar... person. A sugar..." Kara's brain, in a stunning feat of malfunction, had spat out the first available word. "Sugartits."
There had been a very long silence.
Then Lena had put both hands over her mouth and started to laugh.
She had laughed until she had to sit down on the arm of the couch. She had laughed until she cried. She had laughed for so long that Kara, who had initially been terrified, had begun, helplessly, to laugh too. They had spent a full ten minutes wheezing at each other in the dark, with the television still flickering in the corner.
It was supposed to be a one-time thing.
It was supposed to be private.
It lived in the bedroom, in whispers and giggles, in the soft, silly, sacred hours after midnight, for four months. It was a small, ridiculous, secret treasure, and nobody else knew it existed.
Then came the Thursday.
It was a completely ordinary Thursday.
Alex had stopped by the apartment unannounced, with Thai food and every intention of complaining about DEO paperwork. She used her spare key. She walked in. She froze.
Kara was in the kitchen, with her arms around Lena from behind, chin hooked over her shoulder, pressing slow, lazy kisses to the side of her neck, while Lena tried, and failed, to stir a pot of pasta.
In the sweetest, softest, most lovesick voice Alex had ever heard from her sister, Kara sighed:
"Mmm. Love you, Sugartits."
The wooden spoon clattered into the pot.
Alex made a noise like a dying goose.
Lena's entire face went scarlet. Kara's followed half a second later.
"I, that was, that was private," Kara stammered.
Alex pointed at her with a container of pad thai like it was a weapon. "I have known you your entire life. I have heard you say 'I love you' to this woman in twelve different languages. I have walked in on things I can never unsee. And somehow, that is the one that is going to kill me."
Lena buried her face in her hands. "It was a joke. Once. It was supposed to be a joke."
"It slipped," Kara whispered, mortified.
Alex set the food on the counter. She turned on her heel. She walked, very slowly and very steadily, out of the apartment, down the hall, and into the elevator. They could still hear her muttering "sugartits" in pure existential despair all the way down.
The door closed.
The kitchen was silent.
They never spoke of it again.
(Kara still said it sometimes. Only when the door was locked.)
Alex Danvers did not recover quickly.
She made it all the way to the DEO before the full horror settled in. She sat at her desk, stared at a mission report for eleven straight minutes, and then opened the group chat titled Emergency Only (No Exceptions).
Alex: I need to bleach my brain
Alex: permanently
Alex: does anyone know a guy
Winn replied first.
Winn: what happened
Winn: is it alien
Winn: is it Lex
Winn: is it both
Alex typed with the energy of a woman who had seen too much.
Alex: my sister just called Lena Luthor "Sugartits"
Alex: in the kitchen
Alex: while spooning her from behind
Alex: I can never unhear it
Alex: I am no longer a person
The chat went silent for a full forty seconds.
Then:
Nia: I'm sorry
Nia: sugartits???
James: I refuse to believe this
Winn: I need the exact pronunciation for science
Brainy: I have already begun a linguistic analysis of the term's affectionate versus objectifying connotations. Preliminary results are... concerning.
Alex turned her phone face-down and considered early retirement.
At the apartment, Kara and Lena had not moved from the kitchen.
Lena still had her face in her hands. Kara kept opening her mouth and closing it again like a fish that had personally invented shame.
"I am so sorry," Kara finally whispered. "It was supposed to stay in the bedroom. It was a private joke. One time. You were wearing that silk robe and I got stupid."
Lena's shoulders started shaking.
Kara panicked. "Are you crying? Lee, I'm..."
Lena lifted her head. She was laughing. Quiet, helpless, completely undone laughter that made her eyes water.
"You called me Sugartits in front of your sister," she managed, between breaths. "Alex 'I-carry-a-gun-for-a-living' Danvers. And then she just... left the Thai food and walked out."
Kara covered her face. "She's never going to speak to me again."
"She's going to speak to everyone," Lena corrected, still laughing. "We're never living this down."
They stood there for a long moment, forehead to forehead, both red and ridiculous, until Kara mumbled into Lena's shoulder:
"...still love you, Sugartits."
Lena pinched her side. "You're banned from that word for thirty days."
"Twenty."
"Twenty-five. Final offer."
Kara kissed the corner of her mouth, soft and apologetic. "Deal."
Alex lasted exactly six days before the word escaped containment.
It happened during family dinner at Eliza's. Kara was reaching for the mashed potatoes. Alex, who had been side-eyeing her all evening, finally snapped.
"Pass the gravy, Sugartits."
The table went dead quiet.
Eliza blinked. "I'm sorry, what did you just call your sister?"
Kara turned the color of the tomatoes in the salad. Lena calmly took a sip of wine and said nothing, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
Alex pointed her fork like a prosecutor. "She started it. She called Lena that. In my hearing range. I am a victim."
Eliza looked between them, then at Lena, then back at Kara.
"I see," she said carefully. "Well. As long as it's affectionate."
Kara made a noise of pure despair and face-planted into her napkin.
Lena reached over, patted her hair, and murmured just loud enough for Alex to hear:
"Don't worry, darling. I'll protect you from the mean sister."
Alex threw a dinner roll at them both.
By the following week, the entire Superfriends group had weaponized it.
Winn had a custom alert on his phone that played a tiny sugar-cube sound whenever Kara texted the group chat.
Nia started a private poll: Best pet name escalation: Honey / Darling / Sugartits / Other (please specify).
Brainy prepared a thirteen-slide presentation on the historical use of confectionery-based endearments across human cultures, and ended it with a single image of a sugar cube wearing sunglasses.
Kara tried to ban the word in every group setting.
It only made them worse.
The only place the name remained sacred was behind closed doors.
Late at night, when the city was quiet and Lena was soft and warm against her, Kara would press a kiss to her collarbone and whisper it like a secret that still belonged only to them.
Lena never banned it there.
She just smiled into the dark, curled closer, and answered the only way that ever mattered:
"I love you too, you absolute menace."
And somewhere across town, Alex Danvers woke up in a cold sweat for reasons she refused to discuss with anyone.
Girlfriend, Fiancée
There was a small, slow, beautiful stretch of months in which the names shifted again.
It happened at a gala, the first time.
Lena was across the ballroom, deep in conversation with a pair of senators, when a man in a tuxedo approached Kara with a glass of champagne and a very practiced smile.
"I couldn't help noticing you've been watching Ms. Luthor all evening," he said. "Are you a friend?"
"I'm her girlfriend," said Kara.
She did not blink. She did not stammer. She said it the way a person says her own name, simply and plainly and without apology, and it was only afterward that she realized she had not said it before.
The man's smile faded. "Ah. I see."
"Do you?"
"Yes, quite."
"Good." Kara smiled at him, brightly. "Enjoy the champagne."
Across the room, Lena, who had perfect hearing and an excellent sense of timing, lost the thread of her sentence entirely.
"Girlfriend," she repeated, under her breath, in the middle of a senatorial speech.
"I'm sorry?" said the senator.
"Nothing." She smiled radiantly. "Do go on."
The next shift was a ring.
It was not a grand moment. There was no violin, no kneeling, no rose petals. It was a Sunday morning, in the kitchen, and Kara was making pancakes in an old T-shirt, with her hair in a messy knot and flour on her nose. Lena was at the counter, reading the paper. She looked up, and Kara was looking at her, with the oddest expression.
"What?" said Lena.
"I just realized," said Kara slowly, "that I can't imagine a morning without you."
"That's a very sweet thing to say."
"I mean it."
"I know."
"I mean it in a, like, permanent way."
Lena set the paper down.
She looked at Kara. She looked at the pancake, which was burning, and at the ridiculous flour-dusted nose, and at the plain gold ring that had somehow appeared in Kara's other hand, held out in a wobbly, nervous palm, as though she had taken it out of her pocket without quite deciding to.
"Is that," said Lena, in a very small voice.
"I was going to do it properly," said Kara. "I had a plan. There were going to be candles. But you're standing there, and the pancake's on fire, and I just, I..."
"Kara."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"I haven't even asked."
"It's yes," said Lena, and she was laughing, and crying, and halfway across the kitchen. "It's yes. The answer's yes. The pancake's on fire."
"Oh, no," said Kara, and they both lunged for the stove.
The pancake was lost.
The kiss was not.
After that, it was my fiancée.
It was my fiancée, Lena Luthor, at the DEO, to a man who had been trying for three months to get her number. It was my fiancée's company, in a CatCo interview, with a smile so bright it hurt. It was my fiancée has a very good opinion of you, to a rude waiter, and it was my fiancée, in a loud and happy voice, to a perfectly innocent barista, who had only asked how she took her coffee.
"I think she's trying it on," said Lena, to Jess.
"She's testing the sound," said Jess, serenely. "It's a very normal phase."
"She said it to a parking meter."
"It was a very friendly parking meter."
Wife
They were married on a rooftop at sunset, small and private, with the people who already knew.
It was the rooftop of the L-Corp building, the same one with the balcony, a wide and quiet terrace hung with strings of white lights. Jess had arranged the flowers. Sam had arranged the chairs. Cat Grant had been asked to officiate, and had accepted with great condescension and an immediate offer to rewrite the vows.
Eliza cried in the front row.
Lillian sat beside her, in a gray silk suit and a very good hat, looking out at the city with an expression of grim, dignified calm. When Lena walked down the aisle, in a simple white dress, with her hair loose and her eyes shining, Lillian's hand tightened, once, on the arm of her chair.
"Darling," she whispered, very quietly, as her daughter passed.
Lena's step faltered.
She looked at her mother.
Lillian looked straight ahead.
But she was smiling.
Alex was the best woman.
She had volunteered. She had taken the job very seriously. She had spent six weeks drafting a speech and had rehearsed it, privately, into a mirror, while repeating to herself the mantra no sugartits, no sugartits, no sugartits.
She stood at the front of the little terrace, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a crumpled index card in the other, and cleared her throat.
"I've known Kara Danvers my entire life," she began.
A rustle of laughter.
"I've watched her do some incredible things. She's saved this city, more than once. She's saved me, much more than once. But the most impressive thing she has ever done..." Her voice caught, and she paused, and took a breath. "Is find someone who sees her. All of her. The cape, and the glasses, and the nonsense. Someone who looks at her, and understands exactly who she is, and loves her anyway."
She turned, and looked at Lena.
"Lena, you are the best thing that has ever happened to my sister. You are also the reason I now require therapy. I'd like it known that I regret nothing."
Laughter rippled across the terrace.
"So please raise a glass," said Alex, lifting hers, "to my sister, and my sister-in-law. May you live long, and be happy, and keep it..." She stopped.
She glanced at the card.
She glanced at the crowd.
Her mouth twitched.
"...discreet," she finished, in a heroic voice. "To the happy couple."
"To the happy couple!" cried the crowd.
Kara had gone beet red, and Lena was shaking with silent laughter, and Brainy, near the back, was holding up a small card that read SUGAR CUBE SUNGLASSES with an expression of dignified triumph.
Later that night, tangled together in the dark of their bedroom, with the lights of the city drifting softly across the ceiling, Lena traced the new band on Kara's finger.
It was a plain, bright circle, warm from her skin. She turned it, very gently, in the light. She had not stopped looking at it since the ceremony.
"Hi, wife," she whispered, almost shy.
Kara's smile was slow and luminous.
She kissed the corner of Lena's mouth, and answered, soft as forever,
"Hi, wife."
And that was the one that stayed.
(Fin)