Chapter Text
Lena Luthor and Kara Danvers are friends, even though barely acquaintances is the more appropriate description to label their so called relationship. The only reason the two of them are friends to begin with is because Kara works at the little bakery off campus walk that Lena frequents, especially during the late, ‘it’s almost close and why are you still out this late’ shift, and Kara never once complains about brewing a whole batch of coffee or warming up a croissant for her. They barely exchange anything other than customer-employee formalities—maybe if the maker was taking its precious time Kara would ask Lena about her day because it’s always written on her face she didn’t like awkward silences going empty, but never anything beyond that.
Somewhere along the blurred days of her final final exams and a caffeine withdrawal haze and trying to stuff her entire apartment into three suitcases and a couple of boxes that would inevitably sit in storage until the end of time itself, Lena overhears Kara talking on the phone while she’s trying to close in a rather intriguing conversation. This is where it begins.
“Alex, I’m serious,” she says, her voice shifting up an octave in impatience. “There’s no way my car is going to survive from here to National City on a time crunch, I don’t—she’s what?” Lena lurks a few steps away from the counter, trying not to make her eavesdropping an entirely obvious feat. “Alright, alright, fine, I’ll be there, but you’re paying for my gas on the trip back,” she settles, hanging up the phone and tucking it into the back pocket of her jeans.
Lena’s presence startles her—even though the overhead bell on the door jingled when she came strolling in—and Kara’s quick to try and gather her composure when she sees who’s standing there. “Oh, gosh, have you been standing there long?” she asks, concern riddling her face. “I’m sorry, my sister was having a crisis and…yeah, right, okay, your usual?” Kara pushes her glasses up a little higher on the bridge of her nose, apparently they’d fallen in the midst of her flustered rambling, which Lena finds adorable.
“Just walked in,” Lena clarifies, smile pulling on the corners of her lips. “And sure, the usual.”
Kara goes about her routine, starting up the espresso machine and reaching into the dry case for a cinnamon apple turnover, wrapping it in a napkin and gently placing it into a bag before extending it to Lena. Lena takes the opportunity for what it is, an eyebrow quirking in curiosity. “Traveling over break?” she asks, and while it’s a sigh nonetheless, Kara manages to make it lighthearted.
“Yeah, my sister – um, well, she’s got some stuff going on and could use a little sister time, that type of thing, so she’s wanting me to come visit her back home,” Kara explains, before gesturing towards Lena. “What, uh, how about you? Any plans?”
Lena shrugs nonchalantly, her finger absentmindedly running over the top of the bag. “I’m graduating this semester,” she says, and the look on Kara’s face spells out that she wasn’t anticipating that kind of answer at all.
“You’re graduating early? Of course you are,” she says, before looking back at Lena and realizing that oh shit, she’s said that out loud. Lena can’t help but to chuckle. “I mean, congratulations, that’s really awesome! Like, really, really awesome, I wish I was going to get to finish up early. Are you heading back home to, um, celebrate or something?”
“Not exactly; any time I go to National City, there’s never a vacation itinerary attached,” Lena mutters, her eyes casting downwards. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Kara’s got about a trillion different questions on her tongue, all of which head in varying directions and it’s twinkling there in her eyes.
Instead of asking what Lena thinks is coming next—what are you doing in National City? Why are you going there after graduation instead of Fiji like the rest of your bioengineering friends?—Kara nearly knocks the wind out of her and things begin to derail in a gloriously awkward fashion. “Would you maybe want to carpool with me? That’s where my sister lives and it’s not like I’m going to have any, uh, well any other company with me so shotgun will be free and I drive a pretty big car, so there’s plenty of room. And it’s completely up to you; if you don’t want to you, you don’t have to, we don’t really know each other all that well but I just thought it would maybe be fun and a little less lonely that way and—“
Lena’s a bit taken aback by the proposition, seeing as how it came out of nowhere, but she still manages to let out a small laugh as she goes about reassuring the disconcerted blonde across the counter. “Kara, it’s fine. I’d like that,” she says, and even though she’s going to have to figure out a smooth excuse for selling her first class seats secondhand, it’s going to be worth it judging by how Kara’s cheeks are still burning red and that sheepish grin on her face that screams satisfaction.
This is entirely and utterly Kara, of course, or as much as Kara as she's seen. Crazy, perhaps—for all she knows, Lena could very easily be a murderer or trying to take advantage of her in some way, but she's willing to invite her trademark closing-crasher on a road trip all the way up to National City without any sort of hesitation. Lena decides then that Kara is inherently good, beyond taking off the few extra cents when she knows Lena doesn't have it or slipping her an extra half of a turnover when Lena comes in after a harrowing test and it's showing on her face. There are a few things you can tell right off the bat about someone, and Lena doesn't need any other evidence to determine that Kara Danvers is nothing short of good.
The espresso machine makes a weird noise, and Kara grabs the cup of coffee to hand to Lena. “Two sound good?” she asks, drawing her hands back as soon as the cup touches Lena’s fingertips, like she’s scared if she brushes skin she’ll burst into flames.
“Perfect.”
Funny, Lena thinks, how all roads, especially those to National City, always lead to irony.
Kara’s waiting for her right on time Wednesday afternoon out in front of her apartment complex, after she interrupted Lena’s one am last-minute packing extravaganza in a full panic in need of thoroughly detailed directions to her place, her reasoning for such stacked in a laundry list of worry that she was going to royally screw this up. And, in the midst of it, a congratulations on her graduation a few hours earlier.
“Hi,” she says, her face stretched into that perma-grin Lena has no idea in hell she’s able to always hold as she extends her foot, rolling her ankle around a few times before the trunk clicks and opens on its own and god, does she look so pleased with herself. “Look, magic trunk.”
Finding Kara adorable is inevitable; on anyone else, granted, Lena’s sure she’d have rolled her eyes and walked in the opposite direction, but Kara is different. Kara is infectious. “Indeed it is,” she replies.
She’s insistent on helping Lena load her stuff into the car, even though Lena knows she may as well have packed cinderblocks, and Lena keeps trying to tell Kara that she’s got it, dammit, she doesn’t mind getting it, but Kara Danvers does not take no for an answer, apparently, and hoists every last piece of luggage into the car on her own. Lena really has no idea how she does it, and is convinced on the spot that Kara has superhuman strength and a desire for organization, seeing as how their bags are all neatly arranged on some sort of system with space to spare.
“I made a road trip playlist last night,” Kara admits after Lena climbs into the car, one hand on the steering wheel and the other scratching behind her neck, a nervous tic that Lena’s noticed she does whenever someone comes into the bakery that makes her feel uncomfortable, and Lena’s praying that she’s not putting Kara on edge by her presence. “I like to make playlists whenever I go places or do things that last longer than an hour and a half; it’s um, it’s on my phone if you want to look through it or find something else you like, or if you want to listen to the radio, that’s cool, too.”
Lena’s beginning to realize that Kara has a bit of trouble keeping her composure whenever she’s around, and she’s not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
She grabs Kara’s phone from the cup holder while Kara gets buckled, pressing the unlock button. Curiosity piques when she sees her wallpaper; Kara’s arms are tightly wrapped around a smaller brunette whom she appears to be squishing (with her strength, Lena can’t say she’s surprised) and the smile on her face is so wide her eyes and nose are scrunched up and even little pieces of blonde hair falling across can’t take away from it. Lena briefly wonders who the mystery brunette is, and the possibilities in her head are winding: it could be the sister, could be a friend, roommate, that one girl who works at the bakery and Lena always gets disappointed seeing whenever she comes in expecting Kara on the closing shift—
The sound of Kara turns the keys in the ignition only distracts her a little, but it’s her turn to be startled for once when the speakers practically explode, the entire car shaking as the bass from what Lena barely makes out to be an old Missy Elliott song rattles them both. Kara’s of course three steps past alarmed by this, nearly hitting her head on the ceiling of the car as she jumps. Lena helps her out a little bit, pressing the pause button that’s now appeared on Kara’s phone right about the time Kara’s recovered enough to find the volume knob and nearly breaks it as she turns it to the left. It’s silent for a moment, just the two of them trying to catch their breath after that pleasant surprise.
“I might have started the road trip playlist on my drive over,” Kara confesses, her breathing still labored, and Lena chuckles as she pushes her sunglasses down onto her nose.
“I can see that.”
Lena thought the superhuman strength thing was a bit of a quirk, nothing to be genuinely concerned by, but she’s starting to reconsider the idea that perhaps Kara just isn’t human, period.
National City’s roughly an eleven hour drive from Midvale University, and if the GPS that randomly keeps interrupting Kara’s playlist that’s now hit a ten-song Taylor Swift streak with ‘rerouting’ is any indication, she’s aiming to cut time by taking the nine hour back-road route. They’ve only been on the road for about two and a half hours or so, and it’s barely even dinner time in Lena Luthor’s world, and yet Kara’s already finished off an entire bag of pretzels and cleaned out a whole Tupperware of last night’s leftover potstickers that while trying to fetch out of the backseat, she nearly drove the car into a ditch. Meanwhile, Lena’s barely taken a sip of the water Kara brought for her.
She finally has to suggest they pull over whenever they find the next restaurant, because it’s silently killing her that Kara’s plowing through every road-trip snack that she’d probably intended for tonight when she needs the energy to keep her awake and yet, somehow, Lena doubts that’ll be the case because there’s no way in hell Kara Danvers is human, she’s sure of it. She’s even willing to throw away the last month of her vowing to eat healthy and not succumb to the Chinese restaurant two blocks over that delivers at any hour of the night for fast food, if that’s what they pass by first.
Fortunately, the first sign of civilization beyond trees, farms, and sketchy gas stations is a diner, and Kara merely glances over at Lena while she turns her blinker on, looking for some sign of approval from her even though Kara’s stomach has already made the decision for them.
It’s homey and filled with traveling stragglers like them, and Lena doesn’t know if she’s just out of her element in a place like this, that’s quaint and quiet and Kara’s just used to it or what. If anything, this to her is a vast, vast ocean and she is a minnow, meanwhile Kara’s a damn catfish swimming around in a bathtub. Lena Luthor has never done a diner in her life as far as she can remember.
She begins to wonder why that is the longer they’re there.
Being behind the bakery counter over the last three months that they’ve known one another hasn’t really been ideal for getting to know one another, and there’s no time like an awkwardly intimate dinner out in the middle of nowhere to start breaking ground. Kara likes to talk, she’s very personable and could easily carry the whole weight of the conversation on her shoulders without so much as batting an eyelash, but she wants to know more about Lena. She figures that’s fair, seeing as how she’s probably resulted in Kara having to close way past when intended one too many times over the semester.
And, Kara’s kind of adorable, so she doesn’t really know how to say no.
“National City?” Kara prompts somewhere in the middle of her sandwich, as Lena absentmindedly stacks pieces of lettuce onto the tines of her fork. “I mean, it’s a lovely place, but you kind of expect people to be exotic with their post-graduation plans.”
Lena shrugs. “That’s too predictable, I like to stray from what’s expected.” Kara doesn’t quite catch onto the fact that she’s making a joke, and a big one at that, because she couldn’t have been farther from the truth: Lena Luthor is a creature of habit through and through and it’ll be engrained in her until she’s lowered into her grave. She waves her fork around in the air casually. “I’ve had the family business waiting on me since I declared my major freshman year. Now’s the time to step up to the plate, with my mom wanting to take leave and work on personal projects.”
“Then wouldn’t you say that’s expected of you?” Kara quips, and Lena’s eyebrow quirks in response.
“I guess it does,” she replies, the smile creeping onto her face hard to ward off as she plays along. “Maybe I’ll just have you drop me off on the way at the airport. Italy sound unpredictable enough?”
“Very,” Kara agrees, a peal of laughter leaving her throat.
They wind into conversation, spotted at best but Lena loves hearing Kara talk; there’s a reason Kara is in mass comm, no doubt, and it’s for every reason Lena dodged it like the plague: she’s good with people. The twinkle in her eye gets a little brighter when she starts talking about all the things she loves, she trips up her words when she gets really excited about them—she learns Kara played soccer in high school and is still a bit of a fitness junkie, which entirely explains the strength and accelerated metabolism, she hears all about how Kara fell in love with the Harry Potter series at age nine, she basks in Kara’s anecdotes of awkward moments where she struggles to get through her own laughter as she relives it all over again for Lena. And yet, even though she would be content hearing about Kara, just hearing Kara talk for the rest of the evening, Kara wants to know more about her for some reason.
Lena doesn’t think she’s all that intriguing, but Kara does and insists. So she talks about how Kara will dread her senior thesis in two years when she graduates because there’s simply no avoiding the obvious, she recounts when she discovered her allergy to tree nuts, hazelnut most particular—Kara nearly chokes at this revelation, “You mean you risk your life every single time you stop by the shop, and that I could have killed you by accident and never known it?”—she even talks about what she’s going to do the first few weeks at the corporation, despite her belief Kara won’t care, but she does. Kara’s is just as rapt with everything that comes from her lips as Lena feels she is whenever Kara opens her mouth, and it’s a strange feeling, it is.
Their waiter offers them apple pie a la mode for dessert, apparently the only selection of the evening. Lena declines. Kara requests if she can just have the ‘a la mode’ part, and Lena tries not to chuckle.
“So, you’re going to see your sister?” Lena asks when Kara’s giant bowl of ice cream arrives, eager to reroute the conversation away from herself. Besides, Kara’s a rambler and the only thing Lena can think to rattle off about at the moment is all the things that are much, much more interesting than she is.
Her trademark grin etches into her face, and Lena can’t tell if it’s because ice cream is here or if she just loves her sister. God only knows Lena wishes she could express the same sentiment for her own siblings. Kara offers the extra spoon that got delivered despite Lena’s denial of needing one anyways, and she shakes her head. “Alex,” she starts as she digs in. “She’s experiencing a crisis at the moment; otherwise I wouldn’t be driving myself up from school, she would have come down to get me herself. I mostly attribute it to the fact she called me the other night needing an opinion on doughnuts and is therefore too incompetent and way too lazy to operate a vehicle.”
“Sounds treacherous,” Lena hums. “Crisis?”
“She’s lovesick,” Kara states, and Lena does her best not to laugh at, well, everything about Kara's reaction.
“I see. Is she your only sibling?”
“Kind of, I guess? I was adopted when I was twelve so if there are any other siblings running around, I wouldn’t know about them,” Kara explains, her spoon chasing another bite of ice cream as she talks, eyes cast on the bowl rather than Lena. “My dad—er, adopted dad—was killed overseas on a tour when I was fourteen, so it’s just been me, Alex and Eliza ever since. They’re not blood, but they’re family.” She swallows, then adds, “Well, aside from Clark.”
“Clark?” she prompts, and Kara nods. At the sound of his name she seems to lighten up a little more, and judging by the reaction, Lena briefly entertains the idea that he’s a boyfriend.
“Yeah, Clark’s my cousin,” Kara answers, and out the window goes the boyfriend thought. “He’s a writer at the Daily Planet; he’s pretty much the whole reason I even wanted to go into communications to begin with, I think it’s so awesome that he gets to—“
“Wait, Clark Kent is your cousin?” Lena backpedals, and Kara glances up from her ice cream long enough to make eye contact as she nods. To her, that’s no big deal, but Lena isn’t Kara.
“Yeah, why?”
Lena stiffens. She doesn’t know how to find the words without them coming out like knives, that’s the only way they’ve ever come falling from her mouth or anyone else’s, for that matter, and she’s not sure how she’s going to break this without spitting poison all in Kara’s vanilla ice cream. “Lena…” Kara says, sensing something’s wrong, reaching across the table for Lena’s hand in an act of comfort, and like she’s the one who’s about to get burned, she jerks her hand farther back towards her chest. Blue eyes just look at her, trying (and utterly failing) to conceal the rebuff’s aftermath, and dammit, dammit, dammit is the only thing hurtling in Lena’s mind.
She never could catch a break, and probably never would at this rate.
“Kent’s the reason my brother’s serving a life sentence.”
“Oh,” is all Kara can say.
They don’t talk much after leaving the diner; Lena finds one of Kara’s playlists that doesn’t have anything upbeat, to fit the mood of course, and opts for it, Kara turns on cruise control, and Lena leans her seat back as far as it will go without Kara’s hanging outfits getting in her face.
This would happen, no doubt, it’s how Lena’s luck seems to operate. Something good enters her life, inevitably gets fucked over because of her family and their doings. She remembers all of the feelings from Lex’s arrest, the lead weight pressing her shoulders and her parents turning on the frost towards her in order to deal with what her brother had done. Lena remembers feeling like she was living her life in a glass cage, an exhibit for other people to surround and observe and walk away feeling some remorse she was stuck in the predicament she was, but not really. God, she remembers how for Christmas she got a pair of designer sunglasses for when they’d go to court and the cameras would be in her face, but it was okay, because they were designer and that was meant to eradicate the pain of the situation just a little bit. She remembers having to take the semester off because she just couldn’t handle stepping foot from her apartment because her brother had screwed up royally and now it was her reputation thrown in the garbage, too. She feels it even though it isn't her burden to carry and she doesn't know how to turn it off, so instead, it just evolves into the giant wrecking ball that comes crashing into her life right when she thinks it's gone.
She doesn’t know how Kara didn’t realize it sooner, especially if she was Clark’s cousin. Lena had come to find since the incident that her business had been broadcast and made everyone else's business as well, whether they knew her or not, and her automatic assumption these days was that everyone knew the details. Kent's name hadn't been tied to it, of course: there's perks when you're the Daily Planet darling, but Lena knew and according to the science of her warped logic, that meant it might as well have been plastered on a billboard downtown. But Lena’s not a fool, and writing Kara off like that is a mistake. She’s no fool either, Kara’s smart. Especially if it comes to her family, her 'reason'?
Kara had to have known.
Or maybe she just didn’t, and that’s why she’s biting the ever living fuck out of her lower lip, already picked it to the point of bleeding at least twice. Lena’s trying not to count, but there’s nothing else to do.
She wants to say something, anything, break the silence like glass, but she’s almost afraid of what the shards will bury themselves into when she does. She's not good with people, conversations, friends, even; Kara's the first thing she's had to what feels like a friend in god only knows how long and she's positive she's gone and fucked that up now dragging her cousin into it, and Lena wants to fix it desperately, but she can't. She doesn't know how. Instead, she stays quiet, staring out the windshield and letting Kara’s playlists wash over her like cold water. Eventually, Lena just grows numb, and nods off, not even bothering to acknowledge when Kara accidentally knocks her clothes into her face when she reaches for a bag of chips.
Lena wakes up at the lack of music in the car, only to put two and two together and figure out that Kara’s turned it off out of courtesy for Lena's sleeping, since she’s got one earphone in and the other dangling down her neck so she can hear around her if need be. She contemplates saying something now, but won't bother at this point. The headlights bounce off the National City sign as they pass it, and Lena knows she ought to feel a little bit of relief knowing the ride’s almost over, but she doesn’t. Not even a little bit.
Kara drops her off at the hotel somewhere after midnight, and Lena doesn’t even let Kara bid her so much as a goodbye before she utters her thanks and scurries inside.