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At eleven forty-two on a Tuesday night, the top floor of L-Corp was dark except for one office.
It was Lena Luthor's office, and it looked like a spell had gone off in it, which, to be fair, one had. Or several. The glass desk was buried under paper, index cards, graph paper, and four open notebooks full of equations. A whiteboard on wheels stood in the corner, covered in a dense, flowing mess of diagrams, runic circles, and a single angry note in red marker that read STOP USING PI FOR EVERYTHING. Three half-empty mugs of tea sat in a row along the windowsill. Somewhere under the pile, a phone was buzzing.
And in the middle of the desk, held open by a stapler and a paperweight shaped like a very small globe, lay a book.
It was old, and thick, and bound in cracked green leather. The title, in faded gold ink, read Walsh Family Receipts and Remedies. Underneath, in smaller letters, someone had written, in a neat, looping hand: For my Lena, when she's ready.
Lena was not sure she was ready.
She was, however, very committed.
She sat cross-legged in her desk chair, in a gray cardigan, with her glasses pushed up into her hair and a pencil behind her ear, and read the page for the sixth time.
"It's not magic," she told the empty office. "It's math. It's just very poetic math."
The page was a spell. Her mother's writing, in the margin, said: Useful. A little helper. Do not make it clever. The spell itself ran down the page in a flowing mix of old Irish and a notation Lena had spent three weeks reverse-engineering. It called for a ring of salt, a drop of her own blood, a candle, a silver spoon, and a particular kind of intention, a bright, steady, listening sort of thing, the sort you would put into making a friend.
She had been reading about it for a month.
It was, as far as she could tell, an assistant. A little guiding light that could answer questions, fetch references, and tell you when you had left the stove on. A bright, floating, helpful thing, something between a lantern and a very polite ghost.
Like Navi, she thought, and then felt, immediately and deeply, embarrassed.
"Don't," she told herself.
She had played The Legend of Zelda in secret, at fourteen, in a boarding-school dormitory, under a blanket, with the sound turned all the way down. She'd loved the little fairy. She had loved the way it fluttered ahead of you, pointing out where to go. She had never told another living soul. It was, she felt, the last remaining secret of her whole carefully constructed adult life.
"It's a research assistant," she said firmly, to the whiteboard.
The whiteboard said nothing.
She pulled over a clean sheet of paper and began to work.
It took her two more hours.
She calculated the arc, the resonance, the salt ratio, the right angle for the candle. She checked it twice. She checked it a third time with a different method. She wrote the final equation on a sticky note and put it on her monitor, and at one-seventeen in the morning she stood up, stretched until her spine cracked, and began to set the circle.
She laid the salt in a perfect ring on the carpet, in the open space between the desk and the window. She set the candle in the center. She put the silver spoon at the north point, and, after a moment's hesitation, a single sticky note at the south that said DON'T PANIC.
She took a breath.
She pricked her finger.
A single drop of blood fell into the flame, and the flame jumped, bright and blue.
"Mo chara," she said, softly, in her mother's language, in a voice that was a little higher than normal. "Éist liom. Tar chun cabhrú liom."
Listen to me. Come and help me.
The salt began to glow.
The air in the room went still. The candle flame bent over, as if bowing. The pages on the desk fluttered, and the sticky notes lifted at the edges, and a faint hum, a low, silvery, shimmering note, rose from the circle and spread out through the office.
A bead of pale blue light appeared above the candle.
It was no bigger than a marble.
Lena's heart leapt.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, it's working."
The light brightened. It gathered, and swelled, and spun in a slow, graceful spiral, a tiny, shining sphere, just the right size, just the right color, just the very shade of blue she had been so careful not to think about. It bobbed in the air. It tilted, as if looking at her.
"Hello," said Lena, softly. "Hello, there."
The orb gave a small, bright, delighted chime.
Then it did something wrong.
It shuddered.
A thin crackle ran across its surface, like a hairline crack through glass. It gave a thin, thin, high-pitched whine, and the glow went from blue to a worrying shade of violet, and Lena, who had calculated the resonance to four decimal places, felt her stomach drop all the way to the sublevel parking.
"No, no, no, no. Wait. Wait. I put in the, the damping coefficient, I checked, I—"
The orb flew sideways.
It shot out of the circle like a pinball, curved in a long violet arc over the desk, whistled past the whiteboard, clipped a lampshade, and slammed, with a soft and ominous foom, straight into the couch.
It was a very good couch.
Lena would insist on this, later, in every conversation. It was a really good couch. She had bought it four years ago, the week she became CEO, because the office had been so cold and so empty and she had wanted something soft. It was a long, deep, dark gray leather sofa, with a walnut frame, wide arms, and cushions you could sink into like warm sand. It was Italian. It had cost more than a small car. And it had been, in every sense that mattered, the best thing in the whole building.
She had spent so many nights asleep on that couch.
And now it was shrinking.
"No!" Lena yelped. "No, no, no, don't, don't do that, come back!"
It was shrinking fast. The cushions folded inward, the arms drew in, the legs gave a soft and wobbling creak. The whole thing shuddered and compressed, from a couch to a chair to an ottoman to something the size of a loaf of bread, shining a pale violet at the center, as the glow rose to a high, thin, ringing note.
"Please," said Lena, stumbling forward and dropping to her knees on the carpet. "Please don't, it's a good couch, it doesn't deserve, I'll fix it, I'll find the, I'll reverse the, oh no."
The shrinking stopped.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
The tiny leather lump sat on the carpet, in the middle of the salt, very small and very still, glowing a soft, warm, golden light.
Then it began to grow.
It grew up, and up, and up, in a long, slow, shining spiral, like a flower opening time-lapse. The light spread out and thickened, filling the room with warm gold. It took the shape of a woman.
She was tall, and broad, and generous. She had a warm brown face with laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, and silver-streaked hair in a neat crown of braids, and a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a deep gray dress, the exact color of the old couch, with a heavy, soft cardigan the color of walnut. Her hands were big and capable. On her feet were sturdy, practical, comfortable shoes.
She looked to be about sixty-five.
She also looked, quite distinctly, like she had had enough.
She stood in the middle of the salt circle, in the soft golden light, and straightened her cardigan with a firm, deliberate tug. She looked down at herself. She looked at her hands. She flexed her fingers, and wiggled her toes, and let out a long, slow, deeply satisfied "Mmm-hm."
Then she looked up at Lena.
Lena opened her mouth.
She screamed.
It was, she would admit later, an extremely undignified scream. It went on for some time. It ended in a note that Lena had not known she could reach. She scrambled backward on the carpet, with her glasses falling off, and hit the edge of the desk, and knocked over three mugs of tea.
"Oh, sugar," said the woman, with a deep, warm, rolling voice like honey in a hot pan, "don't do that. You'll hurt your throat."
The door burst open.
Jess Tremaine came through it at a dead run, in a sensible gray coat, with her hair half down and a stapler in one hand like a weapon. She had been working late, as she always did, as she had every night since the day she was hired, and she had heard the scream from forty feet away through a closed door.
"Ms. Luthor!"
At the same moment, the balcony doors blew inward.
There was a crash, and a gust of cold night wind, and a flash of red and blue. Supergirl came through the opening at about four hundred miles an hour, with her cape snapping and her fists up and her eyes flashing with heat vision, skidded to a halt on the carpet, and looked around the room.
"LENA!"
Nobody moved.
The wind died down.
The stapler dropped to the floor with a small, sad clack.
In the center of the office, in a circle of glowing salt, stood an elderly woman in a gray dress. On the carpet at her feet sat Lena Luthor, with her glasses off, her hair wild, and a ring of wet tea stains spreading slowly across her cardigan. At the edge of the room, Jess was holding a pencil like a sword. And Supergirl, who had been about to punch a hole in the building, was staring at the stranger with a fist still raised.
"Hello, baby," said the woman, to Kara.
"Hello," said Kara, faintly.
"Hello, Jessica."
"Hello," said Jess, in a very small voice. "Ma'am."
"Don't you 'ma'am' me, sugar. I'm not even a person yet." She looked down at Lena. "You all right, honey?"
"I," said Lena. "You're. I, there's a, what?"
"That's all right. Take your time."
"Where's my couch?"
"Oh, that's me," said the woman, and patted her own side with great fondness. "I'm the couch."
-----
It took ten minutes for everybody to sit down.
They had to sit on the floor.
It was a strange tableau. Lena, in her cardigan, on the carpet, with her knees drawn up. Jess, on an upturned wastebasket, with a notepad. Supergirl, cross-legged, hovering about an inch off the ground out of sheer nervousness, until the woman gave her a look and she dropped. In front of them, in the dim golden lamplight, sat the stranger, in a rolling desk chair she had borrowed with such calm authority that nobody thought to object.
"Now," she said. "I would like to start by saying that I am so grateful."
Lena stared.
"You woke me up, honey. I've been asleep a long time, and that's, well. I'd say it's a gift." She folded her hands. "My name is Bernice. You can call me Miss Bernice. Or Mama B. Either one."
"I'm so sorry," said Lena, in a hollow voice. "I was trying to make a, a helper. An orb. A small, bright, useful, it was supposed to be a light."
"I know, sugar. I felt it."
"It went wrong."
"It sure did."
"It was supposed to, it's, I calculated it, I got to four decimal points,"
"Honey," said Miss Bernice, gently, "you did make a helper."
"I did?"
"Oh, yes. You've made a very helpful one. And I'll tell you why." She leaned forward, and all the warmth went out of her voice, and something else came into it: something steady, and old, and dangerous. "Because I am so tired of watching the two of you."
There was a silence.
"I'm sorry?" said Lena.
"What?" said Kara.
"Four years," said Miss Bernice.
She stood up.
She did it slowly. She rose from the desk chair like a thundercloud, all five feet eleven of her, and put her hands on her hips, and fixed them both with a look that could have stopped a train.
"Four years," she said. "I have sat in this office for four years. And I have seen things. I have held you both, in the dark, on the worst nights of your lives. I have caught you crying, Lena Luthor. I have been under you, I have been leaned on, I have been the only soft thing in a very hard building. I have listened."
"I," said Lena.
"And you," said Miss Bernice, rounding on Kara.
Kara shrank.
"Me?"
"You, with your sandwiches."
"I, what?"
"I am leather, Kara Danvers."
"I know."
"I am Italian leather."
"I'm, I'm aware."
"It's very hard to get potsticker out of Italian leather."
There was a very long silence.
Supergirl had gone a deep, brilliant, remarkable shade of red.
"I can explain," she said.
"You can't."
"I can!"
"There was a lo mein."
"That was one time!"
"There was a pizza. There was a, a burrito, I could have sworn. Sugar, there was a rainbow-colored cereal, at two in the morning, in your cape, and you ate it out of my crevices."
"Those are the cushion gaps!"
"They are my dignity," said Miss Bernice, with great feeling. "And I have forgiven you. Every single time. Because you were tired, and you were sweet, and you were happy, and you fell asleep on me with your mouth open and your boots on. And Lena, every single time, put a blanket over you."
Kara went still.
She turned, very slowly, and looked at Lena.
Lena was staring at the floor.
She had gone a very deep, very quiet red from the collar of her cardigan to the tips of her ears.
"Every time," said Miss Bernice, in a gentler voice. "Four years. She'd bring a blanket from the closet and put it over you. And she'd tuck it around your shoulders, and she'd stand there in the dark for a minute, and look."
"Miss Bernice," said Lena, in a very small voice.
"And she'd put her hand, just for a second, in your hair."
"Please."
"And then she'd go back to her desk, and work, and every once in a while she'd look up, and watch you sleep. And I'd watch her watching you. And I'd think, Lord, Lord, Lord, just say something, you two, I'm only a couch."
The office was very quiet.
On the wastebasket, Jess had put down her notepad. She was looking at the ceiling with the glassy, patient, deeply satisfied expression of a woman whose own long suspicions had just been confirmed by an expert witness.
"Jessica," said Miss Bernice.
"Yes, Miss Bernice?"
"I just want to say, thank you."
"Ma'am?"
"For the cleaning products."
Jess blinked.
"Every other week," said Miss Bernice, with deep warmth. "The good ones. The real conditioner, and the soft microfiber cloth, and that little brush for the seams. Nobody else in this building would've known. You are the only one who ever treated me like I mattered." She laid a hand over her heart. "You are a wonderful woman, and I want you to know that you are seen."
Jess made a small noise.
It was a very small noise, and it was the first time in nine years that anyone in L-Corp had seen her eyes go bright.
"It's, it's nothing," she managed. "It's, it's a quality leather."
"It is," said Miss Bernice. "And so are you."
Jess put a hand over her mouth.
Kara, still bright red, leaned toward Lena and whispered, "Did you know she was crying?"
"I'm not crying," said Jess.
"You are, a little."
"It's dust."
"There's a lot of dust," said Lena weakly.
"There's an enormous amount of dust," said Jess, with great dignity, and wiped her eyes.
"Now," said Miss Bernice.
She settled back into the desk chair, and crossed her legs, and folded her hands on her knee, and looked at the two of them like a judge preparing to deliver a sentence.
"I've had a lot of time to think about this speech."
"Miss Bernice," said Lena. "I don't think this is, I'm not sure this is the appropriate—"
"Hush."
Lena hushed.
"The two of you," said Miss Bernice, "have been making eyes at each other across this room for four years. I have watched you, Lena. I've watched you look at her when she's talking and forget what you were going to say. I've watched you blush, and I've watched you hide it behind a spreadsheet. I have watched you rehearse a hundred times. Standing right there, by the window, with your hands in your hair. Kara, I need to tell you something. And then she walks in, and you say, 'Kara, did you get my email?'"
Lena put her face in her hands.
"And you." She turned. "You land on that balcony every Friday at 6 p.m. with takeout, and you say, 'I was just in the neighborhood.' You've been in the neighborhood, honey, every single Friday, for four years. You live forty minutes away."
"I like the, the air on this side of town," said Kara, in a squeak.
"You like the company."
"I, well."
"It's a thing. It's a known thing. The security guards have a pool."
"They have a what?"
"There's a spreadsheet," said Jess, from the wastebasket, without looking up.
"Jess!"
"I'm not saying who started it."
"Honey," said Miss Bernice, to Lena, "I'm a couch. I don't have a lot of time. I only wake up once. And I'll tell you what I want, before I go back to being furniture." She held up one big, warm, capable hand. "I want to know that the two of you are going to talk. I don't want to find out in my next life that you're still standing on opposite sides of a glass table, mooning at each other, too scared to say a word."
"I'm not scared," said Lena.
"Sugar."
"I'm, strategic."
"Sugar."
"It's a, a complicated, I'm a Luthor, and she's Supergirl, there's the press, and the optics, and the, and the, if this goes wrong I could lose my best, my only," Lena stopped.
She took a very slow breath.
She looked at Kara.
Kara was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, with her cape pooled around her, her golden hair loose, her blue eyes very bright. She had the expression of someone standing at the edge of a very high diving board. She was not breathing, much.
"I have loved you," said Lena, in a thin, shaking voice, "for three years, eight months, and some days."
Kara made a small, high, strangled sound.
"I didn't, I'm not sure, I don't know when. It was sometime in the first six months. You were on my balcony, and you were laughing, and you had a, you had a bit of rice on your chin. And I thought, oh. That's, that's it. That's the thing I can't, that I'm never going to be able to get out of my head." She laughed, a little wetly. "And I thought, you can't. She's Supergirl. She's the best person in the world. She's not going to want the, the Luthor with the, the tea stains."
"Lena."
"I thought you were kind. I thought it was just kindness."
"Lena."
"I thought," said Lena, "that if I said it, you'd be polite about it. And that would be, I couldn't," her voice broke, "bear it."
"Lena."
"What?"
"I have loved you," said Kara, and her voice cracked down the middle, "since the day you flew a jet through a window."
Lena stared at her.
"Not, that's not, I mean, that was later. But, but I've, there's been so many, and I have known. I have known for so long, and I've been so, I've been so afraid. Of all of it. Of, of what it would do. Of ruining it." She pressed a hand to her chest. "You're the best thing in my life. You're the light in my life. I thought, if I said it, and it went wrong, I'd lose the one thing."
"I'm not going to leave."
"I know."
"I'm going to be here."
"I know."
"Kara," said Lena, and crawled forward across the carpet, on her hands and knees, in her wrecked cardigan, with tears running down her face. "I'm going to be here for the rest of my life."
"Then I," said Kara, and reached out, and took both her hands, and held them, as tightly as she'd ever held anything. "I'd like to be here too."
"You'd like to?"
"I'd like to be with you. In every way. If you'd have me."
"Yes," said Lena. "Yes. Oh, god, yes."
Kara pulled her forward, and Lena fell into her arms, and for a long time, neither of them said anything at all.
----
It was Miss Bernice who broke the silence.
She was making a soft, wet, snuffling noise, and she had pulled a large, white, quilted handkerchief out of her cardigan, and was dabbing, in a deeply dignified way, at both eyes.
"Lord," she said, "have mercy."
"Miss Bernice," said Lena, through a smile, from where she was tucked in the crook of Kara's arm.
"Four years."
"I know."
"Four long years."
"I'm sorry."
"You don't need to be sorry, baby. You're here." She blew her nose, magnificently. "Come here. Both of you."
"We're right here," said Kara.
"Come closer."
They got up. They crossed the carpet, still holding hands, a little dazed, a little giddy, with Lena's glasses crooked and Kara's cape half-fallen off her shoulder. Miss Bernice opened her arms.
She was warm.
It was the thing that struck Lena first. She smelled of old leather, and lemon oil, and clean laundry. She had arms like a cushion and a chest like a pillow, and she wrapped them both in an enormous, rocking, sweet-smelling hug that went on for a very long time. She rested her chin on top of Lena's head. She smoothed Kara's hair down, with one big hand.
"My babies," she said, softly. "My babies. Look at you both."
"Thank you," said Lena, into her cardigan.
"For what?"
"For, for everything."
"Oh, sugar," said Miss Bernice, and squeezed her. "That's what a couch is for."
They stayed like that for a while.
Eventually, Miss Bernice drew back, and wiped her eyes again, and looked at Lena with the soft, warm, shining eyes of a woman who has been waiting a long time for something.
"Honey," she said. "I know you've had a long night."
"Yes?"
"Would you like to sit down?"
Lena blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm offering," said Miss Bernice, and patted her own knee, with great and gentle dignity. "A person ought to have a lap to sit on, when she's had a good cry. And I do have the one."
"Oh, I couldn't," said Lena, helplessly. "I'm a grown woman, I'm a, I'm a CEO,"
"Baby, I have held kings."
"I'm tea-stained."
"I have seen stains."
"I'm really, I'm too heavy."
"Child," said Miss Bernice, with magnificent calm, "I'm a couch. I have supported a Kryptonian. Come sit."
Lena looked at Kara.
Kara, grinning from ear to ear, with her eyes red and her cheeks wet, nodded.
So Lena Luthor, Chief Executive Officer of L-Corp, daughter of a dynasty, survivor of a hundred hostile takeovers, and a very powerful witch, climbed carefully into the lap of a sixty-five-year-old woman who had once been a leather sofa, and settled her head on her shoulder.
It was, without any question, the most comfortable she had ever been.
"Mm," she said.
"There you go."
"This is wonderful."
"I know it is."
"You're very soft."
"Four years of practice," said Miss Bernice, smugly, and began, very slowly, to rock.
Kara sat down at their feet, on the carpet, with her head resting against Lena's knee. Miss Bernice reached down, and stroked her hair, too.
"You can have the other knee," she said, "when she's done."
"Thank you," said Kara, in a voice that wobbled.
Behind them, quietly, Jess had opened her notebook again, and was writing something on the last page. After a moment she tore it out, folded it, and slid it under the door of the security office. It read: PAY UP.
-----
The sun came up at six forty-one.
It came through the tall windows in long, warm bars of gold, over a very strange scene. There was a circle of half-melted salt on the carpet. There were three overturned mugs. There was a whiteboard that said STOP USING PI FOR EVERYTHING. And in the middle of the office, side by side on the floor, with a quilted blanket over their legs, lay Supergirl and Lena Luthor, fast asleep, with their fingers laced together and their heads resting on the same cushion.
The cushion was a little warm.
It was also, if you looked closely, very gently breathing.
Miss Bernice was gone.
Or, rather, she had gone back. In the early hours of the morning, after a long, soft, low-voiced conversation about nothing in particular, she had given them both a last, enormous hug, and said, "Now, you take care of each other, you hear?" and shrunk, quietly, in a warm gold glow, back into her old shape.
She was a couch again.
She was a very good couch, long and gray and gentle, with a walnut frame and a wide, soft seat. And someone had carefully, tenderly, arranged two throw pillows in the middle, side by side, in the shape of a heart.
Neither of them had noticed.
At exactly seven o'clock, a small, silvery chime rang through the empty office.
Something floated up from behind the desk.
It was a tiny sphere of light, no bigger than a marble, a gentle, glowing, very particular shade of blue. It bobbed across the room, and circled the sleeping women, once, twice, three times, trailing a faint, silver sparkle. It paused above Lena's ear.
"Hey!" it said, in a very small voice. "Listen!"
Lena groaned.
She did not wake up.
"Hey! Listen! You have a nine o'clock!"
"Mm," said Lena, and pulled the blanket over her head.
The orb hovered for a moment, considering. Then it swooped down, and landed, with great satisfaction, on the arm of the sofa.
The sofa creaked.
It was, if one were being fanciful, the exact creak of an old woman laughing.
"Hey," said the orb, a little more quietly, to nobody. "Listen."
And somewhere in the building, three floors down, a pool of security guards counted their money.
Fin.