🦈🦈🦈

-

Mon-el came back to help them face down one last world threatening villain. He’s all wiry beard and padded suit, and he looks at Kara like he understands her better than anyone. Better than her sister, who has never known the loss of a planet or the inky expanse of space.

Better than Lena, who has memorized loss but never known the planes of Kara’s body.

She watches him press a small blue stone on a silver chain into Kara’s palm, and thinks maybe he’s right.

When the necklace slips around Kara’s neck, Lena tastes chrysanthemums, acid burning at the back of her throat as hot and wet as the tears she refuses to let fall. She excuses herself from the happy reunion to collect herself in the lab, and struggles to breathe.

The fight to get air into her lungs devolves into a hacking cough that she muffles with her sleeve until it comes away wet. There, pressed against the silky green fabric, rests a single petal.

-

“You should go,” she says when Kara comes to her with a crinkled brow and worried eyes, seeking advice, because that’s what friends are for.

Kara’s mouth twists downward beneath the blood red of her Supergirl lipstick. The tense line of her shoulders is sharp as her hands move reflexively to her hips, like she’s preparing for battle.

“You can’t mean that.”

“Of course I do,” Lena says. She wants to be as supportive as Kara has been to her since that very first CatCo article. To payback even a fraction of the kindness Kara has given her over the long and winding course of their friendship.

If this is going to be the end, she wants it to be a good one, even if it kills her.

“It would be a fresh start, away from all the baggage of CatCo and Supergirl. You’ve needed to get away for a while now, and the opportunity is here. You should take it. You’ve more than earned it. How many times have you saved this city? Saved the whole world? You just saved everyone from Nyxly.”

“We did that,” Kara says and her jaw is so tight that it almost snaps. Her eyes soften marginally, uncertainty and sadness flooding into dark blue. “Together.”

Lena’s chest aches, something squeezing around her ribs and up into her heart so strongly that it feels like Kara’s fist.

“We did. That alone proves that we can handle things here for a while. Let us shoulder some of your burden, Kara. You don’t have to do it alone. Like you told me before — we’re your family. We have your back.”

It feels cowardly, hiding behind the proverbial we. Kara’s frown deepens and Lena feels something blossom at the back of her throat.

“Do you want me to leave?”

Lena twists her fingers into the sleeves of her sweater and fights not to answer with a spray of petals that begs her to stay.

“I just want you to be happy.”

-

Lena knows what’s happening to her. It had only taken a few flips of the page in her mother’s grimoire to identify the magical disease, one that threatened any witch who succumbed to the dangerous throes of unrequited love.

She holds a fully blossomed lily in her palms, and lets words that are now familiar slip over her tongue. She pours her love and her grief and her hope into the spaces between the sticky petals, and a moment later the whole thing burns to cinders in her hands.

She collects the ashes into a small jar and slips a sample beneath the lens of her favorite microscope.

The book was very clear that unless the love is returned, the afflicted is left with only two choices: cast a spell to magically remove the romantic feelings, or die.

Lena brushes ashes between her fingers and wonders which would be worse.

-

Kara is leaving.

Mon-el is waiting on the gangplank of a Legion ship, his cape fluttering in the wind as he watches her say her final goodbyes. He looks excited and eager, like the whole future is laid out before him even without the help of time travel.

Kara is somber. There are no excited ramblings about what to do while she’s away or Back to the Future Jokes or loud, boisterous laughs.

Just long goodbyes and stony silence.

She’s been wrapped up in Nia’s trembling arms, and kissed on both cheeks by Brainy and Kelly. She’s stood in the strong embrace of J’onn with their foreheads pressed together like he was sharing something meant only for her.

She’s barely looked at Alex, and hasn’t acknowledged Lena at all.

It hurts, like thorns sprouting in her esophagus and thick petals between her teeth. Lena presses her lips together and refuses to ruin this.

When Kara steps up to her it isn’t with an easy hug or a soft smile. She just stands there, shifting from one red boot to the other, looking between Lena’s eyes like maybe she’ll find something new there.

Lena has spent a lifetime controlling her emotions, hiding her feelings away behind carefully practiced masks of cool indifference but she has never been much good at keeping anything from Kara.

“Bye,” she wheezes around the feel of petals under her tongue.

Kara wraps strong arms around her and when she pulls away Lena’s lips are as red as Supergirl’s.

A thumb brushes across Lena’s bottom lip and comes away sticky with blood and pollen.

“Lena?”

A shower of purple roses erupts from her in place of the words she can’t bring herself to say — don’t leave me, don’t leave me, i love you.

Kara catches her like the bouquet and everything fades to black.

-

When she wakes up it’s to the bright lights of the tower’s medical bay and the blinding worry in Kara’s eyes.

The air rushes out of her like wind through a field of wild flowers, and she struggles to sit up, swaying dangerously.

Kara steadies her with the softest hands she can manage, fingers delicate against her biceps, and she’s so close that Lena can smell stardust.

She lets her head fall to Kara’s chest, turning into her like a sunflower seeking the sun. For a few moments they both just breathe, and then Kara’s arms are sliding around her shoulders, fingers tangling in dark hair, holding Lena impossibly closer.

“I could never leave you,” Kara whispers, hot and serious into the crown of Lena’s head. It washes over her in warm waves. “Please, don’t ask me to again.”

Lena struggles to breathe around a mouthful of plumeria petals, but when Kara pulls back just enough to look at her face, when Kara’s breathes a puff of frost against her flushed face, Lena forgets the name of every flower she’s ever known.

When Kara kisses her it doesn’t taste of honeysuckle or roses.