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The phone rang, and Lena didn't get to it in time.
She was across the penthouse, in her stocking feet, with a glass of wine in one hand and the DEO's incident report in the other, and by the time she crossed the carpet the screen had already gone dark. She looked at it. ALEX DANVERS: 1 MISSED CALL. Under it, a second line: ALEX DANVERS: 2 MISSED CALLS. Then three. Then four.
Alex Danvers did not call Lena Luthor. Alex Danvers texted Lena Luthor, in short, flat, grudgingly polite sentences, usually about brunch. In four years, she had never once rung her.
Lena's stomach went cold.
She had read the report that afternoon. It was eleven pages, redacted in three places, and it said, in the clinical, passionless language of the Department of Extranormal Operations, that an experimental L-Corp satellite array had, during a routine orbital correction, "scattered a fragment cluster of unclassified Kryptonian mineral across the northern quadrant of National City." It said the DEO had recovered four of five fragments. It said the fifth had "entered the atmosphere over the Bay at approximately 14:10." It said, in a small paragraph at the bottom of page nine, in a type size that suggested its author had hoped nobody would read it, "Supergirl was not available for the cleanup due to proximity."
And on page ten, a single photograph. A fist-sized rock. Dark red, with a faint, sullen glow.
Lena had stared at that photograph for a long time.
She looked up now.
The balcony doors were glass, floor to ceiling, and beyond them lay the whole of the city at night, a bed of coals. And standing on the stone terrace, perfectly still, with the wind pulling at her hair, was Kara.
She wasn't in the suit.
That was the first thing. There was no cape, no S, no bright wash of blue and red. She wore a gray T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and both had been torn to ribbons: a long jagged rip down one sleeve, a dark smear across the hem, one leg split open from the knee. Her feet were bare. Her hair, which Lena had never seen anything but neatly combed or charmingly rumpled, hung in a wild, tangled tumble down her back, as though she had flown through a hurricane.
The second thing was her eyes.
They had always been blue. A clear, kind, impossible blue, like the first morning of the world. Now they were dark. They were the red-black of old garnets, with a deep, burning glow at the center of each pupil, and they were fixed on Lena with an intensity that made the air in the room feel suddenly very thin.
And the veins.
They ran up her neck from the collar of her shirt in thin, glittering, scarlet lines, branching along her jaw and across her cheekbones, like cracks in a vase lit from within. They pulsed. Slowly. In time with something Lena couldn't hear.
Red kryptonite, thought Lena.
Oh, God. Oh, Kara.
She stood very still.
She knew what it did. She'd read the files. Everyone had read the files: loss of inhibition, aggression, impulsiveness, complete suspension of the moral filter. She knew what had happened to Cat Grant, in the spring, on the CatCo balcony, when Kara had picked her up by her lapels and held her out over a hundred-foot drop and said, in a reasonable, pleasant tone, "I'm just saying, you don't have to talk to me like that." She knew about the thing Kara had said to Alex, in the DEO kitchen, three weeks later, the thing she had been sobbing about for a whole night afterward in Lena's arms, with her face hot and her hands shaking. I don't even know where it came from.
She knew what Kara could do, if she wanted to.
She also knew what she was looking at.
Kara hadn't moved. She stood on the terrace with her arms at her sides, quite still, and looked. Not at the city. Not at the door. At Lena, through the glass, with her head tilted just a little to one side, in an expression Lena had never seen on her face.
It wasn't rage. It wasn't hunger.
It was something very close to awe.
For a long, long moment, neither of them moved. Behind Lena, on the carpet, the phone began to ring again.
Kara's head snapped toward the sound.
And then she touched the ground, a bare foot on cold stone, and the glass door slid open without a sound, and she walked into the room.
She crossed the carpet slowly.
She didn't stalk. That was the strangest part. There was none of the quick, hot, predatory fury Lena had braced herself for. She moved like something large and dangerous being very careful in a small house. The floor creaked under her bare feet. The lamplight caught the red in her eyes, and the red in her veins, and threw a long dark shadow across the wall.
The phone rang a third time.
Kara looked at it.
She was across the room in less than a blink. The air displaced with a soft whump, and a paper fluttered off the desk. She picked up the phone from the carpet, with two fingers, as though it were something small and distasteful, and looked at the screen. ALEX DANVERS.
"She's worried," said Kara.
Her voice was wrong, too. It was lower than usual, and warm, with an edge of velvet and something loose, something unlatched, like a door standing open in a high wind.
"Alex," said Kara. "Always worried. Always telling me what to do. Don't hit that guy, Kara. Don't say that, Kara. Don't be so," She curled her fingers. The phone made a small sound of distress. "I'm so tired of being careful."
She flicked her wrist.
The phone went across the room like a bullet, hit the far wall, and shattered into forty pieces.
The silence that followed was very large.
Lena didn't flinch. She stood where she was, in her stockings, in the middle of the carpet, with the report in one hand and the wineglass in the other, and she was acutely aware of three things. That the glass was trembling slightly. That Kara had turned back to look at her. And that her own heart was going very hard, and very fast, and, to her considerable shame, not entirely out of fear.
Kara watched her.
She didn't speak. She simply looked. It was a long, slow, consuming, searching look, from Lena's face to her bare feet and back, and under the heat in it, under the wildness, Lena saw it again, the thing she couldn't name. It wasn't only want. There was something quieter in it, and fiercer. It looked, she thought, absurdly, like reverence. Like a person standing before something that they had been told all their life they were not allowed to touch.
She's in a primal state, thought Lena, from somewhere very calm and very far away. Pure instinct. No filter. Whatever's underneath is all that's left.
And she hasn't hurt me.
She had thrown a phone. She had said a hard thing about Alex. But she hadn't raised her voice to Lena. She hadn't taken a single step that was not slow and careful and gentle. She was looking at her, in the middle of her own penthouse, as though Lena were the only thing in the whole world that she was afraid of breaking.
Lena put the wineglass down on the desk.
It took a moment to find her voice. She had faced armed men, and her mother, and a cult. But she found, in the end, that all she needed was a long breath, and a straightened spine, and the particular, silken composure that had carried her through every worst day of her life.
"Kara, darling," she said.
It came out warm. It came out steady.
"I know that something is happening to you. I know it isn't your fault. But I need you to tell me what you need, so that I can help."
Kara went absolutely still.
For about a second and a half, nothing moved. The red in her eyes seemed to flare. The pulse in her veins stuttered.
And then she was there.
She had crossed the whole room in an instant. She stood so close that Lena could feel the heat coming off her, an unnatural, fever-bright burn, like a stove left on. Her face was an inch away. Less. Her eyes were enormous, and dark, and shining, and the veins in her cheeks glowed like embers.
"Say that again," said Kara, hoarsely.
"Which part?"
"Darling."
Lena swallowed.
"Kara, darling."
A shudder went through Kara's whole body. She closed her eyes, and her breath came out in a long, ragged, trembling exhale, and when she opened them again there was something raw and open in her face that was very, very hard to look at.
"I love it," she whispered. "I love when you call me that."
"I know."
"I want you."
It was said so simply. It wasn't a threat, and it wasn't a boast. It was a plain truth, set down like a stone. Lena felt it go through her like a blade of warm light.
"I know," she said again, very quietly.
"I could take you." Kara's voice dropped. Her hand came up, slowly, as though through water, and hovered next to Lena's cheek, not touching, a quarter-inch of fever-hot air between her fingers and Lena's skin. "Right now. I could. Nobody could stop me. Not a single person in this city could, and I know it." Her jaw tightened. "But it wouldn't be right."
Lena didn't breathe.
"It wouldn't be right," said Kara, again, with sudden, ferocious anger, and spun away from her. She flung her arms wide, and turned, in a theatrical, sweeping arc, toward the open balcony and the glittering sky beyond. "I can do whatever I want! Do you understand that? Whatever I want. I'm a god, Lena. I've been one before. I know what it feels like. To be free. To say every single true thing in your chest, and not care who hears it!" She whirled around. Her hair flew. "And I could do it right now. I could tell you everything. I could,"
She stopped.
Her hands were shaking.
"But I can't," she said, in a whisper. The anger had gone out of her voice, and what was left was thin and frightened and young. "With you, I can't. I can't hurt you. If I hurt you, it'd just hurt me. It's the same thing. It's always been the same thing." Her fists clenched. "And I can't just stand here and figure out how to make you love me like I do!"
It was a bellow, in the end. A furious, cracking, wounded bellow, flung into the empty room, and it rang off the glass like a struck bell.
Lena stood absolutely still.
She'd wanted to hear those words for so long.
She'd imagined them a hundred times. In the shower, in the long cold hours before dawn, in the margins of a hundred board meetings. In her imagination, they had always been said in a clean, gentle voice, in a quiet room, with a warm hand held out, and a soft smile. She had never imagined them like this. Shouted, in rage and misery, by a woman with garnet eyes and bleeding feet and a face wet with tears she hadn't noticed she was crying.
And somehow they were better.
Because they were true. They were the truest thing she had ever heard. They came from underneath every wall and every filter and every careful, loving, exhausting performance of being good. This was the thing that was left when all of it was stripped away. And it wasn't a monster at all.
It was this.
It was love.
Lena moved.
It was a small movement. A single step. She crossed the three feet between them, slowly, and reached up, and laid her palm against Kara's cheek.
It was burning.
It was like touching a stone left in the desert sun. The heat of it ran up her arm, and she felt the faint, rapid flutter of the red veins under her fingers, and the thin shivering of the skin beneath. Kara went rigid. Her eyes squeezed shut.
"Darling," said Lena. "I love you too."
Kara made a small, broken sound.
"I love you the same. I have for a very long time. But I need you to understand, sweetheart, you aren't well. You aren't yourself. And I don't want this, not like this, not when you're," She shook her head. "I want you safe. I want you home."
"No."
Kara's eyes snapped open.
They were burning again. The softness had gone out of them, and the old hot red had come flooding back, and with it that wild, hard, glittering anger, flaring up like an ember in the wind. Her hand closed, very gently, around Lena's wrist.
"No," she said. "I'm fine. I'm better than fine. I'm myself. I'm the most myself I've ever been." She leaned in. "Come with me."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Everywhere. I'll give you the world, Lena." Her voice was low and fast, tumbling over itself. "It doesn't deserve you. It never did. It's been so cruel, and it's never said sorry, and I'm so tired of watching it hurt you. We could rule it. Together. We'd make it good. You and me. No more Lex. No more lies. No more people who look at you like," Her grip tightened. "Like you're something to be afraid of. I'd make them sorry.*"
"Kara."
"I would. I'd make them all sorry."
"I know you would," said Lena.
And she did. That was the thing. She stood in the circle of that burning hand, with her wrist trapped and her heartbeat in her ears, and she saw it all, with the cold, clear, merciless sight of someone who has made a life of taking things apart to see how they work.
She doesn't want the world.
She doesn't want a throne. She doesn't want a crown. She isn't asking for power.
She only wants what I want. She wants whatever I want. She just wants to give it to me.
Kara Danvers on an ordinary day was a golden retriever. She was an enormous, bouncing, warm-hearted, tail-wagging golden retriever, who greeted every stranger like a long-lost friend and had once cried at a diaper commercial. And this, Lena thought, with a slow, strange, sinking sense of recognition, this was the same dog. It was the same enormous, generous, loyal, adoring, utterly devoted heart. It had simply been unleashed. It had gone off the lead, and found its teeth, and was standing in the middle of the room with its hackles up, looking for something to protect.
It was not a monster.
It was just a very big, very frightened, very bad dog.
And Lena knew exactly what to do with a bad dog.
"Kara," said Lena.
It was a different voice. It was low, and calm, and absolutely level, the voice she'd used to talk down security guards, and her mother, and on one memorable occasion, an extremely frightened Doberman in a parking garage. It wasn't loud. It didn't have to be.
"Look at me."
Kara's red eyes flickered.
"Look at me, darling. Sit down."
A pause.
"I don't,"
"Sit."
For a moment, Lena thought she'd miscalculated. For a moment, the whole room seemed to hang on a knife's edge, and Kara's grip on her wrist tightened, and a muscle jumped in her jaw.
Then she sat.
She did it all at once, as though her knees had been cut, dropping onto the edge of the sofa with a dull, jolting thump. She looked up at Lena with an expression of utter, furious bewilderment, and under it, tucked very deep, something that was almost hope.
"Good," said Lena, softly.
Kara blinked.
Lena bent. She cupped Kara's chin, and tilted her face up, and pressed a single light kiss to her forehead. It was the briefest touch. Her lips were barely there. But Kara made a sound, a low, shaken, astonished sound, and her whole body shivered, from the crown of her head to the soles of her bare feet.
"Good girl," said Lena.
The veins at Kara's throat flickered. Faded, a little. Flared again.
"Now give me your hands."
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to look at them."
A long, long hesitation. Then Kara held them out, palms up, with an air of sullen suspicion, and Lena took them in her own. They were cut. A dozen small scrapes crossed the knuckles, and there was a deep graze across the heel of one palm that had already begun to close. Lena turned them gently in the light.
"You're hurt."
"I'm not."
"You are."
"It's nothing."
"Then hold still," said Lena, "while I take care of it."
She did. It was almost unbearable, how quickly she did. Lena fetched a cloth from the bathroom, and a bowl of warm water, and sat down on the coffee table, knee to knee with her, and washed the dirt from her hands with great gravity and care, one knuckle at a time. She did not hurry. She did not speak. And at the end of each small piece of work, when a cut was clean, or a bruise was cooled, or a fold of torn skin smoothed flat, she leaned in and pressed a kiss to the back of Kara's hand.
Little kisses. Quick ones. A reward, and a promise. A thank you.
Kara watched her do it, with her whole face trembling.
It was the most remarkable thing Lena had ever seen. She had one hand in the other woman's, and a cloth in the other, and she was sitting on a glass coffee table in her own living room, in her stocking feet, and she had the most dangerous, most powerful, most wild creature on the entire planet eating out of her palm. Not by force. Not by threat. But by being gentle. By being calm. By showing the frightened animal inside that there was nothing here to fear.
"You're not scared of me," whispered Kara, at last.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I know who you are," said Lena. "I always have."
Kara's lip began to wobble.
"I'm sorry," she said, hoarsely, in a voice that cracked like thin ice. She'd gone very small. All the wildness had drained out of her, and left, in its place, a miserable, hunched, shaking thing, with its head down. "I broke your phone."
"It was a terrible phone."
"I was so mean to Alex."
"I know."
"I don't want to be mean to Alex. I love Alex. I just," Her face crumpled. "I get so angry. And I don't know where it goes, and then it's all just,"
"I know, darling."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I'll be good."
"You are good," said Lena. "You are the best person I have ever known. This isn't you. This is a rock. It's a stupid, horrible rock, and it's making you sick, and you didn't ask for it." She stroked Kara's hair back from her damp forehead, very slowly, again and again, as one would calm a child. "And I'm going to help you get rid of it."
"How?"
"First," said Lena, "we're going to wait. And someone's going to come to the door."
"Alex."
"Alex."
Kara's jaw hardened. For a second, the old red came flickering up in her eyes.
"She'll try to," she began.
"I know."
"She'll try to make me."
"She will," said Lena. "And you're going to let her. Because I'm going to be right here."
Kara's whole face twisted.
"What if I don't want to?"
Lena thought about it.
She was quiet for a long moment. And then she smiled, a small, secret, rather wicked smile that she'd used on exactly two occasions in her entire life, both of them in boardrooms.
"Kara," she said. "If you let Alex give you the injection, and you sit very, very still, and you don't break anything, or anyone, I will kiss you while she does it."
There was a very long silence.
"Really?" said Kara.
"On the mouth."
"For how long?"
"For as long as it takes."
"Promise?"
"Cross my heart."
Kara stared at her.
Her eyes were wide. Her mouth was a little open. She looked, Lena thought, like a woman who had just been handed the stars on a plate and was waiting to be told it was a joke. And then, very slowly, with enormous effort, as though it cost her something enormous, she lowered her head and nodded.
"Okay," she whispered.
"Good girl," said Lena, and kissed her forehead again.
Alex arrived eleven minutes later.
She came through the front door at a dead run, in her DEO jacket, with a med kit in one hand and a pistol in the other, and a face the color of old paper. She had not knocked. She did not seem to have noticed that the door was unlocked. She skidded to a halt on the carpet, and her eyes went around the room, the shattered phone, the open balcony, the tipped lamp, and found Lena.
And Kara, sitting very straight on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap, like a child in church.
"Oh," said Alex, faintly. "You're, you're alive."
"We're quite well, thank you," said Lena.
"I called you fifteen times."
"I'm afraid the phone was an early casualty."
"She, she could have,"
"She didn't."
Alex stared. She was breathing hard. Her gun hand had begun, very faintly, to shake. She looked at her sister, and her sister looked back at her, with eyes of dark, burning red, and an expression of tight, suspicious, thoroughly wary compliance.
"Hi, Alex," said Kara.
"Hi."
"Sorry about the thing."
"What thing?"
"All the things."
"It's, we'll," Alex swallowed. "We'll talk about it after."
"Okay."
"You, you're being really, calm," said Alex, carefully, taking a step. The med kit swung from her hand. "Kara. Is that, are you okay? Are you, can you hear me? I've got the, it's the antidote, we've got it, it's a synthesized, it's a counter-agent from the lab. It's going to feel," She wet her lips. "It's going to be a bit of a shock."
"I don't want it."
The room went very quiet.
Alex froze. Lena, in the corner of her eye, saw the old red flare in Kara's eyes, and the muscles in her shoulders tighten, and the knuckles on her folded hands go white.
"I don't want it," said Kara, again. "I don't want to be," She shook her head. "I'll just, you'll make me go back to being,"
"Kara."
It was only a murmur. It was no more than a breath.
But Kara's head turned, and her eyes, wild and wet and terrified, met Lena's, across the width of the sofa.
"Remember what I said," said Lena, very quietly.
Kara looked at her.
Something in her face, something fierce and frightened and young, began, slowly, to give way. She let out a long, shuddering breath.
"Right here?" she whispered.
"Right here."
"You'll be,"
"Right here. I promise."
Kara closed her eyes.
"Okay," she said.
It was a very odd sort of ceremony.
Alex knelt at the end of the sofa, kit open, syringe in her hand, and Lena sat next to Kara, with one arm around her shoulders. Kara's right sleeve had been rolled to the elbow. Her arm lay across Lena's knees, pale and strong and trembling a little, the red veins bright against the skin. Alex took her wrist.
"You're going to feel a pinch," said Alex.
"I know how needles work."
"I'm just saying."
"They don't work on me."
"This one's," Alex cleared her throat. "This one's different. It's a, it's specially designed. You'll feel it."
"Fine."
"I'm going to count to three."
"Fine!"
"One,"
Kara turned her head.
She looked at Lena.
She did not say a word. She simply looked, with her enormous red-gold eyes, and the faintest, most terrified expression of hope, and Lena felt her whole chest go tight and warm and bright.
She leaned in.
"Two,"
She took Kara's face between her hands.
"Three,"
And she kissed her.
It was not what Lena had imagined.
She had imagined it, God help her, more times than she would ever admit. In a hundred soft, golden, careful versions. A rainy night. A hand on the cheek. A moment.
She hadn't imagined this. She hadn't imagined the fever, which poured through her like a flood, as though she'd put her mouth to a furnace. She hadn't imagined the strength in the fingers that curled, convulsively, in her hair, or the muffled, shaking, helpless sound that Kara made against her lips. She hadn't imagined the sudden, startling sweetness of it, the clumsy, trembling, utterly sincere way Kara kissed her back, like a person drinking water for the first time in a very long time.
She kissed her slowly. She kissed her gently. She poured every ounce of tenderness she possessed into the single point of contact between them. And she felt Kara's whole body tighten as the needle went in, and a shudder run through her, a convulsion, a hard, bright, bone-deep jolt, and a gasp that she swallowed.
She held on.
She held on through the shaking. She held on through a low, tearing sound that wasn't quite a sob, and the pulse of heat that seemed to rush, all at once, through every inch of Kara's body. She felt the veins, at the corner of her jaw, flicker and go out. She felt the fever break. She felt the grip in her hair loosen, and soften, and then go slack, and a long, soft, uneven breath shake out of Kara's chest against her mouth.
Behind them, somewhere very far away, Alex said, with a note of awful relief, "Got it. Okay. It's done. It's done."
Lena did not let go.
She kissed her for a little longer, because she'd promised. She kissed her until the last of the heat had drained away, and the trembling in her arms had stilled, and Kara's hands had slid down, slowly, from her hair to her shoulders, and rested there.
And then, very gently, she drew back.
For a moment, Kara didn't open her eyes.
She sat very still on the sofa, with her face tipped up, and her lashes damp, and her mouth, her mouth, a little parted. Her skin was cool. It was her own color, again, a clear, warm, human pink, and the red threads at her throat were gone. Her hair was wild. Her shirt was in ribbons.
She looked, Lena thought, like someone waking from a very long dream.
Her lashes lifted.
They were blue.
It was a clear, deep, impossible blue, as though a window had been thrown open in a dark house, and the sky had come pouring in. They were wide and wet and bewildered, and they found Lena's face, an inch away, and held it.
"Lena?" said Kara.
It was her own voice. Soft. Hoarse. Real.
"Hello, darling."
For about two seconds, nothing happened.
Then memory arrived. Lena watched it come, like a wave rolling up a beach: the shock, the confusion, the dawning, sickening, absolute horror, as piece after piece of the last six hours slotted together behind her eyes. The balcony. The phone. I could take you right now. The ribbons of her shirt, and the shattered plastic on the carpet, and her sister, kneeling at her feet, with a syringe in one hand and her heart in her mouth.
The kiss.
Kara went white.
She leapt off the sofa. She did it in a blur, a gust of air and a wild scramble, and she was on the far side of the room before Lena had finished drawing breath, with both hands over her mouth and her shoulders hunched, shaking from head to foot.
"Oh, my God," she said, behind her fingers. "Oh, my God. Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so, I didn't mean, I didn't, I said, I said all those, and I, and then you, I made you, I forced you to, oh, God, oh, Rao, I can't, I have to go,"
She turned. She took one step toward the balcony.
"Kara."
"I have to go. I'm so sorry."
"Kara," said Lena. "Stop."
She hadn't raised her voice. She hadn't moved from the sofa. But there was something in it, something steady and unyielding, a quiet iron, that stopped Kara in her tracks, like a hand laid flat against her chest.
"Don't you dare," said Lena, "run from me."
Kara turned around.
Her face was wrecked. Tears were running down it, and her mouth was shaking, and she was trembling so hard that her whole body rattled. She looked about eight years old.
"I'm so sorry,"
"Come here."
"I can't, I,"
"Kara."
A beat.
Then, slowly, with the expression of someone walking to the scaffold, Kara came back across the carpet. She stopped about three feet away. She stood there, hunched and wretched, with her hands clenched at her sides.
Lena stood up.
She crossed the three feet between them, and took Kara's face in both hands, and held it.
"Look at me."
Kara looked.
"You did not force me to do anything," said Lena.
"But I,"
"You did not. I offered. It was my idea. I'd have done it a hundred times over." She brushed a tear from Kara's cheek with her thumb. "And you didn't hurt anyone, Kara. You broke a phone. I'd frankly been hoping for an excuse."
A small, broken, hiccuping laugh escaped Kara's throat.
"But the things I said,"
"We'll talk about the things you said."
Kara flinched.
"Not now," said Lena, gently. "You've had a very long day. You're exhausted. You've just come off a chemical bender, and you've got your sister standing in my living room, doing her best to look at the ceiling." She did not turn her head. "Hello, Alex."
"Hi," said Alex, to the ceiling, in a strangled voice.
"Not now," said Lena again. "Not tonight. But we are going to talk. I promise you. About all of it. About what you said, and what I said, and every single thing in between." She paused. "When you're ready."
"What if I'm not,"
"Then I'll wait."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes," said Lena, and smiled, and this time it was not a wicked smile at all. It was soft, and tired, and very, very warm. "I've got plenty of time, darling. I'm not going anywhere."
Kara stared at her.
She stared for a very long time. Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes, red-rimmed, wet, impossibly blue, searched Lena's face for something, a lie, a flaw, a crack in the surface, and found none.
And then she folded, all at once, like a puppet with its strings cut, and dropped her head onto Lena's shoulder, and began, very quietly, to cry.
Lena held her.
She held her in the middle of the penthouse, among the broken glass and the scattered papers and the cold night wind blowing in from the balcony, with Kara's arms wrapped around her waist and Kara's face in her neck, and she stroked her hair, and murmured nothing at all.
Across the room, Alex Danvers quietly put the syringe in the med kit. She snapped the lid shut. She looked at her sister, and at Lena, and, for what might have been the first time in four years, at the two of them together, and something in her face went soft and tired and astonished.
She turned around.
She walked out onto the balcony, and stood there, with her back to the room, looking at the lights of the city, for a very long while.
It was past midnight when Kara finally fell asleep.
She did it on the sofa, in one of Lena's old L-Corp sweatshirts, with her head in Lena's lap and a blanket tucked up to her chin, and her breath coming slow and even. The balcony was closed. The shattered phone had been swept into a dustpan. Alex had left at half-past eleven, with a hug, an awkward pat, and a very quiet "thank you."
Lena sat with her fingers in Kara's hair, in the lamplight, and watched her sleep.
She was a very good dog, she thought. She was the very best.
She smiled. She bent. She pressed one last, light kiss to Kara's temple, and murmured, to the quiet room, to the dark window, to the sleeping city beyond:
"Good girl."
Fin.