Chapter Text
"Since when was Lena moving to National City?" Alex asked as she reached for her beer bottle on Kara's coffee table.
The two were sat in Kara's apartment on the Tuesday evening consuming their weekly Chinese order, with the tv playing some show they’d stopped paying attention to a while ago in favour of conversation.
The blonde, hair down and glasses off, paused with a chopstick full of noodles half way to her mouth, frowning "what do you mean?". Sure, her and Lena had talked a couple of times about the brunette eventually moving to National City but nothing had been permanently put in place, as far as Kara was aware Lena was still doing research with Jack in Metropolis.
“It was on the news earlier that she was set to do a grand opening of the new L-Corp building and there’s rumours that she’ll be working out of national city permanently.” Alex was now also frowning, surely this was some sort of ploy. There’s no way Lena wouldn’t tell at least herself or Kara, her own wife, that she was moving to National City. Unless she hasn’t…
“She hasn’t told you, has she?”
“No, she hasn’t. We’ve discussed the possibility of it at some point, of course, but no solid plan.” Kara pauses perplexed.
“I think you need to call your wife.” Alex murmurs around her beer bottle at the same time Kara moves to get up from the sofa uttering.
“I need to call my wife”
5 Years earlier
A bell rings above the café door as a 19-year-old Kara walks inside the small coffeeshop, her hair in a wispy ponytail, slightly damp, her glasses with rain specks on them from the storm outside. The coffee shop itself isn’t too big, large enough to fit twenty people or so, an assortment of people dotted about, friends catching up over a slice of cake, students sat at the rustic wooden bar along the window of the café nose deep in an essay with a coffee slowly cooling beside them and a queue of two people towards the back where the counter is, patiently waiting for their hot drink.
Perfect, Kara thought.
She was in Metropolis visiting Kal and Lois but had to find a way to entertain herself a couple of hours during the day whilst they were both at the Planet, she decided to go for a wonder about the city, familiarising herself with the inner workings of the city. This was the first time she’d visited her cousin in his own city it was also the first time she’d been left alone in the city to do as she pleased. She was old enough now, her cousin deemed, to look after herself in the concrete jungle. “use your hearing to find me if you get lost” he had said. Fair enough she had thought, quite excited at the prospect of exploring the city her cousin had spent a lot of his adult life but a part of her did resent the fact he’d left her alone again, even if it is only for a day.
She had previously stumbled upon an old book shop where she picked up a book on quantum mechanics. Upon heading back onto the busy streets, she meandered through the expansive metropolis park, where dogs were being walked, families were out with their children and birds were flying about, it was all very peaceful and relatively quiet, until it wasn’t. a siren from a police car sped by interrupting her serenity, she was still struggling with all the different noises of the city, even after her first year at national city university there was still times that kara found herself getting overwhelmed.
Now seemed to be one of those times.
This is how she found herself in the coffee shop away from the noise as best she could, a little nook on a random side street, which thankfully wasn’t playing any music, one less sound not to focus on. She stepped into the queue that had only the one person in front of her, she slipped her glasses off for a moment to clean the waterdrops off with the edge of her t shirt, that’s when it happened. One moment she was stood there focusing all her attention on the motion of cleaning her glasses, practising the new technique Kal had taught her the previous evening of focusing on one motion, one action, one sense when she was feeling too overstimulated, on the cusp of a larger reaction.
That’s when she bumped into her. Completely blindsided if you will. Her glasses dropped out of her hands, clattering to the floor, a hot coffee that would scald if she were human split over her cardigan and jeans.
“oh my goodness I am so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention” a head of brunette hair was scrambling down to pick up her glasses, kara bent down to meet her and as they both went to stand up they both saw the faces that, some would say, were fated to meet.
They stood there, enraptured. Blue meeting green.
The spiller of the coffee spoke first “are you alright, that coffee was boiling? I’m sorry I wasn’t paying any attention to where I was going. Silly me, so clumsy sometimes.”
“um”
Kara was transfixed, somehow this woman was both the most human and most alien woman she’d seen. Surely too beautiful to be human, she thought. She thanked Roa for bestowing this woman in her presence on this day, from her eyes that both weakened her like kryptonite and strengthened her like the sun to her hair that reminded her of the night sky that’d fall upon Argo many years ago. Her bearings finally came back to her as she realised, she was probably staring for too long than what was deemed appropriate.
“no, you’re okay, I’ve got thick skin don’t worry about it. How about your paper? That seems to have suffered a worst fate than my cardigan.” The blonde gestured down the coffee-soaked paper hanging limply from the stranger’s hand, words now all disfigured and incomprehensible.
“No no it’s okay, it’s a printout don’t worry, I can get another printed out easy enough. It’s a first draft anyway so you’ve, or well myself I suppose, has done me a favour.” The brunette waved the coffee sodden papers towards the bin and swept a tendril of hair behind her ear as she smiled bashfully towards her now empty takeaway cup.
“Well since I was in the way of your first draft reading, could I replace your coffee maybe?”
“If anything, I should be buying you a drink for nearly scalding you and ruining a perfectly good cardigan.”
“I’ll never say no to a free drink from a pretty stranger.”
“You know that’s normally cause for concern; you shouldn’t trust strangers so easily.” The woman, who couldn’t be much older than her, sent her a sideway smirk as they queued up in front of the counter.
“I’ll take my chances.”
The smirk turned into a blinding smile. “You don’t even know my name.”
Kara hummed “you haven’t told me.”
“Lena”
Beautiful, just like her, kara thought.
Lena outstretched her hand in the gap between their bodies.
“Kara”
Kara gripped her hand, focusing on not gripping too tight. Palm meets palm and the warmth only seems to resonate within Kara, she hoped this magnetic woman wouldn’t be a stranger for too much longer.