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Notes: I know people prefer fics with Lena, but God how I love writing this moron here.
Kara isn’t in love.
Not because she isn’t capable of it, or because she doesn’t want to be, but because life asks too much of her, and love is a loss of control she can’t afford. She can’t have someone who matters so much that, if ever faced with the choice between saving the world or saving one person, she might not even consider the world at all.
It’s logical. Obvious. Perfectly clear.
And it collapses every single time she sees you.
You were Lena’s friend first. You came all the way from Central City to help her create one simple thing. Something that turned out to be anything but. So you stayed. Days stretched into weeks, weeks into months. Lena grew almost dependent, not just on your inventive mind, but on the way you listened to her fully, entirely. She leaned on you without realizing it, confided in those late, low moments when the office lights were dim and the city felt heavy.
Then it just… spread.
Tuesdays with Winn started casually. One shared comment about a game, one you play too? moment, and suddenly it’s become a ritual. He pretends he’s not emotionally invested. He is deeply emotionally invested.
Mondays with Nia began as an accident and turned out to be sacred. Coffee, sunlight, gentle complaining about the week ahead. Nia clocks the feelings you don’t even know how to name, but she doesn’t say anything. She just smiles, like she’s holding a secret in her pocket.
Alex’s protectiveness was instinctive and a little fierce. To her, you look like someone who might apologize for existing too loudly. Alex decided, immediately, that the world is not allowed to be mean to you. This includes aliens. This includes her own sister, if necessary.
And Kara?
Kara wants a kiss. Repeatedly. Intrusively. At inappropriate times.
It shows up without asking. While Winn is talking. While Lena is monologuing. While the world continues as normal and Kara loses entire seconds of her life to the shape of your mouth.
It’s all she can think about. It follows her into sleep, into dreams she wakes from too fast, heart racing, embarrassed by her own brain.
Which is why she can’t do it. Cannot, will not, must stop doing it.
Because you’re not just important to her. You’re important to everyone. Which means Kara’s fear gets smarter. Loving you wouldn’t just be dangerous. No. It would be selfish. Possessive. Risky in ways she knows too well.
So she smiles. She shows up. She keeps her lips to herself.
Like the hero she is.
The takeout containers are spread across the table, cardboard moons orbiting empty plates. It’s loud in a good way. Winn arguing with Lena about something fictional and therefore extremely serious, Alex stealing fries off Kara’s plate with the confidence of blood relations, you and Nia giggling about something no one knows about. And here Kara is, losing whole stretches of conversation to the idea of your mouth: how it curves when you smile, how it might curve after a kiss, how there are sounds she is suddenly, inexplicably sure you could make.
Everyone sees it at the same time. There’s one potsticker left. There’s a beat. A collective, unspoken understanding. Kara Danvers and potstickers are a known law of nature.
Kara reaches for it. Pauses.
She’s noticed you haven’t eaten much. You do that sometimes, get so absorbed in a conversation, in a story, that food becomes an afterthought. It doesn’t help that you eat incredibly slowly, while the rest of them—animals, really, except for Lena—basically inhale their meals. Kara most of all.
It’s a selfless act. That’s what she tells herself. The hero in her.
“Here.” She places it on your plate. “You have it.”
Winn inhales so hard, he starts coughing. Alex squints. Nia’s eyebrows disappear into her hairline. Lena tilts her head just slightly, curious in that way that has ruined men.
You notice how the room has gone quiet. Not awkwardly quiet. Scientific quiet. Like something has just defied gravity and people have to document it.
“You sure?” Your voice is low, but the room is so still you might as well have shouted.
“Yeah.” Kara swallows. Everyone is still staring. “Not hungry anymore.”
You glance up at her, amused but gentle, because you’ve decided not to pull on the loose thread. “If you change your mind,” you say, holding up the potsticker, “I can share.”
Kara doesn’t think about the food. She thinks about your mouth. About the way your lips curve around words, around food, around things she is very much not allowed to want.
She looks away like that might undo the thought. It doesn’t.
“No,” she says softly. “That’s okay—” babe.
Her tongue knows the shape of it before her brain catches up. It almost slips out. Familiar. Easy. Babe.
It rises to the back of her throat before she can stop it, before she remembers herself, the room, the careful lines she’s drawn and redrawn. Babe.
She swallows hard, and lets the moment pass like it never existed.
Around the table, everyone very pointedly returns to their food. But something has changed. Not enough to be named. Just enough to be remembered later as something more.
She needs to fix this.
That’s the thought that lodges itself behind her eyes sometime after midnight and refuses to leave. Fix it. Smooth it out. Be normal. Be good. Be Kara Danvers, Earth’s most emotionally constipated hero.
So she compensates.
Aggressively.
Winn mentions coffee and the next morning she hands him his exact order, memorized down to the detail he only uses when he’s stressed. She smiles too hard. Calls it nothing. Lena gets pastries flown in from Dublin because Kara remembers an offhand comment and decides this is what being friends is supposed to look like now. Nia needs help and Kara is already there, already lifting, already saying friend like it’s a rule she can’t break.
This is just who she is, she tells herself. Helpful. Attentive. Overly invested in everyone equally. A model of emotional responsibility.
It backfires immediately.
“I don’t understand,” Winn says, staring at Kara’s TV. Pixel Paladins glows on the screen, unmistakable. His game. Yours too. “Why are you playing this now?”
“Because I love it,” Kara says easily. Too easily. “It’s fun.”
Winn slowly looks at her. She’s fairly certain she called him a nerd for this exact game three weeks ago, but she's ignoring that for now.
“Really? You like playing video games now?”
“I have passion, Winn. So much passion.”
He doesn’t even look up from his controller. “Truly inspiring. I’m moved. Would you like that embroidered on a pillow?” Then, casual as a knife between ribs, “Speaking of passion… Here comes your biggest one.”
“What?” Kara turns, heart immediately attempting to evacuate her body.
You’re walking toward them, distracted, smiling at something on your phone, utterly unaware that Kara has just been emotionally pantsed in her own living room.
“Shut up, nerd.” Kara mutters, too late, too quiet.
Winn grins like he just won a prize.
“Hey! Another Paladin is joining our quest, nice!” You drop down on the couch next to her. Close, deliberately so, like there was never another option. So close she actually has to hold her breath so she won't accidentally touch you. “I knew you would like it, if you gave it a chance. Now you can come play with us every Tuesday.”
Kara is staring at your lips.
She has been thinking about them for an alarming amount of time.
Yep, Kara thinks, turning to look straight ahead while her shoulder screams, this has completely backfired.
She’s safer at game nights. With this many people, the distance doesn’t feel chosen. It feels required.
Kara doesn't have to look at you, even though she steals glances consistently. She doesn't have to be your partner at games, though her heart drops on her chest when you reach inside the bowl and pull out Lena's name for the night. She doesn't have to feel weird to have bought your favorite type of soda, when she also bought everyone's favorite snack.
And she doesn’t have to feel bad for using any excuse to get out for a second, before the thought of you steals her breath again.
She's in the kitchen, dumping more popcorn into a bowl, when she feels a hand settle at the small of her back. A small pressure. The touch doesn’t ask permission. It assumes it.
And she doesn’t have to look because it's obvious by the way her body reacts to it. Heart kicking hard enough she’s briefly worried it might actually escape.
“Need any help?”
She could hear it somehow. The babe that never comes, lingering in the space after your voice like she’s the one finishing the sentence.
If this never happened before, why does it feel so familiar? Right in the way nothing ever has before, settling somewhere deep and instinctive, like it’s always known where to land.
Kara’s grip tightens on the bowl. This is nothing. This is normal. People touch each other all the time. Friendly. Casual.
Entirely survivable.
The bowl snaps.
A sharp crack, plastic giving way in her hands, popcorn spilling like evidence across the counter.
“Here, let me—”
Your hands touch as you reach for it, fingers brushing hers.
Kara’s heart somersaults clean out of her body, leaves her hollow and shaking in its wake. The want hits her all at once: violent, instinctive, terrifying. She wants to kiss you. Has to. Like breathing. Like gravity. Like something she won’t survive if she lets herself finish the thought.
That’s what scares her. Not the feeling. The loss of control.
She drops the bowl.
And bolts.
The next time she sees you, Kara has already schooled herself back into containment. The walls are back up. The rules rewritten. She can’t afford to be in love. The world can’t afford her dividing her attention, giving more to one person than to everyone else.
She can’t.
She won’t.
And then there you are.
Soaked. Completely. Water slicking down your hair, clinging to your lashes, tracing the line of your jaw before dripping from your chin. You’re holding your phone in one hand, your computer tucked awkwardly under your arm, a pillow pressed to your chest like it might still mean home.
“It’s all I could save,” you say, breathless, apologetic. Like this is somehow your fault.
Kara’s brain stutters.
Because she wasn’t there when it happened. When the pipe burst and turned your apartment into a rushing, rising thing. When seconds mattered. When water swallowed walls and floors and everything familiar. She wasn’t there.
The realization hits harder than the sight of you standing in her doorway, drenched and shivering and trying to smile through it.
This is what her control costs.
She reaches for you without thinking. “Come in,” she says, voice steady in a way she does not feel. “Stay. Stay as long as you need.”
It isn’t logic that makes her say it. It isn’t duty. This time, it isn't the hero in her.
It’s the simple, unbearable fact that when you needed someone, she wasn’t there. And she will not let that happen again. Never again.
The door closes behind you, water pooling on her floor, and Kara knows with a clarity that frightens her, that whatever lines she thought she’d drawn have already dissolved.
Water usually does that.
“I'm sorry I just showed up here, I should have gone to Lena's, it's just that… God, you know Lena. She would've bought me an apartment the second I told her about mine. Hell, she probably already has a spare one.”
“Probably.” She forces. She wants to comfort you in the only way she can think of right now. She wants to kiss you. Not gently. Not carefully. She wants to do it like she’s been holding her breath for weeks and just remembered how air works.
“Nia has so many flatmates already, and Winn's apartment smells like dirty socks and men.” You drop your things, after you just saved them, and Kara has to control herself not to catch them before they hit the floor. “God, what am I doing? Why am I here?” you say quietly. “You don’t even like to spend time with me.”
“What?”
The word comes out sharper than she means it to, startled loose from her chest. It echoes faintly in the hallway, absurdly loud for something so small.
You freeze. Actually freeze mid-movement, shoulders tensed, hands hovering uselessly above nothing. Like you didn't mean to say it out loud. Like you're scared of what she might say back.
“I mean… You literally bolt every time I come closer.” You breathe out loud, shake your head, “I'm sorry, this is stupid. I apparently have a tendency of ruining everything, including but not limited to apartments. I shouldn't stay. I should just call Lena. She probably has a penthouse she's forgotten she owns anyway.”
“No. Y/N, no. Don't go. Don't—” She almost spills everything, tells you it's the opposite. It's love, can't you see? It's LOVE! “I obviously like you. And you—you came here for a reason, so just stay, okay? Take a shower, warm yourself up. I'm gonna go to your apartment and see what I can salvage.”
“Okay.”
“I'll bring dinner too.” Kara pauses at the door. For half a second, she considers saying something else. Something careful, something rehearsed, something that won’t echo later when she’s alone. She fails. Instead, she points at you, earnest and a little frantic.“Hot shower,like… surface-of-the-sun hot. And don’t apologize anymore. For anything. Especially not existing.”
You smile at that. A real one. Tired, crooked, warm.
“Yes, ma’am,” you tease, and she feels it in places she absolutely cannot afford to feel anything.
Your apartment is a disaster. Waterlogged, ruined, smelling like copper and panic. But she handles it like she handles everything else: with efficiency, fierceness, and a jaw set just a little too tight. She saves what she can. Clothes. Books. One framed photo she pretends not to linger on.
She orders food without thinking. Enough for two. More than enough for two.
When she finally comes back, arms full and cape tucked away, the apartment smells like takeout and clean soap. You’re curled on the couch in borrowed clothes that are definitely too big, and yet fits perfectly. You're on your phone telling Lena she doesn't have to worry. You're safe.
And that's when it hits her. You look safe. You look like you're home. Like you've always been home.
Something in Kara’s chest loosens. Something else tightens to compensate. Something she tries very hard not to register.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hey—” babe. No. She bites the word down hard, like it has teeth. Babe. No. Not now. Maybe not ever. She clears her throat instead, uselessly. “I, uh. I brought food. And what I could save. Unfortunately it wasn't much.”
“More than I was able to.” You point at the single three things you managed to grab before running scared. “I had to borrow something to wear. Sorry.”
“No more apologies. You can use anything here.” Kara says, too quickly. Then, softer, “You hungry?”
You nod, setting your phone aside. “Starving. Trauma does that.”
She huffs a laugh before she can stop herself. It escapes her chest, betrays her. You look up at the sound, surprised, pleased, like you’ve found something shiny on the ground.
She sits on the opposite end of the couch. On purpose. On paper. Kara hands you a container, careful not to touch you again because she’s learned a lot from the bowl incident. You eat quietly for a moment, the kind of quiet that isn’t awkward but isn’t empty either. It’s… settling. Like dust after something breaks.
“This is good,” you say around a bite. “Even if it could feed an entire family.”
She laughs, “I panic-ordered.”
“Ah. A classic.”
You lean back, tugging your legs up beneath you, wrapped in her hoodie like it’s always belonged to you. Kara pretends very hard not to notice. She fails quietly.
“You can take the bed,” she says suddenly.
You blink. “What?”
“The bed,” she repeats, gesturing vaguely beyond the door. “I’ll take the couch.”
“Kara, no. It’s your apartment.”
“And you’re a guest whose home is currently looking like Atlantis.”
You consider it, lips pursed, then shake your head. “I’ll take the couch. I have already invaded enough.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Loses the argument somewhere between your face and her own stubbornness. She almost suggests sleeping together, the idea flaring bright and reckless in her chest before she can smother it. She doesn’t. She can’t do that to herself. Or to you. Or to the world, which she drags into it like a witness she didn’t call but refuses to dismiss.
Funny, Kara thinks later that night, she wanted to avoid a love that could cost the world. Instead, she invited it to sleep on her couch.
