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The first time Lena notices it, Kara’s phone buzzes once, twice, and goes unanswered.
They’re at the Tower, supposedly workshopping alien bio-interfaces, though Brainy’s talking at 1.3x his normal rate and Nia’s doodling constellations in the margins of the project brief. Kara sits cross-legged on the edge of the console table, sleeves rolled to her elbows, thigh bouncing in a tight, restless rhythm. She glances at her phone, then flips it over. The next time it lights up, she pushes it face-down under a notepad.
Lena doesn’t comment. She’s not invested. She just watches Kara’s mouth tighten when Brainy mentions the atmospheric conditions over National City shifting again. By the time they wrap the meeting, Kara is nowhere to be found.
“You’re not listening.”
“I’m multitasking.” Lena says, without looking up from the schematic.
Alex leans her hip against the lab bench, arms folded in that older-sibling way that always makes Lena bristle on principle. “You’re multitasking a firewall into your frontal lobe.”
Lena glances up. “Sorry. You were saying?”
Alex eyes her, then deadpans, “You’re insufferable.”
Lena allows a smile. “Old news.”
Alex hesitates. “You’ve noticed it too, though. Right?”
“The interface inconsistencies?”
“Kara.”
She shouldn’t freeze. It’s too obvious. But it happens. A microscopic hitch in her breath. One Alex catches, but politely ignores.
Lena exhales through her nose, reaches for a stylus she doesn’t need. “She’s always like this when she’s dating someone new.”
“She broke up with Valerie a month ago.”
“Was it Valerie? I thought it was the… the one who dressed like a J.Crew mannequin.”
“That was Valerie.”
“Well.” Lena shrugs. “Then it’s someone new again.”
“Yeah,” Alex says. “That’s the problem.”
Dinner is Thai takeout, consumed standing at Kara’s kitchen counter. She orders four dishes and eats one, picking at the others with a distracted fork.
Lena has always thought of Kara’s apartment as a contradiction. Cozy but sterile. Lived-in, but impersonal. Like someone stayed in a hotel too long and learned to pretend it was home.
They’re halfway through a debate about the ethics of time travel when Kara says it.
“He’s nice,” she says, in that neutral, faintly apologetic tone she uses when she knows she’s going to be unconvincing. “Brilliant. Funny. He builds robotic exoskeletons for wounded veterans.”
Lena doesn’t look up. “You sound thrilled.”
Kara sighs. “He’s not my soulmate.”
Lena pauses. Then glances up. “And yet, here you are. Giving it the ol’ college try.”
“And he knows it, too.” Kara says.
“Knows what?”
“That I’m… waiting.”
Lena wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Waiting for what, exactly?”
Kara says it like she’s reciting an old nursery rhyme. “When the sky turns silver, I’ll meet my soulmate.”
Lena stares at her. Kara takes another bite of noodles. “It’s Kryptonian prophecy. From Rao’s temple. We all get one.”
“And yours includes… color theory?” Lena tries to keep a straight face, which is proving to be more and more difficult with every passing second.
Kara shrugs. “It is very specific.”
Lena presses her fingers to her temples. “Darling... do you even hear yourself right now?”
“It’s not ridiculous,” Kara says. “My mother believed it.”
Lena makes a noise in the back of her throat. “Your mother also programmed a virtual AI to parent you from beyond the grave.”
“She was right about a lot of things.”
“You genuinely think your love life hinges on a cloud pattern?”
“Not a cloud. Light. The refraction has to hit a specific spectrum. A luminous silver, not grey.”
“Oh, well, as long as we’re being precise.” Lena says coolly.
Kara doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even blink. “Please don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.”
Lena leans back against the counter. “So what? Every person you date is just a warm-up act?”
“They’re not the one,” Kara says, simply. “I know they’re not. I feel they’re not.”
“And if the sky never turns silver?”
Kara shrugs again. It’s terrifying, the ease of it. “Then they weren’t out there.”
Lena laughs, sharp and involuntary. “That’s convenient.”
Kara frowns. “It’s not convenient. It’s hopeful.”
“No,” Lena says. “It’s passive.”
Kara puts down her fork. “Why does it bother you so much?”
Lena stares at her. At her stupidly beautiful face. Her hopeful eyes. Her helpless faith in something ancient and useless.
“I just didn’t realize you were the type to outsource your feelings to the weather.”
Later, Lena walks home through a fine mist that doesn’t commit to being rain.
She tells herself she’s irritated by the pseudoscience of it. The sheer illogic. The mental laziness of believing in prophecies instead of probabilities.
But if she’s honest - and she isn’t, not even to herself - it’s not the prophecy that rattles her. It’s the realization that Kara has been waiting her entire life to be told who to love. And someone like that… would never choose Lena on her own, because Lena doesn’t come with divine signage. She just shows up. Stays late. Fixes what she can. Leaves when asked.
No silver sky. Just the dull, predictable grey of realism. She doesn’t notice she’s soaked through until she gets home and peels her blazer off like wet skin. And she’s not sure when the thought occurs - whether it’s in the elevator or the foyer or while she’s standing at her window with a glass of wine she doesn’t want - but when it lands, it lands heavy.
If Kara waits long enough, she might find someone else under that silver sky.
Lena isn’t sure what would be worse: that happening, or it not.
*
Kara stops saying the man’s name. That’s the first thing Lena notices.
He used to come up in passing - always lightly, like a footnote in her day. He said something funny at brunch, built a miniaturized reactor prototype in his garage, used a different voice for every dog he passed on the street. Lena, to her own horror, had liked the sound of him. Not the man himself — she never met him - but the narrative Kara built around him, one of quiet admiration, functional partnership, mutual ease. There had been something soothing in the idea that Kara might finally want someone normal.
But then his name disappeared from conversation. Not replaced, just erased. And Lena, who has spent years refining the art of not asking, says nothing.
Instead, she watches Kara take longer pauses when people ask how she’s doing. Watches her blink a beat too slowly before answering. Watches her smile without conviction, laugh without tension, hover without purpose.
Lena knows what it looks like when someone is out of sync with their own life. She just didn’t expect Kara Danvers to be the type to stall in place and call it destiny.
The next time they’re all at the Tower, Kara brings cupcakes. It’s always cupcakes - small, dense, perfect ones with blue-and-red sprinkles and soft centers that seem engineered to comfort. Kara hands them out like bandages, like answers, like absolution. Lena takes one and doesn’t eat it.
Instead, she waits until Kara starts telling Nia a story about an alien encounter in the subway tunnels and slips into the side office with the observation monitors. She isn’t proud of it, but pride is always the first thing to go when you’re trying to make sense of someone else’s irrationality.
The monitor feed is muted, but she doesn’t need sound to read Kara’s face. There’s animation, yes, but it’s practiced. She moves her hands the way she always does when she’s trying to distract from something she isn’t saying. Her shoulders are slightly hunched, her head tilted a fraction too far to the right - not curious, but bracing.
Lena watches her for exactly three minutes before shutting the feed off. She returns to the group, uneaten cupcake in hand, and offers to drive Nia home just so she doesn’t have to sit next to Kara on the couch.
Later that night, Lena texts Sam: when did people start equating apathy with fate?
Sam, bless her, doesn’t bother asking what this is about: probably around the time people realized fear makes a great excuse for staying put.
Two weeks pass. Timothy - the roboticist boyfriend Kara broke up with last month - is seen on Instagram with a new girl who owns a rescue llama. Andrea spends twenty minutes speculating about whether it’s a PR move. Jess replies with a screenshot from Kara’s last text thread with the man in question, confirming it ended politely, unremarkably, with a “you’re incredible but this isn’t it”. Lena doesn’t ask to see the messages, but Jess hands her the phone anyway.
The timestamp is from 3:16 AM.
“Drunk?” Lena asks.
Jess shakes her head. “No. You know how she gets when she’s too in her head. Sleep doesn’t happen.”
Lena nods. She does know. Kara’s insomnia used to make the news cycle when she went on 40-hour patrol benders. Now it just makes group chat anecdotes and subtle absences.
Alex corners her in the break room that week, stirring oat milk into a lukewarm coffee like it’s a religious rite.
“I know you think she’s being ridiculous.”
“Which part?” Lena asks. “The part where she believes her love life is being dictated by a centuries-old color prediction, or the part where she treats every relationship like a grocery-store sample tray?”
Alex doesn’t rise to the bait. She just holds Lena’s gaze the way she always has - calm, even, a little sad. “You act like she’s using it to avoid commitment. But she believes in it. Not to dodge love. Because she wants it.”
Lena rolls her eyes. “You can’t possibly be defending this.”
“I’m defending her,” Alex says. “Even when I think she’s being dumb. Which, to be clear, I do.”
Lena leans against the counter, arms crossed. “So what, we just let her live in delusion and hope it ends in a poetic sky moment?”
Alex tilts her head. “Why does it matter to you so much?”
And that is the question, isn’t it?
Because it does matter. Immensely. Absurdly. Like an itch under the skin of her brain. It matters that Kara is waiting for something that might never come. It matters that she’s treating real, flesh-and-blood people like scenery on the road to a silver sky. It matters that Lena isn’t even on the list of possibilities.
Or worse - she is, but Kara won’t let herself feel it unless the atmosphere gives her permission.
Kara shows up at L-Corp the next day with lunch.
It’s a small peace offering - a paper bag containing two perfectly wrapped bánh mì, a ginger soda, and a caramel rice bar that Lena once admitted to liking six months ago. Kara acts like it’s nothing, but Lena knows her well enough to know when she’s building a bridge with food.
Lena lets her into the office. Doesn’t smile.
They eat in silence for a few minutes, the kind that should feel companionable, but doesn’t.
Then Kara says it.
“I wish I didn’t believe in it.”
Lena blinks. “Then don’t.”
Kara looks at her like she’s asked her to renounce breathing. “It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” Lena keeps her tone flat. “You’re the one choosing to make it a condition.”
“It’s not a choice. It’s… wired in. It’s Kryptonian. Cultural. It’s what I was raised to expect.”
“No,” Lena says, setting her sandwich down. “It’s what you were taught. You don’t raise children with prophecies unless you want them to outsource their decisions forever.”
Kara flinches. Not visibly, but Lena sees it - the slow blink, the fractional retreat behind her expression.
She softens. A little. “I’m not trying to be cruel.”
Kara nods, quietly. “I know.”
Lena takes a breath. “Then why does it feel like you’re waiting for a lightning strike instead of just… looking at what’s already here?”
Kara says nothing. Just picks up her soda and twists the cap. Lena watches the silver of the metal catch the light, bright and brief and meaningless. She looks away.
That night, she tells Nia everything.
She doesn’t mean to. It happens after three glasses of wine and a two-hour debrief that veered wildly off course. Nia asks one innocent question about Lena’s mood, and suddenly Lena is monologuing about Kara’s sky fixation, her own allergy to magic, and the statistical likelihood of meeting one’s soulmate via color-coded atmospheric anomaly.
Nia listens. Patient. Thoughtful.
Then says, “I don’t think it’s about the prophecy.”
Lena frowns. “Then what is it?”
“I think you’re both scared.” Nia shrugs. “Just in different fonts.”
Lena snorts. “Well that’s not helpful.”
“It kind of is,” Nia replies. “You’re waiting for her to stop believing. She’s waiting for the sky to start cooperating. Either way, no one’s moving.”
There’s a silence. “What do you suggest? A fake weather machine?”
Nia arches an eyebrow. “Would you do it?”
Lena rolls her eyes. “I’m not that insane.”
But later, in bed, she stares at her ceiling for a long time and wonders if she could be. If she wanted to be.
And if insanity is really the word for refusing to be passive.
*
Lena dreams of Kara again. She doesn’t tell anyone.
In the dream, Kara is walking ahead of her through a snowfield that has no scent and no sound. She’s not wearing her suit. Just jeans and a thin grey sweater that’s completely inappropriate for the weather. Her hands are bare. Her hair is down. She doesn’t look cold. She doesn’t look back.
The snowfield turns silver, slowly, from the sky down. The flakes shimmer as they fall, iridescent and slow like confetti in a music video. Kara walks further and further into it until Lena can’t see her anymore.
When Lena wakes up, her mouth tastes like metal and her neck aches from the position she’s fallen asleep in. The lab chair under her is unforgiving. She blinks at the time display on the corner screen and sees 03:47.
Jess walks in twenty minutes later and doesn’t even pretend to be surprised.
“Just checking you haven’t been absorbed by the furniture.”
Lena rubs her eyes, still half-dreaming. “I didn’t realize we were anthropomorphizing my chairs now.”
Jess shrugs. “If I were going to be stuck in here every night until the sun explodes, I’d want a personality too.”
Lena manages a sideways smile, then tilts her head toward the half-finished schematic glowing on the main monitor.
“Ever heard of a tropospheric lens refractor?”
“Not outside a sci-fi novel.”
“Excellent... We’re about to make one.”
Jess doesn’t flinch. “Am I allowed to ask why?”
“No.”
Jess hesitates. “Is this one of your personal projects, or one of your personal projects?”
Lena doesn’t look up. “If I told you, I’d have to redact your memory.”
“That’s a yes.”
Lena reaches for her coffee, which is somehow still warm. She doesn’t remember making it. She’s not entirely convinced she did.
She starts testing atmospheric interference models by noon. By six, she’s mapped eight possible ways to artificially produce a silver-light sky under controlled weather simulation conditions.
By eight, Andrea texts her a string of increasingly concerning messages.
You are not inventing a second sun.
Are you inventing a second sun?
Lena.
Stop.
Come to the drinks thing tonight.
Lena ignores them all and keeps working. Her head is pounding and her stomach is threatening to defect, but the equations are forming cleanly now - elegant, coherent, functional. She’s always found comfort in things that behave as expected.
The sky outside is the kind of late-winter grey that makes buildings look like cardboard and people look like regrets. She glances out at it once, then decides it isn’t worth the distraction.
Kara texts around 9.
Nia says you’re working too hard
(and also that you called her a “dream capitalist”??)
are you okay?
Lena stares at the message longer than she should. She types a reply twice, deletes it both times.
Eventually, she just puts the phone face down and opens a new rendering program.
Sam appears the next morning. Not a call, not a text, not a polite heads-up - just materializes outside the lab door with a paper bag full of croissants and a look that says I’m not in the mood to play games today.
“I brought carbs.” She says.
Lena opens the door and says, “You’re late.”
Sam raises an eyebrow. “For what, your descent into madness?”
Lena hands her coffee. “You’ve missed me.”
They sit on the edge of the worktable and tear apart almond croissants while the light panels above cycle into something approximating morning.
Sam scans the diagrams still pinned to the main display. “Tell me this is at least for a client.”
“It’s not.”
“Tell me you’re not trying to bend the weather to your will out of emotional instability.”
“I’m a Luthor. What else would I be doing?”
Sam glances at her. “So this is about Kara.”
Lena doesn’t answer.
Sam wipes powdered sugar off her hands and drops her voice. “I know it’s not exactly my business, but -”
“You’re right,” Lena says. “It’s not.”
“But I’m going to say something anyway.”
Lena closes her eyes, already regretting the croissant. “Fine.”
Sam taps the edge of the schematic with one finger. “This? All of this? This is you trying to be the sky.”
Lena frowns.
“You know she’s waiting for a sign. You hate that. You don’t believe in signs. So instead, you’re trying to be one.”
Lena doesn’t speak.
“You’re trying to become something she can’t ignore.”
Still, Lena says nothing.
“I love you,” Sam says, softly, “but you’re not a myth. You’re a person.”
Lena laughs, quietly. “Kara’s always wanted both.”
“And that’s the problem,” Sam says. “You’re trying to match her delusion instead of asking her to meet you in the real world.”
Lena stands. “Thanks for the baked goods. The therapy session, less so.”
Sam doesn’t push. She never does. Just stands, picks up her bag, and pauses in the doorway.
“I don’t think you need to prove anything to her. I think she’s just scared. And I think you are too.”
Then she’s gone.
Lena deletes four hours of work that night and starts again.
On Friday, Andrea corners her in the L-Corp lobby.
“You’re dodging my calls.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re building something, and I know you’re going to say it’s none of my business, but if it’s dangerous -”
“It’s not.”
“Is it for Kara?”
Lena hesitates. That’s enough of an answer.
Andrea exhales like she’s trying not to throw something. “Lena, I say this with all the love in the world - if you build the sky for her, and she still doesn’t pick you, then what?” Lena doesn’t reply. Andrea steps closer. “She’s not a weather system. She’s not something you can force into formation.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Lena meets her gaze, dry and steady. “Better than anyone.”
Andrea sighs. “If she’s waiting for a sky, that’s her problem. Don’t make it yours.”
Lena waits until she leaves before heading back to the lab.
It’s almost two in the morning when the prototype finally powers up. The machine is inelegant - a Frankenstein assembly of refractors, microclimate diffusers, and custom-coded optics. It hums low, like a threat. Lena activates the simulation chamber, reroutes the light, and watches as the chamber ceiling flickers into liquid silver.
It’s not grey. It’s not blue. It’s unmistakably, irrefutably silver. Not a trick of the eye. Not an accident of atmosphere. Manufactured. Designed. Proof of concept.
She stands under the glow and thinks about Kara’s face. The slack-jawed wonder she gets when something moves her, that particular tremor at the base of her throat when she’s caught between awe and fear.
Lena doesn’t believe in gods. Or prophets. Or omens. She believes in algorithms and leverage and outcomes.
But as she stands in the silver glow she’s made with her own two hands, she feels something unfamiliar. Not reverence. Not certainty. Just a quiet, awful question: If I make it, and she still doesn’t come, what will I do with myself?
She stays in the chamber until the light fades.
*
The auditorium is packed, the lights are hot, and Lena’s shoes pinch in that precise way that reminds her she still has a body - a small mercy, given how effectively she’s ignored it for the past week.
She’s ten minutes into a guest lecture at MIT when she realizes she’s given the same talk before, three years ago, in Lima, and with more conviction. This version is smoother, more controlled, but something in the delivery feels airless, like she’s packaging truth without quite believing it.
The subject is entropy - or more specifically, how systems trend toward disorder unless actively constrained. Lena gestures to a slide diagramming thermodynamic principles and makes a passing joke about emotional thermodynamics, to polite laughter. Someone in the second row smiles a little too eagerly. She doesn’t return it.
Afterward, during the Q&A, a graduate student asks if she believes chaos can ever be reversed, or if humanity is just delaying the inevitable.
Lena says, “Control is always temporary. The trick is knowing when to let it go.”
She doesn’t think about Kara until she’s walking to her car. Or maybe she’s been thinking about her the entire time, and this is just the first moment she’s willing to admit it.
Kara texts her ten minutes after the lecture ends.
You looked beautiful.
Angry, but beautiful.
I mean that in a complimentary way.
I’ll stop now. Sorry.
Lena reads the first message three times, the second twice, the third once, and deletes the fourth.
She doesn’t reply.
Instead, she goes home and powers up the prototype again, adjusts the light range, refines the wavelength. She reconfigures the emitter housing until the glow refracts exactly the way it did in her dream - clean, soft, metallic, unnatural in all the right ways. The silver hums. Not loudly. Just enough to remind her it’s there. Just enough to sound like a heartbeat.
She doesn’t know why she’s still doing this. The petty answer would be that she wants to prove a point - to show Kara how fragile the whole thing is, how easily manipulated, how little magic is required to make people believe in the divine.
But there’s a deeper answer she’s not ready to face. One that has less to do with deconstructing belief and more to do with offering something Kara can finally touch, something to replace the waiting, the abstract longing, the cosmic leash she’s been tethered to since childhood.
If Kara won’t give herself permission, then Lena will.
She finishes fine-tuning the program around two in the morning and saves the file under the name ObservationBias_v2. The irony isn’t lost on her.
The next afternoon, Lena is in her lab when Alex calls. She answers on speaker, not because she wants to be hands-free, but because it lets her pretend this is just another update, just another informal check-in from National City’s resident big sister.
“She’s not sleeping.” Alex says, without preamble. Lena doesn’t ask who. “She’s not eating, either. I mean, she says she is, but I can tell.”
Lena adjusts the calibration array. “She’s a grown woman.”
“She’s a woman waiting for divine confirmation that she’s allowed to want things.” There’s a pause. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” Alex says.
Lena keeps her tone even. “Then why are you calling me?”
Another pause, heavier this time.
“Because when she talks about you, her voice does something different. It used to happen with hope. Now it happens with fear.” Lena closes her eyes. “She’s never been good at making decisions that feel selfish. You know that.”
“She thinks wanting me would be selfish?”
“No,” Alex says. “She thinks wanting anyone without a sign would be. You’re just… the most obvious one.” Lena exhales slowly, evenly. She doesn’t let her hands shake. Alex continues, softer. “Whatever you’re building, just be careful.” Lena doesn’t reply. “Don’t give her something she can believe in unless you’re ready for her to believe in you.”
The line goes dead.
That night, Lena lies awake in her apartment, staring at the ceiling and wondering if she’s created a loophole or a trap.
She’d intended it as a gesture - a blunt, deliberate challenge to Kara’s faith. A way to demonstrate how belief, for all its weight, can be manufactured. She thought she’d feel triumphant.
Instead, she feels like a child holding a paper crown, waiting to see if anyone kneels. She replays Kara’s words from dinner two weeks ago. When the sky turns silver, I’ll meet my soulmate. As if the universe were an escape clause.
But if Kara really meant it - if she really, sincerely felt something when that light appeared in the sky - then the prophecy isn’t the leash. It’s the crutch. The sky wasn’t telling her what to feel. It was giving her permission to feel what was already there.
The next morning, Lena reprograms the simulation parameters. Not just for accuracy, but for scale. If Kara needs a sky, Lena will give her one.
But it won’t be for proof. It will be for clarity.
Because maybe it’s not about proving Kara wrong. Maybe it never was. Maybe the only way to free her from prophecy is to give her what she thinks she wants, and let her realize that the sky didn’t change anything - it just revealed what was waiting.
She goes out that night. Lets Andrea drag her to some stupid rooftop party with fintech people and influencers who think speaking in metrics makes them interesting. Lena wears black and stands near the exit and lets the wind batter her face until her cheeks are raw.
Kara shows up an hour in.
It’s unclear whether she was invited or just appeared, but Lena knows the difference between casual and deliberate, and this is very deliberate. Kara’s hair is up, her coat is open, and there’s a too-careful nonchalance in the way she holds her drink. She weaves through the crowd like she doesn’t see Lena until she’s standing beside her, looking out over the city.
“Cold night.” She says.
“Not the worst.” Lena replies.
They stand like that for a while. The silence between them is less sharp now, more like static.
Finally, Kara says, “The sky turned silver last week.”
Lena looks at her. “I know.”
“I felt it.”
“What did you feel?”
Kara swallows. “Like something clicked. Like I stopped waiting.”
Lena watches her. “And?”
“I thought maybe it meant something.”
Lena doesn’t move. “And now?”
Kara looks down. “Now I’m not sure if it meant anything at all.”
There it is - the edge of the cliff. The moment where faith hesitates.
Lena turns toward her fully, voice quiet. “Maybe the sky didn’t do anything. Maybe it just let you feel what you were already feeling.”
Kara meets her gaze. For a second, Lena thinks something will happen - a step forward, a hand on her arm, a moment of clarity - but Kara’s face folds inward. Not rejection. Not retreat. Just… fear. She walks away without another word.
Lena stays where she is, breathing against the wind, wondering what it means to give someone everything they asked for - and still have them walk away.
*
Lena is midway through boiling water for tea she won’t drink when the knock comes.
It’s late. Not scandalously so, but late enough that most of the city has settled into either sleep or distraction. She checks the time - 10:48 PM - and the security feed, though there’s only ever one person who shows up without texting first and stands there, perfectly still, like she doesn’t want to interrupt the building. Kara looks small on the camera, not physically but emotionally, like someone who has already second-guessed the decision to come and is just too stubborn to leave.
Lena opens the door without speaking. Kara looks up. She’s in jeans, a blue sweater with a high collar, no makeup, wind-ruffled hair. There’s something apologetic in her posture, though she doesn’t actually say the word.
“I’m not here to cause trouble.” She says.
Lena raises an eyebrow. “That’s always the best way to begin causing it.”
Kara smiles, faint and tired. “Can I come in?”
Lena steps back. She’s already halfway to the kitchen by the time Kara shuts the door behind her.
“You want tea?”
Kara hesitates. “I’m okay.”
Lena makes it anyway, out of habit, or control, or the need to keep her hands busy while the emotional air in the apartment recalibrates.
Kara doesn’t sit. She hovers near the edge of the room, as if proximity might tip something over.
“I was going to text,” she says, “but I thought maybe -”
“You’d show up unannounced instead,” Lena finishes. She turns off the burner, sets the kettle aside. “Bold strategy.”
“I needed to see you.” Kara says.
Lena turns. “And now that you have?”
Kara holds her gaze. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”
Lena gestures to the couch. “Well, now I’m brimming with optimism.”
Kara doesn’t move.
Lena sighs, leans against the counter. “Fine. Let’s hear it.”
For a moment, Kara just looks at her, and Lena gets the unnerving sense that whatever she’s about to say isn’t going to be half as dramatic as it’s about to feel.
Then Kara says, “I think you’re my soulmate.”
Lena stares.
Kara swallows. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Why I feel... why nothing else worked. And then last week, the sky -”
Lena’s eyes close before she can stop them. “Jesus Christ.”
“- turned silver,” Kara finishes, quietly. “I felt it. Something clicked. And I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
Lena opens her eyes. She walks past Kara to the bookshelf, picks up a paperweight, sets it down again. She wants something to throw, but not something she’ll regret destroying.
“You’re really going to do this now.”
Kara flinches. “I - I thought you’d want to know.”
Lena turns to face her. “Why now? Why not all the other times we’ve stood in this apartment, talked like we meant it, circled each other like the world would end if we got any closer? Why wait until some atmospheric anomaly tells you it’s time?”
Kara’s jaw works. “Because I was scared.”
“No,” Lena says. “You were waiting. There’s a difference.”
Kara’s voice tightens. “I had to be sure.”
“And now you are?”
Kara nods. It’s small, fragile, like she knows it won’t help.
Lena doesn’t soften. “You’re not telling me because you feel it. You’re telling me because someone finally gave you permission.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not?” Lena walks back toward her, slow and deliberate. “Because to me, it looks like you spent years ignoring every part of this that felt real, because it wasn’t accompanied by divine signage. And now that it has a neon halo, you’re here.”
Kara’s voice breaks around the edges. “I didn’t want to get it wrong.”
Lena’s eyes flash. “You already did.”
They stand there. The distance between them isn’t far. Three feet, maybe four. Enough to cross in a single step, if someone wanted to. Neither of them does.
Kara’s shoulders slump. Not dramatically - just enough for Lena to see it’s over. The part where this could still feel brave. The part where maybe, just maybe, they get it right this time.
Lena swallows. Her throat burns. She gestures vaguely toward the door. “You should go.”
Kara hesitates, but she doesn’t argue. As the door clicks shut behind her, Lena lets out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. It comes out harsh, as if her lungs are rejecting the silence. She doesn’t cry. That would imply surprise. She just stands in her living room, staring out at a city that’s never made promises, wondering why the hell she thought Kara was different.
She’s back in the lab by 8 AM the next morning, face unreadable, posture sharp. Jess watches her enter, notes the jaw tension, and doesn’t speak. Instead, she slides a coffee across the desk and pretends not to notice that Lena’s hand shakes when she takes it.
Lena pulls up the weather simulation files. The program glows with soft efficiency, waiting to be used. She stares at it for a long time, the cursor blinking like a challenge. She could delete it. That would be rational. Merciful, even. Proof that she’s still Lena Luthor, empiricist, realist, patron saint of logic over longing.
Instead, she opens a new tab and starts refining the interface. She improves the light fidelity, adjusts the projection radius, reworks the emitter array. By noon, the machine can simulate silver skies over five city blocks. By two, it can hold the illusion for up to seven minutes before light decay sets in. Jess peeks her head in once. Lena doesn’t look up. Jess leaves without asking anything.
At 3 PM, she walks into the observation chamber alone and activates the simulation.
The silver sky blooms above her, vast and quiet and manufactured to perfection. Lena stands under it like it means something. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t.
But then again, maybe meaning is just repetition - the same signal enough times until someone believes it. Maybe love works the same way. Maybe Kara just needs one more sign, one more echo, one more version of certainty with Lena’s fingerprints all over it.
She watches the sky flicker, holds her breath, and thinks: I will not wait for her to want me. But when she walks out, she updates the security clearance protocols. She sets Kara’s biometrics to bypass.
Just in case.
*
The DEO debrief is uneventful, which is to say, inefficient. Kara fidgets through it like her suit is too tight, interrupting Brainy twice, forgetting the mission sequence order, misquoting casualty stats. No one calls her on it. Not out loud. But the tension in the room shifts. She’s not present, and everyone knows it.
Lena watches her from the far side of the table, pretending to take notes. She’s gotten good at pretending - always has been - but there’s a difference between detachment and resignation, and right now she’s somewhere between the two.
Kara finally excuses herself after ten more minutes of half-listening, murmuring something about city patrol and slipping out before anyone can ask if she’s okay. Nia gives Alex a look. Alex gives Lena a longer one. Lena closes her tablet and says nothing.
Back at L-Corp, the lights in the lab don’t feel clinical anymore. They feel theatrical. Designed. Lena spends the afternoon adjusting the humidity calibration on the refractor, then disables the wind simulation entirely. It was throwing off the optics, and besides, Kara has never needed the wind to feel like she’s flying.
The simulation is flawless now. She runs it three times. Watches the silver unfold, watches it shimmer and pulse, watches the projection radius hold steady like a well-kept promise. Then she runs it again. Not because she needs to. Because it’s there.
On the fifth loop, she finally asks the question that’s been sitting at the base of her spine for days. What if it did mean something? The sky, she means. The real one. The one Kara saw when she started to believe.
Lena still doesn’t trust belief. But she trusts data. And when she traces the atmospheric event Kara referenced - coordinates, timestamp, satellite logs - she finds the source within ten minutes. A DEO stealth drone, accidentally deployed during a test flight over Sector D. Altitude interference created an anomalous visual spread - not quite a malfunction, but certainly not intended.
She isolates the frequency range. Compares it to her simulation. It matches. Kara’s silver sky was, quite literally, a technological accident. A product of misfired code and proximity error. Human error. Not destiny. Not divine. Just circumstance.
She stares at the data, hand curled loosely around a pen she hasn’t used in hours. She could take this to Kara. Could show her the raw facts, the proof, the bare machinery behind her epiphany.
But she doesn’t, because something about it - something awful and essential - slots into place. The sky wasn’t magic. The sky was nothing. But Kara felt it anyway. Which means the feeling didn’t come from the sky.
It came from her.
She closes the simulation. Shuts down the refractors. Tells Jess to reschedule her Thursday meetings and walks to the park.
It’s a little after six, and the air smells like rain that changed its mind. Families drift past in clumps, early evening strollers with dogs that sniff too eagerly. Lena finds a bench near the center of the park, the kind made of city-budget metal, chipped paint, and bad angles. She sits anyway.
Ten minutes later, Kara lands beside her. She doesn’t say anything at first. Doesn’t ask how Lena knew she’d be there, or why she came, or what it means that she did. Lena doesn’t speak either. The silence feels less loaded than usual, maybe because the worst parts have already happened. The part where Kara believed. The part where she admitted it. The part where Lena sent her away.
They sit like that, not touching, not looking. Just watching the sky start to fade from blue to that soft, exhausted dusk tone cities get when everyone’s pretending to be okay at once.
Kara speaks first. “It wasn’t real, was it?”
Lena knows better than to feign ignorance. “The sky?” Kara nods. Lena keeps her gaze forward. “No. It was a DEO drone error. Refracted light off a cloaking field.”
Kara swallows. “Right.”
Lena waits. Kara doesn’t elaborate.
“You felt it,” Lena says, “because you were ready to feel it.”
Kara turns to look at her. “But it wasn’t real.”
“Neither is love, depending on who you ask.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?” Lena glances over. “You believed something because you wanted it to mean something. That’s belief. That’s -” she gestures vaguely at the sky. “- faith. That’s the part you can’t fake.”
Kara’s voice is small. “You think I’m ridiculous.”
Lena exhales. “I think you’re scared.”
“I was waiting for something to tell me it was safe.”
“And you thought a color in the sky would do that?”
Kara nods, slowly. “It’s what I was told. That I’d know when it turned silver.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracks. “But only after I let myself look at you.”
There it is. A small truth, painfully shaped. Lena doesn’t breathe for a moment. She considers reaching out. Doesn’t.
Instead, she says, “I’ve been building something.”
Kara blinks. “What kind of something?”
Lena glances up at the sky. “The kind that can make the sky turn silver.”
Kara freezes.
“I didn’t do it to trick you,” Lena adds, quiet now. “I did it because I was tired of watching you wait for permission.”
Kara swallows hard. “You built the sky?”
“Yes.”
“You built the prophecy.”
“No,” Lena says. “I built the excuse.”
Kara says nothing. The wind lifts her hair.
“I wanted to show you,” Lena says. “But I didn’t want you to need it.”
“Do you still want to?”
Lena looks over. Kara’s eyes are huge, unguarded in a way that makes Lena want to press her hand against something solid to steady herself.
“Yes,” Lena says. “Come with me.”
Kara hesitates.
Then she stands. “Okay.”
They walk in silence. Not avoidance. Not fear. This time, the silence feels like anticipation. Like air before a storm.
Like the seconds before light changes everything.
*
The lab is dark when they arrive. Not ominous, not dramatic - just sleep-deprived dark, late-evening dark, the kind that smells faintly of plastic and burnt metal and whatever passes for Lena’s adrenaline lately. The overhead lights flicker to life as the door seals behind them, bathing the room in a cold, surgical wash.
Kara steps in like someone crossing a threshold. Lena watches her hesitate just beyond the perimeter of the console bank, as if afraid she might disrupt something. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t ask what she’s about to see.
Lena moves past her, fingers steady on the control panel. “I ran seventy-two simulations before I got the ratio right. The refractors had to be custom-built. The light decay was unpredictable. But eventually, it held.”
Kara’s voice is quiet. “And you did all that because of me.”
“No.” Lena keys in a command. “I did it because of me.”
There’s a soft click, followed by the low, mechanical hum she’s come to know better than her own heartbeat. The emitters activate, one by one. The air shifts. Not in temperature, not in smell — just in feeling, like the room is leaning forward to watch.
The sky begins to turn.
It happens slowly, by design. The overhead projection blooms with that same refracted spectrum, that improbable, breathtaking silver - not grey, not metallic, but that eerie, luminous blend that lives somewhere between moonlight and miracle.
Kara looks up. Her mouth parts slightly. She doesn’t speak.
Lena watches her instead of the simulation. Watches the way her eyes widen. The way her hands twitch once, like they want to reach for something and don’t know what. The way her body stays perfectly still, like movement might ruin it.
The sky holds. Lena steps beside her, close but not touching.
“You said you needed a sign,” she says. “That you couldn’t trust it until something told you it was real.”
Kara’s voice is hoarse. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s artificial,” Lena says. “Manufactured. Entirely within my control.”
Kara finally looks at her. “Then why does it feel so real?”
“Because you’re not feeling the sky,” Lena says. “You’re feeling you.”
Kara swallows. The muscles in her throat shift like it hurts. “I thought it was the prophecy. That the sky would tell me when it was safe. When it was right.”
“And now?”
Kara doesn’t answer. She’s shaking, only slightly, but enough for Lena to see it. She takes a step forward and then turns, full body, toward her. She’s not breathing normally.
“I spent so long thinking love had to come with a label,” she says. “That I’d know because someone else said I would. That certainty had to come from outside of me.”
Lena holds still. She wants to say something - clever, or cruel, or precise - but it doesn’t come.
Kara moves closer. “But I knew. I think I always did.”
Lena’s voice is low. “And what now?”
Kara’s lips part.
Then she kisses her.
It’s not delicate. It’s not hesitant. It’s five years of hesitation combusting at once. Her hands are in Lena’s hair, then Lena’s jaw, then Lena’s waist. The kiss is open-mouthed and reverent, desperate and anchored. Lena gasps into it, arms wrapping around Kara’s back like a reflex, like punishment, like absolution.
The lab forgets them. The lights forget them. The ceiling forgets it’s pretending to be the sky. Lena lets herself be pressed back against the table. There are blueprints underneath her, some half-coded schematics she’ll never finish now. Kara lifts her up onto the metal edge with ridiculous ease, like Lena weighs nothing, like science bends for her too.
The second kiss is messier. Kara’s hand curls under Lena’s jaw like she needs proof that she’s real, like confirmation is something tactile. Lena bites down on her bottom lip, just enough to bruise. Kara moans. It’s a sound Lena didn’t know she’d wanted until she hears it - a little broken, a little greedy.
They don’t speak. There’s nothing left to explain.
Lena’s shirt is open before she even notices. Kara’s mouth traces her collarbone like it’s holy. The skin-to-skin is too warm, too much, perfect. Lena wraps her legs around Kara’s hips and kisses her hard enough to forget her own name.
They make a mess of it - the table, the simulation equipment, the last barriers of restraint. Kara’s suit is half off, Lena’s hair is ruined, and they don’t care. It’s not delicate. It’s not polite. It’s finally, blessedly un-waiting.
They desecrate the lab.
And then, in the sudden, quiet after, Kara kisses her again - slower this time, softer. The kind of kiss that feels like a promise, even when no one says anything out loud. Lena tugs her down gently, lets her head fall onto her chest. Kara breathes against her skin, long and even, like she’s never done it before.
She takes Kara home after midnight.
Not to her own apartment, but to Kara’s - because she suspects Kara needs that, needs the familiarity of her own walls, the comfort of her own bed, the safe illusion that this is something real and already part of her life. They undress again, slower this time. They kiss in the dark. They move like they know each other. They sleep tangled.
Kara Zor-El is blissfully happy by morning. Lena Luthor wakes up pleased. Not victorious. Not triumphant. Just… right. She lies there for a long time, watching the light shift through the curtains.
It’s not silver. It doesn’t have to be.
*
Kara is humming when Lena wakes. Not loudly. Not the kind of humming meant for others to hear - just that unconscious, half-breath melody people make when they’re content and unaware of being watched. It takes Lena a few seconds to place the tune, something orchestral and overplayed, the sort of thing one might hear in a trailer for a movie about space colonists who find love in an apocalypse.
She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move. Just lies there, one arm under the pillow, and listens to Kara hum while she pads around the apartment in mismatched socks and a borrowed L-Corp sweatshirt.
There’s something both obscene and tender about it - the way domesticity settles itself around Kara like it’s always belonged there, like she was born humming in someone’s kitchen, like every prophecy in the world would still lead here if given enough time.
Lena exhales through her nose and closes her eyes again.
She’s not tired. She just doesn’t want to be seen looking.
They spend the morning doing very little. Kara makes breakfast - or tries to, before Lena pulls the skillet from her hand and says, dryly, “Do you want salmonella or intimacy first?”
Kara grins, says, “Can’t I have both?” and Lena gives her a look that makes her laugh, open and bright.
They eat on the couch, legs tangled, plates balanced on thighs. Kara tells her about a DEO training scenario that ended with Brainy trapped in a holographic IKEA. Lena recounts a board meeting where someone sincerely proposed marketing their quantum battery as ‘the Tesla of interdimensional energy’, and Kara chokes on her orange juice.
It’s ordinary. And it isn’t.
Lena’s heart does not flutter. Her stomach does not drop. What she feels is steadier than that - like something realigned. Like the chair she’s been sitting in for years has, finally, been fixed at the right height.
Kara leans her head on Lena’s shoulder after the plates are cleared, murmurs, “This feels easy.” and Lena doesn’t correct her. She doesn’t say, This took years. She doesn’t say, You waited, and I worked, and we bled for it. She just nods, presses a kiss to Kara’s hair, and lets her pretend this was always going to happen. She can afford to be generous now. They’ve already crossed the line.
Later that day, Kara insists on seeing the simulation again.
They return to the lab just before dusk. Lena disables the external security alarms and overrides Jess’s calendar access so there won’t be interruptions. Kara floats into the chamber like it’s a cathedral, head tilted back, eyes wide.
“Run it?” She asks.
Lena does. The sky blooms above them, silver and slow, identical to the night Kara thought everything changed. It’s surreal how accurate it is - how convincing. Kara reaches up like she could touch it.
“It still makes me feel it.” She says.
Lena leans against the railing. “Placebo’s a hell of a thing.”
Kara turns. “It’s not a placebo.”
“It’s not divine, either.”
“No,” Kara agrees. “But it was enough to let me believe.”
Lena considers that. “So you don’t care anymore that it wasn’t real?”
“I didn’t say that.” Kara steps closer. “I care. It mattered. But not the way I thought it did.”
Lena crosses her arms. “Explain.”
Kara thinks. “The prophecy wasn’t wrong. But maybe it was just a metaphor, and I took it too literally. Maybe silver sky meant something impossible becomes real. Maybe it meant: when you stop trying to predict love and let yourself feel it.”
Lena arches an eyebrow. “A romantic interpretation from the girl raised on spreadsheets and science logs.”
Kara shrugs. “I contain multitudes.”
Lena smiles. It’s small, but it counts. Kara walks to her, slower now. The simulation continues overhead, artificial sky cycling on a loop.
“You know what I felt that night?” Kara asks.
Lena doesn’t respond.
“I looked up, and it hit me - not that I’d found my soulmate, but that I’d been standing in front of her for years. That the sky hadn’t changed a thing. It had just let me say it out loud.” Lena exhales, shallow and slow. Kara steps into her space. “But I needed the permission.”
“I know.”
“And you gave it to me.”
“I built it,” Lena corrects. “Out of spite.”
Kara smiles. “Same thing.”
She kisses her again, soft this time, nothing desperate, no urgency to prove or claim or consume. Just the kind of kiss that says: we’re here now. The kind that isn’t waiting for the sky. They stand there long enough for the light to fade, for the simulation to cycle down, for the room to dim and silence to return. Kara rests her forehead against Lena’s.
“I love you.” She says, as if it’s always been true.
Lena says it back, as if she’s never needed a prophecy to know it.
They don’t leave the lab right away. Kara lies down on the floor and insists the acoustics are better there. Lena refuses to join her until Kara drags her down by the wrist. They talk until the building’s heating system hiccups and Kara jokes about imminent combustion. Lena replies that if the lab does explode, she’ll just program the sky again on the moon. Kara says, “Romantic,” and Lena says, “I’m nothing if not consistent.”
They don’t sleep there, but they linger. Because they can. Because they don’t have to wonder anymore if the feeling is valid. Lena doesn’t dismantle the simulation. She doesn’t need to prove anything by destroying it. She just locks the system, files the final program under ConditionsMet_v3, and closes the terminal.
She still doesn’t believe in prophecies, but she believes in evidence. And Kara, curled against her in a stolen sweatshirt and nothing else, is proof of something better than prediction. Not fate. Not magic. Just choice. They leave the lab at 3AM. The sky above them is cloudy. Normal. Undistinguished.
And Kara, smiling like she’s holding a secret no one else knows how to read, says, “Still beautiful.”
Lena agrees.
*
Kara wakes up before Lena. Again.
This is new, a recent trend, the inverse of the months she spent rising after Lena had already left, finding cold bedsheets and scrawled notes about early meetings and late-night breakthroughs. Now, Lena sleeps through sunrise, one arm slung across Kara’s stomach, her breathing slow and even, like she trusts the day to wait for her.
Kara doesn’t move. She just lies there, watching the light curl through the blinds and onto the curve of Lena’s bare shoulder. Her hair is a disaster - slept-on and staticky, tufted awkwardly against Kara’s chest - and there’s a small crease near the corner of her mouth that Kara knows is from pressing her face into her own arm while she sleeps. She looks unguarded. She looks like no one else ever gets to see her like this.
And Kara, for once, doesn’t feel the urge to freeze it. Doesn’t think about what comes next. Doesn’t try to make the moment carry more weight than it does. It’s morning. And Lena is here. And that’s enough. She kisses her shoulder lightly. Not enough to wake her, just enough to feel it. She repeats the simple motion a few times, mindlessly.
Lena stirs anyway. “Creep.” She mutters, without opening her eyes.
Kara smiles into her skin. “Good morning.”
“Is it?” Lena asks, voice thick with sleep.
Kara nudges her gently. “You’re not in a lab. No one’s trying to weaponize your emotions. I didn’t fly into space overnight. By those standards, it’s practically utopian.”
Lena groans. “Stop being cheerful. It’s offensive.”
“Can’t help it. I had good dreams.”
Lena opens one eye. “About me?”
“About data integrity,” Kara deadpans. “Very erotic.”
Lena closes her eye again. “I should’ve built a fake sun that shone only when you lied.”
“You are sexy when you try to be funny,” Kara says. “I love a comedian.”
Lena hums, a sound halfway between agreement and surrender. She shifts onto her back, stretches, winces. “I think you bruised my hip.”
Kara looks smug. “And I think you liked it.”
Lena glances over. “You’re very lucky you’re hot.”
“And you’re lucky I brought croissants yesterday.”
Lena blinks. “You did?”
“Put them in the fridge.”
“God, I’m a genius.”
“You really are,” Kara says, more softly now, and this time, it’s not a joke.
Lena looks at her.
Kara holds her gaze. “I want this, Lena.”
There’s no wobble in her voice. No reverence, no hope disguised as certainty. Just fact, like naming a city, or reading coordinates. Lena breathes once. Then again.
“Good,” She says. “Because I do too.”
*
They don’t tell anyone, not right away. It’s not secrecy. Just preservation. A desire to keep the thing intact before the outside world lays hands on it. Jess notices first - which is impressive, given her strict no-interest-in-your-sex-life policy - and raises a single eyebrow when Lena walks into the lab the following week humming the chord progression to “Criminal” by Fiona Apple.
“You look insufferably well-rested.” She says.
“I’m trying a new supplement.” Lena replies.
Jess doesn’t ask.
Andrea figures it out after Lena no-shows a standing Thursday night catch-up. She texts once - Is this because of her? - and when Lena doesn’t reply, sends a second one, simply: About time. No punctuation. No sarcasm.
Sam takes longer. She assumes Lena’s glow is from professional satisfaction and begins prepping a ‘Woman in STEM’ magazine profile before Kara appears at L-Corp one afternoon in jeans and a cropped leather jacket, her hair damp and Lena’s lipstick barely erased from her jawline. Sam doesn’t mention it. But when she texts Lena later that night - Do I need to invent a new award category? - Lena responds Give it a week. I’ll have earned it.
Alex knows before anyone tells her. Of course she does. She hugs Lena without saying why, and Lena lets her. That’s the entire exchange.
They don’t talk about the prophecy again.
It doesn’t feel necessary.
The simulation is still intact, still saved, still viable. Lena hasn’t deleted it. But she hasn’t run it again, either. She doesn’t need to. Not for proof, not for comfort, not even for sentiment. It exists. Like a relic. Like a story they’ve both outgrown.
They move differently now. Not faster, not clingier - just more certain. Like the waiting has been drained from their bodies. Like they can finally speak in declaratives, not conditionals.
Kara starts leaving things at Lena’s - socks, notebooks, a half-empty bottle of perfume Lena swears she hates but keeps moving to the bathroom counter. Lena pretends not to notice, except that she has started buying double the toothpaste and adjusting the water heater settings before Kara stays over.
They fall into a rhythm. They share space. They make coffee. They fight about whether cereal qualifies as dinner. They take turns remembering to exist. It’s not a silver sky every morning. But it’s not grey either. It’s warm, and layered, and liveable. It’s better than prophecy.
On a Wednesday in early spring, Kara comes home late. Lena is in the kitchen in bare feet and an L-Corp hoodie two sizes too large, stirring something on the stove that smells like ginger and garlic. Kara drops her keys into the bowl by the door and says, “I missed you” like it’s a greeting, not a confession.
Lena glances over her shoulder. “We were together eight hours ago.”
Kara shrugs. “Still counts.”
Lena serves them both. They eat on the floor because the table has been lost entirely to circuit boards and engineering papers, the day’s quiet chaos suspended under a sprawl of Kara’s notes in purple ink. She has a habit of circling her own questions like they’re wild animals that might turn on her if she’s not careful. Lena has never told her how much she likes that.
They eat in comfortable silence, backs against the cabinet, their knees brushing now and then with the smallest sound of fabric on fabric. Kara leans against her thigh more than once and doesn’t pull away. Lena finishes first and watches her chew, slow and focused, like she’s trying to draw the evening out.
When Kara eventually sets her bowl aside and shifts closer, it’s not with ceremony or suggestion. Just gravity. Her hand lands on Lena’s knee. Then higher.
Lena tilts her head, brushes Kara’s hair behind her ear. She leans in. The kiss is unspoken agreement, pressed into place like a seal - not a beginning, not a request. Just continuation. Warm and open and familiar. Kara’s fingers spread over her ribs, steady, holding her in place without pressure. She tastes like tomato and salt and something Lena doesn’t have a name for but recognizes all the same.
The couch is closer than the bed and more forgiving than the floor. Kara tugs her there by the wrist, lazy and loose, pulling Lena into her lap with a kind of confident tenderness that would have startled them both a year ago. Lena doesn’t protest. She sinks into it, straddles Kara’s thighs, their bodies folded together like muscle memory. One hand finds the line of Kara’s jaw, thumb grazing just beneath her mouth. Kara leans into it, eyes half-lidded, mouth already parted.
They kiss again, slower this time. Deeper. It’s the kind of kiss that keeps changing - not because it’s trying to be anything, but because neither of them wants to stop long enough to let it settle. Kara’s hands slip under Lena’s shirt and rest at the small of her back, fingertips cool against skin. Lena hums into her mouth and tilts her hips forward just enough to make them both breathe differently.
Time passes like that. Touches traded. Mouths reacquainted. No urgency, no goal. Just lips and breath and the soft heat of Kara’s thigh between Lena’s knees. They break only to breathe, to glance at each other in the low light, to press foreheads together and exhale. Kara mouths along Lena’s jawline like she’s checking for structural integrity. Lena pulls her closer.
Eventually, Lena shifts them sideways and they slide down onto the cushions, tangled now. Kara curls around her like a blanket, thigh hooked over Lena’s hip, arm thrown across her stomach. Lena’s nose presses to the top of her head. Kara smells like clean sweat and whatever soap she stole from the guest bathroom. The weight of her is grounding. Their legs knot together. Their breathing syncs.
Neither of them speaks. The apartment creaks softly around them, the radiator kicking in with a groan. Someone above them flushes a pipe. In the corner, Lena’s laptop blinks, a simulation still paused on-screen. The projection’s silver still hangs in the machine’s memory, but not in the sky.
Outside, it’s overcast. Somewhere between dusk and midnight. The kind of dark that doesn’t try to be anything else. The kind that holds steady. Lena runs her fingers through Kara’s hair. Kara presses a kiss to her collarbone. Nothing in the room moves after that.
They stay like that until sleep finds them - warm, real, wanting nothing more than what they already have.