There was something decidedly… insistent about Lena’s footsteps. Kara knew it was her, of course, when she picked up Lena heading towards her apartment. Not just her heart rate but her breathing and mumbling to herself and the way she walked, her footfalls painting a picture of how she was walking, and she was mad.
Kara expected a complaint when she opened the door. Lena would sometimes launch without preamble into a rant about this investor or that senator or some such executive at this or that company and just rant adorably, balling her little fists. Kara would never tell her, because she’d feel patronized, but Lena genuinely was cute when she was angry.
Well, annoyed. When she was really angry, throwing a fit angry, fed up with the world angry, she was something else entirely. Kara would move heaven and earth, quite literally, to address whatever bothered her. When she was sad it was even worse and Kara just wanted to bundle her up in her invulnerable arms and shelter her from everything forever.
Lena walked into the apartment, not looking at Kara, and clearly fuming. She dropped the order she’d picked up on the way into the kitchen island and stared at it, then finally glared at Kara. There was no mistaking the subject of her anger.
Kara fidgeted nervously. She shifted on her feet, feeling a pressure of Lena’s gaze that forced her own away.
“Lena? Is something wrong?” She swallowed, hard. “Bad day?”
“Something is wrong,” Lena said, very softly, in the icy tone she reserved for the fools she did not suffer gladly. “Take off your glasses.”
“What?”
“Take off your glasses, Kara.”
“But I can’t see…”
Lena stepped forward and put her hand on the takeout order in its plastic bag. Kara had ordered it and Lena had agreed to pick it up, far from be first time they’d done that. Lena often ordered for them and Kara brought it when Lena was hosting.
Right now Lena was trembling, head tilted forward like she meant to charge, eyes locked on Kara.
“Glasses. Off.”
Kara hesitated briefly.
“Okay,” she muttered, screaming at herself not to do this, pleading for some kind of distraction.
All she wanted to do tonight was curl up with Lena on the couch and watch a movie and focus very very hard on not giving away how badly she wanted to make out with her.
Kara slowly took the earpieces in her hands and slipped them off, setting the too-heavy frames on the table with a soft clunk. The word rushed in, sounds more vibrant and distracting, colors almost unpleasantly sharp.
Lena was staring at her. Her nostrils flared and her fists clenched. She took her hand from the food bag and took another step forward, then another, finally picking up the glasses in her own hand, feeling them. She raised them as if to put them on and stared through them.
“For someone who says she’s blind without them, these glasses don’t have a very strong prescription, do they.”
Possibilities raced through Kara’s mind. Things she could say, things she might do. She’d squeaked out of this before, somehow evaded Lena’s staggering intellect. She had seen curiosity darken her brows, maybe even brief moments of suspicion.
This was different. Heavier. More serious.
“What gave me away?”
“Everything, really. All the pieces were there this whole time, but I just refused to put them together on my own. It took a flat out slap in the face to make me choose to see it.”
Kara’s chest felt like it was caving in. Everything was going wrong. Her chin quivered and the tears began welling hot behind her eyes.
Lena looked at her flatly. “The guy at the take out place asked me why I was picking up Supergirl’s order. I asked him what the hell he was talking about and he told me Supergirl comes on all the time. Then he showed me a selfie.”
Kara licked her lips.
“It has to be a mistake.”
“They have your number on their speed dial as Supergirl, Kara. You let their delivery kid take a selfie in your suit. They wouldn’t let me pay for it. The old lady that owns the place said ‘Supergirls girlfriend, no charge!’ and started laughing.”
Kara stared at her.
“Lena…”
“You better have a good fucking explanation for why your favorite restaurant knows who you really are and not your supposed best friend.”
The tension in their air was palpable, electric. Kara could feel it like the gathering energy in the air before a storm, ready to burst forth with energy and life or mindless destruction. She folded her arms around herself and looked down.
“You do know me,” Kara finally said. “You do know who I really am. You’re the only person who does.”
Lena’s extension was fixed, intense, edging between a scowl and a pout, and Kara realized with a start that she was holding back tears of her own.
“You’re the only person that knows me as me. You know me without Supergirl, but without all the fake stuff I do so people won’t realize I’m Supergirl. I don’t have to pretend to be clumsy with you. You’re not always looking at me like I’m super strong or super fast. I can just be me when I’m with you.”
“You’ve lied to me so many times,” Lena said, after drawing in a deep breath. “Running away from our lunches, telling me wild stories about where you disappear to at work, and I just bought every bit of it. You must think I’m an easy mark.”
“No, never.”
“I’ve always had it in the back of my head. I always thought there was something there, something between us that kept you from really, truly being yourself with me. The way your touches are always so whisper-light and you’re always stealing glances at me. Like you were afraid with every word or movement that you’d give something away.”
“Lena,” Kara began.
“I knew you were hiding something. I had hoped it was something else.”
Kara licked her lips. She quickened her perception, a little trick of will that took her out of sync with the humans around her, processing the world at her natural speed, which made her peers seem almost frozen in place by comparison.
She took this drawn out instant to really look at Lena, truly take her in, savor what she was seeing because it might be the end. She was suddenly heavily, painfully aware that this might be the last time she ever looked on Lena in person.
Great father Rao, she was so beautiful. Not hot or pretty or even gorgeous or sexy, beautiful. She was dressed for the autumn chill in a pea coat and turtleneck and black leggings and her hair was down, letting itself soften into her natural waves. She was without makeup, and Kara suddenly realized that she only ever saw Lena without makeup when she meant to be alone with Kara. When she was her most pure, most true self.
Kara slowed herself again and as she did the world sped up, and she drank in the soft sadness in Lena’s blue-green eyes and all of those things she’d pushed deep down came bubbling to the surface: imagined sighs and the feeling of that lustrous inky hair slipping through her fingers, her name whispered on pillowy lips.
Human thoughts. Alien thoughts. Desires no Kryptonian should even apprehend, much less indulge. The very idea of the non-procreative act was shameful, and to develop these emotional entanglement…
Kara had once mourned her failure, for she had been charged with preserving the ways of her people. Her first command had been to keep Kal Kryptonian.
A task she had failed even within herself.
“You hoped it was something else?”
Lena looked at her so sadly and so sweetly and swallowed.
“Yeah,” she said in a thick voice, “I kinda did.”
Kara smiled in spite of herself. When she sighed, it was as if the weight of a world slid off her shoulders.
“Can’t a girl have two secrets?”
Lena’s eyes widened.
“One day a long time ago, very very far away, a young Kara looked over her shoulder and watched the shockwave shatter the crust of her planet as its core exploded. She lost everything. Her world, her family, her culture, so many things. Tastes. Colors. Places. All gone.”
Lena wrapped her arms around herself, averting her gaze.
“I knew I’d lose you eventually. I just wanted to keep you as long as I could.”
Lena reached up and rubbed at her eyelids with her fingers.
“Do you remember when your mom’s goons threw you off the balcony?”
“Yes,” said Lena.
“Do you remember how I held you when I caught you?”
“I do.”
“I wish I hadn’t lied. I wish I’d never put you down.”
Lena said nothing and did not look up. Kara could hear her heart racing, practically feel the tension in her limbs across the room.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I lied. I’ve always known I could never keep you, I just didn’t want to make it end.”
Lena looked up with tear-wet eyes.
Then she lunged across the room, crossing the gap between them in long strides. Kara Danvers -Kara Zoe-El, Supergirl- was caught almost completely off guard. It wasn’t until Lena was practically charging into her arms, leaping into her, that she remembered to cushion the impact, catch her gently and make sure she didn’t slam herself into an unyielding wall of Kara.
She was so surprised, so shocked into helpless acceptance, that she didn’t offer the slightest residence when Lena reached, grabbed her neck in a firm hold, and pulled her into a kiss. Kara’s stomach did a backflip and she was helpless, undone despite all her strength. For a moment both their eyes opened and they looked at each other in a wordless exchange and Kara began kissing her back in earnest. Lena’s sharp breaths and soft moans instantly kindled a hot need inside her, thrumming like a plucked guitar string, and she effortlessly lifted Lena onto the kitchen counter.
“Holy shit, you’re strong,” Lena breathed.
“Of course I am,” she whispered into Lena’s kiss. “I’m Supergirl.”
And at long last, Kara found something she wanted to taste more than potstickers.
