Chapter Text
The call came at 4:12 in the afternoon, and Kara Danvers did not hear it, because at 4:12 in the afternoon she was in the middle of a very boring meeting about the office parking lot.
She heard it two seconds later, when the whole room went away.
It was not a sound, exactly. It was the absence of one. It was Jess, on the other end of a phone four miles away, taking a breath, and not speaking, and in that silence, Kara heard the thing she'd been trained all her life to listen for.
"Kara," said Jess, at last, in a voice like cracking glass. "It's Lena."
The Luthor Corp building in Metropolis stood forty stories tall, in the oldest part of the city, and had been abandoned by everyone but Lena for the better part of a year. It had been Lionel's. It still smelled like him: old cigars and older money. Lena had kept the top-floor office because, as she put it, "the paperwork is here, and it's quieter than L-Corp."
She had gone there on Tuesdays, once a month, to sign off on what remained of the old company: the foundations, the shuttered subsidiaries, the dead contracts of a dead man. She went alone. She went without security. She had told no one but Jess where she was going, and she had told Jess only because Jess insisted.
At 4:07 that afternoon, a gas main under the lobby had ruptured.
At 4:09, a spark.
By the time Supergirl got there, the building was a column of black smoke. The top eleven floors were gone. The street was full of broken glass and fire engines and a thin, high, wailing sound that took her a moment to place, because it was her own voice, shouting a name.
She went in through the roof.
She dug for nineteen minutes.
She found her in the corner of what had been an office, under a fallen beam and a slab of concrete and a desk, and she lifted all of it with one hand, and Lena was there, small and white and bleeding and breathing, with her dark hair burned back from her forehead and her glasses melted into her cheek.
"Lena," said Kara. "Lena, Lena. Come on. Look at me."
Lena didn't.
Her face was ruined.
Kara didn't let herself see it. She wrapped her in her cape, and held her so tightly that she was afraid of cracking bone, and lifted off into the smoke-black sky with her heart in her mouth and a single word running in her head like a prayer.
Please.
----
The doctors at Metropolis General spoke in the voices doctors use when they have already decided how it ends.
Severe inhalation injury. Third-degree burns across the face and scalp. Intracranial swelling. We've induced a coma to protect the brain. They said it kindly. They said it to Jess, in a quiet beige hallway at two in the morning, with the heavy, careful patience of people who have learned that families hear only one word in ten. We don't know when she'll wake. We don't know if she will.
Jess had registered Lena under her mother's maiden name, on a private floor, with the blinds drawn and a very firm word to the press. She had also left one window on the east side unlatched.
Supergirl, in the stairwell at the end of the hall, in her cape, with her super hearing turned all the way up, heard every word. She waited until the doctors had gone. Then she went in through the window, and shut it behind her, and sat in the chair by the bed.
She went in as Supergirl because that was how Lena knew her, and because, in a white room full of machines, it was the only way she could think of to be seen. Kara Danvers had a perfectly good reason to be in Metropolis General. Kara Danvers had a perfectly good reason to cry. But Supergirl was the one Lena had been waiting for, in a hundred small dark hours, and Supergirl was the one who stayed.
And that was where she stayed.
It took four days for the bandages to finish.
They went over the whole of her face and her scalp and the left side of her neck, layer upon layer of white gauze, soaked in something medicinal that Kara could smell from the door. All that showed of her was her mouth, a thin, pale, bloodless line, and one small, perfect, closed eyelid. Her left hand lay on the sheet. Kara held it.
It was the only part of her that still looked like Lena.
"Hey," said Kara, softly, on the first night.
The monitor beeped.
"It's me. I know, I know, you're, you're resting. I'm not going to wake you." She tried to smile. "I just wanted you to know I'm here."
The monitor beeped.
"I, um. I brought you a book." She held it up, to nobody. "It's the one you said you'd never finish. The long one. About the, the sailors. I thought, I'll read it to you. And when you wake up, you can tell me everything I got wrong."
She opened it.
She read the first line.
She stopped, because her voice had gone out, and sat there with the book open on her knees, saying nothing at all, while the hospital hummed around her and the machine counted out its small, steady pulse.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
"I love you," she said, in the dark, in a whisper she could barely hear herself. "I never said it in the daytime. I'm sorry. I'm going to say it in the daytime."
The monitor beeped.
It did not answer.
She flew to Metropolis every day.
It was a hundred and fifty miles from National City, and she did it in eleven minutes, in the early morning, before the sun was fully up. She was at the window by six, in the suit and the cape. She sat with Lena until nine, and then changed in a stairwell, and went to work as Kara Danvers, and covered her stories, and wrote her articles, and smiled, and flew back at six, and stayed until the nurses made her leave.
She did it for the first week.
She did it for the first month.
She did it for the second, with her eyes growing hollower and her shoulders sagging and her cape, which she never seemed to take off anymore, going slowly gray with the dust of a hundred and fifty miles of sky. Alex tried to talk to her. Alex begged her to rest. Alex, in the third week, simply sat down in front of her apartment door and refused to move until Kara agreed to eat a sandwich.
"You can't keep this up," she said.
"I can."
"You can't. You're running on fumes."
"I'm fine."
"Kara."
"She's all alone in there," said Kara, in a small, unsteady voice. "She, she doesn't have anyone. Lex is in prison. Lillian's in prison. She's got Jess, and she's got me, and if I'm not there, she's, if she wakes up, and nobody's there, I can't, I can't, Alex."
Alex looked at her for a long, long time.
Then she took her hand.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. But you're taking one day off a week."
"I'll try."
"You'll do it."
"I'll try."
Alex sighed.
She never did get the day off.
She talked to her.
It was the thing that got her through. She talked to her about everything. She talked about the weather, and the news, and the new coffee place on Fifth. She told her about Winn's latest disaster, and Nia's new job, and the very strange man who had tried to rob a bank on a unicycle. She told her all the little, silly, wonderful details of an ordinary day, the things she had always told her, in the evenings, curled up on Lena's couch with a bag of takeout and her feet in her lap.
"You'd have loved it," she said, one afternoon. "He had a, a monocle. I swear to god."
The monitor beeped.
"I miss you."
Beep.
"I miss your voice. I miss, I know it's dumb, I miss the way you get all, all, formal, when you're about to say something kind. I miss it when you say my name. I miss you, Lena." Her voice shook. "I'm getting really tired of reading to you."
Beep.
"I'm not stopping, though."
Beep. Beep.
"I'm just saying."
She put her head down on the mattress, beside that small, still hand, and she closed her eyes.
Please, she thought.
In the other room, a nurse stood outside the door with a clipboard, and stopped, and put her hand to her mouth, and went away.
----
It happened on a Wednesday.
There was no drama. There was no choir of angels. There was a gray October morning, a thin sheet of rain on the window, a half-eaten bagel on the side table, and Supergirl, in her chair, her cape pooled on the floor, with her chin on her fist, reading aloud the fifty-ninth page of a very long book about sailors.
"And the sea," she read, in a flat, tired, mechanical voice, "was a great gray, indifferent,"
A finger moved.
Kara stopped.
She looked at the hand in her own.
"Lena?"
It moved again. A twitch, a tremor, just the barest curl of the index finger against her palm. A monitor changed its pitch. Somewhere, a very long way off, a nurse's shoes started to run.
"Lena. Lena. Oh, god. Lena. Can you hear me?"
Under the white wrap of the bandage, one eyelid fluttered.
It opened.
It was green.
It was green and glazed and unfocused and it swam across the ceiling, and the wall, and the window, before it finally, slowly, settled on the red-and-blue figure in the chair. It stayed there. It blinked. Behind the gauze, the lips, so thin and cracked and pale, moved with a faint, dry, rasping click.
"Supergirl," said Lena.
It was barely a whisper.
Kara sobbed.
She dropped the book. She dropped to her knees beside the bed, and took the hand in both of hers, and pressed it to her forehead, and wept, with her shoulders heaving and her whole body shaking, in great shuddering, unashamed, uncontrollable gasps.
"I'm here," she said. "I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"Kara," said Lena, again.
"I'm here."
"What," said the voice, thin and dry as paper, "happened?"
"There was an accident. In the building. There was a, a gas leak. But you're okay. You're okay. You've been asleep a long time. But you're okay."
"How long?"
Kara wiped her face.
"Three months," she said.
The green eye held hers for a long moment.
Then it closed.
"I'm so tired," said Lena.
"I know."
"Don't, don't go."
"I won't," said Kara. "I won't. Not ever."
The next six weeks went very fast.
There were doctors. There were therapists. There were long, bright, sterile days of exercises and examinations and tubes. The swelling went down. The burns, miraculously, had healed beneath the dressings, and the surgeons spoke in cautious, awed voices about the quality of the repair. Remarkable. A truly remarkable result.
The bandages came off on the thirty-first day.
It was done by the chief of reconstructive surgery, a tall, composed woman in a white coat, with cool gray eyes, a very steady pair of hands, and a badge that read DR. T. ELLIOT. She did it alone, in the quiet of the early morning, with Supergirl standing at the foot of the bed, one fist pressed to her mouth. She unwound the gauze slowly. Layer by layer. Strip by strip.
Underneath was Lena's face.
It was perfect. There was not a mark. There was not a scar, or a seam, or a trace of any burn. The skin was pale and smooth and unlined, the cheekbones sharp, the mouth wide and soft and dark, the black brows arched in the exact same line Kara could have drawn in her sleep. It was Lena. It was every inch Lena. It was, if anything, rested.
Kara cried, of course.
"It's a miracle," she said, in a thick voice.
"It's a very good regeneration platform," said Dr. Elliot, with a small, dry smile, and held out a hand. "Your friend Ms. Luthor built it herself. I'm only the technician."
Kara shook it.
It was cool, and dry, and very firm. She would remember that, later.
"Thank you," she said. "I can't, thank you. Thank you so much."
"It was my pleasure," said Dr. Elliot, softly. "I've waited a long time for this."
Lena didn't mind any of it.
She was quiet. She slept a great deal. She spoke in short, careful sentences, and she had a way of looking at things, the window, the television, a bowl of fruit, with a faint, wary, puzzled attention, as though they were things she had read about and never seen. She had the concussion, the doctors said. She'd had a heavy blow to the head. There might be gaps.
"Gaps?" said Kara, anxiously.
"Some memory loss is normal. It tends to resolve." The doctor smiled. "Be patient with her."
"I will."
"Don't push."
"I won't."
"And Supergirl," said the doctor, kindly, "if I may. Get some rest. You look worse than she does."
They sent her home on the second of December.
There was a car, and a nurse, and a very quiet drive back to National City. Lena sat in the back seat with her dark hair grown out to her chin and a pair of plain sunglasses over her eyes. She looked out of the window, at the road, at the passing buildings. She said nothing.
Jess met them at the apartment.
She'd had the place cleaned. There were fresh flowers on the table, and groceries in the refrigerator, and a pot of Lena's favorite tea steeping on the counter. She stood in the doorway, with her hands folded, and her face very composed.
"Ms. Luthor," she said. "Welcome home."
"Thank you, Jessica."
"I'm so glad you're well."
"I appreciate that."
Jess smiled.
It was a very small smile, tight at the edges. She held out a hand. Lena took it, gingerly, politely, in two fingers, the way one might shake the hand of a stranger.
Kara noticed.
She was on the roof across the street, in a hooded jacket, with her hearing turned down as low as it would go, and she heard it anyway: the small catch in Jess's voice, the pause before the handshake.
She did not know why she noticed. She only knew that, for a split second, a very small, dry, cold thing moved through the back of her mind, and passed. She set it down. She was tired. She was so tired. It was nothing.
"I'll let you rest," said Jess.
"Thank you."
"Call me if you need anything."
"I will."
"Anything," said Jess, and glanced, for a moment, at Kara.
Then she left.
----
She came that night as Supergirl.
She had not meant to. She had meant to go home, and sleep, and let Lena rest. But she had been on the roof of her own apartment for an hour, staring at the stars, and she had known, with the helpless certainty of a moth to a lamp, that she would not be able to stay away.
The balcony door was unlatched.
It was always unlatched. It had been unlatched, every night, for fourteen months, since the evening Lena had left a small, handwritten card taped to the glass that read, in her neat, upright hand: For emergencies. And, if you like, for other things.
Kara had come in through that door every night since.
She landed lightly. She tucked her cape around her shoulders. She tapped, twice, on the glass, the way she always did, and waited.
"Come in," said a voice.
She pushed the door.
The apartment was dark, except for a single lamp in the corner. Lena was sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, with her face pale in the glow and her short dark hair tucked behind her ears. She was not wearing her glasses. She was very thin. She looked small, and tired, and unbearably fragile.
She was smiling.
"Hello," she said.
"Hi," said Supergirl. Her voice cracked.
"I'd hoped you'd come."
"I wanted to, I couldn't, I, are you, how are you feeling?"
"Better."
"Are you in pain?"
"Not very."
"Do you need anything? Water? I can get you, I can, I can fly, I can bring you, I can get anything you,"
"Supergirl," said Lena.
"Yes?"
"Come here."
She came.
She crossed the room in three steps, and dropped to her knees beside the couch, and Lena put out both hands and took her face between them. Her palms were warm. Her touch was light. She looked at Kara with those green, glimmering, tired eyes. And then, with a strange and terrible and wonderful tenderness, she leaned forward and kissed her.
It was soft.
Kara's own eyes were closed. She would not remember, until much later, that Lena's had stayed open.
It was a long, slow, aching, careful kiss, the kiss of someone who has waited a very long time. Kara made a small broken noise against her mouth. She put her arms around her, very carefully, so carefully, as though she might break. She felt the hot tears slide down her own face, and she didn't wipe them away.
"I missed you," she said.
"I missed you."
"I was so scared."
"I know."
"I thought I'd lost you."
"I'm here," said Lena, softly, and drew her down, against her shoulder, and stroked her hair. "I'm here."
It was, Kara thought, the happiest moment of her whole life.
It was also, though she would not understand it for many days, the moment that something, deep in the pit of her stomach, tightened, like a very small, very cold hand.
----
The next morning, she came as Kara.
It was a Friday. She had called ahead. She had brought two coffees, a bag of pastries, and a stack of work for the L-Corp board that she'd promised, weeks ago, to help sort, and she stood at the door of Lena's apartment at nine o'clock sharp, with her glasses on and her hair in a ponytail and a smile on her face that was, she hoped, not too wide.
Lena opened the door.
She was dressed. She was wearing a gray suit, with her hair brushed back and her face perfectly composed, and no glasses at all. She was standing very straight.
"Ms. Danvers," she said.
Kara blinked.
"I'm, ha. I mean, Ms. Danvers?"
"Please come in."
"Oh, okay. Sure. I brought coffee."
"Thank you."
"And, um, those scones? The cranberry ones? From, from the place on Fourth. I remembered you liked them."
"That was very thoughtful."
"It's no problem."
"If you'll sit," said Lena, and gestured toward the dining table. "I've reviewed the quarterly documents. I believe there are three items we need to discuss."
Kara sat.
She sat very slowly, with the coffee in her hand, and watched as Lena moved around the table, set out a pen, opened a folder, and began to talk. She spoke in a crisp, cool, even tone, carefully modulated, without a flicker of warmth. She discussed the board, and the quarterly projections, and the shipping schedule. She asked precise, intelligent, impersonal questions.
She did not smile.
She did not once say Kara.
It was, Kara realized, around the second item, the voice she used on strangers. It was the polished, pleasant, impenetrable voice that had won her a reputation as the iciest woman in National City, and that Kara had, in all the long months of their friendship, almost never heard directed at herself.
"Lena," she said, at last.
"Yes, Ms. Danvers?"
"Can we, um. Can we take a break?"
"Certainly."
"You can call me Kara."
"Of course."
"You usually do."
"Do I?"
"You always do."
There was a short pause.
Then Lena put down her pen.
She put two fingers to the bridge of her nose, where her glasses should have been, and sat for a moment with her head bowed, in the pale gray light from the window.
"I'm so sorry," she said, in a different voice.
"What?"
"I'm, I owe you an apology. I've been, I know I've been cold." She let out a long, shaky breath. "It's the, the concussion. The doctors warned me. There are gaps, and I'm, I don't, I can't," she stopped. "I don't remember our friendship."
Kara stared at her.
"I remember you," said Lena. "I remember that you're a reporter, at CatCo. I remember that we, that you've been very kind to me. That we've worked together. But the rest, the details, the things we, the closeness," she gestured, helplessly, with one hand. "It's all, it's fog. I'm trying. I'm so sorry. I don't want you to think I'm unfeeling. I just don't know how I'm supposed to be."
Kara's throat was very tight.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, Lena. Don't, don't apologize. It's fine. It's, you don't have to be anything."
"I want to."
"You don't have to force it."
"I'd like to," said Lena, "get it back."
"We will."
"Will you help me?"
"Of course," said Kara.
She reached across the table. She took Lena's hand, gently, in both of hers, and squeezed. It was warm. It was dry. It lay in her grasp like a small bird.
And in the quiet of the kitchen, in the pale hush of a winter morning, with her fingers laced around those slender, trembling fingers, Kara felt it.
Just once.
A little jerk.
A tiny, involuntary tic in the third finger of Lena's left hand, a quick, light flutter, like the twitch of a sleeper. It was gone almost at once. She might have imagined it.
But Lena had never, ever, twitched.
Not once, in all the hours Kara had held that hand.
Kara didn't move.
She kept her smile, with the tight, careful steadiness of a woman balancing a glass on her head. She said, in an easy voice, "Don't worry about it."
And she listened.
She listened to the heartbeat. It was strong, and regular, and calm, and wrong. It was a little too slow, a little too measured, a little too even. Lena's heart had always been quick and irregular, a fluttering, hurrying, anxious little rhythm that Kara had known by heart for over two years.
It was calm, and slow, and strange.
It's the coma, thought Kara. It's the medication. It's three months of sleep.
She did not believe it.
She kept her smile, and sipped her coffee, and let go of the hand very gently, and agreed to everything on the list. She agreed to the board meeting. She agreed to the lunch. And all the while, in the quiet pit of her stomach, something very small and very cold had begun, softly, to count.
One, it said. The voice.
Two. The finger.
Three. The heart.
That isn't, thought Kara, and refused, with all the strength she had, to finish the thought.