Chapter Text
Alex Danvers did not pace.
She was a DEO agent, a trained soldier, a woman who had stared down White Martians and Cadmus operatives. She did not pace. She was absolutely pacing.
“You have to call her,” she said, for the fourth time in ten minutes, to the back of her sister’s head.
Kara was standing at the window of her apartment with her arms crossed tight over her chest, still wearing the Supergirl suit under an open flannel shirt she’d thrown on when Alex arrived, as if she couldn’t decide which version of herself to be right now. The city stretched out below her, indifferent and glittering.
“I know,” Kara said.
“She reached out, Kara. She reached out...first.”
“I know.”
“After everything. After Krypton, after Myriad, after the satellite...she called you. She could have gone anywhere. She could have gone to Lex, she could have disappeared, she could have...”
“Alex.” Kara’s voice was very quiet. “I know.”
Alex stopped pacing. She pressed her lips together and looked at her sister, really looked at her. Kara’s shoulders were hunched inward in a way they almost never were. She looked smaller than she had any right to be for a woman who could bench-press a freight train. Her glasses were sitting on the kitchen counter, forgotten, and without them her face was open and unguarded and tired in a way that Alex recognized. It was the face Kara made when she was trying very hard not to feel something that was already all the way inside her.
“You love her,” Alex said. Not an accusation. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way only a sister could. Kara’s jaw tightened. She didn’t answer.
“Kara.”
“Don’t.”
“Kara, I’m not. I’m not going to make this weird, I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying.” Kara finally turned from the window, and her eyes were bright in the way that meant she was holding back something large. “I know. I know that I love her. I know that I’ve loved her since - since before I had the words for it. I know that she is my person and I know that I lied to her for years and I know that she is somewhere in this city right now and she is hurting and it is partly because of me.”
She took a breath. “I know all of it, Alex. I’ve known all of it for a very long time. Knowing it doesn’t make the door easier to open.”
Alex was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed the room, and she put both hands on either side of her little sister’s face, her brilliant, terrified, heart-on-her-sleeve little sister who had flown through a wormhole and carried a bomb into space and once cried for thirty minutes because a puppy looked sad, and she looked her dead in the eyes.
“Open the door,” Alex said. “When she knocks. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re scared of, just open the door. Okay?”
Kara’s chin wobbled, just slightly.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Alex kissed her on the forehead. Grabbed her jacket off the back of the couch.
“I’m going to go get a beer,” she said, “and I’m going to sit in my car down the street like a totally normal person. And when this is over — when, not if — you’re going to text me, and I am going to drive directly back here and you are going to tell me everything, and I am going to be incredibly insufferable about it for the rest of my mortal life.”
Kara laughed despite herself. It was small and watery and real.
“I love you,” Kara said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Alex opened the front door. Paused. Looked back. “She loves you too, by the way. She has for years. She’s just also an idiot.” A beat. “You’re both idiots. It’s genuinely painful to watch.”
Then she was gone, and Kara was alone, and the city hummed quietly below the window, and somewhere out there Lena Luthor was making her way toward this building, toward this door. Kara put her glasses back on. She stood in the center of the apartment and she breathed, and she waited.
The knock, when it came, was not timid. Lena had never been timid. Even in the worst moments of her life she had presented herself to the world like a blade: precise, composed, unbreakable. The knock was firm. Deliberate. It said: I am here. I chose to come here. I am not running. Kara stood six feet from the door and did not move. She could hear Lena’s heartbeat on the other side of it. She had been listening to it for years without meaning to, and had learned it the way you learn a piece of music you’ve heard enough times that it lives inside you. Fast when she was excited. Slow and deliberate when she was working. Spiking into something uncontrolled the few times Kara had almost died in her arms. Right now it was doing something she had never heard it do before.
It was terrified.
She’s terrified, Kara thought. She knocked on this door terrified.
She crossed the room in four steps and opened it.
Lena was standing in the hallway in a dark coat, her hair down, a small bag over one shoulder, and she looked...she looked like she hadn’t slept in days, which was probably true. She looked like someone who had burned her whole life down around herself and was now standing in the ash wondering what came next. She looked like she was braced for the door to close in her face.
She looked like Lena.
Kara stared at her.
The silence stretched out between them like a held breath. Lena’s jaw was set, her green eyes moving carefully over Kara’s face, reading it the way she read everything — with that ruthless precision, searching for data, for signals, for the outcome she was already steeling herself against. Kara didn’t know how long she stood there. Long enough that something in Lena’s expression began to fracture at the edges — a tightening around her eyes, a slight drop of the chin, the look of someone beginning to accept what they’d already assumed.
Then Kara stepped back from the door.
Just that. Just a step. But Lena’s breath came out in a rush, and she walked inside, and Kara closed the door behind her, and the city disappeared.
They stood in the living room with three feet of air between them, and neither of them spoke. Lena set her bag down slowly. She looked around the apartment, at the fairy lights strung along the bookshelf, the collection of mugs by the coffee machine, the cork board on the wall covered in photos that Kara had never taken down even during the worst of the last year. Her eyes snagged on one of them and stayed there. It was the two of them at Kara’s old CatCo desk, Lena laughing at something, Kara looking at her with an expression that was, in retrospect, not subtle at all.
She looked away.
“I wasn’t sure you’d let me in,” Lena said.
“I wasn’t sure I would either.”
The honesty of it landed between them like something dropped. Lena’s chin lifted slightly, not defensively, but like someone absorbing a hit they’d expected.
“That’s fair,” she said.
“I’m not saying it to hurt you.” Kara’s voice was careful. Controlled in the way it only was when something underneath it wasn’t controlled at all. “I’m saying it because I stood at that door for thirty seconds and I — I had to decide something. About what I was willing to do.” A pause. “And I opened it. I just need you to know it wasn’t nothing. Opening it.”
Lena looked at her.
“I know,” she said quietly. “I know it wasn’t nothing. I wouldn’t have knocked if I thought it was nothing.”
The silence came back. Different this time. Not empty, but loaded, the way the air gets before a storm.
“I need to say some things,” Lena said. “And I need you to let me get through them. Because if you...if you say something kind to me in the middle of it I’m going to fall apart before I finish and I’ve been trying to get here for weeks.”
Kara nodded. Said nothing.
Lena straightened her spine. It was such a characteristic gesture. The way she assembled herself, piece by piece, before saying something that cost her. Kara had seen her do it in boardrooms and at galas and at the podiums of a dozen charity events. She had never seen her do it in quite this much pain.
“I hurt you,” Lena said. “Deliberately. I want to be clear about that because I think you’ve been generous about it, in the way you’re always generous about everything, and I don’t deserve that generosity. I knew exactly what I was doing. Every single day for the past year, I chose it. I told myself it was justice. I told myself you’d earned it. I built an entire architecture of justification around it and I maintained it carefully because the alternative was...” She stopped. Her throat moved. “The alternative was admitting that I missed you so badly it was making me someone I didn’t recognize.”
She paused. Kept going.
“What I tried to do with Non Nocere was wrong. The method and the intention. Removing choice from people and calling it protection...that’s not who I want to be. That’s who I was raised to be. And I looked up one day and I was standing in a room full of stolen technology and my brother’s approval and I thought...” Her voice went rough. “I thought, when did I become this? And I knew the answer. I became it the moment I decided that being hurt was the same thing as being right.”
Kara was very still.
“I aimed everything I had at you,” Lena said, and her voice cracked on the last word and she pressed forward anyway, through it, because she had to. “At you. You, who showed up every single time. You, who came back from the dead and went to the Fortress of Solitude for me and stood in my lab with kryptonite in your bloodstream and still wouldn’t let me fall. I knew all of that and I aimed everything at you anyway because...”
She stopped. The composure broke.
Not loudly. Lena never broke loudly. She folded. She sat down hard on the couch as if her legs had made a decision without her, bent forward with her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook, and the sound she made was small and wrecked and nothing like the Lena Luthor the world thought it knew.
Kara was across the room before she’d decided to move.
She dropped to her knees in front of Lena, settled between her knees, and she didn’t pull her in, just put her hands gently over Lena’s wrists. A question, not a demand. I’m here. If you want me.
Lena’s hands came away from her face. She looked at Kara...close, too close, both of them breathing the same air, and her eyes were red and her face was open in a way Kara had never seen it, stripped of every layer she’d spent twenty-five years building, and she looked like someone who had run out of walls.
“I was so angry,” Lena said, raw and quiet. “I was so angry at you. For lying. For making me love you and then being someone I didn’t choose.”
The words landed like a fist.
Making me love you.
Kara’s hands tightened slightly on Lena’s wrists.
“And I kept waiting for the anger to be enough,” Lena continued. “I kept waiting to wake up and feel...righteous. Justified. Done with you.” A breath that shook on the way in. “And instead I just kept thinking about the way you say my name. I kept thinking about how you look when you’re reading something you love. I kept thinking that I would give anything to go back. To that night when you told me who you were. And instead of making it about what I’d lost, I would just say thank you. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for thinking I was worth telling.”
The tears were falling now, quietly, and she wasn’t trying to stop them anymore.
“And I can’t go back,” she said. “I can’t take back the kryptonite and I can’t take back the things I said to you and I can’t...” Her voice broke fully. “I’m so sorry, Kara. I am so sorry for all of it. Not because I need you to forgive me. Because you deserve to hear it from me without agenda. You have always deserved better from me than you got.”
The apartment was completely silent.
Kara was looking at Lena, and there was something happening in her chest that she didn’t have words for; some collision of grief and love and anger and relief, all of it moving through her at once, and she was so tired of holding it. So tired of the careful management of all the things she felt about this woman, the constant low-grade ache of it, years of it, love and fear and wanting and loss, and now Lena was right here, right here with her face raw and her walls gone, and Kara was suddenly so exhausted by all the distance she’d kept.
“Can I say something?” Kara’s voice came out lower than she expected.
Lena nodded.
“I’m angry too.” It came out quiet. Steady. “I need you to know that. Because I think you came here expecting me to just...absolve you, and I can’t do that yet, I’m not there yet. What you did with the kryptonite...” She stopped. Breathed through it. “I was terrified, Lena. Not of you. Never of you. But of what it meant. That I had hurt you so badly that you needed to be able to hurt me back.” Her eyes were bright now. “That I had made you feel so unsafe that a weapon felt necessary. That is something I will carry for a very long time.”
Lena flinched.
“But,” Kara said, and she moved her hands from Lena’s wrists, turned them over, held them properly, both hands, fingers laced, a different kind of touch, a deliberate one. “I also need you to know that I understand it. Not excuse it. Understand it. Because I kept something from you for years. I watched you fight for your name and I watched you doubt yourself and I watched Lex manipulate you and there were so many moments I could have told you, should have told you, and I didn’t. Because I was scared.” Her voice cracked on the word. “I was scared that you would look at me differently. I was scared of losing you. And in trying to protect what we had I...I made it into exactly what I was afraid of.”
A tear finally fell. She didn’t try to stop it.
“I’m sorry for that,” Kara said. “I’m sorry I made you feel like you were the one person in my life who couldn’t be trusted with who I really am. Because that is the opposite of the truth. You are the person I have always most wanted to know me. You always have been.”
Lena stared at her. The moment stretched out, thin and shaking, like something being pulled close to breaking.
“Kara.”
“I’m in love with you.” It came out like something that had been waiting too long behind a door, all at once, no preamble. “I’m so in love with you and I have been for so long and I know this is...I know this is not the moment, I know we’re both a mess and the world is ending and there are seventeen better times I could have said this but I’m so tired of it being the thing I don’t say.” Her voice dropped. “I’m so tired of being next to you and not saying it. I have spent years standing right next to you carrying this enormous...this enormous thing and smiling through it and pretending it was just friendship and it isn’t, Lena, it has never been just friendship.”
“Kara.”
“I was in love with you when you helped me find my mother. I was in love with you when you built me the Harun-El cure. I was in love with you when you were furious at me and I had no right to feel it and I felt it anyway. I have been in love with you through every single version of us and there is no version where I’m not...”
“Kara.”
Lena’s hands pulled free of hers.
For one terrible second Kara thought she’d gone too far. Pushed past whatever Lena had come here ready for, said the thing that would make her shut back down and reach for the distance and Kara would watch her go, again.
But Lena’s hands came up to her face.
Both of them. Cupping her jaw, thumbs catching the tears Kara hadn’t fully noticed falling, holding her still the way you hold something you’re terrified of losing.
“Stop,” Lena said. Low. Rough. “Stop talking for one second and let me, and let me look at you.”
Kara stopped.
Lena looked at her. For a long, unguarded, silent moment, she just looked, at the tear-bright eyes and the open face and the years of careful restraint finally, finally abandoned.
“I have been in love with you,” Lena said slowly, like each word was being placed with great deliberateness, “since before I knew how to call it that. I have been in love with you through hating you and through missing you and through building weapons against you and through all of it, Kara, through every terrible thing I did, underneath all of it, it was always this. It was always you.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
“And I am so angry,” Lena continued, and her voice was shaking now, “that we wasted so much time. I am so angry at myself for the year we lost and I am so angry at all the small moments we were this close and neither of us just said it —” She laughed, and it came out wet and ruined and real. “I am furious that we are having this conversation while I look like this.”
“You look...” Kara’s voice was wrecked. “You look like you. You look exactly like you.”
“That is not the compliment you think it is right now.”
“It’s the only compliment I have. I mean it completely.”
They were both crying. It was not elegant. It was nothing like the moment either of them had probably imagined. No perfect lighting, no grand gesture, just two women on a couch in a National City apartment with blotchy faces and years of unsaid things finally said, looking at each other like survivors of something enormous. Kara turned her face slightly into Lena’s palm. Let her lips rest against it.
“Can I kiss you?” she asked.
It came out barely a sound.
Lena’s answer was not a word.
She pulled her in.
It was not gentle, not at first. It was desperate, the way it always is when something has been withheld too long, both of them leaning into it with the full weight of everything they’d been carrying, and Lena’s hands were in Kara’s hair and Kara’s hands were holding Lena like she was both fragile and indestructible, and they kissed like an argument and a surrender at once, like a door finally opened, like the specific relief of putting down something you’ve carried so far your arms have forgotten what empty feels like.
Then slower.
The desperation eased into something else. Something careful and deliberate and unhurried, the kind of kiss that isn’t making up for lost time but simply being present in found time. Lena’s forehead dropped to Kara’s. Both of them breathing.
“Okay,” Lena said.
Her voice was barely there.
“Yeah,” Kara managed.
Neither of them moved.
“We still have to take down Lex,” Lena said eventually.
“I know.”
“And Leviathan.”
“I know.”
“I want you to know that I find that deeply, personally offensive right now.”
Kara kissed her again. Soft. Quick. Like she was already practicing for it being ordinary, for it being something she gets to do every day.
“We’ll handle it fast,” Kara said.
Lena pulled back just enough to look at her. Tear-tracked and undone and smiling with her whole face, with no performance in it at all.
“You’re insufferable,” she said.
“You love me,” Kara said.
A pause.
“So much,” Lena said quietly. “Embarrassingly so. For an extremely long time.”
Kara held her tighter.
Alex’s phone buzzed at 11:47 PM.
She was on her second beer, parked half a block from Kara’s building, having a deeply reasonable conversation with herself about whether she was being a supportive sister or a complete disaster of a human being. (The answer was both. She was always both.)
She looked at her phone.
Kara: you can come up
Alex stared at that for exactly three seconds.
Then she typed back: on a scale of 1-10 how much do I get to be insufferable
Kara: please come up. also bring food. also i’m warning you lena is here
Kara: she’s staying
Kara: please bring a lot of food
Alex Danvers put her car in drive and went to find the only Chinese place open at midnight that Kara trusted, and she smiled the entire way there.
When she knocked on Kara’s door eighteen minutes later with three bags of takeout and a complete inability to play it cool, it was Lena who opened it. Lena Luthor. Standing in Kara’s apartment in her slightly rumpled blouse, her hair down, her eyes still faintly red. Looking more human than Alex had ever seen her and more at ease than she’d seen her in over a year.
They looked at each other for a moment.
Alex took in all of it, the posture, the expression, the very specific quality of the stillness in the apartment that said things had shifted in here, things had been said, things had changed, and then she looked at Lena very carefully and said:
“Are you good?”
Lena blinked, as if she’d been expecting something else. “I...yes. I think so.”
“Good.” Alex held out one of the bags. “Take this. If Kara gets to the dumplings before me we’re going to have a problem.”
Lena took the bag, looking faintly bewildered. Alex stepped inside.
Kara was standing by the kitchen counter wearing the look she always wore when she was trying not to be visibly happy and failing completely; bright eyes, the smile she was pretending wasn’t there, the particular quality of tension in her shoulders that in Kara’s case meant joy rather than anxiety. She looked at Alex like she was braced for impact. Alex set the bags down on the counter.
She looked at her sister.
Then she pointed at Lena. Pointed at Kara. Made a slow, emphatic gesture between them.
“Finally,” she said.
“Alex.”
“I have been waiting years. Do you understand? Years. I once watched you two say goodbye at a gala and it took forty minutes. Forty minutes, Kara. I read three entire articles on my phone. You were literally just saying goodbye.”
Kara had her face buried in her hands.
“I need you to know,” Alex continued, unpacking the food with the energy of someone who had been vindicated on a deeply personal level, “that Kelly and I have an ongoing bet. I said it would happen before the Leviathan situation resolved. Kelly said after. I am extremely pleased to inform you that I am going to win that bet.”
“There was a bet?” Kara said.
“There were multiple bets. J’onn was involved at one point.” Alex pointed at Lena. “He’s going to be very smug. Just so you’re prepared.”
“I’m sorry,” Lena said. “J’onn bet on us?”
“He said, and I quote, ‘some bonds are visible from a great distance.’”
“That’s so...”
“Embarrassing? Yes. Also accurate.” Alex finally looked at the two of them properly. Her little sister, who had carried this for years with that enormous heart of hers that she always gave away too fast and trusted too deeply, and Lena Luthor, who had walked through fire and spite and grief and still knocked on this door, and she felt something settle in her chest that she hadn’t known was still unsettled. She crossed to Kara and pulled her into a hug. Hard. The kind she’d been giving since they were children, the kind that meant I’ve got you, you’re okay, I’m here. Kara hugged her back with the full weight of a Kryptonian who understood what she was being told.
“I’m proud of you,” Alex said quietly, just for Kara.
Kara’s arms tightened.
“Don’t be. I almost didn’t open the door.”
“Yeah, but you did.” Alex pulled back. Looked at her. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all it ever is.”
She stepped back. Cleared her throat. Fully business now.
“Okay,” she said, clapping her hands together. “We’ve got potstickers, we’ve got dumplings, and we have Lex Luthor and an ancient alien conspiracy to dismantle in the morning. Somebody find the remote. I’m not dealing with any of this on an empty stomach.”
Lena looked at Kara.
Kara looked at Lena.
Something passed between them. Quick, wordless, the kind of look that didn’t need translation, and then Kara was grabbing plates from the cabinet and Lena was opening the containers and Alex was already stealing the first dumpling, and the apartment was warm and lit and full, and outside the city hummed on, indifferent and glittering, as it always did.
Later. Much later, when Alex finally left and the city had gone quiet and the takeout containers were stacked by the sink and the fairy lights along the bookshelf cast the apartment in something soft and amber, Kara and Lena were on the couch. Lena was half-asleep against Kara’s shoulder. Kara was not asleep at all, because she was Kryptonian and because there was a warmth in her chest that showed no signs of dimming and because some part of her couldn’t stop marveling at the simple, enormous fact of this...of Lena here, and staying, and knowing. Knowing everything, and staying anyway.
“Kara,” Lena murmured.
“Mm.”
“We really do have to take down Lex tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“I want the record to show that I find the timing genuinely offensive.”
Kara pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“Noted,” she said. “For the record.”
Lena made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh but something in between, and she shifted closer, and Kara held on.
The city went on below them, patient and glittering.
Tomorrow there would be Lex and Leviathan and the work of putting things back together.
Tonight there was this.
This was enough.
This was everything.