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Kara Danvers had never been sick a day in her life on Earth.
That record ended on a Thursday, under a sky the color of wet concrete.
The pest had been small, iridescent, and vicious. It moved like liquid mercury through the vents of the DEO, and every time Kara thought she had destroyed the last of them, it split in two and came at her again. She fought for three hours. She punched, and froze, and herded, and the containment fields kept failing. When it was finally over, the medbay was wrecked. The glass was cracked. The solar bed, her one safe place to recharge, was a blackened crater of melted alloy.
Her skin felt like paper.
She had burned through every drop of sunlight in her cells. For the first time since she was thirteen, she was completely, terrifyingly human.
"Go home," said Alex, steadying her by the elbow. "There's nothing left here to put you in. Rest. Eat. Sit by a window. The sun will..." She glanced up at the ceiling, where the rain was coming down like a thrown bucket. "...okay, the sun will come out eventually."
"I'm fine," said Kara.
She was swaying.
"You're not."
"I just need a minute."
"You need a week. Take the cab. Don't fly. Don't even think about flying."
Kara took the cab.
It was raining so hard the streets had become shallow rivers. Water sheeted down the windows. There was not a single ray of light in the whole gray sky, only a heavy, low, sullen lid of cloud that pressed down over National City like a hand. She dragged herself up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, stopping twice to lean on the wall and catch her breath.
When she finally pushed open the door, the rain stopped.
Just like that. Mid-drop. As if the weather had been waiting for the punchline.
She stood in her doorway, dripping, and looked out the window at the sky. The clouds had not moved. They sat there, dense and unbroken, perfectly useless.
"Really?" she said, to nobody.
She made it as far as the couch before the first real cough tore out of her chest.
----
By the time the fever arrived, she could barely lift her head.
It was a strange, awful, unfamiliar thing. Her body, which had never needed to build antibodies for anything as ordinary as the flu, folded like a house of cards. Everything ached. Her bones. Her joints. The muscles along her spine. Her throat felt lined with broken glass. She shivered so hard her teeth clicked together, and she dragged every blanket she owned into a lopsided nest on the couch, and still could not get warm.
Is this what it's like? she thought, dimly. Is this what everyone feels, all the time?
She did not know whether to be fascinated or appalled.
Somebody knocked.
It took her a very long time to understand what the sound was. Then she remembered, in a hazy, sluggish way, that there was a world outside her apartment, and that people lived in it.
She crawled.
She did not walk to the door. She did not have it in her. She slid off the couch, and made it to her hands and knees, and went across the floor like a very large and very unhappy toddler. When she reached the door, she leaned her whole shoulder against the wood, and used it to haul herself upright.
Her fingers fumbled at the lock.
It took three tries.
When it finally opened, Lena Luthor was on the other side.
She was standing in the hall in a soft cream sweater and a pair of dark jeans, with her hair a little windblown from the weather that had just stopped. In one hand she held a paper bag, and through the top of it Kara could see the unmistakable shapes of ice-cream pints. She looked nervous, and shy, and very slightly hopeful, in a way that Kara had never once seen within the glass walls of L-Corp.
Movie night, thought Kara.
Oh no.
I forgot.
"Kara?" said Lena.
Her smile died.
Her eyes went over Kara's face, the flushed cheeks, the shaking hands, the way she was clinging to the doorframe like the last solid thing in the world. Her eyebrows drew together.
"God," she said. "You look..."
"I'm so sorry," Kara rasped.
It came out like gravel. She tried again. "I should have called. I got exposed to something at work. I'm a mess. You don't have to stay, really, I'm fine, we can reschedule. I don't want you to catch it."
"I should have called first," said Lena, at the same moment.
They stopped.
They looked at each other.
"You were apologizing to me," said Lena, bewildered.
"You were apologizing to me."
"I am sorry. I didn't think. I'm so used to just showing up at people's..." She stopped. She had never, in fact, shown up at anybody's. She did not know why she had said it. "I should have texted."
"It's fine," said Kara, and her knees gave out.
Lena caught her.
She was not expecting the weight. Kara was a good deal heavier than she looked, and for a moment, they swayed together in the doorway, like a pair of dancers who had forgotten the steps. Lena got an arm around her ribs, and the bag of ice cream swung wildly, and a pint hit the floor and rolled off down the hall.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I've got you. Sit."
"I can..."
"Sit."
Kara sat.
She did it mostly because her legs chose that moment to stop working altogether. She folded onto the couch in a miserable heap. The blankets were tangled around her. She did not have the strength to fix them.
Lena stood in the middle of the room.
She looked at the nest of blankets. She looked at the pile of unopened mail, and the cold mug of tea, and the rain-soaked jacket on the floor. She looked at Kara, who was shaking in the lamplight, with her glasses crooked and her cheeks flushed and her hair plastered to her temples.
For a moment, she looked utterly, helplessly lost.
Then she squared her shoulders, the way she did before walking into a hostile boardroom, and something in her face settled into determination.
"Right," she said. "Let's begin."
----
Lena Luthor had never taken care of anyone in her life.
She had been the child who got sick and was left alone, with a glass of water and instructions not to disturb anyone. She had learned early that needing things made people leave. She had never been on this side of it. She had never been the one who was expected to stay.
So she did what she always did when she did not know the procedure.
She researched.
"I'm just going to use the bathroom," she said, and shut herself in.
She ran the tap. She leaned against the sink with her phone in both hands, and typed, with enormous speed, how to care for someone with the flu. She found an article. Then another. Then thirty. She read them all in four minutes, with her lips moving.
Fluids. Rest. Fever management. Monitor for signs of dehydration. Seek medical attention if the fever exceeds 103. Avoid alcohol. Do not give aspirin to children. Honey, ginger, steam...
"Honey," she muttered. "Honey. Right."
She saved the page. She saved eight others. She opened a note on her phone titled PROTOCOL: KARA and began, with enormous care, to type.
When she came out, Kara was staring blankly at the ceiling.
"Were you texting?" she croaked.
"I was consulting."
"About what?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Lena, I think I'm going to die."
"You're not going to die."
"I've never felt this bad."
"You have the flu."
"I've never had the flu."
"Never?"
"I don't get sick," said Kara, with ferocious pride, and then coughed so hard that she nearly fell off the couch.
Lena stared at her.
She had known Kara for a few months, and in all that time, in all the late nights and early mornings, in the rain and the cold and the long gray winter, she had never once heard her sneeze. Not once. She had assumed that she was a very robust person. She had privately suspected she was a robot.
"I've been wondering about that," said Lena slowly. "You've never taken a sick day. Not one."
"I'm very healthy."
"You're alarmingly healthy."
"It's a gift," said Kara, with dignity, and sneezed. It was a small, startled, tentative sneeze, and she looked at the tissue in her hand with an expression of astonished betrayal.
"Is that... normal?" she whispered.
"It's a sneeze, Kara."
"It came out of me."
"That's generally how they work."
"It's horrible."
"I'll get the thermometer," said Lena, who was dangerously close to laughing.
-----
She found it on the third try.
It was in the bathroom drawer, at the very bottom, beneath an unopened box of bandages, a single mismatched sock, an expired coupon for a car wash, and an old birthday card from Alex. It was an ancient digital thing, with a yellowed screen and a tiny rubber tip, and when she pressed the button it beeped, once, with a note of deep skepticism.
She carried it to the couch like a surgeon carrying a scalpel.
"Open," she said.
"I can do it myself."
"You're shaking too hard."
"I am not..."
"Kara. Open."
Kara opened.
Lena slid the thermometer carefully under her tongue. Then she sat on the edge of the cushion, and held her wrist, and checked her watch, with a grave, intent expression, as though she were monitoring a rocket launch.
Kara watched her over the top of the thermometer.
"Whuh aw ew doing?" she mumbled.
"Taking your pulse."
"Whuh?"
"The article said to."
The thermometer beeped.
Lena pulled it out. She squinted at the screen. Her face went through several stages in rapid succession, and ended somewhere near alarm.
"One hundred and two point four," she said.
"Is that bad?"
"It's... elevated."
"Am I dying?"
"No. It's... I think it's..." She bit her lip. "Hold on."
She pulled out her phone.
She searched for four seconds. Then she put the phone down, very carefully, face down, on the coffee table, and clasped both hands in her lap, with the stiff, composed look of a woman who had just read something and decided not to share.
"It's elevated," she said. "That's all."
"Lena."
"It's under a hundred and three."
"Lena, what does the article say?"
"The article says to call a doctor above a hundred and three."
"And?"
"And we are not there yet."
"We're close, though."
"We are monitoring," said Lena, firmly, and picked up the thermometer again, as if daring it to say another word.
-----
She did not know which soup was correct.
She had assumed there would be one, a standard, an official recipe, the sort that every sensible person knew in their bones. But the internet gave her chicken noodle, and miso, and a Greek lemon thing, and a Vietnamese broth that required eleven hours. She ordered all of them. She did not trust a single one.
"I'm not hungry," said Kara.
"You have to eat."
"I really, really am not."
"Kara."
"I feel sick."
"You are sick. That's why we're eating."
The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. Three separate delivery men arrived within the same four minutes, each holding a steaming white bag, each staring at the CEO of L-Corp in a soft cream sweater with the dazed expression of a man who has walked into the wrong dimension.
She tipped all of them forty dollars.
She came back to the couch with six containers. She lined them up on the coffee table in a neat, military row, and opened the first. A rich, golden steam rose out of it.
She dipped in a spoon.
She tasted it.
"Ow," she said, with great dignity, and clapped a hand over her mouth.
"What?"
"It's hot."
"Did you burn yourself?"
"I tested the temperature." She gave Kara a wounded look. "It was too hot."
"That's why they say to wait."
"Who says?"
"Everyone," said Kara, and began, helplessly, to laugh. It turned into a cough. It turned into a series of ragged, rattling hacks that bent her over the edge of the couch, and by the time it had passed, there were tears in her eyes, and Lena was crouched beside her with a hand on her back and a face of absolute terror.
"I'm fine," Kara wheezed. "I'm fine. It's fine."
"You are not."
"I'm sorry. It's just. You've never made soup."
"I have not made it. I have ordered it."
"Same thing."
"It's a completely different thing."
"You burned your tongue on a noodle."
"I'm aware," said Lena, with enormous dignity, "of what I did."
Kara started laughing again.
Lena, despite herself, began to smile.
She blew on the next spoonful, with great ceremony, and held it out. "Open."
"I can hold the..."
"Open."
Kara opened.
She swallowed, and shut her eyes, and made a small, involuntary sound of pure relief. It was rich, and salty, and warm, and it slid down her sore throat like a hand.
"That's," she whispered. "Oh."
"Good?"
"That's the best thing I've ever eaten."
"It's the Vietnamese one," said Lena, a little smugly. "It's the one that took eleven hours."
"They made it in forty minutes."
"They claimed eleven."
"You're so..."
"What?"
"You're so good at this," said Kara, with her eyes still closed.
Lena's spoon paused halfway to the bowl.
It was a small, simple thing to say. It was probably the fever talking. But something in her chest tightened, very slightly, and she looked down at the soup, and cleared her throat.
"I'm terrible at this," she said, quietly.
"You're not."
"I burned my tongue."
"You stayed," said Kara, and opened her eyes.
They were very blue, and very tired, and unguarded. The fever had lent them a kind of glassy brightness. She was looking at Lena with the open, uncomplicated trust of a child.
Lena looked away.
"Eat your soup," she said, a little unsteadily.
-----
"I'm not taking it."
"Kara."
"I don't take things."
"It's cold medicine."
"It's chemicals."
"It is dextromethorphan. It's been tested on millions of people."
"I'm not millions of people."
"Yes, you are," said Lena, "right now," and held out the little plastic cup.
Kara looked at it with deep distrust.
It was a thin, pale-orange liquid, with a faint artificial smell of oranges and sadness. She had a vague, fever-hazy memory of her adoptive mother putting a spoon of something like it in her mouth, once, long ago, on a very bad night. She had been thirteen. She had thrown it up on the carpet.
I shouldn't need it, she thought. I'm Kryptonian.
I'm not Kryptonian, right now. I'm... a person.
"It'll make you feel better," said Lena, gently.
"I don't believe you."
"It tastes like an orange."
"It smells like an orange."
"That's what I said."
"That's not the same."
"Kara Danvers," said Lena, in the voice she used on board members. "I have brought you soup. I have wrapped you in six blankets. I have taken your temperature. I have consulted. You will drink the orange medicine, or I will call Alex."
Kara's eyes went wide.
"You wouldn't."
"I have her number."
"You wouldn't."
"She's a federal agent. She has handcuffs." Lena smiled sweetly. "And a very firm view of cough syrup."
Kara swallowed.
She took the cup.
She downed it in one gulp, and made a face like a person being given a verdict, and handed it back with a shudder.
"That," she said hoarsely, "was disgusting."
"Well done."
"I want a medal."
"I'll arrange it."
"A big one. With a ribbon."
"Duly noted," said Lena, and put the cup on the table.
She picked up the ice cream bag.
"Dessert?" she said.
Kara's whole face lit up.
It was, Lena realized, very probably the most beautiful thing she had ever seen: a sick, miserable, red-nosed woman in a nest of blankets, looking at a pint of mint chocolate chip as though it were the Holy Grail.
"Yes," said Kara.
"It's for your throat. It's medicinal."
"It's so medicinal."
"I looked it up."
"You looked it up?"
"I wasn't going to have you suffer for want of a citation," said Lena, and handed her a spoon.
----
Kara woke at midnight with a very strange, urgent, overwhelming sense that she had to be somewhere else.
She sat up, in the dark, with her heart pounding.
It took her a long moment to understand what it was. She was cold. She was starving. Not for food, but for something deeper, a bone-deep, cellular, aching hunger, a need for light.
Sun.
She needed the sun.
She was on her feet before she knew she had moved. The blankets slid off her shoulders. The room spun. She grabbed the arm of the couch, and swayed, and stared through the dark at the window, where, beyond the glass, a flat, dull, starless sky pressed down on the city like a lid.
Window.
She had to get to the window. She had to open it. She had to get up on the roof, the roof was the best, there was a little patch of sky...
"Kara."
She turned.
Lena was sitting up in the armchair, with her glasses crooked and a blanket across her knees. She had clearly been asleep. Her eyes were huge, and her hair was a mess, and she looked, in the faint light from the streetlamps, startlingly young.
"What are you doing?"
"I need the roof," said Kara.
"The roof?"
"I need to go up. I have to see the..." She stopped. Her brain was swimming. "The sky."
"It's midnight."
"I know."
"It's raining."
"It's not."
"It was." Lena was on her feet. "It will. It's forty degrees, and you have a fever of a hundred and three, you're not going anywhere near a roof..."
"You don't understand."
"Explain it to me."
"I can't," said Kara, miserably. "I just. I need to. It's..." Her voice cracked. "I think I'm dying, Lena."
"You're not dying."
"I feel like something's gone."
Lena crossed the room in three strides.
She put both hands on Kara's shoulders, and turned her, and looked into her face. She was taller than Kara, in the flat light, and her eyes were very green, and very steady, and very fierce.
"Look at me," she said.
Kara looked.
"You're ill. That's all this is. Your body is tired, and it's confused, and your brain is running a fever, and it's telling you strange things. It does that. It's normal." She slid her hands down Kara's arms. "You're not dying. You're not going anywhere. You are going to sit down, and I am going to make you some tea, and you are going to be fine."
"But the sun..."
"The sun will be there in the morning."
"What if it isn't?"
"Then I'll find it for you," said Lena.
Kara stared at her.
She said it so simply. As if it were a thing that could be done. As if a woman in a cream sweater, with sleep-rumpled hair and an alarming number of blankets, could walk out into the night, and find the sun, and carry it back in her hands.
She means it, thought Kara, with a strange, soft ache.
She let Lena steer her back to the couch.
She let her wrap the blankets around her shoulders. She let her put a cup of tea into her hands, honey-sweetened, in a chipped blue mug, and she drank it very slowly, with her eyes closed.
It was not the sun.
But it was warm.
-----
On the second night, the fever came back harder.
It crept up at around two in the morning, the way a tide comes in: a slow, steady, inexorable rise. Kara went from shivering to burning to shivering again, and somewhere around three, her thoughts began to come apart.
"Lena," she said, from the couch, in a conversational tone.
"Hmm?" Lena had dozed off in the armchair, with her chin on her fist.
"Do you ever think about space?"
Lena opened one eye. "...Space?"
"Like, outer space. The whole thing. The black part."
"Occasionally."
"It's so big."
"I'm aware."
"And cold."
"Kara, you should sleep."
"You can't breathe in it, you know. People think you can float. But you actually..." She waved a hand vaguely. "...you do a lot of tumbling."
Lena sat up.
"How do you know that?"
"I read it."
"Where?"
"In a book. A very good book. About, about tumbling." Kara's eyes were bright, and unfocused, and slightly crossed. "It's not a rocket. It's a pod."
Lena's pulse skipped.
A pod.
It was a word she could not quite place. It tickled the edge of some memory. A photograph. A rumor. A line in a classified file on a high shelf in her father's study. She sat very still.
"A pod," she said, carefully.
"For babies."
"For... babies."
"Very small babies. You put them in, and you press the button, and they go..." Kara lifted her hand, and made a long, sweeping arc through the air, ending in a soft, whistling noise. "Fweeeee."
"Kara."
"Yes?"
"I think you should go back to sleep."
"I don't want to." Kara turned her head, and looked at Lena, with enormous, fever-bright, deeply sincere eyes. "Lena."
"Yes?"
"I think you're beautiful."
Lena's whole body went still.
"I think it's really important to tell you," said Kara, earnestly. "Because I might die, and it would be a shame. I've thought you were beautiful since the first day. And I thought you were scary. And I thought you were kind. And I thought, oh no."
Lena put her hand over her mouth.
"And then I thought Alex is going to be so mad," Kara added, as an afterthought.
"I think," said Lena, in a voice that wobbled, "that you've got a very high fever."
"It's a hundred and three."
"Point five," said Lena. "I checked."
"Oh."
"It's the fever talking."
"Maybe."
"It's absolutely the fever."
"Probably," said Kara, and yawned, and was asleep in four seconds.
Lena sat very still, in the dark, with her hand still pressed over her mouth. Her heart was pounding. Her face was hot. She stayed that way for a very long time.
She did not mention it the next day.
Neither did Kara, who had no memory of it whatsoever.
----
It was around four on the second night when the shivering got really bad.
Kara's whole body was trembling, in long, shuddering waves, so hard that the couch cushions shook. Her teeth chattered. Her fingers were icy. Lena, dozing in the armchair, woke to the sound of a faint, broken whimper, and was on her feet in seconds.
"Kara?"
"Cold," said Kara, in a small, cracked voice. "I can't get warm. The blankets aren't, they're not enough."
Lena looked at her.
She looked at the mountain of quilts, and the hot-water bottle, which had gone cold an hour ago, and the thermometer on the coffee table, which read 101.9. She looked at the shape on the couch, hunched and shaking.
She did not know what to do.
Kara's eyes opened halfway, fever-bright, pleading.
"Could you..." She swallowed. "Could you come here? Just for a little while? You don't have to. I just. I think I might be warmer if someone else was close."
Lena's first instinct was to say no.
The idea of climbing under the blankets with another person, even a sick one, even Kara, felt too intimate, too dangerous. It was too near to a thing she had never allowed herself. She had spent her life keeping a careful distance. She stood very still, at the edge of the couch, with her hands opening and closing at her sides.
"I don't want to make you uncomfortable," she said, quietly.
"You won't."
"I might."
"Lena," said Kara, in a voice with no armor left in it at all. "Please."
It was the please that did it.
She exhaled slowly. She toed off her shoes, and lifted the edge of the blankets, as though they might burn her. She slid in, very carefully, as far to the edge as the narrow couch allowed.
The moment her body settled beside Kara's, Kara made a soft, broken sound of relief, and turned toward her, and pressed her forehead against Lena's shoulder.
Her skin was burning.
Lena was cool by comparison. She lay very rigid, staring at the ceiling, hyper-aware of every point of contact: the weight of a head against her collarbone, the shiver of a hand against her ribs. It was strange. It was very strange. It was the strangest thing she had done in years.
Then Kara's fingers found the front of her sweater, and curled there, loose and trusting.
Something in Lena's chest unlocked.
She let her own hand come to rest, lightly, against Kara's back. Not quite an embrace. Close to one. She felt the shivering begin to ease, bit by bit, until it was only a faint tremor, and then not even that.
"Better?" she whispered.
"Mmm," said Kara, already half asleep.
"Good."
She lay awake for a long time, listening to Kara's breathing slow and settle.
This isn't supposed to be easy, she thought. It isn't supposed to feel like this.
But it did.
It felt like the first time in years that she had been warm.
----
Alex used her spare key just after dawn.
She had gotten the short version from J'onn: solar flare, flu, sent home, medbay destroyed. She had called Kara four times, gotten no answer, and had driven across the city in a state of fury and terror, with a bag of supplies on the passenger seat and an elaborate speech prepared about how you are an idiot, and I told you to call.
She unlocked the door.
She stepped inside.
She stopped.
The apartment was quiet. The curtains were drawn. A thin, gray light seeped through the gap, falling across the floor in a pale strip. On the coffee table sat a battered thermometer, six empty soup containers, two spoons stuck upright in a pair of melted ice-cream pints, and a half-finished cup of tea.
On the couch, in a tangled mountain of blankets, lay her sister.
And curled against her, with her arm flung across her waist and her glasses still on, lay Lena Luthor.
Alex stood very still.
She took in the whole picture. The way Lena's body was angled, protective, a little crooked, as if she had fallen asleep mid-guard. The way Kara's hand had curled into the front of her sweater. The soft, slack, peaceful look on both of their faces. It was the first time in days that Kara had looked at ease.
She's human, thought Alex. Right now, she's totally human. And Lena Luthor just spent two days taking care of her, and she doesn't have the slightest idea.
Something complicated moved across her face.
She set the bag of supplies on the floor. She considered waking them. She considered waking Kara, and having a very sharp conversation about secrets and risks and trust. She considered waking Lena, and finding out exactly what she'd noticed.
She did none of those things.
She took out her phone, and typed, very quietly:
Alex: You're an idiot. Alex: She's good for you. Alex: Don't tell her yet. Alex: Eat the soup.
She set it on the arm of the couch, face-up.
Then she tiptoed backward out of the room, and eased the door shut behind her, with almost no sound at all.
-----
The fever broke on the afternoon of the third day.
Kara woke to the smell of burning bread.
She lay still for a moment, in the soft, gray, hazy light, listening. A pan clattered. Someone swore, under their breath, in what sounded very much like fluent Latin. A smoke detector gave a single, indignant chirp and was swiftly silenced.
She smiled, faintly.
She was weak. She was dizzy. Her throat felt as though she had swallowed a cheese grater. But the deep, aching, bone-cold shiver had gone, and she could feel the blankets, warm and heavy and ridiculous, piled over her legs. She turned her head.
Lena was at the counter.
She was still in yesterday's clothes. There were shadows under her eyes. She had a smear of something, jam, possibly, on her sleeve. She was bent over a plate with her tongue between her teeth, in an expression of ferocious concentration, cutting the crusts off two slices of toast.
She had burned the first batch.
Kara could see the evidence, a pair of small black bricks, sitting in the trash. The second batch looked almost perfect. She was trimming them with a knife, with a delicate, surgical precision, as though she were performing a very small and important operation.
"You didn't have to stay," said Kara.
Her voice was still rough, but clearer. It was a human voice, she thought. A fragile one.
Lena glanced up.
There was a soft, startled look on her face, as though she had been caught doing something private. Then she put the knife down, and wiped her hands on a dish towel, and gave a little, shy shrug.
"I wanted to," she said.
"For three days?"
"I'd lost count." A faint, self-conscious smile. "I didn't like the idea of you being alone."
It was so simple.
She carried the plate over, and set it on the coffee table, next to a glass of orange juice, and a glass of water, and a small pill bottle. She stood there for a moment, with her hands twisted together, and looked, for a woman who had once taken apart a hostile board in eleven minutes, utterly at a loss.
"I looked it up," she said. "Toast is, I think, the standard. For recovery."
"It's perfect."
"It's carbon. I burned the first one."
"I saw."
"I burned it twice," said Lena, with some dignity. "The second time was for research."
Kara laughed.
It turned into a cough, but a small one, a normal one, a cough with nothing sinister in it. Lena was beside her in an instant, with a glass of water and a hand on her back.
"Slowly," she murmured.
"I'm okay."
"You're better."
"I think I'm better."
"I think," said Lena, "that you're going to live."
She said it lightly. But her hand, on Kara's back, was trembling, very slightly, and her eyes were bright.
Kara looked at her.
She looked at the tired face, and the rumpled sweater, and the jam stain. She looked at the careful, careless, impossible effort of three days and three nights, from a woman who had never in her life been taught how.
She stayed, she thought.
She stayed, and she didn't know a single thing, and she stayed.
She reached out, weak but certain, and caught Lena's wrist.
"Thank you," she said.
Lena stilled.
"For what?"
"For all of it. The soup. The, the consulting. The medicine. The..." She swallowed. "The three a.m."
A faint color rose in Lena's cheeks.
"You were cold," she said.
"I know."
"It was very practical."
"I know."
"It was strictly medicinal."
"I know," said Kara, and smiled.
Lena turned her hand over, so that their fingers could lace together. Her palm was cool, and steady, against Kara's overheated skin. She did not say anything. But something in her face eased, like a door being unlocked from the inside.
"Stay a little longer?" said Kara.
"As long as you need."
She did not let go.
------
The sun came out on the fourth morning.
Kara woke first.
She was on the couch. Lena was beside her, curled on her side, with her glasses off and her hair loose and her hand tucked beneath her cheek. The blankets were a wreck. The room was quiet. A single thin shaft of light came through the gap in the curtains, and lay across the floor like a long gold ribbon.
Kara stared at it.
For a moment, she did not breathe.
Then she carefully, silently, slid out from under the blankets, and tiptoed across the room, and pulled the curtain back an inch.
The sky was blue.
It was blue from edge to edge. The clouds were gone. They had rolled away in the night, and left behind a clean, bright, glittering morning, and over the rooftops of National City, small and gold and perfect, the sun was rising.
She stood in the window.
She closed her eyes.
It hit her in the face like a wave. It poured over her skin, and into her bones, and down through her whole body, warm and deep and endless, and she felt something in her chest begin to hum. It was a note she had not heard in days. It was a note she had thought, in the very worst hour of the fever, that she might never hear again.
There you are, she thought.
There you are.
Her fingertips tingled. Her breath came easier. She could feel, in the very marrow of her, the long, slow, glorious refilling of a cup that had been drained dry. She opened her eyes, and looked down at her own hands, and for just a moment, a faint, shimmering glow of gold flickered at the edges of her skin.
She glanced over her shoulder.
Lena was still asleep.
Kara breathed out, slowly.
She pressed her palm flat against the glass, and smiled, and let the sun fill her.
Lena woke to the smell of toast.
It was a good smell. A correct smell, golden and warm. She lay still for a moment, with her eyes closed, and the sun on her face, and the strangely peaceful sense that something had changed.
She opened her eyes.
Kara was standing at the counter, in a rumpled T-shirt and sleep shorts, with her hair in a knot and her glasses on. She was humming. She was buttering two slices of toast, and her whole body had a loose, easy, glowing quality, a looseness in the shoulders, a color in the cheeks.
She looked well.
"Morning," said Kara.
"Morning."
"I made breakfast."
"I can see that."
"It's not burned."
"I'm very impressed."
"I know." Kara grinned. "I had a good teacher."
Lena sat up.
She pushed her hair back from her face, and looked at the window, and the bright, bright, cloudless sky. She looked at the sun on the carpet, and the steam from the coffee, and the woman at the counter, who was a good deal paler than usual, and a good deal thinner than before, and who looked, all the same, radiant.
"The sun's out," she said.
"It is."
"You look better."
"I feel better. I feel..." Kara paused. She searched for a word. "Restored."
"That was fast."
"I'm a quick healer."
"You're a remarkably quick healer."
"It's a gift," said Kara, blandly, and handed her a plate.
Lena took it.
She looked at the toast. It was golden. It was perfect. It had been buttered in a little spiral. She looked up at Kara, who was watching her with a faint, hopeful, slightly anxious smile, as though waiting for a verdict.
"It's wonderful," said Lena.
"It's toast."
"It's the best toast I've ever had."
"You're being generous."
"I'm being accurate." She took a bite. She chewed. She closed her eyes. "Kara?"
"Yes?"
"I'd like to say something."
Kara went still.
"I'm not good at this," said Lena, softly. "Caring for people. I never learned. I've spent my whole life being very careful not to need anything, and very careful not to be needed." She opened her eyes. "But these three days were, they were some of the best of my life."
Kara's throat tightened.
"Even the thermometer?"
"Especially the thermometer."
"You were so good."
"I was terrible."
"You were wonderful."
"We'll agree to disagree," said Lena, and her smile was bright, and shy, and a little bit wet. "But if it ever happens again, I'd like to be asked."
"It won't."
"No?"
"I don't get sick," said Kara.
Lena laughed.
It rang out through the sunlit apartment, a clear, startled, delighted sound. She put her plate down, and put her hand over her mouth, and her whole body shook with it. She laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
"Kara Danvers," she said, when she could speak. "You've never been sick."
"That's right."
"You're the healthiest person alive."
"I am."
"You spent three days on that couch, burning, delirious, begging for a roof."
"I don't remember it."
"I do," said Lena, and grinned.
Kara went pink.
She went pink to the roots of her hair, and turned around, very quickly, to butter another slice of toast, and said, to the countertop, in a voice that was almost steady:
"It's all in the past."
"Mm-hm."
"A total fluke."
"Absolutely."
"A one-time thing."
"Of course," said Lena, and picked up her toast.
Outside, the sun poured down over the city, bright and gold and warm. Inside, in a small apartment that smelled of coffee and butter and the last, faint sweetness of ice cream, two women ate breakfast side by side, in the clear, ordinary light of a Tuesday morning, and did not say one word about how long it had been since either of them was this happy.
Fin.