Soulmates: Chapter XXXI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30)

In an empty church, beneath the steeple, the doors remained open for two broken hearts pretending to be people.

A true lady to her last breath, Catherine Grant went in her own time.

Kara was there with her, till the very end, and she made sure Catherine left as Catherine would want to leave. There was a little blush on her cheeks, highlighter across the bones, lipstick and a spritz of perfume. Cat opened her eyes, for the first time in days, beautiful as she always was. She looked at Kara, tired but determined, and Kara said the things she needed to say.

The things she would never tell Lena.

The things Lena knew, perfectly well, would have been said, and yet did not mind nor pry.

Then Cat closed her eyes in the most decisive way, smiling a little as she did, and she was gone minutes after.

Kara sat craned and hunched, jagged and heartbroken.

“I want to cancel the wedding.”

“Alright,” Lena didn’t hesitate.

“It’s not alright.” Kara shook her head vehemently. “We shouldn’t—we can’t be planning something happy. I don’t. I don’t think I can do that. I don’t want to marry you anymore.” She swiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“That's quite alright,” Lena said it slow and certain, she clasped her girlfriend’s fingers and Kara pulled them back quickly into her lap. Lena felt no resent. “Alright, my darling,” Lena didn't try to touch her this time. “Kara I don’t care about the wedding. If it's just the wedding, or if this is the relationship done for now or forever, then I am still sitting right here next to you because I care, and I love you very much, and I'm not going to stop doing those things. It requires no uptake or effort on your part.”

“You should care about the wedding! You should care about all of it!” Kara snatched her swollen eyes across to stare with hateful, boiling anger. “You should care that I have been awful to you for nearly two weeks! And horrible, and cold, and someone not worth signing-up for marriage with, and—and!” Kara shattered anew. “You should care that you deserve better. You should care that you did not sign-up for this the day we met, in your office, when I thought you were the cleaning lady—and despite asking you those awful questions—you took me to the second-best park in the whole city the very next day because you're a good person who deserves good things!”

“I know. I’m not saying you are being crazy or imagining things—you’re not. You have been impossible to be around these last two weeks. Not because you’re a bad person but just…grieving. It turns people inside out, unrecognisable, and so yeah, I’m walking on eggshells, but I'm not mad about it.” Lena hushed and brought Kara’s head into her shoulder. “I know I should care but I just…don’t. I love you. Turns out I love you so much that I don’t need to find new ways to fall in love with you every day. And if this is you? For a while, or for the rest of your life, then it’s us, and it’s me walking on eggshells for the rest of mine.” Lena pressed her lips to Kara’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Lena wiped a tear with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry you are in so much pain and that I cannot make it better. But I’m here. I’m here if it never feels better—and I’m here if it does.”

Kara nodded.

“Can we go home?”

“Let’s go home, baby.” Lena cupped her cheek. “Let’s get you home.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXX

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29)

The room was dark. Cat awoke to a dry throat, balm on her lips, and some faint surprise that she had awoken at all. The sense of surprise was incremental like a bruise in her conscience that pressed and announced the state of things; an ending meandering towards itself in its own good time.

It was coming undone now.

It was the hard to ignore feeling that Kara had brought her home here in dribbles over the months, by the canvas tote bag, until the hospital became somewhat hybrid because...there wasn’t a home to go back to at the end of this.

Silk pyjamas, curled on her side most days with little movement, in a different bed than her original room, Cat still had zero regrets—plenty of complaints. Not the change of scenery. This room was bigger and much more comfortable with real pillows and comforters that smelled like home, stayed smelling like home, vanilla and old books and a touch of essence, Kara laundered them with the right things—in just the right ways—despite it never being asked, not once.

The view beyond this window was better. Cat didn’t know it was possible. It looked over the lower side, at just the right angle, so she could see her building sprouting tall in the distance like a solitude creature in the skyline; her radiant, proud, towering life’s work.

In the world of treatment, timeframes and ordinate doctors, it was never a good sign when they pulled out stops. They ceased with incessant disapproval about the champagne; no side glances to the empty ice bucket, then the two giggling grown-ups indiscreetly discrete about it, with water marks on top of the ugly, dinged steel cabinet that had been hidden away beneath a patterned silk kimono to make it somewhat less ghastly. The doctors said nothing anymore. Things had gotten bad, all the paths ahead leading nowhere but champagne.

Cat saw it all for what it was and she did not mind.

The dog on sore knees and silver whiskers always found its good fortunes when the six cheeseburgers arrived for dinner after a long day of good, lovely things; Cat took the champagne, every drop, until her hands struggled somewhat, and then Kara proved most useful for that too.

Kara seemed to mind a great deal despite saying she didn’t mind at all.

Her refusal to leave seemed quite indicative. Against the adjacent wall there was a camping cot. Cat squinted and saw the huddled shape of a Kara-sized lump. Moonlight struck a distinct, bolting sheen of light through the cracked blinds. It fell across the blonde hair on the pillow as Kara laid turned to the wall. Cat saw the sleeping cot when she was awake in sporadic jaunts through the day, a distinct wrinkle in the made-up blankets, yet she had never seen Kara sleep much—if ever—at all.

Cat smiled and sincerely hoped that even through the hard times there were still lovely dreams for the foolish, optimistic, loyal Kara Danvers of the world. The girls who, despite crippling anxiety, run from their doldrum lives while shaking in their boots for what is waiting at the finish line. The ones with good hearts who say horrible things anyway. The people who, without merit or reward, stick it out until the very end.

She closed her eyes. Tiredness came with immediacy despite the good long sleep, which wasn’t anything new anymore. Laying there, she became aware of her body—the proximate parts of her skin. Her face. Her hands. Her lips. It was a comfort that Cat hadn't expected for the last stretch of her days, back when the news arrived last year, her mind immediately wandering, there while they talked prognosis, simultaneously not there, running through all sorts of sad notions.

This had never been considered. The clean, balmy tack of solid deodorant under her arms. Her face clean and moisturised—the full Korean programme—cleansed, swiped with toner, then serum and ampule, moisturised, then moisturised some more. She could tell from the slipperiness of the silk pants on her shins that her legs had been shaved too, which was silly, almost obsessive, and she rolled her eyes because it felt too much. Then it didn't feel silly. Cat sat with her thoughts, for the briefest moment, then hurried her mind elsewhere.

It got her throat a little tight otherwise.

Kara took it seriously.

Cat didn't need to ask some underpaid stranger to help her use the bathroom, that was the main thing, that had been the big fear. There was preservation to her dignity. A procedural silliness to it. Kara carrying her some days, dipping around the room, supporting her waist on others, joking about conga lines, but always hanging by the door for just a moment too long with something in her eyes.

“Yeah?” Cat glared the first time.

“Sometimes it takes looking at just the right woman, on just the right commode, to realise you do have a pee fetish after all—”

“Do you say that to all the girls?”

“Oh just the ones who get my name off their skin with a Bic lighter and some sense of determination for a better life. Shout if you need anything.” Kara always left it right there, on the line, precisely between silliness and respect.

The spritz of perfume. The little mirror set-up on the bed tray so she could check her lipstick. Things were coming undone, rapid and quickening. Catherine still felt entirely her own creature. She felt respected. She felt like a woman. She felt beautiful, human, and as though her life still had some good moments ahead too.

It wasn’t anything new.

Kara was consistent.

Cat closed her eyes and took herself for a brief waltz. She never used to sleep easy. She slept in this rare, sporadic and fraught way that dictated her understanding of how assistants should model themselves. Cat slept much easier now. It came to her as a form of escape; a prolonged dream of warm days, that she could pick up and put down, consistent and reliable; the mid-eighties, the first sports car she ever purchased—a boxy little thing with head lamps that came up mechanically from the hood when the engine started—and taut, tight twenty-something year old eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Good skin, great hair, and a silk navy blouse without tags in the collar anymore.

Her memories were worth reliving. The initial success of the magazine had brought a wave of correctness to her young, youthful life; there would be no more returns, no more tags, not ever, Catherine always knew what she wanted, always stood by it.

Plus it felt good spending money.

In her dreams it all came back to her, the early days, when money was a new thing and her attitude towards it was young, gauche and cavalier. Her life had gone from some humdrum, boring, cycling food menus back-and-forth to afford a Vanity Fair; into everything Catherine had ever dreamed overnight, with immediacy, all in the blink of an eye. Thirteen with ladylike ideas of herself one moment, twenty-three and put-together the next.

In her mid-twenties she lived very fine. A demitasse with her coffee in the morning. A caviar spoon—carved from precious mother of pearl with her name engraved along the handle—that coincidentally proved to be just the right size for a less than conservative blast of cocaine.

Catherine Grant never did think much of caviar.

In her dream, Cat dipped into an enormous bump with the Tiffany’s spoon, true to the old days as it had all once been, back when it was a procedural and professional thing to do; she drove, with the top down, men in suits with blowing ties in the passenger seats talking numbers for a local news network that she wanted to purchase.

It was the delicious, perfectly precise moment right at the very start of the CatCo expansion.

Cat rubbed her nose and didn’t care, not particularly knowing much about the mechanics of the business or what she was getting herself into, simply giddy and away with it all. It was a smash and grab way of living; an economic boom that had arrived precisely the same time she did, with skyscrapers sprouting up, stock prices up-ticking, Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys, and it felt good to remember.

She wondered if that was what people had meant when they said life flashes before one’s eyes at the end. The best parts, the things that were worth remembering, they had come back to her in a loud, bright, and colourfully trumpeting hello; there were no hospice-shaped goodbyes, not in her nineteen-eighties.

Cat had never told Kara the majority of these things for her story spread. She regretted withholding some of the details. On some level, the messy things; the candour, the ruthless and cut-throat bad things she had done too would have made a much more exciting read.

One Kara wouldn't have enjoyed learning about.

Cat kept things abridged for the sake of her own image. Maybe just a bit to protect the little fool too—her little fool—who had come to believe in fairies and giants, and that Catherine Grant was somehow both of these things.

“Kara?” Cat murmured with her eyes still closed—aware time had moved.

“Mhm. I’m here. Are you ready for something to eat?”

There was a distinct pressure on her bed as though someone had sat down. Then a shift in weight, legs pulling up, until Cat felt someone laying beside her. She opened her eyes. It was daytime, bright and warm, Kara laying there in clean clothes and damp hair and a cheek settled against Cat’s ribs.

“I’m not hungry just yet.” Cat observed the distinct, persistent lack of hunger or thirst as a symptom of progress. “Is there a reason you’re laying all over me like some sort of remedial, drooling and rather overly personable puppy?”

“Because it’s a small bed and the best view of the television. Lena has a live broadcast interview airing this morning.” Kara nudged her to look at the photographs and exposition on screen, glancing up with the most tender and excited blue eyes. “I took her for lunch yesterday. She was so nervous about it but we practiced, and I think.” She didn’t seem so confidant. “Well. You know. I think…she’ll do great.”

“That bad, huh?”

“She forgot her name.”

“Ha!” Cat’s chest hurt from the push of her lungs. “She is terrible in front of cameras. The worst social anxiety. Enjoy the rest of your forever, kiddo.”

“Hush,” Kara said, the silly mood detectable, slinging an arm over Cat’s waist absentmindedly. “I still love that boy, Daddy, think I might just go ahead and be his wife one day.” She joked and parroted the hammy, transatlantic accent in all of the old classic films she had been forced to watch over the last few weeks.

“Alright. You don’t like Turner Classic Movies. We can watch other things if you’re going to be fucking petulant.”

“Not true.” Kara gawked, her brow furrowing. “Why do you think I put them on?”

Cat smiled, not saying anything, trying very hard not to think too much about anything, just watching the television as it all went by, and the interview carried alright enough.

Lena remembered her name.

Surprisingly, she even remembered Kara’s too.

Now the world knew Lena Luthor had found love again and Kara Danvers, soon to be Luthor, would be wearing white in the spring.

“What colour do you think I should wear for your wedding?” Cat felt a certain sudden possession on her soul. Aware she wasn’t going to make the day, just not quite ready yet. “I think floral, maybe something with a little colour?” she whispered.

Kara didn’t say anything for a moment, she laid there, cheek to her ribs, arm slung like a seat belt, thinking about it or holding in her tears, but Cat had grown somewhat expert in not thinking about things, and so she didn’t think about it.

“Navy blue,” Kara quietly replied, an absolute certainty in the rasp of her voice. “You should wear that navy silk blouse, and the matching-coloured pants. I would like that. Will you sit close to the front?”

The smoke struck and the sting grew tense.

“Well, I am Catherine Grant”—she said the line often, it was different this time, meant something very different altogether—“I should be as close to the front as possible.”

It was Kara who cried first, which felt more of a surprise than it should have been. Cat had not seen any tears, for months, for this whole thing, not since the argument on the doorstep.

It had been a good thing.

Cat didn’t like mess.

Yet there Kara finally was, a little contained mess, and Cat felt a warmth flood her heart at the sight of these little stinging tears and the corner of her blanket suddenly repurposed as a hanky.

“It’s okay.” The whimpers on her ribs huffed in breaths that tickled. “We’re going to have so much fun at your wedding. You’ll see. But, you know, I don’t think I’ll be drinking on the day.” Cat wasn’t very good at joking but she kept her tone as bouncy and light as she could. “Will you have two glasses when they get you dressed in the morning? One for you, one for me?”

“You’re the meanest woman I ever met and I want you there on my wedding day.” Kara grabbed a slender wrist and brought it around herself. Cat didn’t know what to do, but she allowed herself to be turned into a seat belt, quite determined to keep the little girl safe for now. “It’s supposed to be you and me. On my wedding day. And I…” Cat grew tense. “I’m getting dressed in the morning and I don’t know what to do, what shoes to wear, feeling ugly and awkward, because I always feel ugly and awkward. But you would be there. You would do the thing you do.”

“The thing I do?”

Kara inhaled and seemed to decide if she couldn’t have the real thing, they would just have to make a wedding day, here and now; put it in her heart and tuck it away for later.

“You grab my shoulders and do the awful mean thing you do with words—but in the Catherine Grant way—that puts everything into perspective.” Kara nuzzled with the saddest smile one woman could possess. “And we look in the mirror together at my wedding dress. It’s not me and my mom. Or, me and my sister. It’s supposed to be you and me—” The tears marched in and they didn’t stop this time. “And I get to see myself different because you fixed whatever thing I didn’t realise needed fixing, something only you could fix, and suddenly I get to feel beautiful and attractive and put-together and ready for it all, like I can go and marry Lena Luthor, because you are there.”

Cat nodded and smiled.

“It’ll be your glasses and your earrings.” Cat moved some hair off her face with gentle fingers. “Take your glasses off and make sure your earrings match either the bouquet or your eyes. And, in God’s name, whatever you do please don’t release doves. It’s tacky and gross—”

“You’re the most hateful person I know.”

“You’re the most irritating, foolish and blindly-optimistic woman I have ever had the displeasure of tolerating an elevator ride with much less the final months of my life.” Cat rolled her eyes, then dramatically softened her tone. “And I want to be there on your wedding day too, Kara, very much, so for now I’m saying that I am going to be there.”

“You’re going to be there.” Kara understood what was being asked of her. “Cat?”

“Mhm.”

“I figured it out—by the way.”

“The thing you said you had originally figured out for your article?”

“Mhm.” Kara nodded. “The thing I was trying to…capture.”

“My forties?”

“Your scar.”

“No.” Cat felt angry. “We agreed. I understand it’s your story too. I understand it’s a big request—but it’s one you agreed too. I do not want reporters making insinuations or asking Lena for the rest of her life whether there was a rift between us after she proposed to ‘my soulmate’ while I was dying of cancer. Does that sound like a fluffy, nice portrait piece for either of you?”

“Cat.” Kara pushed up on her arms. Cat glanced, noticed the tautness, the biceps, the blonde hair sitting crooked in her blue eyes. “You said you didn’t want an obituary and I don’t want to write it. You were right, with what you said, and I want to put that perspective in the story. Most of all because I am selfish and it…keeps you alive, forever, beyond always.”

“I’m always right, be specific.”

“Soulmates.” Kara had this emphatic look in her eyes. “It’s bullshit. It’s…” Kara paused. “I think it’s not the universe designing perfect marriages. You could have more than one perfect marriage, or more than one great love. Look at Lena. I met other people too. I even met a woman once who loved two boys, both called Harry, and I think she preferred the wrong one more.” Kara’s eyes flickered and brought thoughts together into words.

Cat grinned too big for her cheeks.

“Two boys called Harry?”

“The first one tattooed her name on his arm just so she would talk to him,” Kara whispered, astounded and romanticising new things. “Isn’t that the most beautiful little thing you ever heard?”

“Maybe.” Cat nodded. “So, hurry it along. If it’s not romance—then what?”

A slow smile, a deep inhale, the optimist blinked slowly and looked like a scared little girl who needed to believe her own dreamy outlook.

“I think it’s a buddy-system.” Kara propped her chin on her hand and stared off. “I think we come from star dust, on some great adventure, some big school bus trip down to earth, and that’s your person—your unconditional person—on your birthmark.” Kara adjusted her weight, lifted the hem of her shirt and trailed a finger over something that had once been important. “It’s not romance. It’s not even love sometimes. It’s the person who understands how to care for you in the right ways in the exact moment you need it. And you, ballsy and knowing everything, decided you weren't in the business of taking care of people.” Her expression exaggerated as though it were enough explanation.

It wasn’t.

Cat didn’t understand Kara’s point.

“Sorry if it still gives you a boo-boo in your feelings?”

“It doesn’t.” Kara scoffed, impressed by it this time. “You were only nineteen years old, and you knew, despite all of human history and the entire world insisting you...force yourself into the idea of marriage?” Kara smiled. “In your very Catherine Grant way—you set your eyes on bigger things. You did it all for yourself. You were selfish, and you were better off for it, you had the biggest life and chased all your dreams. I think…” Kara inhaled. “I think people should fall in love more, with different people, different things, for different reasons at different points in their life. Not just take the safe bet or the road mapped out for them. I think you are my buddy-up person. I think I’m yours. We found each other to take care of right when we both needed a little help, and that?” There was a forced calmness in her tight throat. “That is a happy ending, it's our happy ending, because nobody in my life has ever got it quite so right as helping me grow the way you have, Catherine.”

Cat didn’t say anything.

It struck her funny.

It struck her right in the heart.

“You sound like you have found your story.” Cat pushed a smile. “I don’t think I was ever wife material. I think, probably, I made a much better…” She sighed and didn’t know what to say. “I liked listening to your perspective, but I don’t think I’m much of a buddy either.”

“Just my person then.” Kara patted her hand, teeth on the rim of her lip as she staved off the tears. “A person I probably would have married if I had been born thirty-years earlier.” She tilted her head and left it at that.

“Mhm. Well, let’s just get you to the alter of your actual wedding.”

“She is going to be quite the bride,” Kara grinned.

“Kara?”

“Mhm.”

Here it was, Cat realised.

“You’ll be a good girl won’t you?”

“For Lena?” Kara softened. “I’ll eat healthy and take care of myself just so I outlive her, yeah. I think she’s earned that much.”

“No, no.” Cat shook her head and—for the first time in her life—felt stupid. “Just, in general. You’ll be a good girl, and find all those different things to fall in love with, and never lose your optimism and keep trying to do good things for people?”

“Like you do?” Kara gave her the sarcastic look.

“Fuck off.”

“Mhm.” Kara smiled sweetly and pecked the back of Cat’s hand with a chaste kiss. “Will you be a good girl? You’ll get home safe—wherever it is we’re all going in the end. Tell everyone I said hello?”

“Good girl? I’m fifty.”

“Still a pretty little girl to me.” Kara was not joking and her expression said as much too.

That did it.

Cat felt those words puncture through her soul.

“Thank you.” Cat stroked Kara’s hair. “Really. For everything, for coming around, but for that too. I can’t even remember the last time somebody dared to speak to me like that.”

“Well, you are a pretty little girl,” Kara murmured as she settled a cheek back on her belly. “You should consider yourself lucky. If I had been born thirty years earlier? Your life would have looked a lot different. I could have married a pretty little girl like that.”

“Nah,” Cat said with a shake of her head. “I'm selfish, Kara, not made for taking care of others—never was made that way.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXVIII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27)

In her calm way, Lena thought about how to deal with this situation.

Kara was sobbing in a way that she had never witnessed before. It was hysterical, beyond herself, beyond the situation, sort of nonsensical in a way that made perfect sense. Lena had tried to comfort but that had made things worse. Then Lena tried to listen, patiently, but now the hours were passing and escaping them, and Kara still hadn’t calmed down.

“I don’t…” Kara’s fists were wound so tight as she rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do. It’s a fourteen-thousand-dollar dress. It’s more than I paid for my car. It’s too expensive. She looked so happy. She just, she looked so happy—”

“Then keep the dress,” Lena whispered with reassurance. “Kara, I’m not embarrassed. I don’t feel like she bought it because she thinks I can’t afford it.”

“But I embarrassed you,” Kara hiccupped.

“No, baby.” Lena shook her head and took her in her arms. “You didn’t embarrass me. You didn’t do anything wrong. Kara, you bought your wedding dress today, it’s supposed to be a good day.”

“She isn’t going to be there!” Kara blurted.

There it was.

“I’m sorry,” Kara panicked and covered her lips. “Lena, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t mean that she’s not going to be at the alter—I mean she isn’t going to be in the pulpit.”

Lena didn’t say anything.

She just stepped forward, took her girlfriend firm and steady, held her so close, so forgivingly, so loving and understated because…

Lena remembered this.

She knew how it felt.

“It’s okay,” Lena hushed. “It’s alright, baby. I know. I know—” She took on most of Kara’s weight suddenly. Kara went slack, almost hanging off her shoulders, breaking in a way that she was always going to.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re second best.” Kara barely got the words out. “I feel—I feel like I’m making you feel like you’re some safe bet when you’re…you’re the woman I want to marry…”

“I don’t feel that way,” Lena told her honestly. “Can I ask why it is you feel that way? There isn’t a wrong answer. I love Cat too, she’s one of my closest friends. There’s no…fucked up feelings there.”

“I don’t know how to make sense of the fact I’m marrying the love of my life and simultaneously burying my soulmate.”

Lena paused.

“Yeah, that makes sense.” She stroked Kara’s back. “Okay, I’m thinking on my feet here, but can I offer you some possible options?”

“Possible options sounds good.” Kara kept her face buried into the safe spot of Lena’s neck and collarbone.

“We’ll go back to Jefferson Elementary on Monday. Take one of those big, dumb, ridiculous fucking cheques with us. You know the cardboard ones—for lotteries and charity fundraises?” Lena took Kara’s cheeks and peered at her with a grin. “I have a stack of them in the basement at the office. Fourteen thousand dollars buys a lot of fruit and greens if you know where to shop, right?”

Kara laughed despite her tears.

Lena took that as progress.

“And we’ll move the wedding up—”

“Don’t do that.” Kara’s face instantly fell serious. “Lena it’s your wedding day too. We can’t—you can’t do that. I don’t want you to make your wedding day fit around…” She didn’t want to finish the sentence.

Lena didn’t mind, not one bit. “She’s my friend too,” she swept Kara’s hair. “A winter wedding. That satin wedding dress? It’s going to look a whole lot cuter with your nipples rock hard underneath. For fourteen-thousand dollars I don’t even mind if you let Cat suck on them,” she whispered, pecking Kara’s temple.

“You are disgusting.”

“I know.” Lena smiled at the guilty laughter. “Definitely not your soulmate,” she joked.

“Can I ask you a question?” Kara’s voice got quiet and nervous.

“Yeah baby, always.”

“Do you miss Sam?”

Lena understood what was being asked. It wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t Kara expunging something she had wrapped herself around like she had been competing with Sam, trying to amount to her, fill in the gaps of spaces she left behind. Kara was asking because it was going to be her too. Not in the same ways but in similar ways.

“Yeah baby,” Lena told the truth. “Always.”

“Does it get easier?”

“I'm not sure. I grieve in different ways now, quieter ways. I don't know if that constitutes easier.” Lena laughed sincerely. “Sam was my person. I don't mean like my special magical tattoo girlfriends soulmate kinda person. It was better than that. It was...more than that." Lena felt how much she was smiling, the entire time Kara watching her cheeks push higher, and it jarred her suddenly. "Sorry, baby." She shook her head before her lips started wobbling.

"What was it like?" Kara slipped her hands around the back of Lena's neck, listening and curious.

Lena hesitated.

She realised, quite sadly, that she was hesitating because she was trying to think of a dark and pointed joke. The kind of barbed humour used to deter questions like that; it hurt to remember but today not-remembering hurt more.

Safe and secure, Lena felt Kara's warm palm gently pressing to her cheek and come away again. It was unhurried, a certain tenderness melting between them, ebbing and abundant. The grief came in quiet footsteps, no banners or trumpeting arrival. Lena felt the smoke get in her eye and the sting get in her throat.

Kara waited in her patient and affirming way—all big blue eyes and time to waste, gathering dust, listening to stories that the furniture around here hadn't heard in quite some time now.

"She was my best friend." Lena croaked. "She was the person who laughed with me, and told me things straight, didn't care if we stayed up all night fighting about it so long as we got Chipotle after and made peace. We sacrificed things for one another—real things—for the other to stay-in the marriage, at different points, for different things. So, Sam was my wife and yes, oh goodness, I miss her very much—" Lena felt a tear and nearly snatched her body away so Kara wouldn't see. She paused, holding it, breathing, allowing herself to not pull from it. "The thing that they don't tell you in grief counselling is that people are different things to you at different times in your life, and you don't—"

It halted.

Lena simply halted.

"It's okay," Kara hushed. "If it's alright I'm going to just stick around here, for a while, looking at you looking right back at me until you feel ready to keep telling me. Jokes are funny and all, but I think these moments mean more to me, so you should speak now or forever hold your peace if this is an uncomfortable amount of eye contact."

It was.

Which made Lena laugh, and that broke the tension, had Kara exaggerating those big blue eyes into a dinnerplate stare. Lena nodded and decided today was as good as any for a heart to heart. The sofa was closest; they went for the dining table instead. It was easier to sit and talk. Lena could also see the reading nook from her seat at the table, the armchair by the window, the shelves and cases; a Kindle with some reading glasses set aside as though Sam was coming back for the last two chapters she had been savouring.

Kara had put it all back after an argument once; she hadn't understood why she couldn't sit there, move the things, dust off the books, until she did understand. Then she felt terrible. Lena felt terrible for being upset about it in the first place.

"We should tidy it away, donate the chair to a library. I think Sam would have liked that," Lena had told Kara just after the incident when she noticed Kara's near-perfect reconstruction of the reading nook.

"Is it okay if we don't?" Kara's fingers found her bicep with the lightest of touches. "If it's best for you then yeah, sure, absolutely. It's just I spent a while falling in love with you in new ways, in your absence, because I figured that was your reading spot and that made me look at it all the time. So, I would world-build and think about the kind of woman who had a reading spot like that, those specific books, the parts you—she—highlighted. I don't know. It's silly..."

"I don't know where this is going but did you fall in love with my dead wife, Kara?"

"No, no. Just got to know her a little. When I look at that reading nook, at that kindle and all those bookmarks on the coffee table that she was coming back to?" Kara stalled and her eyes flickered slightly. "I thought it was your reading nook but it's not, it's hers, and she was coming back to it—to you. She didn't up and leave, you know? I look at it now and feel like I know her. I look at it and I feel like I'm not replacing her." Kara turned her head and looked at Lena as though she were the single-most important woman who had ever lived. "I have to love you the way she would want you to be loved." Kara swallowed and had this expression on her face as though unsure whether she was making sense. "Those are her books, this was her home, she went to work one morning with every intention that she was coming home. So, I don't want to put her away in a box—"

"I did." Lena was deadpan.

Inside, she had been feeling too many things. Here, today, at the dining table, she was feeling too many things; it hurt, and it was always going to, but the reading nook reminded Lena of good little quiet moments.

"So you were saying how she was your best friend?" Kara put down a cup of coffee for her fiancé.

"I know," Lena whispered.

"Tell me?"

Lena inhaled and looked at her with a smile because surprisingly, if she felt anything, it was an awareness of how good it felt to talk about Sam without some sharply barbed punchline concerning her driving.

"She was my best friend since we were five years old, way back in kindergarten. Twenty-five years of my life I spent with her. Only the last six years, once that little birthmark spelled out my name, were we even a couple." Lena saw the surprise in Kara's expression. "She was a good wife. I wish I could tell you that she had all these annoying little things that I hated. I did, I don't anymore, grief does that. I miss her but it's not this...abstract pain. It's localised." Lena pinched it off for a second to keep her throat clear and steady. "My best friend however?" Her eyes pearled. "It will never be okay. It will never make sense. I'm getting married to you and it's like I want to call Sam and tell her about it. Sam, my best friend in kindergarten, middle and high school, college, my person. Not Sam—my wife. Until I remember she piked a sixteen-wheeler going eighty in a little red convertible—like a complete fucking asshole because it was my little red convertible—and now I can't talk to my best friend anymore." Lena laughed very softly with tears dribbling in their own funny rhythm.

She was wrong.

The sharply barbed joke about Sam's driving did make her feel better.

Kara settled her warm palms on flexing knuckles.

"I don't know if this is weird to say but I really wish I had met her, I think we would have been great friends."

"She would have hated you, for a while at least." Lena chuckled hard. "Sam would have thought you were preachy and self-righteous. You would have thought she was a bitch."

"How come?"

"Because you are a little preachy. And she was the biggest fucking bitch I ever met, and I loved that about her the most." Lena shook her head as though exasperated by the mere memory. "Also, you are fucking her wife too so there is that. Sam, my best friend, would have loved you right away for how much you love me. Sam, my wife, would have hated you for at least a little while. Somewhere between... flipping the bird behind your back whenever you walked out of a room and insisting you both carpool to work the day she died. That's top end. That's where it maxes out." Lena gestured with her hand raised to her hairline.

Kara's eyes went wide with the kind of laughter that felt gross, guilty, and so unavoidable that it snorted out of her nose.

"I am the easiest, most-likable and chill of second wives—"

"Kara you have a soulmate who is in end-stage care that is not chill."

There were tears, good ones, absurd ones.

"I'm guessing it doesn't help that my terminally ill soulmate also happens to be your closest friend?" Kara narrowed her eyes.

"God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers." Lena shrugged in the pithiest way possible. "Funny. I don't understand the whole soulmate birthmark thing, like how it must feel, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but sometimes I wonder if soulmate is just..." It was her turn, all of a sudden, shaking her head and unsure if she was making sense. "A limitation. Just this dumb word men in funny hats came up with in ancient times to ringfence something there isn't supposed to be words for."

Kara stared at her girlfriend for the longest time.

"Soulmates are real." She nodded, a little too certain and cocksure. "A soulmate is—well. A soulmate. That's your soulmate."

"I don't have a mark?" Lena tilted her head in a very non-plus, unphased way. "I don't have a soulmate?"

"Maybe you just..." Kara gestured. "Maybe your birthmark is inside your asshole." She shrugged and earned the most boisterous laugh possible. "Maybe it's Sam's last joke on you?"

"Sam, my best friend maybe." Lena grinned.

Kara seemed to think on that for a moment.

Soulmates: Chapter XXV

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24)

Lena awoke with bleary eyes and a warm body tucked against her ribs. Kara nuzzled, kissed the corner of her jaw, giggling and taken with an earlobe she had been nibbling softly on.

“Happy first anniversary,” Lena husked with sleep in her voice. “Beautiful girl, look at you…”

Kara kissed her hard, kissed her sudden and took her jaw and prolonged it all. Surprised by the uptake, Lena rolled on her back and brought Kara with her. A hand slipped back, into her pyjamas, then her underwear, Lena fluttered her eyes and whimpered. She opened them again, saw the way Kara was looking at her and didn’t know what to do with it.

“Yeah?” Lena furrowed her brow.

Kara looked at her as though she had never seen a woman before, as though she would never—could never—look anywhere else. Twenty-four, too young and too old for her age, she just sat there with her hand bobbing in Lena’s underwear.

“I want to marry you. I thought that last week, then every morning after, how I want to do this until one of us takes it to the grave.”

“Are you proposing or asking me to propose?” Lena pushed a slow happy smile.

“Either or.”

“Then yeah,” Lena agreed in a very quiet and ordinary way, blinking and in love. “Let’s figure out logistics after breakfast but sure, yeah, I’ll marry you.” She grinned.

Soulmates: Chapter XXIV

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)

The burn on her ribs hurt in a way she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t infected, but it was going to go that way if she kept idly touching it.

There was a bandage between the skin and the navy silk blouse. It was too expensive, to own at least, but Cat had bought it on the Friday afternoon so the cheque wouldn’t cash from her bank account until Monday. After the job interview, she would fold it neatly with the tag still in the collar, then return it to the department store—make some excuse that it was too big, too garish, too unimpressive for a fine lady such as herself.

Fake it until you make it, that was her theory.

“Catherine, you’re ballsy, and I like that in a woman.” Archer puffed a hard guff on his cigar and leaned back in his barely managing, straining chair. “Look you come here every week and demand an interview. I’m sorry, you’re going to get the same answer. You want a job as a typist or a secretary then maybe we can talk but…” He gestured at the tiny, doe-ish little girl sat in front of him. “You’re not cut out to be a journalist.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“Because you’re Tinkerbell.” He inhaled again and the smell deflated the air from the room. “Give it up, kid, or go see Sharon across town—”

“Sharon writes trash fucking garbage for women in the suburbs who want to feel reassured that they’re the apex of sophistication.” Cat rustled in her chair. “I can do better than horoscopes and cocktail recipes. I want to be on the ground, reporting on things that mean something, that are interesting.”

“I respect your tenacity, kid, but that place doesn’t exist here.” He told her straight. “Not for you.”

“Then I’ll start my own magazine.” Cat shoved herself up and out of the chair. She stopped, glancing around his office, nodding to herself with fiery certainty. “And then? I’ll buy yours.”

Archer laughed her out of the door.

Four years.

Archer’s office became her office, largely because the Archer building became the CatCo building, and for all the things she had done in her life—upsize and relocate her headquarters wasn’t one of them.

“That’s a true story?” Kara didn’t know how to make sense of it. “You just said fuck you and started your own magazine.”

“It was nineteen eighty-five, people had ambition back then. What else was I going to do?”

In Cat’s mind, she remembered the justifications, the emotional driving factors. Not even twenty she had walked down the street after that last impromptu job interview that had gone nowhere promising, cupping the bandage against her ribs that gave her trouble, completely aware she had made a decision that could never be undone.

Years had taken the poignancy of Kara’s name from Cat’s soul.

But in nineteen eighty-five, the wound had been fresh, the name as clear as it was now. Cat had to make something, do something, be someone and have it all. She had to do it—because whoever Kara was?

Cat had given her up just for a shot at something better.

Soulmates: Chapter XXII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21)

The car was a lease hire.

More than that, Cat had found the information within ten seconds of Kara offering the drafted expose. She had sat there in her armchair, back at home for a week now, reading it all carefully, humming sporadically every few seconds as though unimpressed.

Then she picked up the phone, spoke to someone that Kara assumed to be an almost Kafkaesque bureaucratic source. Someone only Cat Grant would have access too. The sort who operated in the highest levels of government, shadowy, a voice distortion box to maintain their anonymity.

A few seconds later, Cat had given her the bad news.

“Lease,” she said, throwing the paper in the trash can. “I mean, sure it’s probably not sensible financial decision making but…” She shrugged.

"Who told you? Someone...in government?"

"Avis." Cat scrunched her face in disbelief. “This isn’t the junior leagues, Kara. You’re up against deep south, Republican senators getting caught in their wives’ underwear for column inches here. Who gives a fuck about an under the table deal on a mud kitchen?”

“The lunch ladies care.” Kara folded her arms and grew steely. “The janitors care. The groundsmen. The school bus drivers. The people paying out of their own pockets to take care of the kids.”

“Okay, now you’re talking about a much larger issue.” Cat pointed out, straining with a wince as she pulled herself out of the chair. “And that’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly not what you just handed me. Nobody gives a fuck about a mud kitchen in the seventh district, but city public funding inequity?” She made a face.

“Okay,” Kara felt ideas begin to collide behind her own eyes. “So, you know, what next? Where do we take it from here?”

“We are taking it nowhere.” Cat furrowed and re-tied the sash of her silk pyjamas. “You? Take it wherever you want. Call me when you have something worth reading.”

“I have other things to pitch too.”

“Oh yeah?” Cat glanced.

Kara hesitated and pulled something out from nowhere.

“Your life story?” she suggested. “You know, just. Who you are? The woman behind…” Kara gestured to the opulence of her home.

Cat blinked in this funny, offended way. “You want to write my obituary before I’m even worm food?”

“I want people to know you.”

“You want to know me.”

“You asked for a good story,” Kara followed her into the hall and through the kitchen. “That would be a good story.”

Cat wouldn’t agree. She wouldn’t go along with it. Yet, there she was, silent for a moment, her head slightly going side to side as though thinking about it.

“Perhaps I’m a narcissist after all.”

“Is that a yes?” Kara balked with shock.

“It’s an initial interview. Call my assistant, schedule something.”

“I am your assistant?”

“Then schedule something.”

Soulmates: Chapter XXI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)

In the office, Kara meandered in this quiet and uncertain way. It felt different without Cat around the place. It was the same, it was somehow different, not like when Cat was on business, gone for an interim then back for Monday. The office seemed to lose a little of the energy.

There wasn’t a felt tension in the air anymore.

It was as though, by and large, everyone accepted it as an improbability that Cat Grant could walk through the door any moment looking for heads to roll.

By the photocopier, Kara paused and daydreamed and went through the motions of a job. She thought about scoops. There was a school on the outskirts of town that she passed by on her morning train, with a derelict roof, potholes in the playground, and a brand-new Maserati parked in the principle’s space.

That seemed…

Odd.

For some reason and no reason, Kara put on her coat and went for a walk. She got coffee, then caught a train back on herself as though going home for the day. She got off four stops early and took another walk. It was around noon, the kids playing, the noise of it something wonderful to hear ear as she turned the corner largely because it proved different than the city noises she had grown used to.

“Hey,” Kara noticed the lunch lady leaving through the gate. “I’m sorry. Do you work there?”

“Sure do.” The woman smiled politely.

She had wiry dark hair, thick glasses, and that pleasant warm smile that made Kara think of lunch ladies back home, and she wondered for a moment if it was a requirement for the job. To be that kind of woman, kind smile, warm eyes, a little boring to the eye of an adult, but for a child who didn’t know how to say they were hungry because there wasn’t much food at home, there would not be a safer person to confide in.

She looked like the kind of woman who saved seconds, thirds, and extra apples.

Kara figured that meant she was the kind of woman who would talk if public funding was winding up in places it shouldn’t.

“Are you…” The woman looked around. “Lost? Or do you have a kid here?”

“I was lost,” Kara said decisively and felt a little reinvigorated. “It’s a long story. Would it be okay if I walk and talk with you? I’m a…” She paused. “I’m a reporter.”

“No comment.”

“You don’t know what I’m asking.”

“Something I shouldn’t give a comment on if I like having a job.” The woman fixed her purse and started walking.

Kara tailed slowly. “Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s a Maserati parked in that spot—which I’m guessing is the principle’s?”

“Why would that be strange?”

“Because you’re holding a fistful of empty canvas bags.” Kara observed, then glanced at the row of tiny supermarkets and grocery stores sandwiched together at the end of the street. “Which means you’re probably spending your own money to bring food for the kids?”

“Lady.” The woman laughed and turned, her hands going outward as though to gesture to the whole neighbourhood. “Look around. You’re in the seventh district. Of course I bring fruit and greens for the kids.”

“But the principle drives a brand-new Maserati?” Kara levelled seriously. “That’s…normal in the seventh?”

The woman didn’t reply but her lips fidgeted, and her eyes glanced.

“If I give you something, what are you going to give to me?”

“Something too, sure.” Kara shrugged. “Seems like you care a lot about the children. We could start there? I wouldn’t need you to go on the record. We could just talk?”

“What should I call you?”

“Kara,” she offered out her hand. “And you?”

“Shirley.” She shook. “Okay, Kara, let’s take a walk.”

Kara felt she had this reporting thing nailed and in the bag.

It defined the rest of her day. She didn’t go back to the office, but it put pride in her legs, had her strolling a little firmer, and when five rolled around and she found herself heading up to Lena’s office, Kara almost skipped through the foyer, buzzing with excitement to have a good thing to talk about.

“Well, hello you.” Lena’s eyes widened with fondness as she put the phone down. “You look happy?”

“You, Miss Luthor.” Kara lifted her chin. “Are looking at Kara Danvers, CatCo Reporter, future Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who just blew the case wide open on Jefferson Elementary School Scandal.” Kara’s hand wafted through the air as though painting the words.

“Jesus what did you find?” Lena footed around her desk, folding her arms over her blouse, hooked on every word.

“The principle.” Kara’s eyebrows wiggled. “He’s been taking payments under the table to secure public sector contracts.”

Lena’s green eyes went wide, then wider, her mouth opening and closing. It was as though she was trying to seem as enthusiastic and interested as she was the moment prior, but had caught herself slipping, then booted it all into overdrive.

“What kind of public sector contracts?” Lena stayed engaged.

“Plumbers, grounds maintenance, the works.” Kara gushed as though she had caught the biggest fish in the pond. “Word on the street? He brought in his brother’s building company to build the mud kitchen and new playground in the kindergarten courtyard. I don’t want to get ahead of myself until I find sources, but his brother’s building company could very well be under the mafia racket. It happens in cities. Just look at the Chrysler building.”

“I think…” Lena trailed and blinked. Kara smiled when her girlfriend took her wrists, clasping, thumb moving in circles on the little bones. “We should go for dinner tonight to celebrate?”

“I’ll pay but I don’t mind waiting for you to finish up,” Kara pecked her lips. “I should email Cat anyway and tell her I took her advice—oh fuck.” Kara realised too late that she had said too much.

“Relax,” Lena laughed softly. “Baby. Sweetheart. Did you—did you think I didn’t notice you had started going into work again?”

“I know I just feel like I should have said something, but I didn’t know how…”

“I completely empathise, believe me.”

“You do?” Kara’s lips quirked. “What haven’t you been saying?”

“Nothing,” Lena excused it with a shake of her head. “Oh, you know, nothing, just…” Her hand started rubbing the back of her neck.

“Lena Luthor!” Kara’s eyes went wide and funny. “You’re keeping a secret!”

Lena grimaced and crumpled. “Yes but—” She didn’t want to say it. “Can we, just, have secrets on the understanding we would tell each other if it was essential? Do we…are we there yet, in terms of trusting each other?”

“We are there.” Kara nodded. “I don’t need to know everything, it’s healthy to have some boundaries. You can keep your secrets, I trust you.”

“You know for two girls who aren’t soulmates…”

“Shut up,” Kara whispered softly with the most heart-eyed expression, kissing her girlfriend’s nose. “Where do you want to go for dinner?”

Soulmates: Chapter XX

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19)

Cat watched the television, half-interested, still not committed to the new Judge Judy syndication. She let the touch up on her manicure dry on the little tray table, where lunch sat untouched, lemon water remained without a sip, because despite outer appearances, she was beginning to feel a little under the weather.

Lena had left a little later than she was hoping but there was time to touch up her lipstick, move her hair this way, then that way, and that made her feel better. It made her feel entirely herself. It was a sense of primness if only because that was who she felt to be, chic, stylish, put-together and unconcerned if it made her conceited. It was certainly not for anybody else. Despite that, Cat felt Thursdays to be both complicated and reliable as far as her diary went.

She had nudged Lena out of the door at eleven forty, if anything, just to prevent a scene unfolding. Cat paid through the nose, liked having a room with a view, but the nurses—all of them paid handsomely to sign non-disclosure agreements—were beginning to talk about her busy, reliable Thursday visitation schedule.

Twelve o’clock, right on time.

“Your final cover sign-off and the important documents.” A heavy brown leather bag filled with work struck the bed in a hard, heavy thud. “I’m still angry about last week.” Kara seethed quietly and folded her arms.

Cat grimaced and looked at the heavy leather bag sprawled on her legs with documents cascading. She rolled her eyes, aware Kara wouldn’t apologise but knowing she still felt a little guilty and that deserved to be drawn out—somewhat.

Cat didn’t have to look away from the television to know Kara’s eyes were doing the thing. The righteous, angry, narrowed and self-grandiose thing that made the corner of her lips twitch with the urge to smile.

“You’re angry every week,” Cat sighed and reached for her reading glasses.

“Then call me consistent.”

“I call you many things. Consistent, while accurate, is not in the top ten.” Cat reached for the brown paper folder first. It was almost over-spilling, fat and wedged with printed stills and photography. “Spit it out, Keira. I have Pilates at two then yoga right after and I don’t want to be late again.”

“Hilarious.”

“You think I’m kidding?” Cat glanced, her brow furrowing deeply.

Kara stalled and didn’t know what to say to that. She grimaced, rubbing her brow as though it might help the tension. Cat blinked and didn’t say anything. She knew how this thing always went.

“About last week…” Kara sat down on a seat that was probably still warm from her girlfriend’s residency. “Cat, I can’t keep doing this.”

“I don’t recall ever inviting you.”

“I just.” Kara shook her head and took off her glasses. “I feel bad because you still pay me my salary even though I quit, which makes me feel like you don’t take it seriously when I tell you that I have quit! I no longer work for you.”

“Kara, I want you to use your listening ears and hear me when I say this to you.” Cat felt herself stiffen, tighten, become stern and at her wits end with all of this. “I pay you to be a personal assistant. I pay you to make sure there is the coffee in my office waiting for me in the morning. My meetings scheduled, my mail organised, my important documents brought to me the way I like them.” Cat nodded down at the heavy, overfilled bag that Kara still brought every week reliable as clockwork.

“I don’t understand your point?”

“Do I go into the office in the morning?”

“No.”

“Do I look as though I have busy, back-to-back meetings to schedule?” Kara didn’t reply but her expression faded into something blank. “You don’t show up to work. If that’s how little you think of yourself, of the industry I have given thirty years of my life to…” Cat shook her head. “If I was your age and I had all this time at my disposal—holding the career position you have? I would be chasing every assignment, every opportunity, on the ground hustling for my next report. As for your salary? I pay you to be my assistant, and here you are, the bag still shows up every week.”

The realisation came in this slow, undeniable way that etched itself across her face. Kara wouldn’t admit it. Today, just like every Thursday, the matter would be finished with for another prolonged interim. It was unspoken but they both understood it the same way. Without the salary, the pretence of a good and logical reason to be here, then Kara would still be here, every week, without a good logical reason or justification.

That would be when things got messy.

Cat didn’t like messy.

“Well, if you’re going to be a giant asshole and keep paying me then I’ll have…” Kara shook her head. “I’ll have to make the most of it and find a story to write.”

“Of course you would show up uninvited to an oncology unit and act like the continuity of your salary despite a total lack of uptake is…” Cat pinched her nose. “Some slight.”

“Sorry.” Kara dipped her head.

“No, you’re not.”

“A little,” she meant it this time. “I felt like I was starting to have things figured out. Then it happened. You happened.” It struck like a sharp barb but with a small inhale Cat held her impenetrable expression. “I feel like I’m…someone I don’t like anymore. It’s like Lena leaves for work—” That made Cat laugh. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” Kara locked her eyes firmer.

“Nothing, nothing. The medicine.” Cat nodded off to the stacked pole. “You were saying?”

“When Lena leaves for work and I have to sit with myself?” Cat felt like a confessional alter on Thursdays, she realised and felt she would now rationalise it this way. “I think about you, and it makes me angry, and most of all it makes me confused, because you…don’t want me. I don’t want you to be my soulmate. But here we are, on borrowed time, and I don’t know how I am supposed to make something of it before…”

Kara broke into tears.

Just a little bit, so small it was almost imperceptible, a shield of layered ice melted from Cat’s heart.

“Well, you are here,” Cat offered softly while tears were dried away. “That’s more than being angry at home.”

“You were right.”

“About?”

“Wasting my talent.”

“I don’t believe I described it as talent.”

“If you’re going to keep paying me then the very least I can do is turn up to my job.” Kara seemed decisive about it. “Maybe there’s a story worth writing, something to get my teeth into.”

“That’s the spirit!” Cat praised something she felt didn’t merit praise, yet today she was a confessional, and perhaps that softened her heart. “Go forth, little one, find me a story worth reading. Also…” Cat paused and glanced at the hemp shopping bag at Kara’s feet.

“Yeah. I brought the two bottles of champagne, and the glazed miso duck, but the place you like wasn’t open so I got the grilled duck from the roof terrace spot and then picked up miso and soy glaze from the Chinese supermarket on my way here. I hope that’s okay, I used the company card.”

“That’s okay.” Cat smiled. “Thank you.”

“Mhm.” Kara placed it down on the little tray table and took away the cafeteria lunch and stale water. “Do you…want help?” She glanced back and forth between the bag as though unsure if Cat felt up to feeding herself.

“Fuck off, Kara.”

“Yes Ma’am.” She left without an argument this time.

Soulmates: Chapter XIX

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18)

Lena felt a little guilty as she stared down at the sandwich in her hand.

Not for the morning spent teasing Kara breathless and panting but for the lie she had told after.

Then again it was straight out of Kara’s old playbook. Not technically a lie but just a little bit of missing context.

Lena didn’t go to work; not right away at least. That was the main thing she felt conflicted about. She had known for some time she wasn’t going to work because Thursday mornings had become a period for constantly reliable out of office engagement.

A short interim of time spent elsewhere, nothing salacious, sometimes an hour, sometimes four, and she didn’t really talk about it to anyone.

At first, Lena didn’t mention it because she thought it might awaken something painful for Kara. That feeling passed. It solidified and became its own secret, just for the sake of having a secret to keep between old friends, silly, fun, and little more than that.

She had been meaning to talk to Kara about it.

She just didn’t know how anymore.

“It does look like bunny ears,” Cat agreed.

“You want half?” Lena offered the other one forward.

“With respect, I would rather try and perform fellatio on a horse running the Kentucky Derby.” Cat’s eyes came to the side again, smirking at the paltry excuse of a sandwich, then back to the television. “Salmonella written all over it.”

“I know, I said the same.” Lena sighed and leaned back in the plastic chair. “How are you feeling?”

“Good.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I know,” Cat sighed. “Me too.”

“You don’t want…” Lena wasn’t even sure what there was to offer. “I can’t get you anything?”

“A magic bullet to rewrite the faulty genetic code that is causing cells to uncontrollably divide and spread into the healthy tissue of my body?” Cat suggested. “Did you pack that with your sandwiches this morning?”

“Forgot it on the kitchen table, sorry.” Lena shrugged and earned a grin. “Cat?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Cat sat there, unbothered by it, in her perfectly Catherine Grant kind of way. There she was in a hospital bed drowning in the size of the gown, some inches too big, still growing bigger by the day, yet still so immaculate and beautiful.

There was this power she held in her hands, even like this, it simply exuded from her; to sit there with an IV pole, dangling chest port, with this certain pronounced thinness from the treatment, and yet she was beautiful in a way that announced itself—demanded it from the eye of the beholder.

Fierce, dignified, highlighter and blush on her cheeks because she still held herself to that standard, and Lena could tell that her blonde hair had been cut and styled, blown out, some pride put into it despite…

Lena didn’t want to acknowledge that Cat’s hair was thinner than last Thursday, but it was. Cat didn’t care, for as long as she had it, she would make the best of it, the most of it, and that was yet another perfectly Catherine Grant thing to do given the circumstances.

“Cat?”

“If you tell me that you love me again—”

“I do.” Lena nodded, solemn, exasperated, staring at nothing. “You are…one of my best friends. You are the person who was there every day, when Sam died, when I was sick and in the hospital after, you killed every hit piece dead in the water—never said a single thing in the magazine despite knowing all the big scoops. I hate things feel weird between us, I hate that you don’t call or text anymore. I hate that we’re not talking about the elephant in the room because you are—were—my best friend.”

“And yet here you are, despite all of this supposed disconnect from my end, every week, more reliable and on time than a German train service.” Cat’s eyes twinkled with amusement, though she never looked away from the television. “Lena, I don’t call or text because I’m…” She gestured at herself, at the room, as though it was arrogant for Lena to assume some priority above it in her thought processes. “Listen, I don’t know what elephant you think there is but if you want to talk about it you should talk about it.”

“Kara.”

“Nope.” Cat shook her head.

“You’re soulmates.”

“We may very well have been,” Cat quietly agreed in a way that was non-committal to the idea, then shrugged and finally looked at her friend. “Here’s the thing, Lena. We can play what if games, we can go round in circles, talk about hypotheticals where I have some long years ahead of me, where Kara is…” She shook her head, as though wanting to say something based and cruel, yet struggling to find something.

That was very unlike Cat Grant.

“She does this thing, you know.” Lena stared off to the side, thinking about it, smiling despite how sad it made her feel. “We’ll be doing something, watching television, eating dinner, whatever. I’ll say something. She doesn’t reply. Then I look and she’s…” Lena gestured at nothing. “She’s away in some daydream, with this vacant look on her face, and I know she’s playing out a different life—some life she says that she doesn’t think about despite very much, constantly, always running away from anything that makes her think about it. She just sort of comes back to life, and there’s this look in her eyes, as though she’s looking at me but seeing…”

Lena didn’t know how to say it.

She didn’t want to say it because then she would be admitting it.

But she gestured.

And Cat understood.

“Lena.” Cat gestured her hands for the rambler to slow down on her rapid, nervous rabbiting. “It sounds as though you care a whole lot more than either of us do and for that I can only apologise.”

“I am objectively the person who should be apologising to you.”

“That won’t be necessary. I sincerely am sorry that I have…become an imagined competitor in your relationship with Kara Danvers. I want you to be happy. I want Kara to be happy. I want that for you both because me?” She stared very seriously. “I have had the happiest, biggest, greatest of lives. I regret nothing. I wish for nothing. If I am supposed to be sat here, filled with regret, then I’m not.”

“I’m not Kara, Cat.” Lena pushed forward slightly. “I know you well enough, for long enough, that I know when you’re talking out of your ass.”

“Then ask me whatever it is you really want to ask me, Lena.” Cat closed her eyes and sighed.

“Did you…” Lena stopped, because she didn’t want to ask, she just wanted the answer so that if ever Kara wanted to know, one day, then someone would have answers to give her. “Did you feel some pull, some awareness? People say that but I wouldn’t know. I just, I’m curious?”

Cat opened her eyes and looked at Lena with a faint, vague expression that couldn’t be deduced. It wasn’t displeasure but it wasn’t a happy memory.

“I felt drawn to her, yes.” Cat nodded. “I think…a week after she started with the temp agency? I realised I was having to force myself to call her Keira. I knew her name, and I don’t know names, not assistants at least.”

“That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

“Because it isn’t.”

“Do you love her?” Lena blurted.

That took Cat back more than a little. She blinked, then blinked again. Lena felt guilty because the answer wasn’t for Kara. It was selfish, it was necessary, it was something she herself wanted to understand, because how could Cat possibly not love that girl?

More than that, Lena didn’t feel jealousy, just this faint sense of unselfish purpose to somehow give everyone a little of whatever they needed. Mostly because she felt greedy, as though there had been an abundance in her life, a prolonged series of habitual good things, despite the fact it wasn’t true. Her wife had died. She had grieved it then, still grieved it now, but there was joy, and her love with Kara didn’t feel like a band aid. It felt like a breath of life. It felt like this good, insular thing where she might make a home for the rest of her life.

But, Lena knew what she had been seeing as time had gone on.

She knew because she used to do the same thing, staring off, losing herself, playing house with Sam long after she passed, wondering about a life that would never take root. The trouble was that Kara still had time to know things, hold it in her hands, have moments beyond the realm of her imagination, and Lena felt it was be selfish—repugnant—to deny her of that.

To deny either of them that small moment in time to just have whatever the universe wanted to give them.

“Your lack of answer is an answer,” Lena told her straight. “I’m not asking because I’m hoping for one or the other. I’m asking because…we’re too old, too jaded, and too fucking deep into this thing not to talk about it?” She rolled her eyes at her friend.

Cat sighed and looked at her manicure resting in her lap.

“She is a very pretty girl.” Cat smiled to herself. “She reminds me of myself when I was younger. It’s not the sweetness, it’s the fury, every now and then her eyes would…” Cat imitated Kara’s expression, eyes narrowing with tension, angry and righteously laser-focused. “I know you won’t believe me but there isn’t some pointed, obsessive attraction. I don’t think I’m supposed to have a soulmate, Lena, because the truth of the matter is that I like women, a little, sure, but I have always preferred men because they are stupid and well-behaved, and Kara Danvers is neither of those things.”

“Please talk to her?” Lena shut her eyes and pleaded.

“I don’t want to make this situation any worse than it—”

“Please,” Lena begged between tight, uncomfortable lips. “Cat, please let her know you a little better. I want to spend my life with her. I want to be the woman who is rock solid and there when she needs me the most. You—” Lena felt a dampness on her cheeks because it hurt, not just for Kara, but her heart too, Cat was her true friend.

“Well go on.” Cat snarked, smiling a little. “Don’t quit just before you start blowing smoke up my ass. You were saying?”

“I was saying, you royal bitch.” They both chuckled and staved off some differing sized rocks in their throats. “You are bowing out in a way only you ever could, you know? A little too early, but still in your own time, with everyone on baited breath hoping for an encore because you are Catherine fucking Grant.” There was such fierce respect in the way she said that name. “I do not know how I am supposed to compete with you, Cat, at some point after the dust settles when she starts to put you on the pedestal. I do not know how to explain and talk about my friend, to the girl I love, knowing that she is falling in love with some version of you in the back of her brain.”

“Kara Danvers will never put me on a pedestal. I think, personally, for her to have my name on her ass cheek?” Cat lifted a brow and thought about it. “Well, she is the person consecrated by the universe to not put me on the pedestal. Everyone else does, seems only right that she wouldn’t.”

“She is twenty-three, but she won’t be always.” Lena shrugged. “What the fuck am I going to do when she’s thirty, forty, then fifty, and she stops and looks around and realises she’s closer to you than she ever was when you were alive? I mean, fuck, dude, don’t do that to me?” Lena scowled at her best friend.

“Lena,” Cat cleared her throat. “I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’m worried.”

“Then shut up and stop worrying.” Cat levelled. “Jesus Christ. Only you. Only fucking you could step on to an oncology unit and feel like you have the right to be upset and wronged by the world. Yes, fine, I will write a letter or something. Just, please can you leave now?” Cat made her laugh without meaning too. She grinned despite herself, rubbing her temples. “Go. Bring actual food next week, and champagne, two bottles, something corked before we were born.”

“Cat?”

“I know,” Cat shooed, “You too.”

Soulmates: Chapter XVII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

Time crept in its peculiar way, constant but not fast enough, Kara had fallen into a light sleep on the sofa. The beep of the scanner on the front door stirred her just a moment before it opened. She sat upright, blinking herself awake, then a yawn struck her just as she turned to say hello.

“You look like a dinosaur.” Lena smiled sweetly and put her purse in the dish, then took off her coat. “Do I ask how your day was? Is that—do we just…” She seemed equally at a loss. “If we need to have serious conversations, we can do that, and if you need something else, we can do that too.”

“Define serious conversation?” Kara perched on her knees and hung her chin over the back of the sofa, watching the way Lena moved, how she didn’t seem to know what to do with her body. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so nervous before…”

“Me, nervous?” Lena glanced back with a calm expression. “Well maybe a little bit. It’s not every day that Catherine Grant’s soulmate—”

“No jokes, please?” Kara didn’t feel any anger. She understood, knew Lena’s reasons, but today wasn’t Lena’s pain. “We can do jokes when it’s your bad time, but today is my bad time too, so let’s save that for lunch tomorrow.”

“Alright.” Lena pursed her lips and put down her defence system. “I’m sorry, darling, I’m not very good at processing hurt but I have been trying to get better, and I did do that on my flight, the processing thing, and I…I can share that space with you.”

“I don’t want you to feel this is a break-up.” Kara blinked. “We’re not breaking-up, I figured that much.”

“You’re…sure?” Lena seemed taken aback.

“Unless you want to find one of those unmarked, plain and unbetroth girls you kept talking about when we first met?” Kara’s eyes brightened. “Didn’t think so,” she whispered at the stalled girlfriend rooted near the door.

“I just don’t want you to feel pressured, like you have to stay, that’s the main thing. I want you to feel heard, and respected, and—” Lena exhaled a fast, lost gasp of steadiness that escaped her. She snatched her head away, because she was crying, and she didn’t want to draw attention there. “Sorry. Excuse me, sorry.” She calmed instantly, as though it had never happened. “I want you to feel loved, Kara, very much. To me, loving you means wanting the best for you—not standing in the way of it.”

“Wine.” Kara lifted the bottle from the coffee table. “It’s been a weird day, I figure we just drink wine from the bottle, talk until we don’t want to talk, then go to bed and lay-in late tomorrow.”

“God yes.” Lena sighed and relaxed, finally daring to come close and sit on the sofa too. “So, a dumb question, but how was your day?” She flopped and turned, trading off with the opened bottle.

“A day.” Kara burst with inappropriate laughter. The tears came, slow and unfought, because she felt safe and that made it okay. “It was a day, babe, turns out you and me? We’re…” Kara shook her head and couldn’t think of a good word.

“Not special magic tattoo girlfriends?” Lena murmured against the neck of the bottle resting to her lips, blinking as she swallowed a swig. “Well, it’s a complication sure.”

Tired as she was, Kara didn’t want to be asleep. She took fingertips to Lena’s cheek, took the loose eyelash that had fallen there, closed her eyes and blew on it. She didn’t wish for anything. The universe wasn’t in that mood. But, Lena laughed, and that felt reliable and familiar.

“You smell good.” Kara sighed and kissed her neck.

“Are we allowed to do this?” Lena murmured, joking, a little serious beneath that. She slipped her arm around the cuddler. Kara pressed her jaw to Lena’s shoulder, tucked into her side and intending to stay there. “Do we—do we cuddle and talk about how we’re not soulmates?”

“I think so.”

“Alright then,” Lena settled and slumped deeper into the sofa, her muscles relaxing against Kara’s body. “So, Cat, how did that go?”

“Terrible.”

“I would ask if you gave her some long, impassionate speech about how I was the light and moon of your life but…” Lena grinned, somehow not jealous or angry. “I take it she didn’t want to run off into the sunset with you?”

“You think I suggested that?” Kara balked.

“I think you have spent your life waiting for a soulmate.” Lena was calm and unaccusatory. “I think it’s been a weird day, and you’re doing your best, and I think I’m not angry whichever way you tried to make sense of it all.”

“You’re a good person.”

“I know,” Lena agreed and tucked blonde hair around Kara’s ear. “You don’t give me enough credit.” She leaned and pecked the temple.

“Would you hate me if I told you…” Kara paused and sighed. “I mean, it’s hard to explain. I wanted, I think, to understand why she didn’t tell me—didn’t help me understand what was happening. I wasn’t selling her unconditional love. I just, I guess, had this idea all of my life that there would be some person, like just one person—my person—and they would love me just the way I was, think I was beautiful, and sexy, and enough, like I was really something, you know? And I…I didn’t understand…why I wasn’t enough.” She didn’t cry but her voice wobbled and strained around it.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Lena stroked a single, bitter tear that had broken from the pack. “It’s okay, baby, I’m not mad. I’m not hurt. And, for the record?” She tilted Kara’s cheeks and looked right at her. “You are more than enough. You are everything, you are all the things, you are beautiful, and sexy, and kind, and…” Lena seemed at a loss. “You’re beyond that, even. So what if special magic tattoo girlfriend doesn’t see it?”

“I told her Lena Luthor was twice the woman she could ever dream of being.” Kara didn’t lie, technically it was the truth.

“You said that?”

“I did.” Kara nodded as she took a swig of merlot.

Lena’s smirk stifled until she couldn’t hold back a spurt of laughter. “You’re doing the thing, right?”

“Which thing?” Kara glanced.

“The Instagram thing. Where you tell the truth a little out of context because you’re worried the whole thing isn’t pretty. So hit me with it, Kara Danvers, the context, the big scoop, I’m sure I will somehow love you anyway.”

A roll of emerald eyes, an exasperated sigh huffing on its own amusement, then breaking into giggles, as though Lena thought it was silly her love might cease, and that was all it took to make Kara feel a little safer with the idea of being seen as…

Not a good person.

“You’re sure you want to know?” Kara’s voice was steady and quiet. “It was…horrible. I was awful to her, Lena.” With a jostle, she pulled away far enough to really look at her girlfriend. “I guess, by extension, that means I’m being awful to you too, right? I mean. Here I am, I’m sitting here, drinking wine with you, feeling like there’s nowhere else I would rather be, but a few hours ago I was on Cat’s doorstep—”

“Hey, stop. It’s okay. Kara it’s alright I’m not…I know this isn’t how things are supposed to be,” Lena sighed and softened. “I know you want to feel certain, like you love me, and I love you, and we could never not be those people, constantly and without complications. But I don’t think it’s that simple. This a weird situation, but I’m okay with it, because you’re telling me the truth, and so maybe you can just be a good woman who is fresh out of good, ethical choices to make right now?”

“Well alright.” Kara pecked the corner of her girlfriend’s lips, then her cheek, settling back on to her shoulder for a little more cuddling. “You’re sure you want me to tell you what I said?”

“I mean, you have edged me for long enough, if it’s not the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard then I’m definitely leaving you in the morning—ouch.” Lena burst into laughter from the cheeky, playful pinch of her ribs. “Alright, alright, I’m sorry.”

“It was fucked up.” Kara wanted to be forgiven for it but didn’t know how. “I said to her…you want to die alone, lonely and without love? You go right ahead but don’t think you’re breaking my heart on your way out the door.”

“Wow.” Lena tilted her chin. “That was…pretty fucked up, sure, I see that.” She offered the opened wine bottle. “What did she say?”

“Something about thirty years ago we would have maybe really loved each other.”

“I could see that, sure.” Kara caught her looking at the mark on her hip. “Do you feel like you have a grasp on what was happening underneath the words? The emotions that were niggling?”

“All of them.”

“Yep, sounds it.”

“Anger.” Kara settled there first. “It was…this feeling of rejection. Not because I wanted her to be my soulmate. I wanted—you know—your name.” The tears gathered up and hung on her lids, but Lena already knew that, and Kara knew that she knew it. “But the way she showed me her mark. It was like, this puckered scar where she burned my name off, put her name right over it, like I didn’t exist, and I wasn’t important, I wasn’t good enough.” Kara shook her head. “It just…I don’t know. I felt worthless.”

“I know it’s not what you want to hear, but it is pretty fucking badass that Cat Grant burned off her soulmate mark and put her own name there instead. Can we just—can we agree that it deserves a Woman of the Year, Glamour Award?”

“Oh, fuck yeah.” Kara laughed and nodded. “I mean, who does that? Who looks in the mirror, stares at the person who is going to love them, wholly, completely, in all of the right ways, for all of their lives—” That did it, Kara lost herself to halting tears and a choke in her throat. “And says, you know what, I deserve more. I deserve everything I want. You, perfect stranger, can go fuck yourself.”

“So, this is it huh?” Lena sighed with a low, content rasp in her voice. “Me, with my dead wife trauma. You, with your unrequited soulmate—who will soon be dead wife trauma too. Which, by the way, I couldn’t be more qualified for helping there, so you made a great choice. And we’re just here, just figuring it out anyway, loving each other as it all stands?” Green eyes found Kara with a little hope.

“I think so.” Kara’s lips twitched, fidgeting side to side. “I hope so?”

“Me too.” Lena’s lips wobbled. “I wish I could give you this perfect soulmate thing. I wanted to give it to Sam, I want to give it to you, it feels difficult making sense of that sometimes like maybe I’m insulting you both because at different points I loved you both in different ways. But I want to be all the things you deserve, Kara. I’m going to go to bed tonight, with you, and feel lucky that we’re going eat breakfast together in the morning, and tomorrow?” Lena rubbed her forehead and thought about it. “We’ll just keep finding different ways to love each other, in spite of everything, day by day, steady as it comes.”

“And if…” Kara inhaled and held it. “If life brings more weird, complex situations?”

Lena smiled warmly. “Kara if you’re supposed to be with Cat then the universe will bring you and Cat together, and I’m not going to stop it, I’m not going to stand in the way. I’m just going to love you for as long as you love me, and enjoy that time, because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed for anyone—not even soulmates.”

“Bedtime?”

“Bedtime.”

Soulmates: Chapter XV

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

She had stayed at the park some long time past ten, just standing there, thinking and not thinking, until a ranger had appeared, uniform and khakis, somewhat concerned.

As it turned out, Southview Hill Park was a suicide hot spot.

Cat had laughed when he said that. She laughed, so hard, so violently, that it took her right back to her early twenties. The park ranger clearly thought this was strange, but satisfied she wasn’t a risk to herself, he let her on her way back down the path towards the turn that would lead to a footbridge, then a stroll to the gates that went back out towards city streets.

For all the things Cat knew in this world, this fact was fond and sacred and morbid in the second-most charming way possible, learned at the precise moment she needed to learn it, perhaps if only because the universe felt some semblance of debt it needed to square away.

She now knew why it was Southview Hill Park was the second most-charming view in the city.

And, sooner rather than later, she would take it to the grave, but there was no need to dwell or hurry things along—she had spent nearly fifty years living slow, idle, in her own distinctly Cat Grant way.

Why change now?

She took a car to her townhouse in the west district. The late-night visitor huddled near her doorstep was half expected, but Cat felt no fondness or romanticism for the display. She got out of the car, rolling her eyes, shoving her purse in Kara’s arms so she could open the front door.

“One hour.” Cat hummed. “You can ask whatever questions you want, but then you need to figure out a way home, and never ask me prying questions again, because that is still very much my area of expertise that I spent thirty years building a conglomerate upon...”

“When were you going to tell me?” Kara’s voice broke her heart.

“Never.” Cat remained firm. “Next question—”

“You don’t get to do that!”

“Why?” Cat snatched and turned around, rearing up close beneath the little girl’s nose. “Why do you feel so entitled to my life? For what reason, exactly? Because bippity-boppity boo—a tattoo showed up on your ass cheek one day?” She balked.

Kara’s chin wobbled and her tears refused to fall. “When did you know?”

“I didn’t,” Cat told the truth. “I didn’t until I did. I burned my birthmark off a long time ago, kiddo, you would be surprised how quickly you forget things with some determination and years behind you.”

“So I am…” Kara nodded and fiddled with her hands. “And you are…”

“Kara. Can I level with you a second?”

“Jesus, I would love it if you did.” There was a loathing, hateful fire in her gentle blue eyes.

It made Cat feel a little warm inside.

Almost resistant to the mere idea, Cat forced it away, told it to go fuck itself, shovelled and buried it dead until a certain sense of wherewithal found her again.

“You are so bright, so hungry for life and in love with the world, so let me ask you this and please—enough with the romantic bullshit—just think about your answer.” Cat swallowed hard. “How many happily ever afters do you really know? How many have you really seen with your own two eyes, enough to trust the biggest decision of your life to something as cruel and arbitrary as the universe?”

“Everyone, Cat. Literally, you fucking narcissist, everybody on the fucking planet except you and Lena Luthor get a happily-ever-after.” Kara grew red faced, shaking, too angry to contain any of it. “Here I am, caught in the shittiest love triangle in the history of the world, the literal worst fucking romance story in the duration of forever!” Kara pointed accusingly. “I was happy! I met Lena, and you knew, Cat, you knew what was happening and you let me fall in love with her anyway—”

“Your parents.” Cat felt her eyebrows knit with accusation. “What’s their marriage like?”

“Like…” Kara twisted and thought about it. “Like a marriage? They're quiet, content, happy.”

“Your grandparents?”

“The same.”

“And that's what you want?” Cat scoffed. “The same old safe bet? You don't want to be twenty, and thirty, and forty, falling in love in different ways every day, hating in little unimportant new ways every day?” Cat narrowed in disbelief. “It's cowardly. Beyond that, I am Catherine Grant, and I am nobody's safe bet.”

Kara stood there like a fool. Largely because she was a fool, and Cat never forgot it, but in some moments it felt more distinct and poignant than others. The youth. The age difference. The levels of life experience so vastly different between them that they were playing entirely different games.

It wasn't Kara's fault, Cat understood that, but it did nothing to alleviate her disappointment.

She didn't love Kara.

But for all of her mercurial ways, Cat wanted so much better for her.

“Soulmates aren't safe bets.” Kara's lips trembled in a different way, something other than anger stuck in her throat this time. “Love isn't...quiet or content! It is hopeless, peaceful, madly in love, blissful! It's not cowardly. You, Cat. You are the coward!”

“Alright.” Cat laughed at that. “Your friends? Do they seem… hopelessly, head over heels, madly in love, blissful in their little fairy-tale lives?”

“I don’t get what you’re trying to say…” Kara knew exactly what was being said.

“I’m saying that it’s bullshit, Kara!” Cat emphasised with boisterous, exploding laughter. It was disbelief, not humour, because it felt as though for all of her life she had been the only person in on this absurd joke. “It’s your Instagram page. It’s make-believe. It’s shiny, pretty little exaggerations because everybody is so fucking consumed with this idea of instantaneous and perfect love that when it dawns on them how empty and lacking it all feels…well!” Cat scoffed. “They must feel like they’re the only people in the world who feel such a thing—who have ever felt such a thing—because everybody else is so happy, shiny, and too terribly frightened to admit it either.”

“So, the entire world is fake other than you?” Kara stuck her hands on her hips. “Love isn’t real. It’s all a lie. You don't have a Kara-shaped birthmark somewhere on your body, and this is...what exactly?”

Kara turned and slightly adjusted the waist of her jeans.

There it was on her hip.

Funny.

Cat forgot, for just the briefest moment, what it was they were fighting about.

“Do you believe in free will?” Cat fixed her most formidable, mercurial, serious of stares and stepped forward to the optimist.

Kara scoffed.

“What does that have to do—”

“Do you, or don't you?”

“Sure. Yes, of course I believe in free will. I'm not...” Kara glanced around. “I'm here on my own conviction not because I think the universe is trying to spite you!”

Hesitant, Cat remembered herself, but she nodded at Kara's assessment of things.

“Do you think the woman you are is the same woman you would be if your life had been different, Kara?” Cat reasoned. “Your whole thing is your shitty little boring rural life back home, right? How it made you—defines you in these big crucial ways you need to process your life through and compare back to—do you think you would be the person you are today if you had different influences, or if you had made different choices?” Cat suggested with a slight cock of her head. “I made a decision thirty years ago that cannot be undone, Kara, because it led me to a lifetime of decisions that I wouldn't have gotten the chance to make had I prioritised something as stupid as a soulmate. Whoever that woman is on your hip...” Cat shook her head in repulsion where none was felt. “She isn't me, kiddo, not this version of me.”

“I think you’re right, Cat, because you are being a giant cunt, and I hate saying that to you, firstly because you are sick, and secondly because you are my soul—”

“If you say that word you’re going to find out the hard way why Anne Wintour tripled her security from late 2014 onwards.” Cat folded her arms. “I’m not sick, Kara, I’m just not yours. Thirty years ago? Maybe. I see that, sure, but I’m not some googly-eyed twenty something doing my first lap around the block.” Cat felt her eyes sting and she wished, prayed, hoped to god they would not reveal her.

“It’s not too late,” Kara whispered with reticence.

She was saying it because she was young, stupid, and life had taught her that it was her line in the script. Cat just shook her head, frustrated, ignoring the thump-thumping of her chest and the strange grief that came with a natural love she felt no desire or claim to.

“Kara, I’m sorry, I was nineteen and I made a choice. It was you or it was me, and I chose me.” Cat unbuttoned the bottom of her blouse and pulled it up to her ribs, tilting to the side, so Kara could see where it had one been. “I chose me, Kara, because it’s my life too.”

There was a puckered, silvered little scar that looked like an old burn. It was where Kara’s name had, indeed, once been—some long time before she had even been born.

The scar had healed, and over it, a new name had been tattooed.

Catherine.

“You deserve to be alone,” Kara cried, heartbroken, furious and without words for the things she was feeling.

“I know, kid.” Cat pushed a small smile. “But you? That does not have to be your choice for your life.”

“Good. That's good, because Lena Luthor is twice the woman you could ever dream of being even if you had batted a thousand instead of wasting your life justifying the nasty, callous way you treat people!” Kara seemed as though she was convincing herself more than anyone else.

It was a good thing, in Cat’s books, meant this whole ordeal would be just a little easier on the crybaby when it got to where it was all going.

Kara wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, adjusted her glasses and seemed to itch for a great escape through the front door she was stepping backwards for.

“Oh no, you're going.” Cat deadpanned, expressionless behind the eyes as she extended her palm. “But wait, I was just about to recite sonnets—”

“Fuck you, Cat. I’m going to Lena’s place, to a woman who loves me, and thinks I have inherent value and worth! You want to die alone, lonely, and without love? You go right ahead but don’t think you’re dismantling my self-esteem on your way into the grave!”

“Well fuck.” Cat reached for the bourbon decanter on the table, rolling her eyes, fond despite the temper steaming out her ears. “You know for what it’s worth I think you and I really might have loved each other to death. Sorry you were thirty years late to the party, kiddo.”

Soulmates: Chapter XIII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

At home that night, Kara felt she couldn’t make sense of it because there was no making sense of it, and so she continued with her life as though nothing had been said about the matter. It was thought of, once in a while, put away and stuffed down, but in the shower, there was too much silence.

The matter simply couldn’t be avoided.

Quietness always allowed for thought processes to procrastinate on things they shouldn’t.

“Hi,” Lena said when the phone was picked up.

“Hey babe,” Kara whispered, juggling the phone between dripping palms as she reached for a towel. “I’m sorry for calling so many times I know it’s still working hours where you are—”

“Do not apologise.” Lena was stern about it. “You do not ever apologise for reaching out, ever, especially when it’s important like this.”

“So you know?” Guilty, Kara felt a weight lift from her shoulders.

“I know.”

“How are you?” Kara did her best to keep it all ticking and steady and without symptom of her own persistent, dribbling tears.

“I'm not the best person to ask questions like that.” Lena sighed. “I'm either great, or as you once phrased it, Miss Danvers, I am...the impulsive, erraticism and paranoia that—many now feel—aptly describes my brother’s downfall into madness—”

“Lena, Jesus Christ, would you stop?” Kara's voice bit more than she meant to.

“Woah.”

“I'm sorry,” Kara didn't skip a beat, softer this time. “I am so sorry. It. It didn't feel good. The joke. I don't know, I'm a little raw. I'm sorry.”

“That's okay. You have every right to feel raw about this too, Kara, you spend virtually every day with Cat. I should have paused and registered that. I think dark humour is my..." Lena sighed and thought. "The jokes are my healthy outlet, but I understand they're not yours. I apologise.”

“Your crutch,” Kara corrected seriously, but she was smiling, and she knew Lena was smiling too. "Don't say sorry. It's been a hard day."

Lena paused.

"How are you?" The concern was palpable.

“I mean…” Kara didn’t know why she was crying. “I mean, yeah, she’s—she’s Cat Grant, you know?”

“At the end of the nuclear apocalypse it will be the cockroaches, Cher, and Cat Grant, I know, she feels indestructible and godly.” Lena talked around all the feelings Kara couldn't quite extrapolate. “But that doesn’t make it any less terrible, baby. I can be on a flight home tonight. I might not get to you until tomorrow morning, but I want to be with you. I want to be there.”

“I feel like it has no right to hit me this hard.” Kara burst into tears. “She’s…she’s awful. She’s the meanest person I know. She’s rude, and crass, and she takes pleasure in putting people down and making them feel horrible! What kind of person does that, Lena?”

“She is all of those things, yes, and somehow also the kindest and most generous person I think any of us know. How do you even make sense of that?” Lena commiserated. “She is both the best and worst for all the same reasons.”

“It’s like…” Kara inhaled and held it for a moment, unsure of why the news had possessed her with such heartbreak. “It’s like every big milestone since I’ve been here. Every good and bad moment, every time I realised just how much I was falling for you, how drawn I felt to you, how connected I felt to you, she was there.”

Strange.

Kara registered it, became aware of it, just as it all rolled and fell off her tongue.

Kara drew a gasp too big for her lungs when she felt the birthmark throb, grow hot, clearing slightly with that distinct heat on her skin.

Lena fell silent.

She fell silent because she knew too.

“Did you…” Lena sounded as though her voice was wobbling, but she coughed and cleared it away. “You just felt the thing now, right? The…birthmark thing?”

Kara kept her palm fixed to the side of her hip and didn’t dare lift it.

“Kara,” Lena whispered. “It’s alright, darling, it’s quite alright. I love you very much and I…” She hung on her pause as though trying to convince herself it was true. “I can say with some certainty that I have known true love with two great and brilliant women in my life, and how very fortunate I am for that, so if you need to put down the phone and take stock of this situation, then I’m here and I’m only ever one phone call away. There are…no bad feelings, only love, always that if nothing else.” Lena laughed sadly, crying and unable to hide it. “I’ll call you when I’m back around.”

Soulmates: Chapter XII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)

Over time, the birthmark became this shifting cloud that Kara no longer monitored. It would tingle, grow warm, sit there, melting in its own patient and prolonged way, and Kara felt no real compulsion to hurry her life along or reveal something she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to anymore.

The winter had broken into spring, a season for new things and lovely awakenings. The sixth most-charming park turned out to be the third most-charming park, once they quantified the state of things, compared gardens, took into full account proximity compared to which parks exactly had the better ice creams and coffee amenities.

Kara picked up her office phone to give the tailor a polite heads-up that Miss Grant would be fifteen minutes late to the appointment, give or take. Cat had been in her office for some time longer than expected and Kara didn’t want to disturb, if only for the frustrated back and forth she had been pacing, in circles, incrementally more frustrated as time ticked along.

When Kara picked up the phone, she found herself listening in on the live call.

“Cat, I’m sorry, I know it’s not what you want to hear but you either break the news yourself, or The Starling Post will by six o’clock tonight.”

“James this isn’t a game, kill the fucking story.”

“Cat, it’s gone beyond me, beyond us, I have spent weeks killing this story but this is about to be front page national news on every media coverage platform between here and New York.”

“At least let me talk to Lena first?”

“Cat, I’m telling you this because you are my friend.” There was a deep inhale, then a pause. “Lena is—” The phone cut suddenly.

Kara glanced up. Cat was looking directly at her, furious, her fingers still driven down into the conference button to cancel the three-way line. Instinctively Kara lifted her hands in defence, she didn’t mean to eavesdrop, she just fell into the conversation at a point where she couldn’t take her ear away. Chewing her nails, the reprimand came swift and assured a few minutes later.

Kara went into the office and waited for the telling off of the century.

“How much did you hear and do not.” Cat pinched the bridge of her nose. “Do not bullshit me, Kara.”

“Something and nothing, I heard enough to know there’s a story about to break, one that you want to kill, and it has something to do with Lena.” Kara rubbed the back of her neck. “I know that you’re angry. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, Cat, but please, can you just tell me…” Kara sniffed and felt embarrassed. “Lena isn’t… she hasn’t done something bad, right? I just. I just love her, very much, and that’s new for me, and I don’t want to worry that she’s lied about something I should know about…”

Cat closed her eyes and her expression slackened as though something about the statement took her by surprise, as though it just didn’t sit right with her, despite best appearances otherwise. She swallowed and shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose again.

“Kara, I think you need to sit down.”

“Oh God.” Kara grimaced and knew what was coming. “Is she—has she done something?”

“Kara—”

“Is it going to break my heart?” She panicked.

“Kara—”

“Oh fuck.” Kara screwed her expression and kicked herself as it dawned all at once. “She’s…she’s dating someone else, isn’t she, behind my back?”

“Kara I have cancer!” Cat burst.

Strange.

Just like that…

The world had stopped on its axis.

“Wh…what?” The colour drained from Kara’s face.

“It’s nothing particularly new.” Cat kept a dour affect as though it were common and expected, typical and uncolourful. “It’s simply…progressed.”

At that Kara almost lurched out of her body.

“Progressed?” She went wide-eyed.

“Progressed.” Cat kept tight-lipped on the matter. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m having a busy day. Can you collect my lunch, and then call ahead to my tailor fitting and let him know I’m going to be late—but I will be there as soon as I can be there.” Cat sighed and strolled out of her office, prim and together.

Kara didn’t know how to make sense of it.

Soulmates: Chapter XI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

In crumpled sheets, Kara awoke without a sore head, feeling fresh, and decidedly happy in a way she had never quite felt after a sexual encounter before last night.

“Hey,” Lena whispered with a smile.

“Hey.” Kara sighed. “Do I…get dressed and go? I’m guessing you have plans today.”

“If you’re busy then I’m busy.” Lena stretched. “But, you know, if you’re not busy… we could go for breakfast, maybe go see about the fifth most-charming park in the city, though it’s not technically in the city—more in the wider metropolitan area.”

“Sounds like a long morning if we’re going out to the wider metro,” Kara giggled and pushed forward, pressing her cheek to Lena’s warm bare chest. “Hi, hello again. You look…” Kara kissed her without thinking.

“You too.” Lena mumbled, kissing, smiling into the prolonged and deepened kisses that clung to her cheeks on grasping fingertips. “You looked breath-taking last night, to tell you the truth, nothing has really changed this morning.”

Kara straddled her hips, she giggled and clambered and sat on top of her because it was too hard not to. It was met with uptake, with strong palms on her spine, which wrapped into a hug that felt giddy and exciting, and kisses in stretches and paths that went in their own little pecks all over her collarbones and chest.

“Lena?”

“Yeah?”

“Could we go on a date?” Kara felt breathless but certain—certain despite the profound uncertainty of what she was asking and what it all meant. “It’s okay, you know, if the answer isn’t yes, but if it is then I want to take you somewhere and just… maybe find your sixth most-charming park, if you would like a more expansive list, if there’s parks you haven’t—” The kiss stifled the words back into her mouth.

“Yeah babe,” Lena murmured and shuffled out of bed with the little worrier on her hips. “Let’s go find the sixth.”

Soulmates: Chapter VIII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

A few weeks later, Kara came into work to find an opened letter on her desk that had been addressed to Catherine Grant. Cat was on a business trip to the Cayman Islands concerning business that had absolutely nothing to do with offshore bank accounts—she was quite clear.

Still, the envelope sat opened, which meant Cat had not only read it before some reason overnighted it back to the office, and it was placed on top of a large opaque plastic bag.

Kara turned the envelope in her hand.

Cat had scrawled a note on the back.

Kara,

This invitation arrived too late for me to do anything about. The gala is tonight, at the Dorson Hotel. It’s a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s society, naturally your name was the first one that came to my mind. I believe Lena Luthor is attending too.

If she isn’t, I should imagine you might want to wear this dress and invite her to reconsider her schedule.

Cat.

Kara opened the package already knowing, deep down, on some level, and yet when she saw the colour and felt the silk on her fingertips, it felt necessary to place it down and take a walk to the coffee machine, if only to compose herself.

Inside of her soul there was—as there had always been—a little girl still laying on her childhood bed, ankles kicking, mucky socks, enamoured with pictures of immaculate and fashionable women that she so desperately wanted to look like one day yet knew, with resolution, she would never get the chance.

When would a farm girl ever need a navy silk evening dress, expensive, like that one, with a thigh slit high enough to startle the sheep and send the cicadas blushing?

Internally, the little girl felt like Cinderella going to the ball, like her whole life had just arrived at the moment it was supposed to, and despite knowing it would make for a beautiful photograph, Kara didn’t want to share this—not with anyone she didn’t already know.

Soulmates: Chapter VII

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Catherine Grant wasn’t as horrendous as Kara once felt her to be.

“Kara?” She leaned around her door on a single high heel, swinging a little almost. “The designers have sent over dresses. I need you to organise what I’m keeping and what I’m sending back.”

“Oh sure, of course. I’m covering the op-ed from the children’s hospital fundraiser gala. Can I get you a temp to help you?”

“Kara,” Cat said quietly, her expression flattening almost imperceptibly. “Does it look like a give a fuck about your extra-curriculars? In here, now please, I’m losing white blood cells and collagen with every passing second of the ennui that comes with reminding you of your job…”

“Yes Ma’am.” Kara pushed away lightly from her desk and stood up without a second word, following her boss into the executive office. “Oh!” Her eyes went wide and bright as she glanced at the navy silk with a thigh slit hung on the rack. “Okay, whatever that one is, the colour is beautiful.”

“You think so?” Cat quirked an odd look. “I thought it was a little too warm…”

“For your skin tone?” Kara balked. “Are you kidding? Don’t you remember the photographs from the front row at Paris Fashion Week? I think you were wearing… I can’t remember. It was like a silk blouse and wide legged pant, and it was all navy, just like that colour there.” Kara pointed with a beaming smile. “I remember seeing that photo and thinking…wow.”

“Must have been someone else.” Cat rolled her eyes. “I haven’t been to Paris Fashion Week since at least 2014. After the krav maga incident with Anna Wintour? Battle lines were drawn. It’s very much the Tupac and Biggie of the publishing world. I steer clear of Paris and London Fashion Week, and she knows laying a single footstep on the Oscars red carpet would be tantamount to a drive-by shooting,” Cat said in her refined, clipped way that breezed over the absurdity.

“No, it was definitely you, probably a year or two before that.” Kara nodded and thought nothing of it.

“You could have only been what…” Cat snorted slightly. “A teenager?”

“Mhm.” Kara never took her eyes off the navy dress.

It reminded her of home, her childhood bedroom, and the magazine cut-outs stuck up on the wall that she saved from whatever fancy lifestyle and fashion magazines she could get her hands on.

Kara continued, “I thought you were the most elegant, beautiful woman I had ever seen. I mean, I was a kid, what did I know about fashion?” Kara shrugged and glanced over at her boss. “I wore dungarees and flannel every day—still do when I’m not at work. But, you know, I saw that photograph and figured…I wanted to dress like that one day. I wanted to look that immaculate and ladylike, just like that, put together and pretty, one day.”

In her own world, Kara imagined what Lena would look like in that colour on her creamy ivory skin, her pristine painted red lips, and some beaming carpet ready grin. Lena’s skin was a little cooler toned, Kara imagined emerald, then ruby red, before settling on emerald again.

The green would bring out her eyes, she thought.

Kara flinched, a certain warmth spreading on her hip, right on that spot that never seemed to get any clearer, yet somehow never looked the same for more than a sporadic, ever-shortening period of a few days a time.

“Kara?” Cat’s voice sounded a little softer—maybe just somewhat flattered.

“Mhm?”

“The next time I want a blow-by-blow of your…rather sad, Charlotte’s Web, Wizard Of Oz, there’s no place like home existence of a childhood, back in Shitsville, Nowhere”—There was absolutely no sting in the way she said it and Kara understood perfectly that none was intended—“I will listen to your TedTalk on how you became the foremost expert in the holistic control of high blood pressure in the elderly with advanced-onset Alzheimer’s disease, by boring them, slowly, lulling them into a state of calm, with stories nobody cares to hear.”

“Miss Grant, that one was impressive even for you.”

“I know.” Cat pushed a small, slow smile. “Put that one in the return pile.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

Soulmates: Chapter VI

(Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The park left Kara wondering what the first possibly had to offer that the second most-charming didn’t. She was unsure if it was a date, whether it could even be a date, because Lena had been married. She had never heard of someone having more than one soulmate and really…

Kara wasn’t interested in waiting out the inevitable by wasting Lena’s time.

It was why she was on the dating site. The only dating site. It was less about connecting with strangers and more about matching soulmates, through data algorithms, who simply couldn’t hold out long enough for life to do what life does best—bring them together when the universe felt ready for another happily ever after.

It was computer science that Kara couldn’t quite wrap her brain around. But the statistics were good, the data reliable, and that was why she personally paid for her membership.

It had been a process of intensive questionnaires, psychological profiling, and even if a person didn’t have the full name from their birthmark, there was still a very good chance of hurrying things along. That was how it had been sold to Kara by her friends at least, the small few who had found their soulmates, and they all swore by it.

Sure, maybe it wasn’t as romantic as brushing shoulders at the state fair, seeing their own names cursive and scrawled upon the flesh of another, just like grandma and grandpa once did, but the website had its merits too.

You could enter letters as they became distinguishable, which the system then analysed and ruled out other profiles without those letters, increasing the visibility of other profiles who entered some variation of letters that could be a possible match to your name too.

Kara had zero profiles, zero matches, and she felt that was a good thing.

It meant that she only needed that one dinging notification on her phone to know she had found the love of her life.

“Can I ask a personal question?”

“It’s our third time hanging out and all we’ve done the previous two times is talk personal questions and prying assumptions about one another’s life, it would be weird if you didn’t ask a personal question.” Lena plonked down on the bench, licking her gelato. “I got pistachio, but I assumed you would prefer rum and raisin.”

“That’s an awfully bold assumption.” Kara smirked and felt funny. “Nobody likes rum and raisin.”

“You do.”

“Do not, it’s only my second favourite flavour.”

“Vanilla being the first?” Lena cocked a knowing look. “It’s under there. Two scoops. You were spoiled.”

“How could you possibly…” Kara went bright eyed, confused, and she swallowed hard. “How—I don’t.” She shook her head.

Was Lena her soulmate?

“Oh.” Lena jolted and seemed to realise the weirdness. “Kara, I apologise. Your Instagram. There was a photograph of vanilla bean ice cream, with a scoop of rum and raisin on the side, I think you put something about them being the greatest combination. I don’t know. I just…I remembered?” She shrugged and seemed embarrassed.

“Oh. Oh!” Kara laughed and felt stupid. “Of course, sure, yes. Jesus. I should tone down my Instagram…”

“Don’t.” Lena brushed it off. “Your Instagram is fun. I like seeing when you’re in the forbidden glass elevator, it lets me know Catherine is out of the city on business. Anyway, you were going to ask a personal question?”

“I should warn you that it’s really personal.”

“Sure, we’ve done that before, yes.” Lena nodded and licked her ice cream.

“Is there like, dating websites, you know for…” The question made Lena stop licking, and she pulled back straight with an awkward expression at the question put to her. “I’m so sorry. Please, forget I asked, that was so rude of me.”

“No, I’m just trying to figure how to answer your question because I think your question proposes something that…” Lena came undone as though she didn’t know how to explain herself. “Are you asking me if there are dating websites for people who, for whatever reason, are not with their soulmate?” She asked softly.

“Yeah.” Kara nodded. “I figure there must be. I know this might sound silly, but I haven’t met someone as young or, you know, as beautiful as you, who has gone through this kind of thing? It’s not like my grandpa was thinking about dating after grandma passed. They got to have a lifetime together.”

“I got a lifetime too, just a little shorter than most I guess.” Lena pushed a little smile. “I don’t have a birthmark so I can’t be sure Sam was my soulmate.”

“What?” Kara’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, yep! There’s a few of us.” Lena grinned as though she loved being the person to reveal this oddity to someone who never considered the possibility before. “Some lost a limb before their birthmark came through, there's people with skin conditions, then there's a few like me.” Lena nodded. “My parents took me to the doctor as a baby—they were so concerned—but it turns out a handful of people, every once in a while, are born without fate scorched on their flesh like an Orwellian horror story.”

“I don’t know whether that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Kara pulled back and didn’t know such a thing even existed.

“I hated it as a kid. I felt like some kind of freak. But these days? There’s something pleasantly less…kill myself about the possibility of there being love again.” Lena did the acerbic, pointed, absolutely not-funny thing that was funny enough to make Kara laugh despite not wanting to.

“Is that something you want?” Kara smiled. “Love again?”

“Perhaps, one day. Once—” Lena faintly circled and gestured at her heart as though dust were still settling. Her eyes were sap green, half-lidded, sad, and yet hopeful for better days, and Kara saw that despite never feeling quite that good at picking people apart. “It gets better every day, or just more refined maybe. Missing her for a moment, feeling sad, then picking life up again and finishing whatever I had been doing. So, Kara Danvers, when the cows come home, perhaps it would not be all that terrible to share a toothbrush holder with someone again. I'm not sure about marriage, but you'll tell me if you see any charming young widows in funeral processions going up to City Crematorium who would look much prettier in white?” Her eyes brightened with amusement.

“Shut up.” Kara licked her ice cream, then elbowed the snarker sat beside her on the bench. “You're repugnant.”

“Big word. You should get in on the action with mine and James' rolling game of Words With Friends.”

“If it isn't a little presumptive or rude to ask—”

“Oh, it will be.” Lena had no doubts. “But that isn't to say I mind, I'm very much enjoying this game of ours, so go right ahead.”

“If you didn't have Sam's name then how...” She had been given clear permission and yet Kara felt it could all still come tumbling down. What business was it of hers? She couldn't stop herself. Lena was too interesting, human, and lovely to enjoy a midday ice cream with, so Kara grew brave. “Was Sam like you?”

She chickened out at the last minute.

She wanted to ask their story, their history, how Lena could possibly know the marriage had bones in the absence of a soulmate marking.

Maybe if there was another ice cream date, Kara figured.

“Sam’s birthmark cleared with my name somewhere between friendship and... more than friendship. So, it would be quite strange if we weren't soulmates. That would be strange, right? If there's another Lena out there somewhere meandering through life unaware my Sam ever existed. Maybe she thinks she’s waiting for a Samuel instead of a Samantha?” Kara didn't think it was likely, but she nodded and watched Lena furrow in thought. “Can you imagine how annoying it must be to have a common name as your birthmark? You just spend forty years calling every John, in every phone book, in every town, like a misfortunately abundant lifetime of John?”

“Okay, now you’re making me nervous! What if my birthmark says Jane?” Kara exasperated.

“You like girls?” Lena twisted in surprise at that.

“I figure so.” Kara shrugged. “I feel like my soulmate is a girl. Do you just like girls or…”

“Just women, sure, but again, I hold out hope one of the other markless folk might find me some years from now and prove pleasant enough for a life idled through slowly with decidedly less car crashes than my last marriage, and so if that sensible Sunday driver is a man? He may very well be a man worth spending my life with...”

“That one wasn’t funny.” Kara pushed Lena’s arm, both of them giggling in spurts of guilty laughter. “You are a sick woman, who needs therapy, and also another ice cream. Shit, I’m so sorry I knocked that out of your hand...” Kara reached for napkins to clean her up.

“No, stop, you’re fine.” Lena sighed. “It was a pretty dark joke.”

“You must have really loved her.” Kara observed and felt some sorrow.

Lena stopped at that with an indiscernible expression. “You think?”

“You’re a good person, Lena. Good people only make jokes like that when absolutely certain everyone is in on the laugh. So, I figure, you must have really loved her, and she must have really loved your gross sense of humour.” Kara scoffed and licked her ice cream. “You like vanilla?” She offered some over. “Don’t make me feel bad for knocking your ice cream—you have to eat some if you like vanilla.”

Lena paused with a little shine to her eyes, a little wobble to her lips, and despite seeing it for what it was, Kara didn’t point any of it out.

“I like vanilla,” she murmured quietly and took a taste. “Thanks, Kara.”