same old blues

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/38810985.

Rating: Mature
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: F/F
Fandom: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Relationship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Character: Kara Danvers, Lena Luthor, Alex Danvers, Samantha "Sam" Arias,
J'onn J'onzz | Hank Henshaw
Additional Tags: canon divergent from the end of season 4, how i wish lena's 'villain arc'
would have gone, by which i mean less deception and world
domination, and more lena embracing her inner brat in front of god and
everyone, one-sided enemies to convenient inconveniences to lovers,
you'd think this would be angsty but actually it's just lena being
dramatic and horny, so. so horny
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2022-05-05 Completed: 2022-07-20 Chapters: 3/3 Words:
29419

same old blues

by searidings

Summary

so the question becomes: what wouldn't kara do for her?

Notes

did someone say horny enemies to lovers i think someone did and that someone was me <3

title from 'same old blues' by phantogram

See the end of the work for more notes

 Chapter 1

“I once adored her— that demands revenge.”

- A. J. Morrison et al.

It's barely 7AM and she hasn't even had her first cup of coffee when yet another man aims yet
another gun at Lena's face.

She sighs.

A blast of self-immolating purple goo – the third since she'd arrived – torpedoes towards her
unprotected head like a glittering lilac death sentence. She drops, rolls behind the nearest support
column and covers her head as the wall behind her explodes into flames.

This particular one of Lex's hardcore goons doesn't look particularly inclined to go down without a
fight, and Lena's rapidly running out of defences. In fact, the lapels of her blazer are already
smoking. She swats at the pale indigo flames, tutting as another ceiling joist crashes to the floor
behind her. This suit is many things – Balenciaga, for one, and an absolutely devastating cut over
the curve of her ass for another – but flame-retardant it is not.

The goon yells another taunt, no doubt something calamitously witty and horrifically xenophobic,
and Lena decides it might be time to cut her losses. She'll get him another day, come back with a
fire extinguisher and a bigger gun.

She hears the tell-tale whir of his fiery purple goo blaster winding up for another shot and books it
towards the wall of windows. The column she'd been hiding behind detonates upon impact, a
violent violet inferno that singes the ends of her eyelashes. She has just enough time to register the
goon's outraged yell and gracefully flip him the finger before she's crashing straight through the
plate glass and out into the open air fifty stories above National City.

The rushing wind at least extinguishes the last of the flames as she plummets, smouldering, toward
the concrete below. And then suddenly she's slowing, the contents of her stomach protesting loudly
as her body gradually halts its descent, hovers, the begins to gently rise once more.

“I didn't ask you to catch me,” she manages to snap once her breath has caught up with her, pouting
hard at the face attached to the strong arms now cradling her thighs and lower back. “I had it
handled.”

“Oh, sure.” Kara, perfect, handsome, infuriating Kara is gazing at her innocently, nodding in
angelic agreement.

Lena huffs. It pisses her off that Supergirl never has a hair out of place even when she's cracking
through the sound barrier. It pisses her off that she's so damn considerate, floating downwards with
Lena as she'd fallen, slowing their descent to avoid Lena crashing straight into the steel beams of
her arms at full speed. It pisses her off that— well. Suffice to say, Kara pisses her off.

“You totally had it handled,” Kara says with mock sincerity. “I'm sure you've got a parachute
stashed somewhere around here that you were just about to deploy.” Her hands palm Lena's body
none too subtly, coasting over skin-tight material. “I'd be interested to know where exactly you've
hidden it.”

Lena growls, wriggling forcefully enough that Kara has no choice but to stop her impromptu frisk
or risk dropping her completely. “I said I had it handled.”

“Well, if you don't want my help, I'm happy to leave you to it.” Now hovering higher than the
building Lena had leapt out of, Kara makes as if to release her.

Lena doesn't even flinch. It's an empty threat and they both know it. She quirks one unimpressed
brow. “Well, all you've ever done is let me down,” she bites out. “No sense changing the habits of
a lifetime now.”

Kara's jaw tightens, a muscle in her cheek flickering. A thrill of satisfaction zings through Lena's
stomach.

“Where to, then?” Kara asks stonily, all trace of teasing gone.

Lena smirks. Another round won. “L-Corp,” she says beatifically, flicking purple-tinged ash from
her blazer. “Though I must warn you, my office has proto-canons primed to fire automatically on
any Kryptonian that hovers in its airspace for more than sixty seconds, so. Better make it a speedy
drop-off.”

Kara gapes at her, momentarily frozen. “Seriously, Lena?”

“What?” she asks sweetly, making sure to flutter her eyelashes a few times. “You'd prefer if I
didn't defend myself against a superpowered alien that lied to my face for four years? After you'd
spent so long telling me to take better care of myself as well.” She sighs dramatically, lining up the
fatal blow. “I suppose concern for my wellbeing was all just part of the deception, in the end.”

Kara's audibly grinding her teeth as they approach Lena's office, a biting retort brewing inside her
like a gathering storm. “You're welcome,” she snaps as she deposits Lena on her balcony, already
backing away from the railing. “You know, for saving your life.”

“Oh, thank you, Supergirl,” Lena calls theatrically to the rapidly retreating blonde, hand pressed
over her heart. At least Kara has finally amassed enough good sense to take her threats as seriously
as she intends them. “Thank you so much for saving my life. You know, after you ruined it.”

Now hovering a good few hundred metres away from the building, Kara groans loudly enough for
it to still be audible, sending a frustrated burst of laser vision straight up through the clouds.

“Thanks so much for dropping by,” Lena calls, fluttering her fingers as she turns toward the
balcony door. “Don't let the proto-canons hit you in the ass on your way out.”

She wraps her fingers around the handle, waiting for the faint hiss of the biometric lock. “Or do,”
she mutters as she steps inside, knowing the words will be picked up easily by Kryptonian
superhearing. “It's the least you deserve.”

She takes a seat at her desk as a great booming crack echoes across the city, then another, and
another. A quick glance out the window at the cloud of red-tinted dust on the horizon confirms
that, yes, Supergirl is punching some mountains into rubble again. That's got to be the fourth time
this week. She smirks. A new record.

Bitter satisfaction smouldering in her veins, Lena settles in to begin her day.
Ostensibly, officially, she and Supergirl are on the same side.

True to form, her ass of a brother has left an absolutely enormous mess to clean up, and
dismantling the legion of followers Lex had ingrained into every level of the city's bureaucracy is
certainly more than a one-woman job. Supergirl and Lena Luthor have spent the two months since
her brother's untimely death (by death she means murder; by untimely she means she should have
done it years ago) tracking down and rooting out Lex's loyalists, from high-ranking government
officials to entry-level Children of Liberty thugs. On paper – and in the papers – they're the city's
crime-fighting dream team.

No one knows the truth.

No one but Kara and Lena and their respective siblings – one of whom is now very much dead –
have any idea that Supergirl and the one remaining Luthor can scarcely stand to inhabit the same
room. No one knows about the years of deception crowding between them, about the devastation
of the eventual reveal. No one else heard the gurgle of blood in her brother's lungs as he told Lena
the truth, a fatal secret for a lethal price.

No one knows of the endless fights between she and Kara. No one else had witnessed the tears, the
screams, the sobs and the recriminations. No one else overheard the accusations of betrayal, the
declarations of hatred, the pleas for forgiveness that went ungranted.

To the rest of the world, Lena is the lone atoning Luthor, and Supergirl her redeemer. And the only
thing in the universe more potent than her fury at her ex-best friend is her drive to right the wrongs
committed by her bloodline, so Lena lets them believe.

If that means she has to spend her days shoulder to shoulder with the woman who broke her heart,
so be it. She's learning, at least, to have a little fun with it along the way.

The thing is, Kara isn't very good at being her enemy.

She gets flustered and grumpy and snaps back at Lena's incessant needling at times, red-faced and
pouting up a storm. But when her temper cools and her fists unclench she's all anxious eyes and
apologetic lips, working harder than ever to win back Lena's trust, her friendship, her forgiveness.
To win back Lena.

And Lena, she doesn't want that. Kara's lies had cut her deeper than anything had since the death of
her mother, the betrayal of her brother, and she's in no hurry to welcome her back with open arms.

In public, she's happy to maintain an alliance with the city's superpowered sweetheart. It is, after
all, beneficial to the smouldering ruins of the Luthor name, and being on Supergirl's guest list
grants her access to resources and opportunities she couldn't otherwise dream of.

But in private, she reiterates her wrath over and over again, pushing and pushing at Kara's fault
lines until there can be no doubt that she means to shatter her as thoroughly as she herself had been
shattered.

The problem is, Kara doesn't fight back. Outside of a few heat-of-the-moment jabs and grumbles
she's just there, steadfast and hopeful and irritating beyond measure.

Lena doesn't want a friend. She doesn't want a saviour or a partner or a lapdog. She doesn't even
want a punching bag, really. What she wants is an enemy. A nemesis, an adversary, a target for the
rage and betrayal still scratching through her veins.

She wants to be able to lash out at Kara and not feel bad about it. To have her lash right back. It's
the only way she can see to navigate this minefield of her splintered faith, to one day make it out
the other side. To let the fires of her fury rage until they burn themselves out.

But even in this, Kara can't seem to help her out. Instead, her compounded guilt and regret and
whatever other emotion lurks in the depths of those bright blue eyes has her bending to Lena's
every whim even more enthusiastically than she had before everything they'd ever built had
crumbled around them.

Kara, it seems, will do whatever she asks. She breaks into federal facilities to steal items Lena
needs. She grants her unrestricted access to the Fortress of Solitude within the course of a single
conversation, a feat her brother had failed to accomplish in a lifetime. She comes unfailingly when
Lena calls, and plenty of times when she doesn’t. Snatches her out of mid-air, shields her from
bullets, absorbs blows meant for her and many more besides.

Her dedication, her selfless malleability, it doesn't sit well with Lena's image of her ex-best friend.
There wasn't, Lena is convinced, a single honest moment in their friendship. Kara never cared for
her the way she'd professed to, or else she never would have hurt her so deeply. Kara never loved
her, or she wouldn't have broken her heart.

And yet. Recent evidence, annoyingly, does not support this most fundamental belief of Lena's new
mindset. Kara's willingness to show up unfailingly, to take the hits Lena rains on her and keep
coming regardless, paints a somewhat different picture.

There must be, Lena reasons, some other motive at play here. Yet another elaborate deception she's
failing to see, another way for Kara to worm inside and break her down, strip her bare and leave
her reeling.

She'll be damned if she lets herself fall prey to that earnest charm again. Once was more than
enough for one lifetime. So Lena will crack this. She will work with Kara and she will watch her
and she will figure out what her play is, and then she will take her down.

And then, just maybe, she'll finally find some peace.

So the question becomes: what wouldn't Kara do for her? It's an interesting notion to puzzle, and an
even more interesting theory to test.

It had begun as penance, Lena knows. Once she'd shown her hand, made it clear to the blonde that
she knew all about her superpowered double life, Kara had come crawling to her over and over
again. Literally, at times; the image of her best friend on her knees before her, heart-shattered and
sobbing as she'd begged for forgiveness, is not one she's likely to forget.

But it's also not an image Lena can allow herself to trust. Not if she's to have any hope of guarding
her heart against this woman who had, once already, cleaved it in two.

So Lena sat, stone-faced and silent, as Kara had cried her anguished apologies into the dark fabric
of her designer suit. She'd arched a single, wordless brow at the blonde's vow to make it up to her,
to prove herself as loyal and true as she'd always claimed to be.

And then, she'd sat back and watched her try.

She'd watched Kara as Supergirl give interview after interview that distanced Lena from her
maniacal brother, that positioned her firmly on the side of the good guys. She'd watched those red
and blue shoulders tighten in irritation as reporter after reporter dragged the Luthor name through
the mud, airing the laundry list of sins committed by her bloodline in front of the whole damn
world.

“Not the Luthors,” Supergirl had growled, over and over again. “Lex.”

She'd watched Kara receive a Pulitzer prize for her whistleblowing exposé on Lex, watched her use
almost her entire acceptance speech to talk about Lena instead. And she'd watched her make – and,
thus far, keep to – the promise to dedicate herself to rooting out Lex's loyalists, freeing the city
from every last remnant of Luthor-sponsored extremism.

That's what they do, now. Kara has Catco, has the DEO and Alex and J’onn and Nia and Brainy
and Kelly. Lena has L-Corp, and none of the above. And in and between their other
responsibilities, Super and Luthor team up, day after day exacting a systematic takedown of every
official in National City and beyond that exudes so much as a whiff of Lex-leaning sympathies.

It's no easy feat. Even with first-hand knowledge of exactly how deep, how all-encompassing Lex's
manipulation can run, the sheer number of supporters her brother had managed to convert to his
cause before his long overdue murder staggers her.

Lena manages to fell a large swathe of them in one swoop when she has the bright idea to freeze all
her brother's accounts, stopping his substantial outpouring of bribes dead in its tracks. But a
disconcerting number of his supporters remain, from state governors to White House janitors, and
many of them seem less than inclined to go down without a fight.

It's hard work, exhausting and gratifying and dangerous in near equal measure. After the third time
an overzealous Lex fanatic takes it upon themselves to visit Lena at her office armed with a
baseball bat and a gun, Kara gives her a signal watch, tells her to use it whenever she needs her.

“I don't need you,” Lena spits, as though if she can only make the words drip with enough venom,
they'll be poisoned by the truth.

Kara, damn her, doesn't even bother to answer. Just smooths her thumb beneath the fresh blood
coagulating along Lena's left cheekbone with a wry arch of her brow.

So, whatever. She'll take the watch, and use it too. After everything Kara's done to her, all the pain
she's caused, saving Lena's ass whenever she needs it really seems like the least she could do.

And, fuck, if Lena wants to use her stupid fucking signal watch adorned with her stupid fucking
house crest and colours to call Kara and tell her to bring her a pizza when she's working late at the
office, then she's more than entitled to that, too. She never does it, but it's a nice thought.

So. What wouldn't Kara do for her? If that line in the sand exists, Lena hasn't crossed it yet.

Kara flies her around the city, around the country, making frequent trips to DC with Lena in her
arms so they can clap handcuffs on yet another scumbag on Lex's payroll. She pulls every DEO
string she can for intel on Lex's supporters, borrows and barters and sometimes outright steals tech
and weapons that will make their capture easier. She shows up unfailingly at all hours of the day
and night, whenever Lena finds herself in a tight spot. Catches her when she leaps from bridges,
balconies, cliffs.

Kara's just there, eager and earnest, whenever Lena needs her. The knowledge lodges itself like a
splinter in the icy shell of her cold, unfeeling heart.

She likes to push it sometimes, prodding at that splinter until it smarts.

The day one of the top Children of Liberty thugs kidnaps her on her way home from spin class,
bundling her into a helicopter and flying her a good fifty miles out over the middle of the Pacific,
Lena doesn't even bother to press her signal watch until she's already been shoved out of the
cockpit.

She's falling fast, the diamond-bright surface of the ocean rushing up to meet her, yet her fingers
pressing at that goddamn crest are lazy, unhurried. And still, still, Kara appears between Lena and
danger, wide-eyed and breathless and so warm against her in all the wrong places.

Kara's devotion, her malleable fervour is so incredible to Lena that she can't help but push it that
little bit further. When their feet touch down on her office balcony once more, the hero all nervous
eyes and wringing fingers at her back, Lena thinks, why not.

“Kara,” she says slowly, firmly. “Jump.”

And before she even has time to blink the Kryptonian is up and off the floor, hovering a good three
feet above the balcony tiles as she stares at Lena with wide, expectant eyes.

Well, fuck. She hadn't even asked how high?

And that, that is why Lena pushes. Why she prods and keeps prodding at that splinter, just to see if
it will split. The thing about it, the troubling, infuriating thing, is that it never does.

It's just another ordinary day taking down ordinary assholes of her brother's extremist persuasion,
when something quite extraordinary happens instead.

She's in an abandoned warehouse somewhere out by the docks, because of course she is. Of course
she's here, beneath cracking corrugated roofing and support beams more unstable than her personal
life, breathing the salt and kerosene scented air as she faces down a handful of nasty looking thugs
a solid five miles away from the nearest person who might hear her if she screamed. God forbid
the outrageous outpouring of her brother's bribe money ever be used to secure more comfortable
accommodation for these little showdowns.

The thugs – what would one call a group of meatheads, anyway? A pack? A flock? – circle her
menacingly, yellowing teeth bared.

Lena sighs, mentally running through her schedule for the day. She's got a conference call with her
Munich investors at ten and a meeting with her head of R&D at eleven, neither of which are
particularly reschedulable. That leaves her with a scant ninety minutes to dispatch of this particular
– gaggle? Gang? Pod? – and make it back to the office in time for a quick reapplication of lipstick.

Lena sucks her teeth. Piece of cake.

She hadn't told Kara about this particular clean up. She never does, until there's no other option.
Calling for back up when everything goes tits up is one thing, but pre-warning? Joint planning?
Collaboration? That all smacks a little too much of partnership for Lena's taste.

Besides, she may not possess the preternatural advantage of sun-given strength and speed, but
Lena Luthor is no damsel in a tower. With a trip of her fingers over the modified signal watch at
her wrist, a solid silver-green gauntlet materialises around her forearm with a satisfying click.

Her brother's Lexosuit had been horrifying, yes, but not without its uses. With a few weeks of
delicate tinkering and an agenda orientated toward helping rather than destroying the planet, she's
managed to convert it into an extremely effective goon-fighting machine.

The first of the – herd? Pride? School? – charges her suddenly, eyes narrowed and spittle flying.
With an easy flick of her wrist Lena freezes him in place with a proton beam from her gauntlet,
tossing him casually out of range like a ragdoll.

His compatriots shriek in outrage, and then three of them are on her at once, a whirlwind of fleshy
biceps and booze-soaked breath. It's almost painfully easy to keep them at bay – a proton blast
here, a well-timed left hook there – and with the space in her brain not required to fight these
sentient beer bongs Lena finds herself surprised and a little disappointed by how simple the whole
mess has become.

That is, until the one meathead of the meathead collective she hadn't been keeping an eye on rushes
her from behind, catching her midway through subduing two of his pals. Lena's already turning,
gauntlet primed, ready to dodge yet another liquor-loose predictable attack, when something
collides with her kidney with the force of a steel beam.

Lena's breath chokes out of her, her vision blackening at the edges as she stumbles, gasping for air.
The two she'd been subduing break free and join the third, the one with iron rods instead of bones,
the one who's bare hands should not have been able to hit that hard, all three of them hemming her
in.

Tasting blood and humming with pain and adrenaline, she tries to straighten. Tries to get her
fingers on her gauntlet, on her signal watch. Tries to open her mouth to deliver yet another
devastatingly witty rejoinder to buy herself some time.

No such luck.

The one with mallets for hands steps forward, swings, and with the inevitable crush of a comet
striking the surface of the world his fist connects with Lena's temple, and she's gone.

The last thing she registers before the starburst of agony turns her world to quiet darkness is the
gleam of hit jet-black eyes.

It's embarrassing is what it is, waking up in the DEO's med bay with Alex Danvers’ supercilious
face gazing down at her.

"Morning, sunshine,” the redhead grins cheerily, seemingly enjoying Lena's loud groan and
accompanying grimace far too much. In the current Super-Luthor spat, it's no secret whose side
Alex has taken.

“I'm not dead, then,” Lena establishes wearily, pressing her fingertips gingerly to her throbbing
temple and wincing at the sizeable lump making itself at home atop her cranium.

“And with your famed powers of expert deduction still intact,” Alex deadpans, flicking through a
rapid-fire slideshow of scans and x-rays on her tablet.

“What's the damage?” she inquires, wincing at the deep ache pulling at her kidney as she swings
her legs over the side of the gurney.
“Renal haematoma caused by blunt force trauma,” Alex reels off, bored. Her eyes flick to Lena's
fingers, carefully cupping her side as she fights down a litany of curses. “Though I'm guessing you
already knew about that.”

Lena narrows her eyes. Alex could at least pretend not to be having a good time right now. Bedside
manner, and all that.

“And I don't think you have a concussion, though you are sporting a rather lovely watercolour of
bruises,” the redhead continues, motioning Lena toward the mirror on her desk. Lena complies,
then sighs. The right side of her face from the jaw up is covered by a swirling mass of blue-black
contusions, her left cheekbone scraped red raw from where she'd hit the ground like a sack of
bricks.

She turns away from the mirror to find Alex beaming at her beatifically. "Good thing purple's your
colour, huh.”

Lena's face pinches into a too-sweet smile, nose wrinkling to grin fakely at her unsympathetic
nurse.

“Keep an eye on that head trauma overnight,” Alex continues unaffected. “Otherwise, you're fine.
I'd be less interested in which injuries you sustained, and more interested in how. The force of that
punch would have shattered your skull if the angle had been a few degrees off.”

“It felt like getting hit by a concrete glove,” Lena sighs, too weary to fight her agreement.

Alex hums, a deep crinkle forming between her eyebrows. “No human should be able to hit that
hard. Not without help.”

“He had help,” comes a voice from the doorway, a swirl of cool air tinged with the scent of rain
and moondust announcing Kara's sudden presence. She's across the room in less than a heartbeat,
warm fingertips tracing the smattering of bruising over Lena's temple as their owner sucks her teeth
in a sympathetic wince.

Lena ducks sharply away, and Kara's hand hovers sadly in mid-air for a moment before dropping
back to her side. Resigned, she turns back to face her sister.

"He had Harun-El.”

The rest of the story, Lena gleans in fits and starts from various inhabitants of the DEO.

Kara had arrived at the warehouse – without the invitation of Lena's finger on her signal watch, but
with the apparent invitation of Lena's thundering heartbeat in her ears – to find Lena already
crumpled unconscious on the ground. She'd fought off the four regular goons with ease, and the
one remaining super turbo goon with somewhat less ease, aided as he was by the black Kryptonite
swirling in his bloodstream.

After a lengthy tussle and the eventual deployment of a handy pair of power-dampening handcuffs
the turbo goon had been deposited in a holding cell, and Lena had been deposited in a hospital bed.

Kara doesn't ask her why she hadn't called for help, and Lena doesn't thank her for providing it
regardless. Neither one of them mention the implicit admission of one set of superpowered ears
tuning into one specific heartbeat with neither invitation nor permission. Bringing it up right now,
while her face is still the colour of a flattened grape, feels a little too close ungrateful. Even if Kara
is being particularly unbearable today.

“You drooled on my suit, you know. While I was flying you here.”

Lena's mouth drops open. “I did not—”

“You did,” Kara says around a mouthful of chicken Caesar wrap. “But it's okay, I don't mind. It
was cute. Cute little unconsciousness dribble.”

“Kara, I swear—”

“Sleepy drool. No big deal, Lena. Happens to the best of us.”

“I have never once in my life—”

“We can just add the dry-cleaning bill to your tab.” Kara grins a wide, half-masticated grin.
“Underneath all the times I've saved your ass.”

“I didn't ask—” Lena starts heatedly, but Kara's already shot out the door.

Temporarily defeated, Lena beats a tired retreat back to her penthouse. Cancels her meetings for
the rest of the week and crawls into bed with the express intention of sleeping straight through to
the following evening.

She would have managed, too, were it not for the Kryptonian who creeps into her bedroom every
two hours on the dot like some kind of solar-powered alarm clock, waking her up to ensure her
possible concussion hasn't caused her to spontaneously die.

“I,” Lena slurs, sleep-thick and groggy on the third of these night-time visits, “am installing
Kryptonite-laced locks on my doors first thing tomorrow.”

“Of course you are, sweetheart,” Kara agrees mildly, prodding at Lena's shoulder until her
fluttering eyelids open fully. “Now, are you nauseous? Any visual impairment? How many fingers
am I holding up?”

"How many fingers am I holding up,” Lena grumbles, snaking one hand out from under the quilt to
flip the blonde an inelegant bird before sleep reclaims her once more.

She's picked up the next evening and flown reluctantly back to the DEO for Alex to check her over
once more, an indignity she agrees to only to prevent the inevitable media storm that would be
generated by Lena Luthor showing up to Urgent Care with a face full of bruises.

Alex decrees her as fine as she can be with the imprint of an iron fist in her skull and her kidney,
and releases her from the med bay only to corral her toward the command centre. It's only her
lingering tiredness and the faint throbbing behind her eyes that prevents her twisting to bite at the
fingers the redhead has wrapped around her bicep like a feral animal.

“So. Harun-El,” J’onn starts with his usual miserable inflection when they're all gathered around
the central console. “When we took down your brother we thought we got it all.”

Lena presses a pointed hand to her temple. “You evidently thought wrong.”

The Martian doesn't even have the good grace to look a little abashed.
“So there are still some caches left,” Alex says, as if this is a startling revelation and not an obvious
conclusion. “Caches that Lex's supporters are using— why? To continue their superhuman
mission? To rebuild the Children of Liberty?”

“It doesn't matter why,” Kara cuts in, her eyes never leaving Lena's face even as she addresses her
sister. “It only matters that we find it all and destroy it, so they can't hurt anyone else.”

J’onn nods, his calculating gaze flicking to Lena. “A team-up?”

“No, thank you,” Lena says stiffly. “I'm doing perfectly fine dismantling my brother's legions of
demon spawn alone.”

Alex scoffs so loudly the other agents in the room stop working to stare. “Oh, absolutely,” she
sneers. “The unconscious woman who was deposited in my med bay yesterday sure looked like she
was doing perfectly fine.”

“Miss Luthor—”

J’onn no longer addresses her by her first name. That fact is almost as painful as it is necessary.

“Miss Luthor, like it or not, you are already in an unofficial alliance with the DEO,” J’onn says
carefully. “We can help each other. We need each other.”

Lena's blood, already simmering, begins to boil in her veins. She stares at the ring of faces, the ring
of faces who had conspired to betray her, to keep her in the dark, to make her out to be the fool
she'd tried so hard never to become. Her lip curls.

“You made it crystal clear that none of you needed me when you lied to my face for four years,”
she spits, low and vicious. “And I am in no such alliance with the DEO. Believe it or not, I'm not in
the habit of collaborating with people I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them. I have never
been your employee, J’onn J’onnz, and I will never be your partner.”

J’onn's brow furrows. “But, you and Supergirl—”

Fire races beneath Lena's skin. “What's between she and I,” she hisses, hiking a thumb in the
direction of the wide-eyed blonde, “is between she and I. It's none of your concern, and I would
appreciate it if you'd act as such. I am nothing to you, and you are nothing to me. I'm grateful for
the medical assistance, Director Danvers,” she says crisply, turning on her heel. “Let's leave our
alliance at that.”

Kara catches her, of course, before her dramatic exit can really take full effect.

"Lena, Lena,” she calls over and over, making such a scene that she has no choice to stop in the
corridor lest the blonde decide to get her attention by breaking into song.

“I get that you don't want anything to do with them,” Kara mumbles once they're finally face to
face, working the toe of her boot against the concrete floor. “But I, well, I'm here for you, you
know. Whatever I can do. Whatever you need. You know that, right?”

Lena doesn't even bother with an acerbic retort, half because the pain in her chest caused by Kara’s
deception is still too raw, and half because she does know that, despite it all. She just quirks one
unimpressed brow, and leaves it at that.
“I'll keep trying, Lena,” the blonde hushes, low and earnest to evade the hearing of the agents
milling around them. “I'll keep trying to make it up to you. I'll keep trying to get you back.
Forever.”

Lena blinks once, deadpan and inflectionless. “Lucky me.”

“So, I was thinking,” the blonde continues, back to her normal buoyancy once more. “I know
you're going to keep going after these guys alone, no matter how many times I tell you it's too
dangerous. And if you won't let me come with you from the start, then I at least want to know that
you're as well-prepared as you can possibly be.”

She steps forward, halving the distance between them, cutting off Lena's indignant retort with
wide, shimmering eyes. Those eyes, Lena thinks hatefully. Those earnest, eager, fucking gorgeous
blue eyes. How can they look the same, after everything that's passed between them? How can they
possibly hold so much love, while also possessing the power to rip her apart?

“I want you to be safe,” Kara whispers, and Lena hates how much she doesn't hate her in this
moment. “I can't see you hurt like that again.”

No. No. This, see. This is how it happens. This is how Kara worms her way in once more, and the
enemy within the fortress walls is far more dangerous than the enemy without.

She hardens her face and her heart. “My safety is none of your concern.”

Kara doesn't even bother to point out the falsity of the statement. She just fixes Lena with a long,
pointed look that would have had a lesser woman squirming in their Louboutins.

“So,” she continues, as if Lena hadn't spoken. “I was thinking, since now we're dealing not just
with idiots but with idiots hopped up on Harun-El, it might be time to upgrade your self-defence
tactics.”

Lena's stomach sinks. She has a feeling that she knows where this is going, and she hates it just as
much as the blonde appears to be enjoying it. “No.”

Kara beams. “Yes,” she crows. “I can teach you.”

Lena's eyes roll heavenwards. “No way.”

“You need to learn to defend yourself against this new type of threat, Lena,” Kara says
authoritatively. It makes Lena want to smack her. “You need to practice.”

Her teeth grind. “I'll build a training simulator.”

"No simulation can compare to the real thing,” Kara says smugly. “You need to really feel it, to
learn the techniques of fighting advanced humans, non-humans. And who's got two superpowered
thumbs and a wide open schedule?” the blonde beams, hiking both thumbs toward her own chest
with a broad grin. “This Kryptonian.”

Lena sighs so heavily she almost falls over. “Surely you don't mean—”

"Train with me,” Kara interrupts soundly, looking far too satisfied with the turn of events for
Lena's taste. “I'm the closest you'll get to facing someone injected with Harun-El, without risking
them actually killing you. You can calibrate your suit so it's better equipped, learn how to fight
most effectively. I'll teach you the strengths to avoid and the weaknesses to exploit.”
Internally, Lena growls. She's smart enough to know when she's been beat, and stubborn enough
not to go down without a fight. Unfortunately for Kara, it's a lethal combination.

Something snarling and bitter curls through her throat like smoke, dark and dangerous. She takes a
step closer, allows the fine bones of her wrist to graze the blonde's forearm light as a feather.

"Have you got some weaknesses you'd like me to exploit, Supergirl?” she hums, sultry smooth and
saccharine sweet as she gazes up at the blonde from beneath her fluttering lashes.

Kara, bless her heart, appears to momentarily swallow her own tongue.

Lena only smirks, turning on her heel and accidentally-on-purpose whipping her long ponytail in
the blonde’s face as she makes her way toward the DEO training room.

Kara may have cornered her into this, but that doesn't mean Lena's planning to let her out of it
unscathed.

As soon as the door has sealed behind them, Kara fiddles with a control panel on the wall until the
sickly green hue of Kryptonite fills the room.

Despite herself, Lena flinches. And, okay, what the fuck. What does she care if Kara's shoulders
tighten in obvious discomfort, if her mouth twists in silent pain? She doesn't. She doesn't, she
doesn't, she doesn't.

“You don't have to do that,” she says before she can think better of it. The words are heavy and
foreign on her tongue. She hates how they feel in her mouth, hates how they sound in her ears. She
says them anyway. “We can train without Kryptonite.”

"Oh, this isn't for your benefit,” Kara says with a pained little smile, one that absolutely does not
land like a stick of dynamite in one of the many fissures of Lena's cracked and crevassed heart,
forcing it to widen even further.

“It's for my peace of mind,” the blonde continues as she gathers her loose hair into a ponytail,
snagging it tight with an elastic from her wrist. “I don't want to hurt you.”

"That must be a recent development in your morality,” Lena bites out, any latent sympathy for the
blonde disappearing back into the gaping maw of resentment clouding her chest.

Kara ignores the barb, securing her hair tie with a sharp snap. "The emitters are on 18%,” she says
with a barely detectable grimace. “I'm still stronger than you but I won't seriously injure you. And
you can hit me without breaking your hand.”

Lena rolls her eyes. “Promises, promises.”

Again, the blonde ignores her. “So, the Harun-El makes humans erratic, but their attacks are pretty
predictable,” she says, gesturing for Lena to join her on the raised platform that constitutes the
training ring. "They go for the easy in, and they're strong. Whatever you do, don't let them get a
good grip on you.”

Kara straightens, tapping her fingertips against her breastbone. “Okay. Come at me.”

Well. Lena doesn't need to hear that invitation twice. She rushes Kara, ducking at the last second to
convert her obvious frontal attack into a shoulder to the softer target of the blonde's belly. Kara
huffs out a surprised breath and Lena's blood runs hot in victory for a moment as she forces the
Kryptonian backwards, feet sliding across the smooth floor. Her self-defence coach would be
proud.

But the victory is momentary, as a second later Kara's arms lock around her waist and suddenly
Lena is upside down, all the blood in her body rushing down to her head.

Faster than she can blink she's being spun, shoved backwards and flipped until her chest is pressed
to the wall, cheek grazing the rough concrete. Her arm is pinned behind her back, immobilised in
such a way that any attempt at escape would dislocate her shoulder.

Kara's body crowds against her back, fingers hot on Lena's wrist, thighs firm and strong against her
own. “Harun-El gives humans strength without skill,” the blonde pants, millimetres from Lena's
cheek. “You can't hope to beat them through brute force.”

The smooth jut of her pelvis grinds surreptitiously against Lena's ass, Kara's broad shoulders
dwarfing her frame entirely. Lena's breathing hitches, heart machine-gunning against her ribcage.

"They're all brawn and no brain,” the blonde hums, and Lena forces herself not to shiver at the
exhale that hits her exposed neck. “So you have to use yours. Your mind’s what will save you.”

Lena clenches her jaw. “Ow,” she hisses through her teeth. "Kara, you're hurting me.”

The blonde releases her instantly, as Lena had known she would, eyes wide and apology already
forming on her lips. Lena uses the moment of distraction to twist and duck, takes advantage of her
newfound freedom to slice her shin across the back of Kara's knees. The hero buckles instantly and
Lena follows her down, landing heavily with her knees on either side of Kara's hips as she grapples
with her flailing arms, pinning her wrists to the ground.

Kara gapes up at her, winded, genuinely immobilised by Lena's grip on the pressure point at her
wrist thanks to the low hum of the Kryptonite emitters. “What the hell was that?” she gasps, wild
strands of hair sticking to her flushed cheeks.

"That,” Lena pants triumphantly, “was me using my mind to save myself.”

Kara's brow crinkles, pink lips pouting. “You know Lex's cronies won't go easy on you just
because you say ouch.”

"No?” Lena arches an eyebrow, pressing the blonde's hands harder into the concrete. “Then maybe
you shouldn't, either.”

Kara's frown deepens, a muscle in her cheek flickering. “What's the matter?” Lena goads, relishing
the breadth of Kara's trim waist between her spread thighs. She leans in close until their noses are
almost touching, fluttering the tips of her fingers over the exposed skin of Kara's inner wrist and
feeling her abs tighten as she gasps.

“Afraid to fight me for real, are you?” she pushes, enjoying the way Kara's jaw clenches. “Has
Supergirl gone soft?”

It's easy, it's painfully easy, to work Kara up this way. It feels cruel, almost, in its simplicity; like
taking candy from a baby. Like taking candy from a baby who's holding the candy out in offering
beneath a glowing neon sign that reads steal me, please.

“You can't kill me, not like this,” Lena pants against Kara's open mouth, shrugging a shoulder in
the direction of the Kryptonite emitters. “And it's not like we're friends. No reason for you to go
easy on me. So,” she smirks as Kara's face darkens, her teeth grinding. “Why don't you show me
what you've got?”

The last thing Lena registers is Kara's tongue darting out to wet her spit-slicked lips before she's
sailing weightless through the air. The Kryptonian doesn't even let her feel the inevitable impact
with the opposite wall, speeding across the room and fisting a hand in the collar of Lena's tight
black combat jacket to spin her in mid-air, knocking her body to the ground. Lena's barely caught
her breath when Kara's tugging her to her feet again, forcing her backwards with a series of jabs
and feints that stretch the outer limits of Lena's lifetime of self-defence experience.

She manages to land a single hit to Kara's ribcage which, she realises a split second too late, was
the blonde's intention all along. Kara uses Lena's momentum to duck beneath her second fist,
whipping a corner of her cape out to snag around Lena's ankle.

Lena hits the ground again, hard, blinking up at the drab grey ceiling as she tries to catch her
breath. Kara's face appears at the centre of the white lights swarming her vision, pink-cheeked and
breathing hard. “Enough?” she puffs, holding out a hand.

Something hot and molten cracks open in the centre of Lena's chest, spreading like magma through
her veins. No one, no one gets the better of Lena Luthor. Especially not this overgrown cheerleader
in a glorified baby romper.

She latches onto the hand extended in her direction, tugging hard as she swings her shin against
Kara's ankles to knock her legs out from under her. Then they're scrambling to face each other
again across the training ring, both a little winded, both utterly unwilling to back down.

Lena lets the pain and rage and heartbreak and betrayal of Kara's deception light up each cell of her
body like electricity through water. She flies at the blonde like a banshee, shoving and slapping
and clawing, all training and finesse lost in the wake of her unbridled ferocity.

It seems to be all Kara can do to try and contain her, grappling for purchase against Lena's body as
she ducks and dodges flailing limbs. After a few breathless moments of furious stalemate Lena
finds herself bundled back against the training room wall, this time face to face with her adversary
as the blonde struggles to immobilise her. She ends with one forearm pinned against her own chest
in an iron grip, the other wrist restrained against the wall above her head.

“Stop,” Kara pants, leaning her weight heavily into Lena's body. Whether it's intended to secure
her immobilization or is just a result of the blonde's Kryptonite-induced exhaustion, she doesn't
know.

“Stop struggling,” the Kryptonian breathes, tone bordering on pleading. “This isn't what I— you're
not learning anything like this.”

“I think I've learned everything I need to know,” Lena hisses, tugging hard at the arm Kara's pinned
to her chest and grimacing at the resulting friction burn.

"Lena, please. I want to help you,” Kara pants, pressing Lena more roughly against the wall when
she tries to squirm free. “I want to teach you.”

Exhausted by the effort of trying to shift Kara's leaden weight off her body, Lena spits a rogue
strand of hair from her mouth with a huff. She might not have a hope of beating Supergirl even with
Kryptonite emitters but, as the blonde had so kindly reminded her, hand to hand combat is not the
only tool in Lena's arsenal.
“Is that really want you want?” she asks, pitching her voice low and suggestive as she moves her
hips again, not fighting now but pushing, pressing. Wide blue eyes blink back at her dumbly and
Lena allows the corner of her mouth to quirk, watching the way Kara's gaze tracks the movement.

“Is it?” Lena hums, fluttering the fingers of her pinned hand so the backs of her nails just barely
skate the angle of the blonde's jaw. “You've got me here, pinned to a wall, and the only thing you
want to do is teach me?”

It's cruel, maybe, to exploit Kara like this. Or it would be cruel, if Lena's own cheeks weren't also
heating up at the prospect, if her pulse wasn't pounding wildly beneath the blonde's fingertips and
all the blood in her body weren't migrating south with pinpoint precision.

"What is it that you really want to do, Kara?” she manages to ask, husked and smouldering.

The grip pinning her wrist to the wall loosens, the blonde's fingers snaking up to rest lightly in the
cradle of Lena's curled palm instead. Kara thumbs deliberately over the delicate protrusions of
Lena's wrist as her pink tongue darts out to wet her lips once more, and Lena feels her mouth go
dry.

“Oh, Lena,” Kara breathes, a low rumble in her chest that hits Lena square between her legs. The
blonde's grip on her other arm loosens, relinquishing her hold on Lena's forearm in favour of
skimming her fingernails down the length of Lena's side.

Lena's hips twitch involuntarily and Kara counters the movement with one of her own, pressing
their bodies together so sharply that Lena gasps. She leans in close, the backs of her fingers
brushing Lena's tangled hair from her neck and shoulder to clear a path, breath hot and damp
against her ear.

“You don't want to know.”

A tiny sound, high-pitched and desperate, builds in the back of Lena's throat. By the time it pushes
its way out of her mouth, Kara is gone.
 Chapter 2

"It is not enough to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed."

- Terrance Hayes

There are no more training sessions, after that.

Kara continues to badger her incessantly about upping her self-defence skills to help her handle the
latest batch of Harun-El hooligans. Lena, mostly out of spite and only a little bit out of fear of her
own traitorous libido, continues to refuse.

Operation: De-Lexify National City continues much as it had ever since the death of her brother.
Lena gets tip-offs regarding the location and affiliation of her brother's devotees, and sets to
busting their balls for them armed with a souped-up gun and a metric tonne of unearned
confidence.

It only sometimes doesn't pay off. She detains four Lexophiles this way over the course of the next
week, two of whom are flying higher than steel-armoured kites on stolen Harun-El.

This, she feels, is a fairly respectable tally. At least, until the fifth goon – huge, mean, and so burly
she probably wouldn't have been able to take him down even without the superhuman cocktail
bubbling through his veins – crushes her Lexosuit gauntlet into atoms with his bare fist and
proceeds to lock the thickset bulk of his biceps around her chest, squeezing tight.

Eyes bulging, lungs bursting, it's all Lena can do to slam the open face of her signal watch against
her captor's ribcage in the hope that some part of his enormous girth will press down on the
emergency button for her.

Kara's there before she can even try – and fail – to suck in another breath. It all happens so quickly;
one moment the oxygen is being wrung from her body like blood from a rag and the next, the
clammy sweat of the meathead's arms around her is replaced by a cool softness, gentle hands
scooping her clear of her collision course with the ground.

“Lena,” comes that horrible, beautiful voice from somewhere above and beyond her swimming
vision. Damp fingers brush her hair back from her cheeks. “Are you hurt?”

Gasping and choking, it takes a solid ten seconds for Lena to suck a single breath back into her
protesting lungs. It takes ten more for her to gather enough oxygen to articulate her response.

“What the fuck does it look like?”

"Yeah, right,” Kara mutters, seemingly distracted by something below the level of Lena's eyes. Her
chest, she realises— is she bleeding? Fuck, did the meathead also manage to stab her at some point
while she was busy being distracted by choking to death?

Struggling to her elbows, Lena forces her white-spotted gaze down to her own torso. No blood, she
notes. A strong start. No protruding daggers, no burns or bruises or, really, any cause for concern
at all. So what, then, is Kara looking at with such incredibly focused— ah.
Yes. Right. So. It appears, upon closer inspection, that at some point during their tussle, the
meathead's claw-like nails had caught in the front of Lena's thin base layer, ripping it open from
shoulder to navel.

“Kara,” she hisses at the blonde still staring at the pale green lace of the bra exposed by her
current state of disarray with an expression much akin to a milk-drunk baby. Wide blue eyes snap
guiltily back to her face and Lena gestures weakly to where their hulking adversary is clambering
out of the hole in the alley wall Kara had blasted him into. “If you could focus just a little longer,
honey.”

That's how it goes, most of the time. Lena either takes down her nemeses alone, or else she fails to
take them down and calls for eleventh hour Kryptonian backup. Kara arrives in a whirlwind of
vicious punches and panicked eyes, flattening whichever foe had gotten the better of Lena that day
before turning to her with a frantic concern that Lena invariably bats away.

Kara comes to her aid in the middle of the workday and in the middle of the night. She leaves
Catco, leaves the DEO, leaves dinner and breakfast and free donut day at her local café, all to show
up unfailingly whenever Lena calls. She arrives fully suited and booted, she arrives fully pyjama-ed
and slipper-ed. She arrives, once, in hip-hugging miniature running shorts and a slate grey sports
bra, unbrushed hair still dripping wetly onto her shoulder straps.

“I had literally just,” she pants as she flips a charging Children of Liberty hooligan neatly over one
shoulder, flattening another two with a well-timed blast of freeze breath, “gotten out of the shower.
I think I might have left the water running.”

Lena, dry-mouthed and panting as she watches droplets of water soak into the thin fabric
highlighting the swell of Kara's chest, cannot even manage an apology.

Two weeks after her first encounter with supercharged adversaries, Lena hits the jackpot. In the
depths of a private lab belonging to a geneticist she'd long suspected of harbouring Lex-leaning
sympathies Lena discovers a cache of Harun-El the size of a small car.

There's no hesitation this time. Her fingers are on her signal watch before she's even fully through
the door. Kara materialises, blessedly fully clothed, hands stacked on trim hips as she appraises the
stash.

“Nice,” she whistles through her teeth, long fingers tapping absently against the faint lines of her
abdominals that Lena is definitely not ogling through skin-tight spandex. “How are we gonna get
rid of it?”

"That's what I called you for, muscles,” Lena mutters derisively. “I can't even lift it.”

"The offer to train with me always stands,” Kara hums as she appraises the stash, measuring her
arm span against the width of the enormous crates. “I could still help you, get you all worked up.
Out,” she corrects with a gasp, wide-eyed, face flushing a gratifying shade of puce. “Get you
worked out, I meant. Work you out. Give you a workout— oh, Rao.”

Lena snorts. “Got a passion for fitness and physique, do you, Supergirl?”

Kara's pink cheeks are radiating heat like a burning star. “Only yours.”

Her eyes widen comically as her own words register. “No, I mean, I didn't—” she struggles as Lena
sniggers loudly behind the fingertips she presses to her lips. You know, like a lady.
“I didn't mean, you know, your physique,” Kara tries again, hands flailing desperately in the air as
if attempting to convey the truth of what she feels for Lena's body. “Just, you know. Your
physique.”

“Kara,” Lena interrupts, fighting hard to ignore the heated weight of those blessed blue eyes roving
over every inch of her frame. "For the love of God. Shut up.”

Kara's mouth snaps obediently shut. In the charged silence that follows, her gaze never deviates
from the trail it's scorching across the length and breadth of Lena's body, and suddenly it's not just
Kryptonian cheeks that are flushing.

Lena forces down a heavy swallow as the quiet between them lengthens, the tension stretching taut.
She notices the exact moment Kara notices the uptick of her heartbeat, blue eyes flicking to her
chest, and suddenly the expression on the blonde's face is not merely desperate but desperately
interested.

Kara's shoulders square, the beginning of a smirk making itself known at the corner of her lips.
Low and husked and maintaining torturous, torrid eye contact the entire time, she steps forward.

“You gonna make me?”

Which, alright. Fuck her.

Fuck her, the filthy perfidious lust demons in the darkest corners of Lena's mind agree
enthusiastically. She douses them in a bucket of ice water, squaring her own shoulders to match.
No. Fuck her.

“If you'd be so kind,” she manages haughtily, gesturing toward the crates upon crates of Harun-El
and snapping the two of them firmly back to the matter at hand.

Kara only shrugs, pink lips still quirking up in the shadow of a smirk that Lena would like very
much to slap clean off her handsome face. With barely a huff of exertion she scoops the whole lot
up and shoots out the door. A moment later Lena sees a red and blue blur streak by the window as
her superpowered lackey flies the vile stuff into space.

Lena takes the momentary respite to slap herself resoundingly in the face. “Get it together,” she
hisses, praying Kara's far enough away by now not to overhear.

A few deep, cleansing, diaphragmatic breaths later, her cheeks have returned to their usual colour
and Lena has returned to her usual sour mood. She doesn't bother thanking Kara when the blonde
returns, flying her across the city and depositing her back on her office balcony with a flourish.

"That must have been their main source of Harun-El,” Kara chirps proudly, triceps and deltoids
flexing beneath her suit as she preens in the slanting sun. “And now it's orbiting Jupiter. Not bad
for a morning's teamwork, huh?”

“We,” Lena articulates slowly and deliberately, carefully looking anywhere but at the posturing
superhero seeming to fill her entire balcony, “are not a team.”

The tip of a pink tongue pokes out between plush lips. “Hey, whatever you say,” Kara simpers,
turning on her heel. “Partner.”

If the blonde hears the litany of curses Lena hurls after her into the crisp morning air, she doesn’t
seem to mind.
There's no more Harun-El.

Each one of Lena's black Kryptonite scans has come up clean. The last remaining cache of the foul
stuff has been launched into space, alongside the Kryptonian elements any remaining Children of
Liberty thugs would need to make more.

There's no more Harun-El and so, the threat is over. Her brother's lackeys – at least, the ones who
aren't powered by alien drugs – are a comparative walk in the park. The threat is over.

And so, Lena turns her attention to other things. And so, work on the suit she'd been making for
Kara – the one with needles containing Harun-El antidote ready to deploy in its sleeves, the one
with an automated emergency distress system, the one with shields and armour and protection
protection protection – falls to the back burner.

There's no more Harun-El, so the threat is over, so Kara is left unprotected. And then, she falls out
of the sky.

The fight is all over the news. Lena pays it no mind. At least, not until Jess, in her office to deliver
a stack of contracts requiring signatures, drops the pile all over her desk with a gasp.

Lena's eyes snap to the wall-mounted television, following her assistant's line of sight. The news
footage is grainy, but it's distinguishable, and it's live.

Lena watches along with all of National City as a dark-hooded figure lands a punch so vicious to
Supergirl's jaw that her entire body slackens, teetering dangerously before it slips over the edge of
the skyscraper upon which she's perched. Lena watches along with all of National City as Supergirl
lands, crack, unmoving amongst the shattered concrete of the sea wall a hundred stories below.
Amid all of National City, only Lena knows which substance had made Supergirl's assailant strong
enough to accomplish his goal.

A boulder of leaden dread in the pit of her stomach almost brings her to her knees. She refuses to
let it. “Helicopter,” she snaps at her still-frozen assistant, not bothering to temper the bite of her
tone. “Now.”

Jess gapes, gaze swinging back and forth between Lena and the newsfeed. “But,” she stumbles,
mouth open in shock. “But, Supergirl—”

Lena sets her jaw. “I'll handle Supergirl.”

Ninety seconds later, Lena's private helicopter is lifting off the roof of L-Corp. One hundred and
eighty seconds later, it's touching down atop the fractured concrete of the decimated waterfront.

Lena pays no mind to the crowd of solemn onlookers. She pays no mind to the gathering TV crews,
the reporters shouting questions, the cops erecting cordons. She pays no mind even to the armoured
SUVs that announce the arrival of the DEO, to the agents that swarm the building from which
Supergirl had plummeted, looking for her assailant.

The only thing in the world that exists is Kara's unconscious form. Four and a half minutes after
she'd watched her hit the ground, Lena – with the assistance of her pilot and head of security – lifts
Kara's battered body into the cockpit of her helicopter and gets her the hell out of Dodge.
Kara wakes less than an hour later.

She is, by this time, laid out along the length of Lena's expensive white couch, ice packs positioned
beneath the plum-coloured bruising of her joints, portable heart monitor affixed firmly to her chest.

Long lashes flutter open. A painful breath shudders beneath aching ribs. Blue eyes blink wide and
beseeching.

“Can I have a hug?”

The vice-grip of tension hooking into every inch of Lena's body releases all at once; an invisible,
inaudible sigh of relief

Her tight jaw unclenches. “Somebody's feeling better.”

“No,” Kara drawls, pink lips pouting up a storm. “Still bad, so bad. Need a hug to make it better.”

"Nice try.” Lena reaches out, slipping the ice pack from beneath the purple-mottled skin of Kara's
shoulder and replacing it with a heating pad. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I fell of a building.” Kara wriggles her fingers and toes, testing out each of her limbs with a
growing grimace. “What's the damage?”

“The fractures to your spine and skull have healed,” Lena says bluntly, biting hard at the inside of
her cheek. “As have your broken arm and two broken legs. Soft tissue damage is all that's left,
some contusions and bruising. Your body burnt out your powers repairing the damage, though.
Solar flaring is the only reason you're still alive.”

Kara lies quiet a long moment, absorbing. At length she rolls her bruised shoulders, cracking her
neck with a wince. “Don't sound like nothing a hug couldn't fix.”

“You are an idiot,” Lena informs her calmly, with only about 40% as much venom as usual. “A
reckless, cavalier, hopeless idiot.”

“Your reckless, cavalier, hopeless idiot,” Kara corrects affably, struggling to sit up. “I got that guy
real good for you. At least, until he got me.”

Lena supports her charge to sitting, rearranging her healing nest of ice and heat and pillows to
account for her new position. “He'd gotten his hands on more Harun-El, hadn't he.”

“Unless he'd recently procured some pure black contacts and replaced all his bones with titanium
rods, I'd say so, yeah,” Kara agrees around a grimace she fights valiantly to hide. “Did you get
him?”

“Your sister did.” Lena holds out a bottle of pills, the strongest painkillers she'd had to hand, and a
glass of water to match. “I saw the DEO carting him off on the news.”

"Yeah, where is Alex?” Kara asks, throwing back the meds. “I can't believe you've managed to
keep her at bay. Fussing over me when I'm injured is, like, her second favourite pastime.”

“No one from the DEO is welcome in my home,” Lena says stiffly, conveniently ignoring her
current houseguest's affiliation with said blacklisted organisation. “Though, I have kept her
informed of your condition,” she concedes with marginally less acerbity, cutting her eyes sideways
at the blonde. “Do you— do you want her here?”
Kara meets her gaze levelly. “Do you?”

"Very obviously not,” Lena mutters, teeth grinding. “But do you?”

"No,” Kara answers, light and easy. “Her fussing is way too overwhelming most of the time, plus
she's always trying to stick me with needles whenever I flare. And anyway—” Blue eyes flick
almost shyly to Lena's face before dancing away again. “I have you.”

It would be nice if Lena could claim that wasn't true. Unfortunately, every single thing about their
current situation screams otherwise.

“I do, don't I?” Kara asks into the silence unfolding between them, voice soft and careful. “Have
you, I mean. You came when I got hurt, didn’t you?”

Lena sighs. She doesn't even need to answer, really. Not when it's her helicopter that had lifted
Kara to safety, her apartment that’s standing in as her hospital bed, her hands that had trembled as
they'd coaxed her back from the brink of death.

“Kara Zor-El,” she breathes instead, hushed and resigned and so, so tired, wrung out by terror and
relief and struggle and exhaustion. “You have ruined me.”

Blue eyes watch her a long moment. Lena feels her chest tighten, pulse thrumming wildly in her
ears.

It's just, Kara does this thing, sometimes.

Well, not sometimes. She does it when she looks at Lena.

It's— subtle. The inclination of her head. The slight dip of her chin. The crinkling around her eyes,
the dropping of her shoulders in a silent sigh.

It's a gentle sort of welcome. It radiates familiarity and affection. It's a softening of her entire body.

It's a move that says, you, oh, it's you, and Kara does it when she looks at Lena.

The blonde's voice is just as gentle, just as quiet. If she notices the conflict raging in Lena's eyes,
the war of want and fear being waged in her heart, she gives no indication.

“I'd say I'd gladly let you return the favour but, honestly?”

Even bruised to high heaven, Kara is so beautiful. That bright blue gaze is so earnest it's no wonder
there was once a time Lena had taken her word as gospel.

“Honestly, Lena, I think you already have.”

Kara stays in her apartment for twenty-five hours.

This is fine, because for the first twenty-four of those hours, Kara is asleep. This is also decidedly
not fine, however, because for the final one of those hours, Kara is awake.

Unconscious, Kara is almost tolerable. Curled up on Lena's couch amid a maelstrom of blankets
and cool packs, skin streaked purple-blue and eyes dark-bruised, the sight of her inspires in Lena's
chest a burning quite different from the usual fury that festers in her heart. This feeling behind her
ribs is softer, less angry; a mellow kind of relief undercut by bitter guilt.
It's Lena's fault, after all. Her fault that Kara had taken up the anti-Lex crusade and gotten
embroiled in the war against Harun-El hooligans in the first place. Her fault that she'd gotten
careless, gotten complacent. Her fault that she'd assumed the threat was over, had failed to provide
the hero with adequate protection against the danger that endured.

That’s why she's letting Kara stay, she reasons, despite the agony still pulsing in all the cracks
between them. Because she feels guilty, and because when Kara is asleep she isn't talking, and
when she isn't talking Lena doesn't feel the urge to slap her nearly as often.

Also, Kara sleeps like the dead. Lena worries that she actually is dead, for a while. Has to spend a
tense five minutes watching the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor just to assure herself of the
blonde's continued existence.

It takes Kara not waking through three hours, half a TV show, and a dropped fork that makes the
most earth-shattering clatter against the edge of the sink before Lena realises that an airhorn in her
ear probably wouldn't wake the sleeping blonde right now.

She'd always known Kara to be a light sleeper, jumpy and responsive to every minute creak and
scrape within a five-mile-radius of her bed. But that, Lena realises, was when she'd had
superhearing. Now, with her powers shot to hell, National City's resident Kryptonian brings new
meaning to the definition of the word comatose.

This works to Lena's advantage around the five-hour mark of Kara's habitation of her apartment.
Lena's leaning over the sleeping blonde, reaching beneath her warm body to change out the cool
packs working hard to reduce the swelling around Kara's battered joints, when her phone starts up a
lively rendition of SexyBack from her back pocket.

Lena jumps, heart hammering as her eyes dart to the unconscious blonde, but Kara doesn't even
flinch at the loud personalised ringtone. Relief flooding her veins, Lena sinks down onto the edge
of the couch by Kara's hip as she answers the call.

“So, were you ever going to tell me that Kara Danvers is Supergirl?” comes Sam Arias’
unimpressed voice down the line. “Or was I just supposed to learn that from your latest homoerotic
publicity stunt myself?”

Lena blinks. At her back, Kara rolls over and sniffles, curling herself around Lena's seated body.
“What?”

“Don't what me, Luthor.”

Sam pauses to slurp something loudly on the other end of the line. Lena would bet her inheritance
it's something that involves copious ice cubes and inhuman amounts of caffeine.

“I watched your little Supergirl heli-rescue on the news,” Sam gets out around the wet sounds of
her chewing on her straw. “I haven't seen you look that panicked since the first time you held Ruby
as a baby. I haven't seen you move that fast since the last Louboutin sale.”

“Other than insulting me,” Lena asks primly past the blood flushing her cheeks, “what's your
point?”

“What's my point?” Sam parrots, incredulous. “How long have I known you, Lena? No, don't
answer that, I'm feeling sensitive about my age right now. I was there,” she snaps, “for two long
years, watching you and Kara Danvers make big sapphic heart eyes at one another as you played
the most insufferable game of gay cat and mouse I've ever had the misfortune to witness. I know
what you look like when you're worried about someone you love, sweetie. I know what you look
like when you're worried about her.”

Lena's mouth opens, then closes, then opens and closes again. Kara, eyes shut and breathing deep,
presses her face to the side of Lena's thigh, nosing into the material of her yoga pants.

“So, my point,” Sam finishes resoundingly, “is that it was not Supergirl-worry, but Kara-Danvers-
worry that I saw plastered all over your face on the six o’clock news.”

“I—” Lena tries weakly. “That wasn't— she—”

"Save it,” Sam cuts in in a tone so firm that Lena decides right then and there to save it. The
Kryptonian is out of the bag, now. There's no stuffing her back in.

“So, question number one, is she okay?” Sam asks into Lena's cowed silence. “And question
number two, what in the actual fuck?”

“She's alright,” Lena mumbles. Kara, still unconscious, nuzzles her cheek into Lena's thigh as if in
agreement. “And— yeah. I know. I don't know. Yeah.”

“Oh, honey, she's got you bad.” Sam whistles long and low through her teeth. Lena is privately,
silently, inclined to agree. “How long have you known? How did she tell you?”

“She didn't,” Lena mutters bitterly, and then it all comes spilling out. The lies, the deception and
the hurt and the years of betrayal pour out of her like the breaking of a tide into Sam's safe harbour.

“So,” Sam hums at the end of the whole sorry tale. “Now what? Like, you hate her – and I totally
get that by the way, babe, one hundred per cent justified – but also like, do you hate her? I mean,”
she barrels on, cutting off Lena's indignant response. “You took her into your helicopter, Lena.”

Kara's sleepy fingers nudge their way into the fabric of Lena's cardigan, twisting tight. Lena
watches them, considers, and doesn't brush them away. “Is that a euphemism?”

“Bound to be,” Sam says cheerfully. “Got her into your cockpit, engaged in some rotator action,
joined the mile high club, take your pick. The point is, you saved her. The point is, you wanted to.”

Lena sighs so heavily she almost falls off the edge of the couch. Kara grumbles at the disruption to
her quest to wind herself as tightly around Lena's body as Kryptonianly possible, brow crinkling
and closed eyelids fluttering.

“Do you think you could try being a little less astute?” she asks Sam quietly, tiredly. Lays her palm
lightly against a warm crown of golden curls until Kara stops fussing in her sleep and settles down
once more. “Pay a little less attention to me, maybe?”

"Not a chance,” Sam chortles happily. “Embarrassing my daughter and my best friend at every
given opportunity is what really makes life worth living. The disasters of your life, of which there
are many, are wildly entertaining, sugar plum.”

"Well, that's a relief,” Lena sighs. Her hand is still on Kara's hair. “Don't suppose you've got any
actual advice on how to navigate the minefield of my fractured relationship with my ex-best-friend-
come-superhero-come-reluctant-partner-come-unconscious-saviour?”

“Can't say that I do,” Sam crows, utterly unapologetic. "But I will say this: the sexual tension
between the two of you is visible from space. Hell, it’s visible from Metropolis, so if I were you I'd
focus on deciding whether you want to kill her, or just want her. After all, it's like I always say,”
she finishes resoundingly, sounding for all the world like she's about to impart the deepest secrets
of the cosmos. “Hate sex is always an option.”

Lena's mouth falls open. “That's what you always say?”

One unhelpful Sam Arias phone call and several hours of furious Googling later, Lena's knee-deep
in research and couch-deep in the arms of a comatose Kryptonian.

It's just, Kara hasn't let her go. She's still asleep, muscles slack and breathing heavy, yet the
twisting grip she's maintaining on Lena's seated form is as unyielding as ever.

After a few fruitless attempts at extricating herself from the horizontal bear hug in which she finds
herself, Lena gives up. Gives into the warmth of the unconscious body at her back, snagging her
laptop from the coffee table and setting to work deciphering just where in the hell Kara's attacker
had gotten his Harun-El from.

Lena stares at the blood chemistry reports Alex had sent over, based on samples taken from the
jackass now in holding at the DEO. She stares at them until her eyes cross and her vision blurs and
two movies start and end on the TV, and she hopes that she's wrong, and she knows that she isn't.

The thing is, the Harun-El in the bloodstream of the guy who'd knocked Kara off a building—
well, it's familiar. Very familiar. In fact, it's Lena's own recipe, right down to the filtration residue
on the drug that could only have been left by someone who knew to use the same model of
centrifuge sitting on Lena's own lab bench.

This is not information that Lena had ever shared with, well, anyone. There had been no break-ins
at her home or office, no theft of the notes and directions required to produce a fresh batch of
Harun-El to the exact specification that Lena herself had managed it.

There is, simply put, no way for anyone other than Lena herself to produce Harun-El like the stuff
bubbling away in Kara's attacker's bloodstream. No one, of course, except her ex-lab partner.

Lena leans back sharply, shoving her laptop onto the coffee table as her mind races with the
implications. Kara, still sleeping, huffs at the sudden movement, grumbling and fussing at the
disruption to her octopus cuddling technique.

Lena strokes her hair absently until the blonde quiets again, her head spinning.

“Son of a bitch.”

After twenty-four hours of sleeping slash trapping Lena with inescapable snuggles, Kara finally
wakes.

Her powers aren't back, not entirely, but her body is almost fully healed. The bruises mottling
beneath golden skin are fading to a dull brownish green, the deep shadows under her eyes
softening.

She looks a whole lot better than she had when Lena had scraped her off the sidewalk. Thus, Lena
feels no guilt over greeting the blurry-eyed blonde with her most recent discovery before she's even
had a chance to stretch.
“It was Eve.”

Kara, still sleepy and soft, crinkles her nose as she wiggles her toes deeper into the blankets.
“What?”

“Eve Teschmacher made the Harun-El that fuelled the guy that punched you off a building,” Lena
says bluntly. “She must be continuing the work my brother started. Carrying his torch.”

Kara pushes herself upright, quiet as she considers the implications. “You're sure?”

“As sure as anyone can be.”

Kara nods. She doesn't ask Lena how she knows, she just believes that she does. Lena appreciates
this. She can't say she'd be so trusting should their roles be reversed.

“What does that mean for us?” Kara asks after a long moment, rolling her neck as she takes a long
gulp from the water glass Lena had left for her. “What do we do now?”

Lena's chin lifts. “We find her, and we stop her making anything that can get anyone else hurt.
Tomorrow, though,” she adds, glancing sideways at the blonde's wan complexion. "You're not
kicking any ass fresh out of a twenty-four-hour solar flare nap.”

“I was out for the whole day?” At Lena's nod, Kara grimaces. “Yeesh. Sorry.”

Lena shrugs briskly, turning her attention back to her laptop. So absorbed is she in her quest to
track down the location of Eve's new lab that she almost, almost doesn't feel the heavy weight of
Kara's gaze on her face. Almost.

"Hey,” Kara says after about ten minutes of pointed staring. “Why are you letting me stay?”

Lena keeps her eyes on her laptop screen. “I can't throw an invalid off my couch. I know you love
to treat me like a villain, but I do have some standards.”

“You're not a villain, and I'm not an invalid.” Kara sits up straighter, her gaze a scalding brand.
“I'm fine, and you know it.”

The words hang in the air between them, unrebuffed. Lena pulls up a new search window, sets
herself to stalking the social media accounts of Eve's family members for any mention of her
whereabouts without a word.

Kara, true to form, can only manage about twelve seconds of silence before she feels the need to
break it. “So?”

Still, Lena does not lift her eyes. "So what?”

Kara clicks her tongue, exasperated. “So, why are you letting me stay here?”

“Debt repayment, I suppose.” If silence won't shut the blonde up, perhaps a half-truth will. “Can't
have you deciding not to come the next time I use the signal watch because I'm too ungrateful to
return the favour.”

“Bullshit.”

Lena's gaze does snap up then, brow arched and mouth opening. “I beg your pardon?”

“You know you don't have to repay me.” Kara shuffles forward on the couch cushions, angling her
body toward Lena's. “You know that this thing between us could be one hundred per cent one-
sided, that you could be the most ungrateful brat on the planet, and I would still come for you. You
know that, Lena.”

“Do I?”

It's flippant, a blatant evasion. A poor attempt at distraction from the way her heart has taken off
behind her ribcage like a fighter jet down the runway.

Kara's gaze is hard and unflinching. There's no room for jokes or avoidance. Beneath the weight of
those piercing blue eyes, there's no room to breathe. “Don't you?”

Lena snaps her laptop shut with a sharp thwap. “Alright then,” she bites out, something hot and
stinging rising in her throat. “Since you seem to know everything I know, why don't you tell me
why I'm letting you stay?

Kara doesn't even blink. “Because you want me here.”

Lena's brows hit her hairline. “I do not.”

Bright blue eyes don't even blink. “I don't think you're even convincing yourself at this point.”

“You are such an ass,” Lena informs the embodiment of earnestness ensconced on her couch
cushions calmly. “I want you in my apartment like I want a hole in the head.”

Pink lips quirk. “Given the frequency with which you put yourself at risk of assassination, I'd say
that's quite a lot.”

Alright, fuck her.

Lena's spine straightens. “I'm mad at you.”

“You know, I don't think you are anymore.” Kara's demeanour has relaxed, smugness rolling off
her easy posture in waves. “I think you're trying to be, but you're not.”

Lena scoffs. “When did you become the expert on the whole world's feelings?”

“Not the whole world.” Kara might actually be inspecting her fingernails right now. “Just you.”

“You know, there are times— and this is one of them, in case you were wondering,” Lena starts
conversationally, pushing up from the opposite couch. “There are times that I absolutely despise
you.”

"Well, you know what they say.” Kara's still watching her, the shadows of a smirk playing at the
corners of her mouth. “It's a very thin line between hate and lo—”

“Don't you dare.”

Her own voice is vicious suddenly, sharp as the blade of a dagger. The temperature in the
apartment drops twenty degrees, a tense and frosty silence crystallising in the chasm between them.
So, the two of them have reached a point where they can stand a little superficial teasing, a little
casual banter. Fine.

But if Kara thinks for one second that the position she now occupies in Lena's life entitles her to
talk about anything deeper, anything real— to talk about that with such levity, such irreverence—
no way. No fucking way.
She will not withstand a lecture on matters of her own heart. Not from the woman who shattered it.

“Don't you dare say that to me.”

Kara's on the back foot now, hands up and blinking fast. “Lena—”

“Get out.”

Pink lips gape at her. Cold fury shudders through Lena like a magnitude ten earthquake. “I'm
serious, Kara. Like you said, you're fine. So, leave. Right now.”

Whatever Kara sees in her eyes is enough to cut any argument dead in its tracks. She's gone without
another word.

She refuses to call Kara, after that.

Seething with the righteous indignation of the wronged, Lena dedicates herself to tracking down
Eve Teschmacher in single-minded solitude. After hours upon hours of research and snooping and
cursing and tearing out of hair – metaphorically, of course; no way in hell is Lena sacrificing her
five-hundred-dollar Brazilian blowout over her – she finally starts to get somewhere.

Tracing backwards through her brother's interminable list of affiliations, alliances, and alumni
associations is as mind-numbing as it is alliterative. Somewhere around her nine thousandth Google
search, though, she comes across a standing lab booking under the name of Jack Worthing – one of
her brother's many aliases – at the Faculty of Chemistry at MIT – one of her brother's many alma
maters.

Lena's never been one to believe in coincidences. Five hours aboard a private jet later, she's pulling
the collar of her pea coat tighter against the brisk Massachusetts wind, keeping the lowest profile
she can manage as she slinks into the chem building after classes let out.

She finds the lab Jack Worthing has booked out easily, and thirty seconds inside it is enough to
cement her suspicions that Jack is actually Eve and that both of them are slobs.

Every available work surface is covered in sheaths of paper and hastily-scrawled notes, beakers of
viscous black liquid in various stages of filtration scattered between them. This is Eve's lab, alright;
the distillation process, just as Lena had suspected, has been copied exactly from the time the two
of them had worked together. So this is Eve's lab, and Eve's lab is the source of the Harun-El still
flooding the xenophobe market.

Lena feels cold fury seep through her veins like ice water. Not only had Eve betrayed her all those
months ago, zip-tying her to a chair and pointing a gun at her head, but she's still betraying her
now.

The deception, the lies, the double life— it stings. Not as much as Kara's had, of course; atop the
weighing scale of importance buried deep in Lena's heart, one blonde does not equal another. But it
stings nevertheless; salt in the wound of her foolhardy trust.

She's just about ready to start smashing things, to maybe spray paint a few choice obscenities over
Eve's meticulous whiteboard calculations, when the window at her back shatters.

Adrenaline spiking hot through her muscles, Lena turns to find the last person she wants to see. Or,
maybe second to last. Lillian's still alive, after all.
Kara's hands are raised, fingers still clasped around the now-empty frame of the window she'd just
decimated. Her eyes are wide, features frozen in shock.

“Oops.”

Lena appraises the shards littering the floor, pitying the pane that had been a poor match for
Kryptonian clumsiness.

“Subtle.”

Kara blushes, swinging herself through the gaping window hole and grinding her toe bashfully into
the debris. "These windows must be really old.”

“Or maybe you're just a buffoon,” Lena counters tiredly. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Kara's chest puffs out. “I came to help.”

Lena's eyes roll so forcefully back into her skull that she gives herself a headache. “I don't recall
extending an invitation.”

Her unwelcome visitor appears irritatingly undeterred by the frosty welcome. “You didn't have to.”

Next time, wait for one, is what Lena plans to say in response. All she actually gets out is a clipped
ne— before she's winded, all the breath forced from her lungs in an ungainly oof as something solid
collides with her abdomen.

By the time she's caught her breath Lena blinks to find herself stuffed into a small cramped space,
pressed up against a big cramped Kryptonian who's hurriedly tugging the door to their cave shut
behind them.

“What in the hell—” Lena starts to say before she's once again cut off by a warm palm clamping
down over her mouth.

“Quiet,” Kara whispers urgently, more a rumble through their joined bodies than an audible sound.
“Someone's coming. We can't be found here.”

The urge to bite the hand covering her mouth is one of the strongest Lena has ever felt. She's
halfway there, lips parting in a silent snarl, before it occurs to her that the ultimate casualty of such
an attack would likely be her own teeth. The need to not crack her enamel on Kryptonian bone wars
with the need to show Kara exactly how she feels about this new development in their mission and
Lena hesitates halfway between the two, open mouth pressed awkwardly against Kara's palm.

In the narrow darkness of their hiding place and quite unintentionally, the very tip of Lena's tongue
brushes the crease where two of Kara's fingers meet. Kara gasps at the contact and something
happens between their bodies, something that feels distinctly like the twitching of hips.

The blonde drops her hands as though the contact had burned, breaths coming in suddenly shallow
pants. Unfortunately for her, there isn't anywhere else to go.

The supply cupboard Kara has apparently stuffed the two of them into is, frankly, tiny. It deserves
the title of supply cupboard the way a cucumber deserves the title of berry: on a technicality, and
not much else.

What it is, really, is a hole. A dark, miniscule hole in the wall, already full to the brim with papers
and pipettes even before Kara had so gallantly stuffed two fully grown bipeds inside it. The two of
them are pressed together chest to chest, hip to hip and, most upsettingly of all, inner thigh to inner
thigh.

Owing to some unknown crate-like thing taking up the majority of the already limited floorspace,
there's only room for one person to stand upright in the cave-like gloom. The net result of this
predicament is that Lena's feet have ended up sandwiched on either side of Kara's, their legs slotted
together as Kara holds Lena's slanting body up at a 45-degree angle to her own.

If anyone had though to ask her opinion on the matter, Lena would have been able to tell them in
no uncertain terms that this arrangement is pretty much the exact opposite of how she would
ideally like to spend her time. Unfortunately, no one had thought to ask. Lena takes it upon herself
to inform her cellmate of her stance on the subject regardless.

“I swear to God—” she starts viciously, only to be cut off from blaspheming any further by the
opening of the lab's outer door.

“What on Earth?” comes a tired, feminine voice, accompanied by a weary sigh and the
unmistakeable squeak of a custodial cart. Lena, cowed into tense silence once more, makes a
mental note to make a sizeable donation to MIT's janitorial staff as the sounds of broken glass
being swept into a dustpan filter through the cupboard door.

“The janitor has headphones on,” Kara whispers a moment later. “Are you okay?”

She's so close in the pitch darkness that her breath tickles Lena's eyelashes. Lena flinches
instinctively, leaning away, a move for which Kara is forced to compensate by tugging them closer
together, keeping Lena suspended awkwardly over the unknown object taking up most of the
floorspace.

“I'm in a cupboard,” Lena hisses with as much quiet venom as she can muster, “with you. Do you
think I'm okay?”

“We just have to wait till she's gone,” Kara breathes, appeasing. “Shouldn't take long.”

“It wouldn't have taken any time at all if you hadn't broken the fucking window,” Lena bites out,
fighting hard to ignore the feeling of Kara's broad hands fitted to the soft curve between her ribcage
and pelvis.

Invisible in the darkness, Kara clicks her tongue. “Occupational hazard. Hey,” she hums, shifting
her weight. Lena clamps down on her tongue at the feeling of Kara's leg moving between hers. The
blonde's hip presses into her pelvis, something hard and uncomfortable trapped between them.

“Is that a gun in your pocket?” Kara asks quietly, cockily. “Or are you just happy to see me?”

It's only the current limitations imposed upon her arm span that prevent Lena from clocking her
square in the jaw, Kryptonian bones or no.

“It's a gun.”

“Oh.”

Kara's grip shifts, one arm sliding around Lena's waist as the other presses between her shoulder
blades. Lena would shove her away, would shove her away in a heartbeat, except that doing so
would certainly result in her falling loudly and inelegantly atop the enormous trip hazard currently
digging into the backs of her calves.
The hand at Lena's hip smooths that little bit lower. “Have you been working out?”

“Are you serious right now?” Lena chokes out, furious. She shoves against Kara's chest; cramped,
ineffectual. Her hands end up trapped between them, pinned and overwarm from too much close
contact. “Don't you have any shame?”

“Not really, no,” Kara admits guilelessly. Lena can't see her at all through the impenetrable
darkness but dear God, she can feel her.

She tries to lean further away, to put a little space between them. She fails, teetering dangerously
backwards over the supplies stacked in the footwell. Kara's sliding grip on her body tightens.

“I'm just saying,” Kara just says into the increasingly weighted silence between them. “If I had to
be scrunched into a cupboard with anyone, I'm sure glad it's you. This is kinda fun.”

"No part of this is fun,” Lena informs her primly. “You appear to have forgotten that I loathe you.”

Beneath Lena's palms, still trapped awkwardly between their bodies, Kara's chest pushes
incrementally closer. Her thumb rubs lightly at Lena's hip.

Unable to fight their proximity with any level of efficacy, Lena allows her body to slacken into
Kara's grip. If this decision presses the two of them closer still, well, it's like Kara had said.
Occupational hazard.

Kara's voice is cocksure, gloating. “You appear to have forgotten as well.”

“This is not some middle school game of seven minutes in heaven,” Lena tries with as much
conviction as she can muster with two large Kryptonian hands stroking over her body. “We're here
to track down a dangerous criminal. To rid the world of a lethal substance. Not— not to be closeted
together.”

Just as soon as the words leave her mouth, Lena wishes with the burning fire of a thousand suns to
be able to suck them back in.

“No, that's not what I meant,” she tries weakly as Kara lets out a restrained snort of choked
laughter. The leg between her own shifts again, pressing a little more insistently.

“I bet it's not.”

Damn Kara. Damn her broad palms and her big shoulders and her firm thighs. Damn the way her
mere proximity melts each one of Lena's higher faculties into malleable goo, even still, even now.

And damn, particularly and right at this moment, the fingertips that have snuck their way ever so
slightly beneath the waistband of her jeans, pressing like brands against her pelvis.

“Kara,” she manages, and if her voice is a little breathy it's only because she has to be quiet, right?
Because whispers are breathy. That's all.

The hand not absorbed in toying lightly with the waistband of her G-string slides into the back
pocket of Lena's jeans, moulding warmly to the curves it finds there. God, Kara is solid. The arms
currently bracketing Lena's waist could be made of steel. Hot, delicious, knee-weakening steel.

“Yes, Lena?”

The whisper is angelic, and decidedly closer to Lena's face than before.
Lena swallows heavily, grateful that in the darkness of their cupboard-tomb she at least isn't
subject to the intensity of those bright blue eyes. “This isn't—” she tries, hoarse. “We shouldn't,
we're— we're no good for each other.”

You're no good for me. That's what she'd meant to say. But somewhere along the path from brain to
lips, the message had gotten twisted.

Kara doesn't seem to mind. “Why not?”

There are a million excellent answers to that question. A billion answers. A trillion.

Right now, Lena can't think of a single one.

The janitor could be dancing the Can-Can accompanied by a full symphony orchestra right outside
the closet door at this very moment, and Lena wouldn't hear it. The only sounds that exist in the
world right now are the frenzied thudding of her heart in her ears, the cotton-soft static of two
bodies shifting together in the darkness.

Kara's face is so close in the gloom that when she speaks, her nose brushes Lena's jaw. She lifts her
head and then there's hot breath against Lena's neck, lips light against her cheekbone.

Something hot and wet slicks briefly inside the shell of her ear. Teeth graze momentarily over the
lobe.

“Why not, Lena?”

Lena doesn't manage to answer so much as she manages to expel an involuntary sound, high and
breathless and desperate and utterly, unbearably embarrassing.

Their faces are so close in the opaque blackness that when Kara smiles, Lena feels it against her
skin. Pink lips part, brushing deliberately against Lena's ear once more, as their owner undoubtedly
prepares to deliver yet another devastating double entendre that will shatter whatever's left of
Lena's mental faculties once and for all.

And then, the door to their cupboard wrenches abruptly open.

The sudden light is blinding.

She and Kara stand there, frozen and blinking hard for a long suspended moment; two deer
interrupted mid-something by mood-killing headlights.

Human eyes must adjust slower than Kryptonian, because Lena's still only perceiving mutable
shapes and blurs against the blinding glow when Kara gasps, stiffening against her now in a way
that is far more scared than sensual.

A high and vaguely familiar Lena? is the last thing Lena hears before she's sailing weightless
through the air once more, clutched tight to the chest of a panicked Kryptonian.

“What— what?” she manages to gasp out over the roaring wind as Kara catapults the two of them
high into the air above the Cambridge skyline. “Where are we— who was that?”

The line of Kara's jaw is hardened with tension. “That was Eve.”

Lena's heart sinks. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Thin wisps of cloud whip by, misting against her skin. “So she knows it was us.” Lena shivers,
only partly from the cold. “She knows that we know.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck,” Lena says once more, loudly and with feeling. “Can you fly any faster?”

Steely blue eyes are fixed straight ahead, the tendons in Kara's neck straining beneath golden skin.
“Not without hurting you.”

“Wouldn't be the first time.”

“Will you let me protect you?” Kara demands after she's set Lena down in her office once more,
diligently checking the biometric lock behind them.

Lena sinks down into her desk chair with a sigh. “No.”

“Eve is dangerous, Lena.”

Kara doesn't shrink under Lena's incredulous stare. If anything, she becomes more earnest still.

“Now that she knows that we're onto her, she has no reason to hide,” the blonde entreats, stacking
her hands on her hips in an authoritative move that has Lena remembering viscerally and
breathlessly just how solid those same hands had felt upon her own body. “She'll come after us in
the open, and if she can make Harun-El, who knows what else she can do. You have to let me
protect you.”

“I have to do no such thing.”

"Lena—”

“No,” she reiterates firmly, rifling through some papers on her desk. “Do me a favour and try and
remember that you and I are not partners. You're not responsible for me.”

Glossy blue eyes widen. “But I want—”

“We gathered some vital information today,” Lena interrupts sharply. “We know where Eve is
working, and what she's doing. So, we've lost the element of surprise, but nothing more. We're
going to get her. Things can continue just the way they were before until we do.”

Kara shakes her head rapidly, looking for all the world like a golden retriever that's just emerged
from a river. “But it's different now that Eve—”

“Don't you have a job?” Lena cuts in, eyes on her papers. “Two jobs, in fact? Don't you think that
maybe you should be there, doing them, instead of here, pestering me?”

“I am doing my jobs,” the blonde insists petulantly, pressing closer to the desk between them. "But
I also need to be here—”

“You can't always be my saviour,” Lena snaps irritably. "Not even the world's peppiest Girl Scout
can be everywhere all at once. You can't protect everyone.”
“I can try.”

Kara's bottom lip is stuck out so far that Lena wants to punch her in the mouth. Wants to lay her
fist, or maybe her lips, right over that plump pout and—

God, God. No.

She forces rigidity into her spine and acid into her tone.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she all but sneers, hardening herself to her own words and the woman who'll hurt
because of them. “Save the valiant hero act for someone who actually cares.”

It's Kara or her, Lena reminds herself sternly as the blonde's expression falls. One of them will
bleed from this; one of them always does. It's Kara or her. Better to cut first than be cut deepest.

“Lena,” Kara says softly, so softly now, all trace of bravado gone. “You really— I thought—”

She cannot, cannot allow their recent— closeness to cloud the memory of the agony she'd suffered
at Kara’s hands. Even if those same hands can heal. Even if they can stroke and caress and cherish,
they can also bruise.

Never again. Never again.

“Once again, you thought wrong.” Lena forces herself to drive the final blow home. Cut or be cut.
Wound or be wounded. “Now. Catco is not paying you, which means I am not paying you, to not
be at your desk in the middle of the workday. So unless you'd like this meeting to progress into a
professional disciplinary hearing, I suggest you leave. Now.”

Kara stares at her with big, sad eyes. Her lips press together tightly, but Lena could swear she still
sees them tremble.

“Yes, boss,” Kara whispers, and she's gone.

She doesn't stay gone, of course.

Kara takes to patrolling conspicuously in the skies around L-Corp whenever Lena's in the office.
She flies above her town car when her driver takes her home. She hovers over the roof of Lena's
apartment building in the mornings, in the evenings, and through much of the night as well.

She's just, she's always there. Distant and withdrawn and with her wounded puppy expression
turned up to maximum, but there nevertheless. With a sigh and a flood of despairing self-hatred,
Lena deactivates her anti-Kryptonian proto-cannons, and tries not to think too hard about it.

At first, she reckons Kara's reaction is overkill. Thinks it's unnecessary, thinks it's irritating, thinks
it's ridiculous.

That's when Eve tries to kill her for the first time.

Attempt number one is a bomb. A pressure switch installed in her office chair, like the kind used on
military-grade land mines. If Lena had sat down, the switch would have been activated, and when
she'd stood up again—

“It would have released” Kara finishes for her when she arrives, her mouth set in a grim line. “You
could have been blown to pieces.”
"I wasn't, though.” She clears her throat. “I put my bag down on the chair first, and heard the
click.”

The cold arch of Kara's brow and the brutal set of her jaw as she flies the rigged chair into space
tells Lena exactly what the blonde thinks of her most recent stroke of luck.

Next, it's a gunman.

The corner of Kara's cape just barely deflects the first bullet, the next two catching her full in the
chest as she shoves Lena roughly out of the line of fire. Lena threads a thin layer of Kevlar into the
lining of one of her favourite suits, and starts taking her bulletproof SUV to work.

Eve sends her poison, sends her nerve gas, sends her hitmen. “Any barrier to progress is the enemy
of progress, and must be destroyed,” one of them hisses in her ear before Supergirl kindly breaks
both arms for him, payment for the ring of bruises he'd left on Lena's throat. “Eve Teschmacher
sends her regards.”

After the assassination attempts hit double digits, Lena is forced to concede that Kara's vigilance
may not be entirely unwarranted.

Today, when an explosion rocks the floor beneath her feet mid-way through her appraisal of L-
Corp's quarterly reports, the first emotion that floods Lena's mind is exasperation. How anyone is
expected to run not one but two multi-million-dollar business empires under these conditions is,
frankly, beyond her.

Fear isn't far behind the irritation, though, and Lena throws herself beneath her desk with practiced
ease just as an enormous souped-up drone armed with at least four separate missile rockets comes
into view through her wall of windows.

She's barely got her fingers on her silent alarm when a streak of red and blue crashes into the drone
from above, ripping and shredding metal as though it offers no more resistance than cotton wool.

So effective is Kara as a one-woman defence system that Lena feels safe enough to crawl out from
beneath her desk, reaching for her tablet to coordinate her own counterattack to function as
Kryptonian backup.

She's primed her proto-cannons, calibrated and ready to blast the god-awful drone to high heaven,
when something starts to niggle in the back of her mind.

It's just, that drone had never actually fired at her. It had barely come close, launching missiles into
the sky above her building and at angles through the surrounding skyscrapers, but never at Lena,
vulnerable behind her wall of glass.

Up till now it had been Lena, not Kara, that had been the target of Eve's attacks. It had made sense:
a human was far easier to take out than a Kryptonian. Yet now, as hero and machine tussle in the
air above National City, the blonde appears to be its primary— its only target.

That's weird. Not only is it a break in Eve's pattern but it's foolish. A third-grader could see that
while today's drone is fitted with enough lethal kit to keep a Kryptonian busy for a while, it's
nowhere near enough to do one any real damage.

Lena's eyes narrow. Eve is brazen, sure, but she isn't stupid. If Kara was the real target here, this is
not the weapon Eve would have chosen. If she can synthesis black Kryptonite she can almost
certainly synthesise green and yet, there isn't so much of a trace of it to be found in this fight.
Something isn't adding up. Lena's finger hovers over the release button for her proto-cannons,
unsure.

It's a stoke of pure luck that she happens to glance up when she does. There, high high above the
current fight, is a black dot in the sky. It's coming closer, it's coming fast.

Lena holds her tablet up, using its camera to scan the incoming object. It's another drone, but
bigger. Much bigger. Enormous, armoured to the nines, and fitted out with missile launchers that
make the first drone's weapons look like BB guns. And, worst of all— there.

Lena scans the projectile for traces of Kryptonite. Her screen flashes the results. Her heart sinks.
The second drone is carrying enough of the green poison to crack a planet down the centre, never
mind one unarmed Kryptonian.

Lena's heart migrates into her throat. In less than five seconds that drone will be in range to fire at
Kara. One of those missiles would be enough to kill her ten times over. The drone is fitted with at
least twenty.

Her palms are sweating. Still, her finger hovers above the red button.

Proto-cannons wouldn't even make a dent in the thick armour of the beast making a beeline for
Kara right now. Eve's made her play, and it's a beauty. Kara is utterly unaware, and Lena is utterly
unable to do a damn thing to save her.

Blissfully unconcerned, Kara fights on. Even Lena screaming her name in pure, primal terror isn't
enough to distract her from her target.

Time slows. Lena's heart thuds so hard in her throat she fears she may vomit it clean out of her
body.

The second drone is nearing, now. It's almost in range. Kara is about to die.

Lena sucks in a shuddering breath. Her entire body is trembling.

She taps unsteadily, desperately, at her tablet. The tip of her index finger lands upon the red button.
And four blasts of white-blue energy fire from the sides of her building, converging seamlessly
upon a single target.

Seconds before the Kryptonite missiles above her head launch, Lena's proto-cannons blast Kara out
of the sky.

An hour later and right on schedule, her phone rings.

She's exhausted, wrung out from a combination of lingering tension and the desperate search she's
been on ever since the drone's appearance, her need to find Eve's current hiding place and kick her
traitorous ass clean into next century now stronger than ever.

Lena hits the green button with a long-suffering sigh.

“You shot me!”

Despite herself, despite her stress and her worry and her weariness, Lena smirks. “You're
welcome.”
Kara sounds like she's still trying to wrap her head around it. “You actually— you actually shot
me!”

“Yes, and you're fine,” Lena points out. “Recovery was, what? Twenty minutes under the sun
lamps?”

“Twenty-five.” Kara's voice is incredulous, full to the brim with the righteous indignation of a
Super. “Seriously, Lena? I know you hate me and everything, but to actually—”

“It was my proto-canon or Eve Teschmacher's Kryptonite missile,” Lena snaps, her patience for the
situation already beginning to wear thin. “Would that have been preferable?”

Silence on the other end of the line. Lena pictures Kara's mouth opening and closing like a
goldfish, cheeks pink and eyes bulging. It's a satisfying image. “You mean she—”

“Sent that drone as a distraction? Exactly.” Lena pinches her fingers together at the bridge of her
nose. “You were so absorbed in your mindless punching that you didn't even notice she had you in
her sights. If I hadn't knocked you out of the sky, Eve would have. Permanently.”

There's a very long moment of silence. “Oh,” Kara says eventually. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh,” Lena snaps, huffing. “Fuck, no one ever accused you of being the brains of the
operation, did they?”

Kara ignores her. “Can I see you?” she blurts suddenly, seeming to surprise even herself with her
urgency.

“What?” Alarm bells start blaring in Lena's mind. “No.”

“Please?”

And there it is, that desperate, intimate tone of voice Kara uses when she's on a one-track mission
to accomplish something devastating like worming her way into Lena's battered heart again. Fuck,
maybe she should have let Eve take her out.

“No.”

“Please.” Kara sounds annoyingly unrejected. “You can't only hate me if you're still saving my life.
There has to be something else there, something more still in your heart. I want to see you, Lena. I
want to say tha—”

She hangs up before the blonde can finish her sentence.

Lena needs some air.

Even through the phone, Kara's devotion is smothering. It's oppressive, this faith she has in Lena.
Her selflessness, her undeterred affection, her tenderness. It's suffocating.

She stumbles out on her balcony, palms pressed to her flushed cheeks. She needs some distance
from Kara, from the echo of her enthusiasm down the phone, the all-encompassing presence of her.

She's distracted, is the thing. Lena is busy, busy thinking about Kara, and that always has come
before anything and everything else.
That's why she doesn't notice, not until it's far too late, the faint whir of drone engines from the
wind-tossed dark above her head.

That's why she doesn't notice the soft hissing of gas releasing all around her. That's why she
doesn’t notice anything at all, until the world turns black and she hits the ground.
 Chapter 3
Chapter Notes

shows up three months late to the update with a bucket full of tender horn: anyways—

See the end of the chapter for more notes

"It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know / where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do with love, except / everything?" - Mary Oliver

“Desflurane.”

That's the first thing Lena hears when the darkness recedes and a foggy haze she vaguely identifies
as reality comes creeping back in. “Mrgh?” is the first thing she manages to say in response,
tongue heavy, lips slack and uncooperative.

“Desflurane,” that high, feminine voice says again. A pale face materialises slowly in Lena's
swimming field of vision, blonde ringlets spilling over armour-clad shoulders. “Before you start
with the usual litany of questions. What did you do to me, where am I, why me, blah blah blah. I'm
just trying to save time here, Lena. Cut out the boring bits.”

Lena's brow furrows. Her mouth feels like sandpaper. “The— the boring bits. Of... kidnapping?”

“Exactly.” Eve Teschmacher clicks her tongue, ticking items off on her fingers. “So. Desflurane is
what I did to you. Quite the handy little inhalational anaesthetic. Expect some coughing and
shortness of breath.”

She beams, sickly-sweet, ticking off another finger. “You're being held captive. The where is really
none of your concern. And as for the why—”

“Oh, I have a catalogue full of guesses about the why,” Lena cuts in. Eve's right, her chest does feel
a little tight. But she'll be damned if she lets that stop her. “Number one, corporate espionage. You
finally realised you're just not as good a scientist without me. Number two, jealousy. You're bitter
than my brother always paid more attention to me than to you. Number three? Oh, I don't know.
Let's call it obsession.” She quirks a brow. “I always did get the impression you had more than a
little friendly interest in me. Am I close?”

Eve's lips press together in a grim line. “I'm not the one with a penchant for the ladies.”

Lena shrugs, as much as one can shrug while suspended from wrists ziptied to a ceiling pipe.
“Your loss.”

“It's cute, Lena,” Eve says then, and before she can even think to question what her captor is
talking about Eve raises a thin steel baton and clubs Lena in the kidney. She gasps as her body
convulses, desperate to shield the site of the wound yet unable to bend far, dangling as she is from
her handcuffs. In the semicircle of her streaming vision, the patent leather of Eve's boots appears.
“It's cute that you still believe you hold any of the power here,” Eve says lightly, running her palm
along the baton almost lovingly before twirling it in her grip, using the tip to force Lena's chin up.

"Now.” Eve's eyes are hard, cold. Colder even than the steel digging hard into Lena's flesh.
“Enough small talk. What's your PIN?”

Over the pounding of blood in her ears, Lena barely hears her. “What?”

“What's your PIN?” Eve asks again, each word articulated by a jab against Lena's windpipe.

“5272,” Lena gasps out before clamping her lips together, eyes widening in shock, in horror.

Before her, Eve only smirks. “Good,” she praises sweetly. “That wasn't so hard, was it? Let's try
another. Who was your first kiss?”

“Isabella Fleming, in the seventh grade.” Again, the answer is out before Lena can do a thing to
stop it. Her mind races, unable to assess this new threat, unable even to comprehend it. “What—”
she wheezes, hoarse and croaking. “What the hell have you done to me?”

"The baby Truth Seeker is a fascinating creature,” Eve starts, light and conversational, and Lena
rolls her eyes even as a pit of dread opens up in her stomach. She must have been truly awful in a
past life, to have to weather such an astronomical number of soliloquising villains in this one.

She twists, shoulders pulling painfully, trying to get a glimpse of her own forearms suspended
above her.

“I injected you with its serum, Lena,” Eve calls as she struggles, sounding far too pleased with
herself. “It's already in your bloodstream, and thus unavailable to be conveniently cast off.
Apologies. You'll be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for— oh.” She
glances carelessly at the watch on her wrist. “At least the next six hours.”

Lena sags against her bonds, momentarily defeated. “Why?” she asks tiredly. “What's the point of
all this?”

“You're right,” Eve agrees. “We should get down to business.” The tip of the steel baton leaves
Lena's chin to track her throat and the length of her sternum, lingering in the hollow of her solar
plexus.

Eve's gaze is hard as diamond. “Who killed Lex Luthor?”

Despite herself, Lena barks out a laugh. “Really?” she chortles. “All this, for him? You didn't need
to drug me to extract that admission, honey. It's right there on my LinkedIn profile.”

Steel pushes insistently at the soft epicentre of Lena's chest. A modicum more pressure and she'll
lose the ability to breathe. She decides to make the most of the time she has left.

“You really need to get over him,” she continues, gasping as the baton pushes harder. “Centring
your whole story around a man like this? Christ, Eve. It's the twenty-first century. We both have
PhDs. Let's at least try to pass the Bechdel Test.”

When steel cracks against her ribs, it's hardly a surprise. Eve gives her no time to recover, lifting
Lena's drooping head with the length of the baton and pressing down hard on her windpipe.

Her voice is half-whisper, half-snarl. “Who killed Lex Luthor?”

It's hard to maintain one's bravado with broken ribs. “I did,” Lena croaks, tears gathering at her lash
line as fire races through her side with each shuddering breath. Beneath the insistent bubble of truth
serum through her veins, the words require no effort at all.

"Thank you,” her captor says evenly, the baton she's using to steadily asphyxiate Lena dropping
from her throat as she steps backward. “I've always known it was you, Lena. I just wanted to hear
you say it. That personal touch, to make this next part all the more poetic.”

Lena's feet slide against the concrete floor. Dangling from her bound hands puts an almost
unbearable pressure on her wrenched shoulders, but it's getting harder to convince her own legs to
keep her upright.

“What next part would that be?” she manages to say around the smallest inhales she can manage,
struggling not to jostle her surely fractured ribcage.

“Oh, it's nothing much,” Eve hums, inspecting the tip of her baton with a critical eye. “Just two
little words.”

“I've got two little words for you,” Lena wheezes, head held high atop trembling shoulders. “Fuck
off.”

The baton strike is as painful as it is expected. This one hits her across the back, a sickening thwack
of metal on bone that sends her pitching forward as far as her trapped wrists will allow before
snapping her backwards, leaving her dangling even more pitifully than before.

Eve barely blinks. “Lena,” she chides with a shake of her head, a clicking of her tongue. “Lena,
Lena, Lena. What's Supergirl's real name?”

And— fuck. She should have seen this coming. She should have known that this would be the
goal. It's obvious, really. Textbook. After all, what's the most valuable secret in her possession?
Kara always has been the most precious thing Lena's ever had.

She can feel the answer on the tip of her tongue, feel the way the words strain against her teeth.
Four syllables, desperate to break free. Four syllables, that would spell the end of any life worth
living.

“K—” her truth serum-laced muscles try to pronounce. “K—”

Lena clamps her jaw shut against her own traitorous response, letting free a garbled sound akin to a
bird choking on a popsicle stick. “Didn't he tell you?” she gasps out instead, trying desperately to
sidestep the imperative to speak true, to buy her, buy them a little more time.

Eve's eyes narrow. Lena scents blood in the water.

“You're telling me you don't already know?” she gabbles. Maybe if she keeps talking, the urge to
spill Kara's name will ease some. “My brother knew Supergirl's identity. He'd known for years.
And yet you, the love of his life—”

Lena has to force herself not to gag on the words. “You don't? Lex never saw fit to tell you, then?
Didn't trust you enough, maybe. Didn't think you important enough.”

Eve's lips pull back in a snarl. “Lex told me everything.”

“Mmhmm.” Lena shifts her weight, trying desperately to ease the pressure on her wrists, her
elbows, her shoulders. “Everything except this.”
Eve's fists clench, and Lena braces herself for another blow. But it doesn't come, and a moment
later the blonde's furrowed brow smooths.

“It doesn’t matter,” Eve says, preternatural calm retuning. “It doesn't matter that he didn't tell me
then. You're going to tell me now.”

Lena grits her teeth. “Like hell I am.”

Eve advances on her once more. A baton strike to the weak spot behind her left knee sends Lena
crumpling, entire bodyweight wrenching down upon her suspended wrists.

“What's Supergirl's real name?”

Lena presses her lips together, biting down on her tongue to keep from screaming in pain as much
as to keep from answering. Eve's face looms close in her swimming vision, cruel and composed.

“What's her name, Lena?”

Something about this situation feels wrong. Something isn't adding up. After everything, all her
research, all the time she'd spent with Lex, how could Eve still not know Supergirl's true identity?
How could she think that this would be the most efficient way to get it?

She doesn't have time to ponder it for long. A well-aimed kick sweeps Lena's feet from under her
and she's left dangling from her handcuffs once more, a wrenching agony blazing through her arms
and torso. She struggles to get her feet under her again, to ease this unbearable pressure. Eve
doesn't let her, pitching her forward with another blow to her shins.

“Tell me her name, and this will all be over,” Eve murmurs from somewhere above her. “For you,
at least. For her, it'll just be beginning.”

Blood blooms across Lena's tongue as she bites down harder. Her efforts to keep her own mouth
clamped shut are failing, and they're failing fast.

“I know you know it,” Eve coos. “I know you know her. I saw the two of you, in that supply closet.
If you're close enough for that, you're definitely on first name terms. Tell me who she is, Lena.”

Lena has to talk. She has to. The chemical compound in her system has lowered her inhibitions
tenfold. The creative centres of her brain are being suppressed, preventing her from inventing a
plausible lie, even as the neural pathways used to access her memories are crystal clear. She can
feel it happening and really, that's the worst part of all of this. That she can feel the way her mind
and body are gearing up to betray Kara, even as it happens. That she can feel it; that she's powerless
to stop it.

Four words. Just four words. Kara Danvers is Supergirl.

When she'd heard them, from her brother's dying lips, Lena had thought they might kill her, too.
And then in the months since, that same refrain, playing through her head on a loop. Kara Danvers
is Supergirl. Four words that had shattered Lena's life before her waking eyes, that had let forth a
tide of torment from which she'd been able to find no respite.

Four words. Kara Danvers is Supergirl.

Lena had thought it would kill her to hear them, once. Then she'd thought she might like to kill
Kara, for keeping them from her for so long. For confirming they were true.
Kara Danvers is Supergirl.

Now, though. Now, Lena realises, with the exhausted resignation of a prisoner at the scaffold, she
would die before she let those words be spoken aloud. Before she'd allow them to harm a single
hair on Kara's lying, deceitful, beloved head.

Eve clicks her fingers in front of Lena's streaming eyes. “Tell me Supergirl's name.”

“What's in a name?” Lena says, just for something to say, just to have any words leave her mouth
that don't rhyme with Schmara Schmanvers. "That which we call a rose by any other name would
smell as sweet.”

Thank fuck for all those years of God-awful private tutors, drilling her Shakespeare until she could
recite it by rote at any required Luthor charity function. Who knew the muscle memory of Romeo
and Juliet might one day save Kara's life.

“Supergirl by any other name will still be stronger than you, Eve,” she chokes out, undeterred even
when another baton strike hits her in the side. “She'll still beat you. She'll still win.”

Eve straightens, gazing down at the steel rod in her palms almost pensively. "Maybe,” she shrugs,
expression neutral. “But you won't. I've got you trapped, Lena. I've got you beat. That's good
enough for me.”

“Don't worry.” Lena spits blood from her tongue, watches the reddish foam splatter the toe of Eve's
left boot with a distant sense of satisfaction. “Supergirl will save me.”

Eve smiles then, the first flash of genuine emotion she'd shown since Lena had first woken. “Oh,
I'm counting on it.”

Lena's mid-way through opening her mouth to ask Eve just what in the hell she means by that
when the roof caves in around them.

Everything is noise and dust and pain and confusion.

Lena spits grit and debris from her mouth, cursing her eternal streak of rotten fucking luck that even
though half the warehouse's corrugated ceiling had collapsed around her ears, the pipe from which
her handcuffed wrists are dangling remains as structurally sound as ever.

Eve is gone. In the space she'd been occupying up until a moment ago there's now a blur of red and
blue and gold.

"Now, I don't like to kill people.”

Firm and soft and razor-edged. Kara's voice. Kara.

Lena blinks hard, struggling to clear her burning eyes. “I don't like to kill people,” Kara says again,
and past her pooling tears and pounding heart Lena hears a thud, a scream, a grunt. “But if you
touch her again, Eve Teschmacher, you had better believe I will make an exception.”

And then Lena sees a wind-up, a flex, a tense. And then Lena watches as a vaguely human-shaped
lump sails through the air, crashing clean through the opposite wall.

Kara is in front of her in the span of a heartbeat, one strong arm at Lena's waist, lifting her to
relieve the pressure on her arms as the other rends the metal of her cuffs as easily as if it were Silly
Putty.

"Lena, Lena,” she breathes, as soft as she had been ferocious a mere moment before. “You're hurt.”

It's a rather redundant observation, really, given the gasping cry Lena bites out as her restraints are
loosed. Her shoulders ignite in an inferno of blinding pain as the weight of her arms drags the
stiffened joints down, releasing them from the unnatural position they've been forced into for the
entirety of Eve's interrogation.

The pain is so bad that Lena can't even begin to fight it. Bruised knees buckle as her throbbing
arms fall limp and useless to her sides. Kara follows her down, gripping at her waist, using her own
legs to cushion Lena's descent. She lands half in Kara's lap, unable to quell the tears that streak
from her eyes at the sharp stab in her ribs, the unbearable ache of her shoulders decompressing.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Kara chants over and over, her hands on Lena's body as gentle and delicate
as though she's handling spun glass. “I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner. I'm sorry I didn't stop her.”

Lena can only shake her head. Her chest has tightened so much, entire body tensing beneath the
onslaught of pain to the point that she can't even speak. She tries to lift a hand to her face, to wipe
the tears from her eyes, only to find that she can't move her arms.

“Shh,” Kara soothes at the panicked gasp she releases, reaching up to massage her biceps and
deltoids gently. “It's just a lack of circulation. Give it a minute, sweetheart. You're okay.”

Lena hiccups past the tight band of terror constricting her ribcage. She should hate that Kara is the
one to see her like this. To witness this vulnerability, to be the one to soothe it. She finds,
resignedly, that she can't. She finds, despairingly, that she's glad.

“Eve?” she manages to choke out when she finds herself once again capable of speech.

Kara's chin tilts in the direction of the crumbling hole in the opposite wall of the warehouse. “She
won't be going anywhere for a while.”

“You should cuff her,” Lena stumbles out, feeling beginning to return to her extremities as a
vicious bout of pins and needles explodes in her fingertips. “Capture her, while you can.”

“I'm good right here, thanks,” Kara says without missing a beat. Her hands are still on Lena's arms,
stroking up and down. “Eve can wait. You can't.”

Kara leans back a little, eyes narrowing. X-ray vision, Lena realises, as bright blue eyes sweep her
body, their owner sucking a sharp breath through her teeth.

“Lena, your ribs,” Kara breathes, worry carving through her features. “What else hurts? What else
did she do to you?”

Lena winces, wriggling her fingers carefully, conducting a mental inventory of her injuries. “I'm
fine. Nothing else broken. Oh.” Heat floods her already flushed cheeks. “She also, um. She injected
me with the, uh. The venom of a baby Truth Seeker.”

She maybe shouldn't have told Kara that, she realises belatedly. Maybe shouldn't have revealed that
particular weakness at a time when she's already so exposed. She finds, once again, that she no
longer gives a shit.

Kara's face is the picture of anguished concern. She winces at the admission, reaching up to brush
Lena's sweat-matted hair out of her eyes. “Right,” she breathes, quiet in the cavernous ruins of the
collapsing warehouse. “So, would this be a bad time to ask what you've bought me for Christmas?”

Despite herself, despite it all, Lena snorts. The truth of the matter is that she doesn't have the
energy to fight Kara, right now. Doesn't have the energy to fight her own instincts whenever Kara's
around.

She only sighs, lets her head loll forward until her forehead rests against the ridge of a royal blue-
clad shoulder. “You, Kara Zor-El, are such an inconvenience.”

“Yeah,” Kara agrees affably. “But a convenient one.”

She doesn't know how long they kneel there. Doesn't know how long she spends wriggling feeling
back into her numbed arms, moderating her breathing so as not to strain her injured ribs, allowing
the solid warmth of Kara's body to return her to a place in which she feels at least partially
prepared to deal with the shitstorm that surely awaits them.

“Alright,” Kara says at last, quiet and close, nudging Lena's forehead up from her shoulder. “Come
on, sweetheart. Time to move.”

Lena sighs, a little more coherent and a little less pain-addled than she had been when Kara had
first busted through the ceiling, but not much.

"Why are you doing this?” she asks as Kara supports her carefully to standing, grip steady and sure
at her hips and waist. “Why do you help me, save me, do all this for me when— when it's
unreciprocated? “

Kara pauses. Meets Lena's eyes, steady as a monolith. “It isn't.”

Lena finds she has to look away. Can't stand the sight of those earnest blue eyes, not while guilt
and shame are waging vicious war in the battleground of her intestines.

“I'm awful to you.”

Kara shrugs a shoulder. Squeezes Lena's hip with one hand. “Not without cause.”

Lena staggers a little once she finally makes it to her feet. The back of her left knee throbs
concomitantly with every beat of her heart, the imprint of Eve's steel baton a brand across her flesh.

Strong arms lock around her, steadying her, trapping she and Kara chest to chest. Lena shakes her
head. Doesn't push herself away.

“Don't martyr yourself for me, Kara. Don't.”

"There are worse things to suffer for.” Another half-shrug. “Worse things to believe in.”

Lena's teeth work over her bottom lip. “There are better choices, too.”

Still, Kara will not break her gaze. “None I want to be making.”

“Kara.”

“Lena.”
“This isn't a game. You know that, right?”

They’re toe to toe. The press of Kara's hands at her waist is the only thing keeping Lena upright.
The weight of Kara's gaze on her face is the only thing keeping her from disappearing completely.

"This thing between us, whatever's left of what we had—” Lena forces her voice not to tremble in
time with her body. "It isn't a joke, or a verbal sparring match or— or one-upmanship, or
something. This isn't— it isn't a game, to me.”

This is my heart, is what she wants to say but won't. This is whatever's left of it, laid at your feet.

“It's not a game to me either,” Kara replies, just as soft, just as serious. “I'm not trying to beat you,
Lena. I'm trying to keep you safe. I'm always trying to keep you safe, trying to make sure I get at
least another day with you. And I think—”

Long eyelashes flutter, dark pupils blown wide.

“I think you're trying to keep me safe, too. I think— I think it might be for the same reason.”

She can't tell her she's wrong. Can't, because of the baby Truth Seeker's venom still percolating in
her veins. Wouldn't, even if she could, for reasons upon which she chooses in this moment not to
dwell.

Lena licks her cracked lips. Doesn't think about what she's doing until Kara's gaze flickers down,
until it catches on her mouth and sticks.

When her voice comes out hoarse this time, it's got nothing to do with her screaming ribs. “You
seem awfully sure that I want you around.”

Kara's eyes are still locked on her lips.

“You seem awfully keen to keep me around. Can't blame a girl for hoping.”

It's happening again. That same magnetism from the supply closet, from the training ring, from
every too-long hug and lingering stare dating back to the very beginning of their entanglement. The
air around and between them thickens with tension, the quiet only amplifying the thudding of their
hearts.

“Lena,” Kara says then, whispers, really, one hand coming up to cup the purpling line of her jaw.

There's none of the heat of their hide-out in the cupboard, none of the flirting or banter or unsubtle
innuendo but— God. There's still all of the intensity.

This – Kara's palm on her lower back, Kara's breath on her face, Kara's fingers at her cheekbone –
this is warmth, not passion. Tenderness, not fervour. Intention, not instinct.

It's going to happen. They're going to kiss. Kara's lips part, just slightly. Her eyes flutter closed.

It's going to happen. And then Lena stops it.

Her head tilts; not much, but enough. Kara's nose nudges her cheek, forehead brushing her temple.
The sigh she releases at the change in destination is disappointed, but not surprised.

“Why, Lena?” she asks, quiet and small. Her lips, those lips brush the underside of Lena's jaw as
she speaks, an inch and an infinity away from where they'd both prefer them to be.
“Why what?” she breathes, though she already knows.

She just, she can't. Maybe it's the truth serum in her system, maybe it's the release of something too
long imprisoned and ignored in her heart, but she can't do it. Can't take this step, can't cross this
line with the weight of their shared history, their shared agony, still yoked around her throat.

If she opens her mouth now the only thing that can possibly spill forth is the truth and while Kara
may be ready to hear it, Lena isn't.

Kara pulls back until there's enough space between them that Lena can breathe again. Strong hands
stack on trim hips, a smooth brow furrowing as Kara squints at Lena like she's a puzzle to be
solved.

“Why won't you kiss me?”

"Because I—”

Fuck. Direct questions and truth serum do not a safe combination make. Lena claps a hand over her
own mouth hard enough that she basically slaps herself in the face, biting down on her cheek so
roughly the copper tang of blood blooms across her tongue. The urge to spill the uncensored truth,
to answer Kara's question honestly and instinctively, is almost irresistible. She can feel the words
bubbling in her throat, pushing for release behind her teeth.

But. No one can make Lena Luthor do a damn thing, not if she doesn't want to. Baby Truth Seeker
or no baby fucking Truth Seeker, no one decides how much she shares but her.

Kara is still watching her, one brow quirked in what Lena would label, if pressed, as amused
apprehension. “Well?” she prompts, and Lena's traitorous mouth tries its best to open again. She
clamps her lips shut with her fingertips. Forces herself to use her brain, to exploit the Truth Seeker's
loopholes in order to override its effects.

"What makes you think that's even a possibility?” she grits out between her fingers.

There. Mentally, Lena pats herself on the back. It's not a lie, but neither is it the truth Kara's
probing for. She's rather proud of herself for that deflection.

Of course, it's a rather weak one, given the proximity of their involvement mere moments before.
Given how close Kara had come to kissing her. Given how close Lena had come to letting her.

But Kara appears undeterred. “Because,” she drawls, drawing out the syllables as she taps her
fingertips lightly against her chin. “Because, I think you want to.”

She takes a step closer again, and Lena has to fight the urge to use the hand still clamped over her
mouth to pinch her nostrils, desperate to avoid the intoxication of Kara's heady scent.

Blue eyes bore into hers, equal parts daunted and daring, certain and wondering.

“Do you want to, Lena?”

And this really isn't fair, because Kara's just saved her life and Lena has truth serum running
through her veins, and her question is unethical but it's also so unnecessary that Lena could scream,
because Kara is Kara, and of course Lena wants to fucking kiss her.

Kara is so much a part of her now that every moment Lena spends not kissing her feels like a
moment in which she's denying the very essence of her own nature, truth serum or no truth serum.
But that, unfortunately, is exactly the problem. She'd indulged herself before, when it came to
Kara. Had taken and taken and taken, anything Kara had wanted to give her, anything she could
get. She'd let herself get hooked and then, when Kara's betrayal had cut off her supply line, the
withdrawal had almost killed her. To fall off the wagon now, to have to go cold turkey once more
when Kara inevitably shatters her all over again, will surely finish the job.

“Do you?” Kara asks once more, fervent and low. If ice could burn, it would be the colour of her
eyes.

Lena opens her mouth to answer. Against every one of her better instincts, Lena opens her mouth to
tell her the truth.

And then there's the sound of shifting debris, and then Eve Teschmacher steps through the ruined
wall of the warehouse with an uninjured smile on her uninjured face.

And then she raises a weapon, some kind of rocket or missile or bazooka, something bigger and
meaner than Lena's ever seen before. And then she aims it right at Lena. Lena, who's closer. Lena,
who's already crippled. Lena, who's weak and fragile and human.

Eve pulls the trigger. The interior of the warehouse lights up like the blaze of a collapsing star.

Lena can do nothing but watch as the missile that will spell her end sails through the air towards
her.

Lena can do nothing but watch as Kara appears, eyes wide and hands reaching. As Kara pushes her
out of the way, all but throws her across the room, and takes that death sentence for her own.

She finds her in the rubble.

Somewhere between Lena’s echoing screams and the deafening force of the blast, Eve has
disappeared. Somewhere beneath the collapsed ruins of what was once an industrial warehouse,
Kara has disappeared, too.

Lena digs through concrete and steel and sheet metal with her bare hands until she finds her, dust-
streaked and bloody. Heedless of her own injuries, she wrenches and tugs at the wreckage until
Kara's body comes free, limp and unmoving in her grasp.

Dread locks its claws around her windpipe, running her through with terror. Blue eyes are closed,
remain closed even when Lena pokes at her, prods at her, shoves. Beneath the tattered remains of a
royal blue crest, Kara's chest isn't moving at all.

What wouldn't Kara do for her? That's long been the question, and. Well. Lena's finally found the
location of that line in the sand. Only, it's not a line. It's a grave. It's Kara's grave.

Running on pure adrenaline, barely feeling anything at all, Lena hooks her damaged arms beneath
the last lump of breezeblock weighting Kara down, shifts it free of her limbs with an inhuman
scream.

And then the body beneath her is coughing, convulsing, spitting up red-tinged dust onto the knees
of Lena's suit and Lena could not in this moment care less about anything on Earth because that
body, that moving, breathing, choking body is alive.

She drags Kara onto her side, helps her clear her airways before easing her upright. Sickly green
pulses bright beneath golden skin. Lena's stomach turns. There'd been Kryptonite in Eve's artillery,
enough to kill. Enough that it still might.

They have to get out of here. The thought is as imperative as it feels impossible.

Kara's eyes can barely open, blonde lashes clagged with blood oozing from a deep wound at her
brow. Her voice is a thickened croak.

"Lena?”

It's sickening is what it is, the visceral way her body reacts upon hearing her own name from that
mouth. Sickening that despite all this time and all the hurt between them, two little syllables from
Kara's lips are enough to light her soul on fire.

She cannot, she cannot live another life with Kara in it. Cannot open herself to the possibility of
being taken advantage of all over again, of being hurt so deeply by one so cherished.

And Lena cannot, as clearly and inarguably as the sun rises in the morning and sets at night, live a
life without her, either.

"Lena?” the body slumped against her own wheezes once more. Blue eyes are fully closed now,
blood draining beneath paling skin. “Is— is that you?”

Lena sighs. Hoists Kara's limp arm round her shoulders and staggers them to standing, squeezing
their bodies together as though she can secure their collective future through sheer force of will and
underdeveloped biceps.

“Who else would it be?”

The portal spews them out atop frigid concrete, two bodies sprawling across the dusty floor of
Lena's Mount Norquay lab.

Safety. That's all she'd been thinking when she'd pressed the button on her watch. She had to get
them away, somewhere Eve couldn't find them. Somewhere she could conceivably shelter a half-
dead Kryptonian, somewhere she could somehow stop her dying the rest of the way. Somewhere
safe.

A mountain bunker isn't ideal, in the scheme of things. But, hey. Beggars can't be choosers. She
supposes she should be grateful her pain- and adrenaline-addled mind hadn't transported them to
her childhood treehouse instead.

Lena's shoulders are screaming, courtesy of her wrists’ extended vacation suspended from a ceiling
pipe. It takes every ounce of gritty determination her body possesses to push herself up from the
ground, to reach for Kara's slumped form and drag her upright.

“Don't— don't feel so good,” Kara mumbles as Lena tries valiantly to manoeuvre her feet beneath
her body. Her face smushes against Lena's shoulder. “Hurts.”

Lena's heart trips in her chest. If she softens now, she will break forever.

“Well, you were hit with a straight shot from a concentrated Kryptonite blaster,” she grits out,
bracing Kara's sliding feet with her own as she tries to tug her to standing. “I wouldn't expect it to
feel good.”
Kara groans, plaintive and small. The burden of her unreceptive body is becoming more
unreceptive and burdensome by the second.

Frustration rises in Lena like flames from a hearth. She lets it fill her, warm her, fuel her. Fuel them
both, at least long enough to get them through this.

“Why the hell did you do it?” she pants as she manages to right them both at last. There are
medical supplies in the lab's antechamber. She can get the two of them there. She has to. “Why
couldn't you have stayed out of the line of fire for once in your goddamn life?”

“Couldn't. Had to,” Kara manages, barely a whisper below Lena's ear. Her feet are dragging more
than stepping, the majority of her leaden weight left to Lena to carry. “Save you.”

“You idiot,” Lena pants, hefting the blonde's limp arm higher across her shoulders. They've made
it halfway across the lab. Her nails dig unforgivingly into Kara's side, scrabbling to maintain their
grip. “Is there even an ounce of self-preservation bouncing around inside that thick skull of yours?
I thought we already had the conversation that very firmly established that you can't protect
everyone.”

"Not everyone,” Kara mumbles faintly, her unwieldy weight growing heavier with every step.
“You.”

The cavernous lab is filled with nothing but the laboured sounds of their breathing, the jagged
stagger of their footfalls. Two thirds of the way. Lena can see the door, behind which she'll find the
medical equipment that might just save them both. She can see it. She can reach it. She can.

"Hurts,” Kara whispers again, weaker even than she had been moments before.

The ungainly rhythm of their steps doesn't falter. Lena doesn't let it.

“I know.”

The way Kara's body sinks against her own no longer feels like balancing. It feels like begging.

“Hurts, Lena.”

“I know, darling.” The endearment she doesn't have the energy to hold back contrasts sharply with
the rough tug of their bodies. The sliding grip Lena's maintaining on Kara's lolling form cannot
afford to be tender. She cannot afford to be anything but bruising. “I know. Just hold on.”

In the cramped cavern that constitutes the lab’s antechamber, buried within the cupboards lining
the rock-hewn walls, Lena finds what she's looking for.

First, a translucent photovoltaic yellow sun patch she'd privately referred to as a portable
Kryptonian charger, slapped against the bare skin of Kara's bicep beneath the tattered remains of
her suit. Next, the spring-loaded disc containing a backup anti-Kryptonite get-up, smacked against
the charred outline of the crest on her chest.

Kara, slumped on the ground, propped upright only by the rock wall at her back, groans plaintively
at the impact as the anti-K suit begins to materialise around her. Lena ignores her whimpers,
rooting determinedly through the stash of medical supplies that would be enough to kit out a
hospital full of Kryptonians on Argo. All of it, created by her own hands. All of it, only ever meant
for one.
She finds the heart monitor she'd been searching for, reaches out to unclip the dark shield of Kara's
helmet so she can fix the sticky pad over the pulse point beneath her jaw. Yellow sun battery pack
beginning to take effect, blue eyes flutter open for the first time since the warehouse.

“Wassat?” Kara slurs as Lena continues to hunt through her arsenal, pulling out gauze and
antiseptic and any number of other potential aids. Her lolling chin juts towards a lead-lined case by
Lena's elbow.

Lena swallows hard. “Don't try to talk.”

“S’lead,” Kara persists stubbornly, her splayed knees bumping pointedly against Lena's thigh.
“S’Kryptonite?”

"Needles,” Lena confirms, resigned. For all her sins, she won't lie to Kara, even without the
imperative of truth serum in her veins. Not with the agony of dishonesty still burning so fresh
between them. “Kryptonite needles. Stop talking. Hold still.”

Kara does hold still, as Lena advances on the oozing cut above her left eye with a wad of thick
gauze. She does not, however, stop talking.

“Why?” she mumbles, barely intelligible but insistent nevertheless. “What's in ‘em?”

Lena grits her teeth.

You are going to turn over the formula to Alex, you are going to take any Kryptonian elements from
your lab and bring them to the DEO, and you are never going to make Kryptonite ever again.

Supergirl's words, Kara's words, burn as sharply in her mind as they had the day she'd first heard
them. Lena bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, pressing the gauze to Kara's bloodied face.

You think I should be grateful that you learned how to make the one substance on this planet that
can kill me?

Kara's eyelids flutter shut for a moment, wincing at the sting. When they open again her gaze is
clearer than it's been for hours, eyes that same determined shade as all those years ago. Ice blue.
Steel blue.

Even if I did trust you. Even if we were on the same side—

Lena shakes her head, desperate to clear away the memories. “It's not important.”

A knee nudges her thigh again, firmer this time. “Tell me.”

She sighs, reaching for more antiseptic. “Kara—”

“Lena.”

Her cheeks heat, hands trembling beneath the weight of her memories. You have secrets. That
changes things. Like so much between them, this topic hasn't gotten any easier with time.

That's not a great question for a Luthor to ask someone in my family.

Lena cringes. She doesn't want to talk about this. Hadn't meant for Kara to ever be here, to ever see
these supplies, to mount that high horse all over again. Despite their rift, despite all the bitterness
and anger and vitriol Lena's spent the last few months drowning the two of them in, she will not be
able to weather this particular fight a second time.
She will not be able to withstand the sight of those eyes looking at her like she's the villain of their
story.

“Please.” She's barely even whispering. “Please drop it.”

“Lena,” Kara breathes, firmer than someone in her current state of ill health has any right to sound.
“Tell me what's in your Kryptonite needles.”

“Painkillers,” Lena bites out sharply, defeated. “Alright? Analgesics. Drugs. Drugs meant for you,
should you ever need them. Drugs meant to stop you suffering. Are you satisfied?”

Kara's body slackens. “Yes,” she wheezes, one gloved hand encircling Lena's wrist. “Use them.”

Lena jerks backwards. The movement is entirely involuntary. “No,” she gasps, bloodstained gauze
fluttering from her fingers. “No, I couldn't, I—”

She'd crafted the needles, yes. She'd filled them with the strongest pharmaceuticals she could
formulate, capable of quelling pain even in cells strong as steel. But the thought of using them now,
of taking that vile green substance into her hands and piercing Kara's flawless, precious skin; of
injecting her with that poison, of causing her pain—

“I can't,” she whispers, horrified to feel her throat close over amid the tears pooling at her lash line.
“I shouldn't.”

“Can,” Kara argues weakly, sounding close to unconsciousness. “You can. Trust you.”

In her chest, Lena's heart backflips off the top diving board and plummets through the air, cracking
its skull against the platform on the way down. She feels breathless suddenly, a little dizzy.
Winded by those two little words that prove how everything has changed completely and not at all.

“Please.” Despite the sun patch, despite the suit steadily filtering Kryptonite out of her system,
Kara's skin is still so, so pale. “Lena, please.”

Her hands are shaking. She fights down the sudden urge to vomit.

She realises now: it's not just about what Kara would do for her. It's about what Lena would do for
Kara. And the answer to that, regrettably, is anything.

“Okay,” she mumbles, fumbling fingers struggling with the box's latch, with the syringes stacked
neatly inside. “Okay. I'm sorry.”

And she plunges a green-tipped needle into Kara's thigh.

The effects take only seconds. In the span of a breath Kara's taut features slacken, her body
relaxing further against the wall at her back. The rigid line of pain in her shoulders loosens and
drains away, a dazed kind of serenity colouring her face.

“Thank you,” she mumbles thickly, as if her tongue is suddenly too big for her mouth. Her fingers
are still at Lena's wrist. “Thank you for using them. Thank you for making them.”

Lena cannot force her body to stop shaking. “I didn't think I'd ever have to— you know I never
planned—”

“I know.” Kara's grip tightens. Even through the thick polymer suit encasing her hands, Lena can
feel the residual warmth of her skin. “I know, Lena. Thank you. I love you.”
Something hot and sharp breaks in Lena's chest. It feels like a rib, maybe. Like a heart.

"God, Kara—”

She wrenches herself away, tugs her knees to her chest, a trembling mass of limbs curled on the
frigid stone. She bats roughly at the hair falling into her eyes, feels herself split apart at the seams.

“Alright,” she gasps, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes. “Alright. You've won, okay?
You've won. I can't fight you anymore. You did it. You wore me down with your warmth and your
earnestness and your never-fucking-ending devotion. I give up, alright? I give in. You've won.”

“I've won?” Kara looks as exhausted as Lena feels. Slate blue eyes narrow, pale lips tugging down
into a frown. "There's nothing to win here, Lena. We've both lost.”

“Oh yeah?”

Lena feels hysterical laughter bubble up behind her teeth. She's powerless against this woman; she
always has been. Has lost to her her faith, her trust, her fight, her heart. The fact that Kara can't
seem to see that, isn't even aware of the astronomical concessions she's attained, only makes it
worse.

“What the hell have you surrendered through all of this?” she asks, a bitterness born of aching
vulnerability pooling in the hollows between the words. “What did you lose?”

Kara meets her gaze steadily. Those big, sad, beautiful eyes don't even blink.

“You.”

Kara falls asleep in her lap. Lena tries to pretend that the submission, the trust inherent to such a
concession doesn't hew her open from the inside out.

She strokes blonde curls back from closed eyes, traces the contusion on her cheek and the wound
on her brow with hesitant, reverent fingers. Looks at Kara, beaten and bruised and bloodied for her,
and feels the ineluctable urge to kill something.

No, not something. Someone.

She eases herself out from beneath Kara, lays her unconscious body gently on the cold stone.
Cracks a bottle of her own human-strength painkillers and swallows down a sizeable handful dry.
Wraps her fractured ribs in as tight a bandage as she dares, rolls her protesting shoulders a few
times, and sets off to commit a murder.

It isn't hard to find Eve, this time.

She's right there, right in the cabin Lena and Lex had loved when they were children. Right there,
in the spot where her brother had died. Right there, in the spot where Lena had killed him.

The ease with which she tracks down her quarry does set off alarm bells in Lena's mind, tiny red
figures screaming trap! trap! trap! as they tap dance through her limbic system. Unfortunately,
these little red do-gooders are immediately squashed flat by the swirling black monstrosity of
furious vengeance currently piloting most of Lena's higher faculties, the one directing her palm
towards the gun she'd picked up from her lab, the one directing her finger to the trigger.
Eve doesn't seem at all surprised to see her. More alarm bells ring, only to be immediately quashed
by rage.

“She dead, then?” is the first thing Eve says to her, leaning against the edge of Lex's old desk,
palms braced against the antique wood.

Lena growls.

Eve's smirk drips with self-satisfaction. It makes Lena want to shoot her. She contents herself with
shooting the ground beside Eve's foot, watching in sick gratification as she flinches, pales.

“Your missile hit the wrong target.”

Lena's voice is cracked and barbarous, sanded down by pain and emotion and exhaustion and
wrath. Eve composes herself after a beat, quirking a brow.

“My missile hit exactly where it was meant to.”

Lena's getting tired of these riddles. She fires another warning shot into the mahogany beside Eve's
left knee, ignores the way her own throbs with the lingering caress of Eve's baton.

“You aimed at me,” she snaps. “And Supergirl happened to get in the way. I was your target.”

“You were,” Eve confirms benignly. “You are. But that missile was never meant for you.”

“For fuck's sake,” Lena snaps. The metal of the gun in her hand is growing warm, slick with sweat.
“Enough games. You kidnapped me, you shot me up with truth serum to find out Supergirl's
identity, you failed. You tried to beat me, you tried to kill me, you failed. I won't.”

She raises the gun. Just like last time, the target before her has threatened the people Lena loves.
Just like last time, she will shoot them, so they can never threaten anyone again.

Just like last time, her hands are shaking.

"That isn't why I injected you with truth serum. Surely you can see that.”

The tap-dancing alarm bells in Lena's mind have multiplied to form a full-blown chorus line,
thudding out an enthusiastic Cancan atop the trigger of whatever self-preservation instincts she's
got left.

She wants to shoot Eve right here, right now, if only so that she doesn't have to hear one more
cryptic word fall out of her smug little face. But her mental chorus line are working themselves into
a frenzy begging her to slow down, to be careful, to take a glimpse at the bigger picture Eve's
offering.

She narrows her eyes, grinds her teeth. “Why, then?”

“I needed a pretence, Lena. A credible reason to kidnap you. I needed the trap to be believable.”

Lena's stomach sinks.

Eve's grin widens. “You're starting to get it now, aren't you? At last. Yes,” she says, gloating and
almost gleeful. “I already knew Supergirl's name. I only wanted you to tell me so that you'd believe
it was your fault, when I destroyed her. So that you'd blame yourself. And you do, don't you? You
know she's dead because of you. You know that everything that's happened to her is your fault.”
Lena wants to protest. Wants to, but can't.

“You see it now, don't you?” Eve asks, and the maniacal joy in her eyes is so closely an echo of her
brother's particular brand of sadism that Lena shivers. “I didn't kidnap you to hurt you. I kidnapped
you so that I'd have bait.”

"Why, Eve?” Lena asks. The gun is suddenly leaden between her palms. She's so, so tired. "What's
your problem with Supergirl? Why are you so desperate to hurt her?”

“Lena, Lena,” Eve chides. “Come on. I thought you'd finally understood. This isn't about her. This
was never about her. Supergirl has always been means to an end.”

Bile rises in the back of Lena's throat. “What end?”

Eve's eyes flash in the dim light. Her smile is nothing short of predatory. “You.”

Lena's stomach plummets to her boots. Her eyes slide closed.

“You were always my target, Lena. I told you that already. You, and you alone.”

Lena works her teeth against the meat of her cheek, trying in vain to regulate her faltering
breathing. Kara, in the firing line because of her. Kara, hurt because of her. Again. Again.

“I wanted to hurt you the way you hurt me when you killed your brother,” Eve says, each word
coldly and clearly enunciated. “I wanted to return the favour, to take away the person you love
most in the world. I wanted to get to you, Lena, wanted to make sure you'd never recover. And
how do I get to you?”

It's not a question that begs an answer, really. Not while Lena's standing here, the salt of Kara's
tears staining her jacket, the echo of Kara's cries ringing in her ears, the grit of Kara's drying blood
coagulating beneath her fingernails.

Eve's eyes flash, dancing with the fire of triumph.

“I get to her.”

Lena could scream.

She could scream at the insulting simplicity of Eve's plan, now that she can see it in its entirety.
She could scream at being manipulated like this, at being punished not through her own pain, but
through Kara's. She could scream at how effective a gambit it is. She could scream at how easily it
had worked.

Lena could scream and so, she does. Long and loud and animal in its acrimony, launching herself at
Eve like she's her own damn missile cannon.

Eve may have been expecting a bullet, but she was not expecting Lena's elbow to her sternum,
Lena's knee to her kidney or Lena's fingernails clawing against her flesh. The surprise knocks her
off balance and Lena presses her advantage, leaning in close to growl against her ear as she
immobilises her target with a forearm braced against her windpipe.

“You don't get to get to her,” she snarls, free hand pressing the muzzle of the gun unforgivingly
into Eve's side. “You don't get to shoot at her, or hurt her, or use her to get to me. You don't get to
come near her.”

Eve's face is reddening beneath the pressure of Lena's arm. Even still, even now, the shadow of a
smirk plays at the corner of her mouth.

“She's mine,” Lena grunts through gritted teeth, fingers flexing on the trigger, “and I will end you
for what you've done to her.”

“Even after she lied to you?” Eve chokes, eyes bulging. “Even after her betrayal?”

“Even if she picked up this gun and shot me clean through the heart,” Lena grits out, the words
shining with truth in the filth of their struggle. “You hear me? Always.”

The body beneath her own relaxes, Eve's lips pulling up into a smile even as they purple from lack
of oxygen. "Then you finally know how I feel,” she wheezes, pitiful and weak. “Then I've taken
from you the same thing you took from me the day you killed your brother. I've gotten what I
wanted so, kill me. Go on. Do it.”

Lena growls again, lungs searing.

“Do it!” Eve rasps, pushing against the arm at her throat, the gun at her side. “Kill me!”

Lena's fingers clench. She is so sick of being used, of being deceived, of being exploited for others’
ends.

“Don't tell me what to fucking do,” she bellows, contrary to the last, and in a scream of pure
frustration and a haze of lurid purple, Eve Teschmacher disappears from Lena's life for the last
time.

"Lena!” a familiar voice yells, and then familiar arms are closing around her, plucking the gun
delicately from her grasp before crushing their bodies together. Their bodies, battered and bruised;
one human, one Kryptonian, both broken, both breathing still.

“Kara,” she shudders out, the bright lilac of the portal she'd just conjured winking out into
nothingness behind them.

“Where did you send her?” Kara asks as she staggers to keep them both upright, supporting Lena's
weight as the adrenaline wears off and the shock sets in and every cell in her body turns to molten,
dragging lead.

“DEO desert facility,” Lena mumbles against Kara's chest as she forces her hands to rove the
blonde's body, checking pulse rate, breathing, lingering injuries. “Portalled her right into a
maximum-security cell, which is more of a courtesy than your sister deserves.”

Kara chuckles, her own fingers mirroring Lena's as they probe one another for fresh wounds. “You
didn't kill her.”

Lena sighs. “Well, she told me to. No way was I gonna do it after that.”

A snort of laughter buries itself in her hair. Kara seems stronger than she had when Lena had left
her lying on the floor of her Mount Norquay bunker, steadier. She's still wearing the anti-
Kryptonite suit but her skin is flawless gold once more, no trace of green poison in sight.
Relief hits Lena like a punch to the gut. “Besides,” she mutters with a grim shake of her head. “I
wasn't going to give her the satisfaction. I want her to live knowing she didn’t win. You're still
alive.”

Kara pulls back then, breaking the contact between them. When their eyes meet, her expression is
unreadable. “You want her to know that you didn't need to kill her because she hadn't killed me.”

The day's tolls manifest suddenly as a rocking dizziness that trembles through Lena's bones. She
fights to clear the blurriness from her vision. “Yeah.”

"That she can't use me to get to you. That I'm yours.”

The edge to Kara's tone is indecipherable past the pounding in Lena's head, the adrenaline-spiked
thudding in her ears.

“Exactly.”

“Even if I picked up this gun and shot you clean through the heart.”

A beat of silence, of stillness. Then another, and another.

Lena sighs. “You heard that part, did you?”

Kara's lips purse. “It's mostly how I tracked you here, once I woke up and realised you'd left me
behind to play out your little suicide revenge mission solo. You have a very piercing shriek.”

Quiet falls between them once more. Lena watches Kara watching her, feels the cosmic scale upon
which their relationship rests teeter between what they are to one another in this moment, and what
they've always been destined to be.

“Did you mean it?” Kara asks, gossamer-soft in the crystalline hush. “Always?”

Lena shrugs one shoulder. Every cell in her body feels like it's vibrating. Whether it's from the
weight of what's happening between them, or the astronomical ass-kicking she'd recently received,
she couldn't say.

“I'm still here, aren’t I?”

Still, the look on Kara's face is utterly inscrutable. “Yeah,” she breathes, full of wonder suddenly,
full of awe. “Yeah, you are. Always.”

Lena swallows, tongue sticking a little against her dry lips. “That's how it felt, you know. When I
found out you'd lied. Like you'd shot me clean through the heart.”

If it's a little hyperbolic, Kara doesn't seem to mind.

“I know,” she murmurs, dirt-streaked fingers twisting and clenching against the tops of her thighs.
Charged silence once more, and then— “I won't do it again.”

Lena allows every last molecule of air in her cracked and screaming chest to sigh out of her at
once.

“I know.”

Hope flickers in the depths of Kara's eyes like an ember undampened amidst graveyards of ash.
“You do?”

“I do,” she says, because some truths simply cannot be ignored forever, and because saying it feels
like salvation, like giving and receiving forgiveness in the very same breath, the very same
heartbeat.

She steps forward, holds out her hands. A gesture of trust. A gesture of peace. “Kara. Take me
home.”

Kara takes her home.

Kara sweeps her into her arms like it’s the very motion for which she'd been designed, and cradles
her close until they touch down in the middle of her sun-drenched loft, and Lena doesn't even need
to say aloud that this is exactly what she'd meant.

Even once Kara sets her back on her feet, she doesn't go far. Just tugs Lena behind the curtain that
demarcates her bedroom and leaves her there as she flits around gathering bandages, painkillers,
towels.

And then she's back and stepping into Lena's space like it's where she belongs because, frankly, it
is. And Kara's hands are steady and sure as she strips Lena of her ruined jacket, her filthy sweater.
As she catches the trailing end of Lena's loosened bandages, lifting the hem of her shirt to trace it
to its source. As her investigation reveals instead the slim holster at Lena's hip, the secondary
pistol she'd stashed there just in case.

Kara quirks a brow in concert with one corner of her lips as she slips the holster deftly from Lena's
belt, discarding the weapon on the bedroom dresser. “One gun not enough for you?” she asks,
amusement colouring the sweet planes of her face. “You wanted one for each hand?”

Lena clicks her tongue. “You think one for each hand would be enough for me?”

Kara's eyes widen in surprise, narrow again as she deploys her x-ray vision, and then she's laughing
loud and beautiful as she walks Lena backwards to sit on the edge of the bed, kneeling before her to
pull the Derringer from its holster at her ankle, slipping a dagger from one of her boots and a slim
canister of mace from the other.

Blue eyes blink up from between her knees, pink lips quirked in poorly concealed amusement.
“Dare I ask if that's all your weapons?”

“I don't know.” Lena quirks a brow, leaning back on her hands. “Dare you?”

Kara chuckles. “Your personal arsenal is a thing of beauty.”

Lena shrugs. “I was on my way to confront a dangerous lunatic. You can never be too prepared.”

A nod, mock serious. “Definitely not.” And then Kara is sliding back up the length of her body,
broad hands palming the span of her waist to extract the taser concealed at the small of Lena's back.

“Is that all?” she husks, throaty and low and okay, it's definitely symbolic, the way Kara's stripping
her of each of her weapons, of every last one of her defences. It's metaphorical and emblematic and
significant, sure, but it's also hot as all fuck, having Kara on her knees like this between Lena's
spread thighs, hands coasting over every inch of her body, and Lena's tired of pretending not to
want the only thing she's truly wanted for the past five and a half years.
She reaches out, fisting two hands in the heavy fabric of Kara's collar. "My earrings also double as
miniature throwing stars.”

Kara comes willingly, laying Lena down on her sheets with careful hands. “I think I can manage to
avoid those.”

“Can't be too careful,” Lena gasps, ripping the studs from her own ears and hurling them carelessly
into the corner of the room. She's barely got them free before Kara's hovering over her, braced
against the mattress, the lengths of their bodies perfectly aligned.

“No, you're right,” she hums, leaning in to nose against Lena's jaw, lips ghosting the shell of her ear
to land a sucking kiss to the newly bared lobe. “This is definitely better.”

Lena's breath hitches, hips twitching, and when her pelvis connects with Kara's the body above her
sinks down, pressing her deliciously into the mattress and it's all good and right and wonderful
until Lena is suddenly unable to breathe.

She hisses out an involuntary wheeze of pain and Kara's weight disappears in an instant, blue eyes
blinking down at her wide and worried.

“Your ribs,” she gasps, fingers returning to the hem of Lena's ruined blouse. “Shit, I'm sorry.”

And then she's deftly unfastening the buttons, revealing the faded white of her haphazard bandage
job before unwinding that too, sucking a sharp breath through her teeth when the mottled
watercolour of Lena's bruised torso is revealed.

Kara doesn’t even hesitate, leaning down to press her lips to each purpling mark, mouth tracking a
trail of fire up the blue-black ladder of Lena's ribcage. It's exquisite, even through the pain. Lena
would take a body full of fractures any day of the week if it meant even one more moment of this.

Only when Kara's nose bumps the underwire of Lena's bra does she raise her head, the pads of her
fingers replacing the plush of her lips against Lena's skin.

“What can I do?” she asks, wide-eyed, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “What do you
need?”

And it's such a cliché, but it's also bone-tremblingly, teeth-achingly true when Lena gasps out,
“You.”

And that, at the last, is all it takes.

In the next instant Kara's mouth is on her own, hotter and wetter and softer and better than Lena
could ever in her wildest fantasies have predicted. The past weeks, months, years of tension and
strain and anticipation between them surge through their kiss, a conflagration of want and need that
threatens to engulf them entirely.

Lena finds she's more than happy to burn atop Kara's pyre.

Her fumbling fingers find the release at Kara's collar that has her anti-Kryptonite suit
dematerialising back into nothing. She pulls and prods at the rest of the layers between them until
Kara's hovering above her once more, the divinely sculpted peaks and planes of her body bared to
Lena for the first time.

And then Kara's eagerly levelling the playing field, stripping what's left of Lena's suit down her
legs, bending her knees open and positioning herself between them.
Lena reaches down suddenly, hastily, fingers twisting in golden curls to bring Kara's eyes up to her
own.

“I love you,” she gasps, urgent all of a sudden, as if they're running out of time. As if this is the end
of something, rather than the beginning of the rest of their lives. “You know that, don't you? You
have to have known. I'm in love with you, too.”

Kara lifts her palm from the swell of Lena's inner thigh to grasp her hand instead. Brings Lena's
fingers to her lips, kissing them, sucking ever so lightly on the tips before pressing them over her
own pounding heart.

“Yours,” she breathes, eyes big and blue and close to buckling beneath the weight of the moment.
“Always.”

And then she leans down, and presses her open mouth between Lena's legs, and the rest of the
world whites out in a haze of kaleidoscopic pleasure.

Kara's tongue works over her with single-minded intensity, dipping and curling inside her as her
hands press Lena's hips down into the mattress. She catapults Lena over the edge with a rough
graze of teeth and then flips her over, mindful of her injuries, before she's even stopped trembling.
Before Lena can catch her breath Kara's bearing down, pressing one of Lena's thighs against the
other so she's even tighter as she drives into her from behind, so deep and so slow that Lena's toes
curl against the sheets, moaning and mouthing wetly at the pillow beneath her.

Lena's barely regained the ability to breathe, has barely reached out a hand to cup between Kara's
legs before she's being lifted once more, cradled to Kara's chest as the blonde's knee keeps her
thighs spread wide.

Kara mouths at her hairline as she pulls her close, presses kiss after kiss to her flushed cheeks and
fluttering eyelids. She strokes at her with the very tip of one finger until Lena's moaning and
begging and writhing against her, crooks another just so and presses firm and unmoving, watching
as Lena's hips shift against it, seeking friction, rubbing and dragging herself against Kara's hand
until she's half-mad with the suspense.

“This is what I wanted to do,” Kara pants against her temple, the delicious pressure of her hand
encouraging Lena to move that little bit faster, that little bit harder. “In the training room, when I
had you pinned to the wall. This is what I've always wanted to do, since I saw you in your office
that very first day.”

Lena whines, both at Kara's words and at the empty ache between her legs at the teasing, hips
stuttering in their rhythm as she chases the white-hot blaze of pleasure.

Kara chuckles breathlessly, leaning down to suck Lena's tongue into her mouth, releasing it with a
wet pop. “Told you you didn't want to know.”

Lena gasps, dizzy with the weight of it all. Determined, she flips them until she's straddling Kara's
thigh, the burning of her injured ribs barely registering beneath the flames licking over her skin.

She reaches down, tracing through slick heat, and uses the leverage of her own thigh between
Kara's to drive two of her fingers deep, dragging them against the softness of her.

Kara gasps, back arching, the tendons in her neck standing out in sharp relief as she shudders.

“I absolutely did want to know,” Lena purrs, pressing hot, open-mouth kisses along the column of
Kara's throat. "Maybe if you'd kissed me instead of lying to me all those years ago, we could have
 gotten here sooner.”

A hoarse sound cracks from the depths of Kara's throat as Lena spreads her fingers, twisting and
curling. “Maybe,” she rasps, fingers smoothing over the curve of Lena's ass before dropping lower,
rubbing at her from behind. “But then I never would have gotten to feel you up in a supply closet.”

Lena lets out a gasp which Kara swallows, tongue probing hot past her lips, her tongue, the clean
edge of her teeth.

“I knew that was your aim the whole time,” Lena accuses once she's reclaimed her own mouth,
thrusting faster as Kara's fingers match her frenzied pace. “Dark cupboard, cramped quarters.
Oldest trick in the book.”

“What can I say,” Kara pants, pressing a sloppy kiss to the swell of Lena's bottom lip. “You're so
hot when you're trying so hard to hate me.”

Lena tries to snort, only it turns into more of a gasp, which turns into more of a moan as Kara slips
three fingers inside her to the knuckle, the tight angle meaning she hits that spot with every thrust.
Lena speeds up her own fingers in response, adds a third, and then Kara's surging up to kiss her like
it's the only thing she's ever wanted to do and then they're both floating, falling, flying.

After, with the sweat cooling on their bodies, with her cheek on Kara's chest and Kara's fingers
carding through the unruly mane of her hair, Sam's words float through her mind unbidden.

Lena's brow furrows.

“So, are we— are we hate fucking right now?”

Kara laughs, tilting her chin to kiss the crinkle between Lena's brows until it softens into nothing.

“Baby, you know damn well that this is nothing short of making love,” she grins, peppering the
final three syllables with smacking kisses to Lena's lips and Lena does know that. She does, she
does, she does.

Kara's smile is infectious, her eyes – those eyes, those bright eyes that have lied to her, saved her,
condemned her, and loved her through it all – still that same old beautiful blue.

“But you tell yourself whatever you need to.”

Chapter End Notes

i am sorry this took eight millennia. please know it almost killed me to write it. i've
already had dramatic-and-horny-lena for three months and it still wasn't enough time
with her. if anything happens to her i will kill everyone in this room and then myself.
*blows a kiss to the sky* for the brat lena we were denied <3

End Notes
 comments are my main source of protein if you are that way inclined <3

musical vibes for this may be found here

come yell at me on tumblr: searidings

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