The room was grey with early morning light, thin ribbons of it filtering through heavy curtains.
Kara surfaced from sleep with a dull, insistent pressure behind her eyes. She'd never been hungover before—she'd never been able to get drunk before—and she had no framework for what she was feeling. She must be getting sick. She'd never been sick either, but she'd observed enough of the human experience to recognize the general shape of it.
She reached up to check her own forehead.
Her hand landed on something smooth and warm that was not her forehead.
Her head turned with the mechanical precision of someone who has not yet caught up to what their body already knows.
Lena?
Lena was asleep beside her.
Kara—fearless in battle, unbothered by Kryptonite, veteran of alien invasions—made a sound that was not quite a scream, clapped her other hand over her mouth, and pulled herself back under the blankets like a startled bird.
For a long moment she lay there staring at the ceiling.
What had actually happened last night?
She retraced events: Metallo. The fight. The Kryptonite. Then cleaning up, sitting down, opening Thea's bottle. Lena asking whether she had a boyfriend. Her asking Lena the same question back. And then—then there was a gap. A clean, unhelpful gap.
One fragment surfaced: she'd apparently asked Lena if she had any tips for a certain aspect of anatomy. Lena had apparently said something about kneading. Whether any actual kneading had occurred, Kara could not confirm—her memory stopped cleanly at that point. Based on available evidence, however, theory had clearly been put into practice.
Kara activated every ability she had across a radius she'd normally reserve for planetary emergencies. Super-vision swept to the moon. Clear—no one was looking at her. Super-hearing scanned the immediate area. Also clear.
The universe had decided to cut her a break.
She moved with maximum speed and minimum noise, gathered the clothes from the floor without checking whether any of them were actually hers, dressed, and was out the window before the room had time to register her absence.
She had her back to Kara's departure. A pair of dark eyes opened.
Lena had been awake for several minutes. As an Earth human with years of boardroom dinners behind her, her alcohol tolerance was higher, and she'd had less to drink. She'd just been thinking.
A brilliant strategist, she discovered, was no better equipped to handle this than anyone else. Her closest friend had, overnight, become something considerably more—and she had no playbook for it. She did what any rational person did when the rational approach stopped working: she sat very still and waited to have a feeling about it.
Lena sat up slowly, smoothed the sheets, and began to consider her situation.
The morning air above National City was cold.
Kara didn't notice. She flew home at maximum speed, poured herself a glass of water, and stood in the middle of the apartment trying to restart her brain.
The water helped, slightly. She sat down.
She and Lena had been close friends. Very close. And now they were apparently something else, and she had no idea what to do with that, or what they were, or what either of them actually wanted, or—Everything dissolved into noise.
It was only then that she registered that the apartment was empty. She and Alex shared this place. Alex should have been here.
Where is she?
Kara was just starting to wonder whether something had happened to her sister when the front door opened—slowly, carefully—and Alex slid inside wearing large sunglasses and an expression that would have been far more convincing at three in the morning than at whatever hour it currently was.
"Oh—hey! You're up early." She gave a warm smile. Very natural.
Kara looked at her. She said nothing.
Alex had no particular attention left for her sister's expression. She was entirely occupied with her own thoughts, and after a long moment she seemed to reach some private decision, walked to the couch, and sat.
"Kara, I—I need to tell you something." She stopped. Tried again. Couldn't find the opening.
Kara redirected her own concerns. Whatever was happening with Lena could wait. Her sister was clearly dealing with something, and if it was trouble, she wanted to know. She set her shoulders. "What is it?"
"Do you remember my friend from high school? The one I was really close with?"
"Jessica something?"
"Right." Alex picked every word. "We were very close. I stayed at her place a lot. I always loved being there—I thought it was just friendship. But looking back now, I think..." She trailed off.
Kara listened with quiet patience. She didn't follow the thread yet, but she was good at sitting with things she didn't understand.
"I've been spending time with someone recently. A police detective—Maggie Sawyer. You've met her."
The topic had apparently shifted. Kara waited.
"I was with her last night." Alex's jaw set. "All night. The whole time." She said it like someone pulling off a bandage, and then she dropped her gaze to the floor and waited to be judged.
Kara had been genuinely baffled by this conversation ten seconds ago.
Then she understood—instantly—with the specific lightning-fast comprehension of someone who had spent the last eight hours navigating the exact same terrain.
The pressure in her chest released by half.
Same day. Same problem. Same solution required.
She thought, briefly, about whether to say anything. She thought about courage—the specific word Thea had used, and what it had meant. Alex had found it in herself to say this out loud. If Alex could be brave, so could she. And this wasn't something terrible. On Krypton, same-sex relationships had never raised many eyebrows—reproductive technology had long since separated the biological question from everything else. The El family had traditional values, yes, but traditional wasn't the same as cruel. Besides—Thea and Diana were right there as a reference point, and they were fine.
"Alex, wait. I also —" And she told her.
Alex stared at her for a long moment.
She had prepared herself for many possible responses from her family when she finally said this out loud. Being immediately one-upped by her own little sister had not made the list. She opened her mouth, closed it, attempted to find grounds to object, and realized she was standing in a glass house.
"Do you actually like her?" The big-sister instinct reasserted itself at least this far. "She's a Luthor."
"We were really good friends before any of this." Kara pulled at her hair. "And now I have no idea what we are, and I don't know how to handle it."
The Danvers sisters sat on opposite ends of the couch and stared at nothing in particular.
Lena, meanwhile, had spent the morning issuing instructions to her assistant in a sequence that could generously be described as nonlinear, then sent her away and picked up her phone.
Her evil stepmother was freshly in police custody—that option was off the table. Lex was unreachable by nature, and even if she found him, there was no version of this conversation that ended well. She turned the problem over and over.
Eventually she called Mercy.
She was Lex's former bodyguard and Lena's unlikely acquaintance—they'd known each other for years, long enough that Lena had once half-expected Mercy to become her sister-in-law. She made small talk, circling the subject gradually, and eventually steered the conversation toward the matter in the most oblique way she could manage.
She had not expected Mercy to be enthusiastic.
She was very enthusiastic. Thoroughly, comprehensively, quotably enthusiastic.
Lena hung up and sat in silence for a moment.
That good?
She turned to her computer and pulled up Supergirl's public profile. She scrolled slowly through the archived photos. In every one, she was the same person—strong, open, relentlessly optimistic. All the qualities Lena had spent years cultivating, Kara just had—naturally, without trying.
Lena's left hand turned her pen in slow circles. She went back through the sequence of events: the plane, the second encounter, the third, each one connected to the last like links in a chain neither of them had noticed assembling. Something had been pulling at this thread for a long time.
She revisited the previous night. Not the blurry parts—the feeling. Like stepping outside her own skin and finding the air easier to breathe.
This might not be so bad after all.