“It’s not like I haven’t considered leaving,” she says, cracking open her own can of soda and pausing for a long sip. She reaches up a hand to rub at her eyes, “I have my eye on job listings. But right now, it’s stable income and my contract’s not up till the end of the year. Unless another paper wants to buy out my contract– which won’t happen, I guarantee– I’m stuck for at least another few months.”
Kara sighs and leans over to bury her face in his shoulder, giving a low whine of unhappiness.
“I was hoping things would get better when I got this job,” she mutters, “It looked like such a great opportunity on paper but ever since we got that new editor it’s been, just… ugh.”
It’s not like being Supergirl gets her a paycheck, or anything– she relies on her civilian income to live and even though she’s human-passing, every comment feels like a slap in the face. If she could quit, she’d have done so ages ago. For now, she has to soldier on and she can come to her wonderful, understanding partner and vent about it all in the privacy of home. Or– his home, at least.
“Let’s just eat and have a nice night in, okay? I don’t want to bring down the whole evening.”
She presses a soft kiss to his jaw, then wonders quietly to herself when she’d started to think of Tom’s place as home. It snuck up on her, she muses, but she spends just as much time here as she does at her own apartment and it’s one of the very few places on Earth that she can be her whole, true self. It’s…. something she hasn’t had in a long time, not since leaving Smallville.
HE LET THE silent moments sit between them, not filling the spaces he realized she needed for her breath. Even as she curled into him to escape — even for a minute — from her frustrations. It was a bit totally unlike Tom, but also exactly like him. He’d always been the more fatalistic between himself and his brother. Seeing the future all the time and nothing but the future made Fate’s machinations feel more inevitable to him. He didn’t have the present to worry about ( he barely remembered that the present existed in most moments, tied up as he was in what was coming ) and so he leaned into the future, not fighting it like Henry did. And here he was, not trying to find ways for Kara to fight, either.
After a silent moment, Tom shrugged. “If this is the time you quit and come here while you look for something better, that’s all well and good,” he said. “Hadn’t realized that it was this soon. — Is it? That future had always been a little fuzzy. In a few futures, you move in while you’re looking for a new job, get one in just about a month, usually. Sometimes you leave, sometimes you don’t. If you’d want to do that, you can.”
Kara moving in — when and why — had always been one of the fuzzier parts of the future, much to Tom’s consternation. He hated it when his present was muddled because everyone else’s present wasn’t yet decided.
“You don’t have to, but you can.”