Chapter Text
If she hadn’t already been brought to her knees, this would have done it.
“You… don’t know who I am?”
It’s barely a whisper, as though if the universe can’t hear the words, it might take pity, might opt to divest them of their truth. But the universe does hear them. Kara does, too.
“I mean, I do. Probably.”
Lena doesn’t even have the energy to summon the flicker of hope this answer should spark. She’s never been that lucky.
Besides, she’s just too tired. She sees them both then – herself, crumpled on the ground; Kara, too weak to manage much more than a trembling foetal position; their eyes barely meeting over the hard edge of the workbench – and can’t ignore how apt it feels, how deserved. They’d been flying high on one another for far too long. They’d been long overdue to crash and burn.
“We were, um. We were clearly in the middle of something, here.”
Limp fingers twitch in Lena’s direction, a feeble attempt to encompass all that’s transpired between them. Lena would have laughed at that, if only she could remember how.
Kara’s gaze is utterly guileless. That’s always spelled trouble.
“But if you’re asking if I recognise you? If I can remember who you are?” Kara’s lips press together in a thin, stretched smile. “No. I can’t. I don’t.”
Lena swallows, broken glass in her airways. “You don’t— you don’t remember anything.”
It could be a question, could be a fact. Could be a blessing or a curse.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I know who I am. I know my life, you know. My history, my family. But I—" Kara pauses, rolling her neck to take in the cavernous ceiling above, the rows of benches and cupboards and screens surrounding them. “I have no idea how I ended up here.”
Her tone is affable, light and untroubled and joking, even, as though her apparent amnesia is a quirky little punchline rather than, like, the third time the entire world has fallen out from beneath the two of them today.
“You—" Lena’s voice cracks. She clears her throat, tries again. “You don’t seem particularly concerned.”
Kara shrugs weakly. “I’m not.”
“You’re not?” That strains credulity at best. “You’re not even the slightest bit worried that you’ve woken up on a gurney, in a cave, with a woman you don’t recognise at all and you feel – and look – like you’ve been run over by a spaceship?”
Kara purses her lips, ever so slightly. Wriggles a little against the cold steel bench at her back. “I don’t think I’d call this a gurney.”
A muscle in Lena’s jaw flickers. “Kara.”
“Yes?”
“How are you— how are you not panicking right now?”
“What do I have to panic about?” Kara asks calmly. “Am I in danger?”
“Are you—? No,” Lena manages, and can only hope it’s true. “Not— not from me.”
Kara clicks her tongue, pitifully weak. “Well, then.”
“But you don’t know me.” The words slice their way from her mouth, barbed by veracity. “How do you know I’m telling the truth?”
“Because you know me.”
Again, Lena fights the irrational urge to laugh. If that were true, they wouldn’t be here.
Kara must see the disbelief in her face because she steels herself, biceps trembling as she forces her body upright with obvious discomfort. The movement overbalances her and she almost topples clean over the other side, slamming a palm to the workbench to steady herself and pressing her forehead to her bent knees, eyes screwed shut.
Lena’s hands are already reaching, mouth already opening, when Kara holds up a shaking finger. She breathes purposefully through her nose as the wave of dizziness passes, blinking slow before tentatively raising her head once more, cheeks flushed and eyes a little glassy.
“You know who I am,” she says before Lena can begin to fuss, begin to panic. “You knew my name, you called me Kara, even in this suit. You know my identity, so. You must know me pretty well. If I’ve shared that with you— I clearly trust you. I clearly always have.”
Kara shrugs one shoulder, a tiny movement, careful not to disrupt her body’s tenuous equilibrium. Meets Lena’s gaze head on. “I’m not dumb enough to stop now.”
Many times, countless times over the course of the past few months, Lena had believed her pain had reached its limit. Had thought, Kara cannot hurt me any more than this. Countless times, she’d been wrong. Today, she is wrong once more.
Yet this Kara, pale and wide-eyed and earnest and inculpable, may be the very first version of herself who does not mean to hurt her. May be the only one able to truly claim she isn’t doing so on purpose, with full working knowledge of the damage she’ll cause.
Guilt forces Lena in Kara’s direction. Betrayal keeps her rooted to the floor. The urge to help, to soothe; to fix her own mistake, to assuage Kara’s suffering because she caused it, because that’s all she’s ever wanted— these imperatives are strong. But so too is the ravenous beast behind her sternum; that desperate, vicious thing determined to destroy an eye for an eye, a heart for a heart.
Everything about this current moment is new to Lena. Nothing at all has changed. The woman in front of her took away her hope, and Lena thanked her by taking away her life, and now the two of them, two people ravaged, razed, ruined with the unspoken intimacy of lovers, cannot recognise one another at all.
In the end, it is pain that breaks the deadlock, just as pain had started it. Kara’s pain, as her forehead hits her bent knees once more, a quiet groan spilling from her lips. Lena’s pain, at seeing it.
She’s up and half-crawling, half-staggering toward the workbench before she can talk herself out of it. She doesn’t want to talk herself out of this, out of helping Kara. Not this Kara, at least. She just, she looks so vulnerable in this moment. So helpless. So innocent.
“Here,” she breathes as she reaches Kara’s side. “Let me— let’s get you cleaned up.”
She fills a clean beaker with water, holds it out for the blonde to drink. Retrieves the dying yellow sun bomb from where it’s sagging like a deflated balloon a few inches above the ground, roots through her supplies for another.
When she doesn’t find one – not a yellow sun bomb, not a solar patch, not a single damned miracle at all – she resigns herself to more surface-level fixes. Nudges a squashed and misshapen power bar into Kara’s hands, fetches her soap, a basin, a stack of rough paper towels.
She still won’t touch her. Lets Kara begin cleaning the blood and grime from her own skin and busies herself cracking apart the sun bomb’s casing, extracting the photovoltaic cell within. She’s in a lab, for Christ’s sake. She must be able to retrofit this tech into something still of use.
Kara accepts the supplies amiably, chewing slowly through the snack and using damp towels to slough some of the filth from her face and hands with small, careful movements. Pauses now and then when an action jars some new injury, face pinching, breathing quick and shallow until the wave passes and her timid efforts can continue.
“Are we going to talk about it?” she asks after one such interruption, voice tight and constricted.
Lena determinedly does not raise her eyes from the motherboard in her hands. “Which part?”
“Any part.” Kara’s voice is soft over the slosh of water, the steady drip from the wad of towels in her hand. “Are we going to talk at all?”
Lena sighs. It’s not an unreasonable request, she supposes. Figures she owes Kara this. This, at least.
“What do you want to talk about?”
Kara flinches as droplets of water trail the length of her neck. Lena presses the backs of her fingers to the side of Kara’s basin, feels the chill of the water within. Stands to replace it with another round, warm and clean.
“Thanks,” Kara hums as she accepts the fresh bowl, her clean-up operation resuming. “And, I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know. You know?”
“Okay. Well.” Lena straightens her spine. Squares her shoulders. “What do you remember?”
Kara’s hand stills where it presses a damp paper towel against her own cheek, lips parted just wide enough for her breath to whistle out between them. She squints, a crinkle forming between her brows and she’s so Kara in this moment, so unbearably herself, that Lena has to look away.
“I remember— flying.”
Lena’s gorge rises. Her fingers twitch across the workbench, heading for her trusty vomit basin.
“It was dark. I was up, up high. I remember lights, bright lights beneath me. I was going somewhere, somewhere important. I was— nervous. But excited too, I think. Or—”
Kara pauses, shakes her head. “Not excited, exactly. Hopeful.”
Saliva fills Lena’s mouth, her whole body pulsing white hot. She’s definitely going to vomit.
“I was flying,” Kara says again. Her eyes are glassy once more. “I was flying. I was free. And then— something hit me. Something— something green.”
She huffs a little breath, short and sharp. Shakes her head. Her hand drops back to her lap. “After that, everything’s just dark.”
Guileless blue eyes find Lena’s. “Does that help?” she asks sweetly, so sweetly.
A violent convulsion seizes Lena from within. It feels like something, something live and slick and roiling, is trying to force its way out of her body. Lena is inclined to let it.
Her palm slams the edge of the basin just in time and then she’s retching again, hot and shameful and unproductive, her body unable to expel any more than she’s already purged. And then, the final nail in the coffin— a warm hand on her back, pressing soundly between her shoulder blades.
“You’re alright,” Kara soothes, the pressure of her contact steady and sure. “You’re okay.”
And Lena had thought she had nothing left to give, but then suddenly she’s crying; great, ugly, gulping sobs, clammy forehead pressed against the hand still gripping the edge of the basin, breathing in metallic steel and watery bile between heaving whimpers.
At some point, Kara gently extracts the basin from beneath her and Lena hits the workbench beside the blonde’s hip face-first, bawling the last of herself into the unforgiving metal. She cries longer than she’d thought she had the capacity to cry; longer than she’d thought she’d had the energy. Cries for herself. Cries for Kara; for the Kara she had lost, once, and then again and again. Cries for how complicated and convoluted and unbearably fucked everything is; for how she can’t even begin to fathom a way out of this abyss.
Lena cries for the fact that she’d hit rock bottom, only to crack clean through the floor to another, darker, rockier bottom, over and over again. She cries for every time she hadn’t over the past weeks, months, years of her life, and she cries for herself, here and now and hopeless.
Lena cries, and cries, and cries. Her body sags, curling about the workbench, face and forearms pressed to the surface, knees trembling a few inches above the floor.
“It was bad, wasn’t it?” Kara whispers, somewhere above and beside her. Her palm slides from Lena’s back, up the ladder of her spine to cup the back of her neck. “Whatever had just happened between us.”
Lena huffs out a choked bark that, in a better universe, might have been a laugh. Swallows another round of sobs as tears and snot and sorrow and shame soak their way into her flesh.
“Yeah,” she gasps, breathing ragged, eyes screwed shut against the world she herself had created. “Yeah. It was bad.”
Eventually, her battered body does hit its limit.
It’s not possible, Lena knows from long years of hard experience, to feel so much for so long. Her body physically cannot keep her suspended in such a harsh, heightened emotional state indefinitely; it’s too draining. Eventually, something else must take over.
This time, it’s fatigue. Leaden and soul-deep as her pulse slows and her tears dry, Lena is confronted with the sudden certainty that she is about to collapse. Kara must sense it because suddenly above her there is a grunt, a metallic scrape, and Kara’s ankle is hooking around the leg of the nearest lab stool, dragging it forward until it bumps the backs of Lena’s thighs.
She crumples atop it gratefully, too weak still to raise her head. Kara’s hand has not moved, resting heavy and warm at the base of her skull.
When at last she does extract her face from the slimy pool of saline she’s accumulated on the steel, her eyes are so puffy, the light so bright, that she can barely see at all. She can feel, though; feel Kara’s hand slide from her skin only to be replaced with a faintly warm dampness, a wad of moist paper towels pressed gently to her cheeks.
Lena takes them, dabbing at the salt already beginning to crystallise against her skin. Presses them to her closed eyes for a moment, just one. Just long enough to steel herself, to build back up the walls of her fortress after the most recent siege, to look Kara in the eyes once more.
“Alright?” the blonde asks softly when their gazes finally meet, her face full of concern that only hurts more for how genuine it is, how utterly non-personal. This is who Kara is, Lena reminds herself. Someone who would comfort a crying woman with all the tenderness of a lover, even when she didn’t know them at all. Because Kara doesn’t know her. Not anymore.
Nothing about this situation is unique or particular or special, not to Kara, as she is now. Lena isn’t special. Not to Kara.
“Alright?” the blonde prompts again, head tipping slightly to meet Lena’s gaze and this time, she manages to nod.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Kara murmurs, taking the damp towels from Lena’s palm and depositing them alongside her own detritus in another of the dirty basins. “Or, maybe do. Can’t have me forgetting this as well.”
Lena’s gaze snaps up, shocked, and Kara cringes. “Too soon?”
She blinks slow, shaking her head. “A little, yeah.”
Kara grimaces guiltily. “Noted.”
Lena straightens at last, pressing palms flat to her flushed cheeks as she struggles to calm her rapid breathing. Kara shuffles in turn, crossing her legs with apparent discomfort and propping an elbow on one bent knee, pillowing her chin in her palm. “So.”
Lena swallows. “So.”
Kara doesn’t ask her what was wrong, what had caused her to cry like the very world was disintegrating around her. This doesn’t tell Lena that Kara doesn’t care. This tells Lena that Kara is afraid to find out.
“I’ve been— injured,” Kara begins, shrugging one shoulder and immediately wincing. “Obviously.”
Lena drops her hands to her lap. Works her teeth against the meat of her cheek. “Yes.”
“And it’s made me— forget.”
Her cheek is not enough. Lena bites down hard on her tongue, pressing and pressing until blood blooms bright. “Apparently.”
“How long?” Kara asks, her breathing uneven. “How much have I lost?”
How terrifying, Lena thinks, how unthinkably sickening it is to live with the knowledge that the answer to that question had so nearly been everything.
“I don’t know,” she forces herself to say instead, focusing on inhaling, on exhaling, again and again. “Your memories— the last thing you described, that wasn’t— that wasn’t long ago. We’re talking a matter of hours. But, then again, you don’t, um. You don’t remember me.”
Oh, those words. They burn, they burn, they burn.
“And if you don’t remember me, that would indicate that you’ve lost— significantly longer.”
Kara’s eyes narrow. “How much longer?”
Lena’s throat closes over. “Years,” she chokes out. “Four years.”
Kara actually flinches backwards, as though the words are a physical blow. She’s reeling, scrambling, struggling to put together the timeline.
Lena’s struggling just the same. It doesn’t make sense; the things Kara remembers, the things she doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense and yet, it does.
Kara’s amnesia is a result of her injuries, of being blasted out of the sky and into the side of a mountain by Kryptonite cannons. Her brain has, understandably, shut down those memories. Has shielded her from the truth of the atrocity she’s been through, the pain she’s suffered.
Wouldn’t it make sense, if Kara’s mind is looking only to protect her, to minimise her misery— wouldn’t it make sense for it to have erased Lena as well?
A choked breath escapes the blonde and Lena’s gaze snaps back to her face, horrified to find tears pooling at her lashline.
“What— what are we going to do?” Kara gets out, trembling and small.
Lena works her teeth against her bottom lip. Her turn to be the strong one. “We’re going to figure it out.”
So. First things first.
“Okay,” Lena says, as close to resolute as she can manage in her exhaustion. “Priority number one. You need medical attention. More than I can give you.”
Kara’s gaze flits, unimpressed, from Lena’s hastily-splinted wrist to her gouged raw knuckles to the blood and bile still drying at her jaw. “So do you.”
“Maybe,” Lena acquiesces with a half-shrug. In truth, she’d largely forgotten about her physical ailments. Their emotional counterparts were proving to be more than enough to handle. “So. We have to get out of here.”
“And where is here?”
“The Rockies,” Lena says, quick and sharp like ripping off a band-aid. “Canada.”
Kara considers this. “How did we get here?”
Lena presses her lips together hard, in no hurry to delve back into their recent past. “I used a trans-matter portal watch.”
Kara nods slowly. “And now it’s—”
“Broken,” Lena interrupts. No sense in building any false hope. “Busted. Gone. Well, except for the shards still embedded in my arm.”
“Alright.” If this fazes Kara, she doesn’t show it. “So how did I get here?”
Lena squints. “Well, you flew.”
“Yeah, right,” Kara mumbles, flattening her palms against the bench beneath her and leveraging herself upwards. “So, I’ll just—”
“Hold on,” Lena cuts in. “Let’s start simpler. You’ve only just managed to sit upright without falling over.”
She ignores Kara’s unimpressed grumble, holding up the beaker with the last of her undrunk water instead. “Here. Freeze this.”
A soot-streaked brow furrows. Kara narrows her eyes at the beaker, lips pursing, cheeks hollowing. The gust of breath she lets out is— warm. Warm, and weak, and barely enough to ruffle Lena’s hair.
Her crinkle deepens. “What? How—”
Blue eyes narrow at a spot on the rough-hewn wall across from them. Kara stares, hard, the muscles in her neck straining, the thrumming outline of a vein appearing at her hairline. Gives up on her staring contest a moment later and shoves roughly at the bench beneath her with both hands, only to thud back down immediately. Growls a little, low in her throat. Reaches for a basin, curls her fingers around it until her knuckles strain white, and doesn’t make a dent.
So. No freeze-breath, no laser vision, no superstrength, no flight. It’s nothing more than Lena had expected. Just keeping her heart beating will have taken every last molecule of strength her body possessed. Kara, however, doesn’t seem to be taking the confirmation quite as congenially.
“You’ve flared,” Lena notes quickly, before the blonde can execute her next test of throwing herself against the solid stone wall, or something equally stupid. “It’s not really surprising.”
Kara’s gaze meets hers, dripping with frustration and suspicion. “I’ve what?”
“Solar flared,” Lena repeats, eyes narrowing. “Burnt out your powers. Has this— has this never happened to you before? That you can remember, I mean?”
Kara’s eyebrows hit her hairline. “Um. No?” she bites out, outrage and quiet terror swirling in her eyes. “The hell do you mean, burnt them out? I can’t burn them out, I’m not a damn lightbulb!”
“You— you kind of are,” Lena points out, cringing. “If your body sufficiently over-exerts itself, expels too much of the yellow sun radiation stored in your cells in one go, it— it burns out. Like a filament in a lightbulb.”
Kara looks furious. “Are you kidding?” she snaps, open-mouthed. “I’m the strongest living being on the planet, which you’re saying somehow makes me the equivalent of a lightbulb? So, what are you gonna do? Replace my damn filament?”
“Replace your solar energy,” Lena murmurs softly, hands open, palms up. “That’s what the yellow sun bomb was for. That’s all we can do.”
“All we can do?” Kara parrots incredulously, fists clenching against her thighs, and Lena remembers suddenly and spectacularly that the woman before her is not one who copes well with the word no.
In her time on Earth, Kara has rarely – if ever – encountered a problem that she could not outfight, outrun, fly away from, or punch into oblivion. Even between the two of them, even when the hard no, the no more of Lena’s screamed soliloquy back in the Fortress had opened up a chasm dividing them, Kara had been unable to acquiesce. Had argued with Lena, bargained with her— hell, had flown halfway across the continent to find her, rather than accept it.
Suddenly and with alarming intensity, Lena pities the person – Alex, most likely – who’d had to teach Kara the limits of her own omnipotence the first time around.
“So I have no powers? And the only way to get them back is to wait?”
Kara says wait the way most people might say liquidise puppies in a blender. Lena shrugs, nodding.
Kara’s pout could melt a glacier. “And I can’t fly. And we’re in Canada.”
Another half-hearted shrug. “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”
“Yeah.” The fight seems to drain from Kara’s shoulders in the space of one unsteady breath. Chin sagging in her palm, she gazes up at Lena with heavy-lidded eyes. “What are we going to do?”
Lena considers this. Considers the two of them, their wounded bodies, their fractured souls. Considers their resounding and resplendent lack of options.
She stands, swaying, and holds out a hand.
“We’re going to walk back to California.”
“So you were, like, joking, right?” Kara pants from Lena’s elbow, cheeks flushed and nose rosy in the frigid air.
Her gait is unsteady, their progress across the dawn-streaked mountainside painfully slow. Even bundled inside the thick polymer of the anti-K suit, Lena’s jacket, and every spare scrap of fabric Lena’s lab had possessed, Kara’s teeth are chattering.
It’s hurting her, it’s hurting them both no end to be out here, slogging through knee-deep snow high up in the deserted powder bowl of the Alberta mountains. Lena knows that. She also knows that it’s their only option. Move or freeze, that’s the choice before them now. Move or die.
Kara sniffles. Lena’s gaze catches on the glitter of ice crystals ringing her nostrils, the corners of her eyes. With one gloved hand to her elbow, she tugs her on faster.
“I know we have to, like, walk this bit,” Kara mumbles, near unintelligible between the chattering of her teeth and her heaving breaths as the battle their way across the scree. “But we’re not actually walking all the way back to National City, are we? You weren’t serious?”
Lena shoots her a dry look. “Do you think I was serious?”
Those wide, wide eyes again, that utter absence of guile. “Well, I don’t really know.” She stumbles on a loose rock, would have faceplanted against the cliffside were it not for Lena’s numb fingers beneath her armpits. Kara straightens, grimacing. “Are you a particularly sarcastic person, generally speaking? I’m not exactly in a position to be a good judge of your character right now.”
Lena presses numb lips together hard, and doesn’t feel a thing.
“I was not serious,” she confirms, nudging her charge onwards once more. “We’ll walk until we hit a town, a house, anywhere with people. And then— we’ll figure out the next bit.”
“Do you think they’ll help us?” Kara asks, squinting as the rising sun crests the eastern peaks to shine directly in their eyes. “We’re strangers.”
Lena huffs out a humourless chuckle. “Not so much. You’re not exactly inconspicuous. Come to think of it, neither am I.”
Kara’s eyes light up. “You’re famous?”
“That’s not the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
Lena doesn’t answer, focused on placing her feet beneath her without falling. They’d traversed the scree from the bunker’s entrance to the bottom of the valley at last and now the snow has deepened so much that they’re sinking almost to their waists.
Lena sets her jaw. Prods Kara into step behind her, into the gulley she’s carving for them both with her own body. Keeps her eyes locked on the southern pass, on that dip between peaks that, if her limited local geography serves her, will let them descend out of this jagged wasteland back into civilisation.
The steepening incline at least forestalls Kara’s barrage of questions and for a long time the only sound is the heaving of two sets of ragged lungs, the occasional grunt of pain as they forge a dogged path onwards.
They climb all morning, pushing higher and higher as the sun hits its zenith in the bluebird sky above. Kara does well, pushing hard and complaining little, aside from the occasional comment on how absolutely masochistic any form of aerobic exercise is for humans.
Melted snow is fine for the occasional drink, but Lena’s long since run out of emergency power bars surreptitiously stashed in her purse by Jess, and when Kara collapses into a snowdrift a few hours past noon and doesn’t get up again, Lena’s hardly surprised.
“Okay,” she pants, assessing the distance behind and ahead of them, the pallor of Kara’s skin and the redness of her fingers before sinking down alongside her. “Let’s take a break. Ten minutes, max.”
Kara only groans, face-first in the snow.
Lena pulls her knees to her chest, blowing lukewarm air over her numb hands and immediately regretting it as the moisture freezes into billions of ice crystals against her skin, stuffing her balled fists into her armpits instead.
Silence falls as their laboured breathing evens out. It’s true silence, here; snow-muffled and thick in the valley below them, crisp-clear and empty in the skies above and it really is beautiful, Lena thinks and resents herself for thinking. The white-capped peaks, the jagged edges of stone smoothed into loveliness, encased in white against the bright blue sky. It would be a beautiful place to die.
Lena resents herself for thinking that, too.
Long minutes pass before snow crunches to her left, Kara’s cheek rolling towards her.
“M’sorry,” she mumbles, exhaustion drooping at the corners of her pale lips. “I’m trying. I just, I feel absolutely fucking awful. Sorry. But, I am trying.”
A fist of pure misery closes around Lena’s windpipe. She stares out at the valley. “I know.”
Silence descends once more. There are no birds here, even. No clouds in the sky. Nothing in the mountains moves, except for them.
Their ten minutes are almost up. They have to keep moving, Lena knows, even as she feels as if she may shake apart at the seams. The pain coursing through her body right now is nothing compared to severe hypothermia, to frostbite, to amputated limbs.
They have to keep moving. Lena did not kill Kara in these mountains, only to save her, only to have her die in the snow once more.
She hasn’t even opened her mouth to nudge them onwards when Kara sighs heavily, pushing herself upright all on her own. Knees drawn up to her chest, hands shoved between her thighs, one cheek resting on her bent knees, she looks so small.
Lena glances away, steeling herself for what lies ahead. Finds herself reluctant to order them back to their feet, back to the struggle of the climb, even as she dreads the alternative.
Kara’s eyes are still on her. Even more than the cuts, the grazes, that gaze burns.
Unable to stand the weight of it, the focus so intense as to be almost oppressive, even here, in the upturned bowl of the heavens, Lena shifts. Gathers her knees beneath her, makes to push herself back to her sodden, aching feet.
“Do you hate me?”
Lena freezes, palms flat to the snowpack, damp hair caught in her eyelashes. “What?”
“You said you did.” Still, Kara’s cheek rests atop her knees, the tight huddle of her body trembling in the shade of the overhanging peak above. Still, her eyes brand Lena’s flesh. “Couple times, in fact. When I woke up, so. Do you really?”
Lena sinks back on her heels, mouth dry from more than just their hike. “I— I don’t—”
“It’s okay if you do,” Kara cuts in, quiet and calm. Pulls her elbows in a little tighter against her own ribs. “I mean, I think it is. If I’ve— if I’ve done something bad enough to make you hate me then, you’re probably right to.”
Lena’s heart thuds so hard she can feel it at the back of her throat. Blood courses through her veins, recklessly burning through what little adrenaline stores she has left.
“How can you say that?” she asks, and finds she truly doesn’t know the answer. She doesn’t even know if she believes it, anymore. There’s no way, there’s no way that Kara can. “How can you just believe that? Be okay with it?”
“Call it a gut feeling.” Kara lifts her chin, pats her own stomach weakly before freezing, grimacing, whole body hunching against a barrage of new pain.
“Whatever you’ve decided to feel about me—" she gasps, almost doubled over, squinting through one eye as her face screws up in agony. “I probably deserve it.”
“No.”
It’s out before Lena can think to stop it.
“Don’t listen to what I said.” Her body’s trembling ratchets up another notch. At this rate, it won’t be long before her muscles give out completely. “Don’t listen to anything I said before I knew you were— you. This you. The way you are, now.”
“Nothing?” Kara looks up at her through long lashes darkened by soot. “None of it?”
“What?” Lena asks, shifting against the softening snow, feeling the sword of Damocles poised once more to shatter her skull. “Which bit are you talking about?”
Silence again, no longer beautiful but terrible. And then—
“You said you loved me.”
Those words are to Lena’s heart what her brother’s Kryptonite cannons had been to Kara’s body.
“No, I—”
“You did.” Kara is insistent. Far too insistent for someone surely on the brink of physical collapse. “And I think I probably love you too. Right?”
Lena can’t breathe.
Kara doesn’t notice. “Seems like I’d be pretty stupid not to.”
Lena’s palms slip through the warmed snowpack. She’s sinking. Drowning.
“Kara,” she mouths and it’s a plea, no doubt about it. She’s pleading for mercy. She's begging.
“You can’t say that,” she manages, unsure how she does it. “Please, you can’t— you don’t know. You have no idea what you’re saying. What it means.”
“Something in me does,” Kara breathes. “Something in me feels it.” One trembling fist comes up, kneading against the hollow of her solar plexus.
Lena feels her own palm rise to match, pressing at the dip of her chest. Her weakness. Her heart.
“That’s not enough,” Lena gasps, the words running her through with the immaculacy of truth. “It’s never been enough. It’s not just about us, about what we feel. It’s not just Kara and Lena, it’s all of it. The history, the baggage, Lex, Supergirl—”
She chokes off, then, the word and all the memories of deception it invokes still all too painful.
Still, Kara watches her. “Lena?” she asks, soft and reverent. “That’s your name?”
It’s all she can do to nod. Still, Kara’s fingers press against her chest. Still, Lena’s mirror her.
“Lena,” she says again, breathy and awed, as if tasting it on her tongue. “Lena.”
This is too much. “Kara,” she chokes out, desperate not to cry. “Please.”
“Lena,” Kara says once more, brow furrowing, chin rising. She straightens, pushing until she too is hunched on her knees, the two of them face to face yet never further from seeing eye to eye.
Lena wants to shove her away. Lena wants to hold her and never let go. Lena wants, and wants, and wants.
“Lena,” Kara says, and her name has never sounded sweeter than it does right now.
Kara’s brow crinkles. “Who the hell is Supergirl?”