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–Sam–
Sam had gotten very good at reading rooms. It was a survival skill, born first from Ruby, from the years of learning to anticipate a child’s moods before they broke into crying or laughter or need. Then from L-Corp, from the particular art of walking into a boardroom and knowing within seconds who held the real power and who was performing it.
She read this room easily. Alex Danvers was pacing. Not the anxious kind of pacing, the thinking kind, the kind that meant she had already made up her mind about something and was only working out the logistics.
Sam sat on the kitchen counter of Alex’s apartment, a mug of coffee warm between both palms, and watched her with something she'd learned to call fondness. It was a soft word for something that lived in her chest like heat.
“You're going to wear a hole in the floor.”
Alex stopped. She turned, and there it was, that specific look Sam had catalogued over six months. The one that was half-exasperated, half-lit-up, the one that said: You. Always you cutting through whatever I was building in my head.
“I have an idea.”
“That’s never the opening of a sentence that ends well for me.”
Alex crossed to the counter, leaning against it beside her, shoulders almost touching. “It could end very well for both of us, actually.”
Sam tilted her head and waited.
‘We’ve been together for six months. That’s half a year. Lena doesn’t know. Kara doesn’t know. And that’s fine, I understand why we’ve been careful, but Sam, I’m tired of having a girlfriend I can’t bring to things. A girlfriend I can't talk to my sister about. A girlfriend I–” She stopped.
Sam watched her throat work.
“I want to stop hiding you. I want Kara to know. I want your best friend to not look at me like I might be an enemy.”
Sam was quiet for a moment. She looked down at her coffee, then back up.
“Lena isn't going to like it.”
“I know.”
“She’s– she’s in a bad place right now. The whole Supergirl thing.”
“I know.”
“And Kara is suspicious of me because of everything with Reign. She’s never said it out loud, but I know she is.”
Alex started, then stopped. “She doesn’t–”
Sam raised an eyebrow. she said it more carefully this time: “...She doesn’t say it out loud. But I know. And I think– I think the only way through that is through it.”
“What if we told them together? Like at the same time. In person. So, they can’t just... spiral alone.”
Sam considered this.
“You want to trap them.”
Alex’s expression was perfectly dignified. “I want to give them the opportunity to be present in our lives.”
“Alex.”
A beat.
“We trap them.”
And that was how the plan was born over cold coffee on a Tuesday morning: Sam would invite Lena to lunch at Noonan’s – easy, natural, nothing suspicious – and Alex would do the same with Kara. They would arrive at the same time. They would tell them together. They would deal with whatever came after.
Sam thought it was a decent plan.
She thought that right up until Alex kissed her, and she stopped thinking about plans at all.
**
–Lena–
Sam had texted her that morning: Lunch? Noonan’s at 12:30. I miss your face.
Lena had said yes immediately, the way she always said yes to Sam, because Sam was one of the few people left whose company she didn’t have to prepare for like an event. She walked into Noonan’s at 12:28 with the closest thing to ease she was capable of anymore.
And then she saw Kara Danvers.
Kara was standing in the doorway, very still, in the particular way she went still when something had surprised her – which was its own kind of information, because very little surprised Kara. Not genuinely. Not since Lena had learned who Kara was.
Lena looked back at the table. Sam was there, as expected. And across from Sam, looking up with an expression of someone braced for impact: Alex Danvers.
Lena understood in an instant what this was.
She took a seat next to Sam because the alternative was walking out, and she had too much dignity for that. She folded her hands on the table. She waited.
Kara sat down without speaking. Lena did not look at her.
Sam spoke first. Her voice was the careful kind. The kind she used when she’d rehearsed. “We thought it would be better to say this together.”
“Say what together?” Lena asked, already knowing where this was going.
Alex answered, “Sam and I are together. We have been for six months. And I know– I know this is complicated. For both of you. And I know you’re both going to have feelings about it. But I’m asking you to hear us out before you–”
Six months.
Lena heard the number the way you heard a number when you were doing damage assessment – clinically, from a slight remove. Six months. Sam had been with Alex for six months and Lena had not known. Had sat across from Sam at dinners and on calls and in offices and Sam had known this thing and chosen not to say it, and Lena understood why – she understood the math of it, the same way she understood her own silence about a hundred things – but understanding why a thing hurt did not make it hurt less.
She said, because the number needed to exist in the room. “Six months. You’ve been with her for six months and you didn't tell me.”
“Lena–”
Lena pressed her lips together. She felt something cross her face and closed the door on it. “I understand.”
And she did. That was the terrible part. She understood completely – the same way she had understood, after the fact, why Kara had not told her. The logic was always sound. The logic always made sense. It was only the part underneath the logic that split something open.
Across the table, Kara had lowered her voice and was saying something to Alex, half a conversation Lena wasn’t supposed to hear but she caught the shape of it anyway. The Reign thing. The history of Sam. Kara’s particular brand of worry, which had always worn the clothes of caution.
Lena looked at Sam instead. Sam was very still, in a way Lena recognized: not peace, but the management of the absence of it. She had seen Sam hold herself that way before, in the months when Reign was still a wound that hadn’t closed, when Sam would sometimes go quiet and distant in the middle of a conversation and come back like she’d travelled somewhere and chosen to return.
Sam was watching Lena the way she always watched Lena when she was frightened of what Lena might do.
Across the table, something resolved between Kara and Alex.
“Okay. Not okay. But okay. As in I’m not going to– We’ll talk about this later.”
Lena looked at Kara. Kara looked back.
There were years between them on this table, invisible and immovable. There was everything that had been said and everything that hadn’t, the specific shape of a friendship that had been built to last and then been used as a location for a lie. Lena looked at Kara’s face and found that she still knew it perfectly, every expression, the way grief looked when Kara was trying to keep it out of her eyes.
She looked away first.
She looked at Sam.
And the thing she felt under the hurt, under the controlled fury of being managed by people who thought they knew what she needed was something that looked almost like hope, and that terrified her more than the rest of it.
She looked at Sam when she said it, not Alex. “Congratulations.”
Sam’s face did something small and careful. An acknowledgment.
Lena held her expression steady until she could trust what it would do on its own. “Now if you would excuse me, I have a business to run.”
Really what she meant is she needed to run. Away from this conversation. Away from her.
**
–Sam–
She gave Lena two hours.
That was the calculation she’d made in the car on the way back – two hours for Lena to sit with it alone, to work through the first layer of the controlled silence, to get to the place underneath where the actual feeling lived. Lena needed that time. She had always needed that time, the way some plants needed dark before they could open.
Sam had needed the two hours too, if she was honest. She’d driven around for twenty minutes before heading toward L-Corp, talking herself through what she knew and what she was frightened of and what she was going to ask for.
She knocked three times, quick. The knock that said: I know I can enter without permission, but I am choosing not to because this moment belongs to you.
“Come in.”
Lena was at her desk. The pen in her hand was held too tightly; Sam could see the indent from across the room. The city skyline behind her was doing its usual perfect-and-indifferent thing, all glass and distance.
Sam closed the door. She stood there and looked at her best friend and thought: there she is. The real version. Not the public Lena, not the board-meeting Lena, but the one who felt things deeply and had learned to press the feeling flat before anyone could see the shape of it.
“I know you said okay.”
“I said congratulations.”
“Which was worse.”
Lena set down the pen. Something in her shoulders shifted – not releasing, but acknowledging.
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“I know. I don’t want to fight with you either. But I need to know– I want to know what’s actually in your head, Lena, because the thing you do where you push everything into boxes–”
“What thing.”
“You know what thing.”
Sam came further into the room. Not to the desk yet, Lena needed space before she needed closeness, that was something Sam had learned early and kept. She moved to the window, then turned, so she could see Lena’s face.
Outside, National City went on being National City. Sam looked at Lena instead. Lena was looking at the desk, at the middle distance between them, thinking something she hadn’t decided whether to say.
Six months, Sam thought. Six months she had held this separate from Lena, telling herself it was because things were still fragile, because Lena had enough, because the timing was never right. And underneath all of those reasons was the real one: she had been afraid. Afraid that Lena’s reaction would make her doubt something she didn’t want to doubt.
Afraid that Lena would be right.
She had to accept that she was worthy of love first. It was never to deceive Lena.
Lena said finally. “I'm worried about you.”
“In what way.”
“In the way where you have given those people, that family, a piece of yourself. A real piece. And they have shown that they are very good at taking pieces from people who trust them and not being careful with them.”
Sam breathed in slowly. She knew what this was. She’d known before she knocked.
“It was not Alex’s secret to share.”
“She lied to me as well, she’s just as bad as her sister.”
“I know how hurt you were when you found out, trust me I know. But Alex is not Kara.”
“They are the same family.”
Sam was quiet for a moment. She looked at Lena – her brilliant, cautious, closed-off best friend who had built so many walls and called them architecture.
“Lena. I know you’re not talking about me right now.”
The silence stretched.
“I’m talking about you.”
“You’re talking about you. About Kara. About the fact that you love her and you’re furious at her and you’re terrified of what she could do with that, and you’re looking at Alex and seeing a version of that story. You’re looking at me and you’re scared of getting second-hand hurt.”
Something moved across Lena's face. She picked up the pen again.
“That’s not an unreasonable thing to be scared of.”
Sam crossed to the desk. She took the chair, not the visitor’s chair, her chair, the one that had her indentation in it at this point, and sat down across from Lena.
“No. It’s not. But I need you to trust me. I have felt broken and unlovable for so long and Alex– Alex sees me. She doesn’t look at like someone who needs fixing. I thought I’d never be worthy of being happy after everything I did and I–”
Lena was looking at her the way she sometimes looked at research, Like something had just aligned that she’d been trying to understand for a long time.
“Oh, Sam.”
Sam’s eyes were bright. She was not going to cry in Lena Luthor’s office.
She exhaled. “She knows the worst thing about me and she–”
“She still looks at me like I’m– I don’t know how to explain it. Like I’m good. Like I’m just a person. I haven’t been just a person in a long time.”
Lena came around the desk. She sat on the edge of it, in front of Sam’s chair, the particular way they sometimes repositioned when a problem was too large for formal furniture, when the thing being discussed required them to be the same size and in the same space.
Sam looked up at her. Lena looked down at her. The skyline went on behind them.
“I’m not going to stop being worried.”
“I know.”
“I reserve the right to be suspicious and ask uncomfortable questions.”
“You wouldn’t be you if you didn't.”
“And if she hurts you–” A small, real smile. “I know where she lives. I'll handle it.”
Sam looked at Lena for a long moment. This woman who had rebuilt herself from scratch twice and was still standing. Who had called Sam every day during the worst of Reign when Sam was frightened of her own reflection. Who had sat on the floor of her lab and not said a single word because sometimes the right thing was not to say anything at all. Who was, right now, scared for her, and showing it the only way Lena Luthor knew how.
“I need time.”
“That’s fair. I’m not asking you to throw Alex a welcome party. I’m asking you to let me have this.”
Lena reached out and put a hand briefly on Sam’s arm. Brief, warm, deliberate.
“You have it. You don’t need my permission.”
Sam exhaled. Something she’d been holding for six months, or maybe longer, went a little looser in her chest.
**
–Kara–
She’d been rehearsing since Wednesday.
Not the words, she never did well with scripted words, they always came out stiff and wrong, like she was reading them off a cue card. But the shape of the conversation. The order of concerns. The way to say what she needed to say without it sounding like an accusation, because it wasn’t an accusation. It was fear, and fear and accusation could look identical from the outside if you weren’t careful.
Sister night was two days after the lunch. Takeout boxes open on the coffee table, the new season of something bad-on-purpose on the television, Alex’s pick, which always meant something that required no emotional labour.
Kara had her glasses on even though she didn’t need them here. Old habit. The glasses still meant something to her, even now, even after– they still meant: I am Kara.
Alex was waiting for her to say it. Kara could tell by the way she was eating, focused, deliberate, giving Kara the courtesy of not pushing.
Kara broke first, as she always did, because Alex had learned years ago that waiting her out worked better than asking.
No preamble. During a commercial break. “She was possessed by an ancient world-ending entity, Alex.”
“I know.”
“That’s not a small thing. That’s not– the Reign thing wasn’t nothing.”
“I know that. I was there.”
She gestured, trying to find the word. “You were there in a professional capacity. You were not there in an– In an investing your heart capacity.”
“Is that a sentence?”
“Alex.”
“Kara.”
Alex set down her fork. She turned on the couch to face Kara properly, the way she always turned when she was done with the preamble and ready for the real thing. Kara pulled her knees up without thinking about it. Old posture. The one that meant she was trying to be contained.
“I know your concerns. And I’m not dismissing them. The Reign thing is real and it’s part of who Sam is, part of what she survived, and she’s incredibly strong for that.”
Kara looked at her sister. Alex’s voice had the particular steadiness it got when she’d already done the hard work of an argument inside her own head, arrived somewhere, and was now simply reporting back.
“But Kara. I need to ask you something and I need you to actually answer it.”
“Okay.”
“Is your hesitation about Sam? Or is it about me?”
Kara unfolded slightly. The question settled in the room.
“What do you mean.”
“I mean– I know how much of your worry about the people I date is actually worry about me. And I know why. I know where it comes from.” She said it with love. Kara felt it as love. She also felt, underneath it, the accuracy of it, which was a different kind of discomfort. “You’ve watched me make choices that weren’t good for me. And you’ve also watched me be so careful that I missed things that could have been good for me. And I think sometimes you default to scepticism as a way of protecting me, and I love you for it, but I need to tell you– She’s good to me, Kara. She sees me. Like, the whole of me. Not just DEO Alex or sister of Supergirl Alex, but me. And she’s funny, God she’s so funny, Kara, and she’s brilliant, and she is honest with me in a way that makes me want to be honest with myself. And she had every reason to write me off after everything with Lena–”
Alex stopped. Pressed her lips together.
Kara set down her own container. She looked at Alex for a long time.
“Are you happy.”
“Yeah.”
“Like really happy. Not ‘this is good enough’ happy. Actually–”
“Kara. Yes. I am happy.”
Kara looked at her sister’s face. And there it was, under the defensiveness and the readiness-for-argument: something settled. Something that had found its place and stopped searching.
She reached out and squeezed Alex’s arm.
“Then I’m happy for you.”
Alex smiled.
“I'm not promising I won’t still worry,” Kara quickly added.
“You’d be a different person if you didn’t. I’d be suspicious.”
Kara almost smiled at that. She looked at the TV, which was showing something with an unrealistic amount of explosions.
“I still the whole Lena thing.”
“That’s a separate conversation.”
“I know. I know it is, I just–”
She went quiet. She felt it then, the way she always felt it when Lena’s name came into a room, the specific ache of something that used to be whole. She missed Lena. That was the truth she’d been carrying under everything else. She was furious at herself, and she missed Lena and she did not know what to do with either of those things and so she’d been putting them in a box and closing the lid.
Alex was watching her. Alex always knew. Kara had stopped being surprised by that a long time ago.
Gently. “I know.”
**
– Alex–
She showed up at Sam’s apartment with wine, takeout Thai, and the residue of a day that had gone sideways in three separate directions. It was a Thursday, which had no particular significance except that it was the day she’d found herself, somewhere around 4 PM, wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere specifically, a somewhere with dark wood floors and a kitchen that always smelled faintly of the good coffee Sam kept in the cabinet above the stove.
Sam opened the door before she knocked. She’d heard the elevator. She always heard the elevator.
Alex had learned a lot of things about Sam Arias in six months. She’d learned that Sam needed to process things in motion, that if something was bothering her, she’d do the dishes, reorganize her desk, take a walk that covered eight blocks without noticing. She’d learned that Sam’s laugh arrived in stages, the first one quiet and almost involuntary, the real one coming a few seconds behind it when her guard had finished deciding it was safe. She’d learned that Sam loved Ruby with a ferocity that was almost architectural, like a load-bearing wall. She’d learned that Sam was one of the most privately tender people Alex had ever met, which was invisible until you were close enough to feel it.
She’d learned that she herself became quieter around Sam. Calmer. Like something that had been running at a frequency it didn’t need to run at had finally found its proper speed.
That had been the surprise of it, honestly. Not the falling, the settling.
They ate on the couch. Alex talked about the debrief. Sam told her about a board call she’d spent the second half of silently composing a breakup text to an investor in her head because the alternative was screaming.
“Did you send it.”
“I sent a very professional follow-up email that conveyed the same information in the language of quarterly projections.”
“That’s somehow more savage.”
“I’ve been a CFO for a long time.”
Alex laughed, the real one. The one that came up before she could think about it. She watched Sam clock it, that small, pleased thing that moved through Sam’s expression when something landed, the way she received it like it was a gift she wasn’t going to make a big deal about.
Six months in and that still caught her somewhere under the sternum.
Later, takeout put away, wine half done, the evening fully settled into itself, they were horizontal on the couch. Alex’s back against Sam’s chest, both of them reading different things in comfortable parallel. Sam had a hand loosely around Alex’s wrist. Probably unconscious. Probably just the gravity of proximity.
Alex was aware of it with every part of herself that wasn’t reading.
This was the thing she hadn’t expected about loving Sam, not the big moments, which she’d anticipated in the abstract, but the specific texture of the small ones. The weight of Sam’s arm across her. The sound of a page turning. The way Sam would occasionally make a small involuntary noise when she read something that surprised her, half-laugh or half-exhale, and never explain it, and Alex had stopped asking because by now she could usually tell which one it was.
She looked up from her own book.
The lamp was on. The city was doing its distant, indifferent thing beyond the windows. Sam’s chin was tipped down over her shoulder, reading, and the particular quality of her attention, that focused, unreachable stillness she got when a book had her, was the same quality Alex had watched her bring to spreadsheets and to Ruby’s homework and to the careful dismantling of a problem that needed dismantling. Sam did not have separate gears for things she cared about. She only had the one setting.
Alex had been in love with her for approximately five months. She had known it for four.
“What's that one about.”
Sam didn’t look up immediately. Another line, maybe two. Then:
“Twins separated at birth. One of them grows up to be a lighthouse keeper.”
‘That’s either very sad or very beautiful.”
“Currently very both.”
Alex turned back to her own page. She read the same sentence three times without retaining it.
“Hey.”
“Mm.”
“Nothing. Just–” She stopped. Sam waited. This was something she’d learned: Sam would always wait. She never rushed Alex toward a thing that wasn’t ready. ‘I was going to say something, but it came out as ‘hey’ instead.”
“That happens to me sometimes.”
“What do you do.”
“Usually just say the thing before my brain can argue me out of it.”
Alex considered the page.
“I like this.”
“The book?”
“Thursday.”
A beat. Sam’s hand shifted on her wrist, a small, intentional press.
Quietly. “Yeah?”
“I like that this is a thing that just exists now. In my week. Thursday with you.”
“It’s not just Thursdays.”
“No. But Thursday specifically. Because Thursday was the first one.”
Sam set her book down on the armrest. Alex felt it. the shift in attention, the full weight of it turning toward her, which still felt like standing in direct sunlight after a long winter.
“I remember that Thursday.”
“You made pasta.”
“You said you weren’t hungry and ate most of it.”
“It was very good pasta.” She tipped her head back and it landed against Sam’s collarbone and she left it there.
The apartment breathed around them. Somewhere in the building, a door closed softly. The lamp threw its warm radius and outside it everything was gentle dark.
‘What were you actually going to say.”
Alex thought about it. She looked at the ceiling. She thought about Kara asking her – are you happy, actually happy – and the ease with which the answer had arrived.
“Just that I don’t want this to become something I forget to notice. This.” She gestured loosely at the air, at the lamp, at the general Thursday-ness of everything. “All of it. The couch. The pasta. The– I’ve been in a lot of situations where I was so busy keeping things together that I forgot to actually be in them. And I don’t want to do that here.”
Sam was quiet for a moment.
Then her arm came around Alex properly and she pressed her lips to the top of Alex’s head, unhurried, like there was no possible version of this evening where she would be anywhere else.
“I love you, Alex Danvers.”
Alex closed her eyes.
“I love you, Sam.”
The weight of the arm. The sound of the city, far away. The book Sam had set down without being asked. The particular silence that wasn’t absence but fullness, that meant: here, I am here, this is not going anywhere.
She stayed exactly where she was and let herself have it.
**
–Lena–
The invitations to the charity gala L-Corp was hosting had been sent out three weeks ago. Lena had worn a fitted black Dior gown. She always wore the black when she needed to feel like herself.
The National City atrium was her design, or her approval of someone else’s design, which amounted to the same thing. She knew every sight line, every exit, every place where the acoustics did something interesting. She had walked into this room a hundred times. Tonight it felt like unfamiliar territory, because Sam had a plan, and Lena had known about the plan since approximately ten minutes after Sam had sent her the invite for approval, because she knew Sam.
She just hadn’t known the full shape of it.
Kara Danvers was here. Alex Danvers was here. Sam had her fingerprints on both of those facts, and Lena moved through the evening carrying that knowledge alongside her champagne, making conversation, being present, waiting.
Across the room, Kara had spotted her within the first five minutes. Lena had felt it before she’d seen it, that particular awareness of being looked at by someone who was trying to decide something. She’d become an expert at recognizing that particular gaze. She’d been on the receiving end of it for most of her life. People always seemed to be deciding something about Lena Luthor.
She looked back, briefly, just long enough to make it known she’d noticed. Then she looked away first.
Small victories. She was collecting them.
Fifteen minutes in, Sam materialized at her elbow with the precise timing of someone who had been watching the room like a chess board.
“You look beautiful.”
“You look like you’re about to do something I haven’t agreed to.”
Sam’s expression was perfectly composed. “I need you to go up to the east balcony. I have a project logistics question I need your input on, and I can’t get away from this conversation for another fifteen minutes.”
“Sam.”
“The North Project. The propellor question we discussed.”
“There is no propellor question.”
“There will be if you don’t go to the balcony.”
Lena looked at her for a long moment.
“If she is up there–”
Sam turned to face her fully, and Lena recognized this version: not strategic Sam, not composed Sam, but the one who called her at 2 AM and said things she only said when the careful exterior had been set down for the night. “Lena.”
“I am not asking you to fix everything tonight. I am asking you to stand in the same place as her for five minutes and let whatever happens happen. That’s all. You’re allowed to not be ready and still try.”
The thing was, and Lena hated this, hated the precision of it, Sam was the only person who could say things like that to her and have them land.
She set down her champagne glass.
“Five minutes.”
“Or longer if you need it.”
The balcony was cool and quiet, the city spread below it in its indifferent grid of light. Lena stood at the railing and breathed the night air and tried to arrange herself into something workable.
She heard Kara before she saw her, the particular quality of someone’s footstep when they’re trying to decide whether to proceed.
Kara stepped out onto the balcony. She stopped when she saw Lena. Her face did the thing it always did, that complicated cascade of things, guilt and warmth and grief and the specific expression Lena had once loved without knowing she loved it.
Lena looked at her.
Kara looked back.
“Alex.”
“Sam.”
A pause. Then, improbably, both of them almost smiled at the same time.
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t resolution. But it was…something. The first breath after a long time of not quite breathing.
Kara went first. “I've been trying to figure out what to say to you for a long time.”
“So have I.”
“Have you come up with anything?”
“Nothing that felt like enough.”
Kara moved to the railing. Not next to Lena, two feet away, a respectful distance, the distance of someone who knew they had not yet earned the closer one.
Quietly. Not the practiced version. The real one, the unwrapped one. “I'm sorry.”
“I know that doesn’t– I know it doesn’t fix anything. I just need you to have heard it. From me. Not as Supergirl, not as anything except the person who was your friend first and should have trusted you with the rest.”
Lena’s throat tightened. She looked out at the city. She thought about all the arguments she’d made to herself over the past year, all the perfectly constructed cases for why she was right to be hurt, right to be furious, right to keep the distance. They were all still true. They had not stopped being true.
They had also stopped being the most important thing she was carrying.
“I'm not ready to be past it.”
“I know.”
“But I think I’m tired of being in the middle of it.”
Kara turned to look at her. Lena met her eyes.
There they were. Two women on a balcony, above a city, with years between them that were going to take more than one night to cross. But the balcony existed. They were standing on it. That was Sam’s gift to them: the location. What they did with it was theirs.
“Can I– can we start somewhere? Not from the beginning. Just from here.”
Lena breathed in. Breathed out. Thought about what Sam had said: you’re allowed to not be ready and still try.
Lena nodded, “From here.”
Below them, through the glass, the gala went on, music and light and the particular hum of a room full of people performing their best versions of themselves. Somewhere in that room, Sam and Alex were no doubt watching the balcony door with the self-satisfaction of two people who had executed a plan.
Lena found, unexpectedly, that she didn’t mind.
**
–Sam –
She found Alex by the windows at the far edge of the atrium, exactly where Sam had expected to find her: close enough to the balcony door to watch it, far enough to look like she wasn’t.
“They’re still up there.” Sam stated.
“I know. I've been ‘not watching’.”
“Very convincingly.”
“How long has it been.”
“Twenty minutes.”
Alex exhaled slowly, the breath of someone who had been holding something and is allowing themselves, carefully, to set it down.
“That’s good, right.”
“Twenty minutes is very good.”
Alex turned from the window. She looked at Sam, that look she had, the particular one Sam had spent weeks trying to name before she’d given up naming it and just let herself be looked at that way. It was full of things: relief, warmth, the specific fondness of someone who has chosen you and keeps choosing you and finds it easy.
“You did that.”
“We did that.”
“I provided logistical support. You did that.”
Sam shook her head, but she was smiling. In the centre of the atrium the orchestra had shifted into something slower, something that moved through the room like a suggestion.
“Dance with me.”
“Here.”
“Here.”
Alex took her hand. They found space at the edge of the floor, not the centre, neither of them needed the centre, and settled into it. Alex’s hand warm at Sam’s waist. Sam’s hand on Alex’s shoulder, feeling the line of muscle underneath the fabric of the green dress shirt Sam had suggested three weeks ago and felt quietly vindicated about now.
They moved. The music was slow and familiar in the way music got when the evening had gone long enough to soften. The lights had warmed. Around them, other couples had found their way to the floor, the room having shifted into its later, easier self.
Sam thought: this is mine. This specific thing, this woman, this moment, this particular quality of light, is mine. She had spent so many years building walls against the word mine, against the claiming of things, because things that were yours could be taken and people who were yours could leave. Reign had stripped even the claim on herself away for a while. She had spent a long time learning how to have things again.
Alex squeezed her hand slightly. Sam looked at her.
“You’re thinking.”
“I’m always thinking.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
“I was thinking about the fact that you look very good in this suit.”
“That’s not what you were thinking.”
“I was thinking about that too.”
Alex’s mouth curved. Sam watched it happen and thought: there it is. The thing that still caught her, months in, the specific joy of making Alex Danvers smile when she wasn’t expecting to.
“Sam.”
Quietly. “I was thinking that I’m happy.”
Alex's voice was soft. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Alex pulled her incrementally closer. Not dramatically, just the half-inch of someone closing a gap they’d decided no longer needed to exist. Sam let herself be pulled and thought: this is what it is to trust someone with the weight of yourself. Not the performance of it. The actual thing.
The music kept going. The lights stayed gold.