Archive of Our Own ^beta

then

It’s late.  

It’s so late, and Lena’s so tired, and her feet have been hurting since ten this morning, and all she wants is to go back to her hotel and throw away her shoes and drink the overpriced bottle of wine that was waiting for her when she checked in yesterday and forget about all of the handshaking and sweet-talking she’s had to do for the last fourteen hours.

Except this is the first merger Lex let her in on, her first since she blasted out of graduate school with her shining dual masters’ degrees to the office Lex had prepared for her, two floors down from his in the gleaming Metropolis headquarters with the staff that are all older than her and waiting for her to trip, to fall, to ruin something so they can throw her to the side.  This is her first project, her first chance to prove herself, her first chance to ruin herself, so even though it’s late and the executives she’s been trying to goad and flatter and cajole into easing the transition plan are disgusting and old and interested only in either her cleavage or her money--sometimes both-- she keeps a smile on her face and makes her way through the building, introducing herself to everyone from analyst to vice president.

By the time she makes it back up towards the higher floors where she’d started her day, where the offices were more spread out, the people fewer and more offensively lewd, she’s met nearly every person in the company they’re buying up and smoothly convinced nearly every important entity within the organization to do their best to make the transition work.

Everyone, at least, but one.  Samantha Arias, some associate or assistant vice president on the finance side, the one who’d been out most of the last two days for some family emergency or another.  There’s one light still on in the executive suites, one office still up and running, and Lena sighs, squares her shoulders, marches forward on aching feet to meet the elusive woman who’s working intently in an empty office building at one in the morning.

“You must be Miss Luthor.”

Samantha Arias is tall, and flustered, pushing up from her desk and hurrying around it to offer her hand.  She’s tall, and flustered, and far more attractive than anyone has any right to be when they’re clearly exhausted and ready to be done with the extremely flattering suit they’re still wearing well into the night in their offensively cramped office, and Lena’s brain shortcircuits for a brief moment.

“I am,” she says belatedly, reaching almost inelegantly for the proffered hand.  “I was sure there was no one else left in the building--”

“I know, I know,” Samantha says, and she reclaims her hand and pushes at her hair with a deep breath.  “I was out for a few days, my daughter was sick and I could only do so much over the VPN, so I’m doing my best to catch up.  I know Jason said that your team needs those cash flows tomorrow, so--”

“Miss Arias, please, don’t worry about it.  Your daughter is obviously more important than a business deal.”  

Lena has never once felt for a second that a family emergency could excuse late work, but she finds herself saying it anyways, and meaning it.  It’s enough to cut through the fluster, and Samantha leans against her desk, slumping tiredly and shoving her hands into her pockets with a sigh, and her rolled-up sleeves show lean lines of muscle along her forearms that shift as she does, and Lena realizes immediately that she’s about to do something incredibly stupid.  

“Thank you,” Sam says, smiling tiredly and letting her head drop down for a moment.

“Of course,” Lena says, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe.  She glances back out into the empty hallway and then back into the office with a wry smile.  “Between you and me, I think your boss needs a few more days to get all of his--ah--”

“Shit in line?”  It’s dry and comes with a smile and startles something approximating a laugh from Lena.

“Something like that, yes,” Lena says delicately, one eyebrow lifting, and Samantha rolls her head on her neck, groaning at the series of cracks that follow, and Lena presses her lips together because Samantha Arias is the first person above a director level at this company who’s not come up on a single one of the LuthorCorp watchlists and that she doesn’t have a strategy in place for excising within six months post-merger, and she’s standing in her office being tall and beautiful and charming and Lena is almost definitely going to be get in trouble for this, but--

“Leave the cash flows for tomorrow,” she says.  “You should be home with your daughter.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” Sam says, dragging her head back down and offering a smile, tired and warm and too attractive for Lena to actually handle.  “It was some 24-hour bug, she’s totally recovered and at the neighbor’s until tomorrow night. I’ll have everything wrapped up--”

The deferral slides right into place as Lena had expected, and she holds back a smile of her own and instead shrugs on shoulder.  “Then come get a drink with me. Off the record, I’d like to hear what you have to say about your colleagues.”

“Oh,” Samantha says, blinking owlishly at Lena, before her shoulders slump and she shrugs. “Sure, why not. Let me just--” She pivots around her too-small desk and shuts down her computer, retrieves her purse, straightens back up with an uncertain smile.  

“I’m not terribly familiar with the area,” Lena says, stepping out of the doorway and gesturing for Samantha to lead the way.  “But I do know that the hotel I’m staying at has a fantastic wine selection.”

Two hours later, after a bottle of wine in the hotel bar and a protracted session of mutual complaining about the lewd and lazy men who Lena had been dealing with all day and Samantha had been dealing with for two years, Lena’s hips are straining off the expensive sheets on her hotel’s bed, her hands tangled into Sam’s-- “Call me Sam,” she’d murmured, somewhere between the last glass of wine and the first time Lena had kissed her, eyes glancing down towards Lena’s hand and how it’s found a place on her thigh-- long hair, spine arching and eyes sliding shut and sinking too far into something that feels too good to be just a one-time mistake.

 

Step One:

“I’m going to move the company.”

It’s late, so late it’s well into morning, and too quiet far above the city in Lena’s apartment.  She doesn’t move, speaking towards the ceiling, save for the way her fingers on one hand twist into the sheets bunching around her.  

Sam rolls over onto one elbow, reaching for Lena but not far enough, her hand settling flat on the sheets instead, close but not close enough, uncertainty written into the familiar lines of her face.  “What?”

“I won’t ask you to move,” Lena says softly, and turns her head just enough to face her.  “But the only way to save it is to rebrand and rebuild, and it can’t be here.”

“Lena,” Sam says quietly.  She reaches for her hesitantly, fingertips catching the sleeve of Lena’s sweater, warm through the cashmere but not warm enough to counter the cold certainty that had taken up residence in Lena’s chest the day Lex burned their entire legacy to the ground.  “I don’t know if now’s the best time to--”

“It has to be as immediate as possible.”  Lena sits up and swings her feet off the bed, bare toes digging into the thick carpet, turning her back from Sam because it’s the only way she can end this-- this-- this arrangement between them that was never a relationship, never real, never anything but warmth and release and calm in a tumultuous world that’s just been ripped apart by her own brother’s homicidal terrorist attack that killed hundreds.  She pushes her hands onto her knees and keeps her back straight, her voice steady. “The longer I wait, the more the news cycle will only associate the company with Le-- with his name. The only way to save it, to save all of those jobs, is to distance it immediately. I have to--”

“I meant for you.”  

It cuts through Lena’s ramble, derails her planned argument, and lands warm and heavy on her shoulders.  

“I don’t know if now’s the best time for you to be making any big decisions.”  Sam’s speaking carefully, more measured than she’s ever been in the last year and a half that they’ve been-- friends, colleagues, allies, whatever it is that they are.  “Your whole life just got turned upside down. You’re allowed to take time to--”

“I don’t have that luxury,” Lena says sharply.  She pushes up to standing and paces away, towards the window, further from where Sam’s sitting on her bed, in jeans and a soft sweater, the same clothes she’d been wearing when the news about Lex came through and she deposited Ruby at a babysitter’s so she could come and be there for Lena, be here with Lena.  “Too many people rely on this company for me to take the time to wallow in my feelings and let it all fall apart.”

“Lena,” Sam says softly, her eyes shining in the soft edges of sunset that have made it through the windows.  “Don’t--”

“This will obviously have to end,” Lena says carefully.  “It never should have gone on as it has, and I’ll be--” Her voice catches somewhere in her chest and she grinds her teeth together.  She hasn’t cried once since this started and she won’t start now, over some non-relationship, over sex, over Sam . “I would appreciate it if you keep our non-work activities to yourself, should anyone ever ask.”

“Right,” Sam says thinly.  “Because you’re the only one who has something to lose if it comes out that I’ve been fucking the company’s namesake for the last year and am the only VP who survived the takeover.”

“That’s not why you were kept on,” Lena says before she can stop herself, the defense of Sam’s abilities automatic.  “You’re extraordinary at your job, you know that--”

“You don’t have to take the whole world on your shoulders,” Sam says, pushing her feet into her shoes and shoving a hand through her hair.  “You’re allowed to be hurt by what he did. You can take time to be human.”

“When have I ever had that option?” Lena says quietly.  She wraps her arms around herself and tilts her head towards the door.  “Thank you for your concern. I’ll see you at work.”

She doesn’t move until her knees start to ache from standing stiffly for so long, well after Sam’s left.  Her phone is still on the counter in the kitchen where she’d left it when Sam arrived, filled to bursting with notifications and emails and missed calls and, in the middle of them all, a text from a familiar number that she’d never actually needed to label.  

Don’t forget to take care of yourself when you’re taking care of everyone else

It’s easier to focus on saving the company she’s inherited than on the process she’s engineering in the back of her head to excise herself from a non-relationship with Samantha Arias, even as she plots it out and executes the first step by by deleting the text and the entire chain preceding it before setting to returning phone calls.

then

“Are you sure we should--”

“Shh!” Sam says, melodramatically comical and too loud for the concrete stairwell they’re in, the sound ricocheting off the walls.  “You’re going to get us in trouble.”

“I own the building, Samantha,” Lena says archly, even as she allows herself to be dragged up the stairs towards the roof access.  “We could have used the elevators.”

“Sneaking away from the holiday party isn’t nearly as fun if you’re allowed to do it and you know it,” Sam says with a sniff.  She flings the door open and grins widely back down at Lena, three steps down, who huffs out a sigh to keep herself from smiling in return because Sam is still tall and still beautiful and still so endearingly charming that Lena can never stop herself.  “Come on.”

It’s freezing on the roof, the cold air cutting through Lena’s flimsy fashionable coat, and she shivers as soon as she steps out.  “This is ridiculous--”

“Over here,” Sam says, rolling her eyes and hooking a hand around Lena’s elbow to yank her around the access door into a sheltered nook away from the wind.  “See? Not that cold at all.”

“It’s still cold.”

“Maybe a little,” Sam amends.  “But it’s quiet, you know? One of the admins used to come up here to smoke, and she told me about it.  No one else really comes up here and it’s just--quiet.”

“Hmph,” Lena says indelicately, and burrows further into her coat to hide the fact that she’s smiling like a drunk idiot.  She glances out across the rooftop to the skyline around them, clear and bright in the cold. “Lex used to love going up to the roof.  Wherever we were, he’d always find a way. He said it helped him think, being able to see the sky.”

“Used to?”  Sam’s coat is unbuttoned, her suit perfectly pressed and the top two buttons on her shirt undone even in the cold, the edges of her collarbones peeking out and taunting Lena.

“He’s too busy now, I suppose.”  Lena smiles, thin and tired, and shrugs.  “When I was first adopted, the first thing he did was teach me how to play chess.  The second was how to get to the roof of the house. We weren’t supposed to, but all of the staff always loved him, and would cover for us whenever our parents asked after us.”

“He sounds like a good brother,” Sam says softly, smiling lazy and warm.  “Do you like working with him?”

“I do.  Even when it’s harder because everyone assumes-- because--”  She pulls in a deep breath of frozen air and shudders. “It’s freezing up here, Samantha.”  

“Here, this will warm you up.”  Sam produces a half-empty bottle of scotch from her coat with a flourish.  

“Honestly, you’re a terrible influence,” Lena says, even as she takes a long sip and sinks into the warmth spreading out from her chest.  “What would your daughter say?”

“She’s nine, she only cares about Justin Bieber and the Disney channel,” Sam says flippantly.  

Lena blinks slowly, forehead wrinkling and years counting off in her head more slowly than usual, too much alcohol and the sheer intoxication of being a foot away from Sam slowing her down.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Sam says, small and quiet and suddenly uncertain in a way Lena’s never seen in the last two months of working together almost every day and fucking secretly in the private bathroom in Lena’s office.  

“The pictures--”

“I only bring in older pictures,” Sam says.  She takes a long swallow of the scotch and lets out a slow breath.  “I was sixteen. Not everyone takes well to the teenage pregnancy thing, so I just--don’t tell them.”

“You were sixteen?” Lena echoes.  “And now you’re--”

Sam shrugs and takes another sip, offers Lena the bottle and avoids her gaze.  “My mom threw me out. Some friends’ parents let me stay with them until I got my GED and found a job, and I took night classes from there.”  She shrugs again and smiles thinly. “There’s a shocking number of scholarships out there for degenerate homeless teenage single mothers.”

“That’s...” Lena starts, eyes wide.  “You’re extraordinary.” She discards the bottle and wraps her hands onto the lapels of Sam’s coat, pushing up on her toes and pulling until she can kiss her, clumsy and cold and uncertain but important , because Sam is important and Lena doesn’t know how else to say it without digging herself deeper into this mess she’s put herself in.  

“This is probably a bad idea,” Sam mumbles against her lips, even as her hands flex at Lena’s waist, somehow burning warm through her coat.  

“I’m not sure that I care either way,” Lena says, and she pulls again, kisses Sam again, presses as close to her as she can.  “Let’s get out of here.”

Sam doesn’t say anything and just kisses Lena, hands curling up around her wrists to her hands and pulls them free from her lapels, breaking off suddenly and pulling Lena back towards the stairwell.

Step Two:

Lena makes the arrangements to move LuthorCorp-- to be rebranded as L Corp-- to National City, one of the only large cities in the country that’s never had an office for a single Luthor corporation or subsidiary or charity, over the course of a month.  She does it through twenty hour days and a liberal use of non-disclosure agreements among every facet of the team she organizes so that the enormous donation she makes to the children’s hospital in National City will be completed and reported on exactly four months before the rebrand to L Corp is announced, and six months before the relocation is completed, far enough apart to mitigate criticisms of opportunism but close enough to hopefully offer a positive turn on the reporting.

The team she uses is mainly lawyers, along with an army of expensive marketers to plan the branding changes, and only one finance person, too junior to technically be there, but also the only person Lena’s trusted aside from her brother.  And, well, maybe trust is overrated, but Sam also has just as much a reason to keep her mouth shut as Lena does, and there’s no potential outcome in the process where Sam talks and it hurts Lena more than it hurts her and her Ruby.

There’s plenty Lena doesn’t know at this point about this uncharted territory she’s in, but that much she does know.  If she calls it mutually assured destruction in her head when she adds Sam’s name to the meeting invites and the transition emails, then that’s fine.  If Sam lingers after every meeting but never quite makes it around to saying anything, concern written plainly into her posture and frustration darkening her eyes when she looks at Lena, then that’s fine, too.

There’s something deep in her chest that Sam took ahold of, somewhere between how her lips learned every inch of Lena’s skin and how she pulled every secret anxiety Lena’s ever held from deep inside her with nothing more than encouraging smiles and gentle hands and kept it all safe, something that burns with resistance every time Lena forces her features into a neutral expression in Sam’s presence.  It’s something new that constructed itself without Lena’s permission over the past months, over working lunches and coffee breaks, weekend mornings in Sam’s apartment and at Ruby’s soccer games and the way she’d structured every meeting possible to be with Sam instead of her bosses.

It’s burns every time Sam’s name comes up, every time she hears Sam’s voice, every long worried look from Sam when no one else is paying attention.  

Early in the process of organizing the relocation, she pulls together a list of executives and research teams she wants moved to the new office and submits it to the head of human resources to develop proposed incentive packages to entice them all to agree to it.  She adds Sam’s name at the very end of the list, out of alphabetical order, and sends the email before she can make herself delete it.

then

“Miss Luthor, Natalie just called from Miss Arias’s office.”  Her voice wavers over the phone, and Lena bites back a sigh.

“Yes?”

“Miss Arias is working remotely today,” Jess says nervously.  “She’s asked to add a dial-in to the 1:30 meeting.”

Lena rubs at her forehead, an ache already heavy behind her eyes even this early in the day, and pulls up the meeting agenda.  A hoard of other finance people and Sam are the only other attendees.

“Just reschedule the meeting, please, Jess,” Lena says after a moment.  “I’d rather we all be in the room.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jess squeaks out.

“And Jess?”  Lena pulls in a slow breath and calms herself, reminds herself how nervous she was her first week, and breathes.  “You’re doing a great job. Don’t stress yourself out.”

“I-- thank you, Miss Luthor.”  The line clicks off and Lena slumps back into her chair.  She only slept three hours the night before, the latest mergers and Lex’s increasingly worrisome long nights in his lab keeping her from any reasonable amount of rest.  This meeting was going to be the first time she’d been in the same room as Sam in two weeks, since the last time her fingernails had dug into the skin of Sam’s back and she’d arched into her, biting down on her shoulder to stay quiet as Sam fucked her slow and lazy in the private bathroom of her office after a nine AM meeting had wrapped early.  

Lena shuts her laptop with a snap and gathers her coat and purse, moving briskly and deliberately to undermine the anxiety warring with her exhaustion. Jess looks up from her desk with wide eyes when Lena emerges, uncertainty tightening her shoulders, and Lena holds up a hand and keeps moving.

“Hold my calls until I return, will you, please?  I’m going to be out until this afternoon.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jess says again, staring unblinking at her as Lena strides to the elevator.  “Should I call you a car?”

“No, thank you,” Lena says as she sweeps into the elevator.  She takes a moment to smile at her assistant in what she hopes is a calm way before the elevator doors close.

It only takes fifteen minutes to walk to Sam’s apartment building, the route familiar under her feet, and her heel click dully on the cheap tile in the lobby.  She’s never walked through it alone before, always making her way in and out of the building with Sam and asking, without fail, how much of a raise she needs to offer her so that she and Ruby can live somewhere nicer.  The elevator carpet is old, if mostly clean, and she keeps her chin high as she marches down the hallway to the apartment at the end of the hall and knocks twice.

The door opens to Sam, her forehead wrinkling and mouth dropping open.  “Hey,” she says after a moment. “What are you--”

“If you honestly think I was going to sit in that meeting without a single other woman present, you’re not nearly as smart as I always thought you were,” Lena says archly.  

“In my defense, it’s completely Ruby’s fault,” Sam says with a shrug, speaking back over her shoulder and stepping back to give Lena space to come in.

“Blaming your child, Samantha?  Really?”

“Yeah,” Ruby pipes up indignantly, even as she slams into Lena for a hug.

“It’s parent/teacher conference day at school,” Sam says as she shuts the door.  “And someone seemed to think that if she didn’t bring home the notices then I wouldn’t go.”  She folds her arms over her chest and raises an eyebrow at Ruby, who shuffles her feet against the carpet.  “Homework, kiddo. Off you go.”

“Bye, Lena,” Ruby mumbles, shuffling back towards her room.

“I can see if I can reschedule the conference,” Sam offers, even as she automatically takes Lena’s purse and sets it on the counter.  

“I already told Jess to reschedule the meeting,” Lena says.  She shrugs out of her jacket and tosses it over the back of the couch.  “Honestly, I could use a break.”

“And you thought that this would be the place to spend your break?”

“Well,” Lena says, faltering for the first time.  “I mean--”

“I have to leave for the school in--” She cranes her head around Lena to check the clock over the kitchen table and the scent of her soap washes over Lena.  “Sixty two minutes.”

Lena breathes in slowly, fingers tangling into the loose edges of the flannel shirt Sam’s wearing, unbuttoned and fluttering over a t-shirt, and her eyes slide shut without her meaning to.

“You look totally worn out,” Sam says gently.  “Come on.” She curls an arm around Lena, easy and warm, and Lena slumps into her side and lets herself be guided down the hallway to Sam’s room.  It feels different on a weekday, the bed made and not the mess of blankets that it’s always been in when she’s left on weekend mornings, the windows cracked and sunlight filtering in and warming the cool colors of Sam’s grey sheets and blue blankets.  

Sam pulls the blankets back with one hand, the other out for Lena to hold onto for balance as she toes out of her heels.  Familiar hands find the zipper on her dress and pull down, soft and comforting and for the first time not remotely sexual, and Lena sighs until her shoulders relax and Sam peels her dress off.  She accepts the sweatpants Sam offers her from the closet and the flannel she shrugs out of, and slips into them, the pants bunching at the ankles and the shirt soft and loose and comforting, and drops down to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Just for a few minutes,” Lena mumbles, even as she curls onto her side and sinks into the mattress.

“Definitely. Totally just a few minutes.” Sam pulls the blanket up to her shoulder and smooths it down.  “I’ll wake you up if there’s a crisis of some kind.”

“Okay,” Lena says, already half asleep, warm in Sam’s bed and surrounded by the soft comfort that is the Arias home, where she can hear Sam closing the door and moving back into the kitchen to unload the dishwasher and Ruby down the hall, door half-open and music floating out into the apartment.  

She wakes up and the shadows have stretched across the room, a cool breeze blowing in through the open window.  She’s wrapped around a pillow, the blankets half flung away and one leg of her sweatpants rucked up towards her knee inelegantly.  Her dress is on a hanger hooked over the door to Sam’s closet, her shoes set neatly under it.

Lena shuffles out into the living room and finds Sam and Ruby on the couch with plates of pizza, and blinks sluggishly at them.

“She lives,” Sam says around a mouthful of pizza crust.  “Was wondering when you were gonna wake up.”

“Yeah, you slept for a whole day,” Ruby chimes in, and panic lurches in Lena’s stomach.

“What?”

“Be nice,” Sam says, nudging at Ruby’s elbow with her foot.  “You did not sleep for a whole day. It’s, like, six.” She produces Lena’s phone from the arm of the couch and offers it to her.  “I checked in at work. The world is not ending. Have some pizza.”

“Oh,” Lena mumbles.  “Good to know.” She unlocks her phone and scrolls through emails anyways, wrinkling her nose when Sam scoffs at her.  The plates are in the cabinet to the right of the sink and she claims one without looking away from her phone and makes her way back into the living room to settle on the couch and accept a piece of pizza from Ruby.  

“Everything good, sleeping beauty?” Sam stretches an impossibly long leg out behind Ruby to push at Lena’s thigh and then dig her toes in under it, wiggling comfortably and raising an eyebrow at the way Lena inspects her pizza and then pats at it with a paper towel to soak up the worst of the grease.  

“The world did not end, you were right,” Lena says delicately.  “Though you did promise to wake me up after half an hour.”

“My dastardly plan to get you caught up on sleep has been revealed,” Sam deadpans.  “Foiled again!” She flails one arm out dramatically, drawing a giggle from Ruby, and Lena rolls her eyes and squirms around on the couch until she’s more comfortable.  

“You’re clearly an evil genius,” Lena says.  

“We’re going to watch Mulan,” Ruby interjects.  “After dinner. Are you going to stay?”

“Oh, I couldn’t--”

“I think so,” Sam says over her, raising an eyebrow at Lena.  “Anyone who shows up at nine in the morning and sleeps until six clearly is too tired to be left to their own devices.  Tired driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving, after all.”

“I took a taxi, thank you very much.”

“It’s the principle of the matter,” Sam says with a flap of one hand.  “You’ll just go home and work until two AM again. As your friend it’s clearly my responsibility to stop you from doing that.”

Something warm and easy burns in Lena’s chest, and she clears her throat and focuses down on her pizza, picking an overly-greasy piece of pepperoni off and automatically offering it to Sam.  “If you insist.”

“I insist,” Sam says, and she pops the pepperoni into her mouth with a grin.

“I insist!” Ruby echoes.  

Lena settles back into the couch, Sam’s leg stretched out and pressed against her thigh and Ruby sandwiched between them, and puts her phone face-down on the arm of the couch.  The world can wait until tomorrow.

 

Step Three:

The day the rebrand is announced, the news floods in with cynicism and disdain, as expected.  Lena tasks her least favorite public relations director with combing through it all and organizing the information into a categorized and ranked database for her to review.  Over half of it is about Lex and his insanity, his genius, the number of lives he ruined; a large, but smaller than expected, portion disaparages her personally for everything from her age to her looks to her ruthlessly capitalistic opportunism.  

It’s worse than she’d expected but, in all honestly, better than she could have realistically hoped for.  The interview she’d done with the Wall Street Journal will drop in two days and, hopefully, will settle some of the flightier shareholders and board members, and the plans for the relocation are moving along on schedule and ready to be announced.  

There’s a folder on her computer with all of the arranged compensation and incentive packages that HR had put together to convince as many of the necessary staff as possible to make the move.  Still out of alphabetical order and at the bottom of list of numbered subfolders is Sam Arias, Vice President of Capital Markets, with a promotion and an exceedingly generous pay bump, a relocation expense, a realty portfolio of suburban homes in excellent school districts to choose from, and enough of a bonus even after taxes to send Ruby to half of the colleges in California for at least the first two years.

Lena hits print on the document and sweeps out of the empty office, the afternoon having disappearing into her examination of the media response to the rebrand and the office emptying around her, and yanks the papers off the printer on her way to the elevator.  She barely breathes the whole walk to Sam’s apartment, and only pauses for one deep breath before knocking. It’s late on a Tuesday, late enough that Ruby’s soccer practice would have already ended, and sure enough the door’s opened by a freshly-showered Ruby beaming up at her.

“Lena!” She’s wrapped in a hug before she can say anything, and her chest burns at the way Ruby holds her tight.  Sam appears in the background, arms folded over her chest carefully, and stays quiet until Ruby pulls back.

“Ruby, babe, can you give us a minute?  We have to talk about work.”

Ruby grumbles until Sam shoots her a firm look, and disappears down the hall with a wave to Lena, who stands awkwardly in the doorway.  

“What’s up?” Sam keeps her distance, leaving Lena to step in and close the door behind her, posture sharp and unchanging.  

“I,” Lena starts, and her stomach aches for a moment.  “I wanted to show you something.”

“And it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

Lena shoves the papers out for Sam instead of answering, words dying in her throat and her planned eloquence, the part where she explained how important Sam was to LuthorCorp-- to L Corp-- and the fundamental part she played in keeping the company flying true after Lex ruined everything, how imperative it was to the company, to Lena, that Sam moved with them, evaporates because she threw Sam’s friendship, her comfort, her concern away months ago and has no right to ask anything of her.

Sam’s eyes dart over the documents and go wide, and she stares back up at Lena. “What is this?” she says quietly.

“A promotion you deserve,” Lena manges to say.  “And a compensation package suiting your capabilities and the role you’ve played in this organization to date.”

“In National City,” Sam says, slow and even, and the burn in Lena’s chest, the one that feels like kissing on a rooftop in the middle of winter and fucking in her office’s private bathroom and three hour drunk conversations late into the night in Sam’s bed about all the ways their childhoods ruined them both, pivots into something far more dangerous, sinking down into her stomach and through her blood.  She’s seen Sam angry before, but never at home, never like this, never at her.

“You spend a year fucking me in secret and then kick me to the curb because you’re so convinced you have to take on the world alone, and now you want me to move my daughter across the country so I can keep being your emotional safety net?”

“I want you to move across the country because you’re one of the only people I trust with my company,” Lena says, aiming for firm but wavering nonetheless, because Sam is furious and seems taller than ever and Lena wants to run, wants to hide, wants to yank at Sam’s collar and kiss her until it hurts more than the way it’s hurt waking up every morning since her brother became the worst mass murderer in the 21st century.  “Please consider my offer.”

“Your offer,” Sam echoes, and Lena pulls her chin up and squares her shoulders and nods once.

“I’ll see you at work,” she says, proud when her voice only wobbles the smallest bit, and sweeps back out the door as quickly as she can without sacrificing the few shreds of pride she has.  

She makes it ten steps down the hall before pivoting on one heel and marching back to the door, fist up to knock and nearly colliding with Sam’s nose when the door opens before she can hit it, and Sam meets her in the middle, hands grasping and lips angry and kisses her until Lena’s nearly hanging in her arms taking big gasping breaths and gripping too-tight at her shoulders.  Her lipstick’s smudged across Sam’s mouth and her fingernails are digging into Sam’s skin through her shirt, hard enough that her knuckles ache when she pulls them free and hurries away.

She doesn’t look back, but hears the door shut softly around the time she makes it to the elevator, and finally lets out a heavy bursting breath and drops her head into her hands.

then

The Luthor house in Austria is high in the Alps, so high that it disappears into the clouds most days, and Lena hates it.  It’s cold and empty and, unfortunately, Lex’s favorite holiday getaway, and so she goes, diligently, every year for the holidays.  

This year is different.  They’re all there and her mother is cold as usual, but Lex has barely emerged from the library the whole time, snarling at anyone who tries to enter.

I don’t even know what time zone you’re in but happy new year!

The text comes in at four in the afternoon on New Years Eve, followed by a picture of Ruby  engrossed in the lab kit Lena had bought her for Christmas.

You’re gonna spoil my kid btw

Lena smiles in spite of herself and swallows the rest of her drink in one go, letting out a sigh and staring up at the ceiling.  There are a dozen work issues she should be dealing with, chief among them reviewing the options Sam had submitted for budget adjustments to deal with the capital Lex had burned through by redirecting half of the research teams onto special projects he wouldn’t let anyone speak about.  

Instead, she pours herself another glass of wine and stabs lazily at the video chat icon on her phone.  It rings in her hand for long seconds and she’s already halfway through the new glass of wine and about to give up when Sam’s forehead appears suddenly.

“Hey!” The camera pulls back shakily and Sam smiles at her, lopsided in the picture, eyebrows lifted.  

“Hi,” Lena says, smiling automatically.  

“Where even are you?  There’s no way you’re anywhere around here with that much snow.”

“Austria,” Lena says, blowing air out through her lips indignantly and rolling her eyes.  “Family tradition.”

“Sounds terrible,” Sam deadpans, and she matches Lena’s eyeroll.  

“How was your Christmas?”

“Oh, it was fine.” Sam shrugs and shuffles around, resituating on what Lena recognizes as the couch in their apartment.  “Just the two of us, nice and easy. We made way too many cookies and then ate all of them and I gained like forty pounds from it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you look terrible now,” Lena says with a scoff, wrinkling her nose and taking in as much of the familiar lines of lean muscle that make up Sam’s body as she can with ehr limited view.  “You literally have the body of a supermodel always.”

“That is a highly inappropriate comment, Miss Luthor,” Sam throws back at her, even as her cheeks darken imperceptibly, and Lena rewards her success with another sip of wine.  “If you want to go over the adjustments, I can--”

“I haven’t looked at them yet,” Lena blurts out.  “I mean, I’m going to tomorrow, but I just-- haven’t yet.”

“Okay,” Sam says slowly, eyebrows lifting and chin propping in her hand.  The camera shakes in her other hand for a moment and Lena squints as it blurs.  “So what’s up?”

“I,” Lena starts, and then stops, her forehead creasing.  “I just wanted to wish you a happy new year.”

“Oh,” Sam says, smiling soft and surprised, and warmth that has nothing to do with wine spreads in Lena’s chest and settles in her toes.  “Happy new year, Lena.”

“So.”  Lena clears her throat after a long moment of staring baldly at Sam’s smile and wishing she was there in Sam’s apartment, small and cozy and homey, watching Disney movies with her and Ruby.  “Ruby liked her gift?”

“Oh, man.”  Sam rolls her eyes and points sharply at her phone.  “We need to have a discussion about price limits for gifts.”

“I’m encouraging her interest in STEM, thank you very much,” Lena says indignantly.  “Don’t you think all little girls should be supported in their interest in the hard sciences?”

“Don’t even try it, lady,” Sam says, firm and sharp and smiling anyways, and Lena sets her wine glass aside and curls more comfortably into her chair, settling in and smiling as well.

Step Three:

Two days and four meetings pass after Lena delivers the promotion offer to Sam’s apartment, nothing but cordial and professional interactions about nitpicky logistics like tax differences in California and how it might affect cash flows, and Lena’s adjusted herself to accepting that things with Sam-- which were never things , but just moments, perhaps-- are over.

Two days and four meetings pass and Lena gets drunk in her office on a Friday night, sitting alone in the empty building and scrolling through the latest iteration of her name trending on Twitter.  

“What are you still doing here?”

She nearly knocks her glass over, Sam’s form silhouetted in the doorway, and Lena lets out a sigh.  

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“I was on my way out and saw your driver still playing Candy Crush at Jess’s desk,” Sam points out.  

“Ah,” Lena says dumbly, and curses herself for it.  “Well. Just working on a few things. Shouldn’t you be--”

“It’s July,” Sam says, stiff and formal.  “Ruby’s at girl scout camp.”

“Right,” Lena says quietly, and rubs at her forehead.  She’d known that. “I knew that.”

“You haven’t been staying here like this every night, have you?”

“Of course not,” Lena says, indignant and entirely untrue.  She takes another sip to cover her discomfort and her lie. “Do you want a drink?”

“Lena,” Sam says with a sigh.  “Go home.”

“You’re one to talk,” Lena says moodily.  

“Fine.”  Sam flips one hand out dismissively.  “Wallow around in your whiskey glass reading all of the shitty reddit comments about you.  Whatever.” She hikes her bag higher on her shoulder and turns to go, and Lena lurches out from behind her desk, tottering in her heels, after her.

“Sam, wait, I--” She almost stumbles, right herself, manages to stand straight in heels that almost grant her the ability to look Sam dead in the eye.  “I apologize, that was rude of me.”

“Lena,” Sam sighs out.  “Can’t you just--”

“I can’t,” Lena says, rushing and hurried and shaking, and she clasps her hands together in front of her.  

“Right,” Sam says, and she pulls in a deep breath and rubs at her eyes.  Lena’s hands wrap around themselves for a split second and then she pushes forward, powered by whiskey and fear and loneliness and the way Sam’s touch could always chase away the worst parts of her, and her arms wrap around Sam’s waist and head falls onto her shoulder.  

“I’m sorry,” Lena mumbles into her shoulder, lips brushing along the side of her neck.  

“Lena,” Sam says again, even as her arms circle Lena and hold her close.  “You can’t just keep--”

“I know,” Lena says.  She sucks in a fortifying breath and pulls back, arms falling away, but is stopped by the way Sam’s hold doesn’t give way to her momentum.  “This isn’t part of the plan.”

Sam nods but doesn’t move and it’s something less than an invitation but more than a retreat, and Lena takes it for what it might be and kisses her, soft and hesitant and filled with all of the worst parts of herself that she needs Sam to banish.  

It doesn’t work, the loneliness and guilt weighing heavily on her shoulders and pushing out from her chest, but she doesn’t let that stop her from pulling Sam further into the office and shutting the door and pushing her against it, from kissing her and tasting her one more time.

It won’t happen again.  It’s not moving forward, but it’s something, and as long as it doesn’t happen again it’ll be fine.  Lena repeats it in her head as Sam’s hips strain against her, over and over and over again.

then

They’re elbow deep into paperwork, sorting through some forecasting concern or another from one of the subsidiaries, when Sam’s phone goes off.

“Shit,” she mutters, swiveling around to check the clock, as if it might read something different than what her phone shows.

“What?”

“Ruby’s music lesson is today,” Sam says with a groan.  “I totally forgot, I have to go-- I’m so sorry, I’ll be back in like an hour--”

“I can take her,” Lena offers without meaning to, and her eyes go wide and Sam’s match pace at the suggestion.  “I mean-- this is more your wheelhouse than mine, and it’s not the end of the world if we don’t get it sorted out tonight, but it would be nice if we could.  If I take her to her lesson then you can work on this and we can go over it after.”

“You’re going to take my kid to a grubby music store across town for a thirty minute singing lesson?”

“Honestly, Samantha, it’s not like I haven’t been in grubby places before.”  Lena rolls her eyes and smiles when Sam’s shoulders relax minutely. “Obviously if it makes you uncomfortable, I understand, but i just thought I could--”

“No, it’s okay, it’s fine,” Sam hurries out.  “I mean, it’s more than fine, honestly, I just-- wasn’t expecting it.”

“So,” Lena says definitively.  “That’s settled, then? I’ll get Ruby from school and take her to her lesson, and then take her to your apartment?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, shaking her head and smiling.  “You’re a lifesaver, Lena Luthor.”

“Clearly not, since I’m the one making you work late.”  Lena rolls her eyes and digs her fingernails into her palm when her hand twitches towards pressing against Sam’s cheek.  “You’ll call the school?”

Sam’s already got her phone out and flashes a thumbs up to Lena on her way out, and Lena makes it around the corner and out of sight before pausing to wonder exactly what it is she’s doing, leaving the office to pick up her employee’s daughter and take her to music practice.

Her towncar draws stares from everyone at the school, and she rolls down the window and offers her driver’s license to the teacher at the pickup line, keeping her expression as neutral as possible when he looks her up and down with surprise.  Ruby bounds towards her with wide eyes and hugs her like she always does, excited and uninhibited, and Lena holds back the impulse to stick her tongue out at the judgmental teacher.

Ruby chatters excitedly the whole way across town, fascinated by the expensive leather seats and the TV built into the car,  throwing questions at Lena and the driver and hugging her yet again before bolting out and into the music store for her lesson.  Lena settles more comfortably into the backseat and sets to responding to emails on her phone, waiting for the half hour to pass.

Gonna pick up some food after i leave.  Any requests?

Lena raises an eyebrow at the notification that pops up and the utter domesticity of it, overshadowing the email to her lawyer that she’s drafting in her typical formal business tone, and switches to the text chain with a small smile.  It takes her longer than expected to find the pizza emoji, but she sends it with a question mark. A thumbs up pops up almost immediately, and her smile doubles just before the car door opens and Ruby flops back into the car.

“All done!”

“Your mom texted,” Lena says.  She taps at Ruby’s shoulder. “Seat belt.  She said she’s going to pick up dinner.”

“Are you staying?”

“I might,” Lena says, raising an eyebrow.  She leans forward to tap on the divider and deliver the next address to the driver, and then settles back in her seat.

“Seat belt,” Ruby parrots, poking at her elbow and fixing a firm glare on her, so much like Sam that Lena’s pulse trips over itself for a moment.

“Yes ma’am.”

The apartment door is cracked when they get there, and Ruby bursts in and makes a beeline for Sam to hug her.

“Hey, baby, how was your lesson?”

“She said I’m getting better  She also said that Lena has a nice car and thought it was yours.”

“Is that so?” Sam raises an eyebrow at Lena. “She’ll be just so disappointed next week, won’t she?”

“It’s not that nice a car,” Lena says primly.  

“Uh huh.”  Sam nudges Ruby towards the kitchen.  “Plates, yeah?”

“Is Lena staying?”

“I don’t know,” Sam drawls out.  “Is Lena staying?” She’s changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt, her hair up messily on top of her head, and she plants her hands on her hips to stare Lena down until she gets a nod.

“Of course,” Lena says, and shrugs out of her coat.  Ruby’s already got three plates in her hands anyways and Sam had already put out two wine glasses on the table before they’d even gotten there, and Lena steps out of her heels and over to the chair she’s sat in for dinner and breakfast before, across from Ruby and to Sam’s left.  

She doesn’t realize she’s staring at Sam’s profile as she opens a bottle of wine-- nose wrinkling faintly the way it does when she’s doing calculations in her head at work, the long line of her neck exposed by the loose collar on her t-shirt and tracking down to her collarbones, hands moving easily even as her focus is on how Ruby is setting the table-- until a filled wine glass is in front of her face and Sam’s eyebrows are up in amusement.

Lena clears her throat and accepts the wine glass, taking a careful sip to occupy herself.  They haven’t had sex in two weeks, too busy with work and family, and this could have been an opportunity to let the edge off of the stress that’s been building hovering between her shoulderblades for weeks but instead she’s here at Sam’s kitchen table, fully clothed and accepting a plate of pizza from a ten year old for dinner.

It feel almost easy, and a measure of the tension in her spine releases when Sam flicks a crumb of pizza crust at Ruby and winks over at Lena.

 Step Three:

The relocation is officially announced, and Lena makes it until noon before hitting her breaking point in dealing with board members and shareholders calling with reprimands and anger and concerns, and she tells Jess to put a block on her calls for two hours so she ostensibly can take a nap.  

Instead she just lays across the couch in her office with the blinds shut and drapes an arm over her eyes, willing the ache between her temples to go away so that she can paste her corporate persona back on and get back to work.  She’s only dealt with half of the board so far and not a single one of them has made it easy on her, the Lex holdovers enraged about legacy and the newer members convinced that she needs them to hold her hand through all of the decisions she makes. She only slept three hours the night before and wishes, desperately, for just a day to sleep. 

Her door opens and shuts quietly and there are only two people who would be willing to do that without knocking first and one of them is Jess, who already knows that Lena’s planning to nap, so she’s too tired to care about decorum and flips a middle finger in Sam’s direction.

“Charming as always.”  Sam’s voice is quiet and calm and immediately works its way between the threads of tension in Lena’s back, warming and loosening them.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to talk about your offer.  You never revoked my open door access, at least as far as Jess goes.”

Lena peels her arm away from her eyes and squints at Sam in the brightness of the midday sunlight.  “Of course I didn’t,” she says drolly. “You’re the only person on the entire finance team I trust. And you’re my friend.”

“Is that so,” Sam says, thin and flat, and she pushes at Lena’s feet until she sits up and leaves room for Sam to sit on the other end of the couch.

“I’m not good at this,” Lena says.  “Having friends. I know that I haven’t treated you well since-- since Lex’s arrest.  But I do trust you, with my company and as my friend.”

“When was the last time you got a full night’s sleep?” Sam’s arms hold tight over her chest, her posture sharp even as she sits, and Lena wants to collapse into her lap and sleep for a week, wants it so much she can feel it in her hands and her toes and her teeth, but she mirrors Sam’s posture and digs her fingernails into her own arms instead.

“I’ll sleep when I have time and the board stops hounding me.”  

“Lena,” Sam says with a sigh.  “Come on. You need to rest.”

“I need to--”

“Lena,” Sam says firmly, posture finally breaking.  She slides closer on the couch and wraps an arm around Lena’s shoulders, and it’s enough to make Lena crumble.  Her head falls onto Sam’s shoulder and she pulls in deep shuddering breaths, trying and failing to stay steady in the face of Sam’s stalwart presence, always here, always at her side.

“I know that this is the right thing to do.”  Lena pushes further into Sam’s side, burying her face in Sam’s neck and holding fast to the lapel of her jacket with tired fingers.  “But I’m just so tired of explaining it to people.”

Sam doesn’t respond, one hand moving absently up and down Lena’s back, calm and comforting and quiet.

“You can say I told you so,” Lena mumbles.

“I don’t doubt your business instincts,” Sam says after a long moment.  “This is probably best for the business in the long run. But that doesn’t mean you have to ruin yourself to do it.”

Lena doesn’t respond, instead letting out a slow breath against Sam’s collarbone and drawing a shiver from her that Lena can feel against her whole body.  She doesn’t let herself do this with anyone who isn’t Sam, doesn’t let anyone else see her like this, cracking and exhausted and worn down at only 23 years old.  Sam is the only person she’s ever trusted to never use her weaknesses against her, and every step Lena’s taken since Lex was arrested to distance herself and hold herself separate, to protect herself, to protect Sam, to protect Ruby, has stalled out because her lips are pressing against Sam’s throat on the couch on her office in the middle of the day and she can’t stop herself, doesn’t want to stop herself, doesn’t want anything more or less than for Sam to lay her down and pull her apart until she can’t feel anything else.

“Lena,” Sam says softly, posture stiffening under Lena’s mouth.  “This isn’t--”

“I know,” Lena says. It’s not a good idea.  It’s a terrible idea. She keeps stalling out on distancing herself from Sam and she shouldn’t be kissing Sam and pulling and pulling and pulling until she’s stretched out on the couch with Sam hovering over her, warm lips on hers and familiar hands on her thigh.  She shouldn’t be clinging to the back of Sam’s neck as her hips move under Sam’s slow ministrations, breathing shaky and sharing air as she holds her in place and lets her eyes fall shut as Sam fucks her slow and dirty on the couch in her office in the middle of the day.

She shouldn’t, but she does anyways.

then

Singapore has always been one of her favorite places to visit.  She loves the warmth and the food, the vibrancy, the opportunity.  She travels there for work as often as she can and extends her trips as much as possible, taking in as much of the city as she can and enjoying as much of it as she can.

The last of her meetings ended an hour ago, and she has a solid two days of rest and relaxation planned and a private beach to enjoy it all on.  Lena stands in the center of her hotel suite, bags packed to relocate to the villa she’d rented, and stares down at the tablet in her hands and the calendars on it, filled with color-coded meetings for regular work and mergers work and personal appointments and, there in grey to the far right, Sam’s calendar.  There’s a note in it for the next Monday off, the day blocked off from meetings, and Lena knows it’s because it’s Sam’s birthday and Ruby made her promise to take the day off this year.

Lena glances at her watch and then back at the calendar and does the math in her head for a brief cluster of seconds before setting the tablet down defiantly and hitting the speed dial on her phone.

“Miss Luthor?” Jess sounds bleary and tired and Lena remind herself of time zones and to offer her an enormous bonus come the holidays.

“Can you get me on the next flight home, please?  I have some things I’d like to attend to this weekend.  I’ll eat whatever cost.”

“Of course,” Jess says through a yawn.  

“You’re a godsend,” Lena says as warmly as she can before ending the call and gathering her bags.  The concierge in the lobby hurries up to her side to claim the bags and bustling to the front doors.

“Miss Luthor, your car is ready, of course, for the--”

“Change of plans,” Lena says politely.  “I’m heading to the airport. There’s something I have to address at home.”

“Of course,” he says, and snaps sharply at the driver to load her bags.  By the time she’s made it to the airport she has an email confirmation from Jess and is checked in already for a direct flight leaving in three hours.  She spends the next two hours buying up six different bottles of wine and whiskey, almost ten pounds of chocolates and candies for Ruby, and an egregiously overpriced but gorgeous watch at duty free, and then the next twenty on the flight home watching trashy movies and getting drunk on champagne in her cabin.

She’s somewhere in the range of deliriously tired when she makes it off the plane, uncertain of what day or time it is, and has to ask the driver who picks her up three times to confirm that it’s still Monday.  It’s after ten at night and there’s less than two hours left in the day when she steps out of the car at Sam’s building and sends her suitcases home with the car and sways on her feet for a long moment, adjusts her grip on the duty free bags, and makes her way inside.

She knocks quietly, cognizant enough of the time to not want to wake Ruby up, and is rewarded with Sam, sweatpants and a hoodie and infuriatingly beautiful, blinking owlishly at her when the door opens.

“What are you-- you’re supposed to be in Singapore.”

“It’s my best friend’s birthday,” Lena says with a shrug.  “What kind of person would I be if I missed that?” She drags both arms up to brandish the duty free bags.  “Happy birthday?”

Sam steps back slowly, automatically, leaving space for Lena to shuffle into the apartment.  “You flew all the way back from Singapore for my birthday?”

Lena shrugs again, standing awkwardly in the living room still laden down with duty free bags, and clears her throat.  “Yes.”

Sam smiles, slow and small, and shakes her head.  “You’re really dramatic, you know that, right?”

“I may have been told as much,” Lena says with a sniff.  She sets the bags down on the couch and rips open the seal on one of them, digging out bottle after bottle of liquor in search of the small box buried inside.

“Please tell this isn’t all for--”

“I also brought some things for Ruby,” Lena says, not looking up.  She finds the box and pulls it out triumphantly and offers it to Sam.  “Here.”

“Lena,” Sam says slowly, even as she takes the box.  “You really didn’t have to-- I don’t need anything--”

“I wanted to,” Lena says quietly.  “But I won’t be offended if you don’t like it.”

Sam shakes her head and pries the box open, eyes going wide at the watch inside, the white face and smooth leather band that contrast with the soft warmth of her skin, the gold backing and inlay that compliment it, her initials engraved on the back.

“This is beautiful,” she says, soft and wavering, and she looks back up at Lena with bright eyes.  Lena relaxes at her smile and steps over to take the watch from her, hands gentle as she fastens it loosely around Sam’s left wrist.  “Thank you so much.”

Lena rocks up on her toes to kiss her instead of saying anything, palms pressing against Sam’s cheeks and holding her close.  Sam’s hands fit around her hips like always and Lena kicks out of her shoes and backs towards the bedroom, not letting up when she stumbles into the corner of the couch or the wall or the edge of the bathroom door on the way.  Sam smiles into the kiss and Lena holds onto it as best she can, filing it away to remember always, and manages to turn them around and push Sam down onto the bed.

Her hands are still pressed against Sam’s cheeks, warm and solid, and Sam looks up at her with dark eyes and breaths coming heavy and everything that Lena’s worried about recently-- her company, her brother, her family, her reputation-- melts away and her focus narrows to just Sam, beautiful and warm and shifting back to give Lena the room she pushes for as she climbs into Sam’s lap.  

“There’s still 78 minutes left in your birthday,” Lena murmurs, curling her hands around the back of Sam’s head.  

“Mhm.”  Sam’s fingers flex at her waist when Lena moves to kiss the side of her neck.

“Best not to waste time.”  Lena pulls back enough to offer Sam the opportunity to turn her down, to send her home, to tell her she’s pushed to far or crossed too many lines, but Sam just pulls at her until she can kiss her again.

Step Four:

Lena’s packed up her life-- or, specifically, paid strangers very handsomely to pack it up for her-- and moved almost all of it to one of the Luthor homes in upstate New York, migrated the majority of her staff to National City and the new offices, and booked a long-term stay in a hotel suite.  She’ll find an apartment at some point, but it’s not high on her list of priorities.

There are other things that are more important than where she’s going to live for the foreseeable future.

May I come by this evening?

She sends the text before she can stop herself, to a number she’s long since memorized and hasn’t used outside of work calls in months.  In spite of her stutters and missteps in the march of progress to separate herself from Sam and the way she knows Lena’s body inside and out, from Ruby and the way she lights up like a Christmas tree whenever Lena drops work to help with her science homework, from the both of them and easy dinners and lazy weekend mornings in their apartment, she’s managed to almost make a clean break.

Almost.

Didn’t you already leave for nc?

Sam’s reply beeps onto her phone and Lena raises an eyebrow at it, thumbs ready to reply when another comes through.

Ruby’s got practice but we’ll be home by seven

Lena pauses and breathes and taps out her confirmation that she’ll be there.

No expensive gifts , Sam adds, and it’s enough almost to make Lena smile.

I promise , she sends back, and true to her word, she knocks on their door at 7:15 that evening with empty hands.  The door swings open immediately and Ruby’s usual flying hug is calmer than usual, her smile less bright.

“You’re really leaving?”

Lena bites down on the inside of her cheek for a moment and glances over to where Sam’s in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher and watching out of the corner of her eye.  “It’s for work,” Lena says after a moment, letting herself be pulled by the hand to the couch. “The company will do better in a new city, and I need to make sure that it does well, you know?  Because so many people work there.”

“Why aren’t we going too?”  Ruby cranes her head around towards the kitchen and Sam clears her throat and stares down at the coffee mug in her hands, and Lena’s stomach twists, cold and knotted, at the way Ruby turns back to her with wide eyes. “Is my mom fired?”

“Absolutely not,” Lena says firmly.  “She’s the smartest person in my whole company.  I wouldn’t trust anyone else to stay and run things here but her.”

“Can you still help me with my homework?”

“Ruby, honey,” Sam starts, leaning against the kitchen counter with sharp shoulders and fingers pressing visibly into the countertop.  “Lena’s going to be--”

“Always available,” Lena says, holding Sam’s gaze unblinkingly before turning back to Ruby.  “I’ll make sure Jess gives you the new office’s number, okay? You know she knows that you can always call me for help.  I promise.”

Behind Ruby, Sam’s jaw clenches and her hands flex against the counters, and Lena can only watch her for so long before closing her eyes and sinking into the hug Ruby grants her with.

“Ruby,” Sam says quietly after a long moment.  “Lena has to head out.”

“I’ll miss you,” Ruby says into Lena’s shoulder, and Lena holds tighter and opens her eyes wide.

“I’ll miss you too, sweetie,” she says softly into Ruby’s hair.  She holds on until Ruby lets go and clears her throat delicately when Sam sends Ruby to work on her homework.

“You don’t have to help her always,” Sam says quietly, unmoving in the kitchen.

“I want to.”  Lena pushes up to her feet and clasps her hands in front of her.  “You know I do.”

Sam stares her down for long seconds, and Lena holds her ground as best she can against the way her hands want to reach for Sam.

“I’ll walk you out,” Sam says abruptly.  She shoves her keys into her pocket and tilts her head towards the door, and Lena nods and follows her out, casting one last look towards Ruby’s closed bedroom door.

“I need to tell you something before I leave,” Lena says as they stand waiting for the elevator.   I’m sorry burns in the back of her throat, please come with me on it’s heels, but she presses her lips together and pauses, breathes, speaks.  “I was going to wait until I was two thousand miles away, but--”

“That cannot possibly be good,” Sam says flatly.

“You’re being promoted,” Lena says over her.  She holds up a hand when Sam’s protest starts to build.  “Please hear me out. You don’t want to move Ruby again, and I respect that.  But I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t trust anyone as much as I trust you, and that means I want you running things here.  If you don’t want to be my CFO, I certainly won’t force you, but I’m still putting you in charge of all of the finances east of the MIssissippi river.  It’ll go into effect on the first of the month, and your pay will be adjusted accordingly.”

She finally pauses and takes a breath.  Sam’s staring at her, not moving until the elevator dings open and shakes them both out of the staring contest.  Lena steps into the elevator and to the right, leaving as much room as possible for Sam.

“Please say something,” Lena says as the doors shut.

“I don’t know what to say,” Sam says, leaning against the wall opposite her.  “I’m not sure I have the experience to--”

“I’m not promoting you because you’re my friend,” Lena says sharply.  “Nor am I doing so because we used to sleep together. I’m promoting you because you have a creative, effective, brilliant head for business strategy and that what I want for my company.”  She smiles thinly and shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe I was always so attracted to you because of how good you are at your job.”

It’s enough to get Sam to crack a smile, and Lena takes it as a win.  The elevator opens into the lobby and she gestures for Sam to leave first, trailing after her and holding her hands together demurely to keep them from reaching for Sam’s hands and hips.

“I’m going to miss you,” Sam says with a sigh, shoulders slumping and hands shoved into her pockets.  

“I am, too,” Lena says softly.  “I-- you’re my friend, my best friend.  I understand that things have been difficult, but that hasn’t changed, at least not for me.  Even if I’m prone to having no idea how to act like it.”

Sam smiles and shakes her head and lets out a deep breath, pulls her hands free and holds her arms out.  

“You’re better at it than you think,” she says, and pulls Lena close, squeezing tight.  

Lena buries her face against Sam’s shoulder and breathes in deep, holding as tight as she dares and refusing to be the first to let go.  She inhales the familiar scent of Sam’s perfume and presses closer, committing the smell to memory, adding it to every inventoried touch and laugh and kiss she’s held onto.

“You’re my best friend,” Lena says again, muffled into Sam’s shoulder.  “And I love you. I hope you know that.”

“I love you too, you nerd,” Sam says, a laugh rumbling through her chest, and she pushes Lena away enough to level a firm look at her.  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, okay? You’re doing great.”

“I’m glad at least one person thinks so,” Lena says, aiming for self-deprecating but instead landing somewhere closer to watery.

“Fuck ‘em all,” Sam says flippantly, and it’s enough to make Lena smile in spite of herself.  Sam smiles in return, warm and soft, and she leans down to press a kiss to Lena’s cheek. “Take care of yourself, Lena Luthor.”

“I would say the same to you, but it’s probably better I tell Ruby to take care of you.”  Lena twists her hands back together to stop them from reaching for Sam’s waist and nods sharply.  “If you don’t have the promotion paperwork tomorrow by close of business, let me know.”

“You’re the boss, boss,” Sam says with a casual salute and a grin that doesn’t meet her eyes.  “Goodbye, Lena.”

“Bye, Sam,” Lena says, and her voice tapers off into a cracking whisper, and she sucks in a sharp breath and sweeps out of the building lobby and into the waiting car, refusing to look back until she’s safely hidden behind tinted windows.  Sam’s standing in the building’s doorway, hands shoved into her pockets, and Lena watches her from the car until it turns the corner.

then

It’s the middle of the night on a rare opportunity for Lena to catch up on sleep, the most recent set of state and federal filings for the latest office they opened in a new state submitted that evening, Sam and Ruby on a trip to the beach for a long weekend, and Lena with a whole glorious three-day weekend ahead of her to relax and unwind.

Except that her phone rings at two in the morning.

“Lena, I sent the wrong filing paperwork.”

“What?”  Lena blinks slowly into the darkness of her bedroom, rubbing at her eyes and sitting up slowly, reaching for the laptop on her bedside table automatically.

“It’s the redlined version from yesterday, it got filed into the wrong folder on the cloud drive and I didn’t check it when I attached it because I was late to get Ruby and we were going to miss our flight and--”

“Sam, breathe,” Lena says, laptop already up and running.  “It’s okay.”

“It’s the wrong version, it doesn’t have the updated--”

“I’ll handle it,” Lena says, and she’s wide awake now and already in the shared drive, hunting down the right version.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Sam says, her voice tight and heavy and Lena can tell through the phone that she’s pacing and shoving a hand through her hair like she always does when she’s stressed.  “I can’t get ahold of Mike, I don’t know if they submitted already or not, but I’ll take the hit from the board if I have to, I promise, this is totally my fault--”

“Sam,” Lena says sharply.  “Stop. Breathe.”

Sam cuts off and sucks in an audible breath, and Lena wrinkles her nose as she sorts through the files in the shared drive until she finds the right one.  

“Okay,” Lena says.  “I’ve got the right one.  I’ll send it to Mike now.”

“What if he already--”

“Well, for starters,” Lena says, pausing as she attaches the files and sends them with a flourish, copying Sam on the email.  “Mike is a lazy prick, so he probably didn’t even see them if you sent them right before you left for the day. And two, even if he did, as the senior executive you report to, he should have checked it before submitting.  And three, if he didn’t do that and submitted it, then Lex has a friend we can talk to on the government side to get it straightened out before the filing deadline. And four , if all of that fails and we get hit with a fine, you are not taking the fall for it.”

“It’s my fault, Lena,” Sam sighs out, an ache in her voice that lances through Lena’s chest.  

“Sixty-two people worked on this paperwork,” Lena says sharply.  “The responsibility lands with the most senior person, and that’s Mike, not you.”

“I screwed it up, though,” Sam says.  

Lena rubs at her forehead and stares at her phone for a long moment before ending the call and hitting the icon for a video chat.  Sam picks up immediately, eyes bloodshot and mouth set in a thin line, and Lena’s free hand grips at the edges of her sheets.

“Did you know that Lex ruined the very first merger he ran?” she says conversationally.  “He’d just hit the first billion in revenue and was cocky and young and stupid, and he thought he could bulldoze through a bunch of sixty year old men who’d been in business since before he was born, all because he had more cash to throw at the problem.  He screwed it up so badly that half of his R&D team wound up leaving to go to the company he’d been trying to buy up.”

Sam blows out a loud breath and rubs at her eyes, mouth softening and eyes lightening, and she shakes her head.

“He owned the company, though,” she says softly.  “I’m just-- me, I’m just--me, some junior executive punching way above my weight, and I screwed up.  People have lost their entire careers over less.”

“Sam, you’re twenty years younger than everyone else doing the same thing you are and you’re doing it better than them, and raising a daughter on your own.  Forgetting one thing is not going to ruin you or your career.”

Sam’s lips press together and her chin dimples and eyes glisten and Lena’s chest burns because she’s never seen Sam cry before.  

“Thank you,” Sam says after a long moment, sniffing and swiping at her eyes.

“It’s just the truth,” Lena says softly.  “You’re the most impressive person I’ve ever known, Samantha Arias.”

Sam scoffs, weak and watery, and shakes her head.  “Says the supergenius wunderkind.”

“I had every advantage my whole childhood,” Lena says with a shrug.  “My parents were cold but I was handed everything I ever needed to excel.  I’ve never had to make it through anything on my own. You went from homeless to the most hypercompetent vice president in the world’s largest company, and you did it on your own.”

“Did I, though?” Sam says, head tilting.  “No one else from my old company survived the first six months.  I only did because--”

“Because you’re good at your job,” Lena says sharply.  “Don’t insult the both of us by assuming I kept you on just because you’re good in bed.  I would have kept you even if I hated you because you are good at what you do, Sam.  Better than anyone else in this entire organization, better than anyone in any company I’ve ever worked with.”  She pauses long enough to take in Sam’s flushed cheeks and the watery shine to her eyes, and lifts one side of her mouth in a smirk.  “The best sex of my life is just a perk, really.”

It draws a laugh out of Sam, unexpected and bright, and Lena’s pulse trips over itself because even over a shoddy video chat and through phone speakers, it’s the best sound she’s ever heard.  

“Best sex of your life?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Lena says with a flippant shrug.  “But you’re better with a strap-on than any man is with a penis.”

“Oh my God,” Sam mumbles, free hand covering her eyes as she flushes darker.  “That’s the most scandalous thing I have ever heard you say.”

“I wish I could say the same for you, you heathen,” Lena says haughtily.  “But you have a filthy mouth sometimes.”

“Normally you like that about me,” Sam throws back, familiar confidence widening her smile and squaring her shoulders, and Lena grins and discards her laptop, curling her knees up towards her chest and resting her phone against them.  

“How’s the beach?”

Sam props her phone up and leans her chin into her hand, sliding into a story about Ruby deciding she needs to learn to surf, and Lena curls around the warmth in her chest as she listens to Sam talk until three in the morning.

 Step Five:

The CFO she appoints in National City isn’t Sam.  He’s a good second choice-- old enough to have experience but young enough to be flexible, genial and smart and respectful of Lena’s knowledge but willing to challenge her when necessary-- but he’s still a second choice.  He’s the last meeting on her docket on day one in the new building, the last of the executives to file through her oversized light-filled penthouse office, and she exchanges pleasantries with him and lets him thank her for the opportunity.

“You weren’t my first choice,” she says mildly, unconcerned with the flash of frustration in his eyes.  “You have big shoes to fill. Don’t let me down.”

He promises not to and cites the series of proposals he’s already come up with, and they’re all good, all smart, all solid business choices that will do the company good.  She sends him off to his own office with a smile and then disappears onto the balcony jutting out from her office, high over National City. It’s warm and balmy, the California sun falling easy on her skin, and she thinks back to another windy rooftop and half a bottle of stolen scotch and Sam Arias, tall and tipsy and admitting that she’d had a daughter at sixteen and pulled herself up from homelessness to becoming one of the youngest and most effective finance executives Lena had ever met.  

She’s long past deleting the string of text messages she had shared with Sam once upon a time, when they were friends-- were something , something that involved sharing silent looks in meetings and drinks after work, Lena buying birthday gifts for Ruby, Sam knowing how to read the different strains of tension laced through Lena’s posture and every single way to unravel her from the inside out-- who traded comments on business rivals and office gossip and different restaurants to try, but she can still recite Sam’s number from memory.  

Sam reports through the new CFO now, her compromised promotion leaving her on the east coast and in a senior vice president role, responsible for every dollar of every L Corp subsidiary east of Kansas.  Lena hasn’t heard her voice, in person or over the phone, in three months.

She pulls her phone out and opens a new text message, taps in a familiar phone number.   The new CFO isn’t as smart as you , she writes out, and then deletes.  

It’s too bad I couldn’t convince you to move out here, the view from the office is amazing.  Delete.

If the new CFO gives you any trouble just let me know.  Delete.  

If I can help with Ruby’s science project again this year just let me know.  Delete.  

I miss you .  Delete.

She close out of the message app and sets her phone to the side.  Out in front of her, across the city, a blur of red and blue streaks across the sunset.  Lena folds her arms across her stomach and follows Supergirl’s path as best as she can until Jess materializes behind her, reminding her of the dinner meeting she has lined up.

She doesn’t text Sam, and counts it as a moment of progress.

then

“So what’s up that couldn’t wait?” Sam says, not looking up from her computer when Lena appears in her office.

“Well.”  Lena settles gracefully down into the seat across the desk from her.  “I know Ruby’s birthday is coming up.”

That gets Sam to look up, eyebrows lifting, and Lena leans back enough to reach the door and shut it behind her.

“Ominous,” Sam says.  She sits back in her chair and stretches, long arms reaching out and rolled-up sleeves pulling appealingly enough to distract Lena for a moment. “What about it?”

“Well,” Lena says again, blinking and shaking her head.  “She’s been so invested in the new Taylor Swift album that I thought--”

“Oh, no,” Sam says.  “No, no. Tell me you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” Lena says innocently as possible.  “Buy tickets to the concert next month?”

“Lena,” Sam says sharply.  “I already told her she couldn’t go.  The tickets are too expensive.”

“But not for me,” Lena says, waving one hand dismissively.

“Lena,” Sam says again, sharp and firm.  “No.”

“What?” Lena blinks at her, brow furrowing.  “Why not?”

“You can’t just-- buy my kid outrageously expensive things, Lena!” Sam snaps.  “I don’t want her growing up thinking that these things are easy to get or to be expected, but I can’t do that if you’re parachuting in and buying her eight hundred dollar concert tickets.”

“But--”

“No,” Sam says.  “No buts. This isn’t a discussion.  This isn’t something you get to argue with me about!  She’s my daughter and I don’t want her growing up--”

“What, spoiled?” Lena says softly.  “Like me?”

Sam’s mouth snaps shut, and she has the grace to look ashamed for a moment.  “You know I think you’re wonderful,” Sam says, quiet and slow and careful. “But I don’t have that kind of money, Lena.  I probably never will. I don’t want her to expect it and me not be able to deliver it.”

Lena sits back in her chair, arms folded protectively over her chest and one finger tapping on her arm methodically.  

“I understand what you’re saying,” she says slowly, focusing on the edges of Sam’s keyboard instead of the frustration she knows is building in her shoulders.  “And I apologize if I overstepped. But I do think I’m within my rights to ask if you think that how I grew up is something I should apologize for.”

“No,” Sam says immediately.  “I’m not-- I don’t think less of you because you’re rich, Lena, you have to know that, right?”

“I thought I did.”

Sam pulls at her watch absently, wiping her thumb across the face and tugging at the strap.  She’s worn it to work every day since Lena gave it to her and, like every time Lena notices it, it warms the edges of her chest, even now, in the middle of an argument.

“I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen,” Sam says, picking carefully through her words.  “I’ve been very lucky and have a good life now, but I don’t want Ruby to get used to the idea that she has a rich fairy godmother who can buy her anything she wants.  I can provide for her, but I can’t do what you can for her, financially, and I don’t want her to--”

“To get used to having me around?”

“Lena,” Sam sighs out, dropping her forehead into her hands.  “You’re my best friend and I l-- of course I want her to be used to having you around.  But I’m her mother and I’m meant to provide for her and I don’t want her to get the idea that she can get anything she wants if she just asks you instead.”

Lena watches her for long seconds, pushing her tongue against the back of her teeth, waiting for a retort to formulate but instead all she has is hands that want to reach for Sam’s and a quiet ache in her chest at the closest they’ve ever come to fighting.  

“Fairy godmother?” Is all she can come up with, one eyebrow arching skywards, and she smiles when Sam props her chin in her hand and sticks her tongue out in response.  

“Not going to live that one down, am I?”

“Not even a tiny bit,” Lena says with a shake of her head.  “I’ll donate the tickets or something. Ruby won’t ever know.”  She pauses and then tacks on, “Just a car, then.”

Sam throws a pen at her.

Step Six:

Lena’s plan to distance herself from Sam Arias-- to end something that may or may not have actually started at any point, to be definitively single, to be alone and use her availability as a tool as much as possible-- involved, at some point, sleeping with new people.  There was no point in breaking off a maybe-relationship with most extraordinary sexual partner she’d ever had if she was just going to be left to her own devices to remember the best sex of her life.

As with many things involving moving past Sam Arias, it had not gone to plan.  Not a single person had struck her interest, romantically or otherwise, ever since.  She’s decided it’s because her brother turned out to be a homicidal maniac and ruined the name of everyone in the family and she had to save his company and all of the jobs within it, and had no time for romance or sex or even friendship.  National City, coastal surf city with the largest media outlet and fashion district in the country housed in its borders, is filled to bursting with beautiful people with low self esteem and small enough bank accounts to be kept in line by the basest of non-disclosure agreements, but none of them catch her attention.

Then her brother’s former best friend and some rookie reporter storm into her office, and suddenly there’s a pull low in her stomach for the shy smiles and sunny disposition of rookie reporter Kara Danvers and the strong shoulders and perfect hair of Supergirl to distract her.  It’s subtle and quiet, the way her friendship with Kara and camaraderie with Supergirl in the face of Lena’s own mother’s treachery grow, and suddenly she’s preparing for a national budgeting call and sees Sam’s name on the agenda and realizes she hasn’t thought of Samantha Arias in weeks.

It dulls the pleasant ache in her stomach, the one that’s been pulling at her whenever Kara hugs her or Supergirl’s generically beautiful smile is flashed her way.  She’s never wanted to forget about Sam, or Ruby, but it’s been months since she heard from either of them outside of irregular formal work events and she hadn’t noticed the way the familiar burn in her chest at the thought of Sam had dulled to something calmer and emptier, something less like heartbreak and more like nostalgia.

Then, suddenly, it’s been a year in National City with Kara’s quiet determination to convince Lena of her friendship, and somewhere in the middle of nearly dying more times than she wants to count and deciding that yes, actually, she is interested in Kara Danvers in both a romantic and a sexual way, she buys a media conglomerate and is stretched too thin to handle it all.

Lena stares down at her overstuffed calendar and contemplates throwing the tablet off the balcony, or selling CatCo off to some Russian oil baron or another, and huffs out a heavy sigh and hits the call button on her phone.

“Jess.”

“Yes ma’am?”

“Can you get me a video conference with Samantha Arias tomorrow, please?”

“Of course.  Should I include--”

“Just Miss Arias, please.”

Almost as suddenly as she leveraged all of her corporate liquidity on a rushed buyout to the tune of $750 million, she’s face to face with Sam for the first time in over a year.

“Hey,” Sam says, quiet and calm and smiling easily through the camera on the other side of the country.  

“Hi,” Lena says, and now she owns a media company, has a pull low in her belly for Kara Danvers’ smile and Supergirl’s shoulders, and also a rushing recurrent warmth building behind her sternum because Sam is smiling at her and all Lena wants is to curl around the comfort of Sam Arias in a shoddy apartment two thousand miles away.

“Not to sound paranoid or anything,” Sam says playfully.  “But are you firing me?”

“What?” Lena blinks rapidly.  “Of course I’m not-- why would you think that?”

Sam shrugs, easy and loose.  “You can never be too careful.  So what’s up? Video conferences aren’t really your thing, and if you had my assistant reorganized my whole week just so you could say hi, Ruby is going to be so mad at both of us for not being here.”

“Ruby,” Lena echoes, soft and warm and entirely forgetting about why she called.  “How is she?”

“Oh, you know,” Sam says with a groan.  “Twelve, hormonal, cantankerous. As you do.”  She pauses and tucks her hair behind her ear. “She misses you.”

“I miss her, too,” Lena says quietly.  “And you.”

Sam ducks her head and clears her throat, hair falling out from behind her ear and blocking half her face from the camera, and Lena takes the moment of privacy to push a hand over her chest for a long second.

“So if you’re not firing me and not calling just to chat,” Sam says after a long silence.  “What’s up?”

“I made an acquisition,” Lena says carefully.  “Yesterday.”

Sam’s eyebrows fold together, her mouth turning down.  “Did I miss--”

“It was a-- um,” Lena says.  “It was a shotgun wedding sort of situation.  I had to act fast, and I understand the complexity of the matter, but it was necessary.”

“Okay,” Sam says slowly.  “How can I help?”

The old familiar warmth in her chest blooms abruptly into something burning and bright, and Lena sucks in a sharp breath, because Sam is two thousand miles aways and they’ve barely spoken in months and she’s still the most solid stalwart support Lena’s ever had.

“I don’t trust anyone else right now to run Catco--”

“Wait, hold on,” Sam says sharply.  “You bought Catco? As in the largest media company in the world, built by the current White House press secretary, Catco?”

“Yes?” Lena says after a moment.

“Oh my God , Lena,” Sam says, blowing out a loud breath.  “How much did you-- do I even want to know--”

“You really don’t,” Lena says demurely.  “Though you’ll find out soon enough, if you accept the offer.”

“What offer?”

“The offer to take my place at L Corp,” Lena says.

Sam blinks at her, mouth falling open slowly.  

“Hear me out,” Lena rushes out.  “Before you decide, at least. Media is a whole different world from technology or finance and I realize that I’m new to it.  But I also fully believe that I now have a responsibility regarding the content released through the media outlet I own and I don’t want to delegate that to someone I barely know from within Catco, nor to anyone within the industry I could hire, so I have to take that on myself and that means--”

“I’ll do it,” Sam says quietly.  

“--I have to dedicate most of my time to-- oh,” Lena says.  “You will?”

“I’ll do it,” sam says again, and she smiles halfway at Lena, pushes her hair back again.

“I didn’t even get to the bribery part of things,” Lena says.  “I have a really convincing pitch about Ruby’s college opportunities and a company housing stipend--”

“You don’t have to convince me, Lena,” Sam says, warm and gentle as always, and the fire burning behind Lena’s sternum fully ignites into something larger, warmer, heavier, something she’d locked away for ages and couldn’t contain now no matter how hard she tried.  

“You didn’t want to move last year,” Lena says slowly.

“Last year you were asking for shitty reasons,” Sam says with a shrug, and it lances through the fire in Lena’s chest and cool it sharply.  “You changed everything because-- I mean, I understand why. I don’t like it and I think you were wrong, but I get it. But this is different.  I don’t think you spent some ungodly amount of money for Catco because you’re trying to prove something about you or your family, so it must be for a good reason.  So I’ve got your back.”

“Oh,” Lena says faintly.  “I-- thank you.” She clears her throat and glances down at her desk to compose herself.  “And for what it’s worth, even though you probably already have a pretty good idea of it, the salary is--”

“A lot,” Sam finishes for her, quirking an eyebrow.  “You’ve never underpaid an employee in your life, Lena.  I have zero doubt that you’re making ten dollars a year and are about to pay me a million for the same job.”

“Oh, honey.”  Lena shakes her head, familiarity and confidence spreading through her limbs.  “You think this job is only worth a million? The low end of market rate for this is five times that, and that’s before the bonus and relocation.”

Sam looks like she’s going to pass out, and Lena smiles widely at her.  Her best friend-- her Sam , tall and beautiful and brilliant, the only person she’s ever trusted, the only person she’s ever come close wanting to spend years with-- is moving to National City.  

She’s nearly died more times than she cares to count since moving to National City, but Sam is smiling broadly at her and is going to move across the country to work with her again.

She might have just undone every piece of effort she put into separating herself from the mistake the started in her hotel room during her very first corporate merger, but today is a good day.

then

The knock on her office door catches Lena when she’s elbow-deep into a research proposal, and she nearly upends the mug of tea on her desk when she jumps.

“Easy there, scaredy cat,” Sam says, smiling slow and lazy, even though it doesn’t reach her eyes.  “You got a minute?”

“Of course,” Lena says, forehead creasing, because Sam never knocks anymore, never asks if Lena has time.  

Sam shuts the door behind her and flops down onto the couch in the office, elbows on her knees and head in her hands.

“Sam?”  Lena pushes up from her desk cautiously, research proposals forgotten in the face of Sam’s defeated posture.

“Our neighbor upstairs,” Sam says into her hands.  “Their pipes blew. Our bathroom is completely ruined.”

“Oh my God,” Lena mumbles, a hand on Sam’s shoulder.  “They’re going to pay to fix it, right?”

“Yeah, of course they are,” Sam says with a shrug.  She sucks in a deep breath and pulls her head out of her hands to look at Lena.  “But we can’t live there while they do. Even if that wasn’t our only bathroom, it’s too dangerous, officially, until they confirm the structural integrity of the upstairs apartment.”

“You’ll stay with me,” Lena says immediately.  “Obviously.”

“Thank you,” Sam breathes out, shoulder slumping tiredly.  “Ruby will love it. But our landlord is such crap, I have no idea how long it’ll be--”

“So move out,” Lena says without thinking.  She winces when defensiveness flashes in Sam’s eyes, and holds up her hands pacifyingly.  “I mean-- not immediately, if it affects your lease or your credit, but at the end of the lease.  You deserve a better home than this, Sam, and not to be crass, but I know how much you make. You can afford something nicer, and you deserve it.”

Sam slumps back against the couch, long legs stretching out under the table in front of her, and groans.  “No, I can’t.”

Lena pulls her knees up onto the couch so she can face Sam, propping her head on her fist.  “I admit I’m not the most familiar with most of the real estate market pricing in the area, but surely--”

“Did you know Ruby already has her heart set on MIT?” Sam says to the ceiling, and Lena’s mouth snaps shut at the name of her alma mater.  “She was already interested before she met you, but now she’s absolutely dead set on it.”

Sam shrugs languidly, one hand flopping out tiredly and dropping onto the couch.  “She’s smart enough for it, and she tests well, so she can get in, I don’t doubt it at all.  But it’s expensive , Lena, and I can’t count on the prospect of scholarships or financial aid to help her.  I don’t want her to graduate with debt, not when I’m still paying mine down--”

Lena reaches out without meaning to and wraps her hand around Sam’s, cutting her off abruptly as their fingers wind together.  She stares down at their hands, uncertain of the intimacy she’d just prompted without meaning to, outside of sex or early mornings in bed, and blinks slowly.

“You’re putting everything into a college fund for Ruby?”

“I don’t want her to have to fight like I did,” Sam says quietly, also staring down at their joined hands.  “I went a community college and a state school and I’m proud of what I’ve done, but I want her to be able to have the choice of any school she can get into and not have a mountain of debt waiting for her on the other side.”

Lena nods slowly, still staring down at their hands, wheels turning in her head as they always do, and she speaks carefully, hesitantly, not looking away from the contrast between their skin tones.  

“I don’t mean to overstep,” she says delicately.  “But I know a few people who know investments inside and out.  If you’ll allow it, I could ask one of them to structure a portfolio for you to invest in for her education.  They can give you a sure bet and a better growth rate than any bank you could work with.”

A charged silence fills the office and the space between them, and Lena pulls in a careful breath and starts to slide her fingers free from Sam’s, pulling back and preparing to apologize, to rescind the offer, to take it back and ask Sam to forget it, when Sam’s hand tightens around hers and the other hooks around the back of her neck and warm lips press against hers suddenly.

“Thank you,” Sam murmurs against her mouth, warm and solid and unwavering.  “So much.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Ruby’s at a girl scout retreat until Sunday morning,” Sam says, breath washing over Lena’s mouth and drawing a shudder from deep in her belly.  “I can come by after work and you can find out what kind of yes it is.”

It’s three in the afternoon and broad daylight and her office is only so private at any given point, and Lena lets out a too-loud groan anyways when Sam kisses her again, quick and filthy, and then she’s gone, sliding out of the office and leaving Lena to press her knees together and groan in frustration.

Step Seven:

Lena’s survived half a dozen attempts on her life since moving to National City.  She’s nearly died in a helicopter, off a building, crushed by a stone model of her own name; she’s nearly been shot and has almost drowned in a crashing plane over the ocean.  She’s listened to her best friend-- her Sam -- admit that she might by dying of some unknown degenerative disease.  She’s been betrayed by her own mother and had to sacrifice someone she might have loved, once upon a time, watching him disintegrate into nothing.

All of that, and nothing has made the world crash around her quite the way it does when her brain puts the pieces together and realizes that Sam-- kind, gentle, brilliant Sam who makes terrible mom jokes and loves her daughter with her whole heart, unreserved and resilient and extraordinary-- has been the unwilling host for the genocidal alien war machine that’s been tormenting National City for months.  Sam’s eyes flash into an unfamiliar crimson and rage clenches her jaw and rips her voice ragged in a way that is entirely not her and Lena’s ears roar and her stomach falls through the floor because her best friend is an unwitting accessory to public enemy number one.

Every step of progress, of distance, of sequestering herself into the role of Sam’s friend and colleague; every moment when she’d felt a familiar warmth growing in her chest when she spoke to Kara and felt a pull away from the soft nostalgia for long nights and early mornings with Sam from what felt like another lifetime; every second of distance since the day she first pushed Sam away expands and compresses and explodes into one mass of fear and worry.  Sam’s life is suddenly the most important part of the equation Lena’s been turning around in her head for weeks and now nothing else-- not the city, not Supergirl, not even Kara and the bright warmth of her smile-- matters in comparison.

Sam returns to herself, crimson fading to brown, anger to confusion, and she wobbles on long legs and uncertainty in the face of Lena’s sudden worry.  

“I’m going to make you better,” Lena promises, hands on Sam’s legs as she kneels down in front of her.  Reign could break her in half before Lena could even blink, but Sam never would hurt her, and Lena’s afraid of so much but she could never be afraid of Sam Arias.  “I promise.”

Every smile from Kara Danvers and moment of grace offered by Supergirl disappears instantaneously into Lena’s promise to save Sam, and for the first time in her life there’s not a single moment of concern or second guessing or other angles to consider.  All that’s left is Sam and the danger she’s in and the people who could hurt her, and whatever determination for distance Lena has held onto for months evaporates into nothing. All that’s left is Sam, and Lena is going to save her.

then

Lena walks into Sam’s office with her head buried in a tablet and swimming with numbers, knocking absently on the doorframe as she steps in.  “Can we talk about the Mayweather numbers for--”

She draws to a sudden stop mid-step, because Sam’s chin is in her hand and her eyes are on her computer a screen, a new sort of focus written into her eyes and mouth.

“Sam?”

“Sorry?” Sam pulls back suddenly, jerking away from the computer and shaking her head.  “Did you say something?”

Lena sits down slowly and reaches back to shut the door, tablet discarded on the desk and forgotten.  “Are you okay?

“Yeah, I’m--fine,” Sam says haltingly. “You wanted to talk about--”

“Sam.”  Lena speaks softly and leans forward, hands in her lap and itching to reach for Sam.  “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” Sam says, and Lena raises an eyebrow.  “I just-- recognized a name on the Mayweather roster, is all.”

“What, your ex is a department head or something?” Lena says it playfully, lazily, already six moves ahead in trying to cajole Sam into talking about whatever’s bothering her.

“Or, you know, the associate director of marketing is Ruby’s father,” Sam mumbles, and Lena chokes on air.

“What?”

Sam sighs and slumps back in her chair, scrubbing at her eyes with her palms and letting out a groan.  “Yep.”

“Ruby’s--really?”

“Yeah, I looked him up,” Sam grumbles at the ceiling.  “Same guy.”

“Oh,” Lena says faintly.  “I mean-- are you-- on good terms?”

“Am I on good terms with the guy who blew me off after knocking me up when I was sixteen, even when my family threw me out on the street?” Sam recites, and Lena winces and pushes at her forehead.

“Okay, stupid question,” she says.  “I-- do you want me to call off the acquisition?”

“What?” Sam’s head snaps back down fast enough the her neck cracks audibly, loud enough that Lena winces in tandem with Sam’s grimace.  “Of course I don’t want-- that is so much bigger than this.”

Lena pushes up to her feet and rounds the desk, hands gathering Sam’s hair to one side and finding her shoulders to rub firmly.  Her thumb dig into the knots at the base of Sam’s neck, pushing against the tension as hard as she can without hurting either of them, and Sam lets out a soft groan.

“I won’t call it off,” Lena says softly. “But I’ll make sure you don’t have to deal with him.”

“You don’t have to--” Sam cuts off with another groan when Lena’s thumb hits a particularly tender spot on her neck.  “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Lena says, still soft, hands careful at Sam’s neck, even as she’s already turning strategies over in her head.  She pauses in her ministrations long enough to lean forward and press her lips gently to the back of Sam’s neck, relishing in the shudder the rips down Sam’s spine.

If, a week later, it comes out that the associate director of marketing at the acquiring company is outed as a serial sexual harasser by anonymously-reporting subordinates and Lena directs her team to make sure he’s gone as a condition of the acquisition, then.  Well. It’s absolutely just for the good of the company and not at all about the stories Sam has told her, late at night and early on weekend mornings, about sleeping in shelters after her friend’s parents could no longer house her, about the car with no heat she and a four year old Ruby slept in while Sam gambled everything she had on a scholarship for a finance degree.  Not at all.

Step Eight:

Sam breaks like nothing Lena has ever seen.  Lena has seen her angry and seen her worried, seen her stressed and exhausted, seen her on two days of no sleep and when she’s dragged herself into work even when she’s barely conscious under the weight of the flu.  Lena’s seen her stretched and strained almost to her breaking point, but she’s never gone past it. Sam’s never broken that Lena’s been there to see, even her worst concerns at work presumably paling in comparison to being sixteen and pregnant and homeless.

After Reign’s outburst, after her understanding, after the defensive cruelty she’d thrown out that Lena had expected but still withered under, Sam fractures around the seams and falls to pieces with huge aching sobs, and Lena doesn’t think about it at all when she drops the barriers and rushes to her side.  

Sam is hurting, and Lena can’t help but be there for her, because Sam has hurt too much in her life already.

“I promise you,” she says, her voice wavering and her eyes watering, holding strong as best she can because Sam is shattered and needs, this time, for Lena to be the one holding them in place, a fixed point in the tumultuous disaster they’ve discovered.  “I won’t let her near Ruby, and I will fix this .  I promise.”

Sam nods, shaky and wavering and broken, and Lena holds tight and presses her forehead to Sam’s.   “I promise,” she says again, over and over. “I promise.”

She doesn’t think of the safety of National City, or Supergirl and the good she’s done and the way Lex had manufactured kryptonite in this exact same way to hold a kryptonian down to earth, or Kara and Alex and how they’ve come to care for Sam and Ruby almost as much as she has.  She doesn’t think of saving the world or protecting the city or her own safety. She doesn’t think of all the ways she’s likely to fail or the way Ruby had looked, alone at an ice rink, shaking and afraid.

She thinks of Sam, just Sam, and the terrifying gulfs of emptiness swallowing her memory; and the way she smiles when she’s figured out a particularly complex tax issue; the way she’s splintered around the understanding that everything she’s ever known is a lie; the way she looks at Ruby when she isn’t paying attention, filled with love and warmth and determination; the way she cracked and disintegrated on the floor of a basement cell deep under L Corp and agreed to let Lena break her body until Reign appears.  

The first night, when Sam sleeps fitfully, fear weighing down her exhaustion, Lena curls at her side in the hospital bed she’d furnished the cell with, holding carefully around her abdomen and resigned to the fact that if Reign appeared when they were sleeping then they were all done for anyways.  She holds onto Sam, familiar and warm even through scrubs in a cold basement, and presses a hand to her cheek while she sleeps and promises to save her.  There's a particular cruelty to it, an irony she doesn't want to acknowledge, to the way it takes Sam's life falling into her hands for her to assign a name and an understanding to how she feels about Sam.

The next morning, Lena fixes electrodes to Sam’s head and whispers useless apologies as she tortures the woman she loves until Reign appears.

then

The Luthor family tradition that her father insisted on and her brother had carried forward for so long, an annual trip to the house in Austria to celebrate Christmas as a family, is foregone in the face of Lex’s growing instability.  Lena follows him to New York, to London, to Bangkok, doing her best to temper his growing mania and convince him to speak to a doctor, a psychiatrist, an alien of any kind who could maybe convince him that the planet wasn’t under attack.

He disappears in the middle of the night from Auckland, and she’s left with nothing but a ransacked hotel room to pay for and a set of bodyguards just as clueless as she is.  The check she writes to the hotel is enough to pay for the damaged room four times over and she hopes it’ll keep them quiet long enough for her to calm him down, and she boards a flight home with exhaustion weighing at her shoulders and a nervous knot in her stomach.  

She doesn’t sleep the whole flight home, and works instead.  The wifi is shoddy but functional, and she schedules emails and plots out a research and development schedule for the new year, drafts agendas for board meetings and schedules the quarterly meetings to woo the larger shareholders.  She gets a response on one of the emails she’d sent out somewhere over the Atlantic, when she’s in some state of borderline delirious exhaustion, a note from Sam regarding a transposed number in a budget document Lena had drafted.

She takes it as a sign and does her best to sleep, and she fails entirely, but it’s enough for her to make it off the plane under her own power when it lands.  The stairs are blurry under her exhaustion and she stumbles on the last one, tripping down towards the tarmac and stopped mid-fall by strong arms catching her.

“Hey, hey, I got you,” Sam says, soft and worried, her familiar perfume the only thing Lena can focus on.

“Sam?”

“I got you,” Sam says again, and she shifts around until her arm is wrapped around Lena’s waist, holding her up easily.  “You don’t make mistakes with numbers, you know. Figured there was something wrong.”

“How did you--”

“Jess told me you were flying home,” Sam murmurs, and Lena slumps against her, head dropping down onto her shoulder.  “And that you’d be landing on Christmas eve. You know how I feel about people being alone on Christmas.”

I love you burns somewhere in her chest, pushing up in her throat and ricocheting off the back of her teeth, and Lena bites down on the inside of her cheek to keep it in.  She doesn’t stop herself, though, from letting Sam settle her into a car and then laying down across the seat and resting her head in Sam’s lap. She falls asleep to Sam’s hand gentle in her hair and doesn’t remember making it up into the apartment, but it’s Christmas morning when she wakes up in Sam’s bed, changed into a soft flannel shirt and sweatpants, warm and rested and comfortable.

The memory of the way she’d nearly let a declaration of love trip out past her lips rises unbidden, and she pulls the blankets higher past her shoulders and rolls over, holding her breathing steady when the door creaks open and Sam tiptoes in to see if she’s awake.  She fakes sleep until she’s alone again, surrounded by everything Sam Arias, and sinks into her concern for her brother to distract from the possibility that she’s in love with her best friend.

Step Nine:

The world is safe and Lena becomes almost every part of her brother she’d never wanted to be-- cold and cynical, distrusted by and distrusting of the Kryptonian who saved the city, saved the world-- but the only part of it all that matters is that Sam and Ruby are safe.

National City is in disarray, filled with smoking holes and the carcasses of buildings and dead bodies to bury; much the same, Lena’s personal life is in shambles, her relationship with Supergirl and the DEO gone up in smoke and her office a disaster of blasted walls and broken windows.  Sam, though, is safe and separated from Reign, and Ruby is unharmed, if potentially in need of a lifetime of therapy, so Lena goes home to her sterile hotel suite and sleeps for three days straight, plagued with nightmares of Sam’s body ripping itself to pieces to discard Reign.

There’s so much to do when she makes it back into the office, too many emails to respond to and stock fluctuations to address, but the first thing she does is tell Jess to clear Sam’s schedule for the next month.  It’s easy, to feed them the lie that Sam was injured during the attack, a quiet misrepresentation that shields Sam from scrutiny and provides her the opportunity to heal.

She plans to wait a week after it all before calling, to keep her distance and allow Sam and Ruby the space to process.  She plans for a week and instead has Sam showing up at her hotel after three days with Ruby in tow.

“Hi,” she says dumbly, stepping back automatically to let them in.  “I didn’t-- I was going to call you.”

“I figured,” Sam says, soft and uncertain and so unlike herself that it rips through Lena’s stomach.  Ruby follows in silently after Sam, trailing close behind her and settling on the couch at her side, unwilling to be more than a few feet from her mother at any point, as if her presence will ward off any remnants of Reign.  “I wanted to see how you were. I-- um. I remember a lot of--”

“Nothing she did was your fault,” Lena says, quick and firm, holding fast to the only certainty she has from this whole mess.  “You aren’t her.”

“Still.” Sam smiles, hollow and sad, and Lena’s fingernails dig into her palms.  “I wanted to see how you are.”

“I’m okay,” Lena says without thinking.  “Tired. But okay.”

“Good,” Sam says, her hands twisting together nervously and her posture entirely unlike herself.  “I--Ruby, can you-- I need to talk to Lena for a bit, okay?”

Ruby looks back and forth between the two of them, regarding Lena for long moments, before nodding carefully.  She hugs Sam tight, pushing her face into the shoulder of sweater, and God, when did Ruby get tall enough for that?  Lena missed so much, moving away.

Ruby pauses at Lena’s side on her way out, fingers fidgeting at her sides, and then hugs her as well.  Lena’s legs shake under the relief, finally processing, if only for the short moments when she has Ruby in her arms, that Sam and Ruby are okay.  The door shuts softly behind Ruby, and Lena’s left alone with Sam for the first time in weeks.

“How are you really?” Lena asks, halting and hesitant.

Sam smiles, thin and unamused, and shakes her head.  Her eyes are underwritten with dark circles, her cheekbones more prominent than usual.  Her sweater hangs too loose over her shoulders, her normally prominent collarbones suddenly gaunt spikes pushing against her skin, as Reign had taken weight Sam couldn't afford to lose with her when she was ripped away.

“I can’t really sleep,” she says after a long moment.  “I don’t think I remember everything, but it’s still--it’s so much.”  Her breath catches audibly in her chest and Lena crosses over to her in an instant, hands hovering at her sides, hesitant but ready, and Sam reaches out with one boney hand to grip at Lena’s arm.

“Have you talked to anyone?” Lena guides her down to sit on the couch, keeping ahold of her hand, thumb working rhythmically across her knuckles.  “I’m sure the DEO could recommend--”

“I wouldn’t know where to start”,” Sam says carefully, her voice cracking.  “I just--maybe one day. But not now. Now I just need to be there for Ruby.”

“Who’s going to be there for you, though?”

Sam looks up at her, eyes dark and exhausted, and shakes her head.  “I don’t need that right now,” she says, raspy and shaking. “I think I just need to-- to start over.  Clean slate.”

“Clean slate,” Lena echoes.  “As in-- not here?”

“I think so,” Sam says carefully.  “I know I signed a contract when--”

“I don’t give a single shit about the contract, Sam,” Lena blurts out.  Her hands tighten around Sam’s unintentionally. “How could you think I-- all I care about is you being okay . I’ll burn the contract, I don’t care about it at all.  I just need to know what you need.”

“I figured you’d say that,” Sam says, wry and smiling in spite of it all. “Can I-- can you just demote me or something.  Move me to another city. I’ll take the hit on my resume, I just-- I need to leave this place.”

“Of course,” Lena says, even as an ache pulls tight in her stomach, her chest, her spine.  “Whatever you need. I promise, you’ll get it. I’ll get the transfer started immediately.”

“Thank you,” Sam mumbles out.  Some of the tension in her shoulders releases and she slumps down, spine curving and shoulders giving way, and she half-falls to the side, head dropping down onto Lena’s shoulder heavily.  “Thank you.”

“Whatever you need,” Lena says softly.  She switches hands out from her grip on Sam’s so she can wrap an arm around narrowed shoulders, fingers curling up into her hair and stroking down.  “I’ve got you.”

“I’d ask you to move too,” Sam says, drowsy and slow.  “I don’t want to do this without you. But you have to stay.  For the company.”

Nausea twists in Lena’s stomach, overwriting every effort she’s ever made to pretend she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in the immediate proximity to Samantha Arias.

then

It’s sudden.  After weeks and months and years of worry, of shadowing Lex’s trips and trying to sneak tracking programs into his computers, of background checking every new hire he made, it all comes to a head in an afternoon.  Hundreds of people are dead and Superman is cornering Lex and capturing him, bringing him down to the police, helping them shove her brother into the back of an armored car, handcuffed and screaming.

It’s sudden, the way the stock price plummets and the resignation emails flood in and her family name is suddenly the mark of a pariah.  It’s sudden, but it’s not, and she should have seen it coming, but she didn’t. She didn’t see it coming, and she’s left standing dumbstruck in front of the news reports on the screens in her office, watching over and over as her brother’s mania killed hundreds.  She didn’t see it coming, and her office empties around her.

The door opens, and she doesn’t turn around from where she’s nursing a bottle of whiskey and staring out across the city.  There are sirens and blue and red lights everywhere, police and firefighters and ambulances still at work to track down all of the wounded and dead, and her office is only one story below Lex’s and higher than anyone else’s in the city, high enough to see it all.  

The door opens, and it’s surely the police, here to bring her in for her failures, for not stopping him, for not saving him, for not being a better sister, a better human.

“Lena.”

It’s Sam.  The police aren’t here-- yet-- but Sam is, hesitant in her reflection in the window in front of Lena, her voice as soft as the blurred edges of her jeans and sweater in the glass, and Lena takes a long swallow from the whiskey bottle.

“What are you doing here?”

“Lena, I--” Sam cuts herself off, and Lena watches flatly in the blurry reflection as she wraps her arms around herself.  “I wanted to see how you are. What I can do.”

“I’m fine,” Lena says callously.  “In case you hadn’t heard. No Luthors were harmed in the making of this massacre.”

“Lena,” Sam says, soft, so soft, so worried, so Sam , and Lena takes another long sip.  She doesn’t move when Sam moves across the office to her side, doesn’t flinch when a hand settles gently at her elbow and pulls the bottle from her grasp.  

“I should have stopped him,” Lena says to her own reflection.  “I should have saved him.  Like he saved me.  I should have been a better-- a better sister, a better family.  I should have been more and maybe if I had been then he wouldn’t have--”

“This isn’t your fault,” Sam says gently, and her hands pull on Lena’s shoulders until she has to turn, to look away from the carnage outside, to face Sam’s concern and the hands pressing to her cheeks.  “You did so much for him. You did so much for everyone. This isn’t your fault.”

“You’re wrong,” Lena says, flat and unaffected.  She doesn’t stop Sam from leading her out of the office and into a car, to her apartment, to where she can lay in her own bed high above the messy remnants of a city and take her shoes off and fall asleep.

Sam is there when she wakes up.

Step Ten:

National City recovers, and Lena rebuilds her company again.

Her office has been reconstructed to exactly what it used to be, clean and bright, but it feels empty and cold in a way it never had before, now that Sam’s gone.  She’d enjoyed the sterile white and sharp lines before, a stark difference to the over-rich reds and mahoganies Lex had favored during his tenure, but now she rattles around the office like a crumb, uncertain of her place without Sam there to tether her.

She keeps her distance, talking through text and through email and the occasional video chat with both Sam and Ruby to make sure they’re settling in okay in Metropolis.  She rebuilds her company, donates millions to reconstruction efforts, leaves Catco to the editor in chief and returns to her world of technology and investment. Sam is two thousand miles away again and it leaves National City cold in a way it had never been when Lena first moved here.

She flies out to Metropolis on a whim, changing an investor call into an in-person meeting so she can have an excuse to be there and find herself in front of the suburban house she knows belongs to Sam and Ruby.  There’s a small yard, a bit unruly, and a set of muddy soccer cleats on the front porch, and a car in the driveway. Sam’s been on a half-remote schedule since she moved, the crowds of in-person meetings more than she can deal with on some days, and Lena squares her shoulders in the face of her nerves and the house in front of her and marches up to ring the doorbell.

It’s six seconds before it opens and Sam blinks at her for only the shortest of moments before all but collapsing into her for a hug.

“Hi,” Lena says softly, holding tight as she dares and willing her pulse to steady against the warm breaths falling heavy against her throat and the clench of Sam’s hands at her back.

“What are you doing here?”

Explanations about work and investors and meetings fall away, and Lena can find nothing more to say except for the quiet “I miss you” she murmurs against Sam’s temple, and Sam’s hands grip tighter to her.

They make it inside, Lena keeping a hand curled around Sam’s elbow and unwilling to let go, even as they settle onto the couch.  The living room is smaller than the one they’d had in National City and still twice the size of the one in their apartment when Lena had first met them.  She lets her hand unwrap from Sam’s elbow and slide down to her hand, wrapping gently around her palm and holding carefully to it as she quizzes Sam on her health, her sleep, her daughter.

“I’m glad you’re doing okay,” Lena says softly, fingers interlocking with Sam’s and holding firm.  

“It’s not always good,” Sam says, raspy and tired, but she smiles, and it’s genuine enough that Lena smiles automatically in response.  “But it’s getting better. I’m getting better.”

“Good,” Lena says firmly.  “You deserve it.”

“So what are you doing out here?” Sam says, poking at Lena’s shoulder with her free hand, smiling almost playfully.  “Surely it’s not because you missed Metropolis all that much.”

Lena pulls in a slow breath and blows it out, shrugging slowly as she does and keeping her focus on their joined hands.  “National City is--it’s different. After everything that happened. Not just the city, but how I feel in it. It’s not the same.”

“To be fair, a lot happened--”

“It’s not the same without you and Ruby,” Lena says carefully.  She doesn’t look up, shifting her hand to wind her fingers through Sam’s.  “It never felt-- it was never empty before, but now it just feels like this big empty box I’m rattling around in alone.”

“Oh,” Sam says, faint and unsure, and Lena pulls in another deep breath, squares her shoulders, calls on every traitorous moment she’d given in to when trying to separate herself from Sam.

“After Lex-- after what he did,” she says, speaking slow and measured, keeping her voice as level as she can.  “I had a plan. I was going to save the company, and turn it into something better than he ever could have imagined or wanted, and I was going to do it all in spite of him.”

“You did,” Sam says quietly, squeezing at Lena’s hand.  “You have. You’ve done so much--”

“And I had a plan to leave you,” Lena plows on, talking over Sam too loudly.  “Because I couldn’t-- I couldn’t be with you, the way I wanted, and do what I needed to do.  I had a plan, and it was easy and simple and should have been fine, but I just couldn’t make it work because I never made a plan to stop being in love with you.”

Sam’s hand goes slack in hers, a sharp inhale the only other acknowledgement Lena gets for her admission.  She pulls in another breath to buy herself a moment and lets Sam’s hand slide free of hers, pulling her own hands together in her lap carefully.

“I know I’ve been-- not great,” Lena says, picking her words carefully.  “I treated you terribly, and took more from you than I ever had a right to.  And I understand if this is something you aren’t interested in hearing, or actively don’t want to, or if you want me to leave immediately.  But I’ve spent years either falling in love with you or telling myself I wasn’t in love with you or trying to get over you, and everything always leads back to you.  Every part of my life that matters, since I first met you, circles back to you.”

Sam pulls her hand back, pushing up to her feet and pacing out of Lena’s reach and pushing at her hair, and Lena winds her hands together and holds her breath, waiting as best she can for Sam to speak.

“All this time,” Sam says eventually.  “You said-- so when we were-- you--”

“I don’t think I ever had a chance not to,” Lena says drily.  She pulls her gaze up from her hands to catch Sam’s wide eyes, and shrugs helplessly.  “You’re brilliant and extraordinary, Sam, and beautiful, and charming, and-- so infuriatingly kind that I don’t know how you’re even real sometimes.  And you’re the first person I want to talk to when I have a bad day, or a great day, or even a boring day, because everything always feels warmer and safer when I’m with you.”

She cuts herself off with a click of her teeth, swallowing the next half-dozen pieces of romantic commentary aching to burst out of her chest.

“Please say something,” she says softly.  “I obviously won’t begrudge you not feeling the same, or wanting time to think, or--”

“I’m a mess, Lena,” Sam says, and it comes out like a crack.  Her eyes are wide in the dark circles surrounding them, sunken into her still-hollowed cheeks, and her mouth presses into a thin shaking line.  There's a sliver of scar tissue, a paper-thin slice of white over her temple just below the hairline, a lingering remnant not of Reign but of the electrodes Lena had used to draw Reign out.  “I--how can you possibly-- look at me.”  She gestures uncertainly to her thinned down frame and unsteady hands, her bloodshot eyes.  “I’ve got nothing to offer you now, but now is when you decide to--”

“You have so much to offer,” Lena says sharply.  “You’re more than what happened to you, just like you’ve always told me that I’m more than who my family is.  But even if you weren’t-- God, this isn’t some transaction. I’m not here to broker a deal with you, I’m here because when the whole world might have ended and I might have stopped it all I could bring myself to care about was protecting you .”

She pushes her hands into her knees and takes a heavy breath, willing herself to stay in one place, to not crowd Sam, to give her space and time to process.  Sam’s hands hang at her sides, shoulders slumped and spine curving, fingers shaking and tapping against her legs.

“All this time,” she says.  “We could have had all of this time.”

“I didn’t know how,” Lena says, soft and slow and guilty.  “I wasn’t-- I thought I could just walk away and I would be okay.  But I could never really walk away, and no matter how far I got, it never stopped.  I never stopped caring about you more than anyone else.”

“Lena,” Sam says, helpless and plaintive, and Lena’s fingers dig into her knees, preparing for the rebuttal, the dismissal, the anger.  “I-- this isn’t--”

“I understand,” Lena says carefully.  “I told you I wouldn’t begrudge you not reciprocating, and I certainly meant it.”  She pushes up to her feet and gathers her purse, carefully avoiding Sam’s gaze. “Please tell Ruby I’m sorry I missed her and that she can still always call--”

“I’m not asking you to leave,” Sam says over her.  “I never said I wanted you to leave.”

“Oh,” Lena says dumbly, dropping her purse without meaning to.  

“This is--not what I expected my day to go like,” Sam says, blowing a deep breath out.  “But that doesn’t mean I want you to leave.”

“What does it mean, then?” Lena ventures.  

“It means I--” Sam says, and then cuts herself off, and Lena’s stomach lurches.  “It means I want you to stay.”

“For dinner?”

“For the night,” Sam says quietly.  “And maybe longer. We can talk about it.”

“We can talk about it,” Lena repeats, and the lurch in her stomach settles as warmth pushes against her sternum.  Air catches in her lungs when Sam covers the distance between them with one long stride, slow and deliberate, and her hands make their way up to follow the line of Lena’s jaw and curl around the back of her head, tipping her chin up until Sam kisses her, slow and easy and warm, and Lena melts into the familiar shift of Sam’s lips against her, the way her hands find Sam’s hips and sharper hipbones than usual, the way Sam’s hands tangle into her hair and hold her close.

“Can you say it again?” Sam mumbles against her lips, eyes still closed.

“I’m in love with you,” Lena says, soft and gentle, and Sam’s forehead presses against hers.  “And you’re still one hundred percent the best sex of my entire life.”

It earns her a laugh, surprised and breathy, and Sam kisses her again, hotter and faster and harder, and Lena feels it straight down her spine to her toes.  

“I take it back,” Sam says.  “I don’t want to talk about it.  Just stay. This time can you just-- stay.  With me.”

Lena curves her arms around Sam’s back and holds as hard as she can, pushing up on her toes so she can kiss Sam again and mutter out “I’m not going anywhere,” and means it.