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The scream came from Kara's kitchen at 9:47 p.m., and Lena Luthor, who had once walked into a room full of armed Cadmus soldiers wearing a cocktail dress, dropped the takeout bag and ran.
"Kara?"
Kara was standing very still in the middle of the kitchen with a drinking glass in one hand and a postcard in the other. Her eyes were fixed on the floor, her whole body leaning away from it, and she was making a small, tight noise in her throat.
On the tile, under the edge of the fridge, sat a spider. It was a large spider, the kind with opinions.
"Okay," Lena said. She put herself between Kara and the floor in one smooth step. "Okay. Stay behind me."
"Lena, you don't have to..."
"Behind me."
Kara went behind her. Lena felt a warm hand settle between her shoulder blades, light, a little unsteady, and decided that was the bravest she had ever felt in her life. It was an absurd thing to feel over a spider. She felt it anyway.
She took the glass and the postcard out of Kara's hands. She crouched. She had grown up in a house with a dead brother's chemistry set, a mother's cold silences and a basement she had never been allowed to enter. A spider was nothing.
It went into the glass without a fight. Lena slid the postcard under it, stood, walked to the window and released it onto the fire escape with a small, dignified there you go.
When she turned around, Kara was staring at her with an expression Lena couldn't read. It was soft, and strange, and slightly pained, like someone trying very hard not to laugh at a moment that mattered.
"Thank you," Kara said. Her voice cracked in the middle. "My hero."
"Don't mention it," Lena said, and she meant it, because she had no idea what she'd just been given.
(Kara had been trying to decide whether to put the spider outside or give it a name. She had gotten as far as "Gerald." She never said so.)
----
The first gunman came through the east doors of the L-Corp charity gala at 10:12 p.m., and the second came through the kitchen, and by 10:13 the ballroom was full of screaming and sparkling glass and the very specific silence of two hundred people trying not to breathe.
Lena did not think. She had learned a long time ago that thinking was what got people killed.
She grabbed the nearest person and shoved them behind her. The nearest person was Kara, in a yellow dress and a cardigan, because Kara wore a cardigan to black-tie events and nobody had ever successfully argued her out of it.
"Lena..."
"Down. Stay down. Do not move."
"Lena, I really..."
The gunman fired.
It was a single shot, aimed at the tall woman in the green gown who had stepped forward with her hands open, and Lena's whole body braced for it. Then something very odd happened. There was a sharp tink, like a coin hitting a bell, and a little puff of wool somewhere behind her left shoulder.
Nothing hit her. She was fairly sure of that. She patted herself down anyway, in the middle of a hostage situation, while the gunman stared at his own weapon with open confusion.
"Huh," said Kara faintly. "Guess he missed."
Lena used the moment. She said three things to the gunman, in order, in a voice she had last used on her mother: put it down; put it down now; you do not want to find out what I do next. Behind her, with a speed Lena would only later remember as suspicious, every gun in the room became briefly stuck, jammed, or simply absent from the hands holding it.
Then the east windows blew inward in a shower of glass, and Supergirl was standing in the ballroom with her cape settling around her.
"Sorry I'm late," she said, breathless, looking at nobody in particular. "I was, um. Across town."
The gunmen were gone before Lena had finished blinking. The room began to breathe again. And Lena turned around, shaking now that it was over, and took Kara's face in both hands.
"Are you hurt?"
"No," Kara said. "I promise. I'm completely fine."
"You were behind me. Why were you not further behind me?"
"I thought... you looked like you had it handled."
"I did not have it handled, Kara, I had a dress." She laughed, high and shaky, and pulled Kara into a hug that lasted a good deal longer than the situation required. "You don't need Supergirl when you have me," she said into her friend's hair. "Okay? I'll always be in front of you. I mean it."
Kara went very quiet. She held on very tight.
"I know," she whispered.
Lena found the hole afterwards. It was a small one, clean and round, just under Kara's left collarbone, in the yellow wool.
"Kara. Your cardigan."
"Oh." Kara looked down. "Yeah. Kevlar."
"Kevlar?"
"Alex makes me wear it. She's... very protective. It's a whole thing."
Lena stared at the hole for a long time. She said, with great gravity, "I'm going to have my R&D team look into this."
Three weeks later Kara received a box with six cardigans in it, each in a different color, each woven with a ballistic-grade fiber that had not been on the market until the previous Thursday. The note said: In case your sister is right.
Kara cried a little, privately, in the doorway of her apartment. Then she wore every single one.
----
"She's just so good," Kara was saying.
They were on Lena's balcony with a bottle of wine, the city glittering far below, and Kara had been talking about Supergirl for eleven minutes. Lena had counted. She was not proud of it.
"And she's so kind about it. You know? Like, even when everybody's asking things of her, she never makes anybody feel small." Kara was pink to the ears. "I just think that she's... really something. Don't you think she's really something?"
Oh, Lena thought.
It landed slowly, the way bad news usually did, from a long way off. Kara Danvers, the sunniest person she had ever met, the person who had walked into her office with potstickers and refused to leave, was pink to the ears about Supergirl.
Of course she was. Everyone was. Supergirl was golden and certain and bulletproof, and Lena was a Luthor with a bad last name and a worse family history. It made a kind of sense. It made a very exact, very painful sense.
She swallowed her wine, and what was in her chest, and said, lightly, "Do you want me to arrange a meeting?"
Kara choked on a potsticker.
"A what?"
"I'm only saying. I have some pull. If you wanted to, I don't know, say something. To her. People do that."
"Lena, no, that is... oh my god. No. That's not... no." Kara waved her hands as if she could erase the suggestion from the air. "That's not what I... why would you..."
"Because you like her."
"I like a lot of people!"
"You like her pink to the ears."
Kara opened her mouth and closed it. For a moment she looked like a person standing at the edge of a very high place, deciding whether to jump.
Lena took pity. She stood, refilled both their glasses, and sat back down a little closer than before.
"For what it's worth," she said, to the city, "I think she'd be lucky. To have someone like you. Someone who notices that she gets tired." She hesitated. "But you don't need her to be brave, you know. You've got plenty of that already. And you've got me."
The silence stretched. She felt Kara turn to look at her.
"Lena," Kara said carefully, in a voice like someone setting down something that might break. "Are you... did you just..."
"I'm only saying I'm in your corner." Lena smiled, and it came out almost right. "Whoever you choose. That's all."
Kara looked at her for a long, long moment, and then did something that Lena did not understand until much, much later. She laughed. It was soft, a little wet, and had nothing unkind in it, and she leaned her head on Lena's shoulder.
"You're an idiot," she said fondly.
"I've been told."
"I love you."
It was meant to sound like friendship. Lena heard every other thing it could be, and kept very still, and let it be friendship for one more night.
----
"Surrender, you scoundrel!"
"Never!"
The backyard of the house on Willow Lane was, at that moment, a warzone. A pirate ship made from two overturned patio chairs and a bedsheet was under heavy fire from a blanket fort, and Captain Lorelei Daniel Luthor Danvers, seven years old and ferociously committed, stood on the top of the picnic table with a wooden spoon raised like Excalibur.
"I am the Terror of the Seven Seas!"
"You're a terrifying person," Lena agreed from the porch swing, where she was in the middle of a coffee. "I've seen your report card."
"Mama."
"Continue, Captain."
Beside the table, Charlotte Alexandra, four years old and entirely uninterested in the plot, was marching in a slow circle with a pillowcase over her head. This was, as far as anyone could tell, her ghost. She was not a participant in the battle. She was simply present.
And in the doorway of the kitchen, wearing a lavender cardigan and an expression of operatic dread, stood Kara.
"Oh no," Kara announced, to nobody. "The pirates."
Lena didn't look up. She knew where this was going. She had known where this was going every single Sunday for six years.
"They're coming for the pie," Kara said, a little louder. She edged out onto the porch, clutching a dish towel to her chest. "They want the blueberry pie! Lena, they're so scary!"
"You are a grown woman."
"I'm a very scared grown woman." Kara slid behind the porch swing and crouched with her hands on Lena's shoulders, peering over the top at the pirate captain with enormous eyes. "Please protect me."
Lorelei narrowed her eyes. She gave her spoon a menacing little twirl. "Give us the pie!"
Lena sighed. She set down her coffee. She stood, slowly, in her ancient L-Corp sweatshirt and her bare feet, and picked up the second wooden spoon from the arm of the swing. The kids had stocked the porch with weapons. It was a thorough household.
She stepped forward and put herself squarely between the pirate and the pie.
"Stay behind me," she said.
Kara made a small, delighted, wildly unconvincing whimper.
Lena raised her spoon. She looked her daughter in the eye. And she said, in the old, clear, absolutely fearless voice she had used on gunmen and board members and her own brother, "You don't need Supergirl when you have me."
"Mama," Lorelei said, patient and exasperated, "Mama Kara is Supergirl."
"Shhh. She's in character."
"I'm so in character," Kara agreed from behind her, and from somewhere in the yard Char said "boo," ghostily, to the fence.
The battle lasted twenty minutes. Lena was run through four times, drowned once in a bucket of imaginary water, and taken prisoner by the Terror of the Seven Seas, who demanded a ransom of two cookies and an extra ten minutes before bed. Kara hid behind her through all of it, whimpering on cue, flinching magnificently at every spoon, clinging to the back of Lena's sweatshirt like the world's most unlikely damsel.
The woman who had once held a collapsing bridge on her back. The woman who had flown through the heart of a sun. The woman who could have lifted the pirate ship, the picnic table, the house and the whole of Willow Lane, and set them down on the moon without spilling the coffee.
She hid behind her wife, and let her win.
That night, after the pie was eaten and the pirates were asleep, Lena found her on the back steps with her chin on her knees, looking at the stars.
"You can stop pretending, you know," Lena said, sitting down beside her. "The kids are in bed."
"Mm."
"I used to think you were so fragile."
Kara laughed, quiet and warm.
"I did," Lena went on. "That spider. The gala. I spent years trying to stand in front of you. I'd have thrown myself in front of anything. And all that time..." She shook her head. "Do you have any idea how ridiculous I must have looked?"
"You looked," Kara said, "like the bravest person I'd ever seen."
Lena turned to her.
"Nobody had ever done that before, Lena." Kara wasn't smiling now. She was looking at the sky, but her voice was steady, and very, very honest. "Everyone has always stood behind me. Waiting for me to fix it. For me to be the one in front. I'm the one people hide behind." She finally turned. "And then you came along, and you put yourself between me and the world, over a spider, and you didn't know I was the strongest person on the planet. You just thought I might be scared."
"I'm sorry..."
"Don't you dare be sorry." Kara caught her hand. "It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. I wasn't going to give it back."
Lena stared at her. Her eyes stung, and she was unreasonably annoyed about that.
"So that's why the cardigans," she said at last.
"The cardigans are great."
"The cardigans are bulletproof."
"The cardigans are the most thoughtful thing anyone's ever given me, and I wear them every single day." Kara grinned and leaned in until their foreheads touched. "I know I don't need Supergirl when I have you."
"You absolutely do not," Lena murmured. "But I'll stay in front anyway."
"Good," Kara whispered. "I'll stay right behind you."
And she did.
Always.