Chapter Text
Lena wakes to warmth first, then to certainty, no careful arithmetic required this time, just the plain fact of Kara's head resting on her chest, one arm slung loose across her stomach, and the small, humbling recognition that neither of them decided this. Not really. Not anymore.
Three nights running now. She's stopped keeping count on purpose.
The light through the window has already gone that deep, molten orange Argo's red sun turns everything into, a color Earth's own sun never quite managed. Alura's kitchen smells faintly of the bitter tea she leaves brewing before she goes, and closer than that, warmer, the smell of Kara's skin, and Lena lies still and breathes it in.
Kara's still asleep, breathing slow and even against her collarbone, and Lena doesn't wake her right away. She lets herself have this first, the weight of her, the warmth, her other hand finding Kara's upper arm where it rests across her stomach and stroking slow lines up and down it, unhurried, in no rush at all for the morning to properly begin. Kara stirs beneath her palm before she's fully awake, a small tightening of her arm, a breath that changes shape, and Lena feels the exact moment consciousness arrives without either of them saying a word about it. Fingers find her stomach again, flatten there, testing, and stay.
Neither of them speaks. There doesn't seem to be a reason to. Kara's thumb moves once, slow, against the hem of Lena's shirt, and Lena answers it without thinking, her own hand covering Kara's, and that's the whole conversation, entirely enough.
Something small scrapes across the window ledge outside, wings against glass, and Lena's attention catches on it for half a second, her hand slipping off Kara's to chase the sound. It's enough. Kara's thumb picks the moment back up the instant she's free of it, tracing slow again along the hem, dipping once, twice, onto the bare skin just beside it before retreating, careful, unhurried, testing.
Kara stays right where she is, head still against Lena's collarbone, her thumb still moving in the same slow drift it's kept up since she woke, close enough to bare skin now that Lena can feel the heat of it. Lena's breath goes slower and deeper than it needs to, chasing the drift of that thumb with too much attention, wanting, absurdly, for it to cross the line.
Then Kara's hand moves, unhurried, sliding down from the hem to settle over the curve of her hip instead, thumb tracing a slow arc there through the fabric, feeling out how far this might go without either of them saying so out loud. Lena tells herself the small drop in her chest is relief. It doesn't feel much like relief. She only tips her chin up to find Lena's eyes, not otherwise moving, hair still a mess, eyes heavy-lidded and unguarded in a way they rarely stay once the day gets moving.
Lena looks down at her, no reason to glance away, and being watched from below, chin tilted up, Kara's weight still settled warm across her ribs, her hand still tracing slow circles at her hip, makes the air between them go taut and warm and entirely too aware of itself. Her throat works, and lower, in her stomach, something pulls tight and doesn't let go, want gathering low and insistent, entirely inconvenient at this hour and beside the point of anything either of them is supposed to be doing today. She does her level best to keep all of it off her face.
Kara speaks first, quiet, barely louder than the hush the room's already sitting in.
"Did you sleep?" Her thumb doesn't stop, still moving in that same slow circle against her hip, and Lena has to concentrate, briefly, entirely too hard, on keeping her voice even.
"Not much." Lena catches her wrist before the circle can widen into anything more, holds it still instead, needing, suddenly, for it to stop being a question of inches. "I couldn't stop turning it over. Whether there's a way to cover the gap instead of avoiding it altogether. I don't know if it's actually possible yet. I want to talk to Rhu today, before we take anything back to the Council again."
Kara's quiet a moment, just watching her, thumb gone still under Lena's hand. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"We'll go see him first, then." No hesitation in it, no need to talk it through before agreeing, just that.
Lena sits with that a moment, and the rest comes out before she's quite decided to let it. "I keep thinking about what they said. About precedent, as if there's a line of people waiting to misuse a reservoir the second they make one exception, as if you're not half the reason any of this technology's still standing to begin with." She hears her own voice climbing and doesn't particularly try to bring it back down. "It was insulting. It still is."
Kara's watching her when she finally looks over, an expression on her face that has nothing to do with the Council at all.
"What," Lena says, half daring her to say it.
Kara just shakes her head. "Nobody's ever gotten this angry on my behalf before. Not like this."
"Well. Someone should have."
Kara doesn't say anything to that. She just tips her head up further and presses a kiss to the underside of Lena's jaw, lingering there a beat longer than she needs to. Lena's eyes fall shut before she can stop them, a slow breath leaving her, want spiking sudden and reckless, an urge to flip them both over, press Kara into the mattress.
They stay a while longer anyway, neither of them in a hurry to be two people with a plan instead of just two people still tangled together in a warm bed.
It's Kara who moves first, eventually, pulling back and swinging her legs out of the bed. She stretches once standing, arms reaching over her head, unhurried, and her shirt rides up with the movement, just enough for Lena's eyes to catch on the chiselled lines and stay there, no real effort made to hide it. Kara notices, and flexes, just slightly, a small show she doesn't bother pretending isn't deliberate. For a second neither of them moves, both of them a little too dark-eyed, a little too aware of the small ordinary space still left between them.
"I'll go make us some breakfast." Kara's voice comes out scratchier than the sentence deserves, lower too, not quite steady yet.
The moment Kara's gone, Lena lets out a long breath and drops both hands over her face, entirely, embarrassingly affected by a stretch that shouldn't have been allowed to do that much damage. A cold shower is suddenly sounding like the only reasonable plan before breakfast. She lies there a moment longer, hands still pressed over her eyes, before finally dragging herself up to find something to wear.
Two floors under the Science Guild tower, past a stairwell that spirals below a dozen unmarked doors, sits the one door that isn't unmarked at all, a small worn sigil pressed into the metal where decades of hands have pushed past it. Inside Rhu's workshop, none of the polish from the towers above survives: workbenches buried under half-built devices, coils of wire, three separate schematics hanging in soft blue light at different heights, and the low electric hum of something charging somewhere out of sight.
Rhu looks up from a half-assembled console the second the door slides open, and it's Kara he spots first, already crossing the room before either of them gets a word out. "Hey, you." Then he actually looks at her properly and stops short. "What happened?"
"They said no." Kara doesn't dress it up.
Rhu's face falls, quick and real. "The whole thing? Even with the numbers I sent over?"
"Even with the numbers." Lena's voice comes out flatter than she means it to. "No precedent. That was the whole argument. Nothing about the science."
Rhu swears under his breath, short and sharp, then seems to remember Lena's standing right there and glances at her properly for the first time since they walked in. "Sorry. Hi. Good to see you, even with the terrible circumstances."
"We think we found a way around it," Lena says, since apparently that's where they're starting now. "Not just the science. The politics of it too. A secondary system, running in parallel, just for the length of the transfer. If it can carry the dome's load for those few minutes, the shield never technically drops at all."
Rhu's quiet for a second, turning that over, then he's crossing to a wall panel and pulling up something new, blueprints Lena doesn't recognize. "There's a system close to that already. Smaller. We use it for scheduled maintenance, when a section of the grid needs to come down for a few minutes at a time." He frowns at the specs. "It's built to run on a completely different signature, though. Standard grid frequency, nothing like what the reservoir puts out raw. You can't just wire the two together and hope."
"We wouldn't need to." Kara says it slowly, the idea arriving as she speaks it. "The ring already converts the reservoir's output once, to route it through me. What if it did the conversion twice? Once for the transfer. Once to feed the backup grid the frequency it actually wants."
Rhu stares at her for a second, then at the ring on her finger, properly looking at it for what feels like the first time. "That might actually work." He sounds almost offended about it. "Why didn't I think of that."
It's Lena who pulls the display closer after that, fingers already moving through the schematic, remapping the dual-conversion pathway in real time. Kara drifts behind her to watch over her shoulder, one hand settling at her waist without seeming to think about it, and Lena doesn't comment, doesn't even seem to notice, already three steps into the math.
Rhu notices, though. His eyes flick from the hand at Lena's waist to Kara's face and back, and he doesn't say a single word about it, the grin doing all the talking his mouth apparently isn't allowed to. Kara catches it and narrows her eyes at him, silent warning, but doesn't move her hand.
Lena's fairly sure her own face is doing something complicated too, and she keeps her eyes on the schematic instead of helping.
Rhu, to his credit, lets it go, though the look on his face says he's filing it away for later.
The next hour settles into real work, all three of them leaned into the same display, throwing numbers back and forth until the numbers start holding. Somewhere behind them a kettle Rhu apparently owns starts complaining about the heat, and nobody moves to deal with it.
"You've forgotten how to carry a decimal," Rhu says at one point, not unkindly, correcting a figure over Kara's shoulder. "What do they even teach you on Earth."
"Excellent television, mostly."
Reaching for the same section of the display at the same moment, Lena's hand lands over Kara's on the glass, and neither of them moves it right away, both of them a beat too aware of the warmth under her palm before Rhu says something about capacitor thresholds and the moment folds itself back into the work.
By the time they land somewhere real, the workshop's gone dim with afternoon, and the shape of it is this: a temporary secondary grid, built off the existing maintenance architecture, the ring doing double duty as converter, reinforced enough to carry the dome's full load for the length of the transfer, so the shield never drops, not even for a second. It isn't perfect. Rhu says as much, twice. But it's real, and it's theirs, and Lena hasn't felt this close to something solid since they landed on Argo.
"We'll need to frame it right," Lena says, already thinking two steps ahead. "As an exchange. I can improve half the grid's efficiency while I'm in there anyway. Give the Council something more than just a request."
Kara's watching her, all the softness in her face pointed nowhere near grid efficiency, and doesn't seem to notice she's doing it.
Rhu looks between them, and whatever he sees there makes him grin outright. "You two are disgusting," he says, entirely fond. "Go home. We'll try again tomorrow."
Outside, the light's gone the deep, end-of-day red the dome always turns it, and Kara laces their fingers together without asking, easy now, walking back toward Alura's with a plan that finally feels like it might hold.
Friday morning, and they're back in the same chamber, five councilors again, Alura among them, though she doesn't so much as glance toward Kara this time, already careful, already neutral.
Lena does most of the talking, same as she did before, except this time there's an actual plan behind the words instead of a plea. She lays it out clean: the secondary grid, the ring's double conversion, the dome never losing coverage for even a second. When she gets to the exchange, offering her own expertise to improve half the city's grid efficiency in return, she watches three of the five councilors actually lean forward.
"The blackout risk," one of them says, studying the schematic Rhu sent ahead, "appears to be resolved." Lena allows herself, for exactly one second, something close to hope.
Then Thal speaks, the youngest of the five, and the one Lena's learned to watch most carefully. "And if we grant this because Lena Luthor offers something valuable in return, what have we actually decided? Not that Kara Zor-El's case merits an exception. That access to the reservoir can be purchased, provided the currency is good enough."
The room goes quiet in a way that isn't hopeful.
"That's not-" Kara starts.
"It's a fair question." Alura says it before Kara can finish, and doesn't look at her daughter when she does.
Lena tries anyway. She reframes it as a standing offer available to anyone with comparable expertise, not a private transaction, but she can see it landing wrong even as she says it, and by the time she's finished, she already knows.
The vote, when it comes, is closer than last time, three against, two for, and for a handful of minutes before Thal ever spoke, it looked like it might be more than two. Alura is one of the two, and doesn't try to hide it, and it changes nothing at all.
Kara's the one who thanks the Council for their time, voice even, hand finding Lena's without looking for it first. It's Lena who can't get the corridor to end fast enough.
She makes it as far as the courtyard before it catches up with her, a sharp breath that doesn't quite come out right, and then Kara's arms are around her before she's even fully stopped walking, steady, solid, none of yesterday's shaking left in her at all.
"It wasn't enough." Lena's voice comes out muffled against Kara's shoulder, and there's real anger in it, aimed entirely at herself. "I keep giving them everything I have and it's never enough. I don't know what else there is to give them."
Her hands won't settle, fisting in the back of Kara's shirt and letting go and fisting again, nothing to do with any of it and nowhere to put it down.
"Hey." Kara pulls back just enough to make her look up. "Rhu couldn't find the flaw in it. They couldn't either, not until Thal went looking for a reason that had nothing to do with the actual science."
Lena laughs, short and wet and entirely without humor. "I told you I wanted to fix this. I don't know how to stop trying."
"I know." Kara's thumb catches a tear before it falls, gentle enough that Lena barely feels it happen. "You spent half of yesterday buried in Rhu's blueprints because you couldn't stand the thought of doing nothing. Don't let one vote tell you something different."
Kara's hand moves to properly cup her cheek then, thumb still tracing slow, and whatever's sitting in her face right now, she isn't bothering to hide any of it. "I can't thank you enough for what you're doing for me. I-" She stops, throat working, tries again. "I'm just so lucky to have you."
Lena hears the catch in it, the half-second where the sentence almost went somewhere else entirely, and doesn't ask. Instead she leans into the hand at her cheek, closes her eyes for just a second, and lets that be answer enough for both of them.
They stay there a while, the courtyard empty around them, and for once neither of them tries to fix anything else today. There'll be time for the next idea tomorrow. Right now there's just this, Kara's arms and the quiet, and Lena letting herself be held instead of being useful for once.
The bar's the same one from last week, tucked along a street that curves beside one of the canals, strings of warm light overhead instead of anything electric. Nyra's already got a table by the time they arrive, feet up on the chair beside her like she owns the place, and Torin's mid-argument with a bartender about something that sounds, from the tone of it, entirely unserious.
"You're late," Nyra says, not looking up from her drink. "I already ordered you the good stuff. Least you can do is not waste it."
"We had a shitty day." Kara slides into the seat across from her.
"I heard." Nyra's eyes cut to Lena, sharp and immediately interested. "Sit. Tell me everything. I want to be properly furious about it."
Lena doesn't need much encouragement, and the anger from yesterday hasn't gone anywhere, it's just found a new audience. "They dressed it up as principle. What it actually came down to was that one of them didn't like the idea of anyone buying their way around a rule, even a rule that makes no sense to begin with."
"Which one?"
"Thal."
"Thal." Nyra's whole face sours around the name. "Of course it was Thal."
"You know her?"
"Everyone knows Thal. She once filed a formal complaint because a bakery extended its hours without consulting the Guild first."
Despite everything, Lena laughs, short and surprised by it.
"She talked about precedent like Kara's life is a hypothetical," Lena says, once she's got her breath back. "Weighing the actual cost of doing nothing is a decision too. Caution isn't free, whatever they want to believe."
"You should file a complaint about her," Nyra says. "See how she likes having her hours picked apart by a stranger."
Kara, across the table, is watching the two of them with something between amusement and open fondness, entirely unbothered about being talked over on her own behalf.
"This is nice," she says, when Lena glances at her. "You two being furious together. I could get used to this."
"Get used to it," Nyra says. "I like her. I'm keeping her."
Lena's barely three sips into whatever Nyra ordered her, something sweet with a kick underneath it she doesn't entirely trust, when Torin's head snaps toward the far side of the room and stays there.
"Is that-" he starts.
It is. Rhu, backed against the wall near the door, thoroughly and enthusiastically kissing a man Lena's never seen before.
Nyra whistles, loud and delighted, several tables' worth of heads turning that clearly aren't hers to turn. "Get it, Rhu!"
He doesn't even break the kiss to acknowledge her, just lifts one hand and flips her off without looking, which somehow makes it funnier.
Kara's already laughing, one hand pressed over her mouth, and Lena's just watching the whole thing with open, delighted disbelief.
"He's been seeing him for weeks," Torin says, already bored of the spectacle, going back to his drink. "Won't tell anyone his name. Very dramatic about it."
Lena bites back a laugh of her own, privately entertained by the memory of being irrationally jealous of Rhu just a couple of weeks ago. She doesn't share the observation. Some things are better left buried.
"I respect it," Nyra says. Then, without any warning at all, her attention swings to Lena. "What about you? Seeing anyone?"
Lena's drink goes down a little too fast. "I've been on a different planet for most of the relevant time period, so."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either." Lena's eyes find Kara's for exactly half a second before she can stop them, quick enough that she almost gets away with it. Almost.
Kara, unhelpfully, is smirking into her own glass.
"What," Lena says.
"Nothing." Kara doesn't look nearly sorry enough for someone claiming innocence.
"Okay, but hypothetically," Nyra says, grinning. "Do you have a type?"
Lena swirls her drink, actually considering it. "Honestly? Someone who'd tell me if my tie was crooked before I walked into a board meeting." A beat. "The bar is lower than you'd think."
Nyra laughs, surprised into it. "That's bleak."
"You'd be shocked how few people clear it."
Kara, across the table, has gone quiet, watching Lena with an expression that doesn't fit a hypothetical conversation about strangers at all.
"That's still not really an answer," Nyra says.
"It's all I've got." Lena considers the drink in her hand, decides it's earned her a little more honesty than that. "Though if we're being thorough, there's the terrifying, looks-like-she-could-end-you type. And then there's the exact opposite. Sweet. Sunny." A small shrug. "No middle ground, historically."
Nyra's eyebrow goes up, sliding pointedly toward Kara and back. "Interesting spread."
"Isn't it."
Kara, who has not been participating in this conversation at all, chooses that exact moment to develop a sudden, deep interest in the ice at the bottom of her glass.
Lena decides the only reasonable defense is offense. "What about you? Anyone currently making your life difficult?"
"Absolutely not. I like my life uncomplicated." Nyra says it a little too fast.
"Why does it have to be complicated, though?" Lena asks, curious now. "Not everyone who likes you is automatically going to ruin your life."
Nyra considers that for a second, drink halfway to her mouth. "When you're right, you're right." She sets the glass back down. "Fine. There might be someone. New. I'm not saying more than that."
"Democratic," Torin mutters, not looking up from his drink.
"Nobody asked you."
The conversation wanders after that, easy with good company and better drinks. Nyra demands an explanation of some Earth concept she's heard about secondhand and finds ridiculous. "So you pay money to watch other people play a sport," she says, incredulous, "and then you also pay money to watch other people who are not playing the sport discuss the people who are playing the sport."
"It's a whole industry," Kara says. "I don't make the rules."
"You people are deeply strange."
Torin, meanwhile, is halfway through a story about the time a twelve-year-old Kara tried to impress a girl from the Artist guild by reciting poetry she'd clearly memorized wrong, and mixed two entire stanzas up with a completely different, significantly less romantic poem about crop rotation.
Lena's eyebrow ticks up, slow and deliberate, and doesn't come back down for a good few seconds.
"It was one line," Kara says, mortified, dragging the conversation back on track.
"It was the ending," Torin says. "The entire ending was about soil nutrients."
Lena's laughing properly now, and Kara's glaring at both of them without any real heat behind it, and this, Lena thinks, is a version of Kara she's never gotten before Argo, unpolished and twelve years old and easy to embarrass, nothing careful about any of it.
"For the record," Kara says, leaning in, voice dropping to something just short of a whisper, "I've gotten much better at poetry since then."
"Prove it."
"Not with an audience." The shift catches low in Lena's stomach, familiar now, a little dangerous, and for just a moment Lena lets herself wonder if tonight might be the night something actually gives.
Two drinks in, maybe three, warm and loose-limbed rather than anything sloppier than that, Lena announces she needs the bathroom, to no one in particular, and extracts herself from the booth with only the mildest wobble.
"Don't fall in," Nyra calls after her, unhelpfully.
The second she's out of sight, Nyra rounds on Kara with the speed of someone who's been waiting for the opening, already switching into Kryptonian without seeming to notice, privacy from anyone else in the bar built into the language itself.
"Okay," she says. "What is that."
"What is what."
"Don't." Torin, unusually serious for him, leans forward. "We've known you since you were four years old. We can see it."
Kara opens her mouth, closes it again.
"She looked at you," Nyra says, gentler now. "When we asked if she was seeing anyone. She looked right at you, Kara."
"It's not-" Kara stops, tries again. "It's complicated."
"It's really not, though," Torin says. "You're clearly obsessed with each other."
Kara's quiet for a second, turning her glass slowly on the table, eyes flicking toward the corridor that leads back to the bathroom, checking. "She almost said it. A few days ago. At the market. She caught herself, but I heard the start of it."
Nyra and Torin exchange a look that Kara doesn't love the shape of.
"So what's stopping you," Nyra says, and it isn't really a question.
Kara takes her time answering, turning the glass another slow half-circle first. "Once I say it, it's real. There's no taking it back afterward. No laughing it off, no pretending I meant something else. Right now I still get all of this," she gestures, vaguely, at the whole evening, at the empty seat where Lena was sitting, "even if I never say the actual words. If I say them and it goes wrong, somehow, I don't just lose the chance. I lose what's already here too."
Torin's quiet for a moment, weighing that. "Sure. But you're not actually avoiding the risk by staying quiet. You're just choosing a slower way to lose her, if it ever comes to that."
"And there's-" Kara stops, presses her palms flat against the table, needing something solid under them, checking the corridor again before she keeps going. "This is going to sound stupid."
"Say it anyway," Nyra says.
"She's already lost so much." Kara's voice drops, careful now. "Her brother. Her mother, twice over, in different ways. Half the people who were supposed to be her family. If I say this, and it goes wrong somehow, that's not just a breakup. That's one more person she loved leaving a hole behind. I don't know how to be responsible for that. I don't know if I get to risk that."
Nyra's quiet for a moment, something gentler than her usual sharpness settling into her face. "Or," she says, "you could be the one thing that doesn't leave a hole. Has that occurred to you at all?"
"I've thought about it. Believe me, I've thought about it." Kara drags a hand through her hair. "It's just loud in there sometimes. Louder than it should be."
"Kara." Torin leans in, and for once there's nothing teasing left in his voice at all. "We've watched her look at you all night, barely paying attention to anything else in the room. We watched her go to war with an entire Council for you, two days in a row. Whatever's loud in your head, it isn't coming from anything she's actually done."
"There was a letter," Kara says, quiet, almost to herself. "Before we came here. She wrote it thinking she might not get the chance to say any of it out loud. I've read it so many times I could recite it back to you. I know what's in it. I know what she feels. I'm still terrified."
"Then don't be scared." Nyra says it simply. "You should tell her. I think you already know the life you could have with her."
The bathroom door swings open across the room, and Kara's eyes find Lena immediately, some instinct she can't seem to switch off. Lena catches the look and holds it for a second, easy, unaware of what she's walking back into, before she reappears at the booth and slides back in without missing a beat. If she notices the sudden, suspicious quiet at the table, she doesn't say anything about it.
They don't stay much longer after that. Outside, the air's gone properly cool, cold enough that Lena wishes she'd brought something warmer, and the canal beside them holds the towers upside down in flat, wavering light. The city's quieter now, most of the evening's clatter thinned down to their own footsteps and the occasional far-off hum of a transit car.
Kara's arm brushes hers more than once along the way, not quite by accident, and neither of them moves away from it. Lena's a little unsteady on the uneven stones, a little warmer than the temperature accounts for, and every few steps some part of her, the part that's had three drinks and watched Kara defend her without even meaning to earlier, wants to close whatever gap is still technically between their hands.
Neither of them says anything for a while. It doesn't feel like it needs filling.
Kara's quiet on the walk, quieter than she means to be, stuck on something she can't seem to shake loose. She keeps picturing it, stupidly, uselessly, what it would actually look like, the two of them, properly. Waking up without needing an excuse for why. Introducing her to people as something more than "my friend Lena," watching that word sit wrong in her mouth every single time now. She wants to just say it. She opens her mouth twice on the walk and both times something in her throat locks up, stupid and immovable, and she hates it, hates that she can talk down a warlord without blinking and still can't manage four words for the one person she'd actually die for.
A few paces separate them, comfortable, unremarkable, a gap neither of them's quite ready to close and neither wants to be caught trying.
Lena's caught in a loop of her own, circling the same question from a different angle. There was a letter. Kara read it, she knows Kara read it, and Kara's never said one single word about what was actually in it, not once, not even close. She's started to wonder if she misjudged the whole thing, read more into it than was ever really there, embarrassed herself completely and just hasn't found out yet. Except then there are moments like tonight, the eye contact she couldn't help, the shoulder that keeps finding hers on a street wide enough to avoid it easily, and none of that adds up to nothing either. So why hasn't she said anything. What is she actually waiting for. Lena's spent her whole life being good at reading people, and she still can't get a straight answer out of the one person whose answer actually matters.
She doesn't get much further than that thought before she glances over and catches Kara already looking, some unguarded softness sitting in her face, a smile that doesn't seem to have a reason attached to it at all. Whatever spiral Lena was working herself into loses its grip immediately, forgotten somewhere between one step and the next.
Their shoulders bump, more than once, the street not quite narrow enough to blame it entirely on that, and neither of them corrects the distance afterward. Neither bothers pretending they weren't just caught looking either, both of them grinning for no real reason at all, the whole night suddenly, inexplicably, very funny.
Lena looks away first, biting back a smile she can feel getting away from her, and Kara knocks their shoulders together again, deliberate this time, unapologetic about it.
Neither of them says the thing sitting behind both their teeth. The quiet carries it instead, heavier and somehow gentler than words would have managed, and by the time Alura's place comes into view, Kara's laced their fingers together without either of them deciding to, and Lena lets it stay there, the small, familiar ache of almost settling in anyway, quiet enough to carry, comfortable enough not to mind carrying it, just this once.
Saturday morning, and Lena's already in the kitchen, hair pinned into a loose, low bun, a few soft pieces left deliberately free at her temples, when she hears Kara's footsteps start down the hall.
Kara comes in already talking, something about whether they have time to stop for tea on the way, and the sentence dies completely the second she rounds the doorway and actually sees her.
Lena's dress is a soft, warm cream, and stitched over the heart, unmistakable, is the crest of the House of El. Kara's wearing the same cream, hair down and loose, unguarded, and for one whole second her brain simply stops functioning as a coherent system, every thought she was halfway through forming gone.
It isn't only that Lena looks beautiful, though she does, achingly, in a way that makes Kara's chest go tight. It's the crest. Red and gold, stitched directly over Lena's heart, the exact shape Kara's worn into a hundred fights and never once expected to see on anyone else, let alone someone she loves, let alone today, when it means exactly what it means.
For one whole second the room seems to tip slightly on its axis, and Kara doesn't have a single working thought left beyond the fact that Lena Luthor is standing in Alura's kitchen wearing her family's name like she has every right to it. Because she does. Because Kara gave her that right months ago and never once had the courage to say so out loud.
Kara's breath goes deep and audible, her whole chest needing the extra room for it. "Oh, Rao." Barely a whisper, the words knocked loose from wherever she usually keeps them.
Lena's hand goes to the fabric at her waist, uncertain suddenly under all that staring. "Rhu told me what it means. Wearing someone's house, today of all days." A small, nervous breath. "I asked Alura first." Her fingers find the fastening at her shoulder instead, already working at it. "If it's too much, I can change."
Kara still hasn't said a single other word, and it takes Lena a beat to realize the silence isn't hesitation at all. It's just Kara, temporarily, entirely without access to language.
Because how does anyone explain, out loud, what it means to watch the person you love choose, deliberately, to carry the weight of your whole family for a day. Nobody making her. Nobody even asking. That she picked this crest to wear through an entire festival, out of every version of belonging available to her on this planet, and asked Kara's own mother's blessing first, quietly, without needing Kara to know until it was already done.
She crosses the kitchen herself instead, slow, and stops close enough that Kara has to tip her head back to keep looking at her. "I wanted you to know I meant it." Lena's voice softens further, careful now. "Not just for this week. Not just for Argo." A steadying breath. "For all of it. Every time you caught me before I hit the ground, literally and otherwise. Every time you believed I could still be someone worth saving, even when I didn't believe it myself." Her hand comes up, resting lightly over the crest at her own chest. "This isn't for the festival. It's everything you've ever been to me. Kara and Supergirl, both of you, I never really saw two different people. I wanted to wear it somewhere everyone could see."
Kara's hand comes up at last, fingers brushing over the emblem stitched at her chest, reverent in a way that has nothing to do with the fabric itself, and her eyes go glassy before she can stop them, throat working around something too big to actually say. "You didn't have to-"
Because nobody's ever done this. Not like this. Not with this much care put into a gesture nobody would have blamed her for skipping entirely.
"I wanted to."
Neither of them moves for a long second, and Lena lets herself wonder, just for that one stretched-out breath, if this might finally be it.
Then Alura's voice cuts through from down the hall, dry as anything. "If you two aren't dressed and ready to go in five minutes, I'm eating both your shares of the honey cakes."
Kara laughs, short and surprised, and whatever was building in the kitchen scatters gently back into the ordinary business of getting out the door.
The festival grounds are already loud by the time they arrive together, color everywhere, banners strung between towers in every guild shade.
Alura pauses before peeling off toward her Council colleagues, studying them both for a moment. "Are you two having a good time?" Her gaze lands on Lena, softer than usual. "The crest suits you, Lena." Then, to Kara: "Show her the observation tower before the procession starts. She'll want to see the whole route laid out."
She's gone again before either of them can respond properly, swallowed into the crowd, and Kara watches her go quietly, an expression on her face she only ever wears for family.
The procession comes through first. Science guild's float trails actual small constellations behind it, holographic and slow-spinning, drawing gasps from the children running alongside. Artist guild's is something enormous and completely incomprehensible, a moving sculpture built from what looks like the competing visions of several people who never agreed on the assignment. Military guild marches past in tight, showy formation, boots hitting the ground in unison loud enough to feel through the soles of Lena's shoes. Labor guild's float is somehow the best one, a full working mechanism doing something elaborate and entirely unnecessary, gears turning gears turning gears for the sole purpose of eventually ringing a bell. Religious guild closes it out, devoted entirely to Rao, a procession of quiet, robed figures carrying nothing but light.
Kara narrates most of it under her breath, opinions about each guild delivered fast and certain, clearly recycled from a lifetime of watching this exact parade. Lena listens to all of it, half the procession forgotten in favor of just watching Kara's face while she talks.
Later, Kara drags her toward a stall selling something skewered and glazed, dark and sticky and, according to Kara, "a genuine crime that Earth doesn't have these." Lena takes one bite and immediately understands the crime in question, sauce running down her wrist before she can catch it.
"You have some," Kara says, delighted, "everywhere."
"You gave me no warning."
"Where would the fun be in that."
Lena, entirely on principle, breaks off a piece of her own skewer and holds it up to Kara's mouth without any warning either, sauce dripping toward her own wrist this time. Kara, laughing, takes the bite anyway, gets sauce on her chin for her trouble, and doesn't seem to mind at all.
"Fair," she concedes, wiping at her chin with the back of her hand and missing entirely.
"You missed."
"Where?"
Lena reaches over and gets it herself, thumb at the corner of Kara's mouth, and for a second neither of them moves, sauce and sunlight and the low, comfortable roar of the crowd around them, before Lena pulls her hand back, too quickly, business suddenly urgent with her own drink instead.
A pack of children weaves past them not long after, dressed in small, homemade lantern costumes, paper and wire and glowing crystal cores, chasing each other in loops that make no logical sense and clearly aren't meant to. One of them trips directly into Kara's legs, apologizes at length and with great seriousness, and is gone again before either of them can properly respond.
Lena's still laughing about it half a block later, delighted in a way she doesn't try to hide. "That was the single most sincere apology I've ever witnessed."
"He had real conviction."
"Zero follow-through on the running, though."
"They're four. Give him time."
"They make their own," Kara adds, watching the pack of them disappear into the crowd, something soft in it. "Every year. My mother made mine when I was little. There's a whole competition for the best one, technically, though nobody under the age of ten actually cares about winning it."
"What was yours?"
"A truly hideous approximation of a starbird. Half the wings fell off before I even got to the festival." Kara's smiling at the memory, easy. "My father said it was the best one there. He was lying. It was objectively terrible."
"I'd like to have seen it."
"It would not have impressed you."
"I'm always impressed by you."
Kara doesn't answer that one right away, something crossing her face too fast for Lena to properly name it, before she nods once, small, and keeps walking.
They find the toss game by accident, a crowd gathered around a spinning painted target, small dyed-petal bundles for ammunition and a prize nobody seems especially invested in. Kara insists on trying immediately.
Nyra spots them almost instantly, of course, loud about it from twenty feet away. "You're doing the elbow thing again! The elbow thing never works!"
"Nobody asked you!" Kara shouts back, and misses her next throw spectacularly, which only makes Nyra laugh harder.
Torin just lifts a hand in greeting, already steering Nyra back toward whichever stall she's supposed to be minding, and they're gone again into the crowd before Lena can even properly say hello.
She is, it turns out, catastrophically bad at it, overcorrecting every single throw, one bundle sailing clean over the target and into a woman's hair four stalls down.
"In my defense," Kara says, with great dignity, watching Lena line up her own throw, "I've never actually had to aim things by hand before. There's usually a reflex involved that I don't currently have access to."
"That's not a real excuse."
"It's the only one I've got."
Lena's throw lands dead center on the first try. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to.
Three failed attempts later, Kara's fully invested now, muttering under her breath about wind conditions that don't exist and a target that's "clearly rigged."
"It's not rigged."
"Everything's rigged when you're losing."
On her fourth try she finally lands one, dead center, and throws both arms up in a full victory display loud enough that half the surrounding stalls look over. The stall keeper, more amused than impressed, hands over the prize: a small woven charm, Rao's symbol worked into cord and glass beads, the sort sold at every stall on the grounds and worth approximately nothing.
Kara presents it to Lena with the gravity of someone handing over a crown. "For you."
"You do know these are everywhere."
"Irrelevant. I earned this one. Through blood, sweat, and several wildly unfair throws."
Lena lets Kara tie it around her wrist herself, fingers unexpectedly careful with the small knot, and doesn't point out that her hands are shaking slightly, just a little, with something that has nothing to do with the effort of tying a bracelet.
Music picks up somewhere near the square as the light starts to lean toward evening, strings and something percussive underneath, and half the crowd folds itself into a dance Lena doesn't know the steps to at all.
"Come here." Kara's already pulling her in before Lena can protest that she has no idea what she's doing. "I'll show you."
It's simple enough once she's shown it twice, a slow turning pattern, hands changing positions on every fourth beat, and Kara guides her through it patiently at first and then not so patiently, spinning her out and catching her again with a laugh every time Lena gets the timing wrong on purpose just to feel that catch again.
"Do you miss it?" Lena asks, somewhere around the second song, quiet enough that it's just for the two of them under the music. "Being here. Before Earth."
Kara's quiet for a moment, turning her slowly under one raised arm before pulling her back in. "Sometimes. Not the way I thought I would." A beat, her hand settling warm at Lena's waist again. "I used to think if I ever got to come back, I'd want to stay. Never leave again."
"And now?"
"Now I think I just wanted to bring someone with me. See if it was as good as I remembered, through someone else's eyes." Kara's gaze drops, briefly, unreadable. "It's better, actually. Being here with you."
"Better than the version you used to imagine?"
"Better than anything I imagined." Kara's voice has gone rougher than the question warranted, and she clears her throat, unconvincingly, an obvious stall for time. "I used to picture bringing someone here as a test, almost. Whether they'd fit. Whether Argo would still feel like mine with someone else standing in it." A small, helpless huff of a laugh. "You made that question feel stupid within about a day."
For a second the air between them changes, the music and the crowd both fading down to something background and unimportant, and Lena waits, breath caught, for whatever's clearly sitting right behind Kara's teeth.
It doesn't come. Kara just spins her out again instead, laughing over the music, and the moment folds itself back into the dance, easy, unremarkable, nothing more than a turn and a laugh.
By the third song neither of them is even pretending to follow the steps properly anymore, just swaying, Kara's hand warm at her waist, and for a while the whole festival narrows down to just this, laughing and slightly out of breath and entirely unwilling to be anywhere else.
The light's properly gone by the time the music finally slows, the sky deepening into the same red-black it always turns after dark. The whole grounds shift mood without anyone announcing it, stalls packing up early, families gathering into loose circles, something anticipatory and hushed replacing the earlier daytime noise. Even the children in their lantern costumes have gone quieter, herded toward parents, saving whatever energy they've got left for whatever comes next.
Somewhere in the distance, small groups have already started drifting away from the main grounds, heading toward the treeline at the edge of the festival park.
Kara goes quiet, watching them go. "That's where the lantern ritual happens. Down by the water, a little ways out."
Lena follows her gaze, feels the evening shift, subtle, present. "Is it time?"
"Almost." A beat, then Kara starts walking, and Lena falls into step beside her.
They leave the main grounds behind gradually, the crowd thinning as they follow a path Kara clearly already knows, until the noise fades down into something more like a memory of itself. A few minutes out, the ground opens into a quiet clearing built around a still pond, its surface dark and glassy, holding a near-perfect, upside-down version of the sky. A park stretches out beyond it, strings of lantern-light threaded low between the trees, and somewhere in that direction, faint enough to be more felt than heard, music plays, slower and gentler than anything back at the square.
Kara holds out her hand without a word, and Lena takes it, letting herself be led the rest of the way through the gathering crowd, past families settling onto blankets and couples finding their own quiet patch of grass near the water. Near the tree line, a young couple is curled together on a blanket of their own, foreheads touching, one of them laughing softly into a kiss, nothing careful about it at all. Lena's chest does something complicated and unfair at the sight of it, a small, sharp ache for a version of easy she isn't sure she's ever actually been allowed. Lena's steps slow almost on their own. She's seen plenty of beautiful things this week, but there's something about this clearing, quiet and green and lit gold at the edges, that catches somewhere low in her chest and holds, and she has to remind herself to keep walking.
"It's beautiful," she says, quiet, and means it more than the two words really cover. Somewhere behind them, the distant music from the park shifts into something slower still, strings mostly, and a few of the people already settled near the water start swaying to it without seeming to notice they're doing it.
A woman near the water's edge is handing out small paper lanterns, delicate folded things no bigger than two cupped hands, each one strung with a slip of blank paper and a small shard of black crystal for writing. She's been doing this a while, by the look of it, hands moving fast and practiced, murmuring something warm to every single person who takes one, whether she knows them or not. Kara takes two, passes one to Lena, and doesn't let go of her hand while she does it.
"Okay, so." Kara turns the lantern over in her free hand, focus fixed entirely on it. "You write your truth on the paper. Something you've been scared to say out loud, that's the whole point. Then you tie it on, here," she demonstrates, string looping through a small hole at the lantern's base, "and you wait. When the dome lights up, that's the signal. Everyone lights their lantern at once and lets go, and while it's going up, you're supposed to actually say it. Out loud. To whoever you're standing with."
She's close enough now that Lena can feel the warmth coming off her, close enough that this should be easy, and Kara still hasn't looked up from the lantern once through the entire explanation, working the string with more concentration than a simple knot actually requires.
Lena watches her not-looking and waits, hopeful in a way she'd be embarrassed to admit to, for Kara's eyes to finally lift to hers. It would take almost nothing, she thinks. A glance. Half a second. She's not asking for the words yet, not really, just some small sign that whatever's about to happen tonight is something Kara wants as badly as she does.
They don't.
Lena stares at her own blank strip for a long moment, and this time she doesn't let herself flinch away from it. She writes quickly, before she can talk herself out of it, five words she's never once said out loud. Kara Zor-El, I'm yours. She folds it small before she can reread it and lose her nerve entirely.
She doesn't look to see what Kara's written. It feels like the one private thing either of them still gets to keep, at least until the telling part.
They wait after that, lanterns unlit, string tied, the clearing filling in around them with more and more people until the whole space hums low with anticipation. Lena's pulse hasn't settled since Kara explained the second half of the ritual. Say it out loud. To whoever you're standing with. She's spent the whole day collecting reasons to hope, the crest, the letter Kara's apparently read a hundred times, the shoulder that wouldn't stop finding hers on the walk home last night, and now here's an entire festival tradition built specifically to force the words out into the open, and Kara chose this exact spot, this exact moment, to bring her to.
Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what the whole night has been building toward, some line neither of them has ever had the courage to cross alone, and here, finally, is a tradition built to walk them both over it together, hand in hand, whether either of them is ready or not. Lena lets herself believe it, fully, recklessly, for the first time all week. She watches Kara's face in the low light, the tight, nervous set of her jaw, and reads it as nerves before a confession instead of nerves about anything else, because after everything today, what else could it possibly be.
Kara's thumb moves once against the back of her hand, absent, unconscious, and Lena has to remind herself to breathe normally, has to stop herself from reading an entire declaration into one small, thoughtless gesture. She fails, mostly. She's been failing at that specific restraint all week.
Then the dome goes bright overhead, all at once, the whole sky washing gold for a single held breath, and around them lanterns start catching, one after another, tiny flames blooming against paper. Somewhere off to the side, a child shrieks with delight at her own lantern catching first, and her whole family laughs.
Kara lights hers with a hand that isn't quite steady. Lena lights her own a second later, and they let go together, two small lights joining hundreds of others rising off the water, the whole clearing filling with drifting fire and, underneath it, dozens of different voices starting to speak at once, soft and low, just for the person standing closest. Then Kara turns to her, close enough now that Lena can feel the warmth coming off her, closer than the ritual strictly requires.
This is it, Lena thinks, this is the moment, and she holds perfectly still, waiting, watching Kara's mouth already starting to shape the first word.
"Lena, I-"
She stops.
For a second neither of them breathes. Then, quieter: "I'm so grateful for you."
That's it. That's the whole sentence.
Something in Lena goes terribly, quietly still, because those aren't the words either of them needed, and some part of her is fairly certain Kara knows it too. Her eyes have gone glassy, wide, caught somewhere between wanting and pure panic, and the silence that follows outlasts anything four words could have filled.
Lena keeps waiting anyway, for a handful of seconds that feel like considerably longer, some small, stubborn part of her still convinced there's more coming, that grateful was just a stumble on the way to something bigger. It doesn't come. The lanterns are still rising around them, other people's whispered truths still filling the air on every side, and Kara is standing right in front of her, close enough to touch, having already said the only thing she apparently intends to say.
Something in Lena's chest drops, sharp and sudden, worse for how high she'd let herself climb first. She'd built an entire case today, brick by careful brick, and watching Kara reach for the safest possible sentence instead of the true one feels like watching all of it collapse in real time, every hopeful thing she'd noticed this week reclassified in an instant as her own wishful reading of nothing at all.
She already knows what this is. She's watched Kara almost-say things all week, the drink stall, the courtyard, this morning in the kitchen with the crest sitting warm between them, and every single time there was an obvious reason for the words to stop, an interruption, a joke, a change of subject. There's nothing here. No excuse. Just Kara choosing gratitude over whatever the real sentence would have demanded of her instead. Lena built an entire case out of moments like these, small and hopeful and easy to misread, and watching this one collapse in real time makes all the others feel like evidence in a case she invented herself, wanting something true so badly she made herself believe the wanting was proof.
Maybe that's the answer. Maybe the truth is that there isn't one, not the kind Lena's been hoping for, and Kara's face right now is just what it looks like to realize that in real time, in front of her. Her throat's gone tight, hot, tears sitting right behind it if she doesn't move soon, and she will not cry here, not in front of a lit sky and hundreds of strangers finding their own courage while she watches hers evaporate in real time.
"I'm such an idiot." It barely makes it out, thick and cracking, and she's already turning, already moving, tears blurring the lanterns still rising around her into smears of light.
She doesn't wait for a response. She lets the crowd swallow her, quick, half-running, before Kara can see anything more than she already has.
Horror floods Kara's face the instant Lena's gone, properly gone, swallowed into the dark and the crowd, and she doesn't let herself process any of it before her body's already moving.
"Lena!" Panic cracks straight through her voice on the second try. "Lena, wait, please-"
She almost had it. She had the actual words lined up, finally, after years of not having them, and then the size of the moment hit her all at once, the fact that once it was out there was no version of the world where she could take it back, and her whole body just seized around the sentence, some old instinct grabbing for control it never actually had. It didn't save her from anything. It just meant losing the one chance she'd actually managed to build, and she's already fifteen feet behind and losing ground, the parade's opening drums starting up somewhere around them, loud and sudden, color already filling the air by the time she reaches the edge of the crowd again.
Fistfuls of dyed petals fly from every direction, red and gold and deep violet blue, the whole street turning into a moving, shouting wall of it within seconds. Someone grabs Kara's arm, laughing, trying to pull her into a dance line, and she has to physically extract herself, apologizing, already pushing past, eyes fixed on the last place she saw cream fabric disappear into the crowd.
She can't fly. She keeps forgetting that, some old reflex trying to launch her upward and finding nothing there to catch, and every time it happens it steals another half-second she doesn't have. So she runs instead, properly runs, shouldering through petal-throwers and dancers and entire families moving the wrong direction, calling Lena's name into noise loud enough to swallow it whole. Her lungs burn in a way they never used to. Her legs ache, actually ache, muscle and bone complaining with every stride, and there's no reserve of strength waiting underneath it to make any of this easier, just her own two feet against packed ground, over and over, chasing the only thing that's ever actually mattered, human now, all the way down.
Kara finds her in a small park past the crowd's edge, quiet and empty, just grass and a few trees, and Lena's back already retreating deeper into it, still walking, still putting distance between them even now.
"Lena, wait." It barely makes it out, ragged, everything Kara has left going into just forming the words. "Please. Stop. Please."
Lena doesn't stop right away, shoulders drawn tight, arms wrapped around herself, walking fast, putting more distance between them with every step.
"Lena-"
She stops. She doesn't turn around.
Kara stumbles the last of the distance toward her anyway, legs giving out on speed she doesn't have anymore, chest burning, and pulls up well short of actually reaching her, doubled over her knees for a second, the whole world narrowed down to the sound of her own lungs. Her whole body's shaking with it, air tearing in and out of her too fast to actually catch, hands braced on her thighs like they're the only thing holding her upright.
"Rao, I fucked up." The words come out rough, unsteady, dragged up out of lungs that still haven't recovered. "I know I fucked up so badly, but please, just, listen to me."
She stops there, throat working, hands trembling at her sides, nerves and fear plain in the pause, and it takes a second before she can make herself keep going.
"Fuck, I'm sorry." Kara takes a deep, ragged breath, trying to steady herself. "I'm trying to get the words out, I just, I'm so scared, Lena. I'm so scared that everything is about to change." Her voice breaks on it, and she doesn't bother hiding that she's crying now too. "And I can't lose you. Again. But I don't want to be a coward anymore. I can't fight this. I can't keep fighting how I feel about you."
She takes a breath, deliberate, the only thing keeping her upright right now. Lena's shoulders are still shaking, still facing away, her breath coming in short, uneven pulls Kara can hear even over her own, crying in a way that carries even without a sound to go with it, and Kara watches it happen and cries harder herself, chest aching with it.
"I want you to know, before I say what I'm about to say, that it has been the greatest gift, having you as my friend." A shaky breath. "If just being your friend were ever going to be enough, I could have kept you safe like that forever and never risked any of this at all."
She breathes in again, unsteady, the air shaking on its way in.
"But I can't help but want to know what it would feel like. To have you."
That's when Lena turns, and Kara can hear her own heartbeat slamming in her ears over everything else.
Slowly, still crying, messily, hands shaking at her sides, her whole face caught somewhere between hurt and disbelief, not quite trusting any of this is actually happening in front of her.
"I've spent years telling myself this was enough. That wanting more of you was greedy." Kara's voice cracks. "That wasn't patience. It was cowardice. Years of it."
Lena makes a small, wrecked sound at that, the first actual sound she's let through, her arms tightening around herself, holding something in.
"Lena, I have been quietly yours for a very long time, and I don't want the quiet between us anymore." Kara's voice shakes. "I want messy. I want loud. I want to say your name like it's not a secret, in front of everyone, all the time. I want the version of us too big to keep this careful about. I'm done being quiet about you."
Lena doesn't say anything. Can't, from the look of her, everything Kara's saying landing somewhere too deep to answer from yet, the words arriving one after another before she's finished absorbing the last one, grief and hope tangled together so completely she doesn't seem to know which one to hold onto.
Kara closes the last of the distance then, slow, deliberate steps on legs still not entirely steady, until she's close enough to touch, something fierce in her eyes even through the tears.
"Since the moment I walked into your office, you changed the whole trajectory of my existence with one sentence." Her voice is barely steady. "I hope what I'm about to say puts us on a new one. A better one."
She reaches up, thumb brushing Lena's cheek.
"I am so in love with you, and it has completely consumed me. Rao, I want you, in every way imaginable, how could I not." A shaking breath. "You feel like home in worlds I never felt like I belonged to." Her voice drops lower, quieter, on the last of it, eyes locked on Lena's. "And no amount of power is ever going to make that stop."
Lena still isn't speaking. Still crying, silent, frozen, and for one terrible second something like disappointment flashes across Kara's face, the old fear creeping back in that she's said too much, too late, into nothing.
She doesn't move away.
"God, Kara." It comes out barely audible, wrecked.
Lena looks away for a second, composing herself, then looks back at Kara with something that might be love plain across her face, visibly searching for the words to hold everything she wants to say.
"Nobody in my family has ever loved me without wanting something for it." The words come out in a rush, messy, everything she's held back for years finally given somewhere to go. "I didn't know what it looked like, love without a condition attached. I thought I'd spend my whole life waiting to recognize it and miss it completely when it finally came. I don't want to quietly love you anymore. I've been doing that so long."
Kara's face crumples properly at that, relief and grief moving through it all at once, and she's crying too hard now to do anything but listen.
"What if it changes everything, and not for the better." Lena's voice is shaking now too, the words coming faster, less composed with every one. "What if I'm not built for this. What if I ruin the one steady, good thing I've ever had, because I wanted more of it than I was supposed to. What if you wake up tomorrow and decide this was just fear talking, not truth." Her breath catches, ragged. "I've run every version of this through my head a hundred times, Kara, and none of them end well. I don't think I have ever been this frightened of anything. Not Lex. Not my own mother. Nothing."
"I am so scared I'll ruin this too." Her hands are shaking, visibly, and she doesn't try to hide it. "But I'm too far past being able to keep it in any longer."
A pause. Her eyes lock on Kara's.
"I'm in love with you."
The words land between them and just stay there, enormous, and Lena's whole face comes apart with the relief of finally saying it, tears coming harder now, not careful anymore, something closer to release. Kara's face is doing the same thing in mirror, both of them undone in the same instant, the sentence breaking something open in both of them at once.
"So deeply, Kara." A breath, barely there.
Both of them are still breathing too hard, chests rising uneven, and then Kara's hands are on Lena's face at the exact same second Lena's fingers curl gently at the back of her neck. Tears are already streaming freely down both their faces as they lean in. Their noses brush first, soft and lingering, the kind of quiet contact that says everything before their mouths finally meet. Lena rises onto her toes to reach her properly, and Kara steadies her without thinking.
The first press is almost careful, overwhelmed, like neither of them can quite believe they're allowed to do this. It's soft for half a second, trembling, salt on salt, and then the dam breaks completely. Kara makes a broken sound against Lena's mouth, something halfway between a sob and a laugh, and the kiss deepens all at once, open, desperate, six years of almost colliding in a single breath. Lena answers just as hard, drawing her closer with the hand at her neck until there's no space left, until their bodies are flush and shaking, until the only thing either of them can feel is the other.
Kara's hands slide into Lena's hair, fingers threading deep, holding on like she's afraid this might still vanish. Lena's already climbing into it, still balanced on her toes, one hand still resting at the back of Kara's neck, the other sliding up to cradle her jaw, and Kara shudders so hard Lena feels it all the way through her. The sound Kara makes then is wrecked, low and helpless, and Lena swallows it, kisses it deeper, tilts her head and opens further and lets years of wanting pour out of her.
They're both still crying into it when the desire catches up, when the kiss turns hungry, when Lena's teeth catch gently on Kara's lower lip and Kara answers with a soft, startled sound that is pure want. Every time one of them pulls back half an inch for air the other chases, mouths finding each other again immediately, messier, wetter, more urgent. Kara's thumbs keep stroking over Lena's cheekbones even while she's kissing her like the world might end if she stops. Lena feels the tremor in those hands and answers it by pressing closer, by holding on tighter, by biting gently and then soothing it until Kara's knees actually buckle a little and she has to catch herself against Lena's waist.
"Rao," Kara breathes against her mouth, the word broken open, and then she's kissing her again before the sound has even finished leaving her, harder, deeper. Lena's answering laugh is wet and disbelieving and full of the same relief. She tastes salt and the faint sweetness of the festival drinks and years of silence finally ending, and she keeps kissing her through it.
And then, somehow, the intensity tips over into something lighter, giddy, almost disbelieving. Lena laughs properly against Kara's mouth, a soft, helpless sound, and Kara starts laughing too, the two of them still trying to kiss through it, failing, grinning into each other like absolute idiots. It's the same way they used to look at each other across a room when no one else was watching, only now there's nothing left to hide. They're kissing like people with a crush and six years of history all at once, soft and messy and a little ridiculous with how happy they are.
They don't hear the parade until the petals start falling.
Color crashes over them in a sudden, joyous rain, red, gold, violet-blue, petals catching in Lena's hair, sticking to the wet tracks on Kara's cheeks, landing on their joined mouths. The drums and the music and the surging crowd flood the little park a heartbeat later. Neither of them breaks apart. Lena's mouth is against hers and Lena's hand is still at the back of her neck and that is the only thing that registers.
Someone in the crowd spots them.
A sharp, delighted shout cuts through the music, then another, and then the people nearest to them are cheering, pure and loud and unselfconscious, clapping and whistling as more petals rain down. A few voices call out something warm in Kryptonian that Lena doesn't catch, but the tone is unmistakable. Kara feels the sound of it against her mouth and laughs into the kiss again, the vibration of it traveling straight through Lena, and Lena laughs too, still crying a little, still kissing her, refusing to let the moment go even as the entire festival seems to gather around them.
When they finally separate, just far enough to breathe, foreheads pressed together, both of them are visibly dazed. Their eyes are soft and unfocused, still half-caught in what just happened, petals caught in both their hair. One is stuck to the corner of Lena's mouth. Kara leans in and kisses it away, softer this time, lingering.
Lena's eyes are bright and wrecked and so full of love it almost knocks the air out of Kara all over again.
Kara's voice comes out soft and a little wrecked itself. "I love you so much."
Lena's answering smile is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen on any planet. She leans in and bumps their noses together, gentle, familiar, and murmurs, "I love you."