Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The garage held the scent of disuse, a vaguely wet smell mixed with earth, stale air, and old motor oil. Electricity hummed to life with the flip of a switch; the antiquated fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed as they warmed up for the first time in years. It was strange to be back. She told herself that she would never go back to this place unless it was absolutely necessary, and here she was, letting her heels echo against the concrete simply because she had a girlish desire.

Lena walked between two neat rows of cars, but she stopped in front of one in particular. She smirked at the black satin car cover, lightly dusted from sitting for so long in an unventilated (though temperature regulated) garage. She gripped the sheet in one hand, the place she’d seen her brother go for when she was a kid. Quickly, she lifted and then snapped her wrist back so that the entire cover came off in one fluid motion. A cloud of dust rose and then settled. She threw the cover to the side, letting it crumple on the ground carelessly.

She ran one finger along the spine of the car’s hood as she walked to the driver’s side door. The car was pristine, though it was probably last polished five years ago. It was a 1966 Shelby GT350, shiny and entirely jet black. Perfect, menacing, elegant. It was the epitome of a mid-60s hot rod.

“Hello, darling,” Lena purred as she opened the door and slid into the black leather bucket seats. It was almost lewd, the slow and careful way she ran her palms down the dark wood grain of the custom steering wheel installed by her father years ago. Her fingers traced its ridges with a light touch before they wrapped around the wheel and gripped tightly, testing the fit. The key was where it always was—wedged into the sun visor on the passenger side. Unsurprisingly, the car roared to life immediately. She let it run as she retrieved her weekender duffel and garment bag.

She always imagined her return to the Luthor Estate would be by failure, a desperate getaway from a miserable life she couldn’t afford (literally and figuratively) to continue. She imagined walking through those doors as a prodigal daughter, come back begrudgingly to beg forgiveness and love from Lillian. It wasn’t a thought she frequently lingered on; Metropolis held too much weight for her to ever consider coming back. It was a shadow that dragged behind her as she trudged on in National City, always trying to face forward, as if forward were west.

And yet? And yet here she was.

She slid back into the driver’s seat and popped mirrored aviators onto her face before she pulled her hair up into a tight ponytail, checked the rear view mirror, and reached across to manually unroll the passenger side window. Lena revved the engine, pleased that it sounded so damn good.

For one fleeting and terrifying moment, Lena had the most startling revelation: she was the richest 26 year old on the whole damn planet. Everything in that old, dusty house was hers. Every car in that garage was hers. Anything that cost money she could buy. She revved the engine again, let it echo in the confined space of the garage. She could have everything. She could sell it all and fuck off to live a stress-free life on some island in the Mediterranean or fulfill her 16 year old self’s fantasy of embodying a billionaire hotshot, coasting her way through the night life of every major city in every country in the world.

But she had somewhere she needed to be and all she wanted was her brother’s old car, the one their mother said was too flashy and too loud and drove like a tugboat.

Well. That wasn’t all she wanted. But that’s what she wanted in that moment before her revelation. And after?

She checked the mirror one last time before easing the car out of the garage. She watched each panel come down in the reflection and when the first one finally touched the ground, she put the car into gear. She hadn’t driven stick shift in ages, but it was what Lex taught her when he had time for her and it’s what she remembered of him aside from his orange jumpsuit and most recently hired hitmen. It came back to her naturally, immediately.

The Shelby took off like Lena remembered and it wasn’t long before she put the car into 6th, heading south on the highway, away from the Luthor Estate and toward the only thing that could have coaxed her back to this coast, to this place, to this house.

Lena tuned the radio and let The Shirelles urge her on as she sped toward Midvale with a smile on her face.

--

Salt and pine lingered in the air over Midvale in early Fall. Winds over the Atlantic had all summer to bring the smell of the ocean to the warmed East coast before it settled into the bay. The leaves along the highway had barely begun to color—everything was still mostly green with small smatterings of yellow and orange, like stray flecks of errant paint. The air was clear and light; the true indicator that Summer had given way to Fall. The hot, humid days petered and bowed out, leaving Midvale pleasantly warm and dry.

It was Kara’s favorite season.

She stood on the second story balcony of Eliza’s house, her second childhood home, and looked out toward the ocean, her gaze aimlessly ghosting over the blue water and the incline of trees on the shore. Kara could hear the waves lapping against the sand and stone, churning about like some ancient thing. The sliding door opened with a soft sound, bringing with it the smell of hot chocolate.

“Hi honey,” Eliza said, passing a mug to Kara. She took it gladly, smiling as she did so. “See anything interesting?”

Kara inclined her head back out toward the bay.

“Just the usual pitter patter of the local fishermen,” she said. More boats were coming in than going out for local morning sales. Kara could hear the chiming of ship’s bells signaling one thing or another and the distant yelling of captains and crew members.

Eliza hummed, looking out as she did so. Her finger tapped against the telescope that sat on the balcony, the one that used to belong to Kenny. Kara didn’t come home often, a fact she felt guilty about, but whenever she did, she was always grateful that Eliza kept everything like she remembered. Maybe it helped her, too, to leave everything the same. Kara always found herself forgetting how big that house was.

“I can’t believe it’s already time,” Eliza said, smiling against the rim of her mug.

“I know.” Kara smiled brightly. “Can you believe a year and half has already passed?”

Eliza shook her head. Every year seemed shorter and shorter—that was just a fact of life. But with Alex being Alex and Kara being Supergirl? Time seemed to fly by without so much as a blink.

“Are you sure you want to stay here?” Eliza asked, suddenly.

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we? Do you not want us here?”

“No, no, not that. It’s just—I’m sure Lena is used to more—” She waved her hand around vaguely. “Opulence.”

Kara laughed.

“But this is home. Nothing beats home,” she smiled. “And it’s walking distance to the venue.”

“Yes, and it’s walking distance to the venue,” Eliza echoed. “I’m just saying, if you and Lena were uncomfortable staying here after the wedding, I wouldn’t be offended if you chose to stay at the Belmond.”

“Who has money to stay at the Belmond?” Kara snorted. Eliza rolled her eyes. “Okay, Lena has money to stay at the Belmond… but that’s her money! I certainly can’t afford it.”

Eliza fixed Kara with a withering stare, one she used to give Kara in high school, silently berating her for teasing Alex about her less than Kryptonian aptitudes.

“ Eliza !” Kara sputtered. “Lena’s money is Lena’s money!”

“I’m just teasing you, Kara,” Eliza said. Gently, she touched Kara’s shoulder. “I’m just trying to reiterate that it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you’d prefer to go the more traditional route.”

Kara enveloped Eliza in a hug with one arm, smiling as she did so.

They stood like that for a while, Kara with her arm around Eliza, matching cups of cocoa in their hands. Occasionally, Kara pointed out some interesting boating pattern on the bay and Eliza would squint until she could see the little white tail following the described vessel moving across the water. Eliza talked a bit about her research, bouncing a few questions off of Kara when she could, and then Kara talked about her duties as Supergirl, sparring her adoptive mother the less wholesome aspects of her job (the things that got her hurt, or Alex hurt, or other people hurt).

The natural lull of their conversation brought them to silence for a few moments before Kara sighed.

“I think… I think I’m going to tell, Lena,” she said, her voice smaller than it had been, less sure than it usually was. She dropped her arm from where it rested, trying to give Eliza some physical space to process. It didn’t take nearly as long as she thought it would for a response to come, however.

“You haven’t told Lena?!”

Kara pinked a little at Eliza’s tone, surprised and only slightly caught off guard by the reaction.

“I—what? No! She doesn’t know,” Kara said.

“Kara, honey, that woman knows.” The look Eliza fixed her with was one that had been especially reserved for Alex during her more rebellious, teenage years. “After everything the two of you have been through—I can’t believe she doesn’t know.”

Kara frowned but couldn’t find the words to protest the notion.

“Sometimes… it’s like—I don’t know how to explain it. But sometimes it’s like she doesn’t want to know,” Kara said. A familiar crinkle formed between her brows as her eyes darted across the tree line, searching, thinking. “Like if one of us says it, it becomes too real, and we’ll never be able to go back to who we were before. Does that make sense?”

Here, Eliza paused. Kara listened to the motors of each boat on the bay and the whisper of the wind in the trees. Someone skipped rocks on the shoreline. A car drove down the highway 10 miles over the speed limit. Eliza reached for Kara and rubbed gently between her shoulder blades. Kara’s eyes slipped shut and for a moment she was 14 years old and everything was too loud, and Eliza was there trying to comfort her.

Except everything was not too loud. It was more… on the precipice of change, a paradigm shift between one moment and the next. Kara felt closer to that edge every single day. In her mind, she imagined herself standing on the edge of a canyon, the bottom lost to shadow, drowned in ignorance. And if she continued to paint that metaphor in her head, Lena was standing next to her, and they had clasped hands, and both of them were to scared to ask if the other was ready to take that final leap.

“I don’t doubt for a second that Lena knows,” Eliza said, after some time. “But I can see why you hesitate to put the truth out there so plainly.” She wrapped her arms around Kara’s shoulders, rubbing her cheek against the soft cotton of Kara’s cardigan. “That being said, dear, I think it’s well past time you take the initiative and tell Lena the plain and simple truth.”

“Is it so plain and simple, though?” Kara asked. Even to her own ears she sounded like 15 years ago, asking about the difference in the color of the sky or the way gravity felt in a fearful way. Her face suddenly felt hot, her eyes full of unshed tears. She wiped at her face with her sleeve. She didn’t know why she was suddenly crying. She felt embarrassed by it, somehow. Eliza rubbed soothing circles against her shoulders without question.

“It could be, sweetie,” Eliza said. “It could be.”

Kara thought back before Supergirl, before the DEO, before CatCo. Her mind stuttered through her memories in reverse, moving quickly past the events of the last two years, all the way back through National City University and Stanhope College, back through highschool, reversing all the way until her memory butted up against an almost literal glass barrier, until it was too much to push past. Along the way, she tried to catalogue all the little pieces of advice Eliza tried to impart on her since coming to Earth. There were moments like look both ways before crossing the street, Kara and sweetie, if it’s too loud you can use these headphones . And then there were bigger things that she was sure Eliza threw out with wild abandon, never to understand the impact it would have on her like it’s okay if you’re not okay right now, just tell me how i can make it better and your best is your best—you don’t have to compare yourself to others if it doesn’t make you feel good .

The things that Eliza tried to teach her about lessons in humanity were hardly ever black and white, but they were typically correct. Kara thought about what Eliza said, how it could be simple, how it could be plain. It seemed an incredulous notion, rooted only in insanity and ignorance. But experience had told her that Eliza knew more than she did in these matters.

After a while, Eliza loosened her grip on Kara, but stayed close, nonetheless.

“I do have to say, you have terrible timing, Kara.”

Kara responded with a wet laugh, nodding in agreement to Eliza’s teasing.

“Better late than never, I suppose.”

--

It was still early in the afternoon when Kara’s ears picked up something strange, something out of place, from the highway.

“What on Earth?” she muttered. She’d been helping Eliza reorganize the bookshelf when she floated back down to the floor, walked up the stairs, and stepped out again toward the balcony.

Tilting her right ear toward the highway, Kara concentrated on the low rumbling until she found the exact car that had peaked her interest. It was loud but sturdy, like it could go on that way forever if the driver wanted. She’d heard old cars before but found them few and far between since living in National City. They were a rarity, and because of that, they typically triggered her hearing. Opening her eyes, Kara tried to take a peek at what was making so much noise as they barreled down the highway, cruising easily at 15 miles an hour above the limit.

The car was an inky black, remarkable in its shade and boldness—a cut of night darting across the asphalt. Admittedly, Kara didn’t know much about cars; that was more Alex’s thing. But it looked good and well taken care of. And then her hearing picked up something else from the car, something soft, something lovely and human.

“ Do I always feel so warm each time/ I look in your eyes of blue, oh,/ oh, oh, do I love you?/ Yes, I love you. ”

Lena Luthor sang slightly off-key to herself as she drove, just barely above the rumble of the motor. She was the very picture of cool with her painted red lips and mirrored aviators on, her hair blowing in the wind with the windows rolled down. She had one hand on the steering wheel, her index finger tapping lightly along to The Ronettes. Her other arm was propped against the ledge of the door, hand waving against the wind as she sped along. Kara strained for a few more moments before she realized Lena would be at her front door in about 7 and a half minutes.

She stepped back into the house and practically ran down the stairs, shouting as she did so.

“Eliza! Lena’s almost here!”

Eliza’s head peeked out from her study. She took her reading glasses from her face and placed them up into her hair.

“Did she just call?” Eliza asked.

“No. She’s got this—this old car,” Kara said. “Maybe it’s a rental? I thought she was just using her usual car service, to be honest.”

“An old car? Wasn’t she flying into Metropolis International?”

Kara shrugged.

“Yea, maybe there’s some weird, elite, vintage rental place us 99 percenters don’t know about.”

Spinning on her heel, Kara made her way to the living room to fluff the pillows on the couch. She picked up the last few books she’d forgotten when she went outside, too. There were a few things out of place on the coffee table—Kara grabbed a mug and brought it to the kitchen sink to wash before restacking the magazines, putting aside the older editions and more gossipy publications. One had Supergirl on the cover and, grimacing, she shoved it into one of the remaining, unorganized shelves at the bottom of the bookcase.

“You’re lucky I haven’t started framing your covers yet,” Eliza said. She smiled, watching Kara hurriedly wipe down the coffee table. “I really should start.”

Kara looked up, stopping abruptly from her harried cleaning.

“You save all of magazines I’m on?”

“I tried to save all of your newspaper clippings—but then you started doing so much, and outside of National City, too.” Eliza spoke like it was nothing, but Kara’s face held a kind of reverence she was incapable of truly explaining. Eliza was not her mother and she never tried to be; she never asked Kara to call her mom, never tried to replace Kara’s parents in the slightest. She never got upset or tried to have a conversation when she heard Kara say Eliza, my foster mother . But Kara knew for a fact that Eliza loved her.

It was always somewhat overwhelming to remember that. There were people on this planet and on others who wanted for nothing except the love of their own mother. And here Kara was, living because of the love of two. Eliza was completely unaware of these thoughts as she helped Kara pick up the miscellaneous flotsam of her life.

The rumble of a loud motor peaked in the driveway and then cut abruptly. Kara snapped up from wiping down a side table and fumbled with her glasses.

“She’s here!”

But the motor was off and Kara had yet to hear the tell tale sign of heels clacking up to the front door. She fidgeted with her hands, tried not to wring her shirt in her palms. Was something wrong with her hearing? Had she missed the opening and closing of the car door? There was nothing and Kara tried very, very hard not to use her powers for eavesdropping.

If Kara were inclined to throw her upbringing and general need to be polite and give people their privacy to the wind, here is what she would have heard: three sighs. The first was quiet, the kind that follows a lengthy but overall satisfying drive. The kind that escaped as the car settled into stagnation, the engine clicking as its parts cooled. The second was a little more indignant, recognizable by women everywhere who caught glimpses of themselves in mirrors and were less than satisfied with the result (this was followed by the quiet, sticky sound of reapplying bright red lipstick and the soft, quick brush of fingers through a newly redone ponytail). The third sigh would come later, after the lipstick and the hair, after the motor stopped clicking, after the car had settled in the driveway.

The third sigh came after these sounds—Lena taking her aviators off, the arms of the frames quietly clicking together, the groan of leather as she shifted her body in the seat, reaching for something behind her, the rustle of a paper bag, the leather creaking once more, and finally stillness. Until, at last, the final sigh escaped from Lena’s lips. It was the kind of sigh meant to steady and ground, something fortifying and relieving all at once.

But Kara—ever mindful of what she was capable of—heard none of those things. Instead, she waited by the door, standing and wringing her hands together. Eliza, from her study, tried not to laugh at the impatient way Kara stood waiting. She gave Kara space to stew in her nerves.

Finally, Kara heard the car door open and slam shut. She heard Lena’s natural stride given away by the sound of her heels on the ground. The doorbell rang and Kara counted a quick, mental 5 before wrenching the door open, just careful enough to not rip it off of its hinges.

“Lena, you’re here!”

Kara enveloped Lena in a strong hug as the other woman laughed, pretty and lilting. And then Kara was laughing too, just because she could, just because Lena let her.

“Kara, it’s only been two days,” Lena said, having found her voice through all that laughter and untangling herself from Kara’s arms. Over Kara’s shoulder, Lena saw Eliza emerge from her study. “Hi, Eliza!”

“Oh, finally, she calls me Eliza.” She stepped forward and also hugged Lena, rubbing her back as she did so. “Thought I was going to have to give you another lecture about calling me ‘Mrs. Danvers’.”

“I figure I’d save you the trouble this time,” Lena said, smiling softly when they parted. She cleared her throat nervously and pushed a paper gift bag into Eliza’s hands. “And you know I can never show up empty handed.”

Eliza looked put out for a moment.

“Lena, really, you don’t need to trouble yourself over me,” she said. Inside was an expensive bottle of red wine Eliza loved, a recently released novel she’d mentioned to Lena the last time they talked, and a bound copy of L-Corp’s latest biomedical breakthrough, complete with schematics and trials.

“I don’t,” Lena said. She fidgeted with a ring on her finger, twisting it against her skin. “I mean—it’s no trouble at all. And if being a Luthor taught me a single thing it’s to never show up to someone else’s home empty-handed.”

Eliza’s smile was kind and soft as she led Lena into the house.

“Kara, get Lena’s bags for her, won’t you?” Eliza called over her shoulder, but Kara was already halfway down the driveway doing what she was told. “Come on, let’s share this bottle, then. It’s not too early in the day, is it?”

Lena left her heels at the foyer and followed Eliza in, listening to the older woman talk about a potential lead she had during a lab session the other week. Expertly, Eliza opened the bottle of red with a few twists of her wrists without ever breaking conversation with Lena—something she’d only ever seen Alex and professional sommeliers do with the same practiced ease. Kara came into the kitchen just in time to receive a glass and Lena gently knocked her own against Kara’s before taking a sip.

They caught up for a few minutes, Kara only interjecting when she felt inclined to, but mostly she stood by Lena’s side and listened as she and Eliza excitedly discussed varying practices and lab junk. Lena leaned against the counter, her black hair still in a slightly windswept ponytail. Kara watched them talk, watched the way Lena’s red lipstick came off a bit with every sip of her wine, watched the scrunch of Lena’s nose as she laughed at something Eliza said, watched the crow’s feet of Eliza’s eyes deepen in mirth.

Kara felt suddenly that this was a perfect moment in her otherwise imperfect life.

She knew immediately that she had to ruin it.

--

“Lena, can you come with me? I want to show you something,” Kara asked. She had an eager, expectant look on her face. Lena didn’t understand why she felt compelled to do it, but she turned toward Eliza and found a warm, encouraging smile on the older woman’s lips. So Lena went.

Lena followed Kara up the stairs and toward the balcony, where they stepped out into the warm sunshine. Kara closed the door softly behind her and held her hand out expectantly. Immediately, Lena placed her hand gently into Kara’s like it was natural; like they held hands all the time; like they spent a lifetime of Kara putting her hand out for Lena as she stepped out of the car or through a door or into a crowded space. Like Lena had always let Kara lead the way.

“Lena.” Kara paused, looking out at the bay. The sun was high, its rays bright in Lena’s eyes as she squinted. Kara didn’t look at her but she squeezed Lena’s hand. “Do you trust me?”

Lena could smell the salt and pine in the air. It reminded her of boarding school—scraped knees and chapped lips and some other girl’s favorite flavor of lip balm.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I did not trust you, Kara.”

The corners of Kara’s mouth crept upward, just a little, as if she were afraid of what it would mean if she smiled fully.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Kara said. Her other hand tapped against the telescope on the porch. “But I think you already have an idea what it is.”

Lena said nothing, tried to assume nothing; she tried to imagine that she was water and somewhere outside of herself there was a something to be listened to just on the outskirts of her hearing so that she wouldn’t have to think about what she did or did not know.

“Can I hug you?” Kara asked. It was not what Lena expected. She smiled softly anyway.

“Of course,” she said, and she opened her arms. Kara stepped into Lena’s space and wrapped her arms around her delicately, intimately. Lena could smell sunshine and warmth, fresh laundry and a familiar brand of fabric softener. Kara smelled like the perfect summer day, like a childhood memory that still made her smile.

“Can you place your feet on mine, please?”

Again, it was a strange and unexpected request, but Lena had a feeling that Kara was trying to build her up to the thing between them in her own way, so she did what Kara requested. She hated touching her bare feet to someone else’s (not that it was a particularly common occurrence); it was something she always thought as unhygienic. Nonetheless, she wiggled her toes against the bones in Kara’s feet and felt as much as she heard Kara giggle at the action.

Kara squeezed, just a little, just enough, and then, suddenly, they were floating. Lena blinked down at their feet and saw the wooden porch move further and further away. Kara floated them up to the side of the house where the roof made a bit of a ledge so that they could stand. Letting go, Kara fidgeted with her hands briefly before she reached up and took her glasses off. She wrapped the frames in Lena’s palm.

From that spot on the roof, Lena could just make out the sound of waves on the shore of the bay.

“My mother’s name was Alura,” Kara started. She looked up at a point just above Lena’s head. For a moment, Lena couldn’t tell whether the gesture resembled coaxing a memory into the present or fighting tears from falling. Perhaps it was both. “And I am 53 years old.”

Lena played idly with Kara’s fingers, hoping the movement would embolden Kara to continue in this funny way of hers. She said nothing, merely waited for Kara to tell her more.

“English isn’t my first language and I have claustrophobia,” Kara continued. She looked down at their hands. She worried her lip between her teeth. “I’ve been to 7 planets, including this one, and I am not human.”

She let go of Lena’s hands and slowly let her hair down from its ponytail.

“My name is Kara Zor-El,” she said, when she was done. She slipped the hair tie on her wrist. “And I am the last daughter of a planet called Krypton. But on this planet, I’m known as Supergirl.”

Leaves rustled against one another like waves lapping against the shore. Lena took the glasses in her palm and unfolded the arms. Very carefully, she put them on Kara’s face and pushed against the bridge until it the settled there. Kara blinked once.

“Hello, Supergirl,” Lena said. “Welcome to Earth.”

They stood there like that for a moment. Lena listened to the leaves and the water and Kara focused on Lena’s eyes, her face, her heartbeat. Everything was steady, calm.

“Are you mad?”

Lena chuckled.

“Kara, do I look mad?”

“No,” Kara said slowly, measuring her words. “But you could be mad. And if you were mad, I would understand. You’re allowed to be mad at me, if that’s how you felt.”

“Kara, I’m not mad,” Lena said, touching Kara’s arm gently. “Maybe at some point I could have been, but I’m not right now.”

“I just… I always felt like you didn’t want to know,” Kara explained. “Like if I said it out loud or you said it out loud it would make it too real and something would change between us.”

“What made you think things between us would change?” Lena asked. She reached up and took the glasses off of Kara’s face again, fingers brushing gently against her cheek as she did so. Lena tilted her head, studying Kara as if she were seeing her for the very first time.

“It’s just—if—if you had asked me… I would have told you the truth,” Kara said. And it was almost adorable, the way that she looked like a guilty child, the protruding lip drawn down into a pout like a much practiced expression for sincerity, meant to barter for sympathy.

“I think I always knew that,” Lena said. “Which is why I never asked.”

“But why didn’t you ask?”

Lena shrugged a shoulder. “Sometimes it felt like you didn’t want me to know.”

“Oh.”

Kara went to reach for her glasses, to fidget nervously as Lena had so often seen, but her frames were no longer on her face. Awkwardly, Kara seemed to realize that and let her hand fall. Lena held her glasses out for her, offering, but Kara shook her head. She opened her mouth in an attempt to speak but she either didn’t have the words or could not find the right ones at the moment. Lena watched her take a deep breath and start over.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“Don’t apologize,” Lena said. “I’m sorry I let you think that things would change between us if I knew the truth.”

Kara worried her lip between her teeth. The light of the sun seemed caught in the bright blue of Kara’s eyes, unencumbered by the lenses of her glasses. Lena enjoyed reading. She was a voracious reader when she had the free time, which wasn’t often. She’d probably read a hundred different metaphors for blue eyes in her lifetime. But she felt as if she’d been struck dumb;  all Lena could think was that Kara’s eyes were so blue .

“Sometimes,” Kara started. “I liked assuming that… that things would be different if you knew. Because you let me be whatever version of me I liked the most that day.” She licked her lips and shifted forward. “When I’m angry or sad, you aren’t afraid of me the way that Alex or Winn get because they’ve seen me rip a steel beam in two. And when I’m happy, you don’t worry about the other parts of my life that I might be ignoring, like how James does, because he’s seen me compartmentalize.”

Lena reached for Kara’s hands again.

“But—but I think I was hurting you, too, by not telling you the truth.” Kara sighed. She turned Lena’s hands over in her own and let her thumbs run idly against the lines in Lena’s palms, eyeing her glasses in one hand, almost skeptical. “If Supergirl went missing, I went missing. And you accepted every excuse I had.”

It was Lena’s turn to hug Kara. She wrapped her arms around Kara’s middle and slipped her hands up Kara’s back before she rested her cheek against Kara’s collarbone. Kara sighed into it and Lena allowed herself a small smile.

“I worried about you,” she whispered, barely audible. She felt Kara’s hands wrap around her shoulders. Lena hesitated for a moment. She could hear Kara’s heartbeat through her chest. “And when you still didn’t tell me, maybe then I was mad, but mostly I just worried.”

They stood there on the roof like that, embracing each other because it was comforting and warm and right and maybe Lena felt a little bit like she was finally holding one whole person, instead of miscellaneous pieces of a puzzle she wasn’t quite sure she could put together.

“Alex had a contingency plan,” Kara said. “If you ever decided to stomp your way into the DEO.”

Lena smiled against Kara’s shoulder.

“I thought about doing it.” She unravelled herself from Kara before unfolding the arms of Kara’s frames and placing them on top of her head, nestled in her blonde hair. Lena squinted at her. “You look remarkable for being 53.”

Kara laughed then, the sound like windchimes to Lena’s ears.

“April 23rd,” Lena said, suddenly. She smiled at the confused look on Kara’s face. “My birthday. Two years ago you asked me what my birthday was and I avoided telling you. Everyone thinks it’s January 3rd—but that’s the day Lionel brought me home to the Luthor Manor and it’s what the press stuck with.”

“You let me give you presents on that day!”

“And I kept telling you not to,” Lena laughed until it petered off with a sigh. She looked at Kara seriously. “My birth certificate says my mother’s name was Catriona. I’ve been on and off antidepressants since I was 16. The first girl I ever kissed wore peach-flavored lip balm.”

Kara’s eyes widened slightly at the last one, but Lena pressed on.

“Almost everything there is to know about me can be found on the internet in one way, shape, or form, except for those things. So,” Lena trailed off. She shrugged a shoulder. It wasn’t much—it’s not like she could offer Kara her own life altering secret, but she didn’t quite know how to express that without saying it explicitly. “I’m just Lena Luthor, no alternate identities here.”

Kara smiled at that.

“Hello, just Lena Luthor, can you do me a favor and count to 60?”

“Sure,” Lena answered, scrunching her nose but not asking questions.

Kara was gone in a flash, shooting up into the sky and disappearing faster than Lena’s eye could follow. She’d seen Supergirl take off like that from about the same distance as Kara was just standing, but it was strange, to actually see Kara throw herself into the sky and know without a doubt that she was Supergirl. Lena shook her head and counted. She got to 58 before Kara landed softly in front of her, a paper cup in hand.

“I forgot about the time difference in Italy, but then I remembered this great cafe in Argentina that Agent Vasquez once told me about,” she said, handing the cup of rich espresso to Lena. “Oh wait.”

Before Lena could take the cup, Kara’s eyes lit up and heat aimed into the frothy surface of the beverage flashed and crackled for a moment. Steam rose from it when she was done.

“Sorry; flying so fast cools it off,” she said sheepishly before she handed the cup to Lena properly. “I know you’re not supposed to reheat espresso and drink it quickly, but I think I do a pretty good job.”

Lena took a sip. She’d say that she was less of a coffee snob than people tended to assume; she once had an ardent, heartfelt, and nostalgic argument in favor of crappy diner coffee with Kara. But she knew what good coffee was and this was definitely it. Could she say for certain that it was from Argentina? No. But the thought of Kara flying all the way there and back just to prove she could? If Kara said it was from the moon, Lena would nod her head in agreement.

“In case you need more convincing…” Kara held out a rough, black rock for Lena.

Lena raised an eyebrow. “Is that…”

“I probably shouldn’t do this so close to you.”

Kara floated away, just enough to create some distance, but not high enough to be seen from outside the perimeter of the house. Lena watched her grin before Kara’s eyes lit up again, focused solely on the dark rock in her palms. Even from where she was, Lena could feel the residual heat against her skin. When Kara finally had a bright red hunk of rock, she brought her palms together and squeezed. It must have been some considerable amount of effort because the tendons in Kara’s neck strained for several moments before her shoulders relaxed. She landed back onto the ledge of the roof and held up a shiny, transparent gem between her thumb and index finger, grinning as she showed off.

“Did—did you just? Wait a second.” Lena plucked the rock from Kara’s grasp and examined it.

“It’s ugly, obviously. I don’t have much experience with—uhm—precision carving.”

“You got me coffee from Argentina and made an uncut diamond in front of me, even after I already said I wasn’t mad,” Lena said, a little breathless and on the verge of laughing. “What if I said I was mad?”

Kara shrugged and scratched at the nape of her neck.

“I didn’t plan that far ahead,” she answered. Lena looked pensive for a moment, thinking.

“What about customs?”

“Customs? Like traditions?”

“No, no, I mean. You’re Supergirl,” Lena said. “You can fly and really fast, too. What happens if you bring something into the state or country that you’re not supposed to?”

Kara laughed awkwardly, a little high, a little loud.

“Please don’t give Alex any more ideas about how she can make me do more paperwork,” Kara said uneasily, though good-naturedly. Lena looked at her, exasperated and slightly admonishing. Kara put her hands up in defense. “I don’t do it that often! And I’m really careful!”

“I can’t believe I know that Supergirl could potentially be harboring invasive species of bugs just because she doesn’t go through customs when she flies across the globe on a whim,” Lena deadpanned. It was more to herself than anything. She looked up at Kara, her one hand holding a cup of coffee and the other hand idly running her thumb against the ridges of a newly formed diamond. Lena smiled and pocketed the gem. “Thank you for telling me the truth."

“I guess if you were really mad, I could’ve just left you on the roof until you calmed down,” Kara teased.

“You would put me in a time out?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I put a billionaire in time out,” she mumbled vaguely. She gestured toward herself and Lena stepped close so that Kara could take them back down to the balcony. Back on the porch, Lena reached up and put Kara’s glasses back on her face properly, struck suddenly by how different and familiar she looked, though nothing had really changed.

Lena let Kara lead the way back into the house, down the stairs, and back into the kitchen where Eliza sat, glasses on, reading the book that Lena had just gifted her. She smiled at them as they both came down the stairs and set the book down gently.

“Well, we shared a glass of wine and I just found out Kara is Supergirl; and it’s only half past 2.” Lena quipped.

Eliza’s eyes went wide and she put a hand to her chest, clutching slightly.

“Kara is Supergirl?!” Eliza asked, incredulous and breathless, bracing herself against the countertop.

“Oh shit.” Lena felt her face heat up immediately and then Kara was bursting with laughter and Eliza’s face returned to a small, knowing smile, and Lena knew that she’d been had.

“Have you been sitting here waiting to make that joke?” Kara asked, halfway to crying from laughing so hard.

“Only a little,” Eliza said. She propped her chin in her hand and furrowed her brow, looking oddly like Alex in that moment. “You two—you need to get ready.”

“God! The wedding, I almost forgot!” Kara turned toward Lena with a smile on her face. “How could I forget?!”

It was such an incredulous question, all Lena could do was laugh. A lot of moments with Kara felt like that, where all she could do was laugh because she was allowed to laugh and laughter was welcomed, appreciated even.

“Why am I freaking out?! I can superspeed! Lena you need to get ready!”

Lena was being pushed up the stairs faster than she could move herself. It was a strange feeling, to suddenly (though not so suddenly that she suffered from whiplash) be moving and then deposited in front of the door to a bathroom. Admittedly, it made her feel slightly nauseous.

“Kara!” Eliza admonished from the kitchen. “You know that makes people sick when they’re not expecting it!”

“Sorry Lena!”

And then the door opened and she was pushed in with her garment bag before the door shut with a quiet click. Lena touched her cheek. She could feel the ghost of what might have been Kara’s lips against her skin. She laughed as she figured out the shower situation, but realized that Kara had only delivered her dress bag and not her duffel.

“Kara,” Lena whispered. She couldn’t help the smile on her face. “You forgot my other bag.”

There was a moment, just long enough for Lena to doubt that Kara had heard her, to think that Kara hadn’t been listening as closely as Lena assumed. But then there was a knock at the door, above the scatter of water against the tub, and Kara’s voice.

“It’s right outside, sorry about that,” she said through the wood.

Lena lowered her voice to just a breath.

“Thank you, Kara.”

--

Kara smiled to herself, back pressed against the bathroom door.

She had expected something less easy, something explosive and emotional. Truthfully, she expected everything to come to a head in the worst possible way—she imagined danger and panic, a tsunami of disaster come crashing through the life that she and Lena shared so precariously, suddenly demolished by The Reveal. In her worst fantasies, she’d imagined white walls and the sickly sweet smell of antiseptic, itchy, off-white bed sheets, and a heart rate monitor as the background track to her confession. Usually, she was in the bed. Less often, it was Lena. Even her pre-planned best case scenarios involved some amount of tears and quiet, simmering rage, Lena’s green eyes bright and dangerous like the one thing that could bring Kara to her knees.

Reality had pleasantly defied her expectations and as Kara heard Lena begin to hum to herself above the low drumming of the shower, she felt momentarily, but explicitly guilty. She presumed the worst. Instead, she was left feeling refreshed and clean. It wasn’t the first time she had the thought, and it wouldn’t be the last time either, but Kara wondered what she did to deserve Lena Luthor in her life.

Kara pushed off the door and made her way to the bedroom she once shared with Alex. Her attire for the wedding was hung up in one corner, steamed earlier that morning by Eliza who insisted Kara couldn’t just put the thing on with all of its wrinkles from being stuffed into a bag unceremoniously before Kara’s quick flight from National City to Midvale.

She did not get ready right away, however. Instead, she laid on her back in her old, twin-sized bed, one arm propped under her head, the other folded over her stomach. She listened to the water running through the pipes in the house, to Eliza’s skin against a page as she read, to the gentle breeze of an East Coast draft. Everything was warm and, for once, in its place.

She could hear Lena’s heartbeat from down the hall.

It lulled her to sleep.

--

Way back before Supergirl, before CatCo, before Astra, before Alex’s plane, even before Lex Luthor, and before her promise with Alex, and even before Kenny, Kara was a teenage girl, strange and lonely in Midvale in the early 2000s. Out of necessity, she’d taken to English quickly. Sometimes she had a strange accent and asked stranger questions and so she she kept mostly to herself. Mostly.

What nobody ever knew was that Kara hid in the bathrooms of Midvale Junior High during lunch. She hid because even then her metabolism was quicker than most humans and the enormous lunch that Eliza packed her everyday drew unwanted attention. So, Kara ate lunch in the girl’s bathroom on the other side of campus, opposite the cafeteria, where it was quietest and where other, mean-spirited teenagers and their threatening quips and their glances of disdain were far, far away (or, as far as one could be in middle school). It was during those lonesome lunches in the far away bathroom that Kara met Amanda Klein.

Amanda was the same age as Kara. Even then, she was tall for her age and lanky because of it. She had knobby knees, always scraped or bruised still, and protruding elbows that she often, clumsily, knocked against corners and doorways as she rounded the halls. The first time Kara met Amanda, the other girl was crying in the next stall, the stall that always sat empty on Kara’s right.

“Hello?” Kara called out, hearing what she knew was called sniffling—something Alex and Eliza both did after they yelled at one another, especially after Jeremiah died.

The latch to the stall door fumbled and Amanda appeared, eyes red rimmed and downcast. She mumbled hasty apologies and said something about growing pains before she sidestepped Kara awkwardly and rushed out of the bathroom. Kara, who (at that point) still had trouble deciphering what was and wasn’t normal between human interactions, simply went into her usual stall to eat and try to tune out what felt like an entire planet.

“Oh,” Kara said, as she walked into the far away girl’s bathroom and was met with tall shoulders and sniffling for a second time. Kara stared at the red-rimmed eyes and tear stained cheeks with curiosity. Alex got angry when Kara saw her cry and Eliza always hid it very well. “I’m sorry. I usually eat in here.”

Amanda sniffed and rubbed at her eyes with the backs of her hands, pushing away thick, dark hair from her face as she did so.

“You eat in here?” she asked, her voice wet and incredulous.

“Yes,” Kara said. She thought that perhaps she should have said yea instead because Alex was trying to teach her to be less formal. The concept of slang confused Kara and frustrated Alex who was only trying to make her new, weird sister less weird.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Kara tilted her head. “Why are you apologizing?”

“I just—it’s your space, isn’t it?”

“My space.” Kara repeated. She didn’t like the sound of it. “It’s the bathroom. And it’s the quietest place at school during lunch. Belinda doesn’t come here to make fun of me.”

“That’s good to know,” Amanda said. She stuck her hand out awkwardly. “I’m Amanda.”

Kara looked at her hand and knew she was supposed to shake it. It was supposed to be good manners. And she wasn’t supposed to grasp at the forearm like they did on Krypton—she was supposed to wrap her hand around Amanda’s and shake.

So she did, slowly and awkwardly. Her hand was limp and open in Amanda’s because she was still learning. It wasn’t that humans were fragile—it was Kara who was strong.

“I’m Kara,” she said as she pulled her hand away. Amanda looked at her strangely.

“Kara.” Amanda repeated. “That’s a really pretty name.”

Nobody had ever called her name pretty before and Kara thought it was odd, not quite making sense of the turn of phrase. How could a name be pretty? Things that were pretty were often things to look at. Music could be pretty, but in a different way than tangible objects. It confused her, but she didn’t mind the implication. It was her name; the name she carried with her from Krypton. The name she begged Kal-El to let her keep because she didn’t want to have to find a new name like Clark Kent when Zor-El was already to be replaced by Danvers. Sometimes she felt as if those two syllables were the only things she really brought with her from Krypton.

Amanda smiled at her.

That’s how the tentative, bathroom friendship between one strange girl and one lonely girl started at Midvale Junior High. Kara learned slang and teenage conversation from Amanda who never asked her why she was so strange or where she came from before she became a Danvers. Amanda didn’t ask much, actually, which was fine by Kara, because that meant she didn’t have to lie or provide an answer that didn’t make sense. But it didn’t mean that Amanda didn’t enjoy Kara’s company. And it didn’t mean she didn’t listen.

“Here,” she said one day, handing Kara a crystal-green CD cover. In Amanda’s swooping handwriting, the words Kara’s Mixtape Vol. 1 were written onto the burned disk. She shrugged a shoulder when Kara took it. “It’s just some songs I thought you would like.”

Kara could hear Belinda on the other side of campus teasing Natalie Kerns for the socks she was wearing.

“You have a walkman, right?” Amanda asked.

Alex had a walkman and so did Eliza, but Kara didn’t have her own. She had no reason to until now.

“Yes,” she said. “Yea.”

“Awesome,” Amanda replied. She smiled all toothy and happy.

The word that Kara would come to associate with Amanda was enthusiastic. Amanda didn’t just like things. Things were awesome, great, wonderful, super cool, rad. It was hard to find something she was indifferent to—even the things she didn’t like, she disliked them with enthusiasm. She cried, a lot, or at least she told Kara that she cried a lot. Too much. Kara didn’t understand, then, what too much feeling entailed. Amanda was emotional and bright and vibrant in a way that Alex and Eliza were not.

She gave Kara her first mixtape and then her second and then a third, and then she tallied off movies that Kara should watch with her sister or with her foster mother or by herself. Amanda never invited herself over and never presumed that Kara wanted to see her outside of their safe haven at the far end of campus at Midvale Junior High. In the halls, they passed each other as quiet children who silently and shyly acknowledged each other with the merest tips of their chins.

In the bathroom, during lunch, Amanda became one of the few people Kara would ever split a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with and when the bell rang, they would sling their backpacks over their shoulders and walk together until they parted, smiling at each other as they went to their separate classes. They spent a whole year and a half like that.

After 8th grade, Kara went to Midvale High with Alex and Amanda went to Northridge High. Luckily for both of them, Belinda went to Grover Cleveland High on the west side of Midvale. Though those two lonely girls shared songs and movies and books with one another, they also only shared a bathroom. After middle school, their point (or place, rather) of contact stayed behind while they moved on.

But they occasionally found each other in the most serendipitous and clandestine ways and somehow, always, in bathrooms.

“Kara!”

Kara jumped, nearly cracking the sink in half as she fumbled with the faucet. Her hands flew up to her face, adjusting her glasses quickly before turning around. Amanda had cut her hair: her thick, dark locks now just brushing her shoulders. She was still as tall as ever and Kara wandered if Amanda would continue to grow after 5’11”. It was their Junior year.

“I didn’t know you went to football games,” Kara said, after they hugged one another, because that seemed like the thing to do. Sometime between seeing one another at Midvale’s main library and the bakery on Main street, they became two girls who hugged each other in greeting.

“I don’t,” Amanda laughed. “God, they’re truly awful. But it’s on my bucket list of things to do before I finish high school.”

“Finish?” Kara tilted her head.

“I’m graduating early,” Amanda said, grinning. “Early admission to MIT.”

“That’s—MIT?! That’s amazing, congrats!”

Something blossomed and then burst in Kara’s chest at Amanda’s news. It was something like pride, almost. Something like jealousy, just. But mostly Kara was happy for her.

“Wow,” Kara breathed. She was impressed and… and something.

“I know.” Amanda scuffed her shoe against the tile of the bathroom floor. The football stadium roared outside, Northridge having just scored a field goal, tying the game. The bathroom was empty. “I’m glad I ran into you.”

“Me too.”

And Kara meant it. Because that something ? It felt a little like loss. And Kara had definitely come to know what that felt like. She glanced down at the sink—Amanda’s hand was on top of hers before it wasn’t, taken back suddenly like Amanda had followed Kara’s glance and felt embarrassed that she hadn’t realized what she’d done. Kara cleared her throat.

“I’ll miss running into you in bathrooms,” she said.

Amanda smiled at her, then reached into her pocket to fish out a pen.

“We still have time, but...” She stuck her arm out and thrust the pen toward Kara. “You could give me your address, if you want. I’ll send you something. From MIT.”

So Kara wrote Eliza’s address on Amanda Klein’s arm in an empty bathroom during a football game in 2007. Kara and Amanda never did see each other in another bathroom in Midvale before Amanda left for college, but Kara did receive mail from Amanda while she was at MIT. The first year Kara got 2 more CDs: Kara’s Mixtapes Vol. 6 & 7 . The second year she got Volume 8 .

And in 2018 she got a letter pressed wedding invitation in cream colored cardstock.

--

“ I have to face the truth/ that no one could ever look at me like you do/ like I’m something worth holding onto. ”

Kara woke up to the bed dipping beside her, her old stereo playing Death Cab For Cutie for some reason. She blinked and Lena’s face came swimming into view, peering at her from above.

“Did you get all excited and then fall asleep?” Lena asked.

Kara rubbed at her eyes.

“It was warm,” she said, sleepily. Then she huffed. “And you try making a diamond with your bare hands.”

Lena laughed before she got up and crossed the room, picking up the jeweled cases of burned disks sitting haphazardly on Kara’s desk.

“I came in to snoop after I did my makeup and you were asleep,” she said, absentmindedly. Kara sat up and stretched. “My old RA used to play this song all the time.”

“Amanda made me all of those,” Kara said. She hovered by Lena’s shoulder reading the labels as she flipped through each CD. “Belinda used to bully the both of us so we hid in the bathroom during lunch.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Lena asked. She turned one over, Volume 3 —it had a track listing written in a pre-teen’s looping scrawl.

Kara thought back to that bathroom underneath the football stadium when she wrote her address on Amanda’s arm with a stray bic pen and how she was afraid to press too hard against the other girl’s skin. She placed both hands on Lena’s shoulders and squeezed affectionately.

“Years,” she admitted. “We went to different high schools.”

“And you both kept in touch?” Lena asked. Volume 5 had a handmade insert made from letters cut out of a magazine.

“Actually, we didn’t,” Kara admitted. “She graduated a year early and went off to school.” She plucked Volume 6, 7, & 8 from the pile. “I got these from her when she was away… I felt bad because I never really wrote her back. The first year going to Stanhope was really hard for me. Alex was—uhm—I just felt really lonely after making so much progress on Earth as a regular human girl.”

“The glasses and ponytail are a terrible disguise,” Lena said, smiling as she spoke. “The real disguise is how you could never guess you were a lonely, alien girl before you were Kara Danvers.”

“Thanks,” Kara said, tipping her chin up and placing her hands on her hips, a kind of smug and proud stance vaguely reminiscent of a certain caped crusader. “I’d say I’m a people person.”

Lena snorted.

“Hurry up and get ready,” Lena said. She removed Volume 8 from the stereo and put Volume 3 in. Dashboard Confessional’s “Hands Down” immediately began to twang through the speakers.

“Okay.” There was a rush of air in the room so forceful it disturbed any loose papers and fluttered one of Alex’s poorly taped posters before everything settled back into place just as suddenly. Lena blinked, glad that she’d put her hair up. When she turned around Kara was already dressed, picking lint off of the lapel of her navy blazer.

“Oh.”

Kara grinned. “I’m ready!”

“That’s… just so not fair,” Lena said, deflating.

Kara flattened the front of her khaki chinos, running her palms down her thighs. The dark brown belt and matching wingtip oxfords were a classic, conservative combo that looked fantastic with her navy blazer, a white handkerchief sticking out of her pocket. Her shirt was something more modern, a collared button down but with a small floral print that almost matched the print of Lena’s halter dress exactly.

“Best party trick I can’t show off,” Kara said, still smoothing out any lines that managed to sneak its way into her attire from her super speed. Her hair was up in a simple ponytail.

“Such a shame,” Lena said, trying to resist the inexplicable urge to tuck a stray lock of flaxen hair behind Kara’s ear.

Kara looked up, smiling at Lena as she adjusted her blazer one last time.

“You look great.”

Two sets of cheeks pinked, voices having toppled over one another in similar patterns of vague nervousness. Chris Carraba’s vocals dared certain, anonymous parties in the background for sweet release from their current plane of existence. Kara’s brain flashed forward through the lyrics of the song without her meaning to and she remembered something in her desk’s bottom drawer, hidden there by Alex the last time they came to visit.

“I told you the venue is walking distance, right?” Kara asked, bending at the knee so she could wrench the drawer open. It always stuck, especially in the summer and early fall.

“You did mention something like that,” Lena responded, watching Kara with a curious eye.

“Good, because I don’t like to drink and fly.”

She rummaged through a few leafs of paper before she found what she was looking for, pleased that it was as full as she remembered. The bottle was dark and oddly shaped, asymmetrical and almost sinister looking, but when Kara uncorked it, the contents smelled floral, light, and slightly earthy. Alex said it reminded her of a spring found in the woods.

“This is… uhm, well I guess it’s alien wine?” Kara said. “You can’t have any though. I mean—you could… maybe. Actually, don’t even think about it, I’m halfway certain it’s poisonous to humans.”

Lena laughed. “So it’s alcoholic?”

“No?” Kara wrapped her fist around the neck of the bottle and took a surly swig. It went down smooth and light, unlike a certain rum she’d been known to have on occasion. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “There’s no alcohol in it; Alex tested it.” She spotted a stack of clean plastic cups left on Alex’s side of the room, she snagged one and poured tangerine colored liquid into it, showing it to Lena. “It’s made on a planet that’s sort of got fruits and then it goes through a process that’s kind of like wine making.”

“And… it gets you drunk?” Lena asked, trying to get to the point.

“Uh huh,” Kara responded before downing the contents of the cup. She paused as soon as she was finished, suddenly wide eyed and looking as if she were guilty of something. “If—I mean, if that’s okay with you. I don’t have to get drunk. I just thought we should have fun. Not that I don’t have fun with you if I don’t drink. I just remembered it was here and now you know about me and everything. So.”

Lena hummed and picked up her clutch, giving Kara time to stew worriedly in her own words. She pulled out a shiny flask and twisted the top off.

“I was worried you were going to let me have all the fun again,” Lena said. She tapped the flask to the edge of Kara’s empty cup, rose an eyebrow until Kara poured herself a drink, and then took a healthy sip from her flask.

“I can’t believe you brought a flask.” Kara laughed, wiping at her mouth again. “Only dads do that.”

“Excuse you,” Lena said, fake indignant as she shoved the flask back into her clutch. “I’m just thinking about being economical. I don’t know how they do weddings in Midvale.”

“It’s not a dry wedding, Lena,” Kara said. “You’re so…” She scrunched her nose, teasing Lena. “Snobby.”

Lena tsked. “I try to be economical and you call me snobby. Maybe I’ll stay at home and tinker around with Eliza in her office, instead.”

Kara huffed and faked an apology before they both bounded down the stairs, laughing, hands full of a bottle of alien liquor and a clutch of hidden, expensive booze like two teens heading out for prom. Par for the course of the metaphor, Eliza stood at the bottom, hands on her hips, glasses perched on her hair. Kara and Lena stopped suddenly, Kara thrusting her hand out to keep Lena from falling forward. They were breathless, caught mid-giggle.

“Should I take photos?” Eliza asked, lips curling up into a smile. “I can get the camera out.” She tilted her head and glanced at Lena with a sly smile. “Do people still pay for paparazzi photos of Lena Luthor?”

Eliza did not get the camera out, but she did snap a few shots with her phone ( for prosperity’s sake , she told them both) before helping Kara find an old, clean flask of her own. She spared them the lecture of staying safe in lieu of patting the flask in Kara’s breast pocket with a significant look that made Kara redden and mumble about not staying out too late. And then she pushed both women out the door and into the bright, afternoon sun.

Like a proper suburban mother, she watched them walk down the street through a gap in the curtains, convincing herself that it was just out of curiosity and not anything malicious, like spying or hovering. She wasn’t a helicopter parent after all. Eliza watched them with a kind of sentimental awe. They were just two young women with very old souls.

Social media and news outlets said whatever they liked about them and Eliza tried to pay them no mind. To her, Supergirl was her foster daughter, an unexpected love that she’d tended to the best she could with what she was given. She often hoped that it was enough.

And Lena Luthor? She’d been unexpected, too.

They turned the corner and Eliza watched as Kara’s mouth twisted up and Lena threw her head back in distant laughter.

--

Kara walked with her hands shoved into the pockets of her pants, shoulders hiked up almost to her ears, a slight spring in her step as they ambled down the lane. Lena walked with her hands clasped behind her back, which seemed uncharacteristically girlish but oddly right in the light of the autumn sun. They talked, but about what it was uncertain. Their conversation ricocheted at breakneck pace from topic to topic—one moment the subject was Kara’s true understanding of quantum entanglement, the next it was the concept of weather and how Kara once visited a planet that was almost devoid of it for it had no moons.

It made Lena dizzy with excitement and curiosity, now unbidden by a invisible, unspeakable wall between them. Kara was an intellectual sparring partner in matters of public relations, pop culture, and literature up until the moment she took her glasses off and told Lena her real surname. Though Lena and Kara could talk about (and have talked) about anything and everything, the understanding that Kara was not of this planet (Lena hesitated to utilize the more familiar turn of phrase that likened Kara to something… more ) seemed to unlock an endless corridor of topics on top of their usual affair.

The 15 minute walk to the venue was short and sweet and full of laughter, the touch of their shoulders brushing against one another stray moments spotted in between. The venue was actually a home on a large plot of land, owned and operated as a farm in its early history until it was renovated and repurposed as an event space in the sleepy suburbs of Midvale.

A large, white tent stood in the middle of the property. Beneath it was a sizable quantity of round tables adorned with calligraphed table numbers and place settings, each one holding a center piece of bright, summer flowers tied together with equally colorful ribbon. On one side of the tent were rows of wooden, white chairs framed in an arc for the ceremony and further onto the property a dance floor and DJ set were situated next to an empty building which was repurposed as the bar and restaurant for the evening.

Whispers of recognition followed Kara up the sidewalk as they neared a more sizeable crowd, but for once, it was not about Lena. No, those familiar hisses of question and then affirmation, incredulity and then reluctant, distant acceptance—they were about her.

Isn’t that—?

God, it is. Do you think she’ll ask us about Superman?

Didn’t you hear?

She works for CatCo ?!

She couldn’t be upset if she tried. Kara had always known that she was strange and unliked as Kara Danvers. Even being Supergirl she knew that she was strange and unliked in certain circles. It was expected. Sure, it didn’t make her feel particularly great, but she tried not to lose too much sleep over what certain parties in high school thought of one Kara Danvers. The Supergirl bit was a little more harrowing, but she’d learned to take it in stride and improve upon her image where she could in the years that she’s acted on being the caped crusader.

It was when those words and tones were directed at Lena that she felt a bite of aggression, a hint of protection.

Today, they were just whispers in the wind. Ghosts that Kara carried with her because she had always been strange as a child. That wasn’t something that she could take back, nor would she want to. It was what made her sister her sister and what made her Kara Danvers.

Perhaps it was the whispering of those ghosts that made her do it, but Kara stuck her hand out expectantly as they walked up the driveway and around the side of the house and she was both relieved and glad when Lena took it plainly. She felt Lena’s heartbeat through her palm, felt Lena’s pulse point through her skin—Kara was clocked into Lena’s heartbeat before she knew it and the whispers of old neighbors and spare classmates fell to the wayside as they walked together.

People congregated in the large, 3-storied home on the property, which served as housing for the welcoming cocktail hour. They snuck through the entrance, dodging older women who gave Lena glances as if they might recognize her from one of their daytime talk shows. The back of the home opened up with garage like doors so that those in the kitchen spilled onto the rest of the property as folks milled about, mingling and drinking, catching up on time lost.

Kara and Lena went straight to the bar where Lena ordered a glass of red wine and Kara a gin and tonic that she added her contraband to.

“Hold on a second,” Lena said. They’d stopped once they walked just outside of the kitchen and out into the afternoon light. Kara followed Lena’s gaze, worried by how overcome Lena suddenly looked. Amanda and her bridesmaids were taking group photos under a willow tree on one end of the property.

“What’s wrong?” Kara asked. Amanda laughed as one bridesmaid stuck her leg out from underneath her dress, posing happily.

“I’m such an idiot,” Lena said, breathing a puff of air, like a laugh. “Amanda Klein, the friend you had in middle school. That’s her?”

“She is the only one dressed as a bride here, Lena.”

Kara fidgeted with her glasses, suddenly wondering if this was going to be a terrible experience, but Lena looked at her with a smile on her face.

“Well, I knew her as Mandy, and she happened to be my RA at MIT.”

--

“God, Luthor! Are you chucking in the sink?”

“Fuck you,” Lena spat. A string of spit stuck to her chin and she wiped at it angrily.

“Girl, you know Boston doesn’t have garbage disposals.”

“Fuck off, Mandy,” Lena growled. She pushed her hair out of her face and felt a fresh wave of nausea roll against her stomach and the back of her throat.

Mandy laughed at her but cooed nonsense and started to rub Lena’s back with a flat palm. The warm touch calmed Lena’s stomach from flipping itself into the kitchen sink, but she still felt nauseous, and against her will she groaned as she laid her head against her arm, bracing herself against the countertop.

“You sound absolutely wrecked,” Mandy said.

“Like I don’t already know that. What are you gonna do?” Lena slurred, shifted her weight from one foot to another. “Write me up? Fucking—fucking lecture me about being a kid? I’ll pay you off if you’re hard up for cash, Klein.”

Mandy stepped away and Lena heard the sounds of her rummaging through the cabinet. Vaguely, she could hear Mandy pushing aside glassware and mugs before she found something satisfactory. Lena peaked from the crook of her elbow and saw Mandy filling up a plastic cup from Woody’s Pizza full of tap water from the sink. Mandy grabbed Lena’s shoulder and forced her up none too gently, before taking Lena’s hand and making her grip the cup properly.

“Drink,” Mandy commanded.

Lena rolled her eyes but started chugging anyway. Even inebriated she could feel Mandy watching her, could feel Mandy’s line of sight on the bob of her throat as she gulped down mouthfuls of water.

“Hasn’t anyone ever taken care of you before?”

Lena pried the cup from her face and swayed angrily.

“I don’t need it.”

“Of course you don’t,” Mandy snorted. “Psych majors would have a field day with you. Look, just because you think you don’t need shit, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t let people help you.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m serious, Lena.” Mandy reached out and tipped the cup back towards Lena’s mouth, trying to get her to drink some more. Begrudgingly, she did. “You’re a kid. In college. In a fucking Master’s program.”

“I’m a Luthor,” she said, gasping from drinking so long. She coughed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I really don’t care about that,” Mandy said plainly.

“Yeah fucking right!” Lena pointed an accusing finger at Mandy. “I heard you and Angela Krueger talking on the first week about how you got assigned babysitting duty to the rich Luthor bitch.”

Mandy swatted Lena’s hand away from her chest and tipped the cup back towards her mouth.

“You’re right, I did call it babysitting duty,” Mandy said, after Lena took 3 more long suffering gulps. Her voice was softer around the edges, her shoulders slightly slumped. “But it was Angela who called you that rich Luthor bitch. Honestly, I saw your name when I got room assignments and stupidly forgot to put LutherCorp and Lena Luthor together. I just saw what year you were born.”

“Then you really are an idiot.” Lena snatched the cup out of Mandy’s hand so she could chug properly on her own instead of having Mandy spill half of it down the front of her shirt. Mandy smiled at her with a lopsided grin.

“I guess,” she said. “I mean, especially here, shit’s all relative.”

Lena paused her drinking to snort into her cup.

“Look, not to get all older, protective upperclassmen on you but—shit—I don’t know. I’m here if you wanna forget who you’re related to or what goes on in the world or whatever.” Mandy knocked her shoe against the cabinet of the sink, suddenly turned sheepish. “I had a friend do that for me once, so. You know.”

“Why are you trying to be nice to me?” Lena asked. “Do you want money? Homework help? Did someone dare you do be nice to the poor, adopted Luthor girl?”

“God, I now understand shaking baby syndrome,” Mandy muttered. “You’re 16, Lena! I’m just trying to be nice for no reason. Some people do that.”

The next day, Lena woke up face down on her own twin sized mattress in her single back on campus. She smoked a cigarette while perched by the window before she pulled out her laptop to sneak into the school’s systems with practiced ease. She was still bleary eyed and half-asleep, toothbrush hanging limply from her mouth as she worked around firewalls and safety measures and into the student records. She pulled up Amanda Klein before she could even scrub her tongue.

What she found was mostly average, boring stuff, really. Solid grades for a decently difficult STEM major and a few notable accomplishments for being a Junior at MIT. There was a list of extracurriculars Mandy participated in like Robot Fight Club and the oldest queer student group on campus—G@MIT. Lena squinted at that one for a little longer than necessary before she scrolled past to still more mundane details about Mandy. She was from some stupidly, boringly named town on the East Coast: Midvale. Went to Northridge High. Born in 1990.

Lena blinked sleep away and gnawed on her toothbrush. She knew Mandy was already a Junior. Lena tapped against her laptop, staring at the number like looking at it would make it ignite into epiphany, make her understand something about Mandy Klein’s motives towards her. It didn’t ignite in anything. She dribbled toothpaste onto her sleep shorts and huffed.

Three knocks thumped against her door as Lena finished wiping at her face. She scowled in the mirror, pausing, waiting to see if it would pass, but the knocking started up again, and more insistently the second time. She stomped over and wrenched the door open quickly.

She misjudged the line of sight on the other end of the door, ending up with an eyeful of chest.

“Hey Luthor,” Mandy grinned. She waved a paper cup of coffee in front of Lena’s face. Lena took it skeptically. Mandy had a pair of headphones loose around her neck, bleeding sound. Death Cab for Cutie crooned solemnly at a low volume. “We’re going for a morning walk across the river if you’re down to join—just me and a few girls from the hall.”

“Oh,” Lena said. She fidgeted against the door, drumming her fingers against the veneer.

“No pressure though. You’re probably busy.” Mandy smiled at her and it felt like one of those rare, genuine moments Lena craved. One of those things she saw from the periphery and wondered at. Wondered what it would be like to be a normal girl in a normal family. Mandy gripped her headphones, ready to put them back into place.

“Thanks,” Lena blurted. She could feel the skin of her cheeks heat up. “For the coffee and—”

“Quit worrying about it, Lena.”

And then Mandy winked and walked away, humming the lyrics to “Your New Twin Sized Bed”. Lena felt embarrassed for recognizing the words.

--

“Wait, you knew Amanda?”

“Yep,” Lena said, the word popping out of her mouth clipped and curt.

“Small world,” Kara muttered. “Literally, actually, Krypton was like 50% bigger than Earth.”

“You’re getting awfully casual about this,” Lena said.

They moved through the property, keeping Amanda and the bridesmaids in their peripheral glances the whole while. Kara could feel the beginnings of her inhibitions start to slip, slowly succumbing to the warm,  happy feeling of being slightly inebriated on a wonderfully pleasant afternoon.

“Sorry,” Kara frowned. “I just, you know, wanted you to get used to the whole idea of me being… you know.”

The laugh that spilled out of Lena’s mouth was bright and full, like an almost tangible thing Kara could cup in her palms.

“Kara, I think I got used to the idea a long time ago,” she said. “It’s just, you never know who might be listening, is all. I want you to be safe, despite me being selfish.”

“Selfish?” Kara paused their walk, fingers brushing Lena’s wrist to get her stop, too. “What do you mean selfish?”

“I—well—”

“Hey, you two!”

Amanda, no longer preoccupied with photo obligations, waved at them happily as she walked over, breaking away from her bridal party and laughing at a joke only Kara could hear. Amanda’s white dress trailed after her, blown against her body by the breeze, looking as though she were a painting come to meet them.

“Lena fucking Luthor,” Amanda laughed as she approached. “Holy crap. You—oh my god, of course you know Kara Danvers, she interviewed you. She works for you!”

She slapped a palm playfully against her forehead.

“Mandy,” Lena sniffed.

Kara blinked at her, taken aback by the posture she now saw, the transformation from Lena to Lena Luthor, 26 year-old billionaire and CEO. Lena had tipped her head, making her neck longer, her back straight; she looked as though she were trying to look down on someone half a foot taller than her, and she was succeeding. However faint, though, Kara could make out the imperceptible quiver at the side of Lena’s mouth, the muscles there twitching, trying to contain either a smile or a smirk.

“You’re still a god damn brat; I don’t care what CatCo or the damn Daily Planet says about you,” Amanda said. “Stop trying to pull sweet Kara Danvers into your vicious cycle of brooding.”

Kara opened her mouth to protest, but Lena stepped forward.

“I cannot believe you invited Kara and I had to show up as an unannounced guest,” she said, haughty and indignant. She folded her arms in front of her, let exaggerated disappointment wash over her features as much as possible. “And I thought I was your favorite underclassmen.”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “Is she always like this?”

Kara sputtered, caught off guard by the energy of the exchange, unaided by the foreign substance sloshing about in her bloodstream. She laughed, awkward and nervous. Amanda leaned in, smiling and looking conspiratorial. She stage whispered behind her hand.

“She’s mad because I used to write her up all the time.”

“You wrote me up twice!” Lena argued.

Amanda paid her no mind and continued to stage whisper to Kara. “Everyone else was afraid they were going to get sued.” Then she turned to Lena. “And anyway, if you didn’t just up and leave coasts with no way to contact you save for your publicist, maybe you’d get invited!”

“Technicalities,” Lena said, brushing Amanda off with the wave of her hand.

Kara looked between the two of them, Lena with her arms folded across her chest and Amanda looking smug. She imagined that there were puzzle pieces missing from the timeline of when she knew Amanda and when she met Lena that could have helped her make better sense of the conversation. The last she’d seen Amanda, Kara had left her in a girl’s bathroom underneath a high school football stadium. The first time she met Lena, Kara had come to tag along with Clark at L-Corp’s (then) new National City offices. She tried to make the two meet in the middle but couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

She felt left out, somehow. She wondered if the Kara Danvers that existed between those two people could have fit into their memories of each other.

Amanda smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling, softening a little. Her grin turned lopsided.

“Time’s… super weird, isn’t it?”

“Something like that,” Lena agreed, and even she was smiling now.

Someone called for Amanda—the photographer was waiting with the groomsmen, all lined up eagerly, ready to take their photo with Amanda in some creative and perhaps dangerous way.

“Ugh, more photos. Listen, I love that you’re both here,” she said, throwing her arms around both of them. “I hope we get more time to catch up!”

Both Lena and Kara watched as Amanda jogged down the path, pretending to launch herself into the air as the groomsmen laughed, shouting that they’d catch her.

“So… you and Amanda—or should I say Mandy?” Kara asked, willing her voice to stay neutral.

“Like I said, Mandy was my RA at MIT.” Lena fidgeted with a ring on her finger, twisting it against her skin. “I was 16 when I moved into campus housing and you know I’ve never been exactly… friendly.” She said the last word sheepishly, like she was embarrassed to admit her flaws so plainly. She cleared her throat. “I was newly released from boarding school and my father’s will gave me unrestricted access to my funds either at 18 or upon arriving at university—whichever came first.”

Kara grinned, only to have Lena scowl at her, knowing that a line of teasing was sure to come. “So you gave Amanda a hard time.”

Lena tsked.

“She’s the one who signed up to be in charge of a bunch of teenagers. Some of us were just… more unruly than others.”

“Unruly.”

“I… may or may not have run into Mandy while I perused upperclassman house parties around Boston,” Lena sniffed.

“And you said you didn’t have a secret identity,” Kara teased. Lena waved her hand around vaguely.

“I was a kid at a very prestigious university with almost unlimited funds. I was bound to get into some amount of trouble.” A low smirk spread across Lena’s face as she remembered something. “Lillian went and made all the detailed arrangements for non-disclosures. Truthfully, I couldn’t have cared less about what was leaked or remained on the internet. As was probably evident of my behavior then.”

“Tell me about your rebellious years,” Kara said. They moseyed through the property at a leisurely pace. Kara could feel the sun on her skin and the rings of laughter from the house on the hill crept down softly to meet her ears. “I mean, if you want to. I didn’t—couldn’t really have an… unruly time in my life. Alex did though.”

When Lena laughed, Kara smiled at the sound of it.

“Not much to tell. I mouthed off and drank a lot, probably made a fool of myself too many times to count and did a bunch of things I shouldn’t have. I wrote a lot of papers hungover and spent too many hours in my upper division labs,” Lena said. “By the time I hit the research for my Master’s I’d learned to behave somewhat.”

Kara listened with rapt attention.

“I was just a kid who was mad at her mother and always in her brother’s shadow and mad at her dad for dying.”

“You and Alex have a lot more in common than the both of you let on,” Kara said.

Kara imagined a younger version of Lena, cheeks red from booze, eyes glazed and wild, starting verbal altercations and causing mayhem at crowded parties. She wondered what it would have been like for them to meet then instead of in that office with the floor to ceiling windows and Clark trying to catch Lena in a lie. She wondered if Lena would have tried to fight her off or ignored her like everyone else did her first year at Stanhope College. She wondered if they would be the same, if they would be friends, would’ve somehow been brought together like they were.

Maybe there was another Earth where Kal-El let Kara come with him when she first crash landed, where she had the opportunity to meet Lena as two teenage kids who hadn’t yet been hurt by family. Her mind flashed through the fully formed, fictional snapshots of that made up timeline like an old film reel. There she was, meeting Lena at a party when Lex and Clark were still friends. There they were sending letters to each other in college. There they were meeting during the summers to tinker with robotics. There she was, her debut as Supergirl. There was Lena, knowing the whole while.

Kara wondered if that version of Earth harbored a timeline where she helped save Lex Luthor. She hoped so. She prayed for it into existence in some parallel dimension.

--

When seating for the ceremony started, Lena and Kara plopped down into seats situated more toward the back, laughing together about something inconsequential, lost to the moment. Liquor buzzed through Lena, keeping her warm like an electric blanket, making everything bright and full. For Kara, the effects of what she had called her wine sank into her like an anchor and painted a neat tinge of blush on her cheeks.

The sun had just started to tip downward, casting the entire property into that quinntessential golden hour. Slowly, guests started to fill up the neat arc of chairs ahead of the ceremony. Their whispers of recognition had died down since the pair had arrived—some of the more smug guests continued to try to cajole their peers into gossip, but it wasn’t a particularly fun game for anyone involved. A few times Lena got looks of recognition and casual greetings; she earned herself a hug from Denice Ryckman, a woman Lena remembered to hang around Mandy’s room on their floor—she was the officiant for the evening.

Neither Lena nor Kara knew Marcus, Amanda’s husband-to-be. He was tall and classically handsome, but definitely goofy. He walked his aging mother down the aisle first, stooping to kiss her on the cheek before she sat. He rubbed his palms against his trousers as his groomsmen lined up behind him and kept nervously adjusting his bowtie while waiting for Amanda to join him.

A tear slipped down his cheek when he saw Amanda for the first time. The best man, who looked very much like he might be Marcus’s brother, punched him playfully in the arm when he sniffed and wiped at his eye. It was all very lovely and soft, the air so still every gasp and shuddered breath by a guest could be felt through Kara like a tremor.

“The setup of the century,” Denice said, midway through the ceremony. “They were too scared to ask each other out, so I had to create increasingly less believable reasons to invite them out together only to leave them alone!”

Everyone laughed while Marcus looked bashful and Amanda rolled her eyes.

It was the kind of thing that made Kara love weddings, the kind of story that made her think that the messy chaos of human life was, perhaps, the right way to live. She imagined that, at one point in its history, Krypton was like this too—imperfect and illogical and left up to chance and circumstance, before the guilds, before the Matricomp and birthing matrix, before the planet wide ban on divorce, even. She loved it, loved that Earth was accidents and mistakes and second chances.

She glanced sideways at Lena, catching that amused and pensive look on the other woman’s face, her green-grey eyes glinting in the sun. She thought about the culture of order and logic she was brought up in until she was 13 and how they lost anyway. Lena smiled at something Marcus said during his vows and Kara wondered if there was another universe, a place where they were reversed: a universe where Lena was sent to Krypton as the last daughter of Gaea, looking for a chance or a solution to save her planet or perhaps her brother.

“I knew you were it for me,” Amanda said. Kara turned her attention back onto the ceremony. Everyone was crying, sighing, feeling so intensely. “I don’t know how; I just looked at you one day and I knew. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

In her mind’s eye, Kara envisioned her immediate future. She imagined waking up tomorrow with the unfamiliar feeling of a hangover and slowly making her way down the steps to find Eliza and Lena bent over metal parts, schematics, and papers at the kitchen island, lost in a microcosm of their own devising. She stretched further; saw her schedule into the next week, could see herself at CatCo, arguing with Lena via email over copy. She saw herself in her cape and suit, doing patrols, absentmindedly landing on that balcony at L-Corp.

She imagined a whole year—snapshots of her life flickered through game nights at Alex’s apartment, requiring Lena’s assistance for the first time at the DEO, a viewing party of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ’s season premiere in her living room, fighting as Supergirl, winning as Supergirl.

She imagined five years into the future. Half imagined scenes blurred together: a pulitzer prize, attending Lena’s TED talks, Alex’s wedding. She saw ten years—Eliza’s “retirement”, L-Corp’s breakthrough in energy, joining something like the Justice League.

In almost every imagined scenario and mundane what-if, Kara’s brain spit out a picture of her and a picture of Lena. Lena with her hair down; Lena with a scowl on her face; Lena tinkering with tech; Lena in that dress that matched her eyes. Lena standing next to her on the edge of every unknown, ready to jump.

Her hand was in Lena’s before she was even conscious of the thought. There was no reaction as Kara intertwined their fingers. She could feel the smooth skin of the back of Lena’s palm, the ridges of her bitten down thumbnail, her heartbeat through her skin.

She felt Lena squeeze, but neither one pulled away to let go.

Kara wondered how long it had been like this. How long had she gone where her mind just filled in the gaps with Lena?

How long could it possibly last?

“By the power vested in me by the State of Virginia, I now pronounce you married.”

--

Sitting at the circular table with yet another glass of whisky in front of her, Lena could only think of one thing: she was content. It was a strange thing to both feel like herself and feel completely unlike herself. Happiness was an accessory she’d only recently started to embrace, finally feeling like maybe she was in a place in her life where she deserved that.

Kara smiled at her over the rim of her glass. Lena noticed the flushed cheeks half an hour ago along with the way Kara was laughing now with the volume pressed up, just a little, just enough. She’d flicked a pebble halfway across the property just because she could (with a small Lena, watch this before she did it) and Lena laughed, couldn’t help but find Kara so amusing and wonderful.

“Hey.”

The guest seated to her right stuck their hand out, grinning in greeting.

“Hi,” Lena said before she reached past a display of flowers to shake their hand. “I’m Lena.”

“Dalia,” they replied. “Looks like you got stuck with the weird cousins.”

“So, if I don’t have a weird cousin, that makes me the weird cousin, right?”

Dalia looked pensive for a moment, their head tilted to the side, one eye squinted in thought. “You know what, you’re right.”

“I have a weird cousin,” Kara said, laughing. She shook hands with Dalia and introduced herself before continuing. “I bet he’d say I’m the weird cousin though.”

Dalia shrugged. “Maybe you’re both the weird cousin,” they said. “Maybe he’s the weird cousin and you’re the gay cousin.”

Lena nearly barked out a laugh.

“Oh—I’m not—”

“So how long have y’all been fucking?”

Lena snorted into her drink as Kara laughed way too loudly to be considered normal, her mouth wide in that panicked sort of way she sometimes got when she was caught off guard.

“Oh no. No, we don’t,” Kara said, her cheeks even more red than before. She was pointing between herself and Lena and shaking her head a little too fast, bordering on… superhuman. Lena could see sweat literally forming on her brow.

“Right on, sexuality is a spectrum,” Dalia said, nodding their head, nonplussed and seemingly immune to Kara’s ever growing awkwardness. “So how long have y’all been seeing each other then? Gonna throw a big wedding like this?”

“We’re just friends,” Lena said, cutting in so Kara wouldn’t have to fight through her inebriation to come up with answer that didn’t involve high pitched laughter.

“Oh. Oh!” Dalia’s eyes widened comically. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. My bad. I just thought—and then you two—wow I’m a dumbass! I’m gonna shut up now.”

They looked almost pained, their expression pinched and apologetic. Lena laughed then, she couldn’t help it; it was too funny to her, flattering as it might have been. Dalia ducked their head, embarrassed. The older woman on Dalia’s other side tugged on their ear and said something Lena didn’t catch, pointing between Lena and Kara as she spoke.

“What? No, mom, they’re not—I said they’re not together!”

Their mother rolled her eyes. “Well why the heck not, they’re such a pretty couple.”

“Mom!” Dalia looked over at Lena, panic stricken and embarrassed. “She’s funny. Right? Funny, haha! So how do you know Marcus?”

“Oh, we don’t!” Kara said, chiming in now that they were both flustered and embarrassed. “I went to middle school with Amanda and technically Lena is my plus one, but she knew Amanda at MIT.”

“That’s cool, you must be smart then! So what do you do?” they asked, looking at Lena.

“Smarts are relative,” Lena replied, surprised at the conversation’s turn. She waved a hand around vaguely, as if trying to waft into existence some explanation of herself that was most simple and least encumbered by connotation and reputation. “I do a number of things, mostly business related these days. Jack of all trades, master of none.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Dalia replied, genuine in their reaction.

“She works too much,” Kara said. She had a smile on her face that Lena recognized as thinly veiled mischief, like a kid with a secret waiting to upset a party. “She owns two companies.”

“Cool,” Dalia said, clearly impressed. “Probably the kind that make money, right? Some tech startups or something?”

Lena laughed at that. How refreshing. How refreshing to just be someone instead of all the faux recognition and assumptions that came upon being identified on sight. It was a nice, sort of carefree moment that Lena found herself unfamiliar with, caught off balance by the delight of it. Opportunities to play herself down were few and far between, after all.

“Something like that,” Kara answered for her, that grin still on her face. “Lena’s good at everything business and tech related.”

“Wish I had the brain for that.” Their mother tapped them against the forehead playfully. “I liked art too much.”

“Oh, me too!” Kara said.

“Kara paints,” Lena interjected. “In addition to writing—she’s a journalist. A good one, too.”

“Wow,” Dalia responded, their jaw slightly slack in awe. “You guys are like, real adults.”

“That’s the L-Corp lady,” their mother said, smacking Dalia across the back of their head with only a small amount of force.

“Ow, the what?” They made a face of exaggerated incredulity, rubbing at the back of their skull. “The L—oh wow. Oh man. Hey, did I mention that I’m a dumbass?”

The banter went on like that through the majority of dinner. Dalia was friendly and polite and seemed well versed in all things pop culture despite being incapable of recognizing either Lena or Kara on sight. But it set a kind of precedent for the rest of their companionable dining, which was fine by Lena. Her liquor addled brain wouldn’t have been up to posturing, even if she needed to.

Kara did most of the leg work as far as conversation went. Dalia and their mother were easy to get along with and Lena took a particular liking to Dalia considering their abrupt snorts of laughter every time Lena quipped out a particularly devastating self-deprecating joke. It was nice when someone took her brand of humor at face value, like she wasn’t an alien who only knew how to be human by observing other humans interact with one another. It was a funny metaphor to make. Kara, after all, had done exactly that.

And she excelled in human interaction where Lena sometimes floundered.

Needless to say, dinner was pleasant. Fun, even. Lena was entertained and comfortable and the laughter that spilled out of Kara’s mouth throughout was so warm and full, Lena thought that she could live in it if she tried. A part of her wanted to try, desperately almost. It was one of those liquor aided thoughts that seemed dramatic and powerful in the moment. But it was true, even if its existence was caused by an 18 year Glenfiddich.

When dinner was replaced by dessert, Kara’s delight was contagious. The rest of their table cheered as individual creme brulees and sorbets made their ways to the table. It was all so amusing, the drunk-side-of-tipsy Kara Danvers and her charm and charisma. Kara was a woman of layers, something Lena had always admired, even before she uttered that confirmation on Eliza’s rooftop (the one Lena had secretly thought would never come). She was always so… optimistic. And she didn’t have to be. Despite everything, Kara was Kara: brilliance and wonder and the light chime of laughter.

--

“Wanna explore that weird house?” Kara said, after dinner.

It surprised Lena, because she fully expected Kara to drag her onto the dancefloor. She’d even prepared a protest for it. But she said sure and they dodged guests in that open kitchen and went straight through to the hallways with pictures of the landscaping processes from the 80s. Lena was contemplating the cost and time of production of the project when Kara sprang the question on her.

“Earlier, before we talked to Amanda, you said something about being selfish.” Kara played idly with a bottle of beer, pulling at the label that had started to peel under the condensation. “What did you mean by that?”

Lena tried to rewind the last hour and a half but found the work difficult to do with all that scotch sloshing around in her grey matter. Her mental faculties were just a touch slower; her recklessness just a touch brighter. The tip of her nose was beginning to numb.

“You’ll have to remind me of the context,” Lena admitted.

“You said,” Kara started, tilting her head and trying to remember. The pink on her cheeks seemed brighter than during dinner and her glasses were slightly askew. “That you wanted me to be safe when I talked about… you know. And you said that I could never know who might be listening—untrue by the way—despite you being selfish.”

“Ah,” Lena replied, remembering the moment now. “I just worry. And I worry for good reason because not everybody has good intentions. But I do want to know. Everything you want to tell me; I want to know.”

She moved from one photo to the next, shoddy time lapse through greying, medium format photos.

“But I have no secrets of my own for you. Between my family’s history and me being one of the richest and most controversial public figures in the country, there’s not much you couldn’t find out about me if you didn’t already know.”

Kara contemplated Lena’s words.

“Our friendship isn’t contingent on weird power plays about identity, Lena,” she said after some time. She reached out and touched Lena’s shoulder with a warm palm.

“No, I know,” she said. And it was true. After 2 years of friendship with Kara, Lena had begun the process of dismantling the harmful notion that friendships and business relationships operated on the same terms and conditions. It was hard to undo that kind of thinking, almost like gene therapy. “I just—I don’t know. I feel like you trust me with so much and I don’t quite know what I did to deserve that.”

“You’re Lena Luthor! You’re my best friend,” Kara said.

And she said it as if it were so simple, like it was all the reason Lena could ever need, that anybody could ever need. So Lena let it go, because maybe it was one of those genuine moments that people had that she had always craved in her life and had never quite understood. Some things were just that simple.

They walked through more of the house and commentated on its decor and detail. Kara sipped at her beer. They sidestepped tipsy looking guests who looked to be queued up for the bathroom, giggling amongst each other with flushed faces. One of those giggling guests in line was Denice, and she winked at Lena as they walked past.

“So, if you ever got married…”

Lena groaned and rolled her eyes for dramatics.

“You always ask me this. Is it really so strange that I didn’t spend my childhood having planned my hypothetical wedding?” she asked. When Supergirl asked Lena Luthor about western marriage customs, she chalked the whole thing up to culture shock. But when Kara Danvers asked Lena Luthor not-so-slyly about dream wedding scenarios on multiple occasions, Lena had to think that maybe her friend was worried about her. Truly, it was just a defense mechanism: to ignore the plausibility of peak stability in her life like that.

“I just think you deserve to have that kind of happiness if it was something you wanted. And if it was something you wanted, you should be able to think about it if and when you wanted to,” Kara said. She shrugged a shoulder. Had Lena always been transparent in front of Kara?

She thought about Kara’s answer seriously, for a moment, blood alcohol content notwithstanding. She thought about the things she allowed or didn’t allow herself to think about or have or experience with a fullness that seemed to come so easily to other people. She thought about all the things Lillian denied her and the things that Lex inadvertently tainted when he went mad with power and righteous spite. She thought about the dark stain of her father’s figure as he blurred into her memories of him.

“Okay,” she said. “So let’s think about it now.”

“What?” Kara laughed. “What do you mean?”

“Help me imagine my wedding,” Lena said. She shrugged and waved a hand around vaguely. “What would be a suitable dream scenario?”

Kara blinked, then tilted her head. Her pink cheeks moved as she gnawed the inside of it, thinking. As smart as she was, Lena felt incredibly dumb in that moment, felt uncreative and unimaginative. She wasn’t being coy; she really had no idea where to start.

“Well are you having a big wedding or a small one?”

“Small,” Lena answered. Instantly, a venue appeared bare and empty in her head. Something with large wooden beams running down the length of the ceiling and slightly-distorted windows, glass having sunk just a bit from age. “But not courthouse small. An actual something.”

Kara smiled, pleased at Lena answer. “Okay, small. Full of flowers?”

“Probably,” Lena said, slowly, thinking. Purple hues cropped up in the imagined venue in her head dotted with white and bits of yellow. A bar at one end of the venue cropped up and Lena said as much.

“Okay, good! Flowers and an open bar at a smallish wedding in… early autumn, right? See? This is easy,” Kara said. She bounced a bit on her heels, delighted at the imagining of things. It made Lena want to try harder.

“Maybe I won’t wear white,” she said, struck by how right the idea felt saying it outloud. “Might clash too much with my complexion.”

“I dunno about that. You’d look good in anything, Lena. But sure, let’s say no white.”

“Some kind of pastel. Nothing too… severe. I think I wear that enough at work,” Lena said.

Kara smiled like she was really in it, like the imagination in her head could be real and true, like she could really envision Lena in a powder blue dress or off-white, pink-hued number walking down the aisle of a smallish venue with purple, white, and yellow flowers. The image in Lena’s head seemed like a vision into a parallel reality where things in her life went right instead of sideways and off the rails.

“Maybe you could do a costume change, too! Like through dinner maybe,” Kara said. “Speaking of dinner—new American? Italian?”

Lena laughed. “Sure, why not. And family style, too. Boring fish dish and everything.”

Kara nodded along, almost seriously, like she was keeping notes to be remembered at a later date.

“What about cake?”

Lena thought about a long-ish table shoved into some corner of the venue, but could not imagine a traditional, tiered cake with one of those plastic wedding toppers at the peak of it. No image of some mountainous thing popped up onto that table.

“I think… I’d prefer pie, to be honest,” Lena said after the scene in her mind seemed to take on its own narration and populated itself with silver tins.

“Sure, we could do pie,” Kara said absently. “And people?”

The fanciful setting in Lena’s mind had structure. It had bones of historic wood and high, vaulted ceilings. It had atmosphere—the vague sense that good food was being prepared close by permeated the day dream like a distant memory. But the scene was still and oddly empty. It had high-tops and flowers, low-tops without gaudy tablecloths, an open bar, and a dessert table. But it had empty seats. An empty podium in dark wood stood lonesome like an obelisk at the venue’s far end. Rows of empty chairs sat bare and open, like unpopulated church pews waiting for sinners.

Lena frowned.

Jack was dead. Her mother continued to elude authorities, despite Lena’s attempts at tracking her herself. Lex’s prison sentence had no end in sight, nor did she have any sort of hope for it would be shortened. For one brutal, self-deprecating moment, Lena feared that that was all there was in her life—graveyards and in memoriams.

She thought of Jess first. She’d have to think about the why later, but maybe it was the alcohol. Jess would cry when she was handed an invite, maybe. Or say something snarky upon receiving it, probably. She imagined Sam and Ruby smiling from the first row where family should be; Sam’s time-wearied eyes bright instead of shaky like they had been since… well, since. Ruby would be older, grown more into herself.

She pictured Alex there, too, sitting grumpily with her arms crossed in front of her as if she might have more important places to be (even in the daydream, Lena knew this wasn’t true and could pick out the slight twitch, the telltale sign of amusement in the corners of Alex’s mouth). Her mind made Winn a ring bearer before she could even alter the fantasy. He wore a bowtie and his eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

And just like that, right next to the podium, Kara was in a dark navy suit with a red boutonniere.

Lena blinked into the present, wrenching herself away from the odd fantasy—an imagined scene turned shameful conjecture. She hadn’t meant to complete her fantasy like that. She felt embarrassed by it, ashamed, somehow. It was an accident… but it didn’t feel entirely accidental. It seemed more like the answer to a question she had no idea she needed to ask.

“Lena?” Kara’s face was scrunched, eyebrows pulled together in concern. “Hey. Where’d you go?”

“Sorry, I…” Lena felt off-kilter, tilted as if she were still halfway between worlds. She cleared her throat. Her palms were suddenly slick. “I—I was trying to think of a guestlist. But all I could imagine were your friends.”

Kara smiled softly, the worried lines in her face smoothing out with relief.

“They’re your friends, too,” she said. It was true. Lena couldn’t say exactly when that had become true, only that it was, that it had happened one day and just became a part of her reality. The answer to a question she had no idea she needed to ask. The realization seemed to pry open something inside of Lena she’d never knew she’d been hiding.

“I need to get a glass of water, really quick,” she found herself saying. “I’ll bring one for you?”

“Sure!” Kara said. She was still smiling. “I’m gonna line up for the bathroom but I’ll meet you back here.”

Lena nodded and walked away on shaky legs, suddenly overcome and somehow overthrown by the lingering image in her mind.

--

Lena stalked back through the house toward the kitchen that opened out onto the property. She found it mostly empty—the party was in full swing on the dance floor. There were a few stragglers hanging about the bar, talking and laughing, but it was by no means crowded. She was able to flag down a bartender for a pint of ice water easily.

She flexed and stretched her palms as she sipped gingerly, trying to dispel some of her strange, wound up energy built up suddenly by her curiously imagined, hypothetical situation. It was such a little thing. She could’ve imagined anybody there.

She was still in the middle of unfairly berating herself when someone forcibly knocked into her from behind, clapping her on the back with an open palm and a fresh peel of laughter in her ear.

“Lena!” Mandy shouted, face flushed.

Lena’s mouth quirked upward and she took Mandy’s hand and wrapped it around her pint of water. Mandy’s eyes lit up with gratitude as she chugged down the contents quickly.

“Well isn’t this just backwards,” Lena teased. Mandy held up a single finger, still drinking, her throat bobbing with each gulp.

“In a kitchen, no less,” Mandy said, breathless after her long drink. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, grimacing at the sweat pooled there. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Are you?” Lena asked. She couldn’t help but be coy.

“Sure, I mean, that means there’s a big fat check waiting for me in my wedding gifts, right?” Mandy said, grinning.

Lena laughed, tossing her head back.

“I’m Kara’s guest! You’re getting a gift based on a journalist’s salary, not a CEO’s,” she said.

“Pfft.” Mandy waved her hand, brushing Lena off before signaling for another glass of water. “Say, you don’t still smoke those terribly expensive cigarettes you started smoking ‘for the aesthetic’ do you?”

“You don’t still drunkenly bum smokes off of people and claim you’ve never paid for a cigarette in your entire life, do you?”

“Not everything has to change so drastically, Lena,” Mandy said, dramatic face to match her faux-scandalized voice. In one hand she grabbed her glass of water off of the bar, and with the other she tugged on Lena’s arm. Lena rolled her eyes but went with her, looking smug as she started to undo the clasp of her clutch without much thought.

They rounded the side of the house, Mandy’s wedding dress hiked up her thighs as she toed about the path that led them to the front driveway, Lena tottering behind her on her heels. Lena unwrapped the plastic on a new case of Nat Shermans and felt suddenly overtaken by a nostalgic sense of deja vu.

“Shoot,” she said, opening the pack and handing one to Mandy. She looked up at one of the windows. “I left Kara in there.”

“Don’t worry. She knows how to find you,” Mandy said. It was the way she said it that had Lena eyeing her for a moment. “Lighter?” Lena let it go and produced her silver zippo with a roll of her eyes.

“Do you want me to smoke it for you, too?”

Mandy leant down, inhaling slowly to get the cigarette started, puffing blue smoke as she did so. Lena lit her own cigarette before snapping the lighter shut, letting that satisfying sound flit through the warm autumn air between them.

“Is that still the same zippo?”

“Mmhmm,” Lena hummed.

“Didn’t you throw it at Riley McGrath’s head spring term? At that house by BU? On Euston Street?”

Lena frowned. “You mean when she tried to fight me in the hallway at that party Andy Clements threw? Yes, and the corner’s never been the same since.”

She held the lighter up and sure enough, one corner was dented. Mandy laughed, bent from the force of it, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Oh yea, I remember. You were so little.”

Lena huffed, but didn’t deign to give Mandy a response. She listened to the distant music coming from the dancefloor behind the house—the DJ was spinning some party song from a top 40s list and the voices of a hundred drunk people screaming the lyrics rang through the night air. Laughter spilled out of one of the windows above them, something that might have sounded like Kara, but Lena wasn’t certain. Mandy looked up at the sound of it.

“So, you and Kara Danvers.”

There was no question, only statement. Fact. Mandy didn’t say anything further but the longer that silence stretched, the more obligated Lena felt to clarify.

“We’re friends,” she said.

Mandy hummed.

“She still looks the same. From when we were kids.” She ran a hand through her dark hair, her perfect curls from the ceremony had come undone. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and took another drag of her cigarette. “She’d never seen The Fox and the Hound until I told her it was my favorite.”

“She’s still got all those old mixtape CDs in her childhood bedroom,” Lena said. She watched Mandy tap on the filter, ashing her cigarette into the wind. A slow smile spread across Mandy’s lips as the information seemed to sink into her.

“I remember making those,” she said. Somewhere, one song blended into another. “Is she still innocent like that? Doesn’t expect people to mean more than what they just say or do?”

Lena thought about how her mind filled in the gap of her fantasy.

“Yea,” Lena admitted.

“Good. I’m glad. I was worried that… well it doesn’t really matter,” Mandy said, finishing lamely, trailing off as she inspected her cigarette.

“Kara never really said much about how well you both knew each other,” Lena ventured. There was an undercurrent to this conversation that she was trying to slog through the alcohol in her brain to get to the bottom of. There was something she was supposed to be seeing that she couldn’t quite make out.

Mandy glanced at her, never quite turning fully, but regarding Lena carefully, like she was also trying to figure out the final image of this puzzle that they’d both lost the box to. Were the pieces all there?

“Kara and I knew each other at very strange times in our lives. At least for me, anyway,” Mandy said. “I think she’s like that for a lot of people—there for them at their strangest times.”

Lena hummed in agreement. She was one of those people, after all.

“I didn’t really think she’d come. It’d been a long time since I’d seen her last but… you know, Marcus and I had one of those weirdly long engagement periods.”

Lena puffed on her cigarette and Mandy tapped her foot against the pavement idly. Mandy was nonchalant as she continued.

“He proposed right around… when Supergirl appeared in National City, actually.” She glanced at Lena with a lopsided smiled. “So I had time to build a guest list, you know? And I didn’t know if Kara Danvers, a reporter for CatCo, would have time for the strange little girl she knew in middle school. Not that Kara’s the type of person to forget about the little people, but you know what I mean. Don’t you?”

Lena leant back, her back against the front of the house. She blew smoke above her head, watched it waft away into the night, pale and slightly blue. It turned orange in the street light and then pulled apart like cotton candy until it faded from view. She felt warm from head to toe.

“But then I got her RSVP and I still didn’t know how to quite reach out or get back in touch so I just… never did and hoped I’d have time to see her today,” Mandy finished. She shrugged a shoulder and continued smoking her cigarette.

“You’d think after 8 personally curated mixtapes, a girl would get the hint about a crush,” Lena said.

Mandy snorted. “It wasn’t really a crush.” She tilted her head and looked at Lena, a strange, smallish smile on her lips. “It was like we were the only two people on the planet who didn’t demand answers from each other.”

“Does Marcus know you invited your childhood crush to your wedding?”

“Lena, you are so annoying,” Mandy said, laughing. She pushed her hair out of her face and rolled her neck and shoulders. “But anyway, you look good. And happy, too, which is saying a lot considering how miserable you always were.”

“I was a teenager,” Lena huffed.

“Sure,” Mandy replied. “But you know what I mean. It’s good to see you. And not on TV or in the newspaper. For what it’s worth, if I had to choose anybody I’d have liked to see you with, Kara Danvers is the number one choice.”

Lena didn’t know what to say to that, really. Smoke curled around their heads, reaching up toward the stars. A lot could change in a few years; Lena’s whole life seemed like definitive proof of that.

Mandy crushed her cigarette until it crumpled against the front of the house. She looked around vaguely before flicking the butt of into some direction with a slight shrug, something Lena remembered seeing many times in college.

“I’m gonna go find my husband and make out with him,” Mandy said. She waggled her eyebrows and Lena took a half-hearted swat at her, but missed. “Hey. Tell Supergirl she’s got fans on the East Coast, too, won’t you?”

Lena snorted and waved Mandy off. She watched Mandy retreat around the house, dress hiked up again as she stepped gingerly over the uneven ground. Half of Lena’s cigarette was left and she planned to enjoy the end of it. She brought the gold filter to her lips and listened to all the movement and noise coming from the house and dancefloor further onto the property. She couldn’t help the little quirk of her lips as she listened.

A laugh that was definitely Kara’s tumbled out of the house with a loud “oh!” to go with it.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

She took another drag, finding comfort in the taste of ash and tea leaves, a sporadic vice she’d let herself indulge in for the past ten years. The song changed to something more recognizable, one of those dance songs with the instructions in it that everyone across generations knew how to do. Lena tapped her foot to its rhythm.

There could be worse people to hypothetically marry in some fictionalized, parallel universe.

--

The lines to the bathrooms seemed exceptionally long. Kara found the first set of bathrooms on the first floor to be overflowing with people. The second floor was marginally better, but a line of people still curved around a hallway. She made a few friends who complimented her on her floral patterned button down and navy blazer. Drunk women complimenting each other while waiting in line for the bathroom was one of Kara’s favorite human interactions. Drunkenly waiting for the bathroom herself, she could see why they did it. It gave them something to do and was non-threatening.

It was also incredibly easy to find things to compliment a person on once uninhibited. The women in line with Kara had no shortage of things to compliment her on. They started with her attire and then excitedly proclaimed how absolutely darling the blue of her eyes were. When one woman laughed and reached out to pat Kara on the arm, she suddenly found herself fumbling her way through a made-up workout routine.

In ten minutes, Kara had seen one woman come out only to be replaced by another. There were 7 other guests in line. Sneakily, she tipped her glasses and looked up, finding a bathroom one more floor up that was completely empty. She untangled herself with what she was hoping was some amount of charm and made her way to the stairs. It was roped off. She frowned at it, debated getting back in line for a minute, then shrugged and hopped over the velvet rope.

The third floor looked like it was where the wedding party got ready that morning. There were clothes and bottles of makeup and hair product strewn about, hung off of chairs and tossed over ottomans. Hair dryers with brushes Kara would have no idea how to use stuck in the corners, still plugged into their respective outlets. She tiptoed past makeup applicators and mismatched sneakers to find the bathroom which proved to be just as much of a mess as the rest of the floor. There was blush on the mirrors.

“Kara!”

“Oh geez,” Kara wheezed, startled by Amanda when she swung open the door after washing her hands. “Amanda!”

Amanda wrapped her arms around Kara’s shoulders. She smelled like tobacco and ash and had a healthy blush on her cheeks to go along with her wide smile.

“You’re not allowed up here.”

Kara laughed, feeling her face heat up.

“I know, but the line was so long…”

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” Amanda said, smiling. “I was just downstairs with Lena.”

“I was worried she was waiting for me,” Kara said. She sniffed, scrunching her nose. “You know those are bad for you?”

“Yea, yea,” Amanda dismissed. “Hey, I’m really glad you came. I know it’s been a long time.”

Kara smiled and fumbled a bit with her glasses. She tucked a strand of hair away from her face.

“Of course! I was so excited when I got your invite—Eliza forwarded it to me because I live in National City, now.”

“I know! I mean, I didn’t—I didn’t know how to find your current address and I figured—well I hoped that Eliza still lived at that address you gave me years ago.”

Kara rubbed at spot on her neck, remembering how she spent an entire semester wondering how she should thank Amanda for sending her another mixtape while she was away at college. It seemed like an impossibly long time ago. Another, more simple life, perhaps.

Amanda stared at Kara for a moment, worrying her lip between her teeth. Kara’s powers felt out of whack. Not dangerously so, just dulled by inebriation, unfocused and uncalibrated. Wonky and loose, she supposed.

“Kara, can I… can I ask you something?”

Kara laughed, a little high, a little loud. “Sure!”

But Amanda didn’t ask anything right away. She seemed hesitant, almost ready to drop the whole thing as soon as she’d been given permission. She worried her hands, twisting her wedding ring against her finger. The movement reminded Kara of Lena and she wondered if Lena was waiting for her downstairs, maybe staring at her phone absently or not.

“Kara. I—does Lena know you’re Supergirl?”

The scene in front of Kara focused, as if her powers were activated by being called upon. Her vision tunneled and her hearing heightened to a level of precision she only associated with an intense adrenaline rush. She could hear a man’s wrist watch counting out seconds as she watched a bead of sweat roll down the side of Amanda’s face and watched the other woman’s eyelids flutter closed in slow motion. And then the moment sped up to live speed and Kara opened and closed her mouth a few times, imitating a fish.

“What? Haha. Supergirl?”

She grimaced. She’d never been good at improvising.

“It’s okay. I know. I knew you were her when you saved that plane.”

Kara fidgeted. She frowned, tried desperately to imagine where this was heading so she could cut it off and reroute the conversation into some different direction. She sagged her shoulders when she realized she really didn’t have it in her to lie to Amanda.

“Yes,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Yea. Lena knows.”

Amanda smiled gently. It made Kara feel small, somehow. Like she was 14, caught in the girl’s bathroom, hiding from an entire planet. As if by muscle memory, she could pick out the sound of water as it flowed through the pipes in the house, the voices of too loud, mildly aggressive people out on the perimeter.

“Lena is… Lena’s a good person. And I’m glad she knows,” Amanda said. She looked over her shoulder, down the stairs to the second floor, as if hoping to find the woman in question come bounding up the steps to meet them. Kara almost hoped for it too.  

“How?” Kara asked. Someone whispered a secret downstairs—it started a string of giggles.

“How’d I know?” Amanda looked around like she was trying to find the answer hidden in the mess somewhere. “I don’t know. But I did. Every time I saw that red cape… whether it was on the news or in a magazine—it was like there wasn’t anybody else it could be. Plus, you’re not exactly hiding.”

Kara touched the frames of her glasses.

“There are better disguises than a ponytail and some fake frames.”

“They’re not fake,” Kara huffed. It was besides the point.

“For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never told anybody my suspicions. It’d probably make me seem crazy anyway. Except not really—knowing you, knowing Kara Danvers, and then seeing what Supergirl does? What she believes in and acts upon? Seems pretty logical.”

Amanda shrugged like it was such a meaningless, innocuous comment to make. At face value, it probably was; but to Kara, it meant the world. It was the kind of validation she sometimes never really knew she needed—the kind of verbal confirmation she hated to want. It was the kind of thing only Alex ever really said to her, in their quiet moments or rough moments.

Kara thought about Lena. She was doing that a lot, today: thinking about Lena. But then again, maybe it was a normal amount and she was only conscious of the fact now.

“I had to ask, though. She didn’t give me a single clue that she knew what I was talking about when I was with her downstairs,” Amanda said. “Lena’s a lot of things. Complicated, as I’m sure you well know. But she’s a good friend. If you can get her to call you that.”

Kara smiled. That was something she could agree on without pretense.

“I’m pretty lucky.”

“I dunno. It might be Lena who’s the lucky one,” Amanda said.

“People might think that,” Kara answered. She frowned slightly, wondering how to word her thoughts properly. “It’s easy to assume, I guess. But I know I’m the lucky one.” She ended with a nod of her head, resolute in her declaration.

“I’m glad you guys found each other.”

Kara was glad, too. In the entire trajectory of her life, it seemed like an impossible thing that she would be friends with Lena Luthor. So many things could have gone wrong—it was a miracle that it went just right. Or went wrong in just the right ways. That seemed a more accurate statement. What if Clark took her in? What if Jeremiah hadn’t disappeared? What if Lena hadn’t been adopted? What if Alex had never been on that plane? What if she spent a year too little or too long in the Phantom Zone?

Despite the endless what-ifs, there was only what happened to be. And though what happened to be hadn’t always painted the brightest picture, Kara thought herself to be very lucky, all things considered.

--

Lena did end up on the dance floor. Or at least, when Mandy and Kara came down the steps, they somehow convinced her to do a round of shots and then practically dragged her bodily outside toward the dance floor.

She’d never been one for the crazy, kinetic energy that came from drunk people bouncing off one another and sing-shouting lyrics to songs they recognized and half-knew the lyrics to. Even (and perhaps especially ) in college, Lena was more for standing on the periphery, making sense of the chaos and understanding camaraderie secondhand. She participated, new the rules of a number of drinking games, but dancing wasn’t something that was typically in her repertoire.

Except there she was, struggling to catch her breath and bouncing up and down with Kara, with Mandy, with a bunch of strangers who bumped and jostled her, and they were all screaming the lyrics to One Direction into the night air. She had no idea that she even knew the lyrics to “What Makes You Beautiful”.

She found herself sinking into the feeling of inebriation, slipping past tipsy, and sliding home into drunk. It was this small pocket of loose freedom Lena rarely found herself in. Had it been 10 years ago, perhaps she would have found herself barreling past it, headlong into angry and hostile territory. She could feel her hair start to fall out of its bun but found it incredibly difficult to get herself to care.

The drunken scenes in front of her flashed through her consciousness like a movie montage. Clips of Kara with her arms above her head, hopping up and down played before jump cutting to lights spinning, Lena being twirled around by Kara as if she were light as a feather, and then smash cut to being properly introduced to Marcus, blushing when Mandy recalled some embarrassing story or another, and then taking a swat at her before she could finish. Lena was having fun, something so normal and ordinary that it seemed extraordinary.

“I take it back, cupcakes instead of wedding cakes are brilliant,” Lena said. She took the wrapper off of the lower portion of a red velvet cupcake.

Her heels were off, laying haphazardly by her chair, and her feet were propped up in Kara’s lap. Fast dance music still played in the background, its beat still thumping through her. The stars were out. Kara’s navy blazer hung off the back of her chair and she’d rolled up the sleeves of her button down—she’d redone her hair, pulling it up and then twisting it into a familiar style. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Why not both,” Kara answered with a shrug. She played with the bones in Lena’s ankle with restless fingertips. “Actually, just skip dinner entirely—serve only dessert.”

Lena laughed as she pulled the bottom off her cupcake cake and smashed it over its own icing. She took a bite of her cupcake sandwich happily.

“Sure, open bar and dessert only, I’m sure that’ll go over very well,” Lena said. She leaned forward, offering, and Kara met her halfway, more than delighted to take a bigger than normal bite that put frosting into the corners of her mouth.

Kara grinned, mouth full, icing on her lips. Lena thought she was beautiful.

“Alex would get a sugar rush and then need a nap,” Kara said. “An ideal scenario.”

“Who said your sister was invited to my wedding?”

Kara tsked. “You’re the one who said you imagined my friends at your wedding.”

“I thought you said they were my friends too!” Lena said, nudging Kara with her foot.  

“You’re right. But consider this!” Kara sat up straight, finger pointed toward the sky, ready to make a declaration. “You could just marry me and then they’d be invited anyway.”

“Well, that’s one solution.” Lena laughed, her head thrown back. “Another solution is I could just marry Alex.”

“Pfft, like you’d pick Alex over me,” Kara said. She latched back onto Lena’s foot, fingers flitting over her metatarsals and thumbs running along the contour of her instep.

“Someone’s awfully confident.”

“Of course I’m confident!” Kara said. She leaned the chair on its back legs and tilted her head smugly, smirking at Lena. Lena nudged just a little and Kara lost her balance, the chair tipping too far back. She flailed and Lena barked out a laugh before Kara gripped the table to stop from falling on her ass. Wood splintered under her hand.

“Oh my god,” Lena said, clapping a hand over her mouth and trying (though failing) not to laugh.

“Oh golly.”

Kara blushed. Her fingers had gone straight through the wooden table and her palm had crushed the edge. Every glass on the surface had been jolted, spilling water and wine across the linen.

“Kara!” Lena hissed, pointing down.

When Kara reached out to grip the table and stop herself from falling, she’d planted her feet to offset the momentum, but had misjudged the amount of strength needed (whether it was from being surprised or inebriated, Lena wasn’t sure). Her shoes pulverized the fake floor placed over the grass and the chair’s front legs had pierced the veneer.

“Come on,” Lena said. She abandoned the half eaten cupcake to get her shoes. She stood, laughing, and tugged on Kara’s hand with her own. “Grab your coat, hurry up, Kara!”

They sprinted away, one woman with her coat thrown over her shoulder, glasses askew, the other barefoot and breathless. They were both laughing and carefree. Lena remembered earlier that morning, her thoughts in her brother’s car, how she was the richest 26 year old on the planet, how everything she could have ever wanted was within her reach. She realized then, running barefoot through the grass, that she was wrong. This was everything she could have ever wanted.

Lena glanced over her shoulder, at Kara’s smiling face and red cheeks, the awkward way her glasses were situated on her face. Some part of her cataloged the way Kara laughed, filed away the way her skin felt against the night air as they rushed on. Like a cartographer, Lena mapped out this moment in its entirety, blinked and drew out all of its topography: from the way Kara’s hand was in hers, to the slight stumble as she ran forward while looking back, to the music still playing in the background. A scene from a parallel universe, here just for her.

They ended up back toward the dance floor, Lena stopping just short, wanting to put her heels back on. Kara’s body came crashing into hers but Lena felt strong arms wrap around her before she was being engulfed in laughter and Kara, who twisted their bodies to exchange momentum, before coming to a breathless stop, holding one another by accident.  

“Hey,” Kara breathed. Her face was close. Lena could see the flecks of gold in the blue of her eyes.

“Hi,” she responded. “Your glasses are crooked.”

“Oh!” Kara backed away to adjust her glasses and Lena bent to put her heels back on. When she stood, Kara draped her blazer over Lena’s shoulders. “Mind holding this for me?”

“Do I look like a coat rack?”

Kara hummed in lieu of an answer, smiling like she was so proud of herself. Her jacket was warm around Lena’s shoulders. It smelled like Kara, like it had been left out in the sunshine. Lena pulled it close.

The DJ turned the music down to announce that now was the time for the bouquet toss. Kara grinned at Lena who only rolled her eyes.

“You want to go catch it, don’t you?”

“Not if you don’t,” Kara said. She pouted and scuffed her shoe across the dance floor. “I mean, technically I’ve caught a bouquet twice.” She looked up, smiling. “I’m happy to stand out here with you if you’d rather not.”

“Oh, come on,” Lena said. They moved across the dance floor, through the almost familiar scene of people lining up, women getting ready to jump and catch and (perhaps) fight for a bunch of flowers. Lena weaved them both from the back of the dance floor to the middle, unwilling to elbow her way past a serious line of women who seemed as if this were the last, true obstacle to complete before their own weddings.

“This is a good spot,” Kara said, whispering.

“No cheating this time like you did at Joanne and Caitlyn’s wedding,” Lena said. She felt more than heard Kara scoff at the statement. Lena caught some vague mumbling about how she didn’t cheat that much.

Two women in front of her started playfully arguing and rough housing. Lena grimaced and took a step back, bumping into Kara’s chest. Hands found their way to her hips, steadying her as the two women were separated by other guests.

“I got you,” Kara said.

Lena watched Mandy take to the DJ stage. She was saying something, something about the wedding and about the guests and how she was happy. Lena didn’t quite catch it all. She looked at the wedding bouquet held loosely in Mandy’s palm and tried to imagine what it would be like to hold something like that and walk down an aisle. Would there be music? Would there be a live quintet? Maybe a quartet. How would she hold it? High? Low? Lena always felt like she had no idea what to do with her arms. Maybe she didn’t need the bouquet—but then what would she do with her hands?

Kara pushed forward, pressing against Lena’s back as guests clamored for a closer spot. The hands on her hips moved to Lena’s shoulders where they squeezed gently. Unbidden, Lena thought about it, the fantasy that made her only slightly ashamed, that didn’t feel so strange and foreign as she would have liked to think. She imagined Kara in a navy suit and brown shoes and then she imagined Kara in a white dress with her hair clipped to one side.

Lena imagined an impossible world where her life was just attending weddings and bridal showers, where she still worked in Research and Development, where she finished her PhD and sometimes had time to herself on the weekends. She imagined an impossible world where Kara Danvers was still Kara Zor-El, where Lex hadn’t gone mad with money and power and misplaced righteousness and vendetta. She imagined an impossible world where Clark Kent and Kara Danvers came to ask her about the fact that she hadn’t blown herself up in a Luthor Corp lab accident and instead made a breakthrough in renewable energy.

She imagined it all different.

And then she imagined it all the same.

Her fantasy of all the things that could have gone right in her life was not hers. It didn’t belong to her because it would never come to be. But for a moment, she imagined a future that could still yet be made.

And she wanted it. She craved it almost so desperately that she felt consumed by the thought of someday marrying Kara in a small-ish venue with rooftop access at the beginning of autumn in a pastel dress. The thought of it pierced into her core with the force of a revelation, washing over her like a solution to a problem she’d been fixated on for far too long. It was the relief of having found the answer to a question that nagged at the back of her brain.

An answer to a question she never thought to ask.

The want was so dire it was all she could think of as Mandy seemed to meet her eyes before turning with a grin and what might have been a wink. She faked the crowd out, causing a bunch of women in front of Lena to jump preemptively, and then tossed the bouquet perfectly. It arched high, then came down, and with all the athleticism a drunk Lena could muster (and even sober she would admit it was not very much), she jumped, caught it, and managed to land without rolling her ankle.

“You caught it!” Kara shouted over the crowd cheering. Her voice was honey in Lena’s ear, close and warm, and Lena couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled out of her mouth. Kara hugged her and Lena felt her feet lift of the ground, and the whole world spun. Vaguely, she was aware that women around them were congratulating them both, as if Kara had helped her catch it, too.

They could think what they liked.

Mandy waved from the stage, a peculiar kind of smile on her face. Lena grinned and held the bouquet aloft while Kara laughed, nudging her forehead against Lena’s.

The thing about the future was that it still had yet to occur.

--

“Are you sure you don’t need your jacket back?”

“No, it’s okay. I run pretty hot.”

Kara felt Lena chuckle against her. It was late. The party had wound down significantly and most of the attendees had hopped into called cars or their pre-arranged hotel shuttles. A few designated drivers milled about, trying to stifle yawns behind hands as their friends attempted to gather their wits for their departure.

The DJ played something soft, winding down the evening as best he could, trying to segue everyone into finally seeing themselves out. There was guitar in there, somewhere, and maybe lyrics, too, but Kara wasn’t really paying attention. Lena’s feet were on hers ( I’m terrible at dancing, Kara ) and she was trying to concentrate on swaying with the right amount of indifference while still remaining vaguely within the confines of tempo.

Lena was pressed into her, drunk and tired, loose in a way that showed her age, like when they walked to the venue in the sun and Lena had her hands behind her back. Kara, too, felt loose and drunk. Exhaustion was folded in there, somewhere, but it was a good kind of tired.

She moved them across the dance floor in a lazy pattern, no real rhyme or reason for their path. Every once in a while, Lena would squeeze Kara’s hand or tighten her grip around Kara’s waist, like she was checking to make sure Kara was still there. Kara could hear Lena’s heartbeat, smooth and steady. It was the one thing that cut through the hazy feeling of being inebriated.

“I had fun today,” Lena said. It was a whisper against Kara’s cheek.

“Me too,” she replied. “Small world.”

“Small universe.”

Kara hummed in agreement, thinking about the little miracles of timing that had put her here.

“Take me home?” Lena asked. The hand in Kara’s palm squeezed.

“Sure,” Kara said. She pulled away, grinning. “I’ll give you a lift back to my place.” She turned, back to Lena, and bent slightly. “Hop on.”

Lena laughed but she did as requested, climbing carefully onto Kara’s bent back and looping her arms over Kara’s shoulders. Kara stood easily, hands gripped to the skin of Lena’s thighs, her dress hiked to accommodate. Kara felt the push of air blow past her ear as Lena sighed.

They left the property relatively unnoticed by those who remained. They stopped by their table so Lena could pick up her clutch and the bouquet before Amanda and Marcus waved them off, too drunk and in love to leave their spots for a proper goodbye, but they both caught Amanda’s wink before Kara walked them off street-side.

The night air was cool and the streets were quiet. Kara could practically feel Lena’s heartbeat through her chest, pressed against her back. Street lamps threw cascades of orange down the avenue, illuminating their path in measured spotlights. Kara floated a few inches off the ground, hovered just over the pavement, lest some unexpected car turned the corner.

“I thought you said you don’t like to drink and fly.”

“I’d say we’re less flying and more hovering,” Kara said. She felt Lena shift, probably craning her neck over Kara’s shoulder to see for herself. Lena’s arms wrapped tight around Kara’s shoulders and Kara felt the soft press of Lena’s lips to the side of her head. The bouquet Lena had caught dangled in front of her, bumping softly against her chest or shoulder intermittently.

“Thanks for the ride,” she murmured.

“Always using my powers for good,” Kara said. She felt Lena huff a laugh.

They glided on home in the quiet of the night, like they were the only two souls on the planet alive and awake.

“Hey Kara?” Lena’s voice was small and soft, as if speaking too loudly would break their bubble and let the outside world come crashing in.  

Kara hummed. She heard Lena inhale, try to speak once, then twice. She could hear the soft press of Lena’s lips, the wet sound she made when her mouth opened, and then nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Kara asked.

Lena’s answer didn’t come immediately, but she got to it, eventually.

“Nothing’s wrong, actually. Everything’s—I wanted to tell you that. But I couldn’t figure out how to say it. Everything’s fine and I’m just really happy.”

“I’m happy, too,” Kara said. She smiled even though she knew Lena couldn’t see it. “You being happy makes me happy.”

The little puff of air that escaped Lena’s mouth could’ve been a scoff. Kara wasn’t quite sure. She was sure of the way Lena shifted, the way she pressed against Kara as if trying to find home in the way their bodies slotted against one another. She was sure of the way Lena held on tightly, something heavier than just a hug, than just holding on. She was sure of the way Lena pressed her forehead to the side of Kara’s face.

Kara was never quite sure of much—a fact that she was often reluctant to admit. There were things she knew for certain, things she’d never forgotten like advanced mathematics that were still theoretical according to Earth’s standards. She knew for certain that the yellow sun gifted her the strength she used to help other people (and she knew for certain that she could tear the planet in half if she ever wanted, too). She knew for certain that Alex would always be there for her and that Eliza loved her. That Clark was sorry, even though he’d never said it. That her parents were more complicated people than her 13 year-old self imagined them to be.

But there were things she was never quite sure of. She was never quite sure of how hard she should throw a wad of paper to make it into a trash bin (she could catch a rotating helicopter from falling out of the sky, but somehow the crumpled ball of paper was always her demise). Or how old a human under four feet tall was exactly. Or whether or not love was something that could be measured. Or if people meant more than what they said or what they did.

Or if she ever meant more than what she said or what she did.

Sometimes, she felt a certain way and did certain things, and if anybody had ever thought to ask, she would say that she had no idea why she felt that way or did those things. Alex said that was very human of her. But it was one of those things that made her feel alien. Like there was an instruction manual to this planet that she hadn’t gotten when she landed. Alex said that was very human of her, too.

When Kara was with Lena she knew that there were things she would never be quite certain of. And that was okay. It was the kind of uncertainty that helped her believe that anything was possible. That everything was possible. That it was possible to mean more than what she said or what she did without really knowing why or how.

“What’s with the car?” Kara asked as she hovered them down the street, Eliza’s home coming into view around the corner, and Lena’s black car glinting in the driveway.

“It was my brother’s,” Lena answered. “He never let me drive it and Lillian hated it because he bought it with his money. The first salary he ever collected for himself, he bought that with.”

“And he gave it to you?”

“Not exactly,” Lena said. She laughed, like there was a punchline to this joke she was telling. “The entire Luthor Estate is mine. That and everything on it. The car was on it.”

“You went back home?”

“No,” Lena said. She sighed. “I haven’t set foot in that house in years. The garage, though, is adjacent to the house. So technically, yes, I was on the property of what I once called home. But really, I haven’t been back.”

“What’s it like?”

Lena hummed, thinking. “Old. And imposing. There’s a library and too many bedrooms. Sort of everything you could imagine for the Luthors.”

“Anything surprising?”

“A garden that I loved. And a swimming pool Lillian would sunbathe by. How ‘bout you? What was home like?”

“Old. And imposing.” Kara laughed. “Krypton built upward instead of outward. Or maybe that’s just what I remember. My family was very old and well-respected. My father had a lab that took up one floor and my mother had an office that took up another.”

“Your father was an engineer?”

“I don’t know,” Kara said. “I used to think he was just a scientist. But I think maybe he was also an engineer.”

“And your mother?”

“She was a judicator. A judge, I guess. But also like a lawyer and a judge in one.”

They drifted up the driveway. There was another car parked on the street.

“That’s weird. Alex is here,” Kara said, picking up Alex’s voice from inside the house, talking to Eliza. She set Lena back onto solid ground.

“Is it strange to say that I don’t want the day to end?” Lena asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kara said. She shrugged a shoulder. Lena looked small in her blazer, the skirt of her dress wrinkled from being carried. “I feel the same way. Something feels… different about today.”

“In a good way?” Lena asked, hopeful. Kara looked at her with a smile playing at her lips.

“Yea, definitely in a good way.”

They stewed in their moment of calm, unmoving, neither one making their way to the front door. A lamp flickered down the street. Kara could hear the ocean churning rocks in the bay. A car drove down the highway. Eliza said something to Alex inside, but Kara couldn’t quite make it out. She looked at Lena—Lena who always worried her lip between her teeth, whose hair fell out of her bun in soft, thick curls, who developed a blush on her neck when she drank a sufficient amount of alcohol. Everything she could ever want was in this moment. Lena in front of her, Alex and Eliza safe on the other side of the front door.

She reached out and let her hand come to rest on Lena’s shoulder. She had a fierce desire to pull Lena into a hug, suddenly, but she let it pass. Kara was more concerned with the color of Lena’s eyes. Were they grey? Or were they green? Maybe they were neither. Maybe they’ve been gold this whole time. Kara’s hand moved of its own will, sliding up Lena’s neck to cup her cheek. Lena tilted, leaned into the touch, her eyes fluttering shut.

Kara swallowed. Her mouth felt dry.

“We should go inside.”

“We should,” Lena agreed.

“Alex is gonna tease me for being out so late.”

“Is she?”

“Yea,” Kara said, a whisper.

The front door swung open suddenly and Kara dropped her hand.

“I thought I heard you kids out here,” Alex said. She was smiling, wearing a comfortable sweater and a pair of jeans. Her eyes darted between Kara and Lena, seemed to linger on Lena for a moment before snapping back to Kara. “Surprise! I came to visit mom. Also, to make Lena sign some paperwork finally.”

Kara rolled her eyes.

“Seriously?” Lena asked.

“Dead serious,” Alex replied. She lolled her head against one shoulder and looked at Lena as if it inconvenienced her, too. “It’s the government, you know?”

Lena snorted, pushing past Alex and into the house, Kara quick to follow.

“Can’t we go back to me making coy comments about how Kara gets around downtown National City without owning a car?”

“I’m ‘fraid not, Luthor,” Alex said, shutting the door behind them. “By the way, you kids are out late.”

“Pfft, told you,” Kara said. “It was a wedding, Alex. Of course we’re gonna stay out late.”

“Yea yea, you smell like that alien booze, too.” Alex slid between her sister and Lena, sniffing as she went past, then turned to Lena. “Want a beer?”

“Sure,” Lena answered, shrugging. She waved to Eliza on the couch.

“Oh, by the way, I kicked you out of the guest room,” Alex said. She opened the fridge, leaned back to inspect their selection, then bent forward to swipe something off a shelf for Lena. “Sorry, but I’m older than you so you get the twin bed that’s next to Kara’s upstairs.”

Lena took the bottle of beer by its neck and rolled her eyes.

They talked for a few minutes and Lena sipped at her beer while Kara recounted bits of the evening, excitedly explaining how Lena actually knew Amanda from college and how Lena had perfectly caught the bouquet. Eliza seemed delighted to hear about the minute details of the venue, asking about the colors of the flowers and the style of the bridesmaids’ dresses. Kara matched her enthusiasm easily, gushing about details Lena had no idea that she’d noticed. But eventually, Kara complained about being tired and—ignoring whatever looks Alex was giving her aside—she tugged Lena up the stairs.

Something alighted in Kara when Lena went willingly. It grounded her as Lena bid Eliza and Alex good night, when Eliza reached out to touch Lena’s arm and explain how nice it was to have them in her home. Kara thought about that something as she undressed at human speed while Lena went through her nightly routine in the bathroom. She tugged a worn, loose tee over her head and sat at the edge of her bed in a pair of dated basketball shorts that might have belonged to Alex. She listened to the water run through the pipes in the house as Lena washed her face and to the quiet whisper of Alex and Eliza as they spoke to one another, jovial tones lilting to Kara’s ears.

She got up to put one of Amanda’s old mix tapes into her CD player, yanked open the drawer where Eliza had put back her contraband, and almost as an afterthought, nudged her bed toward Alex’s, making a shoddy king sized monstrosity shoved to one end of the room. She took a drink out of the bottle before plopping down across both mattresses onto her back.

The door creaked and Kara listened to Lena’s bare feet shuffle across the hardwood over the music playing softly from her desk.

“ So I thought I’d let you know/ that these things take forever/ I especially am slow.”

The bed dipped. Lena’s face, haloed by the overhead light, came into Kara’s line of sight.

“Hey,” Lena said. Her hair was down, one side tucked behind her ear.

“Hi.”

Lena smiled, lowering herself to lay down next to Kara while sipping what was left of her beer. She propped her chin onto her elbow and Kara shifted, tilting her body so that she could look at Lena without craning her neck. Kara could feel Lena thinking, could see the miniscule ways that her eyes darted over Kara’s face.

“You’re not wearing your glasses,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

Kara wanted to keep this moment forever. But it passed. Lena got up to look around for the glasses in question, leaving her beer bottle on the desk, by the CD player and strewn about mixtapes Amanda Klein gifted to a new alien refugee on a planet whose inhabitants called it Earth. Lena went back to the bed with the frames on her face, imitating a clumsy reporter and Kara could do nothing but laugh and be happy that this where she had ended up after everything and anything.

Kara thought that the implausibility of her life collided with the improbability of Lena’s one day in an office building, before Kara was even a reporter. But she was beginning to see that maybe that wasn’t the start at all. That maybe the collision happened before that. That maybe they were set on a path to collide before they had any say in the matter.

They were a miracle born from chaos, like turning air into gold.

--

Light slanted through the windows, falling on Lena’s face, sun beating against her eyelids. She shifted in her half-conscious state, vaguely aware that she was not in her room and not in her bed before her brain caught up with the daylight and reminded her of where, exactly, she was. Everything was still.

The breadth of a morning where the sun was out but its people had yet to rise.

Blinking, she lifted her head a few inches. She’d fallen asleep on Kara’s chest. Supergirl slept with her mouth open, flaxen hair a tangled, thick mess on the pillow she was using—she moved slightly, pulling Lena closer to her. Lena sighed and laid her ear against Kara’s chest, listening.

For the first time in a long time, Lena went back to bed. The future could be written in a couple more hours, after all.