Work Text:
Here are the things that make Lena angry:
A morning cup of coffee that is short of perfect.
Men who insist on carrying her things despite her not needing their help.
Her abilities being put into question.
She could go on and on, but that is not what this list is supposed to be. She was told that she’s too combative, too negative, a pessimist not by nature but as a survival mechanism.
The therapist had laid it in such a way that Lena felt stupid for not seeing it herself. She was torn from a home filled with laughter and hugs and dropped at the Luthor mansion, where whenever she expected a proud smile she was told that she could do better, where she always fell just short of perfection. She had to adapt, quickly, because losing her mother and continuing to be a disappointment to her new one was too much to bear.
So, Lena’s changing that. There is no reason to keep her walls up when surrounded by people who love her so much.
Here are the things that make Lena happy:
1
The darkness.
There are very few other instances that offer the same euphoria as closing all the lights after a long day and succumbing to sleep in the pitch blackness of her room. I fucking love sleep, she finds herself muttering out loud as she burrows into the comfort of her expensive sheets.
Kara is the opposite. Kara associates darkness with words like trapped and lonely. It’s the first roadblock in their blissful relationship, the point of the first compromise , and Lena is willing to do it. She is. Except that slither of fluorescent light sneaking through the gap under the door keeps her awake, and the curtains that Kara likes to keep wide open so she can feel the sun rise on her face steal the last precious moments of Lena’s sleep in the morning.
Maybe she resents the end of their honeymoon phase. Maybe she’s afraid of how ordinary Kara is revealing herself to be now that she’s stripping her layers one by one, afraid that the magic is wearing off along with the mystery. She certainly won't ever convey it.
Watching Kara stir dispels any of those fears. She stretches and murmurs, tilting her cheek towards the sunlight, and Lena smiles as her mind akins her girlfriend to a kitten. The way Kara reaches for her so that Lena is the first thing she sees when she wakes up is like being handed the Nobel Prize for peace.
Lena is a genius. She can figure out a way around the light situation.
. . .
Lena used to get really, really sad when she was away from Kara, that’s the thing. It started early on, when they were only friends. She’d leave Kara’s apartment and on the drive home, as she was taking the same left turn out onto the main road, she’d feel this harrowing pang of loss. She kept it to herself for the longest time, and when she finally expressed it Kara had jumped at the chance to admit that she felt the same. They both found it weird, strange, and didn’t quite make the connection until years later. The solution, they had decided, was frequent sleepovers; every wednesday, a nice little taste in the middle of the week to keep their spirits high.
They were idiots. Lena chuckles at their cluelessness now, but it had felt so… consuming, then, like the not knowing, not expressing even to themselves the depth of their devotion to each other, only made it all the more unmanageable.
Now, Lena’s heart yearns to get back home to Kara, but it is not a desperate, thrashing pull, nor a relentless, nagging fear that she will not be there when she arrives. She puts her keys down in the green plate Kara had molded in a pottery class, hangs her coat on the rack, sets her purse down on the kitchen counter. She presses an upside down kiss to Kara’s lips and caresses her cheek. “Missed you today.”
“Miss you always,” Kara murmurs, eyes the bluest without the obstruction of her glasses. Lena thumbs her chin, the bridge of her nose, the crinkle between her brows where all her stresses pile up. Kara’s sigh is warm on her wrist.
Lena knows just the thing.
. . .
Sex is only an extension of what they had before. When the intimacy and love is already there, Lena finds, it is almost as easy as breathing, a bridge that has been waiting patiently and solidly to be crossed.
Kara’s voice is gravelly and sex-drenched, muscles already loosened by an orgasm. She’s tugging on Lena’s hips, trying to get her up and on her face, but Lena has other plans. She unlatches Kara’s grip, leaning over her for the blindfold in the nightstand.
“I thought we could try something new.”
“What?” Kara asks eagerly, still panting. She frowns at the blindfold. “But… I want to see you.”
Lena’s heart twists. She bends to kiss Kara again, filthy and reassuring. “It’s for me.”
“Put it on,” Kara says, and Lena fumbles her way to Kara’s pleasure, little shared giggles whenever she misses her mark, and then Kara finally gets her mouth on her, keeps going until Lena’s toes are too weak to curl and she’s sated.
She falls asleep with the blindfold still on, in a nice pocket of darkness. It doesn’t become a staple in their sex life, but it is fun whenever Kara is tickled by the urge.
2
Lena likes to be crushed.
It’s something that goes along with the darkness, she supposes. Sometimes she thinks she enjoys having the whole weight of the world on her shoulders a little too much, taking an almost perverted, masochistic pleasure from it. Their therapist would have a lot to say about that, she's sure, but with Kara it feels more natural. Kara is warm and big and strong and handsy, her grip unrelentless as they cuddle in their sleep, her weight comforting and the soft snores at her ear safe.
“I’m gonna crush you,” her girlfriend mutters, slightly resisting Lena’s grip.
“It’s relaxing,” Lena insists, and sighs when Kara puts all her weight on her. She can hardly breathe, but it’s nice. Really nice.
“You’re weird.”
Lena slips her hand under Kara’s shirt. They have just showered and changed into soft pajamas, and she’s never been so content.
“You like it.”
“I more than like it,” Kara counters, squirming when Lena’s fingers ghost over her lower back.
“What’s more than like?”
“You’re a scientist, you should know.”
“You’re a journalist, you should know.”
“I suppose…” Kara huffs, warm over Lena’s skin. “I suppose it could be love. You really like this? I’m not too heavy?”
Lena allows the change of subject, a pleased little flutter in her chest the only proof that the word had been spoken. “I like the pressure,” she explains.
“Is it a sexual thing or a comfort thing?”
“Can be both.”
“Yeah?”
Lena snaps the elastic of Kara’s pants. “Later. Sleepy.”
“Sorry.”
Kara settles on her, crushing, and Lena hums contently as she drifts away.
3
Lena is into positive reinforcement. It’s true, no matter how much she hates that about herself. She enjoys being praised, having her efforts appreciated. She likes it all the more when she doesn’t have to work for it.
Kara will praise her for the littlest things.
“You’re doing so good,” she’ll say, nuzzling the nape of Lena’s neck while she works on a prototype in the tower. She’ll moan obscenely when eating something Lena cooked. “You’re so pretty,” she’ll say, suddenly, randomly. It lights Lena up from the inside. It makes her feel soft but also powerful, like she could heal the world with Kara’s help.
Kara knows all of her now, and Lena never saw the value in that before. All her life she had strived not to be known. To keep her weaknesses to herself, to hide the things she enjoyed so that they won’t be taken away.
Kara wakes her up with her favorite breakfast. She builds a shelf for Lena’s books and puts a lock on the drawer Lena keeps her jewelry in when she sleeps over. She can detect Lena’s mood with a simple text message, and she’ll be there with a comforting hug and kisses on her ears and face in a millisecond.
She’ll stuff Lena full and press her down into the mattress, in a nice pocket of darkness. Her mouth never stops moving, kissing and praising and moaning, and right there, in that tiny room, in that bed, is everything that makes Lena happy.
She’ll have to think of more. She has to learn to appreciate the little things. Happiness is in those, she has learned. It’s not in your achievements, or your legacy, or proving people wrong. None of those had come up as she wrote the list.
She knows that now.
. . .
. . .
Here is a list of things that make Kara happy:
The way Lena jumps into her arms when they hug, fully relying on Kara to hold her up.
Hearing her sister laugh from another room, loud and uninhibited.
Writing her name on a byline.
But that’s not why she’s writing this list. She’s supposed to write the things that make her sad. She fails to see the sense in that. Why dwell on the negative when you could look at the positive?
That’s precisely her problem, according to their therapist. Dr. Davis says that extremes never bode well. You should be happy when you’re happy, and sad when you’re sad, and suppress neither. Lena seems excited, is off biting her lip and writing her own list. Kara supposes she could give it a go.
So, here is a list of things that don’t make Kara happy:
1
Littering.
2
Pollution.
3
Death.
. . .
Their therapist is a nice old lady recommended to them by Kelly.
She’s not old, Kara supposes. She’s fairly young, but wrinkled with stress. Kara wonders how she’s supposed to solve their problems when she seems to have so many herself.
That’s the thing, though. They don’t really have any problems. This is more of a preemptive measure. Lena wants to be here, has adopted a pro-therapy stance by osmosis from Alex and Kelly, so Kara is here too. They didn’t have therapists on Krypton. You sort of just kept things to yourself and put more into society to take your mind off it. It seemed to her like the kind of thing humans needed that she didn’t.
The therapist, Dr. Davis, has them read each other’s lists. Lena hands over two pages filled with words, front and back, and Kara holds out her pink, crumpled sticky note sheepishly.
Lena really took this seriously. Kara’s eyes are lined with tears by the end of it. She is a part of every number on Lena’s list, not because she is what makes Lena happy but because she is doing each of the things that make her happy. It’s all Kara strives for. Seeing herself from Lena’s eyes is something she’ll never forget.
She’s aware, as she flips from page to page, that Lena has nothing to do but sit there and wait. She tries to read it quickly, and sighs shakily when she’s done, shuffling over to hug her girlfriend.
Dr. Davis clears her throat, prompting them to part. “Kara, your list is awfully short.”
“Yeah,” Kara says wetly. “Not many things make me sad, I guess.”
“You lost your whole planet. Doesn’t that make you sad?”
Kara forgets sometimes that her identity is not something secret or sacred anymore.
“It did, but that was a while ago. Now I have Argo city, and my mom and dad were alive all along.”
Dr. Davis hums thoughtfully, fixing Kara with her know-it-all stare. “Just because you found out they’re alive, it doesn’t negate the feelings you had before.”
“Sure it does.”
The room is quiet. Dr. Davis looks concerned by default, but she aims an extra-concerned look Kara’s way. Lena reaches for her hand and squeezes, her eyes soft and wide.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Kara asks, shaking her hand off. “I’m fine.”
Lena’s face falls, and Kara immediately reaches for her again and apologizes. Dr. Davis watches with keen eyes as Kara pulls Lena to her side and kisses her temple. “You seem defensive,” she says.
“I guess I’m just confused. I don’t know what you want from me.” Kara directs her next question at Lena. “You want me to be sad?”
Lena cups her cheek. “I want you to be happy.”
“Okay then,” Kara says, and they move on.
. . .
Kara asks to keep Lena’s list. She can’t stop reading it. She practically has it memorized, and at any free moment, she’ll recite the words to herself, rhythmically, like the words have their own tune, like Lena had written poetry and not something akin to a grocery list.
Kara could write a list of things that make her happy. She could include Lena, make her as happy as she had made Kara. Why were they given different assignments? Who sits down and writes a list of things that makes them sad?
Kara frowns, pushing her laptop away and grabbing a paper and a pen.
Let’s try again.
Here is a list of things that make Kara sad:
1
Her planet dying.
That’s what Dr. Davis and Lena want her to write, isn’t it?
So there.
Imagine the Earth exploding right in front of your eyes. Imagine loneliness your only company as you drift away into the large void of space, a living breathing thing sitting in the pod right next to you, crowding you in, stealing the limited air for itself. Imagine finding out that that Earth, all the places you’d dreamed of visiting, all the people and animals and landmarks that populated it, all that vastness was gone, and only a tiny piece of its rock remained, broken and fractured.
Imagine going back to what was left of your home only to find that you don’t fit in there anymore, that you are an alien not only to what was left of your friends, but to your mother as well. That the city where you grew up is not a puzzle with you as the missing piece but a complete work of art with you as the trespassing finger wanting to touch, because looking is not enough, it will never be enough.
So there. Kara said it, she wrote it down plain and clear. Her planet dying makes her sad, the reminders of it paralyze her, and she hates darkness because of it- all forms of it.
She hates it in the literal sense. She spent so much time in darkness, and simultaneously, no time at all. She has no desire for it.
She hates it in the metaphoric sense too: stories not getting the attention they deserve, the evil in the world, her own little pocket of darkness, the one she carefully tucks away every morning, the darkness she drove Lena to.
There are many things that make her sad, it seems. There’s no good in bringing any of it to the surface.
. . .
Kara drags her cape home. She is solid and strong, and lets herself be that against the wind, flies slowly, leisurely, home.
It’s only 9, but Lena’s in bed already, reading one of her giant books under the lamp light. Kara floats over for her kiss, replacing the book so she can be held and petted.
“Did you eat?” Lena asks, unclipping Kara’s cape and tossing it aside.
“That depends. Did you cook?”
“I made that chicken you liked so much the last time.”
“ Rao , you’re amazing,” Kara says, and then she’s crying, inexplicably, the sort of cry that doesn't so much start as it is just suddenly happening, tearing you apart from the inside out. Kara hasn’t said Rao’s name like that, like she believes it, in years, because she doesn’t, hasn’t since her world was taken from her by the very same entity she’s supposed to believe in.
“What’s wrong?”
Kara struggles to answer. Nothing, she wants to say, nothing’s wrong . But she would be lying.
Something is very, very wrong with her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t write the list,” she says.
“That’s why you’re crying? It’s okay, Kara. Don’t ever do something you don’t want to do, not for me.”
Kara traces Lena’s collarbone, letting out a shaky breath that she hopes marks the end of her abrupt crying. “I don’t like being sad. I don’t like wallowing in it.”
“That’s the point, darling.” Lena cups her head, dragging her nails over her scalp soothingly. “It’s okay to be sad, and it’s okay to put it aside to be dealt with. You need to learn not to sit in it, but also not to shut it out. You know what I mean?”
“I guess.” Kara’s nose curls. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
Lena chuckles, ribcage moving with it, like Kara’s on a rollercoaster. “Yeah. That’s what we’re both supposed to be doing.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Sometimes you really don’t listen,” Lena says, but it’s teasing, and Kara smiles, hiding in the face of so much fondness.
2
She’s never been particularly close to her mother. It seemed to her, from a very young age, that she should’ve been Astra’s daughter instead, and she was ambushed with an insanely powerful wave of guilt whenever she thought it. After discovering her mother’s betrayal, she didn’t feel guilty for thinking it anymore. In fact, she had relished in thinking it, was vindicated by it.
Then she saw her mother again, alive and breathing and beautiful, and it all washed away. Only the guilt remained. She felt so guilty she could barely stand to look at her.
She still can’t look at her.
. . .
“You don’t have to come with me. It’s not like you liked each other,” Lena says, as she does every Saturday, when they bundle up against the cold and visit Lillian’s grave. Kara’s not sure why, but she can guess. Lena never experienced her mother’s love first hand, and all she has as a reminder that her mother cared for her is this one little story. Kara will keep telling it.
“She helped me save you,” she says, helping Lena into her coat.
“Was she scared?”.
“She was as scared as Lillian could get. She looked me in the eyes and begged for my help. She said she loved you.”
Lena’s quiet on the ride over. They walk into the cemetery hand in hand, and separate along the way. Kara sits on the closest bench, lets Lena have a moment with her mother alone.
“She would think it’s ridiculous, If she knew I were visiting her,” Lena says after a while. “She didn’t believe in this sort of stuff. I asked her once, if she had parents and why she didn’t visit them. She said they were dead and there was no point in visiting a dead person.”
Kara suppresses an aggrieved sigh, walking up to stand beside Lena. She stares down at Lillian’s headstone. Lillian had wanted something more elaborate, but Lena decided that her grave didn’t need to be any different from the ones around it.
Lena slips her arms under Kara’s coat and cuddles in. “Do you think your mom would like me?”
“I think she’d pretend to like anyone I introduced her to, just to please me.”
“Okay,” Lena says slowly, dragging the word out. Kara holds her arms before she can pull away, and they end up facing each other with this weird amount of distance between them, close but far away.
“I don’t really know her. Like, at all.” Kara looks away. Her eyes burn. “I don’t want to make this about me.”
“You’re not. I’m asking you.”
Lena is cuddled in again, her nose soft on Kara’s stiff jaw, nuzzling until it loosens and Kara speaks again.
“For the longest time all I knew was that she used me to get Astra, and I hated her. Then I got her back and I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I didn’t know her, so I didn’t let her get to know me.”
Lena pecks Kara’s jaw and walks back to Lillian’s grave. She touches the headstone with two of her fingers, the way she says goodbye, and smiles at Kara over her shoulder.
“I don’t want this for you.”
It puts a lump in Kara’s throat, the idea of it. If Lena got her mother back, what are all the things she would say?
There are so many things Kara should be saying.
“Maybe we can invite her someday. See if she likes you.”
Lena takes Kara’s hand, playfully bumping shoulders. They begin their walk back home. “I think I’d like that.”
3
Kara is half asleep and dreamy. The rhythm of Lena’s typing sounds like a lullaby. Whenever she’s sure Lena is not looking, she’ll watch her work through bleary eyes, and every now and then Lena will check in on her, so Kara will quickly look away and offer her cheek to be stroked.
She traps Lena’s palm one of those times, holding it to her face. It’s only ever warm at night, after Lena has had her cup of tea. “Can I have your hand?” she asks, nuzzling into it. “I want it. Mine.”
“I kinda need it,” Lena says. Kara pouts, and Lena quickly kisses it away before it can work its magic. “Give me ten minutes, then you can have it all night.”
“That’s what she said,” Kara mumbles tiredly.
Lena flicks her forehead. “Make that fifteen minutes.”
Kara rolls on her back, throws her arms akimbo. “I’ll wait forever for you,” she says, jokingly, but their eyes meet and it’s not a joke at all.
Lena goes back to work, but heart is not in it anymore, and her typing is no longer a lullaby, only a disjointed, impatient press. She’s snuggling up with Kara five minutes later, pinching her side when she giggles at her.
“I love you,” Kara says, and Lena kisses her so softly and lovingly, but she doesn’t say it back.
. . .
Lena has a desk in the tower. She handles it all very much the same as being CEO, with some leniency. She’s there at 9 am sharp, tinkering and solving and creating, and she’s out by 5, unless there’s a super crisis that needs her attention.
Kara goes to see her. She’s antsy, has spent the whole day anticipating Lena’s eyes on her, her touch, guessing how she might be wearing her hair. The first thing Lena does when Kara arrives is press their faces together, the damp heat of her red-lipsticked mouth warming Kara’s cheek. Her hair is in a high bun. Her eyes, under long lashes that catch with Kara’s, are bright and breathtaking. Her hands are cold.
“You left early,” Kara says.
“Sorry.”
Lena nuzzles Kara’s cheek, temple to temple, skin to skin. Her fingers ghost from Kara’s shoulders and up to the back of her neck.
“Don’t be sorry. I love waking up to you, that’s all.”
There it is again. Love, out before Kara can consider it, examine it, make sure of it. Out before she can think it. Lena is love, and love is in her hands, love is looking at her.
“Do you think you can love me until I can say it back? I want to. I open my mouth and I choke on it. But I do. I do.”
Kara takes Lena’s hand, held between their chests, and kisses her trembling lips. She reminds herself of Lena’s list. It’s very rare that Lena will tell a story and that it will be a happy one. Kara hopes that this list is the first story of that kind. She hopes that five months from now, five years from now, Lena will be able to say the words I love you easily, that she will settle into the comfort of being cared for and loved, that she will no longer be waiting for the trick, the punchline, the pulling of the carpet.
Kara hopes that she remembers this moment, right here, and no longer feels sad, but proud. Of herself and of Lena. She hopes that her mother will be there, witnessing it with her, and that she would understand the significance, because Kara would’ve told her.
For now, this is okay.