Work Text:
Monday - Stairmaster. Black Coffee. Pain.
Lena’s Monday begins with the violent chirp of her alarm at 4:45 AM, a time no human should be conscious unless they’re under siege or trying to escape a country. She sits upright with the mechanical efficiency of someone who has spent the last three weeks training herself to bypass thought entirely. Thought is unproductive. Thought leads to remembering that Kara’s side of the bed went cold gradually, like a mug of tea no one realized had been forgotten.
At 5:12 AM she walks into the gym with a face like a tax audit. She scans her card, nods once at the empty reception desk, and beelines to the Stairmaster. Not the fancy new one - the one that squeaks faintly on every fourth step. She likes the squeak. It’s the only sound lately that feels honest.
She sets the incline to something obscene and presses start. Her headphones are already in, volume at the legal maximum, Florence + the Machine screaming something about the devil. Lena climbs like she’s fleeing one. Her quads burn by minute six, and by minute eleven, she imagines herself caught on CCTV footage with the caption “WOMAN TRIES TO ASCEND OUT OF HER FEELINGS.” The image makes her smile - the first one in three days - and she immediately hates herself for it.
Jack Spheer arrives at 5:26 AM like a golden retriever who’s just discovered breakfast is a concept. He waves. She doesn’t. He gets on the treadmill beside her anyway. Jack has many qualities, chief among them an inability to take social cues and a complete lack of shame regarding sweat-wicking neon shirts. This morning’s reads IT’S NOT SWEAT, IT’S LIQUID AWESOME. Lena considers the merits of unprovoked murder.
“Morning sunshine, you’re early.” He says cheerfully over the whir of machines.
“I’m always early.” Lena replies, not slowing down.
“You weren’t always early. I mean, I’ve been coming here for months and you only started showing up at this hour two weeks ago.”
“Coincidence.”
Jack squints. “That around the same time you stopped seeing her, right?”
Lena increases the speed. It is, technically, an answer.
By 5:45 AM she’s drenched and silently grateful that Jack doesn’t try to high-five her after cooldown. She walks to the café in the lobby and orders a black coffee from a barista who’s too tired to care that her ponytail is soaked and she looks like someone who files lawsuits for sport. She doesn’t sit. She stands by the window and sips the coffee like it’s a punishment. It is bitter and acidic and entirely undeserving of a pastry accompaniment.
She pulls out her phone. She will not check Kara’s Instagram story. She does not check Kara’s Instagram story. She definitely will not check Kara’s Instagram story.
... She absolutely checks Kara’s Instagram story.
The photo is artfully out of focus. A table. A hand. A whisky glass with condensation. The caption: good company, better drinks.
Lena stares at the hand. Manicured. Red polish. Not hers.
She locks her phone, drops it in her bag, and downs the rest of her coffee like a shot. The burn matches the muscle strain in her legs, and there’s a twisted satisfaction in that symmetry.
At the office, Jess greets her with the usual flurry of updates, followed by a cautious glance at her gallon water bottle and the protein shaker poking out of her designer tote. Lena’s in black slacks and a white silk blouse, but she’s still wearing the gym beneath her skin.
Jess clears her throat. “You’re looking very… energetic, this morning.”
“I’ve been up since four forty-five.”
“Hm. That explains the death aura.”
Lena signs a contract without reading the last two pages. She trusts no one and also doesn’t care. That’s the current emotional sweet spot.
By noon, she’s powered by adrenaline, caffeine, and a vague sense of righteous indignation. Kara hasn’t messaged her since last Wednesday, when she said I’m not sure I can do this right now. Lena had replied, Okay, so don’t. She was proud of that. It was concise. Final. Her therapist - whom she has not consulted since this crisis began - would have called it a boundary.
Still, she opens her texts at lunch. The conversation is pinned. She tells herself she’s checking it for logistics, for professional reasons, for something grounded in reality. The last message remains unread. She swipes away the app and eats her salad with mechanical focus. No dressing. No joy.
That evening, as the sun disappears behind the glass skyline of L-Corp’s tower, Lena finds herself at the gym again. She hadn’t planned on a second workout, but her body arrived here before her brain could make an argument. The Stairmaster is occupied. She glares at the man on it until he gets uncomfortable and leaves five minutes later.
She climbs. The machine squeaks. Florence is screaming again. Everything is perfectly awful.
When she gets home, her muscles are shaking and her inbox is blessedly empty. She showers in silence and lies on her couch in damp hair and a robe, letting exhaustion wrap itself around her ribs like a harness.
This, she thinks, is manageable. If her heart won’t listen to reason, her body can still be bludgeoned into silence.
Tomorrow is deadlifts. She’ll wear the dark leggings and the matching tank. She’ll smile at Jack if he brings another disgusting snack. She’ll lift until something gives.
She tells herself she’s fine.
*
Tuesday - Deadlifts. Boiled Eggs. Self-Loathing.
Lena wakes with her alarm before it can go off, which is either proof of discipline or a failure of the subconscious to set boundaries. It’s 4:43 AM. Her dreams were unremarkable - sterile flashes of spreadsheets, dim hallways, voices without faces. There is no Kara in them, which she interprets as either progress or repression so complete it should be studied.
She drinks a full glass of water, brushes her teeth with the lights off, and changes into all black gym clothes that make her look, in the mirror, like a very serious member of a cult. She adds a swipe of lip balm out of habit, then wipes it off like it’s sentiment.
By 5:08 AM she’s at the rack, chalking her hands and making eye contact with no one. Jack is already there, wearing a tank top that reads SORE TODAY, STRONG TOMORROW. She’s trying to ignore him but he’s grinning in her peripheral vision like an overcafeinated golden retriever.
“You ready to break some records today?” He asks, like they’re training for the Olympics or a particularly vindictive obstacle course.
“I’m ready to not feel anything for ninety minutes.” Lena replies, deadpan.
Jack pauses, then pretends not to hear her. He adds a 10kg plate to her bar like it’s a gesture of love. It’s not. It’s violence.
They begin. The first set is warm-up, the second is tolerable, the third makes something behind her ribs start to crack. Not physically. Emotionally. But pain is pain, and Lena’s whole theory of coping rests on the idea that she can redirect one kind into another and call it progress.
By set five, Jack is making encouraging noises that Lena finds deeply inappropriate. She finishes her final rep and stands still for a long moment, breathing through her teeth like someone trying not to say something humiliating.
“Nice,” Jack says. “New personal best.”
Lena doesn’t respond. She wipes her palms on her towel and stares straight ahead. In the mirror, her expression is unreadable and also deeply unwell.
“Protein?” Jack offers. He pulls a Tupperware container from his bag with an optimism Lena finds alarming. Inside: four cold boiled eggs and a Ziploc bag of celery sticks.
“You’ve brought me rations like a Victorian caretaker.” She mutters.
“Boiled eggs are packed with recovery power. And the celery’s for crunch. Keeps the mind alert.”
“I hate you.”
Jack grins. “That’s fair.”
She eats two of the eggs, unseasoned, no salt, no pepper, no god. One of them is slightly overcooked and has that faint green ring around the yolk that always makes her think of autopsies. She eats it anyway. This is what it means to commit to the bit.
When she gets back to her apartment, she showers quickly and dresses in gray trousers and a black blouse that does nothing to hide the way her shoulders have started to widen. She’s going to have to tailor her suits soon, which would be a problem if she had any events worth attending. Kara has stopped inviting her to anything personal and now only emails her with subject lines like Luthor Corp x CatCo Q3 Sponsorship Timeline.
At the office, Jess greets her with two coffees - one black, one with oat milk - and waits to see which one Lena grabs. Lena takes the black one without speaking.
Jess hesitates. “You know,” she says carefully, “if you ever want to talk about… anything not related to admin, I’m contractually obligated to listen.”
“That sounds emotionally manipulative.”
Jess nods. “It was.”
Lena almost smiles. Almost.
She spends most of the day in meetings, during which her mind wanders to things like Kara’s hands and the way she used to hold Lena’s wrist instead of her hand, like she was always bracing for a goodbye. She remembers a night in September, the rain, the balcony, Kara saying, I just don’t know how to give you what you want.
Lena had said, Try.
Kara had kissed her instead.
At 4 PM, Sam texts her: Dinner tonight. You owe me one social interaction per week. I have receipts.
Lena replies: I have a hamstring strain and nothing to say.
Sam replies: Perfect. You’ll be too sore to run away and too bitter to lie.
Lena considers saying no. Then says nothing at all and drops her phone in her drawer. She knows she won’t go. The idea of sitting across from someone who loves her and being reminded that Kara doesn’t is a bit too sharp-edged for a Tuesday.
At 7 PM, she’s back in the gym. Not to lift - her legs are on strike - but to walk aimlessly on a treadmill and feel the movement dull the inside of her head. She doesn’t wear headphones. She doesn’t need distraction. She needs repetition. Monotony. Something to match the feeling of being texted hey by the woman she loves or replying np, ttyl.
Back in her apartment, she eats a salad that tastes like grief. She adds almonds for crunch, not joy. She opens her texts again. Kara hasn’t written anything. The last message is still the one from last week: I’m not sure I can do this right now.
She falls asleep on the couch in leggings and a hoodie, the TV still playing. Her sleep is shallow and full of noise. In the morning, she’ll do cardio again. She’ll drink more water. She’ll smile at Jack if he brings celery. Maybe she won’t cry in the shower.
Everything hurts.
But at least it’s symmetrical.
*
Wednesday - Rowing Machine. Tuna Salad. False Calm.
Lena wakes up with her face pressed against the corner seam of the couch and her spine bent at an angle that would be considered inhumane by most ergonomic standards. It’s 5:06 AM, which means she’s technically late by her current masochistic schedule, but there’s no real consequence for that other than the vague dissatisfaction of having failed a rule she made up herself. She drags herself upright, rolls her neck until it cracks twice, and ignores the small part of her brain whispering that normal people do not build their weeks around physical fatigue as emotional triage.
By 5:40 AM she’s at the gym, gliding on the rowing machine like she’s training for a post-apocalyptic regatta. Jack’s not there today. A small mercy. She’ll still have to hear about it later - how he had ‘an early call’ and ‘had to make a green smoothie for his girlfriend’, as though that’s not the most sickeningly functional thing a person can say before sunrise.
She rows until her arms ache and the seam of her leggings starts to dig into her hip. The resistance is set high. There’s a rhythm to it - push, pull, return - that mimics productivity without delivering any of its outcomes. She’s not going anywhere. She’s not improving. She’s just maintaining the illusion of forward motion while her brain stays stuck on one simple fact: Kara has not texted her in six days.
Six days used to mean something. It used to mean worry. It used to mean airports and crisis and a quiet voice on the other end of the phone saying, Come home. Now it means nothing. It means silence. Or worse, the occasional distant interaction in a shared email thread, Kara using words like collaborate and appreciate like she’s trying to apply for a job Lena isn’t offering.
The rowing machine screeches as she finishes her last set. A man across the room glances at her like she’s made a scene. She stares him down until he looks away.
At the office, Jess greets her with practiced brightness and a to-go container from some health-conscious café down the street.
“Tuna salad,” Jess announces. “High protein, low effort.”
Lena opens the lid. It’s pale and depressing, like food that never knew warmth. The lettuce is wet in the way that suggests it’s been pre-cut for at least twenty-four hours. The tuna is gray. She eats it anyway.
“You don’t have to pretend this is normal.” Jess says, leaning a hip against the edge of the desk.
“I’m not pretending. I’m committing.”
“To what, exactly?”
Lena doesn’t answer. She chews a forkful of greens like they insulted her family.
Jess lingers. “Just for the record,” she says lightly, “we all know this is about Kara.”
Lena looks up. “Is that in the company Slack channel now?”
“No,” Jess says. “It’s in the air. A bit like asbestos.”
There’s no reply to that, so Lena waves her away and opens the folder on her desk labeled Q3 R&D Budget Allocations like it contains the secrets of the universe instead of just numbers she already memorized yesterday.
Lunch comes and goes. She ignores three meeting invites and a calendar reminder to ‘Revisit Rojas Sustainability Proposal’, which she left there as an optimistic nod to teamwork before she realized she had no interest in functioning as part of anything anymore. She eats a handful of almonds and stares at the wall for thirteen full minutes.
At 3:40 PM, Andrea texts her: If you ghost lunch again I’m bringing wine to your office and making you watch lesbian cinema until you cry.
Lena replies: Which film?
That’s what you have a problem with?
If you say Blue is the Warmest Colour, I’ll block you.
Disobedience. Tongue spitting. Iconic.
Lena doesn’t reply, but the corner of her mouth twitches upward for half a second. It’s not quite a smile, but it’s also not nothing.
After work, she goes home and changes into the oversized hoodie she’s been living in between workouts. The sleeves smell like detergent and sleep deprivation. She doesn’t bother with makeup. She barely brushes her hair. She returns to the gym at 8 PM, already sore and somehow hollow with anticipation, like maybe Kara will be there even though she hasn’t set foot in this building in a month. This is the problem with want. It makes you irrational. It makes you superstitious. It makes you hope.
Kara is not there.
Instead, Lena finds Jack, now in his nighttime gear - a navy tank top that says LIFT LIKE A GIRL, which he claims is feminist but Lena suspects is just what was clean. He greets her with a grin and a bag of ‘homemade trail mix’ that includes cacao nibs and dried peas.
“I didn’t know you could dry peas.” Lena mutters, inspecting it like a biology experiment.
“They’re full of fiber. Gut health is crucial.”
Lena pockets the bag and lies to his face. “I’ll eat it later.”
They stretch in silence. Jack offers to help with mobility exercises. Lena declines. She rows again. This time slower. Less controlled. Less interested in doing anything other than staying in motion so she doesn’t have to go home and stare at the ceiling like it might blink first.
When she finally does leave, it’s almost ten. Her phone buzzes once on the walk back to her building. For one wild, ridiculous second she thinks it’s Kara. It’s not. It’s a calendar notification: Monthly board meeting: Prep slides.
She considers throwing her phone in the gutter, decides against it, and spends the elevator ride up imagining what Kara would say if she saw her now. Maybe something polite. Probably nothing at all. Kara had always been gentle in that sharp, deliberate way that masked avoidance as nobility.
Lena steps inside, drops her keys, peels off her hoodie, and lies flat on the rug like someone performing a self-exorcism. Her body aches. Her brain won’t stop narrating. She closes her eyes and thinks, Tomorrow I’ll box. Tomorrow I’ll be angry enough to hit something that can’t hit back.
She sleeps in her sports bra with the TV on mute.
*
Thursday - Boxing. Celery Juice. Repression.
Lena wakes up before her alarm again, which would be impressive if it weren’t so pathetic. 4:32 AM. She stares at the ceiling for a full three minutes, cataloguing her aches like they’re inventory. Her shoulders are stiff. Her triceps are sore. Her lower back has developed the kind of tension typically reserved for middle managers with untreated rage. Good. It means yesterday happened. It means something is sticking.
She dresses like she’s going to war: compression tights, long-sleeved top, hand wraps already stuffed in her gym bag. The gym is quiet at this hour - just the way she likes it. A single fluorescent light flickers overhead like it’s struggling to stay awake. The air smells like old rubber and disinfectant. There’s a new crack in the mirror by the free weights. She files it away mentally as something to fix later, then punches the bag like it owes her money.
Jack appears at 5:18 AM carrying two bottles of something green and viscous. She glares at him over her shoulder without stopping.
“It’s celery juice.” He says, as if that explains anything.
“Why?”
“Liver support. Gut flora. Anti-inflammatory. You’ve been looking puffy.”
“I have not.” Lena snaps.
“Emotionally puffy.”
She hits the bag harder.
Jack shrugs and sits down on a nearby bench, sipping his own juice like he’s watching a particularly chaotic nature documentary. Lena keeps punching. Her form is good - she’s fast, precise, efficient. There’s something unkind about the way she moves, like she’s disappointed in the bag for not being sentient enough to flinch.
“You know,” Jack says casually, “I read somewhere that unresolved feelings manifest in the body.”
“That’s yoga propaganda.”
He grins. “Could be. Still. You’ve been living like someone auditioning for a reboot of Rocky.”
She doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, she finishes her set, rips off her gloves, and downs the celery juice in one long, defiant gulp. It tastes like chlorophyll and self-hatred.
Back at L-Corp, Jess offers her a muffin. Lena declines on the basis that anything with blueberries is too cheerful for someone whose primary source of joy lately has been the incremental increase in her max lift weight.
Jess sighs. “You know Kara was here yesterday, right? She came by for the PR deck.”
“I’m aware.”
Jess hesitates. “Did you two talk?”
Lena cuts her off with a look that could sterilize a room.
By noon, her inbox is full of things that used to matter. Quarterly reports. Shareholder updates. A proposal from R&D about a new lightweight material that could revolutionize structural integrity in wearable tech. All brilliant. All meaningless.
She eats a grilled chicken salad with no dressing and one cherry tomato that she debates throwing out for being too whimsical. Kara’s thread is still at the top of her messages, pinned like a failed exhibit in an empty gallery.
Andrea calls around 2 PM.
“I’m outside.” She says without preamble.
“Outside where?”
“Your building.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been ignoring me.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been brooding with protein.”
Lena sighs. “Andrea -”
“No. Shut up. I brought a sandwich and a copy of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. If you don’t come down in five minutes, I’m telling your entire board you’ve developed a compulsive relationship with stair machines.”
Lena doesn’t go down.
Andrea sends a selfie flipping her off from the sidewalk and texts, You’re unbearable but I miss you, you emotionally constipated cryptid.
Lena spends the rest of the day in a meeting she doesn’t remember, takes notes she doesn’t review, and answers two questions with nods and one with “we’ll revisit that in Q4,” which she assumes means something to someone.
At 7:45 PM she’s back at the gym. This time she boxes until her arms stop shaking. Until her lungs ache. Until the smell of sweat and rubber and old aggression feels more like home than her actual apartment.
Kara isn’t there. Of course she isn’t. But Lena keeps glancing at the door like a moron.
Jack joins her for cooldown. He brings a foam roller and another bottle of green sludge. This one has ginger in it. Lena accepts it without speaking.
“You know,” he says, “I liked her.”
Lena freezes. “What.”
“Kara. I liked her for you. She looked at you like you were the answer to a question she didn’t know she was asking.”
Lena exhales through her nose. It’s not a laugh. It’s a warning. Like she needs anyone else to rub in how Kara was, objectively, perfect for her. Perfect with her.
“She also looked at you like she didn’t think she deserved the answer.” Jack adds, quieter now.
“That’s not my problem, is it.” Lena says.
Jack just nods. “Not initially, no. But you made it yours.”
She finishes the drink. It’s disgusting. It helps nothing.
At home, she sits on her bed and opens her texts. There’s a message from Sam: I swear to god if you’re ignoring me too I’m going to change your Netflix algorithm to only show Noah Centineo rom-coms.
Lena replies: That’s a war crime.
She doesn’t open Kara’s thread.
She doesn’t sleep well.
Tomorrow is spin class. Jack promised ‘an instructor who plays death metal and screams about capitalism’. Lena finds herself almost looking forward to it. Something about righteous indignation on a stationary bike sounds refreshingly honest.
Everything else is noise.
*
Friday - Spin Class. Protein Waffles. Spiral.
Friday begins with a thunderclap migraine and the low, persistent ache of emotional rot. Lena stares at her bedroom ceiling for exactly five minutes before getting up. Not because she feels like it, but because feeling has officially been recategorized as nonessential. The body must move. That is the only rule. Motion replaces meaning. Endorphins as substitution for affection.
At 5 AM sharp, she walks into the spin studio like she’s preparing to break up with someone in a public place. Jack is already there, brightly lit and fully caffeinated, chatting with the instructor - a woman named Blade, which Lena assumes is either a stage name or a prophecy.
Blade has biceps thicker than Lena’s waist and hair that looks like it’s been cut with a machete. Her playlist opens with Raining Blood. She greets the class by yelling “WAKE UP, YOU LAZY SHITS”, then cranks the resistance knobs to a setting Lena didn’t know existed. Jack whoops. Lena tightens her ponytail and begins pedaling like she’s personally responsible for keeping the lights on.
By minute ten, her legs are screaming and Blade is yelling about sweat being a tax on weakness. By minute twenty, Lena has reached a meditative state of hatred. She watches her reflection in the mirrored wall and sees someone she doesn’t quite recognize - leaner, sharper, more sculpted in the hollow spaces than the filled ones. This version of her doesn’t miss anyone. This version isn’t still checking her phone like a trained dog waiting for a command.
But at minute thirty-two, Cruel Summer comes on, a glitch in Blade’s death metal queue. And Lena sees it for what it is: a joke. The universe pointing and laughing. A song that once played in Kara’s kitchen, fall sunlight across bare shoulders, toast burning in the background while Kara kissed her like she was trying to memorize the inside of Lena’s mouth. That was last August. It’s May now, and Lena is sprinting uphill on a stationary bike surrounded by strangers and grief disguised as quads.
She does not cry. But she does almost bite through her lip.
After class, Jack insists on celebrating their survival with ‘post-spin gains’, which is code for protein waffles that taste like compressed sawdust and sadness. He makes them in the L-Corp break room, because apparently no one has told him that bringing a waffle iron to the workplace is a fireable offense.
“They’re blueberry!” He exclaims proudly, sliding one onto a napkin and drizzling it with something beige.
“Is that syrup?”
“Protein frosting. Vanilla-mushroom flavor.”
Lena eats the waffle without comment. She deserves it. She did this to herself.
Jess walks in mid-bite and stops like she’s stumbled onto a crime scene.
“Are you… enjoying that?”
Lena chews slowly. “Enjoyment is an illusion.”
Jess backs out of the room like she’s seen a demon in heels.
At her desk, Lena stares at her inbox without opening anything. She scrolls, marks a few things unread, then accidentally hovers over the name Kara Danvers in the shared PR thread and immediately feels the Pavlovian surge of cortisol. Her fingers hesitate. She clicks.
The message is short. Polite. Clinical.
Kara Danvers, 10:04 AM: Confirming our team will review the final draft by EOD. Thanks for your flexibility.
Lena stares at it for longer than she’ll admit. Not because of what it says. But because of what it doesn’t. Kara used to write sentences with too many commas, and she used to sign off with lowercase names. Now it’s just correct. It’s immaculate. It’s unfamiliar.
At 1 PM, her phone buzzes with a text from Kara. Not an email. Not a shared doc. An actual text.
hey
That’s it. No context. No follow-up.
Lena stares at the word like it’s an insult.
She locks her phone, throws it face-down on the conference table, and says, “We’re done here” to a group of people who are very much not done and look visibly afraid.
That evening, she lies on her couch in a sweatshirt that still smells faintly of Kara’s perfume. Not the one she wore to work - the one she kept at Lena’s for overnight stays. Dior, something expensive and warm and maddening. Lena pulls the fabric tighter around her face like she’s trying to smother herself gently.
She reopens the text. hey.
She types three separate replies:
what do you want
miss me?
please don’t do this
She deletes all of them. Instead she sends nothing. Leaves it there, glowing.
She turns on the TV. Something loud and violent. Action movies work well on Fridays. She watches without really watching, eyes flicking to the phone every ten minutes like it’s a stove she forgot to turn off. The text remains unanswered. It doesn’t ping again.
At midnight, she moves to the bed. Doesn’t sleep. Just lies there, eyes open, phone face-up beside her. Waiting for nothing in particular. Waiting out the night.
Tomorrow she’ll carry weights around a gym like a circus act. Chicken breast. Minimal eye contact. Fewer mistakes.
She dreams about Kara’s hand resting on her lower back, just enough pressure to say I’m here without saying anything at all. She wakes up furious.
*
Saturday - Weighted Carries. Chicken Breast. Collapse.
Saturday opens on a headache and a text from Andrea that reads simply: If you’re not at brunch by 11, I’m going to tell the press your abs are fake. Lena stares at it for a full minute before muting the thread. She’s not in the mood to defend her core strength.
She pulls on leggings with a high waistband and a loose black tank that reads NOPE in white block letters, which she bought as a joke but now finds disturbingly accurate as a personality descriptor. She ties her hair back in a bun so tight it pulls at the edges of her scalp and considers skipping the gym. Then remembers the text from Kara. Still unanswered. Still glowing at the top of her messages like a trap.
The gym is half-empty when she arrives, which suits her. Jack’s already there, looping a resistance band around his knees and doing squats in a way that makes Lena question male anatomy. He waves her over, oblivious to the way she is actively radiating do not approach energy.
“Weighted carries today,” he announces, holding up two terrifyingly large dumbbells. “Farmer’s walks. Builds core, grip, mental fortitude -”
“Social isolation.” she adds, taking one from him and testing the weight. It pulls on her shoulder immediately. Good.
They begin. It’s stupidly simple: pick up heavy things, walk until it hurts, put them down, repeat. But there’s something satisfying about the linearity of it. Pain in. Pain out. Cause and effect, no nuance. Lena carries sixty kilos of steel across the gym floor and thinks about all the things Kara hasn’t said.
The text came from nowhere. hey. Not I miss you or I was wrong or I made a mistake not choosing you, which would’ve been dramatic and forgivable. Just hey, like they still exist in the same emotional time zone, like Lena hasn’t been bleeding out on the floor of their silence for weeks.
She drops the weights with a controlled thud. Jack claps once. She glares at him.
They do four more laps. By the last, her palms are raw and her shoulders feel like they’re trying to escape her body. She sits on the floor, legs splayed gracelessly, breath shallow. Jack hands her a water bottle and sits beside her like she’s not visibly unraveling.
“Have you considered talking to her?” Jack asks, not looking at her.
“No.”
“It might help.”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know her.”
Jack chews on that for a moment. “Do you still like her?”
Lena closes her eyes. “Don’t be obtuse.”
He nods. “You’re very brave, you know.”
She laughs once, short and mean. “Bravery would’ve been telling her what I wanted before she disappeared.”
“She didn’t disappear.”
“She changed her mind.”
Jack doesn’t argue. Just offers her a Tupperware container with grilled chicken breast, dry, no seasoning. She takes it because she’s earned the punishment.
Back at the office, which she goes to out of habit more than necessity, Jess finds her eating said chicken in the kitchenette and winces audibly.
“You look like you’ve lost your will to live.”
Lena doesn’t look up. “Thank you, Jess, that's good to know.”
Jess sighs, opens the fridge, and pulls out something that contains actual flavor. “I’m saying this because I like my job and I like your face: whatever performance art piece you’re doing about heartbreak, it’s starting to look like a cry for help.”
Lena picks at the chicken. “Not heartbreak. Adjustment.”
“Right. That’s why you’re eating prison food and doing farm work at dawn.”
Lena tosses the fork in the sink and walks out before she says something unfair.
Her phone buzzes as she crosses the lobby. For one gloriously delusional second, she thinks maybe Kara’s followed up. Something real this time. Something with weight. She unlocks the screen.
It’s Sam: If you skip brunch tomorrow, I’m sending you to a lesbian retreat in Vermont with no Wi-Fi.
Lena replies: I hope you get food poisoning.
That evening, she walks to the bodega on the corner and buys a bottle of electrolyte water and a protein bar that tastes like chalk. The man behind the counter gives her a nod like he’s seen a thousand people come through with that look - focused, furious, clearly running from something.
She showers in silence, dresses in nothing, and lies on the floor of her bedroom with the lights off and the phone beside her like a hostage negotiator.
The hey is still there. It doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t grow. It just waits.
She finally texts back: You don’t get to reach out just to see if I’ll bite.
No read receipt. No reply.
She sets the phone face-down, closes her eyes, and breathes like someone trying to survive her own restraint.
Tomorrow is Sunday. Supposedly a rest day. She’s already planning a light circuit. Hydration. Cardio. Something measured.
But she knows - and she hates that she knows - the ache in her chest isn’t lactic acid.
*
Sunday - Cooldown. Strawberry Smoothie. The Kiss.
Lena wakes later than usual, and for once there’s no guilt. Just the measured stiffness of overuse settling deep into her legs and shoulders, a dull echo of every terrible choice she’s made this week disguised as progress. Her sheets are tangled, her mouth is dry, and she has the distinct sense of having forgotten something important in her sleep, though that’s likely just her brain refusing to classify Kara as a dream. The phone is still on the nightstand, quiet and accusatory. No new messages. No apology. Just that one line - hey - sitting in her inbox like a joke with no punchline.
She showers on autopilot, changes into leggings that used to be too tight and now cling to her like a second skin, and makes her way to the gym without preamble. She’s tired of preambles. Tired of text chains with Sam about brunch, of Andrea’s existential threats, of Jess looking at her like someone has died. Tired of silence. Mostly hers.
It’s late morning by the time she arrives, the sun high enough to filter through the windows with that soft, accusatory kind of brightness. The regular crowd is here now - weekend gym people, full of optimism and meal plans and naïve relationships with carbohydrates. They smile, stretch, flirt by the weight rack like nothing hurts.
She warms up with incline walking, arms loose at her sides, hood up like she’s waiting for someone to mistake her for approachable. She doesn’t lift. She doesn’t sprint. Just walks until the ache in her hamstrings competes with the buzzing in her head, a kind of internal static that’s been building all week and is now impossible to ignore.
Jack appears twenty minutes in, armed with two smoothies in enormous plastic cups that look like they were blended by a sentient vitamin shop. He offers her the pink one with an exaggerated flourish.
“Strawberry banana,” he says. “With creatine, chia, flax, and a sprinkle of despair.”
“Thoughtful.” Lena mutters, taking it.
“You’ve earned it.”
She takes a sip. It’s cold and aggressively sweet, the kind of flavor that feels engineered rather than grown. She swallows it anyway.
“You ever think about how creatine is the only relationship I’ve been consistent with all month?”
Jack tilts his head. “That’s bleak.”
“It’s factual.”
They sit side by side on a bench by the stretching area, the smell of rubber mats and eucalyptus cleaner hanging thick in the air.
“Still no word?” Jack asks, without looking at her.
“She texted.” Lena says. “Just not with anything useful.”
“What’d she say?”
“‘Hey’.”
Jack winces. “Jesus.”
“Hmm.”
“You reply?”
“Unfortunately.”
Jack hesitates. “Do I want to know what you said?”
“You probably already do.”
There’s a pause.
“She’ll come around.” He offers, with that particular brand of optimism people who haven’t been abandoned like to wield.
Lena finishes the smoothie without replying. It gives her something to do with her hands.
When she steps outside, the city feels quiet in a way that’s almost performative - blue sky, low breeze, the air clear enough to see your own thoughts if you look too long at anything still. She doesn’t head home right away. Instead she walks a long loop through streets that don’t mean anything, past cafés she’s never gone into and stores she’d never admit to shopping in. Her calves protest the movement, but it’s better than standing still.
And then she sees her.
Kara’s leaning against the wall across from Lena’s building, dressed like she’s not trying to make a statement - jeans, soft sweater, hair tucked back in that way she does when she’s nervous but wants to look like she’s not. No glasses, no barrier. Just her.
Lena slows without meaning to.
Kara doesn’t move. She waits.
Lena crosses the street.
For a long moment, neither of them says anything. There’s a car idling nearby, someone playing faint music from a balcony above, the distant hiss of a street vendor’s grill. All of it somehow quieter than the sound of her own blood.
Jack must have texted her. Of course he did.
“You could’ve said something else,” Lena says. “You literally could’ve said anything.”
Kara nods. “I didn’t know if I was allowed to.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
Kara shifts her weight. “You looked like you were doing better.”
“And that’s not a real excuse.”
“I thought maybe you hated me.”
Lena laughs, but it comes out flat. “I didn’t even get that luxury. Hate requires certainty.”
Kara’s eyes fall to the sidewalk. “I didn’t know how to be what you wanted.”
“No one asked you to be anything,” Lena says. “I just wanted you to show up.”
Kara looks up, and something breaks in her face. Not visibly. Not theatrically. But Lena sees it - the moment the wall buckles. It’s subtle. A narrowing of her eyes, a shift in her breathing. That’s the thing about Kara: even when she’s unraveling, she does it with restraint.
“I didn’t think you’d still want me.” She says, low and slow, like she’s only just decided to say it aloud.
Lena’s lips part, but the anger fizzles out before she can weaponize it. She exhales, sharp and tired, like someone blowing smoke that never existed.
“Then you’re even stupider than I thought.”
It happens quickly after that.
Kara moves like she’s making a mistake she knows she won’t regret, like her body is trying to apologize before her words can catch up. She reaches for Lena with both hands - one cupping the back of her neck, the other settling just below her ribs, like she’s afraid Lena might disappear in the time it takes to get this wrong.
The kiss is not soft. It is not sweet. It is not cinematic.
It’s messy and urgent and utterly undignified, the kind of kiss people don’t recover from. Kara’s mouth is too warm, her thumb presses too hard against Lena’s jaw, and Lena kisses back like she’s trying to claw her way out of loneliness. There’s nothing tentative here, no carefully constructed return. Just hunger and frustration and the way Kara tastes like regret laced with almond milk.
When they finally part, Lena’s pulse is ragged. Kara’s eyes are half-lidded, her chest rising fast.
“I hate you a little bit.” Lena says, not moving.
“I deserve that.”
“You deserve worse.”
Kara nods. “Probably.”
They don’t smile. They don’t embrace. Lena wipes the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand and adjusts her posture like she’s reclaiming her spine.
Lena stares at her for a long beat. “Walk me home.”
Kara doesn’t answer, not with words. She just exhales like she’s bracing for impact, then falls into step beside her, hands in her jacket pockets, gaze fixed forward. The space between them is tentative but real, like a line neither one of them knows how to cross without looking too eager.
They walk past a couple eating ice cream on a bench, someone’s dog barking at its own reflection in a shop window, the distant sound of a saxophone that may or may not be in tune. Lena doesn’t speak. Kara doesn’t try to fill the silence. It stretches, taut and unremarkable, like string pulled between tin cans.
After a block and a half, Kara glances sideways. “You’ve not been crying at the gym, have you?”
Lena lifts an eyebrow without turning her head. “No. Crying’s catabolic.”
Kara huffs something close to a laugh, then swallows it like it’s unfamiliar. “I’m sorry,” she says after a moment, voice quieter now. “For disappearing. For making you feel like… like I thought walking away was noble instead of just cowardly.”
Lena keeps walking. She doesn’t speed up. Doesn’t stop. “It’s impressive how thoroughly you managed both.”
Kara’s steps falter for half a second, just enough to register. “I didn’t know you wanted me,” she says. “I mean, not… really. You’re Lena Luthor.”
“And yet,” Lena replies, deadpan, “I have spent the last few days prioritising glute hypertrophy over basic interpersonal function.”
There’s a pause, longer now, and Lena can feel Kara watching her, like she’s trying to piece together something that already broke. They pass a storefront window, their reflections walking side by side - one of them sharp and unbothered, the other visibly trying.
Kara lets out a slow breath, and there’s a crack in her posture, something uncertain threading through the tension she usually carries like armor. “I’d like to make it up to you,” she says. “However slowly you’ll let me. If you’ll let me.”
Lena doesn’t answer right away. She watches the sidewalk like it might offer clarity. It doesn’t. Her body aches in ways that aren’t muscular anymore. The kind of soreness that comes from wanting something and having nowhere to put it.
“I’m not lifting anything heavier than you,” she says finally. “So make of that what you will.”
Kara smiles without showing teeth. Not joy exactly, but recognition. They keep walking. The silence hums. Something has shifted. It’s not fixed, but it’s facing the right direction.