7. Chapter 7(2)

“What?” Lena asks, after a few seconds of Kara glancing her direction.

Kara shrugs. “What do you want to do today?”

Lena blinks. The idea that she can do whatever she wants, that she has no obligation to be anywhere or be anyone floors her a little and judging from the small smile playing on Kara’s lips, her ex-girlfriend is having similar thoughts. “I don’t know,” she answers honestly. 

Kara plays with her coffee cup a little, shrugs. “Iris mentioned that on this Earth there’s seven seasons of Buffy.”

“What?!” Lena exclaims, sitting forward and laughing a little. “No way.”

“Yeah,” Kara answers, responding to the happy look on Lena’s face. “And she said I could borrow six and seven if we wanted.”

It feels like a lazy Saturday in college. “I could go for a TV marathon,” Lena admits softly admiring the wide grin Kara gives her in reply. 

“Can we order Hawaiian pizza?”

“I don’t know,” Lena says slowly, fighting a smile. “Do they even have that in this universe?”

Kara makes a horrified noise, puts a hand to her chest in exaggerated shock. “Any universe that doesn’t put pineapple on their pizza is a universe I do not want to live in.”

“It’s disgusting, Kara,” Lena replies and enjoys the mock glare she gets in response.

“Just for that I’m ordering three huge, disgusting, high-calorie meat lovers pizzas and eating every single slice in front of you.”

Lena cringes, but she laughs and kicks out at Kara’s thigh, which is like kicking a rock, laughing even harder when Kara makes a show of falling off the bed in a flailing of limbs.

--

Their fourth day on Earth-1 is gorgeous. Bright sunshine and blue skies, and Kara immediately pleads with Lena to spend their afternoon in a park she found not too far from the hotel. It feels a little wrong to be enjoying themselves when the rest of their compatriots are worrying over their abducted friends, but Lena can’t resist the half pout Kara gives her when she asks. 

They find a nice spot under a huge oak tree that allows Lena some shade - she burns if she’s in direct sunlight for more than five minutes - but still lets Kara soak up the rays of the yellow sun. Lena puts her back to the tree trunk and swipes through a tablet Cisco had loaned her with all kinds of information about how the multiverse actually works, how breaches are formed, and what metahumans are. The notes on how Barry’s biology works alone are fascinating. 

“What are you reading?”

Lena looks up at where Kara’s hanging from one of the tree branches and squints a little at the sunlight that streams through the leaves. “Cisco gave me some of his notes on the particle accelerator. Apparently its explosion is what gave Barry his powers.”

Kara lets go of the branch and falls to the ground, floating a little before she hits the grass. “So boring stuff,” she huffs, dropping down onto her back and resting her head unceremoniously on Lena’s knee.

With a roll of her eyes, Lena tugs at a strand of Kara’s hair. “It’s not boring.”

“Is there math?” Kara asks, crossing her ankles and craning her neck a little to look at Lena.

“Yes.”

“Then it’s boring,” Kara replies in a whisper, like she’s confessing a deep dark secret. “Math is the worst. It’s hard.”

Lena scoffs. “I hate when you do that.”

“Do what?” Kara’s fingers twist together where they’re resting on her stomach, the stretch of her shirt lifting just enough to reveal the skin of her hipbones. Lena tries very hard not to notice.

“Act like you’re stupid when you’re not.”

Kara turns a little so her cheek is against Lena’s thigh and she looks up at her, the sunlight playing attractively in her loose blonde hair. “I’m not doing that. I’m just lazy. Math is hard here. It takes like so many conversions for me to even understand anything and I would rather spend my time doing something fun.”

Lena smiles fondly at the memory of Kara slipping up a few times trying to remember little things like how many days there were to a week - instead of six zeytar to one fanff. “Okay,” Lena concedes, shutting her tablet down and setting it to the side. “What would you rather do then?”

With a wide easy grin, Kara presses a little closer to Lena, her head pushing further into Lena’s lap until her shoulders are hitting the side of Lena’s thigh. “Tell me something about yourself.”

“What?” Lena asks. 

“Tell me something about yourself,” Kara repeats, watching Lena expectantly.

“Kara, you know almost everything there is to know about me,” she says with a little laugh.

“Not really,” Kara says and Lena’s smile falters, falls into a frown. “I mean I haven’t actually been around you in four years and you’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince me you’re all different now so…” Kara shrugs, twists her fingers together and wiggles her foot in the air. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

The words stutter into her chest and her heartbeat threatens to start thudding far too loudly so she swallows against it and looks away, out into the park, for a long moment.

“It doesn’t have to be something hard,” Kara murmurs and her hand reaches up to tangle with Lena’s. It’s a comforting gesture, though it does nothing to help the sudden racing of her heart. “Tell me something easy. Like...what did you do on your twenty-first birthday?”

A laugh bursts out of her, loud and unbidden, as she thinks of the answer to Kara’s question. “Lex took me to Germany.”

“Germany?” Kara repeats with a furrowed brow, her fingers stroking against Lena’s in an absent motion. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Lena says, smiling at the memory of her brother taking her around to all his favorite spots in Bavaria. “It was…” distracting is what she wants to say. It had been her first birthday without Kara and the closer it came, the more depressed she had started to feel. Work was something she had become used to using as a distraction tactic, but when Lex noticed she’d logged over ninety hours in the R&D lab days before her birthday, he whisked her away immediately. Using some tech conference as an excuse, they took the earliest flight to Munich and didn’t tell their mother until their layover in Amsterdam.

“It was fun?” Kara ventures and Lena nods. It had been, in its own way.

“Lex got ridiculously drunk on German beer.” Lena laughs a little, wrapped in a happy memory of her brother.

“And you?”

“I made sure he didn’t offend anyone in his stunted German,” Lena says wryly, remembering how her brother had learned all the local slang and attempted to use it at one of the beer gardens to pick up girls.

“Sounds like him,” Kara says and it squeezes tightly in Lena’s gut to be trading memories of her brother with someone that don’t include his rapid descent into madness or the crazed way he had last looked at his trial.

“What about you?” Lena asks to avoid thinking too hard about a time in her life when Lex was just her overprotective brother and not some sort of famous criminal, locked away in prison for life.

“What about me what?” 

“Tell me something,” Lena says. “It’s only fair.”

Their fingers are completely intertwined now and resting against Kara’s stomach without Lena even noticing. It seems her free hand has a mind of its own as well because she’s stroking through the loose hair splayed over her lap absently. 

Kara seems either completely unaware of any of this, or completely unaffected, because she just keeps her eyes trained on the leaves and branches above them and taps a little against Lena’s hand. “You know when I came out?”

Confusion pulls her brows down and she looks at Kara. “What?”

“As Supergirl,” Kara clarifies with a half smile.

“Oh,” Lena says, laughing at herself a little. “When you saved the plane.”

“Yeah,” Kara says, the word a little breathy like she’s getting lost in the memory of it. “Alex was on the plane.”

“How did you - she was?”

A little nod. “Yup.”

“So that’s why you did it?”

Kara looks down to where their fingers are twisting together and plays with the watch on Lena’s wrist with her free hand. “I was on a - a date,” she confesses and Lena’s stomach flips a little. “It was going really bad actually.” Kara laughs a little and Lena relaxes. “And I saw it on the news. I knew Alex was on the flight and I…”

“You weren’t going to let your sister die,” Lena finishes for her, squeezing Kara’s fingers and smiling at her encouragingly.

“Alex was really pissed,” Kara replies, nose scrunching up a bit at the memory. “Like super pissed.”

“Why?” 

Kara shrugs. “She’s spent her entire life trying to protect me and keep my secret and I just kind of came barreling out into the public eye without any regard for the consequences.”

“You saved your sister,” Lena tells her, carding her fingers through Kara’s hair soothingly. “And now you’ve saved the world so many times I’ve lost count.”

Kara scoffs. “Not that many times.”

“Alex loves you,” Lena says and Kara’s brow crinkles as she gives Lena a very clear yeah I know that expression. “I’m just saying.”

“It felt good actually,” Kara says, turning back to look at the sky. Her fingers click open and close the face of Lena’s watch in a fidgety motion.

“Saving the plane?”

“Saving Alex.”

Lena watches the sun come down through the branches, shading and lighting up Kara’s figure in equal measure and the tree sways a little in the breeze. “I can only imagine,” she murmurs.

“Okay, now you go again,” Kara says, looking at Lena expectantly.

Taking a deep breath, Lena tries to think of some benign memory from their time spent apart. It’s a little difficult because so many of her memories either involve throwing herself into work or - she tries not think of Jack. “Do you remember Logan Bell?”

“The guy who interned with you freshman year?”

Lena nods, ignores the way Kara has now spread Lena’s palm out across the defined muscles of her abdomen and is tracing her fingers there. “He got a job with us after graduation. In my department actually.”

“Okay,” Kara says, drawing the word out in confusion. 

Thinning her lips for a moment, Lena takes a breath. “I might have punched him,” she confesses, thinking of the day she finally lost her cool with the man. It was lucky for him she didn’t have anything heavy to throw at him and had to settle for using her fists.

“You what?!” Kara exclaims, sitting up a little and dislodging Lena’s hand from her hair. Kara props up on her elbow to turn and look at Lena and their hands slide down so abruptly that Lena has to pull hers away before it ends up somewhere inappropriate.

She laughs a little at the utterly shocked expression on Kara’s face. “I punched him. And then I fired him.”

Still looking relatively bewildered, Kara stutters a little, shaking her head. “What did he do? That made you punch him I mean.”

With a slight wince, Lena looks away for a brief second. “His work was always subpar anyway. He was lazy and entitled and he had absolutely no passion for the actual job we were trying to do.”

“That’s believable,” Kara says, but she narrows her eyes a little. “But you usually don’t punch people for that.”

“He had a couple of complaints against him. From the women in my department.” 

Recognition dawns on Kara’s face and this time her tone drops a register. “What did he do?” 

“Just something that absolutely warranted the broken nose I gave him,” Lena answers with a shrug. Just thinking of the way he grabbed at his face, bloody and contorted, still gives her a little thrill of satisfaction. “My mother was infuriated, but I remember Lex standing right behind her, laughing, and then he gave me a set of boxing gloves for Christmas that year.”

Kara laughs, her hair tumbling down in waves that draw Lena’s attention for a brief moment. “Next time you need to punch someone, how about you just let me know?”

Lena pushes lightly at Kara’s stomach and Kara pretends to sway under the pressure. “I did just fine myself, thanks.”

“Yeah, but when I punch people my knuckles don’t bruise,” Kara tells her, holding up a hand between them and grinning. “Your hands are so pretty,” Kara adds, picking up the limb in question. “And they do so many good things. I’d hate to see them get hurt.”

It’s not meant to be flirty, Lena knows this, but it comes out that way and Kara is so close to her and everything about the moment makes Lena think about their field outside campus with Kara zooming around trees and floating in the air as she kissed Lena. Heat blooms across her chest and she tugs her hand out of Kara’s grip with a soft clearing of her throat and a low, “Kara.”

Kara must realize how charged the moment has gotten to because she sits up a little more and puts some distance between them. “Sorry,” she says, licking at her lips. Blinking slowly, Kara shakes her head a little as if she can rattle the feelings out of it and takes a deep breath Lena knows she doesn’t need. “It’s easy to forget here.”

Lena knows exactly what she means. Without the ever constant pressure of their lives and responsibilities back home it’s easy to forget that it isn’t four years ago, that they’re not sitting at a bench on campus or in their field. It’s easy to forget that Lena can’t just lean forward and press their lips together when she wants to. 

It’s ridiculously easy and Lena can’t deny that on top of that, it feels good . She had said she needed a vacation and she had, but what she really needed a vacation from was all the stuff in her life that made everything with Kara complicated. She needed to feel like she did in college, the easy casual way she could be with Kara and the way she could let happiness wrap up around her heart without trying to fight it.

“Let’s,” she’s saying before she can stop herself.

Kara’s eyes snap up to meet hers. “Let’s what?”

“Let’s forget,” Lena says softly, holding Kara’s gaze as if it’s the only thing keeping them together.

“Forget what?” Kara asks and her voice is so soft too, like if she speaks any louder it will break whatever’s building between them.

“You said it’d be nice to be just us for a while, right?” Lena replies and the moment feels risky, dangerous even. Adrenaline pools a little on the back of her tongue and she’s sure Kara’s being deafened by the heavy staccato of her heart. “So let’s do that.”

“Lena,” Kara says slowly, still quiet. “What are you saying?”

Reaching out to take ahold of Kara’s hand again, Lena smiles, relaxes her shoulders. “I’m saying let’s forget that everything is crazy complicated between us. We’re here in another universe where we don’t have to worry about either of our jobs or about my crazy family. It’s just us.”

“Just us,” Kara repeats.

“Let’s just do that,” Lena says with a resigned sort of shrug. She’s done fighting constantly against what all her instincts tell her to do around Kara. It’s exhausting trying to resist it. “I want to get to know you again and be around you without second guessing everything.”

“You’re the one that said it would make things too confusing,” Kara says warily and she’s not wrong. At the outset Lena was positive that being around Kara again too much would make everything so much worse, so much harder. But not being around her, not acting normal around her is what’s making everything feel so complicated. 

“It doesn’t have to be confusing here,” Lena says.

Kara’s mouth twitches at the corner. “You sure?”

About Kara? Lena thinks. Always. “We’ll likely be here a few more days,” she says. “I’d like to enjoy my vacation before I have to go back and dig L Corp out of whatever hole my mother’s arrest has surely put it in.”

“Okay,” Kara says, squeezing the fingers twined with Lena’s. “I can do that.”

They’re quiet for a bit, just observing each other and breathing in the feeling of things settling between them.

A mischievous look crosses Kara’s face that Lena arches an eyebrow at. “What’s that look?”

“So if we’re being normal,” Kara says and that’s not entirely what Lena meant, but she understands what Kara’s saying. “Does that mean that if, say, I wanted to…”

She trails off and Lena’s brow pulls down in confusion before suddenly Kara’s speeding to a stand and slinging Lena up into her arms like she weighs nothing before taking off at a run towards the pond in the middle of the park. Lena lets out something between a yelp and a shriek as the air gets whooshed out of her and it takes a disorienting second to realize Kara’s intention.

“Kara, put me down!” Lena orders, but she’s laughing as she yells it and Kara’s laughing. Lena shoves at Kara’s arms and Kara makes an exaggerated show of falling to the ground, both of them tumbling against the grass in a fit of laughter until they’re side by side on their backs. It draws attention from an elderly couple feeding the ducks a few feet away, but Lena can’t find it in her to care.

No one knows her here. There won’t be some headline in the gossip section about the youngest Luthor child being seen cavorting around in the park with grass stains on her pants. Her assistant isn’t going to call her in a few minutes to inform her of some fire she needs to put out. There’s no looming presence of her mother to worry about and no one is shooting her looks purely because they know she’s Lex Luthor’s baby sister.

It’s just Kara. Kara looking at her with amused eyes and a happy face and everything feels like it’s out of a dream she’s never really let herself have.

They’re being normal, Lena reminds herself. She thinks back to what she’d do right now if they were in college. If she’s honest, it’s not so much that she’d do one specific thing or act a certain way, it’s that she wouldn’t hold back, she wouldn’t stop herself from touching Kara if she wanted. Wouldn’t stop Kara from touching her.

So she gives into desire and scoots into Kara’s side, dropping her head on Kara’s shoulder and winding her arm across her stomach until their fingers are tangling together. Kara’s arm goes automatically to her back, the palm resting where it always had just above the waistband of her pants and Lena sinks into the familiar way their bodies fit together.

A bird chirps and flies overhead as a breeze ruffles through Lena’s hair and for the first time in nearly four years, Lena feels like herself.

“I missed you,” Kara says, the words ghosting over Lena’s hair. They had said it to each other just days ago, standing on a balcony in National City, but the sentiment feels different right now, more heavy.

“I missed you too,” Lena whispers and this time her heart stays calm, steady in her chest. Kara tightens her hold on Lena and dusts lips against Lena’s hairline. There are no warning bells that go off trying to remind her of boundaries, no spike of heat in the back of her eyes. Just the sound of Kara’s heart pumping in her chest and the contented feeling of coming home.